Until a few years ago, when corporate communications departments caught on, not long after a calamity the top person would be rightfully criticised and sometimes lose their job or bonus.
Alas, in recent years there’s been a growing trend of leaders “taking full responsibility for their errors” in carefully crafted press releases or teary interviews, sucking in gullible media who praise their willingness to own up. Taking responsibility is especially masterful as it never involves taking any actual responsibility.
No one takes responsibility better for his errors than the founder of Facebook, the now vastly poorer but still excruciatingly wealthy Mark Zuckerberg. (Zuck’s wealth has dropped by US$100 billion this year.) Zuckerberg has emperor-like control over Facebook by virtue of his control of its voting shares (Facebook has a dual-class voting structure whereby pleb shareholders have no voting power) and is a big fan of “taking responsibility”. He did it back in 2018 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal sent Facebook on its eventual doom loop.
Back then Zuck remorsefully told Congress: “It’s clear now we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well … That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook. I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”
After that heartfelt apology, Zuckerberg did nothing to change anything as Facebook board members continued to resign faster than Elon Musk has thought bubbles. A few years later, Zuckerberg is destroying US$10 billion a year on his bizarre metaverse, a second-rate version of The Sims that even Elizabeth Holmes would have realised is a disaster.
The metaverse debacle, coupled with Apple’s privacy changes destroying Facebook’s ability to provide returns for advertisers, has led to Facebook firing 11,000 people last week. Zuck again took responsibility, but like last time won’t be giving up his total domination over Facebook, nor it appears, is yet scaling back his metaverse insanity.
Arguably the world’s most inept CEO, Jack Dorsey, who has managed to destroy two companies (Twitter and Block), did a similar things days earlier. After Musk’s Twitter rampage, where he terminated half of the 7000 staff, Dorsey conceded: “I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologise for that.”
We await Dorsey’s apology for undertaking one of the worst acquisitions of all time, paying US$17 billion to buy Afterpay, which after losing more money last quarter and seeing gross profit shrink is probably worth zero less than a year later. Like Zuck, Dorsey doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to resign as CEO of Block.
Then there’s the co-founder and CEO of share trading app and teen killer Robinhood, Vlad Tenev. After cutting more than 1000 jobs, Tenev admitted that “in this new environment, we are operating with more staffing than appropriate. As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory — This is on me.”
Tenev, of course, didn’t resign or even take a pay cut after his mea culpa, but then again he didn’t quit after causing a young user to suicide after Robinhood falsely told him he had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and had no customer service team to help, so we probably shouldn’t expect too much.
With its share price down more than 80% and active users slumping, it is likely investors’ anger rather the tragic death of an innocent 19-year-old that will lead to Tenev quitting.
This week the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme operator since Bernie Madoff, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, also offered an apology, tweeting: “I’m sorry. That’s the biggest thing. I fucked up, and should have done better.” SBF’s gullible customers who will almost certainly lose more than US$10 billion are probably not overly content with the apology. (Ironically, Bankman-Fried had stepped in to help Robinhood a few months earlier. Who says there’s no honour among thieves?)
But it’s not just tech’s most mendacious characters who use the heartfelt apology to cleanse their negligence. The good guys do as well. Witness Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lutke who conceded in a blog post (after sacking more than 10,000 people): “Placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today and I’m deeply sorry for that.”
Meanwhile, the sorry, not sorry trend has extended to politicians, with cunning Victorian Premier Dan Andrews effortlessly swatting away yet another corruption scandal in July: “The report tabled today shows [it] is absolutely disgraceful behaviour… behaviour that does not meet my expectations or the expectations of hard-working members of the Victorian committee … As leader of the party and leader of our state I take full responsibility for that conduct.”
Andrews naturally didn’t resign and is the favourite to win his third straight Victorian election on November 26.
CEOs and politicians have quickly learnt the best way to avoid responsibility is to pretend to take responsibility and continue as if nothing ever happened, blissfully enabled by a news cycle that barely lasts 48 hours.
Do you hanker for the days when ethics reigned? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
There have never been days when ethics reigned. There have though been occasions in the past when ethics made some difference. There are some examples, way back when, of highly placed, powerful or influential individuals properly held to account: shamed, disgraced, humbled and finally punished and/or ruined. These examples are remembered because of their exceptional nature and are better as proof that ethics did not reign, but only won a battle now and then. The contrast with today is that such ethics is dead and buried across both business and politics. Within organised religion there is little sign it ever had a presence.
Great piece. Afterpay still makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I sure hope Molner and Eisner, and all the connected Canbera lobbyists they cynically lured in with options to stave off credit regulation just long enough to pump the share price to where they did, are enoying the spoils of their spectacularly adroit, entirely legal grift. Dorsey: what a muppet with a silly beard. He makes Skasey look like a financial wizard.
Apologies from any of this lot we’ll never get. I suppose history tells us that there’s always bloody, anarchic violence to look forward to, in rectifying the ethical and moral wrongs. Great, innit.
These may be cheap apologies from rich CEOs, but at least the shareholders in these companies get a half-baked walk-back from their leader. What do staff and customers get when things go pear shaped? Just blame-shifting from the likes of Qantas’ Allan Joyce, who basically blamed travellers for the companies unsatisfactory performance (rather than accept that sacking staff you’d been paid by the government to keep on was a somewhat unethical move). If not for staff and customers, what is a company like Qantas? It’s just another Enron, whose sole goal is to increase their share price – what they actually do to get that price up is entirely immaterial.
Yes, the share price is a metric that doesn’t send or receive signals of a useful nature to and from most of the intricate web of forces that shape a company. And companies are a big component of what shapes society.
So how might we get a better result?
How might capital be better harnessed, directed, or influenced to yield a richer, more sophisticated, better society?
Capital and stock markets work just fine, if they’re properly structured, regulated and policed. ASIC has always been an under-resourced insiders’ giggle, but allowing our bourse to list on itself, in turn incentivising its Board to all sorts of lucrative but fundamentally-conflicted operational tweaks, is what’s really made the ASX a bit of a capital-raising laughing stock globally, these days. Exchanges everywhere are under severe pressure from the extreme over-financialisation of the world economy, but our local failure to keep ahead and on top of the entirely foreseeable consequences of retail trading platforms, multi-derivative synthetic trading instruments, effective bidding wars for hi-speed fibre-optic connectivity and the vastly increased need to actively police disclosure and prospectus obligations is what’s made legal grifts like Afterpay so rife here.
It’s drenching Australian Capitalism in an unfairly grotesque stench. No-one wants to admit it, but the speculative end of the ASX at least – which is supposed to be the engine room of future real growth in a strategically disruptive market – is functioning not far short of a loaded casino, now. The damaging impact of a Full Blown Dog Trade like Dorsey’s Afterpay blunder, on Australia’s entrepreunerial reputation as seen through the eyes of global venture capital, is much bigger than our more serious tech and fin start-up prospects yet realise. International money will be scrutinising the future (and maybe current) likes of Prospa, Canva, Sezzle, etc with more brutal scepticism every day.
Ive also lost money buying conventional shares that were recommended by motley fool, I think disingenuously.
Anyone who speaks as quickly as does Scott Phillips is clearly a shonk.
That he has a daily slot on Steve ‘Poison Dwarf’ Price’s radio show should be a warning.
Yes, me too…The Fools are anyone who swallow their tripe without checking. But at least conventional stocks have a fathomable fundamentals bedrock. If you DYOR diligently you can at least take your chances honestly at the casino based on assay numbers, tech trial results, sales figures…unless there’s outright fraud in the mix. Which even then is at least traceable and actionable, so there’s an ethical deterrent in play. (Theranos!)
Thing about an Afterpay…nobody did anything that’s not totes legal.m! Still a grift, but I bet Molner and Eisner sleep perfectly easy. And why not?!
In most of Australia people are generally protected from liability when they apologise. https://www.ombo.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/134614/MUCC_2021_3.6.pdf
In my view the legal and political worlds are either unaware of this or refuse to acknowledge it for various reasons
Amazing and we can’t get a fair crack for whistle blowers.
Of course, when it came to mentioning Australian politicians, you only mention Dan Andrews. Not Morrison the professional PR-man turned PM, and someone’s who did far worse to people than Dan Andrews did. No. Dan Andrews, and only Dan Andrews,when there are so many others who have sorry’d-not-sorry’d.
So blatantly biased, Adam. It’s pathetic.
Your holidays business is doing better nowadays, but you just keep sooking and sooking.
What an interesting comment, filibustered. I didn’t understand your last venal paragraph, so I clicked on the author’s bio.
Now I think I see what you are alluding to – that Crikey is negative on Andrews because the Covid lockdown that occurred in Victoria was bad for the business interests of one of Crikey’s founders. Is that it?
Well, it would be understandable for a Crikey founder to lament the loss of an income stream that subsidises the publication, if that’s what’s been happening.
But I think you’re on the right track with Morrison. The money he saved by not building remote quarantine facilities at the start of the pandemic is small compared to the money lost from extensive lockdowns.
That shouldn’t be a difficult phenomenon to report on investigatively, assuming our society has a robust, sophisticated press.
But perhaps we don’t have that. Perhaps we only have a chicken and an egg arguing with a kettle and a pot.
This could be fixed by Andrew’s granting Crikey a grant for a new car park and changing room in the lead up to the election.
Morrison never apologised for anything.