The Hidden and the Untold — 24 September 2025

The World You Don’t See

Forces You’ve Never Heard Of: ASML, Grosvenor, Illumina, ITER, Palantir.

We like to think we know who runs the world. Apple. Google. A handful of billionaires grinning from magazine covers. 

But step off the glossy page and the picture blurs. The real power often lives behind closed doors, in companies with names you’ve never heard, in families who prefer silence, in projects most people will never visit.

This series is about them — the ones who shape our civilisation from the shadows. The hidden. The untold.

ASML: The Dutch Workshop That Prints Tomorrow

I once stood outside ASML’s HQ in Veldhoven. Ordinary building. Almost boring. Nothing like the world’s most important tech company should look. Yet inside, they build machines so complex that NASA engineers walk out shaking their heads.

They’re called EUV lithography machines. Each one taller than a house, worth about $200 million, flown in on multiple jumbo jets. There are fewer than a thousand of them in existence. And without them? No iPhones. No Nvidia GPUs. No AI.

Washington knows this. So does Beijing. Whoever controls ASML, controls the speed of progress.

“ASML doesn’t just sell machines; it sells the future itself.”

The Grosvenors: The Family Who Owns Central London

Take a walk through Belgravia on a crisp London morning. White terraces gleam, Bentleys line the kerbs, and it all feels like a set from a period drama. But here’s the secret: much of this land isn’t just London. It’s Grosvenor land.

The Grosvenor family — headed by Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster — owns some 300 acres of the most expensive property in the capital: Belgravia, Mayfair, chunks of Chelsea. Their company, Grosvenor Group, spreads across Europe, North America, Asia. Hugh himself is Britain’s youngest billionaire aristocrat, a godson of King Charles III.

They don’t give TED Talks. They don’t need to. Every brick in Mayfair already whispers their name.

“The Grosvenors don’t need to shout; London itself speaks for them.”

Illumina: Reading Life, One Code at a Time

In 2003, sequencing a genome cost $3 billion. Today it’s under $1,000. That miracle has one name: Illumina.

From San Diego, Illumina dominates genomics. Its machines read three billion letters of human DNA faster than anyone thought possible. Doctors use the tech to predict cancers, design treatments, decide which drugs are safe for you.

But shadows follow. Regulators say Illumina is too dominant. Privacy activists ask: do you really want your DNA stored in corporate servers? Whatever the answer, if you’ve heard of “precision medicine”, Illumina was standing quietly in the room.

“Illumina is writing tomorrow’s medicine in the alphabet of life.”

ITER: Building a Star in Southern France

Drive through Provence and you’ll pass lavender fields, vineyards… and suddenly, a construction site that looks like science fiction. ITER — the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

Its ambition? To bottle a star. To replicate the fusion reaction of the sun, right here on Earth. If it works, we’re talking about clean, endless energy that makes fossil fuels look like smoke from a candle.

The scale is absurd. Magnets bigger than buildings. Scientists from 35 countries. Billions of euros sunk into a dream that most people have never even heard of. But if ITER succeeds, it could be the quiet revolution that saves us from ourselves.

“ITER is not building a machine; it’s bottling a star.”

Palantir: The Company That Knows Before You Do

Palantir sounds like Tolkien — and that’s no accident. The name comes from the “seeing stones” of Middle-earth. Founded in 2003 with CIA seed money, the company builds software that can chew through oceans of data.

Governments use it to track terrorists, monitor pandemics, predict supply chain failures. It reportedly helped in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Today, it whispers in the ears of Washington, London, Brussels — but you’ll never see it in an app store.

Critics warn of mass surveillance. Admirers call it indispensable. Either way, Palantir is already wired into the nervous system of the modern state.

“Palantir doesn’t predict the future; it calculates it.”

And Still They Stay Silent

ASML bends light into chips. The Grosvenors shape cities through deeds of land. Illumina writes in DNA. ITER reaches for a bottled star. Palantir peers through the fog of data.

Five names you won’t see on billboards. Five forces without which our world would falter.

They don’t shout. They don’t seek likes or headlines. They prefer the shadows. And maybe that’s the point. 

Because while we’re distracted by noise, the real world is being built — quietly, patiently — by those who never step into the light.

“Look closer. The story of our age isn’t told by the loudest voices, but by the quietest hands.”