I don't wish that he would have picked a different example or have done anything he's been doing in the last year and a half differently because he's really revealed in a very explicit way who he actually is and has apparently always been:
A devoted gatekeeper who ABSOLUTELY would deny the world a post-abundance future in order to maintain the prestige of his particular career path
Like many in academic math, he's obviously great as an individual researcher but severely lacks the skills, temperament, and character necessary to participate in the other duties his academic position requires (e.g. Dept Chairman) much less extra-curriculars like the politics and the future of AI. And, the signs have probably been there all along.
E.g. I first started thinking this way when I read an interview with him from 2019 in the Princeton Alumni Weekly:
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/mind-mathematician
In response to the "Mozart of Math" nickname, he bafflingly declares "all academics feel for the Salieri character."
Tao basically says he identifies with Salieri because researchers and academics spend their lives developing the high-level expertise needed to perfectly appreciate brilliant breakthroughs, yet the world casts them as mediocrities in comparison to history's absolute anomalies.
It's worth further noting that all of his context on this Mozart / Salieri stuff comes from the 1984 film Amadeus. In that film, Salieri is the villain! He's a gatekeeping loser that actively sabotaged Mozart and Tao happily volunteers that Salieri's his guy for some reason!
E.g. a more recent thing I'd like highlight is one of the "successes" of his Math 2.0 framework he put in his slide deck:
"""
"Open exposition problems" as opposed to open research
problems: finding motivated explanations of results whose
known proofs are currently opaque. (The newly revised
Caltech Mathathon is an interesting experiment in this
direction.)
"""
After Tao and his fellow insecure gatekeeping luddites successfully bullied some Caltech grad students into handing over their event to them, he posted the following statement of absolutely pathetic cuckery on his blog claiming it to be the words of those same weak-willed grad students:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/28/joint-statement-ab...
Note that this "newly revised" event isn't just about writing new exposition on AI solutions, it's about a litany of grievances that people like Tao have had about the works of certain people in math that didn't allow themselves to be bullied like the grad student organizers of the Mathathon.
The letter, again which we're supposed to believe the twenty-something year old grad students definitely wrote themselves, specifically mentions not only OpenAI's Navier-Stokes work, but also brings up the Appel–Haken proof of the four color theorem (from the 80s) and Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture (from the 2010s) as unacceptable works that causes their insecurities to flare up and must be defeated by next-gen gatekeeping.
I'm sure I could think of less responsible potential stewards of our inevitable AI future than Tao, but he and the sorts of people he's aligned himself with really should have no place at all in a position like that.