FRIDAY WRAP: Musk’s pay vote, OpenAI’s new board bro, Google’s monopoly, market meltdown, vegetable health care, and cybertruck google eyes

Introduction

IT’S FRIDAYYYYY!!! And we are LIVE, and MODERATELY ALIVE. This is Ari the Data Queen, joined by AnalystHole Matt Moscardi.  Hazelnut Rallis took a bus to France we assume is competing in the javelin tonight. On today’s weekly wrap up - Google is illegal!  Markets melt down! Brand new paint technology! Men do all the complaining! And googly eyes make everything better!

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. Google's monopoly of online searches is illegal, US judge rules

1. Likely to cost Apple 20bn

2. OpenAI Appoints Carnegie Mellon Professor to Board of Directors

1. A white guy!  Finally!

2. Will join the “safety” team, and OpenAI’s release about his says: “Zico’s work predominantly focuses on AI safety, alignment, and the robustness of machine learning classifiers.” 

3. Here’s a list of new white guy’s paper’s about AI, computing, and neural networks

1. Rethinking LLM Memorization through the Lens of Adversarial Compression

2. Forcing Diffuse Distributions out of Language Models

3. Massive Activations in Large Language Models

4. Tofu: A task of fictitious unlearning for llms

5. Scaling Laws for Data Filtering–Data Curation cannot be Compute Agnostic

6. DART: Implicit Doppler Tomography for Radar Novel View Synthesis

7. Computing Low-Entropy Couplings for Large-Support Distributions

8. Understanding prompt engineering may not require rethinking generalization

9. Manifold preserving guided diffusion

10. Why is SAM Robust to Label Noise?

11. T-mars: Improving visual representations by circumventing text feature learning

12. A simple and effective pruning approach for large language models

4. Meanwhile, Helen Toner, who rightly axed Altman and then was forced to resign to make room for the white tech bro brigade, wrote the following:

1. The malicious use of artificial intelligence: Forecasting, prevention, and mitigation

2. Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims

3. Beyond the AI arms race: America, China, and the dangers of zero-sum thinking

4. AI Accidents: An Emerging Threat: what Could Happen and what to Do

5. You see the difference Sam?  It’s hard to notice and it’s nuanced, but look REAAAAALLLY CAREFULLY

6. Oh, and…

1. Elon Musk is having another go at suing OpenAI and Sam Altman — here's why

1. Musk alleged that Altman and his co-conspirators—"preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence"

2. Musk claimed that OpenAI's deception has damaged his reputation and without legal intervention "will continue to harm Musk’s professional standing and commercial interests particularly in the AI/tech industry, eroding his ability to recruit leading AI scientists and engineers, as he had done for Defendants.

3. Elon Musk's Tesla pay package is once again questioned by the judge who initially tossed it AB

1. Big deal - Musk’s argument is “if the shareholders vote for it, it should be legal”, but the courts are considering whether or not that’s true

2. A post-trial vote has never been used to reverse an adjudicated decision

3. Also, the board is SUBSTANTIALLY THE SAME as the board that approved the pay - even though multiple members are different, the influence is actually GREATER for Musk now and the replacement members are much more entwined with him arguably

4. Oh, and, Kimbal

4. TV networks have no value

1. Paramount Global writes down value of cable networks, cutting 15% of jobs, posts first streaming profit - 6bn write down out of 16bn in goodwill

2. Warner Bros. Discovery tanks after massive impairment charge, Wall Street says 'unlikely' things can get worse - 9bn write down out of 34bn in goodwill

5. How an obscure Japanese yen trade sparked a global market meltdown—and why the worst could be yet to come

1. Carry trade - borrow Yen (with very low interest rates) and buy other things with higher yields

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. Qantas cuts former CEO’s pay by $9.3 million as it aims to fix reputational damage

1. Qantas Group Ltd will reduce former CEO Alan Joyce’s 2023 pay by almost $9.3 million as it commits to implementing all 23 recommendations from its governance review.

2. Fresh produce deliveries are now a covered medical benefit in Tennessee MM

1. Blue Cross Blue Shield of tennessee is targeting medicare and medicaid members who have diabetes or who have young children (i love how that was phrased, young children as a disease) it will reward them with monthly boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables sent to their doors for attending preventative health care appointments.

3. Nissan is using a new paint that keeps cars cool

1. HOW MUCH COOLER? A whole 22 degrees F on the outside, and 9 deg on the inside. 

2. Apparently these new paint can reflect solar rays before reaching the car

3. So you know, as the earth is getting hotter we’re getting creative lol

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. Data:

1. 433m tons of CO2 in 2023 - more than all of the UK or France

2. 95% of investors who answered said “cool”

3. Headline: ‘Cash is king’: Why Glencore kept faith with coal

1. Asshole: Gary Nagle and Glencore investors

2. “The pendulum has swung on ESG over the last nine to 12 months,” said Gary Nagle, the South African chief executive who rose through the ranks. “They [investors] still do recognise that cash is king and that is always the case.”

3. Nagle has lashed out at ESG investors as box-tickers. Last year, he blamed “some ESG person in the basement in office number 27” for an increase in dissent towards its climate change plans.

4. Babies born in 2024 can expect to lose $500K to climate change costs over their lifetime

5. Atlantic Ocean Conveyor Likely to Collapse Before 2050, Say Climate Scientists - DISCOVER Magazine

2. Data AB

1. 61% voting power

2. 51.7% voting power

3. Headline: Instagram wants more teens. So it went looking for them on YouTube.

1. Asshole: Name them, Business Insider

2. REWRITE THE HEADLINE: Mark Zuckerberg wants more teens.  So he went looking for them from Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

3. Sounds more Epstein that way, yeah?

3. Data

1. The value of male influence on boards in the US:

1. Small cap, a man’s influence is worth 1.7x a woman (women occupy 28% boards)

2. Mid cap, a man’s influence is worth 1.7x a woman (women occupy 31% boards)

3. Large cap, a man’s influence is worth 1.6x a woman (women occupy 33% boards)

4. Mega cap, a man’s influence is worth 1.8x a woman (women occupy 36% boards)

2. Asshole: Men, men, men, men, men, men, men…

1. Bumble transfers all board influence to non founder dude observer - lets men swipe left, and this: Bumble and Hinge Let Creeps See Your Exact Location

1. This week, Bumble announced Jennifer Morgan will resign from the board, and the board appointed Martin Brand to the board

1. Brand was a “non-voting observer” designated by Blackstone, who owns 62.9% of the voting power, more than founder Whitney Wolfe Herd who has 26%

2. Brand will effectively be the dual class dictator on the board - a non founder controlling stakeholder who has “observed” since the IPO

3. The move coincides with a move earlier this year that changed the service which had allowed women to make the first move in dating rather than men - men can now make the first move, and the company is now run by a man - men coming out on top at last!

2. White men who are mistreated at work are more likely to notice and report harassment against coworkers

1. White men who were targets of harassment were 70% more likely than other white men in their workplaces to recognize gender bias among their colleagues.

3. Airline says it's testing a booking tool that lets women select seats away from men

1. Trial in India

2. To book a ticket, customers first select a gender. On a subsequent seat-selection page, female travelers see pink seats to designate where other women are seated, according to CNBC.

4. Microsoft Reportedly Had to Ban Bill Gates From Being Alone With Interns

5. A Brief List of People Elon Musk Has Challenged to Combat and Then Chickened Out of Actually Fighting

6. Notice that none of the above stories include any women?

Headline-iest (ALL):

1. MM: The Cybertruck Is Much Improved by Adding Googly Eyes

2. AB: American Airlines flight to Madrid diverted after bathroom overflows

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: 

2. AB: 

3. MM: Grenada, because despite having just two medals at the Olympics, they have 1 medal per 56,000 residents - the best on Earth, eking out Dominica and St. Lucia!

Predictions

1. DR: 

2. AB: 

3. MM: