China is using the steel playbook on AI — and America’s tech billionaires are standing in the blast zone

America’s new Gilded Age rhymes with its last in so many ways, perhaps none more so than its oligarchs and billionaires, with the role of steel being played today by artificial intelligence.

The pre-World War I era at the turn of the century coincided with a surge in modern industrial capitalism that transformed steel barons into America’s first billionaire class, while the new one is minting tech fortunes on a Carnegie- and Rockefeller-sized scale, with Elon Musk flirting with trillionaire status in recent months after the historic SpaceX IPO.

In both eras, the winners controlled the infrastructure layer — mines, mills and railroads then; chips, clouds, AI models and data now — and turned that control into extraordinary wealth, political influence and the ability to shape markets for everyone else.

But now, China lurks just offstage, preparing to bring the steel era’s industrial logic back into the story, using scale, subsidies and price pressure to test how durable today’s AI fortunes really are.

The first billionaire class

Steel did not just build bridges and skyscrapers. It built the first modern American billionaire class, with Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan at the center of a system that fused industrial growth, financial consolidation and enormous private power.

That power was double-edged: the........

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