Musk Gives SpaceX Shares to 73M Kids, Anthropic $100B Promise & ASML Ties CEO Pay to Employee Morale

October 23, 2026: I unpack two very different approaches to sharing AI wealth after Anthropic pledged 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund it controls while Elon Musk announced he'll give one SpaceX share directly to every kid in America, why one approach hands people ownership and the other hands them a promise, and what history teaches us about foundations that drift away from their founders' vision like the Ford Foundation that eventually told Henry Ford's grandson that hospitals weren't part of the program. I explore why Musk's companies support somewhere between 400,000 and a million jobs worldwide, why more than 4,400 SpaceX employees could become millionaires when the company went public, and why giving 73 million children actual equity respects people enough to let them own something instead of waiting for experts to decide who deserves help. I break down the effective altruism philosophy behind Anthropic's approach, why it feels dystopian when the company building technology that might displace millions of jobs also gets to decide which displaced people receive relief, and why Milton Friedman said nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Then I get into why AI is everywhere except in the GDP numbers, why companies spent hundreds of billions on AI in 2025 but 95% of projects produced no measurable profit impact, and why the stock market just had its worst day since June with the NASDAQ dropping 2.6% as investors panic about two opposite things at once. I explore why Meta fell 7% after saying it will spend up to $145 billion on capital projects, why CoreWeave's stock crashed from $163 to $54 as local governments put moratoriums on new data centers, and why the real bottleneck isn't chips but power with the U.S. short about six Californias worth of electricity by 2050. I break down why only 2% of U.S. households pay for AI tools, why the most important jobs in the AI era are linesmen and electricians not prompt engineers, and why leaders need to stop asking how to do the same work cheaper and start asking what they'd build if they could build 10 times as much. Finally, I look at ASML, Europe's most valuable company and the only firm that can build the machines needed to make cutting edge chips, tying executive pay to employee satisfaction by measuring whether people understand their roles, whether teams are organized, and whether managers care about them as people, and why this shifts leadership from lagging indicators like revenue to early warning signs that show up before the numbers drop. Chapters

00:00:00 Ownership Versus Promises: Musk's SpaceX Shares and Anthropic's Public Benefit Fund 00:13:23 The Ford Foundation Warning: When Founders Lose Control of Their Legacy 00:23:16 The Real AI Bottleneck: Power Plants, Not Processors 00:26:54 Beyond Cost Cutting: Moving from Bucket One to Bucket Two AI Strategy 00:33:54 The Efficiency Trap: Why Measuring Everything Turns People Into Line Items