They're not selected for intelligence, but for sociopathy.

My lesson in this came really early in my career. One of our execs was selling vapourware. Just promising our product, that we hadn't made yet, could do literally anything. Then he insisted we build it on this platform he must have had shares in the way he pushed it, only it was also vapourware and didn't do half the things it said it did.

He found it utterly inconceivable that a company would sell a product that didn't do what it said despite doing the exact same thing himself. He was completely delusional.

As we've seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you're wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.

And if you always fail upwards, it's very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.

Man, if all it takes to be a CEO is to make stupid decisions, they should just hire me. I’m the master at that.