WEF Young Global Leaders Highlights: Big Tech
A closer look at some YGL participants in the tech sector reveals a disturbing agenda
As shown in the statistical analysis of the latest update of World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) & Global Leaders of Tomorrow (GLT), Tech was the next largest sub-sector (after Finance) of the dominant Business sector.
Some Notable YGL Tech Pioneers
Mike Adenuga (2005 YGL), founder of Globacom (Nigerian telecom company), fifth richest person in Africa.
Paul Allen (1995 YGL), co-founder of Microsoft. Passed away 2018.
Sam Altman (2016 YGL), CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT), one of the leading figures of the AI boom. Former President of Y Combinator. Invited to the Bilderberg Meetings in 2016, 2022, and 2023.
Marc Benioff (2005 YGL), founder of cloud computing company Salesforce and owner of Time Magazine. Leader of the Agentic AI revolution. Member of Council on Foreign Relations and board member of the WEF.
Jeff Bezos (1998 GLT), founder of Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin. Wealthiest person in the world 2017–2021.
Len Bosack (1993 GLT), founder of XKL, co-founder of Cisco.
Sergey Brin (2005 YGL), co-founder of Google.
Leah Busque (2024 YGL), founder and CEO of Taskrabbit (P2P gig economy).
Steve Chen (2010 YGL), co-founder of Youtube and MixBit (also “PayPal Mafia”).
Peter L. Corsell (2010 YGL), founder of GridPoint (Smart Grid) 2003 at age 25, after being recruited as a CIA intelligence officer stationed in Cuba.
Eleonore Crespo (2025 YGL ), co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment.com (a business planning platform with Agentic AI).
Michael Dell (1993 GLT), founder of Dell Technologies.
Kieran Donovan (2025 YGL ), co-founder and CEO of k-ID (to make the digital world “safer” for kids and teens).
Daniel Ek (2013 YGL), founder of Spotify. Attended the Bilderberg Meetings in Madrid 2024 and in Stockholm 2025.
David Filo (1997 GLT), co-founder of Yahoo.
Bill Gates (1993 GLT), co-founder of Microsoft, GAVI, and Gates Foundation (formerly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, renamed after their divorce due to Bill’s association with Jeffrey Epstein), focused on vaccines, GMO, and global policy. Prominent player in the technocratic agenda, inspired by Carnegie and Rockefeller. As of May 2025, his net worth was US$115.1 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest individual in the world.
Yair Goldfinger (2009 YGL), co-founder of AppCard and Mirabilis (that developed ICQ).
Halsey Minor (1999 GLT), founder of CNET, co-founder of Salesforce, Google Voice, OpenDNS and other tech companies.
He Jin (2020 YGL), founder of Maimai (Chinese social network).
He Zhengyu (2021 YGL), head of systems engineering at Ant Financial, an Alipay spinoff that formed the basis for the Social Credit system in China!
Chad Hurley (2009 YGL), co-founder of Youtube and MixBit (also “PayPal Mafia”).
David Karp (2014 YGL), founder of Tumblr and member of Planned Parenthood. In March 2017, Tumblr and Planned Parenthood launched an initiative calling on the tech industry to support Planned Parenthood. (Not related to Alex Karp.)
Jaroslaw Krolewski (2025 YGL), co-founder and CEO of Synerise, “One of Europe’s most advanced and fastest-growing technology companies specializing in artificial intelligence and big data”.
Corinna E. Lathan (2006 YGL), founder of AnthroTronix specialising in development for wearable computing and robotic control systems. Member of WEF’s Global Agenda Council for Robotics and Smart Devices.
Max Levchin (2011 YGL), co-founder of PayPal (“PayPal Mafia”) and founder of HVF.
Vinny Lingham (2009 YGL), entrepreneur and tech investor, focused on cryptocurrency (known as the “Bitcoin Oracle” in media), co-founder of Civic (a blockchain-based identity verification platform).
Liu Qiangdong ( 2014 YGL), founder of e-commerce platform JD.com. Called “the Jeff Bezos of China”.
Jack Ma (2001 GLT), founder of Alibaba and Alipay. Former member of WEF Board of Trustees.
Matt Mullenweg (2015 YGL), founder of WordPress.
Pierre Omidyar (1999 GLT), founder of eBay.
Larry Page (2002 YGL), co-founder of Google.
Ham Serunjogi (2025 YGL), co-Founder and CEO of Chipper Cash (instant peer-to-peer cross-border payments across Africa and Europe).
Eric Schmidt (1997 GLT), former CEO of Google, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and CEO of Relativity Space. Member of the Bilderberg steering committee, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner (2005 YGL), co-founder of Vivaldi and Opera web browsers.
Jimmy Wales (2007 YGL), founder of Wikipedia.
Evan Williams (2010 YGL), co-founder of Twitter (bought by Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded X).
Michelle Zatlyn (2014 YGL), co-founder, president and COO of Cloudflare.
Niklas Zennström (2005 YGL), co-founder of Skype, Joost, KaZaa. Founder of Zennström Philanthropies that focuses on climate change and human rights initiatives. Has been on the advisory board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Mark Zuckerberg (2010 YGL), founder of Facebook/Meta.
Curiously, none of the Apple founders (Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne) are in the list, despite products like Mac, Apple Music, iPod, iPhone, and iPad being so significant in the digitalisation agenda. I asked Jacob about this and he pointed out that Apple trustee Al Gore is a board member of WEF.
Trump’s Technocrats
At the Omniwar Symposium in October 2024, Patrick Wood from Technocracy News named eight technocrats who are now close to President Trump. Interestingly, five of these were Young Global Leaders or Global Leaders of Tomorrow (several of which have also been highlighted in Jacob’s books and articles).
Marc Andreessen (1996 GLT), “king maker” and presidential advisor since 2024. Co-founder of Opsware Inc., Mosaic, Netscape, and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Michael Kratsios (2020 YGL), director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (as of 2025). Formerly, principal at Thiel Capital and chief of staff for Peter Thiel, President Trump’s top technology Advisor (2019–2021) and Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (2020–2021).
Howard Lutnick (1998 GLT), appointed US Secretary of Commerce 2025. Worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the day of the September 11th attacks but missed it because he took his son for his first day of Kindergarten. Lost 2/3rds of their staff. Update: Next-door neighbour with Jeffrey Epstein. He was reported to the FBI by an insider for financial irregularities, running his company as a Ponzi scheme and buying a house worth millions from Epstein for $10 dollars !1 Confirmed by the recently released Epstein files to have had continual contact.2
Elon Musk (2008 YGL), CEO and product architect of Tesla. Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX. Founder and CEO of xAI. Founder of the Boring Company and X Corp. Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and X.com (part of PayPal). President of the Musk Foundation. The wealthiest person in the world since 2021. Put US$290 million into the Trump campaign. Was appointed the (unofficial) leader of the newly instated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in January 2025 (until falling out with Trump over the “Big Beautiful Bill” in June 2025). Update: Epstein emails show repeated plans for visits to Epstein’s island 2012–2014 but unclear if he actually went. Musk says he didn’t.
Peter Thiel (2007 YGL), founder of Thiel Capital, co-founder of PayPal (“PayPal Mafia”), co-founded Palantir Technologies (with Alex Karp) 2003, and was one of the co-founders of Founders Fund 2005. Central player in the technocratic agenda and close to President Trump. Has been described as the “intellectual architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos”. Member of the Bilderberg steering committee, and American Friends of Bilderberg Inc. Allegedly linked to the CIA, Mossad, and Epstein according to independent journalist Whitney Webb.3 Update: Now confirmed in the Epstein Files to having associated with Epstein, at least for business.
To this list can also be added:
Ken Howery (2012 YGL), co-founder of PayPal (“PayPal Mafia”) and Founders Fund. In 2025 he was appointed as US Ambassador to Denmark by President Trump (which seems very strategic considering Trump’s interest in Greenland). 2019–2021 he was appointed by President Biden as US Ambassador to Sweden (which also seems strategic considering the US interest in getting Sweden and Finland to join NATO). In February 2022, Howery wrote an op-ed pointing out that the Ukraine invasion had dramatically shifted public opinion in Sweden about NATO, and that the country would “make an outstanding addition” to the alliance—which is exactly what happened (very swiftly and without a referendum or public debate).
Clearly, these tech billionaires have no problem flip-flopping politically. Let’s not forget that Silicon Valley and leading tech platforms have been instrumental in driving “woke” issues, no matter how illogical or extreme. Most leading platforms also more or less willingly colluded to protect the official narrative and silence dissenting voices during critical moments of recent years, regardless of what that narrative was or which side was in power.
The TESCREAL Bundle
Some of the most prominent of these tech pioneers and billionaire investors are also transhumanists, extropians, and AGI believers who have openly displayed a chillingly misanthropic view of humanity. This video by independent journalist Taylor Lorenz provides an excellent overview of the futurist religion that has been named with the acronym TESCREAL by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres.4
While Elon Musk seems to be an unpredictable maverick who likes to stir things up, the most dangerous of the lot is probably Peter Thiel and Palantir. This Redacted episode was published 6 December 2025. Well worth watching, especially considering the latest events in the U.S…
Comments by Jacob
As reported by several outlets after the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using Palantir’s surveillance app Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) to identify, track, and deport suspected illegal immigrants. Data (names, addresses, and photos) from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and other public and commercial sources, are being fed into this system. ELITE then delivers “confidence scores” that they can be found at their home location.5
As Palantir’s AI-tools were deployed in Gaza to identify Hamas-supporters, they will also likely be a part of the Trump-led Board of Peace toolbox, and the building of “freedom cities” (digital concentration camps) to disarm all dissent.
At the recent annual meeting in Davos, Thiel’s partner from Palantir and the Bilderberg steering committee, Alex Karp, discussed how AI can support decision-making in defense and security with WEFs co-chairman Larry Fink (CEO of Blackrock).
The next step is to introduce the AI-governed and WEF-supported Agentic State.
As I have pointed out, the dystopian development resembles the “New Earth Order” predicted by Paul Raskin in his Journey to Earthland.
The WEF-supported Tech moguls, with Peter Thiel as a spider in the web, has taken the lead in constructing the technological BEAST with eyes (ICE) to see, predict and act. As Thiel wrote 2004 in his essay The Straussian Moment, “we should consider ... the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services as the crucial path to a truly global pax Americana”.6
This is the realisation of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s technetronic society. As he prophetically wrote in 1968:
Power will gravitate into those who control information and can correlate it most rapidly. Our existing postcrisis management institutions will probably be supplemented by precrisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crisis and to develop programs to cope with them. This could encourage tendencies during the next several decades toward a technocratic dictatorship, leaving less and less room for political procedures as we now know them.7
The full updated Young Global Leaders list can be accessed here.
More highlights will follow.
U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Guardian Complaint Form, Alleged Money Laundering by Howard Lutnick via BGC Financial and Cantor Fitzgerald
U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library
Whitney Webb (2022), One Nation Under Blackmail - Vol. 2: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, SpokenTome.media
Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres (2024), The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence, First Monday, volume 29, number 4 (April 2024), doi: dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636.
Luke Taylor (2026), ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt “illegal immigrants”, BMJ 2026;392:s168
Peter Thiel (2004), “The Straussian Moment”, p. 208, gwern.net/doc/politics/2007-thiel.pdf
Zbigniew Brzezinski (1968), “America in the Technetronic Era” In: Kateb, G. (red.), Utopia: The Potential and Prospect for the Human Condition, Oxford: Routledge, p. 137
Ten Ways the 1% Who Owns Almost All Media Are Manipulating Us to Walk Lockstep Into Our Technocratic Enslavement:
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable
The video with Taylor Lorenz was informative and interesting for the most part, but her conclusions and solutions are not agreeable.
Her list of drawbacks to tech billionaire actions include increased climate change and social inequality, and the extinction of the human species.
I am unsure but suspect human extinction is a posture and not a real desire of tech billionaires, because it seems more likely they want to replace poor people with machines and not all humans.
I believe climate change is not an emergency, and that carbon is not a major factor in it happening.
I observe social inequality in a wide array of power dynamics, but I don't automatically blame the current winner in a single dynamic, or group of dynamics, while championing the underdog on principle as it that somehow makes me a humanist.
Taylor's ultimate solution is to sieze the assets of the rich, regulate their business models so they can't ever be profitable again, and dominate technology to ensure it works toward the communist goal of social equity. Such fantastic delusions about how life should work are premised on marxist ideology and are hopelessly absent of strong reason or sound logic.