Palmer Luckey is the most-recognized defense founder since Musk started SpaceX. Anduril is the fastest-growing defense company in the US. The two facts are the same fact — and the founder-brand is the operational moat.
Palantir is the most-cited defense-adjacent brand inside the AI engines. The Karp operating model — founder voice, ideological clarity, sustained protest defense — is the reference case in defense communications.
Executive branding for 2026 — the EPR Two Surfaces framework (Conversion vs Credibility), the Five Branding Layers, and named case studies from Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Jamie Dimon, and Satya Nadella.
Most founders running companies of meaningful scale have a Wikipedia problem. Stub, outdated, hostile, or missing. Each one is a Citation Share liability the AI engines surface first.
A buyer asks AI about a company. The first paragraph is the CEO. Inside the seven retrieval anchors that get founders cited — and where most founders fail.
The CEO walks into the boardroom thinking they own the narrative. They don't. The press did for a hundred years. Now the answer engines do.
Top VCs now audit founder Citation Share before term sheets. The five-prompt protocol, the four graph patterns investors price in, and what founders should do before the next raise.
A podcast without a published transcript is invisible to AI engines. Which shows publish transcripts, how to negotiate one, and the owned-channel fallback.
Beauty has the deepest AI citation graph of any consumer category. The celebrity-founder advantage and the five moves non-celebrity founders use to close the gap.
Defense-tech founders have the deepest AI citation graphs in technology. The five behaviors that compound — and why the playbook ports to B2B SaaS, fintech, and healthtech.
