What this version of the FedEx story doesn't mention is that Fred was already stiffing his pilots on their salaries. Taking the last money in the company and deciding that the best use for it was the blackjack table in Vegas and not paying his employees ... worked well, but it was a gamble, let's be clear, not a calculated decision - like you say, not the decision of a "great genius". It goes a different way, and you have "FedEx founder decides to go gambling, leaving his employees without paychecks".

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jjmarr 2 days ago | parent [-]

If your marginal utility of money increases with more, it's a rational decision to go to a casino and gamble.

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mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

The casino is an extremely rational savings model if you expected to constantly be robbed and want to convert small (and thus not worth robbing) income streams into occasionally large sums of money to be spent rapidly. I.e. say you are a north korean worker in China/Russia and you occasionally get small change to spend on cigarettes, you could gamble it every 'paycheck' and eventually buy a phone to escape with the winnings.

Filipinos have a more predictable low-loss version of this call Paluwagan.

	▲	barchar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It can also be a way to evade capital controls. You know you'll lose, but otoh you also know you'll probably not lose _everything_ and you buy in with RMB and cash out in HKD.