The AI Boom Is Creating Enormous Wealth for a Few Thousand People and Deep Anxiety for Everyone Else

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Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das sparked widespread discussion after describing San Francisco's current AI moment as "pretty frenetic," with what he called the worst divide in outcomes he has ever seen. Using a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, Das estimated that around 10,000 people, founders and early employees at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia, have crossed a retirement wealth threshold of well above $20 million. Meanwhile, the vast majority of tech workers find themselves stuck in well-paying but capped roles under $500,000 a year, watching the AI gold rush unfold around them without meaningfully participating in its upside. Layoffs are running simultaneously, and many software engineers are grappling with the unsettling feeling that the skills they spent years building are becoming less relevant by the month.

The reaction to Das's post was divided. Some pushed back, arguing that the people described in the post are already among the most fortunate workers in the world and that framing their situation as distressing is hard to take seriously. Others found the underlying dynamic genuinely troubling, with one user putting it sharply by noting that what makes this AI cycle uniquely uncomfortable is that the same technology is functioning as both the lottery ticket for a tiny group and the force dismantling the fallback options for everyone else. That tension, between an unprecedented concentration of new wealth at the top and a spreading sense of professional uncertainty below it, is becoming one of the defining social textures of the current moment in tech.

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10,000 people rich, everyone else watching from outside