Scott Galloway (professor)

Scott Galloway (born November 3, 1964) is an American public speaker, academic, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur.

He is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business.

Early life and education

Galloway grew up in Los Angeles, California. His father was a Scottish immigrant to the United States who worked as a sales executive. His mother, a Jewish immigrant from London, England, worked as a secretary.

Career

Following his graduation from UCLA in 1987, Galloway worked as a fixed income analyst at Morgan Stanley.

In 1992, he founded Prophet, a brand and marketing consultancy firm. In 1997, he founded RedEnvelope, an e-commerce site specializing in unique and personalized gifts. In 2010, Galloway founded the digital intelligence firm L2 Inc, which was acquired in March 2017 by Gartner for $155 million, and the now defunct Firebrand Partners, founded in 2005, an activist hedge fund that invested over $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies. In 2019, Galloway founded the online education startup Section4. He raised $30 million in the Series A round in 2021 for a total funding of $37 million.

He was elected to the 1999 class of the World Economic Forum's "Global Leaders of Tomorrow", which recognizes 100 individuals under the age of 40 whose accomplishments have had impact on a global level.

He has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company, Gateway Computer, Urban Outfitters, and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Galloway is also known for his public presentations and TED-style talks, called ''Winners & Losers'', in which he presented L2's Digital IQ Index results, ranking over 2,500 global brands across numerous dimensions including e-commerce, social media, and digital marketing.

Galloway teaches brand management and digital marketing to second-year MBA students. Much of his research focuses on the Big Four tech companies, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Apple, which he refers to as "The Four" or "the Four Horsemen". His first book, ''The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google,'' was published in 2017. It analyzes the Big Four's peculiar strengths and strategies, their novel economic models, their inherent rapacity, their ambition, and the drastic consequences of their rise that people face in both social and individual terms.

In May 2017, Galloway anticipated Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods Market, a transaction that became reality the following month. He denied any insider knowledge and said he was "just lucky" on that call. In early 2018, Galloway predicted the planned Amazon HQ2 would be located in either the New York metropolitan area or the Washington metropolitan area; with the decision to create two locations, Galloway ended up predicting both correctly.

In September 2018, Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network launched Pivot, a weekly news commentary podcast co-hosted by Kara Swisher and Galloway. In February 2020, Galloway launched ''The Prof G Show'', a weekly podcast answering listener questions on business, money, and tech.

In August 2019, Galloway published a highly critical analysis of WeWork's initial public offering filing, criticizing the company's unprofitability as well as its culture, corporate structure, nepotism, and the evidence of self-dealing on the part of founder Adam Neumann, while also castigating JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, the investment banks underwriting the launch, saying that they "stand to register $124.7 million in fees flinging feces at retail investors. Any equity analyst who endorses this stock above a $9.7 billion valuation is lying, stupid, or both".

On September 28, 2021, CNN announced that Galloway would be a host on its CNN+ streaming platform, though the platform went off the air shortly after launching.

In 2022, Galloway's weekly newsletter ''No Mercy/No Malice'' won the Webby Award and Webby's People's Voice Award for best Business, News & Technology Websites and Mobile Sites.

Positions

Since 2017, Galloway has repeatedly called for U.S. government antitrust intervention against the four consumer technology companies Apple, Meta Platforms, Amazon, and Alphabet, in order to break them up. He advocated against Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency plans in July 2019 due to the company's "gross negligence of user privacy".

In 2019, Galloway endorsed Michael Bloomberg's presidential 2020 candidacy as he "fulfills the Democrats' need for a strong centrist candidate".

In December 2019, he called for the removal of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey while declaring to own more than 330,000 shares of Twitter stock. Relating to the 2015–16 Apple–FBI dispute, he sided with the U.S. government and said that "security agencies should have access to ersonaldata wherever it is if a judge deems that data is key to people's safety or national security."

Israel

Galloway withdrew from being the keynote speaker at annual technology conference Web Summit in the aftermath of October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023. This was in response to tweets by its CEO Paddy Cosgrave that expressed Israel was guilty of “war crimes” in Gaza. Other high profile figures and organisations that also pulled out were Gillian Anderson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Amy Poehler, LL Cool J, Steven Bartlett and tech companies Google, Meta Platforms, Intel, Amazon, Siemens and Stripe. The backlash resulted in Cosgrave resigning his position.

Galloway discussed his decision on his Pivot Podcast with co-host Kara Swisher. Swisher said that "a lot of this is narcissism on Cosgrave's part, he has no place here", "this is not the moment or the right message" and that he should "sit down and shut up for a minute." Galloway said he initially "got very upset, and thought that's it I'm out", that the comments were "anti-Israel”, and “potentially antisemitic." He said he wanted to have a more thoughtful response, however, and consulted with figures such as Swisher, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. He continued: "I think Netanyahu is a criminal, but there is a different level of evil. A different threat, of defcon a million that is represented by terrorism, and there needs to be a swift and crisp response to the apologists out there, whether it’s Elon Musk, whether it’s the media immediately asking everyone to "slow down" when there’s reports of Israeli babies being beheaded, "let’s take a moment, this hasn’t been confirmed" and then a hospital is destroyed and immediately everyone is like "Israel destroyed a hospital". If Hamas put down their weapons, there’d largely be peace right now in Gaza and I’d like to think we could move to something resembling some sort of reparations or start thinking about the next chapter here. If Israel puts down their weapons, they’re all going to be exterminated, and the level of bothsidesism here, the thinly veiled antisemitism, which is infecting our culture, I think we have to have a swift and pretty severe response. I think it's important that people have empathy for both sides, this is a layered and nuanced problem, but there is a different level of inhumanity being demonstrated by one side here. Young people are conflating the struggle of the Palestinians with Civil Rights, and have a lot of empathy for them and quite frankly the far-right in Israel has created a real decline in empathy and support for Israel". He went on to say that Cosgrave was "being an apologist for terrorism”, “a terrible leader, and “putting a lot of people's economic livlihood in the crosshair of his grandstanding and political beliefs - that's not what a CEO does." He said he was ultimately persuaded to withdraw, thinking of how disappointed his late mother, who was Jewish, would be if he attended, as well as seeing "an image of my 80 year old aunt, hiding". He ended off the segment by expressing a wish to bring back CodeCon and hold it in Tel Aviv in 2024.

Personal life

Galloway is married to his second wife, Beata Galloway, a real estate developer born in Poland, whom he met at the Raleigh Hotel pool in Miami. They have two sons together.

Since 2022, Galloway and his family have resided in London.

Galloway identifies as an atheist.

Philanthropy

As of March 2019, Galloway donates 100% of his NYU compensation back to the university. He donated $4.4 million to Berkeley for immigrant student fellowships as well as smaller sums to UCLA and NYU. In July 2024, he donated $12 million to UCLA and UC Berkeley to establish the UC Excelerator program.

In popular culture

Galloway is played by Kelly AuCoin in the 2022 series '' WeCrashed''. When asked why Galloway was included in the show, co-creators Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello credited Galloway's critical blog post about WeWork was a "the Emperor has no clothes moment" for them, meaning that Galloway opened their eyes to the impending doom of WeWork, eventually inspiring the show. Galloway also has a voice-only cameo in season 3 of ''The White Lotus'', where he plays Timothy's lawyer, Chuck.

Bibliography

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See also

* List of atheists (miscellaneous): Business

References

External links

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"Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disrupted"
''Esquire'', March 2018

The Four Horsemen – An Interview with Scott Galloway"
''The Marketing Journal'', October 2017

"Masculinity needs that 'big dick' energy"
Scott Galloway, ''CBC Radio podcast, The Current'', 10 April 2024

"How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future"
Scott Galloway, TED, 2 May 2024

{{DEFAULTSORT:Galloway, Scott
1964 births
Advertising theorists
American atheists
American marketing people
American people of English-Jewish descent
American people of Scottish descent
Branding consultants
Business educators
Haas School of Business alumni
Living people
Marketing theorists
New York University faculty
UCLA College of Letters and Science alumni