Good Week: Snapchat – The popular-but-money-losing messaging service’s parent company – Snap, Inc. – saw shares jump more than 40% on the company’s first day of public trading, resulting in a valuation of $30B.
Bad Week: Scandal-Tainted CEOs – Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will not receive her annual bonus or a potentially lucrative stock award after a company investigation finds that her management team reacted too slowly to a pair of security breach that exposed the personal data of more than 1 billion users and cost Yahoo approximately $350 million. Wells Fargo is withholding annual bonuses from CEO Tim Sloan and seven other top executives in the wake of the bank’s “fake account” scam that was revealed in 2016.
Worse Week: Sterling, Jared and Kay Jewelers – More than 69,000 current and former employees are part of a private class-action suit accusing top executives of Signet Jewelers – corporate parent of the Sterling, Jared and Kay retail chains – of fostering a culture in which sexual harassment and discrimination ran rampant. More than 250 former employees issued sworn statements that women were routinely groped and pressured to trade sex with their male superiors in exchange for promotions. Signet shares took a nosedive on Tuesday and trading was suspended. This certainly casts a creepy new light on Kay’s “Every Kiss Begins with Kay” jingle.
