Tobias Lütke in 2015. Photo by Union Eleven/Wikimedia Commons.

Canadian billionaire Tobias Lütke recently made headlines after taking to social media to endorse the idea that the rich should have more votes than everyone else and that anyone dependent on the state—like pensioners—should have none. Lütke was miffed that citizens overwhelmingly rejected Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s proposal to expand the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport to accommodate jets in a public consultation with federal politicians. Reactions to Lütke’s comments were swift and uniformly negative, particularly in Canada. Whether coming from the left or right, people didn’t take kindly to the idea of the ultra-rich telling them who should and shouldn’t be allowed to vote. As a computer programmer and CEO of Shopify, a global e-commerce company with a market cap of $160 billion, Lütke’s views mirror those of other tech bros like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman who routinely dismiss democracy to boost their own idiosyncratic brands of libertarian authoritarianism. They justify such exclusions on the basis of their own technical, entrepreneurial, and financial success. As Lütke remarked on X, “let people with a stake in the future decide.”

At one level, Lütke’s views can be easily dismissed as the self-interested rantings of a privileged and entitled individual. Lütke, whose net worth is estimated at around $10 billion, seems unaware of the most obvious irony in his argument about who has earned a stake in the future: his apparent assumption that the tech sector has been free of dependence on the state. In fact, decades of government investment in early research acted as the foundational precursor to many important innovations—GPS, the Internet—as well as the modern tech sector itself. But at another level Lütke’s views typify what many members of the uber wealthy have always thought about themselves and what their role should be in influencing government. The only real difference with Lütke’s recent comments is that he uttered them publicly. His outburst is an opportunity to scrutinize how wealth affects........

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