If you hang out much with finance bros (or “capital allocators” as they now call themselves),1 you may chance to hear somebody described as an “operator”. What is this strange species? What is this unusual job with an unusual title? Near as I can tell, an “operator” is somebody who actually runs a real business in the real world. But atop the commanding heights of 21st century America, that makes you an anomaly. You have no podcast. You have no portfolio of bets. You have no LPs, no byzantine leverage structure, and no IRR calculations. You don’t flit from deal to deal, hovering on a castle of financialized abstractions so ethereal the lack of air pressure at that altitude gives you a nosebleed. You aren’t even an intellectual or a scribbler who writes about real things at a layer of remove. No, instead you toil in the muck, doing basically the same thing every day, trying to make an actual business actually succeed. What a weirdo.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Anabasis, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2026-06-01.
- This neologism is actually incredible It’s like something out of early 20th century Marxist propaganda, but they did it to themselves! This is not helping us beat the accusation that we live in a cleverly-disguised planned economy.
