As someone who built a large fortune over the last few decades, I couldn’t help but notice artificial intelligence is something young people now perceive as a source of adversity. Well, roomful of 22-year-olds, let me tell you something about adversity: I myself faced a great deal of adversity back when I was building my large fortune, and when I encountered adversity, I simply turned that adversity into opportunity, which I believe to be your duty vis-a-vis artificial intelligence, which by the way is something you are powerless to halt in any way, and which I, what with my large fortune, feel excited about. Good luck to you, class of 2026!
I hope that encapsulates everything 2026 commencement speakers are tempted to say about AI. If you’ve been honored with the opportunity to address a graduating class on their big day, you’re welcome to just link them to that block of text I wrote instead of actually saying it, because the thing is, if you say it, you’re gonna get booed.
It happened to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield when she spoke to the graduates of University of Central Florida, and then it happened to ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt when he spoke to the graduates of University of Arizona.
But like contact tracers working backwards to find the source of a contagion, the internet just surfaced an early example of the AI-booing phenomenon, which was given the day after Caulfield’s speech, before it went viral.
The speech was by guy with a $450 million net worth Scott Borchetta, a record executive who founded the Big Machine Label Group, and was one of Taylor Swift’s adversaries in the dispute over her masters a few years ago. Middle Tennessee State University just named its media college after Borchetta after he donated $15 million. He also gave this year’s commencement address:
It’s impossible to hate the whole speech. Borchetta says now is “arguably the most exciting and challenging time ever” for the media, which, fair enough, it’s exciting in a way. At one point he says, “there’s a lot more to this world than mad wealth and political power,” and how can one not nod along?
Plus, he is, to be absolutely clear, not characterizing AI as an unalloyed good for the world. Toward the beginning of the speech, he spells this out. “Our biggest challenge today? Pretty easy guess: AI,” Borchetta says, and for the time being, the crowd is with him.
The problem is that Borchetta rhymes AI with a major challenge he and Big Machine faced: how to profit from streaming back when it first took over the music business. In his telling, he made it his job to “sound the alarm” to the record industry when Spotify was about to put the final nail in the coffin of the CD, and turned the “tool” of streaming to his advantage. He found, it seems, a way to secure some kind of profitable equilibrium for himself and his artists under the new system.
And good for him. But while the story goes that Spotify did pull record labels out of their piracy-induced nosedive and return them to profitability, it’s also reputed to have done so at the cost of financial stability for the artists themselves. The New York Times wrote in 2021 that whereas Spotify’s stated goal was to help a million artists make a living, the reality is that the streaming model mostly funnels money to labels and already-rich artists, and that at the time, only 13,000 total artists worldwide out of seven million total 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’s telling the graduates. When the room realizes he’s rhyming that story with AI—essentially telling them to arm themselves with AI the way he wielded streaming, and that one must use one’s weapons to slit throats before one’s own throat gets slit—you can clearly hear some of them revolt. The booing and yelling are barely audible in the video, but Borchetta reacts like the world’s smuggest, surfer-accented sea captain, worried he might have to put down a very un-chill mutiny:
“AI is rewriting production as we sit here (booing). I know it. Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool. (Angry jeering) Hey, like I said, you can, you can hear me now, or you can pay me later. Hey, then do something about it, ‘kay? It’s a tool. Make it work for you.”
Naturally, he also compares AI to a genie, and asserts, “It ain’t goin’ back in the bottle.”
The line, “you can hear me now, or you can pay me later,” is accompanied by a clenched-teeth grin, and Borchetta comes across like someone on a throne atop of a mountain of corpses, taunting the onlookers. His “do something about it,” sounds like a genuine challenge.
On his own terms, Borchetta is not wrong. Of course the economic system we have disproportionally benefits the ruthless, and it certainly doesn’t bend to complaints that it’s unjust. To the victor go the spoils, and who can dispute that Borchetta is a victor?
A recent report from the New York Fed 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’re declining to hire young people in favor of older workers. Survey data also suggest that CEOs with the future on their minds are imagining small staffs. Meanwhile, 90% say they’re deploying 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 the newest workers entering the economy they partly control, essentially, your piece of the pie is getting smaller; I have it; so you’d better come and take it from me? Who wants to throw their hat in the air after hearing that?
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