Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, a big name auto CEO gets arrested and a giant change for the annual White House correspondence dinner.

But first, Facebook keeps losing friends. So the past week has been downright awful for the social network.

Not because of anything new that it did or didn't do, but because there were a bunch of new

revelations about its conduct in the aftermath of already known scandals like Cambridge Analytica

and Russian-born fake news during the 2016 election. So first came a New York Times report, revealing how Mark Zuckerberg was largely out of the loop

on these big issues, often delegating to top lieutenant Cheryl Sandberg, who herself sometimes

delegated downward.

And when decisions were made, a lot of it was done under the auspices of not risking the

ire of Republicans who already distrusted Facebook, or as one

Facebook exec in D.C. said, don't poke the bear, which really didn't work out so well for anybody.

The company also seemed to mislead Congress for months on the Russian interference issue,

kind of slow-walking it, before finally coming clean or sort of clean, since then further

disclosures came later, often prompted by new

media reports. And at the same time, quietly, Facebook was lobbying senators to be softer on it in

public, allegedly leading Chuck Schumer, whose daughter works at Facebook, to tell a fellow

senator to effectively back off. And finally, the company hired political PR firms on both the left and the right, which is

something that was previously known, but not really noticed until now.

So Zuckerberg reportedly referred to a lot of the criticism, particularly the idea the

company misled people as bullshit during an employee call late last week.

But here's what's very real. The talk of Zuckerberg

running for president or Sandberg returning to D.C. in a Democratic administration is over,

...