One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
All MLMs are scams. I hate using the term pyramid schemes, because if you use that term all of the MLM apologists will start cranking out very long-winded philosophical definitions of pyramid schemes that obscure the true point.<p>The MLM &quot;model&quot; can be summarized thusly:<p>- 1. Give people pretty good business advice from a host of good business books<p>- 2. Give people a very positive exciting environment<p>- 3. Give people literally the WORST job ever created with a product that cannot exist on its own in the marketplace if it wasn&#x27;t being artificially propped up by hundreds of thousands of distributors<p>MLMs are scams. And no matter how much they try to attack other industries by saying how unethical they are, or how much they lie about their products, that can never and will never absolve them for the damage they have done to so many lives.<p>ALSO: something else you&#x27;ll notice is that people who&#x27;ve been involved with MLMs might recall them fondly. This is just a defense mechanism (an extremely understandable one) to prevent having to view oneself as being duped. I think it&#x27;s a shame though because we&#x27;ll all be duped or scammed to some degree in our life, no need to change the past. Anyway reading &quot;The Big Con&quot; by David Maurer right now, a book by a sociologist about con-men in the 1940s. It&#x27;s the basis for the movie &quot;The Sting&quot;, and its remarkable how many people in the book are conned but refuse to believe it, and even years later still think their guy is out there, about to return their money at any time with 20x the profit or whatever.<p>EDIT: Also it is nearly impossible to look this stuff up on Google. MLM people have so carpet bombed the search sites the first 30 or so links will be links to Youtube videos with titles like &quot;Is XYZ company a scam??&quot; that find of course it&#x27;s not. Occasionally a random legitimate news article will leak through. Otherwise they&#x27;ve literally walled the world off from anti-MLM information.