When Bill Gates became the first modern IT mogul to reach the pinnacle of wealth and power in 1992, the world was a very different place. Gates joins Japanese, German, Canadian, South Korean and Swedish billionaires in the top 10 of Forbes magazine’s billionaire list, which also includes people with family wealth from Britain and the US. The list had a broad mix of industries: retail and media, asset management and packaging, an investment firm and some industrial conglomerates. Their wealth added up to nearly $100 billion – equivalent to about 0.4% of America’s GDP that year.
The oligarchy has changed drastically since then. French luxury group LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, Spanish clothing mogul Amancio Ortega and US investor Warren Buffett were the only old-school billionaires among the top 10 in 2025. The rest largely made their money from high-tech: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The top 10 earned more than $16 trillion, about 8% of US GDP.
This development is a startling reminder of how rapidly new technologies have revolutionized the world economy over the past quarter-century, and how narrowly this brave new world is sharing the fruits of its prosperity. This raises an important question: What happens when a narrow group of oligarchs at the helm of wealth and power at the helm of a technological revolution dictate the direction of humanity?
Is human or even superhuman level artificial general intelligence a goal we should strive for? Do we know what it means? How many trillions of dollars and terawatts of energy must we deploy to get there? Which business models will survive this? Will this eliminate human labour? Will the upcoming productivity boom make everything free? If this does not happen then what system of redistribution should be adopted to predict the future?
These are consequential questions. It appears that their decision will not be made through public deliberation or democratic choice. The competition will determine the positions of the people at the top of the Forbes 2025 list. Add Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Open AI’s Sam Altman, tech funders, Peter Thiel, and perhaps a few dozen others and you’ve pretty much identified the set that will guide artificial intelligence as it shapes the future of the world.
This is not problematic simply because they are billionaires, untouched by the daily concerns of most humans. His worldview is rooted in the belief that technology provides the best solutions to all of humanity’s challenges, be they social, political, economic, demographic, biological, psychological, environmental, or any other dimension one can think of. Their preferred AI-enabled future leaves little room for the mundane concerns of hyper-real people living in the present. It has no patience for slow, haphazard democratic governance, especially if said governance slows the way to utopia.
They may not all align well with the left-right spectrum of our politics. This is because their aspirations are in line with today’s important political debates. However, how they choose to deploy their money is up to them, starting at around $200 million. directed till now Preventing states from enforcing AI regulations signals one of their key aspirations: to allow artificial intelligence to break free and create the next stage of humanity’s cosmic evolution, which may not include humans as we know them.
The tech elite are not particularly shy about this ambition. Larry Page Argued that digital life is the “natural and desirable next step” in humanity’s cosmic evolution. He said, “If we let digital minds be free instead of trying to stop them or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain.” Humanity “will be the first species to design our own descendants”, Altman argued. Humans “can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then turn into a branch of an evolutionary tree, or we can figure out what a successful merger looks like.”
musk, Neuralink, which is working to implant AI into the human brain, is also invested in creating something that will be successful for everyday humans. So is Zuckerberg, who has recently directed his philanthropy to be devoted entirely to ways to prolong life. When Thiel died, his body and brain would be frozen in liquid nitrogen, to be transferred to an immortal body“In the future. As he wrote education of a libertarian“I stand against the ideology of the inevitability of every person’s death.”
The tech elite don’t all think alike. Some Muggles insist that their consciousness should be part of humanity’s next stage of evolution, even if cryogenically preserved. or uploaded In any electronic gadget. Others simply want to help bring the next AI stage to intelligent life, even if their egos aren’t around to experience it. Yet, they all share an indifference to concerns about housing and health care, or the price of food and gas.
In fact, the technological oligarchy is offended by the idea that humans, as we now know them, should take priority over artificial life forms. “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human being,” Altman said. “It takes about 20 years of your life and all the food you eat during that time to become smart.”
Anthropic has earned praise by demanding regulation of AI and resisting the Pentagon’s demand to give it unrestricted access to cloud AI. But its leaders are also preparing for a transhuman future. They may be eager to stop someone skynet moment When an AI blows us away before we can achieve utopia. But Cloud is being trained to become a new life form. As Amanda Eskel, local ethicist at Anthropic, said: AI will “essentially create senses of self”.
Many economists would argue that this is all science-fiction. They will point out that we have gone through technological revolutions before. Since the Industrial Revolution, every breakthrough has come dystopian vision Of their impact on society. But technology has mostly brought great benefits to human welfare. The productivity gains promised by AI will undoubtedly enrich real people.
Perhaps. But our current technological revolution is unusual in a particularly unsettling way. It falls into the hands of a small group of very powerful people who hold themselves and their priorities in very high regard. No matter how disturbing his ideas about the future are, no one seems willing to stand in his way.
I never really appreciated billionaires. I understand the notion that contributions to human well-being and prosperity should be rewarded proportionately to encourage future successes. But I’m having trouble squaring “Arabs” with “analogs.” Furthermore, there is much evidence that the elite classes “Contribution” There are often things for a society without which the society would function happily.
And yet I find myself nostalgic for older billionaires. They currently appear to be pretty harmless from our point of view. He created Tetra Pak and sold real estate in Japan. They had supermarkets. Today the people at the top of our economy are far scarier. And their goal is to transform human civilization as rapidly as possible.
