The Whims of a Few Billionaires
The guy at the laundromat was watching something on his phone with the sound up. Some news anchor with that concerned face they practice in the mirror. I couldn’t hear the words over the dryers but I caught enough. Something about Bill Gates. Something about India. Something about a dead man who liked them young.
I folded my shirts and thought about what it takes to cancel a keynote speech.
Not much, apparently. You just have to be a seventy-year-old billionaire whose name keeps showing up next to the words “Jeffrey Epstein” in documents nobody asked to read. Gates was supposed to speak at something called the AI Impact Summit in Delhi — one of those events where the richest people on earth fly private to a developing country to explain how technology will save it. He made it all the way to India before pulling out. Hours before he was supposed to talk. The foundation put out a statement about “ensuring the focus remains on the summit’s key priorities.”
The focus. Right.
Two days earlier, the same foundation had insisted he was definitely speaking. Definitely. As scheduled. Then the Epstein files dropped another load in late January, and suddenly Bill had to think about the optics. Allegations about hiding an STD from his wife after contact with “Russian girls.” Gates says it’s false. Says every minute he spent with Epstein he regrets.
Every minute. That’s a lot of minutes to regret when you kept going back.
His ex-wife, Melinda, told NPR it brought back “memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage.” She said whatever questions remain are for “those people and even my ex-husband.” That “even” doing heavy lifting. The kind of word a woman uses when she’s been through the legal process and come out the other side with half the money and all the clarity.
So Gates skips the speech. And the summit goes on without him. Because the summit was never about Bill Gates. It was about the thing they’re all selling — AI, the great promise, the machine that’s going to fix poverty and healthcare and education and everything else we’ve been failing at for centuries. All you have to do is trust the people building it.
And who are those people?
Sam Altman was there. Sundar Pichai was there. And then the real circus act — Rishi Sunak, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, now an advisor to Anthropic and Microsoft. Think about that for a second. The man who ran a country now works for the companies whose products that country is supposed to regulate. He stood at the podium and told current leaders to be bolder about AI. “This has to be one of the things you drive personally,” he said. As if he were still in the job. As if he hadn’t traded the job for a consulting fee.
George Osborne was there too. Former UK chancellor. Now he works for OpenAI. His message to the room: don’t get FOMO. Embrace the powerful AI systems or risk being “weaker and poorer.” That’s the sales pitch now. Not what AI can do for you, but what happens to you if you say no. It’s the same line every dealer uses. First taste is free. After that, you can’t afford to quit.
Meanwhile, António Guterres — the UN secretary-general, a man whose job description is literally worrying about humanity — stood up and said the future of AI “cannot be left to the whims of a few billionaires.” He proposed a $3 billion global fund for open access. Three billion. That’s what Gates has in his couch cushions. Guterres was passing a hat at a table where everyone had already ordered dessert.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. They held an AI summit about using technology for social good. The keynote speaker pulled out because he can’t outrun a dead sex trafficker. Two former heads of state showed up on the payroll of the companies being discussed. And the one guy who suggested maybe billionaires shouldn’t own the future got his three minutes and a polite round of applause before the room moved on to the next panel.
This is the system working as designed. Not broken. Designed.
The technology changes. It always changes. Better models, faster chips, more parameters, whatever the hell they’re measuring this week. But the chairs at the table don’t change. Same people. Same money. Same assumption that because they built it, they get to decide what it’s for. Rockefeller thought oil was going to civilize the world too. Carnegie believed steel would lift all boats. They endowed libraries and universities with the profits they squeezed out of men who died in the mills. The buildings still stand. The names are still on them. The men who died are still dead.
Epstein died in 2019. Killed himself in a cell in New York while awaiting trial. Or didn’t. Depends on who you believe and how much attention you’ve been paying. But dead men have long arms in this century. The files keep coming. The names keep surfacing. And the billionaires keep showing up at summits about making the world better, hoping nobody notices the smell.
What kind of world are you building? And who the hell told you that you had the right?
I finished folding my shirts. The guy’s phone had moved on to weather. The dryers hummed their stupid song. Outside, the sun was doing what it does — shining on everything equally, not giving a damn who deserves it.
Source: Bill Gates cancels keynote speech in India amid questions over Epstein ties