"The pitchforks are here": Billionaires work to contain AI's populist revolt

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. 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 ...

Original source: Axios