Transcript
Hello. Live. From the ESG skyscraper in Black Rock Nevada. It's an early Monday edition of business pants. Joined as always by our BS correspondent. Matt mascardi that's board sabermetrics. Get it. Yeah. I get it. Does anybody else know? I don't think people really even know what board saber metrics is. Yeah, yeah, we're getting there. They will, they will, I am Mr. Consternation, and today's fun snow. Oh, this is retread joke. I'm sorry. And today's Fun sized, let's call it Kit. Kat bar called November 14th 2022. Sexy story updates in sleazy academic paper, birds. Yeah, plus, I got a new bit. Don't forget my new bit. The new bit is, oh, what is a board bit? It's called bored bored bits. Bored bored. You have to pick which one is Bored? Like, I'm bored with this conversation and which, like, I am right now for board of directors. Yeah, exactly. Let's do this. Matt breaking news. Tesla's board. Still sucks. What actually might even suck even more? How is that breaking news? Well, you played the, the bumper I had I just that's true. You just breaking in the sense of these are new news stories over the weekend. Elon Musk said, you know, don't forget. He's also the CEO of Tesla. He was talking about running Tesla's Global operations noting that he runs the electric vehicle manager with great difficulty. That's a quote Based on this headline, Elon Musk says, he has too much work on his plate. The amount that I torture myself, is next level, frankly. There you go, Tesla board. There you go. I think he just admitted it. Now, you can get rid of just it literally. Did it out loud. Get rid of him about this. Also out of The Tesla world I are. I mean really. This is the I'm going to call this the test of the world. We can call this the Twitter world, the SpaceX world and a link World, whatever. But I'm blaming Tesla for this because this is another some other side musk stuff SpaceX. Buys large Twitter ad campaign for Starling as advertisers pause spending? Dare you honestly, that is um, love this get, but the best part about that is he did it with SpaceX. The company that didn't have as much money instead of Tesla because he can't justify doing it with public company shareholder capital. To spend on his own thing. They would not like this, probably coming that you saying this now. Just wait a week. Well, I wouldn't do full the other advertisers into being like, Oh no, you're right. This is a great place to spend my money. Like I like this is the wild west. I like this. The this is from CNBC, the current and former employees from say from SpaceX told CNBC that SpaceX had not typically bought at campaigns from Twitter in the past. I don't know where they got. The idea. All that. You know what? They call that nerd land. That's a related party, transaction, man. Whoa, wow. Thinking money. You win the prize. A CEO taking money from one of his companies, and throwing it at another one of his company to to boost that other company, that has nothing to do with the first company. Do they know how much he spent? How much he paid himself from one company? We don't know this one yet. We don't know this one yet. Let's end on this. Let's end the. The Tesla board. Still sucks on this. Remember we talked about FTX founder Sam bankman, let's call him freed because he's freed. FTX Empire blew up last week. It did indeed. Yeah, well, but when I first met him, he said, he said he called, he said about him. He said this dude is bullshit, which is funny because this is how we refer to Elon Musk. Wow, here. The perfect circle. What we say that's about Elon, I, he probably got that from our show. Moving on update. Our favorite CEO and England. That we have one of those King Charles. Oh, here's that line. King Charles is giving hundreds of his lowest paid workers. A 700 dollar bonus out of his own pocket. It says a King Charles is very much aware of the big jump and energy bills, and is doing what he can. He owns several castles. Sell a fucking castle and give them the money that the plan is to give 700 dollars to cleaners servants and footmen. I'm serious. The seat. This is the CEO of England. I would love it if King, Charles took out a YouTuber ad campaign. Yeah. Speaking of the UK here's one for you Matt and we're this I'm introducing this to you because eventually there's gonna be a an anti-esg War about this one. British Airways changes dress code to allow male pilots and cabin crew to wear makeup, nail varnish and piercing's Matt, regardless of gender, they can now wear subtle shades of nail polish makeup. Oh, so we're looking at you, hot, pink and eggplant purple. Get out of here. It's I love that they couldn't go all the way. They couldn't go all the way subtle shapes. Why literally did they care in the first place? Did anybody look at the pilots hands? You never really pilot ever like, they stand vaguely. Stand at the door when you're walking in the plane sometimes. And they look kind of like they don't want to be there. They're kind of like not against social anxiety. They they don't, they can't look you in the eye. They sit in a in a, in a room, with one other person called 12 hours at a time, like, they lock themselves in that room. These are not people who want to go out and hang out with the the people they're flying. I don't know why anyone cared if they had piercings and dyed hair and whatever they could literally welcome to look. Like they left the Joan Jett concert, I don't care. Welcome to the world of ESG here. I will, I did I did a populist. Corporate governance. Dive I did a populist, ESG, dive, did we have a music for that? Yeah, we do. Hold on a second. Let me just cue it up. Okay, here we go. Maybe this will explain what happened. Okay? So I looked at the management committee at International Airlines Group which runs British Airways, they're 12 of them at the role. White, is that surprised you? I didn't think they'd be all come on there. This is me. So that's not me. This is not, this is not a wolf management committee but here's what happened. A Carolina Martinelli is chief of people shocking. Right. So I'm Guessing the the pro ESG walk messaging came from a woman. That's what happened. Right. Well yeah, I mean do they do they have a headache of HR? Well, that's what. She is chief of people. Oh yeah I guess that's cheap of people. Yeah, I thought if people and diversity was like a second thing from HR, well, you know why I pointed this one out because you know what else she runs. She's also the chief of, she's also the chief of corporate Affairs and sustainability. Wow. All right, they all try. So now they're just they're taking the ESG Rag and they're just throwing it in one corner to see. Literally just ringing out the Eds and the on a woman just do all this stuff. This is And you know what she doesn't even, I looked at her background, she doesn't have the expertise to be the head of Human Resources, let alone, the chief sustainability officer at a major airlines crazy to me. Crazy. How many foot men work at British airlines? Maybe. Okay, that's good because I did want to end with British Airways with this The list of a list of the former chairs going back from 1972. It's all Sir, David Nicholson. Lord McFadden sir Ross, Lord King Lord Marshal sir. And then in 2013, a guy named Keith I just like, I've never seen this before. I've never seen this before, they had, I like that. British Airways had seven straight chairs that were either a sir or a Lord. And then Keith came along Keith. And then Keith. I like he really All right, I have a couple more to wrap up here my updates. My amazing updates for November 14th. This is a new one for us, Matt. The next Warren Buffett curse. They're calling it a curse whenever they're like, cursed the Bambino. Yeah. Like there's saying, whenever you're someone's called the next Warren Buffett, they're saying it's a curse and it happened just now to Sam Bateman fried, right? He was called the next Warren. Buffett was he really, by who the media Fortune Magazine says about everybody. Don't ruin my bed. Here's who else? They're claiming took the curse hit by the curse. Eddie Lampert, you know who he is? No idea. He was a hedge fund manager. He was the chair of Sears and he took over Kmart right before Amazon, destroyed all of it. Wow. So they called him the next Warren Buffett and then Amazon came in. And destroyed his Empire. By that. They meant the next Sears Bill Ackman. He was called the next Warren Buffett, just months before a huge price gouging and drug scandal over at Valiant. With all. So yeah, he followed that up with Herbalife, right? Right. Exactly. And the last one they're calling the guy by the curses are old friend, chamath. He was called the next Warren Buffett. And then his back Empire went bust. Oh, oops. All right. What you want you to. I just want you to know that there's a curse, we don't have a lot of curses in our little ESG world. That's true. What other curses are there is, is there? Well, now there's a person must shares. Is there a must curse? Everything must turns to chaos. It must, um, know there's a Zuck curse for sure, because everything he buys becomes boring. Like, it's like a legless Avatar. That's, that's everything Zuckerberg. Hey, just it's the same reason. Why how Biden beat Trump is just being boring to same about my joke with Tim Cook. Being dead for five years is just apples winning because he's boring. Maybe this is why, maybe this is why Zuck will win over musk because he's just being boring, boring wins but no more quick ones. This one's for you, Matt. A carnival cruise ship and Australia is docking with 800 people on board testing positive for covid. I hate it. I hate everything about the cruise line and the cool out of Carnival was the who they're blaming is great. This is a result of mass testing. Oh, it's the tests fall. It's what they said and if you want to be even more scared, one passenger told the guardian that was scary and that they were very careful when they went ashore. So oh, is there a petri dish floating around where everyone is full of covid, but there's still docking and sending their passengers out to spread covid 8. This is, what's going on a Carnival hundred cases? Yeah, I mean, how many guests are on a cruise. This one says 4600 passengers and crew. 4600. So we do, we honestly think that the other 80% of that cruise ship did not all get this. Of course not there. All carrying covid right now and going home with absolutely the cruises are the worst idea. My first 48 Hours of very heavy symptoms when I just got covid I kept testing negative. Can you imagine your first 48 hours in a two, by two Locker on a cruise ship, how much fun that would have been. Oh, so like is blaming the tests sort of, like, Elon Musk blaming activists for the advertisers leaving Twitter? What is that? That's great. All right, before I hand off to your amazing segment, actually do have a good segment today. I like this bored bored bits. We have, can you explain this man? I'm like, sort of sick of explaining it but tell us again. What's going on at Twitter? Tell us about these corporate, Twitter trolls. All right, I'm going to tell you quickly what these are so for eight dollars, as you know, I don't know, you don't know. But everybody else knows everyone else lives in the real world, you can buy a check. Mark that says you're a verified account, right? Meaning the check marks are now pointless. We used to use the check marks to figure out what was the real account from the fake accounts. Now, the check marks you can just buy. So, what's happened is, Twitter is entirely overrun with like fake parody Company. Accounts pay Corporation, check marks these beautiful corporations. This is beautiful and it's not just corporations everybody. It's people, there's Ted Cruz. There's the Utah, State House of Representatives. There's about the corporation's but the corporations of the funny part. So what we have is a short compilation of all of the, the top sort of, I don't, Know what? Six seven ten. What are your, what are your favorite? Some of my favorites. All right, ready? Well let's just do this. We're just oh, Rocky music for this? Yeah. We're putting some music in the background ready. Well, really it should be Rocky music because this is what we do there and hats off to them because this is the business pants empyre. It's just rolling. I'm really didn't think of this first. I know we're not this one was my favorite. Yeah overall that I've seen so far it's from American Girl. Okay, the doll company. And it just says the Tweet was Felicity owned slaves. Oh, and then responded to itself saying, I'm not even lying. Look at up. Wait, okay, I I apologize for being ignorant who's Felicity. It's one of the American Girl dolls. I think it's amazing. I just it's amazing. That's the statement of fact, it's just a matter of fact it's just it's just that's what I like this so much. It's like five words and it's the greatest five words. Here's another one. There is a Tesla of America at Tesla of America, which is not real Tesla. He's been on a absolute tear but here's one that I liked a lot. Our cars do not respect school zone, speed limits, fuck them kids. Oh well I like that. I'll tell you this one. I'm looking at that tweet. There's no way of knowing that. That's a that's not Tesla not just Tesla the check mark at Tesla of America with The Tesla logo. I mean that's Tesla. That's the point. And what else? Yeah, they have they have another tweet. This is honestly the 53% drop in stock price doesn't FaZe us. If there's anyone who knows about crashing, it's us. Nice true. Played nicely played. There's a bunch more. I'll go through them. Quickly, BP Global, which is at bpd's nuts. Okay, that's something to me. That sounds fake just because we killed the planet doesn't mean we can't miss it and Lockheed Martin the Aerospace company at Lockheed Martini. Yeah. Will we will be halting all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia Israel in the United States until further investigation into their record of Human Rights abuses. That's funny. No. Listen I just got word that that actually, that is a real tweet. Yeah, from Lockheed martini. Eli, Lilly the company that made the interesting one. This is the interesting one. Yeah, they tweeted earlier last week, the fake account tweeted that all insulin will be free and then they tweeted in response to that. We apologize. To those who are have, who were have been served. I don't know, I'm misleading message from a fake Lily account about the cost of Diabetic Care. Humalog is now, 400 dollars. We can do this whenever we want and there's nothing you can do about it suck. It are official Twitter account is at Lily padco. Yeah. And before you giggle too much their share price during this whole event has gone from well, it's dropped 20 dollars. Let's just say that it's down a lot, 20 dollars. This is why they needed to raise the price of diabetic medication Chiquita. Like, Chiquita banana tweeted, we've just overthrown. The government of Brazil. Um, Coca-Cola at actual Coca-Cola tweeted. If this gets 1000 retweets we will put cocaine back in Cocoa. Oh that's nice. It's just delightful. Do my do my favorite one which is the last one that list. Here's the last one we'll just jump right to. And that's again this this looks real. I mean I don't see the joke. You know the the handle the name. It looks like a real account. It's Roblox at ROBLOX underscore us. Yeah and it's almost spelled but I mean it's just read it just say you should we're adding sex to Roblox. That sounds like a nice recipe. That's it. Now, you know, it's it's weird, it's funny, you say that because and before we hand off to the great at mascara is that my brain has been so dumb by the by the world that we live in. Is that a word dummies? Yes, it is. Now that when I first read that and chuckled, that that Roblox was adding sex to Roblox, I like we're adding sex to Roblox. I didn't even see the misspelled. I didn't even see that we are the contraction were is actually spelled w e. R e and adding is spelled with one D. I didn't even know. I mean but Is anybody could buy a check mark. So here's what I encourage everybody who listens to the show. So Keith from the beat, the British Airways. Yeah sure. Yeah, here's what I want. Start at free float reel at freefloat media at freefloat underscore us. Yeah and tweet for us you can all get a blue check. You can make a say whatever you want. We'll just we'll just high five you and call it a day. All right here's my bed. He's ready for my beds. I got two short bits. First up. A oldie. But goodie nerd Alert in honor of Elon Musk. I saw this is crossed my desk. Here is the paper. CEO narcissism and responsibility. Oh, does CEO narcissism affect CSR? Focus. His papers from 2019, from Marwan Al Shamari sheet and whose shimari. So it's it covers Fortune. 500 companies between 2008 and 2013. I won't believe her. The point here, they have a method to identify a narcissistic CEO, and then they have a method to say they're looking at the data and saying, did they focus on CSR more or less, right, here's what they found narcissistic. CEOs love CSR. Oh. That's true. They love CSR. They're all about like ESG CSR impact, he focused thing. Thanks for good press. Narcissistic CEOs, do it for external validation, that's why they do it. They want Eagle washing, however, They found no correlation between focus on internal CSR meaning, they don't care that they're happily willing to ignore like labor issues. Sure, of course, if it does not get them, the press that they would get with say a carbon Target so narcissistic CEOs. Yeah, this makes sense to me our narcissistic, that's what they found. That's that was the finding I thought that was a good finding a good. Look that one up and my second bit today. Yes, it's something new. Called bored bored bits. I like having a lead in like that. Here is the headline. I saw SK pledges to empower outside board members, what's SK? That's okay. Obviously, you have to click on this SK is a Korean company. They have like multiple subsidiaries, they make chips, this is what the chip delicious. Know like healthy like computer chip. Yeah. Oh yeah. Boo delicious. Healthy computer chips. This was a lovely basically, a press release in the Korea. Herald. And the reason why I thought it was funny is because who makes a pledge to empower board members. Isn't that the point the people outside board outside board members? Yeah, but you independent board member. He was assumed that they're empowered because they're board member. You would you would think you fat paycheck would be the empowerment until you look at our influence scores. So let's get is effectively a table which if you don't know what that is in Korea, they have like these, you know, multi holding company that owns shares and a lot of different other companies that all own shares in each other and they basically all get control by one entity. Yeah. And they're often attached to some kind of family control almost always in this case is it doesn't seem to be family control but What I did find is SK Inc. Who's the parent who put out? This kind of press release. He sounding thing. They put four separate CEOs from other sketch entities on this board. Yeah. There are nine board members. the four CEOs, they put on according to our metrics own 91% of the influence over company decision making Can I just say, thank you for pointing this out? And this is why we're so brilliant because A normal ESG ratings provider were just say this board is independent and move on. In fact, right? I looked up at several normal ESG ratings providers. Yes. And they all have their corporate governance as near the top right because they don't have the new ones to capture this type of thing. And I I was one of these. These little some nerdy analysts. I mean I still really am and so much is buzz me for saying low somehow me. And while the anecdotes sucked you couldn't prove it with the metrics, right? You couldn't actually there was no objective way of describing. Why this board sucks. But now we can do it. We've got effectively had the dated approve that this is not an independent board people which makes this next part. See what you use our data. You understand how funny this next part is a user which is the way that they hope to empower the board is by Doing two key. Things number one, They are launching an inversion of like an internal social network or chat system. Where they're getting hot. They're buying slack. They're getting they could talk and share files. That's one thing that they're doing so they're wow, they're letting them talk. I got love this. Yes, to each other not, not to anybody else and two. They hope they can teach them about the company and how to be a board member of the company. That's a education. I don't even know. I don't even know what to say about this is, this is horrifying. That's how they're empowering. I have a suggestion for you skinc limit your Insider CEOs on the board to maybe just one. Oh, and and maybe WeChat for directors as you solve your influence problems. That have slack. That is that is my bored bored. Bored out here run away. That's all we got. That's Steamrollers. I am a Louie. I would almost This is how my dedication to this stupid. Yeah sure. Whatever. Come back tomorrow when we do something at summertime corporate theater tomorrow. Corporate theater tomorrow. We'll see you then goodbye.