You’ll Own Nothing and Call a Waymo

How Silicon Valley is building the access economy that Davos only theorized

In 2016, a Danish politician named Ida Auken published an essay on the World Economic Forum’s website. She described life in 2030: no car, no house, no appliances — everything accessed on demand through shared services. She called it a thought experiment. The internet called it a threat. The phrase that escaped from it — “you’ll own nothing and be happy” — became a fixture of populist outrage aimed at Davos elites scheming in the Swiss Alps.

The outrage was aimed at the wrong people.

The ownership-optional future Auken sketched isn’t being built by European bureaucrats at a ski resort conference. It’s being built in Mountain View, California, by a subsidiary of Alphabet, funded with $16 billion in venture capital, at a $126 billion valuation. It’s called Waymo. And it is currently expanding into 20 American cities.

A Solution Looking for a Problem

Start with the basic question that rarely gets asked: what problem does Waymo actually solve?

Not a car problem. Americans own roughly 290 million registered vehicles. Car ownership is embedded in U.S. infrastructure so deeply that the entire built environment assumes it. The “problem” Waymo addresses is concentrated in dense urban cores where parking is expensive and ride-hailing is already functional. That is a real inconvenience. It is not a crisis demanding a $126 billion solution.

The public isn’t convinced either. AAA’s 2025 survey found that 61% of American drivers are still afraid of self-driving cars, with only 13% expressing trust in them. In Phoenix — where Waymo has operated since 2020 — half of Uber users who are offered a Waymo choose not to take it. After five years in the most favorable test market available, the product still can’t clear a coin-flip on consumer preference.

And then there’s Austin. In 2025, a Waymo robotaxi blocked an ambulance responding to an emergency call, unable to navigate the situation and unwilling to yield. It wasn’t a near-miss — it was a documented failure of a system deployed on public roads, in a city where Waymo’s own data shows it is already suppressing driver wages. The company’s response was characteristically corporate: an acknowledgment, a process note, a forward reference to software improvements. The ambulance was delayed. No one was held accountable. That is what it looks like when a $126 billion market-manufacturing exercise meets the actual physical world.

The Workers Doing the Math

The corporate message is consistent: robotaxis don’t eliminate jobs, they transform them. Waymo’s co-CEO said in March that the company “hasn’t eliminated jobs” in its markets. The industry line is that drivers become remote operators, fleet technicians, incident coordinators.

The data runs a different calculation.

Between July 2024 and July 2025, hourly pay for rideshare drivers fell in every city where robotaxis operated, even as national driver earnings rose. San Francisco saw hourly wages drop 6.9% year-over-year. Austin fell 5.3%. Los Angeles drivers saw monthly earnings fall 18.4% over the same period. In San Francisco, total monthly earnings held roughly flat — because drivers worked more hours to compensate for the lower rate. That is not job preservation. That is income compression disguised as resilience.

The new roles Waymo creates — remote monitoring, sensor calibration, data labeling — are fewer, more technical, and largely remote. They don’t need to be based in Austin or Detroit. They live in Mountain View. Meanwhile, driving has functioned as accessible entry-level work for decades: flexible, no degree required, available to immigrants and workers in economic transition. That access point is being narrowed, and the replacement roles won’t absorb the same population. Researchers estimate roughly 3.5 million driving jobs are at risk from automation over the next decade. Waymo alone isn’t responsible for that number. But Waymo at $126 billion, in 20 cities, is a meaningful part of the mechanism.

Where the Money Goes

When a human rideshare driver completes a trip, the fare circulates locally. The driver pays local taxes, spends at local businesses, supports local housing. The economic activity has roots.

When a Waymo completes a trip, the fare routes to Alphabet in Mountain View. Fleet maintenance creates some local work, but the architecture of the service is designed to extract revenue from communities, not circulate within them. Cities literally pitching Waymo to come to their markets may find themselves hosting a transit service that captures rider spending while contributing minimally to local economic velocity. It’s the same math that hollowed out retail when e-commerce ate it. The convenience was real. The displacement was also real.

The Davos Connection, Done Correctly

There is no conspiracy. Waymo is not executing a WEF directive. But the direction of travel is worth naming plainly.

The subscription-access model — pay per use, own nothing, depend on platforms — is not a fringe idea pushed by globalists in a mountain resort. It is the dominant business model of the most valuable companies on earth. You don’t own your software, your music, or your movies. The WEF didn’t build that world. Apple, Adobe, and Netflix did. Waymo is the next iteration: you don’t own your transportation.

That may produce real benefits. Robotaxis are measurably safer than average human drivers in controlled conditions. Lower per-mile costs could expand mobility access for people who can’t drive. But “there are benefits” is not a complete answer to “who bears the costs.” The benefits flow primarily to riders and Alphabet shareholders. The costs flow to 4.4 million working Americans whose labor is being automated at a pace calibrated by venture capital return targets, not social policy.

The Davos crowd didn’t dream this up. They just had the honesty to say it out loud.