Pension reform means Brits don’t have to wait for billionaires to give them shares

Children may be being given SpaceX shares over in the States, but UK pension reforms means Brits can access superstar companies through their savings, writes Ian Cornelius News arrived last week that Elon Musk will give every American child a share in SpaceX. It comes days after Anthropic, the frontier AI firm, announced plans for five per cent of its shares to be placed in a ‘public benefit’ fund. OpenAI, its competitor, reportedly floated a similar proposal in July. Whatever you might think about the necessity or underlying motivations of these plans, it’s worth pausing on why they’re so eye-catching in today’s market. Consider this: When Microsoft listed in 1986, it was worth less than a billion dollars. Anyone with a modest shareholding came along for the extraordinary ride that followed. You could say it grew ‘in public’. By contrast, early growth in today’s superstar companies is the reserve of billionaires, sovereign wealth funds, various endowments and the sort of g