Tom was shrewd. Which honestly wasn’t that different from any of his “peers”. It was an essential part of being a deal maker, a businessman, a merchant. He laughed at those titles. The human race has developed many ways of making greed sound prettier, but the truth of the matter was all of those professions were greedy at their core. Tom didn’t care about all that. He just wanted a great deal. As one of the first non military merchants allowed out of Sol to trade with the lizards he was ecstatic.
These people were idiots.
He had come prepared with every trick he had learned to create a thriving profitable interstellar empire. He had danced around tax requirements, hired minorities, donated millions to charities he actually owned. Tom was a brilliant man and he was having a really hard time understanding why it was so simple.
Seriously. These people were idiots.
He did the same thing he always did when starting any negotiation. Choose something outrageous and 100% guaranteed to return him a profit with no losses, if the other side was stupid enough to buy it. It never worked out right, but it set a great tone to work from. Every single time he would wrap his proposal carefully in a mix of metaphor, dare and a hefty dose of reverse psychology.
Somehow. Incredulously. Miraculously. The lizard people were filling up the hangars of his ships for free. On what essentially amounted to a dare. “Your technology is crap, I’m just buying it to sell for parts.” What a load of bullshit and they completely bought it. “Crap! This is the best molecular printing system you could ever hope for!” His response had angered them. “I should just leave. This scrap was not even worth the trip.”
The fucking lizard people were eating the steaming plate he had unloaded in front of them with nothing more than some light garnish. He chuckled and took another sip of his 60 year old Japanese single malt.
These people were idiots.