I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace… So many admirable people who were actually really great…
Now, people are just trash. Look at Mark Zuckerberg who leads Facebook. Dude is a lizard man, anytime you think he has shown some character growth he does something truly horrible and illegal that he should be thrown in prison for. For example, he’s been buying up properties in Hawaii and basically stealing them from the locals. He’s basically committing human rights violations by violating the culture of Hawaiian natives and their land deeds that are passed down from generation to generation. He has been systematically stealing them and building a wall on Hawaii, basically a f*cking colonizer. That’s what the guy is. I thought he was a good upstanding person until I learned all these things about him
Current CEO of Google is peak dirtbag. Dude has no interest in the company or it’s success at all, his only concern is patting his pockets while he is there as CEO, and appeasing the shareholders. He has zero interest in helping or making anyone’s life pleasant at the company. Truly a dirtbag in every way.
Current CEO of Home Depot, which I now consider a tech company because they have moved out of retail and into the online space and they are rapidly restructuring their entire business around online sales, that dude is a total piece of work conservative racist. I remember working for this company, This dude’s entire focus is eliminating as many people as feasibly possible from working in the store, making their life living heck, does not see people as human beings at all. Just wants to eliminate anyone and everyone they possibly can, think they are a slave labor force
Elon musk, we all know about him, don’t need to really say much. Every time you think he’s doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It’s like he’s specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday
Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…
Bill Gates was an evil piece of shit, that did many illegal things to secure Microsoft’s software empire.
It was much easier to “hide” sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.
That said I think because tech was such a young industry and innovating so quickly. Many geeks got a chance to run companies that took off. Nowadays it’s Like every other industry with sociopaths in charge.
It was much easier to “hide” sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.
It wasn’t hidden. Everybody knew back in the day what an evil piece of shit he was.
It has just been forgotten about and many current adults weren’t old enough, or even around, in the heyday of his evil empire, so he has been able to whitewash his image. My 50 year old ass remembers though. Fuck Bill Gates.
Bill Gates was an evil piece of shit, that did many illegal things to secure Microsoft’s software empire.
Yup. And his wife left him because of his association with Epstein.
Melinda Gates Says Bill Gates’s Work with “Abhorrent” Jeffrey Epstein Led to Divorce
Nah, she knew about his husband and Epstein ( and his at least strange occupation ) far lower than she’s wiling to admit.
lack of “social intelligence”. They mostly rose through the ranks because their technical (or business) skill. They never had to act for benefit of others to advanve
“Leaders”
They were always bad people but media shilled them as good guys… Buffet is similar example. We all LARPed it. Now we are learning the hard truth.
These people a part of the owner class and control key portions of us and global economy.
They are not the same as the rest of us. They know it and they act upon it.
When you step on an ant do you even notice?
They don’t either peasant, now get back to fucking cucking and making daddy some mother fucking money, boy
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton
And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.
There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.
Money
Came to post the short answer as well. It’s always the same.
Monkey + money = bad
Greed. A sane person will walk away from working once they have enough saved to comfortably retire.
$100 million can let you live comfortably forever, but there are plenty of people who want that much every year.
Those are the folks who become ‘leaders.’
And they should be eaten.
I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable
Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:
- Bill Gates dominated the PC world with aggressive business tactics and vendor lock in.
- Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
- Steve Jobs lied and cheated his investors, his family, and his closest friends to benefit himself.
Tom was a good guy, but possibly because he took his fortune and left tech. There were very few admirable leaders.
Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
It’s well known that ORACLE is an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Steve Jobs decided to kill himself by being an idiot.
So…there was a redemption arc there.
I’m not a fan of
HitlerSteve Jobs, but I am a big fan of the guy who killedHitlerSteve Jobs.Yes but Steve Jobs also bought himself a pointless liver transplant that someone else didn’t get. One he would have never needed if he had listened to doctors instead of trying to treat a very treatable kind of cancer with a diet. So while he did the world a favor, he also took someone with him on the way out.
That man’s killer’s name?
Steve Jobs 🔔
Larry Ellisons Oracle gobbled up many great companies and open source projects and sucked the life out of them, such as Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice, MySQL to name just a few
That was a single blow, Sun owned OpenOffice and MySQL when bought.
See the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation.
when I was growing up
This is really the key. We’re all stupid and unaware of how things work and the particular goings-ons when we’re kids. There were plenty of shitty people running the tech giant companies back then, but we just didn’t realize the extent of what was happening.
Yeah we’re baffled about how kids get sucked into worshipping Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but I remember a brief time in my life when I thought Steve Jobs was the greatest and that he singlehandedly invented the iPhone with a rusty pair of pliers and gumption.
You listed a bunch of people who were “good”, but honestly, none of them were. You just weren’t necessarily aware of how Bill Gates treated anyone who had anything he wanted, or what Steve Jobs did to his daughter.
Honestly, the lesson here is All CEOs Are Bad, it’s just that some are only moderate psychopaths instead of ones that skin cats and then stuff them into mailboxes.
thanks, I didn’t know anything at all about his daughter (after reading your comment) and found this pretty good article/interview with her.
The link below isn’t the fundamental reason, but I think it helps to explain the shift in mindset. With the best of intentions and a desire to innovate and help people live better…the ersartz movement became corrupted by conspicuous consumption and a “disruptor” capitalist mindset:
It was a lot easier to pretend to be a good person when every moral failure you make wasn’t broadcast around the world the moment it was discovered. Case and point, look into Bill Gates more. He wasn’t always a respectful guy, got caught up in the whole “filthy communists” schtick when the government was investigating his company, advocates for more restrictive control of aid distribution favoring manufacturers more than those he’s trying to help, conflicts of interest in his charity, opposing twitters ban of Trump after the insurrection, etc.
I don’t ever remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs being good people. Or Jeff Bezos, trying to kill bookstores.
The guys behind Google seemed okay at first and I think they really wanted to do good. But the way the company culture was built was toxic.
But in the end it’s all about the greed. As soon as a company becomes public and whose stocks become available on the market, it turns to shit.
Look at how Steam is going well and actually helping personal computing progress. Gabe Newell is doing a great job because he loves that he does and ensures the people who work for him do too.
Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).
There are no saints at this level.
Bethesda used to be awesome. Until they popularized DLC
I mean their unwillingness to do anything about the market abuse and rampant child-gambling aside, the lootboxes for purely cosmetic items are one of the least predatory ways to do microtransactions. It’s not like EA where the only way to unlock entire characters in some games is to grind for hundreds of hours or pay, or like COD where they took the lootbox idea and made it actually affect (multiplayer) gameplay
the least predatory ways to do microtransactions
Damning with faint praise.
TBF to Valve, their lootboxes were limited to cosmetic items in a free to play multiplayer games. You can ignore those and it wouldn’t change the gameplay at all.
You’re not going to out-compete the sociopaths if you’re a saint. That’s a reality.
And in politics, too!
Capital demands growth. It doesn’t care how you do it. It doesn’t track or reward whether you did it by making the world better or by creating death squads and working with the CIA to kill thousands of people and overthrow a government that wanted to charge you taxes and limit the amount of land you could have.
It’s been this way, and worse, for a long time. But bear in mind that Twitter gave us the ability to see how billionaires think. Modern media made them more accessible. They didn’t change, our knowledge of them did.
I generally think Satya is a fairly decent guy.
Microsoft is still a fucking shit show, but still.
It’s where the money is. Simple.