My point doesn't relate to age as a number, but to age as a representative of certain internalised ideas - and I think the examples you've listed actually reinforce rather than challenge that distinction.

Take Trump: yes, he is disruptive. But disruptive in what direction? Disruption for its own sake, or disruption toward greater agility and adaptability? There is a meaningful difference between an incumbent using disruption as a political tool and genuinely new thinking breaking through entrenched systems. Macron at 48 ran as an outsider and built a movement from scratch - that is qualitatively different from a 79-year-old billionaire leveraging decades of capital and connections to upend norms. The mechanism matters.

More importantly, the list of EU Prime Ministers proves my point rather than refuting it. These are people who reached the top of systems that were built by and for the post-war, Cold War generation. The pipeline itself filters for a certain kind of thinking. A 48-year-old who spent 20 years climbing the ladder of legacy institutions often carries the same mental model as a 65-year-old - because that is what the system selected for.

Give you a recent example. Armin Papperger, 63, CEO of Rheinmetall - one of the continent's largest and most politically connected defence contractors - recently dismissed Ukraine's drone programme by calling them "Lego drones made by Ukrainian housewives." This is a man whose entire career was built on legacy platforms: heavy armour, long procurement cycles, and peacetime government contracts worth billions.

Rheinmetall's business model depends on relationships with politicians and ministries, not on battlefield experience and feedback loops. It is a model that worked beautifully in 1990. It is a model that reality is now actively retiring.

Now look at Oleksandr Yakovenko, 36, CEO of TAF Industries - one of Ukraine's largest drone manufacturers. His company runs its own R&D centre, iterates its designs weekly based on live battlefield data, and operates a distributed production network specifically engineered to survive missile strikes. That is not a defence company in the traditional sense, but an adaptive system built for a war that is happening right now. This is 2026, not 1979.

The Iran conflict actually made the economics impossible to ignore: $20–50k Shahed drones forcing billion-dollar air defence systems to burn through multimillion-dollar interceptors per engagement. The math isn’t mathing anymore. Papperger's contempt for Ukrainian drones is just the revealed preference of an entire class of incumbents whose capital, legal resources, lobbyists, and political access allow them to keep the gates closed against exactly the kind of thinking Yakovenko represents.

And that is the pattern I hear consistently from contacts across defence, satellite, and comms: the problem is not that older leaders exist. It is that they neither adapt nor make room for those who can. Entrenchment plus gatekeeping - that is what I am writing about.