IBM Isn't a Serious Company Anymore, It's a Ponzi Scheme Operated by a Clique and It Misuses Companies It Acquires to Prop Up or Legitimise the Scheme

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 06, 2026

IBM seems like it's nothing but a "Scheme", or one might say "Ponzi Scheme". We debated this yesterday in IRC and then saw this new comment about IBM's leadership:

That tracks with what a lot of people have seen. Leadership will go out of their way to protect their own, even if it means moving people into roles they have no background in and realistically shouldn’t be in. Experience and fit don’t seem to matter much when someone is part of the inner circle.

It’s all political, top to bottom. Those decisions usually come at the expense of everyone else, who end up dealing with the fallout while a small group benefits. Over time it becomes pretty obvious how the system actually works, regardless of what’s said publicly.

On paper, they’ll tell you exactly how to succeed — follow the process, hit the metrics, do the right things — but in reality none of that carries much weight. Doing everything “by the book” doesn’t get you very far.

What actually matters is who you know and whether the right people favor you. Merit and hard work don’t really move the needle. There’s a relatively small inner circle that effectively runs the IBM side of the site, and advancement depends almost entirely on whether you’re accepted into that group. You need to become one of their vassals. If you aren’t, your career just stalls out.

That dynamic isn’t new either. It’s been entrenched for a long time — easily a decade or more and run by same group of people. The place is extremely political, far more than any other work environment I’ve been in. People eventually figure it out, but by then it’s usually too late to change their trajectory.

This sums up many legitimate observations about today's IBM.

"I am so glad I dump all my IBM stock at $318 a share... loving it!" one person wrote. It has fallen since.

On IBM's demolition, said an associate: "Because those cosplaying as leaders and executives are burning the company for exceedingly short term stock boosts, it looks like they are liquidating the whole company for some personal, emergency cash."

Indeed. Consider how they keep boosting slop all day long, every day. This is from Wednesday in developers.redhat.com:

• Making LLMs boring: From chatbots to semantic processors

• Accelerating large language models with NVFP4 quantization

Red Hat used to promote "Linux", these days it's just "AI" everywhere. Because priority #1 is propping up the 'Ponzi stuff'. On Monday we saw:

• 2026-02-02 [Older] AI-generated product review summaries with OpenShift AI

• 2026-02-02 [Older] How Developer Hub simplifies Backstage configuration

• 2026-02-02 [Older] Cracking the inference code: 3 proven strategies for high-performance AI

• 2026-02-02 [Older] Fast and simple AI deployment on Intel Xeon with Red Hat OpenShift

• 2026-02-02 [Older] IT automation with agentic AI: Introducing the MCP server for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

In Red Hat's official site, about 80% of the publications this week were "AI" nonsense, even "quantum":

• What’s new in post-quantum cryptography in RHEL 10.1

  In May 2025, Red Bait Enterprise GNU/Linux 10 (RHEL) shipped with the first steps toward post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to protect against attacks by quantum computers, which will make attacks on existing classic cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and elliptic curves feasible.

It sometimes feels like IBM took over the trusted Red Hat brand just to prop up IBM's buzzwords of the day.

2 days ago IBM also used Red Hat's site to promote Microsoft's "kill switch" boot ("Secure Boot certificate changes in 2026"), neglecting to say that it is generally a security problem, not a security feature:

Microsoft's 2011 Secure Boot signing certificate is scheduled to expire on June 26, 2026.

It does not even improve security, but it helps IBM suck up to Microsoft and give the US government another back door. █