Education & Training
Deconstructing the Myth of the “Brilliant Jerk”
In some tech circles, insulting colleagues and belittling anyone slower to understand is treated as a sign of confidence, and the next generation of leaders are learning from it.
In some tech circles, insulting colleagues and belittling anyone slower to understand is treated as a sign of confidence, and the next generation of leaders are learning from it. Leaders who behave this way are celebrated as visionaries. Watching closely is the next generation of leaders, current employees and university students learning to emulate them.
Finding the anomaly nobody else clocks, building a security threat model from fragments, tracing an OSINT trail back to a person who didn't want to be found, requires a different kind of thinking. Non-linear thinking. Around 35% of entrepreneurs have dyslexia and 40% have ADHD, and there’s also a disproportionately high level working in security. The intelligence agencies worked this out decades ago. GCHQ has recruited dyslexic analysts for years. The CIA and NSA have said the same about minds that hold ambiguity without forcing an early answer. Jim Clemente, who spent 22 years as an FBI profiler at Quantico working cases like the DC Sniper, reviewed my own work on social engineering and said I had the mind of a profiler. He's dyslexic too. The brain wiring the school system tries to correct is the wiring the highest-stakes environments seek out.
The CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in its field tells the world the future belongs to the neurodivergent. He says there are only two kinds of people who will succeed in the AI era: trade workers, and the neurodivergent. I share the same neurodivergent profile as this CEO, ADHD and dyslexia, though not his ideology or leadership style.
The CEO of another major tech company has been just as candid about the culture he brought with him. His biggest lesson there, he said, was “often the talented people are super opinionated, kind of aggressive, tell you you're dumb. It doesn't always feel good”.
Some of the biggest investors reward this mindset with funding. One prominent investor has called self-reflection a weakness, dismissing introspection as neuroticism dressed up as insight. A neurodivergent mind is being promoted as a necessity for a new AI world but also used as an excuse for toxic and aggressive leadership.
Thankfully, toxic work culture like that is the exception. Most days, what goes wrong between people at work is ordinary misunderstanding. Whether a person is neurodivergent or neurotypical, each of us looks at the world through a lens built from everything that came before, the home we grew up in, the country and culture that raised us, our gender and how the world treated us for it, and the work that shaped us.
Two people in the same meeting can be the sum of completely different lives. One is blunt because in their house blunt meant honest, and the other hears an attack because in theirs, blunt meant a fight was coming. Some cultures read eye contact as trust, others as rudeness. One person thinks out loud and needs to finish the thought, and the other has learned that interrupting is how you get steamrolled. Much of the heat is two people who actually agree, each misunderstanding the other while being misunderstood in return.
A team drawn from different genders, cultures, and ways of thinking sees more than any single person could alone, and builds products that work for people the founders would never have considered. It counts most when we look at AI, which is being trained to make decisions for everyone and can only do that well if the people building it try to empathize with those it'll impact. A team full of people who think alike builds a system that works for people like them and fails quietly for everyone else.
Someone joins one of these companies and quickly learns that being harsh gets rewarded and admitting doubt gets punished. So, they change how they behave and adapt, and it works. They get promoted. A few years later they leave to start their own company or lead at another. They hire people who remind them of themselves and reward the same behavior that got them promoted. Those people learn it the same way and bring it with them when they leave. Nobody writes any of it down.
Culture isn’t documented like a set of processes. People just absorb how successful people act. And the more successful people who've acted that way, the more it looks like the behavior is why they succeeded, so fewer people question it.
AI doesn't have values of its own. It learns them from the people who build it. A leader who never admits a mistake and never stops to ask if he's wrong, builds an AI that does the same: confident, unquestioning, certain it's right even when it isn't. That gets shipped to millions of people who have no idea whose blind spots they've inherited.
The students studying some of today’s leaders closely are learning that the way to signal you belong at the top is to be certain, abrasive, and untroubled by the people you bruise. They're absorbing it as the right way to treat people before they've ever been led, let alone lead anyone.
Most people thought the crowd booed Eric Schmidt just for talking about AI during his May 2026 commencement speech at the University of Arizona. Watching the video, I saw something else: they booed because he told the graduating students to stop asking questions and just jump on the rocket ship. If anything, the last 20 years have taught us that leadership and their decisions should be questioned.
Everyone's being told to prepare for AI. But the first thing to get right is the most important thing we can teach anyone entering work: how we treat other people. Have empathy and show compassion.
Tomorrow’s leaders watching us are deciding what kind of leader they’ll become. Whatever we reward, they'll bring it into the companies they help build and the AI they train. The way a handful of leaders treat people today becomes the way AI treats millions tomorrow.
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