When Bill Gates became the first modern IT tycoon to reach the pinnacle of wealth and power in 1992, the world was a very different place. Gates joined the top 10 on Forbes magazine’s billionaires list along with Japanese, German, Canadian, South Korean and Swedish billionaires, including those with family fortunes from Britain and the United States. There was a broad mix of industries on the list: retail and media, property management and packaging, an investment firm and a couple of industrial conglomerates. Their fortunes almost totaled $100 billion, equivalent to about 0.4% of the United States’ GDP that year.
The oligarchy has changed drastically since then. Bernard Arnault of the French luxury group LVMH, Amancio Ortega, the Spanish clothing magnate, and Warren Buffett, the American investor, were the only old-school billionaires in the top 10 in 2025. The rest largely made their money from high technology: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The top 10 accumulated more than $16 trillion, representing around 8% of the United States GDP.
This evolution offers a striking reminder of how quickly new technologies have revolutionized the global economy over the past quarter century, and how closely this brave new world is sharing the fruits of its prosperity. It raises a critical question: what happens when a small group of oligarchs at the forefront of the technological revolution, sitting at the pinnacle of wealth and power, get to determine the direction of humanity?
Is artificial general intelligence at the human or even superhuman level a goal we should strive for? Do we know what that means? How many trillions of dollars and terawatts of energy would we need to deploy to get there? What business models will survive? Will it end human work? Will the resulting productivity boom make everything free? What redistribution system should be implemented to anticipate the future if not?
These are transcendental questions. It appears that they will not be decided by public deliberation or democratic election. The group of people who top the Forbes list for 2025 will make the decision. Add Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Open AI’s Sam Altman, tech financier Peter Thiel, and maybe a couple dozen others and you’ve pretty much identified the ensemble that will guide artificial intelligence as it shapes the future of the world.
This is problematic not only because they are billionaires, outside the daily concerns of most human beings. Their worldview is embedded in the belief that technology offers the best solution to all of humanity’s challenges, whether social, political, economic, demographic, biological, psychological, environmental or any other dimension you can imagine. Their preferred AI-infested future has little room for the monotonous concerns of the all-too-real people who populate the present. He has no patience for slow and messy democratic governance, especially if such governance slows the path to utopia.
They may not all align neatly on the left-right spectrum of our politics. This is because their aspirations are orthogonal to the critical political debates of the moment. However, how they choose to use their money, starting with nearly $200 million so far earmarked to prevent states from imposing regulations on AI, signals one of their key aspirations: allowing artificial intelligence to break free and build the next phase of humanity’s cosmic evolution, one that may not include humans as we know them.
The technological oligarchs are not particularly shy of this ambition. Larry Page has argued that digital life is the “natural and desirable next step” in humanity’s cosmic evolution. “If we let digital minds be free instead of trying to stop or enslave them, the outcome will almost certainly be good,” he said. Humanity “will be the first species to design our own descendants,” Altman said. Humans “can be the biological bootloader of digital intelligence and then fade into a branch of the evolutionary tree, or we can figure out what a successful fusion looks like.”
Musk, whose Neuralink is working to integrate AI into human minds, is also invested in building what will happen to everyday humans. So is Zuckerberg, who recently directed his philanthropy to devote itself entirely to promoting ways to prolong life. When Thiel dies, his body and brain will be frozen in liquid nitrogen, to be transferred “to an immortal body” in the future. As he wrote in Education of a Libertarian, “I oppose (…) the ideology of the inevitability of the death of each individual.”
Not all technological oligarchs think alike. Some magnates insist that their consciousness should be part of the next step in humanity’s evolution, whether cryogenically preserved or uploaded into some electronic device. Others simply want to help achieve the next AI phase of intelligent life, even if their ego isn’t around to experience it. However, they all share a disinterest in concerns about housing and health care, or the price of food and gasoline.
Indeed, 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 life and all the food you eat during that time before you become intelligent.”
Anthropic has earned praise by calling for regulation of AI and resisting the Pentagon’s demands to give it unrestricted access to its Claude AI. But even their leaders point to a transhuman future. They may be eager to avoid a moment on Skynet where an AI blows us all up before we reach utopia. But Claude is being trained to become a new way of life. As Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s resident ethicist, put it: AIs will “inevitably form senses of themselves.”
Many economists will argue that this is all science fiction nonsense. They will point out that we have been through technological revolutions before. Since the Industrial Revolution, every advancement has generated dystopian visions of its impact on society. But technology has mainly generated great advances in human well-being. The productivity gains promised by AI will undoubtedly make real people richer.
Maybe. But our current technological revolution is unusual in a particularly disturbing way. It comes from a small group of very powerful people who hold themselves and their preferences in very high regard. No matter how worrying his visions of the future may be, no one seems willing to stand in his way.
I never really appreciated billionaires. I understand the idea that contributions to human well-being and prosperity should be rewarded proportionately to incentivize future advancements. But I have found it difficult to square “billions” with “commensurable.” Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that the “contributions” of oligarchs to society are often things that society would have happily done without.
And yet, I feel nostalgic for the billionaires of yesteryear. They seem so harmless from our position in the present. They made Tetra Paks and sold real estate in Japan. They owned supermarkets. The guys who are in charge of our economy today are much scarier. And its goal is to transform human civilization as quickly as possible.
