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

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

    80% confidence
  • Darden had better brands and assets than peers but worse margins and multiples when Starboard invested

    80% confidence
  • The Kenvue management team may not be best suited to create value after the J&J spinoff

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

    80% confidence
  • Starboard Value oversees more than $9 billion today

    80% confidence
  • The fit between Kimberly Clark and Kenvue is probably better than people think

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

    80% confidence
  • Salesforce's rule of 40 score has improved materially since Starboard's engagement

    80% confidence
What we know · the intelligence behind this page
Live from the substrate
What we're seeing
The Agentic Takeover of the CFO's Office
Enterprise finance software vendors—BlackLine, OneStream, Numero AI, and Oracle—are racing to embed autonomous AI agents into core financial operations (close, consolidation, reporting), backed by consolidation M&A (Numero-Royu, BlackLine-WiseLayer), fresh leadership hires, and survey data showing nearly a quarter of CFOs plan to boost AI spending over 50%. Adoption momentum is strong even as at least one bellwether (Oracle) sees its stock lag year-to-date, suggesting the market hasn't yet fully priced in the shift from AI-as-feature to AI-as-agent in finance.
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
Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC
Two significantly different EPS values (10.21 vs 2.68 USD_per_share) are reported for Morgan Stanley on the same observation date (2025-12-31). Fact A specifies FY 2025, while Fact B's 'N/A' fiscal period is ambiguous. If both represent FY 2025 annual EPS, these values directly conflict. The magnitude of the difference (3.8x) is too large to attribute to rounding or minor calculation variations. The missing fiscal period in Fact B raises data quality concerns, but same-date observation + same attribute should reference the same period.
We flag conflicts openly ›
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Activist investors make Wall Street 'efficient': Starboard CEO — Source | Via News | Finance Via News