Better To Be An Ex-CEO Than An X CEO
This Week In Blunders – July 6-12
"Work takes on new meaning when you feel you're pointed in the right direction. Otherwise, it's just a job, and life is too short for that." – Tim Cook
Linda Yaccarino had to know she’d be selling advertising that would appear beside Nazi propaganda and hate speech. She had to know Elon Musk’s incessant antics would continue to alienate the very advertisers she was hired to win back. She had to know Musk would never give her control as CEO of his social media platform X.
She also had to know this:
Yaccarino already had one of the greatest jobs in advertising.
She was chair of advertising sales at NBCUniversal, where she was responsible for more than $10 billion in annual revenue and oversaw all global, national and local advertising sales and partnerships. Among her many successes at NBC Universal, she was credited as a key player in the successful launch of the media giant’s Peacock streaming service.
But in May 2023, she left all this to work under an erratic tech bro, and this week she finally resigned, capping one of the biggest career blunders to ever unfold in broad daylight.
It didn’t help that as she announced her resignation, Musk’s Grok chatbot was praising Hitler and trashing Jews in posts on X. Hate speech was a problem when Yaccarino took the job, which is why advertisers ran away, and this digital toxicity only got worse under her watch.
This is now a permanent X mark on her resume.
What was she thinking?
“I know Linda personally, and this is her dream job,” Tesla bull Gary Black, managing partner of The Future Fund in Chicago, tweeted when she took the job 2023. “Sometimes the market doesn’t get it in the short term for whatever reason. Be patient.”
Yes, and sometimes the market does get it.
Like many Tesla investors, Black was hoping Musk would return his attention to the automaker – like that was going to happen with a man more obsessed with resurrecting and manipulating Donald Trump than making electric toys for rich brats.
Yaccarino must have suffered even more pain than even Musk initially advertised. And some say she was set up to fail from the very beginning.
Just months into the job, Musk famously told advertisers to go fuck themselves. Then he filed a lawsuit against them for leaving his platform en masse, complaining they orchestrated a boycott when he’s the one who told them to get lost.
There were many other indignities, but to top it off, Musk merged X with his artificial intelligence company xAI – directing X into an area where Yaccarino has zero experience. For all her sacrifices and hard work, she ended up working as a glorified advertising director for an out-of-control, hate-spewing AI bot.
It’s unclear where Yaccarino will emerge next. It’s difficult to completely destroy a career in advertising because it’s an industry filled with hucksters who’ve devoted their lives to the fine art of peddling bunk.
Yaccarino has reportedly made enough money in her career that she doesn’t have to work. But who wants to go out like this?
MyPillow’s sleepy lawyers
Artificial intelligence can’t compete with natural stupidity.
A judge has fined the MyPillow guy’s lawyers $3,000 apiece for filing a motion full of AI-generated errors.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, perhaps Trump’s finest election-denying conspiracy theorist, lost a defamation case for calling the former director of security for Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems “treasonous” for not backing election lies.
Lindell has been ordered to cough up $2.3 million – which was probably a successful outcome considering how much worse it could have been for the former drug addict who apparently lacks self-control.
Lindell’s lawyers filed a motion with misquotes from caselaw and citations from nonexistent cases, among other AI-generated errors, a judge ruled.
They say a man who represents himself has a jackass for a client and a fool for an attorney … but what can you say about a jackass who hires fools for attorneys?
Another week, another Ponzi
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday filed civil charges against Newnan, Ga.-based First Liberty Building & Loan and its founder Edwin Brant Frost IV. The regulator alleges a $140 million Ponzi scheme that duped about 300 investors.
Same old story: Frost sold promissory notes and allegedly used new investor funds to pay off old investors while he misappropriated funds for himself. The SEC says he used investors funds to make $2.4 million in credit card payments, which included a $335,000 payment to a rare coin dealer and $230,000 for family vacations.
Ah, the good life.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen this movie before - bad actors luring investors with promises of seemingly over-generous returns – and it does not end well,” said Justin C. Jeffries, associate director of enforcement for the SEC’s Atlanta Regional Office.
Actually it never ends. Ponzi schemes are among the oldest scams on record and people keep falling for them. On Monday, Business Blunders ranked the 15 biggest Ponzi schemes of all time.
Read it. Share it. It’s better to learn from history, than to be burned by history.
Magic Bus
Note to Volkswagen: The 1960s are gone, they weren’t all that great, and nobody wants to pay $70,000 for an electric Microbus.
Hippies drove the original because they liked to smoke weed, drop acid, go to concerts and have a cheap place to crash while they recovered.
They didn’t have a charging station in their parent’s garage. Some even had to siphon gas to get by. And now that they’re retiring, they don’t have the loot for a gimmicky vehicle, and their children would rather take an Uber.
The groovy new ID.Buzz will not make us forget your bogus clean diesel scandal, which felonized some of your top executives for deploying software that cheats on emissions tests.
The Wall Street Journal did a deep dive this week on why this car is a flop:
“The German auto giant had hoped the rebirth of an automotive icon would help it carve out a larger chunk of the lucrative U.S. auto market – a feat that has defied the world’s second-largest carmaker for half a century. Making it electric would help dispel the stench of the company’s emissions scandal. Instead, the reboot has been stunted by a luxury price tag, Trump’s trade war and an embarrassing recall.”
The Who said it better in 1968: “Too much, Magic Bus.”
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Musk and Lindel have created US companies that employ many thousands of people, yet you are laser focused on the negative. They are human and necessarily have eccentricities and quirks. Could you withstand the scrutiny they are under 25 hours a day? It is easy for little people to criticize. I guess that's what your readership demands. The truth, as if anybody in your business cared, is a lot more nuanced. I guess muckraking pays the bills.