Attack of the Trillionaire

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The tech zillionaires want you to believe their power is permanent and their math is real. In this week’s episode of the Nerd Reich podcast—recorded live on Zoom with our subscribers—Dave Karpf and I take apart these stories: Musk’s trillionaire mirage, Thiel’s Argentina exit plan, Palantir’s pitch for defense contractor fascism.

Karpf is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and author of the forthcoming book Vaporware Inc: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present.

Click below to watch our conversation (audio links and full transcript below)

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R.R. Robbins Coming up on a special edition of the Nerd Reich podcast.

Gil Duran There's eight point five billion people on the planet. Only around three thousand of them are billionaires. This is the easiest trolley problem ever.

R.R. Robbins Welcome to the Nerd Reich, I'm producer R.R. Robbins. Quick heads up, this one's a little different.

Not long ago we had a special event for our newsletter subscribers, a private Zoom with Dave Karpf, returning guest and associate professor at George Washington University, also author of the upcoming book Vaporware Inc., and the voice behind the fantastic newsletter, The Future, Now and Then on Beehiiv. He took questions and had a conversation with Gil that covered a lot of ground, from the recent Palantir Manifesto to crypto billionaires in politics to Peter Thiel's escape to Argentina. And we're sharing it as a bonus podcast now.

Quick heads up though, it's Zoom quality audio. Even cleaned up, it gets a little funky. But it's such a great convo, we want to share it. Now we start off with a question about Elon Musk. Take it away, Gil.

Gil Duran Elon Musk has now become the world's first trillionaire on paper after SpaceX had the largest initial public offering ever. There seems something so strange about the fact that this guy gets to become a trillionaire at the very moment that he is spreading election lies on Twitter, which he now owns, of course, and is called X, and has been stoking racial hatred and violence in Ireland. And in the midst of all this, he becomes a trillionaire.

And of course, it was almost a year ago exactly that he left the Trump administration on a huff, pointing the finger at Donald Trump for being in the Epstein files. And it seems like on a day like this, the world is upside down. Why is this guy getting rewarded for being what Ed Luce of the Financial Times has called a Bond villain? So what's this SpaceX IPO all about? What does it mean that Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire on paper?

Dave Karpf Money is kind of fake. It's not only is he the world's first trillionaire while being the world's worst human being, he's also the world's worst worst trillionaire, and SpaceX is worth something like 2.2 trillion dollars according to the markets right now, even though it does not turn a profit. He already had a meme stock in Tesla, and now he just went and created another meme stock. The thing that makes it is so crazy making to me about this.

We have this story of the public markets that when you buy a share of a company, you are then entitled to a share of its revenues. And therefore the value of a company in the stock market is related to some mass wisdom from the investor class about how much that company is how much money that company's gonna make. And that's certainly in the past couple of decades only been a little bit true. Because the other thing that you get when you buy a stock in a company is the right to sell that stock, hopefully for more money later on.

Right. So it's also just a betting market. What we've been seeing for the past several years with Tesla doesn't matter that Tesla sells fewer and fewer cars. The stock ends up being worth more and more because people are just betting that some other greater fool will come along and buy it. And then with SpaceX, that that bet just went forward again. Right. There's a bunch of institutional investors who said, Well, I don't know that this company is ever going to be worth that price, but I do think that somebody else will buy this stock for more than I'm buying it today. Ergo, I'll just do that.

It's kind of like he now has the gravitational force of his money is now strong that he no longer has to obey the sort of the the gravitational laws of the market otherwise. SpaceX is worth that because a bunch of people figured that's it'll just be worth it 'cause Elon could never be wrong. And that meant that he could never be wrong, at least in the short term. On the long term, that all probably falls apart and, I don't know, then we have a great financial crisis because it's within the next six months or so, everybody who has just invested the Nasdaq or other index funds is gonna own a piece of SpaceX of this insanely invalid inflated value. And that means that if it ever crashes because people realize, wait, this thing doesn't actually make money. And it's its investor portfolio is, well, we'll just make ninety percent of the money that exists on Earth. There's nothing to that, but it's gonna get so big that they'll just bail it out or something else ridiculous will happen.

The striking thing is it just really means when somebody is worth that much money, all the other institutional wealth just says, if Elon says it, it'll probably be true. And that has a self-reinforcing quality, such that we no longer have any there there's no check on SpaceX, not even it being a shitty company. Which means there's also, at least in the short term, very little check on Elon, even though he's a shitty person whose companies are also shit. He's a trillionaire now. Okay, I guess by the metrics they count by, he kinda won.

Gil Duran Yeah, and it comes at a moment when the USAID cuts that he celebrated with a chainsaw are killing people, some of the poorest people on earth. Got Ebola resurging, you've got the screwworm. He really screwed up government from the inside, and that's one of the disheartening things about his continued economic inflation is that it seems like people who should know better, many of them, are continuing to just bet on Elon to win.

It's not really an economic choice people are making. It's a moral choice. It's a political bet, right? It's it's about this sort of selfishness they believe that somehow he will scam enough people that'll all be worthwhile. And I think that's what's so disconcerting about it. At the same time I would say, because I don't want to dishearten people, it's sort of like a Greek myth. How far is this gonna go? before it all comes crashing down, right, in the most horrible way possible. Because really the arrogance and the villainy of Elon Musk is sort of begging for a cosmic justice of some kind. And either the Greeks were wrong or the Silicon Valley oligarchs are in for a rude awakening.

Dave Karpf The bit that always comes to mind for me is John Maynard Keynes either said this or every everyone says that he said it. But the line is that the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Everything that we can say about Musk and SpaceX today, we could say about Musk and Tesla a month ago. I drove by a cyber truck earlier today. That car was a failure by any objective measure. And if you actually just look at, is Tesla selling more or less cars now?

It's becoming a shittier and shittier company. And yet there's a set of investors who narrowly say, The only thing I care about is do I think that this number will go up tomorrow or not? And they keep on betting, well, I think the number will go up tomorrow. And it does. And so they get rewarded for that. There's absolutely a cosmic injustice in in that, and it can't last for forever. But Elon Musk has been driving me insane for several years now. And I've been working on a book and every time I go through the manuscript, I've got a line about how much he's worth. And I have to update that. I'm not to update it to say he's now worth a trillion. I mentioned this in a a review last week of a book called Muskism, which is a very good book. One thing that we also have to keep in mind here, Elon Musk at the start of the twenty twenties, his net worth was like twenty four billion dollars, which is two point four percent of a trillion.

Something like 97.6% of his personal wealth was made in the 2020s when his public image was the guy who is destroying USAID, doing DOGE, ruining Tesla, ruining Twitter. He hasn't done business genius stuff for quite a while. The the public image that he had in the 2010s, that's long gone. And yet the sort of pure insanity from him of the past what, six years, has been when the vast majority of his wealth has come together. None of that makes sense. And all of that is consequently unjust. And I'm pretty confident that it can't last for forever. But one of the things that I constantly find myself asking is, how much longer can this thing go? And the disappointing answer is clearly a little long I don't know how, but somehow a little longer. It definitely won't last for forever. And when it does fall apart, everyone's gonna look back and say, well that, that was bound to happen. We could all see the signs. But somehow he now has enough power and and money that the other anchors of money and power just decide to reward him, which leaves him immune from the forces of the marketplace and everything else, at least until it doesn't.

Gil Duran One of our commenters says part of the issue is that he's so embedded in our federal government and national security apparatus. So he's being backed by the state. It's that old Republican dream of privatization. Now we understand why it was so important to them. Because instead of having publicly owned infrastructure and technology, it can enrich these corrupt oligarchs who then use their wealth and power. To push right-wing politics. It's all about offloading public money and power to private hands, which is a recurring theme with these Silicon Valley guys. And so it it's very strange that we have a foreign-born trillionaire who is simultaneously raking government contracts, making sure that our economy is increasingly dependent on him and his products, and also stoking chaos and anti-democratic movements around the country. It's all in one package here. So it's pretty A pretty dark day, I'd say, for the world and for the United States, though I have hope that this is all part of our waking up to the dangers of this sort of unchecked anarcho-capitalist clown car derby that we've got going on here.

Dave Karpf Folks probably don't know. I'm a political scientist by trend. Part of what that means is in the late aughts and the teens, one of the literatures that I contributed to was some of the conversations I was in was the money in politics and campaign finance reform conversation. And back that, if you go back to the George W. Bush era era, the problem of money in politics was very rich people can bundle together $10,000 donations to get up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that has a corrupting influence on politics. We gotta do something about it. And then we had Citizens United.

Part of the calculus, part of what fits into this billionaire poisoning, is we now have Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and folks saying, I'll I'll just spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the government outright. Cause once I buy it, I can then have the government re reward me with billions of dollars of contracts. I can have the, if the SEC or the FTC or anyone else is investigating my companies or my portfolio, I can just tell them to knock it off and they'll do it.

It's a it's a really good deal financially for Elon Musk as a trillionaire to just go and buy the US government. And if we go back twenty years ago, he couldn't do that. But then we had a Supreme Court that decided, we'll allow it now. So, not only are we facing a situation that can't go on forever with Elon Musk, but it's a situation that that's sustaining itself because of the way that we've self sabotaged our political system. We're gonna have to rebuild that too. This is nuts. It can't go on for forever.

But if you look narrowly at what the tech billionaires are doing, it's a great deal for them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. If he almost decides I'm gonna spend a billion dollars on on the midterms, that's a pittance for him. And it could have a real financial payoff for his companies. So narrowly, why wouldn't he do it? That's the thing he's gonna do until there's a cost to it.

Gil Duran the most efficient thing. What they've realized is that you can just buy the whole system and break it.

Got a massive liability here that has to be fixed. And I think that, like I said earlier, it's part of our awakening. It's gonna be painful and scary, but this is how people are gonna have to wake up to what's actually going on and what the real risk is of having these billionaires roaming around doing as they please. Speaking of dangerous billionaire interests that have gone a bit off the rails. Back in April, Palantir listed On its Twitter account, some of the major points, I believe it was twenty-two points, the Palantir Manifesto from the Technological Republic. And it was really almost a color by numbers fascist manifesto. You could literally take any of the list of the fascist characteristics and sort of match it. I think it was Umberto Eco who said, you don't have to have every characteristic of fascism to be fascist.

You have to have a familial resemblance. What was your take on the the Palantir Manifesto? And one of the main points was that Silicon Valley had a moral responsibility to take an interest in the affairs of the country and and participate in the defense of the nation. Even went so far as to call for mandatory national service. It's a universal duty. Kind of framed it up an existential threat. We have to create AI weapons or someone else will do it. Basically framing that they have a moral duty to make the military as good as possible and play a an important role in that. But they also basically said that some cultures are better than others and we have to just accept that and understand it. That Silicon Valley has to play a role in addressing violent crime, basically taking a role in in law enforcement around the country...That it was wrong that wealthier, powerful people have their privacy invaded by the media and others, and this should not be allowed. Down the list, it was an argument basically for elite power and for private companies taking a bigger position in national militaristic defense and law enforcement. Pretty scary stuff. What was your take on the Palantir Manifesto? Why do you think they put that out?

Dave Karpf Folks who don't know me would would not know about this habit that I have on Bluesky. I hate read book reviews on Bluesky. I'll do long threads where I tear it into a book. And I I read the Alex Karp book and I did one of my hate read threads. When I read that, which was a little over a year ago, the book is so bad, y'all. The the book should have been a tweet. And then a year later, they turned the book into a series of tweets. And I read that and I was, this tweet just should have been a MAGA hat. That stands out because part of what really hit me in that manifesto, which again,

It's not even really a manifesto. It's a it's a summary of a shitty book. And it is mostly Palantir doing the pick me pick me dance for the Department of War and for Donald Trump. Alex Karp is the CEO of Palantir, the defense tech giant. Also importantly, because the F in my last name is silent. No relationship, but I write good books. He writes a terrible book with the same

Pronounce last name is mine, different guys, different guys. I did a book club once with a bunch of academics where we trashed that book and it was just a solid hour of people being, Yeah, Karp's the worst writer. And I cringed the entire time. It it it it has plenty of fascism in there. But also a lot of what they're saying in there. It's maybe half of the bullet points are them saying, Hey, the future of defense tech is AI and you should spend a lot of money on that and you should spend it with us. Right? That is them.

Just them saying the defense contracting business is good and we would like some more of that. And then they throw in these almost random asides you're going through the bullet points and then out of nowhere they go from the future of the battlefield as AI to saying, and it it's terrible when political elites get canceled. Right. And all they're doing there is saying, hey, what are the things that Pete Hegseth needs to hear so that he gives us all the money? And I do think we gotta read this. When that came out, was I think about a month.

After Anthropic had their defense contract canceled, they they said, Anthropic, you're dead to us because we think you're too woke. So Palantir is coming into that mix and saying, Hey, if if you're gonna give defense money to a tech giant, it should be us. And we have all the same values as you guys, which on on the one hand is disgusting and is definitely a major step on the road to fascism. I don't wanna doubt that. That's true. It's also just vaguely pathetic because there's no if you read the bullet points in order.

There is no through line. They're just saying all the stuff that they think Hegseth and Trump want to hear. And I'm sure if Democrats win in twenty twenty six, I am sure they will then just pretend that they didn't say some of that stuff because they will quickly pivot to whatever they think needs to be heard today, so long as it keeps the defense contract dollars flowing in.

Gil Duran Palantir's had plenty of defense money under Democrats and Republicans alike. I mean, they're getting a lot more now, right? I think it was a recent story about everybody who's giving money to Trump is also getting government contracts in return. So it's this massive towering flywheel of corruption that we're seeing. One of the things I focus on in my book is the degree to which this interconnected group of oligarchs and venture capitalists are cornering investments on AI, crypto, surveillance and defense technology at the same time that they're cornering government power and even trying to create their own religion. And if you look at Mussolini or Ruth Ben-Ghiat or Robert Paxton or Jason Stanley, that that bundle, fascism.

The word fascism comes from the Latin fasces, which was this bundle of rods in ancient Rome with an axe sticking off the side that was a totem of power in ancient Rome. What they are doing is bundling technology and power together in one bundle. And I use that metaphor to kind of explain because whenever you s call something fascist, the right wing excels at saying, that word doesn't mean anything. You're a fascist. Every you say everything is fascism. So it's really important to understand the degree to which they think that.

By cornering government and these technologies and controlling the money with crypto, they just make something up and then billions of dollars flow and they can parcel that out. The Trump family is now crypto billionaires. And that's the the main mechanism of crypto these days, I think, is as a towering mechanism of corruption in politics. That's been true forever. But they are now directly using it to just bribe and pay off politicians, starting with the Trumps, right?

Yeah. And I think we gotta realize that's where we are. But it it's really about this concentration of power all at once that they are doing. And yeah, I think you're right. Palantir's auditioning for a role, right? Everyone's very aggressively right wing now and all about this return to

Some glorious past that is also the future. So pretty scary stuff. And what bothers me, and I've said this before, is that if Democrats do win power again, we have to make sure that they hold these people accountable for their actions now. It'll be very important to remember what it felt like at this moment, because they'll all put on their smiley faces and pretend like they didn't mean it or they didn't really want to go along with Trump. They just had to. But we have to remember what it looked like in this moment. I think maybe we should have a museum. of American fascism that's dedicated to remembering who did what and how it looked and how it worked. Because if we survive this, we'll have to teach children in the future how close we came to really just losing it all, with very little resistance from the main establishment. Again

Dave Karpf I and what strikes me, similar to Musk becoming a trillionaire, is sort of the time horizon. If you look just in the very narrow short term, that Palantir Manifesto makes financial sense. Palantir is valued as a meme stock. The amount of money that they bring in in government contracts and any other contracts is a tiny fraction of what they're valued on the markets. When you're a meme stock, you just need to do a bunch of noisy shit to convince investors to keep handing you their money, to just continue being the greater fool.

If they're thinking just in the what do we do in the next six months to get attention that's going to keep our stock value high, then I can understand how they back themselves into saying, let's go full fascism, let's do a manifesto, we're gonna be as brashly MAGA as possible. If you look in the medium term, that shit doesn't work. Right. If you look in the in the medium term and the long term and you actually analyze how is SpaceX supposed to turn a profit, it it basically isn't.

They just need to break the laws of physics while no one else breaks the laws of physics and then make all of the money that exists. It's similar to how the plan for Tesla to make money now is we're gonna invent robo servants and then everyone in the world will buy several of them for thirty thousand dollars, even though most of the world doesn't have thirty thousand dollars. None of that makes sense. But that's a problem for later. It it cannot last. And also they're not in the business of making plans that last 10, 20, 30 years. The logic of the of the moment we're in is that this people in power just trying to get through the next quarter, figuring it'll be somebody else's problem later, is what governs us. That can't go on for forever, but it is so frustrating now.

Gil Duran Well, as long as they make their exit in time, I guess they figure they'll be okay. I think I saw a story too from Reuters about how the Trump family's wealth corresponds to the amount of money that was lost by all these people. It reminds me, I was in Rome a couple of weeks ago and every time you go to a European city, you see the scammers doing that little three cups game where there's a ball hidden in one of the cups, and you see all of these tourists around ready to get ripped off. It's how do you not know? That you're gonna lose your money to these people, right? Works that way in a lot of places, including with things like crypto or these meme stocks where someone's getting the money. The money that they're gaining is from other people losing it.

Dave Karpf Polymarket billions and billions are getting spent on Polymarket, pretty much all by suckers who are losing their money to people who are doing scams and investment fraud, right? It's insider trading. They just don't bother with that stuff. And yet people keep on spending more and more money on Polymarket and Kalshi. In the medium term, there's no way that that works. We can all see what that is and that it is ruining all of society, right?

This is me being as conservative as I can be. Unregulated gambling, getting advertised everywhere is that. That's a thing that conservatives are supposed to believe. And here I as a progressive am saying it. All of that is sort of the current moment. We know it can't last, but there's so much profit in it for the billionaire class that they're gonna keep on doing it now and just worry about later later.

Gil Duran We'll have to do a whole show on prediction markets at some point. Degree to which prediction markets are being used as propaganda. For example, in the California governor's race, which I watch closely, the tech bros ran this guy named Matt Mahan. They thought he could win. He ended up sputtering out with like three percent or something like that. It didn't work out. They put in millions and millions of dollars behind him and just they couldn't make fetch happen.

When he entered the race, suddenly he surged to forty percent on Polymarket. Media outlets ran with the story like wow, Mahan is surging. And so it created this whole false narrative that made it seem like he was surging, which people try to do that to convince undecided people to, wow, that guy seems popular. Let me maybe vote for him.

It didn't work, but if you watched it all throughout the race, it was right in the end, but only after having been wrong at every step of the way. And all it did in the end was simply reflect what most people thought based on the polls. So there's this weird thing going on where all that people are really doing is A, losing money, and B, certain people seem to be using it to create temporary propaganda narratives based on probabilities that are actually not probable at all. If you have a thousand dollars to bet and no one else is betting, you can suddenly make it seem like Wow, the odds are way up on this and that's really something easy for people to do. Anyway, we'll do that another time.

R.R. Robbins And speaking of time, right now it's time for the plugs. Dave Karpf, a returning favorite and amazing voice on tech today. Subscribe to his newsletter, The Future Now and Then, at Dave Karpf with an F at the end, beehiiv.com. And his new book, Vaporware Inc., How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present, drops January 2027. Set your reminder now. Speaking of new books, get ready for the Nerd Reich. Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Pre-order it at bookshop.org and check the show notes for links. Pre-orders really make a difference for us, so please do your part and put in one today. And if you want to be part of the next exclusive event like this, where we recorded this episode, sign up for the newsletter and become a paid subscriber today at thenerdreich.com. Now back to the conversation with Gil and Dave.

Gil Duran Speaking of exiting from things at the proper moment when it's the most lucrative or profitable, Elon Musk headed toward becoming a trillionaire and as Palantir issued its Technological Republic Manifesto, Peter Thiel up and moved his family, temporarily at least, to a twelve million dollar mansion in Argentina. And this has raised a lot of questions about what's going on with him. Curtis Yarvin, who was largely funded by Peter Thiel, has been crying, literally weeping in Interview saying that everyone needs to escape because Trump is failing. He's not gonna go all the way with a dictatorship and there's gonna be accountability when Democrats retake power. So on one level, is Thiel heeding this advice and fleeing in terror, trying to set up a a home base somewhere else? Is there something else going on? And I think it's a it's a mix of things. Javier Milei, the president, the anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina, announced new legislation that would ban AI regulation. Lower taxes for tech companies and allow for the creation of non-human corporations. So basically a whole corporation that's just AI has to pose and AI agents. So that seemed like the kind of thing that would be appealing to Thiel. And and Milei made it clear in a Financial Times up it that this was an invitation to billionaires and tech companies to relocate to Argentina, where basically they can just write their own ticket and do as they please. What do you make of Thiel's spreading roots? Temporarily at least, in Argentina.

Dave Karpf So I had a serious answer and a joke answer. Can we st let me start with a joke answer? Peter Thiel has always struck me as a guy who eventually flees to Argentina, right? He does seem like the type. So do it a little earlier than I thought. Anyway, though it's a joke, Peter Thiel. Please don't suit me out of existence. I know you like to do that to people. The serious answer is an important concept to keep in mind is optionality. You take a strategic action, but you leave yourself room to do other stuff still.

Gil Duran Sure, we could use some levity here.

Dave Karpf When Peter Thiel moves to Argentina, he doesn't really move to Argentina. He bought some land in Argentina. He also, I'm pretty sure, has a New Zealand passport and has some land there's with his wealth, he's got land in a bunch of places. So right now, there there's been this libertarian exit idea for quite a while. I know you've written a bunch on this. Quinn Slobodian has a great book on this topic, called Crack-Up Capitalism, about sort of tech billionaires and also through history other billionaires. Trying to crack up nation states so they can carve out zones where they don't get regulated. Right. So Milei has just said, sure, we'll do that for you. Please come here. El Salvador had done that a little while before that for, for for crypto. Honduras had done that. Often what happens is you'll have a right wing president say that. And then later on they lose election because it's terrible for the populace. And then the new government says, Yeah, we're we're not doing that anymore. And then they get sued by the tech billionaires who love to sue everybody.

That could work, right? That could be Argentina decides from now on all the AI companies should be incorporated here and they'll pay us a few dollars in taxes. 'cause of course they don't they don't like paying their taxes. And we won't regulate them at all. And from there we will be the prosperous we're gonna turn our country into Galt's Gulch. If you're Thiel, then it's, Hey, I'm glad that you're saying that, I'll spend twelve million dollars, which is nothing for Peter Thiel, to buy property there and we'll get some headlines for quote unquote moving there.

He's going around the world giving weird speeches about the Antichrist. So if that goes south, it doesn't if it goes well, then he reaps the rewards. If it goes south, then he doesn't lose anything from it. He'll just he's still also in San Francisco. So I I think that that's the main thing is I think we should take it seriously, but also not treat it as a meaningful commitment. When he moves to Argentina, it's not like you or me moving to Argentina, or like when Jason Stanley moved to Canada, he actually moved to Canada. Right, like you Peter Thiel, he has the optionality to undo anything he's doing. So he's just kinda like trying it out.

Gil Duran Well one thing that comes to mind and I I get into this in the first chapter of my book, which is called The Sovereign Individual, Peter Thiel and the Politics of Apocalypse. Peter Thiel read this book, The Sovereign Individual, in the late nineties, and the sovereign individual I've talked about it before. The main thesis of it was that in the twenty first century technology would allow wealthy individuals to basically overcome and escape democracy and that nation states would collapse as all the revenue was sucked out because the wealthy elites could now find ways using technology to escape from the power of governments. And in that book, one of the things that these authors, who were these sort of kooky conspiracy theorists, recommended was obtaining multiple passports so that you could belong in any country, make a point of collecting passports. And two of the countries they singled out that would be good to have a passport for were New Zealand and Argentina.

And I believe Thiel became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 or something. He was able to get there and buy a piece of land and get a get a passport. And now he's doing Argentina. So in a weird way, he's still on that weird damn book. The thesis was that the technologies that would allow this collapse of democratic governments essentially were A, advanced automation, or AI. Which we would call that we'd call it AI today, and something called cybercurrency, a new kind of digital money that would allow people to evade government authority and power. Crypto. We are strangely on the mark for those prophecies. Although, of course, people knew that automation technologies and cybercurrency was a possibility before this damn book came out. They they they just kind of put it in this cheesy, scary format and and publish it as a book.

So that that's one part of it. It's amazing to me that this Argentina thing still fits his sovereign individual fixation. In his Antichrist speeches, which he's been giving all over the world, apparently he spoke about the Antichrist at length at a dinner in Argentina as well. One of the faces of Thiel's Antichrist is anybody who stands against technological acceleration or AI, any regulation of AI is the Antichrist. And so Milei. seems to be answering that with no regulation on AI and even you can have a non human company. So it's really about shopping for a jurisdiction that will allow him to do whatever he wants. And I'm sure having a house there will allow him to maybe get a passport at some point. And that's probably what the real play is there, just preparing for the future. But I doubt that at the height of his power, with JD Vance, his protege a heartbeat away from the presidency, that he's actually leaving the country. I doubt that.

Dave Karpf And again, when you have that kind of money, you you have so much money that you can do that stuff on a lark and see if it goes anywhere. This comes up for me a lot when I end up writing about or studying a bunch of the right wing movements that are funded by Thiel and are manifestly ridiculous. And they often get covered because they got fifty million dollars of of money behind them. And to journalists and a lot of other people, it's, well, that's a lot of money. So there must be something serious here.

The thing you have to keep in mind is Peter Thiel giving fifty million dollars to something is like you or me giving fifty dollars to something. It it's not nothing, but if it sounds like a cool idea and I want to support it just to see where it goes, I I could probably come up with it, right? That's that's not huge grocery money, that's a little grocery money. He can do that with the 50 million. Elon Musk, my god, the dumb idea is that Elon Musk can now fund on a lark because of this concentration of wealth. You cannot have a functional civil society or democracy when this much money is in the hands of just a few utter goobers. And that's that's sort of been what's defined our politics for a decade.

Gil Duran Here's a question from one reader from the chat. What is the end game when large portions of the population are displaced and have no employable skills after AI is implemented full skill? Now there's a loaded and important question.

Dave Karpf First time you and I talked, it was about Balaji Srinivasan, because both of us would read his awful, awful book. Worst book I've ever read. And I've written a book review titled something like Tech Billionaires Have a Blueprint, it is written in crayon. Every time I read what they've actually written about this stuff, what is most striking is the degree to which they have not thought this through. So the practical end game is something like once they have all of the money and automated robo servants that can cater to all of their needs and in their minds those deterrence will work for it. Well, then they kind of don't need the rest of the populace. They can sort of oppress them or kill them off or whatever they need to do. They're not actively planning the genocides. But if the genocides happen, then, whoopsie, we saw with USAID, they're not even apologetic about that shit. People who read Ayn Rand and never got over it. And so they truly believe that

Well, once we have our tech written utopia where nobody can say no to us at all, since we're the maker class, the maker class will be made better through us. And if it's not, then I guess it's their fault somehow. None of that actually works because Ayn Rand wrote bad fiction that doesn't work in reality. These guys have so much wealth and power without having ever figured that out. They're not good at reading. The unintentional endgame is really bad for humanity, which then naturally leads to probably Those people with no power who are immiserated, probably taking up arms and fighting back against the small number of tech barons with all the wealth, all the power and all the resistance. It probably ends in in chaos and social instability. But again, they they haven't thought any of that through because these guys are very rich, but they are not very brighter.

Gil Duran It's not clear how they would be so wealthy without any kind of economy to sustain them. What would anything be worth with no rest of the world? In that book I mentioned The Sovereign Individual, the prophecy is that technology would hollow out the economy and would lead to chaos and violence and collapse as people no longer had work to do. Which is funny because that's what some of these AI companies are now pitching, is that work's gonna any day now all the white collar jobs are gonna be gone, all the law jobs are gonna be gone, even though AI will hallucinate cases that don't exist. I mean, there's still a lot of problems. And there is pushback on that narrative because people say that it's actually not gonna be capable of displacing as many jobs as they're saying. It's also turning out that a lot of this AI stuff is pretty darn expensive. I was just reading a story before the chat, Meta is limiting its workers' use of AI because it's too expensive. And this comes after they've been encouraging their workers to use AI. The idea is that. We're all just gonna pay a lot for AI tokens to use all day to do what exactly? And I guess their vision of the future would seem to be that they'll just have a bunch of machines all talking to each other and somehow generating fake value and that will be the world without without people in it. But I think that that's a big mistake because there's eight point five billion people on the planet.

Only around three thousand of them are billionaires. This is the easiest trolley problem ever, and if there's no other job for people, then the job will be to revolt, have a revolution against billionaire anti human power. Right? They will unite the human race in a struggle to preserve the meaning of humanity. So yeah, I don't think they've fully thought it through. All it took was people to get a little bit hungry for the French Revolution to kick off. And they seem to really be wanting to drive in that direction. I think part of their jobs narrative is to convince investors that these trillions of dollars of investment will all pay off because we'll suck all of the value out of the economy into our company if you just keep pouring trillions and trillions of dollars onto our technology. So I think it's important to not fully believe. Believe the narrative that they have the power they say they have to destroy all jobs. Not to be in denial about the degree to which AI is already changing our reality, but not to fully buy into their fantasies and scenarios, because even they are now running into some roadblocks. And you got people like Ed Zitron and others who say this is a big bubble that's gonna pop. And they're trying to convince you that, We're gonna create godlike AI that's gonna kill all the jobs, but that's part of the marketing hype and narrative. We don't know the answer to the question yet. We don't know the full story, but we can't fully believe everything that these guys say that they're gonna do. Another question we have from someone in the chat, will push back against data centers make a difference? It seems like it's a bipartisan issue.

Dave Karpf I wrote on this last week. I think it really could. And the reason why I think it could is that I think it's a bank shot. As Zitron and other people have noted, AI is a bubble, at least financially. There's different types of financial bubbles, but quite clearly they need massive amounts of cash because they're burning through it trying to build the next wave of AI in order to keep up this story, this narrative that eventually this stuff will so transform the entire world. pure cancer and solve all of physics and everything else. And that that's the reason why the money will eventually work out, right? That the math will eventually math. In order to sustain that narrative, you need to be able to constantly make it seem like the future is arriving soon. So the thing that really excites me about this local data center activism, it is the best opportunity, the the best leverage point we have for creating friction that slows the industry down. And if you create that friction, you very possibly pop the financial bubble.

That doesn't mean that all of AI vanishes overnight. There are things that generative AI is good for. It can continue to be used for those things. If you would like shitty poetry, it's really good at doing that for you. In the same way that when the dot-com bubble popped, that didn't mean that the internet was gone, but it did completely reset the table in terms of who has power and who gets to set regulations, right? Who can avoid accountability and who's gonna face it. If we can pop that bubble sooner. Then the AI future gets shaped by different people at the table, right? We won't have the AI future that is dictated by Sam Altman and Elon Musk alone. The way to reset those power dynamics is to pop the financial bubble. And I actually think there's a a chance that local data center activism creating friction ends up bursting that financial bubble. Because if they can't produce what feels like the future at a fast enough rate. Then people start saying, what did we just spend another five billion dollars on? Where'd you put that last five billion you asked for last month? So I think there's a real chance of that activism at the local level scaling up to something very powerful and altering the trajectory that we're on.

Gil Duran It does seem to be one of those rare things that brings about a bipartisan unity. The other thing that's been similar to that has been this California Forever project in Solano County, where they're trying to build this sort of network state tech utopia city, bunch of venture capitalists secretly bought up thousands of acres of land and then no one knew what they were up to, but it would turn out to be this city. I called it the miracle in Solano in 2024 because in 2024 the These guys found a way to unite Democrats and Republicans against this weird city. And it stuck in my mind, someone on Facebook said, this is like some kind of alien invasion. It's suddenly they're here and they're gonna build their thing in your community. And I think that that we're seeing these struggles everywhere from North Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, all over the Utah, all over the country, people are feeling the pressure from these companies want wanting land. Wanting water, wanting energy, wanting resources. And it does seem to be a kind of a physical manifestation of this political project that has the potential to really activate and and unite people. And the polls show that. I don't know if you saw that Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan was cut on a hot mic telling some CEO, yeah, they don't want these things, but we just do it anyway? Data Center Democrats. one of the new villains who have emerged because everybody wants that tech money. But I do think it raises some important questions about what people deserve. Basically you're saying let us come and take your land and your energy and your water and pollute your air so that we can create a technology that's then going to take your job and and destroy your children and kill your future. Not a really good deal there to look forward to. So people should fight while they can and there's interesting organizing taking place all over the country right now. It's really activating a lot of people.

Dave Karpf Part of what we're seeing here is this is where it ends up really mattering that people have soured on tech, but they don't trust them all. Right. If you go back to 2009, Google's building a bunch of data centers and Amazon is building data centers to support cloud based computing and big data. But if there's pulling on that, people are probably, yeah, those companies build products that I like and need. Good for them, right?

People weren't people didn't hate those companies back then. Facebook circa twenty ten is still viewed as kind of cool. people working at Facebook were real proud to wear their Facebook merch because we're, it's such a great company. And then you have the tech lash circa circa twenty seventeen. These companies get richer and richer, but also people come to hate them and to believe they have all the power, we can't do anything about it. And now by twenty twenty six, that that's the place that we're trapped in is Like people fucking hate Elon Musk. And also he becomes a trillionaire. And there's just a sense of no matter what he does, no matter how publicly he fails, the markets just give him more money. And there's nothing that we can do to stop him. And then when you give people some meaningful leverage point, right? Because the national government isn't listening to us. The stock market isn't listening to us. But local zoning boards, yeah, they'll they'll listen to us.

And that then becomes a rallying cry because what people desperately want, I think, is some meaningful leverage point to say hell no. So that's what we're seeing here. And again, it it's not just people crying to the wilderness and there's no point to it. It's people crying to the wilderness and this really could create some leverage that matters.

Gil Duran Obviously the Republicans are trying to destroy the country very openly, but I've said this in my talks and I say it in my book. My bigger fear is the Democrats will take us on a slower path there because they don't seem to be fully awake to how radically anti democratic Silicon Valley has become. And there's still this sort of old outdated talking point. Silicon Valley is about innovation and all these good things, and we have to be on the side of that. And believe me, that's how it was fifteen, ten years ago even. I worked for Democratic politicians and we held Silicon Valley in high regard and nobody viewed it as an existential threat to democracy. But that has all changed. But right now, you've got Silicon Valley now pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into our elections and suddenly becoming the biggest player in politics. Crypto and AI specifically are already putting like over 200 million dollars into the midterms. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, One the worst and most radical, is now one of the biggest players in political donations. And so that becomes a threat, not only in terms of keeping Republicans in power, but buying off Democrats. And I'm working on a piece about this right now, and this will upset some people perhaps in this conversation, but Gavin Newsom, who's running for president in 2028, is currently in the middle of cozying up to crypto billionaires. One of them has already pledged to do whatever it takes to get him elected. And

Just yesterday he was at an event with Garry Tan of Y Combinator, one of the worst of the worst in terms of the network state guys trying to take over California politics. And because I worked in democratic politics here, a lot of the people around Newsom, the consultants who were behind him, have been with him for years. They're now all moneyed up with Silicon Valley and venture capital, right? So Newsom is going to try to run as a Democrat. Who is funded by Silicon Valley. And he thinks he's smart enough to thread that needle. He can he can somehow pull that off, but he fundamentally doesn't understand what these guys are about. Because they might fund him as a stooge, but believe me, they're gonna try to get JD Vance or someone else elected because then they get everything they want. But the more we have famous Democrats out there hugging up and sucking up to these guys, the worse and worse it gets. I guess my point would be that we have to stigmatize that kind of thing and make it clear that. A Democrat who takes crypto, a Democrat who's schmoozing with the Palantir guys, is not a Democrat who can get elected in this country. And I think we're we're a bit of a far away from that realization. But we can start here by telling everybody crypto is corrupto. I mean, think about it, why should any Democrat be for crypto?

Dave Karpf I I have two reactions. One is I would like to encourage crypto billionaires to donate donate as much money as they would like to Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom is so incredibly Jeb Bush. Go ahead and waste your money on that dude. It is it's not gonna work for him. That, that is a lead balloon. So if they if they want to throw money at that guy, and then we can all sort of point and laugh at him as he does not win a single primary, God bless.

This again goes back to we both need to fix the power of tech in this country, but also need to fix our politics. Right? The the thing that keeps me up at night is less Democrats saying when they, if and when they gain power that they want to make nice with the tech industry. I'm worried about that, but that's that's not the sort of the starring role in my nightmares. The starring role in my nightmares is that they're gonna believe if and when they gain power that. They can treat our government and politics as though we went through normal times and we are still in normal times. Right. If if a Democrat wins in 2028, the amount of work that it's going to take to repair the damage to this country. Just to like just as an example, they will need to clear out the entire FBI and pretty much the entire DOJ. Because the only people left to the FBI and Department of Justice are going to be Kash Patel stooges and personal friends.

That doesn't happen overnight. That's gonna be like a year or more of getting rid of people, having those people then claim procedurally that they were unjustly fired, even though Kash Patel unjustly fired before, and then having to play through courts and maybe facing a Trump judge so it takes a long time. We're gonna have Democrats who come in and say, we're just gonna pretend that now that we're in power, we're back to normal times and we can work for with, whoever is has both been installed in the judiciary and installed in DOJ and everywhere else. As opposed to recognizing an authoritarian was in power and took over the entirety of the government and often handed the keys to that government to Palantir, to Elon, to a bunch of his friends. And we're going to need to reset everything to rebuild the administrative state. That takes a decade or longer. The thing that worries me is that we're gonna have Democrats who tell themselves, no, no, actually it's fine. We'll just sort of pretend that away. And those same Democrats would then be the ones who say, Well, actually now Marc Andreessen wants to have a meeting with me. I should definitely take that meeting. there's crypto people who say that they want to be regulated. They just want to voice the regulation. That sounds reasonable and I'll take the check. But as activists, as members of the public, we're gonna need to push back against that, both because of the corruption, but also because if Democrats do that, then it just won't work because of the actual amount of damage that has been done. We need to take seriously the times we're living in.

Gil Duran Dave Karpf, thank you for joining us. And thank you all for being here.

R.R. Robbins And thanks to our subscribers who joined us for that great conversation. If you want to be part of future special events, become a paid subscriber to our newsletter at http://www.thenerdreich.com. The Nerd Reich is written and hosted by Gil Duran. It's produced by me, R.R. Robbins. Our final word today: about money from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges:

"Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos. Because all pesos are equal, so every day, perhaps every hour, is different."

See you next time.