Wall Street

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

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WILLARD:	I loved you in Wall Street.
HARLEY:

—Hot Shots, Part Deux

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