> this guy apparently killed himself.

where did you get that? this article doesn't say a cause of death.

> The medical examiner’s office has not released his cause of death, but police officials this week said there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.”

So... murder and suicide are the only possible causes of death?

I guess “apparently” doesn’t mean what I thought it did. My apologies.

It now says

> The medical examiner’s office determined the manner of death to be suicide

There is confirmed news now that he killed himself

When David is just a nobody, and Goliath has all of the legal and PR resources in the world, Goliath doesn't even have to swing a punch. Goliath can just drive them crazy with social and legal pressure. Also, David might have been a bit of a decision-making outlier to begin with, being the kind of person who decides going up against Goliath is a good idea.

I work with a relative who is in the real estate space here in India and often deals with land shark mafia. The biggest thing I learned from him, to win in these situations is don't fear or not be afraid of consequences.

You need to have ice water flowing in your veins if you are about to mess with something big. At worst you need to have benign neglect for the consequences.

Often fear is the only instrument they have against you. And if you are not afraid, they will likely not contest further. Threat of jail, violence or courts is often what they use to kill you. In reality most people are afraid to go to war this way. Its messy and often creates more problems for them.

They’ve been pulling out the Reverse Luigi for decades.

If there was a gun involved, I would imagine a neighbor would have called. He was found in his apartment.

I’ve been studying corporate whistleblowers for more than 20 years. You never know for sure which ones are real suicides and which are disappearings, but TPTB always do shitty things beforehand to make the inevitable killing look like a suicide. Even if people figure out that it’s not a suicide, it fucks up the investigation in the first 24 hours if the police think it’s a suicide. A case of this “prepping” that did not end in death was Michael O. Church in 2015-16, but they ended up being so incompetent about it that they called it off. Still damaged his career, though. On the flip side, that guy was never going to make it as a tech bro and is one hell of a novelist, so…?

The “prepping” aspect is truly sickening. Imagine someone who spends six months trying to ruin someone’s life so a fake suicide won’t be investigated. This happens to all whistleblowers, even the ones who live.

By the way, “hit men” don’t really exist, not in the way you think, but that’s a lesson for another time.

That's really interesting. Do you have any books or information about Michael O. Church for further reading? Wasn't he a HN user?

He was long before me. His case is odd because he was way too “openly autistic” for the time and probably wouldn’t have been able to win support at the level to be a real threat, which is probably why they didn’t bother to finish the job.

He put a novel on RoyalRoad that is, in my opinion, better than 98% of what comes out of publishing houses today, though it has a few errors due to the lack of a professional editor, and I haven’t finished it yet so I can’t comment on its entirety. It’s too long (450k words) and maybe too weird for traditional publishing right now, but it’s a solid story: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/85592/farisas-crossing

I will warn you that the politics are not subtle.

David vs goliath where david swears he will never kill himself and that if anything happens to him it is someone coming after them, then david kills himself right before going to court to testify.

Boeing guy and OpenAI whistleblower were both seen as "not depressed" and have even gone far as to say that if anything happened to him that it wouldn't have been an accident.

I'm not sure why there are so many comments trying to downplay and argue around whether OpenAI was a whistleblower or not he fits pretty much all the definition.

OpenAI was suspected of using copyright data but that wasn't the only thing OpenAI whistleblower was keeping under wraps given NDA. The timing of OpenAI partnering with US military is odd.

> Boeing guy [...] were both seen as "not depressed" and have even gone far as to say that if anything happened to him that it wouldn't have been an accident.

Yes, but also, his own brother said:

“He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing, which we believe led to his death,”

Internet echo chambers love a good murder mystery, but dragging a quiet and honest employee who works in the trenches through a protracted, public, and stressful legal situation can be very tough.

What whistleblowers go through would make anyone depressed. Often the goal is to destroy the person psychologically and destroy their credibility.

Often, this is enough and they don’t even bother going through with the hit, because it turns out that even billionaires can’t “just hire a hit man.” Real life corporate hits tend to compromise people the person trusts, but whistleblowers are both sparing with their trust and usually poor, which makes it harder because there are fewer people to compromise.

Yeah, the pattern is real. The patterns of high male suicide rates and Goliaths having a lot of employees combine into a pattern of the innumerate invoking boogeymen wherever it suits their world view, evidence and reason be dammed.