Why a string of 2026 American commencement speeches were booed the moment they mentioned AI, and what leadership research tells us about reading the room.

When Dave Chappelle brought Elon Musk onto the stage at the Chase Center in San Francisco in December 2022. Chappelle introduced him as the richest man in the world. The audience booed for several minutes, with one attendee later describing it as “more boos than I’d ever heard.” 

Chappelle, deadpan, told Musk it “sounds like some of those people you fired are in the audience.” The clip was on Twitter within the hour and watched 1.4 million times in the week that followed. Musk later argued the response had been “90% cheers and 10% boos,” the kind of arithmetic that comes from owning the payroll.”

Would the graduating students at a commencement ceremony be an easier crowd for the man set to become the world’s first trillionaire? You have to go back to 2014 for the last time Elon Muck spoke at a university graduation, sharing five practical rules for success at the USC Marshall School of Business undergraduate commencement. He indicated the need to “work super hard” and reason from fundamental truths. 

At the time Forbes estimated Musk’s net worth to be $10.3 billion, so he has clearly been working super hard in the past 12 years.

The commencement address, at its best, is the speech a generation remembers: generous, not too long, and pitched precisely at people about to walk into the world. Roger Federer at Dartmouth in 2024 told the graduating class that he had won 80% of the matches in his career but only 54% of the points, a reminder that even the most apparently effortless careers are mostly built from getting things wrong and moving on. 

Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005 closed with three short stories and the words “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” Amy Poehler at Harvard’s Class Day in 2011 began by admitting she was exhausted because her young children had been getting up at 5am, then turned it into the most generous advice about parents and people-pleasing anyone has put into a graduation address. 

These speeches went viral for the reasons commencement speeches go viral: they inspired, they hit a chord, and they made the room laugh.

The boos that went viral for the opposite reason

The American commencement season of May 2026 has produced something different. The speakers were experienced. The delivery was unremarkable. The audiences were polite young people in caps and gowns sitting next to their parents. The boos came when the speakers mentioned a single subject. By the next morning, the videos were everywhere.

At the University of Central Florida on 8 May, the real-estate executive Gloria Caulfield told a class of arts and communications graduates that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” One audience member shouted “AI sucks.” When the booing continued, Caulfield called it “Passion.” 

Days later, the music executive Scott Borchetta told graduates at Middle Tennessee State University that AI was “rewriting production as we sit here” and, as the booing rose, instructed the room to “deal with it.” On 17 May at the University of Arizona, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduates that “the question is not whether AI will shape the world; it will,” and was hissed loudly enough that he had to speak over the audience. 

A Fortune piece by Sasha Rogelberg described the underlying mood as cognitive dissonance, citing recent work by Maitraye Das at Northeastern University. The graduating class of 2026 uses AI tools more heavily than any cohort before it. 57% of US college students report using AI in coursework weekly, 20% daily, on Gallup data from last month. The same students fear what AI is doing to the job market they are about to enter. Cheering speakers who praise the technology, in that context, asks more cognitive cooperation than the room has to give.

That is half the story. The other half is about the speakers.

What the research has been showing

Adam Galinsky, professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, has spent more than 2 decades documenting one of the better-evidenced findings in organisational research: power systematically reduces perspective-taking. In a series of experiments published across the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Social Psychological and Personality Science, Galinsky and colleagues have shown that people primed with power, or simply higher in the workplace hierarchy, become measurably worse at modelling what less-powerful people are thinking, feeling and likely to do.

The effect is consistent across studies. Power frees you from the immediate need to attend to others’ viewpoints, and the capacity diminishes through under-use. Senior leaders, in Galinsky’s data, end up in their roles with less of the perspective-taking ability they once had, not more.

The 2026 commencement speakers were exactly the profile his work predicts. Schmidt was the CEO of Google for a decade. Caulfield runs strategic alliances for a major US real-estate firm. Borchetta founded one of Nashville’s most successful record labels. Each was speaking to an audience whose median age was 22, whose median net worth was negative with student debt, and whose employment prospects over the next five years runs is hitting an AI wall. The speakers had the data and the platforms. The audience itself was the one variable they had not modelled.

What reading the room actually looks like

The opposite end of the research is the work coming out of HEC Lausanne. John Antonakis, professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Lausanne’s business faculty, shows that charisma, far from being an innate gift, is a learnable, measurable set of audience-attuning behaviours. In a 2011 Leadership Quarterly paper with Marika Fenley and Sue Liechti, Antonakis identified 12 specific charismatic-communication tactics, including the use of metaphor, contrast, rhetorical questions and stories that listeners can place themselves inside.

In subsequent work with Christian Zehnder, also at Lausanne, he has shown that training in these tactics can increase a leader’s measured charisma by enough to raise worker output by around 18% in field experiments, a return comparable to a substantial economic bonus.

What unites Antonakis’s findings is that charisma is fundamentally about reading the room. The metaphors a charismatic speaker uses are picked for what this audience will recognise. The contrasts they draw are calibrated to the worries this audience is carrying. The stories they tell are ones in which these listeners can see themselves. In Antonakis’s framework, the protagonist of any good speech is the room. The 2026 commencement speakers chose to make themselves the protagonists of their own speeches, in front of audiences who could not yet afford to play supporting characters.

And then there’s Will Ferrell

Will Ferrell, accepting an honorary doctorate at USC in 2017, joked that he was now qualified to perform minor surgeries on unsuspecting members of the public. He closed the address with a pitch-perfect, deliberately dramatic rendition of Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You, holding the final note while tens of thousands of people screamed. The room got exactly what the room needed. There was no AI in it.

The 2026 commencement speakers may yet be proved right about the technology. That was never what the moment was asking them for. A roomful of 22-year-olds about to graduate into a labour market they did not design wanted to be told they would be all right. 

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