As someone who built a huge fortune over the past few decades, I couldn’t help but notice that artificial intelligence is something that young people now perceive as a source of adversity. Well, room full of 22-year-olds, let me tell you something about adversity: I myself faced great adversity when I was building my great fortune, and when I encountered adversity, I simply turned that adversity into opportunity, which I believe is your duty in the face of artificial intelligence, which by the way is something that you cannot stop in any way, and which I, with my great fortune, am excited about. Good luck to you, class of 2026!
I hope this sums up everything the 2026 commencement speakers are tempted to say about AI. If you’ve had the honor of having the opportunity to address a graduating class on their big day, you can link them to that block of text I wrote instead of saying it, because the thing is, if you say it, they’ll boo you.
It happened to the real estate executive Gloria Caulfield when he spoke to graduates of the University of Central Florida, and then it happened to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google when he spoke to graduates at the University of Arizona.
But like contact tracers working backwards to find the source of an infection, the Internet just revealed an early example of the AI booing phenomenon, which occurred the day after Caulfield’s speech, before it went viral.
The speech was guy with a net worth of 450 million dollars Scott Borchetta, a record executive who founded Big Machine Label Group, and He was one of Taylor Swift’s adversaries in the dispute over their masters a few years ago. Middle Tennessee State University just his media school named after Borchetta after him donated $15 million. He also gave this year’s inaugural speech:
It is impossible to hate the entire speech. Borchetta says that now is “possibly the most exciting and challenging time of all time” for the media, which, admittedly, is exciting in a way. At one point he says, “There is so much more to this world than a madness of wealth and political power,” and how can you not agree?
Also, to be absolutely clear, it does not characterize AI as a pure good for the world. Towards the beginning of the speech, he explains it in detail. “Our biggest challenge today? It’s pretty easy to guess: AI,” says Borchetta, and for the moment, the crowd is with him.
The problem is that Borchetta rhymes with AI with a big challenge that he and Big Machine faced: how to profit from streaming when it took over the music business. In his story, he set out to “sound the alarm” to the recording industry when Spotify was about to put the final nail in the coffin of the CD, and took advantage of the “tool” of streaming. He apparently found a way to ensure some kind of profitable balance for himself and his artists under the new system.
And good for him. But while history tells that Spotify did to bring record labels out of their piracy-induced tailspin and return them to profitability, it is also said to have done so at the expense of the financial stability of the artists themselves. The New York Times wrote in 2021 that while Spotify’s stated goal was to help a million artists make a living, the reality is that the streaming model primarily funnels money to labels and artists who are already wealthy, and that at the time, only 13,000 artists worldwide out of a total of seven million artists on Spotify (about two-tenths of a percent) were receiving $50,000 or more in royalties.
But Borchetta is the hero of his own story, and that’s the version he tells the graduates. When the room realizes that he is rhyming that story with AI, essentially telling them to arm themselves with AI the same way he handled streaming, and that one must use their weapons to slit one’s throat before one’s own throat is slit, you can clearly hear some of them rebel. The boos and shouts are barely audible in the video, but Borchetta reacts like the world’s most cocky, surfer-accented boat captain, worried about having to quell a very calm mutiny:
“The AI is rewriting production while we sit here (booing). I know it. Face it. Like I said, it’s a tool. (Angry mocking) Hey, like I said, you can, you can listen to me now, or you can pay me later. Hey, then do something about it, okay? It’s a tool. Make it work for you.”
Naturally, he also compares AI to a genie and states, “It won’t go back into the bottle.”
The line “you can hear me now or you can pay me later” is accompanied by a gritted-toothed smile, and Borchetta looks like someone on a throne atop a mountain of corpses, mocking the spectators. Your “do something about it” sounds like a genuine challenge.
On his own terms, Borchetta is not wrong. Of course, the economic system we have disproportionately benefits the ruthless, and certainly doesn’t give in to complaints that it’s unfair. The spoils will go to the victor, and who can deny that Borchetta is a victor?
A recent report from the New York Federal Reserve exposes the underlying logic of Borchetta’s speech for all its brutality. Borchetta is a CEO, and the plurality of CEOs self-report that they are Reject the hiring of young people in favor of older workers.. Survey data also suggests that forward-thinking CEOs envision small workforces. Meanwhile, 90% say they are implementing AI in their companies in some way.
So, again, you can’t fault Borchetta’s honesty. But when did it become good practice among commencement speakers to tell newer workers entering the economy that they control in part, essentially, your slice of the pie is getting smaller; I have it; so you better come and take it away from me? Who wants to throw their hat in the air after hearing that?
