A rare survey of elite tech CEOs shows what inspires and frightens them about the industry

The Atlantic magazine opened up its Rolodex and managed to get some of the nation’s elite tech CEOs to fill survey. Tumblr CEO David Karp, AutoDesk CEO Carl Bass, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, and Y Combinator’s Sam Alton are among many leading technologists who took time to name their sources of inspiration and fear from the industry.

Twitter is the most overvalued company

Forty-two percent of elite technologists see evidence of a bubble, and Twitter is leading that bandwagon. Seventeen percent of respondents thought Twitter was the most overvalued company, with Uber coming in second, and SnapChat and Facebook stealing third (7 percent).

The biggest barrier to innovation is the government

Sticking true to the Libertarian stereotype, government regulation was seen as the greatest threat to innovation (20 percent), with immigration policies coming in at a close second (16 percent).

Privacy threats come from users, not companies.

It’s not a shocker, but tech CEOs tend not to believe that companies themselves are a threat to privacy (16 percent). Rather, it’s uneducated or unmotivated consumers. When counting companies, 14 percent of the panel thought that Facebook was the greatest threat. (The panel also included non-CEOs, such as Julian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

We’ll have self-driving cars by 2022

The mean response for when we’ll all have a robotic chauffeur is 2022, which is in line with what Tesla CEO Elon Musk has also predicted.

Readers can see the full survey here.