Amazon employees speak up about climate change, but fail to win. Amazon stockholders voted down a proposal on Wednesday that asked CEO Jeff Bezos to consider ways to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. It’s the latest attempt by tech employees to hold their employers accountable, but this one didn’t work — despite having more than 7,500 Amazon workers’ signatures. “For a company the size of Amazon, there just can’t be a program here and there [on climate], it can’t be a patchwork of solutions that are happening in the different businesses that Amazon is involved in,” one Amazon employee told Recode. “It has to be a priority at the top.” That didn’t happen.
[Emily Stewart and Alexia Fernandez Campbell / Vox]
Recode Daily: Amazon employees ask their company to address climate change
Plus: The problem with capitalism, the problem with Big Tech, and the problem with Tesla.
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What if the problem with capitalism is the problem with the stock market? That’s the intriguing idea at the core of America’s new stock exchange, which will be called the Long-Term Stock Exchange. Who knows if it’ll actually take off, but the man behind the competitor to the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange has some interesting ideas that speak to any company preparing to go public. How can a company recruit long-term shareholders? How can long-term shareholders keep a founder on track? And is there a way for short-sellers and activist investors to be kept in check?
[Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Josh Hawley is one of the most interesting and aggressive Republican critics of Big Tech. The new Republican senator from Missouri was equally loud when he was the state’s Attorney General, but he’s positioned himself on Capitol Hill as one of the biggest antagonists of Facebook and Google. And in a new op-ed in USA Today, here’s what he has to say: “Maybe social media’s innovations do our country more harm than good. Maybe social media is best understood as a parasite on productive investment, on meaningful relationships, on a healthy society,” Hawley writes. “Maybe we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.”
[Josh Hawley / USA Today]
Tesla could sink as low as $10 a share. That’s the provocative assertion of a Morgan Stanley analyst who on a private — and leaked — phone call with investors on Wednesday predicted dire times for Elon Musk Inc. Adam Jonas of the investment bank giant once said Tesla could be worth as much as $379 a share, almost double its current price. But Tesla has been dropping like a stone over the last six months, and Jonas went as far as to call it a “restructuring story” as opposed to a “growth story,” as he once considered the carmaker. For what it’s worth, Musk has yet to tweet about the Wall Street dis.
[Dana Hull / Bloomberg]
Top Stories from Recode
How a Silicon Valley startup is trying to rebrand payday loans. Earnin promotes itself as a way to “get paid the minute you leave work.” [Gaby Del Valle]
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