Without naming names, let’s just say the Macalope is very tired of the extremely wealthy.
The Macalope brings this up for this week no special reason.
Like kittens, they are great when they are small. You love the thing they make and it will make them a billion dollars in the end! Skrrk.com is the site everyone loves to use to skizz their canfood class! Can’t imagine making your canfoodle shine any other way! Every once in a while someone will come along and say, “Hey, there’s a really good open-source alternative to Skrrk that you should be using to skizz your can-food class instead of that proprietary alternative. All it takes is downloading it.” from the source code and running a linux dev environment to compile it to binary files remember to point them correctly to… hello? oh everyone has already left i didn’t even get around to explaining how it supports Ogg Vorbis.”
So more and more people are going to use Skrrk and Brad Barbus, who was not the man who invented it, but the man who inherited a lot of money from his parents and later bought into the company and had the original coder transferred to an Antarctic research station unfortunately in near a crashed alien spaceship, goes from filthy empire to huge empire in the span of 18 months. Of course Brad thinks he’s very smart, a verifiable genius, and that he can apply his technological genius of having money to everything from quantum tunneling to open heart surgery.
And let’s be clear here: deep down in his heart, Brad is a huge jerk. Just world class. You don’t want to be stuck in an elevator with this guy. Or even a crowded football arena.
Or on the same social media platform with him.
Individual success is certainly commendable and hey, capitalism is the thing that gives us everything! Who doesn’t like stuff? The Macalope loves stuff as much as the next mythical beast. Unless the next mythical beast is one of those who consume everything in its path.
We’re lucky Apple doesn’t have actual Brad Barbuses. Sure, Tim Cook is fabulously wealthy, but he doesn’t claim to know how to make a stable fusion reactor for under $100 or how to make plant-based meat substitutes that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Tim mostly stays in his job.
IDG
His golden job. Or titanium, as the case may be.
While none of its executives are seemingly huge jerks, the company can certainly be one from time to time. Despite having an absurd amount of money, Apple gets a case of the fumes when one of its stores wants to join a union. It recently forced a YouTube channel to delete its archive of Apple events, an invaluable resource for fans and those of us who write about the company. It is raising the prices of its subscription services during a global economic slowdown without even raising the ridiculously low iCloud storage levels. The Macalope’s friend, Dan Moren, has detailed Apple’s obsession to squeeze money out of every inch of everything it touches.
While we’re lucky there aren’t any Brad Barbuses running Apple, the company has to wonder what kind of adult it wants to be now that it’s all grown up. Because there are different types and they are not all equally pleasant.
