An American equity slash-and-burn CEO has rushed his faith-based mindset about AI to the press, and keeps saying “belief” and “believe” like it’s a virtue rather than a huge red flag.

This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again

He explicitly says he’d “do it again” while also saying “I do not recommend that at all”, the sort of contradiction in a value extraction guy that deserves pushback. He’s claiming vindication while disavowing the method. That’s the tell of someone who knows his real story wouldn’t survive scrutiny, and who acts like nobody is allowed to challenge him on it.

The CEO acquires dying software products and extracts remaining value. He celebrates firing people for not “believing” rather than for failing to deliver measurable outputs. The technical staff who raised concerns about what AI couldn’t do, which is exactly what competent engineers should do, were labeled the “most resistant.”

Expertise became evidence of heresy. And then came the loyalty purge to get rid of technology experts. In other words he rapidly curated a value story and deleted everyone who could prove it wrong.

Engineering operates on evidence to reach a conclusion. You measure, you test, you revise based on outcomes.

Evangelical Christianity operates on belief as the only allowed evidence. You commit first, then interpret outcomes as confirmation. Doubt is sin, not method.

This CEO isn’t accidentally using religious language. He’s describing an actual faith-based decision process, toxic to engineering:

• “saw the light”
• “evangelize”
• “belief was really the thing he needed to recruit for”
• “changing minds was harder than adding skills”

All of this is evidence of incompetent leadership, because it destroys the foundation of intelligence necessary to build quality products. He invested 20% of payroll in a “mass learning initiative” that “failed”, but there’s no metric for what success would have meant. No measurement of productivity gains that justified the purge.

A 75% EBITDA figure is offered as vindication, but there’s no baseline comparison, no demonstration that the mass firing produced better results than alternatives. Because the firings were never about a measured outcome other than loyalty to the supreme ruler.

The business case is entirely post-hoc rationalization for a faith-based loyalty test to block human intelligence. An industry survey found workers who didn’t perform sufficient enthusiasm were labeled as committing “sabotage”. Vaughan’s framework shows why that false framing would follow.

Dissent essential to engineering becomes treason. In Schindler’s List, a Nazi officer abruptly shoots an engineer in the head, because she told him the foundation is flawed, and then he orders his men to follow her recommendation. The expertise was correct. The doubt was the crime.

The McKinsey framing of “lifelong reskilling” completes the circuit. In evangelical Christianity, you’re never saved enough because you must continually demonstrate faith, attend services, tithe, testify. Backsliding is always possible.

The worker under permanent reskilling obligation is the congregant who can never miss a Sunday, always being evaluated for sufficient devotion, while the pastor accumulates wealth as proof of blessing.
Capital gets to be the priesthood.

Labor gets to be the congregation that must perpetually prove faith while receiving no guaranteed salvation.

And let’s be honest. All this “AI transformation” narrative really is just PR cover for what this guy at ESW Capital has always done to squeeze blood from a rock: acquire companies, convert employees to contractors, surveil them, and eliminate headcount.

The faith-based language signals more than incompetent tech leadership—it’s cover for a private equity extraction operation rebranding mass layoffs as visionary disruption mumbo jumbo.

German Cyber Gaza is not hyperbole. It’s accurate.

The radical right-wing minister Andreas Dobrindt is in the news again. And, as usual, it’s not good for Germany.

He became infamous for his wrong “vectoring” monopolist broadband policy that entrenched copper infrastructure across Germany to slow down or even prevent fiber being rolled out like the rest of the world. Dobrindt’s record as Transport and Digital Infrastructure Minister until 2017 was genuinely catastrophic by any professional standard. The Federal Audit Office (Bundesrechnungshof) issued a devastating report concluding that his ministry failed to observe “essential principles of orderly administrative conduct.”

He had all the hallmarks of bad leadership, when you read the report that billions in budget allocations were demanded “without first determining the actual funding requirements”, and staff positions bloated rapidly without any assessment of need. He expanded from 29 to 45 positions in three weeks with “no justification”. Power. He was hungry for rapid power, opposite to lawful and orderly conduct, let alone good governance.

Besides his tech being slow, and never going to improve, the old copper networks that Dobrindt championed are inherently less secure than fiber. More expensive, less secure. Right Dobrindt? The metal is easier to tap, far more vulnerable to physical disruption, and far lower capacity for the kind of real-time threat detection required today. He pushed Germany onto the exact wrong technology back then, and he’s doing it again now.

Let me put it like this. I deployed an entirely switched fiber network to the desktop in 1997 because of security concerns, meeting requirements that copper could not. The idea that Germany in 2017 was being pulled away from fiber should be seen as an absolute failure of leadership. How did his huge “vectoring” campaign, which undermined German infrastructure, not end his political career?

That’s why it should be highlighted now and forever. The guy who brazenly spent 2013-2017 making Germany fall behind the world, was also making it more vulnerable to exactly the kinds of attacks he’s now invoking… Israel to address. How many bad decisions will he be allowed to make?

In other words, the 2026 Berlin power grid attacks he references happened on his infrastructure designs, since resilience was compromised by underinvestment that his ministry’s policy cynically extended. Now he acts like Germans looking at the attacks he enabled will forget his role, and blitz their way into “personelle Aufstockung der Nachrichtendienste und eine Ausweitung digitaler Befugnisse.”

The Israeli expertise he is trying to import was NOT developed as prevention, in the regular sense of infrastructure defense. It was developed primarily to target and maintain control over a population.

Let me put it like this. I was told in 2017 I could not deprecate a specific deployed EOL Java library because weak and broken code was essential for “defense” technology deployed in… Gaza.

The “Zusammenführen von Informationen” Dobrindt describes is the same consolidation playbook that Israel uses for crimes against humanity. The “Prävention, Detektion und Reaktion” chain described is more accurately a hunt and kill chain.

When Dobrindt talks about “Ausweitung digitaler Befugnisse” and “personelle Aufstockung der Nachrichtendienste,” that’s the infrastructure of aggression and control, opposite to defense, a security model developed for certain subject population control.

This is Kahanism-level extremism in the exact place where you do NOT want radical right-wing Israel calling shots. I should know, I personally met Kahane and heard his theories first hand. Germans probably say Kahane who, which is exactly why they should worry more. The connections of the deal to an extremist like Netanyahu forces the awkward question on Germany: where will this Cyber Gaza system be defined and by who? Who will this architecture be pointed at?

We already know part of the answer.

Dobrindt’s first act as Interior Minister was ordering pushbacks at the border. His threat assessments fraudulently inflate left-wing numbers while hiding right-wing growth, using intentional deception and manipulation tactics.

His “Maßnahmenpaket” expands surveillance authorities. The infrastructure being built isn’t neutral. This is an information targeting system to be operated by a minister who clearly demonstrated bias in which threats he sees and which he manufactures.

Anyone who questions the absurdity of the partnership can be positioned as questioning Israel, questioning Holocaust memory, questioning Germany’s special responsibility. Dobrindt explicitly dismissed Gaza concerns as irrelevant, which is a huge tell. The “Premiumpartner” language is a special shield.

The man who claimed left-wing threats literally ‘rising’ from 11,200 to 11,200 (not a typo), while completely ignoring a huge rise in right-wing violent crimes, is now building Germany’s “threat” detection architecture.

This all deflects from his own record. Apparently much easier for him to talk about alignment with Netanyahu than to explain WHY Germany is in this vulnerable position in the first place.

Him. What if he is the threat?

This is classic fascism. In Germany, no less. Create the problems, stoke crisis, point fingers at left-wing phantoms, expand and centralize state power as the only solution.