Transcript
Oh, live. From your headaches backache. It's a woke data. Musk day spectacular here at the woke data. Twizzler Factory. Join us always by. Nobody Matt is being bougie. Ari is being covidde, it's just me. God's favorite reusable bag. And today's mildew flavored bag of Forbes scented nuggets called October 5th, 2022. Elon Musk does things and a new segment from our new sponsor. Let's get to it. We have a lot to cover today. Maybe too much. Let's put the crazy to bed Shelby and that's Elon Musk. So sorry if you don't want to hear about Elon Musk, then Well, you have to still listen to the show and you still have to share it with everybody but sorry I'll just say sorry. There's a lot going on. Maybe this can be the last that we speak of musk for a while. I feel like we've taken a break but I, I just couldn't avoid it. Here we go. Here's the headline. Ukrainian Diplomat blasts Elon Musk with profanity over the billionaires. Peace plan parroting, Putin propaganda. Yeah, you heard me right? This is the world's richest, man. Elon Musk. He's now putting on putting on Twitter polls. Here's the Twitter poll. It's a yes, no polls. Not cute. He's like a child. Here's the poll. It's about Ukraine. Russia, peace. He asks, four things to solve Ukraine, Russia, peace, and want to Simply yes. Or no response redo elections of an extra regions. Crimea back to Russia. Water supply is a Crimea assured and Ukraine remains neutral, I guess, meaning, Ukraine stays at a NATO, that's what Elon Musk is asking about. The car salesman, the guy who runs Tesla, this is what he's asking on Twitter. On top advisor to Ukrainian president, zelinski responded to musk's idea with what he referred to as a better. Peace plan, you crane liberates its territories including the next Camille Russia undergoes deep military, Asian and Military D nuclearization so it can no longer threaten others war. Criminals, go through International tribunal. Let's vote. President zelinsky weighed in mocking Elon Musk saying, which Elon Musk. Do you like more? The one who supports Ukraine or the one? Who supports Russia? And advisor to Ukraine internal affairs. Minister said should Putin declare Elon musk's future Mars colony, historically, Russian and an exit. I like that one. And this one. This is simple. Poetry Ukraine's. Ambassador to Germany tweeted. Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you. Yeah. This is what's going on in the real world children. Finally Elon Musk response was spacex's out of pocket cost to enable and support starlink and Ukraine is 80 million dollars so far. Our support for Russia is 0 dollars. Obviously, we are pro Ukraine, I did the math here, I did some populist math. According to the math, Elon Musk giving 80 million dollars to ukrainians, the equivalent of someone earning 50,000 dollars a year donating 17 dollars to NPR before we get out of this Ukraine nonsense, it's worth noting that the Kremlin is praising Elon Musk. So, there you go. That's Elon Musk for you. So I asked you still in Elon Fanboy. You done, you still proud of your test. La moving on, in other news, yawn after months, of being a complete ass, Elon Musk is suddenly willing to buy Twitter for the original agreed-upon 44 billion dollars after trying to back out Twitter says it plans to close the deal at that price. Yeah yeah that's right. People after all these months of nonsense Elon Musk is suddenly done fighting. It's over. I guess we could be happy about that crowd. Are you happy about that? Yeah, they seem kind of Happy. The fight is over. The petulant child has given in. Here's what you almost got to say. He said the Twitter purchase will accelerate the creation of x. His long discussed. Everything app, it sounds like Elon Musk is planning a app that he's referring to as the everything app. It's part of a company. He's planning called X and yes it does sound like movie super villain Enterprise or I don't know. It sounds scary as all I can say. I think you can agree with me on that and let's get to this other Elon musk's story. Something I tease on Monday. The headline is here are all the juiciest private texts between musk and his billionaire buddies. Discussing plans for Twitter, I emphasize on Monday that we are a people company. Here, we are putting the G back into ESG. We have a new product board sabermetrics, which tries to measure the people, the people in ESG. We do such things as influence scores, how much influence these actual directors have on the board. So these type of stories are always fascinated. Us all the friendships, all the billionaire buddies. Here we go. I'm going to highlight some of my favorites. Let's start with Jack Dorsey. Of course, he's the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. He's the 572 most wealthy person on Earth at about 4.5 billion. He said in the text to Elon a new platform is needed, it can't be a company. That's why I left referring to Twitter. He said the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk That sounds good to me though, right. That's not what the board is supposed to do, once I supposed to be super risk-averse. So something like the board is doing its job. Oh, Jack, Dorsey also told musk the board is terrible. How about that? I can't help. But think that a lot of the people on the board are the people that Jack Dorsey helped get on the board in the first place. But hey, what are you gonna do again? He said, he actually said the board is terrible. I guess the only person he spared was CEO parag, agrawal? Who Dorsey called an incredible engineer. I think that's a jack dorsey's way of saying that he sucks as a CEO. That's from Jack Dorsey. Joe Rogan, he's the CEO of center, right? Fake libertarian, male blowhards? He tweeted to Elon Musk. He said are you going to liberate Twitter from the censorship? Happy mob Rogan said, I really hope you get Twitter. If you do, we should throw one hell of a party musk replied with the 100 emoji. So this is what yeah, this is what children do. This is our children act Prague agrawal, CEO of Twitter. He had a text exchange with Elon Musk. It started off friendly and then and in the mood shifted quickly, when Elon Musk asked to the CEO of Twitter, he asked is Twitter dying. Agrawal told musk, he was free to tweet anything he wanted about Twitter, but quote it's my responsibility to tell you that it's not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak I'd like to provide you perspective on the level of internal destruction right now and how it's hurting our ability to do work. 30 minutes later, Elon musk's asked the CEO of Twitter. What did you get done this week? He then immediately followed up with, I'm not joining the board, this is a waste of time. I gotta tell you this continues to paint Elon Musk as a pet child, but I actually this puts perog in a pretty favorable light. It sounds like he's actually doing his job as the CEO of a big company. So congratulations, Prague. Larry Ellison. Co-founder, former CEO of Oracle, he's the seventh. Richest person in the world. 92 billion Larry Ellison. Imagine that's where all a lot of the world's wealth is it's in Larry Ellison's garage. Think about that. Ellison texted musk. I do think we need another Twitter. And then when musk asked if he wanted to take part in the financing deal, his buddy Ellison wrote yes of course a billion or whatever you recommend and then Larry Ellison said I agree that it has huge potential and it would be lots of fun and that cute billionaire Bros being billionaire Bros it's nice cute. How about this? One. Mathias dopfner CEO at German publishing giant Axel Springer. He writes a plan to Elon Musk, one of the plans was for musk to buy the company, and for his people Matias, his people, to run the company. But he had a plan. #Goal he wrote make Twitter the global backbone of free speech. That sounds terrifying. And he had a game plan. He had a game plan for that. His game plan was number one, solve Free Speech. Okay? Sounds great part of that plan to solve Free Speech, was this first step, make it censorship free by radically reducing terms of services to her users agree. Not to use our service to send spam or scam. Users promote violence or post illegal pornography, and then you also said, make Twitter censorship resistant but seriously How? How are you going to solve this nobody else can solve this? I mean, I'm not even sure there is a solution for this, but his proposal, is that a car salesman and a publisher should be able to figure this out. Solve free speech. That's his game plan. I'm serious. This is all in writing. You can look all this up. About Reid Hoffman, co-founder LinkedIn, Elon Musk wrote to read Hoffman. There is plenty of financial support but you're a friend. So just letting you know, you'd get priority. Oh is he? Isn't that nice? It's more billionaire Bros. Being billionaire Bros. I like that. And again, this is important Insight because this is how actual decisions are made. Palsy Wells, he's making little deals. It also, turns out that Reed Hoffman set Elon Musk up with Microsoft CEO Nadella. So once again, proving the power of influence power friendships, speaking, which James Murdoch I guess he's the non shity Murdoch family member. He's the former CEO at 21st Century Fox. His family, is the 89th, richest family in the world 17 billion dollars and his text to musk. He referenced that he would link musk up with somebody and that he will call when the dust settles and then Murdoch's wife, Catherine, Said will you bring Jack back in an Elon Musk replied Jack doesn't want to come back once again proving the power of little billionaire Bros and friendships isn't that nice billionaire Bros? And friendships. And finally, before I move on some other people that I don't really feel like talking about also texting Elon Musk David Sachs, he's in the PayPal Mafia Egon Durban Twitter board member. He's a VC dude over Silver Lake Capital Sam, bankman freed, he's the founder and CEO of FTX a cryptocurrency exchange. Joe Lawnsdale, co-founder of palantir. Outspoken, political conservative, there's a lot of dangerous characters in here. I think you've noticed that they're all white, dudes know. Yeah, they're all, they're all white dudes. Oh no, Prague Prague prague's, not away dude. I gotta end with my favorite Gayle King because this is a wonderful moment here. A wonderful corporate governance moment, Gayle, King, American television personality co-host of a CBS Morning Show. And Oprah's BFF Oprah by the way is the world's 1,119 richest person, worth 2.5 billion dollars. So Gayle King texted Elon Musk saying Elon You buying Twitter or offering to buy Twitter? Wow. Now, don't you think we should sit down together? Face to face? This is as the kids say, a gangster move. I don't know how shareholders turn this down. Like I said, you are not like the other kids in the class. Elon Musk responded. Oprah would make a good addition to Twitter's board under his ownership. Let's not forget the Oprah was a disaster at Weight Watchers. But whatever, Elon Musk saying that Oprah would be a good board member and he said, quote wisdom about humanity and knowing what is Right are more important than so called bored governance skills which mean pretty much, nothing in my experience. That's right. People Elon Musk CEO of everything. CEO of Tesla SpaceX neuralink where it didn't. He just recently impregnate executive now. He's gonna control and own Twitter. He wants to form an everything company called X to take over the world. This is his quote bored governance, skills, pretty much mean, nothing in his experience. Let's not forget the board, is there to act as a counterbalance to management, really? It's just there to help run things. See how is it? Just how to help help add more expertise, all right. I hope I've done the Elon musk's Justice. I'm getting I'm tired of it. My throat hurts. I think I have Ari's covid even though I'm hundreds of miles away but let me finish the show. Very exciting development. Here, we have a new weekly segment it is sponsored by S gauge. Your ESG data solution. S gauge is an ESG data mining Wizkid and we like wizkids. So we're partnering up with ESG. They're going to sponsor a weekly segment and our man. Paul Hodgson is going to help run this segment again our new and first sponsors Skagit. A little news about Paul Hodgson, he has been senior advisor at ESG since 2019, and it's worked in the field of executive compensation, in ESG, since the early 1990s. He also works as a senior editor, for ISS corporate Solutions and as a freelance writer for sure, holder representative Series in the Interfaith Center for corporate responsibility. This week, Paul looks into the highest paid CEOs from last year. Take it Away, Paul. oh, hi there. It's Paul Hodgson from data. Mining firm ESG. The team sent over to me this week, a list of the top 10 highest paid CEOs, in the S&P 500 in between July last year and July this year. And it's quite a list. Some of them I've been doing this for a very long time and some of these companies turn up in every top, 10 list I've ever seen such as Expedia group, and I'm looking at the list and looking at the industries in the list, travel, and entertainment, Cloud software semiconductor's banking Cosmetics gambling, and it's kind of a covid-19 list. So this 10 of them and there's a lot to say about each of them. So I'm just going to deal with the top five this week which includes Expedia group Warner Brothers Discovery, Amazon Intel and Cloud software company service. Now The highest is almost 300 million dollars, at Expedia group. With the CEO, Peter Kern. In stock and options now. Mr. Kern did not receive any salary or bonus. Well, when he started a CEO in 2019, it was in the middle of the pandemic so he didn't receive any salary or bonus for those years up until 2021, which is the fiscal year. We're talking about More than made up for I would say by the 300 million dollars in stock and options. What we've got to remember is that most of these awards were made When the market was running high, it's only really since the beginning of this year, that stock prices of fallen during 2021, they were on the rise, pretty significantly. So that's why when we're looking at it now with thinking to ourself what an earth justifies, these kinds of payments. And we're talking for the top five compensation total compensation between 160 million and the 300 million at the top there. so, the stock market does provide some justification for payments, like these. Also, we need to remember that the median total compensation for, CEOs, in the S&P 500 was around 14.7 million dollars. So, we're talking about real outliers here. So just to move on to the next one. Warner Bros Discovery, the CEO David sass Lafayette has been there song considerable time and has featured in more than one, but it mildly of top 10 list that I've seen over the years. The firms signed a new contract with him for 2021. With some performance stock involved in the package of total 246 million 573,481. But most of it was options around, 200 million dollars. Along with a 22 million dollar cash bonus. And just in case that wasn't enough a 4.4 million dollar, discretionary cash bonus. Then we have the new CEO at Amazon And Drew jassi. Again, there's been some controversy about him already shareholders, objecting to the size of the package and will be looking at that in future broadcasts from skate statistic of the week. Most of what jassy received were plain vanilla stock and stock options around 200 million dollars. Which made up the vast majority of his total package of 212 million 791,169. Jesse wasn't a new sign to Amazon. He was already in charge of their Cloud software company. And prior to him, Jeff Bezos, who remains his chairman received, basically just a 1.6 million dollar security benefit, and very little else. Number four in the list is also a new higher though, from outside the company rather than from inside. Patrick gelsinger became CEO for Intel during 2021. And most of what he received. Says, the company are make hole Awards. make whole Awards to compensate him for. Compensation that he left on the table at his prior employer. Indeed, the company says that 50% of the golden. Hello is replacing forfeited incentives from his prior employer. Now unusually and unlike the Amazon experience around 72% of his total incentive, pay is performance related, both stock and stock options, the total stock and stock options comes to around 170 million dollars. And here's total pay is 178.6 million dollars. Interestingly. The rest of the named Executives left. When the CEO left or around the same time. So there's a completely new team. It's of the head of Intel. A wonderful thing I found was I was reading the proxy statement to just dig in a little bit into the background of this. Intel has a stockholding guideline of 10 times salary. In other words, in order to meet that you need to hold and own stock of 10 times your base salary. Well, gelsinger's base, salary is not very high and the comment on the stockholding guidelines says Already on track. Well, seems to me that if you're already on track within a few months of being appointed, the stock holding guidelines, probably need to be settled a little higher. Finally, we're looking at service. Now the cloud software company whose CEO William McDermott and 165.8 million dollars during 2021. Some of that was left over from his hiring in 2019. But the majority were performance stock options, which is interesting because a lot of the stock options that have been awarded to the other CEOs were not performance related. These are based on subscription targets and also on absolute stock price targets. They're worth around 140 million dollars and make up most of his total compensation of 165.8 million dollars. Next week, I'll return will look at the compensation of the CEOs at Apple. JP Morgan. Chase Estee Lauder and Penn National gaming and broadcom. The week after that, I think it would be solitary to look at what kind of support levels, the say, on pay vote, the vote that shareholders used to approve or disapprove of executive compensation were for these companies. Because one thing I noticed when I was looking through the proxy statements is there's an awful lot of information about shareholder engagement and explaining the processes Behind These Wards and the decisions by the compensation committee. Etc, etc. So there was clearly quite a bit of pushback. So this is Paul Hodgson senior advisor at ESG data mining firm signing off. Paul with this every week that's with ESG sponsored by ESG, your ESG data solution. I don't think the segments were always be that long, but whatever. Paul contributes is great by me. Great with us. Look forward to hearing Paul every week, usually on Wednesdays, but we might make it up a bit, but he's a perfect fit for our woke data Wednesday's and that's it. We're done. That's the show for today. Stay tuned for a better show tomorrow. I'm promising. You a better show tomorrow. Thank you to everyone here at free flow and business pants. You know who you are? But that's Matt Ari. Jesse our business pants, corporate theater. Troupe, I think everybody think the world later. Bye. Get out of here. Come on.