The 90-hour weeks part?
The fact that he was doing it for a fossil fuel company?
The fact that he’s worth fucking $9.5 billion?
Also, not in the headline, but-
The fact that he did it back in the 90s when you could actually successfully open a small business and make money from it as if it’s relevant today?
The business is a franchise called Raising Caine’s Chicken, which I’ve never had, but if you go by Yelp reviews, it’s either the best restaurant that has ever existed or pretty mediocre.
Also, Wikipedia says very little about his early life, but apparently his parents could afford to send him to a private catholic school, so he didn’t exactly grow up improverished.
I owned my own business with employees twice. I’ve faced decisions where I needed to screw over people to grow my business or make more money. “I owned my own business…”
It is not hard to make a fortune. You just need to be a psychopath in a way that threads all the legal loopholes and only hurt people that are beneath your super secret caste rank we’re never supposed to admit is a thing.
It starts by making your first million in reserve by becoming a slumlord. Then you can afford to use the legal system to bankrupt smaller fish while avoiding larger predators. From then on, you just need to continue to cannibalized as much as possible. Eating big fish is dangerous. Large filter feeders that kill hundreds of thousands of average people are the safest bet. Also, fund the right political party that maintains open loopholes that are easy to exploit and protect their biggest whales, and turn a blind eye to cannibal fish, while selling idiot krill whatever mysticism nonsense they are willing to buy. It is not hard. Just be a terrible human being. I failed when I tried, but my apprentice at the time still has his house to this day.
The fact that it pays to be an awful person shows that there is just something fundamentally wrong with our society. Possibly our species.
I mean the human species is a virus
I would say society, due to having money being displayed as success and intelligence by a lot of major news sources, regardless of the process by which they make/obtain that money.
Sure, but also think of all the horrible people throughout history that clawed their way to power and ruled both ruthlessly and successfully.
I would blame that on outliers and survivorship bias. We don’t exactly care about the 100,000’s of years of relatively peaceful human history. There’s a reason “may you live in interesting times,” is a curse. We live in interesting times.
Peaceful relative to what? Historically, war and conflict has been the norm.
Not really. If it were, we wouldn’t have survived as a species. It’s what we focus on, but it actually makes up a very small segment of the overall human experience.
I disagree. Conflict is what has driven our development as a species. The first tools weren’t for building, they were weapons. Even today, so much new scientific development happens as a result of war, especially in medicine.
Tools predate humans… The first tools weren’t weapons. The first human tools weren’t even weapons for internal conflict, they were for hyenas, since that seems to be what was predominantly hunting us at that point.