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found the cause after a bit of digging.  I added pulumi to the path by creating a symlink `/usr/local/bin/pulumi -&gt; /root/.pulumi/bin/pulumi` and apparently pulumi CLI didn’t like being symlinked that way.

Ah, yes, `pulumi` tries to load plugins from your path. So, if you need to load the Node.js runtime, it'll look for `pulumi-language-nodejs`, and if you need to load the AWS resource provider, it'll look for `pulumi-resource-aws`. So by symlinking, I suspect it did not find the binary adjacent to itself and failed. One solution is to add `~/.pulumi/bin` to your path (defeating the purpose, I suppose of your symlink), or symlinking the plugins also.