Rory Stewart

It's not an enjoyable job to run a billion dollar company.

So you need to be megalomaniacal to some extent.

You need to be power hungry, power seeking, really want success in some form.

Also a very distinctive thing among such people is incredible competitiveness.

It's striking how often such leaders are like intense game players as well.

So intense competitiveness isn't necessarily what we want in something where cooperation would be much better.

But then the final thing is just imagine the situation you're now in.

where over and over in your life, you have made some crazy bet, some belief that you had that others didn't have, and they were all wrong, and you got proved right, and now you're the billionaire.

Okay, now you've got some new crazy belief, and other people are telling you you're all wrong.

you know, you're going to really kind of back yourself again.

And so I think everyone should be very worried about how much power can go.

You know, we've talked about how much power can go into government hands.

That's the thing I'm most worried about.

But I think we should be very worried about how much power could go into company hands as well.

I'm expecting companies to be worth tens of trillions of dollars, again, within just a few years.

With workforces that ultimately go down to one because it's a single person commanding the CEO, commanding a wholly automated workforce.

Again, we'll see this increasingly even just over the next few years.

We'll have single person companies where all the staff are artificial intelligences.

Again, that could lead us, you know, think of the East India Company had its own army.

You know, it was having power on the level of states.