In Silicon Valley, masks are currency.
- Elon Musk wears the mask of the disruptor: chaotic, daring, often cruel. Behind it lies a boy who once needed to prove himself louder than the world that ignored him.
- Sam Altman wears the mask of inevitability: calm, visionary, always talking of destiny. Yet his sprint to scale AI feels less like serenity, more like a man running too fast to remember why he started.
- Mark Zuckerberg wears the mask of the engineer-king: efficiency, iteration, “move fast, break things.” The mask protects him from doubt, but also shields him from empathy.
Each mask serves a purpose — it attracts investors, rallies employees, and seduces the press. But over time, a mask adhered too long fuses with the skin. They forget the face underneath.
That is the quiet tragedy of Big Tech: brilliance bending into caricature, humanity traded for velocity.
But let’s not deceive ourselves. Outside Silicon Valley, we also wear masks:
- At work, the mask of competence.
- With friends, the mask of ease.
- Online, the mask of sharp takes or perfect lives.
Different scale, same mechanism. We forget to ask: what happens if one day the mask does not come off?
And maybe the lesson for us — and for them — is simpler than all the valuations and quarterly targets.
Because there is a freedom that no IPO can buy:
Better to eat roasted sweet potatoes on a hill with an unburdened heart, than to wear a dozen masks until you no longer know your own face.