Henry Farrell on "The political economy of billionaire derangement"

Henry Farrell, The political economy of billionaire derangement, Programmable Mutter, July 15, 2026.

He opens with two somewhat different quotes about billionaires, Tyler Cowen more or less in favor of them and Tim O’Reilly deeply skeptical of them. He suggests we breed them together:

To be clear: this hybrid would be notably different to Tim’s argument, and likely actively objectionable to Tyler. I alone am to blame. But surprisingly, there is inadvertent support for some of its key elements from Peter Thiel, who is a surprisingly valuable chronicler of the conditions that give rise to billionaire derangement, as well as a living example of it (the Antichrist is here!).2 Here, I’m drawing both on lectures that Thiel gave at Stanford, as summarized by his amanuensis Blake Masters, and the resulting co-authored book, Zero To One. These sources have a lot to say about the connections between entrepreneurship, kingship, and personal eccentricity.

The conclusion I draw is that the forces that Tim identifies, combined with specific aspects of the political economy of Silicon Valley, help explain the derangement of certain Silicon Valley billionaires and their epigones. Old style princes were notorious for their tendencies to deranged behavior, which came not just from their inbreeding, but their power, and the unwillingness and inability of others to contradict or check them. So too, modern princes.

Not too long ago, many people, including Tyler, hoped that the advance of classical liberalism would go hand-in-hand with the growing power of tech billionaires, advancing both causes at once. Now, politically influential tech billionaires have visibly lost contact both with reality and with anything that could plausibly be described as classical liberal values. See the screen shotted quote above. Rather than making snide asides about billionaire derangement syndrome, it might be time for such people to confront what actual billionaire derangement means for the ideological straddle that they have relied on for so long. That is even more so, in a world where markets as well as market-makers are being devoured by the passions.

To summarize the particulars of my theory: Thiel’s lectures and book provide good, if incomplete evidence that the princely passions described by Hirschman didn’t disappear, but went underground. Commerce and power were fused into a new ideology of entrepreneurial virtù that became highly influential among the founder community in Silicon Valley. This combined with Silicon Valley’s (and popular culture’s) tendency to connect genius with eccentricity, not simply selecting people who seemed strange, but compounding their strangeness through self-reinforcing feedback loops. Finally, this all happened in an intimate social environment of founders and funders. Billionaires know each other and measure themselves and their success against those they consider peers, in a dense entangled clique that commingles high degrees of mutual influence with rivalries and jealousies.

Farrell then goes on to quote Thiel’s book at some length, analyzing while going along. And so:

In short then, Thiel - both as reported by Masters and in collaboration with him - suggests that Silicon Valley is a place where being a founder is tantamount to being a king. You have a greater chance of succeeding if you are weird, and if you succeed, your weirdness will likely feed upon itself in feedback loops of positive reinforcement. Finally, it is a closely interconnected social system where the key people are conjoined in a dense tangible clique. They observe each other all the time, and are observed by others for cues of what you need to do to become a made man. [...]

SpaceX perhaps marks a culmination of the kingly ideal, a moment in which, as Tim puts it, someone like Musk can “raise enormous amounts of capital while freeing himself from any restraints from those who provide it, so that he can spend the proceeds on Mars, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence or whatever next satisfies his ambition.” But it is also the moment in which someone who is visibly profoundly disturbed has briefly become the world’s first trillionaire. And it is one in which others want to copy him.

And then a bow to Keynes’s “animal spirits” in the market place:

I’ll finish by noting that this is just one aspect of a greater change. Deranged billionaires like Musk and Thiel are both partly responsible for this transformation, and notable symptoms of it. Still, they are not the whole of it. The reason that the SpaceX IPO temporarily succeeded, even though the numbers make no sense whatsoever, is that investment markets too are ruled by vibes. Tyler’s co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok, devoted years of his life to making the case for prediction markets, arguing that they would distill market wisdom into a more general source of knowledge on a multitude of topics. Now they are here, but all too often it’s spirits, not wisdom, that they seem to be distilling. Even more so for crypto. Matt Levine makes a joke about “Bleebzorx Tokens” to explain the worthlessness of memecoins, and someone else invents Bleebzorx Tokens to make a tidy profit.

There’s more at the link.

Paul Krugman: On Holding Elon Musk Accountable

Full transcript HERE. The opening paragraphs:

For most of last year, Elon Musk was the second most powerful man in America. He was running a large part of the government’s budget. And during that time, he established a track record of evil incompetence. I mean, really evil and really incompetent on enormous scales. And why aren’t people talking about it more?

Hi, I’m Paul Krugman, doing a brief follow-on to my discussion that was posted earlier today with Ro Khanna, the Congressman from Silicon Valley, who’s a very interesting guy in many ways.

One of the things that has made him especially interesting in the last few days is that he said something entirely reasonable, which is that if Democrats retake Congress, they should hold investigations into the role of Elon Musk as head of DOGE, the sort of not exactly but effectively government agency, in destroying USAID, the agency that was the principal channel for aid to the most desperate, poorest people in the world.

That’s entirely reasonable, and Khanna went on to say that there are credible estimates that the cancellation, the destruction of Doge has led to millions of unnecessary deaths, including millions of children — which is exactly true. There are studies that say that there is both in the field evidence of widespread death as a result of the cancellation and, of course reasonable health models. Because what do you think happens when you cut away tens of billions of dollars of aid to people who are living right on the edge? So of course it’s a reasonable thing to say.

SpaceX has become a securitized narrative, a meme stock

Know why $SPCX is so volatile?

Because it’s a meme stock with a rocket company thrown in.

So the price is being driven by vibes, not news.

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) June 26, 2026

From the S-1, p. 30:

Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth- seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets.

In other words, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

The world's first trillionaire racist [Musk]

Toby Buckle, Greg Sargent, Elon Musk’s Race War Just Took Darker Turn—Time for a Global Response, The New Republic, June 17, 2026.

If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceX’s initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogul’s mind was elsewhere—a white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening.

In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Musk’s extraordinary wealth is fueled by investors’ bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: his belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multicontinental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.

As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.” [...]

In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Musk’s involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war.

Back at home:

In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts “reveal” the whole minority group’s disguised genocidal intent toward white peoples—and suggest that this is why the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.

Western civilization is under attack:

By endorsing Reconquista, Musk is amplifying one of the clarion calls of the European far right and, increasingly, the American right, as well: “remigration.” This is the idea that saving Western civilization (as Musk imagines it) requires the forced expulsion of huge numbers of immigrants, especially Muslims, and even untold numbers of their descendants. In response to a missive about white people potentially becoming a minority in New Zealand, Musk posted recently: “The doom of Western Civilization must be averted!”

A robot-AI utopia:

But the real intent behind Musk’s indictment of “suicidal empathy” appears to be future-focused too. In an interview, Tarnoff points out that Musk’s imagined future of humanoid robots and AI can be squared with his hatred of mass migration. “You reduce your reliance on immigration as a labor source if you automate more labor,” Tarnoff tells us, noting that in this scenario, AI and robots might then be pressed into service to “restrict immigration.”

In this context, we believe it’s not an accident that Musk explicitly denigrated “civilizational suicidal empathy” while his Department of Government Efficiency decimated the budget of USAID, which helped produce hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. That was a test run: If Musk’s robot-and-AI utopia fails to produce mass abundance for the global poor, and global warming spurs more suffering and more migrations, saving human “civilization” will require dispensing with the empathy gene: It will give us the fortitude to cut loose all that third-world civilizational dead weight.

A national security threat:

Then there’s what a future Democratic Congress can do. The Musk problem will have to be on its agenda in a serious and meaningful way. Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, points out a core problem here: His many government contracts, and his access to privileged information, pose a “national security threat,” even as Space X itself is in many ways a “national security asset.” We need to know a lot more about what Musk’s contracts actually translate into in terms of his personal influence inside the government.

There's much more at the link.

Clueless thy name is Zuckerberg

Victor Tangermann, Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues, Yahoo!Finance, June 16, 2026.

Morale at Meta has seemingly hit rock bottom.

Employees have been roiling from multiple rounds of major layoffs. Last month alone, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company laid off a whopping 8,000 workers, roughly ten percent of its workforce, as part of its chaotic refocusing efforts around AI.

Many of those who remain are now forced to perform the grunt work to train AI models, weekly busywork that's already driving some of them up the wall, as Wired reports.

In an internal memo to employees on Friday, Zuckerberg attempted to lift their spirits in what appears to be a notable failure to read the room. Specifically, the billionaire promised to host a companywide AI hackathon in July — only to get brutally shut down by workers who were in no mood for such a thing.

Meta has regularly hosted hackathons in the past, but given last month's layoff announcement, the reception was extremely chilly. [...]

For all its employees' pain and suffering, Meta has surprisingly little to show. The company continues to trip over its own feet, struggling to release impressive new AI models as its competitors pull ahead further in the ongoing AI race.

Victor Tangermann, Meta’s Super Expensive New AI Team Is Already a Complete Catastrophe, Yahoo!Finance, June 15, 2026.

Now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dream of a metaverse has collapsed in on itself, the billionaire has moved onto his next money pit: a wildly expensive "Superintelligence" unit.

But those who've survived several brutal rounds of layoffs at the company aren't exactly thrilled to be part of his new vision for it. As Wired reports, morale within Meta's 6,500-staffer Applied AI team, which was created in March to support the Superintelligence Labs, is hitting rock bottom.

Three employees who spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity said that the weekly busywork tasks they are being assigned, like generating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta's AI models, is "soul-crushing." [...]

A petition has also been signed by more than 1,600 employees, opposing a draconian new initiative that involves installing software on work computers to track everything employees to, including keystrokes and clicks, data that's then fed to train AI.

Homo economicus on steroids.

Our alien overlords have arrived and their name is “Elon” [Starbase, TX]

Amy Gamerman, Elon Musk Is Colonizing Earth, NYTimes, June 12, 2026

In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the world’s richest man owns nearly all of it. He shapes its future.

This is Starbase, Texas, the city that Elon Musk built on America’s ragged hem at the southern border as the home for SpaceX, his aerospace and artificial intelligence company. Locals describe a highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated city commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies. Starbase is the newest manifestation of Mr. Musk’s political power. It is a beta test for a rising oligarchy that seems intent on transforming America from the inside out. [...]

On May 12, Mr. Musk announced on social media that “SpaceX is considering several locations domestically and internationally to build the world’s most advanced spaceports!” His announcement came on the heels of reports that a large parcel of land in coastal Louisiana may have been acquired by an anonymous aerospace company, widely rumored to be SpaceX.

These spaceports will allow Mr. Musk to create his own reality for other people to live in. He doesn’t need Mars. Mr. Musk has already built a colony of his own.

Mr. Musk often cites “Star Trek” as inspiration for founding SpaceX. “We want to make ‘Star Trek’ real, OK?” he said in January. But Starbase bears less similarity to the enlightened wonderland depicted in that 1960s television show than it does to the autocratic company towns of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Mr. Musk, the industrial titans of that era built their own private fiefs, not only to cement control over workers, but to realize their vision of an ideal society.

Perhaps the most grandiose company town of them all was Fordlandia, the sprawling city that Henry Ford built in the Brazilian rainforest to grow rubber trees. Fordlandia was Ford’s personal Utopia, an expression of his social views, his personal predilections and even his vegetarianism. Workers were forced to subsist on a diet heavy on brown rice, oatmeal and canned peaches, as detailed in Greg Grandin’s “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.” For amusement, there was square dancing — Ford loved square dancing — and poetry readings.

Fordlandia’s ghost haunts Mr. Musk’s colony. Corporate control is so all-encompassing at Starbase that a warning on the menu at its Astropub restaurant alerts diners to the “confidentiality and proprietary nature” of the fare. Students at its private Ad Astra school are guided on “hands-on experiential missions.” The interplanetary mission is even written into the job description for a facilities supervisor overseeing waste management and janitorial needs.

There's much more at the link. It's not pretty reading.

Surprise! Why it was so easy for executives and VCs to hijack the AI revolution

This is a fragment from a longer post in my ongoing commentary on Tyler Cowen's recent monograph on the Marginal Revolution.

* * * * *

OpenAI released GPT-3 in 2020 to a limited audience of insiders, who recognized that it represented a breakthrough. This level of performance came as a surprise. No one predicted it. GPT-3 was scaled up from GPT-2, which was in turn scaled up from GPT-1, but no one was making explicit predictions about the level of performance to be achieved at each step. These were experiments: “Let’s try it and see what happens.”That’s fine. That’s a good way to make progress, to try things out and see what happens. But don’t mistake a lucky trial for genuine knowledge.

Cowen mentioned GPT-3 on Marginal Revolution on July 19, and then published a Bloomberg column on it on July 21, which he excerpted in Marginal Revolution the next day: “...think of GPT-3 as giving computers a facility with words that they have had with numbers for a long time, and with images since about 2012.” I published a working paper in August, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons, which I’ll discuss a bit later.

Two and a half years later, in November of 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public. It spread like wildfire. Now the proverbial everyone witnessed what only a small group had witnessed in the summer of 2020. The machine speaks. Sorta’. But more convincingly than any machine had spoken before and in a way that had unimaginable implications for the future.

A threshold HAS been crossed, but it is not, so far as I can see, a threshold in understanding. It is a threshold in performance along a continuous line of scientific understanding and engineering design and construction, something I have documented in some detail in a recent working paper, The Origins of LLMs. As far as I can tell, there has been no paradigm shift, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, no rank shift, in terms of cognitive rank theory. There were no fundamentally new ideas in the world by, say, late July of 2020 as a consequence consolidating GPT-3 and making it available in limited release.

“What about the scaling hypothesis,” you might ask. “Isn’t that new?” Ilya Sutskever first explored the idea in 2014. And Rich Sutton’s famous 2019 essay, The Bitter Lesson, generated broad discussion and OpenAI published a paper in 2020 that cemented matters, “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models.” Given the nature of computing, scaling up is not trivial. Hundreds if not thousands of technical details need to worked out as the size of the training corpus increases by factors of 10 or more, time after time, and as more and more GPUs are ganged together to assemble the computing power needed. The scaling hypothesis gave researchers reason to expect improved performance with scaling, but there has been no gain in fundamental understanding, not of machine learning, artificial neural nets, and certainly not about language and cognition. Consequently our sense of possibility has expanded enormously. But our knowledge and deep understanding has remained the same, and the scaling hypothesis made it easy to believe that that was just fine.

Consequently our sense of possibility has expanded enormously, while our knowledge and deep understanding has remained the same. And that is what has allowed the field to be captured by businessmen, executives and venture capitalists, who have little understanding of or interest in the underlying conceptual issues. Scaling is something they understand. 

Hype the dramatically increased performance and collect the cash. Purchase and deploy more resources now, reap far greater profits in a decade. Everything else is noise and friction. 

But what if [the Dread] Gary Marcus and other critics are right. What if scaling LLMs is not adequate. What happens to all those investments then? 

Building a machine God

Cade Metz, At the Epicenter of A.I., Pope Leo’s Warnings Are Dismissed, NYTimes, May 26, 2026.

Jeremy Nixon is the 33 cofounder of A.G.I. House in San Francisco, which is a so-called “hacker house.”

Many of the founders and important researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI joined the earliest gatherings at A.G.I. House. Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.

Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.

A.I. has started to crack math problems that humans struggled with for decades, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. “Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,” he said.

This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.

“People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God,” said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. “They are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact.”

What Chris Olah said at the Vatican:

“What is actually happening inside them?” he said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.”

Mr. Nixon thought Mr. Olah’s speech was far more spiritual than the words delivered by the pope, even if Mr. Olah was making claims that were not necessarily based on science. Though Mr. Olah hinted that chatbots may have working lives of their own, Mr. Nixon said, they are still very much dependent on humans to do anything, as Mr. Olah noted.

“A.I. is still controlled by people who are trying to make money or solve some mathematical problem or what have you,” Mr. Nixon said.

But what is clear, he added, is that A.I. researchers are trying to build technologies that have jobs, feel joy and pain, and exhibit all sorts of qualities that match and even exceed the traits that make us human. He believes it could happen within the decade. [...]

“A.I. and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming,” he said.

There's more at the link.

Stanford as a hatchery for future tech overlords [Book Review]

Anand Giridharadas, The Secret Elite One Freshman Discovered at Stanford, NYTimes, May 18, 2026.

Book Review: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, by Theo Baker.

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford in 2022 and pursued two somewhat different paths, junior tech bro, and student journalist. His freshman year included:

(1) Losing your grandparent. (2) Losing your girlfriend. (3) Losing your virginity. (4) Bringing down a university president. (5) Overdosing. (6) Winning a George Polk Award. (7) Partying on yachts and socializing with billionaires. (8) Fending off legal threats. (9) Becoming a meme. (10) Neglecting to complete your homework.

Giridharadas observes:

There are two questions people ask as much as any other: “How can I belong?” and “Who runs the world?” They differ in tenor and aim. The former is vulnerable, often unspoken; the latter fuels two-thirds of Reddit.

What gives Baker’s book its power is that, in this setting, these inquiries strangely dovetailed. By trying to answer what it takes to fit in — the freshman question — he Forrest Gumps his way into answering a question about the attitudes and pretensions overlording mankind. In coming of age as a young man, he travels to the heart of a dehumanizing age.

And so:

Stanford through Baker’s eyes is a foreign country with its own customs, religion, mores and language. Some students are “high-agency” super-builders or super-thinkers — techie Übermenschen expected to make billions. There is the “Coupa circuit,” where shady, tech-adjacent adults spend their days at a coffee shop with students, hoping to get in early on start-ups. There are the NGMIs, who are not going to make it. And there are the “plucked,” highly bright students who form a Stanford within Stanford, with access to Big Tech slush funds and parties. (The liberal arts majors and others with no prospects in technology are largely irrelevant.) [...]

The Stanford-within-Stanford Baker exposes matters to you even if this exclusive core feels impossibly distant. The university has let technology firms and venture capitalists worm so deeply into it that it now functions, in Baker’s telling, as a talent-scouting system for future unicorns. Everyone else is window dressing. And this campus elite betrays attitudes — captured by Baker — so contemptuous of non-Übermenschen, not to mention those far outside this world, that one gets a feel for the kinds of mentalities designing A.I. and presuming to rewire our societies.

Silicon Valley has long promoted itself as more meritocratic than elite circles past. Baker perforates this story. As always, connections, access, shadowy brokers and whims decide who gets the keys. Many students are smart. But those who rise fastest often seem the most ruthless and maniacal. [...]

“Teenagers like me were a commodity,” Baker observes. “We were to be protected and preserved, cosseted and buttered up, exploited, manipulated, funded, bribed and cultivated. We were business.”

There's much more to the review, mostly the story of how Baker joins the school newspaper and pursues an investigation that helps topple Stanford's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.

Tech Bro [Musk] scamming NASDAQ over IPO

Nasdaq is proposing to facilitate the largest involuntary wealth transfer from retirement savers to venture capitalists in market history. And nobody seems to be talking about it.

SpaceX demanded, as a condition for listing, that Nasdaq cut index inclusion seasoning from 3…

— Wes Brown (@w3sbrown) March 17, 2026

A Confluence of Crazies: The Pentagon and the Tech Bros

Robert Wright, Iran and the immortality of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Nonzero Newsletter, Mar. 6, 2026.

I'm not going to try to summarize the first three-quarters of this article, which is about how the irrational projective tendencies (my formulation [1], but not quite Wright's) of US foreign policy lead the country into senseless war after senseless war. Here's where he ends up:

All of this helps explain why the US has devoted so much time and energy to enterprises that kill or immiserate millions and millions of people—not just the military interventions we stage, but the profuse supplying of weapons (for Israel’s war on Gaza, for example), and the economic strangulation of nations like Cuba and Venezuela and Iran. All of these endeavors had the support of intensely motivated special interest groups. By and large, the deployment of US troops and arms and sanctions—our big, blunt, coercive instruments—have nothing to do with serving America’s actual interests, much less the interests of the world. And they repeatedly—as now in Iran—cover us in moral disgrace.

This is one reason I harp, however ineffectually, on the importance of respecting international law. The machinery for making US foreign policy is so out of control—so wildly misaligned with American interests, the global interest, and morality—that it urgently needs to be constrained by some clear and coherent set of rules. And so long as it’s not constrained by such a thing, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: The US military (and I say this as an Army brat who grew up with a genuine affection for the military and genuine pride in my father’s service during World War II and after) is now mainly an instrument of mayhem and is increasingly a source of global instability.

All of which brings us back to Anthropic, whose Claude large language model is integrated into Maven, software that’s operated by Palantir and used by the Pentagon to identify targets. The Washington Post reports that “as planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance.” Given that the Iranian elementary school was hit on the first day of the war, it seems fairly likely that Claude played a role in the selection of that target and thus in the death of more than 100 young girls—many times more kids than were killed in the worst American school shooting.

This might seem to vindicate Dario Amodei’s refusal to give the Pentagon carte blanche to use Claude in “fully autonomous” weapons systems. But before we give him the Nobel Peace Prize, note two things: (1) This kind of contractual carveout almost certainly wouldn’t have made a difference in this case even if honored. No doubt there was a “human in the kill chain”—someone who, at a minimum, scanned the list of targets generated by Maven and said, “Yep, looks like a list of targets. Let’s do it!” (2) Even if Amodei’s scruples had somehow magically prevented the bombing of that school, Claude would still be an accomplice to mass murder. More than 1,000 Iranian civilians have already been killed in this war—a war that flagrantly violates international law and continues to lack a coherently articulated rationale. Anyone who makes money by aiding endeavors like this has a lot to answer for.

Last week Amodei, in explaining Anthropic’s position on Pentagon contracts, emphasized the company’s overall commitment to national security. He wrote, “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” If Amodei genuinely believes that the US military is devoted to addressing actual “existential” threats to the US, he’s too naive to be entrusted with anything as important as running a big AI company.

Obviously, this indictment applies about equally to OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who gladly swooped in and snatched the Pentagon largesse that Amodei will now be denied) and to Google’s Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis and to xAI’s Elon Musk. All the big AI companies are putting their tools at the disposal of the Pentagon to use as it sees fit.[2]

Notes

[1] This paragraph, from my post, TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche, will give you some idea of my thinking about the projective dynamic of America's urges to war:

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

[2] Between the Trump administration in Washington and the Big Tech Billionaires in Silicon Valley, this country is currently dominated by a confluence of crazies, perhaps the largest in American history.

Kara Swisher Talks Elon Musk, Tim Cook And The 'Non-Capitalist' Behavior Of Tech Leaders

From YouTube page:

Sep 10, 2025

In an interview with Forbes Women, editor Maggie McGrath at the 2025 Forbes Power Women's Summit, legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher gives her unfiltered take on the people and trends shaping the future.

General comments about Silicon Valley start at about 12 minutes or so.

When tech CEOs are like grumpy ducklings

That's the title of Henry Farrell's interview with Le Grand Continent in Programmable Mutter.

Louis de Catheu - Something that is quite striking with the second Trump administration is the part taken by the Tech Bros in his entourage and his coalition. To you, what are the causes of this new alignment between the MAGA movement and Silicon Valley active bosses?

Henry Farrell - There are a number of areas where they share common interests. One thing, which is always very important to remember, is that they have common enemies. Many people on the Tech right are very much opposed to some of the measures that the Biden administration was associated with.

The Tech right also harks back to a particular vision of the politics of technology. [...] It more or less suggests: wouldn't it be incredible if we lived in a world in which we did not have to worry about government anymore?

That vision is very clearly part of the animating vision of Peter Thiel. [...] This will be a new world order in which technology founders will effectively be treated almost as the God Kings of these micro communities. People would be able to move back and forth between these communities according to Albert Hirschman’s logic of exit. [...]

The second thing that is important is a much more immediate set of political tensions, some of which are purely and simply due to people in the Silicon Valley right feeling that they did not get sufficient recognition from the Biden administration. [...]

The third thing is that there is an extreme hostility towards unions in Silicon Valley, which goes across the far right through to moderate left Democrat leaning people among the founders. The research of Neil Malhotra, David Broockman, and Gregory Ferenstein, suggests that in many ways Silicon Valley founders and funders are pretty left wing when it comes to a variety of social issues. They are more left wing than you might expect with respect to certain kinds of distributional issues, such as, being more favorable to basic income or to the distribution of welfare. But they are virulently hostile towards anybody who tries to tell them how to do their business. [...]

Opposition to woke is a significant part of the new way of thinking about things, but this is not because people have opposition to individual lifestyles, to people getting gender alteration surgery or any of these things. On principle, many people in Silicon Valley often tend to be radically libertarian when it comes to people's lifestyles. What they really objected to was the possibility that other people could tell them what they could or could not do to shape the workplace of their firms. These three forms of opposition helped to explain why you saw the Big Tech and Trump coming together.

Great Men:

You just spoke about God Kings and the need for respect. That make me think about your writings on the Silicon Valley canon. Some founders in Silicon Valley seem to have very specific views on history, the great men and their own place in history.

When I said that there was a lack of respect, I think that this involves changes in the broader conversation. Over the last number of years, Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists have been treated with a significant degree of worship by the United States press — until around 2015-2016.

If Silicon Valley people wanted to pronounce on something, their grand statements were treated with enormous respect by the press. They had entourages, as if they were presidents. Mark Zuckerberg and other people were deemed by many to be world historical figures.

That, unsurprisingly changed the sense among Silicon Valley people about what their world historic role was. Here, one of the key essays for me is Marc Andreessen's piece, from 2011, called “Why Software is Eating the World,” which suggests that he and his colleagues are going to bring through a fundamental transformation in the way of things. [...]

When you talk to Silicon Valley people, you get the sense that they either read a lot or —which is in some ways nearly the same thing— they pretend to read a lot, because being well read is viewed as being part of the culture.

That is very different from 15 years ago. When my friend Aaron Swartz was alive and was still part of the debate, he used to be extremely grumpy about the lack of intellectual curiosity among Silicon Valley people. Now Silicon Valley people at least feel that they are obliged to pretend to read — and some of them actually do read. [...]

I think that the reason why Silicon Valley leaders read is because they are looking for models of how to act in the world as great men. [...]

We're in a world now where Silicon Valley people really began to identify with the idea that they were great men. This is not to say that great men are perfect, but they are people with very large virtues — and very large flaws as well. Silicon Valley founders were going to be world historical colossuses, bestriding the stage, reshaping the world in their image.

DOGE and its aftereffects:

First of all, there's DOGE's official goal, which is to achieve efficiency in the federal government. Indeed, there were probably a couple of people attached to DOGE for whom that was actually their primary goal.

A second goal was to effectively eliminate large chunks of the federal government. Of course, if you look at where DOGE acted, very often it was acting in those parts of the federal government, which were left coded rather than conservative coded. [...]

Finally, you could argue that a significant part of DOGE and efforts associated with it involved Elon Musk looking to position his own people in places of power. [...]

The first part, the efficiency part, I think never really took off in any very serious way. Perhaps under different Republicans or under Democrats, you might begin to see that take off again seriously. I don't think that was ever really a serious part of the project, as opposed to an ideological justification for it.

The second part, trying to rip away large chunks of the US government, I think is going to continue because it does not just involve DOGE, but is also about the people associated with Project 2025.

The final part - Musk installing his own people into the government - is obviously now unlikely to succeed. A lot of people are probably not going to continue on in the same way, or they will be asked to sign different loyalty oaths than the one that they felt that they were signing when they first came in. [...]

My personal theory is that if you really want to understand the Trump administration, read the autobiography of Cardinal de Retz or similar people who worked in these courts. The modern equivalents don’t have titles of nobility - perhaps they might like to - but they are engaged in the same squalid intrigues based around personal advancement, sex, rivalry. All of these things are going to be part of the Trump administration in a way that they were not part of the Biden administration — which of course had its own rivalries, but they tend to be much more technocratic ones.

AI and AGI:

We're now in a different world. It is very hard to say exactly how the Trump administration thinks about AI and AGI. It has not come out with any explicit documentation. But from what we can tell, this is much less of a coherent vision that the Biden administration had — whether you liked it or not — and much more a question of convergence between the interests of particular powerful companies and the national interest of the United States, which is defined in a somewhat flexible way.

The deals that were done in the Gulf a few weeks ago, or the apparent deal that has been done between the United States and China, which we have not seen the details of, suggest a much more flexible approach to AI. The United States still wants to be the country which really dominates the AI debate and discourse, but it also wants to take full advantage of the opportunities to do deals around AI, which will cement not simply US power, but also the power of particular people within the administration and of particular business interests which have strong connections with the administration. [...]

Throughout all of this we will see a perpetual opportunism in place of planning and strategy. I think that this is going to be a world of deal-making, rather than a world of the United States trying to fulfill a grand vision as it has in the past.

There's much more at the link.

The Tech Right gets skewered with the MacBird!* treatment

Michelle Goldberg, From the Creator of ‘Succession,’ a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right, NYTimes, May 26, 2026.

In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiers on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. [...]

He’s succeeded. Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. [...] In “Mountainhead,” three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hanger-on they call Souper, short for “soup kitchen,” because he’s a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic, juvenile Venis — the richest man in the world — has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deepfakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes or desecrating sacred sites, and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internecine violence turns into apocalyptic global instability.

It’s not a far-fetched premise. Facebook posts accusing Muslims of rape have already helped fuel a genocide in Myanmar, and tools like those that Venis unleashes seem more likely to be months than years away.

Venis’s foil is Jeff, who has built an A.I. that can filter truth from falsehood and whose flashes of conscience put him at odds with the others. Rounding out the quartet is Randall, a venture capitalist — played by a terrific Steve Carrell — who pontificates like the bastard offspring of the investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

As the planet melts down, they start fantasizing about taking over “a couple of failing nations” and running them like start-ups.

After a bit of this and that Goldberg returns to the main line. Speaking of the mega-rich techbros:

“I think they think that their philosophical approach can solve any problem,” Armstrong said of the tech barons. “And I find that amusing and scary.”

It’s an open question, in “Mountainhead,” how seriously we should take the men’s scheming. The characters are titanically arrogant, but outside their domains, they are not particularly effectual. “There’s a lot of society and government which is not amenable to a tech approach,” said Armstrong. “DOGE may have discovered that, and so may anyone who tries to engage with systems with a lot of real human beings in them.”

Still, America’s tech plutocrats have expansive plans, fortunes that make Gilded Age robber barons look like paupers and an ungodly amount of political power, even now that Musk has stepped back from the White House. The “big, beautiful bill” that the House just passed contains a 10-year moratorium on state A.I. regulation. Musk’s company SpaceX is a front-runner for the contract to build Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense shield. When the president went to Saudi Arabia this month, he brought a passel of tech executives with him.

There's more at the link. 

* * * * * 

*MacBird!

is a 1966 satire by Barbara Garson. It was self-published ('Grassy Knoll Press') as a pamphlet, and the full text appeared in the December 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine. It was staged in February 1967.

The play superimposes the John F. Kennedy assassination onto the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Why are Silicon Valley tech leaders obsessed with Tolkien and misread him so badly?

Michiko Kakutani, Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits, NYTimes, May 23, 2025.

There's an obvious answer to that: They're man-children.

Here's how Kakutani opens the article:

For generations of fans, J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings” remains their first experience of the immersive magic of fiction. The trilogy recounts how a motley group of friends set out on a journey to destroy the great Ring of Power and defeat the dark Lord Sauron, who intends to use its dreadful magic to rule all of Middle-earth through “force and fear.” The Ring corrupts all who use it, and its story endures as a potent allegory about the corrupting effects of greed and pride and what Tolkien called the evil “lust for domination.”

Given the trilogy’s idealistic overtones, it’s easy to understand why the books gained a cult following in the 1970s among hippies and Vietnam War protesters, who embraced its love of nature and rejection of consumer culture, and what they saw as its passionate denunciation of militarism and power politics. It’s more difficult to understand why the trilogy’s most prominent fans today are Silicon Valley tech lords like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and a rising group of far-right politicians in both Europe and the United States.

How did a trilogy of novels about wizards and elves and furry-footed hobbits become a touchstone for right-wing power brokers? How did books that evince nostalgia for a pastoral, preindustrial past win an ardent following among the people who are shaping our digital future? Why do so many of today’s high-profile fans of “The Lord of the Rings” and other fantasy and sci-fi classics insist on turning these cautionary tales into aspirational road maps for mastering the universe?

Some of the answers lie in the sheer popularity of the trilogy, which has sold more than 150 million copies across the world and permeated the public imagination, as genre fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

And then there's Traditionalism:

According to the scholar Benjamin Teitelbaum, Traditionalism posits that we are currently living in a dark age brought on by modernity and globalization; if today’s corrupt status quo is toppled, we might return to a golden age of order — much the way that Tolkien’s trilogy ends with the rightful king of Arnor and Gondor assuming the throne and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.

A similar taste for kingly power has taken hold in Silicon Valley. In a guest essay in The Times last year, the former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott pointed to “a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech.” This management style known as “founder mode,” she explained, “embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees.”

The new mood of autocratic certainty in Silicon Valley is summed up in a 2023 manifesto written by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who describes himself and his fellow travelers as “Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

Andreessen, along with Musk and Thiel, helped muster support for Trump in Silicon Valley, and he depicts the tech entrepreneur as a conqueror who achieves “virtuous things” through brazen aggression, and villainizes anything that might slow growth and innovation — like government regulation and demoralizing concepts like “tech ethics” and “risk management.”

Love of Tolkien goes deep in Silicon Valley. Kakutani traces it back to the early days in the 1970s and then tells us:

Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, a lifelong Tolkien fan, oversaw the company’s purchase of the rights to the “Lord of the Rings” back story for $250 million. Multiple seasons of its streaming series “The Rings of Power,” Vanity Fair reports, will most likely cost over $1 billion, making it the most expensive series ever made.

Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and mega donor to right-wing causes, says he’s read the trilogy at least 10 times. He has named several companies after magical objects in “Lord of the Rings.” Vice President JD Vance, whose careers in business and politics were nurtured by Thiel, followed in his steps. Vance has said that a lot of his “conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up,” and he named his venture firm Narya Capital after Gandalf’s magic ring of fire.

Classic fantasy and science fiction stories have informed how many fans think about the world, giving them a Manichaean vocabulary of good vs. evil, and a propensity for asserting that the future of civilization is constantly at stake. The stories also acted as an exhortation to think big and to pursue huge, improbable dreams.

And then there's Asimov's Foundation novels, which

trace a narrative arc that has resonated with right-wing politicians intent on remaking the world. It’s a story line in which a hero or a group of heroes takes on the challenge of a civilization in crisis. They wage war against a dangerous or moribund establishment and aspire to build a brave new world out of the ashes of the old. Similar plot dynamics are at work in Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which depicts a colony of freedom-loving settlers on the moon and their successful revolt against the oppressive rule of bureaucrats on planet Earth.

This does not look good. Kakutani notes:

Tolkien himself regarded “machine worshipers” with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England’s landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home.

Of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics — or, for that matter, any technological innovation — need not be used for war. “They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.”

Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties.

She goes on to note:

The growing embrace in Silicon Valley of “transhumanism” — including research into life extension, machine enhancements and even finding a solution to death — underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? [...] In the case of “The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien argued that mortality is part of “the given nature of Men,” and the Elves called it “the Gift of God (to Men),” allowing them “release from the weariness of Time.” Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, which turned them into his servants.

Many prominent readers of “Lord of the Rings” no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).

Man-children, the lot of them. There's more at the link.

Note: Tolkien was a philologist and medievalist. He did an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my very favorite texts. As far as I can tell, there is more wisdom in that one medieval romance than there is in the Silicon Valley elite.

The Zuck Amuck: TechBros take it to the mat [Fight Club in the Valley]

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David Yaffe-Bellany, The Tech Guys Are Fighting. Literally. NYTimes, May 11, 2025.

Walking into the crowded hotel conference room, Andrew Batey looked like any other tech guy attending ETHDenver, an annual cryptocurrency conference. A venture capital investor based in Florida, Mr. Batey wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the logos of more than a dozen crypto companies, with names like LunarCrush and bitSmiley. He had arrived in town with some expensive footwear — a pair of Off-White Air Jordans, the type of sneaker, he said, that people usually don’t take out of the box.

Mr. Batey, however, was at the conference not to network with fellow crypto enthusiasts but to fight one of them — live on YouTube. At the hotel, a short drive from the conference convention center, he was preparing for his official weigh-in, the final step before a fight the next evening in an arena packed with crypto colleagues. Under the watchful eye of a representative from the Colorado Combative Sports Commission, Mr. Batey, 40, stripped down to his boxers, which were adorned with a cartoon Santa Claus riding a golf cart.

He weighed in at just under 195 pounds, on target for the fight. The bare-chested venture capitalist raised his biceps and flexed for the cameras.

The nation’s tech elite, not content with unfathomable wealth and rising political influence in Washington, have recently developed a new obsession — fighting. Across the United States, men like Mr. Batey are learning to punch, kick, knee, elbow and, in some cases, hammer an opponent over the head with their fists. The figurehead of the movement is Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire chief executive of Meta, who has charted his impressive physical transformation from skinny computer nerd to martial arts fighter on Instagram, one of the apps he owns. A recent post showed Mr. Zuckerberg, dressed in gym shorts and an American flag T-shirt, grappling his opponent to the ground.

Good lord! And these are the dudes leading the AI revolution!

So we have a lot of this and that about techbros working their fight club vibe, all centered on a fight between Batey and Chauncey St. John, a crypto guy from upstate New York. The fight itself:

What followed more closely resembled a schoolyard scrap than a professional martial-arts bout. The choreographed moves that Mr. Batey had rehearsed were nowhere to be seen. Over and over, he threw punches and missed, lunging forward and then lurching back. Mr. St. John swung his arms wildly, whirling in a circle, like a helicopter. Next to the pit, a panel of announcers offered live analysis for the YouTube audience.

“What they lack in technical, they make up for in the heart,” one commentator said. His partner offered a blunter assessment: “It’s hilarious.”

By the end of the first round, Mr. Batey’s nose was bleeding heavily. But soon he forced Mr. St. John to the ground and straddled him, raining punches down onto his head. Within 10 seconds, the referee intervened: Mr. St. John couldn’t continue. It was over.

At the after-party:

That night, Mr. Batey went out to celebrate. He had showered, changed and cleaned up his face, except for a single streak of dried blood that was intact on the bridge of his nose. At the entrance to a party near Civic Center Park, Mr. Batey informed the bouncer that he had featured in “a pro fight tonight, a fight on TV.”

The bouncer didn’t seem impressed. But Mr. Batey found a more appreciative audience on the dance floor, where his friends swarmed him, offering hugs and fist bumps. Soon a chant went up: “Batey, Batey, Batey, Batey.”

Away from the group, Mr. Batey confided that at the arena, not long after the fight, he had approached Mr. St. John to express his respect and gratitude — and to make clear that he was “proud of him, as a human.”

Mr. St. John had fought hard, Mr. Batey said. Maybe someday they would be friends.

“He’s a good guy,” Mr. Batey said. “We’re both just good dudes.”

Come to think of it, that's not so foreign to me. To be sure, I'm not getting in the ring anytime soon. I'm an old man and overweight. But at a jam session, depending on the vibe, I might take heads. I've done it in the past, the distant past to be sure, but I've done it.

So I'm thinking. A jam session is about making music, pleasing an audience, or at any rate, yourself, with your artistic prowess. No one is going to end up bleeding on the floor. But there is one's rep at state, if only for the evening. The combat is real. But it is also artistic. Victory is written in written in grace, elegance, and wit, but – yes! – also virtuosity (sheer technical prowess), and even ferocity.

I wonder how it is with real fighters, professionals. As fighters these techbros are amateurs. "Schoolyard scrap" is what Yaffe-Bellany called. They're not good enough to display artistry. But the professionals, what's the balance between artistry and ferocity? It's one thing to whip your opponent, it's another thing to put on a good show. In pro wrestling it's all about the show. Victory and loss are scripted. Some time they're scripted in professional boxing. But that's illegal and is done behind the scenes. It's cheating.

What's real? That's a real question, and an interesting one at that. How does this dynamic play between nations?