A recent AI-generated debate between Keanu Reeves and Elon Musk has been making the rounds online. While entirely fictional, the conversation struck a nerve. There were some striking reflections that followed. This one in particular captured my attention.
“As a woman I would choose Keanu. As a business person I would explore Musk. As a humanist I would go back to Keanu.”
This sentiment encapsulates a profound truth about the growing chasm between who we are as people and the systems we’ve built around profit, power, and progress. In this imagined debate, Reeves – widely seen as empathetic, grounded, and quietly ethical – represents a human-centric worldview. Musk, the embodiment of relentless innovation and disruption, represents our modern capitalist and techno-optimist trajectory. The fact that so many feel torn between these poles reveals an uncomfortable tension at the heart of modern business.
Today’s business models, particularly in the West, are built on the premise of perpetual growth. The world’s largest companies – Amazon, Meta, Alphabet – are valued not just for their earnings, but for their capacity to endlessly scale. Yet, this model is increasingly at odds with human and planetary sustainability. A 2020 study from Oxfam showed that the world’s richest 1% were responsible for twice as much carbon emissions as the poorest 50% of humanity combined. The profit-driven machine isn’t just ignoring externalities – it’s fuelling them.
Meanwhile, workplace burnout has reached epidemic levels. The World Health Organization now classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon. This isn’t just a personal issue – it’s a structural one. And it’s rooted in the prioritisation of productivity over people.
Unchecked, this divergence between business interests and human needs creates systems that are not only extractive but also unstable. It fosters disillusionment, disengagement, and distrust.
This is not just about ethics; it’s about longevity. Businesses that ignore the human and environmental cost of their actions may see short-term gains, but long-term resilience demands alignment with broader societal values.
So, what must be the purpose of business in this new world order?
For me, it must be to serve people – not just as consumers or units of productivity, but as humans with core needs for safety, connection, purpose, and dignity. The issue isn’t just that many businesses fail to meet these needs – it’s that they actively undermine them. Often unintentionally, yes, but the impact is real.
- When a company drives productivity by normalising burnout, it erodes wellbeing.
- When flexible working is seen as a cost to manage rather than a human right to enable, it chips away at work-life balance.
- When profit depends on underpaying workers, extracting from communities, or polluting ecosystems, the cost isn’t just environmental or economic – it’s existential.
These actions destabilise the very foundations business depends on: trust, talent, social cohesion, and a liveable planet.
What will be the consequences if we continue to pursue the current growth-at-all-costs model unchecked?
We may already be past the tipping point. Have we reached a stage where the human, social, and environmental cost of producing a single dollar of profit outweighs the value it creates? I’m not an economist – but from what I observe, if we’re not there yet, we’re close.
We’ve normalised a world where business success is calculated without accounting for the downstream clean-up: the healthcare costs of stressed and sick workforces, the community costs of gig economies and zero-hour contracts, the environmental devastation from extractive supply chains. And all this in the name of quarterly returns that benefit the few, not the many.
It’s not sustainable – economically, morally, or practically. The system is cracking. So perhaps the more urgent question is no longer whether it will change, but how we’ll shape what comes next.
That’s my view.
What do you think the purpose of business must be in the world we’re heading into? And have we already passed the point where the cost of doing business outweighs the value it creates?