Revenge of The Business Idiot

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Revenge of The Business Idiot

Ed Zitron<br>May 26, 2026<br>41 min read

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If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. My Hater's Guides To Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle.<br>This week, I’ll publish the final part of my ongoing series (“What If…We’re In An AI Bubble?”) about the factors and events that will cause the AI bubble to finally pop, focusing on what consequences might follow the collapse of OpenAI and the wider data center<br>Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week.<br>Today I’m going to speak from the heart, and tell you that we’re ruled by fucking imbeciles.<br>AI is a perfect storm of failed concepts and organizations, and the apex of the Era of the Business Idiot, an epoch where we’re ruled by people so thoroughly disconnected from the actual workforce that it was inevitable that a technology would be created specifically to grift them.<br>Just ask Aaron Levie, CEO of Box:<br>CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.<br>LLMs are dangerous for many, many reasons, but the under-discussed one is how well they play to a certain kind of executive imbecile. Generative AI is — to quote Mo Bitar — really good at doing an impression of work, much like most managers and c-suite executives, and even if it’s completely incapable of doing something, it’ll absolutely say it can and tell you you’re amazing for suggesting it.<br>And that’s why Business Idiots love it.<br>Where regular human beings would say annoying things like “that’s not possible within that timeline” or “we don’t have the resources to do it,” AI will say “of course, right away!” and burn as many tokens as possible. When it makes mistakes, it’ll apologize — as it should because it failed you — but then promise to do better next time, all while costing so much less, at least in theory, than a regular, stinky human being.<br>It’ll create a PRD (product requirements document) of a theoretical software project with the confidence and vigor that you need to take it immediately to a software engineer and say “build this immediately,” and when the software engineer tells you a bunch of bullshit about it not being possible, it’ll spit out several convincing-sounding responses. Fuck, why even bother talking to that engineer at all? Claude Code can mock up a prototype that you can then shove in their fucking face before you fire them for not using AI to do it themselves.<br>I realize I sound a little churlish and dismissive of those who may or may not actually get something out of AI, but this entire industry feels like a mixture of kayfabe and ignorance, slathered with a kind of angry desperation that reflects the distance between reality and fantasy, driven by people that don’t do any fucking work.<br>Any executive-level fuckwit you’ve met in your life now has a seemingly-powerful tool that can burp up mimicry of open source software and, if you constantly prompt it, eventually get something half-functional onto some sort of web server. When you face bugs, it’ll try and fix them, sometimes also “fixing” (adding or deleting code) from elsewhere to be helpful, like when Cursor using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model deleted an entire production database and all its backups. It will never, ever say no, even if it’s incapable, even if it has no thoughts, even if what you are asking is equal parts impossible and unreasonable in both its timescale and scope.<br>A Business Idiot, given his druthers, can sit there and fuck around and make an LLM spit out something that makes him feel like he’s coding, which in turn makes him feel that you, a lazy and stupid engineer, could do even more with the power of AI. It doesn’t matter that it costs an absolute shit-ton of money, or that there’s no way to measure its efficacy. The Lion does not concern himself with things like “efficacy” or “productivity,” and the Lion is increasingly tired of your whining! The Lion doesn’t even understand what it is you do every day other than not doing what The Lion is asking for!<br>You laugh, but this is genuinely how the majority of managers and executives think and act, and now they have a special chatbot that can fart out functional-enough prototypes to convince a Business Idiot they can do anything, because executives and managers do not regularly do much work. As a result, they have little idea what work looks...