LinkedIn warning after spy arrest; Endeavour 'rudderless'; butter crisis
Published: August 04, 2025
LinkedIn warning after spy arrest; Endeavour 'rudderless'; butter crisis
News in brief
The executive chairman of the owner of Dan Murphy’s liquor chain, Endeavour, has resigned effective immediately, meaning the company has no permanent chair, CEO or CFO.
An employee of Mexican fast food chain Mad Mex has received a record payout after a court found her manager sexually harassed her by showing her pornographic videos, brushing sex toys against her thigh and making sexualised comments.
Australia’s largest steelmaker, BlueScope, has formed a consortium with companies from Japan, South Korea and India to bid for the ailing Whyalla manufacturing plant, which received a $2.4 billion government bailout package earlier this year.
The printed newspaper is not dead. The two major publishers, News Corp and Nine, along with Australian Community Media, have signed a five year deal to consolidate print sites, saving millions of dollars.
There is a growing crisis in the world of …. butter. New Zealand accounts for nearly half the world’s butter exports, and prices are up 47 per cent in the six months to the end of June in that country, while the global price trading at a 25-year high.
Fear-o-meter
ASX-listed Endeavour Group is, according to one high profile investor, rudderless. Until incoming CEO, former boss of Virgin Australia, Jayne Hrdlicka, arrives at her desk next year, it seems no-one is running the owner of Dan Murphy’s, BWS and a bunch of pubs.
The decision by executive chairman Ari Mervis to step down came out of the blue, and in a statement, he cited a disagreement with the board. Given he is running the show until the new CEO arrives, it must have been quite a disagreement.
Surprisingly, and concerningly, most big investors are at a loss as to why the chair stepped down.
Endeavour de-merged from Woolworths in mid-2021, and its share price rose for 12 months. Since then, it's pretty much all been bad news. Investors can’t get Hrdlicka in the door soon enough.
Fear & Greed Q+A today
On why he says the Victorian government's proposal to legislate work-from-home two days a week is "as dumb an idea as I've ever heard in my life," with younger workers most disadvantaged because they're not learning from others in the office environment:"We're now making them work from home when they might want to come into an office. It's just lunacy. And it doesn't certainly doesn't help the employee.If my competitors want to work from home five days a week, we absolutely love that. It means we're gonna have an advantage over them. We have a competitor... who is teetering towards bankruptcy, but they get all these awards for working from home. Well, that's totally fine with us. What we don't want is people being forced to work from home....When somebody comes to us for a job, we're really upfront. Say, we are a five day a week office culture. If that doesn't suit you, you live four hours away, if you need lots of flexibility that even we can't provide, we think you should get a job elsewhere. We're very honest and upfront, but there's lots and lots of people who want that. There's lots of people who want to work in the office. Let's just let people decide what they want to do. Let businesses decide what they want to do."
It's Tuesday the 5th of August 2025. A Chinese woman has been arrested in Canberra and charged with foreign interference, just the third time that charged has been laid, as foreign spies target Australians working on projects such as AUKUS. At the same time, ASIO is calling on public servants to not disclose too much on social media.
Greed-o-meter
| Name | Wealth | Source | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elon Musk | $401b | Tesla |
| 2 | Larry Ellison | $300b | Oracle |
| 3 | Mark Zuckerberg | $267b | Meta |
| 4 | Jeff Bezos | $246b | Amazon |
| 5 | Larry Page | $158b | |
| 6 | Jensen Huang | $155b | Nvidia |
| 7 | Sergey Brin | $151b | |
| 8 | Steve Ballmer | $149b | Microsoft |
| 9 | Warren Buffett | $143b | Berkshire Hathaway |
| 10 | Bernard Arnault | $143b | LVMH |
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The 10 richest people on the planet are now worth a combined $US2.1 trillion, according to Forbes - a hefty $100 billion more than last month.
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Source: Forbes