My Roman empire are the new Caesars, those of Silicon Valley: Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos. They do not like the control of the senators and demand all the power for themselves. It is no longer even a metaphor: on Wednesday night, at the presentation of Meta’s new products, Mark Zuckerberg wore a T-shirt that said in Latin: “Aut Zuck, aut nihil”. It means “either Zuck or nothing” and is a play on the Latin original that stands alone: “Either Caesar or nothing.” At his 40th birthday party, He was seen with another shirt with the motto “Cartagho delenda est”, the famous Latin phrase of Cato the Elder. That one claimed to destroy his Mediterranean rival, Caesar Zuck was referring to to your competitors for digital attention. It’s a joke, of course, but there are many jokes and he chose that one.
The head of Meta proudly warned two weeks ago that for him and his company the days of apologizethat image that haunted him for years, apologizing to American politicians for the countless problems that have arisen from the management of his social media empire: misinformation, poor mental health of minors, adulterated campaigns, etc. So the next time the United Nations says that its products have been essential in perpetrating ethnic cleansing (as happened with the Rohingya in Myanmar) Zuckerberg should not mind, that he is already past that phase of his life.
While he wore his Caesarian motto, the new emperor of Silicon Valley, Sam Altman, was finally left alone. Mira Murati, technology director of OpenAI, said goodbye to the company that has become a symbol of the era of generative artificial intelligence with ChatGPT. Murati and two other managers are leaving now that Altman has managed to change the company from being a non-profit organization to behaving like a big tech conventional, immersed in a voracious round of financing to raise 6.5 billion dollars. In his analysis for Atlanticspecialist Karen Hao summarizes the meaning of these movements well: “For the first time, OpenAI’s public and leadership structure are a simple honest reflection of what the company has been: the will of a single person. Just Sam.” Sam alone, at the head of a leading company in a strategic sector, months after he was fired from there for not trusting him or his promise to monitor the risks of runaway intelligent machines.
Altman also said time and time again that he was not interested in money, that he did everything for the good of humanity. But with this turn of the helm, it can rain about 9,500 million euros, 7% of the current value of the company: 134,000 million. He is not the only one cashing in: his commitment to artificial intelligence has multiplied the money in Zuckerberg’s pocket: has earned 65,000 million this year and has entered the 200 club billion (billions of dollars), along with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg.
The leader of that ranking, Musk, also has the vocation of Nero (or better, of Lucio Aurelio Comodo, for challenging a combat type gladiator to Zuckerberg). Like so many technobros from the extreme center, admitted that he thinks about the Roman Empire every day, which caused the historian Mary Beard to laugh, who He asked that no one pay attention to anything Musk can say about the Romans. We knew of Musk’s sympathies for Italian neo-fascism – who brings me back to the Saturday morning I spent listening to him at Giorgia Meloni’s party conference – but an investigation of New York Times has uncovered a scam worthy of the paranoid Domitian. Musk, who was once flanked by two bodyguards, now travels with a Praetorian Guard, a team of 20 bodyguards that operates like one protecting a head of state. According to that report, the businessman has become more fearful and isolated, while exaggerating the severity of the threats he receives: “He has become increasingly entrenched behind a growing phalanx of armed bodyguards as he has become richer, more famous and more loquacious.”
Musk also doesn’t like Republic control. He has announced that he will sue the US aerospace regulator, the only organization that asks for papers to go to space, because they have a mania and make him lawfare. And to shake off regulations, it has become the Trump’s main supporteranother Caligula. Zuckerberg has also reached out to Trump, whom he called to apologize (he has never tired of apologizing to Trump) when Facebook posts about his assassination attempt were deleted. The head of Meta does not want to dislike the Republicans, who accuse him of being pro-left, so he sucks up to them (he has hired the Republican strategist Brian Baker to improve his relationship with the media and right-wing politicians) while cutting off all collaboration with NGOs that could make him appear progressive. But the most worrying thing is that, to do so, Meta has reduced the number of employees dedicated to monitoring problems in the elections, dissolved the electoral integrity team and eliminated the transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor those pages.
If anyone knows about Roman emperors it is Mary Beard, who was asked in XL Weekly by these magnates and said: “It is difficult for us to see that this digital elite has incontestable power and is not accountable to anyone. This didn’t even exist in Rome!” Either Caesar or nothing, no; or Caesar or more than Caesar.
