[ABeeSea]

She does not have $22B in cash. You pay employees in cash. Impact investing is just as brutal as any other investment fund. Dollars can be deployed more impactfully elsewhere. The goal is investments that create long term structural change and subsidizing employees of a declining business doesn’t move them towards that goal.

[mikeyouse]

The point is the business wasn't declining until she changed the mission.. In addition to her Apple wealth, she owns roughly 100 million shares of Disney. 68 staff cuts at $150k/year all-in cost mean she'll save roughly $10M/year.

So she could sell 0.08% of her shares in Disney at today's price and these people would be employed for another year to work on the mission that she / the collective chose.

[donohoe]

"The point is the business wasn't declining until she changed the mission"

WTF? No. Are you just making this up?

She, via Emerson Collective, has invested heavily and they would be in greater trouble were it not for her.

(I used to work for Quartz which was started by The Atlantic so my comments are based on actually having been there and know how these operations work)

[burkaman]

They were profitable for 8 years before she bought them.

https://www.axios.com/the-atlantic-to-expand-adds-100-people...

[chipotle_coyote]

That doesn't mean they stopped being profitable after she bought them, or that she "changed the mission," as a previous poster put it. Just like many other businesses, an infusion of cash allowed them to expand.

It's easy to criticize them for that now, but there's a real sense in which that critique amounts to, "Instead of expanding, they should have used that infusion of capital to restructure their finances in a way that let them survive a dramatic collapse in revenue that happened virtually all at once."

[sanderjd]

I don't know how you could read this thread and get to what you wrote for your alternative "instead of expanding". The alternative proposed by the thread starter is something like: "having invested in expansion, she should continue supporting the employees that were hired during that expansion". And that expansion is the change in the mission that the thread starter is referring to.

[chipotle_coyote]

The expansion was, according to the linked article, largely into live events. I disagree with characterizing that as a "change in the mission" -- the Atlantic always hosted some live events, and they continued publishing the magazine, so it's not as if they pivoted into becoming something they weren't.

But the point I was trying to get at is that if they won't be able to hold live events at all for a year or more to come and may take years past that to get back up to their original level, what does "supporting the employees" hired for that group mean? If we're talking super-generous severance packages, we're in agreement -- but if we're talking about paying them to keep doing a job in support of a business the company can no longer perform, which was the implication I got from the thread, I'd pretty hesitant to sign on.

I suppose I'm pushing back a bit at the notion that because there's a billionaire benefactor involved, that immediately changes the ethics of the situation. If Powell Jobs hadn't invested in them, they hadn't expanded, and they still had to do layoffs like so many media companies have in the last few months have, wouldn't their obligations be essentially the same? It seems to me they would -- yet it also seems to me we probably wouldn't be having this argument in that scenario.

(To be clear, I'm not saying "pity the billionaires" as much as saying "should billionaires exist" seems to me to be a somewhat orthogonal argument.)

[burkaman]

I am not criticizing them for expanding. I am criticizing Jobs for using her power to hire more people, but not using her power to temporarily maintain their jobs in a uniquely dangerous situation.

[donohoe]

First of all, you assume she is running the day-to-day. I don't know that she is. My guess is she isn't and its Emerson plus The The Atlantic. Thats their job.

In terms of "temporarily maintain their jobs", events have been cancelled for months. You can argue that management did try this.

However with no clear Federal management or proper guidance, and states taking opposing approaches, we are going to see this return in waves and events business is not coming back soon.

[chipotle_coyote]

As I said to someone else, if the argument is that she should step in to ensure they have super generous severance packages, I'm in agreement. (I didn't define that above, but I'm thinking around a year, including benefits.) I'm just not on board with what seemed to be an argument for keeping them employed indefinitely.

I agree with the other reply to you, too, though -- I don't know that she "used her power to hire more people," per se. If a VC gives a tech company an infusion of capital and the tech company goes on a hiring spree, I don't think we'd really look at that as the VC using their power to hire more people, and I think that's a much better analogy. Laurene Powell Jobs didn't buy The Atlantic and install herself as an editor or publisher -- she started a social-minded investment organization that bought a majority stake in The Atlantic, and there's little indication she's involved with day-to-day affairs.

[wonnage]

expand? you mean like wework? or any of the other softbank unicorns?

[danvayn]

They did spin up staff numbers and who knows how much was spent on business facets like advertising. I'd atleast agree that it might not have been the best investment decision given the large amount of "competitors" in Atlantic's space

[donohoe]

Yes, the added staff and that lead to the pay-wall they have which was helpful and a long-overdue idea.

[donohoe]

Yes, and print ad revenue continues to march towards the cliff, and then Covid 19 killed companies digital ad budgets and that cratered.

These are all circumstances affecting nearly every media company right now.

[burkaman]

I understand, and most media companies are going to be forced to lay off people when they simply don't have enough money to pay them anymore. I don't blame them if there's nothing they can do. This is a relatively unique circumstance where the owner could easily keep paying them if she wanted to, but has chosen not to. Ad revenue and live events are not gone for good, just for a little while.

[burkaman]

I know she doesn't literally have $22 billion in a bank account, but she could obviously scrounge up enough cash to pay these people if she wanted to.

The Atlantic is not a "declining business". It was profitable for a long time before she bought it, it expanded because she wanted it to, and the decline in revenue is likely temporary. They aren't losing subscribers and they aren't in danger of failing anytime soon.

If she invested in The Atlantic to create long term change, and its subscriber base and reach is growing (which it is), then she shouldn't care about a short term decline in ad revenue. Dollars can certainly be deployed more profitably elsewhere, but you're not gonna accomplish any social change if you base your investments on quarterly profits.

[ABeeSea]

> it expanded because she wanted it to

And now it’s shrinking because she wanted it to.

[burkaman]

I think we're on the same page. She has an immense amount of power which she is wielding in a legal and fairly conventional manner, but one that I consider ethically wrong.

[phlakaton]

Ethically wrong?

Are you saying she is ethically obliged to employ as many people as her bank account makes possible, for as long as her bank account makes that possible?

Or that, having committed to a certain number of employees, she is ethically obliged to maintain that number indefinitely?

You seem to be making a large assumption with the latter: that the dip in revenue is a blip. However 1) general trends in the industry have been pointing down for years, 2) we don't know if business will bounce back to the same level, let alone when. Making an ethical judgment about someone else's business from the outside is fraught enough, but with this level of uncertainty, why would you even go there?

[burkaman]

I think the dip might be a blip because they were profitable for 8 years before she bought them a couple years ago, and they were continuing to do great until the pandemic.

It's a difficult question because I don't think she should be able to have this much power in the first place, so it's hard to say what the most ethical way to wield that power is. I don't think she is obligated to employ as many people as possible for as long as possible.

My basic point is that the magazine is still reaching more people than ever before, it's still achieving its journalistic purpose, so why not use a tiny portion of your immense power to keep these people around for a year or so and see if economic conditions improve. If there's a fundamental shift in the business and, for example, it seems like live events are never really going to happen again, then it's time to let those people go.

[pochamago]

I don't think I understand. Would it have been more ethical in your system if she hadn't hired them in the first place?

[burkaman]

It depends what she did instead. If she just left her money in the bank, no, that's worse. But it would have been more ethical to spend her money in a way that wasn't exclusively dedicated to making more money. Maybe start a collectively owned media organization where power isn't concentrated in one person. Or donate to an existing nonprofit media organization, where revenue is more closely correlated to social impact than the economic health of third party advertisers.

Basically just stop trying to make more money. You don't need any more. Do something to make the world better.

[uoaei]

People who have control over $22 billion have the ability to get a large sum of physical cash very quickly.

The problem is who gets to choose what is "more impactful". Maybe some of those staff were getting ready to shatter the world with an insane revelation that instigates "long-term structural change" and makes life better for everyone. Then Jobs would have invested her money improperly. But because she gets to almost unilaterally decide what happens under her purview, those former employees never get a chance.

[ciarannolan]

>She does not have $22B in cash.

The idea that someone worth $22B can't snap their fingers and have a few million dollars cash available is ridiculous. Do you think there are no buyers for Apple or Disney stock?