MONDAY KETCHUP: Threads > ChatGPT, Musk manboys Zuck, Ant Group's fine, restaurant bill healthcare surcharge, and Director of the Week from Free Float Analytics

Live from it-took-them-3-extra-days-to-pick-up-my-recylcing-palooza, it’s yet another Manic Monday edition of Business Pants. Joined by the Lord of the BS. In today’s soggy marshmallow called July 10, 2023: Top 10 Sexy Story Updates and a new segment called Director of the Week!

DAMION1

1. Threads Now Fastest-Growing App In History—With 100 Million Users In Just Five Days

1. More than 100 million users have joined Meta’s new Threads platform, a feat the Twitter rival has achieved in less than five days, making the Twitter competitor the fastest-growing online platform in history.

2. Threads crossed the 100 million mark early Monday—after being launched across 100 countries on Wednesday evening—according to data from Quiver Quantitative, which tracks the data from the Instagram app.

3. By achieving the milestone in less than five days, Threads has overtaken ChatGPT’s record, as the OpenAI chatbot had reached the 100 million mark in two months.

2. .Musk Hits Below The Belt With Latest Zuckerberg Attacks: ‘Zuck Is A Cuck’

1. The ongoing feud between the billionaire leaders of rival social media giants Twitter and Meta continued this weekend, with Elon Musk trolling Mark Zuckerberg in a pair of tweets that called the Meta CEO a “cuck” and proposed a “literal dick measuring contest” between the two as Meta’s new Twitter competitor Threads reaches 100 million users.

3. China Fines Ant Group $985 Million, in Sign Crackdown Is Over

1. The Chinese authorities announced a fine of nearly $1 billion for the financial technology firm Ant Group on Friday, nearly three years after regulators halted the company’s plan for a record-breaking IPO that ushered in a period of intense government scrutiny of technology firms.

1. Ant Group, formerly known as Ant Financial, is an affiliate company of the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group. The group owns the world's largest mobile (digital) payment platform Alipay, which serves over 1.3 billion users and 80 million merchants

2. Ant, founded in 2014, is one of the world’s largest online financial tech companies. In November 2020, the Chinese authorities halted Ant’s blockbuster initial public offering days before it was set to raise an estimated $34 billion in Hong Kong and Shanghai in what was expected to be the world’s biggest I.P.O.

3. A month later, Chinese regulators ordered Ant to revamp its business. The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, said at the time that Ant had been “indifferent” to the law. The central bank ordered the company to improve transparency, bolster corporate governance and establish a holding company.

4. The investigation into Ant began after its founder and billionaire entrepreneur, Jack Ma, publicly criticized Chinese regulators in 2020 for stifling innovation and being overly cautious. Then, Mr. Ma, the most prominent Chinese tech entrepreneur, disappeared from the public eye.

5. Ant Group said this year that Mr. Ma would give up control of the company. Last month, in a shake-up, two longtime executives who helped Mr. Ma found Alibaba were put in charge of the company.

1. Alibaba CEO to step down to focus on cloud business in surprise leadership reshuffle

2. The company also announced Joe Tsai will take Zhang’s place as the group’s chairman.

3. Zhang will continue to lead the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group as chairman and chief executive after this change, which the company said will take effect Sept. 10.

4. Alibaba Group said in a surprise announcement Tuesday Eddie Wu will succeed Daniel Zhang as its CEO, a move that will free Zhang to focus on the company’s cloud intelligence business.

6. Alibaba Group said in March that it would become a holding company and restructure the group into six different business units with their own CEO and board of directors. This decision may help the units complete successful I.P.O.s and ease Beijing’s concern over the tech giant’s concentration of power and influence.

4. BT CEO Philip Jansen to Step Down in Next 12 Months

1. Former Worldpay CEO Jansen took over in February 2019

2. BT Chair Adam Crozier expects to share update in coming weeks

3. current CEO #-3 in influence (12%)/current chair #-6 (7%)

4. Cheshire/Key perform well

5. People Close To DisneyTell FoxBusiness Bob Iger Is Likely To Seek A Contract Extension Beyond His Current One (Expiring In Dec 2024) As The Company Giant Faces Hurdles In Finding A Successor

6. King Charles Ditches Tradition in Climate Change Talks With Biden

1. In a break from the traditional non-political role, the palace was keen to detail the nature of the king’s conversation with Biden.

2. President Joe Biden met King Charles III for the first time since his coronation Monday, giving the president a lavish welcome to Windsor Castle where Biden was saluted by the scarlet tunic and bearskin clad brass band of the Welsh Guards.

3. In a significant break with tradition, the palace briefed that their meeting would be dominated by discussions of the environment and climate change.

4. The decision to brief on the environmental content of their meeting in advance signalled again Charles’ apparent unwillingness to abandon his lifelong causes, despite a vow to do so at his accession. The king is supposed to sit above politics—Charles’ supporters argue that the climate crisis is too.

7. Starbucks Illegally Shut Down Unionized NY Store, Judge Rules

1. Starbucks Corp. violated federal labor law when it shut down a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, a US labor board judge ruled Thursday.

2. US National Labor Relations Board judge Arthur Amchan wrote in his ruling that the shutdown of a store near Cornell University’s campus “was done in large part to discourage unionization efforts in Ithaca and elsewhere.” He said Starbucks failed to prove that it would close the store “absent its animus towards the pro-union employees who worked there.”

3. The store, located on Ithaca’s College Avenue, was one of Starbucks’ three corporate-run cafes in Ithaca, all of which voted last year to unionize. The company announced two months later that it would shut down the College Avenue store and this year, it said it would close the other two as well. The union has denounced the shutdowns as retaliation, and in May, Cornell’s Student Assembly passed a resolution urging the university to suspend ties with Starbucks over the dispute.

4. In his ruling, Amchan wrote that Starbucks repeatedly violated the National Labor Relations Act in Ithaca, including by punishing union supporters and “suggesting to an employee it would continue to violate the act regardless of what the NLRB decided.” Along with reopening the College Avenue store and reinstating terminated employees with backpay, he wrote, the company should be forced to post a notice about workers’ rights at its cafes throughout the country.

8. Meta and OpenAI face lawsuits from comedian Sarah Silverman and authors after their content was allegedly used to train A.I. models

1. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Sam Altman–led OpenAI have a new headache on their hands this week—lawsuits.

2. A handful of writers—including comedian Sarah Silverman—have brought class-action complaints against the two companies for “remixing the copywrited works of thou­sands of book authors—and many oth­ers—with­out con­sent, com­pen­sa­tion, or credit.”

3. The three plaintiffs allege that when prompted, ChatGPT will produce a summary of their works. They claim this is copyright infringement, as they did not consent to their books being fed to ChatGPT.

9. Diners are shocked to see a 4% 'employee healthcare' fee on their bills at an LA restaurant — but the owner says it's common

1. Diners are increasingly noticing restaurant surcharges.

2. A Los Angeles eatery received blowback after a diner tweeted about its 4% healthcare surcharge.

3. Industry advocates say surcharges are becoming common.

10. Norway's new phosphate deposits are so massive they could guarantee solar power and electric cars keep running for the next 50 years

1. Norge Mining has discovered 77 billion tons of phosphate rock.

2. The company's founder said it could satisfy global demand for fertilizer and EVs for 50 years.

3. Russia is another leading producer of phosphate rock, but the war in Ukraine has disrupted trade.

11. Wizz Air apologizes after a video appears to show a Ukrainian soldier with an amputated leg being kicked off a flight

1. A video appears to show a Ukrainian soldier with an amputated leg being told to get off a Wizzair flight. 

2. The soldier complained he could not sit down because of his prosthesis, the video caption said. 

3. WizzAir apologized in a statement, saying the passenger was kicked off for safety reasons. 

MATT1

Director of the Week

• From the story on Starbuck’s union-busting ruling

• Andrew Campion!

• VP/COO at Nike

• On the board since 2019, part of the board that brought back Shultz

• Head of the Audit/Compliance committee, on the Human Capital committee

• Listed “Human Capital Management” as one of his core skills (which, by the way, NOT listed for Satya Nadella??)

• Also by the way - Starbucks lists on its Skills Matrix “Gender, Ethnic, or National Diversity”... AS A SKILL.

• Our data has SBUX as a Totalitarian board run by its ex-founder Shultz

• Strength is earnings, weakness is controversial business activities… like union busting!

• Overall team win rate is 0.155 - abysmal

• Campion is 3% of the influence and a team worst win rate of 0.404 overall!