Writing Lessons From a Corrupt CEO’s Wicked Games
What Makes Great Writing #019 -- Featuring Former Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price (and his Ghostwriter, Mike Rosenberg)
As you’ve no doubt heard and forgotten by now, another tech startup golden boy went down in flames six weeks ago.
Dan Price, with his man-bun-ready hair and wise-person-shaggy beard, presumably understood that the masses would fall hard for a CEO who railed against corporate greed and ruthlessness, so he hired a ghostwriter to throw digital rocks at big corporations and capitalism in general with the goal of painting a bright mask over Dan’s dark past.
It almost worked.
Dan rode social fame to the Kelly Clarkson Show, NBC News, and The Daily Show. His company, Gravity Payments, doubled its profit and revenue. Dan was the good boss.
Then — the rape allegations, the physical abuse claims, the hints at torture and other truly horrific behavior. Dan quit. The ghostwriter (who haunted women himself), slunk away.
Bad behavior from CEOs is familiar. Cover-ups to this level are not. Social media typically exposes wrongdoing, but the reverse happened for Dan.
Karen White, NYT reporter, put it like this:
“It was the opposite of being canceled. Just as social media can ruin someone, so too can it — through time, persistence and audacity — bury a troubled past.”
Consider this. Using ONLY words, Dan Price nearly erased a bitter court battle with his brother, a history of lying about his motives, and dozens of abuse and rape accusations.
So, let’s study the cover-up.
Let’s turn darkness into light.
This is the first category of Dan's posts — “My Company is Better.”
These were the posts that captured the attention of job applicants and started to set Dan apart as a CEO.
Notice the details in the highlighted post. Gravity Payments does not pay a “livable wage.” It pays “a minimum wage of $70K.” It does not have “good benefits.” It has “paid parental leave, full health care benefits”, etc.
At the close, there’s an antithesis (drawing hard lines between 2 options), made more enticing by the anaphora (repeating “There’s” at the beginning of each sentence). Also, the repetition of “shortage,” which draws a direct comparison between the two extremes.
It juxtaposes them, which you’re about to get very familiar with.
One of the clearest ways to point out a striking difference in two concepts is to juxtapose them, meaning simply to place them side by side and let the reader make the connection. Juxtaposition works well on Twitter, in fiction, and, apparently, on LinkedIn.
Dramatic forms of juxtaposition remove all nuance. Never mind that some republicans approve of unemployment insurance, or that certain democrats believe billionaires should pay less in taxes.
Beneath the surface, this type of post extorts our implicit bias, setting the underdogs reading it on LinkedIn firmly against those ivory tower folks. It’s us vs. them.
(Oh, and there’s parallel structure here too.)
The are two technical reasons this post works well.
Each line has an epistrophe (repeating the same word or phrase at the END of sentences), and the post is also parallel structure by default, repeating the same line 5 times. Combine the two, and you have this relatively easy template to follow:
(Company Name): Highest (item) in (number) years.
(Company Name): Highest (item) in (number) years.
(Company Name): Highest (item) in (number) years.
You can never take viral posts in a vacuum, though. This post also went over well for cultural reasons. On the day Dan’s ghostwriter released this post, the price of gas had just begun to skyrocket.
When your only goal is to get attention, you can’t waste a crisis.
Dan Price’s content sounds a lot like the messages preached by Alec Ross (former Senior Advisor under President Obama), and Yancey Stickler (former CEO of Kickstarter). Both those men wrote books researching and exposing the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the ways in which the American Dream offers less than it once did.
Dan’s posts hit home because many people WANT the changes he proposes. Fairer pay. Less inequality. Better jobs.
Scrub his squirmy personal life away and Dan — or at least, the ghostwriter posing as Dan — makes valuable points. He was the change we want to see in the world.
Or at least, his writing was.
It’s a good reminder of how powerful words can be, even if the people behind those words turn out to be monsters.
Much love as always <3
-Todd B