Prize question: What do Galileo Galilei, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk and Magnus A. Cramer have in common?
Answer: Many think they are crazy.
Because they are visionaries and thought up new approaches to the world.
Except for Cramer, they also discovered this and that. But what counts is the “storytelling”.
The age-old joke of telling people there's more to this world than they can imagine and that they must have something now.
Because then they are part of “something big”.
Because otherwise the neighbor will get it.
It works as long as everyone believes in it.
That's how the stock market works.
"You deserve more," shouts Dr.
Magnus A. Cramer (completely uninhibited and authentic: Matthias Brandt) into the room.
Sometimes he drums his chest in front of the employees like the primates who perform the great world theater of fighting and copulating in insert scenes.
Creative rip-off madness is in demand in Cramer's company for digital payment systems.
You keep external consultants aka auditors aka willing balance sheet abnickers for the paperwork.
They also want to be part of the “family” anyway.
"No one needs an Abitur unless they want to analyze a poem every morning," says Felix Armand (greatly feverish: Thomas Schubert), Cramer's right-hand man, his business partner for ten years and the mastermind behind the success of the financial service provider "Cable Cash".
The keyword is euphoria.
When it comes to creating euphoria, Armand and Cramer, the man with the dazzling white chewing ridge, are the loneliest.
The teeth are part of the show.
Winners have such incredible artificiality in their mouths.
Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos - Bernie Madoff not.
Even.
"King of Stonks", the ingeniously over-the-top Netflix series by "How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)" developers Philipp Käßbohrer and Matthias Murmann from the production company "Bildundtonfabrik", is based on the story of the rise of the digital payment blender Wirecard , which was once considered the greatest promise of the so-called digital location Germany.
A stock market rocket, a billion dollar scam.
A crashed company whose board members have disappeared (rumor has it: with the help of the secret service) or are waiting in prison for the next chapter in their biography.
And that politicians presumably once considered so valuable that, despite early warning signs, it was not only considered “too big to fail”, but also too visionary to be worth bankruptcy.
It all comes down to storytelling
The plan to take over Deutsche Bank went awry anyway, the price of the darling on the stock market plummeted after whistleblowers and the financial press revealed that several billions did not exist in Asian accounts and that allegedly large company takeovers were at best the purchase of small junks at inflated prices.
It is a mixture of stories that can be found in the Wirecard scandal.
Politics, justice, financial corporate culture, consulting business, old and new economy, greed and greed all play a part.
There have already been some documentary reconstructions and feature films.
RTL tried a fictional double portrait of Wirecard's two central managers, the Sky documentary "The Billion Lie" focused on the systemic and the remarkable story of the most important whistleblower.
The Wirecard scandal actually depends on the "storytelling", on the staging.
In this satire series, most of which takes place in Düsseldorf, one's eyes swell more than once with so much blindness, stupidity, selfishness and criminal energy in colorful fast-forward images.
The megalomania of the actors is visually staged until you get dizzy from all the chutzpah, happy coincidences and (insider) jokes.
The fatal thing about storytelling is, as “King of Stonks” Cramer also knows: Stories create contexts of meaning that can be true or dazzle and manipulate.
Advocates meet gullible people
The blueprint for the major frauds of the past twenty years, from Enron to MCIWorldcom, Lehman Brothers, and even Martha Stewart Inc., has been the same: assertive meets gullible.
Greed eats brains.
You see managers (rarely female managers) who act like monkeys in the finest thread, at least that's how "King of Stonks" shows it in all its drasticness.
What is perfidious in a positive sense about this series, which Jan Bonny stages with Facunda Scalerandi and Isabell Suba as a sadomaso event with market-based instruments and as a veritable carnival orgy, is the character of Chief Operating Officer Felix Armand.
You don't want to like him.
Schubert plays him as a sometimes unleashed, sometimes reflected, but in any case highly talented mastermind, who tricked even menacing short sellers (short sellers) like Sheila (great combatant: Larissa Sirah Herden) and the journalist Tom (Andreas Döhler) according to all stock market rules of art.
Brandt's Cramer, on the other hand, is basically stupid as bread, but insularly gifted and narcissistic.
When he's roaming around the garden of his estate after the show in his carnival prince costume (who has the longest feathers on his cap?), he looks pathetic, but he's still highly dangerous.
“King of Stonks” has just been awarded the Bernd Burgemeister Prize at the Munich Film Festival.
Satire has rarely been seen better.
The character of Dr.
Felix A. Cramer is guaranteed a place in the Hall of Fame for the ruthless with family values, within sight of Tony Soprano and Bernie Ebbers.
Although he would probably much rather be standing next to Elon Musk.
Narratively, there is still room for a second season.
King of Stonks airs
on Netflix starting today.