Matsson Gets Even Muskier In The Latest Episode Of Succession
Spoilers for "Succession" follow.
"Succession" is about power structures. The show's drama is about the dynamics of both the Roy family and the Waystar Royco leadership team — Logan (Brian Cox) has traditionally remained on top of both, and those underneath him are always squabbling for bigger pieces of the leftover pie. On a macro level, the show is a depiction of the neo-Gilded Age that is the 21st century. "Succession" focuses on the global elite, but take a drink every time the camera lingers on anonymous service workers toiling in the background.
Since the series parallels real life, it sometimes uses real people as inspiration. The Roys are the Murdochs, for instance, owners of NewsCorp and the most powerful family in media since the Hearsts. Then there's Lukas Matsson (Alexanders Skarsgård), the owner of GoJo who's set to acquire Waystar. Some have suggested he's based on Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify — Elk and Matsson are both Nordic tech bros.
The comparison for me, though, has always been Elon Musk. Like Musk, Matsson is a non-American tech billionaire and they share social awkwardness, a bizarre sense of humor, and flippant use of Twitter. The latest episode, "Tailgate Party," pulled back some unflattering curtains on Matsson and strengthened the Musk parallels while doing so.
'Not even a real coder'
During Matsson's debut in season 3's "Too Much Birthday," Kendall (Jeremy Strong) called him, "The Odin of Codin'." GoJo's main product is its eponymous streaming platform, and it's all but said that Matsson wrote the code for it himself. He literally pisses on Waystar's own streaming app, StarGo, because he takes its poor coding as a personal affront. However, it turns out this was just PR.
At the party, Matsson publicly humiliates his head of communications, Ebba (Eili Harboe), the one he sent bricks of his frozen blood to. She runs away, Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) offer her shoulders to cry on, and she reveals the truth about her boss. "We built his rep. He's not even a real coder, someone gave him a box of tech and he took it to market."
This revelation continues a thematic trend in "Succession" — the rich don't provide anything of real value to society — and explains Matsson's outlook: "Success doesn't really interest me anymore. It's too easy ... like... analysis plus capital plus execution ... anyone can do that." Spoken like someone who doesn't have a creative spark in his body.
The truth about Musk
Some in the media have hailed Elon Musk as a genius ("Iron Man" writer Mark Fergus compared him to Tony Stark, and he's not the only one). However, Musk's actual achievements fall far short of the hype.
Despite reporting otherwise, Musk is not an inventor, he's a financier. He didn't found Tesla (the electric car company he's most known for) — that was Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk simply supplied series-A funding for Tesla, ousted Eberhard, and supplanted him as the face of the company.
Among other problems, Tesla's cars have a nasty habit of catching on fire. The same fate befell the SpaceX (Musk's space travel company) rocket which launched and then exploded on April 20, 2023, in an uncanny reflection of what happened to the Waystar satellite in the "Succession" season 1 finale. Musk's latest investment, Twitter, has been falling apart since he assumed management from founder Jack Dorsey.
How did Musk get to this point in the first place? Too many people are eager to lap up the eccentric genius narrative and Musk abets it by claiming titles such as "Chief Engineer" at companies he owns, giving the impression he has more of a technical role than he really does. He also had a leg up because his father, Errol Musk, owned an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa. From the beginning, Musk has only profited from the labor of others.
What has he invented? He has three patents to his name concerning Tesla, but they're all for ornamental features of the cars (such as the opening-up doors). Not exactly earth-shaking. Take a glimpse at the list of Musk's unfilled promises and you'll see the truth; he's a bulls***ter with luck on his side. This brings us to the next point.
Two Indias
After some (offscreen) drinking, Ebba reveals that Matsson has been artificially inflating GoJo's subscriber numbers in India. This means that GoJo's high stock value is built on fraud and that value will plummet when the truth comes out. Kendall and Roman are ecstatic since they now have a way to kill the deal — it's possible that Matsson can't actually afford to pay the $192 per share acquisition of Waystar he offered. The tell that Matsson could be in real trouble comes when Kendall tells Frank (Peter Friedman) about this. Frank, unlike the Roy siblings, is a serious person. So, if he recognizes GoJo's false numbers as a problem, then it is one.
Musk has engaged in this sort of stock manipulation. On August 7, 2018, he tweeted, "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The funding was not, in fact, secured, and Musk did not take Tesla private. However, the company's stock still went up because investors didn't want to miss out on a potential payday.
Musk was in turn sued by the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) with the charge of making false statements to inflate his company's stock. He and Tesla were ultimately ordered to each pay a $20 million fine, and Musk had to step down as company chairman (he sidestepped this by remaining CEO). In 2023, Musk and Tesla were found not liable in a civil suit by investors lured in by the 2018 tweet, however.
Selling when you don't want to
The similarities between Matsson and Musk should be obvious, but the Roy siblings aren't immune from comparisons either.
When Logan was still around, the obvious comparison for the GoJo/Waystar deal was Disney/Fox; the family-run media conglomerate sells off its entertainment assets to a competitor while retaining its right-wing news network. Now that Kendall and Roman are steering the ship, though, the situation is more like Musk's acquisition of Twitter; they're being locked into a deal they don't want.
Musk first offered to buy Twitter in April 2022 — his offer overpaid relative to the company's value at $44 billion ($54.20 a share). This was a deal Twitter couldn't say no to (à la Matsson's bid for Waystar in "Kill List"), but Musk kept stalling for months after they accepted. It was clear that wasn't prepared for the deal to actually go through, but after Twitter filed a lawsuit, Musk had to commit to the purchase.
Will the Roy siblings have to do the same? Kendall tells Frank that they should plan for Waystar to acquire GoJo instead of the other way around. With only three episodes of "Succession" left, time will tell if Kendall can pull off that turnabout.
New episodes of "Succession" air on HBO and stream on HBO Max every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.