Glee rippled across the internet this week as an octogenarian took shots at the Trillion-Dollar Man.
“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys ... what virtually everyone appreciates,” beloved author Joyce Carol Oates posted on X about Elon Musk. “Scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads) ... In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured.”
The post hit a nerve. “Oates is a lazy liar ... and an abuser of semicolons!” the Tesla CEO replied and, in another post, called her work “laboriously pretentious drivel”.
This is hardly the first time cultural figures have charged business with philistinism. In his book Culture and Anarchy, Victorian author Matthew Arnold wrote of “sweetness and light” – or beauty and intelligence – as antithetical to the philistinism of money-minded industrialists, shopkeepers and bankers. “He who works for machinery,” Arnold wrote, “works for hatred, works only for confusion.”
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Authors have also been blind to the rich drama of business. At the time of the financial crisis, Howard Davies, the former UK financial regulator, once lamented that British authors were “more preoccupied with life after working hours and below the waist” than in banks and law firms. However, that seems to have changed with novels such as Tahmima Anam’s The Startup Wife and Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and Mackenzie.
In fact, Musk has credited science fiction as formative, telling Rolling Stone magazine: “I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.”
Particularly influential was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which he described as “seriously paralleling Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
“The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilisation, minimise the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.”
Christian de Cock, professor of organisation studies at Copenhagen Business School, notes science fiction author Iain Banks has been named as an influence by prominent tech figures including Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, as well as Musk. As utopian – or dystopian – scenarios play out in fictional plot lines, he says, such fiction can help us “understand difficult issues that the integration of AI systems in our corporations and society throw up”.
At a time when business leaders seem to be constantly firefighting, with little time for a hinterland, there is an even stronger case for entrepreneurs and chief executives to make space for books. Reading is not only for the joy of literature, and decompression – but can also make CEOs better at their jobs.
Carolyn Dewar, senior partner at McKinsey, found this was a common thread as she and her colleagues researched their new book A CEO for All Seasons. In interviews with 83 business leaders, including Merck’s Ken Frazier and Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, many said they prioritised taking time to pursue their “curiosity”, as distinct from escapism and pursuing a work-life balance.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Dewar says, sets aside one day a month to read. Others talked about reading “widely – fiction, poetry, not just business books. It was a time to get into their own head space [to] spark ideas.”
Amy Gallo, contributing editor at Harvard Business Review and author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People), says that fiction encourages business leaders to be “comfortable with not knowing. Business books [are] about helping people discover something. There’s usually a conclusion. With fiction, the lesson is not as clear. Plays [and] novels allow you to sit with human nature in its complexity.”
Another aspect of culture is creating connections with colleagues or staff beyond the workplace. “It enables us to see someone as a whole person,” says Gallo. “It’s where creativity comes from. It’s not transactional; we are building on each other’s ideas.”
Who knows if reading will have a place in future chief executives’ lives? The joy of books is in decline among the young.
At last week’s Booker Prize ceremony, author Penelope Lively gave a speech on the importance of books for children, not just for academic reasons but “the climate of the mind” to understand “good and evil, of moral imperatives, of social possibilities”.
Let’s hope business-minded kids take note.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
