Questions people actually ask

What is this, in one sentence?

A draft EU law under which companies whose value comes overwhelmingly from machines rather than people would, once, issue shares worth 3 % of themselves to a fund owned equally by every adult EU citizen.

Do I get money? How much, and when?

Eventually, and honestly: not soon. The fund builds a stake first and pays out of what the stake earns, by law. Payments in the early years are close to zero on purpose, because the fund must preserve its capital before it distributes anything. The objective written into the law is that the stake behind each citizen's entitlement reaches the order of six months of median disposable income within a generation. On the law's own published assumptions that means yearly payments growing from almost nothing towards a few hundred euros over decades, and far more only if automation transforms the economy far more than today. The simulator shows the honest curve for any assumption you choose. Anyone who promises you quick money from this is misleading you, and the law itself says so.

Is this a tax?

No, and the difference is the whole design. A tax takes cash and puts it in a government budget, where it is spent and renegotiated every year. This takes newly issued shares, never cash, puts them in a fund that no government budget can touch, and the fund belongs to citizens directly. No money passes through any treasury. A company pays nothing at all until its own owners cash out.

Which companies would pay?

Only companies that pass a hard, published test: worth at least EUR 75 billion, active in at least three EU countries, and worth at least eighty times what they pay their staff each year. That last number is the signature of production without people. On today's figures roughly nine companies in the world pass it, among them the large AI laboratories and chip designers. Your employer, your bakery and every normal business, including every large normal business, are nowhere near it: even the most automated labour-reliant companies reach about thirty times payroll. The set grows only if the machine economy grows.

Will this kill jobs, or drive innovation away?

The incentives point the other way. A company escapes the test by employing and paying people, which is the outcome the law wants anyway. It owes nothing while it builds, invests and grows, and only shares value at the moment its own owners turn that value into money for themselves. The claim is 3 % and it arrives exactly once per company.

Will companies simply leave the EU?

The obligation follows selling to Europeans, not being based in Europe. A company established in Delaware or Singapore that earns billions in the EU market is covered; leaving the EU means giving up the EU's 450 million customers, and 97 % of something large is worth more than 100 % of something without them. EU and non-EU companies are treated identically, so there is no discrimination to complain about, and the fund's shares carry no votes, so no government gains control of anyone.

Who controls the fund? Can politicians raid it?

Nobody controls the companies through it: the fund's shares can never vote, never take board seats and never tell any company what to do; that is written into the law and made a condition of the whole design. As for raids, the draft is written by people who studied exactly how governments have raided pension funds in Poland and Hungary and wound them down elsewhere, and it answers with entitlements that are personal property, not budget lines: they cannot be seized, redirected, borrowed against by the state or handed to a treasury. The objections page states the raid history in full, at its strongest, before any opponent does.

What if AI stays small and the transformation never comes?

Then almost nothing happens, which is deliberate. The test designates almost no companies in a world where value still comes from people, and the law obliges the Commission to check the evidence every three years and to propose winding the rules down if the premise proves wrong. The instrument is built to matter in the world where machines really do take over most work, and to fade in the world where they do not. The economy that handles it by itself is left to handle it by itself.

What do I have to do now?

Nothing, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. Nothing is being collected: no signature, no email, no money. If the initiative is formally registered one day, signing will happen on the European Commission's own official system, never on this site. What helps today is different: read it, argue with it and, if you would consider being one of the seven organisers an initiative legally needs, say so on the take part page.

Who is behind this, and who pays for it?

One person so far, named on the about page, paying the hosting personally. No organisation, no donations, no political party, no company money, and the law's whole text, its history and every review that attacked it are public in an open repository. If that changes, the rules already published say every euro must be declared.