Short Notes On: Age differences between tech and world leaders

I have a well documented fascination with trying to understand what the world looked like for major figures when they were 20. This seems a pivotal point in a human’s life: they are both absorbing their context from the societies around them, and planning their futures based on what they could see (either consciously or unconsciously.)

Let us focus on one particular point: the ages of the two most powerful world leaders (Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping), versus the ages of the handful of the most powerful tech leaders (Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg).

Half a decade ago, the contrarian thinker and investor Peter Thiel wrote a series of emails back and forth to Nick Clegg and Mark Zuckerberg. Thiel - the first outside investor in Facebook - had spent the previous year iterating ideas with Zuckerberg about what the world would look like by 2030.¹ In these emails, he discussed a boomer versus millennial approach that was strangling society, politics, and institutions.

Thiel notes: “three Presidents (Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump) were all born within 70 days of one another, in the summer of 1946.” This was, arguably, a period of rapid ascendency for American geopolitical power. It’s interesting (to me) then that three of the most consequential American AI companies today are led by men born within 28 months of one another, now in their early forties. These three - Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg - arrived into a world where America was rapidly ascending to be the leading technological power. Two clusters of power - political and technological - born in short bursts of each other, forty years apart.

You are shaped by the world you grew up in. When Donald Trump was twenty, ARPANET - the internet’s precursor - did not exist; when Sam Altman was twenty, Facebook already existed with over two million users. In fact, the day after his birthday, the first video was uploaded to a new website called YouTube. When Xi Jinping was twenty, his generation was torn apart by social upheaval and widespread famine throughout China. When Zuckerberg was twenty, America was three years post 9/11. In a speech at Harvard in 2019, he references what this meant to him and how it shaped Facebook: “When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. The toll on soldiers, families and our national psyche was severe, and most of us felt powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.”²