Introduction
Today, the new technology titans have transcended corporate influence and become political actors. Individuals like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and others like them, have been demonstrated to shape policy, government policy, and foreign relations. A shift that heralds much deeper changes: it is these "cloud capitalists" who are reshaping the economic and political landscape.
Political Economy of Tech Billionaires: Highly publicized, Elon Musk is not the sole tech billionaire reshaping world order. Forays into space and social media put him in the spotlight, whereas others such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have been force multipliers in shaping technological and economic spaces for some time now. It would appear that the less pronounced differentiation between political power and economic power has declined further, and there has been the emergence of a new elite that is present in both the economic and in the political sphere.
The most obvious example, of course, were the associations of Musk to political figures, no less than Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. A string of such associations of political figures to such corporate titans establishes a rather ominous trend toward where private interests get to frame public policies.
From Industrial to Cloud Capital
While industrialists John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison once held the iron fist over resources and production in their prime, their contemporary counterparts, the tech billionaires, possess something even more powerful: cloud capital. While the old money was invested in tangible industries, cloud capital is based on data, behavior modification, and digital infrastructure.
On cloud capital, it is, along with public opinion, that goods are produced, information networks commanded, and giant digital infrastructures managed-all that is so needed in these times. And for that, it renders them parallel only to working feudal lords inasmuch as industries in conjunction with ways of thinking, of working, and connecting are being commanded.
The Hyper Weapon of Cloud Capital
New capital is the super-weapon of today that provides this techno czar with commanding power over societies. Together with the oil, steel, and auto monopolies of the old world, its lords rule it using artificial intelligence, surveillance, and the digital ecosystem.
It's not business-as-usual. It's a shift-from markets to data extractivism-in which wealth is increasingly decoupled from production but tied to the control and ownership of the digital means of production.
The Political Consequences
Of course, it is a profoundly political and moral erasure of corporate and state powers. And as it happens, when billionaires in the tech industry invoke the magic words of "free speech," their deeds quite often have the opposite. In the cause of free expression, for example, Elon Musk has come to the defense of some political leaders but remained mum on the arrest of Julian Assange-so, therefore, the hypocrisy of what they say.
More specifically, cloud capitalists can see and do look through democratic institutions. The fact that they are in charge of policy-making, military procurement, and global communications means that they are not business leaders but political actors who wield rule unaccountably.
Conclusion
The irony is that, in many ways, this period does say something about the times when corporate power and political influence finally became pretty much indistinguishable. The thing is, where there's great reward in cloud capitalism, there's always great peril too. As transition phases across such transitions arise, one would really want democracies to survive amidst mighty controls of a chosen few rich fellows.
The battle for the future is not over technology, but with it-with whom technology belongs and to what.
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