The worst moment in the career of legendary auto executive Lee Iacocca, who died last week at 94, was his 1978 firing as president of Ford Motor Co. by the firm’s chairman, Henry Ford II.

By way of explanation, a sullen Ford famously told Iacocca: “Sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”

So it is with Bruce Linton, fired earlier this month as co-CEO of Canopy Growth Corp., based in Smiths Falls, Ont.

Linton, 52, founded Canopy and built it into the world’s biggest marijuana enterprise.

And his firing on July 3 was probably a mistake.

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Linton was ousted by Canopy’s controlling shareholder, U.S. liquor giant Constellation Brands Inc.

For all its success in marketing brands such as Corona and Modelo beer, Constellation knows nothing about the nascent marijuana industry.

Few people do understand the cannabis industry, with its remarkably diverse customers, jury-rigged supply chains, and different regulations in each of hundreds of jurisdictions.

Constellation has said it will probably select a replacement for Linton from its own ranks, though many in the industry expect it to recruit a consumer-products expert from outside the company.

In Linton, Constellation had an unusually good steward for its $4-billion investment in Canopy, which it made in stages over the past two years. (All figures in U.S. dollars.)

A crackerjack at both internal growth and growth by acquisition, Linton built Canopy from scratch into a $13.4-billion company, as measured by shareholder value. Canopy’s average annual growth rate in revenues over the past five years is 2,362 per cent, compared with Constellation’s 5 per cent.

By April, Constellation had earned a $1.7-billion profit on its 38 per cent stake in Canopy.

The industry consensus on Linton’s firing is that it resulted from the $74-million loss Canopy reported last month in its most recent quarter. But Constellation insists Linton was not removed because of Canopy’s financial performance. It instead offers the vague explanation that Canopy needs a new leader to guide it through its next growth phase.

That’s a shame, because the old leader had a pretty compelling strategy. At Canopy, Linton was building what Warren Buffett would call a “fortress,” a company so entrenched that it’s almost impossible to compete with. For Buffett, such firms include Coca-Cola Co. and McDonald’s Corp.

Linton’s plan was to achieve unassailable market-share dominance. Canopy owns about one-third of the Canadian market for recreational pot, with scores of firms dividing up the rest. Canopy is also a leading supplier of recreational and medicinal cannabis in the U.S. and Europe.

Linton was equally committed to vertical integration. Canopy has strongholds in pot cultivation, R&D, marketing, distribution and retailing. It conducts clinical trials to test new products for people and pets. Canopy even invented its own high-speed machines for making joints, for which it has filed patents.

The understanding between Linton and Rob Sands, then-CEO of Constellation, was that Canopy would use Constellation’s $4 billion to build that fortress.

Constellation could afford to help Linton realize his oft-stated ambition to adopt the Amazon.com Inc. model of enduring many years of early losses in creating “a massive, valuable asset that would dominate the world,” as Linton has described it.

Constellation’s share of Canopy’s notorious fourth-quarter loss was $39 million, a rounding error for the $8.1-billion (2019 sales) Constellation.

But a few days before Linton’s abrupt ouster, Constellation’s new CEO, Bill Newlands, told investors on a conference call that he wanted “a more focused long-term strategy to win markets” at Canopy, “while paving a clear path to profitability.”

A path to profitability in the short term almost certainly means retreat — cutbacks in R&D and new-product development, and auctioning off some of Canopy’s production facilities, of which there are more than a dozen worldwide.

It means dismantling the fortress, even before its completion.

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But the tough reality for Constellation is that economies of scale will separate the winners from the losers in the long overdue shakeout in today’s overcrowded cannabis industry.

Even with forecast annual revenues of as much as $200 billion in the next few years, the global pot industry will eventually be controlled by a handful of giant firms. Constellation itself is part of a Big Liquor oligopoly after many waves of global consolidation.

Constellation might not be done with Linton. The ousted CEO is bound by a noncompete clause, but only in Canada. Linton has long focused on the enormous potential of the U.S. market, and pot companies there began offering Linton jobs soon after the news of his firing.

But Linton wants to be a CEO again, so he’ll be selective about where he lands. With about 18 million shares of Canopy, worth $721 million the day of his dismissal, Linton can write his own ticket, launching another pot firm or buying control of an established one.

There is a backstory here that might tell the real tale of Linton’s curious departure from Canopy.

Fact is, Linton’s days at Canopy were numbered since October, when Constellation announced the planned retirement of its then-CEO, Rob Sands. Sands stepped down March 1, and four months later, Linton was out of a job.

Rob Sands was Linton’s patron.

The Sands family has controlled Constellation for decades. It was Rob Sands who struck the Canopy deal, in order to reduce Constellation’s reliance on the slow-growth liquor business.

But Sands’s successor, Newlands, doesn’t have the Sands family’s patience with upfront losses in building a formidable business. Nor does he have that luxury.

Newlands is Constellation’s first outsider CEO, and Canopy was his early big chance to prove his decisiveness.

It didn’t help Linton that he handed out stock options to all his employees, a morale builder in an industry with a skills-shortage challenge and vulnerability to internal theft. But to Constellation that was a freewheeling practice.

In January, Linton publicly mused that Canopy might eventually eclipse Constellation in size, with Linton becoming Constellation’s chairman. The industry took that as the affable Linton’s usual offhandedness, but at Constellation it read as grandiosity.

And even with a liquor company as his own firm’s controlling shareholder, Linton was openly contemptuous of beverage alcohol — the trade in which Newlands has toiled his entire career.

Just last month, Linton, who does not use cannabis despite an insomnia condition, told Bloomberg Businessweek that he’d rather spend a long evening with potheads than boozers. At least with potheads there’s “no fights. Good conversation.”

And for someone like Newlands, whose career highlight so far is running the Jim Beam bourbon brand, a subordinate who has built the world’s largest company of its kind might be a threat.

Sometimes you just don’t like somebody.