Sep 27, 2026 · 54 min · 9 segments
The AI doom story may be less about existential risk and more about market control. Alex and Richard pull apart the viral Jacob Coxson resignation thread, the Wall Street Journal timing, and the…
But the topic for today and even the broader topic here at Play is this desperation that is starting to creep within the AI labs, the really big ones who have the really big burn rates and the extent to which they're willing to go to manufacture a scenario and an outcome that makes sense to their bottom line.
And yeah, I think we're going to think around this post by Jacob Coxon and how that was set up and all the blowback that came after, you know, I found a timeline on Reddit and apparently his account was created January 21st, 2026.
You know, almost no public posts before the resignation.
And then the thread gets like 100 plus million views.
He gets almost 200,000 followers.
Should we just pause a second for anyone who doesn't?
Yeah.
Um, he recently resigned and around his resignation, uh, posted on X, one of the most viral posts ever on the platform and also one of the most quickly, um, viral posts, um, mentioning that, you know, he thought that, um, That it was unconscionable to continue working in the industry because of the very real threat agreed to by seniors in these organizations that AI poses an existential risk, a 10% risk to humanity that they might actually annihilate us.
And that's been sort of the... uh, seed for this, today's episode in many ways is like how crazy viral that went, but then also who's, who's jumped all over it.
Sorry to interrupt Alex, but I was worried, maybe something unaware of the actual tweet.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's very true.
We live in our own bubble, so we expect people to know some things, which kind of makes sense.
And it's also a funny pun on everything else that's happening in the world.
But yeah, that's correct.
He came out of nowhere, used to work as a researcher.
And then he went on, you know, the thing that's very interesting when you look at this timeline is, And we're going to get into what they're trying to achieve, at least what we think they're trying to achieve.
But the interesting part is that Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive quoting him on the resignation.
But this came out 18 minutes before his thread went up.
So this whole idea of the thread being something that he, you know, he has some friends and, you know, thought how to make it go a bit viral and so on.
Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
You can say that, but you can't really say that it just came by accident and you're just trying to do something when you already have an article with quotes in the Wall Street Journal that is already prepped up and it actually goes live before your tweet.
Yeah.
So, you know, that whole narrative kind of collapses on itself.
And it's, you know, there's a few more things that we're going to get into.
But the topic for today and even the broader topic here at Play is this desperation that is starting to creep within the AI labs, the really big ones who have the really big burn rates and the extent to which they're willing to go to manufacture a scenario and an outcome that makes sense to their bottom line.
And yeah, I think we're going to think around this post by Jacob Coxon and how that was set up and all the blowback that came after, you know, I found a timeline on Reddit and apparently his account was created January 21st, 2026.
You know, almost no public posts before the resignation.
And then the thread gets like 100 plus million views.
He gets almost 200,000 followers.
Should we just pause a second for anyone who doesn't?
Yeah.
Um, he recently resigned and around his resignation, uh, posted on X, one of the most viral posts ever on the platform and also one of the most quickly, um, viral posts, um, mentioning that, you know, he thought that, um, That it was unconscionable to continue working in the industry because of the very real threat agreed to by seniors in these organizations that AI poses an existential risk, a 10% risk to humanity that they might actually annihilate us.
And that's been sort of the... uh, seed for this, today's episode in many ways is like how crazy viral that went, but then also who's, who's jumped all over it.
Sorry to interrupt Alex, but I was worried, maybe something unaware of the actual tweet.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's very true.
We live in our own bubble, so we expect people to know some things, which kind of makes sense.
And it's also a funny pun on everything else that's happening in the world.
But yeah, that's correct.
He came out of nowhere, used to work as a researcher.
And then he went on, you know, the thing that's very interesting when you look at this timeline is, And we're going to get into what they're trying to achieve, at least what we think they're trying to achieve.
But the interesting part is that Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive quoting him on the resignation.
But this came out 18 minutes before his thread went up.
So this whole idea of the thread being something that he, you know, he has some friends and, you know, thought how to make it go a bit viral and so on.
Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
You can say that, but you can't really say that it just came by accident and you're just trying to do something when you already have an article with quotes in the Wall Street Journal that is already prepped up and it actually goes live before your tweet.
Yeah.
So, you know, that whole narrative kind of collapses on itself.
And it's, you know, there's a few more things that we're going to get into.
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