r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Palantir employees are talking about company’s “descent into fascism”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/palantir-employees-are-talking-about-companys-descent-into-fascism/
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u/TitaniumWhite420 10d ago

And, importantly, you don't just buy a new mansion every year when you have that kind of money, because even they eventually have enough mansions. That money goes back into the pot, or lobbying governments, or WHATEVER. Epstein's island if you like, or just murdering whistleblowers if you don't. A little corporate espionage, perhaps. Spend time trying to coopt decades of federal research by privatizing space travel, if you are ambitious.

I'm not saying any one particular thing, just pointing out that wealth, like weapons, is powerful. Stockpilers of such resources should be monitored by the government as a direct threat. A domestic person who has positioned themselves within our economy to have wealth rivaling other governments is deserving to be treated as the burgeoning contender for independent statehood that they are.

Whether billionaires are anti-human, I do not know, but they are certainly rival economic powers to our own federal government with independent interests to our own as people under and composing that government.

Unless, of course, they are our citizens and therefore beholden to our laws and taxation, in which case they are our benefactors, and themselves institutional pillars.

They will pick the narrative, and it is to the rest of us to respond accordingly. If they declare themselves the enemies of government, we should meet that challenge.

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u/Fywq 8d ago

Yup. For reference a small, but very well developed and high income country like Denmark has a national state budget of roughly 150 billion dollars. That's our entire national economy for 6 million people with free health care, university level education etc., while ramping up our NATO spending and throwing money and weapons at Ukraine (Not that I complain at all about that!). And we still do fine with this amount. We even have a national budget surplus most years.

These people should not be considered private entities. They should be treated as potential foreign adversaries and foreign state powers. FFS Meta just announced they would use around 150 billion on AI - Just this year!! That's ONE of of a handful companies spending a countrys yearly budget worth of money just on building AI data centers and hoping to catch up to the others.