⛵ Orca discourse

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Tonight: How orcas became the class warriors of our collective dreams. Plus: Another installment of Bosses Behaving Badly. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

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Last updated June 20 at 7:44 PM ET

#TEAMORCA

The whales are not all right, and that is forcing society to have a conversation about how fundamentally uncool it is to be a billionaire.

That sentence might sound like nonsense if you haven't been following the Orca Discourse, but stick with me...

ICYMI: In recent weeks, people have been projecting visions of class warfare onto orcas that have taken to ramming boats off the Iberian Peninsula. The killer whales are taking revenge; the killer whales are restoring balance in their homeland; killer whales are anti-capitalist heroes; killer whales are us.

To be very clear, experts who study orcas, or "murder dolphins" as they're known in some social media circles, aren't exactly sure why the whales are ramming boats.

One theory, articulated in an article by LiveScience last month, offered up the explanation that one particular whale, known as White Gladis, suffered a traumatic event at the hands of humans, and is teaching her comrades to ram boats in retaliation.

"The orcas are doing this on purpose, of course," Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, told LiveScience. "We don't know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma...gains more strength for us every day," López Fernandez said.

That narrative landed like a bucket of chum in the murky waters of the internet.

And last week, when the story was picked up by The Atlantic under the headline "Killer Whales Are Not Our Friends," Twitter readily took the bait.

"Billionaires aren't my friends either, but an Orca never bought out the community center and tore it down for luxury condos," one person tweeted in response.
"Feels like a publication called The Atlantic should be team orcas," another wrote.
"Y'all raised an entire generation on free willy and expect us to take the yacht's side???" said another.

...OK cool, but I thought this was a business newsletter?...

Right you are!

So let's get down to business, or at least the people who dominate it, and how it all fits into the internet's current nautical obsession.

In this post-pandemic era of late capitalism, episodes like killer-whales-as-comrades shed some light on the popular distaste for the titans of industry that might have, in another century, been venerated. The cool kids no longer want to be Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk — they want an army of orcas to attack their yachts. They want to make T-shirts emblazoned with "Capsize the Rich" or "Orcas 2024."

The whales are, in the collective imagination, fighting against the greed and excess that we find so exasperating and impenetrable in our real lives. The typical CEO in America makes about 400 times what their typical employee makes. The US federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Those pay gaps have long felt insurmountable — a systemic inequality that we can only dream of dismantling.

"Kind of embarrassing that whales are better at revolution than we are," quipped one of the thousands of tweets about orcas in recent days.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I have got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea. It's one of my best stories … F**k them. The grifters."

Spotify executive and podcaster Bill Simmons called Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, "grifters," after their multi-year partnership with Spotify ended on Friday. The couple's $20 million deal with the platform was intended to include numerous programs but ultimately produced just one 12-episode series.

"I wish I had been involved in the 'Meghan and Harry leave Spotify' negotiation," Simmons said on his self-titled podcast Friday. "'The F**king Grifters.' That's the podcast we should have launched with them."

🍽 KITCHEN CONFESSIONAL

Here at Nightcap, we collect tales of bosses behaving badly the way some people comb beaches for seashells. Sure, there are plenty of stories out there in the sands of Corporate America, but only rarely does a gem catch our eye — a manager behaving so uniquely terribly that we're compelled to call them out.

Some recent highlights:

That time during the pandemic when hundreds of people got laid off over Zoom.
That time a CEO publicly reprimanded her employees for daring to ask whether or not they can expect a bonus before urging them to "leave pity city."
Or — never forget — the time the boss praised an employee for selling the family dog in order to comply with a return-to-office mandate.

Today, reader, this story, reported by my colleague Jordan Valinsky, may take the crown.

Here's the deal: A court has ordered a restaurant in California to pay $140,000 to several employees after its owners hired a fake priest (!!!) to extract workplace "sins."

Even the Department of Labor, whose investigators "have seen corrupt employers try all kinds of scams," seemed taken aback. This case, the department said, "may be among the most shameless."

According to testimony from a former employee of the Sacramento-area restaurant, Taqueria Garibaldi, the owner hired someone to hear workers' confessions about such grave offenses as arriving late, stealing money or harboring "bad intentions" toward their employer.

Taqueria Garibaldi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Investigators also found that the restaurant denied employees overtime pay, managers were paid bonuses from the employee tip pool and some employees faced "adverse immigration consequences" for cooperating with investigators, said Regional Solicitor of Labor Marc Pilotin.

"This employer's despicable attempts to retaliate against employees were intended to silence workers, obstruct an investigation and prevent the recovery of unpaid wages," Pilotin said.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🔌 Electric truck maker Rivian is following Ford and General Motors' lead in adopting Tesla-style charging ports — a move that helps advance Tesla's push to become the industry standard.

🗞 Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the United States, is suing Google, alleging the tech giant holds a monopoly over the digital ad market.

📦 Bernie Sanders launched a Senate investigation into working and safety conditions at Amazon warehouses, adding to federal scrutiny on the labor practices of one of the country's largest employers.

🏦 China's central bank cut its main benchmark lending rates for the first time in 10 months, in its latest effort to bolster growth as the world's second largest economy falters.