Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay this week outlining his vision for spreading AI's wealth and opportunity — including to residents of communities that host data centers. The piece runs roughly one-tenth the length of the average novel and is ten times longer than his earlier article on Personal Superintelligence.
Zuckerberg is not writing alone. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set the high-water mark in 2024 with a 13,000-word essay titled 'Machines of Loving Grace.' Nvidia's Jensen Huang and other AI executives have joined the genre. The official rationale is strategic: with Wall Street scrutinizing Meta's tens of billions in capital expenditure and rival labs racing for dominance, these founders want to lay out their vision in exacting detail and bring regulators and the public along.
Columbia Business School professor Dan Wang offered the charitable read: 'They have to draw the boundaries around why AI can be useful even before they begin selling products.'
Communications specialist Patrick Riccards offered the less flattering one. 'CEOs, particularly tech CEOs, believe that their words are gospel,' he told Fortune. The essays, he said, are flags planted in the ground: 'You essentially have five or six tech CEOs that are trying to demonstrate whose [essay] is bigger.'
The Buffett Standard
For a benchmark, the contrast with Warren Buffett is instructive. Buffett's annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders routinely exceeded 10,000 words, packed with the year's lessons, company results and plain-spoken wisdom. He famously drafted them as if explaining the business to his own sisters — smart people who happened to be outside finance. His successor Greg Abel followed that tradition in his first letter as CEO this year.
The distinction is audience. Buffett knew exactly who he was writing for and had earned the right to be heard over decades of results. By contrast, Zuckerberg, Amodei and their peers appear to be writing primarily to each other — a closed loop of founders, investors and the reporters who cover them, each essay answering the last.
That is a problem when the stated goal is public trust. Zuckerberg is facing skepticism from communities wary of data centers and broadly low on trust for Big Tech. A 6,500-word manifesto is an unlikely instrument of persuasion for that audience.
What the Market Sees
The numbers come first. Meta is spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure while its CEO publishes essays longer than most corporate annual reports. Investors are watching the capital allocation, not the word count. The manifesto genre may signal something more telling than its authors intend: when results are still unproven, words fill the gap.
Free enterprise rewards clarity and execution. The CEOs who will earn the right to be read are the ones who deliver margins before they deliver manifestos — and who write, as Buffett did, for the person outside the room, not the rival across the table.
