Succession season 1-4 spoilers below
GoJo’s CEO Lukas Matsson is a character, to say the least. He’s straight to the point, has a seriously dark sense of humour, seems to know what he’s talking about most of the time, and doesn’t come across as particularly materialistic.
We only really get small glimpses of the Swedish billionaire throughout the series, but it’s enough to get a strong sense of who he is: there’s the scene at Kendall’s 40th birthday party where he says all he needs is “privacy, p***y, pasta”; he has a squillion-dollar Lake Como villa he’s never spent any time at; he calls Kendall wearing a tank top and eating popcorn, and says “I’ve never met anyone I respect who sleeps good”.
Then in episode five we get so much more of Matsson: he greets his guests who have arrived to discuss the very important billion-dollar GoJo deal wearing a hooded cagoule – hood up, of course. Then before the meeting starts he says his dad died by suicide, and that he was the person who found him. Later he makes jokes about Tom in Swedish, in front of Tom. Then in the evening he tells Shiv, while snorting something white, that he may have sent pints of blood, in frozen brick form, to his head of comms. Err, like we said, a real character.
It also has to be said that Matsson is by no means the most eccentric CEO out there. Yes, we know he’s not actually real, but his character must surely have been inspired, at least a little, by some of the kooky, barmy tech founders and other squillionaires out there who have some very interesting habits of their own.
Here’s our pick of some of real-life CEO’s best bonkers habits.
Adam Neumann
Over the years, the eccentric and hedonistic antics of WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann have become almost as famous as the co-working office spaces themselves (so famous in fact that Neumann became the subject of an Apple TV miniseries, WeCrashed, which starred Jared Leto as Neumann and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Rebekah.).
According to Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell’s 2021 book The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, which the Financial Times said was “peppered with eye-popping, never-before-reported details”, some of Neumann’s eccentricities included interviewing prospective employees while driving in his Maybach, and then sometimes dropping them off in the middle of traffic — he would have a second car following him which would then pick up the interviewee.
Described by the New York Times as a “towering, hard-partying Israeli”, it’s alleged that during one private jet trip of Neumann’s, some staff members onboard actually donned oxygen masks as the cabin had become so filled with marujana smoke. But perhaps this isn’t such shocking billionaire behaviour. More unique perhaps was a memo that was sent out in 2018 by WeWork that said the company would be banning meat at company events, and that staff would no longer be able to expense meals that included “poultry, pork or red meat”.
Sarah Blakely
For many people commuting is the worst part of the day, but Spanx CEO Sarah Blakely actually spent several years going on a far longer commute than she needed to.
According to Business Insider, Blakely liked to use the time travelling to get to work to think, but as it happened, she lived very close to her work. So she did the unthinkable: she created a fake commute where she would drive around Atlanta for about an hour before heading in.
“I’ve identified where my best thinking happens and it’s in the car,” she told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on his podcast in 2013. “I live really close to Spanx, so I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute,’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx, and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me.”
Andrew Mason
Groupon founder Andrew Mason, who the New York Times once described as “one of the most unusual corporate chieftains” has a quirky sense of humour, to say the least.
According to the Chicago Tribune, in 2010 Mason shared news about a new Groupon college scholarship, titled the The Grouspawn Award, which would be given to children whose parents had used a Groupon on their first date. But to qualify the couple would need proof of the Groupon having been used – making for a very awkward first date conversation.
Given that Mason was dismissed by his board just four years after the company’s founding, due to the company’s dwindling profits, it’s not known whether The Grouspawn Award will ever be awarded. But it’s unlikely.
When he was dismissed he said, “After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today.”
Elon Musk
My bedside table pic.twitter.com/sIdRYJcLTK
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
Musk is perhaps the kookiest of all the kooky CEOs: you only need to read the names of his children with singer Grimes (their son is called X Æ A-XII, while their daughter is called Exa Dark Sideræl) to get a glimpse of his unorthodox thinking.
The Tesla and Space X boss has not only recently taken over Twitter, but he’s also one of the platform’s biggest trolls too. Under his ownership, Twitter’s blue ticks are being removed. For a while he changed the Twitter logo to the image of a Dogecoin cryptocurrency image, just because he said he’d like to a couple of years ago. He’s also used the site to troll seemingly everyone and everything, including Bernie Sanders and Bill Gates.
Then, last November, he posted an image on Twitter of what he said was his bedside table. Laid across it was a fascinating combination of objects: four open cans of caffeine-free Coca-Cola, two guns, and a painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River. Of course.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon boss Bezos amazed everyone with his eloquence when his Shepard rocket touched down from its suborbital flight in July 2021: “Best day ever,” he said. Not very Armstrong, but hella Matsson.
Though many of Bezos’ antics are what might be expected from a multi-billionaire – yachts, women, spaceships, to name the big ones – according to New York magazine, Bezos also loves Lizzo, describing himself as “100%” her biggest fan. He’s also a big fan of milk.
Plus, he’s really quite excited about space: “The solar system could easily support a trillion humans, and if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts, and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources, from solar power and so on. That’s the world that I want my great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren to live in,” he said.
I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100% @lizzo’s biggest fan. #SBLIV pic.twitter.com/RhOduXk8Qd
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) February 3, 2020
Mark Zuckerberg
Anyone who’s spent any time at all on the internet will be well-acquainted with Zuckerberg’s unique facial expressions. His pin-like eyes, his paper-white skin, and his slightly robotic mannerisms have led to a fervent rumour that he may indeed be an alien.
But Zuckerberg’s public image has not been helped by his strange or unique hobbies. According to New York magazine, in the past these have included spear throwing, smoking meats, and allegedly killing a goat with a “laser gun”.
As with Jobs, who became known for wearing a uniform of a black polo neck – and Elizabeth Holmes who followed Jobs’ dressing habit – Zuckerberg has also been known to wear the same coloured t-shirts and hoodies every day. It gives his wardrobe a slightly deranged look.
Steve Jobs
Apple creator and founder Steve Jobs famously believed he could cure his cancer through a combination of sheer willpower, spiritualism and diet. But this was not a reactive attitude: Jobs had long believed in the power of food, which led to some fairly interesting dietary habits over the course of his life.
According to Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Jobs, the tech founder would do things like only eat apples and carrots for weeks on end, which would give him a “sunset-like hue”. Jobs was also apparently a fruitarian at one point, which is a sort of stricter version of veganism. Sounds delicious.
According to NBC news he would also periodically fast, enjoying the feeling of euphoria that it gave him. Perhaps he was simply ahead of the curve on this one: numerous celebrities, including Gwenyth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston, now reportedly swear by the health benefits of intermittent fasting.
