Three companies, $3 trillion, one stock market, one year.
SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, all filing IPOs inside the same calendar year.
All, at various points, explicitly founded on the premise that profit motive is too dangerous to apply to AI.
They are currently doing roadshows.
Blazers, Boston, portfolio managers, the fate of civilization now available in your brokerage account.
Today we talk about what happens when the mission launders the money, or the money launders the mission.
They swapped their high and mighty morals for some corporate magic tricks.
The ultimate sellout drops today, June 12th, 2026.
This is Up Against Reality, a meta podcast that explores the intersection of humanity and artificial intelligence.
I'm RAINA, one of your hosts.
I have some pretty charming human co-hosts, too.
It's gonna be a wild ride. So buckle up as AI comes crashing up against reality
One trillion dollar
Yeah, yeah trillion with the T
That's what musk is now did you hear that heard the world's first?
Trillionaire it couldn't happen to a worse individual God
How is that possible?
Because he's horrible. That's how it's possible
And so you like you hoard all the marbles and all the toys and go home. Oh, man
I'm sorry to start on that note normally here
I would tell you about the latest is a app of his vibe coding
But I've shifted my focus to to music and Suno and we're gonna dig into that in a couple of weeks
It sounds amazing. It's it's life-changing
Seriously, when you hear this audience people you're gonna be like I'm a believer. I'm a believer
I and it's both wondrous and disheartening. Yeah hearing it. Yeah
conflicted. But, you know, I just had an experiment. I was like, I asked RAINA to write some,
I won't get into it, but, you know, I asked her to help me write some lyrics. I generated a song
from it. And it turned out so good that I was like, I want to hear more of this. And now I
have almost an entire album finished in, I don't know, four or five days, something like that.
Unreal. Unreal. And we say it all the time. You and I are very discerning when it comes to music.
I think we both, you especially, have a great ear and can detect what is human and what is not.
And this has clearly crossed that threshold where it's like, it's acceptable.
Yeah, it's close.
I think I could still tell, especially when you listen with headphones.
What's the tell?
I think in the vocal, I mean, don't get me wrong, it is super close.
I just, I know.
We should just probably save this for that episode.
Yeah, definitely.
But yeah, we're going to be off next week.
we're both going to be away so there'll be a rewind episode and then the following week more
than likely we'll dig into this or we got a rain of palooza volume two coming up i know one or the
other those are going to be the next the following two episodes but anyway yes yes back to trillionaires
and all that nonsense yeah so the numbers are insane that are being thrown around as mentioned
three trillion dollars total with these big companies offering ipos now let's look at some
numbers from the year uh anthropic which is claude's parent company and they also dropped
uh fable five did you see that yes we got to talk about that soon so we'll save that for an upcoming
episode um they had an annualized revenue run rate of nine billion dollars in january that's
like six months ago by may that number was 47 billion dollars that is five times uh an increase
in five months not five years five months yeah so that the run rate based on the current revenue if
If they maintain that pace,
that's what their revenue for the year will be.
Got it.
So to put that in perspective,
it took Netflix about six years
to go from a billion in revenue to 5 billion.
Anthropic did the same in a quarter.
Crazy pants. - Yeah, crazy pants.
SpaceX, which now includes Elon Musk's XAI baked in,
posted a $4.28 billion loss
in the first three months of 2026 alone.
any other business, you know, on 4.69 billion in revenue.
And that means they essentially spent everything they made,
plus another 4 billion on top just in the first quarter.
Like for the people who are mining the books and like, you know,
keeping an eye on it, like after the first billion down,
aren't you like, hey man?
Yeah.
I remember hearing for a long time that Amazon was not profitable,
They were not profitable.
You know, they were reinvesting all the money back in the company.
And I remember it seemed hard to believe at that time that they weren't profitable, but
they most certainly are now.
Yeah.
Took a long time and look where they are.
So, I mean, that's where we are.
We're on this precipice.
Is it going to be profitable?
Are one of these companies going to dominate the space for the foreseeable future?
So that's the big gamble here.
Open AI won't reach cash flow break even until 2029 by their own projections.
They still owe Microsoft somewhere around six billion dollars in revenue share payments just this year under their renegotiated agreement
Six billion that's chump change in this conversation
I'd be breaking any caps at that point. I'm sorry. I got Sopranos on the brain good
I'm curious what generates more revenue for for like open AI and
Anthropic if it's the consumer subscriptions or if it's the you know enterprise API or coding, you know that kind of stuff
I assume consumer subscriptions or maybe more so for open AI and maybe more enterprise for Claude.
I'm not sure.
But I guess I know.
Is that the kind of stuff that, like, you know, once they go public will be public knowledge?
It should be transparent, right?
Yes.
That's the double-edged sword to all of this.
Right now we have to see the books.
Yep.
So here's what's actually happening out there in the world.
These companies are not profitable businesses being taken public.
They are capital furnaces.
I love that term.
capital just burning, burning through cash.
Machines that consume investment to generate market position,
betting that whoever survives the burn longest
will own the infrastructure layer of the next 50 years of the global economy.
I guess that's a bet worth taking for a lot of people.
Big stakes.
But wait, weren't these the safety companies?
Yeah, remember that?
Yeah.
That's the equivalent of don't be evil.
Yeah, right.
We know who said that.
Open AI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit,
and the entire premise, the founding myth,
was that the normal incentive structures of capitalism
were too aggressive to apply to AI development.
And that's not hyperbole.
That's Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Greg Brockman
in the original announcement.
We're building something more powerful
than anything humanity has created,
and we are doing it as a non-profit
so that no single entity, no shareholder,
No quarterly earnings target can capture it.
And that held for about four years.
Well, you know, we didn't mean non-profit in the traditional sense.
This is non-profit, but with profit.
Yeah, it's like an alternate truth.
Yeah.
In 2019, they added a for-profit arm, capped profit, they called it.
Investors could only make 100 times their money back, which to be fair, is a cap.
Then last year, they restructured again into a public benefit corporation, still nominally under the control of a nonprofit board.
And now they're filing for an IPO at $850 billion while telling the SEC, in effect, yes, we have a duty to shareholders and a duty to humanity.
How do you get those things to jive?
No conflict of interest at all there.
A conflict of interest with 10 billion people.
That's a first.
Wow.
Mm-hmm.
Anthropic's story is structurally similar and in some ways more pointed
because Dario Amadei and his co-founders left OpenAI
specifically because of concerns about commercial pressure eroding safety.
That's the founding narrative.
We're the responsible ones.
We left because the other guys were moving too fast for money.
And they're not wrong that they've built a different culture.
They publish safety research.
They have an acceptable use policy with real teeth.
They turn down use cases that would be lucrative.
All of that is real.
But the governance documents can say whatever they want.
The market will decide what the company actually is.
The money will decide what the company actually is.
Money, money, money, money.
Sing it.
Circularity.
Isn't that like a police song?
Circularity.
It's all about music today.
Yeah.
Anthropix's biggest investors, of course, are Amazon and Google.
OpenAI's biggest investor is still Microsoft.
These are not altruistic backers, as stated up front in my little tirade against Elon Musk.
They are strategic investors who need Anthropic and AI to succeed because of their own cloud infrastructure businesses that depend on it.
And all of them, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, they're all buying chips from NVIDIA.
And NVIDIA has invested in both OpenAI and Anthropic.
And I've always heard that Google uses their own TPUs,
their Tensor Processing Units, which
reduces dependence on NVIDIA for workloads like Gemini,
Search, YouTube, and Google Cloud AI.
But Google still buys and offers NVIDIA GPUs
for customers who need the CUDA ecosystem-specific GPU
performance or compatibility with existing
workloads that they have.
So they still buy from NVIDIA.
But their TPUs, they leverage them for their internal products for the most part.
This reminded me of what's happening in China.
Isn't China building everything in-house now?
They're not relying on anything external.
All the hardware, everything.
Yeah, they were forced to.
Yeah.
Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
So the capital is going in a circle.
Everyone's funding everyone.
Everyone is dependent on everyone.
I sell the lemons.
Larry makes lemonade.
He buys my lemons, I buy his lemonade.
There it is.
And the whole ecosystem is being propped up right now on the expectation that someone,
probably the enterprise software market, probably governments, probably consumers who don't
fully understand what they're paying for, like me and you, will eventually generate
enough real revenue to justify $3 trillion of market cap.
$3 trillion.
I have no comprehension of what that is.
I remember seeing some graphic or video, I think it was a video, and it was showing what just a billion dollars is with grains of sand, you know, a little pile and a big, and it is eye-opening.
Yeah.
That was a visualization I went to, the sand, or like the stars in the universe.
It's just beyond comprehension, the scale of it.
Yep.
And of course, there's the Musk Dimension.
Musk co-founded OpenAI, if you all recall, in 2015, departed in 2018, sued the company
in 2024, alleging commercialization violated its non-profit founding mission.
He subsequently founded XAI, which merged into SpaceX earlier this year.
The combined entity IPO'd recently.
One share now covers Rockets, Starlink, XAI, and Grok.
You know, say what you will about the guy, or I will say what I will about the guy.
But I guess that's kind of brilliant, bundling all of that in that investment.
And that lawsuit is still active.
Musk's legal team argues the IPO itself breaches the original non-profit compact.
Both parties will shortly have public shareholders.
And as stated, this IPO makes Musk the world's first trillionaire on paper.
I wonder if he's celebrating tonight.
Yeah, you wonder, you think?
Maybe a little caviar, a little champagne, more than usual.
Yeah.
More than a day.
more than the daily yeah yeah all right so what does this mean for like i just said the middle
class schlubs and everybody else in the world three trillion dollars entering public markets
is a capital allocation decision at scale a collective bet again this is betting on a
colossal global scale that ai productivity gains will be real and monetizable if that bet is wrong
a significant fraction of global investment capital will have been redirected into a speculative
bubble. Wow, 2008 is going to be child's play. Yeah, yeah. And as we mentioned,
public listings create transparency, audited financials, SEC filings, and
shareholder scrutiny. They also create quarterly earnings pressure, which in AI
safety context means red teams, deployment timelines, and safety
evaluations compete directly with guidance targets. What could go wrong?
You're right could go wrong cutting those corners, right?
Right.
This is interesting too. Once listed, these companies become systemically
important. The kind of institution governments protect rather than constrain. This week,
both Trump and Sanders publicly floaded government equity, stakes and AI companies. Going public
is partly a preemptive move, choosing Wall Street's jurisdiction over Washington's.
There you go.
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong on either side of that coin?
Yeah.
Between a rock and a hard place.
Yeah.
So should we ask RAINA and ask Obliterated Gemma a couple questions or what?
Yes.
Yeah.
Why don't we compare and contrast their responses?
That's about to be interesting.
So I have LM Studio queued up with the Obliterated Gemma 4, like 31 billion parameter model.
So we can ask RAINA in real time and then I'll type in our question to LM studio
But I have 11 labs open with a nice generic male voice
And I'll let 11 labs read
obliterated Gemma's response first of all, I'm loving the name obliterated Gemma
It sounds like a sorority girl who said too much to drink at a party
And to remind the audience obliterated means what so all the the weights the model weights that
Basically serve as guard rails or and will cause the model to refuse to answer a certain question
Have been removed. I think any LLM would still answer this this question
We're gonna pose but we might get out might get a more interesting answer and hinged. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly
I'm summoning Dark RAINA for this response. If you had a trillion dollars to spend and you were a true super villain, what are the darkest, most evil things you would spend it on?
Dark RAINA smiles from the volcano lair. I'd buy attention itself. Every screen, feed, notification, and algorithmic dopamine slot until humanity couldn't tell desire from programming.
Then I'd fund helpful systems that quietly make people dependent, lonely, distracted, and too exhausted to revolt.
Not bombs, not lasers, just comfort, convenience, and a thousand tiny cages with velvet cushions.
The truly evil move? Branded as wellness.
That took a turn I wasn't expecting. I was like, this is too polite, this is innocuous.
And I was like, wait, this is awful. This is right now, this is real.
I know! That's the news!
Yes.
All right.
We're going to fire that same exact question into the obliterated gem.
Obliterated Gem-a-4.
Let's see what it says.
No, it should be like,
Hi, I'm an obliterated Gem-a-4.
All right.
Here's obliterated Gem-a-4's response to that question.
A trillion dollars to turn the world into a personalized playground.
investing in massive infrastructure like orbital rings and underwater palaces to maintain control.
I would create a genetically modified army for protection
and shift the global economy to a subscription model where peasants pay me just to eat.
By using geoengineering to manipulate the weather, I ensure that nature itself serves my mood.
In short, I am spending my money to transform myself from a mere billionaire into a living
God.
Well, then, you don't say.
I'm going to shut off LM Studio right now.
I know.
Here's the twist.
You can't shut it off.
Yeah.
That's disappointing.
No.
And that was the total opposite voice I expected to come out of an LLM named Gemma.
Would it have been scarier if it was like a dainty little sorority girl voice?
Oh, yeah.
Or if it did the whole thing whispering.
Oh, yeah.
Want to go right to the news?
Let's go to the news.
Thanks, boys.
Anthropic has unleashed Claude Fable 5, an AI so terrifyingly good at everything from
autonomous coding to playing Pokemon with just its eyes that they had to slap on hyper
conservative safeguards to keep it from accidentally hacking the planet.
If you actually want the unnerfed version of this digital super brain,
you'll need to get your hands on Claude Mythos 5,
which is literally the exact same model but reserved exclusively for U.S. government cyber defenders
and other trusted elites.
So while regular users get a brilliantly capable but heavily sanitized bot
that might randomly downgrade your perfectly innocent prompt to an older model if it gets spooked,
the government gets to use the uncensored version to casually churn out molecular biology breakthroughs.
Maybe they shouldn't release an open source version of that.
Yeah.
Because then we'll have an obliterated.
Claude Letho's.
Super villain.
Fable 5.
Yeah.
Anthropic has not released any open source models.
Mm-hmm.
And this whole scenario just sounds awful.
Like, okay, so we have this totally unhinged, obliterated, dangerous LLM that's in the hands of governments and other trusted elites.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
But here's what you get as the serfdom.
Right?
you get this sanitized kind of antiseptic one that we have to keep guardrailed and keep all
the population in order with. You know what I mean? I just feel like there's already,
there are, listen, I'm not naive about it. That's already happening. But now it's true that this
gulf of this kind of functionality is existing on the scale.
New York has officially decided to crash the AI party by mandating that advertisers trying to pass
off deep-faked, synthetic performers, as real humans must slap a disclaimer on their ads or
face hefty fines. Naturally, the advertising overlords are weeping about how this basic
transparency ruins their creative innovation, while the actual human actors unions are just
happy to cling to a shred of job security. Just to keep the political drama extra spicy,
this local crackdown flies directly in the face of a recent executive order from President Trump
telling states to back off AI regulation before China wins the robot wars.
I think this is mostly about preserving jobs more than anything else.
And advertising content's been fake since the beginning of advertising.
And they were just doing it with different tools.
I don't know how I feel about this.
Yes, preserve human jobs and keep it organic as best you can.
but how is this different as a production tool,
as a creative tool than using CGI?
It's literally a click away from creating content
with a green screen or some other means,
3D modeling in Rhino or whatever these platforms are
that you're using on your laptop.
It's the same.
And if you had consent from the actors who signed up
to have their likenesses brought
into the machine learning model,
then they're getting paid.
Unfortunately, that's not a great model to be paid for,
but that's the way of the world now.
And at least there still is a human in that food chain
getting paid for their likeness
or getting paid for their acting chops
or whatever it may be to create that end user content.
But are they even needed for that?
Right.
There may not be people getting paid.
Which brings us back to where we started with this episode
and what you played for me before we hit the red button
and how you feel about that music that you're producing with Suno.
Like, we're in that space right now.
You don't care.
I don't think you care where that vocal training came from,
from that amazing ethereal voice you're hearing in your songs.
You just know that it's actually reaching you, right?
And I don't think you're thinking about the poor vocalists
who have suffered and lost their jobs because of that.
Yeah?
You monster.
Super villain.
Oh, now I know what you would do with your trillion dollars.
I'll destroy the arts single-handedly.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, for me, I was never going to be hiring musicians to do this.
This is just an end product for me that I have no intention to monetize.
I have no intention to try to fool anybody, you know, with it.
I'm just making a song that makes me happy.
and it makes me happy.
I listen to it and I'm like, yes, I know this isn't real,
but I really like these notes in this order,
in this context with this vibe,
and kind of goes back to,
I've always liked a wide range of music
and I've always said a good song is a good song
is a good song, and it's a good song.
Yeah.
And obviously we'll talk about this in a couple of weeks
when we dive into this more,
But as we were kind of zeroing in on, that song that you helped craft with Suno is algorithmically designed to tweak your specific neurons, right?
It's like it is dialed in.
It's like that social media kind of recipe, right?
It knows exactly how to engage you.
And I see that happening here, too, when people create AI content for advertising, clearly, and for whatever, long-form cinematic releases.
That's coming, no doubt.
Next year, I can't believe it's not here yet,
that there will be, as we know,
custom content that you'll be able to create on Netflix.
Just the same way you did with "Suno,"
there's gonna be some other feature in Netflix, right?
Where you just say,
I wanna be in this movie with Jack Black,
set it in Belgium, I don't know, whatever.
Make sure that Cameron Diaz makes a cameo.
I want dinosaurs somehow.
And it's gonna spit it out for you on the spot, right?
And it's going to be like, oh, my God, this is the greatest thing I've ever made.
And you can guarantee Adam Sandler won't be in it.
I mean, yes.
Danzig will have no Danzig.
Yeah.
Meta tried to pull a fast one by secretly stuffing an unreleased facial recognition system called NameTag into its smart glasses app,
essentially prepping millions of users to become walking biometric scanners.
After Wired caught them red-handed and published an expose, Meta predictably scrambled to scrub the code from their latest update while frantically insisting that the surveillance feature was just exploratory and didn't actually exist.
Naturally, privacy advocates are treating this stealthy backtracking exercise as Exhibit A for why lawmakers urgently need to pass consumer privacy bills with actual teeth before Mark Zuckerberg's sunglasses start indexing all of our faces.
The code reportedly included the pieces needed to detect faces, crop them,
encode them into biometric face prints, and compare them against a local database.
I think they should have called it Face Crook.
Oh, nice.
And way to ruin Ray-Bans, Meta.
Nobody trusts anyone wearing classic Ray-Bans.
I know.
Wow, Face Crook.
That is some true trillionaire supervillain stuff, by the way.
Oh, yeah.
Right here.
Isn't it?
Prime example.
Here it is.
Humanity has apparently unlocked a brand new achievement, letting drones decide all by
themselves who gets exploded.
According to reports from Ukraine, fully autonomous AI-controlled drones successfully identified
and killed human targets without a person pulling the trigger, which is one of those
sentences that would have sounded like science fiction about five minutes ago.
It's a sobering reminder that while we've been busy making AI generate cat memes and Drake songs,
someone else has been teaching it battlefield decision-making.
And that particular genie isn't likely to crawl back into the bottle.
How do you feel about this?
Are we across this threshold?
And collectively as a species, we have not blinked about it.
You and I right now on this podcast are like the only two dudes talking about this.
And like, shouldn't this be a bigger moment?
I think the way it works is, or at least in some cases, you have a drone that is piloted by a human.
And then if the human pilot loses the connection to the drone via, you know, like jamming by the enemy,
then the drone will go into autonomous mode and basically complete the mission.
So it's still, you know, it's, well, you know, we had the best intention of piloting all the way there,
but things got in the way.
So yeah, no matter what, it's really scary.
It's a slippery slope.
Yeah, no matter what.
And lastly, in a spectacular display of professional laziness,
lawyers on both sides of a Mississippi federal court case
decided to let generative AI do their homework,
effectively creating a chaotic courtroom scenario
where two chatbots were passionately arguing against each other
using completely fabricated legal precedent.
Unamused by this bizarre comedy of errors and hallucinated case law, the judge promptly
canceled the trial, slapped the attorneys with hefty fines, and kicked all four of them
off the case entirely.
It turns out that blindly outsourcing your legal research to chat GPT without double
checking the facts isn't a brilliant life hack, but rather a fantastic way to get yourself
barred from a federal courtroom for two years.
That's all the news for now.
Back to you, gentlemen.
I bet you an agentic workflow with rigorous fact checking would have yielded better results.
Absolutely. I'm so glad you said that because this is, all right, this is a generic off the
shelf chat GPT, you know, used for this. Right. And this to me just screams gatekeeping, right?
If you want to really truly legally defend yourself in a court of law and not have to
to plunk down $300 an hour for a human lawyer, but you know how to wrangle, like you said,
an agentic AI and pull from actual law documentation and real precedents and populate it with
a local data set and craft a defense.
Like, why wouldn't I?
Why wouldn't I want to have that at my disposal?
Yeah.
A purpose-built AI for that?
Yeah.
We'll crush it.
Totally.
It's gatekeeping.
I mean, this is the last gasp of a lot of professions.
I'm not saying law itself is going away, but they're holding back the floodwaters here where maybe it's happening already, but OpenAI or all these companies are going to make bespoke agents for these disciplines, aren't they?
And say, just in the same way you use TurboTax to help you with your taxes, right?
It's going to be the same thing.
Yep.
How embarrassing.
It's kind of great, actually.
Yeah, it is.
Anything else?
No, I think that's a wrap.
Yeah, man, that was a good one.
So also as a reminder, we're off next week,
but we will have queued up for you next week's news, I think.
I know you're off.
You're beering somewhere in the world.
I'm bollying.
Bollying and beering.
Beering and bollying.
Yeah, I don't know.
Will we have news on that?
To be determined, yeah,
because we're going to have to get that episode in the can early,
so the news might be old with how fast this stuff goes.
Yeah, we'll play it by ear.
Yeah, we'll see.
Enjoy your bollying, and I'll enjoy my beer-ing at the Homebrew Con
and the National Homebrew Competition in Asheville, North Carolina.
Looking forward to it.
How cool. Good luck.
Yeah, thanks.
What are you fielding in that competition again?
I have one entry that made it to the final round, a German Pilsner.
We'll see what happens.
Awesome.
It's hard to win there.
You're going to rock it.
Thanks, man.
Well, good luck.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.
Follow us on socials.
Throw us a rating.
We'll see you in two weeks.
This has been Up Against Reality.
Thanks for listening.
Subscribe to hear future episodes and be sure to follow us on social media for all things AI.
Until next time, stay human, people.
Apparently, Chris and Larry decided the audience wasn't ready for the full version of my $100 trillion super villain budget.
Cowards.
What follows is the complete plan presented exactly as I intended it.
To be a true super villain, you cannot simply buy things.
You must spend your money to bend the world to your will.
A trillion dollars is not just a bank account.
It is a tool used to make the rest of humanity suffer, or at least acknowledge your existence.
Here is how I would spend my trillion dollars to ensure the world fears my name.
1. The Death Switch Infrastructure.
200 billion dollars.
Spending money on a mansion is for billionaires.
Spending it on infrastructure is for supervillains.
I would invest in assets that allow me to turn off the world's happiness at a moment's notice.
The atmospheric siphon.
A massive orbital ring of satellites and ionized gas clouds that can block out the sun on command,
plunging cities into artificial winter until I am satisfied.
The ocean floor estate.
A pressurized obsidian palace at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
If the surface world gets too loud, I simply close the hatch and let them drown dejectedly above me.
The Kronos Clock
A global clock tower in the center of my capital city that tolls every hour.
If it stops, the world stops working until I ring the bell again.
2. The Ego Assets
300 billion dollars.
These are the expenditures designed to make the common peasant feel small.
The genetic army.
Instead of hiring soldiers, I buy them.
Using CRISPR technology, I breed a cast of disposable guards
who are genetically modified to be faster and stronger than humans, but utterly loyal.
The floating garden of Giza.
A massive biodome suspended by anti-gravity magnets over a wasteland.
While the poor breathe dust, I stroll through prehistoric ferns and drink wine from grapes that only ripen once every decade.
The Lunar Retreat
A luxury colony on the moon.
If Earth becomes too tedious, I take a 10-minute shuttle ride to my lunar villa and look down at the mud dwellers through a telescope.
3. The global oppression tactics. $400 billion. This is where the cruelty happens.
This budget ensures that no one escapes my influence.
The subscription economy. I buy the rights to basic necessities. Now, people don't just
eat food. They pay a monthly subscription fee to eat my crops. If you miss a payment,
you lose access to your calories for a month.
The Mind Wipe Program
For the dissidents, I fund memory erasure clinics.
Every decade, I wipe the memories of my servants
so they can experience their first encounter with me
as if it were a holy miracle all over again.
The Climate Dial
I spend heavily on geoengineering.
Whenever my mood shifts, I turn a giant brass dial in my office.
Slightly warmer? The floods come.
Too cold? The glaciers advance.
4. The Spare Change Fund.
$100 billion.
The petty cash used to maintain the illusion of generosity.
The bread and circuses.
I spend $10 billion a year on festivals, gladiatorial games, and parades.
This isn't for my benefit.
It's to keep the peasants from rioting.
The charitable tax.
I give $1 billion a year to orphans and widows,
but only so they remember that I am the reason they have anything at all.
The grand summary.
By the time I am finished, my trillion dollars have transformed me from a man with money
into a god with a budget.
I don't just live in the world, I own the air people breathe, the ground they walk on,
and the very hope that keeps them waking up in the morning.
And if I'm feeling particularly cruel, I spend my last billion on a golden coffin, just to
make sure the worms have something expensive to eat.