View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwyqAvFbAdY
The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior
The inspirational executive seemed to lose his way after moving to a mansion in Utah and giving up his corporate role, including a starvation diet and fascination with fire.
www.wsj.com
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These are the eyes of a man who will die of loneliness. They will certainly be slanted.
The pair I'm talking about belonged to Tony Hsieh, the founder and former CEO of Zappos. He died in a housefire recently. His story up until now has been one of material success, but I say, especially now, that his story is a tragedy: a genetic tragedy. And the theme of that tragedy is the sisiphean task of being liked, WHEN YOU ARE AN UGLY ASIAN.
You see, unlike white billionaires, Tony, the natural asian male beta, cared a lot about what other people thought of him. And that care struck a chord in the patterns of wanting to be liked by cool strangers, desperately:
Let's take the sale of his first company LinkExchange. On an old interview on NPR, I recall he stated he could have timed to exit his company in a way to obtain substantially more profit, but instead chose to leave at a time when he was simply unhappy, as he felt the company, due to the impersonal way of how it had to scale, became structured in a way that forced him to not always be the good guy. He would rather a profitable company be sold than stay and be the bad guy.
He still made quite a pretty penny by leaving early, and with that new fortune, I think due to the extreme coping and low-self esteem from being an ugly introvert CS chink, he found himself with the NEED to experiment in trying to become a "cool" leader, to make up for all those lost times. He founded Zappos. A company who's very brand is simply extreme customer satisfaction, beyond all others at the time. He had the vision to make his company a happy, holistic, autonomous workplace, where unhappy workers were paid to quit. Tony wanted to bring economic growth to downtrodden downtown Las Vegas by creating some weird hippy commune, and setting shop there.
At the time, the need to provide customer satisfaction was borderline corporately negligent of profit for profit's sake. It was all about customer loyalty. The long-term betabuxx play. I can see that in Tony. He's the kind of guy that needs to naturally overdeliver just for a smidge of loyalty. Fucking asian beta shit. You see the theme I'm getting at here--
Tony was known for being a "huggy" guy in a semi-creepy way (incels know it's only creepy because he's ugly). Tony, like most beta asian men have a massively anxious attachment style. At least that's how journalist Kara Swisher seemed to recall on a podcast. Though the creepiness was heavily implied as an initial instinct, she then backtracked a bit, and tried to virtue signal that he hugged in a wholesome way, because even the most virulent feminists realize its a bit gauche to creepshame an recently deceased well-intentioned billionaire with mental health issues who just enjoyed hugs.
I think only an ugly chink can get accused of being a "cult" leader for genuinely wanting people around him to be happy beyond what a normie CEO would deem acceptable. To me, he seemed like a guy that just wanted to legimitately earn respect and affection, yet was too stoic and nice to force it. Instead of directly paying for friends, create a business environment that incentivizes friendship. To Tony, that's chaotic good, to a normie, that's just weird. How ironic, that Tony was ultimately fooling himself. I think In the process of just keeping everything fun, fresh, and happy, and that beta need of overly needing to win over "cool" people and strangers, over the years, he got usurped by an entourage of "cool" sycophants that led him down a spiral of depression, drug/alcohol addiction, and insanity. That's one account, another account on a podcast claims that like many fucked mid-life dudes, his original peer group his age started settling down, starting families, and he was the one suddenly all alone. Surely he had "facebook" friends, and friends on paper, but nothing close. Nothing meaningful. Figures for a rice. He had to desperately seek attention from other cheap sporadic sources, which can be a bit dangerous if you are overly agreeable and wealthy.
COVID-19 did not help things. It forced him to isolate from any group of love and power he desperately needed and became accostomed to. I think what happened is that in isolation he began to realize that his cult, or any friends he had for that matter, was entirely propped up by his own fortune. And in the wake of the pandemic, it's not like these "cool" sycophants are neccessarily obligated to shoot him a call or text to elevate his own sense of importance.
So in his solitude, he retreated into that teenage nihilism. He began experimenting with extreme minimalism (while injesting copious amounts of alcohol, ecstacy, and shrooms). How little food can he eat and still survive? How little oxygen does he need to survive? In the same way he dabbled with trying to bring holistic value and community to the world, the questions he now began asking himself were like passive-aggressive experimentations in committing suicide. As COVID wore on, he was nearly 100 lbs, and was irresponsibly playing with fire like a nihilistic teenager. What does it all mean? Why give people anything if they simply can't call me back and say hello. By all actionable accounts his pattern of behavior leading to the inhalation death is suicidal in nature, although the instance wherein he died was not necessarily intentional. He died because he did not care to live.
It's funny looking back at this now, because I think this branding influence of Zappos certainly rubbed on Amazon, which at the time of being acquired was still unprofitable. The only thing missing from Zappos' equation was fucking over its own warehouse workers, which Amazon was obliged, to become the juggernaut it is today.
That's something to think about. Amazon/Bezos is thriving today, is because it's psychotic and doesn't give a shit in order to win for the empty pursuit of winning, and Tony is dead because he cared too much yet, ultimately got nothing out of it, so he no longer cared to live. All this desperation to be needed, because he was ugly, a probably a virgin in his teens, and never recovered from it. Money cannot escape genetics-- although a billionaire, he died Mike Yanagita lonely.
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