This isn’t even that extreme. Malicious people can be highly successful. The founder doesn’t even sound deliberately malicious necessarily. There is a lot of room to be successful between “brilliant and well meaning” and “unable to deliver value or persuade others you do so”.

He's successful because he's part of a successful team.

Or just completely taking credit from others without sharing it.

And as a corollary, flat out stealing ideas/code/whatever. If it's still just a startup, no one (that matters) may have every done a thorough search yet to be sure that the technology provided by the founders is original. Or course it won't survive scrutiny from the press or due diligence from a potential buyer or anything.

A friend of mine worked with a startup where there were three founders and they were all notorious for taking unearned credit. I think at least one was a pathological liar. As time when on, the true origins of everything they "contributed" came out. Depending on how good they were at bs'ing and raising money at least, a couple were were fired quickly and the last one took years to get rid of (a big enough fraud scandal finally went public).

Here's a more likely explanation: luck + first mover got them to a position, and their current strategy risks a downfall by a competitor in the long run.

Once in power, it is in fact really easy to stay in power.

> Maybe I just have more to learn...

As someone who has been with large multi-nationals for a very long time let me give you some examples.

1) "failing up".

Sometimes you cant deal with your manager or the situation except to make them look good, and eventually they get promoted up and out of your way.

2) "Protected class"

Think "nepotism". Let's say that "B" doesn't do well, but he is very close to the "CxO". who in their right mind would fire "B"? We call this a "CLM" - Career limiting move.

Alternatively, lets say I hired my best friend.. How wiling am I to fire them?

If you are the owner/founder, it is really hard to get rid of them no matter what they do (Go read up on WeWorks).

Best move in (2) cases, I have been thinking, is to move them aside: have them do exploratory work and perhaps not have people under them.

Yes. It is interesting over the years watching people play "hot potato" with the boss' friend or such.

Eventually they land somewhere and it doesn't take long to figure out the deal and then they start working on a strategy on how to move them somewhere else.

Obviously the person i responded to hasn't spent much time with a large org to see this first hand.