It’s time to block reckless AI IPOs and tax billionaires

We cannot let the billionaire class take unprecedented risks with our future

America is a divided country in crisis. Despite the sunny economic forecast coming from the Trump administration, millions of Americans are struggling to find and keep jobs, getting crushed under the rising cost of living, and losing health insurance when they need it the most.

Meanwhile, via corporate consolidation and political corruption, the billionaire class is getting richer faster than ever before: a 40% increase in wealth in just the last two years. Today, the combined wealth of nearly 3,000 global billionaires equals one-fifth of the entire world’s yearly output. Nearly 1,000 billionaires live and do business in the United States.

The tools of their domination are tax loopholes, corporate mergers and, in the tech world where many of these billionaires exist, IPOs. When a company goes public, its founders and investors win the capitalist lottery. And instead of paying their fair share of taxes and redistributing resources back into society, most turn around and fund even more corporate consolidation and political corruption to extend their dominion.

Elon Musk became an instant trillionaire when SpaceX went public earlier this year, on the backs of workers’ pensions – and is bankrolling the Republican midterm campaigns with a small percentage of his egregious gains. Oracle’s Larry Ellison – currently seventh on the Forbes billionaires list – backed the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger that is destroying the film industry and the livelihoods of the Americans who labor in it. Google’s Sergey Brin spent $100m opposing California’s Prop 40, a one-time wealth tax that would put the funds toward healthcare and other public services.

To pay for essential services, we must tax billionaires, and pass legislation to do so starting in California and New York, but that is clearly not enough. We cannot allow more billionaires – or trillionaires – to be made in this country, further expanding the inequality chasm that’s turning a dignified life into a luxury in this country. We must also block the impending tech IPOs and preserve what’s left of our economy and our society.

The Trump administration and tech investors have positioned IPOs as market success stories: when a company goes public, US investors could gain from their valuations. But regular Americans also shoulder a company’s risks – and risk their own futures when that stock ends up in their retirement accounts without consent.

Problems with a private company or its products become problems for everyone invested in that company once it goes public, whether they’ve made the choice or not. And when the speculative investment bubble pops – such as with the 2008 crisis – regular people end up holding the bag.

It’s no secret that the AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are intending to go public in the near future. Both of these players also had major security flaws exposed recently, and openly acknowledge mind-bogglingly huge amounts of debt. If these companies are allowed to go public, their cofounders and investors – some of whom are already billionaires – will rise to whole new strata of private wealth.

Americans, meanwhile, will be financially crushed if the technologies fail or if these companies prove unable to make good on their extravagant financial promises. Already, the 10 most valuable public companies are in tech, which means the country’s economy depends on the stability of a single industry, one with an undeniable history of bubbles, crashes and, in extreme cases like Theranos, outright fraud.

June’s highly contentious SpaceX IPO already carries great risk for regular investors. If more speculative tech companies with staggering risk profiles are allowed to follow suit, the results will become too much for the market to bear.

If and when the AI bubble bursts, it will take all of us with it, investors or not. Recessions level lives indiscriminately, and globally. The one exception will be the billionaires, who will have sufficient resources to walk away from the wreckage relatively unscathed.

We cannot let the billionaire class take these kinds of risks with our future. To stop these reckless IPOs we must stand together, take collective action, and push for real change. We must find legal and legislative avenues to stop the new tech IPOs from minting new billionaires and transferring the AI industry’s enormous risks onto us.

The first step is passing wealth taxes on billionaires to keep them in check. Today, let’s send a message to the billionaires that Americans will not lie down and let them bulldoze working people and the environment on their way to the bank. Tax the billionaires. Block the IPOs.

Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book is End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor

Ilana Glazer is a comedian and video-podcaster who co-created the comedy series Broad City, wrote and starred in the movie Babes, made her Broadway debut last year in Goodnight, and Good Luck and, now, hosts the comedy and socio-political video-podcast, It’s Open With Ilana Glazer