Crash Landing

**A kaleidoscopic account of the financial carnage of the pandemic, revealing the fear, grit, and gambles that drove the economy s winners and losers from a leading business reporter

A true masterwork . . . perceptive, well researched, and captivating. David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, bestselling author of How to Invest**

It was the ultimate test for CEOs, and almost none of them saw it coming. In early March 2020, with the Dow Jones flirting with 30,000, the world s biggest companies were riding an eleven-year economic high. By the end of the month, millions were out of work, iconic firms were begging for bailouts, and countless small businesses were in freefall. Slick consulting teams and country-club connections were suddenly of little use: Business leaders were fumbling in the dark, tossing out long-term strategy and making decisions on the fly decisions that, they hoped, might just save them.

In Crash Landing, award-winning business journalist Liz Hoffman shows how the pandemic set the economy on fire but if you look closely, the tinder was already there. After the global financial crisis in 2008, corporate leaders embraced cheap debt and growth at all costs. Wages flatlined. Millions were pushed into the gig economy. Companies crammed workers into offices, and airlines did the same with planes. Wall Street cheered on this relentless march toward efficiency, overlooking the collateral damage and the risks sowed in the process.

Based on astonishing access inside some of the world s biggest and most iconic companies, Crash Landing is a kaleidoscopic account of the most remarkable period in modern economic history, revealing through gripping, fly-on-the-wall reporting how CEOs battled an economic catastrophe for which there was no playbook: among them, Airbnb s Brian Chesky, blindsided by a virus in the middle of a high-stakes effort to go public; American Airlines Doug Parker, shuttling between K Street and the White House, determined to secure a multibillion-dollar bailout; and Ford s Jim Hackett, as his assembly lines went from building cars to churning out ventilators.

In the tradition of Too Big to Fail and The Big Short, Crash Landing exposes the fear, grit, and gambles behind the pandemic economy, while probing its implications for the future of work, corporate leadership, and capitalism itself, asking: Will this remarkable time give rise to newfound resilience, or become just another costly mistake to be forgotten?

Autorentext

Liz Hoffman

Leseprobe
CHAPTER 1

BORROWED TIME

Steven Mnuchin was sick of talking about global warming.

Half an hour into a private dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the conversation had been of little else. Executives from the biggest companies in the world had gathered in the ritzy ski town’s famed Grand Hotel Belvédère. A shrine to a nineteenth-century European version of wellness, nestled into the side of Davos’s steep hill, in recent times the hotel served as the power center of the annual summit. For one week a year in late January, snipers patrolled its rooftops as the world’s corporate elite gathered. It was a long and annoying trip, even by private jet, but the chance to rub elbows with their peers and senior government officials—and to be seen as masters of the universe, thought leaders for the century to come—was irresistible. Among the attendees at that evening’s dinner were Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Chevron’s Mike Wirth, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, Volkswagen chairman Herbert Diess, and Wall Street dealmaker Ken Moelis, along with Mnuchin and his colleague in Trump’s cabinet, Wilbur Ross, the octogenarian commerce secretary.

This kind of dinner was exactly what these corporate executives had come to the Alps for. Squeezed around a long table covered in white linen and dotted with fresh-cut flowers and elegant candle tapers, the group had somberly—if not soberly—discussed the need for more radical action on climate change.

It was the kind of tin-eared talk that was as much a part of Davos as alpaca-lined parkas and galosh-covered Armani loafers. The organization behind it all, the World Economic Forum, had been founded in 1971 by a Swiss university professor as a humble academic venue for resolving international conflicts and promoting shared prosperity.

But in recent years it had become a capitalist cheerfest, where the highest-tier tickets cost more than $500,000 and even a spartan hotel room fetched more than $600 a night. Corporate executives, hedge fund titans, and government officials disembarked from helicopters and black cars to spend five days doling out management advice to the developing world and patting themselves on the back for it. In 2020, more than a hundred billionaires were in attendance, and even for Mnuchin—a wealthy man himself, a former Goldman Sachs executive turned Hollywood producer who had been one of Trump’s first cabinet picks—the hypocrisy was a bit thick. He also thought their attention was misplaced.

“Global warming is an issue, but it’s not the only issue,” he told the room, as tuxedo-clad waiters circled to refill wine glasses. Iran’s nuclear program was growing more sophisticated by the day and should be higher than it was on everyone’s worry list, he said. “Also, you know, there’s a city of eleven million people in China that’s on lockdown.”

It was January 25, 2020, more than three weeks since the virus had been reported by Chinese authorities. It had already sickened some five hundred people in the country and killed seventeen, by the country’s official tally.

But how bad was it? Reports of the virus struck many of the evening’s attendees as the kind of thing that cropped up from time to time in the developing world—and China in particular. Decades after the communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong had penned a poem bidding “farewell to the god of plagues,” promising to eradicate a deadly parasitic fever, spread by the use of human waste as fertilizer, and bring China into the modern age, the country remained fertile ground for pathogens. Rapidly expanding cities butted up against stubborn old-world customs, creating the ideal conditions for what epidemiologists call “spillover,” in which diseases that might otherwise have circulated harmlessly through animal populations jump to humans, with unpredictable consequences. By 2004, a respiratory disease, SARS, had killed hundreds in China. It was later genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling bats, from which, experts theorized, it had jumped to civets, a small catlike mammal commonly sold for slaughter as a delicacy in village markets. Before that, in 1997, it was a virulent strain of flu that traveled from poultry to humans, stamped out only by the slaughter of millions of chickens. Another flu variant had originated in Hong Kong in 1968 and was ultimately blamed for as many as a million deaths globally.

Now, in late January 2020, a new virus had appeared. It didn’t yet have a name, much less a forensic footprint or a treatment protocol. But to those global observers who knew what to look out for, it had all the markings of a killer. While much remained unknown as Mnuchin admonished his fellow elites for their misplaced attention, it was clear the virus could spread between people. Early studies suggested it could live on surfaces, possibly for days. Chinese authorities had moved to seal off Wuhan ahead of the Lunar New Year, a major travel holiday that would send millions of people out from cities that were breeding grounds for a highly contagious disease back to their homes in suburbs and rural villages. Officials…