The following story contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 6 of Succession, “Living+.”
NOW THAT we’re a few weeks removed from Logan Roy’s shocking death in Succession (and only a few days removed in the show’s world), the primary storyline for the show’s final season is starting to really take shape. Namely, how the sale of Waystar-Royco to unpredictable Swedish billionaire Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) will go; in Episode 5, “Kill List,” Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) made it abundantly clear that they hate Matsson, and will do anything in their power to kill the deal. And Matsson is, at this point, rich enough to stuff their mouths with as much money as he needs to in order to close it all out—and make them miserable in the process.
The latest chapter in this extremely bizarre standoff between rich people is a new product called Living+, which Kendall and Roman plan to introduce during Waystar’s investor day. But Lukas isn’t into Living+, which we hear throughout the episode described as something between a cruise ship experience on land and, as Kendall describes it, a plan to “warehouse the elderly and keep them drunk on content while we suck them dollar dry.” Matsson thinks Shiv is his person on the inside; he wants to mostly maintain a status quo until he takes over, and his plan is for her to tell him what he needs to know in order to stay a step ahead of her brothers. But the brothers, eager to blow the deal up and keep Waystar for themselves, want to use Living+ as a way to raise stock prices and, eventually, price Matsson out.
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And so throughout the episode, there’s lots of number-fudging, lots of video-fudging (Greg (Nicholas Braun) somehow gets a video editor to literally create a video from scratch of Logan saying that profits will double), and lots of over-promising; Kendall essentially promises during his Living+ presentation that Waystar can help prospective consumers live forever (or, at least, a really long time).
And Matsson doesn’t like any of it one bit. So he calls Shiv, and Shiv tells him that maybe he can put a stop to it. And so, like a certain real-life famous billionaire who loves to shit post, Matsson took to Twitter.
What does Matsson’s Tweet, “Doderick Macht Frei,” mean?
At the tail end of Kendall’s presentation about Living+, Matsson wrangles the world’s attention just by typing a few words, inserting a photo, and pressing “Tweet” on his phone. The words: “Doderick Macht Frei,” with a crudely-edited photo of Doderick the dog holding balloons, next to the Living+ logo, and standing in front of the entrance to a concentration camp.
Credit to all the Roy kids for knowing their history; Roman and Shiv both immediately pick up on it (“That’s a very nasty joke,” Roman says, before Shiv confirms: “That’s what, a holocaust joke?”), and Kendall immediately knows what Matsson is getting at when asked about it following his presentation.
Before you understand what that means and why everyone on-screen was so concerned about it, it’s important for us to add a little context. Doderick, as a poster shown earlier in the episode for the fictional film Doderick and Friends reminded us, is essentially Waystar-Royco’s Mickey Mouse-esque mascot. If you remember all the way back to the very first episode, Cousin Greg’s job at the time was dressing up in a Doderick costume and doing a high pitched voice at a Waystar theme park (He, of course, lost this job after showing up to work stoned and puking through the character’s eyes).
In Kendall’s presentation for Living+, he promised that actors, directors, and characters would potentially stop by these new developments as added perks.
And then there’s the “Macht Frei” part of Matsson’s Tweet; this is where he takes things to his predictable extreme. “Arbeit macht frei” is a German phrase that appeared at the entrances to concentration camps (including Auschwitz), and translates to “Work sets you free.”
The Auschwitz website explains the context: “Prisoners marched out through the gate in rows of five each morning… When they returned to camp, the prisoners carried their fellow prisoners who had collapsed from exhaustion or illness, as well as those who had been worked to death or been murdered during the day.”
So, to put it simply: Matsson is comparing his future company’s newest product to Nazi Germany concentration camps. He would probably say he was doing it “for the Lols,” but we see what’s going on here.
Why did Matsson tweet about Living+?
When Matsson called Shiv during Kendall’s presentation to tell her he didn’t like what was going on, she gave him an idea. “He’s riding a bullshit unicycle, but maybe someone could put a stick in the spokes?”
She essentially was telling Matsson that Kendall was selling snake oil, but doing a fairly good job at it. But someone needed to call it out. Matsson, knowing the reality of this product, took it upon himself to try to do that. He does not want this product to be well-received and allow Waystar’s stock to rise in price (let alone have to actually create Living+).
But Kendall handles it better than we possibly could’ve imagined; he remains calm, eventually just saying that Matsson is “very European,” and laughing it off. We hear from Hugo, Karolina, and the rest of the Waystar comms team that his presentation is being received very well, and above and below Matsson’s Tweet, actually see a few other reactions.
“Presentation today was totally compelling. I’m going long on KR,” one Tweeter said. “What would you say to an offer of immortality? I’d say yes fucking please dog. Even if the offer was from a talking dog,” says another.
Before long, we learn that Matsson has deleted his Tweet. That’s a point in Kendall’s favor.
And in the most visually significant moment of the season so far, we finally see Kendall floating, triumphant, face up in a body of water—after causing the death of a young waiter in Season 1 and nearly drowning with a beer bottle in his hand in Season 3—in a moment of victory.
But be warned: the skies behind him are not sunny.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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