He’s not paying 1billion for a single defamation case. For one thing that’s the sum of multiple cases against him, and the more significant thing is that he lost because he did not fight it through the legal process and got a default judgement entered against him, and the most significant thing is that this amount is awarded due to punitive damages.

The amount is not simply meant to compensate the aggrieved party. That would have been capped to a much smaller amount. However because of a continuous series of intentional deceit and fraudulent actions during the lawsuit itself, punitive damages were awarded instead, where the point is to set an example against such behavior in court cases.

That extra punishment is for the benefit of the legal system rather than the aggrieved, it was something he could have simply avoided by just fighting the court case through the normal legal process. He would have simply lost and would only have had to pay a fraction of that amount.

The point of the ability to punish subversion of the legal process is that otherwise, no legal consequence for ignoring the court, would mean that anyone could completely ignore the legal process (which is what he was attempting to do).

This is correct. Real estate prices don’t mean anything to the vast majority of companies since most of them are not in the real estate business and likely even lease their office spaces. It could have a minor impact to the balance sheet if deemed impaired but it doesn’t amount to something that matters in valuation which cares more about P&L, cash flow, and working capital.

Business leaders are human, they don’t know what the fuck is going on, or how to “increase shareholder value”. So for lack of better ideas they can just tell employees to go back to the office.

Basically, if you don’t know how to stop a ship from sinking, you can at least change the curtains on the windows so you look busy on the way down.

They first, make the decision to go back to the office, second, they tell their team to go find reasons to rationalize the decision. There isn’t a nuanced logic to arriving at the conclusion, they make these calls off-hand on gut feelings. The thinking comes in later from the direct reports trying to fill in the logical gaps, even if the decision wasn’t a logical one to begin with.

This comes off as very “Old man yells at clouds”.

People will watch what they want to watch. It doesn’t matter if you want them to watch something else. He’s free to make non-superhero movies, and people will watch it if they prefer it. You can’t dictate “taste” to people.

It’s about ego. The boss doesn’t know how to make the company perform better, they’re all out of ideas. They have to change something to make it look like they’re doing something, so RTO is the low hanging fruit.

There’s really no more justification needed than that. Looking at practical benefits to explain RTO pushes won’t get you answers because the practical benefits are so slim and conditional relative to the strain it creates.

It’s all about ego. They self-identity as the hardcore alpha boss that deserves high pay because they “earn” it. So to massage that ego, they go into the office even though they dont need to, and are meeting with nobody there. It’s pointless but it feeds their ego.

So they feel alone at the office…and in that worldview they are hardworking (an assumed condition), and nobody else is there, therefore everyone else is not hardworking (regardless of how much work they’re actually doing).