Wall Street

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Apocryphal target of a hostile takeover by apocryphal corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street.

It was during an extraordinary extraordinary general meeting at Teldar Paper shareholders that Gekko sought to persuade investors that “…greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

This launched a thousand aspiring political careers from well-meaning teenaged lefties who are now executives at bulge bracket investment banks.

Oliver Stone got it nearly right. But there is a better word for greed that “good”: “inevitable”. Greed is inevitable. If you haven't configured your operation to assume that users will be coming from a perspective of personal enrichment, it’s gonna break.

See also

• Evolution
• Corporate action