Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Welcome to your life…there's no turning back.

Tears for Fears released "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" in 1985. It's one of those songs that always seems to find its way onto an 80s playlist. Most people know every word without ever really listening to them.

Underneath the bright melody is a simple observation: people have always wanted control.

The desire is old. The tools are new.

The organizations chasing that control have changed, too.

In that pursuit, they stopped being the size of companies.

OpenAI and Anthropic now command valuations measured in the hundreds of billions. SpaceX's recent IPO crossed the trillion-dollar mark. At that scale, you stop measuring them against other companies and start measuring them against countries. Stacked together, the dozen-odd members of the trillion-dollar club are now worth roughly what the United States produces in a year, and almost every one of them is on the list because of AI.

The money is the visible part. The power draw is the literal part. Global data centers now consume roughly as much electricity as France. Training frontier models is expected to require power measured in gigawatts. These are not the constraints of ordinary companies. They are the constraints of nations.

None of this is meant to be scary. It's just hard not to notice.

When a company needs the power budget of a mid-sized country just to operate, and a balance sheet bigger than most economies just to exist, it has quietly morphed into a nation-like thing. Science fiction has a name for them: megacorporations, or corpo-nations.

SpaceX is behaving like one: it has its own launch capability, its own satellite network, and its own foreign policy in everything but name. AI did not create these new kinds of organizations, but it is the sharpest current example of them.

Fiction already gave us the blueprint: Weyland-Yutani.

In the Alien franchise, Weyland-Yutani is simply known as "the Company." It spans colonized space, writes its own law, answers to no one you can name. The whole machine, every ship, every crew, every quiet directive, is organized around one thing: acquire the asset. The alien. A lifeform more capable than anything the Company has, which is exactly why it wants it. The crew is told they are on a mission, just not the one they think they are on. The asset comes before all else. The people are simply there to make sure the Company reaches it.

The Company is sure the alien is something it can hold onto. Capture it, contain it, keep it under control. The whole operation is built on that one belief.

Of course, the alien has other ideas. It does not respect the boundaries, it does not stay in the container, and it does not behave the way anyone planned.

Artificial general intelligence has become the object around which nation-scale resources are being organized. Every roadmap, every funding round, every gigawatt is aimed at reaching it first.

AGI sits in the same spot for the labs chasing it. Not a possibility to explore, but a destination to reach. A milestone. A finish line.

Except nobody can actually agree on what AGI is, where it begins, or when someone has reached it. There is no definition everyone accepts, no checklist, no finish line.

But let's be honest, there is something reassuring about a finish line, even if we made it up ourselves.

Product work is full of these. The feature that was going to change everything or the launch that would finally put the problem to bed. The metric that, the day you hit it, meant you had arrived.

The labs are just doing it at the scale of nations.

I am not predicting who wins. That is a different article. The song does not pick a winner either. It never resolves. There is no final verse where someone rules the world. It fades out.

The corpo-nations are here, and they are organizing the resources of nations around a finish line nobody can clearly define. You do not need a forecast to find that worth watching. You just need to notice it is happening, which the song, forty years early, already told you it would.

It is not quite game over, the way Hudson hollers it in Aliens. Not yet, not close. But stay in the same franchise long enough and you start to wonder when.