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Behind the nation’s greatest college basketball teams is a steady flow of donations from billionaires with varying industry backgrounds and connections to the schools. 

Among them are the cofounder of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest investment firms; the owner of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and a Houston hospitality mogul whose name is flashed on an entire arena. Several powerhouse teams bankrolled by billionaires are favored to advance far in this year’s March Madness tournament. 

Considering the global sports entertainment industry is estimated to be worth more than $3 trillion, it’s no wonder America’s wealthiest are eager to throw money at the nation’s best college athletics programs. 

This year’s March Madness tournament is particularly flush with billionaire money. The Big Ten alone sent six teams to the Sweet 16, meaning the financial stakes for some of the country’s wealthiest athletic boosters have never been higher. This year’s men’s tournament is expected to have more than $270 million in payouts, with each of the 135 available units (games) valued at roughly $2 million, paid out to conferences over six years (that’s about $350,000 per year).

That money flows directly to conferences, not schools. That’s why wealthy alumni and other billionaire boosters step in to fill the gap, pouring hundreds of millions into facilities, NIL deals, and recruiting budgets that tournament checks can’t offer.

Fortune has compiled a sampling of billionaire donors to schools participating in this year’s Sweet 16. Note, this list is not exhaustive.

David Rubenstein is backing Duke

Rubenstein, cofounder of The Carlyle Group, grew up in Baltimore and earned his undergraduate degree from Duke University in 1970, where he has made generous donations over the decades. 

He cofounded The Carlyle Group in 1987 with just $5 million in capital, but grew it to one of the world’s largest private equity firms with $477 billion in assets under management. Rubenstein is worth an estimated $4.2 billion.

Rubenstein has donated more than $60 million to his alma mater, including a $10 million gift to Duke Athletics in 2012. He said he made the donation because of Duke’s “success in so many sports over so many years, [and] because of the program’s commitment to academic achievement and excellence.”

The Carlyle cofounder has made several other multimillion-dollar donations to Duke over the years, including a $20 million scholarship endowment for first-generation students in 2017 and a $25 million gift to support the arts. The billionaire also served on Duke’s board of trustees from 2005 to 2017, including a term as chairman.

Duke, the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament’s East Region, faces St. John’s on Friday at 7:10 p.m. EST on CBS. The Blue Devils are favored to advance.

Jerry Jones credits the University of Arkansas for his success

Jones, the longtime owner of the Dallas Cowboys, has a deep connection to one of this year’s Sweet 16 schools. He’s a University of Arkansas alum and played for the Razorbacks football team in the 1960s before he went on to become a successful oil businessman and the owner of the Dallas Cowboys in 1989. Jones is currently worth an estimated $19.4 billion, with the Cowboys worth approximately $13 billion.

In 2015, Jones donated $10.65 million to Arkansas’ athletic program, which he credited for his success. The gift supported Arkansas’ Student-Athlete Success Center.

“My experiences at the University of Arkansas as a student-athlete under the legendary Coach Frank Broyles helped shape me as a man and guide me on my future career path,” Jones said at the time of the donation. “I would not be where I am today without those life lessons learned as a student-athlete at the University of Arkansas.”

Arkansas faces No. 1 seed Arizona on Thursday at 9:45 p.m. EST on CBS. The Razorbacks are considered a significant underdog, but freshman star Darius Acuff Jr. has made them one of the tournament’s most exciting teams to watch.

Tilman Fertitta supports his hometown

Fertitta is the definition of a hometown billionaire backer. The CEO of Fertitta Entertainment and owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets, he is Houston’s richest sports owner with an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion—a fortune built on hospitality, gaming, and entertainment through his Landry’s restaurant and hotel empire with more than 600 dining, entertainment, and gaming locations nationwide.

In 2016, Fertitta pledged $20 million to the University of Houston’s athletics program to renovate the school’s on-campus basketball arena. This was the largest individual athletic donation in UH history at the time. Fertitta attended UH, although he left before finishing his degree. But the school awarded him with an honorary doctorate in August. 

“This gift is personal,” Fertitta said when he made the 2016 donation. “It represents a commitment from my family and me to support the University of Houston in its quest to strengthen our nationally competitive institution, both in academics and athletics.”

“Upgrading our athletics facilities shows we are serious about competing at the highest levels of collegiate sports for many years to come,” he continued.

The arena was subsequently renamed Fertitta Center. He made an additional $50 million pledge to UH’s medical school in 2022. 

Houston, the No. 2 seed in the South Region, faces Illinois on Thursday at 10:05 p.m. EST on TBS. The Cougars are favored to win.

Larry Ellison is behind Michigan’s makeover

Ellison cofounded tech giant Oracle and is currently one of the world’s wealthiest individuals with a net worth of nearly $200 billion.

He also reportedly underwrote the richest recruiting flip in college football history. Ellison reportedly helped the University of Michigan fund a name, image, and likeness sports package to poach quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood from Louisiana State University in November 2024. While Ellison didn’t have a prior connection to the Wolverines, his wife, Jolin, is a Michigan alumna.

Michigan, the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region, faces Alabama on Friday at 7:35 p.m. EST on TBS. The Wolverines, who are favored to win on Friday, have three projected first-round NBA draft picks on their roster.

Daniel Gilbert funds alma mater, Michigan State

Gilbert founded Rock Financial in 1985, which would eventually become mortgage behemoth Rocket Companies. The fintech and homeownership services company has a $40 billion market cap, and Gilbert has an estimated net worth of $29.4 billion. He also owns the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.

Gilbert donated $15 million to his alma mater, Michigan State University, in 2016 for use toward the school’s basketball program. Both he and his wife, Jennifer, attended Michigan State and said that, at the time, the school had “played a large role in both of our lives.”

Michigan State, the No. 3 seed in the East Region, faces UConn on Friday at 9:45 p.m. EST on CBS. UConn is slightly favored to win.

Jimmy Haslam has donated $50 million to University of Tennessee

Haslam is a University of Tennessee alum and the owner of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, a franchise he purchased in 2012. He and his family built their fortune through Pilot Flying J, the nation’s largest truck-stop chain, which they sold to Berkshire Hathaway in a deal that totaled $13.65 billion over several years. Haslam is worth nearly $10 billion today.

The Haslam family has donated $50 million to the University of Tennessee, one of the largest gifts in school history, supporting academics and athletics at the Knoxville campus. The family’s name adorns Haslam College of Business at UT.

Tennessee, the No. 6 seed in the Midwest Region, faces Iowa State on Friday at 10:10 p.m. EST on TBS. Iowa State is currently favored to win.

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Sending your resume into the void has never felt more useless.

Employers cut 92,000 jobs in February alone. Unemployment among entry-level employees peaked last July at 13.3%, the worst entry-level market in 37 years. Two-thirds of companies have put hiring on pause while they wait to see where AI can fill the gaps, and in the meantime, 1.17 million jobs have been cut since last year.

So you do what everyone does: You turn to AI to write a cover letter that slightly exaggerates the role you held in your junior year of college. That’s totally fine, since three-quarters of resumes never reach a human’s eyes anyway. This means you’re using AI to write something that gets read by AI, fulfilling some twisted ouroboros that Socrates and the lot would have had a doozy explaining to their students.

For Wharton Business Economics Professor Judd Kessler, there’s a simple alternative: Toss the fake enthusiasm and pick up the phone. The University of Pennsylvania professor and author of Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want instead thinks the cover letter’s days are numbered.

“I expect that in the not too distant future, cover letters are gone,” Kessler told Fortune. “Either cover letters will be required and everybody will have AI write good ones and they’ll be ignored, or employers will stop asking for them because they realize they’re not looking at them and they’re not adding value.”

Kessler says job hunting is starting to look a lot like the good ol’ days: It’s all about who you know. At the heart of his argument is the concept of a hidden market: any system that has to allocate something valuable without simply letting the highest bidder win. Think of Taylor Swift pricing concert tickets at $99 when millions of fans would pay 10 times that, or a university with 50,000 applicants for 2,000 freshman seats. Price alone can’t decide who gets what, so other rules take over—rules like knowing a roadie who can get you behind the stage, or having an alumni vouch for you. These are all signals in a hidden market.

And the labor market is one of the biggest hidden markets of all.

“We want to allocate scarce resources, and we don’t want to let price do the job on its own,” Kessler said. “We find it more efficient to have a search process where we identify the best person for the role.”

In this dynamic, signals like the cover letter used to matter, because it meant candidates were spending the time and making the effort to show their enthusiasm.

“It was a costly signal that a job candidate could send that they were really interested in a particular role,” Kessler said. “And it was costly because writing a good one was hard and took time, and you couldn’t do it for every firm.” The signal was hard to ignore: This candidate was serious; after all, they wrote a cover letter. 

The AI ouroboros

That all changed when AI made it a quick snap to fake enthusiasm in three frivolous paragraphs.

“Generative AI comes, and something that used to take a few hours to do well now takes a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes,” Kessler said. “And all of a sudden that signal that used to be costly is now very cheap. Economists would call it cheap talk: You can make it look like you are really motivated to join that firm, that the job was designed for you, but you can create that signal very cheaply.”

The research backs him up. Kessler pointed to a study by economists Jingyi Cui, Gabriel Dias, and Justin Ye that tracked what happened when a major job platform introduced an AI cover-letter writing assistant. Letter quality improved because they were better targeted, and well-targeted letters led to more interviews. But as the tool spread, “employers stopped relying on cover letters in their hiring decisions,” Kessler said. “The cover letters got better, and they became a less useful tool overall.”

“In the old days, there used to be a few good cover letters, and that was how you could identify the best-fit candidates,” he said. “Now, all the cover letters pass some threshold. They become a prerequisite rather than a differentiator.”

Once every application looks polished, none stand out—and the rational employer either outsources the reading to AI or stops reading altogether. “That’s when you would hand it off to AI to be responsible,” Kessler said.

Kessler has watched it happen in his own hiring. Despite selecting research assistants at Wharton for the last 15 years, “all of the best cover letters have come in the last 12 months,” he said with a laugh, all of which suddenly reference his research papers.

“That used to be a way that I could tell who was actually motivated,” he said. “But now everybody does that, and my guess is it’s not because everybody has read that research. Everybody has figured out that AI can write a good summary of what I work on and weave that into a narrative. And that means I can’t use the cover letter as a good indication that somebody’s motivated to work with me.”

Instead of relying on an AI-written CliffNotes summary of his own research, Kessler now points to other hidden market signals: “Do they take my course? Do they come to office hours? Do they try to meet with me in person? Those are the signals I start to rely on more, because the cover letter is insufficient.”

A return to the coffee chat

The cover letter is dead, Kessler says and as a result, the signals are going old school: reaching out and classic networking.

“For the specific signal of ‘I really want to work at this firm,’ which is a signal that the applicant themselves can send, it’s going to be more things that cannot be replicated with AI,” he said.

“It’s going to be doing in-person networking with members of the leadership team at the firm, taking people that work at the firm out to coffee, going to the coffee chat that the firm has. And those are real costly signals, because they can’t be replicated with AI,” he added. “When I choose to go talk to people at a firm, I’m using hours that I can’t spend talking to people at another firm.”

While the coffee chat isn’t new, Kessler said the return to meeting people and showing other signals spells the cover letter’s inevitable end.

“I often describe this as the age of the cover letter being over,” Kessler said. “AI killed the cover letter.”

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In the time it takes to walk from your car to your desk, President Donald Trump added $1.7 trillion to stocks and pushed the price of oil down by $17, or approximately 15%. By the time you got your coffee, Iran had reportedly called him a liar, and half those gains vanished.

This is the average Monday morning for a very market-oriented executive in the fourth week of war.

At approximately 7 a.m. ET, Trump posted in all-caps on Truth Social that the U.S. and Iran held “very good and productive conversations” over the weekend toward “a complete and total resolution” of hostilities in the Middle East. He ordered the Pentagon to pause all strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days. 

Washington had kept Israel informed of the talks, Reuters reported, and Israel is expected to follow the U.S. in suspending strikes on Iranian power plants.

That came after Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran Saturday night, calling on the regime to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face bombardment of its power grid. Now, it appears he’s buying time for the workweek, and leaving the weekend as a buffer before any next move.

S&P 500 futures swung nearly 4% off their lows, Brent crude collapsed from $109 to a low of $92 before partially recovering, and West Texas Intermediate touched $88.70, its lowest point since the war began.

Iran’s state media reported that the talks never happened, citing an unnamed “senior security official” in a post on Telegram. The official called it a ploy to manipulate markets and said there’s no communication lines between the two countries. As of time of writing, no official from Iran has publicly confirmed or denied Trump’s claim. 

Trump told Fox Business that talks did occur Sunday night, involving special envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, facilitated by Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. Iran wants a deal “badly,” he said.

“We have major points of agreement—I would say almost all points of agreement. Perhaps that hasn’t been conveyed,” he added, also joking that Iran needs “better public relations people.” 

Wall Street has a word for all of it, coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong last May: TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out. The acronym describes Trump’s habit of making catastrophic threats that cause market panic, then reversing course before economic pain can set in. The trade has minted money for investors who bought every dip, confident that Trump’s tolerance for damage had a ceiling. 

The pattern was seen in his trade war last year as he announced prohibitively high tariffs only to reach a deal later. It played out in Greenland too early this year, when Trump spent weeks threatening to seize the island only to settle for a vague base agreement.

The Iran war is, theoretically, supposed to function differently: after all, it takes “two to TACO,” since Trump cannot just unilaterally end the war the same way he could unilaterally pull back sanctions.

Oil analyst Rory Johnston wrote on Monday that though the “base case” was that Trump would try to back out and declare victory, it won’t be that simple to bring down oil prices.

“Hormuz flow still hasn’t resumed and every day we’re shedding more oil from the system,” he wrote on X. “That’ll catch up—can’t jawbone 10 to 15 million barrels per day stock draws.” 

It is unclear who Trump is even negotiating with on Iran’s side. He told Fox Business he’s dealing with the man who’s “most respected” in Iran, though “It’s a little tough — we’ve wiped out everybody.”

U.S.-Israeli forces have killed most of Iran’s top brass, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, security chief Ali Larijani, and other senior leaders. When asked a few weeks ago whom Trump wanted to see replace the ayatollah, Trump said “everyone we had in mind is dead.”

The Jerusalem Post has reported that Trump’s actual interlocutor is Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. 

Trump also said on Fox Business Monday that he and new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei—son of the late Ali Khamenei—would together be in charge of the Strait of Hormuz.

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The ‘Gen Z stare’ became an internet meme last year—used to describe a blank, expressionless look from a generation often glued to their phones. But it’s not just a phenomenon among today’s young people—even Mark Zuckerberg once had his own version of it.

On a recent episode of The Social Radars podcast, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham recalled meeting the Facebook cofounder around 2007—and being struck by his lack of social skills.

“[Zuckerberg] has this weird thing where if he didn’t have anything to say, he wouldn’t fill the gap with passing conversation,” Graham said. “He had no concept of small talk.”

The silence coming from the twentysomething Harvard dropout, Graham added, was more jarring than expected: “It was surprisingly disconcerting. I didn’t realize how important small talk was until I met the lack of it. But he would just stare at you if there wasn’t anything [to say].”

In the 1990s, Graham cofounded the software company Viaweb, which Yahoo acquired in 1998 for $49 million. In 2005, he co-founded the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has helped launch billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, and Reddit. While his exact net worth is not public, Graham has likely earned substantial income through his investments.

Even Mark Zuckerberg agrees he came across ‘as robotic’ before finding success

Now 41, Zuckerberg’s communication skills have in fact visibly evolved. From delivering Harvard’s commencement address in 2017 to testifying before Congress multiple times, he’s grown into a far more polished public speaker—and it’s worked to his advantage. Zuckerberg himself now has a net worth of $210 billion.

Graham quipped his first meeting with Zuckerberg was before he “had learned to imitate a normal person,”—but the tech founder himself has acknowledged he has struggled with communication as he’s taken his social media platform from a Harvard dorm room idea to one of the biggest companies in the world with a $1.5 trillion market cap.

“Look, historically I’ve had a very hard time expressing myself,” Zuckerberg told NBC News in 2019. “I just come across as robotic.”

He echoed that sentiment years later on Threads, saying that feedback about his awkwardness initially made things worse—but he’s improved with time: “Being awkward and getting negative feedback on how I came across definitely made me more careful and scripted,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2024.

Fortune reached out to Y Combinator and Meta for further comment.

Communication is more than a nice-to-have—it’s a skill that billionaire CEOs like Richard Branson and Jamie Dimon say is table stakes

Graham’s observations about a young Zuckerberg—and his evolution—underscore a broader point: communication, even seemingly trivial small talk, can shape how ideas are received and careers unfold. While Zuckerberg had a breakthrough product and early momentum to offset his social awkwardness, many Gen Z workers don’t have that cushion—and are struggling with communication in today’s tech-driven workplace.

About 38% say networking makes them anxious, according to a survey conducted by Strand Partners for LinkedIn, with many young people avoiding it altogether because they don’t know where to start. But the stakes go beyond just missed opportunities: communication gaps are among the reasons some employers have already begun giving the pink slip to recent Gen Z hires.

Strong communication has long been a hallmark of effective leadership. Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, has called it the “most important skill any leader can possess.”

“Communication makes the world go round. It facilitates human connections, and allows us to learn, grow and progress,” Branson wrote in 2015. “It’s not just about speaking or reading, but understanding what is being said – and in some cases what is not being said.”

And in the age of AI, those human skills are becoming even more valuable than ever. 

“AI can’t replace genuine human connection,” said Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place To Work. “It can’t listen, care, or inspire people. That’s what leaders do. Technology can help us work smarter, but only people can build trust.”

It’s a view shared by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who said that soft skills like communication matter more than ever.

“My advice to people would be critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ [emotional quotient], learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write,” Dimon told Fox News late last year. “You’ll have plenty of jobs.”

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The U.S. government is insolvent. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.

Importantly, the $47.78 trillion in reported liabilities does not include the unfunded obligations of social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare — those are disclosed separately in the off-balance-sheet Statement of Social Insurance (SOSI).

The government’s consolidated balance sheet position, excluding the SOSI, deteriorated by nearly $2.07 trillion between FY 2024 and FY 2025, reaching a staggering negative $41.72 trillion. Total liabilities are now nearly eight times the value of reported assets. The largest drivers were a $2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable (now $30.33 trillion) and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable (now $15.47 trillion).

The Off-Balance-Sheet Iceberg

The off-balance-sheet picture is even more alarming. The 75-year unfunded social insurance obligation surged by $10.1 trillion in a single year, rising from $78.3 trillion in FY 2024 to $88.4 trillion in FY 2025 — driven primarily by a $6.9 trillion jump in projected Medicare Part B shortfalls and a $2.5 trillion increase for Social Security. The Treasury’s Statement of Long-Term Fiscal Projections shows the 75-year fiscal gap widening from 4.3% of GDP in FY 2024 to 4.7% in FY 2025.

If the $88.4 trillion in 75-year off-balance-sheet obligations were added to the $47.8 trillion in official balance sheet liabilities, total federal obligations would now exceed $136.2 trillion — roughly five times U.S. annual GDP.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.

What $136 Trillion Looks Like in Your Living Room

Not only has the financial press ignored the consolidated financial statements, but most members of Congress and members of the general public will not read the consolidated financial statements. Documents like the consolidated financial statements are not the kind of thing you want to read before driving. If that’s not bad enough, most people cannot relate to the trillion-dollar numbers in the financial statements. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate them into terms that people will understand.

Most people cannot relate to trillion-dollar figures on a government ledger. So consider this: divide every number by 100 million — drop eight zeros — and federal finances look like a household budget in freefall.

That household earns $52,446 and spends $73,378 — running a $20,932 annual deficit. Its total liabilities and unfunded promises amount to $1,361,788 against just $60,554 in assets, leaving it $1.3 million in the hole. Uncle Sam, by any accounting standard, is insolvent.

Congress has clearly lost control of the nation’s finances. America is facing a fiscal catastrophe. The reckoning, long deferred, is becoming impossible to ignore.

Two Bills That Could Change Everything

Addressing this crisis — and preventing recurrence — requires two specific legislative actions.

First, Congress should pass the bipartisan H.R. 3289 — Fiscal Commission Act, sponsored by Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), and 41 co-sponsors. Such a commission would force a public reckoning with the facts, the trade-offs, and the hard choices that restoring fiscal health requires.

Second, Congress should call an Article V Convention limited to proposing a fiscal responsibility amendment to the U.S. Constitution. H.Con.Res. 15, sponsored by Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), would do exactly that. 

Modeled on Switzerland’s Debt Brake, such an amendment would mandate a balanced budget over the business cycle and prohibit federal spending from growing faster than the U.S. economy.

These two bills represent the most credible path forward — if Congress has the will to act.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Face-faced college graduates are watching the American Dream be swept out from underneath them, and entering a gloomy entry-level job market pillaged by AI automation. However, not every company is reeling back hiring young professionals in favor of the tech tools; Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says his business is actually ramping up its recruiting of the digitally-savvy generation. 

“The kids coming out of college right now learned how to program with AI,” Huffman said recently during the Sourcery with Molly O’Shea podcast. “They’re really good at it, and so I think we will go heavy on new grads, because they’re so much more AI native.”

While some CEOs marvel over the abilities of chatbots and AI agents, recent graduates are actually ripe for the new tech-driven world of work: the digital natives grew up with the internet, and spent most of their higher education in the ChatGPT era. They’re deeply familiar with the technology and are much more apt to leverage it in their work. And the cofounder of the $26.7 billion social media empire says that propensity is actually a gift: older generations are more resistant to automating their craft, even if it’s for the better. 

“It’s the old people like me, it’s like I didn’t want to give [coding] up. I finally did,” the 42-year-old millennial CEO explained. “The younger people don’t have that baggage. They just write with AI.”

Reddit CEO says not hiring Gen Z grads is a costly mistake

Tech workers may be nervous that their AI use will lead to their inevitable displacement—but Huffman was resolute that the tech won’t reduce the company’s engineering headcount. 

A Reddit spokesperson also underscored to Fortune that its emerging talent team focuses on recruiting young professionals, also offering new grad opportunities and internships developing essential skills like machine learning, data science, and computer science.

While the tide seems to have shifted away from tech companies recruiting college talent before graduation, Huffman warned that could be a costly mistake. The billionaire says employers need to hire graduates “right out of the gate,” or risk having to pay them 100 times more down the line. 

“There are so many reasons to hire new grads,” Huffman continued. “If you don’t hire them as new grads, you will never see them. They will never be on the job market again. They’re too valuable to ever let them be on the job market.”

CEOs say Gen Z workers are essential to innovation and succession

As companies enforce sweeping layoffs and reel back hiring, entry-level graduates are contending with a fierce labor market. 

The proportion of unemployed Americans who are first-time workers hit a 37-year high in 2025, hitting a peak of 13.3% in July before tapering down to 10.6% last month. And some CEOs even believe the percent of unemployed college graduates could skyrocket within just a couple of years. 

However, there’s a vocal cohort of leaders who won’t leave Gen Z out in the cold—and in fact, their inexperience is sometimes seen as an asset. Echoing Huffman’s point that Gen Z doesn’t come with “baggage,” Ricardo Amper, the founder and CEO of $1.25 billion software company Incode Technologies, believes Gen Z’s naivety is exactly what businesses need to innovate. They aren’t held back by preconceived notions of work or a professional mindset shaped by decades of career experience. 

“My belief [is] that coming out with a fresh mind, first principles, is important. That’s why young people are particularly helpful in tech, because they’re less biased,” Amper told Fortune earlier this year. “I think too much knowledge is actually bad in tech: you’re biased.”

Even if employers believe that AI agents can take over the jobs of their young employees, automating their roles could do long-term damage.

Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky, has warned against shutting Gen Z professionals out of the workforce because the consequences are stifled innovation and a lack of talent ready to step into millennial’s and Gen Xer’s positions. 

“[AI] can do a lot of lower-level, more entry-level position jobs. But if no young people can get jobs, then you have no one in the future to do the highly strategic leadership positions,” Chesky told ABC News in a 2025 interview. “So we need to make room for people early in their careers, even if AI can do the interns’ work.”

Plus, some CEOs like Mark Cuban even argue that it’s an opportune time for Gen Z to seize the moment. Older generations less skilled with AI will need to learn how to implement the tools effectively—and that’s where young digitally-savvy workers step in. 

“Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies,” Cuban advised young workers during the TBPN podcast in 2025. “Learn to customize a model, walk into a company, show the benefits. That is every single job that’s going to be available for kids coming out of school.”

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Markets rebounded Monday after President Donald Trump retreated from his threat to destroy Iranian energy infrastructure and revealed talks with the regime, but the world is unlikely to revert to its prewar status quo, according to a geopolitics expert.

In a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, Eurasia Group Chairman and former State Department official Cliff Kupchan predicted the Iranian regime, dominated by successive layers of hardliners, will remain hostile to the U.S.

“The end of the war, therefore, is unlikely to usher in a stable peace,” he warned. “That reality means the Strait of Hormuz will become a source of geopolitical risk for a long time—a live wire down the middle of the global economy.”

Even if Tehran eventually negotiates away its uranium enrichment program and longer-range ballistic missiles, it will still have drones, mines and fast attack boats that can threaten tankers, Kupchan pointed out.

And Iran wouldn’t have to use its diminished capabilities very often to scare investors. In fact, despite the U.S. and Israel decimating its military with thousands of airstrikes, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been able to keep the Strait of Hormuz largely closed with occasional attacks on ships.

That threat has effectively bottled up about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas, and prices have soared, though they pulled back somewhat on Monday. Still, the genie is already out of the bottle.

“From now on traders will act based on the knowledge that Iran might at any time attack, and that new perception will create new risk premia in critically important sectors,” Kupchan said.

Indeed, Brent crude oil prices are still above $100 a barrel after tumbling 10% Monday. He expects them to trade in the $80 range for several months due to the lingering risk as well as the time needed to restore output. Oil giants like Saudi Arabia and Iraq slashed production as their exports have been throttled by the Hormuz closure.

Likewise for the LNG market, which suffered a major shock last week when Iran struck a top natural gas field in Qatar that will take years to repair. Meanwhile, the Gulf is also a major source of fertilizer, aluminum, and helium, meaning shortages will curb crop yields, industrial output, and semiconductor supplies, respectively.

The new risk environment will cause prices to stay higher globally and further stoke inflation, Kupchan added. At the same time, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will struggle to rehabilitate their images as safe places to invest, affecting the AI and defense sectors too.

“Capital is a coward, going only where it feels safe,” he noted. “Once unimaginable images of office and hotel towers burning after Iranian strikes will pierce investor sentiment.”

To be sure, the U.S. will likely help allies rebuild after the war and increase regional integration, but the Gulf will need a long time to become a global safe haven for capital again, Kupchan wrote.

There are indications, however, that the Iran war will persist or eventually reignite if there’s a ceasefire. Thousands of Marines are still headed for the Middle East for a potential ground assault on Iran’s main oil-export hub, Kharg Island, or perhaps coastal areas to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The UAE also hinted at an increasingly hardened position toward Iran that aligns more closely with the U.S. and Israeli stance.

“Our thinking does not stop at a ceasefire, but rather turns toward solutions that ensure lasting security in the Arabian Gulf, curbing the nuclear threat, missiles, drones, and the bullying of the straits,” Anwar Gargash, a senior UAE diplomat, wrote on X over the weekend. “It is inconceivable that this aggression should turn into a permanent state of threat.”

Even NATO, which nearly collapsed earlier this year as Trump threatened to seize Greenland, will eventually come around to support the Iran war, despite several members rejecting U.S. demands to provide naval escorts, Secretary General Mark Rutte said Sunday.

That’s after Iran launched ballistic missiles at a U.S.-U.K. base 2,500 miles away on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The attack was unsuccessful, but it demonstrated that Iran’s missiles have much longer range than previously known and could theoretically reach most of Europe.

“If Iran would have the nuclear capability, including, together with the missile capability, it will be a direct threat, a existential threat, to Israel, to the region, to Europe, to the stability in the world,” Rutte told CBS News. “So the president doing this is crucial, and I’ve seen the polling, but I really hope the American people will be with him, because he is doing this to make the whole world safer.”

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A landmark free trade deal between the European Union and four South American countries will begin on May 1 after more than a quarter-century of negotiations and new global economic uncertainty unleashed by tariffs, critical mineral controls and the war in Iran.

The European Commission said Monday that the start date for the EU-Mercosur free trade deal was triggered by Brussels receiving a “note verbale” from Paraguay that it had approved the deal, which is a key part of the 27-nation EU’s strategy to slash economic dependencies on China and the United States.

Parliaments in Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina have ratified the deal that links more than 700 million people and accounts for 25% of global gross domestic product. Bolivia, the newest Mercosur member, didn’t participate in negotiations but will be able to join the deal in the coming years.

“The priority now is turning this EU-Mercosur agreement into concrete outcomes, giving EU exporters the platform they need to seize new opportunities for trade, growth and jobs,” said European trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.

Fierce opposition by farmers and environmentalists delayed the deal in December. It then hit another snag after EU lawmakers voted to send the deal to the bloc’s judiciary. The EU executive responded by saying it would provisionally enact the deal — effectively sidestepping the European Parliament.

That means trade will begin in May and halt only if the European Court of Justice rules against it.

French President Emmanuel Macron called that move “a bad surprise.” France and Poland had led a campaign to halt or temper the deal with clauses protecting consumers and agricultural producers.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has shrugged off such criticism of a deal she describes as vital for the EU’s survival in a newly disordered world.

“This is about resilience, this is about growth, and Europe shaping its own future,” she told a news conference in February. Recently, she has not taken questions about the issue.

Von der Leyen is in Australia this week for talks aimed at a potential free trade deal, defense cooperation and critical mineral supplies.

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