There’s a scene that keeps rattling around in my head. Elon Musk naming his companies after Iain M. Banks novels, quoting Asimov’s Foundation like it’s scripture, talking about Mars like it’s a plot point he’s personally responsible for finishing. And I keep thinking: this guy read some paperbacks in middle school and never really put them down. None of us did, actually. But most of us didn’t end up running rockets.

The Books That Built the Billionaires

Here’s the thing about a lot of the guys (and yeah, it’s mostly guys) who built the tech world we’re all stuck living in now – they grew up on a very specific diet of science fiction. Heinlein. Asimov. Neal Stephenson. The kind of stuff you find on a shelf in a kid’s bedroom next to a chemistry set and a poster of the periodic table. Great books, some of them. Genuinely great. But they were written, in a lot of cases, by and for teenage boys who wanted to feel like the smartest person in every room and also secretly save the world while everyone else was too dumb to see the danger coming.

That’s not a knock on the books themselves. I read plenty of them too, and I loved them. But there’s a difference between enjoying a fantasy and building a company – or a government policy, or a rocket program – around it like it’s a blueprint. And that’s basically what’s happened. Silicon Valley took the aesthetics of sci-fi (chrome, colonies, godlike founders solving problems nobody else can see) and skipped over the actual warnings baked into most of those stories.

Because let’s be honest, a huge chunk of classic sci-fi is a warning. Asimov’s robots break down because rigid rules always find loopholes. Heinlein’s heroes are often deeply flawed, sometimes outright dangerous. Even Iain Banks, whose Culture novels Musk loves to reference for ship names, wrote a universe that worked precisely because it had abundance and no scarcity-driven ego trips running the show. That’s the opposite of a guy hoarding rockets and social media platforms like trophies.

The Chosen One Problem

What really gets me is the “chosen one” thing. So many of these founders seem to genuinely believe they’re the singular genius who sees what nobody else can see. It’s a very 13-year-old-boy way of thinking about yourself – special, misunderstood, destined. Great for a coming-of-age novel. Not great when you’re making decisions that affect a few billion people’s newsfeeds or, you know, the actual climate.

So Why Does This Matter Now?

Because we’re not reading these fantasies anymore. We’re living inside them. Mars colonization talk isn’t a thought experiment at a sci-fi convention panel, it’s an actual budget line. AI “alignment” debates borrow language straight out of robot uprising plots. And the guys running these companies genuinely seem to think they’re the protagonist of the story, not, say, a side character who accidentally causes the apocalypse because he skipped the ethics chapter.

“Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction.”

That line from the original piece stuck with me because it’s so simple and so exactly right. It’s not that these people read bad books. It’s that they read good books and walked away with the wrong takeaway. They wanted the power fantasy, not the moral of the story. Foundation isn’t a manual for becoming a benevolent tech overlord, it’s a slow meditation on how empires crumble no matter how clever their founders think they are. Somebody skipped a few chapters.

The Part Nobody Wants to Admit

I’ve noticed this pattern before in other industries – finance guys quoting Sun Tzu without reading past the highlight reel, startup bros treating “The Art of War” like a productivity hack. It’s the same move. Take something with depth, strip out the nuance, keep the parts that flatter you. Sci-fi just happens to be the genre that shaped this particular generation of builders, so it’s the lens they filter everything through.

And look, I get the appeal. These books are fun. Genuinely, unapologetically fun. There’s something thrilling about imagining yourself as the person who cracks the code nobody else could. But there’s a reason most of those stories don’t end with the genius getting everything he wants and riding off into a happy sunset. Usually there’s a reckoning. A cost. Somebody in the story pays for the hubris – and it’s rarely the guy who caused it.

What’s interesting here is how selective the memory gets. Ask one of these founders about Asimov and they’ll talk your ear off about the Three Laws of Robotics like it’s gospel. Ask them about the actual plots, where those laws constantly fail in unexpected ways because reality is messier than rules on paper? Crickets. That’s not an accident. That’s cherry-picking dressed up as intellectual seriousness.

What This Actually Means

I don’t think this is going away anytime soon, if I’m being honest. The current crop of founders grew up on this stuff, and the next crop is growing up watching these founders act it out in real time, which just recycles the fantasy for another generation. It’s a loop. A pretty expensive, pretty consequential loop.

Maybe the fix isn’t telling these guys to stop reading sci-fi. Maybe it’s just asking them to finish the book. Read past the cool part where the genius saves the day. Get to the part where the story asks whether he should have had that much power in the first place. That chapter’s usually in there somewhere. It’s just easier to skip when you’re the one holding the rocket.