It will talk about how the heir has become an active philanthropist, dedicating his/her life to “making things right”. It will list their accomplishments since the family was exposed. It will end with an open ended question about “the sins of our fathers.” It will really make you think.
They will spend their life slowly giving away half their fortune, one gala at a time. They will start a foundation. It will have a name not too dissimilar from a pharmaceutical brand name—meaningless but vaguely positive (too bad Altria is taken). They will max out that foundation’s board with Big Names in that world—just so long as their name isn’t Sackler.
Their investment of half of the payout they kept will grow larger than the original started at, and they’ll never pay more than a nominal dime in taxes thanks to those sweet 501(c)3 write-offs.
Their reputation will be laundered, at least enough for their checkbooks invited back to the parties. And their kids? Home free.
In a few generation the hundreds of thousands of deaths on their hands will be forgotten, except by the families of the victims that were just the cost of doing business for them.
They were billionaires yesterday and they’re going to be billionaires tomorrow. Their reputation is going to be fine because we live in a society that absolutely worships money and those who have it. People with that kind of money can pay to scrub the internet.
No, but I don’t see how that deters them from misbehaving. How many billionaire oil or pharma magnates just wish they had a little more respectability? You think they care at all what people think about them? If they did, they wouldn’t have done what made them their blood money in the first place.
The Sacklers enabled the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and yet which did they choose to protect: their money or their reputation?
I'm sorry but this is so naive.
Maybe true if you've got a bit of money and a little bit of notoriety, but I don't think that it would be possible to dissociate the Sacklers' name from the opioid crisis anytime soon.
Attention is short. I wouldn't rule it out; pr goes a long way. Spend a couple million on a completely unrelated but well regarded cause of charity and folks who don't have skin in the opioid-game won't associate them for the bad they did (but for their most recent memories).
What will keep the association alive for a while will be documentaries and those who watch them, but lets be real: that's not the public.
I think this is too big to be easily cleaned up.
Never argued against that, and I don't disagree with that at all. But if someone cares to do even the bare minimum of research, it's easy to come up with the Sacklers. What I am arguing against is that the Sacklers will somehow be able to use their wealth to scrub Google et al of their association with OxyContin.
> It’s not like they absolutely have to donate using the Sackler name.
For folks like them, though, then what's the point? After a certain level of Midas-like wealth, the only point is societal standing and legacy. The Sacklers don't seem like the type of folks who are going to get inner joy by donating anonymously.
Aye, there's the rub.
The Sacklers have been donating huge sums to put their name on things for a long time.
You should make people aware of it when they invite you to events or places with their name on it. I've seen people call out Jeff Dean for inviting people to some Sackler named event; he seemed pretty horrified as well he should be.
And yes, I have heard that PR companies exist to clean up reputations, but it should be possible to at least make it clear what happened.
I think I read somewhere that a hedge fund had decided not to take an allocation from the Sacklers. That's exactly the kind of thing reputation is supposed to do. It's a blunt instrument, but people deciding to partially ostracize those who have done wrong is how things should work.