FRIDAY WRAP: CEOs and the war, MSFT and XOM deals closing, Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize, OpenAI’s “flexible” core values, $341bn low wage share buybacks, and aliens vs. ESG

LIVE from your ESG UFO, it’s a Business Pants Friday Show here at October 13th Studios, featuring all your favorites: Ari the data queen, Jessie the Money Whisperer, and AnalystHole Matt Moscardi. On today’s weekly wrap up: CEOs who wear their jeans in the shower, gender gap award winners, flexible core values, and The UN's Green Climate Fund

Story of the Week (DR):

1. CEOs and War AB MM JS

1. Here are the CEOs and investors who want Harvard to release the names of students blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks — so they can avoid hiring them

2. ADL boss slams CEOs who stay silent after Hamas attacks

3. Bill Ackman says it's not harassment to ask for the pro-Hamas Harvard students to be named — it's a CEO's due diligence

4. Apollo CEO is calling for University of Pennsylvania leaders to resign after he says they refused to strongly condemn antisemitism

5. Musk argues with EU commissioner over Israel/Hamas disinformation on X

6. Israeli billionaire and his wife QUIT board of Harvard's famed Kennedy School of business after slamming college's woke president Claudine Gay's 'shocking and insensitive' response to Hamas massacre

2. Movie theater giant AMC's boss Adam Aron revealed as the mystery CEO who fell victim to a catfish blackmail scheme he called an 'elaborate criminal extortion'

1. No wonder this company is tanking

1. Aron has 41% of influence

2. 33% women with 20% of influence

3. Top 3 influencers are men: 65% influence average age 72

3. More Brits believe in aliens than understand ESG: new polling

1. 13% (22% believe aliens have visited earth)

4. Mergers

1. Exxon Mobil Buying Pioneer Natural Resources For Nearly $60 Billion—In Biggest Deal In Decades

1. The three Exxon Mobil directors picked by Engine No. 1, the eco-minded activist hedge fund, unanimously voted for the company’s takeover of the shale oil giant Pioneer Natural Resources.

2. Microsoft Closes $75 Billion Activision Blizzard Deal

1. Bobby Kotick Is Resigning As CEO Of Activision Blizzard In 2024

1. Must have been a bad environment if: “In 2021, our founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bobby Kotick, asked that his compensation, excluding the value of benefits, be reduced to the lowest amount permitted to be paid to exempt employees under California law, which is currently less than US$65,000 per year. More importantly, he requested that the Board tie any future changes in his compensation to the achievement of appropriate progress towards our workplace excellence goals.” 

2. At $95 per share: $617M

3. Two longest serving directors who saved Kotick’s butt:

1. Chair Brian Kelly: $118M

2. Lead Independent Director AND chair of compensation committee AND chair of Nominating committee Robert Morgado: $16M

4. Even the members of the Workplace Responsibility Committee (oddly consisting of just two women) walk off with a nice chunk of cash:

1. Dawn Ostroff (Chair): $885k (on top of the $136k in cash)

1. Chief Content and Advertising Business Officer of Spotify

2. Reveta Bowers: $1.9M

5. Levi’s CEO wears his jeans into the shower when they’re ‘really gross’ and washes them with hand soap—and says you should, too

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. Claudia Goldin awarded Nobel Prize for economics DR JS MM

1. A harvard university professor who has spent nearly her entire career looking into the gender gap in the labor market and the forces behind it won the Nobel Prize for economics

2. “In the past, the difference in earnings between men and women could be blamed on educational attainment and occupation choices. However, Goldin has shown that the bulk of the current earnings gap is now between men and women in the same jobs — and that it mostly emerges after the birth of a woman’s first child.”

3. “the division of unpaid caregiving and household labor between heterosexual couples.”

2. Trump things

1. Trump NDAs Scrapped: Hundreds Of 2016 Campaign Staffers Can Now Publicly Criticize Him

1. A former Trump campaign staffer argued the “agreement had been weaponized to silence her over allegations she made against a supervisor of sexual and verbal harassment”

2. SPAC to return remaining $533 million raised for Trump social media deal

1. Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC.O), the SPAC that plans to merge with former U.S. President Donald Trump's media and technology company, said this week it would return to investors $533 million raised for the deal, after some have already backtracked on $467 million of commitments.

3. A wildly hyped 3-year cruise has been delayed weeks before it was set to sail because there's no ship yet

1. 3 YEARS ON A SHIP. WHAT IS THIS NIGHTMARE.

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. CORE VALUES THAT ARE SO CORE YOU CAN CHANGE THEM JS MM

1. OpenAI

2. Let’s start by defining a “core value” - according to Harvard Business Review in 2002: 

1. Core values are the deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company's actions; they serve as its cultural cornerstones. Collins and Porras succinctly define core values as being inherent and sacrosanct; they can never be compromised, either for convenience or short-term economic gain.

3. Now that we’re on the same page, this: OpenAI has quietly changed its ‘core values’

1. The company, who’s founder openly described how AI would wipe out humanity, has gone from:

1. Audacious, Thoughtful, Unpretentious, Impact-driven, Collaborative, and Growth-oriented, to…

2. “AGI focus” (artificial general intelligence - the intelligence of a median worker) being the first. “Anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope,” the website reads. The others are Intense and scrappy, Scale, Make something people love, and Team spirit.

2. SCALE… fucking SCALE!  Notice what’s not on there??  NOT DESTROYING HUMANITY.  Scale > destruction of humankind!

2. LADIES - STOP ENABLING MAN BABIES TO BE CLOSE TO POWER - IT’S YOUR FAULT NOW, NOT HIS DR

1. Twitter CEO Says That Due to Reasons, She Has to Cancel Appearance Defending Elon Musk’s Deranged Behavior

1. The primary source of misinformation for Israeli Hamas conflict is X, and the “CEO” can’t be available to talk because she’s busy figuring out she’s not the CEO

2. Qantas Goyder’s fake apology

1. “We” are sorry.  Vanessa Hudson: “I” am sorry.

3. Caroline Ellison’s testimony

1. Chinese Bribes, Thai Prostitutes and an End to the Lies: Caroline Ellison’s Explosive Second Day of Testimony Against Sam Bankman-Fried

3. STOP GIVING CREDIT TO BILLIONAIRES WITHOUT POPULIST MATH AB

1.  St. Louis will pay $500 per month for residents to ‘lift themselves out of poverty’ in a program partly funded by Jack Dorsey

1. Federal COVID money = $5m

2. Dorsey money = $1m

3. Dorsey net worth = $3.3bn

2. POPULIST MATH ALERT

1. Poverty line for family of four: 30,000

1. 2,500/mo gross

2. Number of families below poverty line: 7.4m

3. IF you gave the 7.4m half the amount to get them to poverty line: 1,250/mo x 7.4m = $111bn

1. Elon Musk net worth: $261bn

2. One person could end poverty in the US and still have $150bn net worth

3. If the top 15 US billionaires split it relative to their net worth, the individual cost to them is play money

Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):

1. The UN's Green Climate Fund missed its target because of wealthy nations

1. The United Nations’ Green Climate Fund fell short of its $10 billion target at its second pledge conference in Bonn, Germany, to replenish funds.

2. Established in 2010, it helps developing countries cut emissions and prepare for climate change.

3. While some countries like the UK announced their pledges in advance, five nations didn’t renew their commitments, including Australia, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US.

4. The US and China are the world’s top polluters, but one hasn’t renewed its pledge to the Green Climate Fund, and the other has never contributed. The US made the largest pledge at the fund’s launch—about $3 billion back in 2014—but hasn’t renewed since. China has yet to join the fund with other wealthy nations.

2. Ford Says It Won’t Raise Its Offer to Autoworkers Union DR

1. And the reason cited is: “We are at the limit. Any more will stretch our ability to invest in the business.” 

2. Ford, you just agreed to a 9.2B loan from the US government to build three electric vehicle battery plants

3. And it’s estimated that the loan funds will ultimately create 7,500 staff positions at the three plants. Don’t you need employees to work in those factories???

3. The 100 largest low-wage employers have spent $341 billion on stock buybacks since 2020 MM AB

1. A new Institute for Policy Studies report, Executive Excess 2023, reveals that between January 1, 2020 and May of this year, these companies reported a combined $341 billion in stock buyback spending.

1. Lowe’s led the list with $35B in stock buybacks. For reference- the average employee salary is less than $30k

2. In 2022 alone, Lowe’s spent more than $14 billion on buybacks—enough to give every one of its 301,000 U.S. employees a nearly $47k bonus.

2. At the 65 companies where the same person held the top job between 2019 and 2022, the Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ personal stock holdings soared 33 percent while median pay at these firms rose only 10 percent to an average of just under $32k.

3. Stock buybacks are not new. This is robbery and it’s utterly exhausting. Pay your employees a living wage.

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Nobody; this week sucks. Maybe Kotick.

2. AB: Movie theaters

3. MM: Lulu Meservey!  Don’t know who that is?  She was hired as the Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer at Activision… right after the acquisition was announced and Kotick was fielding questions about unionization and ongoing harassment probes!  

1. Asian woman to be the face of white men behaving badly!

2. Winner because she signed a contract with a $3m in RSUs that were a three year vest that immediately vest on closing the deal!  She can quit now happily!

4. JS: Aliens and definitely not us: More Brits believe in aliens than understand ESG

Predictions

1. DR: Glass Cliff CEO at AMC

2. AB: 

3. MM: Don’t be fooled by this headline: Dollar General stock jumps after it brings back former CEO to jolt slowing sales growth.  According to Free Float Analytics:

1. The highest influence humans on Dollar General’s board are NEITHER THE CEO OR EX CEO - it’s Chair Michael Calbert who works at KKR who BOUGHT Dollar General in 2007 and re-IPO’ed in 2013.  Calbert and long-tenured director Bryant, who sits on almost every committee, engineered the boomerang!

1. “The Board has tremendous respect for Jeff and greatly appreciates his many contributions to the Company, especially during his long tenure leading our retail operations,” said Michael Calbert, the chairman of the company’s board, in a statement. “However, at this time, the Board has determined that a change in leadership is necessary to restore stability and confidence in the Company moving forward.”

2. Prediction: Calbert and KKR RE-RE-BUY Dollar General inside 18 months, Calbert is made CEO, then they RE-RE-RE-IPO by 2027 and Calbert is made Chair of the Board again.

4. JS: Newest glass cliff alert: Stephanie Linnartz, who just took over as Under Armour CEO

1. Linnartz hopes to turn around a company hurt by slumping growth and controversies surrounding its founder.

2. 75% INFLUENCE FOR KEVIN PLANK