http://www.eagletalonpartners.com/

Eagle Talon Partners Alternative Investments, 4851 Tamiami Trail North, Ste 200, Naples, FL (2026)

09/03/2026

Reorganizations are cheap. Restating two years of financials is not.

On Monday, S&P Global CEO Martina Cheung split Market Intelligence into two units. Kensho Data & Platforms goes to Sally Moore, whose Chief Client Officer role expands to co-head. Enterprise Solutions stays with Darren Thomas, now co-head and on the executive leadership team.

Co-heads carry a specific risk. When a decision falls between two profit-and-loss statements, someone has to own it. If neither does, the structure slows the company rather than sharpening it. Moore also keeps a company-wide client role while running one half, so the two seats are not symmetrical.

On the same morning, S&P Global recast its 2025 and first-quarter 2026 segment financials to match the new structure. That runs through the audit committee and the SEC filings. Companies rarely do it for cosmetic changes.

Cheung moved assets out too. Maritime & Trade goes to S&P Global Energy. Credit risk analytics go to S&P Global Ratings. And S&P Global is separating Mobility Global into its own public company.

Co-leadership structures are showing up more often at large, complex companies, and the trend seems to be gaining momentum. KKR moved to co-CEOs Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall in 2021. Netflix followed in 2023 with Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters. Oracle did the same in 2025, Clay Magouyrk on cloud infrastructure and Mike Sicilia on applications.

Restated segments, transferred assets, and a separated division are hard to walk back. A press release is not.

The second-quarter results are the first financial read under the new structure.

Cheung restated the books before she had to prove the structure works. Is that conviction, or a CEO removing her own ability to reverse?

09/02/2026

Apple's new CEO reports to a board chaired by his predecessor.

Yesterday was John Ternus’ first official day as CEO. He joined the product design team in 2001 on the Cinema Display and spent 25 years building hardware. Craig Federighi, who runs software engineering, was long considered the front-runner.

So the board answered a software challenge with a hardware engineer.

Apple pays Google roughly $1 billion a year to license a custom Gemini model that powers Siri. That dependency is the binding constraint on the next five years, and Apple does not own it.

On hardware ex*****on, he's proven. He led the engineering for the Mac's exit from Intel. Announced in June 2020 on a two-year target, first M1 five months later, full line closer to three.

On software and artificial intelligence, he's untested. On capital allocation, he's unproven. Apple returns roughly $100 billion a year to shareholders, and its largest acquisition ever is still Beats, at $3 billion in 2014.

Arthur Levinson chaired Apple's board for 15 years as an independent director. Today he becomes lead independent director, and Cook becomes Executive Chairman. Apple swapped an independent chair for its former CEO on the day the Ternus started.

At Eagle Talon, we read a succession against three things.

1. Fit of the leader to the pressing challenge.
2. What the board actually decided.
3. The authority the handoff transfers. Ternus is a partial fit on the first. The second and third both point to continuity, with Cook present on the board.

Two things would change my read, either one inside Ternus's first four quarters. A material step-up in capital spending for artificial intelligence. Or an acquisition bigger than Beats. Either one means the board wants a change of direction. Neither means it wants continuity.

Would you rather Ternus break with Cook’s strategy during year one, or prove he can run Cook's playbook better than Cook did?

09/01/2026

NVIDIA bought equity in the capacity it wants Corning to build.

The second quarter, reported July 28, was the first test. Core sales of $4.74 billion, up 17%, against $4.63 billion expected. Core earnings of $0.78 a share, up 30%. Optical Communications, the fiber and connectivity business, did $2.07 billion, up 32%. Enterprise networks within that segment grew 65%.

The stock fell 16% intraday.

The third-quarter guide is where the reaction turned. Revenue of $4.9 to $5.0 billion topped out at the $4.99 billion consensus rather than clearing it. A stock that had more than doubled year to date carried expectations no in-line revenue range could support.

Wendell Weeks has run Corning Incorporated since 2005. He read where the physical constraint in the AI buildout would land, and committed capacity before the market agreed.

The May 6 Nvidia agreement shows what that cost: three new US plants in North Carolina and Texas, and a tenfold increase in optical connectivity capacity. Nvidia paid $500 million up front for pre-funded warrants on 3 million shares, and holds warrants for 15 million more at a $180 strike. Total potential investment if all warrants are exercised: $3.2 billion.

Nvidia is funding capacity it will not own, taking equity risk on Corning's ex*****on. Customers rarely put capital behind a supplier's factories. The $180 strike prices what this one expects.

At Eagle Talon we test capital commitment against strategic claim — then who absorbs the loss if demand slips, and what a leader signed rather than announced. Weeks clears all three.

Corning answered with dated targets, not reassurance: $20 billion annualized by the end of 2026, $30 billion by end of 2028, $40 billion by 2030. Concentration risk cuts the other way. Optical Communications was roughly 44% of core sales, and those targets assume that share keeps compounding.

Which tells you more about Weeks over the next two years: the $180 strike Nvidia negotiated, or the $40 billion Corning published?

Note: This image contains AI-generated elements.

08/29/2026

Dual-class shares protect a founder's vision. They also protect the founder from the one thing that could save the company: being told no.

Alphabet Inc, Meta, Snap. Each runs a share structure that shields the founder from the shareholder opposition that would force accountability under one-share-one-vote.

The case for it is coherent. Founders with a long-term view shouldn't be hostage to the quarterly earnings cycle. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept control of Google through Class B shares carrying ten votes each and built for a decade the public market might not have funded on its own. Mark Zuckerberg held his voting control through the post-IPO crash and the Cambridge Analytica crisis.

The honest problem is that the same structure that protected two of the great value creators of the last twenty years also protects the founder whose thesis has quietly stopped working.

When Irenic Capital built a roughly 2.5% stake in Snap and pushed publicly for a spin-off of the Specs augmented-reality unit, deep cost cuts, and faster AI ad monetization, Evan Spiegel didn't have to listen. He and co-founder Bobby Murphy together hold roughly 99% of Snap's voting power through a three-class share structure. Class A shares traded publicly carry zero votes. The stock jumped roughly 14% on Irenic's announcement — a clear signal of investor appetite for change — but that signal carried no governance weight whatsoever.

Snap's stock is down roughly 35% year to date, even after a strong Q2 beat sent shares up 14% in August.

The edge is in telling the two apart: founder control worth paying a premium for, and entrenchment that should be priced as a discount. At Eagle Talon, we treat that call as its own governance risk factor, and the time to make it is before the decline.

In Snap's case, when does the dual-class structure stop protecting the vision and start protecting the mistake — and who should get to make that call?

Note: This image contains AI-generated elements.

08/27/2026

The Arctic tern flies 44,000 miles a year and never takes the direct route.

Pole to pole and back, navigating by sun, stars and the earth's magnetic field. The route meanders because the bird trades distance for wind it can use.

That trade is why the distance flown runs so far past the straight line between the poles. The destination stays fixed while the route keeps changing.

Most investors describe themselves as long-term. The first serious drawdown prices that claim.

Capital that was meant to be patient gets repositioned. Conviction that was meant to be durable turns out to have been contingent on results.

Patience is the easy half. Judgment is knowing which new information should move a thesis and which should not.

A leadership change at a core holding moves it. A weak quarter in a business whose economics are intact does not. The difference is usually visible in the order book, the retention rate, or the unit economics — not in the reported earnings line.

Long-term investors tend to give back their advantage by confusing a weak quarter with a broken thesis.

At Eagle Talon the work happens before we own anything. We map an incoming leader's operating record and their capital allocation history. Then we test both against the governance structure they will work inside and the challenge the business actually faces.

That work pays twice.

It tells us how much to buy and at what price, because the case was already underwritten before the market got interested.

And it tells us the specific things that would have to break for the thesis to break. When a position falls hard and nothing on that list has happened, we hold, and often add. When something on the list does happen, we sell without arguing with ourselves about it. That last part is harder than it sounds.

A tern lives about 30 years and covers roughly 1.5 million miles. None of it is a straight line.

For your largest holding, what would the CEO have to decide for you to sell?

Note: This image contains AI-generated elements.

08/26/2026

Mark Leonard stopped writing to shareholders in 2018.

Constellation Software Inc had compounded anyway. In March the company announced he would not stand for re-election, and his board term ended after the May annual meeting. Mark Miller runs Constellation as President. Leonard stays on as an advisor.

That distinction carries weight. An advisory role gives influence without a vote. A board seat gives both. Constellation kept the counsel and released the governance.

The letters were never what made Leonard unusual. His valuation discipline was formed in years when overpaying had immediate consequences.

That is a dimension most succession processes skip. Boards study a candidate's record through the expansion phase of a cycle. They rarely ask what that candidate did when the cycle turned.

Henry Singleton ran eight tender offers at Teledyne Technologies, Inc. between 1972 and 1984. He retired roughly 90% of shares outstanding, about $2.5 billion of stock. He bought because the price sat below his own estimate of value.

Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria ran Nomad from 2001 to 2014. They then returned outside capital, having judged that the supply of mispriced businesses had thinned.

Both men held a private valuation the market could not argue them out of. Sector expertise had nothing to do with it.

Much of today's AI capital spending is directed by executives whose formative allocation decisions were made when money was close to free. Rate normalization and margin pressure may test judgment that has never been tested.

At Eagle Talon we score incoming leaders on one question above the resume. What did this person do when they were wrong, and how quickly did they correct it?

The real test at Constellation is whether the process outlives the advisor.

Which part of Constellation's record do you credit to Leonard himself, and which to the capital allocation system he left behind?

Note: This image contains AI-generated elements.

08/22/2026

Kelly Ortberg's first act as Boeing CEO was declining to give investors a number.

That was August 2024. Boeing brought him in from outside, after 35 years in aerospace and the CEO job at Rockwell Collins. He inherited two fatal 737 MAX crashes, a door plug that blew out mid-flight, a machinists' strike, and an open criminal case. On his first earnings call he withheld guidance. He said he lacked enough visibility inside his own factories to forecast responsibly.

Two years later he is forecasting.

Boeing has guided to $1 billion to $3 billion of free cash flow in 2026, its first cash-positive year since the groundings. Free cash flow in 2025 was negative at roughly $1.9 billion. But operating cash flow swung to $1.1 billion positive from a $12.1 billion outflow.

The legal overhang has cleared. Boeing's May 2025 non-prosecution agreement with the Justice Department cost $244 million in fines plus $445 million for victims' families. The Fifth Circuit turned back the last challenge in March 2026.

What remains is production rate against quality.

In May 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration cleared Boeing to build 737 MAX jets at 47 a month, up from 42. Ortberg has said the line needs a few months of stabilization first. He wants 63 eventually.

In December 2025 he bought back Spirit AeroSystems, which it previously owned and which was the supplier that built the door plug fuselage. He chose to own the quality risk rather than manage it through a contract.

At Eagle Talon we map a chief executive's operating record and capital allocation against the company's most pressing constraint. Ortberg has bought control of that constraint. He has not yet had to choose between it and the cash number he has now committed to.

A specific failure mode: the step to 52 a month gets announced before two quarters of declining rework at 47.

He built credibility by refusing to give a number he could not defend. What would make you believe 47 a month is a number he can deliver?

08/20/2026

BlackRock's biggest deal since iShares did more than expand the firm. It may reshape the profile of whoever eventually replaces Larry Fink.

In July 2025, BlackRock closed its $12 billion, all-stock acquisition of HPS Investment Partners, its biggest capital allocation decision since buying iShares in 2009. The deal added roughly $165 billion in client assets and built an integrated private credit platform of about $220 billion.

It pushed BlackRock deeper into private credit just as endowments, foundations, and family offices shift into illiquid alternatives. Fink has signaled this for years, and the logic holds: as the 60/40 portfolio loses its edge, fees from private credit and infrastructure look more durable than falling index-product fees.

The strategy is sound. The ex*****on is the open question.

HPS brings its own culture, its own compensation structure, and a client model that has never run inside a firm of BlackRock's scale. Integration at that size in alternatives rarely follows the acquirer's timeline.

The governance point sits under the strategy. Index funds and iShares still generate the overwhelming majority of BlackRock's roughly $12 trillion in assets. HPS adds a second business the next CEO has to run as fluently as that index core, not a replacement for it.

Fink is 73 and has said he intends to stay. If he sees the integration through, his successor inherits a settled platform. If it drags, they inherit one still being assembled.

At Eagle Talon, we treat an acquisition that widens the next CEO's job as a governance signal in its own right, and we map the successor's background against it. The board made the right call. The harder one is whether Fink's successor should come from alternatives or from the index and exchange-traded fund (ETF) business that still defines BlackRock.

When one deal widens what the next CEO has to master, how should a board weigh private markets fluency against the business that still earns most of its revenue?

08/19/2026

Dow's new CEO takes over just as the tailwind lifting its results fades.

Karen Carter was promoted to CEO effective July 1, the insider Dow's board chose over an outside hire. She joined as an intern in 1994. She rose through sales, the plastics business, and human resources, then ran Packaging and Specialty Plastics, Dow's largest segment. She became chief operating officer in December 2024. She is also the first woman and first Black CEO in Dow's nearly 130-year history.

The board did not reach outside. It promoted the executive who helped design Transform to Outperform, the cost program she now has to finish. And Jim Fitterling is not gone. He becomes Executive Chair, still chairing the board she answers to and steering long-term strategy.

Finishing the cuts plays to what Carter has proven: operational discipline. What she has never done is allocate capital to reposition the portfolio for growth. That is the harder job once the cost program ends, and the one Fitterling's continued influence may shape most.

The backdrop is unforgiving. Dow lost $2.4 billion in 2025 and opened 2026 with a $445 million quarterly loss. It is 55% of the way through cutting roughly 4,500 roles.

The beat that made headlines was not Carter's quarter. Second-quarter results, reported July 23, swung to a profit and topped expectations, lifted by a roughly 40% rise in polyethylene prices under Fitterling. Carter's first quarter as CEO is the third, already guided down to about $1.7 billion in operating earnings from $2.3 billion. Her first report as CEO, due in late October, is the quarter guided lower.

At Eagle Talon, we weigh a CEO against the job ahead, not the one just finished. Carter has run Dow's businesses. She has never had to decide where they grow next.

Once the cutting is done, can an operator who came up inside Dow become the capital allocator who decides where it grows next?

08/18/2026

Nelson Peltz lost his Disney proxy fight, and the changes he wanted still arrived.

Trian's 2024 campaign ended in a decisive defeat. Peltz drew 31% of the vote against Iger's 94%, the most expensive proxy contest ever. His 2023 push never reached a ballot. He dropped it after The Walt Disney Company laid out a restructuring plan.

Then look at what shifted. Disney refreshed its board with two independent directors. It moved faster on the ESPN review. And it resolved the succession that hung over Iger for years. Josh D'Amaro, who ran parks and experiences, became CEO on March 18. Iger stepped back to a board seat and senior advisor role through year-end.

None of it required Peltz to win a seat. How much of it he caused is the harder question.

Disney's turnaround was already in motion when the 2023 push collapsed. Streaming economics were forcing the ESPN review regardless. The board had its own reasons to settle succession. Peltz's campaign likely accelerated some of this and stiffened the board's resolve on the rest. It did not produce the outcome alone.

That distinction matters when investors size an activist position. A proxy vote is binary. The pressure behind it is not. A credible governance argument doesn't vanish when the vote is counted. Other large shareholders often absorb it quietly rather than pick a public fight.

The deeper test is whether any of it fixed the business. A cleaner board and a settled CEO answer the governance complaint. They don't, on their own, make ESPN's streaming transition profitable.

At Eagle Talon, we underwrite activist situations on what the pressure plausibly changed regardless of the vote. Then we test whether that changes the economics or stops at governance. One is a durable return driver. The other only looks like progress.

Peltz lost the vote. He may have won part of the outcome. When an activist loses decisively but the company still moves his way, how do you separate his pressure from what was coming regardless?

Eagle Talon Partners Alternative Investments

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