Tim Higgins is a business columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to CNBC. His weekly column focuses on influential companies and their leaders, among them Elon Musk, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, and he co-hosts Bold Names, the Journal's weekly interview podcast with business leaders (Source: wsj.com).
Background
Higgins became a columnist in 2023 after more than two decades as a reporter, covering subjects ranging from the bankruptcy of General Motors to the 2016 presidential campaigns. He is the author of Power Play, on Tesla and Musk, and iWar, on Apple. A graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, he also holds an MBA from Michigan State University and lives in San Francisco (Source: wsj.com).
His beat is the personality-and-governance side of large technology companies rather than the technical or policy side, which is the register his AI coverage works in.
The Altman IPO framing
Higgins's 3 May 2026 column framed the OpenAI IPO run-up "as the central narrative test of" Altman's career, quoting Paul Graham's assessment — "You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he'd be the king" — and adding: "Now, the cannibals are at the gate."
The column's analytical move is the Travis Kalanick comparison, which situates Altman in a founder archetype whose defining characteristic is survival through governance crises rather than product or technical judgment. The framing treats OpenAI's governance history as the operative variable in assessing the company's public-market transition, rather than as background to a capability story. It is a natural extension of the Musk and Tesla reporting that produced Power Play, where the same governance-and-founder lens is applied to an earlier company.
Relationships
- related: Sam Altman — the subject of the May 2026 column
- related: OpenAI, AI Industry Discourse Analysis, AI Bubble Debate
- related: Atoms — Travis Kalanick, the comparison case in the Altman column, now leads this robotics holding company