'Wrong answer': 'Shark Tank' star slams CEO's response to health exec's assassination
The reaction by executives across the nation following the brutal cold-blooded killing of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson last week didn’t sit right with "Shark Tank" star investor Kevin O’Leary.
Instead of making efforts to fortify security around them, executives should “read the room” — and realize the public is turning against them, the investor and chairman of O'Leary Ventures said Wednesday.
“This is quite a backlash,” O’Leary said. “This is the power of social media.”
O'Leary made the remarks during an appearance on CNN, where he pointed out the dynamics at play in a case that stirred simmering frustrations surrounding health care in America against the backdrop of calculated assassination.
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"If anything good is going to come of this, it's going to be policy change because you've basically got people lighting up their torches, just like in the Frankenstein story and going to the castle, and they're going to burn it down," O’Leary told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And you got to hear that, so if you're an executive saying, 'get me more security guards,' wrong answer. That’s just wrong.”
Hostile public outcry following Thompson’s killing, which included the arrest of suspected assassin Luigi Mangione on Monday, played out because of frustrations with the health insurance appeals process. O’Leary went out to advise executives in the health care industry to work to relate to their customers because "everybody is affected by health care."
"They should be coming out now saying, 'Look, we get it, we have families too, we're people, we have children, we care about what you think about, and we're going to automate this process and make it better,'" O’Leary said. "But putting a fence around headquarters, hiring more security guards, that's all bad imagery, Wolf. It’s all bad. And it's not the right answer."
O'Leary acknowledged in response to a question from Blitzer that there are valid reasons to deny an insurance claim, but added, "It doesn't matter at this point."
"Social media is now the jury, and it doesn't like what it sees," he said.
Watch the clip below or at this link.