NEO turnover, Yaccarino sexually harassed by xAI, Dollar Tree’s buyback, and Ackman’s tennis career

Story of the Week (DR):

1. NEO turnover week MM

1. Apple CFO and COO resign, raising questions about CEO Tim Cook's future

1. Apple CEO succession plan blown open as most obvious candidate to step down

2. Chief Operating Officer (COO) Jeff Williams, 62, will retire at the end of this year. Following the retirement of former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Luca Maestri, 61, last year, the departure of these 'key figures in growth' seems to signal a significant generational shift within Apple.

3. Meet Apple’s next COO Sahib Khan, a 30-year veteran who will oversee the iPhone maker’s supply chain amid the ‘Trump tariff black cloud’

2. Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino quits after Grok AI praises Hitler

3. Wendy's CEO Kirk Tanner Leaving Burger Giant for Hershey

1. Is this another Peltz failure? Tanner has been CEO of Wendy’s since only February 2024

1. Trian Fund Management controls two board seats:

1. Peter May (29%): director since 1993; former Wendy’s executive; Founding Partner of Trian; chair of Capital and Investment committee, chair of Technology Committee, member of Compensation Committee, member of Corporate Social Responsibility committee, and member of Executive committee.

2. Matthew Peltz (31%): son of Nelson; Partner of Trian; chair of Corporate Social Responsibility committee, member of Capital and Investment committee, member of Technology Committee, and member of Executive committee.

1. Matthew resigned in same 8-k mentioning the CEO’s departure and will be replaced by his brother Bradley Peltz; drafted by the Ottawa Senators and played in the Senators’ organization from September 2012 to January 2013.

2. Always my favorite line: “There are no arrangements or understandings between Mr. B. Peltz and any other persons pursuant to which Mr. B. Peltz was selected as a director.”

3. His photo on website:

3. leaving Tanner (8%) with a small voice

1. Golden hello at Hershey: (i) $7M RSU Award (ii) $4M PSU Award, (iii) an additional $1.2M Pro-Rata 2025 RSU Award, and (iv) an additional $2.2M Pro-Rata 2025 RSU Award

2. Wendy’s: salary $1M; 175% annual target; $6M annual equity target

3. Hershey: $1.25M/180%/$9M

4. Also Kristin Dolan, James Dolan wife

5. Hershey not much different: controlled by Hershey Trust and several Hershey Trust directors

2. Interim CEO is CFO Ken Cook, who started in December 2024

2. Tesla announces Nov. annual meeting under pressure from shareholders, but may still be skirting law

1. Elon Musk’s Tesla finally sets a shareholder meeting date amid doubts about his long-denied $56 billion pay package

2. The exciting Item 5.08 (which I never see): “The board of directors (the “Board”) of Tesla, Inc. (“Tesla”) has designated November 6, 2025 as the date of Tesla’s 2025 annual meeting of shareholders (the “2025 Annual Meeting”).”

3. T-Mobile follows orders from Trump FCC, ends DEI to get two mergers approved

1. "As T-Mobile indicated earlier this year, we recognize that the legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI under federal law has changed and we remain fully committed to ensuring that T-Mobile does not have any policies or practices that enable invidious discrimination, whether in fulfillment of DEI or any other purpose," T-Mobile General Counsel Mark Nelson wrote in a July 8 letter that was posted to the Federal Communications Commission's filings website yesterday. "We have conducted a comprehensive review of T-Mobile's policies, programs, and activities, and pursuant to this review, T-Mobile is ending its DEI-related policies as described below, not just in name, but in substance."

2. CEO Mike Sievert: CNN Business recognized Mike as “CEO of the Year” in 2022, and Yale honored him in 2024 with its “Legend in Leadership Award,” in part due to the impact of these initiatives.

4. UPS Drivers Are Battling Deadly Heat—Without A.C. in Their Trucks

1. Why is the company dragging its heels on updating the vehicles, as the new union contract requires?

2. As part of the contract the union negotiated with UPS in 2023, the company is now required to provide workers with several protections against the kind of extreme heat many of them are facing across the U.S. right now. Those include readily available clean water and ice, as well as access to “cool zones” and the right to take and extend breaks when they feel overheated. The contract further mandated UPS to install fans in the largely non-air-conditioned warehouses where packages are sorted and loaded, and in the front of vehicles. Delivery trucks have also been outfitted with heat exhaust shields and vents. UPS Teamsters, though, are still waiting on some of these historic protections. 

3. UPS is required to equip its fleet with at least 28,000 new air-conditioned delivery trucks by the time the current contract expires in 2028; toward that end, all new vans UPS purchases after January 1, 2024, are supposed to have air conditioning. As of last summer, CNN reported, it hadn’t bought any. UPS Brand Management Representative Becca Hunnicut did not directly answer my questions about whether UPS has purchased any new delivery vehicles equipped with air conditioning since the beginning of 2024 and if any of its delivery trucks currently have air conditioning. She wrote over email that the company is “installing air conditioning in all new delivery vehicles we buy and adding them as quickly as possible,” adding that UPS does not “publicly share the number of vehicles we purchase” and that it is “prioritizing deployment in the hottest regions.”

Goodliest of the Week (MM/DR):

1. DR: ‘Prevention is better than remedy’: majority of investors say governance gaps attract activists, research shows MM DR

1. 84 percent of investors polled, who hail from North America, Europe (including the UK) and Asia, said that poor governance was the main driver of activist investor attention.

2. Investors also largely (71 percent) favor activism targeting the board on governance and management change versus operational (10 percent), balance sheet (3 percent) or M&A activism (3 percent)

2. MM: Tesla announces Nov. annual meeting under pressure from shareholders, but may still be skirting law

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. Democracy

1. 73% of votes cast in alternative democracy were for directors in the US

2. 0.01% of directors up for a vote were voted out - incumbency rules

3. We know governance in corporations isn’t working, and it’s the primary driver of activism:  ‘Prevention is better than remedy’: majority of investors say governance gaps attract activists, research shows

1. Governance proponents were the only winners in the shareholder proposal space with an 18% win rate

4. We know money doesn’t care nearly as much about performance as it cares about power status quo:

1. Vote Gap - directors batting .333 or lower on TSR vs. average vote at the company

1. Average vote gap was actually +1.3% - bottom directors outperformed average vote at the companies

5. We know that only 22% of US directors have “merit”, but we know that more than 1 in 4 directors are connected to each other through other boards and non profits - including the CEO

6. So we should all fucking lose our minds when…

1. New York’s Financial Crowd Rushes to Build Anti-Mamdani War Chest - no more buying elections

2. Jamie Dimon criticizes Zohran Mamdani as 'Marxist,' blasts Democrats' DEI push: 'Big hearts and little brain' - shut your fat mouth

2. Advertisers

1. Your ads are now next to AI for middle school boys

2. Grok praises Hitler, gives credit to Musk for removing “woke filters”

1. Grok's harmful outputs come at a time when advertisers have just begun returning to X, after X first sued advocacy groups publishing reports of hate speech on the platform, then sued advertiser groups who boycotted the platform allegedly partly due to those reports. Most recently, X's plan to sue firms that don't buy ads has seemed to pay off, while the Federal Trade Commission has moved to stop advertising boycotts, which may help X avoid losing revenue no matter what Grok is trained to say.

3. Musk says Grok chatbot was 'manipulated' into praising Hitler

1. Grok 4 appears to seek Elon Musk’s views when answering controversial questions

4. No more hedging “well, he is a brilliant businessman and innovator” - Elon Musk is a fucking nightmare, antisemite, misogynist pig baby.

5. We don’t say “Well, Hitler was a brilliant dictator, but you know, Holocaust.”  Musk is pure shitbird.  

3. Dollar Tree DR

1. NEW RULE: if your CEO pay ratio is more than 5:1, the Aristotle rule, no fucking share buybacks

2. Share Buyback Program Declared by Dollar Tree (NASDAQ:DLTR) Board of Directors

1. our median employee in fiscal 2024 was a parttime hourly store associate located in the United States.

2. Out of a total population of 209,517 employees, 140,001 were part-time employees and 5,892 were either temporary or seasonal workers.

3. Mr. Creedon’s total annual compensation for purposes of the pay ratio was $9,246,835

4. The median employee’s total annual compensation for fiscal 2024 was $15,602, resulting in an estimated pay ratio of 592:1.

3. Creedon effectively made is median employee’s salary 14 hours into his first 24 hours of the year

4. The board approved a buyback of $2.5 billion, with a “B”, equal to roughly 11.5% of outstanding shares

5. The annual total paid to part time employees is $2.18 billion - they took a full year of 140,000 people’s pay and bought their own stock with it to grease investors

6. According to the internet, a Dollar Tree cashier makes on average $10/hour - you could easy give them $15 and pay for it for TWO YEARS without needing to make a dollar if you can afford these buybacks

7. And Bill Ackman is busy complaining why a labor focused socialist democrat won NYC mayor…  

Headliniest of the Week

1. DR: TVA board set to be all-male, all-white

1. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump nominated four white men to join the three white men he left on the board after firing the only two female directors.

2. MM: Barbie Launches Doll With Type 1 Diabetes

3. MM: How Starbucks’ Founder Uses the ‘Two Chairs Rule’ to Guide Every Leadership Decision

1. “Every decision that we tried to make with two chairs metaphorically sitting in the room was designed to ask ourselves during the debate, is this decision going to exceed the expectations of our people and our customers and make them proud?” Schultz said. “And if the answer was no, we shouldn’t do it.”

2. Not mentioned were the chairs of “CEO” and “Chair of Board” a total of three times

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Kirk Tanner, more chocolate, less disgusting grease, less Peltz, more diversity in leadership, and zero nepotism (LD is woman; 3 Hershey Trust board members are Asian woman and two lack men)

2. MM: Tennis, the great billionaire equalizer. ‘Biggest joke I’ve ever watched in professional tennis’: Swift backlash after billionaire Bill Ackman’s pro debut

Predictions

1. DR: New Wendy’s director Brad Peltz gets caught watching hockey during board meetings, still gets the support of 99.3% of shareholders

MM: Elon Musk Obtains Permit to Spew Pollution - isn’t this the greatest future money maker for the Trump administration?  Pay for a permit to do heinous shit?  PREDICTION: Trump begins issuing permits, with starting cost of $1m, for oil spills, pollution, hate speech, deforestation, and using forced labor (kids or immigrants are both covered, obviously).