The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1859 - Get Your Pitchforks. Woke CEOs Are Way Overpaid.

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

The most unqualified people are finding themselves at the top of major U.S. companies with no ambition to innovate. Now they call for a wealth tax. Ep. 1859 - - - Today's Sponsors: Tecovas - Right now get 10% off at https://tecovas.com/MATT when you sign up for email and texts. Tax Relief Advocates - Visit https://TRA.com or call 800-575-1753. Tax Relief Advocates—real solutions for real people. ZipRecruiter - Try ZipRecruiter to post your job FOR FREE at http://ziprecruiter.com/WALSH One Nation America - Making your voice heard is easier than ever. You can get election reminders, look up your polling location, and pick a date to vote early. Go to https://GOPVotes.org today. Paid for by SLF PAC. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. - - - DailyWire: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dailywire.com/subscribe 🇺🇸 Get 3-Months of DailyWire for just $17.76 📜 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 🍿 Watch Run Hide Fight: Infidels https://www.dailywire.com/videos/run-hide-fight-infidels 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're like most Americans, you probably feel the pinch of higher prices. Energy is rising, food is rising, housing is rising. By all accounts, the cost of living will prove to be the decisive factor in the upcoming elections, as it was in 24 and 2022, and has been in basically every national election in the world, certainly since the pandemic. Inflation and a declining quality of life for many Americans has been the defining issues of the decade. Today we're going to talk about one group of people who is not feeling the pinch, at least financially, and that is America's CEOs. Together, they've managed to weather the storm quite well.

And today I'm going to ask something that you don't often hear from commentators on the right, which is, are these CEOs really worth $50 million a year? Is that possible? Now, let's consider the case of one of them. This is United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby. Here's a photo of this guy. Kirby is in many ways the perfect embodiment of America's CEO class. He took a company in decline in an industry notorious for degradation and somehow made the experience worse. Last June, the company went viral when a passenger posted this picture of a meal in business class on a flight from Barcelona to Chicago. So take a look at this gourmet fare.

and if you too want to try the rubber chicken, United is serving in business class, but you can book a ticket on that route now for about $5,000. Since taking the reins at United, Kirby has turned their in-flight experience into an ordeal that would, in a perfect world, be prohibited by the Geneva Convention. But making the airline worse isn't Kirby's only accomplishment as CEO. One year after taking his position, he announced a new United Airlines flight service. school saying, quote, our plan is for half of them to be women and people of color. So for Kirby, it's not enough to make you suffer on board. He wants to train unqualified pilots,

hired exclusively because of their sex or color, so that eventually he can kill his customers also in fiery crashes. Now, this, of course, has a quota system that precisely zero United Airlines passengers have ever demanded or requested or desired in any way, presumably because they value their lives. Even after years of relentless DEI brainwashing, still every passenger on every plane in America instinctively feels a wave of relief when they see that their pilot is a white guy in his 50s with a mustache. We all do. Don't pretend you don't. Now some people, not me, might then feel ashamed for having felt that relief, but we all feel it. And one of the other big problems with United is that they have a lot of delays that Kirby has done nothing to improve. Although, to be

fair, a large part of the issue is that they have a hub at Newark, which is an airport that has the look and smell and general unpleasantness of a giant football stadium-sized porta-pottie. Now, granted, it's in New Jersey, which is the port-a-potty of states, but still, in any case, through it all, how much is this drag-dressing, comically incompetent moron who has done nothing at all to help his company improve any of its services actually worth? Well, his total compensation last year was $32.3 million, which comes out to $124,230 per workday. Now, if Scott Kirby were a self-respecting person, he would quit his job in humiliation and shame. He'd go into retirement or hiding in a cabin in the woods somewhere, never to return to corporate America.

But Scott Kirby is not doing that. Instead, he's finding ways to bring even more shame on the name of his company. United Airlines. Seems kind of unthinkable. You know, it should be impossible to do anything that makes United Airlines look worse than it already does. It's like doing something to further ruin the reputation of Osama bin Laden or Headlice or Canada. How can it possibly be done? But he found a way. Recently, he started doing interviews, issuing the usual meaningless platitudes, and rolling up the ladder for everybody else. This is courtesy of Fox business, quote, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes

approaching 100% for certain estates arguing that growing wealth, wealth inequality, poses a threat to American society. Kirby, who took home about $32.3 million in total compensation in fiscal year 2025, made the remarks when asked about declining public trust in corporate executives. Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that. Kirby said, the airline executive argued that a wealth tax would need to be implemented nationwide rather than at the state level to prevent wealthy Americans

from relocating to avoid paying it. Now, the thing about Scott Kirby is that he didn't actually build anything. He started his career as a budget analyst for the Pentagon, which notably has never passed an audit and has an annual budget of something like, I don't know, a thousand trillion dollars,

give or take, and yet always needs more money. He rose quickly by jumping from failing airline to failing airline, like a plague of locust, before finally failing up to his current job at United, where somehow he's worth per year about 30 times more than the average American will make in a lifetime. Now, remarkably, one of the things he's focused on in the last year is pulling coach seats from his airplanes

and expanding the premium cabins. So Scott Kirby has no problem at all, making it harder for middle-class families to afford flying, even as he pretends to care about them. I mean, one thing he could do is try to make the coach seats more comfortable, you know, give a little more space to coach to the people who cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars to fly. But he's not doing that. And if you want to know why socialism is on the rise in America, look no further than Scott Kirby. And that's why he's on TV promoting

hypothetical taxes and voicing the same banalities and platitudes that he hopes will keep him safe when the pitchforks come. And we know, by the way, that it's nothing but platitudes because the Treasury website includes a link where you can voluntarily give the government money in addition to what you owe in taxes. So if Scott Kirby means what he says, surely he'll go there right now and donate. Why wouldn't he donate $30 million? I mean, Scott, you don't need more than $2 million a year, do you? Aren't you worried about wealth inequality? But of course, Scott, Kirby who's built nothing won't do that. Instead he wants to make sure that the millionaire owner of your local excavation company who built everything himself can't hand anything down to his kids.

It's interesting how that works. Now, the reason Kirby is doing this is not because he believes what he's saying. Instead, what he's actually interested in doing is finding some way to stave off the rampaging communist hordes that are threatening to take control of the government in a few years and are intent on destroying the economy. He thinks that if corporate executives start talking about taxing the rich, then maybe the communist will be nicer to them. Maybe they won't nationalize his airline.

Maybe they won't raise the corporate tax rate to 100%. Maybe they won't gun him down in the streets of New York and celebrate his murder all over Reddit, as they did to the United Healthcare CEO. It's a desperation play. It's a sign of weakness. And of course, if and when the communists do take control, all of these gestures will mean absolutely,

absolutely nothing to them. They will seize his airline, confiscate his wealth, and throw him in prison or off a cliff, and think nothing of it. The best case scenario for Scott Kirby in the event of a communist takeover is that he escapes, like Alex Kerenzky, who also tried to make 11th hour amends with the Bolsheviks immediately before they took over. And of course, none of this would really matter for us, because at the end of the day, Kirby is just a bureaucrat running a crappy airline in a failing industry. But unfortunately, guys like Kirby making unreasonable amounts of money in exchange for doing nothing, does have implications for us. And that's why it's important for conservatives to acknowledge that while it's

very important for highly productive, entrepreneurial, impressive innovators to be rewarded for their work, it's also true that in modern DEI-oriented corporate America, highly productive, entrepreneurial, impressive innovators only become CEO if they build the company themselves. And it's important to distinguish between idiots like Kirby, who should he disappear tomorrow, would be replaced by a corporate drone just like him and nothing at all would change at the company or in the world. And, you know, between them and innovators like Elon Musk. Now, when talentless corporate hacks who have achieved nothing, you know, make tens of millions of dollars a year, it breeds resentment. And honestly, it should.

Now, what's interesting about what's unfolding right now is that Democrats actually seem, though, to prefer, you know, corporate shills like Kirby. Remarkably, they're targeting the innovators, specifically. the same day that Elon Musk debuted a flying car, which is one of the most impressive things we've ever seen any company do ever, Bernie Sanders called for the abolition of trillionaires. Really? Elon Musk, the last American who's truly innovating at scale, is the problem. The guy making flying cars and catching rockets out of the air and wants to go to Mars and we'll actually do it. He's the guy. He's the guy. guy we got to worry about. But this in and of itself is extremely revealing. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will gush endlessly about how horrible Elon Musk is. But they'll never mention the moronic CEOs who are looting the carcasses of once great companies they somehow control today, but could never have built. And it's not just Scott Kirby. I mean, this is a widespread problem

in corporate America. One CEO you never hear Bernie Sanders talk about is General Motors Mary Barra. She's the former HR executive turned CEO. In fact, Barra has been celebrated as a role model by liberals like Hillary Clinton, who once claimed that Barra broke the steel ceiling by becoming a CEO of a manufacturing company. So how valuable is Mary Barra? Well, last year, Toyota's CEO made $6 million. VW CEO made $8 million. And Mary Barra at General Motors, can you guess how much she made? $48 million in a year. Now, wait a second. You might be asking, well, what did she do at General Motors that made her worth eight

times Toyota's CEO and six times VW's CEO? After all, Toyota is a much more successful company according to every objective financial, strategic, operational metric you can think of. Toyota is worth three times General Motors market cash. Toyota is dramatically more profitable, generating more than $24 billion annually compared to GM's $6 billion. Toyota sells far more than GM, something like $4 million more every year, and they never needed any government bailout. They never had to declare bankruptcy. So really, what has Mary Barra done?

Well, she oversaw a failed transition to electric vehicles that cost GM more than $6 billion in write-offs. She was overseeing the release of the 6.2-liter V8 engine that is bricking Tahos and Suburban nationwide right now. It is currently the subject of a federal investigation. Industry insiders describe it as a total disaster. Meanwhile, she's laid off more than 20,000 workers, mostly Americans, and often during the holidays. Bernie Sanders and Rokana will demand that Elon Musk be forced at gunpoint to sell his shares in his company, which is where virtually all of his wealth comes from. They'll demonize him at every opportunity. Tim Walls will go on stage and celebrate when Tesla stock drops.

Meanwhile, Mary Barra is barely mentioned, if she's mentioned ever. You know, I'm obviously about as far from a Bernie Sanders communist as it is possible to get. But still, the sheer amount of money this woman is earning, given her contributions to the company or total lack thereof, is baffling. $48 million a year is nearly 700 times the average U.S. salary, which means the average person in the U.S. would have to work for 700 years or about eight lifetimes to earn what this woman makes in one single year. Even as the CEOs of other giant car companies, companies significantly more successful than hers, make a fraction of what she makes. Think about this. Toyota's far more successful. but the CEO doesn't get anywhere near as much compensation. It's very similar to the situation with Boeing a few years back when the CEO got a massive golden parachute worth tens of millions of dollars a year, worth tens of millions of dollars after overseeing the disastrous back-to-back crashes of the max airplanes, which were totally preventable. Boeing's incompetence caused those crashes. And meanwhile, Airbus's CEO, who didn't oversee any crashes was getting about one-third of the Boeing CEO's compensation.

Even the most rabidly pro-free market capitalist, of which I am one, cannot honestly defend what Mary Barra is doing and making. And quite frankly, we shouldn't have to. Conservatives should be honest to acknowledge the role that people like Barra play in driving up the demand for socialism. The discrepancy also reminds me of this extraordinary true story from 1984 when GM and Toyota actually agreed to work together on a joint venture in Fremont, California. It's one of the most interesting and revealing stories in automotive history that no one really talks about anymore. But the joint venture was called New United Motor Manufacturing, or New Me. And the basic idea was that for a brief shining moment, these two arch rivals would put aside their differences and work together because they both had something to learn from

each other. And for GM, they wanted to learn how to run an auto plant. You know, they had a really bad dysfunctional assembly plant in Fremont that they had to close a couple of years earlier because the employees, many of whom were diverse, never actually showed up to work. And if they did show up, they were drunk or high. The unions were destroying the place. They were making garbage cars. In fact, in some cases, the employees were sabotaging the cars on purpose for the fun of it. They would do things like seal Coke bottles inside the doors just to mess with the customers. So GM shut the Fremont plant down. They fired all the workers and they were desperate for Toyota to fly in and show them how to run an auto plant and manufacture a car in an affordable, sustainable way.

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That's TRA.com. Or call 800-575775-1753. Again, that's 800, 575, 1753, tax relief advocates, real solutions for real people. Now, for Toyota, the upside of the deal was that they could learn on a day-to-day basis how to deal with American labor unions. They wanted to learn the rules and regulations, the expectations, and so on. So as part of this arrangement, Toyota transported the recently fired GM-Fremont workers to Japan for two weeks to build cars in the Toyota factories. and right away, they were taught a very different method for handling defects on the assembly line. You see, back at Fremont, the GM workers were told to push every car through to the end of the line, no matter how many problems were obvious.

The idea was that the issues would get patched up in the repair yards at some point. But in Japan, the GM workers were taught a different routine. They were given something called an Andon cord on the assembly line, and they were told to pull the cord if they spotted any issues during production at all. And once they did so, the line would stop. The problem, as well as its root cause, would be addressed immediately. It was a really kind of mind-blowing experience for these employees to be around managers who actually cared about the finished product. And the workers also received much more general training. Watch. All new hires went through a four-day orientation.

And then 450 team leaders and group leaders were then sent to Japan for a three-week classroom and on-the-job training program. Numi adopted the Japanese spirit of heavy training. production workers received over 250 hours of training in their first six months on the job, and 50 more hours of training each year thereafter. Typical American workers were lucky to receive 40 hours in their first six months, and 20 hours annually thereafter. In the old GM system, management held all the power, no matter how competent they actually were. Toyota, on the other hand, diffuse certain responsibilities out into the hands of the workers. So rather than, like a traditional military hierarchy, you had these small special forces units

of four to six workers. These were all cross-trained in each other's tasks, ergo all the aforementioned training time. Now, after this brief experiment, most of the problems were resolved to the Fremont plan. All of a sudden, they were producing good cars, and pretty much everyone had a job again. Because as part of the deal, Toyota had agreed to rehire 85% of the workers that GM had fired, including some of the union bosses that had caused so many of the problems. And again, you know, that's how this all worked up. And this is from the channel Asianometry, which kind of tells the rest of the story. Watch.

By 1986, a number of hours it took for Numi to produce a car, adjusted for weld number, automation, car size, and other factors far exceeded that of the old GM plant. It also exceeded that of a similar plant, GM Framingham, and nearly matched Toyota's core corolla plant in Takaoka. Absenteeism fell from 20 to 25% to just 3 to 4%. GM Fremont closed with over 2,000 grievances outstanding. Numi had just 700 grievances its entire first eight years. 90% of employees at the factory described themselves as being either satisfied or very satisfied with their work.

Now, the experiment isn't perfect, mainly because it's possible that some of the other factors were involved in the workers' improvement. And in particular, many of these employees had just been fired. You know, they had been unemployed for a while. Stance a reason that for some of them, they got a wake-up call and they were motivated when they came back. But for the most part, it looks a lot like Toyota simply had a much better company. They had a better system for dealing with problems on the line, which is to say they actually had a system at all for dealing with them. They didn't have a diverse workforce. They had less bureaucracy.

And the result was that they produced a better product. Now, the really funny part of that story, though, is that GM didn't apply the Toyota model to all of its plans. The other union bosses all over the country were not interested in slowing down production or adopting a quality over quantity model. The experiment fizzled out. And evidently, no lessons were learned. To this day, Toyota is a more successful company. Toyota, again, outperforms General Motors across virtually every operational, financial, and strategic metric. And meanwhile, their CEO is making dramatically less money than the girl boss Mary Barra at GM, who has no idea what she's doing.

But Mary Barra gets to keep her job anyway because she's the product of a corporate environment that rewards gender more than competence. It cannot be stressed enough. And this is one of the problems with the standard right-wing conservative response to some of the economic talking points on the left. You hear conservatives say, well, but these CEOs are all there, the builders and innovators. And yeah, some of them are. Elon Musk is Mary Barra and all the CEOs like her are not builders. She has not built anything ever. She's not an entrepreneur. She's not a shrewd businesswoman. She has no skills. She's done nothing. She has achieved nothing. She was put in charge of a massive multi-billion dollar company. She didn't grow it to that point. She didn't have anything to do with growing it. And all that has happened under her regime is the company has become worse at everything in every way.

You could put literally anyone in her job and they could do what she does, which is really nothing except the company becomes a little worse while you're there. I mean, anyone could just sit there behind the desk and get paid $50 million to make the company worse. I'll do it. I'll do it for $10 million. I'll take a massive pay cut compared to Mary Barra. and for $10 million, I will be the CEO and just not do anything and make everything worse. I'll happily do it. I'll do it for $5 million.

That's as low as I'll go. Now, the criticisms that the left makes against millionaire CEOs, again, actually apply to somebody like Mary Barra. And she, in fact, does not remotely deserve the salary she's getting paid. She is, in effect, a kind of welfare case. That doesn't mean the government should come in and take the government. government should come in and take the money, redistribute. Not saying that at all. That's not at all what I think.

In fact, we started this by talking about why these wealth taxes are retarded. And that's what I believe. But still, the fact remains. I mean, this is just the fact. And yet she is precisely the kind of CEO. The left will not single out. Instead, they single out Elon Musk, who is in every conceivable sense the exact opposite of Mary Barra.

He is an actual builder and innovator. Mary Bearer wouldn't have a job if she were a man and everyone knows it. The company became completely woke when it was popular to do it. They're falling apart. But the woman in charge is rewarded with glowing profiles from various left-wing outlets while GM's employees lose everything. That's not to single out GM. I mean, pretty much every recognizable major corporation is like this, or many of them are.

When Chrysler announced the Jeep Grand Cherokee in 1992, the highly politically incorrect president, Bob Lutz, drove the SUV straight through a glass window at the North American International Auto Show. Whatever American spirit was evident there is now gone, at least in corporate America. Even Apple, one of the biggest companies on the planet, has spent the last decade doing nothing.

They invented a pregnant man emoji, and that's about it. Every new product from Apple is just the iPhone again, but in a slightly different form. Here's the iPhone attached to your wrist. Here's the iPhone on a little stand on the kitchen counter. Here's the iPhone you can wear on your face. Meanwhile, this is the McDonald's CEO, famously trying to sell his company's latest burger,

which he describes not as a burger, but as a product, with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner of war being forced to eat the banana rice in Somalia. You've probably seen this, but let's enjoy it again. We've got two quarter pound patties, a delicious big arch sauce, and of course, some lettuce. So, oh, there's so much going on with this. First of all, let's try to get this thing.

I don't even know how to attack it. Got so much to it. Ooh, there's also some crispy onions on here as well. I see those kind of coming out. All right, the moment of truth. That is so good. That's a big bite for a big arch. It's distinctively McDonald's.

Only McDonald's could do this type of burger, but it also was unlike anything else on our menu. It's a delicious product. You know, you've got sort of the cheeses and the gooiness, but those crispy onions as well gives a nice texture. And of course, we've got the pickles. So just nothing but bread in that bite. The smallest possible way you could have taken.

And even that one little bite of the Big Arch sandwich, almost makes them want to puke. And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is how obviously robotic and inauthentic the whole scene was. It's like chat cheapy tea. is talking about eating a hamburger. And somehow this guy wasn't fired over this, even though he went on camera and made it abundantly clear

that he hates the product his company is selling. He's viscerally disgusted by McDonald's food, but McDonald's is still happy to pay him $20 million a year, which I guess is fitting because it's $1 million for each percentage point the stock has declined in the past year. Now, people see this happening at every major corporation, and they think, well, it doesn't make any sense. That's not fair.

Now the primary reason that America never became communist or socialist is that for most of its history, the rich people, what was corporate America, the actual builders and innovators, and they felt something called noblese oblige. They cared about the well-being of the country and the people in it. They voluntarily made an effort to improve the country since the country made it possible for them to get rich in the first place. The most famous example of this is the steel baron Andrew Carnegie. We're a long way from, you know, Andrew Carnegie these days with these people. But he voluntarily gave away 90% of his fortune, funding more than 2,500 libraries across the United States, along with the Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which became Carnegie Mellon. He created a fund for civilians who saved other people's lives. He created endowments and foundations to promote teaching and scientific research and peace. He even paid for more than 7,000 church organs because why not? He wrote a book called The Gospel of Wealth in which he wrote, quote,

The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the latter upon which the aspiring can rise. He believed that the proper administration of wealth would bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. Now, around the turn of the 20th century, these views were actually popular in America. After the Civil War, the banker George Peabody built schools throughout the American South. John D. Rockefeller was responsible for eliminating. hookworm, Julius Rosenwald of Sears Corporation, built 5,000 schools for black children in the South. Henry Ford wasn't laying off workers and building defective vehicles like Henry Barra. He was paying line workers enough that they could afford the cars they were making.

And he was the first to do that. The small mill town of Rumford, Maine, perfectly embodied bodies, how this used to work. It has a Carnegie Library across the street from Strait Glass Park, which is full of high-end company housing for workers from the local paper mills. The mill owner, Hugh Chisholm, took so much pride in what he was doing and what he was building that he hired an architect to build the company housing, but not just any architect. He hired the same guy who designed the Supreme Court. And it's still there today. You can go look at it. Just blocks away as a four-story mechanics institute also conceived by Chisholm and paid for by the local mill so that there would be a space for working people to improve themselves, mentally, morally, socially, and physically for a low cost. So that was corporate America roughly a century ago, back when the elites actually cared about the country. These were the attitudes and practices that prevented a socialist revolution in America. I save time by making ordinary decisions quickly. Most tasks do not require extensive research, a committee meeting, three days of reflection.

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And with elections around a corner, it can be hard to find time to vote. Waiting until Election Day, though, is a risk. A flat tire or a sick child could mean you miss out on the making your voice heard. That's why I need you to vote early. Go to gopvotes.org, find your polling place, and bank your vote today. If you live in the critical Senate battleground states of Alaska, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, or Texas, early voting is already underway this week. The radical left has won Democrat primaries across the country, and their turnout machine is ready to swarm the polls this fall. That's why you need a plan to vote to. President Trump

is counting on you. Our movement is counting on you. I'm counting on you. Don't wait, head to GOPvotes.org. Make your plan to vote early today paid for by SLF PAC not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Imagine if Mary Barrow, rather than taking a nearly $50 million in compensation, built a community center and a library and hired a talented architect to build housing for her workers. But of course, she's not doing that. She's not a visionary when it comes to the product or how to manage people. She is stupid. And so she's just laying them off and replacing them with AI. Good luck to her when the revolution comes. To the extent America's rich are generous, they're giving to awful causes. The conservative hedge fund manager Ken Griffin,

for example, just donated $3 billion to Carnegie Melligan for Carnegie Mellon for reasons that aren't remotely clear. Now, he's decided to fund the university system that's destroying the country, apparently because he holds the very misguided belief that he can fix the institution. Now, Carnegie himself, of course, endowed Carnegie Mellon. So I'm not attacking the idea of funding schools. But Carnegie had no idea what higher education would become. It wasn't that back when he endowed the school. But now it is.

And if you look at these institutions today without exception, or with very few exceptions, they're rife with censorship, propaganda, moral panics like the deranged behavior that's currently underway at Cornell. So, no, we shouldn't be funding institutions that despise this country. Instead, we should be allowing as many Americans as possible to invest in the companies that are actually trying to build new technology and create more jobs. last week an inebriated Indiana Democrat named Jamie West, who we spent some time on talking about over the weekend. And, you know, it's a lot of fun to laugh at her, and we should. But she drunkenly made a point, one good point, about how tech companies should have to invest in the communities

that they want to put their data centers in. And that's totally correct. Why not? That's the kind of thing Republicans would be insane for opposing, but many of them do. Why shouldn't a company worth a zillion dollars be required to meaningfully invest in a community where they want to build their infrastructure? That's not socialism. That's just common sense. That's rational.

That's like, that's America first. That's caring about American communities. And if you're a town manager or a county bureaucrat, you watch that video, before you agree to let wind turbines or solar panels or data centers especially come to your town, why shouldn't you get every cent you can out of these companies to build yourself a mechanics institute, hire an award-winning architect to do it? Why not? though most people don't realize it. America is richer today than it was a century ago, so there's no reason they can't do that. Somewhere at the top is somebody like Mary Barra or Scott Kirby.

You know, surely they can afford it. Ten years ago, the corporate class was much more interested in social governance scores and donating to the vast black hole of inner-city nonprofits. And today they're not even interested in that. what we're seeing now from our AI overlords, including Sam Altman and people like him, is this idea that in the future, nobody will have a job. And so instead we'll all be completely dependent on big tech. And some people are excited about this.

This is a representative post from somebody calling himself a futurist, for example. And there's a lot of this on social media right now. It says, quote, two years from now, you will not work. you will not worry about money. You will get your cash payments from all the major AI labs. Think of it like three to five companies giving you $1,000 check every week. And this is the idea you hear a lot now. So the AI companies in the near future, supposedly, this is the idea,

will give us all stipends and we will become dependence of Sam Altman. This is supposed to be an optimistic vision of the future. Actually, it's deeply horrifying. And it's not what we mean, at least it's not what I mean, when I say that these CEOs should be contributing to their community and to their country. This sounds like a dystopian nightmare. I don't want to live off of handouts from my big tech overlords. The fact that anyone sees that as some heavenly vision of the future is extremely depressing.

Living as serfs with our hands out, going to big tech, can I have my, can I have my, can I have my stipend this week, please? Lord Sam, can you give me my stipend? You know, this is not the kind of a future we should be trying to build for ourselves and our children. And there is another way. It involves providing the right incentives and giving people a clear sense of the stakes that are involved, which is what Toyota did with those GM employees. And if you do that, support for socialism plummets. You know, we can't do anything to change the minds of the Somalis and the other foreign scammers who have come here to plunder our treasury. All we can do with them or about them is deport them, and we should. But we can reverse the trend we're seeing among native-born

Americans who are now entertaining the single most destructive ideology the West has ever seen in record numbers. We can take a cue from the guy who's building flying cars and catching rockets in mid-air, instead of the 85-year-old whiny socialist from Vermont. We can return to the sense of genuine excitement for the future, which was so dominant in this country in the middle of the 20th century when people were thrilled by everything from moon landings to shopping malls. That is objectively a much better place for the United States to be. And in the long run, it's also a much better outcome for even the most useless CEOs, the Scott Kirby's and Mary Barras of the world.

Under their system, you know, the system that they're advocating for, that Kirby is advocating for, the CEOs get sent to the gallows. Under the other system, the CEOs invest a fraction of their company's vast wealth to help create a country with many more Elon Musk's and as few Scott Kirby's and Mary Barras as possible. That's the best way to prevent a bold. Bolshevik takeover in this country, you know, voluntarily end the comically absurd pay packages and give Americans a stake in the success of the American economy.

Elon Musk has started this campaign. Now every CEO who wants their company to exist in 20 years, and it doesn't want their children to live under Bolshevik rule for the next century, should follow suit. As it turns out, Elon Musk, America's innovator-in-chief apparently understands that, you know, this is what we urgently need, and we need the noblesse oblige to make a comeback. That's an idea which has long since fallen out of favor, that again, the nobility that is the rich and powerful, have a basic responsibility to act honorably and generously and to care about and meaningfully invest in the future of their nation. It's not a government policy, not something that can be achieved

through taxation. It's just a basic expectation of honorable behavior. An expectation that of course, should fall on everybody of any income bracket in one form or another. And the point is not that the richest Americans, the ones with an enormous amount of equity, you know, in the largest companies on the planet, should give handouts. They shouldn't. Instead, they should actually invest in a meaningful way in the future of the country. Not because the government forces them to do it, but because they actually care about the future of the country. It's not like they need to be driven by pure virtue and charity to care. If the country has no future, Neither do the companies.

So this is just a matter of, you know, rational long-term planning. And Elon just announced his own plan to do exactly this. Watch. Meanwhile, Elon Musk vows a giveaway of one share of SpaceX to every child in the United States. In the social media post, Musk says this gift will be the very first of many to come. This news comes a day after AI giant Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund. Live now to CBS News, senior business and tech correspondent, Joe Ling Kent. Okay, so JoLing, first of all, good to see you, my friend.

Second of all, what's the why, especially for Musk here? Well, he was responding essentially to Anthropics saying that they're going to have this public benefit fund. He responds to the announcement on X, which of course he owns and says, wouldn't it be better to give money directly to the public? And so he proposes this idea of giving shares of SpaceX to individual kids. And if you do the math, it's basically 72, 73 million kids, people under the age of 18 in the United States of America. Right now we have SpaceX stock at about. I'm just looking at the ticker here. It's about $148 a share.

So you do the math, and that's a pretty significant. Now, as it stands today, a share of SpaceX isn't worth much, only around $150. But if you give a child a share of SpaceX today, it'll almost certainly be worth much, much more by the time he's 18. and certainly by the time he retires, by Musk's estimates, which are admittedly optimistic, that share could be worth more than $7,000 within the next decade. And the moral of the story is that it's very important for builders and creators like Elon to do what they do and get rich doing it. That's how the system is supposed to work.

Those are CEOs who took on extraordinary risk, built massive corporations from the ground up. Elon just unveiled a flying car, which we're supposed to be angry about. Bernie Sanders has never created a single job in his life, never had an original thought in his life, never done anything remotely interesting or inspiring. But he wants to destroy what Elon built because if people see Elon doing amazing things, they might realize that the government is wasting their money and then the whole scam falls apart. There are also corporate suits who are getting very rich and don't deserve to. In the cases of the vast majority of established companies, CEO compensation is totally detached from reality. There's no universe where Mary Barra is worth $48 million a year, which comes out to around $184,000 per workday, which is nearly triple the annual salary of an American worker, triple the average American salary in one day. It's obscene. And what makes it obscene is not the amount. Elon Musk is worth astronomically more than her. Mary Barra is closer to being below the poverty line than she is to being anywhere. near Elon Musk's net worth. But again, he's a builder. He's an innovator, a great man of history.

Guys like him should be rich. They should be rewarded. Barra is a talentless, non-achieving HR manager who floated her way to the top on the wings of DEI. She doesn't inspire anyone. She does the opposite. And if she's ever fired, everyone knows she'll get a massive payout, just like the CEO of every other failed company. So the incentive structure doesn't make sense. to most people because it's a ridiculous system. And therefore, in increasing numbers, young Americans, not just foreigners, are thinking that socialism is the answer. Which it isn't. Now, that's not a rational conclusion.

It's not smart. It's a disaster for the country and the entire human race. Socialism is one of the most evil systems ever devised by mankind. But that's what they're doing. Now, Elon has earned his money because he's actually creating meaningful new products, including self-driving technology that people can use on a day-to-day basis. No question that his net worth is earned, which, by the way, is not stored in some bank vault. You know, it's not in his checking account.

His net worth comes from his stock and Tesla and SpaceX. And if any American wants a share in that wealth, then to see, the same gains and losses that Elon sees, to a smaller degree, obviously, they can buy the stock as well. They're publicly traded. That's how it's supposed to work. And ultimately, the goal is to create a lot more Elon's and no more merry-bearers. We need to be a country that facilitates and rewards builders and innovators again. That is the best way to prevent the coming socialist revolution. And in fact, it turns out it's the only way. I'll do for the show today.

Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed. You sit there and shake because you're dependent on drink. You're sick is all over you. Have you ever seen a child starve to death, professor?

No. I have.