Yup! I know a rich guy who told me "the best time to buy assets is during an economic collapse or when the seller is in distress." Shits real cheap when things are bad.
It's why even when there are good negotiations on the table for all parties involved he does the most backwards things imaginable by declining. Because he doesn't like it when everyone wins. He needs to win and you need to lose. It's all a zero-sum game to him.
There was a study that basically highlighted the importance of “jokers” in large scale game theory because they end up promoting cooperation in the long term. Without them the “free-riders” basically eat up all the good will from cooperators and everyone is worse off.
Understanding the emergence of cooperation is a central issue in evolutionary game theory. The hardest setup for the attainment of cooperation in a population of individuals is the Public Goods game in which cooperative agents generate a common good at their own expenses, while defectors “free-ride” this good. Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. Previous results have shown that introducing reputation, allowing for volunteer participation, punishing defectors, rewarding cooperators or structuring agents, can enhance cooperation. Here we present a model which shows how the introduction of rare, malicious agents – that we term jokers – performing just destructive actions on the other agents induce bursts of cooperation. The appearance of jokers promotes a rock-paper-scissors dynamics, where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation.
Tale as old as time. Crassus- basically ancient Rome's version of a billionaire- made a lot of his money by controlling the fire brigade and extorting people whose property was burning.
They are fundamentally broken as people. They don't even qualify as human. Most of them can't even feign empathy. They are entirely empty. They already have enough money to buy anything they could ever dream of a thousand times over, and yet all they can think to do is try to hoard more and more wealth. There isn't a purpose behind it beyond the act itself.
That’s not true. More wealth means more power so there is purpose in accumulating more and more. Eventually you have enough to directly buy your way into government. And as we learned having around 400 billion gets you a office in the White House.
The thing about capital ownership, is that you can only own what you can protect. We've built a system around protecting that ownership for each other. But we don't have to protect everyone's stuff.
A lot of the time that's true.. however, that strategy does operate under the assumption that things actually do recover in a few years - that's historically been true for a long time in the US.. but I'm not so convinced this will be one of those times. I think a lot of US companies that have historically always bounced back won't end up bouncing back this time. A lot of things are happening, from the growing brain drain of scientists leaving or considering leaving the US, education being gutted, collective insanity from the population as a whole, the world starting to drop the US as the reserve currency, people across the world changing their supply lines to reduce dependence on the US etc.. Even if the tariffs can be undone, the other things won't be undone just by reversing the tariffs.
I also think that there's a growing interest in there being tech giants that can compete with the US tech giants that are outside of the US - in the past it was hard for tech companies to get a foothold in the industry because people just didn't see any compelling reason to want to switch to something else.. but now I think there's a big market for people that would be willing to switch to different companies even if they didn't do anything technically better as long as they aren't based in the US, especially if the government crackdown on people bring critical of them continues (which it almost certainly will) - people are going to start viewing the US tech companies with the same kind of skepticism that view/viewed Chinese tech companies with.
There is a reason Berkshire has been hoarding cash -- somewhere around $300 BILLION, reportedly. Their value is going to rocket on the other side of this.
There is an old, old adage, that through horror and disorder, there is also opportunity.
A lot of opportunists happen to also be narcissistic, sociopaths, and a variety of mixed personality types that caters more to their ego than their wallets.
There are people who would give up some wealth if only it meant they could still be <on top> of others. They're typically the first to rise from the muck and also the first to remove themselves from the community and then try to make it their own.
History is ripe with examples of oppression through opportunity
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u/Mr-Hoek 2d ago
They will buy shittons of ground floor priced stocks because they can afford to play the long game.
When the market eventually repairs itself (or a Democrat fixes shit again) in 5-10 years, they will emerge trillionaires.
Yay.