How To Turn Around Public Opinion About Tech: It's Not Just About Philanthropy

By Stephen Jordan

As of this writing, the eight richest people in the world all hail from the tech sector. Tech stocks are booming. So why do Americans have such a dim view of AI and the industry?

The technology industry has produced extraordinary wealth, powerful companies, and tools that billions of people use every day. It has also produced a level of public suspicion that should concern anyone who cares about the sector's long-term influence. The question is no longer whether technology will shape society. It already does. The question is whether the people building it will earn enough trust to keep doing so.

This isn't a bash session. It's worth acknowledging what many of these leaders have actually accomplished. They did not inherit their wealth. They built products that billions of people voluntarily use every day. They spent decades operating at the frontier of human capability and used those skills to create companies, jobs, and technologies that have made the world more productive, more connected, and in many respects more free. The instinct to ask, "Why should I share what I earned?" shouldn't be interpreted as just greed or selfishness. It is a reasonable human response to watching others try to claim credit for—or simply take—what you built.

However, the failure to engage with the social consequences of technological change is not merely a moral problem. It is a strategic one. It's amazing how some incredibly smart people that I respect a lot can be so dumb about this.

Public distrust is real, and it is not confined to one political party or ideology. Concerns about artificial intelligence, privacy, children's exposure to technology, workforce displacement, energy consumption, and market concentration have become mainstream. Communities increasingly question whether the benefits of innovation are being distributed fairly and whether the costs are being imposed on people who never agreed to bear them.

Some libertarians instinctively recoil at the suggestion that successful entrepreneurs owe society anything beyond obeying the law. That instinct is understandable. Wealth created through voluntary exchange is fundamentally different from wealth obtained through political privilege.

Yet there is a danger in confusing economic success with political legitimacy.

Markets do not operate in a vacuum. Property rights, contract enforcement, entrepreneurial freedom, and limited regulation all depend upon public trust in the institutions that sustain them. When large numbers of people conclude that a system is unfair, they do not respond by reading Hayek or Friedman. They demand investigations, restrictions, taxes, lawsuits, and regulation.

The choice is not between civic responsibility and freedom. It is between exercising responsibility voluntarily or having constraints imposed involuntarily.

The most successful industrialists of the last Gilded Age eventually learned that preserving capitalism required demonstrating that capitalism served society broadly. Today's technology leaders face the same challenge.

Viewed through that lens, engaging with the social consequences of technological change is not an act of charity. It is an act of enlightened self-interest.

Some of the distrust stems from the scale of the industry's success. A small number of firms and founders now occupy a position of extraordinary economic and cultural influence. Elon Musk may become the world's first trillionaire. Technology companies account for roughly one-third of the S&P 500's market capitalization. Their products shape how people communicate, work, shop, learn, and increasingly how they think.

None of this means technology has been a social failure. On the contrary, the sector has delivered enormous gains in productivity, convenience, communication, and opportunity.

The trouble begins when leaders speak as though innovation alone should satisfy their public engagement contributions.

People who live near energy-intensive data centers, who worry about their jobs being automated, or who fear their children are growing up in unhealthy digital environments do not experience technological progress as an abstraction. They experience it as a set of tradeoffs.

Some of these concerns are amplified by the industry's own rhetoric. When executives like Matthew Prince, publicly discuss eliminating large categories of jobs, replacing human labor, or disrupting entire sectors of the economy, they may impress investors while alarming everyone else. It should not be surprising that people become skeptical when they hear leaders celebrate efficiencies that may come at their expense.

Many think philanthropy is the best solution to gain social buy in. The problem? Who says tech leaders would do a good job giving away their money?

Philanthropy only matters if it is credible, humble, and connected to real human needs.

Large fortunes do not automatically produce wisdom about social change.

Bill Gates is among the most serious philanthropists of the modern era, yet even the Gates Foundation has faced sustained criticism over some of its agricultural initiatives in Africa. Critics argued that certain programs increased dependence on expensive inputs and failed to deliver all of the promised benefits. Whether one agrees with those criticisms or not, the larger lesson remains: even the best-funded good intentions can miss the mark.

The last time America generated this much wealth this quickly, the beneficiaries were called robber barons. Tech leaders do not want the backlash these people generated. They were excoriated in the court of public opinion, labor laws were passed, and their arguments about how much they were improving society went unheard. Ultimately, many of their businesses were broken up.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others eventually developed a tradition of organized philanthropy that still shapes American civic life more than a century later, but they are remembered by what their companies did under their leadership, as much as by their philanthropy..

The lesson is not that today's technology leaders should not model Gilded Age philanthropy - they could do a great deal of good potentially. The lesson is that great fortunes become socially sustainable when they are paired with institutional humility, long-term thinking, and visible public benefit.

So what should technology leaders do?

First, rebuild trust through character rather than communication.

Public relations campaigns cannot compensate for behavior. Leaders who want trust must be transparent, consistent, and willing to acknowledge mistakes early rather than deny them until forced to respond. Hypocrisy destroys credibility faster than almost any technological failure.

Second, approach social engagement with humility.

Not every social problem requires a technological solution. Sometimes direct assistance is more valuable than grand theories of transformation. Scholarships, disaster relief funds, workforce retraining, housing assistance, childcare support, and local institutions may not sound visionary, but they often produce more measurable good than attempts to engineer society from the top down.

Third, learn from history.

The most successful philanthropists did not simply spend money. They built institutions capable of outlasting them. Their greatest achievements were often not individual projects but durable structures that strengthened civic life for generations.

Fourth, develop industry-wide policies that put people first.

Individual acts of generosity cannot solve structural challenges created by an entire sector.

The airline industry improved safety through shared standards, incident reporting, and professional norms. Medicine developed ethical codes because the power entrusted to physicians required corresponding responsibilities. The car industry has made a commitment to safety measures standard. Technology is rapidly reaching a similar point.

A technology-sector equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath or Johnson and Johnson Credo may sound ambitious, but the underlying principle is simple: do no unnecessary harm, and demonstrate that commitment through practice rather than rhetoric.

If technology leaders want the public to continue granting them extraordinary freedom, they must earn that freedom continuously. They must show that wealth creation and social responsibility are not opposing forces but complementary ones. They must demonstrate that innovation can improve lives without treating communities as collateral damage, and that philanthropy is not a shield against criticism but evidence of stewardship.

The lesson of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Peabody is not that great fortunes should be apologized for. It is that great fortunes create great responsibilities. The industrial leaders who understood this helped build institutions that still shape American life more than a century later. The technology leaders of today have the opportunity to do the same.

The future may well belong to the companies that innovate fastest. But history will remember the leaders who paired innovation with legitimacy, prosperity with stewardship, and power with trust.