View / The age of executive power is missing CEOs

President Donald Trump is meddling in corporate mergers. So is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Welcome to the age of executive power. The only thing missing are the CEOs.

Big business has never been more politically salient, but the CEOs who sit atop it have rarely mattered less. This week, a dozen of them are trailing Trump to China on a trip that has very little to do with them and from which they can expect very little in return. Jets and soybeans are about all that’s formally on the table, leaving only Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg and Cargill’s Brian Sikes with much reason to be there. The rest of them got seats at the state dinner and mingled over cocktails at the exclusive Capital Club in Beijing. But they’re not the main attraction. They’re props.

Jensen Huang was set to be invited, then left off the list, then reinvited, before scrambling to Alaska where he met Air Force One with a backpack, looking all too human. But even chips are absent from the formal agenda because the politics are too messy. That’s a long way to go to be a background actor.

Meanwhile, back home the US economy is as central to culture and politics as it’s been since 2008. Americans are souring on capitalism, a development that, while unwelcome for CEOs, might at least bring them into focus. And yet they remain oddly blurry — non-player characters in pixelated suits, adding texture to scenes they aren’t actively shaping. The public’s ambivalence toward corporate chiefs cuts across gender, age, party, and even income. Nobody is seriously floating Bob Iger or Howard Schultz as a 2028 presidential prospect — the business-builder, centrist blank canvas onto which Americans might project their hopes and dreams.

Even the celebrity CEOs building our AI future have been swallowed by forces bigger than themselves. Anthropic and OpenAI are dancing uneasily with the Pentagon, and neither has come off better for it. Tim Cook, whose name Trump got wrong by accident once and now on purpose, flashed a thumbs-up and a peace sign as he walked out of Beijing’s Great Hall of People — but is no closer to curtailing Apple’s overreliance on China. Elon Musk is more powerful than he was before Trump was elected, but less powerful than he was in the days after Trump was sworn in.

CEOs have gotten little of what they paid for. During Trump’s first term, they were afraid of getting a presidential tweet; now they’re afraid of getting a president on their cap table. I wrote nine months ago that CEOs were in the strange position of being “the focal point of cultural ire but with little of the power that made it deserving of populist outrage in the past.”

Nobody liked the robber barons, but at least they wielded power.