Kevin O’Leary is a Canadian businessman who is best known for being one of the potential investors on the television show Shark Tank. Despite being called the Shark on the show, O’Leary is actually an ostrich in a suit. And like all enormous flightless birds, O’Leary has a giant bird brain, which he uses to formulate any truly awful ideas that come out of his throat. (It really makes you question the meritocracy that has allowed him to amass a net worth of $400 million.)
Most of his wing flapping is pretty awful, in the standard “ancient man screeches at a cloud” style, and he’s recently dusted off oldies, but it’s good: Today’s subjects spend too much money on coffee. This is a balmy take overthrown So many times over that you have to have your head buried in the sand or somewhere else to believe that it still holds any weight. Frankly, it’s not worth the mental energy to refute it yet again, unless you’re a deeply petty person with a lot of time on your hands. Which I am.
Anyway, let’s roast this bird.
As originally reported Yahoo FinanceO’Leary recently posted online in which he said that going out for coffee is a “waste” of money on “stupid things.”
“Stop buying $5.50 coffee. You have to go to work and spend $15 on a sandwich, what are you, an idiot?”
“You start adding it up every day, it’s a lot of money. Most people, especially those working in metropolitan areas who are just starting out and making their first $60,000, are wasting about $15,000 a year on crap. And they should stop doing that.”
O’Leary then recounts how he observed teenage people spending “$22 or more a pop” on avocado toast —another classic example of an angry boomer—from which he concludes that 1) every teenage person does it, and 2) they do it all the time. With these two indisputable assumptions, O’Leary dispels the straw man, concluding that this is what keeps the younger generation from buying houses or anything else. “How often do they eat out? Twenty-two dollars a few times a week could go toward a down payment on a house.” [] It certainly has nothing to do with a shrinking middle class, skyrocketing house prices, or the rising cost of living while wages stagnate. It’s avocado toast and coffee!
It seems deeply stupid to me, but what do I know? I’m not half as good a businessman as Kevin O’Leary. I, for one, have I have never lost $15 million in cryptocurrency—and who could have foreseen that?—nor did I have to defend my association with Sam Bankman-Friedformer CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for fraud and other white-collar crimes. (This may be why O’Leary hates millennials, which is fine.) And I I have never said anything in defense of not raising taxes on billionaires “entrepreneurs” that “we don’t make any money because we take everything and invest it in companies and start growing them. And we get capital gains.”
And I certainly don’t have the miser mentality that makes O’Leary’s savings feel so heated. I haven’t spent more than millions on watches AND old guitars that I run through terrible sounding wah pedalsI have never created corporate vanity wine project sell a three-pack on QVC for $53. Maybe that’s good, I’ve never tried it. It just seems like a waste of money for something that costs $3. Oh wait, I must have mixed up the cue cards. This is what O’Leary said about coffee in 2017. Forgive the confusion. O’Leary’s wine, as he will no doubt attest, is a parsimonious folly, and one that is entirely justified.
O’Leary has every right to go wild with his money and spend whatever he wants, to not play his guitar and invest in some golden trinket that will trigger a stimulus response that week. But please, honestly, shut the fuck up about what it’s like for millennials, and never lecture younger people, who have a hefty deck of disadvantages that he honestly has no idea about. Honestly, we should be paying for coffee and avocados instead of treating them as knee-jerk commodities that Western spending should be minimized on. The idea that we should keep these prices as low as possible so someone can save money to hoard ancient asshole guitars and deeply mediocre Patek Philippes is actually disgusting and out of touch with reality, a real “let them eat cake” type of shit.
Losing millions of dollars on Bernie Madoff’s pixelated cash is certainly not the best starting point for being taken seriously as a commentator on generational issues, but then again, Kevin O’Leary is not a grave person. He’s like an ostrich trying to tell you how to fly, hoping that if he flaps his wings tough enough, you’ll believe him. It’s a very do-as-I-say-not-like-Emu kind of thing.
