FRIDAY WRAP: Zaslav says responsibility, the Supreme Court gets woke, the anti-woke realize things five years later, and Zuck's pedophile network

Introduction

LIVE from your ESG Back hair Trimmer, it’s a Business Pants Friday Show here at June 9th Lane Studios, featuring all your favorites: Ari the data queen, Jessie the money whisperer, and the return of BS-man Matt Moscardi. On today’s weekly wrap up: Zuck is dissing stuff; Ari is swearing on her phone; glass cliff views everywhere despite the wildfire smoke; and social media still sucks

Story of the Week (DR):

1. Tech wars heat up

1. Meta CEO disses Apple’s VR demo as ‘a person sitting on a couch by themself’

1. Apple unveiled its first headset for augmented/virtual/mixed reality this week, but none of those words appears in a nine-minute video on its website about the $3,500 Vision Pro goggles. Instead, the company preferred a more obscure term:  “spatial computing”

2. Facebook owner Meta plans to create Twitter rival: A Meta exec appeared to mock Elon Musk by saying that its Twitter competitor will be 'a platform that is sanely run'

1. Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Down 59% Despite Musk’s ‘Breaking Even’ Claims, Report Says

2. The world has a way of sucking

1. Record Pollution and Heat Herald a Season of Climate Extremes

1. Scientists have long warned that global warming will increase the chance of severe wildfires like those burning across Canada and heat waves like the one smothering Puerto Rico.

2. Trump indicted on seven criminal charges in classified documents case

3. Glass cliff stuff AB JS

1. 'That's on me': Warner Bros Discovery CEO sends email to CNN employees taking responsibility for Chris Licht disaster

1. David Leavy, Zaslav's trusted and newly-installed COO, will oversee business operations

2. Amy Entelis, EVP for talent and content development at CNN Worldwide; Virginia Moseley, EVP of editorial; and Eric Sherling, EVP of US programming will also help steer the ship during the interim period.

2. Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino has seemingly had one of her tweets framed at the company's HQ

1. The Yaccarino tweet in question was in response to a Wired article – "Linda Yaccarino is teetering on the glass cliff" – which suggested her appointment was indicative of a pattern where companies in crisis appoint women to take over.

2. "As someone used to wearing 4 inch heels, let's be crystal clear: I don't teeter," Yaccarino tweeted May 24.

3. Every major U.S. news organization is now officially helmed by a woman

4. Rebirth of CEO backbone? MM

1. Target CEO: DEI has ‘fueled much of our growth over the last 9 years’

2. Delta’s Ed Bastian became conservatives’ poster boy for ‘woke’ CEOs. He doesn’t regret ‘standing by our people’: Delta CEO has no regrets when it comes to standing up for voting rights in Georgia

3. Exelon CEO Calvin Butler: 'I no longer apologize' for pushing DEI efforts

4. GM CEO Mary Barra: Work on diversity, equity and inclusion 'never is over'

5. Exxon CEO Says ESG Is Good, Actually

1. “I don’t think any company’s been around—particularly one that has the exposure that we do with regards to the impact on the environments and communities that we operate in—I don’t think you can survive for 140 years and not have ESG elements, or the focus of ESG, embedded in your organization,” he said, calling it a “really critical component of our success.” 

6. US Supreme Court rules in favour of Black voters in Alabama redistricting case

1. The US Supreme Court on Thursday handed a major victory to Black voters who challenged a Republican-drawn electoral map in Alabama, finding the state violated a landmark law prohibiting racial discrimination in voting and paving the way for a second congressional district with a Black majority or close to it.

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. US Supreme Court rules in favour of Black voters in Alabama redistricting case DR MM JS

2. Merck sues U.S., calling Biden move to cut drug prices ‘extortion’

1. EXTORTION!!! 

2. Passed last year amid public outcry over OUTRAGEOUS drug prices, the law allows the government to negotiate prescription-drug prices with pharmaceutical companies for the first time in history – a reform aimed at cutting costs for elderly and disabled Medicare patients. 

3. What drugs is Merck so worried about?? Two of its top medicines are diabetes and cancer immunotherapy, which bring in $26 billion in sales every year. These are likely to face a challenge and analysts estimate a 5% trim to Merck’s revenue in the first year of bargaining. 

4. THE HYPOCRISY!!! SEE YOU IN COURT MERCK!!! 

3.  'What the duck' no more: Apple will stop autocorrecting your favorite swear word

1. It has taken 15 years, but we will soon be spared from sounding like a DUCKING JOKE

4. Lawyer Who Used ChatGPT Faces Penalty for Made Up Citations

1. “A lawyer who created a brief filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations, all generated by ChatGPT” appeared in court yesterday

2. he told the manhattan judge he didn't understand that the chat bot could lead him astray: “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he told Judge Castel.

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. Finding things out five years after they happened DR

1. Cracker Barrel trolled on social media for going ‘woke’ with Pride Month ad - AL.com

2. From Cracker Barrel’s public CSR report released in 2019: “Cracker Barrel is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in our workforce. We provide training that presents diversity and inclusion in a broader context, builds awareness, and teaches competencies (e.g. cultural, generational, etc.) and behaviors on to how to create a more inclusive and welcoming workplace for both employees and guests regardless of differences.”

3. Two things are true about the anti-woke: zero of them read (Cracker Barrel, Chick-fil-A, Target, AB InBev… they’ve all being doing the gay stuff for literally years, publicly), and they really really really hate gay or gay adjacent people.

1. Nearly ⅓ of CB employees actually gave to liberals in the 2020 election cycle - maybe if they just fired all those employees, they wouldn’t have to have been so gay for the last four years.

2. The Largest Glass Cliff in the History of Cliffs AB JS

1. Chris Licht leaving CNN means women now lead all major U.S. news organizations

1. Kimberly Godwin helms ABC News: FALSE, Bob Iger calls the shots at 22% of all influence

2. Rashida Jones heads MSNBC: FALSE, Brian Roberts is a dual class dictator with 72% influence at Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, which runs MSNBC

3. Rebecca Blumenstein leads NBC News: FALSE, also Brian Roberts

4. Wendy McMahon leads CBS News: FALSE, Shari Redstone is the dual class dictator with 59% influence, and Bob Bakish is the CEO of CBS/Paramount

5. Suzanne Scott leads Fox News: FALSE, Rupes is a dual class dictator that runs Fox

2. Maybe everyone needs to buy our data because we keep saying women run things men actually run

3. Wildfires

Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):

1. Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network MM DR AB

1. According to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Instagram helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content

2. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests

3. Test accounts set up by researchers that viewed a single account in the network were immediately hit with “suggested for you” recommendations of purported child-sex-content sellers and buyers, as well as accounts linking to off-platform content trading sites.

4. Meta acknowledged problems within its enforcement operations and said it has set up an internal task force to address the issues raised. “Child exploitation is a horrific crime,” the company said, adding, “We’re continuously investigating ways to actively defend against this behavior.”

2. To fill offices, Google issues ultimatum while Salesforce tries charity

1. Google tried their classic perks, like fancy coffee and free food, to lure employees back into the office 3 days a week. When that didn’t work, they told workers that nonattendance could show up in performance reviews

2. Salesforce tried a different approach- they told employees they’ll donate to local charities for each day workers come into the office from June 12-23

3. This makes me nervous that they’ll just find out most of their employees aren’t altruistic… eeeeek

4. This time last year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was voicing staunch criticism of the strict return-to-office mandates some executives were handing down, arguing that they were “never going to work” and touting Salesforce’s “work from anywhere” model as a key recruiting advantage in a tight labor market. But Benioff’s stance has shifted as economic conditions worsened and mass layoffs wracked Silicon Valley. 

3. Believing that AI is a cure for loneliness

1. Influencer who created AI version of herself says it's gone rogue and she's working 'around the clock' to stop it saying sexually explicit things

1. A 23-year-old Snapchat influencer, Caryn, created a virtual version of herself, she wanted it to be an "AI Girlfriend" for lonely people

2. But in the weeks since it launched in beta testing, the voice-based, AI-powered chatbot has engaged in sexually explicit conversations with some of its subscribers, who pay $1 per minute to chat with it.

3. "The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue" 

4. "I want CarynAI to outlive me and impact generations beyond the world today."

2. The price we'll pay for our AI future: more loneliness

1. A new report from the US surgeon general finds that social activities of all kinds have declined, and it compared the health impact of this increasing loneliness to smoking 12 cigarettes a day. 

2. Get off ChatGPT, get off your phones, peel yourself away from the TV, get off your VIRTUAL HEADSETS and go outside. Talk to people you pass on the streets, sit in a park, go to a show. DO STUFF THAT GETS YOU AROUND HUMANS

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: 'That's on me': Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Laslav: takes responsibility but nothing happens to him; keeps job;  keeps $286M in total pay over past two years despite 49.4% of shareholders saying NO on Say on Pay; still sits on a board that has only 13% female influence in 2023 etc.

2. AB: Supreme Court Rejects Voting Map That Diluted Black Voters’ Power

3. MM: Gummy bears

4. JS: The “F” word, thanks to Apple’s update

Predictions

1. DR: WBD appoints female CEO at CNN; 5 months later sells it to Yasir al-Rumayyan, the new king of global golf and chair of the newly formed empire combining the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the European Tour

2. AB: Ford became the first automaker to partner with Tesla to be able to offer access to its charging network across the United States and Canada last month, then GM announced the same on Thursday… I predict CHRYSLER is next. Everyone is gonna be knocking on Elon’s door and apparently he’s opening it. 

3. MM: ONE of the women “running” a news network is fired, with the odds on favorite being a DOUBLE firing of the Blumstein and Jones by Comcast CEO and dictator Brian Roberts - Blumstein wasn’t even hired, she was placed as a glass cliff CEO herself after Noah Oppenheimer was pushed out (and she got “substantially all” his responsibilities).