Sam Altman said intelligence would be as cheap as tap water. Eighteen months later, business owners in Taiwan aren’t feeling lifted by the rising tide — they’re staring at a choice nobody prepared them for: AI can make one person do the work of three, but the other two have been with you for years.

Most AI founders start optimizing token costs before they even find product-market fit. But in an era where intelligence is becoming as cheap as electricity, penny-pinching on tokens might be killing your product experience.

When Google banned thousands of OpenClaw users without warning, the real battle wasn’t about server load. It was about who gets to own your digital memory. From the ban wave to a bidding war for talent to Meta’s $2B Manus acquisition — peeling back the layers of the AI agent gateway war.

A developer sent a voice message from Morocco. His AI agent figured out how to handle it on its own. That moment forced a complete recalibration — of what we think AI can do, what apps are for, and what privacy even means anymore.

Most management books teach you to build processes. Musk’s method is the opposite — tear them down. From firing 80% of Twitter to iterating through rocket explosions at SpaceX, a breakdown of this extreme but effective philosophy and where it falls apart.