Bob Parsons: US Marine, Vietnam combat vet, self-made guy, and definitely outspoken – he’s cut from a different cloth than many of the privileged, feckless, and overpaid CEO’s of today’s technology companies (and eBay in particular).

Parsons has grit and though a Billionaire hasn’t lost touch with where he came from, and he does a lot of actual society-benefiting philanthropic work (compare his contributions to Omidyar whose “charity” work consists largely of whack-a-doodle political extremism).

Parsons is easily one of my top-5 favorite CEOs of the last couple decades (and he makes some excellent golf clubs to boot).

One the “elephant story”:

1) The elephants were by all accounts a real threat to the crops
2) Crop destruction was a real threat to possible starvation
3) The villagers asked for help
4) The villagers consumed the meat provided by the kill

In doing a quick search of articles that still show this old story, Mashable appears to have done a reasonable job of attempting some objectivity in their reporting of this: https://mashable.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-elephant-story/

Vodpod videos no longer available.

So is Parsons sorry for the elephant hunt—or at the very least, sorry that he put it up on the Internet? Absolutely not, as an uncontrite Parsons told me in an interview Friday night:

Am I rocked over it? No. Am I sad that I put it up. No. Do I plan to do it again? Yes.