✨💰 A world where Sam Altman and Elon Musk are AI trillionaires
Spoiler: It would be far from a dystopia
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
No joke: Elon Musk and Sam Altman could both be on course for 13-digit fortunes. (Oracle founder Larry Ellison is now about as rich as Musk at about $400 billion, but he’s 81.) Tesla’s board is dangling a $1 trillion pay package if Musk can deliver 20 million vehicles, a million robotaxis and humanoid robots, and push the firm’s value above $8.5 trillion. Altman, meanwhile, sits atop OpenAI, whose artificial intelligence tools are already reshaping work. If AI proves truly transformative — curing diseases, inventing supermaterials, accelerating science — one could easily imagine its boss residing in the same zip code of wealth as Musk.
Replicants and riches
Yes, yes, yes, the prospect of such record riches will surely horrify inequality hawks. As it is, left-wing populists like Zohan Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, see the existence of the current crop of mega-richies as a (further) indictment of “late” capitalism. Recall that the socialist politician has argued flatly that "we shouldn't have billionaires." The line plays well on social media, especially among younger voters a) steeped in ignorance about the entrepreneurial roots of American superwealth and b) a half-century of cultural pessimism about technological progress.
On that latter point, science fiction has long depicted technology as deepening inequality, from Blade Runner (1982) to Elysium (2013). The fear is that AI, genetic editing, and space colonies will enrich a gilded elite while everyone else slogs through dystopian drizzle. FX's new series Alien: Earth exemplifies this phenomenon by presenting a future where Earth is governed by five massive corporations competing to control alien bioweapons technology.
This errant, Down Wing view is what I call the “Blade Runner Fallacy,” in my 2023 book and this newsletter. As I have written:
Instead of one of the most famous cinematic depictions of a future dystopia, the world of Blade Runner should be one of dramatically greater wealth, health (there’s a historical correlation between tech progress and higher life expectancy), resources, and problem-solving capabilities. Replicants take most of the jobs? Here’s a pretty generous basic income for displaced human workers. Destructive climate change? Mega-machines to suck carbon out of the sky. Resource constraints? Asteroid mining. Population explosion? To quote an ad from the first film, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” Then again, life on Earth should also be pretty good for the Earth-loving remainers.
This fallacy has persisted decade after decade despite economic history pointing in the entirely opposite direction. Automobiles, air travel, computers, and smartphones all began as luxuries, only to become mass-market products within a generation. Nobel economist William Nordhaus calculated that innovators capture just two percent of the social value they create, with 98 percent flowing to consumers in lower prices and better goods. Musk does not receive a better Covid vaccine than his factory workers or have access to a better smartphone. Altman’s AI chatbots and helpers are already in the hands of hundreds of millions.
Disruption, not dynasty
Back to the current source of American superwealth. The USA has 1,135 billionaires worth $5.7 trillion, up from 927 in 2020, according to a recent analysis in The Wall Street Journal. A 2024 report from the bank UBS shows US billionaire wealth represents over 40 percent of the global total. Then there’s this: About 70 percent of US billionaires are self-made, compared with fewer than half in most of Western Europe, where fortunes are anchored in luxury brands and inheritance. American dynamism has delivered companies that dominate the commanding heights of the 21st-century economy. Europe’s more hostile climate for tycoons and risk-taking has coincided with relative stagnation.
The wrong dystopia
These techno-trillionaires, when they emerge, will be by-products of growth, progress, and abundance. Consider what that world might look like. A Musk worth a trillion dollars is one who has delivered not only mass-market electric vehicles but fleets of autonomous robotaxis and humanoid laborers. Goods and services become cheaper as machines take on dangerous, dirty, or dull work. His reusable rockets would help make viable a multitrillion-dollar space economy and also be repurposed for the more mundane business of moving people and cargo across the globe in under an hour.
An Altman worth a trillion is one who has overseen the mainstreaming of AI far more powerful than today’s chatbots. Every child, whether in Lagos or Los Angeles, could summon a patient AI tutor. Doctors and researchers, amplified by their digital colleagues, could accelerate drug discovery, climate modeling, and materials science by orders of magnitude. Intelligence itself would approach the price of electricity, an input so cheap and abundant that it recedes into the background of daily life.
The rise of trillionaires might well test political systems. But to obsessively focus only on the commas in Musk’s or Altman’s bank accounts is to miss the larger story. A world where two (and hopefully far more) Americans are worth a trillion is one in which scarcity has retreated further, productivity has surged, and humanity as a whole lives better — not just those in rich economies. The real dystopia would be to embrace the Blade Runner Fallacy and ensure such a world never arrives.
On sale everywhere: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised by James Pethokoukis
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NASA Confirms Ancient Life Remains Found on Mars by Perserverence - next BIG future
I love this perspective, so often public commentators ignore the basic principles of economics. I do however worry about a world in which human labor is no longer necessary for a viable economy. We can see examples of how a machine state may harm or exclude individuals that are not relevant for economic production or growth (i.e. China, Russia, even the homeless in the US). Trillionaires with unbounded political power don’t really have an incentive to provide basic income to individuals when those individuals are the only check on their power (through a democratic vote). What’s your perspective on the fundamental tension between a trillionaire class with machine power and a democratic country with human power?
A world in which _Tesla_ (as a company) or, arguably, OpenAI is successful,_might_ be a world in which the general population benefited from whatever the company was produced.
However, a CEO _can_ become a trillionnaire (in valuations) without the company going well.
Right before the bubble bursts, everybody is rich.