Some see them as examples to follow. Others bosses with whom they wouldn’t have worked for the world. But they leave no one indifferent. In his last try The myth of the entrepreneur (Ed. La Découverte), Anthony Galluzzo, lecturer at the University of Saint-Etienne, attacks the “prefabricated” image of the heroes of entrepreneurship, mainly Americans, who arrive out of nowhere and revolutionize a sector. He tries to demonstrate how their journey and their success are fictionalized to hide a deeply capitalist reality, which highlights individual success and justifies inequalities. Interview.
A young genius, from a modest background, who is revolutionizing an industrial sector from his garage to reach the top of an industrial empire…. Is this a good summary of the myth of the entrepreneur?
It is more or less that. If we read the literature about entrepreneurial celebrities, we realize that there is the same way of talking about them, the same themes that come up. A highly creative, visionary individual who sees what ordinary mortals cannot see. He is an inspiration, guiding his employees who would be lost without him.
Who is behind this image? Entrepreneurs? The media?
A bit of both. On the one hand, there are “storyteller” entrepreneurs, who seek to make themselves known, like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. They can thus enhance the image of their company to sell and attract investors. And opposite, there are journalists who must produce attractive content and are looking for “good customers”. They will develop their notoriety by offering them interviews, by granting them covers. This is what I call a symbiotic relationship.
In your book, you attack this representation of the entrepreneur. Could it be a fabricated image?
It is very difficult to know what is real or not. In most cases, the sources are the contractors themselves. But it’s pretty much always the same story. Emphasis is placed on the precocity of individuals, on their setting in motion from an original trauma. For example, Steve Jobs is often depicted as a “marginal”, having grown up in a poor environment. In reality, he comes from the Californian “middle class”, steeped in technology. His father was a high-level technician and he inherited this cultural capital. It is a way of opposing the other “big bosses”, to whom they do not want to be assimilated.
Why refuse this comparison?
Putting their success on the sole account of their genius allows them to justify their power. Anyone who triumphs over the market by his qualities and his work alone deserves to concentrate and capture a maximum of the value produced. Businessmen would only be capitalists, while entrepreneurs have “a vision”. They don’t do this for the money.
When Bernie Sanders reminded Elon Musk that he and a few other billionaires had more wealth than billions of human beings, the latter replied that he was not interested in money, that he was on a mission to make money. ‘Man a multiplanetary species. Putting one’s wealth “at the service of humanity” makes it possible to conceal the question of the sharing of value and exploitation and to make invisible the thousands of ultra-competent engineers and managers and the millions of workers in the world who work for them.
Do they really believe it?
I think part. It’s all the easier to believe it when you’re in a dominant position in society. It is flattering to think that if one is rich and powerful it is because one has earned it.
However, you explain that this merit is to be put into perspective…
I do not deny that these characters have qualities. But above all, they are very lucky. That of being born in the right place, at the right time. There are areas where you have to be to seize a whole bunch of opportunities. And it is precisely there that Steve Jobs grew up, in California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, in the 1960s and 1970s, when this industry was booming.
In your book, you mainly talk about the United States, with the example of Steve Jobs in particular. Is this vision spreading in France?
To create an empire with a phase of hypergrowth, it is necessary to be in favorable social, geographical and historical conditions. If it were only about individual abilities, why, among the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, are there not more individuals from Sudan, Mozambique or Pakistan?
In Silicon Valley, for example, there were all the necessary structures: research laboratories, Stanford University, and a highly qualified staff of researchers and managers. When Steve Jobs created Apple in the late 1970s, he drew on this ecosystem to build his strengths.
Among these favorable conditions, you mention State investments…
Totally. Only a State is capable of generating fundamental research, which even large companies do not take the risk of subsidizing. The entrepreneur arrives at the end of this process to seize these opportunities, by exploiting a work force already present.
Isn’t there then a contradiction with these entrepreneurs borrowing from freedom and often claiming to be able to do better than the State?
The great figures of Silicon Valley often tell that its history begins in the 1980s. In reality, from the 1910s, with the First World War, the United States invested massively in the region to produce radars. Then, for more than fifty years, the State will be the main funder and client of this ecosystem. Only then will private investment take over.
It is found almost everywhere, and the literature of personal development and entrepreneurial coaching takes up these ideas. This responds to a request for need: I am offered an individual solution because I am potentially stronger than the others. This stifles any collective solution.
Emmanuel Macron, president of the “start up Nation”, can he be compared to a political entrepreneur?
It’s quite similar. The man who started from nothing, rebellious and visionary…. These are narrative elements inherited from romantic literature and applied to entrepreneurial heroes, but also to statesmen. With the “first in line”, the “suit” paid thanks to his efforts, there is all this phraseology which shows that if you are deserving, you will succeed. With the other idea in subtext: if you have not succeeded, you are solely responsible for it…