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Monday Brief: Musk Pledges SpaceX Shares to Kids, Korea’s Pension Gives Back Much of Its Chip Gains, Stablecoins Move Faster

October 19, 2026 Aaron Harme

Elon Musk says he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in America next year, a pledge that came a day after he told Anthropic to hand its new fund’s shares straight to the public. South Korea’s National Pension Service has watched its Korean stock holdings lose more than a third of their value since June, most of it in two chipmakers.

Stablecoin payments, made with crypto tokens pegged to a currency like the dollar, grew 45% this year while the supply of coins stood still. In California, the campaign against a one-time billionaire tax has raised roughly ten times what its backers have, and nine companies told a new tokenized-stock venue to leave their shares off its menu.

In this Brief

Musk owns about 4.8 billion SpaceX shares, and the pledge would use about 1.5% of them
Korea’s pension fund raised its target for Korean stocks while it paused its own sell rule
Stablecoin payments reached $482 billion through September as the coins in circulation barely grew
Props 41 and 42 can block California’s billionaire tax even if voters pass it
OKXICE’s own notice lists nine companies that objected to tokenized trading of their stock

Musk says every US child gets a SpaceX share next year

“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk posted Monday, adding that it would be “the first of many,” CNBC reports. He gave no details on how. CNBC counts 72 million children under 18 and puts the gift at about $10.5 billion at Friday’s $146.03 close. Musk owns about 4.8 billion shares, per an August SEC filing, so the pledge would use about 1.5% of his holding.

The pledge followed Musk’s Sunday reply to Anthropic’s 5% public-benefit fund: “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.” SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell has already pledged more than $320 million in stock to fund Trump Accounts, government-seeded investment accounts for children born from 2025 through 2028, for more than two million kids, Yahoo Finance reports. Business Insider notes it is not clear whether Musk would use those accounts. Until he names one, nobody knows where 72 million shares would land.

Korea’s pension fund gives back much of its chip gains

The National Pension Service’s disclosed stakes in 287 Korean companies fell 182.4 trillion won, about $137 billion, or 35.3%, between June 30 and Oct. 15, the Seoul Economic Daily reports from FnGuide data. SK hynix and Samsung Electronics accounted for 131.1 trillion won of that. It was the fund’s largest quarterly paper loss on record.

The fund paused its rule to sell domestic stocks back to target in January, as prices surged, and raised the target for Korean stocks from 14.4% to 20.8% by May. Chairman Kim Sung-joo told lawmakers that following the rule would have meant selling more than 800 billion won a day, over 10% of the KOSPI’s trading value. BusinessKorea reports critics now say the fund failed as a safety net. Holding more chip stock was the decision, and the fund owned 7.32% of SK hynix as its shares fell by about half.

Stablecoins are changing hands faster

Stablecoin payments reached $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, up 45%, while the coins in circulation rose 0.4% to about $305 billion, CoinDesk reports from an Allium study. Spending on stablecoin-linked cards hit $3.9 billion, ten times a year earlier.

Allium counts just 2.5% of $97.9 trillion in raw transfers as end-user activity, and card spending in the second quarter was 0.03% of Visa’s $4 trillion in volume. Mastercard, Stripe and Visa each announced stablecoin services last week. The growth is coming from coins that already exist moving more often, and the card networks are building the rails it moves on.

Prop 40’s opponents can win two ways

The campaign against California’s Prop 40, a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires, has raised more than $340 million and spent at least $21.2 million in the first 19 days of September, the Guardian reports from state filings. Sergey Brin has given at least $102 million and Eric Schmidt more than $42 million. The yes side has raised just under $33 million.

Opponents also put Props 41 and 42 on the November ballot. If either gets more yes votes than Prop 40, the tax does not take effect even if it passes. A late-September University of California poll had Prop 40 at 45% yes and 42% no, down from a seven-point lead a month earlier. Brin’s donation alone is about three times what the whole yes campaign has raised.

Nine companies keep their stock off OKXICE

OKXICE’s Oct. 15 public notice lists nine companies that filed objections to tokenized trading of their shares: Cerebras Systems, AppLovin, Applied Digital, Rocket Lab, CoreWeave, Verizon, Applied Optoelectronics, Broadcom and UnitedHealth. The venue is a 50/50 joint venture of NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange and an OKX holding company, operating under the SEC’s five-year exemption issued Sept. 17.

The objection bars only that venue, The Block reports, and OKXICE still plans to list dozens of others, including Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft. Nasdaq said it would opt out for its own shares. Under this exemption the company decides, and OKXICE’s notice gives no reasons for the nine objections. Aaron’s post has the objection window.

Also noted

Nvidia brought six big investment firms into financing platforms that could mobilize more than $500 billion for AI-infrastructure builders, Mehran Gul writes in Fortune; our longer read covers Nvidia’s offer to back resale values on part of a deal.
Payday-advance apps marketed as earned wage access carried a 232% APR on the average loan, in bank data covering about 347,000 borrowers, the Center for Responsible Lending found; our longer read runs the fees by state.
ESPN gave Joe Buck a six-year, $108 million extension while Troy Aikman heads toward free agency after the network’s first Super Bowl, Front Office Sports reports; Aaron’s post has the per-year math.
A 30-second TV spot in Harlingen, Texas, cost political candidates under $500 two years ago and now runs about $12,000, Bloomberg reports.
LinkedIn says its detection changes cut views of posts it classifies as AI slop by 40%, CNN reports.

Sources

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