The Hollow Men
American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.
By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.
These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.
In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.
Today, we have severed that link.
We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.
If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.
This looting starts in the boardroom.
We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.
Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.
And for what?
Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.
They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.
And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?
We get the Delegation Economy.
When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.
This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.
They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.
While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.
If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.
The time for polite governance is over.
If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.
My dad battled prostate cancer, and UnitedHealthcare denied him experimental treatments that might have saved his life. I don’t have sympathy for that CEO because there was none for my father, who fought to the very end and lost his battle with cancer. Fuck that CEO
Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare who stole about $70k a year off me back in the states and rejected like half of my fraking claims, has thankfully died today.
Hopefully some more scummy medical insurance CEOs are next!
$GME up $2 (almost 8%) to nearly $30 (a month ago it was at $21). No news today, but pretty significant call option activity has appeared to drive some of this move over the past month. Is RK going to provide a YOLO update soon?
It is painful to have been so wrong about the potential for reform over the last four years. But the fight continues, and we will continue to marshal all of our resources to simplify markets, increase competition and move trading on to lit markets.
I was wrong to think that the SEC had the institutional ability to take on the market makers. One of the staff at the SEC told me SIFMA (the broker-dealer association) practically has an office at the SEC. Regulatory capture is a fundamental obstacle to any change at all.
When he came in to the office, he identified all of the problems with markets that we did. He came out with strong proposals that quantified the damage to markets from unchecked internalization and uncompetitive market making. And then nothing happened.
Gary Gensler announced that he is resigning as of Nov 18. He came in with big promises of reform and major changes - I was very optimistic on his term. That said, it's disappointing that almost none of the big changes happened, and we're left pretty much where we started.
Citron employee Ryan Choi was sued by the SEC for securities fraud. Choi assisted Andrew Left in drafting tweets for Citron Research.
The SEC announced that Ryan Choi has agreed to pay over $1.8 million to settle charges for negligently defrauding Citron Research readers through tweets.
As we’ve previously reported, many short sellers are anxious, unsure of when the SEC will take action, according to our sources.
Follow InvestorTurf for exclusive information you won’t find anywhere else!