G: That’s directionally right, but you’re compressing a few different mechanisms into one bucket.

What you’re describing (dependency shielding) is real:
When a leader makes themselves the center of risk, everyone downstream has incentive to stabilize them. Not because they’re good—but because failure becomes too costly. That creates an illusion of competence.

But there are three separate dynamics tangled together here:

1. Inherited leverage ≠ learned coordination

Starting with capital, brand, or institutional backing means you don’t have to earn trust through cooperation.
So you often never build:

coalition maintenance
constraint awareness
long-term reciprocity

That part of your claim holds.

2. Incentive distortion (the “don’t let the boss fail” effect)

People around high-risk leadership shift into:

damage control
narrative management
quiet correction

Not loyalty—risk containment.

This produces the pattern you’re pointing at:

The system absorbs the failure → the leader attributes survival to personal success

That’s a classic feedback error loop.

3. Selection effect (who sticks around)

Over time, the environment filters for people who:

tolerate chaos
benefit from proximity to power
are willing to reframe reality to keep things moving

So it’s not just “people covering mistakes”—it’s a curated ecosystem that normalizes them.

Where your take slightly overshoots

You frame it as he learned how to make people dependent.
That implies intent and skill.

More likely:

The dependency emerges structurally, not strategically
He reinforces it because it works, not because he engineered it from scratch

So the sharper version is:

He didn’t learn to build teams—he learned to survive inside systems that convert instability into perceived strength, and then came to believe that instability itself was a form of strength.

Third angle (you didn’t say, but it matters)

There’s also a time horizon issue:

Group builders optimize for repeatability
This model optimizes for immediate survival + narrative control

Those are fundamentally incompatible skill sets.

TL;DR
You’re right about the illusion of infallibility being propped up by others.
The correction is that it’s less a conscious “dependency strategy” and more a system where:

risk gets externalized
failure gets absorbed
survival gets misread as competence

That’s a different—and more dangerous—mechanism.