• 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.

• Berkshire Hathaway is set to invest $330 million in Bending Spoons, adding to its previous $600 million.
• Warren Buffett's storied conglomerate is poised to hold a 4% stake in the owner of AOL and Vimeo.
• Berkshire's wager is a surprise, but there's some DNA in common with Bending Spoons.

Berkshire Hathaway's latest bet isn't a no-brainer or a head-scratcher; it's somewhere in between.

What's the deal?

Berkshire — which has seen Warren Buffett retire as CEO and chairman since the turn of the year — has agreed to invest $330 million in Bending Spoons, on top of a $600 million injection when the Italian tech conglomerate went public in July, giving the Nebraska behemoth a 4% stake.

Bending Spoons disclosed Berkshire's backing in a press release on Wednesday, catapulting its stock up nearly 50% over two days, a phenomenon known as the "Buffett effect." The stock fell on Friday, but still ended the week more than 20% above Monday's opening price.

Berkshire has agreed to buy 10 million shares for $33 each, around a 13% discount to Bending Spoons' closing price of $38 on Tuesday, the day before the deal was announced.

CEO and cofounder Luca Ferrari described Berkshire in the press release as "among the finest and most respected capital allocators in the world," and a "longstanding inspiration" for Bending Spoons.

Neither company responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.

What is Bending Spoons?

Bending Spoons acquires digital businesses, transforms and optimizes them to increase profits, then reinvests those earnings in further acquisitions.

It has been pursuing that strategy for more than a decade and has never sold a material business. Its acquisitions to date include AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer.

Ferrari's company said in the press release that it "strives to envision the most successful version of an acquired business," then works to close the gap between that vision and reality "as quickly and completely as possible."

Bending Spoons said that typically involves "deep" transformation such as "reorganizing teams, overhauling technology, redesigning user interfaces, accelerating product development, and enhancing marketing and monetization," often with a good dose of AI.

Ferrari gave the example of Evernote on a recent episode of the "Joys of Compounding" podcast.

He said the business had around 350 employees when Bending Spoons acquired it at the start of 2023. That shrank to roughly 60 within 12 to 18 months, and now it's being run by around 20 people.

Yet Ferrari said Evernote "launched by far the biggest update to the product in maybe a decade" this spring.

Why is Berkshire's investment a surprise?

First and foremost, Bending Spoons is a tech conglomerate, and Berkshire has eschewed tech for most of its history with a few big exceptions, namely Apple and Alphabet.

That's because Buffett is a bargain hunter who likes to invest with a "margin of safety" in case something goes wrong, and tries to stay within his "circle of competence," only buying into what he deeply understands.

Tech companies have rarely been a good fit for his approach, as they typically have lofty valuations, unpredictable outlooks, and complex products and services.

Indeed, Bending Spoons generated 32 cents in earnings per share last year. Berkshire is paying more than 100 times that per share in the coming private placement.

It's true that Bending Spoons is growing fast, with revenue surging 126% year-on-year to $704 million in the second quarter and adjusted operating income jumping 150% to $381 million. Few, however, would consider the stock a bargain from a fundamental perspective.

Berkshire is also famously a hands-off acquirer, offering founders the opportunity to cash out while continuing to run their businesses as they see fit. In contrast, a core aspect of Bending Spoons' strategy is revamping its acquisitions.

How does the deal make sense?

Berkshire and Bending Spoons have similarities as well as differences.

Both are decentralized conglomerates that buy businesses not to flip them, but to own them for the long term. Berkshire is a web of largely autonomous companies, including GEICO, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, Pilot Travel Centers, and BNSF Railway. It has long offered a permanent home to the businesses it buys.

Bending Spoons has positioned itself as a forever owner, too, emulating Berkshire's approach of taking the cash generated by a subsidiary like See's Candies and using it to acquire more businesses.

Ferrari said in his recent podcast interview that Bending Spoons has fostered a culture of caring deeply about the company, and doesn't centralize decision-making in part because that "deprives people of that precious sense of ownership."

Buffett famously wrote "An Owner's Manual" for Berkshire shareholders. He's championed that mindset by keeping more than 99% of his net worth in Berkshire stock, and encouraging the company's other executives and directors to have skin in the game too.

Ferrari also said on the podcast that he has a "pathological love of learning" across different domains. That echoes Buffett's boundless curiosity and the late Charlie Munger's insatiable appetite for knowledge. Buffett's longtime business partner studied architecture, physics, history, meteorology, psychology, law, and, of course, investing, among other subjects.

Beyond their similar philosophies, it's worth noting that investing less than $1 billion into Bending Spoons isn't a huge deal for Berkshire. It has a $1.1 trillion market capitalization, had a $365 billion cash pile at the end of June, and its biggest stock position was worth about $66 billion at that time.

What's the takeaway?

The Bending Spoons deal could mark an evolution in Berkshire's investing style following Buffett's departure as CEO and chairman.

Berkshire hasn't commented on the purchase or on whether Buffett was involved. Its relatively small size could mean his remaining investment manager, Ted Weschler, was behind it.

Or it might be new CEO Greg Abel, who piled an additional $10 billion into Alphabet in a private placement this summer after consulting with Buffett.

Whoever was responsible, and whatever their reasons for investing, this will be an intriguing wager to watch for Berkshire followers.

• Harvard's endowment returned a five-year high of 27.1% in the 12 months to June 30, besting the S&P 500.
• The Ivy League college counted a $2.2 billion SpaceX stake as its top Q2 portfolio holding by far.
• Harvard's endowment grew to almost $68 billion after accounting for taxes, gifts, and distributions.

Harvard University delivered its best investment return in five years as its bet on SpaceX boosted its stock portfolio.

The elite college's endowment returned 27.1% in the fiscal year ended June 30, its annual financial report revealed on Thursday. That comfortably outpaced the benchmark S&P 500's 22.3% total return over the same period.

After accounting for taxes, distributions, and gifts, Harvard's endowment grew by $11 billion to nearly $68 billion.

Harvard Management Company's stake in Elon Musk's maker of Starship rockets, Starlink satellites, and AI chatbot Grok was worth $2.2 billion at the end of June, per its second-quarter portfolio disclosure.

SpaceX was its number-one holding, more than six times more valuable than its second-biggest position, a sub-$350 million stake in Taiwan Semiconductor.

Its next-largest positions — each worth over $150 million — were Cerebras, Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia. Its 19 holdings at the end of June were together worth about $4.3 billion, more than double the portfolio's $1.8 billion value three months earlier.

Harvard said the strong performance of its endowment, which is nearly 400 years old and comprises about 15,000 individual funds, helped it weather the "abrupt termination of federal research grants" by the Trump administration.

It's worth noting that 13-F portfolio disclosures are a snapshot of a fund's US stock holdings on a certain date. They don't include foreign-listed stocks, non-stock assets like bonds or real estate, private investments, or stocks sold short.

Harvard said that as of June 30, 14% of its endowment was invested in public equities, 29% in hedge funds, 46% in private equity, 4% in real estate, and the balance elsewhere.

Harvard declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

SpaceX's valuation has whipsawed since the aerospace company went public on June 12. Its market capitalization topped $2.4 trillion on June 20, then tanked to $1.4 trillion by August 1, and has since rallied to around $2 trillion.

Musk's company posted a 92% year-on-year revenue jump for the quarter ended June, helping narrow its net loss from $1 billion to $541 million.

The world's richest man recently posted on X that he sees a path for SpaceX to be worth "orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy," implying its stock could rise at least 6,000-fold to $12 quadrillion over time.

He later clarified that wasn't a "statement of extreme confidence," but he believes the probability of achieving that valuation is "not zero." On October 14, he said he expects SpaceX to be worth more than $100 trillion in the next 10 years.

Harvard is one of several shareholders to reveal a sizable stake in SpaceX. Google parent Alphabet reported a roughly 4% stake valued at $94 billion as of the end of June. Longtime Musk associate Peter Thiel disclosed a 3.2% position worth $73 billion held by his Founders Fund and related entities. AI chipmaker Nvidia has a $21 billion stake.