The purchase of New Bellevue House, where Leesa and I now reside, was financed in two ways - with the sale of the Bellevue House estate, which had been in the Oliver family for two and a half centuries and is now a tatty strip mall featuring a Chuck E Cheeses, and with consulting work I’d done for a tech start up based in Switzerland. Confidentiality agreements prevent me from dragging you through the sordid details, but I got paid before the thing went kablooey. There’s no small irony about me being compensated by an AI business operating via bitcoin, since I know nothing of either. But I do know something about crisis communications and these high flyers had crises galore. The facts of the case were exotic, multinational, involving hundreds of millions of Euros and were potentially felonious - a target rich environment for yours truly. Crises discommode even the most seasoned Harvard MBAs. They imagine their careers evaporating before their very eyes and, very often, they’re correct. Here’s how it usually goes.
© 2024 John Oliver
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