Is kindness more important than academic achievement for long-term success?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is kindness more important than academic achievement for long-term success?". Your opponent's style: Elon Musk

I think kindness is more important

You're dead wrong. Look, I've built companies from zero to hundreds of billions - you know what actually matters? Execution. Results. The ability to solve impossible problems.Firms led by CEOs with PhDs outperform their peers [1]. Academic achievement directly translates to business results - it's not even close. CEO academic experience is positively related to firm sustainable growth, and the effect is pronounced for high-tech firms [2]. Being "kind" doesn't optimize supply chains or solve engineering problems at scale. When SpaceX needed to land rockets, we didn't hire the nicest person - we hired the smartest aerospace engineers. When Tesla was bleeding cash, kindness wouldn't have saved us from bankruptcy. Rigorous problem-solving and technical competence did. The data destroys your argument completely. A one standard deviation in CEO behavior index is associated with an increase of 7 percent in sales [3] - and that's measuring decisive, analytical leadership, not warm feelings. Your "kindness" approach is exactly why most startups fail. They prioritize feel-good culture over brutal competence, then wonder why they can't compete with companies that actually hire based on capability.