Evening Pulse: Twitter — Now, the Tough Part... Top VW Engineers in the Cross Hairs... A Great Day for Hedge Fund Managers
@Jack. Comparisons to Steve Jobs and Larry Page are obvious — and to Jerry Yang and Mark Pincus perhaps unwanted — but the “Return of the Founder story” is always dramatic. Jack Dorsey, the new permanent Twitter CEO, is also a member of an even smaller club, of chief executives running two companies (Jobs, again, with Pixar, and Elon Musk presently of Tesla and SpaceX). That one of Dorsey’s companies, Square, is only on the IPO road makes his juggling act highly unusual, if not unprecedented. So it’s time to note the difficult choice before Twitter’s board, given that the arguably best candidate came with baggage. Indeed, board member Peter Currie said Dorsey was not even the first choice because that full-time thing was an original job description.
#Quote
“We didn’t get to a different answer until we had interviewed a wide range of candidates and until we had seen Jack on the job.”
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Make It Work: Volkswagen’s probe into the diesel emissions scandal is zeroing in on two senior engineers who, sources tell The Wall Street Journal’s William Boston, “couldn’t deliver as promised a clean diesel engine for the U.S. market.” Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi’s chief engineer, and Wolfgang Hatz, developer of Porsche’s Formula One and Le Mans racing engines, are among the engineers already suspended and are considered “two of the best and brightest engineers in German industry.”
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Take a Walk: The US Supreme Court let stand an appeals court decision that reversed the high-profile insider trading convictions of at least two hedge fund managers and is also likely to make it more difficult to bring such prosecutions. Newly liberated are Todd Newman (ex-Diamondback Capital) and Anthony Chiasson (Level Global Investors), convicted in 2012. A third defendant, Michael Steinberg (ex-SAC Capital) was convicted two years later and is also likely to have his conviction overturned. As synthesized by Bloomberg’s Sheelah Kolhatkar, the higher bar set by the appeals decision is this: “A trader must know that information he receives about a company was leaked in return for some benefit of consequence for trading on it to be a crime.”
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DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman is retiring, effective Oct. 16. Board member Edward Breen will step in as interim CEO. The move comes a scant five months after Kullman battled back an aggressive activist shareholder revolt led by Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management. But the fundamentals are still strained: DuPont lowered its outlook and said it would accelerate a restructuring. Shares in the chemical company — down 27% this year — were up 4% in a very up broad market, and another 5.5% in after-hours trading.
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The New York Times announced it now has one million digital-only subscribers, “far more than any other news organization in the world.”
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BP’s US settlement over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was raised to $20.8 billion. Even at $18.7 billion it was “the largest environmental settlement — and the largest civil settlement with any single entity — in the nation’s history.”
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Mid-Flight Emergency: The co-pilot of a domestic American Airlines flight took over when the pilot became ill and died. AA550, Phoenix to Boston, made an emergency landing in Syracuse, NY where a new flight crew took the airliner to its final destination.
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What you may have missed — and simply must read:
- You've heard about Peeple, the 'Yelp for People'. Here's what its co-founder has to say on the backlash—and why she calls it the 'positivity app' we all need.
- "Sure, women say, Wall Street as an industry markets to us, but it doesn't serve us." — Sallie Krawcheck
- Anne-Marie Slaughter has advice for getting rid of the 'Mad Men workplace'—the assumption that workers have a full-time caregiver at home. Here's how to make the case for more flexibility.
- This is what really happened when Zappos got rid of all its bosses.
- More must-read real talk from Sophia Amoruso: "The older I get, the less confident I become. There’s simply more to lose."
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- Did you sleep in? Check this morning's update: 'Jack Is (Officially) Back, Bankruptcy for American Apparel, Trade Deal Reached Despite Canadian Dairy'
- Twice a day we share the news professionals need to know. Never miss one again: Download the Pulse app.
- And for even more, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
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Cover Art: Will Brennan, Matt Talley and Tyler Bahnmuller take a canoe to investigate their homes following flooding in the area October 5, 2015 in Columbia, South Carolina. The state of South Carolina experienced record rainfall amounts over the weekend which stranded motorists and residents and forced hundreds of evacuations and rescues. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Confidential
9 年ein volkswagen, ein reich, ein führer, ein kaputt !
Consumer Services Professional
9 年John, the action was taken at VW definitely systematic to outsmart US EPA because if VW went back retrofit all the vehicles made for running on diesel, it quite expensive. The economical solution was having Marketing Dept came up a Clean Diesel campaign and the Software Engineers modified the emission program by observing the steps those EPA or Smog Inspectors processing and worked backward from there. When you have more than one departments involve definitely executives involved in the loop too. Therefore, it was a top down decision not rogue engineers.
Director at The Cochabamba Project
9 年Thanks for this. I like the gesture - but I'd like to pick you up on one point: You say; "Lord Stern put forward the compelling economic case for climate change back in 2006. He has since upgraded his views, urging us to reinvest 2% of GDP each year, if we are to deal with the worst impacts of climate change." This bit is correct - except here is a more recent evaluation: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/governments-social-cost-carbon-could-be-increased However, you then say; "Translating this, for each of our businesses, we should be reinvesting at least 2% of annual sales revenue, just on climate change strategies." - I would say that investing in "strategies" is an EXTRA obligation, over and above simply paying for offsetting at the TRUE market cost of $220 a tonne. Investing in Strategies is the extra work you are going to have to do to make sure you don't have to go on paying teh same or more every year.