The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Sisters coffee, grab a seat by the window, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Amazon Primed Andy Jassy to Be CEO. Can He Keep What Jeff Bezos Built? Andy Jassy is about to take over an e-commerce colossus that employs 1.3 million people. His first challenge is an antitrust campaign that threatens the empire he will oversee. (Wall Street Journal)
• America’s Pot Labs Have A THC Problem America’s legal weed industry sold over $17 billion of pot last year and the industry’s obsession with THC, pot’s most famous intoxicant, has created financial rewards for every marginal increase in THC potency. “THC inflation is pernicious, it’s easy to accomplish and there are strong financial incentives to do it.” (FiveThirtyEight)
• How big business exploits small business Companies like Facebook and Uber say they’re supporting small businesses while squashing them. But what can be less obvious is that these same entities are constantly finding new ways to stunt small-business growth to keep new entrants and potential competitors at bay. They also create roadblocks and find ways to extract money and power from small businesses in order to maintain their positions and increase profits. (Vox)
• Here’s What the Future of the American House Looks Like From dazzling entries to year-round porches, how our priorities have awakened a new era of design. The ideal of the American home was already in flux, shifting, as it does, from one decade to the next. Welcome home, where the party’s just beginning. (Veranda)
• The social media influencers are just getting started Don’t believe rumours of their decline and imminent extinction. A revolutionary new digital marketplace is emerging, which will be dominated by content “creators” defined by their authenticity, transparency and values (Tortoise) see also TikTokers Filmed Inside a $5.299 Million California Listing. It Found a Buyer in Two Weeks. Real-estate agent Rochelle Atlas Maize hatched a plan to market a Santa Monica home with a two-story waterslide and a video production area using the short-video app (Wall Street Journal)
• Robbing the Xbox Vault: Inside a $10 Million Gift Card Fraud Microsoft lost millions of dollars’ worth of Xbox gift cards in an online scheme. Turns out it was an inside job (Businessweek)
• The Internet Is Rotting: Too much has been lost already. Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. But the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. (The Atlantic)
• The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth: A Michigan Republican spent eight months searching for evidence of election fraud, but all he found was lies. (The Atlantic)
• No, You Can’t Recycle a Bowling Ball (But People Sure Keep Trying) Why do 1,200 balls end up at New York City’s main recycling plant each year? Bowling balls don’t emit greenhouse gases; they don’t leach anything into the earth or water. Unfortunately, they’re still a neon sign warning of the harsh realities of recycling. (Curbed)
• Faster than the Fastest: Jesse Owens wasn’t afraid of Adolf Hitler or Jim Crow, but he feared Eulace Peacock (Sports Illustrated)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Steve Romick, Managing Partner at FPA, which manages $26 billion in equity, fixed income, and alternative strategies. Romick has run the $11 billion FPA Crescent Fund since its 1993 inception and was named Morningstar’s U.S. Allocation Fund Manager of the Year.
Trust in the media has increased the past year (Outside of America).
Source: The Economist
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