National strength is no longer measured solely by traditional military forces or diplomatic treaties.
Instead, it is now defined by the tech titans who control the digital pipelines, cloud infrastructures, artificial intelligence models, and space networks.
There are three factions: the Space Team, the AI Team, and the Social Media Team.
The space team
The leaders of the 'space team' are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Musk dominates space infrastructure with SpaceX and Starlink, and he's also a member of the social media team via X.
His stated drive is saving humanity, which is an interesting way to describe one's work.
To be fair, Neuralink is absolutely ground-breaking.
Jeff Bezos is a direct competitor with Blue Origin - even though Blue Origin is nowhere near as successful as SpaceX - but Bezos has immense power through AWS - Amazing Web Services.
People only realised this a while back, when a long, long, long list of apps were all down (Slack, Canva, Netflix, Adobe, etc) at the same time, and people found out that was because they all rely on AWS servers.
The AI team
The AI team comprises Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, which has an going an open beef with Elon Musk, and Larry Ellison, who insists the US should focus on AI-driven data sovereignty.
The social media team (and PayPal 'mafia')
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook (now Meta) started as a social network, but it has evolved into an AI-powered company with a strong focus on wearables.
Then there's Peter Thiel, member of the so-called 'PayPal Mafia' (=people who made their first millions/billions through PayPal) and Palmer Luckey (Anduril) who believes AI should be used for defense tech.
Honourable mentions
We have to mention Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and more importantly Jensen Huang (NVIDIA).
Huang's case is particularly interesting.
His company used to be known for making gaming hardware, but at some point people realised: "wait a second, this guy makes chips that are needed for everything."
As national governments rely more heavily on private infrastructure to project power globally, the line between private tech enterprise and state strategy continues to blur.
It's a new type of feudalism.
