Transcript
Live from your ESG air fryer. It's a woke data, Wednesday spectacular here at the ESG Lobster Shack. joined as always by nobody Matt is pretending to be sick today and nobody else wants to hang out with me and today's What do I want to talk about episode of fluffy ESG, tidbits. Tesla's, paid committee. A note from our sponsor and a bonus corporate theater piece. Today's episode is sponsored by skde, your ESG data solution. Let's get to the headline. Okay, let's start the show today with stories, I was looking at but decided against covering in no particular order. Billionaire. Climate activist wins board fight at Australia's AGL energy. The activist is Mike Cannon. Brooks co-founder and co-ceo of atlassian he got four directors on the board could go Mike Goldman Sachs paid over 12 million dollars to bury Partners, claim of sexist culture, the payment went to a former partner, who will alleged troubling Behavior by Bosses the bank settled with a departing partner. Two years ago in a deal that kept secret, her detail account of senior Executives making vulgar and dismissive comments about women. The upper wrongs of the Goldman Sachs were rattled by the remarks. She described in the roster of people allegedly behind them including CEO, David Solomon, diesel the confidential payment is likely among the largest of its kind on Wall Street, where firms use their Deep Pockets to prevent accusations of troubling behavior from becoming public. The partner portrayed a leadership culture, That favors men mistreats women and pays them less, what a bad news coming out of Goldman Sachs in the last few months. Next story I decided not to cover. I read the midnight, email Elon Musk sent Twitter staff, telling them to work long hours at high intensity or quit. So yeah I read it and now you don't have to because I read it the next story I'm not gonna cover. The headline is profoundly disturbing the pr firm for the cop 27. Climate Summit has a long history with big oil Hill and Milton strategies has been sharply. Criticized for what critics say is a long track record of supporting disinformation on behalf of its Big Oil clients. According to Duncan maisel. Campaign director at clean creative. He said there is almost no more inappropriate agency to bring on to lead Communications for a climate Summit. Wow. A peer reviewed study published last year. In the journal climatic change was the first to comprehensively document. The role that PR firms have played in helping the world's most profitable oil and gas companies improve their environmental image and block climate action. What the hell is going on at cop, 27. So, Coca-Cola, Chief sponsor and now this Next story, I'm not covering. Here's the headline companies. Have diversity. Fatigue, I didn't like this one, the demand for change and tangible action remains strong but the will to see them through to meaningful execution has ebbed. Yeah, this one's highly depressing because we're really talking about a demand for change that has been strongest over the past two years. It's already ebbing is terrible. Next story from the ESG news world. I'm not going to cover Tyson Foods CFO. Has an interesting addition to the company's earnings call and apology for his arrest last week that we've covered that here extensively. But now he's apologizing to investors on an earnings call all, so the Tyson CEO defends questioned expertise of new leadership including recently, arrested CFO. Yeah, remember that's the great great, great grandson or whatever of Tyson Foods company founder. of speaking of which out of India, Kotak bank owned by billionaire, Uday kotel Rejects. CEO's son as leader. So technically it's possible to stab nepotism in the back. Finally, The Last Story I'm not going to talk about Stephen schwarzman. He's the chair CEO of co-founder of Blackstone. He says that he is not going to support Trump for a 2024 presidential race. I definitely don't want to talk about any of that. So what do I want to talk about? How about this is the headline? Elon musk's long time. Friend defend his role. Designing the Tesla CEO's 55 billion dollar PayPal package, the lawsuit. Alleges that the Performance Based stock option. Grant was negotiated by the compensation committee and approved by Tesla board members who had conflicts of interest due to personal and professional ties to MUSC including investments in his companies. So, let's talk about the competition committee at Tesla at the time that approved this ridiculously greedy Grant. First and foremost, the longtime friend that article from Fortune is referring to is Ira, Aaron Price. He had this to say he has been as hard-working a CEO as there can be okay. There you go. That's all you need to know. Ira also testified that his friendship with musk played no role in his vote to approve the plan. Okay. So yeah. I mean that really. What more do we need to know, played no role At the time, musk's long time, friend was not only chair of the pay committee test Tesla because also chair of the nominating committee. So he had a considerable amount of power. Next member of the competition committee that approved this ridiculous Grant was Robyn denholm. She's the current chair of Tesla. She had a bunch of things to say all of them, basically the same thought. She said my view is that his focus and attention is important. The time is not as important to me. I'm not concerned about the amount of time that he spends. We didn't talk about time. I'm not concerned about time. I know periods of time where he is sleeping on the factory floor. Okay? We get it Robin. You don't care about time. But too bad, most of the rest of the world does including the creep who is threatening to fire Twitter employees, if they don't work along hours at high intensity, that's right, that's what Elon is now he's that was in his email to Twitter workers that quote, long hours at high intensity must be worked in order to keep your job. So I guess someone Cares about time spent at a job. Just not the current chair of Tesla Robyn denholm. The other two members of the paid committee at the time were Linda Johnson rice and Kathleen. Wilson Thompson Ms. Rice was on the board for less than two years and she's already gone and Wilson Thompson was on the board for less than a year. So they were both pawns. They had actually no say in this matter that's the paid committee that approved his package two Pawns. Someone who doesn't care if the CEO is working full-time and a long time buddy. Hey Elon, I know you're listening to our show. These are some of the reasons Tesla's, ESG score suffers. It's not because woke teenagers are having a sad day. That's not why you got booted out of that ESG index, not because of what teenagers is actually. Because you're governance sucks. Let's talk about the 2019, proxy vote. So it was in 2019 that this PayPal package was put in. And let me tell you a few things about what was going on at the time. First of all, Tesla did not have a 2019 say-on-pay vote because they only vote on pay. Every three years at Tesla. Isn't that convenient? Well crafted to put out that PayPal packaged in an off year? Not only that, but at the time, not all directors were even voted on every year. Only two directors, they only voted on two directors that year. But there was a 2019 Equity incentive plan that was voted on by shareholders in 2019. Officially 33% of shareholders were against, but if you subtract, Elon shares, if you subtract elon's brother, Kimball shares. That's right. Don't forget, Elon musk's brother. Kimball musk is on the board of Tesla along with elon's longtime friend Larry Ellison. If you subtract all their shares than actually, 62% of Tesla shareholders, would have rejected, the 2019 Equity incentive plan that references, Elon musk's terrible and greedy PayPal package. Before we wrap up this story, I wanted to point out some of our own internal data from board saber metrics. We are covering actual influence on boards. So we have Quantified away to represent the actual influence on, on boards. And remember, Tesla is a single share single vote. Company. There's no dominant control Shareholder technically it is democracy but according to our data back in 2018, 2019 Elon Musk controlled over two-thirds of the influence. On the Tesla board, add his longtime friends influence of 5%, his brother's influence of 6% were already at basically 75% of the board is controlled by Elon. So that's the actual that's actually going on a Tesla. And if you want more data like that, reach out to us by our board, saber Matrix data, here's a word from our sponsor. Here's the great Paul Hodgson from ESG. Is one of our ESG Data Solutions. Hello there, Paul Hodgson with the ESG, statistic of the week, you know, in light of the findings by data from board sabermetrics, that Democratic boards that's with a small D. Now, I forget that ad actually outperformed boards that are dominated by one or two outsized personalities. I thought it'd be a good idea to look at what kind of size of board is typical. So we pulled some statistics, for the S&P 500, and there's been very, very little change over the last five years. Basically, the mean, the average has been 10.8 slight uptick in 10.9 in 2022, but the media's been 11 board members right through that time period. And there are very, very few boards with small numbers of directors and I'm assuming that small numbers of directors Probably represents a less Democratic board than a board with a large number of directors. Although there must be exceptions to that as well. You can have, you know, 12 Lackey and one outsized personality as well as you can see from the statistics larger boards, really predominate, even some with more than 12 directors which I'm assuming in most cases is probably Finance. Boards Bank boards tend to be larger than in other Industries. Most of the population is at 10 directors or above which is, that's a big board and hopefully a democratic one. This is Paul Hodgson signing off on S gauge statistic of the week. Thanks for listening and finally, thank you. Paul, that's our sponsor skh, finally. Before we wrap up today, I wanted to play a bonus, corporate theater piece from our talented corporate theater players. For those of you who don't know, we work with a small but dedicated group of writers and voice actors who helped us bring some levity to the ESG headlines. We put these shows out every Tuesday as a podcast and all so run them weekly on a radio station up here in Portland. Maine, I actually just met with a group of teenagers who also want to get involved with our corporate theater. So the corporate theater world is expanding and taking over the world. So just you watch out, I wanted to play this sketch today because the news changes so suddenly that some of these sketches can go absolutely pretty quickly and this one didn't make the cup from this this week so I want to play it. This one is about the verification process at Twitter and also covers the US elections from last week. Mark. Hey, Paul, great to see you. Thanks so much for having this meeting on the zoom call. I mean so early in the morning but I don't know. We just hadn't talked in a while. Yeah. Well ever since I moved to Ohio, we haven't spoken in Forever. How's it going, man? You know, same old Saints. You all vote down there in the old. Oh yesterday. Oh yeah. You. Oh, you bet up here in me and I voted for incumbent Governor, Janet Mills. I haven't checked the results yet, but I heard she got over like 360,000 votes, which is like 55% or something like that. Yeah. So who's your Governor now? What who's your Governor? Well I just said. Miss Mills got 55% of the vote so she's our governor that's unlikely. How so let me see some internet troll from Illinois is now your governor. Heard what when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he changed the verification process for celebrities politicians and VIPs did. Yeah. So instead of going through a verification process, you simply pay eight dollars a month and voila. You get the blue verification check mark in your account. Okay. Trippy, what does this have to do with means Governor? Well that internet troll from Illinois. Yeah. Jeff jorgens something he created a fake account for Janet Mills, but he got in there on Twitter first and well, now technically, he's Janet Mills. Sorry. What that's insane right now. Well, welcome to the 2020s, my friend. I can't be right? No, it's alright. The weekly quintillion just reported. He's already shit. Nine boxes to the blame house. Holy cow. Yeah, no, I'm reading that right now. Sorry pal. But But I don't want to have just Jorgen something be our governor get used to it now. Don't feel so bad in our state. We have the demon fears ago. Why become governor here? And he snagged. Mike Devine on Twitter and subscribe to the eight dollars a month. It doesn't even want the job. He just wanted to see if he could. Now he's doing a job he doesn't want for the next four years. Sorry, grad school. This is amazing. Oh it's weird. I mean as of last week the state of Oklahoma is now technically Warren Buffett. What Missouri has accidentally voted to legalized. Encounters key. Lime pie, and set of marijuana after an executive for a joke, signed up and verified an account simply called weed. That's just weird. It's worse in Arkansas. Marie Callender. Key lime pie is now illegal. Okay, look, this can be forever, right? I mean, how is Elon Musk responded to all this? Well, that's a good question. Let me see if he's tweeted about this. Hmm. What is this? A fake account? What's going on? What's making you asked that? No, this is clearly the official Elon Musk Twitter page. It has a little blue verification more. What is it say? His latest tweet simply says, I'm a big doo doo head who was stupid and has stupid legs in the metaverse? I would Elon even say that about him. Oh wait. Oh yeah, Zuckerberg he's Elon now. That's neither better nor worse, is it? That's business pants for November 16th 2022. This is what it sounds like when Matt pretends to have the flu. Thank you for listening. Please tell 25,000 of your friends to subscribe and download our podcast. We will see you tomorrow because we are dedicated fools to the ESG business news world. We do this show every damn day.