I like twitter. I get
a lot of info from it. For instance, when Libgen fails, I always find somewhere
on twitter how to access it again.
However, it has an
exaggerated effect as a social media platform, since all the meat press – tv,
magazines, papers – have an exaggerated sense of it, which they push on down
the line. The racists who get their N word jones on twittering and trolling get
a lot more attention than the cops apartheid style management of urban life and
the systematic racism of the economic system, from job hiring to mortgage
making, that does its best to insert a bit of misery into the day to day of African-Americans.
So Elon Musk’s buying
of Twitter has the downside that pretty surely he is going to run it into the
ground. However, I am fascinated by the business aspect. I am fascinated by the
way Musk is hopping down a path once hopped down by Forbes’ Magazine’s boy
genius of 2004, Eddie Lampert.
For those who don’t
remember: Eddie Lampert was one of the evil billionaires hatched by Goldman
Sachs. After learning how rent-seeking, a totally useless and harmful
enterprise, gets you warm praise in the press and among the country club set at
the Hamptons, Lampert struck out on his own and eventually bought Sears
Roebuck.
The youth of today
probably don’t recognize that name – or the name of K-Mart. One has to reach
for the references – Sears was the Amazon of its time, K-Mart the Walmart. Sears,
when I was growing up, was the family store. This didn’t mean that we liked
Sears: quite the contrary. We bought at Sears and bitched about Sears in equal
measure. My Grandfather, in the 1950s, got so made at a Sears employee they had
a fistfight – or so my Pop used to say. Sears, however, had sales people whoknew their products, and for my family, which tended to treasure power toolsand such, Sears was an Eldorado. Its Craftsman tool line had everything. And atreasonable prices! So I grew up among Craftsman power drills and Craftsman Electric Hand Saws. Ah, I can hear, as I
write those words, the agonizing whine of a blade going through a 4 x 4, the
sawdust in a plume behind it. This , as much as rock n roll, was the music of
my youth.
Even in 2006, one
might be astonished to learn, the capital value of Sears was greater than that
of Amazon. In the 90s, my introduction to the world wide web – and even discussion
groups – was made via Prodigy, brought to you by Sears Roebuck. But at this
point, even, the upper management had lost the thread. Which is what a predator
like Lampert was looking for.
The usual buy with
debt, dump, pay yourself cycle followed. Unlike Twitter, however, Lampert’s
little accountants had noted that Sears had tremendous real estate holdings in
cities. Sell those off! Fire half the staff, hire anybody, train nobody, sell
of the product lines, create sightlines in stores that told the customer
nothing, let each expedition to Sears be
a buying nightmare, take the pensions and, by legal tricks, sever it from the
employees who had made the store prosper, and so on. A good recap of the Lampert
story, the story of America in the age of Obama and Trump, appeared inInstitutional Investor here. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He
Musk is no Eddie
Lampert. He’s a super salesman, but as a businessman he sucks, and as an
investor you could train a duckling to make better decisions. Thus, he has
saddled himself with a company that is incapable of giving him a return on his
money. He has no big pension fund to drain, he has no real estate to vend. He
is paying more in interest on the debt he piled up on Twitter to buy it than twitter
will ever pay out. In cases like this, the Sears formula – shit on an American
capitalist institution, sit back and watch your fortune grow – will be
difficult if not impossible to reproduce. Musk of course has a desire to be up
there with the Tech legends (all of them disgusting in their own ways): Gates,
Jobs, Zuckerberg. I predict that in the future, he will be ranked, instead,
with Murdoch, the man who spent 12 billion dollars for Myspace. Myspace,
remember myspace? In 2011, it was sold
for 34 million dollars.
Ecce Twitter.
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