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Marijuana is totally legal in California these days, and there is a lot of medical research suggesting that it is less harmful than alcohol. So, does it matter if the CEO of a public company takes a single puff on a joint in public?
Apparently, that's the case if you call yourself Elon Musk. The boss of Tesla has unleashed another series of manic debates on social media about his personal behavior during the game of Thursday night, taken in a podcast.
But a more serious question – one that might be overlooked in the pot-induced haze – is whether his behavior makes Tesla a dysfunctional organization. Dave Morton joined Tesla as chief accountant on August 6th. The next day, Mr. Musk published his notorious tweet about a possible buyout, with a "secured financing". Now, Mr. Morton has resigned.
In a regulatory brief released Friday, he attributed the "level of public attention to society, as well as the pace within the company". Who would not have had second thoughts after Twitter's self-destructive explosion?
Report as important
Third force of online advertising under new management. The former director of advertising at Google, Tim Armstrong, has spent nearly a decade trying to create a big advertising giant to compete with the search giant (and, more recently, Facebook). On Friday, he appeared disappearing, a clear result of a divergence of views with Verizon's new boss, Hans Vestberg. Oath, the Verizon unit he created from AOL, Yahoo and other acquisitions, will now be more closely integrated with the other activities of the telephone company.
Who is next for the Four Comma Club? Microsoft looks set to become the third technology company to break the $ 1,000,000 mark, says FT's Tom Braithwaite. It may be "chronically uncontrollable" compared to Apple and Amazon (whose market value briefly exceeded the trillion dollars this week). But he has finally made real progress in the transition to the cloud and has a well-diversified business.
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Open source surveys are maturing. New Yorker Hosts with Eliot Higgins, the Briton who pioneered the scrutiny of videos and other publicly available information to discover important information. Higgins began by digging the weapons used in Syria: these days, he earns most of his money by teaching his investigative techniques to others.
Anti-social capital. Chamath Palihapitiya, who helped drive Facebook's massive global growth, made waves when he resigned to help create a venture capital firm, Social Capital, seven years ago. Things do not look so good these days. Dan Primack, of Axios, highlights the exodus of business talent, including co-founders Mamoon Hamid and Ted Maidenberg. Now, some of the firm's partners are preparing to meet Palihapitiya – and are eager to find out what's going on.
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