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Source document· November 13, 2025

Activist investors make Wall Street 'efficient': Starboard CEO

View original at finance.yahoo.com
Activist investors make Wall Street 'efficient': Starboard CEO Starboard Value managing member, CEO, and chief investment officer Jeffrey Smith is among the most influential activist investors on Wall Street…
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  • Darden had better brands and assets than peers but worse margins and multiples when Starboard invested

    80% confidence

  • Starboard Value oversees more than $9 billion today

    80% confidence

  • The Kenvue management team may not be best suited to create value after the J&J spinoff

    80% confidence

  • The complete board replacement at Darden was the only time it's ever been done for a Fortune 500 company and won't be done again

    80% confidence

  • Kenvue has the best brands in consumer health but had lower margins, growth rate, and multiples than peers

    80% confidence

  • Starboard Value was a $3 billion hedge fund when it moved on Darden in December 2013

    80% confidence

  • Corporate America has been more active than before Starboard started, making changes faster due to activism

    80% confidence

  • The biggest impact of activism is lighting a fire under management teams to do more faster than they would have otherwise

    80% confidence

  • There is no big change in brand trust affecting Tylenol sales despite autism concerns

    80% confidence

  • The fit between Kimberly Clark and Kenvue is probably better than people think

    80% confidence

  • The Kimberly-Clark and Kenvue organizational structures overlap beautifully with similar geographic P&L structures

    80% confidence

  • Salesforce is going to be an AI beneficiary and is still focused on profit margins

    80% confidence

  • Salesforce's rule of 40 score has improved materially since Starboard's engagement

    80% confidence

  • Dealing with COVID was massively stressful for portfolio management and overall operations

    80% confidence

  • Activism is going to make the overall market more efficient

    80% confidence

  • Kimberly-Clark is further along than Kenvue in digital and newer marketing transitions

    80% confidence
What we know · the intelligence behind this page
Live from the substrate
What we're seeing
AI Capital Surge: Late-August 2026 Funding Wave Spans Fintech, Enterprise Agents, and Robotics
A dense cluster of funding rounds landing on 2026-08-28 — from identity/fraud fintech player Socure ($156M plus its acquisition of Fravity) to enterprise AI agent startups (Instinct, Generalist AI, Owner), model infrastructure (Stability AI, Emerald AI), and autonomous logistics/aerospace (Gatik, Regent Craft) — signals investors are rotating aggressively into AI-native companies with demonstrable ROI, especially in financial risk/compliance and back-office automation. Parallel signals (Multiverse Computing's compression benchmarks cutting inference cost/latency, and Arkestro/CloneOps.ai publishing hard savings and labor-displacement figures) suggest the funding is chasing efficiency and measurable economic impact rather than pure model scale.
Our read on the data ›
Signals we're tracking
Satellite-Terrestrial Network Integration Acceleration
Increased investment and launches in hybrid satellite-cellular networks across telecom industry; competitive responses from other carriers; regulatory activity around satellite spectrum; expansion of emergency/rural connectivity use cases
Patterns we're watching ›
Where sources disagree
ING Group
Both facts record the same metric (shares_outstanding) for ING Group at the identical observation date (2025-12-31). FACT A states 2,902,437,688 shares; FACT B states 2,902 million shares (2,902,000,000). The difference is 437,688 shares (~0.015%). This is a genuine value conflict, though the discrepancy appears to result from FACT B rounding to the nearest million while FACT A provides the precise count.
We flag conflicts openly ›
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Activist investors make Wall Street 'efficient': Starboard CEO — Source | Via News | Via News