Chelsea Clinton, Board Member: So This Is Capitalism
Chelsea Clinton, 31, was just named to the board of Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). She will most certainly ask many tough questions about Diller's performance and compensation.
Let me be clear about a few things concerning Ms. Clinton:
- She's smarter than I am. She's got degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Columbia and is going for another at my alma mater NYU. (They took pity on me, is all I can figure.)
- She's worked at McKinsey Consulting and the global investment firm Avenue Capital Group.
- By the time she was 12 she knew more about politics than all but a handful of people on Earth.
- She knows how to pick out a wedding gown.
- Whatever else you may think of her parents, there is no doubt she hit the genetic jackpot when it came to intelligence.
I could be wrong, but for some reason I doubt she was named to the board after an extensive search by a highly qualified and disinterested third party. I don't know if Diller has known her all her life and thinks she's lightning in a bottle, or if he was hanging with Bill and thought this would be a nice thing to do. Maybe it was none of the above. Maybe they'd worked together on a charity, like her father's foundation.
I do know that her hiring was no different than it is for a lot of directors at any number of U.S. corporations. Many directors are friends of the CEO -- either socially or through business. Or they're someone the CEO knows he or she can work with. Unless they represent one of the largest stockholders in the company, they have no direct connection to the company's shareholders.
Many directors are certainly diligent people who do independent research into a company's performance. Many of them also just trust in the person who picked them for the board in the first place. The pay is good and the hours are short.
Independent oversight?
Image courtesy of Wiki Commons.
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