Reasons To Be Skeptical About Barry McCarthy's Peloton Plans

Peloton’s new CEO, Barry McCarthy, wants the world to know he's not moving across the country just to preside over the sale of the troubled fitness equipment company. Instead, he told the Financial Times, he plans to concentrate on building out the content side of Peloton’s business, where profit margins are much higher than they are on the hardware side. Yeah, right. This seems like the kind of message that an incoming CEO comes up with after extensive consultation with highly paid PR people. And usually this message is the opposite of what is really going on.

After all, what CEO takes over a troubled company and proclaims that their strategy is to sell it? That’s a guaranteed way to depress any sale price. As for the significance of McCarthy moving across the country for the job, there is none. Does anyone imagine McCarthy is packing up a U-Haul and personally driving a household of furniture from California to New York? Of course not. He can easily rent an apartment and fly back to California whenever he wants. McCarthy was based in New York before, when he was CFO of Spotify, and he magically found his way home to California after he retired. We’re not in the 19th century, where moving across the country was a major logistical exercise.