I think of myself as someone who is relatively skeptical of authority, but even so it's hard to disabuse myself of the notion that company leadership is there due to meritocratic reasons.

Just because they're VPs in the biggest company in the world doesn't mean they're actually smarter or more capable than a random person selected from the population at large. Some of them might be, but SOO many people are in their spots due to the accident of their birth and other random processes that happened afterwards.