Sanders, Trump, Musk: Three proposals to redistribute the wealth created by AI

The advent of AI is reconfiguring production structures, but is also shaking the very foundations of Western monetary and fiscal policies. With the rise of global automation, a major ideological divide is now emerging between supporters of state centralization of technological infrastructures and defenders of liberalized private capitalism. Today this dynamic is at the heart of global macroeconomic debates, with governments and major captains of industry seeking to anticipate the employment imbalances of tomorrow.

Washington's standoff for control of AI giants

As the race to AI accelerates, the debate over technology governance has reached a major political turning point with Vice President JD Vance's statements on The Diary of a CEO podcast. He confirmed that the Trump administration is considering taking direct stakes in major artificial intelligence companies.

This desire for state interference soon took shape through several notable initiatives and precedents in the heart of the American capital:

• The strategic precedent of the CHIPS Act: the federal government has already converted public subsidies into a direct stake of around 10% in the semiconductor giant Intel;
• The sovereign wealth fund bill: Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which proposes a one-time 50% tax on share transfers from large AI firms in order to capitalize a public fund;
• Control of voting rights: this American sovereign fund would hold, according to the bill, 50% of the voting rights in the targeted structures to guarantee state control;
• Negotiations at the top: Donald Trump himself formally mentioned these public participation mechanisms during private strategic discussions with Sam Altman, the director of OpenAI.

This legislative offensive comes in a context of global restructuring of the productive system, where the threat of work automation worries regulators. Thus, data from the World Economic Forum estimate that 92 million jobs could be displaced around the world by 2030. If the job cuts announced by American companies are barely linked to AI (less than 1% of the 1.1 million positions eliminated), the technological change leads Washington to want to put the computing infrastructures under cover.

The objective of the promoters of the sovereign wealth fund is to ensure that productivity gains from AI are not captured by a few private monopolies, but benefit the State. Thus the state apparatus seeks to provide itself with a lever of direct control and regular revenue flows to compensate for the future contraction of traditional tax revenues based on human labor.

Elon Musk's monetary alternative and the specter of deflation

This June 21, following Washington's desire for partial nationalization, Elon Musk affirmed on the social network X his categorical opposition to any form of public ownership of AI capital, through a series of declarations. To oppose the sovereign fund model, the entrepreneur defends the maintenance of exclusively private ownership of technology companies, like his own entity xAI, associated with a direct financial redistribution mechanism.

Elon Musk said: “it’s better to just send the money directly to people from the Treasury”. For him, the injection of public liquidity in the form of “Universal High Income via checks issued by the central administration” is the best way to respond to the rise in mass unemployment caused by automation without calling into question the efficiency and management of the private sector.

In monetary matters, this position is based on a hypothesis of rupture with classic inflationary theories. As the U.S. national debt tops $38 trillion and the interest burden tops $1 trillion a year, Musk argues that physical abundance generated by AI and humanoid robotics will change price dynamics. His thesis is that the massive increase in the volume of goods and services will exceed the rate of money creation, rendering inoperative the historical rule that the issuance of cash causes inflation.

The businessman formulated his macroeconomic forecast by saying: “in fact, I predict that we will desperately fight deflation”. In this framework of hyper-productivity, the payment of universal checks would no longer be considered as social assistance, but rather as a technical adjustment necessary to preserve the speed of money and support demand in the face of falling wages.

The financial paradoxes of the world's first trillionaire and disruptive robotics

This doctrinal positioning takes on particular relevance in view of the evolution of the fortune of Elon Musk, who has become the first trillionaire in History. Such an unprecedented valuation follows the IPO of its aerospace company SpaceX, whose stock is now listed at $135, bringing the firm's overall value to $210 billion.

Musk's stake in SpaceX, which is around 38% to 40%, as well as his significant stake in the automobile manufacturer Tesla, have provoked harsh criticism from non-governmental organizations like Oxfam. They qualify this concentration of capital as “symbol of extreme economic inequality”. Its supporters emphasize on the contrary that this wealth is mainly composed of unrealized shareholdings, reinvested directly in the development of disruptive industries.

To confirm his model of disengagement from public debt via technology, Musk is counting on the intensive deployment of humanoid robotics, and more precisely on the Tesla Optimus program. In an interview with investor Nikhil Kamath, the billionaire assured that the diffusion of these humanoid robots within three years would create so much material wealth that it would put an end to the American sovereign debt crisis. From this point of view, the possibility of providing almost free and endless labor is a game changer for the foundations of the market economy.

Productive capital is no longer measured by human working time, but by the computing power linked to the artificial intelligence and mechanical efficiency installed. This paradigm shift is at the very basis of the concept of universal redistribution, made necessary by the progressive obsolescence of traditional employment.