A thousand dollars
at birth.

A Trump Account is a custodial investment account for a minor, written into the tax code as section 530A. Any US citizen child under 18 with a valid Social Security number can have one. Children born from 1 January 2025 through 31 December 2028 also receive a one-time $1,000 contribution from the Treasury, which the IRS calls a pilot.

Money cannot come out before the child turns 18. After that, withdrawals for college tuition and for a first home, up to $10,000, avoid the penalty. Anything else taken before age 59 and a half draws a 10% penalty, and pre-tax contributions are taxed as ordinary income on the way out. Families may add up to $5,000 a year until the child turns 18.

The accounts opened on 4 July 2026. By late June more than seven million had been opened for children under 18, of which 1.7 million qualified for the $1,000 federal seed. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said he expects 25 million Americans to take one up. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts the cost at $17bn through 2028. About 3.6 million children were born in the United States in 2025, a 1% fall on the year before.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers published the growth projections that the programme is sold on. Under its mid-range case, a 10.3% annual return, the $1,000 seed and nothing else becomes $5,839 by the time the child turns 18. That is the number for a family that adds nothing.

Fill the account to its $5,000 annual ceiling for eighteen years and the same model returns $303,757. The difference between the two outcomes is 52 times, and what produces it is $90,000 of family deposits rather than the federal contribution. The Urban Institute reached the obvious conclusion.

“Without additional deposits...children of wealthy parents will primarily benefit.”

Two readings follow, and both are inferences rather than findings. The first is that the $1,000 works as an enrolment device: it opens the account, and the account is a tax-advantaged vehicle whose value depends on what the family puts in. The second is that the tax benefit scales with the deposit, so it is worth most to households with $5,000 a year to spare. Adam N. Michel, assessing the structure, found that Trump Accounts would yield the lowest after-tax value of any comparable savings account.

The policy did not begin in Congress. Brad Gerstner, founder of the investment firm Altimeter Capital, proposed a $1,000 account for every American child at birth in 2020. He founded the Invest America Foundation in 2025 to push it, assembled a CEO council behind it, and the Invest America Act was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz before being folded into the reconciliation bill that became law.

On 9 June 2025 the White House held a roundtable on the accounts. Gerstner attended alongside Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber. Dell Technologies pledged to match the government’s $1,000 for the newborn children of its own employees, and Gerstner said other chief executives had agreed to contribute at a level appropriate to their company.

Tenev’s public case for the policy rests on a claim about labour. He told Fortune in August 2025 that AI would disrupt the labour market within five to ten years, and that Americans would have to live on investment returns rather than wages. He has described a future economy in which humans account for less than 1% of total intelligence.

“if you can't rely on labor to generate money to make a living, capital becomes more important.”

The Treasury named BNY as financial agent for the programme. BNY selected Robinhood. Robinhood announced in April 2026 that it would act as broker and sole initial trustee for Trump Accounts on behalf of the Treasury, building the front end, the educational material and the customer support. The consumer app is white-labelled and carries no Robinhood branding. The governing document is a trust agreement written under section 530A.

Robinhood therefore holds custody of federally seeded accounts that cannot be drawn on until the holder turns 18. For a brokerage whose revenue has tracked short-term trading volume, that is a source of long-duration assets under custody and a channel to customers who are not yet born. Tenev has described the commercial position without hedging.

“Trump Accounts put Robinhood in front of the next generation of investors.”

How the trustee is paid took some finding, because the answer is not in the programme’s consumer material. It is in a no-action letter Robinhood requested from the SEC on 5 May 2026, seeking relief from the requirement to hand parents a Form CRS relationship summary. To obtain it, Robinhood had to describe the account’s economics, and the Division of Trading and Markets recited those representations back.

Families pay nothing. Robinhood is barred by its agreement with the financial agent from collecting any fee from the accounts, directly or indirectly. The money reaches it from the Treasury instead, through BNY, under contracts neither party has published. Robinhood told investors the work is priced cost-plus with a small margin, and in the second quarter of 2026 it booked $25m of revenue from the programme.

Two consequences follow from the terms rather than from any reading of them. Because section 530A caps eligible funds at 0.1% of balance in annual fees and expenses, the expense ratio cannot become a meaningful revenue line. And because the accounts cannot be moved to another broker while Robinhood is sole trustee, the custody stays put whatever the family thinks of the app.

Nothing here alleges wrongdoing, and the sequence is a matter of public record rather than inference. Tenev advocated for the legislation at the White House in June 2025. The legislation passed. Robinhood was selected as trustee in April 2026. The accounts opened in July 2026, and by the end of that quarter the arrangement was earning.

On GivingTuesday 2025, Michael and Susan Dell committed $6.25bn to seed accounts for children the federal programme misses. The grant is $250 a child, a quarter of the federal seed, to about 25 million children aged ten and under who were born before 1 January 2025. Eligibility is drawn by ZIP code: median income of $150,000 or less. The commitment is more than double the $2.9bn the Dells report having given in the foundation’s entire history.

Others followed with geographic pledges. Ray and Barbara Dalio took Connecticut, Gerstner took Indiana, Harold Hamm took Oklahoma. Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, pledged one SpaceX share to each of more than two million children, worth about $320m at announcement-date prices, which puts private company equity into federally chartered accounts. Elon Musk has announced no pledge of his own.

Set the private money against the public. The disclosed pledges come to $6.57bn, against $17bn of Treasury cost through 2028. The private money is about two fifths of the federal commitment, and it is directed by ZIP code and by state according to criteria the donors wrote themselves.

On 23 July 2026 The Economist published an 85-minute interview with Elon Musk, recorded at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory and conducted by the editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes. Musk expects AI to exceed the sum of human intelligence in about five years, and to be far greater than it within ten. He describes the likely result as an age of abundance in which anyone can have anything they can think of.

Pressed on what shareholders own in such a world, he said money would not matter in 2036.

“What do you want money for? You want money for goods and services, right?”

Minton Beddoes asked whether that required much higher taxes on capital to fund a universal income. His answer was direct.

“I think that the Treasury should just simply issue people checks.”

The claim is widely attributed to the BBC. It was not made there. Musk gave a well-known BBC interview in April 2023 and the abundance material does not appear in it.

A second record runs alongside the forecast. The Musk Foundation gave $474m in 2024, a record for the vehicle, and reporting on its filings found that it still fell about $400m short of the 5% minimum distribution the IRS requires of private foundations, for the fourth consecutive year. More than three-quarters of the 2024 grants went to entities Musk controls, and a further $35m went into a donor-advised fund. The foundation has no paid staff, and its three unpaid directors were recorded spending an average of two hours and six minutes a week on it.

Peter Thiel is the counter-case in the group, and the numbers are small enough to state without rounding. The Thiel Foundation held about $45m in assets and paid out $4.3m in 2023, falling to roughly $3.4m in 2024. Against a fortune estimated at $25bn, the foundation itself amounts to about 0.18% of his wealth.

Nearly half the 2023 payout went out as $50,000 Thiel Fellowship grants to 43 recipients. Imitatio, which funds work on mimetic theory, took about a quarter of the grants. More than $1m a year goes to DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund.

His political spending runs on a different scale. In the 2022 cycle he put $35m into 16 federal races, including $15m behind a single Senate candidate in Ohio and $20m behind another in Arizona. That $15m is roughly three and a half times what his foundation distributed to charity that year. He gave more than $1.7m in the 2024 cycle after saying he was finished with political donations, and $1.5m to Club for Growth Action in February 2026. No pledge to Trump Accounts from Thiel appears on the public record.

The pattern is not confined to these three. The Institute for Policy Studies reviewed the Giving Pledge at fifteen years in July 2025 and found that 32 of the original US signatories who are still billionaires had grown 283% wealthier since signing. Of the original 57 signatories, one living couple, John and Laura Arnold, had given away half. The original cohort has given an estimated $206bn, of which roughly $164bn, or 80%, went into private foundations rather than to operating charities.

The four threads converge on one mechanism. A federal seed opens an account, a brokerage that campaigned for the seed operates the account, private donors extend it to children the statute misses on terms they choose, and the argument offered for all of it is that wages are going to stop working. Whether that argument is correct is not something the record settles. What the record does show is that the $1,000 is the smallest number in the programme.