Calling The "Visionaries" In And Out Of The Education World What Many Of Them Truly Are - Sociopaths

Tony Schwartz in the NY Times on Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk:

The three leaders are arguably the most extraordinary business visionaries of our times. Each of them has introduced unique products that changed – or in Mr. Musk’s case, have huge potential to change – the way we live.

...

What disheartens me is how little care and appreciation any of them give (or in Mr. Jobs’s case, gave) to hard-working and loyal employees, and how unnecessarily cruel and demeaning they could be to the people who helped make their dreams come true.

...

Given the extraordinary success of these men, the obvious question is whether being relentlessly hard on people, and even cruel, may get them to perform better.

Like their biographers, I think the answer is no. Our research at the Energy Project has shown that the more employees feel their needs are being met at work – above all, for respect and appreciation – the better they perform.

Here's how these three "visionary" leaders treated their employees and/or others:

As Mr. Isaacson writes of Mr. Jobs: “Nasty was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him.”

...

Mr. Jobs drove around without a license on his car, and he regularly parked in spaces reserved for the handicapped. As Mr. Ive said of his attitude, “I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him.”

Amazon employees collected examples of Mr. Bezos’s most eviscerating put-downs, including, “Are you lazy or just incompetent?” “Why are you wasting my life?” and “I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”

When Mr. Musk’s loyal executive assistant of 12 years asked for a significant raise, he told her to take a two-week vacation while he thought about it. When she returned, he told her the relationship wasn’t going to work anymore. According to Mr. Vance, they haven’t spoken since.

And of course all of this nastiness, this "I am the most special person on the planet and you will treat me as such!" stems from the egocentric belief these men had or have of their own so-called genius.

But Schwartz thinks there's another reason Jobs, Bezos and Musk act or acted so badly - out of fear:

People like these three visionaries deeply crave control. Each of them was far more likely to act out suddenly and behave poorly when he wasn’t getting exactly what he wanted — when he felt that others were failing to live up to his standards.

All three invested endless hours and energy in building and running their businesses — and far less in anything else, including taking care of the people who worked for them or even understanding what doing so might look like. To a large extent, people were simply a means to an end.

I understand what it is like to have one’s self entirely tied up with external success. No amount is ever quite enough. To a large extent, for these men, employees are simply a means to an end.

If you're a teacher these days, you know some of the drill that the people who work or worked for Jobs, Bezos and Musk know because some of the same personality types have been given the power to run school systems and schools themselves.

In the "visions" of the corporate education reformers, students are seen as "products," teachers are seen as a means to an end, control is the most sought-after goal and the only thing that truly matters is imposing an agenda and rigging the data to make it look successful.

Many education leaders these days are little versions of Bezos, Jobs and Musk - always without the "genius" or "vision," of course, though some education leaders think they have it - see Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Cami Anderson, et al. for the same delusional arrogance and egocentric patterns that Bezos, Jobs and Musk displayed.

But it doesn't really matter whether the Kleins and Rhees of the world have the "genius" or "vision" of Bezos or Jobs or not because a truly successful leader shouldn't be treating people like "products" or a "means to an end," a truly successful leader shouldn't be so obsessed with control and fear that they run roughshod over everybody and everything.

Schwartz concludes:

The question their management style raises is not whether being tough, harsh and relentlessly demanding gets people to work better. Of course it doesn’t, and certainly not sustainably. Can anyone truly doubt that people are more productive in workplaces that help them to be healthier and happier?

The more apt question is how much more these men could have enhanced thousands of people’s lives – and perhaps made them even more successful — if they had invested as much in taking care of them as they did in conceiving great products.

“Try not to become a man of success,” Albert Einstein once said, “but rather a man of value.”

It is time we stop fetishizing so-called corporate geniuses like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and other so-called "visionaries" (you can add many others to the list - Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates come immediately to mind) and call them exactly what they are - sociopaths who in the end do a lot more harm than good.

The same goes for the little versions in education - the Kleins, the Rhees, et al. - who for years have lived on the press of their "visions" and "genius" (think the TIME cover with Rhee on it holding the broom.)

But remember, you can't decry the sociopathology of the Kleins and Rhees of the education world while praising the "genius" and "vision" of sociopaths like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates.

Gates is an easy one for people in the ed world to despise - his foundation's work to destroy public schools makes that an easy thing.

But Steve Jobs still gets fetishized by some for his "genius" and "vision".

Truly his "vision" was "@#$% you, I get my way or I destroy you!"

And that's the kind of vision we can do without these days - in or out of education.

For another example, see one Andrew Cuomo in Albany.

The More Money These Philanthropists "Give Away," The Richer They Get

In case you missed this news:

NEW YORK: Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the wealthiest living US entrepreneur, with an estimated net worth of $80.2 billion, according to Wealth-X.

The list of 10 billionaires was dominated by "technopreneurs" as six of them made their fortunes from technology or technology-related businesses, including Gates, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The 10 entrepreneurs are collectively worth $407.4 billion, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total ultra-rich wealth in America, according to Wealth-X, the global wealth intelligence and prospecting firm headquartered in Singapore. The combined market capitalisation of these 10 individuals' primary companies is $1.7 trillion, which means they have created wealth that's four times what they themselves are worth.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett, who at 83 is also the oldest person on the list, was ranked second with an estimated wealth of $64.2 billion.

 Buffett was followed by Ellison of Oracle with a net worth of $48.2 billion and businessman and Bloomberg LP founder Michael Bloomberg with $33.7 billion.

Sheldon Adelson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, was ranked fifth with a net worth of $32.8 billion, while Google's Larry Page was placed sixth with a net worth of $31.3 billion.

 Zuckerberg, 30, is the youngest person on the list and was placed seventh with a net worth of $30.9 billion, followed by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com (8th, $30.5 billion); Google's Sergey Brin (9th, $30.1 billion) and Carl Icahn (10th, $25.5 billion).

All the self-made entrepreneurs on the list are active in the world of philanthropy, and six of them have joined the Giving Pledge, a campaign initiated by Gates and Buffet to encourage the world's most affluent individuals to pledge at least half of their fortunes to charity, the Wealth-X report said.

How is it that so many of these "philanthropists" who have taken the "Giving Pledge" to "give away" at least half their fortunes before they die keep getting richer and richer even as they engage in their so-called "philanthropy"?

It seems the more money they give away, the more money they accumulate.

Odd, isn't it?

Mark Zuckerberg: Bill Gates Was My Hero

Down at the end of the NY Times suck up piece to Bill Gates today is this:

“When I was growing up, Bill Gates was my hero,” Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, said in a speech at a conference last month. He added: “I think he’s one of the greatest visionaries that our industry has ever had."

No wonder Zuckerberg grew up to be a sociopath.

Newark Star Ledger: Chris Christie And Cory Booker Share Same Key Donors

The corporate education reformers are coming out for both Christie and Booker:

Five dozen wealthy donors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley have placed their bets on both of New Jersey’s big political stars — Republican Gov. Chris Christie and Democratic Newark Mayor Cory Booker — this campaign season, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.

When the governor and the mayor hit the fundraising circuit in California this year, they collected maximum donations from many of the same tech moguls at gatherings hosted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a friend to both men.

When they were home in the Garden State, the two celebrity politicians drew big checks from the same prominent real estate brokers and land developers.

And in New York, Kenneth Langone, the Republican billionaire who pushed Christie to run against President Obama in the 2012 race, has given $5,200 to Booker’s campaign for U.S. Senate this year and $3,800 to Christie’s re-election effort.

In all, 59 people in four states have given to both candidates this year, The Star-Ledger review found. From that donor base, Booker has received $300,550 and Christie has drawn $212,000 — a small portion of their total fundraising hauls: $8.6 million for the mayor and nearly $7 million for the governor.

...

Some of their support seems to be issue-based. Two billionaires — Alan Fournier of New Jersey and John Doerr of California — are prominent backers of some of the education policies Booker and Christie espouse.

"It’s really all about education. They both have very strong track records on education reform and trying to help kids," said Fournier, founder of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund based in Summit and co-founder of the nonprofit education group Better Education for New Jersey Kids. "New Jersey has the worst gap between minority students and upper-class suburban kids in the country, and we spend more in New Jersey than most states on a per-pupil basis, but we haven’t gotten the results."

Fournier, who was in the audience last week for Christie’s speech at a KIPP charter schools conference in Las Vegas, applauded Christie’s work tying teacher tenure to student achievement last year. Fournier, a registered Republican, stressed that education reform is a bipartisan effort and noted he also supports Democrats such as Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and state Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex).

"If you want to make change in New Jersey, it has to be on both sides of the aisle," he said.

Facebook spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg said Zuckerberg "is a longtime supporter of both Christie and Booker, dating back to Mark’s work with both of them on the issue of education reform."

The three worked on a $100 million education initiative for Newark schools — donated by Zuckerberg — that kicked off when they appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2010.

A vote for Cory Booker is a vote for Chris Christie is a vote for hedge fundie-backed corporate education reform as well as Wall Street-friendly policies that steal money from the little people to give it to the wealthy.

Same goes for Steve Fulop, Booker's Goldman Sachs buddy in Jersey City.

Facebook Shedding Investors AND Users

Alec Liu at Motherboard:

On a day when Wall Street darling Apple hit new highs, making it the most valuable company ever (not adjusted for inflation), ex-darling Facebook continues to reach record lows. After its controversial IPO, Mark Zuckerberg has been unable to convince investors of a brighter future. It’s not just Wall Street that remains flocking to the exits, the company has been leaking high-level execs since it went public. The site is also shedding users. Despite robust international growth, Facebook lost 6 million U.S. users in May.

Now, with the three-month investor lock-up period over — the period in which pre-IPO shareholders are barred from selling a certain chunk of their shares — the company is losing one of its largest and most notable shareholders. PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor (he famously paid $500,000 in 2004 for a 10.2 percent stake) Peter Thiel on Monday sold another 20 million shares, nearly his entire stake. Along with the proceeds of the initial IPO, Thiel has netted himself a tidy $1 billion for his troubles.

That investors are cashing out after one of the most hyped IPOs in history is only natural but the velocity of the selling belies a lack of confidence in Zuckerberg to fulfill Facebook’s lofty promises. Thiel isn’t just any old investor. He sits on the board and has privileged insight into the future of the company. As he must understand by now, this is only beginning for Facebook’s Wall Street woes. It faces three more “lock-up” expirations by year end with the biggest in November, when a further 1.32 billion shares could flood the market eclipsing many times over last week’s paltry 271 million share window.

“We don’t build services to make money,” Zuckerberg wrote half a year ago in Facebook’s IPO prospectus, hinting at the company’s inherent identity crisis. The site was never designed to make money, it was crafted to suck users in and keep them within the confines of Facebook’s world. Zuckerberg, perhaps unwittingly, admitted the central paradox to this agreement: “People want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.” But by going public at the valuation that they did, around $100 billion, Zuckerberg and company signed a pact with the devil. That number doesn’t represent real value. It’s a promise that would conceivably be delivered down the line, essentially a public declaration that profits will indeed be maximized.

Those profits have yet to materialize as Zuckerberg now tries to toe that fine line between making people happy — or rather, keeping them hooked — while sucking them dry along the way. In trying to please all, the users (the site has the lowest customer satisfaction rating among its peers), its partners (who complain about robot infestations), and Wall Street (the stock is down nearly 50 percent since it went public), Zuckerberg has only succeeded in disappointing everyone.

Facebook’s drastic fall from grace isn’t just a Zuckerberg screw-up, it’s indicative of a broader trend. Many of the startups expected to fuel new web economy are floundering. Zynga’s stock continues to tank and even Groupon’s staunchest supporters are starting to give up hope. In short, the race for users hasn’t proved as fruitful as most would have hoped.

How poorly has Facebook performed?

Facebook (NASDAQ: FB  ) shares are down about 37% since the company went public in 2012. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up about 26% overall.

Very poorly indeed.

Facebook Shares Hit New Low As Investors Flee

Falling, falling, falling:

Facebook's shares fell to new lows in early trading Thursday as insiders were freed to sell another 270m shares.

The expiration of a lock-up period for insiders increased the pool of available shares by 60%. Facebook's share price fell close to 7% in early trading to $19.73, a level that is more than 46% lower than the $38 IPO price set in May.

Goldman Sachs, Elevation Partners, which counts U2's Bono as a partner, and DST Global are among the early investors that will now be allowed to sell more shares. Goldman and DST were among the investors who increased the number of shares they sold at $38 shortly before the IPO.

Facebook's shares have been hit hard as analysts have worried the firm has yet to figure out a way to make money from mobile users, the fastest growing of their business. After such a precipitous fall in share price, analysts are split on whether investors will take advantage of the end of the lock-up to sell more shares.

One analyst, who wished to remain anonymous, pointed to Angie's List, a referral service, whose share price plummeted on Tuesday after its IPO lockup expired. "I wouldn't even think of buying this until the price comes down," he said

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A commenter at The Guardian writes the following:

Capitalism eats itself as a company that produces nothing fools the foolish and gets them to buy shares in it and then they are shocked when suddenly they realise a company that produces nothing can't actually be worth anything in real terms.......

Angie's List, Zynga, Groupon, Facebook - gee, feels like the Tech Bubble Burst all over again.

Time To Put Facebook Out Of Business

It's looking more like Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg and the underwriters of the Facebook IPO swindled gullible investors, and not just the mom and pop kind who bought into the IPO hype the day the company started selling shares, but also "sophisticated" private market investors who bought before the company went public:

Those sophisticated pros include GSV Capital, a publicly traded investment company that bought a bunch of shares at a $70 billion valuation in June 2011, when the move was seen as such a coup that GSV’s own stock price went up as a result.

By January of this year, private market investors were buying shares at a valuation of about $100 billion.

Whoever bought at that price has now lost almost half of their money.

Worse, this stock seems capable of going lower. Henry Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst turned tech blogger, estimates that a fair price for Facebook stock is somewhere between $16 and $24 per share.

The Washington Post reports the scope of the investigations Facebook and its underwriters now face and why, even if its found that no laws were broken by the parties involved, the Facebook IPO has become the poster child of what's wrong with modern capitalism:

The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining how the company, its underwriters and the NASDAQ stock market executed Facebook’s IPO, according to Capitol Hill staffers and members of Congress who’ve been briefed by regulators.

SEC officials would neither confirm nor deny whether the agency is conducting an investigation. But there are three major questions swirling around the troubled IPO: what caused the technical glitches that disrupted Facebook’s NASDAQ debut; whether Facebook gave privileged information to certain analysts and investors; and whether Morgan Stanley, the IPO’s lead underwriter, gave conflicting messages to different kinds of investors before the offering.

For some in Congress, if federal regulators come up empty-handed, that could be an even greater cause for concern. “This IPO is a poster child for all that’s wrong with current practices,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in an interview. Whether or not the SEC or other regulators bring down the hammer, he believes that Facebook’s IPO is a clear sign that capital markets are rigged against ordinary “mom and pop” retail investors.

Now the best way to handle this, in my humble, naive opinion, is for people disgusted by the Facebook swindle to simply end their association with Facebook.

Stop using it.

Close your account.

Don't reopen it.

Send Zuckerberg and the other crooks at Facebook into a desperate scramble to save the company as it bleeds hundreds of thousands of accounts a month.

Remember, Facebook is already playing fast and loose with your information, selling it to the highest bidder, making money off of your data.

And remember, too, that if you have signed into your account even once since 2009, you have then signed a terms of service agreement that said Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook own all of your data and information forever, that you cannot take it back from them once you've posted anything.

This is a slimy, crooked company run by a slimy, crooked sociopath.

The way the IPO was handled, with some connected investors getting privileged information while others were lied to by the company, is not an aberration of company behavior - it is exactly how this company operates.

So make Zuckerberg and Facebook pay for their crimes and ethical breaches.

Stop using Facebook.

Close your account.

Don't reopen it.

If you can't quit the social network habit, then migrate to one of those alternative, open source social networks.

You know, the ones where you own your information and data and take it with you when you go.

Believe me, that kind of action will get the notice of Mr. Zuckerberg and his financial associates.

It will get the notice of Wall Street as well.

And maybe, just maybe, this kind of action can bring about the kind "reform" the world really needs - fewer slimy, crooked businesses run by slimy, crooked sociopaths.

After all, they're only in business of making billions because people use their systems.

But if you tune out, drop out and opt out, well, they won't be in the business of making billions anymore.

Not until they figure out the next scam, at any rate.

NOTE: I do not have a Facebook account.

I have never opened a Facebook account.

I will never open a Facebook account.

Sociopath of The Year

TIME gave out its annual "Person of the Year" award - they gave this year's award to Facebook "founder" Mark Zuckerberg.

Their rationale:

"For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives," Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg is Time's 2010 "Person of the Year," the magazine just announced.

Meanwhile WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - the man so dangerous to Western Civilization that he is being detained indefinitely on a "sex without use of condom" charge was only a runner-up.

More jive ass from the corporate media.

Assange has the powers that be very, very worried that the veil will be lifted off the banksters' world of operations.

He has already revealed the hypocrisy, hubris and idiocy that is American foreign policy, the American war strategy in Afghanistan, and the murderous consequences these policies have had for some innocent civilians.

Still, Zuckerberg gets the nod for Facebook.

What a joke.

I plan on being the last person on the face of the earth to NOT have a Facebook account.

I may even request that tidbit of info for my obit.

And anyway, hopefully by then some new technology will have come along created by some new sociopath that will put the old sociopath out of business.

POSTSCRIPT: May I remind everybody why I am calling Zuckerberg a "sociopath":

We've long discussed the fact that Facebook is a bit scary when it comes to privacy. This month saw renewed focus on Facebook's privacy problems following the launch of a new feature that lets Facebook share personal, identifiable information with selected partners. The feature, called "Instant Personalization," is enabled by default for all users and lets Facebook partners put your private Facebook information, including profile photos, up on their pages without user permission.

In the weeks following, some shocking revelations about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have intensified privacy concerns about the social network, leading to a small exodus as users quit Facebook in droves.

So just in case you didn't already have them, here are three reasons why Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a truly terrifying individual that you should be very, very afraid of:

1. Zuckerberg likes to play around with users' private data.

Remember when you signed up on Facebook and they swore that they would keep your private information secure? Apparently "secure" doesn't include preventing Facebook themselves from accessing your data. No matter how you configure your profile, Facebook still has access to everything you do on the site - they can read the text of your private messages, they can see whose profile you've been viewing - they can essentially see every single thing you do on the site. Not only can they do this, but according to David Kirkpatrick, author of the soon-to-be-released book "The Facebook Effect," Zuckerberg loves to play around with that stockpile of private data.

The book describes Zuckerberg as "amusing himself" by conducting experiments with users' private information. One particularly interesting example was that Zuckerberg, by analyzing users communication patterns and relationship graphs, could predict within 33% accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with after a week.

That's right - Zuckerberg is using Facebook to play around with your life.

2. Zuckerberg doesn't believe in privacy - at least, other people's privacy.

According to some under-the-table tweeting last month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg "doesn't believe" in privacy - which is ironic, considering that he's fairly private about his own life. Apparently he doesn't believe in privacy for his users and the public at large, but doesn't include himself in that group. The social network's repeated incursions into their users' private information should be viewed in the context of that statement, keeping in mind that Facebook has been steadily chipping away at what little privacy remains for years and has no plans to stop that in the future.

3. Zuckerberg is a socially awkard, sex-crazed sociopath.

According to multiple insider accounts from friends of the Facebook founder, Zuckerberg is an "asberger's like" figure with difficulty engaging in normal social intercourse. According to the upcoming Facebook movie ("The Social Network"), Zuckerberg is a sex-obsessed sociopath whose original goal in starting the world's largest social network was to create a site where users could rate other Harvard students in a "hot or not" setup. We'll all know a lot more about these accusations in detail once "The Social Network" comes out, but if you must know now, you can read Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Millionaires," the book on which the movie is based.

The latest privacy woes for Facebook - the revelation this week that they've violated their own privacy policies and shared personal, identifiable information with advertisers - more on that later. If you haven't yet checked out or list of Five Reasons it Might be Time to Kill Your Facebook, now might be a good time to do so.

This guy doesn't belong on the cover of TIME.

He belongs in jail.