The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now
On May 25, 2019, the Twitter account belonging to the long-retired Alaska senator Mike Gravel posted , “The wealthiest 10% of Americans control 70% of the nation’s total wealth - and almost everyone telling you inequality doesn’t ‘really matter’ comes from that bracket.”
Gravel, who had just turned 89, didn’t write the post himself. It was the work of a pair of teenagers, Henry Williams and David Oks , who had recruited Gravel to lend his name and his online presence to an outsider, leftist presidential campaign — a stunt that became an internet phenomenon, channeling youthful 21st century anti-establishment messages through the persona of someone old enough to have helped expose the Pentagon Papers.
This month, Williams and Oks posted a different set of messages on X: they announced they were going to work on OpenAI’s Strategic Futures team “to help prepare the world for transformative AI,” as Oks put it .
Seven years after denouncing the destructive effects of inequality and runaway corporate power, the duo formerly known as the “Gravel Teens” has signed on with a Silicon Valley behemoth with a valuation of more than $850 billion and a goal of fundamentally upending labor and everyday life. In 2025, OpenAI’s billionaire co-founder, Sam Altman, predicted that AI technology meant that certain types of jobs like customer service will be “totally, totally gone.”
Williams and Oks will be working, they wrote, under Dean W.
Ball, a former AI policy adviser to President Donald Trump and a veteran of the right-wing think-tank world. Ball described Strategic Futures as a place where his team would “think about the long-range political economy and political theory outcomes from technologies like super intelligence and highly capable AI systems.”
Ball said he was impressed with Oks’ and Williams’ analytical acumen, and hired them specifically as a duo.
“I think David and Henry are a fantastically capable pair of writer and editor,” Ball said. “I had some conversations with them that made me really excited, and thus far, it’s played out wonderfully. They have hit the ground running.