Survey Finds 70% of Americans Back Putting Half of AI Company Stock Into a Public Wealth Fund

A survey highlighted by economist Peter Earle in a piece for AmericanThinker.com, republished by ZeroHedge, found that roughly 70% of Americans support transferring half the stock of major AI companies into a public wealth fund. The number reflects significant anxiety about AI, and it also reveals something about how Americans think about wealth in 2026.

Start with the obvious comparison. Thirty years ago, the commercial internet did everything AI skeptics fear today. It wiped out newspapers, travel agencies, music stores, and classified ads. It destroyed entire job categories. And there was no serious public movement to confiscate half of Amazon's or Google's stock and hand it to a federal fund. Americans accepted that Jeff Bezos and Larry Page took enormous risks and reaped enormous rewards. Nobody organized a ballot initiative to nationalize half of Netscape.

That's the contrast Earle draws, and it's a fair one. If seven in ten Americans really do support this kind of redistribution for AI companies specifically, something has shifted in how people think about who owns the gains from innovation.

What's actually being proposed, and what isn't clear

The survey data as described doesn't specify a mechanism. Would this be a mandatory equity transfer, similar to a windfall tax paid in shares instead of cash? Would it apply only to future IPOs, or retroactively to companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google? None of that is spelled out in the source material. That matters, because "half the stock of major AI companies" is a description of a sentiment, not a policy with actual legislative language behind it.

This is one survey, cited secondhand through an opinion column. No pollster, sample size, methodology, or margin of error is identified in the material reviewed here. That doesn't mean the number is wrong. It means readers should treat "70%" as a data point worth investigating further, not gospel.

The case for taking the concern seriously

Even without knowing the poll's mechanics, the underlying anxiety is real and worth stating fairly. AI is different from the dot-com internet in at least one respect: the speed and concentration of the gains. A handful of companies—OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and Anthropic among them—are capturing an outsized share of a technology that touches nearly every industry simultaneously, not sequentially the way the internet rolled out over a decade and a half. If AI displaces radiologists, paralegals, customer service reps, and truck dispatchers all in the same five-year window, the adjustment period American workers get is much shorter than what internet-era workers had. People who worry about that aren't Luddites hallucinating a problem. Displacement fears are grounded in something real, even if the solution proposed, seizing half of company equity, is a different question entirely.

The case against the "wealth fund" idea

Earle's argument is that turning that anxiety into a demand for equity confiscation represents a much bigger philosophical break than a policy debate over job retraining or unemployment insurance. American law generally treats a company's stock as the property of whoever built it, funded it, or bought shares in it on the open market. A government mandate to transfer half of that ownership to a public fund would be, functionally, a form of nationalization, something the United States has never done to a healthy, legally operating industry outside of wartime emergency powers or specific regulated utilities.

There's also a practical problem. If investors believe that any sufficiently successful company can have half its equity clawed back by popular demand, that changes the incentive to invest, build, or take the entrepreneurial risk in the first place. That's not a partisan argument, it's basic capital-markets logic. Reduce the expected reward for risk, and you reduce the risk-taking.

What's unresolved

No legislation matching this description has been introduced in Congress as of this writing, and no political party has formally adopted "half the stock into a public fund" as a platform position. This appears, based on available sourcing, to be a measure of public sentiment rather than an active policy proposal moving through any legislative body.

The open question is whether that 70% figure holds up under a differently worded poll, and whether it reflects genuine appetite for nationalization or simply frustration with AI-driven job insecurity expressed in blunt, non-technical terms by survey respondents who weren't asked to specify a mechanism. Until an actual bill, sovereign wealth fund proposal, or ballot measure exists, this remains a data point about mood, not a policy in motion.