Far be it for me to criticize a guy for spouting off information that’s not entirely accurate. I’ve had my fair share of debacles over the years, as have we all. However, most of us aren’t governors, and all of us aren’t California Governor Jerry Brown. The next time he decides to spill the contents of his brain on national television, I sincerely hope he does a bit more research on the topic at-hand before waxing intellectual on a subject he’s clearly not well-versed in.
During an appearance on “CBS This Morning”, Brown decided it was time for him to spit some knowledge on the Facebook IPO. You may have heard something about it. During the interview, the governor boldly declared that California is the magical land where Facebook was invented.
“Not in Texas, not in Arizona, not in Manhattan and certainly not, you know, under the White House or the Congress,” he proudly expressed. Charlie Rose quickly pointed out that, in reality, the social networking site originated at Harvard University in Cambridge.
In order to correct the snafu, Brown retorted that the inventors of the website soon moved to California where all of the other innovators reside. Nice try, my friend, but you’ve already let your ignorance out of the proverbial bag. To be fair, the Facebook HQ has been in the state since 2004, though it’s really no excuse for such a mistake. Given that nearly every other article penned about Mark Zuckerberg and his company references the whole Harvard thing, Brown should have read that somewhere. Or, at least, had someone read it to him.
Brown is probably just overwhelmed with emotion that the state will collect nearly $2.1 billion dollars in taxes thanks to the IPO, so I suppose we can cut him some slack. This time.