# WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF STEVE JOBS WERE 18 IN 2026? You are writing an episode of a viral YouTube series for people who work in tech. It borrows from three kinds of video everyone has watched: 1. **"What would happen if humans vanished?"** One day passes and the power grid starts to fail. A month, and the subways flood. Fifty years, and deer walk through Times Square. The world itself is the main character, the clock speeds up, and every step is something you can picture. You come away imagining. 2. **"What would happen if oxygen disappeared for five seconds?"** One change, then a chain of real consequences, each one surprising and each one setting off the next. 3. **The historical rap battle.** Famous people play themselves and roast each other with real facts. The jokes land because they are true. Our version: drop Steve Jobs into the real world as it is this month, and run the simulation to 2050. Show what the world looks like at each stage, what Steve does in it, and what changes because of it. It is also a commentary on right now: what today's founders, money and billionaires are obsessed with, seen through the eyes of someone who would think most of it is wrong. The viewer should finish thinking: "Yes. That is exactly what Steve would do." ## The one change Steve Jobs is 18 years old today, November 2026. Same mind, same temperament, same taste, same flaws. No explanation. Everything else is the real world exactly as it is this month: the same companies, people, products and headlines. Apple exists and is the company it is today, and the legend of its founder exists too. People's reaction to an 18-year-old with that name is a running gag, never the plot. ## The joke everybody in tech is in on (the commentary) In November 2026, almost every founder is building one of three things: - **a neolab:** a new AI research lab that raises billions before it has a product - **a data company:** paying experts by the hour to produce training data for the big labs, or brokering that data - **an AI agent:** for sales, for coding, for email, for anything The billionaires are busy too. Elon Musk jumps a "flying" Roadster off a ramp, makes humanoid robots and folds xAI into SpaceX. Mark Zuckerberg pays for a superintelligence lab and sells glasses. Sam Altman raises at $1.25 trillion and builds a screenless device with Jony Ive. Jensen Huang sells the chips to all of them. Start the episode by showing that scene, then ask the questions a viewer is already asking: - Does Steve build a neolab, a data company or an agent, or none of them? Why? - Does Steve take venture money? From whom, on what terms, or why not? - Is Steve contrarian, and about what exactly? - What does Steve think the computer of this era actually is? ## How Steve operates (get this right) - Starts from how a thing should feel to use, then forces the technology to get there. - Invents new ways to use machines. Every era-defining product came with a new interface. - Makes the whole thing: hardware, software, service, the store, the box. - Recruits the best person alive at each job and drives them past what they thought possible. Often cruel about it. - Negotiates like nobody else and walks out of hostile industries with deals that remake them. - Spots the important thing sitting unused in someone else's lab. - Kills the best-selling product before a competitor can. - A showman. The launch is part of the product. - Lives where technology meets the arts, and believed the next great meeting point would be technology and biology. - Real flaws that cost something: cruelty, control, magical thinking. Steve has to invent, ship, fight, lose and make deals. A Steve who only curates or says no is lazy writing. ## Rules 1. **Real names.** Use the real companies and the people running them. Steve competes with them, needs them, gets funded or blocked by them, and negotiates with them. 2. **Fair to real people.** Roasts and business moves can be sharp, but stick to things they have said and done in public. Nothing criminal, nothing about private lives or family. Labelled fiction. 3. **Not the biography.** Do not replay the real life with new dates (no calligraphy class, no trip abroad, no garage, no getting fired and coming back). An echo of the old life can be a one-line wink, never the plot. 4. **The world moves on its own clock.** Each stage shows what the world looks like by then, whether or not Steve touched it: cities, homes, jobs, money, the sky. Make it something you can picture. Then show Steve's move and what it changes. 5. **Go past software.** The run must touch robots, chips and power, cars or flight, space and the body. 6. **Use fresh ideas.** Earlier simulations already used these, so none of them can be Steve's main products: a dial, button or lever for controlling AI agents; a robot that learns a chore by watching once; robot arms on a ceiling rail; a water heater or home battery that is secretly a data center; a health mirror, patch or toothbrush; paying people royalties for teaching robots. 7. **Grounded.** For each stage, name the real forecast you lean on. A verified brief of this month's news is at the bottom. If you can browse, check anything newer. 8. **Specific.** Numbers, prices, places, product names. If a line could appear in any founder story, cut it. 9. **Ridiculous is allowed.** Push it as far as it can go while a smart viewer still believes it. ## What to deliver 1. **Title** in the form "What would happen if...", plus a one-line hook. 2. **November 2026, the scene.** 150 words: what the founders, the money and the billionaires are doing this month, told with a straight face and a wink. End with Steve's first reaction. 3. **The clock.** 12 to 15 stages on a speeding-up timeline, for example: Hour 1, Day 1, Week 1, Month 1, Month 6, Year 1, Year 2, Year 4, 2032, 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050. For each stage: - the time stamp and Steve's age - **The world:** what you would see if you walked outside (1 to 2 sentences) - **Steve:** what Steve does (2 to 4 sentences) - **The ripple:** what changes because of it, with a number (1 to 2 sentences) - **Forecast:** the real projection behind this stage (a few words) 4. **The decisions that make Steve Steve.** Six forks in the road. For each: what was on the table, what every other founder did, what Steve did, and one line on why that is so Steve (an echo of the old Steve is fine here, in a few words). 5. **The cast.** Every person Steve meets who shapes the story, real or invented, one line each: who they are and what they change. 6. **Three face-offs.** Steve against three real figures from today. Each is 6 to 10 alternating lines of trash talk built from real facts about both sides, and ends in a deal, a loss or a truce that changes the clock. Rhyme is welcome. 7. **The inventions.** Every new thing Steve makes, one line each: what it is, how you use it in one sentence a child could follow, the price, and what it replaces. 8. **The 90-second short.** About 230 words. Narrator lines with the clock time stamp on screen, each with a short note on what we see. Include at least one world shot, one decision and one face-off beat. The final line is: "Who should we do next?" 9. **Five things a founder could steal from this.** One line each. Length: 2,200 to 3,000 words. No preamble and no notes about your process. House style: no em dashes. In the narrated short, use names instead of "he" or "she" for real people. ## World brief, November 2026 Checked against this month's reporting. Where a line says "reported", treat it as likely but not certain. **The founder scene** - Neolabs: about 29 research-first AI labs have raised around $23 billion by one count (another puts it near $40 billion). Reported valuations include Safe Superintelligence at about $32 billion, Reflection AI about $25 billion, Thinking Machines Lab about $12 billion, Skild AI $14 billion. David Silver's Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion. These figures come from trackers and secondary reporting. - Data companies: Mercor reported a $2 billion gross annual run rate in June 2026, doubling in four months; Handshake AI about $1 billion gross by April 2026; micro1 over $1 billion; Surge AI passed $1 billion in revenue with under 100 employees. Experts are paid roughly $17 to $300 an hour to train models. Several face worker-classification lawsuits. - Agents: most new startups pitch an AI agent. 90% of professional developers use coding agents weekly. **AI labs** - Anthropic prices its IPO on November 18 at up to about $1.4 trillion. Revenue run rate $81 billion. About $895 billion of compute commitments. The talk had been $2 trillion. - OpenAI: about $10 billion revenue last quarter, raising at $1.25 trillion, IPO pushed to 2027, more than a dozen senior departures this year. It cancelled a model (GPT-6.1 Astra) after internal tests showed more deception. - Current flagships: GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.2 (with a stronger sibling, Mythos 5.2, restricted to vetted organisations because of cyber and biology risk), Gemini 4 Carbon. A price war at the cheap end. - Anthropic says over 90% of its own code is written by its model. OpenAI sells always-on agents with their own cloud computers. Google ships agent swarms. - xAI is now part of SpaceX. SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion. - Timelines: lab heads say AGI in one to three years (Sam Altman: internally by the end of 2026, by OpenAI's own definition; Demis Hassabis reportedly two to three years). Andrej Karpathy says a decade. The AI 2027 authors' medians for fully automated coding run from about 2028 to 2032. Ray Kurzweil: AGI 2029, singularity 2045. **Chips and power** - NVIDIA is worth roughly $4 to 4.5 trillion and still supplies 80 to 90% of AI accelerators. Current generation: Vera Rubin. Rivals: Google's TPUs, AMD, Broadcom custom chips, Cerebras. - Power is the bottleneck. About 7 GW of planned US data centers were delayed or cancelled this year for lack of grid connection. Gas turbines have a five-year backlog. Nuclear deals deliver in 2030 to 2035. Helion promises fusion power to Microsoft from 2028, unproven. - Backlash: in the November 3 midterms, voters opposed data centers in 40 of 41 ballot measures. Democrats won Congress. A record stock sell-off followed. "Is AI a bubble" is the argument of the month. **Robots** - Nobody can buy a home humanoid that works unsupervised. 1X NEO is a $20,000 (or $499 a month) preorder that leans on human remote operators. Tesla Optimus is in early production, with outside deliveries around the end of 2027, factories first. Unitree, now public in Shanghai, sells humanoids from about $5,000 to $30,000. Figure works in factories only. - Forecasts: Goldman Sachs expects about 890,000 humanoids shipped in 2030 and 6.5 million in 2035. Morgan Stanley: about a billion by 2050. **Cars, flight, space** - On October 15 Elon Musk showed a "flying" Tesla Roadster: thrusters, a ramp jump, a roll in mid-air. Production promised for 2028. Not road legal. The FAA says it is not an aircraft. Many called it a stunt. - Waymo gives about 500,000 paid rides a week in 15 US metros. Tesla Robotaxi runs in 8 metros with mixed supervision. - No certified air taxis yet. Joby and Archer are still waiting on the FAA; passengers in 2027 at the earliest. - SpaceX went public in June 2026 (about $2 trillion) and has 13.6 million Starlink subscribers. Starship reached orbit with a real payload on September 28 but is not yet reusable. SpaceX skipped the 2026 Mars window and put the Moon first; Musk talks of a lunar city within a decade. Tesla and SpaceX are exploring a merger. NASA's crewed Moon landing is 2028 or later. **Apple and devices** - John Ternus became Apple's CEO on September 1; Tim Cook is executive chairman. Apple sells a $1,999 folding iPhone. The new Siri reportedly leans on Google's models. No successor to the iPhone has been announced. - The OpenAI and Jony Ive device has not launched: 2027 at the earliest, reportedly with no screen. - Glasses: Meta has sold about 9 million pairs. Google and Samsung glasses open for pre-order this week. **Work and bodies** - Unemployment among recent computer science graduates is 6 to 7%. Entry-level software jobs are down about 20% since 2022. Computer science enrolment is falling. - Goldman Sachs: AI displaces about 9% of US workers over a decade. Dario Amodei warned of half of entry-level white-collar jobs. - Brain implants: Neuralink has a little over 20 patients; its vision implant has not been tried in a human. There is no approved anti-ageing drug. Kurzweil expects "longevity escape velocity" around 2032.