Did AI Kill the Samsung CEO? Or Was It a Lack of It?

The day after their CEO died, Samsung Electronics offices all over the world were abuzz with speculation about what might have led to the incident. Here are a few theories overheard around the coffee machines.

1.       He had a performance review meeting the next day, and his heart was expecting a pounding. To avoid this, it thought stopping was the best option.

2.       Since he was the super boss, he couldn’t bitch around with his colleagues about his boss. Lesson – it’s important to have an idiot boss because you must have someone to vent about, for the health of your heart.

3.       After running like a rat for decades and reaching the pinnacle, he realized – “Is that all? is this what I was running for? Is it where the race ends? This is a lousy place.” So he just logged out.

4.       When he joined Samsung as a fresh engineer, he bonded with colleagues his age. Fast forward a few decades, and while many of them are still four levels below him in the hierarchy, they’re all as happy as ever—drinking beer and playing ping-pong after work. Meanwhile, the CEO felt... well, a little less valuable. It was like his heart just gave up.

5.       He googled the Apple CEO’s net worth.

6.       He realized those below him (those mentioned in #4) did not make him feel happy, those above him (Apple CEO) did not make him feel good either. So why bother, and just escaped to another world.

7.       He had just returned from a “strategy” meeting. Someone accidentally opened a PowerPoint file from 10 years ago, and when he glanced at it, he realized... it had the same points as this year’s slides. He immediately felt worthless.

8.       He attended a school reunion the previous weekend and had a mediocre whisky—yet it made him just as high as the expensive Scotch he usually drank. At that moment, he realized all his years of hopping from cubicle to cubicle were useless.

9.       As a CEO, he thought he would be the ultimate boss, with no one to report to. But in reality, shareholders constantly pestered him for more more. Then he set his sights on becoming a shareholder himself, but his heart said – Enough! and signed out.

10.   AI was about to take his job. Having spent his entire career at Samsung, his heart no longer knew how to beat like a non-Samsungi. It paused for a firmware update but the hardware was too old for updated software.