On 9 January 2007, a man in a black mock turtleneck walked onto the Macworld stage in San Francisco and unveiled the iPhone. The phone did not need a celebrity to sell it. But for that hour, and for years afterwards, it is hard to say where Steve Jobs ended and Apple began.

That blur is the subject of this column.

The CEO as the brand describes a company whose chief executive has become its most recognisable public symbol, so that customers, investors and staff read the leader’s words, looks and conduct as statements about the company itself.

It is powerful. It is cheap. And it is a single point of failure that sits in the corner office and owns a phone.

Why do companies let the CEO become the brand?

Mostly, they do not decide to. It happens.

A founder starts out as the only person who can explain the product, so the founder does the explaining. Journalists prefer a protagonist to a press release, and they reward leaders whose firms follow a distinctive, consistent strategy by crediting the results to the person rather than to circumstance, timing or the hundreds of engineers in the building. The story writes itself, and then it hardens.

There is a commercial logic too. A recognisable leader is a free media channel. Senior executives, asked to put a number on it, attribute close to half of their company’s reputation to the reputation of the person at the top. That is a large share of a valuable asset resting on one human being, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on the human.

Consider what a strong founder-figurehead gives a young company. A face to trust before there is a track record. A voice that can make a strange category feel inevitable.

A point of view that sounds like conviction because it comes from someone with skin in the game. No brand book can manufacture those things in year one.

The rewards: attention you cannot buy

Start with Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington, in July 1994. Bezos built a personal brand out of documents rather than stagecraft. His annual letters to shareholders, published since 1998, turned a handful of principles (customer obsession, long-term thinking, the idea that it is always “Day 1”) into something closer to corporate scripture.

Jeff Bezos explains Amazon’s "Day 1" principle, one of the ideas he set out in his shareholder letters.

Shareholders got the numbers. They also got a philosophy with a recognisable author.

Jack Ma did the reverse. A former English lecturer from Hangzhou who co-founded Alibaba in 1999, he sold the company through performance: big-stage speeches, theatrical anniversary shows, and in September 2017 a Michael Jackson-inspired routine in front of staff at Alibaba’s 18th birthday party.

For international audiences who could not tell Taobao from Tmall, Ma was Alibaba. His story, the teacher who beat the odds, made a Chinese e-commerce giant legible to the world.

Closer to home, Tony Fernandes bought a struggling AirAsia from DRB-Hicom in 2001 for a token one ringgit, taking on two Boeing 737s and around RM40 million of debt. He was almost always seen in jeans and an AirAsia cap, a long way from the gold-braided formality of legacy carriers. The founder’s informality was the low-cost promise, made visible. Within a year the airline had broken even.

And then there is Jensen Huang, who signed Nvidia’s incorporation papers in April 1993 and has spent the years since in a black leather jacket. When he visited Taiwan in 2024, crowds and photographers followed him so closely that local media coined “Jensanity”. For a company whose products are chips most people will never see, that kind of fame is extraordinary. It gives an invisible business a human outline.

Jensen Huang’s Computex 2024 keynote in Taipei, published by NVIDIA, from the visit described above.

In every case, the leader supplies what a corporate identity struggles to: a personality with a history, a wardrobe that works like a visual asset, and opinions that sound like they belong to someone.

The trouble with borrowed trust

Here is the catch. Every one of those rewards is borrowed against a person, and people are not assets on a balance sheet. They age, fall ill, change their minds, take up new causes, say things at conferences and sometimes leave.

Brand managers spend years building distinctive assets precisely because colours, shapes and sounds behave predictably. A shade of green does not give an interview. A sonic logo does not develop political views. A CEO does all of these things, often on a Tuesday, and every one of them lands on the company.

There is also a quieter risk, documented in management research: the leader who reads enough flattering coverage can come to believe it, grow overconfident in past choices and keep repeating the strategy that made them famous long after the market has moved. Celebrity, in other words, can damage the judgement it was supposed to reflect. You do not need to diagnose any individual to see the structural problem. Praise concentrates on one person, and so does the risk.

What happens when the CEO and the brand split?

This is the question founders actually ask, usually in private. The documented record offers several kinds of split, and they hurt in different ways.

The political split. Elon Musk is the most documented modern case of a chief executive’s public profile and a company’s sales pulling in different directions. For years his profile was central to how Tesla was talked about.

After he bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, renamed it X in July 2023 and later took a prominent role in the US administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in 2025, Tesla’s sales in Democratic-leaning US counties fell well behind those in Republican-leaning ones.

Estimates built on county-level registration data put the cost at roughly one million to 1.26 million vehicles between October 2022 and April 2025, with rival electric and hybrid models picking up part of the slack. In March 2025 more than 200 protests were held at Tesla locations around the world.

Leave the politics aside; the brand lesson is narrow and hard. For many buyers an electric car was a statement of values, and the car’s most visible human symbol had taken highly public political positions that many of those buyers did not share. The product did not change. The meaning did.

The regulatory split. In October 2020, Jack Ma publicly criticised China’s financial regulators shortly before Ant Group’s planned dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong, which was set to raise around US$34.5 billion. Days later the Shanghai Stock Exchange suspended the offering.

Ma kept a very low public profile for the following three months. Alibaba received a $2.8 billion antitrust fine in April 2021, and in January 2023 Ant restructured so that Ma’s voting rights fell from more than half to around 6 per cent. When he attended a symposium hosted by Xi Jinping in February 2025, state television showed his image but state media omitted his name.

The founder who had once been Alibaba’s loudest voice could now appear on state television without being named.

Can a company outlive the person it was built around?

Some splits are about conduct, and some are simply about time.

The conduct split. Dov Charney founded American Apparel and made himself central to its identity, choosing many models personally and shooting many of the provocative campaigns himself. In June 2014 the board suspended him, citing alleged violations of company policy; he was removed as chief executive in December that year and has said he was never charged with a crime or found liable.

American Apparel filed for bankruptcy in October 2015 and was sold to Gildan Activewear for $88 million in January 2017, after which it reopened online only. A brand whose look had been so personally authored now had to find a voice without its author.

Singapore has its own sobering example. Zilingo, the Singapore-headquartered fashion-tech start-up founded in 2015 and valued at close to $1 billion by 2019, was highly visible through its founding chief executive. In March 2022 the board suspended her after whistleblowers raised concerns about payments; she was dismissed that May, the allegations remain contested in ongoing litigation, and the company entered liquidation in February 2023. When a young company is this closely identified with one person, a boardroom dispute becomes a brand event.

The succession split. The gentlest split is also inevitable. Jobs took medical leave in January 2009 and again in January 2011, resigned as chief executive on 24 August 2011 and died that October. Tim Cook had run day-to-day operations during both absences and was named successor the day Jobs resigned.

The brand survived because, under the turtleneck, there was a system.

Is a founder-led brand a good idea for a small business?

Often, yes. For an SME or a start-up, the founder is frequently the most credible thing the company owns. Picture a Jalan Besar coffee roaster whose owner talks about every farm she buys from. Her knowledge is the differentiation, and hiding it behind a logo would be daft.

The question is not whether to use the founder. It is whether the brand can stand up if the founder sits down.

Brian Chesky offers a useful study. As Airbnb’s co-founder he once lived in rentals booked through his own platform, and when he had to cut around 1,900 jobs, roughly a quarter of staff, on 5 May 2020, he did it with a long personal letter that let departing employees keep their laptops, waived the one-year equity cliff and set up a public alumni directory to help them find work.

The news came in the founder’s own voice, not a corporate statement. Yet the Airbnb brand itself, its symbol, its product and its host community, does not rest on Chesky alone.

That is the balance to aim for: a leader who embodies the brand without being its only container.

Rebuilding the person, rebuilding the brand

Leaders can also reposition themselves, deliberately or otherwise, and the company moves with them. Mark Zuckerberg spent years in a grey T-shirt and jeans, a uniform that became part of his public image.

He testified before the US Senate in April 2018 over the Cambridge Analytica affair; renamed the company Meta in October 2021; took up mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu in 2022; and by 2024 had moved to gold chains and streetwear. In January 2025 Meta ended its use of third-party fact-checkers in favour of community notes.

Because Zuckerberg holds a majority of Meta’s voting power, his public reinvention and the company’s direction are read together, by critics and fans alike.

Bezos shows a related pattern after leaving the top job. He handed the chief executive role to Andy Jassy in July 2021, flew to the edge of space on Blue Origin’s first crewed flight that same month, and, as owner of The Washington Post, blocked its editorial board from endorsing a presidential candidate in 2024. More than 250,000 subscribers cancelled. The person had moved on from Amazon’s daily running, but his choices still carried brand consequences for the institutions attached to his name.

How to manage a CEO-led brand without killing it

None of this argues for faceless corporations. It argues for planning. A few practical moves, roughly in order of importance:

Separate the promise from the person. Write down what the company stands for in terms that would still be true if the founder left tomorrow. If you cannot, you have a personality, not a brand.

Build distinctive assets that are not human. A colour, a symbol, a tone of voice, a service ritual. These are the parts of the brand that do not have opinions.

Share the stage. Put other leaders, engineers and customers in front of the audience long before you need them there. Apple’s handover worked partly because Cook had already been seen running the place.

Agree the rules of engagement. Decide in advance which topics the CEO speaks on as the company’s voice and which are personal. This will not stop a determined founder, but it gives the board a framework before a crisis rather than during one.

Plan succession as a brand project, not only an HR one. Who carries the story next? What do they wear, say, sign? Rehearse it.

Watch the gap. Track how customers perceive the leader alongside how they perceive the company. If the two lines start to diverge, you will see it in the data before you see it in the sales.

Quick answers for the boardroom

What does “CEO as the brand” mean?
It describes a company whose chief executive has become its most recognisable public symbol, so that the leader’s statements, appearance and behaviour are read as statements about the company. Steve Jobs at Apple and Jack Ma at Alibaba are classic examples.

What is the biggest risk of a CEO-led brand?
Concentration. Reputation, attention and meaning all rest on one person, so illness, departure, misconduct allegations or a sharp change in the leader’s public positions can move customer perception overnight, even when the product has not changed.

Should a start-up founder build a personal brand?
Usually yes, because early on the founder is often the company’s most credible asset. The safeguard is to build non-human brand assets and a second line of visible leaders in parallel, so the business can stand on its own.

A face can open the door for a brand; making sure the house stands without it is the work of brand strategy.