[biimugan]

> 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.

[WalterBright]

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.

[biimugan]

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.