Testosterone Inc

Chris Byron, a bestselling author who also writes a column for the New York Post, examines how the chief executive became a celebrity in late twentieth-century America. During the 1990s boom, top executives were hailed as the nation's business heroes, admired as bold reformers who trimmed costs, drove efficiency, unveiled ambitious plans, and struck major deals. When the market collapsed and the praise turned to ridicule, it became clear that these leaders were in many ways closer to aging rock musicians than to sober managers. Most were middle-aged white men, and they were intoxicated by authority and driven by sex, money, and glamour.

The book opens the boardroom doors to reveal the serial affairs and repeated marriages of these dealmakers. Its central figure is Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric and the most prominent of the celebrity chief executives. Orbiting him are Ron Perelman of Revlon, Al Dunlap of Sunbeam, and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, men who indulged their appetites for spending and conquest in public view.

Byron follows these men into the places where they lived their private lives. He visits the bars where Welch looked for women with a circle of early business allies, and he accompanies Perelman and his mistress on a week in Paris aboard the Concorde, a trip Perelman assumed his wife knew nothing about. He also looks in on Dunlap's household in an Army officers' residence, where his first wife later alleged in divorce papers that he had threatened her with a knife while making a chilling remark about human flesh. Finally, he traces Kozlowski's craving for respect alongside his womanizing.

By turns funny and sad, the book tracks the four men from troubled childhoods through their moments of greatest triumph and into their downfall. Their stories include suicide and murder, along with unstable marriages and bold business gambles that ended in financial ruin. Byron presents the account as an untold chronicle of the late 1990s, when male ambition and appetite overwhelmed many corporate leaders.