One by one, some of the biggest names in tech are publicly supporting the idea of giving cash handouts to all Americans. The latest is self-made multimillionaire Stewart Butterfield, the CEO and co-founder of the workplace chat program Slack, which is reportedly in the process of raising $500 million at a $5 billion valuation. Butterfield also co-founded Flickr, which sold to Yahoo, reportedly for $35 million. He joins Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Y-Combinator president Sam Altman, who all say society will both need and benefit from universal basic income (UBI), a guaranteed cash payment given to every resident irrespective of employment status.

It "doesn't have to be much, but giving people even a very small safety net would unlock a huge amount of entrepreneurialism," says Butterfield in a recent Twitter exchange about UBI.