- In today’s CEO Daily: The fine print behind the billionaire generosity sweepstakes.
- The big leadership story: Nvidia remains AI’s best risk-reward opportunity.
- The markets: Down globally as investors await the latest round of corporate earnings
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune
Good morning. Should we celebrate billionaires donating shares in their companies? Elon Musk announced on X yesterday that he’s going to give every kid under 18 in the U.S. a share of SpaceX next year. At $147.96 per share, that’s about $10.7 billion worth of stock. (SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell pledged last week to give more than 2 million kids a share of her stock through a Trump Account.) Meanwhile, Anthropic co-founder and President Daniela Amodei announced that the company will commit 5% of its shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a wholly owned LLC “dedicated entirely to the public benefit.”
One reason for the sudden burst of generosity into Trump Accounts may be that the U.S. Treasury changed the rules on Sept. 30 to let individuals donate stocks that recipients must hold on to for at least five years. That could make donating stock much more attractive than giving cash to these accounts, which is how Susan and Michael Dell donated $6.25 billion last year. Stock donors can deduct the full market value of their shares without paying capital gains tax on the assets’ growth. For founders sitting atop a mountain of stock, that beats selling shares, paying tax, and then giving away the cash. (Recipients will pay income tax when the stock is sold.)
But there are downsides to letting donors gift their shares. For one thing, individual stocks are more volatile than an index fund and the five-year holding period means millions of shareholders can’t sell if things go wrong. Conflict-of-interest rules may bar some workers and their families from holding certain stocks; the Treasury has moved to ban ESG funds from accounts, but there’s no way for people to keep certain stocks out of their kids’ accounts. Leaders may donate stock to curry favor in certain districts. Shotwell, for one, wrote on X that her shares will be dispersed with “a bit more emphasis for those that live near our central Texas home,” where SpaceX has faced lawsuits and protests. Imagine if every leader who donated moneyinto the Trump Accounts instead donated shares that recipients had to hold for five years.
For Anthropic, the motivation to put 5% of its as-yet-unissued shares in a fund may be more about building public support ahead of its $2 trillion IPO. But the proposed fund is an LLC, not a 501(c)(3) charity, which means Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei or other leaders can move and deploy the funds as they see fit. What constitutes a “public good,” after all, is in the eyes of the beholder. If all goes well, that could be a massive amount of capital in one fund, and still be too little to compensate for jobs lost to AI.
Is it churlish to focus on what is inspiring these leaders to give instead of what their stock donations could achieve? Maybe. After all, many a good cause got its start from a spirit of noblesse oblige. But forced ownership of companies, however small that stake might be, usually happens in a crisis—such as when the U.S. government took direct stakes in AIG, GM, Citibank, and other institutions during the financial crisis. This time, “the public” is being forced to take a stake because billionaires can now dispense stocks like fairy dust into your kid’s investment account.
There are other ways to democratize investing and promote the public good. Some foresee a day when frontier labs could be regulated like public utilities with independent trusts, audits, and dividends that reflect the degree to which these companies draw on shared assets like energy and intellectual property. Then again, I can’t imagine any CEO would want to be forced to put assets in a government-controlled fund they can’t control. All the more reason for leaders to play the generosity sweepstakes in ways that are advantageous to them. Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
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