In 1776 — that same year America declared its independence — Adam Smith published the equally revolutionary The Wealth of Nations, his founding explanation of national economic value. Two hundred and fifty years later, Tim O’Reilly argues in the free-market Economist that Elon Musk and his fellow tech barons are building a monarchical form of capitalism that the proto-democratic Smith would have hated. Musk, O’Reilly reports, believes that SpaceX will become “worth more than the rest of Earth”. The merchants are becoming princes, O’Reilly warns. And the rest of us are becoming peasants. Such is the road to serfdom in our AI age.

So who should own the AI in our bewildering age of multi-trillion dollar start-ups like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI? Or as That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare asks in his latest editorial, who should own the “intelligence” of our AI age?

Keith uses a bottling plant as a metaphor to describe our dilemma. Since no single entity can own this intelligence — the sum total of our common experience — charging us for it would be like seizing the Earth’s water supply and selling it back to us, Coca-Cola style, in plastic bottles. Except that the Hayekian Keith approves of the bottling process. Private companies, rather than governments, he argues, are most suited to doing this.

For Keith, this dilemma is also an opportunity to redistribute the ownership of intelligence. He argues for a “Human Wealth Fund” into which every consequential AI company should put a slice of its equity. In the manner of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, this fund would be distributed to all citizens.

Rather than Denmark, now we should become like Norway, a tiny homogenous nation with a cultural distaste for Muskian individual wealth. Not very realistic, I fear. On top of that, it’s hard to imagine our tech princes collaborating on anything. Musk and Altman aren’t on speaking terms while Altman and Amodei, who also loathe each other, are focused on their IPOs. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which presumably would coordinate this fund, is pitching a $100,000-a-month fast feed of the president’s posts.

Keith’s question, “who owns the intelligence”, is the right one. But the answer won’t come from trickle-down funds set-up by our tech princes. Such supposed munificence is about as likely as America becoming Norway. Read the fine print of any “Human Wealth Fund” set up by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. As we should know all too well by now, when a “revolutionary” Silicon Valley gives stuff away, it turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. Free plastic bottles of intelligence, anyone?

Five Takeaways

•       Intelligence, Not AI. The week’s framing shift: the word AI is too small, because AI is merely the tool for harvesting and delivering the thing itself — intelligence, the sum total of our common human experience. Keith argues the renaming is not semantic but political: the moment intelligence sits at the center of the discussion, everyone’s opinion has to be shaped by what it actually is, and the idea that any single entity could own it starts to look as bizarre as owning the world’s water supply. Andrew’s rejoinder: they’re still just words — though he concedes intelligence is the better one.

•       Bottled Intelligence Is Good — The Question Is Who Benefits. Keith refuses the critic’s role: bottling intelligence, like Google’s bottling of the world’s words into search, is a good thing, because only massively capitalized private companies can innovate at that scale — and between private entities and governments as owners of intelligence, he’ll take the companies every time. What’s wrong is the distribution of the benefits. Even insiders are complaining: Alex Karp is publicly angry at OpenAI and Anthropic’s pricing, while China’s Kimi K3 — released the day of recording and, Keith claims, better than Claude Fable — signals that very good models are about to get very cheap.

•       Capitalism Adam Smith Would Hate. Tim O’Reilly argues in The Economist that Musk and his type are building a capitalism Smith would despise — founders as monarchs, a point Henry Farrell reinforces with a slide from Peter Thiel’s startup class placing the king of a monarchy and the founder of a startup side by side. Keith’s response is characteristically unsentimental: Smith would have hated everything since the Federal Reserve, and the founder-king structure — Larry and Sergey’s voting shares, Zuckerberg’s special rights, corporations bigger than countries with user bases bigger than China — is simply the stage of capitalism we’re at. The question is whether there’s a path from here to somewhere better.

•       The Human Wealth Fund. Keith’s path comes in two versions: government-down, a sovereign wealth fund holding AI equity for every citizen; or company-up, the AI companies voluntarily endowing a global fund — and it only takes one to move first, because everyone else would have to react. His proxy is Norway, where every citizen benefits from ownership — not payouts, ownership — in the oil fund; AI revenues, unlike Norwegian oil, could eventually drive most of a doubled global GDP. His critique of the Brynjolfsson economists’ much-signed statement is that “must act now” is vacuous: he’d have added a point four naming the actual mechanism.

•       The Bet. Andrew’s counter-case: Musk and Altman loathe each other, the mob hates AI so thoroughly that no pro-AI politician can survive, the states from Newsom’s California to Florida are embracing nothing, New York just enacted the first data center moratorium, and the founders — eyes on their IPOs — are in the pockets of the banks. Hence the wager: 5% of the Teare Wealth Fund says no Human Wealth Fund this year, and none in the twenties. Keith declined the bet, on principle: he’s an advocate, and only through advocacy does public opinion change. As Andrew put it: keep fighting the good fight — maybe one of the crazy ideas will stick.

About the Guest

Keith Teare is the founder and editor of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, and Andrew’s weekly co-host. A British-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, he was a co-founder of TechCrunch and runs the Palo Alto–based venture firm SignalRank. He and Andrew have been arguing about technology — productively — every week for years.

References:

•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter; this week’s editorial argues that the word AI is too small, and that the central question of the age is who owns intelligence.

•       Tim O’Reilly in The Economist — on Elon Musk building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate, quoting Musk’s claim that SpaceX will become worth more than the rest of the Earth.

•       Henry Farrell — the big tech critic’s companion piece, featuring the slide from Peter Thiel’s startup class that plac...