this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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What's up with billionaires and not paying their bills?
I think it’s more that people who tend to be billionaires tend to also be kinda scummy people.
You dont make that kind of money being honest and empathetic. The most honest ppl I know that run businesses are barely paying themselves. There's a reason CEOs have higher than normal representation of psychopaths. It allows them to make the best decisions even if it means running the orphan killing machine 24/7.
I think you mean the "most profitable in the next 3 months on average" decision. It certainly isn't the best decision by any other metric.
Think I got rich by paying people?
This is so much more true than I think most people believe.
My husband and I have a small engine business, and I took a free "community entrepreneur bootcamp" class through the local university this spring in the hope that we might learn something helpful. Instead, I learned fun things like leaning on your customers' fears as a marketing tactic (?? 😔🤦) and that the most prominent local accountant - brought in as an expert speaker by the university! - advises his clients to pay as little as possible as late as possible, and most appallingly, I'm not exaggerating, these are the actual words I heard this man say in front of a room full of people: "if one of your employees gets hurt at your business, it's better for you to stand on their neck until they stop breathing than to call for help, because it's so much easier and cheaper to settle a death claim then an injury." And he actually said that it sounds like he's joking but he's not, this is his understanding of the situation.
I genuinely want to see the best in everyone, and I have never before had the experience of fantasizing about a person's death while they were talking in front of me, and it was abhorrent and awful but also... Wtf? How do we even help someone who sees other people as expendable tools the way this person does?
What can we even do about people who not only don't want to live up to their agreements and commitments, but are just straight up out to fuck everyone else over? How do we help/fix that?
It sounds very similar to when I was in seminary. They literally had classes on how to manipulate your audience. How to “use vocal patterns and body language to make yourself appear more sincere.”
People severely underestimate how many shitty people there are in this world (and even those who appear trustworthy) that would eat your firstborn to increase their net worth if it wasn’t illegal.
I read an article years ago that explained why so many people get "religious" feelings at big revival-type events at Six Flags, Carowinds, etc, even if they're not particularly devout.
There's a thing called respiratory alkalosis (essentially hyperventilation) which makes you light-headed and confused. At it's really easy to trigger by making people stand up quickly, sing really hard, sit back down, stand up and cheer, etc.
That sounds interesting! Do you remember where you found it? I would love to read it.
I'm back! I couldn't find the specific thing I read, but I found something probably better, an actual study published in Pubmed:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8871314/
Thanks! You made my day, my good lemming.
The conclusion fits what you said earlier, and it is easy to see how this is probably used cynically for these cult bro events:
You're welcome! I had a personal experience with this, too.
When I was a kid, my parents used to make me go to church and youth group stuff. We went to one of those "hip" events at Carowinds (like a Six Flags, Disney type amusement park). Before it started our youth leader said - to his credit - "No matter what you feel, DO NOT go down to the front when they call people up."
Sure enough towards the end, I start feeling "the spirit", and I'm the most skeptical, atheist/agnostic in the whole group. But I stayed in my seat. And when we got back to the hotel I was thinking "what the hell happened there?"
I'll try to look for it. It was a loooong time ago though.
This sounds like an unfortunate consequence of the evolutionary pressure that has been allowed to take place within humanity for the past ~150 years. Profit is more important than anything else. So of course you'll have sociopathic "profit-above-all-else" mindsets among influential business figures.
From a business standpoint I would never want to hire that accountant. If he openly talks about employees that way and being a bad customers to others he would probably also be a very bad supplier.
💀
That is because of regulations that pass the buck. If the US had public health care, and fines for negligence and OSHA violations, this wouldn't be true. Public health care would be the best thing for small businesses because it removes the health insurance benefits and workers' compensation issues completely. One big problem with the GOP is they are half right a lot, regulations are problematic, but not in the way they think. They take this half rightness and use it to do the wrong thing.
💀
You don't become a billionaire by being honest and spending your money.
This is not a thoughtful reply. Hopefully Lemmy can do better. I dislike Elon more than most people, but just reading uninformed ragebait like this is exhausting. Yes his parents managed an emerald mine, no they weren’t that wealthy, and no it didn’t make a substantial impact on the source of his wealth.
Edit: most of his wealth originated from PayPal. Yes the money from the emerald mine helped him get to the US, and get an education. And it may have even helped him in his earlier career a bit. But it wasn’t like hundreds of millions of dollars that were just given to him like “here, go be rich!”.
So he basically had as much monetary benefit as an upper-middle-class kid in America. Not the same as the commenter I’m replying to who implied that Elon is only wealthy because of his parents wealth, which is just obviously wrong.
Just to be clear again, I think he’s a scumbag. BUT I don’t think we should blindly agree with something just because it fits our narrative… we should have intellectual curiosity for the truth. If anyone has any evidence that Elon received a substantial portion of his wealth from his parents’ emerald mine, please show that because I couldn’t find it.
Sources:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/
https://people.com/human-interest/who-is-errol-musk-elon-musk-father/
his parents OWNED the mine lol
? What’s your source that he received his billions of dollars from an emerald mine?
I don’t trust Elon as a source at all!
The parent comment literally said that he was a billionaire from inheriting an emerald mine. That’s patently untrue, and I’m curious why you disagree? Or what information you have that I’ve missed, looking at the sources I cited (which discuss the mine). I’m not doubting that the mine existed, or that it helped him get started at life.
Tesla is worth almost a trillion dollars. And Elon owns 23% of Tesla shares. So that’s ~200B right there alone. Then add in his shares of SpaceX. It’s clear that his wealth is directly tied to the shares he owns of Tesla skyrocketing, not from an emerald mine.
Yeah, I marked it with edit to give more information, but the point was the same, I’m so confused. Just genuinely trying to act in good faith here
In this case I think he doesn't understand cloud hosting at all, so he doesn't see the cost making sense. If you don't value something, the pricetag seems ridiculous and you won't even consider paying it. He will probably realize the mistake eventually.
with higher interest rates, it means they can't get cheap loans, these companies will go under if the rates keep rising