Olympiad Man has displaced Davos Man

The article argues that International Olympiad medalists—especially in maths, physics, chemistry and informatics—now form a distinctive capitalist elite (Olympiad Man), displacing Davos/McKinsey networks. AI safety turmoil is cast as a crisis inside this cohort: Anthropic researchers who were a third of Britain's 2017 maths Olympiad team resigned; Amodei was on America's physics squad; OpenAI appointed Paul Christiano (maths silver) to its board. Google paid $2.7bn in 2024 to hire Noam Shazeer (perfect maths score 1994), who later moved to OpenAI. Meta's best-paid executive is framed as likely Alexandr Wang (29), versus Sheryl Sandberg in the 2010s. AI startups with Olympiad founders cited include Databricks ($190bn), Cursor ($60bn), Cognition ($48bn) and Perplexity ($30bn). The piece contrasts their rationalist/EA culture and p(doom) language with how investors, politicians and the public perceive them.