Trump’s TikTok Backtrack
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Hello and welcome to the first Slate Money of the new Trump administration. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios with Elizabeth Spires of New York Times and Places. Hello. With, of course, Emily Peck of Axios. Hey, Felix. We are going to talk about TikTok, which is up again and possibly illegally up again. We are going to talk about TikTok

Trump's meme coin and all of the fraught reaction there too. We are going to talk about shoplifting, but not the shoplifting from real physical stores type, the digital type, which is apparently incredibly popular among the young. We have a very tight and coherent Slate Plus segment about

the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Michelle and Barack Obama and what they have done in their post-constitutional lives. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

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So we should start with TikTok because we were very careful not to talk about TikTok last week because we didn't know what was going to happen. And

The whole thing turned out a little bit crazier than I expected, which was that TikTok did, as threatened, take itself down towards the end of the Biden administration. President Biden had said to them, listen, you don't need to take yourself down because I won't enforce the law. And TikTok quite sensibly said, well, look, we are a U.S. corporation and we have to follow the law whether you're enforcing it or not. So we're just going to take ourselves down in order.

obeisance to the law. And then 15 hours later, they went back up saying, well, the president hasn't even changed yet, but the president-elect has done a tweet, or he put a thing out on Truth Social saying, I am going to sign a piece of paper when I become president, basically saying exactly what Biden said that he would do. And

And they said, well, you know what, President Trump? You are amazing. We will bring ourselves back up for you. And they gave a little sign, a little box to every single user of the app, myself included, saying, thank you, President Trump. You're great. And here, enjoy TikTok.

I wrote a little thing for Axios calling it a masterclass in sycophancy, which I think it really was. And it's kind of amazing to see how successful it was because Donald Trump really can now swan around taking credit for keeping TikTok back up. And somehow it's even more than that. He

by sheer power of Trumpian aura, seems to have changed the Chinese government's mind on whether or not they are going to be willing to allow ByteDance to sell TikTok US to a US consortium. So well done, Trump.

I think there's some negotiating on both sides here. You know, the sort of, as you put it, sycophantic message to Trump just fell short of saying, dear handsome orange leader. But the point of it is they understand that he's easily flattered and he's already sort of walking back some of his talk about tariffs and saying that, you know, he's willing to negotiate. So I think some of this is about Chinese government kind of positioning itself and Chinese companies to say whatever will make Trump feel good in the moment. But I think there's some negotiating on both sides here.

But the reality is right now, you know, if you go to Apple and Google, you're still not going to get updates and you can't download the app freshly because this is still a live situation. Yeah, the law is unambiguous that TikTok as it stands right now, not owned by Americans, cannot operate in this country.

And Google and Apple are following the law as they are legally bound to do. What is fascinating to me is that Oracle, which is a half a trillion dollar corporation that is a major piece of the internet infrastructure of America.

is not that basically this TikTok decision to come back up, TikTok itself couldn't make that decision. They needed to persuade Larry Ellison to break the law. And Larry Ellison basically said, oh, if I can get myself into President Trump's good graces by breaking the law, I'll do that. And he was rewarded by President Trump calling him like a great man and the CEO of everything and having all manner of flattery in the direction of Trump to Ellison. And that, of course, is worth

billions of dollars to Ellison. Well, you saw it when you charted, Felix, the stock price of Oracle, and it's had a nice little tear in the past month or so, thanks to this. Yes? Or was it something else? Yeah, I mean, partly thanks to this, and partly because he was part of this Stargate consortium, and partly, yeah, just because it does seem that Trump is incredibly...

needy when it comes to wanting the richest men in the world to sort of orient themselves towards him and tell him how wonderful he is. That's why he put

Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk all like next to each other, right next to him at the inauguration because he's like, look at these guys, these guys are really rich and they are, you know, admiring me. And Ellison, I don't know if you've like caught up with this, but thanks to this latest surge in the Oracle share price, Ellison is now the fourth richest man in the world. There you go. One thing I've been thinking about a lot, and I'm sure you guys have too, is what are laws about?

Because, look, Congress passed a law on a bipartisan basis banning the social media app. President Biden signed it. Everyone was for it. And then there was this big

It's not 100% clear why. We wrote about it this week and others have pointed out. Trump is saying now like, well, I changed my mind because TikTok has a lot of young people. Young people helped win me the election. He claimed that he won the young vote by 35 points, which is kind of wild. Which isn't true. The vibes are there.

The Youngs did swing Trump. Yeah, and TikTok did help him, so he is right. And maybe that's why he changed his mind. He also said, every rich person in the country has called me about TikTok. So he didn't elaborate on that part, so I don't know. That's probably just Jeffy ass, but yeah. Yeah. But okay, so the law passes. The Supreme Court—it goes to the Supreme Court—

TikTok, you know, objects. The Supreme Court says Congress passed the law. It's pretty unambiguous. This is a real law, but it doesn't get enforced. And it's not so crazy. Like, as I'm thinking about it in real time right now,

There are all kinds of laws that aren't enforced in the United States. A law is just words on paper. It only works if it's like Santa Claus. People have to believe in it. The enforcement mechanisms in the U.S. government have to kick in and enforce the law. And in fact, there are many laws in the United States that

that don't get enforced. The way they're enforced is people go to court. I write about employment issues all the time, race discrimination, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, all that stuff. There are laws against it, but no one's going out and looking for violators. People who are violated have to go to court to assert their right and enforce the law. It's actually kind of like

a fragile system. It's not just like, well, there's a law, you know, it's very much more than that. But that said, Emily, I think it's fair to say that if you are the general counsel of Apple or the general counsel of Google, and you see this law, which has been signed into law by President Biden,

and it's absolutely unambiguous, I think it's a very easy decision for you to say, well, we have to follow the law. Oh, yeah. It gives you an out. It gives you an excuse. The much more interesting question is if you are the general counsel of

Oracle, what do you do when TikTok says, okay, let's bring it back up? I think the answer there is like you say, listen, my job as a lawyer is not to make decisions about whether we should be up or down. My job as a lawyer is to give you legal advice. And dear Mr. Ellison, my legal advice is that if you did this, it would be illegal, but it's your choice. You're the CEO. And then, you know, Larry Ellison takes that legal advice under advisement and says, I'm

I'm going to bring it back up. Right. There are a couple of things that play here. One is that, you know, Ellison has generally had a good relationship with Trump in the sense that, you know, people forget when Ellison was very high profile in the, their early aughts, he was largely regarded as kind of a Machiavellian asshole, which, you know, he still is, but his sixth wife has softened him in his width. He knows, he knows how to manipulate somebody like Trump.

And when Trump was kind of waffling on the TikTok issue during the first term, part of what Trump wanted was not a full divestiture, but a kind of partnership structure. And Oracle was slated to be the primary U.S. partner. And that's how he got into this position. Yeah. And he still sees a path for that. So he's going to at least publicly say whatever Trump, you know, wants to hear. Oracle.

Oracle doesn't have, they're not in the same position as Apple and Google, where they have a sort of live contract with TikTok, where, you know, they are the distributor for that app and for updates and stuff like that. So Oracle can just sit tight and indicate to Trump, you know, what they want or that

they maybe are willing to not comply with the law while not actually doing anything so there's not much liability for them right now i very much disagree on on like the facts of the matter here i think

Yeah, like Google and Apple, all they're doing is allowing or not allowing downloads and updates of the app. Oracle is powering the entire app. When you are in the United States and watching a video on TikTok, that video is being fed to you from Oracle servers. The millions of hours of TikTok usage that are being consumed every day

hour in America are all coming from Oracle. Oracle is way more embedded with TikTok and is actually being paid by TikTok in a way that Google and Apple are not. Breaking the law is very much in Oracle's self-interest, as Elizabeth was explaining.

But yeah, but I guess I was kind of reading Elizabeth as saying that somehow Oracle was in more of a gray zone than Google and Apple. They don't need to do anything. Just by domiciling the servers in a different jurisdiction, I mean, I don't think that they necessarily have to break the law to continue providing hosting services.

Yeah, because that was the law. That was the whole deal that they did. That's why Oracle has this deal in the first place is that the United States insisted that US TikTok content be hosted in the United States. And Oracle was like, okay, we are going to host this on our servers in Texas. And that was a previous law that they had to do that. And Akamai is the other one. The Oracle and Akamai are unambiguously breaking the law here. And

tactically speaking, it makes perfect sense for them to do it. But I think it's worth just pointing out that they really are doing it and they're not denying it. We talked about this a little in our call yesterday, and I went and looked up my terms. There's a great Ezra Klein podcast that came out right before inauguration about what's called a personalist regime. These are essentially cult of personality type dictatorships.

And the podcast goes into sort of like how they work. And one of the key vectors is,

The leader courts people, gets them on their side and has them essentially do what Larry Ellison has done, which is break the law. The leader will say, you know, it's okay, you know, give them like tacit approval or in this case, explicit approval and say, you know, it's okay to be corrupt or to take this bribe or do whatever, to do corruption because I'm going to turn a blind eye to you because I'm doing you a favor, you're doing me a favor, it's all good and happy.

But then the personalist dictator sort of has you, right? You've broken the law. You've taken a bribe. You've done something corrupt and you've done it with their approval. But that approval can be removed at a later date. So now you're sort of like in their orbit. They totally have you under their thumb and in their control. And I feel like this is sort of an example of that.

Also, no one cares that Lemonade has been shut down. No one is clamoring for it or breaking the law. I just want to point that out. I don't know what it is. And there's another app called CapCut. Oh, yeah, CapCut. CapCut is big because it's what everyone uses to edit their TikTok videos. So now Instagram has released a CapCut clone trying to jump into this space. Yeah, it's pretty clear that if TikTok does survive,

And it now looks as though it will. The main US winner is going to be Oracle, who's going to have probably a large stake in it and so on and so forth.

And the loser is going to be Meta, right? And Google, because that social video trend for all the people were going to Little Red Book and Lemonade and all the rest of it. Ultimately, though, people were going to scratch that itch by going to Reels and Shorts. And now they don't need to go to Reels and Shorts. I think we need to say for the record that TikTok is...

so much better than Reels. If it had been shut down and Reels had benefited, it would have been just not right. Free market capitalism would have lost because TikTok is clearly the superior social network. It's much better. So this is my question, right? It is very clear that the deal being cobbled together between ByteDance and with the tacit assent of the Chinese government and various bidders in the United States

is that some U.S. consortium is going to buy TikTok U.S., but they are not going to buy the algorithm. They are not going to have rights to the algorithm. When you say that TikTok is better than Reels, what you're saying is you value the algorithm. So the question is, what do you think the chances are that a U.S.-run TikTok is going to be any good? And what are the chances that they're just going to turn into another crappy Reels because they're not going to have the algorithm?

It's going to be another crappy Reels without the algorithm, I think.

Is it all the algorithm that makes me like it? Possibly. The user interface is a little bit different. The content always seems fresher and newsier, but also more random and weird. That's the algorithm. Okay, I'm talking through. Well, are you sure they're not essentially licensing the algorithm? I understand they can't purchase it outright, but if they're not using the existing algorithm, what are they using? Again, this is all to be negotiated, but I think the general vibe is that they are going to...

have to roll their own. Well, that'll be the death of TikTok then. Like the people talking about buying it are not like the country's best and brightest social media innovators. It's like the guy who used to own the Dodgers and who else? I don't even know. But it is also Larry Allison who kind of knows a little bit about what he's doing. An 85 year old man? No, no, he's only 80. No, no.

No, but just remember that this algorithm was one of the first instances of AI really making a lot of money for a company that ByteDance built the AI that powers the algorithm, you know, however many years ago, five, six years ago. And then it really took off and they made billions of dollars.

But I think it's obvious at this point that, you know, any crappy open source AI that you can get off the shelf is much more powerful today than whatever ByteDance was using five or six years ago. So in theory, you should be able to come up with something at least as good as that. It shouldn't be that hard. When Trump talks about TikTok, he says stuff like, I think.

We're going to take 50%. I think the U.S. is going to have 50%. What does that mean? What is he saying? Are we doing the socialism? What does that mean, Elizabeth? Can you translate Trump into English? That would be Trump just making shit up because, I mean, it's like 80% of it's already, you know, the U.S. assets are owned by BlackRock and General Atlantic. You know, Trump just...

says things. And I think we should all know that by now. So sometimes they'll throw a statistic in there just to make it sound more legitimate. But like he's saying, the United States will own half of TikTok. And I'm like, what? We're talking about unloading Fannie and Freddie and then we're going to take on the social media side? That seems weird. Maybe we should merge TikTok with Fannie and Freddie. I like that. 60% of ByteDance is owned by global investors and 20% by its employees, including people in the U.S.,

And I think 20% by its co-founders.

But the Chinese government has a golden share, which means that they don't really have an economic interest, but they can prevent it from doing anything they don't want it to do. Would the United States then get the golden share? So golden shares are a thing, right? I grew up in the era of Thatcherite privatization in the United Kingdom. And it was very common for the UK government to retain a golden share in all of the companies that it privatized.

I don't think they ever really used it very much, but maybe the U.S. government would get a golden share with that. But I feel like the Trump vision here is the exact opposite. A golden share gives you control without an ownership stake. And what Trump seems to want is an ownership stake without control.

Yeah, he said he at first he said we're going to get it or I'm going to get it. And then he was like, no, no, I mean, America, because I think at first he was thinking I'm going to get half of what he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Like, that's true. This is the perfect segue, because we should also talk about his meme coin that maybe he can just swap $20 billion worth of Trump memes for a 50% stake in TikTok.

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I find the meme coin stuff hilarious. You know, I don't. I find it actually genuinely terrifying. Why don't we tell the listeners? Elizabeth, what is this meme coin? So Trump has issued a meme coin. The sign for it is dollar sign Trump. And then right off the chills of that, the same company or related company, all owned by, you know, the Trump family, Trump org.

and various subsidiaries launched a dollar sign Melania coin, which caused some of the people who had bought into Trump coin to sell their Trump stock to get into Melania coin. And Trump coin launched in the middle of a crypto ball where all of the big crypto influencers were busy when this launched and did not see this coming. And so they are all

pretty angry about it. Why are they so mad? I actually don't understand that part. They wanted to speculate on it and number go up and make money. No, the reason they're mad is because they have spent the past five, six years, anyway, quite a long time

desperately trying to make crypto look and feel and be a legitimate parallel financial system that has actual utility and that people can use on things that aren't just scams and rug pulls. And then Trump launches this thing that is clearly just a scam and a rug pull. And they're like, you have set back the course of crypto by five years here because you

There's no utilities to this at all. There's billions of dollars of value in these coins. All of that value is going to Trump. You know,

He is effectively putting this tin cup out in front of the world's rich people and saying, like, you can just bribe me now by buying Trump coins. And that's perfectly legal and fine. And my hand-picked Supreme Court will not blink an eye if you do that. So the whole thing just stinks to high heaven, frankly. And the crypto world knows this, right? The crypto world is well aware of how much this stinks. They have to...

align themselves with Trump because he is their great white hope for becoming deregulated or regulated or whatever it is they want. And so they were celebrating him at the crypto ball for being this great hope of crypto, the crypto president and all the rest of it. And then he goes and pulls this and you're like, oh, no, like, no. Part of it is there's what I think of as like a sort of tech bro optimism that veers into naivete when it comes to politics.

So a lot of these crypto guys had this impression that because they had sort of captured Trump's attention and you have three tech oligarchs sitting in the front row at the inauguration and so on, that their interests were very aligned with Trump.

And to some extent they are. But you also have to just ignore everything we know about Donald Trump to not anticipate that he would do something like this. Like there are words that some of the people who are complaining about it used to describe the meme coins, and they were unseemly, a bad look, grifty and cheap.

Did these guys just discover Donald Trump yesterday? Because this is every business adventure he does. Trump steaks, Trump wines. If he can gold plate something and put his name on it, he's going to do it. I just don't understand how this was not fully anticipated by the crypto community from the beginning. I think it came as a surprise because it was so...

blatant and the timing was so cynical and and it's so cringy and also because he had actually weirdly kind of not stepped across that line before like you know there had been a few sort of Trumpy NFTs and that kind of thing but

but the idea of launching his own effectively launching his own cryptocurrency and please don't ask me to explain the difference between a coin and a token and a meme because it's not interesting or important but like he effectively he launched launched his own cryptocurrency you can buy and sell it on the crypto exchanges and that was somewhere he hadn't gone until literally the eve of his inauguration and like

Whoa. Shows you how weak the opposition to him. I mean, I saw like Elizabeth Warren was calling for an investigation in a letter. That's it.

Our incoming president is selling a digital currency in his name for his own benefit, his own enrichment. And everyone's like, oh, so funny. Also, he owns 80% of it. So if you were the person who bought the Trump meme coin and he decides to sell a big portion of his stake in the whole thing tanks, like he can unilaterally do that. He owns 80% of it, which, you know, that kind of rug pull is not unimaginable.

unheard of and so I think that's another thing that makes it super sketchy but I'm not even sure Trump gives a shit that's not a rug pull that's

actually explicitly laid out on the gettrumpmemes.com website is they have this thing called an emissions schedule. And they're like, starting in April, this is how many memes, how many Trump coins Trump is going to sell every month for the next three years. And those coins like coming onto the market on a monthly basis between April and, you

It's theoretically totally priced in at this point. People know those coins are going to get unlocked and they're going to be emitted. What if he doesn't do it though? Felix, it's not regulated like a security. Exactly. So the unlocking of the coins is baked into the coin. That's not something that he does or doesn't do. That's just like coded into how the coin works.

Once it's unlocked, it looks like he does not have to sell them. But if he wants to sell them, he can either just sell them on the open market on some like coin exchange, which I think you're right, would probably depress the price.

Or he can create his own like Trump kitty of Trump coins and sell them at whatever price he likes to anyone in the world. You know, when I say he can sell them, what I mean is like Eric Trump or whoever's running the Trump organization can sell them to anyone who wants to carry favor with Trump.

at any price that is negotiated bilaterally between those two parties. And so even if the market price of the coin is relatively low, that doesn't mean he can't make a huge amount of money by selling his stash for more. Has he made money so far or it's just all on paper? He has definitely made money so far. How? Well, I mean, he sold the first 200 million coins.

right? They're all his coins in some way. It's a little bit hard to find out exactly how much money he made by selling those first 200 million coins. The only estimate I've seen said $54 million. It could be more than that. We don't know. But he has definitely made something. And he's definitely made like a non-negligible amount of money from this so far. So the incoming president of the United States made up

a thing out of thin air called dollar sign Trump and then sold the made up thing and made maybe tens of millions of dollars already on it. Yes. Coin. There's an Andrew Ross Sorkin coin I saw this morning. Well, no, but this is the thing. There was this thing. Do you remember, I don't know, 10 years ago?

Everyone was creating their own currency. You know, a friend of the pod, Joe Weisenthal, created this thing called stalwart bucks. And they were all just jokes, right? Yeah. The fact that you can create your own currency has been...

feature of crypto for as long as crypto has been around pretty much. It does seem fun. And, you know, if you go on to Coinbase, you can see a very, very long list of a million different currencies you can buy. It's not just Bitcoin. You can buy Ethereum. You can buy Solana. You can buy Dogecoin. You can buy, you know, whatever you want, right? I think we should start our own cryptocurrency and call it dollar sign fee, fee

Felix, Emily, Elizabeth, and sell it. Can we do that? Anyone can do that. Let's go. No one would buy it. And it would be silly because like that was a thing. You know, this was the whole shit coin era of 10 years ago. Right. And that was the thing that happened. And then it kind of fell off. And then people moved on to, you know, NFTs. And now people are moving on to memes. And the difference between a meme and a shit coin is huge.

I don't know. It's weird. But what is absolutely clear here is that there's no utility to this. And even the website itself says, if you're buying this, you're not buying it to make money. You're just buying it because you want to have fun and celebrate Trump. You said the utility, Felix. It's a way to give money to Trump. Well, I mean, but that's not what Trump is saying. If you go to gettrumpmemes.com, it says there is no utility. This is just

fun and games. I would also bet the target market, like the hardcore Trump supporters, don't necessarily understand that it's not a full feature cryptocurrency. It's not like buying Bitcoin. I don't know what feature Bitcoin has that Trump doesn't, to be honest. It's not like any cryptocurrency has that many features.

Well, it's more fungible. It trades, you know, it's mechanically different in the way that it exists on exchanges. If Trump shitcoin actually got traction and people were really trading it, of course, it might function more like Bitcoin. But right now it's more like buying something from the Franklin Mint and hoping that it gives up.

No, there's real volume. I mean, this is a pretty liquid instrument. There is real volume in it, and it's trading, and you can buy and sell. And people have made money by buying low and selling high, and people have lost money by buying high and selling low.

But yeah, to your point, it's not, it's probably not going to have lasting value. But the only thing that Trump really cares about is, is it going to, is there going to be people out there willing to pay him money for it for the next three years? And I think probably the answer to that is yes. That's fine. Seems fine. It's okay to bribe the president. That's whatever. And just to be clear, and I, you know, and I had this chart, which went kind of viral last weekend about this.

If you value Trump's 800 million remaining coins at the market traded value of the existing 200 million coins, which is an assumption you can make and you can quibble with that and we can have a whole fight about whether that's reasonable or not. But this is what, you know, is standard practice in the stock market when you calculate the single fully diluted market cap.

Then this one shit coin alone is like 89% of Trump's net worth or probably a bit lower now, maybe like 50% of Trump's net worth because it's gone down in value. But like the overwhelming majority of his net worth is memes. It's either this Trump meme or it's TJT stuff, which is also a meme. I mean, he memed his way into the White House, so it seems valuable.

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What's next? Digital shoplifting. The rich are stealing and Felix has caught them. This is a trend that had kind of passed me by. And now, like, there's been a couple of reports that

And it seems to be a relatively solid finding that for all that there's a wailing and a gnashing of teeth about people stealing stuff from Rite Aid or Target or whatever, there is at the same time a genuine epidemic of digital shoplifting. And you think, well, how on earth can you steal something virtually? Turns out it's really easy. How do you do it?

You order something on the internet and then it arrives and you're like, great, it's a thing. And then you say, it never arrived. I want my money back. And then they give you your money back. And then you have the thing and your money back and you've basically stolen it. And Felix, who is doing the stealing? It's not us Gen Xers. It's not us Gen Xers. It's the millennials and the Gen Zs. And it's not just the millennials and the Gen Zs. It's the millennials and the Gen Zs who make more than $100,000 a year.

Which you called rich, which I don't think is right. Well, I mean, we're still in edits, Emily. I might change that. I would like people to write in, actually, to SlateMoneyAtSlate.com and tell me if for an individual making $100,000 a year or more, is that a rich person? What was the form of words you wanted? Affluent? High income. High income. So boring. So yeah, write in SlateMoneyAtSlate.com and let us know. I do think for like someone in their early 20s, if you're making a six-figure salary, that you're doing well for yourself. Yes, yes.

of course, to be sure. And these are the people who are most likely to be committing this crime. And it is, you know, on the subject of like breaking the law, this is clearly illegal.

And yet people do it every day. And there are really no repercussions doing it. The worst thing that happens, you know, you phone up your credit card company, dispute the charge, the credit card company automatically refunds you pending the outcome of an investigation. The worst thing that happens is they do the investigation and they find that you did actually get the good and so you wind up paying for it. But it's a kind of no harm, no foul thing. There's no sort of

criminal penalty there for committing that crime. So let's unpack. Why is Gen Z so lawless? There was a piece in Forbes and their big picture reason was these young folks are disillusioned with the economy. It's the same as the old people wagging their finger and being like, they have no respect, you know? Kids these days. But

But let's take it seriously. So is this more frequent for Gen Z because Gen Z is disillusioned with the economy? Is it just because they're more digitally native and they sort of know what they're doing, whereas like old Gen Xers or boomers are just barely getting by on the internet? I think it's that they're more disillusioned with institutions and particularly corporations. So they think of this as a kind of victimless crime. You know, like if I'm...

you're doing this to Amazon, like, who cares? It's a giant company. It's not going to kill them. And I also think a lot of them just don't realize it's a crime. Like, I think they think of it as just like working the system or finding a loophole. 100%. And the reason I know this is because I'm writing this whole article off a survey that was done about this. And, you know, they were like, have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? And all of these Zoomers and even millennials were like, yep, yep, yep, I've done that. And then they're like,

Is this bad? Is this a crime? No, no, this is not. They're perfectly happy to admit to it. If they think of it as a crime, they wouldn't be so willing to admit to doing it to pollsters. This reminds me of what we talked about last year when we talked about the ATM scam. Do you remember when people were going to the ATM and stealing the money and people were saying, oh, they don't realize that it's stealing. And then we got like a hundred letters. It was probably like five.

But we got like 100 letters that were like, of course it's stealing. And they know they're stealing. And I feel like it's the same thing here. They know they're stealing. They know. I mean, come on. You're lying. You're saying I didn't get this package when you got the package. You think that's okay? Like people know lying is lying. Okay, Buma. I'm going to be skeptical a little bit about the numbers because I was looking at the way the questions were asked. Okay. There's a stat that said 52%.

of millennials, Gen Zers, say that they would commit first party fraud if there were no consequences. And also having done polling, the questions are being asked in such a way where you're asking people about historical behavior. No, no, they do. This is the, and I apologize, Elizabeth, for not sending you the exact questions. I do have them. They had this long list of criminal things that people do.

And they went down this list one by one and said, have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? And specifically, like, have you done this in the holidays? But for holiday gifts, have you done this, like, you know, within the last year? Have you done this ever? And then they aggregated it all to find people who had, you know, what percentage of people had committed fraud over the past year, which is the stat I use, 55% of people.

Gen Z, you know, over $100,000 had committed fraud within the past year. If you look at whether you've done it ever, it goes up to like 73%. But the way I did it, because on that list of, you know, have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? Included a couple of things that I thought were a little bit of a gray zone, which included maxing out your credit card without really intending to pay it back and taking out a buy now pay later loan without intending to pay it back.

And there are very good reasons why that behavior can be or sometimes is criminal. But I felt that, you know, sometimes people just

in the course of their day-to-day life, you know, do things like max out their credit cards and not have any clue that, you know, reason why they think they're going to be able to pay it back. And that I felt is not super criminal. So I literally went back to the polling company and I was like, can you just remove those questions and just include the ones that are clearly criminal?

fraudulent and criminal. And that was how I managed to get to that 55% figure. Yeah, because also, I mean, when you're talking about maxing out credit cards and not being able to pay them back, it's really hard to tease out intent, especially in self-reporting there. It's like, you know, people do that because they're at crimes of desperation and they don't realize their crimes. Whereas if you place a sports bet and

and then it loses and then you phone up the sports betting company or email them and say, I never placed that bet. Someone else placed that bet. Then yeah, that you're clearly, you know what you're doing. Well, one time I bought a windbreaker for my daughter and it came and it was in my garage and I just didn't notice it was there. So I told Amazon that I'd never got it and they sent me another one. And then like a month later, I was like, oh, it was already in my garage. So then I had two of them, by the way.

She never wore either, but I didn't do anything about it. So I guess, would that count? Would I be in your list? So I think you would count as someone who has done it ever, probably not in the last year, but also who didn't deliberately do it. Okay.

Yeah, I think that's not a good faith trying to manipulate the system. No, it's just ham-handed. I almost never return stuff, even whenever I should. Just anything that feels administrative, I always procrastinate on and then just never do it. But recently I had to search for Amazon stuff that, you know, I got a notification that was delivered.

And I was surprised they definitely sort of bulked up the process you have to go through in order to say, like, my package didn't arrive and I need another one. And so in this case, what I got was just like a heavy package package.

And I got a notification that it arrived with a photo, but the photo showed the package in front of not my house, like somebody else's house, but it wasn't identifiable enough that I could see which house it was. So, you know, I was chatting with their customer service person and they just kept insisting that, you know, they're like, no, but we have photographic evidence. And I said, I'm not saying it wasn't delivered. It just wasn't delivered to me. And so it took them like

three weeks to get me a replacement and I still had to do you know so I think this is something that the last time I had to return something is probably two years ago and they were just like oh here it is the merchants are deeply aware of this and are making it harder to commit this kind of fraud through exactly the kind of creating the kind of hoops that you're talking about taking those photographs as

digital proof and all the rest of it. So these crimes are probably becoming a bit harder to commit. But that doesn't mean that, you know, the Zoomers aren't one step ahead and aren't still committing them. I think part of it is, isn't there some dumb like Instagram saying about what do you do when no one is watching or something? But like, no one is watching you shop online. So,

you know, you can do whatever. If you're shopping in person, you're going to think twice, I imagine, about grabbing stuff off the shelf, putting it on, you know, pulling like a Winona Ryder or, you know, or shoplifting. You're going to think twice about shoplifting because you can be caught and like shamed and, you know, taken by security into the back office or whatever. But when you're shopping online, no one's really watching. So you can pull a lot of crap that you normally wouldn't do. It's just a more private experience.

And the other thing I would say is that this relates back to our TikTok conversation about laws and policies and enforcement. Because when there was lax enforcement, there was more of this, and now they're cracking down. Maybe there'll be less. Those were two points in a row. Feel free to comment on whichever. No, no comments. No, no, no. Emily, you have upsummed it perfectly. You have brought this conversation to its natural high point. And we can move on to a numbers round.

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Me? Yeah. I do. What is it? It's 100. Heard of it? It's a good one. It's 10 squared. Yeah, 100. It's like an emoji even. It's 100 for the 100th floor of a building in New York City, an apartment building. And on the 100th floor, you will find a restaurant called 10 Cubed.

It is one of about a dozen private restaurants in the city that Dion Cierci, the wonderful New York Times reporter Dion Cierci, wrote about in the Times last week, this week, who knows?

They know that 10 cubed is 1,000, not 100, right? I don't know. That's what it's called. That's amazing. Good for you knowing math. Yes, so that's one funny thing. It should be 10 times itself. 10 times 10. 10 squared. It should be 10 squared. 10 squared. Yeah, why is it 10 cubed? Oh, my God. I have to tell. Dionne did not mention that. Okay, so there are all these private restaurants in New York City that are in people's luxury apartment buildings, and it's like this big perk. You know, Daniel, how do you say his last name? Lude. Lude.

Daniel Blude is the chef at one of them, and Dionne profiled the chef at another.

A 10 cubed Neduvo salam sounds like a lovely guy. There may be like one or two diners an evening at this restaurant with this amazing view of New York City, fine dining, empty restaurant. Can you imagine a more symbol of the Gilded Age thing than these like empty restaurants hovering above New York City that rich people spend, you know, insane maintenance fees for their luxury apartments that sit empty?

most of the time and this restaurant that sits empty most of the time doesn't even have fresh food in stock according to the article because they so infrequently have people eat there and that when someone comes to eat there they like run out to Union Square to buy stuff or wherever

Like, I just found it kind of shocking. And she mentions in the piece that private restaurants and residential buildings were a thing back in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the Dakota apartment building, that's like John Lennon's apartment building, you know, and the Ansonia, only murders in the buildings kind of based on it. They had also had private restaurants. And the one at the Ansonia had a lobby in the fountain with actual baby seals in it. Baby seals? Baby seals. Baby seals.

I don't think they ate the seals, if that's what you were thinking. My number is also food-related.

Or, you know, food and drink related. Emily knows this one already. It's $710, which is following up from the conversation we had a week or two ago about the right to repair. $710 is the number of dollars it cost me to replace the ice maker in my freezer. That's so much money. I don't understand. You said it would cost you less to get a new refrigerator. I mean, probably not. But like...

It's insane. Yes. Was that mostly labor or parts? How much was labor? Yeah, I'm sure it's mostly labor. Like the part was just this little piece of plastic. Unbelievable.

Our colleague, Neil Irwin of Axios, told a story of maybe Larry Summers saying that it's cheaper if you make a hole in your wall, it's cheaper to buy a flat screen TV to cover it up than it is to actually repair the hole in your wall. Yeah, I feel like that's like Mark Andreessen. Okay. Slate money at slate.com.

Anyway, yeah, guys, if your icebreaker conks out, I'm telling you, you're in a world of financial pain. You could get a little plastic ice tray, you know. That's what we've been doing for the past two years. And then we just finished a renovation. We're like, well, the one thing that doesn't work in our apartment is the ice maker. So it's about time we fix this. And then the guy came over. He said, I can fix it. No problem. I'm like, OK. That'll be $1 million. Can I have $710, please? And we're like, yeah.

Elizabeth, what's your number? My number is 215. And that's how many minutes the movie The Brutalist is. And so The Brutalist very specifically includes an intermission in all viewings. It's part of the film. Yeah.

Intermissions used to be a thing in Hollywood that were pretty common, and now they're not. So now people are sort of debating about whether having an intermission ruins the experience or makes it better. But also movies keep getting longer and longer when the auteurs do them or the very high-profile directors do them. So there's a guy named Dan Gardner who made an app called RunPee.

after watching Peter Jackson's King Kong in the theater, because that was 187 minutes. So the Renpey app tells you where in the movie you should go to the bathroom, where you would miss the least and ruin your movie experience. I've just gotten myself tickets to go see Les Enfants du Paradis, the Children of Paradise, the great French movie from 1945 or 44, something like that. That's over three hours long.

Three hour movies are not a new thing. But yeah, I went to see The Brutalist. My friend Kevin also went to see The Brutalist in Spain. And the projectionist in this like very grand 70 millimeter movie theater was very into the fact that there was a intermission. And so the intermission card comes up and he's like, okay,

And I'm going to pause the movie for 15 minutes now. And so the projectionist paused the movie for 15 minutes. Everyone got back in their seats. He started up the movie again. And then the next 15 minutes of the movie were just a card counting down 15 minutes because actually they've included the 15 minute intermission as part of the movie. And so the intermission turned into 30 minutes.

Well, that used to be why they would have intermissions. You know, the projectionists would have to change the reels and it would take a minute. So they just give everybody a break. They don't make short movies anymore. Like they've always made long movies, but they also used to make short movies, especially like the more commercial films would be like 90 minutes or, you know, two hours max. But that doesn't happen as much anymore. I feel like my favorite movie of the year was My Old Us. Did you guys see that? Aubrey Plaza. It's really good. I feel like that's a short movie.

But it's Canadian, so maybe that doesn't count. Now it's like TV shows are basically the length of movies. I have obviously, I've seen the Brits.

the brutalist maybe we can turn it into a money talk segment somehow or maybe not but that's not what we're going to be talking about next week on money talks is it no we're not going to have money talks next week are we no no not next week people can still listen to the money talks from this week which is harold pollock right harold pollock and i talking about the economics of long-term care for loved ones

So yeah, listen to this week's Money Talks if you haven't already. That is in your feed. And thank you for listening to this week's Slate Money. Many thanks to Merritt Jacob and Chena Roth and Jefferman Mollie for putting the show together. And we will be back next Saturday with yet more Slate Money. Hi, it's Carvel from Slate's How To Podcast. Are you ready for a fresh start in 2025?

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Hi, Slate listeners. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, host of What Next TBD. Our show focuses on the intersection of tech and power, which is, you know, kind of relevant right now. On Friday's episode, we're talking about Doge, the new Department of Government Efficiency. It's Elon Musk's meme-y cost-cutting agency that's taken aim at various parts of the government.

What can Doge do? Will the multiple lawsuits stop it? All of that. We're getting into it on Friday. Then, if you are a Slate Plus member, there is more where that came from. Our first bonus episode of The Discourse is now live. Slate's Nitish Pawar joins me. We unpack the broligarchy, including Musk himself, and, uh,

whatever he was doing with his arm at Trump's presidential inauguration. So you can catch What Next TBD wherever you listen to Slate Podcasts, and The Discourse is our special new feature for Slate Plus members.