The Thread Tying The Corporate Crises Together

Tucker Carlson very belatedly featured the viral "My Day at Work" TikTok video by the egregiously entitled Twitter employee on his show earlier this week, with commentary from Mike Rowe. The thing nobody has pointed out, as far as I can tell, is that this video seems to have reached general notice last year on October 26, which was exactly one day before Elon Musk bought Twitter. In other words, it was almost immediately overtaken by events, and by December, a visitor to the same Twitter headquarters shown in the video characterized that headquarters as looking like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned.

In fact, the story as of Tuesday was:

Twitter’s landlord, the Columbia Property Trust, is suing the company for neglecting to pay rent for its downtown San Francisco headquarters.

The company’s new owner, Elon Musk, has reportedly been attempting to renegotiate the terms of the lease, as the company frantically tries to cut costs.

As I've said, Twitter ought to be a business-school illustration of Stein's Law, that which cannot continue must stop. Twitter's basic problem was that its product had no real value, and most years it lost money:

Twitter has been operating at a massive loss for years, failing to book an annual profit since 2019 (Mauer, 2022). For eight out of the last ten years, the company has posted a loss. While losses are trending downwards, the company saw a net loss of a staggering $1.14 billion in 2020.

The question neither Tucker Carlson nor Mike Rowe asks in the Fox segment is why investors and advertisers continued to support a company that was both extravagant in its spending, with a work environment that was more like a luxury resort than a place of employment, but produced such a worthless product. The one event that burst that bubble was Musk's takeover -- advertisers left the platform on the basis that Musk would minimize its censorship, resulting in a product that no longer maintained the appearance of a comfortable consensus among the gentry class. That suggests in turn that this was the value Twitter provided to both the advertisers and the investors, and this in turn appears to have justified the extravagent spending on an almost entirely non-productive workforce.

Tucker then turns to Mike Rowe and Rowe's point that "it's more important than ever to show the fact that a lot of Americans are doing real work". The dissonance between valueless products and workers who have real jobs carries over to the other two corporate crises of 2022, FTX and Southwest Airlines. FTX was a bubble that burst like Twitter, with an executive clique that lived even more extravagantly than the pampered and coddled drones at Twitter.

Its product was equally valueless, but one thing that struck me about the bios of its leadership clique was the emptiness of their accomplishments. I've pointed out here that figures like Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison were treated like prodigies before they even started school, and they received many awards for their precocious achievements in math and physics, culminating in admission to elite universities -- yet they'd also been diagnosed with ADHD, which makes it impossible to do the sort of concentration and sustained mental work that's actually needed to win math and physics awards, much less attend elite universities.

In other words, they were living in a sort of high-status alternate reality fostered by the same self-validating gentry class that sustained Twitter. And make no mistake, given its history, Twitter's bubble would have burst even if Musk hadn't taken it over.

What's emerging with Southwest isn't so different: following the story of its holiday meltdown and uneven recovery, the impression I've had is of an executive clique that operated in isolation from the pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, and ramp workers who'd made the company successful over decades and continue to be loyal. A letter from a vice president of the Southwest pilots' union makes this point:

Herb [Kelleher]’s legacy and the culture he built from the ground up was centered on his employees and empowering them to make proactive decisions at the lowest level possible. However, the culture that Gary Kelly ushered in with his ascension to the throne was the exact opposite. Gary’s vision was to become the darling of the investment community while building an insulated and vertical hierarchical structure where all decision-making authority was slowly stripped from front line experts with the most situational awareness and moved further up the cubicle chain in Dallas far removed from line operations. During that time, he took our Company from being known for our personality and agility to becoming a classic technocrat’s dream with an explosion of stove-piped vice-presidential fiefdoms that all communicate vertically with little-to-no horizontal integration.

. . . A monetization of the once vaunted Southwest culture and instead turning it into a headquarters-centric cult. A good old boys and girls network indeed.

. . . I do not begrudge the vast sums of money our executives earned for working their way up the corporate ranks. I am a capitalist, and I love American upward mobility. I do, however, begrudge earning vast personal wealth while running our Company’s operations and culture into the ground.

The article that quotes this letter comments,

The sociology of pilots, and pilot unions, is fascinating because here the second vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association declares “I am a capitalist, and I love American upward mobility.” You’d never hear that from Sara Nelson [president of the non-Southwest flight attendants' union].

Pilot unions work to limit entry into their profession, to give them greater leverage in work rule and salary negotiations. But they don’t have the same narrative of desperate class warfare that other airlines do. Indeed, like law enforcement unions they tend to skew more Republican.

This is an interesting commentary on the current makeup of the "working class" -- the current Southwest narrative shows numerous employees at the operations level, regardless of professional status or education, working independently to resolve customer problems, often actively bypassing the corporate bureaucracy to do so, while recognizing the company's crisis results from an executive clique that's gone over to corporate capitalism in its current form. In other words, these people are a certain kind of Republicans, nothing like a traditional proletariat.

I hope this suggests a way forward.