A hedge fund called Irenic Capital bought 2.5% of Snap, put up a website named savesnapnow.com, and uploaded a PowerPoint titled “6 Steps to 7X.” Two weeks later, Snap fired a thousand people. The stock jumped. Evan Spiegel got on the earnings call and described it as “a new way of working,” which translates from billionaire into English as “we figured out we can stop paying a thousand people and the market will applaud.”
This is the whole model now. You don’t have to own the company to gut it. You buy a slice of the cap table, post a website like a conspiracy theorist, upload a deck, and the CEO trips over himself trying to prove he’s a serious man. A thousand households lost their paychecks this week so a fund manager could get a 600% price target printed in Bloomberg.
The press keeps calling it “efficiency.” It isn’t — it’s a transfer. Wages that used to go to the engineers who actually made Snapchat work now go to Evan Spiegel’s stock-based comp and Irenic’s quarterly letter. Call it what it is. A hedge fund uploaded a PDF, a thousand people got fired, and the stock went up, because that is exactly what these people built the machine to do.