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"We are in a historic moment in wealth creation," said CNBC wealth reporter Robert Frank at the keynote presentation of the 2026 edition of the Christie's Art + Tech Summit last week, alongside Christie's CEO Bonnie Brennan and Michael Anders, founder of the investment firm ICONIQ Capital. Frank was referring to the riches being created as big AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX go public. These initial public offerings are projected to create 20 new billionaires, while SpaceX's IPO alone is projected to have made4,400 employees into millionaires. The question at the summit was: will all this new wealth create new art collectors? Anders, Brennan, and Frank struggled to define the future desires of a new generation of mega-rich.
"AI is driving a pursuit of experience, for art, something you can get your hands on," said Anders, drawing from his experience interacting with the high-net-worth clients of ICONIQ. The speakers connected revenue increases in the first half of 2026 in luxury markets like jewelry and art-Christie's raked in $4.5 billion so far in 2026, making it the auction house's strongest first half in five years-to these IPOs. While that link between AI wealth and luxury trends can be hard to prove in those aforementioned sectors, it certainly seems to be the case in the San Francisco real estate market, where the median price of a home has jumped by $461,000 as AI employees cash in billions of dollars' worth of stocks, as per the BBC.
Yet, later in the conversation, Anders noted that though he thought AI workers would start to pursue "extreme experiences on boats and planes," he added that "they're so busy building they haven't woken up to that." Another thing they haven't seemed to wake up to is philanthropy. "There's so much fear of failure that they tend to wait until they're done running their companies."
Then, there was the issue of taste, which seems to be an overwhelming fixation among tech workers and the culture workers who hope they still have something to offer. Can we expect tech wealth to follow in the footsteps of the great patrons of art, such as publishing magnate S.I. Newhouse? While Brennan spoke a bit about education and the guidance that Christie's specialists could provide in regards to taste, she was blunt about what they come in wanting.
"It used to be that a trophy was an apartment on Park Avenue and a Picasso over the fireplace," said Brennan. "Now they want a sports team or an $11 million Jerry Garcia guitar. Young buyers are interested in pop culture."
Christie's, as always, is willing to adapt to the tastes of their clients, but the auction house also has multiple strategies for wooing tech wealth and trying to convert them to fine art.
"It was a fantasy that we could get Silicon Valley, we didn't think they would be interested in what we had," said Max Carter during the "State of the Union Art Market" roundtable, moderated by Erik Schatzker, editorial director of Bloomberg New Economy. Christie's has fostered their relationship with tech wealth by being aggressively open to selling NFTs, for example. Additionally, the sale of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's estate was another big draw for tech industry insiders who wanted a piece of the tech legend's legacy. "Digital art might have its place," said Carter. But there would always be demand for "rare, unique expressions."
Despite the conversations on AI and the state of the art market, the Summit seemed oddly unfocused. Aside from the panel "Navigating the Market" with Advisor Benjamin ‘Redbeard' Gross, a crypto investor who is an active participant in the digital art world, and Kiya Tadele, a digital artist, there was almost no representation from the artists, curators, and experts who work in digital art. Instead there were tech founders who didn't seem to know much about cultural industries, or art world participants who didn't seem to know much about tech. In fact, the Summit seemed keen to distance itself from the figures who work at the intersection. When presenting‘"Navigating the Market" Christie's Global Managing Director Marcus Fox reminded the audience that "we are post-NFT."
"I don't really want to sift through the wreckage," Fox said, and when introducing Gross and Tadele stressed to the audience that "though they use this tech" referring to Ethereum and blockchain more generally, that this conversation was not about NFTs. He further clarified that not all digital art is NFTs. While NFT has long been a "bad word" in the art world, it seemed like a missed opportunity for the Summit to not gather creative technologists and other figures to talk about issues and solutions related to the preservation, display, and sale of digital art, not to mention continued debates around copyright and datasets for training AI models, as they have in the past. It created a depressingly passive vision of the art world, holding out its hands, hoping that a newly minted AI billionaire will decide to care about buying paintings.
