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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
My take has been that tech CEOs, as the blue tribers they are, will never stop taking loyalty oaths to the left, but as billionaire capitalists, they will be hated by the exact same class they pledge loyalty to. As a result, they have absolutely no friends and nobody who will run cover for them. That leaves them facing a bunch of hit pieces and getting no puff pieces, as well as no fans willing to go to war for them.
Elon musk might have alot of haters, but he has a ton of rabid superfans going to war on the internet trying to squash anything negative about him. And it kind of works, normies who aren't plugged directly into the anti-trump programming machine just think he's a awkward nerdy rocket man. Meanwhile non-tech CEOs know to shut up, and make their loyalty oaths in private, if they still feel the need to. Who even knows what the CEO of Boeing or Walmart thinks about some issue or another, or even who they are. Meanwhile Sam can't help but get on stage at every opportunity, and open his mouth and say something that will piss off another chunk of the shrinking group of people who don't hate him yet.
Tech execs are jacked up on hopium hoping that AI models get significantly better in the next few years. In an attempt to get ahead of the curve, they're adopting policies and methods that assume those models are already here.
The fact that the majority of all code that has ever been created in history has been created since the start of 2026 is actually an incredibly bad thing. Code itself is a burden, and is only there because of the functionality it enables. And I haven't seen any major improvement in the functionality offered by major companies recently at all. In fact it often seems that things are getting worse.
Sam Hyde's Dear Elon video goes into this quite a bit. Right-wingers don't care that he's a weirdo obsessed with electric cars and who has tons of children he doesn't actually raise with a dozen different women. So long as he is willing to side with us on the core issues we care about (like immigration) or at least not be actively hostile against it (like he seems to be with religion), the right is willing to accept and love him, warts and all. It's when he sided with Vivek Ramaswamy's overtly anti-white and anti-American views on immigration that a lot of the love the right was showing for him evaporated overnight.
Personally I've never loved (nor hated) Elon, I've always seen him as a rich, sometimes entertaining weirdo who finally fixed the space industry. But his interests aren't mine, and never have been. When our interests align I'll gladly accept the help, but I will never expect him to be a reliable ally.
Personal opinion: I don't give a damn about Elon's opinions either way, he makes cool stuff happen and I'm glad he's around. World would be less interesting without the guy.
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