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.