Definitely, he has a very fragile ego. I’m also not a psychologist and too lazy to look it up, but read smg about the two types of narcissm, vulnerable and grandiose, which have very different behaviours, but come from the same internal feeling of inferiority.

I actually worked with a client very much like him, absolutely incompetent with fragile ago, always playing powergames and trying to humiliate others. What was surprising to see is how hard it is to deal with them, they really exhausted me, and at the end I left the project looking worse than I could have with a normal person. They also openly abused everybody, peers and teammates, not just me the lowly service provider. And the results of his work was always horrendous: crunch hours, months of delays, missing features, etc. I only hear bad things about them from others, yet I always saw some people falling over themselves trying to please this horrible human being, and I couldn’t understand why.

It’s like some people are inherently drawn to these narcissists, while others are repulsed by them, and these two types don’t understand the others. I look at similar world “leaders” like Putin, Orban, or the South American chainsaw clown, and laugh at these idiots, yet millions are happily voting for them.