Maybe? I'm having a hard time finding a contemporary example. Bezos bowed out (though Amazon culture was famously bad for years), and even Facebook doesn't have

Maybe? I'm having a hard time finding a contemporary example. Bezos bowed out (though Amazon culture was famously bad for years), and even Facebook doesn't have 100k employees. My point though is there is a difference between having a leader who got there by politicking versus a leader who got there by building a great company. They're both going to have different strengths and weaknesses, but there's at least a chance the founder isn't going to tolerate the sycophants. An example: I was at Google 2005-2008. My manager's manager's manager was one of the early empire builders. He hired like crazy with no plan at all for the people he was hiring, and kept getting promoted for managing such a rapidly growing org. Eventually he rose high enough up that someone near the top realized what was going on, and promptly fired the guy, leaving behind a fair-sized mess as folks tried to figure out what to do with all his hires. From what I've read lately, if this guy had just shown up to Google a few years later, he'd still be getting promoted.