Yang launched his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign as a virtually unknown longshot in November 2017. He built his entire platform around a single, then-radical argument: that AI and automation were about to destroy millions of American jobs and Washington wasn’t even having the conversation.<\/p>\n
His signature proposal was the Freedom Dividend \u2014 a $1,000-per-month universal basic income paid to every American adult regardless of employment status. He argued it was the only serious policy response to the wave of job displacement he saw coming.<\/p>\n
Since then, AI job losses have intensified across Big Tech notables such as Meta (META<\/a>), Amazon (AMZN<\/a>), and Microsoft (MSFT<\/a>). Fears of mass white-collar job losses have also risen meaningfully.<\/p>\n Despite his presidential bid running out of steam toward the end, Yang did receive an endorsement from Tesla (TSLA<\/a>) and SpaceX (SPCX<\/a>) co-founder Elon Musk on Aug. 10, 2019. Musk has since become a controversial trillionaire and more outspoken on a range of issues.<\/p>\n Here are several excerpts from our interview with Yang.<\/p>\n On accepting another endorsement from Musk: <\/p>\n “Yeah, I would. I mean \u2026 he’s for trying to advance society in different ways. I don’t agree with him on every single thing, but like, who the heck agrees with someone on everything? I would gladly accept Elon’s support.”<\/p>\n “[T]hat’s not just me saying it. That’s [Anthropic (ANTH.PVT<\/a>) CEO] Dario Amodei saying token tax and [OpenAI (OPAI.PVT<\/a>) CEO] Sam Altman saying national wealth fund. It makes zero sense that you’d have AI, which compares itself to electricity, and then not tax it and not regulate it. Can you imagine if the power grid\u00a0was unregulated? So that’s just, again, an example of our government not being on the curve.”<\/p>\n On AI job loss: <\/p>\n “We’re just in the first or second inning. And a public company CEO reached out to me, bought me breakfast, and said, \u2018I’m going to fire 30% of my workforce and my revenue is going to go up 200%. I’m going to get a raise. What do we do?\u2019 And so these are the very early days. Look, was there some muddying of the water in terms of the tech layoffs? Like, did they overhire? And then are they using AI as something of a justification or rationale? Yes. But the AI buzz saw\u00a0is real.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former 2020 presidential hopeful and businessman Andrew Yang isn’t ruling out another run at the White House in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":719387,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,225185,181,507,309742,11,74,3123],"class_list":["post-719386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-andrew-yang","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-democratic-presidential-campaign","tag-elon-musk","tag-technology","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719386\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"NEW](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/19edb61e-75d0-4b51-8b49-2be581c4d502.jpeg\")
Andrew Yang speaks during TAAF Heritage Month Summit and Celebration Day 2 on May 15, 2026, in New York City. (JP Yim\/Getty Images for the Asian American Foundation) \u00b7 JP Yim via Getty Images On why he would tax AI: <\/p>\n