[HN Gopher] Today's CEOs are essentially carnival barkers (2021)
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Today's CEOs are essentially carnival barkers (2021)
Author : browserman
Score : 67 points
Date : 2022-04-29 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prospect.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (prospect.org)
| meany wrote:
| This is overly hyperbolic. The article references 3 high profile
| CEOs and states "Todays CEOs" are essentially carnival barkers.
| The majority of CEOs aren't in tech and don't have anywhere near
| this life or career trajectory. Also, if you read biography of
| Edison, Ford, Rockfeller, etc. Many of there behaviors will seem
| tame. For instance, Edison electrocuted an elephant to make
| Teslas AC current seem too dangerous compared the DC current he
| was pushing.
| hhs wrote:
| Please note, this piece seems to be a review of five books:
| "The cult of we", "Power play", "Bad blood", "Amazon unbound",
| and "An ugly truth".
| jshier wrote:
| Thomas Edison, the person, had nothing to do with the
| electrocution of Topsy. An employee of one of the various
| Edison electric companies, long since out of Edison's control,
| was the one who set that up.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/musk-brain-chip-company-neura...
| echelon wrote:
| Your comment was dead, but I vouched for it because I wanted
| to respond.
|
| Many research protocols that interface with the brains of
| animals call for euthanasia. Non-invasive study simply isn't
| adequate, and most of what we know about the brain comes from
| dissection and vivisection.
|
| In fact, much of animal-based biological research imparts
| permanent physical trauma on the animals in order to study
| some disease pathway. They may even be born (or cloned) with
| immune systems that give them cancer and certain death.
|
| Live animal protocols are designed to be as humane and
| ethical as possible. Lab researchers are taught how to
| painlessly euthanize rodents, for instance, and there is a
| lot of reporting and accountability involved.
|
| Biological research seeks to make our lives better and to put
| an end to debilitating diseases and disorders, including
| ultimately death itself.
|
| Another way to look at this is to consider other
| perspectives: (I mean this in a gentle way and please don't
| read if you're easily triggered by strong visceral imagery)
| lions are eating gazelle on the savannah while they are still
| alive, certain wasp larva eat their hosts from the inside
| out, orcas play with their food and torture it for hours,
| primates turn to cannibalism and infanticide, our ancestors
| had to eat animals and quite possibly cousins, and our sun
| will eventually boil all of our oceans before the universe
| itself goes dark.
|
| Nature is brutal when it comes to capturing and transforming
| energy, and physics even more so. These lab protocols, though
| they may seem macabre, are seeking to extend our knowledge
| and end suffering in a humane way.
|
| Edison's stunt was marketing. Elon's company is attempting to
| fix broken bodies.
| zeruch wrote:
| "The majority of CEOs aren't in tech and don't have anywhere
| near this life or career trajectory. "
|
| ...but they are monopolizing the expectations and setting a bar
| for the perception thereof.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| This person has clearly never been CEO. There's like a hundred
| thousand CEOs in the US. Adam Neuman doesn't make a trend.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Have you been a CEO?
|
| Edit: come on guys, you're going to criticize the author for
| not having been a CEO? If you haven't been one either, what's
| the basis for the criticism? It makes no logical sense.
|
| Edit 2: Regardless of whether the author is right or wrong,
| "You can't judge because you were never a CEO" is a silly
| comment to make. Maybe, the author is wrong, but in any case
| it's not because he's never been a CEO. Almost nobody has been
| a CEO. Does that mean they are immune from criticism by the
| rest of us? I just really felt the need to point out the sloppy
| thinking there. I'm clearly right about this. It seems as
| though pointing out _obvious logical mistakes_ is now
| justification for downvotes and taking personal offence?
| pram wrote:
| I guess the point is it's painting with a wide brush. Not
| every company needs a charlatan sociopath at the head. The
| CEO of a lawn care service is probably living a pretty
| mundane life.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| OK but I was clearly responding to the comment "The author
| has never been a CEO." The reasoning is faulty regardless
| of whether the conclusion is correct.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| Yes. And yes "You can't judge because you were never a CEO"
| is a silly comment to make. Take my point as a shorthand for
| "this person has neither experienced what that job is or
| bothered learning what it is".
| McLaren_Ferrari wrote:
| In a world where people work less and less and participate in
| culture more and more it only makes sense that CEOs become
| essentially influencers, self-promoters and politicians.
|
| The stock price isn't seen as a KPI anymore, back in the days
| businessmen would make sure the company would sell quality
| products and services in the real world and then the stock price
| going up was just a mere consequence of that.
|
| Nowdays it's all about transforming the company into a mission, a
| political movement or an outright cult. The stock is seen as a
| something to sell and if you can do so without any product sold
| in the real world then it's so much better because as a CEO you
| managed to efficiently skip a very labor-intensive and capital-
| intensive process to get to what you really want: Market Cap
| glory.
|
| It used to be that corporate America had a certain arrogance of
| being superior to politics, religion and cults. People who
| resorted to that were singled out as desperate and it was the
| hint that their company was about to go under.
|
| Nowadays it's the opposite: CEOs and companies which don't
| shitpost, don't talk politics and don't try to recruit people in
| their cults are left behind.
|
| It's "fake it till' you make it" on an unprecedented level out
| there. And the worst offender is the one is worshipped the most
| on here, irony because game should recognize game.
|
| I think if we coldly examine the moves like in a chess game, he's
| doing all the right things to be successful in this environment.
|
| As I said when the population consumes culture at an
| unprecedented rate, you gotta become culture to be relevant. Hate
| the game, not the player.
| blowski wrote:
| It might feel like that, but I'm not sure it is in reality.
| "Good To Great" (Jim Collins) was published in 2001, and
| commented how publicity-seeking CEOs seemed to do better when
| the reality was quite different.
|
| I wouldn't be especially surprised to see Elon Musk bankrupt by
| the end of the decade.
| McLaren_Ferrari wrote:
| > Good To Great" (Jim Collins) was published in 2001
|
| It was completely different social landscape, people
| participate in culture at a much higher rate today.
|
| The time people devote to catch up with latest social trends,
| celebrity news, rivalries etc. is unprecedented.
|
| Say if a culture icon like the Beatles were in their prime
| today they'd have something like 1.2B instagram followers.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "Nowadays it's the opposite: CEOs who don't shitpost, don't
| talk politics and don't try to recruit people in their cults
| are left behind"
|
| Having recently read one of those "Top 2021 CEO Compensation"
| reports for my metro, I think they're doing just fine.
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| I completely disagree. I think WeWork and Theranos are causing
| a ripple effect in all stages of VC right now. No one wants to
| be the investor of the next catastrophic failure.
|
| Investors are looking under the hood to ensure the company is
| real, has something that can scale, and that the team can legit
| do the work.
|
| Anything else is a dated view of how to grow a business. If a
| CEO wants to be an influencer then run the marketing department
| and let a real CEO run the company.
| spfzero wrote:
| I found it pretty remarkable that Theranos was not even
| mentioned, at least in comparison. Theranos makes the
| author's case far better than Tesla, though not better than
| We Work.
| kjksf wrote:
| Zuckerberg wrote the initial code for Facebook.
|
| Jeff Bezos used to send packages in the early days of Amazon.
|
| Musk is working like a dog, splitting his time between SpaceX
| and Tesla.
|
| But sure, they are just influencers, self-promoters and
| politicians.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| hatters gonna hate hate hate
|
| folks just can't cope with others doing well
|
| it sucks to not live up to one's own dreams but that's the
| human condition
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Sometimes critics are motivated by legit grievances.
| Without skeptics grifters will fleece the rich and poor
| alike.
| McLaren_Ferrari wrote:
| > Musk is working like a dog, splitting his time between
| SpaceX and Tesla.
|
| For a guy who is working like a dog , he has plenty of time
| to tweet nonsense to the masses. And now he owns the asylum.
|
| But I think he's doing all the right things to be successful
| in this environment.
|
| As I said when the population consumes culture at an
| unprecedented rate, you gotta become culture to be relevant.
| Hate the game, not the player.
|
| Paraphrasing Tony Montana:
|
| "In America first you get the attention, then you get the
| power, then you get the money, then you get the women"
| phoehne wrote:
| There's a saying that the stock market is a voting machine in
| the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. I think
| tech is especially vulnerable to big booms. Most of the stuff
| in the physical world doesn't pay off as well or with the same
| margins and multiples. So we get a kind of "get rich quick"
| mentality that attracts money and grifters.
|
| That being said, I would be surprised if anyone knew the name
| of the CEO of Walmart which makes about 4.5x the revenue of
| Amazon. (They are different businesses with different models -
| so it's an apples to cement blocks comparison). I do think
| there are totally dodgy CEOs out there that do nothing for a
| company's stock price except soak up money that should go to
| shareholders. But they're more managerial nothings that keep
| the ship afloat.
|
| But to look at a-holes like Bezos, Musk, etc. and think that
| P&G, Walmart, Target, Boeing, Ford, General Motors, Union
| Pacific, or any of the S&P500 CEOs are falling over themselves
| to shitpost is ludicrous.
|
| At the end of the day the CEO is supposed to do three things,
| publicly. The first is cheerlead for the company - meaning to
| put the best spin on the news to protect the interests of
| shareholders. Second is to be the top sales person and go gaga
| over the company's products. Finally, to make sure that
| everyone believes the company is run by sane, sober, and
| focused people who want to make sustainable and real gains in
| profitability.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| A CEO is supposed to do 1 thing -> generate more profit $ in
| the future.
|
| How he/she does it is up to them. It's not up to you or I to
| judge if they are doing the right things. Just check if they
| are accomplishing their goal.
| phoehne wrote:
| I disagree, too many instances of CEOs propping up short
| term results at the expense of future company health, or
| even existence. We totally get to judge how they accomplish
| that goal. Otherwise we wind up with Enron, WorldCom,
| Washington Mutual, Theranos, AIG, etc. Part of that
| assessment can come from their public persona and how they
| present themselves and their company. The problem is that
| most of the business press and sell-side analysts are
| willing to gloss over evidence of poor character as good
| qualities. He's not "willing to commit fraud to post a good
| quarter," he's "is aggressive and unconventional."
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It's arguable that Musk is doing the first two things you
| mentioned with his social media antics, just in an incredibly
| gonzo way. And perhaps he's achieving the third as well, by
| cultivating a cult of personality. A CEO doesn't have to make
| _everyone_ believe that, just enough people.
| phoehne wrote:
| Sure, until it fails and then it fails spectacularly. I
| think Musk may be the exception to the general rule. And
| some founder type CEOs don't go off the rails until they
| know they're on the way out and don't have to pretend any
| more. (Not that I think Musk is on his way out any where. I
| love Musk. All hail Musk.)
|
| But I say those words with a sense that I might be eating
| them, if something horrible comes out and we all say "gee -
| should have seen those red flags".
| McLaren_Ferrari wrote:
| For how I conceive business Musk is a borderline scammer.
|
| But I wholeheartadly agree with the above message.
|
| As you said new elements could come in to make you re-
| evaluate your admiration
|
| By the same token new elements could come in for me to
| re-evaluate my stance and if we are indeed at the dawn of
| an era where CEOs become even more politcians, showmen,
| pop-culture icons then I'd have no problem tipping my hat
| to Musk as a pioneer of such new powerful trend.
|
| Similarly I'd also tip my hat if "creative accounting"
| becomes the norm and also embracing the concept of
| manifestation and "self-fulfilling prophecy" concerning
| the stock price which has to be pumped at all costs to
| make sure that there is always enough air flowing on the
| wings to keep the company in air.
| McLaren_Ferrari wrote:
| He'd not be able to do it in say 1985.
|
| It's the unprecendented amount of time that Americans
| devote to following pop-culture and Musk wants to become
| pop-culture squared.
|
| China is approaching this thing differently, they make it
| very clear if you want to become a pop-culture icon you
| should sing or act. It's not allowing businessmen to become
| influencers or politicians, nor to put their nose into
| public health or education.
|
| According to them the roles should be clearly separated, so
| his style and twitter purchase won't work there (or would
| work there for different reasons such as China using it as
| a trojan horse in the AMerican society)
| paulpauper wrote:
| "get up at 4 am and be rich"
|
| "cut the daily latte habit, cancel your Netflix is the key to
| prosperity"
|
| Favoritism, luck (which includes having rich and generous
| parents), and connections plays such a huge, largely uncredited
| role for success, especially in businesses. Even Bill Gates, as
| smart as he is, benefited from lots of luck.
|
| The business racket is not much different from the pundit racket.
| It's the same insularity and being out of tough with reality.
| creaghpatr wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: becoming the beneficiary of favoritism is a
| skill that can be cultivated.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| Racing is a great manifestation of this. Drivers often claim
| bad luck for being hit by another car. But the best drivers
| just seem to rarely have bad luck.
|
| Knowing how to keep yourself out of situations where unlucky
| events may happen is just as important a skill in racing as
| driving fast.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| As true as that may be it also completely ignores the point
| that luck might include that an individual's parents are
| wealthy, as well as generous enough with their wealth to lend
| - or give - some to said individual.
|
| I think to your point: all the luck in the world won't fix a
| bad execution. It could still be commendable when a person
| who gets lucky is able to turn that luck into success.
| zeruch wrote:
| ...unpopular or unsavory in its implications?
| ithkuil wrote:
| I guess a lot depends of what are the grounds of
| favoritism. You know, sometimes just being good at doing
| stuff and having somebody who has first hand experience of
| you being good at something and then backs you for
| something else that they couldn't objectively know you'd be
| good (compared to tons of other candidates) but, you know,
| good old gut feeling "I know this person has it" ... well
| that's technically favoritism, yet it certainly feels quite
| different from favouring somebody for other reasons like
| being family or doing some kind of personal favours.
| rektide wrote:
| Notably Bill Gates's mom got to know the board of IBM & helped
| connect & land her son's contract for a disk operating
| system[1] at a time when the DoJ used to have active anti-trust
| deparments, and was hounding IBM for vertically owning the
| market.
|
| [1] https://www.biography.com/video/bill-gates-help-from-
| mom-208...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I am up at 4am. At work by 5am most days. I'm not rich. In fact
| none of my many bosses are ever at the office before 8am.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| The "credit" one deserves in business success isn't about
| having created a successful business. It's for having fought
| and survived the psychological trauma that one goes through to
| create a successful business.
|
| Not everyone will have the opportunity to slay a dragon. But in
| my opinion those who have the opportunity, and succeed, are
| deserving of recognition.
| bsder wrote:
| > Even Bill Gates, as smart as he is, benefited from lots of
| luck.
|
| Luck ... read as _rich parents_.
|
| Bill Gates had parents who had connections with extremely
| important people in multi-national companies.
|
| Bill Gates had access to a computer as a _child_ (via his
| expensive private academy) back when computers were ferociously
| expensive.
|
| Bill Gates had parents who could cut a check for $50,000 (in
| the 1970s) on the whim of their child.
|
| Bill Gates had the ability to drop out of Harvard knowing that
| _he could always go back or to somewhere else_ because his
| parents could pay for it.
|
| The child of a steelworker, for example, has no ability to take
| any of these chances because if they fail there is no recovery.
| If you get into Harvard, you _will_ go the full four years.
| Even if your business idea is great, your parents will _not_
| cut a $50K check as that would pay for your college (and a
| house and a car and college for your siblings and still have
| about $25K left over) at the time. Even including the adults
| around you, none of the people around you have access to those
| expensive "computers". And your parents certainly don't have
| access to the senior executives of US Steel, for example.
|
| The "leeway to fail" is a big deal in allowing you to roll the
| dice to make "luck".
| melony wrote:
| Being the scion of a well-connected family in law and banking
| probably helped him the most.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Yes, well-known his mother put him where he needed to be.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Sounds like that actually happened, at least in one
| instance
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207040
| staunch wrote:
| No doubt Bill Gates had massive privilege (in the
| traditional sense the word). He came from an upper class
| family with particularly powerful connections. The same is
| true of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to a possibly lesser
| extent.
|
| But almost every person with even greater levels of
| privilege manages to do _so much_ less than them. Which
| proves that one can 't rightly attribute their great
| success to privilege alone. If one wants to be correct (and
| not just feel good) one has to admit that they did some
| amazing things based in large part on merit.
|
| And that's the rub. Merit alone is often not enough.
| Privilege alone is often not enough. And luck always plays
| a role in determining the magnitude of anyone's success.
|
| It takes extraordinary merit to be a John Carmack, Palmer
| Luckey, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs. People who had no
| privilege (in the traditional sense) and yet their merit
| (and luck) was so great that they did big things despite
| the fact.
|
| Many people use the privilege argument to try to dismiss
| what people like Elon Musk have done. As if they could have
| done just as well had they been privileged. Envy is clearly
| clouding their thinking and confusing them. It's totally
| understandable for people to feel this way but ultimately
| and obviously incorrect in most cases.
|
| A goal for modern societies should be to give everyone the
| kinds of opportunities that only the privileged
| historically had. But this won't prevent some people from
| doing much more with new opportunities than others. Merit
| will come to dominate outcomes instead of privilege. This
| will make the world much richer but won't solve everything.
| melony wrote:
| You are missing the network effects. Wealth compounds,
| capital grows, assets beget assets. If an ordinary person
| is lucky, he or she may win the literal lottery and may
| never have to work again. If a massively privileged
| person wins the proverbial lottery, he or she will have
| enough money to rival the GDP of nations and appear on
| Forbes magazine. The difference is hardly linear.
| mxkopy wrote:
| I think this makes sense, but luck is a weird way to put
| it. I'm sure Bill Gates' family had _plans_ to create
| generational wealth; at the very least they didn 't
| ignore the possibility. The question of whether or not
| Bill is lucky because he wasn't responsible for starting
| those plans is the same question of if I'm more lucky to
| have been born in this body or in one 500 years into the
| future.
| staunch wrote:
| How do network effects apply here? Do you mean to refer
| to compounding growth?
|
| It's true that wealth begets wealth. Zuckerberg's kids
| are billionaires without having to do anything. Bill
| Gates would've been rich even if he had not started
| Microsoft, just through inheritance.
|
| But Steve Jobs led the creation of the most valuable
| company on the planet. There was no blocker to him being
| richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Larry Ellison is
| among the richest people on the planet. John Carmack and
| Palmer Luckey have generational wealth.
|
| Creating a massive company is what makes someone as rich
| as an Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They had more opportunity
| to create a massive company than a person from a lower
| class, but it's got nothing to do with network effects.
| The main driver of these people's massive fortunes is
| technology that scales globally.
| wpasc wrote:
| One of your examples I believe hurts your point: "Whether
| they win $500 million or $1 million, about 70 percent of
| lotto winners lose or spend all that money in five years
| or less."
|
| https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-
| winners/#:~:text=W....
| [deleted]
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Say around 150 years ago, this sort of article might have
| appeared in some prestigious newspaper of record. Without the
| technology to link rebuttals or comments to it, maybe 30+ years
| later when the history books of that original time period were
| being written and most of the influential people alive during
| that time period were gone, it would be trivially easy for some
| historian to interpret a really bad take like this as gospel, get
| it in front of school-children, and have it taught as truth. They
| could be well-intentioned, but still easily get things grossly
| wrong without the ability to see rebuttals to it.
|
| Opinions are always fair to have: everybody has them, and even
| bad ones. But you have to wonder how much of history is really
| just garbage takes like this. This to me is a large argument in
| favor of more sites having blog comments and not censoring
| opinions, even if 99% of the takes are usually garbage. When the
| journalists and historians of the future are writing about this
| time period, it would be horrific if the only sources available
| were equally garbage takes like this with no commentary available
| in rebuttal.
| zeruch wrote:
| ..as a general statement, I think that's being too kind.
| flappyeagle wrote:
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