Business
Paul Oreffice, a Combative Chief of Dow Chemical, Dies at 97
Paul F. Oreffice, who as the pugnacious head of Dow Chemical grew and diversified the company at the same time that he rebuffed Vietnam veterans over Agent Orange, argued that the chemical dioxin was harmless and oversaw the manufacturing of silicone breast implants that were known to leak, died on Dec. 26 at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz. He was 97.
His family confirmed his death.
Mr. Oreffice (pronounced like orifice) spoke in staccato, fast-paced sentences, and they were often deployed in pushing back against environmentalists, politicians and journalists during an era, the 1970s and ’80s, when the environmental movement was gaining force by focusing on toxic chemicals in the air and water.
Under his 17-year leadership, which included the titles of president, chief executive and chairman, Mr. Oreffice weathered intense controversies.
His public relations instinct was for confrontation, not conciliation. He had an intense dislike for what he perceived as government meddling in business, which he traced to his having grown up in Italy under Mussolini. “I’ve seen what overgoverning can do,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “I was born under a Fascist dictatorship, and my father was jailed by it.”
Mr. Oreffice took the reins of the Dow USA division in 1975, when its public image was tainted from campus protests of the 1960s that had vilified the company as a maker of the incendiary agent napalm, which was widely used in Vietnam.
When Dow pulled out of apartheid South Africa in 1987 under pressure from shareholders, Mr. Oreffice said: “I’m not proud of it. I think we should have stayed and fought.”
In 1977, when Jane Fonda lacerated Dow in a speech at Central Michigan University, not far from Dow headquarters, in Midland, Mich., Mr. Oreffice canceled the company’s donations to the school, writing its president that he could not support Ms. Fonda’s “venom against free enterprise.”
Instead, Mr. Oreffice financed the campaigns of anti-regulation politicians. And he sued the Environmental Protection Agency for surveilling Dow’s sprawling Midland plants from the air when the company refused an on-site inspection.
The case made its way to the United States Supreme Court, which in 1986 ruled against the company, at the time the No. 2 American chemical maker after DuPont. (The companies merged in 2017, then split into three companies.)
In 1983, Rep. James H. Scheuer, Democrat of New York, disclosed that Dow had been allowed to edit an E.P.A. report on the leakage of dioxin, one of the most toxic substances ever manufactured, from the Midland plants into the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay.
E.P.A. regional officials told Congress that their superiors in the Reagan administration ordered the changes to comply with demands made by Dow. Mr. Oreffice, appearing on NBC’s “Today” show, offered a sweeping dismissal.
“There is absolutely no evidence of dioxin doing any damage to humans except for causing something called chloracne,” he said. “It’s a rash.”
His statement brushed aside evidence that dioxin was extremely hazardous to laboratory animals and had been shown in some research to be linked with a rare soft-tissue cancer in humans.
One former Dow president, Herbert Dow Doan, a grandson of the company founder, told a public relations publication, Provoke Media, in 1990 that Mr. Oreffice’s style was not one fine-tuned to mollify critics. “The reason is part ego, part pride,” he said. “Paul is inclined to push his line to the point where some people say he is arrogant.”
There is no question that Mr. Oreffice’s strength of will also uplifted Dow’s businesses, which through the 1970s were overly dependent on basic chemicals like chlorine. When a glut of low-priced petrochemicals flooded the global market in the early 80s, he aggressively reshaped Dow by diversifying into consumer products, such as shampoos and the cleaning fluid Fantastik, and by moving into foreign markets. By 1987, Dow posted a record profit of $1.3 billion (about $3.5 billion in today’s currency).
At the same time, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 20,000 Vietnam veterans and their families against Dow and other makers of Agent Orange was further tarnishing the company’s image. The suit, filed in 1979, charged that dioxin in Agent Orange led to cancer in combat veterans and genetic defects in their children.
Dow argued that it had made Agent Orange at the request of the government and was not responsible for how it was used. But in 1984, the company and other makers of Agent Orange, without admitting liability, settled the lawsuit for $180 million, with the proceeds going to veterans and their families.
In another controversy, Dow Corning, a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Corning Inc., released documents in February 1992 showing that it had known since 1971 that silicone gel could leak from breast implants it made.
Tens of thousands of women had sued the company, claiming their implants had given them breast cancer and autoimmune diseases. Dow Corning agreed to a $3.2 billion settlement after the company had been driven to file for bankruptcy protection.
In 1999, an independent review by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that silicone implants do not cause major diseases.
Paul Fausto Orrefice was born Nov. 29, 1927, in Venice. His parents, Max and Elena (Friedenberg) Oreffice, moved the family to Ecuador in 1940 as Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. Paul came to the U.S. in 1945, entering Purdue University with fewer than 50 words of English at his command.
He graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1949, became a naturalized citizen, and after two years in the Army went to work for Dow in 1953.
“When I walked into Midland, Mich., this was ‘WASP’ country, and I was a ‘W’ but I wasn’t an ‘ASP,’” he told The Washington Post in 1986. “I spoke with an accent and combed my hair straight back, which just wasn’t done.”
Mr. Oreffice represented Dow in Switzerland, Italy, Brazil and Spain before being called back to the Midland headquarters in 1969 and appointed the company’s financial vice president. He became president of Dow Chemical U.S.A. in 1975 and was then promoted to president and chief executive of the parent Dow Chemical Company in 1978. In 1986, he added the title of chairman.
To the astonishment of many observers, Dow poured millions of dollars in the mid-1980s into a public-relations campaign to improve its image, including a new slogan, “Dow let’s you do great things.”
Under company rules, when he reached age 60, Mr. Oreffice stepped down as president and chief executive in 1987. He retired as chairman in 1992.
He is survived by his wife of 29 years, Jo Ann Pepper Oreffice, his children Laura Jennison and Andy Oreffice, six grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.
In retirement, Mr. Oreffice pursued a passion for thoroughbred racehorses, investing in Kentucky Derby starters and spending summers at a home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was a partner in a Preakness Stakes winner, Summer Squall, and a Belmont Stakes winner, Palace Malice.
In 2006, he published a memoir about rising from an immigrant with little English to a corporate titan, titling it “Only in America.”
The sale of Warner Bros. — whether in pieces to Netflix or in its entirety to Paramount — is stirring mounting worries among Hollywood union leaders about the possible fallout for their members.
Unions representing writers, directors, actors and crew workers have voiced growing concerns that further consolidation in the media industry will reduce competition, potentially causing studios to pay less for content, and make it more difficult for people to find work.
“We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends,” said Michele Mulroney, president of the Writers Guild of America West. “There are lots of promises made that one plus one is going to equal three. But it’s very hard to envision how two behemoths, for example, Warner Bros. and Netflix … can keep up the level of output they currently have.”
Last week, Netflix announced it agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and TV studio, Burbank lot, HBO and HBO Max for $27.75 a share, or $72 billion. It also agreed to take on more than $10 billion of Warner Bros.’ debt. But Paramount, whose previous offers were rebuffed by Warner Bros., has appealed directly to shareholders with an alternative bid to buy all of the company for about $78 billion.
Paramount said it will have more than $6 billion in cuts over three years, while also saying the combined companies will release at least 30 movies a year. Netflix said it expects its deal will have $2 billion to $3 billion in cost cuts.
Those cuts are expected to trigger thousands of layoffs across Hollywood, which has already been squeezed by the flight of production overseas and a contraction in the once booming TV business.
Mulroney said that employment for WGA writers in episodic television is down as much as 40% when comparing the 2023-2024 writing season to 2022-2023.
Executives from both companies have said their deals would benefit creative talent and consumers.
But Hollywood union leaders are skeptical.
“We can hear the generalizations all day long, but it doesn’t really mean anything unless it’s on paper, and we just don’t know if these companies are even prepared to make promises in writing,” said Lindsay Dougherty, Teamsters at-large vice president and principal officer for Local 399, which represents drivers, location managers and casting directors.
Dougherty said the Teamsters have been engaged with both Netflix and Paramount, seeking commitments to keep filming in Los Angeles.
“We have a lot of members that are struggling to find work, or haven’t really worked in the last year or so,” Dougherty said.
Mulroney said her union has concerns about both bids, either by Netflix or Paramount.
“We don’t think the merger is inevitable,” Mulroney said. “We think there’s an opportunity to push back here.”
If Netflix were to buy Warner Bros.’ TV and film businesses, Mulroney said that could further undermine the theatrical business.
“It’s hard to imagine them fully embracing theatrical exhibition,” Mulroney said. “The exhibition business has been struggling to get back on its feet ever since the pandemic, so a move like this could really be existential.”
But the Writers Guild also has issues with Paramount’s bid, Mulroney said, noting that it would put Paramount-owned CBS News and CNN under the same parent company.
“We have censorship concerns,” Mulroney said. “We saw issues around [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Kimmel. We’re concerned about what the news would look like under single ownership here.”
That question was made more salient this week after President Trump, who has for years harshly criticized CNN’s hosts and news coverage, said he believes CNN should be sold.
The worries come as some unions’ major studio contracts, including the DGA, WGA and performers guild SAG-AFTRA, are set to expire next year. Two years ago, writers and actors went on a prolonged strike to push for more AI protections and better wages and benefits.
The Directors Guild of America and performers union SAG-AFTRA have voiced similar objections to the pending media consolidation.
“A deal that is in the interest of SAG-AFTRA members and all other workers in the entertainment industry must result in more creation and more production, not less,” the union said.
SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the union has been in discussions with both Paramount and Netflix.
“It is as yet unclear what path forward is going to best protect the legacy that Warner Brothers presents, and that’s something that we’re very actively investigating right now,” he said.
It’s not clear, however, how much influence the unions will have in the outcome.
“They just don’t have a seat at the ultimate decision making table,” said David Smith, a professor of economics at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. “I expect their primary involvement could be through creating more awareness of potential challenges with a merger and potentially more regulatory scrutiny … I think that’s what they’re attempting to do.”
Businessman Brian Kahn has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud in a case that brought down a hedge fund, helped lead to the bankruptcy of a retailer and damaged West Los Angeles investment bank B. Riley Financial.
Kahn, 52, admitted in a Trenton, N.J., federal court Wednesday to hiding trading losses that brought down Prophecy Asset Management in 2020. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged the losses exceeded $400 million.
An investor lawsuit has accused Kahn of funneling some of the fund’s money to Franchise Group, a Delaware retail holding company assembled by the investor that owned Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and other chains.
B. Riley provided $600 million through debt it raised to finance a $2.8-billion management buyout led by Kahn in 2023. It also took a 31% stake in the company and lent Kahn’s investment fund $201 million, largely secured with shares of Franchise Group.
Kahn had done deals with B. Riley co-founder Bryant Riley before partnering with the L.A. businessman on Franchise Group.
However, the buyout didn’t work out amid fallout from the hedge fund scandal and slowing sales at the retailers. Franchise Group filed for bankruptcy in November 2024. A slimmed-down version of the company emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
B. Riley has disclosed in regulatory filings that the firm and Riley have received SEC subpoenas regarding its dealings with Kahn, Franchise group and other matters.
Riley, 58, the firm’s chairman and co-chief executive, has denied knowledge of wrongdoing, and an outside law firm reached the same conclusion.
The failed deal led to huge losses at the financial services firm that pummeled B. Riley’s stock, which had approached $90 in 2021. Shares were trading Friday at $3.98.
The company has marked down its Franchise Group investment, and has spent the last year or so paring debt through refinancing, selling off parts of its business and other steps, including closing offices.
The company announced last month it is changing its name to BRC Group Holdings in January. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At Wednesday’s plea hearing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kelly Lyons said that Kahn conspired to “defraud dozens of investors who had invested approximately $360 million” through “lies, deception, misleading statements and material omissions.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp released Kahn on a $100,000 bond and set an April 2 sentencing date. He faces up to five years in prison. Kahn, his lawyer and Lyons declined to comment after the hearing.
Kahn is the third Prophecy official charged over the hedge fund’s collapse. Two other executives, John Hughes and Jeffrey Spotts, have also been charged.
Hughes pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Spotts pleaded not guilty and faces trial next year. The two men and Kahn also have been sued by the SEC over the Prophecy collapse.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.
“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.
“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.
Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.
“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.
Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.
“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”
Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.
“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.
Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.
The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.
Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.
“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.
“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.
Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.
The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.
“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.
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