If you're basing that opinion on interactions with other people that you potentially don't like in the first place, who you're already judging to be inferior to engineers, it's not surprising that you find business knowledge to be useless.

You're judging them on their compatibility with your personality, not on the actual knowledge that an MBA or other sort of business degree provides. It's really easy for engineers to completely dismiss the kind of knowledge (including emotional knowledge) that people in sales, business, and marketing possess. They aren't just some dummies who don't know how to code.

It also shouldn't be surprising that pure engineering companies like AMD are run by engineers, and while HP is an engineering company in some form, it's also more of a business services company. They do things like contract out desktop support services to large corporations or the government - that is much less about engineering and technical ability and more about providing continuing services, providing a business relationship.

It's actually not a lot different than hiring a custodial firm. Why wouldn't someone with a business background run HP? HP's commodity hardware business doesn't actually make a whole lot of money from what I remember.