Narcissism and the Rest of Us
18: Famous Narcissist Leaders
Photo: iStock
Probably the world’s most famous narcissists today are leading two very large countries. One is a murderous, plundering villain and the other, a vengeful, lying, sociopath … well, this puts me into the politics of the moment, a place I don’t care to go. I also don’t want photos of either of these two malignant narcissists glaring at me in my blog. Just like I don’t want to look at a picture of Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot. The reality is most countries, large and small, are led by narcissists, with an important distinction.
Healthy narcissists hold maladaptive behaviors in check for the good of their constituents, while pathological narcissists are all about themselves, their dysfunction spilling over into unethical, criminal acts at the expense of their constituents, especially those less fortunate.
In each of my blog series I’ve included a post on famous people with that particular condition. But identifying high-achievers with bipolar disorder is quite different from selecting narcissist leaders to profile — because, among the movers and shakers in the world, that’s too many candidates. To solve my quandary, I’ve decided to select one person to profile — someone who doesn’t commit genocide and ostensibly works toward the common good. Someone of interest, to, say, the Harvard Business Review:
There’s something new and daring about the CEOs who are transforming today’s industries. Just compare them with the executives who ran large companies in the 1950s-1980s. Those executives shunned the press and had their comments carefully crafted by corporate PR departments. But today’s CEOs — superstars such as Bill Gates [b. 1955, cofounded Microsoft, CEO of Gates Foundation], Andy Grove [1936-2016, former head of Intel], Steve Jobs [1955-2011, cofounder/CEO of Apple], Jeff Bezos [b. 1964, founder of Amazon, current net worth: $254 billion], and Jack Welch [1935-2020; former head of GE] — hire their own publicists, write books, grant spontaneous interviews, and actively promote their personal philosophies. Their faces adorn the covers of BusinessWeek, Time, and the Economist. [The absence of women or people of color is glaring.]
What’s more, the world’s business personalities are increasingly seen as the makers and shapers of our public and personal agendas. They advise schools on what kids should learn and lawmakers on how to invest the public’s money. We look to them for thoughts on everything from the future of e-commerce to hot places to vacation. —Michael Maccoby, “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons,” Harvard Business Review, 2004
So, from an abundance of narcissistic riches, my candidate is Bill Gates, who amassed a fortune that he’s giving away — going from decades as the world’s richest man to 13th on Forbes’ ranked list.. As I wrote in post 2, I’m not qualified nor is anyone to make a long-distance diagnosis. When I call Gates a narcissist, it’s a suggestion — not a fact. And since we know just how many forms of narcissism there are, it might be that he’s a happy narcissist.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates, 2025
Seattle-born William Henry Gates III (b. 1955), a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s-1980s, co-founded Microsoft with his high school friend Paul Allen, after dropping out of Harvard in 1975. Microsoft went public in 1986 — making Gates the world’s youngest billionaire at age 31 and, as ranked by Forbes, the world’s wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years (1995-2017). Gates became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth surpassed $100 billion. According to Forbes, as of May 2025, his net worth still stands around $115 billion, making him the world’s 13th-richest person. Gates was Microsoft’s CEO for 25 years and president/chairman of the board until he ended all affiliation in 2020.
Gates and his then-wife Melinda started the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (renamed the Gates Foundation after his divorce), the world’s largest private charitable organization. It largely focused on public health, education, and poverty.
Source: Wikipedia
One of the foundation’s education initiatives was devoted to creating small high schools across the U.S. as an answer to low student achievement — a major half-billion dollar effort with disappointing results. Health initiatives have fared better. One initiative funds programs to eradicate transmissible diseases (tuberculosis, AIDs, malaria), which has contributed to a decline in new HIV infections and deaths globally. Currently, Gates has taken up the environment and global access to sustainable energy.
Who Ripped Off Whom?
In the early Microsoft days, Gates was called a brilliant, modern-day “robber baron” when Microsoft was accused of acting like a monopoly in PC-operating systems. Microsoft ruthlessly eliminated rivals and amassed wealth, similar to unscrupulous, anti-competitive methods of late 19th-century industrialists — the original robber barons John D. Rockefeller (oil), Andrew Carnegie (steel), and Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads and shipping).
The story of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Xerox has been told in books and articles and can easily be found floating around the internet. So I won’t repeat it here except to say it was a tale of colossal ego, competition, subterfuge, lawsuits/countersuits, and rivalry that probably continues to today. There was no idea or business practice that wasn’t ripe for pilfering, further developing, and profiting from during the Microsoft-Apple wars. In fact, Gate’s monopolistic practices led to a U.S. Department of Justice antitrust case in the late 1990s, where a federal judge ultimately found Microsoft liable for illegally maintaining a monopoly and engaging in anticompetitive conduct. According to Wikipedia, the judge initially ordered a breakup of the company, though this was later settled out of court with “behavioral constraints.”
Bill Gates with his team, and the Gates Foundation’s sprawling home in Seattle.
And like the original robber barons who revised their public images with great public deeds — from endowing universities and museums to founding some of the most august philanthropies still active today — the Gates Foundation has dedicated itself to solving major, intractable domestic and international problems. Yet, hubris can be found here as well — pumping tens of millions of dollars into massive efforts that couldn’t possibly be sustained once the funding inevitably ended.
“Extensive philanthropy through the Gates Foundation is sometimes viewed in the same vein as that of Carnegie and Rockefeller — a way to use a vast, “ill-gotten” fortune to influence policy and “save the world” in a way that aligns with his personal priorities, without public accountability. Armed with roughly $67 billion, the foundation is better equipped to attack disease and malnutrition than many governments. —David Enrich, business investigations editor, The New York Times, in his book review of The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab, New York Times Book Review.
Is Gates a Narcissist?
While this is unknown, I can’t help but give an extended quotation from Enrich’s review of Tim Schwab’s book — a book Gates took issue with — though much of the Gates profile is corroborated by other sources [lightly edited for brevity]:
A quarter-century ago, Bill Gates became an international symbol of greed, arrogance, and hubris for his no-holds-barred leadership of Microsoft.
Then, not long after the U.S. government sued the company for abusing its monopolistic powers, Gates underwent a transformation. He set aside his business ambitions and devoted his energies to giving away his vast fortune. He went from being a corporate villain to a world-saving philanthropist — or so the story goes.
In his new book … journalist Tim Schwab dismisses that makeover as a fanciful fable. The real Gates … remains a power-hungry, narcissistic control freak, and the sprawling … Gates Foundation is little more than a vehicle for him to accumulate and deploy influence on a far greater scale than he could as a mere billionaire software mogul. It is profoundly undemocratic and entrenches inequality, Schwab argues.
[Gates’] “unyielding belief in himself, that he is both right and righteous in everything he does,” has led him to think that he and only he knows how best to tackle the world’s most complex problems….
One of the book’s most compelling sections is about the foundation’s support for family planning. Gates’s preferred method of contraception is a hormone implant that gets inserted into women’s arms and prevents pregnancy for up to five years. The foundation struck a deal with drug companies to encourage them to sell tens of millions of these implants at steep discounts. With the market flooded, health clinics in countries like Malawi and Uganda began resorting to “hard-sell tactics” to push women to accept implants that they didn’t want. Schwab describes it as a form of eugenics-inspired coercion.
Melinda French Gates. Getty Images
While Schwab allows that Gates has some good intentions and that the foundation has saved some lives, he documents how it tends to exaggerate or even concoct data about the impact of its work, including widely cited figures about just how many lives it has actually saved.
[Schwab recounts how] the foundation had agreements with drug and health care companies that entitled it to license for free whatever the companies produced with the foundation’s money. Why, Schwab asks, didn’t the foundation insist that some of these companies donate their vaccines and other products and equipment to poor countries?
These are reasonable questions, and Schwab makes a strong case, based on years of reporting, that under the direction of a humbler man the Gates Foundation would probably be a more effective force for good. —David Enrich, business investigations editor, The New York Times, in his book review of The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab, New York Times Book Review.
Why We Like Narcissist Leaders
In It’s All Your Fault at Work: Managing Narcissists and Other High-Conflict People, excerpted by High Conflict Institute, clinical social workers Bill Eddy (also an attorney) and Georgi DiStefano write, “Whether in business, politics, or workgroups, there is a natural tendency to select narcissistic leaders. They are attracted to leadership roles as part of their personalities — their drive for extra respect and extra attention; their belief in their own ideas; their enjoyment of winning contests; their ability to charm and persuade people; and their ability to focus narrowly on a goal (getting chosen as the leader).”
Photo: Shutterstock
The authors add, we’re also attracted to narcissists for similar reasons. “We like being charmed and persuaded; we enjoy giving them our rapt attention; we like how hard they work to become our leaders; we are attracted to their stories of overcoming past challenges and their visions of future success; and the average person doesn’t want the headaches of being a leader (or competing with a narcissist to get there).”
The attraction between narcissistic leaders and group members seems to be part of human nature — and may have helped us organize and survive as humans over thousands of years against endless adversity. A small dose of narcissism may work — it helps people persevere in the face of incredible odds, to be unfazed by strong criticism, to get attention for unpopular (but sometimes good) ideas, and to draw together many different types of people (sometimes millions) around them and their ideas. This may be especially true in times of war and survival.
This also may be true in times of cultural revolutions, such as the popular entrepreneurs who led breakthroughs resulting in our high-tech lifestyles. These include … Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) — all with some narcissistic traits, but also successful and effective management styles. Their narcissistic traits may cause them to be difficult to the people around them, but they may still be manageable and productive.
Steve Jobs famously said that he didn’t do market research because people didn’t really know what they wanted — but he did! He was often right. —Bill Eddy and Georgi DiStefano, It’s All Your Fault at Work: Managing Narcissists and Other High-Conflict People, excerpted by High Conflict Institute
We know when disorders lurk among the worse, autocratic leaders. It doesn’t take long to become obvious to those surrounding them. “Unfortunately, under the surface … they are over the top.” Eddy and DiStefano list three major categories to discern maladaptive narcissism:
- Lack of self-awareness and self-reflection, acting defensive rather than insightful.
- Lack of adaptation or change — even though their behavior is dysfunctional — because they don’t see the problem.
- Belief the cause of all problems is outside of themselves, either making them feel helpless or aggressively try to blame others to feel better. The authors call them high-conflict narcissists whose “target of blame” generates increasing conflicts as they attack or attempt to eliminate their targets.
Research on Narcissists at Work
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Eddy and DiStefano cite The Narcissism Epidemic by Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, who explain narcissists in the workplace see themselves as great leaders and are more likely than other employees to be chosen as leaders by their peers. But gradually, their peers see their “negative qualities and stop viewing them as leaders.” Studies show narcissist managers are rated as average for problem-solving skills but below average for “leadership skills, interpersonal skills, and integrity.” Narcissist work colleagues not in leadership take credit for the work of others, tend to do less work than others, and blame their co-workers for problems — even when they’re friends.
Narcissists As Business Leaders
Business literature is full of research finding the most effective leaders are not those with overflowing charisma, the ones that stand out, grab attention, and are convincing. Eddy and DiStefano reference Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, who cites research on effective leadership. They push themselves to work hard, are known for their humility and desire to bring out the best in their team, and focus on the business — not on themselves.
In The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge and Campbell make a similar point: Narcissists may be good at rising to power within an organization, but their success doesn’t last long. They are overconfident and not good team players. They sell others on an inflated image of what they can do, but they can’t fulfill it. In looking at 100 technology companies, the more narcissistic CEOs had dramatic moments of success, but overall their companies were more volatile and surpassed by companies with less narcissistic CEOs and more steady performances. Narcissists are risk takers and this threatens the value of a company rather than enhancing it. Some narcissists may create a great company — and then crash it! —Bill Eddy and Georgi DiStefano, It’s All Your Fault at Work: Managing Narcissists and Other High-Conflict People, excerpted in High Conflict Institute
So what do we conclude from the Bill Gates story and research on effective vs narcissistic leadership? Any one of us who have worked at more than a few jobs over many years have certainly encountered a boss or coworker who was insufferable, self-absorbed, and “clueless,” if not ruthless. They made our working lives stressful, sapping it of any pleasure we could take from a positive work environment. In my last place of work, where I remained for 20 years, I can attest to the difference in working under a narcissist for the first decade and an “adaptive leader,” at the same place, for the second decade. We deserve the leader who values their team, who gives guidance without micromanaging, without being the know-it-all, who isn’t jealous and suspicious and paranoid that others are coming for their job. We deserve to be among those people.
Coming Up Next
I’ve been the brunt of verbal, non-physical narcissistic rage — and it felt like I was turned inside out. Nothing to protect me from something both terrifying and irrational, like becoming a central villain in a reimagined personal history. This is an unpleasant topic. But for anyone who has experienced it, I hope it helps to understand why it happens. In Post 19: Narcissistic Rage and Self-Awareness, I will attempt to do just that.
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