Silicon Valley has spent the last decade promising that artificial intelligence would lift everyone, and now its richest practitioners are scrambling to make sure the public believes it before the public decides otherwise. The men poised to become the world’s first trillionaires are no longer debating whether AI will reshape the economy. They are debating how to keep voters from coming after their fortunes when it does.
Axios reports that America’s billionaires are now drafting their own remedies for AI-driven inequality, eager to head off a populist backlash before it gathers force. The boom has raised the stakes of the wealth-tax fight considerably, unleashing a technology capable of eliminating millions of jobs even as it produces unprecedented concentrations of personal wealth. Populist politicians, especially on the left, have framed the moment as capitalism’s reckoning, an economy already tilted toward the elite about to tilt further still.
The tech titans see the danger clearly enough. Their proposed solutions, however, tend to involve everyone except themselves rethinking how money works.
The Gospel of Shared Abundance
Jeff Bezos, currently the world’s fourth-richest man, told CNBC last week that the bottom half of earners should owe no federal income tax at all. “You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens,” the Amazon founder said. It is a tidy argument, and a convenient one, since it relocates the conversation away from his own balance sheet and toward the futility of taxing it.
Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI and has long championed universal basic income, now prefers what he calls “universal basic compute,” handing people access to AI’s productive power rather than a monthly check. In April his company went further, floating a New Deal-style social contract complete with a public wealth fund, taxes on AI-driven returns and automated labor, and a four-day workweek.
Elon Musk, whose SpaceX public offering could crown him the first trillionaire, has called for “universal HIGH INCOME” payments from Washington, insisting that robot-driven growth will be so abundant that inflation simply won’t follow. Each man has arrived, by a different route, at the same comforting conclusion. The machines will generate enough wealth that nobody needs to take any from the people who own the machines.
Knowing Where the Pitchforks Point
Whatever the sincerity behind these proposals, the people floating them understand that the politics of extreme wealth can curdle quickly. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made the point bluntly in a January essay, offering what he termed a pragmatic case for billionaires to back higher taxes on AI wealth. If they refuse to support a sensible version, he warned, they will end up with a punitive one designed by a mob.
OpenAI named the same fear in an April policy document, cautioning that AI could leave power and wealth more concentrated rather than more broadly shared. The company’s foundation then put cash behind the worry, committing $250 million to help workers and communities absorb the disruption and to experiment with sharing AI’s gains before resentment hardens into something unmanageable.
There is wisdom worth heeding in their nervousness, even if self-interest sharpens it. Scripture warned long ago about the rot that sets in when the powerful trust their riches more than they trust anything else. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. The men building these systems are not wrong to sense that a society which feels robbed will eventually act like one.
The Left Smells Blood
Anti-billionaire politics has hardened into an organizing principle for a Democratic Party still hunting for a post-Trump identity. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called this week for rewriting the tax code, including fresh levies on wealth and data centers, so Americans share in AI’s economic gains. Warren, now being courted by would-be 2028 contenders, pointed to Silicon Valley’s own warnings about a permanent underclass displaced by automation.
The movement is not confined to Washington. In New York City, state lawmakers passed Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tax on luxury second homes valued above $5 million, a measure he promoted in a video filmed outside hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse.
In Maine, Democratic Senate frontrunner Graham Platner launched his campaign by declaring the oligarchy itself the enemy, backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are more than a year into a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. In California, unions claim more than 1.5 million signatures for a one-time 5 percent billionaire wealth tax bound for the November ballot, with proceeds earmarked for health care, education, and food assistance.
The strangest convert to the cause is former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, now running for governor and casting himself as the billionaire who wants to tax other billionaires. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 candidate, opposes the measure but has told fellow Democrats not to dismiss the anger it channels.
“The pitchforks [are] here, they’re not just coming,” Newsom said last week, predicting that resentment toward billionaires and automation will define the next two election cycles.
A Test Nobody Can Fake
The billionaire tax fight is becoming a referendum on a single question. Will AI deliver the broad prosperity its champions keep promising, or will it deliver a level of wealth concentration that, as Amodei himself put it, could break society?
The men at the center of this transformation have written essays, pledged money, and proposed clever new arrangements for spreading the wealth around. What they have not yet done is convince a skeptical public that any of it amounts to more than insurance against the day the resentment turns into policy.
The teacher in Queens that Bezos invoked is not, in the end, persuaded by white papers and foundation grants. She will decide whether the AI revolution served her or merely served the people who built it. The billionaires sense, correctly, that the verdict is no longer theirs to control.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
