The Ford family once tightened their belts to protect their company. Today? They’re milking it with generous dividends.
Wall Street Journal columnist Jonathan Weil — the first reporter to question Enron’s finances and a relentless critic of private equity’s “fishy” accounting — has sounded the alarm on Ford’s dividend math.
Weil’s take? Ford’s “adjusted free cash flow” is little more than cash flow before bad stuff. Wall Street has a less charitable term for Ford’s financial legerdemain.
To Toronto Argonauts football fans he was Ulysses ‘Crazy Legs’ Curtis, one of the greatest running backs of his day. To me, he was my junior high gym teacher — the intimidating, muscular man who barked, “You boys are the poorest excuse for the male species I’ve ever met” — and then inspired me to build the discipline and pushup prowess that shaped my life.
Only today did I learn how legendary Curtis truly was.
Mark Zuckerberg spent $110M to wall himself off from his Silicon Valley neighbors. He could have used some of his billions to wall children off from Meta’s chatbots.
Reuters uncovered internal guidelines that allowed bots to flirt with kids and even write racist screeds. Meta’s response? The same rinse-and-repeat PR denial we’ve heard for years.
So far, only rock legend Neil Young has expressed outrage — and bolted from Facebook.
Pension funds. University endowments. Your retirement account. The Wall Street Journal reporter who first exposed Enron warns they could be the next victims of private equity’s “fishy” accounting.
Gulfstreams. $14,000 cappuccino machines. A $96M payday—6,666x the median wage he pays employees—while telling managers to cut costs. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is the poster boy for CEO narcissism. Here’s why investors should care.
My latest Starkman Approved trilogy:
The true value of a McKinsey consultant—spoiler: it’s not their slide decks.
Corporate America doubles down on toxic stock buybacks while the real economy withers.
Delta Air Lines traps passengers in another tarmac debacle—no air, no toilets, no accountability.
Read and rage — at least that’s my intent.
Verizon only wants “high-quality” customers, says its $24 million CEO Hans Vestberg. If that’s the goal, investors should demand the immediate deactivation of Vestberg—and the dead-weight board he chairs.
Mass layoffs. Major data breaches. A disrespected brand. And the architect of one of the worst media deals in recent corporate history.
AT&T CEO John Stankey’s record is a case study in failing upward.
And yet—last week—he told employees they must embrace AT&T’s new performance-based culture.
If you’ve flown recently, rented a car, or stayed in a hotel—you’ve probably been Hertzed.
America’s CEO aristocracy is delusional if it thinks it can keep gorging on obscene compensation while tossing crumbs to the workers who keep their empires afloat.
At the next meeting of the Business Roundtable—that gilded club of corporate royalty—someone might want to include a short history lesson on a woman named Marie Antoinette.