Axios’ Dan Primack told Chamath Palihapitiya he wasn’t afraid for his own career, but he worried about his 15-year-old daughter’s generation and its path to stable employment. The billionaire investor answered with a question of his own: “Are you saying that you think she’s just going to be unemployed and a ward of the state?”
The response was an over-the-top way of rejecting the premise. Palihapitiya said the AI job apocalypse may make for an “incredible headline,” but he argued the case is not rooted in “patterns of the past.” He also told Primack, “I think it’s great to spark a debate.” Both halves belong in the record: he engaged with the question and then said the history does not support it.
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His argument is that technology has historically multiplied the number of things a person does in a day rather than removing the person. “I suspect if you just trend it, that 35 things now goes to 300 things over the next thousand years,” he said. “There’s going to be more ways in which we allocate time.”
Palihapitiya co-hosts the “All-In” podcast and runs Social Capital. He is also chief executive of 8090, an AI software company that announced a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce (CRM) on June 26, 2026, two days after the Axios interview was published.
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He is not alone in the position. MIT researchers who collected thousands of worker evaluations of workplace tasks described AI automation, in a paper first posted in April 2026, as a continuum between “crashing waves” that surge abruptly over small sets of tasks and “rising tides” that spread more slowly and broadly. In May 2026, Sam Altman said he had expected more damage by now: “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.” Jeff Bezos has made a similar case, arguing the technology gives workers a bigger tool rather than taking the work away.
Since the interview ran, the two series of data points that would settle it either way have moved slightly in his direction.
Job openings in the information sector, the Bureau of Labor Statistics category covering software publishing, data processing, and telecommunications, stood at 89,000 in June 2026 and 96,000 in July, the most recent month the BLS has published. Indeed’s Hiring Lab index of U.S. software development postings read 73.6 on the day the interview was published and 76.6 on Sept. 11, 2026.
The levels are the other half of that picture, and they cut the other way. Information-sector openings were 157,000 in July 2025, so the category is running at roughly three-fifths of where it stood a year earlier. Indeed, it benchmarks its index to Feb. 1, 2020, at 100, which puts software development postings about 23% below their pre-pandemic level, while postings across all categories sit slightly above it. Hiring in the corner of the economy closest to the technology has not collapsed since June. It has also not recovered.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Barchart.com