By Maria Bregman
I was reading about Michael Dell this morning. You know, the computer guy. The man whose beige boxes sat on every office desk in the nineties. It turns out he – and his wife, Susan – are doing something fairly staggering. They are dropping $6.25 billion.
That’s billion with a ‘b’.
They aren’t building a rocket to Mars. They aren’t buying a social media platform to run it into the ground. They are topping up investment accounts for American children. Twenty-five million of them. It’s part of a wider scheme with the US Treasury to give kids a “baby bond,” a financial nest egg that matures when they hit adulthood.
It’s a massive, ego-driven, typically American bit of philanthropy. But once I got past the headline – and my usual cynicism about tech billionaires trying to play God with their wallets – I started wondering.
What would happen if we did this here?
And I don’t mean “what would happen to the economy?” I leave that to the guys in the suits. I mean, what would happen to us? To British culture? To the music, the theatre, the weird little art galleries in converted railway arches?
Because, let’s be honest, the UK arts scene is currently running on fumes. We are seeing a slow, grinding gentrification of creativity. If you want to be an artist in London or Manchester today, you usually need the Bank of Mum and Dad to back you up.
So, if a British billionaire decided to drop six billion quid on the next generation, who could it be? And would it actually save the soul of British culture, or just give a load of teenagers money to blow on crypto?
The Usual Suspects: Who Has the Cash?
Let’s look at the runners and riders. Who in the UK has pockets deep enough to pull a Dell?
It’s a short list.
We don’t really have the same culture of “giving while living” that the Americans have. Our rich tend to hoard it, or buy football clubs, or move to Monaco to avoid the taxman.
James Dyson? He’s got the money. He’s worth somewhere north of £20 billion, depending on which rich list you believe. But Dyson’s philanthropy is very… specific. It’s about engineering. It’s about fixing things. He wants more people to design vacuum cleaners and batteries. I can’t see him handing out no-strings-attached cash to a kid who might use it to fund a experimental noise-rock album.
Jim Ratcliffe? The INEOS guy? Unlikely. He seems more interested in Manchester United and sailing. He’s putting his money into things he can watch on a weekend.
Then you have the aristocratic money. The Duke of Westminster. The Grosvenor family. They have billions tied up in Mayfair property. They do a lot of quiet charity work, sure. But dropping £6 billion in one go? That requires a level of flashy, American-style disruption that the British aristocracy usually considers bad manners.
There is one family, though. The Sainsburys.
Specifically, the branch of the family that gave us the Sainsbury Centre and supports the National Gallery. They understand that money isn’t just for accumulation; it’s for civilization. But even then, their wealth is often tied up in trusts and foundations. Liquidating that much cash to give directly to “the youth” would be a logistical nightmare.
Actually, scrap that. The most interesting name isn’t a traditional businessman.
What about J.K. Rowling?
She’s not in the Dell league of wealth – she’s a billionaire, but not a multi-multi-billionaire on that scale. But she has a history of dropping off the rich lists because she gives so much away. And she knows, intimately, what it’s like to create while broke. She knows the value of a safety net.
But let’s be real. In the UK, we don’t look to billionaires to fix society. We look to the State. And the State is broke.
We actually tried this, remember? Gordon Brown’s Child Trust Funds. Every kid got a voucher. It was a brilliant idea. Then the Tories came in, saw a line item that looked like “free money,” and scrapped it.
So if it happens, it has to be private money. It has to be a maverick.
The “F-You Money” of Creativity
Let’s imagine it happens. Let’s imagine some reclusive British tech tycoon – maybe a founder of a fintech unicorn we’ve never heard of – decides to match the Dell pledge.
Every child born in the UK gets an investment account. By the time they turn 18, with compound interest, they have a pot of cash. Maybe £15,000. Maybe £20,000.
To a banker, that’s a deposit on a very small flat in a bad area.
But to an artist? That is freedom.
We talk a lot about “access” in the arts. We talk about funding bodies and grants. But the biggest barrier to entry isn’t the cost of paintbrushes or violin lessons. It’s the rent.
It is the terrifying, paralyzing fear that if you spend two years writing a novel and it fails, you will starve.
Right now, the only people who can take that risk are the ones with a safety net. The “nepo babies.” I don’t use that term to be mean – some of them are incredibly talented. But they have an invisible advantage. They know that if the play flops, they won’t be homeless.
If you give every kid in Britain a nest egg, you democratize risk.
Suddenly, the kid from a council estate in Glasgow can say, “You know what? I’m going to move to London and try to be an actor for two years. I have the money to survive.”
The girl in Cornwall who wants to start a sustainable fashion brand doesn’t have to beg a bank for a loan she can’t get. She has the capital.
It changes the psychology of a generation.
The “Dole” Dividend
I remember talking to an old punk musician a few years back. He was waxing lyrical about the 1970s. He said, “We didn’t have money, but we had the dole.”
In the 70s and 80s, the benefits system in the UK was loose enough that you could effectively sign on, live in a squat, and spend your days learning to play the guitar. It was an unofficial arts subsidy. It gave us The Clash, The Smiths, the Young British Artists.
We closed that loophole a long time ago. Now, the benefits system is a punitive, grinding machine that demands you spend 35 hours a week looking for work you don’t want.
A Dell-style investment fund would effectively bring back that creative freedom. It’s “F-You Money” for the masses.
Think about the music we’re missing out on right now because the people who should be making it are working double shifts at Deliveroo. Think about the plays that aren’t being written because the writers are too exhausted from their zero-hours contracts.
Money doesn’t create talent. I know that. You can give a boring person a million pounds and they’ll just be a rich boring person. But money buys time. And time is the soil that talent grows in.
The Risk of the “Easy Life”
But – and here is where my skepticism kicks in – is there a downside?
There is a romantic idea that art comes from suffering. That you need to starve in a garret to write a masterpiece.
If we give every 18-year-old a cushion, do we lose the edge?
If you look at the current cultural landscape, it’s remarkably safe. It’s risk-averse. The people making art are comfortable, so the art is comfortable. It’s polite.
If you make everyone comfortable, do we just get more beige art?
I used to think this. I used to think that struggle was a necessary ingredient. But then I looked at the rent prices in London again.
There is “struggle” – eating beans on toast so you can buy canvas – and then there is “survival.” We are currently in the survival phase. People aren’t making art because they are literally trying to keep the lights on.
I’d argue that financial security actually allows for stranger art. If you don’t need your painting to sell immediately to pay the gas bill, you can paint something weird. You can take a punt.
The market forces us to be commercial. A safety net allows us to be experimental.
The Cultural Shift
There is another angle here. It’s about who gets to tell the stories.
Right now, British culture is dominated by a very specific voice. It’s the voice of the private school, the Oxbridge grad, the London elite. They tell stories about dinner parties and inheritances and witty misunderstandings in Tuscany.
And that’s fine. I like a witty misunderstanding in Tuscany as much as the next person.
But we are losing the rougher textures. We are losing the stories of the provinces, of the working class, of the immigrant experience – not told as “trauma porn” for a middle-class audience, but told with the swagger of ownership.
If a generation of working-class kids hits adulthood with capital in their pockets, they don’t just become consumers. They become producers. They start their own record labels. They open their own venues. They don’t have to wait for the gatekeepers at the BBC or the National Theatre to let them in. They can build their own gates.
The “Dell” Effect in the UK
So, back to the Dells. $6.25 billion.
It’s easy to be cynical. It’s easy to say it’s tax avoidance, or reputation laundering, or just a drop in the ocean compared to what the government should be doing.
But the sheer scale of it forces a conversation.
In the UK, we are paralyzed by a lack of investment. Our arts institutions are crumbling. Our schools are cutting music and drama because they can’t afford the heating. We are stripping the assets of our culture and wondering why the output is getting stale.
We need a shock to the system.
If I were a British billionaire sitting on a pile of cash, looking at the state of the country, I’d be looking at this Dell move and thinking, “Why not me?”
It wouldn’t just be an investment in “the economy.” It would be an investment in the national imagination.
Because the next David Bowie is out there right now. Maybe they’re seven years old. Maybe they’re living in a damp flat in Hull or a tower block in Peckham. And right now, the odds are stacked so heavily against them that we will probably never hear their name.
They don’t need a handout. They don’t need a lecture on resilience. They need a bit of capital. They need the ability to say “no” to the shift at the warehouse so they can say “yes” to the rehearsal.
That’s what $6.25 billion buys you. It doesn’t just buy stocks and shares. It buys the future.
And frankly, looking at the present, the future could use all the help it can get.
Of course, if we did this in the UK, we’d probably mess it up. We’d wrap it in so much red tape that you’d need a lawyer to access the cash. Or we’d insist that the money could only be spent on “approved” investments, like government bonds or apprenticeships in coding.
That would be a mistake.
The beauty of the “baby bond” idea is the autonomy. It says to the next generation: “We trust you.”
And that’s something young people in this country haven’t heard for a very, very long time.
So, James Dyson? Jim Ratcliffe? Are you listening? The Americans are making us look bad. Again. Put your hand in your pocket. Not for a building with your name on it, but for the messy, unpredictable, brilliant potential of the kids who might just save us all from boredom.
