‘I’m in favor of taxes,’ says Nvidia’s Jensen Huang—but he doesn’t agree with Bill Gates on his plan to slow an AI fallout

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is open to ideas about how to share the massive wealth being generated by the AI boom.

He’s created billionaires on his executive team, personally ensures his staff are competitively paid, and is “perfectly fine” with proposals to tax the ultra-wealthy more.

But he disagrees with a proposal from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to tax robots and AI tokens.

Gates resurfaced his suggestion in an essay this week, writing: “Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings.

But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense.

The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.” The entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist also suggested that governments will need the funds.

Gates figures that if AI takes the jobs of humans, then state revenues from income tax will drop.

“A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net,” Gates explained.

Huang disagrees.

In an interview with Fox Business’s The Claman Countdown , the chipmaker boss said: “I love the heck out of Bill … but I don’t see what he sees.

I see something very, very different.

And so my remedies will be a little different.” Huang added: “I’m in favor of taxes.

And I think that … for anybody who is productive, it’s a great way for us to contribute back to society and the economy.

But the fact of the matter is, there are probably lots of different ways to approach this.” Gates—a self-professed AI optimist—had a markedly more cautious tone in his latest op-ed.