I’ve spent years watching tech executives climb onto a stage as if they were rock stars, and it worries me more each time, because of what that fascination keeps us from seeing. When OpenAI fired Sam Altman in November 2023, 90% of its staff signed a letter within 48 hours threatening to quit if he wasn’t reinstated — a loyalty no central banker or industrial-age CEO ever commanded (Hackernoon). Elon Musk turned his X account into his own reality show, and the platform itself adjusted its algorithm in 2023 to boost his posts by a factor of a thousand (Node Magazine). This isn’t spontaneous charisma. It’s an attention strategy, and it works.
What’s real: the cult genuinely moves markets and policy
I’m not exaggerating this to make it interesting. These figures wield genuine power over decisions that affect us: from shifts in content-moderation policy to direct influence over government deregulation agendas. The public treats them as lone visionaries who “built” these companies, when the actual construction is the work of thousands of anonymous people. The lone-genius narrative is simply easier to sell —and to admire— than the real complexity behind a trillion-dollar corporation.
What nobody tells you: who actually owns it
While the spotlight points at the CEO’s face, let’s look at who holds the vote. Vanguard is the largest shareholder in every one of the “Magnificent Seven” (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla), and BlackRock is the second-largest shareholder in all seven, with stakes ranging from 6% to 7.6% in each (Yahoo Finance). Add State Street and you get “The Big Three” managing over US$15 trillion in assets — close to three-quarters of U.S. GDP (Of Dollars and Data). That’s not a decorative stat: it means board votes, a voice in corporate governance, and influence over which companies enter or leave the indexes that nearly every pension fund on the planet —including Colombians investing in global ETFs— replicates automatically.
Here’s the question that actually matters: the same tech companies asking Congress for AI regulation today —and warning about its risks— spent more than US$100 million lobbying specifically to avoid that regulation, including backing a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI rules, according to the investigation opened in July 2026 by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Jan Schakowsky (Rep. Schakowsky’s Office). The fear they spread in the press about AI isn’t naive: it defines which barriers to entry survive, and those barriers are almost always controlled by whoever is already inside.
Rockstars, or a smokescreen?
I don’t think there’s a coordinated conspiracy in a dark room. I think something simpler, and just as troubling: when the public idolizes a person, it stops asking the structural questions about the company, the fund that owns it, and the regulator that’s supposed to watch it. That’s exactly what suits an oligopoly — not that nobody looks, but that everybody looks in the wrong place. If Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street show up as the top shareholders in the same seven or eight companies that will end up supplying our autonomous transportation, our AI infrastructure and tomorrow’s financial systems, the real question isn’t whether Sam Altman or Elon Musk “deserve” their cult following. It’s whether we’re heading toward a future with far fewer real suppliers than we think, dressed up as fierce competition between rival geniuses.
What you can actually control
You can’t vote at BlackRock’s annual meeting, but you can check how much of your own savings —through a mandatory pension fund or an ETF— is automatically tied to those same seven companies, without you ever actively deciding that. You can diversify away from the fashionable index. And above all, you can stop confusing admiration for a CEO with blind trust in the ownership structure standing behind him. The next time a tech executive takes the stage to announce the future, it’s worth asking: who in that room actually holds the decisive vote, with the microphone turned off?
If questions like this interest you, the Daily Briefing follows them every day, with data, not personality cults.