alt Hacker NewsCheating is never cool. It’s awful.
But the knee jerk maximum-cancel for any offense is a problem. CEOs are not saints. Very few people are. If our standard for corporate leadership is not just to be good at business but also to be above reproach personally… who’s left?
It’s an unfortunate fact that humans are generally fallible and imperfect. Jack Welch cheated on his wife. Many other execs have. It sucks, but the world would not be better if there were a career death penalty for doing so.
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Career death penalty is a bit hyperbolic, no?
Nobody is saying he can't retain most/all of hi billions and do something else. But, leading a multi-billion dollar business should come with some minimum expectation of morality. If for nothing else because being an immoral turd opens you to extortion.
I really don't get the sentiment that flying around the world to cavort with a Chinese spy is ok-ish. That's insane.
Moral degeneracy from the top down. At least in the past there was some appearance of statesmanship.
I think I'm with ModernMech on this one. It's too easy, I think, to focus on the idea of CEOs being forced to resign as a "career death penalty" to the degree that we lose sight of how well-off the people we're talking about are. Jensen Huang's wealth is estimated at over $150 billion dollars. That's more than most corporations in America. If he never worked another day in his life, never earned another cent of interest on investments, lived to be 100, and spent $5M per day for the rest of his life, he would die being worth over $80B. I understand "death penalty" is metaphorical, that he probably wants to work, yadda yadda yadda, but goddamn, let's not pretend that is an actual penalty.
(For that matter, let's not pretend that if he resigned now he wouldn't be able to immediately pick up work again if he wanted to. Because, to reiterate, he is worth over $150 billion dollars. He could start a new company. He could start ten new companies. He could buy an island and build a secret underwater volcano lair to start a new career as a Bond villain. Assuming he doesn't have a secret underwater volcano lair already, of course.)
> CEOs are not saints.
I concur, but...
> Jack Welch
You might have picked a better example than the guy who systematically hollowed out the American institution that was GE by evangelizing cartoonishly corporatist short-term MBA culture then leaving when the bill came due and washing his hands of that destructive movement that he propelled to the forefront of American business. There are tons of great leaders who did hurtful things in their private lives. I don't think that Jack Welch is exemplary of that first criterion (unless you count a legacy of financial engineering and grinding employees into pulp as leadership).
> maximum-cancel for any offense
They aren't saying "maximum cancel", they're just saying maybe this guy shouldn't be running one of the most consequential companies in the world when he's more interested in dopamine farming.
At the end of the day, asking a billionaire to resign his role, so he can sail off into the sunset on his yacht and have all the affairs he wants for the rest of his days isn't really on any scale of punishment or cancelling I'm familiar with.
Somehow we live in a world where with great power comes no responsibility or accountability, and it's quickly becoming too big of a problem to handle.
> Jack Welch cheated on his wife. Many other execs have
Along with a lot of people who are not executives, and people who were not executives at the time and went on to become executives. Like it or not cheating is relatively common, our species is not strictly monogamous and the evidence can be found in male anatomy (read about it if you are interested, particularly in comparison to Chimpanzee and Gorilla anatomy).
I am not saying this as a defense of cheating; it is just a fact that people cheat on their spouses, regardless of the moral implications or how "never cool" it is.