GameStop (GME) CEO Ryan Cohen took to social media site X on Wednesday to make the case that American capitalism is rotting from the head down. The timing is intriguing, with GameStop (GME) reportedly on the hunt for an acquisition that could reset investor sentiment on the stock.
Cohen warned that the idea of an owner-operator or risk-taker has been replaced with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat that he called the risk-free insider and the hollow men of the boardroom.
Key snippets of the missive are below.
“They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about governance and ESG. But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition. In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken. Today, we have severed that link.”
“If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a ‘Golden Parachute’ worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.”
“They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.”
“The time for polite governance is over. If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the “Owner’s Mentality.” We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.”