The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now

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

Activelifezero.com – Seven years after commandeering the social media accounts of a 89-year-old retired senator to deliver blistering critiques of wealth concentration, two former teenage activists have walked into one of the most powerful technology firms on Earth. Henry Williams and David Oks — the pair once dubbed the “Gravel Teens” for their 2019 internet campaign — announced on X that they are joining OpenAI’s Strategic Futures team, where they will, in Oks’s words, “help prepare the world for transformative AI.”

The announcement lands with a particular jolt of irony. In May 2019, the duo had recruited Alaska’s former senator Mike Gravel to lend his name and decades of political credibility to a deliberately unserious outsider presidential bid. Their stated purpose was never to win an election but to expose what they saw as the hollow, focus-grouped language of centrist Democrats and to give voice to left-wing frustration. The stunt became a genuine cultural moment, funneling the sardonic, disaffected rhetoric of progressive podcasts and Twitter threads through the persona of a man old enough to have helped surface the Pentagon Papers.

The Original Gambit

The campaign’s signature move was a May 25, 2019 tweet posted from Gravel’s account: “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 himself did not compose the line. Williams and Oks did, along with a full slate of progressive policy proposals laid out on a dedicated campaign website.

Their rhetorical style drew heavily on the vocabulary of left-leaning media ecosystems — the irony-laden, often world-weary cadence of shows like “Chapo Trap House.” One viral post from that spring read:

“[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.”

Yet beneath the provocation, the two teenagers spoke openly of a deeper ambition. Williams told the New York Times in 2019 that the cathartic humor of progressive media 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 founded the Gravel Institute, a nonprofit designed to function as a progressive counterweight to conservative educational platforms such as PragerU. The institute produced video content featuring figures like former labor secretary Robert Reich, who dismantled common myths surrounding minimum-wage debates, and Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, who examined the relationship between oil-company profits and consumer gas prices. The channel amassed several hundred thousand YouTube subscribers and sustained itself through recurring financial support from viewers.

The OpenAI Turn

This month, however, the pair posted a very different kind of message on X. They confirmed they would be working under Dean W. Ball, a former AI policy adviser to President Donald Trump and a longtime fixture of right-wing think-tank circles. Ball, who leads the Strategic Futures unit, described his team’s mandate as thinking about the “long-range political economy and political theory outcomes from technologies like super intelligence and highly capable AI systems.”

The hiring decision, Ball explained, was made with the duo specifically in mind as a unit. He praised their combined skill set:

“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.”

Ball was emphatic that ideological alignment played no role in the decision. “I hire smart people, that’s what it comes down to. I hire the right people for the job,” he said. “I don’t care about their politics.”

Why the Shift Matters

The move raises a question that has followed the broader tech industry for years: how do progressive critics of corporate power end up inside the very institutions they once mocked? OpenAI, now valued at more than $850 billion, is not a neutral employer. Its billionaire co-founder Sam Altman told audiences in 2025 that AI would render certain categories of employment — customer service among them — “totally, totally gone.” The company’s stated mission includes fundamentally restructuring labor markets and daily routines in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Still, the hiring pattern is not unique to OpenAI. Firms like Anthropic and others in the sector are recruiting writers, philosophers, ethicists, and physicists alongside their armies of software engineers, often at a pace that mirrors the speed at which they ingest rare books into training corpora. The demand for people who can articulate the political and philosophical stakes of superintelligent systems has created a new labor market for exactly the kind of trained, rhetorically skilled progressives who once spent their twenties lampooning Silicon Valley from podcast studios.

Whether Williams and Oks see their new role as a continuation of their original project — using institutional proximity to shape how transformative technology is governed — or as a pragmatic compromise remains to be seen. What is clear is that the gap between the teenager posting inequality statistics from a retired senator’s account and the young professional advising a half-trillion-dollar AI lab on the political economy of superintelligence has narrowed dramatically in seven years. The establishment they once sought to embarrass now employs them, and the questions they once posed from the outside are now, at least in part, theirs to answer from within.

Oks and Williams responded to inquiries through an OpenAI spokesperson. Magowan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.