Dear Billionaires: Your Wealth Is Denominated in a Dying Currency

I’m not here to tell you billionaires should care about people. That argument has been made, eloquently, for centuries. It doesn’t work. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s never been the actual operating logic of power. So let’s skip it.

I want to talk about something more uncomfortable: the possibility that the wealth and power currently being consolidated at the top of the global economy is about to become meaningless. Not redistributed, not regulated away. Meaningless. And that the people hoarding it most aggressively are the ones who should be most worried.

Here’s what I mean.

Jeff Bezos’s fortune is a function of consumer spending. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire requires billions of humans who want to connect with each other through his platforms. The entire venture capital ecosystem values AI companies based on the assumption that there will be customers: human beings and human-run organizations willing to pay for what these systems produce.

Now follow the thread these same leaders keep pulling on.

AI systems are, right now, beginning to replace human cognitive labor at scale. The trajectory we’re on suggests that within a few years, most of the knowledge work that currently sustains the global middle class will be automatable, and the manual labor that remains is next.

The cheerful version of this story is that new jobs will emerge, as they always have. That’s possible. But it depends on an assumption that has never been tested: that humans remain the relevant economic agents, that when AI can produce, create, analyze, manage, and coordinate better than we can, there will still be a reason to pay us to do things, and therefore a reason for us to have money, and therefore someone to buy what Amazon is selling.

If that assumption breaks (and it might) then the entire structure that makes a billionaire a billionaire collapses. Not because of revolution or regulation, but because of irrelevance. You can’t be the richest person in a room that no longer exists.

I don’t think the people at the top of the current economy have fully internalized that the value of what you hold is only as durable as the system that gives it meaning. A billionaire’s net worth is only real until the economy it’s denominated in stops functioning.

And the billionaires need the rest of us more than they’ve ever been willing to admit for reasons that are structural. Who do you sell things to when your customers can’t earn money? Who uses your platform when people are fighting for survival instead of posting? Who do you negotiate with, compete against, show off to, build legacy for, in a world where most of humanity has become economically vestigial?

Right now, the gains from AI are flowing almost entirely to the companies building it and the investors behind them. There is no mechanism, no institution, no movement, no policy framework to help redirect that surplus toward maintaining a functioning society of empowered humans. And the window for building such a mechanism is closing fast, because the technology clearly isn’t going to wait for us to get our institutional act together.

The cruel irony is that the oligarchs’ self-interest and humanity’s interest may be more aligned right now than at any point in history, but for a reason no one likes. The billionaires need a world full of capable, empowered, economically participating humans in order for their wealth to mean anything. And the rest of us need the billionaires to figure this out before they’ve already destroyed the systems we all depend on.

This is the prisoner’s dilemma at civilizational scale, and the clock is the AI development timeline.

Here’s the question that I think the smartest, most powerful people in the world need to ask themselves:

What are you building all of this for, if the world you’re building it in won’t exist by the time you’re done?