This Billion Dollar Bankruptcy Is Worse Than You Think
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Mashinsky
Mashinsky attended a few different universities where he majored in electrical engineering but did not graduate. He later served in the Israeli Army.
"As the founder of eight startups and three Unicorns, Alex has raised more than $1.5B with over $3B in exits, 50+ patents, and led the Celsius team with over $25B in assets." -> 50 patents, credentialism. This man is not a scientist/researcher devoting his time in this pursuit.
See: "a long tradition of decent achievement bestowing authority, then making one's personal fortune by leveraging that earned authority into decades of hackery. See Krugman, Paul and Jay Gould, Steven. It is a symptom of our overcredentialed and credential obsessed society"
https://web.archive.org/web/20000818233151/http://thestandar...
"Visitors to his family home in the Israeli city of Ashkelon say the place is a Rube Goldberg assemblage of energy-saving gadgets ginned up by Mashinsky's father Boris, such as solar panels that heat rainwater to supply the family bath, which then drains outside to water the lawn. It was years before the elder Mashinsky realized that diluted bath soap was killing his trees.
Always tinkering, the younger Mashinsky liked to tap into public phone lines until Israel's national telco threatened to shut off his family's telephone service. He flitted through three universities, never finishing a degree in electrical engineering, served his requisite time in the Israeli army and then struck out to find the promised land, his own global company."
"In his teens he began buying confiscated goods from customs auctions at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport. He bought hairdryers, VCRs, pens, electrostatic paper and anything he could snatch up with borrowed money, resold them and pocketed a tidy profit."
To me it sounds like Alex was in over his head from a young age, poverty changes people and it seems like he was raised a certain way. Entrepreneurial? Sure. Smart? Sure. Grifter? Yes.
"He tried importing urea from Russia, selling Indonesian gold to Switzerland and brokering poisonous sodium cyanide excavated in China for use by gold miners in the U.S. The cyanide business collapsed in 1989 as Mashinsky watched the Tiananmen Square crackdown on CNN.
"I saw this guy standing in front of a tank and I asked the bartender what was going on," Mashinsky says. "My big deal went through the floor." "
Always someone else responsible.
But back at Arbinet, reality proved less inspiring. Mashinsky's creativity provided an endless stream of new ideas that he loved to strut for interested audiences. But while Mashinsky traveled and talked, promising initiatives at the company – like Internet telephony – were lost because of a lack of focus. In addition, says Bravard, Arbinet's former president, "Clients were extremely frustrated by the gap between Alex's talk and the reality." Arbinet couldn't keep up with the ideas as quickly as Mashinsky could spin them out."
"With Wall Street spooked and Mashinsky on an extended trip to Asia, Bravard and his team made their ultimatum. Mashinsky rushed home from China and fired Arbinet's management for trying to "steal the company." A week later, he temporarily rehired them."
"He was also an early developer of voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP).[10][11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Mashinsky#cite_note-10 , check out the sources if you want a laugh.
"What if Mashinsky's telecom dreams ultimately fail? He has other, even more ambitious plans. He wants to tap recent advances in genetics to commercialize "body transplants." Companies of the future will be able to "give an old person a new body – keep the head, keep the spine and re-create the rest," he predicts. "That'll be my next assignment.""