Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla is calling for a sweeping rethink of capitalism in the era of artificial intelligence. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 on Tuesday, the Khosla Ventures founder proposed that the U.S. government take a 10% ownership stake in all public companies, using those proceeds to fund broad-based public wealth distribution.
As a follow-up to his wealth-sharing proposal, Khosla revealed that his idea was inspired by President Donald Trump’s move to have the U.S. government acquire a 10% stake in Intel.
“When Trump bought 10% of Intel, I wondered if it wasn’t a good idea,” Khosla said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. “Take 10% of every corporation and put it in a national pool for the people. That’s really interesting. Just take 10% of every public company.”
While AI pioneers have long debated universal basic income (UBI) as a safety net for the automation era including the high-profile OpenResearch study on cash transfers supported by Sam Altman, few major investors have gone as far as Khosla in suggesting direct government ownership of private industry.
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Acknowledging the divisive nature of his proposal, Khosla told the audience that bold, unconventional ideas may be the only way to preserve social stability as artificial general intelligence reshapes the global economy. He emphasized that the coming wave of AI-driven disruption would require “extreme proposals” to ensure that prosperity is shared broadly, not concentrated among a handful of corporations and investors.
“I’ll get critique for this idea,” Khosla said. “But you know, sharing the wealth of AI is a really, really big need to level the benefits to everybody… We won’t need to do it in 15 years, but we do have to take care of those people. We will, by 2035, have a hugely, hugely deflationary economy.”
Khosla also warned that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence will inevitably disrupt traditional employment, forcing society to rethink how work and value are defined. Yet, he framed this disruption as an opening for innovation rather than decline.
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For entrepreneurs, this is a massive opportunity to build, he said, pointing out that AI applications are emerging across every profession from accounting and medicine to chip design, auditing, marketing, and entertainment. Khosla urged founders to view this transition not as a threat but as a chance to reimagine industries through AI-driven solutions.
Continuing his remarks, Khosla reflected on how AI will fundamentally redefine the nature of work in the coming years. He predicted that many of today’s manual or repetitive jobs could soon disappear as automation becomes more capable and widespread.
The jobs that people perform today could go away emphasizing that society should embrace this transition rather than fear it. Citing examples from manufacturing and agriculture, Khosla added that mounting a tire on an assembly line or working as a farmer is “not a job that humans should have.”
“That’s servitude to survival,” Khosla said.