The dawning of the 20th century, though, coincided with several universal suffrage movements that spent decades dismantling those systems precisely because they entrenched the political power of the already wealthy and locked out workers, women, and minorities from any say in the laws governing them. Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, told Fortune recently that the housing market showed signs of returning to an “early 1900s” status quo, but this surely was not what she meant.

Perhaps ironically, Lütke’s tweetstorm began as a response to Jordan Grimes bemoaning the current crisis conditions in the housing market. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Laura Waxmann had reported on classic NIMBY (not in my backyard) activism as hundreds of San Francisco Marina residents swamped a town hall to protest what for them was an “uncomfortably tall, 22 & 18 story project at the low-slung neighborhood’s waterfront.” The excessive influence of old homeowners has been dubbed an “oldigarchy” by Yale professor Samuel Moyn, who advocated in his recent book Gerontocracy in America for something like the reverse of Lütke’s policy: extending the voting age down to an ever-younger population to counterbalance the tyranny of NIMBY boomers.

The irony critics can’t ignore

Lütke’s own track record with voting rights makes the endorsement especially pointed. In 2022, Shopify shareholders approved a “Founder Share” structure that guarantees Lütke at least 40% of the company’s voting power regardless of how much equity he actually owns—a mechanism governance watchdogs criticized as an entrenchment device that decouples voting power from ownership stake. Glass Lewis, a proxy advisory firm, publicly flagged the structure as controversial when it went to a shareholder vote.

In other words, Lütke secured himself outsize, guaranteed control over his own company’s decisions—then publicly praised a system that would strip voting power from the majority of ordinary Americans in the political sphere.