Hello everyone! Welcome to this weekly roundup of Business Insider stories from co-Editor in Chief Matt Turner. Subscribe here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Sunday.
Read on for more on the dark secret at the heart of the yachting industry, a profile of playboy turned pragmatic media mogul Jay Penske, and an interview with Nxivm survivor India Oxenberg.
Samantha Lee/Business Insider
Hello!
I want to start by highlighting three in-depth stories we published in the past 24 hours.
- Rob Price, Meghan Morris, and Becky Peterson described the 199 days that doomed Quibi, and explain how $1.75 billion couldn’t save the most hyped app of the year from a pandemic and apathetic users.
- Patrick Coffee and Tanya Dua published the inside story on the biggest independent ad agency, The Richards Group, where some say an old-school culture that included all-male retreats fueled racism and sexism.
- Melia Russell and Dan DeFrancesco talked to insiders at Coinbase, who detailed the communication quirks of controversial CEO Brian Armstrong that contributed to an employee exodus.
Yacht crew members describe rampant harassment
From Hillary Hoffower:
At the core of the yachting industry, which portrays a glamorous lifestyle of working in paradise on multimillion-dollar vessels, may be a dark secret: a rampant sexual-harassment problem.
About 65% of yacht crew members who responded to a 2018 survey by the Professional Yachting Association said they had witnessed or been aware of an incident of physical or verbal sexual harassment on board. Nearly 40% of the 870 respondents in the survey — whose findings were presented at the Monaco Yacht Show — said they had experienced unwanted physical contact, and half said they had received unwanted sexual or sexist comments.
Only 22% of respondents who said they experienced sexual harassment also said they reported it.
Business Insider spoke with 15 current or former yacht crew members. Of those, 11 came forward with firsthand allegations of sexual harassment while on board. Many asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions within the industry. Another four former and current crew members told Business Insider that they experienced verbal abuse, bullying, and discrimination on board.
Read the full story here:
From playboy to pragmatic media mogul
David M. Benett /Getty Images
From Julia Black:
He has movie-star good looks, a former Victoria’s Secret model wife, and a billionaire father.
Now Jay Penske can lay claim to the second-largest audience in digital publishing in the US.
On September 23, Penske Media Corporation, or PMC, which owns Rolling Stone, Variety, and Women’s Wear Daily, announced it would take control of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and Vibe as part of a joint venture with the entertainment company MRC. The new entity will be called PMRC. The move will create a near-monopoly on Hollywood industry news — and put PMC ahead of publishers like Meredith, Condé Nast, and BuzzFeed, with a Comscore ranking second only to Hearst’s.
Business Insider interviewed more than 30 of Penske’s current and former executives, editorial staffers, and media industry peers about the press-shy CEO. Many requested to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions from the company. These conversations revealed an eccentric and dynamic entrepreneur determined to defy the odds in publishing and to prove himself outside of his family name.
You can read the full story here:
Also read:
India Oxenberg speaks out
Courtesy of STARZ
From Melkorka Licea:
When India Oxenberg dropped out of college at 19, she had dreams of starting her own catering company in Los Angeles.
But despite her passion for the culinary arts, she felt she was lacking a kind of business acumen.
“I felt like I was missing a lot of skills,” Oxenberg, now 29, told Business Insider. “And I felt like I was missing the confidence that I needed to even just pursue something like that … Something entrepreneurial is hard regardless, let alone being 19.”
Oxenberg’s ears perked up at a business opportunity raised by her mother, the former “Dynasty” star Catherine Oxenberg. It was a new training program called the Executive Success Program, run by a group called Nxivm. The pair soon attended an in-person introduction put on by the group.
Little did she know, it would launch her on a seven-year journey into one of the most notorious cults in American history, where she said she was psychologically and physically tortured and abused, and even branded with another human being’s initials.
Hear from the CEOs of Netflix, Nasdaq, Mastercard, Lululemon, Vice, and more
The Business Insider Global Trends event took place last week, bringing together speakers from Asia, Europe, and North America for a five day digital event. Here are some of the highlights:
- Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings compares the company’s new dual leadership model to a family with 2 parents: ‘It can be incredibly powerful’
- Nasdaq’s CEO says the cloud is the ‘future of the industry’ and the tech could be used to conduct actual trading within the next decade
- Mastercard’s incoming CEO explains how the card giant is trying to level the playing field for SMBs competing with big-box retailers
- 4 ways Lululemon outsmarted a potential pandemic downfall and kept business booming while other retailers struggled to stay afloat, according to CEO Calvin McDonald
- Vice Media’s Nancy Dubuc explains why publishers should be wary of Google and Facebook’s news-funding efforts
Here are some headlines from the past week you might have missed.
— Matt
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