FTAV Person of Interest 2017: The Longlist
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Star fund manager turned tape fighter. “I don’t know when I’m going to be proved right, but I’m utterly convinced that I am right, as I have been right before,” says Mr Woodford, who has invested client money in a company that renounces the universal laws of thermodynamics.
[Will investors keep the faith? – FT]
The main shareholder and former chairman of South Africa’s answer to IKEA, which came with nonsensical paperwork and fell apart shortly after assembly.
[Steinhoff fights to survive – FT]
Pity the historians who have to explain how a bumptious frat boy from the Kappa Theta Davos chapter came to tongue-shine his way into the White House for just long enough to deliver the office’s first official position on autofellatio. Of all the batshit crazy happenings in the Trump presidency, Mooch’s ten-day stint as Director of Comms will surely rank somewhere near the middle.
[Freakish, embarrassing and all too short – Rolling Stone]
“Independent Business Advisor” is how Mr Brown now identifies himself on Linkedin. Spin down the page and you might eventually spot his eight year stewardship of Ve, a turgescent ad-tech unicorpse that on liquidation owed £7,674.76 to a supplier of office fruit baskets.
[The rise and fall of a tech unicorn – FT]
A Rube Goldberg for the Internet of Shit generation.
[Juice machines and red flags – Matt Levine]
In a career stretching five decades, the insuppressible Sir Richard has gripped the business world and numerous women with both hands and turned it and them upside down.
[Virgin Care sues NHS – FT]
Obviously Travis, whose conduct failed to meet the ethical standards expected in the minicab despatch industry. However, the nomination is shared with those investors who chose to bankroll a firm whose exploitative disregard for all humanity was fashioned exactly in its creator’s own image, then grew uncomfortable only after his toxicity started to affect venture round valuations.
[Fire Travis Kalanick – FTAV]
Come with me / and you’ll be / in a world of pure imagination.
Take a look / and you’ll see / some elements of fabrication.
[The myth and reality of a startup slumdog millionaire – FTAV]
The widely respected spindoctor will be bouncing back to even greater things in 2018 and anyway everyone’s already bored stiff by the complete non-story about the Guptas and since that whole episode was basically nothing to do with him there’s really no point in dragging it up again, according to a person familiar with the matter.
[Jacob Zuma, the Guptas and the selling of South Africa – FT]
In SpaceX, no one can engineer your scheme.
[A postcard from Elon Musk’s future – FTAV]
A billionaire hedge fund manager whose relentless pushing of an ideological agenda makes him a dangerously subverting force on democracy and/or a convenient bogeyman for overstimulated political hypochondriacs.
[What next for Steve Bannon’s moneyman? – Bloomberg]
A billionaire hedge fund manager whose relentless pushing of an ideological agenda makes him a dangerously subverting force on democracy and/or a convenient bogeyman for overstimulated political hypochondriacs.
[Soros hatred is a global sickness – FT]
The art of Vision has taught us that in order to truly dominate a bubble, the warrior must become the bubble.
[Soaring rhetoric meets dull reality – FTAV]
With the launch of bitcoin futures, Mr Duffy has given the crypto-Tamagochi set a thin veneer of legitimacy, an even denser obfuscation of complexity, a creeping suspicion of unchecked liability, and another excuse never to just shut the hell up about bitcoin.
[Why shoddy market structures pose problems – FTAV]
The godfather of narcotics marketing, whose legacy has been envenomed by family business Purdue Pharma for the purpose of pushing OxyContin, a semi-synthetic that stands apart as the purest distillation of opium currently on sale in pharmacies, darkweb marketplaces and nightclub toilets. Mr Sackler’s nomination, in common with a percentage of Purdue’s customer mailing list, is being served posthumously.
[The family that built an empire of pain – The New Yorker]
Those are our nominations; yours go in the comment box.
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