fortune--2020-02-17--Business gets ready to trip: How psychedelic drugs may revolutionize mental health care

Tim Ferriss and I are hiking in Solitude. As in Solitude, Utah, 20 minutes or so outside Salt Lake City. It’s Tuesday afternoon in the mountains, and we’re crunching along on snowshoes over two-day-old packed powder. The path is single-file and despite a lack of humanity, we’re having a tough time hearing each other because of the noise underfoot. So Ferriss proposes a system, as he is wont to do. He’ll hold the recorder. I’ll ask a question. And he’ll answer directly into the microphone as we walk. Repeat as necessary. When we’re done, we’ll soak in the majesty of our surroundings and take a selfie. Okay, how about an introduction to break the ice?
“Let’s see. This is Tim Ferriss speaking from the wilderness of Utah, looking out at the snow-covered expanse here in the stillness with my good friend, Mr. O’Brien,” he says. We’re not actually tight. I mean, we’re getting along fine. But this is the first time we’ve met. “I’m a self-experimenter, I suppose entrepreneur, sometimes podcaster, and full-time professional dilettante, the author of books with questionable titles including The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, and I’m currently heavily focused on trying to help find cures or treatments for intractable psychiatric conditions—predominantly through the study of psychedelic compounds.”
Way to get to the point, Ferriss! But he’s being a bit modest. The 42-year-old guru is the author of five bestselling books, and his interview-style podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, is approaching half a billion downloads. He’s also been a highly successful angel investor, with well-timed rounds in Uber, Twitter, Alibaba, Shopify, Duolingo, and Facebook, among many others. In person, he appears precisely as his fans would expect him to: fit, rested, ready to banter, caffeinated, and thoughtful. In a word, optimized.
Now Ferriss is applying his considerable talents to this new quest: He has become a sort of pied piper in the movement to advance psychedelics as a potential elixir for a murderers’ row of psychiatric afflictions, including OCD and PTSD, opioid addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, cluster headaches, and suicidal ideation. In characteristic fashion, he’s identified what he believes is an epic efficiency hack for a global crisis. “I view the next five years as an absolutely golden window. There’s an opportunity to use relatively small amounts of money to have billions of dollars of impact and to affect millions of lives,” he says. “There just aren’t that many opportunities that are so dramatically obvious.”
The need for a change in approach is clear. “Mental illness” is an absurdly large grab bag of disorders, but taken as a whole, it exacts an astronomical toll on society. The National Institute of Mental Health says nearly one in five U.S. adults lives with some form of it. According to the World Health Organization, 300 million people worldwide have an anxiety disorder. And there’s a death by suicide every 40 seconds—that includes 20 veterans a day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Almost 21 million Americans have at least one addiction, per the U.S. Surgeon General, and things are only getting worse. The Lancet Commission—a group of experts in psychiatry, public health, neuroscience, etc.—projects that the cost of mental disorders, currently on the rise in every country, will reach $16 trillion by 2030, including lost productivity. The current standard of care clearly benefits some. Antidepressant medication sales in 2017 surpassed $14 billion. But SSRI drugs—antidepressants that boost the level of serotonin in the brain—can take months to take hold; the first prescription is effective only about 30% of the time. Up to 15% of benzodiazepine users become addicted, and adults on antidepressants are 2.5 times as likely to attempt suicide.
Meanwhile, in various clinical trials, psychedelics are demonstrating both safety and efficacy across the terrain. Scientific papers have been popping up like, well, mushrooms after a good soaking, producing data to blow away conventional methods. Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, has been shown to cause a rapid and sustained reduction in anxiety and depression in a group of patients with life-threatening cancer. When paired with counseling, it has improved the ability of some patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression to recognize and process emotion on people’s faces. That correlates to reducing anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure. The other psychedelic agent most commonly being studied, MDMA, commonly called ecstasy or molly, has in some scientific studies proved highly effective at treating patients with persistent PTSD. In one Phase II trial of 107 patients who’d had PTSD for an average of over 17 years, 56% no longer showed signs of the affliction after one session of MDMA-assisted therapy. Psychedelics are helping to break addictions, as well. A combination of psilocybin and cognitive therapy enabled 80% of one study’s participants to kick cigarettes for at least six months. Compare that with the 35% for the most effective available smoking-cessation drug, varenicline.
There’s plenty more data where all that comes from. So much so that the U.S. Federal Drug Administration has granted breakthrough therapy designation status to MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, and to psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Both compounds have been cleared for fast-track review by the FDA and could find their way into hospitals and treatment clinics within a few years, if not sooner.
Ferriss says he’s donated upwards of $3 million to support the underlying science and has corralled millions more from wealthy friends. They’ve kicked in half of the $17 million grant to create the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, the first U.S. research center of its kind. The rest came from billionaire hedge fund magnate Steven A. Cohen and his wife, Alexandra, via their foundation, which has donated millions to move the needle on Lyme disease research and intends to follow suit with psychedelics.
The money is meant to give researchers the security and freedom to explore how psychedelics work and to be ambitious in investigating the boundaries. Beyond money, Ferriss is using his platform to raise the profile of psychedelics-oriented researchers, doctors, entrepreneurs, and authors—on his podcast and at standing-room-only panels before audiences at the Milken Institute Global Conference and SXSW.
He may currently be in Solitude—on a two-month sojourn from his beloved Austin that he planned with the goal of becoming a better skier—but Ferriss has plenty of company on his latest mission. Across science, culture, politics, and business, a diverse community of supporters is forming to push psychedelics out of the shadows and into the mainstream. They’re acting toward similar ends but within the bounds of their own interests. You’ve got underground hippies and nurses pushing psychedelics across a whisper network, while offshore purveyors are offering cushy retreats for adventurers and bon vivants. There are mystical shamans, Silicon Valley legends, dueling patent attorneys, and financiers aiming for IPOs. VCs are starting psychedelics funds. Activists are eyeing universal access, while nonprofits and philanthropists are urging caution.
The increasing acceptance of marijuana—now legal for medical use in all but a handful of states, and for recreational purposes in 11 states—is an obvious source of optimism. But there’s also a fear among some that a misstep will cause a tragedy that derails the movement. Given that advocating, handling, concocting, ingesting, distributing, and administering psychedelic substances remain crimes that can carry first-offense trafficking penalties of up to 40 years in prison and a $5 million fine, there’s a lot of work ahead. What will it take to expand the consciousness of regulators, drugmakers, law enforcement officials, and voters about the benefits of psychedelics?
II.
Ferriss was drawn to psychedelics by a history of family depression, friends lost to suicide and drug overdoses, and a perpetual search for meaning. He narrowly escaped suicide himself—a dramatic tale he recounts in a TED Talk—and despite runaway success, says he has often felt hopeless and a general sense of being lost. Which hardly makes him unique. “I know spectacularly, absurdly wealthy people who are completely miserable. I know spectacularly absurdly fit athletes who are completely miserable,” he says. “Everyone is fighting a battle we know nothing about.”
In his teenage years, Ferriss says that every summer he and some buddies would grab a handful of mushrooms and go for a long walk. Their only intentions were to enjoy their own company and be amazed. He soon noticed that after each trip, he’d feel a certain glow—a sense of being renewed, refreshed, and hopeful for a month or two. Then one summer he nearly got hit by a car while walking off a heavy dose. He stopped the ritual cold turkey.
A decade or so later, he found himself in a persistent funk. “It was like there was always a pebble, or a handful of pebbles, in my shoes,” he says. “And they were causing worse and worse symptoms.” He decided to try to evoke that glow again in a safer setting. He found a guide to facilitate a journey in a yurt and took a huge, seven-gram dose, followed by a two-gram booster. He describes it as equivalent to a decade of highly effective talk therapy. “I came out with a deeply renewed interest in exploring this world,” he says. “I felt there was a possibility that you could walk into the experience and walk out a very different person.”
Ferriss’s career has been built on a series of curiosity-to-obsession cycles, and the interest in psychedelics fits the pattern. He found his way to Roland Griffiths, the director of the Johns Hopkins facility, who has been studying psychedelics for 20 years and has lately become a beneficiary of Ferriss’s largesse. Sitting together in the Baltimore center where almost 400 patients have taken more than 700 psychedelic journeys, the white-haired, bespectacled Griffiths and I discuss his own epiphany and fascination with consciousness. “I went into psychedelics as pretty much a skeptic. The level of unbridled enthusiasm among psychedelic proponents made me suspicious,” he says. “By no means did I think we would find what we have found.”
Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins, has been studying the effects of psychedelics on the mind for two decades. Photograph by Jared Soares for Fortune
For example: In the first research since the 1970s to administer psilocybin to psychedelic-naive participants, conducted at Griffiths’s lab, 67% rated it among the top five most meaningful experiences of their lifetime; 79% said it increased their well-being or life satisfaction. Years later, Griffiths and team demonstrated that a single session produces large and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer. They’ve shown psilocybin’s effectiveness in curbing cigarette-smoking addiction and its overwhelming tendency to increase spirituality, empathy, and a general sense of connectedness to nature and other humans.
How does psilocybin work its magic? “We know psilocybin produces marked alterations in brain network connectivity during the time of drug action and, to a lesser extent, after it has left the body,” Griffiths says. Psilocybin and other psychedelics also produce neuroplasticity, which increases psychological flexibility and openness. This often leads to psychological insights. A brain on psychedelics is also more interconnected. In a normal brain, visual regions talk primarily with each other, for example. When the brain is on psychedelics, communication happens more broadly. Psychedelics also decrease activity in the default mode network, a brain network implicated in a sense of self, or ego. A brain on psychedelics tends to be more childlike, playful, imaginative, and creative—and less judgmental. Think of taking psychedelics like rebooting a computer to clear out glitches, except when the computer restarts, it has a new outlook on life.
Griffiths has found that people who undergo a psychedelic session are often overcome with feelings of humility and love. “You see compassion, understanding, and a connectivity toward mutual caretaking. This sense that we’re all in this together,” he says. Psilocybin tends to increase spirituality or the belief in a higher power, but “it doesn’t have to be about religion. It’s really the golden rule.”
I went into psychedelics as pretty much a skeptic. The level of unbridled enthusiasm made me suspicious. By no means did I think we would find what we have found. Roland Griffiths, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research
Ferriss and Griffiths first met at a San Francisco event where Griffiths was speaking. Ferriss approached. “I had no idea who he was. He said, ‘Gee, this is really interesting. I’d like to help out,’ ” says Griffiths, who is generally wary when approached by enthusiasts. Ferriss had a unique follow-through. “I remember saying, ‘Well, these studies are really quite complicated, and it’s not easy to raise money.’ And he said, in a really modest, understated way, ‘I may have some leads that could be helpful.’ ”
Ferriss is focusing on the science behind psychedelics because he believes a stronger scientific foundation will make it more difficult to push the medicine back into the shadows. He considers the Hopkins center a model and is imploring his friends to put their money into many similar centers he hopes will be announced later this year.
I ask Ferriss for the pitch to a potential investor. It usually starts with a text: “I’ve spent the last handful of years looking for attractive targets in the psychedelics space that can knock over a lot of other dominoes,” Ferriss will write. “I’m pre-negotiating the documents so it’s as easy as possible to come in. Two conditions. One, a minimum of $2 million, $400,000 a year for five years, a tax-deductible donation. Two, it cannot be anonymous, because that would only reinforce the stigma we’re trying to remove. If you want to bend the arc of history, I think this is one of the best opportunities you will ever have.”
He says he often closes the donation without so much as a follow-up call.
III.
This seems like a good time for me to come clean as something other than a disinterested narrator of this story. In the fall of 2018, I read Michael Pollan’s bestselling book How to Change Your Mind. It struck a chord. Around that time, I had been experiencing an unshakable ennui. A birthday with a really big number was approaching. The weather in the Bay Area was awful—gray and wet for weeks on end. The Groundhog Day nature of my daily routine was weighing on me. I briefly considered a psychedelic journey but didn’t know how to start. Plus, it felt risky.
At my annual physical exam my doctor diagnosed mild depression; we discussed an SSRI prescription. I completed a survey about my symptoms and waited to hear back. Then one morning while walking the dog, I got a call from an old friend. He said he’d been taking underground psychedelic journeys to cope with the tragic deaths of his nephew and a childhood friend. I asked if his guide might recommend someone near me. That’s how I found Matthew, a Bay Area transplant with an old-school Marin County guise—beads, perpetually bare feet, painted toenails, a soothing voice, and gentle disposition. Matthew and I come from similar backgrounds and are of similar age and immediately connected. We sat on a bench in his garden and discussed my malaise as well as, in the parlance of the community, my intentions. We took hikes and discussed death and spirituality, nature, family, and what to expect. I was nervous. I asked about the medicine’s provenance, dosing, duration, and safety, his training and experience. He answered with patience, but we both knew that taking the journey would require a leap of faith.
Matthew recommended I start with MDMA, a drug that promotes empathy, to “open the heart.” When the day came, we sat cross-legged before a makeshift altar in a therapist’s space not far from my office. He made me agree to three terms: 1. For my own safety, I could not leave the room until he declared the journey complete. 2. He would not allow me to hurt myself or him. 3. He would not allow me to engage in any sexual activity with him. Those conditions seemed acceptable but somehow did little to calm my nerves. Just how open would my heart be?
He lit sage, said a short prayer, instructed me to consider the medicine carefully, and left the room. I swallowed the capsule hurriedly and waited for his return and for the journey to begin. My mushroom session proceeded similarly, except I chewed five grams of dried stems and caps. In each case, I began by lying flat on an air mattress, a blindfold over my eyes. Matthew played a soundtrack that eventually seemed to conduct the whole experience. I was largely unaware of his presence until he’d encourage me to drink water or ease me toward my intentions. But I leaned on him heavily during the integration sessions. All told, we spent about six hours together during each journey, plus about six to eight hours of counseling.
I came out with a deeply renewed interest in exploring this world. Tim Ferriss, who equates one mushroom trip to a decade of highly effective talk therapy.
I experienced moments of both serene spirituality and postapocalyptic bleakness. On MDMA, I vaulted into the tableau of a recurring childhood nightmare. But instead of my boyhood anxiety, I felt wonder and safety. I traveled back in time to visit my wife during our early days of dating and forward to peer into the adult eyes of my 10- and 13-year-old sons. I was waiting for an elevator; the doors opened, and there they were as twentysomethings. It took my breath away. All I could think of to say was, “What do you do?” When the elder opened his mouth, I raised my hand. “Don’t answer,” I said. “I can wait. You guys are going to be okay.” It’s all a father ever wants to know.
I emerged from the journey with two gifts, one short-lived and the other more enduring. When I fell under the influence, I began feeling music with my body rather than merely hearing it with my ears. My arms drifted upward and danced like charmed snakes. This persisted for a week. Whenever I listened to music, especially classical, my hands would float and dance. If I concentrated fully, my arms would elevate. On the first day I worried about brain damage. Then I embraced it. The effect eventually subsided. I miss it.
The other gift was a new voice. One of my intentions was to be more present, to soak in the now rather than constantly worrying over a future scenario. The medicine spoke with my voice, but in an octave and with a sense of compassion that I don’t typically employ. It repeated softly, “Be here.” Six months later, I still use it as a prompt. When I say those words aloud, I feel pins and needles in my shoulders.
The mushrooms were, as they say, next-level shit. My intentions here were more about coming to terms with mortality and finding avenues for growth. I died at least a dozen times. My body dissolved into water and seeped into soil. I became a seed, curled into the tightest ball, then a sunflower sprouting upright, reaching for energizing sunlight, until collapsing with the onset of winter. This scene repeated until I was spent. I finally screamed, “Not this time!” And with that I became a tree, drawing energy and strength from my powerful trunk. I felt rooted, and an overwhelming sensation of love. Then I was a human baby, with his entire life ahead of him. Eventually, I became a sea turtle, lazily navigating the ocean, and then a red-tailed hawk, soaring through the sky.
When I confronted my professional fears, the medicine told me, simply, to write. About what? It told me this story would be a good place to start. I have the chance to help people. I wept.
As the effects faded, I repeated a refrain that becomes increasingly lucid on my recording. Using my new voice, I’m offering myself instructions for navigating forward. Strong like a tree. Explore like a sea turtle. Soar like a hawk. Feel as a human.
IV.
If you feel like the psychedelics train might be headed for a cliff, you’re not alone. This is the obligatory part of any story on the topic that traces the trail of psychedelics through the ages. There’s evidence that magic mushrooms, for example, have been used for thousands of years, and many psychedelics are legal in Brazil, Jamaica, and the Netherlands, and on Native American reservations. But the relevant backstory comes from the psychedelics renaissance of the 1950s and ’60s, when the focus was primarily on LSD, and a thousand papers were published on psychedelics’ safety and efficacy.
This was a time of larger-than-life characters that included Albert Hofmann (the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD), Ram Dass (the healer and the author of Be Here Now), and the psychedelics poster child, Timothy Leary, he of the memorable mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Long version short: Psychedelics became a rallying point for the counterculture in the anti-war movement. Soon after, President Richard Nixon categorized them, alongside heroin, as Schedule 1 substances with no acceptable medical use and a high potential for abuse. MDMA received similar treatment in the mid-’80s after flooding the rave scene, despite having been administered by thousands of therapists over the years. And psychedelics entered into a long, dark winter.
So here we are anew, with scientists signaling the remarkable potential of psychedelics. But this time the conversation has shifted toward medicine as the costs of mental illness have skyrocketed. Far from advocating a counterculture, advocates are now aiming for the mainstream. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), founded by Rick Doblin in the ’80s, is currently running a Phase III clinical trial—at a range of locations including the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Sheba Medical Center in Israel—to test the efficacy of MDMA on PTSD. “The interim analysis should come back around the first week of April,” Doblin tells me. “That’s the moment of truth for us.” He’s hopeful that an MDMA product will be on the market in 2022.
In anticipation, MAPS is training hundreds of facilitators—because the medicine alone is not enough. “We don’t use the word ‘guide,’ because it implies someone knows where the journey should go,” he says. “Think of it more like a midwife.” In 2019, the Israeli Ministry of Health approved MDMA as a compassionate treatment for PTSD. And the FDA recently approved compassionate use for 50 PTSD patients. Doblin, 66, takes this as a good sign. He’s working with VA hospitals in hopes of administering MDMA to the more than 1 million veterans riddled with PTSD, which costs the VA on the order of $17 billion a year. Ultimately, he envisions tens of thousands of psychedelics clinics.
MAPS has played a key role in lowering cultural resistance to psychedelics over the past three decades, and it continues to bang the drum. Doblin, who holds a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard, just returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, where MAPS hosted peripheral events to educate global business leaders on the power and economic potential of psychedelics. “Next year we’re hoping we’ll be invited to the main event,” he says. MAPS created videos of soldiers and cancer patients who have benefited from psychedelics. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have shown sympathy toward the cause, including Andrew Yang on the left and Iowa Representative Jeff Shipley on the right.
Nevertheless, there’s palpable anxiety that the movement is one bad trip away from disaster—a headline-grabbing overdose perhaps. And there is no shortage of finger-pointing. I pay a visit to Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at UC–San Francisco. She’s worried about the underground. “I recognize how important the underground community has been at continuing to shepherd these compounds in the Bay Area,” she says, sitting in the room where her team is facilitating studies on MDMA and psilocybin for various afflictions. “But I don’t want the whole thing derailed because of some narcissist who’s pretty sure he’s been called upon by the powers of the universe and the spirits of the wind to administer these compounds in his living room on Saturday nights and something goes terribly wrong.”
Bestselling author and podcast host Tim Ferriss. Photograph by Drew Anthony Smith for Fortune
Others warn against the specter of recreational legalization. The philanthropist Alexandra Cohen, whose foundation is funding the Johns Hopkins research center alongside Ferriss, speaks for many when she says, “My biggest fear is that psychedelics are legalized, something terrible happens, and then we’re back to where we started. It’s so important for that not to happen.”
Then there are the activists railing against anyone perceived as trying to confine access to psychedelics to the wealthy, connected, lucky, and entitled. Larry Norris is cofounder of Decriminalize Nature, the organization that led the effort to decriminalize magic mushrooms, mescaline, ayahuasca, and iboga in Oakland last June, following Denver’s similar action a month prior. “Only a very small percentage of the population has access to clinical trials,” he says. The prospect of accidents doesn’t scare him. He’s worried about scientists improperly executing trials in the FDA spotlight. “Those trials aren’t inexpensive,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be great if the scientists could learn from what’s happening in the community?”
To spur universal access, Decriminalize Nature has created a legal template for other cities to follow. Norris says more than 100 have requested information packets, and he thinks 20 will decriminalize in 2020, including Santa Cruz, Calif., which passed the measure in late January. Berkeley and Chicago aren’t far behind. Statewide ballot initiatives in California and Oregon could soon follow.
V.
The state of Hawaii has established a medical working group to develop a plan ensuring that psilocybin services will become accessible and affordable therapeutic options for all residents 21 years of age and older. And David Nikzad couldn’t be more excited.
Nikzad, 43, is the high-energy, jovial founder of a Hawaiian biotech company called Orthogonal Thinker. He’s intent on unleashing a psychedelic extract he calls Psilly onto microdosers, consciousness explorers, and medical patients alike—for a dollar a dose! “I call it Project Crop Dust,” he says with a laugh while driving his Jeep along Oahu’s North Shore. Nikzad fled the investing world a decade ago for Maui. He’s squirrelly about his net worth or where his money comes from except to say that he invested early in the online investment platform Betterment and bought pre-IPO shares of Airbnb on the secondary market. Now he’s all-in on this effort. Orthogonal runs an “alkaloid accelerator” program for psychedelics startups while investing in cannabis, hemp, CBD, and unprocessed food businesses.
As a child, Nikzad was diagnosed with a variety of learning disorders. “I was given Ritalin, Adderall, Lexapro, everything,” he says. “By my teens, I had moved from 100 milligrams of Adderall a day to cocaine, and I had an overdose that should have killed me. From that point on I became a tinkerer trying to cure myself.”
He thinks his current regimen, which involves daily doses of Psilly and a diet free of processed foods, can help wean millions off never-ending prescriptions. (He has no medical or scientific training, calling himself a “kitchen chemist.”) Nikzad has been working with EI.ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary, and chemists including one who studied under Alexander Shulgin, the so-called godfather of psychedelics, on a highly precise method to extract pure psilocin, the psychoactive ingredient our bodies make when ingesting psilocybin. “We can be exact down to one-1,000th of a dose,” he says.
Nikzad says Orthogonal has raised $5.5 million from individual and institutional donors as well as crowdfunding campaigns, but he’s not out to make a lot of money. EI.ventures has a team of patent and IP lawyers filing paperwork to protect their product and process, but Nikzad would rather embrace an open-source model to enable a thousand fungi business models to bloom.
He picks me up in his jeep at 7 a.m., and we head for the vicinity of Mokuleia, to an area he asks me not to name. We’re going on a hike—a preview of the type of corporate retreat he’d like to offer one day to boost team bonding or facilitate conflict resolution. “I’ll give you the companies I’d love to host—Pepsi, Pfizer, Facebook,” he says with a guffaw. “Salesforce, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Don’t be surprised!”
Orthogonal’s legal team stresses that the company is not in the business of manufacturing, producing, or distributing any Schedule 1 substances. And yet I find myself holding a Yeti mug of water mixed with a three-milligram dose, the equivalent of three grams of magic mushrooms, plus echinacea and turmeric—not an Orthogonal product, the lawyers insist. It’s a formula that should leave me primed to soak in nature on a long hike.
We meander between mountains and the shoreline, making small talk as we go. The water in my mug tastes earthy. As I approach empty, maybe 30 minutes later, I begin to perceive patterns in the ground cover. Time slows. We pass through a cloud of gnats, and I recognize a mathematical matrix. I marvel at an albatross crossing the skyline and a family of humpbacks slapping tails and breaching near the horizon. A thousand shades of blue appear as the sea crashes on black lava. I grab a shady spot and swear to myself that I’ll never leave.
The trip slowly wears off, and we return to Nikzad’s home, where I shower and go for a walk to reflect. Along the way, I encounter a sea turtle, eyes blinking slowly as it bathes in the sun. I sit nearby and listen as the tide laps the sand.
VI.
There’s a parable making the rounds in the psychedelics community. It was published on the website for the Auryn Project, a nonprofit advocacy group. “We Will Call It Pala” is a poignant if maudlin story that’s worth reading in full, but here’s the gist: An entrepreneur starts a network of clinics treating patients with psychedelics. The business grows quickly and is eventually acquired by a pharma company. In the end, the founder is rich but despondent over what her company has become. The story is a pure reflection of the angst I encounter among the psychedelics community about the incursion of big business. And big business is definitely circling.
Look no further than Christian Angermayer, a German financier and the founder of ATAI Life Sciences, which has raised $150 million from the likes of wealthy VCs Peter Thiel and Steve Jurvetson. Angermayer acknowledges that he’s taken psychedelics—“Make sure you make it clear that it’s legal in the Caribbean,” he tells me—but not for any affliction. He tells me he is, and always has been, a happy person. Nevertheless, the experience was profound. “This was the single most meaningful, important thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” he says.
I contacted several pharma companies for this story to ask whether they have any interest or stake in psychedelics. Each told me, in so many words, no. But Angermayer rebuts that narrative. “We had amazing discussions with pharma CEOs and heads of business development at the JPMorgan conference,” he says, referring to the annual biotech investment convention in San Francisco in January. “They want to talk.” He says he expects ATAI to announce a partnership with a pharmaceutical company in the spring.
Many in the psychedelics community are wary of pharma’s typical prescription model, which they feel maximizes profits and dependency over healing. Psychedelics, by contrast, are the kind of thing you take maybe just once, or every few months. The same sources have mixed feelings about ATAI: Yes, the company is investing heavily and increasing the profile of psychedelics. But can ATAI’s investors be trusted?
Then there’s the issue of patents. ATAI and the ventures it’s backing have been aggressively trying to patent psychedelics-related intellectual property to establish exclusivity. For this reason one source characterizes them as the Darth Vader of the psychedelics galaxy. I relay the sentiment to Angermayer, who isn’t fazed. “We’re trying to bring psychedelics into the medical world so it will be affordable to people because it will be paid for by the health care system,” he says. “The only way to do that is with patents.”
One of ATAI’s primary investments, Compass Pathways, has raised $55 million. The company received a breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA in 2018 for the application of its synthesized psilocybin compound, Comp360, for treatment-resistant depression. In a video call, CEO George Goldsmith is measured, urging caution about hype and expressing the need to operate under full oversight of regulatory bodies. He hardly seems like a Sith Lord.
When I ask about the rationale for patenting something that grows freely out of wood chips, he has a ready answer. “Well, the synthesized psilocybin is the highest levels of purity, so it doesn’t grow out of wood chips. The wood chips and the mushrooms are free,” he says with a smile. “We have to incentivize investors to take huge amounts of risk. The phase of development that we’re in is known as the valley of death. It’s where most compounds fail. So that’s why we’ve patented all the work that we’ve done to create this specific, highly pure form of psilocybin that we’re using for our work in treatment-resistant depression.”
For another perspective, I contact Carey Turnbull, who sits on the boards for the Heffter Research Institute and the Usona Institute, both nonprofits founded to promote psychedelics research. In November, Usona received its own FDA breakthrough therapy designation for psilocybin for the treatment of a major depressive disorder. Usona gives its product to qualified researchers, much the way the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives away the polio vaccine. Turnbull agrees to talk on the condition that I make it clear that he’s speaking for himself, not on behalf of any institution.
A serial entrepreneur from the energy world, Turnbull has been highly involved in fostering psychedelics research, sponsoring studies at Johns Hopkins, Yale, and NYU. Lately he’s found himself embroiled in a battle over Compass’s patent filings. He personally retained a patent attorney to ensure that industry actors continue to have the freedom to operate. And he claims Compass has persistently tried to own intellectual property that it has no rights to.
The company’s first patent filing, in October 2018, had 27 claims of novelty. Turnbull’s attorney considered all of them specious and suggested that he hire chemists and psychiatrists to review them. Their consensus: “He seems to be attempting to patent Albert Hofmann’s means of making psilocybin,” Turnbull says. Hofmann famously discovered LSD, but he also was the first to identify psilocybin and to invent a way to make it synthetically in a laboratory. “So we go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and say, ‘Look, he’s attempting to patent prior art or inherent properties.’ Compass simply withdrew all 27 points.”
Compass resubmitted an application with 10 points of novelty. The chemists reiterated their case, and Turnbull objected to the USPTO. Compass again withdrew. Finally, Compass filed a single point, which was approved on Dec. 31, 2019. As Fortune went to press, Turnbull’s lawyer was preparing another objection.
I pored over the USPTO website and a host of documents provided to me by Turnbull. They all substantiate his characterization of events. I also read a document from the European Patent Office, which rejected all 27 claims of novelty, citing prior art by Hofmann, the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, and others.
Turnbull assures me he’s not anti-capitalist but insists Compass is trying to block competition. “You can see they’re hanging on by their fingernails,” he says. “I don’t object to Compass having patents or making profit. I object to their claiming ownership of IP that exists in the public commons rather than contributing to the public commons. Compass has shown almost no creativity. Their pitch sheet says, essentially, we’re going to establish exclusivity and make billions. But they’re entering a field that has been extensively researched by others.”
And that’s not all that’s bugging Turnbull. He explains that making psilocybin for prescription medicine, as both Compass and Usona must do for clinical trials, is highly complex. Only a few labs have the licenses and skill sets to do so. Usona approached one of the labs, Onyx, to make pharmaceutical grade psilocybin. “They said, ‘Oh, Compass made us guarantee we won’t do that for anyone else,’ ” Turnbull recalls. “At first I thought it might be a misunderstanding. But George [Goldsmith] confirmed it.” Turnbull shows me an email thread that confirms the situation with Onyx.
Goldsmith is dismissive of Turnbull’s narrative. “We don’t comment on the specifics of our patent prosecution, but there’s always back and forth. That’s the way the patent process works,” he says. “The idea is you build on what others have done.”
As for locking up access to Onyx, Goldsmith says: “Our manufacturing contracts are exclusive, in line with standard industry practice.”
VII.
Around the time I begin wondering if there’s a movie to be made about all the drama in the psychedelics movement, a potential star drops out of central casting onto the sidewalk beneath my office. Her name is Maria Florencia Bollini, but everyone just calls her Flor. An Argentinian trained as a high priestess in the African shamanic tradition, she’s clad in a full-length cashmere coat, Gucci sunglasses and heels, and a wide-brimmed fedora, and sipping yerba maté. If we were somewhere other than sleepy downtown Mill Valley, I’d look for flashbulbs.
Flor, who is 39, talks a thousand miles an hour, waving her hands and barreling through topics that range from the ways that females can achieve orgasm (four, she says) to the molecular makeup of 5-MeO-DMT, a.k.a. the “God Molecule.” But mainly she wants to discuss how her network of healers is going to save us all from ourselves.
She’s aiming to turn the world of psychedelics on its head with a company called Nana—from a word, used in parts of Africa, meaning wise healer or priestess—that intends to replace status quo methods of delivering mental health care with what she describes as a system of “transformative medicine.” Flor explains that Nana is primarily a technology play. She says that she and her team are creating a sort of “Nana in a box”—an online platform to enable the build-out of a loose network of healing centers around the globe.
The company is creating a prototype center as a proof of concept, she tells me, but the real IP comes in teaching healers how to administer psychedelics and integrate the experience through counseling. Flor is insistent that the healers will be exclusively women because, let’s face it, they’re the more nurturing, empathetic, and compassionate gender. The clinics will start with whatever’s legal, including cannabis and ketamine, and expand as more psychedelics become permissible.
Maria Florencia Bollini, a.k.a. Flor, is using her experience as an African shaman as the foundation for her new psychedelics startup, Nana. Photograph by Maggie Shannon for Fortune
The company will provide everything needed to get started or to transition existing clinics into Nana clinics. That includes training—“Imagine it like the Wonder Woman academy!”—as well as an online platform and app that offers 24/7 support, patient assessment, a template for psychospiritual integration, a user manual for the body (brain neurochemistry, mindfulness, etc.), and more. The revenue plan centers on monthly subscriptions. Pricing hasn’t been set but, she says, “We’re trying to make it as accessible as possible.”
Flor honed her methods, she says, by conducting thousands of journeys herself. She tells me that she was once among the world’s most expensive guides, working with movie stars and industry titans. Further, she claims to have helped clients beat sex, porn, gambling, and drug addictions, as well as eating disorders, depression, PTSD, and alcoholism. She tells me she’s been trained in the use of a range of psychedelics, but her professional focus has always been on the God Molecule. She calls it the most effective and efficient psychedelic, producing a highly intense journey that lasts only about 20 minutes, versus hours for psilocybin.
“The idea is we take what I’ve learned, weave it all together with some adaptive reasoning, and create an integrated experience to help people radically transform lives within six months,” she says.
The inspiration for Nana came from Flor’s own ayahuasca sessions. The medicine, she says, instructed her to start the company. Around then, her head of strategy and business development, Seth Teicher, was on a similar path. Teicher was on the founding team of the online travel company Atlas Obscura and a digital surgery company called Activ Surgical as well as a principal at GreatPoint Ventures, where he focused on health care and enterprise software. He found his way to Nana after navigating through his own personal hell.
In 2018 he contracted neurological Lyme disease and grew sick to the point of incapacitation. He descended into hopelessness and despair—until he did a massive dose of ketamine. It gave him the will to fight until, through a series of serendipitous events, he met a Stanford professor who was testing an off-label drug on Lyme victims. He got a prescription, and it worked. As he healed, he began reflecting on how the ketamine experience sent him on a path to health. He wondered if he could start a TripAdvisor for psychedelics. A mutual friend introduced him to Flor. “She laid out a vision for how to treat the whole person,” he says through tears. “I was like, ‘This woman is the truth.’ ”
The duo then recruited one of the inventors of ride-hailing, Jahan Khanna, to be Nana’s head of product. Khanna cofounded Sidecar before Uber and Lyft existed and later became Uber’s head of innovation. He draws a parallel between the friction involved in my underground psychedelic journey and his experience. “It reminds me so much of taking a gypsy cab before Uber. Before ride-sharing existed, you could always get random people to give you rides,” he says. “You should be able to have one of these experiences without the fear, or wondering, ‘Where does this substance come from?’ ”
Flor has recruited an advisory panel that includes MAPS founder Doblin and Bjarke Ingels, the celebrity architect behind Two World Trade Center and Google’s HQ, among many others. When I ask her about fundraising, she tells me she has commitments for upwards of $1 million on her admittedly aggressive terms. “We’re building an entire industry here,” she says, “and this is a chance to come in at the beginning.”
She says she’s turned down money for various reasons. For example, she shows me a $2 million offer she rejected because she didn’t like the terms. She says she excused herself from a call with Jason Camm, the chief medical officer at Thiel Capital, when he wouldn’t say whether he’d ever had a psychedelic experience. (Camm didn’t return requests for comment.) She met with Angermayer, whom she says she liked, but they couldn’t find common ground. “He wanted to take the whole round,” she says. “I said, ‘No, we’re doing this on our terms.’ ”
Angermayer acknowledges that he discussed the possibility of an investment in Nana, but spins the outcome a bit differently. “It’s not like I said, ‘Hey, we want the whole round!’ But I can’t do small tickets, because it doesn’t move the needle. I said, ‘If we were to do this at all, we would need to take the whole round.’ ”
I speak with two investors who have taken early stakes in Nana. One tells me he can’t believe the reception Flor is getting: “I was on one call with a super-high-net-worth individual who wouldn’t even let her get through the pitch. He was, like, ‘Send me the wiring instructions.’”
VIII.
Tim Ferriss is back home in Austin, albeit temporarily. He’s preparing to jet off to Costa Rica to hike the jungle and maybe do some surfing. Before he takes off, we have one more conversation. He calls the two-month Utah experiment a success. He picked up some new skills on the mountain while managing to avoid his inbox: 618,952 unread emails and counting. I tell him about the various people I’ve met—the cauldron of anecdotes, the intensity of emotions and ambition, and all the tension, real and perceived. He says it sounds like a telenovela. I have to agree.
We end up discussing Katharine McCormick, the American philanthropist who is almost single-handedly responsible for the birth control pill. In the 1950s, she donated the equivalent of $20 million to spur research behind the oral contraceptive, avoiding controversy by pushing it through the FDA as an aid for menstrual disorders. It strikes us as both inspiring and an apt analogy for the burgeoning world of psychedelics. Everyone is waiting for a latter-day Richard Nixon to impose institutional disapproval. We should really be looking for Katharine McCormick to hack the system for everyone’s benefit.
“Two parallels that are striking: The first is that for a relatively small sum of money, she was able to completely bend the arc of history in a positive direction,” Ferriss says. “And if you look at the ripple effects, the list is infinite, right? Birth control, better education for women, better jobs for women. It’s hard to wrap your head around all she accomplished with that amount of money. There are thousands of people in the U.S. who can easily do that now.”
Before we hang up, I tell him that many of my sources have expressed gratitude for my willingness to listen. Gratitude is, I’ve surmised, an enlightened habit that I should practice. So I thank Ferriss for welcoming me into his life for a short time, for sharing his passion, showing me around, and for our day together in Solitude. “Wow. That is so great to hear. You made my day,” he says. “I’ve had a really tough week.”
With a bit of prodding, he expounds. “A young friend unexpectedly died of cancer complications, and I was having trouble processing it. Until six years ago, I shut down nearly all of my emotions. My protective mechanism was always to feel nothing. I was numb,” he says. “I was surviving, but I wasn’t really living. Now I want to feel it all. We’re not here very long.”
No one escapes pain. Not even Tim Ferriss.
Three mind-blowing numbers behind the movement
80%
Portion of cancer patients who experienced reduced anxiety and fear of death a minimum of six months after a single psilocybin treatment, according to one study.
133
Number of clinics in the U.S. legally providing ketamine treatments for depression and other psychiatric conditions. The total is growing fast.
67%
Portion of “drug-naive” patients in a study at Johns Hopkins who rated their first time using psilocybin among the top five most meaningful experiences of their lifetime. And 79% said it increased their well-being or life satisfaction.
Four psychedelics with the potential to go mainstream
A growing body of evidence supports the use of psychedelic drugs to treat a range of conditions. Here are a handful edging closer to legalization:
Ketamine
A.k.a. Special K
What’s the trip like?
Out-of-body experiences and hallucinations are common. It can be addictive and/or cause “k-holes,” dissociative experiences that can be frightening or temporarily disabling.
How is it taken?
Ketamine has long been legal as an anesthetic—typically used by veterinarians. But it’s also used in ketamine-infusion therapy for treatment-resistant depression. In March 2019, the FDA approved a modified nasal spray (brand name: Spravato) that uses a closely related drug, esketamine. Both the spray and the IV can only be legally administered in clinical settings.
What’s it used for?
Ketamine has been shown to rapidly reduce life-threatening thoughts or actions, treat depression, and relieve anxiety.
Where is it being tested?
Ketamine clinics have been multiplying rapidly. The clinics range from doctors’ offices to lavish wellness centers. Therapy regimens often require a handful of sessions and can cost upwards of $1,000 each.
MDMA
A.k.a. Ecstasy, molly
What’s the trip like?
It’s a “heart opener,” creating feelings of love and taking you to places where you feel love.
How is it taken?
MDMA is usually taken in capsule form and swallowed but is sometimes snorted.
What’s it used for?
It’s used to ease trauma and is especially effective for couples therapy. It helps men express their love, showing what they feel, and encourages sharing and talking. Because it causes a drop in serotonin levels, it typically requires 5-HTP supplements to aid recovery.
Where is it being tested?
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is currently conducting Phase III clinical trials. Ten clinics have been granted expanded access by the FDA, meaning they can start providing treatment. MAPS hopes to introduce a series of MDMA clinics in 2022, pending final FDA approval.
Psilocybin
A.k.a. the psychoactive component of magic mushrooms
What’s the trip like?
Taking a full dose, approximately three grams, can elicit a six-hour experience that seems akin to being overtaken by a super-intelligence. It typically creates a profound connection with nature. Afterglow can last for up to three months.
How is it taken?
Typically by chewing dry mushroom stems and caps. But researchers are working on synthetic compounds.
What’s it used for?
It’s a long-lasting antidepressant. It has also been shown to kick addictions and increase empathy.
Where is it being tested?
Magic mushrooms are easily grown or even commonly found in wood chips or on cow patties, for example. Psilocybin is legal in many countries and is now decriminalized in Denver, Oakland, and Santa Cruz, Calif. Underground guides are relatively common. Compass Pathways and Usona are conducting Phase II clinical trials with synthesized versions.
5-MeO-DMT
A.k.a. The God Molecule; The Toad
What’s the trip like?
Depending on the dosage, it’s like a rocket ship into unconditional love. The peak experience lasts only about five minutes, and within 20 minutes you’re back to reality.
How is it taken?
It’s usually vaporized, but it can also be snorted.
What’s it used for?
It’s an anti-inflammatory and creates neurogenesis. It’s been credited with beating addictions, enabling infertile couples to conceive, creating greater self-awareness, and lessening anxiety and depression. It’s considered the most powerful and efficient psychedelic because of its short duration.
Where is it being tested?
The psychedelics nonprofit Usona Institute is engaged in early discovery work. It has launched a 5-MeO-DMT manufacturing program that will enable controlled first-in-human clinical trials “in the years to come.”
Jeffrey O’Brien (@jeffreyobrien) is cofounder of the Bay Area storytelling studio, StoryTK.
Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly identified Esketamine (brand name: Spravato) and ketamine as the same drug; in fact they are chemically related but different drugs.
A version of this article appears in the March 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Business Get Ready to Trip.”
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fortune--2020-02-17--Inside the most influential fashion show in menswear

Since 1972 the sartorial elite of men’s style have gathered in Florence for a meal at Trattoria Cammillo—with reservations made far in advance. They’re in town for Pitti Uomo, the most influential show in menswear that remains a very consciously niche event. Pitti takes over the city for four days every January and June and is a vital stop before a more youthful, showier Milan Fashion Week. It’s also far beyond the norm.
Like a decades-old Armagnac, Pitti is better experienced than described. With 21,400 buyers, 1,200 exhibitors, and countless editors, photographers, and tastemakers from around the world in attendance, there’s something for everyone. It’s a place where bespoke is expected, vanity is soaring, and the streets of Florence are overrun with ankle-exposing loafers in the perfect suede patina.
“This is the Super Bowl of men’s style,” says Scott Schuman, whose pioneering photography put Pitti on the map as the source for the real style of real men. “Milan and Paris Fashion Week are more of a young men’s game,” adds Schuman. “Here you see how to dress well as an older guy, a big guy, a skinny guy. Pitti is so diverse.”
The Brioni show at the first Pitti dedicated to menswear in 1952. Courtesy of Brioni
The show occupies a dozen buildings within the Fortezza da Basso. Regardless of how many times one attends, the concentration of brands can be dizzying—especially after a night of Negronis at Harry’s Bar. There you’ll find well-lapelled men concluding many Pitti nights.
The main pavilion is devoted to the evolution of tailoring and the brands redefining it—a thoughtful mix of collections that could easily live within one lucky man’s wardrobe. Savile Row’s friendliest new neighbor, Drake’s, is just a stone’s throw from the après-ski–inspired booth of cashmere king Brunello Cucinelli. Dozens more booths showcase a new wave of international clothing brands that have adopted a traditional way of doing things.
“Pitti plays a fundamental role in defining the taste of men’s collections all over the world,” says Cucinelli. “Our presence here has become increasingly important, and the space allows us to showcase our philosophy.”
According to Raffaello Napoleone, the show’s CEO, “Pitti is the only appointment worldwide where you can understand menswear in a few square meters.”
Buyers and tastemakers get up close and personal with the goods. Courtesy of AKAStudio Collective/Pitti Uomo
The reasons for attending are as diverse as the crowd, but it all leads back to the discovery of style and the innovation of artisanal leaders. “People want quality, an honest story—the real stuff,” says the young founder of Les Belles Heures, Sylvain Deleuze, who designs classic silk and cashmere scarves with a modern edge. “It’s spreading in the market and at Pitti. The most influential people are professionals.”
Michael Hill, the visionary behind Drake’s, holds court every season with one of the largest spaces at Pitti. The brand’s distinctive look reflects Hill’s personal warmth and his well-stamped passport. At ease in a corduroy suit and desert boots on Savile Row, Hill is inspired by the meticulous approach of Japanese artisans. “There’s an international perspective to balance with our own, and Pitti is one of the places we learn how to do that,” he says.
De Petrillo is one of the enlightened brands catering to this market with a Japanese-specific fit of the exceptional suits and jackets they make with Neapolitan ease.
Pitti’s open format allows anyone to eye what buyers and editors are gravitating toward, which this year included labels Private White V.C., Lardini, Errico Formicola, Orazio Luciano, and Sciamat, all of them embodying the shift toward informality with sartorial sophistication.
Fortune spies Paul Croughton, editor-in-chief of Robb Report, seeking out elegant clothes in gorgeous fabrics by Boglioli and Ring Jacket. GQ’s Sam Hine is a fan of Pitti’s guest designer program, which, he says, encourages a fresh, unisex perspective: “Even though the bulk of the fair is about traditional men’s tailoring, Pitti’s organizers know where things are headed.”
Indeed, in 2019 they partnered with Jeremy Kirkland of menswear podcast Blamo! to bring the show to enthusiasts beyond the Fortezza with short-form audio vignettes of the scene.
Florence-based Niccolo Ricci is confident that the old will continue to prevail in the new. His family’s company, Stefano Ricci, preserves centuries-old textile processes while designing for the international elite. “I understand streetwear and sportswear, but you have to remember how things started,” he says. “The hope is that we see younger guys dressed in made-to-measure suits or at least in some jackets.”
A version of this article appears in the March 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “The Stylish Merchants of Florence.”
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fortune--2020-02-17--Mapping a contagion: How the coronavirus may spread around the world

How far and fast a virus spreads in today’s world is less about physical distance and more about travel patterns of the humans carrying it. In that sense, New York City may be “closer” to London than it is to Rochester, N.Y., based on airline traffic. “The modern transportation network is how infectious diseases get to faraway places,” says Dirk Brockmann, a German physicist and professor at the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin, who specializes in complex systems. To help public health officials around the world better assess risk, Brockmann developed a system of mapping based on airport connections. His visualization above shows the effective distance of cities globally from the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China.


fortune--2020-02-17--Oracle and Google are about to face off in tech’s trial of the century

How Apple defied the odds to post the biggest quarterly profit ever

On March 24, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear one of the most momentous tech cases in decades. The outcome—depending on which participant you believe—will either safeguard future innovation or deal a deserved comeuppance to a lawless tech giant.
The case is Google v. Oracle, and it turns on who owns scraps of computer code known as APIs. Short for application programming interfaces, APIs allow one computer program to talk to another by letting, for instance, a weather app pull live temperatures from a third party and then display them on a map. APIs are an essential building block of the digital economy, and in the blockbuster case Oracle says Google committed copyright infringement by using its APIs without permission. Those APIs relate to the Java programming language, which Google used to build its mobile Android software—an act of piracy, in Oracle’s view, worth $9 billion in damages.
For its part, Google warns that an appeals court made a grievous mistake in ruling for Oracle and that, if the Supreme Court upholds the ruling, it would force companies to ask permission or pay every time they use the high-tech equivalent of a nut or a bolt. “Google’s view has been the industry’s view for decades, and that’s why the software industry has thrived,” says Google’s attorney, Tom Goldstein. “The industry is scared to death the lower court’s ruling will take hold.”
Oracle dismisses Google’s claims as overblown, noting the lower court’s ruling in its favor hasn’t inhibited recent tech innovations like superfast 5G mobile networks and artificial intelligence. “It’s such utter nonsense,” says Oracle’s general counsel, Dorian Daley. “Nothing is going to change. The only big change is Google didn’t want to take a license when everyone else did.”
The outcome of the case could turn on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of fair use, a legal doctrine that permits unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations, such as for excerpts and parody. Google won before a federal judge on the fair-use issue, but an appeals court overturned that finding.
Before the Supreme Court, Google and its allies, however, plan to make fair use a fallback position. Their main argument is instead that the kind of APIs used by Google are ineligible for copyright because they represent an idea or a method—similar to a recipe or a math formula, which can’t be copyrighted. In support of this position, they point to a case from 1880 in which the Supreme Court ruled that a bookkeeper’s wife could not copyright a system of ledger headings in account books.
“It’s an oldie but goodie,” says law professor Pam Samuelson, who adds the argument will likely resonate with the justices because the Supreme Court pays close attention to its own precedents.
Samuelson, an influential copyright scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, has authored a brief signed by 72 law professors in support of Google. Also on the company’s side are prominent computer scientists, IBM, and Google’s longtime antagonist, Microsoft, which has warned the Supreme Court of “disastrous consequences for innovation” if Oracle prevails.
Oracle has prominent allies of its own, not least of which is the U.S. government, which filed a brief supporting the corporate database giant. For some, the government’s decision to back Oracle may reflect the company’s close ties with President Trump’s White House. According to Samuelson, the appearance of President Trump’s solicitor general on the government’s brief—instead of a deputy or agency head—stands out.
What makes Google v. Oracle still more intriguing is that legal scholars are genuinely uncertain of the outcome. Unlike issues such as abortion and gun control, Supreme Court justices’ views on copyright are seldom scrutinized during the appointment process, making it harder to predict how they’ll rule.
A final wild card in the case is the fact that the aged members of the Supreme Court are unlikely to have deep knowledge of APIs. Harvard law professor Rebecca Tushnet, who filed a brief supporting Google and its fair-use argument, believes the justices will get up to speed when the case goes to trial. Nonetheless, she acknowledges there is a risk they may overlook the technical intricacies of the case—including that Google is claiming only a specific subset of APIs shouldn’t be copyrighted. If this happens, the justices may rely instead on the broader story lines that the companies are arguing.
“A compelling narrative always matters. It gives the court a reason to find in your favor,” says Tushnet. “One framing of the story is that Google went ahead and plundered. The other framing is Oracle took something that belongs to everyone else.”
Tech rulings
Three Supreme Court decisions that have had a major impact on intellectual property in tech.
MGM v. Grokster (2005)
The court handed record labels a major victory in their war against piracy by ruling that a popular peer-to-peer music service could be shut down.
Alice v. CLS Bank (2014)
This case involving digital escrow services ended up limiting the scope of software patents, reducing the legal threat that tech companies face.
ABC v. Aereo (2014)
The justices ruled that a startup offering antennas to view and record free over-the-air broadcasts is illegal, providing a big win for the TV industry.
A version of this article appears in the March 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Tech’s Trial of the Century.”
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fortune--2020-02-17--American soccer’s next goal? Turning a profit

Oracle and Google are about to face off in tech ’ s trial of the century

Fifteen years ago, Major League Soccer was a struggling 12-team enterprise clawing its way back from a serious bankruptcy scare. Most teams were renting cavernous football stadiums where they played in front of sparse crowds. The league was distinctly scrappy, and buy-in prices for new owners were comically low: Before that season, an ownership group in Utah paid the pocket-change sum of $7.5 million for the right to start an expansion team.
This spring, in its 25th season, the MLS will field 26 clubs, among them a new Miami team whose owners include former superstar midfielder David Beckham. Many will play in state-of-the-art, soccer-specific stadiums—though others now sell out those huge NFL arenas. And when hedge fund billionaire David Tepper finalized a deal in December to launch a franchise in Charlotte in 2021, he reportedly agreed to a $325 million entry fee.
These are heady times for the MLS, as the world’s game has finally embedded itself in the consciousness of American millennials. A recent Gallup poll ranked soccer as the second most popular sport to watch in the U.S. among those ages 18 to 34, behind only (American) football. While much of that interest revolves around globally popular clubs like those in England’s Premier League, the MLS is tapping it, too, as TV ratings and per-game attendance climb.
In response, a wave of investors from the worlds of business and finance are pouring unprecedented sums into the league, at skyscraping valuations. In September, Joe Mansueto, founder and chairman of investment research firm Morningstar, bought the 51% of the Chicago Fire that he didn’t already own, in a deal valuing the team at about $400 million. In November, Quibi CEO (and former Hewlett Packard Enterprise and eBay CEO) Meg Whitman acquired a minority stake in FC Cincinnati; that purchase reportedly valued the club at $500 million.
Seattle Sounders FC midfielder Cristian Roldan (7) holds off Toronto FC defender Justin Morrow (2) during the second half of the MLS Cup at CenturyLink Field in Seattle in front of 69,274 people. The game set the Seattle Sounders franchise record for attendance. Jennifer Buchanan—USA TODAY Sports/courtesy of MLS
Meanwhile, entry fees have climbed exponentially. Tepper’s Charlotte deal came not long after a group led by another private equity investor, Ron Burkle, agreed to pay a reported $200 million to start a club in Sacramento. Soaring prices are “as good a reflection as you can get of the sport of soccer at the top-tier professional level, and the desire to be a part of that,” says Bill McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group who has owned Minnesota United FC since 2012.
Still, the price tags have raised eyebrows, given the MLS’s relatively meager economics—especially compared with the Big Four U.S. leagues (the MLB, the NHL, the NBA, and the NFL). The 31-team NHL, the smallest of the Big Four in revenue, is expected to bring in about $5 billion this season. By contrast, the 23 teams that played in the 2018 MLS season generated about $800 million, according to a Forbes study. The MLS’s marketing arm—which also owns sponsorship and TV rights for the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams and the Mexican men’s national team in the U.S.—adds an estimated $350 million in annual revenue.
The MLS does not publicize its financials, but it acknowledges that the majority of its clubs do not turn a profit. What’s more, the league’s single-entity ownership structure, which requires revenue sharing among franchises, limits individual teams’ upside. Given those constraints, attaining profitability can be a long-shot bet for new teams. “It’s hard to pencil out some of these numbers” that investors are now paying, says Steven A. Bank, a professor of business law at UCLA School of Law.
The factor that could change the game is a more lucrative broadcast contract. Right now the MLS isn’t even the most-watched soccer league in the U.S.—that honor goes to Mexico’s Liga MX, with its avid Latinx fan base. And the current MLS broadcast deal, with ESPN, Fox Sports, and Univision, pays only $90 million annually. (The NHL’s is reportedly worth $200 million annually.) But that contract is due to expire after the 2022 season.
Patrick Rishe, director of the sports business program at Washington University’s Olin Business School, notes that the league is almost ensured a much larger contract by virtue of having added so many franchises in recent years. What’s more, a rapidly changing media landscape, where streaming has cut into traditional TV ratings, could play into the MLS’s hands, given that the league is most popular among a younger, cord-cutting demographic.
Cincinnati investor Whitman—whose current company specializes in streaming content—tells Fortune she sees streaming as “a tremendous opportunity,” adding, “Most of the league’s avid fans have grown up immersed in the mobile experience.” (Sports and streaming have already spawned some big deals: Amazon is reportedly paying the NFL $65 million annually to air just one game a week on its Prime Video service.)
It’s too early to tell whether a broadcast windfall will arrive. But one theme sounded by the new generation of owners is that a stake in the MLS’s potential is cheap when compared with other sports. Carolyn Kindle Betz—the Enterprise Rent-A-Car heir who leads an ownership group bringing a team to St. Louis in 2022—points to the $650 million that the NHL commanded for an expansion team in Seattle, twice what Tepper paid in Charlotte.
As for financial performance, Chicago owner Mansueto uses a telling metaphor. “An MLS team is not a value stock; it’s a growth stock,” he says. “The values are predicated on significant future growth rather than current profitability measures—or a lack thereof.” The question is whether that stock more closely resembles Amazon or Pets.com.
A version of this article appears in the March 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “American Soccer’s Next Goal: Profits.”
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fortune--2020-02-17--Does the co-CEO model actually work?

Does the co-CEO model actually work?

In the hierarchies of corporate America, there’s nothing ambiguous about the position of “chief executive officer.” Whoever holds the CEO title sits at the tip-top of the org chart; it’s right there in the capital C. But what happens when that designation—and the power it implies—is shared?
That’s the unusual experiment that several companies have undertaken in the past few months, splitting the role of CEO between two executives. In September, WeWork’s parent named two interim CEOs, Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson, to replace founder and spiritual guru Adam Neumann, who stepped down as the embattled shared-office giant postponed its IPO. (The pair will be replaced in February by a single new CEO, Sandeep Mathrani.) Software giant SAP in October named Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein co-CEOs—the third time the German company has opted for the dual-leader arrangement. And in January, luggage startup Away wound up with two CEOs after former chief Steph Korey returned to cohead the company just weeks after reports of toxic work behavior prompted her to step down. She’s now splitting the position with Stuart Haselden, the former Lululemon executive whom Away had initially tapped as Korey’s lone replacement.
Can such power-sharing arrangements succeed? Some management experts are skeptical, but the data—limited though it may be—suggests that, in the right circumstances, they can.
Fortune has kept track of co-CEOs in the Fortune 1,000 since 1997, when there were six pairs. Since then the count has fluctuated sporadically, surging to a high of 15, when our Fortune 500 issue was released in 2000, and dropping to as low as one in 2007 and 2008. When we did our count for 2019, the tally was 13, with companies like Salesforce (Marc Benioff and Keith Block), Nordstrom (Erik Nordstrom and Peter Nordstrom), and Markel (Thomas Gayner and Richard Whitt) employing the co-CEO model.
But regardless of its gyrations, the figure represents a tiny fraction of the Fortune 1,000 universe. University of Virginia management professor Emma Zhao says that’s for good reason. Her research concludes that the co–chief executive structure is “probably not a good thing,” she says. With coauthor Lindred Greer at the University of Michigan, Zhao conducted studies of how groups negotiate and found that “when higher-power individuals work with other higher-power individuals, destructive power dynamics may emerge, which harm group performance.” Paranoia creeps up as bigwigs fret that their personal clout is under threat from their peers. That can lead to “preemptive power moves against others in the group.” People in top jobs aren’t used to having to “check each decision” with someone else, she says. “It’s hard for them to be in that trusting relationship.”
Certainly there have been some dramatic co-CEO breakups in the past, like when Jon Corzine abruptly ceded control of Goldman Sachs to his co-CEO, Henry Paulson, ahead of the firm’s 1999 IPO, or the messy power struggle between Sanford Weill and John Reed at Citigroup that resulted in Reed’s departure in 2000. The chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said “tension” was behind the decoupling of its co-CEOs in 2008, less than a year after their appointments. And Publicis and Omnicom abandoned a 2014 merger that would have created the world’s largest advertising company in part because of a clash of CEO egos.
The statistics, too, point to the co-CEO structure as more volatile. The median duration of co-CEO partnerships in the Fortune 1,000 is 2.1 years. Compare that with the median tenure of Fortune 500 CEOs last year: 4.9 years.
But one common metric to assess CEO tenure is stock performance versus the wider market, and when Fortune examined that figure for co-CEOs it told a more nuanced tale. The median total return during the 57 co-CEO stints in the Fortune 1,000 since 1997 was 28%, while the median total return for the S&P 500 over the same time periods was 14%.
Of course, given the small sample size, there’s a limit to how much can be read into this data. But Matteo Arena, a finance professor at Marquette University, thinks it’s equally misleading to put too much emphasis on the one-off anecdotes about feuding co-CEOs. In fact, his research on cochiefs suggests that the arrangement “works quite well” for companies that opt for it.
Arena’s 2011 study with two coauthors found that the market reacts positively to the appointment of co-CEOs and that their presence “has a positive impact” on a company’s market value. It works best for family businesses, situations in which the co-CEOs are founders, after mergers (when a leader from each company becomes a cochief), and in cases when additional governance is needed, Arena says. Maybe an existing CEO is “great at ideas” but has other weaknesses, he says, citing the Away drama. In such a situation, the CEO could “use a peer to work with, rather than just a board that meets a few times a year.” Zhao adds that the co-CEO model is a way for a company to signal that it’s putting more checks and balances in place, which is why the arrangement may emerge from a corporate crisis.
Despite the upbeat results of his research, Arena acknowledges that the co-CEO model “shouldn’t work for all companies or even the majority of companies.” The joint structure still presents a huge challenge in that “you need to have CEOs able to buy in and accept the arrangement,” he says. And even with evidence in hand, it’s hard to persuade a seasoned leader to share.
High profile co-CEO hits…
KKR co-CEOs Henry Kravis and George Roberts
The cousins have run the company jointly for 44 years and overseen total returns of 388% since going public in 2010.
…and misses
Former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia co-CEOs Wenda Harris Millard and Robin Marino
Named cochiefs in June 2008, the pairing collapsed in less than a year; the company’s stock underperformed the S&P 500 during their brief tenure.
By the Numbers
13
Number of CEO pairs serving in the Fortune 1,000 in 2019.
28% vs. 14%
Median total return since 1997 for Fortune 1,000 companies led by co-CEOs, compared with the S&P 500.
2.1 vs. 4.9 years
Median tenure of Fortune 1,000 co-CEOs, compared with median Fortune 500 CEO tenure.
A version of this article appears in the March 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Are Two CEOs Better Than One?”
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fortune--2020-02-17--How Blackstone became the world’s biggest corporate landlord

The Cosmopolitan and Bellagio hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. Stuyvesant Town, the largest apartment complex in Manhattan. Embassy Office Parks in Bangalore, one of India’s biggest destinations for IT tenants. Except for their prominence and enormous size, these properties don’t much resemble one another. They have something crucial in common, however: They’re all owned by investment funds controlled by Blackstone Group, the private equity giant.
Over the past decade, Blackstone has relentlessly expanded its reach in real estate. Since going public in 2007, Blackstone has multiplied eightfold the equity capital it devotes to real estate, to $163 billion. Blackstone leverages that capital by taking out mortgages, so the total value of the property it owns “in the ground” is around $325 billion. By these measures it ranks, by Fortune’s estimates, as the world’s largest commercial real estate company.
Blackstone amassed this empire with relatively little fanfare, but recent megadeals have made its scale hard to miss. Last fall it finished raising the biggest real estate investment fund in history, at $20.5 billion. It also clinched the largest private property transaction ever, buying roughly 1,000 warehouses, including dozens leased to Amazon, from logistics firm GLP for $18.7 billion. In an industry in which most owners and investors are much smaller, Blackstone’s heft has made it the most-watched player. “We’ve never seen a firm that can do the size of deals they regularly do, or move that fast,” says Roy March, chief of real estate investment bank Eastdil Secured.
Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, Manhattan’s largest apartment complex, lower right, was purchased by Blackstone in 2015. Since going public in 2007, Blackstone has multiplied eightfold the equity capital it devotes to real estate, to $163 billion. Daniel Acker—Bloomberg via Getty Images
These massive deals have also reshaped Blackstone itself. For most of its 35-year existence, the firm’s big profit spinner was its traditional private equity franchise, which focused on buying and fixing laggard industrial companies. But six years ago, real estate jumped far ahead. That prominence is also now reflected in Blackstone’s top ranks. In 2018, Jonathan Gray, 50, the manager who built the real estate business, was named president and COO, and he’s slated to eventually succeed longtime CEO and cofounder Steve Schwarzman.
For a relatively young firm, Blackstone’s culture feels old–Wall Street formal. Full business attire is de rigueur, and even on Fridays jackets mainly stay on. Conference rooms display paintings by such artists as Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly, whose work wouldn’t have been out of place in a boardroom in 1970.
In conversation in his 44th floor office, Gray outlines an investment philosophy that’s as daring as the dress code is conservative. Property prices are elevated even as economic growth is slowing, he notes: “That makes it a lot more difficult to achieve big returns across the entire market.” Blackstone’s challenge is to pick the right spots in the market to keep delivering steady returns.
With his firmwide role growing, Gray has handed Blackstone’s property baton to global real estate coheads Ken Caplan and Kathleen McCarthy. And their latest strategic pivot, with its emphasis on unglamorous but lucrative properties in fast-growing cities, underscores how the broader economy is evolving.
Blackstone invests in real estate through two basic categories of funds. The first is its Blackstone Real Estate Partners (or BREP) vehicles, which the firm calls “opportunistic.” BREP funds often buy distressed or partly empty properties that they can fix up quickly to earn big short-term returns. Since the first BREP fund’s launch in 1994, the category has returned 15% a year on average, after fees. The second category, Core+, is more conservative, targeting properties that already generate stable rental income. Core+ vehicles, which include the Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust (BREIT), currently hold $46.2 billion in capital, and have been producing annual returns of roughly 10%, including dividends.
Examples from each category show how they differ: A BREP fund bought Las Vegas’s unfinished Cosmopolitan hotel in 2014 for $1.9 billion and spent an additional $488 million to turn it into a trophy destination now worth much more. By contrast, BREIT owns approximately 60,000 units in multifamily buildings, which it purchased for their steady rental income.
The firm’s ties to huge institutional investors give it an important edge. By raising gigantic funds, Blackstone is able to purchase large holdings in a single stroke. In effect, Blackstone can bid on properties that smaller players can’t, and often gets a discount as a result. “If a $20 million office building is for sale, you might have 20 bidders,” says Tyler Henritze, head of acquisitions for the Americas. “When it’s a $20 billion deal, the competition is a lot more limited.” That discount, notes Jakub Nowak of brokerage firm Marcus & Millichap, increases the likelihood that Blackstone can sell those properties at a premium.
If a $20 million building is for sale, you might have 20 bidders. When it’s a $20 billion deal, the competition is a lot more limited. Tyler Henritze, head of acquisitions for the Americas, Blackstone
Blackstone showed how effective its business model could be after it took two giant public companies, Hilton Hotels and Equity Office Properties, private in 2007. Unlike other investors at the time who saw their bets go sour in the Great Recession, Gray’s team secured long-term financing and built a large cash cushion. That enabled Blackstone to hold Hilton and EOP and invest in improving them despite the economic storms. The deals eventually earned the firm $21 billion in profit, and the cautious financial strategy is now a template for Blackstone’s big property deals.
Today Blackstone is narrowing its focus to what it calls “knowledge centers”—fast-growing cities that attract young professionals in droves. “We’re seeing a massive trend toward re-urbanization and gentrification,” says Caplan. High prices in many of these cities have cooled some investors’ enthusiasm—it’s harder to profit from rents when your purchase price is huge. But Caplan and McCarthy reckon that New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, London, Berlin, and Stockholm will continue to generate outsize growth.
In these marquee cities, the firm isn’t relying on marquee projects. Blackstone is shunning retail and is highly selective about new office deals. Instead, multifamily rental housing is one of its favorite plays in these metros, where demand is strong and new construction is minimal.
Blackstone is garnering its biggest gains in a traditionally dreary yawn of an asset: warehouses. As e-commerce surges, McCarthy explains, inventories are shifting from store shelves to gigantic warehouses, which in turn need to be in proximity to millions of homes to ensure that deliveries arrive swiftly. That trend has turned distribution hubs in “last-mile infill” areas, within 15 miles of city centers, into coveted spaces—and Blackstone is gobbling them up. In 2019 alone, it bought nearly $25 billion worth of logistics properties.
The firm anticipates that rents for warehouses, now expanding at 10% or more a year on top properties, will grow much faster than for apartments and offices. And to snag top tenants, the company is improving properties with such additions as rooftop solar panels and extra parking, says Nadeem Meghji, head of real estate for the Americas.
The contrast between a low-slung, drab delivery hub and a glitzy Manhattan office tower could hardly be starker. But in real estate, glitz is often a distraction. “People still view warehouses as unglamorous, as a commodity,” Gray says. “They tend to look backwards.” To Blackstone, the future looks like a football-field-size logistics center in New Jersey.
Real Money
92%
Total 12-month return (through Feb. 7) for Blackstone Group Stock.
$11.3 Billion
Blackstone’s adjusted earnings from real estate since 2009.
Source: Company filings.
$325 Billion
Estimated current value of Blackstone’s real estate portfolio.
(Includes invested capital and leverage.)
A version of this article appears in the March 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Big Buildings, Big Bucks at Blackstone.”
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fortune--2020-02-17--How Apple defied the odds to post the biggest quarterly profit ever

Well, the bears blew this call. Many on Wall Street worried Apple was stagnating at this time last year, pinned under the weight of slowing iPhone sales and a failure to produce new market-dominating products. The stock fell 38.8% from its 2018 high through January 2019. But what a difference a year makes. Not only are iPhone sales climbing, but both the Apple Watch and AirPods are also huge successes, driving 37% year-over-year growth in the wearables division and helping Apple notch the highest quarterly profit ever reported ($22.2 billion in the company’s first quarter). Then there’s Services, which if broken out separately as a company would be No. 66 on the Fortune 500 by revenue. Apple’s stock has come roaring back, giving the company more than 40 times the market capitalization of Ford Motor. “The bears were dead wrong—as wearables have proven. They underestimated the iPhone upgrade cycle, which has been a home run for Apple over the past year, with the iPhone 11 front and center,” says Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. Though the coronavirus is sure to impact Q2 in terms of production, Apple keeps defying the odds.
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fortune--2020-02-17--Bayer is facing a new wave of herbicide lawsuits—and this time it’s not over Monsanto’s Roundup

The first U.S. trial over a herbicide called dicamba has landed Bayer AG and its German rival BASF SE with another potentially multi-billion-dollar problem.
Jurors in federal court in Cape Girardeau awarded $265 million Saturday to a Missouri farmer who blamed the herbicide for destroying his peach orchards. The companies now face more than 140 lawsuits over allegations that dicamba wreaked havoc across the Midwestern U.S. when it drifted onto crops that weren’t engineered to resist it.
While two German industrial giants are involved, the focus is set to fall on Bayer, already seeking to settle thousands of lawsuits claiming exposure to its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer. Both dicamba and Roundup are produced by Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018.
The loss heaps more pressure on Bayer Chief Executive Officer Werner Baumann, who staked his career on the $63 billion takeover of Monsanto. Last April, after a couple of Roundup trial losses, Baumann became the first CEO of a major German company in decades to lose a shareholder confidence vote.
Activist investor Elliott Management later announced the purchase a stake in the company, raising the prospect of holders pushing to split up the pharma and agro-chemicals conglomerate. Baumann, a defender of that setup, faces another shareholder vote in April.
Act Fast
Since dicamba is another legacy Monsanto product, the latest verdict threatens to undo Bayer’s recent momentum. Since June, the stock has recouped about half of the value it lost following the Roundup trial losses.
Bayer shares fell as much as 3.3% in Frankfurt trading, the sharpest drop in more than four months. The ruling is “a negative for sure,” though dicamba will probably not grow into a headache as big as Roundup, according to Dennis Berzhanin, an analyst at Pareto Securities in Frankfurt.
The company vowed to appeal, saying “there was no competent evidence presented which showed that Monsanto’s products were present” on the Missouri farm and were responsible for the farmer’s losses.
BASF said it was surprised by the jury’s decision and would use “all legal remedies available.” The stock dropped less than 1% in Germany.
Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who teaches about mass torts, said Bayer needs to get on top of this latest situation fast.
“The sooner you put the fire out on this, the better,” Tobias said Sunday in an interview. “If every one of these dicamba cases is worth more than $250 million, that’s going to create another multi-billion-dollar headache for Bayer and investors won’t like that one bit.”
Bayer has thus far managed to avoid going back to trial over Roundup and talks have heated up with plaintiff attorneys toward a possible resolution of that litigation. Its shares would probably surge if Bayer can close the Roundup headache for as little as $10 billion, analysts have said.
The Roundup and dicamba litigation aren’t Bayer’s only legal woes. It’s set to go to trial in March in the first of thousands of lawsuits claiming it hid safety risks of its Essure birth-control device.
Other Cases
The company is also battling lawsuits by numerous cities alleging that Monsanto contaminated waterways with toxic PCBs, a chemical compound widely used in industrial applications before it was banned in 1979 over environmental concerns. Bayer has denied wrongdoing over both weedkillers as well as Essure and PCBs. It also has appealed the Roundup verdicts.
Saturday’s decision to impose $250 million in punishment damages on top of $15 million to compensate farmer Bill Bader may encourage other commercial growers from Arkansas to Illinois to pursue trials rather than settle their claims over ruined crops. It’s unclear how the award will be split between Bayer and BASF.
Monsanto has been fighting lawsuits since 2015 over its dicamba product, now called XtendiMax. BASF makes its own dicamba-based herbicide for use on its genetically modified seeds.
The companies say the crop damages stem from farmers applying the chemical incorrectly, and that dicamba’s current formulations won’t drift if proper procedures are followed.
Peach Yields
In the Missouri trial, Bader said neighbors planted dicamba-resistant cotton engineered by Monsanto and sprayed it with the older, easy-drift version of the weedkiller made by BASF. The herbicide enveloped his orchards, curling leaves and killing trees.
The companies’ lawyers presented statistical evidence showing that Bader’s peach yields had begun to fall prior to 2015. They cited weather events, such as hail storms and late freezes, as the cause for declining production.
Bev Randles, one of Bader’s lawyers, said the verdict sends a message to all U.S. corporations.
“There is no giant too big,” she said. “Everyone has to follow the law.”
The case is Bader Farms v. Monsanto Co., 16-cv-00299, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Missouri (Cape Girardeau).
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fortune--2020-02-17--A forest stands between Elon Musk and his planned Tesla Giga Berlin factory

Elon Musk’s first electric car plant in Europe is facing legal delays that could set the project back by several months after a court said clearing a forest near Berlin for the Tesla Inc. factory must stop immediately while it considers a challenge by environmentalists.
The Berlin-Brandenburg higher administrative court issued a temporary injunction against further logging, overturning a lower court ruling that had rejected a request by environmental group Gruene Liga Brandenburg. The group is seeking to prevent Tesla from clearing more of the trees and the court said it will make a final decision on the complaint in the coming days.
Tesla and the government of Brandenburg, where the plant is located, have until mid-day on Tuesday to respond to the court and will meet that deadline, Joerg Steinbach, Brandenburg’s economy minister, said on Twitter, adding that they will then “rely on the prompt decision” of the court.
If Tesla doesn’t clear the forest by mid-March before the wildlife breeding period begins, construction could be delayed by six to nine months, local officials have warned. They’ve argued the site is an “inferior” pine forest that was planted to be harvested in the first place. Gruene Liga Brandenburg didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The injunction threatens Tesla’s ambitious timetable of having the plant up and running from mid-2021. If it does clear Germany’s red tape, the site could churn out as many as 500,000 cars a year, employ 12,000 people and pose a serious challenge to Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and BMW AG. Musk recently tried to ease local concerns about water usage for the plant, which would border a nature reserve.
Workers have already scoured the equivalent of about 150 soccer fields of forest and removed most of the errant World War II ammunition found there.
The project’s environmental stipulations include scaring off or relocating wolves, bats, snakes and lizards until construction is over. Under German environmental regulations, the project in the small town of Gruenheide must also consider the breeding period for local wildlife in spring.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on Feb. 17 at 6:22 a.m. ET.
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