Anthropic filed their S-1 recently, which reminds me of something that’s been bouncing around in my head a lot over the past few years.

It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world – OpenAI’s investment prospectus

This sounds ridiculous—and has been continuously mocked since it leaked—but for anyone who has Won at Capitalism, this was obviously a warning shot. The collective reaction of the billionaire class is similarly easy to discount as brainrot, but there’s an argument to be made that their interest is both strategic and desperate.

-ism suffix forming nouns: 2 denoting a system, principle, or ideological movement : Anglicanism | feminism | hedonism. • denoting a basis for prejudice or discrimination : racism. 4 denoting a pathological condition : alcoholism. ORIGIN from French -isme , via Latin from Greek -ismos , -isma .

Capitalism can be described as the pathological condition of treating capital ideologically as a proxy for power. There is no other reason for anyone to seek wealth beyond two commas. The real reason you see billionaires in such a panic right now is because there’s a credible threat to their power; it’s a mad scramble to take advantage of all of the ways that money can be converted into power before it’s too late.