By the end of the year, or at the latest by early 2027, the takeover will be complete. The giants of artificial intelligence (AI) – SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI – will have gone public. After technological supremacy, these three companies are set to consolidate their financial power, aiming to eclipse the giants of “old tech.” SpaceX, which also encompasses xAI, Elon Musk’s AI firm, is targeting a valuation approaching $2 trillion, which would place it fifth among publicly listed companies on Wall Street, behind Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. OpenAI, the company led by Sam Altman that launched ChatGPT in November 2022, could be valued at between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion, while Anthropic, the company founded by Dario Amodei and known for disrupting the established order with its AI model, Claude, could reach between $850 billion and $1.1 trillion.
With a stock market listing comes the truth of price and power, as the new godfathers of global techno-capitalism take their place. This carousel confirms the extraordinary creative force of American capitalism. These fortunes do not belong to heirs or result from rents accumulated on the backs of employees, but are the fruit of major, disruptive innovations. In just a few years, Altman and Amodei have created $2 trillion in value out of nothing – more than two-thirds the market capitalization of the entire CAC 40 index [the benchmark French stock market index]. American billionaires and their fortunes are not a fixed stock or a social class; they are a flow that constantly regenerates. These entrepreneurs are creators, often from middle-class backgrounds. Who could have imagined that Jensen Huang, an immigrant from Taiwan, would transform Nvidia – the video game chip company he founded in 1993 – into a leading AI firm and the world’s most valuable company?
Just as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg once were, the masters of AI will be inevitably hated. For their wealth, but also for their transformation of society. This is already the case for Musk, the libertarian entrepreneur with ties to Trumpism, whose fortune Bloomberg estimates at $658 billion. For now, Altman and Amodei have “modest” fortunes by American standards – $3.5 billion and $7 billion, according to Bloomberg. But that could change with the windfalls awarded at their companies’ public offerings. They embody the power of AI, which both excites and unsettles the United States: data centers that draw water and electricity from communities, fears over the disappearance of skilled jobs and a looming addiction akin to that caused by Instagram and TikTok.
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