Recently, Forbes published an article that went viral.
Obviously: sex, money, power, Silicon Valley, AI, Nvidia bros who lose their minds when a beautiful woman knows what a GPU is.
The article describes a growing niche of high-end escorts catering to the AI elite in Silicon Valley.
It insists: these are not merely attractive women, but women with brains! Capable of discussing venture capital, longevity, artificial intelligence, crypto, and the future of humanity with wealthy founders and engineers before heading to the bedroom.
The article is well-reported, the details are vivid, and as usual, it misses the point.
The implicit argument of the article is that AI created a new market. But I suspect the opposite is true. The market is (very) ancient. The faces of the elite may have changed, but the mechanism did not.
I read the piece fully and wasn't shocked. I've spent years in rooms with powerful men (as a HUMINT operator, not an escort) and I understood the phenomenon immediately.
Spy and escort operate in the space between what people show in public and what they actually are: the Grey Zone. Both know that attention is one of the rarest and most powerful resources that exists.
So yes. I understand why someone would pay $6,000 for that. And it has almost nothing to do with sex.
This is what we're going to explore today: what the existence of such a market reveals about one of the richest and most technologically advanced elite ecosystems on earth, and about their very difficult relationship with uncertainty.
What Forbes reported and what they didn't see
The details are there, if you know how to read them.