It is because you never attended the right orgy. Maybe chance goes into it, but it isn't like there is a civil service exam for CEOs. Computer models are useless, they only take into account success but never optimize against failure. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-ri... The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/the-computer-that-pre... “There’s the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon, when the mainframe computers took up the whole basement, and they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify. Numbers of ships, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo—everything you could quantify,” says James Willbanks, the chair of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “They put it in the hopper and said, ‘When will we win in Vietnam?’ They went away on Friday and the thing ground away all weekend. [They] came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, 'You won in 1965.’”