Kevin O’Leary is a Canadian businessman who is best known as one of the potential investors on the television program Shark Tank. Despite being referred to on the show as a Shark, O’Leary is, in fact, an ostrich in a business suit. And like all large flightless birds, O’Leary’s got a giant bird brain that he uses to formulate whatever really terrible ideas wriggle their way out of his gullet. (It really makes you question the meritocracy that allowed him to amass a $400 million net worth.)
Most of his flapping is pretty terrible in the standard “old man squawks at cloud” sort of way, and he has recently dusted off an oldie but a goodie: serfs these days spend too much on coffee. It’s a hot take debunked so many times over that one must have their head buried deep in the sand or elsewhere to believe it still carries any weight. It’s frankly not worth your mental energy to disprove yet again, unless you’re a deeply petty person with a lot of time on your hands. Which I am.
So anyway, let’s roast this bird.
As initially reported by Yahoo Finance, O’Leary laid his most recent egg online about how going out for coffee equates to “pissing away” your money on “stupid stuff.”
“Stop buying coffee for $5.50. You got to work and spend $15 on a sandwich, what are you an idiot?”
“You start to add that up everyday, it’s a ton of money. Most people, particularly working in metropolitan cities that are just starting out in their job making their first $60,000, piss away about $15,000 a year on stupid stuff. And that’s what they should stop doing.”
O’Leary then shares an account of watching young people spend “$22 a pop and more” on avocado toast—another angry boomer classic—from which he extrapolates that, 1) every young person is doing this, and 2) they are doing it all the time. With these two rock solid assumptions, O’Leary blows down the strawman, concluding that this is what is keeping the younger generation from buying houses or whatever. “How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.” [Narrator: It couldn’t.] It certainly has nothing to do with a shrinking middle class or skyrocketing home prices or the cost of living going up while wages stagnate. It’s the avocado toast and the coffee!
This seems profoundly stupid to me but, what do I know? I’m not nearly the businessman Kevin O’Leary is. I, for instance, have never lost $15 million in cryptocurrency—and who could’ve seen that coming?—nor have I had to defend my ties to Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of crypto exchange FTX now serving 25 years in prison for fraud and other white collar crimes. (This might be why O’Leary hates millennials, which, fair enough.) And I’ve never said in defense of not increasing taxes on billionaires “entrepreneurs” that “we don’t make any money because we’re taking it all and putting it into companies and starting to grow them. And we get capital gains.”
And I certainly don’t have the miser mindset that keeps O’Leary’s nest egg so warm. I haven’t spent over millions on watches and vintage guitars that I run through terrible-sounding wah pedals. I’ve never created a vanity corporate wine project to sell a three-pack on QVC for $53. Maybe it’s good, I’ve never tried it. It just seems like such a waste of money for something that costs $3. Oh wait, I seem to have got my cue cards mixed up. That’s what O’Leary said about coffee back in 2017. Forgive the confusion. O’Leary’s wine, as I’m sure he’d attest to, is a frugal splurge, totally in reason.
O’Leary is well within his right to get all loosey-goosey with his money and spend whatever he wants to suck at playing the guitar and invest in whatever golden bauble nonsense draws his stimulus-response in a given week. But please, honestly, shut up the fuck up about what it’s like for millennials, and never lecture younger people against whom there is a significant deck of disadvantage stacked that he really has zero clue about. Honestly we should be paying more for coffee and avocados, as opposed to treating them as reflexive commodities upon which western spending habits should be minimized. The idea that we should keep these prices as low as possible so that one may save their money to accrue vintage asshole guitars and deeply mid Patek Philippes is so truly gross and out of touch, real Let Them Eat Cake shit.
Losing millions of dollars to pixel cash Bernie Madoff is certainly not the best starting point on your way to being taken seriously as a commentator on generational issues, but then again, Kevin O’Leary is not a serious person. He’s an ostrich, trying to tell you how to fly, and hoping that if he flaps hard enough you might believe him. It’s very do-as-I-say-not-as-Emu.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
