Kevin Roose
Technology journalist and author covering AI and the labs building it, and a former New York Times technology columnist.
“One person at one of these companies recently told me that they think their company might be the last company. And I thought, like, the last company to IPO this year? What do you mean? They were like, no, we think this might be the teleological end of capitalism. And there might never be another large company primarily run by humans.”
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Nilay Patel asks whether the idealists running frontier AI labs can manage companies at this scale. Roose says nobody could, since no one has gone from zero revenue to a possible $2 trillion IPO in five years. He argues you need to know how strange their beliefs are to understand the race.
Transcript
…cost quite a bit more money than they thought. And so the enterprise SaaS stuff is like how you sort of keep the flywheel going and pay for the GPUs and pay for the salaries of the researchers. Like this is sort of the table stakes of getting to keep pushing on the frontier, keep pushing to AGI.
…because they could not make their ideals align. And none of them seem like great managers. Like I don't know truly what they're like, but idealists and we're going to run an enterprise software company are not usually in the same sentence, often not. Do you think they can take the pressure?
…Like, I just think it would all kind of fall apart because they're all zealots and missionaries. Like, they are all in this, not all, probably. There's some people in like the SaaS sales department who are just kind of there for the paycheck. But like, a lot of the key people at these companies are united in their belief that they are building. You know, one person, I won't, I won't say who, one person at one of these companies recently told me that they think their company might be the last company. And I thought, like, the last company to IPO this year? What do you mean? They were like, no, we think this might be the teleological end of capitalism. And there might never be another large company primarily run by humans. And so, like, these people are weird and weird in ways that are worrying, but also very interesting. And so, this is what I was trying to do in the book: is not like tell you that these people are terrible or great. It's just like, you need to know who they are. Like, you need to know that they all hate each other. You need to know that they are these peculiar breed of thinkers to understand the…
There's a portion of your book where you talk about people splitting away from effective altruism to go become accelerationists. And you have a woman in there who's like, well, the accelerationists have better parties. And I just, I like those vibes better. And I thought to myself, well, what does…
I think there are probably two or three reasons that they're doing it. And, you know, I've asked them all, pretty much, you know, I talked to like 150 people for this and I asked all of them some version of this. Like, if it's so dangerous, why are you doing it? And the answers would usually start…
Yeah.
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