The Press Box - Uber, Facebook, and Elon Musk Seek Image Repair | Damage Control (Ep. 473)

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

The Ringer’s Kate Knibbs and Justin Charity unpack the complicated politics and relationship between pop musician Grimes and tech billionaire Elon Musk (1:50), and then analyze the recent television ad campaigns from Facebook and Uber that vaguely acknowledge each company’s recent scandals and promise to be better (13:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get started, I just want to tell you about a couple of different things happening at The Ringer. Yesterday, Justin Charity, my co-host, was on Micah Peter's new podcast on Shuffle. It's a music podcast, and it is released on Wednesdays, and the newest episode is about Janet Jackson's legacy and Meek Mill's Life After Prison. You should definitely check it out. And if you want to go to The Ringer.com, I wrote a story yesterday. It's a Q&A with a the Wall Street Journal reporter John Carriroo, who just wrote a book called Bad Blood. It's a really, really fascinating account of Theranos, the blood testing startup that went horribly awry, and I had a really great conversation with him, so you should read it. And now on to Damage Control.

I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and defies us in popular culture. This week we're talking about Facebook, Uber, and their recent cryptic TV advertisements, which seem to be part of their respective apology towards. But first, we're talking about the weirdest celebrity couple of 2018, which is saying a lot. Elon Musk and Grimes. Do you know who Grimes is? I know who Grimes is.

Okay. Give me some credit. We're going to talk about why they're especially disturbing and almost politicized celebrity. couple on this week's damage control. Elon Musk is a billionaire, the founder of Tesla, and in my opinion, a real-life supervillain. Grimes is a beloved Canadian musician known for her alternative style. They're dating. A lot of people are very confused about that because Musk is a very well-known cutthroat capitalist

who wants to colonize Mars, while Grimes had anti-imperialist in her Twitter bio in recently. Some people were disappointed and angry with Grimes for seemingly betraying her principles to be with the Silicon Valley tycoon. And this week, Grimes defended her new boyfriend on Twitter by arguing that Musk is not against unionization, which left fans even more perplexed as Musk's anti-labor practices at Tesla have been well documented. It's a fraught couple. So this is like this is a celebrity dating story. But help me understand why, so like you said, it's two politically, seemingly politically incompatible people dating or politically irreconcilable people dating. Why do Musk's politics for fans of Grimes?

Why do Elon Musk's politics necessarily reflect on Grimes? I think it's because she had a reputation for being a bit more thoughtful than like the average celebrity. And also, Elon Musk is just like deeply uncool. And Grimes seemed like she might genuinely be cool. So I think that, like, offended people's sensibilities. And also I think it's how proactively she's gone about publicly supporting him. But I think that everyone should settle down. I think I've actually come out the other side and now I'm sort of in favor of this union because at least it's raising awareness about,

Elon Musk's bad labor practices. And it's another, I mean, I know you and I have discussed why celebrities shouldn't be put on pedestals in the past, like in our recent Kanye conversation, we were talking about that. This is like another example of why you shouldn't just assume that an artist you like has good, coherent politics. But I don't even know that that's the, with Elon Musk and Grimes, right, I just, I'm hesitant to look at any couple. And I mean, beyond putting anyone on a pedestal, it's just like there are two people who have some sort of romantic relationship of some degree of severity. And yeah, I don't know.

Have people just not dated? I think only one thing if Elon were, if Elon were Alex Jones, maybe, I would be like, okay, and now I, yes. That would be wild. That's incomprehensible and that's the sort of person who shouldn't be allowed to date anyone. Right? Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. Do people, I just don't, it just seems weird for that to be the standard of dating.

The idea that these two people need to be roughly politically coherent in order for them to make sense as two people who have sex and maybe do more than that. Talk about, make really, really dorky jokes about. Right. Right. Which is how they met, right? Like Elon Musk at one point, this, I mean, originally this relationship surfaced in public. I think, according to a gossip item and maybe the post or something around the time of the Mac gala. Yeah, and then they came public at the Mac gala.

Right. And I think Musk is the one who said that they initially bonded over a tweet of his. I've never, what man has ever? He slid into her DMs. Oh, it's right. She had a tweet about some science bullshit. And then they bonded over science. Yeah, and it was like a bad pun.

Something good. But, I mean, I think this relationship is actually really. It's a tool we can use to learn. Okay, first of all, first lesson from this relationship. If you are rich enough, you can slide into someone's DMs and make a bad joke and start dating them. Second lesson, don't assume that your celebrities who seem cool are going to partner up with someone cool or that they have coherent politics. Kate, I'm going to tell you my problem with this story. Please do.

It is about two celebrities dating. My general cynical take on celebrities dating in all forms is that celebrity relationships aren't real, that they're not romantic relationships for the most part. They are public relations endeavors meant to market people more effectively than they're currently being marketed. Now, maybe there are instances in which that's not true. I don't know, but that's my general rule of thumb about them. and I think a lot of people looking at Elon Musk and Grimes, I've seen a lot of people framing their relationship

in terms of, oh, they're dating because Elon Musk needs a certain sort of credibility, right? Like, he's already, he's trying to go to space. He's trying to be the cool tech guy. This is just another gambit by him to establish himself as like a knockoff Bruce Wayne tech billionaire guy. The collision of these two disparate public personas is really interesting.

And yeah, I think that Grimes bestows upon Musk something that he needs. He has a pretty bad reputation as a romantic partner because one of his ex-wives wrote this sort of scathing expose, or not an expose, but like an essay about their relationship. It was called, like, I was a millionaire's starter wife or something like that in Elle, just sort of detailing how controlling he was. And ever since then, he's dated and married various beautiful blonde women, Amber Hurd. But Grimes is offering something different from his established dating of beautiful blonde women because she is this sort of alternative fashion punky producer.

I mean, she is a very, very talented musician. Like she's a genuinely good artist. And she's pretty outspoken. And so I think that lent him something. that he wants. If he's seen dating this independent woman, maybe he'll look like less of a controlling psycho. Right.

If they, or if celebrities in general, look at relationship, like a romantic pairing that way, that seems cynical. But it seems equally cynical to me that the audiences for these two people, especially Grimes' audience, kind of implicitly agree that that's all celebrity relationships are, right? Because they, in so much as there's a back-class. to this celebrity couple, I think specifically a backlash against crimes. To me, it's people sort of discarding the personal, romantic element of this relationship and regarding the relationship only as a brand exercise for the two people involved.

That doesn't seem any more or less cynical than Elon Musk's purposes in being in this relationship and publicizing this relationship in the first place. See, this is why I'm pro this union. I'm like, let these Canadian rich people kiss. But I'm anti this union if only because it's one of those things that reveals in ways that always makes me uncomfortable. It reveals how psychologically invested, intelligent adults are in the romantic lives of strangers who don't give a shit about them. Like, that's what's strange to me. And I imagine if Grimes was who people thought she was and was this sort of.

crusading activist with this incredibly cogent political philosophy. And they fell in love and she completely changed Elon Musk's ideology. And then she convinced him to colonize Mars for everyone and not just for rich people. And then he saved us all. And then he turned into a superhero. That would be pretty cool, wouldn't it? That would be cool if I were a child and needed to imagine things like that. But I guess my question is why do I need to imagine either either the current scenario or that scenario, that sort of idealistic scenario? Like, I don't know. I think the two people are dating and they may break up, they may break up at some point. Like, they may be fake, they may be real. It just strikes me as interesting that people, I would say very immediately when the news of this relationship

leaked, it really became this political referendum on crimes in a way that, I mean, if you if her tweets or any evidence, I think she was very startled by. But it's startling to me how quickly people interpreted this relationship as a political referendum on crimes. Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this relationship and the response to it is because it's a very classic example of everyone focusing on completely the wrong things. Instead of people getting all worked up about Elon Musk's documented anti-labor practices,

they're just upset that a cool girl decided to date him. Right, right. And it's weird because there's a sense in which the backlash to this celebrity pairing, if you ask those people why they're mad, they'll tell you, well, I'm mad because of Elon Musk's bad labor practices and his bad outlook on the future. They'll tell you that in response. But that they, they'll tell you that. They They sort of themselves have inverted the conversation so that the conversation isn't actually about those things that they care about. It's about the superficial thing, which is the pairing itself. And so, yeah, it's this weird sense in which the discourse, which maybe has righteous intentions, has completely reversed its own polarity and is leading with the totally frivolous, like, meaningless story that's about obsessing over other people's love lives, even though the thing that ostensibly we all. about it is that Elon Musk is an unsavory figure.

Yeah. Although, if he's listening, I would take a ticket to Mars. Why? Why are you trying to go to Mars? I'm talking like worst case scenario. I'm not going to go right now. But do you know how going to be for Agi and Zach as the producers of this podcast if you went to Mars and then we had to take. Like that would be the time zones.

We don't even know how that works. This would be in a postering our universe. Oh, my God. This is dark. It's got really dark really quickly. From now on. Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy. So we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place.

Friends. Because when this place does what it was built for, then we all get a little closer. Facebook and Uber. They're both two big tech companies. And they've both got television advertisements running right now. Except those advertisements aren't for Facebook or Uber. The TV advertisements are basically apologies to their respective

user bases. Now, Facebook is apologizing for its routine and scandalous mismanagement of user data, and Uber is basically apologizing for being Uber. Like, where do we start with Uber, Kate? You got it right. Oh, yeah. I was going to say, Uber is apologizing for a lot of things, and we'll get into that. The Uber ad in particular is actually very vague, just because the range of that company's indiscretions is actually pretty broad. Accordingly, the Uber ad is actually pretty vague. Let's listen to a bit of that ad starring the company's new CEO, Derek Kuzhahi. One of our core values as a company is to always do the right thing. And if there are times when we fall short, we commit to being open, taking responsibility for the problem, and fixing it.

And you've got my word that we're charting an even better road for Uber and for those that rely on us every day. Kate, we're going to learn from our mistakes. If we make more mistakes, we're going to learn from those two. Okay, so you've heard the Facebook ad, you've heard the Uber ad. This is classic corporate damage control. That's the name of our podcast. Damage control. This is what we hear in the biz referred to as a rehabilitation campaign, right?

So let's start with Facebook. I think the Facebook ad is interesting, if only because Facebook is with the biggest website on the planet and they've taken out TV ads. They have video capabilities on Facebook. What is the point of there being TV ads apologizing? I'm sure they did some sort of cost-benefit analysis and we're like, man, we got to apologize to the people who have basic cable still. But I don't really understand these ads either because Facebook has suffered blows to its

reputation, but they haven't translated to really any negative consequences for the company insofar as like losing users. They've been facing a lot. of scrutiny from politicians, both in the U.S. and in Europe. But it's not like Facebook has been hemorrhaging users or anything. Honestly, I think it was weird that they did this ad because it seems unnecessary to remind people that they transgressed. I will say, I thought the ad was interesting, especially comparing it to Uber, because it made it really, it sort of reinforced the idea that Facebook is an essential mode of communication for

tons of people. Facebook, I mean, the ad sort of highlights that when Facebook works well, it's this incredibly powerful way to stay in touch and to meet people and just to exist in the digital world. I think they probably should have just gone with that and not mentioned the fact that they had transgressed. If that ad had just been about all the nice things Facebook had done, it would have been, I think, just as effective. So that the ad is Facebook addressing the idea that beyond it's pretty simple origins, right? It's just a way to connect people, a way for you to break up with a girlfriend publicly on a social media platform and list your relationship status and message people. You know, the ad acknowledges that Facebook has struggled with spam and fake news and managing user data.

And it's sort of the ad, Zuckerberg's not in the ad, I should say. Which was a good call on their part. He's, well, his spirit looms large in that to me. I mean, it is good because his media presence is something else. He's tried so hard to become more of a presentable public-facing CEO, but I don't want to see his face. But the ad is interesting because it echoes a company line about Facebook that I associate with Zuckerberg personally, which is that permanent defensive Facebook as, how could we have ever known? You know, like I developed this in my dorm room.

how could we have ever known that managing people's personal information would require a level of seriousness and professionalization? It's this very nostalgic, very adolescent way of talking about Facebook as like, who could imagine that something like this could have ever been, become so complicated? Yeah. It's very whimsical. The ad becomes very whimsical in how it characterizes the challenges that Facebook has confronted. And it doubles down on the idea that the company's problems stem from, from it being too idealistic for its own good. Right. Now it's sort of taken a step back and is ready to be a little tougher on all the fake news and the spam and whatever.

I don't think they even needed to spend the money on these ads, though. It's weird that it's a TV commercial about Facebook and that it's a high, in my mind, stylistically. It doesn't seem like a product ad. It seems like a public service announcement. It's like an disembodied public service announcement. An existential defense. It's an existential referendum on the idea of Facebook. But the weird thing about its energy and its language is that it basically flows like a campaign ad, right?

God. Yeah, it flows like, and I'm not trying to drag us back to Mark Zuckerberg for president because I think that that, I think that avenue is closed in a lot of ways. But it's an ad that when you watch it, you get to the end of the ad and you're like, am I being, am I supposed to vote for Facebook now? Is this what the point of this ad is? Like, Facebook's troubles are so prominent. and Zuckerberg's congressional testimony was so prominent. And it just, it's unclear to me what the Facebook ad is even litigating at this point. For something that's airing currently on television,

it just seems like a very vague, all-purpose piece of reputation management that I just, I'm not entirely sure what its effectiveness is. Do you think that the effect is supposed to just be, you get to the end of that ad, it has some, like, dainty little music in it. It's a vaguely optimistic piece of messaging. And you come away and you're like 0.01% more optimistic about Facebook and then you see the ad 400 times and then you're, you know, 2% more optimistic about Facebook. I think it might actually be not even trying to make people optimistic, but just not mad enough to call their representatives. I guess my working theory about this is that, so Facebook didn't really lose any users from the scandal, but it has been getting a lot of regulatory pressure.

So in Europe, they're enacting these new data laws. And Mark Zuckerberg has sort of claimed that the same data protections will extend to America, but also said it in a really vague and, you know, said it with a lot of caveats. I think that Facebook might be hoping that if it can rehabilitate itself enough to sort of make Congress forget that it hasn't actually fixed everything that it said it was going to fix, it won't have to fix anything. Like, I think they're just trying to smooth things over so that the changes they have to make are as minimal as possible. I guess that's my working theory,

but I don't even know they needed to do this. I feel like the news cycle moves so fast, people probably are not even calling their senators being like, investigate Facebook anymore. And I can imagine people inside Facebook thinking this is, man, there's been so much bad media on TV about Facebook let's get up some positive media on TV about Facebook. We'll just do that via buying ads.

That's sort of the simple, like, somebody who works in that sort of reputation management, it probably is just thinking it would be nice to have some, to have content about Facebook on television. That isn't castigating Facebook and saying Facebook is horrible and Zuckerberg is horrible. Yeah. That makes sense. That's a lot less complicated than my theory. Yeah.

I want to talk about Uber, which seems like a, I can't tell whether I think it should be more or less maligned than Facebook. Well, I think Facebook is more dangerous. And also, so I was thinking about the ads in relation to each other. And I do think, so Uber is in a lot more of an existential crisis because of its scandals. Like it had, Travis Clannock does not work there anymore. Like, he was ousted. Yeah, let's talk about what Uber's scandals were.

Yeah. You want to give a brief. Oh, man. So there have been, there have been like a bunch of different ones. There's been several scandals regarding Uber not doing background checks on drivers and then people getting assaulted. That's one. There's like a wider scandal of Uber basically destroying the taxi industry and ruining a lot of people's livelihoods. That's too.

They had situations where Uber employees were sort of caught like surveilling customers. Then there was this whole, there were protests and the taxi drivers were on strike. and Uber wasn't on strike, so it got really bad press for seeming like it was crossing a picket line. And, like, there's been so many different intersecting Uber scandals. And they've been very aggressive. Like, Travis Kalanick, who you're talking about is sort of for a long time, the central figure and a lot of the ill will toward Uber. And he was certainly not a person who was very good at crisis management. He was a very chaotic.

I mean, one of the scandals was actually that he. He was tapes berating an Uber driver. Like, he, it was just a total mess. I mean, I could go on listening to scales. One more that I just wanted to mention was that Susan Fowler, who used to work at Uber, wrote a piece detailing the climate of sexual harassment and misogyny within the company. And that also, like, I think that was one of the big things that ended up destroying Klanik's tenure. So Uber had all these bad things. Like, it had a horrible reputation.

Right. And I think if the story of Facebook scandals is naivete, Uber is kind of more straight up nefarious. Yes. And also the other big difference, I think, between Uber and Facebook situations is that you can quit using Uber pretty easily because Lyft exists. And if you're in New York, cabs exist. Cabs exist. There's a lot of, it hasn't established this self as a monopoly as this indispensable tool in the way that Facebook has for many communities. So it's not as entrenched. And we're seeing, you know, Lyft is gaining market share now. Like Uber actually has lost customers based on its scandals, whereas Facebook didn't really. Right. So they were actually in, I thought it was probably, I got why they were doing this video more than I got why Facebook was.

Sure. It's like they go through, Uber goes through losing Kalanik. They get this new CEO, Kazashahi. They get these advertisements on TV. The Facebook ad talks about fake news. It talks about the issues that people would ostensibly be mad at Facebook for. It's hard for me to guess what the Uber ads are even about. It's very much, you know, Kazu Shahi opens the ad,

and he's in the vaguest possible way, acknowledging that some people in the world somewhere may have some ill will for some reason toward Uber. But the ad otherwise just seems like a vague car commercial. The visual language of it, the music, the music, the people. progression of it. The language becomes this very generic. If we make mistakes, we're going to stop making mistakes.

Yeah, I'm actually surprised. Do you remember that car commercial that was like, like a rock? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. I could see Dara sitting down at the piano and, you know. Yeah, it was definitely vague, but honestly, it would have been pretty brutal to have him list all the horrible things that Uber actually did. so I get why they were euphemistic in that regard. Yeah. It was just a way of saying,

hey, that shitty guy who did all that bad stuff doesn't work here anymore. There's a new guy in town. I did think, I sat back and thought, how many people in the markets for these ads even know that much about Kalanik, know that much about specifically the internal strife at Uber to such a degree that would justify the existence of these ads in the first place?

Because otherwise, I just, I tried to watch the ad. I tried to take myself out of my own context and watch the ad as somebody who only vaguely knows about Uber. And there's a level on which the Uber ad just seems illegible. I'm sure in like rural areas where Uber isn't available or whatever they do the commercial and be like, what? For sure. I mean, and I guess these ads are airing in markets where, I mean, the crazy thing about Uber is that they always have these local legal battles and local political battles. and so these ads in some way or maybe support for Uber's messaging in different markets where maybe they're competing with taxi industry or what have you.

You know what I think it is? So, for instance, the two ads that we're talking about in this episode, our producers told us about. Like, I actually don't watch. Yeah, neither of us have cable, right? You don't have cable either. Right. And it's weird because so much of all of the big news that we read about these companies as sort of bad actors in the tech community, is through online.

And it is weird to sort of step out of online and step into the world of television commercials and think about how somebody's processed the Facebook fake news scandals or the uber sexual harassment scandals as a nightly news, you know, network television consumer as opposed to a web obsessive consumer. I think there's probably a difference,

although I do, since I don't have cable either, I'm really basing this off whenever I go home to my parents' house, they're big nightly news watchers. And so I like to sort of do a sort of comparison of what sort of news we've been getting because it is interesting to see how like the medium through which you consume news informs your diet of info. But there have been like TV exposés on Uber for sure. So I don't think it's one of those things that's too obscure. I will say that I was in the grocery store the other day and people in line were like talking and they were talking about Instagram and how they were quitting Facebook and I'm annoying. So I was like, oh, you know Instagram's owned by Facebook and neither of them knew that. So I think we do always have to take a step back and remember that most people are psychologically healthier than us and aren't glued to Twitter all the time.

Right. The thing we have in common, though, is that we're all trapped on Facebook. Even after we have deleted or disabled our Facebook accounts, we're all trapped on Facebook together. Oh, yes. I feel like a very large swath of people don't even know that Instagram is owned by Facebook. They use Facebook without even knowing it, basically. And, I mean, I know some people have been able to cut ties with the company altogether, but it's really hard to use the Internet and not use any Facebook products, whether it's WhatsApp. or Instagram or just like using a Facebook login to access another website or whatever. Like it's very hard to quit. I mean, in that sense, it doesn't really matter whether I saw the TV ads.

It doesn't really matter whether I disable my Facebook or not. I think the thing we all have in common, whether we have Facebook or not, is that whether we know it, we're all kind of just stuck in a Facebook world and we're stuck on Facebook together forever. Looking at pictures of Elon Musk and Graham. True, true. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs.

That's it from us this week. We'll see you again on damage control in two weeks. Bye.