"Q: What do Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone have in common? (Besides being rich white men, that is.) A: All of them joined Jamie Dimon in battle as the JPMorgan Chase CEO fought to keep his job as the bank's board chairman. Corporate governance isn't usually a sexy topic. But as JPMorgan held its annual meeting in Tampa today, all of Wall Street was watching one specific governance proposal on the ballot — a nonbinding resolution that would have split the bank's CEO and board chairman roles. If the proposal had been passed by shareholders and adopted by the board, Dimon would have been stripped of half of his powers, effectively dealing him a no-confidence vote after a year of regulatory problems and investigations stemming from the London Whale trading losses. The threat of having Dimon taken down a peg — and potentially having him quit altogether in protest — was enough to send JPMorgan into a furious behind-the-scenes lobbying effort to keep the popular CEO in power. The bank's countercampaign worked: Only 32 percent of the bank's shareholders voted to split the roles, fewer than had voted for a similar proposal last year. That will come as a relief to the bank, which has spent hundreds if not thousands of man-hours trying to keep Dimon in his seat. 'It was very much an effort across the bank,' one person familiar with JPMorgan Chase's lobbying efforts told Daily Intelligencer, adding that 'Jamie was not the one making calls on this.'" (NYMag)
"Harvey Weinstein hosted an intimate lunch in Cannes with Len Blavatnik on the billionaire’s 164-foot yacht Odessa. Guests at the Sunday event included CBS chief Les Moonves, Julie Chen, actors Naomie Harris, Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Keanu Reeves, Octavia Spencer andMichael B. Jordan and filmmaker Ryan Coogler. Blavatnik, who owns Warner Music and is an investor in The Weinstein Co., introduced Joss Stone, who gave a surprise live performance on deck. A witness told us, 'Crowds gathered on the dock as the celebs came out of their cars, and they got a free concert as they could hear Joss singing.'" (PageSix)
"Nancy Jo Sales published 'The Suspects Wore Louboutins' in Vanity Fair in March of 2010. Sofia Coppola announced optioning the article by December of 2011; Emma Watson was cast by February of 2012; the resulting movie, The Bling Ring, opens in a month. But first! Tomorrow comes The Bling Ring—the book. Nancy Jo Sales started afresh. She already had, after all, endless hours of interviews with the crowd of young people in Southern California who burgled celebrity homes. In case you missed the original story, or have buried its fuzzy outline under later tabloid scandals, the case concerns five kiddos (and two friends who did reselling) who best liked to steal outfits, shoes, photos, watches and anything else that felt personal. And they did it quite a bit: they hit Brian Austin Green's house just a week after Lindsay Lohan's house, back in August of 2009. Poor Brian Austin Green! And it turns out this book is basically The Journalist and the Murderer for the TMZ age. It's really pretty devastating. "Corporations are now people and people are now products, known as 'brands,' Sales writes, in a history of what is either the degradation or the democratization of celebrity. ('Either/or doesn't seem right, but you know.) Both the path to getting fame and the resulting benefits (money, mostly) became obvious to us all. This is true—and happened so quickly—to the point where, Sales notes, theft victim Paris Hilton began to look as if she had an 'Old Hollywood glamour to her.' (Before noting that Hilton's popularity's rise and fall mirrored George W. Bush's. This is a book, after all, that mentions Bobby Kennedy, Donald Trump, Michael Milken, Richard Nixon, Salomon Brothers and Glenn Greenwald all on the same page.)" (TheAwl)
"last Tuesday, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, Muffie Potter Aston and Somers Farkas hosted the cocktail party for jewelry designerJudith Murat, creator of House of Murat, to celebrate the release of her gold-leafed hardcover book, 'Judy’s Journey into the Land of Murat,' with a private book-signing event and trunk show to benefit Alzheimer’s Association at the home of Andrea and John Stark. The reception brought out friends and supporters of the Alzheimer’s Association including Jean Shafiroff, Nicole Noonan, Sharon Bush, Michele Gerber Klein, Geoffrey Bradfield, Cassandra Seidenfeld, Cole Rumbough, Elaine Sargent, Joanna Mastroianni and Maggie Norris, Stephania Conrad, Christine Schott and Liliana Cavendish, Susan Jacob Allison Lang, Alison Minton. Murat signed books with co-author Charles (Sunny) Castor for friends including with a first look of Judith Murat’s latest collections." (NYSocialDiary)
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