A good friend who knows the place well, tells me Stellenbosch University hosts a local version of the infamous Eurotrash – idle offspring of the super-rich whose distinguishing characteristic is how they flash cash. He was appalled at frequent exhibitions of their extravagance at well-heeled local restaurants in the town. Hopefully the kids tip well.
Funders of these spendthrift youngsters may well learn something from William Cohan’s new book Power Failure which is about the late former General Electric CEO Jack Welch. It is the subject of an excellent review in a recent edition of The New Yorker, which asks whether the once vaunted executive was the greatest CEO of his era – or the worst.
More to our point, Cohan’s book shares some interesting fathering advice from Welch. The article reads: “In all of our many discussions, the only time he spoke about his children was when he told me that he ‘loved them to pieces’ but that he had made ‘a mistake’ when he gave each of them a bunch of GE stock when he first became CEO.” Because the stock had performed well, they each had something like $50m in company shares.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___Although two of Welch’s four kids went to Harvard Business School and one went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, they all quit their jobs, disappointing their father. “They turned out differently than I’d hoped,” Welch told Cohan. “We’re close. But they got too much money. . . . If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have given it to them.” Welch died on 1 March, 2020. His offspring have faded into the obscurity from whence they came.
More for you to read today:
- Niall Ferguson: FTX kept your crypto in a crypt not a vault. The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is a tale of the way we live now — tweeting, not reading.
- Wall Street rebuffs soft-landing dream as 92% bet on stagflation. With a closely watched section of the Treasury yield curve sending fresh recession signals, stagflation is the consensus viewpoint among a whopping 92% of respondents in BofA’s latest fund-manager survey.
- Keeping the EFF from power with a (very loose) ANC/DA arrangement. What if the ANC was kept in power through a loose arrangement with the DA to keep an official ANC/EFF coalition at bay?
- Scoring South Africa’s decline. William Saunderson-Meyer writes on SAICE’s report card on the state of the country’s infrastructure.
- Qatar’s tarnished World Cup is too big for brands to boycott. The ultimate determinant of how enthusiastically brands get behind the tournament may be simply which teams progress.
- Ivo Vegter argues that Bitcoin is, in fact, not dead. The price doldrums in which bitcoin finds itself, and the collapse of the FTX exchange, have made it fashionable, once again, to declare crypto, or bitcoin, or both, dead.
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For many external observers, airline veteran Gidon Novick personified the best chance of a turnaround for teetering South African Airways and saving at least some of the billions injected by taxpayers. But the former CEO of Comair and co-founder of Lift this week announced his resignation as a director of the Takatso consortium, which is negotiating to acquire 51% of SAA. Forthright as ever, Novick says his team brought airline expertise to the consortium and invested heavily over 18 months in compiling a project plan but despite its 20% shareholding, was “kept in the dark”. He spoke to Alec Hogg of BizNews.
