Thanks, I think this makes sense. Why do you think the Google dudes are not already worshiped, seeing how Google is already a success–or are they?
Yes, my bad! 
Understandable. You had Steve on your mind.
Not disagreeing. I’m simply saying that the guy on TV (who’s not famous enough to have a name, apparently :)) is being successful at self-promoting (I guess) but isn’t held up as some great manager by the tech and business press (or the media in general). That’s the standard I’m talking about.
Anyone right now (we won’t know until later when their peak was). I was simply saying that, if Musk were to die now, I don’t think it would be that big a deal in the press and he would soon be more or less forgotten. Justified or not. Whereas the hype around Jobs was very intense while he was alive and has hardly abated since he died.
We dig their whiz-bang-ness, but they have tossed a bunch of stuff out there that hasn’t worked. And the complex ambiguity of Google and Moonshots and buying Nest and Cars and stuff - it hasn’t been clear what Sergey and Larry do.
We’ll have to see how Cars and other things work out.
With Amazon, look at Echo - people are looking at it as the Next Big Platform. If it becomes pervasive, Bezos, confrontrational managmeent style and all, could get a new surge of worship.
I’m going to wager that Musk’s or Zuckenberg’s death would be a way bigger deal than Ellison’s or Dell’s (who are, by the way, still active CEO’s, and Dell is just 51, so I don’t see why they’re on that side of the list), and quite more relevant for millennials.
So I still don’t see what makes you put some names in the “Steve Jobs” list and others in the “not Steve Jobs”
I think their deaths would be a big deal because they are CEOs of important companies, but my point is that I doubt they would be talked about a paragons of management for very long, and they would soon recede into the past in a way that Jobs hasn’t.
Ellison and Dell just don’t seem to be talked about much any more and not really worshiped at all. Understandable about Dell, since his company is no longer seen as having interesting tech. Not really sure about why Ellison isn’t talked about–is Oracle seen as boring now? I don’t know.
No one here has yet addressed the big picture I talked about, which is what is really important: that CEO worship was indeed a thing and now it seems to be much less of a thing. Jobs is the one guy I see bucking that trend right now, with Buffet as I said also remaining a kind of perennial worshipee.
Right, but isn’t the magnitude of the mon-mons enough to engender worship? Per, um, Google: Google’s revenue is largely made up by advertising revenue, which amounted to 67.39 billion US dollars in 2015. Or is it just that what Google does well is now considered a wee bit boring?
Just looked. Yeah, that could be cool. Thanks for the tip.
Agreed. If Elon Musk died tomorrow, it’d be all over the news, and as more and more cars go electric, he’s going to lionized as a visionary.
Its possible that at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Charlie (who granted is not and has never been the CEO) gets as much worship as Warren.
CEO worship may never reach the heights you get at a BH annual meeting.
The 90s were an awesome time for CEO worship - because everyone was making money and deals. There really hasn’t been the same opportunities - and people got a little jaded about CEO worship with a few market crashes.
Jobs is a unusual case - the James Dean of CEOs - died at the peak moment before his time, leaving us wondering what we lost. No one is going to wonder that about Bill Gates - he retired. Ellison’s business doesn’t really have a consumer component - IT people get it, corporate finance people get it. Welch was a self promoter.
Puli’s were an obscure breed until Zuckerberg got one - I met a woman with Pulis - she said she can’t afford them any longer. So I’m not sure its dead - I think just tempered with realism.
I can imagine!
Yeah, I think that’s it. In the 90s, there was a sense that smart people were leading us in the right direction. That turned out to be mostly lies and fantasies.
Good observes.
Interesting. Beyond his tepid (to my eyes) reputation in the tech and biz press, I don’t feel that Zuck is really all that popular with the masses. People tend to have a love/hate relationship with Facebook and don’t feel that Zuck really has their best interests at heart. He does not seem loved.
What’s the general view on Bob Iger?
A couple of things reasons I imagine.
The Jack Welches and Lee Iacoccas were “worshiped” because they effectively ran massively successful corporations and the success of those companies was largely attributed to their management style.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs Michael Dell and other 90s tech gurus were “worshipped” for basically putting high technology in the hands of everyday people and transforming the economy as we know it.
Since then, we have had the dot-com crash, Enron, Arthur Andersen, Madoff, Lehman, Bear Sterns, the 2008 financial crisis and Trump. Massive income inequality has become a major issue. So in general, I think people are less inclined to throw worship towards billionaire CEOs.
I think Zuckerberg is viewed less of a “brilliant CEO” and more of a nerd who struck it rich building a really popular social networking site. Indeed the current Silicon Valley tech trend of eschewing transitional management practices (ie Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh) and developing disruptive technologies makes these CEOs appear less as brilliant leaders improving the world and more like greedy, amoral nerds who don’t care about the impact of their tech, so long as they get rich.
Right, it was the tail end of the Age of Conglomerates before that style of corporate bloat became less fashionable and Silicon Valley really rose to prominence.
Yep.
Nailed it, methinks.
Right. Tech seems less benevolent than it used to.
My friend listens to tech podcasts all day and NPR and he tells me tech CEO’s are still worshiped. There’s really no way to prove this either way.
Not sure if it is related but in baseball, the young general managers are worshiped by many stat heads.
But I am. I’m saying that two examples from the “no CEO-worship” list, Elon and Zuckerberg, are way more famous and better-known than two of your instances of “CEO worship” have ever been. At least for what I can tell.
I mean, a biopic about Zuckerberg became a huge blockbuster. Not even Bill Gates has that- only “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, and that was a tv movie that was half about Jobs.
Do any of the names on any of the lists gets as much iconic status as Gates? No. But the ones from the newer generation manage to land closer.
So, to answer your question, do I think that the age of CEO worship has ended? Well, judging from the instances you provided, I have to say “no, if anything, it has increased, by my observations”.
You mean The Social Network, right?
• It wasn’t a biopic. It was a fictional movie more or less based on Zuck.
• It was a negative portrayal!
• Even if it weren’t negative, sheer fame is not what I’m talking about. I’ve specified it several times: fawning in the tech and business media about their management skills, strategy, insightfulness, etc.
Sure. There’s plenty of that on Elon or Bezos. Zuckenberg in a different way now that he’s in full Messiah mode. Page and Brin could do no wrong by the media up until quite recently.
All of those get way more fawning than the names in your 90’s list. Maybe excepting Gates, but not for much.
I think it’s a bit more insular. Tech CEOs are great at building cults of personality around themselves and for some reason people in that industry eat that shit up. I suppose it has something to do with channeling the same socially awkward obsessive compulsiveness into a channel that makes them think they are smarter and better than everyone else. I’ve worked for a number of those companies. They really do create a cult-like environment where everyone working there thinks they are the “best and the brightest changing the world with technology” and the CEO is some sort of genius. Even at my last company where the CEO was a total dipshit.
So you think the tech and biz press fawn over the guys in my list more than said press fawned over the 90s guys back in the 90s? I don’t think that’s true at all.
I think they all get less press in total re their performance as CEOs, and I don’t think they are really fawned over all that much. The enthusiasm seems tepid.
I agree that the Google guys got more worship until more recently. For awhile now, though, I have read very little about them as individuals.