So, David Webb is finally hanging up his calculator. The man who spent decades acting as the unpaid, unloved, and entirely too-analytical hall monitor for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has finally realized that the students aren’t just smoking in the bathroom—they have sold the bathroom to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands and set the school on fire for the insurance money. We are told, with the kind of somber reverence usually reserved for fallen minor deities, that Webb was an ‘exemplary shareholder.’ In the lexicon of modern finance, being called an ‘exemplary shareholder’ is roughly equivalent to being called a ‘polite terminal patient.’ It suggests a level of commitment to a lost cause that borders on the pathological.

For the uninitiated, or those too busy trying to figure out which crypto-scam will pay for their groceries, Webb was the architect of Webb-site.com. For years, he performed the intellectual labor that the Hong Kong regulators were too lazy, too compromised, or too busy at lunch to handle. He was the man who mapped out the ‘Enigma Network,’ a cluster of fifty interconnected companies that were essentially a human centipede of corporate governance, feeding off one another’s inflated valuations until the whole thing predictably collapsed into a pile of necrotic assets. He treated the HKEX like a math problem, while the rest of the world treated it like a laundromat. The tragedy of David Webb is not that he is leaving; it is the hilarious delusion that his presence ever actually mattered in the grand, entropic scheme of global capital.

Webb was a ‘capitalist crusader,’ a title that is itself an oxymoron. Crusades are for true believers; capitalism is for people who believe in nothing but the compound interest on their own cynicism. He spent his life trying to make the casino slightly more honest so that the ‘right’ people could win. He believed in the ‘integrity of the market’ with the fervor of a man who thinks you can fix a sewer by asking the rats to sign a code of conduct. The tycoons of Hong Kong didn’t hate Webb because he was wrong; they hated him because he was loud about the math. In a city built on the obfuscation of wealth, being able to read a balance sheet is considered a form of heresy.

But let’s look at the ‘victims’ he ostensibly defended: the minority shareholders. These are the retail investors, the ‘mums and dads’ who gamble their life savings on penny stocks with names like ‘Global Prosperity Mega-Tech (Cayman)’ and then act surprised when the CEO vanishes to a non-extradition country with the pension fund. Webb was their shepherd, but the sheep were always destined for the kebab shop. You cannot save people who view the stock market as a magical slot machine that occasionally spits out justice. Webb’s retirement is merely the realization that you cannot perform surgery on a ghost. Hong Kong, once the glimmering altar of greed, has transitioned from a playground for oligarchs into a laboratory for a very different kind of control.

We are witnessing the pivot from ‘sneaky corruption’ to ‘mandatory loyalty.’ The old guard of tycoons at least had the decency to lie to your face about their profit margins. The new era doesn’t need to lie because it doesn’t care if you believe it. When the political landscape shifts from a counting-house to a panopticon, a corporate governance activist becomes about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Why bother exposing a shell company when the entire concept of private property is being redefined by whoever has the biggest flag and the loudest loudspeaker?

Webb’s departure marks the end of the delusion that you can have a ‘clean’ market in a city being systematically re-engineered to prioritize stability over truth. He was a relic of a time when we pretended that numbers meant something other than a way to keep the peasants from revolting. He leave behind a legacy of spreadsheets that no one will read and warnings that no one will heed. The spreadsheets of the damned are quite thorough, I’m sure. Now that the ‘exemplary shareholder’ has left the building, the mask can finally come off. We can all admit that the house always wins, and the house is now guarded by people who don’t give a damn about your fiduciary duty or your minority rights. Goodbye, David. You tried to fix a rigged game with a rulebook. The rest of us will be over here, watching the building burn and wondering why you bothered to bring a fire extinguisher to a volcano.