Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich has a lot in common with wealthy Wall Street bankers and corporate CEO’s. While most hedge fund managers and CEO’s have not gotten blow jobs during bass solos at concerts, Lars, bankers and CEOs agree that litigiousness is awesome, acquiring ugly expensive art collections is important and the piracy of your product is the sole locus of evil on earth. So, which quotes are from Lars?
1. “People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress.”
2. “I want to make sure I have good people on my board who aren’t going to f—k with me.”
3. “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”
4. “[We have] a tendency to jump and then start asking questions on the way down, then realize that as we get closer to the ground that there’s no safety net and realize we should have asked more questions on the way down.”
5. “Stolen’s a strong word. It’s copyrighted content that the owner wasn’t paid for.”
6. “It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is. From a business standpoint, this is about piracy - aka taking something that doesn’t belong to you; and that is morally and legally wrong.”
7. “Copy protection is a balancing act because it always reduces the value of your product. State-of-the-art copy protection makes your customers hate you.”
8. “As long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
9. “So while we think it’s an interesting market, because it’s large, we just haven’t figured out a way to make a substantial profit in that market.”
10. “I think if anything we were just caught off guard by how passionate people were about this whole internet phenomenon at the time and it kind of blind-sided us, but we stood our ground and stuck with our principles and a lot of people now are patting us on the back and saying how right we were.”
Answers:
1. Not Lars. Alan Dlugash, partner at accounting firm Karks Paneth & Shron, LLP.
2. Not Lars. Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman.
3. Not Lars. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.
4. Lars.
5. Not Lars. Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
6. Lars.
7. Not Lars. Bruce Schneier, Chief Technical Officer of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.
8. Not Lars. Bill Gates.
9. Not Lars. Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison.
10 Lars.