MBS, LinkedIn, and the Business Ethics of Dismemberment 

You can be kicked off of LinkedIn for all kinds of reasons: using a fake name or credentials; impersonating someone else; creating multiple personal accounts; sending mass connection requests to strangers; sending the same message to many people at once; promoting products or services in unsolicited DMs; bullying, threatening, or harassing another user; posting sexually explicit content; posting hate speech; and so on.

You can’t and won’t be kicked off of LinkedIn,  however, simply because it’s a known fact that you commissioned a hit squad to kill and dismember a journalist, that the murder and dismemberment was successful, and that in your spare time, you run a slick but squalid theocracy which you wish to promote on LinkedIn. Dismemberment, murder, and torture are compatible with “professionalism.” Dick pics and crop tops are not. That, at any rate, is the ethos of the modern business world as represented by LinkedIn.

That’s Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and famously, the man who commissioned the execution-by-dismemberment of the now-forgotten Jamal Khashoggi. I saw the post today on LinkedIn. The link in the post goes here, to Saudi Arabia’s so-called Public Investment Fund.  You could almost be forgiven for thinking that I’m making up the facts I’ve just recounted about Khashoggi, but they’re as settled at this point as anything can be. Unfortunately, “settled” doesn’t mean “taken seriously.” It means taken for granted.

I’m not so much suggesting that dick pics (or even crop tops) should be normalized on LinkedIn as suggesting that maybe murder, torture, and theocracy should not be. I know how sensitive people can be about the dangers of “woke cancel culture.” It just seems worth remembering that there are worse things in the world than that, and that some people never wake up from them.  MBS’s Saudi Arabia is one of those things, and probably deserves a more severe reception at LinkedIn than it’s gotten.  If we can cancel racy pictures and multiple connection requests without much fanfare, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to think that we can cancel murder, torture, and theocracy, too. Which is not of course to say that we will, or that LinkedIn will. Just to say in all modesty that we should.