FRIDAY WRAP: Murdoch is OUT, replaced by Murdoch! Biden's Climate Corps launches! Bjorn Gulden's sympathizes, apologizes for Kanye! Qantas pays glass cliff janitor CEO less!

Introduction

LIVE from your anti-ESG Iced Mochaccino Maker, it’s a Business Pants Friday Show here at September 22nd Studios, featuring most of your favorites: Ari the data queen, Jessie the Money Whisperer, and AnalystHole Matt Moscardi. On today’s weekly wrap up: the real life Succession finally happens, Biden does cool things but is still hated, a German sneaker company aligns with a self-proclaimed Nazi, and another woman apologizes for a man

Story of the Week (DR):

1. Rupert Murdoch steps down from Fox and News Corp, to remain as Chairman Emeritus JS MM

1. He will continue to offer counsel in his emeritus role

2. Though the move places the Murdoch family companies more firmly under Lachlan’s control, a bruising succession battle may still loom. Upon Rupert Murdoch’s death, his four adult children would have to work out his ultimate successor among themselves, based on a plan he put into place nearly two decades ago.

1. Under the terms of the trust that controls the family’s stake in the empire, each of Mr. Murdoch’s four eldest children — Lachlan Murdoch, Elisabeth Murdoch, James Murdoch and Prudence Murdoch — will have an equal vote on its future following his death; until then, Mr. Murdoch holds the controlling vote.

3. In his farewell note to staff, he made clear he would “be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice.”

4. “Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.”

2. Clorox says last month’s cyberattack is still disrupting production

1. Clorox on Monday warned of a material financial hit from ongoing production disruption

2. The attack is still causing “wide scale disruption” to the company's operations; the company does not have an estimate for when it will be able to resume full operations.

3. New Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson apologises to sacked workers

1. For shit that happened before she was CEO! I watched her apology video: she didn’t even make one lame excuse about her predecessor. This is an amazing achievement of Glass Cliff Holiness. 

4. Six young people sue 32 European states over climate change

1. Six Portuguese youths are taking 32 nations to the European Court of Human Rights this month for not doing enough to stop global warming, the latest bid to secure climate justice through the courts

5. BONUS fake headline: Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden didn’t mean what he said and isn’t a ‘bad person’

1. See assholiest of the week

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. Biden’s new Climate Corps will train thousands of young people JS DR

1. The White House on Wednesday unveiled a new climate jobs training program that it says could put 20,000 people to work in its first year on projects like restoring land, improving communities' resilience to natural disasters and deploying clean energy.

2. The American Climate Corps is modeled after the New Deal,  a program that put millions to work during the Great Depression. 

2. Gov. Maura Healey Bans MA Agencies From Purchasing Single-Use Plastic Bottles

1. Healey was giving a keynote address at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York Monday when she announced Massachusetts would be the first state to adopt a procurement ban on single-use plastic bottles.

3. Kraft Singles American cheese recall: plastic choking fears impact 84,000 cases of wrapped slices

4. Florida’s “War on Woke” Is Spurring a Brain Drain - The Nation

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. Bjorn Gulden JS DR

1. “Very unfortunate because I don’t think he meant what he said and I don’t think he’s a bad person — it just came across that way,” Gulden said on the podcast

1. THE WOKE MOB MADE US FIRE HIM, NOT… 

2. “I see good things about Hitler,” West told Jones during the bizarre appearance on the Infowars Network, alongside Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. “Every human being has value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”

3. “I like Hitler,” he added later, and called himself a Nazi.

2. Thomas Rabe is the chair of… EVERY COMMITTEE!

1. Supervisory board - Damion should describe this structure

2. Elon Musk’s Neuralink Wants Volunteers For First Human Trial Of Its Brain Implant Chip

1. Just to be sure I’m outlining this correctly:

1. A mercurial billionaire with a penchant for sleeping with his staff and sympathizing with Nazis and Peter Thiel with a casual indifferent to humans and calls everyone who doesn’t agree with him woke… wants to implant a chip in a quadrapelic’s brain to “record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention”

2. It’s actually possible the worst part is the acronym for the project:PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface) - BOLD IS THEIRS.

2. Just to be sure we’re remembering correctly:

1. The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink's Monkeys Actually Died - WIRED

2. UC Davis veterinary records cited by the Physicians Committee—which WIRED also obtained through a subsequent California public records request—chronicle a battery of complications that developed following procedures involving electrodes being surgically implanted into monkeys’ brains. The complications include bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema, a condition colloquially known as “brain swelling.”

3. researchers observed the monkey, identified only as “Animal 20” by UC Davis, scratching at the surgical site, which emitted a bloody discharge, and yanking on a connector that eventually dislodged part of the device. A surgery to repair the issue was carried out the following day, yet fungal and bacterial infections took root. 

4. Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”

5. The necropsy for Animal 22 clearly states that “the failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection.”

3. Richard Goyder MM

1. New Qantas CEO ‘sorry’ for brutal sacking - news.com.au

1. WRONG - Alan Joyce was CEO, Richard Goyder was AND IS board chair

2. Should be “Chair and ex-CEO do not apologize for illegal sackings”

2. Also, Pay rises for all the Qantas board: What each director received - Sydney Morning Herald

1. They gave themselves raises, and gave their new glass cliff janitor CEO A PAY CUT

1. Alan Joyce: 2022 base pay 2.146m with max 150% STIP and 185% LTIP

2. Vanessa Hudson: 2023 contract base pay of 1.6m with max 100% STIP and 160% LTIP

3. THEY LITERALLY PAID THEMSELVES AND ROLLED HER OUT AT HALF PAY TO APOLOGIZE FOR THEM

2. Never a bigger asshole than these fuckers

4. Rishi Sunak

1. Rishi Sunak to Weaken U.K. Climate Targets as Election Approaches

Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):

1. Women apologizing for men- Qantas CEO to apologise to 1700 workers illegally sacked

1. The new Qantas chief, Vanessa Hudson, executive will start off her tenure with a direct apology to the nearly 1700 workers her company illegally sacked during the pandemic.

2. GLASS CLIFF ALERT (read our paper)

2. Tim Cook admits ‘we constantly ask ourselves’ whether Apple should advertise on Twitter: ‘There are some things I don’t like’ 

1. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?!!

2. Cook, himself a member of an often persecuted minority as the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company, called anti-Semitism flat out “abhorrent” and had no place anywhere, least of which in the public domain. 

3. Rampant CEO misconduct MM DR

1. CS Disco CEO Kiwi Camara gives up $110M pay package after ‘groping female employee,’ shoving meat in her face

2. BP boss Bernard Looney quits after board misled over relationships

3. Cboe’s CEO Resigns Over Undisclosed Personal Relationships (Edward Tilly)

4. Data from Exechange.com, which has tracked CEO departures for companies in the Russell 3000 stock index since the start of 2017, shows last year half of the forced CEO departures among the 3,000 largest US companies were due to personal misconduct, up from 14% in 2017, according to the Conference Board.

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Vanessa Hudson, for showing actual leadership

2. MM: Clydesdales!  Anheuser-Busch to stop cutting off Clydesdale horse tails after backlash - the woke mob saved their tails!  Too bad the trans community doesn’t have lovely, fluffy tails…

3. JS: Utah- 2023’s winner of happiest state in America according to WalletHub (based on Emotional and physical well-being, work environment, community)

1. CT is 6 and ME is 30!!!!!!!!!! So there DR

1. (Being poor and cold and dealing with tourists makes nobody happy)

Predictions

1. DR: Just like in the TV show, shit’s gonna go wild when Rupert dies, and just like in the TV show we end up with a non-Murdoch CEO

2. MM: After reading this story: Former Enron CFO Andy Fastow to Discuss Ethical Business, I predict that Alan Joyce, the now former CEO of Qantas, will give classes on CEO pay and how to avoid conflicts of interest with your board of directors.  The lecture will be titled: A Dog’s Breakfast - Making a Mess and Still Getting Paid