• Elon Musk says he'll give a SpaceX share to every child in the US next year.
• That would be a $10.5 billion gift based on SpaceX's stock price and roughly 72 million recipients.
• Musk said this would be the "first of many" SpaceX share giveaways but didn't offer further details.

Elon Musk says he'll give every child in the US a piece of his space company, a gift worth around $10.5 billion today.

"Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America," Musk wrote in an early Monday post on X. "This will be the first of many."

There are roughly 72 million children in the US based on 2025 census data, and SpaceX stock closed at $146 on Friday. If Musk donated 72 million shares right now they would be worth around $10.5 billion.

Musk didn't provide any further details on how the giveaway would work, such as eligibility criteria or specific timing, or whether the shares will be transferred to Trump Accounts.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is the world's richest person, with an estimated net worth of $904 billion as of Friday's close, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

SpaceX — the company behind Falcon rockets, Starship launch vehicles, Starlink satellites, the AI chatbot Grok, and X — went public this summer and has a market capitalization of about $2 trillion.

Excluding restricted shares and options, Musk owns 4.77 billion SpaceX shares for about a 36% stake, worth just under $700 billion at Friday's close. The rest of his fortune largely comprises his stakes in his other companies, including Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.

Donating 72 million shares would reduce Musk's number of SpaceX shares by 1.5%. If, as indicated in his X post, he follows that up with further giveaways, his stake could shrink significantly.

Musk's pledge is part of a broader trend of gifting shares to America's children, aimed at ensuring they all own a piece of the stock market and reap its gains over time, and benefit from a lifetime of compounding wealth.

The Trump administration launched Trump Accounts — tax-advantaged investment accounts — for eligible children this summer, with those born between 2025 and 2028 receiving a $1,000 federal seed deposit. Numerous companies have agreed to contribute to them as well.

Michael and Susan Dell contributed $250 to 25 million American children's Trump Accounts earlier this month, a gift totaling $6.25 billion that was allocated first to those in the lowest-income ZIP codes.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and her husband pledged in July to give shares of SpaceX to more than 2 million children.

Musk shared his SpaceX gift idea after Anthropic pledged to commit 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund.

"I recommend giving shares directly to the public," he replied on X. "This is what I will be doing."

Another X user described Anthropic and Musk's pledges as "the beginning of universal basic income." Musk corrected him, writing *universal high income."

Musk has predicted that advances in AI, robotics, and other technologies will usher in an age of abundance in which everyone can have "whatever stuff they want."

He's recommended people stop saving for retirement in 10 or 20 years as their nest eggs will be "irrelevant," and has proposed government checks for all as the best response to job losses from AI.

Correction: October 19, 2026 — An earlier version of this story incorrectly described SpaceX as a private company. It went public in June 2026.

Meta wants to build one of the largest data centers in the world in rural Louisiana. 

The facility, known as Hyperion, is being built to train and operate the artificial intelligence systems behind Meta’s products. What began as a $10 billion proposal has since ballooned into a more than $50 billion development spanning nearly 10 million square feet and roughly 3,650 acres. At full scale, Hyperion is expected to require 5 gigawatts of computing capacity, making it the largest data center in Meta’s global fleet and one of the largest ever built. According to Meta, the project is expected to employ around 7,500 workers during peak construction and support 1,000 permanent jobs once operational.

For residents of Richland Parish, the arrival of Meta has brought both desperately needed jobs and profound uncertainty about what the project will mean for the community. The enormous facility is being constructed on former farmland and will require an equally immense network of infrastructure to support it. In nearby Rayville, many residents view Meta as an economic lifeline after decades of limited employment opportunities, with local families securing jobs that pay far more than the parish’s median income. But the influx of highly paid, out-of-town workers has also driven up rent and the cost of living as landlords and businesses increasingly orient themselves toward Meta employees. Landlords routinely raise the rent of low-income housing in order to price out local tenants in favor of contractors, forcing residents to move out of the area to afford housing.

Bringing Meta to Richland Parish

Richland Parish is a rural stretch of northeast Louisiana dominated by flat, fertile land rich with cotton, soybeans, corn, and rice. The parish’s economy has historically revolved around large-scale, row-crop farming, but declining farm incomes and population loss has strained the region in recent generations. Richland’s employment rate sits at 49.9%, 9.4% below the already dismal state average, with a median income of $53,544. A total of 36% of the 20,000 person population is Black. Rayville, the parish seat, is 80% Black. For decades, Richland has been far removed from the state’s economic centers of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, receiving little of the investment that has flowed into Louisiana’s larger cities.

That changed in January 2024, when Entergy Louisiana, the state’s monopoly power company, began a year-long courting ritual to bring Meta’s largest data center to the impoverished parish. Following months of backdoor deals and nondisclosure agreements, Meta announced plans to build a $10 billion, 4-million-square-foot data center on a 2,250-acre flood plain. In July 2026, Meta expanded the project, committing more than $50 billion and nearly 10 million square feet to what may become the largest data center in the company’s fleet and home to its massive Hyperion AI training cluster.

Both Meta and Entergy have been quick to dismiss community concerns, with state officials claiming that “whatever comes out of it will be better than the mostly fallow farmland that was there.” Meta likewise touts a laundry list of benefits it promises to bring to the area, most notably permanent jobs and increased tax revenue. The company now claims that the expanded Hyperion AI center will create more than 1,000 permanent jobs, alongside thousands of temporary construction jobs.

But Meta has refused to provide the evidence behind those projections. On August 12, the Louisiana Public Service Commission voted 3–1 to overturn the recommendation of an administrative law judge that Meta turn over information substantiating its projected job creation, economic impact, and electricity demand, effectively shielding the company’s claims from public scrutiny.

Meta’s empty promises of economic growth

The public’s skepticism is warranted. Data centers routinely generate thousands of temporary construction jobs while creating only a fraction as many permanent positions once construction ends. Meta’s projects in Texas and Oklahoma, for example, are expected to leave only around 100 operational jobs each after thousands of construction workers leave. QTS similarly estimates that a data center campus in York County, North Carolina will produce roughly 1,000 construction jobs but only about 100 permanent onsite positions. Even Hyperion’s original proposal called for roughly 5,000 construction workers but only 500 permanent operational employees. None of these figures guarantee that the permanent positions will go to Richland Parish residents. Meta has offered assurances about local hiring, but there is no binding commitment requiring the company to employ local workers.

Meta also claims the data center will bring tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue to Richland Parish, an argument it bolsters by pointing to the 2,000% increase in sales-tax totals since construction began – $50,000 of which has funded bonuses for some local schoolteachers. But that windfall is largely a product of the construction boom itself, not a sustainable source of revenue generated by the completed data center. The teacher bonuses are distributed through Richland Parish’s longstanding one-cent sales-tax program, which provides annual “13th checks” to eligible school employees. As those construction workers spend money in the parish, that pool has temporarily grown; once construction ends, so will much of the revenue feeding it. The result is a temporary infusion of money that can obscure the longer-term fiscal consequences of the project. When the construction boom ends, Richland Parish will be left with the costs of a massive industrial project, and fewer public resources to pay for them.

Cementing Louisiana’s dependence on fossil fuels amid environmental devastation

The environmental impact of the Meta data center could also be deadly for residents of Richland Parish and Louisiana as a whole. The Hyperion AI data center is expected to consume roughly half of the state’s electrical capacity – approximately seven times the energy consumed by the entire city of New Orleans – placing enormous new demands on Entergy’s already overburdened power grid. Louisiana residents know what a fragile electrical system can mean in a disaster. After Hurricane Katrina, Entergy’s restoration efforts took 42 days to complete across its service territory. In 2021, Hurricane Ida left nearly 950,000 customers without power after an Entergy tower fell into the Mississippi River, a disaster that required 15 days of restoration work just to bring more than 90% of affected customers back online.

Rather than address these vulnerabilities, Entergy’s proposed solution to Hyperion’s unprecedented energy demands is to build an entirely new fossil-fuel energy infrastructure around the data center. The company plans to construct ten natural-gas power plants, including seven new facilities capable of generating roughly 5.2 gigawatts of electricity, alongside new transmission lines and a massive 500-kilovolt substation. Meta, Entergy, and the Louisiana state government are working to present these projects as investments that will strengthen Louisiana’s electrical grid and improve reliability for ordinary customers.

Louisiana is being asked to construct an enormous new fossil-fuel-based energy system so that a single private corporation can consume an unprecedented share of its electricity. More generation may increase capacity, but it does not eliminate the physical vulnerabilities that have repeatedly left Louisiana residents without power after hurricanes. Instead, the state is doubling down on a centralized, fossil-fuel-dependent grid whose infrastructure will remain vulnerable to the same storms that have already decimated Louisiana’s communities.

Entergy’s catastrophic deal with Meta has arrived as Louisiana is already on the front lines of an environmental crisis. The state has lost more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land since 1932 and continues to lose more than 16 square miles each year. The state has experienced 31 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters since 2018, leaving communities to repeatedly rebuild from hurricanes, flooding, and extreme weather. Meanwhile, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the area known as “Cancer Alley” contains a dense concentration of petrochemical and chemical facilities, exposing surrounding communities to significant air pollution and toxic emissions which have resulted in a cancer rate fifty times higher than the national average.

People of Louisiana reject corporate profiteering

These environmental pressures are only compounded by an affordability crisis. In 2024, 49% of Louisiana households – nearly 900,000 – were either living in poverty or earning too little to afford basic necessities. A basic survival budget costs an estimated $30,708 a year for a single adult and $81,912 for a family of four, before accounting for savings or emergencies such as climate disaster. All the while, the state is being asked to absorb another enormous industrial project while nearly half of its households are already struggling financially and its communities confront environmental catastrophe.

Read more: A massive AI data center transforms rural Utah into a national flashpoint

Community opposition to the Hyperion project reflects a growing recognition that the promised benefits of corporate development cannot be separated from the costs that residents will be asked to bear. The fight is not simply over one data center, but over who gets to determine what Louisiana’s resources are used for and whose interests development is meant to serve. For generations, Louisiana communities have been told that jobs and investment require accepting pollution, environmental destruction, and the transformation of local resources into private profit.

Hyperion offers another version of the same bargain: enormous amounts of Louisiana’s land, electricity, water, and public infrastructure would be redirected toward the interests of one of the world’s largest technology companies. And the resistance to that bargain extends far beyond Richland Parish. Hundreds of Louisianans have mobilized around Public Service Commission meetings, traveling to the capital to demand that regulators prioritize the people who will bear the costs of Meta and Entergy’s expansion. Their concerns have repeatedly been dismissed or overridden by a majority of commissioners, even as the commission has approved billions of dollars in new generation and transmission infrastructure for the project. A 2024 investigation by the Louisiana Illuminator and Floodlight found that nearly 43% of campaign contributions to Louisiana utility commissioners over the previous decade came from utilities, energy-related businesses, and their attorneys and lobbyists, with Entergy Louisiana and its executives and family members contributing roughly $350,000.

The resistance emerging across Louisiana is more than a battle over a single data center. It is a decisive stand for the right of Louisianians to determine their own future, rather than surrender it to corporate interests. This is a battle for the future of working people everywhere, and the people have vowed to keep fighting. 

Kieran Spencer is a New Orleans-based historian and organizer.