This morning The New York Times published an exposé on incoming New York Representative George Santos (R) who will soon represent a district covering western Long Island and a part of Queens. Put simply, this is one of those stories where the reporters check on the various elements of Santos’ inspiring American story and basically none of it checks out. There are the colleges he claimed to attend with no record of him, the investment banks he claimed to have worked at who have no record of his employment. Along the way there’s the criminal record in Brazil and the family real estate company that doesn’t appear to own any real estate. It just goes on and on. As I said, it’s one of those stories.
When I saw the headline I thought, wait, don’t I remember that name? Sure enough, almost exactly a year ago I wrote a couple posts about Santos’ pack of nonsensical tall tales. To be fair, the Times went into infinitely more depth. I was mainly focused on a gas price tale of woe he was pitching on social media. Santos explained how he was paying an insane amount of money putting gas in his car because of Joe Biden’s inflation. The problem was that his claimed spending required him to be logging at least 1,000 miles a week on a 15-mile commute. Needless to say, I found running those numbers irresistible and went to town on it.
Just an incredible exposé from the New York Times on an incoming GOP member of Congress leads today’s Morning Memo.
I know we’ve been a bit Elon-centric here of late, but the latest developments should prompt us to look to some of the core challenges behind what we now call social media. The Musk saga is comparatively simple: a middle-aged buffoon on one-half midlife crisis, one-half power trip running roughshod over everything. But outside such extreme cases there are more basic challenges. The essence of the social media business proposition is to be the venue for literally everyone talking about everything while managing the venue through automated processes which keep the staff capacity and costs low. Put a different way, success means scale: revenues growing exponentially while costs grow arithmetically.
