Since Succession premiered nearly five years ago, Nicholas Braun’s Greg the Egg has demonstrated time and time again his unique skills as a lanky parasite.
In the seventh installment of the hit show’s final season, Tailgate Party, the “slim reaper” has his sights set on GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson.
To understand how Greg gets in the barefoot billionaire’s good books, however, we need to backtrack briefly. Early in the episode, Tom assigns Greg the task of informing a group of 100 Waystar Royco staffers that they’ve been impacted by a round of layoffs.
It’s a great move, HR explains, as Greg looks like he cares about making job cuts, but he actually couldn’t care less. Bulletproof, right? It does make you wonder where Waystar head of PR Karolina Novotney was in all this.
“If I have been too wordy, yes, we are letting all of you go,” Greg says to a shocked Zoom call. “Obviously, I can’t take questions on this call, but this is a very sad day.”
Yet again, Succession manages to mimic real life. There have been 191,416 employees laid off in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, with the lion’s share coming from the tech industry. Many of those tech companies have been criticized for the heartless ways in which they communicated with outgoing staffers.
Zoom seems like an intentional choice, too. In March 2022, Better.com CEO Vishal Garg informed a large number of employees about job cuts in an awkward video announcement, where he also didn’t take questions.
Nonetheless, Greg’s “jacknife, slit their throat” internal comms style impresses Matsson. Turns out he’s not “backwash at the bottom of the gene pool,” the Swede says in between puffs of his vape at Tom and Shivs’ election-eve party.
Did it work? While he claims to be “Team Ken-Ro,” Greg now also has good standing in the enemy camp, as well.
Gerri bolsters her defense
Despite Roman trying to retroactively un-fire Waystar general counsel Gerri, the company veteran insists that she’s out, and she has demands.
At the top of her agenda? “Eye-watering sums” of money, or hundreds of millions of dollars, to be exact. But whatsmore, Gerri wants to control the narrative. The announcement of her departure needs to be on her terms.
To effectively do so, Gerri has retained personal reputation management. The external PR agency will coordinate with Karolina in developing a farewell announcement based on a set of prewritten bullet points from Gerri.
“If I ever get a whiff of anything undermining my narrative anytime in the next five years, I will sue and I will go public with the many, many pictures of your genitalia that I have in my possession,” Gerri warns Roman.
Matsson’s mythical status starts to crumble
As well as revealing GoJo has drastically inflated subscriber numbers in India, “Tailgate Party” unveils another secret about its eccentric founder: he’s not even a real coder.
Ebba, GoJo’s chief comms officer and Matsson’s ex-girlfriend, explains to Roman and Kendall that the company’s PR department built his whole reputation, creating a facade to give GoJo and Matsson more market clout.
With only three episodes left and the CE-Bros on his case, both Matsson’s reputation and tech empire are in grave danger.