fortune--2020-02-06--Legendary actor Kirk Douglas dies at 103

Kirk Douglas, the three-time Oscar-nominated actor who played resolute heroes and formidable villains in more than 80 movies, including Spartacus and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, has died. He was 103.
People magazine reported his death Wednesday, citing a statement from his son, actor and Oscar winner Michael Douglas. Details of his death weren’t immediately available. “It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103,” Michael Douglas said in the statement.
Known for his toothy grin, cleft chin, blazing eyes and granite-chiseled features, Douglas specialized in self-centered, cocky characters, and worked with top directors including Stanley Kubrick and Vincente Minnelli.
He won lifetime achievement awards from the American Film Institute in 1991 and the Screen Actors Guild in 1999 and, in 1996, an honorary Academy Award “for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community.” It was presented by his son, Michael, who had won an Oscar for best actor in Wall Street (1987). Other sons and a grandson also worked in films.
On stage at the 2011 Oscars to announce the best-supporting-actress winner, Douglas, at 94, poked fun at his own failure to win one of the trophies for acting. “I’ll never forget this moment,” he said. “Three times, and I lost every time.”
Golden Globe
His portrayal of Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life” did earn him a Golden Globe and a New York Film Critics Circle Award. He also won a Best Picture Golden Globe for “Spartacus.” In 1981, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Douglas infused every role with passion, and his performances were often multilayered ones,” movie critic Leonard Maltin said. “He could bring sinister traits to sympathetic characters, and vice versa.”
Film critics called the agile, athletic Douglas one of the first action heroes, from his performance in films including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).
In Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Douglas created a humorous rivalry with Burt Lancaster, playing Doc Holliday to Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp. The two were close friends who made six films together.
He said his biggest career regret was not playing the main character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which was co-produced by his son Michael and won the Academy Award for best picture. He had played the lead on stage in the 1960s but was too old by the time the film, directed by Milos Forman, was ready to shoot. Jack Nicholson got the role and won the Oscar for best actor.
Ragman’s Son
Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch Demsky on Dec. 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, N.Y. His parents, Harry and Bryna, were illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants. His father sold rags. In The Ragman’s Son” his 1988 autobiography, Douglas said his impoverished childhood was fraught with anti-Semitism that fueled his ambition and competitive drive.
He graduated from St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., in 1938 and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan in 1941. After changing his name in 1939, Douglas first appeared on the New York stage in 1941 in Spring Again.
He made his film debut in 1946 as Barbara Stanwyck’s district-attorney husband in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. His breakout role as devious boxer Midge Kelly in 1949’s Champion cemented his forceful, intense screen persona, making him a star and earning him an Oscar nomination.
Hollywood Blacklist
Like Lancaster and John Wayne, Douglas was one of the first movie stars to form his own production company to manage his career. Through Bryna Productions, founded in 1952, Douglas hired screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted for alleged Communist ties, to write the Spartacus screenplay.
This action unofficially ended the blacklist and allowed filmmakers banned during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist push in the 1950s to return to work in Hollywood. In a letter to the New York Times in 2011, Douglas said backing his friend Trumbo against the blacklist “was one of the proudest decisions of my life.”
At the height of his career in the 1950s, Douglas kept himself at Hollywood’s center, sometimes turning out three films a year. He starred in well-reviewed movies with A-list directors, including Billy Wilder’s The Big Carnival, as a callously ambitious reporter, and Howard Hawks’s The Big Sky, as a frontiersman.
He was nominated for two Oscars working with Minnelli, as a ruthless movie producer in The Bad and the Beautiful and as depressed artist Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life.
Production Company
Douglas played an idealistic French officer battling military corruption in Kubrick’s antiwar film Paths of Glory. He then used his production company, which made Paths of Glory, to bring Spartacus to the screen in 1960. Kubrick directed Douglas in the title role as a slave who leads an insurrection against tyrannical Roman leaders.
Most of his films in the 1960s and 1970s were Westerns and war films in which Douglas played a rugged individual. Approaching 60, the athletic actor still flexed his leading-man muscles in three films he called a trilogy: as a Mafia leader in The Brotherhood, an advertising executive in The Arrangement, and a prison inmate in There Was a Crooked Man.
In his later years, he appeared less frequently in films, mostly in character roles. In 2003, Douglas starred with his first wife Diana, son Michael, and grandson Cameron in It Runs in the Family. Diana Douglas died in 2015.
Personal Trials
He suffered personal tragedies and severe health problems in the 1990s. In 1991, he was the only survivor of a helicopter crash that killed two people. A 1996 stroke left him with a severe speech impediment.
After the crash, Douglas reconnected with his Jewish faith. He studied the Talmud and Torah and made his second bar mitzvah at age 83. He wrote two children’s books about Judaism.
In 2002, he wrote My Stroke of Luck, detailing his battle with depression and helplessness after his stroke. Douglas said he felt so hopeless that he became suicidal, putting the loaded gun he had used in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in his mouth. Before he could pull the trigger, he hit a bad tooth, causing such pain he had second thoughts.
He had four sons from two marriages, all of whom entered the movie business—Joel and Peter as producers, Michael and Eric as actors. Eric Douglas died in 2004.
Douglas celebrated his 90th birthday in December 2006 by issuing a news release urging “America’s young people” to tackle problems such as poverty, global warming, and AIDS.
“The world is a mess,” Douglas said, “and you are inheriting it. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you.”
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—Seconds-long streaming delays can make or break live entertainment—American Factory directors on capturing what “globalization looks like”
—Charlize Theron and John Lithgow reflect on Bombshell’s indelible impact
—HBO’s “McMillion$” shows how cheaters scammed McDonald’s Monopoly
—Content is king: Inside Netflix’s streaming wars strategy
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fortune--2020-02-06--Nestlé invests another $200 million in Aimmune’s peanut allergy drug

These countries have imposed China travel restrictions over the coronavirus

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Good afternoon, readers.
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first-ever treatment for peanut allergies in young patients, Aimmune Therapeutics’s Palforzia. And the victory is already paying dividends for the biotech firm.
On Wednesday, food giant Nestlé’s Health Science arm announced an additional $200 million investment in Aimmune (on top of a $273 million existing stake, bring the total to $473 million).
It’s a convertible stock deal by Nestlé, which clearly has an interest in a company that’s on the bleeding edge of drug development for one of the most prevalent food allergies in the world—one that’s innately important for a global firm that manufactures foods which may contain peanuts. Nestlé’ food companies include ice cream brands, food service providers, candy makers, and much more.
“We are impressed with the progress Aimmune has made as it prepares to launch Palforzia, the first drug approved by the FDA for any form of food allergy,” said Nestlé Health Science CEO Greg Behar in a statement.
Palforzia was approved last Friday but, when it comes to its sales potential, the drug has faced some controversy among the investor class.
For instance, the treatment—which uses a formulation of peanut protein in order to get children who have deadly allergies used to the substance—requires significant oversight and eventual “up-dosing.” That’s a complicated process for a potentially deadly condition, and the treatment comes with a regulatory warning about its potential to cause anaphylaxis.
But the Nestlé investment underscores the bull theory. After all, about 1.2 million children have peanut allergies. That’s about 2% of the entire non-adult population of the United States. Evaluate Pharma projects that Palforzia could be a blockbuster drug that brings in more than $1 billion in annual sales by 2024.
The bet here is that, despite the challenges of administering the drug, enough parents and doctors will want to give the product a try and sales will soar.
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Verily plots a digital eye care venture with a Japanese pharma. Google parent Alphabet's life sciences arm has teamed up with Santen Pharma in order to develop a high-tech contact lens which can actually measure glucose levels. Why would you want to do something like that? The hope is to use such technology to better diagnose and treat conditions such as dry eye and glaucoma. But don't get your hopes up too much—a different iteration of this project with Alcon was shelved a few years ago. (FierceBiotech)
INDICATIONS
Gates Foundation pledges up to $100 million in coronavirus fight. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pledging up to $100 million (adding $90 million to their January pledge of $10 million) in order to diagnose, contain, and treat the Wuhan coronavirus. “Our hope is that these resources will help catalyze a rapid and effective international response. This response should be guided by science, not fear, and it should build on the steps that the World Health Organization has taken to date," said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman in a statement. (Fortune)
THE BIG PICTURE
U.S. government proposes higher Medicare payments next year. It's still in the works, but the U.S. government is proposing a modest increase to private health insurers in the Medicare Advantage program, a hike of about 0.93%. That may sound like a small number but considering the sheer volume of patients covered under the program, companies like UnitedHealth, Humana, Centene, and others appear poised for a significant boost. (Reuters)
REQUIRED READING
How the menopause taboo hurts working women, by Kristen Bellstrom
Bitcoin is too slow. Can lightning labs fix that?, by Jeff John Roberts
How much is an Oscar worth?, by Paula Bernstein
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fortune--2020-02-06--First step in study shows CRISPR gene-edited cells are safe for use in cancer patients

Land O ’ Lakes wants to introduce you to the farmer behind your butter

This is the web version of Brainstorm Health Daily, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top health care news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Happy Thursday, readers!
Cool science is intrinsically exciting. And the concept of slicing and dicing DNA through CRISPR gene-editing in order to treat conditions ranging from cancer to inherited disorders is ever-so-cool—on top of being a massive opportunity for investors and businesses, and, most importantly, potentially life-changing for patients (always good to keep them top of mind).
But from the early days of the genomic revolution, there’s been a key question: are edited cells safe to use in humans?
On Thursday, we got at least a little bit more information on the safety-side of this nascent biological tech—and it’s good news.
The University of Pennsylvania and other researchers, who are running the first-ever CRISPR gene-editing study on humans in the U.S., announced that deploying genetically modified cells to to fight cancer is safe for patients. This is a follow-up on their November news that reported early-stage safety trial data for the clinical trials approved in 2016.
The new report adds to the theory that this technology, at the very least, won’t be harmful. Though they don’t know if the modified genes will fight cancers, tests can move ahead without adding extra worries for researchers, doctors, or patients—and that is no small thing.
But, it’s worth stating the flip side of all this good news once more: Efficacy in fighting cancers—and the details about which types it may be most effective against—are still completely up in the air. This is, literally, the very first step of the clinical trial process. Consider it due diligence.
And it’s possible that even the safety concerns may re-emerge depending on the specific disease that a patient has.
Still, it’s an intriguing advance for one of the most fascinating biotechnological innovations in decades. We’ll definitely be watching to see what happens next.
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
An A.I. approach to coronavirus. Rockville, Md.-based Insilico Medicine is taking an artificial intelligence hammer to the coronavirus threat, my colleague Jeremy Kahn writes. What's fascinating about the technology (at least according to Insilico's claims) is that it could be deployed to rapidly suss out the kinds of molecules that could be effective combatants against the new coronavirus strain that's been spreading across the globe and hitting international markets. (Fortune)
INDICATIONS
The Johnson & Johnson talc saga continues. Drug giant Johnson & Johnson's drama over whether or not its popular talc powder products are linked to ovarian cancer (a claim the company has vehemently denied) continued on Thursday as a jury reportedly handed down a $750 million verdict of punitive damages to the firm. J&J plans to appeal the renumeration. The company has been successful on that front in several other cases when faced with sizable verdicts. (Reuters)
THE BIG PICTURE
The war on Medicaid. University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley is one of the sharpest minds when it comes to U.S. health care policy. So it's worth reading his words even if you may disagree with his underlying philosophies—and there are few issues as important to the working poor as Medicaid policy. Bagley has a typically eloquent and insightful piece in the Washington Post about the Trump administration's efforts to turn Medicaid, a federal-state partnership health care safety net program, into a "block grant." Such a move would likely allow states to undercut the benefits provided to the nation's poor. It's a viewpoint worth considering. (Washington Post)
REQUIRED READING
Stock scammers are using the coronavirus outbreak to dupe investors, by Lucinda Shen
Why mobile carriers are bidding billions more for 5G airwaves, by Aaron Pressman
A Peloton revenue miss paired with a strong annual outlook, by Bloomberg
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fortune--2020-02-06--Land O’Lakes wants to introduce you to the farmer behind your butter

First step in study shows CRISPR gene-edited cells are safe for use in cancer patients

A year and a half into her new role as CEO of Land O’Lakes, Beth Ford decided it was time do a company-wide strategic review. One of her biggest takeaways as she pored over every facet of the business: Many consumers did not realize that Land O’Lakes is a farmer-owned cooperative.
“It’s not that we hid it,” Ford says. “We just thought that people knew.”
Now as the company approaches its 100th birthday, Land O’Lakes plans to double down on emphasizing its farmer roots—a move meant to appeal to shoppers who increasingly want a deeper connection to what they eat. “We are at a time when consumers want more information about where food originates,” Ford says.
The Minneapolis-based company, which generates $15 billion in sales, has already started to feature its farmers in some of its marketing videos and is in the middle of rolling out new packaging that stresses its farmer ownership.
The new approach is in some ways a throwback to the 1980s and 1990s when the company regularly highlighted its farmers, says Heather Anfang, senior vice president of U.S. dairy foods for Land O’Lakes. In its more recent past, the company switched to talking about the features and benefits of its products rather than the people behind them.
But today’s consumers are more interested in buying goods that are a reflection of their own values, Anfang says. “As we talk to them about supporting a family-owned cooperative and supporting American farmers,” she says, “that’s very relevant to them.” Ford says that the company’s research has consistently shown that farmers are a trusted resource.
Land O’Lakes’ branding move comes amid an industrywide struggle in the dairy sector, especially as milk consumption has declined. Dean Foods, the largest milk producer in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy protection in November. Dairy producer Borden followed in January with its own filing for bankruptcy protection, citing a changing consumer and higher costs.
Land O’Lakes—which sells products made with milk, but not the beverage itself—has been immune to some of these pressures. Instead, the company has doubled down on value-added products like cultured butter, cheese, and refrigerated desserts. “There’s still a lot of growth in dairy,” says Ford.
Ford has been very vocal about the struggles of rural America and its farmers, attempting to call attention to what she calls the country’s “shared destiny” with the heartland. “Our opportunity,” she says, “is to reduce the distances between the consumer and the farmer.”


fortune--2020-02-06--The 5 top tech skills companies want in new hires right now

Here’s just one way the enormous (and growing) appetite for tech talent is unique: demand is highest early in the year. Unlike in the rest of the job market, where most employers post fewer jobs in January despite a spike in applicants, a new report from career site Indeed notes that the number of IT openings has peaked at the beginning of every year since 2014.
2020 is no exception, with seven in 10 companies planning to expand tech hiring in 2020’s first six months, according to a Robert Half survey of 2,800 IT managers. Most (86%) of those decision-makers say finding enough people with the right skills is “challenging,” especially in cybersecurity, cloud computing, and database management. So it’s no surprise that many employers (75%) are offering extras like sign-on bonuses.
That’s terrific for techies, of course, but there’s a catch. “IT jobs are notorious for requiring specific, but ever-changing, skills,” says Indeed economist Andrew Flowers. “To thrive in today’s tech world, you need to be adept in a shifting menu of programming languages, web frameworks, libraries, databases, statistical methods, workflow tools, and platforms.” Whew. It can be tough, Flowers adds, for individual job hunters to “find those positions that are well matched with their skill sets.”
To make that daunting task a little bit easier, Indeed dove into its vast database of job listings and analyzed the most in-demand tech roles now, along with the specific skills it takes to qualify for the top four.
The 10 most widely available IT jobs now, according to Indeed’s report: software engineer, senior software engineer, software architect, system engineer, developer, systems administrator, full stack developer, technical support specialist, front-end developer, and product manager.
It’s worth noting that the top two, software engineer and senior software engineer, are the biggest categories by far, accounting for almost 11% of total job openings (including non-IT jobs) posted on Indeed.
Software engineers now need to be expert in “at least one, or preferably several, programming languages,” says Flowers, adding that “the most useful language to know depends greatly on the specific job in question.” The six languages most mentioned in recent software-engineer job postings : Java, C++, Python, JavaScript, C#, C, and NET.
Even if you have all the right skills at the moment, what employers need can change fast, Flowers says, so “people who want these jobs must be quick and agile” about spotting trends and picking up new skills as they go along.
Tim Tully agrees. Chief technology officer at data giant Splunk—whose clients number 92 of the Fortune 100—Tully says that the most important trait IT job candidates need now is “a strong desire to learn.” It might be too broad of a requirement, but consider Tully’s own list of the five most essential tech skills now:
1. Real-time data management
“Data is key,” says Tully, “and the need for understanding and managing data in real time is growing.”
2. Design thinking
“When I started my career 20 years ago, engineers didn’t need to think about design. Now they do. The bar is higher.”
3. App development
“You need a mobile version of every website now.”
4. A.I. and machine learning
They both “power everything, or soon will.”
5. A composite of the first four skills
That is, “it’s important to be at least fairly conversant with all of them.”
If that sounds like a tall order, it is. “You need to be like a Swiss Army knife,” he explains. To shine in tech, “you used to be able to pigeonhole yourself as an expert in one area of IT, or maybe two. Not anymore.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—How to succeed in your January job hunt
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—A.I. is transforming the job interview—and everything after
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fortune--2020-02-06--Why mobile carriers are bidding billions for more 5G airwaves

An ongoing federal auction for 5G airwave licenses has reached almost $8 billion, hitting double what analysts anticipated and signaling a huge appetite for high-speed wireless networks.
The Federal Communications Commission is selling more than 14,000 individual licenses for service in metro areas nationwide.
The high-frequency bands, known as millimeter wave, don’t travel very far—only a few city blocks from cell sites, in many cases—but they can carry a huge amount of data. Downloads in the bands available can approach 2 gigabits-per second, fast enough to download an entire movie almost instantaneously.
Interest is far greater than expected considering two relatively tepid auctions for similar airwaves in the past few years. Analysts had said that mobile carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile would only bid $2 billion to $4 billion in total for the rights.
The general consensus was that the companies would try to save their money to bid on lower-band spectrum rights that the FCC plans to auction later this year. Those airwaves, at lower frequencies that travel much farther, will also be compatible with 5G.
Instead of modest interest, bidding reached $7.6 billion as of Jan. 30, when the auction was temporarily paused. Bidding resumes on Feb. 18.
“We would have expected most bidders to be preserving financial capacity for the more valuable spectrum that will be auctioned in the next 12 months,” analyst Vivek Stalam at New Street Research notes.
The agency won’t reveal the winning bidders until after the auction concludes, likely within a few more weeks. But the highest bids were for the biggest cities, with almost $1 billion for airwave rights in New York City, over $700 million for Los Angeles, and about $350 million for Chicago.
The companies are prohibited from discussing the ongoing auction under FCC rules.
The mobile industry is racing to provide superfast 5G—the successor to 4G—nationwide to attract as many subscribers as possible. But companies are challenged by a lack of airwave spectrum.
Currently, AT&T and Verizon offer 5G to consumers in parts of a few dozen cities each, while Sprint offers the service in only nine cities. Meanwhile, T-Mobile provides what it describes as nationwide 5G coverage, reaching areas where about 200 million people live, but at speeds only slightly faster than current 4G networks.
In South Korea, the three major carriers there have already covered 85 cities with 5G. And China expects to expand 5G from 50 of its largest cities today to 300 by the end of the year.
Those countries and many other are focusing on lower-spectrum bands than those the FCC is selling in the current auction. But similar lower-spectrum airwaves in the U.S. are already in use by other players, including military radar installations and satellite to ground communications.
Some analysts think the carriers would be wiser to wait for those bands to be freed up in the U.S. The FCC is working on moving the satellite users from a segment known as the C-band, for example. Walt Piecyk, an analyst at LightShed Partners, is skeptical that millimeter wave bands will end up being as useful as airwaves in the C-Band, which can travel much further, requiring fewer cell sites.
“The outcome of the C-Band spectrum will have a larger impact on 5G in the United States than this auction,” he says.
One reason for the higher bidding in the current auction may be the size of the spectrum blocks up for sale. In its two prior millimeter wave auctions, the FCC sold smaller blocks. The current auction, however, is for a total of 3,400 megahertz of spectrum across three bands, the most ever sold at one time. That means each license will have far greater capacity for connecting phones and carrying data traffic.
There is also one wrinkle in the auction procedures that may be inflating the bids. AT&T and Verizon already own some licenses in the 39 GHz band, one of those up for bid. Under the FCC’s rules, the carriers are entitled to some of the auction proceeds for surrendering those existing licenses to be sold.
That may have encouraged them to bid more aggressively for other licenses. In essence, they would be getting back some proceeds to offset their bids. The FCC reports the total amount bid for the auction without taking into account any refunds, however.
It’s also possible that AT&T and Verizon may be sitting on the sidelines, and instead waiting to collect up to $3 billion for selling their 39 GHz licenses, says analyst Stalam, at New Street. In that case the $7.6 billion in total bids is accurate, but two of the largest carriers would be sellers.
Even with the auction total approaching $8 billion, it could be dwarfed by the sale of C-Band licenses. Analysts predict that sale could bring in $30 billion to $50 billion. At that rate, the carriers might need speedy 5G phones just to keep up with the bidding.
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—Predicting the biggest tech headlines of 2020
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fortune--2020-02-06--Stock scammers are using the coronavirus outbreak to dupe investors, SEC warns

As coronavirus takes its toll on the economy by grounding flights and closing casinos, stock market scammers may be looking for a way to make a quick buck.
“We have become aware of a number of Internet promotions, including on social media, claiming that the products or services of publicly-traded companies can prevent, detect, or cure coronavirus, and that the stock of these companies will dramatically increase in value as a result,” the SEC warned Tuesday. “We urge investors to be wary of these promotions.”
The SEC declined to name specific companies, though coronavirus news has had effects on some health industry stocks.
These alerts come as the virus continues its global march. On Wednesday, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the 12th case stateside, while the most recent estimates say the coronavirus has killed 563 people and infected 28,000 in China, and spread to 24 other countries. No vaccine has yet been identified.
Not the first time
It wouldn’t be the first time that scammers saw an opportunity to exploit investors amid a global health crisis. During the Ebola outbreak of 2014, U.S. regulators warned investors against stock scams involving the deadly virus. In particular, the SEC urged investors to be on their guard when microcap companies claim they are developing products to prevent or treat Ebola. At the time, the SEC suspended trading of four companies that touted their Ebola-related services, citing a lack of publicly available information: Bravo Enterprises, Immunotech Laboratories, Myriad Interactive Media, and Wholehealth Products.
In general, the SEC has warned investors to tread carefully through over-the-counter micro-cap markets. Such listed companies are subject to looser reporting rules, and their share prices are more susceptible to, for example, pump-and-dump schemes—allowing outsiders to spread misinformation to boost a stock price, before selling rapidly to net a quick profit.
It’s not the only example of misinformation, which has been rampant through the coronavirus outbreak. Scammers have sent phishing emails claiming to have preventative information on the virus.
Online, claims that garlic, sesame oil, or vitamin C can cure or prevent coronavirus have also made the rounds as World Health Organization specialists chase down and refute them as they surface. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are also working to combat false information on the disease.
With the contagion still far from peaking, the likeliness of future coronavirus scams grows.
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—WATCH: Biggest investing opportunities and risks for 2020
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fortune--2020-02-06--Weinstein rape trial moving faster than anticipated as prosecutors rest their case

Prosecutors in Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial rested their case Thursday after more than two weeks of testimony punctuated by harrowing accounts from six women who say he ignored pleas of “no, no, no” and excused his behavior as a Hollywood norm.
“The people rest, judge,” Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon said, moving the closely watched celebrity trial one step closer to a verdict.
Weinstein attorney Donna Rotunno immediately asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that testimony from the woman he is charged with raping “does not in any way show a forcible act by Mr. Weinstein.” The judge rejected the request.
Now Weinstein’s lawyers will start calling witnesses of their own. They haven’t said whether Weinstein himself will testify. Doing so could bring big risks because prosecutors would be able to grill him about each of the allegations that jurors have already heard about in vivid detail.
Among the witnesses the defense is expected to call is a psychologist who specializes in human memory. The defense is looking to raise doubts about the women’s recollections of encounters that in some cases are more than a decade or two old.
The criminal charges at the trial in New York City are based on two allegations: that Weinstein raped a woman in March 2013 and that he forced oral sex on another woman in 2006.
The allegations against Weinstein helped fuel the #MeToo movement. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Weinstein, 67, maintains that any sexual encounters were consensual.
Prosecutors ended their case after the last of the other accusers allowed to testify finished telling jurors about about an encounter with the disgraced movie mogul in 2013.
Lauren Marie Young, a model from suburban Philadelphia, testified that Weinstein invited her to his Beverly Hills hotel room, lured her to the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, pulled down her dress and groped her breast.
Additional women, including Young, have been allowed to testify as prosecutors attempt to show there was a practiced method to Weinstein’s attacks, including inviting women to his hotel room to discuss business, then disrobing and demanding sexual favors.
Her testimony bookended that of the first accuser to testify, actress Annabella Sciorra, who alleges Weinstein barged into her apartment in the mid-1990s, threw her on a bed and raped her as she tried to fight him off by kicking and punching him.
In between, jurors heard similar stories of Weinstein ingratiating himself with much younger women, appearing to show interest in helping their careers before getting them into a hotel room or an apartment and violating them.
Most were aspiring actresses. Sciorra was a star on the rise. Another, the 2006 accuser Mimi Haleyi, was looking at the time to get more involved in behind-the-scenes aspects of the entertainment business.
Jurors also were reminded of the complexity of the women’s relationships with Weinstein.
For example, the woman Weinstein is charged with raping faced three days of questioning, much of it on cross-examination, as Weinstein’s lawyers scoured friendly, sometimes flirtatious emails she sent the film producer after the alleged assault.
The woman acknowledged meeting Weinstein for other sexual encounters. She said she kept in touch because “his ego was so fragile” and that contacting him “made me feel safe.”
At one point, Weinstein lawyer Rotunno asked the woman why she would accept favors from “your rapist.”
The woman turned to jurors and declared: “I want the jury to know that he is my rapist.”
The Associated Press has a policy of not publishing the names of people who allege sexual assault without their consent. It is withholding name of the rape accuser because it isn’t clear if she wishes to be identified publicly.
Prosecutors attempted to thwart the defense’s focus on some of the women’s continued interactions with Weinstein by calling to the witness stand a forensic psychiatrist who specializes in victim behavior. Dr. Barbara Ziv, who testified at the 2018 retrial that led to Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction in Pennsylvania, said most victims in such cases continue to have contact with their attackers for fear of retaliation and because many hope what happened “is just an aberration.”
On Wednesday, prosecutors also showed jurors emails they didn’t see during the woman’s exhaustive cross-examination that showed it was Weinstein trying to keep their complex relationship afloat, pining for meetings as she latched onto excuses to avoid him.
After one instance of getting the cold shoulder, Weinstein emailed the woman’s roommate in October 2013, writing: “Tell your friend… I’m friendly.”
In December 2015, Weinstein asked the woman: “R u meeting me or forgetting me…”
The trial has moved far quicker than anyone involved anticipated. Jurors were initially told to expect six weeks of testimony. Now the case could be decided by mid-February.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Seconds-long streaming delays can make or break live entertainment—American Factory directors on capturing what “globalization looks like”
—Charlize Theron and John Lithgow reflect on Bombshell’s indelible impact
—HBO’s “McMillion$” shows how cheaters scammed McDonald’s Monopoly
—Content is king: Inside Netflix’s streaming wars strategy
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fortune--2020-02-06--Tesla’s growth problem—by the numbers

Tesla’s growth problem—by the numbers

The good news for investors looking to jump on the Tesla train, and join the biggest momentum play in recent history, is that the price dropped by 17.2% on Wednesday, making Elon Musk’s phenom $27.3 billion cheaper in a single day.
The bad news is that Tesla’s market cap, as of Wednesday’s close, stands at $132.4 billion. (That was before Thursday’s open, in which it climbed by a mere 3%.)
Tesla’s valuation—despite Wednesday’s big selloff, it’s tripled since early October— is the crucial metric in handicapping whether it’s a good or bad investment from here. Why?
Because taking its market cap as a starting point allows you shut out what Tesla’s fans expect it will deliver, and focus on what it must deliver to reward shareholders. Tesla’s gigantic market cap establishes the starting bar that in turn dictates the height of all future bars it must surmount to deliver a decent return. And since the starting bar was already lofty a year ago, and has tripled in height since, Tesla will need an Olympian pole vault of a jump, the kind usually achieved only by the best of tech, to reach those heights.
In 2019, Tesla surprised Wall Street by delivering $872 million in free cash flow—defined as cash from operations less investments in plant and equipment. That’s up from a negative $222 million in 2018, and a deficit of $4.1 billion in 2017. Hence, Tesla is now selling for 152 times last year’s free cash flow (the $132.4 billion market cap divided by $872 million in FCF)—the very dollars needed for, say, dividends, buybacks, or to invest in operations for expanding or streamlining production.
Buckle up, investors
Tesla is a risky stock, to put it mildly. So let’s assume that its shareholders would want at least a 10% annual return. Who would want to be strapped into Tesla, careening around mountain curves, for less?
Here’s a model showing the cash flow trajectory that would get Tesla to that 10% annual benchmark over the next ten years. We’ll assume Tesla pays no dividends, and doesn’t buy back stock, since it’s likely that given Musk’s supreme confidence in his model, he’ll plough back all of his cash flow to grow his creation. So 100% of the gains would come from a growth in the stock price. We’ll also assume that Tesla’s big growth sprint lasts through 2029, and that thereafter it no longer generates outsize returns on its re-invested earnings—the normal life cycle for fast-growing companies.
In our model, the price of Tesla’s shares would need to rise 159% by the end of our target period in February, 2030. But getting there requires its total market cap to wax even more, because it’s likely that Tesla will have a lot more shares outstanding via grants to employees, and perhaps dilutive acquisitions. We’ll use a conservative estimate that the float will be 12% bigger in early 2030. So growing its share price by 159% over those ten years dictates that its overall valuation rise by 12% more, or 178%, to compensate for the higher share count. Hitting the 10%-a-year target requires that Tesla’s market cap jump to 178%, or nearly triple, to $368 billion in ten years.
Explore: Fortune’s Q1 2020 quarterly investment guide
What size cash flow would get Tesla to a valuation of $368 billion? Let’s project that Tesla will remain a glamour stock in early 2030, commanding a premium multiple of 20 times FCF. That math requires that its FCF jump from last year’s $872 million, to $18.4 billion (its $368 billion market cap divided by its multiple of 20).
Increasing cashflow from $872 million to $18.4 billion—a 21-fold jump— in a decade would would require average annual increases of 36% a year. That’s like adding 85% in FCF every two years.
If Tesla proves extremely profitable by carmaker standards and generates 15% pre-tax (and 12% after-tax) free cash flow returns on sales, its annual revenues would need to hit $153 billion in early 2030. Getting there would entail increasing 2019 sales ($24.6 billion) more than six-fold.
The rub is that Tesla would need to gobble up a gigantic proportion of tomorrow’s passenger car market. Last year, it sold 367,000 autos at an average price of $57,000. But Tesla is targeting the mass market with its lower-priced Model 3. It’s hard to predict the average price for a Tesla ten years hence, but if we project a mix dominated by its lower priced models, a reasonable estimate might be in the $50,000 range. At that price, Tesla would need to sell 3.1 million autos by the start of 2030. That’s 2.7 million more than it sold in 2019.
How big is that number as a share of the projected growth of the total world market, and Tesla’s target audience? IHS predicts that global light vehicle sales will expand from 95 million in 2019 to 110 million in 2026, the end of its forecast period. If we project that sales increase at the 2% annual rate IHS posits for the end of that period, sales would hit 120 million by early 2030, for a total increase of 25 million from 2019.
It’s a sure bet that far less than half of that increase will come in the Tesla’s relatively high-priced sweetspot. It’s likely that all Tesla cars would sell for more than $40,000 in 2029. (The average price for a light vehicle today is $27,000). But even if we make a generous prediction that 40%, or 10 million of the market’s growth comes in cars costing $40,000 or more, Tesla would by early 2030, need to be capturing close to 30% of the entire increase in the upper four-tenths of the world’s light vehicle market. Taking that huge slice of the growth pie would force Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, Ford, GM and sundry rivals to battle over the shrunken portion that’s left. Those competitors will battle back with their own electric cars and bargain pricing to slow Tesla’s rise.
You’ve got to buy a lot of big, Tesla-positive predictions on volumes, margins, and weak response from competitors to believe that it will take that much of tomorrow’s market, the essential for rewarding investors from here.
Miracle stocks are common in tech, but Tesla is operating in the generally dreary business of cars. The math is likely to puncture the miracle.
On the other hand, Tesla could prove a thriving carmaker, and its stock could still perform poorly. The good-company/poor-investment scenario is more likely than the bull case for its shares.
Tesla’s fans are to blame for its probable failure as an investment from these heights. Their exuberance has set the bar too high for their hero’s stock to vault to glory.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—All of your questions on filing taxes in 2020, answered
—The health of the economy in nine charts
—Why investors are cooling on “direct-to-consumer” brands
—The coronavirus is already disrupting the global supply chain
—WATCH: Biggest investing opportunities and risks for 2020
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fortune--2020-02-06--Shadow Inc.: How a company with 120 Facebook likes ended up at the center of the Iowa caucus firesto

Shadow Inc.: How a company with 120 Facebook likes ended up at the center of the Iowa caucus firestorm

The first official votes of the 2020 presidential race were delayed three days after a little-known vote tabulation app experienced massive technical errors during the Democratic Iowa caucuses Monday evening.
With the 2020 race accelerating, one would think the Democratic National Committee would go with battle-tested software—not a brand-new app. But now the U.S. electorate is demanding an explanation from Shadow Inc., after Iowa Democrats used its glitchy, undependable app to tabulate votes, derailing a crucial part of the American electoral process and ultimately playing into Trump’s—and conspiracy theorists’—hands.
Before this week, virtually no one knew of the little startup. The company’s app, Shadow—developed in part by Acronym, a “values-driven” nonprofit organization aiming to “educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters”—was contracted by the DNC for the caucus.
For a Washington, D.C., startup with 120 Facebook likes, that’s a tall order.
The Shadow app was distributed through TestFairy, a mobile app testing platform, rather than the official app stores on Android and iOS, with their far more stringent security and performance requirements.
“[We help] companies release better apps in shorter development cycles,” Yair Bar-On, the cofounder and CEO of TestFairy, tells Fortune. “The main reason our customers use us is security since we not only provide the service on a private cloud but also provide data encryption.”
“By definition, beta apps have bugs,” he says. “TestFairy does not replace the App Store.”
Speaking anonymously to the New York Times, two Acronym sources said that they released Shadow through TestFairy because they ran out of time for the app stores to approve it.
So, why would Shadow—untested, unknown, unstable—be green-lighted by the DNC to bear such a grave responsibility? The answer may lie in Acronym executives’ extensive ties to high-profile and influential Democrats.
An app with party ties
Acronym’s COO, Kim Peyser, is a former Obama administration official; its training manager, Andrea Ramos, is also the digital organizing director for Elizabeth Warren’s campaign; and the company’s founder and CEO, Tara McCowan, was deemed “the Democrats’ most dangerous digital strategist” by OZY for bringing disparate parts of progressive campaigning, like door knocking, social media campaigning, and TV and online content, together under one corporate umbrella.
As far as Shadow, the company’s CEO, Gerard Niemira, states on his LinkedIn page that he “[led a] small but mighty team” for Hillary Clinton’s “Hillary for America” campaign in 2016. And Shadow’s COO, James Hickey, an Oberlin College graduate in 2007, also worked for the Clinton campaign as an engineering manager.
Acronym, which Fortune could not reach for comment, has distanced itself from Shadow, saying it is a mere “investor” in the startup—despite stating last January that they “launched Shadow,” a proclamation since scrubbed from Acronym’s website.
“[We are] a nonprofit organization and not a technology company,” a spokesperson from Acronym told CRN. “As such, we have not provided any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party.”
Groundbase, a technology platform acquired by Shadow to develop the app, was similarly scrubbed from the portfolio of early investor Higher Ground Labs.
Aiming to quell still-warm concerns about foreign meddling, Mandy McClure, the communications director of the Iowa Democratic Party, was quick to call the snafu “not a hack or an intrusion,” but “a reporting issue.”
“The underlying data and paper trail is sound,” she said in a statement. “[It] will simply take time to further report the results.”
As of Thursday evening, the Iowa results were 100% reported, with former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) neck and neck at 26.2% and 26.1%, respectively. “An unmitigated disaster,” President Donald Trump tweeted.
“I don’t think people gave us a chance to win,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said.
After facing heat for what was seen as a premature victory speech, Buttigieg called his numbers so far “verifiable but still very, very frustrating.”
Whether owing to possible interests within the Democratic Party or a lack of plain old technological oversight, the fact remains Shadow was not ready to be brought into the fray, and the Iowa caucus suffered because of it.
And when the mere act of tallying a caucus vote leads to this level of disarray, those opposed to Democrats may echo political consultant Brad Blakeman, as quoted by Trump: “[They] want to run a country, and they can’t run a caucus.”
Whether or not Blakeman is oversimplifying the matter, the lesson of Shadow and of the still-bungled Iowa caucus is clear—the electoral process is too precious for slapdash technology.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—2020 candidates’ positions, and records, on economic issues that affect women
—Coronavirus forces China’s neighbors to make tough choices
—Europe’s refugee crisis is getting worse—for these children
—Fortune Explains: The debt ceiling
—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-02-06--Stop making excuses for the lack of diversity in film

This is the web version of raceAhead, Fortune’s daily newsletter on race, culture, and inclusive leadership. To get it delivered daily to your inbox, sign up here.
In her latest opinion piece for the New York Times, Aisha Harris digs into Hollywood’s habit of embracing films that have a diversity dodge built in. She gets right to the point. Why do so few of Martin Scorsese’s films have female leads? Or meaningful roles for people of color, for that matter?
“When it comes to filmmakers guarding themselves against critiques for telling the same-old stories about white men, history is a powerful shield,” she writes. She was referring to The Irishman, Scorsese’s epic three-decade saga of mobs, unions, and politicos, and in which actor Anna Paquin has only one line in three and a half hours of mostly white male drama. Scorsese has dismissed the critique, saying that his films have women if the story calls for it.
But Oscar contenders consistently retreat to safe territory when it comes to diversity—this year, there’s 1917, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, and Little Women to parse.
“A quick glance at the best picture nominees reveals just how impenetrable that armor is: Of the nine films in this category, all but two spend the majority of their running times at least 39 years in the past,” writes Harris. “Each of these period pieces is overwhelmingly homogeneous when it comes to race, gender or both; the fact that they are set firmly in the past seemingly allows them to exist without much pushback.”
The problem she says, bringing receipts, is that there were women and people of color in history. Fighting in wars. Putting white astronauts on the moon. In justice movements. Even hanging around with Henry the VIII. Erasing them from film is a choice, and perhaps a conscious one designed to continue to center white men in stories that actually belong to everyone.
In the spirit of embracing uncomfortable conversations about race and culture, there is an outstanding option this year.
Consider American Factory, the Oscar-nominated documentary feature, and the Netflix debut of Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground Productions. The film does a remarkable job documenting the culture clash when a Chinese company re-opens a much-lamented shuttered factory in Ohio. It offers a surprising and poignant look at the human challenges of globalization and is sparking important conversations in the U.S. and in China, where pirated versions are finding an audience prevented from accessing Netflix.
My colleague Aric Jenkins has a terrific interview with the filmmakers here.
What caught me up short was one surreal moment, about an hour in, that Jenkins describes perfectly: “The Chinese president of a Chinese-owned factory is coaching a roomful of Chinese workers on how to increase the productivity of their American coworkers, whom they work together with in Dayton.”
To do that, Fuyao Glass America president Jeff Daochuan Liu had to explain “Americans” to them, part exasperated manager, part armchair anthropologist. It was a startling look at how Americans are perceived, and I imagine for some people was an uncomfortable and unfamiliar window into what it’s like to be stereotyped, diminished, and erased.
“You need some skills to handle Americans. How can we take advantage of American characteristics to make them work for Fuyao?” he begins.
“There’s a culture in the U.S. where children are showered with encouragement. So everyone who grows up in the U.S. is overconfident. They are super confident. Americans love being flattered to death. You will get into trouble if you fight with them. ‘Donkeys like being touched in the direction their hair grows.’ You should touch donkeys in the direction their hairs grow, otherwise they’ll kick you.”
But it was Liu who delivered the real kicker. “We need to use our wisdom to guide and help them.”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On Point
The largest companies in the U.K. are failing to set diversity targets on corporate boards This is the finding of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), U.K.’s audit and accounting regulator, which found that Britain’s largest companies are not setting goals to increase diversity on board. According to their study, a dismal 2% of FTSE 250 companies and 14% of the FTSE 100 set measurable goals for board diversity. In cases where targets have been set, no FTSE 350 companies are reporting their progress. “The U.K.’s record on boardroom ethnicity is poor,” said Sir Jon Thompson, CEO of the FRC in a statement. “A more diverse boardroom leads to better business outcomes, which is why the U.K. Corporate Governance Code, and now the UK Stewardship Code, requires companies and investors to promote diversity and inclusion. We will monitor closely how companies report on their policies or explain their lack of progress, in this area.”
FRC
Study: Native Americans are offended by team mascots and name of D.C.’s American football team The study, conducted by the University of California Berkeley, contradicts previous surveys on the matter. More than 1,000 self-identified Native Americans participated—67% of whom routinely engage in tribal cultural practices—and reported feeling deeply offended by “caricatures of Native Americans.” The study is the largest to explore Indigenous attitudes toward sports mascots. “We keep seeing clear examples of Native people speaking up and protesting these problematic team names and mascots. Yet, public opinion polls, with little methodological transparency, say that Native people are not offended. Things just don’t add up,” says Arianne Eason, the UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology who co-led the study.
Berkeley
The FBI declares white supremacist and racially-motivated terrorism a “national threat priority” FBI director Christopher Wray, speaking at an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, says the agency has elevated its assessment of the danger posed by racially-motivated violent extremists. He cited white supremacists explicitly, and the “lone actors” who are radicalized online, and who decide to attack “soft targets” in public like houses of worship and retail outlets. "That threat is what we assess is the biggest threat to the homeland right now," he said.
CBS News
White House threatens to veto emergency aid package to Puerto Rico On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives is planning a vote on a $4.7 billion emergency aid package intended to help the U.S. territory recover from a series of earthquakes, but the Trump administration called this package “misguided.” It is the latest in a series of stand-offs between the White House and the Democrat-led House on aid to Puerto Rico; the island has been waiting for two years on billions of dollars approved by Congress for recovery from Hurricane Maria.
Washington Post
On Background
Hey, ally! You’ve been called out. Now what? Sam Dylan Finch is here with an important reminder that it’s human to feel defensive when you’ve been told you’ve made a mistake in speech or deed. But saying, “I didn’t mean it that way!” just won’t get you where you, as an ally, need to be. Repairing things “requires decentering our own feelings and tuning in, which takes a certain amount of practice and skill,” he says. “This can be difficult to do when we’re feeling fragile and vulnerable.” Finch offers nine phrases to use that can both minimize any harm caused and help anyone grow. (All are excellent. “I believe you” and “thank you” are the foundations.) But Finch offers a smart adjustment to the natural impulse to ask the person you harmed for help. “You never want to imply that the folks who are calling you out are required to give you an extensive education or invest even more labor on your behalf,” he says. He offers a better way.
Everyday Feminism
Back in the day, distinctively Black names offered an advantage Numerous research has shown that people with distinctively Black names are discriminated against in employment, education, and health care scenarios. But this fascinating working paper from economic historians Lisa Cook, Trevon Logan, and John Parman found that in the past, Black men with obviously Black names lived longer than other Black men. The team examined over three million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina issued between 1802 to 1970 and found a “robust within-race mortality difference,” which added more than one year of life to men with Black-sounding names. Prepare to nerd out, their methodology is fascinating and still evolving. “Overall, the results suggest cultural factors may be at play in both the transmission of distinctively black names and their mortality effects,” they say. “As much as 10% of the historical between-race mortality gap would have been closed if every black man were given a black name.”
NBER
Deaf man adopted a deaf rescue dog and taught him sign language Emerson had a rough start in life. The pup suffered from seizures and canine parvovirus, a dangerous illness for puppies, before he was three months old. After he recovered, Lindsay Powers, from foster-based rescue NFR Maine, posted about Emerson on Facebook. Nick Abbot, who is also deaf, thought they would have a good connection—and they did! Abbot has taught Emerson to sit, lie down, and come by signing, and documented their many adventures together on a popular Instagram account and in a children’s book, the proceeds of which will be shared with rescue shelters as well as organizations for people with audio disabilities. Not really an inclusion lesson here, but, sometimes it’s just nice to look at pictures of a very good boy.
The Epoch Times
Tamara El-Waylly produces raceAhead and manages the op-ed program.
Quote
"My impression of Americans is that they uncomplicated. Interpersonal relations among Americans are much more practical, in contrast to the complicated way that we Chinese people treat each other."
—Men Xuezhi, 54, doctor, Beijing, in an Associated Press roundup of how Americans are perceived around the world.


fortune--2020-02-06--How the Indie Spirits and Oscars will reflect an exhilarating—and often odd—awards season

If there’s one moment that encapsulates exactly how unique this awards season has felt, it was on Monday, Jan. 27, inside Hollywood’s Ray Dolby Ballroom during the Academy’s annual pre-Oscars luncheon, which saw more than 160 nominees gather for their coveted annual group photo.
As guests dined on yet another of this season’s plant-based creations (maitake mushroom and black rice, courtesy of maestro Wolfgang Puck), emcee Illeana Douglas painstakingly announced each nominee present, with the names intermingling like some sort of fantasy dinner-party parlor game.
Robert De Niro. Al Pacino. Brad Pitt. Charlize Theron. Taika Waititi. Leonardo DiCaprio. Cynthia Erivo. Quentin Tarantino. Greta Gerwig. Sam Mendes. Laura Dern. Noah Baumbach. Renée Zellweger. (And this doesn’t include luminaries who weren’t present, including a Scorsese, a Hanks, a Driver, a Johansson, and a Phoenix.)
But not one of those icons received a more shrieking reception than Parasite director and cowriter Bong Joon Ho—delivered by a fan base affectionately anointed “the Bong Hive”—as the auteur filmmaker settled into his place in the nominees photo.
Bong Joon Ho (seated, on the set of “Parasite”) is now developing a limited series for HBO based on his Oscar-nominated feature with executive producer Adam McKay. Courtesy of Neon
And the reaction was for good reason: Parasite, which earned six Oscar nominations, has made history as the first South Korean movie to be nominated for Best Picture and Best International Film. It’s also grossed nearly $164 million worldwide after becoming the highest-grossing Palme d’Or winner in France and North America in 15 years since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.
With a slew of coveted wins—including SAG Ensemble, WGA’s Best Original Screenplay, the Golden Globe for Foreign Language film, and two wins at BAFTA, including Original Screenplay and non-English film—Parasite is now a lock for Best International Film at the Independent Spirit Awards and Oscars this weekend.
Could Bong be poised to claim his place in Oscar’s Best Picture history, too? Maybe.
At press time, many pundits agree that Parasite, a satirical thriller about a poor Korean family’s con of a rich couple that culminates in a blood-soaked finale, is now neck and neck for Best Picture with Universal’s 1917, the World War I epic by Sam Mendes—in its own right a formidable contender.
Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (center, on the set of “1917”) based his Best Picture frontrunner in part on accounts of World War I by his paternal grandfather, Alfred Mendes. Since its Dec. 25 opening, the Universal release has earned more than $252 million worldwide. Courtesy of Universal Pictures
The British director won Best Motion Picture – Drama at the Globes and has scored coveted Directors Guild and Producers Guild wins, which are often reliable industry-precursors to Oscar’s Best Picture. This past Sunday, he walked away with seven key wins at BAFTA, including Best Film. It was the last major relevant industry event to occur before the end of Oscar voting on Feb. 4.
As Mendes’s film has garnered wide appeal among voters in the past six weeks (the war epic was a somewhat late entrant to the race, in late November, whereas upstart studio Neon acquired Parasite months before its Cannes win in May), the Academy tea leaves are becoming easier to read: Bong is a lock for International Film and favored for Original Screenplay at the Oscars (sorry, Tarantino). Mendes is the likely victor for Best Director, and the battle for Best Picture is now winnowed down to their two uniquely thrilling pieces of work.
This reality has no doubt been a blow for numerous big-swing contenders this season, including Warner Bros.’ 11-time nominee Joker from Todd Phillips, Netflix’s double bill of Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and Sony’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, for four. Offering some consolation, actors Joaquin Phoenix, Dern, and Pitt are all but Oscar locks for Joker, Marriage, and Hollywood (with Judy’s Zellweger filling out the fourth acting slot).
Interestingly, Marriage is the only film this season to cross over significantly with nominees for Film Independent Spirit Awards, which since 2011 has seen nearly half of its Best Feature winners also take Oscar’s top prize, including: The Artist, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman…, Spotlight, and Moonlight.
Netflix’s “Marriage Story” by writer-director Noah Baumbach is the only Best Picture Oscar contender this year that is also nominated for Film Independent’s Spirit Award for Best Feature. Wilson Webb—Netflix
But at this year’s Spirits, whose Aubrey Plaza–hosted ceremony airs Saturday (5 p.m. ET on IFC), the Best Feature winner won’t offer any insight into Oscar’s Best Picture race, as the most likely to win is Marriage or A24’s Uncut Gems by the Safdie brothers, who were wholesale snubbed by the Academy alongside their Spirit-nominated lead actor Adam Sandler. (Universal’s 1917 is decidedly not Spirit-eligible, with a rumored budget of $90 million.)
For many, the Spirits’ minimal overlap with Academy front-runners feels particularly resonant this year. Spirits nominees include actors of color (Jennifer Lopez, Kevin Harrison Jr., and Alfre Woodard, for three) and two female directors (Honey Boy’s Alma Har’el and Hustlers’ Lorene Scafaria), whereas the Oscars have only one acting nominee of color and no female Best Director nominees. It also makes predicting Best Picture at the Oscars, whose host-less telecast airs Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, trickier than usual.
What do we know nearly for sure is the final face-off of this strange, truncated season is now Bong—an international, outlier talent telling a story in Korean about class divide and excess—versus Mendes, a British theater vet chronicling a personal story from a “forgotten” world war.
Whatever is revealed on Sunday, one thing is for certain: The Bong Hive has already spoken, and Hollywood will likely never be the same.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—How Randy Newman’s family built a film-scoring dynasty over the course of a century
—How much is an Oscar worth?
—Bombshell‘s Charlize Theron and John Lithgow reflect on the film’s indelible impact
—American Factory directors on capturing what “globalization looks like on a human scale”
—Taika Waititi on Kiwi humor, directing as Hitler, and why kids should see Jojo Rabbit
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-02-06--Democratic Party chairman calls on Iowa Democrats to ‘recanvass’ caucus results

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee is calling for a “recanvass” of the results of Monday’s Iowa caucus, which was marred by technical problems and delays.
The chairman of the Democratic National Committee called on Thursday for a “recanvass” of the results of Monday’s Iowa caucus, which was marred by technical problems and delays.
”Enough is enough,” party leaderr Tom Perez wrote on Twitter. He said he was calling for the recanvass in order to “assure public confidence in the results.”
With 97% of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are nearly tied.
The technical glitches plaguing the first contest on the 2020 nominating calendar have made an already complicated candidate selection process even more complicated, forcing state officials to apologize and raising questions about Iowa’s traditional prime spot in picking nominees.
The caucus crisis was an embarrassing twist after months of promoting Iowa as a chance for Democrats to find some clarity in a jumbled field. Instead, after a buildup that featured seven rounds of debates, nearly $1 billion spent nationwide and a year of political jockeying, caucus day ended with no winner and no official results.
Iowa marked the first contest in a primary season that will span all 50 states and several U.S. territories, ending at the party’s national convention in July.
At issue was an app that the Iowa Democratic Party used to tabulate the results of the contest. The app was rolled out shortly before caucusing began and did not go through rigorous testing.
A coding error yielded problematic results Monday. And backup phone lines for reporting the outcomes were jammed, with many placed on hold for hours in order to report outcomes.
Much of the political world has already shifted its attention to next-up New Hampshire, which holds the first primary election in the Democrats’ 2020 nomination fight on Tuesday.
The chaos surrounding the reporting breakdown has undermined the impact of Iowa’s election, which typically rewards winners with a surge of momentum heading into subsequent primary contests.
The two early leaders are separated by 40 years in age and conflicting ideology.
Sanders, a 78-year-old self-described democratic socialist, has been a progressive powerhouse for decades. Buttigieg, a 38-year-old former municipal official, represents the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party. Buttigieg is also the first openly gay candidate to earn presidential primary delegates.
Wednesday’s updated results show Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar trailing.
The chairman of the Democratic National Committee is calling for a “recanvass” of the results of Monday’s Iowa caucus, which was marred by technical problems and delays.


fortune--2020-02-06--Amazon is going on a hiring spree on its home turf

Amazon is dramatically boosting its employee count in the city where it was founded.
The online retailer, in a blog post, said it plans to increase its staff in Bellevue, Wash. from 2,000 to 15,000 over the next few years.
“We opened our first office building in Bellevue in 2017. It’s a growing, business-friendly city with great amenities, a high quality of life, and a fantastic talent pool,” the company said in a blog post.
Bellevue holds a special place in Amazon’s history. It was in the garage of a rented home in that town that Jeff Bezos started the company in July 1995.
The Bellevue hiring spree comes as Amazon continues increase staffing in Seattle. The Seattle Times notes the company has over 11,000 Seattle-specific job openings and is still adding space in the city.
The company is in the midst of a tax fight with Seattle, however, as the City Council considers a tax on large employers to fund affordable housing and homeless services. That dispute led Amazon to pull out of an agreement to lease over 700,000 square feet of office space in Rainier Square.
Amazon employs over 500,000 people throughout the United States and nearly 800,000 worldwide.
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—The first coronavirus drug candidate is set for testing in China
—2020 candidates on the issues that matter to working women
—What you need to know about new IBM CEO Arvind Krishna
—HBO’s “McMillion$” shows how cheaters scammed McDonald’s Monopoly
—WATCH: Why CEOs are pessimistic about 2020 business outlook
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fortune--2020-02-06--Trump takes victory lap and unleashes fury at impeachment enemies

Exulting in his impeachment acquittal, President Donald Trump took a scorched-earth victory lap Thursday, unleashing his fury against those who tried to remove him from office while looking ahead to his reelection campaign.
Trump, speaking to a room full of supporters at the White House, declared the impeachment proceedings a “disgrace” and complained anew that it was “a very unfair situation,” echoing his broadsides hours earlier that stunned the crowd at an annual prayer breakfast.
“It was evil, it was corrupt,” Trump declared at the White House. “This should never ever happen to another president, ever.”
“We went through hell, unfairly. We did nothing wrong,” he continued.
As Trump spoke, nearly every inch of the White House’East Room was packed with supporters. Among them: Republican senators who cast some of the votes to acquit him, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Chuck Grassley, several Cabinet members, including Attorney General William Barr and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and staunch House allies including Reps. Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Earlier, speaking from a stage where he was joined by congressional leaders, inc luding Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the impeachment charge against him, Trump shattered the usual veneer of bipartisanship at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.
“As everybody knows, my family, our great country and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people,” Trump said at the annual event. His airing of grievances came hours before he was to deliver a full response to the impeachment vote at the White House surrounded by supporters.
“They have done everything possible to destroy us and by so doing very badly hurt our nation,” said Trump, who triumphantly held up copies of two newspapers with banner “ACQUITTED” headlines as he took the stage.
His remarks were especially jarring and whiplash-inducing coming after a series of scripture-quoting speeches, including a keynote address by Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor and president of a conservative think tank, who had bemoaned a “crisis of contempt and polarization” in the nation and urged those gathered to ”love your enemies.”
“I don’t know if I agree with you,” Trump said as he took the microphone, and then he proceeded to demonstrate it.
“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” he said in an apparent reference to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a longtime Trump critic who cited his faith in becoming the only Republican to vote for Trump’s removal.
“Nor do I like people who say ‘I pray for you’ when you know that is not so,’” he said, in a reference to Pelosi, who has offered that message for the president when the two leaders have sparred publicly.
The House speaker shook her head at various points during Trump’s remarks, but did not appear to interact with Trump personally. Earlier she had offered a prayer for the poor and the persecuted.
She said later that Trump’s remarks were “so completely inappropriate, especially at a prayer breakfast..” She took particular issue with his swipe at Romney’s faith and said that yes, she does pray for the president.
His comments were a clear sign that the post-impeachment Trump is emboldened like never before as he barrels ahead in his reelection fight with a united Republican Party behind him. And it stood in stark contrast to the apology offered by Bill Clinton in the aftermath of his own impeachment acquittal in 1999.
Clinton said then in a White House address: “I want to say again to the American people how profoundly sorry I am for what I said and did to trigger these events and the great burden they have imposed on the Congress and on the American people.”
Trump had avoided talk of impeachment in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, holding his tongue until the Senate had cast its official acquittal vote.
By the next day, he was already moving to use impeachment as a 2020 rallying cry.
Trump tweeted after the Senate vote that he would mark his acquittal with a statement to the nation at noon Thursday to “discuss our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax!” The president’s supporters were being invited to join him at the East Room event.
Asked what Trump would say, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News Channel that he would talk about “just how horribly he was treated, and you know, that maybe people should pay for that.”
“People should be held accountable. The Democrats should be held accountable,” she said. “People need to understand what the Democrats did was dishonest and it was corrupt.”
The president and his allies have been on a victory lap since Wednesday, sending giddy tweets needling his accusers and Democrats and celebrating.
Indeed, the night of the impeachment vote was one of revelry for members of the president’s circle. In Washington, many, including Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, his girlfriend, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, and the president’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, gathered at the president’s hotel a few blocks from the White House, one of the few MAGA safe zones in the deeply Democratic city.
The president himself remained at the White House but worked the phones, calling several confidants to exult about the verdict, bitterly complain about Romney and to promise that his Thursday noon statement would not want to be missed, according to a person familiar with the calls but not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.
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fortune--2020-02-06--Click here to oust the board— Inside the A.I. startup that’s transforming activist investing

Last year, Coast Capital was locked in a bruising trans-Atlantic battle with FirstGroup—the British operator of Greyhound buses as well as a fleet of 42,500 yellow school buses in the U.S. and Canada— before finally scoring a series of decisive blows in its activist investor crusade.
In May, the U.S. hedge fund, which holds a 10% stake in FirstGroup, persuaded the transportation firm to put its Greyhound bus business up for sale—a principal demand. Two months later, it forced out FirstGroup’s chairman. By the end of year, First Group agreed to appoint advisors to figure out whether or not to divest the rest of its North American business.
From his office in southwest England, Grant Fuller had been watching the back-and-forth blows with great interest. Fuller wasn’t involved in the Coast Capital-FirstGroup battle, but he saw the ordeal as an instructive one.
It takes equal measures of persuasion, tact and good timing to win over fellow outsiders in getting a board to abruptly change direction. And Coast Capital deftly exhibited all three in its fight, observed Fuller, a fintech entrepreneur.
Fuller is no ordinary observer of proxy battles. His company, Irithmics, has built a high-tech tool that he believes will help investors to replicate many of the skills seasoned activist investors deploy to win over their targets.
In recent years, artificial intelligence has transformed much of Big Finance, supercharging, for example, firms’ ability to manage risk, advise clients and improve trading returns. Now A.I. promises to automate and democratize a part of big finance that was off-limits to all but the most powerful corporate raiders: activist investing.
Coast Capital “knew exactly which buttons to push to disrupt those investors. What we have done at Irithmics is wrap that up into a product. Now everybody can do that,” Fuller, Irithmics CEO, said during a visit by Fortune to the company’s base at a former glove factory in the attractive Wiltshire village of Holt, two and a half hours’ drive west of London.
Neither Coast Capital nor FirstGroup are clients of Irithmics, but the company tracked the activist skirmish because it served as a useful “live” test case of the technology the British startup was developing.
Irithmics’ A.I. tool revealed, for example, that Coast Capital’s blistering attacks—delivered in various public statements and press interviews—on FirstGroup, were hitting home with investors as early as mid-2019. An Irithmics dashboard of sorts detailed the precise inflection points in which investors grew negatively disposed to news about FirstGroup, those moments when the shares were more vulnerable to short-selling.
The age of activist investing
This month, Irithmics will pull the curtain off this new tool, called “Investor Messaging” app. The tool works both ways. Activist investors can use it in their tussles with a public company. A company, meanwhile, can use it to spot where it’s most vulnerable to an activist attack.
Activist investing, in which an influential investor or group with a large holding in a certain company uses that sway to force the company to make big changes, is on the rise, particularly in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
News that renowned activist investors like Carl Icahn, Daniel Loeb or Paul Singer’s hedge funds, have bought a significant stake in a company can strike fear into the target’s management ranks and board. While activist investors can be a force for good, spotting inefficiencies and raising shareholder returns, companies often see them as meddlers more interested in short-term gain.
Often, activists want to appoint their own board members or oust the CEO. These fights can leave a company vulnerable to takeover.
No matter what side of the fence you stand on, it’s hard to quibble with the results activist investors get. Nearly one in four (23%) companies targeted by activists were ultimately acquired by another firm, recent research showed. Another report by the investment bank Lazard found that in 122 cases from a year ago, activist investors got their people (or themselves) board seats.
The leading activist investors in 2019 were the familiar names: U.S. hedge funds Elliott Management and Starboard Value. The latter pulled off one of last year’s highest-profile campaigns, pushing for eBay to sell non-core assets such as ticketing unit StubHub and its classified ads business. EBay’s CEO stepped down in September, and the company announced two months later it would sell StubHub for around $4 billion. In the case of FirstGroup, shares are up roughly 15% since the firm sold off its Greyhound bus business.
With concerns over climate change and board diversity front and center, we are living in the age of activist investing. It’s also the age of fintechs. And so it’s little wonder that algorithms are being built to help the most disruptive shareholders gain an advantage.
Irithmic’s “Investor Messaging” tool draws on 1.5 terabytes of data from publicly available sources such as regulatory filings, asset managers’ disclosures, brokers’ notes, shareholder registers and news headlines to compile a detailed picture of the trading habits of the world’s 250,000 institutional investors, and their likely stance towards a particular company. For example, an oil company under pressure by activists to come clean about its progress towards Paris climate accord targets—as happened recently in the case of Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Norway’s Equinor—could use the A.I. tool to determine just how widely held these views were among fellow shareholders, or how susceptible they were to falling under the activists’ sway.
“A very one-sided fight”
Fuller, 47, studied chemistry to PhD level at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland before taking part in research at Cambridge University on applying neural networks to public health and epidemiology.
He then moved into finance, working for the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and RiskMetrics before joining Bloomberg to help build and develop its AIM (alternative investment market) portfolio and risk management platform for hedge funds across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Fuller caught the startup bug in 2012 when he co-founded Irithmics with Balázs Boros, 40, a Hungarian-born computer scientist. For a startup, Irithmics has deep ties to London’s financial center. Since 2018, the company has furnished London Stock Exchange listed companies with data on investor sentiment generated by its A.I. algorithms.
Members of the Irithmics senior team—Grant Fuller (left), Balázs Boros (center) and Haakon Thor Brunstad—in the Irithmics office in Holt, England. Courtesy of Irithmics
The Irithmics’ origin story is anything but conventional. In 2011, Fuller came across an article in the scientific journal Nature by Andrew Haldane, then executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, and Robert May, professor of zoology at Oxford University. Haldane and May suggested that many of the systemic failures that had occurred during the global financial crisis could be traced in much the same way as epidemiologists mapping the spread of infectious diseases.
Fuller and Boros set about building such a model, one that could measure and track investor sentiment. Hedge fund investors caught wind of it, and bankrolled Fuller and Boros for several years as they applied the technology to understand “not what securities a hedge fund owned, but why they had bought them. As soon as you start understanding ‘why?’, you can begin to map this back into what is the strategy of the fund,” Fuller said.
The “Investor Messaging” tool is its latest effort, one that generated heated internal debate. The question of whether to market the new tool to both activist investors and to target companies wasn’t an easy one to resolve at first. In the end, they decided if they didn’t offer it to everyone, they’d be open to criticisms of weaponizing data to give one side an advantage.
“If only the activists have it, it is going to be a very one-sided fight,” Fuller said.
It helps the sales team, of course, to market a product to both corporate IR teams and to activist firms.
Irithmics’ system covers 16,000 listed companies—ranging from Apple to Royal Dutch Shell to Volkswagen—across North America, Europe and Australia. That amounts to roughly 1 million rows of fresh data—or 1.5 gigabytes—daily.
Fuller gave Fortune a sneak peek in early January when it was being beta-tested by prospective users. The app offers corporate investors a detailed view of a company’s performance broken up into 30 different metrics including financial performance, business complexity, executive pay and its ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) track record.
Irithmics’ algorithms rely on deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing to review, for example, everything that’s written about the company to grade the management team in specific areas such as corporate governance or business structure. The tool calculates whether those grades might ultimately sway investors to buy up more shares or bail on the company.
Dots on a graph highlight the specific dates where the views and expectations of investors began to measurably change on these issues. Elsewhere, the app indicates how sensitive a particular stock is to breaking news about the company or its sector, and whether that news flow could trigger short-selling.
Taken together, the tool allows activist investors to challenge management strategy. It does so by homing in on the target company’s biggest vulnerabilities—more to the point, which issues might trigger a shareholder revolt. It might be the company’s overly complex business structure, or a chronically poor performing unit in which the executive team has more faith in than investors.
Conversely, a company’s management might use the same tool to win over investors on difficult issues. If it has precise data, for example, that shareholders are more interested in growth, it can focus on this area in its communications to the market. Likewise, with a measure of investor concern about environmental exposure, it can adjust accordingly.
Activist investors have long employed big data, a team of quants and high-speed computers to find vulnerable boards to bully and cajole into changing strategy. A.I. appears set to obliterate this high-tech advantage, and some predict that could dramatically change the dynamics of these high-stakes campaigns.
If an activist investor says “we’ve got the statistics on your company—it says X, Y, Z—maybe this will be a stepping stone to corporates being more receptive, more engaging, rather than trying to constantly defend themselves,” says Peter Hamid, a senior consultant with financial PR firm Maitland/AMO. “A lot of the time activist investors are only trying to do one thing, which is to try to add value to what they initially bought.” Hamid has begun using Irithmics’ data in his work advising listed companies on how to present their story to investors.
Fuller said the new product is getting plenty of interest from activist investors, but he did not think it would drive a surge in activist challenges to companies.
“A surge of activist activity is happening anyway, just look at the numbers,” Fuller says. “What this will do is make it easier for people to understand how to criticize companies. But the reverse is true: the companies themselves now have a mechanism to defend themselves.”
The tool is aimed at institutional investors, activist investors and companies and is not designed for retail or day traders. The company does not disclose the price but says it costs less than a human analyst.
“What on earth are you going to make with that?”
Fuller admits to spending a lot of time trying to figure out what a single investment decision by a complete stranger reveals about her larger investment strategy. Away from the office, he’s that person who looks into your grocery basket to guess what you’re planning for dinner.
“For me, when you walk around the supermarket and you have a little peep into someone’s shopping cart, it’s always curious … You could find Greek yoghurt and cucumber and you think ‘Ah, you’re making tzatziki’ or something. Other times you think ‘What on earth are you going to make with that?’ For me, that is a really interesting exercise,” he admits.
Fuller is inspired by economist John Maynard Keynes’s dictum that “successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.”
“It turns out every company which Irithmics tracks has a unique fingerprint of how their investors will respond when you give them a particular pieces of news,” he says. “No two are the same, and they evolve over time.”
Back in the office, Fuller and his small team are looking at adding data on foreign exchange and commodities to the new product. Such an addition would shed light on how capital moves between countries and asset classes on a daily basis.
As for its own finances, Irithmics is not pondering an IPO—for now. Fuller is coy about the company’s funding beyond saying it’s backed by a Dutch private investment firm.
But there is a type of road show in the works.
Later this month, Fuller and Boros are heading to Australia, home to a host of companies that are particularly vulnerable to activist pressure over environmental issues. There they’re scheduled to meet with listed mining companies as well as hedge funds and other asset managers to demonstrate the new activist product.
Some of the firms on the calendar requested the visit, Fuller insists. “There is real interest in this.”
After that, a more arduous journey awaits. Fuller and Boros plan to move the Irithmics operations out of Holt and back to London—to be closer to developers, prospective clients and the city’s thriving fintech marketplace.
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fortune--2020-02-06--After a turbulent 2019, Southwest is giving employees a big bonus

While 2019 was, in many ways, a year Southwest Airlines would rather forget, the carrier is once again making it one to remember for its employees.
As part of its annual profit sharing tradition, Southwest will give its 60,000 employees a $667 million bonus. That works out to more than six weeks pay for every eligible employee.
“Our Employees delivered outstanding results despite a challenging year, and it’s a pleasure to reward our People for all they contribute to our continued success,” said Gary Kelly, chairman of the board and CEO of Southwest Airlines in a statement. “We recognize their resolve, persistence, resilience, and devotion to each other, our Customers, and our cause.”
The announcement follows a similar action by Delta Air Lines in January. The Atlanta-based carrier gave its workers $1.6 billion in profit sharing, the equivalent of roughly two months pay.
This marks the 46th consecutive year Southwest has given a profit sharing bonus to its workers. Over the past two decades, the carrier says, those payouts have topped $5 billion.
Southwest has been hard hit by the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max aircraft. Southwest has 34 Max planes in its fleet and had been scheduled to receive 41 more in 2019. Those have been grounded since last March.
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