[api]

I wasn't suggesting that it was conscious con-artistry (though I don't completely rule it out either).

I worked in business consulting for a bit. Part of what I learned is that at least some emperors have no clothes. There were really two main types I encountered:

(1) Extremely competent, hard-working executives who try their best to build real value.

(2) Fast talking dominance machines. Sociopaths, really. They make big promises, send a lot of primate dominance gestures, and generally build vapid unsustainable businesses that eventually fail. Yet the failure never sticks to them, and it often never sticks to their initial investors. Usually it's handed off to someone down the line (later investors, the public, employees, etc.).

When I see a resume that consists of a series of a series of unsustainable businesses where the early investors and executives made out well by handing a bag of flaming poo to later investors, I tend to suspect that we're dealing with category (2) players.

I also suspect that when I hear of extremely magnetic reality-distortion-field personality types. There is a certain kind of charisma that I take as a contrarian indicator.