“The biggest problem in this country is [AI] will raise the standard of living of the average person, but the people involved are likely to get 10, 100 times wealthier than they already are,” Karp told Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on the MDMeets podcast. “That’s a problem for society.”

Karp estimated AI could make him “20x wealthier,” implying a fortune approaching $300 billion. Middle-class workers, he said, might simply see their salaries double over the next decade. Karp slammed the disparity as a “complete decoupling of unimaginable wealth and normal wealth.”

For Karp, the problem isn’t just the scale of the wealth—it’s who is likely to accumulate it.

“It’s done by people you don’t really relate to, like very oddly shaped IQ specimens that you probably wouldn’t want to have over for dinner,” Karp said. “And if they were over for dinner you’d have nothing to talk to them about, and vice versa.”

Many of the same people who stand to benefit the most from AI are also overselling its promise, he added: “The overselling of AI in this country is really somewhat disconcerting, but it’s also depressing because you don’t have to do it.”

Income inequality has been widening for generations—and 2025 was a record-breaking year for billionaire wealth

Wealth inequality has been a topic of debate for decades, with the richest households capturing an ever-larger share of economic gains, while wage growth for many workers has remained comparatively modest. 

The AI boom has only accelerated that trend. In 2025, global billionaire wealth surged by over 16%—three times faster than the previous five-year average—to $18.3 trillion, its highest level in history, according to Oxfam.

No one has embodied that explosion in wealth more than Elon Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s fortune currently stands at roughly $833 billion after he briefly became the world’s first trillionaire earlier this year.

The scale of that wealth is almost difficult to comprehend. 

Oxfam estimated that someone with a $1 trillion fortune could pay a 10% wealth tax—roughly $100 billion—and still remain among the richest people on Earth. The organization also estimated that $100 billion would be enough to lift more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty for a year.

Even Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink share Karp’s concerns about workers being left behind

Karp hasn’t been the only leader to sound the alarm about rising income inequality.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whose net worth is estimated at $1.3 billion, warned earlier this year that AI risks leaving much of the world behind if its benefits remain concentrated among a small number of winners.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain,” Fink said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Early gains are flowing to the owners of models, owners of data and owners of infrastructure,” Fink added. “The open question: What happens to everyone else if AI does to white-collar workers what globalization did to blue-collar workers? We need to confront that today directly. It is not about the future. The future is now.” 

Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton—often dubbed the “Godfather of AI”—has voiced similar concerns.

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said last year. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, however, has taken a more measured view. While he questioned some of the rhetoric surrounding inequality, he has acknowledged many lower-income Americans face hardships.

“If you were the average citizen here and you say, ‘These wealthy people are getting unbelievably wealthy, and this segment’s been left behind,’ that’s kind of annoying.”

He added to Axios that “we have, in fact, left the lower-income folks behind.”