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The First Corporate Psychopath Got Shipwrecked on an Island and Tried to Start a Pirate Empire

Not the whimsical kind of pirates, either.

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If you’ve intuited by now that the people at the very top of the corporate hierarchy are complete and utter wackos who have little regard for human life, you’d probably think that there’s just something about the version of the corporate CEO that came around sometime during the Industrial Revolution that is uniquely psychopathic.

A research team publishing their findings in the Asian Journal of Business Ethics, however, found that corporate psychopathy is nothing new, since there is strong evidence of a maniac fostering a toxic workplace dating back to 1629.

And of course, they were an executive with the Dutch East India Company, one of the old world’s foremost examples of a corporation run amok.

Jeronimus Cornelisz was an under-merchant for the Dutch East India Company and a contender for the worst boss in recorded history. When the company’s flagship, Batavia, hit a reef near Western Australia, senior management hopped into a longboat to go get help, leaving Cornelisz........

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