Investor Nelson Peltz believes he played matchmaker for Donald Trump and Elon Musk at a breakfast together in late spring with Peltz’ son Diesel. He says he’s friends with the Tesla billionaire, who was recently named the president elect’s cost-cutter-in-chief, and that he’s looking forward to Trump’s next term.“I’m very pleased, I’m very optimistic,” he said, and “the alternative was ridiculous.”“I was a matchmaker … I don’t know that Donald would have had this sweeping victory without Elon’s help. Elon was in Pennsylvania. I thought he was going to be Dutch or something,” he told CNBC’s Delivering Alpha Investor Conference in NYC.“Amish?” interjected the moderator?“Yeah right, I thought he was going to be Amish. He was there almost full time. He came to New York every now and then to say hello. But other than that, he was, he was there. And I take my hat off to him. I mean, he got the bit in his teeth and he wanted it to to work. And if Donald gives him the opportunity, he will cut costs. And that’s what we need to do. We need to cut costs.”“You’re a businessman, you’ve got to have your revenue be bigger than your expenses. It’s really simple. We don’t have that in America.”He had an example. One of Peltz target companies, Unilever, just unveiled major job cuts. “We’ve announced that there are 7,500 white collar jobs that we don’t need.“Think about that. Running a company with 7,500 extra people to pay every week. And they’re not happy either, because they want to be doing something. They’re not happy. They don’t just want to be hiding, which is what they were doing. They’re hiding. That’s all they do. They need to feel that they’re being constructive. So we’re going to help those 7,500 people feel constructive, and it’ll be good for both parties.”It wasn’t clear if just being laid off will make the employees feel constructive or there are programs in place to find new jobs, although that did not appear in any of the layoff news.Peltz also talked Disney after the activist and his Trian Partners lost a long, bitter and costly proxy battle against the entertainment conglomerate this year.Re-litigating the fight, he described Disney’s directors as inept and corrupt. He said the stock is higher because the board — under new chairman James Gorman — is set to name a successor to Bob Iger. He called Gorman “a good man” and thinks he’ll announce the new chief executive next year — well ahead of the late 2026 expiration of Iger’s contract.Peltz made his name amassing big holding in target companies and pushing for board seats and change. A common problem he noted is that companies created by founders thrived but “once these companies got successful — Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Disney — and that founder moved on, then you wound up with a company without founders and a board put there to watch the management.”His first director’s gig in the 1970s paid $5k to $10k a year. “That’s an honorarium, it’s not source of income. Today, directors can be making $300k to $400k a year.”“Now it’s getting serious. You’re on two, three boards. You’re retired. Nice retirement income for you. The first thing you don’t want to do is upset the chairman. You want to make sure he’s happy with you.“That’s what we had at Disney. That’s what we have at a lot of these places.”So, he was asked, why didn’t he win?“Wh? Because the index funds didn’t want me to win. The index funds get paid a lot of money from Disney, and they didn’t want me to win,” he said — a bit of an anti-climax.It wasn’t a total loss, he noted. He bought the shares in the mid-to-low $80s and sold them at $119 after the proxy fight. They have bounced around since. “If the stock goes back to the $80s, you guys, I’ll be back. I promise.”
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