On July 6th, the president stood in the Oval Office, surrounded by kids (including one who’d fallen asleep by the Resolute desk), and rang the opening bells of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ simultaneously.

This wasn’t to celebrate the launch of an executive order or presidential letter. It was the launch of Trump Accounts, a program that hands every American child born from 2025-2028 a $1,000 investment account, seeded by the Treasury.

Democrats have had wet dreams of passing something like a “baby dividend” since roughly 2010 — but there was no think tank, PAC, or presidential hopeful behind this. It was the brainchild of a hedge fund manager, and it started with a random conversation at his dinner table.

Here, the exclusive account directly from Brad Gerstner: how the idea went from a thought in his son’s head to the president’s desk.

How America Got Its Accounts

After getting a law degree from Indiana University (on a full scholarship), Gerstner worked as an attorney for a few years until he decided to go into government. Then, after a stint as Indiana’s Deputy Secretary of State in the late 90s, becoming a founding principal of venture capital firm General Catalyst, cofounding and exiting two internet startups (making him an actual founder, not a Bay Area LARPer subsisting on tier-3 VC checks), and running his own book as a hedge fund portfolio manager investing in airlines — he started his own fund, Altimeter Capital. He spun it up with $3 million dollars of cash right after the financial crisis.

When Gerstner’s sons were born, he opened custodial investment accounts for the two of them. As he tells it, his son, Lincoln, asked him at dinner one night, “Why don’t other kids get to have the same thing?”

An idea was born.

Gerstner tells me, “the motivation was very simple. We needed an at-scale industrial change to the social contract if we were going to deal with two major problems: the growing wealth gap and the increasing drift away from capitalism — which less than half of Americans under the age of 40 have a positive view on.”