🤜 Welcome to the first issue of Dog Jail Biz Beat, where we pummel fresh, dripping insights out of the day’s biggest business news.
This week’s newsletter is all about jobs. Namely, how you better have ownership if you want to keep yours. (Congrats on another great quarter, Mark!) And don’t miss: a chat with Microsoft’s Bing AI about what’s next for Vice Media.
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One Big Number
Number of VR avatar legs previously promised by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose personal wealth grew by $10 billion dollars last week after company say most newest money number big fella, not small fry.
Amid layoffs that will put 21,000 Meta employees out of work, Zuckerberg seems to be happy with his own performance. On an earnings call, he denied that Meta was “moving away from the metaverse” — presumably a physical impossibility for the floating, doll-like torso trapped in his own machine.
Arrest Report
💀 DEATH ROW: Digital Media (fka “New Media” fka “blogs”). Citing “business realities,” Vice aggregated Buzzfeed’s deep, depressing job cuts last week (h/t Vox)
🚔 IN CUSTODY: Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, blocked by UK regulators. Annoyed megacorp-loving gamers can blame it on lag.
🐑 AT LARGE: “Generative AI” as a necessary talking point when talking to shareholders. We are, at best, maybe six months away from Zima rebranding as “Zima Machine Learning.”
The Beatdown
One week after the surprise shitcanning of Tucker Carlson, we’re finally learning what led up to the white nationalist night-blogger’s untergang.
Had the cost of Abercrombie Farrakhan’s on-air lies finally exceeded their value to the (famously profit-motivated) Murdoch clan? Did the private behavior exposed by recent lawsuits make Carlson too toxic for even his goblin-like employers?
LOL, YOU WISH: In the short term, at least, there wasn’t much of a business case for dumping Carlson. On the day the noxious uncoupling was announced, the Fox Corporation lost $800 million in value — millions more than the entire Dominion Voting Systems settlement. (Its stock has since bounced back.) And in the days that followed, audience numbers for Carlson’s time slot jumped off a cliff.
No, new reports suggest a much more ancient dynamic was at play: It was the rise of Carlson and the fear that this instilled in Fox management that made war inevitable. Also, Rupert reportedly thinks the guy who wants to fuck the lady M&Ms is weird.
SICK OF THE DUDE: Stories from the (Murdoch-owned) Wall Street Journal and (Hitler fanzine) Breitbart painted the same picture from different angles, one where strong performance granted Carlson the freedom to let his rune-covered freak flag fly — but only for so long. As the Journal put it:
In recent years, battles between Mr. Carlson and Fox management got so bad that former Trump aide Raj Shah was appointed to be his internal advocate and an intermediary between Mr. Carlson and Fox’s communications department, according to people familiar with the arrangement and filings in the Dominion case. […] Inside Fox News, there has been a growing sense that Mr. Carlson couldn’t be managed, and viewed himself as untouchable, people familiar with the company said.
And, according to Breitbart:
[Fellow ousted Fox creep Dan] Bongino and Carlson, one source said, “were considered the two most likely to say ‘fuck you’ to management.” […] [One network source said,] “Neither one of them were controllable, and they were just doing their own thing. They were developing such a profile that it became problems for them.”
However, the most intriguing explanation (roundly denied by Breitbart’s sources) came from Vanity Fair. That report pointed to Carlson’s religious extremism and the Christian weirdness it brought out in Murdoch’s (now ex-)fiancée Ann Lesley Smith. In March, the three were reportedly eating together when Smith pulled out a bible and started reading from it. Needless to say, dinner was ruined. “That stuff freaks Rupert out,” a source reportedly told the magazine.
THE BOTTOM LINE: This dynamic is surely familiar to anyone who’s worked in media or similarly metrics-driven fields, such as arms sales or consumer banking. The bosses demand numbers — and then feign horror when they meet the kind of psycho it takes to get them.
COUNTER ATTACK: Speaking to Semafor, the lawyer of a former Fox producer now suing Carlson offered a more spatiotemporal take, saying he had “no comment on those reports other than to say that timing is a matter of physics, and as such is undeniable.”
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