[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.