Green Means Go
If you were hoping for a rager, you were on the wrong private jet. A tropical storm had
DELAYED THE FLIGHT FROM OTTAWA TO Newfoundland by eight hours, and the mood on board Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton’s chartered Embraer Legacy 450 on the evening of October 16 was celebratory but cautious. At midnight that night, Canada would become the first G20 nation (and the second country in the world, after Uruguay) to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. Linton, who had arguably more of the stuff to sell than anyone on the planet, was racing to get to his company’s flagship Tweed store in St. John’s, in the Newfoundland time zone, where clocks are somewhat inconceivably set a half hour ahead of the next easternmost time zone. If the plane’s all-too-apt ETA of 10:17 p.m. local held, he had a chance to make what would be Canada’s very first “rec” sale.
Since obtaining one of Canada’s earliest licenses for commercial cultivation of medical marijuana about five years ago, Linton had built a global weed empire. His publicly held company employed more than 2,000 people and had more than 4 million square feet of marijuana under cultivation, an 80,000-square-foot warehouse stocked to the rafters with inventory, and $78 million (U.S.) in fiscal 2018 revenue. On October 16, its market cap had soared to $11 billion, and it had billions of dollars in new funding from the Constellation Group (owner of Corona beer).
Leading the biggest company in Canada’s hottest new business sector since beaver skins had made Linton one of the most famous CEOs in the country. But these next 24 hours would offer him something new: a shot at cementing his top-dog status with investors (who had driven up Canopy’s stock price by nearly 100% between July and mid-October) and attracting millions of new customers who could become brand devotees. Linton, wearing a black hoodie and jeans, disheveled hair falling over the tops of his ears, sipped a beer while thumb-typing on his BlackBerry and making jokes with an in-house filmmaker and a couple of reporters along for
