[fizzyfizz]

The OP is mostly talking about image, not reality. What image do tech founders choose to project.

OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.

Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.

Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.

They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.

The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.

Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.

[harrall]

I don’t know about everyone else but “nerds” have never had a positive image to the general population.

Nerds as honest or incorruptible? In popular media, from Revenge of the Nerds to The Simpsons to Big Bang Theory, the defining feature of “nerds” is that they have poor social skills and less regard for their fellow humans.

Now people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk look like the nerds that now have money and power! Ah ha! “It doesn’t matter what others think of me now! This is revenge for looking down on me before!”

[watwut]

I always interpreted terms geek and nerd as: geek is someone knowledgeable extremely into a some tech or scifi or some such".

Nerd is geek plus low social skills. He may be just awkward and once you get used to it he is actually nice. Or, he may be as asshole. But always weird.

[SenHeng]

You may be right. Ut that’s just pointless bike-shedding.

harrall is right that to the general populace, nerds/geeks are interchangeable terms for people who prefer to study/play with computers rather than socialise with the rest of us.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they have a better moral compass and will always do the right thing. Those are images that nerds put onto themselves.

[watwut]

I agree with more compass.

But I genuinely find it weird that Musk and CEOs in general are called geeks or nerds. Their whole thing is that they made a choice to spend less time doing actual tech work and a lot more time doing business, managing, dealing, etc. Whole their success is predicated on their ability to make people do what they want. They are not spending time tinkering with computers, they are spending time schmoozing for investment contacts. That is literal opposite of a nerd or a geek.

In the "revenge of the nerds" drama, they would be ultrasocial jocks bullies with cool computer game at home.