The Wealth from AI Will Go to Owners. Here's How to Change That.
Worker productivity in the United States has risen 80% since 1984. Real wages? Up 20%. The stock market over the same period? Roughly 9,000%.
AI is about to repeat that pattern — at a larger scale. BlackRock's Larry Fink has said as much. The people who own things will capture the gains. The people who do things will watch from the sidelines.
We've been here before.
Economic historian Carlota Pérez calls this the "installation phase" of a technological revolution — a casino-like period where financiers and tech barons vacuum up most of the value, inequality spikes, and populism follows. The Gilded Age looked like this. The Roaring Twenties looked like this. So does 2026.
But Pérez's framework holds an underappreciated insight. Every installation phase has eventually given way to a golden age — a period where new technologies spread broadly, productivity and wages finally move together, and prosperity stops being a spectator sport. The age of electricity had the Belle Époque. The petroleum era had the postwar boom.
The question isn't whether AI will create enormous wealth. It will. The question is: who gets it?
The Evidence Is Already There
This isn't a theoretical argument. Pete Stavros, co-head of global private equity at KKR, has been running a 15-year experiment that makes the case better than any policy paper could.
Starting in 2011, Stavros began extending equity stakes to all employees at KKR portfolio companies — not just executives. The results are hard to argue with.
At C.H.I. Overhead Doors, an Illinois manufacturer KKR acquired in 2015, only 18 employees held equity at purchase. KKR extended ownership to all 800 workers. When the company sold in 2022, hourly employees averaging $50,000 a year walked away with payouts averaging $175,000. At CoolIT Systems in Calgary, workers averaged roughly $240,000 at exit — Wall Street bonus territory for factory floor wages. At Ingersoll Rand, 16,000 employees across 80 countries shared $800 million in wealth creation.
KKR now runs ownership programs at 84 companies covering nearly 200,000 non-management workers. It has already distributed $1.8 billion across 13 exits. Projected total payouts from remaining portfolio companies: as much as $14 billion.
And Stavros is emphatic that this is not charity.
Employee turnover collapsed at these companies. At some portfolio firms, KKR was hiring 3,000 fewer people per year after implementing ownership — a direct, measurable cost saving. Engagement scores moved from the 20th percentile to the 90th. KKR won the $1.6 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster in 2023 partly because sellers and employees valued its ownership commitment.
"It's hard to get rich on your labor alone," Stavros has said. "People build wealth in this country by owning things. But that hasn't been the case for frontline workers."
The Policy Tools Already Exist
Employee stock ownership plans — ESOPs — have been part of federal law since the 1970s. Today they cover about 15 million workers. That number should be far higher, and the barriers keeping it low are largely structural, not ideological.
A few targeted interventions could change the math significantly:
Expand seller-side tax incentives. Owners who sell to an ESOP can already defer — sometimes eliminate — capital gains taxes. Pennsylvania recently extended this benefit at the state level. More states should follow, and Congress should go further.
Simplify formation. The legal and fiduciary requirements for setting up an ESOP remain a bureaucratic obstacle course. A standardized process, similar to B Corp certification, would dramatically lower the barrier for small and mid-sized businesses.
Create a cooperative conversion loan facility. The 30-year mortgage turned homeownership from a fantasy into a middle-class norm. A similar financing innovation could do the same for worker ownership.
Reform stock buyback taxation. Since 1982, public companies have funneled trillions into share repurchases rather than wages, training, or capital investment. The Inflation Reduction Act's 1% excise tax on buybacks was a start — but too small to shift behavior. Raising it while offering benefits for companies that adopt broad ownership structures would change the calculus.
Use the government's purchasing power. The federal government spends over $700 billion a year on contracts. Requiring bidders to disclose ownership structures and giving preference to employee-owned firms would create powerful market signals without a single mandate.
The Window Is Now
A wave of baby boomer business owners will retire over the next decade. Roughly $10 trillion in privately held business assets will change hands in the next 20 years. The default outcome — if nothing changes — is that most of those businesses will close, sell to private equity, or get broken up. The workers who built them will receive nothing beyond their wages.
That's the default. It doesn't have to be.
With the right incentives, a meaningful fraction of those transfers could flow to the people who actually did the work. Not through redistribution. Not through punitive taxation. Through ownership — the same mechanism that built wealth for every other group that ever got access to it.
The Stavros model proves this doesn't require sacrificing returns. The "evergreen companies" — firms like SAS Institute, Springfield ReManufacturing, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, built on long-term logic rather than exit-and-flip — prove it doesn't require surrendering to capital markets.
What it requires is changing the defaults.
Golden ages don't just happen. They have to be built — deliberately, structurally, with policy that points capital toward productive enterprise rather than financial engineering. We've done it before. The postwar boom didn't emerge from thin air; it was shaped by institutions, incentives, and a generation of policymakers who understood that broadly shared prosperity was both a moral good and an economic one.
AI will generate extraordinary wealth. The only real question is whether the people who create that wealth will share in it.
That's a policy choice. And we're running out of time to make it.