Then, open up Forbes’ list of N richest people, and count how many of them got on that list by climbing the management hierarchy at a big company.
I predict that, to within reasonable approximation, the answer will be zero. Nobody gets on Forbes’ list of richest people by climbing the hierarchy at a big company. They get on that list by founding a company, inheriting, or both.
I didn’t check this either, but it reminds me of a fun fact that, if you look at the CEO of a large company, the CEO-founders are roughly population-average height, while the people promoted up to CEO are towering monstrosities. Copying from my post Neuroscience of human sexual attraction triggers:
…I’m not sure if anyone has done a rigorous systematic study to back that up, but some examples (from here, the author claims not to have cherry-picked) are: John S. Watson (promoted up to CEO of Chevron): 6’4” = 193 cm; Tim Cook (promoted up to CEO of Apple): 6’3” = 190 cm; Jeffrey Immelt (promoted up to CEO of General Electric): 6’4” = 193 cm; Mark Zuckerberg (founded Facebook): 5’9” = 175 cm; Larry Page (co-founded Google): 5’11” = 180 cm; Sergey Brin (co-founded Google): 5’8” = 173 cm; Jack Dorsey (co-founded Twitter): 5’11” = 180 cm; Richard Branson (founded Virgin): 5’11” = 180 cm; Elon Musk (quasi-founded Tesla, PayPal, SpaceX): 5’11” = 180 cm; Warren Buffett (quasi-founded Berkshire Hathaway): 5’10” = 178 cm.
I didn’t check this either, but it reminds me of a fun fact that, if you look at the CEO of a large company, the CEO-founders are roughly population-average height, while the people promoted up to CEO are towering monstrosities. Copying from my post Neuroscience of human sexual attraction triggers:
The people I instinctively checked after reading this:
Pichai: 5′11
Gates: 5′10
Ballmer: 6′5
I got conflicting estimates for Jobs and Nadella