Wealth & Money Quote by Giovanni Ribisi

There is a special kind of menace in the phrase "unabashedly ruthless": it frames greed not as a guilty vice but as a proudly worn operating system. Giovanni Ribisi, speaking as an actor who’s spent his career adjacent to Hollywood’s machinery, lands on a detail that feels truer than any big moral speech. The indictment isn’t simply that "those people" want money; it’s that they’ve opted out of shame, the one social brake that still matters when laws and contracts favor the powerful.

The wording does a lot of quiet work. "Those people" draws a line without naming names, a classic industry tactic: everyone knows the type, but no one wants the lawsuit or the burned bridge. It’s a condemnation that also signals the speaker’s awareness of how retaliation travels in tight professional ecosystems. "As far as money is concerned" is the coldest part - a carved-out exception that implies they may perform warmth, artistry, even ethics in other domains, but when the budget, backend, or leverage comes up, the mask drops.

The subtext is class and access: in creative fields, money is the real author. Ribisi’s phrasing suggests a world where empathy is negotiable and "ruthless" is rebranded as professionalism. The line resonates because it refuses the comforting fantasy that success is just talent meeting opportunity; it hints at the quieter truth that some people treat every relationship as a transaction, and they’re not embarrassed about it.