What is dead may never die?
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As with many like him, the evil keeps him going. Kissinger stands as a prominent counterpoint to the Just World Fallacy.
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And this illustrates one of the reasons that most grifters DON’T target the .01%ers even though they have enough money to make them a tempting target. She is very likely to go to jail for a significant period of time, because prosecutors take bilking the rich very seriously. Like pharma-douche, she is going to jail for cheating rich people instead of endangering the health of regular people. Because their money is more important than our health.
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And still grubbing for money, because what else is he going to do with the little bit of life he has left?
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Reading about all the moneyed assholes Theranos ripped off, my reaction is:
Though Theranos is still terrible and I can’t gain a lot of pleasure from my schadenfreude because the assholes still had plenty of money left over, so they’re not exactly hurting. Sadly.
Continuing proof that the good die young.
Yeah, people talk about how the rich should butt out of other subjects because they don’t know anything beyond their core competency of making money, but frankly they often don’t know anything about that, either. They just got lucky. And that luck spawned a whole bunch of cognitive errors - that because they got lucky, they must be good at business, because they were good at business, they must be smart, because they’re smart…
Trump, despite his shamelessly ripping off his followers, isn’t actually generating all that much money, compared to the big boys. It’s only because he’s so poor, personally, and he’s destroyed all other avenues where he might gain money, that it’s worth it for him.
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Bring back the popular use of guillotines. And not just for her.
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One of the problems with targeting billionaires is that they’re very careful about where they put their money for the following particular reason (relayed to me by a friend who does securities litigation for a billionaire): whatever else, billionaires don’t accumulate a billion dollars (or hold on to a billion dollars) without being very anal about what their money is doing. So they are very reluctant to put $50MM at work in someone else’s project. Not because they can’t lose $50MM – that’s often the daily wing in their wealth --but because if they put $50MM to work they have to then think about it. And they only have so much mind-space they can put on the projects in their lives.
So it says a lot for the quality and charisma of the scam at work here that they were able to overcome that level of bureaucratic skepticism that’s at work in dealing with billionaires’ money.
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Exactly. This endless front-page scandal would have been a week-long “isn’t that awful” story if the victims had all been ordinary folk losing their life’s savings. As we have seen many, many times.
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Yeah, but it’s far safer and easier to get away with it if you fleece millions of regular people for $10 each and not billionaires for millions each.
She’s going to go to jail , likely for the rest of her life, because she picked the wrong people to rip off. If she picked the right people, there’d be a sternly written letter and we’d all have to click through another screen when we buy stocks, warning us that “investments are risk based blah blah blah.”
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I actually see this as akin to those cases where a scammer targets members of the same church or ethnic community. In this case instead of being Armenian, or Baptist, it was the “rich and powerful” that she convinced her marks she was one of, and therefore “trustworthy.”
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Also, some of those awful people were simultaneously accomplices, helping to sucker more people and clients. It’s just a basket of deplorables.
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To be clear, she also scammed many ordinary people by fraudulently selling them bogus medical tests. And in fact, the “scam” on investors was that the product was a scam and she didn’t tell them.
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A good point. There’s a lot of signaling that goes on with Due Diligence – “well, this guy put money in” and so I can follow suit without doing as much. I bet there are a bunch of these guys pissed off at one another for following another’s lead (although it’s probably mostly an okay procedure).
Some of them were probably on to the bezzle and needed more investors to get their money out.
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Trump just launched a social media network (I know, lol) through the use of a SPAC merger. Enough Kool-aid enthusiasts have meme stocked it into absurd valuation that he is likely to get away with at least a couple of hundred million.
Of course, the business plan is almost certainly an exercise in comical absurdity and it will slip beneath the waves within months, but he does know how to fleece the marks.
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There’s no reason to call these people “elite”. What they are is some combination of lucky, greedy, and crooked. The qualities they choose aren’t good, and the qualities they didn’t choose don’t reflect on them for that reason.
In the reality where Hitler was only a successful painter, Henry Kissinger would probably be best known for playing football with Greuther Fürth.
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Thanks for the reminder that I need to be a better Congressperson Trainer. (And, I suppose, small ad agency dissector?)
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