Just How Involved Is Bill Gates in Open AI?

And other questions no one has yet tackled about one of the world's richest men

Netanyahu and Gates at Davos in 2014 — right as OpenAI was founded

I recently read The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire by Tim Schwab, and I came away with more questions than answers. It seems, per Schwab, that notwithstanding the public relations push by Gates to refashion — or is it rehabilitate? — his image, that he remains firmly in control of the Microsoft empire.

This is consistent with the stories I’ve heard over the years. There seems to be a pattern. An ambitious young person. A storied government official. A promising scientist. Each of them go in with great promise but each reacts much the same. They don’t want to talk about it. They get worried. Their families shut them up. That is, if the lawyers don’t come for them first.

And yet the SEC investigations continue apace. Barry Diller, Sam Altman’s mentor, insider traded on the news of a Activision-Microsoft merger while Sam Altman’s conduct at OpenAI is being probed.

Billionaires don’t buy things, they buy people, you’re told. My own dalliances with the billionaire class is actually a bit more complicated. I think billionaires, particularly foreign-born ones, often act as plausible deniability engines for funding foreign operations within the United States.

It’s chilling, too, the degree to which billionaires will retain lawyers to intimidate the press or their own disgruntled, exhausted staff. Gates has retained the very pro-Israel Clare Locke — the same firm retained by Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska and Christian Angermayer — to shakedown would be whistleblowers about Gates’s activity, especially as it concerns Gates Ventures, which seemingly operated as something of a money laundry. Records aren’t kept and money is rushed through the door.

Were I the SEC or the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority or the FTC I’d look very closely at Gates Ventures.

There’s quite a bit of conspiracy theories floating about what exactly has persuaded Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to back Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Was he involved in a criminal enterprise in India? Is fear of the exposure of that ring something that is driving his actions and making him awfully litigious?

I think it’s much more likely that the Indians are on the march, that Vinod Khosla is Indian intelligence, and that the slave masters of the subcontinent fear a slave revolt so they want to restructure the relationship between labor and capital. You’re not thinking very hard about AI if you’re not thinking about this chart.

As Chinese labor grew more expensive the AI talk began.

Bill Gates’s relationship to the Indian subcontinent is well known and he’s been spotted yucking it up with Zuck.

You have to protect the monopoly if you’re going to continue operating. Where there is monopoly, there is foreign intrigue. Those profits can be reinvested and used to warp the American market.

Gates acquired LinkedIn where Jeffrey Epstein was a shareholder. Arthur Bloom has documented other strange activity involving another Microsoft-acquired company — GitHub — and all the intrigue around it.

Just How Messed Up is the Tech Economy? Quite a Lot

When I applied many years ago to M12 Ventures — one of the venture arms of Microsoft — I was told in no uncertain terms that because I “had an Israeli problem” they wouldn’t be investing with me. That was that.

Years later I learned that Netanyahu and Bill Gates were particularly close. Indeed Bill Gates — who isn’t Jewish — was listed as one of the American donors to Likud.

In our own time there are two sorts of empires — petrostates and slave empires. I’d argue that the way in which they interact with one another is altogether fascinating and revealing for how our world really operates.

First, the petrostates. It’s no secret that petrostates want to continue keeping the price of oil high. They’ll do whatever they can to do that — funding fake environmentalist solutions or sabotaging green energy projects, comes to mind — or even toppling other, weaker petrostates. If they are the Koch organization they’ll even back neoconservatives like Nikki Haley who promises enough instability to drive up energy prices.

Focusing on oil alone doesn’t get the job done. You’ve got to be thinking about energy.

The way I’ve come to think about cryptocurrency and machine learning is that these machines use tremendous amounts of energy, thus pushing up global energy prices. Cryptocurrencies, as a recent report found in The Insider, can be used to pay spies like those involved in Wirecard fraudster (and GRU asset) Jan Marsalek’s Bulgarian hacking operations. To what extent cryptocurrency is used for these sorts of illicit operations is anyone’s guess. Edward Snowden gave the game away when he tweeted: “Prediction: A national government will be revealed this year to have been buying Bitcoin—the modern replacement for monetary gold—without having disclosed that fact publicly.”

But might AI serve just as important a function? Might AI be helping to drive up global energy prices right as demand softens? Might AI — and its attendant ability to organize Big Data — be exactly what intelligence services need?

Global energy prices haven’t returned to their 2022 heights.

By driving up rates, the Fed has reduced consumption right as the Biden Administration’s oil permitting and export has reduced the effects of the two wars in the Europe and the Middle East on the American public.

The Biden government is to be commended for keeping global oil prices stable by reducing the power of OPEC, by producing record barrels of oil, and by investing in alternate sources of energy.

But demand, especially in China, is softening and you should expect to see a push by the Russians and other states toward conservation or even emissions caps. They’ll want to be paid to keep their polluting resources in the ground.

Gates, though, has other ideas. He wants to march toward nuclear power — itself something that Russia has long dominated. Vaclav Smil, who Gates has had on the payroll for years, is Russian-adjacent, and calls for conservation. Which, of course, drives up energy prices. This is as good a place as any to note Gates’s relationship to the Terra Power Thorium Reactors and its partnership with China.

Right around the time that Bill Gates created his venture fund Gates Ventures he gave a 2007 speech in Moscow talking about Russian software exports. Most recently it was revealed that Microsoft’s executive email system had been breached by the Russians.

And that’s before we even get to the question of what exactly Gates was doing with that foxy Russian bridge player that Epstein wrote to Gates about in a not so subtle hint that Epstein knew what Gates was up to.

Epstein knew that Gates was exploring the people around him.

*****

We often times need a way of talking without talking about what we’re really talking about.

How should we think about slavery?

The first empires were slave empires. We don’t talk about the way in which these empires might still be around in different guises. Is Apple, with its large nets and long hours in his Chinese factories a slave empire? Might Microsoft be a slave empire? Cannibalizing up your Works in its quest for AI?

How can you enslave a “knowledge worker”? I have a few ideas. You must first make them feel as if they are liberated.

You give them a title. You give them prestige. You let them take photos with all the VIPs you have that come through the door. That’s social proof.

They’re “mission focused” but eager to please. They are someone who could be asked to do anything, someone who is a people pleaser. Someone who says “yes” enthusiastically. Ideally you’d hire a real go getter from the Ivy League or Washington D.C. and you’d isolate her from friends and family. Eventually she’ll be wise to you—and you’ll discard her.

All that comes later, of course. That’s after the national emergency takes place. After you run America’s covid response from your offices. After you’ve promised everyone that you’re a good billionaire who wouldn’t hurt no one.

Just get that vaccine, okay? Just get the jab. Don’t ask what it’s in it— or about the circumstances which produced it.

Don’t ask about the experiments that were run and who the guinea pigs are.

You wouldn’t want to be blacklisted would you?

Here’s a current theory I’ve been working on about how billionaires subvert democracy.

Let’s say you sold a product internationally.

It could be software, it could be widgets. It could be anything so long as it’s a monopoly and the profit margins exist. The less able people are to track that product and its sales, the better.

You hired kids — usually meritocrats — from the “best” schools. You worked them all the time so they didn’t develop much of a personal life beyond you. It helps to select for good kids who have complicated family lives.

You’d invest heavily in PR and make everyone believe that you’re a good boy.

But enough about Bill Gates.