The history of the United States is (and continues to be) littered with efforts to restrict voting rights to those who are already closest to the seat of power. At the nation’s founding, only white landowners could vote. As that expanded, states started doing things like issuing poll taxes to keep minority groups, low-income people, and women from exercising their right. We have, as a society, largely decided that those things are a bad idea, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly found them to be unconstitutional.

Shopify CEO Toni Lukte seems to think we should go back to giving more voting shares to those who already have the most ability to exercise power. The head of the largest e-commerce platform in the United States engaged in a back-and-forth on Twitter over the weekend where he proposed and eventually endorsed new ways to restrict voting from marginalized groups.

In response to a post complaining that older, property-owning populations are making it harder to build more housing projects in San Franciscoâa valid concern and one that actually points to the very problem of giving more power to people who are viewed as “more invested” in a community based on their access to capitalâLutke offered up an way to deal with the problem: take way the elderly’s right to vote.

“New deal: when you get your pension deal itâs locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide,” he wrote.

New deal: when you get your pension deal itâs locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.

— tobi lutke (@tobi) July 25, 2026

Figuring out why this idea is dumb and bad does not require data or well-reasoned justifications, but here are some: The median annual payout of government pensions is $33,310 for federal employees and $24,930 for state workers. Private pensions, which are exceedingly rare thanks to the ongoing erosion of workers’ rights and unions, pay out a median benefit of $11,440 per year. That includes money that the employee contributed; it’s not just some gift handed out to people.

We kicked the pension leg of the three-legged stool of retirement (that’s Social Security, employee pensions, and personal savings) out in the 1980s to shift responsibility further onto personal savings, and now just 18% of the nation’s workforce gets a pension. Much of the money paid out by pensions is spent by retirees on things like food services and healthcare. This is because they are using the money to live. It is not luxury spending. The vast majority of pension payouts are not pushing elderly people into wealthy tax brackets; they simply keep people out of poverty.

So Lutke has primarily created a system to keep poor old people from voting, grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of pensions. Somehow, it got worse.

In response to his pitch, a person identifying themselves as a retired banking executive added a wrinkle: “What about weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay? (no income tax paid – 0 vote, $1-100k – 1 vote, $100-200k 2 votes and so on… cap it at 5 votes for $500k+. For those that constantly complain about the wealthy not paying tax/fair share they’d have nothing to worry about right? Why not reward representation of taxation and build a democracy around those that foot the bill?”

Interesting… what about weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay? (no income tax paid – 0 vote, $1-100k – 1 vote, $100-200k 2 votes and so on… cap it at 5 votes for $500k+. For those that constantly complain about the wealthy not paying tax/fair shareâ¦

— Eric Thor (@EricSThor) July 26, 2026

A normal response to that would be “Hey man, the idea that income is somehow directly correlated to productivity or even value generated isn’t true, and worker wages have been decoupled from their actual productivity for about as long as we’ve been destroying the pension system. This is just a way to give rich people more power in a direct way, rather than the slightly more indirect method of spending their money to back political campaigns.”

Instead, Lutke responded, “Good system.”

Just a really quick accounting of what this would look like: About 30% of Americans would lose the right to vote entirely. That’s about 50 million people, a majority of whom are elderly, unable to work due to a serious disability, or students. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t even really sniff $500,000 in income tax paid until you are making at least $1.2 million in annual salary (likely more given all the tools available to lower your tax burden). About 800,000 Americans report having an annual income of about $1 million, so let’s use that for napkin math purposes. About 800,000 millionaires would now have the equivalent of four million votes.

So you’ve now heavily weighted political power to the wealthy while removing the votes of marginalized groups who are already largely ignored voting blocs. Shocking to believe that would benefit Lutkeâor at least, it would if he even lived in America, which he doesn’t because he’s Canadian. In fact, he was recently Canada’s highest-paid CEO.

Not that you would believe him, because obviously people in Lutke’s tax bracket are all heavily invested in protecting one another and preserving their power (as this whole exercise shows), but don’t expect any consequence to come of this for Shopify’s CEO. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and a Shopify board member, tossed his support behind the executive’s position.

“Board member here. Tobi is the sole seeding reason that there is a Shopify, that it has prospered beyond the wildest shareholder imaginations, and that it has its stellar reputation among merchants and customers alike. Our care and appreciation couldn’t be greater!” he wrote, prompting a response from Elon Musk calling Lutke a “national treasure”âyou know, just in case it wasn’t already abundantly clear that tech leaders are intentionally pushing us toward an authoritarian state where their wealth wields even more power.

Hansson, better known on Twitter as DHH, has been keeping his name in the zeitgeist lately with some wild takes. In a post ostensibly pushing for open weights for AI models (a reasonable position), he highlighted how Anthropic’s Claude wouldn’t translate his blog post comparing Romani people to invasive wolves and saying you deal with overpopulation by shooting themâand while the “shooting” was supposed to be a metaphor for deportation, it doesn’t really come across that Hansson would object to either outcome.

Hansson has been getting increasingly racist and xenophobic for a while, and has become more and more willing to let those flags flyâespecially since there is seemingly little social penalty for it anymore, particularly on Twitter. It seems maybe some of those habits and ideas have rubbed off on Lutke. Good thing these guys don’t have inordinate amounts of power already or anything!