Unicorn Syndrome

Strong Opinions, Weekly Held

When Elon Musk weighs in on foreign diplomacy, when Aaron Rodgers opines about public health, when Russell Brand proffers religious sermons — we should be alarmed by the scale of their overreach. This is not merely the product of ordinary arrogance. This is a modern cocktail of ego, accolades and power, served up to a global audience. I call it Unicorn Syndrome: a relatively novel, increasingly dangerous phenomenon that's probably infecting an organization near you.

It works like this: A talented person achieves success with broad impact. Rather than attributing their achievements to context-specific factors, they ascribe their wins to innate special abilities. They come to believe their prior success was just one select application of their talent, which can (and should!) be broadly applied across unrelated fields.

I’m not talking about commonplace attempts to apply general smarts to adjacent areas of expertise and interest. This isn’t a software CEO starting an entirely new venture, a religious studies professor writing about humans and AI, or a baseball analyst offering predictions on the Super Bowl. It’s not your friend training for a marathon who shares opinions on everyday nutrition. Those are reasonable progressions. What I’m talking about goes beyond just straying out of your swim lane. Unicorn Syndrome is jumping from a pool to an ocean.

Syndrome Origins

Supercharged by 21^st century interconnectivity, Unicorn Syndrome arises from the unique interplay between egotism, social reinforcement, and the outsized power associated with having succeeded in a high-impact area.

Egotism is the fuel. Not the everyday kind of ego we all carry, but the industrial-grade hubris that can arise from achieving something genuinely difficult where others have failed.

Social Reinforcement is the amplifier. Success attracts an ecosystem of people who have strong incentives to validate your genius. This isn't malicious so much as a natural consequence of our attention economy, but it creates a feedback loop where half-baked thoughts are viewed as untapped wisdom.

Power is the enabler. Market success enables influence and resources. Now you have the ability to act on your opinions. You can create platforms to voice your ideas. You can hire teams to implement them. You can even, in some cases, get appointed to government positions to reform entire systems based on your accomplishments in unrelated domains.

Those afflicted with Unicorn Syndrome position themselves as general-purpose thought leaders who can scale their intelligence and intuition universally. They often dismiss experts as less capable or intelligent, particularly when progress in those fields hasn’t matched their expectations. An epidemiological mapping would show a cluster around one area: Silicon Valley.

While not confined to the tech industry, Silicon Valley techno-solutionists likely account for the lion’s share of offenders. The influence of the tech world makes its leaders hyper-susceptible to the triad of egotism, social reinforcement, and power. It figures that a culture which celebrates ideas like ‘Founder Mode’ and embraces successful VCs as would-be philosopher kings would ship Unicorn Syndrome to the masses.

Indeed, it was a conversation with a tech industry friend who's led an impressive career spanning several prominent companies — whom I'll call "Mark" — that crystallized this idea for me. We were catching up one evening on the phone when our conversation (naturally) drifted to RFK.

Bewildered by his transformation from lawyer to self-proclaimed immunology expert, I said: “It’s like he came to see his success in one discrete thing — and his popularity — as evidence of having been divinely ordained, and now he’s confused being successful with being wise, and thinks he can do anything because he’s special.”

To which Mark replied, without even a moment’s hesitation: “That sounds like everyone in tech who’s made any money.”

And just like the tech itself, Unicorn Syndrome has come for all of us.

Real World Consequences

Unicorn Syndrome exemplifies what happens when organizational design fails to prevent sycophantic echo chambers around leaders and how incentive structures allow hubris to flourish. It’s a visible lesson in what can go wrong when we confuse charisma with competence.

Consider the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — a real attempt by tech giants to bring private-sector speed and innovation into federal agencies. Reasoning endemic to Unicorn Syndrome underwrote the initiative: Government is inefficient because anyone working there is either too lazy or too stupid to compete in the private sector. If we bring in The Best People and incentivize them properly, we can run the government like a business.

(Of course, it shouldn’t take a genius to realize that you can’t apply startup principles to government agencies. In the U.S., roughly 20% of businesses fail within their first year and nearly half of businesses are gone within five. It’s a healthy feature of markets that individual businesses fail, but society cannot have the Department of the Army fail and just wait around for creative destruction to bring forth a more innovative military. Government referees so the players compete fairly; agencies aren’t trying to score points themselves.)

DOGE will end up being one of the most consequential experiments ever born from Unicorn Syndrome. In came the tech bros to finally bestow their brilliance upon centuries of government bureaucracy. Only they didn't find much of what they expected.

One high-profile case involved Sahil Lavingia, an early Pinterest employee and the successful Founder/CEO of Gumroad, who was brought in to overhaul operations at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Once inside the VA, to his shock, he found the agency and its employees rather functional. “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins,” he told Fast Company. Which makes it all the more ironic that he was fired from DOGE after less than two months for sharing his honest thoughts. The first rule of Unicorn Syndrome is you don’t talk about Unicorn Syndrome.

When we start staffing our institutions based on pedigree, charisma, and disruptor vibes rather than meaningful experience and subject-matter expertise, it impacts organizations worldwide. Healthy organizations build systems to keep problematic leaders from steering the ship. Cultures corrupted by Unicorn Syndrome dismantle those guardrails and hand the wheel to the loudest person with the most-watched TED Talk.

Is there a Cure?

Historically, intellectual hubris was self-curing. Stray too far from your expertise and the market would reject your disparate ideas. Now, once you’ve attained enough fame and money, there’s always a new corner of the world willing to platform your ideas or bankroll your next endeavor. In the past, poor results might have isolated you from your peers and ruled out continued social reinforcement. Today you can retreat online and spend most of your waking hours in virtual spaces while audience capture leaves you surrounded by digital enablers who reinforce your self-worth and brilliance. Previously, straying too far afield would have caused enough embarrassment to cut off your access to power. Now it earns you a seat in the Presidential Cabinet.

With traditional market forces rendered ineffectual, novel treatments for Unicorn Syndrome have emerged but have thus far proven futile.

Media fragmentation has depleted the traditional power of journalistic accountability: if one outlet criticizes, another’s happy to platform. Backlash from real experts calling out inaccuracies rarely has an impact, as these experts rarely offer the same polish or platforms. And if they do garner sufficient attention, their nuance is met with pithy soundbites. Guess which wins online? Plus, those afflicted with Unicorn Syndrome position themselves as rebels shaking up the status quo, even when they’re billionaires. If the culture says you’ve crossed the line, you can monetize your “cancellation” on Substack and YouTube.

Because of the platforms and capital structures we’ve built, overreach doesn’t get punished — it gets amplified. The line between being catastrophically wrong and being seen as a visionary is now mostly a matter of storytelling. The system rewards overreach so long as it’s well-packaged.

So no, we’re probably not curing Unicorn Syndrome anytime soon. But we can get better at recognizing it inside our own organizations. We can build cultures that reward evidence over instinct, questions over certainty, and curiosity over charisma. We can ask what qualifies someone to lead the conversation and who isn’t being heard. We can build systems that make it harder to mistake confidence for competence. And with any luck, we can begin to celebrate leaders who stay in their pool—not because they’re small thinkers, but because they respect the depth.

That's it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and intentional.