They are probably sitting next to you at the coffee shop or the airport lounge, or certainly at the local co-working space, tapping away on their laptops and chatting furiously with Claude and Gemini. According to the latest figures, there are now 30 million “solopreneurs” in the United States, side-hustling and gig-working their way to their first few million. This is mostly to be celebrated. After all, allowing enterprise and initiative to flourish is the free market’s greatest strength. And yet, there might also be a dark side to the boom in one-person entrepreneurship — one that conservatives should take seriously.
The number of solopreneurs is soaring. Stripe, which has a better handle on the figures than most organizations because it processes the money that solopreneurs make, reports that the number of solopreneurs using the platform who earn more than $100,000 has increased by a third since 2022. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued recently that it would not be long before we saw the first $1 billion start-up created and run by a single person. Medvi, a medical-tech company, has built a reported $400 million in sales without going to the bother of hiring anyone, although, in fairness, its founder, Matthew Gallagher, brought his brother and some freelance contractors on board. Sure, there is a certain amount of hype around the boom. Altman has lots of AI tokens to sell. Yet there is also some substance to it. It has always been possible to make a good living as a freelancer. But technology now means you can build a substantial business without ever creating an HR department, writing a mission statement to fire up the staff, or worrying about the vacation schedule. It will just be you and your chatbot taking on the world.
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