"The pitchforks are here": Billionaires work to contain AI's populist revolt
· Axios
America's billionaires are developing their own prescriptions for AI-fueled inequality, anxious to defuse a populist revolt aimed at their ballooning fortunes.
Why it matters: The AI boom has dramatically raised the stakes of the wealth-tax debate, unleashing a technology that could wipe out millions of jobs while minting the world's first trillionaires.
Visit esporist.com for more information.
- Populist politicians, particularly on the left, have cast this as capitalism's next great reckoning: an even deeper concentration of wealth and power in an economy already rigged for the elite.
Zoom in: Some of the richest men in tech have warned for years AI could destabilize the economy. Many suggest the answer is not deceleration or wealth taxes, but shared abundance.
- Jeff Bezos, the world's fourth-richest man, said on CNBC last week that the bottom 50% of earners should pay zero federal income tax. "You could double the taxes I pay and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens," the Amazon founder argued.
- Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and a longtime proponent of universal basic income, now favors "universal basic compute" — giving people access to AI's productive power instead of a fixed cash payment. OpenAI went further in April with a New Deal-style social contract that proposed a public wealth fund, taxes on AI-driven returns and automated labor, and a four-day workweek.
- Elon Musk, whose SpaceX IPO could help make him the world's first trillionaire, has called for "universal HIGH INCOME" checks from the federal government — arguing robots will drive so much growth that inflation won't follow.
Between the lines: The billionaires and AI leaders floating these ideas are keenly aware that the politics of extreme wealth could turn dangerous fast.
- In a January essay, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made what he called "a pragmatic argument" for billionaires to support higher taxes on AI wealth. "If they don't support a good version," Amodei wrote, "they'll inevitably get a bad version designed by a mob."
- OpenAI named the same risk in its April policy blueprint, warning that AI could leave "power and wealth becoming more concentrated instead of more widely shared." Its foundation put money behind that anxiety Wednesday, committing $250 million to help workers and communities weather the disruption — and to test new ways to share AI's gains before the backlash hardens.
The big picture: Anti-billionaire politics has become an organizing principle for the Democratic Party, which remains in search of a durable post-Trump identity.
- In Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called Wednesday for overhauling the tax code, including new taxes on wealth and data centers, to ensure Americans share in the economic gains of AI. Warren — who is being courted by potential 2028 presidential candidates — cited Silicon Valley's own warnings about a "permanent underclass" displaced by AI.
- In New York City, state lawmakers this week passed Mayor Zohran Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes above $5 million — a measure he controversially promoted in a video outside hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin's $238 million Manhattan penthouse.
- In Maine, Democratic Senate frontrunner Graham Platner launched his campaign by declaring that "the enemy is the oligarchy." He's backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who are more than a year into their nationwide "Fighting Oligarchy" tour.
- In California, unions say they have gathered more than 1.5 million signatures to put a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax on the November ballot, aiming to fund health care, education and food assistance programs.
The intrigue: Former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, who is running for governor as a progressive, has endorsed the measure, casting himself as "the billionaire who wants to tax other billionaires."
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, opposes the measure — but has urged Democrats not to ignore the populist forces it represents.
- "The pitchforks [are] here, they're not just coming," Newsom said last week, warning that resentment toward billionaires and AI-driven automation will dominate the 2026 and 2028 elections.
The bottom line: The billionaire tax fight is becoming a test of whether AI creates shared prosperity — or a level of wealth concentration that Amodei warns could "break society."