Opinion Sam Altman back at OpenAI: Are tech bros the new Kardashians?

Once upon a time, art imitated life. Prehistoric cave paintings often depicted hunts, humans and animals, telling stories through real-life images. Millennia later, especially after mass communication became possible, you could say there was a reversal, real began taking its cues from reel. Young men began to wear their caps backwards in the manner of Holden Caulfield after reading The Catcher in the Rye; there were the Friends-inspired “Rachel” haircuts and generations of young men trying to catch chickens and shadow box after watching Rocky. Things got really meta with “reality” TV — fake reality pretending to be real, aspiring to be a genre. And now, the Kardashians have competition from an unlikely source — the (Big) Tech Bros.

Take the weekend gone by. First, there was the delicious irony (as pointed out by many a meme) of Open AI CEO Sam Altman losing his job — because of artificial intelligence and potential regulatory issues. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella jumped to his rescue, and Altman has a job with the OG Big Tech company. Even as the soap opera of Altman’s employment was unfolding, spotlight stealer extraordinaire Elon Musk threatened the advertisers deserting X (formerly Twitter) with a “thermonuclear lawsuit”. Cynics may argue that the atomic threat is a way to distract from the Space X rocket explosion — after all, reality TV demands a bit of intrigue. Of course, swish-pans and threats aren’t always enough to hold the attention of an audience with the social media-induced attention deficit. That’s why, perhaps, there’s the tantalising on-again, off-again fight between Musk and Facebook’s Zuck.

Advertisement

Why do billionaires, some of the most powerful people in the world, insist on acting out a WWE-like plotline — brash, hyperbolic and driven by the most obvious of insecurities? The easy answer is “boys will be boys”. More likely, though, they have figured out, as the halo around their achievements fades and calls for regulation increase, that it’s better to be a distraction than the centre of attention.