What If AI Paid You? How Pete Buttigieg’s Big Idea Can Create A Fairer America

Not Quite UBI... It's Capitalism Where Citizens Have Skin In The Game

Pete Buttigieg brought more than a new beard and his cool intellectual charm to the Flagrant podcast two weeks ago—he also dropped a bold idea that deserves more attention.

The former Transport Secretary said every American should get a “share” in AI, given that taxpayer-funded technologies, like the internet from the 1960s, laid its foundation.

“I think there’s a way to deal in American citizens,” Buttigieg said. “Kind of like a dividend off of the value that’s being created from AI… Why shouldn’t we all get a share instead of it going to a handful of super wealthy people who are consolidating their power?”

Think of it as a royalties dispute. If the public helped build the internet - the backbone of artificial intelligence, why shouldn't we get a cut of the wealth it generates?

Tech companies have also been harvesting our personal data for years and now AI models are trained on humanity’s collective knowledge—our intellectual heritage.

Yet instead of being dealt our cut, we’re being charged up to $200 a month to use this technology to its fullest.

Big Tech’s profiting off our data—Buttigieg’s AI Dividend could fix this injustice,

An Idea Whose Time May Have Come

It’s not a completely new idea. Open AI’s Sam Altman has given it extensive thought in his manifesto Moore's Law For Everything.

“The best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner,” he says, envisioning a dividend of around $13,500 per year.

Economist Mariana Mazzucato has long argued that the real risk-taker behind breakthrough technologies has been the public, through governments. And she’s talking about risk to invest in technologies not the risks associated with those technologies running wild in the free market - something even AI developers warn about.

Andrew Yang championed a similar concept in his 2020 presidential run, pitching a Freedom Dividend—a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to offset job losses from automation.

He still argues it’s a no-brainer, especially as poverty drives up costs for crime prevention, incarceration, and emergency services.

“Poverty is a problem we can solve,” Yang says. And we can start by compensating people for their data in a data dividend.

In 2023, Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier proposed an AI Dividend fund, where companies profiting from generative AI trained on public data pay into a pool that sends checks to citizens. They pointed to Alaska, where residents receive annual dividends from state oil profits—a collectively owned resource, much like our data.

“When Big Tech companies produce output from generative AI that was trained on public data, they would pay a tiny licensing fee, by the word or pixel or relevant unit of data. Those fees would go into the AI Dividend fund. Every few months, the Commerce Department would send out the entirety of the fund, split equally, to every resident nationwide,” they argued. “That’s it.”

Some countries are already getting into the habit of slapping considerable taxes on the biggest tech companies. France taxes Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon 3% of their revenue, with plans to raise it to 5%. Italy, Spain, and India are exploring similar moves.

There’s also a more familiar way of arguing this. Think of the tariffs Donald Trump’s administration is imposing on countries who run a trade deficit with the US. Their logic is that if a country is benefitting disproportionately from the US market, their products should be tariffed reciprocally in the US. So what about when some companies are benefitting disproportionally from the US? Shouldn’t they also be penalised in some way?

The case is clear: we deserve a slice of the AI pie. The question is how to make it happen—and who will lead the charge.

Pete Buttigieg has thrown his hat in the ring. As a likely 2028 presidential candidate and as one of the Democrats’ best communicators, there could hardly be a better choice.

So what about making it happen. Let’s look at the numbers.

The Math Seems To Add Up: $15,000 Annual Payouts Are Possible Even Today

To estimate the potential impact, I used Grok and ChatGPT to source the most recent available financial data and then built out some formulas. (Hey, if Trump’s team could do it for their tariffs calculations, why not?)

Here’s the bottom line:

A small tax on the revenue and valuation of the world’s biggest companies could generate upwards of $1.4 trillion annually*. Divide that by all American taxpayers and they each get a check of around $5,000. Limit it to just the lowest 100 million earners, and the dividend soars to $15,000.

Considering that the federal minimum wage is $15,000 and the average US wage is $60,000, this could be transformative. These numbers could grow fast as AI and robotics boost productivity.

But for this to happen without too much pain, the companies who win most from this reality should pay their fair share to those most at risk.

That’s why this tax shouldn’t just target tech giants. All top-performing companies will benefit from AI, streamlining processes and cutting costs. Taxing the biggest winners ensures fairness while leaving smaller businesses free to innovate.

The top 500 U.S. companies would also gain most from the economic impact of an AI Dividend. As money flows into society, lifting millions of people out of poverty, consumer spending would surge, fueling a new economic boom.

Over time, the dividend might reach a point where most people no longer need to work—which will be just as well because there won’t be many jobs for them anyway. And maybe that’s not a bad thing because there’s much more to life than working for pay.

The Future Of Work Could Be Worklessness

Imagine a post-work world where labour is no longer the main path to purpose. With an AI Dividend of $15,000 annually, or another form of AI wealth-sharing, a single parent could cut back on overtime to spend more time with their kids, while an aspiring musician could afford to gig part-time and still pay rent. Communities could thrive as people volunteer, start small businesses, or join local projects—free from the grind of jobs that only enrich others.

This could spark an innovation boom. With financial security, more of us would have time to tackle problems technology can’t yet solve, whether it’s curing diseases or reimagining education. As AI and robotics reduce the need for human labour, the dividend could grow, potentially allowing most people to step away from work entirely.

A post-work future may challenge the American Dream—but isn’t true freedom the ultimate goal? If billionaires can retire their families for generations, why can’t humanity collectively start to slowly retire too?

As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their new book Abundance, “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need”. In this case, we need to build a new wealth distribution mechanism so we can actually reap the benefits that capitalism has enabled.

The Risk Of Doing Nothing: A Dystopian Divide

Critics might argue that an AI dividend is governmental overreach or economically unfeasible. But consider the alternative: without it, the wealth gap will spiral as AI accelerates inequality. Billionaires already control vast resources, and AI will only deepen this divide.

McKinsey estimates 30% of U.S. jobs could be automated by 2030, and Goldman Sachs predicts 50% by 2045. Imagine what this means for people’s healthcare when so many Americans only afford insurance because their employers pay for it.

Most people will face shrinking opportunities and stagnant wages. Even high earners making $200,000+ won’t be immune as AI outpaces human skills. Many of these people are only valuable today because they are building the processes needed for AI to thrive once it has more agency.

Wealth will concentrate further, with billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg buying up land in places like Hawaii, driving up costs and displacing locals - as is happening in so many other parts of the world as luxury housing is abundant and affordable housing is dwindling.

We all know this is happening. Gary Stevenson compares this to the U.S. losing wealth to China through trade imbalances. Without intervention, ordinary citizens—and even governments—will grow poorer as wealth flows to a tiny elite.

In this world, poverty will continue to surge, straining public resources. Costs for crime prevention, incarceration, and emergency services will skyrocket, as Yang has warned.

Trump’s push to revive manufacturing won’t help—people don’t want factory jobs; they want time with their kids and space to live better lives than their parents.

Instead they risk existential threats from AI systems that even their own creators don’t trust. It’s inhumane to give people a starting point of $0.

Surely we can do better than that.

How Companies Can Already Start Sharing Their Wealth

In some ways, this vision can already happen through existing structures. And if companies want to avoid a new tax, there could be another option: prove they’re already sharing enough wealth to avoid or reduce their tax burden.

Here’s how that could work:

1. Creator Rewards
   
   Platforms like YouTube and TikTok already pay creators. But these schemes often favour top influencers and lack transparency. To qualify for AI tax exemptions, companies could prove they’re distributing at least 2–3% of annual revenue to a broad base of creators, not just stars.
   
   Tech giants could even offer micro-payments to users whose data trains their AI models—ensuring even casual users receive something in return. Independent audits would ensure fairness and accountability. The more people take up these creator opportunities, the faster we can distribute some of this wealth.
   

2. Employee Ownership
   
   Companies like Apple and Google already reward workers with stock. But these benefits often don’t reach lower-level employees. A benchmark—say, 5–10% of new stock issuances going to all staff, not just executives—could be a condition for tax relief. This would turn workers into shareholders, giving them a direct stake in AI-driven success.
   
   Fun fact: In Mexico certain companies must give up 10% of their profits to employees to ensure they have a fair income. There are huge advantages to dealing in your employees and this is something more workers should demand of their employers, especially if they’re being asked to train AI systems that could replace them.
   

3. More Public Ownership Through Fintech
   
   Another positive trend we can encourage at grassroots level is investing in listed companies through fintech apps which have really democratised this process in recent years. Unfortunately, here it is only those with enough savings who benefit most, so we should find ways of encouraging more people to invest in mutual funds and benefit from some of the growth that is taking place.

   
   Apps like Robinhood are making investing easier than ever. The Investment Company Institute says 53.7% of American households own mutual funds today. In 1980, that figure was 5.7% - and even as recently as 2010, it stood at 45.3%. A recent survey also found that 30% of Gen Z began investing in university or early adulthood, compared to 15% of Millennials, 9% of Gen X and 6% of Baby Boomers.

We need to look for these win-win solutions. There must be a good way of keeping businesses innovating but having the value they create with their users, spread out across society.

This Idea Has Bi-Partisan Potential And Could Be A Winning Ticket For Democrats

Buttigieg was savvy to pitch this on a podcast where Democrats rarely tread. The idea transcends party lines and could be used to create the broad church needed for the Democratic Party to mount a serious challenge to Trump.

Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have long backed Universal Basic Income, and what is more DOGE than giving people money directly instead of creating bloated bureaucracies to hand it out?

This should also satisfy those on the Left who are focused on taxing the wealthy to help the little guy. AI Dividends could give people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders a sustainable and non-radical proposal to push: Hold corporations accountable and distribute wealth directly, without stifling growth and creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

It’s quite simple really. The 20th-century deal was work hard, get paid. The 21st-century deal could be contribute, engage, and share the wealth. It’s not charity or communism—it’s a royalty for your hard-earned tax dollars, your data, your daily engagement, and the part you played in building this common heritage.

It’s going from an unpaid intern for trillion-dollar companies to shareholders in the 21st-century economy.

A new social contract is begging to be written. The question is, who will write it? Arguably, this should be a global effort. Or if the US takes the lead, it should at least be a bipartisan opportunity.

At this stage, however, what we really need is a charismatic, hard-working and persuasive politician ready to take this idea to the mainstream and respond to the skeptics.

With Pete Buttigieg entering the fray, there’s a reason to be hopeful.

Your move, America.

*To reach a dividend fund of $1.4 trillion, I assumed a tax of 3% on revenue and 1% of market value (which can be calculated using a three-year rolling average) on the top 500 US companies and the top 200 non-US companies who have millions of American users/customers.