Tech lords of the world…Rafia Zakaria
THIS past weekend, rumours were flying around that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was hosting a $600 million wedding to his fiancée Lauren Sanchez in Aspen, Colorado. The rumour reached all corners of the world with news outlets regurgitating stories about this inordinately expensive upcoming wedding. One TikToker even posted a video of private jets parked at the Aspen airport as evidence that the world’s wealthy were arriving for the event. The rumour turned out to be wrong. Eventually, Bezos, who was there to host a holiday party at a famous sushi restaurant, took to X to clarify matters, saying that people should not believe everything they read. While this may be true, believing such a thing is well within the realm of possibility — after all Bezos has a fortune valued at $251 billion so a bill of $600m would not have made a huge dent in his wealth.
One of the people to respond to Bezos’s tweet was Tesla founder Elon Musk who said that he hoped Bezos would indeed host an “epic wedding”. Musk is one of the few other people in the world who could also host such an event or an even more lavish or expensive one. Musk — who is the world’s richest man (Bezos is supposed to be the second richest) — has a fortune that is more than double that of Bezos at $486bn. His holdings include everything from Tesla cars to the Starlink satellite system.
The online camaraderie between the two billionaires is fascinating as is the impact they are likely to have on the world in the next decade. Just some days before their banter on X, the two were sitting together to have dinner with president-elect Donald Trump at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago. That too may have been Musk’s doing because Bezos and Trump have not got along in the past. Those recriminations may have been buried, however, as Bezos, along with other tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, pledged $1m for Trump’s inauguration fund.
With great wealth comes the lust for great power. Even before its tenure in government, the incoming Trump administration has become beholden to billionaires. According to news reports, Musk alone donated over $270m to Trump’s electoral campaign, helping to propel him towards his decisive victory. He also donated money to many other Republican campaigns and has thus been instrumental in the Republican takeover of the House and the Senate. Such is his investment in the new Trump administration that Musk (much to Trump’s annoyance) is being seen as the actual president and Trump the vice president.
Like all jokes, there is some truth to this one. Musk, with all his other billionaire buddies in tow, expects to have great influence on the massive turnaround in US policy beginning this month. Already Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, has been appointed to lead the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’. While such a government department does not exist at the moment, Trump has said that the two will be charged with looking at government spending and then provide reports as to where there is room to trim the fat.
This is already happening and already causing problems for the ‘MAGA’ (‘Make America Great Again’ — Trump’s campaign slogan) Republicans.
A few days before Christmas, the US government almost ran out of money when Musk and Trump expressed their displeasure at the spending bill in the Republican-led Congress. The bill, they complained, was full of kickbacks and pet projects that Musk thinks prevent the government from functioning at the level of efficiency of a private enterprise. The bill stalled but Republican Speaker Mike Johnson managed to push it through.
Musk has essentially promised revenge on all the Republicans who voted in favour. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending billdeserves to be voted out in two years!” he asserted.
MAGA and Musk butted heads again over the issue of H-1B visas for highly skilled workers. MAGA hardliners want to crack down on all immigrants at all skill levels. Musk, however, has let it be known that he is in favour of maintaining and even increasing the number of H-1B visas because America needs to attract and keep all the world’s best engineering talent. Trump has toyed with this idea before saying that international students who get PhD degrees in the US should all get green cards along with their diplomas. In his last administration though, Trump had cut the number of these visas.
The visa issue represents a flashpoint. The tech lords see the US as pioneer-in-chief and the vanguard of the age of artificial intelligence, while Trump’s MAGA crowd see the country as a Christian nationalist paradise where white people are at the top of the racial hierarchy. Musk and other tech lords who have been visiting Mar-a-Lago definitely expect to be provided all the corporate tax breaks as well as all the high-skilled workers that are needed to bring about the great age of AI.
Whoever wins that tussle will impact the entire world. Countries such as India are watching the wrangling closely as they have engineers to export to the US. Others like China are similarly interested because a victory for the tech lords means a faster speed of innovation within the US. Sadly, the unexplained interruptions in internet connectivity and the lack of investment in training computer engineers in Pakistan means that this country has become an outlier and hence irrelevant in a world that is on the cusp of these changes. For those that matter, the story will begin later this month when Donald Trump is inaugurated as president of the United States for the second time.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
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