Welcome back. The Invest in America Trump accounts go live on Saturday as America marks its 250th birthday. As you know, Altimeter's Brad Gerstner was the driving force behind that program. And he joins us once again live. Welcome. It's good to see you.
I mean, Scott, it's great to be here. I'm in my flag room. I got my flag cup. Got the flag behind me. How about those boys out in Santa Clara last night? You know, country road take me home. I mean, that was a huge victory. Great to be in America.
Bogus red card. Let's just throw that out there cuz everybody agrees for certain.
All right. Let's talk about this. So, what a journey, right? Now we're on literally the cusp of all this being live. I mean, how's this feel? From when you first pitched this with us, it was a dream back then. I know you couldn't have imagined a day, maybe you did, that this soon, theoretically, that we would be here.
Yeah, well, it is soon. Thank you for asking. And frankly, thank you for having me on, Scott, in the fall of I think 2020 or 2021 when we first talked about it on the Halftime Report. You know, it was that show that caused it to go a little bit viral on Twitter, got more people talking about it, that led me to set up the Invest in America Foundation. It's pretty surreal, you know, the idea that starting this Saturday, every child born forevermore, forevermore, in the history of America will get an investment account at birth seeded with a thousand dollars in the S&P 500 that will compound for their lifetime. And the momentum we have around this is totally extraordinary. Every company that is signing up to add money to the accounts of the kids of their employees, companies like Micron, Sanjay announced this week 250 million dollars going to a million kids in the communities they serve. Of course, everybody's familiar with the 6.25 billion-dollar gift from the Dells. But we have Ray Dalio in Connecticut, me in Indiana, Harold Hamm in Oklahoma. And I tell you, I have billions and billions of announcements in queue for the kids. This is bonus dollars to go into these accounts. And of course, let's step back for a second. What did we talk about on that first show? Why do we need this so badly? Because 60% of Americans aren't feeling connected to the American dream. They're not participating in the upside of compounding. This changes all that. This makes every child a shareholder from birth, and they will be able to compound for a lifetime in the upside of the capital markets, right? That's how we close the wealth gap. That's how we get everybody feeling like they're on Team America again, benefiting from the upside of America, right? Owning some shares in SpaceX, in Google, in OpenAI, in Anthropic, in all these companies that we're talking about. This is step one. Remember, this is a journey that will last decades, but this is an important milestone. I'll be at the White House on Monday for a historic joint bell ringing where the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ are coming together for the first time. And we're going to ring the opening bell, a joint bell, from the Oval Office for the first time in history, marking the celebration for the launch of these accounts. So, I couldn't be more grateful for all the incredible partners along the way. You know, on Monday I was in Philly with Senators Fetterman and McCormick. Yesterday I was in Newark at a Big Brothers Big Sisters with Senator Booker. And this is a real big bipartisan tent, but we would not be here without the leadership of President Trump. He frankly was the one willing to take the entrepreneurial risk to make sure that every kid in America had an investment account.
You mentioned the momentum even more this morning that we, you know, Goldman Sachs to contribute a thousand to the Trump accounts for eligible employees and their children. Morgan Stanley, an announcement moving just moments ago before we welcomed you on the program. So, the momentum is real. It's tangible. You can see it. And you mentioned SpaceX, which I thought was interesting. Are we going to get something from SpaceX where they become a contributor here as well? You brought the name up, so I might as well ask you.
Well, listen, I'm unabashed. Michael Dell and I are the chairman of going out and talking to everybody and getting them to give to the kids of America. This is a transformational new type of philanthropy in America at scale. Remember when Berkshire, when Warren Buffett tried to give all his money to the Gates Foundation and was frustrated by the overhead and the lack of success and return on that investment. Now imagine that instead he could just give a share of Berkshire Hathaway to every child in America and let that compound for the last 20 years. Think about the transformational effect of that. So we now have the ability to have large-scale direct philanthropy, no middleman in the middle taking a rake of those proceeds going directly to these kids. And we know when kids have savings, when they have investment, they're more likely to graduate from high school and college, they're more likely to buy a home, they're more likely to start a business, they're less likely to be incarcerated. So yes, I have talked to SpaceX and Google and OpenAI and Anthropic and every one of our friends and major companies. And by the way, not just technology companies. I'm also talking with Dave Ricks at Eli Lilly and my friends in Indiana. You know, we're talking to industrial companies. We think that every company in America has an opportunity to customize a giving program in a way that makes the most sense to them. I was talking to Ryan MacInerney from Visa. They're matching for all the kids of Visa, but I said, 'Ryan, why don't you adopt 100 schools across America and give to every kid in those schools.' So this unlocks a creative new form of philanthropy. We truly are on day one. The companies we've already announced are the pioneers. So yes, I would say stay tuned. A lot of announcements coming.
