Trump backs the U.S. taking ownership stakes in major AI firms

Vice President JD Vance said that Trump wants the U.S. government to have a stake in the country’s successful AI giants.

He backs the idea as a sovereign wealth fund, making him “a very unconventional person” Vance shared Trump’s plan on The Diary Of A CEO episode on Thursday. Vance added that it was an odd stance for a Republican White House. “The president is supportive of the United States owning these big AI companies,” Vance said.

He added that Trump “likes the idea as sort of a sovereign wealth fund idea,” and called him “a very unconventional person” for a Republican to think that way. Vance also said he doubted that taxes alone could spread the coming AI fortune to workers, even if these firms pile up trillions of dollars over the next ten or twenty years. “I’m very skeptical of that,” he said.

He called pure redistribution “a very modern… liberal concept” that could leave the poor as “subservients of the rich.” He suggested labor unions might be a better model.

“You’ve got to give the workers a seat at the table,” he said. Musk pushed back on X In a post Saturday, he wrote that it would be “better just to send money directly to the people from the Treasury.” On worries about inflation, Musk said that “so long as the increase in goods & services exceeds the increase in the money supply,” which he expects from AI and robots, “there will not be inflation.”

The newly minted trillionaire went further: “In fact, my prediction is that we will desperately be fighting deflation!” Mark Cuban weighed in Saturday too, looking at the plan to move half of the major AI stocks into a government fund. He said the idea “is not a plan” by itself.

Cuban pointed out that these same firms would still need to raise hundreds of billions more in capital, which made him question whether taxpayer-funded stakes would really help taxpayers. He raised the same doubt about data-center spending. He also asked who could be trusted to speak for taxpayers in such deals.

“Certainly not politi