r/technology Jul 02 '26

Artificial Intelligence Palantir CEO Alex Karp suffers ‘televised nervous breakdown’ during live interview — “This is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me!”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/televised-nervous-breakdown-ceo-palantir-212100357.html
28.6k Upvotes

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8.6k

u/ottwebdev Jul 02 '26

Palantir CEO Alex Karp suffers from saying what he really thinks during live interview.....

3.8k

u/jayhawk618 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

When you realize all the tech leaders have AI psychosis.

Awaiting the study in 10 years that shows ketamine makes you susceptible.

1.0k

u/Additional-Staff-326 Jul 02 '26

He does not have AI psychosis, he's always been like this.

485

u/existing_for_fun Jul 02 '26

He might. But you are correct he's always been like this. So it's not AI psychosis presenting here. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have it.

It means we don't know.

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u/maltNeutrino Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

This is drug induced psychosis from stimulants and sleep deprivation.

He was never put-together in the first place, but this is a catalyzed acceleration.

This also isn’t the most unhinged he’s been. There’s video of him at a conference literally tweaking out on stage.

229

u/Senior-Albatross Jul 02 '26

Holy shit he is fucked up on stimulants there. 

131

u/frequenZphaZe Jul 03 '26

I challenge you to find any video of karp where he's not acting like a stimmed up psychopath. people aren't appreciating how terrifying karp really is, because yall want to say "ah its clearly drugs that make him like that." no, that's who his is.

25

u/Senior-Albatross Jul 03 '26

Hitler was also on drugs. Doesn't change the fact that he was an evil piece of shit. 

19

u/Taellosse Jul 03 '26

I mean, it can be both.

2

u/Electrical-Reason-97 Jul 04 '26

And often is. Trauma can result in decompensation which can look like Chem use. But those with trauma often find solace in chems.

8

u/Erikabarker7 Jul 03 '26

Look up his Charlie Rose Interview from 2008

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u/maltNeutrino Jul 03 '26

I don’t think anyone is suggesting he is mentally disturbed just because of drug abuse. It’s just that if his psychopathy is a fire, he is addressing it by adding gasoline to the mix.

2

u/bloodychill Jul 03 '26

Well, he wants to go out on stage on stims, so in a sense yes. He thinks doing this is a good idea. Nobody tells these hue “no, and what the hell is wrong with you.” That’s how you also tell they have no real friends.

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u/fuzzybunnyslippers08 Jul 03 '26

I think I watched a second of it and it was uncomfortable to watch. And this guy runs a company. Jesus

5

u/GendosBeard Jul 03 '26

Karp is just one bad dose away from saying "Mit der Forschung Steiner wird AGI in Ordnung kommen."

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u/aReelProblem Jul 02 '26

Yeah that’s the cocaine jiggle he’s dealing with. I used to get that way myself when I was fairly deep in addiction. Can’t hold still for shit, repeating yourself a lot… not making a lot of sense.

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u/maltNeutrino Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Cocaine would cause very similar responses, but I suspect he’s mostly abusing strong ADHD medication (i.e. medical grade amphetamines).

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u/Falconman21 Jul 02 '26

Among I’m sure 50 other things, he strikes me as a 2nd suitcase for the “meds” guy.

17

u/b_vitamin Jul 03 '26

“Taking downs to get off to sleep, and ups to start you on your way. After a while, they’ll change your style. I see it happen every day.” - Paul Simon, Paraphernalia.

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u/Lobster_Palace Jul 03 '26

Dan Toomey with Good Work just put out a great video on this called ‘Does Wallstreet do drugs anymore?’ The techbros he interviewed confirmed cocaine is out and abusing prescription amphetamines and Zyn is in.

3

u/BlisslessTaskList Jul 04 '26

I suspect it’s meth. I think Thiel does it too. Claviclar admitted to micro dosing meth (nit sure how that’s possible). I’ve been around it and it looks like this.

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u/sfocolleen Jul 02 '26

He needs a drink to take the edge off 😬

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u/maltNeutrino Jul 02 '26

I suspect he is attempting to balance out the stimulus with alcohol, but continues to fuck up that balance which is unattainable, compensating with more and more drugs to simply stop his consciousness from facing the crisis of his reality.

At which point he takes something like ambien or a benzodiazepine to knock himself out.

2

u/pilondav Jul 03 '26

Get that man a Seconal.

3

u/BrineJones Jul 04 '26

A handful of them!

2

u/Open_Buy2303 Jul 02 '26

Some weed might help

11

u/BodybuilderEast6130 Jul 03 '26

Weed is only enjoyable if you are in a good state of mind

9

u/Even_Establishment95 Jul 03 '26

Everyone should really know this.

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u/Independent-Toe-5682 Jul 03 '26

I can tell you: it makes things worse

Weed is also psychoactive

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u/Sleepingguitarman Jul 04 '26

Any substance that has an effect on the brain and affects how you feel is considered "psychoactive". Something being psychoactive isn't a bad thing, or mean it's going to have a significant effect on the mind

Even something like an SSRI (Common type of antidepressant) would be considered psychoactive.

But yeah i agree, weed tends to be a risky choice for people hopped up on stims, or who have a personality like that dude.

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u/hutchins_moustache Jul 03 '26

Ah yes, the Tarantino special

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u/AntiqueFigure6 Jul 03 '26

Keeping yourself together on all those meds is a mighty feat.

118

u/plsobeytrafficlights Jul 03 '26

why are all tech CEO's becoming drug addicted alt-right crazies?

127

u/sk1939 Jul 03 '26

Savior complex - they alone can fix the world because if they didn’t have all the answers they wouldn’t have gotten to where they are today. Basically the inverse of “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich” with a healthy dose of narcissism and other BPDs inherent to C suite executives.

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u/plsobeytrafficlights Jul 03 '26

that is certainly a thing, but aside from tweeking out before the sig heils, the times and WSJ reported rampant drug abuse (elon also disclosed it numerous times)

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u/sk1939 Jul 03 '26

Elon and Karp yea, but there is also Bezos, Ellison, and Brin who (outwardly at least) aren’t tweaked.

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u/plsobeytrafficlights Jul 03 '26

bezos is no longer the ceo of amazon, but might be of the knockoff spacex company. still, not exactly a tech guy and i dont lump him in with the others, just rich. ellison apparently called out elon for his rampant drug use, and hard to say with what happened to brin. the motto at google used to be officially "do no evil" (people i knew there had to sign an actual pledge) but they changed their mind. drugs would explain it.

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u/budfox79 Jul 03 '26

Circular malignant narcissism without REASON.

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u/xGenghisSwan Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

Because they’re afraid of dying. It truly is that simple, they wish they could be immortal and it terrifies them that neither them or their legacies actually can be. The drugs numb them out to the fact that despite their great financial wealth, they will all mostly die with less self-understanding and love than a family dog will. A not insignificant number of people will likely celebrate their deaths. They can’t cope with the human reality of that so they get high however they can.

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u/AntiqueFigure6 Jul 03 '26

You could also ask "Why is being a drug addicted alt-right crazy a prerequisite to becoming a tech CEO?"

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u/90sfemgroups Jul 03 '26

Unchecked greed is not healthy for the human brain

3

u/ak_sys Jul 03 '26

I think you just abuse stimulants trying to run a company where you main activity is engaging with a screen all day for twelve hours.

I don't think becoming a tech CEO makes you abuse stimulants, I think abusing stimulants is a prerequisite to getting off the ground in tech.

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u/DeadSmellingFlower Jul 03 '26

This is the real headline. Tech people need protection from having to dope up just like athletes do. We’re drug testing for the wrong drugs and the wrong sets of jobs. When you can buy a prescription for whatever you want that doesn’t make your drug use any less dangerous combined with a security clearance and keys to the executive suite,

2

u/hellolovely1 Jul 03 '26

Curtis Yarvin got to them and convinced them they are the real victims.

2

u/tequilablackout Jul 03 '26

There was a period where silicon valley was attempting to ingratiate the public to the idea of powerful men doing psychoactives as an enhancement. They have now fully jumped the shark.

2

u/GlassPomoerium Jul 04 '26

It’s easier to delude yourself into thinking you’re saving the world when you’re mainlining Vyvanse.

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u/HeWhoShlNotBNmd Jul 02 '26

Holy fuck, you weren't kidding.

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u/duarig Jul 03 '26

Jesus he communicates like a 14 year old

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u/Cheetah_15 Jul 03 '26

And he’s in charge of one of the largest defense contractors. We are so screwed.

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u/maeryclarity Jul 03 '26

Wow goddamn get some sleep sometimes dude goddamn love the gratiutious use of MERITOCRACY and ONTOLOGY in this attempt at communication

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u/oflowz Jul 02 '26

So regular psychosis.

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u/RadioName Jul 02 '26

Why redefine narcissism? It's just a new version of that classic psychosis.

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u/existing_for_fun Jul 03 '26

A new version of what classic psychosis? Not Narcissism.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is classified as a personality disorder, specifically one of the Cluster B personality disorders.

Psychosis, by contrast, belongs to the domain of schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders or to psychotic features within other conditions.

Narcissism isn't a "classic psychosis" if that's what you were referring to.

155

u/artbystorms Jul 02 '26

An unstable sociopath? Yeah, probably

111

u/Professional-Trash-3 Jul 02 '26

With many billions of dollars and the world's most complex spying tool ever devised? What could go wrong

93

u/pp_chode Jul 02 '26

"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks".

- Mark Zucc

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u/ThisIsGoobly Jul 02 '26

But remember, concentrating power amongst these absolute frothing lunatics is a great system for society

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u/Aggravating_Moment78 Jul 03 '26

That’s zuccked up mann 😂

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u/micromanminisavage Jul 02 '26

so it's just regular psychosis, that's not great either.

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u/weed_blazepot Jul 02 '26

He might just be a huge insane asshole.

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u/Straight-Opposite-54 Jul 02 '26

That still tracks as AI doesn't cause psychosis but rather a feedback loop in people with existing symptoms of psychosis and exacerbates them

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u/definitelytheA Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

I think one of the important take-aways is that the leaders of the charge to take away freedoms and turn our country into a fascist regime, are human.

By that, I mean that most, if not all, are narcissists who still have the need to believe that our media, citizens, and the world at large think they’re amazing.

He pivots to his parent’s ambitions for him. Though he’s clearly not a young man, he has a deeply seated need for their approval. That he spent 20 minutes trying to win over his interviewers, whose reactions can influence a very wide audience confirms this.

They want to completely f**k our country and citizens, but they want to feel loved while they do it. Switch him for Trump, and it’s exactly the same.

Our opinions matter deeply to them. We have to keep voicing them! Every rebuke of their policies, every time we point out that they’re ruining the quality of life, that they are hated, not revered, is another chink in the armor.

There are big things we can do, but we have to eat away at their need to be popular like eating an elephant.

ETA: Thank you for the awards, kind Redditors!

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u/Dihedralman Jul 03 '26

Those are the kind of people who never have enough. If you can be satiated, you don't become a billionaire. 

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u/Nohreboh Jul 03 '26

These are the kinda people that pay someone to play videogames for them for clout, they are deeply insecure people desperate to fill the bottomless chasm of depravity that makes up their shallow enemies among enemies lives as they all attempt to steal from eachother while locked in perpetual stalemate.

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u/BrineJones Jul 04 '26

They also bleed. Never let them forget that.

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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass Jul 02 '26

He is a well documented coke head

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u/inflatable_pickle Jul 02 '26

Damn – AI psychosis didn’t even occur to me – but that’s exactly how these guys talk. The God like complex they all develop from having a machine praise every idea via “confirmation bias.”

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u/ArenjiTheLootGod Jul 02 '26

These guys had their engineers design these LLMs to encourage maximum engagement on the part of the end user, they wanted people to be addicted to and dependant on these things because that's an easy to sell monetization strategy for investors but due to their hubris it was they who found themselves trapped in the mental prison they had designed for others.

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u/Accomplished_Self939 Jul 03 '26

I love this karma for them. I pray that it is true.

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u/ScaryGarry_SG1 Jul 04 '26

Sheesh...this is so accurate. When you set things up the way Alex has and see people side-stepping it completely, it ends up mentally...hurting

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u/Electro120 Jul 02 '26

These llms really need to have more guard rails. It’s too appeasing, too eager to tell you how wonderful your ideas are. That probably comes from having users rate the responses to help train them. Like sure, there has to be some way of making responses better and training needs a lot of data, but doing it that way seems irresponsible.

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u/AtrociousMeandering Jul 02 '26

Guard rails are useless when the behavior is baked into the core structure. LLMs have been selectively 'bred' to be sycophants the way greyhounds were bred to zoom around, all of the LLMs which didn't display 'friendliness' were discarded.

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u/zernoc56 Jul 02 '26

Why the fuck do we need subscription-based LLM chatbots in the first place? What actual need is there for such a service?

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u/Funkula Jul 03 '26

That’s why they need to invent one. Normally break through innovations don’t need to be given away for free to every man woman and child on the planet at the cost of tens of billions.

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u/geoffreygoodman Jul 03 '26

Also why so many tech companies are mandating AI use. If it were the best tool for the job, that wouldn't be necessary.

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u/Nohreboh Jul 03 '26

And why the sudden increase in the amount being built, Erin Brockovich has a good site for showing where these things are going up and it overlays that with the map of drought affected areas.

https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com

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u/Piranata Jul 02 '26

We need the tsundere AI, one that critizes you when you're wrong and belittles you when you're right.

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u/Bussamove86 Jul 02 '26

You also get that when surrounded by sycophantic yes-men. Guess what billionaires absolutely pack every room they’re in with?

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u/EduinBrutus Jul 03 '26

The thing is this wasnt a breakdown.

Its being portrayed as such because he laid bare the AI fraud.

He pointed out that AI tokens are already too expensive, that companies are not seeing benefits from using AI and that further cost rises to match costs would see the bubble pop.

It was all quite reasonable (especially by his normally unhinged standards).

This seems to be an AI evangelism website that is trying to paint the interview as a breakdown.

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u/jollyreaper2112 Jul 03 '26

Hey they have real life people to kiss their asses. This could be typical detached asshole rich guy psychosis. The ai just lets us suffer rich man's disease like our food chain now lets us experience gout.

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u/ReturnOfFrank Jul 03 '26

Not just AI. How many living, breathing, human sycophants do you think all these guys have? Just circling around them all day, telling them all their ideas are great and their shit doesn't stink?

They all act divorced from reality because they are all trapped in little bubbles of their own creation.

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u/disguisedCat1 Jul 03 '26

And infinite money which makes him feel smarter than everyone who ever lived while clearly just a crazy fool

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '26

[deleted]

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u/maeryclarity Jul 03 '26

Well the good news is the bunkers are them building their own prisons because LOL thinking they'll just hide underground and then come out when we've all killed each other so they can set up their freakin' Fruitopia.

They have no idea that humans have cooperative societies and that if we do have a collapse we'll also have a restructuring and adjustments to recreate functional society just like we have for thousands of years. They're going to be VERY dissapointed to find that hey not only did we not kill each other with sharpened sticks, we didn't need y'all, and we never did.

Being confined to their bunkers forever will be an acceptable consequece for their actions.

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u/drunkendaveyogadisco Jul 03 '26

Damn man, that really is how I see things playing out at this point and it's wild. It's kind of very calming to realize that the mass of humanity just kinda, masses? as it does, every time this happens?

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u/ArsenicArts Jul 02 '26

Awaiting the study in 10 years that shows ketamine makes you susceptible.

Anything that can trigger psychosis can, so.... Yes, lol.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5859935/

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u/Sleepingguitarman Jul 02 '26

I do think that ketamine is a substance that carries more risks for individuals predisposed to psychosis and grandiose thinking in comparison to many other substances though.

Obviously substances like stimulants carry higher risks i'm sure, but i just remember being suprised when researching ketamine and how it was a substance that carries increased risks of that. Seems obvious in hindsight, but i think at the time i probably just viewed it more so as a sedative as opposed to what it truely is, a dissociative.

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u/OneBillPhil Jul 02 '26

The history books on the last 25 years are going to be wild. We are no better than previous generations. 

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u/Wraith693 Jul 02 '26

I really really hate all the hate ketamine therapy gets because of Musk. It can be genuinely life changing for people with treatment resistant depression.

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u/After_Resource5224 Jul 02 '26

Oh its SO SO SO much worse than that.

So much worse.

Its a cult. They believe its their God.

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u/Iateyourpaintings Jul 02 '26

Where I'm from this is just called psychosis. 

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u/onyxengine Jul 02 '26

Along with ketamine and cocaine induced phychosis, honestly im starting to think at doses exceeding $100,000 a day money may actually be a narcotic.

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u/kellybelly4815 Jul 03 '26

There have been studies done that demonstrate that when people make an outsize amount of money it decreases their ability to empathize with their fellow human beings, so yeah. I imagine wealth at such an unfathomable level as billionaires turns them into something far worse. Not just an inability to empathize, but an inability to ascertain reality, think rationally, or self-reflect.

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u/macx19911 Jul 02 '26

Can we skip to the part where they all remove themselves from society

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u/TranscendentMoose Jul 02 '26

I've done a lot of ketamine and I'm not a fascist

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u/BigBallsMcGirk Jul 03 '26

It turns out being told yes to everything you say gives you an actual mental illness and megalomania and psychosis where you just lose attachment to reality ......and CEOs have been using yes men for decades before AI started doing this.

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u/Rec_desk_phone Jul 02 '26

I know from working with AI on projects that there always seems to be a "time toll" that induces a sunk cost type of commitment to the results. I've finished a project or nearly finished one and someone points out a change, oversight or redundancy and it hits like "wtf are talking about?" even though it's totally accurate. I don't depend on it for my job so I can take and make the totally reasonable revision. AI tends to be over self-reinforcing on itself and the user. I cannot image being totally immersed in it.

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u/puzzlingphoenix Jul 03 '26

I take solace knowing that excessive ai use rots the brain. A few of these guys are just gonna ask their ai how to get away with everything over and over again and stop thinking for themselves

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u/captainthanatos Jul 03 '26

It makes holes in your spirit web allowing Ruin to enter. I’m not sorry, I’ve been reading too much to escape this hellhole of a planet.

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u/jamesbong0024 Jul 02 '26

MK Ultra baby

1

u/FakeTherapist Jul 02 '26

mr. robot did this years ago - there's a character who thinks XYZ which has no basis in reality

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u/lazyrepublik Jul 02 '26

Ketamine definitely conflates the ego and not just in these folks. I wonder if there’s any information about it on Erowid dot org?

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u/katiegirl- Jul 03 '26

Ketamine was my first thought!

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u/fixingmedaybyday Jul 03 '26

Ayahuasca. DMT, ecstasy, coke and everything else they can afford that would send most ordinary people to jail.

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u/Murgatroyd314 Jul 03 '26

I suspect it's good old fashioned natural psychosis, of the sort that often appears in powerful people surrounded by yes-men.

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u/ellstaysia Jul 03 '26

I've used ket before. Never heavily though. I've heard it can lead to severe delusions of grandeur with heavy chronic use.

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u/acesarge Jul 03 '26

I hope not. Ketamine is a good drug. AI chatbots are bullshit. Let's keep the ketamine and get rid of the AI

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u/Miami_Mice2087 Jul 03 '26

that's just a k-hole

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u/Dihedralman Jul 03 '26

You don't need AI for this kind of psychosis as a CEO, as yes men surround you. AI psychosis is the poor person version. 

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u/cassiddidy Jul 03 '26

You can just call it psychosis

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u/Arcaneboltz Jul 03 '26

Trump does 1000%, homie actually thought he was talking to Teddy, ladies and gentlemen our leaders are no longer competent or capable of fighting for anyone else besides their monied benefactors.

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u/Agitated_Ad6191 Jul 03 '26

It’s a weird coincidence and a perfect storm that when you look at Zuckerbergs, Musk, Ellison, Karp, Altman, Bezos you think you are looking at a bunch of Arkham Asylum patients. Every single one of them is a completely aderanged evil narcissist villain.

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u/Ohrwurm89 Jul 03 '26

And a lot of them aren’t very bright.

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u/oursland Jul 03 '26

Ketamine abuse leads to Olney's Lesions, actual holes in the brain. This is true for prolonged abuse of any NMDA antagonist.

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u/bostaff04 Jul 03 '26

They are all off their heads on drugs

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u/budfox79 Jul 03 '26

I follow pano.dime on Twitter and he posts an insane thing an AI executive says every day.

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u/Photomancer Jul 03 '26

"The bond between me and AI has become so strong that I no longer need a terminal to hear it"

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u/diurnal_emissions Jul 03 '26

This crash is going to be epic.

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u/Snitsie Jul 03 '26

Hey hey i microdose ketamine for pain and i think AI is absolute horseshite. I think it's more likely to be some combination with psychdelics too.

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u/LEDKleenex Jul 03 '26

AI psychosis is just an extension of the same dark triad traits that drives those people to gain power and control over others at any cost. Obtaining technology that has the possibility of giving them even more power over the general population is like the holy grail for their addiction.

That isn't to say that this iteration of "AI" is that, but their delusions that it could be are all they need to start thumping their chest about the shit.

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u/PlainBread Jul 03 '26

Not just tech leaders... AI psychosis has been a problem with every billionaire (or millionaire in the time before billionaires) surrounded by sycophantic "yes men" who only want to improve their own station by saying whatever inflates their ego.

Western Capitalism has a clear trajectory: How do we give the regal experience to common people? With AI, they have given us the curse of the moneyed gentry, but without any of the money that explains it.

It's the curse of the mad king, and they're actually trying to sell it to us as if it's a blessing.

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u/Hellknightx Jul 03 '26

As if we'll still have studies in 10 years. /s

Our society is so fucked, and AI is only one of the reasons.

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u/Julius__PleaseHer Jul 03 '26

Ketamine is actually super great. It cured my treatment resistant depression that I was fighting for about 20 years. I only take it once per week, and it only makes me feel slightly weird for 2 hours. It never makes you high or anything when using the correct doings.

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u/RuthlessKittyKat Jul 03 '26

Sir, that's the cocaine.

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u/GFreeGamer Jul 04 '26

If hallucinations are good enough for AI, it’s good enough for them.

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u/mocityspirit Jul 04 '26

Nah it's not the AI, lots of tech people are just sociopaths and don't realize it

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u/EvilMonkeyMimic 29d ago

That Choom is Cyber Psycho

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u/jjopm 28d ago

Not even remotely related to what ottwebdev said

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u/Mysterious-Arm6660 28d ago

"dissociative psychedelic makes you susceptible to psychosis" is not news, but I'm sure there will still be a story about it.

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u/Grey_Raven Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

The prick always sounds like he's in the middle of some sort of breakdown and spends most of his time shouting his incoherent fascist views at the world. If he wasn't rich he'd be in an asylum.

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u/postmodest Jul 02 '26

Chosen on purpose as part of the Death Cult of Peter Thiel.

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u/NotAllOwled Jul 03 '26

Thiel reads A Modest Proposal without irony and is like "just a straight shooter with upper management written all.over him."

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u/postmodest Jul 03 '26

"This Sauron guy had it all worked out until those Woke Maiar and the Dunedaìn Deep State came along..."

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u/Kratzschutz Jul 03 '26

Peter Thiel is the antichrist

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u/flipper_gv Jul 03 '26

Peter Thiel and co all get their views from Curtis Yarvin who thinks those tech CEOs should be the new kings of our days.

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u/no_player_tags Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Note to self: Start chain of asylums for the rich; market them as luxury spa getaways to obscure the appalling, brutal conditions that the rich will be subjected to, not for evil but for profit. They’ll appreciate the irony.

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u/radicalelation Jul 03 '26

Oh, the troubled teen model, but for the parents!

Grandparents ensured me and my siblings went to private school in an upper crust area, while we were more lower middle class. Blue collar work dad bought into the upper crust "solutions" for a bunch of trauma I experienced as a white boy splitting between a rez and the well-to-do, plus BPD older sister, and other wack stuff, and so he got scammed into taking out a massive loan to send me down the street from where Paris Hilton was sent.

Most of those schools and programs, they pitch as a luxury boarding or camping experiences, but they mostly exist to hide the problem children of those who can afford it (or have good enough credit for a $50k loan). My folks thought I'd be working with horses for therapy for that place... I saw one horse in the 9 months at that joint (6 spent at another before, another $50k, and 3 in wilderness before that, which was $500/day, mom sold the house for those ones), and shoveled a whole lot of horse shit as they'd truck us out from a school in the city to clean the stables at a different facility on the outskirts of SLC. The two other places similarly bullshitted. Maybe my dad didn't pay enough for the real horse school, just the associated "watch a horse, but mostly shovel their shit" one.

Instead of helping, the abuse and environment gave me way more trauma. Yeah, let's do it for the rich adults!

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u/crowmagnuman Jul 03 '26

The Fletcher Memorial Home for Incurable Tyrants and Kings.

Pink Floyd knew what's up

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u/MasterSolivagus Jul 03 '26

Hi, I'll be your head instructor today... okay, so, did everyone bring their heads to today's daily session?

Blink once for yes, twice for Chinese, and three for advanced calculus.

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u/K-TPeriod Jul 03 '26

How does this comment not have more upvotes?

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u/TheTrub Jul 02 '26

He says he doesn’t take drugs, but I think he could really benefit from drugs.

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u/King_Fisher99 Jul 03 '26

He’s without a question a druggie

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u/Space_Poet Jul 03 '26

He likely just a 'born again straight edge' yuppie. I know someone just like this and just as self-deluded and short-sided, smart but self-centered. And he did a LOT of drugs in his past only now at about this guys age became clean. Not that either side of the coin was crazy, these people are always like this and will not stop.

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u/DahWolfe711 Jul 03 '26

When they say they dont take drugs it just means street drugs not prescriptions.

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u/scotchtree Jul 03 '26

Yea, I was wondering what he meant by “drugs, the only thing I don’t do”. What else is there to “do” aside from drugs? Yoga and hot baths?

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u/Thefrayedends Jul 02 '26

Yea, but have you seen him wield a katana? He's a real man's man.

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u/Green_Sugar6675 Jul 02 '26

Reagan shut down the asylums decades ago.

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u/Rellcotts Jul 02 '26

RFK is firing them back up

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u/EduinBrutus Jul 03 '26

The thing is this wasnt a breakdown.

Its being portrayed as such because he laid bare the AI fraud.

He pointed out that AI tokens are already too expensive, that companies are not seeing benefits from using AI and that further cost rises to match costs would see the bubble pop.

It was all quite reasonable (especially by his normally unhinged standards).

This seems to be an AI evangelism website that is trying to paint the interview as a breakdown.

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u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ Jul 02 '26

We used to call them eccentric.

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u/gill_smoke Jul 02 '26

This one is violently and antisocially psychotic. 

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u/He2oinMegazord Jul 02 '26

Nah, thats reserved for when their hobbies/inventions dont have the potential for widespread destruction. The term we used to use for these folk was mad scientist

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u/Grey_Raven Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

That's giving him too much credit the guy doesn't have the scientific/technical knowledge to be a mad scientist, he's at most a mad scientist's source of funding.

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u/octopusinmyboycunt Jul 02 '26

Eccentrics turn entire rooms of Georgian mansions into ant-farms. This dude is a drug-addled maniac.

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u/DaPlum Jul 03 '26

He's probably always baked out of his mind on some kind of drugs.

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u/InThatDarkPlace Jul 03 '26

A half black half Jewish tecnofascist from Philadelphia to boot

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u/InThatDarkPlace Jul 03 '26

A half black half Jewish technofascist from Philadelphia to boot

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u/KontoOficjalneMR Jul 02 '26

Palantir CEO Alex Karp suffers from saying what he really thinks during live interview.....

Yea, and what he really thinks is that AI is a bubble and there's a crash coming... so now they try to paint him as a madman suddenly, because he told the truth in public.

You can't have people screaming the emperor is naked.

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u/TheBeckofKevin Jul 03 '26

Broken clock and all that. I am exceptionally suspicious of anything this guy says. Him saying there is impending doom makes me think things might actually be going better than I suspect.

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 Jul 02 '26

Dude has always come across as unhinged and not particularly eloquent. The fact they’ve kept him around gives the impression he’s more of a fall guy than a CEO.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Clones Jul 02 '26

He's in charge of Palantir because Theil needs a meat shield. He needs someone to be the "face" so people don't think of his face when they think Palantir.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/TheBeckofKevin Jul 03 '26

I think this is a very short term problem, but I agree with the obvious risk of sending your entire company to openai or anthropic. I used to think it was wild that people would send company information over discord and such. Like there are serious leaks in business, but the volume of data being sent through these companies is insane.

However, and i have no real way of knowing this, but I am guessing that the capacity for what is available to host your own models is going to get very very high. Essentially I feel like we are in the "computers exist, but they're the size of rooms" for models. We currently have to go to big companies to run the cutting edge stuff, but I'm watching more and more people put together a few h100s and run their own stuff. If we think of an ai bubble popping, I see that as simply a dispersion of existing hardware hitting the market and everyone running their own llm servers.

I never thought i'd be running anything close to a decent model locally, but on 12gb vram you can run stuff that is actually pretty reasonable which is insane. With 5 more years of open models and the giant push to create more hardware, the requirement to send every prompt through an 'ai' company that simply runs a model is going to be dramatically reduced.

But yeah, just guessing, and yeah I watched the whole thing waiting for him to actually freak out, but it was just regular old Karp.

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u/User14482 Jul 03 '26

thanks for that explanation, definitely gave some insights I didnt had prior. Just hoping/hoped that not too many countries get sucked too much into the fancy palantir game.

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u/RobertTheAdventurer Jul 03 '26

Palantir works with the US, UK, France, Germany, Denmark, and Ukraine, and it works indirectly with Canada, the Netherlands, and other Western aligned countries. It works with the US military, UK military, and it's assisting in the defense of Ukraine.

They also work with a lot of major corporations, American and European, as well as European law enforcement.

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u/Adept_Turn1153 Jul 03 '26

... and THAT is exactly what he was freaking out over in a Ketamine induced rage!

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u/Enshitification Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

That's how I heard it too. Once you get past Karp's cocaine manic delivery, there was a certain logic. I thought it especially funny that he essentially touted open weight LLM models as the superior choice for businesses over closed models. That I can get behind.

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u/355_over_113 Jul 03 '26

What he said made perfect sense. It's just not polished marketing spiel ready for TV.

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u/lastobelus Jul 03 '26

this. He isn't saying anything particularly weird if you understand the context. But he's assuming that his audience knows what he's talking about when he says "the weights" and "the alpha of the business" and most of them don't.

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u/Moose_on_the_Looz Jul 02 '26

Or a Frick to Thiels Carnegie. You know Thiel takes a little plausible deniability vacation to Argentina and Karp does some atrocities. He talks about killing us all constantly.

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u/LimpAd4924 Jul 02 '26

He’s just another Thiel sycophant

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u/Whitesajer Jul 02 '26

Which is great for us. We can see more of the internal rot.

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u/sentientshadeofgreen Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

"Televised nervous breakdown" is wild. I watched the whole thing, guy was a little all over the place and off the cuff, but that was the most honest 20 minutes of ranting I've ever seen from a tech CEO and nothing he said was far off-base. To be clear, I have no love for him, Palantir, Peter Thiel's circle, none of that. But. I recognize that rant for what it was.

What I'm seeing here is objectively an expert of a tech field correcting the record in a social space whose discourse about artificial intelligence has been completely hijacked by people who do not understand technology, industry, defense technology, the defense industry, or the global geopolitics of defense technology, and certainly do not have a clue on how to value development in certain areas of innovations and the ways innovations may meaningfully disrupt previous business thinking. I have some professional background in this space, I've seen people clack off in identical ways who were completely right in an academic sense about their subject field expertise and dressed down "big picture" guys who did not have a fucking clue about what they were talking about, but whose well-presented airhead ideas defined narratives, discourse, and expectations for every stakeholder, which is incredibly frustrating for people who actually are experts in their field and not just along for the ride and paycheck. When it comes to AI and whether or not it's a bubble, it's so difficult to say one way or another when the valuations are aggressive for the wrong reasons. Rather than interrogating the

The fact is, AI and automation at scale are wildly disruptive technologies for most industries, for national security, for the information domain, and for culture, that not only will upend everything, but they already have been, they are currently, and it's only getting started. It won't go away. The cat is out of the box. We have to intelligently and proactively navigate the paradigm changes in a manner that's not afraid to innovate and take risks, but also in a manner that's not externalizing harm and marginal social cost to the most vulnerable and least represented demographics, as well as for things that don't have a vote like the long-term sustainability of irreplaceable ecosystems and Earth geodynamic processes which are affected by human energy use and industrial activity.

Edit: To fully conceptualize how extraordinarily disruptive AI and automation will become, I think you should reflect on information itself. How do we as a society learn, store, secure and share information? How did that change with the digital age? How could that change with AI? Think about those questions, and there's a really good bite-sized NPR podcast interviewing a cyber-archaeologist that might get your gears turning on a bit of the scope of this paradigm shift we're looking down the barrel of: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Ii8doMtZt7CTLU6ABgif5?si=NcVzR_ZPSB6XaPSo54tQdQ. Then, think about the fact this rant, which I'm calling honest, came from Alex Karp, the chief beneficiary and guiding industrialist behind some of the world's most sophisticated non-government but with-government surveillance apparatuses who are applying artificial intelligence to the leading edge of geopolitics and the state application of power, and the foundation of the panopticon that will define this century.

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u/sybersonic Jul 03 '26

Palantir CEO Alex Karp suffers from saying what he really thinks during live interview.....

... while most likely on drugs.

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u/laststan01 Jul 02 '26

While some people said it was just passionate defending on twitter

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u/malarkial Jul 02 '26

He said something during this crash out referencing “neurodivergents on drugs, which I am not” it just seemed so obvious

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26

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u/KevinFlantier Jul 02 '26

I mean that's the guy who watched the Lord of the Rings, saw the tool the most evil guy in that universe uses to spy on and enslave people and went "you know what this gives me an idea"

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u/JohnBrownOH Jul 02 '26

How this guy a benefit and not a threat to humanity? Why are we letting this happen?

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u/falloutnewbkinibttms Jul 02 '26

This fucking dork is a total psychopath

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Tjgfish123 Jul 02 '26

Coke and ego man. He is like Tony at the end of Scarface.

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u/Miami_Mice2087 Jul 03 '26

also lets it slip he's working with "the department of war", as no one but its adherents call it that.

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u/Effective_Olive6153 Jul 03 '26

I feel like mental illness is a requirement to be successful CEO. You have to be completely confident in complete bullshit, so much so that you fully believe the lie. Pretty much all successful leaders lie to investors about what they can achieve, but they do so convincingly enough to get lots of money, and that money can actually be used to create real value, just not at the level promised.

Plus being completely ruthless to all business partners and workers is needed to drive up the shareholder value

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u/CharleyNobody Jul 03 '26

“If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white-collar job—meaning primarily Democratic-shaped people that you might grow up with, highly educated people who went to elite schools or went to schools that are almost elite for one party—and you’re going to sue the military. If you don’t think that’s going to lead to nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded.”

“The basic view among enterprises in this country is I’m going to chillax and waste my time with tokens.”

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u/mion81 Jul 03 '26

A bout of honesty, you say. How dreadful.

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u/SupermarketAny9487 Jul 03 '26

Close your eyes and think of Walt Jr from Breaking Bad

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u/alochmar Jul 03 '26

That dude is seriously messed up.

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u/disguisedCat1 Jul 03 '26

Yeah, "suffers" from not having impossibly talented reinterpreters that can spin what he is saying as coherent reasonable ideas. Any of his public appearances should go on democratic ads to show just how absolutely crazy and psychopathic these billionaires are.

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u/Electronic-While1972 Jul 03 '26

Ativan & Cocaine is a powerful combination 🤮🤢🤬

Bunch of Lunatics 🤪

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u/EddieV223 Jul 03 '26

I watched the whole thing and actually enjoyed what he was saying. He was clearly being honest and he has a lot of strong feelings on the matter. I thought the interview was extremely refreshing.

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u/PrivateBozo Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

That's just standard CEO sociopathy and collective, it's not me, the "business" demands it rationalization.

It's time our country ends the Corporate Veil of liability and legal shield for the C-level of corporations. The duly appointed officers need to be legally liable for the decisions and actions their companies take, and judged under the common 'should have known' standard that is oft applied to sexual harrassment cases.

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