The big tech bro is watching you

Once upon a time, pop culture's fat-cat villains wore pinstripe suits, smoked cigars, Wall Streeted long, and partied hard between hostile takeovers and alpha male displays of misogyny, while having overpriced miso soup seated next to arm candy. Today, they wear hoodies, trainers, talk geek, tweet AI safety and plan to colonise Uranus. The capitalist villain is no longer Gordon Gekko, but Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and, of course, Elon Musk. As AI Orwell would have said about this sub-genre of the bad capitalist: Big Tech Bro is Watching You.

When dozens of students walked out of Monday's Stanford University graduation ceremony as Google CEO and Stanford alumnus Sundar Pichai took the stage to deliver his keynote address, we were witness to a new 'cool target'. Not only are these baddies seen to be key players in human jobs being replaced with AI bots, but placards at Stanford like 'ICE spies with Google AI' point to an unholy communion of HNI nerds with the deep state.

This new archetype is the billionaire - and one trillionaire - who insists he's saving the world while quietly monetising your eyeballs. Their slogan is no longer 'Greed is good', but 'Trust me, I'm disrupting'. These men (women are yet to enter this fray) are simultaneously saviours and saboteurs, prophets and profiteers. They want to be loved, feared and followed - on X.