this reminds me of a oneshot from like 5 years ago, where 2 dudes where in direct business competition, where one was a grandson of a genius yakuza dude so everyone believed he was one as well, but he was a really swell guy no ambitions or evil ideas, and the other one was a poor dude but with a great mind for business, both of their business were tied up most of the time but then the poor dude store started to go down, he inmediately believed that the other dude was doing some shaddy shit to bring him under, and after 2 pages of thinking wildly he decided to do shaddy shit too, coz he believed that his wits wouldnt be enough to win against money and power.
His whole plan was executed perfectly till the last step, where he forced the other dude to make a decision, now i cant rememebr exacly the setup he made, but it was something like this
> option A : that would screw him over but help a lot of ppl
> option B : do shaddy shit to secure an assload of money
the dude believed that he would pick the 2nd option, he had no doubt, he was super sure, coz if he picked the 1st one he would take losses too, obviosly the other dude picked the 1st one to the mc surprise, and after a confrontation and them finally speaking it turned out that the mc's business started going down coz a bunch of his employees were stealing from him, coz he wasnt a good judge of character
it ends with the 2 of them building a new business, covering for each other weaknesses, it was a good read and it had the classic ''Dont assume stuff'' kind of lesson but it was still fun to read