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Trade Wire - BUY/SELL

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Chipotle Chief Strategy Officer and former CFO Jack Hartung is joining the board of Tesla, where he will be greeted by his son-in-law–a non-executive, salaried employee of Tesla since  2016–and Elon’s brother Kimbal, who served on Chipotle board from 2013 to 2019. 

Here’s a good one at small cap company Luminar Technologies, following a Code of Business Conduct and Ethics inquiry by the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors, CEO and Chair Austin Russell and director Jun Hong Heng immediately resigned. However, the former CEO will remain on the Board and be available to the incoming CEO on transition and technology matters.

As a companion piece to the 2025 “down to two women on the board but nobody seems to care” theory, there are several companies now that are appointing male directors despite having only two women on the board, as an example:

Nutanix is comfortable with only two women as they replace retiring David Humphrey with Eric Brandt. With Eric, they now have two board members who were executives at Broadcom, a second director who also has experience being CFO, and a guy that already serves on four other publicly-traded companies so he understands how to schedule board meetings.

Likewise at Qorvo, Peter Feld joins a board with only two women. Peter represents the second director at Qorvo with experience at Marvell Technology

And at Live Nation Entertainment Trump administration toady Richard Grenell joins a 2-women Board; just this morning the new Live nation Entertainment director tweeted: “Left wing violence is out of control from Palm Springs, CA to Washington, DC. Leaders on the Left must speak up now. We all must focus on this growing Left wing violence problem.” Grenell is miraculously the acting president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts despite no background in anything resembling “the Arts.”

Two influential directors are stepping down from their respective boards:

O’Reilly Automotive is losing Larry O’Reilly, consistent with the Board’s mandatory retirement age policy. Luckily for shareholders they have a spare O’Reilly in the trunk: that’s Larry’s brother David O’Reilly.

And at Paychex, founder, former CEO/Chair, and board member since the Carter Administration Thomas Golisano and his 63% influence is stepping down. That’s a lot of power up for grabs.

Finally, in executive pay news:

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