Tech billionaire Lukas Matsson’s weird behaviour on Succession is actually quite realistic

The behaviour of this fictional tech billionaire might feel implausible but an industry insider says it actually happens in the real world.

Lukas Matsson in Succession. Picture: Foxtel/Binge/HBO

This is your spoiler warning. We shall be discussing episode five of Succession’s final season, so if you haven’t caught up yet, come back once you’ve seen it.

As always, the spoilers shall commence immediately after these images of Logan Roy politely asking the unspoilt interlopers among you to go away.

Spoilers.

Incoming.

Episode five follows all the bigwigs at Waystar Royco as they cross the Atlantic for a summit with megarich Swedish tech bro Lukas Matsson, who wants to buy the company.

Co-CEOs Kendall and Roman expect to haggle over price with Matsson, but he blindsides them by changing the terms of his offer. Before he died, Logan was angling for a carve out that would have left him in control of Waystar’s news service, ATN. Against the idyllic Norwegian backdrop, Matsson tells the brothers he now wants to snap up ATN as well.

Ken and Roman resist and, eventually, try to tank the entire deal, but their plan backfires when Matsson improves his offer to a price the board would never refuse (cleverly, he calls Frank to reveal this new offer, not the CEOs, which ties their hands completely).

Matsson, radiating a certain smugness. Picture: Foxtel/Binge/HBO

Kendall, unimpressed. Picture: Foxtel/Binge/HBO

Roman, bemused. Picture: Foxtel/Binge/HBO

This episode is the most sustained and illuminating look we’ve had at Matsson, who has been enigmatic and difficult to read ever since he popped up in season three. It turns out he’s quite the weirdo.

This is most apparent during a late-night scene with Shiv, in which Matsson confesses to sending an ex-lover (who was and still is a subordinate) half-litre bricks of his frozen blood. He describes this gesture as “a joke” that became “not a joke”. Odd, creepy, sinister – many adjectives spring to mind.

The blood stuff is perhaps extreme to the point of implausibility, but Matsson’s other strange behaviour is apparently quite realistic. So says Dick Costolo, a former venture capitalist who was CEO of Twitter from 2010 to 2015.

Speaking to this week’s edition of HBO’s official Succession podcast, Costolo said Matsson “is definitely a character type that you see in tech”.

“Minus the direct personal insults, a lot of the characters (in this show) are the kinds of people you see in tech. There are definitely personality types like that,” he said.

“Does someone like Matsson seem real to you?” asked the podcast’s host, journalist Kara Swisher.

“Yes. For sure,” said Costolo.

“In some cases, the more powerful you get, the quirkier, the more strange the idiosyncrasies become. So 100 per cent there are people like that. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone describe something that they’ve done like that as part of a negotiation, to that degree. But those people exist.”

Matsson reveals his weird blood brick habit. Picture: Foxtel/Binge/HBO

Shiv digests. Picture: Foxtel/Binge/HBO

Costolo stressed that the bricks of blood were “getting into pretty fictional realms”, but in essence, Matsson was “just trying to show Shiv how much of a crazy person he is”. And that is something that does happen in the real world.

“I guess if I can try to draw an analogy to real life, it’s definitely the case that buyers will try to make you think, ‘Hey I’m crazy, and liable to bail on this deal at any moment, so don’t say anything that’s going to offend me.’ So I think that’s kind of what’s going on here,” he said.

“I thought it was a weird scene, and he’s trying to get into her head a bit, obviously, and trying to maybe pull her in and separate her from the brothers. But it was a weird way of going about that.”

Swisher quipped that she could think of “maybe four people” she knew in real life who would pull something like the blood manoeuvre.

“It’s scary to think about people like Matsson having so much power and influence in the world, and being so decidedly odd. Because he really is, he’s so strange,” she said.

“It’s increasingly true that executives of the biggest companies in the world have an incredible amount of influence over geopolitical affairs,” agreed Costolo.

Powerful people like Matsson do really exist. Picture: Foxtel/Binge/HBO

The summit itself is sexed up a bit for television but it, too, is quite realistic.

“Aside from the fact that you wouldn’t send everyone over there until you’d signed a terms sheet or something on the dotted line, these kinds of things happen. When we sold Feedburner to Google, post the signing they were like, ‘OK, now we want to interview all your engineers and everybody on the sales team to see if they’re Googly,’” Costolo recalled.

“It’s less of a massage and a steam, as it is in this episode, and more like the executives going off into a conference room ... it’s a lot less compelling than the Nordic retreat.

“During those courting periods you’re definitely holding dinners and trying to pull people in who are investors in both companies, maybe, and are trying to push things together. That all, 100 per cent goes on.”

Also realistic: the so-called “kill list” that the Waystar-employed characters (apart from the Roys) spend much of the episode stressing about.

“It happens, for sure. It’s done very, very differently at different places. It can be done in gracious ways or it can be done in a less than gracious way,” said Costolo.

“So one of the things that happens, just to be blunt about it, is the acquirer is usually going to say something like, ‘Well how much more efficient can we make the business when it’s part of Twitter.’ And one of the ways to gain efficiency is, ‘We already have an HR and a finance department.’ Those kinds of functions are more typically (going to be targeted.)

“Those general administrative functions, they usually get condensed, consolidated.”

Sorry about it, Hugo.

New episodes of Succession are available every Monday on Binge

Twitter: @SamClench