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How high can the world’s most valuable cannabis company go? Canadian cannabis producer Tilray became the first marijuana company to go public on the Nasdaq in July. Its initial share price was $17; Tilray’s stock has recently skyrocketed well past $200, making the company worth more than $20 billion — more than American Airlines. Some 76 percent of the company’s shares are held by Privateer Holdings, a private equity firm backed by investor Peter Thiel. Sparking the boom: Canada is about to legalize marijuana; the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration just signed off on Tilray’s plan to import marijuana from Canada to the University of California San Diego’s cannabis research center for medical research. [Emily Stewart / Vox]
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A Silicon Valley VC is running for Congress in California farm country. Recode visited the campaign trail, where Republican incumbent Jeff Denham would like to make “venture capitalist” a dirty word — and where he and his wiry 32-year-old Democratic opponent are locked in one of America’s most competitive congressional races. At a broader level, this election is something of a referendum on how people feel about Silicon Valley at this moment of reckoning for Big Tech. [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Amazon is considering a plan to open as many as 3,000 of its cashierless Amazon Go convenience stores by 2021. It currently has three stores in Seattle and one in Chicago; that would represent aggressive expansion. [Spencer Soper / Bloomberg]
Take a look inside Facebook’s under-construction “War Room,” the social network’s HQ for safeguarding elections. More than 300 people across the company are working on the initiative, but the War Room will house a team of about 20 focused on rooting out disinformation, monitoring false news and deleting fake accounts that may be trying to influence voters before elections in the United States, Brazil and other countries. Foreign operatives have already evolved their online influence campaigns to skirt the measures Facebook has put in place ahead of the November midterms. [Sheera Frankel and Mike Isaac / The New York Times]
The Democratic National Committee is trying to stop Democratic campaigns and committees from using Android devices, particularly those made by Chinese telecom firm ZTE Corp. The DNC is instead promoting the use of Apple’s iPhones in order to help avoid future cyber threats following the Russian hack of its servers during the 2016 presidential campaign. [Thomas Brewster / Forbes]
The U.S. military is taking a more aggressive stance in its push to combat foreign government hackers and cyberattacks. The Department of Defense’s new Cyber Strategy will allow the U.S. military to “build a more lethal force” of hackers “to disrupt or halt malicious cyber activity at its source, including activity that falls below the level of armed conflict.” [Jose Pagliery and Ryan Browne / CNN]
In a “hallway conversation” podcast, Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans and board partner Steven Sinofsky talk all about Tesla — and about the nature of disruption overall. How disruptive is Tesla really, and what exactly are they disrupting — from the dashboard to carmakers to vendors to energy source to autonomy overall? And what is the long view of how software is eating transportation? [Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky / a16z]
Netflix was a big winner at the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards, tying with long-reigning prestige-TV champ HBO for 23 Emmys in total, and easily dominating traditional broadcast TV. (Amazon did okay, too.) Here’s a look inside the streaming service’s high-stakes quest to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Now, as it prepares to steer the Alfonso Cuarón-directed “Roma” through the Oscar gauntlet, the company’s moves may not only determine the next best-picture winner — they’ll reveal whether Netflix can finally move from disruptive outsider to mainstream player. “If ‘Roma’ can’t win, Netflix can never win,” says one Hollywood agent. [Steven Zeitchik / The Washington Post]
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
