I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.

If you think about "Stockholm Syndrome" for a minute, where a prisoner begins to empathize with their captives, and form a psychological bond with them, it's hard to find a better and more frequent example than how the trade press gushes over 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12-figure -ionaires. It turns my stomach, to be honest, how the press--and you and I along with them--ignore the financial machinations of the -ionaire class and conflate their sinful wealth with preternatural intelligence. 

We treat these men like gods--altman, musk, thiel, karp, bezos. We should regard them as clods. Clods that don't pay tax. 

No one outside of tump ever talks about the system being rigged, or the miscreance of CEOs who act as heads of their own compensation committees or that CEO pay has risen from about 17-times the pay of median workers in 1970 (arguably amerika's most-equal age) to more than 300-times the pay of an average worker today.

If you made $25,000 in 1974--a decent salary, a CEO would comparatively have brought in $425,000. Today, if you make a decent salary, say $100,000, the average CEO would make $30,000,000. Plus, when the inevitable bellying-upping of once great companies happens--the CEO and the money behind them have it all structured so they get paid first. Workers, pensions, debt be damned, Mustique, here I come.

All that being posited, about fourteen dozen people sent me the article here from Forbes. My email box exploded with the above, treating Martin Sorrell like he's an oracle, not an oral-rinse. 

Yes, Sorrell built a giant house of agency cards--with other people's money--with no acquisition strategy other than dominate the agency-world shelf space. Why in god's name would you buy Y&R, O&M, JWT, Grey and dozens of smaller look-alikes. 

All this was to gull investors into ginning up the stock price by manipulating numbers until which point the whole thing has collapsed. Sorrell's former agency has seen it's market-cap plummet from being worth $31,870,000,000 eleven years ago to $3,610,000,000 today. 

If your house suffered similar decline in value, if it went from being worth $310,000 to $36,000 you would not be going to your realtor for investment advice. Basically, post-Sorrell, Park Avenue apartments are now available at Love Canal prices. But let's treat him as wise. 

(Grabbi. Rapi. Leavi. I grabbed, I raped, I l left--as Caesar might have said.)

On top of all this, and one more things our Stockholm journalists don't mention, is that Sorrell, while CEO of WPP routinely paid himself hundreds of millions of dollars--a salary way out of whack of any comparable standard--moral, ethical or competitive.

In 2015, WPP's peak year, Sorrell took home $102,000,000--1,444 times his average employee. Sorrell, in short, paid himself as if he were more valuable to WPP than fourteen-hundred people making $100,000 each. BTW, Sorrell is still on WPP's payroll, as are three or six other former CEOs, at a time when WPP's aggregate payroll has been "trimmed" from a high of 203,000 workers to under 100,000 today.

The truth is I have nothing, really, against either Sorrell or WPP. What I do despise are lies. 

Lies that are repeated and lead to building a mythology about a man that is almost wholly fabricated

WPP and their ilk played the game and profited from it. That doesn't make them geniuses, or people to admire, emulate or trust. Any more than Bernie Madoff was a genius, admirable or someone to emulate.

The problem with crashes is a lot of people get buried.