Pivot - Elon Threatens to Walk, TikTok's Fave CPA, Krystal Todd, and more.
Episode Date: June 7, 2022Surprise, surprise: Elon is threatening to walk away from the Twitter deal. We look ahead to the upcoming public hearings from the January 6th committee. Then, Kara and Scott are joined by Friend of P...ivot, Krystal Todd, CPA, to discuss her financial literacy crusade on TikTok and YouTube. You can find Krystal on TikTok at @KrystalToddCPA and on her YouTube channel, The Cash Compass. Send us your Listener Mail questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or via Yappa, at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hi, everyone.
This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway.
Scott, there's a lot that's gone on this weekend. Did you have a good weekend? from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway.
Scott, there's a lot that's gone on this weekend.
Did you have a good weekend?
Oh, I had a really nice weekend.
Did you?
Yeah, we had a really nice lot of time with the boys.
Yeah, it was really nice.
How about yours?
I went to my nephew's wedding, Chris.
I'm going to give a call out to him and Eleanor.
It was lovely.
It was a Swisher fest, but it was, by the end, my son Alex was like, that's enough Swishers for me for a little while.
Because they kept asking him how tall he was.
He couldn't believe how tall he was.
And last time I saw you, you were this high kind of thing.
So, I got a little bored with that.
And then the questions about college and stuff like that.
But otherwise, it was a lovely, it was on in Larchmont, New York by the ocean.
Right across from where I grew up, which was interesting on Long Island,
which was kind of ironic in some ways.
Yeah, it was good.
It was a nice wedding.
Congratulations to Chris and Eleanor.
Good.
It was a gorgeous wedding.
It was very lovely.
It was very lovely.
That's nice. They had his and hers drinks.
His and hers drinks?
Yeah.
And that says a lot about who you are.
What were their respective drinks?
And I'll tell you something
about each of their personalities.
One was a Negroni of some sort.
His was a Negroni.
Okay.
So he's a little bit fancy.
He's a little bit fancy.
All right.
Okay.
And hers was a, it was some sort of gin fizz kind of thing.
Gin fizz.
Oh, well, I know she's white.
That's the first thing.
She probably went to a prestigious school.
Yes, she did.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Hello, boom.
What's your drink?
We have our drinks.
Mine is now non-alcoholic.
I'm Zacopin Coke, which says that I like to think I'm successful, but you can't take the boy out of the trailer park.
No, let's ruin that fine rub with Atlanta champagne.
No, let's ruin that fine rub with Atlanta champagne.
Whenever I did a blog post talking about that I drink Zacop and Coke, and true rum drinkers are literally horrified.
Horrified. They're literally horrified that I take Zacop and I throw it.
You're not even supposed to put ice in a good rum.
No, you're not because it's expensive.
Yeah.
So you take very expensive liquor and ice it up, right?
Yeah.
No, I take a beautiful home and I decorate it like I'm Trump.
You trash it.
Well, one of the interesting things is they had some champagne.
It was actually Spumante.
It was white wine that goes to the bottom of the ocean,
and that's where they chill it for a while.
What?
And then it gets covered with, like, crab poop or whatever.
I don't know. The bottle does.
And it came out like that, and then they put CO2 in it.
It was delicious.
The whole thing was very nice.
It was lovely.
It was a lovely evening.
Okay, then.
Gin fizz.
Congratulations.
Anyway, congratulations to them.
I hope they have a lovely, lovely wife.
He's a doctor.
She's a nurse.
She's about to be a nurse practitioner.
It's a very service-oriented couple.
Anyway, so today, speaking of not service-oriented,
Elon Musk will be walking away from the Twitter deal, he says.
He may be.
Who knows?
Who's to say?
It's the same noise that he's been making for a while.
We'll preview some news coming out of the January 6th committee,
which relies a lot on communications over social media, et cetera.
We'll also speak with Crystal Todd, a CPA who's teaching the basics of personal finance
on TikTok, and she cracks me up.
That's why we have her here.
But first, I'd like to give this out of the way.
I wrote a column about Sheryl Sandberg last week.
The journal had a story which I didn't think was,
I think it's going nowhere,
was under investigation at Meta as recently as May,
looked into her use of corporate resources
to plan her upcoming wedding. A spokesman for Meta says Sandberg's decision to leave
is not connected to the probe. And meanwhile, Francis Haugen says the company will only recover
if Zuckerberg steps down. Go for it, Francis. It said there was an investigation, but not many
details. I find this to be a nothing burger, but maybe I'm incorrect. Yeah, I find it unusual to be in a
position of defending Sheryl Sandberg. I mean, there's two things here, a couple things. One,
I think this is bullshit. I think it's gossip. I don't. I just, I think they found something.
It was probably, and again, pure conjecture, someone probably complained that she was using
company resources to plan her wedding, and they feel an obligation to, quote, unquote, investigate it, which might mean just one person finding out that,
okay, Cheryl, you owe us a couple hundred bucks for using this company resource, whatever. I just
don't think she's that dumb. Yeah, she's very tight. She runs things like a tight. If you ever
dinner her house, you'll see she never misses a trick, I'll tell you. But I just find this gossipy and clickbait. I think there are much bigger issues
around Sheryl Sandberg's behavior at Meta. What I did not like was she immediately said,
or not immediately, but it's been reported that she sees herself as someone who has been targeted
and been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. And I would argue, okay, that might be true for a lot of female executives,
but she has leaned in to the whole, I am woman, hear me roar,
and I believe that she has actually been given more courtesy because of her gender.
See, I do not. I am on the opposite side.
I'm not necessarily fully on Cheryl's side, but as you know,
I think that he deserves more of the attention, and she gets an enormous amount of flack deserved for him.
That's true. And Nick Clegg will not last. His lies will age faster because he is not a woman
leaning into the important discussion around gender balance in the workplace. It's like you
can't have it both ways, Kara. I mean... Yeah, I agree. I would agree. But I think that she...
People don't... Like, look at this Amber Heard thing.
Like, look, if you look at the British case, wow, is he looked guilty there.
And it was a judge.
And here's a jury.
And it was a popularity contest on social media.
She's not the loveliest lady.
And, you know, she's a lot of trouble.
But it seems like the outsized reaction is crazy.
You know, he seems like a lot.
And if you read the British stuff, it's pretty severe, actually.
And so, I don't know.
I just feel like the minute—
There's a lot of people that love to hate on a woman more than hating on a man.
They just do.
I think that's right.
The Herd Debt case for me is like the really, really freaky porn I've just said.
Probably better if you don't pay attention to it.
That's correct.
I just don't watch.
I've taken pride in trying to totally ignore all stories and reporting around deaf and heard.
I just, there's just better places for my attention.
So, I am woefully and gratefully uninformed about the case.
Right.
Well, let's go, besides Sandberg in this case,
look, it's going nowhere.
That's really the point.
They're going to find nothing.
They may find a small thing.
Trying to embarrass her.
On the way out.
Yes, I would agree.
In this case, Francis Haugen's idea
that Mark Zuckerberg will step down
or should step down
and that company will not recover if he doesn't.
What do you think about that?
I mean, obviously, Francis, that's not an unusual thing for Francis to say, but what is your feeling?
Yeah, and Musk shouldn't be the CEO of three companies. I couldn't agree more with her. She
couldn't be more right, and it's not going to happen. There's dual-class shareholder status.
He controls the company. He's made a lot of people very wealthy, and he controls the board. Anyone
who thoughtfully pushed back or tried to coach him or say, you know, this might be bad for the world, left the board.
So he surrounded himself with a group of people that just agree with him or eventually fired.
Any kind of company he acquired where there was a quote-unquote real leader, eventually the deal was, here's hundreds of millions of dollars.
You've been sidelined. Go away. And so the notion that he—
With rancor. I would say with rancor, actually. It's an unusual thing to be given that much money
and the people that leave really don't like, you know, anyway.
But he's—look, she's right, but that's not—I don't think that's going to happen. I don't
think he's going to wake up one morning and suddenly realize that, mate, but I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think he's going to wake up one morning and suddenly realize that maybe I don't have the skills or the empathy to be controlling something this powerful.
I just don't.
Yeah.
Wouldn't that be nice?
I thought he had the chance when they renamed it or something else to be, as you know, I wrote about it, to become.
It was one of those.
Remember, in the piece I wrote about Sam Murray, there were a lot of exits for her at various times, and she didn't take them.
She just kept going down the highway.
He has had several opportunities for an exit and has not taken them.
And, you know, go upstairs, become the chairman, be the pontificator like Gates did, kind of in chief, and talk about the future, write a book maybe.
But he has not taken it.
He's very young, obviously.
But he certainly is going to hold on to power here, Francis.
I don't think there's any way.
But this is, okay, granted, this is armchair psychology.
But I think that with Sheryl Sandberg, this was part of the journey.
I'll make a couple billion bucks.
I'll create global awareness.
I'll be seen as the female executive empowering people.
And then I will
run for governor and then president. I think Mark Zuckerberg is at the destination. I don't think he
has any desire to do anything else but run, but have everybody, not 2 billion people, but have
6 billion people all glued to an environment that he can run Nissan ads against and just become
wealthier and wealthier. This is the ends, not the means.
And I think what happened with Cheryl,
and I'm curious because you know her, I don't.
This is what I think happened.
I think when shit started getting ugly for Cheryl,
she thought, well, I'll wait.
This is cyclical, not structural.
She said it to Steve Levy, yeah.
I'll wait till my things calm down.
I'll wait till I have a few public wins.
My reputation is restored. Then I will punch out. And here's the thing. It never happened.
Yeah. As we kept peeling the onion back, as time went on, as the clock kept ticking,
it appeared that her decisions and her cover-ups and her delay and obfuscation
only became more brazen, more disingenuous, and more damaging.
And so she just never got that moment to leave on a high note.
She did not.
She talked about that publicly with Stephen Levy, the idea that she was waiting for a moment.
There were lots of moments, though, as I noted.
In any case, speaking of departing executives, another one, Amazon.
This is a big one.
Amazon's consumer CEO, Dave Clark, who's been there for a long time, resigned last week
with reports of tension with his boss, Andy Jassy.
This is a big move by Andy Jassy.
It's sort of when Tim Cook let go of someone who was very close.
I can't remember his name anymore.
But there was a big executive move at Apple right around this time of Tim Cook's tenure.
Under Clark's leadership, Amazon warehouses have overexpanded and workers voted to unionize.
So he has sort of the hardest job at the company.
And so obviously, Jassy, who had been focused over at AWS and other places, is showing his teeth here, which is interesting.
Yeah, I take the other side of this.
I think David Clark is arguably one of the most talented executives in the world.
I think if you look at his ability to stay out of the limelight and just execute, I mean, who has executed better?
He has been in controversy, but go ahead.
Who has executed better?
What operating executive has operated better?
You could argue maybe Andy Jassy, head of AWS, who's number two likely in the world globally?
The guy or gal who ran Consumer for Amazon.
So this is what is going to happen.
David Clark is about to announce a big fucking job.
He's still young.
He's arguably one of the two or three most talented operating executives in the world.
So I can't imagine a phone that is ringing louder and more often than David Clark. Absolutely. I don't think that's the case, but I think he was one of the
possible contenders. And this is what happens. It happened at Disney. And it happened at Apple.
This is what happens. There's a lot of number twos running around at most of these companies.
And, you know, it's been a tougher road for Dave Clark recently, let's just say.
But nonetheless, of course, he's obviously a accomplished executive.
But he will definitely be running.
What do you think he could run?
He could run.
But anyway, Andy Jassy has to put his people in place, in other words.
In most cases, you're right.
When all the number twos wake up and look in the mirror and say, hello, number one. And then when they find out they're not going to
be the number one when there's a shift, they decide, I'll go be number one somewhere else.
And that's actually a good thing. These are talented people. Companies are meant to,
you know, they're meant to plant other acorns of trees of which the shade we will never sit under.
But anyways, the question isn't what could he run?
The question is,
what couldn't he run?
I can see.
He's also very wealthy,
let's be clear.
He's been there for a long time,
as have most of the executives at Amazon.
And he started very young,
so did Dave.
I mean,
I think it's an interesting question.
I mean,
a logistics company,
any of them he could run.
It's a question of what he wants to do.
That's exactly right.
But look for
a guy like that. There isn't a company, there isn't a board in the world that says, oh no,
we wouldn't want that guy to run our company. Walmart, Target. Yeah, I mean, he could.
Yeah, so he's going to have a very big, I don't know him personally. So as far as I know,
he wants to take a breather. I doubt it. I find that these individuals really like to work, and they get huge reward out of it.
Unfortunately, a lot of us, and I think this is true of you, our identity is largely tied to our professional endeavors.
Indeed.
So I think his exit is much less interesting than where he's going to pop up as CEO.
All right.
Well, we'll see where that is. In any case, it'll be interesting to see if there's
other ones leaving at Amazon. There's Dave Lamputas. There's a bunch of people there.
Anyway, Coinbase also rescinded job offers that had gone out to prospective employees
as it extended its hiring freeze. That must be a cold drink of water for people when that happens.
Has that ever happened to you? Never happened to me.
It happened to, when I graduated from business school in 1992, get this. So at Stern right now,
the average, kids get an average number of five or six offers and get this. You know the average
salary of a Stern grad this year? Don't tell me. The average salary,000. The average starting salary with sign-on bonus for Stern MBA hit $182,000 this past year.
And supposedly, it's going to be over $200,000 this year when they do the math.
Wow.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
When I graduated from the Haas School, now get this, back in 92 in the middle of a recession,
60% of us had zero job offers on the day of graduation. And then what happened is,
I mean, you never know what's going to happen. One of the most talented people I've ever worked
with, a woman named Maureen Mullen in 2008, I don't think I'm, 2009, I don't think I'm speaking
out of school. She kept having her offer from a consulting firm delayed. And I've said, you're
amazing. Help me start this firm called L2. Keep working. Oh,
it's been delayed six months. Keep working. And then finally, I said, come on, they're
fucking with you. Stop it. Join us full time. And she agreed. But this happens.
Rescission among a firm that, quite frankly, is, I think, going to be really challenged and
could potentially go to zero. As you said, by the way, you were the one on Coinbase saying it's no needed, especially if there was a pullback.
Well, the stock's gone from, it hit 400 on the day of the IPO.
It's now, what, 50 or something?
Anyways, and it's had to disclose, which is really weird, that this is not a safe place to store your crypto.
That if we go bankrupt, our creditors have access to your tokens.
It's not like a bank where if the bank goes under, your deposits are guaranteed. And I should
disclose, I'm an investor and on the board of a company called Ledger, which is cold storage.
And we have seen our business uptick as a function of people want their assets to be
somewhere they think is safe and can't be seized by creditors. Anyways, Coinbase is in a world of hurt, but Coinbase is not alone.
Coinbase is one of a cadre of companies, hundreds of companies, where their SG&A has exploded
and the revenues have gone up, but not as much as their SG&A.
And then when you see the kind of drawdown in market cap, they need to
rethink everything, including their spending. And the majority of expenses isn't R&D. It isn't
office space. It's people. And so, I would argue they're the first ones out of Vietnam,
the ones who had their offers rescinded. They go get a job somewhere else. Because if you got a
job at Coinbase, it probably means you're pretty talented and you have a lot of options.
They're going to be fine.
It's much better to have that happen than to go there for two years and find out it's not working out.
We will see.
They were certainly flying high.
The CEO was having dinners, those thought dinners.
That's always a bad sign for me when CEOs have thought dinners.
You mean when they come to New York and you get a call from a PR executive saying that they want to share their vision of the world with you?
And your vision.
And they want to get your input?
I did that for the shortest time.
So they've been inviting you to an intimate dinner to share?
Because they love your work.
Yeah.
And it's like, okay, this is called a speaking engagement.
You need to pay me a shit ton of money or I'd rather hang out with my boys.
I used to do it a long time ago for sourcing, but now I'm like, no fucking way.
It's literally like, why would I want to hang out with this guy?
Seriously.
What gave you the impression I have any bizarre to hang out with?
Is there a celebrity?
If there's a celebrity, sometimes I do it.
Anyway, let's get to our first speaking of celebrities.
Celebrity CEOs, their first big story.
Surprise, surprise.
Elon Musk is threatening to walk away
from the Twitter deal again.
This is like,
I'm going to break,
I'm really,
this time I'm going to break up with you.
In a letter on Monday,
Musk said he wants more information
on the number of bots
and fake accounts on the platform
and accused Twitter of withholding data.
Twitter doesn't have to give him anything.
Musk first paused the deal on May 13th.
We didn't pause it.
There was no such thing.
Let's see what we said back then.
As of now, this deal is off.
It makes absolutely no sense for Elon Musk.
Can he just sit and wait and then reprice or not?
That's the correct question.
For a billion dollars, he has six months to kind of see what happens.
All right. So we have said that. You know, Bill Cohen has talked about this. He's got time. He
can drag this out forever, you know, and he has like six months and then beyond that,
another six months apparently. So what thinks you of this latest filing? Yeah.
To me, it seems obvious what's going on. So I'll give you a brief history of what I think is the obvious.
All right.
Most teenage boys up until the age of 25 or 21, their prefrontal cortex does not evolve, does not fully mature, and they have very poor impulse control.
And there's been a lot of news about how negative and damaging and destructive that can be to our society. What people also don't talk about is the reason why we
put 19-year-olds in uniform is that lack of impulse control means they're much more likely
to engage in acts of heroism. They're much more likely to take a bullet and then keep running
into the field to save their brothers and sisters in arms. They're much more likely to take a bullet and then keep running into the field to save their brothers and sisters in arms.
They're much more likely to random acts of generosity.
An immature prefrontal cortex kind of describes, in my view, Elon Musk's approach to Twitter.
And that is, I love Twitter.
I'm just going to buy it.
I'm the richest man in the world.
I'm going to pay $45 billion for it.
I'm going to back the board into a corner.
They know it's not worth this much. They agree. Yeah. As Bill said, he played it perfectly,
the first part. But the board said, all right, you have trouble with impulse control. We're
going to make you sign a hermetically sealed agreement that includes your agreement in a
legal document that you signed and had all your $1,200 an hour lawyer's review
that you waive rights to diligence. You waive all rights. And then what happens? The market
goes down. The stock that was guaranteeing his massive equity investment that he would have to
borrow against goes down. And all of a sudden, he realizes this is a $22 stock that I have agreed to pay $54.20 for.
Okay, bad idea in my stock, the golden goose of Tesla is down 30%.
Get me the fuck out of Dodge.
I thought Vietnam was going to be weekends in Bangkok and bonding with my brothers and serving my country.
And I found out this is not what I signed up for.
I am disillusioned. Get me out of
here. And he said to his lawyers, find a reason, any reason to get me out of this deal. And they
said, okay, the only thing we can come up with is if you can credibly claim they have made false
statements in their SEC filings, because that is a general condition of closing, that they haven't lied in SEC filings. And they said the only thing that
might hold water is that they have said that less than approximately 5% of their accounts are bots.
That is probably not true. Now, distinct to the fact that you knew that, distinct to the fact
that you have weaponized these bots to artificially increase your share price. Distinct to the fact that you use these bots to attack your retractors.
You should put out cloud cover to say that, oh my gosh, there's more than 5% bots. And they said
there wasn't. All right. I'm going to cut you off now. All right. So, land it. Land the plane,
Scott. He's full of shit. He's full of shit. Okay, thank you. He's full of shit. He wants out.
Does he want out or does he want another price?
Maybe he's not getting the price he wants.
There is no other price, Cara, because even this board can't agree to another price because a deal with Elon Musk means nothing.
Nothing.
Well, Bill had noted that they could ask for a much bigger breakup fee.
If they get a $10 billion breakup fee, they'll let him negotiate down to $45 a share.
He's not going to do it.
He doesn't want a lower fee.
You know what fee he wants?
Get me the fuck out of here.
That's the lower price he wants.
And he's now just trying to create cloud cover for what is going to be a legal battle and some sort of breakup fee.
This is the beginning of a negotiation.
Yeah, he's really grown tiresome on Twitter, too.
He overdid this one, I have to say.
His diehard fans will love it. But the stock of Tesla continues to be low. It's not as low as it
was. It was at 628. It's at 704 now. It's actually held up pretty well. All things considered,
it's held up well. Yeah, 704 now. Yeah, it went down there for a minute in scary territory,
but people tell me it had to get down to 400 before it got really frightening for him. Twitter's down today, but it's in the 30s,
39, close to 40. In any case, we'll see what happens. So, by the way, Musk told executives
that Tesla needed to lay off 10% of its workforce because he had a super bad feeling, whatever that
is from an economic point of view. He later clarified that he meant salaried
employees only expects to grow the number of hourly workers, which is these are factory workers,
which is a huge demand for Tesla still, despite all the new cars coming. By the way, I saw the
new BMW. It's gorgeous. I wouldn't buy it still, but it's nonetheless fantastic.
That's a cool car. You would never buy that car.
The BMW electric one? The electric one looks like a very pleasant car to drive. Yeah, I don't see you in a BMW. That's just way too cool a car. You would never buy that car. The BMW electric one? The electric one looks like a very pleasant car to drive.
Yeah, I don't see you in a BMW.
That's just way too cool a car.
I love my Kia.
Love the Kia.
Love the family Kia.
And the minute I can get rid of it, I will.
I see you in a Mazda.
That's your brand.
I had a Mazda.
See, there you go.
There you go.
Stick shift.
Turbo.
I did.
I liked it.
Turbo Mazda.
I had a turbo Mazda.
Oh, my God.
That's like me wearing cologne. It just doesn't matter.
My high school boyfriend taught me how to drive with a shift car, and I've loved it ever since I've drove.
I am going to resist the temptation to say anything about any of that.
He did. Chris Price. Hi, Chris. How you doing? He was so nice.
By the way, my eighth grade boyfriend's marrying one of my best friends from grammar in high school.
You had a boyfriend in the eighth grade?
Yes, I did.
Chris Keeney.
I like the Chris.
I like the Chris name.
Jesus.
Anyway, I never remember all their names, which is weird because there's so few of them.
But actually, there weren't that many few.
So in any case, super bad feeling about the economy, salaried employees.
This was another kind of screw up a little bit around that.
People were sort of scratching their head about his mouthing off once again.
First off, I mean, you got to admire.
I'll give him this.
Okay.
Again, goes back to that lack of impulse control.
It.
The transparency is great.
But as a CEO, you're not transparent about upcoming layoffs because all it does is create unnecessary stress and anxiety where everyone walks around and thinks, am I part of this 10% that's about to be fired?
And most likely makes them more apt to return the calls of headhunters saying, do you want to come work on the new Pontiac Leaf or something, right?
Yeah.
So it's not a smart idea. Now, what was worse, in my view, against the above full of shit was he then decided to say that, OK, if you don't come into the office, don't bother showing up.
that, okay, me saying this will shed about five or 10%, because supposedly a third of people under the age of 30
say they would look for another job
if they had to come into the office.
I think this is his way of saying,
I don't think all of a sudden he's woken up
and decided he doesn't like remote work.
I think it's like, you know what?
I'd rather not pay severance
because if you're paying $50,000 per employee in severance
and you got to lay off 10,000 people,
10% of your workforce, that's half a billion dollars employee in severance, and you got to lay off 10,000 people, 10% of your workforce.
That's a lot of money.
That's half a billion dollars in upcoming severance payments.
Yeah.
So, you know.
Yeah, he's trying to make trouble.
He's shaking the tree.
There you go.
He's shaking the tree.
That's what he's doing.
Anyway, by the way, there were new reports that Tesla hired a PR firm to monitor employee Facebook group in 2018 as several employees pushed for unionization.
They all do it.
In any case, Elon, clam down, as they say at IVARs in Seattle.
Clam down.
He's got to clam down.
And anyway, so we'll see what happens.
But basically, Scott says, full of shit.
Correct?
Am I correctly translating your—?
No, I think he's very transparent here, except all of his sycophant—
So a guy named John Najarian, who's on CNBC a lot, I actually think is a really thoughtful guy.
I love listening to him.
He and his brothers are both investors and options guys, and I just like hearing them think.
He said on Twitter, Scott, I said this is, you know, I put out snarkily.
Nonsense.
I said this is, you know, I put out snarkily.
Dear bots, artificially pump my stock price, attack my detractors, now get me out of this deal.
What I'm saying is basically I'm going to use this as a red herring for why I want out of this deal.
And he said, Scott, if you bought a house and you found out that there was radon in the basement, you're not obligated to close.
That's a fair point. Except this is like buying a house where you waive all
rights for, you waive all, no contingencies, you waive all rights of inspection, and you sign an
agreement saying, I'm showing up. So even if there's a meth lab in the basement, you have to
show up to close. Yeah, I think if they lie, if you can prove they lied about it, you can get out of
things like that. I believe that's the case in houses. People noted to me. Well, if they
misrepresented themselves. Did you see that episode
of Breaking Bad, by the way?
That's an episode of Breaking Bad.
Jesse's parents didn't disclose
it was a methadone.
Oddly enough, at the wedding,
they discussed Breaking Bad endlessly.
My brother loves it
and his wife loves it.
Best TV show in history.
Maybe the exception of The Sopranos.
Anyway, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back,
revelations about the January 6th
are incoming.
We'll speak with a friend of Pivot also about spreading financial literacy over TikTok.
I'm very excited about this.
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Scott, we're back.
The January 6th committee will host
his first public hearings this week.
It's already making news.
One big reveal, Mike Pence's chief of staff
worried for his boss's safety ahead of January 6th.
The vice president's top aide told the Secret Service that Trump could turn on Pence and
could put the vice president in danger.
The committee has enlisted former ABC News president James Golston to produce Thursday
night's hearing.
There's going to be a huge boom on social media around this with a mix of live testimony
and pre-produced video.
They are going for it, as they say. It's been 500 days since the insurrection. Is there still enough
anger for the news to make an impact? I got to say, there was a lot of conservative people at
this wedding I was at, and they don't care. They don't care. They don't care. But over 800 people
have been charged with crimes relating to January 6th. The most serious charge is yet a seditious conspiracy for the leaders of the Oath Keepers.
So what is the point of this and how should they, from a marketing point of view, I hate to boil it down to that, how do they get people's attention when people don't seem to care enough?
They should.
It's terrifying.
Well, that's the problem, right, is that Sheryl Sandberg's exit or more important news gets pushed down by the Herd Debt Trial.
And kind of a decent strategy is to slowball the whole thing.
The further people move away from something, the less angry they get.
So what you hope comes from this.
And by the way, I think they're smart.
I think whenever you have people ranging from Jeremy Raskin to Liz Cheney agreeing on something, it's an important moment. And I
think they're getting very savvy at it. They're going to produce the hearing. They're going to
make it more MTV or TikTok-y. They're learning. The hope is that they immediately move to some
sort of legislation while there's some momentum. And that is, I personally believe the Electoral
College should be abandoned. Liz Cheney won't go for that because she benefits from the fact there are two
senators representing a state that has fewer people than most cities. But when you think about
how we would actually affect the change, when Trump tried to rig the election, he wanted to
replace the electors, right? Send new people.
Send different people who are loyal to me and will lie. So, if – I think what would be productive
here is not anger or embarrassing anybody. I think that the FBI and the DOJ are doing their job and
putting people in prison who broke laws. What you hope comes out of this is that we start to look at
gerrymandering and how antiquated the electoral college is. You should – if you – I mean, my view at the end of the day, I know it's a good argument,
if you win the popular vote, you should win the presidency.
So, and the notion that we start in Iowa, the notion that we start in states that over
index on white people and older people, I think has been damaging to our nation.
Yeah, conservative people.
But I hope that we move to, I hope this immediately moves to proposed legislation to rethink how
we elect our leaders and how we have gotten to minority rule.
Your thoughts?
Absent of that, which is never going to happen until we have some sort of civil war, I hate to tell you.
I'm dreaming.
How do you produce this?
There's got to be a lot of social media.
There's got to be a lot of, like, reveals, big reveals.
You've seen Liz Cheney
out there giving interviews. She's a very active tweeter and quite good at it. Raskin is,
Adam Schiff is, stuff like that. How do you, and then of course, there's going to be counter,
apparently the Trump people have counter-programming that's going to go on
during this time. And especially on social media, One hopes that they understand the power of social media
here over networks. That's the thing I worry about, is that's what happened with Johnny Depp.
It was all social media that impacted the trial. Do you think they understand that?
I don't know. Have the ranking member slap or assault the chair of the committee? I mean,
look, what they do is they do what they do.
They produce the thing, and then they take as many sound bites as they can.
They cook it.
They create some manufactured moments, and they turn to social media where most of our
attention is, and they try and get people motivated and upset enough, and they remind
them of just how outrageous it was, how embarrassing a moment this was, how much moral authority our nation lost, what just a stain on the history of this country that day was.
And that hopefully ignites enough emotion such that we can have real change.
But it's all about production, and it's all about slicing and dicing and putting it on social media.
What are your thoughts?
I think they have to.
I think they have to.
I think they have to make this as shocking as possible.
The issue is how shocking is it? Trump is supposedly going to announce his bid for president as early as summer. That was one report. You know, he's a shameless man. So, of course, he's going to do this. But I think he's better at counter-programming. Like, I think it does work eventually. You know, I think it goes, it just works to exhaust people. Ex people exhausting people is their best tool it's like you know i i
again i was at this wedding i was like well it didn't happen i'm like yeah but it almost did
and they're like yeah but it didn't like that and i was like what like you know i had a cousin of
mine who happens to be gay was like trump's not that that, he's not anti-gay himself. I'm like, yeah, but all his friends are. He goes, yeah, well.
No, his policies are anti-gay.
I know. It was like, you know, they just, like, people like are coming out of COVID. They're
feeling not wanting to get sucked into partisanship. I worry that, you know, that they can't make,
there has to be an announcement so shocking. And even then we're in such a shockable society.
We're like, what, it's sort of like the Truman Show.
It's like, what's on TV next?
And so I worry about this.
I worry about that this is going to win.
Although a January 2020 poll found that, 2022 poll found about 40% of Republicans approve of the committee.
But there's going to be so much counter-programming.
They've got to be careful dealing with that.
That's my feeling.
But to this, look, think about Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Yeah.
Neither would be president or the wealthiest man in the world if they hadn't done what is key to disproportionately advancing your interest and your wealth faster than inflation or your competitive group.
And that is they leaned in and they became masters at an emerging medium.
Yeah. And what I say to anybody, and if you want to disproportionately grow your influence,
you have to get great at the next medium.
Yes.
And it's not easy.
I remember Tory Burch built an entire brand, a billion-dollar empire, because she had a
feel for Instagram.
While all of the luxury players were figuring out what's the legal liability, what if we say this, what if we say something that offends people, she just started
talking about her shoes and taking them off at TSA and taking pictures and everything. It just
resonated. And I would say, again, I would be totally focused. I wouldn't be too preoccupied
with Twitter because it's disproportionately, we, quote, unquote, in the beltway of what we think of as what people call the cultural elite are obsessed with Twitter.
I would say I would want – if I were advising Jeremy Raskin or Liz Cheney, I would be like, I want the smartest people, agencies, and vendors in a room thinking about TikTok morning, noon, and night around this.
Yep, 100%.
We are now going to bring on a friend of Pivot.
Crystal Todd is a CPA and an influencer on TikTok.
And I don't mean that in an insulting way because she's fantastic, where she offers up financial advice, giving investing tips to beginners and has a series on dead broke companies, which are very funny.
Let's listen to some clips. Popular but dead broke companies part five. I did not know Peloton
cost $2,000. They tripping. They have lost money for the past three years. As you can see for 2021,
they lost $187 million. And again, this is lost from operations. So that means they're
business model socks. If you came to me and said, Hey, Crystal, I want to sell shirts and every
shirt you sold cost you $4 to sell. I'd be like, sis, we got to talk. Crystal, this is fantastic.
Welcome Crystal Todd. How you doing? Thanks, Karen. Thanks, Scott. Great to be here. I'm doing
fantastic. Good. So you're like Scott's soulmate in some way. So I had to have you here.
So I'm curious.
100%.
100%, except you're much smarter. Anyway, why did you decide to take your advice to TikTok? And
talk a little bit about how you conceived it, because it's very straight talk. You show the
numbers behind you often. You sort of deal with some basic stuff, but it's relatively
complex, even though it's aimed at beginners. Yeah, of course. So I was on YouTube. I've been
on YouTube since 2019. And of course, I think the audience on YouTube is a little bit more
mature. They're a little bit more established. So a lot of times I'm just talking amongst peers.
But my purpose really is to spread awareness of financial information to
everybody, not just people who agree with me. And TikTok is a great place because it's high
engagement and the information moves really fast. So it allows me to get my content out in a concise
way, but still educating and entertaining, which is the most important part because this stuff
is boring, puts you right to sleep. So you need to have some entertainment in it.
So what's been the response? Who listens to you? Do you get a sense of that?
Yes, definitely. On TikTok, it's a much younger crowd. So I find myself explaining things that
maybe people on YouTube would have understood already, which is perfect because then it's
opportunity to kind of show more about this finance world. But I would say maybe the 20
something year olds, definitely Gen
Z is paying attention a lot. And they're, you know, opining on some of my videos, especially
when it comes to like work culture, because apparently nobody wants to work. No, apparently,
yes, they do. But nonetheless, when you try to do them, you talked about being concise. And that's
one thing you really do, you go to the heart of the issue, like, look at this number, let me
explain why this number is important. How do you conceive of them? How short and how long? And
what is the message you're trying to get through when you're trying to do the various things?
So the timing just came from basically trial and error. You can see certain videos will need some
more explanation. So when I'm actually showing things or like illustrating on my whiteboard,
that requires maybe the full three minutes on TikTok. But little tidbits of information is
actually a little bit more easier to digest. So it depends on the information. If it's like a
pretty intense topic, like these popular but dead broke companies, there's so many factors in their
balance sheet and their income statement. And I don't want to bore people and I don't want to,
you know, also maybe provide too much information.
So a lot of times I'll record everything I want to say and then I'll play it back and say, but what really makes sense?
What's going to really encourage somebody to look into some more?
So a shock factor and things like that really evoke emotion because that's where people, we're emotional beings.
Yes, absolutely. Speaking of which, Scott.
Yes, absolutely. Speaking of which, Scott?
So I'm not exaggerating. Yesterday, my 11-year-old, speaking of dates, took a date to Atlantic Avenue here in Delray Beach.
And he came home with a $40 British box of candy. And I'm like, how much that cost? He said, $40.
And I said, how do you buy it? And he's like, with the money you gave me. And I said to him, quote, well, the math ain't mathing,
which is a crystal, which is a crystal quote. I just want to start off by saying,
I think you are doing really important work. And I'm hugely appreciative of what you're doing.
It just strikes me, and there will be a question in here, that I learned, I went to calculus in high school, and it caused me so much stress. I don't think I've been able to use it a
whole heck of a lot, but I also was blessed. I used to go to the payphone booth and contact my
broker, Cy Serrell, because I bought 16 shares of Columbia Pictures and he used to walk me through
stuff about the stock market, and that has paid off huge dividends. What do you think we could do in high school? What would you take out and
what would you insert? Because what I think you're doing is so important. I think you're going to
save a lot of people, young people, a lot of heartache. And I think you're also going to help
people establish economic security earlier in their lives. What could we do at a high school level to improve people's financial literacy?
Exactly. The school system is so antiquated. It's so, I mean, it's vintage, okay? And there is no,
at least on a nationwide basis, there's no requirement for financial education,
which is weird because I dissected frogs in my science class, right? Like,
I will never do that ever again in my life. However, I wasn't taught how to, you know,
balance a checkbook or what a check even is, what dividends are, all of these basic things that we
see in our lives every day, but we didn't get exposure to. So creating an environment where
when you're going to school, it's not only an elective kind of brush to the side, but it's
required, especially for our high schoolers, maybe in, you know, starting in 10th grade or so, because the
more years you have this, the better, you know, you don't get better at anything unless you're
actually practicing. So we need years and years and years of financial education at different
levels that are actually palatable for those kids. So like what, what would you have? What
would you have? What would be critical balance?
You mentioned balancing a checkbook. What are the things because it's astonishing, we never talk
about money at all, and then throw these kids into whatever. I mean, I had to sit with my sons
and explain a checkbook, but go ahead. Yeah, exactly. And of course, maybe we don't use
checkbooks as much these days. And when I was growing up, we used a bunch more. But at the
very basics, we need to learn about money management
and actually looking for a return on investment. What happened to me is like, I mean, things worked
out in my favor, but sometimes kids just end up going to college because it's the right thing to
do. But have you calculated your return on that investment? How much money are you going to spend
on that college tuition? And what is it going to come back out to you? Are you going to be able to
see that return within a couple of years? Or does somebody in your field
never make the kind of money you would make
you incurred with all those fees?
So definitely calculating your investments,
basic money management,
understanding basic stocks,
and of course, new current events that are coming up.
Bitcoin is a big thing, cryptocurrencies, Web3.
There's a whole bunch of current events
that we're also missing from the education system. How are you handling that on the videos, Bitcoin? Because Bitcoin's
gone down. A lot of young people are focused on that, of course, and have lost a lot of money,
or the meme stocks or things, or NFTs. And my focus is on education. And I think with all the
access we have to the internet, a lot of times you'll just scroll on Twitter, you'll see something about Bitcoin, then you will make a purchase. No, absolutely not. I really
pride myself in educating people because when you're educated and you see fluctuations, whether
it's in cryptocurrency or even stocks, you're going to be solid because you know that you did
the research and maybe you feel confident about that company. You didn't just buy it because
somebody on the internet said to. And that's why people end up having FOMO and rushing in and out of things because
they don't do the work themselves. They haven't vetted the company. They have no clue what's
going on except what they see on Twitter. I'm curious what opportunities have come your way.
Do you see yourself eventually being like a Susie Orman or what is your, we all have to make a
living. We all, you talk about the importance of economic security,
but how does this play into your career? I like to look at and advise anybody in any
industry to do this. Think about what you would be doing in your industry 10 years from now.
I'm in accounting, and I already see it at my day job. We are instilling a lot of different
technology. These days, you have to be very technology, you know, enough, right?
You have to understand technology and what it's doing and where things are moving.
And the trend for education is going online.
With the pandemic, we all were forced to be in our houses and many of these kids had to
learn online.
But now I think that it's because the internet has made online learning so much easily accessible.
I see that people are going to be on the internet looking for this information, which I actually will provide in courses. So I have a bunch of
courses in the pipeline. One is actually releasing next week. And it's about just money management.
Okay. And then as these courses build, we are going to increase things. I'll have current events,
discords, way that people can actually communicate and be up to date about current economic
trends that are not biased because you want to have the education piece and then you make your own decision from there.
So you have categories of videos, you have money hacks. What's your number one money hack?
My favorite one is a piece of advice is there is risk in everything. So I don't want that to
deter you from investing. Maybe back in the day, you could have your money in a savings account
and then you could
retire and you could live off that savings. That world has long gone. And now in order to actually
make a living and become more financially successful, you have to step out into that
risk curve. So not being afraid and actually researching everything you know and taking time
to educate yourself so you can make sound financial decisions is very, very crucial.
And it's the best thing I can tell anybody to do.
Don't ever just listen to someone on the internet.
I say it on my videos all the time.
I'm just a random girl on the internet, right?
Go do your own due diligence.
I don't think so, but okay.
All right, I don't think you are.
In that way, you also cover investing.
And one of the things Scott's been talking a lot about,
I want Scott to talk about buy now, pay later.
But when people don't have experience in investing and want to jump in with a small amount, they sort of get sucked up into whatever it's an AMC meme or whatever it happens to be.
How do you recommend for someone who doesn't have experience?
To get started?
Okay, it depends.
So I believe that at the very least you should be
investing in something every single month, because as I said, if you're saving, you're losing and we
all see inflation now. I mean, I've been preaching from the mountains since 2019, but this has been
going on for years and now we're actually seeing a lot of traction. So people are talking about it
a lot, right? So inflation has taken over and we need to make sure we're figuring out ways to keep
our money secure and sound. So when you're first starting out, having something that's automatic, maybe if you're
not so comfortable yet, but you know you want to get started, you can try ETFs, right?
So these are going to be exchange traded funds that are going to be a collection of different
bonds or stocks in whatever kind of industry you're interested in, right?
So I would say, think of what you're interested in, something that you can actually research
and you won't get tired of.
And then you can, from there, pick an ETF, which would be something that you could invest in every single month.
And that would be like your passive investments. But you can also get active out here. Right.
And you can also target companies that you actually like. So if you like Amazon, just throwing that out there, look at their financials, get an understanding of what's coming up next.
Every quarter, these companies have conversations with their investors and they let them know what's exactly in the pipeline for
them. So get comfortable with these companies and then actually put some money in. So a lot of times
people will say, I want to invest. And then they just sit there with the money in their savings
account. If you actually just put something in there, now you have some sweat equity, right?
You have some skin in the game. And that'll motivate you to
look into it deeper. At least that was my experience, especially with like precious
metals, for example. Definitely wasn't on board with that at first, but I said, let me just invest
something in there. And then as you see it growing a little bit, you get excited and then you put
more effort into it. I'm curious if you see a difference between the financial literacy of
boys versus girls. And I think a lot about this.
I think that boys have this problem where they think, I don't need to save because I'm going
to be a baller and someday make $100 million. How do boys think about it differently than
girls in high school? Or have you found a difference? Yes, I've absolutely found a
difference. And even when women are actually into these things, a lot of times you're
into like the cute budget planners. This is, I hate to do this because obviously I'm a woman too,
but I can't help but notice what I noticed. Right. So in it on the YouTube realm, I'll have
plenty of men commenting and a lot of them actually do know their stuff. Right. So a lot
of them are engaged. They're talking about more complex matters. And I only really see the women get excited when I'm doing budgeting stuff. So I don't know why that is necessarily,
but it's very interesting. I think women don't take on these more complex problems enough and
actually want to learn about these more complex financial situations. And the men seem a little
bit more, so maybe to a full, Maybe they think they know it all, right?
So then they're on my channel like,
you're wrong because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know?
Well, let me, Crystal, just on the subject,
let me put forward a thesis and you respond to it.
We all see dopa hits at that age.
And boys get dopa from gambling
and they approach investing as a gambler
and girls get dopa from buying.
And they think about saving
money as a means to such that they can buy something really fabulous. Your thoughts?
Yeah. No, I think it's absolutely true. And even sometimes the guys will fall victim to just,
you know, that lifestyle creeper just buying things frivolously for no reason. But definitely
women, I'm guilty of it. I like to have my nails done. I like to go out to eat and things like that. So yeah, we're victims of our society.
We have two more questions. One of the things that Scott's talked about and written a lot is
buy now, pay later, which is a trend, you know, all these apps when they do that and instant
credit and things like that. You've had a video talking about how minimum payments on credit
cards are designed to keep us in debt forever. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention given to student debt right now. And it gets amplified by the internet in a lot of ways.
How do you look at that? Because people get either sucked up into Robin Hood in a gamified way.
You're trying to make investing fun, but there is a danger to making it too fun, correct?
Yes. And we have just repackaged layaway in so many different ways.
These buy now, pay later, like, you know, after pay Klarna and even fractional shares,
in my opinion, is definitely a form of layaway. You can't afford the whole stock. So you're just
buying piece by piece. While on one hand, it is great because it does open up, I guess,
more accessibility for those who cannot buy full shares of stocks, but it is
teaching us how to be a very debt-hungry society, buying off of margins. So you're basically taking
out loans just to get stocks and getting into really high-risk things. So I definitely don't
encourage these type of buy now, pay later, especially with clothes. A lot of it is buying
clothes or buying just random things in your house. If you can't afford it, you probably should not be buying it.
That's just a stark reality. So these type of companies are encouraging us to get into more
debt. Debt makes the world go round. So someone has to be in debt, honestly. But the more people
that we can actually convert to not really following the system, the better. One of the biggest reasons for divorce is financial disagreement.
Have you I think you have such an important voice.
Have you thought about bridging financial security and financial literacy to relationships and how important it is to start having those conversations earlier in a relationship?
Oh, my goodness. No, I actually made a video about relationships and money
years ago and it was like one of the worst performing videos i've ever had on my channel
never mind the people are not interested
see you know i have one last question should we get on tiktok crystal you made a jump we'd be
terrible on tiktok no you guys would be awesome on tiktok are you kidding me what should we do i would slip and break a hip on tiktok no you guys should definitely post
pieces of your podcast on tiktok even just like you recording on tiktok people i mean oh my god
the engagement on tiktok is so awesome it's becoming like a more fast-paced youtube and
there's a wealth of information on there and i really see a need for you know the political things that you guys talk about and the finance business things that we talk about on there there's a wealth of information on there. And I really see a need for, you know, the political things that you guys talk about and the finance business things that we talk about.
There's a, there's a need for it on there. A lot of times it's just like a whole bunch of
billionaires talking about how great they're doing and how you should buy their course. And yes,
I'm going to sell the course too, but my focus is on accessibility and helping raise awareness
about these financial topics. Well, in any case, we find Crystal fantastic. You should follow her.
You can find her on TikTok
at Crystal Todd CPA.
That's Crystal with a K.
Where are you on YouTube?
What's the same thing?
It's the Cash Compass.
The Cash Compass.
All right.
Anyway, she's fantastic.
I watch not that much TikTok,
but you were someone I found
as I tell people I watch your show.
The math ain't mathing, Kara.
Math ain't mathing. Anyway. The math ain't mathing.
Anyway, we're big fans, Crystal.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for your good and important work.
Of course.
Thanks for having me, guys.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
All right, Scott, one more quick break.
We'll be back for predictions.
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Okay, Scott, let's hear some predictions.
So I just have one. And it's always dangerous to make stock predictions,
so I'm trying to avoid it and just talk about what I buy and what I sell,
but that's not going to stop me today.
Twitter right now is at about $40 a share,
which is way off the supposed closing price of $54.20.
It's going to be in the 20s in the next, I don't know, 30 to 60 days
as two things become increasingly clear.
The person who agreed to buy it is not going to buy it,
and it's very difficult to enforce.
It's very difficult to get someone to show up with $45 billion.
You can fine them. This is all about the fine now, but people are someone to show up with $45 billion. You can fine them.
This is all about the fine now.
But people are going to wake up and realize, okay, he started acquiring shares at $32 a share.
And since he began acquiring shares at $32 a share, the peer group is off 20% to 50%,
meaning the natural level of Twitter is either in the high teens or the low 20s.
And when people realize that it's
just increasingly unlikely this individual is going to show up with the funds and the next
stage of realization will be people realizing there really isn't another deal here done at a
lower price because the board can't accept a lower price from a guy whose agreement or commitments mean nothing. So I
think you're going to see huge pressure on Twitter stock as all of a sudden the stock price begins
falling to its natural level as an independent trade company.
Could Elon then return? That's the thing.
I think he's outed himself as someone who's not a credible acquirer.
I know, but a hostile, like, oh, he could do a tender.
He could do a tender. That's an interesting point. I think he's got his eyebrows pretty badly burned off here.
I don't know.
I mean, this has not been good for him.
The bloom is off the rose, as they say.
But we'll see where it goes.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Any predictions from you, Cara?
I do not.
I just predict that.
What do I predict?
I don't have any predictions.
There you go.
I don't have any predictions.
By the way, it's a shitty business.
You're smart not to do it.
Because when you get them wrong, people remind you.
When you get them right, they're like, well, of course, because all the events leading up to it.
Oh, I'll have one.
I'll do one.
I'll do one.
Not a stock one.
I think Sheryl Sandberg's going to get a CEO job if she wants one.
I'm going to tell you that.
You were talking about the Amazon exec.
Okay, but does she want one?
I think she wants to run for office.
I don't know.
I'm just saying.
A lot of people talked about this this weekend. I tend to agree with them. Actually, Bill Cohen wrote a really good piece about it. I think it's very hard to find experienced CEOs that have the experience she has and all the stuff she has. I think they will look the other way. Certain companies will go, you know what? She's really good at what she does. We'll see. Anyway, I don't know. If she wanted to, she certainly could.
good what she does. We'll see. Anyway, I don't know. If she wanted to, she certainly could.
All right. That's the show. Don't forget to send us your dating questions, by the way,
because we're going to have a special on that. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit your questions for us or call 855-51-PIVOT. Although Crystal shut our relationship money thing down
rather quickly. In any case, we're going for it. We're going to have that as one of the questions.
Anyway, the link is also in our show notes. Okay, Scott, that's the show.
We'll be back on Friday for more. Please read us out.
Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie
Ingerthot engineered the episode. Thanks also to Drew Rose and Neil Silverio. Make sure you're
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from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. The math ain't
math and care. Have a great week. Okay, great.