According to Odaily, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in an interview with CEO Diary that Trump supports establishing a U.S. sovereign wealth fund and using it to hold equity stakes in frontier artificial intelligence companies. Vance connected the proposal to the distribution of economic gains created by AI, arguing that large AI companies should not be allowed to grow into unconstrained monopolies.
Vance points to state ownership and labor participation
In Vance’s framing, state ownership would not be only a financial arrangement. It would also be tied to a mechanism through which ordinary workers could directly share in the economic dividends generated by artificial intelligence. He advocated a structure involving state shareholding and labor participation, with the aim of letting workers receive a more direct portion of the benefits created as AI firms expand.
The distribution model described by Vance focuses on the production side of the economy. Rather than relying only on private ownership structures inside major AI companies, his proposal would place the state inside the channel through which returns from frontier AI businesses are allocated. His remarks presented this as a response to the risk that large AI enterprises could become dominant actors without sufficient constraints.
Musk favors direct Treasury payments instead
Elon Musk responded publicly on X, saying that a better approach than government ownership of corporate equity would be for the Treasury to send money directly to citizens. Musk’s position puts the distribution mechanism on the consumption side: instead of the government entering the ownership structure of companies, the state would transfer funds directly to the public.
Musk also said that, under the push of AI and robotics, the supply of goods and services will grow faster than the money supply. On that basis, he argued that direct payments would not lead to inflation. In his view, the real issue to address in the future is “massive deflation.” The disagreement between Vance and Musk therefore centers on the path of wealth distribution: Vance supports state participation in distributing returns from the production side, while Musk supports direct subsidies to citizens from the consumption side and opposes government intervention in corporate ownership structures.