Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is back on HBO after months of the writers' strike left the news infotainment program on hiatus. Last week it returned with a Wall Street mainstay in its sights: management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
Oliver took issue with many different aspects of McKinsey, from its corporate culture, to its hubris, to its big misses — like when it told AT&T in the 80's that the total addressable market for cell phones was 900,000 units, an estimate that Oliver points out was off by about 87,000%.
He even referred to McKinsey as the "Salt Bae" of consulting firms for offering simple solutions to problems that aren't that complex while charging a fortune for their services.
But the show's biggest issue with the firm is its client list.
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McKinsey, for example, started working with the tobacco industry in 1956, and only stopped working with them in 2021 "which is, and this is true, too late! That would be like finding out Subway dropped Jared's (Fogle) contract today," Oliver said on his show.
He also pointed out that McKinsey received $84 million dollars from Purdue Pharma — the OxyContin maker that settled with the U.S. government in 2020, receiving a criminal fine of $3.5 billion and a $2 billion criminal forfeiture — during the height of the opioid epidemic "for advice on how to 'turbo charge' sales of Oxycontin."
As if working for Purdue Pharma wasn't bad enough, Last Week Tonight also showed evidence that McKinsey was not only also working with the Food and Drug Administration (the federal agency tasked with regulating companies like Purdue Pharma) but that it was also using the same consultants to advise both entities at the same time — which should have raised questions about conflicts of interest, had anyone been paying attention.
One of the projects involved four McKinsey consultants who were tasked with writing "scripts" for Purdue to use in a meeting with the FDA on the safety of pediatric OxyContin at the same time they were consulting at the federal agency.
McKinsey ended up paying more than $550 million in settlement claims by U.S. states who said the firm helped Purdue fuel the opioid epidemic.
McKinsey responded to questions from the show about its involvement with the royal house of Saudi Arabia during the time journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by agents of the Saudi government, saying, "If a client or proposed project falls short of our standards, we will not do the work."
But Oliver then showed evidence that they actually did "do the work" for the Saudi government, including creating a dossier of political dissidents for the regime, and since the firm continues to work with the Saudi government, Oliver called McKinsey's 'standards' "fucking flexible."
Check out the segment below:
McKinsey: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) pic.twitter.com/DKQl4V4E9b
— G_ (@_G_the_first) October 23, 2023
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