Welcome to Media Events, the blog where it usually costs a dollar to read the posts. However! This post is free for now.

For the next few weeks, I will be experimenting with making each new post free for a few days, then locking it behind a paywall after a new one goes up. If you want to read anything from the Media Events archive, such as this long essay about the inherent tension between Bob Dylan’s deliberate inscrutability and Timothee Chalamet’s Zoomer tryhardism, or this other long essay on the empty husk that is Mark Zuckerberg’s manly swaglord era, you’ll need to pay a dollar.

Click here to proactively pay a dollar to read all of the Media Events posts your heart desires.

America’s current operating principle is a sort of hybrid of two ideas that come from very different places. The first is “bossism,” a term the writer John Ganz popularized a couple years ago to describe an emerging “class-consciousness of the most reactionary section of the tech bourgeoisie.” Guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel dream of a world with, he wrote, “No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations.” Kind of like John Lennon’s “Imagine,” except for making Hell real and plunging all of us into it. (After “bossism” was co-opted by the bosses themselves, Ganz wrote that he regretted popularizing the term, noting that its misinterpretation was doubly unfortunate since he deliberately invoked it due to its origins in apartheid-era South Africa. Given what’s happening at this point, maybe he should reconsider his reconsideration.)

The second is “Founder Mode,” coined by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham in an essay about how start-up founders fail to scale their companies because once their companies hit a certain point of growth, they go into “manager mode,” ceding too much power over to their employees (especially middle managers), a pitfall he characterizes as “hir[ing] professional fakers and let[ting] them drive the company into the ground,” while remaining overly referential to their boards and VCs. The founders are the ultimate victims of this system, he says, because they “feel like they're being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do.”

Because oligarchical tech doofuses love throwing out bold, counterintuitive assertions, he concludes, “Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you’re mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions.” It’s worth noting that Graham thanks Elon Musk for reading a draft of his post, because it helps unlock the fact that “Founder Mode” is “bossism” rendered in the most flattering light possible by the bosses themselves.

If you’re in charge of a thing, it’s very appealing to believe that you should exact total control over your organization in order to bring your singular vision to life. And that because only you know what the ultimate goal is, every decision you make is justified, even if everyone around you disagrees with it. If your ego is big enough, you could almost trick yourself into believing that if everyone around you vehemently disagrees with one of your decisions, it’s proof that you’ve never been more correct in your life.

I think it’s safe to say that Nico Harrison, the general manager of the Dallas Mavericks, has gone Founder Mode like no NBA executive before him. On Saturday night, it was announced that Harrison, working in secret with the Los Angeles Lakers’s GM Rob Pelinka, had engineered a three-team trade that sent Luka Doncic to the Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis, in what many are calling both “the most explosive trade of the century” and “dumb as hell.”

The trade seemed so lopsided and doodooheaded that no one — not even ESPN’s Shams Charania, who broke the news — believed it when they first heard about it. A couple days later, Harrison traded the pretty good, pretty young Quentin Grimes, plus a second-round pick, to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for the decidedly mid and often injured Caleb Martin — an equally lopsided, though much more minor, move. 

To read Ramona Shelburne and Tim MacMahon’s report on how the Luka-AD trade came together is to delve into Nico Harrison and Rob Pelinka hagiography. We get paragraphs of context about how the two GMs are so close and were able to do this secret deal that, context and all, still feels a hell of a lot like Harrison became possessed by BOB from Twin Peaks and, under the grip of this force of arbitrary, demonic evil, decided to gift the Lakers the kind of league-warping generational superstar the team seems to attract at a conveniently once-in-a-generation pace. Their piece applauds Harrison for keeping Luka completely in the dark, even though it’s his life that Harrison upended and he’s also the guy who actually puts butts in the seats.

It is hard, sometimes, to feel bad for NBA superstars, what with the millions of dollars and the being really tall and able to do mystical things with a basketball. But these guys are workers, and even if they get paid more than their bosses, the bosses still want to exert power over them just like they do to the rest of us. 

It’s easy to see shades of Elon, who’s attempting to run the same (failed, dumb) playbook he used on Twitter on the American government, in Harrison’s actions. Much like how Elon bought Twitter and told all his employees that they’d be fired if they didn’t work “hard core” towards his specific goals for the company, leaks following the Luka trade (presumably from Harrison’s camp) painted Luka Doncic as a fat slob who selfishly traveled separately from the team and used his own health staff instead of the team’s in-house one. Clearly, Luka was not working hard core enough! 

Similarly, in a press conference the day after the trade, Harrison (joined by coach Jason Kidd, who had not been consulted about the move and looked ready to pull an R. Budd Dwyer) made a pointed comment about how the team believes that defense, the only basketball-related thing that Luka kinda sucks at, is the thing that wins championships. 

As many people have pointed out, these explanations hold about as much water as a sun visor. Again, this is a team that was in the Finals last year! Michael Pina of The Ringer noted that even though they lost those finals, the Mavs still held the Boston Celtics to a 109.2 offensive rating, which, according to Michael who understands analytics in ways that I do not, is very good. Meanwhile, Luka went supernova in the Western Conference Finals against the Minnesota Timberwolves, last year’s premier “Defense Wins Championships”-style team, which leads me to question whether defense wins championships or if Luka would have won a championship if the roster that Nico Harrison put around him offered as much help as the one around Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. As for Luka’s weight being an issue, as John Daly once said, “You can’t pull fat.” Besides, as Ryan Rusillo put it, Luka’s so good that he could smoke cigarettes on the court and he’d still be worth unlimited amounts of money. 

There is nothing about this narrative that makes sense, and even days after it is still driving people to the point of conspiracy. It’s worth remembering that Mark Cuban, who once joked that he’d rather divorce his wife than trade Luka, sold his controlling interest in the Mavs last year to an ownership group led by Miriam Adelson, widow of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and a big-time Trump donor, and her son-in-law Patrick Dumont, a former executive at Sheldon’s casinos. The Adelsons, as a rule, do not like paying their casino workers very much money, or even particularly respect them. And it is indisputably true that shipping Luka off helped the Mavs duck the league’s luxury tax, the specter currently haunting the NBA.

Basically, if you’re an NBA team and your payroll is over a certain amount, you have to donate all the money above that number to a pot that gets distributed to all the teams below that amount. The prevailing wisdom in the league is that it’s only worth it for a team’s General Manager to go above the tax line if they think their team can win a championship. This year, for what it’s worth, 25 teams were above the tax line at some point. But there is one team who can win the championship, and that team will be the Philadelphia 76ers. (hahaha jk) 

So what happens every year near the trade deadline, aka the day that I’m posting this, is that lots of the league’s GMs get pressure from ownership to make trades that put them under the tax line, and then they make a bunch of trades that seem pointless but probably risk making the team worse through disrupting the group’s chemistry, or they cut some veteran who never plays but is nevertheless vitally important to the team because they’re a surrogate father figure to the 19-year-old rookie who’s in the starting lineup but can’t remember to do his own laundry or whatever. 

But if getting under tax because of an Adelson-mandated austerity regime were the only goal, Luka wouldn’t have gotten the boot — they would have just dumped some salaries and called it a day. It’s helpful, though, to consider the history of Miriam Adelson’s late husband Sheldon and labor: He once took the Vegas Culinary Workers union to the Supreme Court for protesting on the sidewalk outside one of his casinos, and in 2012, made $105 million in political contributions in 2012, specifically to kick unions in the shins. The mind boggles at the thought that he was somehow saving money by spending a tenth of a billion dollars. 

So, let’s jam all this back into the worldview of “Founder Mode,” aka Paul Graham’s argument that founders are victims of both their VCs/board and their employees, and as a result should feel justified in doing the dumbest shit possible. Given that he both answers to ownership and actually runs the team, Nico Harrison gets to be our founder.

Then you have a Mavs ownership group whose members have classically viewed having workers who create their value to be a necessary at best and a big pain in the ass at worst. They, in this scenario, are the VCs who, Graham writes, “don’t know how founders should run companies” unless they’ve built one themselves, and/or the “C-level execs [who], as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.” Miriam and Pat haven’t run a team before, so you can’t listen to ’em, even if you have to technically do what they tell you to do. You want the Mavs under the tax line?, I imagine Harrison grumbling to himself as he called up the Lakers to enact his greatest fantasy, which also happened to be a thing that would assuredly make ownership very, very angry. I’ll get us under the damn tax line!

Luka Doncic, in this analogy, can almost be viewed as one of the middle managers who Graham loathes with such burning intensity. Harrison might have recruited the team’s personnel and negotiated their contracts, but when those players were on the floor, whatever vision Harrison might have had for the team when he assembled it flew out the window — those dudes were just letting Luka cook and following his lead. Luka’s greatest sin may very well have been that by being the meteoric talent he is, he couldn’t help but do this his way and not Harrison’s. And if, by making the bold, counterintuitive decision to get under the tax by offloading Luka in an extremely butt-ass trade, Harrison ended up pissing everyone off, it only reinforces how correct he must be — after all, he’s in charge, and therefore he must know what he’s doing. The stupidity of the Founder Mode worldview is truly breathtaking.

The day after the trade went down, Mavs fans protested outside the stadium, including by throwing a mock-funeral for Luka. They had a game that night, which they proceeded to lose by 43 points, and they lost the one after that in Philly by a razor-thin margin that Luka could have easily turned into a blowout.

In that press conference I talked about a little earlier, Nico Harrison was asked how he thought the trade for Davis would work out in the long term. He dodged the question, saying, “The future for me is three, four years from now. Ten years from now, they’ll probably bury me and [Kidd] by then. Or we’ll bury ourselves.”

It wasn’t as snappy a turn of phrase as, “History will absolve me.” But saying that would have implied there’ll be a future at all.