A finance expert and Fortune 500 therapist examine the potential motivations of billionaire cheater Steve Ballmer and his subordinates. Unsurprisingly, people who have enough money to do literally anything they want do not evaluate risk the same way as the rest of us. Just another sign that wealth hoarding is a mental illness, imo.

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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    11 小时前

    Hate to break it to the noobs, but Ballmer has ALWAYS been an asshole, I mean like from the first day. He probably punched his mama in the face once he was out. That’s why Gates put him in charge, mistaking sheer arrogance (which he had) as managerial ability (which he absolutely did not have).

    He’s been a brutal bastard for as long as he’s been in business, and had the authors talked to anyone that worked at Microsoft in the 90s they’d have known it. Instead, they write the entire article as though this is just recently happening, which is odd as fuck. It makes me wonder who they are trying to convince, and why.

    It’s hard to blame acquired wealth when a motherfucker never had an ethic beyond bullying and “fuck you I got mine” anyway.

    • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 小时前

      Gates was also an asshole. Fucker bought the rights to what was literally called (internally) as QDOS, or Quick and Dirty Operating System, then turned around and sold it to IBM, as if it was theirs. We got stuck with that shitty foundation for decades, with the many iterations of DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 9x, etc.

    • artifex@piefed.zipOP
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      5 小时前

      So maybe it’s a cyclic problem. You have to act like a psychopath to become a billionaire. And becoming a billionaire makes you act like a psychopath.

    • jestho@lemmy.zip
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      9 小时前

      Yeah, I think they got it in the wrong order. All billionaires are psychopaths, but not all psychopaths are billionaires.

  • nonentity@sh.itjust.works
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    21 小时前

    Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

    Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

  • Tango@piefed.ca
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    20 小时前

    I hate the existence of billionaires as much as the next person, but it always rubs me the wrong way when journalism wears its bias as a badge of honor. Just the facts, please; trust me enough to come to the right conclusion on my own.

    • Sims@lemmy.ml
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      9 小时前

      trust me enough to come to the right conclusion on my own.

      The whole western information sphere, and most people are already mind-colonized, by attitudes like this. Any uncertainty in facts is claimed as ‘Conspiracy thinking’ and boxed in with stories of Aliens and shit - just to make it embarrassing to believe in. It’s a real playbook from the elite.

      The US elites are constantly manipulating what ‘facts’ is, and muddles/hides all evidence. They can prosper for centuries behind this ‘Hard facts only’ mental shield, where all the lesser deductive and abductive facts are being downplayed/ridiculed and ignored.

      It IS a badge of honor not to have succumbed to US elites constant propaganda narrative, and as long as they DO seek the facts - as all real journalism should - I think it is quite okay to try and correlate all the other types of facts (inductive, deductive and abductive facts) into a coherent and likely picture that connects the dots and show everyone how this current mess came about and works.

      Let critical investigative journalism explore and try to connect ALL the dots - as they are supposed to.

  • Salamanderwizard@lemmy.world
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    23 小时前

    I mean history has taught me tyrants know what a rope fashioned to fit around the head and tighten on the neck means.

    • artifex@piefed.zipOP
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      19 小时前

      From the article and underlying research though, it’s weirder than that. The ultra wealthy literally do not evaluate risk the same way. It’s like they’re unable to comprehend a scenario where they might be disadvantaged or endangered.