by Brian Hamilton, opinion contributor – 05/02/26 2:00 PM ET
Elon Musk recently proposed giving government payouts to people who lose their jobs to AI. Specifically, he called for “universal high income via checks issued by the Federal government.”
It’s not often that there are so many things wrong with an idea that I don’t quite know where to start. Even Sam Altman, who once spent $14 million to fund a study on universal basic income, said this week that he had changed his mind about the concept.
We live in a culture that often elevates successful individuals to a kind of universal authority, amplified by social media. So I think it’s important to note that there are people who are accomplished in one area but incompetent in others. Just because Michael Jordan can dunk a basketball doesn’t mean we should put him in charge of NASA. Likewise, just because Musk is a successful entrepreneur does not make him all-knowing in economics or public policy.
We must first challenge some of the underlying assumptions made by Musk and others about AI. In this case, there is a growing idea that AI will take away numerous jobs without a corresponding shift in the composition of the labor market. But the composition of work has been changing since the country’s founding. There is little evidence so far that AI represents a greater rate of change than, say, the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. For now, that claim is a hypothesis, not a fact.
What, then, would giving free government payouts to people actually do? At a minimum, it would take away individual accountability and initiative. Imagine what this idea would have meant in the mid-19th century, when factories were starting to flourish. People would have waited around for government handouts instead of taking ownership of their lives and changing their work skills. It would have had a devastating impact on individual initiative.
America was established on a set of principles that have worked out pretty well. One of them is that things should be controlled by lots of people, not by the few — kings and queens, for example.
This is the undergirding of every major American virtue. We don’t want our country controlled by a few oligarchs in a state of informational feudalism where they, under their own goodwill or at their own discretion, decide what to give the rest of us. We become their pawns.
This is already happening through wealth inequality, where the few have way too much control in our society. It is a perversion of everything that has made us great as a nation. These very few tech leaders already have an outsized role, and we need to be vigilant about their impact on public policy.
It is also worth recognizing that the people proffering solutions might gain from the implementation of those poor solutions. The few people yelling that the sky will fall because of AI happen to be the same people who will gain financially if the rest of us think the sky will fall. They have an enormous investment in the things they are saying or, as my dad used to say, they have a dog in the fight.
If AI-driven job displacement is cushioned by government payouts, it could reduce resistance to rapid automation, which benefits the companies building and deploying these technologies. It’s not very American for the guy on trial to be his own jury.
Finally, even if everything Musk and others like him say comes true (it won’t), it’s not appropriate to offload the negative externalities of what you create onto the government — that is, us. If what you are doing is taking jobs away, then own it, acknowledge it, and pay people from your own pocket, not my pocket. After all, you created the technology. Offloading the consequences to the government is weak and un-American, where we should all be responsible for our own actions.
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Brian Hamilton is the founder of Sageworks (now Abrigo), one of the world’s very first fintech companies. He is also the founder of Inmates to Entrepreneurs.
