Last Friday, Eric Schmidt — net worth somewhere between $25 billion and $36 billion depending on which billionaire scoreboard you trust — stood in front of the University of Arizona’s graduating class and told them, with a straight face, that “when someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”
He was booed. Repeatedly. Loud enough that local news led with it and national outlets followed.
Good.
I’ve spent thirty years building software. I was employee number six at Break.com when we were doing over a hundred million pageviews a day with six people on staff. I’ve architected systems for Microsoft, Sony, Yahoo, Rockstar, 2K, Best Buy, Allegiant. Right now I am shipping multi-agent AI systems in production. I am not an AI doomer. I am not anti-technology. I have been building the rocketship Schmidt is talking about for three decades.
And I want to say, on behalf of the people who actually keep the lights on in this industry: how dare you.
How dare a man with a $25 billion fortune, three mansions, a confiscated-Russian-oligarch superyacht, a $24 million Pacific Heights co-op he treats as a flip, and a private influence machine in Washington stand on a stage and tell 22-year-olds drowning in student debt that the problem with their lives is that they are insufficiently grateful for the rocketship.
How dare you, after a decade of personally lobbying the federal government to accelerate the very technology that is collapsing their job market, tell them their fear is “rational” — and then in the same breath tell them to get on board or get left behind.
The graduates were not being irrational. They were doing math.
According to Goldman Sachs, employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed roles fell 16% between late 2022 and mid-2025. Among young software developers specifically — the exact career path many of those Arizona graduates trained for — the decline was nearly 20%. CNBC reported entry-level job postings overall had declined approximately 35% by September 2025. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis confirmed that occupations with higher AI exposure saw the largest unemployment increases in the country.
Just in 2025: roughly 170,000 US tech layoffs. The first six months alone produced 77,999 tech job losses directly attributed to AI — about 427 layoffs every single day. Then 2026 opened with another 113,000 workers laid off in the first quarter, while $725 billion floods into AI infrastructure. Cloudflare cut more than 1,100 roles — roughly a fifth of its company — and openly cited a 600% spike in “internal AI activity.” Oracle reportedly saved $8–10 billion by cutting 10,000 workers. Wall Street is planning to remove approximately 200,000 jobs over the next three to five years, mostly entry-level and back office.
Meanwhile, Schmidt’s personal fortune grew by $1.8 billion in a single week of AI hype back in 2023. He has been printing money off the same wave that is printing pink slips for everyone else.
So when he tells a stadium of graduates “the future is yours to shape,” what he is actually telling them is: I have already shaped it. I shaped it from a Holland Park townhouse and a London mansion. Now sit down and be grateful for the seat I am not actually offering you.
The Snowpiercer economy
Remember the movie Snowpiercer? Bong Joon-ho’s frozen-earth dystopia where humanity’s survivors are crammed onto a perpetual-motion train. The wealthy live in the front cars — saunas, sushi, classical music, aquariums, schoolrooms. The poor live in the tail cars — protein bricks made of insects, no light, armed guards at the door. Same train. Same engine. Same fate if the wheels stop turning. But two utterly different worlds, separated by who got which seat.
That is the AI rocketship Eric Schmidt is talking about.
Schmidt himself said it out loud at Stanford in 2024 — before that talk was conveniently scrubbed from YouTube — that AI would “widen the economic gap between rich and poor countries.” Larry Fink at BlackRock said it again in his 2026 shareholder letter: the real story of AI is not what it is doing to your job, it is what it is doing for his class. The top 1% in the US now hold 31.7% of all household wealth, the widest gap since the Fed started measuring it in 1989. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, put it plainer still: AI will take your job and make the “tech bro” class richer while doing it. Even the founders of Anthropic, the people who literally build the models, are now pledging to give away 80% of their wealth specifically because, in their own words, the level of wealth concentration AI is producing “will break society.”
So who built the front car? Schmidt did. Who steers it? Schmidt does. Who gets to sit in it? Not the kids he just lectured.
Nvidia’s “Let them be electricians” doctrine
While Schmidt was doing the rocketship speech, Jensen Huang has been touring the planet with the parallel script: AI is here, and the rest of you should go to trade school. At Davos he told Larry Fink that the AI buildout would create “six-figure salaries” for plumbers, electricians, steel workers, and construction crews. At Carnegie Mellon’s commencement — a school of computer scientists and engineers — he told newly minted CS grads that “electricians, plumbers, iron workers, technicians, builders — this is your time.”
Read that again. The CEO of the world’s most valuable AI company told a graduating computer science class that their time was over and the electricians were up.
Let me translate the actual message: We will build the data centers. You will wire them. We will own the model weights, the chips, the IPO upside, the SPV equity, the patent stack. You will pull conduit and pour concrete. We will be paid in eight-figure stock grants. You will be paid in W-2 with overtime if you are lucky.
Skilled trades are an honorable career and the pay is genuinely real — BLS puts median electrician wages around $62,000 with the top decile over $106,000. None of that is the problem. The arrogance is in the direction the advice flows. The CEO of a multi-trillion-dollar company, the man whose entire net worth comes from sitting in the front car, lecturing 22-year-olds that their future is in the tail car holding a multimeter.
You first, Jensen. You first, Eric. Hand over the keys to Nvidia. Apprentice as a journeyman electrician for six years. Pull a couple of overnight shifts during a Phoenix heat wave at one of these data centers you are so excited about. Then come back and tell the graduates to get on the rocketship.
The public has done the math too
This is not just my opinion. The country is on the same page.
Pew Research, June 2025: 50% of US adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them more concerned than excited. Only 10% say more excited. In 2021 that “concerned” number was 37%. Concern is growing, not shrinking, in direct proportion to how much the technology has actually shipped.
63% of American workers believe AI will decrease overall job availability. 56% of the general public is highly concerned about job loss to AI — versus 25% of AI experts. There is a 50-point gap between how experts and the public see AI’s impact on jobs. The people closest to the steering wheel are the ones least afraid of it. The people in the tail car are terrified. That is exactly what you would predict from a Snowpiercer.
About 1 in 5 Americans now say it is “morally wrong” to be a billionaire — and that number jumps among Gen Z, the demographic Schmidt was literally addressing on Friday. The gap between US corporate profits and worker pay is the widest it has been since 1989. Republicans and Democrats disagree on almost everything in 2026, but they agree on this: roughly 60% of both groups say they lack confidence in US companies to develop AI responsibly.
This is the room Eric Schmidt walked into. A generation that has done the spreadsheet, knows the numbers, watched their older siblings get laid off, and is now being told by a man with $25 billion to just get on the rocketship and stop asking questions.
He was booed not because the kids are anti-technology. He was booed because the kids can read.
The case for an AI that doesn’t end with pitchforks
Here is what is maddening about all of this: it did not have to be this way, and it still doesn’t.
I build AI systems for a living. I have built multi-agent orchestration platforms, RAG pipelines, MCP servers, vector-storage systems on SQL Server 2025. I know what this technology can actually do when it is pointed at the right problem. It can compress the cost of medical diagnosis. It can eliminate the legal-services gap for working people. It can give a kid in a rural town the same kind of tutor that a Greenwich kid gets at $400 an hour. It can extend the productivity of small businesses, solo practitioners, and under-resourced municipalities that have been steamrolled by economies of scale for forty years.
But none of that happens by accident. None of it happens because Eric Schmidt tells a stadium to “get on the rocketship.” It happens when the technology is deliberately pointed at problems that benefit the bottom 90%, not just the cap-table holders. That requires three things the current AI elite has shown approximately zero interest in:
One. A real plan for the entry-level worker whose first rung on the career ladder just got automated. Not a vague “they will find new jobs” hand-wave. A real plan, with funding behind it, that does not consist of “go become a plumber.”
Two. Honest accounting of who paid for this. AI infrastructure is being subsidized, directly and indirectly, by taxpayer-funded electricity grids, taxpayer-funded basic research, taxpayer-built water and land infrastructure, and an entire scraping operation that ingested the public’s collective writing without compensation. The public owns a meaningful stake in this technology whether the cap table acknowledges it or not.
Three. Some humility from the people on stage. Schmidt did not build the rocketship by himself. He inherited a search company that was built by 20-something engineers and pumped to scale by an entire generation of workers who got paid in salary while he got paid in equity. He is not the captain of the rocketship. He is the man who got handed the keys.
Booing is the first signal, not the last
I want to be careful here, because I know what kind of column this can turn into, and I am not interested in writing that column.
But history has a pattern, and the pattern is worth saying out loud, because the people on stage seem to have forgotten it.
When an economic transition concentrates the upside in a tiny ownership class while telling the workforce to be grateful for the table scraps, the workforce does not stay grateful forever. The Luddites smashed looms. French peasants stopped being amused by Versailles speeches. The Gilded Age robber barons got the Sherman Antitrust Act and Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting. The 2008 Wall Street bailouts produced Occupy, then Trump, then Bernie, then the wholesale realignment of American politics that we are still living through. The gilets jaunes in France did not start as a revolt — they started as a complaint about a fuel tax.
Booing a commencement speaker is the politest possible version of this signal. It is the version where the kids still believe in the system enough to show up to the ceremony, put on the gown, and let their parents take photos. The next version is louder. The version after that arrives in legislation, regulation, taxation, and political coalitions you cannot buy your way out of.
So this is the warning, delivered as politely as I can manage. Eric, Jensen, and the rest of you in the front car — you are sitting on a finite stockpile of public goodwill, and you have been burning it at a rate that not even your own valuations can keep up with. The graduates booing you on Friday were doing you a favor. They were telling you what the room thinks of your speech while you could still walk off the stage.
If the speech doesn’t change, the next response from the room will not be a boo.
So maybe, Eric, instead of telling them to get on your rocketship, you could try the harder thing: build a rocketship with seats for them.
Or hand over your seat.
Or, by your own logic, go become an electrician.
The rest of us are tired of waiting in the tail car.