You can now, quite literally, eat the rich, but some are questioning the motives behind the trend taking over Los Angeles and New York City.
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Pick your favorite (or more accurately, least favorite) billionaire businessman — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Jack Ma. Williamsburg-based company and art collective MSCHF, who’s most well known for their infamous Satan Shoes collaboration with Lil Nas X, has crafted tasty concoctions with all their heads sitting at the short end of a popsicle stick, ready to be chopped off in a guillotine-esque ritual.
Trucks serving the treats popped up across Los Angeles and New York City on Monday, and they were so popular that by 5 PM, the New York City truck had already sold out of all of their Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos popsicles.
MSCHF's new ice cream trucks, complete with jingle, are like souped up Mister Softee vehicles, only these more adult versions have the slogan “EAT THE RICH” plastered across its car doors. The term was first coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his book History of the French Revolution, which chronicled the wealth inequality in France when merchants were giving moldy bread and diseased meat to the poor so that they could save the best of their products for their wealthy customers. In light of the hunger felt by the poor, Rousseau famously wrote, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
It’s become the motto choice for anti-corporate and anti-capitalist members of Gen Z, and waves of them took to social media to post themselves at the EAT THE RICH popsicle trucks.
@eatitkatie They tasted p expensive tbh #mschf
The irony is that each of these tiny popsicles costs $10, and many users have used that fact to critique MSCHF, saying that the company is commodifying anti-capitalist messaging and placing it at unreasonably high prices, an act that is contradictory to its supposed mission.
@limegui #duet with @jeremycohen you’re going to eat the rich by making people rich??? #eattherich #nyc #capitalism #mschf #newyorkcity #jeffbezos
The $10 price is both being derided as hypocrisy and also praised as a parody of corporate neoliberalism. The parody idea aligns with the company’s doctrine of causing “structured chaos” and their nihilistic outlook, but paradoxically, MSCHF — who’s backers include a prominent venture capital firm — collaborated with celebrity DJ and multi-millionaire producer Diplo to have him perform at the LA truck on Melrose Avenue on Monday night.
@rickyglaser Thanks @mschf ‼️ #mschf @Diplo #diplo
It’s important to note that even amid the supposed hypocrisy, this isn’t MSCHF’s first entry into the anti-corporate space. In 2019, MSCHF launched “The Blue Donkey,” a “restaurant” that lets corporate employees use company money to order food from them through GrubHub/Seamless. The trick was that the money didn’t actually go to any food at all. Instead, The Blue Donkey took the money and redirected it to political campaigns for candidates that supported anti-corporate policies.
The user was obviously in on the scheme, with each of them having to text MSCHF so that the company could ensure the user wasn’t working for Seamless, as even they acknowledged that what they were doing was “violating basically everyone’s” Terms of Service.
The company seems to have been dedicated to the idea of anti-corporatism since launching The Blue Donkey. In fact, in 2020, Insider interviewed the founder of MSCHF, Gabriel Whaley, and wrote that it was “unclear” if MSCHF “makes any money” at all. Earlier this year, MSCHF had to settle in court after being sued by Nike for their Lil Nas X Satan Shoes collaboration and was forced to offer refunds to any customer that wanted one as terms of the settlement.
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Following the celebrity status the company achieved from the whole Satan Shoes ordeal, Whaley told the New York Times that they would never do anything in the sneaker world again, despite the money they could make from playing into their new image, saying that the money wasn’t why he or the team was at the company. To him, the Satan Shoes were a “comment on the absurdity of the collaboration culture practiced by some brands, and about the perniciousness of intolerance.”
Whaley has even ignored the guidance of Fortune 500 CEOs who wanted to turn MSCHF into a proper and traditional business with a logo and a flagship product, telling the New York Times in the interview, “The day we sell hoodies is the day I shut this down.”
Whaley sees himself as more of a Banksy type and MSCHF as the catalyst for his art. His work has always been a delicate balance between parodying corporations and becoming the very entities he’s mocking. The “EAT THE RICH POPSICLES” trucks walk that line even more recklessly than ever before, and as the line gets tighter and tighter, he risks falling off into absurdity. That’s all a part of the art.
Photo courtesy of MSCHF
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