THE ALGO RAJ: POLITICAL RISKS OF TECH OLIGARCHY

ON Thursday evening, he was worth $696 billion. Roughly 12 hours later, as SpaceX listed on Nasdaq, mercurial genius Elon Musk notched history’s milestone—the world’s first trillionaire.

- SHANKKAR AIYAR

A trillion is eleven digits long. I asked Grok how long it would take to spend it. The answer: 31,710 years, three times longer than recorded human civilisation.

Warren Buffett observed that neither he nor anyone else could have dreamt of the fortunes now attainable. “It has been mind-blowing—beyond the imaginations of Ford, Carnegie, Morgan or even Rockefeller. Billions became the new millions.” A trillion, it would seem, is the new billion.

SpaceX clocked $2.1 trillion in market cap to join sibling Tesla in the pantheon of a dozen tech hegemons who together command about $25 trillion. Twelve stocks—Nvidia, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, SpaceX, TSMC, Broadcom, Tesla, Micron, Meta, Samsung—account for over 40 percent of all US-listed stocks. The SpaceX IPO was oversubscribed four times notwithstanding caveats like only CEO Musk can sack CEO Musk and, warnings about markets that did not exist.

SpaceX will be followed by Anthropic valued at $965 billion and Open AI at $852 billion. The rise of Algo Raj, the expansion of moneycracy amid inadequate guardrails, represents a political risk for democracies. Already, the tech hegemon complex is larger than the GDP of Europe and China individually, and even more than the combined GDP of Japan, India and the UK. The cumulative wealth of the Big Tech founders is nearly $3 trillion.