In late April 2025 Elon Musk announced that he would reduce the amount of time spent in Washington, D.C. as Director of the Department of Government Efficiency. The Trump administration is assembled of former hedge fund managers, investment firm bosses, entrepreneurs, business executives, and TV celebrities.
You might think it is a good thing. However, history demonstrates that businessmen are almost always bad politicians. Here is why. The thing is that humans are biological and social beings. More specifically, humans are primates who compete for access to food, sexual reproduction as well as for dominance within their social groups.
Those dominant individuals who prioritize access to food, or resources in a wider sense, should strive to become entrepreneurs and businessmen. Hoarding resources to a level that exceeds your personal needs does not fit in with the public good. Super rich individuals live like hamsters who are strictly solitary creatures with the real passion for food hoarding. Hamsters also do not tolerate the presence of other individuals of both their own and the opposite sex to the extent that, if housed together, this may lead to acute and even chronic stress. All in all, a hamster is an ideal character for the role of a successful misanthropic capitalist in the spirit of Uncle Scrooge from a Dickens story or a Hollywood cartoon featuring Donald Duck.
I am sure that political partners, competitors, and adversaries have already studied Trump “business” administration’s psychological profile very well to arrive at a conclusion that a weekly 15% drop in U.S. stock market or a daily 50 basis point rise in 10-year U.S. Treasury yield eventually leads to a situation where many senior federal officials start losing their cool.
At the same time, those dominant individuals who prioritize access to sexual reproduction should strive to become celebrities. Research shows that women prefer celebrities like movie, pop, or sports stars over richer billionaires or business executives because fame is sexier than anonymous and grey wealth. Just recall 81-year old Mick Jagger with his myriad of wives, girlfriends, love affairs, and eight children with five women (“sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll” as they say). I would add that according to this metric, Donald Trump (5 children with three women) and Elon Musk (at least 14 children with four women) can be also viewed as celebrities rather than as a businessman and an entrepreneur.
Only if you are a dominant individual who prioritizes social dominance, you should strive to become a politician. Politicians are more austere personalities for whom hoarding resources and getting access to sex are of secondary importance. Furthermore, most revolutionary transformations of societies in different periods of human history were primarily led by the individuals with a “fanatical” personality trait. The word “fanatical” implies not just an ideological acknowledgement of the need to implement some strategy, but a sincere, almost religious, belief in its necessity.
We can recall examples from different historical periods: Alexander the Great and the Hellenization of the Middle East; Julius Caesar and the transformation of the Roman Republic into a monarchy; Oliver Cromwell and the end of absolutism in England; Peter the Great and his transformations in Russia; Napoleon and the end of absolutism in France; Lenin and the formation of the Soviet Union; Franklin D. Roosevelt and the “peaceful” revolution in America during the Great Depression of the 1930s, etc.
This fanaticism could be explained by their choleric personality traits and a “weak”, from a biological point of view, nervous system. Its “weakness” implied an inability to accept the situation as it is and “relax.” The only things that could calm it down for a while were actions aimed at correcting the real or imaginary shortcomings of the society. A classic example is Alexander the Great’s approach to solving the “Gordian Knot” problem. He simply cut it in half instead of wasting time (and irritating his nervous system!) to untie it. As Plutarch claimed: “He did not covet pleasure,
nor even wealth, but excellence and fame.”
Another good example is Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal in the 1930s, which, among other things, aimed at equalizing the standard of living: in the period from 1929 to 1950 the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% of U.S. residents fell from 24% to 10%, while the top marginal income tax rate rose from 24% to 84%. Today Roosevelt is called the savior of capitalism. In
the 1930s, the press called him a traitor to his class.
Brilliantly written and deeply thought-provoking! Your blend of history, psychology, and modern politics is both sharp and entertaining. I especially enjoyed the comparison of personality traits across professions. One question: do you think the current political climate could ever favor a true “fanatical” reformer again, or has media-driven populism changed the game for good?
Thank you very much for your kind comment!
In order for such a “fanatical” reformer to emerge, you need a real existential crisis. Humans need “leaders” in times of crisis. Otherwise, they are just happy to have grey “managers.” These two notions are often confused.
If you want to know more, please check out my article “Why Managers Want to Become Leaders and Why They Largely Fail: One of the Greatest Intellectual Confusions of Our Times.”
https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2023/09/27/why-managers-want-to-become-leaders-and-why-they-largely-fail-one-of-the-greatest-intellectual-confusions-of-our-times/