Praising Pozzo
Let’s, for chrissake, press pause on valorizing CEOs.
“In the goodness of my heart I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him. The truth is you can’t drive such creatures away.
The best thing would be to kill them.”
- Pozzo, Waiting for Godot
The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024 ignited a furious and macabre debate: did he deserve it? According to a recent Emerson poll, young voters aged 18-29 are split, 40% saying the killing was acceptable and 40% saying it was not. The other 20% were evidently high at the time, thought the pollster was their DoorDasher, and responded, “I asked for Extra Ranch sauce.”
The debate continues to rage, but for me there’s a larger question: not “Should we be murdering CEOs?” but rather, “Should we be venerating them?”
Should we be exalting them, lauding them, aspiring to be like them?
We have made CEOs our national heroes; it’s not just that CEOs of the largest companies earn 344 times the amount of their typical worker (up 1,209% since 1978), it’s their very character we laud. They are hard workers! Bold risk-takers! Determined self-starters! Creators of jobs for us, the mere mortals lucky to work for them! It won’t be long before Thomas Jefferson is pried from his memorial and replaced with a marble likeness of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
I worked in Corporate America for twenty years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, these are, for the most part, not people we should be revering. These people are not well. They are, quite often, batshit crazy. Most people who’ve suffered working for these folks know as I do that the C in “C Suite” stands for cray-cray. Or cuckoo. Or, increasingly, criminal. It is not that they have no moral compass, it’s that they do not want one. A moral compass is bad for business.
A biotech report from Goldman Sachs posed the question: “Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?” After all, they continue, one-shot therapies might be medically attractive, but they “offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies.”
These are not healthy people.
A recent Senate probe revealed that Amazon—which earned $500 billion in 2023—manipulates injury data to make their warehouses appear safer, rather than spending on safer warehouses.
These people are not well.
AbbVie, the sixth largest biomedical company, seems rather bullish on the whole climate change/mass extinction trend. “Climate change may create a greater need for existing or even new products,” they reported. “Our immunology product line could see an increase in sales as a result.” Eli Lilly, meanwhile, is excited that “These [climate] risks may drive an increased demand for ... our diabetes products,” while Merck cheers that “As the climate changes, there will be expanded markets for products for tropical and weather related diseases.”
I say this as someone living a few miles from the Pacific Palisades climate-change inspired inferno: these people need help.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the CEO of an AI company in San Francisco, is running ads in bus shelters (where the homeless huddle from the cold) with such headlines as “Stop Hiring Humans,” and promising that his AI bots “won’t complain about work-life balance.” I suppose that’s okay, though, since Musk, God of CEOs, has determined that there’s no such thing as homelessness anyway, it’s just a “propaganda word for violent drug addicts.”
Jaspar needs to talk to someone.
And Musk, well—Musk’s probably beyond help at this point.
This is planetary level madness. According to Oxfam, Bezos’s private jets release as much carbon in a year as an Amazon employee would in 207 years. The Walton family’s yachts produce as much carbon in a year as 1,714 of Sam Walton’s workers would combined.
What accounts for this? Here’s a clue:
Mark Zuckerberg, asked who he admires most, named Augustus. Caesar Augustus, who came to power by fomenting civil war and forming a military junta, who granted himself lifelong immunity from all crimes, who effectively made himself Censor so he could manipulate votes, who filled the Senate with loyalists who wouldn’t question him and who took control of the mint so he could control the production of money. What’s wrong, Mark, was Gandhi too obvious a choice? Jane Goodall not doing it for you? Jesus too blue-collar?
These are our heroes?
These are our role models?
These people may be better off in padded rooms than corner offices. That was the finding, incidentally, in a 2006 study of CEOs: fully 12% exhibited psychopathic traits, meaning psychopathy is somewhere around 12 times more common among senior management than among the general population, and about the same rate found in prisons.
That number was revised in 2016, by the way.
Up.
The number of CEOs who are psychos is actually closer to 20%.
“A psychopath,” Forbes explains, “is different from a psychotic in that the latter is a person who has lost touch with reality, often suffering from delusions, while the former is not detached from reality but lacks empathy and doesn’t care about the consequences of his or her actions. Psychopaths are generally considered intelligent, manipulative and charming—and lack the ability to learn from mistakes or punishment.”
Sound familiar? I’ll give you a hint: he’s about to be sworn in as President of the United States.
Usually, at this point in articles like this, the furious CEO acolytes, the true believers in our Corporate Gods, simply claim that I hate capitalism. For the record, then, I do not. In fact, capitalism sounds like a pretty good idea. I say we give it a shot. Because whatever this is we have now isn’t capitalism.
It’s Psychoism.
It’s Batshitcrazyism.
It’s Meshuganism.
I was reminded of all this the other night, when I attended a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. For those unfamiliar with the play, it concerns two tramps waiting upon a desolate road for a man named Godot who never shows. A single sickly tree is all that accompanies them. Midway through the first act, the two tramps are confronted with a wealthy man, Pozzo, leading about his wretched slave Lucky by means of a rope tied about Lucky’s chafed neck. Pozzo berates Lucky, belittles Lucky, whips Lucky. You can debate whether Lucky should have pulled a 3D-printed gun and murdered Pozzo, but you can’t debate that Pozzo is somehow noble and admirable. He is, in the language of theatrical dramaturgy, a piece of shit. I am pleased to report that for now, at least, the audience was visibly disturbed by Pozzo’s cruelty and arrogance. For now, at least, their hearts went out to Lucky. But I can easily imagine a time in the not-too-distant future, should our Pozzo Republic continue along its CEO deification path, when children will be taught that Pozzo is the hero of the play and starving, battered, bloody Lucky is the evil, lazy, paid-sick-day demanding villain who brings down the noble captain of industry.
“Boo!” the children will jeer when Lucky appears, for Lucky complains about his work conditions, begs for minimum wage and expects something essentially human called “work/life balance.”
And Pozzo, well, Pozzo will be cheered. After all, the teacher will say, Pozzo provides goods and services. Pozzo creates jobs. Pozzo works harder than Lucky, 344 times harder, apparently, which is why he earns 344 times what Lucky earns.
And at the end of the play, just before the curtain, it will be revealed that the land they have all been waiting on was once protected national parkland, but which Pozzo cleverly paid a politician to free up for noble commercial use, that he’s cleared all but that one single useless tree to make room for a two-golf-course, ten-pool, three-spa luxury condominium development, the profits of which he runs through an offshore shell company to avoid paying taxes on.
“Yay!” the children will cheer.
Our hero.
Shalom Auslander is a novelist, short story writer, essayist and scriptwriter. He writes The Fetal Position on Substack, and his new memoir, FEH, will be available in July.
NOTE: I am required to note that the lunatics mentioned in this piece may not be lunatics, just in case the aforementioned lunatics decide to sue for insinuating that they are lunatics, which is just the kind of lawsuit a lunatic would pursue.
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This is the first Persuasion article I have read that I can say I was shocked to see here. The unrestrained language was certainly a giveaway, but in general the tone of the piece was like nothing I have ever seen here.
I honestly don't know anyone who "valorizes" CEOs as a group, and the only place I can see it coming from is a person whose worldview about corporate America comes from the darkest parts of the very extreme left. There are CEOs who are unlovable, and CEOs who are incompetent. But who is it, exactly, that is viewing them as heroes?
Some CEOs are excellent (I've worked for a couple) and deserve praise for their far-thinking work, which is, in fact, quite hard. Is there room in the author's world for those of us who admire them?
I won't even get into the author's unfortunate attempts to diagnose and psychoanalyze CEOs. I have been a Persuasion subscriber from its start, and hope never again to see an article like this, which is not, in my opinion, persuasive at all.
I was working at General Electric when Jack Welch took it over. I thought that GE was the greatest corporation that had ever been created in the United States. I was proud of both the quality and the range of the products that we made, and of the fact that WE made them. But Jack Welch wasn't interested in making products, he was interested in making money. He juiced the stock price with short-term measures -- a lot of this article could have described him -- and by effectively liquidating the company. He retired as the most respected businessman in America, and managed to get out just before the whole house came crashing down. What he managed best was his exit, for himself anyway. That was real virtuoso work.
There are a lot of good CEOs out there, I'm sure. I consider Warren Buffett to be one of them, and I could name others. But for every CEO who wants to be another Warren Buffett, it seems that there are a hundred or a thousand or more who want to be another Jack Welch.
As long as that's true, cautionary tales like this serve a useful purpose.