2022 marked the return to earth of the Overconfident Man

Mark Wilson/WPA Pool/Paul Hennessy/Getty Images; Rachel Mendelson/Insider

Let’s start with a parable. This parable is about a guy that you have never heard of. Ernie Garcia II could easily have made it onto this list. In reality, almost all of the factors were there for this exact scenario to occur. He chose an adventure that we all could learn from.

For a brief moment last year, Ernie wasn’t just a billionaire. He was close to Zuckosphere wealth. The pandemic had slowed down car dealerships and stalled production lines. It also caused a unique chip shortage that caused a massive spike in used car prices. Ernie’s son, Carvana, a cash-inducing car vending machine, was worth a laughable $60 billion. Ernie was blessed with extraordinary and absurd fortune during the COVID era. However, he did not possess one fatal trait that would have made him a laughing stock. Carvana’s stock became the second worst performing stock of America in 2022.

Ernie, unlike the other characters on this list, did not believe or drink his own Kool-Aid. Ernie cashed out and then, the most important part, he stopped talking. He retreated into obscurity, his pride and billionaire status intact.

This is the story about all the chumps that didn’t do the same thing Ernie did and decided to make complete asses of themselves in 2022. The Overconfidence Problem is a result of The Overconfidence man’s excessive use of free money and the incessant notifications from the internet to its most inveterate addicts that their followers and likes are growing by the millions and billions of people, The OverconfidenceMan flew too close the sun only to crash back to Earth as a tired nation logs off and starts leaving the house again.

This list is topped by Elon Musk, who was the ideal platonic example of the self-aggrandizing, self parodying personality type that flourished during Trump’s presidency and reached its peak during the pandemic. While it is a masculine trope in some ways, there were also women who joined the Overconfidence group, including a Supreme Court justice, and a prime minister, whose term was said to have “roughly the shelf life of a head” of lettuce.

Sam Bankman-Fried speaks during a benefit for CARE Children with Special Needs in New York City on June 23, 2022.

10. Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried fled the country just months before Covid began, allegedly in order to avoid being served with an anti-racketeering suit brought by a crypto investor claiming he was manipulating markets. (The suit was dismissed by the plaintiff, who was a crypto ambulance chaser. SBF became Joe Biden’s second largest donor within a year. Biden was already a billionaire by the time of his inauguration. Biden was a billionaire by 2022. He was referred to in the media as J.P. Morgan, Warren Buffett and Charles Koch. SBF casually described his business to Bloomberg Podcast in April as a Ponzi scheme, just as soon as anyone had any idea who he was. Now, the SEC has revealed that his crypto exchange FTX had been extorting customers since its inception in 2019.

The $8 billion grift was fuelled by ADHD medication, gambling addictions, Ben Bernanke and the secular Prosperity Gospel preached by his parents, law professors. Covid stimulus funds, and old cliches about “liberal media” only seem to get more and cheaper. It was, however, largely the result of a dysfunctional system that inculcated all under 35s in the (generally correct) belief that “fake is till you make it” is the only viable way to avoid the death of despair. A deluge of elite posts marveling over how careless/sloppy/brazenly illegal the whole thing turned out to be mostly ignored the underlying issue of the unrelenting ponzification of everything — and whether “society” should maybe attempt to do something about it.

9. Warren Buffett

While 2022 was a difficult year for wealth accumulation through fraud and speculation it was also a year that we were disgusted by the empires built “the old-fashioned way” through labor exploitation. This brings me to Warren Buffett, America’s dark lord in “value” investments.

Elon Musk observed that no billionaire has created a more consistent brand than Buffett. He “has managed to build a great image for him as a kind grandfather,” which may be exaggerating the situation. No, he doesn’t think Buffett should pay more taxes. However, the 0.1% effective tax rate he paid between 2014-2018 makes this belief pretty useless. Buffett, like other successful altruists at SBF, has always planned to compensate his greed by giving away the vast majority his fortune to tax-exempt foundations run by him and other billionaires.

While Buffett and Bill Ackman are now the owners of two of the seven monopoly freight railroad systems, and large stakes in the majority of others, they have made nearly a trillion dollars out of the lives and families of railroad workers. In 2022, Americans learned that these workers are available 24/7/365 because Buffett et al. have rehired more than 50,000 of their colleagues to finance stock buybacks. This scheme is built on loopholes that are not available to just multimillionaires. Freight railroads are protected from worker strikes and competition by federal law. Buffett doesn’t have to pay railroaders or truckers any compensation for the time they waste waiting for overly long trains to arrive. Republicans joined the workers against Oligarch of Omaha by adding seven GOP votes in support of Bernie Sanders’ November effort to grant Buffett’s workers seven sick days. Although it couldn’t gather the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster the story highlighted a unique theme in the chastening for 2022: Outside Capitol Hill, no one is buying the old Calvinist tropes which have allowed and sustained the greatest Overconfidence Men over the centuries. Despite unprecedented polarization, media-addled misanthropy and unprecedented polarization, public approval for labor unions is at an all-time high of 57 years. Only 11% approves of billionaires.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney for 2019. Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images

8. Sean Patrick Maloney

The New York Congressman, a lame duck, was one of the invincible golden kids of Democratic Party leadership that no one can stand. He was elected chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ahead of the midterm elections. This committee determines who is eligible to run for Congress and what their hysterical spam email will say. It also decides how many TV spots they get for ads mocking their opponents for being MAGA wingnuts.

Six vulnerable Democratic members met last November to accuse Maloney, alleging that he had sabotaged their chances of reelection. They refused to endorse any campaign ads or marketing materials that were focused on anything other than the “All January 6 every the time” message that was so successful in the Virginia gubernatorial election. Maloney was more than willing to back down and he advised voters to “eat Chef Boyardee” in order to avoid serious inflation questions. In May, Maloney changed districts to run in a district with a greater number of Democrats, in what the Intercept called “the most selfish district hop in American politics history”. He lost, dear reader.

It gets even better: in December, the New York Times published an incredible story about George Santos (Republican congressman-elect), who had won a blue district south of Maloney’s despite allegedly fabricating every detail about his career, life, and nonexistent animal rescue organization he claimed to have created. Maloney’s DCCC had created an 87-page dossier about Santos. His researchers didn’t catch a single one.

Dan Price, former CEO of Gravity Payments in 2021. Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Photos

7. Dan Price

Whoa. Dan Price, a class-traitor CEO of Gravity Payments, a Seattle credit card processing company, paid each employee at least $70,000 per year. His Twitter feed, which became an indispensable resource for information on corporate greed and worker exploitation, was also called the Giant of Populist Twitter. Posts about delivery apps exploiting independent restaurants were shared, as was a comparison of the 93% increase in hospital CEO salaries to the 3% increase in nurse pay during the same period. There were also cheers for striking John Deere factory workers who demanded “a piece” of the profits while their bosses enjoyed record profits.

Price’s entire personal brand turned out to be a Ponzi scheme for damage control and cover-up. Price hired a ghostwriter to run his social media operations. This was to hide an analysis done by an independent journalist. It suggested that Gravity’s entire business model relied upon defrauding credit card issuers and restaurants. He also may have concocted the $70,000 minimum wages idea to discredit claims that he had embezzled company funds. Price denied all of this and won a 2016 lawsuit brought by his brother that charged Price with overpaying. After the New York Times reported that Price had been accused of sexual and physical abuse, Price quit Gravity. He’ll be facing trial in January for misdemeanor sexual assault of a 26 year-old woman. Price’s reign as America’s IRL Robin Hood for seven years underscored the inability of cancel culture to be a force for good. It couldn’t uncover the sexual predation of a Twitter celebrity leftist — real journalism had done this — so maybe it was only good for degrading dead men and other non-powerful people.

After being elected leader of the UK’s Conservative Party Headquarters, Liz Truss will be leaving on September 5, 2022.

6. Liz Truss

However, Price’s lengthy con was frustrating for seven years, culminating in his cancellation. The 45-day rise to power of Liz Truss (Britain’s “Disruptor In Chief”) with a “planet sized mass of ambition and overconfidence, which catapulted him to the UK prime ministership was alarmingly quick.

Truss, like most Tories, was a conservative politician who held the job. She advocated cutting government worker wages, unions, and taxing banker bonuses. Even the bankers resented her for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. After she fired Lord Butler, an 84-year old civil servant, a group of them drove the pound into freefall. The Economist said that Pruss’ prime ministership had “roughly the shelf life of a heads of lettuce.” This in turn inspired a tabloid and livestream to ask viewers to wager on which one would last longer.

The spectacle provided a bit of humor for fellow Overconfidence Men all over the globe. “Bye @trussliz Congratulations to lettuce,” tweeted Putin’s former stand-in Dmitry Medvedev. Elon Musk couldn’t resist responding, “pretty good trolling tbh.”

5. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, not the global movement

Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza said once, “Black lives don’t matter under capitalism.” They’re like oil or water. In retrospect, the more important question was how Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (the charity Garza and her friend Patrisse Cullors co-founded to expand their viral hashtag) could find a more just path. It was easy to be shocked by the news about improprieties. However, the fact that BLM had a number of grassroots affiliates, which was despite the group having at least $90million in donations, was a powerful reminder of the hollowness of social media activism. Garza, who quit BLMGF many years ago, criticized the group for too much concern with online influencers, and too little about “knocking at doors” or “building a base.”

New York Magazine exposed Cullors’ group as a hipster portfolio of real estate with over a million followers on Twitter in January. Cullors resisted the temptation to blame bad press for her house-buying spree in a right-wing plot. Another bombshell was revealed in April: BLM had made secret real estate transactions no one knew about. This included a Malibu mansion measuring 6,500 square feet and costing $6 million. It was not intended to host parties but Cullors.

Brett Favre, a former NFL quarterback, spoke at the NFL Hall of Fame Inshrinement Ceremony in 2016. Joe Robbins/Getty images

4. Brett Favre

Just two days after the news about the “BLM influencer house” broke, Mississippi Today ran an explosive series on the $77 million theft of another fund meant to aid the poor and vulnerable. It featured, among other assholes like Brett Favre, a decorated former NFL quarterback. Favre claims he was being “smeared” because he didn’t know the purpose of the block grant that he used to build a stadium to support his daughter’s college volleyball team. The state sued Favre and 38 others in an effort to recover the money.

The BLM scandal had highlighted the danger of social media virtue signaling being confused with real life progress. But the Favre saga, which was brimming with emoticon-strewn text between Favre and the governor, Favre, his custodian for the Mississippi state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and Favre, and a pharmabro business partner he helps secure welfare funds, offered a dark glimpse into the depraved society that has foresworn to even pretending to be caring for the weak and vulnerable. Favre asked the governor in one exchange if he knew anyone who could help with the stadium’s unfinished locker rooms — similar to “the prison industry”, which, after all, imprisons a larger portion of the Mississippi population than any other country or state.

Outside the US Supreme Court, Washington, DC, a bobblehead of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen. This was shortly after her death in 2020.

3. RBG

It was somewhat surprising and not completely rational when the shock of Dobbs finally blew the sails out of the stubbornly high stock price of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Her personal brand had previously sustained a small industry of T-shirts, tote bags and craft gins, as well as a downtown Washington DC hotel.

RBG’s 2020 death was greeted like Queen Elizabeth’s by the Pussyhat set. It seemed as though the grave ramifications on the reproductive organs referred to by the headwear weren’t immediately frighteningly obvious. One Stanford law professor said that RBG gave her generation the “right to be a lawyer, the ability to be a doctor and the right to attend elite colleges or any college” and “everything else that followed.” Dobbs was right to point out RBG’s exaggerated sense of irreplaceability. Or was it invincibility. Our uterine sovereignty had been taken away. The frail octogenarian was first diagnosed with pancreatic carcinoma in 2009, one year after Obama took office. This was back when Democratic control over the Senate meant that he could quickly appoint any successor. RBG wanted her successor to be a female president, as she was high on her Girlboss supply. We got Donald Trump instead, and he was able to change the balance of power on the court.

The gushing Stanford professor said it best: “She gambled on the rights of my daughters and my granddaughter.” Unfortunately, that is her legacy. It is also the legacy the upper middle class believes that affluent women careerism somehow makes a righteous project. But maybe that is just her hubris that makes them truly “Notorious.”

2. Vladimir Putin

Ten months into Vladimir Putin’s diabolical Ukraine War, Anton Troianovski, New York Times Moscow Bureau chief, revealed something remarkable about its origins: The Russian president did not seem to have spoken about it to anyone. No one believes that Putin ever had “one meeting prior to the invasion where the wisdom to go to war was discussed openly,” according to the scores of military commanders, experts, and former confidantes he spoke to about the war. He had avoided most meetings during the pandemic and kept his social circle small to a “pod” of close friends. Troianovski stated that it was like a social media algorithm. Loyalists “read his mood and start to give him the kind of information they believe he needs.” In other words, a physical version of a Boomer’s social media feed had helped to steer one of the last true Machiavellians in geopolitics to commit a horrific, pointless human sacrifice against Ukraine and his people.

2022 Putin was more insane than any Russiagate addicts had ever dreamed. Realists looked dumb because he took them at their word that he wasn’t interested in reuniting Soviet empire. The hawks looked dumb when he warned us that the first few months would not be easy. Putin’s monstrous war caused a break from the trainwreck solipsism of Elon Musk. He polled his followers about his (frankly, reasonable!) proposal for a possible peace deal on Twitter in October, a few weeks before he unleashed his kamikaze attack on the social media platform.

Elon Musk speaks at 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition, March 2020.Win McNamee/Getty Images

1. Elon Musk

It is strange to remember what Elon Musk used to look like. He was a billionaire, which is a net benefit for an American society that has been cursed. In fact, SpaceX was returning from its first manned mission to the International Space Station in “delightfully dull” glory in the weeks prior to Musk taking control of Twitter. This was the end to an embarrassing 11 year period in which NASA had to pay Russia $80million per person to transport astronauts to the station. He then succumbed to a five-alarm social media addiction and offered to pay $44billion, or 38% more than its market capital, to purchase Twitter. Which: If you have 125 millions followers, who buys the cow?

Elon Musk, his brain apparently damaged by the insular cesspool that he bought, found a staggering array of ways to make a mess of himself over the next month. He lied to the advertisers on Twitter, laid off thousands of employees, forgo the 60-day notice required by federal law, and ran roughshod over basic notions about free speech he claimed to be trying to restore. He began charging $8 per month for “verification” but did not delegate the responsibility of verifying the identities of anyone, such as someone who wanted to pretend to be Eli Lilly for a few hours. He reinstated hatespeeching wingnut accounts and suspended accounts that posted his private jet’s location, citing an alleged confrontation with a “stalker”, whose details he appears to have liberally manipulated. It was enough to alarm the NASA Administrator that he called his SpaceX contacts to find out if there were any concerns. It was unlikely that it was: Musk’s companies are capable of making rockets, cars and solar energy systems despite their infantile leader and overconfidence.

Business Insider has the original article.
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By: insider@insider.com (Maureen Tkacik)
Title: 2022 was the year the Overconfidence Man fell back to earth
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/2022-the-year-the-overconfidence-man-fell-back-to-earth-2022-12
Published Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2022 13:00:00 +0000