Last Fool Capitalism
The oldest trick in the market, wearing AI as a costume.
A company announces it’s cutting a fifth of its staff. The release credits artificial intelligence: leaner, faster, the future. The share price lifts on the news. Somewhere a chief executive’s stock options vest a little richer.
Six months later the product is worse. Hold times stretch. The thing you used to rely on now arrives thinner, slower, wrong more often. The savings came out of quality. They ran the product down and booked the saving as profit. Nobody automated the work. They stopped doing it.
By the time the rot shows, the operator who made the call is gone, or going. The bonus is banked. The next person inherits a husk and a balance sheet that looks, for one more quarter, magnificent.
I’ve started calling this last fool capitalism.
The name welds two older ideas. The first is greater fool theory: the notion that you can buy an overvalued thing and still come out ahead, as long as a bigger fool turns up to take it off your hands. The market is a game of pass-the-parcel and the music is always about to stop. The last fool, the one holding the parcel when it does, eats the loss. Everyone before them made off with the profit.
The second is late capitalism, the worn old phrase for a system grinding through its decadent phase, burning the furniture to stay warm.
Weld them together and you get the move I keep watching. An operator degrades an asset on purpose, extracts the difference as personal gain, and hands the degraded thing to whoever is next. The greater fool at least had to be talked into overpaying. Here the loss is loaded in advance and passed down the line.
I started by blaming age
When I first sketched this, I blamed age. The octogenarian in the boardroom, the octogenarian in the Senate, voting for the fuel that cooks a planet they won’t live to see boil. Easy villains, and I had them lined up.
Then I looked at who actually does this. Plenty of old people care fiercely about what they leave behind. Plenty of thirty-four-year-olds strip a company to the studs with a full life ahead of them and don’t lose a night’s sleep. Age wasn’t the engine. What drives it is the gap between two clocks: how long you’re on the hook, and how long the damage takes to land.
When your clock runs to the next bonus and the damage runs to the next decade, the rational move, in the narrowest sense, is to ignore the damage. It isn’t yours. You’ll be three jobs away when it arrives. Shorten the first clock with vesting schedules, election cycles, three-year tenures and quarterly targets, and you manufacture indifference at scale. It takes no villains — just ordinary people and short horizons, and the system hands those out free.
Two shapes of damage
The damage comes in two shapes, and they aren’t the same.
One is a relay. The gutted company survives, just, and gets passed to the next operator, who runs the same play again. Pass-the-parcel where the parcel rots a little more with each hand it touches. This can go on for years. The brand coasts on a reputation it no longer earns, and customers leave one at a time, too slowly to show up in any single quarter.
The other is a dump. The carbon doesn’t get handed to a successor who might, in theory, fix it. It goes one way, into an atmosphere shared by everyone downstream, including people not yet born to object. No relay. No next holder who might break the chain. Just a transfer from those who profit now to those who pay later, and no return path.
Same engine, short horizon. Two different machines bolted to it.
After me, the flood
None of this is new. Louis XV is supposed to have said après moi, le déluge: after me, the flood. The attribution is shaky; the sentiment isn’t. After me, let it all come down, because I won’t be here to get wet. That has been the motto of the short-horizon operator for three hundred years.
The only thing AI has changed is the press release. It gives the oldest move in the book a clean, modern, future-facing reason to do what people in that position have always wanted an excuse to do: take the money and leave the wreckage to someone else. Headcount cuts used to look like failure. Now they look like vision.
So when the next leaner-faster-thanks-to-AI announcement lands and the market claps, ask the question that matters. Watch where the gains land and where the costs land, and check whether the person making the call will still be in the room when the bill arrives.
If they won’t, you already know what you’re looking at.
The fix, if there is one, is unglamorous and structural: make people hold the thing they made. Long tenures. Clawbacks that bite years later. Reward tied to what the asset is worth after you’ve gone, rather than what it reported the quarter you left. Close the gap between the two clocks and the indifference has nowhere to grow.
Everything else is decoration on a parcel that’s already rotting.