U.S. Business and the Liar’s Premium

This week reminded me of how Trump's dishonesty is eroding American business morality...

Sam Altman took the witness stand in Oakland this week (May 12), wearing a careful expression of a man whose lawyers had spent weeks preparing him to be questioned about his honesty. Within a few minutes Elon Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, was asking him, under oath, whether he was completely trustworthy. Altman paused. He said that he believed so. Molo asked whether he always told the truth. Altman said that he believed he was a truthful person. The press benches did not stir. The jurors did not exchange glances. The remarkable thing about the moment was how unremarkable it felt. Twenty years ago that exchange, put under oath to the chief executive of one of the most consequential corporations on earth, would have constituted a scandal in itself. The questions being possible would have been the news. In 2026 it is housekeeping. The questions are asked, the answers are given, the trial proceeds.

This is the second cross examination of the new American century in which a leading technology executive has been asked, in open court, to certify his own honesty. The first was Mark Zuckerberg, repeatedly. The third will arrive on schedule. We have come to expect this of the people who run our most valuable companies. We have come, more strangely, to forgive it. The Musk v. Altman trial, now in its third week, has produced a kind of clinical portrait of the modern American executive: court filings show Altman holding more than two billion dollars in personal stakes across nine companies that do commercial business with OpenAI, including roughly $1.7 billion in the fusion startup Helion and $633 million in Stripe; testimony details the procedural recusals by which these conflicts were said to be managed; the OpenAI board’s clinical 2023 verdict, since walked back, was that he had not been consistently candid with them. It is the kind of record that, in another era, would have ended a career. In this era it appears to have built one.

It would be comforting to treat Altman as an outlier. He is not. He is the median.

What the past decade of American business produces, when one reads it as a single document rather than as a series of unconnected scandals, is the steady professionalization of the strategic lie. The lie has been domesticated. It has been integrated into the standard playbook of capital formation, the way leveraged buyouts were integrated in the 1980s and stock buybacks were integrated in the 2010s. There are conferences at which it is discussed, in coded vocabulary, by people who would not call it what it is. There are venture firms whose entire portfolio thesis depends on the founder being a particular kind of plausible liar. There is, in the most expensive square footage in America, a quiet and almost embarrassed consensus that the truth, as a feature of executive communication, is something one uses tactically.

The lies sort themselves by what they purchase.

Some buy capital. Adam Neumann took a commercial real estate sublease arbitrage and rebranded it as a physical social network, a state of consciousness, a generational reordering of work. SoftBank, which had decided in advance that the next great founder would have Neumann’s affect, wrote checks against the story until the valuation reached $47 billion. The IPO collapsed. Neumann walked away with a package initially valued at roughly $1.7 billion. He then raised hundreds of millions for a new residential real estate company on the strength of the same résumé. Larry Ellison built the foundation of his fortune, in Oracle’s early years, on a corporate culture of prematurely recognizing revenue. Oracle settled with the SEC. The stock survived. Ellison is now worth roughly $200 billion and controls, through his son, Paramount Global and a substantial portion of the American news ecosystem. Charlie Javice invented four million users for a financial aid startup and sold the company to JPMorgan for $175 million. She was convicted, which is worth noting: she is the exception that defines the rule. She lied to a single well resourced counterparty with subpoena power. Lie to a public market and the market thanks you with a higher multiple.

Some lies buy control. This is the harder category to see because it is rarely a single declarative falsehood. It is, instead, the steady granular management of which facts reach which decision maker, and when, and through whom. The OpenAI situation, again, is exemplary. The two billion dollar personal portfolio overlapping with the company’s supply chain is one element. The procedural recusals are another. The 2023 board attempt to assert oversight, defeated within a week by Microsoft and the employee base, is a third. The new board structure, which ensures the board cannot do that again, is the fourth and most important. The dishonesty was not a single sentence on a single day. The dishonesty was the governance architecture itself, which made certain truths organizationally unspeakable. Alex Gorsky was running the relevant Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical division during the years, roughly 1999 to 2005, when the company was marketing the antipsychotic Risperdal for unapproved uses in children and the elderly. The conduct generated $2.2 billion in federal penalties in a settlement that closed in 2013, by which time Gorsky had been promoted to chief executive of the parent company. He was promoted not despite his management of the fallout but because of it. The Boeing executives who declined to disclose to the FAA the existence and behavior of the MCAS flight system on the 737 MAX did so within a culture that understood, from above, that disclosure would be expensive. Two airliners flew into the ground. Three hundred forty six people died. Dennis Muilenburg, the chief executive who oversaw the period, left with an exit package of approximately $62 million.

And some lies, the most lucrative kind, buy reputation. At sufficient scale the lie ceases to read as a lie and begins to read as ambition, as visionary impatience, as the founder’s necessary distortion field. A founder with a vision is priced differently from a founder with a product. Elon Musk has been promising fully autonomous Tesla driving by the following calendar year, every year, since 2015. The promises have not been borne out by the engineering record, year over year, and the SEC has previously taken enforcement action against Tesla over related disclosure practices. They were also load bearing. They lifted Tesla into a trillion dollar valuation built on the assumption that the promise would eventually be kept, by someone, somehow, before the gravitational pull of the actual product caught up. Musk is, on most days, the wealthiest person in human history. He is currently suing Sam Altman for what he calls dishonesty. Mark Zuckerberg absorbed the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, the scrutiny that followed the 2016 election, the Facebook Files, and a metaverse pivot that has consumed roughly $70 billion in operating losses. His personal net worth roughly tripled across the same period. The lesson the market drew from this was not that Zuckerberg had been dishonest. The lesson was that platforms above a certain scale are not disciplined by reputation in any meaningful sense, and never will be again. Trevor Milton was convicted in 2022 of securities fraud for promising hydrogen trucks his company could not build. He rolled an unpowered prototype down a hill and called it a working vehicle. President Trump pardoned him in March of 2025. The signal that pardon sent into every founder pitch deck in America is difficult to overstate.

Which brings us, as the line of argument has to, to the president.

The temptation, when one writes about American politics in 2026, is to treat Donald Trump as a thing that has happened to the country, an exogenous shock to be absorbed and modeled like a hurricane. This is wrong. He is not an external variable. He is the most powerful single piece of cultural infrastructure in American life, and he has been, for a decade now, the figure against whom everyone else in American public life adjusts. To imagine that the country’s chief executives are unaffected by the moral character of its chief executive is to misunderstand both the office and the country.

Trump’s specific contribution to American commercial life is not that he made lying possible. Lying was always possible. Ellison and Neumann did not need permission. Trump’s contribution is that he demonstrated, at the apex of American visibility, that lying is not punished. He inflated his personal net worth by hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain favorable loans. He was found liable in a $355 million civil fraud judgment in New York. He ran a fake university and a fake charity. He attempted to overturn the result of a federal election. He was convicted on 34 felony counts. None of it disqualified him. A meaningful slice of the American electorate received the entire record as evidence not of dishonor but of competence, the kind of competence that, in their reading, can only be acquired by a man willing to lie effectively when honest men will not.

A country imitates its president. This is not metaphor and it is not moralism. It is descriptive. The presidency is the most visible site of behavioral modeling in American life and has been so since the office acquired its modern form. Theodore Roosevelt did not produce the muckrakers; the muckrakers preceded him, and he attempted in a famous 1906 speech, borrowed from Bunyan, to scold them as men whose gaze never lifted from the floor. But his combative public moralism set the tonal range within which they continued to work, and they took his moralism more seriously than he had intended. Ida Tarbell would later write that he had misread his Bunyan. The point is that the tonal range belongs to the office whether the occupant likes it or not. Franklin Roosevelt’s combination of patrician confidence and tactical opacity produced a generation of executives who learned to combine the two. Eisenhower’s procedural reticence shaped the boardroom temperament of postwar industrial America. Ronald Reagan’s blend of optimism and selective inattention to inconvenient facts produced an entire managerial style that survived him by twenty years. A president does not merely set policy. He sets the range within which power may be exercised.

When that tonal range includes the strategic lie as a recognized and respected instrument, when the most visible American demonstrates daily that consequence does not attach to dishonesty in service of one’s own success, the rational executive updates accordingly. He is not corrupted in any acute sense. He simply reads the data. His general counsel reads it. His chief financial officer reads it. His board reads it. They have all watched the same decade. They have all seen which behaviors are punished and which are not. They have priced this into their decisions, into their disclosures, into their compensation structures, into the careful gradient by which truth is permitted to reach the audit committee.

The federal enforcement architecture against which the calculation is run has, meanwhile, been visibly disassembled. The Department of Justice’s white collar fraud section has been hollowed. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement budget has been cut by roughly a third. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being administratively dismantled. The pardon power is being deployed, in real time, to erase business fraud convictions whose subjects are politically loyal. State attorneys general bring the cases they can and decline the cases they cannot. The signal traveling up and down the chain of American executive life is consistent and unmistakable. The cost of lying has gone down, the upside of lying has gone up, and any chief executive who is not adjusting accordingly is failing in his fiduciary duty.

None of this would be sustainable without the consent of the consumer, and that consent has been remarkably steady. Americans buy iPhones from a company whose chief executive routinely testifies in his own conflict of interest proceedings. They drive Teslas they were told, year after year, would drive themselves. They use platforms whose chief executives have, over the past decade, been forced to read prepared apologies into congressional microphones with such frequency that the apologies have begun to function as a kind of corporate liturgy. The customer base does not punish any of it. To understand why is to understand something uncomfortable about the country.

The first reason is that American culture has, since its founding, distinguished sharply between method and outcome, and has reserved its serious moral attention for the latter. The country that produced Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan and the Pullman Company has never been particularly impressed by the question of how the railroad got built. It cared whether the railroad ran. The Tesla that almost drives itself is forgiven its prior decade of misrepresentation because, in some attenuated sense, it now almost drives itself. The pardon is retroactive and total. Whatever the founder said while building the thing becomes, on the day the thing works, hustle.

The second reason is that the American executive, beginning roughly with Lee Iacocca and arriving fully with Steve Jobs, has been recast as a kind of cultural performer, and his consumers as a kind of audience. The lies are not bugs in this arrangement. They are features. The reality television presidency was made possible by the reality television corporation, and both run on the same underlying engagement model. The audience does not require honesty. The audience requires drama. Sam Altman in a courtroom is a more compelling figure than Sam Altman in a press release. Elon Musk’s annual broken promise is content. The lie functions as the season cliffhanger, and the consumer, who is now also the audience, returns for the next episode.

The third reason is the hardest to write about because it implicates the reader. Americans want to believe they could do this too. The promise of the American Dream has, in the past forty years, quietly contracted from the promise of a stable middle class life to the promise of, possibly, becoming an outlier billionaire. The technique by which the outlier billionaire is now produced has become legible. To punish the liar is to admit that the technique requires lying, and to admit that the technique requires lying is to render the Dream, in its modern form, ethically unavailable to honest people. The consumer who continues buying from the liar is protecting his own aspirational frame. He is not endorsing the dishonesty. He is preserving the possibility that he might, one day, deploy it himself.

This is, in the end, the deepest sense in which the United States is becoming a different country. We are not living through a temporary loss of integrity that will be restored by the next election. We are watching the steady repricing of honesty as a commercial good. Honesty had, for most of the twentieth century, a premium attached to it. Companies traded at higher multiples because their disclosures could be trusted. Founders raised at better terms because their representations could be relied upon. The auditor signed his name and meant it. The boardroom understood that certain things, however inconvenient, would have to be said aloud. That premium has been bid down. It has not been bid all the way to zero, but it is no longer the dominant pricing input it was, and the executives who built their careers on its persistence are retiring without replacement.

The historical analog, for those who require one, is the Gilded Age. The decades after the Civil War produced an American business culture in which financial manipulation, regulatory capture, and routine dishonesty toward investors and the public were not aberrations but practices. The repricing of honesty took an enormous amount of structural work to undo: the Progressive Era, the muckrakers, the Pujo hearings, the Pecora hearings, the Sherman and Clayton Acts, the creation of the SEC, the New Deal, the entire postwar regulatory state. It required a generation of journalists, regulators, prosecutors, and presidents who collectively decided that the country could not function on the prior equilibrium. It took roughly fifty years.

We are at the beginning of the corresponding repricing.

I do not want to be misunderstood. There are still honest chief executives running serious American companies under serious governance. There are still federal prosecutors doing patient work. There are still board members who, when the time comes, will ask the unwelcome question. The country is not yet a counterfactual. But the equilibrium has moved, and equilibria are sticky. Once a society reprices the truth downward, the cost of repricing it back upward is paid in indictments, in collapsed institutions, in slow generational labor performed by people who do not get rich for performing it. We have not yet begun to pay that cost. We are still, on most days, enjoying the upside of the new arrangement, in the form of trillion dollar valuations and visionary founders and pardons issued by friends.

Sam Altman left the witness stand in Oakland on the afternoon of May 12. He had been on the stand for roughly four hours. Bret Taylor, the chairman of the OpenAI board, had testified earlier that morning that Altman was forthright and transparent. The trial will end. There will be a verdict. The verdict will, in any material sense, not matter. OpenAI is now valued at $850 billion. Altman’s portfolio of investments in adjacent companies has, since the filing of the disclosure, appreciated. The president of the United States, who in another era might have weighed in on the matter from the bully pulpit, is occupied with his own affairs.

The country is producing its next generation of chief executives now, in the business schools and the venture firms and the operator networks where the rising founders watch and learn. They are not stupid. They have read the same record the rest of us have read. They have noticed which behaviors are rewarded. They are adjusting accordingly. We will meet them in five years and in ten, in their own courtrooms and their own boardrooms and their own depositions, and they will sound, when asked under oath whether they are completely trustworthy, exactly like Sam Altman.

They will believe so.