I am, oddly enough, the chief executive officer of two (trivially small) tech companies.

When companies do something terrible (and they do, all the time) who are you going to blame for it? It's not at all surprising that CEOs have earned the reputation they have.

> people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form

Might I suggest a viewing of the 2025 film "Bugonia"?

>My

And who are you? An account created for one post? There is a pattern of green account with usernames vaguely related to the subject matter of their comments.

Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.

An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO after years of reading “CEOs bad” content online, they can go into a learned helplessness mode because they think the behavior they’re seeing is normal. They don’t believe changing jobs would help because they’ve learned from social media to believe that their CEO’s bad behavior is actually normal.

This has becoming a frequent topic when in a rotational mentorship program where I volunteer: Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this. We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.

Ah yes just go start a company. Let me just ask my father for a small business loan of a million dollars.

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