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Will the AI Bubble Burst in the Face of the Working Class?
The ultimate betrayal will be if AI succeeds in making America vastly wealthier while leaving working Americans with less economic security, less political power, and with the bill for another generation of financial speculation wiping out our retirement accounts.
Nov 01, 2026
The AI bubble and it’s possible disintegration gives us some pretty grim insights into the question of what happens when the richest people in the world rebuild the economy in a way that it no longer needs working people, but still expects them to pay their bills.
Reuters reported this week that China’s AI and semiconductor stock boom has suffered a sudden and staggering reversal: Their STAR50 index of Beijing’s AI and chip champions (like our NASDAQ) has plunged 40% in less than four months, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value.
Their robotics company Unitree's IPO just three months ago was oversubscribed 8,000 times by Chinese small investors and has lost half its value. Dong Baozhen, a Beijing fund manager, told Reuters:
And now we see the bubble bursting.
The same day (Monday) here in America Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27% of its global workforce, as it’s planning to replace them with AI. And when Anthropic (Claude) filed to go public, they disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss and some $657 billion in infrastructure deals with companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and SpaceX; fully $498 billion of that is noncancelable even if the company never uses the computing capacity it’s reserved.
Things got even weirder on Wednesday, when Microsoft and Alphabet reported some striking “earnings” numbers. Alphabet burned through $9.1 billion in free cash flow for the second straight quarter. NPR’s 1A tallied up Monday’s AI deals alone at roughly $235 billion, nearly 1% of American GDP, all in just one single day.
While Wall Street has been pouring massive sums into AI companies, data centers, chips, and power infrastructure, Economist Dean Baker reports at his weekly AI Bubble Monitor that CoreWeave’s debt (the company rents computing power to the AI giants) is now considered so deep in junk bond territory that they’re having to pay 16% interest on their long-term debt to get investors to bite.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.
Most of today’s frenzy of data center and power plant construction is based on the current state of the AI chip-and-software art, but Moore’s Law dictates that over time—and not a lot of time, probably just a matter of months or years at the most—the size and power needs of these AI data centers will decrease exponentially.
Already, entire buildings filled with computers are on the verge of being replaced by a single “wafer” disc that will carry the computing power of billions of today’s red-hot chips. The Wall Street Journal broke the news with an article titled and subtitled:
The Microchip Era Is About to End. The future is in wafers. Data centers will be the size of a box, not vast energy-hogging structures.
Author George Gilder noted we’re not just on the verge of the breakthrough; it’s nearly in production:
Cerebras of Palo Alto, Calif., used the concept in its WSE-3 wafer-scale engine. The WSE-3 boasts some four trillion transistors—14 times as many as Nvidia’s Blackwell chip—with 7,000 times the memory bandwidth. Cerebras inscribed the memory directly on to the wafer rather than relegating it to distant chips and chiplets in high-bandwidth memory mazes. The company stacked up its wafer-scale engines 16-fold, thereby reducing a data center to a small box with 64 trillion transistors.
A data center—a 700,000 square-foot building drawing gigawatts of electricity and chugging millions of gallons of water for cooling—replaced by “a small box” that could be powered by rooftop solar and a good battery bank.
Meanwhile, multiple companies have rolled out AI products that can run on a desktop PC, eliminating the need for data centers altogether. Perplexity introduced one just last month with the headline:
Perplexity Computer now runs fully local on Mac.
Ya think that may have an impact on our economy?
Places booming today as AI and other data facilities and the power plants and transmission lines to feed them are being built—if Moore’s Law applies to data centers as it has proven to apply to all things digital from computers to cell phones to TVs and satellites—will soon look like Flint, Michigan when Ronald Reagan’s free trade policies began to seriously bite in the 1990s.
It sure looks like we’re seeing a repeat of previous bubbles and bursts ranging from Dutch tulips to the 19th century railroads to this century’s dot-com and home mortgage collapses. And the people running the show seem just fine with creating a world where the rich get mindbogglingly richer while working people and 401k investors are out on the street.
JD Vance’s sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Marc Andreesen, the billionaire who helped Elon recruit young men for DOGE to take apart our government, complained on a podcast this year that government workers have both civil service protections and public-sector unions, giving them “two layers of insulation against ever getting fired.”
Unions, of course, are actual democracy in the workplace that generations of workers have literally fought and died for, but these guys don’t seem to appreciate or even understand that.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a 2021 essay that as AI advances, “even more power will shift from labor to capital.” His warning points out how easily AI could dramatically increase the power of people who own businesses and tech while gutting the bargaining power of people who work for a living.
And, indeed, that’s already happening. Like Microsoft this week, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October, all after CEO Andy Jassy warned his employees that AI would “reduce our total corporate workforce.” One AI-related layoff tracker counts nearly 119,000 layoffs so far this year tied explicitly to AI automation, roughly four and a half times last year’s total.
And now the robotics business is exploding, with AI built into local machines that can assemble cars, sew clothing, clean streets, and drive you around town. It’s opened an entirely new industry: outfitting humans with sensors to track their movements to train robots to replace them.
So, if machines replace our workers, who’s going to have enough money to buy the goods and services the machines are putting out?
I grew up in a union family; my dad worked in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, Michigan and was able to raise four boys with a three-bedroom home, a new car every few years, and had a decent retirement. Henry Ford increased his workers’ pay so they’d be able to buy the cars they were making.
This isn’t rocket science. Workers are also customers, taxpayers, homeowners, and parents; they’re the ultimate economic base of their communities. If AI destroys their purchasing power, we’re gnawing away at the foundation of America’s historic economic greatness.
We’ve seen versions of this before.
Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loan industry leading to predatory behavior that produced a massive crash; it cost taxpayers over $100 billion to clean up the mess (a trillion in today’s money). But Reagan also sent those banksters to prison: His regulators made more than 30,000 criminal referrals to the Justice Department, which won more than 1,000 felony convictions.
Since then, times have changed; it appears that the morbidly rich have acquired near-total immunity, no matter how badly they screw up things, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires and corporations owning judges and politicians.
Congress and Bill Clinton deregulated our banks in the late 1990s and the bill came due in 2008 when it all fell apart and millions of Americans lost their homes, families watched retirement accounts evaporate, and workers who’d done absolutely nothing wrong lost their livelihoods.
Nepo-baby George W. Bush chose to hold nobody accountable, and even let the banksters keep their billion-dollar bonuses pulled out just before all the dominoes collapsed. He made zero criminal referrals against the big banks, in a crisis that was 70 times larger than Reagan’s S&L mess.
It appears that the AI gods tech bros think that’s the new normal and are betting on getting the same or better from the Trump regime. After all, in his first term he put “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, who’d thrown an estimated 36,000 Californians out of their homes during the 2008 crash, in charge of the entire economy as Treasury Secretary.
And this time the stakes are even larger than the banking system’s freeze-up; AI is now deeply entangled with America’s military, intelligence agencies, national security infrastructure, and the rivalry with China.
And in their arrogance, they’re saying the quiet part out loud: Last November, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told a Wall Street Journal conference that her company wanted a federal “backstop” for the financing behind its data centers. When a reporter asked whether she meant a government guarantee, she answered, “Exactly.”
And pouring gasoline on this particular bonfire, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill lets these companies write off the full cost of their data center hardware the year they buy it rather than the normal depreciation schedules every other industry in America has to stick to.
Perhaps that’s because the Trump family is so well-invested now in this, and he’s depending on tech bro billions to keep Republicans in office; Elon alone is spending almost a half-billion so far this year to that end.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are already paying. Residential electricity prices rose 6.9% last year, more than double the inflation rate, and Goldman Sachs’ analysts say they expect data centers to drive a massive 40% of electricity demand growth through the end of the decade.
The 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwest states have been hit with $23 billion in consumer electricity price increases through at least 2028, driven by AI data centers. A homeowner in Manassas, Virginia opened a $281 electric bill in January, up from about $100 the month before.
If today’s boom goes bust, who’s going to be left stuck with the bills for the half-built transmission lines, data centers, and power plants? Apparently it won’t be the morbidly rich tech bro masters of the universe, any more than it was Bush’s billionaire bankers.
None of this is to diminish the power and importance of AI. But the internet was real, too, and look what happened in the 1999-2002 period when that industry took down people’s retirement accounts while creating billionaires out of Zuck, Bezos, and Gates.
In 1983, Reagan instructed his Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commision to stop enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust and other anti-monopoly laws, leading to a decade of “Mergers & Acquisitions Mania” as was documented in Michael Douglas’ “greed is good” movie, Wall Street.
Add that to Reagan decriminalizing share buybacks and you have the perfect storm of perverse incentives that end up with doors falling off airplanes, workers and communities being screwed, and a new low standard of crappy customer service—all fed by a lack of competition. And we see that consolidation now happening in AI.
This is what happens when the people who own the machines accumulate more economic—and, thus, political—power than the people who depend on wages. It’s the old question: “Is the economy here to serve us, or are we here to serve the small number of mostly white men who control the economy?”
The AI revolution is going to force that debate back into the open.
The ultimate betrayal will be if AI succeeds in making America vastly wealthier while leaving working Americans with less economic security, less political power, and with the bill for another generation of financial speculation wiping out our retirement accounts.
If that happens, we need to be ready to force the issue of the concentration of wealth and power that grew up around it. We failed with the internet giants in 2000 and the banksters in 2008. We need to prepare—politically and economically—for the next cycle of boom and bust that’s increasingly seeming inevitable.
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I Swore an Oath to Serve and Protect—the President and ICE Betrayed Theirs
The Trump administration's priorities are all wrong: We want our veterans to have healthcare, our local hospitals to stay open, and our first responders to help in emergencies, not more reckless and poorly trained federal agents on our streets.
Oct 31, 2026
Since President Donald Trump took the oath of office for a second time, he got to work helping billionaires get richer, while families across southern Minnesota are stretched thin. They’ve struggled to feed their families, fill their gas tank, and pay for their healthcare. Instead of taking action to lower costs, Trump and federal officials invaded our communities and used our tax dollars to fund mass deportations.
As a United States Army and Military Police Corps veteran, I know what it means to uphold an oath to serve and protect. What I can’t understand is betraying that oath, which is what our president and too many leaders have done. That’s why I was especially angered learning how much we stand to lose because of these federal deportation policies, according to a new cost calculator. Across southern Minnesota. $374 million of our taxes, or $1,520 per taxpayer, could continue funding the mass deportations. Knowing that our tax dollars are fueling this, while we are getting by with less, makes me sick.
I dedicated my career to our country, serving 32 years in the criminal justice system as a deputy sheriff, a jail administrator, consultant trainer, and policy writer for the National Institute of Corrections. As a former administrator, I know the cost of public safety, the value of every taxpayer dollar, and right from wrong.
When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota.
The actions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection officers during “Operation Metro Surge” and the subsequent Department of Homeland Security proceedings should sicken every law enforcement and correctional officer who takes pride in upholding the law. Not since the insurrection on January 6, 2021 have I been so angry and disillusioned with our government. Our country watched as public servants who swore an oath condemned the attacks of January 6. But after a corrupt president pressured them, too many of our leaders changed their tune, blurred the lines between right and wrong, and seemingly forgot their oath entirely. Watching “Operation Metro Surge” resurfaced feelings of disappointment, disgust, and betrayal of trust I hadn’t felt since January 6.
Officers depriving anyone of their civil rights, including due process, is wrong.
Officers brandishing firearms without articulable cause is wrong.
Officers detaining people without the ability to communicate with legal counsel within a reasonable amount of time is wrong.
And forcing working Minnesotans to pay for this chaos is wrong.
When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota. That’s 6,900 veterans who won't get their medical care paid for. That’s 1,260 teachers in our public schools and 2,053 firefighters in our communities.
These numbers, while disturbing, are consistent when it comes to how Donald Trump harms working families. The president’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” slashed the budget for lifesaving programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to provide massive tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations. While CEOs pick out their newest vacation home, more people have to forgo doctor’s visits to cover their electricity bill or car payment.
These priorities are all wrong. We want our veterans to have healthcare, our local hospitals to stay open, and our first responders to help in emergencies, not more reckless and poorly trained federal agents on our streets.
As taxpayers, we have a responsibility to speak up when lawmakers have betrayed our trust. I encourage everyone to speak to their friends and family about how Trump will always be in the business of helping the ultra wealthy while making us pay for it.
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Boo-Hoo! California's Billionaire Snowflakes Are Scared of a One-Time, 5% Tax!
The 22 billionaires who have spent or spoken against California's Prop 40 have seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months, yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
Oct 31, 2026
Americans overwhelmingly support taxing billionaires more. But some of those billionaires, including those who’ve seen their wealth balloon in recent years, are spending big to stop it.
Voters in California, for example, are considering a ballot initiative called Prop 40—a one-time, 5% wealth tax exclusively on the state’s 200-plus billionaires. But a few dozen billionaires are ponying up tens of millions to fight the tax and threatening to run away if they lose.
In an analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now (TURN), the Institute for Policy Studies identified 22 Golden State billionaires who have contributed substantial funds or been outspoken opponents of Prop 40. This group has seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months. Yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK."
The 22 billionaire snowflakes include a bunch of tech bros and crypto barons making billions off developing an AI future for the rest of us.
Several are chums of Jeffrey Epstein, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion to $32.6 billion. That puts his wealth at 11,319 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000. To protect his gains, Thiel has given $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. (Thiel himself recently moved to Argentina.)
Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, and DoorDash, gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025, to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times that of the median Californian.
Google’s Sergey Brin has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. From the deck of his $450 million yacht, the Dragonfly, Brin has seen his personal wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion to $253 billion. Brin’s wealth is a stratospheric 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Not all the billionaires are cowering in the corner.
Billionaire Tom Steyer said he would vote for the billionaire wealth tax and wished it went further to reduce inequality. Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, is worth an estimated $190 billion and supports the one-time wealth tax. He told CBS News that “it’s a privilege, it’s a responsibility” to pay taxes—and that “nothing would give me more joy” than to pay more.
California’s 231 billionaires held approximately $2.3 trillion as of September 22, 2026 and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches. According to economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid on average just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder Larry Page paid even less—just 0.07% of their wealth annually.
We can see why these billionaire snowflakes don’t want anything to change. Still, the one-time wealth tax would be just a small fraction of their gains in the last few years—and nevermind of their overall wealth, which will remain massive.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK. You’ll have 95% of your billions and tens of thousands of your neighbors will have healthcare. You will get over this one quickly.”
Californians will decide their fate in November: a vote for oligarchy or a first step toward rebalancing our democracy? And Americans elsewhere will be watching.
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How to Stop Billionaires from Hijacking the Midterms
The bulk of political dark money flows directly back into media companies that the nation’s richest donors control. We can break the cycle.
Oct 30, 2026
There’s a drama playing out across American screens in 2026. But not the sort you might expect. There are villains and heroes, yes, high finance and political intrigue, too. There may even be a surprise ending—but we’ll have to wait until the Nov. 3 season finale to find out.
The actual plot, though, is not unfolding on television screens or streaming platforms but in corridors of political power and extreme wealth, far from public view. It’s a tale about the hijacking of US elections by the world’s richest people.
According to the Federal Election Commission, as of early October a record-setting $16 billion and counting had been plowed into the 2026 midterm-election cycle. Hundreds of millions more have been added to that tally in the weeks since. Much of this money comes from the world’s richest oligarchs, many who built their unlimited wealth from ownership stakes in massive tech and media conglomerates.
So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society.
Elon Musk has contributed just shy of half-a-billion dollars to Republican-aligned political campaigns and Super PACs for the 2026 midterms. That’s more than his total political contributions during the 2024 presidential election. With no limit on how much he can spend, Musk made the biggest electoral donation in American history—$158 million—to help one candidate (senatorial hopeful Ken Paxton of Texas).
Lesser known are the contributions lower-ranking multibillionaires have made: Mike Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, and George Soros have contributed a combined $227 million to Democratic-aligned campaigns; GOP election initiatives have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ($92 million); Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein ($150 million); and Jeff and Janine Yass ($110 million) .
Hundreds of millions more have found their way into the accounts of shadowy Super PACs that are not required to disclose their donors.
Musk millions for media manipulation
Most of this whopping cash infusion pays for political ads: The media-tracking firm AdImpact projects a record-breaking $11.6 billion of that $16 billion total—or approximately 73 percent of all political contributions—will buy ads on broadcast and cable-TV stations, radio outlets, streaming services and social-media platforms.
Viewers are left with little to help them separate fact from fiction before they head to the polls. That’s because the media outlets that serve up campaign spots have zero legal obligation to reject ads that peddle lies. While nearly half of this money goes to air political ads on broadcast outlets, the Communications Act of 1934 prohibits television and radio stations from censoring or editing candidate-sponsored ads, even when they know the content is false.
And while the Federal Communications Commission does require a degree of transparency regarding who paid for a given broadcast ad, it does not monitor or regulate the accuracy of an ad’s claims.
Since 2024, the owners of social-media platforms like Facebook, X and YouTube—which account for a growing piece of the ad-spending pie—have largely abandoned efforts to fact check the political ads that course across their networks.
The money-and-media-election complex
That’s a lot of data points to digest. But the information on political-ad spending leads to one disturbing conclusion: The bulk of money spent to manipulate and even misinform viewers flows back to media companies that many of the nation’s richest donors control. This cycle of money and influence is turning people away from meaningful political engagement, put off by the deluge of dishonest attack ads that will have aired hundreds of thousands of times before viewers become voters on Nov. 3.
It’s a toxic combination of ingredients that Free Press co-founders Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols called the “money and media election complex,” in which wealthy donors, giant corporations, politicians, regulators and corporate media align their interests against a public seeking to legitimately engage in democracy.
“The complex has tremendous gravitational power,” McChesney and Nichols wrote more than a decade ago, “which increases the degree of difficulty for those wishing to participate in elections in a manner not conducive to wealthy funders, corporate media or preservation of the status quo.”
So much for the idea that our news-and-information systems should foster the public exchange of diverse ideas that are the lifeblood of civic society. Instead we have a political system that’s beholden to billionaire donors, and a hyper-commercial media that are getting rich off keeping voters in the dark.
Media outlets must take their obligations more seriously. In exchange for First Amendment freedoms, they need to cover the money that’s poisoning our politics, expose the groups and individuals funding political ads and address the falsehoods presented in many of these spots. With little time remaining before the midterms, the time to do this reporting is now.
Right-sizing Big Media
Public policy must also address the media’s systemic failings. And while communications regulation may look fuzzy when viewed from 30,000 feet, at the ground level the consequences of bad rules and regulations come into sharper focus. Nowhere is this more evident than during elections.
Instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.
The lack of adequate diversity and competition in media has encouraged industry owners to think of their outlets as profit-making machines with no obligation to disclose to viewers the political money and special interests that make them tick. And the lack of local reporters holding candidates to account—the consequence of runaway media consolidation in turn spurring newsroom cutbacks and closures—in many ways explains the rise of a class of politicians who spend more time wooing wealthy contributors than attending to the needs of voters back home.
This has created a dependency between those who control political power (and need access to the media to keep it) and those who control the media (and need access to political power to keep it). This cycle has gotten so toxic that instead of nurturing democracy and free speech, commercialized media today threaten to distort it.
These systemic remedies include making political ad-spending information easily available, including exposing the true funders bankrolling Super PACs. Such disclosure should happen in the body of the ads themselves. We must also get serious about strategies and policies that foster independent, local political journalism. Free Press Action has made a number of promising inroads here through state-level legislation to fund civic media.
And we need to right-size massive media conglomerates, using existing antitrust law and media-ownership limits while strengthening other rules that have been gutted at the urging of a powerful media lobby and far-too compliant lawmakers and regulators.
There’s a growing backlash against billionaire control of our political and media systems that could make these reforms possible.
The failures of corporate media have undercut the First Amendment goal of creating, in the words of the Supreme Court in 1969, an “informed public capable of conducting its own affairs.” True participatory democracy will have no chance at survival if we fail to insist on serious changes now.
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Led by Elon Musk, 515 Superrich People Have Donated $4.2 Billion to Super PACs for 2026 Elections
"Until something is done, like overturning the Citizens United US Supreme Court decision, the wealthy’s stranglehold on our political system will continue to tighten."
Oct 28, 2026
The "almost cartoon-villain level of political spending" by SpaceX CEO and former Trump administration adviser Elon Musk has reached a fever pitch ahead of the midterm elections, with the right-wing billionaire's donations of $445 million to super political action committees accounting for 10% of the $4.2 billion the PACs have brought in.
As an analysis released Tuesday by the government watchdog Public Citizen found, Musk has led the way in contributing huge sums to super PACs. The PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money on behalf of candidates and causes and have increasingly influenced elections following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which said the government cannot restrict political spending by corporations.
But excluding Musk, just 514 donors have contributed about $3.8 billion to super PACs this election cycle, as Republicans attempt to hold onto control of the US Senate and House of Representatives despite President Donald Trump's plummeting approval rating and his record of raising the prices of gas and other essentials with his illegal war on Iran and his tariff policy.
Altogether, the donations from the 515 contributors account for 73% of all super PAC funding from individuals, corporations, and nonprofits this election cycle, according to Public Citizen.
"The figures add to a growing body of evidence that unlimited political spending has concentrated influence over elections among a tiny number of wealthy individuals and corporations," said the organization, noting that Musk's contributions come two years after he poured nearly $300 million into the 2024 elections, boosting Trump and other Republicans and spending close to $120 million more than the next closest donor.
The report follows an earlier Public Citizen analysis that found more than 100 super PACs that have raised at least $1 million received the majority of the funding from just a single donor, collectively gathering more than $1 billion to boost the candidates of their choice.
The Senate Leadership Fund has the most donors contributing at least $1 million each, with 61 people contributing $496 million.
“When 500 donors account for more than 70% of super PAC contributions, we should be asking whose voices our political system is prioritizing.”
MAGA Inc., the super PAC affiliated with Trump, has taken $405 million from 102 contributors ahead of the crucial midterms, while the Senate Majority PAC has received $244 million from 44 people or groups.
Fifty-three donors have sent $231 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, while 31 donors have contributed $183 million to the House Majority PAC.
“Super PACs have helped create a political system where a small number of wealthy interests can spend unlimited amounts to influence elections and shape the choices voters face,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “When 500 donors account for more than 70% of super PAC contributions, we should be asking whose voices our political system is prioritizing.”
After Musk, GOP megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been the second-largest contributors to super PACs this year. The Uihleins own the packing company Uline, and have pushed for years for government deregulation and against labor unions.
Other top contributors include multiple dark money groups, right-wing megadonor Jeffrey Yass—a longtime funder of anti-LGBTQ+, anti-choice, and anti-public school campaigns—and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said earlier this year that he would prefer to use artificial intelligence in his business rather than hire human workers.
As The Washington Sun reported Tuesday, dark money groups, which don't have to reveal the source of their contributions, have poured more than $392 million into the four congressional leadership PACs this year.
The Public Citizen report stresses that the hundreds of top donors to super PACs this year gave amounts of money that "most Americans could not fathom donating to a political cause."
More than 85% of the money raised by super PACs ahead of the midterms came from donors who gave at least $20,000—"nearly a quarter of the median household income," said Public Citizen.
"Until something is done, like overturning the Citizens United US Supreme Court decision," said the group, "the wealthy’s stranglehold on our political system will continue to tighten."
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Sanders: Billionaires Fighting Prop 40 Would 'Rather Poor Kids With Cancer Die Than Pay a Little More in Taxes'
The senator noted that "billionaires in California are spending $333 million to wage a war" on the proposed one-time tax.
Oct 27, 2026
As one Golden State tech billionaire suggested he wouldn't move away even if voters passed the California Billionaire Tax Act that he opposes, progressive US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday took aim at the wealthy taxpayers working to defeat Proposition 40.
"Billionaires in California are spending $333 million to wage a war," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on social media. "Against what? Homelessness? No. Cancer? No. Child poverty? No. They're waging war against a 5% billionaire wealth tax. They'd rather poor kids with cancer die than pay a little more in taxes. That is obscene."
Sanders, a former Democratic presidential candidate who has campaigned in California for the ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the state's billionaires to offset healthcare funding cuts, was citing contributions to Building a Better California, a group created in January.
"Eighty or so donors have provided more than $333 million to Building a Better California, state records show, making it among the best-funded political efforts in California history," The New York Times reported Tuesday. "The donor list is a who's who of tech celebrities: the Google co-founder Sergey Brin; the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt; the Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison; the legendary investor John Doerr."
Abby Lunardini, a spokesperson for the group, told the Times that "our supporters have created companies, entirely new industries, and hundreds of thousands of jobs here in California, and they want our state to remain the place where the future is built and where people can still afford to live, dream big, and succeed."
Lunardini claimed the wealth tax would "permanently damage the state's budget, tax base, and economy," though dozens of multimillionaire Californians have signed an open letter supporting the one-time wealth tax, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—one of the richest men in the world—is preparing to potentially pay it, and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey said Monday that he won't leave the state.
TechCrunch reported on his latest comments, in which Luckey—whose defense company won key US military contracts after he was announced as one of the leaders of a new Pentagon project on the "future of warfare"—made clear that he opposes Prop 40:
"I think that this tax act, if you can call it a tax, is going to cause a lot of problems. It’s causing a lot of people to run who I don’t want to be running. It’s going to cause companies that I work with to leave the state, which is a problem for me. As of right now, though, I’m not running. I am staying. I think California is something special. I want to fight for California," Luckey said during an invite-only press conference on Monday.
He added that he's felt pressure from other billionaires to declare his intention to leave.
"This has been a point of friction between me and some of my other billionaire friends," he said. "They've said things like: 'Palmer, you have to have solidarity for us. You can't enable these really bad policies. If you stay and if you don't leave, it's going to show them that there's no consequences.' I empathize with that argument, but it's not one that I'm going to participate in right now because I still believe that we can fix things."
Luckey has publicly sparred with US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—who, like Sanders, supports Prop 40. Leading political opponents in the state include term-limited Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who's expected to run for president in 2028, and former US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Democrat running to replace the governor.
Estimates vary on how much the tax—which would apply to any billionaire residing in the state as of January 1, 2026—could cost the richest Californians, if approved by voters in next week's midterm elections.
Forbes pointed to one of them on Tuesday: "$104 billion. That's how much economists Jasper Boll, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman estimate California's billionaires would owe if Proposition 40 is enacted, according to an analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Saez and Zucman helped draft the tax proposal."
Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review editor and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted in a Tuesday column at The Washington Post—owned by Jeff Bezos, another one of the world's richest men—that "a new study by Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh, two economists affiliated with the Hoover Institution, challenges that projection."
After trying to "account for the uncertainty over whether taxes can be collected from other billionaires, such as the ones who have left since the beginning of the year and may thus have a legal case for escaping the tax," Ponnuru summarized, those economists estimated Prop 40 would generate around $30 billion. The columnist also acknowledged that Zucman "has issued a barrage of attacks on that paper."
Specifically, Zucman called it "spectacularly misleading" and explained "its crucial flaw," which is that "they assume that billionaires will leave permanently, frightened by the prospects of an annual wealth tax."
"Let's be clear: This is a highly inappropriate way to model the effect of Prop 40 on taxpayer behavior. For one, it's a basic violation of rational expectations, a cornerstone of modern economics," Zucman said.
In Jaros and Rauh's world, "the billionaires act irrationally: They respond to a policy that does not exist and will never exist," he added. "Economics students around the world are taught this is not an appropriate way to model behavior—but apparently in this context (fighting Prop 40) it's OK."
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US Billionaires Compete for 'Most Awful Human Being' Award
If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power.
Oct 23, 2026
Our billionaires seem to be in a competition for most awful human being alive. We have Larry Ellison, along with son, taking over CBS and immediately destroying its prized news show, 60 Minutes. They appointed Bari Weiss, a right-wing apparatchik, to oversee CBS’s entire news operation. She has immediately sought to make the news more Trump-friendly. This has led to many reporters being fired and threats to others to make their reporting toe the Trump line or risk being fired. Many of the network’s longest-serving reporters just quit.
The fun doesn’t stop here. The Ellison clique is also getting control of CNN through Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Presumably we can look forward to more Trump-friendly reporting there also.
To be clear, neither of these networks was a paragon of objective reporting before the Ellison family takeover. Both networks regularly marginalized and belittled progressives in the US and around the world. But they did at least have an ostensible commitment to objectivity, unlike, say, Fox News.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions.
Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to view the huge Meta social media platforms as important mechanisms for pushing his political agenda. Last Saturday, the Instagram site for the No Kings march went down for four hours, exactly when it was being most widely used. Meta claimed there was no political motive; it was just incompetence.
We might be more inclined to accept the incompetence story if there wasn’t a comparable picture in Brazil in the lead-up to its presidential election. Lula, the incumbent president, is locked in a tight race with Flavio Bolsanaro, a right-winger who is openly allied with Donald Trump. It seems that the sites of supporters of Lula and his supporters have repeatedly run into the same sort of technical difficulties with Meta.
Then we go to everyone’s favorite evil billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit intention of using it as a vehicle to support his politics. He not only opened the gates to all sorts of racist, sexist, and harassing material; he has throttled the accounts of many progressives so that their comments are less widely viewed.
Musk also has teamed up with Ellison, who was given a controlling stake in TikTok, after Donald Trump wrestled it away from its Chinese owner. TikTok decided to suspend the account for the documentary Musk, just before its initial release. Musk apparently gave the film a bad review, which was enough to get it banned from TikTok for at least a period of time. Musk is also contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to get some of the most awful people on the planet elected as governors or senators.
This crew of centibillionaires sees the purpose of government to make themselves ever richer, and are prepared to use their money to ensure that it does. Their use of campaign contributions for this purpose is widely recognized, but that is only part of the story.
Their control of major media outlets is at least as important. If a television or radio ad can affect people’s votes, then surely what people hear between the ads also can affect their votes.
Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions. It is essential to weaken their control.
One good place to start would be reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts the huge social media platforms from liability for third-party content. This gives social media platforms an advantage over broadcast and print outlets, which are liable for harms (defamation or fraud) caused by third-party content. Fox News famously paid out $787 million for spreading third- party lies about the 2020 election. Section 230 can be amended in a way that levels the playing field and favors smaller non-profit or subscription-supported platforms.
The other route is to increase support for alternative media. There has been serious progress in this area. The Local News Act was recently signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom. This measure gives a subsidy of up to $20,000 per reporter for news outlets to cover local news. Several other states are considering similar measures.
It’s a long way from measures giving modest subsidies for local news to the multibillion-dollar media outlets and social media platforms that dominate what people see and hear. But these are an important foot in the door. If these measures succeed and are popular, they can spread to other states and possibly be implemented nationally.
In any case, if we are serious about limiting the ability of the billionaires to buy democracy, we have to go beyond worrying about campaign contributions. If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power. Those concerned about democracy need to recognize this fact.
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How Stock Buybacks Turbocharged the Wealth of Google's Billionaire Co-Founders
When you do the math, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are $55 billion wealthier today than they would be had the limitation on stock buybacks that existed prior to 1982 not been modified.
Oct 23, 2026
One of us previously wrote on the tax treatment of stock buybacks. Prior to a rule change by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1982, publicly traded corporations faced strict limits in the number of shares they could buy back. The 1982 rule change effectively gave corporations a choice: They could use their profits to buy shares on the open market, with no meaningful limit, or they could distribute their profits as dividends to their shareholders, taxable at the same rate as ordinary income.
The rule the Securities and Exchange Commission changed was related to insider trading; the SEC might not care about the tax consequences of share buybacks, but everyone else involved surely does. As noted in the post, the shareholders who don’t sell when a corporation buys back shares are the beneficiaries of the rule change:
To understand the impact of the SEC rule change, focus on the shareholders who don’t sell any shares in connection with a buyback. They’re the ones who reap the tax benefit. The selling shareholders were going to sell anyhow. We’re talking about publicly traded stock here. The decision to sell has nothing to do with the corporation’s decision to buy, and a selling shareholder has no idea who buys their publicly traded shares. The corporation doesn’t benefit either. It’s just shedding cash either way.
The concentration of American wealth—and the accompanying concentration of political power—now poses an existential threat to our democracy. Stock buybacks have made this situation measurably worse than it otherwise would have been.
But not all non-selling shareholders benefit from stock buybacks. If you own stock inside an IRA, the corporation’s decision whether to buy shares or issue dividends is not critical to you. You avoid an immediate income tax consequence either way. And if you don’t want a stock buyback to cause an increase in your ownership interest in the corporation, you can sell a few shares off, also without tax consequence, and create an economic result identical to that of a dividend.
The same applies to shares held by other retirement accounts, pension plans, university endowment funds, and other tax-exempt entities.
That leaves the ultra-rich—and especially the billionaires—as the main beneficiaries of stock buybacks. The benefits are enormous, and become ever larger as we move up the wealth scale.
The situation of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin exemplifies the wealth concentrating impact of the SEC rule change. Alphabet, which became the publicly traded parent of Google in a 2015 reorganization, has bought back a lot of shares over the past 11 years. Page and Brin, the third and fourth wealthiest Americans, respectively, have a combined wealth totaling over half a trillion dollars. As of October 16, the two held a combined total of 14,960,019,745 shares of Alphabet stock—778,102,320 for Page and 717,917,425 for Brin—which they’d held at least since Google’s IPO in 2004 (adjusted for stock splits over that period).
Brin is leading the opposition to California’s Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time wealth tax of 5% on all residents of California as of January 1, 2026 with personal wealth exceeding $1 billion. Brin claims to have changed his state of residence to Nevada prior to that date, although it’s not clear whether the steps he took to accomplish that change were sufficient to avoid California residence for purposes of Proposition 40. To date, Brin has contributed over $100 million to groups opposing Proposition or supporting Propositions 41 and 42, which effectively would nullify Proposition 40.
Page, similarly, has moved to Florida, although it’s not clear if he has avoided being a California resident as of January 1, 2026.
If Proposition 40 passed and if Brin’s attempt to avoid California residency were unsuccessful, his tax liability would be in the $12 billion to $14 billion range. His co-founder Page would face a slightly higher tax liability under Proposition 40. Their total liability would be around $28 billion, give or take a few billion.
I was curious how Page and Brin’s prospective Proposition 40 tax liability compares with the wealth they now hold that’s attributable to the 1982 SEC rule change. Would the one-time tax recoup the windfall bestowed on them by the SEC rule change?
To determine that windfall, we figured that without the rule change the profits used by Alphabet to buyback shares would instead have been distributed as dividends and that the dividends would have been taxable as ordinary income. Yes, the federal tax rate applicable to dividends was reduced in 2003 to equal the long-term capital gains rate, but analyzing the counterfactual of “if there were no SEC rule change” points to the assumption the tax rate applicable to dividends would not have been reduced. Because of the SEC rule change, there was not much point for anyone to oppose lowering the tax rate applicable to dividends in 2003. Corporations could protect their shareholders from the higher rate by buying back stock instead of issuing dividends.
Absent the SEC rule change, then, the revenue cost of a reduction in the tax rate applicable to dividends would have posed a much larger obstacle to enactment. Would the rate nonetheless have been reduced? We’ll never know. But since we’re exploring the potential windfall to Page and Brin attributable to the SEC rule change, the higher of the two possible tax rates on dividends was the logical choice.
To determine the savings to Brin and Page, we calculated the change in their percentage ownership of Alphabet that would have resulted from each stock buyback, beginning with the first stock buyback in 2015, had the amount used in the buyback instead been distributed as a dividend, followed by Page and Brin paying federal and state income tax on the dividend, then purchasing additional Alphabet shares with the after-tax proceeds of the dividend. For simplicity, we assumed a total 50% US and California rate for each year during the period. The actual annual rate during the period, factoring in the full federal deductibility of state income tax prior to 2018, would have been slightly higher.
Under this alternative scenario, Page and Brin would now hold 10.9% of the outstanding shares of Alphabet, some 1.3 percentage points less than the percentage they currently hold.
When you do the math, Page and Brin are $55 billion wealthier today than they would be had the limitation on stock buybacks that existed prior to 1982 not been modified and had dividends continued to be considered ordinary income for federal income tax purposes. [And if you assume the federal rate would have been reduced to the capital gains rate in 2003, they’re still $41 billion wealthier today by virtue of the 1982 SEC rule change.]
Put another way, about 10% of their obscene combined wealth of over half a trillion dollars has been derived from one tax giveaway. And—it’s important to note—that tax giveaway wasn’t even delivered by duly elected members of Congress. Rather, it was ordained by unelected regulators (or, really, anti-regulators) at the SEC.
If Proposition 40 passes and Page and Brin are required to pay the one-time tax, they’ll still be $25 billion ahead. Don’t feel too bad for them.
Page and Brin likely are the most extreme examples of how the 1982 SEC rule change conferred massive additional wealth on the wealthiest Americans. But they’re far from the only examples. Meta, Oracle, Nvidia, and Dell all have distributed tens of billions of dollars in buybacks. Apple has bought back nearly half its shares through stock buybacks over the past decade. In total, stock buybacks have been running in the $1 trillion per year range and may hit $1.5 trillion this year. Today’s billionaires undoubtedly are sitting on several hundred billion dollars of additional wealth courtesy of stock buybacks.
The concentration of American wealth—and the accompanying concentration of political power—now poses an existential threat to our democracy. Stock buybacks have made this situation measurably worse than it otherwise would have been. We can’t do much about the damage that’s already been done. But we could avoid further damage.
This piece was first published on Substack.
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Big Tech Has Become the 'Ubiquitous Villain' of the 2026 Midterms
"Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place," said one Democratic strategist.
Oct 22, 2026
American voters' antipathy toward Big Tech companies has become a central theme of campaigns in the 2026 midterm elections, according to an analysis published by The Guardian on Thursday.
The Guardian noted that hundreds of midterm campaign ads attacking data centers have aired over the past two months, with both Republicans and Democrats accusing one another of being pawns of the artificial intelligence industry.
"And it’s not only data centers," The Guardian added. "The public anxiety over AI and distaste for the billionaires developing it, as well as backlash over encroaching tech like surveillance cameras, has turned the tech industry into a ubiquitous villain this election cycle."
Silicon Valley has become a punching bag for politicians even as Big Tech moguls have been throwing record sums of money to elect politicians sympathetic to their needs.
Super political action committees (PACs) "funded by tech billionaires are among the top spenders in this election cycle," The Guardian explained. "Leading the Future, formed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has raised more than $75 million to back tech-friendly candidates. [SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk has sunk $366 million into Republican causes, more than he spent on the 2024 presidential election."
Much of the Big Tech money has been going toward Republican candidates this cycle, even though the industry has traditionally had close ties with elected Democrats.
Texas Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico in recent days has been trying to turn Big Tech money being spent against him into an advantage, highlighting in particular the outsize role that Musk is playing funding the campaign of his Republican rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
After Musk on Wednesday used his platform X to declare that "there is something deeply wrong with Talarico," the Texas Democrat quickly returned fire.
"There is something deeply wrong with a political system," Talarico wrote, "that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US senator."
A report published by The Atlantic on Monday examined how the tech industry's embrace of President Donald Trump during his second term has given Democrats an incentive to pummel the industry, particularly when polls show a bipartisan hostility to AI data centers.
In fact, Democratic strategists told The Atlantic that data centers have proven to be a top wedge issue capable of getting normally loyal GOP voters to think twice before voting for a Republican candidate.
"Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Democratic strategist Rob Flaherty told The Atlantic. "They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time."
Democratic strategists started pushing the party to take a more populist approach toward the tech industry when polling data "showed surprising concern about AI" even in traditionally conservative rural districts, The Atlantic reported.
Rishi Bharwani, US director of tech regulation advocacy group Reset Tech, said much has changed since Democrats under former President Barack Obama embraced the industry as a positive force for society.
“What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire," said Bharwani, "and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing. These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety."
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Why US Voters of All Political Stripes Loath the Big Tech Billionaires
Let us count the many reasons.
Oct 22, 2026
One of few silver linings of these dark Trump times is that much of what had been hidden has now been exposed.
I’m referring specifically to where the power lies in our system—power to decide how most Americans live and work. This exposure is having a huge effect on American attitudes. It may even lead to a fundamental political realignment along with major reforms.
To summarize: America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech.
Let me start with some historic context, then discuss how this affects the most pressing issues in the 2026 campaign, and finally suggest some likely outcomes.
I. The First Gilded Age’s Robber Barons and the Second Gilded Age’s Billionaire Barons of Big Tech
The first Gilded Age, which stretched from the late 1870s to around 1900, featured “robber barons” who lived like kings while corrupting the federal and state governments with bribes to get whatever they wanted from pliant legislators.
Today’s second Gilded Age is led by the billionaire barons of Big Tech, who are similarly living like kings while corrupting our democracy.
Just three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms, an all-time record.
One of them—Elon Musk—sank more than a quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected in 2024 and is sinking even more into the 2026 midterms.
In return, Trump has allowed Musk to extend his monopoly on satellite communications, financed largely by taxpayers—even giving him the power to disable Ukraine intelligence. Trump also allowed Musk’s DOGE to rampage through federal databases and gather information on every American.
Larry Ellison and his son, David, defanged CBS News and its flagship “60 Minutes” and kicked Trump critic and satirist Stephen Colbert off the air. In return, Trump has greenlit the Ellisons’ acquisition of a media empire stretching from Paramount to CNN, CBS and CBS News, TBS, TNT, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Discovery, HBO, and TikTok.
Jeff Bezos gave Melania Trump a $40 million licensing fee for a puff documentary about her (with about $28 million going directly to her) and another $35 million for marketing the movie dud. Bezos also destroyed the integrity of the editorial page of The Washington Post by barring it from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and from writing anything negative about capitalism under Trump.
In return, Trump has given Bezos and his Amazon carte blanche to monopolize online retailing along with federal contracts to provide cloud infrastructure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Security Agency (NSA).
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom fundraising campaign, and he gave Trump personally a custom engraved glass and 24-karat gold base plaque. In return, Trump has given Cook and Apple critical exemptions from Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing them to import electronic components from China.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also helped finance Trump’s inauguration and his ballroom, gave Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from its platforms after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, rolled back content moderation and fact-checking on his platforms, and brought Trump loyalists into Meta’s leadership.
In return, Trump went along with Zuckerberg and Meta’s wish not to have a federal AI regulator but to rely on “self-policing” and to pressure European and other countries not to impose taxes on digital services.
II. The Billionaire Barons and AI
The billionaire barons of Big Tech are now investing more than $1 trillion of other people’s money and debt—along with taxpayer-financed subsidies—into AI. (Last year’s giant Trump-Republican tax cut featured major tax breaks for Big Tech, helping drive a big decrease in corporate tax payments even as AI spending soars.)
The billionaire barons are thereby exposing the US economy to the largest gamble since Wall Street’s wanton betting led to the 2008 financial crisis—threatening tens of millions of jobs, putting energy-guzzling data centers all around the nation, and posing a non-negligible threat to the survival of the human species.
The barons are also hastening climate change through the data centers’ exponential energy and water demands, along with the expansion and resurrection of fossil fuel infrastructure to power AI.
Tech giants’ self-reported greenhouse gas emissions have surged. Meta’s emissions jumped over 60 percent, Google’s rose nearly 50 percent, Amazon’s increased by 33 percent, and Microsoft’s by more than 23 percent—almost entirely driven by building and expanding data centers.
The billionaire barons of Big Tech are also among the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s war in Iran, through their ownership of advanced AI.
Peter Theil’s Palantir is powering the US military's targeting and data operations through its Maven Smart System platform, which processes massive streams of satellite, drone, and intelligence data.
Billionaires Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, and Trae Stephens are behind Anduril, which provides major counter-drone defense systems used to intercept Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones. Billionaires Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google—along with billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI and billionaires Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic—are providing advance AI models and technology for military planning, intelligence, and counter-drone operations.
III. Will History Rhyme?
By the first decade of the 20th century, Americans had had enough of the brazen inequalities and corruption that characterized the first Gilded Age. A wave of reforms—antitrust laws, progressive taxation, pure food and drug regulation, bans on corporate political activities—blocked much of what the robber barons had been doing.
Then, after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the nation ensured that the barons could no longer wreak havoc on America. Labor laws, securities laws, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and additional taxes on high incomes were enacted, laying the basis for the prosperity of the post-World War II era.
Are we on the precipice of another age of reform?
Perhaps. A new Politico poll shows that Americans are fed up with the billionaire robber barons of Big Tech—and Republicans are likely to take most of the political blame on Election Day.
The top tax priorities for voters, according to the poll, are hiking taxes on billionaires and curbing tax breaks for big companies.
Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—called Republicans the party of tech tax breaks, more than double the 21 percent who said the same for Democrats. Voters are also far more likely to want candidates who propose stripping away tax incentives for the data centers needed to fuel the AI boom.
About a fifth of respondents said that ending those tax breaks would be among their most important tax issues in the midterms (only 1 in 10 wanted to offer new preferences for data centers).
A majority of respondents thought that tech chief executives have been secretive about the potential risks of AI, while a plurality of Americans believe both that the risks of artificial intelligence development outweigh the benefits and that the government should strictly regulate AI.
It’s impossible to know whether the upcoming midterms elections will reflect these sentiments or, even if they do, whether these sentiments will find their way into subsequent legislation.
But—given the polls, and also what I’m hearing informally from around the nation—it seems likely to me that high on the nation’s emerging progressive agenda will be busting up Big Tech monopolies, getting big money out of our politics, enacting a wealth tax, putting guardrails around AI, seeking to reverse climate change, and preventing billionaires from creating and owning media empires.
I can’t say precisely when we’ll see these enacted, but I’m confident we will see them. America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech, with good reason.
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