I was a business reporter for almost 30 years, specializing in CEOs - the great, the mediocre, and the really, really bad (sometimes all in one person). From the early 1990s to the late 2010s, I rode shotgun, watching in awe as the Corner Office point of view - ever Alpha - left the political, the academic, and basically every other perspective in the dust.
Shareholder-driven capitalism meant what was good for business was good for, well, everyone. ("everyone" wasn't supposed to mean income inequality hitting historical highs). That belief, in turn, elevated industry titans from Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg to Jack Welch and Warren Buffett as the most powerful voices on the planet. The real decisions were made at Davos or in Sun Valley, not DC or Brussels. Politics were an inconvenience. For decades - until companies like Microsoft and Google became well-acquainted with antitrust law - tech companies ignored Washington and didn't even lobby. Why bother?
As trust dropped for institutions overall but rose for corporate leaders, even social change movements were pushed forward by CEOs. Leaders like former Levi's CEO Chip Bergh and Dick's Sporting Goods CEO Lauren Hobart spoke in favor of topics such as gun safety or equity.
Other organizations, political groups, and communities followed corporations' lead - and it seemed to work for business: Less than five years ago, at the height of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, The Edelman Trust Barometer showed that employees of all generations were 7.0 to 9.5 times more likely to be attracted to a company that takes a stand on key issues. Even if you didn't agree with the policies, the point is that executives knew they were fully empowered to make these decisions independently.
Fast forward to today. As the rich get richer and stock market valuations increasingly are tied to a tiny group of corporate behemoths, the leaders of those companies have more economic power than ever. And yet, they have willingly and shockingly lost their ability to use it (except, of course, when they actually join the administration, like good old Elon).
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so terrifying: The daily parade of CEOs bearing literal golden gifts -- Hello Tim Cook! -- as they bow and scrape to the President of the United States, horse-trading "investments" in the USA that have little chance of materializing in return for not being taxed or publicly humiliated in a given month. Unlike other organizations that have limited leverage -- nonprofits, universities, and now they'd like you to think Congress -- these guys actually DO have the clout to resist. But they don't - or won't - even as one of their own (Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan) has his job directly threatened by the President, and along with another, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, may soon be signing up to pay a regular vig to Uncle Sam.