Billionaire Gwynne Shotwell gifts 2m SpaceX shares to kids

American billionaire Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, said she and her husband, Robert, are giving more than 2 million of their SpaceX shares to children through the new federal savings plans known as Trump Accounts, with the stock set to reach the accounts in December.

The first part of the gift is “transferring to escrow as we speak,” Shotwell said in a post on X on Friday. It will go to children aged 11 to 17 who live in ZIP codes where the median family income is $57,000 or less, as well as children in ZIP codes too small for income figures to be reported. “These families should receive a notice by Monday,” she said.

A second gift is due to be finalized in the coming weeks. It will cover eligible children in military families serving overseas, children in foster care, and more children in families earning $90,000 or less in counties near the couple’s home in Texas.

SpaceX shares fell more than 5% on Friday to close at $135.90, which puts the value of 2 million shares at about $272 million. The drop left the stock near its $135 initial public offering price. It peaked above $225 in June, days after its debut.

From pledge to delivery

Shotwell first pledged in July to put SpaceX stock into the accounts for older children, who are not covered by the government’s own contributions. The accounts, created by last year’s federal tax and spending law, opened on July 4. The U.S. Treasury deposits $1,000 for each child born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, and it automatically enrolled more than 60 million children with valid Social Security numbers on Oct. 1.

In her post, Shotwell thanked SpaceX, the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service and the Dell Foundation, and credited Michael Dell and investor Brad Gerstner for their work on children’s long-term financial security. Dell, the founder of Dell Technologies, and his wife, Susan, pledged $6.25 billion in December 2025 to seed accounts for about 25 million children aged 10 and under.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, said on Oct. 19 that he would give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in America next year. He has not said how the shares will be distributed.

A stake built over two decades

Shotwell, 62, joined SpaceX in 2002 as its 11th employee to run business development and has been president and chief operating officer since 2008. She oversees the company’s day-to-day operations, including its Falcon rockets, Starlink satellite internet service and its contracts with NASA and the U.S. military. Before SpaceX, she spent a decade at Aerospace Corp. and ran the space systems division at Microcosm.

She first became a billionaire in April 2025, on the back of a $350 billion valuation for SpaceX, then still a private company. She held about 12.6 million SpaceX shares when the company went public on the Nasdaq on June 12, a stake worth more than $2 billion after its first day of trading.

The gift would hand roughly a sixth of those shares to children. In September, Shotwell also filed a notice with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to sell 342,170 SpaceX shares, worth about $52 million at the time.

SpaceX is now worth about $1.8 trillion, down from more than $2.3 trillion on Oct. 6. Musk said earlier this month that SpaceX and Tesla had set up special board committees to explore a possible merger, though he said they had not agreed on terms and might never do so.