All of those people are founders.

My thesis is that there's no place in the world to be hired as an engineer w/ an MBA (which is comparably compensated to and inaccessible to "just" engineers or "just" MBAs), and no place within traditional hierarchies.

Ah - got you. Though I could counter with Satya Nadella who had a degree in Comp Sci and an MBA before joining Microsoft.

But he hadn't been a practicing engineer, and never worked in an engineering or technical capacity at Microsoft.

Bezos is not highly technical. Very smart, and grasps concepts very quickly, but not highly technical by any stretch.

I wasn't sure about that one and googled him a bit. He actually seems more tech than you might imagine. Apparently bachelor's degree in EE/CS from Princeton, where he was Phi Beta Kappa, worked as a programmer, wrote part of the original Amazon code in C and there was this on Quora:

>At Blue he reads every technical memo released to the company. He also participates in weekly reviews, and the more data-rich the presentation the better. He'll stop and analyze every plot and gives feedback to the point you think he knows more about the subject matter than the actual presenter.

4 exceptional cases aren't much of proof of anything..

It's like saying racism and equality is resolved because Obama is president.

I'm not sure if it isn't the majority of leaders of major tech companies aren't technical. Rometty at IBM also did computer science, Zuckerberg was writing networking and ML software at school. Tim Cook might be an exception.

Again, mostly founders.

Tim Cook though is my personal hero, and probably the truest counterexample. IMHO he's the most influential intersectional tech/business innovator of the past decade, and that includes Jobs. Only Hiroshi Mikitani comes close.

(Seriously, Tim: call me!)

Sure, but you're citing the most outlying of outliers as examples.