69% of Americans Want an AI Wealth Fund as the ‘Ripping Point’ Approaches

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Americans want the government to save them…

A new survey from research firm Verasight shows that 69% of Americans want to force artificial-intelligence (“AI”) companies to transfer half of their stock into a public “sovereign wealth fund.”

The idea comes straight from the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act legislation proposed last month by Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist…

Under the legislation, the fund would be overseen by a seven-member board appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate…

“The decisions they make will be accountable to the public, which we do not have right now,” Sanders said, adding that board members could work to stop decisions that could lead to widespread job loss.

But it’s not just the usual suspects calling for more government control over private companies – this is becoming a much more bipartisan issue. Bloomberg noted that this general idea could even garner support from President Donald Trump, who issued an executive order last year to establish this sort of fund.

The order left out a few key details, such as who would manage the whole thing and, crucially, where the money would come from. Since then, there’s been a series of investments in chipmakers, rare-earth miners and quantum computing companies, though the structures of these transactions lack much consistency.

Those stakes currently include roughly 30 deals for roughly $26.7 billion in investments, including…

The Department of Commerce leads the way with seventeen announced deals, including taking a 10 percent stake in Intel. The Development Finance Corporation, the United States’ development bank, has pledged six equity transactions in critical minerals, energy, and infrastructure. The Department of Defense has disclosed seven deals, and the Department of Energy has participated in two.

This is the strange place that America finds itself at today…

A forced equity grab is exactly the kind of upheaval that Wall Street veteran Whitney Tilson has been warning about. He calls it America’s “ripping point”… a K-shaped split between the folks getting rich off AI and those who are falling behind. As I wrote when covering Whitney’s prediction:

Federal Reserve data shows that the top 1% in America now control nearly one-third of the nation’s wealth. The bottom half of the U.S. population, on the other hand, controls less than 3%.

And white-collar hiring keeps shrinking… Core office sectors have been cutting jobs for three straight years now, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Social unrest is growing. Debt is ballooning. Political extremism is spreading.

For a wide swath of the population, the American dream is getting harder to even imagine, much less attain.

And today, those economic fears are turning far more political…

AI Layoffs Aren’t Slowing Down

Firings across corporate America show no signs of stopping.

Instead, they’re increasingly beginning to fit the pattern I once described as an AI “doom loop”: A company cuts staff, funnels the savings into AI, and gets rewarded with a higher stock price. Then a rival copies the move.

Meta Platforms (META), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft (MSFT) have each moved to shed thousands of workers even as they push their AI budgets into the hundreds of billions. All told, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that more than 100,000 people this year alone have been laid off thanks to AI.

And in June, employers added just 57,000 jobs, well below the 115,000 analysts expected. The headline unemployment rate did tick down to 4.2%, but for a grim reason… Labor force participation slid to its lowest reading since March 2021.

People are not landing jobs so much as walking away from the search. Roughly half a million fewer Americans reported being employed. And Goldman Sachs thinks the damage has barely started. As CNBC reports…

Goldman Sachs Senior Global Economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the labor force, or around 15 million workers, could lose their jobs during a 10-year AI transition period, the bank said in a report published last month.

This “would be the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s and in other periods of significant technological change,” Briggs said.

Expect AI Resentment to Rise in America

None of these data points makes the idea of the government taking over half of an entire sector a good one…

Instead, it is a factor of the rising resentment as folks watch AI mint millionaires and billionaires, even as their own paychecks disappear. And it echoes a warning I have raised before about the gathering backlash against the AI build-out…

Over the past two years, residents have blocked or delayed a staggering $64 billion worth of data-center projects. And roughly 55% of the elected officials who have spoken out against data centers are Republicans, not Democrats.

The backlash here isn’t along the usual political fault lines.

It’s widespread… made up of regular folks worried about their water, their electric bills, their property values, and whether their elected officials are cutting deals behind closed doors.

And we predict the data-center backlash will grow much more significant, much more volatile, and far more violent.

For example, the group behind the foiled plot to attack the UFC Freedom 250 fight night at the White House last month listed AI data centers among their grievances. As Newsweek reported about a study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point:

The opposition is “better understood as a grievance structure than a movement” rooted in conditions, including job losses and governance that failed to keep pace, that “map onto grievances we already know can cause political violence.”

“That’s what makes it durable: the same anti-AI narrative activates the far right, the far left, and environmental extremists at the same time,” [study author Yannick] Veilleux-Lepage said.

So let me revisit something I wrote last fall. Back then, I was blunt about the likelihood of an easy political fix:

There is no socialist government coming to “save you” from AI – whether that means seizing corporate assets and redistributing them to the favored few or creating new robot taxes.

You can’t stop the hundreds of billions of dollars going into AI, whether they’re ultimately profitable or not… If anything, those capital flows are still gathering speed.

And you can’t stop corporations from focusing on efficiencies, even at the cost of millions of American jobs… America’s embrace of innovation is why it has been the world’s wealthiest economy for so long.

But you can keep yourself from ending up on the wrong side of this widening chasm in America by relying on yourself, not the government.

All that remains true… even if the chances of a governmental asset seizure are higher today than they were then.

History offers a sobering parallel… For roughly half a century during the early Industrial Revolution, output boomed while workers’ wages went nowhere. Instead, the gains piled up for the owners of capital. I believe that is likely to happen again with AI.

For investors, a forced 50% equity transfer would gut shareholders of the biggest AI names, and even a watered-down version would take a bite. We’ll be watching developments here closely, but for now the odds favor gridlock…

Sanders’ bill has no realistic path through this Congress. And the best move you can make today is to use AI, rather than fear it.

That’s the bitter twist for white-collar workers caught in layoffs. Gallup has found that tech employees who do not use AI regularly are about three times more likely to be laid off than the ones who do.

It’s the same thing for your investments…

The investors who are using and investing in AI are much more likely to succeed than the investors who are avoiding it. That’s Whitney’s point, which he noted in his exclusive interview here…

We’re right in the middle of the biggest economic and financial step-change we’ll see in our lifetimes.

When I started out from my kitchen table 26 years ago, building a system like this was impossible.

But now AI is showing us ways to beat stocks, gold, bonds, real estate… and even potentially outperform the great Warren Buffett.

AI will only grow stronger… smarter… and more powerful with every passing day.

And you can use it to grow wealthy by making sure it’s working for you, not against you. Learn how to put yourself, your money, and your family on the right side of history right here.