Succession but IRL: how we all became spectators of corporate collapse

Earlier this year, the fourth and final season of Succession aired to near-universal acclaim, with episodes recording viewing figures in the millions. Much of this success was no doubt thanks to the show’s masterful storytelling and Kendall Roy’s babygirl antics, but it also speaks to a broader appetite in modern entertainment: the desire to watch a corporation in freefall as the lives of its inner circle collapse around their ears. And why wouldn’t we want to watch that? If billion-dollar companies get to dodge taxes, manipulate elections, rip natural resources from the earth, and grossly underpay their workers, then the least we can do is indulge in a bit of schadenfreude when they fail.

However topical it might be, though, Succession is ultimately fiction. Riding a wave of eat-the-rich media (see also: last year’s The White Lotus, The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness) it critiques and parodies modern capitalism for our entertainment, but no one faces any real consequences. This means we can enjoy the Roy family’s cruel games and power struggles with a clear conscience, safe in the knowledge that they’ll have little impact on the wider world. However, it also dulls their downfall slightly. Yes, a well-written script and award-winning performances can make us feel like the story matters in the moment, but can it really compete with the real thing?

In 2023, there’s been no shortage of IRL corporate crises to rival the fictional dramas on our screens. Flick from one channel to the next to watch Elon Musk tank Twitter’s stock price, cringe at the misfortune of overeager crypto bros, or follow high-stakes negotiations at OpenAI that could shape the future of humanity. Looking for something a little less safe-for-work? Take off the child-lock and find the official downfall of the once-lauded crypto exchange FTX, wrapped up in rumours about a ten-person polycule, or the gruesome details of Neuralink’s monkey deaths.

Viewers are spoilt for choice. From the tech industry, to finance, to the fledgling digital art market, companies seem to be crumbling everywhere we look, and there’s a perverse pleasure in watching it all explode like a SpaceX rocket undergoing “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

Maybe the most obvious example of these white-collar theatrics this year is the “implosion” of OpenAI, which kicked off with the surprise firing of CEO Sam Altman on November 17. Shocking as that was, the story only got juicier a couple of days later, when Mira Murati – the interim CEO – also left and more than 700 employees threatened to follow suit, announcing plans to defect to a new Altman-led startup if their leader wasn’t reinstated. By that Wednesday, in fact, he was back at the helm, at the expense of yet another CEO and most of the board members who originally ousted him. The twists and turns seemed never-ending.

It helped, of course, that the OpenAI saga had a powerful and pretty unusual character at its core. Just this month, Time named Altman one of the most influential people in the world for his work to advance AI systems, while simultaneously warning us that they could wipe out all human civilisation. His other projects include building a giant database of people’s eyeballs in exchange for cryptocurrency, and his hobbies include racing McLarens and prepping for the apocalypse, with a stash of “guns, gold [...] gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur”, as per an old interview in the New Yorker. Sound a bit like another cartoon CEO we know?

Yes, we’re talking about Elon Musk (the one true babygirl). Not to be outdone by his former coworker, the SpaceX founder and Twitter saboteur drummed up plenty of his own spectacles this year, including but not limited to the embarrassing fallout of his social media takeover. We’re talking two livestreamed rocket explosions – each of which spawned a wave of “rapid unscheduled disassembly” memes – plus numerous lawsuits and a disturbing penchant for right-wing conspiracy theories. But at least the Taliban still counts him among its allies.

By far the weirdest public meltdown of Musk’s 2023, though, came in the summer, when he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight amid a war of words over Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads. Sadly, we never actually got to see the two billionaires beat each other to a pulp, because... Elon’s mum said he wasn’t allowed. (It totally didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Zuck is trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.) If you enjoyed this pathetic tale, then you might also like the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced “poster boy for crypto” who was described by his own lawyer as the “worst” witness he’d ever encountered in the wake of his multi-billion-dollar fraud conviction earlier this year.

Just like Donald Trump turned politics into a bizarre sort of entertainment – for better or more likely worse – in the run up to his election in 2016, these OTT figures clearly have a talent for turning dry business negotiations into tense thrillers or catty comedies, primed for our viewing pleasure. Who needs Succession anyway?

It’s worth noting that this phenomenon isn’t entirely new. We’ve always enjoyed poking fun at the likes of Mark Zuckerberg as he testifies in front of Congress about giving us all brain worms, or tries to do normal human things like drink a glass of water, but recently the drama has intensified, with more eyes on it than ever before. So what’s changed? Sure, successful shows like Succession or Industry may have primed our brains to strip corporate crises for their most entertaining parts, but that’s not all. The business leaders, and the ways they conduct themselves, feel different too. Or maybe we just see more of their egomaniacal antics, since they came up in a social media ecosystem where sharing the most intimate aspects of your life (and airing dirty laundry) comes as second nature.

Would the OpenAI story have been so compelling if it wasn’t beamed directly to our timelines, communicated via cryptic statements, ironic selfies, cult-like coordinated posts, and many, many emojis? Would Elon veering off the rails hit quite the same if we didn’t get to watch the horror story unfold in real-time, courtesy of the yawning void where his self-awareness should be? Would we even be conscious of WeWork’s bankruptcy news, the FTX trial, or the downfall of a niche tech industry bank, if they didn’t float to the surface on a river of memes? Maybe not.

More importantly, without social media we couldn’t have witnessed the cherry on top of Yuga Labs’ terrible year, which saw the Bored Ape and CryptoPunk company lay off an undisclosed number of employees amid an easily-predictable NFT slump.

ICYMI, Yuga Labs threw its third annual ApeFest in Hong Kong in November, where collectors gathered to dance, show off their funny little JPEGs, and... suffer mass blindness, which was allegedly traced back to the event’s powerful UV lights. Obviously, vision loss is no joke (even if it is only temporary) but in the days after the festival it was hard not to get drawn in by the testimonies of the unlucky attendees. “Worst pain in the eyes I’ve ever felt. Waterfall of tears that felt like acid that can’t be washed away.” “Doctor doesn’t think it’s pink eye.” “I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore… It remains a great experience.” If this was the season finale of Bored Ape Yacht Club season three, the Rotten Tomatoes ratings would be off the charts, the script writers deserving of an Emmy. 

Alas, laughing at crypto bros is all well and good, but now we have to Get Serious for a moment. After all, entertaining as they may be, none of the aforementioned dramas are actually supposed to be entertainment; for most people involved, they’re quite the opposite, and the real-world consequences are liable to muddy the waters of any satisfaction we take from corporate death spirals, no matter how well the ‘plot’ comes together. Is there a black humour to the crash-and-burn of the NFT market and various meme coins? Yes. But the individual consequences can be dark and disastrous, too. The same goes for the collapse of much-hated companies like WeWork, or banks, which necessarily come with job losses and lost savings, not to mention what 2023’s numerous layoffs said about the wider world economy. 

Then, there’s the question of who actually benefits from the Succession-ification of corporate drama. Spoiler: it’s rarely who you’re rooting for. On numerous occasions this year, for example, shady traders have manipulated the memosphere to encourage investment in the extremely risky stock of near-bankrupt companies (see: WeWork, Bed Bath & Beyond) – a half-ironic joke that likely left many less-experienced investors out of pocket. Meanwhile, the outsized personas of top brass like Elon Musk and Sam Altman have only enhanced their auras of cultish devotion, with many worrying that the aftermath of Altman’s public spat with the OpenAI board has left the CEO without appropriate oversight (a big deal, if you’re supposedly working on “the most powerful technology humanity has yet invented”). When we’re laughing as we scroll down the timeline, are we really fuelling these power trips and degen delusions? Is our attention fuelling their next dystopian scheme?

These are difficult questions to answer. On the one hand, you have something concrete and quantifiable: profits and losses, boom and bust. On the other, there’s stories, egos, and ideas floating in cyberspace. How much does one influence the other? When we cash up at the end of the day, does watching big baby billionaires break down on X leave us in the black, or deep in the red? 

An optimist might suggest that our taste for real-life bankruptcies and boardroom dramas can help expose some of the wilder parts of big business, and inspire a healthier, more transparent future once the dust has settled. A not-so-optimistic take is that the economy doesn’t care whether we laugh, cry, or ignore it completely, companies will collapse nevertheless, and maybe the ones that survive will usher in the end of civilisation, but at least we had a laugh while the world burned. (Just remember: billionaires won’t see your memes, but your friend who just lost their life savings might.) Either way, it seems increasingly likely that Elon was right about one thing amid all his ranting and raving. In 2023 and beyond: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”