This week: the billionaires who broke the economy want to pay you to shut up about it.
Last week, Elon Musk pinned a post to the top of his X profile: "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI."
Sam Altman wants to go bigger — "universal extreme wealth", paid in compute tokens. Amodei says UBI may be "part of the answer." Khosla says it's a necessary safety net. All of them, in unison.
These are the guys who spent twenty years arguing that government should stay out of markets, that handouts breed dependency, that the individual should stand on their own. Musk literally ran a federal cost-cutting operation. And now they want the government to mail checks to every citizen.
Why? Because they broke the thing, and they know it. The people building the tools that eat the jobs are pre-emptively offering to pay for the damage — on their terms, through their platforms, using their math.
A universal basic income paid by the people who automated your job is not a safety net. It's a leash.
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