"What You Have to Understand is People's Fears About Money"

April 28, 2023 4:03 PM

Presentations and pitch decks by the largest business failures and corporate frauds
posted by chavenet (23 comments total)

It’s always interesting to see the lies told by the grifters to the people who think they’re the smartest people in the room.

They aren’t, but this shows us how gullible they are.
posted by mephron at 5:22 PM on April 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

Why not hang them all?
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:46 PM on April 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

not enough rope
posted by clavdivs at 6:12 PM on April 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'd say "eat them instead", but I'm minding my cholesterol.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:28 PM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Are they vegetarians? It's healthy to eat vegetarians.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:16 PM on April 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

a movie comparison seems apt.
posted by clavdivs at 7:48 PM on April 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wonder how they got access to all these slide decks given how confidential most of them are.
posted by creatrixtiara at 10:32 PM on April 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wonder how they got access to all these slide decks given how confidential most of them are.

"Confidential" in this case means "don't share this or we'll fire / sue you." Those threats have no teeth when the business has already collapsed.
posted by rouftop at 6:50 AM on April 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

Many of these are dense and complex--but the immediate message, the actual nugget of content is buried behind the wall of charts and data, paragraphs, "infographics". It's not even really communication, it's an imitation of communication as the presenter and the audience sit there, go through the empty ritual of the C-suite conference, and then tick a box to go about their business with this cultural requirement out of the way. No one harmed by bad news, no one stepping up to take responsibility.

In contrast, the Enron one starts out pretty direct. "Complete loss of investor confidence." "No access to capital." "Series of bad investments." Uh, yeah? But then, look at the date. This looks like a hard pitch to push the merger with Dynegy, which would fall apart several days later. I'd have to go back and review what all went on at that time (Wikipedia might be a good starting point), but I'd wonder if the actual numbers in the later slides in this deck had any relation to reality at all. There might be details I'm not picking up on, but it feels like a con pattern: be candid at the beginning to win people over, then pour out the bullcrap later when you're sealing the deal.
posted by gimonca at 7:16 AM on April 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

The thing that never fails to amuse me is that Elizabeth Holmes' dad was a VP at Enron. There's two generations of grift here.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:21 AM on April 29, 2023 [14 favorites]

Looking at the first two, the content doesn’t really match the promise. The WorldCom slide deck is actually a bill of good health from the auditor. The Enron slide deck is given a month after the con was made public. If you want to see, the lies perpetrators told investors, earnings calls probably make a better source material, but you probably wouldn’t see that on a blog for a pitch deck website.
posted by pwnguin at 9:29 AM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wonder how they got access to all these slide decks given how confidential most of them are.

I obviously haven't looked them all up to confirm, but these look like the kinds of documents that get produced in litigation--and thus end up attached as exhibits to public motions--or bankruptcy proceedings (ditto, plus more) all the time.

The predictive coding models in modern discovery tech are famously based on Enron litigation document productions.
posted by praemunire at 9:48 AM on April 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

Fake it while you fake it!
posted by misterpatrick at 10:17 AM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

the actual nugget of content is buried behind the wall of charts and data, paragraphs, "infographics". It's not even really communication, it's an imitation of communication as the presenter and the audience sit there, go through the empty ritual of the C-suite conference, and then tick a box to go about their business with this cultural requirement out of the way.

The second Theranos one is remarkable, because it does--or, at least, seems to do--what the company had previously gone to great pains not to do: reveal the inner workings of the Edison, their tabletop blood testing station. Before that, the company had subjected even would-be investors to incredibly onerous NDAs and (at least according to the miniseries The Dropout) stationed Secret Service-type security personnel in employee workspaces. So, the presentation at least seems to reveal how the thing supposedly worked... although I don't know anything about that sort of technology, so I can't say whether or not any of it means anything.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:38 AM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I worked for one of these companies and it's gratifying to know that all those presentations we got in the quarterly town halls really were just as bullshit as they seemed.
posted by weirdly airport at 10:47 AM on April 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

I love how all of these start off with "[FuckedCompany] was a..." except for "Nikola Corporation is an American manufacturer..."

Nikola is so transparently a Breyers/Dreyers-style market swindling firm that the pitch deck company putting the article together treats the still-operating concern's impending failure and toothlessness of its inheritors as a given.
posted by infinitewindow at 11:10 AM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Huh, infinitewindow can you say more about Breyers/Dreyers? I tried searching but got food reviews not market history.
posted by Richard Daly at 12:38 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

One of them was an artisan whole-fat super tasty ice cream brand. One was a Johnny-come-lately trading on market confusion via similar names, with an objectively worse product, but was able to build such an advantage profit-wise that the original firm sold out and made ice cream even worse than the Johnny-come-lately.

To this day, I can't tell you which was which (I prefer Blue Bunny, myself).
posted by infinitewindow at 1:14 PM on April 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Risk management is at the very core of Lehman's business model."
[Snort!]
posted by PhilipS123 at 2:24 PM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Breyer's (RIP) was the original.
posted by praemunire at 3:00 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Breyer's was some good stuff. Didn't know about their fall from grace. Still buy some of their stuff. Tastes good.

Aiden's is the organic go to we go to, but hasn't seemed to be as available as it used to.
posted by Windopaene at 6:29 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I used to love Breyer's Vanilla Bean ice cream. It wasn't fatty premium like Haagen-Dazs but was sold in 1/2 gallons and was just basically Less Is More in ice cream form.

Unilever ruined it. I discovered this when I had some and instead of light and clean tasting as always I got a mouthful of glutinous gummy goo. I wrote to complain and got a polite letter back explaining that the addition of guar gum was to ensure a positive customer experience despite difficult shipping challenges. (I interpret this to mean that numerous freeze thaw cycles have to be endured while still delivering a consistently shitty product at the end.) To rub salt in the wound they wanted to let me know how much of a valued consumer I was and to express this they sent 2 coupons for free ice cream.

"You'll take it and you'll like it!"
posted by Pembquist at 9:34 PM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Breyer's (RIP) was the original.

The “Johnny-come-lately” has been around for nearly a century. They’re both garbage now (thanks, capitalism!), but I haven’t seen any evidence that their downfall has anything to do with each other.
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 6:38 PM on May 1, 2023 [2 favorites]