You cannot make friends with the rock stars...if you're going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist. First, you never get paid much, but you will get free records from the record company.
[There’s] fuckin’ nothin' about you that is controversial. God, it's gonna get ugly. And they're gonna buy you drinks, you're gonna meet girls, they're gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know, it sounds great, but these people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars and they will ruin rock 'n' roll and strangle everything we love about it.
Because they're trying to buy respectability for a form that's gloriously and righteously dumb.
Lester Bangs, Almost Famous (2000)
I am tired of hearing about Mark Zuckerberg's "new look," in part because I don't care about it, and in part because I see it as yet another blatant — and successful — attempt to divert attention from the outright decay of the platforms he runs.
It doesn't matter that Mark Zuckerberg has a gold chain, nor is it of any journalistic importance to ask him why he's wearing it, as any questions around or articles about his new look are, by definition, a distraction from the very real and damaging things that Mark Zuckerberg does every day, like how Facebook and Instagram are intentionally manipulative and harmful platforms or how Meta, as a company, creates far more emissions than it can cover with renewable energy, or that Meta's AI product's only differentiating feature is that its 500 million monthly active users are helping kill our planet by generating meaningless slop.
In a just world, every piece about Mark Zuckerberg would include something about how decrepit Meta's products are, its weak-handed approach to drug cartels and human traffickers, or how Facebook's algorithm regularly boosted and supported anti-vax groups. For over a decade, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have acted with a complete disregard for user safety, all while pedling a product that actively impedes users from seeing their friends' posts, abusing them with a continual flow of intrusive and annoying ads.
Yet all Mark Zuckerberg has to do to make that go away is wear a shirt that sort of references Julius Caesar for the Washington Post to say that he "has the swagger of a Roman emperor," and publish a glossy feature about Zuckerberg's new "bro-ified" look that asserts he has "raised his stock among start-up founders as Silicon Valley shifts to the right" — a statement that suggests, for whatever reason, that Mark Zuckerberg is some sort of apolitical actor rather than someone that hired a former member of the Bush Administration to run public policy, who in turn intervened to make sure that the COVID conspiracy movie "Plandemic" could run rampant on the platform despite Facebook's internal team trying to block it.
Instead, Mark Zuckerberg has, and I quote the Post, transformed himself from "a dorky, democracy-destroying CEO into a dripped-out, jacked AI accelerationist in the eyes of potential Meta recruits."
I cannot express how little this matters, and how terribly everybody is falling for the bait. The Post's piece has some level of critique, but continually returns to the tropes of Zuckerberg being "unapologetic" for unspecific acts, all while actively helping refurbish his image as somebody unbound by consequence or responsibility.
While I understand why people might write this up — after all, Zuckerberg is a public figure with immense influence — the only reason that he is dressing differently is so that people will publish a bunch of things talking about how he's dressing differently, and then pontificate about what that means, doing a bunch of free marketing for the unfireable chief executive billionaire of a company built on the back of manipulating and hurting its users.
Yet this keeps happening. Back in August, the Wall Street Journal published an incredibly stupid piece about "Elon Musk's Walk With Jesus," a piece entirely built off of a series of tweets about how Musk suggested that if we don't "stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish." The media simply cannot help itself with people of power. It must decode everything, turning a meaningless and meandering Musk conversation with crybaby demagogue Jordan Peterson into an anecdote about Musk being a "cultural Christian," rather than saying absolutely fucking nothing about it, because every single time guys like Musk say things like this they want people to write it up.
It's branding. When Musk tweets some stupid thing, he's doing so to get a reaction, to get the media to write it up, to create more noise and more attention, and to continually interfere with people's perspectives, in the same way that right wing grifters like Russell Brand convert to Christianity. It's all a fucking grift, and every time the media participates they are helping whitewash the reputations of ultra-rich and ultra-powerful people.
While it may seem (and be) harmless to just talk about Zuckerberg's new clothes, the problem comes when you start interpreting what they mean. There is no reason for the Wall Street Journal to try and connect — and I quote — Zuckerberg's "gilded Zuckaissance" (fuck you, man) with "a resurging period for [Meta's] business." These two things are only connected if you, the journalist, decide to connect them, and connecting them is both what Zuckerberg wants you to do and outright irresponsible. There is absolutely no connection between these two events, other than the desperation of some members of the media to add meaning to an event that is transparently, obviously, painfully built to get headlines that connect his image to the state of his company.
By telling the story of an "evolved" Zuckerberg that's "unapologetic," the media whitewashes a man who has continually acted with disregard for society and exploited hundreds of millions of people in pursuit of eternal growth. By claiming he's "evolving" or "changing" or "growing" or anything like that, writers are actively working to forgive Zuckerberg, all without ever explaining what it is they're forgiving him for, because those analyses almost never happen.
To be clear, Zuckerberg started dressing differently in May, yet he's still getting headlines about it in October. This has been a successful — and loathsome — PR campaign, one where the media has fallen for it hook, line and sinker, all while ignoring the environmental damage of Meta's pursuit of generative AI and the fact that the company fucking sucks.
This is a problem of focus and accountability, and illustrative of a continual failure to catch a conman in the act.
Let me give you an example — somehow there's only one story out there about the massive problems in Meta's ad platform, where ad buyers have seen thousands of dollars of losses from incorrect targeting or ignored budgets, with one buyer reporting "high-five-figure" losses because ads meant for younger audiences exclusively targeted people aged 65 and older. Meta makes around 99% of its revenue from advertising, and it's been just over a year since a massive bug caused thousands of advertisers to run campaigns that were "essentially ineffective" according to CNBC.
One would think that there being ruinous bugs at the heart of the sole revenue stream of a $1.5 trillion company would be more important than its CEO dressing like a 90s rapper, and you'd be incorrect. Zuckerberg's new look is far more important than basically any other story about Facebook or Instagram or Meta this year, because, despite the obvious harms of these executives, there is still a fascination with them — and, I'd argue, a desperation to try and make these men more interesting and deep than they really are.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman are not, despite their achievements, remarkable people. They are dull, and while they might be intelligent, they’re far from intellectual, appearing to lack any real interests, hobbies or joys, other than Zuckerberg's brief dalliance with mixed martial arts. They all read the same shit, they talk the same way, they have the same faux-intellectualism that usually boils down to how they're "big thinkers" that think about "big things" like "intelligence" and "consciousness," when what they mostly do is dance around issues without adding anything substantive, because they don't really believe anything.
At the core of this problem is, in my mind, a distinct unwillingness — perhaps it's a kind of cognitive dissonance — to believe that somebody could be so rich, powerful, and mediocre. It's much easier to see Sam Altman as a "genius master-class strategist" than as just another rich guy that's really good at manipulating other rich guys into doing things for him, or Elon Musk as a "precocious genius" rather than a boorish oaf that's exceedingly good at leveraging both assets and his personal brand.
It's far more comfortable to see the world as one where these people have "earned" their position, and that they, at the top of their industries, are special people, because otherwise you'd have to consider that for the most part, they're all frightfully average.
There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.
The problem isn't so much how dull they are, but how desperate some are to make them exceptional. Sam Altman's rise to power came, in part, from members of the media propping him up as a genius, with the New Yorker saying that "Altman's great strengths are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems," a needless and impossible-to-prove romanticization of a person done in the name of rationalizing his success. Having watched and listened to hours of Altman talking, I can tell you that he's a pretty bright guy, but also deeply mediocre — one of thousands of different "pretty smart Stanford guys" that you'll find in any bar in the Bay Area.
The New Yorker's article is deeply bizarre, because it chooses to simply assume that people like Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman are, by virtue of being rich, are also smart, and that because they think Sam Altman is smart, he is, indeed, smart. Altman's history is steeped in failure and deceit, yet he knows that all he has to do is say some vague epithet about how superintelligence is "a few thousand days away" to get attention, because the media will not sit and think "hey, is Sam Altman someone that would lie to us?" despite him continually lying about OpenAI's progress toward this very goal.
Silicon Valley exists in a kind of bizarre paradox where the youngest companies are often met with the most scrutiny and attention as its most powerful figures can destroy their products and lie in public with barely a hint of analysis. Meanwhile, the most powerful companies enjoy a level of impunity, with their founders asked only the most superficial, softball of questions — and deflecting anything tougher by throwing out dead cats when the situation demands.
Note: I am saying that said scrutiny should be equal!
OpenAI is probably the most flagrant example — a horrible business that burns money with a product that lacks any mass-market product market fit where most members of the media still have faith because...well, Uber lost a lot of money, I guess? And look at it now, a company that, after fifteen years, occasionally makes a profit.
There is such unbelievable faith in men who have continually failed to live up to it — an indomitable belief that this much money couldn't be wrong, and that the people running these companies are anything other than selfish opportunists that will say what they need to as a means of getting what they want, and that they got there not through a combination of privilege, luck and connections, but through some sort of superior intellect and guile.
The problem — the real human cost — is that by mythologizing these men, by putting them on a pedestal, we allow them to alter the terms of reality. Generative AI's destructive, larcenous growth exists in large part because people buy Sam Altman's shit, and because they believe that he's somebody special, a genius operator that can do the impossible, which in turn helps them platform his half-truths and outright lies.
Mark Zuckerberg has weathered the storm of his decaying services and the horrifying things that Meta does on a daily basis because people still want him to be some sort of Silicon Valley hero, and he will continue to accumulate wealth and power while actively harming both his products and society at large as long as we keep treating him as such.
I am serious when I say a different approach to these men would have created vastly different outcomes. Had Sam Altman not been mythologized, there is far less of a chance that people — both investors and the media — would've taken OpenAI this seriously, and questions around profitability and sustainability would've been immediate problems to address versus "issues" to be "mitigated."
Had Mark Zuckerberg been held to account in any measurable way at the beginning, rather than given softball interviews dressed up as criticism, we would've likely had far more immediate and meaningful legislation around our personal data, and far fewer opportunities for Meta to grow based on actively abusing its users.
Had Elon Musk and Tesla been interrogated earlier, I doubt Musk would still be CEO, as the ugliness that we see from him on a daily basis has always been there. Instead, Erin Biba had her life ruined by his acolytes with few standing to defend her.
Even now, Musk runs rampant, spreading disinformation about hurricane relief efforts and intimating that a presidential candidate should be killed “as a joke,” all while running Twitter into the ground, its revenue cratering by 84%, and lying so often that there’s an entire website chronicling his fibs. Musk has repeatedly and unquestionably proven he’s both a horrible person and a terrible businessman, a craven liar — especially with regard to Tesla products.
Yet the media still takes the idea that he’d launch a robotaxi network seriously, even though Musk has been lying about this shit since 2019. At Tesla’s We, Robot event — held, bizarrely, in the early hours of Friday, October 11 — Musk once again promised that the Robotaxi was imminent, with the company aiming to launch in 2026 or 2027.
To the media’s credit, some publications called bullshit. Business Insider spoke to actual industry analysts, which pointed out that: a.) Musk has yet to deliver on full-self-driving technology; b.) Tesla didn’t actually provide evidence for how it would reach the “higher levels of autonomy” needed; c.) Tesla would need to get regulatory approval for literally every part of the vehicle; and d.) Tesla would be competing against established companies like Uber and Lyft, as well as Waymo, who all enjoy a massive head-start.
Others, regrettably, were all too happy to take Musk at his word. The Guardian, which generally isn’t afraid to go head-to-head with big tech, was almost entirely uncritical in its coverage — save for a few paragraphs buried at the end, where it noted that Tesla faces legal action over its failure to deliver full self-driving technology, and over alleged safety driving in existing autonomous features.
The Verge did slightly better, noting the years of “false promises and blown deadlines,” and the regulatory challenges ahead, but it still let itself down with the headline “Elon Musk’s robotaxi is finally here.” It isn’t. You saw a prototype and heard a speech.
Then we have the auto press - you know, the people supposed to act as the watchdogs for the auto industry. Top Gear and AutoCar both delivered sickening puff pieces that gushed over the “relaxed, lounge feel” of the interior, or, in the case of the latter, literally could have been a press release. A complete abdication of one’s responsibilities, deferring to a man who has, time and time again, proven himself to be a chronic liar.
I didn’t even mention the ridiculous “debut” of Tesla’s Optimus “robots” — allegedly “AI-powered” “humanoid robots” that could “assist with household chores.” While there may have been some outlets that were immediately suspicious, far too many simply ran exactly what Musk said and acted as if he’d proven that these were actual robots walking around and doing things on their own accord, as opposed to what was blatantly obvious: that they were controlled remotely by human operators.
In a just world, Musk’s events would be covered like a press conference from a disgraced politician, with the default assumption that he’s going to lie because he almost certainly will. As I previously noted, he already lied about the Robotaxi, saying in 2019 that there would be “more than 1 million robotaxis on the road next year,” with “next year” meaning 2020, which was four years ago. Musk has now updated his prediction to “before 2027.” What are we doing here?
The reason that Elon Musk is able to lie and get away with it is that a far-too-large chunk of the press seems dedicated to swallowing every single one of them. No amount of followup journalism will ever counterbalance the automatic stenography as his events take place — the assumption being, I assume, that readers “want this” — nor will it help when the majority of articles summarizing what happened blandly repeat exactly what promises Musk has made without calling them out as outright lies.
And no, it doesn’t really help to bury a statement or two in there about how Musk has “yet to deliver.” The story should start with the fact he’s a liar and end with the new lies he’s telling.
The media needs to start folding its arms and refusing to accept the terms that these people set. Every single article about OpenAI should include something about the brittleness of its business, and about the many, many half-truths of Sam Altman — yet more often than not these pieces feel like they simply accept that whatever he’s saying is both reasonable and accurate. The same goes for Musk, or Zuckerberg, or Pichai, or Nadella. All of these men have grown rich and powerful off the back of a lack of pushback by the media.
You cannot — and should not — separate these men from their actions, nor should reporters fall for their distractions. If a dictator ran a successful tech company every single thing they did would be
The real problem children are, of course, people like Kara Swisher, who, more than anything, WANTS to be friends with the rockstars and has done so successfully. Swisher’s book tour involved her being interviewed by Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman — a shameful display of corruption, one so flagrant and stomach-turning that it should have led to an industry-wide condemnation of her legacy, rather than a general silence with a few people saying “I liked the book.”
Then there are people like Casey Newton, who happily parrot whatever Mark Zuckerberg wants them to under the auspices of “objectivity,” dutifully writing down things like “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” and claiming that “no one company will run the metaverse — it will be an “embodied internet,” a meaningless pile of nonsense, marketing collateral written down in service of a billionaire as a means of retaining access.
I realize that the argument might be that these executives wouldn't give an interview to somebody that won't play nice, and the counterargument is that if nobody accepted those terms, they'd have to start talking to more people. If Zuckerberg couldn't click his heels together and get Alex Heath or Casey Newton to nod approvingly, if every avenue was challenging, he'd be forced to give more honest interviews, or not give any interviews at all.
My frustration with Casey isn’t just that he acts as a stenographer for the powerful — it’s that he’s capable of much, much more, as proven by his brutal reporting on the horrifying conditions that Facebook moderators work under. He can - and should - do better.
As an aside: Some people argue that these "nice" interviews can sometimes "have an edge" where the subject is "hung on their words."
This is, for the most part, false. While Isaac Chotiner has mastered the art of making people bumble into saying something stupid, he is most decidedly not an access journalist.
"Gotcha" moments where you ask a question and they fumble the answer are not gotchas unless you are willing to actually go in for the kill - to say "what does that mean?" and "why don't you have an answer to that question?" If you ask a question and don't even respond to the answer, or quickly move on, you're effectively acting as if it never happened.
One might say that asking a question multiple times or refusing to move on is "aggressive." Please note that every single executive in this piece is worth at least a billion dollars. Suck it up butter cup.
One might also argue that being this daring in an interview environment means you'll never get another interview.
This is only the case because everybody is accepting the terms of access journalism.
None of this is to suggest that there has been no criticism. As much as I criticize the Post's piece on Zuckerberg, Nitasha Tiku (who wrote the original piece) has published deeply critical investigative journalism about Sam Altman, and CNBC's Lora Kolodny and Bloomberg's Dana Hull have spent over a decade reporting on Musk's failures, as have the reporters at the Wall Street Journal been fastidiously and aggressively covering Zuckerberg and his cohort in brutal detail.
The Washington Post's tech desk interrogated OpenAI early and often, covering its unsustainable costs, the jobs it started to take, and why you shouldn't tell ChatGPT your health concerns at a time (early 2023) when some were actively cowering in terror at what a Large Language Model told them to do. Ellen Huet's (Bloomberg-published) "Foundering" series about Sam Altman was insightful (and disturbing), and had the courage to tell the story of Annie Altman, Sam Altman's sister who has accused Altman of multiple acts of abuse. Things can be better.
Sadly, these men are regularly given air cover for their acts and their lies, and opportunities to talk about anything other than the things they've done - or not done, in Musk's case.
Far too often the default position with men like Sam Altman is to give them the benefit of the doubt, to assume that things will work out how they say they will, and to trust what they're saying as well-intentioned and informed. In doing so, readers and viewers are deprived of the truth — that these men are fallible, selfish, and willing to do anything they have to as a means of growing or sustaining their power.
We need to stop wanting to like these people. We need to stop craving to understand them on a deeper level, or finding any fascination in what they do. We cannot take them at their word, nor give them the benefit of the doubt without significant, meaningful proof, the kind that we would expect from literally anybody else.
