Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves doubled down on his attack of Wall Street analysts, saying during an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell” on Friday he would “absolutely” talk that way to them again.
“Oh yeah, absolutely…when you’re not the CEO of Facebook, Google or Tesla, being on CNBC at 3 p.m. is a big accomplishment,” Goncalves said.
Earlier on Friday, Goncalves ripped Wall Street analysts in a rant during his company’s third-quarter conference call, targeting Goldman Sachs’ Matthew Korn. The CEO questioned Korn for saying Cleveland-Cliffs had a “slight” miss on its operating results, even though the company reported an increase in profit and improving revenue. After seeing Korn’s report, Goncalves went after Korn, saying “you can run but you can’t hide.”
“It’s totally unacceptable that a Goldman Sachs analyst has a bad math and puts out a paper before the call – before the call – calling a miss when it’s not a miss,” Goncalves said on Closing Bell.
“It’s unbelievable that this big banks has still employ this type of people. You should resign for your lack of knowledge of things, it’s not like that you don’t understand, you are very one of the best, it’s not like you don’t understand our business, you don’t understand your own business. You are a disaster. You are an embarrassment to your parents,” Goncalves said during the earnings call.
Cleveland-Cliffs bills itself as the largest and oldest iron ore miner in the U.S.
During the conference call, Goncalves referred to an unspecified individual and said the company’s stock buybacks “are going to screw this guy so badly that … they will have to commit suicide.”
When asked by CNBC’s Sara Eisen how this kind of behavior serves Cleveland-Cliffs’ shareholders, Goncalves defended himself by saying he “was not bashing any analyst, I was just mentioning a fact.”
“That’s my company. I’m a big shareholder of this company. I’m the chairman-CEO of the company. I will be in all the calls. And I will act on behalf of my shareholders and I will defend my shareholders like I did today,” Goncalves said.
Goncalves further defended his rant by saying that other CEOs “are cookie-cutter people.”
“I’m different. You like it great, you don’t like it, great,” Goncalves said.
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