If you’ve never heard the name Elad Gil, you’re not alone. He’s not a headline-chaser or a techno-evangelist. He doesn’t preach on panels. He doesn’t tweet manifestos. He doesn’t need to. His name travels in whispers, passed from boardroom to boardroom like a trade secret. Yet what Gil is quietly engineering could shape the economy for decades, perhaps even forever.
Not through invention, but through subtraction.
Gil made his money the Silicon Valley way — early and often. Google, Twitter, Stripe, Airbnb. He was a ghost in the margins, always one chess move ahead. But now, the ghost is stepping into the light. According to TechCrunch, Gil has turned his attention to service businesses: accounting firms, law offices, and marketing agencies. Stable. Predictable. Bloated with white-collar workers. The kinds of jobs parents once prayed their children would land. And that’s exactly why he’s targeting them.
Is it heartless? That depends on whether you think hearts belong in the workplace.
The model is surgical: Acquire the business, replace the humans with AI, use the freed-up cash to buy the next one, and repeat. Some might refer to it as innovation. I prefer to label it consolidation through automation. A system designed not to disrupt but to dismantle, not just head count but entire categories of human purpose.
Take a beat to really absorb that. Gil isn’t automating the future. He’s converting the present. Turning human institutions — businesses once run by people, for people — into stripped-down algorithmic systems. Places where your skills, your degree, and your job title don’t mean anything any more. Because the thing doing your job now doesn’t sleep, doesn’t complain, doesn’t have flings with colleagues, and doesn’t ask for a raise.
A machine with no need for you
Gil’s investments include Klarity, which uses AI to automate back office work across industries as varied as accounting, finance, health care, insurance, and law – where it helps remove the need for junior associates and legal clerks. Pricey legal work, a crucial upward mobility pipeline for generations, is especially in the crosshairs; there’s also HarveyAI, catching on fast in elite law firms across the U.S. Entire tiers of legal support are becoming obsolete. In marketing, meanwhile, firms like Copy.ai and Jasper are turning copywriters and ad creatives into legacy roles. It’s not “do more with less.” It’s “do everything with code.”
Is it heartless? That depends on whether you think hearts belong in the workplace.
Gil and his cohort don’t. To them, the human being isn’t a collaborator. It’s a friction point. A legacy system waiting to be deprecated. Unlike the robber barons of a century ago — who, however brutally, still depended on human labor to build their empires — today’s technocrats don’t need you. They need your data. Your patterns. Your output, divorced from your existence. This is a different species of capitalism. Not extractive, but excisive.
And let’s be honest — this isn’t just about greedy investors. Gil’s strategy lands because many of these jobs, for years, have been pointless. A generation of college graduates was funneled into open-plan offices to send emails, fine-tune slide decks, and sit through meetings that led nowhere. The “bulls**t job” economy, as David Graeber put it, was never built to last. But that doesn’t mean what replaces it will be better or more humane.
You can call these jobs expendable. Maybe they were. But they still structured lives. They paid mortgages. They gave people routine, insurance, and purpose. They were a way in. And now, increasingly, they’re a way out — out of the economy, out of relevance, out of the social contract.
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Ontological redesign
Some cheer this shift. Let the accountants go. Let the copywriters retrain. Let the middle managers find something “real” to do. But real where? And for whom?
The jobs replacing these eliminated roles don’t exist — not at scale, not at pay, not with stability. The idea that workers can simply upskill and move into “AI oversight” or “prompt engineering” is a Silicon Valley fairy tale. For every prompt engineer making $300K, there are a hundred people waiting tables or fighting with gig apps for scraps.
When the AI wave rolls over the white-collar workforce, there’s no levee to stop it. No new Roosevelt. No Marshall Plan for knowledge work. Just the slow, quiet disappearance of millions of people from the center of economic life. And when the lights go out in those buildings, when the consultants, creatives, and coordinators vanish from LinkedIn, what comes next?
Nothing.
Gil’s model isn’t just about economic efficiency. It’s about ontological redesign. It asks: What kinds of people should exist in a digital economy? And the answer, increasingly, is: fewer. Fewer thinkers. Fewer doers. Fewer citizens with jobs that anchor them to a class, a community, and a sense of contribution.
What remain are consumers. Subscribers. Passive users of a system run by invisible technocrats who, like Gil, don’t need to advertise. They don’t govern with slogans. They govern with math. With marginal gains. With software that logs on when you’re asleep and decides that, actually, you’re no longer needed.
There are no protests for this kind of change, no uprisings, and no villains twirling mustaches on TV. The great erasure is happening in silence — in HR spreadsheets, calendar invites that never get sent, and job postings that never go live.
And the most sinister part?
It works.
Profits go up. Costs go down. Investors cheer. Business schools start case studies. Politicians, desperate not to look Luddite, parrot the line that “AI will create more jobs than it destroys.” And they may even believe it.
But such a belief doesn’t mirror reality. In fact, it ignores it.
The automated and displaced
Let’s say you’re 42, mid-career, working at a regional law firm or a mid-tier marketing agency. You’re not a thought leader. You’re not building apps in your spare time. You’re just … working. Supporting a family, trying to get ahead.
Your firm gets acquired by one of Gil’s AI-forward portfolio companies. Your job is “automated.” No severance, just a link to an AI help center and a webinar about how to “future-proof your skills.” Good luck. Try Fiverr. Try Upwork. Try not to drown. The truth is, people like you don’t get retrained. You get sidelined.
And the longer you’re out, the harder it gets to claw your way back in. Not because you’re unqualified, but because the rules changed in the blink of an eye. Because the economy stopped needing you.
To be fair, Gil didn’t invent this trajectory. He’s just executing it more efficiently — and more quietly — than most. He’s not building a Terminator. He’s building infrastructure. Tools, workflows, and systems designed to remove human labor the way a surgeon removes a tumor: cleanly, clinically, with minimal disruption to the host.
But make no mistake. Once you strip out enough of those pieces, the whole system fails. Not with a bang, but with quiet resignation. So when your child asks what job he should pursue, what do you tell him? If a degree in law or accounting can be outpaced by an LLM trained on Reddit threads and the Harvard Law Review, where does that leave stability? What becomes of upward mobility or any sense of security at all?
Gil may not be the architect of dystopia, but he is its quiet contractor, making acquisitions one at a time.
The question isn’t whether we stop him. It’s whether we recognize what he represents and whether we’re willing to fight for a future in which relevance isn’t defined by whether or not you can be replaced by a line of code. Because if we don’t, then the most terrifying part won’t be what Gil builds.
It’ll be what he no longer needs.
Us.
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