Grubstakers - Episode 147: Meg Whitman

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

Thanks for joining us on our International Woman’s day special! We chose to discuss the tenacious Meg Whitman. She grew up in the area of NY, that F. Scott Fitzgerald based the book The Great Gatsby on. Her parents came from families tied to Boston's elite, known as the "Boston Brahmins. She would make her billions using her ties to Goldman Sachs with her new business she works at eBay. Her kids have assaulted people and used racial slurs at college. They support Joe Biden to ask America why why why why why why why why why why why…Enjoy

We'll be right back. I don't like what I read about. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, 2... The evil has gone. Hello and welcome to Grubstakers. I'm Andy Palmer. Yogi Poliwal. Sean P. McCarthy.

Steve Jeffers. And today we are doing another who's who of who doesn't want who to have health care. Reoccurring coverage of Joe Biden billionaires. This week it's Meg Whitman who has a net worth of $3.7 billion, according to Forbes. And she's, along with being a supporter of Delaware's most famous politician, she is also most closely tied to Delaware's most famous company, which is eBay. And you may say, wait, no, that's in San Jose. Well, we'll get to that. So what's interesting about Mae Whitman, besides being, from what we can tell, just a terrible person to everyone she meets, just reading about her, she's just mean to every single person. She's either being manipulative or outright cruel.

She's a real battle axe. Yeah. It is interesting contrast because usually on this podcast, we talk about billionaires who are generally not violent in their interpersonal day-to-day interactions, but they operate structures of wealth that are violent and oppressive. Whereas in Meg Whitman, we actually have someone who is both. She's operating a violent structure and she also shoves her subordinates. Yeah. And her son is a sexual predator. She's our first billionaire to have paid someone $200,000 for assault.

I guess it wasn't technically assault because there wasn't a criminal case. But she did pay a subordinate $200,000 because she shoved her. Man, I would love to get shoved by Meg. In addition to being mean-spirited, she also has this air of being a good businesswoman, but we'll get into how that's not true. Yeah, she was definitely a very lucky businesswoman who then kind of, despite her best efforts uh hit it bing and so uh we can go into her backstory uh some bio she was born on august 4th 1956 she is 63 years old uh and you know you looked a bit into her family lineage which is pretty interesting yeah i found a chart for a

website that was reproduced from the family forest national treasure edition copyright 98 2009 millisecond publishing company inc this required me to find her mother's maiden name and look her up a family tree of that but this thing is literally a rainbow from meg cushing whitman the billionaire recovering today that goes all the way back to the 1700s the late 1600s now let's work our way step by step back this far because because where we end here is pretty is pretty great so it begins with and we have some bio on her husband as well that i'll cover but it begins with margaret Cushing Meg Whitman and her parents Hendrix Hallett Whitman Jr. and Margaret Cushing Goodhue. And Hendrix Hallett Whitman Jr.

his parents are Hendrix Hallett Whitman Sr. and Adelaide Chatfield Taylor. And according to this, Adelaide Chatfield hadn't died, or I guess that's when they're married, I'm not sure. And then on her mom's side, Lawrence Cushing Goodhue and Gertrude Monroe Smith.

Now, there is a Business Insider article that discusses that she grew up on Long Island and her parents come from families tied to Boston's elite known as the Boston Brahmins. And listen, when it comes to cultural appropriation, I am allowed- And that's your cousins, right? I can tolerate some things, but the Boston Brahmins? I've already mentioned on this show how I don't trust anyone in Boston. Fuck Boston forever. Especially these guys that claim to be Flash Gordons.

And we're the fucking Pollywals? Go Sox. Hey, I'm wicked and posting a caste system over here. Go Modi, go Pats. But yeah, no, you got to respect like white elites who call themselves the Brahmins. We are the upper cast in this cast system of America. Yo, if I don't have my Dunkins here in 15 minutes, I'm going to demote you to the warrior cast. I like two things.

Prime Minister Modi and Mark Wahlberg. She was born in Oyster Bay, New York in an affluent area of Long Island that helped inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald's

The Great Gatsby. So if you ever read that book and thought man these people are fucking whack that is literally the parents of the billionaire we're

covering today. Yeah this is the first time we're covering the villains in the book the great gatsby oh man but like so the fucked up thing is i think we should put in the description of this a link to this family tree that yogi found because this thing is huge like yogi could spend the entire hour going through all the different links so we might as well just go as far back as possible okay so we have uh john otis taylor married harriet ames 1806 and 1807 to 1896 right so we've got some like senators some nova nova scotia um uh elected officials but then going all the way back yes on her dad's side her great great great grandfather was a part of the nova scotia foundation which i guess is like a country club in nova scotia i believe well i think one of On her dad's side, her great-great-great-grandfather was a part of the Nova Scotia Foundation, which I guess is like a country club in Nova Scotia, I believe.

Well, I think one of them was also in a provincial assembly or something. Here's the thing. Very difficult information to find, but between Bing, Firefox, and Chrome, they couldn't scrub the internet that clean. But this chart that I'm looking at right now goes, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine generations back, all the way to someone named Sarah Tudor, which I think we can all agree is very interesting. now i want to congratulate her ancestors on giving birth before being beheaded it's it's an interesting timeline because we couldn't find any direct connection to the actual Tudor family, but the timing of it, the mid-17th century, mid-1600s, it corresponds right with the English Civil War. So let's say you're in the lineage of a royal family at the same time that they're beheading Charles I. You might want to hop on a boat. Yeah.

I'm calling Whitman and her husband's family mammoth money this money goes back to prehistoric days son it is uh wild how deep these pockets go some of the colonies in the u.s were also choosing sides during the english civil war once word broke got to them that it broke out i'm just kind of wondering it like where whitman's ancestors fell like on those battle lines i'm not sure so that is uh meg whitman's uh fell on those battle lines. I'm not sure. So that is Meg Whitman's family history. I also looked up her husband, Griffith R. Harsh IV. Now, he is married to...

Anybody the fourth is already in... If you're third plus, wow. Well, then their son is Griffith R. Harsh V. Oh, Jesus. And he is the one that we'll talk about later on in this episode who's dealt with some sex crimes. It's also so funny. They're like, man, I mean, I want to give you a different name. The name Griffith is about as good as they get.

The son, I believe, goes by Griff. So in Handful of Articles, he goes by Griff. But Griffith R. Harsh, his parents, Griffith R. Harsh III, that guy was born January 9, 1924 in Birmingham, Alabama. Can I just say how appropriate it is that they named a rapist Harsh? This dude, his obituary is literally like six paragraphs. And he was like a devout Christian faith was the bedrock of his life is the third sentence in this thing. He was in the military service including medical training in the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II.

In another article I found that he was just like an instructor that he didn't like see any combat or anything. But I had to find his parents as well. His dad was Griffith for theutherford harsh the second mom mary smith harsh and then their dad griffith rutherford harsh the first i found a alabama pioneers article about september 30th 1860 is when griffith rutherford harsh was born he came from from Germany and he settled in Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee. And this guy was a doctor who eventually became a lawyer and then gave his law firm to his son, Griffith R. Harsh Jr., who later became associated with their family in his law practice. Griffith R. Harsh Jr. served as first lieutenant in the Coast Artillery,

spent some time in France in the war zone, but for the most part was detailed as an instructor. So this family goes back to the 1860s

and this is not even the billionaire recovering, this is her husband. In Griffith Rutherford's Alabama Pioneers article here it talks about he

obtained his education at Franklin College Tennessee and the public schools of New York City and Nashville Tennessee entered Vanderbilt University in 1880

and graduated from the law department. He was awarded the Founders Medal as a best graduate. After graduating, he went west and engaged

in various occupations for several years. He was among the first to go into the Coeur d'Alene gold fields in northern Idaho. So he may be a literal grub staker.

There is an argument to be made that this guy is a grub staker by the way when it comes to uh owning people over uh family lineage there it's it is interesting that like my dad was able to trace back the palmer family to this like pilgrim named or not uh puritan named walter palmer um and so like i feel some sort of similarity to like uh whitman's background sure at the same time though like considering uh her how she ended up and how i ended up there was a definite fork somewhere over the centuries you know during during the first english civil war there were some some motherfuckers in the U.S. colonies were so fervent in their defense of the crown that they actually went back.

Oh, really? Huh. Can you imagine just going out six months? Wild. Like, journey back home? Yeah. I think it was six weeks. Maybe.

Maybe not. Oh, okay. Several months. Total. I mean, from packing up to leaving to show up yeah i'm just imagining one of andy's patrician ancestors in the year 1929 going no you see the stocks are gonna keep going up we gotta go all in right now oh man in 1929 they were dirt farmers in kansas so they'd already fucked up by that. Oh, yeah. It had gone off the rails long before that.

But yes, just talking about the lineage of Meg Whitman's husband, Griffith R. Harsh IV, just on his Wikipedia page, I'm just going to quote it. He's a direct descendant of Revolutionary War General and North Carolina State Senator Griffith Rutherford. Wow. So they, you know, they certainly go back even before the American civil war. I also, or sorry,

the American revolutionary war. Um, I also found on the, that ancestry tree Yogi found, uh, she has a, uh, an ancestor named governor Benjamin Miller, uh,

who lived from 1672 to 1747. Apparently he was one of the first three settlers in Middlefield, Connecticut. Really? But apparently, he wasn't actually a governor. He was just called governor because he had a lot of influence with local Native Americans.

Sure. Which is like, yeah, definitely sign on the dotted line. We'll honor that promise. Governor to your word here. But all of that is to say that she traces her money so far back that this is the billionaire we have covered who has the lowest ever Forbes self-made score. Oh, really? What is that? Six out of ten.

The lowest number they have ever awarded for a self-made billionaire. Fucking brilliant. She probably descends from people who told the Romans where Boudicca was Yeah, this is where she sleeps So Going into her personal history. She studied math at Princeton and business at Harvard Business School Mm-hmm. She originally wanted to study science, but then I guess decided that that wasn't for her. Yeah, she kind of said calculus and chemistry were too hard because she wanted to go and become a doctor like her family lineage.

Well, actually not her family lineage. She just wanted to be a doctor. She got a math degree at Princeton and was like calculus is too hard. The physical sciences are too hard. I guess I'll just do math. Classic. Some articles that talk about her being like i i took in college i thought that like oh no becoming a doctor is going to be all chemistry so i gotta drop out of that mindset

now she ended up marrying a doctor who uh griffith uh the fourth marsh the fourth is harsh the fourth god damn what the fuck is that guy's name it was harsh it's harsh yeah uh marsh would make more sense but harsh is funnier and also true in this case. But yeah, so in 77, she gets a master's degree in business administration from Harvard. And then in 79, she becomes a brand manager at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. She had to shove so many people to get that job. Well, from there, she moved to work at Bain in their San Francisco office. Yes, she married her husband at that time,

and he was doing his residency in San Francisco. And so that's why she moved from Cincinnati to San Francisco at that time. This is from the Business Insider article. While a sophomore at Princeton, Whitman met Griffith Harshforth. They didn't date until years later after she invited him to her sister's wedding and he forgot and blew her off. He then called to apologize and ask her out. That's a guy who didn't realize who was trying to fuck. And then once he did, he went, hey, so I realize that your lineage goes back to the 1600s.

Can I get that puss? But no, I actually did just want to back up just really quick. We were talking about she grew up in, you know, Cold Spring Harbor in New york you know kind of long island great gatsby fuckers just from her wikipedia um she graduated uh cold spring harbor high school uh and did you know actually interesting fact um the title is ironic i did not know that uh just from her Wikipedia quote, in her memoirs, she said that she was top 10 of her class of her high school. And I just like that quote,

in her memoirs she says it. Not in the records of the high school is it said that she was top 10 in her class. Just in her fucking memoirs, she's claiming this now. It's such weird psychology when it's like you've been the the ceo of ebay you made your billions and you start to be like i was also top 10 in my high school class right it's like

these people have pathological insecurity yeah where it's like clearly you trace your fortune back to fucking revolutionary war procurement like something i want to do a future episode on i'll only get into it briefly now but robert Robert Morris is a guy who's commonly called the quote-unquote financier of the American Revolution. But there was jokes at the time the American Revolution financed him because he was kind of the procurement officer. Later, he helped manage the First Bank of the United States during the Revolutionary War. Half of all war contracts went to firms linked to him. So that's entirely what happens with these different fortunes where, you know, we talk about her husband's ancestor being a Revolutionary War general and a state senator. Well, it's like these people who are heavily involved in the political elements of revolution and war

tend to find the public purse strings ending up in their own pockets. So this is how a lot of these fortunes were built, through piracy and self-dealing. I guess speaking of piracy, her family took a hard turn. In 1989, she became VP of Disney. Could be an Epstein connection there. I did Google Meg Whitman Epstein. Unfortunately, just Jennifer Epstein, the reporter,

wrote some articles about Meg Whitman, and that's all that turns up initially still an epstein connection in uh 1991 she joined a company called stride right in 1995 she became the ceo of trans world delivery in 1997 she's really jumping around uh she became hasbro's division general manager which meant she oversaw play school and mr potato head marketing yeah like that's a fucking difficult job this toy's been around for 40 years hey can you keep selling it in the stores and she is also apparently responsible for importing teletubbies from the uk to the us um which turned all the millennials gay so i do like what if these are all just shoving settlements she just has to leave every job after two years because she can't.

$200,000 each time. Yeah. Well, I remember reading what she did at Stride Line, which was the shoe company she worked at. She worked at the Keds line, which is K-E-D-S, and she was in charge of the vintage retro Keds throwback looks. And it's like, how hard is a job where you have to remake shoes you made already? We've already had these designs for shoes that existed 20 years ago, and we're thinking about bringing them back. Can you handle this?

Yes. Here's a million dollars. Is that where she was price fixing, or am I jumping ahead? No, that was, she was accused of price fixing with competitors. Oh, she was fixing shoe prices? Yeah, so. She worked for a, she was fixing shoe prices? Yeah. She worked for a company that was fixing shoe prices? You fixed shoe prices.

Load it up. Her timeline goes like this. She's at Procter & Gamble from 79 to 81, Bain & Company from 81 to 89, 89 to 92, she's at Walt Disney, 92 to 95, she's at Stride Rite, 95 to 96, she's at Fl Disney 92 to 95 she's at Stride Right 95 to 96 she's at Flores Trans World Delivery and then 97 to 98 is when she's at Hasbro selling Mr. Potato Head and this is right before

she finally gets her job at the company that would make her her billions eBay so eBay uh is a little company it was started by a fella named Pierre Omidyar and if you're wondering how you get that name it's he's a french-born iranian american and it was uh originally just a personal website and on it he this this is also kind of like the origin story and ebay i'll get to in a second has lied about their origin stories so you can take this with a grain of salt sure um but he claims that he jokingly sold a laser pointer for 14.83 and it was a um it was a broken laser pointer and when someone bought it he said that he emailed the person and said uh don't you know that it's broken and the guy said actually i'm a collector of broken laser pointers what um also this guy pierre is worth that 12 billion

we'll get to him in the future because uh's definitely one of these believes his own bullshit, pretends to be a hippie Silicon Valley billionaires. From there, he set up a little auction marketplace. And it was originally a hobby. But then his web provider was like, hey, you have to pay for the business level because there's a lot of traffic on your site. So he began charging fees. He said no one complained. And so he began charging fees he said no one uh complained and so um he just started scaling up it was originally called auction web but uh he tried

to change its name to echo bay technology but echo bay.com was taken by a mining company called echo bay mine so he shortened it to ebay um the big origin story that ebay came out with was that it was originally used for him to for pierre to sell his i'm gonna say pierre because i'm not gonna try to pronounce that last name again um it was uh it came out for pierre to help trade pez dispensers for his fiance that's right her obsessive collection is what ended up becoming ebay yes and uh that was a lot that was apparently the um they they when they were first starting that they tried to sell the um media on the line that ebay was created to form a quote perfect market and no one gave a shit about that line and so then they

came someone came up with the pez dispenser line and what happened with the pez dispenser line. And what happened with the Pez dispenser line is it actually caught on so much that like people who were trying to buy and sell like collector's toys decided to go use that website. Sure, it was a marketing ploy. Yeah, it was a marketing ploy and it was actually a surprisingly successful one. And this is all before Whitman came on board. And so it became very popular with Beanie Babies, where at one point 10% of all sales on eBay were selling Beanie Babies. And that really kind of drove the growth of eBay, oddly enough.

Yeah, that show was huge. Speaking of pump and dump scams. It was a perfect market. So Meg Whitman comes on in March 1998, and possibly day one. Because I looked at the SEC records. In March 1998, very same month that she stepped in, they filed to be a company in Delaware. Oh.

Yeah. Why they shift over there, Andy? Well, in Delaware, this is from investopedia um i'd always known delaware was uh um a tax haven but it i never knew the specifics but uh here's some of the benefits of uh putting your uh corporation where all of the offices are in california in delaware uh corporations in delaware might not need to disclose who their officers and directors are when they file. The corporation is based in Delaware, but does not conduct its operations in Delaware. The state's corporate income tax may not apply. There is no state corporate income tax on goods and services provided by a Delaware corporation operating outside of Delaware, which is just like it's a law they put on the books

like there's no way purely to attract shell operations yeah and it's there's no way that like you can explain that other than corruption because it's by the way that it's written it's not going to bring money into delaware it's it's specifically to delaware uh it's specific i don't know it was in india it's just specifically to give people a tax haven right of course um that's where the brahmins of boston live in delaware delaware uh the state does not have a corporate tax on interest or other investment income that uh delaware holding company earns and if a holding corporation owns fixed income investments or equity investments it isn't taxed on gains on the state level right and so delaware is basically just the cayman islands with shittier weather yeah and oh look where's the fucking senator running for president

from uh whose interest do you think he was representing as the senator from delaware this is from the clown sec tech the the eBay effect that was released in 2005. This is Meg Whitman's introduction to eBay, which we've covered a little bit, but this is from her own mouth, if you will. Quickly grown beyond Omidyar's ability to manage it. Enter Meg Whitman, a Harvard MBA who was running marketing for Hasbro's Mr. Potato Head

in PlaySchool products. She had first declined to interview at a fledgling.com she'd never heard of. And even when she decided to visit eBay, Whitman didn't exactly have high expectations. I was really happy to see a receptionist when I showed up. We just hired a receptionist because we thought it'd be a nice idea to have a receptionist when we had CEO candidates come in. So basically, she didn't even fucking think the company was worth looking at. And this is the company that would make her her billions.

Yeah. I was just going to say, it's interesting to me where you just heard in that clip there talking about the company grew beyond Pierre's ability to manage it. And you always hear that with these dot-com startups or whatever tech company. They grow. The founder needs to bring in a professional ceo to run the thing but it seems like with meg whitman it was just like they just picked somebody who oh she's married to a guy named the fourth and traces her lineage

back to the fucking royalists in the english civil war or whatever the case may be because it really seems to me like she did absolutely nothing for this company they just picked you know a ceo with the pedigree you know maybe she had lobbying connections or some shit she did but uh but it seems like all of the decisions she actually made were a disaster and she just got to cash the billion dollar check well she seemed to have some one of the first things she did going in is she um got golds involved to take the company public. And I don't know, I couldn't find details on whether like Goldman Sachs made them some large loans to expand rapidly. But as soon as she got there, she had stock options of about seven cents per share. And as soon as they went public, she apparently made $57.3 million selling 685 shares, which came out to about $83.65 a share.

Damn. Which is especially weird because if you look at eBay's IPO, when it first goes on the market, it's 79 cents, which is already like a, um, uh, tenfold increase in the value of her shares. Right. But it's never,

ever in the history of eBay stock been as high as 83 65. One of our sources even said that she was able to sell the share. Some of her shares at $170. I couldn't find anything backing that up. Um, the highest publicly traded price we found on the New York Stock Exchange was about $42.

Yeah, and that was recent. Like during her time, its highest was about $35. Yeah, exactly. And it is, now it is common for insiders. There are ways for insiders to legally publicly trade stuff.

Right. And they have to like meet a tight window of when everyone can see that they're trading yada yada but there are also other private markets that i think we mentioned like briefly in a few other episodes like uh i think during the jim sim jim simons episode it came up or something sure uh they're what called black pools was it gonna be black no wait no they're called dark pools sorry it's so much funnier when it's not being done to me dark they're what called

dark pools i know what they mean insiders we all know what it really means that where insiders can safely trade large blocks of shares and exercise options in a way that won't like quote spook the market gotcha so if i mean if people see a bunch of insiders about to sell something in these public sec filings that they can necessarily try to get in on the action themselves and you might argue that that's fair but they can get around that legally using these other go-betweens and private markets that you wouldn't see how exactly they're structuring these deals. And you can occasionally get really high premiums on an all-stock deal with someone to exchange shares,

or maybe they're using leverage to get a higher profit. So there are some ways in which you could realize a higher price, but that's still staggering. And it's also, you've got to wonder like who's buying that? Who's like using... Why are they buying it? Yeah. Who's using a backroom deal to buy a stock that's like 10 to 20 times what it's trading on the market?

Right. Yeah. So what was the purpose of this trade? Yeah. Is there some kind of transaction like with another company that's going on? Like an exchange of ownership? Yeah. Because Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, all the other New York investment banks were, of course, sued by then Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York after the dot-com crash. Because what they were doing was they were sending their analysts out, their quote-unquote unbiased analysts, to go out and tell the public people on business networks, hey, buy this stock. This stock has a buy rating, which, of course, is the stock they're IPO-ing. Or they have somebody on the board of another company they're IPOing who wants this stock to go up.

So they're going out and pumping these stocks in many cases that had no way whatsoever to make money. And then another part of this that was part of the Elliott Spitzer settlement is a practice called spinning, which is very clearly—I mean, we know Meg Whitman was engaged in it here, which is legalized bribery. It's not illegal anymore, but it was at the time. Yes. So when I was looking into Meg Whitman's tenure at eBay, I couldn't find any major crime. Shut up, Meg. There was no, like, one big crime, but there were there were several like let's say half crimes

and uh the uh spinning or i guess flipping is another term for what they were doing um pushing someone could be a crime that could be a crime i mean she never went to jail i'll put it that way um the uh spinning thing uh the way that worked out was Goldman Sachs invited Meg along with Pierre and another eBay executive to buy shares in numerous startups that Goldman represented. And then the three of them would sell the shares in some cases within hours or days of the IPO. What? For a profit of three million. So literal pump and dump. Yeah. And so what made it, I guess, especially scandalous was that the deal was made for senior executives and not all shareholders of eBay.

And part of what was going on here was that at the same time, Mae Whitman was on the board at Goldman Sachs. So she had like an insider track to goldman sachs and the um they they did this spinning from 1999 until 2001 and then in 2002 it was made illegal and they stopped and so uh right on the edge there um so then another thing that maybe the degree to which it was a a full crime isn't necessarily clear but kind of in the half crime range uh was what their dealings with paypal you looked into yogi yeah so at ebay there was a lot of scandals early on basically if you would buy something and the seller wouldn't give it to you ebay would look at it but they had to be a referee which was very new at the time.

Incidentally, eBay is one of the first tech companies to implement the have employees that aren't technically employees model that we now see with Lyft and Uber. So this is something that was very profitable at the time, because it's literally, how do you make money? Well, a group of people we don't pay make us money, basically. But when it comes to the insurance on purchases itself, were you to make a purchase via PayPal, that you would be insured but not other payments. So if you paid with a credit card, it wouldn't work. So in this Clown Tech, the eBay Effect documentary, they ask her about it, and she gives, I think,

one of the best bullshit answers. eBay also urges buyers to use PayPal, its payment processing system that provides up to $1,000 of insurance. You must, though, have thought about the idea of, all right, we'll just insure everything. It must have occurred to you, and you must have decided not to do it. Why? They can have the law of unintended consequences consequences that if everything is insured, what does that say about what the bad guys can do? The bad guys could also be buyers and say, you know,

and actually be on both ends of those sides of that transaction. So there can, there could actually be a situation where if you insure everything, actually you increase the total fraud on the site. When the eBay effect continues. What? So, so you want to prevent people from being criminals unless they're using PayPal as well.

Yeah, exactly. Like, it doesn't make any fucking sense. We should just clarify for people who don't know, eBay had bought PayPal. Yes. So they are driving people into PayPal by only insuring PayPal transactions.

And PayPal also had a scandal where people that were sex workers were using it to make sure that they weren't being killed by using cash or other forms of currency. And PayPal would shut down their accounts and then take the money without giving it back to the sex workers. But that's for another time. So after that, we have something that is really just actual criminal activity, which is Department of Justice antitrust legislation. And this happened, the actual DOJ lawsuit happened in 2012. But the allegations are that beginning in no later than 2006 and lasting until at least 2009,

eBay and Intuit entered into an illegal agreement that restricted their ability to actively recruit employees from the other company. And for some period of time, even restricted at least eBay from hiring any employees at Intuit. In 2007, the pact evolved into an agreement that eBay would not recruit into its employees. eBay's recruiting personnel were instructed not to pursue potential applicants that came from Intuit and to throw away such resumes, the department said. And it goes on to say the agreement eliminated a significant form of competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived of the access to better job opportunities and salaries. So another way of putting that is just that there were lawsuits also involving other companies like Google at the time for the same practice.

All these Silicon Valley companies, what they were doing is they were agreeing not to hire each other's employees yeah not so that yeah to not poach so that those employees couldn't get a better wage at another company and so this was just you know one of the uh just a straight up sleazy way of driving down wages and uh keeping employees working in shitty working conditions with, I'd say, probably the world's worst boss. Right. Well, I mean, it's literally cartelization. They're forming a cartel to put a price ceiling on wages to the detriment of labor,

which, of course, is constantly fucked over in this country. And what's interesting to note, and we'll get back to this when we get into our political career, is that this was also being investigated by the Office of the Attorney General of the state of california um this investigation i mean it the um doj uh uh investigation was from 2012 but i'd say that if she got into the governor's mansion in 2010 right she probably would have had some leverage to, let's say, crush this. And so maybe she wasn't just running for the betterment of California.

So the final thing that eBay really did that stands out during her tenure is they were stealing trade secrets from Craigslist. And the way that they did this is one of the three founders of Craigslist, not Craig, was looking to cash out, go his own way. And so the other two founders, Craig and I think Jim, wanted a buyer then to buy his part of the company and then help run craigslist sure and so they got a bunch of buyers or a bunch of like people who were interested and this was around 2005 um but and a lot of this is detailed in this article by mark aims on the website pando.com um but apparently uh there were some talks with ebay and they kind of were falling through but then meg whitman um asked pierre to kind of smooth talk the guys at craigslist like this was in the emails or this was even in in her court testimony she asked them to kind of smooth talk uh craigslist so that uh and cultivate pierce image as a just software developer who got lucky with philanthropic interest to kind of appeal to uh i'm hesitant to say craigslist more altruistic

um intentions because those guys are also billionaires but craigslist probably not as evil as ebay at this time yeah and so once they got someone who was in sorry well meg whitman we've seen this in billionaires in past she became uh the ebay main dude's mad dog you need somebody to bite hands and bark at people when they're calling you out for being bullshit and meg whitman although she seems like she's just like a you know like friendly you know suburban white mom that takes her kids to soccer practice uh no this lady is pushing people oh yeah and we're about to dive into the psychology of meg whitman here um so looking into kind of how what it's like to um kind of uh be on the um uh the biting end of Meg Whitman.

As soon as eBay got in on Craigslist's board, they started asking for compilations of Craigslist financial data, site metrics data, all the data about, you know, how they would develop in a new city um and then they started working on internally uh a website that they called the craigslist killer kijiji oh really and they didn't tell the people at ebay this but they were directly um just taking their financial information like they would ask to go in and like work on Craigslist servers and pull as much data as they could and bring it back to eBay. And then in 2007, they actually launched Kijiji, a direct competitor to Craigslist. Wow.

And the founders of Craigslist started saying saying we kind of want to pull out of this and um you know we we don't we don't really want you here anymore and uh someone they started like telling this to the ebay people and the ebay people started saying hey you know i know you want to do this but you're uh driving ebay execs parentheses especially meg to distraction what and um then they started telling the the two craigslist guys that ebay's takeover was inevitable and that craigslist needed to accept their fate telling uh buckmaster that's jim buckmaster one of the two craigslist guys uh that he and newmark were mortal but ebay was not and ebay would acquire 100 of craigslist whether they took decades and if necessary over new marks and buck masters dead

bodies wow humans die but the buy it now button is forever this is whitman uh this is whitman's surrogate um we'll get to women uh so then uh price who I think was a Whitman surrogate also, he warned Jim Buttmaster, one of the Craigslist guys in 2005, to beware of Meg's wrath, saying that there were two Meg Whitmans, the quote good Meg and quote the evil Meg, who could be a monster when she got angry and frustrated. And so. frustrated and so and this is like so this comes out during the california governor's race uh when meg whitman is of course running for for governor this idea that there's a good meg and an evil meg yeah and you know they claim that like oh we were just trying to like negotiate you know the best position you know good cop bad cop and all this but like from everything we know of ebay's internal culture there was uh among employees she was referred to as Evil Meg, you know, when she was in a bad mood. So it's like this is a fucking psychopath who abuses subordinates all the time and gets the nickname Evil Meg.

Yeah, you're the new me. Shut up, Meg. So eventually, like the Craigslist guys wrote to eBay and said, hey, we want to get out of this deal. And eBay's lawyer responded, how would Jim and Craig react if Whitman told them to, quote, go pound sand? And then they waited. Then. But that wasn't like the official response from eBay. It wasn't until two weeks later that Meg Whitman wrote this email.

This really gets to the heart of Meg Whitman. Dear Jim, thanks so much for your note and your kind words for Pierre and me. Needless to say, I feel the same way about you, Craig and the Craigslist community. In fact, we are so happy with our personal relationship with Craigslist that we could

neither imagine doing anything to disturb our personal rapport with you or Craigig nor parting with our shareholding in craigslist incorporated under any foreseeable circumstances quite to the contrary we would welcome the opportunity to acquire the remainder of craigslist incorporated we do not already own whether you and craig feel it would be appropriate in addition we remain more than willing to provide liquidity to Craigslist Incorporated employee option holders. Given the foregoing long held and off communicated sentiment, we are quite surprised that you would suggest any course of action to the contrary, especially given your recent comments to the Times. And this is quote, many companies offer classifieds, but since we don't concern ourselves with considerations such as the market share or revenue maximization, we don't think of them as competition. Our focus is providing what

users want. If other companies are better positioned, then users should migrate over to that. End quote. In keeping with the comments, our culture places on integrity. We have already taken even further steps to completely firewall off the operations related to our Kijiji offering in the U.S. from corporate management of our investment in Craigslist Incorporated. That's a lie. Hence, more than ever, we feel we should, as we have unfortunately been able to do to date, together leverage the myriad of assets in the global eBay Incorporated family to provide the Craigslist community with the best possible user experience warmest regards meg and a judge in a delaware court uh described that email as meg telling them to go pound sand

shut up meg and then right after that in uh um in an interview with fortune magazine uh jim at craigslist said uh these issues are an obvious concern but our first instinct is to trust ebay and then internal emails between um whitman and this guy price she said that those comments were pretty funny and then price said i'm glad to read that he trusts us and whitman responded love this smiley face and so basically what they were i mean they were fucking with them yeah they were fucking with them and what they were trying to do i think was they wanted to put craigslist out of business by launching a competitor yeah to drive down the value of craigslist and then acquire craigslist

and then have a monopoly on all of craigslist services exactly whether it's through craigslist or kijiji and so uh the the at the end of the story what happened is that craigslist um they watered down the shares that ebay held um and then removed them from the board good for them yeah yeah ebay countersued to get the shares unwatered down and they the media portrayed it as a win for ebay because they got the shares unwatered down sure but they didn't get a seat back on the board. There were a couple other lawsuits that ended eventually with eBay and Craigslist severing ties. And so I think the way that I think that email kind of gets to the core of who Meg Whitman is.

And then the love this smiley face. And then just to talk about her business acumen for a second. While she was at eBay also, she made the decision to purchase not all of Skype, but part of Skype. Correct. For $4.1 billion in 2005. This is at the same time that she was trying to strangle Craigslist.

And if you look at eBay stock at the the time like as soon as they buy skype ebay stock just takes a dive and never really recovers until after she leaves and what the kicker of it i think sean you're right well the thing is people should should understand this eBay for Skype deal because it is one of the funniest deals in business history, because essentially they give Skype four point one billion dollars and it's described as eBay buying Skype. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They are leasing the technology from Skype. They don't actually own it. And then Skype will subsequently cancel that lease. So it was just, you know, apparently Meg Whitman is against welfare, but not in this case, where she gave Skype $4.1 billion of eBay shareholder money for no reason whatsoever. Hilarious. And then she gracefully exited in 2007 on top of the world um so i guess we can now now that we've uh given the ebay story we can talk about her her political aspirations in california just one more thing before we get to the political

stuff i did want to mention just that uh employee shoving incident we should just briefly describe it um because i find this amusing this is in, and people should know that she shoved a subordinate. The subordinate's name was Youngmi Kim. The subordinate was briefing her for an interview she was going to give on the video game Second Life. She was going to, I don't know if any of our listeners

or the people in this room played this. I played a bit of it, if you remember back in the day. Yeah, I used to hang out with Drew Carey on Second Life. You could, like, grief people by getting like a gun that shot a cube that made the sound you're the man now dog you're the man now dog and fill up the entire room and then people would uh spam uh homophobic slurs at you and leave there was a presidential candidate who apparently uh bragged about being the first person to set up i think

this is 2008 yeah uh virtual second life campaign office and immediately people sent flying penises into it brilliant brilliant but yes so this is like the serious nature where this uh subordinate young me kim is just trying to tell meg like hey here's you know maybe some questions that might be uh asked in this interview here's your stock answers things to expect and uh she gets so angry she shoves this subordinate and has to pay a $200,000 settlement after a lawsuit is threatened. So, you know, Meg Whitman is definitely a billionaire who takes video games seriously. We can't hold that against her. You know, gaming is a serious business. So we're now moving on to her political tenure of running for governor in

California. She was questioned about her time at Goldman during a debate, and this was her response. Spinning was made illegal. So do you still believe, as you said in your book, that you did nothing wrong? And was your behavior unethical, yes or no? So here's the facts on Goldman Sachs. I was on the board eight years ago for 15 short months, and I got off because, as Donald Trump says, I fired them. I didn't like the culture. I didn't like the management, and I got off. With regard to IPO shares, I did receive IPO shares because we had a brokerage account with Goldman Sachs. And we did make money on that, about $1.8 million. I did not actually see a conflict of interest here. It was a completely separate account.

It had nothing to do with eBay's banking business. So that is the facts on Goldman Sachs. I'm sorry, Ms. Whitman, just to clarify for Ms. Marinucci's question, you do not believe you did anything wrong? I think she asked you yes or no. No, I did not do anything wrong. Mr. Poizner, one minute rebuttal. Wow, you really don't get this, Meg. This is a situation where you are the CEO of eBay receiving investment banking services from Goldman Sachs. Then you join the Goldman Sachs board and the compensation committee.

Then Goldman Sachs started to feed you these sweetheart deals. Not one, not two, but a hundred of them. And you made a fortune, a separate fortune from your eBay fortune, and then until you got caught, you didn't think anything was wrong. The fact is Congress investigated what you did. They called it corrupt. The SEC investigated what you did and immediately declared what you did illegal. And the eBay shareholders investigated what you did,

and they sued you, and they sued you for a huge conflict of interest. The only reason why you paid back any of this money is because you had to settle the lawsuit. This campaign really is going to come down to a few things. Judgment, character, ethics, track record, and vision. And the fact is, your judgment was just terrible back then, and you're still not admitting to the fact that you had a huge conflict of interest, you exploited it, and you

made millions personally from it. It's just wrong. Thank you, Mr. Poisoner. What's funny is that I mean, people can't see this, obviously, but it makes so much sense that in 2010, California gubernatorial debate would have

the setup of a competitive ted talk that was the the republican primary debate uh for governor to clarify yeah because she she ran against jerry brown in the general election and that was her republican opponent there and it's it's also interesting that she said conflict of interest because while running for governor um she still had a lot of gold Sachs stock, and Goldman Sachs was underwriting a bunch of the bonds for California during their financial crisis in the, you know, 28 to 20-whatever.

So while she was on the compensation committee of Goldman Sachs as part of her duties as a board person for Goldman Sachs, she gave bonus increases to the likes of Henry Hank Paulson and also to Lloyd Blankfein. Right. This is when they were, you know, pumping out mortgage-backed securities where like 98-some percent of the underlying mortgages were straight-up fraud.

But yes, and you know, it is just something where it's like this kind of spinning, you know, like Andy just said, she was invested in like, I think Wiki says 21 investment funds managed byman sachs while she was running for governor of california she says she's gonna divest and all that shit but but i mean it is just fucked up where this is the way the game is played with with the spinning is goldman sachs gives these insiders on different boards of different companies uh you know millions of of dollars of easy IPO money at the expense of public shareholders. And then it's like they're paying off all of these board members.

So, of course, the board members go to Goldman Sachs when they want an IPO or, you know, they go to Morgan Stanley or whoever's paying their bills. It is just pay to play bribery and it is a corruption of the public markets. But this is just the way the fucking system works. Yeah. Anyway, she lost in that governor campaign i found from that business insider article that she spent nearly 150 million of her own money in the campaign and i like to believe if michael bloomberg is rosa parks meg whitman is like colvin the teenager that was charged with assault and battery and disorderly conduct and defying the

segregation law and afterwards everything changed this is a direct quote from Colvin I did research on her my mom and dad got me out of jail and my dad said Claudette you put us in a lot of danger she recalls he was worried about repercussions from the KKK so that night he didn't sleep he sat in the corner with a shotgun fully loaded all

night where's that movie Jordan Peele that's amazing but similar to Michael from the KKK, so that night he didn't sleep. He sat in the corner with a shotgun fully loaded all night. Where is that movie, Jordan Peele? That's amazing. But similar to Michael Bloomberg spending $500 million and losing. Wait, Jordan Peele doesn't just have to make black movies. That's true, but this would be a great horror film. Oh, yeah. Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that Meg Whitman paved the way for billionaires to lose money on elections.

I do want to talk about that briefly, because the California governor's race in 2010, Meg Whitman spends $144 million of her own money to lose by like more than 10 points to Jerry Brown. That's right. Though it was close for a minute in the polls. But, you know, people, I guess, say they will use these case studies of money in politics doesn't matter. She spent all this money, she still lost. But it really did kind of pave the way for, you know, Michael Bloomberg, like Yogi was saying there, where I'm just going to quote from Susie Kim and Mother Jones is actually writing up a New York Times story. And the gist of this story is that Meg Whitman paid

more than $1 million. She put it into the film production company of mike murphy a top gop strategist who was thinking of working with her primary opponent and then months later he became a senior advisor for the whitman campaign instead she pays him another 665 000 for his six months of work um quoting from the new york times in the months before the deal was closed, he'd been thinking about working for his opponent or for Meg Whitman's opponent, Steve Posner, who you just heard in that clip we played. He was the state insurance commissioner of California. The timing of the investment and its unusual nature, Ms. Whitman lists no other holdings in the world of independent movie production, raised some questions about its ultimate purpose. Was it strictly a business decision or part of an effort to ensure that a coveted political strategist did not work for the competition? Or perhaps the way to sweeten a pot so that he would eventually sign on with the right team?

So they can just throw money around, which is why you see all these mayors endorsing Bloomberg. When you have a fortune, you can just bribe people and really subvert the political process. You could also say that Mike Bloomberg paved the way for her to pave the way for Mike Bloomberg because he had kind of already been like creating that system in his campaign for mayor where he had no experience whatsoever, but bought his way into the office. But he won. He won. That's the difference.

I think that one thing I really want to mention here is that Michael Bloomberg losing and spending $500 million is very scary if things don't change in this country because we're now closer to Mark Cuban running for president and spending $3 billion. So is Ross Perot like Harriet Tubman or some shit in this? You know, incidentally, there is a black supporter of Meg Whitman at a 2010 campaign rally, and she says that she was a Democrat her whole life.

But then Ross Perot was the first Republican she resonated with. And then Ronald Reagan calling one year the year of the Bible made her Christian values believe in the Republican Party. So Ross Perot does factor into this. I mean, Reagan called a year a year of the Bible. Yeah, I believe so. Every new thing I learn about Reagan. But I mean, I want...

I'm pretty sure zero AD is the year of the Bible. I really want to make this clear, though. Billionaires are competitive. And if Bloomberg spent $500 million to lose, the next person is going to spend a billion to lose.

But... It gets you a legitimate shot is what it buys you if if bloomberg spent four or seven billion which he could afford you know we might be looking at a bloomberg candidacy right now it's that's the thing that's scariest about political donations from the billionaire elite being uncounted for i mean it's it's fucking ludicrous right now at the same time if bloomberg were spending $4 billion in the way that he was spending the $500 million,

we could have been looking at really lining our pockets with completely unsupervised fake endorsements. Well, I will say that I am looking at getting a job at Meg Whitman's new company, so we will talk about that more in a moment. Yeah, we will do ad reads for your political campaign. Just read between the lines, people.

Well, yeah, so let's go to Meg Whitman's current company and then go into her family. Well, there's one last thing I want to mention, and that from 2011 to, I believe, 2017, she was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard Company. And HP is a company that makes printers, calculators and stuff. Yeah, that's TI-84. Never.

Hewlett Packard is a company that makes printers and other electronic goods. And she came into a company that was losing revenue because their business and consumer base was tethered together because of years of not separating them. So her entire thing was to separate those two but it drove the hp stock down 91 when she did that shit and then after a year or two later she she left so she has not done anything revolutionary or innovative in any business from hp to ebay to hasbro to florist transworld Delivery to Stride Right to Disney to Bain to Procter & Gamble. She has only been a child of the elite and has been coddled her way to continuing to be the elite.

Her one innovation was bringing Goldman Sachs into eBay to pump up their IPO. Yeah, but that would have happened. Goldman Sachs don't know you big on money i mean like they would have figured that out eventually but you're right that was her it's her one success yes that's true yeah goldman sachs was walking into like three guys in a fucking college dorm room who had like ten dollars in revenue and being like yeah you want to fucking ipo this for two billion dollars let's go baby uh we're we we don't give a shit and you know like

this is what when they talk about how smart they are billionaires or whatever this is just they are in the networks right if you are in the networks you can be an abusive dipshit who uh buys skype but doesn't actually buy it for 4.1 billion dollars and shove subordinates you're just born into the right family you know the right people you have access to the big pool of money, and you cannot fail. You can only fail upwards. And I guess just like a couple things we should mention briefly from the California governor's campaign, because it is fascinating that essentially by running for governor, she subjected herself to a bunch of press scrutiny she wouldn't get otherwise. So,

you know, this is kind of only why we know some of these things about her uh came out from the sacramento b she was running for governor but didn't cast a vote in an election until she was 46 years old until 2002 uh just going through that and she mentions that she was too busy raising her family and supporting her husband to vote and like one of the unassailable yeah she's got like a billion three billion one billion at the time like she just paid maids to raise her husband and then uh got into a settle a dispute with one of them um in september uh 2010 this is uh you know the election of course is in november 2010 it's actually kind of a dead heat in the polls at this point. But then what happens is that she had hired an undocumented maid. And you see this in politics even has a term, nanny gate, because so many rich politicians hire undocumented people to raise their children, clean their house, do everything. So what happened with her maid, she fired her maid in June 2019 when the maid came to her and asked her for help with her citizenship. Because she had hired this maid back in, I believe, 2002.

And this maid said that she got a, the maid got a lawyer, Gloria Allred, who's, you know, kind of a famous lawyer. And according to the maid's lawyer, the maid came to Meg Whitman and said in June 2009 that she wanted help with applying for U.S. citizenship. And then Meg Whitman told her, quote, from now on, you don't know me and i don't know you unquote so this is you know like your maid who's been raising your children cleaning your house asks you for help and you're like i don't know you you don't know me get the fuck out right fires her maid and this is entirely just because she knew for years that she had an undocumented maid but she also knew it would become a political issue when she ran for governor so she just terminated and threw this woman out on the streets. And listen, I know some of our listeners might not love Sean McCarthy's comedic takes,

but let's get another comedian's take on this Gloria Allred's allegations against Meg Whitman. Well, do you know this story? As you may have heard, Republican candidate Meg Whitman is in trouble for allegedly having an undocumented alien working in her home and of course gloria allred is representing the undocumented alien in fact uh gloria allred called the maid the rosa parks of the latino community the only problem is rosa parks was here legally okay i think we kind of forget that it Anyway, Meg Whitman. It's Jay Leno. Oh, my God. Meg Whitman is fighting the charge that she knew the maid was illegal. In fact, she agreed to take a lie detector.

Well, here's what she had to say about Gloria Allred. Take a look at this. Here's what she said. I think the tragedy of this is that Nikki is, I think, being manipulated. I think Nikki probably didn't understand exactly what she'd gotten into with Gloria Allred. Yeah, see, now Nikki is the maid.

And, you know, as I look back at the press conference yesterday, I think Gloria Allred was manipulating that maid. You have to look carefully. Take a look. Nikki's number on her card did not match her name. You don't know me. It's a bit where it's supposed to look like a ventriloquist dummy is operating her mouth yeah rosa parks was here illegally because her ancestors were chained to a boat you know i forgot uh doing research at 3 a.m why the rosa parks connection

was there this was the reason i mentioned rosa parks earlier but yeah so um to correct it earlier she worked as a housekeeper for meg whitman from 2000 to 2009 she said initially she was hired to work 15 hours a week for 23 an hour 23 an hour but that the family constantly asked her to perform overtime and additional duties without paying her extra time for the overtime or reimbursing her if she's driving the car or, you know, reimbursing her for any expenses, basically. And then Gloria Allred, her lawyer, says that they knew at least from 2003, so she hires the maid 2000 to 2009, at least from 2003, we know that she knew that she was undocumented because Social Security sent them a letter in 2003 saying that the maid's Social Security number wasn't real.

It was a fake number. And then they pretended, Meg Whitman and her husband, that they didn't receive this letter. But Gloria Allred produces the letter, which actually has her husband's writing a note on it. And then later they had to acknowledge that they may have received it, but forgot about it. So, I mean, it is just like start to finish bullshit. And, you know, this hurts her with the Latino community in California in particular, because, you know, not so much, of course, employing an undocumented person as just treating them like straight up garbage

and saying, you don't know me, I don't know you. And then settling with this lady for $5,500. That's it? Yes. She eventually had to settle with the housekeeper for $5,500. That's it? Yes. She eventually had to settle with the housekeeper for $5,500, and I do like that the nation, or the LA Times tallied this up.

Meg Whitman's campaign spent $144 million, which accounts for $36 for every vote she got in California. The $5,500 she gave her housekeeper amounted to the price of a mere 152 votes. Oh, that's great. That's wonderful. That's actually hyper-efficient

compared to what Bloomberg paid for his votes, probably. There was one story where their campaign tweeted out a tweet that said, County Sheriff Associate says Whitman 2010 for Governor, the SDE County Sheriff. So the cops are supporting whitman 2010 for governor the sde county

sheriff so the cops are supporting whitman 2020 for governor and the hyperlink they did to go to the article actually went to a youtube video titled k on fuwa fuwa time base featuring a bespectacled long-haired japanese man dressing in a pink tutu and thigh-high stockings rocking out on bass guitar in a bedroom now doing a typ a typo is, you know, forgivable, but the tweet was posted at 4.40 p.m. October 18th, and as this thing was written, noon of October 20th, it's still up. So it was up for two days without them even realizing it. Yeah, we played the video, though, and that guy could shred.

I mean, Andy, before we we recorded said that that's probably the coolest thing her campaign ever did yeah yeah so after her run at politics she decided to get out of that game and get into the quibby game and you're wondering yourself what's quibby quibby i am wondering that to myself well good to know that it's quick bites of captivating entertainment created for mobile by the best talent designed to fit perfectly into any moment of your day. I'm calling it here. This company is going to crash and burn. Oh, yeah. Because first of all, the name and second of all, the idea and third of all, the people running it.

It's like a combination of Vine, TikTok and and Seesaw all wrapped up into one. So one-third of a successful company. One-fourth, I think. Basically, what Quibi is is that they are revolutionizing the game by making content that's suited for your phone. I don't know if that exactly means that the aspect ratio is to your phone, but they have Caitlin Olsen Bennett from Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame and a few other people signed on to do content for their streaming service. Now, their goal is that, like, you know, basically when you make anything that's on a screen, there's like a close-up, a wide, and various panning shots and so on and so forth. With Quibi, all the wide shots will be done on probably decent cameras.

But all the close-ups will be from cell phones' perspective. So they're integrating how people live into media, which is just a fancier way of saying they're making content that sucks and is cheaper. Yeah, it sounds like they're trying to develop the concept that no one wants, which is sitcoms in portrait mode. Yeah, precisely.

So it's Meg Whitmanman for and jeffrey katzenberg and they say they're not competing against netflix disney plus hbo max peacock or any of the other streaming services that have launched or are launching soon you've got it all wrong you're not even asking the right questions this is a perfect example of uh billionaire elites saying that we're making stuff that you can't even think of right now. And really, it's just they know that people watch trash on their phones and they're going to make slightly better trash. It's kind of like when you buy organic vegetables and it's like, why am I paying more for vegetables that aren't poisoned? Why am I paying for you to not put poison on this

instead of just never putting poison on any of our vegetables. We should note from Variety, during an all-hands meeting at Quibi, Meg Whitman compared journalists to child predators. Oh, yeah. And she said that the way journalists cultivate sources is similar to the way child predators, quote-unquote, groom victims. Yeah. And she had to admit to Variety her remarks were, quote-unquote, mostly accurately portrayed.

And she apologized for comparing journalists to child predators. What's so great is she has to make those claims to journalists every time she's in front of them, and she's with Caitlin Olsen-Bennett, and so Caitlin Olsen-Bennett just has to sit and be like, ah, here's the child predators question again, and just sit and just be like, that's my boss on my left. I can't literally be myself right now. Meg, there are reports that you compare journalists to sexual predators.

Is that, were those comments accurately portrayed? And if so, do you regret them? So they were mostly accurately portrayed and I regret it terribly. I am so sorry. I made a terrible mistake. I used an analogy that was inappropriate and just plain wrong. None of us are ever perfect. I didn't intend it. And it's not at all how I think, how I feel. I've had a long, long history with journalists, and I completely respect what you all do and the important role that you play. So I'm super sorry about it. Well, I mean, and you can just imagine, why does she have to make this comment, calling journalists child predators at an all-hands meeting at quibi it's because all of the employees

know they're on the fucking titanic and she's telling them hey don't go telling journalists that this is all just a giant fucking scam to ipo this shit also i think your children and and guess what the people who were in at that meeting did immediately after that meeting told journalists yeah and that's why we're hearing about it we should just mention quibi i think is going to go public in april 2020 or not ipo but like you'll be able to use the service in april so we will see if our predictions that this thing will be a fucking five alarm fire bear out but most likely I'm pretty sure they'll hire me

they got two positions in New York open and instead of applying I'm just going to go to location and be like I think you guys need what I'm doing get in on the Quibi money I'm going to entourage the Quibi I'm going to roll it and go why aren't you guys hiring me for this thing that you're working on currently and hope I get them on the right moment where you go

yes you're exactly who we need you're going to do the like our parents advice for how to get a job where it's just like well knock in and knock on the door ask if they're hiring and you know what they might take me they don't know what the fuck they're doing can i just say i already know this is gonna fail because i already burned my phone's monthly eight gigabyte limit just looking at twitter bullshit like okay you want to fucking stream high-definition videos? I'm already out of data by like the halfway point of the month,

so good luck with this shit. You're not the demographic. They want 14-year-old white girls or old people. That's the market to go for if you want money these days. But that's how Charlize Theron actually got her first manager. She was at a bank,

and the bank teller wouldn't cash her check, and then she cussed him out, and a guy behind her in line was the manager. He was my card that's charlie's theron she's a real monster um but lastly going down to what visual impression of her a monster that i feel i'm very frustrated right now yeah i've never seen it but we'll take a photo of andy's face and put on instagram if he wants us to. It's very jarring. So you may be wondering, okay, so Yogi, obviously Meg Whitman sucks and her family on both sides,

her husband and herself are mammoth money, which is a term I'd like to populate, which is money that goes back over five generations. But where is this money going? Well, they have two sons. And I want to warn our listeners we are going to be talking about

some sexual abuse scandals in a moment here as well as one of her sons using racial slurs so be warned that that is about to come up. So, they have one son Griffith Harsh V because boy, keep that shit going if you know what I mean. Not appropriate. the fifth because boy keep that shit going if you know what i mean not appropriate so i'm gonna read this entire thing from gawker

a 22 year old woman named valerie sanchez was riding a bus to paul alto's blue chalk cafe on the night of may 26 2006 when she crossed paths with griffith rutherford harsh fifth meg's oldest eldest son and a notoriously delinquent sophomore at princeton at the time according to a police report file later that night sanchez and her friends had mocked his fraternity and said fuck you and fuck your fraternity honestly queens to him before sanchez swiped griff's baseball cap off his head the altercation escalated when both parties arrived at Blue Chalk Cafe. According to Valerie's statement to the police, they were inside the bar when Griff pushed her with two open hands on her chest and shoulder area.

She fell down and felt her right ankle snap. A nearby security guard witnessed the event and corroborated Valerie's version of the events. So, say it how you will, this motherfucker broke a woman's ankle because she said, fuck your fraternity. He was charged with felony battery. That's right. The next morning, Meg Whitman, this is from the same Gawker article, the next morning, Meg Whitman,

Griff's mother, and then the CEO of eBay, posted Griff's $25,000 bail with a cashier's check, and it brought her son home. Turns out if you take a frat guy and then give him a billion dollar inheritance, it is exactly what you would expect. Yeah.

And so nine, again, from the same article. And we should just shout out the journalist, Maureen O'Connor for Gawker, wrote essentially the Meg Whitman's rapist children beat for Gawker. She's written several articles about Meg Whitman's children and uh unfortunately gawker is uh now defunct but you know i mean like these are people these are that happen yeah these people billionaires and you know politicians or whoever say their children are not you know fair game or go after me don't go after my kids well it's like

these fucking rapist pieces of shit are going to be the ones inheriting meg whitman's money so it's like these people will be the ones in 20 or 30 years from now who are spending meg whitman's goldman sachs insider trading fortune and these people are psychopathic monsters just from the uh the gawker article yogi was quoting uh nine court dates followed over the next year but the charges were all ultimately dismissed although it's unclear why um and they weren't able to get meg whitman to respond to comment the lawyer who handled the case said he was not authorized to respond to gawker's questions but it's like okay so nine court dates charges dismissed no idea why probably because she's a billionaire who peddles a bunch of money around california and national politics of course um but so and then the even more horrifying story is, again,

the same journalist, Maureen O'Connor at Gawker, talks about the rape accusations at Princeton, where Griff Rutherford Harsh V attended Princeton after Meg Whitman paid $30 million to Princeton to build a building in her name. So she paid Princeton a $30 million bribe to accept my son into Princeton. Incidentally, at that time, that same son was banned from living on the campus. So while there's $30 million being built for dorms for new future students, her son was literally banned. Right. So he's charged with felony assault for breaking a

sorority girl's ankle. And then in addition to that, just quoting from the Maureen O'Connor Gawker article, on a spring night in 2006, Griff, then a sophomore, went partying on the street, a boozy row of private undergrad dining clubs. As he would later tell a panel of university disciplinarians, he ran into a classmate and went back home with her. They had sex. She awoke the next morning with a black eye, bruised face, and she told friends had no memories from the previous night. According to multiple sources, one of whom was a dormitory advisor at the time, the girl had told friends Griff Harsh raped her. A friend who spent time with her the following morning spoke to us under condition of anonymity. Quote, she woke up with him on top of her, and then he was like, you need the morning after pill. And she was like, why? What happened?

She didn't remember having sex. She didn't remember consenting. She didn't remember any of it. She went to the campus health clinic the next day after the alleged assault. Shortly thereafter, Princeton launched an internal investigation. Her friend told Gawker, quote, she didn't want to press charges because it's Meg Whitman's son. She didn't want to go through that.

She didn't go to the police. She didn't get a rape hit. She was, quote, unquote, terrified of the social reproduction of repercussions of accusing such a high-profile student of rape. So, again, this is what happens when billionaires have their shitty fucking kids, is that this guy can get away with felony assault. He owns the fucking judicial system. You can imagine being a fucking kid in college

who gets raped by this guy and feeling like, very justifiably so, that you have no options. The police are not going to side with you here. And, I mean, even if they did side with you there's uh you're in for a world of hell from her lawyers from people that she hires to smear you every which way so get the best lawyers money can buy yeah and she'll get i mean she'll have connections to like call you a whore in the media. Well, I mean, the reality is there probably allegedly are some cases where this has happened and it's been hushed up.

You know, what Sean and I are reading has been stuff that's even been cleaned up a little bit, but we were able to dig and find some stuff. William Harsh is he went to a part of the college campus where there's mostly white people and there was a black music group that had performed that night that were hanging out after the show and he literally rolls up and he goes man what are all the n-words doing here just yells it and so he's

repeatedly used the n-word several times wait hard r yeah yes and it's like it's fucking disgusting that So he's repeatedly used the N-word several times. Wait, hard R? Yeah, yes. And it's like, it's fucking disgusting that these people continue to exist without any repercussion and live in a world where their mammoth money supports their fucking bullshit habits. I wonder where he learned that language. In a different article from the LA Weekly, it talks about William literally just throwing

a hissy fit because a softball coach was like hey you can't be on this field we're going to use it for softball and he's like nope we're using it for rugby so he grabs like the first base and throws it over the edge and then grab the same fucking bullshit that gets you know no consequences for the rich i wonder where they inherited those kinds of attitudes exactly that make you fucking violently uh shove people and throw things when you don't get your way i mean we know where they got them from fucking meg whitman and her cuck of a husband literally condone this behavior and hush it up and you know alleged cuck of a husband alleged cuck of a husband sure that's fair it's not for now that dude's cocking for hard he's lazy as

shit but i mean it's one of those things where the whitman lineage allows rape to continue and who knows what type of crimes against humanity have occurred with their lineage from i mean her dad her husband's father and father and great and grandfather were all lawyers in birmingham alabama i wonder if any law cases happened with black people in 1800s to 1970 i mean you know a lot of the stuff on the internet was scrubbed but we found some of it because billionaires aren't smart they just have enough money to pay people to make things look good and to close out the gawker article regarding the the rape accusations i just wanted to quote a little bit more from it.

As we mentioned, she doesn't go to the police for obvious reasons, but Princeton launches an internal investigation. During the summer of 06, Griff, his accuser, and a handful of other witnesses testified before Princeton's University Committee on Discipline, a panel of about a dozen students, faculty members, and administrators tasked with adjudicating non-academic misconduct. A source gave Gawker Griff's closing statement to this panel. He says, quote, I am deeply saddened and upset that redacted finds herself in this situation where she cannot remember what occurred between us that night. He said he thought she had been sober enough to consent. He attributed her injuries to an accidental fall.

And, you know, and he also, you know... Oh, an accidental fall. That's happened once before, hasn't it? Another person's fucking ankle broke in half because this guy was accidentally falling on people. Right. That's not the automatic red flag for abuse. Yeah, exactly.

Right. It's just like if you have a good enough lawyer, just spam the word accidental fall. Yeah. Like it's a fucking high-doken and street fighter. It's just like if you have a good enough lawyer, just spam the word accidental fall. Like it's a fucking high doken and street fighter. It's just your go to move. You will just win every case. Gawker quotes the lady who was raped. Quotes her friend saying, quote, how somebody would think it was OK to sleep with a girl who is bleeding from her face is beyond me. The friend goes on. i think what happened is wrong i think the university handled it wrong i would never fault redacted because i understand to

press charges against a billionaire son is daunting she just wants to forget that it happened and move on with her life and he if he wants to say they slept together before he gets to unquote and that's the fucking world we live in these are the people and you know what pisses me off these are the people who are restoring Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to decency. These fucking rapist pieces of shit, rapist enabling pieces of shit are like, we are the decency party. We're going to stop Bernie Sanders, stop the divisiveness. It's like, no, you're paying off your fucking kids rape bills. Certainly, Joe. Certainly. Why the fuck is this the predicament we're in right now fucking kids' rape bills. Yeah. Certainly, Joe, certainly.

Why the fuck is this the predicament we're in right now? It's horseshit. And then just from the same article, after graduation, Griff, according to his LinkedIn page, went on to work at the private equity firm Solomere, founded by Tag Romney, Mitt Romney's son. And it just so happens Meg Whitman was heavily involved in the Mitt romney campaign

both in 2008 2012 i believe she was a campaign fundraiser among other uh titles so her uh her kid gets like a make work job at uh mitt romney's kids fake private equity fund which oddly enough during the run for governor of california meg whitman's campaign pays about 96 000 to this private equity firm doesn't seem to have any political connection, but maybe she's just using fucking campaign funds to pay her dipshit son's salary. Mammoth money. I wonder if any legislation from Utah is going to be beneficial to her in the future. Yeah, most likely. But, you know, I mean, it's just such bullshit where it's like she's a fucking through and through Republican who backs Chris Christie in the 2016 primary and then just says, oh, Trump is like bad and I don't like his rhetoric or some shit.

So she becomes a flashback to the clip Yogi played of her explicitly citing Donald Trump. Oh, yeah. Well, in that clip in a positive way in that clip, I'll close out the episode with it. Yeah. And it's just something where it's, you know, it's dangerous to let these people take over the Democratic Party. And it's certainly we should never let them pretend that they are the decent people. No, I mean, my family was telling me that they listen to Pod Save America and it's actually dangerous that Bernie's multiracial coalition is kind of like Trump supporters and that they don't listen. All I know is I've never trust Brahmins and I still don't. I did. I did just want to mention with Meg Whitman, we've talked on this podcast before on how the Warren Buffett, Bill Gates giving pledge is bullshit, where, you know, the billionaires

will pledge to give away half their fortune to quote unquote charitable causes. But you look at like a billionaire like Pete Peterson, he gives half his fortune, signs the pledge, gives it gives this fortune to reducing the deficit, which basically means cutting Social Security, cutting welfare, all this shit. So it's like you just say whatever you already wanted to fund is charitable causes or people will will give it to charter schools and say, I'm signing the giving pledge and giving money to charter schools. Meg Whitman in 2010, Warren Buff say, I'm signing the giving pledge and giving money to charter schools. Meg Whitman in 2010, Warren Buffett asked her to join the giving pledge, and she refused.

She declined to join the giving pledge and pledged to give away half her fortune. But she does fund charter schools, and Forbes only gives her a 3 out of 10 philanthropy score, which is very abysmally low. I wonder why. Yeah, but I like that even this fucking bullshit pledge is too much for her. She wants to keep all the fucking money and give it to her rapist sons. Or rapist son and N-word screaming son.

I don't want to confuse the two. And with that, this has been Gross Stickers. I'm Yogi Poliwal. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening. we'll see you on the patreon side vote bernie and uh as a little reward for hanging it out through the uh last part there here are the smooth drum moves of herman's hermits again I'm Henry VIII, I am

Henry VIII, I am, I am I got married to the widow next door She's been married seven times before And everyone was an Henry She wouldn't have a Willie or a Sam I'm an eighth old man, I'm Henry Henry VIII, I am Second verse, same as the first or a Sam I'm an eighth old man I'm Henry Henry the eighth I am

second verse same as the first how long did we do sorry Henry the eighth I am I am I got married

to the widow next door she's been married seven times before and everyone was an Henry she wouldn't have a Willie or a Sam

I'm an eighth old man, I'm NRA. NRA the eighth I am. That is the CEO of HP and Clinton supporter Meg Whitman. Thank you, Meg Whitman. Thank you, madam. I want to ask you about this, about what is the key reason that would stop you from voting for Donald Trump? If there was one thing that said no matter what else changed, this is the thing that would stop me. Well, as you know, as a lifelong Republican, right, voting, going across party lines to vote for Hillary Clinton and be a supporter was a challenge.

But I think Donald Trump is a dishonest demagogue. He has exploited our worst fears around xenophobia, racism. DONALD TRUMP IS A DISHONEST DEMOCRAT. HE HAS EXPLOITED OUR WORST FEARS AROUND XENOPHOBIA, RACISM, AND HE HAS LOWERED THE LEVEL OF DISCOURSE IN THIS COUNTRY, WHICH I THINK IS REALLY, REALLY UNFORTUNATE. SO I'M FOR HILLARY ALL THE WAY. WELL, I'M ASKING YOU, WHAT IS THE ONE ISSUE THAT BUGS YOU? I MEAN, DO YOU LIKE THE FACT THAT HE SAYS HE'S AGAINST TRADE, HE'S AGAINST TPP, HE'S AGAINST NAFTA.

DOES THAT BOTHER YOU? YOU KNOW, I ACTUALLY THINK IT IS HIS CHARACTER THAT IS THE MOST PROBLEMATIC FOR ME. I THINK WE NEED TO LOOK UP TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. I THINK HE NEEDS TO BE A ROLE MODEL OR SHE NEEDS TO BE A ROLE MODEL FOR OUR CHILDREN. AND SO IT REALLY IS AROUND THE CHARACTER THAT I THINK BOTHERS ME THE MOST. YES, I DON'T AGREE WITH HIS TRADE POLICIES. I DON'T most. Yes, I don't agree with his trade policies. I don't agree with his immigration policies. There's lots I don't agree with.

But what I will say is I think it's about the character of the person. What about the fact that over 60% of the American people don't like, don't trust either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? We see these numbers every day. You see them. What do you make of them? How do you explain them? Both candidates not being trusted. Yeah, listen, I mean, it's an unprecedented election. I've never seen anything like this in my entire career. But one of these two individuals will be president of the United States. And I think Hillary has the temperament. I think she has the global experience. I think

she has the economic plan that is going to make the economy work for everybody. And I really AND I THINK HILLARY HAS THE TEMPERAMENT, I THINK SHE HAS THE GLOBAL EXPERIENCE, I THINK SHE HAS THE ECONOMIC PLAN THAT IS GOING TO MAKE THE ECONOMY WORK FOR EVERYBODY. AND I REALLY LIKE THE FACT THAT SHE IS GOING TO PULL THIS COUNTRY TOGETHER BECAUSE WE ARE GOING TO BE STRONGER TOGETHER. DIVIDED WE FALL, UNITED WE STAND. AND I THINK SHE'S GOING TO DO A GREAT JOB AFTER THE ELECTION WHEN SHE WINS OF PULLING THIS COUNTRY TOGETHER, WHICH I THINK IS REALLY IMPORTANT. YOU WERE BACKING CHRIS CHRISTIE. HE'S GOTTEN INVOLVED WITH THIS WHOLE BRIDGEGATE PROBLEM. YOU TRUSTED HIM. DO YOU TRUST HILLARY CLINTON AND CHRIS CHRISTIE BOTH TO THIS DAY? BOTH OF THEM? WELL, LISTEN, I WAS A SUPPORTER OF CHRIS CHRISTIE. I THOUGHT HE HAD DONE A LOT OF

VERY GOOD THINGS IN HIS CAREER. I WAS DISAPPOINTED A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY.

I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. I THINK HE'S A VERY GOOD GUY. THE ECONOMY FOR AVERAGE WORKING PEOPLE. WHICH HILLARY DO YOU BELIEVE? THIS IS TRICKY. ONE LAST QUESTION. WE'RE HEARING THAT HILLARY CLINTON THANKS TO WIKILEASE HAS COME OUT FOR OPEN TRADE, OPEN BORDERS, FREE TRADE IN THE HEMISPHERE. BUT PUBLICLY, HER PUBLIC POSITION HAS BEEN I'M AGAINST

TPP. I'M QUESTIONING NAFTA. WHICH IS SHE, A FREE TRADER OR A PROTECTIONIST? WE'RE GETTING DIFFERENT MESSAGES FROM HER. WHICH DO YOU LIKE? WELL, L, listen, I think smart trade deals are important. Listen, it's very important for the economy of the United States to trade with other countries. Isolationism will not be the right answer for this country. So we've got to do smart trade deals.

And I think Hillary's for smart trade deals. But that doesn't say whether she's a free trader or a protectionist. Which is she? Which do you like? Well, you know what? Usually these things aren BLACK AND WHITE, ARE THEY, CHRIS? YOU KNOW, YOU'RE A FREE TRADER IF THE DEAL IS SMART. YOU'RE AGAINST TRADE. YOU'RE AGAINST TRADE IF THE DEALS ARE NOT SMART. MEC WOMEN, WITH ALL DERESPECT, YOU HAVE TO BE FOR T.P. OR AGAINST IT.

ARE YOU FOR T.P.P.? I AM FOR T.P.P. YES, I AM. WHERE'S HILLARY ON T.P.P.? SO SHE'S AGAINST IT. AND NOT THAT I AGREE WITH EVERY SINGLE THING THAT HILLARY CLINTON STANDS FOR. YOU SAID THE MOST

IMPORTANT ISSUE IS THE ECONOMY AND YOU DISAGREE WITH HER ROLE IN THE WORLD ECONOMICALLY. SO WHERE DO YOU AGREE WITH HER ON ECONOMICS? SO FIRST OF ALL, I AGREE ON HER INFRASTRUCTURE PROGRAM. WE NEED TO REBUILD THE

INFRASTRUCTURE IN THIS COUNTRY. IT NOT ONLY PROVIDES JOBS, BUT IT ACTUALLY CREATES THE ABILITY FOR GOODS AND SERVICES AND PEOPLE. So first of all, I agree on her infrastructure program. We need to rebuild the infrastructure in this country. It not only provides jobs, but it actually creates the ability for goods and services and people to move around this country. The second area is her innovation agenda. We have got to own the next generation of industries in the world, whether that's 3D printing or immunotherapy or robotics or artificial intelligence or big data and analytics. And we need to make sure that we are the leader in those categories, that we create jobs for every kind of American with all kinds of educational backgrounds.

And we can do that if we set our mind to it and we decide as a country, we want to make sure that we lead in these brand new industries, that over time we'll create a lot of jobs for this country. Thank you so much. It's an honor having you on the show. Meg Whitman tonight from Hewlett Packard. that Salim Fraha is first forwarding this article to Garrett Price. Do you see that? Yes. And then Garrett Price forwards the article to Meg Whitman. I see that. And Meg Whitman's responses directly to my question

mister buck master did you think it was pretty funny that you trusted eBay? No. Dirty pool, Mr. Dirty pool. I didn't ask you about Meg Whitman's sort of reported comments that leaked out. Did you, were they accurate that she was sort of? Yes, and here's the thing is, is that the quote was an accurate quote. The words that she said are in no way fashion, shape, or form a reflection of what she thinks or feels. And so it was an unfortunate choice of words in a moment. She recognized that it was.

I've known her for 35 years. She is a great person of high values and honestly I can say to you without a question holds you and journalists in the highest possible regard. So it's just one of those moments wrong thing but no no bad intent. That was a lie! This is the 40th part of this campaign in which somebody in your campaign referred to Ms. Whitman as a whore. A campaign spokesman then described that as salty language and apologized after a fashion. We've heard no outrage from you about the use of that kind of language,

which to many women is the same as calling an African-American the N-word. Have you been in charge of the investigation of your campaign to find out who was responsible for using that phrase? I don't agree with that comparison, number one. Number two, this is a five-week-old private conversation picked up on a cell phone with a garbled transmission, very hard to detect who it is. This is not, well, I don't want to get into the term and how it's used,

but I will say the campaign apologized promptly, and I affirm that apology tonight. You're repeating it to Ms. Whitman? Yes, I am. I do. It's unfortunate. I'm sorry it happened, and I apologize, Ms. Whitman. So, Jerry, it's not just me. It's the people of California who deserve better than slurs and personal attacks.

That's not what California is about. It is not our better selves. And I think people know exact, I think every Californian and especially women know exactly what's going on here and that is a deeply offensive term to women.