Why Altman and Musk pose a problem for Washington

The collision of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and the recent chaos at OpenAI reveals something even bigger than social media’s shifting tectonic plates—the extent of the society-shaping power wielded by a very small cadre of Silicon Valley titans. Individual personalities—and individual fortunes—matter far more in the world of Silicon Valley startups than they do in corporate America’s more consensus-oriented, traditional bureaucracies. Once, industrial names like Morgan or Rockefeller or Ford drove national policy from their boardroom chairs, a version of America we might have thought we’ve put to rest. Not in tech: Today we take it for granted that Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk are more or less synonymous with their corporate empires. The lesson for not just America, but humanity writ large, is that a very small group of people have come to wield total, personalized control over many of the systems—whether Musk’s social media platform or Altman’s intelligence machines—that are shaping society’s present and future.