captains of industry

Cultural  

1. A phrase that is sometimes used to describe businesspeople who are especially successful and powerful.

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Example Sentences

“Here you get a little 5-foot-four guy who flies airplanes and the next thing you know this guy is in the White House meeting all these senators and congressmen, standing in front of all these captains of industry and have them pat me on the back and shake my hand,” Dwight says.

From Seattle Times

For all its cultural and economic legacy as a place of extracted wealth, where captains of industry have bitten into the earth to carry off the riches of coal seams, Kentucky is also a state where things go to disappear.

From Salon

Asked to choose flight or invisibility as a superpower — that old party game — how many novelists would choose flight, like captains of industry tend to do?

From New York Times

Even with the smoldering remains of the dot-com era visible in the rearview mirror, the tech industry still fostered an air of opportunity, potential and self-reinvention — manifest destiny remade for 21st-century captains of industry, a new frontier without the pesky limitations of a finite continent.

From New York Times

People with narcissism “may be grandiose or self-loathing, extraverted or socially isolated, captains of industry or unable to maintain steady employment, model citizens or prone to antisocial activities,” according to a review paper on diagnosing the disorder.

From Scientific American