SpaceX’s IPO this summer created an estimated 4,400 new millionaires overnight, and Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to soon follow. Goldman Sachs projects a historic year for IPO proceeds, driven by the AI boom. The question is: How much of this enormous wealth will trickle down to the people who need it most?
We’ve watched this moment take shape from different angles — one of us building and scaling technology companies, the other leading a nonprofit that provides career training to help people move into the middle class. From both of these vantage points, we see a country where costs are rising, services are stretched thin, and the American dream is further out of reach.
AI wealth can help solve these problems. But there’s an alarming misapprehension circulating in tech circles: that the nonprofit sector lacks the talent, speed, and ambition to deploy capital at this scale. Techies who came up in the “move fast and break things” era want to apply that same ethos to philanthropy, rebuilding the sector in tech’s image.
The truth is we don’t need a whole new infrastructure to make the best use of new AI wealth. There are 1.8 million nonprofits operating in the U.S. right now, deploying roughly $600 billion in charitable giving each year to make peoples’ lives and communities better. This is a sector that’s helped solve civilizational challenges like eradicating smallpox and lifting more than a billion people out of extreme poverty. Contrary to perceptions, nonprofit workers aren’t well-meaning amateurs waiting for tech to save the day, but savvy operators with deep community knowledge and relationships that can’t simply be replicated.
