Summary
Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot in a premeditated attack outside the New York Hilton Midtown before speaking at an investor conference.
The gunman, still at large, fired multiple times, leaving shell casings marked with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.”
Authorities suggest Thompson was targeted but remain unclear on the motive. His wife confirmed prior threats against him.
Analysts speculate a possible vendetta tied to his company. The case raises questions about executive security, as Thompson lacked personal protection despite known risks.
“The motive remains unclear” is one of those things that, as a journalist, you know you have to write because it is absolutely the truth, but you hate yourself for every letter of every word because you know how fucking stupid it sounds given the circumstances.
“I mean, there are millions of people with motive. Which one in particular we will hopefully never know”
Unless it turns out he was murdered by, for example, an irate shareholder who didn’t make the money he wanted to make.
There is more than one reason he could have been murdered.
Murder bingo, murder scavenger hunt, time traveler trying to stop the future apocalypse no lack of options…
Are you really suggesting that only possible realistic motive to murder him is because of his position at UHC?
I can think of so many plausible scenarios. I just gave you one, here’s another: he was cheating on his wife, so she paid to have him killed, something that actually happens in the real world and doesn’t involved time travelers.
I’m sure you would like this to be a just world where bad people get killed for good reasons, but that’s not how the world works. Hitler’s generals tried to assassinate him and it wasn’t because they thought he was being too mean to the Jews.
Absolutely, hence why they do have to say that the motive is unclear. While we all have strong theories about why this happened, there are plenty of other possibilities that have to be considered. Could have been taken out by his family for insurance money, could have been a business rival, the guy might have gotten in shit with the mob. At this point they just don’t know.
The impression I got from when I lived in the US is that at his level, US oligarchs generally don’t like getting their hands dirty and there are strong communal disincentives to disrespecting “honour among thieves” laws. All the oligarchs groups will gang up on you if you use direct violence against another oligarch.
From what I’ve read, the “mob” in the US largely has no power, definitely nothing on the level of Brian Thompson. Even transnational groups (Mexican cartels, EU gangs, central American gangs) keep a low profile in the US and make a concentrated effort to avoid publicity.
I will admit, family issues is a possibility. Difficult to say. The business rivalry or mob connection doesn’t seem even in the realm of possibility, but I could be wrong.
Exactly. We just don’t have enough information yet and it is just silly to assume this is some sort of just world where people behind atrocities that are subsequently murdered are murdered because of those atrocities.
If that were the case writing the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” on the bullet casings was a pretty stupid move, given that it calls attention to the atrocities said shareholder profits from. It seems most likely that the motive is exactly what the bullet casings suggest.
“It is still unclear which of the potential motives caused the man to pull the trigger”
“deny,” “defend,” and “depose.”
He literally left the manifesto there and they can’t figure it out.
Nah, that’s a cop out. They could absolutely find somebody speculating on the motive to quote if they wanted to.
As of about a month ago there had been ~320 murders in NYC this year.
Yet this single one has captured the media’s attention nationwide and cops seem to be heavily focused on this one.
Because modern society at pretty much every institutional level sees the wealthy and powerful as not just more important than us, but they dont even see us. Hell, compare this to school shootings that only make local news now.
Historically, societies like this end in an incredibly brutal fashion. And until the wealthy and powerful really can build terminator style robot armies…
The masses are always going to win.
It’s kind of the natural consequences of hyper concentration of a finite and essential resource. People rarely sit around and starve voluntarily, and once the majority are starving, people start acting like a mob.
We see it day to day over minor stuff where people just refuse to follow societial norms. Everyday we’re shown that rules don’t really matter, and none of the people who matter are held accountable. If someone isn’t physically stopped from doing something, they take that as permission. Hell, that was the defense of most 1/6ers.
The social contract was invalidated a long time ago, people are just now realizing it. And that’s the only thing that really seperates us from animals.
Crashing out is gonna be the norm pretty fucking soon, I don’t think we have 4 years or that trump will be able to hold society together.
There’s a very high chance we’re gonna live in some interesting times.
I think the biggest thing to emphasize - and you mentioned it but I think it bears repeating over and over - is that when the system fails to enforce justice, people will seek justice themselves. This is the social contract you mentioned. I think we should expect more of this until the system is reformed and people like this do face justice within it.
Not really.
Look up the origin of the FBI. Hoover was a low level clerk when he was handed the reins. He didn’t have much of a budget but he did have the willingness to sit and do a lot of research.
When the time came to go after Emma Goldman the government had reams and reams of paper ‘proving’ how dangerous she was.
From now on, the CEOs will travel with security squads, and President Trump will authorize them to shoot to kill anyone who comes in fifty feet of the VIP.
This is more likely to be a one-off, like Gamestop.
It will take just a bit more pressure for people to also walk in squads. There’s plenty of guns to go around.
Let me guess. You’ve never actually been in a gunfight, or been in the ER after a gun fight.
That’s obviously the end goal Musk is going for.
But I’m by no means the first person who realized the only thing the masses have going for us is sheer overwhelming numbers, and the day the wealthy have robot soldiers we’re fucked because by then they won’t need our labor either.
We go from being individually expendable to the entirety of us being expendable.
It’s gonna happen eventually, so we can’t just keep alternating between neoliberals and fascists, regardless of which one is in charge when it happens, we’re all still fucked when the wealthy and powerful don’t need us.
Poor people just need to cobble together EMP weapons if there are robot oppressors. Robots couldn’t be wirelessly controlled or have any wireless antennas without being EMP vulnerable.
That said, very few of those murders were not point blank assassinations in public during the day. That’s sort of a bigger deal.
Edit: Me not inglesh gud.
People are interested in it (see Lemmy as an example), and news outlets publish stuff that gets clicks. What’s so hard to believe about that?
The media is treating it like a national tragedy, Walz was giving his condolences for some reason, and so are lots of other politicians.
It’s like when those billionaires all died in that submarine and the powerful people that run the media and politics treated it as some huge event and spent crazy money investigating.
They acted like it’s was 9/11, because to them $'s are what matters, so when one person with the same amount of $ as 100,000 people, they act like 100,000 average people die.
Do you not see that? The difference between how a wealthy person and a poor person are treated?
America used to have wealth worship, people still to some extent go to the Biltmore mansion to marvel at how nice robber barons lived centuries ago, or binge watch Downtown Abbey. But nowadays the vast amount of people upon hearing something bad happened to a billionaire, will at best say they dont give a fuck.
The contrast between what people are saying, and what they’re told by their leaders and the media isn’t jivving. And it’s obvious.
Look at history…
When societies are at the stage we are now, very very few bare any resemblance to that in just a decade or two. For better or worse, shit is likely to substantially change soon.
Edit:
To put it as simple as possible, the masses are told implicitly every day they don’t matter and only the wealthy do. Eventually people will start acting like their lives really don’t matter.
Which is bad for everyone, and has been happening for a while now. We’re just approaching the tipping point where “crashing out” is the majority opinion
This post really rings true. This is the small rumbling before the big quake.
The reason everyone is offering condolences and claiming this is bad is because the government is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, and that offers protection to the elite in society. Even on radical left lemmy, you can be banned for implying this is a good thing.
This person was at the top of a pyramid that lied to and deceived millions of people and made life absolute hell for people undergoing medical problems. He was responsible for that misery. He created hell on earth for those people. He was not that different than a mass-murderer, knowing full well what his policies would do, only his actions were legal.
His company delayed, denied, and defended, and the assailant had an answer to deny and an answer to defend but there was no delay, just a quick deposing of this guy. It was obviously symbolic.
It’s funny because the founding fathers of the US had enough of the bullshit from England and so they decided to rebel and used violence to create a New Republic… but their violence made them patriots and heroes. It’s just interesting… I haven’t seen 1 person call the assailant a hero yet. It’s not like the Founding Fathers of the US used rhetoric and voting to persuade England to stop its brutality.
I bet a lot of people are secretly thinking that assailant is a hero. (In accordance with lemmy’s policies, I am not saying he is a hero and instead am saying the assailant is very bad and violence is always bad.)
But we’re in such gilded-age end-times right now that the corporate media always parrot the idea that violence is always bad… (with the implied part being the government, backing the elite oligarchy, is the exception) and the populace has internalized that thinking out of fear.
We have democracy in this country and should vote in leaders that actually make legislation that is sensible, but it’s impossible because the bottom 40 percent of society are brain-washed by religious delusions that the elite thrust upon them in order to make them easier to control. The problems in society are caused by religion and it’s just impossible to make the stupidest bottom 40 percent of people stop believing in bullshit.
The elite have given people a choice: gun rights and policies for the rich… or no guns and policies for the poor. There is no middle class pro-gun party and it’s by design. We need to have liberals start embracing the NRA because any gun regulation seems toxic to middle America, and for good reason. To anyone who say the Democrats are not an anti-gun party, you’re lying and everyone can see through it. Any gun regulation is a slow decent to zero guns for regular people, and working class middle America knows it, which is part of why we keep ending up with these horrible leaders allowing health care in the US to descend into an abyss.
The media is treating it like a national tragedy
That’s my point. The media runs on clicks, and people are clicking.
Do you not see that? The difference between how a wealthy person and a poor person are treated?
How could I not see that? In your top comment you blame the media for this. We’re saying the same thing, but I’m just pointing out why the media acting like it is.
We’re on the same page, but sometimes it’s easier to be defensive and downvote. I hope you’ll see what I’m saying.
Walz was giving his condolences
Ouch. Walz pushing crocodile tears for a guy like that, when Walz’s day gig is arguably representing the will and good of all Americans. Or I thought that was the league he was trying to play in. Thats a real drag, I thought maybe he had some character and some sort of inherent dignity, but maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see.
Thats Disappointing, Walz, but I’m sure you’ll get some future campaign bribes out of it, which is what this is all about.
It is normal for politicians to offer condolences to a deceased person who was rich out of respect and not to tarnish his image.
Now, with regard to the death of the CEO of that company, it does not affect much because those who made that decision were more people. It is like when a high-ranking government official dies, it does not change much.
“We do not know why” haha, take a wild guess, please!
It’s unclear because there’s a few different reasons somebody would want this man dead
No, it’s because they are immensely fearful of admitting the reason because they know a lot of other people would agree and it would potentially upset the status quo so much. And that would be bad for their masters.
Especially if it turned out to be contagious.
It’s because they literally don’t know who killed him yet. You don’t have to come up with a silly conspiracy theory when the obvious answer is that they don’t know who killed him yet and they don’t know why he was killed yet.
Someone who does bad things can be killed for other reasons. John Lennon was not assassinated for beating and otherwise abusing his wives and girlfriends. The guy who killed Jeffrey Dahmer in prison did it because he thought, but wasn’t sure, that Dahmer poked him in the back.
The case raises questions about executive security
Thankfully it doesn’t raise any questions about the place of billionaire CEOs of companies making life and death decisions for the general populace for the sake of their overflowing pocket book. Boy would that be awkward.
Just FYI - he was worth about $43 million. https://blackstarnews.com/brian-thompson-net-worth/
Sure, he was in the upswing of his career making $20m a year since 2021. Also being investigated for fraud/insider trading for selling $15m of stocks before results of a federal antitrust investigation became public. Sounds swell.
Is this like the Boomer thing where we use one word that means one thing to describe something else?
Just curious: do you know any life or death decision he personally made that wasn’t the result of hundreds of bean counters crafting policy over many years? I find it hard to believe the ceo rubber stamped any decision like that, or even that he was aware of the details of any individual case.
The CEO is ultimately responsible for the actions of the company. That’s literally their job. They set policy, direction and strategy, and if we’re to listen to what CEOs say they do,they also set the tone, attitude and energy of the company.
So unless the denials that resulted in death were done in opposition to corporate policy, the CEO is responsible for them.
Additionally, there was literally nothing stopping him from pushing a company policy of, as a thought, approving all claims involving minors, changing approval standards to only deny when the treatment was unequivocally unnecessary after a verbal consultation between the patients doctor and the insurance review doctor, and moving the balance of claim review to fraud investigation to recoup money after instead of denying upfront.
He’s only been there since 2021. These policies don’t show up overnight. How do you know he wasn’t working to change these policies?
Decisions that led to his company having the worst denial rate nationwide and the decision to wholly adopt an AI system that is known to have a 90% error rate to achieve it. Overflowing profits and bonuses sank right in to his pockets for his business acumen, and the key thing you do to earn that CEO payday is sign off on everything and be culpable when the shit hits the fan.
Yes the machine of human misery and death was already constructed before Mr Thompson got into the drivers seat. What’s you’re point? That he somehow didn’t know it was a death machine?
Strange to me that people are celebrating this guys death without knowing him or anything about how much his actions caused the issues with uhcs policy. He was handed the reign and therfore deserved death is the general tone here. Seems unjust and evil to me. I wouldn’t wish murder on anyone, worrying so many seem to disagree.
CEOs of these companies will say things along the lines of find a way to deny an extra X% of claims this year, our profits are down!
Edit: and I wouldn’t be surprised if they said something like or find a reason to deny that will get overturned if looked at further but maybe they won’t fight back hard enough.
I finally understand what certain people mean when they talk about “good guys with guns”.
This was always the dream, the picture everyone tried to paint. Grabbing your powderhorn, Putting on your tricorne hat, and defending liberty against tyranny, and all that. It just never really actually happened.
It used to happen more frequently, the battle of Blair mountain for example.
