Transcript
Oh, it's me. If you're wondering why I'm by myself again, it's because Damien is still out, but I am live. From the underside of Liz trusses tax cuts. For a Biz nuggets edition of business pants brought to you by ESG. Your ESG data provider, Damian is on sick. Leave pending his lobotomy. I'm A Part B, hot dog. In the tower of creosote, that is October 20th. 2022, nuggets, nuggets. More nuggets in the silky voice of esg's, Paul Hodgson with the stat of the week. I'm not gonna make you sit through this. We're just gonna jump right into some nuggets. Let's make some highly processed news like product right now. It's going to be a bit hard with that Damian. He is my counterbalance and as much as he does all the work and that's why we're late today. But better late than never? Here we go. In our. And yet somehow, Bobby kotick still has a job headline of the week. Liz trust has resigned after 44 days in power that plunged the UK into chaos. for those of you who are keeping score, we didn't track Liz trust very much, but if you're keeping score nose, biting COO of impossible or beyond meat, 24 days before he got canned, Liz Truss, 44 days, almost double a nose. Biting CEO, Bobby kotick, 5,840 days. Since it was first reported. He sexually harassed an employee. Congratulations to Bobby. I mean, don't screw up taxes. You're out don't bite. Someone's nose in a parking lot, gone. Grab some of the opposite genders ass. Whatever you got another 5,000 days to go. In our hey, Ma. Have you seen my free market anywhere? I could have swore I left my free market on the counter but it's gone now. Ask Dad headline of the week. Missouri, attorney general leads. 919 State Coalition in launching investigation into six major Banks over. ESG investing. See, I was always the guy that said the free market had unintended consequences, like massive income inequality and consolidation of power, Mis, valuation of things like climate or biodiversity, but leave it to Missouri and the Republicans in America to make me wish and pine for the old days of free market ideologues when that's all we had to worry about. What do we what are we doing? We're suing because they do what they feel like. Well, welcome to America in our wait. Can Texas be sued for discrimination against companies using biometric data? Because they used in ESG data point like privacy in a lawsuit against the company confusion of the week. Texas ages Sue's Google for over facial and voice data collection. That's right. The Texas Attorney General. Suing Google for an ESG data point. But suing companies. Who use ESG data for ESG data? That's it. That's what that's where we're at. I wish I had Damien here. because he might make me feel better about my confusion instead, I have to go to the next headline and our And chovies, you can add to my peanut butter sandwich. Oh, you do lovely headline of the week. Headlines of the week, Dr. Doom noriel rabini says, to brace for a crash that combines the worst of the financial crisis and 1970 style stagflation. And this headline people are splurging to buy Grimace birdie and Hamburglar toys from McDonald's. Adult, happy meal with some spending 50 dollars for the figurines. I'm just gonna let that just let that sink in. Fall, this is a lot to unpack there. There's an adult happy meal. Isn't the Happy Meal like doesn't it by necessity to negate your adult penis. Second of all, how have you ever seen an image of the original? Grimace from like 1970, whenever it was made? It was like a 400-pound purple blob with four arms that stole milkshakes. And now we pay fifty dollars to buy a plastic version of that 50 years later. I think noriel rabini needs to go to a McDonald's. That's where he's gonna get over. His fear of the worst financial crisis and 70s style. Stagflation simultaneously in our The Jews. Did it headline of the week? parlor managed to accidentally expose, most of its Elite members, private email information, and message announcing, Kanye West takeover Honestly, it's been like a big week. Are you really like month? Maybe even thousand years for anti-Semitism? It's so hot right now. With Kanye saying that he can't say whatever he wants. He can't say he wants to go Defcon 3 on Jews in this country without getting banned from other social media. So he goes and he buys parler as a result and then parlor makes all of its other very conservative members emails available as part of that. I mean, Trump was in the news, talking about Jews three or four times in the past couple, what is happening? Where, where am I? Where do I live? What is this place? in our, Always take the under bet headline of the week. You won't believe how many all female CEO CFO Duos run the 500. Largest public us companies. Oh, but I will here. Deductive reasoning. When reading an article like this, if the number was 0, they would write it in the headline. They would say no. All female CEO CFO Doo's exist. In the largest 500 public companies in the world and the US. But so, it has to be more than 0. But if the number was like, more than 10 Then it doesn't sound that bad, right? Like, and I would believe it. So you can't say that so you know, the numbers between 0 and 10 and the survey says answer please. Three. Totally believable because that's where we're at. But no d e. I is what is is too woke, right? 500 companies. 50% of the population generally more educated. I mean, on average, we're talking about here. Generally more educated and yet out of 500 superhero Duos of CEO CFO. 3 of those Duos are all women. Just statistically speaking, doesn't that seem like a little bit, you know, our my six-month-old it's like all I want to do is shit and eat and sleep. Since we had him, we thought kids were like playful and fun but no, they just shit and eat and sleep headline of the week. Proxy advisors have inherent incentive to create controversy study shows. Yeah. Yeah they do. Here's your follow-up. Headline, studies are intended to generate headlines study shows. If your business model is basically predicated on people, knowing who you are and calling bulshit on companies, you would indeed want to start controversies. I'm just saying, I'm just saying does we don't need a study about everything now that one seemed pretty obvious in our Climate change. Gave me x amount. A headache. Yesterday. How was your day headline of the week? Crustacean, decimation due to climate change, driven cannibalization. First of all, major props major props. To the headline writers from time because this is from time. For using the shun, the repetition. The onomatopoeic repetition at the end of crustacean decimation cannibalization nicely done really nicely done, second of all, Climate change, heating up the ocean, cause snow crabs to cannibalize each other. This is the future that Missouri wants by suing Banks over climate change. What? What? Cannibalizing snow, crabs, that sounds fun. and finally, before we get to Paul's 6 minutes CEO, pay hot take There's this. in our, SpongeBob SquarePants. Just exported nuclear material to Iran but don't worry because Mike The Situation Sorrentino from the Jersey Shore has stockpiled. Bio weapons to send to help you crane headlines of the week. Luke Skywalker helps you crane drone effort, and Elon musk's starlink is at the Forefront of a corporatized space war in Ukraine. at last some, real adults in charge of blowing each other up, You were worried but we finally made it. We're there. Now, the adults in the room can help us blow each other up. That's it for our nuggets. I kept it. Short on to do next is I want to go to the stat of the week from our sponsor s gauge. You're our ESG provider, your ESG provider, who's helping us actually power board, saber metrics. So without further ado, you don't need to hear from me anymore. Here is the silky voice. Of Paul Hodgson. Good day, everyone. This is Paul Hodgson here, with the escaped statistic of the week, I decided to look at the sale on pay vote in results for the top 10 highest paid CEOs. Almost, as soon as I opened up the proxy statements because I knew I'd find the results that I was expecting because having looked at them. There's the proxy statements a little bit with what I can most generously call special pleading for the CEO pay packages like on page one or maybe page two. So you know that the companies will worried about Howie's going to view those pay packages. It was sort of a like, no really. It's totally justifiable to pay the CEO. This much just hold your nose and vote. Yes. Now, Matt Stoll a little of my thunder in his transcript for last week's podcast on Wednesday, giving out some of the voting results and looking at some of the inequities in voting power But I thought I'd dig a little bit deeper into that. See if we could get a bit more. Bit more nuggets out of there. So out of the 10, four of the companies, lost this thing on paper, which is very unusual. Although, this year, I think, was the the highest number of lost sale on pay boats, ever recorded in the Russell 3000. So, the companies that lost outright were Intel Corporation Penn, National gaming, service now and JP Morgan Chase. Yeah, I know, I let the cat out of bag last week but JP Morgan Chase. Lost their say on pay vote. 69% of shareholders voted against his Paypal package. Pretty soon, shareholders are going to approve splitting, the chairman and CEO position and James. Diamond is going to have to stay a million CEO to reap that whole retention bonus. Pretty extraordinary result. So let's have a look at the others. A couple of others that they yes they won and but some cases only just so the first one is Amazon a pretty narrow margin. They won the vote by just 5.8 percentage points that could have gone either way, only around 40 million shares was the margin of Victory there at Apple, almost twice as many shareholders said, yes to say on pay. But there were as many broken non-votes as neighbors, a broken non-votes or votes that are their shares that are held by somebody. But nobody's actually cast them either one way or the other, on that particular vote. If they cared, the would have gone down because there was as many broken non-votes as neighborhoods. So, if you doubled it up, then, Probably would have gone down. Broadcom. Yeah, the margin of victory was much broader there. Yeah, I did do that on purpose. The other three companies are all a little more complicated. Warner Brothers, Discovery, Expedia and Estee Lauder. Okay, so let's deal with them in that order. No, we won't. We'll deal with Expedia first. Okay. So first of all, Warner, Brothers, and just Warner Brothers, Discovery and Expedia only have say, on pay boats once every two years. Permissible, yes, legal under SEC regulations. Yes, but do most shareholders have memories that go back to 12 months now, they still worried about the pay that was not approved. The previous year, I doubt it and are they going to register a protest vote? 12 months later, probably not. So it's a good ruse. If you don't want anybody to a pine on your pay. And I mean, you could even say, well, let's pay them a lot this year when we don't have a vote and not so much next year, when we do, that would work as well. Warner Brothers Discovery also has a classified board again really poor governance practice as is not having a say on paper to every year. So classified board means that shareholders don't get to vote on all of the directors. Every year they just vote on a single class each year. And And again. there's unequal voting rights, another poor governance practice at one of those Discovery, so a fund partnership, whatever led by founder John Malone owns 95% of series, A1 preferred stock and 26% of the voting power of regular common stock. So as you can imagine, that is quite a lot of voting power. So it seems pretty unlikely that a sandpaper would ever go down at the company. Malone sits on the board and sits on boards all over the place. Including yes, where Expedia, so that takes us to Expedia. Okay, so I know I said I was going to deal with Expedia first but I changed my mind and my notes were in the wrong order. So now we get to them. An Expedia again, there are unequal voting rights expedia's chairman Barry Diller has 26.9% of the total voting power at the company that comes from his ownership of Class B common stock, which has 10 boats per share, compared to regular common stock on by everybody else. BlackRock, Vanguard, Etc, which has one per share so it's a similar situation at Estee Lauder. Although it's kind of worse. As map pointed out in the transcript to the podcast last Wednesday. so the estate of vote passed, they do have a say on paper every year, but the family owns 82.4% of Class B shares, which has 10 boats, per share compared to class A shares, which has one vote for share. So I looked at the figures and one. If they only had one vote per class b, share, as they do with class A shares, they've lost the PayPal. 2, if we excluded, The family-owned shares. and just looked at the publicly owned voltage shares more than half of public shareholders, voted against the pay package, So again. In a normal voting situation, like say a democracy. We'd call that cheating and as Paul Hodgson signing off as gauge statistic of the week, see you next week. Bye-bye. That was Paul. We are free float, Paul from ESG, that's all we got. Come back. Tomorrow, when I assume gaming, still gonna be dead. But I think Ari and I are and Jesse this week just yet, I think might be joining us, we'll be doing our first. Three of us doing the week Roundup. This was happening tomorrow so come back for that otherwise I'll see you later.