Jack Dorsey exits Twitter

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: Jack Dorsey exits Twitter

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, November 30th and this is your FT News Briefing.

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Marc Filippino
Jack Dorsey posted his final tweet as CEO of Twitter, and commodities giant Glencore is under pressure to get out of its dirtiest but very profitable thermal coal business. Plus, some say Pfizer has saved the world with its Covid vaccine. Our global pharmaceuticals correspondent Hannah Kuchler, talks about how it got there and the downside of Pfizer’s dominance.

Hannah Kuchler
Well, I think it puts them in a very powerful position over things that companies don’t normally have power over

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Marc Filippino
Glencore is under pressure to spin off its thermal coal business. Activist hedge fund Bluebell Capital Partners wrote to the mining and commodities trading company earlier this month in a letter seen by the FT, in which Bluebell urged Glencore to chart a future without the world’s most polluting fossil fuel. Bluebell also urged the group to divest non-core assets and improve corporate governance. Glencore is the world’s biggest exporter of thermal coal, which is burned in power stations, and its coal business is expected to make billions. Glencore does have a plan to close down its mines over the next 30 years, but Bluebell says the strategy is morally unacceptable and financially flawed. The hedge fund isn’t big, but it’s known to be shrewd. Its campaign at French foodmaker Danone led to the ousting of the company’s CEO earlier this year.

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Marc Filippino
Jack Dorsey resigned as head of Twitter yesterday, 15 years after he co-founded it. The 45-year-old said he wants the company to move on from its founders.

Cristina Criddle
But when we look into the reporting a little bit more, one person familiar with the process said that this succession has been planned for more than a year.

Marc Filippino
That’s our technology reporter Cristina Criddle.

Cristina Criddle
So last year, activist hedge funds Elliott Management took a 4 per cent stake in Twitter, and they tried to get rid of Dorsey then. It was really concerned that Dorsey was distracted because he was also the founder of another company, Square, which is a mobile payment system. And they also had some concerns that he had other interests in cryptocurrencies that were distracting him from his job at Twitter. So they set up a committee of directors to evaluate the leadership last year, and apparently then they planned the successor. So Dorsey has sort of been staying in position only until this moment, now that they’ve announced Parag will be taking over.

Marc Filippino
Yeah, Parag being Parag Agrawal, the former chief technology officer of Twitter, and Jack Dorsey’s replacement. Cristina, what do you make of this choice?

Cristina Criddle
Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that they’ve gone with an insider who has been at the company for so long. They clearly don’t want to bring in a flashy name from another company who might be bringing something external, but maybe not know the company very well. People I’ve spoken to have said that Agrawal is egoless, but he’s very formidable, very brilliant and really likes to get down to the core of an issue rather than trying to come up with a flashy fix. So he will spend a lot of time trying to understand the different teams and how they work and trying to understand the problem. He’s also been described as a little bit nerdy and not having the same sort of Silicon Valley silver tongue that perhaps Jack Dorsey has. But everybody I’ve spoken to has said that he’s very impressive and that they are really happy with him becoming the new CEO.

Marc Filippino
Cristina Criddle is the FT’s technology reporter. She’s based in London.

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Marc Filippino
One of the biggest effects of the pandemic has been a huge expansion of state power. Governments have imposed lockdowns. They’ve propped up economies with public funds. But when it comes to medical solutions, they’re almost completely dependent on private companies, and one company in particular. The FT’s global pharmaceuticals correspondent Hannah Kuchler has been writing about how Pfizer became so dominant. She joins me now. Hi, Hannah.

Hannah Kuchler
Hello.

Marc Filippino
So pre-pandemic, Pfizer’s most famous drug was Viagra. We all know what that does. Now, Pfizer is behind the bestselling pharmaceutical product of all time. How did this happen?

Hannah Kuchler
Yeah. One of the really great lines in this piece is, I spoke to this US official who said it’s not even their product (laughter), and that is one of the interesting things about this story. The vaccine that’s now known as the Pfizer shot almost everywhere in the world was actually made in the labs of BioNTech, their German partner which is this pioneer in mRNA technology, which we know has been the real sort of supercharged this vaccine and made it the most successful in the world.

Marc Filippino
So briefly, in dollar terms, in financial terms, what has Pfizer’s Covid vaccine meant for the company itself and for its position in the market?

Hannah Kuchler
I mean, it’s absolutely huge. So Pfizer is forecasting this year $36bn in revenue from this vaccine. Now, before that, we used to call a blockbuster drug, is a billion dollar drug, right? Some of the big mega blockbusters, drugs like Humira, which is an anti-inflammatory drug that can be used for a whole range of diseases so is prescribed fairly widely. That comes in at $20bn. So 36 is like out of nowhere, a complete record breaker, and it’s probably gonna continue. Pfizer reckons that it will have $29bn in revenue next year, but it’s probably gonna be more than that because that was based on contracts it had already signed in mid-October.

Marc Filippino
Now, of course, Pfizer isn’t the only one out there with a vaccine. Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, AstraZeneca. Why was Pfizer so much more successful at distributing the vaccine than other pharmaceutical companies?

Hannah Kuchler
So Pfizer was very big before the pandemic. It was the only major vaccine maker that we actually see or has a vaccine, a Covid shot on the market right now. And so it had expertise in making vaccines. It also had a lot more financial firepower than a company like Moderna that it never had a product before. BioNTech, obviously, its partner also never had a product before. So it was able to really turbo charge the production because of that combination of, you know, expertise and money.

Marc Filippino
So Hannah, Pfizer is the most dominant player in the market now. Is there cause for concern?

Hannah Kuchler
Well, I think it puts them in a very powerful position over things that companies don’t normally have power over. Over, you know, who gets doses that can potentially save millions of lives. And so you have a lot of people, unfortunately, in very, you know, barely vaccinated areas of the world who are quite resentful of the idea that Pfizer has saved the world because they don’t feel like they saved their parts of the world. We can have a debate and maybe we should about the extent to which that’s the responsibility of governments and the extent to which that’s the responsibility of companies that are set up to make money. But I think that certainly a lot of people I talked to felt that it was playing really hardball and that there was not much they could do when faced with such a global power in the form of a company. And then the other big point is, you know, one of the reasons why Pfizer will have more power in this situation, whether it wants it or not, is that it has a big, good global co-operation between governments. They’ve not worked together to fund initiatives like Covax early enough or to decide how you distribute vaccines more equitably. It has been a bit of a grab for each for their own.

Marc Filippino
So now we have this new coronavirus variant that global health officials are worried about, Omicron. Can we assume that Pfizer is well-placed to respond to it?

Hannah Kuchler
Well, pretty well-placed because mRNA technology is the most adaptable technology out there. You take this gene sequence, you just change the gene sequence. Now, obviously, because of regulation, you have to do some more tests. You have to do probably a small bridging trial in people. (Inaudible) we haven’t heard exactly what they’re going to ask for, but that certainly means that they’re likely to double down on their dominance there. And Albert Bourla said this week that he thinks that they would make almost 4bn doses of a new version of a vaccine, which suggests to me that they’re saying, maybe we have like a really short switch over time, but we’re pretty much gonna meet the same targets as we were always going to, even if we switched to a new tweaked vaccine.

Marc Filippino
Interesting. Hannah Kuchler is the FT’s global pharmaceutical correspondent. Thanks, Hannah.

Hannah Kuchler
Thank you.

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Marc Filippino
Before we go, we have a quick correction to make. In yesterday’s show, we overstated the importance of oil in Iran’s economy. We removed that section for clarity. You could read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

This transcript has been automatically generated. If by any chance there is an error please send the details for a correction to: typo@ft.com. We will do our best to make the amendment as soon as possible.