The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now

From Anti-Corporate Stunt to Silicon Valley: The Gravel Teens’ Unlikely Pivot to OpenAI

Earthguardiansonline.com – Seven years after commandeering the social media accounts of a 89-year-old retired senator to blast inequality and corporate excess, two young men who became internet legends for their leftist presidential prank have walked into the offices of one of the most powerful technology firms on Earth. Henry Williams and David Oks — the pair once dubbed the “Gravel Teens” — announced on X this month that they are joining OpenAI’s Strategic Futures team, a unit tasked with anticipating how transformative artificial intelligence will reshape economies, labor markets, and daily life. The company they have entered carries a valuation exceeding $850 billion and a stated ambition of fundamentally restructuring how people work and live.

The announcement lands with a particular irony that commentators have not been slow to notice. In 2019, Williams and Oks built their entire public identity around railing against the concentration of wealth and the unchecked reach of mega-corporations. Now they are embedded inside a firm whose billionaire co-founder, Sam Altman, told audiences in 2025 that categories of employment such as customer service roles would be “totally, totally gone” thanks to AI. The gap between the teenager posting about wealth inequality and the same teenager drafting strategy documents inside an AI laboratory is, by any measure, a jarring one.

The 2019 Stunt That Became a Movement

The episode began on May 25, 2019, when the Twitter feed of Alaska’s long-retired senator Mike Gravel published a post reading:

“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 celebrated his 89th birthday, did not author the message. It was the product of Williams and Oks, who had persuaded the elderly senator to lend his name and his online following to an outsider, explicitly leftist presidential bid. The stunt was never intended to win an election. Its purpose, as the two explained at the time, was to expose what they considered the bland, focus-grouped messaging of centrist Democrats and to give voice to a reservoir of left-wing frustration that had no institutional outlet. They wrapped their arguments in the sardonic, irony-drenched register of left-leaning Twitter and podcasts such as “Chapo Trap House,” aiming to humiliate mainstream politicians into shifting policy.

“[I]f you want a vision of the future under Cory Booker, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. and every once in a while it stops for an inspirational lecture on how we should never stop dreaming.”

That May 2019 post captured the tone: part satire, part genuine grievance. Yet Williams insisted the project carried a sincere undercurrent. Speaking to the New York Times that year, he acknowledged the appeal of pure catharsis while insisting it left him unsatisfied.

“‘Chapo Trap House’ is great catharsis. But it doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t make me feel like anything can change.”

After the Campaign: The Gravel Institute

When Gravel’s candidacy wound down, Oks, Williams, and their friend Henry Magowan channeled the project’s momentum into the Gravel Institute, a nonprofit designed to function as a progressive counterweight to conservative educational platforms such as PragerU. The Institute produced video content hosted by a roster of left-leaning figures. Former labor secretary Robert Reich appeared to dismantle common myths surrounding minimum-wage debates, while Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, addressed the relationship between oil-company profit margins and consumer gas prices. The channel amassed several hundred thousand YouTube subscribers, though recurring financial support remained a persistent challenge.

Inside OpenAI’s Strategic Futures

Their new role places Williams and Oks under the supervision of Dean W. Ball, a former AI policy adviser to President Donald Trump and a longtime fixture of right-wing think-tank circles. Ball framed the Strategic Futures unit as a space for examining “the long-range political economy and political theory outcomes from technologies like super intelligence and highly capable AI systems.” He emphasized that he recruited the two specifically as a pair, citing their combined strengths as writer and editor.

“I think David and Henry are a fantastically capable pair of writer and editor. 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. They are dedicated, and they care quite a lot about what they’re doing.”

Asked whether ideological alignment factored into the hiring decision, Ball was blunt.

“I hire smart people, that’s what it comes down to. I hire the right people for the job. I don’t care about their politics.”

A Broader Pattern in AI Hiring

The Williams-Oks appointment is not an isolated curiosity. Across the industry, firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic are recruiting writers, philosophers, ethicists, and physicists at a pace that mirrors their appetite for rare books and training data. The logic is straightforward: as models grow more capable, the questions they raise — about labor displacement, governance, epistemic authority, and the distribution of power — demand people fluent in political theory and public discourse, not merely in gradient descent. A former anti-corporate activist drafting scenario analyses for superintelligence governance fits that need as naturally as a physicist modeling transformer architectures.

Whether the move represents a genuine evolution of Williams’ and Oks’ political commitments, a pragmatic career step, or something in between remains a question the two have not publicly resolved. Oks and Williams provided written responses through an OpenAI spokesperson; Magowan did not respond to multiple requests for comment. What is clear is that the arc from a 2019 Twitter stunt aimed at embarrassing centrist Democrats to a 2026 strategy role inside a half-trillion-dollar-plus AI laboratory compresses, in two individuals, one of the most consequential cultural shifts of the decade: the moment when the people who once defined themselves against corporate power found themselves, willingly, inside its most powerful new engine.