Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Female "Billionaire" Lynn Tilton, female role model (for females) par excellence

An anonymous reader recently got torn a new one in the discussion that followed my post Patriarchy or Insignificance?. She (?) made the following rather amusing statement:
There are also women are a more "masculine" psychologically and are very high achievers and bad-asses (one billionaire Lynn Tilton comes to mind). They are a minority but they are out there, the exception disproves the rule.
Exceptions prove the rule, but you can't expect that a cuck/lefty/feminist knows anything about statistics. Anyway, I was not familiar with Lynn Tilton, but I had the strong suspicion that if she really was a self-made billionaire, we would all be very familiar with her name. Just recall how battalions of cucks and feminists have written masturbatory articles on Elizabeth Holmes for years -- until it emerged that she was a complete and utter fraud. Noticing this discrepancy, I spent a negligible amount of time on a search machine that is not called Google, which quickly led to some highly amusing reading.

As it turned out, Lynn Tilton is not only a rather peculiar character, she is also, apparently, a fraud. Who would have thought?

In late 2015, the SEC launched a fraud investigation against her. Just a few weeks ago, CNBC updates its readers on the fate of the "embattled distressed investor". They had some not-so-nice words about her:
Tilton, who spent years cultivating a reputation as a savvy turnaround investor in distressed manufacturing companies, is facing multiple lawsuits from backers of her funds, as well as a fraud case which could result in her being barred from the securities industry. 
All image, no substance? I could swear that I encountered that pattern before.

That was not all. You click around for a few minutes, and quickly realize that you are dealing with the scum of the earth. Even her own fund (!) sues her (more).

That was not nearly all. Through Fortune Magazine I came across these gems:

She had a reputation for letting it all hang out, literally.

Early on in her career, Tilton sent out “Dominatrix Santa” holiday cards, that featured pictures of Tilton in lingerie, a Santa’s hat and a whip. She talked a lot about her wealth, routinely defending her claim that she was one of the world’s few women billionaires. She nearly had a reality show, tentatively titled the ‘Diva of Distress,’ that never aired. And she would drop in references to oral sex in speeches about her business philosophy. 

Old hags making sex references? There had to be more to be found online, and there was. New York Magazine ran a long feature on her in 2011, which was among the most amusing non-fiction I have read in a while. Note that I deliberately did not include a picture of Lynn Tilton in this article. If you look her up online, you may interpret the juicier quotes below as gross instead of merely bizarre.
And,” she adds, lowering her already deep Mae West voice another octave, “as you may have noticed, I am all woman.”
She was 51 at that time.
“I’ll be your girlfriend,” she’s told clients, “but I won’t be your bitch.” 
Patriarch currently claims over $8 billion in annual revenue, and Tilton says the company has made her a billionaire as well as the owner of more businesses than any other woman in America. These claims can’t easily be verified, but they’re impressive enough that Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a dean at the Yale School of Management, has invited her to speak on a leadership panel.

Sure, can't be verified, but they are impressive enough. Where have we seen that kind of reasoning before?
“I like to be balanced. With one hand I stroke; with the other hand I smack.”
“It’s only men I strip and flip,” she tells the managers. “My companies I keep long term and close to my heart.”
LOL.
“Look, I am the largest female business owner in this country,” she says, coming out from behind the rack in a Herve Leger gown. “I own 74 midsize businesses, and Obama has not once called me into the White House on these issues.”
Sure, owning 74 mostly distressed midsize businesses is roughly the same as running BlackRock, the FED, or Goldman.
She came across as a total nutjob. I mean, I understand wanting to be a woman and yadda yadda yadda. But the people who don’t try and conform somewhat don’t get all of the opportunities. And, you know, nobody likes seeing too much boob.”
There is nothing wrong with a bit of boob, but probably not when it's an old woman in a business setting.
It’s not as if Tilton isn’t aware that her style can overshadow her substance. “I think the fact that I look like this hinders me in some ways,” Tilton says between outfit changes. “But that’s also what makes me so much more fascinating, right?” 
I know, right?
She begins wriggling out of the dress. “I’m all about transparency,” she explains, as the dress falls to the floor. She’s not wearing any underwear. “Where do you get someone who’s worth looking at and listening to?”
She is a total narcissist.
Tilton thought she had everything she wanted—“Good-looking man, great sex, small island, still looking good in a thong bikini”—and planned on moving to a small island in the Philippines. 
Protip: women who openly talk about how much great sex they are having normally want to signal that they are not getting enough sex. It is certainly noticeable that it is particularly older single women who do that. Furthermore, if they tell you how good-looking they are, well, they normally aren't (and they know it).
Later, according to someone present, she told the crowd this variation of the well-worn joke: “There are three universal lies: Margins are weak, but we’ll make it up in volume; the check’s in the mail; and I won’t come in your mouth.”
Tasteless. There are few things more embarrassing than old women making sexual innuendos or crassly describing sexual acts. Also note that due to fixed and variable costs you can certainly make up weak margins in volume. There are plenty of business majors who don't know this basic fact, though.
Tilton is also finding her personal wealth coming under increasing scrutiny. Though the CLOs net her at least $25 million annually, some in the industry scoff at her claims of being a billionaire. “Not even close,” says someone whose membership in that club has never been challenged. When I repeat this to Tilton, she presents a simple, unaudited spreadsheet listing the values of her cash and gold, homes, planes, and jewelry, which total around a half a billion dollars; and a list of her most profitable companies, of which she is sole owner. “Randy likes the billionaire tag because it makes me so unusual,” she complains. “But I don’t like this onus it puts on me to prove it to the press.”

She was harsher to Forbes, which pressed for documentation for its billionaires list. “She threw the reporter out,” Randy Jones told me in early March. “She doesn’t want to be defined by her wealth.” When the magazine published last week a series of confrontational blog posts challenging Tilton’s billionaire credentials and suggesting Patriarch’s dealings smelled bad, Tilton told me she was convinced that she was the subject of a “witch hunt.”
Make of that what you will. Here are some keywords: victim card, insecurity, busted. Keep in mind that she claimed she was a billionaire, and now she complains about the "onus to prove it to the press". For fucks sake! If you can't stand the heat, then stay out of the kitchen. Obviously, she could have saved herself the scrutiny and embarrassment had she not insisted on taking a spot in the limelight and making outlandish claims. I haven't followed the trail from Forbes to the more recent articles which I linked to above, but it is not implausible that Forbes played a major role in triggering a chain of events that eventually led to the current SEC fraud probe --- Patriarch is her company; "dealings smelling bad" is code for potentially fraudulent behavior.

I've saved the best for last:
Tilton perceives all of her male employees as being in love with her. Which is perhaps the reason that, holding court in a conference room during her 50th-­birthday party, Tilton offered her male employees a choice: They could take a Jell-O shot off her stomach or lick whipped cream off her breasts. “The crazy part was, she saw it as morale building,” says one person present. “People were hiding in the bathroom.” 
Unbelievable. Let's be glad that there aren't so many female billionaires around.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
(Also, if you’ve got a comment that is off-topic or only tangentially related to this article, then please post in the most recent Open Thread. Thank you.)

7 comments:

  1. If this woman really was so rich,and was so desperate for male attention,then the smart thing to do would be to hire the best plastic/cosmetic surgeons on the planet to work on her. With her riches,she could do it (she probably doesn't have to be a billionaire,the 600 million she supposedly has should be enough)

    Of course,its only a temporary fix at best,but its probably the best this deluded woman could hope for.

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  2. "Obama has not called me once into the White House on these issues."

    The same Obama that let Hillary Clinton get away with fraud and corruption.

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    1. To be honest, one of your best posts for a long time!!

      Time is gone to call out PUA bullshit and idiots that cooperated...its dry. Now its more important - in times of exaggerated feminism - to call out bullshit women claim on the media and take a shot at this.

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  3. Sad. Good sleuthing.

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  4. Great post Aaron. A general rule I have is that you have to be very sceptical about finance , business and investment gurus who get a lot of press, especially the ones that seek out celebrity. Whether male or female, usually their energy is devoted to their image and their media releases. Donald Trump and Kevin O'Leary are good examples where they have an image of being business titans and the reality falls short of the hype.

    Given that we are all about diversity, we obviously need a few female business "titans" to round out it out. Tilton sounds remarkably scary, both personally as well as in terms of investing in her. Another good example of a female celebrity CEO where the reputation is at odds with the record is Carly Fiorina.

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    1. Add Marissa Mayer to that list. The gushing of the tech press after she became CEO of Yahoo was unbearable. Her track record at Google was less than stellar, which should have dampened any enthusiasm weren't it about the fact that she has a vag, which she used to fuck Larry Page with. Yahoo was struggling before she took over, and she has done little to improve things, which only further demonstrated that she was a poor choice. But, hey, as long as we get more women in we're bound to succeed, amirite? (Note for idiots wanting to comment on Yahoo: that company's worth is almost entirely due to their shares in Alibaba. Yahoo itself is roughly in the laughing stock category and has been shopped around for a fire sale price.)

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    2. If you have time, the book "marissa mayer and the fight to save yahoo" is a great book..you can read the entire book or skip to the part about how it came to be that Yahoo picked Mayer to take over as CEO.

      She's pretty much trying to put Google ideas into Yahoo.

      You are spot-on, the value of Yahoo was tied to Alibaba. There were also (complicated, at least to me) tax benefits towards owning Alibaba. But the U.S. tax authorities clipped said benefits which diminished Yahoo's share value.

      I got a LOT of flak on social media when I supported a headline about Marissa Mayer taking a SECOND maternity leave earlier this year. The headline was about how Marissa Mayer likely avoided getting fired by announcing her second maternity leave. She avoided it since a company can't fire a woman about to go on maternity leave!

      When my female Facebook friends explained to me (woman-splaining?) how it was sexist, they said it was sexist because such a headline would not apply to a man.

      I said, well of course that wouldn't apply to a man, the man would effing get FIRED without a maternity leave preventing that!!

      Delete

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