Dario Funds Middlemen. Elon Funds Kids.

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Yesterday, Anthropic announced that it is “investing in the public benefit.” Today, Elon Musk answered with one sentence on X. Put the two side by side and you get the cleanest picture yet of two philosophies about what happens to the money the AI boom is about to throw off. One trusts the institutions. The other trusts the person. I know which one I trust.

Start with the facts, because the details matter here. The first thing I had to check was whether Anthropic’s “5%” was 5% of net income or gross income. It turns out it is neither. It is 5% of Anthropic’s shares, committed to a new entity called the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval. The board can add another 2% for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a baseline that has not been disclosed. Reuters estimates that if the coming IPO values Anthropic at $1.5 to $2 trillion, that 5% is worth somewhere between $75 billion and $100 billion. Add the co-founders’ pledge to donate 80% of their equity and the employee matching program, and Anthropic says roughly 20% of the company is “dedicated to the public good.”

That is a big number. I’ll give them that. Now look at the plumbing.

The Fund is a wholly owned LLC, not a 501(c)(3), which in Anthropic’s words gives it “adjustability between different forms of giving.” So the company that writes the check also owns the checkbook. Its own examples of where the money might go are “large donations to traditional nonprofits” or “direct distributions to specific populations.” Specific populations, chosen by whom, by what criteria, and through which intermediaries? We are told that structure and governance will be shared “in the coming months.” To be fair, they do say none of the Fund’s equity will be used for lobbying or political giving. But “we’ll explain who decides later” is not a plan. It’s a press release with a blank where the plan should be.

Now Elon. Early Monday he posted: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.” Reuters puts the value at roughly $11 billion, based on about 72 million American children. Bloomberg reports that he has agreed in principle to deliver those shares through Trump Accounts, although implementation details have not been announced. The difference in philosophy is right there in his own words: give “the shares directly to the public.”

For anyone who hasn’t followed it, Trump Accounts are a new kind of traditional IRA for children under 18 who have a Social Security number. Treasury’s temporary regulations, published September 30, allow “qualified stock contributions,” which means a donor can put stock straight into a child’s account. There is no grant committee, no program officer, and no “capacity-building” overhead. The share is in the kid’s name. Done.

Yes, Anthropic’s headline number is bigger than Elon’s. But the size of the pledge isn’t the question. The question is how much of it actually lands in the hands of a human being who needs it. On that measure, one share in a child’s account beats a billion-dollar promise routed through a maze of middlemen.

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And here’s the part nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. Elon called this “the first of many.” Put a share in every child’s Trump Account at birth, keep adding shares year after year, and let compounding do what compounding does for sixty-five years. You end up with something that looks a lot like retirement security, owned by the person, not promised by a government that is already running out of other people’s money. Social Security’s trust fund is headed for insolvency, and every fix on the table is a tax hike or a benefit cut. In my view, Trump Accounts plus a steady stream of donated stock is the real answer to the Social Security problem: a private account that grows instead of an IOU that shrinks. Give a kid real ownership at birth, and by retirement the safety net is already in his name.

Which brings me to the Palisades.

In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires turned whole neighborhoods into ash. The FireAid benefit concert raised about $100 million. Plenty of survivors then asked a fair question: where’s mine? The answer, according to FireAid’s own lawyers at Latham & Watkins, is that FireAid never intended to pay victims directly. The money went to nonprofit organizations: about $75 million in the first six months, with $25 million still to be handed out. Latham found no evidence of fraud. Some grantees did hand out cash, gift cards and debit cards. Others did “other forms of relief consistent with FireAid’s mission.”

Then the House Judiciary Committee’s Republicans published their own report in January 2026. It concluded that FireAid had advertised the money would go directly to victims, and that “unfortunately, this was not the case.” According to Rep. Kevin Kiley’s office, $100,000 went to promote voter participation, about $550,000 went to organizations involved in political advocacy, and more than $500,000 went to administrative costs. So a family standing in front of a burned-out chimney watched its sympathy money get spent on voter outreach and overhead. Nobody was technically defrauded, and somehow that makes it worse. That is the system working as designed.

To be clear about where the record ends and my opinion begins: the investigators did not find that “none of them got a dime.” Some survivors did get help through grantees. My point is that the direct share was a fraction, the rest disappeared into the nonprofit economy, and the donors thought they were helping the people on the news.

And when the NGO world goes beyond overhead into outright theft, it’s spectacular. Look at Feeding Our Future in Minnesota, where federal prosecutors charged dozens of defendants in what the Justice Department called a roughly $250 million fraud against a federal child nutrition program during the pandemic. The money was meant to feed hungry kids. Prosecutors say it bought houses and luxury cars instead. That is what “trust the intermediary” looks like when the intermediary is a crook.

Here’s my opinion, plainly stated. When a Silicon Valley company says it will “explore large donations to traditional nonprofits,” history tells me where most of that money ends up: the foundation and advocacy world, which leans heavily left and is very good at paying itself first. I can’t prove where a fund that doesn’t have published rules yet will send its money. But I can read a track record, and I’m not betting on this one.

Now for some high-end pondering. AI is about to produce more wealth, faster, than anything in human history. The real question of this decade isn’t whether that wealth gets shared. Everyone from Dario to Elon now agrees it should. The question is who stands between the wealth and the people. One model puts a committee, a governance structure “to be announced,” and a network of grantees in that spot. The other model puts nothing there. A share of stock, a child’s name, an account the government already built. If AI ends up dissolving middlemen everywhere else in the economy, it would be a strange irony if the AI companies’ own philanthropy built a brand-new layer of them.

Dario’s announcement is generous on paper and vague where it counts. Calling it “the public benefit” doesn’t change the fact that the money stays inside a company-owned LLC, waiting for a governance plan. That’s lipstick on a pig. It’s very expensive lipstick, and it’s still a pig.

Give it to the kid. The kid knows where his own account is.

Sources:

My Living AI News Now. Your Place for AI News. Commentary, not financial advice.

C. Rich

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