9 ms·
I am kind of surprised billionaires and CEOs don't order each others' killings more often. I was doing homework one night and the building next door's top 2 fl
by rdtsc 8y ago
I am kind of surprised billionaires and CEOs don't order each others' killings more often.
I was doing homework one night and the building next door's top 2 floors were blown up because some banker had a hit placed on his head. So perhaps I have pretty low expectations on what powerful people without morals can do.
- r00fus 8y agoMaybe because it was harder to bypass local laws before? Untraceable money (crypto) is great way to "incentivize" removal of one of your rivals.
- nostromo 8y agoIs the only thing holding you back from murder lack of funds? If not, why do you think billionaires are any different?
- chottocharaii 8y agoHe probably assumes becoming mega rich requires a certain form of sociopathy that ditinguishes the group from the rest of us.
- tuesdayrain 8y agoIf I had near infinite funding + the opportunity to be above the law, I'd definitely be tempted to act as some sort of vigilante.
- newsbinator 8y agoBill Gates realized he could save a lot more kids from the heartache of losing their parents by curing malaria in millions permanently, instead of stopping the Joker from robbing individuals a few nights a week.
- hnaccy 8y agoPresumably a billionaire would be better suited to both get away with and profit from such a murder.
- geomark 8y agoIn places where the rule of law is weak and corruption is rampant it is easy to literally get away with murder just by paying off the police. But that doesn't protect you from retribution from associates of the people you had killed. You have to either wipe out the entire enemy tribe, or make it look like a very convincing accident, or very convincingly pin it on someone else. Sometimes you combine those with the assistance of the corrupt police.
- forkLding 8y agoLikely in societies with more corruption and low labour costs, using gangsters as intimidation and to assassinate your opponents is more frequent. Happened in China, underground gangsters would phone up rich local businessmen asking if they needed their services. As well, debt collection agencies in certain countries are opaque enough that their practices border on near-criminal.
- baddox 8y agoIf the only thing holding you back from murder is a lack of funds, you are probably more likely than average to become a billionaire.
- newsbinator 8y agoIf television is to be believed, detective work is discovering means, motive and opportunity. By that measure, billionaires are in any given instant 2/3rds of the way there.
- drb91 8y agoLarge companies and those who run them can be both ruthless and amoral. I think it’s a mistake to think the average person’s intuition would apply here.
- mywittyname 8y agoThis is it. If you tell a typical senior executive at a company that their actions will lead to the death of 10 million people, their primary concern will be if the company will still make money one the deal, then how they can hide their actions from regulators in order to maximize their return. You might think they would consider whether or not they'd be jailed, but that thought never crosses their mind.
- jjeaff 8y agoI disagree. Very, very few people, CEOs included have that little disregard for human life. Most CEOs aren't that different from you or I.
- drb91 8y agoFWIW I agree, but the CEOs that do fit the mold of ruthless and amoral are extraordinarily well suited for large scale business.
- mywittyname 8y agoI've seen enough evidence of senior leadership of major companies disregarding human life. Car manufactures are particularly bad in this respect, lots of major safety issues in vehicles wouldn't be fixed if not for regulators, since wrongful death lawsuits are cheaper than fixing the issue. You can look at cigarettes companies for trying to deflect from medical evidence that they cause cancer. Similarly with asbestos and black lung. There's so much evidence that senior leadership at large companies are more than willing to let people die rather than pay out. Down vote me all you want, but there's plenty of evidence to convince me.
- cm2187 8y agoBeside moral grounds which you seem to give people little credit for, highly educated people who have been financially successful know how to make money by legal means. The risk benefit ratio is just not worth it particularly in a western country where the chances of getting away with murder are pretty slim (there aren’t many unsolved high profile murders).
- zawerf 8y agoIt is indeed surprising because the profit motive is there and it is not limited to just rival billionaires. Any random guy with enough capital can short the company stock and then place a hit on the CEO. I would expect stuff like that to happen super often but I don't think I have even heard of one real case like this.
- kasey_junk 8y agoCan you explain that trade precisely? Like with example orders/prices? I’d also be curious about how one gets reliable hitmen & deniability and the like.
- stevewodil 8y agoExplain what trade? If the CEO dies the stock will go down due to the uncertainty of the future for the company.
- kasey_junk 8y agoRight. Give me literally the orders you put in, with a timeline for the hit. Then explain the price points, liquid capital & risk stats you need to make a particular profit. This is basic stuff for actual short sell trades so I presume it is easy to produce in the “hit a CEO” fund space.
- jjoonathan 8y agoI'm no trader, so I couldn't confidently craft a good strategy to exploit an opportunity even if there was a good one. How about you explain why you don't expect this to be workable instead?
- kasey_junk 8y agoSure. The first rule is that no trade is a good one without specific entrance & exit points. Saying “I can predict a share will go up/down” independent of that specificity & risk profile is a classic example of someone who isn’t realistic in their trading behavior. The second rule is that shorting is much much harder to get right than going long. Small procedural errors or day long mistimes of the market turn trades unprofitable. Third, the market for this trade is exceptionally non-desperate people. If you have the money to make this trade happen you have virtually risk free access to trades that keep you fat & happy. Finally, the riskiest part of this trade is the most hand wavy “hit a ceo” is not a thing I can get a counter party to hedge. It’s quite literally impossible for the vast majority market participants. Even before we talk about the very real likelihood of going to jail let’s talk about the risk of not being successful. See above about short timing. All told the answer to “why don’t rich guys hit other rich guys to short their assets” can easily boil down to “cause that’s stupid”
- Consultant32452 8y agoMAD. It's the same reason political leaders aren't assassinating each other all the time. If you go around assassinating other billionaires, there's a fair chance you'll get assassinated in response by others.
- dragonwriter 8y agoMoreover, if you normalize assassinating billionaires, it's not just other billionaires you need to look out for.
- bilbo0s 8y ago>I was doing homework one night and the building next door's top 2 floors were blown up because some banker had a hit placed on his head... Wait. What? Did this really happen somewhere? (Sorry for the question if it's stupid, I just was unaware of all of this.)
- onetimemanytime 8y agoOf course it happens, less in USA and only because FBI will send 500 agents to find the killer. Killing a billionaire or a politician it's hard and risky but that only increases the price. Boom or bust
- bilbo0s 8y agoYeah, but where did this happen? I mean, what city? and when? I'd just like to read about what happened.
- hourislate 8y agoI would guess Russia.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoAluminum wars https://www.google.com/search?q=+Aluminium+Wars https://www.google.com/search?q=+Aluminium+Wars Almost certain that there's a market: want X killed? It will cost you this much.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoOne https://www.reuters.com/article/us-albania-banks-shooting-idUSKBN0F115720140626 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-albania-banks-shooting-id...
- rdtsc 8y agoNot gonna say the exact place and city not sure it matters. But seeing people's couches, tables, kitchens, toys all exposed via a big hole in the building was pretty surreal and kind of hard to forget. Pretty sure I didn't dream that, as you seem to be wondering. The amazing thing is nobody got killed, many people in the surrounding apartment were lucky, or not home. Even the banker was not killed.
- kijin 8y agoA billionaire has a lot to lose if he ever gets caught. Why risk even a small chance of spending the rest of your life in prison with the common criminals you detest so much? Unless the stakes are extremely high, it's better to forget about the few tens of millions you didn't make and just chill in your yacht. Meanwhile, the modern legal system offers a much better way to destroy your rivals, take their money, and publicly humiliate them if that's what your ego demands. It suits a billionaire's style to send lawyers, not hitmen.
- bitexploder 8y agoA billionaire has as much to lose as almost anyone else. You don’t perceive wealth as “more to lose”.
- topmonk 8y agoA guy working for McDonalds and living in a small run down apartment in a bad neighborhood definitely has less to lose by going to prison then a billionaire.
- bitexploder 8y agoI think this takes a narrow materialistic view of things. People don’t suddenly get any happier when they have billions of dollars. At the very bottom, sure, there is something there. But the average HN reader and poster has as much to lose as any billionaire or millionaire in the abstract. Freedom is an extremely undervalued asset.
- jjeaff 8y agoYes, they do. Poverty creates desperation. They also have less to gain. Most any billionaire likely understands that earning a few more billion will not change their life that much.
- bitexploder 8y agoI can’t disagree about people living at or below poverty line, even from the materialistic view. The average HN reader, though? Philosophically, I believe what I wrote is generally true. Having a bunch of money isn’t going to change how happy someone is. You aren’t any freer. You are still bound by the human condition like everyone else.
- corey_moncure 8y agoOnce you're a billionaire, maybe the Nash equilibrium suggests that you don't go too far to upset the cart for other billionaires. If I ever become one, I'll make sure to come back to this post and let you know what's up.
- jungler 8y agoMy observation is that elites tend towards keeping around multiple forms of mutual blackmail in their pockets so that they stay in a cease-fire arrangement: e.g. all the conspiracy/cult stories where everyone is made an equal participant in some crime or disturbing ritual. This allows them to avoid simply killing each other(too risky) while still allowing credible threats to power, and gatekeeping contenders who won't play by the same rules. "Civil" society is an expression that alludes to making that ruleset ethically responsible and cooling down the competition. It's tested constantly by anyone who wants to get ahead. The behavior is everywhere once you look: If you have a poorly regulated sport, match fixing, cheating, dangerous play, and exclusionary collusion all become rampant. If you have a labor force with few protections and high competition, they start to climb over each other to pump up their image. And when organized crime structures break down, violence erupts. Democratic structures, coalition-building, collective bargaining, and other tactics that negotiate rights and protections solve most of these issues temporarily, at least until a majority are satisfied enough to stop participating, by which time someone ambitious will have found a new angle for changing the rules. If it feels like this era is more unstable or more violent, it's because there are some very broad changes hitting. Disruption worked.
- majos 8y agoThis is your observation about elites, or your theory? Saying that you've regularly observed elites keeping blackmail on each other in their pockets seems...deserving of elaboration.
- jungler 8y agoWell, if I had observed all of it, I would be implicated, wouldn't I? Most of the material comes second-hand. It's not hard to open up a biography of a powerful figure and dissect it.
- hodgesrm 8y agoIt seems more likely that at certain times elites have found they have more in common with each other than the lower classes even across religious or ethnic boundaries. This was certainly true for at least part of the Middle Ages. As Saladin famously said to Guy of Lusignan, "kings do not kill kings." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_of_Lusignan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_of_Lusignan
- WalterBright 8y agoProbably because they are not the comic book villains that Hollywood routinely portrays them as.
- oh_sigh 8y agoBillionaires might be too big at that point. I think you'd be more likely to find hits taken out on the regional couple dozen millionaire businessmen.
- jacquesm 8y ago> I was doing homework one night and the building next door's top 2 floors were blown up because some banker had a hit placed on his head. Wow. What country was that in?
- dhnsmakala 8y agoOn the other side of this, I am surprised that people kill each other at all.
- kopo 8y agoerm...Osama was rich. His target was Wall St.
- dig1 8y agoRisk management :) It is more effective to burn someone to the ground through legal system (layers, tax reports) than risk everything using something illegal. This is how large corporations cleans up competitors - either they buy you for the price they set or slowly destroy you through lawsuits.