> The only difference was leadership.

Not really. There are a lot of external factors that could explain the difference in the company's performance. Different time, different customers, different overall market strength, different availability in capital, different interest rates. You can't pin the company's success or failure entirely on the CEO, and there is not that much correlation between CEO compensation and company success.

I think a lot of people could do Nadella’s job and you’d see similar company performance. In fact I’d be so bold to say that the higher up on the totem pole you go, the more people could do an equal or better job. The world has few CEOs simply because the world has few companies, not because the job is particularly difficult or requires niche, rare skill.

We love to hero worship, though, and the fiction we consume loves to uplift That One Person who won the day, downplaying everyone else who contributed to that win, and the environment in which the win happened.

Nadella changed the focus and direction of Microsoft. The company increased in value 10x. Maybe "anyone could have done that", in hindsight. Heck, if I went back in time with a detailed copy of Apple's history, I could have done what Jobs did.

But without that guide, I would have destroyed Apple. I'm just not that good.

All I am saying is we don't know that it was his decisions that caused the value increase and not something else, and we can't know because we can't do a controlled experiment in another otherwise identical universe to rule out other factors.

In order to increase the market cap of the company by 10x over 10 years, he would have had to have consistently made the best decision.

Being dumb luck seems highly unlikely.

If you can show me an incompetent CEO who presided over such success, I'd enjoy hearing about it.

> The only difference was leadership.

That's quite the leap though, and is just confusing correlation and causation. Maybe the previous leadership was simply getting in the way of the engineers and managers that had the good ideas. And the new leadership was more hands-off, or focused in other areas like marketing. Or those cases are just flukes. For every case like the ones you cite, I could find two where the exact opposite happened.

If you're downing a shot of vodka every morning, and suddenly stop, then yeah, your health is going to improve.

In my opinion, many (if not most) of these CEOs are business-focused people with no technical (or even non-technical) knowledge of anything they purport to manage. And on the whole, they really don't affect the value of the company one way or the other.

Jobs created 3 fortunes. One you could attribute to luck. Two is getting hard to say any schmuck could have done that. 3 means Jobs was a unicorn.

I'm not saying any schmuck could have done that. I'm saying that the engineers and managers at Apple (to use your example) are just as (if not more) responsible for the success than Jobs. Those lower-level engineers and managers also explain the repeated successes. And that, I would say, is the case in most market successes. The CEO is not remotely deserving of all the credit, or even most of the credit, in most situations. They don't really deserve to be paid what they're paid.

There's this certain anti-historical proclivity to create heroes for worship. Because it's a simple story to tell and it gives you the opportunity to put yourself in the hero's shoes. But the simple story is almost always wrong.