The Silent Decline of Traditional Elites
A new, relatively quiet power is already installed among us. For decades, power had a recognizable format. As defined in the book “The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making” by David Rothkopf, power was held by politicians, bankers, top executives of multinational corporations, academics who spoke on well-lit panels or wrote Sunday columns. According to Rothkopf, who counted them, this group was comprised of about 6,000 individuals. They had an institutional voice, a narrative that was repeated as an echo in the media, and a network of legitimacy that, although increasingly worn out, continued to operate out of sheer inertia.
A New Ruling Class: From Office to Code
But over the past 10 years it has become clear that that world has been falling apart. Not all at once, not with a visible revolution. But in silence, while another form of authority is emerging, more complex, less decorative and much more effective. They are the new cognitive elites. They don't need a position to exert influence or a diploma to gain respect. It's enough for them to build things that work. Organizations, algorithms, hardware architectures, language models, solutions to problems whose complexity exceeds the understanding of almost all those who still occupy the front row of traditional forums.
The Formula of the New Power: Technique, Vision, Execution and Narrative
What distinguishes this new class is not a title or a surname, nor the wealth they have accumulated prior to the moment they become relevant, but a rare combination of capabilities: frontier technical mastery, long-term strategic vision, an obsessive orientation to execution, and something even rarer these days: narrative autonomy. They don't seek to be part of the consensus; they design their own. And they do so with a mix of mathematical rigor and faith in the possibility that something can still be invented that truly changes the rules of the game.
A power that breaks through without asking permission
The world opened the door to them not because they wanted to, but because they had no other choice. The old elites don't know what to do with artificial intelligence, with the energy transition, with institutional decomposition. And while they meet at the G20, in Davos, in Washington, in New York or in Brussels, and they issue statements, the new ones are resolving and implementing. Jensen Huang redefining global computing infrastructure from NVIDIA. Sam Altman modeling geopolitical power around generative AI. Eric Schmidt designing more relevant algorithmic governance mechanisms than any United Nations committee. Zuckerberg, Thiel, Lin. The names change, but the pattern is repeated.
The architects of the future are here
They are not ordinary entrepreneurs. Nor are they simply brilliant technicians. They are something else: architects and builders of new systems, in the broadest sense of the word. People who operate from a post-national, post-hierarchical and, in a certain way, post-institutional logic. Their compass is not power, but effectiveness. They don't wonder who should give them permission. They wonder if they can make it work.
A hegemony with fissures
And yet, this new order has its own fragility. Because everything that is born outside the traditional framework risks being slowed down. The brutal clarity with which they think can turn into indifference. The focus on execution can ignore the human and moral edges of the problem. Technical meritocracy, when it becomes dogma and is taken to the extreme, risks forgetting that talent is not always accompanied by conscience. Moral isolation is a real risk. And the cultural disconnect, too.
Over the next five years, we will see how these elites consolidate a new type of hegemony. They will not necessarily seek political power (although we will witness attempts at assault as Elon Musk has done with Trump), but above all they will exercise it through the structures they control. Their companies will increasingly resemble small states with their own currencies, rules and symbolic territories. Their way of thinking will permeate universities, forms of leadership and new standards of ambition. And, most importantly, their language—clarity, precision, applied logic—will slowly replace the empty discourse of those who continue to hold office but no longer have authority.
But what are the implications for other mortals of this paradigm shift in power? I can think of three.
A New Order of Global Power
The first and most obvious thing is that power, as we knew it, is beginning to take on a more diffuse and polymorphic form. And since the states have mostly been left in the hands of mediocre politicians (because the best have seen it clearly and prefer to be members of these new elites thanks to their abilities) they will put in place mechanisms to crush the new elites (which is what the mediocre always try to... destroy, remove and annul the smartest). The problem they are going to encounter is that if these new elites end up functioning as microstates —with their own currencies, regulatory frameworks, symbolic identity systems and even moral governance—, we will no longer be talking only about economic concentration, but about a power that extends its tentacles much further and in much more subtle ways. We will not see the fall of nation-states, but we will see a gradual and irreversible erosion of their regulatory monopoly. For millions of people, legitimacy and loyalty could move from Parliament to the API. From the Constitution to the Terms & Conditions. And that reconfigures not only geopolitics, but the way in which people understand their place in the world.
Cultural reconfiguration: pragmatism as hegemony
In parallel, this new elite logic infiltrates cultural imaginaries, the architecture of universities, and the new standards of leadership. What used to be one way of seeing the world—efficiency, execution, quantifiable impact—threatens to become the only legitimate criterion of ambition. The immeasurable, the slow, the symbolic, begins to fall out of the game. The humanities will not lose ground because they are failed, but because they do not produce metrics. And when that happens, the risk is no longer just an arrogant technocracy, but a profound cultural poverty, where the only valid way to exist is to be functional.
In this context, the very notion of “aspiring to something” changes skin. It's no longer about serving, inspiring, or cultivating. It's about building, scaling, dominating. Anything that does not have that architecture of linear progress risks being classified as irrelevant. And that, inevitably, fracture. A cultural divide is opening up between those who understand the world as a technical project, and those who still live it as a human experience. And the latter — those who are still living the world as a human experience — are not wrong or outdated. In fact, if we attend to what really makes us happy, what truly holds us up when everything else fails, we will always find it in the essentials: the bond with others, the sense of belonging, the slow pace of a conversation that seeks nothing but to share time. The paradox is brutal: while the new elites impose functional logic as the only legitimate form of aspiration, data - and life - remind us that happiness still belongs to those who prioritize the unquantifiable. And if that fracture doesn't close, it won't just be a cultural divide. It will be an existential gap that is difficult to fill with code, capital or efficiency.
Delegated Democracy, Privatized Sovereignty
The most disturbing thing, however, is that all of this occurs regardless of any classical institutional design. No one has voted for these elites. They don't have to be held to account. There are no formal counterweights, term limits, or control mechanisms. And although apparently they do not seek traditional political power, in practice they influence it, shape it and, if necessary, neutralize it if it does not align with their vision. Musk is just the most visible example. But he's not the only one. What emerges is a dual system: states that represent formal sovereignty and platforms that operate real sovereignty.
The future will be at stake in that tension. Because yes, we will have more innovation, more efficiency, more solutions. But also a real risk of losing touch with what makes us more human. And, above all, at risk is the system of government that - without being perfect - has given us stability, rights, representation and the possibility of correcting the collective course: democracy based on participation, pluralism, legitimacy built from below. And if that link is broken, what awaits us is not necessarily dystopia, but rather an era of opaque governance, where citizenship becomes a passive, almost technical role. A consumer of structures, rather than an author of their destiny.
Solutions? There are no easy answers. More regulation or nostalgic calls to the past will not be enough. Nor with a cultural rebellion without the capacity to articulate real alternatives. What is at stake is not just a dispute between logics—technocratic versus humanist—but an even deeper question: how do we reconstitute a sense of common in a world where power no longer needs permission and speed leaves institutions behind? Ideas, proposals and comments are welcome.
