52-year-old worked 90-hour weeks in an oil refinery to save money for his business—now he's worth $9.5 billion
www.cnbc.com
Todd Graves, the co-founder and co-CEO of Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers, is an unlikely billionaire. Here's how he built his business.

The 90-hour weeks part?
The fact that he was doing it for a fossil fuel company?
The fact that he’s worth fucking $9.5 billion?

Also, not in the headline, but-

The fact that he did it back in the 90s when you could actually successfully open a small business and make money from it as if it’s relevant today?

The business is a franchise called Raising Caine’s Chicken, which I’ve never had, but if you go by Yelp reviews, it’s either the best restaurant that has ever existed or pretty mediocre.

Also, Wikipedia says very little about his early life, but apparently his parents could afford to send him to a private catholic school, so he didn’t exactly grow up improverished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Graves_(entrepreneur)

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
    0·
    28 days ago

    The fact that it pays to be an awful person shows that there is just something fundamentally wrong with our society. Possibly our species.

    • SoupBrick@yiffit.net
      0·
      28 days ago

      I would say society, due to having money being displayed as success and intelligence by a lot of major news sources, regardless of the process by which they make/obtain that money.

      • Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        27 days ago

        My Google news feed thing on my phone constantly has these bullshit side hustle articles. I hate everything about them

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
        0·
        28 days ago

        Sure, but also think of all the horrible people throughout history that clawed their way to power and ruled both ruthlessly and successfully.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
          0·
          27 days ago

          I would blame that on outliers and survivorship bias. We don’t exactly care about the 100,000’s of years of relatively peaceful human history. There’s a reason “may you live in interesting times,” is a curse. We live in interesting times.

    • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      Terms of service are slavery contracts that presume all persons possess the means to process and competently understand the choices they make. The acceptance of these agreements is the legal forfeiture of citizenship and democracy. This is the simplified core issue of present Western society. Ultimately, people have proven that they will sell democracy and citizenship to anyone willing to create digital novelties. This has normalized and funded exploitation and the US party of open legislative loopholes for criminals.

      Seems like a stretch unless you fundamentally understand the implications against the third pillar of democracy—freedom of information required for an informed public. Informational determinism is a cornerstone of democracy. This cornerstone is missing and the house of cards is falling as a result. Most of our present issues boil down to this one problem either directly or indirectly.