Foster Grant

Hey, Tate.

[laughs] You know, I grew up in California, so naturally I got to know a little something about sunglasses, and that's why I wear polarized Foster Grants, especially when I drive.

Because nothing cuts through glare better than these.

Mm.

I was still after that elusive, what makes someone successful? Why is someone successful? And with that, I did that.

I worked with Foster Grant, Vodafone.

major red carpet store that did the red carpets for the Met Gala.

So amazing clients.

60s and 70s it was the age of conglomerates you know i wrote a book about ge that was of course the ultimate yeah but of course there was you know there was westinghouse there was itt there were there a number of ltv there was a number of conglomerates well uh eli black uh became the ceo of of a conglomerate that was uh called first was called united fruit after he acquired United Fruit.

He acquired A&W Root Beer, Baskin Robbins Ice Cream, a big meatpacking company, Foster Grant Sunglasses.

And once he had gotten this conglomerate together, changed the name to United Brands.

It was a publicly traded company.

And given that the stock price was tied to profitability and given that they had a fair amount of debt at this point, trashing of the income statement was going to affect stock price, was going to affect cash flow, ability to pay down debt.

And so there was a lot of concern.

The banks had their hooks into the company, forced Eli to sell Foster Grant sunglasses, which he didn't want to sell and had recently bought, but got a good price for it and used that to pay down debt.

But there was still this concern about tariffs, especially some of the tariffs kind of went away and negotiated some away but some didn't and in particular honduras kept its tariffs on the bananas and long story short uh eli oversaw uh the payment of a bribe to the finance minister of honduras to try to ameliorate these tariffs and it later came out that other bribes were paid uh as well you know i don't think eli himself was paying the bribes but he his people were paying the bribes he knew about it and eventually this was investigated by the sec and the southern district of new york and became the accounting firm uh that the company employed uh became aware of it uh one of the board members informed the accounting firm uh and this was you know reported to the full board and Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.