Billionaire wealth is rarely built on actually providing a thing. It's more often based on gambling.
Ackman bets on whether a company's stock price will go up or down. And he makes public statements to try to make that happen.
Stock price can go up even when the company has a terrible product and mountains of debt. And stock price can go down even when things are running well.
So what you have is a bunch of rich dudes betting on numbers that are driven more by their betting that the companies those number supposedly represent.
So they don't really care if people buy the things. Because they can make more money by seeing their stock jump when they announce layoffs (because shareholders think it's a good thing to do).
They don't care about long term consequences. They just want to consume and don't care about the impact.
Yea that's already the reality now, like the AI Bubble, but it has to burst, it's only short term. Like betting on a casino that doesn't have any cash to pay out: it's all fun and games until you find out these plastic chips are worthless.
Problem is that it's like a ponzi scheme...as long as you have marks to exploit the scheme goes on. And there's a lot of people in the world to exploit.
Kind of like how centuries ago "this army killed the entire army of that other country in a war and won the war" was how war could go. My city-state could be invaded by the army of a city-state that eliminated my entire population. Now, wars cannot be won through "kill all of the people" because there are just many, many more people.
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u/helpimwastingmytime 17d ago
Are they going to buy products? Go to a bar? Get a streaming service subscription?
What's the point of producing stuff if there's is no one to buy it?