The Cult of Personality
AI is not about The CEOs
# The Cult of Personality: AI is Not About the CEOs
Stewart Alsop has been watching tech for nearly five decades. When he says Sam Altman is one of the worst CEOs he's observed — that Altman "wouldn't recognize a strategy if it hit him in the face" — it's worth taking seriously. The evidence he marshals is real: $180 billion raised, Sora canceled, no coherent executive team, a podcast network acquired for reasons nobody can explain.
I don't want to argue with the observations. I want to argue with the framing.
The personality critique is the oldest and laziest form of tech journalism. It's satisfying in the moment and explains almost nothing. If OpenAI replaced Altman tomorrow with the most disciplined, operationally rigorous CEO in the industry, would the fundamental dynamics change? Would the capital stop flowing? Would the valuation compress? Would the strategic incoherence — which is partly to do with how early stage the company is, partly structural, partly a function of OpenAI's bizarre nonprofit/for-profit hybrid — suddenly resolve?
The real story isn't Sam Altman. The real story is what kind of market produces an $850 billion valuation for a company with no coherent strategy. That's a story about capital behaving like it's buying the next big thing before it is big. It's a story about a moment so large, and yet uncertain, that investors are terrified of being left out more than they're worried about being wrong. This is rational behavior for such a game changing moment.
Alsop contrasts Altman unfavorably with Anthropic's discipline and Musk's delivery record. But comparisons are not fair in this fast-changing ecosystem.
The Economist asked this week how to control "the five men" who control AI. It is the wrong question.
Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, Musk and Zuckerberg are not the right focus. The actual technology, tools and capabilities are.
The cult of personality — positive or negative — is how commenters avoid the harder questions. It's more comfortable to say "bad CEO" than to ask why the market rewards him anyway. That question is more interesting, more unsettling, and more useful.
That's what this week is actually about.
John Thornhill's FT piece adds a sharper diagnosis than most of the week's commentary manages. The AI leaders now calling for calmer rhetoric didn't just fail to prevent public anxiety — they engineered it.
The existential risk narrative was a deliberate communications strategy, optimized for credibility in Washington and credibility with investors. It worked on those audiences. It also landed, inevitably, in the broader public imagination as confirmation that the thing being built is genuinely dangerous. We are dangerous therefore we are important does not land. The public only hears the first part of the sentence.
That is more than irony. It is a leadership failure dressed up as responsibility. The people who most needed a positive, honest account of what AI means for their lives — younger workers facing credential inflation, gig workers watching their market compress, communities living beside the data centers — got "we might be building something dangerous, and we need to be regulated." That is not a message. It is a bet that safety would become a moat.
The same leaders now tasked with undoing the dread are the ones who built it. Thornhill circles that point. This editorial says it directly.
Thornhill's other piece this week — the Lunch with the FT profile of Dario Amodei — completes the picture. Amodei has warned that AI will eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. He is simultaneously raising $30 billion to build the technology doing it, funding PACs for stricter safety regulation, and coordinating with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft on frameworks for how frontier models get released.
He describes the open-source community and smaller competitors as "chaotically oriented actors." He says he wants AI regulated like cars and aeroplanes. Both things are true, and both serve the same interest: regulation written at Anthropic's scale, meeting Anthropic's compliance costs, enforced on a market where Anthropic already has a $380 billion valuation and a seat at every table.
This is not conspiracy. Sadly Amodei and Altman, and certainly Musk and Hassabis, all believe that AI might be unsafe. On the face of it that is bizarre. AI is software operating within human-run systems, deployment controls, and institutional constraints; the real risks are mostly misuse, concentration of power, and bad governance, not science-fiction autonomy. But insofar as there are risks the right narrative is a positive narrative about what the platforms can and are doing to optimize its utility while minimizing any risks. Not a "help, it's dangerous" but a "wow, it's awesome, and we are making it safe."
It is the normal logic of incumbency: build a moat, then legislate it into a monopoly or oligopoly. The people digging AI's grave are the same ones insisting they're the only responsible diggers. The self-defeating prophecy — existential risk as marketing, regulation as competitive strategy — runs all the way down.
Do you want to lead, or narrate yourself as a victim? You cannot do both for long.
When I started writing this editorial I wanted to accuse the observers, and especially the critical observers of AI, as creating a cult of personality aimed at demonizing the CEOs. As I reflect it is clear that those leaders are placing themselves in the spotlight as being responsible for possibly bad outcomes. They have created their own cult-like platform. In that context it is little wonder they are being demonized by listeners.
How to change that? We need real technical, business and social leadership that champions solutions and gains. Leave others to do the demonizing. Self-demonization is not just a bad look. It is a bad strategy. Maybe look at NVidia's Jensen Huang for a clue about how to be an AI leader.