FRIDAY WRAP: transcript 12/16

SHOW: Spotify, Apple

LIVE from Damion’s lost luggage on his way to Europe for the holidays, it’s a Friday Business Pants round up featuring Ari the data queen and Jessie the money whisperer!? I’m full of BS! On today’s show: Story of the Week, Goodliest of the Week, Assholiest of the Week, and Exhaustingest of the Week!??

Story of the Week (DR):

1. ?Elon owning the narrative JS AB
2. Elon vs. ElonJet
3. Suing a college kid who used public information to track his jet
4. Elon vs. journalists
5. Banned journalists who talked bad about him
6. Elon vs. policies
7. Changed policy after banning journalists so he could ban… more… journalists?
8. Elon vs. paying bills
9. Twitter stops paying rent because it wants to and auctions furniture because it’s trolling
10. Elon and his mom vs. unfunny employees
11. Tweets in middle of meeting with advertisers, allegedly fires employee for not finding it funny - which sounds spurious but at this point, isn’t anything possible?
12. Elon vs. Tesla’s board
13. Sold more than $3bn in stock after saying he wouldn’t sell stock, trolls board
14. Elon vs. his customers
15. Testing whether he’ll get banned from Apple store by forcing users to have their data sold
16. Also, forces users to have their data sold
17. TikTok ban
18. Because China, not because of teen hypersexualization
19. Making its way through Congress with bipartisan support
20. Bill to ban on government devices this week passed Senate
21. ?Trump steaks… water… magazine… ice… wine… superhero NFTs
22. $99!? Sold out!? Will be huge!
23. ESG hearings in Texas
24. In which:
25. “Capitalism is the foundation of American exceptionalism”
26. “ESG is tearing America down”
27. “China and Saudi Arabia don’t care about the ESG score”
28. Two of the largest asset managers in the world had to explain that they want to make money

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. ?World’s first carbon border tax lands in Europe MM AB
2. A preliminary agreement was reached in Europe this week to impose a carbon tax on imported goods… “the move is intended to help EU industries avoid being undercut by cheaper goods made in countries with weaker greenhouse gas emission rules.”
3. How it works: companies importing products like cement, steel, iron, fertilizer would be required to buy certificates to cover ALL the CO2 emissions associated with the products. These certificates must cover production and transportation emissions, but it also has to cover indirect emissions, aka the carbon pollution from the electricity used to manufacture the goods! Goods like aluminum use HUGE amounts of electricity to produce, and this is where the bulk of their overall emissions comes from.
4. How the world is reacting: People are pissed. US manufacturers are worried the plan will make it harder for them to export goods to the EU; high-emitting developing countries are frustrated. The UK and Canada are considering implementing their own taxes.
5. ?HSBC to stop funding new oil and gas fields as part of policy overhaul JS
6. HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, is saying no to new fossil fuel investments and is requiring additional information from energy clients over their plans to cut carbon emissions, assessing their plans annually. Their focus is to help companies overhaul their businesses and drive development of cleaner energy sources.
7. MacKenzie Scott reveals details of her $14bn in donations to 1,600 non-profits (Forbes net worth estimate $27B)
8. If you’re gonna be a billionaire, be like MacKenzie Scott.
9. On Wednesday, MacKenzie Scott revealed the website Yield Giving, which not only goes into detail about who she has donated to, but will also allow organizations to submit themselves as candidates for her philanthropy.
10. Something important to her team when evaluating organizations - “experienced leadership representative of the community served”
11. She doesn’t do interviews about her donations, she doesn’t whine that giving away money is so hard (like her ex husband). She just does it.?

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. ?Blackrock, State Street, and ISS AB JS
2. Texas subpoenaed you, and who did you send?
3. Dalia Blass, Lori Heinel, and Lorraine Kelly
4. THREE WOMEN to sit in front of 6 white Texas dudes and get yelled at about how ESG is a woke mind virus destroying Texan jobs by giving the sun a job
5. ?Every writer who wrote a story about Elon
6. You know, if you stop writing about that idiot we won’t pay attention
7. This is Trump playbook - if they’re talking about you, you’re winning
8. The guy who wrote this: The woke diversity industry is now completely out of control
9. The “diversity industry”
10. Look at the Twitter account of any major corporation. “The pronouns of this bank are she/them, and if you’ve ever retweeted JK Rowling we’ll cancel your debit card.”
11. Clearly, then, there’s no point trying to fight the diversity industry’s unstoppable rise. In fact, perhaps we should encourage our children to seek work in it, too. As the economy dwindles, it’s the one industry that’s sure to keep growing, and to offer our children decent pay and job security. Because, in both the public and private sectors, there will always be exciting new progressive bandwagons for organisations to make a big show of leaping aboard.
12. Populist math time!
13. The FTSE 250 - the largest 250 public companies in the UK - reported a whopping 10% of their directors were ethnic minorities
14. The average board is 35% female, compared to 51% of the population, and they’re more likely to have a higher education degree
15. Women make 82c on the pound!? Congrats diversity industry!
16. A massive 20% of UK companies have boards where women have as much influence as they have bodies

Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):

1. ?Greenwashing and believing you’re going to get away with it when you’re the largest retailer in the world MM JS
2. Amazon made the claim that it reduced its use of single-use plastic this past year, across its network
3. A report by environmental group Oceana has found that plastic waste from Amazon packages went up by 18% last year
4. For years, the advocacy organization has been pushing the company to release more data around its plastic footprint.? That idea was put up for a vote two times at Amazon’s annual shareholders meetings during the past two years. The last vote, held in May, got support from 48% of shareholders.
5. Amazon disclosed in a blog post on Tuesday, two days before Oceana’s report came out, that? it used about 214 million pounds of single-use plastic packaging to ship orders to customers in 2021 — less than one-third the amount Oceana calculated. Amazon did not disclose if its overall plastic footprint grew between 2020 and 2021, when it was seeing a boom in sales due to the pandemic.
6. No accountability within leadership at Amazon…so greenwashing it is!
7. ?Pure and deadly greed: Lawmakers slam Pfizer’s 400% price hike on COVID shots
8. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Senator-elect Peter Welch (D-Vt.) sent a scathing letter to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla this week over the company's plan to increase the price of its COVID-19 vaccines by 400 percent next year when it enters the commercial market.
9. In October, Pfizer revealed plans to sell its COVID-19 vaccine for somewhere between $110 and $130 next year. Most recently, the US government paid only about $30 per dose.
10. Warren and Welch called Pfizer's price hike "pure and deadly greed" and accused the company of "unseemly profiteering." They noted that before Pfizer reaped billions in profits during the pandemic, it benefited from federal support, including building its vaccine from foundational research conducted at the National Institutes of Health, plus receiving a $1.95 billion advance-purchase agreement via the government's Operation Warp Speed.
11. The worth of a CEO has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978 AB
12. 399 times above a typical worker’s pay
13. The EPI stated exactly what I was thinking when they commented that this increase far exceeds “the growth in productivity, profits or stock market values in that period,”
14. Only a small proportion of CEO bonuses are allocated to ESG metrics and very few long-term incentive plans contain any ESG targets
15. Dripping in injustice!!!!

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Me, for sitting in the grimy Logan airport waiting room at Gate E12 for my flight that is delayed because it invades Elon Musk’s privacy
2. AB: MacKenzie Scott, again.
3. MM: Colonizers!? France beat Morocco!
4. JS: DAMION because he’s literally on vacation for three weeks

Predictions

1. DR: I will not catch COVID on my trip
2. AB: The journalists will be reinstated. RIGHT? They gotta be. But the jet tracking is gone for ever, bye kid.
3. MM: Elon Kid ends up in jail for longer than Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, because JUSTICE AND… France repeats as World Cup Champion, because JUSTICE!
4. JS:?