Have you ever met a CEO like this? If so, did they come from marketing or sales?
There has been a misconception that sociopaths are psychopaths without violent tendencies but with the same lack of empathy, but there's really no rigor in any of it.
Those folks have little in common with a successful but amoral ceo, or even our powertripping middle managers. For one thing they are in jail most of the time.
In life you see folks with different abilities, like the ability to make people like them, or bullshit thier way out of situations. And sometimes those people also happen to be assholes.
I'm not sure diagnosis is the right approach here. Maybe a better approach would be to tackle the problems, which seem to be the same workers rights issues government regulations have tried to tackle for a long time. But this is Silicon Valley where you too will be rich after IPO if you just forget all that right. This is Holywood, back in the bad old days, just without the unions.
The trouble with diagnosis as a moral judgement is that it detracts from thier use in describing ill people and how we should regard them. If your boss is evil because he's a sociopath, what about jack cheating on his wife during a bipolar manic phase? Neither of them can help it. And your boss is evil.
It also shows the way medical diagnosis which had a specific meaning, and applied to people we don't meet, get mapped to perfectly well people who we do. Once a child, who would have been in need of guidance a decade before, is told they are a psychopath and taken from main stream schooling, there will be little help for them.
Historically, the term sociopath was first introduced as a replacement for "psychopath" since, for some reason, there seemed to be stigma attached to that term. Later introducing "Antisocial Personality" was tried as another attempt to duck the stigma. Somehow it didn't work, can't imagine why, and the terms have been at least slightly repurposed by at least some psychologists.
Even though he would get little or no responses, he'd talk to his employees about the time he and Marc had a conversation regarding such and such business matter.
I just think something feels off about him. The enthusiasm doesn't feel 100% genuine.
I don't get this feeling from anyone else in the company. But hopefully I am not blinded by "knowing" this about CEOs from HN/startup scene/roumours etc.
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Worst part? I feel like I'd like to learn from it / about it. It is a really fascinating topic for me. I almost kind of envy it somehow.
The answer to this question is most definitely Yes, but the question remains the proper one.
Thanks for pointing this out.