I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable

Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:

• Bill Gates dominated the PC world with aggressive business tactics and vendor lock in.
• Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
• Steve Jobs lied and cheated his investors, his family, and his closest friends to benefit himself.

Tom was a good guy, but possibly because he took his fortune and left tech. There were very few admirable leaders.

Capitalism rewards psychopathy

when I was growing up

This is really the key. We're all stupid and unaware of how things work and the particular goings-ons when we're kids. There were plenty of shitty people running the tech giant companies back then, but we just didn't realize the extent of what was happening.

Edit: The evolution of social media also adds a lot to this. We are both more connected to each other and society, and therefore more aware of BS think it's pulled by corporations. Then, of course, you have folks like Elon Musk who seem to make a point of making sure everyone knows how big of a piece of shit they are, and how proud of it they are.

They were all evil shit back then... You were just innocent and information didn't travel as fast

Also, Jobs "pretty decent"? That asshole was Narciso reborn

Gates was always a dirtbag.

He is one of the main reasons proprietary software is so prevalent and predatory nowadays.

bill gates was like, one of the worst of the worst. Dude literally broke the law, and then settled to avoid paying for acquiring fees.

They have never been good.

sociopaths have a pretty big advantage in capitalist leadership positions over non-sociopaths. they are more likely to get there in the first place, and they will perform better.

Bill Gates was an evil piece of shit, that did many illegal things to secure Microsoft's software empire.

It was much easier to "hide" sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.

That said I think because tech was such a young industry and innovating so quickly. Many geeks got a chance to run companies that took off. Nowadays it's Like every other industry with sociopaths in charge.

Normal well adjusted people get a few million dollars and call it a day. Only people with a mental problem get billions and keep trying to get more.

I remember when I was growing up,

You remember propaganda (when corporations do it, it's called "Public Relations").

That's what you remember. Now, thanks to the internet democratizign information somewhat, they don't just get to feed us their "public relations" anymore. Now people can counter that shit, and people see them for what they really are - parasites.

It's capitalism, baby. Welcome to the real world.

Bill Gates admirable? Did we grow up in the 90s in the same dimension? Him and Windows were the butt of almost every IT joke, and there was his whole thing of never doing anything original or innovative except gobbling up companies and tech who were. Then the court battles. Those were a pretty big thing, even as a teen I followed the progress of it on the news. Then holding the whole web back for almost a decade as we had to deal with the monopoly of IE.

Greed. A sane person will walk away from working once they have enough saved to comfortably retire.

$100 million can let you live comfortably forever, but there are plenty of people who want that much every year.

Those are the folks who become 'leaders.'

I remember when I was growing up

You can basically stop right there. You were young and naive, viewing the world through the rose colored glasses of youth.

You listed a bunch of people who were "good", but honestly, none of them were. You just weren't necessarily aware of how Bill Gates treated anyone who had anything he wanted, or what Steve Jobs did to his daughter.

Honestly, the lesson here is All CEOs Are Bad, it's just that some are only moderate psychopaths instead of ones that skin cats and then stuff them into mailboxes.

You don't get to be a billionaire and a decent person. Choose 1.

When did you grow up that Gates has not been evil yet? All of the 90s was marked by Microsoft making home computing worse to create a monopoly. Fucking emails formatted in a way that's unreadable outside Windows, closed .doc format that became a de facto standard in offices and likely many other things I don't remember

"I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…"

They are but as usual it's the WORKERS who are the good brilliant people, not the ownership class and 3 letter executive dirt bags. They're the same in EVERY industry. Owner/CEO ONLY cares about profit profit profit, fuck everyone and everything else.

Workers, they're a mixed bag as there are so many different people, but in the tech space they're generally intelligent "good" people.

You haven't named a decent person in your post.

The Google founders are simply more secretive in their lifestyles compared to Musk. They dropped the "Don't Be Evil" motto a long time ago.

These people have always been bad. Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford, all of them had their issues. The big difference between then and now is the information we have access to. These leaders are more or less forced to live a very public life. We can find all sorts of articles and investigative journalism reports about Elon actually having family money. And when you are rich enough to control the few newspapers, the stories are going to put you in a very good light.

It's not just tech, but leadership positions in general.

Short answer is that the traits you need to climb the ladder have significant overlap with the traits of legit psychopathy.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mind-of-the-manager/201304/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership

Their job is to maximize shareholder profit. That is their only and one true job as CEOs. If you want a CEO that is not evil, look for companies that are not public even though they could be.

This phenomenon is not limited to tech company leaders.

It's a common problem with all large corporations leadership, and gets increasingly worse the larger that corporation becomes.

Evil people are less constrained by morality and more capable of doing what is necessary to climb hierarchies. This can happen in any organización, not just business.

I don't know much about the other guys you named, but close friend of Jeffry Epstein, Bill Gates is a demon with good PR. A lot of his outreach consists of privatizing schools in Africa and America, testing vaccines on tribal girls in India without consent, and demanding Oxford sell their covid vaccine instead of releasing it free..

But if you google anything about Bill Gates medical activities, they get drowned out by puff pieces and fact checks about microchips in vaccines instead of the.

You cant get that kind of money without being piece of shit humanbeing. You need to constantly look out for opportunities to exploit others and how could you even do that if you have any shred of empathy or decency. Not sure if they were like this from the beginning or if they became like this when they got enough money or if its influence from their family, but we will all suffer under their rule.

You can look back to Lee Iacocca. The Ford Pintos caught on fire because he sat back at his desk and laughed at the engineers who wanted to add a safety bar back there, the car had to be 2000 dollars no matter what.

Then he was at Chrysler and pioneered the idea that CEOs could set their own bonuses. At the time it was a shocking idea, called unethical.

Now the personal tech world comes along....

Steve Jobs (wasn't perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy),

Very very incorrect. He was a complete garbage pail of a human being from the very beginning.

Behind the Bastards: Part One: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-steve-jobs

Narcicistic sociopaths are the best profile to boost profit. Even some of the "good guys" you listed as founders were some trashy pricks.

Tech is just the most visible industry right now. Look at any other major corporations and you'll find the same.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton

At its very core, capitalism breeds greed.

Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They're not any different than your typical psychopath executive.

I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn't be surprised if it's billions.

Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.

You're out of your mind if you thought bill gates was someone to look up to.

Mate, that's the curse of capitalism. Yeah the living standards have improved and all, but the balance of scale tips so much towards the evil doings of these executives and the guys at the top that it doesn't matter how much my living standard increases.

Tech or not, they've always been like this.

Capitalism

I'd blame capitalism. And corporations prefering short term growth and attracting investors. And the whole modern business model of exploiting users private data to sell advertisements. That's how the whole internet works these days and thak makes being evil baked into every successful company.

And btw: Zuck did one good thing. He personally gave us competetive AI models to tinker around with. If it weren't for people like him, we would have AI dominate us without the average person having access to more than the online services like ChatGPT. Yeah but that doesn't take away from the things you lined out.