Consistent with his penchant for megalomania and performance, Kendall, wearing a bomber jacket on stage, introduces the product using lofty theatrics to mask its dystopian qualities. The concept of Living+ is a Waystar-branded nursing home with a mind-numbing amount of content from the company’s entertainment divisions. Kendall also claims the product could extend an old person’s life by years or even decades, by giving them access to pharmaceutical products only available to the super rich.
If that weren’t uncomfortable enough, he talks to his dead father on stage, using edited and manipulated green-screen footage of Logan, recorded prior to his death. Kendall then tearfully suggests Living+ could have given him more time with his dad. His cringey emotional appeal works. The investors seated in the audience heartily applaud. But there’s one crucial person who definitely doesn’t like it: the tech CEO in the process of acquiring Waystar, Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), who, during Kendall’s presentation, horrifically tweets a Holocaust reference.
When paired with last week’s episode, which culminated in three billionaires — Kendall, his brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Matsson trading insults on a Norwegian mountaintop — it’s hard not to grimace at the real-life parallels the show both draws from and reflects back. The fictional billionaires on “Succession” are a grim reminder that in real life, a lot of hugely consequential decisions — ones that put countless people’s jobs and livelihoods at stake, and shape what we read, watch and consume — are made by rich white men just making it up as they go along. They act on impulse, feed their egos, chase shiny objects and pick fights with other billionaires, with little regard for the damage they leave in their wake.
It must be nice to be able to make such costly decisions on a whim, like during the “Succession” Season 3 finale, when Logan explains he’s pursuing a deal with Matsson because “I feel it in my bones.” (It’s the kind of tactic his kids have tried to replicate — but with far less success, often fumbling their power plays.) It must be nice to act on “harebrained schemes,” as Shiv (Sarah Snook) describes her brother’s theatrics. Or to use your company and exorbitant wealth to beef with a fellow billionaire, as the Roys are now doing with Matsson.
As it heads into its final episodes, “Succession” has set up a potential collision course: Kendall and Roman are recklessly attempting to torpedo the deal Logan had been finalizing with Matsson. Under Logan’s deal, Matsson’s tech company GoJo was slated to acquire Waystar Royco, with the exception of the company’s popular right-wing news network ATN. But Kendall and Roman, now finally in control after their father’s death, are thirsty for power.
In the climactic mountaintop scene of last week’s episode, Roman impulsively and idiotically admits to Matsson he and his brother intend to tank the deal. Not to diminish Roman’s grief, but this admission essentially amounts to a billionaire being mad at another billionaire. Roman chews out Matsson for heartlessly making them trek all the way to GoJo’s corporate retreat in Norway, just days after their father died.
Matsson also dismisses Kendall as “Vaulter guy,” referring to Kendall’s failed acquisition of digital media startup Vaulter. Early in Season 2, Kendall, at Logan’s behest, guts the entire site and lays off nearly all of its employees. That scene will always send a shiver down the spine of anyone who has ever worked in media, and experienced round after round of mass layoffs at the hands of gluttonous CEOs. Unlike the journalists losing their jobs, there are no consequences for them. They will simply move on to their next shiny object, whether it’s Living+, or in real life, “pivot to video” or AI.
One of the many themes on “Succession” is the way the characters never say what they mean, whether it’s emotionally or on a business level. Obfuscation is power. Words are meaningless. As Kendall says in Season 1, they’re just “complicated airflow.” Do any of them really know anything? Is any of it real, or just posturing?
That meaninglessness is everywhere. It’s at the heart of ATN’s slogan: “We here for you.” (Or: “We hear for you.”) It’s Shiv telling now-estranged husband Tom: “I may not love you, but I do love you.” Kendall is the king of throwing around empty buzzwords, like describing his vision for a new news outlet as “high-calorie info parcels” (or “info snacks?”), and asking Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) to “take my cultural temperature.”
In Sunday night’s episode, Kendall advertises Living+ using jargon like “integrated everyday character IP life enhancement.” Earlier, he reads out loud from a company document that calls it “personalized longevity programs.” But what Living+ really is, as he says afterward, is “planning to warehouse the elderly and keep them drunk on content while we suck ’em dollar dry.” Later, Shiv describes it even more bluntly as “prison camps for grannies.”
Like the Roys, real-life rich CEOs obfuscate their misguided decisions using meaningless corporate jargon. What does “economic headwinds” even mean? Or what about the myriad euphemisms for when a company shuts down or gets acquired, and employees lose their jobs: “sunsetting,” “restructuring,” “reorganizing,” “consolidating,” “offboarding due to involuntary termination”?
This content was originally published here.
