I like how the persistent ills of amoral, toxic businesses are now "Silicon Valley's Special Problem with Bro Culture."
It's just Wall St. in t-shirts. If you let sociopaths run everything, you'll always end up with this result.
Using this term glibly breaks the HN guideline against calling names. You refer below to "people I highly expect were diagnosable sociopath/psychopaths" (emphasis added). "Highly expect" is a way of saying "don't know". Slinging provocative labels is great for emoting but reliably degrades substantive discussion, so please don't do it here.
I understand - it's a horrifying baseline condition for human society. But pretending like it's untrue or limited to some tiny subset of marginal deviants isn't getting us anywhere. Most socipaths/psychopaths are non-violent and still manage to cause immeasureable harm in people's lives, every day.
When somebody says a CEO is a sociopath they are essentially arguing that the CEO has little/no empathy, believes their success is due to their own inherent superiority, views morality/law as an obstacles to their success, and defines success as in personal achievement without regard for collective wellbeing.
Moreover, by name-calling the trait (using a derogatory word) one is collectively reshaping the cultural definition of success away from "Make billions of dollars you have no need for and are going to leave to your kids" toward "Make the world a better place."
So I disagree on every level I guess.
It's hardly shocking, when you see what someone like Martin Shkreli can do, and realize that the major qualification is not being a moron, and not having a conscience. A lot of the "brilliant innovation" out there is just a matter of people who aren't fazed by the notion of collecting all of your data and selling it on, or giving birth to Mirai if it means selling more toasters.
When a slick suit, the ability to lie without actually feeling any anxiety or doubt, and a "strong presence" can net you millions before anyone realizes that they made a bad bed... is it a shock? When that person can leverage their titanic failure into work experience that makes them more likely to be funded next time?
Except Wall Street makes no pretense of being anything else, whereas with S.V the talk is constantly on about "disrupting" the status quo, "thinking different", "changing the world" etc. There's a hypocrisy in there that's not doing S.V.'s image any favors I think.