"You Need to Make Money Now, Before You Become a Part of the Permanent Underclass."

 

“Silicon Valley is filled with all sorts of dreams.

 

But one of those wild-eyed ideas, long debated on subreddits and in hacker houses, is becoming a real-life nightmare: Will the artificial-intelligence boom be the last chance to get rich before artificial intelligence makes money essentially worthless?

 

The argument is that tech companies (and their leaders) will become a class unto their own with infinite wealth. No one else will have the means to generate money for themselves because AI will have taken their jobs and opportunities.

 

In other words, the bridge is about to be raised for those chasing the American dream. And everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side.

 

It's the kind of FOMO that on first blush seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief. But the idea's mere existence helps explain some of the increasing class worries in California, where a growing movement to tax billionaires is roiling the Democratic Party, affordable housing is a real concern and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach.

 

Yes, it smacks of sci-fi thinking. But in San Francisco it feels real. And it's made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of OpenAI's Sam Altman and warnings by Anthropic's Dario Amodei about Great Depression-like worker displacement.

 

"The transition will be bumpy," Musk said this month on a podcast. "We'll have radical change, social unrest and immense prosperity."

 

And that's Musk's best-case scenario.

 

History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats.

 

What's being talked about now -- massive job loss to automation and the need for public safety nets, in the form of universal basic income -- paints a dramatically different future. It's still not clear there's any appetite for so-called UBI, which runs counter to many Americans' bedrock ideals of personal achievement.

 

"I used to be really excited about UBI . . . but I think people really need agency; they need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go," Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said last year when asked by a podcaster about how people will create wealth in the AI era. "If you just say, 'OK, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets . . . a dividend from that,' it's not going to feel good, and I don't think it actually would be good for people."

 

If money is out, scarce assets, like art, could become key.

 

Musk has said as much himself. His vision for the future involves robots that handle physical tasks while humanity struggles to keep up with AI thinking, leading to what he calls "universal high income" and an era of abundance. "If you don't have a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has," he said at a conference last year.

 

More recently, Musk suggested people shouldn't even worry about saving for retirement, predicting AI will provide healthcare and entertainment. "It won't matter," he said of retirement savings.

 

Bold statements from a guy who insisted on a $1 trillion pay package from Tesla, where he is CEO -- which he has argued wasn't about the money, but about maintaining control over the company from misguided activist investors.

 

Still, it can look like the rich are trying to get richer. So maybe it's not surprising the San Francisco tech community has been infused with a get-rich-now-or-die-trying vibe.

 

Sheridan Clayborne, a young man working in the AI-startup scene, seemed to embody the current zeitgeist when he was quoted this past fall in the San Francisco Standard.

 

"This is the last chance to build generational wealth," the online news site quoted him saying. "You need to make money now, before you become a part of the permanent underclass."

 

Weeks later, social-media posts on Facebook, X and LinkedIn began claiming Nvidia's Jensen Huang had said something similar. The CEO, these breathless posts claimed, was warning "the period from 2025 to 2030 may be the last major chance for everyday people to build real wealth through technology."

 

Scary stuff, except Huang didn't say it. Rather, his numerous public appearances in the past few months have been filled with talk about the potential for AI to be more of an equalizing force for technology.

 

"We're going to have a wealth of resources, things that we think are valuable today, that in the future are just not that valuable. . .because it's automated," Huang told Joe Rogan last month.

 

It can be hard to sort fact from fiction in an era of technology that seems pulled straight from an Iain Banks novel. And backers of AI companies have billions, if not trillions, of reasons to hope their gambles aren't just once-in-a-generation jackpots, but once in a human existence.

 

Further contributing to the FOMO in San Francisco is the expectation that local AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, will soon go public, minting many more millionaires.

 

After the New York Times ran a headline this past week about the wave of "mega" IPOs expected this year, local real-estate agent Rohin Dhar posted on X: "May I humbly suggest you buy your house in San Francisco before this."

 

The tech entrepreneur, who was once part of Y Combinator years ago, told me he was drawn to real estate in part because of a belief new AI wealth will fuel a housing boom. Or, as he predicted last year, "the mother of all tech booms is coming."

 

Get some while you can.” [1]

 

1. Tech World Says Get Rich Now, or Else. Higgins, Tim.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 20 Jan 2026: B6.