The Cult of the Entrepreneur and How to Avoid It

Imperious, infallible, and fawned over by employees and customers: Don't fall for it. You can succeed without being an asshole.

-  Bill Saporito

The request to the board of directors was simple enough: Give me 25 percent of the company if you expect me to continue running it as brilliantly as I do. "Me" being Elon Musk, and the company being Tesla. "I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having -25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can't be overturned," he wrote in mid-January on X, formerly known as Twitter.

As if Tesla's Musk-bound board ever had the power to overturn him. The same goes for the boards and big investors in SpaceX, and X, and Neuralink, and his new AI company, XAI. To Musk's 169 million social media followers, a $60 billion pay bump that would come out of equity probably seemed reasonable for a man of his genius.

Like Musk, Sam Altman, the co-founder and former CEO of OpenAI-and also the current CEO of OpenAI-is not one to allow his board to tell him no, even though that's what a board is supposed to do occasionally. When Altman's board dismissed him last year, essentially for changing OpenAI's strategy without their approval, he staged a palace coup by threatening to take 700 employees/followers with him to Microsoft, a multibillion-dollar investor in OpenAI. Altman had been there before, too: A few years ago, Y Combinator's partners invited him to get lost for using his post as president to put his own interests ahead of the organization's.