Bezos and Musk won’t be this powerful forever—history says so

[ResidentialBusiness]

Since the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the power of tech moguls has been more conspicuous than ever. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, campaigned extensively for Donald Trump and earned “first buddy” status. One of the most circulated photos from the inauguration showed the lineup of Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg standing in front of Trump’s Cabinet picks. Musk donated at least $250 million to Trump’s campaign, while Bezos and Zuckerberg each pledged $1 million to the inauguration.

Such active support of the president has struck many as glaringly opportunistic, given that all three were significant critics of Trump and his actions during his first term. But looking at how their companies and leadership have evolved, perhaps it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Over the past two decades, these leaders’ early commitments to the public good dissipated as their wealth piled up. When they were scrappy startups, they followed the common path of underdogs bucking against the systems that stood in the way of success. But as they accumulated vast power and became part of the establishment, their focus shifted to protecting the very systems they used to challenge.

This is an age-old pattern. The Medici family rose to prominence in Florence and used their wealth to support important arts and civic projects. As their power consolidated, they became entrenched in Florentine politics and eventually led through corruption and violence. Julius Caesar went from populist leader to dictator for life, as did Napolean. The saying “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” reflects this trajectory.

Today’s tech moguls may be gratified they have achieved such dominance, but history shows that overreach invites resistance, and as cultural values evolve, the very traits that once defined a leader’s success can later lead to their downfall.

Over time, public resentment at the Medicis’ authoritarian control and reliance on patronage led to exile and collapse of their dominance; Caesar and Napoleon were murdered and exiled, respectively. The history of modern business is replete with similar stories. Henry Ford revolutionized work with his $5-per-day wage, then went on to violently suppress labor, and at the end of his life struggled to compete with GM and Chrysler. More recently, Adam Neumann of WeWork and Travis Kalanick of Uber ran through this cycle at record speed.

Bezos is, so far, a textbook example of the first half of this doomed path. In the early days of Amazon, he focused on e-commerce with the vow to make goods more affordable and accessible to everyone. Now the company is a poster child for labor abuses.

More than a decade ago, when Bezos bought The Washington Post, he promised not to interfere in the paper’s coverage. This commitment was shattered when he killed the paper’s endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris less than two weeks before the election. Bezos said the decision was due to a principled stance to reestablish trust in the media, but his true feelings for Trump were clearly on display when he was one of the first billionaires to offer fawning postelection congratulations for the twice-impeached president’s “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.”

While some expressed surprise at this turn toward Trump, Bezos’s waning commitment to the public can be traced to other domains as well, such as Amazon’s treatment of workers and its backtracking on its climate commitments.

Amazon’s journey from a small online bookstore to a global tech giant earned Bezos years of admiration from business and mainstream press. He was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999, and topped many best CEO lists, including those of Fortune in 2012 and Harvard Business Review in 2014.

Alongside these recognitions, serious questions emerged about Bezos’s management of Amazon. In May 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation labeled him the “World’s Worst Boss,” condemning the inhumanity of Amazon’s business and employment models. Bezos was dropped from Harvard Business Review’s ranking of the top 100 CEOs in 2019 due to the company’s working conditions and employment policies, among other factors, a dramatic omission given that he was one of only a few CEOs who had appeared every year from 2013 to 2018.

Such reassessments are due, at least in part, to the fact that expectations about what constitutes responsible leadership shift over time. While the achievements of business leaders are frequently credited to their personal skill and effort, research from Harvard Business School on the 1,000 most well-known leaders in the 20th century—from Henry Ford to Jack Welch—showed that their successes, and the public’s perceptions of them, were due primarily to how they appealed to the dominant cultural values of their time.

The conclusion is that leaders who thrive when certain business practices are celebrated run into problems when the business environment shifts.  

Consider Welch, CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. In 1999, he was hailed as the best CEO of the 20th century for embodying the idea of “shareholder primacy,” which posits that a corporation’s sole objective is maximizing short-term profits for shareholders. But the standard Welch pioneered has undergone a critical reappraisal. Harvard Business Review stated in 2020 that he “probably isn’t the ideal model for 21st-century executives.” In a recent book titled The Man Who Broke Capitalism, New York Times journalist David Gelles situated Welch historically and explored his devastating legacy.  

Since Welch stepped down, GE has struggled, and as of 2024 when the company split itself up, its stock still traded for less than it did when Welch retired. In 2018, it was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after being a founding company in the index more than 120 years ago. A significant reason was that GE Capital, the growth engine under Welch, saw massive losses following the 2008 financial crisis.

The reappraisal of Welch’s legacy, and middling results of the company’s finance-driven focus since 2000, serves as a poignant illustration of the evolving skepticism of the neoliberal shareholder-centric model he exemplified. It’s also emblematic of how leaders’ models become antiquated after changes in the business environment. Welch’s ideas are now seen as disastrous in an era that has increasingly demanded a focus beyond short-term profit.

Seen from this perspective, despite the privileged position the “broligarchs” enjoyed at Trump’s inauguration, their days at the top may be numbered.

While many have likened Trump’s ideas and policies as a throwback to Welch’s day, a key difference is there are many indications that the public is increasingly fed up with greedy CEOs. In a tragic example, Luigi Mangione—who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—was celebrated online as a folk hero striking back against an executive who boasted that the company’s positive earnings were from slashing insurance coverage. A recent YouGov poll found that more 18- to 29-year-olds had a favorable opinion of Mangione than an unfavorable one, which may be a leading indicator of the depth of contempt for business leaders who exploit the public.

It’s unclear how long the general public will stand for today’s gross displays of skyrocketing inequality. Bezos, for instance, reportedly believes that people are inherently “lazy,” and so, in addition to harsh working conditions, Amazon’s employment model is designed for minimal upward mobility. Recently, however, the company has experienced significant pushback from workers who have voted to unionize at one of the company’s distribution facilities and an Amazon-owned Whole Foods supermarket. It’s also notable that Amazon, Tesla, and Meta have all recently suffered backlash from consumers’ disgust at their leaders’ behaviors.

With growing discontent comes a shift in cultural values, and while the tech bros’ power today may seem unassailable, history shows this can change quickly, and it may not be long before the nation’s richest citizens are seen not as pioneering heroes but as the embodiments of greed, corruption, and the worst excesses of 21st-century capitalism.

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