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For at least a year now, newspapers have been increasingly filled with urgent and anxious reports about the quickening pace of artificial intelligence development, warning ominously that the technology will eventually defy human control and take over the world.

It is a threat worth taking seriously, and no mere hype. But with all the attention devoted to AI’s growing power, an even more imminent danger has become clear: With their prodigious fortunes, a small cast of men who lead the world’s most powerful AI-related companies have come to wield extraordinary and perhaps already-unstoppable power over U.S. government and society—and, thereby, unprecedented influence over world affairs.

For at least a year now, newspapers have been increasingly filled with urgent and anxious reports about the quickening pace of artificial intelligence development, warning ominously that the technology will eventually defy human control and take over the world.

It is a threat worth taking seriously, and no mere hype. But with all the attention devoted to AI’s growing power, an even more imminent danger has become clear: With their prodigious fortunes, a small cast of men who lead the world’s most powerful AI-related companies have come to wield extraordinary and perhaps already-unstoppable power over U.S. government and society—and, thereby, unprecedented influence over world affairs.

The richest among them, Elon Musk, is the most spectacular example. He has exhibited no modesty about his ambitions as he has used his Midas-like wealth and tentacular corporations to become an irresistible force in contemporary affairs. The U.S. government now openly depends on Musk, who became a trillionaire in June, for its space program, for global communications, and for holding the country’s own in competition with China in frontier industries such as electric vehicles and batteries. But that is far from all.

Early in U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the White House accorded a leading role to Musk in shaping—and ostensibly streamlining—the country’s bureaucracy. It gave him not only unprecedented say over large-scale firings........

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