Because the topic of leadership is my bread and butter, I often find myself in debates about what makes a leader successful.
One assertion I hear far too often is that anyone who’s a self-made billionaire MUST be smart.
I only need one name to win the argument: Dan Snyder. It might be the only useful thing he’s ever done.
It’s hard to argue that Snyder hasn’t been a success as a businessman—for certain definitions of success, anyway. Though the rise of Snyder Communications in the early ‘90s landed him the title of youngest-ever CEO of an NYSE-listed company, his blunders in that role—as well as Six Flags chair and owner of Dick Clark Productions—would suggest he’s a conniving Scrooge of cartoonish proportions.
This was never more evident than during his tenure as the owner of the Washington Commanders. In two-and-a-half decades, Snyder managed to transform the team from the jewel of the National Football League to its laughingstock. Fan attendance dropped from first in the league to last. He ran through 27 quarterbacks, 10 head coaches, and a .424 winning percentage. The team that won three Super Bowls in the decade preceding his ownership appeared in the playoffs six times during his tenure.
Joe Gibbs, whom I’d argue is the greatest coach in NFL history not named Bill Belichick, entered the Snyder era with a 140–65 record. With Snyder at the helm? 31–36.
On the business side, Snyder gouged fans, bungled personnel decisions, and found himself embroiled in sexual harassment and financial misconduct scandals. Despite significant pressure from social groups and corporate sponsors, he flat out refused to change the team’s controversial name for over a decade.
If anyone publicly criticized him, he sued them for defamation.
It’s no wonder that the American Enterprise Institute summed up Snyder’s operations as “a leading exemplar of this tendency toward irrationality” in 2006. “[Snyder is] the most frightening example of [an owner that hasn’t] thought through the simple economics of pro football,” the report reads.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone in the NFL who has a nice word to say about Dan Snyder. Fans have called for him to sell the team for nearly a decade—a battle cry that fellow owners began echoing last year. Think about just how bad you have to be to make a bunch of your fellow NFL team owners—people who have every possible incentive to keep an incompetent owner in the league—still find you so intolerable they need to push you out.
Snyder finally relented earlier this year, ending a nightmarish tenure at the helm of a foundering organization. His reward for doing so isn’t jail time or retreating to his Northern Virginia compound in disgrace—it’s a cool six billion dollars, the largest sum a professional sports team has ever been sold for.
What does this tell us? First, there is no level of incompetence that makes owning an NFL team a poor investment. You literally cannot mess it up.
More importantly, though, Snyder’s payday shines a light on a larger problem in the US, which is that if you’re rich and powerful enough, there are no consequences for your actions. While it’s not clear Snyder has perpetrated any actual crimes, it is evident that he’s paid out a lot of hush money and enforced non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements with many of whom he’s done business with.
It’s the same tactics used frequently by people in power to cover up their wrongdoing, including Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump.
As Michael Kinsley once said, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal.
The long-standing struggle with justice in any country has been to enforce laws equally across the population, but that’s easier said than done. Someone shoplifting at a 7-Eleven is far more likely to be punished than those who have the means to take advantage of loopholes—as evidenced by the many crimes perpetrated by banks leading up to, during, and after the 2008 financial crisis.
A more telling example is the IRS’s auditing practices. Research consistently shows that people making $20,000 or less are more than five times as likely to be audited than people at any other income level. By contrast, millionaires have less than a 1.1 percent chance of being audited.
Anatole France once said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” The problem isn’t just that the law is enforced against the weak but not the powerful. It’s that the powerful shape the laws so that what they want to do isn’t illegal in the first place.
Or, as Terry Pratchett once wrote, “While it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.”
While it’s easy to despair at the reality of present injustice, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it isn’t always this way. Weinstein was eventually brought to justice, ditto John Kapoor, Allen Stanford, and Raj Rajaratnam.
We have plenty of examples of the rich and powerful who were eventually held accountable for their wrongdoing. Yes, it took way too long, but the point here is that they CAN be held accountable if we choose to do so.
A good first step in that direction is a recent ruling from the National Labor Relations Board, which states that employers cannot force workers to sign non-disparagement clauses as part of their severance package. Several state legislatures have also introduced bills that would make the practice illegal. It’s a valuable, important, and long overdue decision that almost certainly would have dragged some of Snyder’s skeletons out of the Washington Commanders’ front office.
The main thing to remember here is that sometimes—all too rarely, but sometimes—justice really does find even the wealthiest and most powerful members of American society. In that, we remain fortunate. Even in most European nations, a billionaire going to jail is simply something that never happens. We have the tools to make everyone in the United States accountable for their actions. We simply have to choose to use them.
Otherwise, we’ll have to keep suffering through rule by Dan Snyder.
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