Sam Zell Goes On CNBC, Irritates America, Runs Out Of Zoom Minutes

Do we not know what they’re going to say?

When you invite “brand names” — “legends,” as it were — onto CNBC and ask them leading questions about stimulus checks and retail investor manias, is it really news when they respond precisely as you knew they would?

I would argue no. But social media begs to differ, given what looked, on Tuesday, like backlash against Sam Zell, who expressed some doubt about stimulus checks and whether college students should (or, according to Zell, shouldn’t) be receiving them.

“If part of this is being fueled by the stimulus package we’ve already gotten, if we get an even bigger stimulus package, could that keep the music playing,” the network’s Becky Quick wondered, referencing recent manifestations of froth in equity markets.

Zell delivered the goods, where that just means soundbites that will drive traffic to CNBC’s website and satisfy viewers looking for confirmation bias for the theory that college students are plowing stimulus payments into GameStop.

“I’m hopeful that the next stimulus package is really directed to the people who need help. I’m not sure that a $2,000 check to a college student is necessarily productive, whereas there are people who are not getting enough to eat,” Zell remarked, adding that if stimulus isn’t targeted properly, “we’re just creating a surplus of capital that’s just floating around and we’re trying to figure out what to do with it.”

There’s really not a lot that’s particularly controversial about those remarks, and even if you think there is, blame CNBC, not Zell. They called him up and asked him questions with the sole intent to extract exactly the responses they got. This is entertainment, folks. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s meant to elicit some kind of emotional response. And it doesn’t matter whether that response is favorable. It just matters if it gets people talking, clicking, and watching. Zell’s opinion on Joe Biden’s stimulus package is meaningless outside of that context.

Anyway, below, find a clip of Zell comparing WallStreetBets to the dot-com mania.

“You’ve seen manias before,” Quick told Zell. “I’m just wondering what you think as we’ve watched all of this play out, with the Reddit traders, and GameStop, and with Bitcoin.”

Again, the response may as well have been scripted. “It’s reminiscent of 1999 — all kinds of preposterous valuations,” he said. “What’s going on is a giant game of ‘I can get out before it falls.’ There’s no connection between the prices of these stocks and the underlying company.”

That’s true. But that wasn’t social media’s takeaway. Rather, America’s takeaway was that, to paraphrase Sam, “there’s no connection between Zell and the underlying economy.”

There was no chance (none) that Zell was going to come away from this interview looking and sounding like anything other than an out-of-touch billionaire. Of course, Zell surely doesn’t care, so that’s the silver lining for him.

“You can go to the casino and flip the roulette wheel and you probably have the same amount of certainty as what’s going to happen as you have in this kind of stuff,” he went on to muse, chastising who he called “18-year-old mavens,” and calling the whole Reddit episode “very negative for the stock market.”

Ultimately, he ran out of Zoom minutes. As one member of the Twitterati put it, “Sam Zell didn’t get wealthy throwing around Zoom subscription money.”