Everything Must Go
A Bruce Willis movie, a BBC villain, and the week the country ran a fire sale on itself.
November 13, 2026
I don't often like to comment on national tragedies. A tanker hitting a riverboat full of people is not a punchline, and I am not going to pretend it is. But the rest of this week kept reminding me of a Bruce Willis movie, and once I saw it I could not unsee it, so here we are.
The movie is Live Free or Die Hard, from 2007. Thomas Gabriel, played by Timothy Olyphant, is a former Defense Department analyst who warned the government its systems were wide open, got fired and discredited for his trouble, and came back to prove his point by breaking the country. While he did go about it the wrong way one can see what he did. His plan has a name. His hacker, Matt Farrell, played by Justin Long, explains it to John McClane, and the explanation is the whole movie in one paragraph:
"It's a three-step systematic attack on the entire national infrastructure. Okay, step one: take out all the transportation. Step two: the financial base and telecoms. Step three: You get rid of all the utilities. Gas, water, electric, nuclear. Pretty much anything that's run by computers which, which today is almost everything. So that's why they call it a fire sale, because everything must go."
Gabriel has a line for McClane that sticks with me: "You're a Timex watch in a digital world." And here is the part people forget. The fire sale was not the job. The fire sale was the cover. While the whole country watched its traffic lights and its stock market and its power grid fall over, Gabriel was robbing the financial system blind. The chaos was the distraction. The money was the point.
Then there is the other one, the BBC Sherlock episode "The Reichenbach Fall." Jim Moriarty, played by Andrew Scott, walks into the Tower of London with a phone and a wad of gum, listening to Rossini. On his phone he opens the Bank of England vault, unlocks every cell at Pentonville Prison, and breaks into the case holding the Crown Jewels, all at the same time. He writes "Get Sherlock" backwards on the glass, smashes it with a fire extinguisher, and then he does the thing that makes the scene: he waits. The police find him sitting on the throne, wearing the crown, holding the sceptre and the orb. He didn't ask for anything. No demands, no ransom, no manifesto. The whole point was the demonstration. In a world of locked rooms, the man with the key is king. And honey, you should see me in a crown.
Now the week.
On Thursday, Microsoft 365 went down in 74 countries. Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, the whole suite, gone because some servers lost capacity and a configuration change landed wrong. Microsoft says it was not a cyberattack, and an executive said so on the record. More than 130,000 Outlook problem reports came in at the peak. The stock had already fallen 4.45 percent over the two sessions before Friday, off record highs near 560 dollars, and it fell toward 520, dropped about 2.5 percent before the market opened Friday, then clawed its way back to about flat by the close. A trillion-dollar company lost its email for a day and the market shrugged, then bought the dip.
On Friday, the FAA grounded every flight in America. A communication issue hit all the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, and the order went out: extraordinary circumstances, safety, nothing takes off until further notice. It started here, at O'Hare and Midway, and then it went nationwide. The second nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001. The airlines fell with it. United down, American down, Delta down, Southwest down, all of them dropping in step the minute the news hit, after they had already fallen Thursday on oil prices. Delta had dropped 5.2 percent Thursday, United 6 percent, American 5.6 percent, before a single plane was grounded.
And Nvidia. Jensen Huang, the man who built the company that powers the AI boom, resigned on Thursday after admitting he was unfaithful to his wife of more than 40 years, and after reports that one of the women, a Singapore tech executive named Alice Huang, is suspected by U.S. officials of spying for China. The board had opened an investigation into whether he was the target of a foreign intelligence operation. Then a second affair came out, with an Nvidia vice president. The stock fell more than 13 percent in a day, 14 percent at its worst. One affair, then two, and the most important chip company on earth lost an eighth of its value in a day. China denies the spying claim. Huang has agreed to testify before Congress.
And in New Orleans, a tanker hit a docked riverboat on the Mississippi, 129 people aboard, at least a dozen in the water, the boat on its side, the river closed. The cause is not known. The casualty count is not confirmed. That one is not a joke and I am not making it one.
Here is what I keep coming back to. I do not see a terrorist organization taking over, and I do not see demands. I do not see a brilliant mastermind sitting on the throne in the royal jewels, showing the world what he is capable of. Nobody took credit. Nobody sent a ransom note. Nobody wore the crown.
What I see is worse in its own way, and funnier, and that is why I am writing this. The fire sale happened without Gabriel. The systems took themselves down. A config change killed the email of 74 countries. A radio failure grounded every plane in America. An affair, then a second affair, knocked 13 percent off the company that runs the AI age. No villain required. The locks were that easy to pick, and the whole country runs on three companies' servers and one agency's radios, and the few who control the many do not even have to show up to prove it. Gabriel needed a team of hackers and a grudge. Moriarty needed a phone and a crown. This week needed a bad afternoon and a worse love life.
Which brings me to the question I actually want to ask, because it is the question the movie trains you to ask. In the movie, the chaos was the cover and the money was the point. So before Nvidia took the hit, did anybody sell? Before Microsoft went dark, did anybody sell? Before the airlines fell out of the sky, metaphorically speaking, did anybody sell? A sell before a dip and a buyback after does wonders. It squeezes a market. It makes a fortune out of somebody else's bad day, and it looks exactly like nothing at all if you do it right.
I am not saying anybody did. I am asking, because that is the question. What would show it is not a feeling. It is volume, and options activity, and insider filings, and the tape. So far the tape says the moves followed the news, in that order: Microsoft was already sliding on AI competition worries before the outage, the airlines were already down Thursday on oil before the ground stop, Nvidia fell after the resignation hit the wires. The public story, in every case, is that the news came first and the selling came second. Fine. But the movie is right about one thing: if you wanted to rob the place, this is how you would do it. You would not need a team of hackers. You would need to know the email was going down before the email went down. You would need to know the planes were staying on the ground before the planes stayed on the ground. And then you would buy it all back while everyone else was still reading the headlines.
One affair and then a second changed a whole stock market and a lot of portfolios. That is the sentence I keep coming back to. Not a war. Not a hack. An affair, and then another one. The chips that run the whole AI age, bent by a love life. If that does not make you laugh, you are not paying attention, and if it does not scare you a little, you are not paying attention either.
The good news is there is no mastermind. The bad news is there does not need to be one. Everything must go, and it did, and nobody even bothered to send a ransom note.
Sources
Live Free or Die Hard, plot and quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die_Hard
"The Reichenbach Fall," BBC Sherlock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reichenbach_Fall
Microsoft 365 outage, November 12-13, 2026: https://wire.com/en/blog/microsoft-365-outage-november-2026
FAA nationwide ground stop, November 13, 2026: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/11/13/faa-orders-nationwide-groundstop-at-us-airports-citing-safety/92765499007/
Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO, November 12, 2026: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2026/11/12/jensen-huang-nvidia-ceo-resigns-affair-investigation/92734431007/
New Orleans riverboat collision, November 13, 2026: https://dukecountry.fm/2026/11/13/freighter-collides-with-cruise-ship-in-new-orleans-passengers-in-the-water/