Yea cause Steve Jobs dying stopped apple from becoming a juggernaut. People need to stop idolizing the fact that one or two people are "indispensable". Humanity moves forward eventually, even if Einstein wasn't born, someone would have figured out general relativity.
It's also quite silly that society often credits one guy at the top who supposedly has "incredible vision" and yet would likely fail at explaining even the most basic technical details. And if such a person must be credited, why not the CTO, chief engineers, or principal scientists, who are at least closer to what actually drive the technical innovations than the CEO?
In reality, it's actually the 1000s of actual engineers that deserve most of the credit, and yet are never mentioned. Society never learns about the one engineer (or team) that solves a problem that others have been stuck on for some time. The aggregate contributions of such innovators are a far more significant driving force behind progress.
Why do we never hear of the many? It's probably because it's just easier to focus on a single personality who can be marketed as an "unconventional genius" or some such nonsense.
Our stupid monkey brains are evolved to work in a primitive, human centric way, we always need a "figure", a "leader" to look up to, we can't comprehend that many people can be involved in something, that doesn't satisfy our primate brains need to follow or worship someone.
Human motivations and effort are like Brownian motion completely stochastic and hard to direct in any one direction to make any significant impact .
A effective leader whether it is Musk, Jobs, Altman, Gandhi, Mandela (or Hitler for that matter) has the unique to skill to be able to direct everyone in a common direction efficiently like a superconducting material.
They are not individually contributing like say a Nobel laureate doing theoretical research. They get accolades they get is because they were able to direct many other people to achieve a very hard objective and keep them motivated and focused on the common vision, That is rare and difficult to do.
In the case of Altman, yes there were 1000s researchers, programmers who did the all the actual heavy lifting of getting OpenAI where it is today.
However without his ability and vision to get funding none of them would be doing what they are doing today at OpenAI.
All those people would not work a day more if there is no pay, would not be able train any model without resources. A CEO's first priotity is to make that happen by selling that vision to investors, Secondly he has to sell the vision to all these researchers to leave their cushy academic and large company jobs to work in small unproven startup and create an environment they can thrive in their roles. He has done both very well.
Unrelated, but maybe you mean special relativity. Poincaré was very close and others like Lorentz would have made the logical leap to discover special relativity.
Most scientists however agree that GR would have taken much longer for someone to fill in the crucial gap of modeling gravity as the geometry of space time.
