The Drama Kings of Tech

It's hard to know whether this performative strain in tech culture reflects something essential about the industry. Maybe its leaders are just unusually visible, because the legacy media are more interested in them, or because they figure so prominently on the social-media platforms that they operate. Or maybe a few outlier personalities--Musk in particular--are responsible for most of the soap-opera vibes. It could also be the general cultural atmosphere. Over the past 20 years, a fashion for aggrieved and confrontational behavior has migrated out of reality television into the wider entertainment and business worlds, and also into politics, in the person of Donald Trump. If the tech titans weren't so self-serious, their bad behavior might simply blend into this broader coarsening.