The Hollow Men
American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.
By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.
These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.
In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.
Today, we have severed that link.
We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.
If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.
This looting starts in the boardroom.
We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.
Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.
And for what?
Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.
They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.
And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?
We get the Delegation Economy.
When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.
This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.
They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.
While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.
If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.
The time for polite governance is over.
If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.
Gamestop Development
I'm not going to interview Ryan Cohen today. Ryan is working on something monumental, and he would not be able to say much. We both agreed that "I cannot answer that on advice of counsel" is the last thing anyone wants to hear. I'm on pins and needles like everyone else. Hope to have news and the interview soon. @ryancohen $GME
Final Stop GameStop: The Jig is Up
In Part 1, I outlined how he arrived on the scene – we had a talk in 2019 about GameStop and investing. The Chewy founder then made a big splash as an activist with a Form 13D filing later in 2020.
He has held on with the diamondest hands.
Ryan, the current Executive Chairman, CEO and owner of now about 9% of GameStop stock, ascended to this dual role in September 2023.
Let’s take a look at the business as it stands today.
Here I will introduce the Scion Analyst Template, in parts. This is a Microsoft Word template I put together for my wayward analysts early in 2006. The idea was to get everyone thinking my way about analyzing stocks.
I will now, as I would have in 2006, analyze GameStop stock by working through the template one section at a time.
open.substack.com/pub/michaeljbu…
$GME CEO Ryan Cohen @ryancohen purchased an additional 500,000 shares at a weighted average price of $21.1174/share on January 20, 2026:
sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
Happy 2 year anniversary to one of the worst analyst calls in recent stock market history, @Wedbush
cc @ryancohen reports of your demise were greatly exaggerated
BREAKING NEWS: GameStop’s last side sell-side analyst (Wedbush) calls it quits in bombshell statement 🚨🚨🚨
The official Wedbush statement: "We are dropping coverage on $GME due to reallocation of analyst resources. Going forward, our rating (Underperform), target price ($13.50) and estimates should not be relied upon."
How poetic.