Stiglitz: AI Will Make Tech Bros Richer at Your Expense

President Donald Trump indefinitely postponed an Executive Order on AI this week after lobbying from tech billionaires David Sacks, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. That decision, and the broader trajectory it signals, is exactly what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz warns has been wrong with technology-driven inequality for decades.

Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor who studied financial crises and the hollowing out of the American middle class, released a reissue of his 2024 book The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society that frames AI as a textbook case of how technology can turbocharge inequality. In an interview with Fortune, he laid out a simple mechanism: AI lets firms strip labor out of production, concentrate profits at the top, and push transition risks onto workers and the public.