Jeff Bezos predicts AI could let families live on one paycheck. Amodei and Gates warn of a rougher road

Detailed summary

Bezos thinks AI could end the need for two earners. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Bill Gates warn of a harder transition.

In April 2007, two months before the first iPhone went on sale, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave Apple’s new phone little hope. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” he told USA Today.

He had company. Critics mocked the device’s features, from its touchscreen keyboard to its built-in apps. It cost $499 to $599, lacked 3G and corporate email support, and had no third-party app store at launch.

PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak went further, writing in March 2007 that Apple “should pull the plug on the iPhone” and calling the handset business a “buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies.” Fortune later collected the worst of those calls. Apple now ranks No. 4 on the 2026 Fortune 500.

The objections to the iPhone sound familiar in 2026: early technical flaws, high costs, doubts about usefulness for serious work, and the disruption of established industry norms. Generative AI draws the same charges, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is betting the skeptics are wrong again.

Speaking with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Blue Origin’s factory floor in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for the network’s 30th anniversary, Bezos predicted that AI-driven productivity gains could let two-income households live on one paycheck, or let workers support a family on a three-day week.

“You’re not going to need to have a two-earner household. If you want it, fine. If you don’t want to have it, one of the people might drop out,” Bezos said, as Fortune reported.

Instead of mass unemployment, he expects a labor shortage, with employers competing for people who can afford to work less. “It’s going to actually be difficult to hire people,” he said. He made a similar argument in June at VivaTech in Paris, where he said AI will create more jobs, not fewer.

The stakes are large. In 2025, both parents worked full-time in 52% of U.S. different-sex couples with children under 18, up from 31% in 1975, according to Pew Research Center.

Bezos has money behind the prediction.

Opening of the article, excerpted from Fortune. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.