Why Successful Entrepreneurs Are Usually Terrible People
We celebrate successful entrepreneurs like modern-day heroes, but there’s an uncomfortable truth hiding behind the billion-dollar valuations and magazine
We celebrate successful entrepreneurs like modern-day heroes, but there’s an uncomfortable truth hiding behind the billion-dollar valuations and magazine covers. The personality traits that drive entrepreneurial success often make these leaders genuinely terrible people to work with, live with, and be around. The research is clear, and the evidence is everywhere, but we keep pretending that nice people make the best business leaders.
The data tells a disturbing story. According to recent studies, 20 percent of business leaders may have psychopathic tendencies, compared to just 1 percent of the general population. Successful entrepreneurs consistently score higher on measures of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, the so-called “Dark Triad” of personality traits. These aren’t accidents or exceptions. They’re features, not bugs, of entrepreneurial success.
The Dark Triad Connection
Research examining 4,798 respondents across three countries found that successful entrepreneurs consistently display higher levels of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy compared to the general population. These traits aren’t just correlated with entrepreneurial intention, they’re directly linked to the behaviors that drive business success.
Narcissistic individuals more successfully obtain early stakeholder buy-in due to their confidence, extroversion, and passion. When facing risky environments with high uncertainty, narcissistic entrepreneurs convey psychological security to their team members, transforming uncertainty into opportunity. This builds trust and support, facilitating their ability to acquire resources and exploit relationships.
The connection isn’t subtle. Studies show that people with Dark Triad traits frequently score higher on both self-rated and subordinate-rated leadership assessments. Psychopaths are viewed as bold risk-takers, Machiavellians as strategic, and narcissists as visionaries. These perceptions help them climb corporate ladders and attract followers, even when their leadership creates toxic environments.
The Empathy Problem
Successful entrepreneurs often lack the empathy that makes normal human relationships function. This isn’t just unfortunate, it’s practically useful. Empathy creates hesitation when making brutal but necessary business decisions. It makes you worry about the impact on employees when you need to cut costs, the effect on customers when you raise prices, or the consequences for communities when you relocate operations.
High scores in Dark Triad traits statistically increase a person’s likelihood to create severe problems for organizations, especially when they’re in leadership positions. They tend to be less compassionate, agreeable, and empathetic. But these same traits allow them to make decisions that more empathetic people simply can’t stomach.
The research shows that narcissism is positively associated with entrepreneurial intention and orientation, but there’s little association between narcissism and actual business success metrics like employee count or revenue growth. However, narcissistic entrepreneurs do report higher levels of personal well-being and life satisfaction. They feel great about themselves while creating misery for everyone around them.
Real-World Examples
The evidence isn’t just statistical. Look at the most celebrated successful entrepreneurs of our time, and you’ll find consistent patterns of behavior that would be considered abusive in any other context.
Steve Jobs was infamous for his dismissive, arrogant, and condescending behavior. He would ask flabbergasting personal questions in interviews to intentionally stress prospective employees, fire people without warning, and maintain a zero-tolerance policy for mistakes. He called workers at any time, even at 3 a.m. or during vacations, expecting immediate responses.
Jeff Bezos created what Amazon’s own HR director described as “purposeful Darwinism” at Amazon. The company became known as a “bruising workplace” where people regularly break down at their desks and grown men leave conference rooms with faces covered to hide their tears. Some employees who worked under Bezos required counseling and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Elon Musk has built a reputation for firing hundreds of employees without warning, denying severance payments, and creating what observers describe as toxic work environments. He sends important emails at 2:30 a.m. and expects staff to match his intense work ethic. When someone declares a project timeline unreasonable, he removes them from the project and declares himself CEO of it.
These aren’t isolated incidents or personality quirks. They’re systematic patterns of behavior that demonstrate a fundamental disregard for the well-being of others in service of business objectives.
The Success Formula
The uncomfortable reality is that successful entrepreneurs succeed partly because they’re willing to do things that decent people won’t do. They’ll exploit personal relationships for business gain, manipulate employees’ emotional investment to extract more work, and sacrifice the mental health of their teams to meet aggressive deadlines.
Research shows that Machiavellian leaders function with strategic accuracy, successfully navigating corporate environments through their capacity to manipulate people and circumstances. They’re masters of business politics, outmaneuvering competitors with strategic partnerships and deception. Their goals frequently take precedence over ethics or human decency.
Psychopathic leaders thrive in chaotic settings and often instigate crises to maintain control over subordinates. They come across as bold and confident, traits frequently confused with strong leadership, but they’re actually erratic and cruel due to their lack of empathy and impulsive behaviors.
The research confirms what many have suspected. CEO dark triad traits positively affect external performance indicators like breakthrough sales, but negatively affect internal performance indicators like organizational health. They can generate impressive business results while destroying the human systems that created those results.
The Mythology Problem
We’ve created a mythology around entrepreneurial success that celebrates these destructive traits as necessary virtues. The stories of Jobs’ fiery temper, Musk’s relentless demands, and Bezos’ ruthlessness are romanticized in business media, leading many young founders to believe such behaviors are synonymous with success.
This mythology is dangerous because it misattributes causation. Just because successful entrepreneurs display these traits doesn’t mean the traits cause the success. But the myth persists because it’s more psychologically satisfying to believe that success requires special, even terrible, qualities than to acknowledge the role of luck, timing, and circumstance.
The result is a business culture that tolerates and even rewards abusive behavior when it’s associated with financial performance. Organizations where success is valued more highly than morality allow toxic leaders to keep rising, as shareholders and board members ignore the poisonous environments these leaders create.
The Human Cost
The impact of working under Dark Triad leaders extends far beyond office politics. Employee stress levels are significantly higher in organizations with such leadership. Research shows that employees working for their worst managers are twice as likely to report unhealthy coping behaviors such as substance abuse, overeating, and treating their families poorly.
High turnover, job dissatisfaction, and burnout are consistent features of organizations led by successful entrepreneurs with Dark Triad traits. The psychological damage often extends beyond the workplace, affecting employees’ personal relationships and long-term mental health.
Yet these costs are rarely factored into assessments of entrepreneurial success. We measure revenue, growth, and market share, but we don’t measure the human wreckage left behind. The true cost of entrepreneurial success includes the broken families, damaged mental health, and destroyed personal relationships of everyone who helped build these successful companies.
Why We Pretend Otherwise
Despite overwhelming evidence, we continue to pretend that successful entrepreneurs are good people who happen to be demanding. This fiction serves several purposes. It allows us to celebrate business success without confronting the moral implications. It lets successful entrepreneurs maintain their public image while continuing destructive private behavior. And it provides aspiring entrepreneurs with role models they can emulate without feeling guilty.
The business media participates in this fiction by focusing on the positive outcomes while minimizing or ignoring the human costs. Profile pieces celebrate vision and determination while glossing over the systematic abuse required to achieve those outcomes. The result is a sanitized version of entrepreneurial success that bears little resemblance to the actual experience of working for these leaders.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The evidence is clear. Successful entrepreneurs are often terrible people, not despite their success, but because of the traits that enabled it. They lack empathy, manipulate relationships, and prioritize business outcomes over human welfare. These aren’t character flaws to overcome, they’re features that directly contribute to their ability to build successful companies.
This doesn’t mean all successful entrepreneurs are terrible people, but it does mean that the personality traits associated with entrepreneurial success often correlate with behaviors most people would consider morally unacceptable. The successful entrepreneurs who are also decent human beings succeed in spite of their decency, not because of it.
The business world would be more honest if we acknowledged this reality instead of pretending that successful entrepreneurs are role models for anything other than business results. Their success comes at a human cost that we prefer not to calculate, but that cost is real whether we acknowledge it or not.
Understanding this doesn’t mean we should excuse abusive behavior or celebrate toxic leadership. But it might help us develop more realistic expectations about the people who build the companies that shape our economy and, ultimately, our society.
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