Have executives ever seemed as bland as they do these days? C.E.O.s sit through media trainings to learn how to talk on TV. Public-relations reps accompany them on their meetings with reporters, ready to interrupt if ever their bosses utter an impolitic syllable. Even executives’ tweets read like the flattest of advertising: “We have begun manufacturing the Mac Pro in Austin,” Tim Cook recently wrote. “It’s the most powerful Mac ever.” Thank goodness, then, for the investors, activists, commentators—and, yes, the occasional executive—who are still willing to throw down. In 2013, they brought us several old-fashioned brawls over business and economics, full of mean insults and hurt feelings. Here are some of the best.
Bill Ackman vs. Herbalife: Late last year, Ackman, the hedge-fund investor, described the nutrition company Herbalife as a pyramid scheme, and made a billion-dollar bet against it. Matters got worse this year, when other investors started to take sides. First, Daniel Loeb, of Third Point, described Ackman’s notion as “preposterous.” Then, Carl Icahn got personal: Ackman, he said, was a “crybaby.” Herbalife’s stock price plummeted right after Ackman’s accusations last year, but quickly recovered—and since the beginning of 2013, it has more than doubled. Still, in November, Ackman vowed to take his battle “to the end of the earth.”
Winner: Herbalife.
John M. Broder vs. Elon Musk: In February, John M. Broder of the Times described an almost ridiculously disastrous test drive of Tesla’s Model S sedan. How disastrous? It ended, Broder wrote, with the car shutting itself down and needing a tow. Elon Musk, Tesla’s C.E.O., was displeased—but not because his car had just failed. He believed Broder “did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running,” he wrote in a blog post. He went on, sounding a little like a jilted lover, “We were played for a fool.” Broder defended himself vigorously. Later, the Times’ public editor weighed in more measuredly. “I am convinced that he took on the test drive in good faith, and told the story as he experienced it,” she wrote. “Did he use good judgment along the way? Not especially.”
Winner: readers.
@rupertmurdoch vs. The World: Days after Murdoch, the News Corp. C.E.O., joined Twitter in late 2011, Max Read lamented on Gawker about the Twitter account, “Boy, is it boring and terrible.” Read had a point: One early tweet read, grandfatherishly, “Back to work tomorrow. Enough idling!” But when it comes to a penchant for provocation, @rupertmurdoch has, over the past two years, caught up with its namesake. Some of the best this year, in no particular order: “Watch new Merkel govt take mighty Germany into gentle decline.” “Congratulations to new Twitter director. Let’s hope she does not repeat Nokia accomplishment!” “BBC massive taxpayer funded mouthpiece for tiny circulation leftist Guardian.” “How did fat lady who fell thru street get to 400 lbs? Welfare, stamps, etc? Then leave us all with 20yrs immense health bills.” And, of course, this cryptic gem: ““Please expose Eric Schmidt, Google ” etc. Just wait!” Oh, we’re waiting.
Winner: Twitter.
Jagdish Bhagwati vs. Amartya Sen: The decline of India’s rupee this year reignited a long-running debate over what’s behind its economic troubles: too much privatization and liberalization of Indian industries, or not enough. Two books released this year captured the tension between those points of view: “Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries,” by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, and “An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions,” by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. The books might have coexisted quietly, if uncomfortably, if Bhagwati and Panagariya hadn’t written to The Economist, accusing Sen of only paying “lip service” to the importance of economic growth; Sen, in a reply, shot back that this was an “outrageous distortion:” Economic growth is very important, he wrote, but “has to be combined with devoting resources to remove illiteracy, ill health, undernutrition and other deprivations.” In November, Pankaj Mishra laid out the arguments in a piece in The New York Review of Books; for those keeping score at home, he seemed to come out on the side of Drèze and Sen.
Winner: India.
Eric Schneiderman vs. Donald Trump: Schneiderman, the New York State Attorney General, fired the first shot in this fight, when he sued Trump University for alleged fraud. But Trump fired the second, third, fourth, and fifth shots, and he’s still firing. Early on, he called Schneiderman a “political hack” and a “lightweight.” Trump also questioned the timing of the lawsuit, noting that it came after the Attorney General met with President Obama (another frequent Trump target). The Attorney General was, at first, circumspect: Trump’s criticism, he said, was “just an effort to distract from the substance of the case.” But more recently, Schneiderman has fired some deadly shots of his own: In a piece in the January, 2014, issue of Vanity Fair—“Big Hair on Campus,” by William D. Cohan—he said, “I assure you I have many more important things to talk to the President about than the fact that we busted this penny-ante fraud… [Trump] seems to be the kind of person who goes to the Super Bowl and thinks the people in the huddle are talking about him.”
Winner: Schneiderman.
Gay-rights activists vs. Sponsors of the Sochi Games: In June, Russia passed a controversial law that bans “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships to minors”—opening up the possibility of criminalizing any talk of sexual orientation or gay rights. With the Olympics set to open in Sochi, Russia, in February, gay-rights activists targeted the Sochi sponsors—Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, and Samsung, among others—urging them to boycott the Olympics, or at least to take a strong position against the Russian law. In October, an organization called All Out circled Coke’s headquarters with trucks towing twenty-two-foot billboards that called for the company to ask for a repeal of the propaganda law. (“DON’T STAY BOTTLED UP,” one of them exhorted.) The gay-rights activist Masha Gessen suggested to Richard Socarides that Coca-Cola might try a more creative response: “put a rainbow on every Olympic Coke can.”
Winner: Pretty much no one.
The Pope vs. Rush Limbaugh: As they say at Mass, Lord have mercy. After Pope Francis issued his first apostolic exhortation, in which he lamented that global wealth is unevenly distributed, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative commentator, had his own lament to offer: “This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope,” he said on his radio show in November. Finally, the Pope was forced, in an interview with an Italian publication, to clarify his position on Marxism: “The Marxist ideology is wrong. But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.” But he couldn’t help but reiterate his critique of “trickle-down theories” of economic growth: “There was a promise that the glass would overflow whenever it was full, and the poor would benefit. Instead, the glass magically got bigger whenever it filled up, and nothing ever spilled over for the poor.”
Winner: The Vatican.
Photograph by Drew Angerer/Bloomberg via Getty.
Vauhini Vara
from Currency http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/12/the-seven-best-business-fights-of-2013.html
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