CEO Daily | Fortune Data Sheet: A painful morning in America

Somewhere only we know. The nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police moved some tech companies to action. Facebook offered $10 million and Google's YouTube and Intel pledged $1 million donations to social justice and anti-racism organizations. Apple said it would do the same, without naming a dollar amount.

I walked across an empty land . Meanwhile, what is going on with social networks and the president? New Street Research analyst and former FCC official Blair Levin probably had the smartest take on Trump's executive order issued last week: "It is not designed to change the law but rather, is designed to provide the President and the FCC an opportunity to 'work the refs' in the run-up to the November election." At Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke with Trump on Friday and "expressed concerns" but did not request anything specific from the president, Axios reports. Seemingly after the call, though without mentioning it, Zuck posted his own note about the controversy with a weird justification for why Facebook left up Trump's threatening post about Minneapolis. Some other top Facebook officials rejected that view.

I felt the earth beneath my feet. Shifting gears to some truly uplifting news, two NASA astronauts launched from Cape Canaveral on Saturday and arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The journey marked the first launch of humans into orbit by a private company ever and the first such launch from U.S. soil since the last Space Shuttle mission in 2011. In other positive flying news, electric flight startup Magnix successfully flew its all-electric nine-passenger Cessna airplane for 30 minutes last week. The flight marked the largest ever electric plane to make it into the skies.

Simple thing, where have you gone? Which jobs will be eliminated by A.I.? Apparently some in journalism. Microsoft let go about 50 editorial contractors last week and replaced them with an A.I. system to select news and headlines for the popular news section of MSN.com, Business Insider reports.

So tell me when you're gonna let me in. The government of India nixed a plan by Walmart-owned Flipkart to get into the food retail business. The online seller said last year that it wanted to get into food retail by connecting with tens of thousands of small farmers, but government officials said the plan did not comply with regulatory guidelines. Rivals Amazon, Zomato, and Grofers have secured permission to sell food online.

This could be the end of everything . It was the perfect anecdote to encapsulate the rise of online influencers, but it may not have been perfectly true. Forbes says it never should have added Kylie Jenner to its billionaires list because Jenner allegedly misled the magazine about the success of her cosmetics business. Still, after selling 51% the business to Coty for $600 million in January, Jenner is now worth approximately $900 million, the magazine says.

(Today's headline reference explainer video, on a day when we could all use something to rely on.)

After the successful SpaceX launch on Saturday, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine made a short speech that ended with the thought that the mission could inspire kids to want to become the next Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson. That struck Hackaday contributing editor Jenny List as a wrong-headed suggestion.

I was slightly shocked and saddened to hear this from the NASA administrator, because to my mind the careers of Musk, Bezos, or Branson should not be the ones first brought to mind by a space launch. This isn’t a comment on those three in themselves; although they have many critics it is undeniable that they have each through their respective space companies brought much to the world of space flight. Instead it’s a comment on what a NASA administrator should be trying to inspire in kids.

Ask yourself how many billionaire masters-of-the-universe it takes for a successful space race compared to the number of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technicians, physicists, et al. From the anecdote of the NASA administrator it takes about three, but if he is to make good on his goal of returning to the Moon in 2024 and then eventually taking humanity to Mars it will take a generation packed full of those other roles.