Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/10/jeff-bezos-divorce.html
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Last year WSJ had an article on how the performance of hedge funds suffers noticeably after the fund managers get a divorce. I don’t know if anyone has done a similar study on CEOs but they should.
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This is all kinds of gross.
Tangentially related: IMO we as a society need to ditch this idea that anything can grow forever, especially business. And while I’m at it, shareholder focused capitalism sucks.
Well, I feel better.
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I don’t think Wall Street is listening to your advice.
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Yes, it’s a soulless, grotesque question.
How so? People get divorced all the time. I can think of millions of things more soulless and grotesque than simply wondering “hey, I wonder what happens to the stock price when a founder of a company gets divorced”
If you want to see grotesque and soulless, wait until Trump mentions it in one of his tweets about the failing Washington Post.
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Gracefully scaling operations up and down is a capability that is slowly coming to businesses. You are not going to like where I’m going with this, though…
In tech, that capability comes from cloud computing. Pay for the resources you use, and just delete them when you are done with them. There’s auto-scaling capabilities which will clone and destroy instances on demand.
In businesses which require human beings, and not racks of servers, this takes the form of contractors. Incidentally, also very popular in tech companies. Also in the UK I’ve heard. Probably Germany too.
The next step up from staffing firms is more pay-as-you-go type services. Like Fiverr, Uber, etc. As for critical infrastructure like offices, this is less and less critical as more and more workers are remote. Send them a laptop when they’re hired, mail it back when they are done. That’s assuming that companies aren’t having them BYOD.
The future of scalable companies who don’t plan for unlimited growth is not the utopia you would think. (I mean, unless we get UBI, universal healthcare, etc.)
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Honestly, why do we even care about Bezos? He won’t be missing any meals…
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$136.2 billion. Wow. That’s about enough to pay for a wall.
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And why would I care about Amazon’s stock value anyway? I don’t own any.
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I can’t get over the fact that Bezos apparently did not have a prenup agreement.
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He did, but it was delivered to the wrong address.
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I remember hearing a while ago that the original concept of a company was one in which it was expected it would have a finite life time - it would raise money, do something to increase value, then return the increased value to the shareholders and gracefully close down. I’m not sure of the validity of my assertion, but I’d be interested if anyone else knows more…
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You’re right, but a boy can dream, can’t he?
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Divorce is not the grotesque part. But you know that because you’re not new here. Xeni is referring to the reducing of considerations of divorce to the stock price of a company.
Some people see their spouse as their partner in their financial fortunes and don’t feel the need to have a written contract dividing them in the event of the dissolution of that partnership. Obviously others do. Nothing intrinsically wrong with either. People have different ways of sharing their lives with each other.
From what I’ve read, Mrs. Bezos was instrumental in helping Mr. Bezos start his company from relatively little.
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A lot of software companies run on an unspoken five year plan: Start up, make something using developers on burn-out overtime, position for a buyout, profit!
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“How will Jeff Bezos’ divorce affect Amazon’s stock price?” Any other “affect/effect” survivors out there?
Or somebody stole it from their lawyer’s front porch…
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If you think about it, Amazon’s business model is soulless and grotesque.
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There was a time when Jeff wasn’t a flaming asshole, after that it was too late.
In the meantime he’s been a flaming asshole for years now, so I don’t see why the stock would take a hit, if anything it should jump with Mrs Bezos no longer in the way.
(/s for the humor impaired.)
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Honestly couldn’t say. He might be a swell guy to know or a flaming asshole. His business practices, while far from the worst, are what I have serious objections to, but for me that’s more a fucntion of the system than the personality of CEOs. Which isn’t to say some CEOs I could name can’t be public dickheads on a personal level, but if Bezos has it hasn’t flown into my news gathering radar.
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