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Flipping Out Suzy Weiss

Published

1 year ago

November 3, 2023

Illustration by The Free Press

It started a few weeks ago. Texts from friends, and then acquaintances, with a coupon for $120 and a simple declaration: “Add me on Flip.”

I scoffed. “What is this?” I texted back. “Have you been hacked?”

Eventually I clicked and was taken to a site called Flip, where I read that it was “For the stories told over transactions.”

“For everyone who understands that shopping is not just about acquiring, but about coming together,” it read.

Then I was not only confused but disturbed.

I noticed a Flip fever taking hold of The Free Press offices. Everyone under 35 told me they were on the site, scrolling and scoring anything from skincare to lamps. A co-worker offered, “It’s like TikTok for shopping.”

Flip’s app launched in 2021 and they’ve since secured nearly $95 million in venture funding, including cash from the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. It’s climbed the charts to number fifteen in the shopping category of Apple’s app store with some 2 million users. To get people to sign up, Flip awards users a credit of up to $140 for each new friend lured onto the site. (The more contacts a friend already has on Flip, the more credit they’re worth.) If you bag a friend, you both get a windfall to spend in-app.

The total amount you rake in is limited only by the number of contacts you have. Flip shows me that if I got everyone in my contacts list to sign up, I’d get $40,730 in credit. It’s like a Ponzi scheme except, it seems, we’re all just spending Abu Dhabi’s money.

On the app are thousands of brands including home goods, accessories, and every cosmetic item you can think of. There are clothes, there are gadgets. There’s endless crap for your pet.

Ten evenings ago, a friend, Rebecca, sent me yet another invite. “Everyone is texting me this!” I responded. “Is it a Ponzi scheme?”

“Hope not,” she texted back. I cracked, and clicked the little card Rebecca sent me, and was whisked to the app store, where I downloaded Flip, and set up an account.

And that’s where the trouble starts. Once you’ve impatiently agreed to give away your data, access to your camera roll, your location, who knows, who cares, you’re delivered to the Flip feed. There you encounter video after video of mostly women, your new “Flip Fam,” trying out a new product—a stainless steel saucier, a gel eyeliner pencil, tweezers, a rice cooker, blush, workout clothes, a bergamot candle, an anti-anxiety journal—behind a banner where you can click to buy it.

The people in the videos are mostly not professional influencers whose job it is to project an aspirational lifestyle and sell product placement on their feed. But they’ve spent so much time watching influencers hawking wares they’re able to regurgitate the ubiquitous technique on demand.

“Hi guys,” an off-screen voice will purr, doing her best Kim Kardashian, steadying the camera while she burglarizes a cardboard box. “I’m super excited to show you my new bedsheets from Sheets & Giggles in the color lilac.” If a Flip user buys those sheets through her video, the creator earns even more money to spend on Flip. (You also accrue rewards for just viewing and interacting with content. Reviews are usually summed up with “obsessed.”)

And on and on it goes; an ouroboros of stuff, a perfect and terrifying infinity of advertisements whose by-product is content and packaging. The whole thing would give Marshall McLuhan a headache. It gave me a cookie sheet, three skin serums, kitchen shears, and a serving spoon. Within a day, I was sending out my own invitations, begging people to sign up with my code. So was everyone else, it felt like.

“Add me on Flip,” I implored a high school classmate who I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. I texted invitations to exes. I offered my code to someone only to sheepishly follow up with “Also, happy birthday.” I was chasing the high of more credits, pestering friends to spend theirs so I’d get mine, the $40,000 constantly blinking in neon somewhere in my imagination.

The app founders clearly believe—and maybe they’re right—that this is the future of shopping.

But really, it’s the past.

In the early aughts, I used to watch QVC on my grandmother’s television while she slept, that channel where the commercial is the whole show. You’d listen to the coiffed ladies go on and on about Tupperware or sterling silver jewelry or limited-edition Beanie Babies. They’d spend hours pointing out observable facts about the products like, “This Tupperware is a little smaller than that one, for snacks.” The joke, of course, was on the customer, who’d slowly become convinced that not only should they buy the product being sold, but that they deserved it. That they earned it. That it would change everything.

Like with all social media, Flip—and in this case, QVC—eliminates the middleman. The shopper becomes the reviewer, saleswoman, and advertiser all at once, fused into a single over-incentivized being who only ever wanted free charcoal toothpaste but ended up with a new set of silverware. Flip understands that in the digital age, shopping online and “adding to cart” is where the adrenaline rush comes in. Especially if you think you’re getting a deal.

As a journalist, I cannot be bought. But as a private citizen, I will fork over my entire contact list for $35 in credit. And apparently my Saturday night, which I spent ferociously clicking through the various brands on Flip to assure myself I was spending my free money wisely. I scrolled until my eyes crossed and my thumb hurt. A friend and I joked about Flip Wrist—carpal tunnel from hours of swiping. We fantasized about saving up all our credits from our contacts to buy a house.

According to its site, Flip is for people whose “standards are serious,” as if it’s an advanced condition. And it is. By the time you place your order for the thing you didn’t need, the upgrade you’d never really thought about, you’ve already bookmarked eighty other products on your wishlist. My Flip Fam—which includes an eight-year-old who exclaimed about a mascara,“It’s gluten free and vegan!”—reminds me that this is a form of self-care. That I deserve this. That this will change everything.

By now it’s been a week and the Flip boxes are arriving. The cookie sheet was tiny, basically built to fit an Easy-Bake Oven. A co-worker’s electric kettle had dead spiders rolling around in it. Luckily for us, Flip does free returns.

Suzy Weiss is a Free Press writer. Read her last piece about the people who race 3,100 miles in 52 days to achieve world peace, and follow her on Twitter (now X) @SnoozyWeiss.

Kiran Sampath contributed to the reporting of this story.

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The inauguration of a multi-billion dollar grift Judd Legum

Published

3 hours ago

January 21, 2025

admin

On Monday, Donald Trump took the oath of office — the first person to be sworn in as president while simultaneously hawking an eponymous meme coin.

Trump launched $TRUMP, a crypto token, on Friday night. Meme coins are crypto tokens tied to a celebrity or joke. The first and most famous is DOGE coin, a cryptocurrency centered around a famous image of a Shiba Inu dog. $TRUMP features an image of Trump during the assassination attempt last summer.

While meme coins are nominally tied to digital “artwork,” they function primarily as a speculative asset. Since many meme coins attempt to capitalize on online trends, they are known for extreme volatility. Hailey Welch, an online personality known as the “Hawk Tuah girl,” launched the “Hawk” meme coin in December. The Hawk coin’s value exploded shortly after launch, reaching a market cap of $490 million. But the price quickly collapsed. Today, the total value of all the 999 million Hawk coins is less than $30,000. You can buy 338 Hawk coins for less than one cent.

Trump is leveraging the prestige of the presidency and the global coverage of the inauguration to boost the price of $TRUMP. By Sunday evening, the price of one $TRUMP coin soared to over $75, putting the value of the 200 million $TRUMP coins in circulation at nearly $15 billion. By Monday afternoon, $TRUMP had lost about 40% of its value.

The primary beneficiary of this speculative activity is Trump himself. In a move that raised red flags even among crypto enthusiasts, 80% of all $TRUMP coins are reserved for a company owned by Trump. At its peak, the value of these coins exceeded $50 billion, making $TRUMP, which did not exist a few days ago, the dominant source of Trump’s wealth. The $TRUMP coins owned by Trump are currently locked, meaning they cannot be sold, but will be released in tranches over the next three years.

In 2016, Trump’s net worth was estimated to be about $3 billion. Before the launch of the $TRUMP, that had increased to around $7 billion, largely due to the public listing of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Truth Social loses millions of dollars every quarter and has few users, but Trump’s fans keep its stock price elevated.

So Trump has a huge financial incentive to keep the price of $TRUMP elevated until he can sell his coins. For Trump, there is nothing but upside. He received the coins for free — whatever he can sell them for will be a windfall. Trump’s supporters, however, could suffer huge financial losses. By Monday afternoon, a single $TRUMP coin cost $40. People who buy these coins looking to turn a big profit could instead find themselves with massive losses.

A vehicle for corrupt foreign influence

$TRUMP does not only create problems for reckless Trump fans. It means that the White House is for sale. Anyone seeking to curry favor with Trump — including foreign governments — now has a vehicle to transfer a virtually unlimited amount of money to Trump by driving up the price of $TRUMP coins.

As with all crypto transactions, anyone can purchase $TRUMP anonymously. The only record involves a digital wallet with no public owner. This means a foreign entity could make a large purchase of $TRUMP coins — perhaps boosting $TRUMP’s value before Trump sold some of his holdings — and no one would know. It creates an unprecedented and completely opaque method to bribe the President of the United States.

“While it’s tempting to dismiss this as just another Trump spectacle, the launch of the official Trump token opens up a Pandora’s box of ethical and regulatory questions,” Justin d’Anethan, an independent crypto analyst, told Reuters.

This week, we started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch

Crypto companies under federal investigation boost $TRUMP

Thousands of meme coins are launched every month. The failure rate for meme coins is estimated at over 97%. With so much competition, it is hard to make a significant number of people become aware of a meme coin. Trump, as the President of the United States, solves that problem. But even once people discover a meme coin, it needs to be easy to buy and sell in order to sustain interest.

It is possible to buy and sell crypto assets without an intermediary. But most people buy and sell crypto through a handful of popular exchanges, which make the process easy and allow you to use cash and other assets to fund purchases.

Exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood can greatly increase awareness and demand for a meme coin. At the same time, they are not going to list every new meme coin that is issued — especially since many of them are scams.

But Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood all have made $TRUMP available to their users, dramatically increasing the number of buyers, and sending its price higher. And they aren’t just quietly listing $TRUMP. They are promoting $TRUMP to their user base.

Improving your relationship with the president is a good idea for any business. But these companies have even stronger motivations. Coinbase is currently being prosecuted by the SEC for “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.” The SEC is also prosecuting Kraken for similar alleged activities. Robinhood has not been charged but received a “Wells Notice” from the SEC last May, indicating enforcement action is coming.

The crypto industry is reportedly hoping that, under the Trump administration, the SEC will either end their prosecutions and investigations or offer a favorable settlements.

More broadly, these companies are counting on the Trump administration to allow them to operate legally. The $TRUMP coin allows Trump to make billions from a more permissive regulatory environment. It transforms the presidency from a public trust into a tool for personal enrichment.

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Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

4 hours ago

January 21, 2025

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Yesterday, we saw the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaug…

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Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

4 hours ago

January 21, 2025

admin

It’s Tuesday, January 21. I’m Olly Wiseman and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. It’s good to be back.

Today we answer the big questions about the transfer of power in Washington. Among them: Will Trump fight lawfare with lawfare? Will TikTok survive? Is neoliberalism dead? Is Trump cool? Does that even matter? Are we at war with Panama now? And: that hat.

But first: the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaugural address and more like a State of the Union / campaign speech mashup. Ignoring unifying inaugural speech traditions stretching back to George Washington, he trashed his political opponents and touted new policies that would bring about a “golden age.”

His proposals were a Trumpian mix of serious (action on immigration and inflation) and, well, strange. It’s the Gulf of America now, and we’re “taking back” the Panama Canal, baby!

His promised day-one executive orders included:

Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, unlocking federal funding for a border wall, reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and designating drug cartels as “global terrorists.”
Cutting regulations around oil and gas production by declaring another national emergency, this one on energy. (“We will drill, baby, drill.”)
Ending the environmental rules he calls “Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.”
Establishing an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs.
And ending the “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” (You read about Trump’s repudiation of gender ideology in the federal government first in The Free Press on Sunday.)

Later in the day, Trump signed these orders. He also pardoned members of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. Trump’s January 6 pardons went further than his closest allies appear to have anticipated. Earlier this month, J.D. Vance said that those who committed violence during the riot “obviously” should not be pardoned. But Trump has commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Back to Trump’s speech. If there was a theme, it was that his own astonishing political comeback portends a national revival, one that he’ll deliver.

“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”

Trump went further. His comeback, and his country’s, he claimed, weren’t just linked but were providential. Recalling the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, he said: “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Gone was the grim “American Carnage” theme of his first inaugural speech. He spoke of the many challenges that “will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”

It is a promise both populist and popular, a reminder of why Trump won.

It is also, as my colleague Peter Savodnik argues in his column today, the death knell of neoliberalism and the end of cool.

Here’s Peter: Trump’s critics, “the so-called progressive elites, are howling at the idea that this chump, who is so very unserious, is The One who will restore our seriousness. They miss the point. Only the brawling, bumbling ringleader of the great circus that is today’s Republican Party could break open our sclerotic overclass and lay it bare for the whole republic to see not simply its emptiness but its rot.”

Read Peter’s article, “Trump Is Uncool. And That’s a Good Thing.”

Joe Biden’s Unpardonable Last Act

Another promise Trump made was to “rebalance” the scales of justice. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department of our government will end,” he said in his inaugural address. This would normally sound like a partisan gripe, if it weren’t for the final presidential acts of his predecessor, writes Eli Lake in The Free Press.

Just moments earlier, Joe Biden had issued sweeping preemptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses. The outgoing president did the same for some of his successor’s high-profile opponents, including Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. The level of clemency is without precedent, writes Eli, and inconsistent with Biden’s 2020 promise to uphold the rule of law. Indeed, four years ago Biden expressed his concern that Trump would pardon his own political cronies.

Trump now faces a choice: continue Biden’s erosion of norms, or end the cycle of lawfare. Which will it be?

Read Eli’s full report on Biden’s final act as president—and how Trump might respond.

(Photo by Rebecca Noble via Getty Images; illustration by *The Free Press*)

TikTok on the Clock

The first big internal MAGA dustup of Trump’s second term centers on TikTok, the Chinese-owned social network. Congress passed legislation that forced either the ban or the sale of the app, but on Sunday Trump gave TikTok an eleventh-hour reprieve announcing his intent to keep the app alive for 90 days. Hours after going dark, the short-video platform blinked back on.

This was welcome news to the crowd at a TikTok-sponsored inauguration party Sunday evening. Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold was on the scene and spoke to influencers who say: “We the people are for TikTok.” Read her full dispatch here.

Meanwhile, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent Silicon Valley supporter of Donald Trump, argues that the new president’s TikTok maneuvers undermine the rule of law. Now that Congress and the Supreme Court have weighed in, it doesn’t matter what Trump thinks of the TikTok ban. “The law must take effect,” writes Joe. “Because in our republic, it is the Congress that writes the law. If President Trump disagrees, he can try to change Congress’s mind.”

Read Joe Lonsdale’s op-ed: “Mr. President, Don’t Abandon the Rule of Law to Save TikTok.”

Melania Trump, wearing a hat, looks on during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena. (Jim Watson via Getty Images)

Fashion Police: Inauguration Edition

Okay, now the important stuff: the outfits. Suzy Weiss answers some of the really pressing inauguration questions: How did Melania pull off a hat that obscured half her face? Was there a hidden message in Trump’s choice of tie? And Lauren Sanchez’s white lace corset under a blazer: inappropriate or awesome? (Answer: both.) Read Suzy’s full fashion report here.

(Of course, the best-dressed crowd in D.C. this past weekend came to the party we threw. Read about that here.)

More Notes on the Inauguration. . .

Did the inauguration really need to be inside? Freezing temperatures forced proceedings indoors for the first time in forty years. But America’s ruling class wasn’t always so sensitive. As my colleague Chuck Lane points out, yesterday’s weather, frigid as it was, couldn’t hold an icicle to the 30-below wind chill at Ulysses S. Grant’s second inauguration on March 4, 1873. Chuck describes the frosty scene at that evening’s inaugural ball, held in a hangar-like temporary pavilion, in his book The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction: “Dignitaries gamely shuffled across the dance floor in their overcoats, as horn and tuba players squeaked out music through the frozen valves of their instruments. Dozens of birdcages dangled from the ceiling; the canaries inside were supposed to accompany the orchestra. But the cold was so intense that the birds shivered, tucked their beaks under their wings, and then began to drop dead.”
In the beginning—i.e., last Friday—there was the $TRUMP meme coin. It’s kinda sorta like Bitcoin, only Trumpier. On the day it was issued, as traders anticipated the new president’s inauguration, it rose from $10 to $75, giving it a total value of more than $10 billion—billions, we should point out, backed by nothing but Trump’s considerable celebrity. It was yet another signal that his administration would embrace crypto. Then came the $MELANIA meme coin. Weirdly, its arrival caused the $TRUMP coin to drop down to $40. Then $TRUMP rose again in anticipation of the inauguration. Then, both the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins fell by 30 percent as he gave his inaugural address. Strange. Or maybe not. The volatility of meme coins is a given—that’s kinda the point for traders—and anticipation is always a more powerful driver than the actual event. What does the future hold for $TRUMP and $MELANIA? Probably more extreme volatility. But maybe people will figure out the coins’ value is built on air and they’ll collapse—at which point, maybe the president might decide to regulate crypto after all.

Indicted New York mayor Eric Adams ditched MLK Day celebrations in his city to attend the president’s inauguration. It’s the latest act of Adams’ MAGA charm offensive, which has included a trip to Mar-a-Lago and a shift in his position on immigration, saying he is open to a rollback of sanctuary city policies. Many speculate Adams—who faces federal bribery and fraud charges—is angling for a pardon. Whatever Adams’ next chapter, his eyebrows will still be flawless.
Carrie Underwood improvised an a cappella performance of “America the Beautiful” after technical difficulties nixed her backing track. “You know the words—help me out here,” the country singer said, before launching into the patriotic anthem. . . and nailing it.