Steven Lipin: Activism, M&A, and the Rising Stakes of Board Communication

(0:00) Intro (1:36) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel (2:23) Start of interview (3:11) Steve's origin story (5:05) His Journey into Journalism (6:02) The Rise of Governance Movement (7:00) Transformation of Board Accountability. Reference to the 1992 Board coup at GM and other historical changes. (10:24) Communication in Governance (12:25) Establishing Gladstone Place Partners (15:00) Crisis Management and Board Roles (17:34) The Importance of Investor Relations (20:40) Current Landscape of Shareholder Activism.  (25:14) The Snap activism case. The impact of activism on companies with dual-class share structures. (30:12) M&A Transactions, Delaware and DExit. The impact of Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk. Reference to E201 with Leo Strine. (34:47) The Ongoing Cybersecurity Challenge. Reference to Anthropic's new Claude Mythos.  (37:51) The Impact of AI on Governance. The case of Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon. *Reference to evanepstein.substack.com and E204 with Eric Ries. (42:50) AI's PR problem. The challenge of building data centers. The geopolitics of AI. (46:30) Impact of job firings, due to AI? (49:53) The state of ESG and DEI in 2026. (52:05) Books that have greatly influenced his life: The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto (2004) The Power Broker, by Robert Caro (1974) Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow (2004) (53:10) His mentors.  (54:00) Quotes that he thinks of often or lives her life by (Grateful Dead lyrics) (54:24) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that he loves (55:06) The living person he most admires Steven Lipin is founder and CEO of communications advisory firm Gladstone Place Partners and a trusted advisor in the field of strategic, financial and corporate governance communications. You can follow Evan on social media at:X: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License