FRIDAY WRAP: Alan Shaw’s fun times, Southwest has no board left, D&D AI, Deere’s DEI hypocrisy

Introduction

LIVE from your ESG compost bin, it’s a Business Pants Friday Show here at September 13th Lane Studios, featuring only one of your favorites: Matt Moscardi. On today’s weekly wrap up: ongoing drama Boeing, AI Darth Vader, strawberry-flavored AI, and Adam Neumann continues to fail

Today’s show is brought to you by freefloatanalytics.com - everything you ever wanted to know about who runs public companies, all free.

Story of the Week (DR):

1. Norfolk Southern CEO fired for ethics violation, secret relationship

2. Boeing factory workers strike for first time since 2008 after overwhelmingly rejecting contract

1. Boeing's CEO is begging his machinists not to strike

3. Southwest shakes up board but doesn’t fire CEO under pressure from Paul Singer’s activist hedge fund DR

1. Southwest Airlines executive chair, and former CEO, Gary Kelly (2004/69/21%) has given up and will step down from his role at the company’s 2025 annual meeting

2. Meanwhile, SIX directors have resigned and will leave the board in November

1. Those six are David W. Biegler (2006/77/3%), J. Veronica Biggins (2011/77/6%), Roy Blunt 2023/77/2%), William H. Cunningham (2000/80/14%), Thomas W. Gilligan (2015/69/7%), and Jill A. Soltau (57/2023/9%)

2. Fuur new directors will be appointed at that time.

3. Overall: the board is losing 62% total influence, four directors who are 80 or nearly 80, and three directors who have been on board pre-Obama.

4. Apple has to pay Ireland $14.4 billion

1. 3% of GDP

5. Australia plans to ban children from social media

1. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the plan to introduce legislation into parliament by the end of 2024 to block children from social media and other digital platforms unless they are over a certain age – likely to be between 14 and 16.

Goodliest of the Week (MM, pretending to be AB):

1. Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons DR

2. American Airlines flight attendants ratify new contract with immediate raises topping 20%

3. Before He Died, James Earl Jones Signed Paperwork to Voice Darth Vader Using AI

Exhausting-est of the Week (DR, pretending to be JS):

1. Adam Neumann's climate startup is quietly refunding investors after failing to launch a crypto token

2. Boeing boss tells workers strike would ‘put recovery in jeopardy’ MM

3. Activist Investor Kicks DEI-Obsessed Southwest Airlines Leadership To The Curb

1. The prevalence of DEI initiatives across the airline industry has drawn scrutiny following a number of high-profile mishaps (and in the case of Boeing, deadly crashes).

2. “If you’re looking for a diverse workforce and not a qualified workforce, you’ve got issues,” an American Airlines pilot previously told The Epoch Times. “We’re not putting the best up-front.”

4. Elon Musk Threatens to Impregnate Taylor Swift

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. OpenAI Launching "Strawberry" Model With "Human-Like Reasoning" as Soon as This Week

1. “We founded the OpenAI Nonprofit in late 2015 with the goal of building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. A project like this might previously have been the provenance of one or multiple governments—a humanity-scale endeavor pursuing broad benefit for humankind.”

2. “We always suspected that our project would be capital intensive, which is why we launched with the goal of $1 billion in donation commitments. Yet over the years, OpenAI’s Nonprofit received approximately $130.5 million in total donations”

3. “It became increasingly clear that donations alone would not scale with the cost of computational power and talent required to push core research forward, jeopardizing our mission.”

4. Clues humanity doesn’t want this - this is just more tech bro jesus complex assholes:

1. OpenAI set its own goal - for “the benefit of humanity”

2. They set a donation target of $1bn - and got $130m - because “humanity” doesn’t want AI

3. They PIVOT to NOT non-profit so it doesn’t “jeopardize the mission” - THAT NO ONE ASKED FOR

4. The “donations” were… $100m from Musk, and some money from Altman and Reid Hoffman?  Is that “HUMANITY”??

2. Investors

1. Norfolk Southern CEO fired for ethics violation, secret relationship

3. Deere settles US SEC bribery probe into massage parlor, other gifts in Thailand DR

1. Where’s fucking Robby Starbuck now??

2. The DEI did it

Headliniest of the Week

1. DR: Tennis Channel Ousts CEO, Citing Time Spent Advising Dr. Phil

1. Sinclair Broadcast Group has ousted longtime Tennis Channel chairman and chief executive officer Ken Solomon, citing time spent in non-work activities as reasoning for his departure. Specifically, the parent company took issue with the executive’s advisory and board member role for Dr. Phil McGraw’s Merit Street Media company, per an exclusive report from the Wall Street Journal.

2. MM: It takes only one Cheetos bag to have ‘world-changing’ impact on an ecosystem, national park says

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Boeing workers

2. AB: 

3. MM: Ancora and Adam Neumann

Predictions

1. DR: No prediction. Just a gloat: here is my prediction last week: “Volkswagen responds to the trial of former CEO Martin Winterkorn by laying off 10% of its global workforce and reducing its commitment to EV manufacturing”. And here is the headline from Wednesday: Volkswagen scraps decades-old job guarantees, paving way for lay-offs

2. AB: 

3. MM: In the next 12 months, we see our first “board trade” - it’s too good not to do