This applies to countless wealthy tycoons throughout history.
Take a certain boss’s fatal leap — from the outside, it looked like a sudden impulse. But those in the know understood it was inevitable. The only question was when.
The one genuinely surprising detail in this entirely unsurprising end? He still had his beloved amber piece on him when he went.
As for his last words before the end — “My feet hurt.”
Equally strange, much like the recent death of another unconventional titan, whose final words were: “I feel unwell. I want to get up and walk around.”
At this point, Master Chi can’t help but feel a chill. Apparently, feet can be more dangerous than mouths. Because sometimes, when you start walking — you end up walking too far.
Of course, setting aside all the conspiracy theories, our story begins in 2014.
2014 was a remarkable year — the founding year for countless rough-and-tumble business upstarts. In the three years that followed, they blazed across their respective fields with a strange, unearthly glow — and then, like the heroes of Mount Liang (the doomed outlaws of Water Margin), each met a tragic end in a flash of hollow glory.
No matter how many toasts were raised in their honor at the height of their power, no matter how much flattery filled those rooms — the only word the real players ever had for them was: bandits.
A sneer and a shrug — that was the genuine attitude of those at the top.
Fair enough. Just as a respectable woman builds her career through respectable institutions, you’ll never see someone from a proper family rise through the ranks starting as a massage girl. No matter how successful you are on a crooked path, the end is always the same: you get cleaned up. Living fast and dying violent — that’s the way of small men.
Survive first. Then live well.
That’s why the real players would never touch the vicious poison known as “fast money.” And the king of all poisons was the legendary P2P lending schemes.
Think back to those days: mass stupidity combined with the greed of con men, amplified by the internet. It dawned on certain people that raking in hundreds of billions no longer required proper pedigree or connections. As the saying goes: a Tsinghua or Peking University degree counts for less than raw nerve. Just be bold enough, and no one can stop you.
But we must engrave one truth into our bones: to judge whether a game has a future, the key indicator is not the rules of the game itself, nor its supposed returns.
What you really need to look at is who’s playing.
If the players are a crowd that talks a big game about their sky-high abilities but still plays by the rules — that game probably isn’t going anywhere. But if the players show up in suits and act deadly serious, yet occasionally flip a card and exchange knowing glances with the dealer — that game is worth watching.
Of course, you can’t just sit there and let yourself be slaughtered. The right move is to build relationships with the dealer and the other big players, and fish together.
As for those who look completely by-the-book, play completely by-the-book, and teach you to play completely by-the-book — stay far away from them. They are fools.
As Master Chi once told several friends on the verge of breaking into the ranks: if you want to eventually reach the shore safely in this life, you must avoid every opportunity that promises fast money.
Because when you’re buried in debt, many people will want to keep you alive. But when you’re sitting on a fortune, many people will want you dead.
The difference: in the first case, you’re taking the bullet for everyone else. In the second, killing you is how they divide the spoils.
Of course, our man who rose from humble origins surely understood all of this. But what good does understanding do? He tried to follow others by fleeing to Hong Kong, only to find himself working alongside the lackeys of lackeys of lackeys. That must have been part of what pushed him to give up.
To make matters worse, after Boss Lai fell from power, even his last remaining connection was severed. Despair set in from that point on.
Just as the downfall of an entrepreneur begins when he starts chasing female celebrities, the dead end for a capitalist begins when he starts relying on an all-female inner circle. Chasing female celebrities signals that the proper establishment has closed its doors to him — so he turns to the entertainment world, generally not a place known for high intellect, to find a sense of relevance. By the same token, relying on an all-female inner circle means the men in his world have broken his trust entirely. Only women, he believes, can offer him love and loyalty.
And yet — don’t underestimate it — men exploiting women are far more effective than women exploiting men. Because one great advantage of an all-female inner circle is that each woman will try to leverage her loyalty and trust in exchange for your affection and enthusiasm.
Haven’t you noticed how obsessively women watch palace intrigue dramas? So some women — and note, I mean some women — no matter how refined their background, the moment you place them in a harem dynamic, they naturally become masters of court maneuvering. No training needed — it comes to them instinctively. And the one who benefits, of course, is the deeply calculating man at the center.
And then there are those who loudly insist that without insurance or trust fund credentials, you can’t truly be called a “glove” (a proxy asset holder). Please — don’t pretend to be an insider. Because for the past four years, those two instruments were untouchable. Nobody wanted anything to do with them.
When a pack of wolves is tearing into fresh meat, what’s a little puppy doing trying to get clever? And as it goes — puppies don’t tend to live very long.
Forty-eight years old. By any measure of life pattern (格局), that’s precisely when a man’s first great peak should be just beginning. And yet it ended abruptly. All one can say is: what is not destined cannot be forced.
So be it. As the old saying goes, the words of a dying man are kind. Since he said he wanted to get up and walk around — then walk he did.
Either way, once you’ve walked away from this world, you no longer have to face what was left behind. Some things were never meant to be carried by bandits to begin with.