Watch: Billionaire CEO says unemployment 'has to jump' to put 'arrogant' workers in their placelocked

return2ozma@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 867 points –
Watch: Billionaire CEO says unemployment 'has to jump' to put 'arrogant' workers in their place
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Not to mention he seems to be confused as to why business owners don't already just layoff a ton of people to send some sort of message and put them in their place.

Hmmm... I wonder why that hasn't happened... its almost as if there was some reason business owners would actually need good workers... That can't be tho, must be something else... 🤔

Businesses don't need the working class silly, they take on the burden of employing them out of the goodness of their hearts.

😂

It was like someone here on Lemmy who was talking about how it was the taxpayers who made 'meaningful contributions' to society. I was like, "what about the people who make your food and clean your hotel room when you go on that luxury vacation?"

There's this weird balance with businesses. While narcissists and sociopaths make the wealthiest business owners, many successful business owners are merely "unpleasant".

Look at Musk. If he were competent (and the Twitter thing wasn't originally just an attempt to manipulate stock prices), the whole "buy and gut" attitude can be quite effective at making money. Dump compliance folks. Dump critical personnel and let them "figure it the fuck out", etc. I've seen businesses run by sociopaths do things like that all the time.

And hell, let's look at Musk a bit more. Everyone talks about how much money Twitter is losing. Nobody is talking about how much money Musk is losing (or not losing). First, a full 1/3 of the purchase price are loans in Twitter's name (!!!). That puts Musk on the hook for only $30B directly... which he paid in equity of other companies (making the purchase tax-sheltered).

Burned utterly to the ground (the product and the staff), 2023 might be their first profitable year since 2019 (albeit as a MUCH smaller company), and I'm guessing Musk is collecting a fair chunk of change in salary and bonuses. Ironically, I'm guessing he's still going to amortize the "losses" as he builds his own ROI.

Yes, a better leader would have created a successful Twitter. And YES, Musk never really wanted to spend that much on it. But I firmly believe he's taking it to the bank anyway.

And as horrific as most CEO's are, a lot of them don't have this type of behavior in them. Which is the other side of the "reason business owners need good workers". Not every CEO is willing to embrace "profit-focused mass-layoffs"