Elon Musk is officially the richest man on Earth. The source of his wealth is not his own cunning. Nor can it be fully explained by capitalism’s financial architecture, tax loopholes, and the value created by the workers employed in his various ventures.

Tech billionaires’ companies are robbing humanity of its distinctive capacity to create. From social media data to academic outputs, literary pieces, artwork, movies, music, podcasts, software code, our health care records, you name it: generative AI models are trained on creative products from around the world. Once operational, data retrieved from user prompts is used to fine-tune them, improving AI’s predictive capacities. AI is, unmistakably, a product of humanity.

Bernie Sanders’ call for levying a one-time 50 percent tax on AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — to be paid in stock — is, seen from this perspective, a reasonable compensatory measure.