Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and the Billionaire Delusion of Politics Without Politics

"Ugh, politics is icky" say the very special boys.

Musk photo by Gage Skidmore; Altman photo by TechCrunch

In the mostly disappointing HBO satire “Mountainhead” (spoilers ahead), four obscenely wealthy tech bros gathered in a luxury mountain home watch as the social network one of them owns causes a worldwide political and social collapse. Eventually they begin throwing around the idea of using their billions to mount a coup against the United States government, and perhaps the rest of the world while they’re at it, to usher in a vaguely-conceived reorganization of society. In the end they don’t pursue the idea very far, mostly because they’re complete morons and they get distracted by trying to kill the one among them who thinks it might not be a good idea. Which they can’t pull off either.

Along with stilted dialogue in which the characters keep blurting out tech industry catch-phrases with little context (“I just want to get us transhuman!”), the film suffers from an overly simplistic portrayal of the tech barons. But in fairness, the white dudes who sit atop the tech industry constitute a new and puzzling species of weirdo, one that may defy easy satire. To understand them fully you have to appreciate both their intelligence and their stupidity. They are genuinely smart, which (along with a lot of luck) has helped them accumulate all those billions. But when they start mucking about in politics, one can see how dumb they are.

To wit: Elon Musk, fresh from destroying the federal government, deciding he got bored with it, and then getting in a whiny squabble with Donald Trump, has now announced that he’ll be starting a third party. So far it seems to exist only as a series of tweets, but he has said that it would “laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,” presumably to seize the fulcrum of power in Congress to accomplish, well…something or other. Here’s a tweet from a fan account he reposted, which is the closest he has come to filling out the substance of this new endeavor:

We’ve got “responsible spending only,” which means Whatever programs I like, but not the ones I don’t like. Then three items that are specifically Direct lots of public money to my companies and my industry, but with no regulation. Then there’s “free speech,” i.e. My right-wing sewer of a social media platform is awesome, but I’ll sue you if you say things that make me look bad. Then “pro natalist” i.e. have lots of babies, one of Musk’s personal obsessions, and finally “centrist policies everywhere else,” which means absolutely nothing. This is the kind of elementary-school-level conception you’d expect from somebody who even now can’t be bothered to think too much about what politics and governing involve.

If Musk had any patience or follow-through, he would realize that taking over one of our two large parties — which he almost did — would be both easier to accomplish and more likely to succeed than starting a meaningful third party. But he likes the idea of a third party because it’s something he thinks he can run without having to deal with all the competing interests, the institutional constraints, the politicians with their own ideas — in short, everything that makes politics and policymaking what it is.

And I get it: Politics is frustrating. I’m sure it was especially frustrating for Musk, who lives in a bubble in which he gets all his information from right-wing orcs on X while surrounded by sycophants constantly telling him what a world-historical genius he is and praising every fart that comes out of either end of his G/I tract as the most brilliant expulsion of air they’ve ever had the privilege to hear.

The trouble is that the American electoral system is built to perpetuate the dominance of the two parties. Winner-take-all elections in single-member districts ensure that even a relatively strong third party can’t get any representation at the state or federal level, and without that representation they find it hard to build support. But if you’re going to try it, you at least need to stand for something meaningful. But that’s apparently too boring to worry about.

Musk is not alone in his displeasure with the political system. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and along with Musk one of the half-dozen most important figures in the contemporary tech industry, has his own complaints:

Like other tech leaders, Altman made a personal $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund, but today he seems mostly concerned with how the Democrats are mean to billionaires like him, by talking about higher taxes on the wealthy and stubbornly supporting a social safety net, which apparently is not as cool as an imaginary “up elevator.” To anyone who follows the ideology of Silicon Valley in general and the AI industry in particular, it sounds very familiar when Altman says “We should encourage people to make tons of money and then also find ways to widely distribute wealth.” The second part of that equation is the “Yadda, yadda, yadda” of the AI industry — they claim they’re concerned about distributing benefits widely once they become billionaires or trillionaires, but they never say exactly how that’s supposed to happen.

But worry not: Once we achieve artificial general intelligence, we can just ask the AGI how to “solve” poverty and inequality. This is something people in the industry actually believe we’ll be able to do, as though these were technical problems and not political ones.

Like Musk, Altman may be brilliant at some aspects of business, but he has nothing but the most banal thoughts about politics and political economy. “I think the government usually does a worse job than markets,” he says. At what, exactly? Stopping e.coli outbreaks? Waging war? “I also believe that education is critically important to keeping the American edge.” So insightful! Tell us more, oh luminescent knower of things.

So what do Altman’s ideas come down to? It sounds a lot like he doesn’t enjoy paying taxes, or even hearing people say that he and people like him ought to pay more taxes, and he doesn’t want the government restraining his industry’s ability to act in whatever way it wants, whatever the consequences. In other words: the same old song oligarchs have been singing as long as there have been oligarchs.

Musk and Altman are sworn enemies; they started OpenAI together, then had a falling out, which led to Altman seizing control of the company and Musk starting xAI, the sole accomplishment of which has been to produce the craptastic chatbot Grok. But they appear to agree about politics, in that neither one of them understands the first thing about how it works and would prefer if the system just gave them everything they want. Which, unfortunately, it usually does already.

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