I Took A Break. The Tech Billionaires Didn't

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I’ve been gone for the last three months.

First a major health scare. Then the Chevening South Asia Journalism Programme fellowship pulled me out of this chair entirely. But it gave me some time to talk to folks, mull over things.

The myriad lawyers, tech activists, engineers, journalists, and data scientists I spoke to led me to the same conclusion: The promising and shiny AI tools are breaking the world, primarily led by Tech Billionaire cults, with social media as their liturgy.

Last week's heatwave made the climate stakes concrete for Europeans in a way spreadsheets and expert inputs never do. Yet the live policy debate around the world isn't how to cut emissions, but rather who gets to use what's left of the grid.

In Henrico County, Virginia, now home to 37 data centres, the county manager asked schools to switch off lights and computers to save electricity, after rates jumped 25%. Priorities, in order.

Read more: County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to ‘Conserve Electricity’ | 404 Media

AI Warfare Is Now

A highlight of the fellowship was a panel where Professor Shakuntala Banaji of the LSE made a point I haven't shaken since: you cannot separate a technology from its worst uses, including its military ones.

This year proved it. On February 28, US-Israeli strikes on Iran opened with a hit on a primary school in Minab, killing 156 people, including 120 children, according to Amnesty International's investigation. The strikes were guided by the Pentagon's Maven Smart System, built by Palantir, with Anthropic's Claude embedded to rank targets and generate strike coordinates. The school had been fenced off from a still-active IRGC compound next door since 2016, but CNN's reporting suggests the targeting data never caught up. Asked what role Claude played, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Bloomberg he didn't know, only that "a human makes the final decision."

Palantir also runs the NHS's Federated Data Platform, a seven-year, £330 million contract. NHS England insists Palantir is merely a "processor". Critics, including the BMA, warn its tools enable the kind of mission creep that leads to state overreach.

In January 2024, Palantir separately signed a "strategic partnership" with Israel's Ministry of Defence. A UN Special Rapporteur report found "reasonable grounds" to believe Palantir supplied core defence infrastructure and an AI platform used in Israel's targeting operations, the same broad category of tools behind Lavender and Where's Daddy, which assign Palestinians threat scores and track them to their homes before strikes. Palantir has publicly denied direct involvement in Lavender itself, and stayed quiet on the rest.

Read more: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza | +972 Magazine

It's the same company running a British hospital platform, feeding a Pentagon targeting system, and reportedly tied to a Gaza kill list. Banaji's point holds up depressingly well: you can't separate the technology from its worst uses. Increasingly, you can't separate the company from them either.

The Tech Bro Cults

Speaking of Thiel: a hacktivist leak recently exposed the guest list of Dialog, an invite-only network he co-founded in 2006. WIRED verified the directory, which listed 222 attendees for this year's retreat, including NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Senator Ted Cruz, and a Palantir co-founder.

Session titles ranged from "Bring Back Nuclear" to, unnervingly, "Build-a-Cult" and weirdly, “How’s your sex life?”. None of the 222 registered with a government email, keeping their attendance outside the reach of public records law.

Read more: Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society | WIRED

Thiel isn't the only one cashing in. In June, Elon Musk's SpaceX, now folded together with his AI company xAI, went public in the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion. Combined with his Tesla stake, it briefly made Musk the world's first paper trillionaire. The pitch was Mars and off-world colonies. What the filing actually showed: an AI division that lost $6.4 billion in 2025, attached to a chatbot, Grok, accused of generating child sexual abuse material. Protesters marked the night before the IPO with a 40-foot inflatable Musk in Times Square, over exactly that.

Read more: SpaceX IPO price sets new record | NPR

Then there's Trump. His newly released financial disclosure shows he earned $1.4 billion from crypto ventures alone last year, the single biggest slice, $635 million, in royalties from his $TRUMP meme coin. The coin itself has lost 97% of its value since launch, which was absorbed by his supporters.

Thiel, Musk and Trump aren't doing the same thing by accident. Opacity is the business model, and the public (cult followers) is expected to fund it without asking too many questions.

The current AI bubble is a product of this cult worship.

In Case You Missed It

My colleague Adrija Bose worked with Tarunima Prabhakar and Tora Agarwala to investigate India's AI "nudification" economy, tracing the money, the platforms, and the almost total lack of enforcement behind it.

The investigation centres on a 30-year-old Assam engineer who spent five years running a fake Instagram persona built from his ex-girlfriend's face, earning roughly ₹10 lakh in subscriptions in the seven months before his arrest. It traces the money through a Bengaluru-backed payment platform, the images to fine-tuned models sold openly on Hugging Face and CivitAI, and the accountability to a dead end: only 2.43% of India's 2024 cybercrime complaints ever became a police case.

Read more: Desi Faces, Foreign Servers: Inside The AI Economy Undressing Women | Decode

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