Feb 04 2025 41 mins
Live from a pile of dark chocolate-dipped kittens, it’s an all-new Terrific Tuesday edition of Business Pants. Joined by Analyst-Hole Matt Moscardi! On today's calorie free Double Big Mac called February 4th 2025: the Who Do You Blame? Game!
Our show today is being sponsored by Free Float Analytics, the only platform measuring board power, connections, and performance for FREE.
DAMION1
Who Do You Blame? Game
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf Gets Pay Bump To $31.2 Million
CEO Charlie Scharf: for being greedy. His pay ratio was already an alarming 325:1 last year.
Shareholders: Say on Pay 57% approval in 2021; 73% approval in 2022. Despite policy tweaks which resulted in 92% support in 2023 and 93% in 2024: the song remains the same: the CEO’s pay steadily and magically increases annually: $21M, $25M, $26M, and now $31M
Pay Committee chair Ronald Sargent: why on earth would you ask the former CEO of Staples to control setting the pay of a fellow S&P 500 CEO brother? It’s an immediate conflict of interest.
Female board power: at -19% this is a board that chooses to underpower female leadership. 5 women control an aggregate 20% influence while the top 5 men control 68%
Citi bucks back-to-office trend and embraces hybrid working
The board: 8 of 14 directors are women
The CEO: In 2021, Jane Fraser became Citi’s CEO and the first woman to lead a major U.S. bank
Shareholders: 26% in 2024 supported a SHP requesting a report on the effectiveness of Citi’s policies and practices in respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights in Citi’s existing and proposed financing
Chief Human Resources Officer Sara Wechter: Sara serves on the board of Onex Corporation (relatively rare for CHROs and is not afraid in her Citigroup bio to state that “she has championed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across Citi, leading the firm in exceeding its original 3-year aspirational representation goals set in 2018 for women globally and black talent in the U.S.”
McDonald’s Shamrock Shake returns — and so does Grimace’s uncle
The CEO: Chris Kempczinski’s CEO pay ratio of 1,212:1 proves he doesn’t care what anybody thinks.
The Chair: oh wait, that’s also Chris Kempczinski
The Lead independent Director: Miles White, clearly not independent having served on the board since 2009
The Sustainability & Corporate Responsibility Committee Chair: The Committee that monitors strategies covering food, sourcing, the environment, human rights, community engagement, philanthropy, and DEI is Paul Walsh. A man who sold alcohol (former CEO at Diageo) and is currently the Executive Chair at a company that sells expensive racing cars (McLaren Group).
The CEO: Sam Altman the guy who refused to be fired for his board while subverting the company’s mandate and mission.
The Chair: Bret Taylor, the guy who comes from Twitter/Facebook/Google and is clearly disinterested in what humanity actually needs.
The board: for allowing a CEO who was previously fired partly for lying to the board to sit on the board as a director.
The two women who nearly fired Sam Altman: former OpenAI directors Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley
Target hit with national boycott call over decision to drop DEI initiatives
The CEO: Brian Cornell’s CEO pay ratio of 719:1 proves he doesn’t care about anybody but himself.
The double DEI-hating director: Dmitri Stockton also on the board of Deere
The lead independent director: woman of color Monica Lozano, former CEO of The College Futures Foundation, whose “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is paramount to its vision for advancing a racially, socially, and economically just California where generations of learners can thrive.”
The chair of the committee responsible for Human capital management, specifically “DE&I in support of our business”: Compensation & Human Capital Management Committee chair Monica Lozano
Coca-Cola and Novartis’s CEOs don’t care if ‘ESG’ has become a toxic phrase among some
Novartis CEO Vasant (Vas) Narasimhan: whose ego is so strong and secure he doesn’t even need to serve on the board responsible for his oversight.
Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey: for having the strength to say it:
“If ESG becomes toxic as a phrase, which it basically has in the U.S., it doesn’t matter to me. I’m just going to stop saying ‘ESG.’ But the idea that for my basic product, I want to be water positive, I want to have a circular economy on my packaging, and I want to grow our business with less sugar—you can call it anything you like, but no one with common sense says those are bad ideas.
“My business strategy is constant and clear and centered around the business and the things that consumers care about and that fix societal problems. If people want to attach labels to it, that’s their issue. I’m saying this business will be great if I fix these problems, and it will be good for shareholders and be good for society.”
Coca-Cola’s Lead Independent Director and Corporate Governance and Sustainability Committee chair Maria Elena Lagomasino: maybe some of the woke messaging of Disney movies altered her conscience?
Female board power at Coke: 49% influence
MATT1
Ryder's $2.5M Settlement Brings 4-Year Governance Overhaul: What's Changing for Shareholders - suit alleged Ryder’s management team and board artificially inflated the values of certain Ryder assets and made materially misleading statements regarding those values - suit alleged breach of fiduciary duties, unjust enrichment, and waste of corporate assets. Board has to create a Corporate Risk Steering Committee, company must hire a Chief Compliance Officer, a Management-level “Disclosure Committee”, at least two Audit Committee members must be financial experts, they have to hire a third party to do market research, they have to have a “pricing” team to examine market prices, they have a clawback, and they have a non-retaliation policy.
CEO Robert Sanchez - CEO since 2013, the Man in the Chair
The Audit Committee - a FIVE person audit committee, all of whom they disclosed in 2020 were “financial experts”, all but one of whom was a CEO at another company that made them a “financial expert” (the fifth was an accounting professor), one of whom was the lead independent director who had been there since 2002
Dmitri Stockton! The director who now has the wonderful distinction of having sat on the Deere board the flipped on DEI, the Target board that flipped on DEI, Stanley Black and Decker who was sued for not disclosing executive perks, and the Ryder board who was sued for sucking at being a board - all while he was there!
DEI! Dmitri Stockton is BLACK and Robert Sanchez SOUNDS MEXICAN!
US Steel Flags Trump DEI Order as Risk Factor for Investors
Racist old white guys and tech bros! The order was written, ostensibly, by Stephen Miller, Trump, and Musk, the three horseman of the brownpocolypse, and US Steel is now including Trump’s DEI order as a material risk to the company
The lawyers! The company said in its annual report last year that it aims “to have an engaged and diverse workforce to promote new ideas and innovation, reflect the communities where we operate, and deliver exceptional customer service.” This year, that same sentence omitted a reference to having a “diverse” workforce. That sounds like Duane D. Holloway, chief ethics and compliance officer and general counsel, right?
DEI! Duane Holloway… is BLACK! Mr. Holloway serves on the board of directors of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA), the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, the Allegheny County Parks Foundation and Gilman School. He also serves as Executive Sponsor of U. S. Steel’s SteelPARENTS Employee Resource Group. That all sounds exceedingly woke and DEIish.
The board! US Steel managed to find 8 white males for their 12 person board, 3 white woman, and 1 black woman… so people of color have a whopping 6% influence on the board. It DOES feel risky to talk about them though, right?
Walgreens stock plunges. Its dividend payout changes are to blame
Roz Brewer! She was a DEI hire after all, right? Can’t we pin this on her tenure as fake CEO?
Steffano Pessina! The man with 61% of board influence, the man who fired Roz Brewer, the man who we’ll find out today won re-election despite cratering the company as executive chair!
DEI! Did you see this line in the announcement about the dividend cessation? “In fiscal 2024, WBA scored 100% on the Disability Equality Index for disability inclusion”. SO WOKE.