I would be surprised to find any successful company that had no shenanigans in their origin story.
My history included a startup that shipped empty boxes to meet numbers, scraped thousands of emails from more popular websites to sell as their own traffic, even one that forged stock certificates to secure funding. (The FBI ended that one)
Please don’t normalize this. Just because it has many famous examples does not mean it should ever become socially acceptable. Fuck every company that has done this.
Woah, never knew this. Do you have any reference? I cannot find anything about it.
And it's not just in tech. New restaurants hire actors as customers to make the restaurant appear busy and popular. Publishing companies and authors buy their own books to make it appear popular and climb the best sellers list. Clubs give out free tickets. Studios buy seats or entire theaters to make it seems like their movies are selling out. The older you get, the naive idealized world of business recedes as the stark "fake it til you make it" world emerges. Everyone fakes it. But not everyone makes it. Taken to extreme, we get elizabeth holmes and theranos.