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The Era of the Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The
The broader point I’m trying to make is that neoliberalism is inherently selfish, believing that the free market should reign supreme, bereft of government intervention, regulation or interference, thinking that somehow these terms will enable "freedom" rather than a kind of market-dominated quasi-dictatorship where our entire lives are dominated by the whims of the affluent, and that there is no institution that can possibly push back against them. Excluding those fired due to criminal levels of malfeasance — like Robert Moffat, the man once tipped to be the next CEO of IBM, had he not been convicted of securities fraud and jailed for six months, thus losing nearly $85m in benefits — most ousted corporate leaders often enjoy generous severance packages, far beyond the usual “two weeks of pay and COBRA.” WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s $200m in cash and $225m in (now-worthless) stock is perhaps the most egregious example of this. The Information reported recently that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott — the chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of over $200 billion, despite the fact that, like SalesForce, nobody really knows what it does — chose to push AI across his whole organization (both in product and in practice) based on the mental consideration I'd usually associate with a raven finding a shiny object:
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