Who doesn’t love a good story?

Like a story of overcoming adversity, of perseverance, of triumph? We like those who buck the status quo, who disrupt industries, and who despite being pioneers and trailblazers, who make it all seem within reach.

These folx, who we call visionaries, are able to see past the present into a bold and daring future. They ask courageous questions, push people out of their comfort zones, and demand people be willing to sacrifice for their vision.

There’s just one problem.

Most of the time, these stories are made up, grade-A, horse shit.

“The visionary” is, quite possibly, capitalism’s greatest illusion and we, apparently, never seem to get tired of it.

Here’s what I mean...

Who will be the next genius, "visionary" to grace the cover of Forbes?

Sadly, that honor has become a bit like the Madden Curse as titan-after-titan industry is revealed to be a fraud or greatly exaggerated. Whether shown on Forbes, Fortune, Time, or Bloomberg, there is a disturbing trend of people cast as visionaries, who turn out to be sociopaths and liars, being showered with praise.

Sam Bankman-Fried (or “SBF” as he’s apparently known) was on the cover of Forbes in October 2021. He was the founder of FTX, a crypto-currency exchange, and Alameda Research, a trading firm. At one point he was worth of $26 BILLION dollars. In October is was $10.5 Billion, and then...

Less than a week ago, FTX filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and sent catastrophic ripples through both crypto markets and financial markets. Turns out, the whole thing was being run like a ponzi scheme. Oh, and rumor has it that SBF is in the Bahamas with millions of other people’s money. What a visionary!

She threw on a black turtleneck, artificially deepened her voice, and pretended that her solution worked. That was enough for her to be hailed “the next Steve Jobs.” Forbes now has her net worth at $0 and she was found guilty on 4 out of 13 charges.

Behold, the visionary.

The answer is no. That shit is stupid. It looks like Second Life circa 2007, but where no one has feet.

After countless privacy violations, subjecting users to psychological experiments without consent, flooding the world with unrestricted misinformation, helping foreign nations to disrupt our elections, engaging in a pattern of obviously anti-competitive monopolistic business practices, and most recently guiding his company to losing more than a $700 billion loss in value — in about one year — by betting on a stupid vision of wearing VR goggle to simulate a cubicle, Zuck is a special kind of “visionary” billionaire. Don't worry though, only 11,000 people were laid off.

He got lucky and built a social network at the right time, ripped off features from everyone else, bought up any compe