Ben Delo, the source of one half of Reform’s £72 million mega-donation, wrote in The Spectator last year about being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome as a child. The self-confessed geek, now 42, was socially awkward. He did not fit in and he did not care to. His condition would shape the course of his life, making him very good at math, very rich and hellbent on getting involved in politics.

Christopher Harborne, the crypto billionaire who has matched Delo’s donation, we know much less about. Despite being a billionaire many times over, the 63-year-old has the air of a chemistry teacher and an aversion to interviews. Like Delo, who until recently lived in Hong Kong, he also forged his way in the Far East, living in Thailand. It’s invidious to make conjectures about anyone’s neurodiversity – and I won’t – but Harborne is clearly extremely smart and highly unconventional.

We are on safer ground, however, when it comes to Elon Musk, who considered donating to Reform before ditching Nigel Farage, calling him “weak sauce.” Musk had more time to get used to the media and in 2021, at the age of 49, he used the stage of Saturday Night Live to tell the world he had Asperger’s. It played no less a role in shaping his life than it did for Delo, even if it does not define him.

Should we be worried when men who think so differently from us wield such power?

Should we be worried when men who think so differently from us wield such power?

On the same weekend that the £72 million earthquake was changing the financial landscape of Britain’s political parties, another seismic event was happening over in the United States in the world of AI. Musk – who runs SpaceXAI – joined OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis in supporting a call by Anthropic founder Dario Amodei for a coordinated slowdown in the pace of frontier model development.

These four men have a huge role in stewarding the biggest technological revolution in history. Despite their huge power, however, we still know relatively little about them.

I spent four years researching Musk for a book and am convinced that he thinks in a way that is far more different than most of us can imagine. Altman and Amodei have their own particularities but they meet the same description. One of Altman’s mentors, Peter Thiel, for example, told the New Yorker: “Sam’s program for the world is anchored by ideas, not people. And that’s what makes it powerful – because it doesn’t immediately get derailed by questions of popularity.”

Amodei, meanwhile, has earned a reputation for being more vocal on moral questions; he is no friend of Donald Trump and his worldview has been linked to the Effective Altruism movement, which is highly rationalist in nature.

Whether it’s Delo or Musk, should we be worried when men who think so differently from the rest of us wield such financial and political power? Their raw cognitive ability enables them to accrue wealth on a quasi-sovereign level by understanding complex systems rather than people. But communication is not their forte and, with some exceptions (DoGE, for example), they avoid public office and, as a consequence, evade the scrutiny that elected politicians are subjected to. The phrase “autistocracy,” once used by Rory Sutherland, comes to mind but not in the sense that he meant it. The Spectator’s........

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