Create an outing from the following: For a time, Steve Jobs liked to relieve stress by soaking his feet in toilet water. He bathed only once a week, convinced that his vegan, fruit-heavy diet meant he didn’t smell.

His obsession with outlandish, restrictive diets — in college, his friends recall him eating so many carrots that his skin took on an orange tinge — are renowned, and not just because they sound so wild. The public has gobbled up stories of Jobs’s strange habits and mystical beliefs (and famously belligerent personality), which have long been studied in the press and in biographies and cited by other founders as if there’s a counterintuitive insight to be learned from how the Apple founder lived.

Jobs might have been an early, or perhaps the most famous, example of an uber-wealthy CEO with a cult-like hold on the public imagination. He wasn’t just an inventor, shilling candy-colored computers and iPhones — he was a kind of spiritual guru for his flock. Today, there are many others emulating this Jobsian mold, from Elon Musk to Sheryl Sandberg to Marc Benioff.

It’s a phenomenon of our age that entrepreneurs are celebrities at all. Why is LinkedIn, a networking site for posting resumes and finding jobs, also a boundless library of nonsensical, self-congratulatory anecdotes from CEOs about work ethic and success? Why do the investors and software engineers of Silicon Valley have millions of people hanging on to their every dashed-off tweet? Even before he bought Twitter, Elon Musk had over 80 million followers on the platform. There are droves of social media accounts dedicated to regurgitating contextless words of wisdom from business leaders and entrepreneurs. An entire motivation-porn segment of business journalism affirms the distinctiveness of the billionaire’s mindset, repackaging interviews, speeches, and books into life hacks for the masses. And an ever-ballooning influencer sphere invites high-net-worth entrepreneurs onto podcasts and Youtube channels to dispense life advice — spiritual self-help adapted to the age of the entrepreneur.

The draw is obvious: Who better to teach the secrets of success than the superstars who have helmed incredibly profitable businesses? While income inequality has soared in the US over the past few decades, many Americans still find individual billionaires to be inspirational icons to emulate. One study published in 2021 found that people dislike hearing about the wealthy as a group, yet admire wealthy individuals, because they tend to believe their money was earned.

Billionaires are a fairly recent invention of human society, but self-improvement is old. Its well-worn maxims and bromides have been recycled and rehashed for centuries, if not longer. And billionaires haven’t updated the message even a bit. Self-help, particularly the kind doled out by the very rich, has adopted the posturing of New Thought preachers, with echoes of the prosperity gospel that found a resurgence in post-World War II America. And it looks a lot like today’s woo-woo vision boards, manifesting, and Lucky Girl Syndrome.

In the worldview of many of these masters of the universe, being self-reliant is still edifying; rugged individualism is noble. To think otherwise is being negative.

For their followers, this gospel might soothe the fear of what might happen to you in a world where no economic security is guaranteed, where people fall through the cracks every day with few social safety nets to catch them.

“The 20th century saw our adulation move from politicians, royalty, and the church to business,” says Christopher McKenna, a professor of business history and strategy at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. “We came to think that business should be the model for everything.”