"These companies are at an inflection point. With Mr. Trump’s election, Silicon Valley’s power will reach new heights. The president named David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist and A.I. investor, as his A.I. czar and empowered another tech billionaire, Elon Musk, to slash through the government. Mr. Trump brought a cadre of tech executives with him on his recent trip to Saudi Arabia. If Senate Republicans now vote to prohibit states from regulating A.I. for 10 years, Silicon Valley’s impunity will be enshrined in law, cementing these companies’ empire status.
Their influence now extends well beyond the realm of business. We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence. That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold.
Technological progress does not require businesses to operate like empires. Some of the most impactful A.I. advancements came not from tech behemoths racing to recreate human levels of intelligence, but from the development of relatively inexpensive, energy-efficient models to tackle specific tasks such as weather forecasting."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/silicon-valley-ai-empire.html
Market manipulation, bribery, extortion, treason...
