Everything about CEOs is like a monarchy. Wealth inheritance in business families like the Waltons? Just the capitalism version of royal heirs getting their throne. Presidents? They don’t run jackshit ever since money got into politics
America is back in the era of kings, and arguably a worse one
When we think of kings we tend to think of their late medieval/early modern European incarnation, but that was a bit of a historical anomaly—the end stage of a thousand-year-long process of the monarchy being captured by the aristocracy. But the aristocracy was the older institution of the two, and the more malignant.
In ancient times kings were generally opposed to aristocrats, drawing on popular support to curb the natural tendency of the aristocracy to extract so much wealth from the lower classes that violent revolutions would result. (Think the Roman Republic, where wealthy senators were terrified of a popular leader becoming king and eliminating the Senate.)
So it’s not that CEOs are becoming kings—it’s that plutocrats are subverting yet another in a long line of institutions designed to contain them.