BILLIONAIRE
PET PEEVES

When people pay full price for anything. "There's a coupon RIGHT THERE." The man is worth $128 billion and still drives to McDonald's for the $3.19 breakfast. He doesn't even get the combo. That's extra.

Cryptocurrency. The mere mention makes him reach for his Cherry Coke like it's a stress ball. He once called Bitcoin "rat poison squared." Not rat poison. Rat poison SQUARED. He did the math on how much he hates it.

When restaurants serve Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola. He owns $25 billion in Coke stock. This is personal. He has literally gotten up and left restaurants over this. The man has walked away from more Pepsi than most people earn in a lifetime.

People who sell stocks they've held for less than 20 years. "That's not investing, that's FIDGETING." His ideal holding period is "forever," which is also how long he's been saying the same thing about index funds.

The SEC. All of it. The entire organization. He calls them the "Shortseller Enrichment Commission." He tweeted this. The SEC fined him $20 million. He paid it like a parking ticket and kept tweeting.

When people call X "Twitter." It's X. HE PAID $44 BILLION FOR THE LETTER X. Every time someone says "I saw it on Twitter," a small part of his net worth dies. The rebrand cost him more goodwill than most CEOs have in the first place.

Traffic. He literally started a tunnel company because traffic annoyed him that much. Most people honk. Elon Musk founded The Boring Company. That's not a coping mechanism, that's a billion-dollar tantrum, and honestly? Respect.

Being called a billionaire instead of "engineer" or "Technoking." He gave himself that title at Tesla. It's on the SEC filings. The SEC had to process paperwork that says "Technoking." That might be his greatest achievement.

When his rockets don't stick the landing. He takes it personally. Like a chef whose souffle collapsed in front of Gordon Ramsay. Except the souffle cost $60 million and the whole world was watching it explode on a livestream.

When Amazon packages arrive late. He built the company and STILL checks his delivery tracking. He once forwarded a customer complaint email to the entire executive team with just a "?" as the message. That single question mark has ended more careers than most HR departments.

People who start meetings with PowerPoint. At Amazon it's 6-page memos or you're fired (probably). The first 20 minutes of every Amazon meeting is just people silently reading. It's like a library with worse coffee and higher stakes.

When people describe his laugh as "supervillain-esque." It IS supervillain-esque. It's the laugh of a man who saw your entire purchase history and found it amusing. But pointing it out is apparently a fireable offense.

Two-day shipping that takes three days. The betrayal. He spent $61 billion on logistics infrastructure and one late package unravels his entire sense of self. Three-day shipping isn't a delay. It's a personal insult to everything he's built.

People who refuse to try the Metaverse. He spent $36 billion on it. THIRTY-SIX BILLION. That's more than the GDP of Iceland. For a virtual world where his avatar doesn't have legs. At least try it before you roast the legless avatar.

Privacy questions in congressional hearings. "Senator, we run ads." He's explained this roughly 400 times. Each time his eye twitches slightly less, which is somehow more unsettling. The water-drinking moments alone deserve their own Wikipedia article.

When people say he looks like a robot. He started posting videos of himself doing MMA and hunting with a spear specifically to combat this. It worked. Now he looks like a robot that does MMA and hunts with a spear.

The fact that nobody calls it "Meta." It's been years. Everyone still says Facebook. He renamed a trillion-dollar company and the world collectively said "no thanks, we're good."

Stupidity. In all its forms. Every form. He once said "I have nothing to add" at the Berkshire meeting and it was the most devastating burn in corporate history. Silence was his weapon and he wielded it like a katana.

Bitcoin. He called it "rat poison," "turds," and "a venereal disease." When asked to elaborate, he said he didn't want to. That's it. No further explanation. Just vibes and contempt.

People who don't read. He read 600 pages a day and judged everyone who didn't. If you told Charlie Munger you "don't have time to read," he would look at you the way a surgeon looks at someone who Googled their diagnosis.

EBITDA. He called it "BS earnings." "Every time you see EBITDA, just substitute it with 'BS earnings.'" CFOs everywhere felt a chill they couldn't explain.

Incompetent CEOs. Which, according to Carl, is ALL of them. He's launched proxy fights against so many boards that corporate America sees his name on the shareholder list the way a gazelle sees a lion at the watering hole.

When companies use the phrase "shareholder value" without actually creating any. He will buy 10% of your company just to tell you you're bad at your job. That's not investing. That's the most expensive performance review in history.

Poison pills. Companies adopt them specifically to keep him out. He considers this a compliment and an insult simultaneously. It's like barring someone from a restaurant they were going to buy anyway.

People who think he's mellowed with age. He launched a major proxy fight in his late 80s. He will fight you for control of your company from a hospital bed if necessary. Retirement is a pet peeve.

People who aren't radically transparent. At Bridgewater, every meeting is recorded. Every. Meeting. Including the one where you cried about your performance review. That's in the archives now. Radical transparency means your worst moments are corporate training material.

When people take criticism personally. He wrote a 600-page book called "Principles" that's basically a manual for not having feelings at work. If you cry in a meeting, that's a data point. The data says you're weak.

Employees who can't rate their colleagues on a 1-10 scale in real time. Bridgewater has an app for this called "Dot Collector." You rate people DURING the meeting. To their face. On a tablet. This is what $15 billion buys you: institutionalized awkwardness.

Central banks that don't understand debt cycles. He made a YouTube video explaining the entire global economy in 30 minutes. It has 50 million views. The Fed has not watched it. This keeps him up at night.

People who think he's microchipping them through vaccines. He spent $10 billion trying to eradicate polio and the internet decided he's installing 5G trackers. The man can't even get Windows to update without crashing and you think he's running a global surveillance chip? Through a NEEDLE?

When people ask about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. His eye does a thing. A very specific thing. PR teams have been deployed. Statements have been issued. The eye still does the thing.

Apple users. He built Microsoft. He lost the mobile war. He knows it. Every time he sees someone with an iPhone, a tiny piece of 1998 dies inside him. He uses an Android. He wants you to know this.

People who think climate change is fake. He wrote an entire book about it. He invested billions in clean energy. Someone on Facebook told him to "do his own research." He has labs. He has LABS.

People who buy stocks they can't explain to a child. His entire investing philosophy is "buy what you know." If you can't explain what the company does in two sentences, you shouldn't own it. The number of people who bought crypto because "it goes up" haunts his retirement.

Professional fund managers who underperform the S&P 500. He averaged 29% annual returns for 13 years and then watched the entire industry fail to beat an index. It's like winning every Olympic gold and then watching the next generation trip on the starting blocks.

"Diworsification" -- when companies acquire things that make no sense. He coined the term. When a shoe company buys a software firm, Peter Lynch feels a disturbance in the Force. Like a million portfolios suddenly cried out in terror.

People who try to time the market. "Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections than in the corrections themselves." He said this in 1989. Everyone ignored it. He's been right for 37 years and people STILL try to time it.

Stable currencies. He made $1 billion in a single day by shorting the British pound. Stability is his enemy. When a currency is "rock solid," Soros sees a challenge, not a fact. The Bank of England learned this the hard way.

Conspiracy theories about him. He's been blamed for everything from controlling the weather to funding every protest since 1992. He's 93 years old. The man does not have the energy to orchestrate all of this. He barely has the energy to orchestrate lunch.

Politicians who don't understand reflexivity. He wrote an entire philosophical framework about how markets and reality influence each other. Nobody in government read it. They didn't even read the summary. He's been explaining it since 1987.

When people say he's "just lucky." He returned 30% annually for 30 years. That's not luck. That's not even skill. That's a statistical anomaly that should be studied by NASA.

Bad Shark Tank pitches. When someone values their company at $10 million with $12 in revenue, a part of Mark Cuban's soul leaves his body. You can see it happen in real time. His eyebrows do the thing. The other sharks look away.

NBA referees. He's been fined over $2 million for complaining about officiating. Two million dollars in fines. That's not anger management issues. That's a subscription service for yelling at refs.

People who don't respond to emails quickly. He's famous for answering emails within minutes, at any hour. If you take more than 24 hours to respond to Mark Cuban, he's already moved on, invested in your competitor, and forgotten your name.

When entrepreneurs say "we have no competition." You have competition. You always have competition. Even if your product is a solar-powered hat that also walks your dog, SOMEONE is working on version 2.0 in a garage right now.

People who didn't listen to him. About the housing crash. About the tech bubble. About inflation. About water shortages. He's been right about approximately everything and the world's response has consistently been "who is this guy and why is he yelling?"

When people only know him from The Big Short. He's a trained neurologist who taught himself financial analysis, identified the biggest fraud in mortgage history, and bet against the entire housing market. But sure, ask him about Christian Bale.

Social media. He deletes his Twitter account roughly every 6 weeks. Posts a cryptic warning about economic collapse, gets 2 million impressions, deletes everything, and goes back to reading 10-K filings in a dark room. This is his cardio.

Index funds. He's called them the next bubble. Passive investing is "dumb money," he says, while most active managers can't beat the index. He's in a war with a concept. And he might be winning.

When the SEC investigates him for being right. They investigated his trades AFTER the housing crisis. He was right. They investigated anyway. It's like arresting the weatherman for predicting rain.

Ugly design. Anything ugly. A misaligned pixel could ruin his entire week. He once made the Macintosh team redo a circuit board because it wasn't aesthetically pleasing. INSIDE THE COMPUTER. Where nobody would see it. "A great carpenter doesn't use bad wood for the back of a cabinet," he said. The engineers cried.

Android. He called it "grand theft" and vowed to go "thermonuclear" on Google. He didn't mean legally. He meant emotionally, spiritually, and corporately. The word "thermonuclear" has never been used more accurately by a CEO in a black turtleneck.

Buttons. Physical buttons. The iPhone was born because Steve Jobs looked at every phone on the market and decided they all had too many buttons. He reduced the entire phone to one button. Then his successors removed THAT button too. He would have loved that.

PowerPoint. He banned it at Apple. If you walked into a Steve Jobs meeting with a slide deck, you walked out with a new understanding of fear. Presentations were done on whiteboards or not at all. Clipart was a capital offense.

Being compared to Steve Jobs. Every keynote. Every product launch. Every interview. "But Steve would have..." He's been CEO for over a decade, tripled Apple's market cap to $3 trillion, and people still introduce him as "the guy after Steve." That's a $3 trillion asterisk.

Supply chain disruptions. Tim Cook doesn't lose sleep over product design. He loses sleep over a container ship stuck in the Suez Canal. He turned Apple's supply chain into the most efficient machine on Earth and ONE boat sideways in a canal nearly broke him.

Leakers. Apple's secrecy culture is legendary and Tim Cook takes leaks like a personal betrayal. When product details leak early, somewhere in Cupertino, a door closes very quietly and someone is never seen at Apple Park again.

People who say Apple doesn't innovate anymore. They literally put a computer on your face (Vision Pro). Whether you wanted that is a different question, but "not innovative" is a stretch when you're selling a $3,500 ski goggle that runs apps.

AI doomers. People who think AI will destroy humanity. He's building AI. He KNOWS the risks. But every time someone compares ChatGPT to Skynet, he has to do another Senate hearing where he politely explains that no, the chatbot is not going to launch nuclear missiles. Probably.

When people use ChatGPT to write emails and don't proofread them. He built the tool. He didn't build it so you could send your boss a message that starts with "As an AI language model, I'm unable to attend Friday's meeting."

Being fired and then rehired in the same weekend. The OpenAI board fired him on a Friday and the entire company threatened to quit by Monday. He was back by Tuesday. It's the fastest corporate resurrection since Lazarus, except Lazarus didn't have a $90 billion valuation.

People who say "AI will take all the jobs" at dinner parties. He's trying to eat. He knows. He's thought about it more than you have. He has a 47-page internal memo about it. Let him have his pasta.

Emails longer than 280 characters. He co-founded Twitter and his brain has been permanently reformatted to short-form communication. If your email has a second paragraph, he's already meditating about why you wasted his time.

People who eat more than one meal a day. He famously ate once a day and did ice baths. His wellness routine reads like a medieval monk's diary. If you eat lunch AND dinner, Jack Dorsey considers you an indulgent hedonist.

Centralized social media. He created Twitter, then LEFT Twitter, then built a decentralized alternative. He's essentially competing with his own legacy. That's like a chef opening a restaurant across the street from his old restaurant specifically to prove the old menu was wrong.

When people confuse him with Jack Dorsey the other one. There is no other one. But people still email the wrong Jack Dorsey constantly. Being a billionaire doesn't protect you from people who can't use LinkedIn.

Being the second-richest person instead of the first. He's been chasing the top spot for decades. Every time he gets close, Elon tweets something and his stock goes up another $30 billion. It's like a race where the other guy has a jetpack.

When people say the cloud is just "someone else's computer." He spent $80 billion building Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It's not someone else's computer. It's HIS computer. And he'd like you to rent it, please.

Amazon Web Services existing. AWS dominates the cloud. Oracle Cloud wants to dominate the cloud. Larry Ellison goes to sleep thinking about AWS the way Ahab thought about the whale. Except the whale is Jeff Bezos's server farm.

People who use SAP instead of Oracle. He's been fighting SAP since the 1990s. It's the longest-running corporate grudge in tech history. Some rivalries fade. This one has its own Wikipedia section.

Fast fashion. He runs LVMH -- Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy. When someone walks into a meeting wearing H&M, he doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. The cashmere speaks.

When Americans mispronounce luxury brand names. "It's not HER-mees. It's air-MEZ." He's been correcting people since 1984. He will never stop. This is his Sisyphean burden and he carries it with impeccable posture.

Being called an "oligarch." He's French. The word is "magnate." Or "titan." Or "the richest person in the world," which he has been, multiple times, while Americans were still trying to pronounce "Moat Hennessy."

People who buy fake Louis Vuitton. Every counterfeit bag is a personal attack on his empire. LVMH spends $40 million a year fighting counterfeits. He's waging a global war against knockoff handbags and he's WINNING.

Bitcoin. He called it a "fraud" and "worse than tulip bulbs." Then JPMorgan launched its own cryptocurrency. Then he said he regretted calling it a fraud. Then he called it a fraud again. Jamie Dimon's relationship with Bitcoin is the most complicated on-again-off-again in finance.

Fintech startups that think they can replace JPMorgan. "We're disrupting banking!" says the startup with 12 employees and a Series A. JPMorgan has $3.9 trillion in assets. You're not disrupting them. You're a rounding error on their rounding error.

Remote work. He's been trying to get JPMorgan employees back to the office since 2021. He thinks remote work kills creativity, collaboration, and culture. His employees think the commute kills their will to live. Stalemate.

When politicians blame banks for everything. He's testified before Congress more times than most people have filed taxes. Each time he puts on the same "I'm being very patient with you" face. It's become his brand.

When people call NVIDIA a "gaming company." It WAS a gaming company. Now it's an AI infrastructure company worth $3 trillion. That's like calling Amazon a bookstore. Technically true historically, wildly inaccurate currently.

Dress codes. He wears a leather jacket to everything. Earnings calls. Keynotes. Probably board meetings. When you're worth $106 billion, your outfit IS the dress code. Everyone else is underdressed by not wearing leather.

AMD. They've been competitors since the 1990s. Every time AMD launches a new GPU, Jensen Huang's leather jacket creaks with competitive tension. It's the chip industry's oldest rivalry and he's winning by roughly $2.7 trillion in market cap.

People who think the AI boom will end. "You don't understand. Every data center in the world needs to be rebuilt." He says this the way other people say "good morning." The conviction is terrifying and, so far, profitable.

Reddit. Specifically r/WallStreetBets. The GameStop saga turned Ken Griffin into a meme. Citadel's role in the Robinhood trading halt made him internet villain number one. He went from "who?" to "KEN GRIFFIN LIED UNDER OATH" trending on Twitter in 48 hours.

When people say "payment for order flow" is a conflict of interest. Citadel Securities pays brokers for retail order flow. Is it a conflict? Ken Griffin has a very long, very detailed, very aggressive answer that can be summarized as: "No, and also, how dare you."

Chicago politics. He spent $100 million trying to fix Illinois politics. It didn't work. So he moved Citadel to Miami. When your solution to bad governance is "move the entire company to Florida," you've reached a level of pet peeve that transcends annoyance.

Not being as famous as the hedge fund managers he outperforms. He's made more money than most of them and gets a fraction of the press. Until GameStop, most people had never heard of him. He preferred it that way. The monkey's paw curled.

Ties. He hasn't worn one since approximately 1985. He once cut a guest's tie off with scissors on camera. If you show up to a Virgin meeting in a tie, you have fundamentally misread the room, the company, and the man.

The phrase "that's not possible." He started an airline to compete with British Airways because his flight got cancelled. Most people complain on Twitter. Branson started a COMPETING AIRLINE. That's the most expensive customer service complaint in history.

Elon Musk going to space first. The Bezos-Branson-Musk space race was the most expensive midlife crisis in human history. Branson technically went first (by Branson's definition of "space"). The asterisk haunts him.

People who think he's just a branding guy. He's started over 400 companies. Four hundred. Most people can't start a conversation at a party. He started a record label, an airline, a space company, and a telecom before lunch.

Competition. He literally wrote "competition is for losers" in his book. His entire philosophy is that you should build a monopoly and then pretend it's not a monopoly. He said this out loud. In a bestseller. The FTC read it and sighed.

Colleges that charge $80,000 a year. He created the Thiel Fellowship, which PAYS people $100,000 to drop out of college. That's not a scholarship. That's an anti-scholarship. He's paying students to leave the building.

When people call him a "tech bro." He co-founded PayPal, was Facebook's first outside investor, and built Palantir. He's not a tech bro. He's a tech ARCHITECT. The distinction matters to him more than you'd think.

The media. He secretly funded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. SECRETLY. For YEARS. That's not a grudge. That's a strategic, multi-year, covert operation to destroy a media company because they outed him. Supervillain energy.

Short sellers. She takes every short position on ARKK personally. When hedge funds short her holdings, she buys MORE. "We're right, they're wrong, and time will prove it." Time has been somewhat unkind so far, but the conviction is unwavering.

People who judge her 5-year targets after 1 year. She said Tesla would hit $4,600 by 2026. When it was at $100 in 2023, people laughed. She said "just wait." She's been saying "just wait" for four years. The waitlist for her predictions is longer than the predictions themselves.

The efficient market hypothesis. The idea that markets are rational offends her on a molecular level. She built her entire fund on the thesis that markets are WRONG about innovation. If markets were efficient, ARK wouldn't exist. The fact that ARK is down 70% from its high is, in her view, further proof that markets are inefficient.

When people call her funds "speculative." "It's innovation investing," she'll tell you. "We're investing in exponential growth curves." The exponential curve went the wrong direction for a while, but the terminology matters.

When people bring up WeWork. He invested $18.5 billion. EIGHTEEN POINT FIVE BILLION. The company was worth $47 billion, then $0, then somehow $9 billion again. He showed a slide at an earnings call with a picture of a goose and said he was "embarrassed." The goose was unexplained.

Being told to diversify. The Vision Fund was a $100 billion bet on the future. He didn't diversify. He went all-in on everything at once. It's not a portfolio strategy. It's a psychological condition with a Bloomberg terminal.

Short-term thinkers. His business plan spans 300 years. THREE HUNDRED YEARS. He presented a 300-year plan to investors and expected them to take it seriously. The average CEO plans 3 quarters ahead. Masa plans 3 centuries. Nobody knows what happens in year 47, least of all Masa.

When his net worth drops $20 billion in a quarter and people ask if he's okay. He lost $70 billion during the dot-com crash -- the largest personal loss in history at the time. He described it as "a little setback." That's not resilience. That's a dissociative episode with good PR.

When people ignore risk until it's too late. He's been writing memos about risk management since 1990. Nobody reads them until the market crashes. Then everyone says "Howard Marks predicted this!" He predicted EVERYTHING. You just didn't subscribe to the memo.

Overconfidence in forecasters. "Nobody knows" is essentially his catchphrase. He's worth $2.2 billion and his central thesis is that nobody, including him, knows what's going to happen. The humility is either refreshing or terrifying, depending on your portfolio.

When people confuse being contrarian with being right. "Non-consensus and right" is his holy grail. "Non-consensus and wrong" is just being wrong with extra steps. He's been explaining this difference for 30 years and people still mix them up.

The word "always." Markets don't always go up. Interest rates don't always stay low. "Always" is a red flag word. If someone says "always" in a financial context, Howard Marks closes the memo he's reading and starts writing one about why they're wrong.

The Net Worth Sweep. The government bailed out Fannie Mae, stole all the profits, and pretended they didn't. He wrote EIGHT BOOKS about it. Not a blog post. Not a tweet thread. Eight. Full. Books. The Fanniegate series is longer than Harry Potter. The villain is the U.S. Treasury instead of Voldemort, but the betrayal feels the same.

When people tell him to diversify. His portfolio is concentrated in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred shares. That's it. That's the portfolio. "Diversification is protection against ignorance," Buffett says. Glen is not ignorant. He is FOCUSED. And slightly terrifying.

People who haven't read the court filings. He's read all of them. Every motion. Every response. Every footnote. If you haven't read Judge Lamberth's rulings, Glen will email you the PDFs. Unsolicited. At 2 AM. With highlights.

The phrase "move on." Move on from what? From the largest theft of shareholder value in American history? He will not move on. He will not diversify. He will not stop writing books. The government will give back those profits or Glen will die trying. There is no middle ground.