Wall Street

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WILLARD:	I loved you in Wall Street.
HARLEY:

—Hot Shots, Part Deux

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 than “good”: “inevitable”.

Greed is inevitable. If you haven’t configured your operation, business, polity, etc., to assume that users will be coming at everything they do, first and foremost, from a perspective of personal enrichment and self-interest, it’s gonna break.

This did not stop the snowflakes of the world forgetting this in the early 2020s.

See also

• Stakeholder capitalism
• Shareholder capitalism
• Snowflake
• Evolution
• Corporate action