Every now and again, a billionaire doesn’t get what he wants. On Monday, Elon Musk was handed a rare loss when a federal jury in San Francisco unanimously threw out his lawsuit against OpenAI’s top leaders, including CEO Sam Altman. Musk had alleged that Altman illegally enriched himself when converting OpenAI—the nonprofit both men helped cofound—into a for-profit company. The jury, however, found that Musk, who owns a competing AI company, xAI, waited too long to bring the case. That means Musk won’t get what he sought, at least this time. He won’t get the restoration of OpenAI’s nonprofit status; he won’t get Altman’s removal from its board; and he won’t get more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft.
Thus ends this little drama. The bigger story isn’t over. Altman may have won against Musk, but their mudfight is a grating and relatively minor plot point in the long chronicle of AI companies’ exploiting lavishly funded public-private partnerships in order to force their plans and products onto the rest of us. Indeed, the many ways that the Trump White House is helping this incestuous network of companies steamroll public opposition and regulation should be understood as part of the administration’s broader pursuit of two mutually dependent goals: minority rule and the enrichment of the ultra-wealthy.
Donald Trump and Silicon Valley executives both like to pretend they’re transforming the status quo. A reactionary alliance between the right and big business, though, is pretty standard fare. As historians like Nancy MacLean have detailed, corporate leaders have spent decades attempting to insulate themselves from the democratic decision-making that threatens to limit their profits and their fringe ideologies. Trump’s outlandish behavior shouldn’t distract from the fact that his White House is chasing the fairly traditional Republican goals of slashing taxes for corporations and the rich, torching environmental regulations, and rolling back civil rights protections.
The fact that Silicon Valley executives try to claim a vaguely liberal-coded moral high ground is likewise a helpful cover for their own self-interest in minority rule. A recent Gallup poll, for instance, found that 71 percent of Americans oppose the local construction of AI data centers. An Economist/YouGov survey has shown that 70 percent of Americans—including 68 percent of Republicans, and majorities across every age demographic—think AI is advancing too quickly.
This overwhelming disapproval is a sign that what companies like xAI and OpenAI have pitched as the inevitable march of progress is anything but. Last year, nearly 50 data center projects worth at least $156 billion were blocked or stalled by local opposition. An analysis from Heatmap Pro found that data center cancelations reached an all-time high in the first-half of 2026, with local opposition quelling 20 proposed projects worth nearly $42 billion. Municipal governments from Indiana to New Jersey have passed local bans on data center expansion. Maine’s legislature passed the country’s first-ever statewide moratorium earlier this year, which Democratic Governor Janet Mills eventually vetoed; she suspended her Senate campaign a few days later. In recent weeks, commencement speakers heralding the rise of artificial intelligence as “the next Industrial Revolution” and an unavoidable tool for progress have been enthusiastically booed by graduating students.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been more than happy to help the companies that have cozied up to it. In just one recent example, the Department of Justice signaled that it’s “evaluating possible intervention or amicus participation” in a suit being brought against Musk by the NAACP, alleging that Musk’s xAI has illegally installed and operated 27 gas turbines to run its Colossus data center complex near Memphis, Tennessee. In reaction to news that the White House might vet new AI models before they’re released, an anonymous senior White House official assured the press—and worried AI companies—that it was seeking a “partnership” with the industry rather than “government regulation.” Chief of Staff Susie Wiles similarly posted on social media that the government is not “in the business of picking winners and losers.”
As opposition to AI mounts, the companies behind it have invested heavily in their lobbying and campaign finance operations. Meta, Nvidia, and Microsoft spent $47.1 million on their combined Washington lobbying efforts last year. OpenAI spent $1 million in the first half of 2026, and has pushed for the White House to preempt state-level regulations on data centers and artificial intelligence. The nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen has found that a quarter of federal lobbyists in D.C. are involved in AI issues. The pro-AI Super PAC Leading the Future—launched in August by Open AI cofounder Greg Brockman and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale (among others)—has raised more than $75 million in advance of November’s midterm elections.
Despite the tens of millions being poured into campaigns and lobbying efforts by billionaires, AI boosters have tried to paint their opponents as the ones who are furthering “elite” interests. In the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, two Palantir executives—Anthony Bak and Mehdi Alhassani—warned that bipartisan opposition to the AI buildout risked making it “accessible only to the wealthy,” arguing that such fights were “the surest way to guarantee that artificial intelligence becomes a tool of the wealthy elite.” This a stupid but predictable argument. For decades, bona fide elites on the right have claimed that a different, self-serving cadre of liberal elites have been the real force behind everything from the War on Poverty to protests against the Vietnam War to seatbelt requirements, and—more recently—climate policy. Today’s AI enthusiasts have subbed out the neocons’ old complaints about the “New Class” for screeds against NIMBYs, doomers, and a shadowy, George Soros-funded “network of Leftist activist organizations” that the Washington Examiner recently blamed for a remarkably bipartisan data center pushback.
These faux-populist grievances are, as ever, nonsense. Musk and Altman have more in common with Trump than with any of the workers whose jobs they constantly talk about eliminating, or some imagined “little man” whom tech executives allege will be left behind by data center moratoriums. Beefs among tech elites are—as author Karen Hao has argued—a distraction from the ground-level fights that are stymying them. “Nothing about this trial or OpenAI’s financial structure,” Hao wrote before the proceedings had concluded, “will change the imperial drive of these companies to consolidate ever-more data and capital, terraform the Earth, exhaust and displace labor, and embed themselves deep within the state to gain leverage over its apparatuses of violence.”
However much AI executives might drone on about utopia and/or apocalypse, their material interests and their visions for the future are deeply aligned with Trump’s—and the generations of right-wingers who came before him. They all want to keep democracy from interfering with their plans for accumulating unlimited wealth and power. They may skirmish in court and on social media every once in a while, but they’re all on the same side.
