The state poison control system has identified 21 cases of amatoxin poisoning, likely caused by death cap mushrooms, the health department said Friday. The toxic wild mushrooms are often mistaken for edible ones because of their appearance and taste.

“Death cap mushrooms contain potentially deadly toxins that can lead to liver failure,” Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “Because the death cap can easily be mistaken for edible safe mushrooms, we advise the public not to forage for wild mushrooms at all during this high-risk season.”

One adult has died and several patients have required intensive care, including at least one who might need a liver transplant.

Officials advise against wild mushroom foraging

Wet weather fuels the growth of death cap mushrooms, and officials warn against any wild mushroom foraging to avoid confusion. Residents in central California’s Monterey County became ill after eating mushrooms found in a local park, according to county health officials. Another cluster of cases were in the San Francisco Bay Area, but state health officials warned that the risk is everywhere.

There were more than 4,500 cases of exposure to unidentified mushrooms logged at America’s Poison Centers in 2023, according to their National Poison Data System annual report. Roughly half were in young children, who experts warn may pick and eat a mushroom while playing outside.

California’s poison control system sees hundreds of cases of wild mushroom poisonings each year. The death cap mushroom and the “destroying angel” mushroom look and taste similar to edible mushrooms, so experts warn that a mushroom’s color is not a reliable way of detecting its toxicity. And whether it is eaten raw or cooked does not matter.

Symptom improvement is not an all-clear

People can have stomach cramping, nausea, diarrhea or vomiting within 24 hours after ingesting a toxic mushroom. Though gastrointestinal symptoms may improve, health officials warn that patients can still develop serious complications, including liver damage, that surface later.

People looking for guidance on diagnosing or treating mushroom poisoning can contact the poison control hotline at 1-800-222-1222.

The justices could take the next step in a case being argued Monday that calls for a unanimous 90-year-old decision limiting executive authority to be overturned.

The court’s conservatives, liberal Justice Elena Kagan noted in September, seem to be “raring to take that action.”

They already have allowed Trump, in the opening months of the Republican’s second term, to fire almost everyone he has wanted, despite the court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor that prohibits the president from removing the heads of independent agencies without cause.

The officials include Rebecca Slaughter, whose firing from the Federal Trade Commission is at issue in the current case, as well as officials from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The only officials who have so far survived efforts to remove them are Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, and Shira Perlmutter, a copyright official with the Library of Congress. The court already has suggested that it will view the Fed differently from other independent agencies, and Trump has said he wants her out because of allegations of mortgage fraud. Cook says she did nothing wrong.

Humphrey’s Executor has long been a target of the conservative legal movement that has embraced an expansive view of presidential power known as the unitary executive.

The case before the high court involves the same agency, the FTC, that was at issue in 1935. The justices established that presidents — Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time — could not fire the appointed leaders of the alphabet soup of federal agencies without cause.

The decision ushered in an era of powerful independent federal agencies charged with regulating labor relations, employment discrimination, the air waves and much else.

Proponents of the unitary executive theory have said the modern administrative state gets the Constitution all wrong: Federal agencies that are part of the executive branch answer to the president, and that includes the ability to fire their leaders at will.

As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1988 dissent that has taken on mythical status among conservatives, “this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.”

Since 2010 and under Roberts’ leadership, the Supreme Court has steadily whittled away at laws restricting the president’s ability to fire people.

In 2020, Roberts wrote for the court that “the President’s removal power is the rule, not the exception” in a decision upholding Trump’s firing of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau despite job protections similar to those upheld in Humphrey’s case.

In the 2024 immunity decision that spared Trump from being prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Roberts included the power to fire among the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” powers that Congress lacks the authority to restrict.

But according to legal historians and even a prominent proponent of the originalism approach to interpreting the Constitution that is favored by conservatives, Roberts may be wrong about the history underpinning the unitary executive.

“Both the text and the history of Article II are far more equivocal than the current Court has been suggesting,” wrote Caleb Nelson, a University of Virginia law professor who once served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

Jane Manners, a Fordham University law professor, said she and other historians filed briefs with the court to provide history and context about the removal power in the country’s early years that also could lead the court to revise its views. “I’m not holding my breath,” she said.

Slaughter’s lawyers embrace the historians’ arguments, telling the court that limits on Trump’s power are consistent with the Constitution and U.S. history.

The Justice Department argues Trump can fire board members for any reason as he works to carry out his agenda and that the precedent should be tossed aside.

“Humphrey’s Executor was always egregiously wrong,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.

A second question in the case could affect Cook, the Fed governor. Even if a firing turns out to be illegal, the court wants to decide whether judges have the power to reinstate someone.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote earlier this year that fired employees who win in court can likely get back pay, but not reinstatement.

That might affect Cook’s ability to remain in her job. The justices have seemed wary about the economic uncertainty that might result if Trump can fire the leaders of the central bank. The court will hear separate arguments in January about whether Cook can remain in her job as her court case challenging her firing proceeds.

Thompson, chairman of the Chief Executive Alliance and previously ranked as the world’s top CEO coach, and Loflin, Nasdaq’s Global Head of Board Advisory, joined forces to provide a 360-view of this loaded moment for leadership, from the C-suite and board perspectives, respectively. In a wide-ranging conversation with Fortune, they talked about the Shakespearean themes of leadership and turmoil and the feeling that “heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

For those aspiring to reach the top, Thompson shared the conventional wisdom he’d learned from his mentor, Marshall Goldsmith: “What got you here got you halfway there.” (Goldsmith had a New York Times bestseller in 2007 with What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.)

The transition from being a high-performing executive in a “swim lane” to having the “aperture of having a full enterprise” requires substantial new learning and skill development, Thompson argued, because no matter how great an executive you are or how prepared you think you might be, the stakes are existentially high. The risk that a CEO might “lose his or her head within the next year or so” is “easily like 20% or at the big brands It feels like it’s twice that,” said Thompson, who recently penned an essay on the subject of CEO “decapitation” for Fortune.

Adding to this pressure, Thompson and Loflin added, is the radical shift in board member expectations. Board members, who once might have been “golf buddies,” are now “really under the gun to perform.” They are “less patient” and expected to “actually deliver,” based on their subject matter expertise.

This environment demands nearly every candidate be ready to serve as a “peacetime in a wartime CEO,” Thompson said, capable of harvesting the best aspects of the company culture while also being “disrupting and breaking new ground.” An executive promoted from a functional role, such as a CFO, may possess the “gravitas of understanding the street and the shareholders,” but often lacks the breadth to “light hearts and minds” across the workforce, or do “ride-alongs with customers.”

The loneliness of the tower, and ‘relationology’

Fortune has been tracking this tenuous moment for leaders throughout 2025. Top recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found 1,235 CEOs had left (or lost) their jobs through the first half of 2025, a stunning 12% increase from 2024 and the highest year-to-date total since Challenger began tracking CEO turnover in 2002.

Jim Rossman, Barclays’ global head of shareholder advisory, who’s been closely tracking shareholder activism for decades, similarly found record activist-linked turnover at the top for 2025. “It feels like what activists have done is basically [to hold] public companies to the standards of private equity,” Rossman told Fortune in a previous interview, as they have come to view the CEO “more as an operator, not somebody who’s risen through the ranks.” In other words: Results matter.

The intense environment contributes to feelings of isolation. As CEOs often note, being the boss is a lonely job where leaders are caught in the middle, with information they cannot share with reports but must share with the board, creating a huge information asymmetry, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella previously told McKinsey.

Carolyn Dewar, the co-leader and founder of McKinsey’s CEO Practice, previously told Fortune that “No one else in your organization or above you, like your board or your investors, see all the pieces you see.” She advocated for leaders to surround themselves with trusted advisors—“a kitchen cabinet” of sorts.

Similarly, Loflin told Fortune he’s fond of the concept of “relationology,” which he describes as “sort of a study of relationships.” He suggested leaders must develop a “portfolio of relationships of intimacy” that are “very context-relevant.” A leader’s effectiveness hinges on having fluency, for instance, when speaking to a CFO about analyst days, or working with a compliance team to keep the business safe or connecting authentically with union executives. Loflin said he’s often seen it being a “big surprise” to accomplished leaders that they have, say, seven different groups they need to engage and maybe as many as six new skills to really flesh out before they’re ready to take the enterprise to the next level.

This need for deep, context-aware connection also applies to personal life, Loflin added. The idea that a personal life and professional life can be entirely separate “undermines leadership and undermines the fabric of a company.” Critically, Loflin said, the chair must really know his CEO “at a deep level, like a Shakespearean level,” requiring a transparency that ensures appropriate accountability. After all, Loflin noted as one example, boards have to be mindful that a personal relationship that violates company policy can jeopardize corporate governance at the drop of a hat. The board really needs to know who their CEO is, maybe better than the CEO knows themselves.

The power and the privilege, the hubris and the humility

Loflin, who admitted to Fortune that he’s a bit of a Shakespeare nerd, noted the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is determined by “the vulnerability and the self-awareness of the protagonist,” and a tragic outcome results from a feeling he likened to “never recognizing whether I needed to grow or change.”

Thompson added that surviving as a CEO requires an “odd combination” of traits you might read in a Greek tragedy: hubris and humility.

The CEO must possess the hubris, or excessive pride, to believe they can be the best in their field, but also the profound humility that acknowledges they can’t do it alone.

The professional mandate is relentless, Thompson added, citing a key interview for the book from Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon: if you were the “same guy you were a year ago, you don’t deserve to be promoted.” Thompson said he thinks of hubris of being at “the edge of your competence, so rather than retreating, you actually should lean into that” to acquire the skills and help you need to keep growing as a professional.

For top leaders, Thompson said, the top job is not a prize to be won, but a “privilege to do this role.” Just as Olympic athletes must constantly improve, he added, leaders must recognize that breaking a record only attracts more competition.

Loflin urged boards and executives alike to move beyond a Wolf of Wall Street mindset and into “what it means to authentically care for and build the confidence and foster appropriate accountability.” He said that for many executives, admitting you have areas to improve on and get better at is a “special vulnerability.” He argued boards need more genuine, interpersonal affection—sometimes of the tough love variety—is needed to prevent a truly Shakespearean tragedy on their watch.

Loflin said he’d just had breakfast with a board director for a $30 billion company and the subject of love arose: “Do you love your management team?” The director said yes, definitely, almost like relatives. After all, they had been with the company over a decade and come to have deep relationships with other directors and their C-suite. Loflin argued that over decades of advising boards on corporate governance, he wishes more would adopt this sort of attitude.

“I don’t think it’s going to hurt anything in business because a good father has to talk to a troubled son, hopefully he’s mentoring when [the son is] getting himself in trouble.” After all, Loflin continued, “bad stuff happens, and I think some of these metaphors are important.” In other words, it shouldn’t be the Wolf of Wall Street, but the wolf—or the activist—is always at the door.