Marc Andreessen: Harvard Business School was built on a broken 1941 theory — and it's collapsing
elonmusk · x · 2026-11-01
Marc Andreessen (reposted by Elon Musk) traces the rise and fall of managerialism, citing James Burnham's 1941 book The Machiavellians. His thesis: great companies are founder-run — Henry Ford at Ford, Bob Noyce at Intel, and today Elon Musk running Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink simultaneously. Between the 1880s and 1920s, the philosophy of the portable 'professional manager' displaced founders, spawning Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB, management as a universal skill, and the 1970s conglomerate wave. Drawing on 30 years backing founders since co-founding Netscape (1994) and a16z (2009), plus his Meta board seat since 2008, he argues managerial CEOs keep losing to founders and the whole edifice is now collapsing.
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