Ramaswamy's AI Wealth Plan Overpromises, Undercuts Workers

Vivek Ramaswamy argues in the Wall Street Journal that workers can build wealth in the AI era — ambitious, optimistic, headline-friendly. Here's the thing: ambition isn't a strategy. I agree with the impulse behind his piece, that workers shouldn't be passive bystanders as automation reshapes jobs. But the column reads more like a pep talk than a blueprint; it raises hope without laying out the nuts-and-bolts of how that hope translates into assets people can actually hold. It's the rhetorical equivalent of an inspiring keynote where you walk out fired up and then realize you have absolutely no idea what to do on Monday.

Ownership Isn’t a Motto

Ramaswamy's core idea — that workers can "build wealth" as AI grows — leans on a venerable American instinct: buy equity, own a piece of the upside. I like that instinct. I saw a similar pitch at CES last year from a startup promising fractional ownership of smart fridges, and yes, the demo fridge talked more than it cooled. Ownership feels modern again, like we're rediscovering a 20th-century idea and wrapping it in a 21st-century interface. But look — it's one thing to exhort employees to get stock; it's another to explain the machinery by which a broad swath of workers, many without tech-sector bargaining power, will gain real equity rather than stock that vests and then dwindles as markets gyrate. Ramaswamy doesn't wrestle with the practical obstacles: private companies keeping tight founder control, the tax code treating capital gains differently than wages, and the reality that equity in early-stage ventures is a high-variance bet that most payroll deductions can't match.

History is pretty blunt here. We’ve run this “everyone can be an owner” experiment before with stock-based compensation in tech and broad-based 401(k) participation. The people who already had stable income and job security got a shot at serious upside; the folks cycling through precarious work got volatility and pamphlets about “long-term horizons.” That’s not a reason to abandon the ownership idea — it’s a reason to design it with those frictions in mind instead of assuming the market will just sort it out.

We need policy and institutional redesigns that turn rhetorical ownership into reliable wealth-building: expanded employee stock ownership plans outside the usual cluster of big-tech firms; tax incentives tied to long-term employee-held equity instead of short-term options flipping; portable share accounts that follow gig and freelance workers rather than vanishing when a contract ends. I’m not asking for utopia — I realize those are heavy lifts that require actual legislation, not just vibes — but the column skips them. Sure, but rhetoric without institutions is like promising a spaceship and not building a launch pad; you can admire the blueprint all you want. Right now his promise of worker wealth through AI sounds more like a concept render than a working prototype.

Sectoral Winners and Losers — Don’t Pretend It’s Uniform

Where Ramaswamy and I align is on the basic faith that AI will create opportunity, not just carnage. But he frames that opportunity as essentially economy-wide, as if “workers” are one undifferentiated category. History says otherwise. Some sectors will soak up productivity gains and create new value chains; others will be hollowed out. Healthcare administrative tasks, legal research, logistics optimization — those will change differently than, say, hairstyling or home caregiving, which rely on human touch, trust, and physical presence. You can automate billing codes; you can’t easily automate a haircut done exactly the way someone likes after ten years of small talk and micro-adjustments.

That fragmentation matters because it breaks the fantasy of a single prescription. Different policies are needed: reskilling in place for white-collar workers watching AI chew through their “PowerPoint and email” job descriptions; wage-support and portable benefits for gig-economy workers who get algorithmic management instead of steady raises; infrastructure and local investment in regions losing manufacturing jobs while AI supercharges already-dominant hubs. When you blur that all into one grand curve of progress, you end up with platitudes about “upskilling” instead of a map of who needs what, where, and when.

I'll be honest — expecting the market alone to reallocate wealth broadly is naive. Markets make winners spectacularly rich and leave the rest wondering what happened; it’s a pattern older than Wall Street itself and at least as old as the first industrial loom. Ramaswamy gestures toward optimism but stops short of mapping which worker cohorts should get which toolsets. It’s like Charles Stross’ Accelerando where technological acceleration forces a cultural reckoning; you need both tech and social architecture to steer the change. Leave out the latter and you end up with great tools that mostly reinforce whoever was already in a strong position.

Where Are the Trade-Offs?

Ramaswamy's tone presumes a near-frictionless conversion of AI gains into worker wealth, but policy and corporate governance decisions will mediate that transfer every step of the way. Do we incentivize companies to share gains via profit-sharing? Do we reform corporate law to give workers a seat at the table? Or do we double down on capital-friendly regimes that reward shareholders and founders first and trust that everything trickles? The piece nods at possibility without weighing trade-offs or power dynamics inside firms.

Look at Salesforce or Costco — not saints, not villains, just examples that made explicit choices to lean into employee benefits and, in Salesforce’s case, equity and philanthropy woven into the corporate structure. Those weren’t inevitable outcomes of “the market”; they were governance choices that changed how gains flowed. By contrast, plenty of high-growth firms treat workers as a pure cost to be minimized while keeping the upside locked in restricted stock units at the top. When you say workers can build wealth in an AI era without talking about those diverging models, you’re skipping the part of the story where the plot actually happens.

Counterargument: Some will say that creating mandates for profit-sharing or worker equity is dangerous — it could deter investment, slow innovation, and make U.S. firms less competitive globally. Yeah, no — regulation can be clumsy, sure, and heavy-handed mandates would be dumb; markets do need dynamism and room for weird experiments. But there’s a middle path. Targeted incentives, like tax credits for companies that institute broad-based employee equity that vests over long horizons, or federal support for portable benefits that reduce the friction of job transitions, can nudge behavior without wrecking venture appetites. Policy can be catalytic rather than coercive; it doesn’t have to be a choice between laissez-faire and central planning.

I'll say this: any serious plan has to reconcile three things — the concentration of financial returns in capital, the sluggishness of wage growth for many, and the speed at which AI will change job tasks and job ladders. Ramaswamy gives us a cheer for worker wealth. I bought the popcorn. I want the playbook.

Because if his thesis is right and AI really does mint new fortunes, the question isn’t whether workers can build wealth — it’s whether the rules he leaves vague will quietly decide which slice of workers ever get close to the upside he’s promising.