The Week in Cheek: business news that won't put a Morningstar curse on you

The biggest business news story this week was the abrupt resignation of CEO John Stumpf from Wells Fargo, the victim of an epic Elizabeth Warren takedown and the Morningstar curse. Stumpf won Morningstar's 2015 CEO of the Year award. Of the five most recent CEO winners of Morningstar's prize, only one still has a job.

“We do not give any formal preference to CEOs that are expected to depart soon.” ~ A Morningstar spokesperson assures 2016 CEO of the Year nominees that it's just a coincidence

Mr Stumpf will take $120 million into a gold-plated retirement unlike Ashley, a Wells Fargo employee featured in a recent NPR Planet Money podcast who was fired from her job because she didn't meet the unrealistic targets that were set for her. Mr Stumpf had to sit passively and be a chief executive pi?ata to collect his millions, but Ashley who worked at the San Francisco branch directly below Stumpf's office was forced to “Dial for Dollars” immediately after a bank robbery with police milling about and the stench of the foiled bank robber's poop-soiled pants still in the air. After she was fired she discovered that Wells Fargo had written her up on a U5 document, a report card shared among bankers that read...

Failure to perform job duties.

Wells Fargo made good on its threat to make it hard for Ashley to find work again.

“It's like having a black cloud that's kind of looming behind you. And I'm always trying to get in front of the cloud, out of the cloud, into the sunshine, but it's always there.” ~ Ashley can never forget her time at Wells Fargo

Tim Sloan performed his job duties so well that on Wednesday he became John Stumpf's replacement. Mr Sloan is a lot like Mr Stumpf. They both come from the Midwest, have long careers at Wells Fargo and banker tans but shockingly, Stumpf plays bridge whereas Sloan plays golf. Tim Sloan comes from the unblemished corporate and investment banking side of the business where he kept a paper crown on his desk, the 2014 reward for advising Burger King to marry Tim Hortons and move to Canada where they could live together as a same-tax couple. Most recently, Tim Sloan is the fixer who told Carrie Tolsteldt (the executive who oversaw fraudulent operations at the bank) that he had a special solution for her: retire now, forfeit $19 million in compensation and say you always wanted to return to Nebraska.

Don't expect Tim to rock the stagecoach, but he will give it a fresh coat of paint and a paper crown.

Quote of the Week:

“We're only limited by our sense of urgency. Life is short. Every day matters.” ~ Always the contrarian, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey uses the brevity of life argument to try to get his employees to work harder

This week Theranos, the blood-testing company with the name that puts therapy before diagnosis, became Monty Python's latest Black Knight. With each fresh dismemberment and accompanying reputational hemorrhage, the company insists that it's just a flesh wound. Monday Partner Fund Management LP, a San Francisco-based hedge fund, announced it was suing Theranos for saying that it had “proprietary technologies that worked” to attract the fund's $96.1 million investment in the bloody startup.

“ I am invincible!” ~ Theranos responds to Partner Fund Management's investor lawsuit

Samsung thought its Galaxy Note 7 was invincible until it blew up was replaced and blew up again. Until recently, phones blowing up was something that only happened in a hip hop song. The company announced this week that it would kill the invincible product, a worst-case scenario move that will cost Samsung billions of dollars in profit. On the bright side, Samsung is getting a ton of free advertising out of the debacle.

As of noon Saturday October 14, the Federal Aviation Administration has added the Note 7 to the no-fly list, alerting us all to the dangers of concentrated power.

Briefly:

• Apparently Soylent Bars, the product heralded as the end of food, is the beginning of uncontrollable diarrhea.
• Hyperloop One, the Quentin Tarantino startup where everybody is suing each other, has managed to get $50 million in fresh funding, a former Uber CFO, a sultan and a Russian oligarch. How? Because the hyperloop is Elon Musk's brainchild and nobody remembers what happened last summer.

• Snap hired Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs for its hotly anticipated March 2017 IPO estimated to be valued at $25 billion, but JP Morgan, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Allen & Co can come along too because investment bankers love to party with startups in cool glasses. In 2016 so far, 19 tech companies have gone public at a collective value of only $3.3 billion.
• Verizon wants to renegotiate its $4.8 billion purchase of Yahoo because apparently something material has happened that was not disclosed in the original deal.

And finally, from the "when you're a coder everything looks like code" file, two billionaires (one of which may be Elon Musk) have secretly hired scientists to work on breaking out of the simulation in which Bank of America says there's a 50-50 chance we're all trapped. Neither billionaire asked the rest of us if we want to escape from this simulation and into something potentially much worse with orange creatures and locker-room talk and beauty pageants. This disruption thing has gone a bit too far.

Hope you have a real nice weekend simulation.

Recommended Reading/Viewing/Listening

A New Yorker profile of Sam Altman.

XXX-rated billionaire Gulfstream jet porn from Vanity Fair.

Leonard Cohen, the songwriter Bob Dylan said was number one.

The latest on Elon Musk from his biographer Ashlee Vance.

Is it possible to get us to put down our wireless mobile devices? Tristan Harris thinks so.

Should you buy your mattress online?

Charlie Rose interviews "Sophia" and she's a whole bot of fun. You can even see the wheels turning.

And finally, a carpet f-bombing of startups.