In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg started training mixed martial arts. He grew a beard. He killed a goat and posted the photo. He dropped Meta’s fact-checking programme, fired the trust and safety team, and began publicly aligning with the incoming Trump administration. The man who spent a decade performing progressive values discovered that dominance had better market dynamics.
This was not a personality change. It was a positioning change. And the speed of it tells you everything about what the previous position was worth.
Donald Trump didn’t invent narcissistic leadership. He removed the need to disguise it. Before Trump, the corporate world maintained a polite fiction that leadership required empathy, collaboration, and emotional intelligence. Executive coaches built careers on this fiction. Business schools taught it. TED talks propagated it.
Trump demonstrated that none of it was necessary. You could be openly contemptuous of expertise, publicly humiliate subordinates, demand personal loyalty over institutional competence, and not only survive but win. And win big.
The leadership industry watched this happen and continued selling empathy workshops. The market had moved. The consultants had not.
Elon Musk took the lesson further. He bought Twitter, fired 80% of the staff by email, and dared the world to tell him it was wrong. When people did tell him it was wrong, the platform continued to function — badly, but visibly. The message was clear: most of the people in your organisation are unnecessary, and the ones who remain will work harder out of fear. That is not a management philosophy. It is the Controller profile operating without restraint, backed by enough capital to absorb the damage.
Zuckerberg’s cage fighting, Musk’s public brawling, Trump’s rally performances — these are not eccentricities. They are signals. They communicate a model of power that is pre-modern, pre-democratic, and pre-institutional. The strong man. The alpha. The leader who dominates rather than deliberates.
The leadership research is unambiguous on narcissistic leaders. They are disproportionately selected for senior roles because interview processes reward confidence, self-promotion, and the appearance of certainty. They perform well initially because they are decisive and energising. They destroy organisations over time because they cannot tolerate dissent, they surround themselves with compliant people, and they eliminate the feedback loops that would tell them they are failing.
Every organisation that has ever collapsed from the top has the same autopsy: a leader who could not hear bad news, surrounded by people who learned not to deliver it. The conspiracy of silence around a narcissistic leader is not a failure of courage. It is a rational response to a system that punishes honesty.
The comfortable nonsense is the belief that this moment will pass. That the culture will self-correct. That the empathy pendulum will swing back. It might. But the damage is structural. A generation of emerging leaders has now watched the most visible leaders on earth succeed through dominance, cruelty, and the open rejection of everything the leadership industry taught them.
They are learning. Just not what we hoped they would learn.