The New Babel

May 28, 2026

Alex Karp is a cheap son-of-a-bitch. The Palantir CEO, worth $3.6 billion, spent $100,000 to knock progressive challenger Graham Platner out of Maine’s Democratic primary. A pro-Collins super PAC turned that into $2 million in attack ads. For Karp, $100,000 is 0.0028% of his net worth. That’s the equivalent of $2.80 for someone lucky enough to earn $100,000 a year. Karp spent less on anti-Platner attacks than he’d pay for an overpriced Starbucks espresso macchiato.

The media hyperventilates about these Silicon Valley contributions and completely misses the point. When the headline reads “$100,000 Spent in Maine Senate Race,” readers see big money. What they don’t see is how meaningless that amount is for Alex Karp. It’s not an investment—it’s a tip. The returns aren’t votes for candidates. It’s a system where democracy is a fire sale and Silicon Valley oligarchs are snapping it up. This is what government capture looks like: billionaires with unlimited resources buying democracy for spare change.

This started sixteen years ago when Justice Sam Alito mouthed the words “not true” in the middle of President Obama’s State of the Union address. Six days earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations have First Amendment rights to unlimited political spending.

Money is speech.

Corporations are people.

Obama spoke directly to the justices seated in front of him:

“Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—
to spend without limit in our elections.”

That’s when Alito smugly shook his head muttering, “not true.”

We know today that Alito was wrong and Obama was right—but even Obama couldn’t foresee how cheap it would be to buy a government. When Teddy Roosevelt battled John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, it was a clash of titans—presidential power against industrial empire. Today’s oligarchs face no such resistance. They don’t battle a president. They buy one—and he’s selling. Trump’s crypto wealth has grown by at least $7.5 billion since 2024, built on pardons for convicted crypto executives, neutered consumer protections, and investors paying $400 million for $TRUMP memecoins in exchange for access. And all the oligarchs have to do is reach between the cushions of their mansion sofas, pull out pocket change, and the regulatory state bends.

Yet the right has spent decades demonizing George Soros as a puppet-master buying American democracy with dark money. The numbers tell a different story.

Soros has spent $103 million on the 2026 midterms. The AI oligarchs—Andreessen, Horowitz, and their Silicon Valley allies—have already spent $300 million. Soros is spending a far larger share of his wealth. Tech billionaires are spending a rounding error of their fortunes.

Look what they're buying: Soros backs candidates and causes—retail democratic politics, one race at a time with an eye toward improving American lives. The oligarchs are buying influence wholesale. They're not funding campaigns. They're eliminating the government's will to restrain their power. They're buying federal preemption of state AI laws. Accelerated data center permits bypassing environmental and community review. Congress will spend billions on DHS and ICE to keep immigrants from taking American jobs but won't lift a finger to stop AI from eliminating American jobs. The oligarchs buy that silence with campaign contributions. Their goal isn't winning elections. It's neutering democratic resistance. We know Peter Thiel’s well-worn catchphrase:

“Freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.”

That is, the freedom of Silicon Valley billionaires—libertarians who see themselves as a commune of philosopher kings—to do exactly what they want to enrich themselves without government interference because democracy gets in their way—and they’re not having it.

Marc Andreessen explains to Joe Rogan this month why AI is superior to human workers:

“AI never gets sick, never gets drunk, never files HR complaints.”

Larry Ellison, Oracle founder whose son David is reducing CBS—and likely CNN—to state television, describes his vision for AI-powered mass surveillance:

“We’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.
Citizens will be on their best behavior.”

David Sacks left his White House role as AI and Crypto Czar and now co-chairs the “President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.” Its 15 members are made up of 14 Silicon Valley philosopher kings and one scientist. A former colleague describes Sacks’ worldview:

“There’s masters and there’s slaves.”

Sacks believes he is among the masters. The rest of us? Slaves.

Kevin O’Leary is a Canadian billionaire known as “Mr. Wonderful.” He’s pushing a 62.5 square mile $100 billion data center in Box Elder County, Utah. It will double the state’s energy consumption, pass along the costs, and drain the Great Salt Lake already teetering on ecological collapse. When locals protest, he accuses them of Chinese propaganda.

The human costs of AI expansion are already mounting. Ellison laid off 30,000 workers from Oracle via a 6:00 a.m. email—right after raking in a $305 million Tennessee tax break and delivering a mere 637 of the 8,000 promised jobs.

Meta cut 8,000 workers citing its “shift to AI.” No remedy offered. No safety net.

Dario Amodei of Anthropic—one of the “trusted” AI companies—predicts 50 percent of white-collar jobs will disappear in five years.

And the displaced? Companies automating workers out of existence get the tax breaks. So far, the displaced get nothing. Musk and Altman express sympathy for universal basic income. Sympathy is not a plan. And sympathy played no part when Musk’s DOGE gutted American institutions nor as Altman races to build the AGI that will eliminate jobs.

If Virgil were to lead us into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell today, we’d no doubt find a band of billionaires icebound in their cold betrayal of humanity and utterly unconcerned about the devastation their pursuits cause to people or planet. They have betrayed the Enlightenment itself.

Pope Leo XIV was elected just over a year ago and this week released his first encyclical. He warns us—that is to say, he warns billionaires—that humanity is facing a pivotal choice. His concern isn’t theological. It’s diagnostic:

“Artificial Intelligence now demands to be ‘disarmed,’
freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death.”

And the media doesn’t see it. If they do, they’re not reporting it. They report the dollar figures—$100,000 in Maine! $300 million for political PACs!—but the scale is missing. This is not billionaire wealth. It’s pocket change. The story isn’t shiny or bloody or scandalous enough for cable news to package—despite being democratic government capture happening in plain sight.

Ben Rhodes sees it. In a New York Times op-ed, he writes:

“In California, it has been dispiriting to watch candidates shout at each other about their credentials to reform housing laws while investors make billions off an A.I. boom that could wipe out jobs needed to pay rent. Our political debates feel divorced from how power functions, apportioning shrinking resources while Wall Street and Silicon Valley make record profits.”

Gil Duran and a handful of others have been sounding the alarm about Silicon Valley technofascists for years. And the rest? “AGI” gets covered as innovation. Worse, we are scolded for worrying about it. “Regulatory capture” gets filed under campaign finance.

The story is there. Connect the dots. Oracle’s 30,000 workers. Meta’s 8,000. Gone in the blink of an eye. Karp’s espresso macchiato money buys Senate influence. O’Leary’s Box Elder County data center drains the Great Salt Lake. These aren’t isolated incidents. This is the system.

Face the thing. Name it. Report the scale. The Tower of Babel was never completed thanks to the arrogance of those who would be gods. The new Tower doesn’t have to be a sure thing—but only if we see it rising.

Musing

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