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WIRED Casts Patti Harrison as Musk, Altman, and Other Tech Chiefs

September 21, 2026 at 15:02 EDT

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Comedian and actor Patti Harrison is the cover star of WIRED's November/December 2026 issue on tech and gender, playing Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, with Lauren Sánchez Bezos beside Bezos. The WIRED Women package, published online on September 21, uses the costumes to press a plainer question: who runs the industry, and why the first names that come back are still almost all men.

SEP 21, 2026 · NOV/DEC ISSUE

One actor, six faces of tech power

Patti Harrison appears as Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, with Lauren Sánchez Bezos beside him, on a gender issue that still finds no consensus most powerful woman in Silicon Valley.

COVER ARCHIVE, 1993 TO A 2010 COUNT

Same scale. Column height is the number of covers.

Covers with at least one man

Covers celebrating women for their work

Covers featuring a man outnumbered covers that celebrated a woman's professional work by 17.5 to 1.

634

Women surveyed about tech jobs

Likenesses, counting Sánchez Bezos

3 mo.

Of asking, and no consensus name

HOW THE ISSUE TOOK SHAPE

Happy-hour joke about a women's magazine

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Full issue on tech and gender

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Harrison as the men who get named first

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Reporting on who actually holds power

PRAISE

Some viewers called the likenesses sharp satire and credited careful makeup or retouching. The casting makes the "who runs the world" line literal.

PUSHBACK

Others called it corny, said a joke had stayed a joke, or argued it is easier to manufacture billionaires than to question them. Some said a generative model would have been simpler.

"Do not let AI become a tool that's just for the guys."

Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic

Day to day. She says the leadership team reports to her, while her brother Dario is the public chief executive.

Not the political face. The political agenda sits with Dario and cofounder Tom Brown.

A harder view. Timnit Gebru says AI is worse for women than tech was in the 2010s.

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