One’s a narcissist, the other’s a socialist, but there’s room for all in this improbable coming together.
by Harold Meyerson June 15, 2026 (Prospect.org)
The case for having the government take co-ownership of AI—make that the cases for having the government take co-ownership of AI—grow louder. I had to pluralize “case” since President Trump’s perspective on the virtues of government co-ownership are distinct from Bernie Sanders’s and those of his fellow democratic socialists (like, e.g., me).
Last week, Trump returned to the topic, saying the White House would soon host a meeting with a dozen or so top AI executives to discuss the industry’s future. For Trump, this isn’t breaking new ground. He’s already made deals to take partial government ownership of a host of corporations: U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse, and roughly 15 companies (where some deals are still in progress) in the fields of rare earth mining or quantum computing.
As my mentor, DSA founder Michael Harrington, used to say, “any idiot can nationalize a company. The question is, can he socialize a company?”
Trump’s distinctive brand of idiocy was not what Harrington was focused on. In Trump’s case, the narcissism that fuels his need to control everything around him, to appear the winner in dealmaking, and to have his name stamped on a product to presumably enhance his stature has driven him to champion government co-ownership. He has taken the right-wing belief in a unitary executive one huge step further, governing by the creed of L’état c’est moi as far as Congress and the courts will let him. His is neither democratic socialism nor the socialism claimed by various authoritarians; it’s self-magnifying socialism. The model is neither Karl Marx, Gene Debs, nor Lenin; it’s Louis XIV.
Then there’s Bernie Sanders’s proposal, which is to create a sovereign wealth fund that can take major shares in fundamentally important private enterprises. Such funds exist in nations that sit atop oil fields, like Norway or Saudi Arabia, as well as in one decidedly un-Marxist U.S. state, Alaska, whose residents get an annual dividend of roughly $1,000 to $3,000 from a specified share of the revenues of oil companies drilling on lands that the state has leased or otherwise permitted them to drill on.
There’s no reason, of course, why sovereign wealth funds should restrict their investments to fossil fuels; any industry that generates massive revenues and is essential to public life should logically qualify for government co-ownership. A host of enterprises that meet that second criterion (essential to public life) are often wholly owned by governments, of course: chiefly utilities and transportation, often with the additional goal of reducing costs to consumers.
For Sanders and his allies, the move for co-ownership of the emerging AI industry stems from concerns about both income distribution and oversight in the public interest. As to that latter concern, there’s a reasonable fear that mere regulation won’t be up to the task of ensuring the public good, given both the transformational potential of AI and the speed with which it innovates. Needless to say, this concern for adequate regulation is not something that Trump has raised.
The concern about income distribution, sad to say, is rooted in a current reality in which wages for most Americans either stagnate or grow only incrementally, while income from investment increases much more rapidly and substantially, as last week’s SpaceX IPO that made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire illustrates. AI’s potential to reward its investors while eliminating jobs could push that reality to a societal breaking point.
Both of Sanders’s concerns also inform the religious left. As Pope Leo XIV put it in his recent encyclical on artificial intelligence, “When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.” Co-ownership is a good way to ensure that.
Most of the leaders of the tech behemoths, as well as the largest investors in those companies (e.g., Andreessen Horowitz), paint a rosy future for the economy as AI advances into ever more spheres of life. The revenues and savings it will generate, they say, will flow to all. Last week, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is forming a new AI company, insisted that AI will generate such huge productivity gains that everyone will benefit.
“There’s going to be two-earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool, because there’s going to be so much productivity,” Bezos said.
In that statement, he assumed that productivity gains are shared with workers, though that hasn’t been the case since the 1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has been demonstrating for the past three decades. From the end of World War II through the ’70s, the rate of productivity gains and workers’ wage increases were virtually identical. Since then, as corporate attacks on unions all but eliminated collective bargaining in the private sector, productivity continued to rise while wages did only slightly better than flatlining. As a study by the RAND Corporation, commissioned by businessman Nick Hanauer, has demonstrated, if the share of corporate revenues going to employees had retained the levels it had in the three postwar decades, every American worker’s yearly income would be roughly $28,000 higher than it currently is.
Besides, Bezos himself has done everything in his considerable power to make sure that the immense revenues that Amazon earns are not shared with its workers. The company he founded, in which he remains both its executive chairman and largest single shareholder, will not bargain with its workers who’ve voted to unionize: Those at its Staten Island warehouse so voted four years ago, yet Amazon has consistently refused to sit down with them. It has shuttered all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province of Quebec after the workers in one of those warehouses opted to go union. It has contested in U.S. courts the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board—a settled question for the past 90 years—for fear that the Board, during the Biden administration, might rule that the law requires the company to bargain when its workers have opted to do so (which, incidentally, happens to be exactly what the law requires).
Like most of his peers who control Big Tech, then, Bezos’s promises that AI’s immense revenues will surely trickle down to workers and the public should generate even more immense levels of skepticism. And that, I suppose, is one more reason to insist on public ownership, as American CEOs are maniacally devoted to suppressing labor income, but rely on capital income for such life’s necessities as bigger and sleeker yachts.
Harold Meyerson
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect. More by Harold Meyerson
