In this episode, I sit down with world-renowned political scientist Ian Bremmer to explore how artificial intelligence could reshape global power. For decades, world order has been defined by nation-states, the U.S., China, and shifting alliances between countries. But Ian argues we may be overlooking something far more disruptive. In this conversation, we unpack what AI could mean for geopolitics, the U.S.–China rivalry, and a future where the most powerful actors may no longer just be countries. Ian argues we urgently need to rethink what governance looks like in this new world, and the steps we can take to build it. Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of the world-leading political risk research and consulting firm, Eurasia Group. You can catch Ian’s weekly public television show GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, where he breaks down the world’s biggest geopolitical stories with the leaders and thinkers shaping them. Want more Ian Bremmer? Catch his weekly public television show GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, where he breaks down the world’s biggest geopolitical stories with the leaders and thinkers shaping them. And if you prefer your global politics with a side of satire, check out Puppet Regime — featuring world leaders as puppets. Yes, really.
@Michaeach3 Meet Zahwa Arafat. She is worth BILLIONS.
How does she live? 🔴 She owns entire blocks in London. She even has a street named after her because she owns every property on both sides. 🔴 She owns luxury real estate in Paris and across France. 🔴She holds properties in Malta and sits on massive Swiss bank accounts.
Where did this wealth come from? It was stolen by her father, Yasser Arafat.
Arafat wasn’t even Palestinian. His real name was Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini. He was an Egyptian terrorist born in Cairo who invented his “Palestinian” identity in 1964.
He stole billions, and his daughter lives like royalty in Europe.
When will the West wake up to this massive scam? Share this everywhere.
It’s Jewish American Heritage Month. Without Jewish Americans, you wouldn’t have: Google. OpenAI. WhatsApp. Facebook. Anthropic. Polymarket. Palantir. The NBA. Dell. Waze. Goldman Sachs. Oracle. BlackRock. Home Depot. Estée Lauder. Starbucks. Just to name a few. Jewish Americans have helped shape modern technology, finance, entertainment, sports, medicine, and entrepreneurship far beyond our numbers.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman may grab the headlines, but billionaires, theorists, and futurists are designing the most transformative technology of our era
Donald Trump presents the Stargate project alongside Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son, on January 21, 2025.Jabin Botsford (The Washington Post/Getty Images)
The tech trial of the century pits Elon Musk against Sam Altman in a California courtroom battle that has it all: money, betrayal, egos, and the future of the most disruptive technology of our time, artificial intelligence (AI). Musk and Altman dominate the headlines, and their statements go viral within seconds, partly because they are such singular figures.
But the real story of who controls AI isn’t unfolding in that courtroom, nor is it limited to those two men. It’s taking shape in Abu Dhabi’s meeting rooms, in the discreet offices of a fund in Hangzhou, and in the data centers rising in the Texas desert.There are many more players, but these nine individuals are quietly deciding — far from press conferences and social‑media fights — how the technology that will change everything is built, financed, and governed. These are their profiles.
Jensen Huang: The infrastructure
No one in the history of technology has had so much power over an industry without having any direct involvement in it. Jensen Huang, 62, born in Tainan, Taiwan, co-founded Nvidia in 1993 in a San Jose Denny’s with $40,000 in capital. In 1996, the company was a month away from bankruptcy. He bet everything on an unproven chip — the RIVA 128 — and saved the business. Since then, he has turned that obsession with survival into a corporate philosophy: he tells his employees that the company is always “30 days away from going under.”
Jensen Huang, at the last Nvidia conference, on March 17th.Carlos Barria (REUTERS)
What no one anticipated was that chips designed for video games would be the perfect infrastructure for training artificial intelligence models. By the time the world realized this, Nvidia was worth $3 billion, and Huang had tattooed the company’s logo on his left shoulder. Today, without its CUDA architecture, which is two decades ahead of any competitor, there would be no OpenAI, no Google DeepMind, no Anthropic, no DeepSeek. All the chatbots we know have been trained on Nvidia’s silicon chip.
In 2026, Huang was appointed to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Major financial magazines have named him the best CEO in the world. The black leather jacket he wears at every presentation has become a symbol of power, much like Steve Jobs’s turtleneck sweater once was. Huang doesn’t write the algorithms or sign the contracts: he simply controls the single gateway everyone needs to use.
Larry Ellison: Old-school power
Larry Ellison is 81 years old, and he has the kind of patience that only comes from having built a company over nearly 50 years. He founded Oracle in 1977 with a CIA contract. For decades, he periodically ranked as the richest man in the world, and he became known for his extravagant lifestyle — from America’s Cup sailing competitions to buying an entire island, Lānai, in Hawaii.
Larry Ellison, on January 21, 2025, at the White House.AARON SCHWARTZ / POOL (EFE)
When AI took off, Ellison did what he has always done: identify the piece of infrastructure everyone will need — and get there first. The breakthrough came in September 2025: a $300‑billion contract with OpenAI, the largest cloud‑computing deal ever signed, along with his stake in Stargate, the half‑trillion‑dollar project announced at the White House alongside Trump. The man who in 2008 called cloud computing “complete gibberish” is now its chief architect.
Masayoshi Son: The gambler
Masayoshi Son is not an investor. He’s a gambler — on a colossal scale. His biography includes the largest personal capital loss in history: during the dot‑com crash, he lost $70 billion. He came back. Then he bet on WeWork and lost billions more. He came back again.
Masayoshi Son, during an AI event in Tokyo, in 2025.Kim Kyung-Hoon (REUTERS)
He now chairs Stargate, has invested $41 billion in OpenAI, and has proposed a half‑trillion‑dollar complex in Arizona to build the physical and energy infrastructure needed for the next generation of AI. Son has stopped investing in China — “zero,” he says — and has reinvented himself as the great financier of America’s AI dream.
Marc Andreessen: The ideologue
Marc Andreessen doesn’t build models, chips, or data centers. He does something more difficult: he writes the mental script that many of the AI billionaires use to decide where to put their money. He co-founded Netscape, the first internet browser, and then created Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the fund that has financed Facebook, Airbnb, and the leading AI startups of the last decade.
Marc Andreessen, in a company image.
In 2023, he published his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a 5,000-word document declaring that halting AI amounts to “a form of murder.” It also named the “patron saints” of the movement, listing figures such as Nick Land, the father of dark accelerationism, a philosophical current that is openly anti‑democratic. Andreessen had been a Democratic voter for decades. But Biden’s proposal for a minimum tax on billionaires pushed him toward Trump, whom he actively funded in 2024. His reflections on how capitalism should dismantle democracy through technology are embraced — more or less explicitly — by many of the major leaders in AI.
Peter Thiel: The architect of chaos
Peter Thiel displays an unusual trait in Silicon Valley, at least as it used to be: he doesn’t need to be liked. In a James Bond film, he and his partner Alex Karp would be more villainous than the villain. He backed Trump when it was the most unpopular thing a tech magnate could do, he launched JD Vance’s political career with a record‑setting $15‑million donation, and placed his former chief of staff as a key adviser to the president. The White House’s AI policy today reflects his obsessions: radical deregulation, skepticism toward any body that might place limits on technology, and an unapologetic push for a militarized, anti‑democratic vision of AI.
Peter Thiel, at a conference in Cambridge (United Kingdom) in 2024.Nordin Catic (Getty Images for The Cambridge Union)
He co‑founded PayPal with Musk and later created Palantir, a data‑analysis company for governments and militaries, initially funded by the CIA’s venture‑capital arm and now considered one of the greatest human‑rights risks in the history of technology.
What’s remarkable about Thiel isn’t his money: it’s the effectiveness with which he has exported his ideology. His PayPal partner, David Sacks, is now Trump’s AI czar. And he and Karp recently published a manifesto calling for AI to be placed directly at the service of defense and the “technological supremacy” of the West. Thiel doesn’t build chips or train models. He builds the mental and political framework within which everyone else operates.
Reid Hoffman: The ‘connector’
He’s the man everyone knows, and everyone calls. He co-founded LinkedIn, was vice president of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb, and one of the first funders of OpenAI, where he served on the board for five years. His value wasn’t in any particular company, but in being the hub the entire ecosystem turned to for advice and connections.
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.DAVE GETZSCHMAN
However, in 2025, he lost his seat at OpenAI due to conflicts of interest: his startup, Inflection AI, was acquired by Microsoft. His Democratic leanings left him without influence in the Trump administration. Now he is isolated from the new axis of power (Trump, Musk, and Thiel). The question that Hoffman embodies better than anyone is whether networking power has an expiration date when the network changes its structure and ideology.
Daniela Amodei: The invisible power
In an industry where the founders of major AI labs hold PhDs in computational physics, Daniela Amodei arrived with a degree in English literature. In 2018, she joined OpenAI as vice president of security and policy. In 2021, when her brother Dario and several colleagues concluded that the pace of commercialization was incompatible with truly safe AI, they founded Anthropic. She is the president. Dario is the CEO.
Daniela Amodei, in an image from the company.
Today, Anthropic generates $4 billion in annual revenue and is the AI of choice for major corporations. In 2025, the Pentagon excluded it from its AI contracts, sparking a political and business battle that made Anthropic the epicenter of the war for the future of military AI. Daniela Amodei leads everything that isn’t pure research: operations, strategy, culture, partnerships, and talent. In 2025, Forbes included her on its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. Her name appears far less frequently than her brother’s in the media, but she is, in the words of an early investor, “the execution engine that makes the lab function.”
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan: The petrodollars
His name doesn’t come up in discussions about AI regulation. He doesn’t give interviews.He has no social media profile. And yet, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and national security advisor, controls more than $1.4 trillion in assets.
Donald Trump with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, in 2025 at the White House.Daniel Torok (Official White House/ American Photo Archive / Alamy / Cordon Press)
In 2024, he launched MGX, which in less than two years has become one of the largest funders of global AI: it has invested in OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Binance, and is a founding partner of Stargate. The most disturbing dimension of his power is the one no one discusses openly: one of his companies (G42) has been accused of developing espionage tools for the UAE, and negotiations to create a customized version of ChatGPT for the UAE include content tailored “to the monarchy’s political line.”
Liang Wenfeng: Chinese power
On January 27, 2025, Nvidia’s stock plummeted $589 billion in a single day, the largest destruction of market value in history. It happened because of a 40-year-old man with “a terrible haircut,” as one of his associates described him upon meeting him.
One of the few images of Liang Wenfeng, in 2019, in Shanghai.VCG/Getty Images
In 2021, when U.S. sanctions restricted China’s access to high-end chips, he bought thousands of permitted GPUs and started an AI project. The result was DeepSeek R1: a model trained on 2,048 chips with a budget of $5.6 million that rivaled GPT-4 and proved that Western sanctions on technology don’t work as expected. He’s the man who instilled the most fear in Silicon Valley and the White House in 2025. Almost no one knows how to pronounce his name, but Wenfeng’s is likely the one that will be heard the most from this entire list in the coming years.
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Legends on Netflix a recommendation linking it todays need for War on Drugs, cover abroad and UK
Thought for 1m 5s
If you’re looking for a gripping, timely Netflix recommendation that hits right at the heart of the drug crisis—both historical and shockingly relevant today—watch Legends. https://artifacts.grokusercontent.com/third-party-image
radiotimes.com This brand-new six-part British drama (premiered May 7, 2026) is inspired by a true, untold story from the early 1990s. A team of ordinary UK Customs and Excise officers—civil servants with zero espionage training—are given new identities (“legends”) and sent undercover to infiltrate some of Britain’s most violent drug gangs. Their mission: stop the flood of heroin devastating streets, clubs, and communities during the height of the epidemic. netflix.com +1 Starring Tom Burke and Steve Coogan (who absolutely nails his role), with a strong ensemble including Hayley Squires, it’s tense, suspenseful, and grounded in real events. Think The Gold meets Line of Duty—gritty 90s Britain, high-stakes infiltration, moral gray areas, and the human cost on both sides of the law. At just six episodes, it’s the perfect binge: smart, propulsive, and never preachy. https://artifacts.grokusercontent.com/third-party-image
variety.com Why it perfectly links to today’s urgent need for a real War on Drugs
Legends isn’t just nostalgia for Thatcher-era crackdowns. It shows how targeted, intelligence-driven enforcement—undercover ops, border control, and dismantling supply networks—actually worked against organized crime when drugs were pouring in unchecked.Margaret Thatcher’s government treated the heroin crisis as the emergency it was, and these “everyday” officers risked everything to fight it from the inside.
variety.com Fast-forward to 2026, and the crisis hasn’t gone away—it’s evolved, gone global, and gotten deadlier with synthetics. The show is a stark reminder that supply-side pressure (disrupting cartels, trafficking routes, and gangs) remains essential alongside treatment and harm reduction. Pure decriminalization or demand-only approaches haven’t stopped the flow; powerful criminal networks adapt and profit.In the UK right now: Drug-poisoning deaths are still tragically high. In 2024 (latest full ONS data), England and Wales recorded thousands of deaths, with cocaine mentions up 14% for the 13th straight year (1,279 deaths) and opioids involved in nearly half. Heroin/morphine remain the top killers among opiates, while nitazenes (synthetic opioids up to 100x stronger than heroin) surged nearly 4x to 195 deaths. ons.gov.uk +1 Scottish gangs and international networks keep trafficking cocaine, heroin, and new synthetics into Europe and the UK, with Europol operations targeting violent crews as recently as March 2026.
reuters.com Abroad (and feeding straight into the UK): The US fentanyl catastrophe—largely from Mexican cartels sourcing precursors internationally—has been catastrophic, with 72,776 fentanyl-related deaths in 2023 alone (though overall overdose numbers have started declining slightly into 2025 thanks to some enforcement wins and market shifts).
usafacts.org +1 Globally, the UN World Drug Report and Europol highlight how criminal networks control massive cocaine and synthetic drug pipelines into Europe. Gangs use violence, intimidation, and sophisticated smuggling—exactly the world Legends dramatizes.The series drives home a simple truth: when authorities go on the offensive with undercover work and cross-border pressure (as in the real ops that inspired the show), they can disrupt the trade and save lives. Today’s version needs the same urgency—updated for fentanyl analogues, nitazenes, and hyper-connected cartels—because the human toll (families shattered, communities flooded, lives lost) hasn’t stopped.
Legends isn’t propaganda; it’s a dramatized but faithful look at what happens when society fights back effectively.
whats-on-netflix.com Stream it on Netflix today. It’s not just great TV—it’s a compelling case for why the war on drugs (smart, targeted enforcement included) is still very much needed in 2026, from Liverpool to London to the global supply lines. You won’t regret it.
Semiconductors power everything from AI to smartphones — but making them is a complex manufacturing feat. As supply chain risks mount and dependence on Taiwan comes into sharper focus, countries are spending billions of dollars to bring chipmaking closer to home. More on Primer pic.twitter.com/3eKK9bzWtl
A commenter on a livestream recently asked me if my faith has ever wavered through the multiple war zones I've reported in, and now the genocide in Gaza that we have all witnessed. I described how the evil in all of us is indeed real, but so is the good. pic.twitter.com/vCH22WXFJF
“The ruling Al Thani family is financing terrorism.”
Khalid Al-Hail, leader of the Qatar National Democratic Party and one of the most prominent voices of the Qatari opposition, has dropped a nuclear accusation from exile:
Former British Minister Rory Stewart discusses growing global criticism of Israel and concerns over the collapse of the rules-based international order.@RoryStewartUKpic.twitter.com/vKQFnJ3LwD
canisgallicus 