Who to blame: Hormel’s CEO search, “eat now pay later”, DOI vs. DEI, and Signal’s woke board

THE BLAME GAME

1. The Walt Disney Company’s vote results

1. Maria Elena Lagomasino

1. 2025: 98% YES

2. 2024: 63% YES

3. 2023: 92% YES

2. ISS: for being flip-floppers

3. Your average investor for only paying attention when an activist investor shows up

4. Your average, no-research investor for buying into the narrative that James Gorman has solved a succession planning problem merely by showing up 

5. Anyone who doesn’t listen to our analysis or use freefloatanaltyics.com or is a client of freefloat

2. Former Hormel CEO rejoins board to help company find next CEO. He will join the search committee to help find the company’s next top executive, Hormel said. Current CEO Jim Snee is retiring in October. Ettinger will also represent the Hormel Foundation, which he chairs, on the company’s board. The foundation owns 46% of Hormel stock. The Board has formed a search committee and will benefit from its existing CEO-succession process to identify Snee’s successor. Mr. Ettinger joins the Board’s Governance Committee and ad hoc CEO Search Committee

1. The Governance Committee (7 meetings last year)

1. “ Review the Company’s executive succession plans”

2. Lead Director William Newlands (19%)

1. Second highest after CEO/Chair James Snee (33%)

2. Sits on Governance Committee

3. $313,138 (highest paid director)

4. CEO of $33B Market Cap Constellation Brands where stock price down 90$ (more than 33%) over the past year: he’s probably busy and agitated

1. Where the one skill he does NOT have is “Accounting and Financial Reporting” and yet serves on Hormel Audit Committee (10 meetings last year)

3. Governance Committee Chair Gary C. Bhojwani

1. CEO of $4B CNO Financial Group

4. The board

1. This is what happens when two people dominate influence (52%)

3. Ameriprise CEO earns more than $50M for fifth year in a row.

1. First of all: hats off to Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Patrick Kennedy for being thorough: “James Cracchiolo realized $56.1 million in total compensation for 2024 between stock rewards, salary and bonuses.” And for including CEO Pay ratio (191:1)

2. Compensation Committee (7 meetings)

1. Dianne Neal Blixt (Chair)

1. Executive Committee (chaired by CEO Cracchiolo)

2. Value of shareholdings as of March 2025: $7M

2. Amy DiGeso

1. Executive Committee (chaired by CEO Cracchiolo)

2. Value of shareholdings as of March 2025: $7M

3. Previously held positions at the American Express Company

1. James Cracchiolo: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Ameriprise Financial since 2005, when the company, American Express Financial Advisors, completed its spin-off from the American Express Company

3. Armando Pimentel, Jr.

1. Value of shareholdings as of March 2025: $2M

4. Robert F. Sharpe, Jr.

1. Executive Committee (chaired by CEO Cracchiolo)

2. Value of shareholdings as of March 2025: $31M

5. W. Edward Walter III

1. Value of shareholdings as of March 2025: $4M

3. The board’s general inattention to shareholders

1. Say on Pay 2024 (12% NO) and 2023 (18% NO) and 2022 (20% NO)

4. CEO and Chair James M. Cracchiolo

4. 'Eat now, pay later'? DoorDash-Klarna deal fuels concerns around loans for takeout

1. DoorDash

1. Co founders CEO Tony Xu (35%), Andy Fang (25%), Stanley Tang (25%)

2. Nobody else on the board is important

2. Klarna Co-founder/CEO/Director (since 2005) Sebastian Siemiatkowski

1. Klarna faces backlash after CEO shares names of laid-off workers on social media, 10% of workforce

2. In December 2024, he stated that the company stopped hiring people last year because "AI can do all of the jobs that we humans do. It’s just a question of how we apply it and use it”

3. Klarna’s CEO says that AI is already as smart as any human worker, and warns employees to brace for impact. “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do. It’s just a question about how we apply it and use it.”

3. Klarna board

1. Roger Walton Ferguson

1. International Flavors & Fragrances (chair of the board)

2. Corning Incorporated  (chair of the compensation committee)

3. Alphabet (chair of the audit committee)

4. chief investment officer and chairman of the Investment Committee of Red Cell Partners

5. director of the Institute for Advanced Study

6. Director at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

7. Director at the Smithsonian Institution

8. Director at The Aspen Institute

9. Director at the Group of Thirty

10. member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents

11. member of the Economic Club of New York

12. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations

13. Member of the National Association for Business Economics

14. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Co-Chair of the Academy’s Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education

15. Fellow of the American Philosophical Society

2. Sequoia Capital/Michael Moritz (chairman)

1. Director Andrew Reed

3. Former Twitter Executive Chair Omid R. Kordestani (2020-)

4. Dopes who Eat now, pay later on an app when they more than likely can walk to the market and buy a kiwi

5. Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains

1. Bluesky, for selling anything other than t-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg

2. Mark Zuckerberg, for sucking

3. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, a woman of color who is clearly a DEI hire

6. Trump National Security Adviser Accidentally Sent Plans for a Bombing Campaign to a Random Journalist

1. Messages were sent through Signal, and apparently a defense committee chat group that included the VP, Hegseth, and every important national security members… added a random journalist from the Atlantic in the planning of the Yemen bombings - so who do we blame?

1. Signal board member Katherina Maher

1. Signal is a non profit, but still has a board - and it includes the CEO of NPR!  The woke sit on the board!

2. Signal board members Amba Kak and Meredith Whittaker

1. They both were at the AI Now Institute, which Whittaker founded - so BFFs - and Whittaker was an NYU professor (woke!) and Kak was appointed by Biden’s FTC as an advisor (woke!)

3. Elon Musk!

1. Because lest you think anything happens without this asshole, his foundation gave $2m in 2021, before he got super un-woke, alongside gifts to MIT, Georgetown, and Penn, whose president Liz Magill the anti-woke got fired

4. Trump’s national security team, who used a retail messenger service that utilizes Google, Microsoft, and Amazon cloud technology as its biggest expenses, to plan the bombing of some brown people

7. Tesla has $1.4 billion that seems to have gone astray, potentially raising questions about the company’s controls

1. Robyn Denholm, chair of the board AND the audit committee who’s ALSO on the nominating and comp committees and chairs the “disclosure” committee that babysits middle school Musk’s social media posts

2. Kimbal Musk, who was on the Chipotle board when they had an e coli outbreak, and it might be that he suggested the money should be spent to help prove that burritos do NOT have e coli

3. DEI - they spent all the money on the Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day and COBE training around anti-harassment, which in 2023, covered 97% of Tesla employees

8. Female executives are fighting back against alpha male CEOs

1. Middle school manflake executives

1. The imposter syndrome alpha male tech bro manflake role models of Musk, Zuck, Bezos, all of whom hand select their boards and are never challenged (prediction: Zuck will get a divorce before the end of Trump’s term to find a girl with fake boobs to date)

2. Female executives

1. You had to go get educations and be good at shit through hard work - how are the imposters supposed impress you with their pecs?

3. DEI

9. Caesars Entertainment, Inc. Announces Two New Independent Directors

1. The press release makes it sounds like regular business, but the two directors were put there by aged activist and guy who doesn’t like pig crates or Bill Ackman: Carl Icahn… so who’s to blame when Icahn comes to town?

1. Caesars’ board, who bats a woeful .373 average TSR despite a whopping .831 EBITDA average - just INVITING an activist

2. Icahn Enterprises board, one of whose members is joining Caesars to teach them a thing or two… despite having a board with an average .332 TSR and .539 EBITDA?  The activist’s own board sucks more than the existing board?

3. Investors, who were so worried about the board’s abilities, the lowest vote getter in 2024 got 86.2%, not for poor performance, but because he was 84 years old, head of the nominating committee, and had been on the board for 20 years… the average not including that guy was 98% in favor.  98% average!

4. DEI

10. ‘DOI’ Is the New ‘DEI’ at JPMorgan

1. The word “equity” - this sounds a lot like “power” or “ownership”, that’s definitely in the purview of white alpha male middle schoolers now

2. The word “opportunity” - this sounds a lot better to alpha male middle schoolers, but, “We are changing “equity” to “opportunity” and renaming our organization to Diversity, Opportunity & Inclusion (DOI) because the “e” always meant equal opportunity to us, not equal outcomes” - opportunity means you don’t actually have to, you know, get anything

3. Jamie Dimon’s fat mouth