Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke calls pensioners ‘dependents’ who shouldn’t get to vote — then agreed those who pay $500,000 in tax should get 5 votes

The thread got worse from there. Two hours later, an account posting as Eric Thor proposed weighing every citizen’s vote by income tax paid: zero votes if you owe nothing, one vote if you pay up to $100,000; up to 5 votes if you’re a top taxpayer paying $500,000 or more each year. In the U.S., that would only apply to those earning millions per year.

Lütke’s answer ran two words. “Good system.”

Lütke runs one of the most valuable companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange and sits at No. 302 on Forbes’ 2026 billionaires list. Shopify, an Ottawa-based payments giant, also trades on the Nasdaq.

His pension post goes after retirees. Anyone whose retirement income is locked in should stop voting, he wrote, whether or not they still owe tax. If he’s speaking about the U.S., that would include 53.8 million retired workers the Social Security Administration counted in January.

The tiered plan he called a “good system” would draw its line somewhere else. It hands zero votes to any of the 40% of American households with no federal income tax bill — roughly 76 million of them in 2025, by Tax Policy Center estimates.

If your pension is locked in, or the standard deduction and credits wipe out what you owe, you’d be on the wrong side of Lütke’s line.

What Lütke was replying to

This online dust-up started during a conversation about two residential towers planned in San Francisco’s Marina district.

According to a local ABC station, roughly 400 residents turned out to an evening community meeting on July 23, many to protest a project that some in the mostly low-rise neighborhood feel would be too tall.

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Laura Waxmann posted from the meeting. She attached a picture of the room, which was packed with mostly older people. She explained that planning officials had told the room the project complies with local and state code.

“We need to change the laws, or we need to change the lawmakers,” local resident Lori Brooke of the Cow Hollow Association said, per Waxmann’s reporting.

Jordan Grimes ,legislative director at the Bay Area conservation and housing nonprofit Greenbelt Alliance, quoted Waxmann’s post and added his own thoughts.

He wrote: “Ban corporate rentals and complain about hedge funds all you want, but the housing crisis stays unfixed until somebody deals with the power these residents hold over local government.”

Lütke was replying to that post, and everything after it sits in the same thread.

Grimes was making a point about the power held by residents who choose to show up to such meetings (although it’s not clear if they will succeed in halting the project).

Brooke suggested changing the status quote by electing different lawmakers, but Lütke proposed something much more radical: change the voters.

Who actually pays no federal income tax

The Tax Policy Center has profiled the non-paying households for years. Around 70% of them live on less than $75,000 a year, and nearly half get by on under $40,000. They owe nothing because the standard deduction and credits like the child tax credit zero them out, not because they found a loophole. A home health aide making $34,000 with two kids would typically land in this group. So would a retired teacher whose pension and Social Security fall under the thresholds.

Retirees mostly aren’t off the tax rolls anyway. Nearly half (48%) of everyone drawing Social Security this year will hand some of it back to the IRS, by the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate, delivered to the Senate Budget Committee on March 25. And a pension is deferred pay — they earned it; it was just deducted from their paychecks over decades. Social Security is no gift either: the payroll taxes that fund it came out of the worker’s pay too.

There is some truth to the fact that older people are overrepresented among those who speak at zoning meetings. In 2018, Boston University researchers studied who speaks at such meetings across Massachusetts, and matched the names to voter records. The people who show up are older, more likely to own their homes and far more opposed to new housing than everyone else.

The usual ways to cope with not-in-my-backyard sentiment (NIMBYism) at the policy level deal with a process: Let the state approve projects instead of the city. Limit how many rounds of review a project has to survive. Or give opponents a shorter window to appeal.