Who Killed the Great American CEO?

If you’re one of the wealthy, powerful, litigious people I’m about to cast in a not-so-favorable light, welcome! Congratulations on all your success! I urge you to note our (laughably tiny) total number of YouTube subscribers and reflect upon this Wikipedia article before deciding to make a whole thing about it.

CEOs aren’t so popular right now. To prove this, I can give you statistics on how much the American public hates them—they really, really do—or I can just ask you to remember the moment when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed.

He was assassinated in cold blood, on a public street, in broad daylight. And the public didn’t mourn it—they celebrated it. Reactions to the news ranged from contemptuous indifference to sadistic glee. Many people view his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, far more sympathetically than they did Thompson. The prosecutors in that case believe there’s a serious risk that the jury may rule in Mangione’s favor. Not because he didn’t do it—but because they understand why he did it.

And it’s not just healthcare CEOs. Wesley LePatner was the CEO of Blackstone’s Real Estate Investment Trust. They’re a private equity giant headed by Lehman Brothers alumni specialized in buying up real estate in the midst of our ongoing housing crisis. When she was shot and killed in her Manhattan office, there was some excitement online that she may have been targeted for this reason. As it turns out, she appears to have been an unlucky casualty of a gunman who wanted to terrorize different executives. But there is clearly an appetite for violence against people in business leadership.

And that appetite is growing. People who scrape by on less than $50K a year hate CEOs about three times as much as middle-class folks. And since joblessness is rising and wages have stagnated, the number of low-income people is growing, and so presumably is hatred of CEOs.

Now, I don’t blame people one bit for loathing CEOs. I think their rage is pretty logical. When my parents were born, a CEO earned about 20 times more than their workers. They now pay themselves 630 times more. CEOs have been talking out of both sides of their mouths, bragging about record-breaking quarters while wringing their hands when employees beg for really basic shit like a full headcount. They’re yanking back work-from-home opportunities, which they hypocritically still grant to themselves. They’ve gone all-in on AI designed to make their own workforce obsolete. They’ve kissed the ring of fascists… with tongue. And many work harder to cultivate a mythologized public image than to actually do good, and they get all pissy when people notice they’re full of shit.

In a time when most people live one medical crisis away from bankruptcy, CEOs live rarified lives that the rest of us can only dream about. Money is so cheap to them they can afford to rent whole cities for their weddings, build mega-mansions on private islands, work remotely from their private yachts, seek immortality with any ethically dubious medical treatment they like, and brush off the kinds of tax and legal troubles that would ruin anyone else.

…So, yeah, not a lot to love there!

All of this stirs up a question in my mind: does it have to be this way?

Do all CEOs have to be bloodsucking assholes? Are anger and hatred inevitable trade-offs for wealth and power? Or is it possible for one enterprising person to start a great American business and get rich without exploiting their customers and/or workers along the way?

And if so, where are they? What’s happened to the good CEOs? Did King Haggard bid the Red Bull to gather them up and drive them into the sea? Because I can’t find them!

I’m asking this question because it feels like America’s bench of heroes is running very thin. And—spoiler alert—I do think it’s possible for good CEOs to exist. We need them now more than ever. But I think they’re being driven to the brink of extinction by a dangerous group of people you need to know more about.

Luckily for me, there’s a crystal clear example happening right now now, in my local news. It’s gonna give me a great opportunity to illustrate the systemic pressures driving good people out of leadership roles in business. And luckily for you, it’s also juicy and fascinating family drama.

That’s right: we’re going back to Market Basket.

What’s the tl;dr of Market Basket?

If you read “To Hell and Back for Cheap Groceries,” you already know Market Basket well, as my epic 17-store test revealed them to be the cheapest place to buy food in the region, beating rivals like Walmart, Aldi, and dollar stores. If you missed that, pull it up in another tab. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever written, and it goes into way more detail. But I’ll give you a quick summary that will get you up to speed for today’s discussion.

Market Basket is a family-owned grocery chain with 90 stores across New England. They have clean, efficient locations with good selections staffed by phenomenal employees whose diligence is explained by the fact that they get far better pay and benefits than most retail workers. Despite all these “extras,” no rival touches their prices. They’re so popular that the only New Englanders who don’t shop at Market Basket are enochlophobics. And that’s not a joke!

Grocery stores have notoriously thin margins. So how is one company able to keep prices so low, while also treating their staff better than anyone else?

My theory is that their success is attributable to their leadership. Its longest-serving CEOs have been a chain of fathers and sons who have intentionally prioritized fairness and compassion over making a quick and easy buck.

• Athanasios Demoulas, the company founder, was a fair and compassionate man, as evidenced by his willingness to go into debt to keep his customers fed throughout the Great Depression. Having a leader like that is like hitting a hole-in-one.
• Telemachus “Mike” Demoulas, his son, was a fair and compassionate man too. One employee described meeting him this way: “I first met [Mike] in 1977 when he purchased our facility. He didn’t just walk in with ownership—he walked in with humility. He introduced himself to the staff and asked, ‘Do you like working here? Are you treated well? Do you make enough money to feed your families?'” Having a leader like that is like hitting a second hole-in-one in a row.
• Arthur T. Demoulas, his son, is a fair and compassionate man too. There are so many stories about his decency that I’m at a loss to choose examples. We’ll get more into his leadership style in a moment anyway. For now, it’s enough to say that he’s this company’s third hole-in-one in a row.

These men feel like relics—heroes from a bygone mythic age of American capitalism. They’re humble, hardworking, fair-minded, community-oriented patriarchs. I think Americans hate modern CEOs because they’ve come to embody the opposite of these values. The public now expects CEOs to be self-aggrandizing sharks who bully their competitors, grind down their employees, short-change their customers, break the law, and shirk their responsibility to reinvest in the communities that created them.

I don’t have to tell you that hitting three holes-in-one is improbably rare. (I checked, it’s the current world record.) So it stands to reason that we’d run into trouble trying to get a fourth.

~*Foreshadowing!*~

What makes a good leader?

Arthur T. Demoulas is a well-known and respected figure in New England. It’s not because he goes on talk shows or writes books about his management philosophy. Most of what we know about him comes from people organically volunteering stories about him. I’ll summarize a few examples that I think illustrate his character.

(To protect current employees from potential retaliation, I’ve chosen not to attribute names to these stories. I collected them from comments in public and private social media groups, as well as my own personal contacts. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of individual anecdotes, but the sheer number of similar stories satisfies my need for verification.)

Arthur T. Demoulas has established or continued the chain’s most generous benefits. Under his leadership, the company offers healthcare, paid vacations, parental leave, 401(k) matching, tuition assistance, and profit sharing even for part-time employees.

He’s famous for honoring employee milestones, going to as many weddings, funerals, and retirement parties as he can. One employee mentioned seeing him at two different funerals on the same day. Keep in mind: these are his personal nights and weekends. I cannot imagine the stamina it requires to be so available to such a large community.

As a leader, he seems to have real compassion for his employees. Not in a “thoughts and prayers” way, but through meaningful actions. One brutally sad example I found was when an employee’s child died. Arthur T. Demoulas granted that employee six months of paid time off, with a pledge to give more if needed. Contrast this with multibillion-dollar global companies that have the nerve to pass the hat amongst employees when someone with years of loyal service gets sick or suffers a loss.

Perhaps most tellingly, Arthur T. Demoulas would disagree with my thesis that Market Basket is great primarily because of leaders like him. He consistently attributes success not to himself, but to his employees. In his own words:“Here at Market Basket, everyone is special. No one person is better or more important than another. Whether it’s a full timer, or a part timer, whether it’s a sacker or a cashier, or a grocery clerk, or a truck driver, or a warehouse selector, a store manager, a supervisor, a customer, a vendor or a CEO, we are all equal. We are all equal and by working together and only together do we succeed.”

Demoulas is a textbook example of what the corporate world calls a “servant leader.” He thinks his company’s success or failure rides not on his own personal genius, but on the collective potential of his employees. So he chooses to spend most of his energy unlocking that potential by supporting them in any way he can.

Now, this isn’t the only right way to lead a group of people. Other missions and cultures may call for different approaches. If you look, you can find examples of effective leaders who are autocratic and democratic, visionary and traditional, hands-off and hands-on.

But I think all great CEOs have one very important commonality: they’ve found a way to succeed without exploiting either customers or employees.

“But Kitty, there is no such thing as an ethical capitalist because according to the labor theory of value, the system is always exploitative so long as workers are forced to sell their excess labor in exchange for—“

Unironically: comrade, I feel you.

As the vanguard prepares for revolution, we—the rear guard—are focused on harm reduction. I think it’s important to remind our readers that exploitation exists on a spectrum from deeply harmful to mutually beneficial. In the system we live within today, one man’s choices can make the difference between poverty and stability for millions of people. It shouldn’t be that way—but it is. If we write off all business leaders as inherently evil, we give them an “easy out” from making morally courageous decisions as powerful individuals. Which, as Arthur T. Demoulas demonstrates, they are certainly capable of doing.

McKinsey Consulting once visited Market Basket and told CEO Arthur T. Demoulas that he could increase profit margins by raising prices. Demoulas’ response? ‘I don’t need the money, the customers need the money.’

Rest assured that I was not put on this planet to haul water for billionaires. That’s not what I’m doing today. Quite the opposite—trust the process.

What makes a good CEO?

Being a good leader isn’t a business role, but a social one.

As you’ve surely noticed in your own life, good leaders don’t just live at the top of every level of society and industry. There are entry-level workers, volunteers, even children who are good leaders. We expect good leaders to also be good people—or at least make the effort. You can’t be a good leader to your family, or your coworkers, or your D&D group, if you treat people like shit.

In contrast, chief executive officer isn’t a social role. It’s a job. And you can be very good at that job while treating people like shit. That’s why I think it’s important to tease these often-conflated roles apart.

In my experience, CEOs mostly want to do four things.

• Make the customers happy.
• Make the employees happy.
• Grow the market share.
• Turn a profit.

The order and degree to which they care about each one varies considerably.

Take my tiny two-person business, where my number one priority is employee happiness. BGR would be bigger and more profitable if we did things we hate: using AI to optimize the SEO on our short-form spon-con and deliver it while dancing like monkeys. But that’s simply not our top priority. If our follower count never matches the level of effort we put into everything we produce, so be it!

Conversely, there are many CEOs who only invest in employee happiness if it sinks so low that poor retention threatens those other three goals. For example, Dollar General abused its employees to the point that whole teams walked off the job, hundreds of locations closed, and OSHA fined them millions. It’s such an extreme crisis that they fired CEO Jeff Owen and got back together with their ex, Todd Vasos. (Yeah, I’m sure the guy who oversaw the company during all those OSHA violations will know just what to do, lmao.)

You might think that making money is most CEOs top priority, but even that’s not always the case. Remember that for years, Amazon technically lost money. That’s because CEO Jeff Bezos stayed laser-focused on growing market share. He wanted to build one website that made shopping so easy that people forgot how to shop anywhere else. And boy did that strategy pay off!

Many CEOs become newsworthy when they came up with weird min-maxing strategies that succeed or fail spectacularly.  But there are some who seem to have it all. Which brings us into our breaking news segment.

By any metric, Arthur T. Demoulas is both a good leader and a good CEO. Under his leadership, Market Basket is clearly winning as a chain. Their customers are happy; their employees are happy; they’ve grown at a strategically steady pace; and their revenue last year was $7.7 billion.

But in May of this year, Arthur T. Demoulas was ousted from his position as CEO.

Let that sink in.

This guy did everything right. And now he’s gone.

…Doesn’t that pique your interest?!

Why? The number one reason people quit their jobs is to escape bad bosses, yet this guy’s employees keep photos of him on their desks. Grocery stores’ prices are up 25% over the last two years, but the stores he leads are beacons of affordability with deep wells of customer goodwill. So why’s he gone? Why can’t we have nice things?

Understanding this one example will reveal an important rising force for corruption that we’ve never talked about before. So come, let’s dirty our fingernails together!

Who can fire a CEO?

Arthur T. Demoulas is the CEO and largest shareholder of Market Basket—but not its sole owner.

• He controls 28% of the company.
• His three sisters each own 20%.
• The remainder is in a trust for the next generation.

Fractured ownership is a known liability for multigenerational, family-owned businesses. Think of your extended family—grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, the ex-brother-in-law who drinks too much, the aunt who believes 5 Minute Crafts videos are real. Imagine locking them all into one room with the goal of picking a single movie to watch together, and you will have the faintest glimpse of how contentious shit might get.

It’s my observation that in family-run businesses, the chain of good leadership is usually disrupted by the family’s changing circumstances. The poor immigrant who fixes cars to feed his family has a totally different life experience than his grandson who grows up partying in the Hamptons, wanting for nothing, secure in the knowledge he’ll inherit an auto parts distribution empire without any special effort on his part. No shit those people are going to be very different leaders!

That doesn’t seem to be the case with Market Basket. Arthur T. Demoulas has put forth two of his own children, Madeline and T.A., as successors. As usual, I’m shook to find myself defending nepotism… but that is very much how a family business is entitled to run itself. His kids have worked at the company from a young age, and I like their odds more than those of some private equity rando.

Alas, Arthur T. is out on his ass because his sisters teamed up against him. His two children are also gone, fired at the direction of their own aunts. 

Market Basket, like most companies, is structured to make this entirely possible via a board of directors.

What is a board?

If a company is owned by just one person, they’re called the owner. But if the company is owned by many people, those people are called shareholders. Their piece of the company is their share.

If you own shares in any publicly traded company via stocks, you are a shareholder. The pie slice you own is probably so pathetically small that nobody really cares that much about what you think. But in a company like Market Basket, where the number of individual shareholders can be counted on one hand, a shareholder is a very important person. They may not work at the company, but they expect to have a say in how it’s run.

A board of directors is a group of people chosen by the shareholders to act in the best interest of the company. If you’re picturing a dozen indistinguishable old dudes in navy suits sitting around a gigantic funereal slab of an office table… yep, that’s them!

Think of them as a miniature democracy within a company. The CEO acts like a president, wielding broad executive power. The board is like a legislature that gives him advice, holds him accountable, and could potentially override him if they think he’s putting the company in danger by making truly grievous mistakes.

(And yes, I’m using male pronouns to refer to hypothetical CEOs throughout this article. It just makes my sentences a lot clearer. I’m not the one who decided to make 90% of all Fortune 500 CEOs male, and I certainly didn’t invent English and its stupid conflation of plurals and genderless singulars, so it’s illegal for you to be mad at me about it.)

Why do companies even have boards?

At the risk of generalizing, company founders and CEOs tend to have bold personalities. It’s easier to succeed in business if you’re a visionary with drive and not a little bit of stubbornness. Those traits help get a company off the ground.

In the beginning, many small companies are owned by only one or two people. Jess and I, for example, have an LLC with a 50/50 partnership. Decisions have to be unanimous between the two of us, which isn’t hard because we’re both always right! If we make poor decisions, we’re really only hurting ourselves… and maybe our producer, our spouses, and our dogs. (“Sorry, losers—Acorns ended its affiliate program. That means starting this quarter, the Three Dog Bakery gravy train is over. It’s gonna be all Milk Bones for the rest of the fiscal year. And yes, I will be snapping them in half.”)

If we had 500 employees whose ability to feed their families and retire and have healthcare rode on our choices alone? (Tugs collar.) Then I understand the appeal of inviting more smart, experienced people in to provide outside perspective and mediate disagreements.

For this reason, almost all medium/large companies and non-profit organizations have boards of directors.

What makes a board turn on their CEO?

Boards and CEOs are supposed to work together. They’re like mommy and daddy: they may sometimes disagree, but the one thing they always agree on is that they love you very much.

But sometimes relationships break down, and daddies have to go live somewhere else. The most dysfunctional possible outcome is a board voting together to oust its CEO. Keep in mind that this power only flows in one direction. Like in a democracy, the president can’t fire senators—but the senate can come together to remove a president from office.

Brb, fantasizing, fantasizing, fantasizing… Okay, I’m back!

When I researched this topic, I read many case studies. Most fit into one of three categories. (And by the way—some of these are technically resignations, but I’m counting them anyway because they only happened because the writing was on the wall that the board had the votes and intent to throw them out if they refused to leave of their own accord.)

1. Boards fire CEOs when the CEO engages in serious misconduct.

Sometimes a CEO does something so egregiously foolish the board has to fire them to salvage the company. Think of the Weinstein Company, which fired their CEO/founder/namesake Harvey Weinstein after he—you know—Harvey Weinsteined all over the place.

Another example would be Kohl’s CEO Ashley Buchanan, who was dismissed by his board after only a few months on the job for siphoning unusually favorable business contracts to a company owned by—you guessed it—his extramarital affair partner.

Sex pests and corporate leadership: name a more iconic duo!

Serious breeches of trust like fraud and abuse are excellent justifications for a board to exist and to have the power to fire its own CEO.

I will note, however, that I think misconduct is sometimes used as a pretext. For example, Nestlé CEO Laurent Freixe was recently fired, without getting his golden parachute, supposedly for having an affair with an employee, which violated the company’s code of conduct. But I want to note that under Freixe’s year of leadership, Nestle’s share price dropped by almost 20%. Call me a cynic, but if he’d increased share prices by 20%, I imagine the board might’ve discreetly turned a blind eye to the situation.

2. Boards fire CEOs when the company eats shit.

Twenty-teens darling Groupon’s stock debuted at $20 a share. But within a few years, it dropped to less than $3. The board fired its founder and CEO Andrew Mason basically because he failed to find ways to make their weird business model profitable.

More recently, Dave Calhoun was ousted as the CEO of Boeing after a truly disastrous string of fatal crashes and highly publicized safety failures. Those failures triggered expensive legal fees, production delays, threats of investigation, stock devaluation, and general reputational damage. Investors stopped believing that a man lacking engineering experience could lead an engineering company to make good engineering decisions. He was replaced by a man with an engineering background.

Needing to distance themselves from past mistakes and gain fresh direction after crisis seems like another excellent reason for a company to have a board with the ability to fire its CEO.

3. Boards fire CEOs when there’s an internal power struggle over the company’s ultimate goals.

Put a frozen banana and a scoop of yogurt in your blender, because here comes the juice.

This is the “irreconcilable differences” category. One faction wants to sell the company, and the other wants to keep it. One wants to take it public, while the other wants to stay private. Some people want to partner exclusively with luxury retailers while others want their products on a shelf in every Walmart. If two groups emerge with fundamentally opposing ideas about how to make the business succeed, the CEO will lose if the board coalesces into a majority that wants something he doesn’t.

And this is where the process—in my opinion—is being perverted, and damaging our society.

Historically, the nature of a board of directors is to moderate the CEOs. CEOs are the heroes of the Hero’s Journey, brash young Luke Skywalkers. The board is supposed to be their Obi-Wan Kenobi, slowing them down and making them think things through.

If the words “historically” and “supposed to be” are making your Spidey Senses tingle, your close reading does you credit! Much like the Galactic Senate in the Star Wars prequels, this once-moderating force has been corrupted in recent times to instead do the exact opposite.

There’s ample evidence that boards are increasingly stacked with radicals teaming up with each other to drive great CEOs out of power.

Rise of the disruptive shareholder

History is full of legislators protecting key constituents and private benefactors. Sometimes it’s a flat-out crime, like the Jack Abramoff scandal. But favorable treatment is often too subtle or indirect to rise to the level of criminality. When a representative from Iowa votes to extend corn subsidies, is that corrupt? Not necessarily! But if their biggest campaign donor is a major corn producer, and they retire to a well-paid consulting role with them, well… it just doesn’t smell right.

I told you that shareholders elect board members to act in a company’s best interest. Given how much a board resembles a legislative body, you won’t be shocked to hear that similar ethical concerns tend to come up. Is this board member loyal to the company—or to the shareholder who put them in this lucrative position? People can honestly disagree about the best direction for a large business, so it’s often a matter of trust. And business executives join politicians as the least trusted American professions, so. Yeah.

Through complicit board members, minority shareholders can try to gain control of companies and force unpopular changes. I call them disruptive shareholders.

(The media uses the phrase activist shareholders. I hate that choice, because it conflates two very different things. Someone who pressures companies to do socially responsible things, like divest from dangerous industries or genocidal countries, should be called an “activist shareholder.” A singularly wealthy and well-connected person acting purely out of self-interest, forcing their ideas on a mostly unwilling company, is not activism and should not be called activism.)

A disruptive shareholder’s goal is often a hostile takeover: assuming control of a company against its leaders’ wishes. If they don’t have the support to achieve that, they may settle for acquiring more board seats, shifting policy, or manipulating share prices.

Disruptive shareholders are growing in number, boldness, and power. Just in the past few years, major companies like HSBC, Disney, and Unilever have staved off serious attacks. As wealth concentrates down into fewer and fewer hands, disruptive shareholders become more and more influential.

Now, look… I know this segment has felt as dry as the heels of my feet after a hot shower in January, and as irrelevant as that time those celebrities sang Imagine. I’m sorry—I had to do it. This is the power shift you have to understand if you want to know why your odds of having a non-shitty boss are shrinking every year.

Who are the Demoulas sisters?

Let’s turn the conversation back to our case study. I’ve told you a lot about Arthur T. Demoulas, and through him, what makes a good CEO.

Now let me now tell you what I’ve been able to learn about his three sisters, as well as the board members they’ve chosen to represent themselves. Through each of them, I think I can explain what makes a bad board member.

These ladies are public figures. They’ve been in and out of the news for decades, and they’re suing to gain control of a business that employs tens of thousands and feeds millions. However, like their brother, they are fairly private. So I’ve researched them exhaustively from every angle available to me.

Now, I have to be careful about what I share, because these ladies are wealthy, well-connected, and litigious. I will present you with some of the facts I uncovered about them, which are true to the best of my knowledge. I will also give you my personal interpretations of their actions, motivations, and characters—which are only my opinion. They have a right to a different interpretation, and if they respond in any way to this article, I will post it here to give you the opportunity to see all sides.

To quote Strange Aeons: “The greatest research skill you can have is being a nosy bitch who wants to find out.”

Note: The video version of this article has many supporting pictures and videos, which I can’t include, because they would drag our site performance to hell. So check out that version if you want to see exactly what I’m talking about!

Who is Francis Demoulas Kettenbach?

This is the Boston Public Library. It’s the first municipal library in our nation, and the fact that it is so gloriously, palatially beautiful is a testament to the hopeful, enlightened spirit of its age. It was conceived of as a palace for the people. Its entrance is flanked by two statues representing Science and Art. Its edifice proclaims: “Funded through the Munificence and Public Spirit of Citizens, the Commonwealth requires the Education of the People as the Safeguard of Order and Liberty.” 

When Jess and I first met, we lived within walking distance of this place. We visited it all the time. We’d go wearing practically pajamas, grubby as hell, working on silly projects. And it was so special to pick any chair, and sit down, and know that this place exists for me. For my enablement and self-betterment and joy.

This city has many beautiful parks and public spaces. This is my second favorite of them all. When my grandparents visited Boston for a single afternoon, this was the place I brought them. I love the Boston Public Library. My shitty videos surely won’t do it justice—it’s simply one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever visited, and I’ve never stopped being stunned that this place exists.

I’m showing you this only to contextualize the prestige and rarity of owning 303 Commonwealth Avenue.

Just a short walk away, 303 Commonwealth Avenue sits squarely in the heart of downtown Boston, right between Newbury Street and the Charles River. It was designed in 1895 by the architectural firm McKim, Mead, & White—the same architects who designed the Boston Public Library.

Although they may not be household names today, this group represents the most productive and influential architects in American history. They defined the American Renaissance architectural style, pioneered the City Beautiful movement of urban planning, and created many of America’s most stunning and admired buildings. Madison Square Garden! The Washington Square Arch! The original Penn Station! Many of our most beautiful state capitals, museums, libraries, and public spaces came from this firm’s imagination.

They built some private homes too, such as Newport’s Rosecliff. Very few private individuals could brag they owned a McKim, Mead, & White home. Among them are the most famous names of the Gilded Age: Morgans and Vanderbilts. Today, most of them have become museums and historic landmarks open to the public.

… But not this one.

This one belongs to Frances Demoulas Kettenbach, the eldest Demoulas sister. And how she came to be its sole owner is a story worthy of becoming a New York Times bestseller!*

*True Crime list.

This five-floor mansion, with its pearly granite facade, is described by architectural historian Bainbridge Bunting as “the most striking instance in the Back Bay of the individual house attaining an impressive, self-sufficient, yet restrained monumentality.” In was owned by a series of wealthy magnates and their heirs until the 1960s, when its floors were segregated and converted into five lovely condominiums.

In 1977, Jerome and Bernadette Wodinsky moved into the top floor. He was a Brandeis professor researching octopus behavior. She worked at Neiman Marcus. They loved their home, and lived at 303 Commonwealth for over three decades. 

In 1996, Frances Demoulas and her husband Michael Kettenbach moved in. They bought one condo, then another, then another. They offered to buy the top floor too, but the Wodinskys didn’t want to sell. Jerome was elderly and suffered from heart disease and emphysema; the couple was comfortable and wanted to stay indefinitely.

And that didn’t agree with Frances Demoulas and her husband Michael at all. She “desired to acquire all five units in the building for the purpose of transforming [it] into a single-family residence for themselves.”

Let me stop here and ask you to use your imagination. Pretend this is you. You want this building to yourself, and everyone is willing to sell to you except the old couple on the top floor. What would you do?

I polled some friends, and pretty much everyone agreed they’d never find themselves in such a situation, because they’d never seek to live in a 15,000 square foot mansion no matter how many lotteries they won. But when pressed, they offered three possibilities.

• “Offer more money?”
• “Just wait, cuz they’re old?”
• “Try to make friends with them?”

These are good ideas because they’re prosocial strategies.

Humans are social animals. We’re hardwired to live together in collectives. When an argument breaks out over resources, it’s harmful to the group to fight like badgers over it. We developed these great big brains primarily to comprehend language, read facial expressions and body positioning, remember debts and alliances, work together, and avoid socially disruptive violence. When in conflict, most humans default to prosocial strategies.

But Frances Kettenbach did not.

She chose… other tactics.

• She started by physically tormenting her elderly neighbors. The Kettenbachs “arranged the inspection” of their building’s older but operational elevator “in the hopes that it would result in [the Department of Public Safety] condemning” it. The inspector only issued a simple repair ticket, and in response, Frances Demoulas decommissioned the elevator entirely. In doing so, she forced the elderly Wodinskys to crawl on their hands and knees up four flights of stairs, every single time they wanted to enter or leave their own home. The hope, I guess, was that they’d give up and sell or die.
• When that wasn’t enough, Frances Kettenbach tormented them financially. Since she controlled a supermajority of the condo association’s votes, she had carte blanche authority to order any expensive cosmetic or structural upgrades she wanted. She ordered a new heating system, a new electrical system—and the Wodinskys had no choice but to foot one fifth of every bill. 
• If the couple asked for something reasonable from the condo association, Frances Demoulas turned the request against them. For example, when the 10-year-old roof developed a small leak, instead of having it patched, she had the whole roof replaced and new skylights installed. This cost $150,000, and she again demanded the Wodinskys foot 20% of the bill.
• Both judges and juries agreed she used her vast wealth and legal representation to “coerce, intimidate, and threaten the Wodinskys in an effort to force them out of their home.” She sent private investigators to scare them at their workplaces with threats of bankruptcy. Gary Crossen, the Kettenbachs’ personal lawyer, was later disbarred for his thuggish behavior as their fixer.

Thankfully, the Wodinskys didn’t back down. They brought the Kettenbach Demoulases to court, where a jury dick-slapped them with a $1.85 million dollar judgement in the Wodinskys’ favor. When Frances Demoulas appealed, they said “sorry, maybe we weren’t clear” and awarded appellate fees too, ballooning the judgement against them.

But maybe they thought it was all worth it in the end, because they finally got to have 303 Commonwealth Avenue all to themselves, since it’s a single-family home again, belonging solely to the Kettenbach Demoulases.

…Frances doesn’t actually live in it, of course.

If my research is correct, she actually lives in a $100 million dollar Palm Beach palace a stone’s throw from Mar-a-Lago. Basically, as soon as she had sole legal ownership of this place, she was off hunting for the next thing to make hers!

That’s how she acquired a house for herself. What will she do now that she wants a grocery store chain?

Grocery stores employ a lot of skilled, able-bodied workers. If those people are (metaphorically) made to crawl, they can leave, or protest, or organize—they have options. But some of the people who work at Market Basket are disabled. Some are older, or don’t speak English, or can’t drive to a farther workplace. If those people have a boss who treats them with kindness and dignity, they can be excellent employees and treasured participants in the community. But if they have a boss devoid of empathy, willing to inflict harm on others for her own personal gain, I fear they will suffer terribly.

Bad board members are antisocial

I… I just… imagine a trolley dilemma where your options are: live in a four story mansion, or force sick old people to crawl on their hands and knees every day and live in a FIVE story mansion. Imagine slamming that lever down so fast your hand was a blur.

It’s a rare kind of person who fails a simple binary moral choice so spectacularly. I can’t imagine clearer evidence that someone like this does not belong anywhere near leadership of a company of tens of thousands of employees.

In the words of Peter Stormare in Until Dawn, who chews the scenery eternally in my Mind Palace whenever I try to understand actions like these: “What gives you the right to play god in these peoples’ lives? What makes you so special then? You’re sick! You’re a sick fuck!”

I don’t know what’s wrong with Frances Demoulas. I’m not asserting she has a mental illness, personality disorder, or an overabundance of lead being released back into her bloodstream from her osteoporostic old lady bones. I don’t have the training to recognize any of that. It wouldn’t be my place to guess even if I did. But it’s hard to avoid pathologizing language when describing behavior like this. My earliest drafts used words like “sociopath, psychopath, narcissist” because I struggled to find strong enough words to paint the dangerous, vicious aberrance of her actions. But these are medicalized terms, and I really shouldn’t be mucking around in them.

I’ll say I don’t believe she’s a sadist. I found no evidence that she inflicts pain for enjoyment. Rather, I think she simply doesn’t care about how her actions terrorize others; their terror is their problem. If they want it to stop, they should give her what she wants! She doesn’t pause to consider alternatives that preserve the social order. And we do have words for that.

Frances Demoulas employed antisocial strategies when she came into conflict with her neighbors.

Antisocial behaviors are behaviors taken without regard for the harm they do to others, or the disruptions they cause to social harmony. They may be criminal, as a judge and jury deemed true in this case—but more often, they’re merely inconsiderate, cruel, and rude.

Frances Kettenbach isn’t a board member at Market Basket, but a significant shareholder, which means she has power over board composition. All three sisters are alleged to have chosen board members who are personally loyal to them (and I found a lot of evidence to corroborate that—more on that later). Whether it’s direct or indirect, this is how people who’re comfortable making antisocial choices end up on company boards where they can do unspeakable damage.

Boards exist to act carefully, protect the company from ruinous litigation, and safeguard the livelihood of its employees. When given full control of just one condo association, Frances Demoulas acted recklessly, instigated lawsuits with multimillion dollar judgements against her, and cruelly subjected the people she was supposed to represent with callous, intentional physical and financial torment. I’d rather not up the stakes to 30,000 people and cross my fingers for a big heel-face turn.

Antisocial people are often ostracized because of their history of unpleasant behavior. And this tracks with my research into Frances Kettenbach. Most people who are as wealthy as she is have a strong social presence. They’re active in charitable organizations or local politics. You can find them in photographs of store openings, galas, and weddings. But most mentions of her are in court dockets, unflattering press articles, and nasty social media comments.

She doesn’t deserve my sympathy or empathy—I save that for the people she’s hurt. But I do pity her. Nobody brings a baby into the world hoping she’ll grow up to be a miserable, lonely, aggrieved old bully. What a waste of life.

So that’s Sister #1! We’ve got two more stops on this crazy train, so c’mon!

Who is Glorianne Demoulas Farnham?

Eldest sister Frances and youngest sister Caren have been accused of dishonest self-dealing business practices in Arthur T. Demoulas’s countersuit and in many other cases going back years. And don’t worry, Caren’s getting her own segment. It’ll be very this!

But Glorianne, the middle sister, is an interesting one. Her name is on the docket, but otherwise, the court records are silent about her role in this. The others are allegedly using shady land deals, self-dealing contracts, and board manipulation to siphon more of Market Basket’s wealth into their own hands. But there are no such allegations against Glorianne specifically.

If Frances seems like a cartoon bad guy, Glorianne may be more benign. I know who I would rather sit next to on a plane. (Not that I ever would—I don’t think the Demoulas sisters fly Spirit Airlines.)

As a semiprofessional middle child, my instincts told me Glorianne was probably the hold out, the last one to agree to launch the family into an emotional nuclear winter. I found some evidence for this in the filings for their parents’ charitable foundation. This foundation gives money to hospitals, schools, and youth programs in their community. Tax records capture the number of hours each administrator works toward the foundation.

• The person doing the most work is its sole paid administrator, Sue Dufresne, estimating six hours of work a week. (Sue, by the way, is among the many allies of Arthur T. Demoulas the sisters fired this year. “Thanks for vouchsafing our parents’ legacy for many years—now get the fuck out!”)
• Following her is Arthur T. himself, working an estimated two hours per week.
• Glorianne is the only sister who claims to do anything for the foundation, at an estimated one hour per week. To me, that suggests that Glorianne was the peacekeeper between the factions.

Looking at public records and past news coverage of Glorianne Demoulas, I’m left with the impression that she leads the most charmed life anyone could realistically expect. (Note: The video version contains additional sources. Because I’m a sweetie pie, I’ve chosen to withhold links in the text version if they list specific addresses, or give excessive information about non-public family members.)

• She was born into a wealthy family. As far as an outsider like me can tell, she didn’t grow up wanting for anything material.
• According to the countersuit, she has never worked at Market Basket. I can find no record of her ever having worked anywhere. It may be that she did and I simply failed to find any documentation of it. But I think it’s pretty likely she’s always had the option to not work, which is an amazing luxury.
• She married a star football player. The two have stayed married for something like 40 years. Mazel tov!
• Together they have a handsome son and beautiful daughter, who seem to be healthy, educated, athletic, and successful adults out pursuing their own dreams.
• She owns a modest little family home. (I mean, I wouldn’t call it that—but I’m sure they do!)
• When she wants to get away for the weekend, she can go to her other modest little family home. Which has twice the square footage. On a pristine, beautiful lakefront. In one of the most expensive and prestigious neighborhoods in the most expensive and prestigious areas of the highest-functioning and most expensive states in America.
• Her name’s on the paperwork for multiple other properties, but I’m not going to show them because I’m pretty sure they’re occupied by her kids. Which is great! It’s a blessing to be able to extend stability to your loved ones.
• And of course, Market Basket pays her $40,000,000 every year.

Oh yeah. Have I mentioned that part yet?

In a lede buried so deeply James Cameron couldn’t build a submersible to find it, each of the sisters takes home more than forty million dollars in dividends every year. And that’s after tax!

This is not money earned in exchange for labor. It’s the product of their inheritance—their money’s money. The labor generating this capital belonged to their grandfather, and their father, and their brother, and the collective effort of tens of thousands of employees over many decades. And I guess that’s not enough for them, as they’re willing to knife their own brother in the back for a chance to get more.

I really need you to understand how hard it is to spend $40 million a year. I tasked our Patreon donors with helping me brainstorm.

• Let’s be incredibly magnanimous and give $10 million to charity every year.
• Another $10 million can go to a combination of living expenses and supporting friends/family.

With the money that is left…

• Do you like food? If you wanted to dine out for every single breakfast, lunch, and dinner for an entire year, good luck figuring out how to order $18,000 worth of food at every meal.
• Want more time for yourself? You could hire a personal assistant, housekeeper, private chef, chauffeur, personal trainer, stylist, nanny, dog walker, bodyguard, and a poison taste-tester to tend to your needs constantly, on a full-time basis. You could hire ALL of those people and pay them each a salary of $165,000… a month.
• Love to travel? If you went on a three-week vacation, four times a year, start researching places where the rooms cost $238,000 a night, because that’s your budget. (To contextualize that further: if you went to the ultra-luxury Hawaiian resort where they filmed season one of The White Lotus, and rented their most expensive private suite, you could fill it with 12 friends, each of you getting all-inclusive access to fine dining, spa treatments, personal assistants, boat tours, scuba instruction, anything you wanted, on demand, all the time, and it would only be $40,000 a night. So you’ll have to do a lot better than that!
• Let’s buy some dream homes for our patrons! Megan wants an eight-bedroom house in the Pacific Northwest, which is $5M whether you prefer modern farmhouse or full-on Polly Pocket Starlight Castle. Katherine requests a mountain home in Gatlinburg, this one’s giving luxury onsen realness for only $2M. Jamie says she wants a Boston condo across the street from the Brookline Booksmith, but I know what she really wants is the $3M one upstairs from it so she gets a nice view of the S.S. Pierce building. Let’s throw on Jackie’s vacation home in the Outer Banks—this one is only $1M but it’s got that friendly Gulla Gulla Island vibe. Obviously, we buy back Frogwarts and turn it into our own Xavier’s School for the Whatevers AKA the dream we’ve been obsessed with for YEARS.
• And… Jesus H. Christ, we’ve barely crawled over the halfway point?!

I’m done! I’m intellectually exhausted thinking of ways to spend in one lifetime what these women bring home in one year.

And evidently they need… more???

Bad board members are rapacious

There’s a question that lives at the heart of personal finance. And it’s a question I have no idea how to answer.

Why do some people want money?

Obviously, I know why people need money. We’re animals, inefficient beings of flesh and blood. If we don’t consume anything, we die. As part of our never-ending quest for the calories we need to sustain our mortal bodies, we require food and clothing and housing. Luckily we’ve organized our society so that we can easily trade our labor for those things, using the intermediary of money. I get that.

I also know why people want to have more money than they need. An excess of resources brings physical and psychological safety. It insulates you against life’s worst misfortunes, offers opportunities to extend stability to your family and friends, and tempts you with a dazzling array of pleasure-seeking opportunities. (And since most of us live in a country colonized by Puritans, let me drop a gentle reminder that seeking pleasure is natural and morally neutral.) But I would argue these are still needs—just higher needs. We can survive without stability, community, legacy, fulfillment, a sense of purpose… but we’re driven to seek them as part of our human condition.

So I get why people need money. And I get why people want to have more than they need.

But there are some people who have more money than any one person could ever realistically use in one lifetime—yet what they want more than anything is more money. Their desire for money is so profound they’ll seek it to the detriment of their own higher needs. They’ll isolate themselves from friends, damage their relationships with family, and defer pleasure-seeking opportunities in order to get more money.

And it is those people that make me Confused Math Lady.

The way I see it, there are two possibilities.

One is that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is incomplete. Maybe there’s some as-yet-unnamed higher level of personal satisfaction that only a handful of especially ambitious and enterprising people can see. And it happens to be something that requires oodles and oodles of money to attain, so the fact that they’re righteously grasping at it with all of their souls justifies everything they do. Elon Musk would be one such example. He’s justified keeping every penny of his ludicrous wealth because he says he wants to carry the flame of human civilization into space. (Personally, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to become mankind’s second Prometheus! I can’t wait for the part where the gods chain him to a rock and send a daily eagle to devour his lily liver straight out of his Donkey Kong barrel-shaped body as a punishment for being a hubristic little bitch.)

The other possibility is that the pyramid is right. Money-lovers are stuck in the lower tiers like the cast of No Exit. They want safety and love and esteem just like everybody else, but they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that money is what’s stopping them from getting it. Their quest for money is actually a quest for self-actualization—a thing that all people want, and cannot ever stop wanting.

This situation is dangerous, because it creates a tremendous potential social evil. Because an ultra-wealthy person incapable of being satisfied has the power to craft policies that drain wealth away from others on a massive scale. The modest wealth and stability that a normal person could use to live a satisfying life is diverted towards an end it cannot achieve: bringing satisfaction to a person who doesn’t understand how to be satisfied.

Which brings me back to Glorianne.

Glorianne Farnham is 73 years old. The average American woman will die at age 81. So statistically, she’s only got eight more trips around the sun. Someone with her resources can choose to go almost anywhere, do almost anything with that precious remaining time.

What she’s chosen to do is to drag her immediate family members to court, initiating what will surely be a life-sucking, multiyear slug-fest of suits and countersuits that will drain them all emotionally and financially. In doing so she’s also made herself a target of hatred in the broader community. When she dies, I think this proxy fight will likely be the main bullet point in her obituary. Malcontent might be her legacy.

All, presumably, to get more money.

Rapaciousness is an act of self-harm. It’s sad to watch. Once again, I pity this woman and her sisters, who have so much and still need more.

But rapacious people cannot be invited into boardrooms. If they’re given power over others, their inability to be satisfied threatens the stability of companies and potentially society itself. In recent decades, rapacious board members have voted down profit sharing, pensions, paid vacations, parental leave, and pay raises because they would rather push customers and employees to the brink of starvation than sacrifice a single golden coin off the embarrassing dragon hoard of personal wealth they’ve promised to their insatiable shareholders.

Boards are supposed to keep companies safe. They’re supposed to bring stability and long-sightedness. But many have doomed themselves by capitulating to the avariciousness of a handful of…

Peter Stormare: “Psychopath…“

No…

Peter Stormare: “…psychopath!“

NO, Peter Storemare, no! A handful of ~*greedy jerks!*~ When greedy jerks make all the decisions, companies collapse suddenly under the weight of years of broken priorities and covert mismanagement. They create booms and busts they’re too fragile to endure. And they cheapen the experience of being alive in a modern human society by pushing its greatest innovations and pleasures into the hands of only a lucky few.

I want to end this segment by pointing out how this harm perpetuates across generations.

For this piece, I investigated EVERY member of the Demoulas family, including their adult children. I’ve chosen not to share almost anything that I learned about them, because most of them are not public figures, and it doesn’t feel fair to drag their names into this. But I will share a single quote from an interview with Glorianne’s son, pro hockey player Bobby Farnham.

When a journalist asked Glorianne’s son about the Demoulas family business, he shut the journalist down hard. He said he didn’t like to talk about it “like, at all.”

It’s entirely possible the subject merely bores him, or distracts from his personal achievements, and there’s nothing else to it. But I wonder if it’s because the interfamily conflict has been a source of lifelong pain for him, as I think it may be for all of the Demoulas children and grandchildren. It’s terrible to imagine a child learning to fear and mistrust their own family members. I have a little niece and nephew who think I’m the coolest person on the planet. I can’t imagine what it would take to one day fire them without cause from their jobs and sue their parents. Who would want to bring children into a family where those vital bonds could be so easily torn apart? I can’t imagine there isn’t a lot of trauma there.

Bobby Farnham seems like a nice guy, by the way. He had a crazy long pro hockey career. That’s a very intense sport; I hope he’s doing well. I wonder what he’s up to today…

(ring ring, ring, ring) One sec, folks, I gotta answer the phone… Yello?

…What’s that? He opened a what?

…A private equity firm?!

…How long after that did his mother turn on his uncle to join forces with a bunch of aunts and cousins who are alleged to have indulged in extensive self-dealing? A year, really?

…Huh. Well, I’m sure there’s nothing ethically dubious going on there. I mean, it’s not like he’s using his extensive relationships with high-net-worth individuals and family offices to build his own wealth.

…What’s that? That’s literally what his company says it does on the About Us page?! That can’t be true…

Lol, it is.

Who is Caren Demoulas Pasquale?

Arthur T. Demoulas’s counterclaim makes clear the ringleaders of this corporate coup. Middle sister Glorianne and her family are only mentioned twice. But the eldest and youngest sisters’ families are mentioned 35 and 31 times, respectively. You already know about Frances onee-sama, so let’s meet youngest sister Caren.

Caren Demoulas Pasquale, like her sisters, has never worked at Market Basket. I could not find records of her ever having worked anywhere except in her personal family enterprises.

The Kettenbach Demoulases and Pasquale Demoulases are both accused of enriching themselves with commercial real estate schemes and suspicious business contracts. There are pages and pages of legal documentation about this going back years. We don’t have time for all that, so here is an immensely simplified explanation via the counterclaim.

Allegedly, these families bought land that was perfect for Market Baskets. They then offered to sell the land to Market Basket but during the bidding, they got their personal friends to put in crazy high bids, just to artificially bump up the land’s price. Arthur T. Demoulas said “Could you not?” But the sisters teamed up to outvote him.

Caren Demoulas’s participation in this scheme, if true, informs my opinion that she’s as coldheartedly anti-social and rapacious as her other sisters. Market Basket is a profit-sharing institution. Therefore, if shareholders force the company to buy land at inflated prices, they’re stealing money out of the pockets of regular employees.

It is bone-chilling to see these ghouls glad-handing with the very people most directly victimized by their insatiable, devious greed (… allegedly). The fact that they’re able to shake hands and pose for photos with their victims tells me that the people whose labor built their personal wealth are not even real to them. They’re objects, abstractions, NPCs—anything but friends.

… But that’s not to say they don’t have friends elsewhere. Like, say, on the board!

Bad board members are coordinated

The relationship between the sisters and their board members is rife with obvious potential conflicts of interest.

A conflict of interest is an external relationship that has the potential to improperly bias someone tasked with making impartial decisions on behalf of a company. It’s one of the most intuitive business practices—everybody gets why it’s bad.

Let’s say you ran a beauty pageant—for dogs!—where first prize gets ten thousand bucks. I could be an impartial judge—but not if my own dog was in the contest. Because I’ve already formed the (correct) opinion that my dear sweet Mama is the most beautiful, the most talented, the specialest, the shiniest, the shimmeriest… you also couldn’t trust my vote if my friends’ dogs were entered. Because although they’re all the owners of extremely handsome boys, I obviously would jump at any pretext to put ten thousand smackeroos in my friends’ pockets.

Every company with a board expects that board to be free from conflicts of interest. It’s de rigueur.

But inappropriate closeness and personal loyalty are sometimes hard to prove. If someone’s taken a secret pledge of loyalty, they’re not gonna own up to it. The shareholder isn’t dumb; they won’t say “I’m nominating this person because he’s my best friend’s husband, and I know he’ll always do whatever I say!” And the board-member-to-be won’t say “yep, fuck the company, I’ll only ever vote in the interest of this one shareholder because she’s my best chance to ascend into the billionaire class.”

No, both parties will do everything they can to obscure their conflicting relationship. You would never claim your pick was impartial if it could be really easily disproven by anyone with access to basic public records and a little free time.

… Right?

… Right, Caren?

Let me describe the home of Caren Demoulas Pasquale. It’s a six thousand square foot custom-built multimillion dollar mansion sitting on a few acres of land in the heart of the second-wealthiest town in Massachusetts. The property is surrounded by conservation land, and feels very private, yet it’s just steps to the Rail Trail and an easy walk to Weston’s cute little downtown. It’s got a long private driveway and a massive pool out back.

Basically, it’s a real shithole! I totally get why the Pasquale-Demoulases needed to also buy a little oceanfront getaway in Rhode Island, and then sell it for another more different oceanfront getaway in Rhode Island, this one costing more than $5M for four times the square footage of an average local home. Market Basket employees, when your feet hurt at the end of a long shift, just remember: it’s for a good cause!

In the interest of fairness, I think I should also investigate the board members they’ve chosen to act as their impartial representatives.

Let me describe the home of the newly elected board chair Jay Hachigian. It’s a seven thousand square foot custom-built, multimillion dollar mansion sitting on a few acres of land in the heart of downtown Weston. It also has a long private driveway and a massive pool out back. Y’know, if the two houses look similar, it’s probably because they were built at the same time, by the same builder.

I’m really happy that the Demoulas sisters found the perfect guy to act as a diligent and fully impartial chairman of the board of their grandfather’s company. The fact that he lives next door to one of them sure is a crazy coincidence!

Almost as crazy as the coincidence of Jay Hatchigian being married to Jill Columbosian Hatchigian, a woman who’s been Caren Demoulas’s personal friend for fifty fucking years.

You know, when I asked our Patrons what they would do if they earned $40 million every year, many mentioned wanting to buy houses directly next door to their closest friends and family. Nobody followed up with “also, give their spouses cushy jobs as my professional thrall,” but don’t think less of them. Our Patreon is full of Pours! They just don’t know the tricks of the ultra-wealthy.

And this IS normal to them. Of the 50 largest American companies, ~80% of them are connected by one or more shared board members. Fortune 500 companies have 5,400 board seats available, but the same 750 people warm their asses in 30% of them. It’s a genteel, perfectly legal cartel of millionaires and billionaires.

Hatchigian isn’t the only new board member with obvious conflicts of interest. According to the counterclaim, codefendant Michael Keyes was given a board membership about a year after working for the company that put in the bid that drove up the price of the future Market Basket location the sisters forced through. And Steven Collins’s former business partner David Mussafer is another longtime friend of the Pasquale Demoulases; he lives about a mile down the road, in the biggest and nicest Weston mansion of them all.

I don’t know Market Basket’s bylaws regarding conflicts of interest. Maybe this intense lifelong friendship was disclosed and deemed acceptable. I’m not alleging that anything illegal happened here. But I know for a fact that the world is filled with smart, honest, capable businesspeople who don’t live 500 feet away from major shareholders, and haven’t worked for companies alleged to have cheated the company in question.

What I want you to understand from all this is that bad board members are intensely coordinated. You might think that people who exhibit antisocial and rapacious behaviors are doomed to work alone, but that’s not the case—they’re running devastatingly effective team strats. People with low empathy and large appetites behave in ways that shock normal, healthy people—but they’re actually remarkably predictable to each other. They will always act in their own self-interest. So they gather around each other and work together to take down prey much larger than themselves.

What makes good CEOs vulnerable?

We’ve talked you to death about rising income inequality in America. You know that we blame the shift on the ultra-wealthy, their indefensible greed, and the political and social structures that enable them to take far more than their fair share.

What we may have failed to drive home is that a new class of person is arising as a result. These people seek to create a new aristocracy, a new elite ruling class of permanent billionaires. They seek a wealth so vast that it can never be drawn down, even by the most profligate heirs.

There are three ways into this class:

1. A lucky circumstance of birth, inheriting vast generational wealth and power with no special effort on your part. They often have recognizable surnames, but you’d be hard pressed to name any personal accomplishments. (Examples include Jim Walton, Karl Albrecht Jr., and Barron Trump.)
2. Holding some kind of once-in-a-generation talent for something, and having the ambition, business acumen, good timing, and luck to translate it into massive material wealth. (Think of someone like Warren Buffet, George Lucas, or Taylor Swift.)
3. Find someone in one of the first two categories, and hold on to their coattails for dear life. (We may rarely know their names, but for every one Oprah Winfrey, there’s a handful of Gayle Kings and Stedman Grahams whose dead weight is lifted by the rocket ship trajectory of others.)

History is full of CEOS who fit into that second category. Steve Jobs, for example, was a domineering jerk and an arrogant fruitarian. But I’d argue he’s an example of someone who succeeded because he had several kinds of genius that synergized together. If he didn’t have S-tier cleverness in technology, business, and marketing PLUS the benefits of good luck and timing, his company would’ve sunk into the dot com tar pits like so many others.

Boards are full of the third category of would-be elites. They weren’t born great, and they can’t achieve greatness. So they orient their whole lives around getting a chance to have greatness thrust upon them.

These leeches are smart enough to recognize genius in others, but not smart enough to figure out how to replicate it within themselves. They could never start their own company and make it flourish without relying on connections; that’s too hard! But they restlessly hunger for everything a good CEO has: the money, yes, the power, sure—but also the stability, the identity, the respect, the admiration, the credit, the inner peace that comes from being assured of your own excellence. It’s emotional as well as material, which is why they’re so insatiable.

Good CEOS—like Arthur T. Demoulas—build companies without exploiting others. And by doing so, they attract these bottom-feeders in droves, because they represent the easiest, clearest short-term opportunity to turn millions into billions. Market Basket’s prices are low, and their employee costs are high. Exploiting this business model for massive personal gain requires no special brilliance or genius. Ya push your way in, raise prices, and slash costs. Boom, done!

In fact, you can just copy the homework your competitors have already done. Lower wages to whatever Albertson’s pays; slash benefits to match whatever Kroger offers; install the same self-checkouts you see at Publix. Now instruct your store managers to creep pricing up by 3% every quarter until the frog is thoroughly boiled and customers are paying way more than they once did.

Think of it this way: if I waved a magic wand and put you in charge of Walmart for one year, do you think you could raise their profits way beyond current expectations? … Probably not, right? Hundreds of very cunning leaders within that company have spent decades coming up with innovative ways to shave pennies and dimes off their stores’ processes. To succeed in that environment, you’d have to be more clever than everyone who came before you, as well as everyone who works at a competing big-box store. It probably ain’t gonna happen.

… But if I put you in charge of Market Basket? You could raise prices across the board by 15% overnight and still be the cheapest local chain.

Morally bankrupt business idiots cannot resist a fruit hanging this low, this juicy. And the structure of boards makes it possible for them to harvest what they did not grow.

How do you remove a bad board member?

I told you that companies with boards function sort of like a democracy, with CEOs as the president and boards as the legislature. Just like in government, these forces need a third party to provide checks and balances: the courts. When CEO Arthur T. Demoulas and board members loyal to the sisters irrevocably clashed, the issue was hauled into the Delaware chancellory court, where—at time of writing—the matter is still under consideration.

I think Arthur T. Demoulas has good odds of being reinstated by the courts. The sister’s original suit was thin and vague, but their brother’s countersuit feels like ten pounds of evidence stuffed into a one pound bag.

But that outcome is far from guaranteed. More evidence might come out. A judge may not agree with my interpretation of the facts. Specific language in Market Basket’s bylaws or past minutes might work against him. We could end up with half-resolutions that prolong or deepen the conflict. Who’s to say what will happen! Regardless, the fight will take years, disrupt the course of business, and cost millions in legal fees.

That’s super inefficient—and I think we can do better. 

Looking at Market Basket as a cautionary tale, I also see a different, better option to curb the forces of both rule-breaking CEOs and disruptive shareholders and their proxy board members. 

Instead of making our legal system into an inefficient and slow-moving counterweight, let it instead be a final referee. Because there’s another group that’s far better positioned to act as tiebreaker in these destructive CEO/board civil wars.

And that’s the employees.

Why employees make the best mediators in board/CEO disputes

I want you to imagine an individual Market Basket employee. Her name is Rosa. She’s an older Brazilian American woman who lives in East Boston. She works as a checkout clerk at the Chelsea store. After diligently saving, she’s managed to buy a condo right nearby. She supports her elderly parents by sending money back home. When her shift is over, she does her personal shopping there too. 

Now, I want you to imagine that Market Basket shits the bed, and all of its stores close overnight.

Add Rosa to the list of people I’ve profiled today—Arthur T. Demoulas; his sisters Frances, Glorianne, and Caren; and the board members they’ve chosen to represent themselves—and tell me: of all of them, who would suffer the most if Market Basket failed?

I’d argue that it’s not the people who are major shareholders in the business, but someone like Rosa. The Demoulas siblings may feel sad about it, but they would not lose their best job prospect, 100% of their income, and access to affordable food in their neighborhood, which has historically been a food desert. But Rosa would.

Many modern business leaders seem to have forgotten the virtues of stability. They’re manically focused on growing shareholder value alone. But employees still want to find the perfect balance. They want good jobs, but they also want to keep goods and services affordable for themselves and their neighbors. On a daily basis, they’re the ones who are the most inconvenienced by waste and mismanagement. They’re perfectly capable of evaluating the merits of competing leadership visions. And in almost every situation I could imagine, I’d trust their judgement on what the company actually needs.

Companies have wide latitude to determine their own bylaws. It would be fairly simple to implement a system of companywide voting to resolve disputes. It would create a model that maintains family ownership, but synthesizes it with worker cooperative-style conflict resolution.

Implementing such a model is possible, but it requires the full cooperation of both CEO and board. It strikes me as the faster, cleaner path to finding just and sensible outcomes. As a bonus, it doesn’t rely on taxpayer funding. It also incentivizes both the CEO and board to connect with employees, articulate a vision, and prioritize their happiness.

This is my idea. It’s not the only option, and it may not be the best. If you think you have a better one, I’d love to hear it. Because this problem is causing widespread damage to our economy, and we need to find solutions to stop it.

So there you go. If you want to know why you can’t have a good boss, that’s my take. Great bosses are great because they don’t exploit others—but exploiting others is insanely profitable, and our systems of corporate governance makes it possible for small, coordinated teams of selfish, greedy people to work together to oust the guy you actually like and seat themselves on his throne. Hopefully the courts will stop them, but if they don’t, the only recourse is for employees and customers to walk away.

Readers, I set out to help you understand an important cultural shift within corporate America, and how it’s driving good leaders out of their seats of power. I hope I’ve done that. There will be more developments in this story in the future. But I’m probably going to let them pass me by? Despite appearances, I’m actually not trying to turn Bitches Get Riches into a college-level seminar called More for Your Dollar: Form and Meaning in the Semiotics of Market Basket. But I simply couldn’t let such a rich opportunity to opine and educate pass me by.

Did you learn something new? Are you thinking about your own past leaders in a new light? Do you have other ideas for taming disruptive shareholders or exposing their board proxies? Let me know in the comments!

Special thanks go to my research assistant and our legal reviewers for their help on this one, as well as our amazing Patreon donors. Their support gives us the financial security to write as boldly as we please. If this is the kind of journalism you want to see more of in the world, join us. Also, we’ll buy all of their dream homes as soon as we hit the $40M/year threshold, guarenteed! So think of it as an investment in your future as well as our present.