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Two words from a tech billionaire just reopened a fight over democracy that many assumed was settled a century ago. Tobi Lütke, chief executive of Shopify, a company worth close to $154 billion, spent the weekend arguing on X that some people should lose the right to vote entirely. Retirees. Low earners. Anyone who doesn’t pay income tax. The backlash, reported by CBC News, was immediate.
The whole thing started over housing, not politics. Lütke was responding to frustration about a stalled housing market when he floated a new deal: pension recipients should have their financial futures locked in and guaranteed. In exchange, he wrote, they would be reclassified as dependents and lose their vote, the same way minors can’t vote. One reply took the idea much further.
An account posting as “Eric Thor,” a self-described retired banking executive, proposed weighting every vote by income tax paid: zero votes for anyone who owes nothing, one vote for incomes up to a set threshold, scaling upward until it caps out for the highest earners. Lütke replied with two words: “Good system.” Those two words are still spreading across social media.
This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team for accuracy and clarity.
The Plan Would Give Five Votes to Six-Figure Earners and Zero to Everyone Else
Under the proposal, anyone with no net income tax bill would get zero votes. Earners between $1 and $100,000 would receive one vote. The scale climbs from there in stages until it caps at five votes for anyone paying tax on $500,000 or more each year. A single top earner’s ballot, under this system, would count five times over.
The disenfranchised group under this plan would be enormous. It would include retirees living on pension income, students, stay-at-home caregivers, disabled people, and millions of low-wage workers who owe no net income tax after deductions and credits. Meanwhile, a small slice of high earners would gain a fivefold multiplier on their political power, concentrating influence in hands that already hold outsized economic control.
Tying voting rights to wealth or tax contribution isn’t new. It has a name: census suffrage, or property-qualified voting. For most of early modern history, only property owners or taxpayers above a set threshold could cast a ballot, a system used across 19th-century Europe and parts of the early United States. Ancient Greece and Rome ran the same way. Universal suffrage movements spent decades tearing it down.
Lütke’s Own Company Guarantees Him 40% of the Vote No Matter What He Owns
Lütke’s history with voting power makes his endorsement land differently. In 2022, Shopify shareholders approved a Founder Share structure that locks in 40% of the company’s total voting power for Lütke, his family, and his affiliates, regardless of how much stock he actually owns. The structure survives even if his equity stake shrinks to a sliver of the company.
Three proxy advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services, Glass Lewis, and Egan-Jones, urged shareholders to reject the plan before the vote. Glass Lewis specifically flagged the arrangement as a governance risk that decouples voting power from actual ownership stake. Shareholders approved it anyway, carried in part by the supervoting shares Lütke already controlled heading into the meeting. One governance expert said afterward that the vote had effectively become a bet on Lütke personally, more than on the company itself.
In other words, Lütke secured guaranteed, outsized control over his own company years before he ever weighed in on this debate. Then, on a Saturday afternoon, he publicly praised a system that would strip voting power from the majority of ordinary people in a political system he doesn’t run. Commenters were quick to point out the contradiction, and it kept resurfacing throughout the weekend.
A Yale Professor Already Proposed the Opposite Fix, and It’s Gaining Traction
The frustration that sparked Lütke’s comments hasn’t gone away. The exchange began as a reaction to a stalled housing market, where a small population of older, wealthier homeowners frequently blocks new development near where they live. Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, has noted that current housing conditions increasingly resemble the era before modern suffrage protections existed.
Yale law professor Samuel Moyn has been studying the same imbalance from a different angle for years. In his book, Gerontocracy in America, he argues that older, wealthier voters already dominate policy, real estate, and the tax code at the expense of younger generations. His proposed fix runs in the opposite direction of Lütke’s: lower the voting age further and give young people
Two proposals now sit on opposite ends of the same argument. One would strip the vote from anyone who doesn’t pay income tax and hand extra ballots to the wealthy. The other would extend the vote to more young people to counter the power that wealth and age already buy. Only one of these has already been tried before, and history is the reason it was abandoned.