Well shoot, you keep producing plausible explanations: so now he might be so narcissistic that he thinks the reason he can't find capable subordinates is because people are intimidated by his awesomeness.
Wow, that is a stretch and reads like an advocacy of Bible skip code or Nostradamus predictions. So the best case scenario is that he doesn't understand conversational context? Well I stand corrected: he is either a liar, suffers from a mental disorder, or isn't a native English speaker.
That reading would also fit into the conversation as a sort of commiseration. "But...you the man dad, who wouldn't want to work with you?"