The Hidden Cost of Tech Billionaires
They aren’t lone geniuses — they are beneficiaries of public investment, legal loopholes, and a rigged system they helped design. It’s time they paid their fair share.
We love a good origin story in America — the garage startup, the dropout genius, the bold disrupter who bet everything on a dream. And nowhere do these myths shine brighter than in the tech world. We lionize Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and others as if they conjured wealth from sheer intellect and grit. But the truth is more complicated — and more troubling.
Yes, they’re smart. Some may even be brilliant. But none of them could have become billionaires — certainly not to the tune of $100 billion or more — without systematically exploiting a nation built on public investment, legal blind spots, and civic trust. They built their empires on the backs of citizens, laws, and public infrastructure, and then used their fortunes to rewrite the rules in their favor.
Let’s be clear: they don’t need to be punished for being successful. But they do need to be taxed like the rest of us. And right now, they’re not — because they bought a system that keeps it that way.
The public paid for their tools
The tech revolution didn’t start in Silicon Valley garages. It started in government labs, public universities, and taxpayer-funded research projects.
The internet? Born from ARPANET, a Defense Department initiative.
GPS? A Cold War-era military system.
Satellite technology? On the back of NASA’s public investment of over $250 billion over 65 years. [As a Naval officer, my father was on Wernher von Braun’s Project Orbiter that resulted in the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1 in 1958.]
Human spaceflight? On the back of NASA’s public investment of over $690 billion since 1958. [Not including the intentionally generous NASA contracts that today subsidize SpaceX.]
Touchscreens, voice recognition, and the early foundations of artificial intelligence? All publicly funded.
What the tech billionaires did was recognize the commercial potential of these technologies before others did. That’s no small thing. But the tools they built with weren’t all theirs. The American public paid for most of them.
Yet when it came time to share in the profits — through fair taxation, equitable labor policies, or reinvestment in the public good — the billionaires turned their backs on the country that made them possible.
Gaming the tax code while dodging the bill
Amazon famously paid $0 in federal income tax in 2018 — despite over $10 billion in profits. Apple parked hundreds of billions offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. Alphabet (Google) used a tax scheme called the “Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich” to shift profits abroad and shrink its U.S. tax burden.
All of this is legal. And that’s the problem.
The wealth of tech billionaires doesn’t come in the form of salaries like most workers. It comes from capital gains — the appreciation of stock value. But instead of selling shares and paying taxes, they borrow against their equity at low interest rates, using their wealth as collateral.
This legal maneuver means they can live like kings — private jets, mega-yachts, political influence — while paying far less in taxes, proportionally, than a teacher or firefighter. They’ve gamed the tax system, and they’ve used their wealth to keep it that way.
Disrupting labor, then offloading the cost
It wasn’t enough to exploit tax loopholes. Tech billionaires rewrote the labor rules, too — often in ways that left their workers vulnerable.
Uber and Lyft classified drivers as independent contractors, stripping them of benefits, healthcare, and job security. Amazon built a warehouse empire on the backs of underpaid and overworked employees, tracked by algorithm, punished for bathroom breaks. Content moderators for social media platforms — who view humanity’s worst content daily — are often hired through third-party firms, denied the protections and pay of direct employees.
Meanwhile, the public picks up the slack: subsidizing food, housing, and medical care for workers who can’t survive on the wages offered by billion-dollar companies.
This is not innovation. It’s exploitation.
Controlling the playing field
Once tech giants achieved dominance, they didn’t stop at market disruption. They bought competitors, distorted marketplaces, and locked in users.
- Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp not to improve user experience, but to neutralize competition.
- Amazon used third-party seller data to copy popular products and undercut the very merchants who depended on its platform.
- Apple maintains a tight grip on its App Store, forcing developers to pay a 30% fee — a modern-day digital tollbooth.
This kind of behavior would have drawn the wrath of antitrust regulators in any other era. But today’s tech billionaires don’t just avoid regulation — they write it.
Through relentless lobbying, campaign donations, and think tank funding, they influence Congress, delay accountability, and ensure the law bends in their favor. The result? They gain the privileges of extreme wealth without the responsibilities of citizenship the rest of us have.
Profiting off public trust, avoiding public responsibility
Even cultural and legal norms have become tools to exploit.
- AI companies scrape content from the internet — books, articles, artwork — without paying creators. Then they build proprietary models they monetize at scale.
- Social media platforms amplify division, extremism, and misinformation — all in pursuit of engagement and ad dollars.
- Tech companies offload content moderation, privacy enforcement, and ethical AI concerns onto users or low-paid contractors.
What binds all of this together is a consistent pattern: extract value, externalize cost, and avoid responsibility.
A rigged system needs to be unrigged
We don’t need to vilify innovation. And we don’t need to pretend these billionaires aren’t smart, driven, or visionary in their own ways. But we also can’t keep pretending they did it all on their own — or that the system that rewards them while burdening everyone else is working.
The tech billionaire class benefited enormously from:
- Public investment
- Civic infrastructure
- Generous legal systems
- Weak regulation
- A mythology of individual genius
- A tax code they helped rewrite
It’s not envy to ask them to pay their share. It’s fairness.
Working Americans are taxed on every paycheck. Small business owners pay full freight. Teachers and nurses can’t borrow against stock options they don’t have. Meanwhile, the richest men in history get to build private yachts, dodge taxes, and influence elections — all while we subsidize them.
A debt as yet unpaid
The nation invested in their future. Its citizens built the systems that enabled them to succeed. Its courts and regulators looked the other way as they amassed historic fortunes. Now it’s time for them to return the favor — not with philanthropy or PR campaigns, but with taxes.
They may have been smart. But they didn’t do it alone. And they shouldn’t be allowed to keep gaming a system that was never meant to serve only the few.
Author’s Note:
I’m definitely in favor of tech entrepreneurship. I’ve had a wonderful career in software development. In the early 1990s, I founded my first startup. When we sold it I shared the proceeds, I hope equitably, with the great team of people who worked hard to make it a success.
[I appreciate that it made me financially secure — but I must be missing the need-for-power billionaire gene — it was the sheer joy of building something great, with great people, that excited me. Maybe Vietnam had taught me that family and service to something larger than yourself are what’s really important. At 78, I’m currently a co-founder of another startup.]
Way back then, we were always afraid that Bill Gates and Microsoft might notice and crush us. Gates is truly brilliant, but in those days, he was totally focused and ruthless. Fortunately for the world, he is now applying that drive, genius, and enormous wealth to making the world a safer and healthier place.
Today’s crop of billionaires are just as driven and ruthless as Microsoft’s Gates — but the rules that constrained Microsoft in the 1990s have been mostly done away with by too many years of political contributions and lobbying.
Today’s billionaires are not constrained by the old rules — and make no mistake — wealth is power and much of today’s political turmoil is the direct result of their abuse of that power.
