The rise of the topless (male) tycoon: bosses are now muscular and also smart

The path to the top used to involve insight, enormous ambition and maybe a stint at Harvard Business School.

Now, it seems some executives are also aspiring to a statuesque physique that could rival a Greek god.

The recently announced partnership between fashion group Frasers and online company THG has not just brought two retailers together. It is also a friendship between Frasers boss Michael Murray, 34, and Matt Moulding, 52, the founder of THG. The two men share a penchant for working out and showing off their toned torsos.

Murray’s videos on Instagram show off his tanned pecs, honed through boxing, sprinting and weightlifting.

Moulding takes time out from managing his business empire to like posts.

However, one man who has not succumbed to the cult of body beauty is Murray’s overlord, Mike Ashley, who also happens to be his father-in-law. He makes no secret of his love of pints and once described himself as “fat as a barrel”.

His pot-bellied silhouette, however, fits the traditional shape of the British male chief executive.

That fat sent subliminal signals to shareholders. It spoke of well-stocked dining tables in the boardroom, suggesting that the boss was too busy crunching profit numbers to spend on frivolities like the gym.

Perhaps Murray, on the other hand, wants to be a living advertisement for the Sports Direct chain that sits at the heart of his retail empire. Moulding boasts an equally robust upper body (as Gen Z calls it), in line with his business selling dietary supplements and beauty products.

As with much of British corporate life, the trend for muscle-bound bosses may have originated in America.

The most famous of them all is Jeff Bezos, 60, the billionaire founder of Amazon. He used to be scrawny but seems to have decided to bulk up around 2017. Moulding was dubbed the “British Bezos” when THG made its stock market debut in September 2020, amid hopes that his online retail operation could become the next Amazon. The subsequent 92 per cent drop in the stock means there are fewer such comparisons.

Jensen Huang, head of semiconductor giant Nvidia, is another boss wedded to a fitness regimen, rising before dawn to work out.

Meta’s billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has also come under Silicon Valley’s institutional scrutiny.

He has completed the “Murph” challenge, named after a US Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan. This challenge requires competitors to run one mile, do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups and 300 squats, before running another mile, all while wearing a 20-pound weighted vest.

It’s easy to mock business leaders who seem to want to look like male role models, but striving to be a corporate Adonis may not be entirely a matter of vanity.

The life of a CEO is tough, physically and mentally. In theory, investors could benefit from having a well-rounded man at the helm.

Then again, that might not be the case. Gym junkie Neil Woodford’s triceps push-ups failed to stop his followers from losing their shirts.

No matter how muscular the boss is, the numbers to consider are those in the accounts, not those in the gym.