Earlier this month, Vox announced a new vertical dedicated to “growth” that’s funded entirely by the Arnold Foundation, the influence arm of billionaire former Enron energy trader and founder of energy commodity hedge fund Centaurus Energy John Arnold. Arnold has long-donated to center-liberal causes, some seemingly benign (investigative journalism) and others that are, to say the least, controversial (spy planes in poor majority-Black cities, for example). Arnold’s latest ideological—and economic—agenda is to promote so-called Abundance, a vague political movement currently fashionable among wealthy liberals that’s a constellation of conferences, think tanks, political action group, billionaire donors, and best-selling books by New York Times and Atlantic authors. Their primary ethos is “growth” through deregulation of industry. Some of the proposals are sensible (obviously not all regulations make sense and regulations can, and often are, manipulated by other capital actors). But this seed of a decent, if entirely banal, idea has predictably morphed into an all-encompassing politics of deregulation and anti-Left populism that dovetails with the political needs of Silicon Valley, and the ultrawealthy in general.
Aside from the broader ideological aims it’s worth noting that, in a direct and urgent way, the primary focus on “growth” through rapid and broad deregulation aligns neatly with the most direct and urgent needs of Silicon Valley billionaires—including Arnold, and the company whose board of directors he joined in February 2024, Meta (formerly Facebook). Arnold has discussed publicly how he was brought onto Meta’s board specifically to handle the energy crisis facing AI companies, telling Bloomberg’s David Rubenstein in August of last year:
“I think [Meta was] looking for somebody who had some energy expertise. The amount of infrastructure that’s required to run the data centers for AI is immense, and the industry is under a real challenge. It is putting tremendous challenges upon the utility industry and the electric industry, in general. But the tech platform companies that are involved in AI are really struggling with this, I think, and my background in public policy is an asset to them.”
Translation: companies that have dumped trillions of dollars betting on LLMs understand that their energy demands are far outstripping capacity, and over the next years and decades getting ahead of these demands will be central to their need for infinite growth. Enter: “Abundance” as an ideological and public policy catch-all for these needs.
Vox’s Case for Growth vertical—while also focusing on related topics like housing and transportation projects—very much prioritizes energy and the building up of energy capacity, name checking it three times in their launch announcement. In Case for Growth’s subsequent articles, the role this supposed “cheap, clean energy” would play in allowing us to scale up AI is simply taken for granted, often spoken about in mystical and providential terms. In his article, “Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country,” Vox Senior Editorial Director Bryan Walsh made somewhat fantastical claims about “clean energy’s” immediate impact on “growing the pie.” While railing against the supposed myopia of “zero sum” leftists, Walsh insisted that
If you’re convinced the pie is fixed, you’ll resist immigration, block new housing, and treat technological progress as a threat rather than a source of abundance — even when those are exactly the changes that would create more opportunity for everyone.
In a genuinely stagnant, low-growth world, this might be rational. But we are on the cusp of technologies — from AI to cheap clean energy — that could dramatically increase the size of the pie.
This is a fairly lofty assertion. What is its source substantiating this assertion? Walsh links to another Case for Growth article entitled “The long, fun list of things we could do with unlimited clean energy” which reads like a press release for Silicon Valley. It never, needless to say, establishes the premise that we are “on the cusp” of “cheap clean energy” with any journalistic rigor. Progress is certainly being made in renewables, but even this has other environmental trade-offs and will certainly not, any time soon, usher in a post-scarcity future. This glossy puffery is not serious reporting on a complex and politically fraught topic. It’s Silicon Valley boosterism posing as policy reporting.
In addition to more overt advocacy for Arnold and Meta’s political interests around energy and AI, Case for Growth has thus far produced more abstract ideological defenses of neoliberalism that align with Arnold’s broader worldview, such as:
- Why America gave up on economists
- The only number that really matters: If you care about happiness, well-being, or growth, you should care about GDP
- We can have growth while fighting climate change
- (The aforementioned) Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country
The final example is, indeed, fairly on-the-nose ideological propaganda making the traditional neoliberal argument that what’s most important is “growing the pie.” The substance of the articles vary but in general they lament an alleged rise of “populism,” attack the supposedly overly regulatory and zero-sum “Left” and the political forces against “growth”—a rather vague political goal that we are led to believe is, per se, unobjectionable.
Case for Growth is also running outright puffery for the AI industry more broadly. Their podcast, Explain It to Me, published an episode on “How AI could create ‘a world without work’” where they painted a rosy picture of a post-scarcity society where AI does most of our labor. “AI abundance,” host Jonquilyn Hill tells listeners, “essentially carries the notion that we could all be so much wealthier than we can even imagine today.”
In his article defending the AI industry from its doubters, “We’re running out of good ideas. AI might be how we find new ones,” Walsh insists—after box-checking worries around slop—that we should focus on the “pro-social uses of AI that could actually help address major problems.”
“If I wanted to change people’s minds about AI, to give them the good news that this technology would bring,” Walsh says, volunteering to promote the AI industry, “I would start with what it could do for the foundation of human prosperity: scientific research.”
The day before Vox announced their Case for Growth vertical, with an ostensible focus on promoting AI-oriented growth and “cheaper and cleaner energy,” the $1.6 trillion company Arnold is on the board of directors of, Meta, kicked off their PR campaign to frame their AI investments as environmentally sustainable. “Meta is seeing an increase in emissions related to AI and looking towards an array of clean energy and low-carbon solutions to manage AI’s needs and related emissions,” a Dec. 1 press release read.
Arnold, who was a special guest speaker for the top oil and gas industry lobbying group American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) last year, promotes other neoliberal PR efforts. In 2024 he donated $175,000 to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), an ostensibly liberal think tank funded by Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Amazon and Walmart, that I profiled in 2023. PPI operates the @CNLiberalism Twitter account (formerly @Ne0liberal) that attempts to make neoliberalism fun, cool, and novel while promoting bog-standard free market and anti-regulatory dogma for zoomers. Arnold has also lavished money on Bari Weiss’ “anti-woke” university, the free market think tank Niskanen Center, the rightwing American Enterprise Institute, and a similar Abundance publication launched earlier this year called The Argument.
This rah-rah posture for wealthy Americans is not new for Vox; it’s baked into their DNA as a media company co-founded by arch free-marketers Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias over 10 years ago. And they have long run sycophantic write-ups for billionaires—Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Dustin Moskovitz, Sam Bankman-Fried (who funded Vox until he didn’t) and, of course, John Arnold. But this latest project is murky with its conflicts of interest, and ought to be more transparent about where Arnold’s and Meta’s financial interests come into direct contact with Vox’s deregulatory ideological output and seemingly benign-sounding “case for growth.” It’s not enough to disclose the funding source (which they, to their credit, do at the end of every article). They need to disclose what direct interests John Arnold and Meta have in promoting “streamlined” regulation and scaling up the electrical grid. It’s not solely about “smart policy” or “lowering costs” for the average person, but very much about promoting an urgent political priority for the industry and person funding the vertical.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.