Elon Musk Promises One SpaceX Share for Every US Child

How to share AI wealth? Neither the US nor Asia has the answer

Elon Musk has promised one SpaceX share, next year, for “every kid in America”. The offer was described as about US$10.6 billion for some 73 million children.

The promise came the day after Anthropic committed 5 per cent of its shares to a public benefit fund. Anthropic is an artificial intelligence laboratory preparing one of the largest listings in history.

Two models for sharing AI wealth

The offers differ in who would hold the shares.

Anthropic’s shares will sit in an entity the company owns and will be spent on the public’s behalf. Musk’s shares would go, by a route he has not explained, into a child’s name.

Together, the proposals point to a question that the rapid growth of AI has made harder to avoid: should the public own the companies that AI makes rich? Silicon Valley has begun answering yes, but on terms set by the companies and their founders.

US firms are offering cash and shares in arrangements they create themselves. Asian economies, meanwhile, still depend on creating jobs to distribute the benefits of economic growth.

A wider economic problem

The issue became more urgent after International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva described AI as a “slow-moving tsunami”. She said the technology could shift income from labour to capital and augment, downgrade or eliminate 40 per cent of jobs worldwide.

Georgieva made the remarks in Bangkok, where the warning carries particular weight because Asia’s economic growth has long depended on creating jobs.

That leaves the United States and Asia facing different versions of the same challenge. American technology companies are beginning to propose ways for the public to receive a share of AI-generated wealth, while Asian economies remain tied to employment as the main route for sharing the dividends of growth.

Neither approach yet provides a settled answer to who should own the gains from AI, or how those gains should reach the public.

Source: South China Morning Post