Tip: Try a valid symbol or a specific company name for relevant results Breaking The Federal Reserve hikes interest rates for the first time in 3 years. Follow for live updates A Trump Science Advisor Says Elon Musk And Sam Altman Won’t End Up With AI’s Money: ‘There Will Be A Billionaire That Will Emerge That Has Zero Net Worth Today’ A man President Trump appointed to his science and technology council in March says the three people everyone assumes will own the AI economy will not, and that the person who does is currently worth nothing. "I don't buy into the narrative that Dario, Elon, and Sam end up having all the value in AI," David Friedberg said in a clip published on September 2 from a Diary of a CEO interview.
"Because in the next 10 years, there will be a billionaire that will emerge that has zero net worth today, downloaded open-source AI, and built a company that made them a billionaire. And there're going to be someone that's going to come from nowhere." He used first names. The three he meant are Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman of OpenAI.
Friedberg co-hosts the All-In podcast, runs the venture firm The Production Board, and was named to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on March 25. Frontier proprietary models are expensive per unit of output; hosted open-weight models are not. Anthropic's top tier and OpenAI's flagship both list $50 per million output tokens on their published pricing pages, with input at $10.
Running one of the cheap open models through a commodity host currently costs between about $0.18 and $0.60 per million output tokens. So there is a real opportunity right now for those who can understand open-weight models and monetize and market the right opportunities in that gap. **Sponsored Content: This Startup Is Targeting a Massive Untapped Energy Market** That comparison sets a small open model against the single most expensive closed one. Compare like with like and it collapses.
DeepSeek's largest open-weight model, released under an MIT license, runs about $2.60 per million output tokens on one host, roughly 19 times cheaper than the top proprietary tier, rather than a hundred. Moonshot's Kimi K3 is around $15, which is about three times cheaper. And Google's current Pro-tier model, which is proprietary, lists at $12.
The honest version of Friedberg's claim is not that the frontier is free, but rather that capable models are now cheap enough that capital is not the barrier it was. The scale he is betting against is large, and every figure attached to it is an estimate. Forbes put Musk's net worth at about $938 billion this week while Bloomberg estimated about $904 billion, a $34 billion disagreement about the same man.
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