Derek Thompson

But I really do think if I'm really reaching down

into understanding like why am I passionate about getting people to see these other ways that surprising accumulations of power can stop things from happening in the public good is because that's where I think we're missing the story.

Can I throw the baseball back to you?

Like, how do you situate the corporate power critique in your current conception of abundance slash maybe alternative way to ask that question?

A time machine materializes right next to us over here, takes us back to December 2023, allowing us

just enough time to add a chapter seven to the book called Abundance and Corporate Power.

Do you write that chapter and what do you put in it?

Yeah, I think I agree.

I don't consider myself anti-billionaire, TM, but I don't think you can look at what's happening with money in government right now and the increasing role that billionaires have over campaign finance and not be a little bit concerned about the last 15 months.

And what we saw between 2024 and 2025 is that billionaires contributed, by some estimations, between 10, 15, and 25% of total campaign spending.

then got a president that cut taxes for the top 0.1% by an average of $300,000 and paid for it by the largest cuts to Medicaid, healthcare for low-income people in American history.

That is...

That is a terrifying vision of the future of plutocracy, if that's an omen.

And if you look at the direction of billionaire incomes made possible by the rise of technologies like AI, which are currently in private markets, which means that retail investors do not even have an opportunity to benefit from the tripling and triple quadrupling and decatoupling of anthropic and open AI's enterprise value,

That clearly points toward a world in which billionaires have an enormous amount of political power.

And that scares me.

And I don't have a perfect solution to it.

It's something I'm thinking about a lot right now.

I had a conversation on my own podcast with Gabriel Zuckman about the feasibility of billionaire taxes, which are their own can of worms.

But I think it's absolutely a problem we need to think about more in the next few years.