Michael and Susan Dell just did something worth celebrating, and worth copying.

Through their foundation, they’ve committed $6.25 billion to drop $250 into investment accounts for up to 25 million American kids — children age 10 and under, born before January 1, 2025, with a Social Security number, living in ZIP codes where the median household income is $150,000 or less. The money goes into the new federal “Trump Accounts” (the Invest America program), which otherwise seed $1,000 for babies born from 2025 on. The Dells’ gift is aimed squarely at the kids who missed that window — the ones who’d otherwise start with nothing. Parents just have to open the account; the $250 lands automatically.

That’s the whole thing. No strings, no lecture, no means-tested paperwork maze. Open an account for your kid, and a stranger puts $250 in it. It’s one of the largest single acts of philanthropy ever aimed at ordinary American families, and it’s built on the one financial idea that actually works without fail: start early and let time do the work.

What “25 million” actually means — and why the design is clever

It’s worth clearing up what that 25 million number is, because it’s easy to misread. It is not a count of how many kids that age exist in America, and it’s not an arbitrary slice the Dells decided to stop at. It’s simply what $6.25 billion buys at $250 a head: $6.25 billion ÷ $250 = 25 million grants.

Here’s the important part: that number was sized to cover essentially the entire eligible group, not a lucky fraction of it. By the Dells’ own accounting, the money will reach nearly 80% of all American children age 10 and under who were born before 2025 — across about 75% of the country’s ZIP codes. So this isn’t a lottery for a few. It’s built to reach almost every kid in the target range, first-come until the 25 million are activated, with any leftover funds going to children older than 10. The honest answer to “did they fund enough for all the kids that age?” is: yes, near enough — they funded the whole target group, minus the wealthiest slice.

And that targeting is the quietly smart part of the whole thing:

• It’s income-screened, but barely. To qualify, a child has to live in a ZIP code where median household income is $150,000 or less. That excludes only the richest areas — the families who’d notice a $250 deposit least — while still sweeping in the overwhelming majority of American kids. Nearly everyone qualifies; only the very top is left out. It’s a means test light enough that it doesn’t turn into the usual paperwork gauntlet, but real enough that the money flows toward the kids who need it.
• It doesn’t duplicate the government. The $250 goes specifically to kids who missed the federal $1,000 newborn deposit — those born before 2025. No child double-dips, and the private money fills exactly the gap the federal program leaves open. The Dell gift and the Treasury seed interlock instead of overlapping.
• It’s nearly automatic. Parents open or activate a Trump Account, and the $250 arrives. No essay, no caseworker, no proving your hardship.

Put those together and it’s about the most efficient targeting you could design: near-universal reach, a feather-light means test that skips only the rich, and a clean dovetail with the existing federal program so not a dollar is wasted paying twice. Whatever you think of the branding, the mechanism is thoughtful.

The charity Give Directly built its reputation on an idea that sounded almost heretical to the aid world: instead of routing help to the poor through layers of programs, staff, and overhead, just give people the money directly and trust them with it — an approach that keeps holding up in controlled studies against more paternalistic alternatives. The Dell gift is that same instinct, pointed at the future instead of the present. No agency, no strings, no overhead skimming the top; the $250 lands straight in the child’s own account and starts working. The only twist is that it’s locked and invested, so “direct cash” becomes “direct capital” — compounding for decades instead of spent today.

Why $250 at age zero is worth more than it looks

Here’s the thing about that $250. Left untouched until adulthood and invested in a low-cost index fund, it becomes a very different animal than $250 handed over as cash — because you’ve given it the one input money can’t buy back: decades.

At a 7% return above inflation — a reasonable long-run number for a broad stock index, stated in today’s dollars — here’s what a single seed becomes if it’s left alone:

All figures in today’s dollars (e.g., a 7% return above inflation). This is the purchasing power the money would have in the future: invest $18k for your child today and they’ll have $1 million of purchasing power, in today’s dollars, at 60. The actual account balance will be multiple millions, due to inflation.

The $250 alone won’t retire anyone. By 18 it’s worth a used laptop. But that was never the point. The point is that the account now exists, it has a balance, and the kid grows up watching it grow. Dell said it plainly in his own interviews: kids with accounts — even with modest sums in them — tend to have better outcomes than kids without. The dollars are the smaller half of the gift. The bigger half is that a child now has a stake in the future and a front-row seat to compounding.

The number that should keep you up at night

Look at the bottom row again. Eighteen thousand dollars, put in at birth and never touched, becomes roughly a million dollars in today’s purchasing power by age 60. Not nominal, inflated-away dollars — a real million.

That’s the cheapest million any of us will ever have access to, and almost nobody uses it. Not because $18,000 is unreachable — plenty of families spend more than that on a single vehicle — but because the window that makes it work slams shut a little more every year the account sits empty. The same $18,000 started at age 10 instead of age 0 loses roughly half its ending value. Started at 20, you’ve thrown away three-quarters of it. Time is the ingredient, and it’s the only one you can’t buy later.

That’s what makes the Dells’ move so smart. They didn’t try to solve poverty with the size of the check. They attacked the timing — getting a seed into the ground for millions of kids while those kids still have 60-plus years of compounding ahead of them. It’s the highest-leverage philanthropic dollar there is.

It would take 72 people

Here’s another thought

The Dells gave $250 per kid. But run the same idea can go further. Consider a $18,000 seed, the amount that compounds into a real million by age 60 — and the total for all 25 million eligible kids comes to $450 billion.

That sounds impossibly large until you divide it by what the Dells already proved one family will give: $450 billion ÷ $6.25 billion = 72. Seventy-two more gifts the exact size of the Dells’ would fully fund an $18,000 head start for every eligible child in the country.

One note before the numbers below: every net-worth figure in this piece is from the Forbes 400 as of September 1, 2025. I deliberately froze the math to one dated, settled snapshot so it stays internally consistent — but fortunes at this altitude move fast, and several of these are already very different today (some dramatically so). Read them as a fixed reference point I had to pick, not a live quote. Many of these people’s net worths have grown greatly in that time.

Seventy-two. Out of a group that is not remotely that small:

• The 400 richest Americans are worth a combined $6.6 trillion. The entire $450 billion is less than 7% of that one list.
• The top 20 Americans alone hold about $3 trillion — nearly half of all U.S. billionaire wealth. The whole program would cost 15% of just their fortunes, and nothing of anyone else’s.
• The Dells’ own $6.25 billion came out of a fortune well north of $100 billion.

And the number that shows how within reach this really is: that same Forbes 400 got $1.2 trillion richer in a single year. The entire cost of giving 25 million American kids a genuine shot at a million-dollar retirement is less than half of what this group gained last year alone.

It’s also worth sizing $450 billion against what the country spends without blinking. To be clear, I’m not pointing at the billionaires alone and saying “you should fund this” — I’m just laying out the math for the many possible routes to funding it. The United States spends about $1 trillion on its military every single year. The full cost of handing 25 million kids an $18,000 head start is less than half of one year’s defense budget — and, crucially, it’s a one-time event, not an annual line item. The military costs that much again next year, and the year after. This would happen once and then compound on its own for sixty years. Measured against the U.S.–Iran war of 2025–26 — which the Pentagon’s own accounting put at roughly $29 billion (independent estimates run higher, near $40 billion; war-cost figures are contested and still moving) — $450 billion is on the order of fifteen of those wars. Same money, wildly different afterlife: one version is spent and gone; the other sits in twenty-five million children’s names, growing, for the rest of their lives.

The money already exists, concentrated in a few hundred hands. The Dells showed it can be done and exactly how to do it. The only thing missing is 71 more people willing to sign the same check.

Or: everyone gives the same slice

The version above treats a $12 billion fortune and a $428 billion fortune as if they should write the same check. They shouldn’t. So here’s another option — draw a line, and everyone above it could decide to give the same percentage of what they have.

Put the line at $12 billion. For scale: the cutoff just to make the Forbes 400 at all is $3.8 billion — the poorest people on the entire list are worth that much (2025’s floor includes newcomers like early AppLovin investor Eduardo Vivas, at exactly $3.8 billion). A $12 billion floor therefore asks nothing of roughly the bottom 330 names and leans entirely on the very top.

That leaves about the 70 wealthiest Americans, worth a combined ~$4.2 trillion. (The top 50 alone are worth $3.9 trillion, and the 50th-richest American — Jerry Jones — is still worth $19.6 billion, so the $12 billion club runs roughly twenty names deeper than the published top 50. I’ve estimated that tail from the $19.6 billion mark down to the floor; the exact total drifts with the market.)

Raising $450 billion from a $4.2 trillion pool, with everyone contributing the identical share of their wealth, comes to about 10.6% — a tenth of their net worth, paid once. Up and down the ladder, that looks like this:

Read down the ladder and the pattern is simple: the larger the fortune, the larger the check, but the percentage is identical for everyone — a tenth, once. That’s the whole point of splitting it by share instead of by flat dollar amount. It scales to what each person actually has, so the same gesture asks the same thing of everyone on the list. And it could be scaled even further down — to people worth a mere $100 million, if they wanted in. It’s all opt-in; again, I’m just showing the potential math, and maybe someone richer will run with it.

What about just one year’s newborns?

Now shrink the question down. Forget the 25 million older kids for a moment. What would it cost to give every single baby born in the United States in one year the full $18,000 — the seed that becomes a real million by age 60?

In 2024, 3.63 million babies were born in the U.S. At $18,000 each, funding the entire cohort — every newborn in America, rich or poor, no exceptions — costs about $65 billion.

The federal government already does a shrunken version of exactly this: it seeds each newborn’s Trump Account with $1,000, which runs about $3.6 billion a year. Going from $1,000 to $18,000 — from a nice token to a genuinely life-altering sum — would cost roughly $61 billion more per birth-year. And doing it every year, forever, for every new class of American babies? About $65 billion annually. That’s less than 1% of the annual yearly US government budget.

The Social Security angle

Here’s where that $65 billion a year gets genuinely interesting.

Social Security is the single largest program in the federal budget — it paid out about $1.6 trillion in 2025 to roughly 70 million people, close to a fifth of everything the federal government spends. And it’s in well-documented trouble. The 2025 Trustees Report projects the retirement trust fund runs dry around 2033 — and a 2025 law has since nudged that to late 2032. When it happens, incoming payroll taxes will cover only about 77% of promised benefits, meaning an automatic 23% cut for everyone, unless Congress raises taxes or trims benefits first. The program’s shortfall over the next 75 years is estimated at roughly $25 trillion.

Now set the newborn-seeding number next to that. Funding an $18,000 account for every baby born in a year costs about $65 billion — a little over 4% of a single year’s Social Security spending. For roughly four cents on every dollar Social Security already pays out, you could hand every American newborn a seed that grows, untouched, into about a million dollars of real retirement money by their sixties.

Be honest about what that does and doesn’t fix. It does nothing for the 2033 cliff. The babies seeded today don’t retire for sixty-plus years, so current retirees and the near-term shortfall need their own answer.

It is a structural fix on a long delay. Social Security’s core problem is demographic: it’s pay-as-you-go, and there are fewer workers standing behind each retiree every decade. Seeding newborns attacks the squeeze from the other end. A generation that reaches retirement already holding a private million — money that compounded on its own, entirely outside the payroll-tax system — is a generation that leans on Social Security far less. That opens doors a cash-strapped program can’t otherwise touch: you could means-test more comfortably, restructure benefits, or simply let a partly self-funded cohort take pressure off the system without pushing anyone into poverty. Run the seeding for twenty years and it totals on the order of $1.3 trillion — a fraction of the $25 trillion hole, except it doesn’t plug the hole so much as slowly make the hole matter less.

As one piece of the long-run answer, “give every citizen a funded head start on their own retirement” is among the few ideas that gets cheaper and more powerful the earlier you start it. Which is the same lesson as everything else in this piece — only here it’s aimed at the whole country at once.

Not everyone will cheer

A gift like this draws two reactions, and they tell you a lot about the person reacting.

The first is gratitude — the obvious one. Someone with more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes put a real asset into the hands of a child who had nothing, and asked for nothing back.

The second is the reflex to turn it into an indictment: see, this proves a handful of people have too much; the answer is to tax them, not thank them. That argument isn’t crazy on its face. Fortunes this size do sit alongside real need, and $250 or $325 million is a rounding error against the wealth behind it. Reasonable people can debate the tax code, and they should — on its own terms.

But look at what that reflex actually does. If the public answer to a man putting $6.25 billion into poor kids’ investment accounts is “this is why we need higher taxes,” you’ve just told every other billionaire in the country that generosity buys them an attack instead of goodwill. That is precisely how you get less of it. Nobody writes the next check to become the villain in someone else’s argument.

The better response — the one that produces more seeded kids, not fewer — is to treat this as unambiguously good and say so loudly. Brad Gerstner, one of the people behind the program, has framed it as a “50-state challenge”: philanthropists claiming states one by one, a friendly race to see who can set up the most kids. That’s exactly the right energy. A billionaire who funds a whole state’s worth of children should get the headline they’d actually want.

And be honest about mixed motives, because they matter less than critics think. Some of these gifts are partly PR. Some companies signing on have political favors in mind. Fine. The four-year-old with a share of stock locked away until adulthood does not care what was in the giver’s heart — the compounding works the same either way. When the urge to look generous produces actual generosity aimed at kids who need it, the smart move is to lean into the incentive, not sneer at it.

None of this is an argument against government or policy. It’s an argument against poisoning a genuinely good act — because the reflex to do so costs the exact children everyone claims to be worried about.

The list is already growing

The Dells started something, and they’re no longer alone. A roster of people has stepped up to put real assets into kids’ accounts, and it’s worth naming them — setting a child up for a lifetime of compounding deserves to be on the record.

• Gwynne and Robert Shotwell. The president of SpaceX and her husband gave one share of SpaceX stock to each of more than two million children aged 11 to 17 in lower-income areas — worth roughly $320 million, tilted toward kids near their central Texas home. Every one of those children now literally owns a piece of a rocket company, locked away until they turn 18.
• Ray and Barbara Dalio. The Bridgewater founder and his wife pledged $250 apiece for roughly 300,000 children across Connecticut.
• Brad Gerstner. The Altimeter Capital investor — one of the program’s architects — is seeding accounts for Indiana kids under five, some 400,000 of them, and is the one pushing the 50-state challenge.
• Kraken. The crypto exchange is sponsoring an account for every single child born in Wyoming in 2026.

Then there’s the corporate wall. Dozens of companies — the Treasury counted more than fifty by late August — are matching the government’s $1,000 for their employees’ newborns. The usual financial giants are in (JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Schwab), but so is a crowd that should catch the eye of anyone who cares about sound money: Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, Jack Dorsey’s Block, and — going furthest of all — Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, which is adding $250 a year for every U.S. employee’s child under 18, not just newborns.

There’s something fitting in that. The people who talk the most about hard money and long time horizons are the ones lining up to fund 60-year compounding accounts for children. That’s the whole argument of this blog in miniature: put a good asset in early, then get out of time’s way.

And the lane is wide open for the giving-focused to do more. Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Jack Dorsey — people who’ve built their public identities around giving money away — could each seed entire states without feeling the dent. Shotwell already proved you don’t even need cash: you can gift the asset itself. Picture a child’s account holding a share of Amazon, a share of Block, or a sliver of bitcoin — bought once and left alone for eighteen years. (The mechanics for donating stock and other assets are still being finalized, but the door is open.) The tools exist. What’s missing is more people willing to walk through it, and a culture that claps when they do.

One name missing from the list

There’s a conspicuous absence on the donor roll, and it’s worth naming precisely because the accounts carry his name. President Trump created the program, headlines its summits, and has personally called on the country’s business leaders and philanthropists to fund it — his Treasury even branded the ask a “50-State Challenge.” Yet as of this writing there’s no public record of Trump putting in a dollar of his own.

That stands out for two reasons. First, it’s literally his name on the accounts — if anyone’s own money belongs in there, it’s his. Second, he can obviously afford it: he sits at No. 201 on the very Forbes 400 this piece is built around, and his estimated net worth jumped from about $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion in a single year of being president. The presidency has made him dramatically richer.

So the optic isn’t just striking — it’s backwards. The man asking everyone else to fund the kids’ accounts with his name on them hasn’t opened his own wallet, while a hedge-fund manager, a rocket company’s president, and a software CEO have. If the whole game is making generosity contagious, the person whose name is at the top of the letterhead should be first in line, not missing from it — even a symbolic $250-a-kid gesture somewhere would do more for the cause than another summit. He can plainly afford it, and it’s his name on the door. He should write the check.

We should want a lot more of this

So here’s the encouragement, and it runs four directions:

To other people with means: this is the template. You don’t need $6.25 billion. Employers can seed accounts for employees’ kids. Wealthy families, foundations, churches, hometown boosters, and small-business owners can seed the accounts of the kids around them. A $250 gift to a newborn is worth more to that child’s life than a $2,500 gift at their high school graduation, and it costs a tenth as much. Match the Dells’ idea at whatever scale you’ve got.

To grandparents and parents: you already have the most powerful version of this, and it requires no billionaire. Watch how fast the target fills once everyone does a little. A child born today gets $1,000 from the Treasury. If a parent’s employer is one of the dozens now matching, that’s another $1,000 — the account is at $2,000 before the family has saved a dime. That leaves $16,000 to reach the $18,000 that becomes a real million. A grandparent’s $1,000 in year one. A birthday that’s a deposit instead of more plastic. An aunt, an uncle, a godparent adding what they can. Spread across a childhood and left to compound, $16,000 isn’t a mountain — it’s a handful of small, deliberate deposits by people who love the kid. If you’re going to give a child money anyway, give it to them at age 2, not age 22.

To everyone else: you don’t need a kid of your own to do this. Any child with an account can receive a contribution from anyone. If you know a young family stretched thin, the highest-return gift you will ever hand them is a few hundred dollars in their child’s account before that child can walk — plus a nudge to open one if they haven’t. Give to the accounts of the kids in your life. You can even contribute directly to any child’s Trump Account with a QR code the account generates — a genuinely useful feature. The money never touches the parents, never gets spent on something else, and never gets forgotten: it’s auto-invested. It’s a great account and a great tool.

To the kid, eventually: the account teaches the lesson the money can’t. A child who watches $250 quietly turn into $845, then keeps adding, learns in their bones what most adults never internalize — that patient capital beats almost everything, and that the earliest dollar is always the most valuable one.

And for anyone weighing whether to do this at scale, it’s worth being honest about the upside to the giver, too. This is one of the rare gifts almost impossible to read as anything but good — no downside headline, no “but was it really effective” hand-wringing, no overhead quietly eating the donation, just a child, by name, with an account that grows for sixty years. The Dells, the Shotwells, the Dalios didn’t only set kids up; they attached their names to about the most defensible act of generosity available anywhere right now. In a moment when great wealth mostly attracts suspicion, funding a generation’s head start earns something rarer and harder to buy: goodwill nobody can argue with. It’s good for the kid and good for the giver at the same time — which is exactly what should make it an easy yes.

Michael and Susan Dell found the single most efficient thing you can do with a philanthropic dollar and did it 25 million times. The right response isn’t just applause. It’s imitation.

Give a kid a head start. The math is on your side, and it never gets cheaper than today.