GoKawiil“If I’m to have a symbol, it shall be one I respect .”
Back in January, it came to light via FEC reporting that OpenAI’s president and co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife had made a monumental $25 million donation to MAGA Inc. last September—one of the largest individual political donations of 2025.
When interviewed by WIRED about his newfound political largesse, Brockman explained the check in rather grand terms. “This mission, in my mind, is bigger than companies, bigger than corporate structures,” he said. “We are embarking on a journey to develop this technology that’s going to be the most impactful thing humanity has ever created.”
The word that sticks out to me here is “humanity”. He writes a $25 million check with his wife to a partisan political operation, one with very specific policy positions affecting very specific people, and explains it in the language of humanity. The kind that lives in essays and mission statements, not the kind that has healthcare anxieties or gets deported or loses jobs or disagrees with you about politics. Capital-H, abstract, floating-above-the-fray Humanity.
Brockman is not an outlier. If you’ve worked in or around big tech for any length of time, you’ve met the type, probably several dozen of them. They’re everywhere in AI. They care enormously about Humanity. They’d do anything for Humanity. They just can’t be bothered with actual people.
And if these executives and companies don’t see and address the disconnect in their public messaging, they’re doomed to keep losing the battle for hearts and minds the industry desperately needs them to win.
The View From Orbit
When I contemplate a mascot for this type of executive, the image that comes to mind is blue, nude, and levitating: Dr. Manhattan.
For those who haven’t read writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons’ “Watchmen”, here’s the quick version: Jon Osterman is a nuclear physicist who gets disintegrated in a lab accident and reconstitutes himself as a being of godlike power. He can see across time. He can manipulate matter at the atomic level. He is, for all practical purposes, omniscient and omnipotent. And over the arc of the story, he gradually loses the ability to give a shit about people.
This isn’t a flaw in his character. Moore wrote it as the inevitable consequence of operating at that altitude. Manhattan can perceive the entire arc of human civilization. He understands the quantum mechanics underlying all of existence. He genuinely does care about humanity’s survival in some detached cosmic sense. But he can’t maintain a relationship with the woman he loves or comfort someone who’s grieving. Individual suffering becomes statistically insignificant when you’re tracking the movements of atoms and the trajectory of species.
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