"I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." — Clarence Darrow
Upon hearing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's sudden demise after a man in a hoodie shot and killed the policymaker outside a Hilton in midtown Manhattan, the internet erupted in a peculiar cocktail of dark glee and grim satisfaction.
For a man whose company spent years perfecting the art of telling people "no" when they needed "yes," the irony was thick enough to chew—and chew many did.
The killing of Thompson, whose annual compensation package exceeded $10 million, drew instant, sardonic comments from some social media users.
“Thoughts and sympathy today to all of those who have lost loved ones, because they were denied insurance claims by #UnitedHealthcare,” wrote one such user.
Another posted a mock logo for the company featuring crosshairs, along with the question, “Do you think I’d get sued if I made this as a shirt.”
Yet another wrote, “It’s hard to find sympathy for a CEO of one of the worst health care companies in the world…They eat off your family members [sic] grave.”
It wasn’t all random comments from otherwise anonymous individuals, either.
Anthony Zenkus, a senior lecturer in social work at Columbia University, wrote on X, “Today we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down…wait, I’m sorry— today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”
As of Thursday evening, Zenkus’s post had been liked 84,000 times and retweeted 11,000 times.
Those kinds of sentiments spurred a counter-reaction.
Billy Binion, a reporter for libertarian publication Reason, wrote on X that it was “vile” that people seemed to be “gleefully celebrating a dad of two getting shot to death.”
Robert Pondiscio of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote on the same site that the online response to Thompson’s killing “marks a new and ominous low for social media.” — KRON San Franciso
Now, I’m no fan of violence, and murder is neither a just solution nor a moral stance. But as I scrolled through the reactions, I couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling: not sympathy for the man but discomfort at how little I could muster.
And then it hit me—this wasn’t schadenfreude over a life lost. It was something more profound: the collective catharsis of those crushed under the grinding gears of profit-driven cruelty.
Thompson wasn’t simply a man—he was a symbol of an oppressive system that denies life-saving treatments to sick children while celebrating cost-cutting measures with champagne and investor applause. He stood for the modern corporate ethos that monetizes misery and reaps dividends from people’s despair.
CEOs and The Wealthy have killed us off for years
—All for profit, and no one is safe, not even children.
And it’s not just healthcare. Consider Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing legislation to shuffle children as young as 14 into meatpacking plants—a Dickensian nightmare repackaged as “opportunity.”
Supporters of the new law say it gets rid of a tedious requirement, streamlines the hiring process, and allows parents — rather than the government — to make decisions about their children.
But opponents say the work certificates protected vulnerable youth from exploitation.
"It was wild to listen to adults argue in favor of eliminating a one-page form that helps the Department of Labor ensure young workers aren't being exploited," the group Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families wrote about the law in a legislative session recap. — NPR
If this is what Republicans mean by "protecting children and family values," they can stuff it! Seriously, the so-called "good old days" of unchecked child labor gave us kids as young as six years old who wound up maimed, mangled, or dead.
Is that the nostalgia they’re selling—childhoods spent dodging factory gears instead of playing hopscotch?
“Unguarded machinery was a major problem for children working in factories.
One hospital reported that every year it treated nearly a thousand people for wounds and mutilations caused by machines in factories. Michael Ward, a doctor working in Manchester told a parliamentary committee in 1819:
"When I was a surgeon in the infirmary, accidents were very often admitted to the infirmary, through the children's hands and arms having being caught in the machinery; in many instances the muscles, and the skin is stripped down to the bone, and in some instances a finger or two might be lost.
Last summer I visited Lever Street School. The number of children at that time in the school, who were employed in factories, was 106. The number of children who had received injuries from the machinery amounted to very nearly one half. There were forty-seven injured in this way." - Spartacus Educational
The Healthcare Monster is but a symptom—
Men like Thompson don’t merely profit from suffering; they revel in it. They’re the modern-day Marie Antoinettes, offering non-existent cake to the hungry and quietly counting the coins from picked pockets—look at Elon Musk, for instance.
As he and Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy go over their plan to dismantle much-needed safety nets via their made-up play toy government agency DOGE, Musk jokes that taking money and assistance from the poor will be “tedious” and “unglamorous” cost-cutting work. The cherry on top? “Compensation is zero.”
“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” he wrote. “What a great deal!”
Check out the infuriating article here — Elon Musk’s DOGE Seeks “High-IQ Revolutionaries” Willing to Work 80 Hours a Week for Free | Vanity Fair
Is it any wonder people have asked why the bullet found Thompson and not Musk?
Not that I condone such sentiments—violence begets chaos, and chaos leaves all but the richest worse off. But the sentiment speaks to a deep, festering wound in our collective soul.
The tragedy isn’t just Thompson’s death. It’s the billion-dollar system he represented, one that profits by denying chemo drugs to little girls and tells grieving families their premiums, “don’t cover this.”
As Rick Wilson aptly stated, “Health insurance companies do not make their money by providing care; they make their money by denying it.” And that’s the crux of it: a world where suffering is engineered for profit.
That’s what is vile, Billy Binion.
And there it is
—the American Dream distilled into a cold, heartless business model where the less you help, the more you earn. It's capitalism’s version of “opposite day,” but with life-and-death stakes.
This isn't just a broken system; it's a masterpiece of sociopathic efficiency.
Think about it: there are countless ways to get rich while ensuring people have food, shelter, and basic dignity. But no—someone had to sit down and say, “What if we make wealth-building fun by making misery mandatory?” It’s like playing Monopoly, except the board is on fire, and the only pieces left are a noose and a foreclosure notice.
We’ve lived too long under this abusive paradigm, told to sacrifice, to tighten our belts, to "work harder" while the ultra-rich build empires on our exhaustion. Worse, we’ve been turned against each other, squabbling over crumbs while CEOs pop champagne with the blood, sweat, and tears we’ve unwittingly donated to their bottom line.
It’s the same twisted logic behind child labor laws being rolled back: why let kids have carefree childhoods when they could be mangled in meatpacking plants? Why let adults rest when they could work 80-hour weeks for zero pay to satisfy Elon Musk’s whims? Why let anyone live when so much money can be made from their suffering?
Thompson’s death doesn’t solve this vexing, eternal problem. But the shot outside the Hilton may finally echo where it needs to: in the halls of power, in boardrooms of marble and glass, where men like him make decisions that shape our lives.
The question now is whether that echo will spur change—or whether some will continue eating cake until there’s no one left to serve it.
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