Re:Suck It, Wall Street
by tptacek on Friday January 29, 2021 @12:25PM
(#25959816)
People have been predicting Exxon's demise for at least 4 years now.
But look: it's not my claim that Exxon is a good investment. In fact: Exxon's stock seems to have tracked the prevailing grim sentiment about the oil business. Rather, what I'm pointing out is that it doesn't seem reasonable to suggest that Exxon is "functionally dead", a "phony-baloney" company propped up by paymasters in the rigged financial services industry. Exxon is, as a company... kind of important? Like, it does a bunch of stuff?
Another example: Boeing. We're all aware of a big reason for Boeing's predicament. But Boeing didn't get there by being a "zombie" that wasn't doing real business; in fact, we can probably ruefully say Boeing did too much business on the 737 Max product. So there's another reason you can be on the "zombie" list: your company made a huge mistake that will take years to climb out from.
Moderna was also on the list Taibbi linked to. Because it was an R&D company that wasn't meaningfully shipping product. I don't know that we even need to talk about Moderna's financial prospects (I genuinely have no idea what they are) to dispose of the idea that it's a "functionally dead" "phony-baloney" company; it's a key, effective component of a strategy to rescue the world from a global pandemic. So there's yet another way to get bucketed as a zombie: you can be a startup.
My point --- I was too lazy to type it last night and am too lazy to come up with a way to say it succinctly now, sorry --- is that Taibbi is either taken in by or preying on a layman's understanding of the word "zombie" to drive a column about how 1/3rd of the market is kayfabe. There is probably a way to make that point, maybe without even having to argue that Ford Motors is a fake company. But Taibbi tried to make it by linking to an article that calls out Tesla and Moderna as examples of the "zombie" phenomenon; he either hasn't read his link, which basically refutes his argument, or he's assuming you won't. Because after he writes that link, he goes on to imply that "zombie" means here what a normal person thinks it means. And it does not.
But look: it's not my claim that Exxon is a good investment. In fact: Exxon's stock seems to have tracked the prevailing grim sentiment about the oil business. Rather, what I'm pointing out is that it doesn't seem reasonable to suggest that Exxon is "functionally dead", a "phony-baloney" company propped up by paymasters in the rigged financial services industry. Exxon is, as a company... kind of important? Like, it does a bunch of stuff?
Another example: Boeing. We're all aware of a big reason for Boeing's predicament. But Boeing didn't get there by being a "zombie" that wasn't doing real business; in fact, we can probably ruefully say Boeing did too much business on the 737 Max product. So there's another reason you can be on the "zombie" list: your company made a huge mistake that will take years to climb out from.
Moderna was also on the list Taibbi linked to. Because it was an R&D company that wasn't meaningfully shipping product. I don't know that we even need to talk about Moderna's financial prospects (I genuinely have no idea what they are) to dispose of the idea that it's a "functionally dead" "phony-baloney" company; it's a key, effective component of a strategy to rescue the world from a global pandemic. So there's yet another way to get bucketed as a zombie: you can be a startup.
My point --- I was too lazy to type it last night and am too lazy to come up with a way to say it succinctly now, sorry --- is that Taibbi is either taken in by or preying on a layman's understanding of the word "zombie" to drive a column about how 1/3rd of the market is kayfabe. There is probably a way to make that point, maybe without even having to argue that Ford Motors is a fake company. But Taibbi tried to make it by linking to an article that calls out Tesla and Moderna as examples of the "zombie" phenomenon; he either hasn't read his link, which basically refutes his argument, or he's assuming you won't. Because after he writes that link, he goes on to imply that "zombie" means here what a normal person thinks it means. And it does not.