NEWSWORTHY
Keep a lid on it. Employee relations at Google aren't getting any better. The company fired four employees for what it described as violations of data security policies. Employees who have been organizing to pressure the company on other policy matters said the fired workers were hit for their activism.
I'm gonna bounce. Your profit margin is my opportunity, wool sneaker edition. Hip sneaker maker Allbirds is complaining after Amazon started selling similar footgear at one-third the price. Allbirds says its kicks are made with renewable materials. "Please steal our approach to sustainability," co-founder Joseph Zwillinger wrote in a post on Medium.
Driving me to distraction. All your personal information isn't just traded by tech giants. The California Department of Motor Vehicles makes more than $50 million a year selling drivers' data, Motherboard reports. In one of the less humorous yet still humorous responses, the agency said: "The DMV takes its obligation to protect personal information very seriously."
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The rise and fall of the company formerly known as WeWork is starting to raise broad questions about the big investor behind the scenes. SoftBank Group, led by its billionaire founder Masayoshi Son, raised a $100 billion fund and then poured money into startups around the globe with seemingly little rigor or analysis. Bloomberg reporters Peter Elstrom and Pavel Alpeyev followed the money in a feature on SoftBank, and what they found won't inspire much confidence in the rest of the $100 billion portfolio.
When SoftBank buys shares in a startup and then invests again at a higher valuation, Son says he has made a profit. That is legal under accounting standards, but SoftBank receives no money. The only change is that SoftBank has boosted the value of its original stake from, say, $1 billion to $2 billion by raising the value of the startup. In SoftBank's income statements and return calculations, at least some of the additional $1 billion can be counted as profit. "They pump up valuations to get higher returns to look good to investors," says Eric Schiffer, chief executive officer of Patriarch Organization, a Los Angeles-based private equity fund. "That kind of fundraising apparatus is essentially unicorn porn."
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ON THE MOVE
Ellen Kullman, former CEO of chemical company DuPont, is taking over at six-year-old 3D-printing startup Carbon, where she has served on the board of directors since 2016...The chief operating officer at Airbnb, Belinda Johnson, is stepping down and will not be replaced. Johnson will join the company's board of directors and Airbnb will hire for a new, lower-ranking position of vice president of operations...Tech equipment maker A10 Networks hired Dhrupad Trivedi as its new CEO to replace former boss and founder Lee Chen, who announced his retirement in July. Trivedi was EVP and CTO at Belden, where he oversaw the company's Tripwire security software unit.
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Epidemic of Fear: How the Trouble-Ridden Debut of a Breakthrough Vaccine Sparked a Panic By Erika Fry
This French Billionaire Is Closing in on Title of 'World's Richest Man' Following the Tiffany Takeover By Adrian Croft
BEFORE YOU GO
This year's Information is Beautiful Awards came out last week. And the winners are all amazing. Send your imagination soaring with the online version of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus, but try not to get too depressed when you view the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Marine Research's interactive maps of plastic polluting our oceans. Writer and "datavisualizer" David McCandless, author of the brilliant design tome Information is Beautiful , has organized the awards series to highlight great dataviz for the past few years.
Aaron Pressman
On Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com
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