Kinda not upset at a con man conning a high paying job out of a shitty tech corporation. Kinda OK with that, all the way down.
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They’re nothing special. During Dotcom 1.0 a lot of startups looking for investment had at least one smooth-talking techie “guru” type founder who knew how to bamboozle someone so eager to get in on the gold rush that he wouldn’t look too closely at the (carefully rigged) financial projections. These types usually had already built a little personality cult for themselves amongst their co-founders and early employees.
When we’d fund a company based on adjusted (i.e. reality-based) numbers, sometimes the guru would then proceed to try and pull off short cons. In one case, a bookkeeper we’d installed called me to confirm a large proposed expense to send a guru full-freight to a tech “thought leader” conference at a Hawaiian luxury resort. When I called him to discuss the value of this trip to the company (as opposed to himself) he told me had “decided” not go (“didn’t X tell you?”) before I started asking questions.
Shingy is kind of an extreme carryover of that type. They’re still around in the industry (see Elizabeth Holmes), but seem to have gravitated to the cryptocurrency/blockchain and SEO/digital advertising and “gig economy” spaces.
In terms of the con artists not looking for money, they occurred outside the business context. They’re usually sociopaths who get off just manipulating and controlling people emotionally, narcissistic energy vampires who use grifts to boost their egos, and the occasional high-functioning substance abuser. They’re harder to spot at first because they’re not asking for something quantifiable like money.
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Yeah, but I’d bet that there were 100 better idea generators inside the company who never got listened to and earned 20x less than this twit.
This all comes off like an “I was in on the joke the whole time!” move, intended to soften the ridiculous air of hucksterism that he’s exuded since day 1.
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