Tesla: Bluff? USB — Enough & Other News You Need to Know

BETTING ON NEVADA? — Tesla is still losing money — nearly $62 million, or 50 cents a share, from $30.5 million a year ago — but it will be spending more cash real soon. Lots more. The electric vehicle brainchild of entrepreneur Elon Musk is driving ahead with a plan to build a giant factory to make batteries, and has now officially partnered with Panasonic to make it happen. The question is where. The Dallas Morning News reports that Tesla is still evaluating sites in California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. But Tesla is breaking ground in Reno, Nevada — and that has tongues wagging. “The fact that they’ve broken ground in Reno is really significant,” Jonathan Gemmen, a senior location consultant with Austin Consulting, a site-selection firm based in Cleveland, told DMN. Mr. Musk's legendary sense of humor might be at play here, since Nevada, the gambling capital of the United States, is the home of the bluff. And any billionaire can afford to rent a backhoe for an afternoon. Nevada may win the jackpot, but Tesla is holding a very strong hand now: The gigafactory, which Musk says will employ 6,500 people by 2020, isn't just the pipe dream of some unaccountable guy who thinks he can launch and land rocket ships. (Oh, wait. He can.) Panasonic has been around about 100 years (that's IBM territory) and actually makes money. Rumor has it the company will ultimately ante up $1 billion of the estimated $5 billion cost of the facility. So, watch the parade of governors of the "known" states offering all sorts of concessions, and don't be surprised if the plant ends up where you least expect it. Consider, if you will, a certain presidential prospect from a northeastern state whose very public spat with Musk might be prompting him to think this is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Maybe NJ Gov. Chris Christie can even kill three birds, what with all that vacant commercial space from the flight of pharma. And, as commenter Helena van der Merwe points out below, Panasonic's North American headquarters is located in — Newark, NJ.

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THE DAY AFTER — This time yesterday the news was just breaking that Target had tapped Brian Cornell as CEO. Cornell isn't exactly "Brian Who?" but the unexpected choice seemed to need a bit of explaining; as my insightful colleague Isabelle Roughol put it pithily: "Not much has been written about Cornell yet." There's more now and the meme seems to be: Cornell knows food, but does he know fashion? Per the Wall Street Journal:

Brian Cornell spent time in top roles at Safeway Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and PepsiCo Inc., PEP -0.91% giving him a lot of knowledge of the food and consumer basics that make up a growing part of the discounter's business. But he lacks deep experience with online sales and fashionable housewares, areas where Target has to show strong improvement to win back shoppers and reverse more than a year of falling traffic.

Target's home-town paper, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, did what amounts to a "Meet Brian Cornell" piece on the executive who isn't a household name. Even praise from the one analyst the paper quotes seems somewhat faint: "Sam's had mid-single to high-single digit same-store sales the entire time he was CEO, and then it kind of tapered about two quarters after he left," Edward Jones analyst Brian Yarbrough told the paper. "I'm not saying he's solely responsible for that, but Sam's numbers looked really good while he was there." The good news is that expectations are not hyperbolic, to say the least. But Target doesn't need a rock star. It needs someone who understands me.

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UNIVERSAL SECURITY BREACH — In an article whose parallels to safe sex are hard to miss, Wired reports that USB sticks are fundamentally unsafe. Period, end of story. It's not that there might be malware in the flash drive that you may be able to see and avoid. It's that the malware can exist in the firmware, which you can't. And the problem isn't limited to USB sticks, which some of us still pass around, in the words of author Andy Greenberg, "like silicon business cards." Reporting on work to be formally presented next week by security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell, Greenberg writes:

All manner of USB devices from keyboards and mice to smartphones have firmware that can be reprogrammed—in addition to USB memory sticks, Nohl and Lell say they’ve also tested their attack on an Android handset plugged into a PC. And once a BadUSB-infected device is connected to a computer, Nohl and Lell describe a grab bag of evil tricks it can play. It can, for example, replace software being installed with with a corrupted or backdoored version. It can even impersonate a USB keyboard to suddenly start typing commands. “It can do whatever you can do with a keyboard, which is basically everything a computer does,” says Nohl.

So, practice safe USB. Fight the urge to hook up. Keep it in your pants. I'll stop now.

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DAY ONE — After the Dow Jones industrial average wiped out what remained of its gains this year with Thursday's one-day 1.9 percent drop, all eyes are on the markets again: How will investors behave on the first day of the rest of the year? The known catalyst will be this morning's jobs report, and the number released at 8:30 am ET — 209,000 new nonfarm jobs in July — fell short of expectations of 230,000. The unemployment rate also ticked up to 6.2%. Will that further upset a skittish market, or provide a salve because it means the Fed is less likely to increase rates sooner than later? The markets are as complicated as each counterparty's motivations. But keep this in mind: It's been a very good run since the recession bottom — the S&P is up 183% through yesterday's close from the bear-market nadir on March 9, 2009, and long-term prospects still seem positive. So join me today in not checking the value of your 401(k).

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AMERICA FIRSTERS — You're already feeling a little poorer today, so why not check out this chart which identifies the richest person in each state? The interactive graphic, compiled and published by real estate blog Movato, is just the sort of unhealthy snack you need on a Friday morning. Here are some quick takeaways:

• If your heart's desire is to be the richest person in any state, your best shot is to a) acquire a tad more than $700 million and b) move to Alaska

• If traversing another country to get to the rest of the United States is a deal-breaker, you'll need $1,000,000,001 and a hankering to live in New Mexico.

• 4 percent of the richest people in a state are Koch brothers: David rules New York and Charles, Kansas.

• The dude who owns Vermont isn't me, so don't try to hit me up for a loan.

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Are you the second richest in your state — and steaming mad? Got a drawer full of USB sticks you plan to set on fire? Comment below. Insider knowledge of any topic in the news? Write your own darn post. Share the URL here in the comments and tweet "Tip @LinkedInPulse". (Want to write, but don't yet have access? Leave your info here.)