TAG

# AI

2026-08-11

The Greatest Product Managers, No. 8: Bill Gates — He Wrote an End Date for His Own Organization: Close at the End of 2045, After Spending $200 Billion

On January 14, 2026, the Gates Foundation's board approved a $9 billion annual budget and confirmed the foundation will close permanently at the end of 2045. Before it does, it will spend another $200 billion — double what it spent in its first 25 years — while cutting about 500 roles over the next five years. Not because money is short. Because it has to finish on time. Writing an end date for your own organization is a rare move: nearly every organization's implicit goal is to survive. He ranks 8th on our board with an OVR of 95. Business 99 is the top bracket of the entire list; originality 94 is the lowest in the top ten. He was never the inventor. Fifty years ago he put other people's inventions on every desk; today he is distributing $200 billion against a deadline. He is also the only person in the top ten still writing on his own personal website.

2026-07-19

The Woman Who Built ChatGPT Just Shipped a Model She Admits Isn't the Strongest — and Investors Are About to Value Her at $50 Billion

Yesterday Kimi K3 was still shouting "topped the charts, number one in the world." Today the woman who built ChatGPT did the exact opposite. On July 16, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines released Inkling — a 975B open-weights model, natively multimodal, with adjustable thinking effort — yet in black and white the announcement says it is "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed." Meanwhile this company, just a year and a half old, is raising a new round at roughly a $50 billion valuation — four times last July's. Why is someone who shipped a model that isn't the strongest worth $50 billion? The answer hides in the thing she's best at, and the most expensive thing in the AI era: judging what actually makes a good product.