For about forty years, America has been splitting into two economies. In one, you own things that compound — equity, a stake in the companies doing the work, wealth that grows while you sleep. In the other, you own only your time, and you sell it by the hour. For a generation, the first economy has pulled away from the second: the wealthiest 10 percent of households now own about 90 percent of the stock market, while the bottom half own barely 1 percent. Artificial intelligence will eventually turn that gap into a canyon.
The accounts that launched this month are the first serious attempt to build a bridge across it. And, sensibly, they start with children.
Earlier this month, the President rang the opening bells of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq from the Oval Office, marking the launch of Invest America — the initiative the administration has branded Trump Accounts, an investment account for every American child, federally seeded for some, and creating a vehicle for the wealthy to contribute at scale. The name is in the title because it’s what you’ve heard this called; now set it aside. It invites you to file the idea under a political debate before you’ve understood it, and what sits underneath is far bigger than politics.
One of the primary men behind that opening door is Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, who has pushed the idea since 2020. Its origin is a kitchen table: Gerstner had opened accounts for his two sons at birth, and one of them, Lincoln, asked the question that became national policy — Well, this doesn’t seem fair. Why do we get these, and what about the other kids? Every American child, all 70 million of them, is now eligible to open an account and potentially own a slice of the country’s capital markets.
The Divide
Lincoln’s question is the whole thing in miniature: some children are born onto the compounding side of the economy, and most are not.
Look at where a generation of growth actually went. Over the same decades that stock prices soared, wages lagged far behind. This isn’t a forecast or a theory — it’s the documented record of the last forty years, and nobody serious disputes it. If you owned the compounding side, you pulled away. If you owned only your hours, you stayed roughly in place or fell further behind.
Why AI Widens It
I wrote a book called Emergence about how our brains, constrained to about 20 watts of power, built intelligence beyond biology, and what happens now that we’ve plugged intelligence into the power grid. One of the things we explore together in the book is the AI trajectory, which, if you follow far enough into the future, stops being a story about machines and becomes a story about which side of this divide you’re on.
Here is the part that gets misunderstood. In the short and medium term, AI is likely to create more jobs than it destroys. Some jobs will go away fast — a call-center representative, for one — but on the whole, job growth could continue for a decade or more. When the cost of producing something collapses, its price falls, and it becomes cheaper, unlocking demand that never would have been penciled out before. I watched a version of this firsthand back in the 1980s, when, as a college student, I rebuilt a real estate firm’s giant paper spreadsheets in a new program called Lotus 1-2-3. Some accounting jobs got cut, and yet the field grew to a record 1.6 million today. Spreadsheets didn’t end accounting jobs; they multiplied the analysts. After the ATM, teller jobs rose for two decades because cheaper branches meant more could be opened — until a different technology, online banking, finally shrank them.
But more jobs is not the same as a smaller divide. Even in the optimistic case, AI does one thing relentlessly: it makes capital more productive than labor. The returns flow to whoever owns the machines, the models, the companies. So paychecks can hold — even grow — while the gap between the two economies keeps widening, because the compounding is happening on a side most people don’t reach. And as AI becomes embodied, carried into the physical world by robots, even expanding demand may not be enough to keep every worker on the labor side employed. The kind of reversal online banking eventually brought to tellers could potentially arrive across the economy. The gap becomes an uncrossable canyon.
This is Not Politics
There are two familiar answers to a widening divide, and both are incomplete.
The left says redistribute income from the capital side to the labor side through the government with a larger safety net and programs, welfare by another name, run through a government that has proven incompetent at exactly this. And worse, that leaves people where they are, on the shrinking side, but even more dependent on government. The right says let the market run. But the market, left to its own devices, has left most people on the side that is falling behind.
There is a third way that combines the left’s diagnostic focus with the right’s powerful tools. Capital is winning — so put people on the side of capital. Don’t redistribute income; that is a known failed model. The framework is not safety nets. It is ownership pathways.
That is not only a change of policy; it is a change of language. For a century, we have described the people who fall behind in the vocabulary of the welfare state — benefits, handouts, entitlements. This is the language of a failing welfare state. Ownership speaks and thinks differently. Make people owners and watch what happens. Owners have a completely different view of those who build wealth when they participate in the journey: Gratitude.
The First Bridge
That is what these accounts actually are — they are not just a savings program, but the first serious mechanism to move ordinary people onto the compounding side of the economy, built while the already large divide is still narrow enough to cross and early enough in a wave of vast wealth creation that new owners can ride the wave up.
We know the shape of the model works because it has been partly proven at a smaller scale. Alaska took the wealth from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and made every resident an owner; the Permanent Fund has paid each Alaskan a dividend for four decades. It is not welfare. It is a return on ownership. Norway did the same with North Sea oil. Both have their flaws, but both turned a windfall into citizen ownership rather than a bureaucratic welfare model, and both laid real groundwork here.
The honest danger is the years in between. A $1,000 seed today is not a stake that can catch a worker displaced tomorrow; the bridge has to be built faster than the canyon widens. That is the real race, and it is the reason to start now rather than once the crossing is already too wide.
And notice who is funding it. The money is pouring in — $6.25 billion from Michael and Susan Dell late last year, entire states adopted by Ray Dalio and by Gerstner himself, two million children handed SpaceX shares by Gwynne Shotwell — with Gerstner projecting more than $100 billion in private contributions within a year. The same capital that calculates its way out of high-tax states is sprinting to put money directly into children’s ownership. It was never unwilling to give; it was unwilling to give to a middleman it didn’t trust. Design a direct path onto the capital side, and the wallet opens. When the app went live, it hit No. 1 in the App Store’s finance category and rose into the top five overall, behind ChatGPT and Claude — tens of millions of families not so much signing up for a benefit, but rather being let in.
Expanding the Bridge to All Americans
The honest question is how you fund a crossing for all Americans, and the answer follows the same logic: you build the bridge from the side of the river that is rising.
The old economy taxes labor — a system designed to take a share of wages. But wages are potentially the shrinking side in a longer AI trajectory. The growing side is capital and corporate profit, and AI pours fuel on exactly that: As it makes companies radically more efficient and more profitable, their earnings climb, and the taxes those earnings generate climb with them. This is not a new entitlement funded by the old economy. It is a claim on the new one, helping people to become owners. A free-market model for shrinking the divide.
There is a much bigger source hiding in plain sight, and it may be the one that finally breaks the partisan logjam. Every dollar lost to government waste, fraud, and excessive spending is potentially a dollar of ownership the public never receives.
Today, cutting that waste is a bloodless austerity fight nobody wins, because the savings just vanish back into the general fund. But imagine the dollars reclaimed were converted, pro rata, into ownership stakes for citizens. You would see far less irrational resistance to government efforts to curb waste, fraud, and excessive spending.
And here is the quiet elegance. The wealthy already carry most of the load; the top 10% pay roughly 70% of all federal income taxes. But an ownership dividend would be split pro rata: one equal share per citizen, never doled out by need. Even Michael Dell would get a slice — far smaller than he paid in, and a tiny fraction of what he already donated to these very accounts for children. Listen differently when you hear “tax the rich their fair share.” In this model, the money quietly runs downhill, across the divide, without the perverse incentives of inefficient tax increases routing money through the most inefficient mechanism possible, the government.
That is why starting with children is smart. It is the politically possible first span, and the place where compounding has the most time to work. Build the rails for kids now, while the crossing is short and the compounding window is long, then widen them, over time, toward every American through naturally compounding increased tax revenue and radical reduction in government spending, waste, and fraud.
The Bridge Before the Canyon
A dividend funded to citizen-owners isn’t exactly altruistic. It is self-preserving at scale. It is the spark plug that keeps the engine firing. If AI produces everything and most people own nothing, buying stops, and the whole machine stalls. Ownership keeps money in motion by keeping people on the right side of the divide.
I grew up in my early years in government-subsidized housing and in poverty, and over fifty years, I clawed my way from one side of this divide to the other. I have the view from both. Brad Gerstner and this administration have now built the mechanism, and my optimism about the country’s future has risen as a result. What we owe each other now is the conversation about what it is for: ownership over dependency. Participation in the extraordinary American capital markets.
And right now, the wealthy finally have a direct, efficient way to help build it. And they are now and will continue. Where I grew up in Texas, we had a saying for the skeptics in a moment like this.
“Hide and watch.”
