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To achieve the American Dream, it is no longer enough to work from nine to five. For too many years, wealth has primarily accumulated in assets, rather than in wages. 

Now, AI is transforming how our economy operates, and a wide range of voices are unifying around a shared goal: expanding worker equity ownership.  

The ownership economy has the potential to expand the ability of every citizen to own financial capital, to benefit from an upside once reserved for the rich, and to help to experience the American Dream.  

I am optimistic that with the right policies and momentum, an ownership economy can become the foundation of a new social contract between business and society—where corporate profit and economic participation reinforce one another, grounded in the principles of Inclusive Capitalism: fairness, equity, and opportunity.  Many investors, politicians, and business leaders—including big tech CEOs—increasingly recognize that as AI reshapes work and productivity, the wealth it creates must be shared broadly across society.  

In his encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” titled Encyclical on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo XIV calls on us to create an economy that values dignity, and that “instead of waiting for the benefits of growth to reach the poor, ‘eventually,’ decisions need to be taken now to ensure that growth becomes inclusive from the outset.” 

Pope Leo is far from alone in this view. Worlds away, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink similarly argued in his 2026 letter to investors that with AI driving growth in capital markets, ownership, too, must broaden. 

From historic programs like the federally-sponsored employee stock ownership plans (known as “ESOPs”) to new policies like Trump Accounts, an ownership economy is already part of our national mindset, but access must be expanded and made much easier to understand and implement.  Here are three ideas toward that end: 

Worker capital and retraining credits from AI investment funds

Business leaders closest to technological change are proposing new ways to share their economic gains with workers—whether through direct participation in market returns, or workforce development spending.  OpenAI’s proposal for a wealth fund, seeded through AI productivity gains and invested in technology companies, or even Elon Musk’s push for universal wealth, are premised on the idea that AI-driven abundance can offer capital-based alternatives to universal basic income. California Governor Gavin Newsom recently directed state agencies to study such capital mechanisms for their potential to protect workers amid loss of income and jobs to AI.

These ideas directly confront the risks of labor market dislocation and rising inequality but leave unanswered questions about how to create meaningful work and purpose. As Pope Leo XIV reminds us, “It is essential to invest in accessible education and retraining, so that the professional mobility demanded by the digital economy does not become a harsh selection between those who are able to update their skills and those who cannot.”

This gap is being addressed by some industry solutions. Verizon has established a Transition Fund for employees displaced by AI, which CEO Dan Schulman hopes will be adopted by other companies, and even evolve into sector-based transition funds supported by multiple companies. In Korea, Samsung averted a worker strike by agreeing to a profit-sharing agreement which will award employees 10.5% of operating profits from its AI chip business—a bold move investors rewarded with an 8% jump in the company’s stock price.

Public investment funds for the AI transition

Policymakers and economists are exploring national vehicles designed to help workers share in the gains of technological change.  Senator Mark Kelly has proposed a Federal trust fund as part of his AI for America framework, which would spend a portion of AI-driven profits on worker training, career support, and long-term economic investment.  Economist and Nobel Laureate Simon Johnson has proposed a dividend model in which an innovation dividend from returns on technology investment would be distributed more directly to workers and communities affected by its disruptions. Both proposals reflect the recognition that the AI transition will require new public investment frameworks to better link technological change, wealth creation, and economic participation.

From stakeholders to stockholders

To fully realize the potential of the ownership economy, we must expand employee ownership across all sizes of U.S. companies. This is crucial because it creates wealth-building opportunities for working families and also strengthens employee agency and business resilience. 

To accomplish this, organizations such as the Clinton Policy Institute are exploring new ways of financing employee buyouts of privately held companies, many of which face a succession challenge as their founders and long-time owners retire. On the other hand, larger companies, especially publicly traded ones, offer other forms of profit sharing through broad-based equity. For instance, investment firms like KKR are scaling the wealth-building potential of employee ownership across portfolio companies alongside Ownership Works, a nonprofit that supports investors to enable broad-based ownership and cultivate ownership culture at the company level.

The key is that workers across sectors and firms are able to benefit from the ownership economy. 

The business case for employee ownership

To be sure, leading companies are showing how ownership benefits everyone, from hourly workers to customers and shareholders. In one of the economy’s most disrupted sectors, several of the most successful supermarket chains—including Publix, WinCo, and Houchens Industries—are employee-owned, demonstrating unique resilience in the face of supply chain shocks, inflationary pressure and technological change.  Last year, Walmart, the country’s largest grocery retailer and employer, introduced stock grants for store managers, boosting the compensation of retail employees who will be on the frontlines of Walmart’s AI deployment strategy, and the human-AI interactions which will define the future of success. 

This model is spreading across sectors as well.  In 2024, Bank of America used equity awards to complement its efforts to improve compensation for approximately 97% of its workforce.  

Investment makes the difference 

Policy is trying to keep pace, but more needs to be done. The Biden Administration launched the Division of Employee Ownership within the Department of Labor with more than $50 million. President Trump has continued to support the Division’s mission and called for spurring greater growth of ESOPs. 

Yet, so far, bipartisan support has not unlocked the institutional capital needed to expand the ownership economy. While new policy incentives and financing mechanisms are awaited, investors should not stay on the sidelines.  

I am encouraged by how some investors are pressing ahead by tapping into promising opportunities in collaboration with State governments. States are emerging as laboratories for scaling ownership models, alongside institutional investors such as public pension funds as well as philanthropic capital. From this ongoing work, new financing pathways for broad-based ownership are taking shape among policymakers, investors, and companies, offering an early blueprint for the ownership economy where more workers participate in the wealth they help create.

In a stunning reversal, President Donald Trump on Wednesday overturned a policy decision by the Department of Homeland Security that ordered most Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to stop conducting traffic stops in light of deadly shootings in Maine and Texas. 

The decision, confirmed by a White House official, came roughly 24 hours after ICE agents had been informed of the pause on vehicle stops, and soon after Trump praised such stops as one of ICE agents’ “most important and effective Crime Fighting tools” in a social media post.

“I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming!” Trump added. Shortly afterwards, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reposted Trump’s Truth Social post, while adding that getting criminals off the street remained ICE’s top priority. 

The decision by DHS to halt traffic stops was intended to apply specifically to agents under Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch of ICE that detains and ultimately deports undocumented immigrants. An internal email obtained by TIME also shows that exceptions would be made when agents need to execute a criminal warrant on a target who is inside of a vehicle. 

The policy guidance initially came after Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine publicly urged Mullin to pause all “non-violent traffic stops” in the wake of a shooting in Biddeford, Maine that involved ICE agents. That episode had resulted in the death of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national who was not the target of a warrant. The investigation into the shooting is still ongoing. 

In a statement, Collins continued her call to halt the traffic stops, especially in light of the events in her state and Texas. “In certain emergency situations, I understand traffic stops are warranted, but to have them routinely done when we have had two recent shootings that are under investigation calls for a halt in that approach for now, ” Collins said. 

A similar incident is also under investigation in Houston, where ICE agents pursued and fatally shot 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo through the passenger window last Tuesday. DHS claimed in a statement that Araujo had rammed an ICE enforcement vehicle and attempted to run over an ICE agent. 

The back-to-back incidents signal a return of an aggressive deportation operation nationwide after a disastrous operation in Minnesota earlier this year prompted a seismic personnel shuffle and some moderate reforms: The training period for ICE agents, which had been shortened to 42 days under Kristi Noem’s leadership, was extended back to 72 days starting on July 1, and Congress gave ICE $20 million to equip its agents with body-worn cameras. 

Shrugging off a monthslong funding fight on Capitol Hill, DHS is now renewing its push to increase the number of arrests of immigrants and to expand its hiring of agents. Multiple outlets reported that immigration arrests surged to more than 10,000 people in a span of five days in late June, and White House Border Czar Tom Homan said in an interview with Fox News in May that the administration was on track to deploy 10,000 additional agents, with about 7,000 on board and 3,000 more going through training.

“Bottom line is, we are not gonna give up on President Trump’s promise on mass deportations,” Homan said.

The big-screen prestige spectacle is in danger. Now that the smartest, most interesting pictures tend to be smaller, independent projects—and the studios, to the extent they exist anymore, have begun pouring their resources into fodder for their streaming platforms—fewer people over 40 or 50 care to go out to the movies anymore, and you can’t blame them. What’s out there for them? A big-screen extravaganza like The Odyssey, made by a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, who’s adamant about preserving the communal watching experience—and one who’s committed to shooting the old-fashioned way, on film—seems to be our only hope.

But instead of being an answer to our prayers, The Odyssey ends up being just another reason for despair. In the runup to its release, The Odyssey seems to have inspired more anxiety than actual anticipation. Lovers of classical literature have been asking, Will it hew close enough to Homer’s vision? Or, perhaps more accurately, Will it hew close enough to their vision of Homer’s vision? On the right, pundits have bemoaned what they see as the pure fact that you simply cannot have a Black Helen of Troy (she’s played in the film by Lupita Nyong’o), though it’s hard to fathom that the most controversial trait of a woman who’s been hatched from a swan’s egg should be the color of her skin. The Odyssey has already inspired so much chitter-chatter that its actual release was poised to be a letdown in comparison. But just wait till you actually see this eye-glazing dud of a movie.

Matt Damon, earnestly bewhiskered, stars as Odysseus, the King of Ithaca and a revered warrior, who’s working hard—or so it seems—to get home to his wife, Penelope (a reasonably dignified Anne Hathaway), and the grown son he has never gotten a chance to know, Telemachus (Tom Holland, so bland he’s practically unreadable). Odysseus has been gone for 20 years: The first 10 of those were eaten up by military exploits, chiefly the Trojan War—Nolan’s movie, like Homer’s tale, begins at the end of that war, with a giant wooden horse half-sunk in the sand, a pretty direct reference to the beached and forlorn Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. Throughout The Odyssey, we’ll get flashback glimpses of just how violent the sack of Troy, led by Odysseus, was. The suggestion is that he has done some Really Bad Stuff, though the battle scenes, while elaborate, are so tastefully un-bloody that it’s hard to feel there’s anything at stake.

It will take Odysseus 10 years to get home, and though he and a gang of surviving warriors set sail from Troy near the beginning of the movie, he will ultimately return without his men. (They’re played by an assortment of actors including Himesh Patel and Elliot Page, though most of them blur into a somewhat faceless mass of dudes in Marvin the Martian helmets.) The challenges they face on their journey are many: After a lone sheep leads them into a cave, they encounter a one-eyed giant, the Cyclops (Bill Irwin). Odysseus, in a supposed act of bravery, blinds the giant by stabbing his one good eye, and his men turn against him, grumbling that he has angered Poseidon, the god of the sea, the Cyclops’ father. And sure enough, the ocean tosses their tiny, rough-hewn wooden ships hither and thither. Other stuff happens on other islands: At one stop, the men anger the Sun God by eating his cattle, despite Odysseus' bossy warning not to do so. At another, the enchantress Circe gives the hungry men—though not Odysseus—a generous meal, but only as an excuse to turn them into swine. This is the finest scene in the movie, perhaps the only truly good one: as Circe, Samantha Morton seems to have dropped in from a different, better picture, uttering a chilly incantation as she massages the men’s dirty, meaty faces into visages with pig snouts. Later, she’ll tell Odysseus that all she was really doing was revealing the true nature of men. It’s hard to argue with her.

As this arduous journey continues, Damon’s Odysseus comes to look more and more like Nick Nolte’s mugshot, with added facial hair. He’s exhausted; he’s lonely for his wife—but not too lonely, seeing as Charlize Theron’s comely nymph Calypso will hold him hostage on her island for a total of seven years. (Theron is a luminous presence, but the movie kicks into snooze territory during these dreamy beach sequences—there are far too many of them scattered throughout.) Every once in a while, the goddess Athena (Zendaya) will appear at Odysseus’ side to judge his actions, mostly by offering a scowl of disapproval, the sort of face a wife makes when her husband loads the dishwasher wrong.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Hathaway’s Penelope is weary for a different reason: though she’s holding out hope that her husband Odysseus is still alive, she must fend off 108 boorish suitors—they’re like Airbnb guests who refuse to leave. These men, each aspiring to become king, hope to bully her into marrying. Chief among them is the aggressively reptilian Antinous—Robert Pattinson plays him with a plastered-on leer. Hathaway’s costumes and jewelry are the saving grace of these scenes: at one point she wears a gown that falls around her in lustrous teal folds, a testament to the fact that Nolan does at least strive to hire the best craftspeople—not just anybody can dye fabric to look this luminous. (The costume designer here is Ellen Mirojnick.)

But unlike Odysseus, who survives being waylaid by giants, sorceresses, nymphs, and numerous other distractions, Nolan himself becomes dragged down by the details of his Odyssey. The poem, packed with events, with description, with magic and all manner of deceptions, is episodic by nature. How do you make this story flow and glide on-screen? Maybe you do it not by trying to pack everything in, but by cutting away, by focusing on the most potent, exciting, and moving details. You might do something along the lines of what Uberto Pasolini did with his underseen 2024 picture The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, which takes the final stretch of The Odyssey and weaves it into a graceful, moving whole. It doesn’t help that Nolan’s Odyssey—even when viewed, as he hopes audiences will see it, in IMAX—looks muddy and underwhelming. The Return was shot in Greece and Italy, and its landscapes are part of its vitality; cinematographer Marius Panduru made Ithaca look like a place worth coming home to. In Nolan’s Odyssey, shot by his frequent collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema in a host of locations including Italy, Greece, Morocco, Iceland, and Scotland, almost every landscape—a churning sea here, a set of cliffs there—just looks like business as usual, only bigger. There’s soil, but you don’t feel its texture; there’s sun, but you don’t feel its warmth. When Damon’s Odysseus is greeted by his ancient, dying dog Argos, who has waited patiently and poignantly for his return, Argos’s little tail wriggles mechanically as he takes his last breath. Odysseus expresses a flash of grief, and then it’s on to the next beat. There isn’t a minute to lose here, even in a runtime of nearly three hours.

There are other problems, among them Nolan’s failure to make use of Nyong’o's gifts. The issue isn't that her casting plays into any of the advance criticism the movie has received; it's that it barely feels like a choice at all, representing not a burst of imagination but a failure of nerve. Nyong’o plays two roles here, that of Helen and of Clytemnestra, Helen’s twin sister. But there’s so much decorously, Homerically faithful story swirling around these two figures, glimpsed mostly in passing—and so many men around them, doing seriously manly stuff—that neither role registers. Through no fault of Nyong’o’s—who’s both accomplished and, though it should go without saying, uncommonly beautiful—these are almost blink-and-you-miss-them portrayals, the kind of thing a director can magnanimously hand out like candy. We’re supposed to applaud Nolan for bravery in casting, but the result comes off as tokenism, surely the opposite of what he intended.

But then, there’s little in The Odyssey that breathes. It churns so dutifully toward its predictable conclusions—summed up roughly as “War dehumanizes men!” and “Civilization, now as in Odysseus’ time, is on the brink!”—that you begin to wonder if it wouldn’t be a better use of your time to just stay home and read The Odyssey.  We want and need more movie artistry—and more dedication to the craft, which Nolan, no matter what you think of him, surely espouses. But a movie still needs to add up to something you actually want to watch, not just a testament to a filmmaker’s solemn dedication to the hallowed tradition of filmmaking. We’ve reached a point where we get so few extravagant, ambitious studio movies that we’re expected to collapse with gratitude whenever we're presented with one. That’s not opening ourselves to what movies can be; it’s succumbing to a kind of hostage taking. No matter how endangered the movies become, we still get to choose what moves and delights us. Why settle for less? It’s our job to make demands. Otherwise, we’re nothing more than spoils of war.

Correction, July 15

The original version of this story misspelled an actor’s first name. He is Elliot Page, not Elliott.