A Google Friend Is Now Facebook’s

In a sign that Google’s status as the coolest place to work may be waning, the company has lost another high-ranking employee to the social networking site Facebook.

Ethan Beard, former director of social media at Google, has joined Facebook as director of business development. The announcement, made last week, came just three weeks after Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s vice president for global online sales and operations, said she was leaving to become Facebook’s chief operations officer.

Facebook’s chief financial officer, Gideon Yu, is also a former Google employee.

Google’s stock price has dropped by a third since January. Facebook, by contrast, is still private and attracting plenty of investment. ELIZABETH OLSON

SAIL AWAY Tom Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, is putting his superyacht, the Maltese Falcon, up for sale, just two years after he first set sail on it.

Mr. Perkins reportedly spent at least $150 million on building the yacht. He has asked its builder, Perini Navi, to offer it for $181 million, according to Superyachttimes.com.

The 288-foot, three-masted clipper, one of the world’s largest sailing yachts, has 11,000 square feet of living space. ELIZABETH OLSON

BACKUP PERK The Boeing Company has provided a perk to its chief executive, W. James McNerney Jr., that he probably hopes he doesn’t have to use.

Last year, Boeing spent nearly $90,000 to install a backup generator at Mr. McNerney’s home, according to the company’s annual proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Todd Blecher, a Boeing spokesman, said the generator would allow Mr. McNerney to work at home if there were a power failure. Mr. Blecher said the money covered the cost of the generator, installation and some soundproofing “to meet the neighborhood standards for noise abatement.”

But why count this as a perk, which requires disclosure, as opposed to a business expense, which doesn’t?

Mr. Blecher said that the company’s lawyers decided that having the generator at Mr. McNerney’s home was a perk because it was both a “personal benefit” and something “not generally available to other employees.” MICHELLE LEDER

POWER TO PEROT Public companies engage in all sorts of extracurricular transactions with their senior executives and directors, like property leases and the purchase of legal and consulting services. But Anurag Jain, a vice president who runs two business groups for Perot Systems in Plano, Tex., may be the highest-ranking executive whose family sells electricity to his employer.

In its latest proxy statement, Perot Systems, founded by the two-time presidential candidate Ross Perot, disclosed that it started buying electric power in India last year from members of Mr. Jain’s family and a partnership owned and controlled by Mr. Jain and his family members.