Trumpy Tech Billionaires Pretty Psyched To #MakeAmericaUnemployedAgain

Surely the wealth will trickle down this time!

Throughout most of the last four years, we’ve had an incredibly tight job market, with the unemployment rate frequently dipping lower than at any time over the past five decades. This has made things very difficult for employers who prefer to pay their employees very little money. “No one wants to work anymore!” they cried, as so many of their potential employees went to work for companies willing to pay them a living wage.

Now that we are embarking on yet another Trump presidency, some of his wealthiest, techiest supporters are excitedly sharing their ideas for loosening that jobs market up. Elon Musk has been very vocal about how he would like to expand the H-1B visa program because he believes that there are not enough Americans who are smart enough for him to hire.

Elon Told Americans They're Too Stupid And Lazy To Hire. It Did Not Go Over Well!

While much of the MAGA riot over this has revolved around the fact that (gently speaking) they do not care for Indian people and non-white immigrants in general and do not want them in our country, there are reasonable criticisms to be made about the way the H-1B visa program used to allow companies to replace fully qualified American workers with foreign workers who will accept less money and have less leverage in negotiations because they can’t just go and switch jobs very easily.

As Bernie Sanders noted, “If these jobs are only going to ‘the best and brightest’ [as Musk said], why has Tesla employed H-1B guest workers as associate accountants for as little as $58,000, associate mechanical engineers for as little as $70,000 a year, and associate material planners for as little as $80,000 a year?”

It does make one wonder!

Musk’s nemesis, OpenAI/ChatGPT guy Sam Altman, is also very excited about replacing American workers — but he wants to replace them with AI.

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In a recent blog post on his personal site, Altman wrote:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI [AI that is smarter than humans are] as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

Now, people who know way more about this than I do will tell you that no one should listen to a damn thing Altman says, as he is full of shit. Fair! Also, no one needs to be a tech expert to notice that he’s been talking for a month about how ChatGPT is losing money on its $200 a month subscriptions, and how OpenAI just won’t survive unless they are allowed to use copyrighted materials without paying for them — and that he may be hoping that telling potential investors that exciting new anti-labor developments are afoot will lead to a cash infusion.

But I have to say, I do think it is somewhat important that a guy who just donated a million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration is so very jazzed about replacing workers with AI programs.

Will this upset MAGA as much as Musk’s H1B takes? It’s hard to be sure, and would likely depend on whether the robots can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower or not.

Of course, the American Right has been very excited about AI and the potential it has to replace creatives like artists, photographers, actors, writers, musicians and what have you. They don’t really care about the job loss there, because people in the creative professions tend to be liberals, and they’re excited because they think AI will allow them to shape popular culture themselves without actually having to develop any talent or skill. They are also frequently quite jazzed about the idea of just being able to have the robots make them their own “personalized” movies and television shows so they won’t accidentally be exposed to ideas (and faces) they don’t like.

Those who are most excited about AI tend to believe it will only take the jobs of people they dislike, or jobs that they don’t think should be jobs in the first place. Like the drummer I went on a Tinder date with who was thrilled that AI would allow him to make music and even write songs without having to deal with singers or guitarists. (It did not go well!!)

But The Guardian reports, in its article about Altman’s claim, that many companies are hoping to build AI programs to replace workers of all kinds:

OpenAI is reportedly planning to launch an AI agent codenamed “Operator” this month, after Microsoft announced its Copilot Studio product and rival Anthropic launched the Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, which can carry out tasks on the computer such as moving a mouse cursor and typing text.

McKinsey, for instance, is building an agent to process new client inquiries by carrying out tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings. The consulting firm has predicted that by 2030, activities accounting for up to 30% of hours worked across the US economy could be automated.

Bloomberg reported that Operator will use a computer to take actions on a user’s behalf, such as writing code or booking travel.

Of course, not all of these Trumpy tech guys want to get rid of workers and replace them with AI. Some are doing it the old fashioned way, by just eliminating their jobs entirely. The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world after Musk and fellow giver of $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, is reportedly about to lay off “many dozens” of staffers this week. Bezos could easily pay every Post staff member’s salary out of his own pocket change, so it’s more likely that this is due to wanting to gut the paper and let it die in darkness, or gut the paper and replace all of the current staff with people who would never make a cartoon satirizing his new partnership with Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, too, has recently announced his plans to move content moderation to Texas, where he can get away with paying workers less than in California — likely requiring current workers to move or get laid off, as he has done previously.

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These last two likely seem like good news to the MAGA faithful, but it’s worth noting how very, very casual these fellas and companies are about purging workers. The likelihood that it will only affect the Left and not “Real Americans” like them is pretty much nil. Things just don’t usually work that way.

After all, Bezos’s Amazon has already announced coming layoffs in 2025, as have Boeing and Spirit Airlines.

But hey! These tech guys and the people who own other companies headed towards major layoffs this year are set to get some major tax cuts — so perhaps the wealth will just trickle down after all. And if not, at least there may be jobs with all those employers who couldn’t find cheap enough workers over the last four years. America first!