May the Fourth: Cybersecurity Is the Geekiest Industry in Business

Cybersecurity Talks About Star Wars More Than Media & Entertainment Does.

May's data drop is in. We searched the corpus for every Star Wars reference we could think of. The phrase "star wars" itself appears in 363 distinct interviews. The franchise has been in the cultural water supply for nearly fifty years, so the volume isn't the surprise.

The surprise is who's doing the referencing. The industry that fights an actual dark side every day — Cybersecurity — talks about Star Wars more per capita than the industry that makes movies. CISOs reference it more than CMOs. And almost nobody says the line you'd expect them to say.

Go deeper: Explore industry-specific intelligence profiles to see what cultural references each vertical actually uses.

The Industry Leaderboard

Per-capita Star Wars mentions across our largest verticals:

Cybersecurity wins. Not by a hair — by enough to call it the result of a real cultural pattern. The people who spend their careers thinking about adversaries, intrusions, and shadowy threats reach for the franchise that built the modern adversary archetype.

It tracks. The Star Wars vocabulary maps cleanly onto the security mental model. Threat actors are the Empire. Detection-and-response teams are the Rebellion. Zero-day exploits are the Death Star plans. The metaphor isn't a stretch — it's almost too tight.

The Role Leaderboard

The raw counts go to the roles with the most representation in the corpus. But the per-capita story is the CISO. There are far fewer CISOs in our data than CEOs, yet CISOs out-reference CMOs in absolute terms. The CISO is the geekiest role in the C-suite. By a wide margin.

CFOs, by contrast, are nearly silent on the franchise. The function that thinks in spreadsheets does not think in lightsabers.

The Character Hierarchy

Which characters do business leaders actually invoke?

Yoda beats Vader. Narrowly, but consistently. The wise mentor outranks the iconic villain in the leadership corpus. That fits a corpus made of leadership interviews — leaders are reaching for sage figures more than for antagonists. The hero archetype they invoke is the teacher, not the warrior.

"Jedi mind trick" is the dominant working metaphor. With 26 distinct mentions, it's the most-used Star Wars reference applied to a business situation. Leaders use it to describe persuasion they're slightly embarrassed to admit they're doing — talking a board into a decision, getting a reluctant exec to ship, convincing a customer the price is fair.

"Dark side" is mostly not Star Wars. The phrase appears in 322 interviews, but only 49 are the construction "dark side of the [Empire / Force / it]." The rest are general usage — "dark side of growth," "dark side of remote work," "dark side of AI." The franchise gave us the phrase. The business world untethered it.

The Line Nobody Says

Here's the genuinely surprising finding.

"May the Fourth" appears in 21 interviews — leaders acknowledging the holiday, usually in episodes recorded around early May.

"May the Force be with you" appears in one.

Twenty-one leaders are willing to reference the calendar joke. Exactly one is willing to deliver the actual line. The cultural reference has been so thoroughly absorbed that the original quote has become unspeakable — too earnest, too on-the-nose, too obvious to risk. The reference moved from quotation to allusion. Saying the line is now the cringe version. Knowing the line is the only version that lands.

This is a real linguistic pattern. When a phrase becomes universally understood, the cost of stating it directly goes up. The phrase keeps its meaning while losing its utility. "May the Force" became one of those phrases. The 363 leaders who reference Star Wars all know the line. Almost none will say it.

What the Geek Index Predicts

The Cybersecurity-leads-the-geek-charts finding isn't trivia. It's a positioning signal.

If you sell into cybersecurity, your buyer responds to adversary metaphors, archetype-driven narratives, and good-vs-evil framing in a way that buyers in other verticals do not. The CISO will not roll their eyes if your pitch deck includes a Death Star analogy. The CMO will. Match the vocabulary to the buyer.

If you sell into Media & Entertainment, you're selling to people who make the cultural references — meaning they're more sensitive to lazy ones. The bar is higher. Generic Star Wars references don't land in M&E. Specific ones do.

And if you sell into Finance, leave the lightsabers at home. The franchise barely registers there. The metaphor has to come from somewhere else — chess, war, sports. Not the galaxy far, far away.

May the Fourth is a holiday for the buyers who name their detection systems after Jedi orders. The rest of the C-suite is just nodding along.