FRIDAY WRAP: The founder fetish tech bro bank collapses, fear-of-pricing-out insulin price drops, Barney Frank did it for the money, and pay gaps in college sports. Plus winners and predictions.

LIVE from your Free float HQ (no joke needed), it’s a Business Pants Friday Show here at March 17th Studios, featuring: Ari the data queen, Jessie the Money Whisperer and BS-man Matt Moscardi. On today’s weekly wrap up: sucky banks, cleantech goals, bankers named frank, and chatbot-palooza

Story of the Week (DR):

1. Bank collapses AB MM

1. SVB’s disgraced ex-CEO spotted holidaying in Hawaii days after presiding over second biggest bank collapse in U.S. history

1. According to the Daily Mail, Becker and his wife Marilyn Bautista were picked up in a chauffeur-driven limousine on Monday afternoon and were taken to San Francisco Airport. The pair then boarded a first-class flight to Maui’s Kahului Airport. The gated community their holiday home is in features a tennis court, three swimming pools, three surf breaks and a clubhouse for the community.

2. Becker has also caught the attention of the authorities after he sold shares in SVB worth nearly $30 million over the past two years—with deals going through in the days before the bank disclosed a $1.8 billion loss on a portfolio sold to Goldman Sachs. Becker’s sale of $3.6 million worth of shares went through on Feb. 27.

1. He’s not the only one—reports from CNBC claim execs at the business sold shares worth a total of $84 million in the past 24 months. The company’s CFO Daniel Beck offloaded around a third of his stake in the business on the same day Becker’s sale filtered through—a total of around $575,000 worth of shares.

2. ‘Get woke, go broke’: Silicon Valley Bank's top woman executive, LGBTQ+ activist gets targeted for lender's failure - Business Today

3. Warren to SVB CEO: "You lobbied for weaker rules, got what you wanted"

2. Oscars (that nobody cared about)

1. Oscars goody bags contained ‘unseemly’ gift: certificates for Aboriginal land

1. Indigenous groups in Australia said they weren't consulted and called the conservation ploy a "money-making scheme."

2. As Academy Award nominees opened up their exclusive goody bags this year, they found vouchers for cosmetic surgery, invitations for complimentary stays at a lighthouse in Italy, and a chocolate box with a personalized video embedded inside. They also found a certificate to plots of land in Australia, one square meter of Indigenous territory in northeast Australia, gifted to recover the “spiritual connection” Aboriginal people have had with Australia and conserve and protect the area. 

3. But members of the Barunggam and other Aboriginal communities, the original caretakers of the territory in question, say they were never contacted on the matter, and Indigenous groups cited in materials given out to Oscar nominees also say they had no communication with the organization behind the goody bag gift.

3. Larry Fink Letter (that he doesn’t care about)

1. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Dials Back ESG Talk in Letter After Backlash

2. Fink focused on macroeconomic concerns, notably inflation, and the wider energy transition. 

3. So it may seem like a natural step that this year, Fink in his letter dialed back talk of investing with environmental, social, and governance factors in mind. There were a couple of references to "sustainability," no mentions of ESG, and no pushback on so-called woke investing. And unlike last year's letter, he didn't strike a defensive tone. 

4. The world needs Free Float and Board Sabermetrics? JS

1. SVB Exposes ‘Lazy’ ESG Funds as Hundreds Bought Into Doomed Bank

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. Novo Nordisk to slash US insulin prices, following move by Eli Lilly MM AB

1. Earlier this month, Eli Lilly said it would cut the list prices for its most commonly prescribed insulin products by 70%…. AND WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

2. Novo Nordisk, which owns 43% of the market share in the U.S. and Canada, also said it would reduce the list price of unbranded insulin products by 65% to 75%

2. Ford issues ‘Men’s Only’ Explorer JS

1. It starts out with a tough-guy voiceover: “Introducing the men’s only ford explorer…. with no windshield wipers, no heater, no turn signals, no rearview mirrors, no GPS, are you kidding? Ah, it’s missing all the parts created by women”

2. Great satire highlighting women inventors

3. Though before including Ford on here I did have to go look at their board representation of women. Ford is a controlled, family firm, with two Fords on the board, so it is a totalitarian board where most of the influence is held by the Fords, HOWEVER, excluding people whose last name is Ford, women make up 30% of directors and hold 32% of that influence.  

4. Are Ford cars going to be banned from Texas and Florida now? Is the police gonna burn their own police cars?

3. Diesel Giant Cummins Has A $13 Billion Cleantech Goal DR

1. Cummins is the largest independent engine manufacturer for commercial and industrial equipment, such as diesel engines and generators. Currently their cleantech  business makes up only 1.5% of their $28 billion revenue

2. However, Cummins CEO and president Jennifer Rumsey wants to get that percentage to 50% in the next 7 years. Under her tenure, Cummins has folded its existing clean power products into a new brand, called Accelera, that will focus on batteries, fuel cells, electric truck components, and electrolyzers to make GREEN hydrogen.

3. Accelera is quickly becoming a competitor in green tech, specifically to make vehicles and energy more sustainable, going up against a major player in heavy-duty trucks.. Tesla. 

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. Damion

1. Who, after 20 years of being an analyst, HAD TO USE CHAT GPT TO FIND EBIT FOR CREDIT SUISSE

2. Barney Frank AB JS DR

1. I need to make money?  Governance is dead.

3. Strive, the most meritocratic company of all

1. Removal of Salesforce letter!

4. ISS

1. Top proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services on Thursday said it would expand its offering of conservative-leaning counsel

2. WHAT, WHERE’S MY LIBERAL POLICY?

5. Meme bank runs by 1% tech bros

Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):

1. AI CHATBOTS…still… MM

1. Here’s the headline: Snapchat’s AI could be the creepiest chatbot yet

2. When their AI, MyAI, was told it was talking to a 15-year-old, it still offered advice when asked about how to hide the smells of alcohol and pot, though it did note the activities may be illegal. It also offered to write a school essay for the supposed student and gave advice on how to continue using Snap if their parents deleted the app.

3. In another test, conducted by the cofounder of Center for Humane Technology, it gave advice to a supposed 13-year-old on how to set the mood for their first time having sex—with a 31-year-old.

4. Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of NewsGuard, which tracks misinformation believes, [Chatbot technology] is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet,”

2. Pay gaps…this time in COLLEGE SPORTS DR AB

1. Men make twice as much money as women under the NCAA’s new rules that allow college basketball players to cash in

2. In June 2021, the Supreme Court cleared the way for college athletes to benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). Since then,they have earned six — sometimes seven — figures on such NIL deals

3. Data from Opendorse, a Lincoln, Nebraska-based marketing platform for athletes, found that male college basketball players make twice as much as their female counterparts. The numbers point to a disappointing reality that the long-standing disparities in professional sports already pervade college competition.

4. There’s two ways college athletes get paid: 1) traditional endorsements, which female athletes make more money on because they tend to have larger, more engaged audiences and then 2) NIL collectives: rich donors and alumni establish these funds to pool money from businesses and fans, then dole out that cash to a school’s athletes. 

5. Opendorse data found that — excluding the money from collectives — male and female basketball players made roughly the same amount of money from NIL deals, which means these collectives are exacerbating the gender pay gap.

6. “For a lot of women’s basketball players, college is the peak of their earning potential,” said Lawrence. “There will be women’s basketball players that get drafted into the WNBA and take a pay cut.”

3. Texas

1. The Republican-dominated Texas State Board of Education altered its internal guidance to schools last month to emphasize the “positive” aspects of fossil fuels in science textbooks.

2. The changes are raising concerns among scientists, education experts and other board members that the panel is establishing policies that could lead to the statewide purchase of textbooks that undermine basic tenets of climate change for years to come.

3. The board member who proposed the changes, Patricia Hardy, has rejected mainstream climate science and argued that current teachings about global warming are too “negative.” She goes on to say: “If they’re going to tout how wonderful the alternative climate change stuff is, then they need to also say all the things that are not good about it and not just hit on the fossil fuel industry,” Hardy said in an interview Wednesday. “Our schools are paid for by the fossil fuel industry for the most part, so there’s a little bit of disingenuousness.”

4. The new guidelines also portray the Earth’s warming temperatures as the result of natural fluctuations

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Greg Becker (re: Hawaii)

2. AB: The acronym “FDIC”… EVERYONE IS GOOGLING IT. Highest popularity on google trends in the last 5 years.

3. MM: Barney Frank, who made 2.5m as a director of Signature since 2015 at 5% average influence, keeps the money as the bank fails

4. JS: GUINNESS: Many as 13,000,000 pints of Guinness are consumed worldwide on the holiday alone which is 819% more Guinness than usual,

Predictions

1. DR: failed SVB CEO & CFO re-hired before the end of the year (whenever they get tired of the beach and/or run out of organic SPF 50)

2. AB: Stitch Fix is gonna go down.

3. MM: The Founder Fetish Economy is dead.  Young Mark Zuckerberg’s will need to get loans from Bank of Jamie Dimon for the foreseeable future, competing with Jane the Mechanic and Gus the guy with the local home design company.  The result is startup founders complain that affirmative action is the reason they aren’t educated enough and don’t have a leg up, leading to a Critical White Theory course at Praeger University in which they study the systemic bias against white men living the San Francisco Bay area.

JS: We’re getting closer to my prediction that investors will finally appreciate mycorrhizal relationships and will invest millions in fungi: Growing mushrooms alongside trees could feed millions and mitigate effects of climate change