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, the Khosla Ventures founder suggested the United States government could take a ten percent stake in all public corporations and redistribute that corporate wealth to the public at large.
Khosla explained that the idea was spurred by a recent decision for the US government to purchase a stake in Intel. He stated that he wondered if it was not a good idea to take ten percent of every corporation and put it in a national pool for the people. He described the concept of taking ten percent of every public company as really interesting.
AI leaders have explored universal basic income proposals in the past, most notably in studies backed in part by Sam Altman. Still, it is rare for a prominent investor to so explicitly endorse a national stake in private industry. Khosla acknowledged the controversy of his idea onstage but said that extreme proposals were necessary to sustain social cohesion through the disruption of artificial general intelligence.
He said he expects to receive critique for this idea. However, he emphasized that sharing the wealth of AI is a really big need to level the benefits to everybody. He predicted that while we will not need to do it in fifteen years, we do have to take care of those people affected. He believes that by 2035, we will have a hugely deflationary economy.
Khosla also cautioned that the rise of AI would displace jobs, which would require significant societal changes. For startup founders, he said this presents an opportunity to build, noting that there is a startup opportunity in building AI for every profession such as accounting, medicine, chip design, auditing, marketing, and entertainment.
The venture capitalist also suggested that the nature of work would change in the AI era, as the jobs 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. He described that kind of labor as servitude to survival.