Better idea: drive a stake 50% through AI CEO's chest. Better, faster results, not just economically, but ecologically too!
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That’s no reason not to ask
Giving up only means that it will never happen. Having the balls to demand, it means it will at least remain a thorn in the Nazis side.
And if you ever propose the argument, other than “fuck the Nazis“, then I can’t see why anyone should ever back you
Agreed, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
To take it a bit further: this is why the elite echelon of society is full of narcissistic assholes. Normal people feel shame when asking for more than their fair share. All the rich know is "gimmee" and "mine" so they naturally plunder their way to the top through their shamelessness and lack of self reflection and empathy.
Normal folks could get a bit more shameless about demanding our fair cut and a huge chunk of the rich and powerful could stfu and shamefully reflect on everyone they exploited to get to where they are. Actually we could all reflect a little more because even the low middle class American/European lifestyle floats on a pool of blood and exploitation, even though we like to pretend our shit doesn't stink.
We talk about "top-down" economics. How about "bottom-up" instead. Once everyone has free healthcare. Once everyone has food. Once everyone has basic human rights. Then, and only then, does the money trickle up so you can buy a yacht. The incentive to make society succeed is still there, but suddenly there's an incentive to uplift the most vulnerable instead of ignoring, mistreating, or even exterminating them.
How about tax hikes that slow down when quality of life indicators go up. The faster and more comprehensively corporations unfuck their shit, the slower we hike it. Comply or pay.
I know this already a wall of text, but I also want to tie it in with bargaining. Have ya'll ever been to a big street market in a country with shopkeepers who are extremely skilled and shrewd when it comes to bartering? The rich and powerful are the shopkeepers and we're the naive American tourists flooding the market. They're gonna tell you that their kids are gonna starve if they knock $10 off that fake Rolex or that their boss will be angry. They definitely try to make you think that it cost them more than the screaming deal they're giving you. That's not always true, but the narrative is often effective to separate the tourist and their money. We have to be shrewd, we have to be cutthroat, and we have to be willing to walk when companies don't play on our terms.
Keep your eye on the ball: 100% of the profits must pay for universal healthcare.
I love this idea, but I’m not sure if any AI company has made any profit to date lmao
No AI company will ever make a profit.
That’s no excuse for you to forget that human rights is our ultimate goal.
Never take your eye off the ball. Vote for humans. Fight for human equality. 🏳️🌈
The thing is, their values are overstated. It's a bubble economy. AI companies are racing for IPO specifically because they want to leave the public holding the bag when it finally crashes.
I don't want any stake in AI companies.
Government sponsored public investment funds should focus on stable, long-term investments and basic essentials like utilities, telecom, housing, agriculture, etc.
I would include healthcare and education in that list but I believe those things shouldn't be monetized at all and should be entirely non-profit.
But AI though is not a good investment. It only looks like one now because it's a pump and dump. A ponzi scheme, even.
I expected Bernie to be better than this...
They need to be funding UBI with it too. Every time a company kills a job because of AI they need to be taxed and that should go to UBI.
Almost everyone in this thread seems to be assuming the US would pay for half the shares/equity of these companies.
That is not what is being proposed.
What is being proposed is that the US Govt simply seize half the shares/equity/board voting powers in these companies, without paying a cent for them.
It is a half-nationalization.
Not a half-bailout.
EDIT
I go into more detail and explain in this comment in this same thread:
Good clarification. I'm convinced we will end up bailing them out anyway. We should nationalize and operate as a public good if generative AI is that important to society.
I genuienly struggle to think of a kind of economic thing that better qualifies as a public utility.
Completely agree that this kind of technology, with such broad and immense ongoing, as well as potential implications, cannot be allowed to be directed by the whims of wealthy capitalist conmen rent seekers.
Nationalization doesn't change the fact that for example OpenAI plans to burn $100B in 2026 without any profit so taxpayers will inherit $50B debt just from 2026. Moreover it doesn't stop those companies for raising more debt from for example corporate bonds emission just by saying 50% of their capital is government owned. That would allow them to literally raise trillions.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/30/openais-cash-burn-will-be-one-of-the-big-bubble-questions-of-2026
https://archive.ph/8Ej9z
If OpenAI fails, and the government owns half of it...
The assets and power the government acquired for no monetary cost simply becomes zero.
The other part of simply seizing half the shares is that the government (presumably a number of ministers/officials in charge of the new sovereign wealth fund) now has half the voting power of the entire board.
That is a pretty direct way to wield influence as to the decisions the company can make, how the CEO can behave.
You want maybe the accounting to actually deprecate the GPUs they have or lease over a realistic timeframe, instead of a totally bullshit one?
Half of your shareholders now demand this.
C Suite refuse to comply?
Begin the process of firing them.
First of all, fuck no. Remove all of the AI companies. Now. Secondly, this will guarantee they become "too big to fail". Like, it feels as if they're purposefully doing this to make it palatable to bail them out.
I think the intention is to get the profits of automation to the people when more jobs are inevitably automated.
It is, but unintended consequences.
With this, then we couldn't afford Sam Altman to experience failure because he will drag folks down with him. So the companies invested become too big to fall, and the still private leadership gets to run things however they wish knowing the government will cover for any mistakes.
It's bad enough as the government will panic about retirement accounts when they falter, this exacerbates it.
It's a risky form of private-public partnership, with a lot of ways the company can privatize rewards but socialize the risk.
This feels like a setup to the biggest rug-pull in history. The whole thing is going to shit and the taxpayers will be holding the bags.
I agree. No public funds should go to AI. No taxpayer money should be used to construct AI or datacenters. When the AI companies start to collapse, they should receive no bailouts.
Bailouts are corruption. Why do the rich get socialism and the rest of us get crushing capitalism? When we fail, we get stepped on. When the rich fail, they get billion dollar bailouts? But they claim they deserve to keep all their riches because they worked hard for it?
I could be a billionaire oligarch too if all of my failures were compensated for with billion dollar bailouts. It's not hard to succeed when you are elevated to the heights of the gods every time you face a little adversity.
Does this mean we'll all be bag holders when the AI bubble bursts?
We are already holding the bag.
They are "too big to fail"
It is the de way
50% might have been a fair cut if they actually asked for permission up front,but they didn't. Everything made by AI is fruit if the poison tree and should be something equal to public domain.
When I found out what it meant when other countries have sovereign wealth funds...
I have no idea how most people in America keep convincing themselves they've somehow got a good deal.
It's mostly oil countries that have a sovereign wealth fund and it comes out of the oil money. Norway, Saudi Arabia. Idea being that oil is a limited resource with a lot of value and the proceeds should be used to ensure everyone's future.
Of course the US IS an oil country...
You know they will agree and give everyone stakes exactly when bubble is about to pop
Public stake isn't for profits (especially not short term capital gains), it's about concentration & not getting controlled.
50% seems very low. They created these companies by scraping and pirating information.
50% means that they just need to fool a few people to get what they want. Imo it should be more like 90% public with a requirement that all services must be provided for free.
How about a 50% stake in all companies valued over 5 billionaire dollars.
rare bernie L
just do socialism. stop this wishy washy bullshit. capitalism must die.
Pretty horseshit to act like they trained AI on only American data so only Americans should benefit.
What about the literal entire rest of the world? They get nothing right?
Just another example of America exploiting the world for their own benefit. Even the good ones are so corrupted by their system that they do it without realizing.
I don’t think these companies are worth the value of the paper that their charters are written on. I don’t think many of them are going to last much longer, but he might actually be on to something here in terms of diffusing a massive financial fraud that’s about to happen in broad daylight.
The common wisdom right now is to just “put your money in an index fund, it’s safer and outperforms actively managed portfolios.” Which is to say, a fund that just buys a little bit of everything from a given list, rather than trying to pick stocks that someone thinks will do well, it creates a very diversified portfolio that is protected from anyone company fucking up by having the value spread over as many things as possible. Because many people just put their money in index funds now, getting listed in an index kind of guarantees that lots of people will be buying the shares consistently and thus consistently causing the price to rise over time.
To get in to these lists, normally, a company has to have been public for a while, generally about a year, and show profitability for a prolonged time. These rules have recently been changed though.
A bunch of the AI companies are doing initial public offerings (IPO meaning putting their shares on the public markets for the first time) in the next few months. And stating absolutely insane valuations. Because of the rule changes, they’re basically all getting immediately listed in index funds. And since they’re all targeting insane valuations, they’re going to automatically suck up a bunch of retirement money by default.
I’m not sure about anthropic and openAI on this next part, but SpaceX (which just “bought” Xai), is only going public with about 5% of it’s shares, so theoretically they can just trickle more shares on to the market to get bought up by index funds, and because supply of actual shares is artificially constrained, it will lead to massive overvaluation of those shares, taking up a disproportionate amount of money going in to index funds.
It’s actually fucking criminal that this is being allowed to happen, but because the rules for index funds and IPOs are set by financial institutions and stock exchanges, with very limited oversight by the government, they can just do this.
If the government were to take these 50% shares, it would kind of throw a wrench in the plans, since it would give the government the ability to sell those shares on to the market and stop the over valuation that allows them to take disproportionately from the index funds.
If this ever passed, I bet we’d see a pretty quick devaluation in these things.
It would be a good idea if the entirety of the current industry for it wasn't built entirely on smoke and mirrors type promises.
The general idea (so far as I can parse) is that if these companies are expecting a government bailout when it all goes south, then the tax payers who would be bailing them out should get paid back. But in practice, what will happen is we'll be saddled with the debt and these companies will weasel out of it.
The fact is I don't want to own a stake in any of these companies. I would rather they make it illegal for these companies to ask for a bailout from the government and close loopholes they will use to file for bankruptcy.
If they're going to fail the government should buy their assets (data centers, infrastructure, etc) if the people agree that's okay. Instead of what will likely happen (the companies left standing when it all goes under will buy up all the assets dirt cheap).
Wouldn’t this make everyone interested in the bad business practices that would increase the profits?
What happens when they go bust?
Maybe we all get to enjoy a massive tax write off like a big business
That's great for the US, but these companies are fucking the whole planet. What will the US do when other countries hold them responsible?
I forget how pro state people are on here sometimes. Is no one concerned what the fascist government will do with that stake?
The biggest flaw, aside from it having to succeed in our corporate owned Congress, is that it would require these companies to actually make money, and based on the technology we have today, that seems unlikely to happen anytime in the next decade. At least not without some major technological breakthrough. But it’s better than nothing I suppose.
I see what you're going for, but... No thanks.
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