The men who promise future “universal high income” from AI abundance won’t tolerate a one-time 5% levy to fund healthcare now.

The gap between rhetoric and revealed preference is the whole game. They’ll promise trickle down paradise tomorrow as long as they can hoard today, and tomorrow never comes.

It’s called fraud.

The “socialist” vocabulary they float serves a specific propaganda function: it preemptively neutralizes redistribution demands by positioning billionaires as already on board with sharing. No need to organize, regulate, or expropriate because you should just trust them to pay their share.

Then they don’t, and what are you or anyone else going to do about it?

As noted in an astute article by Noreena Hertz, the promises arrive after the accumulation phase, from people whose entire careers have been defined by aggressive tax avoidance, regulatory capture, and labor suppression. Their pledge of “universal high income” has exactly the credibility of a Victorian mill owner promising the welfare state, which is to say, absolutely none.

It’s called fraud.

They’re proposing that governments “socialize only the returns” – which means the public bears the risks (job displacement, social disruption, infrastructure costs) while private actors capture the productive capacity itself. That’s not a departure from trickle-down; it’s its perfected form.

Look at what they’re not proposing:

• Not worker ownership of AI systems
• Not public ownership of foundational models
• Not democratic control over deployment decisions
• Not binding redistribution mechanisms with enforcement

This is trickle-down economics rebranded into “socialist” vocabulary with no actual positive outcome. The structural logic is identical: concentrate ownership now, promise benefits will flow to others later, with no binding mechanism to enforce it. The only difference is rhetorical packaging – instead of “let us keep our wealth and jobs will materialize through market magic,” it’s “let us keep ownership of everything and checks will materialize through our future generosity.”

It’s called fraud.

Larry Page is protesting a one-time 5% tax on his hundreds of billions of accumulated wealth to protect his island-purchasing power. He’s relocating his wife’s marine conservation charity out of state to ensure not one dollar of his wealth contributes to California healthcare, even indirectly, even from the philanthropic arm that’s supposed to demonstrate he has a social conscience.

Meanwhile, Jensen Huang said he’s “perfectly fine” with staying and paying the tax, because why wouldn’t he? The flight is a choice, not an economic necessity, and it isolates the ones leaving as making an active ideological statement about who deserves what.

And remember who started this conversation: Elon Musk, promising “universal high income” along with flights to Mars by 2018, and driverless cars by 2017, while having already relocated Tesla’s headquarters to Texas in 2021 – after taking billions in California taxpayer subsidies.

It’s called fraud.

The man promising future abundance has already demonstrated he doesn’t deliver on predictions and won’t pay present obligations.

As Hertz puts it:

In their envisioned future, the “springs of cooperative wealth” will flow so abundantly that people will receive “according to their needs,” not according to the hours they clock in a factory. If that last sentence sounds familiar, that’s because it comes from Karl Marx.

Billionaires quoting Marx while acting like Rockefeller.

If you think charity spend by billionaires today is controversial, just look back at the early 1900s during industrialization.

It’s called fraud.