How to Blackmail Your Own Company for $24 Billion

• CEO of big EV company 🚗⚡
• Got “distracted” by politics to “fix” government 🙄
• Board freaked out — share price dipped 📉
• They begged me to come back
• Offered $24B in stock to “stay focused” 💰
• Me: Pretends to think about it 🤔
• Also me: 🏝️💃

Hey, if I can do it, so can you!

I’m the CEO of a Very Important Electric Vehicle Company™.
We make fast cars, slow trucks, and sometimes, flamethrowers — because synergy.

One day, I got “bored” of only running a trillion-dollar empire and decided,
“You know what this planet needs? Me… in politics.”

So I started going on long livestream rants about “fixing” government inefficiency.
I proposed bold reforms, like replacing all DMV lines with racetracks and making Congress wear matching jumpsuits “for brand consistency.”

Problem was… I accidentally rubbed the wrong billionaires the wrong way.
(Let’s just say the yacht industry really hates my proposal for “public yacht-sharing.”)

Suddenly, the board of my company got nervous.
Share price wobbled. Investors started emailing me at 3 a.m. with subject lines like “???”

Then, one fateful Tuesday, they invited me to a “casual lunch meeting.”
There was no lunch. Only spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets showing exactly how much money I was not making them by being distracted.

So they made me a “generous” offer:
— Return to the company full-time.
— Stop trying to single-handedly run the government.
— In exchange, they’d “reluctantly” give me a slightly motivating stock package worth… $24 billion.

Naturally, I acted like I needed time to “think about it” —
while secretly texting my accountant, “We did it. Book the island.”

So yes… I blackmailed my own company without even meaning to.
And the best part? They thanked me for it.

Moral of the story: Always keep a side-hobby… just in case your main job isn’t paying enough.

The Christina Chapman Saga Impressed Me. What About You?

If this is such a big deal, how come I never heard about this till I saw the WSJ podcast?

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-everyday-american-who-hustled-for-north-korea/110efe13-3071-43db-85b8-1d44330ce1f6

The total $ amount she siphoned to NK through her laptop farm : $17 million! (she got to keep about $180k - not bad for a non techie)

Annie Minoff: That is wild to me. Imagine being a North Korean hacker and applying for a job at a cybersecurity company.

Robert McMillan: Yeah. Imagine getting it.

Laptop farmers help make that happen. They receive North Korean's work laptops and help set them up so that the scammers can operate them remotely. They also help with logging on in the morning and logging off at night. And that's what Christina Chapman did. After she got that LinkedIn message, Chapman became one of what researchers estimate could be dozens of laptop farmers who've cropped up all across the US.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/north-korea-hacks-us-remote-work-using-unwitting-americans-article-13059908.html

Christina Chapman, a 50-year-old ex-waitress and bootcamp graduate coder, posted gleefully about her day-to-day grind on TikTok—giving peeks into her client sessions, lunches, and travels. But in the corner of one 2023 video, federal agents noticed more than a dozen idling laptops. These were not for her own projects—they were used by North Korean IT staff illegally impersonating US-based employees, the Wall Street Journal reported.

https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-stole-your-tech-job-ai-interviews/

Once again, the applicant said they were based in the US, had an Anglo name, and appeared to be a young Asian man with a thick, non-American accent. He used a basic virtual background, was on a terrible internet connection, and had a single-minded focus on salary. This candidate, though, was wearing glasses. In the lenses, Wijckmans spotted the reflection of multiple screens, and he could make out a white chatbox with messages scrolling by. “He was clearly either chatting with somebody or on some AI tool,” Wijckmans remembers.

From Sherwood News