This week we witnessed the further destruction of the reputations of tech “visionaries.” You’d think that after years of watching the likes of Kalanick, Holmes, and Neumann self-destruct we’d have learned something. But, of course, we never learn anything.
Let’s start with dickwad extraordinaire, Mark Zuckerbag. Zucky is knee-deep in trouble.
His company has lost over 70% of its value this year; he’s blowing over $10 billion annually on his bewildering metaverse obsession; and his shareholders are screaming for blood. So this week he fired 11,000 people. But couldn’t even do that right.
The great Beth Collier noticed that Zbag’s memo to his employees notifying them that they were dead meat was strikingly similar to a memo sent by Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, to his employees a week earlier. I have excerpted some of the language from both memos. See if you don’t agree
Just a coincidence, right?
I don’t think you could paint a more perfect picture of this jerk — a man who couldn’t be bothered to use his own language to speak from his heart to 11,000 people who worked to help make him one of the richest people in the world. Instead, he chose to cut and paste language from someone else. What a dick.
Musk Still Batting .000
While Zbag was busy copying his friend’s homework, the Muskrat was busy destroying Twitter.
Right after we went to press last week, Twitter announced that they had mistakenly laid-off dozens of employees and begged them to please come back.
Then Musk brilliantly threatened advertisers who had run screaming from him with a “thermonuclear name-and-shame” campaign. Here’s his big idea: He’s going to name all the companies who have stopped advertising on Twitter and they will be so ashamed and so despised by their customers that they will come running back. This guy is really, truly fucking bonkers.
Meanwhile this week, new defections from Twitter among major advertising brands came to light — including Chipotle and United Airlines.
Next came his idiotic answer to his brand safety nightmare. He instituted his $8-a-month “blue-check” program that certifies that you are officially you. And that you are a real, no-shit, card-carrying, true-blue Twitter dreckmeister. It turned out to have the exact opposite of the intended effect. Twitter was swamped with all kinds of new fake users who fraudulently bought the “blue-check” medallion. Including our Blessed Savior…
Unlike Musk, at least this guy has a sense of humor.
According to the NY Times, “Twitter, the so-called global town square, with about 240 million users, has descended in recent days into a messy swirl of accounts pretending to be high-profile brands and sending disruptive tweets.”
It didn’t take long for Twitter to change its idiotic “true blue” scheme. Maybe this tweet was the “brand safe/verified” tweet that did it…
Next, in a brilliant PR move, Musk told employees that declaring bankruptcy was not out of the question. That must have gone down really well with his bankers and his Saudi business partners.
Finally, having seen and heard enough, at the end of the week some of his highest ranking executives walked. This did not sit well with Federal authorities who are now investigating his actions since taking over Twitter.
I wish I was good enough to make all this shit up.
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My favorite Musk quote about buying Twitter, “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.” Yeah, he loves humanity. He just doesn’t like people.
Finally We Come to This Dipshit…
Honestly, if I ran a restaurant and this billionaire slob came tumbling in dressed like this, I’d throw his ugly ass out.
So this guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been the poster child for the worldwide cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. This week his company, FTX, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy.
According to press reports, “At least $1 billion of customer funds — and possibly as much as $2 billion — have gone missing.” Ooh, that’s not good.
Apparently, another half a billion in cryptocurrency disappeared in “unauthorized transactions” according to the company.
FTX, which is a cryptocurrency trading company with a whole lot of other side hustles I can’t possibly explain or understand, was apparently a fun little multi-billion dollar house of cards run out of an apartment in the Bahamas by Bankman-Fried and a bunch of his pals.
Lots of people have lost millions. The whole crypto thing will now finally get the once-over from the incompetent regulatory bodies who are supposed to protect our most vulnerable populations — nitwits and Millennials — from shit like this.
What, you may ask, has any of this got to do with advertising? Well, perhaps you remember the FTX spot from the Super Bowl a while back in which Luddite dinosaur Larry David could not be convinced to invest in crypto. As a card-carrying Luddite dinosaur myself, I have to thank Bankman-Fried for green-lighting a funny spot, that, ironically, turned out to be right on the money.
ENDS
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