‘Shark Tank’ host Kevin O’Leary discussed the response to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, and proved nothing other than these fat cats are clueless about what’s angering the American public.
I do not disagree with him that these CEOs need to “read the room,” but there’s a big elephant in that same room that he ignored during this interview:
The reaction by executives across the nation following the brutal cold-blooded killing of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson last week didn’t sit right with “Shark Tank” star investor Kevin O’Leary.
Instead of making efforts to fortify security around them, executives should “read the room” — and realize the public is turning against them, the investor and chairman of O’Leary Ventures said Wednesday.
“This is quite a backlash,” O’Leary said. “This is the power of social media.”
“If anything good is going to come of this, it’s going to be policy change because you’ve basically got people lighting up their torches, just like in the Frankenstein story and going to the castle, and they’re going to burn it down,” O’Leary told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And you got to hear that, so if you’re an executive saying, ‘get me more security guards,’ wrong answer. That’s just wrong.”
[…]
“They should be coming out now saying, ‘Look, we get it, we have families too, we’re people, we have children, we care about what you think about, and we’re going to automate this process and make it better,'” O’Leary said. “But putting a fence around headquarters, hiring more security guards, that’s all bad imagery, Wolf. It’s all bad. And it’s not the right answer.”
O’Leary acknowledged in response to a question from Blitzer that there are valid reasons to deny an insurance claim, but added, “It doesn’t matter at this point.”
Denying claims is one of the reasons there’s such anger. Still, the other elephant in the room they both ignored is CEO pay and the fact that people like Thompson were getting rich by denying claims to Americans who died as a result of his company’s actions.
Maybe one of these days, we can have an honest conversation about people profiting off of people dying and what type of society we want to be.
CNN said, “Honest conversation? Not today!” We got treated to the likes of Blitzer and O’Leary instead.
