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Thin Gruel: Tetrahedron, Target, Firing

2024/12/13
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GiveWell: GiveWell是一个认真对待捐款影响的非营利组织,他们通过严格的研究和公开错误来确保捐款产生最大影响,致力于将捐款用于具有最高影响力的慈善事业。 他们已经运作了17年以上,并获得了超过125,000名捐赠者的支持,捐款总额超过20亿美元,据估计这些捐款将拯救超过200,000人的生命。 GiveWell的运作模式是通过严格的研究来评估慈善组织的影响力,并将其研究结果(包括错误)公开,以确保透明度和问责制。 Katie Greifeld: 在ETF行业会议上,她是名人;本期节目将讨论洋葱报收购Infowars的尝试、Target公司因骄傲月营销活动引发的诉讼以及Ken Peterman被解雇后进行内幕交易的情况。 在讨论洋葱报竞购Infowars的过程中,她详细阐述了拍卖过程、出价、Sandy Hook家长对洋葱报的支持、法官推翻初拍结果的决定以及洋葱报在第二次拍卖中的潜在策略。 在讨论Target的骄傲月营销活动时,她概述了美国优先法律集团的证券欺诈诉讼,以及Target在其年度报告中关于ESG和DEI风险因素的披露。 在讨论Ken Peterman的内幕交易指控时,她描述了SEC的指控、Peterman在被解雇后出售股票的行为以及围绕其行为是否构成内幕交易的论点。 Matt Levine: 在某些语境下,他是名人;在Bloomberg加密货币会议上,他也是名人;Sam Bankman-Fried曾是名人,人们为了接近他而互相推搡。 在讨论洋葱报竞购Infowars的过程中,他分析了拍卖程序、出价以及Sandy Hook家长对洋葱报的支持。 在讨论Target的骄傲月营销活动时,他分析了该案件的法律和政治含义,认为它反映了当前政治环境下对ESG和DEI政策的不同立场,并指出任何公司的不良行为,只要导致股价下跌,都可能被指控为证券欺诈。 在讨论Ken Peterman的内幕交易指控时,他分析了Peterman的行为以及SEC的指控,并探讨了其行为是否构成内幕交易。 Ken Peterman: Ken Peterman在被解雇后立即出售公司股票,这被SEC认定为内幕交易。 Peterman在被解雇后,利用其作为公司高管所掌握的未公开信息,在公司股票价格下跌之前将其全部出售,从而避免了大约12,000美元的损失。 SEC指控Peterman的行为构成内幕交易,因为他违反了公司的禁售期规定,并在被解雇后仍利用其内幕信息进行交易。

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Chapters
The Onion's surprising bid for Alex Jones's InfoWars during bankruptcy proceedings is examined. The auction's complexities, involving cash bids, creditor support, and the Sandy Hook parents' influence, are discussed, culminating in a court decision to re-run the auction.
  • The Onion bid on InfoWars assets in bankruptcy.
  • The bid was less than a competing bid but had the support of Sandy Hook parents.
  • A judge ruled the auction process was unfair, necessitating a re-run.

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GiveWell, a nonprofit that researches and recommends giving opportunities, takes the impact of donations seriously. To ensure their recommendations withstand tough scrutiny, GiveWell had their own researchers spend months trying to identify flaws in their past work. They then published their findings, mistakes and all, for any donors to use for their giving. It's this kind of rigor that can help your donation make a big impact on the world. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations

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This is the day it all crashes and burns. Yeah. Hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast. Your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money.

I'm Matt Levine, and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television. I also write a newsletter called ETF IQ. Katie, you're like gracing us with a little bit of your presence between sessions at the big ETF conference, huh? Yeah, you know, we were, well, I was joking. I was joking.

As I walked in 10 minutes late, Matt had been sitting here mic'd up. There's an ETF conference at Bloomberg. It's Thursday when we're recording this. Matt's a celebrity in a lot of contexts. I'm a celebrity in an ETF context. And, you know, walking through an ETF event, it's hard to get anywhere on time.

I feel like this is a challenge and I'm going to have to come back to the ETF event. Yeah. I mean, now you're going to walk upstairs and everyone's going to just stop in their tracks. Bloomberg once had a crypto conference in which I interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried on stage. I remember. A real highlight. But at a Bloomberg crypto conference, I'm like a little bit of a celebrity. And like before this interview, people were coming up to me and being like, I'm a fan. And then after this interview, I walked back to the green room with Sam Bankman-Fried and like,

He was a celebrity. People were pushing each other aside to get to Sam Bankman Freed. This was in better times for him. Certainly levels. Yeah, that's a real time capsule. That happened. Yeah. When was that? It was like summer 2021. I introduced him on stage. I said something like, Sam Bankman Freed probably needs no introduction. He's probably bought most of your companies. This is back between when everything else crashed and when FTX crashed. Yeah, like the Terra Luna stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man. Anyway.

Well, anyway. What are you talking about today, Katie? We're going to talk about The Onion and InfoWars. We're going to talk about Target. And some proof that everything is securities fraud. I described that correctly, right? Sure. Okay. And then we're going to talk about Ken Peterman, who was fired. And then it's over. Right. But did he? Watch this. Yeah.

So The Onion. This was interesting. I haven't checked in on this story in a while, and then you published on it. And I thought that The Onion was for sure buying InfoWars. That's the surface level headline reading that I had done. But turns out, not exactly. Right. So InfoWars, Alex Jones's company that he used to spread various right-wing conspiracy theories, one of which is that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. The parents of the Sandy Hook children who were killed sued him.

and won like a billion dollars of damages which is considerably more money than alex jones and info wars have and so they filed for bankruptcy and you know like kind of that means that the sandy hook parents kind of own his assets kind of but like what it literally means is that the bankruptcy trustee has an auction of the assets which is basically like the info wars like

company and brand and website and stuff. And the highest bidder at the auction wins the assets. And like the money from the bid goes to Alex Jones's creditors, which means mainly the Sandiak families, but there are also some other people who he owes money to either because he borrowed money from them or because they also sued him. And so they had an auction and there were two bidders. And one of them was this thing called First United American Companies. FUAC. FUAC, which is like

Kind of Alex Jones. It's like someone's putting up money for Alex Jones to buy back InfoWars so he can continue running it as InfoWars.

And then the other bidder was The Onion, or its corporate parent, which has the great name Global Tetrahedron LLC. Beautiful. Great name. Like really like The Onion, you know, all throughout the corporate structure, they're committed to comedy. They committed to the bit. Yeah. And so they bid for the assets and they had less cash than FUAC. But what they had was the support of the Sandy Hook parents. Because if you think about the parents, like one thing they want is money.

Another thing they want is for Alex Jones to stop running InfoWars and stop broadcasting conspiracy theories. And then a third thing they want is that I think they liked what The Onion's plans for InfoWars were, which is sort of like running as a satire of this conspiracy site. And also, I think, you know, there was like a teaming up with Everytown for Gun Safety, the Michael Bloomberg-backed initiative. They would use InfoWars in part to sort of work against gun violence. And so the parents liked that plan. And they

they supported it. And so you had this auction in which on the one side was a higher cash bid,

from FUAC. And then the other side was like the bid that was supported by the lion's share of the creditors. And so the bankruptcy trustee said that the onion won and then FUAC went to court to stop it. And the judge said, actually, this was not a fair auction. You have to run the auction again and kind of give it to the highest bidder. So is that what happens now that we have another auction? I think what happens now is we have another auction. And it seems like

The decision was that the bankruptcy trustees procedures weren't good enough. And like, you can have another auction where the onion could win. The way it worked is that the FUAC bid was cash. It was $3.5 million. The onions bid was $1.75 million in cash. And also the parents, the Sandy Hook parents signed a waiver basically saying whatever money

other creditors, other people who Alex Jones had money to, whatever money the other creditors would get from any other bid, they will get $100,000 more from this onion bid. So basically, if the onion puts in $1.75 million, as much as all of that can go to the other creditors, whereas if FUAC puts in $3.5 million,

You know, three quarters of that or something is going to go to the Sandy Hook parents because they have most of the claims in bankruptcy. And so because of that waiver, they could go to the court and say, look, we can guarantee that the other creditors will get more money from our bid than from any other bid. And like these creditors support it. So it's the highest bid, even though it has less money.

Interesting. So what needs to happen in round two of this auction for the Onion to be successful? Do they just simply need more money? Well, so there's a couple of things. One is that like the procedure of the auction got sort of wonky at the end where like it was supposed to be an open auction and it sort of turned to a sealed bid auction. And part of that is because the Onion bid was we will pay $100,000 more than anyone else. So there's not really a point of having multiple rounds of bids.

But you could imagine just structuring the bid again so that they can do a more open auction and then sort of come into the same result. The other possibility is that, you know, a reader suggested this to me. Like if FUAC says this waiver from the parents isn't real, like it doesn't count as real value. Yeah.

And I think the trustee argued and the onion argues, and I think this is clearly true, that this is like a normal way to provide value in bankruptcy. You know, I wrote about credit bids where the creditor who has a mortgage on a house could get that house without paying more cash for it because they can bid the amount of their lien.

Here, these parents have a huge claim in the bankruptcy, and if they wave a portion of their claim, then that provides value to the other creditors. But if you don't like that, then the answer is finance it. The answer is the onion could go out and borrow $2 million from a bank and pay it back. That $2 million will then go to the San Diego parents when they win the auction, and then they could route it back to the onion and then to the bank. If the parents...

want a non-financial benefit from this and like are bidding a portion of their claims, you could probably find a way to like get the bank to put up the money and then have it circle back to the bank. So that might be another thing that happens here.

Do you think that something like that actually would? I mean, how do the bids change, but also like how the auction changes when it's run again? I think that if the auction is run again, it might be more transparent or whatever, but the trustee thinks that the waiver of claims provides a lot of value. And I think he's right. And it's sort of hard to imagine the trustee changing his mind on that. And I don't think the court ruled that he was wrong, but you could imagine something where

the Onion puts up more cash and then gets the cash back so that they have a higher optical cash bid, but like ultimately come to the same place. Well, this will be interesting to follow, but I kind of wish that I just stayed in my ignorant little bubble and only had read the first headline because it seems like really good poetic justice that the Onion with the backing of the parents would buy InfoWars. I still would guess that that's what's going to happen, but I'm not sure. Yeah.

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Let's talk about Target. Do you remember the 2023 Pride marketing event?

From Target? No, I remember solely the controversy about it. I don't remember it either. I also remember the controversy, but only very vaguely. I mean, they had like LGBT pride themed merchandise at like the end of the aisle or something. People got really mad about it. Was this before or after the Bud Light thing? I want to say it was after the Bud Light thing, but I'm not sure. Man. Was it around the same time? It was after the Bud Light. It was after. Man, why do companies keep doing this? It led to a boycott. The stock went down. Yeah.

Target has a lot of problems that aren't related to this, whereas it feels like the Bud Light thing really jeopardized Bud Light's position. Right. The Bud Light thing was like a sort of switch flipped on Bud Light. Yeah. But in any case, securities fraud. So you do something and their stock goes down. Someone's going to sue you for securities fraud. And here what happened is that America First legal group, like a Stephen Miller-backed, like sort of Trump official-backed,

anti-woke, anti-DEI sort of legal entity. Very in vogue right now, it feels like. Very in vogue right now. They sued Target for security fraud. And what they said was that you did this thing. You did this marketing event. You didn't disclose that it would

a customer boycott and your stock went down. And so therefore we were just frauded because we bought the stock not knowing that you were doing this thing that would cause a customer boycott. And then when the stock went down, we lost because of that fraud, which struck me at the time. This is they sued in like August of last year. It struck me as sort of a crazy theory because

It's not like Target was concealing that they were doing a pride marketing event. It was marketing. Right. It was quite public. Yeah. And you might say, well, okay, but they didn't warn investors that this event might lead to a boycott. Right.

But they actually did do that. There's actually a risk factor in their annual report saying that our position or perceived lack of position on environmental, social, and governance, ESG, matters such as sustainability, responsible sourcing, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, DE&I, could harm our reputation. And

could result in consumer boycotts. That's pretty clear. Well, not enough, Matt. That, you know, you're saying our DEI initiatives could like harm our reputation and lead to consumer boycotts. And so what the people suing said is, well, okay, you said that, but you didn't say specifically this 2023 marketing initiative could lead to a consumer boycott. You didn't specifically call out this thing as a problem.

And last week, a judge agreed with them and said, yes, this is not sufficient disclosure. And the case can go forward because Target really might have defrauded shareholders by not telling them about the possibility that there would be a boycott for this marketing initiative. So that's wild. It's pretty wild. Yeah. And you talk about this in the column, but it's...

Yeah.

But I don't think that's really what it means. But they should go overboard. I don't think it's really what it means. I think what it means is like technically this is about disclosure, but it's not really because you can't possibly disclose everything that could go wrong, right? Like you have a risk factor that's like,

What we do about DEI could cause a customer boycott. That's pretty good. That's like a pretty specific disclosure, but it's not specific enough. I think that what it means on its face is that everything is securities fraud. What it means on its face is that if you do something, then the stock price goes down. Doesn't matter what your disclosure said. There's some problem with the disclosure, no matter what. There's always something that you could have said that you didn't say, and you can always get sued. And so...

It's a true case of everything is securities fraud. It's a true case of any bad thing that a company does that causes its stock price to go down can be securities fraud without worrying about what its disclosure said. That's one possible reading. I don't think that's the right reading. I think the right reading is that this is a conservative legal group

picking a place to file this case with a very Republican judge. And this sort of anti-DEI, anti-woke advocacy is on the rise politically. And I've been writing about the idea that everything is securities fraud for a long time. The idea that anything you don't like that a public company does, you can say, well, what they really did is they failed to disclose it. And so it's securities fraud.

And when I started writing about this like a decade ago, it was because the New York Attorney General was suing, I think, ExxonMobil for not disclosing enough about climate change. And basically saying, well, climate change is this like fraught political topic, but we can point to your securities disclosure and say, oh, you didn't like warn investors enough that like climate change was coming and it would be bad for oil companies. And therefore you're committing securities fraud. Ultimately, the New York AG lost that case, but-

That was where this idea started, was this idea that we can use securities laws to pursue substantive political purposes. And what's happening now is the same thing, but from the other side politically. What's happening now is if you don't like DEI initiatives, you can sue and call them securities fraud, and now you can win or your case doesn't get dismissed.

You've seen in the current SEC, like there's been a lot of securities cases about climate disclosure. There's a case that I talk about a lot. This is a long time ago. The SEC sued SeaWorld for mistreating its orcas. I remember. And said that was securities fraud. And it's like all these like things that you can wrap up into securities fraud in the next four years with like

a very Republican judiciary and like a Trump SEC, it's going to be the reverse. It's going to be everything that conservatives don't like is going to be securities fraud.

How does that make you feel? Because that feels like a lot of fodder for the Money Stuff column and potentially the podcast. Does that excite you or do you feel tired? I feel tired. This decision seems wrong and not like traditional securities fraud reasoning. So I think there's going to be a lot of stuff where it's like, yeah, this doesn't really make sense. Yeah. But, you know, fodder for the column.

Totally different from ESG or DEI. But in just talking about the disclosures and like thinking about, you know, how does this change things about, you know, how companies disclose possible risks? It kind of reminded me of that short seller. I think it was Carisdale Capital with that very tongue in cheek letter, which was basically just like, assume we don't hold the stock anymore. I don't know. I could see some parallels there. Yeah, I think it's harder to do in like the corporate risk factor context. Yeah.

You can't be as sarcastic. No, that's too bad. I do wonder at what point it turns in on itself, if it does at all. If you're disclosing every possible risk factor, if the stock does go down because of that risk factor, I mean, could they then get sued? Because, hello, you knew this was going to potentially hurt the stock price and you did it anyway. Or is that silly? Technically, that's not a securities fraud claim. That's a state law fiduciary duty claim. Yeah. Which people...

which people are less excited to bring for various reasons. But no, sure. I mean, even when it's in a risk factor, often what happens is a company says, "If we got hacked, that would be really bad for us." And then once they get hacked, it's like, you have this risk factor saying, "If we get hacked," but you already got hacked and you haven't updated that risk factor. You're deceiving us by saying, "If we get hacked," when you did get hacked. So there's a lot of that where even the existence of the risk factor creates a potential for more liability because you have

you have to update the risk factor to sort of cover what's actually happened already. How should we end this section? My summing up would be, like I've said for 10 years, that every bad thing that a public company does is security fraud.

And like what's happening now is that what counts as a bad thing is shifting, right? Like you might think that like polluting is bad, but the new vibe is that having ESG policies is bad. And so a lot of stuff is going to be treated as bad and is then going to be treated as security fraud because everything is security fraud. I don't know. That was a very good summing up. That was good. It's fine. Everything's subjective. What is bad? I don't know.

GiveWell, a nonprofit that researches and recommends giving opportunities, takes the impact of donations seriously. To ensure their recommendations withstand tough scrutiny, GiveWell had their own researchers spend months trying to identify flaws in their past work. They then published their findings, mistakes and all, for any donors to use for their giving. It's this kind of rigor that can help your donation make a big impact on the world. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations

and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 125,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives. If you've never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donations matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick

podcast and specify where you heard this ad make sure they know that you heard about give well from this podcast you know what's bad no being fired but you know what else i don't want that is super bad is insider trading wow i don't want to be fired i like insider trading oh i mean no i mean i go on i enjoy writing about insider trading i have a soft spot for insider traders

So, incredible SEC case this week. Ken Peterman was the CEO of a pretty small company called ComTech Telecommunications. And the following sequence of events allegedly occurred. One, he got their earnings results a few weeks before they were announced. They were terrible. Two, he got called into a meeting with a lawyer doing an investigation.

his alleged sexual relationship with a subordinate. Not good. And in this meeting, he, one, confessed to that relationship, and two, confessed that he had had someone else watch the mandatory sexual harassment training video for him because he was too busy to do it. He was busy. He was busy doing sexual harassment. Right, right. Probably not. But I read a lot about accounting firm partners or whatever who don't take their

regulatory continuing education requirements, seriously. But if you're doing sexual harassment, you should really watch the sexual harassment video. It's like, you'll learn something. Well, maybe he thought it wasn't, which is also why he should have watched the video. Right. Would have maybe realized the error of his ways. Anyway. Anyway. So that happened at this meeting. Cool. And shortly after the meeting, the board called him and said, we're going to fire you for cause. And then he called his broker and tried to sell all of his stock in the company. Sell it all. Then...

The next day, the company announced that he was fired and the stock fell like 27%. And then like a few days later, they announced the earnings of the stock fell even more. So by selling the stock, he avoided something like $12,000 of losses, which is like, this is a small company. Right, right. Anyway, the SEC says this inside of trading. You read the description of what he was doing.

He was in a blackout period. So the company had a policy saying executives can't trade the stock in the couple of weeks before earnings are announced. Because they worry about exactly what happened, which is that here he knew the earnings before they were public. And he was trying to trade stocks during the earnings. And so he tried to sell stock and his broker was like, aren't you in a blackout period for executives? And he said, I'm not an executive anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. He's not an insider. It's not insider trading. That seems pretty watertight. No, it's not. I'm just kidding. I promise. I promise. But in any case, it's a little unclear what his defense or what his reasoning was. But to me, one, you're not an insider anymore. Not subject to the blackout. By the way, the company told him he was subject to the blackout even after he was fired. And he probably was. But there's an argument. Ah, I didn't know I was subject to a blackout. I had been fired.

But then the other thing is, like, I just think that you should be able to do a little insider trading out of, like, peak. Yeah. He was mad at them. They fired him. Why should he keep owning the stock? We're all entitled to fits of passion where we just sell a lot of stock. Right. It's not that he was... I mean, it probably was. But, like, it maybe wasn't that he was, like, trying to sell the stock before it went down. He was just, like, mad at the company. He didn't want to own the stock anymore. Yeah. For whatever reason. We've all been ticked off before. So would it...

I should be his defensler. Not really. Maybe. Hey, Ken Peterman, if you're listening. But I mean, it's insider trading, whatever. But what if the earnings had been really great and the stock actually went up by 25% after earnings, but he had sold all his stock? Do you think that he would still be in hot water? No, because they only really bring cases where it's like you had material non-public information and like active on it. And here...

In your hypothetical, it wouldn't seem like he was acting on material information because it went the other way. He was just following his emotions. He was following his emotions. Yeah. I don't know, man. Like, you sell the stock like an hour after you get fired. You're not like making a calculation of like... No. Maybe you are. I don't know. I wrote once about the CEO of Ajax, the Dutch soccer club. Yeah. They hired him. And after his job interview, he was like, I'm going to be the CEO. I crushed that. I crushed that. I'm going to be the CEO. Yeah.

I want to own the stock of the company and the CEO. So he went out and bought a bunch of stock and then they rescinded the job offer because they're like, he's insider trading. Ultimately, he got a different job there. They toned down the punishment, but they initially thought it was not okay for him to buy the stock before he was announced as CEO. That feels like thin gruel, but what do I know? I cover ETFs in a newsletter called ETF IQ.

People love it in the ETF world. You're a celebrity. I mention it because we got an email to the podcast mailbag asking why I don't promote the fact that I also have a newsletter. But it just felt, you know. Some emailers to the podcast wish that it was much, much more about ETFs. Others, much less. Some writers to the mailbag wish that we didn't talk about ETFs so much. But thank you for writing it and thank you for reading ETF IQ.

Mailbag. Mailbag. Hey, write in to the podcast. Moneypod at Bloomberg.net. Yeah, the holiday is quickly approaching. We want to do another mailbag episode. Appreciate everyone who's written in so far, but keep them coming.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Levine. And I'm Katie Greifeld. You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com. And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on open interest between 9 to 11 a.m. Eastern. We'd love to hear from you. You can send an email to moneypod at Bloomberg.net. Ask us a question and we might answer it on air. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.

The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Masarakis and Moses Andam. Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples. Brendan Francis Noonan is our executive producer. And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening to The Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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