“Taking what you need
Bite the hand that feeds
You’ll lose your memory and you got no shame”
“Nice Guys Finish Last” — Green Day

Green Day spent almost a decade releasing records and playing clubs in California before their 1994 release “Dookie” became a monster success, eventually reaching more than 10 million albums sold.

The punk rockers have now totaled 92 award victories in their career and have even had an album adapted to a Broadway Play.

“Nice Guys Finish Last” was the final single released from Green Day’s “Nimrod” album. The song was featured on the movie Varsity Blues, which earned it an MTV Movie Award for best song from a movie in 1999. Interestingly, the song didn’t really chart well, never reaching the overall top 100 singles on Billboard and peaking at 31 on the Billboard alternative charts.

Our long national nightmare is over.

Okay, to clarify, I’m not talking about the weeks-long drama of a functionless Congress due to the lack of a Speaker of the House. Nor am I discussing the nightmare of yet another appearance by the Houston Astros in the World Series.

No, I’m discussing the months-long ridiculousness that was Taco Bell suing the owners of the trademark phrase “Taco Tuesday” in all 50 states, that ended Tuesday when Gregory’s Restaurant & Bar in Somers Point, New Jersey, forfeited its ownership of the trademark in the state of New Jersey.

This all began when Taco Bell casually used the phrase in an advertisement, only to be sued by Taco John’s, who owned the trademark in 49 of the 50 states, for use of a trademarked advertising phrase.

Lebron James was the face of a Taco Bell advertising campaign that called into question how someone could hold the rights to such a “common” phrase.

Of course, Taco Bell’s “win” was based entirely on a trademark/copyright judge ruling in their favor and putting the phrase into public use, right?

Um, no.

Not at all.

Taco Bell, a company with more than $2 billion in annual revenue, used its significant financial resources to drag out the issue in court. Gregory’s Restaurant & Bar owners Greg and Walt Gregory explained that the ongoing cost of fighting Taco Bell in court to hold the advertising trademark that they had held in New Jersey for more than 40 years was the too much, with estimated costs well over six figures.

Holding a trademark requires paying in fees on that trademark. Each 10 years, the trademark must be renewed, so over the last 40+ years, Gregory’s has paid roughly $2,000 in fees in order to hold the trademark.

Doing such allowed the restaurant to hold the exclusive use of the phrase in advertising within the state of New Jersey — even over Taco John’s, who held the trademark on the phrase in every other state in the country.

Taco John’s held the trademark on the phrase for nearly 35 years before backing out of the legal fight with Taco Bell in July, also citing the cost of legal fees to continue the battle.

Sure, Taco John’s is a national chain restaurant, so many feel like citing poverty in the procedures should fall on deaf ears, but Taco John’s has an annual revenue of $14.3 million nationwide. That means that Taco Bell’s annual revenue is roughly 140 times the revenue of Taco John’s, so the ability to financially afford a prolonged legal battle is absolutely a case of deep pockets winning out.

To put it into a more manageable perspective, just imagine a pair of landowners in a dispute over two properties that border one another.

One landowner has an income of $40,000 per year. The other landowner has an income of $5.6 million per year (140 times $40,000). Which do you think will be able to more easily afford a prolonged legal fight?

Of course, this case has generated very little sympathy for Gregory’s and even less for Taco John’s.

However, if someone began using the phrase “I’m loving it” in their regional restaurant’s advertising and ended up being sued by McDonald’s for trademark violation, most would laugh at the regional restaurant for (to clean up a popular online phrase) “messing around and finding out” - meaning that they did something that they knew was wrong and are now facing consequences.

Taco Bell did that, but they used wealth and size to cause others to fold and give up legally-defensible positions. In other words, Taco Bell messed around with no ramifications.

No one has filed for business bankruptcy of more company value in the history of the country than Donald Trump. Read that again — Trump has bankrupted bigger businesses than anyone else in the history of the country.

Yet many cite his name on buildings and personal financial worth (which legal cases are beginning to show may likely be significantly inflated) as evidence that “well, he must know what he’s doing because he’s a ‘good’ businessman.”

Not only that, but those same people want to emulate his life, willing to overlook numerous red flags of personality, financial dealings, and relationships while pointing out lesser issues in Trump’s rivals as reasons to not support them.

Elon Musk has made a fortune out of wielding his money as a weapon.

After Musk was part of the group that sold online payment service Paypal for more than a billion dollars, he pushed forward into electric vehicles with Tesla, making him more money, and SpaceX, which has brought in billions in investment dollars, even though it’s still losing millions each year overall.

He then utilized the valuations of those companies to garner the funding from banks to purchase Twitter last year for $43 billion. Since, he’s seen the revenues of the company reduced to roughly 10% of what they were at the time of the purchase, in large part due to many actions he’s taken to make Twitter what he wanted it to be, rather than adding features and/or making moves that were aimed at increasing the customer base.

In fact, when he purchased Twitter, Musk stated it was in order to expand free speech on the platform.

In barely more than a year of owning Twitter, Musk has taken the company from a A-/B+ typical grade in “protecting free speech through regulation” in The New York Times’ online polling in 2019 to a D grade this summer, with people from both sides of the political aisle calling out arbitrary content rules on the platform that exist now, actually stifling free speech.

Yet, many still hold Musk up as an ideal.

Again, this is really not surprising, as we have an aspirational American ideal that tends to overlook the missteps of a person or company with significant power or financial resources.

That same warped view of the “American dream” sees the end desire as being solely financial — in other words he/she with the biggest bank account wins. Except doing this often requires the person to make decisions that anyone could easily see are unethical, abusive, and even illegal.

This past week, I heard from many people who remembered fondly working with, playing golf with, or simply speaking with my grandfather. It was not because he had the biggest wallet in the room and made sure everyone knew it.

It’s precisely because he knew the real value in life is in so much more than money. While nice guys may finish last…they often are much happier with the race they’ve run than those who finish at the top of the leaderboard.