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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.
Of course they won’t have any friends. Their first loyalty is to their class interests as business executives. Thats the dynamic that puts them into a position of being able to exercise social power in the first place. Without said wealth backing them, they have no policies or playground in society to experiment with. All they can do is pay lip service.
Their class interests are defined along their wealth. These people aren’t ideological subjects in the sense that Islam still dominates the consciousness of the Iranian elite. They are still obedient along with the rest of the population. Tech CEO’s here throw their money around treating society like it’s their personal plaything to mess with. Some are dangerous ideologues no doubt, but you saw just how frail that was when so many of them did a 180 after Trump returned for a second term.
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