Vinod Khosla has a bold vision for how society could be reconfigured to share the abundance created by AI technology. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Tuesday, the Khosla Ventures founder suggested the U.S. government could take a 10% stake in all public corporations and redistribute that corporate wealth to the public at large.
As Khosla put it, the idea was spurred by President Donald Trump’s decision for the U.S. government to purchase a 10% stake in Intel. “When Trump bought 10% of Intel, I wondered if it wasn’t a good idea,” Khosla said onstage at Disrupt. “Take 10% of every corporation and put it in a national pool for the people. That’s really interesting. Just take 10% of every public company.”
AI leaders have explored universal basic income proposals in the past, most notably in OpenResearch’s extended study on cash payments, backed in part by Sam Altman. Still it’s rare for a prominent investor to so explicitly endorse a national stake in private industry. Khosla acknowledged the controversy onstage but said extreme proposals were necessary to sustain social cohesion through the disruption of artificial general intelligence.
“I’ll get critique for this idea,” Khosla said. “But you know, sharing the wealth of AI is a really, really big need to level the benefits to everybody … We won’t need to do it in 15 years, but we do have to take care of those people. We will, by 2035, have a hugely, hugely deflationary economy.”
Khosla also cautioned that the rise of AI would also displace jobs, which would require significant societal changes. For startup founders, this presents an opportunity to build, he said, noting that there’s a startup in building AI for every profession, like accounting, medicine, chip design, auditing, marketing, entertainment, and more.
The VC also suggested that the nature of work would change in the AI era, as the jobs that people perform today could go away. He pointed to work like mounting a tire on an assembly line or working as a farmer as “not a job that humans should have.”
“That’s servitude to survival,” Khosla said.
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