There needs to be a real reckoning with what unchecked corporate power does to human beings.
What happened to EMC after the Dell takeover wasn’t just a business shift. It was a dismantling. A culture was stripped, people were discarded, and decades of loyalty were erased, all in service of financial objectives set by someone who would never bear the consequences. That kind of damage doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when wealth insulates leadership from humanity.
But it doesn’t stop at the billionaire level.
What made it even more disturbing was watching the layers of managers beneath them fall in line like puppets. The obedient middle tier. People who traded conscience for proximity to power. Who repeated corporate talking points as if they were truth, never questioning the harm being done, never stopping to ask who was paying the price.
That is the most chilling part: how programmed it all is. How sleepwalking managers enforce decisions they didn’t make, defend outcomes they wouldn’t survive, and convince themselves they are just doing their jobs. Completely unaware, or unwilling to be aware, of how thoroughly money and hierarchy have overridden their moral compass. This isn’t leadership. It is extraction enabled by obedience. It is cruelty made efficient by people who mistake compliance for professionalism.
If we are going to talk about accountability, it cannot stop with the billionaires at the top. It also has to include the systems and the people who carry out harm while telling themselves it is normal, necessary, or inevitable.
It is not.