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Oh, let's not pat Fred Smith on the back for his grit and determination here. FedEx was already shafting their pilots for months before this. Bounced paychecks

Oh, let's not pat Fred Smith on the back for his grit and determination here. FedEx was already shafting their pilots for months before this. Bounced paychecks, pilots paying for jet fuel on personal credit cards, and more. If I was a pilot there, I'd have said "Fuck you, Fred", even though he won. How sociopathic do you have to be to gamble company money (sorry, isn't that a felony?) while bouncing paychecks? And yet you'll still have people here applauding your hustler mentality, apparently.

Dylan16807 3y ago
> FedEx was already shafting their pilots for months before this. Bounced paychecks, pilots paying for jet fuel on personal credit cards, and more. This is bad. > How sociopathic do you have to be to gamble company money (sorry, isn't that a felony?) while bouncing paychecks? It sounds like he was about to bounce a lot more paychecks. Going all or nothing instead isn't something I would call sociopathic. What makes you call it that? Normally "gambling company money" implies embezzlement, which is not what happened here.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > Normally "gambling company money" implies embezzlement, which is not what happened here. Huh, what? "In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill." "Embezzlement is the fraudulent taking of property by someone to whom it was entrusted, usually involving theft from a business or employer." I mean I suppose you could try to make some argument that it was an officially sanctioned company act, but that's definitely some post facto rationalization. "’The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000.’ I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000-- how could you do that?’ He shrugged his shoulders" Sounds both unsanctioned and sociopathic to me. And not Fred's first or last brush with financial malfeasance, indicted for forgery over a $2 million loan from his family's trust fund. I'm inclined to think 'selfish' much more than 'plucky startup founder'.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Embezzlement as in, you bet the money and if it succeeds you pocket the excess. Or that you already stole money and you're desperately gambling company money to make it back and hide the theft. This is not embezzlement. It's reckless, not theft. > Sounds both unsanctioned and sociopathic to me. Very unsanctioned, but I don't see how you get sociopathic from that quote. Please explain what's sociopathic about it like I'm stupid. The lack of funding is already there. This act shifts the odds but doesn't really make them worse. And if the company doesn't run out of money that seems like a good thing. The first quote I saw here was that payroll was going to fail if he didn't do this. I don't think a guarantee of only paying half the employees is better than a 50% chance of paying everyone or paying no one, for example. If this wasn't affecting payroll then sociopathy is even less of a worry. Only if this was going to risk payroll with no benefit to payroll do I see a serious moral issue.
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      How is this not theft? He took company funds and gambled them. That he won and was able to replace them is immaterial. Martin Shkreli was convicted for misusing company funds even though he made his investors money. It's not "not theft" because you can or do put the money back. I can't understand how you can't see that. That $5,000 ($40,000 in today's money) might not have gone very far, but you are very eager to whitewash it because he ended up winning on his gamble, and FedEx has gone on to success. He easily could have lost that bet, and that money could have reimbursed credit card bills for his employees. How that isn't reckless and malfeasance, I don't understand. "We're screwed. I can use the last of this money to try to do something right, or fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!" isn't leadership.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        Okay, I don't want to argue about the exact semantics of the word theft and what kinds of "misuse of funds" it includes. Nothing went in his pocket; it wasn't embezzlement. And Shkreli was moving money between companies and lying to investors, neither of which is relevant here. More importantly, none of that explains what is sociopathic here. > He easily could have lost that bet, and that money could have reimbursed credit card bills for his employees. But would it have been used that way? Or would it have kept propping the company up for a bit longer until total collapse? > How that isn't reckless and malfeasance, I don't understand. "We're screwed. I can use the last of this money to try to do something right, or fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!" isn't leadership. I never said it wasn't reckless. But he got the business out of being screwed. If he failed, the business would have gone from screwed to... also screwed. What "do something right" do you have in mind that was so important it becomes sociopathic if he doesn't do it? And it has to be something that would have happened if he didn't gamble, but wouldn't have happened if he lost. In other words, if your claim is right then there has to be a big human-impacting difference between the "he does nothing" outcome and the "he loses the gamble" outcome. And I'm not really seeing that difference. If both scenarios involve total shutdown and the only difference is a few days, that ain't it.

Dylan16807 3y ago

> FedEx was already shafting their pilots for months before this. Bounced paychecks, pilots paying for jet fuel on personal credit cards, and more. This is bad. > How sociopathic do you have to be to gamble company money (sorry, isn't that a felony?) while bouncing paychecks? It sounds like he was about to bounce a lot more paychecks. Going all or nothing instead isn't something I would call sociopathic. What makes you call it that? Normally "gambling company money" implies embezzlement, which is not what happened here.

FireBeyond 3y ago
> Normally "gambling company money" implies embezzlement, which is not what happened here. Huh, what? "In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill." "Embezzlement is the fraudulent taking of property by someone to whom it was entrusted, usually involving theft from a business or employer." I mean I suppose you could try to make some argument that it was an officially sanctioned company act, but that's definitely some post facto rationalization. "’The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000.’ I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000-- how could you do that?’ He shrugged his shoulders" Sounds both unsanctioned and sociopathic to me. And not Fred's first or last brush with financial malfeasance, indicted for forgery over a $2 million loan from his family's trust fund. I'm inclined to think 'selfish' much more than 'plucky startup founder'.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Embezzlement as in, you bet the money and if it succeeds you pocket the excess. Or that you already stole money and you're desperately gambling company money to make it back and hide the theft. This is not embezzlement. It's reckless, not theft. > Sounds both unsanctioned and sociopathic to me. Very unsanctioned, but I don't see how you get sociopathic from that quote. Please explain what's sociopathic about it like I'm stupid. The lack of funding is already there. This act shifts the odds but doesn't really make them worse. And if the company doesn't run out of money that seems like a good thing. The first quote I saw here was that payroll was going to fail if he didn't do this. I don't think a guarantee of only paying half the employees is better than a 50% chance of paying everyone or paying no one, for example. If this wasn't affecting payroll then sociopathy is even less of a worry. Only if this was going to risk payroll with no benefit to payroll do I see a serious moral issue.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    How is this not theft? He took company funds and gambled them. That he won and was able to replace them is immaterial. Martin Shkreli was convicted for misusing company funds even though he made his investors money. It's not "not theft" because you can or do put the money back. I can't understand how you can't see that. That $5,000 ($40,000 in today's money) might not have gone very far, but you are very eager to whitewash it because he ended up winning on his gamble, and FedEx has gone on to success. He easily could have lost that bet, and that money could have reimbursed credit card bills for his employees. How that isn't reckless and malfeasance, I don't understand. "We're screwed. I can use the last of this money to try to do something right, or fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!" isn't leadership.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Okay, I don't want to argue about the exact semantics of the word theft and what kinds of "misuse of funds" it includes. Nothing went in his pocket; it wasn't embezzlement. And Shkreli was moving money between companies and lying to investors, neither of which is relevant here. More importantly, none of that explains what is sociopathic here. > He easily could have lost that bet, and that money could have reimbursed credit card bills for his employees. But would it have been used that way? Or would it have kept propping the company up for a bit longer until total collapse? > How that isn't reckless and malfeasance, I don't understand. "We're screwed. I can use the last of this money to try to do something right, or fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!" isn't leadership. I never said it wasn't reckless. But he got the business out of being screwed. If he failed, the business would have gone from screwed to... also screwed. What "do something right" do you have in mind that was so important it becomes sociopathic if he doesn't do it? And it has to be something that would have happened if he didn't gamble, but wouldn't have happened if he lost. In other words, if your claim is right then there has to be a big human-impacting difference between the "he does nothing" outcome and the "he loses the gamble" outcome. And I'm not really seeing that difference. If both scenarios involve total shutdown and the only difference is a few days, that ain't it.