Rutger Bregman

Historian. Books: 'Utopia for Realists' (2014), 'Humankind' (2020) and 'Moral Ambition' (2025). Co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition.

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

So this is Rupert Murdoch reading my book on universal basic income, the 15-hour workweek, and open borders around the globe. I'm sure he'll love it. https://t.co/OPxTBXHO5D

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

A critical security issue affecting PHP is being announced in 14 minutes.

Need to immediately patch or take your PHP dependant system offline.

https://t.co/LO7SdyP2hm

[Jake Sherman @JakeSherman]

New Talarico ad running statewide:

"Ken Paxton says, I don't have his experience, and he's right.

"I've never been indicted for fraud. I've never been reported to the FBI for bribery. I've never been impeached by my own party, and I've never given a sweetheart deal to a pedophile.

"I have a different kind of experience. I've worked with both parties to cap the cost of insulin and pass the largest property tax cut in Texas history. I'm James Tallarico and I approve this message because we need a different kind of experience in Washington."

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

Hi @elonmusk , we’ve conducted the most comprehensive study to date on tax unfairness in the United States.

We found that you, like your fellow billionaires, pay a lower effective tax rate than the average American.

So if you really want to help the American people, I have a better suggestion than charity: pay more taxes. 🧵

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

They’ll never forgive a bunch of grad student libs for making a company more valuable than almost anything they’ve ever funded and that all their portfolio companies are dependent on

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

Ezra Klein has become a master of the “telling the left shit it doesn’t want to hear but needs to” and breaking the “omg ai is just fake!!!” bubble is his current focus

[etn. @etnshow]

Moral Ambition Author @rutgerbregman sees the advent of AI as an almost religious moment that could upend democratic ideals:

"We are living through an incredible ideological, indeed almost religious moment when people have to start picking sides."

"For a long time...it was kind of taken for granted, like, 'Oh yeah, we all believe in human rights, and history has ended, and hopefully at some point all the nations will turn into democracies.'"

"Now it turns out...some people have a very different take on where we should go...some people think that we're a biological bootloader for something else...some people are like, 'Well actually, maybe we should shrink the moral circle.'"

"In this age of AI, I want to be personally on like Team Human..."

"So suddenly...democratic nations...are waking up and kind of like, 'Oh, so this is actually a thing. Like, this thing we always talked about, that's actually an ideology that's now under threat that maybe then, perhaps, we got to start fighting for.'"

[etn. @etnshow]

World Renowned Author @rutgerbregman believes that the left have fallen into a state of AI Denial and that there is so much misinformation about AI in leftist circles:

"Still I keep meeting people who say, 'Oh, it's only a stochastic parrot. Oh, I asked ChatGPT in 2023 to write me a limerick and I wasn't impressed. Oh, I asked Gemini how many R's there were in strawberry and he gave the wrong answer.'"

"I'm like, are you fucking paying attention? Have you heard of what's happening in mathematics? One big problem, by the way, is that the big AI debate is obviously happening on Twitter. But so many lefties have deleted their Twitter accounts for good reasons because like Elon Musk turned it into a swamp..."

"For me, like Twitter is so important to be up to date. LinkedIn, Instagram, it's all completely useless if you want to be informed."

"The mathematics stuff from OpenAI—where was that? Like that should have been on every single front page, and yeah, most of it you can only find on X."

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Anthropic's leaders need to stop commenting on the emergence of RSI like a local news anchor reporting on traffic on the 101, and acknowledge that they are the traffic, and they're not going to build something that they don't want to exist.

They should move beyond "pacing" language, commit to specific policies and red lines, explain why those lines are red, and then use that costly signal to build an international consensus around norms.

It's not that I trust the CCP, or that I think global lab monitoring and verification is imminent. But the status quo is absurd.

You've got US lab leaders writing (or favorably quote-tweeting) essays about slowing down while simultaneously saying "things are moving faster and faster" and "btw, our internal models finished mathematics on Tuesday, next up: physics."

The effect is the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning race after race while using his press conferences to bemoan the dangerous speed of modern sprinting on one's legs so would everybody please try a little less hard next race, and then ... breaking his 100m record again the following month. Honestly ask yourself: If you were China, why would you take this pausing/pacing stuff seriously?

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

For better or worse the people who’ve been prescient about AI are the “doomers” who founded OpenAI and Anthropic.

The accelerationists are the people who thought NFTs and/or the Metaverse were going to be the next big thing.

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

ICE is hunting down immigrants with the help of Palantir.

In six months, Palantir’s founder, @PeterThiel, will be able to start spending unimaginable sums of money —completely tax-free — to bankroll the political causes dear to his heart.

He'll be able to do it thanks to a tax-avoidance scheme he’s been building for more than 20 years, at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer.

Let me explain. 🧵

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

So OpenAI and Anthropic expect a catastrophe by 2027, and they’re planning… the PR response.

Have they considered not causing the catastrophe?

[Jim VandeHei @JimVandeHei]

Scoop: Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event…They assume one in ‘27…
https://t.co/Jro9TigbgH

[Morten N. Støstad @MortenStostad]

Two new papers show that wealth taxes lead to very little out-migration by the wealthy, while increasing tax revenue.

Most think wealth taxes always make the wealthy flee , an exodus -- but there is no existing empirical evidence for such an exodus, anywhere, at any time 1/n

[Morten N. Støstad @MortenStostad]

An extremely relevant paper, given the renewed concern that wealth taxes lead to massive out-migration:

The Norwegian wealth tax "exodus", discussed in global media, never happened. At most 100 individuals left. Tax revenue increased by +71.5%. No changes in business activity.

[Abhishek Saha @ObhishekSaha]

When the proof of Fermat's last theorem was announced by Wiles in June 1993, newspapers around the world covered it extensively. I was a ten-year-old boy in Calcutta, India, and the story was splashed across my local newspaper. A few months later, I went to a bookshop with my grandfather and bought two popular books that tried to explain what all the excitement was about.

Yesterday was the single greatest day of mathematical breakthroughs in history. This is not an exaggeration.

In terms the collective significance and depth of the results released, this was at least ten times, perhaps even a hundred times, as momentous as the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

So where is the media? Where are the headlines, the breathless newsrooms, the door to door conversations? Where is the sense of incredible wonder this moment deserves?

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

I want to talk about Patrick Collison.

Let’s start with a simple acknowledgment: he is one of the most impressive philanthropists right now:

- When Covid hit, he and Tyler Cowen launched Fast Grants and got money to scientists within days.
- He helped launch the Arc Institute, so biologists could do science instead of drowning in paperwork for grants.
- And Stripe, under Collison’s leadership, built Frontier: a super ambitious pledge to guarantee a market for carbon removal tech.

This is all really awesome! Few billionaires have thought harder about how to do a lot of good with their money.

But now we have to talk about what the hell Patrick Collison is doing in California.

He has given $15 million to ‘Building a Better California’, one of the most cynical political campaigns I’ve seen in a long time. It's the main vehicle fighting Prop 40: a one-time 5% tax on the state's ~200 billionaires (to make up for federal cuts to healthcare for low-income Californians).

And look at how this group does it:

- It’s funding an extremely aggressive "No" campaign (opponents are outspending supporters roughly six to one).
- It also put two decoy measures on the same ballot. Prop 41 *seems* to be about good governance. Prop 42 is sold as ‘protecting your retirement savings’. But both contain a clause: if either gets more votes than the billionaire tax, the tax is cancelled.
- Meanwhile, the retirement story is total nonsense. Prop 40 already exempts pensions. CalMatters calls the deluge of ads misleading and the SF Chronicle calls Prop 41 a ‘cynical poison pill’.
- The sad reality is that all this misinformation is working though. Polls show small majorities backing the billionaire tax and the measures designed to kill it. You can vote yes on all three and cancel out your own vote. Most people don’t realize this.

Through all of it, Collison HASN'T SAID A WORD about why he's funding this slimy campaign.

This is a public intellectual who writes thoughtfully about progress. If he believes Prop 40 is bad policy, he should do the honorable thing and make the case! And tell us what he'd rather do about extreme concentrations of wealth and power, or explain why he thinks they aren't a problem for our democracy and civilization.

Instead we get silence + $15 million for a campaign built on misinformation and shady political tactics.

@patrickc, what are you doing?

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

A one-time 5% wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley’s billionaires’ wealth back to where it was just 31 days ago, on September 7.

When it was "just" 178% higher than on January 1, 2023.

They’d rather let 3 million people lose their health insurance than let that happen.

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

Tom Steyer is the only billionaire who supports the California billionaire tax. He makes SO many powerful observations in the recent @NewYorker article about the selfish, decadent and morally corrupt elites running Silicon Valley right now.

From the piece:

"I suggested to several super-rich Californians, ‘Look, if you don’t like this, why don’t we sit down and come up with something that works from your standpoint and actually addresses the issues?’ And they had no interest in doing it."

He lamented the passing of what he saw as tech’s originating spirit, entrepreneurial but also patriotic, which was exemplified by the Hewlett-Packard founders’ heavy involvement in philanthropy and public service."

Can you imagine David Packard or Bill Hewlett doing the kind of self-promotion that Elon Musk does?” he said. “There’s obviously been just a really dramatic change. I don’t want to turn them into gods, but Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett felt a deep connection with the country and with the state and with the land. It doesn’t exist today.”

I asked him how he explains this change. “The people who are making the big money in California are technology people,” he said, and many of them “are incredibly focussed on that and quite dismissive of the other kinds of learning. That is not something they respect. English literature is not something they respect.”

It may be pertinent that we were speaking at the decidedly old-school Yale Club, in New York City—Steyer is an alum. “When you get too reductive in terms of focussing just on money, or just focussing on technology, there are a lot of things that you’re cutting away from that world view,” he went on. “And a lot of those things are what we would think of as human values, like compassion, some sense of honor, all the things that you read about in the soft courses. And, if you don’t have that, then O.K., good night. You have a different frame of reference and a different value system.”

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Californians will vote on whether to impose a one-time, five-per-cent wealth tax on billionaires. “If it passes, it will be a revolution,” an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said. https://t.co/mtMLp4ar1R

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

In the Scott Alexander vs Steven Pinker debate, it really is notable that one side has a much, much better track record on predicting AI trends than the other…

At this point, the burden of proof is on Pinker as to why we should still listen to him.

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

The number of California billionaires has increased from 245 to 261 in 2026 since the billionaire tax has been on the ballot. Those claiming billionaires are fleeing are gaslighting. https://t.co/WTJRy1BY6m

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

This is why the billionaire class is freaking out.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin in particular has completely lost it - he has spent 102 MILLION, all to defeat a tiny tax on his ginormous fortune.

It's honestly sad to see: so rich, and they still don't understand what's really scarce in life: your fucking time on this planet!

Instead, this guy spends hours, days and weeks obsessing over this little tax that he'll barely notice. Pathetic.

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

If California’s “billionaire tax” passes, it will amount to the first time that a government in the U.S. has successfully taxed the assets, rather than the income, of extremely rich people as a class. https://t.co/mtMLp4ar1R