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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Is the only thing holding you back from murder lack of funds?

If not, why do you think billionaires are any different?

Large companies and those who run them can be both ruthless and amoral. I think it’s a mistake to think the average person’s intuition would apply here.

This is it. If you tell a typical senior executive at a company that their actions will lead to the death of 10 million people, their primary concern will be if the company will still make money one the deal, then how they can hide their actions from regulators in order to maximize their return.

You might think they would consider whether or not they'd be jailed, but that thought never crosses their mind.

I disagree. Very, very few people, CEOs included have that little disregard for human life. Most CEOs aren't that different from you or I.

FWIW I agree, but the CEOs that do fit the mold of ruthless and amoral are extraordinarily well suited for large scale business.

I've seen enough evidence of senior leadership of major companies disregarding human life. Car manufactures are particularly bad in this respect, lots of major safety issues in vehicles wouldn't be fixed if not for regulators, since wrongful death lawsuits are cheaper than fixing the issue.

You can look at cigarettes companies for trying to deflect from medical evidence that they cause cancer. Similarly with asbestos and black lung. There's so much evidence that senior leadership at large companies are more than willing to let people die rather than pay out.

Down vote me all you want, but there's plenty of evidence to convince me.

Beside moral grounds which you seem to give people little credit for, highly educated people who have been financially successful know how to make money by legal means. The risk benefit ratio is just not worth it particularly in a western country where the chances of getting away with murder are pretty slim (there aren’t many unsolved high profile murders).

I think you are right. As the return on passive market investments go down you should expect to see more of this as the “return” for extralegal tactics will proportionally rise.

That said, I think it’s fairly impossible to spot a successful murder as distinct from accident/natural causes. Consider the death of Michael Hastings. Do I think that was murder? Probably not, but there’s no way to firmly put that thought to bed either. It certainly wouldn’t be marked as an “unsolved murder”.

Exactly. "Accidents" can happen. Some families have more of them. You'll never know.

Likely in societies with more corruption and low labour costs, using gangsters as intimidation and to assassinate your opponents is more frequent.

Happened in China, underground gangsters would phone up rich local businessmen asking if they needed their services. As well, debt collection agencies in certain countries are opaque enough that their practices border on near-criminal.

Presumably a billionaire would be better suited to both get away with and profit from such a murder.

In places where the rule of law is weak and corruption is rampant it is easy to literally get away with murder just by paying off the police. But that doesn't protect you from retribution from associates of the people you had killed. You have to either wipe out the entire enemy tribe, or make it look like a very convincing accident, or very convincingly pin it on someone else. Sometimes you combine those with the assistance of the corrupt police.

If television is to be believed, detective work is discovering means, motive and opportunity.

By that measure, billionaires are in any given instant 2/3rds of the way there.

If the only thing holding you back from murder is a lack of funds, you are probably more likely than average to become a billionaire.

If I had near infinite funding + the opportunity to be above the law, I'd definitely be tempted to act as some sort of vigilante.

Bill Gates realized he could save a lot more kids from the heartache of losing their parents by curing malaria in millions permanently, instead of stopping the Joker from robbing individuals a few nights a week.

He probably assumes becoming mega rich requires a certain form of sociopathy that ditinguishes the group from the rest of us.

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