All hail, Robert De Niro. He is truly the G.O.A.T. for getting this off his chest in the most Robert De Niro way possible.
The CEOS of tech companies often have HUGE egos. It’s just the hyper-competitive nature of the industry they’re in — they’re hungry wins and innovation in a sector that’s rapidly changing. And here’s the thing — 80% of mainstream America doesn’t know who the players in the space are, sans a few Forbes list household names like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Bill Gates of Microsoft or Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google.
Unless you work in tech or finance, you’ve *probably* never heard of Stewart Butterfield. He’s a Silicon Valley tycoon who founded a group chat software called Slack. It’s reportedly worth $2.8 billion. Think AIM, ICQ, GChat, or whatever you use, but tied directly to your enterprise with admin controls. The entire BroBible team uses it to talk to each other, usually about very important business communication like this:
Catch my drift? Pretty pointless.
Almost every new media company uses Slack, along with pretty much every tech company or digital industry where people sit behind computers to talk to each other in real-time. Tens of thousands of companies pay to use it a month, hence the crazy valuation.
Construction workers don’t need slack. Nor do food service employees. Or real estate agents. Or doctors. Or fighter pilots. Or firemen. Or the person who serves you a bagel in the morning.
Actors? They don’t need Slack either.
No one *really* needs Slack considering there’s a thousand other ways to digitally communicate with people, but it’s become a “hip” industry standard in some circles. On Wednesday at the WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards, Robert De Niro told the founder of Slack how he really feels about him: That he can go fuck himself.
It started when Stewart Butterfield accepted an award. In his speech, he said this, according to Page 6:
“We are a long way from San Francisco,” joked tech mogul Stewart Butterfield of hot app Slack, when he scanned the room of “supermodels and movie stars” including Karlie Kloss, Brad Pitt and Jared Leto, who gave him the award. Butterfield joked he was receiving the “nerd award” and pointed at De Niro, mentioning, “I watched ‘Godfather II’ on the plane . . . when you killed Don Fanucci, I liked that.”
De Niro then took the stage to present an award to Angelina Jolie:
De Niro, up next, growled, “Whoever the last speaker was . . . I thought you were a bit condescending to us actors . . . celebrities. I’m gonna go on record with you just to say that. And I don’t give a f - - k who you are.”
Of course, Butterfield LOVED it.
I just literally got trash-talked by Robert De Niro. “I don’t know who the FUCK you are.” #lifegoals pic.twitter.com/j9yT5ZiU4A
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) November 5, 2015
“”
Putting CEOs with huge egos in their place. That’s the power move of the year in my book.
Never change, De Niro.
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[H/T: Business Insider]