You don’t need brains to be a Boss (or by extension, a Billionaire)
For the last 23 years, I have come to the growing realization that it doesn’t take raw intelligence, creativity, passion, or any kind of genius to become a boss (and by extension, a billionaire).
It just takes money, ruthlessness and a metric shit tonne of arrogance.
In 1999, I was hired as a full time employee at Microsoft as a software developer. I and many of my peers had Excel spreadsheets with our options and vesting schedules plotted, along with the stock price trends showing an ever upward valuation of the company and anticipated stock splits. I figured at the time I just needed to stay 5 years and 4 stock splits to feasibly be able to retire with a cool $10M on hand…
Bill Gates was the CEO, and the sky was the limit. Until the Dept of Justice decided that it wanted to break up MSFT as a monopoly.
Evidence in archived emails existed documenting the monopolistic ambitions of the Internet Explorer browser team — Ben Slivka explicitly used terms like “destroy”, “kill” to describe how they would prevail over Netscape. And that ended our dream of riches and early retirement. BillG left the President/CEO chair and handed it over to Steve Ballmer, who effectively completed the slaughter of MSFT valuation.
But BillG, SteveB, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Scott McEnerny, John McAfee, and later Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, etc etc… have all joined the ranks of the billionaire elite. With money gained through family or from extreme luck they used greed, treachery, ruthlessness and sociopathy to become even richer. In the process, they fucked over many people who were the actual geniuses who did the work and created the products and breakthroughs which changed our lives.
For sure, there were people ahead of them who paved the road to this bliss. Donald Trump, the Kirshners, Timothy Mellon, John D. Rockefeller Sr, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, and so many more who through just having money to begin with were able to either maintain or grow influence. Having money to spare which you can use on new and risky ventures just mitigates the risk — just like a roulette table, you can put money on several numbers and the red or black option, and through diversification be more assured of getting a big reward.
That doesn’t take brains. It just takes someone who wont be explicitly stupid and bet on sure failures.
Which reminds me of a parable — this is actually in the Library of Congress and is available for publication, and is a truism that reflects how real life actually works:
When the body was first created, all the parts wanted to be Boss. The brain said, “I should be Boss because I control all of the body’s responses and functions.”
The feet said, “We should be Boss since we carry the brain about and get him to where he wants to go.”
The hands said, “We should be the Boss because we do all the work and earn all the money.”
Finally, the asshole spoke up. All the parts laughed at the idea of the asshole being the Boss. So, the asshole went on strike, blocked itself up and refused to work.
Within a short time, the eyes became crossed, the hands clenched, the feet twitched, the heart and lungs began to panic, and the brain fevered. Eventually, they all decided that the asshole should be the Boss, so the motion was passed. All the other parts did all the work while the Boss just sat and passed out the shit!
Moral Of The Story: You don’t need a brain to be a Boss — — any asshole will do.
Don’t give more credit to these assholes than they deserve. Its far more likely that many of the original smart and creative people who did the hard work got fucked royally by these guys to them to have accumulated what they have today.