Bernie Sanders Challenges Silicon Valley: 50% Wealth Tax on AI Stocks for $7 Trillion Sovereign Fund
Bernie Sanders has presented a drastic bill to transfer colossal wealth shares from leading artificial intelligence companies directly into the hands of the state. The senator from Vermont revealed the details of the legislation to the Associated Press, outlining a mechanism for forced withdrawal designed to ensure that the community has a direct stake in large tech companies.
The cornerstone of the bill rests on a one-time 50% tax applied not on liquidity, but on the stock holdings of AI companies. The threshold set for the application of the measure concerns all entities in the sector that exceed or reach $200 million in annual revenue from AI-related activities, extending to new market players as soon as they hit this sales level. Through this transfer of shares, American citizens would become relative or absolute majority shareholders of the main private giants in the sector.
Public Governance and Feasibility Concerns
According to projections developed by the senator's team, the sovereign fund thus established would manage an estimated wealth of approximately $7 trillion. The annual income generated from this enormous shareholding would allow for the generation of hundreds of billions of dollars to fund public programs related to education, housing policies, and healthcare. The plan also hypothesizes the distribution of an annual 5% dividend to ensure a direct cash payment of over $1,000 to every U.S. citizen, relieving taxpayers from the risk of losses in case of depreciation of the stocks in the market.
The management of the fund would be entrusted to the Independent Commission for Democratic AI, a committee of seven members directly appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. This independent body would exercise the voting rights associated with the public shares to guide corporate choices, potentially blocking corporate decisions deemed harmful to citizens. Sanders' outlined path aims to impose a democratic oversight in corporate decision-making processes, preventing the benefits derived from automation from remaining the exclusive prerogative of a few large industrial groups.
The proposal also includes the advanced robotics segment, defined in the text as any autonomous or semi-autonomous mechanical system that uses AI for industrial or commercial purposes, excluding medical control devices or strictly military nature. Reactions from the tech sector are predictably hostile. Despite figures like Sam Altman of OpenAI showing a generic theoretical openness to profit redistribution from technology, direct talks with Sanders revealed insurmountable gaps regarding the percentage of public ownership. Opponents of the plan raise strong substantive concerns, fearing the immediate collapse of financial markets due to forced dilution of corporate shares and the likely emergence of corporate loopholes, such as the fragmentation of businesses into smaller subsidiaries to circumvent the $200 million threshold.