Succession: Tailgate Party
May 8, 2023 6:06 AM - Season 4, Episode 7 - Subscribe
Hoping to work the angles, Kendall and Roman ask Shiv to invite a campaign insider to Logan’s pre-election day party.
Awesome awesome awesome. Episode subtitle: “…in which recap just how awful these people are.” This season has been so good at shoving everyone in the room for an hour and lighting fires. I am not ready for it to end.
posted by chill at 6:37 AM on May 8, 2023
posted by chill at 6:37 AM on May 8, 2023
I love Shiv’s Lydia-Tár-ass insults. Why call someone an asshole when you can call them servile, striving, and parochial?
I don’t like or root for any of these characters (except Gerri) but I did feel proud of Tom for telling 40 of the most powerful people in the US to fuck off out of his house.
posted by ejs at 7:22 AM on May 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
I don’t like or root for any of these characters (except Gerri) but I did feel proud of Tom for telling 40 of the most powerful people in the US to fuck off out of his house.
posted by ejs at 7:22 AM on May 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
Really
The best delivered line in the episode.
Was the Ebba response to comforting drop about poor India subscription rate a play on the boys? Really how has no one managed to sell them the Brooklyn bridge, it's been days since they could control their own money.
How can this end, there was a sitcom generations ago that got a new showrunner that decide to change up and sent the entire cast (-1) on a church picknick bus over a cliff. I'm looking for a huge financial success for them all just as the choppers collide over the east river.
posted by sammyo at 7:55 AM on May 8, 2023
The best delivered line in the episode.
Was the Ebba response to comforting drop about poor India subscription rate a play on the boys? Really how has no one managed to sell them the Brooklyn bridge, it's been days since they could control their own money.
How can this end, there was a sitcom generations ago that got a new showrunner that decide to change up and sent the entire cast (-1) on a church picknick bus over a cliff. I'm looking for a huge financial success for them all just as the choppers collide over the east river.
posted by sammyo at 7:55 AM on May 8, 2023
I feel like the India thing is "real"; it feels like a nod to wirecard, a German "fintech" (very fraud-y, probably not doing fin or tech) company who nearly bought Deutsche Bank before they were caught out. It's been pointed out that if they had succeeding in buying a giant bank, they probably could've hidden all the fraud and gotten away with it. How much would the India thing matter if GoJo is a dominant Netflix/Spotify type of content provider who has a bunch of real subscribers, just not as many as they thought? I guess the stock would take a hit for a while, and there would certainly be some lawsuits. I feel like Matsson's unstable behavior is more alarming than the messy accounting in India -- because GoJo is at least a real company with people like Nate paying $10 a month for it -- but what do I know.
I loved that the show opened with Tom's heartless approach to the zoom firings, and of course ends with him feeling rather more upset at his firing being grand entertainment. (This was the hypocrisy episode, even more than usual -- we also got a reminder of how Roman sexually harassed Gerri, paired with his glee at uncovering Matsson's abhorrent behavior toward Ebbe.)
One of the best things about watching Tom is that he is deeply servile to power for 95% of the time, and then will reach some kind of natural end to his patience and push back in a way no other human would ("Thank you for the chicken, Logan").
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:11 AM on May 8, 2023 [20 favorites]
I loved that the show opened with Tom's heartless approach to the zoom firings, and of course ends with him feeling rather more upset at his firing being grand entertainment. (This was the hypocrisy episode, even more than usual -- we also got a reminder of how Roman sexually harassed Gerri, paired with his glee at uncovering Matsson's abhorrent behavior toward Ebbe.)
One of the best things about watching Tom is that he is deeply servile to power for 95% of the time, and then will reach some kind of natural end to his patience and push back in a way no other human would ("Thank you for the chicken, Logan").
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:11 AM on May 8, 2023 [20 favorites]
There is no cringe as wholly delicious as Greg cringe.
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 AM on May 8, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 AM on May 8, 2023 [10 favorites]
I've become increasingly dissatisfied with Succession over the past couple of seasons, and I think this episode helped me put a finger on it. The writers seem to have an almost pathological desire to maintain "suspense" by metronomically alternating wins and losses. Matsson had some big wins recently, and the deal looked like a sure thing, so now we get a fraud in India out of nowhere, just to keep things spicy.
The fraud isn't necessarily unrealistic---it's totally plausible that someone like Matssson would let something like that fester under his watch---but it feels cheap. Having a stray comment from one of the deal professionals (who were theoretically doing stringent DD!) a couple of episodes ago about how the India number look a little wonky would have gone a long way towards making the revelation feel "real," not just something that was ginned up at the last minute for drama.
It increasingly feels like nothing in each individual episode really matters, or has any stakes, because it's all subject to being overturned by whatever deus ex machina nerfs / buffs are required to keep things "interesting". To me the plot does not feel particularly organic or emergent from the characters and systems we’ve learned about, it just kind of feels like the writers pushing dolls together to set up the big speeches they really want on the Emmy reel.
posted by rishabguha at 9:12 AM on May 8, 2023 [17 favorites]
The fraud isn't necessarily unrealistic---it's totally plausible that someone like Matssson would let something like that fester under his watch---but it feels cheap. Having a stray comment from one of the deal professionals (who were theoretically doing stringent DD!) a couple of episodes ago about how the India number look a little wonky would have gone a long way towards making the revelation feel "real," not just something that was ginned up at the last minute for drama.
It increasingly feels like nothing in each individual episode really matters, or has any stakes, because it's all subject to being overturned by whatever deus ex machina nerfs / buffs are required to keep things "interesting". To me the plot does not feel particularly organic or emergent from the characters and systems we’ve learned about, it just kind of feels like the writers pushing dolls together to set up the big speeches they really want on the Emmy reel.
posted by rishabguha at 9:12 AM on May 8, 2023 [17 favorites]
Matsson, out of focus in the background, pointing at himself when Connor says there’s only one person in the room who doesn’t treat him like he’s a joke.
The lack of proper diligence on GoJo have parallels to Wirecard, where accounting firms, their auditors, and famously the German regulators, took their inflated numbers at face value for years.
posted by boogieboy at 9:34 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
The lack of proper diligence on GoJo have parallels to Wirecard, where accounting firms, their auditors, and famously the German regulators, took their inflated numbers at face value for years.
posted by boogieboy at 9:34 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
I have to hand it to Alexander Skarsgard. I've often found it difficult to separate him from his Big Little Lies character. He did too good a job in that role and I can't help seeing him as a certain kind of terrifying creep. I mean this sincerely -- he's transformed into a totally different terrifying creep in this series.
Mark Linn-Baker shows up so infrequently that I've always forgotten about him by the time he appears again and it's SUCH a delightful surprise.
posted by lampoil at 10:19 AM on May 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
Mark Linn-Baker shows up so infrequently that I've always forgotten about him by the time he appears again and it's SUCH a delightful surprise.
posted by lampoil at 10:19 AM on May 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
lampoil, you definitely need to watch True Blood, in which Alexander Skarsgard shows his range by playing a third kind of terrifying creep.
posted by ejs at 11:08 AM on May 8, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by ejs at 11:08 AM on May 8, 2023 [18 favorites]
It increasingly feels like nothing in each individual episode really matters, or has any stakes, because it's all subject to being overturned by whatever deus ex machina nerfs / buffs are required to keep things "interesting". To me the plot does not feel particularly organic or emergent from the characters and systems we’ve learned about, it just kind of feels like the writers pushing dolls together to set up the big speeches they really want on the Emmy reel.
That's a totally reasonable thing to dislike, but this is specifically what I love about this show (and loved about The Thick of It, and loved about Veep until the original showrunners left). Possibly The Thick of It just did this in such a distilled, concentrated form that it makes the pattern recognizable on the other shows I just mentioned, but the dramatic architecture is always:
That "overturning" you mention isn't a new trait to the show: it's present right at the start, with Frank getting fired in the pilot and Kendall getting denied CEO. Logan's firing of Ken after the failed vote of no confidence is this striking instance of father breaking away from son, yet, just a couple of episodes later, Logan asks Ken to come back in. Later, during season 3, Logan offers to let Ken back into the company once again, before subsequently offering to buy out his shares (and then he reneges on that too).
On the one hand, it's a reflection of the inherent hollowness of these enterprises (business and contemporary politics). I like it in part because it feels like an accurate reflection of the state of things nowadays: the Matsson bullshit isn't even modeled around the crypto banks collapsing, but there's always this sense that everyone's playing with paper money up top, while down below individuals lose their livelihoods and have their futures robbed from them. It also goes a long way towards explaining why virtually every character in all these shows and films is fundamentally psychotic: not only do you have to be able to abandon all your principles, because you will not be permitted to cling to any of them, but your only reward for sticking with this is raw, naked power. You're not building anything meaningful; you're not making your little dent on the universe. You're either in it for the payout, like the senior management at Waystar, or you're in it for the raw stimulation of it, like Logan and Matsson. It's no coincidence that the people up at the tippy top are the most nihilistic: their fundamental lack of conviction means they're the only people who are genuinely suited for this world.
But that's not really the story of Succession. That's the surface-level one, the one that pretends to matter, but it's as hollow as the enterprise itself. The real story is that, no matter how much every character claims that this is "just business," this is a human enterprise, and it grinds people up and spits them out. Succession is a character drama, not a political one, and the story that does have stakes and does continually evolve is the story of these characters' relationships to one another.
I'm curious, for instance, whether Ken is being set up to reveal himself as a genuine killer or if there's a pratfall coming for him, but one reason I find it hard to confidently predict one way or another is that the real story is the one where he coldly turns on his siblings for the sake of getting his shot at power. The arc of the season has revolved around the siblings' alliance disintegrating: Shiv has been actively working to betray them, Ken tells himself he's doing this "for the good of the company," and Roman is the one who's left just hoping this will bring them all together. Matsson's relationship with Ebba is more tangible than Gojo is: the twists and turns around his attempted acquisition of Waystar hinge on his character rather than on his business, just as, while Logan was still alive, those same twists hinged on Logan's relationship with his kids.
Alan Sepinwall, who's one of my favorite reviewers but who I find has certain blind spots as a critic, took the stance that season 3 of Succession was repeating plotlines from earlier seasons, because he was focused on the business side of things; interpersonally, however, season 3 covered a lot of new ground. Shiv and Roman weren't really invested in Ken's campaign against his father in the first season; season 2, however, brought them in as genuine participants in Waystar Royco, so suddenly Ken's woke anti-Waystar revolution meant something personal to the both of them. The ways that Ken hurts both of them, and the ways that they lash back, are brand-new; so too are the tensions between Shiv and Roman, each of whom sees themselves as the new Logan, and holds the other in contempt—Shiv because Roman is a spineless jello who molds himself to his father, and Roman because Shiv thinks she can walk in and be the most competent person in the room, without understanding the business whatsoever.
And Logan, in many ways the person who most believed his "just business" credo, was always fallible too. He did take things personally; he did seek love from his children; he did get battered around by the chaos of his own feelings, pretending that he was reacting objectively to the politics of the situation. The series literally opens with his pissing in a corner of his bedroom because he doesn't know which house he's in—that's Logan in a nutshell. This season opened with him at what ought to have been his triumphant swan song, and instead we got two episodes back-to-back of him feeling miserable and lost, because it was never really enough for him after all.
Returning to this episode, the significance of Matsson's company turning out to be fraudulent—apart from being a completely accurate take on most tech companies—is how it affects Ken and Shiv.
Shiv's newfound kinship with Tom was built on their shady little backroom deal with Matsson; Shiv's need to suck up to Matsson all evening, even as he shat all over Tom, was partly what drove a wedge between them during the party, and discovering that Matsson might be a fraud caused her to panic because she's staked every important relationship in her life on him. Her marriage hinges on Matsson; her relationship with her siblings has gotten, well, shivved because she's cozying up to Matsson. And her conviction that it was all "worth it" doesn't last if Matsson turns out to be bullshit. What's more, leaving aside the weird sexual undertones of the two of them, Matsson is literally her father all over again: completely unreliable, charismatic enough to convince her that he's worth investing in, and fundamentally incapable of caring about the damage he does to other people, including to her and Tom.
And Ken, who was already looking for ways to sabotage the deal—and who invited Nate to the party to help him sabotage the deal, unwittingly exacerbating Shiv's issues with Tom—hears about the India thing and, rather than taking the sane route of scuttling the deal and leaving it at that, decides immediately that he needs to go balls-to-the-wall on this, without consulting his siblings first. Dramatically speaking, that matters less for the "who buys who" dimension of this, and more for the "how far is Ken willing to sacrifice his soul" dimension. Which, seeing as this episode opens up with him yelling at Rava as she accuses him of fostering a culture that's terrifying his own daughter, is almost certainly "absolutely all of it," but even that matters less than the question of how he'll hurt everyone else in his life on the plummet down.
Putting it another way, if the people up top are playing with fake money and the people down below get real hurt, who does Ken decide ought to be down below? Logan, for his faults, rarely treated his own children like he felt they should get permanently wounded over his grudges (apart from y'know extended psychological abuse); Ken was the one exception, and the two times that Logan really crossed that line—causing his relapse in season 1 and trying to sacrifice Ken at the end of season 2—he showed rare genuine discomfort over it. Roman has occasionally been really vile towards his siblings, but usually in ways that he thinks are playful; Shiv is absolutely trying to fuck Ken and Roman over, but she doesn't think they'll be materially affected by it at all. Of the three of them, Kendall is the one I could see genuinely writing his siblings off as NRPI, and that's the horrifying open question at this point in the show.
One of the really interesting divisions between Jesse Armstrong's various politically-bent shows has to do with each one's characters' relationship to power. Veep's early seasons revolve around Selena, a megalomaniac who's too incompetent to hold power, confronting again and again the fact that she will have to debase herself if she wants any power whatsoever, and that she still probably won't wind up with any. In The Thick of It, ministers were nominally powerful but felt immensely powerless; their staff was so powerless that they still valued the tiny amounts of power they could scramble to claim over one another. But Malcolm Tucker, who was the breakout star of The Thick of It by a mile, was interesting because he had political convictions on some level, and just happened to be brutal and Machiavellian enough that he understood his entire party to be sacrificial pawns in the name of the overall scheme.
Succession is so compelling because power and family are synonymous: none of Logan's children were given a choice about being this close to power, or about being part of this family, and the fascinating thing is that they'd have been much better off if either power or family wasn't an issue. This would be easier for them if they were unrelated, since they wouldn't be bound to one another or care about one another if they weren't—though if they were unrelated they wouldn't have power to begin with. And the thing that perpetually gets in their way is the fact of their own power: it's why Shiv betrays Ken and Roman, it's why Ken betrays Roman and Shiv, and it's why Roman, among other things, identified a literal Nazi as the best possible presidential candidate.
That constant fluctuation of business stakes, in other words, is essential for the stakes of their family drama. If it were to ever settle down, the kids would have time to work out where they stood in things, how they related to one another, and how to maybe come to peace with that. Instead, things shift so constantly and drastically that they're each constantly thrown into tension with one another, tempted with the possibility of doing a shitty thing for personal gain, and thwarted when they think they've finally made a good move.
Take Tom and Shiv. Without the chaos at the end of season 3, Tom wouldn't have made his move against Shiv; without Logan's death, Tom wouldn't have been suddenly powerless despite that move, in a way that let him and Shiv get close; without Ken and Roman becoming CEO and COO, Shiv wouldn't have been looking for a new loved one to take sides with; and without Matsson's fraud, this wouldn't have all come crashing down in a way that ended with Tom and Shiv screaming at one another on the balcony.
Rather than being arbitrary or stake-less, that chaos is immaculately well-wrought, calculated to constantly bring characters' relationships to a head. It only seems senseless if you, like the siblings, buy into the fact that the throne is what ultimately matters. But Succession isn't Game of Thrones; it's cynical and bleak about power and its tarnished flavor of "royalty" in a way that even George R. R. Martin can only feint at. And the drama of Succession lies in how, distracted by the delusional belief that this company means anything whatsoever—a delusion that each and every character knows on some level is a lie—these people forsake everything that could have ever meant anything to them. Ethics, ideology, empathy, people, love, family... it all slips away, as quietly and sadly off-screen as Logan did. All that's left are chest compressions that everybody knows don't mean a goddamn thing.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:28 AM on May 8, 2023 [50 favorites]
That's a totally reasonable thing to dislike, but this is specifically what I love about this show (and loved about The Thick of It, and loved about Veep until the original showrunners left). Possibly The Thick of It just did this in such a distilled, concentrated form that it makes the pattern recognizable on the other shows I just mentioned, but the dramatic architecture is always:
- Everything is up in the air and liable to change.
- You can't afford not to invest in the current position you're in like your life depended on it.
That "overturning" you mention isn't a new trait to the show: it's present right at the start, with Frank getting fired in the pilot and Kendall getting denied CEO. Logan's firing of Ken after the failed vote of no confidence is this striking instance of father breaking away from son, yet, just a couple of episodes later, Logan asks Ken to come back in. Later, during season 3, Logan offers to let Ken back into the company once again, before subsequently offering to buy out his shares (and then he reneges on that too).
On the one hand, it's a reflection of the inherent hollowness of these enterprises (business and contemporary politics). I like it in part because it feels like an accurate reflection of the state of things nowadays: the Matsson bullshit isn't even modeled around the crypto banks collapsing, but there's always this sense that everyone's playing with paper money up top, while down below individuals lose their livelihoods and have their futures robbed from them. It also goes a long way towards explaining why virtually every character in all these shows and films is fundamentally psychotic: not only do you have to be able to abandon all your principles, because you will not be permitted to cling to any of them, but your only reward for sticking with this is raw, naked power. You're not building anything meaningful; you're not making your little dent on the universe. You're either in it for the payout, like the senior management at Waystar, or you're in it for the raw stimulation of it, like Logan and Matsson. It's no coincidence that the people up at the tippy top are the most nihilistic: their fundamental lack of conviction means they're the only people who are genuinely suited for this world.
But that's not really the story of Succession. That's the surface-level one, the one that pretends to matter, but it's as hollow as the enterprise itself. The real story is that, no matter how much every character claims that this is "just business," this is a human enterprise, and it grinds people up and spits them out. Succession is a character drama, not a political one, and the story that does have stakes and does continually evolve is the story of these characters' relationships to one another.
I'm curious, for instance, whether Ken is being set up to reveal himself as a genuine killer or if there's a pratfall coming for him, but one reason I find it hard to confidently predict one way or another is that the real story is the one where he coldly turns on his siblings for the sake of getting his shot at power. The arc of the season has revolved around the siblings' alliance disintegrating: Shiv has been actively working to betray them, Ken tells himself he's doing this "for the good of the company," and Roman is the one who's left just hoping this will bring them all together. Matsson's relationship with Ebba is more tangible than Gojo is: the twists and turns around his attempted acquisition of Waystar hinge on his character rather than on his business, just as, while Logan was still alive, those same twists hinged on Logan's relationship with his kids.
Alan Sepinwall, who's one of my favorite reviewers but who I find has certain blind spots as a critic, took the stance that season 3 of Succession was repeating plotlines from earlier seasons, because he was focused on the business side of things; interpersonally, however, season 3 covered a lot of new ground. Shiv and Roman weren't really invested in Ken's campaign against his father in the first season; season 2, however, brought them in as genuine participants in Waystar Royco, so suddenly Ken's woke anti-Waystar revolution meant something personal to the both of them. The ways that Ken hurts both of them, and the ways that they lash back, are brand-new; so too are the tensions between Shiv and Roman, each of whom sees themselves as the new Logan, and holds the other in contempt—Shiv because Roman is a spineless jello who molds himself to his father, and Roman because Shiv thinks she can walk in and be the most competent person in the room, without understanding the business whatsoever.
And Logan, in many ways the person who most believed his "just business" credo, was always fallible too. He did take things personally; he did seek love from his children; he did get battered around by the chaos of his own feelings, pretending that he was reacting objectively to the politics of the situation. The series literally opens with his pissing in a corner of his bedroom because he doesn't know which house he's in—that's Logan in a nutshell. This season opened with him at what ought to have been his triumphant swan song, and instead we got two episodes back-to-back of him feeling miserable and lost, because it was never really enough for him after all.
Returning to this episode, the significance of Matsson's company turning out to be fraudulent—apart from being a completely accurate take on most tech companies—is how it affects Ken and Shiv.
Shiv's newfound kinship with Tom was built on their shady little backroom deal with Matsson; Shiv's need to suck up to Matsson all evening, even as he shat all over Tom, was partly what drove a wedge between them during the party, and discovering that Matsson might be a fraud caused her to panic because she's staked every important relationship in her life on him. Her marriage hinges on Matsson; her relationship with her siblings has gotten, well, shivved because she's cozying up to Matsson. And her conviction that it was all "worth it" doesn't last if Matsson turns out to be bullshit. What's more, leaving aside the weird sexual undertones of the two of them, Matsson is literally her father all over again: completely unreliable, charismatic enough to convince her that he's worth investing in, and fundamentally incapable of caring about the damage he does to other people, including to her and Tom.
And Ken, who was already looking for ways to sabotage the deal—and who invited Nate to the party to help him sabotage the deal, unwittingly exacerbating Shiv's issues with Tom—hears about the India thing and, rather than taking the sane route of scuttling the deal and leaving it at that, decides immediately that he needs to go balls-to-the-wall on this, without consulting his siblings first. Dramatically speaking, that matters less for the "who buys who" dimension of this, and more for the "how far is Ken willing to sacrifice his soul" dimension. Which, seeing as this episode opens up with him yelling at Rava as she accuses him of fostering a culture that's terrifying his own daughter, is almost certainly "absolutely all of it," but even that matters less than the question of how he'll hurt everyone else in his life on the plummet down.
Putting it another way, if the people up top are playing with fake money and the people down below get real hurt, who does Ken decide ought to be down below? Logan, for his faults, rarely treated his own children like he felt they should get permanently wounded over his grudges (apart from y'know extended psychological abuse); Ken was the one exception, and the two times that Logan really crossed that line—causing his relapse in season 1 and trying to sacrifice Ken at the end of season 2—he showed rare genuine discomfort over it. Roman has occasionally been really vile towards his siblings, but usually in ways that he thinks are playful; Shiv is absolutely trying to fuck Ken and Roman over, but she doesn't think they'll be materially affected by it at all. Of the three of them, Kendall is the one I could see genuinely writing his siblings off as NRPI, and that's the horrifying open question at this point in the show.
One of the really interesting divisions between Jesse Armstrong's various politically-bent shows has to do with each one's characters' relationship to power. Veep's early seasons revolve around Selena, a megalomaniac who's too incompetent to hold power, confronting again and again the fact that she will have to debase herself if she wants any power whatsoever, and that she still probably won't wind up with any. In The Thick of It, ministers were nominally powerful but felt immensely powerless; their staff was so powerless that they still valued the tiny amounts of power they could scramble to claim over one another. But Malcolm Tucker, who was the breakout star of The Thick of It by a mile, was interesting because he had political convictions on some level, and just happened to be brutal and Machiavellian enough that he understood his entire party to be sacrificial pawns in the name of the overall scheme.
Succession is so compelling because power and family are synonymous: none of Logan's children were given a choice about being this close to power, or about being part of this family, and the fascinating thing is that they'd have been much better off if either power or family wasn't an issue. This would be easier for them if they were unrelated, since they wouldn't be bound to one another or care about one another if they weren't—though if they were unrelated they wouldn't have power to begin with. And the thing that perpetually gets in their way is the fact of their own power: it's why Shiv betrays Ken and Roman, it's why Ken betrays Roman and Shiv, and it's why Roman, among other things, identified a literal Nazi as the best possible presidential candidate.
That constant fluctuation of business stakes, in other words, is essential for the stakes of their family drama. If it were to ever settle down, the kids would have time to work out where they stood in things, how they related to one another, and how to maybe come to peace with that. Instead, things shift so constantly and drastically that they're each constantly thrown into tension with one another, tempted with the possibility of doing a shitty thing for personal gain, and thwarted when they think they've finally made a good move.
Take Tom and Shiv. Without the chaos at the end of season 3, Tom wouldn't have made his move against Shiv; without Logan's death, Tom wouldn't have been suddenly powerless despite that move, in a way that let him and Shiv get close; without Ken and Roman becoming CEO and COO, Shiv wouldn't have been looking for a new loved one to take sides with; and without Matsson's fraud, this wouldn't have all come crashing down in a way that ended with Tom and Shiv screaming at one another on the balcony.
Rather than being arbitrary or stake-less, that chaos is immaculately well-wrought, calculated to constantly bring characters' relationships to a head. It only seems senseless if you, like the siblings, buy into the fact that the throne is what ultimately matters. But Succession isn't Game of Thrones; it's cynical and bleak about power and its tarnished flavor of "royalty" in a way that even George R. R. Martin can only feint at. And the drama of Succession lies in how, distracted by the delusional belief that this company means anything whatsoever—a delusion that each and every character knows on some level is a lie—these people forsake everything that could have ever meant anything to them. Ethics, ideology, empathy, people, love, family... it all slips away, as quietly and sadly off-screen as Logan did. All that's left are chest compressions that everybody knows don't mean a goddamn thing.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:28 AM on May 8, 2023 [50 favorites]
lampoil, you definitely need to watch True Blood, in which Alexander Skarsgard shows his range by playing a third kind of terrifying creep.
Skarsgard is fantastic in Succession and he was harrowing in Big Little Lies, so maybe it's a true testament to what a good actor he is that, despite all these stunning and awful roles, he will forever be the male model yelling "ex-SQUEEZE me, have you ever heard of STYLING GEL?" in Zoolander.
In my headcanon, every character that Skarsgard plays dies in a freak gasoline-fight accident.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:30 AM on May 8, 2023 [18 favorites]
Skarsgard is fantastic in Succession and he was harrowing in Big Little Lies, so maybe it's a true testament to what a good actor he is that, despite all these stunning and awful roles, he will forever be the male model yelling "ex-SQUEEZE me, have you ever heard of STYLING GEL?" in Zoolander.
In my headcanon, every character that Skarsgard plays dies in a freak gasoline-fight accident.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:30 AM on May 8, 2023 [18 favorites]
THCBT, that is an excellent analysis, one I completely agree with. But, if I may, let me distill it down: Succession is structured like a sitcom, not a drama. The reset button may not get hit literally at the end of every episode, but it’s damn close.
Also like a sitcom, it plays fast and loose with the facts. Very little of the deal making holds up to scrutiny, and the timing and speed of it all is ridiculous. But, as you lay out so well, it sets up situations in which the character play off each other, beautifully.
And it is, of course, loaded with belly laugh worthy one-liners, just like a good sitcom. These also have only passing relation to the drama. Tether, they are all about the characters, with the insults and name calling often being so funny and so biting.
posted by Frayed Knot at 2:15 PM on May 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
Also like a sitcom, it plays fast and loose with the facts. Very little of the deal making holds up to scrutiny, and the timing and speed of it all is ridiculous. But, as you lay out so well, it sets up situations in which the character play off each other, beautifully.
And it is, of course, loaded with belly laugh worthy one-liners, just like a good sitcom. These also have only passing relation to the drama. Tether, they are all about the characters, with the insults and name calling often being so funny and so biting.
posted by Frayed Knot at 2:15 PM on May 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
This episode joins a long list of film and TV shows that have somehow referenced the fable of the scorpion and the frog. In this case it is Tom who pins Shiv as the one who will be unable to resist sabotaging things, even if it causes her to suffer too - because to do so is just “in her nature”.
posted by rongorongo at 3:49 PM on May 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by rongorongo at 3:49 PM on May 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Good episode, can’t wait to see what transpires at Logan’s funeral.
posted by oldnumberseven at 7:36 PM on May 8, 2023
posted by oldnumberseven at 7:36 PM on May 8, 2023
Slate Money’s Succession Podcast has this episode’s directors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini on this week.
posted by boogieboy at 11:34 PM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by boogieboy at 11:34 PM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
Was the Ebba response to comforting drop about poor India subscription rate a play on the boys?
I am wondering if it is a play not just on them but also on Shiv? Not totally sure if Succession does this kind of long con, exactly; and it's a tribute to the character that they created in Mattson (and tribute to Skarsgård, holy hell--that guy!) that we REALLY do not know if he's the kind of loose cannon who would 1) run a company badly enough that such a massive "metrics" error re: their India base could plausibly happen, and then 2) actually think he could brazen it out by closing the deal asap and the fraudulent numbers get swamped, or folded in unnoticed, in the hoopla?
OR--option 2--is Mattson actually a very sane manipulator & businessperson, who is playing the kids against each other to take down all three. Maybe the India scandal and the Ebba scandal both are complete fabrications.
Argument for the second theory: Mattson has successfully used Shiv to get the inside info on her brothers' plans. He told her the story about his harassment of Ebba, to bring her in close (and we really don't even know if it's true--Roman's "rat-fucker" uncovered the same dirt, but who knows if Mattson planted that too). Shiv got Mattson into the party so he could do damage control re: the brothers' work on regulatory (or, let's be real, so that she could do damage control on his behalf).
So, then, AT the party, Mattson loves all over Shiv; again, uses her, lets her work her connections to protect him; and even presumes she will gracefully acquiesce in public to the suggestion that Tom might be on the chopping block. (Which, nb, presumably is news to Shiv in the moment, since she clearly had some influence over the "kill list" last week, which did not include Tom.)
Later Mattson tells Shiv she can have "anything" in the acquisition--but does not actually commit to so much as a square of waystar toilet paper (They will circle back to that, apparently).
Anyway. The fight ("Ebbaaaa! Ebbaaaa!") in this scenario would have been a setup. Sad Ebba goes on the balcony for a smoke, the failsons follow her out there (of course. Predictable, to all parties). Ebba, with barely a conversational push from the boys, unloads the most dangerous and closely held secret Mattson/Gojo has. I mean, really? According to harassment story the Roy kids are hearing, Ebba's got plenty of reason to want to get away from Mattson. And she says she's getting out in 3 months. But-- whatever HER golden parachute's gonna be, it's not going to be helped either by tanking the deal OR for that matter (if the deal is tanked), subjecting GoJo itself to massive embarrassing company-devaluing public scrutiny. Why in the name of god would this comms person, who has social anxiety supposedly & doesn't even like to talk to people at parties, suddenly open up & spill this to Kendall & Rome of all people? IF the harassment story is true, then, sure, maybe she doesn't care about burning Mattson down. But against her own interests, when she could just hold the party line for 3 months, until her planned exit? Nah!!
SO, sorry for my long setup here. Bottom line, maybe Mattson is setting up messieurs CEO & COO to try to blow things up with Waystar's board (or go solo, as Kendall's predictably now doing with Frank) over completely made-up stories? Both the India numbers, and the dysfunctional relationship with Ebba? Is is possible that in this case, the Waystar board ends up dealing with an apparently crazy CEO/COO; all confidence lost in Roman & Kendall, who have now stooped so low as to peddle fairy tales to tank the deal (the one they had sworn to shepherd through); tons of damage control to do at a vulnerable stage for Waystar; Waystar's value plummets because god only knows who is in control by now; and Mattson steps in to save the day (while renegotiating a much MUCH better deal)? I'm not a business or wall street person so I'm not totally sure how that would/could play? Could Kendall & Roman be booted from their positions on a no-confidence vote? (Would be a lovely callback to season 1! And if that happens, my god I'd love to see Frank's hand go up.)
I'm also not sure what the kids' controlling interest amounts to; but since they don't each have a controlling interest--if they are at each other's throats (and/or any trust they have had in each other is OVER--and I do think that's where we're headed), then the controlling interest too goes up in smoke.
So then... if Mattson's strategy is to divide & conquer--which in one respect it definitely is, the way he's pulled Shiv to his side--but if his long game is that he doesn't want ANY of the Roys involved in his own new ikea-ed-to-fuck media entity, then now he needs to unload Shiv. He could have been confident (going along with the theory that all of this might be a setup) that the boys would tell Shiv about India, and that Shiv would come running to him. So, once again--during that confrontation with her--is he really that off-the-chain erratic person he presented to Shiv? Or is he simply done with her services, and so he's blowing up their relationship? In which case, maybe Mattson figures she runs back to her brothers; or maybe just that he's destroyed her confidence in him; or maybe he doesn't even care the specific outcome. He's just fractured all of them to bits (including Tom!). His work here is done, and now he can just sit back and watch the fireworks while the Roy kids self-destruct? One thing we can be sure of is that Mattson is NOT team Shiv. He has taken & taken & taken from her. But he has not given her a SCRAP in return. Unless maybe you count the convo about the frozen blood, which (theoretically) gave her leverage. But that is, again, another reason I suspect that story might be bullshit.
The kids don't really have receipts (far as we know) on any of this dirt they've been told; they're all running off half-cocked in different directions, just believing everything. And maybe everything is TRUE!! I dunno. Just seems all a bit convenient to me. And Ebba & Mattson cozying up together in the background, in the scene when Rome tears Con a new one? Were Rome & Kendall even noticing that?? Like... when did Ebba & Mattson actually have a chance to reconcile, post Ebba's supposedly being humiliated by her team, and then her supposedly crying into the tea she was spilling to R&K?
Kendall's plan right now (I think) with Frank is to blow the whistle on GoJo, take down Mattson, and then Waystar acquires GoJo, easy peasy. But what if Mattson's a step ahead, and his plan is to decapitate the (interim) Roy leadership at Waystar, thus devaluing it, and acquire at a lower price and without any of that pesky family (whom he clearly despises) in power? Is that plausible?
Whatever the kids' many shortcomings, it seems pretty clear that the ONLY chance in hell that they have is if their power (and, I personally believe, some individual skills) is consolidated.
And at this point in the narrative, they are actively working against each other (well, I don't know about Roman, but I expect that's coming). I don't expect any of that to get better, and don't see how it ends well for any of the three. Someone's gonna win, and I guess my money's on Mattson at this point. Although who knows!! Maybe Mattson is Elon Musk, just another guy with more ego & money than sense or empathy, and he really is simply as nuts as he seems.
If any of this comes true, there are a couple lines I'd like to see come back & bite Rome & Kendall in the ass. One, when Rome says to Mattson, on the mountain, "if you tell anyone anything I've said here, I will say it was a negotiating tactic." Would love to see Mattson say that back to Rome, if it turns out Mattson & company have been up to shenanigans. And second, when Kendall said (think it was the same scene) to Mattson, "I'm already rich." Yikes. I don't know how MUCH wealth these kids have, we know it's billions; but also largely not liquid. Wonder if Kendall might end up a lot less rich.
I have another comment but it's on a different topic, and this is already FAR too long, so.
posted by torticat at 2:59 AM on May 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
I am wondering if it is a play not just on them but also on Shiv? Not totally sure if Succession does this kind of long con, exactly; and it's a tribute to the character that they created in Mattson (and tribute to Skarsgård, holy hell--that guy!) that we REALLY do not know if he's the kind of loose cannon who would 1) run a company badly enough that such a massive "metrics" error re: their India base could plausibly happen, and then 2) actually think he could brazen it out by closing the deal asap and the fraudulent numbers get swamped, or folded in unnoticed, in the hoopla?
OR--option 2--is Mattson actually a very sane manipulator & businessperson, who is playing the kids against each other to take down all three. Maybe the India scandal and the Ebba scandal both are complete fabrications.
Argument for the second theory: Mattson has successfully used Shiv to get the inside info on her brothers' plans. He told her the story about his harassment of Ebba, to bring her in close (and we really don't even know if it's true--Roman's "rat-fucker" uncovered the same dirt, but who knows if Mattson planted that too). Shiv got Mattson into the party so he could do damage control re: the brothers' work on regulatory (or, let's be real, so that she could do damage control on his behalf).
So, then, AT the party, Mattson loves all over Shiv; again, uses her, lets her work her connections to protect him; and even presumes she will gracefully acquiesce in public to the suggestion that Tom might be on the chopping block. (Which, nb, presumably is news to Shiv in the moment, since she clearly had some influence over the "kill list" last week, which did not include Tom.)
Later Mattson tells Shiv she can have "anything" in the acquisition--but does not actually commit to so much as a square of waystar toilet paper (They will circle back to that, apparently).
Anyway. The fight ("Ebbaaaa! Ebbaaaa!") in this scenario would have been a setup. Sad Ebba goes on the balcony for a smoke, the failsons follow her out there (of course. Predictable, to all parties). Ebba, with barely a conversational push from the boys, unloads the most dangerous and closely held secret Mattson/Gojo has. I mean, really? According to harassment story the Roy kids are hearing, Ebba's got plenty of reason to want to get away from Mattson. And she says she's getting out in 3 months. But-- whatever HER golden parachute's gonna be, it's not going to be helped either by tanking the deal OR for that matter (if the deal is tanked), subjecting GoJo itself to massive embarrassing company-devaluing public scrutiny. Why in the name of god would this comms person, who has social anxiety supposedly & doesn't even like to talk to people at parties, suddenly open up & spill this to Kendall & Rome of all people? IF the harassment story is true, then, sure, maybe she doesn't care about burning Mattson down. But against her own interests, when she could just hold the party line for 3 months, until her planned exit? Nah!!
SO, sorry for my long setup here. Bottom line, maybe Mattson is setting up messieurs CEO & COO to try to blow things up with Waystar's board (or go solo, as Kendall's predictably now doing with Frank) over completely made-up stories? Both the India numbers, and the dysfunctional relationship with Ebba? Is is possible that in this case, the Waystar board ends up dealing with an apparently crazy CEO/COO; all confidence lost in Roman & Kendall, who have now stooped so low as to peddle fairy tales to tank the deal (the one they had sworn to shepherd through); tons of damage control to do at a vulnerable stage for Waystar; Waystar's value plummets because god only knows who is in control by now; and Mattson steps in to save the day (while renegotiating a much MUCH better deal)? I'm not a business or wall street person so I'm not totally sure how that would/could play? Could Kendall & Roman be booted from their positions on a no-confidence vote? (Would be a lovely callback to season 1! And if that happens, my god I'd love to see Frank's hand go up.)
I'm also not sure what the kids' controlling interest amounts to; but since they don't each have a controlling interest--if they are at each other's throats (and/or any trust they have had in each other is OVER--and I do think that's where we're headed), then the controlling interest too goes up in smoke.
So then... if Mattson's strategy is to divide & conquer--which in one respect it definitely is, the way he's pulled Shiv to his side--but if his long game is that he doesn't want ANY of the Roys involved in his own new ikea-ed-to-fuck media entity, then now he needs to unload Shiv. He could have been confident (going along with the theory that all of this might be a setup) that the boys would tell Shiv about India, and that Shiv would come running to him. So, once again--during that confrontation with her--is he really that off-the-chain erratic person he presented to Shiv? Or is he simply done with her services, and so he's blowing up their relationship? In which case, maybe Mattson figures she runs back to her brothers; or maybe just that he's destroyed her confidence in him; or maybe he doesn't even care the specific outcome. He's just fractured all of them to bits (including Tom!). His work here is done, and now he can just sit back and watch the fireworks while the Roy kids self-destruct? One thing we can be sure of is that Mattson is NOT team Shiv. He has taken & taken & taken from her. But he has not given her a SCRAP in return. Unless maybe you count the convo about the frozen blood, which (theoretically) gave her leverage. But that is, again, another reason I suspect that story might be bullshit.
The kids don't really have receipts (far as we know) on any of this dirt they've been told; they're all running off half-cocked in different directions, just believing everything. And maybe everything is TRUE!! I dunno. Just seems all a bit convenient to me. And Ebba & Mattson cozying up together in the background, in the scene when Rome tears Con a new one? Were Rome & Kendall even noticing that?? Like... when did Ebba & Mattson actually have a chance to reconcile, post Ebba's supposedly being humiliated by her team, and then her supposedly crying into the tea she was spilling to R&K?
Kendall's plan right now (I think) with Frank is to blow the whistle on GoJo, take down Mattson, and then Waystar acquires GoJo, easy peasy. But what if Mattson's a step ahead, and his plan is to decapitate the (interim) Roy leadership at Waystar, thus devaluing it, and acquire at a lower price and without any of that pesky family (whom he clearly despises) in power? Is that plausible?
Whatever the kids' many shortcomings, it seems pretty clear that the ONLY chance in hell that they have is if their power (and, I personally believe, some individual skills) is consolidated.
And at this point in the narrative, they are actively working against each other (well, I don't know about Roman, but I expect that's coming). I don't expect any of that to get better, and don't see how it ends well for any of the three. Someone's gonna win, and I guess my money's on Mattson at this point. Although who knows!! Maybe Mattson is Elon Musk, just another guy with more ego & money than sense or empathy, and he really is simply as nuts as he seems.
If any of this comes true, there are a couple lines I'd like to see come back & bite Rome & Kendall in the ass. One, when Rome says to Mattson, on the mountain, "if you tell anyone anything I've said here, I will say it was a negotiating tactic." Would love to see Mattson say that back to Rome, if it turns out Mattson & company have been up to shenanigans. And second, when Kendall said (think it was the same scene) to Mattson, "I'm already rich." Yikes. I don't know how MUCH wealth these kids have, we know it's billions; but also largely not liquid. Wonder if Kendall might end up a lot less rich.
I have another comment but it's on a different topic, and this is already FAR too long, so.
posted by torticat at 2:59 AM on May 9, 2023 [13 favorites]
For what it's worth, the Succession writers have all been pretty open about how their policy is "no hidden schemes"—I think Jesse Armstrong or Lucy Prebble said that they don't write plots that revolve around characters hiding information or knowing more than the audience.
My assumption is that Ebba is telling the truth about India—partly because it feels like the more interesting twist, partly because we've had multiple rounds of "is Matsson playing 4D chess?" that all ended in "no maybe he's just kinda dumb and awful," and partly because Succession really does seem invested in not mythologizing the rich shitbags who rule the world.
(A Reddit comment pointed out that Succession feels in many ways like a pointed retort to Billions, which does relish in the "Machavellian billionaire genius" trope. Succession will reward heat-of-the-moment bloodthirsty tactics, like Ken's choice to turn on Logan at the end of s2 or Tom's similar betrayal of the siblings at the end of s3, but any longer-term strategy almost invariably leads to disaster: witness the vote of no confidence, the attempt to sink Waystar with cruises, Ken's plan to step up as CEO, Shiv's plan to step up as CEO, Roman's plan to step up etc.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:08 AM on May 9, 2023 [9 favorites]
My assumption is that Ebba is telling the truth about India—partly because it feels like the more interesting twist, partly because we've had multiple rounds of "is Matsson playing 4D chess?" that all ended in "no maybe he's just kinda dumb and awful," and partly because Succession really does seem invested in not mythologizing the rich shitbags who rule the world.
(A Reddit comment pointed out that Succession feels in many ways like a pointed retort to Billions, which does relish in the "Machavellian billionaire genius" trope. Succession will reward heat-of-the-moment bloodthirsty tactics, like Ken's choice to turn on Logan at the end of s2 or Tom's similar betrayal of the siblings at the end of s3, but any longer-term strategy almost invariably leads to disaster: witness the vote of no confidence, the attempt to sink Waystar with cruises, Ken's plan to step up as CEO, Shiv's plan to step up as CEO, Roman's plan to step up etc.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:08 AM on May 9, 2023 [9 favorites]
The sub-plot of the red wine that Frank says tastes of "wet dog"
Tom to Sommelier: "the German one...with its label... it's a light fruity red...don't say its biodynamic... and don't say its German...just say its a light fruity red... and a little bit of fizz is normal"
Tom to Nathan: "its a light and fruity, the kind of wine that separates the connoisseurs from the Malbec morons".
Tom to Sommelier: "can you push a few more of these [bottles of wine] ..no - in fact put them away so we create a kind of.. scarcity"
posted by rongorongo at 5:47 AM on May 9, 2023 [6 favorites]
Tom to Sommelier: "the German one...with its label... it's a light fruity red...don't say its biodynamic... and don't say its German...just say its a light fruity red... and a little bit of fizz is normal"
Tom to Nathan: "its a light and fruity, the kind of wine that separates the connoisseurs from the Malbec morons".
Tom to Sommelier: "can you push a few more of these [bottles of wine] ..no - in fact put them away so we create a kind of.. scarcity"
posted by rongorongo at 5:47 AM on May 9, 2023 [6 favorites]
Two of the things I've found least convincing recently are Matsson suddenly telling all to Shiv about sending blood etc, and Ebba suddenly telling all to Kendall and Roman about India. Both came too out of nowhere, and I don't see why Matsson or Ebba would be so open about these things to the Roys, without a lot more build-up.
Which makes me hope that both are part of a GoJo plot to undermine the Roys. It would be fun to see their reactions when they learn this at the worst possible, climactic moment. But I also expect that we have to take both of these at face value, and that they're, unusually, some not-very-convincing plotting/writing.
posted by fabius at 5:52 AM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
Which makes me hope that both are part of a GoJo plot to undermine the Roys. It would be fun to see their reactions when they learn this at the worst possible, climactic moment. But I also expect that we have to take both of these at face value, and that they're, unusually, some not-very-convincing plotting/writing.
posted by fabius at 5:52 AM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
I loved the wine plot. particularly this full line: "a little bit of fizz is normal, it’s sophisticated". Oh man how many times I've hear bad wine papered over that way. Bad wine has a long history on Succession. This particular wine has shown up before, it comes from Tom & Shiv's very own vineyard. Which regrettably is in Germany and makes red wines. Maybe if they hyperdecant it it'll improve? Awkward to put it in a blender if it's fizzy.
I don't think Matsson and crew are planning some deep scheme. Like folks have said, this just isn't that kind of show. The India thing does come out of nowhere but, eh, most things come out of nowhere in Succession. Except fruity pétillant German red wine. That's been a long setup.
posted by Nelson at 6:26 AM on May 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
I don't think Matsson and crew are planning some deep scheme. Like folks have said, this just isn't that kind of show. The India thing does come out of nowhere but, eh, most things come out of nowhere in Succession. Except fruity pétillant German red wine. That's been a long setup.
posted by Nelson at 6:26 AM on May 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
The India thing surprised me because I don’t see on its face how that kind of thing could tank a deal like this. So they miscalculated or lied about how many subscribers they have in India - that’s one number? Is the concern then that the other numbers are suspect? How is that just coming to light now? It’s a paid service. If Twitter said there were 200M Americans paying for twitter, we’d agree that was obviously not true (right?).
Two of the things I've found least convincing recently are Matsson suddenly telling all to Shiv about sending blood etc, and Ebba suddenly telling all to Kendall and Roman about India.
My take is that Matsson was testing Shiv and Ebba was mad because Lukas and Oskar were being shitty (and I don’t think Ebba actually said much, though obviously it was enough). It was compelling to watch Shiv realize Matsson is full of shit.
The best scene re: wine in Succession, IMHO, is when Tom is trying the wine from the vineyard he and Shiv bought. He tries to describe it positively and finally he says, “it’s not very nice, is it, Shiv?” And it’s a metaphor for their relationship.
posted by kat518 at 6:53 AM on May 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
Two of the things I've found least convincing recently are Matsson suddenly telling all to Shiv about sending blood etc, and Ebba suddenly telling all to Kendall and Roman about India.
My take is that Matsson was testing Shiv and Ebba was mad because Lukas and Oskar were being shitty (and I don’t think Ebba actually said much, though obviously it was enough). It was compelling to watch Shiv realize Matsson is full of shit.
The best scene re: wine in Succession, IMHO, is when Tom is trying the wine from the vineyard he and Shiv bought. He tries to describe it positively and finally he says, “it’s not very nice, is it, Shiv?” And it’s a metaphor for their relationship.
posted by kat518 at 6:53 AM on May 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
Tom Wambsgans living my dream of yelling at everyone to gtfo of his house at the end of a party.
posted by maddieD at 6:59 AM on May 9, 2023 [16 favorites]
posted by maddieD at 6:59 AM on May 9, 2023 [16 favorites]
I don’t know why this episode left me feeling sympathetic towards Shiv but I feel like she never felt certain that Tom loved her for her as opposed to her last name. It was easier to believe when he was clearly infatuated with her but her greatest fear was that he’d pick Logan over her, and he did.
posted by kat518 at 7:11 AM on May 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by kat518 at 7:11 AM on May 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Skarsgard is fantastic in Succession and he was harrowing in Big Little Lies, so maybe it's a true testament to what a good actor he is that, despite all these stunning and awful roles, he will forever be the male model yelling "ex-SQUEEZE me, have you ever heard of STYLING GEL?" in Zoolander.
You just blew my mind.
posted by Ragged Richard at 7:43 AM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
You just blew my mind.
posted by Ragged Richard at 7:43 AM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
Matsson, out of focus in the background, pointing at himself when Connor says there’s only one person in the room who doesn’t treat him like he’s a joke.
Great catch!
But what does it mean? What does it portend?
Is it just one more part in his divide-and-conquer scheme?
Does he have big plans for Con?
Does he actually believe Connor's *not* a joke?!?
posted by whuppy at 8:09 AM on May 9, 2023
Great catch!
But what does it mean? What does it portend?
Is it just one more part in his divide-and-conquer scheme?
Does he have big plans for Con?
Does he actually believe Connor's *not* a joke?!?
posted by whuppy at 8:09 AM on May 9, 2023
I think he was just goofing around.
posted by Flashman at 8:21 AM on May 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Flashman at 8:21 AM on May 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
I'm sorry, how can Tom and Shiv fight about whether she'll end up "alright" when she will, basically no matter what happens, always be sitting on top of a near-literal mountain of money? Like, sure, Tom loses his job, maybe he lands somewhere else, maybe he coasts for a while, but you can be sure he's not getting any of Shiv's money, and he'll have to find another job sooner or later.
The stakes in this show are basically zero for everybody except Tom, Greg, and Willa, and to a much lesser extent the Waystar suits, but nobody can say it because it would ruin the illusion that the dumb shit any of these morons do actually matters.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:26 AM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
The stakes in this show are basically zero for everybody except Tom, Greg, and Willa, and to a much lesser extent the Waystar suits, but nobody can say it because it would ruin the illusion that the dumb shit any of these morons do actually matters.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:26 AM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
yes you have articulated the point of the fight they were having
posted by JimBennett at 11:08 AM on May 9, 2023
posted by JimBennett at 11:08 AM on May 9, 2023
I am wondering if it is a play not just on them but also on Shiv?
I noticed that when Shiv approached Matsson about the "India numbers", Mattson immediately brought up the issue, in spite of Shiv not yet mentioning India. hm.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:06 PM on May 9, 2023
I noticed that when Shiv approached Matsson about the "India numbers", Mattson immediately brought up the issue, in spite of Shiv not yet mentioning India. hm.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:06 PM on May 9, 2023
Does he actually believe Connor's *not* a joke?!?
Messing with him/them! Besides goofily pointing at himself in the background, he's yelling after Connor as he leaves, "I'm with you! You got my vote!"
posted by torticat at 12:47 PM on May 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Messing with him/them! Besides goofily pointing at himself in the background, he's yelling after Connor as he leaves, "I'm with you! You got my vote!"
posted by torticat at 12:47 PM on May 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
The whole Greg firing spree and bragging to Matsson about it, they couldn’t be foreshadowing Greg (or Gary as Matsson called him) being the one to eventually slit Tom’s throat, could they? That would be brutal. And funny.
posted by chill at 1:14 PM on May 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by chill at 1:14 PM on May 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
If Twitter said there were 200M Americans paying for twitter, we’d agree that was obviously not true (right?).
If this was back when Twitter was a publicly traded company (as GoJo is on TV show), it would have never sold to Musk because it would have been fined into oblivion by the SEC and it's entire leadership would currently be preparing for their criminal trials.
Also, you example is missing a zero, because the streaming service in the Succession-verse is so large that even the subscribers they (maybe) made up are larger than the customer base of every real-world streaming service combined if Matsson's "make more sense if there were too Indias" comment is literal.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:16 PM on May 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
If this was back when Twitter was a publicly traded company (as GoJo is on TV show), it would have never sold to Musk because it would have been fined into oblivion by the SEC and it's entire leadership would currently be preparing for their criminal trials.
Also, you example is missing a zero, because the streaming service in the Succession-verse is so large that even the subscribers they (maybe) made up are larger than the customer base of every real-world streaming service combined if Matsson's "make more sense if there were too Indias" comment is literal.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:16 PM on May 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
He meant that double of whatever their audience was in India, not the population of India.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:00 PM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Apocryphon at 5:00 PM on May 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
Pretty sure the India thing is not a play as I remember Matsson genuinely seemed kind of stressed-but-hiding-it back when they were at the offsite in Norway. Mostly when he first gave the higher offer but also a little bit in the scene where the brothers were threathening to delay the deal for months. Didn't Matsson mention something like 'I need this (fast)' back there?
And yeah, if the news comes out and Waystar use their media channel to blow it up even more, even apart from any regulatory consequences, at the least, his stock drops hard, the deal tanks (paid 50/50 in stocks/cash) and he's vulnerable to the reverse take over.
But agreed with others in this thread that the real drama is in the relationships. Will they just not acknowledge the pregnancy at all, and Shiv quietly and off screen gets an abortion? Having a kid with Tom at this point is such a recipe for misery for everyone involved.
posted by kwartel at 3:32 AM on May 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
And yeah, if the news comes out and Waystar use their media channel to blow it up even more, even apart from any regulatory consequences, at the least, his stock drops hard, the deal tanks (paid 50/50 in stocks/cash) and he's vulnerable to the reverse take over.
But agreed with others in this thread that the real drama is in the relationships. Will they just not acknowledge the pregnancy at all, and Shiv quietly and off screen gets an abortion? Having a kid with Tom at this point is such a recipe for misery for everyone involved.
posted by kwartel at 3:32 AM on May 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
I will also note that Ebba spilling the beans on India appeared to happen organically following Greg attaching himself to the Gojo group and offering to fire her. Didn’t appear pre-meditated.
posted by chill at 4:13 AM on May 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by chill at 4:13 AM on May 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yeah I mean like, one of the disturbing things about the tech industry—probably about the corporate world in general, but tech's the one I know best—is that the people at the top are really in over their heads. They're emotionally immature, they don't understand most things about the world around them, and they're so surrounded by people telling them that their ultraspecific definition of "intelligent" is actually the best one that they're drinking their own Kool-Aid in a really precarious way.
Kara Swisher, who hosts the official Succession podcast, was loudly-and-proudly berating people who thought that Elon Musk would run Twitter into the ground. Like, she was doing that after Elon Musk took over. She has since changed her stance, in part because Elon specifically sent a harassment brigade her way, and on the podcast she affects this knowing cynicism about these people... but Swisher has been a tech reporter for decades, and she's always adopted this attitude that she was covering Great People changing the world in vast and incredible ways. The reason she has any power in the industry at all is that she's been too blithely optimistic about Big Tech for it to even qualify as sucking up: she's been a believer in this shit.
Similarly, Paul Graham—who founded YCombinator, one of the most influential investment groups in Silicon Valley—was smugly tweeting about how delusional the hoi polloi were by criticizing Elon Musk. Graham is the guy who initially invested in: Reddit, Dropbox, Stripe, Airbnb, Twitch, Quora, Instacart, Discus, and 9Gag, among about a hundred others. And in the year 2023 anno Domini, he was still sneering at people who thought that Elon Musk, who had already carried an actual sink into Twitter HQ, might be kind of a stupid fucking dipshit.
Swisher and Graham have both reversed their positions on Elon, but neither of them has commented on the reversal in any way. They can't. Because to admit that their initial take was wrong, they'd have to at least passingly explain why they thought the most obvious fucking mistake in the world was actually a clever genius ploy, and the only real explanation is that the entire industry is built on sand and delusion. (And the sand it's built on, much like Willa's, will absolutely give you mites.)
So much of Big Tech is founded on propaganda. Even in the case of a lot of the biggest companies, the real edge isn't technological: it's a delusional media that doesn't know the first thing about interrogating Big Tech's claims. Beyond that, you're looking at cutthroat avarice—Microsoft's monopolistic maneuverings, Uber's incredibly shitty anticompetitive practices, Amazon's literal everything—and the exploitation of regulations that haven't been written yet. Facebook completely changed the ways that publishers operate online by flat-out lying to them about statistics, in a way that has literally ruined the media sector. "Exploiting ignorance" is the number one or two money-maker online, running neck-and-neck with flat-out "exploitation."
And I'm saying all this as a self-identified tech optimist. I still harbor bright-and-glowy feelings about what digital technology might do for the world, even amidst this godawfulness and chaos. I'll even go as far as to hold sympathetic and respectful views of people in tech who have done some combination of openly stupid and awful things: I have some measure of respect and even appreciation for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey, and unironically am a fan of lots of Apple leadership. But it's one thing to acknowledge the various intelligences that have shaped the sector, and another to buy into the myth that these people are captains of industry, or even that they're as savvy as a halfway-intelligent political schemer. Thus far, they've gotten away with murder because the average age of an American politician is 103, which means they can simply throw a wall of jargon at Congress and walk away scot-free. But they're so arrogant, so convinced that they don't need to understand anything but tech, that they're bewilderingly incompetent on every other front. And most of them don't understand tech especially well, either.
(I was going to say something about how there are smart CEOs in successful-but-smaller companies and mention Anil Dash as a particular smarties, but I think I still have some comments from a previous account flaming him on MetaFilter for suggesting a white background, so, whoops.)
All this is to say that Matsson feels extremely plausible to me. He's not not a shark—Logan wasn't an idiot to consider selling to him. But he's convinced that his position in the tech world makes him invincible: he can flaunt any norm and any regulation, he can abuse his employees in ways that Logan himself never did, and he can gloat over anybody who's mired in any other industry, because he's the future and they're not. And to some extent he can get away with this—but tech CEOs have failed, and when they fall, they fall hard. And every time, it seems, they fall for the same basic reasons: they're messy as fuck, they're borderline incompetent, and they assume that they're untouchable. Their upper management is typically about as screwy and incestuous as a high school drama club—witness Theranos' weird sex scandals, or the WeWork founder's batshitinsane wife firing random employees because of their auras—and when they melt down, they melt down in shockingly adolescent ways.
The only reason they don't always melt down is twofold: one, some people buy into these myths more than they ought to; and two, the ones who don't buy it are aware that they're unbelievably close to terrifying power, which might either crush them or belong to them, depending on how they play their cards. Sam Bankman-Fried is the most notable recent example of this: a dude who should've been making weird Scott Alexander fanboy posts on Tumblr instead entrusted with billions of dollars and the world's grodiest polycule. They self-style as geniuses, but even the genuinely brilliant tech overlord—and "genuinely brilliant" is fucking rare—is usually unbelievably dim. Like, I hold that Steve Jobs was as incredible a visionary as he's often given credit for, and even then he managed to get kicked out of his own company once, and eventually died because he was so invested in alternative medicine that he didn't bother consulting actual doctors about his cancer. This is peak intelligence, where tech is concerned: everybody else is dumber than this.
The reason I know that Matsson isn't pulling some double-bluff with India is that, if he'd attempted that, it would have felt like an eight-year-old trying to hoodwink his parents into leaving the cookie jar unguarded. It would have been the most asinine attempt at con artistry in the fucking world. And maybe it would have worked anyway, because the Roy kids are still that dumb, but there'd be no uncertainty in this thread as to whether or not he was running a con. Instead, the joke would probably be that Ken and Shiv and Roman instantly recognize the bluff, I mean instantly, and then somehow talk themselves into thinking that he wasn't bluffing after all. Because that happens too. Because tech people, and I include myself in this, and I say this so so lovingly, are the dumbest people in the goddamn world.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:00 AM on May 10, 2023 [15 favorites]
Kara Swisher, who hosts the official Succession podcast, was loudly-and-proudly berating people who thought that Elon Musk would run Twitter into the ground. Like, she was doing that after Elon Musk took over. She has since changed her stance, in part because Elon specifically sent a harassment brigade her way, and on the podcast she affects this knowing cynicism about these people... but Swisher has been a tech reporter for decades, and she's always adopted this attitude that she was covering Great People changing the world in vast and incredible ways. The reason she has any power in the industry at all is that she's been too blithely optimistic about Big Tech for it to even qualify as sucking up: she's been a believer in this shit.
Similarly, Paul Graham—who founded YCombinator, one of the most influential investment groups in Silicon Valley—was smugly tweeting about how delusional the hoi polloi were by criticizing Elon Musk. Graham is the guy who initially invested in: Reddit, Dropbox, Stripe, Airbnb, Twitch, Quora, Instacart, Discus, and 9Gag, among about a hundred others. And in the year 2023 anno Domini, he was still sneering at people who thought that Elon Musk, who had already carried an actual sink into Twitter HQ, might be kind of a stupid fucking dipshit.
Swisher and Graham have both reversed their positions on Elon, but neither of them has commented on the reversal in any way. They can't. Because to admit that their initial take was wrong, they'd have to at least passingly explain why they thought the most obvious fucking mistake in the world was actually a clever genius ploy, and the only real explanation is that the entire industry is built on sand and delusion. (And the sand it's built on, much like Willa's, will absolutely give you mites.)
So much of Big Tech is founded on propaganda. Even in the case of a lot of the biggest companies, the real edge isn't technological: it's a delusional media that doesn't know the first thing about interrogating Big Tech's claims. Beyond that, you're looking at cutthroat avarice—Microsoft's monopolistic maneuverings, Uber's incredibly shitty anticompetitive practices, Amazon's literal everything—and the exploitation of regulations that haven't been written yet. Facebook completely changed the ways that publishers operate online by flat-out lying to them about statistics, in a way that has literally ruined the media sector. "Exploiting ignorance" is the number one or two money-maker online, running neck-and-neck with flat-out "exploitation."
And I'm saying all this as a self-identified tech optimist. I still harbor bright-and-glowy feelings about what digital technology might do for the world, even amidst this godawfulness and chaos. I'll even go as far as to hold sympathetic and respectful views of people in tech who have done some combination of openly stupid and awful things: I have some measure of respect and even appreciation for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey, and unironically am a fan of lots of Apple leadership. But it's one thing to acknowledge the various intelligences that have shaped the sector, and another to buy into the myth that these people are captains of industry, or even that they're as savvy as a halfway-intelligent political schemer. Thus far, they've gotten away with murder because the average age of an American politician is 103, which means they can simply throw a wall of jargon at Congress and walk away scot-free. But they're so arrogant, so convinced that they don't need to understand anything but tech, that they're bewilderingly incompetent on every other front. And most of them don't understand tech especially well, either.
(I was going to say something about how there are smart CEOs in successful-but-smaller companies and mention Anil Dash as a particular smarties, but I think I still have some comments from a previous account flaming him on MetaFilter for suggesting a white background, so, whoops.)
All this is to say that Matsson feels extremely plausible to me. He's not not a shark—Logan wasn't an idiot to consider selling to him. But he's convinced that his position in the tech world makes him invincible: he can flaunt any norm and any regulation, he can abuse his employees in ways that Logan himself never did, and he can gloat over anybody who's mired in any other industry, because he's the future and they're not. And to some extent he can get away with this—but tech CEOs have failed, and when they fall, they fall hard. And every time, it seems, they fall for the same basic reasons: they're messy as fuck, they're borderline incompetent, and they assume that they're untouchable. Their upper management is typically about as screwy and incestuous as a high school drama club—witness Theranos' weird sex scandals, or the WeWork founder's batshitinsane wife firing random employees because of their auras—and when they melt down, they melt down in shockingly adolescent ways.
The only reason they don't always melt down is twofold: one, some people buy into these myths more than they ought to; and two, the ones who don't buy it are aware that they're unbelievably close to terrifying power, which might either crush them or belong to them, depending on how they play their cards. Sam Bankman-Fried is the most notable recent example of this: a dude who should've been making weird Scott Alexander fanboy posts on Tumblr instead entrusted with billions of dollars and the world's grodiest polycule. They self-style as geniuses, but even the genuinely brilliant tech overlord—and "genuinely brilliant" is fucking rare—is usually unbelievably dim. Like, I hold that Steve Jobs was as incredible a visionary as he's often given credit for, and even then he managed to get kicked out of his own company once, and eventually died because he was so invested in alternative medicine that he didn't bother consulting actual doctors about his cancer. This is peak intelligence, where tech is concerned: everybody else is dumber than this.
The reason I know that Matsson isn't pulling some double-bluff with India is that, if he'd attempted that, it would have felt like an eight-year-old trying to hoodwink his parents into leaving the cookie jar unguarded. It would have been the most asinine attempt at con artistry in the fucking world. And maybe it would have worked anyway, because the Roy kids are still that dumb, but there'd be no uncertainty in this thread as to whether or not he was running a con. Instead, the joke would probably be that Ken and Shiv and Roman instantly recognize the bluff, I mean instantly, and then somehow talk themselves into thinking that he wasn't bluffing after all. Because that happens too. Because tech people, and I include myself in this, and I say this so so lovingly, are the dumbest people in the goddamn world.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:00 AM on May 10, 2023 [15 favorites]
If there’s any metaphorical chess played in the succession world, it’s strictly the one-dimensional kind.
posted by boogieboy at 8:26 AM on May 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by boogieboy at 8:26 AM on May 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
Kara Swisher, who hosts the official Succession podcast
this is off topic but i have always found this choice hilarious. it would be like asking Garfield to host a podcast about how Lasagna is bad. whoever at HBO made that pick does not understand the show they're airing lmao.
posted by JimBennett at 8:37 AM on May 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
this is off topic but i have always found this choice hilarious. it would be like asking Garfield to host a podcast about how Lasagna is bad. whoever at HBO made that pick does not understand the show they're airing lmao.
posted by JimBennett at 8:37 AM on May 10, 2023 [8 favorites]
It's an extremely modern-day-HBO choice, and HBO (well, Discovery or whomever) is an extremely Succession-y company.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:11 PM on May 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:11 PM on May 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
He meant that double of whatever their audience was in India, not the population of India.
This misses the wry humour of his statement. He meant that the inflated number of subscribers is so large that it would only make sense if India was twice as large, that an impossibly high percentage of the Indian population is a subscriber.
posted by Flashman at 8:45 AM on May 11, 2023
This misses the wry humour of his statement. He meant that the inflated number of subscribers is so large that it would only make sense if India was twice as large, that an impossibly high percentage of the Indian population is a subscriber.
posted by Flashman at 8:45 AM on May 11, 2023
Disney+ loses 4m subscribers amid exodus in Indian market
Subscribers to Disney+ services, home to movies such as Toy Story, Monsters, Thor and Black Panther, fell to nearly 158 million from January to March, the second quarter of customer losses after a net loss of 2.4 million in the previous three months. Analysts had expected Disney+ to add more than 1 million customers in the quarter. The shares fell nearly 5% in after-hours trading.posted by Apocryphon at 12:38 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Most of the lost subscribers came from Disney+ Hotstar in India after the company lost streaming rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches. Disney also lost 300,000 customers in the US and Canada, after raising subscription prices in December.
Its a great tribute to the writing and acting in the show, that a psychologist can make a video talking about how the major characters are a showcase for specific types of narcissism. If you are an avid narcissism watcher then you probably have a better chance of predicting what will happen next than anybody else.
posted by rongorongo at 10:53 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by rongorongo at 10:53 PM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Nice mini thread for comedy writer Joel Morris, which touches on the "Sitcom structure" discussed above...
"The characters are masterfully trapped, seemingly in motion, but constantly reset. Pure sitcom."
posted by chill at 4:28 AM on May 12, 2023
"The characters are masterfully trapped, seemingly in motion, but constantly reset. Pure sitcom."
posted by chill at 4:28 AM on May 12, 2023
The stakes in this show are basically zero for everybody except Tom, Greg, and Willa, and to a much lesser extent the Waystar suits, but nobody can say it because it would ruin the illusion that the dumb shit any of these morons do actually matters.
At this point, I'd argue that only Tom is left in that category.
It was noted previously that if Greg's grandfather in fact followed through in giving his shares to Greenpeace - note we have no confirmation that this happened and Greg was part of the Ken-led attack on Logan after that point so his grandfather may well have changed his mind - he would be left with $5m. As Tom points out, that would make him "the tallest dwarf in America, you'd feel like a chump working but not have enough to do nothing". On the other hand, it's not nothing and you could live pretty well in the Midwest on that.
Willa... well it depends on what her pre-nup says, right? Connor is just about romantic and foolish enough (and Willa + mother switched on enough) to make sure that she isn't left with nothing, no matter what happens. She will never be poor (in the context of this series poor = having to work) again at least.
But Tom? He can contact all the lawyers he wants. Probably reach some kind of settlement to keep things out of the news but the reality is Shiv's lawyers would argue that he wasn't a naive kid being tricked into signing - he was a senior business guy himself and knew what he was agreeing too.
The India thing surprised me because I don’t see on its face how that kind of thing could tank a deal like this. So they miscalculated or lied about how many subscribers they have in India - that’s one number? Is the concern then that the other numbers are suspect? How is that just coming to light now? It’s a paid service. If Twitter said there were 200M Americans paying for twitter, we’d agree that was obviously not true (right?).
So part of the challenge of valuing a growth company is that all your indicators are very leading.
We often value a company based on the value of its current cash flows + value due to growth. If that company is something like Ford, then most of the value is based on it's current level of profits not its growth. That means it's pretty hard to be tricked by the company because actual sales have to translate to actual revenue has to translate to actual cash and if the cash isn't showing up... something is being fiddled. That isn't true for the growth numbers but like I said, most of the value is in Ford just selling what it currently sells forever with a small bump due to expected growth.
Fast growing companies are much harder because all the value is in the growth. So you have X free trial subscribers who you assume will become Y paid subscribers and you assume they will stay paid / upgrade to other services based on various historical numbers. So that number "X" is very hard to verify and companies often have tricky custom definitions (see Twitter daily active users) and because of the lag between free sign up and cash showing up, there is no way of using the rest of the financial statements to verify. We don't really know what GoJo's business and revenue model is but if it's like a lot of tech companies then injecting fake early subscription numbers into the system will massively inflate the valuation.
posted by atrazine at 7:28 AM on May 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
At this point, I'd argue that only Tom is left in that category.
It was noted previously that if Greg's grandfather in fact followed through in giving his shares to Greenpeace - note we have no confirmation that this happened and Greg was part of the Ken-led attack on Logan after that point so his grandfather may well have changed his mind - he would be left with $5m. As Tom points out, that would make him "the tallest dwarf in America, you'd feel like a chump working but not have enough to do nothing". On the other hand, it's not nothing and you could live pretty well in the Midwest on that.
Willa... well it depends on what her pre-nup says, right? Connor is just about romantic and foolish enough (and Willa + mother switched on enough) to make sure that she isn't left with nothing, no matter what happens. She will never be poor (in the context of this series poor = having to work) again at least.
But Tom? He can contact all the lawyers he wants. Probably reach some kind of settlement to keep things out of the news but the reality is Shiv's lawyers would argue that he wasn't a naive kid being tricked into signing - he was a senior business guy himself and knew what he was agreeing too.
The India thing surprised me because I don’t see on its face how that kind of thing could tank a deal like this. So they miscalculated or lied about how many subscribers they have in India - that’s one number? Is the concern then that the other numbers are suspect? How is that just coming to light now? It’s a paid service. If Twitter said there were 200M Americans paying for twitter, we’d agree that was obviously not true (right?).
So part of the challenge of valuing a growth company is that all your indicators are very leading.
We often value a company based on the value of its current cash flows + value due to growth. If that company is something like Ford, then most of the value is based on it's current level of profits not its growth. That means it's pretty hard to be tricked by the company because actual sales have to translate to actual revenue has to translate to actual cash and if the cash isn't showing up... something is being fiddled. That isn't true for the growth numbers but like I said, most of the value is in Ford just selling what it currently sells forever with a small bump due to expected growth.
Fast growing companies are much harder because all the value is in the growth. So you have X free trial subscribers who you assume will become Y paid subscribers and you assume they will stay paid / upgrade to other services based on various historical numbers. So that number "X" is very hard to verify and companies often have tricky custom definitions (see Twitter daily active users) and because of the lag between free sign up and cash showing up, there is no way of using the rest of the financial statements to verify. We don't really know what GoJo's business and revenue model is but if it's like a lot of tech companies then injecting fake early subscription numbers into the system will massively inflate the valuation.
posted by atrazine at 7:28 AM on May 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
Kara Swisher, who hosts the official Succession podcast, was loudly-and-proudly berating people who thought that Elon Musk would run Twitter into the ground.
“These aren’t *real* journalists, Richard. They’re *tech* journalists.” — Gavin Belson
posted by mlis at 5:30 PM on May 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
“These aren’t *real* journalists, Richard. They’re *tech* journalists.” — Gavin Belson
posted by mlis at 5:30 PM on May 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
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Kendall, Roman, and Shiv are all finding out they lack the part of their father that made what he did work. Nate even says as much to Kendall as he leaves, "we're not our fathers and that's a good thing".
posted by Nelson at 6:21 AM on May 8, 2023 [14 favorites]