Get Ready for the 100-Year-Old CEO

How old is too old to lead? It's a difficult question, but increasingly a necessary one.

- LILA MACLELLAN

THE U.S. IS HEADING into an election year with an 80-year-old incumbent presidential candidate, Joe Biden, who's already the oldest sitting president in history. His likely challenger, Donald Trump, is only three years younger at 77. Meanwhile Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, has had episodes that left him frozen in silence in front of live cameras. Dianne Feinstein, 90, missed 91 votes during a three-month sick leave from the Senate. And a critical mass of aging politicians has led to warnings from a Pentagon-funded think tank about dementia causing security risks.

Outside of government, Warren Buffett, the 93-year-old Berkshire Hathaway founder and CEO, recently reassured investors that the day his named successor steps in is many years off. His right-hand man and vice chairman, Charlie Munger, is still clocking in for duty at age 99. Both Rupert Murdoch, who retired as chair of News Corp and Fox News last month, and George Soros, who in June gave up control of his Open Society Foundations, waited until they were 92 to step down.

How old is too old to lead? It's a difficult question to answer, and an awkward one. In modern-day America, the elderly are often shunted aside, ignored, or worse. And yet talking about the infirmities that come with age is largely taboo. In a culture where the Puritan work ethic endures, and many successful people define themselves primarily by their job and title, suggesting that someone is too old to work can feel akin to banishing them to an island of the forgotten and the irrelevant.