Three young men who just crowed about becoming the world’s youngest self-made billionaires pulled a raw deal on the people who helped build their company. Mercor’s trio secured a headline-grabbing $350 million funding round that pushed the startup to a $10 billion valuation, a meteoric rise that yesterday’s newsrooms celebrated and today’s contractors are still paying for. The contrast between their newfound wealth and the treatment of rank-and-file workers could not be starker.
What followed was textbook hyperspeed Silicon Valley: a major AI project was abruptly shuttered and the thousands of contractors who worked on it were offered rehire at a sharply reduced rate. Workers say the program paid roughly $21 an hour and was suddenly replaced with a near-identical project paying $16 an hour, leaving many families scrambling as promised hours evaporated. This wasn’t a business decision made in a vacuum—it was a choice by a company that had just minted billionaires to cut wages for people doing the real work.
Contractors describe confusion, lost income, and a sense of being treated like interchangeable cogs rather than human beings with bills and kids and holidays coming up. Some voices in the Slack groups and on Reddit say the shutdown came with no meaningful notice, and that the new rate is even below minimums in a few states where the work was done. That kind of callousness toward everyday Americans should outrage anyone who believes in fair deals and honest labor.
Don’t be fooled by the PR spin: these founders were handpicked by elite programs, benefitted from top-tier investors, and walked into a nine-figure payout that made them household names overnight. That pedigree doesn’t absolve them of responsibility to treat workers with decency, and their claim that the work was “temporary” reads hollow when people relied on those hours. When billionaires can pivot a project and shave pay rates without consequences, it reinforces the growing chasm between coastal tech elites and the rest of America.
This is part of a larger playbook in Big Tech and the AI supply chain: outsource the grunt work to a hidden, fragile workforce while celebrating valuations inside glass towers. Mercor says it pays out large sums daily and manages tens of thousands of contractors, yet when push came to shove the people making the models usable were the first to get squeezed. That disconnect should trouble every voter who believes in an economy that rewards hard work rather than just startup hype.
Conservatives should be the loudest defenders of these workers: they are the hardworking Americans who actually do the labor, not the venture-backed wunderkinds who skim the headlines. We need accountability, transparency, and market standards that stop companies from treating human beings as disposable inputs to be repriced at will. Stand with the contractors who deserve fair notice, fair pay, and the dignity every American should expect in the workplace.
