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It's funny when these executives, on one side, will happily lay people off, implement attrition policies, or engage in morally-questionable behaviors, all with the purpose of maximize profits, while on the other hand blame the employees that they don't care about the company, and are only in it for the money. It's a thinly veiled way of saying "only I am allowed to play the game as the ruthless capitalist".

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Yes, that's the exact greedy classism that the century-ago Gilded Age made well-known to dedicated students of U.S. history today. I'd be shocked if 1% of students who passed an handwritten-essay history exam in the past fifty years remember it at all. On the plus side, at least we don't have to reinvent terminology for this: it's all already written down and studied in depth and condensed into a two hours PBS documentary so that anyone in the cog class today can learn about it — even if they've been largely been denied literacy by the leadership class starving out public education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjpYzFtxfjU via https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/gilded-age...

I once worked as a contractor at a startup whose CEO had little trophies on display in a wall case showing off funding rounds for previous startups. There were like 3 employees and 15 contractors, and he had one of the contractors give a speech about believing in the mission or whatever. It was laughable. I was only there a couple months and found out later they got bought out by the largest company in the space. He probably bought a few more tacky red Ferraris after that.

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