Earlier this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg published his latest reflections on the future of artificial intelligence—a 6,500-word essay outlining ways to distribute the wealth and opportunities generated by AI to all people, including skeptics such as residents of communities that host data centers.

The word count makes the piece roughly one-tenth the length of an average novel and approximately ten times longer than his article on Personal Superintelligence published a year earlier.

Zuckerberg is hardly alone in embracing the long-form manifesto format. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei delivered the genre's longest entry in 2024 with his 13,000-word essay "Machines of Loving Grace." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also joined the trend, along with OpenAI's Sam Altman, whose own essays on AI's economic future helped establish the template that others now follow.

The stated rationale is high-minded: with Wall Street scrutinizing Meta's tens of billions in capital expenditure, the EU AI Act reshaping regulatory obligations for foundation model developers, and rival labs racing for dominance, these founders want to articulate their vision in exacting detail while bringing regulators and the public along for the journey. As Columbia Business School professor Dan Wang explained, "They have to draw the boundaries around why AI can be useful even before they begin selling products."

However, communications specialist Patrick Riccards offered a less flattering interpretation. "CEOs, particularly tech CEOs, believe that their words are gospel," he said. In his view, these essays function as territorial markers: "You essentially have five or six tech CEOs that are trying to demonstrate whose…[shall we say essay] is bigger."

In an era defined by shrinking attention spans, this raises an obvious question: do people beyond the closed circle of AI titans actually read these sprawling pieces? And if not, what purpose do they serve?

Warren Buffett offers an instructive model for what effective long-form leadership communication can look like. His annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders routinely exceeded 10,000 words, delving deeply into the year's lessons and the company's financial results, all sprinkled with his characteristically folksy wisdom. Yet length was never the point.

Buffett wrote to be understood by anyone. He famously drafted his letters as if explaining the business to his own sisters—intelligent people who happened to be outside the world of finance. Readers did not flock to his letters because he wrote prolifically. They read him because he had earned the right to be heard through decades of consistent results, and then chose to communicate plainly. His successor Greg Abel's first letter as CEO this year continued that same tradition.

This is where the distinction lies. Buffett knew precisely who his readers were. Zuckerberg, Amodei, and their peers, by contrast, appear to be writing primarily to one another—a closed loop of founders, investors, and the reporters who cover them, with each essay seemingly responding to the last.

Whether that constitutes the right audience is debatable. Zuckerberg is facing public scrutiny from communities wary of data centers being built in their neighborhoods—their concerns rooted in the enormous energy and water demands these facilities impose on local infrastructure—and from citizens whose trust in Big Tech remains low. A 6,500-word manifesto seems unlikely to shift those sentiments.

If there is one lesson any CEO can draw from Buffett's example, it is this: the writing itself is the easy part. Earning the right to be read is the hard part.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.