Comment by DrewADesign
12 hours ago
This “It’s not about profits, man, it’s about how much you’re worth. The rules have changed. Don’t get left behind,” nonsense is exactly what a bunch of super wrong people said about investing during the .com bust. Even if we got some useful tech out of it in the end, that was a lot of people’s money that got flushed down the toilet.
But the survivors became some of the biggest and most profitable companies on the planet: Google, Amazon, Ebay/Paypal. And of course, the people selling shovels always do well in a rush (Apple, Adobe, etc).
I’m not talking about the health of the the industry— I’m talking about the fallout for employees, anyone with any stake in the stock market, etc. A whole lot of retail investors, 401k holders, etc. got fucked, and a whole lot of other people lost their jobs. Careers were stunted. This was before we had preexisting condition protection so for people with cancer or other serious chronic health conditions, losing a job could be a death sentence, even if they got another job the very next day. The housing market got screwed up.
From the big short (and a bunch of introductory macroeconomics classes:)
"For every 1% that unemployment rises, 40,000 people die."
There are consequences to people running big companies like they’re playing poker.
And the owners of those companies became mega billionaires and turned into monsters. Maybe there's a lesson there