Second, despite their frustrations, these production managers felt that they were making history and that John was an inspired leader. Toy Story was a meaningful project to work on. That they liked so much of what they were doing allowed them to put up with the parts of the job they came to resent. This was a revelation to me: The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers. I also realized that this kind of thing, if left unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar.

And, most challenging of all, they were almost inextricably interwoven with all that was good, smart, and creative about the company and its people—all the things it would have been madness to destroy, or even to tamper with. We couldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But IBM failed to commercialize Tesauro’s project—why would a vendor of business servers sell commercial backgammon software to a few hundred customers? Why, indeed.

This adorable nook in the marketplace was filled in 1994 by the Norwegian researcher Fredrik Dahl. Dahl was an unusual man who enjoyed backgammon, chess, simulated tank battles, jiu-jitsu, and foraging in the woods for edible fungi. He worked for Norway’s defense establishment, where he simulated outcomes from a hypothetical Soviet invasion. His work drew inspiration from the 1983 movie WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick. In that movie, an AI attempts to start a nuclear war.

Nvidia’s frenzied six-month shipping cycle left the perfectionists at 3dfx at a disadvantage. At one point, one of 3dfx’s founders publicly speculated about declaring a truce between the two companies so that technical standards could be established before the next generation of products shipped. “That’s when I knew we had him,” Kirk said. “We were in a death struggle with 3dfx, and one of us had to die.

THIRTEEN: Superintelligence

“It took a sharper eye to spot the differences. There was the vision question, with Musk moving backward from fantasy and Huang moving forward from reality. There was also the topic of loyalty. Musk did not value it; he often fired people arbitrarily and without warning, in one case canning the entire Starlink engineering team almost at random on a Sunday

afternoon. Huang almost never fired anyone, and when he did, it was only after multiple cautions and the offer of a performance-improvement plan. It took truly egregious behavior to get kicked out of Nvidia, and many employees worked there for decades, including boomerang hires like Catanzaro and Aarts. Even when operating economics forced Huang to shutter a division, he reassigned employees to other useful tasks. In 2019 Curtis Priem returned to Nvidia’s offices for the first time in sixteen years to join Huang and Malachowsky for a reunion of the company’s founders. “I was astounded at how many people were still there,” he said. “Jeff Fisher, his kids were working for Nvidia.