News / corporate
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1 min read
Core Values
Read more . . . →The word is INTEGRITY. The machine underneath it eats paper. Marble lobby, gold lettering, recessed lighting. Very serious building. The kind of building where the font costs more than your rent. And bolted to the wall beneath the word INTEGRITY, flush-mounted like it was always part of the plan, is a document shredder with a full belly. The strips are still hanging. Whatever went in there is never coming back, and neither is the irony. Somebody approved this layout.
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Your Frustration Has a Score
Read more . . . →Amazon built an internal system called “Atlas” that assigns every warehouse a score between 100 and 900. A hundred means workers are organizing. Nine hundred means they’re not. Machine learning models crunch daily sentiment data to predict which buildings will unionize next, sort them into tiers, and deploy what the company calls “empathetic listening” before anyone can get to a card signing. Your break room conversations are a signal. Your desire for a living wage is a risk metric on a dashboard in Seattle. Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility voted to form a union in April 2022. Four...
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Every 4.23 Seconds
Read more . . . →Elon Musk made $158 billion at Tesla last year. His median employee made $57,243. That means Musk earned a full year of his average worker’s salary every 4.23 seconds. Not every minute. Every 4.23 seconds. You can’t read this paragraph faster than that man out-earns the people building his cars. The AFL-CIO’s latest Paywatch report has the average S&P 500 CEO making 312 times what their median worker earns. Up from 285 the year before. Highest ratio in three decades of counting. And those numbers exclude Musk entirely, because his payout is so large it breaks the average. Factor him...
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1 min read
Annihilation Is an Appetizer
Read more . . . →“Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not?” That’s a real quote from the President of the United States, about a country of 90 million people, delivered like he was choosing between appetizers. Seven months into a war he started. The man treats annihilation like a coin flip. The same week, his administration approved a $24.3 billion F-35 deal to Saudi Arabia. First time an Arab country has been cleared for fifth-generation stealth fighters. Lockheed Martin’s stock ticked up. Pratt & Whitney gets their cut. The defense contractors are having the quarter of their lives....
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Your Insecurity Is a Revenue Stream
Read more . . . →The manosphere isn’t a movement. It’s a mall. A multibillion-dollar shopping center for men who got told they were broken and then got sold the fix. Supplements, coaching programs, crypto schemes, looksmaxxing “academies” charging three grand to teach you how to hold eye contact. The whole operation runs on one insight: male insecurity, when packaged correctly, is the most dependable revenue stream on the internet. Every influencer in the space figured out the same business model at the same time. Tell young men the world hates them, then charge $49/month for the antidote. The supplements alone are projected to clear...
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1 min read
The Smallest Slice Since 1947
Read more . . . →Since 1947, the government has tracked how much of the economy goes to the people who actually do the work. This year it hit 52.8 percent, the lowest number in the entire dataset. Not during Reagan. Not during the 2008 crash. Not during COVID. Right now, with corporate pre-tax profits at $4.8 trillion in a single quarter. The economy is doing fine. Your cut of it isn’t. Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation last year came out to $158 billion, 2.5 million times what the median Tesla employee made. Two and a half million times. The S&P 500 has gained 600 percent...
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Twenty-Four Million and a Straight Face
Read more . . . →Wynn Resorts pocketed $2.22 billion in profit last year. Their Encore casino in Boston cleared $237 million on its own. CEO Craig Billings collected $24 million in compensation. And last week, 1,350 housekeepers, cooks, valet drivers, and cashiers walked out because the company decided a $10-an-hour raise spread over three years was asking too much. Three dollars and thirty-three cents a year. Then the company offered to fund their healthcare coverage out of that raise, so the raise just pays for what they already had. A $24-million man looked at his $237-million casino and told the people who clean the...
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They Fired You and Blamed the Robot
Read more . . . →Almost six out of ten companies now admit they frame layoffs as “AI-driven” when the real reason is financial. Straight up. Into a survey. Block fired forty percent of its workforce and the stock jumped twenty-four percent the same day. Dorsey posted $2.87 billion in gross profit that quarter. Cloudflare axed eleven hundred people — a fifth of the company — while reporting record revenue up thirty-four percent. These aren’t companies in trouble. These are companies doing better than ever who figured out Wall Street pays you more per share when you have fewer employees. Meta’s internal memos said the...
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She Came from UnitedHealth and Promised Not to Make Trouble
Read more . . . →The CDC has a new director. The last one got fired for disagreeing with RFK Jr. about vaccines — the real kind, the kind that wiped out polio, not the Facebook comment section kind. The replacement is Dr. Erica Schwartz, previously of UnitedHealth Group, where she pulled $850,000 a year. At her confirmation hearing she said vaccines are safe and effective, then dodged every question about whether she’d push back if Kennedy told her otherwise. Said she was “unaware” of some of his policy changes. The whole audition was don’t know anything, don’t push back. The agency she’s inheriting has...
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The Layoff Came With a LinkedIn Post Explaining Why It Was Good
Read more . . . →Monday.com cut one in five of its people this week — about 630 jobs out of 3,000 — and the cofounder went on LinkedIn to make sure you understood it wasn’t what it looked like. His words: this “was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI.” Read that against the same filing, where the company says it’s trimming headcount to run “leaner” as it bets the whole product on its AI platform. And here’s the part that gives it away: Monday.com still projects up to 20% revenue growth this year. This isn’t a drowning company throwing weight...
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