Artificial Reparations

Trump and Bernie target AI for legalized plunder...

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

~ Frédéric Bastiat, from The Law (1850)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

Whoa! What’s this?

President Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders... as unlikely bedfellows!

We apologize to readers for the mental image... and pause so that they may scrub and banish it from their otherwise unadulterated minds...

Alas, sometimes what is seen cannot be unseen.

Faithful readers of this column will recall from our last Note that Bernard Sanders, the Democratic Socialist from Vermont, will soon introduce a bill to fleece American AI companies of half their worth. From Wednesday’s Note:

Earlier this month, Senator Sanders announced he will soon introduce a bill to “give” the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America. Ordinarily known as “fencing stolen goods,” this would be achieved through a one time tax/seizure not on profit... but on stock in the companies themselves. Expropriation, by any other name...

In other words, about what you’d expect from a card-carrying kleptocrat, who still believes, after all these years, that the best way to multiply wealth is to divide it.

But what about the Artist of the Deal, the King of Debt himself, Donald J.?

Not the kind of man who likes to be outdone, it appears Mr. Trump is now out to out-Bernie Bernie!

The Government’s Stake

No sooner had our pithy Note landed in your inbox when the president (having obviously just skimmed it himself) told reporters he was considering a similar shakedown. As usual, the newswires were on hand to bullhorn his latest brainwave:

WASHINGTON, June 10 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on ​Wednesday that he expects top artificial intelligence companies to agree to “giving ‌back” to the public, an apparent reference to a possible government stake in the firms.

“I’m going to have meetings with the top 12 or 15 executives very ​shortly, and we’re talking about giving back something to the ​public, and if we do that, the public will become ⁠very rich,” Trump told reporters in the White House’s Oval Office. “I ​think they’ll do that, and I think it’ll make it very popular.”

And there you have it, dear reader, the quiet part said out loud. Modern politics is not about doing what’s just... it’s about doing what’s popular.

And what’s more popular today than hating on billionaires? Especially tech billionaires. For one thing, they have more money than the rest of us. Therefore, the logic goes, they must be greedy. And evil. Mustn’t forget evil. For another thing, they’re creepy. And weird. And... techy.

Nevermind that we all use their products... that one in five Americans (according to Gallup polls) actively engages A.I. daily... a number that rockets to 50% who use it “occasionally” in their jobs... and a whopping 90% when accounting for AI-powered apps on their phones... (features like recommendation algorithms, voice assistants, spam filtering, navigation, and camera enhancements for the influencer class, etc.)

Point is, we didn’t think of A.I. first. And we feel icky while using it! (And even ickier when we discover we’re being used by it.)

Hmm... maybe some of that sweet, sweet A.I. loot will help soothe the self-loathing?

As for Mr. Trump’s Big Beautiful Promise, that “the public will become very rich,” we expect that to age like one of Bernie’s campaign slogans.

Other People’s Money

Setting aside the blatant violation of private property rights for a second... and the dangerous precedent it would surely set... and the fact that other countries (notably Argentina) are presently offering market friendly jurisdictions in which to build the future...

Let us instead indulge in a round of Bernie’s favorite pastime... spending other people’s money.

Per the Reuters article, OpenAI is targeting a $1 trillion valuation when it goes public sometime later this year (although the company’s most recent private financing valued it at roughly $852 billion in April 2026).

Even supposing the state were to confiscate 100% of OpenAI, effectively killing the golden goose before it had the chance to lay a single shiny egg, the most aggressive estimate of its potential valuation would be gobbled up within months, if not weeks.

Using the Congressional Budget Office’s 2026 projection of $7.4 trillion in federal outlays (spending) for fiscal year 2026, a one time, $1 trillion windfall would fund the current administration for... wait for it...

... about 1.62 months (or 49 days, to be precise).

And that’s if all Bernie’s wishes came true and the State finally went Full Soviet, nationalizing the entire enterprise... before inevitably mismanaging it back into the dirt whence it came.

But just while we’re having fun with other people’s stuff, let’s imagine a scenario where voters were bribed directly with some of the ill-gotten gains, say in the form of a “public wealth fund,” in which they were gifted a slice of a pie they did not bake in the first place.

(Recall H.L. Mencken’s definition of democracy as “a kind of advanced auction on stolen goods.”)

AI Pies in the Sky

Let’s say OpenAI goes public at the magic 13 figure mark. An Initial Public Offering (IPO) aims to sell a partial stake in the company, typically about 10-20%. (Google offered 19% in its IPO back in 2004...Meta Platforms sold 16% when it went public in 2012... Snowflake Inc., the cloud computing giant, offered 10% in 2020.)

Setting aside the myriad complexities of such financial operations, like shares issued by the company to raise cash for the business, stock sold by existing members and employees (insiders), hefty underwriting fees, piles of legal, accounting and compliance costs, share dilution, and the bazillion associated taxes in which Uncle Sam gets his again and again, etc. ...

Were OpenAI to IPO at a clean $1 trillion valuation, a 10% float translates to $100 billion raised.

Say every last cent of that goes into “the fund” to buy votes from the green-eyed public, what political scientists call “clientism,” and what cynical newsletter writers call “modern democracy.”

Divided among a US population of 340 million people... that giant bonanza translates to a stake of about $294 per man, woman and child in the nation. (A generous 20% float would raise up to $200 billion, or about $588 per person.)

At $15/hour, $294 not even one part-time week’s wage (before taxes!) for the average worker. Barely enough for him to purchase a fortnight of groceries... or one week of rent... or a cheap, secondhand smartphone, loaded up with all those juicy AI-powered apps, so he can whither away his hours in quiet and dazed confusion, wondering what the heck happened.

And while he’s scrolling away and whispering sweet nothings to his kinky AI girlfriend, the National Debt will crest $40 trillion over the coming months. That’s about $235-250,000 per taxpayer… or 1,000x his slice of the AI pie.

A few hundred bucks is hardly enough to make the workaday voter “very rich,” in other words, but it may be enough to distract him while his government sells his future to the highest bidder.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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