51吃瓜

On a recent episode of his , All-In, David Sacks reached for Plato. The subject was whether anyone should be allowed to regulate artificial intelligence. Sacks was against regulation, and to explain why he summoned the oldest question in political philosophy: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who will guard the guardians? Who watches the watchman, restrains the restrainer, checks the power we create to check everything else?聽

It is a serious question. It has worried free people for two thousand years. And Sacks, when he asked it, had until ten weeks earlier been the guardian himself: the White House AI and crypto , the single official in the United States government charged with steering policy across the two industries he is personally invested in. The man warning that the state cannot be trusted with power over AI had just held exactly that power. He had used it not to build a check but to tear the existing ones down, and had done it while his portfolio.

That is the whole story. The rest of this is just detail.

These men are not wrong that unaccountable power is dangerous. They are righter than they know, and they prove it daily, because they have become the thing they warn against and cannot see it. They have performed a single trick, so deep in the grammar of their politics that they no longer notice it: They have defined 鈥減ower鈥� to mean only the power of the state, and 鈥渇reedom鈥� to mean only its absence. Once you accept that definition, a private empire answerable to no one is not power at all. It is liberty. A man who cannot be fired is not a sovereign. He is an entrepreneur. And a billionaire holding a government office over his own industry is not a conflict of interest. He is a patriot doing public service. The trick is the entire game, and almost no one calls it.

So let us call it in the three places they run it.

The shareholder they erased

Start with the corporation, and grant them their best argument up front, because it is real. A founder with genuine vision needs room to think in decades, free from the quarterly mob that would punish him for building something slow and great. Fine. True of Jobs, true of Bezos. Now watch what they did with the principle.

In 2004, Google鈥檚 founders kept ten votes per share for themselves and sold one-vote shares to the public, and called it long-term independence. By Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg held a permanent majority of the vote while owning a fraction of the company. By 2017, Snap went public selling shares with no votes at all, the first major American company to invite the public to hand over its money and forbid it from having any say whatsoever. 

And Musk鈥檚 SpaceX is simply the frontier of that same road: roughly 79% of the votes on 40% of the equity, chief executive and chairman and chief technologist at once, removable only by a vote he himself controls, which is to say removable by no one. Shareholder complaints go to private arbitration where no precedent forms and the public learns nothing. And because the company is too big to keep out of the stock indices, the retirement savings of ordinary Americans will be poured into it automatically, buying them a stake in an empire over which they have, by deliberate design, not one word.

Across twenty years the single most important check on corporate power, the ability of a company鈥檚 owners to fire the people running it, was quietly written out of the constitution of the modern tech firm. Not by law. By design, one charter at a time, each step blessed as the romance of the visionary founder. The result is a guardian who cannot be fired. And the men who built him spend their evenings warning you about the danger of a technology falling into too few unaccountable hands.

The referee put on the striped shirt

Now the second place, which turns the irony into something worse. The revolving door between business and government is old, and if that were the charge it would be tired. It is not the charge. What has happened in the past year is more direct than influence-peddling. The owners of the industry simply walked into the offices built to oversee it, and kept the ownership.

Sacks ran AI and crypto policy from inside the White House as a 鈥渟pecial government employee, a designation that by law skips Senate confirmation and skips full financial disclosure, while he kept his venture fund and its bets on the industries he was now regulating. A Biden AI adviser, no partisan of these men, the only question that matters: whether the role was serving the public or 鈥渁 particular few individuals.鈥澛�

A White House memo that Sacks sold over $200 million in digital assets. That is the size of the interest he carried into the office that would write the digital-asset rules. Elon Musk ran the Department of Government Efficiency () under the same , his teams into federal agencies with access to the Treasury鈥檚 payment systems and the of millions, while his companies held billions in federal contracts and faced live federal investigations. The status, as one outlet put it, gave him an from government that elected officials do not get: the power of the state without the ballot, without the disclosure, without the leash. Marc Andreessen, whose firm is among the largest backers of defense tech and AI, took a on the reconstituted Defense Policy Board, advising the Secretary of War on precisely the modernization his portfolio is built to profit from, and a beside David Friedberg on the science and technology council (PCAST) that Sacks co-chairs.

Four men. Four offices inside the government that are supposed to hold their industries to account, entered through a side door cut specifically to bypass the confirmation, the disclosure and the accountability that bind everyone else who touches that kind of power. They did not capture the referee. They put on the striped shirt, kept playing and told the stands that the real threat was letting anyone referee at all.

And when anyone suggests the public might claim a stake in this, a share, a vote, a sliver of democratic control over fortunes built on the public鈥檚 own knowledge, these same men reach not for an argument but for a word. Socialism. Friedberg calls a group of elected officials 鈥渢he great American politburo.鈥� A proposal that the public own a piece of what the public helped build becomes 鈥渃onfiscation,鈥� 鈥渟eizing the means of production,鈥� the road to a world where 鈥渁 small number of people own and control everything.鈥� Read that last phrase again. It is not a description of the thing they fear. It is a description of the thing they are building, in their charters and now in their offices, and they have hung the alarm on the door so that it rings every time the public reaches for the handle.

The bill they hand to someone else

The second evasion is the myth of the self-made man, and again, grant the true part without flinching. Musk slept on the floor. He poured his own money back into SpaceX when it was three failed launches from dead. The competence is real and the achievement is real and the lazy critique that calls every fortune theft loses to the facts in the first round.

Built on what, though? The engineers came out of public universities and did research the public paid for. The physics was worked out over a century of federally funded science with no commercial use at the time, which is exactly why only the public would fund it. The idea of landing a booster was rehearsed for decades inside NASA before SpaceX made it look easy. 

And SpaceX itself, the proof text of building it alone, has taken roughly in government contracts by its own president鈥檚 count, with the federal commitments across Musk鈥檚 whole empire totaling close to by The Washington Post鈥檚 tally. The internet his companies run on was a . The courts that enforce his contracts, the law that lets him take a company public without being robbed at the door, the Navy that keeps his shipping lanes open: all of it the tax-funded inheritance of the society he now describes as a parasite feeding on him.

Which brings us to their favorite word, aimed in exactly the wrong direction. The moocher. The free rider. The taker. Run the concept honestly and ask who it actually fits. The cashier one rent payment from the street, riding the public bus to a public hospital, paying a higher share of her income in tax than the billionaire pays on his gains? Or the man who built $22 billion on public research and public contracts, routes the proceeds to pay as little as the law allows, and turns to the camera to explain that the drain on society is the poor? One of them is taking far more from the common pot than he returns, and it is not the cashier. The genius of the moocher rhetoric is that it points the finger downward, at the people with the least, and away from the people who took the most and give back the least.

And then the sharpest case, which I will state coldly because cold is what it deserves. In early 2025 Musk, from inside the government, led the gutting of USAID, one of the cheapest instruments of human decency the country owned, a rounding error in the budget that bought vaccines and food and HIV medicine for some of the poorest people alive. A Boston University epidemiologist built a public of what the sudden cutoff would cost in lives. By that model the deaths ran past seven hundred within a year, most of them children.聽

I give that as what it is, one researcher鈥檚 with a published method, not a settled count and not a charge of murder. But the structure stands regardless of the exact figure. A man who has drawn tens of billions from the public treasury used a temporary perch inside the state to kill the small sums keeping the world鈥檚 poorest children alive, in the name of efficiency, while his own contracts went untouched. A government watchdog put it in one line: he power over the very agencies that pay his companies billions. There is the free rider, fully inverted. The man who took the most appointed himself the one who decides whether anyone else gets anything. Then he, and some in the government he worked for, the .

The same move scales to the planet. For thirty years 鈥渇ree trade鈥� flew as a banner over agreements that were, on inspection, mostly on governments to stay out of the way of capital, enforced by a mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement that hands a corporation the right to sue a country, in a private tribunal, for passing a law it dislikes. No worker has that right. No community has it. Only the investor. And the that shows what it is for is running now, and it leads straight back to these men.聽

On a Honduran island sits Pr贸spera, a private enclave with its own laws and courts and tax code, where you sign an agreement to enter the way you accept a software license, backed by Pronomos Capital, whose investors include the same Marc Andreessen now seated on the Defense Policy Board. When Honduras democratically repealed the law that created these zones, Pr贸spera did not accept the vote. It sued the country for nearly $11 billion, not for money lost but for profit it imagined it would have made over thirty years. $11 billion is of the entire annual budget of Honduras. The question the case asks is the only question: can a people their own laws, or does a corporation鈥檚 guess at future profit an entire nation’s vote? Whatever the answer may be, the very existence of this lawsuit will have a on human rights, environmental protections and even international law, as Honduras is now to withdraw from the World Bank鈥檚 International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

The cost they never name

There is a word that never appears in all their hours of talk about wealth and value and the future. Externality. The cost an activity dumps on someone who never agreed to bear it. The word is missing because the concept is fatal to them, since to admit it is to admit the public has a claim on private activity, and the public having a claim is the one thing the whole machine exists to deny. Four cases, fast, where the evidence is not in dispute. 

The first and second, both historical and on public record. , the largest unpriced cost in history, booked as private profit in real time and charged to the global poor and the unborn who got no vote. The , where the gains were private and the losses were socialized in cash, profits mine and losses ours, stated without irony by the people who actually live by it.聽

Third: the cost of social media dumped on the public despite companies鈥� of its harms. Meta鈥檚 own researchers, who studied what Instagram does to teenage girls and it down in a slide that read 鈥渨e make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.鈥� Other internal studies found that 13.5% of teen girls surveyed said Instragam worsened suicidal thoughts and 17% said it worsened eating disorders, and yet Meta kept the engagement engine running anyway, because the harm landed on the children and the profit landed on the books, which is why forty-odd state attorneys general now them on the model of the Big Tobacco lawsuits. While some experts offer a 鈥減erception of harm versus measured harm鈥� approach, the point still stands 鈥� these corporations knew harm is done, and still chose to march forward.

Finally, the one arriving right now: the AI boom has a physical bill, and and computation. By All-In host Chamath Palihapitiya鈥檚 own admission, unlike the internet, every user costs something real. So when a data center drains a regional grid and the family鈥檚 electric bill climbs, when it drinks a town鈥檚 water in a place already short of it, when the automation throws a category of worker overboard, who pays? They will tell you about the upside in loving detail. The cost they wave off as someone else鈥檚 problem, or the price of progress, or a thing the market will fix. It is the carbon sermon again, word for word, at the dawn of the next fortune, preached by some of the same men. We know how it ends. We are still paying for the last time we believed it.

Who guards the guardians

Here is what is actually at stake, and it is not that business is bad and government is good. That is a trap they spring in one sentence by pointing at any failed agency, and there are many. A healthy society is neither side winning. It is the permanent, grinding, unfinished negotiation between them, the market free enough to build and the public strong enough to set the bounds and count the costs and ensure no private power grows large enough to escape the leash. Neither wins for good, and that is not the flaw. That is the design. The tension is the thing that keeps power answerable, and it is supposed to be exhausting, and it is never supposed to end.

What these men offer is the end of it. One party to the contest declaring the contest over, announcing that it has won and appointing itself the referee. The shareholder erased is the negotiation ended inside the firm. The corporation suing a nation is the negotiation ended between capital and democracy. The unpriced externality is the negotiation ended with everyone downstream. The billionaire in the government office is the negotiation ended inside the state. Every one of them is a check torn out and a counter-party stripped of standing and a power that was meant to stay contestable made permanent.

And the reason a reasonable person can listen to them for hours and nod is that they are very good at a particular trick. Call it the Houdini act. While the real work goes on quietly, in charter amendments and arbitration clauses and special-employee designations, the public square is kept roaring with provocation and grievance and spectacle, the same men starring as persecuted truth-tellers in whatever fight is eating the discourse that week, flooding the zone so thoroughly that no one has the attention left to watch the charters being rewritten. The provocation is not a distraction from the project. It is the cover for it.

Underneath it sits the belief that drives the whole thing, and it should be named. It is the conviction, held with real sincerity, that their judgment is so superior and their intentions so pure that the ordinary rules of accountability simply should not apply to them. You hear it when Palantir CEO Alex Karp , in effect, that anyone who disagrees with what he is building is an idiot, because he is saving their lives whether they grasp it or not.聽

It is the oldest delusion of the strong, the fantasy that the great man is great enough to be trusted with unchecked power because he, uniquely, will use it well. Every generation makes men who believe it about themselves, and the whole architecture of constitutional democracy exists because every generation has been proven wrong. The check on power was never built because the powerful are evil. It was built because they are human, and fallible, and need to answer to someone other than themselves no matter how pure they believe they are. The man certain he should not be checked is the man who most needs to be.

So, back to the question Sacks asked, since it is a good one and deserves a real answer. Who guards the guardians? Not the state alone, he is right about that. But the question does not stop where he stopped it. It keeps going until it reaches him, and the men beside him, who have made themselves the guardians in the corporation and the state at once and arranged with great care to be guarded by no one.

The answer a free society gives is not clean and not final, and that is its strength. Who guards the guardians? We do. All of us, badly, partly, through institutions none of us owns and all of us have to keep repairing, in a negotiation that never ends and is not supposed to. That is the answer these men cannot abide, because it counts them among the guarded. 

The emperor in the story is not naked because he is poor. He is naked because everyone agreed to call his nakedness a robe. The robe these men are wearing is a definition, the one that says private power is freedom and only public power can be tyranny, and it is doing the exact work the imaginary cloth did. It asks us to look at a concentration of unaccountable power and agree to call it liberty. We do not have to agree. The question is still standing where Sacks left it, pointing now at the men who asked it. Who will guard the guardians? It was always going to be us, or it was going to be no one. And no one is what they are counting on.

[Cheyenne Torres edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author鈥檚 own and do not necessarily reflect 51吃瓜鈥檚 editorial policy.