Ed Zitron: Shareholder Supremacy really took root when a man called Jack Welch joined General Electric as a junior engineer, eventually becoming a manager who pushed his people so hard he literally blew up a factory. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Newsletter: The Shareholder Supremacy has eaten the world, turning the tech industry into the playground of do-nothing management dictators that see human beings as assets and the customer as subordinate to growth - all inspired by GE’s Jack Welch. www.wheresyoured.at/tss/

The Shareholder Supremacywww.wheresyoured.at I promise you, everything that's happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it's hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that's also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google can proliferate unprofitable, unsustainable

In 1916, the Michigan Supreme Court, in demanding Ford stop cutting costs and raising wages, expressed a non-binding legal opinion that the interests of shareholders should always take precedence over anything else. It's inspired a hundred years of rot. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Thus began the Shareholder Supremacy, a financial death cult disconnected from production and humanity itself, a continual shell game where companies do things not to produce an outcome in real life, but to manipulate investors and the markets themselves. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Shareholder Supremacy really took root when a man called Jack Welch joined General Electric as a junior engineer, eventually becoming a manager who pushed his people so hard he literally blew up a factory. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Jack Welch was eventually in line to become GE's new CEO, and realized the company could save money by laying people off - at the time considered a last resort - creating the modern-day culture of profit-centric layoffs that end thousands of careers. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Welch would become CEO of GE in 1981, and in two years would lay off over 72,000 people, inventing "stack ranking" where the bottom 10% is culled every quarter. Jack Welch is a corporate war criminal responsible for ruining millions of people's lives. wheresyoured.at/tss/

However, Jack Welch's real legacy was in how he manipulated his stock, constantly buying and selling companies, turning GE Credit into a giant unregulated bank, and laying off thousands as a means of meeting analyst targets and boosting its stock price. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Welch took GE from a successful, sustainable company to an ultra-profitable growth-at-all-costs monstrosity that did whatever it had to - Thai auto loans, buying investment banks, outsourcing products, whatever it took to con the market. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Welch's GE taught every single company that they should lay off people to make more money, that product was subordinate to shareholder happiness, and growth was all that matters. GE was a terrible company the street loved because the number always went up. wheresyoured.at/tss/

In Welch's world, a CEO's job isn't to make the company strong, or to make good product, but to find as many ways to make money as possible. His philosophy turned management into a kind of con artistry - and created people like Sam Altman and Mira Murati. wheresyoured.at/tss/

I’m very likely not telling you something you don’t already know but Jack Welch had a lot to do with the abysmal deterioration of Boeing over the last couple of decades.

this was good, ed

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