Read a few headlines on virtually any news source or social media platform, and you'll undoubtedly come across numerous accusations and/or scathing criticism from high-profile tech CEOs. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been compared to comic book supervillain Lex Luthor for nearly a decade. Mark Zuckerberg has been compared to a robot. And virtually every leader of a successful technology company in Silicon Valley has been vilified or implicated in at least one high-profile news story.
So how did denigrating these powerful tech CEOs become such a popular trend? Are they really worth all the angst?
Wealth and inequality
Part of the problem is due to the sheer amount of wealth these highly successful tech CEOs generate. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison represent 4 of the 10 richest people in the world as of 2018, and their combined net worth was over $331 billion. To put that into perspective, they could give $1,000 to every man, woman, and child in the United States and still have money left over, or make 331,000 people millionaires overnight.
Surfing the web for the cheapest internet plan on a break from a minimum wage job, it's hard to begrudge someone who could buy a yacht and not notice a difference in their bank account.
Unfortunately, this hatred of wealth manifests itself in other ways. Seeing someone with billions of dollars at his disposal, the public may immediately assume that he obtained it using morally questionable means, or accuse him of having stolen that wealth. Bad for not distributing to the less fortunate.
Understanding the role of technology
Another motivating factor is our slow understanding of the role of technology in our society. Google, Facebook, and Twitter offer free services and have done an amazing job of giving us access to more information, communication, and human connection. But at the same time, these companies need to make money, much of it through advertising and personal data collection.
Consumers, by and large, have used these technology products to the point of dependence without thinking critically about the terms and conditions (which, to be fair, are often difficult to find or understand). Then, when a scandal like Cambridge Analytica comes to light, everyone is surprised that this completely free revolutionary product has exposed their personal data to nefarious and/or biased groups. The same can be said when it's revealed that your smart speaker is collecting data about you, or that Google keeps logs of every search you make.
Technology is advancing at a pace that is hard to fathom, and our culture, our laws, and even our social interactions cannot keep up. When the gap between our understanding of how technology works and how it actually works becomes apparent, we cannot help the people responsible for creating the technology. We assume they always knew it could be exploited and didn't care, or we assume they deliberately withheld important information, rather than presenting it in this format.
Confidence and conviction
CTOs are also outstanding leaders who excel as effective managers with a keen sense of public relations. They must remain calm and confident in times of trouble, and speak concisely and eloquently so that they do not say anything that can be used against them. They are also naturally persuasive and use language in precise, sometimes unnatural ways. This combination of traits makes them seem inhuman, robotic, isolated, or a combination of all three, and further alienates them from ordinary people. When a problem arises, it is very easy to portray it as the villain.
Hiveminds and echo chambers
It doesn't help that we live in an age of echo chambers, where people isolate themselves to only read news from sources they agree with and interact with people with whom they share political views. Have a relationship. If you're part of a group of people who seem attached to the idea that tech CEOs are sociopathic agents of social destruction, you'll inevitably buy into that idea and join the crusade.
There is no doubt that Silicon Valley has problems, from a lack of diversity to a ruthless corporate culture, and we must look at the technology we use with a critical and skeptical eye. But using black-and-white thinking to reduce CEOs to cartoon villains, or to elevate them above other leaders in our society, is unwarranted and irrational.
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