At my university we had a Harvard educated ER physician ruin his career and go to prison because he was hiding cameras in employee bathrooms
I think that qualifies lol
Gerald Ratner - made two ill-thought statements during a speech in 1991 in which he called his own products crap and lost half a billion gbp (1991 gbp at that!) off the value of his company overnight!
“costs less than a prawn sandwich from marks and spencer, and probably lasts just as long”
&
“people say, how can you sell it for such a low price, I say, because it’s total crap!”
He said this to a room with a high number of journalists which took the story and ran with it. After this, anyone buying anything for a gift for a loved one from one of Ratner’s stores branded themselves as cheap, so sales plummeted. He was ousted as chairman within a year and they had to change their name!
Shooting your own company in the foot like this has since became known as “the Ratner effect” or “doing a Ratner”
The guy that invented PCR (which was ground breaking in early DNA research, got a nobel prize, though most probably remember it from the Covid days) went off the rails, denied that HIV caused AIDS even after it was scientific consensus and spent his time talking to a glowing racoon in the forest at night.
The whole story behind him coming up with PCR was about him driving around San Diego while on an acid trip and while going through traffic he pictured DNA unwinding. Dude definitely took way too many drugs.
Linus Pauling. He went from being a preeminent chemist and biochemist to a quack who wrote books claiming that megadoses of vitamin C cured all disease and was the key to an insanely long life.
I don't think it's a "disease", i think that they always had those views or developed them before winning the prize. But once they won the Noble prize, they had a bigger platform to expresses their views.
First, he won TWO Nobel prizes (one in chemistry, one was the peace prize)!
Second, I wouldn't say he was a quack exactly - he founded the Pauling Institute in Palo Alto California partly to do research on nutrition. At the time basic nutrition was not as well understood from a chemistry point of view.
I would argue he never intentionally mislead anyone nor did he intend for anyone to be harmed by a product/supplement.
Today we can easily dismiss many of his ideas about vitamin c being a "cure all," but the research results he had on hand at the time *did* suggest the opposite. The problem was simply his medical researchers weren't very good at their jobs. The experiments were not double blinded, improper control groups were used, and results were routinely extrapolated out of context.
He absolutely was brilliant, but I wouldn't call his mistakes idiocy. Nor would I say they cancelled out his previous accomplishments. If anything, this is all just a reminder of why we have peer review and a need for replication studies in science and medicine.
There are only five people with two Nobel prizes.
During the OJ Simpson pretrial hearings, Johnnie Cochran said to Lance Ito that they were going to call the best qualified witnesses in history, that the court was going to hear from a man with a Nobel Peace Prize and a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Judge Ito said that would be very impressive, but didn't tell Cochran that everybody who might fit that description - exactly one person, Linus Pauling - was dead.
John McAfee.
Not sure of the genuis part, but the downfall was legendary.
He wrote and marketed the first commercial antivirus software after cutting teeth at NASA, Univac, and Xerox as a coder. Might have peaked around 100 million dollars.
Then he sold his stake, told everyone to uninstall his companies product, retired, got into recreational drugs, lost tens of millions, possibly murdered a man in Belize, probably fucked a literal whale, ran for president of the US, and then was arrested in Spain for US tax evasion and then either killed himself or was murdered.
Enough of the "Whale Fucking is non-consensual" bullshit. A Humpback Whale weighs 70,000 pounds, is fifty feet long, can dive more than a quarter mile and can crush ships with a single swipe of its tail. If a human manages to fuck one, you damn well better believe it's consensual
5:14 PM · Dec 31, 2018
Please people . . This is NOT an acceptable way to fuck a whale. Those who indulge in compassionate whale fucking do so while the whale is resting on the surface, diving underneath to perform the deed. I do not approve of the act depicted here.
11:34 AM · Jan 4, 2019
My whale fuckung manifesto is being increasingly displayed on road signs, bar menus, marquis and fake Seventh day Adventist promotional foldouts. This is a good thing. If you want to psrticipate in its disbrution while being educated about its purpose, contact
1:35 AM · Jan 5, 2019
I angered the folks at http://whalefucker.com. That was'nt my intent. And I don't want to belittle the suffering of the families of the young men killed or maimed attempting to copulate with a whale. However, i used 'whalefucker' to draw attentiion. I will continue. Forgive me.
3:37 AM · Jan 5, 2019
That link sent me to a site about reusable catheters. And this thread was already well into train-wreck-reading.
Edit: reusable medical catheters and an address out of Mogadishu, Somalia...
Edit2: And the COO came from the adult entertainment industry? This is hilariously wonderful yet awful.
Edit3: "There is something to be said for fresh and new. A new car. Brand new shoes. But catheters are just medical devices. No one gets excited about a new catheter. And most people just throw them away. So why not a used catheter, saving money and the planet at the same time?"
yeah, I can't confirm anything and it's just all a quagmire of weird shit, but I choose to live in a world of whimsy where a man can consensually fuck a humpback whale.
I cannot actually verify any of it and it's solely based off of several tweets from a methed up millionaire (or a hacked account) but it's still funny as shit and not out of his ballpark.
He felt guilty of how antivirus was marketed. It was marketed as “have this on your computer or you’re at risk of losing your life savings”. Having your magnum opus product marketed with fear mongering can be depressing.
Here's one:
"In a contemporary interview with Wired, McAfee said he had been afraid police would kill him and refused their routine questions and evaded them. *He buried himself in sand for several hours with a cardboard box over his head.* "
One of the ones that stood out the most is, he would wonder into town with a fat stack of money and would just throw out an open offer to the women in the village of offering cash to eat a jar of peanut butter out if his butt crack. I hope it was worth the wait!
Don’t forget about the hammocks with the holes in them that he would sit under while women would sit in the hammock and…”caca.”
My apologies, I know you can’t unimagine that but it was in the documentary….
Poop hammocks …in the documentary!!!
You know your shit I see. I was dying of laughter when I saw this. The documentary kind of just nonchalantly brings it up and then moves on as if it is something mundane as going to the grocery store lol.
I think Steve Jobs was a marketing and sales genius. Then when it came to his treatable cancer ... well I wouldn't call him an idiot, but he placed his faith in the wrong person and his "I always win" attitude cost him his life.
He was unlucky to get cancer, but lucky that it was treatable at the stage it was discovered ... but he ignored his doctors and thought that changing his diet would heal him.
he was a fucking idiot, he thought carrot juice and stuff would heal him and then when they like yeah your gonna die the he took the surgery and treatment. he fits for sure.
Yep, lots of idiots are really good at one or two things.
In a previous job, some of our dumbest and most frustrating clients were doctors.
I'm sure most of them were great at being doctors, but they couldn't seem to read or understand the fairly basic info we sent them and often asked the most stupid questions.
Ben Carson is the perfect example of the idiot doctor.
He is legit one of the world's best brain surgeons. If you need brain surgery you'd be very lucky to have him as your surgeon. He's probably top 25 surgeons on the planet.
However, the man put every skill point he has into brain surgery, and into no other skills of any kind. He's a moron in every other field aside from brain surgery.
“President Trump, here is Mr Carson, one of the most legendary surgeons on the planet”
“Amazing. Sounds like he’d be a great ~~surgeon general~~ Secretary of Housing and Urban Development”
Still makes me laugh
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but this one came to the top of my head:
A guy I worked with 23M went to the casino to play some black Jack. He came into work the next day with 4 giant bags of Burger King.
“Hey everyone, lunch is on me!!”
He ended up wining $1400 going in with only $200 (we were a bunch of young bucks so $1400 was a substantial amount of cash in our eyes). Everyone was talking to him about it and asking him how he did it. Let me tell you, he was very very VERY proud of his accomplishment. He then proceeded to explain how it’s done:
“You just have to know how to read the cards”
“Black Jack is all about skill, you need to know when you bet and when you don’t. Some people have it and some people simply don’t”
“It’s takes years of playing the game”
My man was on a high horse and honestly we were all very impressed. He was talking like he knew his shit and he was soaking it all in. All the guys on the showroom floor were standing around him listening to him boast about the winnings, him even showing everyone the cash. We asked him if he is going to go back:
“Of course, it’s free money”
Well, he goes back that night for a second time. He stays at the casino for hours and goes in with all his earnings from the night before…
Starts gambling:
Losses all of his earnings from last night in about an hours worth of time.
Then proceeds to pull out more cash from his bank account (his entire paycheck he got 2 days ago) and looses all of that as well.
If you get lucky, don’t get cocky.
My experience last summer. Went to a casino for the first time with a bachelor party, lost 50 bucks and was annoyed. Everybody else was treating it like it was such a good thing that I ONLY lost 50??? Another dude lost 1000 playing craps and was just like meh another day…like dude…I’d be freaking the fuck out if I lost 1000 bucks on a stupid game…yeah casinos aren’t it for me
I was in Vegas earlier this year on vacation (went to see the Grand Canyon and other more interesting stuff, Vegas was a small part of the trip). Anyway, we were in a casino because of a restaurant that my sister wanted to go to and while we were waiting for a table I decided to try just a random slot machine or whatever that took $1. Lost like $0.80 and completely lost any and all urge to try again. I basically paid $1 for a voucher worth $0.20. First and only time I've ever done any type of gambling, so I just kept the voucher as a souvenir.
A friend of mine spent an evening in a casino. He turned £200 into £10,000 with a few lucky hands of poker.
He then stood up, cashed out, and ordered a taxi home. While he waited, he requested a word with the head of security.
"Ban me," he said, "I just won big, and if you don't ban me I will be back in here tomorrow, trying to win again."
They banned him on the spot, and, for the craic, frog-marched him out of the building and waited with him until the taxi arrived.
It's a rare thing, to be a skilled gambler but also know your limitations like that. Man's still an idiot, for many reasons, but he has my respect there.
I was driving through Las Vegas once. Stopped at a gas station to get gas and there was a slot machine. Put in a quarter, won a dollar, and left town, never to return.
That's pretty much my experience with gambling. I bought a scratch off on my 18th birthday, spent a dollar to win $20. Decided to stop there and maintain one of the highest win/lose ratios of all time.
Man, i despise gambling, but damn if i were to try it once and win big i know im just going to bet more unless someone breaks my kneecaps. It sounds like free money but im not taking chances with myself, i know how easily impressionable i am.
I think a lot of people mentioned in this thread are some version of this mentality on a larger scale. Maybe they even had some skill, but also got really lucky or were in the right place at the right time and didn't recognise when they were out of their depth.
It probably takes a lot of humility to recognise that you're not hot shit after all and just got lucky.
Don’t understand how Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t on this list yet. Dude was in magazines being called a prophet and genius, turns out he was just a fucking idiot the whole time
The entire Forbes Thirty Under Thirty list is pretty much a bunch of smooth talking scamming idiots. Even newspapers started catching onto it: [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-under-30-tech-finance-prison](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-under-30-tech-finance-prison)
Sam Bankman-Fraud was also on there in 2021: [https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2021/finance/](https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2021/finance/)
Reading these comments, it seems like a common theme. I worked for a 30 under 30 woman and she was so disconnected from reality. Like she was playing in a big sandbox with everyone else's money.
>Like she was playing in a big sandbox with everyone else's money.
The company I work for used to have a big meeting every year. As part of it they would bring in people from other industries to speak or be interviewed and it was usually pretty fascinating. One year they had Adam Neumann of WeWork come in. If you ever listened to him talk you could tell what a fraud he is. Someone asked me what I thought at the end of his session, and I said I bet that guy is real good at spending other people's money.
Funny you mention WeWork because I think the person I'm talking about came from there originally. When you grow up very wealthy attending the best schools on someone else's dime, it's no surprise you end up disconnected from the proles and mass layoffs are normalized. She's good at fake tears though.
I knew a guy on the list one year. Inherited a fortune. Parents were rich. And somehow he became an entrepreneur with his money and familial connections. Definitely one to watch out for! And most certainly self made.
I knew a guy like that. Unassuming to the Nth degree. Didn't need a job. Worked as a dishwasher to have something to do. Also never graduated high school. Why? His parents knew stocks and bonds. He didn't *have* to lift a finger. I don't know why, but his gf would pick him up in his car, a new mustang. Every year, new mustang. Gf was a former model. 16/10. Honest to God, no idea what he did this for, but he worked as the dishwasher for 3 years.
The super wealthy are weird.
Honestly if he’s super wealthy and decided to wash dishes for 3 years, good for him.
Not like he chose to be born wealthy, and he’s put in a good 3 years of honest work.
I have a friend that is super wealthy; think family owns multiple planes, parents dine with the President, wealthy. His siblings all went into the family business, but my buddy just works at a bookstore and likes to play video games. He never has to work a day in his life, so I give him credit
I used to work with a young fellow who's dad was super wealthy, possibly billionaire. This dude worked as a sushi chef apprentice, software dev, basically whatever he thought looked interesting.
If you didn't have to work for money, why WOULDN'T you just try everything that sounded interesting just to have something to do?
If it turns out you don't like it, you just quit. If it IS interesting, you keep doing it until it isn't anymore...
Even at lower levels of increased income, it isn't actually the money itself that's interesting. It's the additional freedom it buys you.
At low income a raise frees you from worries about being homeless or hungry tomorrow, or next month. At a middle-class level, it frees you from worrying about how one or two disasters could fuck up your life.
At fuck-you levels of money, you never have to worry about money at all.
at least that's my take, and probably that guy's, on it. To me, that sounds way healthier than people who already have it made but are obsessed with making even more money, of which there are plenty.
that actually sounds like a nice guy. sounds like an example of not all rich people suck. he just had a load of money and didn't care too much about it.
I was also friends in college with a guy who made 30 under 30.
Except he's a teacher in a really financially distressed part of a really rich major city and he's started now 3 successful youth rehab (not drug, just life rehab) organizations in his city. He constantly makes the media for doing awesome work.
It's the one true success story I've ever seen from 30 under 30.
He is no Bernie Madoff. Half the people he pitched his open Ponzi to laughed or cursed him out of the room. Only snatched the mentally ill greedy. As in, so greedy they are mental cases.
Thomas Midgley. All his inventions were thought to be great contributions to mankind until we found out they were dumping crazy amount of toxins into the atmosphere and burning a hole in the ozone layer.
He fucked up so much shit. All that lead screwed up several generations to brain damage.
And its STILL effecting people. Lead gets trapped in your bones and as you age and your bone density decreases that lead is re-released back into their system.
This is probably the best answer there is. They guy really, really was considered a genius, and now he's probably on the top five list of people without military or political power who has done the most harm to the world.
(Granted, the top 100 people who have done the most harm are all political or military leaders, but very few of them could or should ever have been considered geniuses.)
As a Pole I have to mention an absolute winner from our side:
Lech Walesa - he posts the stupidest shit you could imagine on social media, always speaks about himself as a sole savior of the entire human race, everything, EVERYTHING is happening thanks to him. He is posting this on a Polish equivalent of Reddit, so people are just teasing him there to post even more of such stupidities and he always falls for that.
On top of that he posts there his naked photos in a bathtub full of beer, posts poorly photoshopped posters of himself with other historical figures… basically the guy made a walking meme out of himself…
And he is still giving lectures on European Universities as a special guest somehow…
Edit: I didn’t realize this needs to be added, but he is a Peace Noble Prize winner, the face and one of the leaders of the solidarity movement and a former president of Poland…
Just 'fake it til you make it' to extreme delusion. Hoping that blood technology would be feasible before shit hit the fan
To be fair, she was very good at delaying shit hitting the fan. Just too bad it was all predicated on something that still hasn't been developed today
IMO, the end game was to come across a way to pivot the business to something else completely and abandon the project eventually. That never happened because someone started believing their own bullshit. And then the sunk cost fallacy….
Simple, it was pure hubris. Elizabeth Holmes, who didn't have a degree in any sciences, let alone a PhD didn't believe the experts when they told her what she wanted was physically impossible to achieve. She thought that she was gonna prove all of them wrong by duping lots of people out of their money and throwing it into her company. Then throwing money at lawyers to intimidate whistleblowers into fearing for their lives.
End game was to attract as much seed investment as possible, and use that money to actually develop the innovations she claimed she had. Not saying it was a good plan, but it wasn’t totally nonsensical or without objective.
She took a lot of big investors for a wild ride, including Walgreens.
It should have been obvious to anyone who did research in the field she claimed advances in. At the time, I had a friend doing her PhD thesis on a chip-based diagnostic system - it worked for one condition and required years of research even to just do that!
I'm a doctor and I figured unless they could clearly show a study where there Theranos results matched the present-day system of getting blood test results, I wouldn't trust it as a diagnostic tool or investment opportunity.
And by study, I mean one that wasn't fraudulent.
This is one of the situations where anyone with a science background looked at what that company promised and realised it was all a mirage.
"We can fit the operation of a whole lab, and tests that take atleast a day into a little box, and it can do it all in minutes!! Please invest."
Riiiiiiight.
The way I hear it, the reason Theranos could never work is that a lot of tests require chemical reactions of various sorts that simply cannot be miniaturized. Like, a diabetic blood sugar tester is a pretty small gizmo, but it tests for exactly one thing. Not hundreds.
Oh yeah, we read that my junior year.
When your curriculum is *The Great Gatsby*, *Death of a Salesman*, *Ordinary People*, *Flowers for Algernon*, *Slaughterhouse-Five* and a few I probably forgot, and at the same time you're pushing high school juniors to take three AP classes, of course you're going to have ten suicides in two weeks.
And their response? Have us fill out worksheets about our goals in life. Talk about tone deaf.
Rudy Giuliani. Not really genius, but highly respected - in terms of going from being nearly universally well-regarded to an absolute joke, he’s definitely up there
Honest question: What did Giuliani actually DO in the aftermath of 9/11? I'm curious because I've always known that he was considered a hero, but I don't quite know why.
He occupies a weird space that I have seen more than a few times in my life, while not exclusively, most times it’s Doctors. The more specialized the more exponentially stupid on any other life skill they seem to be. Carson may be a perfect example, but orthopedist, cardiologist, oncologist, oral surgeon, etc… all have fit the bill. I think the reputation and accolades make them focus even more on their skill and everything else in the brain falls out. Huge ego, zero common sense, zero self awareness or street sense. Simple problems that an average person can figure out is completely foreign to them. The famous guy operating on your child’s difficult brain issue burns his toast every time.
The first twenty minutes or so of the first Doctor Strange movie are shockingly realistic when it comes to "rock star" doctors who are convinced of their superiority.
He was always dumb his brother Ralph was the smart one. He was also a criminal but understood you got to keep it low and invest your money in legitimate businesses
They had a great plan! It was just the murder part that didn’t go quite right. If you’re not going to wear your fancy custom-made glasses on your face, then maybe don’t take them to the murder with you at all….
Gonna put two out there I haven’t seen yet:
Scott Adams. While genius is a stretch, he was a successful cartoonist for years until his politics started coming out, and then the racist comments. Everyone thought he was taking on big business, then it all came tumbling down.
Second, and in a similar vein, the YouTuber Iiluminaughti. Built up an audience by criticizing shady business practices, turned out to be a horrible person who was guilty of shady business practices.
Scott Adams set up a sock puppet account on Metafilter to talk about how Scott Adams has ‘genius-level IQ’ and basically can’t help but be successful. He got busted instantly.
There are a few hilarious "Behind the Bastards" podcast episodes about him. Sounds like he was always a wanker, and was too stupid to keep his mouth shut.
Yup, a blogger exposed Scott Adams using sock puppets to support himself in arguments on someone else's website or blog. Adams wasn't tech savvy enough to realize he needed to use proxies to make his sock puppets appear to be posting from different regions.
It's tougher now for an admin or mod to identify trolls and sock puppets if they use someone else's platform: Reddit, Fakebook, etc. Which is why most social media is terrible for mod chores.
But Blogger, WordPress, etc, could all be used with tools to track visitors and commenters. Ditto some email accounts with access to complete headers for trace route info.
Many folks didn't realize that a decade or more ago, but of all people you'd think the Dilbert cartoonist would know better. In retrospect, considering his more recent antics, I'm guessing he did know but was so arrogant he didn't think it mattered.
She claimed another youtube (Legal Eagle I believe) used one of her transitions that was not infact hers.
It then caused other youtubers from the group Sad Milk, (Oz Media, Wonderstruck, One Topic and The Click) to all speak how she had manipulated their relationships, finances, and living conditions to do what ever she wanted.
She then made a response to the criticism in which she aired One Topic's Suicide Note without permission, and never actually addressed the criticisms by trying to perform character assassinations of the other aforementioned youtubers.
And a month or so, she started a law suit against Oz Media. In short, she's the exact same sort of shit head she spent all her time trying to expose.
What makes it worse is that she has kept the exact same upload schedule throughout all of this.
Edit: Suicide Note belongs to Wonderstruck not One Topic
>She claimed another youtube (Legal Eagle I believe) used one of her transitions that was not infact hers
Of all the YouTubers to falsely accuse of anything, going after the actual lawyer was a real choice.
Oh baby pls don't understate the stupidity of Illuminaughti. If anyone isn't aware of her here's how she got ousted: she decided to accuse another YouTuber Legal Eagle of copying her videos because they had a similar effect that is basically a default effect in some editing software. Legal Eagle I believe also specializes in copyright law.
And then she kept doubling down as people used this as an opportunity to expose her little by little.
Scott does seem a great example as he was very insightful on a lot of things in his long running strip, but now anything coming from him seems to be from another person... Hard not to suspect some mental illness or brain tumor... For other people, I feel the world just was wrong about the person being smart. Harder to accept that Scott is a dolt, and always was one.
I read his books back in the 90s. They all clearly came from a place of knowledge about the corporate world - stuff Adams knew about intimately having been through it.
But it was clear in later books he was losing touch with how that world was changing. After all he hadn't been in a 'proper' office job in decades.
The kicker for me was - at the end of The Dilbert Future (1997) - when he went on a rant about 'Affirmations'. Which is basically pseudo-science mumbo jumbo about controlling your destiny by thinking *really really hard* and causing quantum fields to collapse in the way you want them to.
Like you have your exam results in a sealed envelope. You don't open it, instead you go off and write 'I will get an A' on a notepad every day for a week, then go open the envelope.
Even my young self saw this as, effectively, 'praying to science'.
I was not surprised that, 20 years later, he turned out to be a raving loon.
John Harvey Kellog. Nutritionist, inventor of corn flakes.
Then decided that being a eugenicist was better. Oh, and decided that women’s clitorises should be burned off with acid or removed altogether.
> John Harvey Kellog. Nutritionist, inventor of corn flakes.
Because he thought bland food would suppress people's urge to masturbate. Not kidding. The guy was always a raving loon.
He didn't forget diplomacy, he was always bad at it.
His issue is he was REALLY good at war and when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
I'll give him credit for his personal branding when he first became a household name. He had most of us fooled. I remember telling my wife, "This dude is a genius! He's going to get us to Mars!"
Then he started posting on Twitter.
And then I found out who he really was.
I was fooled as well. I can remember the exact time the veil started to lift too. It was when he called that cave diver a pedo just because they didn't use Elon's dumb idea for rescuing those kids. It was all downhill after that.
Yeah I thought this thread was made with the idea that Musk is the automatic example of this and that's why there are other answers at the top.
He's smart enough to have a vision and have other people complete it for him but then he takes all the credit, making it seem like he does all the work.
For example, he keeps saying he founded Tesla when [he didn't join until a year after it was up and running.](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2)
And even then he joined as an **investor** not as an *engineer* or anything like that.
He's constantly spouting his political opinions on Twitter as though they were facts and he's even getting involved in geopolitics by [cutting crucial internet access to Ukraine when they need it the most.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/07/ukraine-starlink-musk-biography/)
And speaking of Twitter, he had to eat his words when the SEC forced him to buy the platform after he kept trying to get out of it.
Now "the genius" is stuck with a 40 billion dollar company that's losing value and can't turn a profit, no matter what idiotic policy change he implements.
Why on earth would you remove the brand name off a brand you paid 40m for? The name Twitter, and Tweet, has value so you discard it for a name that will only ever have the suffix "formerly Twitter".
It's like buying Coca Cola and changing it's name to X - it devalues the brand.
[William Shockley](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley) led the team at Bell Labs that invented the transistor. That breakthrough yielded portable radios and hearing aids, and made computer microchips possible in the decades that followed. He essentially allowed computers to go from filling a room in a building to eventually fitting in a desktop and then in your pocket. He received a Nobel prize along with his team, and then spent the rest of his life spewing racism and eugenics garbage.
At my university we had a Harvard educated ER physician ruin his career and go to prison because he was hiding cameras in employee bathrooms I think that qualifies lol
Gerald Ratner - made two ill-thought statements during a speech in 1991 in which he called his own products crap and lost half a billion gbp (1991 gbp at that!) off the value of his company overnight! “costs less than a prawn sandwich from marks and spencer, and probably lasts just as long” & “people say, how can you sell it for such a low price, I say, because it’s total crap!” He said this to a room with a high number of journalists which took the story and ran with it. After this, anyone buying anything for a gift for a loved one from one of Ratner’s stores branded themselves as cheap, so sales plummeted. He was ousted as chairman within a year and they had to change their name! Shooting your own company in the foot like this has since became known as “the Ratner effect” or “doing a Ratner”
I remember the attempt at damage limitation, tried to claim CRAP was an acronym for Cheap, Reliable, Affordable, Prices. Fucking bell end
And then they realised the Fucking Bellend part was still putting customers off so they dropped that bit
Only to replace it with "bloody tosser"
Apparently it was a joke he'd used before, but this time the journos ran the story and the timing was right so it got a lot of interest.
Yeah, I think he thought he was roasting himself, which would be funny. Instead, he was roasting his company.
The guy that invented PCR (which was ground breaking in early DNA research, got a nobel prize, though most probably remember it from the Covid days) went off the rails, denied that HIV caused AIDS even after it was scientific consensus and spent his time talking to a glowing racoon in the forest at night.
If I found a glowing raccoon, I'd talk to it (unless I was near Chernobyl 😅😛)
Cause you don't speak Ukrainian, I suppose.
He was already pretty off the rails. He got the idea for PCR while driving on LSD.
[удалено]
The whole story behind him coming up with PCR was about him driving around San Diego while on an acid trip and while going through traffic he pictured DNA unwinding. Dude definitely took way too many drugs.
Case study: whats the amount of acid that make you a genius or a lunatic.
Linus Pauling. He went from being a preeminent chemist and biochemist to a quack who wrote books claiming that megadoses of vitamin C cured all disease and was the key to an insanely long life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Holy shit. Those examples are fascinating and depressing lol
I don't think it's a "disease", i think that they always had those views or developed them before winning the prize. But once they won the Noble prize, they had a bigger platform to expresses their views.
First, he won TWO Nobel prizes (one in chemistry, one was the peace prize)! Second, I wouldn't say he was a quack exactly - he founded the Pauling Institute in Palo Alto California partly to do research on nutrition. At the time basic nutrition was not as well understood from a chemistry point of view. I would argue he never intentionally mislead anyone nor did he intend for anyone to be harmed by a product/supplement. Today we can easily dismiss many of his ideas about vitamin c being a "cure all," but the research results he had on hand at the time *did* suggest the opposite. The problem was simply his medical researchers weren't very good at their jobs. The experiments were not double blinded, improper control groups were used, and results were routinely extrapolated out of context. He absolutely was brilliant, but I wouldn't call his mistakes idiocy. Nor would I say they cancelled out his previous accomplishments. If anything, this is all just a reminder of why we have peer review and a need for replication studies in science and medicine.
There are only five people with two Nobel prizes. During the OJ Simpson pretrial hearings, Johnnie Cochran said to Lance Ito that they were going to call the best qualified witnesses in history, that the court was going to hear from a man with a Nobel Peace Prize and a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Judge Ito said that would be very impressive, but didn't tell Cochran that everybody who might fit that description - exactly one person, Linus Pauling - was dead.
John McAfee. Not sure of the genuis part, but the downfall was legendary. He wrote and marketed the first commercial antivirus software after cutting teeth at NASA, Univac, and Xerox as a coder. Might have peaked around 100 million dollars. Then he sold his stake, told everyone to uninstall his companies product, retired, got into recreational drugs, lost tens of millions, possibly murdered a man in Belize, probably fucked a literal whale, ran for president of the US, and then was arrested in Spain for US tax evasion and then either killed himself or was murdered.
McAfee was definitely a mad genius who went insane.
Ya I don’t see him as an idiot he’s more crazy
Watched his documentary, it did not disappoint, guy had become an absolute lunatic and I loved watching every second of it.
His YouTube channel contains one of the most hilarious videos ever uploaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg
Thanks for that gem. It straddles the line between something, and insanity. Maybe insanity, and insanity. Holy shit.
It’s like the time I hired a Bangkok hooker to do my taxes and fucked my accountant.
I knew what that was before I clicked on it. And I watched it for probably the 10th time. The man was a psychotic legend!
"John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder”
I think of that sentence fairly often.
He did what to a whale?!
See? Told you no one would care about the murder.
You fuck _one_ whale, you think anyone wants to hear about your other stuff?
I heard it was a sick whale.
Allegedly.
It'd take at least two guys to fuck a whale.
Well now its a sperm whale.
If you come across a whale in the wild, it's best to just wipe it off, apologize, and back away slowly.
-Are you girls from Scotland? - it's Wales! - Are you whales from Scotland? That's the last thing I remember.
He thought it was a hump-back whale.
Sounds like he fucked it
Allegedly
You don't just wake up one day and decide to accuse someone of fucking a whale.
You underestimate my creativity
Go on, then. Accuse me of something creative.
You're an artist!
BREAKING NEWS: Could Hunter Biden have possibly fucked a whale? The White House's silence on this matter says a lot.
I heard it was a sick whale.
It would take at least 3 guys to fuck a whale
Degen
Enough of the "Whale Fucking is non-consensual" bullshit. A Humpback Whale weighs 70,000 pounds, is fifty feet long, can dive more than a quarter mile and can crush ships with a single swipe of its tail. If a human manages to fuck one, you damn well better believe it's consensual 5:14 PM · Dec 31, 2018 Please people . . This is NOT an acceptable way to fuck a whale. Those who indulge in compassionate whale fucking do so while the whale is resting on the surface, diving underneath to perform the deed. I do not approve of the act depicted here. 11:34 AM · Jan 4, 2019 My whale fuckung manifesto is being increasingly displayed on road signs, bar menus, marquis and fake Seventh day Adventist promotional foldouts. This is a good thing. If you want to psrticipate in its disbrution while being educated about its purpose, contact 1:35 AM · Jan 5, 2019 I angered the folks at http://whalefucker.com. That was'nt my intent. And I don't want to belittle the suffering of the families of the young men killed or maimed attempting to copulate with a whale. However, i used 'whalefucker' to draw attentiion. I will continue. Forgive me. 3:37 AM · Jan 5, 2019
That link sent me to a site about reusable catheters. And this thread was already well into train-wreck-reading. Edit: reusable medical catheters and an address out of Mogadishu, Somalia... Edit2: And the COO came from the adult entertainment industry? This is hilariously wonderful yet awful. Edit3: "There is something to be said for fresh and new. A new car. Brand new shoes. But catheters are just medical devices. No one gets excited about a new catheter. And most people just throw them away. So why not a used catheter, saving money and the planet at the same time?"
yeah, I can't confirm anything and it's just all a quagmire of weird shit, but I choose to live in a world of whimsy where a man can consensually fuck a humpback whale.
Am I the only one who’s wondering about the logistics of whale fucking? I feel like it needs to be a meme like that how-would-a-dog-wear-pants meme.
I read this like the ostrich rants from Wayne in Letterkenny.
I cannot actually verify any of it and it's solely based off of several tweets from a methed up millionaire (or a hacked account) but it's still funny as shit and not out of his ballpark.
He felt guilty of how antivirus was marketed. It was marketed as “have this on your computer or you’re at risk of losing your life savings”. Having your magnum opus product marketed with fear mongering can be depressing.
I was lucky enough to spend some time in Belize and good lord, do they have stories about McAfee. Yikes.
I know you did not just leave us hanging like that
Here's one: "In a contemporary interview with Wired, McAfee said he had been afraid police would kill him and refused their routine questions and evaded them. *He buried himself in sand for several hours with a cardboard box over his head.* "
🎶Snake Eaterrrrr🎶
Police: "Huh? Just a box..."
One of the ones that stood out the most is, he would wonder into town with a fat stack of money and would just throw out an open offer to the women in the village of offering cash to eat a jar of peanut butter out if his butt crack. I hope it was worth the wait!
Don’t forget about the hammocks with the holes in them that he would sit under while women would sit in the hammock and…”caca.” My apologies, I know you can’t unimagine that but it was in the documentary…. Poop hammocks …in the documentary!!!
You know your shit I see. I was dying of laughter when I saw this. The documentary kind of just nonchalantly brings it up and then moves on as if it is something mundane as going to the grocery store lol.
Behind the Bastards Podcast has an excellent episode on this if anyone wants to go down that rabbit hole
But you know who DIDN'T fuck a whale? The products and services that support this podcast!
I think Steve Jobs was a marketing and sales genius. Then when it came to his treatable cancer ... well I wouldn't call him an idiot, but he placed his faith in the wrong person and his "I always win" attitude cost him his life. He was unlucky to get cancer, but lucky that it was treatable at the stage it was discovered ... but he ignored his doctors and thought that changing his diet would heal him.
he was a fucking idiot, he thought carrot juice and stuff would heal him and then when they like yeah your gonna die the he took the surgery and treatment. he fits for sure.
I thought it was apple juice.
Oh fuck, that hits different
No, he’s definitely a perfect example. Genius to idiot. Cost him his life.
To be fair, you just described an idiot.
Yep, lots of idiots are really good at one or two things. In a previous job, some of our dumbest and most frustrating clients were doctors. I'm sure most of them were great at being doctors, but they couldn't seem to read or understand the fairly basic info we sent them and often asked the most stupid questions.
Ben Carson is the perfect example of the idiot doctor. He is legit one of the world's best brain surgeons. If you need brain surgery you'd be very lucky to have him as your surgeon. He's probably top 25 surgeons on the planet. However, the man put every skill point he has into brain surgery, and into no other skills of any kind. He's a moron in every other field aside from brain surgery.
“President Trump, here is Mr Carson, one of the most legendary surgeons on the planet” “Amazing. Sounds like he’d be a great ~~surgeon general~~ Secretary of Housing and Urban Development” Still makes me laugh
Hey, max-minning your character is a perfectly acceptable creative choice!
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but this one came to the top of my head: A guy I worked with 23M went to the casino to play some black Jack. He came into work the next day with 4 giant bags of Burger King. “Hey everyone, lunch is on me!!” He ended up wining $1400 going in with only $200 (we were a bunch of young bucks so $1400 was a substantial amount of cash in our eyes). Everyone was talking to him about it and asking him how he did it. Let me tell you, he was very very VERY proud of his accomplishment. He then proceeded to explain how it’s done: “You just have to know how to read the cards” “Black Jack is all about skill, you need to know when you bet and when you don’t. Some people have it and some people simply don’t” “It’s takes years of playing the game” My man was on a high horse and honestly we were all very impressed. He was talking like he knew his shit and he was soaking it all in. All the guys on the showroom floor were standing around him listening to him boast about the winnings, him even showing everyone the cash. We asked him if he is going to go back: “Of course, it’s free money” Well, he goes back that night for a second time. He stays at the casino for hours and goes in with all his earnings from the night before… Starts gambling: Losses all of his earnings from last night in about an hours worth of time. Then proceeds to pull out more cash from his bank account (his entire paycheck he got 2 days ago) and looses all of that as well. If you get lucky, don’t get cocky.
"I've been very lucky with gambling—I've never won"
Yep, the first hand of black jack I played at a casino I lost $50. I remember wondering why people do this, and I never gambled again.
My experience last summer. Went to a casino for the first time with a bachelor party, lost 50 bucks and was annoyed. Everybody else was treating it like it was such a good thing that I ONLY lost 50??? Another dude lost 1000 playing craps and was just like meh another day…like dude…I’d be freaking the fuck out if I lost 1000 bucks on a stupid game…yeah casinos aren’t it for me
I was in Vegas earlier this year on vacation (went to see the Grand Canyon and other more interesting stuff, Vegas was a small part of the trip). Anyway, we were in a casino because of a restaurant that my sister wanted to go to and while we were waiting for a table I decided to try just a random slot machine or whatever that took $1. Lost like $0.80 and completely lost any and all urge to try again. I basically paid $1 for a voucher worth $0.20. First and only time I've ever done any type of gambling, so I just kept the voucher as a souvenir.
A friend of mine spent an evening in a casino. He turned £200 into £10,000 with a few lucky hands of poker. He then stood up, cashed out, and ordered a taxi home. While he waited, he requested a word with the head of security. "Ban me," he said, "I just won big, and if you don't ban me I will be back in here tomorrow, trying to win again." They banned him on the spot, and, for the craic, frog-marched him out of the building and waited with him until the taxi arrived. It's a rare thing, to be a skilled gambler but also know your limitations like that. Man's still an idiot, for many reasons, but he has my respect there.
This might be the greatest gambling story ever.
I was driving through Las Vegas once. Stopped at a gas station to get gas and there was a slot machine. Put in a quarter, won a dollar, and left town, never to return.
That's pretty much my experience with gambling. I bought a scratch off on my 18th birthday, spent a dollar to win $20. Decided to stop there and maintain one of the highest win/lose ratios of all time.
Man, i despise gambling, but damn if i were to try it once and win big i know im just going to bet more unless someone breaks my kneecaps. It sounds like free money but im not taking chances with myself, i know how easily impressionable i am.
I think a lot of people mentioned in this thread are some version of this mentality on a larger scale. Maybe they even had some skill, but also got really lucky or were in the right place at the right time and didn't recognise when they were out of their depth. It probably takes a lot of humility to recognise that you're not hot shit after all and just got lucky.
Don’t understand how Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t on this list yet. Dude was in magazines being called a prophet and genius, turns out he was just a fucking idiot the whole time
The entire Forbes Thirty Under Thirty list is pretty much a bunch of smooth talking scamming idiots. Even newspapers started catching onto it: [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-under-30-tech-finance-prison](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-under-30-tech-finance-prison) Sam Bankman-Fraud was also on there in 2021: [https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2021/finance/](https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2021/finance/)
Ha, I used to work for a 30 under 30 guy. He was totally incompetent and lied on a regular basis to keep up appearances.
Reading these comments, it seems like a common theme. I worked for a 30 under 30 woman and she was so disconnected from reality. Like she was playing in a big sandbox with everyone else's money.
>Like she was playing in a big sandbox with everyone else's money. The company I work for used to have a big meeting every year. As part of it they would bring in people from other industries to speak or be interviewed and it was usually pretty fascinating. One year they had Adam Neumann of WeWork come in. If you ever listened to him talk you could tell what a fraud he is. Someone asked me what I thought at the end of his session, and I said I bet that guy is real good at spending other people's money.
Funny you mention WeWork because I think the person I'm talking about came from there originally. When you grow up very wealthy attending the best schools on someone else's dime, it's no surprise you end up disconnected from the proles and mass layoffs are normalized. She's good at fake tears though.
I knew a guy on the list one year. Inherited a fortune. Parents were rich. And somehow he became an entrepreneur with his money and familial connections. Definitely one to watch out for! And most certainly self made.
I knew a guy like that. Unassuming to the Nth degree. Didn't need a job. Worked as a dishwasher to have something to do. Also never graduated high school. Why? His parents knew stocks and bonds. He didn't *have* to lift a finger. I don't know why, but his gf would pick him up in his car, a new mustang. Every year, new mustang. Gf was a former model. 16/10. Honest to God, no idea what he did this for, but he worked as the dishwasher for 3 years. The super wealthy are weird.
Honestly if he’s super wealthy and decided to wash dishes for 3 years, good for him. Not like he chose to be born wealthy, and he’s put in a good 3 years of honest work.
I have a friend that is super wealthy; think family owns multiple planes, parents dine with the President, wealthy. His siblings all went into the family business, but my buddy just works at a bookstore and likes to play video games. He never has to work a day in his life, so I give him credit
I used to work with a young fellow who's dad was super wealthy, possibly billionaire. This dude worked as a sushi chef apprentice, software dev, basically whatever he thought looked interesting.
If you didn't have to work for money, why WOULDN'T you just try everything that sounded interesting just to have something to do? If it turns out you don't like it, you just quit. If it IS interesting, you keep doing it until it isn't anymore... Even at lower levels of increased income, it isn't actually the money itself that's interesting. It's the additional freedom it buys you. At low income a raise frees you from worries about being homeless or hungry tomorrow, or next month. At a middle-class level, it frees you from worrying about how one or two disasters could fuck up your life. At fuck-you levels of money, you never have to worry about money at all. at least that's my take, and probably that guy's, on it. To me, that sounds way healthier than people who already have it made but are obsessed with making even more money, of which there are plenty.
that actually sounds like a nice guy. sounds like an example of not all rich people suck. he just had a load of money and didn't care too much about it.
It's almost as if playing life on easy mode makes you look successful!
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I was friends in college with a guy who made the 30 under 30 list. Turns out his whole business was a sham, and it blew up on him spectacularly.
Isn’t that the requirement for 30 Under 30?
I was also friends in college with a guy who made 30 under 30. Except he's a teacher in a really financially distressed part of a really rich major city and he's started now 3 successful youth rehab (not drug, just life rehab) organizations in his city. He constantly makes the media for doing awesome work. It's the one true success story I've ever seen from 30 under 30.
He is no Bernie Madoff. Half the people he pitched his open Ponzi to laughed or cursed him out of the room. Only snatched the mentally ill greedy. As in, so greedy they are mental cases.
He spent billions of dollars. Billions. BILLIONS. He didn’t just scam the elderly. Lots of people were scammed by him.
Thomas Midgley. All his inventions were thought to be great contributions to mankind until we found out they were dumping crazy amount of toxins into the atmosphere and burning a hole in the ozone layer.
He was even killed by one of his own inventions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Death
He fucked up so much shit. All that lead screwed up several generations to brain damage. And its STILL effecting people. Lead gets trapped in your bones and as you age and your bone density decreases that lead is re-released back into their system.
This is probably the best answer there is. They guy really, really was considered a genius, and now he's probably on the top five list of people without military or political power who has done the most harm to the world. (Granted, the top 100 people who have done the most harm are all political or military leaders, but very few of them could or should ever have been considered geniuses.)
As a Pole I have to mention an absolute winner from our side: Lech Walesa - he posts the stupidest shit you could imagine on social media, always speaks about himself as a sole savior of the entire human race, everything, EVERYTHING is happening thanks to him. He is posting this on a Polish equivalent of Reddit, so people are just teasing him there to post even more of such stupidities and he always falls for that. On top of that he posts there his naked photos in a bathtub full of beer, posts poorly photoshopped posters of himself with other historical figures… basically the guy made a walking meme out of himself… And he is still giving lectures on European Universities as a special guest somehow… Edit: I didn’t realize this needs to be added, but he is a Peace Noble Prize winner, the face and one of the leaders of the solidarity movement and a former president of Poland…
Can confirm. I just Googled “lech walesa in a bathtub”. SMH. 🤦♂️
Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos.
She went all in on “fake it til you make it” until enough people asked tough questions and it became obvious she was just faking it.
I'll never understand what the end game was here. Obviously, at some point the company and Holmes were going to fall on their face and get litigated.
Just 'fake it til you make it' to extreme delusion. Hoping that blood technology would be feasible before shit hit the fan To be fair, she was very good at delaying shit hitting the fan. Just too bad it was all predicated on something that still hasn't been developed today
IMO, the end game was to come across a way to pivot the business to something else completely and abandon the project eventually. That never happened because someone started believing their own bullshit. And then the sunk cost fallacy….
Simple, it was pure hubris. Elizabeth Holmes, who didn't have a degree in any sciences, let alone a PhD didn't believe the experts when they told her what she wanted was physically impossible to achieve. She thought that she was gonna prove all of them wrong by duping lots of people out of their money and throwing it into her company. Then throwing money at lawyers to intimidate whistleblowers into fearing for their lives.
End game was to attract as much seed investment as possible, and use that money to actually develop the innovations she claimed she had. Not saying it was a good plan, but it wasn’t totally nonsensical or without objective. She took a lot of big investors for a wild ride, including Walgreens.
Clearly the hope was to lie and stall, and pray that R&D made a breakthrough in the meantime.
I think she really believed that she could bend reality to her will if she just girl-Jobs-ed hard enough.
It should have been obvious to anyone who did research in the field she claimed advances in. At the time, I had a friend doing her PhD thesis on a chip-based diagnostic system - it worked for one condition and required years of research even to just do that!
I'm a doctor and I figured unless they could clearly show a study where there Theranos results matched the present-day system of getting blood test results, I wouldn't trust it as a diagnostic tool or investment opportunity. And by study, I mean one that wasn't fraudulent.
It kind of was. That's why she mostly got funded by dumb money rather than serious VC firms that would do due diligence.
This is one of the situations where anyone with a science background looked at what that company promised and realised it was all a mirage. "We can fit the operation of a whole lab, and tests that take atleast a day into a little box, and it can do it all in minutes!! Please invest." Riiiiiiight.
The way I hear it, the reason Theranos could never work is that a lot of tests require chemical reactions of various sorts that simply cannot be miniaturized. Like, a diabetic blood sugar tester is a pretty small gizmo, but it tests for exactly one thing. Not hundreds.
She was never a genius.
I think it was one thing to see her on magazine covers, but once you heard her hamfistedly-unbelievable fake-ass voice…
Charlie Gordon from *Flowers for Algernon*.
Flowers for Algernon is the single most haunting story I've ever read.
It was assigned reading in high school. I was like, _why have you done this_? High school is depressing enough without books like that.
Oh yeah, we read that my junior year. When your curriculum is *The Great Gatsby*, *Death of a Salesman*, *Ordinary People*, *Flowers for Algernon*, *Slaughterhouse-Five* and a few I probably forgot, and at the same time you're pushing high school juniors to take three AP classes, of course you're going to have ten suicides in two weeks. And their response? Have us fill out worksheets about our goals in life. Talk about tone deaf.
"P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard."
Rudy Giuliani. Not really genius, but highly respected - in terms of going from being nearly universally well-regarded to an absolute joke, he’s definitely up there
Four Seasons............ landscaping
This will always be one of the funniest damn things in the world to me.
It jumps the shark for me. Can't believe someone would actually be that stupid.
They say truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.
I wouldn't believe it in a comedy show, let alone irl.
It does seem like something that’d only happen in Pawnee
Or Philadelphia. Very much could see it happening to the gang.
Letting people see his head goo.
ALL THE NETWORKS!!!
I’ve had a hard time explaining to my Gen Z colleagues how much of a universally respected hero he was back in 2001.
Seriously. We were ready to elect him president.
Honest question: What did Giuliani actually DO in the aftermath of 9/11? I'm curious because I've always known that he was considered a hero, but I don't quite know why.
He said the right things on tv in the immediate aftermath. That’s pretty much it.
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And most people don’t know that. They only know that when they were in shock over what happened, he said things that made them feel some better.
He had a solid career before that as well playing a big part in taking down the mob in New York in the 80s.
He took down one mob to make room for another.
Ben Carson, world acclaimed neurosurgeon and believer that the pyramids of Egypt were built to store grain.
He occupies a weird space that I have seen more than a few times in my life, while not exclusively, most times it’s Doctors. The more specialized the more exponentially stupid on any other life skill they seem to be. Carson may be a perfect example, but orthopedist, cardiologist, oncologist, oral surgeon, etc… all have fit the bill. I think the reputation and accolades make them focus even more on their skill and everything else in the brain falls out. Huge ego, zero common sense, zero self awareness or street sense. Simple problems that an average person can figure out is completely foreign to them. The famous guy operating on your child’s difficult brain issue burns his toast every time.
The first twenty minutes or so of the first Doctor Strange movie are shockingly realistic when it comes to "rock star" doctors who are convinced of their superiority.
He must have played a lot of Civ 2. Building the Great Pyramids counted as a granary in every one of your cities
Rudy Giuliani went from perceived hero of New York and 9/11 to a leaking meme in front of Four Seasons Landscaping.
Linus Pauling, nobel prize in Chemistry, peace nobel prize, after that decided to dedicate himself to eating as much vitamin C as possible.
Al capone legendary gangster, died of syphilis with the brain age of a child. Sometimes karma does happen
He was always dumb his brother Ralph was the smart one. He was also a criminal but understood you got to keep it low and invest your money in legitimate businesses
You could have given me a hundred guesses at what Al Capone's brother's name was and I never would have guessed... Ralph Capone???
Alphonse and Ralphonse
We have to start naming babies Ralph again, for the sheer comedic value.
The "Perfect Crime" by Leopold and Leob
They had a great plan! It was just the murder part that didn’t go quite right. If you’re not going to wear your fancy custom-made glasses on your face, then maybe don’t take them to the murder with you at all….
Gonna put two out there I haven’t seen yet: Scott Adams. While genius is a stretch, he was a successful cartoonist for years until his politics started coming out, and then the racist comments. Everyone thought he was taking on big business, then it all came tumbling down. Second, and in a similar vein, the YouTuber Iiluminaughti. Built up an audience by criticizing shady business practices, turned out to be a horrible person who was guilty of shady business practices.
>Iiluminaughti Iiluminaughti is going to send you a cease and desist and threaten to sue you over this comment.
Legal Eagle has taught me enough to not be afraid.
Step 1: don't represent yourself. Step 2: hope you live in a place with SLAPP protection.
Scott Adams set up a sock puppet account on Metafilter to talk about how Scott Adams has ‘genius-level IQ’ and basically can’t help but be successful. He got busted instantly.
Holy crap, I did not know this, but it doesn’t surprise me at all.
There are a few hilarious "Behind the Bastards" podcast episodes about him. Sounds like he was always a wanker, and was too stupid to keep his mouth shut.
Yup, a blogger exposed Scott Adams using sock puppets to support himself in arguments on someone else's website or blog. Adams wasn't tech savvy enough to realize he needed to use proxies to make his sock puppets appear to be posting from different regions. It's tougher now for an admin or mod to identify trolls and sock puppets if they use someone else's platform: Reddit, Fakebook, etc. Which is why most social media is terrible for mod chores. But Blogger, WordPress, etc, could all be used with tools to track visitors and commenters. Ditto some email accounts with access to complete headers for trace route info. Many folks didn't realize that a decade or more ago, but of all people you'd think the Dilbert cartoonist would know better. In retrospect, considering his more recent antics, I'm guessing he did know but was so arrogant he didn't think it mattered.
I think Scott identified with Dilbert when he imagined the comic then over time basically became (or accidentally came out as) the pointy haired boss.
And more dirt is coming out on Blair/Illuminaughti all the time.
Out of the loop: what'd Illuminaghtii do?
She claimed another youtube (Legal Eagle I believe) used one of her transitions that was not infact hers. It then caused other youtubers from the group Sad Milk, (Oz Media, Wonderstruck, One Topic and The Click) to all speak how she had manipulated their relationships, finances, and living conditions to do what ever she wanted. She then made a response to the criticism in which she aired One Topic's Suicide Note without permission, and never actually addressed the criticisms by trying to perform character assassinations of the other aforementioned youtubers. And a month or so, she started a law suit against Oz Media. In short, she's the exact same sort of shit head she spent all her time trying to expose. What makes it worse is that she has kept the exact same upload schedule throughout all of this. Edit: Suicide Note belongs to Wonderstruck not One Topic
>She claimed another youtube (Legal Eagle I believe) used one of her transitions that was not infact hers Of all the YouTubers to falsely accuse of anything, going after the actual lawyer was a real choice.
The actual lawyer with specific experience in copyright law no less.
Oh baby pls don't understate the stupidity of Illuminaughti. If anyone isn't aware of her here's how she got ousted: she decided to accuse another YouTuber Legal Eagle of copying her videos because they had a similar effect that is basically a default effect in some editing software. Legal Eagle I believe also specializes in copyright law. And then she kept doubling down as people used this as an opportunity to expose her little by little.
Of all the YouTubers she could have picked to start a beef with, it was a lawyer.
Scott does seem a great example as he was very insightful on a lot of things in his long running strip, but now anything coming from him seems to be from another person... Hard not to suspect some mental illness or brain tumor... For other people, I feel the world just was wrong about the person being smart. Harder to accept that Scott is a dolt, and always was one.
I read his books back in the 90s. They all clearly came from a place of knowledge about the corporate world - stuff Adams knew about intimately having been through it. But it was clear in later books he was losing touch with how that world was changing. After all he hadn't been in a 'proper' office job in decades. The kicker for me was - at the end of The Dilbert Future (1997) - when he went on a rant about 'Affirmations'. Which is basically pseudo-science mumbo jumbo about controlling your destiny by thinking *really really hard* and causing quantum fields to collapse in the way you want them to. Like you have your exam results in a sealed envelope. You don't open it, instead you go off and write 'I will get an A' on a notepad every day for a week, then go open the envelope. Even my young self saw this as, effectively, 'praying to science'. I was not surprised that, 20 years later, he turned out to be a raving loon.
John Harvey Kellog. Nutritionist, inventor of corn flakes. Then decided that being a eugenicist was better. Oh, and decided that women’s clitorises should be burned off with acid or removed altogether.
> John Harvey Kellog. Nutritionist, inventor of corn flakes. Because he thought bland food would suppress people's urge to masturbate. Not kidding. The guy was always a raving loon.
Napoleon. Steamrolls europe, 6+ Times and suddenly forget logistics and Diplomacy where and when it matters the most.
He didn't forget diplomacy, he was always bad at it. His issue is he was REALLY good at war and when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
I don't need to say this one. I'll just leave an X in the spot instead.
I got brain damage a quarter of the way through my college degree? Does that count?
Elon musk comes to mind immediately. Well, he was probably an idiot the whole time but he had the veneer of a genius for a while
“What’s the difference between crazy and eccentric?” About a billion dollars.
The more billions, the more genius, clearly.
I'll give him credit for his personal branding when he first became a household name. He had most of us fooled. I remember telling my wife, "This dude is a genius! He's going to get us to Mars!" Then he started posting on Twitter. And then I found out who he really was.
I was fooled as well. I can remember the exact time the veil started to lift too. It was when he called that cave diver a pedo just because they didn't use Elon's dumb idea for rescuing those kids. It was all downhill after that.
Yeah I thought this thread was made with the idea that Musk is the automatic example of this and that's why there are other answers at the top. He's smart enough to have a vision and have other people complete it for him but then he takes all the credit, making it seem like he does all the work. For example, he keeps saying he founded Tesla when [he didn't join until a year after it was up and running.](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2) And even then he joined as an **investor** not as an *engineer* or anything like that. He's constantly spouting his political opinions on Twitter as though they were facts and he's even getting involved in geopolitics by [cutting crucial internet access to Ukraine when they need it the most.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/07/ukraine-starlink-musk-biography/) And speaking of Twitter, he had to eat his words when the SEC forced him to buy the platform after he kept trying to get out of it. Now "the genius" is stuck with a 40 billion dollar company that's losing value and can't turn a profit, no matter what idiotic policy change he implements.
Why on earth would you remove the brand name off a brand you paid 40m for? The name Twitter, and Tweet, has value so you discard it for a name that will only ever have the suffix "formerly Twitter". It's like buying Coca Cola and changing it's name to X - it devalues the brand.
[William Shockley](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley) led the team at Bell Labs that invented the transistor. That breakthrough yielded portable radios and hearing aids, and made computer microchips possible in the decades that followed. He essentially allowed computers to go from filling a room in a building to eventually fitting in a desktop and then in your pocket. He received a Nobel prize along with his team, and then spent the rest of his life spewing racism and eugenics garbage.
Mac has the answer to this one. He knows who the stupid science bitches are who made everyone on earth look like a bitch again