Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, whose company commands a market capitalization near $154 billion, told his social media followers this week that a tax-tiered voting system—one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax—would be a “good system.”
That two-word endorsement, dropped into a viral thread, has reignited a debate over wealth, power, and democracy that most Americans thought was settled more than a century ago.
The proposal would invert the founding American principle of “no taxation without representation” into something closer to “no representation without taxation”—and specifically, high taxation. Reactions online split sharply: Some framed it as a provocative thought experiment about aligning fiscal responsibility with political voice, while others called it a naked attempt to legitimize plutocracy by giving billionaires and multimillionaires a formal, multiplied vote over the laws that govern everyone else.
But it also revealed that America is grappling with a political economy debate, as a frozen housing market and an entrenched wealthy baby boomer demographic have many, not just Lütke, arguing that something big needs to change.
How the thread started
The exchange began with a provocation from Lütke: Pension recipients should have their financial futures “locked in and guaranteed,” but in return would be reclassified as “dependents” and lose the right to vote—the same way minors can’t vote. A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk,” proposed a sliding scale: zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more. The pitch was framed as fairness—reward “representation” for those who “foot the bill” through taxation.
That was the good system that Lütke endorsed.
To be clear, under this proposed system, the disenfranchised bloc would be enormous. It would encompass all retirees living on Social Security and pension income, students, caregivers, disabled Americans, and millions of low-wage workers who owe no net federal income tax after deductions and credits. Meanwhile, a small population of high earners would receive up to five votes each—a fivefold multiplier on political power concentrated in the hands of people already holding disproportionate economic power.
This is not a new idea—it’s an old, discredited one
Tying the right to vote to wealth or tax contribution has a name: “census suffrage,” or property-qualified voting. In fact, it was the dominant system for the majority of early modern history. Across much of 19th-century Europe and in parts of the early United States, only property owners or taxpayers above a certain threshold could cast a ballot. The earliest democracies in history, in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, likewise limited voting to property owners.
The dawning of the 20th century, though, coincided with several universal suffrage movements that spent decades dismantling those systems precisely because they entrenched the political power of the already wealthy and locked out workers, women, and minorities from any say in the laws governing them. Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, told Fortune recently that the housing market showed signs of returning to an “early 1900s” status quo, but this surely was not what she meant.
Perhaps ironically, Lütke’s tweetstorm began as a response to Jordan Grimes bemoaning the current crisis conditions in the housing market. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Laura Waxmann had reported on classic NIMBY (not in my backyard) activism as hundreds of San Francisco Marina residents swamped a town hall to protest what for them was an “uncomfortably tall, 22 & 18 story project at the low-slung neighborhood’s waterfront.” The excessive influence of old homeowners has been dubbed an “oldigarchy” by Yale professor Samuel Moyn, who advocated in his recent book Gerontocracy in America for something like the reverse of Lütke’s policy: extending the voting age down to an ever-younger population to counterbalance the tyranny of NIMBY boomers.
The irony critics can’t ignore
Lütke’s own track record with voting rights makes the endorsement especially pointed. In 2022, Shopify shareholders approved a “Founder Share” structure that guarantees Lütke at least 40% of the company’s voting power regardless of how much equity he actually owns—a mechanism governance watchdogs criticized as an entrenchment device that decouples voting power from ownership stake. Glass Lewis, a proxy advisory firm, publicly flagged the structure as controversial when it went to a shareholder vote.
In other words, Lütke secured himself outsize, guaranteed control over his own company’s decisions—then publicly praised a system that would strip voting power from the majority of ordinary Americans in the political sphere.
Shopify did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
