Let's start with what they're saying. Last month, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the fourth richest person on the planet, went on CNBC Squawk Box and said it was absurd to tax someone making $50,000 a year. He proposed that the bottom 50% of American earners, which is roughly 76 million households, should pay zero federal income tax. When people are starting out and they're struggling, stop taxing them. We don't need it, he said. So, this is the same Jeff Bezos who, according to a ProPublica investigation, based on confidential IRS data, by the way, paid zero federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, years in which he was already one of the wealthiest people alive. ProPublica calculated his effective true tax rate between 2014 and 2018 at 0.98%, less than 1%, which means that in the years ProPublica examined, Jeff Bezos was paying a lower tax rate than somebody selling jewelry on Etsy, for example. The richest 25 Americans, ProPublica found, pay an average of 15.8% in tax, which is less than many of the nurses and teachers Bezos is now expressing concern about. His company, Amazon, has cut 30,000 jobs since October, explicitly citing AI efficiency gains while AWS posted its fastest growth in 13 quarters. And he is now on television saying he wants to advocate for the financial well-being of a nurse in Queens making $75,000. The man who paid 0.98% wants you to know he thinks taxes on the working class are absurd. He is technically correct. He is also, in a manner of speaking, an expert on the subject of not paying them.

Around the same time, Elon Musk, who paid zero federal income tax in 2018, posted on X that universal high income via checks issued by the federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI, which is a fascinating policy position coming from a man who is currently embedded in the department responsible for cutting federal checks to as few people as possible. OpenAI has proposed a public wealth fund so that the public can benefit from AI-driven economic growth. And Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has warned that AI could wipe out up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs within 5 years and called it a duty to be honest about what's coming. And then this week, Senator Bernie Sanders announced he will introduce a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America. The language has changed. The tone has changed. The people who were once saying get ready are now saying we need to make sure the benefits are shared. The question worth asking is what specifically made them start saying that?

Residents cite water usage, effects on quality of life, increased cost of living, and a general distrust of AI, particularly its impact on the job market. National estimates project data center electricity use could double or triple by 2028, representing up to 12% of all US electricity consumption. California State Senator Sasha Renee Perez introduced a bill banning backup diesel generators at data centers and preventing them from placing electricity costs on the ratepayers. In Shelbyville, Indiana, the mayor was caught on camera holding an anti-data center sign and telling a table of ladies, "I've seen a lot of these all over town, but I only see them in shitty houses." A woman corrected him, "working class, you see them at working class houses." The mayor replied, "most of them are rentals." Another lady said, "it doesn't matter if they're rentals or not, they're still human beings." The community had gathered over 2,000 signatures on a petition to halt the project, a proposal to turn 429 acres of farmland into an 11-building data center complex. The city council advanced the plan anyway, ignoring the jeers and shouts of an angry public. In Indianapolis, a city-county councilor's home was allegedly shot at after a pro-data center vote. The mayor's apology, when it came, said he regrets that his choice of words may have caused offense. The passive voice in that sentence is doing more work than most of Shelbyville's elected officials, it seems. He clarified he was referring to property maintenance, whose concerns carry weight in a billion-dollar development decision turns out to depend, in Shelbyville at least, on whether you rent or not.

And this is just data centers, right? Over 142,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in 2026 so far, which is a 33% increase over last year. Cities are covering AI surveillance cameras with bin bags because they cannot figure out how to turn them off. DuckDuckGo installed search 30% after Google tried to force AI into search. A January 2026 Mercer poll found that 40% of employees are concerned about job loss due to AI, up from 28% in 2024. 29% of employees admit to sabotaging their company's AI agenda, which given that this is self-reported sabotage, suggests the actual number is likely higher, largely out of fear of becoming obsolete. The backlash is not one story. It is dozens of stories happening simultaneously in every sector, in every community, in every country, and the billionaires, I think, can read.

Data centers are sometimes presented as critical infrastructure, and some of them genuinely are, but they are not job creators in any meaningful sense. A facility covering hundreds of acres, consuming enough electricity to power a small city, drawing millions of gallons of water for cooling, once built, it employs a skeleton crew. The construction phase creates temporary work, yes. The operational phase creates a server room with a locked door, however. The promise is jobs, but the reality is a humming building that employs fewer people than the farm it replaced. The communities bearing the costs, like higher energy bills, strained grids, noise, water consumption, are not the communities reaping the benefits. The benefits accrue to the companies whose AI models run on the servers inside those buildings. The same companies whose CEOs, by the way, are now expressing concerns about inequality on television. The compassion, it turns out, scales with the backlash. I covered a very similar dynamic in my video on tech CEOs suffering from AI psychosis, how the people making the biggest decisions about AI are the furthest from its consequences. The pattern repeats. The pattern always repeats. California Governor Gavin Newsom captured the political temperature in a single sentence last week. The pitchforks are here, he said. They are not just coming, which is the kind of sentence a governor says when the polling data has become impossible to reinterpret. He warned that resentment towards billionaires and AI-driven automation would dominate the 2026 and 2028 elections, and the billionaires can see them. Axios reported that America's wealthiest figures are developing their own prescriptions for AI-fueled inequality, anxious to diffuse a populist revolt aimed at their ballooning fortunes. There are now 86 AI billionaires on Forbes annual ranking worth a collective $2.9 trillion. 86 people, $2.9 trillion, and a growing suspicion among the other 330 million that the arrangement may not be working for everyone. The AI boom, as Axios framed it, has unleashed a technology that could wipe out millions of jobs while minting the world's first trillionaires. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for overhauling the tax code, including new taxes on wealth and data centers to ensure Americans share in the economic gains of AI. Anti-billionaire politics has become, in Axios's words, an organizing principle for the Democratic Party.

Those communities are not asking for a share of the wealth, they're asking for the data center not to be built next to their house. They are asking for input on decisions that affect their lives. They're asking to be consulted before the ground is broken, not compensated after the damage is done. And that distinction between redistribution and participation is one the billionaire proposals consistently fail to address. Let me be clear about what I think is happening here. The technology has not fundamentally changed. The deployment strategy has not changed. The business models have not changed. What has changed is the political cost of ignoring the backlash. The narrative shift from AI will change everything and that's exciting to we need to make sure the benefits are shared tracks precisely with the moment when data centers started being banned, surveillance cameras started being covered with bin bags, 142,000 workers lost their jobs in 5 months, and DuckDuckGo install search 30% in a single week. The concern is real in the sense that these people can read a poll. It is less obviously real in the sense that any of them have actually slowed down, which brings me to the Sanders proposal because I think it deserves serious engagement rather than reflexive dismissal.

The bill would give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America held through a sovereign wealth fund. Sanders' argument is very straightforward. AI was trained on humanity's collective knowledge, our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images, and ideas spanning generations. Sam Altman himself has acknowledged that AI models were trained on the collective experience, knowledge, and learning of humanity. If the raw material belongs to everyone, the argument goes, the wealth generated from it should benefit everyone as well. Arguably the whole planet, but here we are. Sanders compared his proposal to two existing models. Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, built on oil wealth, is now worth $2.3 trillion and funds the country's public welfare system. The Alaska Permanent Fund has paid $1,000 to $2,000 to every Alaskan citizens annually since 1980. One funds public services, the other writes checks directly to citizens. Sanders wants both, and he is not the only one thinking along these lines. South Korea recently saw a proposal for a citizen's dividend funded by semiconductor tax windfalls from Samsung and SK Hynix. The irony, and it is a significant one here, is that the AI companies themselves have been flirting with this idea, too. OpenAI proposed a public wealth fund. Altman has written about universal basic income funded by AI. Even Musk endorsed the concept.

The billionaires and the socialist senator are at a very high level of abstraction, saying the exact same thing. The wealth generated by AI needs to flow to the public. They just disagree about the mechanism, which is either encouraging or deeply suspicious, depending on your general outlook. The billionaires prefer voluntary redistribution, wealth funds, charitable commitments, tax proposals that may or may not become law. Sanders prefers ownership, a structural change that would give the public a seat at the table, not just a share of the proceeds. Here are my honest thoughts on this. I would not be personally opposed to something like it. A significant portion of the public anger around AI is not really about the technology. It is about who benefits from the technology. If people felt they had a genuine stake in AI success, if the wealth generated by these systems flowed even partially back to the public whose data and knowledge built them, the conversation would be very different. A lot of the fear, the hostility, the reflexive rejection of AI as a concept, not all of it, but a meaningful share, of course, stems from the perception that this is something being done to people for the benefit of a very small number of very wealthy individuals. Change the ownership structure and you change that perception. Whether you also change the reality is a separate question and a super important one, of course, but the political will required for something like this is extraordinary. And I say that not as a commentary on any specific political figure, but just as an observation about incentive structures.

The people who would need to vote for this legislation operate within the same system that benefits from the status quo. Campaign contributions, lobbying, the revolving door between government and industry, these are structural forces, not individual moral failures. AI is currently making a very small number of people a very large amount of it. Asking those people to voluntarily share 50% of their ownership is essentially asking them to act against the incentive structure they operate within. History offers very few examples of people voluntarily halving their own wealth. It offers quite a few examples of people saying that they will and then just not doing it. It's not that it's impossible, but it would require a level of political pressure that has not yet materialized at the federal level, even if at the social level in places like Monterey Park and Shelbyville, it very clearly has. And there is a version of the story where the backlash works, where the political pressure forces genuine structural change, not up as in podcast appearances designed to take the temperature down a little bit, but I mean actual redistribution of ownership, actual regulatory frameworks, actual accountability for deployment decisions that affect millions of people. Norway did it with oil, Alaska did it with oil. There is no fundamental reason it cannot be done with AI, except that the people who would need to allow it are the same people who benefit most from it not happening.

And of course, there is another version of the story where the billionaires successfully absorb the backlash, where the proposals stay proposals, the wealth funds stay theoretical, the tax cuts for low earners become a talking point rather than a policy, and the underlying structure remains exactly as it is, where the fire behind them dies down just enough for business to continue as usual. Which version plays out in reality depends entirely on whether the political energy currently banning data centers and covering cameras with bin bags translates into something that reaches the federal level. The local resistance is very real. The question is only whether it scales further. What I do know for sure is this, the same people who told the world to prepare for a revolution are now trying to negotiate the terms of surrender, and the terms they're offering so far are remarkably generous to themselves. That alone tells you something important. They are not scared of AI. They're scared of what happens when the people affected by AI start organizing. And given what's been happening in Monterey Park, Shelbyville, Dayton, Evanston, and the DuckDuckGo download charts, they probably should be. The technology is very powerful. It has genuine applications. It can do extraordinary things, but a significant portion of the resistance it faces has nothing to do with the technology itself. It has to do with trust and trust is not rebuilt by going on television to propose tax cuts while your company fires 30,000 people. Trust is rebuilt by demonstrating not promising demonstrating that the benefits of this technology extend beyond the people who own it. Until that happens the pitchforks are not going anywhere probably and the billionaires for the first time in this cycle appear to know it. But AI billionaires moderating their messaging is only half the story. What happens when the companies they run start making changes to products that billions of people use every single day without asking whether those people even want the change. Well, Google just found out. That's the video that I would watch next. Thanks so much for watching this one. Subscribe and I'll see you all in the next one.