This morning, I woke up with a strange, unsettling thought:
What if Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin - the tech gods aren’t really who we think they are?
What if they’re not gods at all?
What if they’re just products?
The Myth of the Tech Genius
We’ve been fed the same story again and again. The brilliant dropout. The visionary founder. The misfit in the garage who ends up changing the world. These stories have been told so many times, in books, on TED stages, in Netflix documentaries, that they feel like truth. They’re not just success stories - they’re cultural scripture.
We’re told these figures succeeded because they were smarter, faster, and bolder than everyone else. Because they 'thought different.'
But step back, and the cracks in the myth start to show.
Systems Make the Individual
Behind every so-called tech genius is a system:
- Elite institutions like Stanford, Harvard, MIT.
- Wealthy families or early access to technology.
- Networks of investors, incubators, and advisors.
- Cultural timing that rewards specific ideas at specific moments.
Bill Gates had early access to computers at a private school in the 1960s. Steve Jobs was mentored by engineers at HP. Elon Musk came up during a time when clean energy and Mars colonization were just becoming viable (and marketable). Zuckerberg built Facebook in a Harvard dorm, but the infrastructure to scale it existed long before he wrote the code.
They didn’t build these systems - they used them.
They didn’t emerge from the void - they were shaped by environment, timing, capital, and culture.
In other words, they’re products of their systems.
Manufactured Icons
The tech world needs figureheads. Investors need poster boys. The media loves a good origin story. So we take complexity and reduce it to something easily consumable:
- Jobs as the tortured artist.
- Musk as the iron-willed futurist.
- Gates as the cold-blooded genius.
- Zuck as the social-network savant.
But these aren’t complete people - they’re brands.
They’re narratives designed to sell products, raise stock prices, win loyalty, and build empires.
The real work? Often done by teams, by researchers, by people you’ll never hear about.
The genius? Often built on the backs of lesser-known pioneers.
The idea that a single person changed the world with pure brilliance is not just inaccurate - it’s dangerous. It discourages collaboration. It glorifies hustle over ethics. It feeds the myth that you’re either born a genius or you're nobody.
Why This Realization Matters
When we stop idolizing individuals and start examining the systems behind them, everything shifts:
We start asking harder questions. Who gets left out of these narratives? Who’s not in the room when the “next big thing” is being built?
We stop chasing unicorn myths and start thinking about how innovation actually happens - incrementally, collaboratively, and imperfectly.
We realize we’re in a system too. And if we’re not careful, it’s shaping us into products as well - optimized for likes, productivity, and hustle until we’re just another myth in the making.
A More Honest Narrative
What if we stopped looking for the next Steve Jobs, and started building better systems?
What if we stopped telling kids to be the next Elon, and started asking: What kind of world would you design if you had real power?
What if we measured success not by wealth or disruption, but by how well we understood the forces shaping us - and how consciously we shaped them in return?
You Are a Product, Too
If the tech gods are just products, then the logical next question is:
What kind of product is the system making out of you?
Are you designing your life - or are you being manufactured?
Once you start asking that, it becomes harder to sleepwalk through the myths.
It becomes harder to worship icons.
It becomes harder to play someone else’s game.
And maybe - just maybe - that’s the point.
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