From trillion-dollar pay packages to billion-dollar cloud deals, the AI gold rush has officially gone imperial. Elon Musk’s Tesla investors are balking at his record-shattering payday, Sam Altman just signed a $38 billion pact with Amazon, and Palantir’s Alex Karp is turning government contracts into an AI war machine. Together, they’re cashing in on a revolution they claim is about “intelligence”—but really, it’s about control.
In today’s episode, Kala breaks down the power plays behind the profits: why Palantir’s numbers stunned Wall Street, how Amazon’s data-center boom is remaking small-town America, and why Nvidia’s chip drama with Trump and Xi is now national-security policy. Plus, the new hierarchy of billionaires—Ellison, Bezos, Musk, Altman—whose fortunes now rise and fall with the flow of compute and energy.
Forget the hype cycle. This is the real economy of AI—who’s building it, who’s hoarding it, and who’s quietly rewriting capitalism while the rest of us refresh our feeds.
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