fortune--2020-08-10--Apple CEO Tim Cook is now a billionaire

Apple CEO Tim Cook is now a billionaire

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Few on Wall Street thought Tim Cook could ever match Steve Jobs.
Well.
Nine years after Jobs stepped down and thrust Cook to the top of Apple, the company is more valuable than ever — and so is Cook.
Apple’s share price rose almost 5% last week, leaving the company Jobs co-founded 44 years ago in his parents’ California home on the cusp of stock-market milestone: a market value of nearly $2 trillion.
It was valued at about $350 billion when Jobs died. Cook, meantime, has joined one of the most elite clubs for CEOs who didn’t actually found the companies they run: his net worth has eclipsed $1 billion, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Cook’s net worth estimate is based on an analysis of regulatory filings and applying the market performance of a typical wealthy investor to his proceeds from share sales. Cook, 59, said in 2015 that he plans to give most of his fortune away and has already gifted million of dollars worth of Apple shares. His wealth could be lower if he’s made other undisclosed charitable gifts.
Josh Rosenstock, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment.
“This tech cycle has been way bigger and longer than I thought,” said Hussein Kanji, a partner at venture capital firm Hoxton Ventures who expressed caution about Apple’s long-term outlook after Jobs left the company. “Out of all these stocks, Apple has become the greatest cash generation machine in history.”
FAANG stocks
Apple’s market value and Cook’s riches reflect the rise of the FAANG stocks, a phrase that didn’t even exist in the Jobs era. It also comes as Cook and his fellow Big Tech CEOs — Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc., Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc. and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook Inc. — face antitrust investigations into what their critics characterize as monopolistic powers.
While Bezos and Zuckerberg have huge stakes in the companies they founded, Cook’s path to the 10-figure-club was more incremental. The vast majority of his estimated wealth comes from equity awards he’s received since joining Apple in 1998, where he has drawn plaudits for mastering the company’s complex supply chain.
He got a massive award of restricted shares on his first day as CEO. The equity has paid out in annual increments, with part of them contingent on Apple’s stock outperforming at least two-thirds of firms in the S&P 500. Barring a sudden drop in Apple’s stock price, Cook is poised to receive his ninth payout from the award, consisting of 560,000 shares, later this month.
Around half of those will likely be withheld for taxes but the remainder should boost Cook’s fortune by another $100 million. He currently owns 847,969 shares directly, or about 0.02% of Apple shares, worth around $375 million. Proceeds from previous share sales, dividends and other compensation add another $650 million to his net worth, according to calculations by Bloomberg.
Mammoth positions
Cook’s stake is small compared with the mammoth positions founders like Bezos, Zuckerberg and Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk control at their respective companies. Apple shares are distributed widely among different investors and executives, so the world’s most valuable company has minted very few billionaires among its employees.
When Jobs stepped down in August 2011 and died soon after, Cook had already filled in as interim CEO on several occasions. But investors and analysts were concerned that Apple wouldn’t be able to innovate as much as it did in the past.
While Apple over the past decade hasn’t revealed a new product as groundbreaking as the iPhone, the company still has thrived. Cook has overseen the development of devices like the iPhone X and Apple Watch, new services like Apple Music, and research on new frontiers like self-driving cars and augmented-reality glasses.
Even the pandemic, which has hammered many other parts of the economy, has been a boon to Apple and other big tech companies as people have gotten even more reliant on their products and services.
Their recent success stands in contrast to the economic upheaval caused by the coronavirus: a growing string of bankruptcies, tens of millions unemployed and massive public deficits.
When Apple reported results recently, Cook acknowledged the hardship facing legions of families and businesses.
“We do not have a zero-sum approach to prosperity,” he said on a conference call. “Especially in times like this, we are focused on growing the pie, making sure our success isn’t just our success.”


fortune--2020-08-10--Robinhood will no longer share stock ‘popularity data’ with sites like Robintrack

When does the extra $ 400 unemployment benefit start ?
Everything to know about Trump ’ s executive order

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The stock-trading app Robinhood quietly turned off a feature on Friday that allowed anyone to see which companies’ shares were surging in popularity—a feature that helped fuel recent improbable rallies in basket-case firms like Hertz and Kodak.
“We announced we’ve decided to streamline public information about trends in investor activity on our platform,” said a spokesperson for Robinhood. “Moving forward, our web platform will not display the number of customers who hold a particular stock on Robinhood.”
The company also said it is restricting access to its APIs, which are a software tool that allows third parties to pull data from websites.
Robinhood’s decision has already led one website that relied on the firm’s data to shut down. The site, known as Robintrack, created dashboards that showed what stocks were trending in close to real time.
In a recent interview with Fortune, the site’s creator, Casey Primozic, said Robintrack received over 300,000 visitors a month and praised Robinhood for sharing data—what his site terms “popularity data”—that other firms either kept private or charged large amounts of money to access.
Primozic confirmed to Bloomberg on Friday that he was shutting down the site, saying Robinhood decided to cut off the data over concerns that “other people”—presumably including Robintrack—were using the data in ways that could mischaracterize the company as pandering to day traders.
Primozic’s claim is consistent with comments that Robinhood provided to Fortune. Most notably, a company spokesperson stressed that the majority of the site’s users were “buy and hold” investors who acted as “thoughtful participants in the markets.”
The company’s comments appear to be a tacit attempt to counteract a recent spate of negative headlines that have characterized Robinhood as creating a FOMO mentality among users, in part by building a “gamified” casino-like interface. Robinhood drew particular criticism after a 22-year-old options traders committed suicide upon accruing what he believed was a massive financial liability.
“The whole thing with everyone seeing what ‘Robinhood traders’ are holding has been a PR headache, and I can’t imagine it brings them a ton of brand value,” says Ranjan Roy, a veteran trader who recently wrote a popular blog post about Robinhood’s business model.
Others have suggested on Twitter that Robinhood’s decision to cut off the data presages a move by the company to package and sell the information to hedge funds or other financial companies. The speculation appeared to be fueled in part by the fact Robinhood takes payments from Citadel Securities and others to channel customer orders to such firms—a common practice among brokerages.
The company spokesperson, however, said its decision to cut off access to data is not tied to making money.
“We don’t have plans to sell this data,” she said.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:


fortune--2020-08-10--New York’s public transit asks Apple to solve this iPhone problem

New York’s mass transit agency wants Apple to come up with a better way for iPhone users to unlock their phones without taking off their masks, as it seeks to guard against the spread of the coronavirus in buses and subways.
In a letter to CEO Tim Cook obtained by The Associated Press, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Patrick Foye said riders have been seen removing their masks to unlock their phones using face-recognition technology, despite a recent update by Apple that simplifies the unlock process for people wearing masks.
Previously, an iPhone user wearing a mask would have to wait a few seconds as face recognition software tried to identify them before they eventually could enter a passcode. In response to the pandemic, Apple’s iOS 13.5, released in May, automatically presents the passcode field after a user swipes up from the bottom of the lock screen. Also, Apple Pay Express Transit, introduced last year, allows riders on some bus and subway lines to pay with their iPhone or Apple Watch without having to wake the device.
“We understand Apple is working to address the issue and know that Apple has a range of technologies at its disposal as a global leader among tech companies,” Foye wrote in the letter sent Sunday. “We urge Apple to accelerate the deployment of new technologies and solutions that further protect customers in the era of COVID-19.”
Foye added that the MTA would be willing to collaborate with Apple on messaging to make sure users know about the recent iPhone modification.
“There’s nothing more important to us than the health and safety of our customers,” Apple said in an emailed statement that noted the upgrades it has already made. “We are fully committed to continuing to work with the MTA to support their efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Bus and subway use in New York and other cities plunged during the height of the pandemic. The MTA lost more than 90% of its subway ridership, which along with reduced revenue at its other properties has created a fiscal hole that will take years to fill, officials have said. Ridership has slowly increased but still lags far behind pre-pandemic levels.
In addition to an aggressive cleaning program that has included the unprecedented step of shutting down the subway overnight, the MTA requires all riders to wear masks and socially distance. The authority has said in recent weeks that more than 90% are wearing some form of face covering.


fortune--2020-08-10--Trump just signed an order to give an extra $400 in weekly unemployment benefits. Is that legal?

President Trump signed executive orders on Saturday that aim to relieve economic hardships related to the pandemic. One would provide $400 in unemployment benefits to certain workers, while another seeks to boost income by freezing payroll taxes.
In response, critics claimed such measures are illegal, point out that Congress not the President has “power over the purse.” One Republican senator even described the orders as “unconstitutional slop.” Meanwhile, Trump’s allies and some legal scholars pointed to laws that could provide legal cover for his actions.
So how will this all play out? Here’s a plain English guide to Trump’s orders, the legal debate and what could happen next.
How can the President create a $400 weekly federal unemployment benefit without Congress?
It’s doubtful he can. Of the four executive orders that Trump issued on Saturday, this one has come under the most fire.
The proposed benefit would replace the now-lapsed $600 in additional unemployment payments but would be available to a smaller pool of workers (gig workers and employees who earned little income would be excluded). The plan also requires states—which are facing huge budget shortfalls—to agree to pay $100 of the $400 in proposed benefits in order for their residents to be eligible.
In order to pay for the federal portion of the $400, the Trump Administration would tap $44 billion in funds allocated to the disaster relief agency, FEMA. On its face, this provides a way for the President get around the Constitution’s rules that only Congress can raise funds: By tapping the FEMA funds, Trump is merely spending funds that Congress has already allocated.
The problem with this loophole is that there are existing laws that specify how disaster funds may be allocated. And as law professor David Super notes, such funds can only be used for unemployed people who are ineligible for other jobless benefits. Trump’s order, however, appears to exclude the latter class of people who would be eligible—while extending the benefits to those who are not eligible under the disaster laws.
While a handful of other legal scholars, such as Josh Blackman, read Trump’s move as constitutional, they are a minority view. Most commentators, including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board—a vocal supporter of the President—view the plan to pay $400 as outside the law.
What about the plan to boost income with a payroll tax cut? Is that legal?
Right now, employers deduct a 6.2% payroll tax from their workers’ paychecks. They collect this money on behalf of the federal government, which uses it to fund Social Security and other programs.
Trump’s executive order does not seek to eliminate this tax, but rather to suspend it—meaning that employees would have to pay the tax at some point in the future. But Trump also says he would eliminate this future obligation if he is re-elected.
Unlike the plan to pay $400 in unemployment benefits, there is a consensus that suspending payroll tax is clearly legal. In the event of a disaster, the President has the authority to stop various tax collection for up to one year—this is the power the Treasury Department used to push this year’s tax filing deadline from April to July.
But even though Trump’s order concerning the payroll tax is probably legal, it has attracted plenty of criticism on the grounds it is unlikely to provide much economic relief. The reason is that employers will be reluctant to change their payroll procedures to stop withholding funds that will have to submitted anyways. Meanwhile, Trump’s promise that he will eliminate the future obligation is unlikely to persuade them to do so—for the reason that, to fulfill the promise, he would have to both win reelection and get Congress to pass a law authorizing the measure.
In the meantime, one scholar claim the biggest beneficiary of Trump’s payroll executive order will not be American workers but a handful of tax lawyers:
… other than give employers a headache when they have to figure out what it all means. (Also a nice stimulus package for tax lawyers in private practice, who are going to be billing a whole bunch of hours over the next several weeks advising clients what to do!) 8/ — Daniel Hemel (@DanielJHemel) August 9, 2020
What about the other executive orders on evictions and student loans?
The other two executive orders are related to evictions and student loans. In the case of the former, Trump’s order merely suggests that certain agencies like HUD consider taking measures to prevent evictions—there is no firm order for them to do anything.
As for student loans, the order in question calls for letting certain borrowers defer payments if they are experiencing economic hardship—a power that is clearly within the federal government’s power.
The upshot is that the eviction and student loan orders have not sparked a legal controversy like the ones related to unemployment benefits or payroll taxes.
So what happens now? Will there a big court fight?
It’s possible. Trump’s executive orders have angered both liberals, who argue they are ineffective and illegal, as well as conservatives who have long been suspicious of such orders. Meanwhile, executive orders have already been a hot button issue in federal courts in recent years—most notably those issued by President Obama concerning undocumented immigrants.
But while Trump’s orders certainly provide fodder for a court fight, most of the action for now is likely to be on the political rather than the legal front. With the Presidential election only three months away, Trump’s critics are likely to focus their energy on defeating him at the ballot box rather than legal challenges that could take years. That doesn’t mean there won’t be lawsuits—only that they will take a backseat to the political process for now.
More must-read finance coverage from Fortune:


fortune--2020-08-10--The key to making your company greener? A strong finance team

While the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our personal and business lives upside down, we can’t ignore the silver linings that have emerged—perhaps none greater than a renewed sense of collective responsibility and urgency in taking on climate change.
Leading companies are creating meaningful financial sustainability incentives with accompanying metrics to measure their progress. To meet our ultimate climate change goals, however, change must be led from the CEO—and in partnership with finance.
There has been a steep change in the U.S. sustainability landscape over recent years, which is expected to accelerate as we emerge from COVID-19 in the coming months and years. Company leaders increasingly recognize the competitive imperative to take action. ING’s 2019 survey of U.S. executives found that 45% are now strongly influenced by sustainability when setting business growth strategy, up from 29% in 2018.
U.S. investors and consumers are adding impetus too. The sustainable finance market has surpassed $1 trillion globally, with the Americas growing to be the second-largest market with $322 billion worth of sustainable finance issuances to date. On the consumer side, ING’s latest circular economy research, surveying 15,000 consumers globally, found that 54% of those in the U.S. are less likely to buy from companies that perform poorly on environmental issues.
Finance as a sustainability advocate
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for sustainable transformation, but it is clear that to achieve the best results it needs to be embedded across every corner of the company. Commitment from the CEO, of course, is critical. But the finance team, with its roles in forecasting and planning to ensure growth, risk management, capital planning, investor relations, and budgeting, is vital to a successful outcome. Together, the CEO and the finance function are critical in aligning sustainability objectives up and down the company.
Here are several ways the finance team can support the CEO to chart effective sustainable transformation:
Aligning funding with sustainability objectives
Sustainable financing transactions continue to grow, both globally and in the U.S., driven by the introduction and availability of more product types in the market.
As the range of sustainable finance products expands, there are more opportunities for finance professionals to align their company’s funding with its sustainability objectives. Whether they are following the Green Bond Principles, or setting loan terms based upon sustainability performance targets, sustainable finance instruments can provide a very visible means of holding the business accountable for its progress on sustainable transformation.
In December 2019, Johnson Controls became one of the first industrial companies to link its senior revolving credit facilities to specific sustainability metrics in the U.S. The company’s action linked interest rates and fees to the company’s performance in areas such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That made it critical for the finance team to closely track and validate the organization’s sustainability progress—and report this up to senior management, as well as to the wider organization and external stakeholders.
Another more recent example is Xylem’s green finance framework, released in June 2020. The framework adopted by Xylem, a global water-technology company, follows the Green Bond Principles 2018 and the Green Loan Principles 2020, and covers four key areas: use of proceeds; the process for project evaluation and selection; management of proceeds; and reporting. It offers a great example of interconnecting business strategy and purpose with finance and sustainability goals.
Tracking and measuring to maintain momentum
As the old adage goes: “What gets measured gets done.” One of the strengths of finance professionals is that they like to measure organizational performance in a quantitative manner—a valuable attribute in the context of sustainable transformation.
A company’s sustainability strategy may encompass wide-ranging objectives, from reducing its environmental footprint to ensuring positive social outcomes in communities where it—or its supply-chain partners—operate. And while initiatives such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures are helping companies to identify the right metrics to track and report on, each business will need its own customized performance indicators to achieve a detailed view of progress toward sustainability goals. This information is critical to holding internal stakeholders to account on sustainable transformation and in helping company management to see what is and isn’t working.
Communicating the sustainability story
Using green finance can help reinforce a company’s sustainable transformation because it usually involves publicly stating a set of green objectives for the funding. By externalizing this vision, the company maintains inward pressure on making the operational changes happen across its ecosystem, establishing and monitoring sustainability targets for different teams across the business, from procurement to production.
It creates opportunities to align the organization’s internal and external communication of its sustainability narrative too. For instance, the growth of the green finance market raises the possibility of attracting a broader base of investors, as the demand for sustainable investment opportunities increases. The finance function, with the communications team, can engage investors with a defined set of green objectives and performance metrics, and a clear vision for the company’s transformation, helping to attract long-term capital.
Not only is sustainable transformation an environmental imperative, but it is increasingly becoming demand-driven, whether it is business customers refusing to buy from suppliers that don’t meet stringent green standards, or everyday consumers boycotting brands that are shown to be ignoring their responsibilities. Competing against this backdrop means accelerating organizational transformation, but to do so effectively will require both the CEO and the finance function to commit fully to a sustainable vision for the business. Only then will other business teams be empowered to unlock the full extent of sustainable opportunities for the organization.
Gerald Walker is the CEO of ING in the Americas.


fortune--2020-08-10--The overnight coronavirus expert

The overnight coronavirus expert

I want to tell you a story about an unusual storyteller. His name is Tomas Pueyo, a 37-year-old Spaniard who went to Stanford, lives in San Francisco, and earns his living running strategy for a company called Course Hero.
Were it not for the pandemic, Pueyo would be just another tech guy, albeit a quirky one. A few years back he wrote a book deconstructing the Star Wars narrative. He gave a TEDx talk about story structure. He posted his views of the world on Facebook.
Then, just as the coronavirus was descending upon the U.S., he published two long articles on Medium. The first warned Americans to take the virus seriously. It has been viewed 40 million times. The second, “The Hammer and the Dance,” coined a term picked up by scientists, public health officials, and veteran journalists. With clear language and clever charts, Pueyo accurately described how the world would react to the pandemic: first with dramatic shutdowns (the hammer) and then with chock-a-block containment efforts (the dance).
Experts were shocked that someone with no health-industry training could be so effective. “Everything felt like it was thoughtfully constructed and fact-based,” says Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, who, like many, doubted Pueyo before reading his work carefully.
I met Pueyo in early June, the first (masked) in-person meeting either of us had since sheltering in place. I asked him what gave him the confidence to write so authoritatively about such a complicated topic. “Credentialism is not as strong as it used to be,” he replied. Pueyo has turned the vogue to dismiss experts on its head by nearly instantaneously becoming one himself. He studies publicly available information until he understands the data well enough to explain to people without scientific backgrounds.
All of a sudden Pueyo was an epidemiological superstar—all while holding down his day job. Donald McNeil, the eminent health writer for The New York Times, referenced “The Hammer and the Dance.” CNN’s Anderson Cooper invited Pueyo to speak on TV. Pueyo followed up with more Medium posts and tweets, repeatedly making accurate predictions about the course of the virus.
Pueyo’s story is a counter-narrative to social-media personalities who are famous for being famous. He is semi-famous because he has done outstanding work and promoted it well. When we first met, he told me he felt he had aged several years because he wasn’t sleeping much, what with the demands of a job and a calling—and a young family.
When we spoke the next month, as infection rates were jumping in California and much of the South, he was somewhat hopeful (and better rested), if only because Americans were beginning to pay attention to the science of the disease.
“In politics, there is a long time from decision to impact,” he told me, this time over Zoom. “You can story-tell your way around that. With coronavirus, the feedback loop gets shortened from months to weeks. With coronavirus, you cannot escape reality.”
***
Fortune is collecting nominations for our annual Most Powerful Women lists: We’re shaking things up a little this year, adding a new criterion: how the executive wields her power to shape her company and the wider world for the better. (Examples might include instituting hazard pay for frontline employees during the pandemic, instituting gender/racial pay parity, creating a program or business unit that serves a disadvantaged population, measurably reducing the company’s carbon footprint, or creating new hiring pipelines that have resulted in a more diverse workforce.)
We’re accepting submissions through this online form. The deadline for applications is Aug. 24.
Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
adam.lashinsky@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by David Z. Morris. Check out The Ledger, the fintech newsletter he edits weekly.
NEWSWORTHY
Twit goes Tok? Twitter has reportedly been in discussions with TikTok about a “combination.” The Trump administration has driven the imminent divestment of TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform, over national security concerns. Twitter adding TikTok would be at once a victory and a comeuppance: Jack Dorsey’s text-based platform spent five years in charge of TikTok precursor Vine before unceremoniously shutting it down in 2017.
SpaceX makes the grade. SpaceX and United Launch Alliance will split a multibillion-dollar contract to provide satellite launch services for the U.S. military. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed and Boeing, and has long had a near-monopoly on launches. Now SpaceX, whose successful recovery of rocket elements is meant to make its launches cheaper, will share 40% of a contract worth as much as $6 billion.
Kodak kaput. The US Development Finance Corporation announced Friday on Twitter that a $765 million loan to Eastman Kodak to fund its pivot into pharmaceuticals was on hold. The agency says it will proceed if and when an SEC investigation, announced last week, has dismissed allegations of insider trading related to the loan. News of the loan was apparently leaked one day early, triggering a furious stock rally and creating the opportunity for massive profit by Kodak executives, including CEO Jim Continenza, who had just been issued millions of stock options. With the loan on hold, Kodak stock was off nearly 50% in premarket trading Monday.
Bitcoin $12,000. The market price of Bitcoin hit $12,000 on Sunday, August 9. The cryptocurrency hit a peak of nearly $20,000 during a furious bubble in late 2017 and then returned to a peak of just over $12,300 in June 2019. Bulls argue that the uncensorable, decentralized digital cash has renewed relevance as the coronavirus pandemic strains government-backed currencies, and while rising international tension threatens new barriers on mainstream payment rails.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
North Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia has become another entirely predictable case study of America’s inept, denial-based response to the coronavirus. Following the data-manipulating playbook of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, the school last week suspended a student who published photos of crowded conditions and lax mask enforcement. On Sunday (quelle surprise!), the school announced that six students and three faculty members had tested positive for the virus. Classes will be shifted online...for two whole days.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Trump’s WeChat order sends Tencent shares on a wild ride – Naomi Xu Elegant
Will India’s Jio be the next tech giant? – Vivienne Walt
How realistic is a 45-day sale for TikTok? – Danielle Abril and Anne Sraders
How the new coronavirus contact-tracing apps protect user privacy – David Z. Morris
How the Fed’s new real-time payments system could transform commerce – Rey Mashayekhi
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Looking for fresh Quar Content? It’s six days until the debut of HBO’s Lovecraft Country. Created by producers including J.J. Abrams and Jordan


fortune--2020-08-10--TikTok’s woes won’t end after just 45 days

This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Happy Monday, Term Sheet readers!
It’s great to be back from vacation in the Catskills—though the news certainly has not taken a break.
TikTok is scrambling to hash together a plan B as President Donald Trump’s administration threatens to ban the app in the U.S. due to its Chinese ownership. Even as it negotiates a potential deal to sell its operations to Microsoft, TikTok is now planning to sue the Trump administration over the president’s executive order, per NPR.
Twitter is also now in the running to merge with TikTok’s U.S. operations, per the Wall Street Journal. But Microsoft is still in the lead to snap up parts of TikTok.
There’s good reason to fight the ban rather than try to go through with a merger: Finding a buyer is one thing—closing a deal and extricating TikTok from its Chinese operations in a way that satisfies Washington is a whole other ballpark. Deals of over $25 billion took an average of nine months to close, per a Gartner study, a timeline that lengthens depending on the complexity of the deal. And heck, if this deal is not complex, I don’t know what is.
So what happens to TikTok’s operations as it seeks to turn a potential breakup with Bytedance into reality over a course of at least several months?
Forty-five days is one timeline to watch: Another deadline to eye is the U.S. presidential election. U.S.-China geopolitical tensions have contributed to the pressure on TikTok, but domestic politics have also played a role. Trump, at one point, sought to ban TikTok outright, dismissing the idea of a sale to Microsoft. So why did he change his mind? Many in the Republican party worried a ban would alienate young voters ahead of the election, according to Reuters.
The Fortune Global 500: Fortune’s 2020 list of the top 500 companies in the world by revenue went live today. Included in the package is a fascinating story on India’s Jio Platforms, the mobile phone company that has lately garnered billions from Google, Facebook, KKR, and Silver Lake, and is now seeking to become the next big tech giant by capitalizing on the world’s second largest country by population.
Per the story, by my colleague Vivienne Walt: “Jio’s extraordinary season of fundraising might never have happened had it not been for a persistent complaint by [Mukesh] Ambani’s teenage twins that will sound familiar to any parent: The Internet was too slow to adequately run the sites other kids were consuming every day.”
I single out Jio because its story fits into the larger narrative of rising geopolitical tensions around the world: Smartphones made by Chinese company Xiaomi have become the market leader in recent years in India (though studies suggest smartphone penetration is still low—about a quarter of the population own one). Jio is now working with Google to build an entry-level smartphone. That news came as India itself has sought to distance itself from Chinese-backed companies.
Fortune is collecting nominations for our annual Most Powerful Women lists: We’re shaking things up a little this year, adding a new criterion: how the executive wields her power to shape her company and the wider world for the better. (Examples might include instituting hazard pay for frontline employees during the pandemic, instituting gender/racial pay parity, creating a program or business unit that serves a disadvantaged population, measurably reducing the company’s carbon footprint, or creating new hiring pipelines that have resulted in a more diverse workforce.)
We’re accepting submissions through this online form. The deadline for applications is Aug. 24.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Skillshare, a New York-based online learning platform, raised $66 million in funding. OMERS Growth Equity led the round.
- Routable, a San Francisco-based business-to-business payments service, raised $16 million total with $12 million in Series A funding from Y Combinator, Founders Co-Op, Lee Fixel, Box Group, as well as Liquid 2 Ventures, Jason Gardner, Gokul Rajaram, Aaron Schildkrout, Sam Hodges, and Immad Akhund.
- Vicarious Surgical, a Boston, Mass.-based maker of a surgical robotics platform, raised $13.2 million in funding. Philip Liang of E15 Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and AME Cloud Ventures.
- Oomnitza, a San Francisco-based platform for tracking and securing digital assets, raised $12.5 million in Series B funding. Shasta Ventures and Riverside Acceleration Capital led the round.
- IRONSCALES, a Tel Aviv-based email security platform, raised $8 million in extended Series B funding. Jump Capital led the round and was joined by investors including K1 Investment Management.
- WorkPatterns, a Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based people analytics platform, raised $2.8 million in seed funding from investors including Javelin Venture Partners and Pathfinder (Founders Fund’s early stage vehicle).
- Keyless, a London-based cybersecurity company, raised $2.2 million in funding. P101 SGR led the round and was joined by investors including Maire Investments, Luiss Alumni 4 Growth, Primomiglio SGR, and Xpring.
- Brio Systems, a Boston, Mass.-based maker of a Covid-19 testing system for the workplace, raised $1.9 million in seed funding. Investors included One Way Ventures, Techstars Ventures, Nimble Ventures, and Castor Ventures.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- OceanSound Partners recapped Netrix, a Bannockburn, Ill.-based provider of cloud infrastructure, collaboration, data, and development services and solutions to small and midsize enterprise customers. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Infinedi Partners invested in Cultural Experiences Abroad, a Phoenix, Ariz.-based provider of study abroad educational programs for U.S. university students in foreign countries. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Marlin Equity Partners invested in Pentalog, a French IT outsourcing company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Intelerad Medical Systems, backed by Hg, acquired Radius, a Nashville, Tenn.-based provider of private and public cloud hosting. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Apollo Global Management is mulling a 3 billion-pound ($3.9 billion) takeover bid for AA, a U.K. roadside recovery service AA Plc, per Sky News. Read more.
- BGH Capital agreed to acquire Village Roadshow (AUX:VRL), an Australian theme parks and movie theater operator for an enterprise value of up to A$758 million ($548.41 million). Read more.
OTHERS
- Aveva Group is in advanced talks to acquire OSIsoft, a San Leandro, Calif.-based industrial software maker, for about $5 billion, per Bloomberg citing sources. Read more.
- TGS offered to acquire PGS’s multi-client data library for $600 million in cash.
- Third Point Re agreed to acquire Sirius International, a Sweden- and Bermuda-based reinsurer, for roughly $788 million in cash and stock. The combined company is valued at about $3.3 billion.
BREAKUPS, HANGUPS, AND BANKRUPTCIES
- Pacific Drilling SA, a Luxembourg-based offshore oil and gas drilling contractor, may seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Read more.
- Learfield IMG College, a multimedia business that owns broadcast rights for several collegiate sports programs, is preparing for a possible financial restructuring, per the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
- Temasek Holdings terminated its S$4.1 billion ($3 billion) conditional offer for Keppel Corp, a Singapore conglomerate with marine businesses, by invoking a material adverse change (MAC) clause. Read more.
IPOS
- Xpeng, an Guangzhou, China-based electric luxury car maker, filed for an $100 million IPO. It posted revenue of $328.5 million in 2019 and a loss of $657.6 million. Firms including GGV and Taobao backed the Xpeng. It plans to list on the NYSE as “XPEV.” Read more.
- KE Holdings, a Beijing-based housing platform, plans to raise $1.9 billion in an offering of 106 million ADSs priced between $17 to $19 (About $800 million worth of ADSs acquired by insiders). The company posted revenue of $6.5 billion and losses of $308.5 million in 2019. Firms including Tencent, SoftBank, and Hillhouse back the firm. It plans to list on the NYSE as “BEKE.” Read more.
- Vistas Media Acquisition, a SPAC targeting companies in the media and entertainment industry, raised $100 million. The firm is led by Jacob Cherian, the former CEO of I-AM Capital Acquisition. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “VMACU.” Read more.
- FTAC Olympus Acquisition, a SPAC formed with the management of The Bancorp, filed for a $750 million IPO. The firm is targeting a fintech. It is led by Chairman Betsy Cohen, the founder of The Bancorp, and CEO Ryan Gilbert, a General Partner at Propel Venture Partners. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “FTOCU.” Read more.
- CF Finance Acquisition II, the second blank check company formed by Cantor Fitzgerald, filed for an $525 million IPO. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “CFIIU.” Read more.
- Hims, a San Francisco-based digital health company that sells wellness and health-care products, is in talks to go public via merger with SPAC Oaktree Acquisition Corp. in a deal that could value the firm at $2 billion, per Bloomberg citing sources. Hims is backed by firms including Institutional Venture Partners, Forerunner Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures. Read more.
- Canoo, a California-based EV startup, is in talked to go public by merging with an SPAC, Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp. IV. The SPAC is seeking to raise $300 million in new equity for the deal which would value the startup at over $2 billion, per Bloomberg citing sources. Read more.
- Ucommune, China’s biggest workspace provider, withdrew plans for an $100 million IPO. It posted net revenue of $62.7 million in 2018 and loss of $60.1 million. It planned to list on the NYSE as “UK.” Read more.
EXITS
- Roper Technologies Inc (NYSE: ROP) is in talks to acquire Vertafore, an insurance software maker backed by Vista Equity Partners and Bain Capital, for close to $5.5 billion. Read more.
- TA Associates acquired Surfaces Group, a Cenate Sotto, Italy-based supplier of abrasive tools used to smoothen, cut and polish high-end ceramic tiles, stone slabs, glass panes and metal objects, from Astorg. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
F+FS
- Clearlake Capital Group is expected to surpass its $1 billion target for Clearlake Flagship Plus Partners LP fund, used to supplement large investments and to find opportunities created from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, per the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
PEOPLE
- Wendell Brooks resigned as president of Intel Capital. Anthony Lin, who has led the round mergers and acquisitions and international investing, will takeover on an interim basis.
- Blake Heyde, Philip Purcell, and Mike Manno were promoted to vice president at Flexpoint Ford.
- Weston Moyer was promoted to principal from senior associate at Spike Ventures, the Stanford alumni fund of Alumni Ventures Group.


fortune--2020-08-10--The U.S. wanted to starve Huawei of chips. It’s working

Last Friday, the CEO of Huawei Technologies’ consumer business group, Richard Yu, said the Chinese smartphone manufacturer will stop developing the chips that power its flagship smartphones, jeopardizing the company’s position as the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer.
“Huawei’s mobile phones have no chip supply, which makes our shipment volume this year a little less than 240 million units (shipped last year),” Yu said at the industry event in Huawei’s hometown of Shenzhen last week, stating the decline “is a huge loss for us.”
Kirin chips, which Huawei designs in-house, power the company’s most advanced smartphones, but the manufacturing of Kirin chips is outsourced to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). In May, the White House prohibited TSMC from taking more product orders from Huawei, a move that leveraged TSMC’s reliance on U.S. tech to run its factories.
Yu said production of Huawei’s high-end Kirin chips will cease on Sept. 15—the end of the 120-day window the U.S. gave TSMC to finish outstanding Huawei orders. Without TSMC, Huawei has no way to produce its own chips, and so, Yu said, “this year may be the last generation of Huawei Kirin high-end chips.”
Huawei declined Fortune‘s request for further comment.
There are few alternatives to TSMC. The $380 billion company is the world’s most advanced manufacturer of semiconductors, occupying over 50% of the global market for contract chip manufacturing. The capabilities of China’s own rival contract manufacturer, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), is generations behind TSMC—meaning it wouldn’t be able to produce the chip designs Huawei creates.
Huawei could use generic chips provided by companies like Qualcomm to power its smartphones, but the cost of such an alternative would be higher and the performance would be lower than Huawei’s custom-made chips. Plus, there’s the risk that the White House will prevent California-based Qualcomm from selling to Huawei, too.
The U.S. has long viewed Huawei as a security threat. Last year, the Department of Commerce prohibited U.S. chipmakers from selling components to Huawei, without special permission, but the agency has so far not enforced the rule. According to the Wall Street Journal, Qualcomm—as well as other U.S. chip companies—is lobbying the Trump Administration to keep Huawei as a customer, warning that the ban could cost U.S. chipmakers a $8 billion market.
Another possibility is for Huawei to get its chips from Taiwan’s MediaTek—the world’s fourth largest chip designer. MediaTek outsources manufacturing of its chip designs to TSMC, so it would be able to provide Huawei with a chipset that’s nearly as sophisticated as Huawei is used to.
“MediaTek said in their last earning call that they will have 40% of the Chinese market for 5G chips by the end of the year, so we already suspect it will be shipping many more processors to Huawei,” says Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research.
The Taiwanese firm is an attractive business partner for Huawei, Wang says, because it is less susceptible to U.S. intervention. But Huawei’s engineers will need time to figure out how to get the best performance from MediaTek’s processors, meaning Huawei’s future releases likely “won’t be as good as before—at least in the beginning.”
The problem Huawei is now facing with its smartphone chips also may apply to the chips TSMC manufactures for Huawei’s 5G base stations. Currently, Huawei produces the world’s most advanced 5G infrastructure systems and has won more contracts for developing 5G networks than any of its competitors. But, as with smartphones, market dominance requires producing your own designs.
“If things cannot change and Huawei cannot get TSMC to produce chips, Huawei will lose the 5G market very fast,” Wang warns. Huawei has been stockpiling chips in anticipation of U.S. sanctions cutting off its supply lines, but it’s unclear how long that inventory will last. If Huawei can’t promise clients it can provide future maintenance, customers may go elsewhere.


fortune--2020-08-10--Mnuchin: Stimulus checks still on the table following Trump’s order to provide $400 enhanced unemplo

Mnuchin: Stimulus checks still on the table following Trump’s order to provide $400 enhanced unemployment benefits

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On Saturday President Donald Trump signed executive orders and memorandums to halt residential evictions, provide $400 weekly enhanced unemployment benefits, defer payroll taxes, and extend student-loan relief until the end of the year.
This came after unfruitful negotiations between Democratic and Republican leaders on Friday for a broad stimulus bill, which would have included a second round of stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits to help Americans cope with the pandemic.
But on Monday Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appeared on CNBC and told viewers that the White House is still open to a stimulus bill that includes stimulus checks, another round of forgivable PPP loans, and money for schools and hospitals.
“We’re prepared to put more money on the table,” Mnuchin said Monday on CNBC. “Again, if we can get a fair deal we’re willing to do it this week.”
What’s holding up the $1,200 stimulus checks—which both parties support—and a broader stimulus bill? Simply put: Democrats haven’t come down enough in their asking price for the stimulus bill, and Republicans haven’t come up enough.
“It was a disappointing meeting. We reiterated in very strong terms our offer: We come down $1 trillion from our top number, which was $3.4 trillion, and they go up $1 trillion from their top number, which was $1 trillion. And that way we could begin to meet in the middle,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters Friday.
After Mnuchin declined the Democrat’s compromise on Friday, he told reporters that the President should sign executive orders to bypass Congress on issues like enhanced unemployment benefits. Trump announced later Friday he’d do just that, and on Saturday he signed the memorandums and executive orders.
Democratic leaders have yet to provide an update Monday on where they stand on stimulus negotiations.


fortune--2020-08-10--How a beatnik couple from the Bronx created one of the first designer names in fine jewelry

David Yurman, one of the first designer names in fine jewelry, nearly sold his company for $30,000 as a wedding gift to his wife, Sybil. But she refused to let him sell, and the two, now 77, went on to build a multimillion-dollar brand.
As told to Dinah Eng
David Yurman: I grew up in the Bronx, and my father owned a trimming company. My mother was a housewife. I was dyslexic and had ADD, but I didn’t know it until 1975 or so.
Sybil Yurman: I grew up 10 blocks from David but did not know him. My father was a poet and writer, and made furniture and drapery. My mother ran the family insurance brokerage. I also had ADD, and my language was visual.
David: At 16, I learned welding and brazing. I made little animals and sculpted the sign language alphabet that deaf people use. I sold them for $5 to $15 at school.
Sybil: I left school at 15½ because the principal told my father I was a poor student and would never graduate. I ran away from home and made enough money to move to California. I lived and worked at Hyphen House in San Francisco, where I was exposed to people like Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen. My life was about being in the moment, painting, Zen, doing whatever interested me.
David: In 1964 I was apprenticing with [Cubist sculptor] Jacques Lipchitz, who knew Picasso and Modigliani, making $150 a week. It was the height of the beatnik era. Then I opened my own studio in Greenwich Village while working for [abstract sculptor] Hans Van de Bovenkamp.
Sybil: I moved back to New York and met David at Hans’s, where I worked. We liked each other right away. One day he made a necklace for me, and I wore it to a gallery. A woman admired it and said she could sell them. David said no. I said yes. I left the necklace with her, and by the time we got home she had sold four of them. That was the beginning of his making sculptural jewelry.
David: We created the business so that we wouldn’t have to work for someone else. In 1972 we moved to Putnam Valley, N.Y., where I had a studio in a former mill. I made jewelry that we’d sell at craft fairs …
Sybil: … and sold at galleries. As it started getting bigger and bigger, we went to a retail jewelry show in New York. When the Bloomingdale’s buyer came up, I said, “Someone else placed an order first, so we can’t make any more jewelry unless you pay for it first.” He asked, “Who placed the order?” It was Saks Fifth Avenue.
David: I told him he could pay half upfront and half on delivery. He looked at me like we were from the woods.
Mixed metal bracelets and a starburst pendant necklace with garnet and diamonds. All are in the latest David Yurman collection. Courtesy of David Yurman; Jeroo Harris—Getty Images for David Yurman
Sybil: But he agreed to do it. Then life became more complicated. No banks would lend us money for the materials or to pay our suppliers. Going into the mainstream was extremely difficult, so we decided to sell the business.
David: In 1979 we got married, had a luncheon with friends, then went to see a man in the jewelry district. I said, “Selling the business is my wedding present to my wife, so we can just go back to doing our art.” He gave a number, and before I could say anything …
Sybil: … I said, “That’s too low.” He offered $30,000.
David: I made that much at a good craft fair.
Sybil: So we left, and we incorporated the business in 1980. Back then the stores wielded an incredible amount of power. A major retailer once canceled an order two days before delivery, putting us on the brink of bankruptcy. A doctor friend gave us $50,000 to keep us in business. So we drew up guidelines that retailers had to sign so that we wouldn’t get in that position again.
David: The difficult part was we wanted to use our name in the stores.
Sybil: At the time, amethyst rings, gold necklaces, or watches would all be in the case together, sold by category. We wanted the stores to buy our collections—the earrings, necklaces, and rings—all together.
David: You told them, “We’re American craftspeople, we’re designers. This is our art form, and it has a personality to it.”
Sybil: They wanted what we did, so they agreed.
David: There were times when the economy was in a slump, and we couldn’t pay people. We’d call them and say, “We’ll pay you 20% this month, and some more next month.” It made all the difference.
Sybil: At one point, a man in a drugstore gave me 50¢ when he saw that I didn’t have enough to buy diapers for our son.
David: But we kept growing the company.
Sybil: In the ’90s, we were one of the major vendors at Neiman Marcus. We opened our first boutique in November 1999 in New York.
David: We were very profitable in the U.S., but then we went to Paris and my ego got the best of me. I thought, If we can sell an American jewelry brand to Parisians, it would be like selling ice to Eskimos. And we did it. Within two to three years of selling in Printemps, we gained their most loyal group of customers.
Sybil: Our success is due to trust and forming relationships with people who helped us along the way. It’s about taking a risk and being willing to work all night for it.
David: In our 50 years of being together, I’ve learned it’s better to be kind than right. Creating a business is like creating a family. The jewelry is just the by-product.
David and Sybil’s best advice
Envision possibilities together.
“We both were brought up as existentialists in the beatnik era. Whenever we asked a store for something, we’d say, ‘How do we make this happen? If we partner together, we can fulfill your need in the marketplace, and our need to create.'”
A version of this article appears in the August/September 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “The family jewels.”


fortune--2020-08-10--Why sustainable menswear is never out of style

Sustaining things over time is one of life’s great joys: relationships, good health, suit measurements. Now more than ever is the time to reflect on what we have and maintain fewer, better things. The most admired chefs of our time, from Alice Waters to Eric Ripert to Dan Barber, compose seemingly simple dishes of impeccably sourced food that support an entire ecosystem. An indulgent meal at Barber’s flagship restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns captures this perfectly: It’s natural food on the highest level, sourced from the farm that is right outside.
We pay increasing amounts of attention to the sourcing of our food, but what about our attire? The ethos of farm-to-table dining mirrors one that is generations old but still practiced by a coterie of designers, tailors, and fabric mills who are fighting the good fight against the problematic manufacturing of fast fashion. These brands achieve sustainable style in its truest form: with respect for everyone, and everything, in the process. Aesthetics are at their height. Integrity is a given. And while sport coats, cashmere knits, bomber jackets, and made-to-measure trousers may be unassuming contenders for the future of clothing, many pioneering small brands around the world are quietly redefining it.
Having a cup of tea with the people you make clothes with is very important to Mike Stoll. So is driving to see them. These are two of the reasons why the fabric mills he’s worked with over his 48 years of developing his impressively elegant brand, Private White V.C., are no more than 30 minutes away. Before that, his father and grandfather were doing the same thing. So was the grandfather of James Eden, Stoll’s business partner, who, Stoll says, focuses on the more “glamorous side of things.”
The two are based in Manchester, England, in the same building where Private White V.C. began as a raincoat factory 150 years ago. Now they evolve an archive of 11,000 patterns and specs into modern classics for their London shop and with a rotation of collaborators including online clothing destinations Mr Porter and Permanent Style.
Racing green cotton-nylon vest ($795), glen check tweed jacket ($1,415), and “fun” Oxford ($235) by Drake’s. Courtesy of John Spinks
“We still weave our own cotton in Lancashire,” says Stoll—the same source used for the jacket linings that kept pilots warm in World War II. Sixty percent of Stoll’s textiles come from within 50 miles of his design shop in Manchester. “Our team improves garments with a gentle nudge,” Stoll says. He keeps things natural and local with the exception of a seasonal highlight from Loro Piana, an Italian firm specializing in cashmere. Despite its heritage, Private White V.C. brings a refreshingly cool approach to every belted safari jacket, summer bomber, and linen shacket. The ideal, Stoll says, is for people to buy seven items over seven years—slowly and over time.
“We still weave our own cotton in Lancashire,” says Mike Stoll—the same source used for the jacket linings that kept pilots warm in World War II. Sixty percent of Stoll’s textiles come from within 50 miles of his design shop in Manchester.
Michael Hill is a world-class host. It’s no surprise that as its creative director he’s evolved Drake’s—a brand that captures Britishness in the same way Ralph Lauren taps into Americana—from a well-respected tie and scarf maker into a red-hot menswear brand. All while preserving long-term relationships established by founder Michael Drake. That’s exactly what Hill is in it for. “To be in it for the long run,” he says, “we need to work with specialists whose product continues to stand the test of time.” Drake’s has two of its own factories in East London, where it’s been since the 1970s. Its partner suppliers are nearly all family-owned enterprises with a rich history in their specialty, from printing near Manchester to indigo dyeing in Okayama, Japan. “In so many cases we’ve stuck by each other, right now more than ever. You want to work with people who love what they do and are dedicated to that.”
Stòffa’s asymmetric jacket in plongé leather. ($2,200). Courtesy of Stòffa
Stòffa founders Agyesh Madan and Nick Ragosta do a lot to make less and do it well. The young duo keep things simple. They launched with three outerwear styles and two fabrics, a precise offering they have maintained for nearly two years. Their made-to-measure, made-to-order approach is beloved by the discerning creative set they dress. It applies the exacting style they developed while making tailored suits at Neapolitan label Isaia to refined clothes customized for clients’ more casual endeavors. Their prevailing sensitivity to water usage and traceability from the makers they work with—all based in Italy—give them the confidence to produce less and originate more. It also builds the trust of those who wear Stòffa. “We thought it was a better way and made a difference in the enjoyment of clothes,” Ragosta says. “Real luxury is about the most personal things and the specialness of materials. It’s working with smaller mills and creating unique fabrics.” The fabrics are highly specialized and edited, in naturally dyed colors that sit well together in a wardrobe. This helps clients feel confident when choosing their custom shirt jacket or a woven scarf that was knit on century-old looms. Whether it’s during a visit to Stòffa’s artful showroom or through principled collaborators like Drake’s, there’s an unspoken certainty each brand conveys—the kind you feel with a seasoned sommelier.
Patterns for Stòffa’s wool-based products, which are made in Biella, Italy. Courtesy of Stòffa
“In order to make a delicious meal we need the best possible ingredients,” says Matteo Bozzalla of Valstar. The brand’s sartorial approach to handmade outerwear has earned it a place in the wardrobes of elegantly understated men. For Bozzalla, sustainability means respect: for raw materials, for mills, for current and future generations. Circular production of natural fabrics is cemented in Valstar’s process. While few heritage brands feel so modern, it’s a quality he attributes to mixing older, experienced craftsmen with a younger generation of designers to bring the excellence his clients and family expect. His enduring recipe is undoubtedly a successful one, prepared thoughtfully and without a rush.
A version of this article appears in the August/September 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Fewer, finer.”


fortune--2020-08-10--A new low for the Global 500: No women of color run businesses on this year’s list

This is the web version of The Broadsheet, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Uber shares guidance for appropriate driver-passenger conversation, Oprah Winfrey continues advocating for Breonna Taylor, and there are no women of color who run businesses on this year’s Global 500. Make the most of your Monday.
– Global view. The Fortune Global 500 today hit a new low. For the first time in several years, all of the women who run Global 500 companies are white.
The 2020 Global 500 list is out this morning, and women run just 13 of the 500 companies that made the cut. Thirteen is one fewer than last year, and two of the companies to drop off the list happen to be the ones run by women of color. Flex, the manufacturing and supply chain logistics company led by CEO Revathi Advaithi, didn’t meet the list’s $25.4 billion revenue cutoff. Pertamina, the Indonesian state-owned oil and gas company led by president director Nicke Widyawati, did not report 2019 fiscal-year results by the list’s close, excluding the business from this year’s tally.
Fortune‘s data on female Global 500 CEOs goes back to 2014, and in the past six years there has never been a Global 500 in which zero women of color ran businesses on the list. (Past women among this group include former PepsiCO CEO Indra Nooyi, former chairman and managing director of Hindustan Petroleum Nishi Vasudeva, and former State Bank of India chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya.)
The list of female Fortune 500 CEOs is hardly a diverse one—there are no Black women running Fortune 500 businesses and only three women of color do so—but this year’s Global 500 is decidedly worse for diversity, especially when you consider that the Global 500 represents businesses in every country around the world. (The Global 500 ranks companies by size across the global economy, compared to the Fortune 500’s U.S. focus.)
On this year’s list, Mary Barra’s GM is the highest-ranking woman-led company (as a multinational corporation, GM appears on both the Fortune 500 and the Global 500). There are other Fortune 500 repeats: Anthem CEO Gail Boudreaux, UPS CEO Carol Tomé, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic, Progressive CEO Tricia Griffith, and Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden.
The other five names come from companies headquartered outside the U.S. Accenture is incorporated in Ireland, putting CEO Julie Sweet on the Global 500 list. Amanda Blanc was named CEO of the U.K. insurer Aviva in July. Claire Waysand is interim CEO of the French electric utility Engie; she succeeded Isabelle Kocher, who was ousted from the role in February. Martina Merz runs the German industrial engineering conglomerate Thyssenkrupp. And Emma Walmsley is still at the helm of British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, leading the business through the coronavirus vaccine race.
These 13 women lead just 2.6% of Global 500 businesses.
The Global 500—like the Fortune 500—is not a scientific assessment of where women stand in the global economy, but it does provide a moment-in-time insight into who is running the world’s biggest businesses. This year, it’s not women of color.
See the full Global 500 here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- 26 billboards. Oprah Winfrey is continuing to use her platform to seek justice for Breonna Taylor. This time she put up 26 billboards around Louisville—in honor of Taylor's 26 years—that feature a version of Taylor's O Magazine cover and call for the police who killed her to be arrested. A related piece to read: this Washington Post feature about Taylor's sister, Ju’Niyah Palmer.
- Polite conversation. Ever felt uncomfortable during a conversation with an Uber driver? The company is now training drivers on appropriate "conversational boundaries," including avoiding questions like "are you married?" The training videos are in partnership with RAINN as part of a broader sexual assault and harassment education initiative. Fortune
- Diagnosing the problem. One reason the U.S. health care system can be racist and sexist? Less than 3% of doctors are Black women. Fortune's Maria Aspan talks to doctors about why the problem persists—and the issues it perpetuates. Fortune
- Power couple. In a joint op-ed, Michelle Obama and Melinda Gates sound the alarm: "adolescent girls in low and middle-income countries are particularly at risk of being overlooked and left behind" during the coronavirus pandemic. Girls' education, safety, and security are all at risk around the world right now. CNN
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Major League Baseball hired KPMG chief diversity and inclusion officer Michele Meyer-Shipp as chief people and culture officer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Tracing the strike. In India, 1 million women have been working as coronavirus contact tracers. Now 600,000 of them are going on strike. Before coronavirus, the Accredited Social Health Activists worked to eradicate polio, prevent women from dying in childbirth, and provide health services in rural areas and slums; the ASHAs are seeking better pay and a changed legal status as workers. Bloomberg
- Congress in Kansas. In last week's primaries, all four Native American women who ran for office in Kansas won their primaries. Christina Haswood, 26, is the presumptive winner of a state House seat and says she was inspired to run by Rep. Sharice Davids, who in 2018 became one of the first two Native women elected to Congress. "I always thought that us Natives weren’t accepted in politics here in Kansas, but then Congresswoman Davids did it,” Haswood says. “And I was like, ‘OK, I can do it too.'" Indian Country Today
- Mask up? We already knew that artificial intelligence could be racist and sexist, but this new discrepancy is quite something. Researchers found that when analyzing masked faces, A.I. often misidentified masks as facial hair on men. On women, a common misidentification was "duct tape"—with A.I. drawing on portrayals of women as victims of violence. VentureBeat
ON MY RADAR
How Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest upended the filming of Surviving Jeffrey Epstein Fortune
100 years later, these activists continue their ancestors’ work New York Times
How Kristi Noem, Mt. Rushmore and Trump fueled speculation about Pence’s job New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"It’s like this underground community that’s talked about but not talked about."
-Kristen Wiig on going through unsuccessful IVF and then welcoming twins through a surrogate


fortune--2020-08-10--An electric revolution is coming for American trucking

The video was candid, narrow, shaky, and without fanfare—its first frames capturing not much more than asphalt. But in the span of 14 minutes, Trevor Milton, the founder and executive chairman of Nikola Motor, a Phoenix startup committed to making electric semitrucks, energized investors enough to send his company’s stock up 35% in a single day.
The clip reveals a hydrogen fuel-cell electric semi rolling around a blisteringly hot Arizona parking lot. Milton jogs after the truck on foot, pointing out the various components of its unusual powertrain and swiping at critics who believe the company’s technology is fake.
“These damn trolls,” he says between gulps of air. “I wonder if they’re going to go apologize to everyone for the lies they spread.”
Founded in 2014, Nikola is named after famed 19th-century inventor Tesla (just like that other controversial electric-vehicle concern). Though Nikola has yet to deliver a single truck to a customer—hence the critics—investors have valued the company at as much as $20 billion.
The tech world, it seems, has a growing fascination with trucking. Entrepreneurs, and the investors backing them, are convinced that replacing greenhouse gas–spewing diesel semis with cleaner electric versions is a huge opportunity to make a profit while also making the world a better place.
“There’s a lot of hype and excitement,” says Ben Hartford, a Baird equities analyst focused on logistics.
The American Trucking Associations like to say that the industry is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy, and they have a point. Freight trucks carry nearly 73% of all cargo transported in the U.S. But those vehicles are still overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels. Medium- and heavy-duty trucks account for about 6.4% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
To cut their contribution, truck operators would need to spend lots of money on less polluting trucks. A firm nudge came in June with a new California regulation requiring that, beginning in 2024, at least 5% of medium- and heavy-duty trucks sold in the state produce zero emissions. (The share jumps to 30% in 2030, then 100% by 2045. Short-haul trucks, used to deliver cargo between ports, rail yards, and warehouses, are subject to an even more aggressive timetable.) Since the state is uniquely influential in this area—a dozen states have adopted California’s motor vehicle emission regulations—pressure could quickly build for truck operators.
Regulation isn’t the only factor driving electrification. Elon Musk’s Tesla, which has promised to deliver its own electric semi in 2021, says a battery-electric truck costs about half as much to fuel per mile as its diesel counterpart. Maintenance costs for electric trucks are also expected to be lower because they have fewer moving parts.
The upstarts face a stiff challenge from established truckmakers. Toyota, the world’s largest automaker by sales, and Paccar’s Peterbilt, the No. 2 semi manufacturer behind Daimler-owned Freightliner, have publicly committed to a zero-emissions trucking future. Renault already produces medium-duty battery-electric trucks in Europe. In the U.S., Volvo and Freightliner have put dozens of electric trucks on the road for testing. Like Nikola and Tesla, the goal is to start selling them next year.
“How does it integrate into a fleet? How does the charging work? We’re trying to figure out the practical things,” says Keith Brandis, a Volvo business development executive.
Midsize trucking and warehouse operator NFI Logistics has been operating 10 Freightliner electric trucks in California for nearly a year as part of a pilot program. NFI will soon add trucks from Volvo’s program, dubbed Lights, which deployed its first test trucks in June. Bill Bliem, head of fleet services at NFI, says his company’s top motivator in leading the electric-trucking charge is its commitment to sustainability. But he admits competitiveness is also a factor.
“We’re hoping that battery pricing will come down and range will increase,” says Bliem. “Once that happens, we think there will be a cost benefit to running electric.”
Once battery pricing comes down and range increases, we think there will be a cost benefit to running electric.
In their present form, electric trucks have a key shortcoming: limited range versus their diesel counterparts. Tesla, for example, says its top-range model will go 500 miles on a single charge, compared with 800 miles for a diesel truck on one tank of fuel.
So electrification is happening first on short-haul routes. NFI is using its Freightliner test trucks to deliver cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to its warehouses east of L.A., a 100-mile roundtrip.
The cost advantage for hydrogen-electric trucks, like the Nikola Two model in Milton’s video, is less clear. Refueling with liquid hydrogen is quicker than recharging a battery, and hydrogen can carry more energy for its weight than a battery—more practical for long-haul trucking. But liquid hydrogen fuel, which is produced by using electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, is generally more expensive than charging batteries directly.
Speaking of expensive: Nearly everyone agrees that electric trucks will cost more than diesel semis, which can go for as much as $150,000. So far Tesla is the only manufacturer to have hinted at pricing, saying its electric trucks will start at between $150,000 and $200,000. Other manufacturers are expected to charge more because Tesla is believed to be producing batteries for less than its competitors.
Nikola plans to use a different business model for its hydrogen fuel-cell semis. Instead of selling trucks, it plans to lease them as part of a package that includes hydrogen fueling and maintenance.
And then there’s the cost of building new charging stations—necessary when it can take several hours to recharge a large truck battery. While some states, e.g., California, offer grants to soften the financial blow, others do not. “We’ve got customers that want us to run electric in the Northeast,” Bliem says. “But unfortunately those states right now do not have the funding where it would make sense to run even one electric tractor—if you could get one.”
That’s a dealbreaker for many operators. Of an estimated 1.9 million U.S. trucking firms, as many as 94% have fleets of 20 trucks or fewer. Moreover, roughly 9% of all truckers are independent owner-operators who drive a truck they own. Smaller operators just can’t afford the sizable investments it would take to go electric, says Glen Kedzie, who leads energy and environmental policy issues at the American Trucking Associations.
Though operators have years before they’re forced to give up diesel trucks, the market dynamics of electrification are already falling into place. “You start to raise the barriers to entry for the smallest carrier,” says Baird’s Hartford. Next stop: consolidation of a fragmented industry.
Provided your startup isn’t trying to upend it, that is. Nikola’s Milton says he understands the skepticism about his company’s chances but points out that carmakers said the same thing about Tesla early on. “Now Tesla is worth more than most of them combined,” he says. “We don’t mind being the underdog.”
Read more: Teslanomics: How to justify being the most valuable car company on earth
By the numbers
April 2020 Class 8 (semi) U.S. sales
Daimler: 38.1%
Paccar: 30.4%
Volvo: 15.9%
Navistar: 15.5%
Notes: Daimler makes the Freightliner and Western Star brands; Paccar, Kenworth and Peterbilt; and Volvo, Volvo and Mack.
Source: Ward’s
A version of this article appears in the August/September 2020 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline “Future bound and hammer down.”


fortune--2020-08-10--Teslanomics: How to justify being the most valuable car company on earth

You could practically see Elon Musk smile. On July 1, after an impressive rally of its stock price, Tesla—the 17-year-old electric-car company for which Musk serves as CEO—became the world’s most valuable automaker, worth an eye-watering $209 billion. Barely a month later, it’s worth $279 billion—more than quadruple the combined value of American icons General Motors and Ford Motor, even though the California company sold just 4% of the vehicles the Detroit duo did last year.
How substantial must Tesla’s actual sales be to meet its investors’ outsize expectations? We asked Joe Osha, a JMP Securities analyst who specializes in energy and industrial tech—and a frequent Tesla bull—to show his math. By his calculation Tesla needs to sell 2.5 million vehicles per year, or almost seven times what it managed last year, by 2025 to justify its lofty valuation.
Read more: An electric revolution is coming for American trucking
How did Osha arrive at that number? The analyst estimates that the global EV market—of which Tesla controls nearly a third today—will represent 6 million vehicles per year by 2025, or about 8% of the total global vehicle market. If a substantial share of the EV market goes to low-cost Chinese vehicles, he says, that leaves upwards of 4.5 million units to Tesla and its peers. Osha believes Tesla will capture the lion’s share of this portion—2.5 million per year—because “they’re ahead of the competition on product.”
Tesla, of course, requires the production capacity to support that kind of output. The automaker itself says its factories in Berlin (under construction), Shanghai, and Fremont, Calif., will support 1.1 million vehicles by the end of 2021. But Osha believes that “continued expansion to 2.5 million units is plausible even if we don’t have specific locations or plans” for new factories.
In the meantime, Osha says Tesla’s Ebitda margin will reach 20% (including stock-based compensation—about 2% for Tesla) by 2025, requiring a GAAP gross margin between 21% and 25%. The company’s current gross margin— 21% in its latest quarter—includes factory depreciation, labor, and materials; Osha believes it will improve with modest economies of scale.
Add it all up using the ubiquitous 20X Ebitda multiple, and Tesla will be an automaker worth somewhere in the ballparkof $400 billion in 2025, Osha says—or about $300 billion today, taking risk and opportunity cost into consideration.
“Tesla may or may not end up as successful as we think it will be,” he says. “But this company went from barely existing to selling half-a-million units a year. It should be valued like a growth company.”
A version of this article appears in the August/September 2020 issue of Fortune magazine.


fortune--2020-08-11--Banks stand to make billions from the pandemic. How can that filter down to everyday Americans?

At first glance, the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic mirrors the one following the subprime mortgage crisis that came to a head in 2008.
Similar to the Great Recession, today unemployment has soared to double digits, more than 55 million have filed for jobless benefits, and nearly one out of three Americans has missed a housing payment.
Unlike last decade’s crisis, when taxpayers bailed out the nation’s financial institutions to the tune of $498 billion, big banks today can support their employees and their customers in a way that brings our economy back up to speed.
In an ironic twist, banks actually stand to rake in billions in fees from distributing pandemic relief to small businesses and have beat earnings estimates, in large part thanks to capitalization requirements set by the Dodd-Frank Act, which marked its 10th anniversary in July. These same safeguards are now under attack by Senate Republicans, who are exploiting this crisis to quietly send us back to the days when big banks brazenly gambled with Americans’ savings.
But the gains made by the nation’s biggest banks during COVID-19 have not translated to gains for customers or employees. In fact, according to a new analysis by the Committee for Better Banks, the nation’s only independent organization of frontline bank workers, many of the country’s largest banks failed to support their customers and employees through the onset of the crisis.
We set the bar high because that’s what this crisis demands, and because banks have an unmatched opportunity to safeguard the financial health of consumers nationwide: The 12 banks analyzed in the scorecard have combined total assets of $8.5 trillion and made more than $155 billion in profits last year.
Our scorecard, which graded banks on their handling of small-business lending, worker protections, and customer protections, resulted in failing grades for four of the country’s largest banks: Wells Fargo, Santander, PNC Bank, and U.S. Bank. Only one of the 12—Fifth Third Bank—scored above a C.
If banks canceled stock buybacks to put more dollars into bridging the economic fallout of the virus, they gained points. Same for if they quickly adapted to telework, offered paid leave, offered hazard pay, or ensured social distancing and cleaning.
A patchwork of workplace safety policies strained already overextended frontline bank workers trying to mend customers’ financial troubles. Some banks like Capital One and Fifth Third performed well, while others like Wells Fargo dragged their feet. Wells Fargo has even forced employees to work out of major downtown office buildings throughout the pandemic for in-person training that—with their managers teleworking—winds up happening over the phone. Moreover, only half of the banks committed to halting layoffs that would leave employees without health insurance or a paycheck in the midst of a pandemic.
Major failures for consumers brought the grades down considerably. Our analysis found that eight banks did not extend one-year forbearance, as detailed in the federal CARES Act, to all their mortgages. A federal watchdog found Bank of America and Truist to be some of the biggest offenders in providing confusing information to customers regarding forbearance policies. And customers told us they lay awake in a cold sweat over their ability to get small-business relief loans, terrified that after being urged to apply to multiple banks for the Paycheck Protection Program, they had accidentally committed fraud.
Banks should be judged for how they treat people, especially during a national crisis. And yet, when the economy ground to a halt, banks like Wells Fargo sidestepped their workers and customers to lobby for regulatory easing that would boost their profit line.
It’s critical that we do not make the mistakes of the last recession and give banks a pass on accountability. For banks’ employees and customers, everything is on the line—and much more can, and should, be done by the banks to help get our economy out of this pandemic-induced recession and prevent a housing apocalypse.
To start, we urge banks to extend one-year forbearance protections not only to all their mortgage customers but also to auto and student loan customers. Additionally, banks should halt layoffs until we have a vaccine, while making sure all frontline employees are afforded adequate protections so they can safely serve customers’ needs.
We’ve also invited these banks to join us in creating a USA Banking Crisis Committee that includes worker representatives to set industrywide standards impacting workers and customers. Many of the largest U.S. banks’ foreign peers and international divisions have already created similar committees, which have successfully reduced worker anxieties and helped ensure resources were directed efficiently.
Everyday Americans—those who suffered most from the big banks’ misconduct—did their part to save the economy in 2008, bailing out the banks from a crisis of their own creation. It’s time now for banks to step up and take action to meaningfully reduce physical and financial risk for their customers and their employees.
Erin Mahoney and Nick Weiner are organizing directors of the Committee for Better Banks.


fortune--2020-08-11--Salesforce launches Work.com for schools

Banks stand to make billions from the pandemic .
How can that filter down to everyday Americans ?

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No one has cracked the code on reopening schools. But Salesforce is trying to do its part—and, of course, push one of its products, Work.com, into the education space.
Starting today, the company will offer its workplace management software to schools. The product is meant to be used as a command and communication center for educational institutions. It includes a “wellness check” feature that enables schools to assess if students, teachers, and staff are able to return to campus by analyzing health survey results and other wellness “trends and insights.” It also enables administrators to track cases and relationships of those who have been infected or exposed to COVID-19 by easily creating visual maps of associated contacts and locations. (The individual cases are entered manually, not via track-and-trace apps.)
Work.com has already been used by companies and governments looking to manage their pandemic data and response, like the state of Rhode Island. Here, too, contact tracing is done by humans, and Work.com functions as the system of record and communication.
Only a little more than half of K–12 schools and colleges in the United States have provided reentry plans for the current school year. Some of those that have reopened in recent days have already had to deal with cases and shutdowns. Consider Georgia’s North Paulding High School, which made headlines for its crowded hallways and unmasked students. That school has now been shut down, in order to be “thoroughly cleaned and disinfected” because several students and staffers tested positive for COVID-19. In other words, sadly, there will likely be plenty of demand for products that help schools find and track cases, like Work.com and countless other tech tools now being hawked to schools and businesses looking to reopen.
Schools that are either choosing to or being forced to opt for remote-only learning are dealing with their own issues, too. The pandemic has shone light on an existing digital divide, with some students struggling to get access to reliable Internet and devices, many of them Black and Latinx.
To that end, Salesforce has also announced a $20 million grant to school districts in San Francisco, Oakland, Indianapolis, Chicago, and New York City. The money is meant to support distance learning and to “bridge the equity gap” for students and educators. According to Ebony Beckwith, chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce, these cities were chosen based on needs and the company’s presence in various regions; the tech player is also encouraging employees to volunteer in these school districts.
To be sure, $20 million flowing into a handful of cities and a software product that helps schools manage the chaos of information they must deal with is just one of many efforts underway by many companies. And there is no single, currently available solution that makes opening schools completely safe or opting for distance learning completely effective and equitable. But, like many other tools now out there, it’s a start.


fortune--2020-08-11--U.K. facial recognition pilots broke privacy, data protection and equality laws, court rules

The U.K. has long been an enthusiastic surveillance state—it has one CCTV camera for every 11 people. And like many other countries these days, its authorities are increasingly putting facial-recognition smarts behind those cameras.
However, one of the U.K.’s pioneering deployments of automated facial recognition has been ruled unlawful by an appeals court on three separate grounds: privacy, data protection, and equality.
South Wales Police, which was behind the 2017–18 technological trials, will not appeal against the ruling.
The ruling could have major implications for the guidelines police must follow when using such technology, as the country’s surveillance-camera watchdog has now criticized the government for failing to keep those guidelines up to date.
The case was brought by a civil liberties campaigner named Ed Bridges, whose image was captured at least twice by police cameras in the Welsh capital, Cardiff—once when he was shopping for Christmas presents in 2017, and once when attending a protest outside an arms fair in 2018.
With backing from the civil liberties group Liberty, Bridges complained to the High Court about violations of his rights. He lost in September 2019, but won his appeal on Tuesday.
The automated facial recognition (AFR) system involved in the case is known as AFR Locate. It captures images of people’s faces and compares them with a watchlist, then throws away the images if there is no match. The watchlist includes people for whom there is an outstanding arrest warrant, people suspected of committing crimes, vulnerable people, and so on.
On Tuesday, the Court of Appeal upheld three of the five grounds for Bridges’ appeal.
Human rights
The first was about the privacy rights in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To comply with this rule, public authorities can only interfere with someone’s privacy if they have sufficient backing from their country’s laws in doing so, and if it’s necessary for reasons such as national security or the prevention of crime.
The court said there was “no clear guidance on where AFR Locate could be used and who could be put on a watchlist,” so it upheld this part of Bridges’ appeal.
The failure of South Wales Police to comply with Article 8 also meant the police force failed to conduct a proper data-protection impact assessment before deploying the system; its impact assessment assumed the force wasn’t infringing on people’s privacy rights, which made it inadequate.
The third successful part of Bridges’ appeal was about the question of bias.
It is by now well known in tech and policy circles that the artificial intelligence algorithms underpinning facial recognition systems are often inherently biased, because they are more likely to incorrectly identify women and dark-skinned people. The racial-profiling implications are so severe that IBM pulled out of the facial-recognition space a couple of months back.
Under the U.K.’s Equality Act of 2010, public authorities are supposed to consider the potentially discriminatory implications of their policies. According to the court, South Wales Police “erred by not taking reasonable steps to make enquiries about whether the AFR Locate software had bias on racial or sex grounds.”
‘Major victory’
Bridges tweeted that he was “incredibly, ecstatically pleased” by the ruling.
I'm incredibly, ecstatically pleased by today's judgement on the case I brought with @libertyhq against the use of automatic facial recognition technology by South Wales Police. The Court of Appeal agreed that this technology threatens our rights. https://t.co/2kZiz7lJpv [1/5] — Ed Bridges (@DrEdBridges) August 11, 2020
Liberty, the group that supported him in the case, said in a statement that the ruling was “a major victory in the fight against discriminatory and oppressive facial recognition,” and called for the technology to be banned.
“The Court has agreed that this dystopian surveillance tool violates our rights and threatens our liberties,” said Liberty lawyer Megan Goulding in a statement. “Facial recognition discriminates against people of color, and it is absolutely right that the Court found that South Wales Police had failed in their duty to investigate and avoid discrimination.”
It should be noted that the court did not say there was any evidence that the system was discriminatory—it just said the police force failed to check whether it was or not. Separately, London’s Metropolitan Police claimed earlier this year that the algorithms it uses only generate false positives 0.1% of the time, but news reports have suggested inaccuracy rates as high as 81%.
South Wales Police said it would not appeal against Tuesday’s ruling. Indeed, chief constable Matt Jukes described it as “a judgment that we can work with.”
“Our policies have already evolved since the trials in 2017 and 2018 were considered by the courts, and we are now in discussions with the Home Office and surveillance camera commissioner about the further adjustments we should make and any other interventions that are required,” Jukes said.
The chief constable, who said the use of automated facial recognition had resulted in 61 arrests so far, singled out the bias issue as one his force was working particularly hard to address.
“In 2019 we commissioned academic analysis of this question, and although the current pandemic has disrupted its progress, this work has restarted and will inform our response to the Court of Appeal’s conclusions,” Jukes said.
‘Asleep on watch’
Tony Porter, the U.K.’s surveillance camera commissioner, responded to the ruling with an attack on the Home Office, the government department responsible for overseeing police activity.
Porter said he had been trying “fruitlessly” to get the Home Office to update its code of practice around facial recognition’s use by the authorities. He accused the department of being “asleep on watch” and called on it to act in the public interest and update those guidelines.
“I do not believe the judgment is fatal to the use of this technology, indeed, I believe adoption of new and advancing technologies is an important element of keeping citizens safe. It does however set clear parameters as to use, regulation, and legal oversight,” Porter said.
“Maybe the regulators at the sharp end of this subject matter really do understand things a little more than those advising ministers sometimes purport to.”
Fortune has asked the Home Office for a response to Porter’s criticism, but has received no reply at the time of writing.


fortune--2020-08-11--TheBoardlist—a leading advocate for putting more women on corporate boards—opens its platform to men

TheBoardlist—a leading advocate for putting more women on corporate boards—opens its platform to men of color

The movement for gender diversity on corporate boards has made real progress in the past decade, inching past the long-sought milestone of 20% female representation on Fortune 1000 boards in 2017. But while that effort has always aimed to include women of color, broader racial diversity has never been its first priority.
Now, one of the leading organizations pushing for more gender-inclusive boards is expanding its mission. TheBoardlist, a platform that connects companies with qualified women ready to serve as directors, will now allow men of color to participate in its service, the company announced Tuesday. That decision takes the power and influence of the largely successful movement to improve women’s representation on corporate boards and puts it behind the push for boards’ racial diversity, which has been backed by far fewer resources.
“Our broad lens was always diversity. Our starting point was gender,” says theBoardlist founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. “We’ve always known at some point we would expand. There’s no doubt that the acceleration of racial equity as a cultural issue and a business issue definitely led us to say this is the right time.”
Within the Fortune 500, white men hold an estimated 66% of board seats, according to an Alliance for Board Diversity and Deloitte report cited by theBoardlist. Another 18% belong to white women. Nine percent of Fortune 500 board directors are Black men or women, 4% are Asian, and 4% are Latino.
TheBoardlist began with advocating for women, Singh Cassidy says, because the issue was a “very obvious and large starting point.” Many other champions of corporate diversity have taken a similar approach—including in state legislatures, where lawmakers have issued gender-based quotas for public companies, but have not yet done the same for race. (Illinois attempted to legislate on both fronts in 2019, but saw its final bill watered down by the time it reached the governor’s desk.)
Lawmakers and advocates have often hoped that gender would “open the door” to a broader conversation about diversity, says California State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, who introduced the state’s groundbreaking boards legislation.
That hasn’t always turned out to be the case. In states that have led on gender diversity on boards, racial diversity is certainly on lawmakers’ radar—but none have moved forward on the problem yet. “I suspect that issue will come up eventually, but I don’t think it’s top of mind for most folks,” says Washington State Sen. Jamie Pedersen, citing the more immediate pressures of the pandemic and police reform; Pedersen introduced the state’s board gender diversity legislation, which was enacted in March. Jackson is retiring so she won’t be leading any boards legislation on racial diversity in California, but she says the issue has come up among her colleagues and she expects to see some action.
The movement for board diversity involves other stakeholders besides lawmakers and advocates, from the companies naming candidates to these seats to the outside firms that help businesses navigate inflection points like initial public offerings. Goldman Sachs this year announced it would not take a company public unless it has at least one “diverse” member on its board; that language doesn’t leave out racial diversity, but it doesn’t explicitly require it either.
“I think you’ll see not just legislators, but people who are involved in taking companies public, or in corporate governance,” predicts Singh Cassidy. “They’ll all broadly trend towards this initiative.”