What kids really need is mandatory personal finance classes in High School, which would teach them how to handle money, debt, spending, budgeting and general financial health.

Nothing would help the next generation more, even above giving them seed investment money, than helping them avoid the pitfalls which are just waiting for them around every corner.

This is badass.

My first intuition was that he was just throwing money away. Imagine getting $250 at some arbitrarily young age! But it looks like it's going into something like a 529 plan. That'll be great for these kids come 18 years from now.

But an even more important idea here is going from zero to one investment accounts. That will have a profound impact on the financial literacy and lifelong savings behavior of many of these kids.

This move isn't going to win him any steak dinners or awards bestowed by people running power organizations. Instead, his charity is diffused across millions of children who will be too young to ever vote him into any office. Many of them won't ever even know who he was.

When my daughter wanted her first tablet, a friend of mine said he had an old one he could sell me for $50. Cool, I said, and my daughter saved up her allowance (paid for feeding the cats, as I recall) to get the money. Then, my friend said to just put the $50 in her savings account.

Oh, I said, right, we should set one of those up for her.

Once she had one, it was clear I should be adding to it every month. But, the initial nudge to get her one was important. Hopefully, having an account will make it more likely to put a little in every month? It's not everything, but it's also not nothing.

Of course, cheaper housing would help the kids more, but that has more entrenched interests opposed to it (almost every homeowner), and not even Dell has enough to overcome that.

Selfless move. Have a lot of respect for the Dell philanthropy arm for doing this, will surely benefit a bunch of kids down the road even if they are more financially literate

$250 seems way too small to make a tangible difference, but I suppose it's better than nothing.

$250 per child, at 5% interest rate, compounded in 18 years, you'd get $601.65.

Even in today's money, I wouldn't call it a "head start"

I would much rather tax the wealthy, so that we could create a society where we don't have children who need a "financial head start"

I read a book nearly a decade ago, that I think is worth highlighting.

> The book's central thesis is that members of the global elite are using philanthropic institutions to preserve a system that concentrates wealth and power at the top at the expense of societal progress. Giridharadas examines the narrow limits of modern philanthropy, claiming that rich donors avoid contributing to causes which could undermine their own lofty status. He argues that in some cases, the political lobbying efforts of wealthy donors may reduce the government's ability to address inequality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...

They rather give kids $6.25B going straight to SPX than build schools. At some point, the billionaires realized it’s best to keep Americans uneducated. They then turn around and hire all the immigrants and complain why there are so many of them in this country.

People realize this is precursor to them removing social security for this generation of kids?

I think the better idea would be to give $10k to 620k children who might be much more in need.

Let them eat cake.

I’m not sure how much good $250 will do for a child.

I think this essentially explains why taxing billionaires is not very useful, because the total amount of their life generated wealth assets amounts to a small amount for 25 million people let alone larger populations.

Even if you took all the $’s away, the government really needs to tax high numbers of lower income people for the income to be meaningful.

If I was a billionaire, I would avoid the phrase "collective action" in my press statements.

(It's clearly hard to hate giving money to kids; that seems good. What seems bad is relying on the largesse of the extremely wealthy.)

for a moment i thought that was Annabelle trailer !!

If only there was some sensible way for 25M children to be given a financial head start that wasn't Michael Dell directly funding it.

See his total net worth and the YTD increase: https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/michael-s-de.... Google/ChatGPT his 2019 (pre-covid) net worth (I'll save you the trouble): $27B. It doesn't matter if it's super accurate because we all know the multiple is probably pretty accurate given what's transpired.

And before you go calling me a wealth hater, I just wish the US wasn't such a wealth lover. Just a bit less emphasis on people getting rich and a bit more emphasis on getting our shit together so that the government can fund savings accounts for kids and while they're at it teach them some basic understanding of investment/budgeting.

"Why don't the poor just have investment accounts" - Marie-Antoinette Dell

Having $250 in an account does practically nothing for the child. But having $6.25B invested does generate fees for bankers chosen to manage this program. (Chosen by the president's Wall Street entourage, presumably?)

So we are going to live in a world where the national well-being is dependent on the good whims of billionaires and their "pet" causes. Not in the geographic or interest vicinity of a feudal lord? Too bad, maybe you should work harder, fuck you.

How much are the investment bankers going to profit off these childhood investment accounts?

They're making it seem like this is some big selfless thing, giving a bunch of kids a small amount of cash. I see it as a big payday for the large banks.

It's so interesting how many of the comments already are some variant of how ridiculous this is that a rich person voluntarily donated their own money. That that's somehow bad, and what we really need to do is to force all of them to donate via taxation.

But you just got $6 billion and you already want more? This attitude exactly why so many people are against raising taxes, supposedly against their own self-interest. The idea that I can freely spend OTHER people's money is the most seductive thing in the world.