Can you vote for or against technological progress? In most elections, it’s not that simple. But this November, Californians will have as close an opportunity as any group of voters has ever had to do so. That opportunity comes in the form of a ballot initiative proposing a wealth tax on the state’s billionaires. Prop 40, sponsored by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, one of California’s largest labor unions, is summarized as follows: “billionaires who were residents of California on January 1, 2026 would have to pay a one-time state tax equal to 5 percent of their net worth. The tax would be due in 2027.”
You may be asking yourself whether anyone — for or against it — could actually believe that, if passed, the wealth tax would be a “one-time” measure rather than the first of many. California has no plans to slow its rate of spending, trending to almost $400 billion annually. The measure’s official summary tells voters that “Ninety percent of the money would have to be spent on health care services for the public. The rest would have to be spent on education, food assistance, and administration of the wealth tax.”
California is infamous for its high taxes, but young people head west anyway, because that’s where the gold is. These two economic facts have coexisted for decades. Because California has supported so much of American technocapitalism in the last half century, it would have been hard to imagine a measure as extreme as a confiscatory wealth tax gaining serious traction. But Prop 40 has a real chance of passing in a few months. Something has changed in how the public views technology and the wealthy. That something is AI. And so, while Prop 40 presents itself as a tax on the ultrarich to prop up healthcare and education spending in California, it really should be thought of as a referendum on AI.
Of California’s 200 or so billionaires, most did not make their wealth by innovating in AI. A few did — like Cursor’s Michael Truell, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, or Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang. Most made their wealth in the infrastructure of the technology boom that began with personal computers and exploded with the Internet. Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Jensen Huang were all rich before the AI wave (though they are considerably richer because of it). The state’s official ballot analysis, from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, tells us as much. “California Is Home to Many Billionaires,” the document says. “Many of these billionaires gained their wealth as executives or investors in California technology companies.”
Today, in the midst of an AI revolution that promises to, well, be a revolution, the rhetoric around billionaires has changed into a specific anti-AI reaction, even counter-revolution. And as a result, all the billionaires are, whether they like it or not, “AI billionaires.” An “AI billionaire,” in this essay’s usage, is not someone who became fabulously wealthy by creating a successful AI product. It is someone whose fortune is now bundled up in assets that have benefitted handsomely from AI, and stand to gain even more. Because AI promises to affect the entire economy, no billionaire is exempt from this definition in the public’s eyes: land billionaires, energy billionaires, real estate billionaires… They’re all AI billionaires now.
Billionaires
Like most American children, growing up I knew vaguely that there were billionaires out there.
Warren Buffett was the richest man in the world, and he was friends with Bill Gates. I knew little about either man. Buffett was a good man and from Nebraska; Gates was a computer nerd. Then, in sixth grade, there was a printed-out picture of the Mexican businessman Carlos Slim in the back of my classroom. Slim held the title of the wealthiest man in the world from 2010 through 2013 and a place on the bulletin board of 2013’s “big names” next to tennis player Li Na and whistleblower Edward Snowden. He made his money on Mexico’s phone monopoly; his Wikipedia page calls him an “oligarch.”
When I was in high school in the late 2010s, Mark Zuckerberg was the ultimate “evil billionaire.” After the 2016 Presidential election, in which Donald Trump made great use of social media, Facebook and its CEO became scapegoats for a media and political establishment looking for reasons why Trump had won. With growing public anxiety around the effects of social media on teenagers, Zuckerberg was in the hot seat.
A decade later, the principal cause of Zuckerberg’s public villain status is very different: he and his renamed company, Meta Platforms, are spending billions on building data centers. The 2017 Zuckerberg, dragged before Congress to answer questions about Russian advertising purchases, might be relieved to learn that within a decade no one would be asking him about elections at all, or asking him to censor political material; his relief would stop if he learned how much complaining there’d be about his company’s investments in technology infrastructure (“data centers”) throughout the United States.
And that is essentially the difference between Zuckerberg as technology billionaire and Zuckerberg as AI billionaire.
Elon Musk has been through the same transformation. His life was easier when he was hated because Tesla wasn’t unionized, or when SpaceX made messes on the beach in Texas. Now, he’s merged SpaceX with xAI (itself merged with X), built massive data centers, and deployed Tesla’s self-driving cars around the United States. The complaints are considerably different.
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