Part One of a three-part “who’s who” series providing brief profiles of many major players in the AI industry. This first part focuses on AI’s powerful technology moguls. They are listed alphabetically by their company name: Amazon, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, and xAI.
Amazon
Primary AI Product: AWS (Amazon Web Services) and AI chips
Jeff Bezos (Amazon Magnate)
The well-known founder and former CEO of Amazon.com recently rented Venice for his wedding and sent Katy Perry into space on one of his Blue Origin rockets. In October 2025, Bezos reportedly said “This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.” In the same appearance, he also admitted that AI was “an industry bubble.”
Anthropic
Primary AI Product: Claude
Daniela Amodei (Anthropic Cofounder/VP of Safety & Policy)
Born in San Francisco in 1987, Amodei’s undergraduate degree in English Literature shows that, with the right familial connections, a Humanities degree can lead to a high-profile job in Silicon Valley. First working in AI ethics and safety at OpenAI alongside her brother Dario, she left alongside him in 2021 to co-found Anthropic. Her stewardship of Anthropic’s Safety & Policy has helped create the public perception that Anthropic is the ethical AI company – oh, except for the fact that they pirated thousands of books to train Claude. Truly, Anthropic are the only people moral enough to responsibly shepherd humanity into the era of AGI.
Dario Amodei (Anthropic Cofounder/CEO)
The San Francisco native first made waves as the vice president of research at OpenAI. Amodei’s concerns about Sam Altman‘s ability to ethically steward AGI (should that breakthrough happen) as well as their Boomer versus Doomer philosophical disagreements led Dario and his sister Daniela to leave OpenAI in 2021 and co-found Anthropic. Famous for being awkward, as well as for kind of standing up against the US military‘s desire to use Anthropic’s models for automated killing machines.
DeepSeek
Primary AI Product: DeepSeek AI
Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek CEO)
Born in Wuchuan in 1985, Liang founded DeepSeek in October 2023. In October 2022, US president Joe Biden began exerting export controls over computer chips sold in China, preventing Chinese companies from buying the latest cutting edge Nvidia chips. In order to regain their lost income in China, Nvidia began manufacturing lower power AI chips specifically for the Chinese market; the US retaliated with tighter export controls, so Nvidia made even lower power chips, and so on. The US assumed this would guarantee American superiority in AI development. However, on 20 January 2025, DeepSeek released their R1 LLM, a powerful frontier model that was trained for a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley LLMs, running on Nvidia’s lower quality chips. The ensuing frenzy over DeepSeek’s substantial achievement led to a US stock market crash a week later and DeepSeek overtaking ChatGPT as the number one app in the so-called West. As DeepSeek continues to innovate with less powerful resources than their American competitors, Liang’s personal value has continued to skyrocket: as of 14 July 2026, he has become the world’s richest AI model CEO.
Primary AI Product: DeepMind/Gemini
Jeff Dean (Head of Google AI/DeepMind)
As Google’s 30th employee, Hawaiian-born Dean has worked his up from engineering advertising and Google Translate to eventually becoming head of Google’s AI department. He was involved in multiple controversial firings of Google whistleblower employees including Timnit Gebru (fired for exposing racist practices at Google and within its AI models) and Satrajit Chatterjee (fired for directly challenging the veracity of Dean’s own research). Dean came up with the name “Gemini” for Google’s AI chatbot when the company decided to merge its Google Brain and DeepMind departments into a single department named Google DeepMind.
Meta
Primary AI Product: Meta AI
Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Cofounder, chairman & CEO)
After gambling his company’s future on VR/the “Metaverse” and losing (big), Zuckerberg pivoted to playing catchup with AI. You might know him as the man responsible for temporarily letting everyone use Meta AI to make deepfakes of anyone with an Instagram account, the man responsible for tracking his employees’ every keystroke to train the Meta AI monitoring system, and the man responsible for using a biased AI system to fire pregnant employees.
Microsoft
Primary AI Products: Copilot, Azure
Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO)
Hyderabad-born executive responsible for Microsoft’s early investment in OpenAI and subsequently providing the vote of confidence in Sam Altman necessary to get him re-instated as OpenAI’s CEO after an unsuccessful internal coup in 2024. Nadella also bet big on making Copilot the centrepiece of Windows 11, to the company’s eventual chagrin. When Microsoft was exposed in 2025 as having helped the Israeli military’s elite cybersecurity division Unit 8200 collect millions of hours of audio recordings from the mobile phones of Palestinians, store them in Azure, and process their data with Microsoft AI (thereby helping Unit 8200 target civilians during the Palestine genocide post-Oct. 7, 2023), Nadella took “decisive action” by allowing the head of Microsoft Israel to quietly resign, then transferring oversight of the Israeli branch to Microsoft France. Incidentally, the Palestine Boycott/Divest/Sanctions movement has declared Microsoft to be “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide…in Gaza.” Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide led Brian Eno to donate the fee Microsoft paid him for composing the Windows 95 startup sound to aid for Palestine, saying “I pledge that the fee I originally received for that Windows 95 chime will now go towards helping the victims of the attacks on Gaza. If a sound can signal a real change then let it be this one.”
Nvidia
Primary AI Product: GPUs
Jensen Huang (Nvidia Founder & CEO)
The Taiwanese/American founder of Nvidia is known for many things: not wearing a watch, always wearing a leather jacket regardless of social etiquette or context, and AI tokenmaxxing. He designs and manufactures the computing chips, or GPUs, that power AI companies’ Data Centers, thereby making him and his company a pivotal part of the AI supply chain, better known as the AI Bubble; as described by Cory Doctorow: “…it’s normal for Nvidia to ‘invest’ tens of billions in a data center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The same chunk of money [is] being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).”
OpenAI
Primary AI Product: ChatGPT
Sam Altman (OpenAI Cofounder/CEO)
A college drop-out and venture capitalist, Altman was born in Chicago in 1985. Although he developed an interest in computers at an early age, he has no formal credentials in computer science, having studied it for only two years as an undergraduate at Stanford University before quitting. He is known mostly for his uncanny ability to convince people to give him money, often seeming to know exactly what to say to someone in order to get them on his side (he also writes emails and Tweets in all lowercase, and speaks with an affected vocal fry). His devotion to the contemporary philosophical movements of Effective Altruism and Effective Accelerationism have been motivating factors for him to earn as much money as he possibly can while giving half of it away to recipients he deems will have a positive long term impact on humanity; he got his start with this investment strategy while first working for, then serving as president of, Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” providing funding for mostly tech-based startups.
He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 along with Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Y Combinator research (and YC’s Jessica Livingston), and the Indian company Infosys. Originally positioned as a nonprofit organisation that was concerned about the danger of human civilisation becoming obsolete upon the “inevitable” creation of AGI – Artificial General Intelligence – as many AI theorists have suggested, Altman quickly shifted the company’s focus to profit behind the scenes.
His penchant for rarely telling the truth and manipulating his colleagues led to an unsuccessful coup attempt by several OpenAI employees and board members to have him ousted as the company’s CEO; it also led to Elon Musk’s unsuccessful lawsuit against OpenAI, with Musk claiming he was lied to about OpenAI’s plans to permanently remain a nonprofit in order to get him to invest more money with them.
His estranged sister Annie has accused him of sexual abuse during their childhood, leading Sam to counter-sue her for defamation.
One of the many other companies Sam has created, Tools For Humanity, scans humans’ biometrics by putting their head inside a volleyball-sized orb, which Altman claims will help prove their humanity in a post-AGI world (meaning Altman himself will control humanity’s access to capital, health care, etc). The company began by scanning economically challenged people in countries across the Global South, promising them cryptocurrency in exchange for their biometrics – a business manuever that almost single-handedly proves journalist Karen Hao’s hypothesis that AI companies are simply technology-based versions of the colonising empires of old.
And yet, there are powerful (and even intelligent) people who still believe Sam Altman is the only person alive with the moral sense to guide the human race through the so-called “inevitable” advent of AI that will be as smart or smarter than humans.
Greg Brockman (OpenAI Cofounder & President)
Born in North Dakota in 1987, Brockman excelled at mathematics early in life, then dropped out of both Harvard University and then MIT to work for the international payment processing tech firm Stripe. Brockman then, after having one dinner with Elon Musk and Sam Altman, quit Stripe in 2015 to help cofound OpenAI. He married his wife Anna in November 2019, in a ceremony officiated by then-OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever in the OpenAI offices during a workday.
Brockman was also a target of the 2023 failed coup that temporarily ousted Sam Altman because, according to coup leader Mira Murati, Altman’s working relationship with Brockman made it impossible for her as Chief Technology Officer to do her job, as documented in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI (2025). Microsoft quickly stepped in, offering Altman and Brockman positions at Microsoft to head a new internal AI research division. This and an employee revolt forced the end of the coup, with both Altman and Brockman returning to OpenAI a mere four days after their ousting.
In 2025, the Brockmans were the largest donor to Donald Trump’s Political Action Committee MAGA, Inc., with each of them donating US$12.5 million.
Mira Murati (OpenAI Former Chief Technology Officer)
Albanian-American Murati (born 1988) is the former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI who led the infamous failed 2023 coup to oust Sam Altman as CEO after becoming disturbed by Altman’s constant mixed messaging and downright lying, using his close working relationship with Greg Brockman to shut Murati out of significant portions of the company. She collaborated with then-OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever to axe Altman, but the coup only lasted four days before Microsoft swooped in and offered Altman a new position at Microsoft, resetting the balance of power that had very briefly shifted.
In February 2025 she founded her own AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab; the company has attracted significant venture capital investment, and introduced their first open-weights AI model after a year and a half of development.
“it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious,” OpenAI’s Sutskever tweeted in 2022, to which one Google DeepMind scientist replied “…in the same sense that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.”
Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Cofounder & Former Chief Scientist)
Born in 1986 in Gorky, Soviet Union, Israeli-Canadian computer scientist Sutskever grew up in Jerusalem before moving to Toronto for university, eventually earning a PhD in computer science. His PhD supervisor was the so-called “godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton. Sutskever became an expert in so-called Neural Networks, machine learning devices whose architecture attempts to mimic (albeit in an extremely limited fashion, per physicist Adam Becker in More Everything Forever [2026]) the neuron structure of the human brain. Sutskever was next hired as a research scientist for Google Brain in 2013, staying for two years before leaving to cofound OpenAI in order to pursue what had become his dream: hyperscaling a neural network in order to achieve AGI, an AI with fully human-like intelligence. Sutskever became an integral figure at OpenAI, somewhere between company cheerleader and corporate evangelist. Karen Hao’s extended description of Sutskever from her book Empire of AI is worth quoting here:
Sutskever didn’t often program himself. At times his hands-off approach to technical work bothered some employees…Sutskever’s conviction [was] in rallying [employees] around a single focus: one that would ultimately allow OpenAI–then an underdog–to beat Google and DeepMind…As OpenAI grew and Sutskever’s profile rose, his lack of a filter would at times turn into a liability…He made statements using his signature bullish confidence…”it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious,” he tweeted in 2022…[to which] one DeepMind scientist specialized in the study of cognition and consciousness replied “…in the same sense that it may be that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.”…Many employees at OpenAI…saw him as something of a prophet…Shortly after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, OpenAI would host a holiday party…Sutskever [got] up in front of the crowd, wearing an OpenAI t-shirt and black blazer, [delivering] what had become his new mantra. “Feel the AGI,” he said. “Feel the AGI.” (p.119-120)
Sutskever initially stayed on at OpenAI following his participation in the failed 2023 coup to oust Sam Altman, leaving in 2024 to create his own startup: Safe Superintellingence, based in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv. It remains to be seen what the company will actually accomplish.
Palantir
Primary AI Product: AI Warfare
Alex Karp (Palantir Cofounder and CEO)
Born in New York City in 1967, billionaire businessman Alex Karp is one of the more academically accomplished of the AI moguls, having earned a law degree from Stanford University and a PhD in social theory from the Goethe University in Frankfurt; however, he acts ad living proof that all the book learning in the world does not automatically imbue one with empathy, nor even basic logic or morality. Having morphed from a somewhat left-leaning academic to a rabid US nationalist, Karp appears to delight in carnage, warfare, and settler colonialist violence when he’s not simply thinking about money. Just listen to what the man actually said onstage in front of a live audience of sentient human beings about his inner desire to violently kill his business rivals:
This man is now not only helping the second Trump administration spy on American citizens and wage war around the world, he’s also somehow in charge of the medical records of every private citizen in the UK who has ever utilised the health care of the NHS.
Peter Thiel (Palantir Cofounder and Chairman)
German-American venture capitalist and conservative political activist Peter Thiel got his start in the tech world when he founded PayPal in 1999, a year later purchasing Elon Musk‘s X.com, an early Internet-based financial services company. This venture created what has come to be known as the Paypal Mafia, a group of businessmen/venture capitalists who either helped found or worked for PayPal who have gone on to found further tech ventures, often becoming billionaires and libertarians like Thiel in the process.
Thiel and Alex Karp founded Palantir in 2003, inspired by the US government’s reaction to the September 11th attack on the New York World Trade Center. Bristling with their newfound nationalistic views and a shared hatred for Muslims, Karp and Thiel realised the US government was beginning to widen its use of technology for surveillance of their enemies as well as of US citizens, and they wanted to provide data analysis to help the US “reduce terrorism“. They named the company Palantir after the similarly named indestructible crystal balls used by the dark wizard Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (perhaps a bit on the nose regarding the company’s moral motivations). In recent years, Palantir has assisted Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people post-October 7th 2023.
Incidentally, Thiel has also admitted to paying US$10 million to allow professional wrestler Hulk Hogan sue media website Gawker into oblivion in 2013 for publishing a sex tape as revenge against Gawker for publicly outing Thiel as gay in 2007 (Thiel is married to American financier and former vice president of BlackRock Matt Danzeisen).
In a 2025 podcast interview about AI, Thiel could not immediately answer whether or not he wanted the human race to endure:
Thiel, a wannbe academic heavily influenced by the mimetic theory posited by French thinker René Girard, firmly believes the Antichrist is returning (or has possibly already returned), and this belief helps guide not only his investments and business dealings, but also his day to day life. In 2025, Thiel gave a private series of Antichrist Lectures at venues in San Francisco (he repeated the series in Rome in 2026) suggesting that the Antichrist might be the United States or Greta Thunberg.
Thiel hand-picked Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance (a mentee of Thiel’s) in the 2024 US presidential election.
xAI/SpaceX/Tesla/Neuralink/Space Karen
Primary AI Product: Grok
Elon Musk (World’s First Trillionaire™)
You probably already know what you want to know about Elon, whether you have drunk his Kool-Aid and truly believe he’s the world’s smartest man or you can see through his thin skin into the heart of the damaged little boy inside him who just wants people to like him. So there’s not much point in summarising him here, as anyone reading this has likely already made up their mind about him. But in terms of his impact on the AI world, you could look at this or this and find out pretty much where the guy stands.
Bonus: Generative AI Output
Primary AI Product: Itself
Tilly Norwood (World’s First AI “Actress”)
AI-Generated “actress” Tilly Norwood first appeared on Instagram on 6 May 2025. Reaction was overwhelmingly hostile. The creator of the conceptual clickbait is London-based Dutch actress Eline Van der Velden, who will probably love finding this bio show up in her Google alert for “Tilly Norwood”. Van der Velden has claimed it took “a lot of work” to generate Norwood, which goes to show that every idea should really be accompanied by an honest cost/benefit analysis before it’s allowed to come to fruition. So far Norwood has “starred” in unfunny online comedic skits, but a July 2026 report by NBC News claims the digital golem will star in an honest-to-gosh Hollywood movie entitled Misaligned (an unfunny in-joke referring to AI alignment). And Eline, just to clear this up before you tell it to yourself: we don’t dislike Tilly because we’re jealous we didn’t think of her. We think Tilly represents the desperation of a failed creative trying to cash in on a Silicon Valley tech trend that’s helping to destroy our planet. We hope you’re proud of yourself.