Corporate celebrities : Don’t fall for hype or glib tongues

THE notion that many who succeed in finance, commerce and industry have sometimes become more famous than Hollywood stars, subjects of bestseller books and blockbuster movies, ending up on a regular basis in the gossip pages, is nothing new or for that matter, necessarily disturbing.

Founders of successful businesses – like John Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie, and more recently, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos – have had more impact on the world and on how we live and work than many legendary statesmen and generals who had won wars and built empire. Some of these business people were colourful characters who occasionally found themselves entangled in scandals, including accusations of personal misconduct and messy divorces, that have drawn the attention of the press and the general public.

Moreover, one of the reasons many of these men and women were successful was because they were contrarians who challenged the conventional wisdom, inviting controversy, making waves, and creating enemies as they became a focus of heated debates. From that perspective, that, say, Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are on the list of the world’s top celebrities, tormented by the paparazzi or the scandals sheets, has become part of our media-shaped reality.