The Case for Better Workwear
There was a time when running away with a lot of other people’s money took a little decorum. You needed to put on a suit in the morning, go down to wall street and put in the hard yards to swindle an old lady out of her retirement money.
Look at Bernie Madoff, a true gentleman bandit. Responsible for perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history, Madoff made off with about $20 billion and ruined thousands of peoples lives. He put on his white shirt, black tie, and blazer and he got to work. Truly inspirational. For the pleasure of it, he got sentenced to 150 years in prison, of which he only served 12 before he escaped straight to hell.
Back in my day, if you wanted to steal millions, or even billions of dollars, you had to AT LEAST cosplay as Steve Jobs to ease the wallets of investors into a false sense of security. Black turtlenecks scream trustworthiness, that’s why every Bond villain wears them. Perhaps the best example of this working a treat was kid wonder, Elizabeth Holmes, getting every big name investor involved in her magic blood sampling devices. The devices were supposed to do almost every test under the sun in almost no time at all, but the main mechanisms that made them work was smoke, mirrors, and 150 watt lies. In November, she was sentenced to 135 months in prison for defrauding investors of “several hundreds of millions of dollars”.
Now, in today’s era of the 2020’s, all pretence is gone. Fashion sense is plummeting as fast as [current trendy crypto coin here]. Sam Bankman-Fried put a bow on a rocky year for crypto when suddenly all the money disappeared from his popular exchange FTX. He described this in a phone call to his parents as a “Liquidity Issue”. I’d have liquidity issues as well if I, say for example, secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds into another one of my companies and then somehow disappeared a billion or two of that in the process. That didn’t happen to Bankman-Fried though, “We didn’t secretly transfer,” he said. “We had confusing internal labelling and misread it.” Confusing internal labelling, it gets you every time. But this isn’t the real problem. The real problem is his outfit. Jeans, grubby T-shirt, a hoodie, a school backpack. Truly the garb of an avant garde Steven Hawking grade bad boy intellectual. This is the outfit of the modern businessman wanting to lend himself the air of mystique, and I abhor it. Mostly because it’s also my daily uniform. I don’t want to be tripping over investors who think I’m the next unicorn wunderkind while trying to avoid dropping kebab crumbs into my keyboard.
But if you would like to give me a lot of money, consider my latest venture: a new crypto currency used for burning real cash. If you care about inflation, then you’d get involved. Simply give me all your money and I promise that it will stay out of circulation forever. I’ll give it a nice little summer home in the Bahamas. In return, you get what I call BurnCoin which is pegged to the value of its own popularity.
Thankyou, this was my TedX talk.