2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you." https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
2014: "Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent..." https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president
Now, this isn't about pg specifically. Maybe he had reservations at the time but still thought he was making the right decision, maybe he's since changed his mind, maybe he hasn't but has pretty well moved on from this scene. Not interesting.
I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system.
Maybe a moralistic, basically decent person couldn't get ChatGPT launched and turned in to the household topic of discussion it is today; maybe nice people can't build cheap rockets. Maybe in the future, when making an endorsement for a leadership position in some company, someone might be brazen enough to say aloud, "I believe this person is sufficiently nasty to make us all more successful."
And so then the question is, does society net benefit more from the moralists or more from the capitalists? Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? How many Altmans can we have before something goes horribly, irreversibly wrong?
Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?
I even think believing this idea (you need to be ruthless to succeed) is dangerous. And if you behave like a boss from the 90s at some point you will be exposed. I've seen places where these people rule and they only have high turnover with the exception of these few shops where investors are funneling tons of money so employees just stopped caring.
And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work.
Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy.
Bezos was at DE Shaw and called the Internet as a vehicle for commerce on the early side, to put it mildly.
Ellison saw that what we now call RDBMS was going to Be Big and substantially implemented the early versions personally.
Now this isn’t a license for any of the icky shit any of these folks have done since, but all of them put some of the points their character class rolled into “actually build something”.
Altman put all his points into manipulate if not blackmail people around me until the machine coughs up the next stair on the ladder.
I’m generally in favor of “less bond villains”, but that’s not the topic of the thread and neatly bypasses another key point which is that all the other bond villains you mentioned (and I’ve met a few of them) have some redeeming quality as opposed to, Jesus, could a fucking Kennedy get away with a farce like this?
Stop changing the subject. I know all those essays by heart. I was synthesizing them with inside YC baseball the day they were published.
It's fascinating how nobody was making this claim of a non-technical Musk up until the moment he stopped being loyal to one particular wing of US politics. Now we see a concerted effort to diminish his achievements. Do you people really think this will work? There is endless testimony from people - independent of Musk and in the space industry - saying that the dude is an honest to god rocket scientist who single-handedly made SpaceX happen through sheer force of will, engineering ability and personal investment. He routinely displays a fluent understanding of orbital mechanics well beyond what any normal CEO would be expected to display. Anyone can read his bio or the testimony of people who work in the space industry and understand that Musk was (and still is) intimately involved in every aspect of SpaceX, down to detailed engineering decisions.
Shotwell meanwhile is regularly described as managing the business development side. She negotiates with customers and oversees day to day operations. This is critical work that she clearly does very well, and she has an engineering background. But I can't find examples of people claiming that she drives product development or overall strategy for SpaceX.
Being fed the tour guide's summary and high-level overview of an event is not the same thing as knowing how they work.
Elon Musk's virtues start and stop at the way projects were funded. He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. It's well established that his takes are merely performative and with a substance of a pre-pubrescent edgy rant.
If there was any value in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the hot mess that his tenure has been, is to put the spotlight on how incidental the success of companies like SpaceX is regarding Elon Musk's influence. You're talking about the guy behind stunts like the "pedo guy" incident and yanking live servers out of their sockets as a cost-cutting measure.
Apart from Zip2 which he started from scratch and wrote the early code for, SpaceX which he stated from scratch, Neuralink likewise, OpenAI which he co founded and was the biggest early funder for and probably some others.
Could you please elaborate what you mean by that?
For better or worse Mark was/is able to see some deep minimal structure that allows what used to be a web page and is now a mobile app to elicit responses that bear an uncanny resemblance to the way human beings behave and interact in a setting unmediated by either a priest or a protocol. On the properties he runs people act a hell of a lot like they do in a bar or any other place where sapiens mix and match.
I’m not sure that turbocharging spinal-reflex humanity via computer networks is going all that well, which is one of the main reasons I parted ways with the endeavor once the true scope for mechanical advantage became clear, but he clearly sees things about what motivates people that Freud was throwing darts at.
I might have been one of the few true assassins he sent after people like Vic Gunderotta or Evan Spiegel and certainly he knows how to delegate the mechanics of leaving would-be adversaries on the scrap heap of history, but he knew who to send the hitters after and when.
He started off looking like a Lore from Star Trek, and then took the criticism seriously enough to learn to present as a genuine human.
Might have been around the time FB was getting named by the UN as bearing some responsibility for a genocide though.
So if anything, for him at least, the opposite.
Not so much wealth hoarders but products of the capitalist system where you can own a company and it may do well and become worth lots of money.
And what is the alternative? Communist communal ownership of the means of production is not really cracking along these days.
Are we working too hard on the wrong yet interesting problems or do we just need a sufficiently amoral person to manipulate, harass and cheat their way into partnerships, sales and general interest? Do we accept such behaviour is noble if we make enough success and money from it?
One of them doesn't belong on the list. Fossil fuel and legacy automobile companies killed EVs[1][2], bought all the battery patents and made sure there were no EVs made. Until Tesla made them possible, by building gigafactories so battery is not a constraint and supercharger network.
Why is the list restricted to only a few tech billionaires? Where are the fossil fuel billionaires who actively do harm? 10 million people die every year from air pollution, and fossil fuels are only possible because of $7 trillion subsidies/year.
Why isn't Gates on the list?[3] Koch brothers? Hundreds of middle-eastern fossil fuel princes? Warren Buffett who owns Coke (39 grams of sugar/can) fast food chains, cookies, candy, ice cream companies, fossil fuel companies, utilities that actively lobby against solar/wind.
Dan and Farris Wilks, Oil billionaires who are making policy changes on many issues? [4][5][6]
Where are the financial billionaires, real estate, healthcare, insurance, fast fashion, chemicals?
[1] A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...
[3] That's why Gates personally intervened to scuttle the Oxford team's plan to make its publicly funded vaccine research free to all, coercing them into doing an exclusive license deal with Astrazeneca: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/
[4] https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fr...
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-poli...
[6] https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billion...
They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested, i.e. put to work creating things that people want.
> moralists ... capitalists
History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets).
Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must have big business.
Adam Smith saw "Theory of Moral Sentiments" as the foundation of his later work on "Wealth of Nations", right? ie that morals were a necessary prerequisite to markets etc.
As for abortion, the debate there rests on a conflict of the rights of two people, and there isn't any clear answer to it based on rights.
Marriage is tangled up with the rights of children. Children are not fully formed humans and we allot them a subset of the rights of adults. Marriage without children is an issue of morality, not rights.
I don't know what mesopothemia is.
Second, places like Babylon had a very sophisticated legal, financial and administrative system, with tons of written evidence preserved in the form of clay tables surviving.
The Code of Hammurabi being cited as one of the most important pieces of written evidence of a code of laws in ancient times.
The fact is they have enough money to have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults AND ALSO invest a shitload of money.
History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy. I hope we can find a way forward without that "solution" happening here.
You can have big business without robber barons. I'm not sure that exploitation is a necessity to produce things like chat bots, even really good chatbots. Pretending that these people are not hoarding wealth is not really going to answer the question, though.
Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent.
> History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy.
History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.
> You can have big business without robber barons.
Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.
Historically there have been swings in inequality. It can just lead to people voting in left wing governments who tax the rich a lot.
Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).
A morality based system could be, for example, you do not have the right to the fruits of your labor, you automatically owe those fruits to others.
I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.
> a wide inductive gap
A book could be easily written about it.
In my life time I've seen being gay or smoking weed (for example) turn from immoral to widely accepted. Kind of hard to consider these shifting sentiments as a solid foundation for anything.
Lost in the food fight over today's robberbarons is recognition that small and medium new business formation continues to decline.
IMHO, those are the job creators and wealth creation (vs mere wealth transfer) I prefer we boosted. I trust billionaires will somehow muddle along with or without our help.
The more large, visible winners you have in a society the more us little people are incentivized to buy those lottery tickets. Crowd funding, angel investing and small funds do exist. Or even Robinhood.
You’ve previously argued for the merits of e.g. the Gates fortune, and as someone who went head-to-head with MSFT in the springtime of its excellence and I’m inclined to believe the guy who was there.
In your opinion, which you know I respect as much as any hacker living, did Altman build anything or do anything of value to be a billionaire off AirBnB stock certainly less than 3, probably less than one year after Loopt was sold at a loss with Conway’s finger on the scales?
I'm sorry to say I don't know enough about Altman to form any kind of opinion on him.
For example, if someone believes that the concept of rights isn't based on morals, I'd suspect they're using a very narrow definition of 'morals'.
Morals are something one learns.
And you're wrong. These people do have cash vaults, but they're other peoples' cash vaults. How else do you think they buy things? And they're living in their multi-million dollar mansions and yachts out of benevolence? Please.
They all ended up as hell-holes.
I'm not really interested in repeating that history.
It is not at all necessary for wealthy people to be benevolent in order to contribute to society. Nor do they need to be nice people, nor do they need to be unselfish.
The free market harnesses selfishness for the benefit of society. It's why it works so well, as excoriating selfish people.
For example, the Wright Brothers invented the airplane so they could get rich off of licensing the patents. Dig into it, and that's the bald, unvarnished, truth. They did get modestly wealthy, but were poor businessmen. Look at what their selfishness did - glorious airplane travel! Have you ever flown on an airplane? You're benefiting from the selfishness of the Wrights.
BTW, everybody is selfish. I am selfish. You are selfish. Everyone who says they are unselfish are selfish. That's what a billion years of evolution did to us.
The Panama Papers showed this to be a myth. The ultra rich are in fact extracting wealth and hoarding it in tax havens.
You're correct that for a large and prosperous society you need some large organizations, but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs.
I suspect you've defined a tautology by assuming that anyone running a large organization is a sociopathic megalomaniac.
But let's take an example. Which do you think is better run - NASA or SpaceX?
There are endless numbers of idiots in black turtlenecks being absolute dicks to other co-working space members because they believe that being a dick is a prerequisite to commercial success. They are clearly cargo-culting something.
Most CEOs of large organisations appear to be psychopaths. Is this because you need to be a psychopath to run a large organisation? Or because you need to be a psychopath to get to be a CEO of a large organisation? (these are different things).
It does make sense that non-psychopathic founders don't build the kind of scale of organisation that we're having such problems with. A "normal" person can accept an exit at the merely "more money than you'll ever be able to spend in your lifetime" level, rather than scaling to FAAANG level. Likewise, non-psychopathic executives are probably at a disadvantage when climbing a career ladder.
Psychopathic CEOs make psychopathic decisions, based on their own mental dysfunction. We're seeing this in the Enshittification of Everything; though probably more immediately and clearly in Musk's antics at X: ego over every other consideration.
If we could wave a wand and appoint non-psychopathic CEOs at all the large tech companies, would we see them change behaviour and solve a lot of the problems themselves? Or is it inherent in the organisation culture now, or a required feature of the organisational culture in order to grow so large?
We have historically curbed the extreme capitalist tendencies that build such large organisations. We have anti-trust laws, and all sorts of regulations to control the damage that unbridled capitalism does, and break up large monopolistic organisations. Do we need to draw that line a lot lower for tech?
I like Musk's version of twitter better than the old version. His tweets often make me laugh.
