They’ve reinvented themselves with new titles: creators, disruptors, innovators. These are the terms applied to today’s billionaire class. They are moguls no longer, no mere captains of industry; rather, they are nothing short of “visionaries,” undeterred by obstacles and uninhibited by rules and norms. As Thoreau once said, “The hero obeys his own law.”
In the case of the business hero, that can be practically no law at all. As Walter Isaacson detailed in his biography of Steve Jobs, Apple’s shaman in chief—perhaps the quintessential business hero—wore no shoes when he worked at Atari, drove around without a license plate, and didn’t acknowledge his own child for the first 10 years of her life. He also reamed people out mercilessly on a regular basis, refused to provide stock options for early Apple employees, and essentially kicked off the tremendously brutal—and tremendously damaging—“patent wars.”
But he’s a business hero, you see, and so we cannot judge him as a mere mortal.
Similar passes have been handed out to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—the latter of whom also received a credulous limning at the hands of Isaacson in a tome that’s aged poorly as more detailed accounts of Musk’s capricious and incompetent reign at Twitter (now rechristened “X”) have emerged. These men, nevertheless, have ascended to new heights under the notion that, like Jobs, they are “ushering in a new age.” Although Amazon is monopolistic and Musk egotistic, we’ve been told that we need them like we once needed Wernher von Braun. Because we need mavericks and geniuses. Surely society can, and must, bear the cost of their caprice.
Naturally, this all presumes, in all cases, that we wouldn’t have reached the future without them. It also rests on the assumption that their specific vision of a new age is unquestionably a virtuous one—an idea that’s not looking so certain right now—and that their leadership was or is so singularly outstanding that no one else could’ve matched their efforts.
We promote these business heroes as if they’re Thomas Edison and John D. Rockefeller rolled into one. We look to them as if they are national leaders whose wealth substantiates some greater wisdom. We should consider the possibility of not doing this anymore.
As a college adviser, about half the kids I work with want to go to business school. Why? Well, because businesspeople have become this generation’s astronauts. And why not? If you’re a successful entrepreneur, you get to be greedy without accountability, you get feted for your brilliance, and you’re treated like a celebrity. You get to “move fast and break things” and no one is allowed to blame you for it. It’s an accountability-free zone; the guy who put on the first disastrous Fyre Festival is hard at work planning a second.
If you become rich and famous enough, you don’t have to follow any rules at all. And then you can perhaps run for president (or at least buy a share in one).
The roots of this modern-day treatment of businessmen as god-conquerors harken back to Max Weber’s notion of a “calling,” as he laid out in The Protestant Work Ethic. Trump, Musk, Bezos, et al. believe (or at least act as if) they’re predestined for greatness. They are the great protagonists of the story, and the rest of us are merely background actors, nonplayer characters. By definition, anyone who challenges them must be wrong and not divinely inspired. Money itself is treated as a sign of an industrious spirit smiling on those banking the bucks (even when it’s all just inherited wealth). We as a nation still keep the myth of meritocracy, even if we now only rank a mediocre twenty-seventh in the world in terms of social mobility.
Still, colleges largely buy into, even promote, this narrative. Inordinate attention is given to business schools, all of which, from my experience, tend to market one of two stock characters: the pure, uncut business hero or a more self-styled, altruistic version of the same. The pure-business-hero schools (the Ross School at Michigan, Wharton, UT-Austin) tend to be highly competitive and treat the college experience as if it’s little more than a training ground for future business generals. Altruistic business-hero schools (Kelley at Indiana, Wisconsin, SMU) present business as the best road to doing good deeds, rather naïvely believing that the students who attend are going into business because they want to add value to society rather than add value to their stock portfolio. All of them hawk the idea of “creativity” because it sounds better than “avarice.”
Yet for all the talk of creativity they spout, these colleges do not promote their arts programs with anywhere near the same level of vigor. F. Scott Fitzgerald was good, but he was no Jay Gould.
The business hero is the enduring myth of American society. It’s not new, of course: In the 1970s and 1980s Lee Iacocca was everywhere; certainly Onassis and others had their admirers. Jack Welch lived long enough to play a role in his own self-parody. Still, in this age of yore, it wasn’t automatically presumed that the interests of the business class and those of the country always aligned. “Greed is good,” still played as a villain’s aphorism.
Some people have forgotten that the robber barons were the bad guys of history. We were suspicious of the megarich because they were often unscrupulous and mistreated workers. Before he became a philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie was a union-buster who hired the Pinkertons to break the backs of labor. Yes, he helped expand the railroads and was probably the nation’s biggest promoter of steel—a technology that would indeed take us into the future. Yet no one saw him as beyond reproach. When the dam at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club that he belonged to (along with Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and many other notable members of the aristocracy) burst due to poor upkeep, causing the Johnstown Flood and 2,209 deaths, the elites at the club were rightfully blamed.
The same can’t be said of the dams we’ve seen collapse more recently. Nowadays, when our ubiquitous social media apps cause political violence in places like India and Myanmar, and can very credibly be linked to a host of social maladies, such as teen anxiety, depression, and negative self-perceptions, Mark Zuckerberg sees his stock go up. The bug is the feature, the selling point; the mayhem is the system working as designed. Now as a new flood—one of hatred and fascism—threatens to wipe away our institutions and very morality, our oligarchs shrug and deflect blame. Of the top 10 richest men in America, not one of them has publicly endorsed Kamala Harris or been willing to condemn Donald Trump. These supposed business heroes are mostly business cowards, the first to stoop to obey.
Occasionally, we hear about the whispered condemnations that those in the billionaire class supposedly voice behind closed doors. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor who heads the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and who has encouraged CEOs to speak up for the public good, told Fortune, “They don’t antagonize Trump because … they don’t want to alienate customers and employees and investors who think differently about the elections if they don’t have to. No reason to stick a finger in the eye and antagonize parts of their own workforce, parts of their own customer base, parts of their own investor base.”*
Let’s be clear: This is not to universally condemn all wealthy people. Mark Cuban has spoken out rather vociferously against Trump’s depredations, as have 20 former CEOs working in conjunction with Sonnenfeld’s institute. Bill Gates has been quieter but at least lets his wallet do the talking. Oprah and Taylor Swift are billionaires too.
But it’s more than past due time that we tore down these false and nonsensical myths about the executive god-kings in our midst. The actions of Bezos and Musk and Patrick Soon-Shiong shouldn’t shock anyone because—steady yourself—they like power and money. They will rationalize their choices, of course. But you’ll consistently find that that rationalization follows a simple formula: I am brilliant, only I can accomplish these things, and therefore whatever is best for me is best for everyone.
All of these billionaire cowards are really just trying to protect themselves and the reputations they know hang on a tissue-thin foundation, by placing what you might call a Pascal’s wager on politics. They know that Kamala Harris will do the responsible thing and act as an agent of the people if elected, regardless of who supported her or who did not. She will not award contracts based on patronage. Conversely, they know that Trump will be vindictive to those who opposed him, if he succeeds. So they have nothing to lose by betting on Trump and everything to gain for the people they truly care about: themselves. This is not about what’s best for their workers or for the future of America; it’s about what ensures their own entrenched positions within their institutions and future wealth and power.
As for the colleges that are pitching the business-hero narrative to students: They can talk all they want about how their business schools instill character. They’re ignoring the fact that that character is Gordon Gekko. “Greed is good,” Mr. Gekko told us. Greed will save America, he said. The Business Roundtable still seems to agree.
What truly is the difference between Sam Bankman-Fried and Steven A. Cohen? Or between Bernie Madoff and Donald Trump? It’s simple: SBF and Madoff lost the money, and because of that, they couldn’t be heroes anymore. Cohen and Trump maintain their cash flow and their followings because they held onto the money and the power. The only difference between good guys and bad guys in this universe is that the bad guys were not smart enough to avoid getting caught. Still, to many in America, that makes those who have avoided accountability not just rich but morally upright. We’re in real danger of following these oligarchs down their dreadful path, allowing them to build their morally defunct Megalopolis high enough to blot out the light.
* This article originally misidentified the publication that published Sonnenfeld’s quote.
