For most of industrial history, becoming a billionaire required the inconvenience of other people. They wanted salaries, windows, and occasional explanations. They formed committees. Sometimes they formed unions, which are committees with consequences. The entrepreneur’s ancient predicament was that, to become fantastically rich, he first had to arrange for several thousand people to be moderately annoyed.
Artificial intelligence may finally resolve this staffing issue.
In a conversation with Alexis Ohanian, Sam Altman predicted that AI would make possible a company worth a billion dollars run by one person. Among his tech CEO friends, he said, there was already a betting pool on when it would happen. This is how the future arrives now: as a side wager among people whose group chat could acquire Portugal.
The valuation matters. Altman was talking about a billion dollars in company value, which is different from earning a billion dollars, in much the same way that being described as marriage material differs from someone helping you move. Still, the proposition is arresting. One founder. No employees. A vast commercial enterprise conducted in the clothes you slept in.
We should pause to appreciate the achievement. For decades, corporations have insisted that their people are their greatest asset. Now someone proposes removing all of them, and the asset becomes worth a billion dollars. Somewhere, a human resources director is adjusting a presentation.
Then being removed from it.
Imagine the founder’s first morning. The engineering agent has built the product. The marketing agent has identified an underserved demographic: people who have not yet been marketed to by this particular agent. The sales agent is nurturing leads, a phrase that makes prospective customers sound like injured hedgehogs. At 9:14, the founder closes three contracts while brushing his teeth.
By noon, he has achieved financial independence. By two, he needs someone to complain to about work.
This is where the difficulties begin. An office serves many functions beyond producing whatever it says on the website. It provides witnesses. When a client asks for the entire project to be redone in a slightly more confident shade of blue, you need another person to look at. The look is part of your compensation. No benefits package adequately accounts for it.
An AI can offer sympathy, of course. It can offer sympathy in seventeen languages and export the sympathy as a spreadsheet. But it cannot quite reproduce the colleague who says nothing, takes off his glasses, and stares at the ceiling. This is because the colleague also has rent to pay. His despair has collateral.
Our founder will therefore create a colleague agent. Then another, to complain about the first. Before long, he will need a management agent to mediate. The management agent will recommend a retreat. The retreat will take place entirely inside his laptop, but somehow still cost $18,000.
He will ask for an explanation. The finance agent will explain that the retreat was essential to alignment. He will ask what has been aligned. The agents will schedule a follow-up.
We have been here before, although previously someone had to book a conference room.
There is a serious liberation buried beneath the pitch. People with good ideas spend years waiting for permission, funding, or a technical cofounder who will answer an email. Tools that let them build things themselves could be wonderful. A small business that supports its owner, serves its customers, and closes at six is an excellent invention. We should try celebrating one sometime.
But the billion-dollar requirement gives the game away. A person making a comfortable living is apparently insufficiently futuristic. He must become a financial event. His independence only counts once an investment banker can express it as a multiple.
And the solitude is selective. The company’s sole employee will rely on chips, data centers, electricity, payment networks, and the work of people distributed across the planet. Calling this a one-person company is a little like calling a man in a hotel a one-person household. Technically, he occupies the room alone. Someone is still downstairs washing the towels.
None of this prevents the company from being valuable. It does complicate the founder’s eventual memoir, Alone Against the World, written with assistance from the world.
The deeper question is what happens to the person left in charge. With every task delegated, his remaining occupation will be deciding whether the tasks were done properly. He will become the customer of his own productivity: inspecting dashboards, approving suggestions, and wondering why a machine that can write software cannot understand what he meant by “a bit warmer.”
By Friday, the agents will have produced more work than he can review in a lifetime. He will request a summary. Another agent will summarize the summary. Eventually, a green circle will tell him that everything is fine.
This will be reassuring until he remembers that he commissioned the circle.
Perhaps he will hire someone. Just one person, initially. Someone sensible, with judgment, who can notice when the numbers look strange and say so without first congratulating him on the question. Someone who can sit across a table and disagree.
The salary will seem outrageous. There will be holidays to arrange, opinions to accommodate, another mug in the sink. The office Christmas party will require two crackers and no strategy.
And one afternoon, after a particularly stupid call, their eyes will meet.
For the first time all week, the founder will feel rich.
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