Everyone talks about AI regulation as if it were a neutral, technical question. It isn't. To understand who wants to control AI, you first need to understand how the world is actually governed today. It's not just governments. It's a web of international agencies, NGOs, foundations, consultants, and the regulators they all orbit around. And it runs on a mechanism with a boring name and enormous consequences: regulatory capture. Here's how it works. A rule gets written. The people who understand it best are the incumbents it's supposed to regulate, so they help write it. Compliance becomes so expensive that only the big players can afford it. The rule that was meant to constrain them becomes their moat. Then the regulators leave for jobs at the companies they regulated, and the cycle starts again. Now add the philanthropic layer. The Gates Foundation is one of the largest funders of the WHO, giving more than most member states. Most of that money is earmarked, which means it goes to the priorities the donor picks, not the ones countries vote on. It co-founded Gavi and sits at the table of the global health architecture it finances. One unelected private foundation shaping the health agenda of billions of people. Soros's Open Society Foundations has given away tens of billions of dollars, much of it to advocacy, legal, media and political organizations. Whatever you think of the causes, that's private money buying a seat in public debates across dozens of countries, without a single voter being consulted. Add the UN agencies, the conference circuit, and the NGOs funded by the same governments they claim to hold accountable. You get a closed loop. The same networks fund the studies, write the reports, staff the agencies, advise the regulators, and then fund the NGOs that applaud the result. They call it philanthropy. I call it influence without accountability. Maybe some of them sincerely believe they're doing good. It doesn't matter. A system where a handful of billionaires and institutions set the agenda for everyone and answer to no one is a broken system. And that system runs on one thing: opacity. The complexity is the feature. Nobody can read every report, follow every dollar, map every board. AI ends that. When a model can trace every grant, every earmarked contribution, every revolving-door career and every NGO funding stream in seconds, the loop becomes visible. And what becomes visible becomes contestable. Elon understood this early. But it won't come down to one man. It will come down to the tools themselves. That's why you should listen very carefully when someone tells you AI is too dangerous to be left free and must be "governed" by states and international bodies. Ask who will sit on those bodies. Ask who will write the rules. Ask who will fund the experts advising them. Captured AI is the only scenario where this system survives. An AI that's licensed, filtered, and aligned to values defined by the right institutions isn't a check on power. It's the most powerful tool power has ever had. Free AI is the opposite. It's the end of the information asymmetry that made all of this possible. So be vigilant. Not about AI. About who wants to own it. The old system is dying. Don't let it buy itself a second life.

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene." It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why. First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created. So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?" And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied. Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake. Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation. Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it. Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better? The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians? A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite. Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences. The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions. The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem." Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing. Government is the fourth box. By design. Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it. And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money. The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet. Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it. So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear. China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build. India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie. South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines. Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian. Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%. No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build. And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years. Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity. Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek. A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018. Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years. One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world. Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades. If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet. It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week. And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out. You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake. Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little. The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery. Choose.

I explained why almost every actor and artist ends up on the same side. Today I want to show you that none of this is an accident. It was theorized almost a hundred years ago, by an Italian communist sitting in a prison cell. His name was Antonio Gramsci. Once you understand his idea, you will see it everywhere. Start with the problem Gramsci was trying to solve. Karl Marx had predicted that workers in rich countries would rise up and overthrow capitalism. It never happened. Workers in Italy, France, England and America didn't want a revolution. They went to church on Sunday. They loved their country. They wanted a house, a family, a better life for their kids. The communists couldn't understand it. They had the theory, the anger, the slogans. Why wasn't anyone following them? Gramsci, locked up by Mussolini, spent years thinking about this. And he found the answer. His answer was this: a society isn't held together by police and soldiers. It's held together by what people believe is normal. What you learned at school. What your priest told you. What the newspaper says. What the movies show you. What your neighbors think is obvious. Gramsci called this "hegemony." Put simply, it means: whoever decides what is normal, rules. So he drew a conclusion that changed everything. In the West, you can't win by attacking the palace. You'll lose. People will defend the system because they believe in it. You first have to change what people believe. You have to win the schools, the universities, the newspapers, the arts, the churches. Slowly. Patiently. Trench by trench. He called it a "war of position." Once the culture is yours, politics falls into your hands like ripe fruit. Forty years later, in 1967, a German student leader named Rudi Dutschke turned this idea into a battle plan. He called it "the long march through the institutions." The idea was simple. Don't burn down the university. Become the professor. Don't attack the newspaper. Become the editor. Don't fight the courts. Become the judge. Get inside every institution, rise to the top, and change it from within. Now watch how it works in real life, step by step. A young activist goes to university. He stays. He becomes a professor. Now he trains thousands of students every year. Those students become teachers, journalists, lawyers, HR managers, screenwriters, civil servants. They all learned the same ideas from the same people. They hire people who think like them. After one generation, the institution has changed. After two, nobody remembers it was ever different. Studies have found that at elite American colleges, Democrat professors outnumber Republicans by roughly ten to one, and in some departments there are almost none. That isn't a conspiracy meeting in a basement. It's what a completed march looks like. And here is the most powerful part. Once the institutions are won, you don't need to force anyone. People absorb the ideas without noticing. A fish doesn't know it's wet. A young actor who grew up with teachers, drama coaches, screenwriters, agents and award juries who all think the same way doesn't need to read Gramsci. He just breathes the air. To him, these are not opinions. They are simply what good people believe. And anyone who disagrees isn't someone with a different view. He's a bad person. That's the final stage of hegemony. Disagreement stops being an argument and becomes a moral stain. You don't debate the other side anymore. You cancel it. This is why Hollywood thinks as one. This is why so many newsrooms sound identical. This is why your kids come home from college with ideas you never taught them. Nobody had to give an order. The march was already over. Conservatives made one huge mistake for fifty years. They thought winning elections was enough. They focused on Washington while the other side took the classrooms, the studios, and the newsrooms. They won some votes and lost the culture. And as Andrew Breitbart used to say, politics is downstream of culture. The good news is that a march can go in both directions. Buying Twitter and turning it into X was one institution taken back. There will be others. But it won't happen by complaining. It will happen when people who love freedom start teaching, writing, filming, building, and creating again. They understood the game a hundred years ago. It's time you did too.