"get up at 4 am and be rich"<p>"cut the daily latte habit, cancel your Netflix is the key to prosperity"<p>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.<p>The business racket is not much different from the pundit racket. It's the same insularity and being out of tough with reality.
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.
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.<p>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.
That's harsh. I don't think people should be taken to task for for taking advantage of the "privilege" they were born in. Why wouldn't you take advantage of college (and thus a decent well paying job) when someone born in poverty in a low-income country can barely make ends meet? Why wouldn't you take advantage of access to a mainframe when you were a kid because your dad worked for the university?<p>Successful non-CEO people also benefit from luck and other factors. The world is fundamentally unfair. I don't think anyone owes anyone anything, but its my personal philosophy that its up to me to make sure I'm given a fair shake by others - to the extent that I can influence things.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.