These sorts of things always make me wonder how much of this is hubris and how much is stupidity. Do they really not see how bad it is to just replace your search results without telling you and charge advertisers for you not searching their brand or did they know and just didn't think that anyone could catch them?
We constantly hear about executives being completely out of touch with the real world, but we also see them just not understanding the basics of business. It really could be either but it's probably a fair bit of both.