This obscures what actually happened here. In 2013, Elon warned Demis Hassabis that the future of AI shouldn’t be controlled by Larry Page. He tried to cobble together financing with PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek to buy DeepMind himself. Google closed for $500M anyway. Losing that deal is why OpenAI exists. Musk co-founded it in 2015 specifically to break Google’s grip on AI talent. Then he poached Ilya Sutskever from Google Brain with $1.9M salary plus signing bonus to become OpenAI’s chief scientist. Page “refused to hang out” with Musk after that. So yes, five people shaped 30 years of tech. But the more interesting pattern: those five people spent most of that time trying to prevent each other from winning. Zuck’s $800M bid for DeepMind failed. Elon’s counter-bid failed. Both responded by building competing AI labs. The jet story sounds like networking. What it actually shows is surveillance. Every major tech founder in 2013 was tracking who controlled the best AI researchers and trying to either acquire them or block rivals from acquiring them. The same handful of people keep appearing because there are only about 200 researchers in the world capable of building frontier AI systems, and every billionaire in tech knew it a decade before the rest of us figured it out.