The executive chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, is stepping down... and hinting about pursuing a new role in 'public service'.
What it means: We're spotting a pattern here. First Robert Iger, chief exec of Disney, said he'd consider running for office, then Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, now this guy – seems like Trump has made the businessman --> president life goal a thing.
When Trump was running for president, a lot of people came out and said they weren't sure his career was quite the right prep for presidency: scaling businesses for profit isn't necessarily the same skillset as overseeing how all the companies, banks, and resources in the economy work together.
But others said being a businessman teaches you to be efficient and goal-oriented, surely good things when it comes to managing economic policy. In Schultz's case, he's been hailed a 'social impact entrepreneur', investing part of Starbucks' profits into projects tackling poverty and inequality around the world in a way that wasn't common for businesses to do back when it all began in the 1980s.
At the same time, Starbucks has come under serious fire for not paying enough tax, particularly in the UK – they've not broken laws, but they've done their best to 'minimise contributions' through some clever legal maneouvres (that's the difference between 'tax avoidance', which is legal, and 'tax evasion', which isn't.)
