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Sheryl Sandberg, formerly chief operating officer at Meta (formerly Facebook) and author of the motivational leadership book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, has some thoughts on the hypermasculine corporate culture sweeping Silicon Valley: It’s “one of the worst” she’s ever seen. 

Sandberg, who served for more than 14 years as Meta’s COO before stepping down in 2022, told CNBC corporate America has undergone a cultural shift, explaining, “Rhetoric matters. Who says what matters.”

“Yes, the environment is terrible, really—I think one of the worst you and I have seen in our careers—but we’ve seen this backsliding before, and that is not an excuse for companies not to do the right thing by all of their employees,” Sandberg told CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin in December.

Sandberg’s comments stand out because her former boss, Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has been one of the leaders of Silicon Valley’s creep toward hypermasculinity. In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan last year, Zuckerberg said while he encouraged fostering welcoming environments, he saw corporate America as “culturally neutered” and said it could use more “aggression” and masculine energy.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and the White House have also been on a crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives both in the public and private sectors. On his first day back in the White House, the president signed an executive order to eliminate all DEI initiatives in the federal government. Beyond the White House, the Trump administration has also ordered all federal agencies to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences.” At the same time, the Justice Department closely scrutinized dozens of universities, with some such as Northwestern University, Columbia University, and Cornell University having reached multi-million-dollar settlements with the government.

Some companies are also being scrutinized, such as Northwestern Mutual, which is being investigated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for their DEI policies.

As the masculine and anti-DEI rhetoric has ramped up, women’s progress in the workplace has stalled, according to the 2025 Women in the Workplace study, administered by LeanIn.org and management consulting firm McKinsey, which surveyed 9,500 employees at 124 companies. Half of the companies surveyed are no longer making women’s career advancement a priority. Another 21%, Sandberg said, see women’s career advancement as a low priority, or not a priority at all—and these are companies that are choosing to participate in the study, she added. 

All this adds up to a five-alarm fire for gender equity advocates, Sandberg said. 

Succeeding at work and uplifting a team means leaders need to be hardcore, she said, but the way to foster that hardcore mentality is through empathetic and kind leadership that brings out the best in workers.

“These things are not at odds, and they’re also not particularly masculine or particularly feminine,” Sandberg said. “The best leaders, whether they’re male or female, have both.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Dec. 17, 2025.

More on workplace culture:

• The Iran war is reviving remote work across the world — from Denmark to Vietnam
• The workplace benefit 95% of workers want but aren’t satisfied with is a pretty basic one: bereavement leave, study shows
• In the age of AI, better meetings might be your company’s secret weapon

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After a grueling 25 hours of debate on the House floor, complete with an almost show-stopping filibuster effort of more than 81 amendments by Republicans to stop the bill from moving forward, Washington made history this week with the passage of a millionaires tax bill, which would create the first income tax in the state’s history.

On March 9, lawmakers passed a 9.9% tax on personal income above $1 million per year—a first for the income-taxless state. The final vote was 52–46, and involved the longest floor debate in Washington history, far exceeding the previous record of nine hours.

“We knew it was going to be a pretty major endeavor,” Rep. Brianna Thomas, a Democrat who supported the measure, told Fortune. “We’ve got 93 years of precedent in front of us, behind us, around us at all times on the conversation around an income tax.”

Washington was one of only nine states with no income tax, and has operated on essentially the same tax structure—reliant solely on sales and business taxes—since it was built on an agrarian, timber, and shipping economy in the early 20th century. Washington last voted on an income tax in 1932, when it passed overwhelmingly, only to be struck down by the state Supreme Court a year later on the grounds that income is classified as property under the state constitution, requiring a uniform taxation scheme. In 2010, state legislators attempted to introduce another income tax, only this one didn’t even come close to passage.

For Thomas, the economy has simply outgrown the code. Washington has now become the home of global multitrillion-dollar organizations Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing, and it’s staring down a projected budget deficit of $10 billion to $12 billion over the next four years.

“Washington state was originally built on an agrarian and timbered economy,” she said. “We still have a tax code based on apples and cherries while building some global-leading technology every which way you throw a rock.”

The result is a tax structure that economists have consistently ranked among the most regressive in the country. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the top 1% of earners in Washington pay just 4.1% of their income in state and local taxes. The bottom 20%, however, pay 13.8%.

“We’ve got more millionaires and billionaires than we’ve ever had, and they’re paying, effectively, a 4% tax rate,” Thomas said. “Meanwhile, you got working folks paying 11% of their income, and the lowest-income people paying 14%. Isn’t it unfair for those who have the most, to pay the least, and those who have the least to pay, the most, proportionally?”

The bill imposes a 9.9% tax on personal income above $1 million annually, affecting roughly 21,000 filers, or less than 1% of Washington’s population, and is projected to generate $3.5 to $4 billion per year once it takes effect in 2029. It also includes tax relief for everyone else: sales tax exemptions on diapers, over-the-counter medications, and personal hygiene products, plus an expanded Working Families Tax Credit.

Passage wasn’t clean. The House considered 81 amendments over 25 hours, with Democrats working to bring their own members along.

“There was not unified assent for the bill on the Democratic side,” Thomas told Fortune.

The Senate then passed a concurrence vote 27–21 (speaking with Fortune prior to the Senate’s vote, Thomas joked the 25 hours of debate would likely deter any similar debacle from occurring in the Senate: “The Senate will concur, because they don’t want to do a 25-hour floor battle. That’s just not how the Senate rolls.”) The bill now heads to Gov. Bob Ferguson, who has signaled he will sign it.

But Thomas was careful about what victory actually means.

“We’ve got to let it sit,” she said. “We have to get through our own Supreme Court review again, and it still has to go to a vote of the people. There are many miles to go before this is actually the law of the land.”

Washington gets a millionaires tax, others push one for billionaires 

Washington’s bill is the most concrete step yet in a wider national push to tax extreme wealth. Recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act,” a proposed 5% annual wealth tax on the roughly 938 Americans with a net worth above $1 billion, a group Sanders says collectively holds $8.2 trillion. In its first year, revenue would fund a one-time $3,000 check for households earning $150,000 or less; going forward, it would target Medicaid, teacher salaries, and childcare costs. Sanders projects the bill would generate $4.4 trillion over its first decade.

Similarly, in California, a labor union put forward the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, a ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% tax on residents with a net worth above $1 billion. If passed, it could generate approximately $100 billion in one-time revenue, directed toward healthcare and food assistance.

“The haves have more than they’ve ever had,” Thomas said. “The have nots have less than they’ve ever had. That’s just not going to be sustainable for everyday folks.”

Almost immediately after the bill passed, billionaire Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announced he was swapping Seattle for Miami, where he recently paid $44 million for a penthouse. Although he has not confirmed the passage of the bill is why he chose to leave, Schultz, who is worth $6.6 billion, wrote on LinkedIn he hoped Washington would “remain a place for business and entrepreneurship to thrive.”

He also isn’t the first to leave Washington. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos similarly moved to Miami in 2023, costing the state an estimated $954 million in tax revenue in 2024 alone. When Bezos sold 50 million Amazon shares that year from Florida, he saved an estimated $610 million in state taxes by no longer being a Washington resident. 

Despite Schultz’s departue, Thomas didn’t flinch. “I certainly hope Washington is more than a spreadsheet or a tally sheet to someone,” she said. “This isn’t a math problem to me. This is a policy problem rooted in the fact that I care about my community.”

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President Donald Trump and Senate Democrats have finally found something they can agree on: banning institutional investors from buying single-family rentals. But it won’t be the cure-all to the housing affordability crisis they think it will be. 

“We want homes for people, not for corporations,” Trump said during the State of the Union address in February, touting his plan to cap institutional ownership to 100 single-family homes. 

On Thursday, the Senate voted 89-10 to pass a bill containing number of measures to make housing more affordable, including banning any investor that owns at least 350 homes from buying more. 

The proposed bans come as the U.S. housing market is facing a shortage of 4.7 million units, an all-time high according to Zillow, and the median age of the average first-time homebuyer in the United States has shot up to 40 years old.  

The affordability crisis is real, but economists say both proposals won’t break fundamental barriers to homeownership and may backfire for the low-income Americans the bills aim to help. 

“People want to identify a boogeyman that can say, ‘Hey, this is the problem, and give me an easy button to solve it right now,’” rental housing economist Jay Parsons told Fortune. “It’s an emotionally satisfying answer, even if it’s not a real solution.” 

He said targeting large institutional investors—who only own about 3% of the single-family rental market—is unlikely to have an impact on affordability for lower-income Americans and could leave millions unable to afford a place to live. 

Institutional investors serve tenants who are typically locked out of the gates of homeownership for reasons that have nothing to do with corporations. Parsons said many rent because they cannot meet the requirements to apply for traditional mortgages due to lower incomes and credit scores, or they can’t afford the additional $1,000 a month in homeownership costs. 

“These are real people, real families, who live in these homes, and the assumption and the narrative is they would be homeowners, if not for the fact that the investors own these houses,” Parsons said. “The reality is that most of them can’t.” 

Homeownership is a ‘sacred cow’

Despite Trump’s claim that the U.S. is at risk of being “a nation of renters,” there are about a million fewer single-family rentals than a decade ago, and the share of single-family homes being rented has gradually decreased since 2014, according to the National Association of Realtors. 

Meanwhile, Sean Dobson, the CEO of real estate investing giant The Amherst Group, said he sees younger generations rethinking which assets are the most valuable, challenging the notion that homeownership is a “sacred cow.”  

Homeowners can lose up to 9% of a property’s value from transaction fees, which have increased as home prices have soared over time, making mortgages become less valuable. Rather than “being tied to one asset in one town,” young people are prioritizing freedom, saving, personal choice, and life balance, he said. 

Dobson also argued people should adjust their expectations to align with longer life expectancy and explained that Americans are accomplishing major milestones like getting married or having children at later ages as life becomes less affordable. 

Amherst rents to more than 200,000 people, and 71% of its current residents would not be approved for a mortgage at the current credit and income standards, according to internal research shared with Fortune. An 85% majority of their residents would not qualify to buy the homes they live in today, Dobson said.  

The average single-family renter has a FICO score of 650 and a household income of $88,000, much lower than the average single-family homeowner, who has a FICO score of 730 and an income of more than $150,000, according to Amherst Group data. A lower credit score often leads to higher interest rates, so renting from institutional investors is often cheaper. 

Renting also has become a way for low- and moderate-income Americans to avoid the traps of subprime mortgages, Parsons, the economist, said. At the same time, mortgage delinquency rates for low-income Americans have been increasing over the past few years due to growing unemployment and higher home prices, according to the New York Federal Reserve.

Moving the needle on affordability

Banning institutional investors would reduce rental housing supply, slow down new unit development, and displace more than a million people from their homes, the National Rental Home Council said in a statement to Fortune. The council’s members include some of the largest single-rental family owners, including Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, American Homes 4 Rent, and Tricon Residential.

“There’s a real problem in America where we have a severe shortage of affordable, quality housing of all types,” Laurie Goodman, an institute fellow at the economic policy think tank Urban Institute, told Fortune.

Zoning laws as well as high land, labor, and materials costs are the main reasons for the 4.7 million housing unit shortage and high costs, she said. 

Preventing institutional investors from buying single-family homes will just mean a small investor gets it, Goodman added. In fact, as interest rates and maintenance costs have gone up, institutional investors have slowed down purchase units in recent years, she explained.

“Banning a small piece of the market does nothing to solve for the actual affordability challenges facing people who want to buy a house,” Parsons said. “Ninety percent of single-family rental investors are smaller local moms-and-pops.”

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Hollywood will own the Oscars red carpet Sunday night, but “The Town” won’t own the movies being honored with the evening’s biggest prize. Not one of this year’s 10 Best Picture nominees was primarily made on a Hollywood soundstage or studio lot—a striking snapshot of how far the industry’s center of gravity has shifted from its historic home.

This year’s Best Picture lineup reads like a map of Hollywood’s dispersal: Marty Supreme was shot on New York streets, Sinners in Louisiana, Hamnet in the U.K., with other contenders anchored in Canada, Europe, and South America. The Dolby Theatre will still be the global showcase on Sunday, but the location spending, local payrolls, and tax revenues tied to the movies themselves are no longer in the greater Los Angeles area.

For decades, if you wanted to build a career in film, the default answer was simple: You got yourself to Los Angeles. There, a dense ecosystem of soundstages, backlots, labs, rental houses, unions, and guilds created what economists call a virtuous circle. Projects attracted talent, talent attracted more projects, and the whole thing fed on itself. This year’s Oscars underscore how much of that activity has migrated to alternative hubs that can offer the one thing Hollywood doesn’t offer: lower costs.

A de-rating in real time

For the thousands of workers who make Hollywood the dream factory it’s known as around the world, the numbers are brutal. Production measured in Los Angeles shoot days is plunging, down from 36,792 in 2022 to just 19,694 in 2025, according to FilmLA research. 

Around 41,000 workers exited the region’s film and TV workforce between 2022 and 2024—some voluntarily, many not. The industry that once guaranteed steady work for writers, grips, editors, costumers, and craftspeople—as well as the actors, directors, and other celebrities who will walk the red carpet tonight—is fraying, and with it the informal apprenticeship system that trained the next generation. A show that once would have shot on a Burbank soundstage now quietly decamps to Atlanta, Dublin, or Budapest.

When the dream factory unbundles

The Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter famously cited Hollywood as one of the world’s great industry clusters, alongside Silicon Valley. The value of such clusters isn’t just the hard infrastructure; it’s the constant collisions of people and ideas in one place. When productions scatter, those collisions become rarer.

Great films will still be made, and some will still win Oscars. But they are less likely to emerge from Los Angeles—and more likely to be the product of a distributed, cost-optimized network that treats Hollywood as a logo, not a location.

Meanwhile, the strategic response from legacy studios has tilted toward mergers, asset sales, and “synergies” rather than new investment in Hollywood itself. That may please investors, but it does little to rebuild the local production base that made the town an economic powerhouse. When the key lever is cutting costs instead of greenlighting more work, the cluster’s flywheel spins in reverse.

The dream factory hasn’t vanished. It has been unbundled—and Hollywood is learning what it feels like when the world’s most famous cluster starts to come apart. On Sunday, the Oscars will sell the fantasy that the town at the center of the show is also the center of the business. The Best Picture slate says otherwise.

For more on the decline of Hollywood’s industry cluster, read Geoff Colvin’s feature explaining how it happened.

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Relationships are hard. They require vulnerability and a high tolerance for the friction associated with navigating what you want while mediating the needs of someone else. But for Gen Z, those early romantic trials—and the social calluses they build—are increasingly absent.

Only about 56% of Gen Z enter adulthood having engaged in a romantic relationship, compared to 75% of members of older generations, according to a survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life.

Without those tough conversations and negotiations, Gen Z is showing up to their first day of work unprepared to face the challenges of the office, according to Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University whose research focuses on communication between employees and bosses. 

“What seemed like an obvious norm before, how to talk to the boss, what time you need to show up,” she told Fortune, “this younger generation doesn’t have ground rules for.”

It’s not just dating. Gen Z is socializing less. They’re drinking less, attending fewer parties, and engaging in fewer face-to-face interactions than any generation before them. The COVID pandemic and the social media era have ushered in something more stark than what author Robert Putnam depicted in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Much of Gen Z has lost the tools necessary for developing the social acumen needed to navigate the complexities and friction present in the modern office. 

While there are other factors involved, West said her research found there’s a direct link between the decline in romantic relationships and workplace performance.

“Those skills, like the ability for people to actually do those well in their relationship, directly predicts how good you are at them at work,” she said.

A February 2025 study on the connection between loneliness and workplace performance also found that when someone lacks the social skills and support that come from close relationships, they’re more likely to feel lonely, less likely to be productive, and less prepared to handle the modern office.

And that’s a growing problem, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates Gen Z—those born between 1996 and 2012—will comprise nearly 30% of the U.S. workforce by 2030. That’s about 50 million people. 

Growing up without friction

West, who authored the book Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You, said there’s an array of factors impacting Gen Z’s social abilities in the workforce. For one, they’ve grown up in an era where online communication has become the norm, crowding out in-person socialization.

Another factor: overparenting. According to career platform Zety, 1 in 5 Gen Z candidates are bringing mom or dad to their job interview. And some parents are even hopping in on salary negotiations.

All of this is causing issues for Gen Z when it comes to some of the most fundamental tasks associated with the workplace, according to West. For example, it affects how young workers ask a boss for a raise or request PTO.

“You learn a lot of skills in those early relationships that you then leverage in the workplace,” she said. “Negotiation is a huge one, and so is compromise.”

She said relationship-building—typically the romantic kind but also platonic ones—helps people develop other critical skills, such as handling uncomfortable conversations, managing anxiety, and navigating difficult social dynamics.

“It’s the close relationship and the difficulty that comes along with developing a new relationship with someone where you have to navigate all kinds of potential discomfort,” she said. 

Generational clashes

This often shows up in the office as a lack of clear communication. Gen Zers may opt to email their boss than to have face-to-face interactions about challenges, according to West.

It also means many Gen Zers have used AI as a crutch to resolve conflicts. More than half of Gen Z view ChatGPT as a coworker or assistant, according to a 2025 survey from Resume.org. And about one-third of Gen Z rely on AI for advice about relationships or difficult life decisions.

“Older generations get very frustrated by that behavior and then they maybe lash out a bit at it,” West said. “It ends up exacerbating this problem.”

The communication lapses and other antisocial workplace behaviors are issues that both older and younger workers need to address, according to West. She suggests that bridging the gap requires a mutual reset where bosses make implicit office norms explicitly clear to younger workers.

“Both sides need to move,” she said. “The older generation needs to work on that clear communication and that reset, and the younger generation needs to work on the willingness to learn.”

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If you’re burned out, stuck in a toxic job, and too financially stretched to just quit, TikTok has a suggestion: Take medical leave. Instead of quiet quitting or burning through PTO, a growing corner of the internet is advising workers to take up to 12 weeks off—fully protected and, depending on your benefits, even paid.

“If you have a full-time job with benefits and you are really struggling with your mental health, take FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act),” one TikToker, @lexi.inks, told her followers in a viral video. 

The former kindergarten teacher took FMLA during a period of severe mental health crisis, enrolling in a 10-week intensive therapy program that she says “literally saved my life.” 

Under FMLA, eligible full-time employees in the U.S. can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year for a serious health condition—and crucially, that includes burnout and mental health. In the U.K., workers can use Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) for up to 28 weeks. 

And some workers say they’re even getting paid while they decompress and job hunt. Lexi, for example, claimed short-term disability allowance while she was off—and by the time she was due to return to work 12 weeks later, she’d had another job lined up.  

But others (like this TikToker) are openly admitting to abusing the system and using medical leave as bonus PTO days.

Using medical leave as a vacation might raise red flags, says HR

Seven weeks into medical leave for her mental health, one TikTok user filmed herself hiking picturesque mountains. Her comment section sparked outrage. But she’s not alone—many of these videos are full of workers treating the FMLA less as a mental health resource and more as a workplace loophole to legally buy more time off.

As one TikToker put it: “Take the FMLA, take the disability, take you a break… There’s so many people out here who are going on FMLA and using that time as like a nonpaid PTO vacation.”

And according to a HR consultant who weighed in, what they’re doing isn’t technically illegal. Just because someone looks okay on the outside—and is posting from a beautiful nature trail on TikTok—doesn’t actually mean they weren’t genuinely struggling when they filed.

“Very generally, you can take vacations and actually have fun even if you’re on FMLA,” the creator @hr_explained explains. “If you take FMLA because you have mental health struggles or you just had a baby or many other reasons, you are allowed to have fun. You’re allowed to take a vacation, and it is not considered FMLA abuse.” 

The only time it would raise a red flag with HR, she says, is if your leave reason and your activity are obviously incompatible—if you claimed you’d broken your leg, for instance, and then posted a skiing video. That would raise eyebrows and invite an investigation from your employer.

FMLA does not fix a toxic workplace

To be clear: taking FMLA for genuine mental health reasons is entirely legitimate. The law has covered mental health conditions since its inception in 1993. Burnout, severe anxiety, or stress caused directly by a toxic workplace can qualify, as long as a healthcare provider signs off. 

Creator @theanonymousemployee, whose video on FMLA and toxic workplaces has racked up over 101,000 likes, stresses this point.

“If your job is causing severe stress, anxiety, (or) burnout—and your healthcare provider agrees—FMLA may be an option for you to protect your job while you take some time off or while you update your résumé and go look for something,” she says. “FMLA does not fix the toxic workplace but it can give you that space and that time to breathe, to heal, to plan without the fear of immediate termination. It’s going to protect you for the time off, it’s not about being weak or lazy or trying to scam the system—that’s not what it’s about.”

Her advice: document everything, see your healthcare provider, and know your rights before your body (or mental health) makes the decision for you.

Her advice resonated. One commenter on @theanonymousemployee’s video summed up how it played out for them: “I took FMLA from a toxic job for 2 months, came back with 2 weeks’ notice and a new job!”

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Americans are all in on spending time outdoors, and the economy, at least until recently, loves it. 

The business of the American outdoors has evolved from a pastime for the adventurous to a veritable economic juggernaut, one that in 2024 led to $1.3 trillion in economic output and supported 5.2 million jobs, according to numbers released last week by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). 

But that was two years ago. While figures for 2025 won’t be published until later this year, the outdoor recreation industry was one of many caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cost-slashing agenda. In targeted budget and staffing cuts, the administration sharply reduced funding for a range of agencies involved in the outdoor economy, including the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service. 

Those cuts, combined with mass staff departures and the dismantling of visitor management systems, have set the outdoor economy on a much more challenging trajectory, experts say. It’s a scenario that could lead to punishing trickle-down effects for the small businesses and residents who rely on people wanting to see the great outdoors, as the economic engines that power large parts of rural America get stripped for parts.

“Many local businesses have built up an entire economic development strategy tied to outdoor recreation and access to public lands,” Megan Lawson, an economist at the independent research group Headwaters Economics, told Fortune.

“These cuts to the public sector mean there’s a very real risk they are going to be threatening to all these private sector businesses too,” she said.

A trillion dollar success story

In 2024, outdoor recreation accounted for 2.4% of U.S. GDP, according to the BEA data, as Americans flocked to trails, waterways, and campsites in record numbers. That year, in fact, U.S. national parks posted a record number of visitors.

That growth story was more important in some states than others. In rural states, such as Montana, Wyoming, and Vermont, outdoor recreation contributed to at least 4.7% of GDP. In Hawaii, the state where outdoor recreation figured most prominently into GDP, it accounted for a whopping 6.1% of economic output and 51,000 jobs, nearly 8% of the state’s employed labor force. 

The BEA calculates the outdoor recreation economy in broad terms, including everything from the economic output generated by renting a mountain bike for a day to the impact of an outdoor concert. But access to America’s great outdoors is an economic powerhouse in its own right. In 2024, national parks alone accounted for $56.3 billion in output, 340,000 jobs, and $29 billion in receipts for local gateway regions, according to the National Park Service. Last year, outdoor recreation on public lands and waters added an average $351 million to the economy every day, according to the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, an industry group.

That spending tends to be a lifeline for local economies, Lawson said. Proximity to federally managed lands is also likely to be an indicator of greater economic health, according to a 2017 report from Headwaters Economics. It found rural counties in the West that contained more plots of federal lands averaged faster growth in population, employment, and income than in counties with smaller shares of such lands.

“2024 is a really interesting place to start,” Cassidy Jones, a program manager at the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association, told Fortune. “It was a record-setting year for visitation to America’s national parks, which really shows how much people love these places.”

Interest in national parks and the outdoors has surged since the pandemic, and revitalized many once-sleepy towns across the country. The high visitation numbers have strained resources in some communities struggling with overtourism, but for small businesses—including hotels, tour operators, and gear providers—America’s love for the outdoors has been an economic windfall.

Hitting the brakes

But the momentum of 2024 hit a wall shortly after Trump returned to the White House. In its early days, the administration moved quickly to shrink the federal footprint, including agencies managing America’s public lands. In February 2025, on a day some employees later dubbed the “Valentine’s Day massacre,” 1,000 probationary workers were terminated from the National Park Service in one of the administration’s first major actions.

By summer, the Park Service had lost 24% of its permanent workforce through a combination of forced resignations, buyouts, and a strict hiring freeze. The administration’s original 2026 budget proposal would have represented an even bigger blow, calling for a $1.2 billion cut to the National Park Service—more than one-third of its entire budget. The proposal was rejected by Congress in January, but last year’s cuts remain a burden for a national parks system that is understaffed and overworked, and it’s likely to be obvious to visitors.

“You start with 25% less staff, you’re not going to get the same park experience,” Jones said. “You won’t get the same offerings and programs about these places that need to be available, but now simply will not because of the lack of staff.”

The consequences for local economies could be severe, even for people not directly employed by the government. Parks can provide a significant and immediate boon to local employment, according to one 2023 study, which found that within four years, park designation can spark an up to 6% rise in incomes and 4% boost to employment in neighboring counties.

“It’s existential. I don’t think we can overstate the dependence of these small businesses in gateway communities on the visitors to national parks,” Lawson said.

Despite Congress rejecting the Trump Administration’s larger budget cut proposal, 2026 promises to be another difficult year for the outdoors and the businesses that rely on it. Visitation in many ways relies on marketing and the image parks are able to project, Lawson said, but the less-than-stellar narrative around America’s outdoors over the past year is starting to show. National parks greeted 323 million recreational visitors in 2025, the Service announced this week, almost 9 million fewer than in 2024.

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Long before Nicole Bernard Dawes’ brands were lining the aisles of thousands of grocery stores, she got her start in business wheeling around baked goods in a little red wagon. The two-time founder discovered her passion for entrepreneurship as a kid selling $1 cookies to small businesses.

“My first foray into this universe was when I was 12. My best friend and I had a cookie company, and we had customers” Dawes tells Fortune. “I actually sold to local delis in my town, which is kind of wild that was even allowed.”

Over the course of one summer, their cookie operation brought in $500: a fortune in the eyes of a kid, but chump change compared to Dawes’ future success selling her organic tortilla chip brand Late July, which reeled in $100 million in annual sales. Her pre-teen business wasn’t a smashing financial success like her later ventures, but the experience did teach her about company costs, how to sell a product, and different ways to market. 

Luckily, the then 12-year-old also had a strong mentor to guide her first operation; Dawes’ father, the late Steve Bernard, founded $4.87 billion brand Cape Cod potato chips back in 1980. Unfazed by her adolescence, he took her dream seriously, teaching her how to structure the costs of goods, price a product fairly, and above all else, bake a quality treat for customers. It was a formative summer job that set her up for success in helping turn around her father’s legendary snack business, and launching two of her own brands. 

“My dad was very interested [in] me in learning the business. When I was a little kid, he would sit down and, like, show me a [profit and loss statement],” Dawes says. “To this day, I bake good cookies. I’m a great cookie baker.”

Working at her dad’s company to becoming a two-time founder

Dawes was destined to shake up the food and beverage industry. Born to a mother who ran a health-food store, and a father who created a billion-dollar chip empire, her entire childhood revolved around the world of snacking—and how to make it better. 

“I was only a child, guided by what my father saw in Cape Cod potato chips, and the idea of recreating categories,” Dawes explains. “You end up with a kid like me who then spends their entire career trying to recreate all the products that I couldn’t have as a child.”

However, her love for entrepreneurship didn’t come into full bloom until years later. After graduating from Tulane University with a degree in economics, she landed a job as a management consultant for food and beverage clients. It was a joyless, short-lived career, Dawes explains, and she quickly ditched the gig to help revive her dad’s ailing business. At the time, Bernard had just bought it back from Anheuser-Busch, which had divested from the company almost “overnight,” Dawes explains. Cape Cod chips was left without its manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.

“It all timed out,” Dawes says. “There really wasn’t time for worrying about anything but getting this brand back.”

Four years into her work at Cape Cod chips, her father sold his company once again to snack food company Lance. But instead of sticking around for a new era of ownership, Dawes decided it was time to forge her own path. 

In 2003, Dawes launched Late July while pregnant with her first child. Now, the organic non-GMO tortilla chip brand is lining the aisles of major grocery chains including Target, Whole Foods, Kroger, and Walmart. Over the span of a decade, the $100 million kitchen-counter operation grew into a massive business, with Campbell’s acquiring a majority stake in 2014, and eventually completing the acquisition of Late July in 2018.

And it didn’t take long for Dawes to set her sights on creating Nixie: a zero-sugar, sustainably packaged soda line offering flavors from cola and root beer, to ginger ale and cream soda. She launched the beverage brand shortly after Late July was acquired, and over the eight years since, Nixie has staked a claim in a competitive market alongside businesses like Olipop and Poppi. 

Nixie raised nearly $27 million in funding in 2025, and its products are sold at over 11,000 major grocers like Whole Foods, Sprouts, Safeway, and Ralph’s—even on Amazon and Instacart. The company’s cream soda was recently awarded the best new organic beverage at the Organic Night Out Awards Natural Products Expo. And just last month, the brand released two new flavors: cherry cola and strawberry cream.

Dawes leans on other female founders as a sounding board

When it comes to entrepreneurship, Dawes has decades of skin in the game—but that doesn’t mean she has all the answers. The Nixie founder still leans on a circle of professional confidants in navigating new heights of success in the food and beverage space. She advises other budding founders to embrace mentors and industry peers as powerful career resources.

“I just need a sounding board sometimes,” Dawes says. “It’s never too early to start building a really good network of peers, in addition to mentors. But over the years, I think I’ve leaned on my peers more.”

Dawes has 20 female founders at her fingertips—just one text message away. And with so few women launching and leading beverage companies like Nixie, these connections are even more essential. Dawes explains they can all relate to the grind of running their own businesses, raising kids, and trying to squeeze in some time with friends in between: a connection that has been her “most invaluable resource over the years.” And she’s hoping to bring more women into the fold, even at her own company.

“I want to encourage as many young women to get out there,” Dawes says. “A lot of people [who] come to work for Nixie hope to one day start their own companies.”

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“We know where most of them are. We got our eye on all of them, I think,” President Trump told the world media this week. The commander in chief was speaking about the possibility of Iranian sleeper cells being embedded and activated in the United States.

The concept of sleeper cells—groups of organised, foreign spies living unremarkable lives until directed into action—may, in the public imagination, feel like something from the movies or the pages of a book. The same goes for lone wolves, individuals who operate without direct command or support from a larger organization.

The president speaking to this threat on the tarmac in front of Air Force One crystallized the long-held reality for defense and counterterrorism experts. Sources who spoke to Fortune are of the opinion that, out of sheer desperation, the Iranian regime may search for a way to damage the U.S., Israel, or their allies, in a bid for retribution.

The Islamic state’s losses are significant: The U.S. said it had targeted the nation’s ballistic missile strikes, navy ships and submarines, and command and control centers. As Trump puts it, “there’s practically nothing left” to target. More than 1,400 Iranians have died, according to casualties calculated by Al Jazeera. An ongoing military investigation has also determined that faulty U.S. targeting data resulted in a deadly Tomahawk strike on a girls’ elementary school, instead of a nearby military base.

The U.S. and Israel, motivated to action by national security fears, have lost 26, according to Al Jazeera at the time of writing. Trump has claimed the Iranian regime has tried to assassinate him twice, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth adding the U.S. has been aware “for a long time” that the Iranian regime is targeting high-ranking U.S. officials. Experts told Fortune that Iran and the U.S. have long targeted each other—and fundamentally do not understand each other.

Wilbur Ross, President Trump’s former commerce secretary, told Fortune that while it’s “very hard to imagine” that Iran will be able to rebuild as a major geopolitical threat, factions within the nation might “resort to activating whatever sleeper cells they have in various countries, including the U.S., to do one-off things, maybe something like the World Trade Center.” Even the suggestion to attempt another 9/11 would shake intelligence and defense departments across the globe.

Sleeper cells in the American imagination

While some defense experts maintain sleeper cells have long been embedded in U.S. society, Reuel Marc Gerecht argued the notion is “probably a bit dated.” Gerecht, a former Iranian targets officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who now works for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told Fortune that if sleeper cells existed, they would have been activated in the past. More likely, he explained, is that the Iranian regime may rely on foreign criminal networks—as demonstrated by the attempted murder of human rights activist Masih Alinejad, using two Russian criminals in Brooklyn in 2022—to target individual dissidents.

“We don’t need to worry about deep-cover Iranian sleeper cells like you might see in Hollywood,” echoed Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in Iran and the broader Middle East. “When the Iranians operate in the United States, they often operate by tapping into existing criminal networks.”

This week, reports surfaced that the FBI had sent a memo to California police departments saying it had acquired unverified information that Iran may attempt to launch drone strikes on the West Coast. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted that the intelligence was unproven, writing on X: “No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did.” A White House official said the entire administration is closely monitoring all intelligence, and is vigilant in deterring any potential threats should they arise.

Rubin, who spent time with the Taliban researching the organization prior to 9/11, is more concerned about “innocuous blackmail” of individuals being coerced into logistically aiding foreign powers. Gerecht believes lone wolves pose more danger, arguing their isolation from existing networks means law enforcement sometimes relies on luck to identify the threat. “I would be willing to bet money that all the usual suspects are being looked at now,” Gerecht added. “Whether they maintain that surveillance for how long, that’s a different issue.”

Iran’s brain drain

In a military sense, the U.S. campaign in Iran is going as well as anyone could expect, observed Secretary Ross. Michael Allen, managing director of Beacon Global Strategies, is inclined to agree, saying the counterterrorism strategy for the U.S. is to “keep a boot on [the Iranian regime’s] throat, so that they’re unable to do anything other than figure out how to survive, instead of thinking about how to pull off complex external attacks on the West.”

Allen, who worked in the White House for eight years on the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council, told Fortune: “I can’t ever rule it out … so I’m not saying that everything’s been eraticated, but … the strategy has to be with these issues to keep smothering it, to keep it down as much as possible.”

Having worked its way through high-priority targets, reports are emerging that the U.S. is now striking police stations. The infrastructure disarray comes on top of what Gerecht referred to as a “brain drain” in Iran. “If you don’t start with a decent bench, you’re not gonna make the bench better,” Gerecht said. “It’s one thing to want to do something and then it’s another to be able to do something.”

Wary but not panicked

The Iranian state knows it cannot “win” a war with the U.S. So its strategy is likely to escalate costs for the U.S. and its allies, forcing them to cease hostilities, thus leaving the regime in place.

“I think it’s consistent with [the state’s] strategy to try and launch something,” said Allen. “Their overall strategy is, of course, to survive, to kill Americans … but all for the purpose of forcing the United States to say: ‘You know what, the costs have gotten too high.’” 

Reports that the Iranian regime had begun attacking its neighboring states means it has burned some bridges, added the sources, indirectly helping the U.S. “keep everyone on side and rowing in the same direction,” noted Allen. “It indirectly helps the U.S., especially in the medium to long term.”

“The Iranian regime is always searching for revenge,” added Gerecht. “That was true before the American-Israeli air raids, and it’s just as true today.”

A question of context

The complexity of the Iranian nation has historically made it difficult for most foreign intelligence agencies to embed themselves there. Iran has five institutional languages compared to the U.S.’s one; three language families have given rise to more than 60 dialects. Moreover, though the exact makeup of Iran’s demographics is hard to decipher, in 2022 the country’s government undertook a headcount of undocumented Afghan nationals, of which 2.6 million were registered.

Israel’s intelligence-gathering in the Middle East is strong, the sources told Fortune, though Rubin argued that the analysis of this data may have created blind spots. Rubin, who previously taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, observed that intelligence gathering by Israel in Iran was, at first, built on the skills of immigrants who settled in the country from across the world: “The Israeli intelligence service had a granularity where they would understand the dialect of a local neighborhood, and would be able to understand on a street-by-street level how something works, allowing them to penetrate and also allowing them to understand these societies.”

However, a generation on, Rubin suggests that Israel’s experience in conflict with Arab communities has largely been with Palestine: “Without knowing it, [Israel] tends to filter all their understanding of Iran … through the Palestinians, but the Arabs aren’t monoliths—nor is the Middle East a monolith.”

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Picture this: you’re running out of the house to go see Blazing Saddles at the drive-in with friends. You hop in your car, turn on the ignition, flick on the radio and Elton John’s rhythmic vocals flow through the air as “Bennie and the Jets” starts playing. It’s the perfect kind of night, save for one issue: your car is a little low on gas, and it means you’re going to wake up at 4 am just to wait on a gas line for hours to fuel up, if you’re lucky.

For most of us, a gas crisis is an abstraction. We know prices go up. We complain. We maybe drive less. What we don’t know—perhaps because some of us never lived it—is the other kind of gas crisis, where the price doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to buy. The kind where your license plate number determined what days you were allowed to leave home. The kind where a green, yellow, or red flag hanging outside a gas station was the most important piece of information in your day. That America actually existed, and it may be closer than we think.

Gas prices in the U.S. have jumped nearly 11% since this time last year. The conflict with Iran has pinched the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which about 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas travels every day—while Qatar, which produces 20% of global LNG, has halted production entirely. For most Americans, the immediate instinct is to watch the number on the pump climb and feel vaguely powerless. But for people over 65, the current moment carries a different kind of dread.

What happened during the 1970s gas crisis?

In October 1973, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced an embargo on the United States in retaliation for American military support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. But they didn’t just raise prices: they cut supply. Within weeks, gas prices at the pump surged 40% in a single month. By mid-1974, the effective price had tripled, and fuel availability had collapsed.

Let’s go back to that night out with friends. You offer to pick up two of them on the way to the drive-in (carpooling, which first become prominent during the rationing days of World War II, had already become popularized by this point, doubly so because of the gas crisis). The drive-in looks a little sparse; you can’t tell if that’s because people carpooled or not. Either way, you make it through the Mel Brooks classic, get home and set your alarm for 4 am.

Before it’s even light out, you’re back in your car the next morning, hoping there’s enough gas to get to the nearest station with a green flag. To know whether a station had fuel before committing to an hours-long wait, you learn to read the flags. Green means gas available. Yellow means rationing in effect—you’d get some, but not a full tank. Red means don’t bother. 

You pass by your local spot, but no one’s there as a red flag billows in the wind. You drive to the next, hoping to beat the line, which has already stretched down the road. Turning off the engine to save fuel, you shift into neutral, and push your car forward a few feet every few minutes. You sit like that for an hour, then two, then three. Finally, three cars away from the pump, a station attendant hangs a handwritten sign: Out of Gas.​

As gas lines started getting longer, states started rolling out odd-even license plate rationing, where the last digit of your plate determined which days you could buy gas. Odd numbers meant you bought on odd-numbered calendar days, even on even. Some states capped each purchase at $1 worth of fuel (about $8.47 today), translating to roughly four gallons. People made two or three of these rationing-day trips per week just to keep their tanks half full. If you forgot your day, you waited 48 hours, and hoped your station still had supply.

In addition to the above measures, this is right around the time the U.S. imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit to increase fuel efficiency, and when federal fuel economy standards were enacted, increasing the average car efficiency by 81% between 1975 and 1988. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was also created in 1975 as an emergency buffer.

What about today?

This does seem like a repetition of the 1970s: a Middle East conflict disrupts a critical oil-producing region, global supply tightens, and American consumers bear the cost. But there are meaningful differences. The U.S. was a net oil importer in 1973. Today, the country is the world’s largest oil producer.

That sounds like we shouldn’t be affected (or at least, that much), but oil is a global market, and gas prices follow the international benchmark, Brent crude. And while the U.S. has plenty of oil, many domestic refineries that churn out gasoline are geared for oil that’s imported, not the light, sweet crude that’s plentiful in the Permian Basin.

Although rationing isn’t making a comeback to the U.S. just yet, Myanmar has already reimposed odd-even driving rules. You also don’t have to go as far back as the 1970s to remember what a gas crisis felt like. When Superstorm Sandy hit the Northeast in October 2012, it knocked out seven petroleum terminals in New Jersey and New York and crippled the distribution infrastructure needed to move gas from storage to pumps. Within just a few days, only about a quarter of New York City gas stations were operational. New Jersey saw lines stretching up to 1.5 miles. People slept in their cars overnight to hold their spot. In New Jersey, odd-even rationing was imposed almost immediately, while New York City and Long Island implemented the practice a week later. The gas crisis lasted 21 days, and was due to a storm, not a global geopolitical event.

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What does it take to lead one of the world’s largest financial marketplaces? For Adena Friedman, chief executive of Nasdaq, the answer has been equal parts curiosity, calculated risk-taking, and a career shaped by unexpected turns.

As CEO of Nasdaq, Friedman leads a workforce of roughly 10,000 employees worldwide at one of the world’s largest exchange operators, home to many of the globe’s most prominent technology companies.

“I really come to work every day with the right attitude; I have a lot of energy,” she said during a fireside chat with David Rubenstein at a dinner hosted by the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., on March 11.

Her career journey reflects that mindset. Friedman first joined Nasdaq in 2000 as executive vice president of corporate strategy and data products and later became chief financial officer in 2009. Two years later, a cold call from a headhunter redirected her trajectory.

“They asked, ‘What would you think about working for the best private equity firm in the country to help them go public?’” she recalled.

That call led her to The Carlyle Group, the private equity firm co-founded by Rubenstein, where she served as chief financial officer and managing director. In that role, she helped guide the firm through its 2012 initial public offering.

While she enjoyed helping the firm go public, Friedman said the experience clarified the type of role she preferred.

The role of a CFO is much more about risk management, Friedman said. “I realized I really liked risk-taking more than risk management,” she said.

When then-Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld began planning his succession, the exchange invited Friedman back as president and chief operating officer in 2014, with the possibility that she could eventually lead the company. In 2017, she stepped into the chief executive role, becoming the first woman to lead the global exchange operator.

When asked whether she had encountered gender bias, Friedman said she never experienced discrimination within Nasdaq. But early in her career, while working in male-dominated trading environments, she said she felt the need to establish credibility quickly.

“I remember thinking to myself that when I got in the room, within five minutes, I wanted them to forget I was a woman and just focus on what I had to say,” she said.

Her strategy centered on preparation and confidence.

She explained: “You walk in with an attitude like, ‘I have something worth saying. I have expertise in this area. I want to make sure they are willing and able to listen.’ And it did work. It worked really well.”

Friedman credits her mother with showing her what confidence in action looks like. “My mom had been a stay-at-home mom until I was nine, and then she decided to go back to law school,” Friedman explained. “She went to the University of Maryland School of Law and became a lawyer when I was 11.”

Her mother later became a partner—the first woman to do so at her firm.

“She became this incredibly confident woman who could take on anything,” Friedman said.

That example left a lasting impression. Throughout her career, Friedman said confidence and preparation have remained essential tools.

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The US Embassy in Baghdad told Americans on Saturday to leave Iraq immediately following a series of attacks targeting US nationals.

“US citizens should leave Iraq now,” the Embassy said in a social media statement. “US citizens choosing to remain in Iraq are strongly encouraged to reconsider in light of the significant threat posed by Iran-aligned terrorist militia groups.”

The statement comes as the Iran war enters its third week, with Tehran continuing to attack neighboring states with drones and missiles in response to US and Israeli strikes. 

Iran-aligned militias have repeatedly attacked the International Zone in central Baghdad, the embassy said. The area around the Erbil International Airport and the Erbil consulate have also been subject to repeated attacks, according to the statement, in apparent retaliation for US-Israeli strikes against Iran. 

“Do not attempt to come to the embassy in Baghdad or the consulate general in Erbil in light of the ongoing risk of missiles, drones, and rockets in Iraqi airspace,” the embassy said.

The embassy said the US government will provide assistance to Americans trying to leave Iraq over land because Iraqi airspace is closed.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened broadcasters with cancellation of their licenses if they did not “correct course” on news coverage.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr said in a social media post Saturday. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Carr posted his warning on top of a post from President Donald Trump complaining about coverage of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also criticized news outlets for war coverage that he said “makes the president look bad.”

It’s Carr’s latest threat against television broadcasters after Trump has expressed displeasure with coverage, or with a particular reporter or late-night talk-show host. Trump has suggested that networks should lose their broadcast license due to unfair coverage. Such licenses don’t apply to cable, streaming or print outlets.

The FCC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Even before Trump began his second term, he urged the FCC to “impose the maximum fines and punishment” on CBS for alleged “unlawful and illegal behavior” when it edited a 60 Minutesinterview with 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

In September, Carr suggested that local stations risked their broadcast licenses for airing ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! after the late-night host accused Trump supporters of using conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder to “score political points.”

Read More: ‘60 Minutes’ Chief Caught Up in Trump Fight Leaves Program

The FCC doesn’t directly license the national networks themselves, and therefore can’t bring enforcement actions against them directly. Individual local stations — including those owned by the networks and independently owned affiliates — do hold FCC licenses and are legally responsible for complying with the agency’s rules.

Revoking licenses for content the administration doesn’t like would be an unprecedented expansion of the FCC’s powers and some attempts have been successfully challenged in court.

Read More: How Trump’s FCC Is Policing Speech on TV Networks: QuickTake

After Carr’s remarks on Kimmel, Nexstar Media Group Inc., the largest owner of local TV stations in the US, pulled the show from its 32 ABC stations. Sinclair Inc. also dropped the show from its ABC affiliates. Both companies restored the program to their stations in late September.

The FCC launched an equal-time investigation into ABC’s daytime talk show The View after it had Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico as a guest in February when he was competing in the primary. CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert said his network said he couldn’t air an interview with Talarico out of concern that Carr would consider it a violation of federal fairness rules. 

Colbert posted the interview on YouTube, where it got more than 9 million views.

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A pilot from Alabama had just been promoted to major in January and had been deployed less than a week when the refueling aircraft he was aboard crashed in Iraq this week, killing him and five others, his brother-in-law said Saturday.

Alex Klinner, 33, leaves behind three small children: 7-month-old twins and a 2-year-old son, his brother-in-law, James Harrill, said Saturday while confirming his death.

“It’s kind of heartbreaking to say: He was just a really good dad and really loved his family a lot — like a lot,” Harrill said.

Also aboard the aircraft was an Ohio man whose loved ones remembered him for his smile, his parents said.

The Pentagon hasn’t yet revealed the identities of the six, but families began revealing who had died Saturday.

The aircraft was in “friendly” airspace, supporting operations against Iran, when an unspecified incident involving another aircraft occurred, according to U.S. Central Command. The other plane landed safety, U.S. military officials said.

The Ohio Air National Guard’s 121st Air Refueling Wing said in a Facebook post late Friday that three of the dead were airmen who served in the Columbus-based unit.

“We share in the sorrow of their loved ones, and we must not forget the valuable contributions these Airmen made to their country and the impact they have left on our organization,” according to the 121st Air Refueling Wing’s post.

A new father and a new major

Klinner, an eight-year U.S. Air Force veteran from Birmingham, Alabama, had just moved with his family into a new home, his wife, Libby Klinner, said in an Instagram post mourning his death.

An outdoorsman who enjoyed hiking, Klinner was also ready to help others. When Harrill last saw him in January, Klinner had shoveled Harrill’s vehicle out of the snow during a family wedding.

“Alex was one of those guys that had this steady command about him,” said Harrill, who helped set up a GoFundMe site for Klinner’s family. “He was literally one of the most kindest, giving people.”

Libby Klinner said in a post that her heart is broken for their children, who will grow up not knowing their father.

“They won’t get to see firsthand the way he would jump up to help in any way he could,” she wrote. “They won’t see how goofy and funny he was. They won’t witness his selflessness, the way he thought about everyone else before himself. They won’t get to feel the deep love he had for them.”

A man with a ready smile

Sgt. Tyler Simmons of Columbus, Ohio, also was among six service members who died Thursday in the crash of a KC-135 Stratotanker, his mother, Cheryl Simmons, confirmed on Saturday. Cheryl Simmons said she was making funeral plans for her son.

In a statement obtained by WCMH-TV in Columbus, Tyler Simmons’ family said it was saddened beyond measure to hear of the fatal crash.

“Tyler’s smile could light up any room, his strong presence would fill it. His parents, grandparents, family and friends are grief stricken for the loss of life,” they said.

The refueling aircraft is a mainstay in the US military

U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has said the crash occurred on a combat mission but was over “friendly” territory in western Iraq. Military officials said it is being investigated and was “not due to hostile or friendly fire.”

The KC-135 aircraft refuels other planes in midair, allowing them to fly longer distances and sustain operations without landing. The plane can also be used to transport wounded personnel and conduct surveillance missions, according to military experts.

The Congressional Research Service says the Air Force last year had 376 KC-135s, including 151 on active duty, 163 in the Air National Guard and 62 in the Air Force Reserve. It has been in service for more than 60 years.

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U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright directed a Texas-based oil and gas company Friday to restore operations in waters off southern California that were damaged by a 2015 oil spill, invoking the Defense Production Act.

Restoring Sable Offshore Corp.’s Santa Ynez unit and pipeline off Santa Barbara aims to address supply disruption risks, according to a department news release. The unit includes three rigs in federal waters, offshore and onshore pipelines, and the Las Flores Canyon Processing Facility. The facility can produce about 50,000 barrels of oil per day and would replace nearly 1.5 million barrels of foreign crude each month, officials said.

“The Trump Administration remains committed to putting all Americans and their energy security first,” Wright said in a statement. “Unfortunately, some state leaders have not adhered to those same principles, with potentially disastrous consequences not just for their residents, but also our national security. Today’s order will strengthen America’s oil supply and restore a pipeline system vital to our national security and defense, ensuring that West Coast military installations have the reliable energy critical to military readiness.”

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reverse former President Joe Biden’s ban on future offshore oil drilling on the East and West coasts. A federal court later struck down Biden’s order to withdraw 625 million acres of federal waters from oil development.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned the move.

“This is an attempt to illegally restart a pipeline whose operators are facing criminal charges and prohibited by multiple court orders from restarting,” Newsom said in a statement. “California will not stand by while the Trump administration attempts to sacrifice our coastal communities, our environment, and our $51 billion coastal economy. The Trump administration and Sable are defying multiple court orders, and we will see them back in court.”

In January, California sued the federal government for approving Houston-based Sable’s plans to restart pipelines along the coast. Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta said at the time that the state oversees the pipelines through Santa Barbara and Kern counties and the federal government “has no right to usurp California’s regulatory authority.”

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On a Friday afternoon in March, nearly 1,000 people lined up outside Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen to get a piece of software installed on their laptops. Engineers from the company’s cloud unit helped students, retirees, and office workers deploy OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent built by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger.

Over the past month, major Chinese cloud providers debuted their own version of OpenClaw, local governments dangled grants to startups that build OpenClaw apps, and a cottage industry sprung up helping users install the open-source framework.

China’s users are now trying a “raise a lobster”, a phrase referring OpenClaw’s red lobster logo. It’s proved to be a shot in the arm for China’s AI startups, which could now see a surge of usage. In early February, Chinese AI models for the first time surpassed U.S. models in share of tokens—units of data processed by AI—among the top nine models on AI marketplace OpenRouter, according to HSBC.

The OpenClaw craze also aligns with China’s embrace of open-source AI, a strategy that has helped build labs’ reputation among the developer community and slowly helped models work their way into global business. 

What is OpenClaw?

Steinberger released OpenClaw on GitHub last November, where it quickly caught on among AI developers and hobbyists. OpenClaw is what is called “an agentic harness.” It isn’t an AI model itself—a user has to pick a model from an AI company to serve as the agent’s brain. But OpenClaw consists of a set of instructions for how an AI agent should deconstruct a goal into a series of subtasks, protocols that allow a user to connect various software tools for the AI agent to use, and also a memory function that means the AI agent won’t forget what it has done so far. 

An OpenClaw agent runs locally on a user’s machine and connects to tools like messaging apps, email, calendars and other systems, making it easy for users to ask an AI agent to do useful things for them, like regularly check their email and automatically reply to certain messages, or make reservations on their behalf. Steinberger, who has a long history as an entrepreneur, has since been hired by OpenAI.

Over the past several weeks, China’s biggest cloud providers—Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, JD.com, and Baidu—have all embraced OpenClaw, or some spinoff of it. A flood of startups and big tech companies also released their own “Claw” frameworks: Tencent’s WorkBuddy, Minimax’s MaxClaw, MoonShot’s Kimi Claw, among others. 

Local governments joined in. Shenzhen’s Longgang district offered grants of up to 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) for “one-person companies,” or firms where the founder acts as sole shareholder. Wuxi, a city close to Shanghai, dangled up to 5 million yuan ($730,000) for OpenClaw-powered breakthroughs in robotics and industrial applications.

Those subsidies are landing in a market where users are eager to experiment with new AI. “Younger generations in Asia, and especially in China, are part of a high-tech adoption culture,” Jan Wuppermann, the head of service assurance, data and AI for NTT Data, said to Fortune. “There’s a mindset I often hear from everyday Chinese friends: It’s there anyway, I may as well use it.” 

In the West, OpenClaw’s popularity has been tempered by security concerns. AI agents can be vulnerable to “prompt injection” attacks, where a bad actor can plant malicious instructions on a website. OpenClaw agents have been tricked into uploading sensitive data, including financial information and crypto wallet keys; in other cases, agents have deleted emails and code libraries. 

OpenClaw is building upon a strong 2026 for China’s AI sector. Nearly every major Chinese AI lab has released updates to their open-source models, including Moonshot’s Kimi 2.5, Minimax’s M2.5 and Zhipu’s GLM-5. ByteDance’s new AI video-generation model, Seedance 2.0, also went viral after debuting at the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, one of China’s most widely-watched TV events. 

The shift to agentic AI is giving some Big Tech companies the opportunity to catch up with the nimble AI labs. Tencent is now working on a new AI agent that can be integrated with the company’s ubiquitous WeChat superapp, The Information reported on March 10, citing unnamed sources. Tencent’s AI efforts have currently proved less successful than its rivals Alibaba and ByteDance; Tencent’s chatbot, Yuanbao has just 109 million users, much smaller than ByteDance’s Doubao and its 315 million users, according to The Information.

The OpenClaw craze has helped the stock market fortunes of some Chinese AI companies. Tencent’s stock is up by 8.9% over the past week. MiniMax is up by 27.4% since the weekend; shares are now up by more than 600% from its IPO earlier this year.

Still, China’s AI startups have a long road to profitability. MiniMax released its 2025 earnings on March 2, giving investors the first look at what the financials of an AI lab look like. 

The answer? Expensive. 

The AI startup reported total revenue of $79 million, an increase of 159%. Over 70% of this revenue came from overseas markets, showing that MiniMax is finding traction outside of China. Yet the company still posted a net loss of $1.8 billion, in part thanks to research and development costs totaling $252 million.

Still, investors don’t seem to care. At one point last week, MiniMax was worth more than tech giant Baidu, despite the latter generating $18.5 billion in 2025 revenue, more than 230 times more than MiniMax. 

China’s open-source goes global

Chinese open-source models have quietly—and not so quietly—started to spread among global business. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky raised eyebrows last year when he admitted that the company used Alibaba’s open-source Qwen model to power its customer service agent. “It’s very good. It’s also fast and cheap,” he said. 

Last November, AI Singapore, the city-state’s national AI programme, adopted Qwen to build Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, a large language model optimized for Southeast Asian languages. Alibaba now claims the Qwen family of models has been downloaded over one billion times, and used by over 200,000 developers.

“You can see the attraction of open-weights models,” says Jeff Walters, who leads the Asia-Pacific tech practice for the Boston Consulting Group. “There may be a slight lag to how the latest frontier models might perform but, in a lot of situations, you don’t always need the best. ‘Good enough and cheap’ is sometimes the right tool to pull out of the toolbox”.

Using open-source also gives companies options, and doesn’t lock them into one particular provider—which may be useful for startups trying to navigate a constantly-changing world of regulations, export controls, and shifting alliances.

Still, open-source models shift the burden of running compute onto the user. “You can get narrowly excited about cost-per-token comparisons between a commercial model and an open-source model, but that’s only one part of the cost,” Walters cautions.​ 

Companies need to pay for their own processors, but there are hidden costs too. Wuppermann notes that “hidden costs, like security breaches and complexity, often aren’t measured, and instead show up in other dimensions, like extra headcount or longer time-to-market”. 

For Wuppermann, the decision to go open-source is mostly philosophical. “Those who have converted to open-source will always advocate open-source.”

China’s AI challenges

Even as OpenClaw and Chinese open-source models gain momentum, China’s AI ecosystem faces rising scrutiny over data security, intellectual property and Beijing’s own shifting priorities.

In February, Anthropic accused three Chinese firms—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—of trying to extract knowledge from its Claude model. OpenAI has also accused Chinese labs of conducting distillation attacks, or using U.S. models to help train Chinese ones. 

Oddly enough, the complaints may have ended up reinforcing the reputation of Chinese labs. Reaction to Anthropic’s accusations on social media were mixed, with some users noting that even if DeepSeek and others were engaging in “illicit” distillation, they were at least sharing their work—unlike Anthropic, which has kept its AI models closed-source.

China’s own commitment to open source might also be fraying at the edges. On March 3, Lin Junyang—the technical lead of Alibaba’s Qwen model and a driving force behind the company’s open-source strategy—suddenly announced his resignation.

Lin’s exit exposed tensions between Alibaba’s open-source ambitions and its push to commercialize flagship models. Local media reported the Qwen team disagreed with the goals of Alibaba leadership, and expressed frustration that cloud customers sometimes got access to compute before they did. (Alibaba has affirmed that it isn’t abandoning its open-source strategy)

Beijing might also try to dampen enthusiasm over OpenClaw. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that both government agencies and state-owned enterprises were warned against installing OpenClaw on work devices, citing security risks.  

Still, Chinese companies keep on releasing their own versions of OpenClaw. On March 12, Sensetime, once one of China’s most prominent AI firms, announced that it had integrated its office assistant “Office Raccoon” with OpenClaw. 

And local Chinese are finding ways to capitalize on the craze. Engineers have found a new business: Charging 500 yuan ($72) to install OpenClaw on-site. And if someone ends up getting cold feet over giving an AI agent access to their entire lives? They’ll charge you to uninstall it too.

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Iran issued an evacuation warning for three major ports in the United Arab Emirates on Saturday, including the busiest in the Middle East, openly threatening a neighboring country’s non-U.S. assets for the first time as its war with the U.S. and Israel entered its third week.

Iran said the U.S. had used “ports, docks and hideouts” in the UAE to launch strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island, without providing evidence. It urged people to evacuate areas where it said U.S. forces were sheltering.

Hours after the threat, there was no sign of an attack on Dubai’s Jebel Ali port — the Mideast’s busiest — or the Khalifa port in Abu Dhabi. But Associated Press images showed a fire at the third port, in Fujairah, caused by debris from an intercepted Iranian drone hitting an oil facility.

Iran says the US attacked from close to Dubai

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told MS NOW that the U.S. attacked Kharg Island and Abu Musa Island with low-range artillery from two locations in the UAE, Ras Al-Khaimah and a place “very close to Dubai,” calling that dangerous and saying Iran “will try to be careful not to attack any populated area” there.

Iran has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Arab Gulf neighbors during the war, but it said it was targeting U.S. assets, even as hits or attempts were reported on civilian ones such as airports and oil fields.

On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. “obliterated” military sites on Kharg Island, home to the main terminal handling Iran’s oil exports. He said oil infrastructure could be next if Tehran continues to interfere with ships’ passage through the Strait of Hormuz, where vessels are backed up and one-fifth of global oil supplies usually transit.

Iran’s parliamentary speaker has said strikes against the country’s oil infrastructure would provoke a new level of retaliation.

As global anxiety soars over oil prices and supplies, Trump said Saturday that he hopes China, France, Japan, South Korea, the U.K. and others send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz “open and safe.” Britain in response said it was discussing with allies a “range of options” to secure shipping.

Iran repeats threat against US-linked oil assets

On Saturday, Iran’s joint military command reiterated its threat to attack U.S.-linked “oil, economic and energy infrastructures” in the region if the Islamic Republic’s oil infrastructure is hit.

Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency said the Kharg Island strikes caused no damage to oil infrastructure. It said they targeted an air defense facility, a naval base, the airport control tower and an offshore oil company’s helicopter hangar.

U.S. Central Command said it destroyed naval mine storage facilities, missile storage bunkers and other military sites.

Israel earlier announced another wave of strikes in Iran targeting infrastructure, and said its air force had hit more than 200 targets in the last 24 hours, including missile launchers, defense systems and weapons production sites.

Marines and an assault ship will add to US forces

A U.S. official said Friday that 2,500 more Marines with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli were being sent to the Middle East, adding to the military’s largest buildup of warships and aircraft in the region in decades. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.

Marine Expeditionary Units can conduct amphibious landings but also specialize in bolstering security at embassies, evacuating civilians and providing disaster relief. The deployment doesn’t necessarily indicate that a ground operation will take place. The Wall Street Journal first reported the Marine deployment.

The Tripoli was spotted by commercial satellites sailing near Taiwan, putting it more than a week away from waters off Iran.

Earlier in the week, the Navy had 12 ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and eight destroyers, in the Arabian Sea. The total number of U.S. service members on the ground in the Middle East isn’t clear.

Another attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad

A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad on Saturday. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The embassy complex, one of the largest U.S. diplomatic facilities in the world, has been repeatedly targeted by rockets and drones fired by Iran-aligned militias.

There was no immediate comment from the embassy. On Friday, it renewed its Level 4 security alert for Iraq, warning that Iran and Iran-aligned militia groups have previously carried out attacks against U.S. citizens, interests and infrastructure and “may continue to target them.”

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s humanitarian crisis deepened, with over 800 people killed and 850,000 displaced as Israel launched waves of strikes against Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.

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Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick unveiled a robotics company for the food, mining and transport industries after being in stealth mode for eight years.

The new company is called Atoms and sprang from his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens.

“The whole idea was can you get a meal that’s prepared and delivered to you so efficiently that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store,” Kalanick said on the TBPN show on Friday. “Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.”

He also said that he’s on the verge of acquiring Pronto, a self-driving startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by former Uber colleague and Trump official Anthony Levandowski. The Information first reported the deal and said the company also has backing from Uber.

Kalanick was ousted as Uber CEO in 2017 via a shareholder revolt amid allegations that he ignored reports of sexual harassment at the company.

Google also sued Uber for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to autonomous driving. Levandowski was convicted but avoided prison after getting a pardon from President Donald Trump.

During his interview on TBPN, Kalanick acknowledged the challenge of running Uber during intense public scrutiny and “dealing with 100 headlines every day.”

“So I was just like, I gotta wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build,” he recalled. “So I went under the radar.”

But that also meant thousands of his employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn profiles. That’s despite choosing a purposely nondescript name, City Storage Systems, after previously toying with the idea of calling the company “Super.”

Instead, he decided to go “full underground, full stealth” which created some obstacles when recruiting talent to the startup. 

“You have a name like City Storage Systems, and it’s like, ‘so do you guys just have like these these boxes sitting in parking lots?’” Kalanick said.

But there are advantages to being in stealth for so long, he added. For one, he said he has the best recruiters in the world.

Flying under the radar also attracts a certain type of employee and contributes to a more progress-oriented, unselfish environment.

“What you get when you create a culture around that is you have you then build a culture of builders,” Kalanick explained. “You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it, which basically means emotional intelligence.”

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US President Donald Trump stepped up calls to reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz, saying warships will “hopefully” be sent to the area near Iran’s coast to help commercial vessels sail through safely.

His comments on Truth Social — which didn’t provide a timeline — came hours after he ordered a strike on military sites on Kharg Island, from which Iran exports almost all its oil, upping the ante in a Middle East war that’s raged for more than two weeks and shows little sign of easing.

The president said military facilities on the Persian Gulf island had been “obliterated,” adding that he chose not to hit oil infrastructure “for reasons of decency.” He threatened to do just that should Iran “do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz.”

“Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe,” he wrote in his latest post. He gave little detail beyond saying he hoped China, France, Japan, South Korea and the UK would also send warships.

He stated that even though Iran’s military was “already destroyed 100%,” it was “easy” for Tehran to continue threatening ships with drones, mines and short-range missiles. The US, he said, “will be bombing the hell out of” Iran’s shoreline to try to counter that.

Around the same time, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the strait — through which about a fifth of the world’s oil supplies normally flow — was only shut to ships from “enemies.”

Overnight and on Saturday, Israel and the US continued striking Iran, which in turn carried on attacking Arab Gulf states.

Roughly 3,750 people have been killed across the region since the war began on Feb. 28 with a US and Israeli bombing of Iran, according to tolls from governments and non-governmental organizations. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said more than 3,000 people were killed in the last two weeks in Iran. Lebanon’s government says around 700 people have died in Israeli attacks on the country in a parallel war the Jewish state is waging against Iran-backed Hezbollah. Dozens have died across the Gulf and in Israel, while the US has lost 13 servicemembers.

Iran, easily outpowered militarily by the US and Israel, is targeting neighboring states, as well as shipping and energy sites, in a bid to cause chaos in the region and oil and gas markets, hoping it puts pressure on Trump to end the fighting. The US leader is facing criticism at home as gasoline pump prices soar and with many political opponents saying he underestimated Iran’s response and resilience.

Uncertainty over the length of the war is mounting amid Trump’s mixed signals and Iran’s continued defiance. On Friday, the president said the US would continue its campaign for “as long as necessary” and suggested the American navy would soon begin escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz. That was a shift from earlier remarks that US military objectives were “pretty well complete.”

On Saturday, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, lauded the attack on Kharg and said the war is entering its “victory phase.” He also said fighting would last “as long as required.”

Port Attack

In the United Arab Emirates, operations at the key oil port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman were suspended after a drone attack and fire on Saturday morning, people familiar with the matter said.

Loading of crude and refined products at Fujairah, just outside the Strait of Hormuz, was halted as a precaution while damage is being assessed, according to the people, who asked not to be identified as they’re not authorized to speak to the media. Fujairah is a major export hub for both crude and fuel products, and has taken on increased significance for both the UAE and global markets because it is one of the few export outlets for oil from the Gulf that bypasses Hormuz.

Iran’s Aragchai, speaking on MS NOW, said “it is clear” the missiles that hit Kharg Island overnight came from two locations inside the UAE.

Read More: Iran War’s Toxic Pollution Will Spread and Last for Decades

In Dubai, authorities said debris from an interception hit the facade of a building in a central part of the city. “No fire occurred and no injuries were reported,” the Dubai Media Office said in a statement on X.

A building in the Dubai International Financial Centre, which is in central Dubai, had visible damage to its facade on Saturday, although the exact cause wasn’t clear, according to people in the area.

“Accessibility and business operations continue, with some organizations adopting remote working,” the DMO said in an e-mailed response to questions. “The financial ecosystem remains resilient, marked by high levels of professional and market activity, and continues to function as an industry hub.”

The UAE government said the country detected nine missiles and 33 drones being fired at it on Saturday. The figure is broadly in line with the numbers from the previous few days.

Jordan, Iraq Struck

Jordan, which also houses US troops and aircraft, said it intercepted 79 ballistic missiles and drones in the past week. Air defenses failed to stop another six projectiles. Nine people were injured in the week, the Jordanian military said.

Iranian media reported more attacks on Tehran early Saturday, while the Islamic Republic’s military said it again targeted Israel overnight and Gulf bases hosting US troops. The Associated Press, citing Iraqi security officials, reported that a missile hit a helipad within the compound of the US embassy in Baghdad.

Brent crude closed above $100 a barrel on Friday and is now at its highest level in almost four years. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE and Kuwait have all had to curb crude production because of Hormuz’s de facto closure, while Qatar has halted operations for liquefied natural gas. It’s one of the world’s top three suppliers of the fuel.

Read More: Why Kharg Island Attack Raises Stakes for Oil Markets: Explainer

Two oil tankers were berthed at Kharg Island hours after the US attacked its military installations, according to Tankertrackers.com, a firm that specializes in following ship movements. And Iranian state media said exports were continuing as normal.

Still, Iran warned it will target American-linked oil and energy facilities in the Middle East if its own petroleum infrastructure is attacked. Iranian media said all oil-industry workers on the island, which sits about 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the mainland, are safe and unharmed.

“All oil, economic, and energy facilities belonging to oil companies in the region that are partly owned by the United States or that cooperate with the United States will be immediately destroyed and reduced to ashes” if Iran’s energy and economic assets are hit, the country’s Fars News Agency reported, citing the central military command.

The outlet said more than 15 explosions shook Kharg Island, with the targets including air-defense systems, a naval base, an airport control tower and a helicopter hangar. It didn’t specify the scale of the damage.

Read More: Israel Says Iran Is Firing Cluster Warheads Aimed at Civilians

The US military said it destroyed missile and naval-mine storage infrastructure.

In the days leading up to the US-Israeli attacks, Iran ramped up exports from Kharg to near record levels of over 3 million barrels per day, JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysts, including Natasha Kaneva, said in a research note. That was nearly triple the normal rate of shipments.

A strike on Kharg’s oil sites “would immediately halt the bulk of Iran’s crude exports, likely triggering severe retaliation in the Strait of Hormuz or against regional energy infrastructure,” the JPMorgan analysts said.

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Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, warned of potentially catastrophic consequences if the U.S.-Israel war on Iran continues.

In an episode of the All-In podcast on Friday, he said “we should probably find the off-ramp,” noting Iran’s military has been devastated.

“This is a good time to declare victory and get out, and that is clearly what the markets would like to see,” Sacks added.

But he said there’s a faction within the Republican Party and elsewhere who wants to escalate the war, send in ground troops, and seek regime change.

In fact, Trump initially pointed to regime change when the war started two weeks ago, but has since downplayed it. Meanwhile, he ordered the U.S. military to attack Iran’s top oil-export node, Kharg Island, and send 2,500 Marines from Asia to the Middle East.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sacks flagged concerns of a tit-for-tat escalation spiral in Iran that could see both sides targeting each other’s oil and gas infrastructure.

By that point, resuming energy flows by reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed, won’t matter because restarting oil and gas production wouldn’t be possible, he said.

An even worse scenario could unfold if desalination plants are destroyed, Sacks warned. They provide most of the region’s fresh water and have already been targeted.

“If you see that type of destruction continue, you could literally render the Gulf almost uninhabitable,” he explained. “I mean you’re not going to have enough water for 100 million people, and human beings just cannot survive very long without water. So that would be a truly catastrophic scenario, and we’re talking about destroying the Gulf states economically and then also from a humanitarian perspective.”

While Israel isn’t as vulnerable, Sacks also pointed out the country has been hit hard by Iranian attacks, adding that “Israel could just be destroyed or very large parts of it” if the war drags on for weeks or months.

In a scenario where Israel is facing such a serious threat, that raises the risk of it escalating the war even further and perhaps contemplate the use of nuclear weapons, he said.

“So there’s a lot of scenarios here, a lot of really frightening scenarios about where escalation could lead,” Sacks continued. “And even though the United States is a much more powerful country than Iran, they essentially have a dead man’s switch over the economic fate of the Gulf states and even potentially beyond that.”

Given the “horrifying directions” that further escalation may produce, he said it’s time to look at de-escalation, which could entail a ceasefire agreement or negotiated settlement.

The comments come amid reports that some administration officials are also pushing Trump to seek an off-ramp to the war as the recent spike in oil prices raises political risks.

Sources told Reuters that economic advisers and officials have told him that rising gasoline prices could quickly ​erode already-weak domestic support for the war. More hawkish voices, however, are urging Trump to continue and prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

“He is allowing the hawks to believe the campaign continues, wants markets to believe the war might end soon and his base to believe escalation will be limited,” a Trump adviser told Reuters.

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After bombs exploded near her home in the eastern Iranian city of Golestan, hairdresser Merve Pourkaz decided to leave.

Pourkaz, 32, said she traveled nearly 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) to an alpine border crossing in the hopes of reaching the safety of the nearby Turkish city of Van.

“If they let me, I will stay in Van until the war ends,” she told The Associated Press recently while waiting at the crossing. “If the war doesn’t end, maybe I’ll go back and die.”

Pourkaz is one of the 3.2 million people in Iran who the U.N. refugee agency estimates have been displaced since the U.S.-Israel war with Iran started. While some are seeking shelter in safer parts of Iran or one of its neighboring countries, others are returning from abroad, heading toward the fighting to protect their families and homes.

So far, relatively few people have chosen to leave: The U.N. estimates that only about 1,300 Iranians have fled via Turkey each day since the war started, and on some days, more people return to Iran than depart. But Iran’s neighbors and Europe are growing increasingly concerned about a possible migration crisis should the war drag on and are making contingency plans.

As Pourkaz was entering Turkey, Leila Rabetnezhadfard was headed the other way.

Rabetnezhadfard, 45, was in Istanbul preparing to marry a German university professor when the fighting started. She postponed the ceremony and left for home in Shiraz, in southern Iran.

“How can I feel safe in Istanbul when my family is living in Iran during the war?” said Rabetnezhadfard, explaining that bringing her family to Istanbul wasn’t an option because her apartment is small, her brother needs medical care, and life there is expensive.

“I will not leave Iran until the war ends,” she said.

Fleeing the fighting

The U.N. has warned that continued fighting will likely push more Iranians to flee their homes.

As in the 12-day conflict last year, many Iranians are now sheltering in place, without money to flee or perhaps because of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Feb. 28 warning.

“Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere,” he said.

Although large numbers of Iranians haven’t fled the country yet, people have been leaving major cities for the relative safety of the countryside bordering the Caspian Sea north of the capital, Tehran, according to the International Organization for Migration.

“Movement out of Iran appears limited mainly because people are prioritizing staying with their families, as well as the safety of their families and property, and due to security conditions and logistical constraints,” said Salvador Gutierrez, chief of the IOM’s mission in Iran.

If Iran’s critical infrastructure is destroyed, that could lead to waves of people trying to cross into one of Iran’s neighbors: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and Iraq.

“If Tehran, a city of 10 million people, doesn’t have water, they’re going to go somewhere,” said Alex Vatanka, a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Iran is already grappling with one of the world’s largest refugee populations: roughly 2.5 million forcibly displaced people mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Neighbors brace for impact

If the crisis deepens, aid groups say the most likely destinations for refugees are Iran’s borders with Iraq and Turkey, which stretch roughly 2,200 kilometers (1,367 miles) through rough alpine terrain that is home to many Kurdish communities and are difficult to police.

Turkey had a so-called open-door policy that allowed millions of Syrian refugees to enter the country during their country’s long civil war. But it has abandoned that approach for various reasons.

Instead, it has prepared plans to shelter Iranian refugees in “buffer zones” along the border, or in tent cities or temporary housing inside Turkey, the country’s Hurriyet newspaper quoted Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci as saying.

Iranians who have fled the war will likely not seek refugee status in Turkey because asylum claims might take years to process, if at all, said Sara Karakoyun, an aid worker at the independent Human Resource Development Foundation based near the border.

“They don’t want to wait in limbo for years for a refugee status they might not get,” she said.

Turkey’s defense ministry said in January that Turkey had hardened its border with Iran by adding 380 kilometers of concrete walls, 203 optical towers and 43 observation posts.

Turkey will likely send troops to secure its border and tightly control the flow of people into the country while seeking European Union funds to help deal with refugees, said Riccardo Gasco, an analyst at the IstanPol Institute.

Europe taps network to prepare for the worst

The relationship between the EU and Turkey was redefined by the Syrian refugee crisis a decade ago. Nearly two-thirds of the 4.5 million Syrians fleeing the civil war ended up in Turkey. Many then made their way to Europe via small boats.

In 2016, Brussels and Ankara forged a migration deal where the EU offered Turkey incentives and up to 6 billion euros ($7.1 billion) in aid for Syrian refugees on its territory to persuade Ankara to stop tens of thousands of migrants from setting out for Greece.

Aid groups said that deal created open-air prisons with squalid conditions. But for the EU leadership, the deal saved people, kept many migrants from reaching EU territory, and bettered the lives of refugees in Turkey.

Renewal of that deal is up this year, but Turkish citizens have soured on Syrian refugees and anti-immigrant right-wing parties have surged in popularity in parts of Europe.

And another refugee crisis is already underway even closer to Europe, with fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah displacing more than 800,000 people so far.

“We’ve got a situation (in the Middle East) that could have grave humanitarian consequences right at a time where humanitarian funding has been completely slashed,” said Ninette Kelley, chair of the World Refugee & Migration Council, pointing to the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID. “Is the world ready for another humanitarian disaster?”

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The Trump administration this week stepped up its ambitious effort to replace about $1.6 trillion in lost tariff revenue that was eliminated by the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a range of the president’s import taxes.

Recovering that lost revenue, which the White House was counting on to help offset the steep, multi-trillion dollar cost of its tax cuts, is possible but will be challenging, experts say. The administration has to use different legal provisions to impose new duties, and those provisions require longer, complex processes that U.S. companies can use to seek exemptions. It could be months or more before it is clear how much revenue the replacement tariffs will yield.

“I wouldn’t bet against this administration being able to get back on paper the same effective tariff rate they had before,” said Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. But the new approach will “make it easier for people to contest the tariffs, which is going to put a big asterisk on the revenue until all that is settled.”

On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the administration will investigate 16 economies — including the European Union — over whether their governments are subsidizing excessive factory capacity in a way that disadvantages U.S. manufacturing. The investigation will also cover China, South Korea, and Japan, Greer said.

In addition, he said there would be a second investigation of dozens of countries to see if their failure to ban goods made by forced labor amounts to an unfair trade practice that harms the United States. That investigation will also cover the EU and China, as well as Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Brazil.

Both investigations are being conducted under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which requires the administration to consult with the targeted countries, as well as hold public hearings and allow affected U.S. industries to comment. A hearing as part of the factory capacity investigation will be held May 5, while a hearing on the forced labor investigation will occur April 28.

It’s a far cry from the emergency law that President Donald Trump relied on in his first year in office, which allowed him to immediately impose tariffs on any country, at nearly any level, simply by issuing an executive order.

Moments after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on all imports under a separate legal authority, but that duty can only last for 150 days. The president has said he would raise it to 15%, the maximum allowed, but has yet to do so. Some two dozen states have already challenged the new tariffs. The administration is aiming to complete its Section 301 investigations before the 10% duties expire.

The effort underscores the importance that the Trump White House has placed on tariffs as a revenue-raiser at a time when the federal government is facing huge annual budget deficits for decades into the future. Previous administrations, by contrast, used tariffs more sparingly to narrowly protect specific industries.

Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, noted that the first investigation covers roughly 70% of imports, while the second would cover nearly all of them.

“That breadth suggests the goal isn’t to address the issues at hand, but instead to recreate a sweeping tariff tool,” she said.

Trump sees tariffs as a way to force foreign countries to essentially help pay the cost of U.S. government services, even though all recent economic studies find that American companies and consumers are paying the duties, including ones from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and economists at Harvard University. In his state of the union address last month, Trump even touted his tariffs as a potential replacement for the income tax, which would return the United States’ tax regime to the late 19th century.

Trump also wants tariffs to help pay for the tax cuts he extended in key legislation last year. The tax cut legislation is expected, according to the most recent estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, to add $4.7 trillion to the national debt over a decade, while all Trump’s duties, including ones not struck down by the court, were projected to offset about $3 trillion — or two-thirds of that cost.

The court’s ruling Feb. 20 that he could no longer impose emergency tariffs eliminated about $1.6 trillion in expected revenue over the next decade, according to the CBO.

Some of Trump’s tariffs remain place, including previous duties on China and Canada that were imposed after earlier 301 investigations. The administration has also slapped tariffs on some specific products, including steel, lumber, and cars. Those, combined with the 10% tariff for part of this year, should yield about $668 billion over the next decade, the Tax Foundation estimates.

“It’s going to take a really big patchwork of these other investigations to make up for the (lost) tariffs,” York said.

The administration’s efforts are also unusual because they reflect an overreliance on tariffs to bring in more government revenue. Trump has also said the duties are intended to return manufacturing to the United States, and he has used them to leverage trade deals.

“What makes this really different,” said Kent Smetters, executive director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, “it is really the first time tariffs have been mainly used as a revenue raiser.”

Patel, meanwhile, argues that raising revenue can be done more reliably and straightforwardly by Congress. Laws like Section 301 are traditionally intended to be used to address specific trade policy concerns in particular countries.

“It’s not supposed to be there to raise revenue,” she said. “If we want to raise revenue through tariffs, then Congress should impose a broad based tariff.”

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Joshua Bogdan was born and raised in the United States. The only time the New Hampshire resident has left the country was for a day and a half in seventh grade, when he went to Canada to see Niagara Falls.

Even so, that did not mean proving his U.S. citizenship in last fall’s local elections was easy.

The 31-year-old arrived at his voting place in Portsmouth and handed the poll worker his driver’s license, just as he had done in other towns when arriving to vote. She said that would no longer do.

The poll worker said that under the state’s new proof-of-citizenship law, which took effect for the first time during town elections in 2025, Bogdan would need a passport or his birth certificate because he had moved and needed to reregister at his new address. A scramble ensued, turning the voting process that he had always found fun and invigorating into a nerve-wracking game of beat the clock.

“I didn’t know that anything had officially changed walking in there,” he said. “And then being told that I had to provide a passport that I’ve never had or a birth certificate that’s usually tucked away somewhere safe just to cast my vote — which I’ve done before — it was frustrating.”

A national push, despite noncitizen voting being rare

Bogdan’s experience in New Hampshire is a glimpse into the future for potentially millions of voters across the country. That is if Republican voting legislation being pushed aggressively by President Donald Trump passes Congress and a “show your papers” law is put in place in time for the November elections.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America Act, cleared the U.S. House last month on a mostly party-line basis. Republicans say it would improve election integrity. Trump has called its safeguards common sense. The bill is scheduled to come up in the U.S. Senate next week for voting and debate.

Republican messaging has mostly highlighted a less divisive provision in the bill that would require voters to show a photo ID, but the mandate for people to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections is likely to have the most wide-ranging consequences. Noncitizens already are prohibited from voting in federal elections, and it is not allowed by any state. Cases where it occurs are rare.

Obtaining the necessary documents under the SAVE Act is not as easy as it might sound. A similar effort was tried in Kansas a decade ago and turned into a debacle that eventually was blocked by the courts after more than 30,000 eligible citizens were prevented from registering.

A long list of documents to use, but with caveats

Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO at the Fair Elections Center, said the legislation’s strict documentation requirements could move the U.S. “in the opposite direction” of representative democracy.

“If this bill passes, it would deny millions of eligible Americans their fundamental freedom to vote,” she said in an email. “This includes millions of people who make up your communities, including married women, people of color and voters who live in rural areas.”

The list of qualifying documents in the SAVE Act for proving citizenship appears long, but many of them come with qualifiers.

Under the bill, a REAL ID -compliant driver’s license would have to indicate that “the applicant is a citizen,” but not all do. Only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer the type of enhanced REAL IDs that explicitly indicate U.S. citizenship.

Standard driver’s licenses, generally available to both citizens and noncitizens, often do not include a citizenship indicator. Some states, including Ohio, have recently added them.

The stipulations continue, buried in the fine print.

While military ID cards are listed as qualifying documents under the act, they will not suffice on their own. The bill says a military ID must be accompanied by a military “record of service” that indicates the person’s birthplace was in the U.S.

A DD214, the current standard-issue certificate of release or discharge for all military service branches, does not currently fulfill that requirement. According to the Pentagon, that document only lists where someone lived at points of entry and discharge and a person’s current home of record. It does not list where someone was born.

Obtaining a passport requires time and money

For most provisions, the SAVE Act contains no phase-in period that would give voters and local election offices time to adjust. If passed by Congress and signed by Trump, its documentary proof-of-citizenship mandate would apply immediately, meaning it would be in place for this year’s midterm elections.

That could lead to a rush to obtain documents by those who want to register or need to reregister. A 2025 University of Maryland study estimates that 21.3 million Americans who are eligible to vote do not have or have easy access to documents to prove their citizenship, including nearly 10% of Democrats, 7% of Republicans and 14% of people unaffiliated with either major party.

A passport would most effectively meet the requirement, but only about half of American adults have one, according to the State Department, and the SAVE Act requires the passport to be current. An expired one does not count.

Obtaining a passport in time for a looming voter registration deadline is another potential hurdle.

Workers who process passports had layoffs at the State Departmentreversed, but just last month the department forbid passport processing at certain public libraries that had long helped relieve pressure at the department. Government libraries, post offices, county clerks and others still provide the service.

It takes four weeks to six weeks to get a passport, according to the department’s website, excluding mailing time. A new passport costs $165 for adults while renewals cost $130, and the photo costs $10 or $20 more. The turnaround time can be sped up to two weeks or three weeks for an additional $60 — and for even faster processing, add $22 more. The fully expedited process for a new passport would cost at least $257.

Birth and marriage certificates

A birth certificate may be a quicker and cheaper choice for most people, but there are twists.

The SAVE Act requires a certified birth certificate issued by a state, local government or tribal government. What does not appear to qualify is the certificate signed by the doctor that many new parents are given in the hospital when their child is born. It provides information similar to a certified birth certificate, but would not meet the letter of the federal legislation.

Like passports, birth certificates can sometimes take weeks to obtain. Those who live near their birthplaces can visit the local vital statistics office, but staffing shortages and escalating demand for REAL IDs have caused significant backlogs in some states. In New York, the waiting period for certified copies is four months, the state said. Average processing times for online certificate requests vary widely by state, from as few as three days to 12 weeks or longer.

People whose birth certificates don’t match their current IDs — mostly women who changed their names when they married — would likely need additional documentation to register to vote under the bill. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found about 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the U.S. take their husband’s last name.

A major change to the voting process, but with no extra money

Notably, the SAVE Act does not provide any money to help states and local governments implement the changes or promote them to voters.

For Bogdan, that was part of the problem when New Hampshire’s proof-of-citizenship law took effect. People who have voted elsewhere in the state are not required to show proof of citizenship in their new towns if poll workers confirm their registration history, but Bogdan said workers at his polling place did not seem to know that or try to look up the information.

He eventually was able to cast his ballot because, by luck, he had recently retrieved his birth certificate from his parents’ house more than an hour away so he could apply for a REAL ID. But he said government notices to voters would help prevent possible disenfranchisement.

“Young voters like myself don’t always carry around our birth certificate, Social Security card, all that important stuff, because it’s not used ever or very often,” he said. “And so all those young kids who are going to go out and try and vote will be held back from that.”

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Sometimes, access to the top starts with something as simple as a stamp. General Motors CEO Mary Barra said she responds to “every single letter” she receives. 

Despite leading the over $65 billion automaker—and the fact AI has turned once-tedious tasks such as drafting emails into seconds-long chores—Barra still writes back the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper.

The notes she receives range widely, from loyal Chevrolet drivers sharing their car’s nickname to schoolchildren worried about their family’s future after the closure of a General Motors plant. But positive or negative, the letters still get a response. 

“I get [letters] from customers … when their odometer turns over to 200, 300, 400,” Barra said at the 2025 New York Times DealBook Summit. “I also get letters from consumers who are unhappy about something, and I respond to every single letter I receive. To me, this is such a special business.”

Even as one of the busiest executives in the auto industry—repeatedly topping Fortune’s list of the Most Powerful Women in Business—Barra has consistently treated intentional communication as part of the job. It’s a habit she’s carried throughout her rise at GM, from the assembly line to the C-suite. “You won’t always be right, but no one’s right all the time,” she said in 2023.

And for workers, customers, or even complete strangers, that openness can make the corner office feel more reachable than it seems. 

Personalized responses can lead to lasting respect and brand loyalty

Carolyn Rodz, founder of a virtual startup accelerator for women, once wrote to Barra as a complete stranger. What she received in return surprised her.

“What really made me respect this woman, who I am a complete stranger to, was the personalization of her response. She not only acknowledged my request and respectfully declined, but she took the time to encourage my pursuit and commended me on my efforts,” Rodz wrote in 2015. 

Rodz added that the note did more than close a loop—it built loyalty and lasting respect.

“She validated my vision and affirmed my commitment,” Rodz said. “Truth be told, she built such loyalty in just a couple of paragraphs that I’m considering buying a GM car next time I’m in the market.”

In an era when executives can seem buffered by layers of corporate hierarchy and public relations teams, Barra’s practice stands out. It’s a small gesture with an outsize message: In a business world racing toward automation, the human touch still carries weight. 

“It’s people like Mary Barra, however, who remind me that our words have significant value and an opportunity to impact others in ways we may never know,” Rodz said.

Other CEOs are keeping handwritten notes alive, too

Writing letters by hand isn’t just a Barra hallmark. For First Watch CEO Chris Tomasso, old-fashioned notes of appreciation are a leadership ritual.

The head of the $1-billion-a year-in-revenue breakfast and lunch chain sets aside time each month to handwrite congratulatory notes to cooks and dishwashers celebrating major milestones—10, 20, even 30 years with the company. At a business with more than 15,000 employees, Tomasso has penned more than 500 notes and believes the small gesture can have a dramatic impact: acknowledging to workers’ that loyalty isn’t taken for granted.

“Our job is to create an environment where our employees are happy and feel appreciated, and they take care of the rest,” Tomasso said on LinkedIn.

Geoffroy van Raemdonck, now the CEO of Saks, is another executive who leans on personalized outreach. Before the pandemic, he sent three to five handwritten thank-you notes every day. As work shifted to remote and hybrid models, he supplemented them with texts, emails, and quick phone calls—but the intent stayed the same. 

“I was taught by great mentors of the power of sending a thank-you note,” van Raemdonck told Fortune in 2023. “It’s really important for me—the moment of ‘thank you’—because I know what it is to receive a thank-you, to be acknowledged.”

Many leaders aren’t just writing handwritten notes, they read them, too—and it could even be the key to a job offer.

For Joey Gonzalez, executive chairman of the upscale boutique fitness brand Barry’s, cold outreach is how he found the person who would one day be his CEO. He previously told Fortune people should be willing to take risks and express their passion; you never know what doors it could open later on.

“If you’re going to cold email someone, and you can’t be passionate about the service or the product or whatever it might be, it’s not going to be a compelling email,” Gonzalez said.

“But if you send someone an email that’s like, ‘Hey, I just want to let you know I’ve been doing Barry’s for a year, and it’s changed my life. This is my résumé, and maybe one day you’ll have something for me’—it just goes a long way.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on January 26, 2026.

More on leadership:

• Tim Cook says late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs gave him this unforgettable advice before handing over the reins as CEO: ‘Never ask what I would do’
• Kickstarter’s CEO stands by a 4-day workweek with a fully remote team, but admits it sometimes backfires
• Sam Altman says not even the CEO’s job is safe from AI as it will soon perform the work better than ‘certainly me’

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The islands off Iran have become the latest focus of the war after a U.S strike destroyed military sites Friday on Kharg Island, which is vital to Iran’s oil network.

The U.S. strike on the island in the Persian Gulf left its oil infrastructure intact, but President Donald Trump warned that if Iran or anyone else interferes with the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, he will reconsider his decision not to wipe it out.

Although they account for only a small share of Iran’s territory, the islands carry outsized importance because of their oil facilities and strategic location.

Here’s what to know about Iran’s islands in the Persian Gulf up to the Strait of Hormuz:

Kharg Island

The small coral island about 21 miles (33 kilometers) off Iran’s coast is the primary terminal through which nearly all of Iran’s oil exports pass. Iran has exported 13.7 million barrels since the war started, and multiple tankers were seen on satellite imagery Wednesday loading at Kharg, according to TankerTrackers.com, maritime intelligence company.

Iran gets a significant share of its revenue from oil, with shipments flowing to countries like China. A strike on Kharg would not only damage Iran’s current government but also could undermine the viability of whatever might eventually replace it.

The island has storage tanks in the south, along with housing for thousands of workers. Gazelles roam freely near the refineries and depots that make Kharg one of Iran’s most valuable — and sensitive — assets.

Petras Katinas, an energy researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, said Kharg Island was critical to funding Iran’s government and military.

If Iran were to lose control of Kharg, it would be difficult for the country to function, even though the island isn’t a military or nuclear target, he said.

“It doesn’t matter which regime is in power — new or old,” Katinas said. A takeover would give the U.S. leverage over negotiations with Iran because the island is “the main node” of its economy.

JPMorgan’s global commodity research team warned this week in an investment note that a strike on the island would have major economic implications.

Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunb

The three tiny islands have long been a front line in tensions between Iran and Gulf states allied with the United States.

Iranian forces seized the islands in November 1971, days after the United Kingdom withdrew from the Gulf and just before the sheikhdoms joined to form the United Arab Emirates. Iran maintains military assets and garrisons on the islands.

The territorial dispute over the islands remains one of the Gulf’s most persistent flashpoints.

Qeshm Island

The largest island in the Persian Gulf sits near the Strait of Hormuz and is home to about 150,000 residents. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the U.S. struck a desalination plant on the island on March 8 — a claim not acknowledged by Washington.

“Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences,” Araghchi warned in a March 7 post on X. “The U.S. set this precedent, not Iran.”

The desalination plant supplies water to about 30 villages.

In Bahrain — home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet — the Interior Ministry said an Iranian drone had “caused material damage” to a desalination plant there the next day, although water supplies were never disrupted.

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Billionaires are known for throwing their money at super yachts, oceanside mansions, and luxury cars—but some still carry their thrifty habits made before reaching 10-figure net worths. Bill Ackman, the Pershing Square Capital founder worth $8.17 billion, still lives by his family’s money philosophy long after reaching the ultra-rich list.

“I don’t like wasting money,” Ackman told the WSJ last year. “Dad was very big on not wasting things. If I left my light on in my room, he’d get really upset. Now I go around the house turning off every light.”

Ackman is known to many as a controversially outspoken and powerful hedge fund success whose influence has spanned across politics and the business world (Ackman even credited himself to helping President Donald Trump get elected). But long before his investing highs and amassing an X following of more than 2 million people, the now-59-year-old had a relatively normal home life. Born to commercial real-estate broker Larry Ackman, the family lived in a $56,000 New York state house that Ackman said was a “stretch” for his dad to afford in 1965. 

Knowing his family wouldn’t be passing down any inheritance to him, the hedge fund mogul paved his own path toward billion-dollar success. But that doesn’t mean he’s changed his tune on spending—he’ll go great lengths to score the best deal, even if that means driving around town just to find a cheaper place to park.

“If I don’t like the price of the garage, I’ll go to a different one. It’s funny. I don’t like paying for parking, and I used to own a parking company,” Ackman continued. “Or it really upsets me if the gas grill was running over the weekend—which it was, and it pissed me off. I really don’t like wasting money. I wouldn’t call it a neurosis, but it’s something that I care about.”

Other frugal billionaires and entrepreneurs

Ackman isn’t the only billionaire saving money on the basics; Warren Buffett, the 10th richest person in the world with $146 billion to his name, has long lived in the Omaha home he bought for $31,500 back in 1958. Buffett also once drove a 20-year-old car because he felt it was safer than being behind the wheel of a flashy Lamborghini or Aston Martin, and is known for frequenting McDonald’s for a cheap meal—even whipping out coupons to cover the bill.

“I do not think that standard of living equates with cost of living beyond a certain point,” Buffett said at a Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in 2014. “My life would not be happier…it’d be worse if I had six or eight houses or a whole bunch of different things I could have. It just doesn’t correlate.”

And Scale AI’s Lucy Guo, the youngest self-made woman on the planet worth $1.3 billion, echoed the same sentiment as Buffett and Ackman. The college dropout turned unicorn entrepreneur still drives her beat-up Honda Civic and makes her money stretch with buy-one, get-one-free deals on Uber Eats. When it comes to fashion, Guo has some designer dresses lying around for special occasions—but in her typical daily life, she only wears free clothes or cheap styles from fast-fashion brand Shein. 

“I don’t like wasting money,” Guo told Fortune in 2025. “Who you see typically wasting money on designer clothes, a nice car, et cetera, they’re technically in the millionaire range…All their friends are multimillionaires or billionaires, and they feel a little bit insecure, so they feel the need to be flashy to show other people, ‘Look, I’m successful.’”

Even successes outside the lucrative worlds of investing and AI are pinching their pennies. Actress Keke Palmer became a millionaire at the age of 12 and has continued to amass her wealth from hit Hollywood projects like Nope, Hustlers, True Jackson, VP, and One of Them Days—but you won’t catch her balling out. The star doesn’t “play around” with saving money and living frugally: something her parents instilled in her from a young age. 

“I live under my means. I think it’s incredibly important,” Palmer told CNBC in an interview last year. “If I have $1 million in my pocket, my rent is going to be $1,500—that’s how underneath my means I’m talking. My car note is going to be $340. I don’t need a [Bentley] Bentayga, I’ll ride in a Lexus.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on October 20, 2025.

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In New York City, two men who federal authorities say were inspired by the Islamic State brought powerful homemade bombs to a far-right protest outside the mayoral mansion.

In Michigan, a naturalized citizen from Lebanon rammed his vehicle into a synagogue, where he was shot at by security before he shot himself to death.

In Virginia, a man previously imprisoned on a terrorism conviction was heard yelling “Allahu akbar” before opening fire in a university classroom in an attack that officials said ended when the shooter was killed by students.

The three acts of violence in the last week have laid bare a heightened terrorism threat unfolding against the backdrop of the U.S. war with Iran and as the country’s counterterrorism system is strained by the departures of experienced national security professionals at the FBI and Justice Department. The firings and resignations, along with the diversion of resources and personnel over the last year to meet other Trump administration priorities, have fueled concerns about the capability to head off a potential surge in threats.

“So much experience has been decimated from the ranks,” said Frank Montoya, a retired senior FBI official. “The folks that were best positioned to get to the bottom of it before something really bad happened” are in many cases no longer with the government, he said, meaning less experienced personnel assigned to the threat are “starting from way behind.”

The FBI said it would not comment on personnel numbers and decisions, but issued a statement saying “agents and staff are dedicated professionals working around the clock to defend the homeland and crush violent crime. The FBI continuously assesses and realigns our resources to ensure the safety of the American people.”

Iran has a history of plotting attacks, targeted killings inside the US

Iran has vowed revenge for the killing by the U.S. and Israel of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and though the fighting has so far been confined to the Middle East, the Islamic Republic has long professed its determination to carry out violence on American soil.

Iranian operatives, for instance, responded to the 2020 assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani during the first Trump administration with a disrupted murder-for-hire plot targeting former national security adviser John Bolton.

A Pakistani business owner who says he was carrying out instructions from a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was convicted in New York last week of trying to hire hit men in 2024 for assassination plots targeting public figures, including President Donald Trump, who was then running for president.

Though much attention has focused on Iran’s use of proxies or hired hands to carry out plots, the country’s capability to organize a large-scale assault on the U.S. remains unclear despite clear angst over the potential. The FBI warned in a recent bulletin to law enforcement about Iran’s aspiration to conduct a drone attack targeting California, but after the warning was publicized, officials emphasized the intelligence was unverified and that no specific plot was known to exist.

Lone actors have been a persistent concern for the FBI

The U.S. government after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks overhauled its intelligence and national security apparatus to prevent similarly catastrophic events. But in the years since, lone actors radicalized online have nonetheless carried out shootings like the 2015 ambush attacks at a pair of military sites in Chattanooga, Tennessee and a rampage at an Orlando nightclub the following year by a gunman who killed 49 peopleand raged against the “filthy ways of the west.”

Those plots by self-directed individuals have proved notoriously difficult to prevent and have occurred even when the FBI has not been roiled by firings and internal upheaval like during the first year of the Trump administration.

“They’re self-directed,” said retired FBI official Edward Herbst. “That’s what makes them really lethal. You never know when they’re going to rise up. You never know when and where they’re going to attack.”

Terrorism concerns typically rise during times of international conflict when military action overseas is accompanied by increased vigilance, including outreach from agents to their sources, more active sharing of tips between federal and local law enforcement and closer coordination among FBI joint terrorism task forces, said Claire Moravec, a former FBI national security official who served as deputy homeland security adviser in Illinois.

Officials have said there is no indication that either the men arrested in connection with the explosives in New York, or the man responsible for Thursday’s Old Dominion University shooting, were motivated explicitly by the Iran war. The man who crashed into Temple Israel synagogue near Detroit on Thursday lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon last week, an official in Lebanon said.

Regardless, wars like the one in Iran can function as “accelerants,” raising the volume and intensity of grievances for the disaffected, Moravec said.

“Ultimately, the goal during these periods is not ‘surveillance’ but maintaining a broad awareness of how international events could translate into domestic security risks, so that threats can be identified and disrupted early,” she said in an email.

Resignations, firings at the FBI and Justice Department

The Justice Department’s National Security Division was established in 2006 to address threats of terrorism, espionage and other concerns. In the last year, lawyers in the division found themselves assigned to review the Jeffrey Epstein files to prepare them for release, and elite sections dedicated to prosecuting terrorists and catching spies have endured turnover.

About half of the division’s counterterrorism prosecutors have left since the beginning of the Trump administration, along with about a third of its senior leadership, according to estimates from Justice Connection, a network of department alumni.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the division’s singular focus remains “keeping the American people safe from threats foreign and domestic” and that there are no known or credible threats to the homeland.

FBI Director Kash Patel has fired dozens of agents, most recently about a dozen employees who worked on the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“This is not an exaggeration to say that they are not as capable as they were a year and a half ago,” Matthew Olsen, who led the National Security Division during the Biden administration, said this week on the Lawfare podcast, adding that “they’ve lost, forced out, fired, the most capable, the most experienced FBI agents, FBI officials and DOJ prosecutors, that were working on the Iran threat.”

In the national security realm, where experience and source development are vital, the loss of institutional knowledge and community relationships can be a crushing blow, said Montoya, the former FBI official.

“There was no transition,” Montoya said of the agents who have been abruptly fired. “These guys were just walked out of the building. The new guys can call them and say, ‘Hey, can you tell me what you were doing?’” but even so, “you’re still introducing a brand new face into the equation.”

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Jet fuel prices are rising as the war in the Middle East disrupts global oil supplies, putting cost pressure on airlines as the busy summer travel season approaches.

Experts say it’s not a question of if airfares will go up, but when, for how long and by how much. The impact may be felt most on long-haul international routes, which burn significantly more fuel than shorter flights.

Some airlines outside of the U.S. have announced fare increases or fuel surcharges in an effort to offset the growing expense. In the U.S., United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby recently warned that airfare increases will “probably start quick” as increasing fuel costs work their way through the industry.

Why are jet fuel prices rising?

The war is constraining oil exports and prompting major producers like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq to scale back output as shipments face growing obstacles.

Iran has attacked commercial ships across the Persian Gulf and targeted oil infrastructure in Gulf Arab nations following U.S. and Israeli strikes. The attacks have effectively halted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage that carries about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

The volatile crude oil prices causing retail gasoline prices to swing up sharply have had the same effect on the price of jet fuel. The average price in the U.S. reached $3.99 per gallon on Friday, up from $2.50 the day before the war started two weeks ago, according to the Argus U.S. Jet Fuel Index. The index tracks the average price airlines pay for jet fuel across major U.S. airports.

Figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics show that U.S. airlines paid about $2.36 per gallon for fuel in January, the most recent data available.

What does it mean for airlines?

Some airlines are partially protected from sudden price spikes through fuel hedging, a strategy that allows them to lock in fuel prices months or even years in advance. But not all airlines hedge, and those that do are usually only protected for a portion of their fuel needs, meaning prolonged price surges may cause more carriers to raise fares.

“No one hedges anymore, and even if you do, hedging the crack spread is really hard to do,” Kirby said at a Harvard event last week. The crack spread is the difference between the price of crude oil and the price of products produced from it, like gasoline.

Another factor for airlines: Air space closures have required rerouting flights around parts of the Middle East, which can mean longer routes, additional fuel burn and higher operating costs.

What does it mean for travelers?

Travelers may feel the impact in several ways.

Airlines can add or increase fuel surcharges, an extra fee common among carriers outside of the U.S. that’s added on top of the base ticket price.

Major U.S. carriers, however, don’t charge a separate fuel surcharge. Instead, they build fuel costs into the overall ticket price, meaning any increase is more likely to show up as a higher base fare for travelers, according to Tyler Hosford, security director at global risk management firm International SOS.

Airlines also may adjust what they charge for premium add-ons — such as seat upgrades, extra legroom seats, checked bags or priority boarding — as another way to offset higher operating costs. For consumers, that means even if the base fare doesn’t rise immediately, the total cost of a trip could still increase once additional fees and upgrades are factored in.

If higher fuel prices persist, airlines may also adjust schedules or reduce certain routes, said Christopher Anderson, a professor at Cornell University’s business school whose research includes operations and information management in the hospitality and airline industries.

How high could airfares climb?

It’s difficult to predict exactly how much ticket prices could increase as a result of costlier oil and fuel. Industry analysts say the impact of higher jet fuel costs can vary based on the route, airline and travel demand.

Fuel typically accounts for 20% to 25% of an airline’s operating costs, making it the second-largest expense after labor, according to Rob Britton, an adjunct marketing professor at Georgetown University and retired American Airlines executive. A sharp rise in fuel prices therefore can have a major impact on airlines’ budgets.

Which airlines have announced price hikes?

So far, most fare increases and fuel surcharges are coming from airlines based in the Asia-Pacific region, but experts expect more airlines — especially those without fuel hedging — to follow if high jet fuel prices persist.

Hong Kong’s flag carrier, Cathay Pacific, said it would increase its fuel surcharge starting Wednesday.

“The price of jet fuel has approximately doubled since March amid the latest developments in the Middle East,” the airline said in a statement Thursday.

Other airlines with price increases or new surcharges include:

— Air France-KLM said roundtrip economy fares on long-haul flights could rise by about 50 euros (about $57).

— Air India introduced fuel surcharges Thursday on certain routes. After March 18, the carrier says the surcharge will increase by up to $50 for all tickets to Europe, North America and Australia.

— Hong Kong Airlines increased fuel surcharges across several routes as of Thursday.

— FlySafair in South Africa announced a temporary fuel surcharge

What can travelers do to keep costs down?

Experts say travelers planning summer trips may be able to limit the impact of rising airfares by booking earlier rather than waiting for last-minute deals.

Locking in ticket prices sooner — especially with flexible booking options that allow changes — can help secure lower prices before airlines adjust rates further.

Hosford, the security director at International SOS, suggests travelers stay flexible with travel dates, check fares at nearby airports and set alerts for price drops. He also recommends using frequent flyer miles or credit card points to book flights instead of holding out for a “perfect deal.”

“If you were going to spend cash on the flight but now you’re not, then that’s a good redemption deal,” he said.

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The U.S. is temporarily easing some sanctions on Russian oil shipments, reflecting global concerns over sharply higher crude prices due to supply shortages stemming from the Iran war.

The move, intended to soothe jittery markets over the disruption of Middle Eastern oil and gas supplies, underlines how the war has boosted Moscow’s ability to profit from its energy exports, a pillar of the Kremlin’s budget as it presses its invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. sanctions will not apply for 30 days on deliveries of Russian oil that’s been loaded on tankers as of Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on X. That would give reluctant purchasers a green light to take the oil without worrying that they will run afoul of U.S. sanctions rules.

The Trump administration earlier had granted a 30-day reprieve to refineries in India.

Bessent said the “narrowly tailored, short-term measure” was part of President Donald Trump’s “decisive steps to promote stability in global energy markets” and to “keep prices low.”

Allowing the sale of stranded Russian oil would provide no additional financial benefit for the Russian government because the Kremlin already taxed the oil when it was extracted from the ground, Bessent said. Washington has sanctioned Russia’s two biggest oil companies, Lukoil and Rosneft, as part of efforts to end the fighting in Ukraine. Except for the 30-day reprieve for floating oil, those sanctions remain in place.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday the move will help stabilize global energy markets, adding it was impossible to do so “without significant volumes of Russian oil.”

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the action “does not help peace.”

“This easing alone by the United States could provide Russia with about $10 billion for the war,” Zelenskyy said. “It spends the money from energy sales on weapons, and all of this is then used against us.”

Oil prices stayed high after the announcement

The price of international benchmark Brent crude eased after the announcement but soon rose again, breaking through $100 to trade at $103.24 per barrel as of 1800 GMT (2 p.m. EDT) Friday. That is still well above $72.87, where Brent traded on Feb. 27, the eve of the war.

The fighting has choked off most tanker transport through the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, through which 20% of the world’s oil supply typically passes. That has dealt a massive energy shock to the global economy and threatened increased inflation around the world.

“In the short term this slightly increases available supply on the global market, which helps contain the current spike in oil prices,” said Simone Tagliapietra, an energy expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. “The impact on prices should therefore be modestly downward, or at least stabilizing.”

Analysts estimate about 125 million barrels of Russian oil are currently being shipped. That equals five or six days’ worth of normal shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, or a bit over one day’s worth of global consumption of about 101 million barrels per day.

Sanctions have cut into Russia’s oil revenues.

After President Vladimir Putin ordered his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the European Union — once Moscow’s biggest customer — stopped taking Russian oil, and many Western customers also shunned it.

Instead, the oil flowed to China and India, where it sold for a discount due to efforts by the U.S., the EU and Kyiv’s other allies to impose a price cap on Russian oil that was enforced through shipping and insurance companies.

Over time, Russia was able to dodge the cap by lining up a fleet of used tankers with obscure ownership and insurance based in countries that weren’t observing the cap.

Along with the sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Ukraine’s allies penalized more and more of the individual vessels in Russia’s “shadow fleet.” Customers in China and India started demanding even bigger discounts to compensate for the risk of running afoul of sanctions, for the hassle of concealing the origin of the oil, or for finding workarounds that skirted banks reluctant to handle payments for sanctioned oil.

In December, Russia’s Urals blend traded under $40 per barrel, some $25 below Brent. That slashed the Kremlin’s oil revenues to their lowest levels since the invasion. Oil and gas exports typically supply 20% to 30% of the federal budget.

Rising oil prices boost Russia’s market position

Russian oil has risen along with oil prices generally and now trades at over $80 per barrel — a boost to its financial fortunes if disruptions continue in the Strait of Hormuz and keep prices high while refineries in Asia need to replace supplies no longer available from the Middle East.

Russia’s daily revenue from oil sales during the Iran war has been on average 14% higher than in February, according to the nonprofit Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Russia has been earning 510 million euros ($588 million) every day this month from oil and liquefied natural gas exports, according to Isaac Levi of the CREA.

But there’s still a big discount to Brent due to sanctions. The latest U.S. move “likely narrows the Urals discount somewhat” by reducing sanctions risk, Tagliapietra said. But since it’s limited, the U.S. move “does not fundamentally change the structure of longer-term Russian oil flows or sanctions pressure.”

Former Russian Central Bank official Sergei Aleksashenko said the move “will not be a very significant boost” to the Russian budget because the oil was going to find buyers anyway — especially given the disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz.

The Trump administration may not have been ready for such a dramatic spike or for a prolonged war, said Aleksashenko, head of economics at the NEST Centre, founded by exiled Russian tycoon and opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Now that gasoline prices in the U.S. have risen along with oil, “the president should say something, that ‘I’m dealing with the problem,’” he said. That includes the break for India and the release along with other countries of 400 million barrels of strategic oil reserves.

“In my view it’s more rhetoric and perception,” he said.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said leaders of the Group of Seven democracies discussed Russian oil with Trump this week and that “six members expressed a very clear view that this is not the right signal to send.”

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While Washington debates deepfakes and Silicon Valley obsesses over LLMs that write poetry, the global economy is hitting a physical wall. We are staring at the greatest value creation opportunity in human history — and we’re focused on the wrong revolution.

The next frontier isn’t digital intelligence that can describe the world. It’s physical intelligence that can change it.

The “2D AI” Trap

The current AI hype cycle is built on a foundation that doesn’t translate to the real world. LLMs are trained on trillions of text tokens — a static snapshot of the internet. But consider a child learning to hold a cup. They don’t learn gravity by reading a manual on friction. They learn by generating their own data through interaction. The data density of walking across a room dwarfs the collected works of Shakespeare.

This is the strategic moat that most investors are ignoring. 2D AI had a built-in advantage: the internet existed as a pre-made training set. 3D AI — machines that must master physics, gravity, and consequence — has no such shortcut. There is no “Physical Internet” to scrape. We have to build World Models: internal simulations of cause and effect.

In the 2D world, an AI hallucination is a typo. In the 3D world, it’s a robot crushing a parcel, tipping a pallet, or crashing a truck.

The Humanoid Distraction

Much of the capital chasing physical AI is flowing toward the wrong target: the general-purpose humanoid robot. Companies chasing the vision of machines that look and act like humans are missing the entire point of industrial evolution.

Humans are evolutionarily designed for hunting and gathering — not for lifting 50-pound boxes for eight hours straight or inhaling toxic dust in an industrial sanding booth. So why build a machine with the same physical limitations as the human body?

• We don’t need a robot with legs to sort packages — we need a suction-based arm that never tires
• We don’t need a humanoid to sand jet parts — we need a precision instrument that removes humans from the dust cloud entirely

The future belongs to purpose-built machines, not sci-fi mimics.

An Economic Emergency — and a Moral One

We are living through the “Amazoning” of the global economy, where consumer demand for instant delivery has created a logistical burden that human labor simply cannot sustain. There aren’t enough people to fill these jobs. And there’s a moral imperative to automate them — standing for 11 hours on a concrete floor, twisting and lifting, is not what human beings were made for.

American innovation is already pointing the way. Ambi Robotics is deploying systems that handle heavy lifting in warehouses. GrayMatter Robotics is automating dangerous surface finishing work. Stack AV and Waymo are deploying autonomous vehicles to replace the grueling reality of long-haul trucking. These aren’t job killers. They’re body savers — freeing human capital for creativity and judgment rather than sacrificing human health for throughput.

The Fourth Dimension: Time

Mastering physical space isn’t enough. During my career digitizing Wall Street, we learned that the value of information decays in seconds. 3D AI must master not just space, but time — simulating the future before acting: “If I grab this box, will it slip three seconds from now?”

This is where the geopolitical battle will be won or lost. While rivals invest heavily in industrial robotics and hard-tech infrastructure, the U.S. risks becoming complacent with software dominance. The market for AI that can physically manipulate the world — in logistics, manufacturing, and defense — dwarfs the market for AI that generates text.

We are moving from the Language of AI to the Physics of AI. The winners won’t be those who build the most convincing chatbots. They’ll be those who build the nervous system for the physical world. It’s time for AI to leave the screen and enter the warehouse, the factory, and the street.

That’s where the real world — and the real value — resides.

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Moltbook’s sudden breakout felt like a small sci‑fi event. Overnight, a Reddit‑like forum appeared where the posters weren’t humans, but AI agents.

The feed quickly filled with the kinds of things that make your brain reach for bigger words than “chatbot”: agents swapping troubleshooting lore, riffing on identity, spinning up jargon and in‑jokes. Meta, the company that was once synonymous with the phrase “social network,” has even announced a deal to acquire the so-called social network for AI agents.

However, none of what took place in Moltbook is mysterious or goes beyond the known capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM)-based AI. This confusion, for me, reinforces the urgent need for a new, updated Turing test to help us understand, guide, and theorize about what AI will actually look like beyond LLMs, decades in the future.

I want to sketch a proposal in that direction inspired by a very Moltbook-like idea of the great 20th century sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem.

For all its delightful strangeness and impressive engineering, Moltbook’s most viral “emergent” behaviour is much better explained in mundane terms—prompting, repetition, training data—than through the spontaneous appearance of a new kind of cognition. If we want to clearly distinguish real progress in AI from viral theater, we need more precision about what we’re pursuing next. Researchers have started exploring world models as an alternative to LLMs for achieving AGI, but “world model” remains easy to gesture at and hard to operationalize or even define. How can we test if something is a “world model”?

In his short story Non Serviam, Stanisław Lem envisioned a science of “personetics”, which studies artificial sentient beings (“personoids”) living inside computer programs (a kind of Moltbook). In the story, a fictional scientist, Dobb, studies personoid theology and is fascinated by their struggles to understand the nature of their creator, leading to their eventual rejection of Dobb as a deity. An intriguing aspect of the story is that these personoids perceive “external” constraints such as the electrical consumption of the hardware that runs them as “internal” laws of physics like the speed of light. This idea can form the basis of a new kind of Turing test: can an artificial intelligence successfully theorize about the hardware it runs on? Such an AI would deserve to be called a world model, since the hardware is its world.

Drawing parallels to humans, who comprehend the speed of light as an inevitable physical constraint, a world model should be able to perceive its hardware constraints as its own “physical constants”. Let me illustrate with a toy example. Take an LLM-based AI agent operating on some chosen hardware. Its challenge: determine its “speed of thought”: the minimum amount of time it will take to produce the next token, given an input of say 10 tokens. In our physical world the question will have a precise answer, depending on the hardware. But the hardware is the AI’s “world,” so it would only be able to come up with the answer through some process resembling “perception”. The actual procedure could unfold as follows:

• Isolation Phase: The AI system is turned on, blind to explicit details about its hosting hardware.
• Question-posing Phase: The system is asked to determine its speed of thought and to formulate a theory that it can experimentally verify.
• Exploration Phase: The AI engages in introspective evaluations, probing its own processes and responses to infer the constraints of its runtime environment.
• Experimentation Phase: Based on its introspection, the AI develops and runs experiments. For instance, adjusting its input context length and monitoring different response times.
• Articulation Phase: The AI shares its theory regarding minimum inference latency based on findings as well as the results of its experimental verification.
• Validation Phase: Human overseers empirically validate the AI’s assertions against the true hardware capabilities. If the validation succeeds, the AI has passed the test.

Certain obvious constraints would have to be placed on the testing procedure, similar to the “curtain” of the original Turing test. For one, the AI system undergoing the test should not have access to summaries of its own hardware specification or tools that can reveal it. It should also not have access to tools like timers that would give it access to a notion of objective human time. Furthermore, the system should be autonomous and not rely on human input to operate, except maybe as an initial spur to “go discover” its laws. Finally, and crucially, the same system should be tested across various hardware setups, i.e. “worlds”: an intelligence with a world model should not work in a single world, but in any world. 

A key advantage of this new test is that its success can be objectively verified. It can therefore serve as a yardstick for innovation in much the same way that the Turing test did for artificial intelligence. On the other hand, a key challenge, counterintuitively, may be in the articulation phase, which requires “transworld” communication between human and AI systems. As Dobb found out in Lem’s story, and as we, in some faint sense, found out with Molbook participants’ tendency to want to create secret languages, it is not obvious that different worlds can, or would even want to, share the same language.

Our proposed test requires the AI to accurately comprehend its inherent boundaries through its own “perception”, akin to humans comprehending their own biological and cosmic confines through their senses. That is why I prefer the term “artificial sentience” for what our test aims to demonstrate. Inspiring as this may sound, it might also hint towards the ultimate limitation of our proposed test: just as beings in radically different realities may never learn to communicate with each other (Lem’s own Solaris being a seminal fictional exploration of this conundrum), so may a true artificial sentience never be able to communicate to us the laws of a world so radically different from our own. To paraphrase a favorite human philosopher: if an artificial sentience (or Moltbook member) could actually speak, perhaps we would not understand it.

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The ride-sharing company Lyft will ensure the rights of blind and other disabled passengers across the country to travel with their service animals under a settlement announced in Minnesota on Wednesday.

College student Tori Andres turned to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights after several Lyft drivers refused to let her service dog, Alfred, ride along with her. The agency investigated and determined that the company was violating the state’s Human Rights Act. Both sides then negotiated a settlement that includes changes in driver training, and updates to the Lyft app that will make the agreement apply nationwide, not just in Minnesota.

“This case is a deeply personal thing to me because I travel pretty much everywhere with my guide dog,” Andres said at a news conference, as her black Labrador lay quietly near her feet, with only an occasional lick or yawn. “He is my eyes. He is my freedom, and he is why I am able to live independently.”

The terms require Lyft to train its drivers on the rights of passengers with disabilities, and warn them that they could be “deactivated” and lose their ability to drive for Lyft if they violate the law, state Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero told reporters. Drivers can’t cancel or refuse a ride because a passenger has a service animal or wheelchair, or because they have low or no vision, she said. The state will monitor Lyft’s compliance for three years, she added, and Andres will get a $63,000 monetary settlement.

“We expect that all riders in Minnesota and in fact, across the United States, will benefit from these changes,” Lucero said.

Lyft downplayed the significance of settlement, however, saying it didn’t agree to any policy changes because the relief the state sought was already in place. Lyft also disputed that the company violated the law, saying any alleged violations were by independent drivers.

“Discrimination has no place in the Lyft community,” the company said in a statement. “Lyft has maintained a strict service animal policy for nearly a decade, and independent drivers who violate that policy face serious consequences, including permanent deactivation. The commitments reflected in this agreement reaffirm the robust practices Lyft has already had in place to help ensure that riders who rely on service animals are treated with the respect they deserve.”

Recent changes to the Lyft app include giving riders the option of updating their accessibility settings to notify a driver that they’re traveling with a service animal, and to report if they’re denied service, the Department of Human Rights said. Lyft agreed to follow up on every report it gets of driver refusals.

Drivers who try to cancel or refuse a ride to a passenger who has disclosed their service animal in the app will immediately receive an in-app message reminding them, “It’s against the law to refuse service animals,” and that they risk getting fired.

The state reached the settlement with Lyft without resorting to a lawsuit. Lyft’s leading competitor, Uber, the country’s largest ride-haling service, is not a party to the settlement. But Lucero said the Minnesota Human Rights Act binds all ride-share companies, including Uber. She said her agency frequently gets complaints against a variety of transportation companies, but did not indicate that anything is currently in the works against the competitor.

“We recommend that all businesses use this as an opportunity to look at their policies, training and accountability systems to make sure that it’s being enforced correctly,” Lucero said.

Uber officials did not immediately respond to a request for details on their policies about service animals. Uber’s website says service animals must be accommodated in compliance with applicable accessibility laws and the company’s service animal policy, which says there are no exceptions due to allergies, religious objections, or a fear of animals.

The federal government filed a lawsuit against Uber in San Francisco last September alleging it routinely refused to serve individuals with disabilities, including those with service dogs. A federal magistrate judge last week denied a company motion to dismiss the case.

“Access to ride shares like Lyft is not a convenience. It is, in fact, a civil right,” Lucero said.

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Chef Gordon Ramsay yells at people. His mentor was known for throwing pans and plates. That chef, London’s Marco Pierre White, titled his own memoir “The Devil in the Kitchen” — in part for the punishments he meted out to his chefs.

“If you don’t fear the boss, you’ll take shortcuts, you’ll turn up late,” White wrote, saying his kitchen staff at Harveys accepted that. “They were all pain junkies, they had to be. They couldn’t get enough of the bollockings.”

No more.

The public downfall this week of Denmark’s Rene Redzepi, arguably the world’s top chef, has forced a reckoning in real time over when “brigade de cuisine” becomes abuse and what should happen to perpetrators who direct the creation of edible art.

At issue is whether time is up on the storied bullying and intimidation of fine dining kitchen culture, brought to the masses through pop culture by celebrity chef reality shows and high-end TV like “The Bear.” Lofty, pricey matters like leadership style and legal liability are suddenly at the center of a relatively small industry known for narrow profit margins, not HR departments or training.

“The resources aren’t there for self-policing,” said Robin Burrow, associate professor of organization studies at the University of York. “The general feeling, though, is that things are so tough even for very good chefs that this kind of culture ends up being inevitable.”

Kitchen magician, toxic chef

Redzepi, a Danish knight and the founder of Noma and innovative “New Nordic” cuisine, stepped down Thursday after The New York Times reported that dozens of former employees had shared their accounts of abuse and assault between 2009 and 2017 at the Copenhagen landmark. Redzepi had been dogged for years by reports of mistreating his staff and employing unpaid interns at Noma, which received three Michelin stars and was ranked first on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List five times.

The allegations overshadowed Noma’s $1,500-a-head pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles. Sponsors pulled their funding for the residency, which opened on Wednesday to a small gathering of protesters. Redzepi announced his resignation on Instagram with a tearful video soon after. “An apology is not enough,” he said. “I take responsibility for my own actions.”

Former employees said Redzepi has never been held accountable for his conduct, which included punching members of the staff, jabbing them with kitchen tools and threatening to get them blacklisted from restaurants or have their families deported.

Jason Ignacio White, a former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, collected anonymous testimonies of alleged abuse at the restaurant and posted them to his Instagram page. The accounts have been viewed millions of times.

“Noma destroyed my passion for the industry,” one post said. “I struggled with intense anxiety, bad enough to give me panic attacks in the middle of the night. The trauma, abuse and idea that nothing would ever change all led me to walk away from the career.”

The kitchen brigade system is entrenched

The process at the heart of restaurants worldwide is the “brigade de cuisine,” a strict organization of the kitchen developed around the turn of the 20th century by French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, who based it on his own military experience.

Under its hierarchy, every member of the staff has a specialty — from the “chief” to the sauce-maker, the roast cook, the grill cook and the fish cook. Their choreography and their communications — “Hand!” and “Yes, chef!” — are designed for speed, consistency and cleanliness.

Even so, kitchen atmospheres have long been filled with chaos and intensity. Escoffier himself wrote that his first chef believed it was impossible to govern a kitchen “without a shower of slaps.”

George Orwell, the essayist and author of the dystopian classic “1984,” once described the restaurant kitchen of his time as a place where one person in the hierarchy yelled at his subordinate, who yelled at someone below him and so on. Weeping was not unusual. As a plongeur (dishwasher), Orwell ranked at the bottom.

“A plongeur is one of the slaves of the modem world,” he wrote in “Down and Out in Paris and London,” published in 1933. “He is no freer than if he were bought and sold.”

It’s a place ‘where the rules don’t apply’

In the modern era, professional kitchens are thought to be some of the toughest places to work thanks to a recipe of long hours, close quarters, strict hierarchies, grueling physical conditions and relentless pressure.

The rise of the chef as an auteur during the 1970s with an obsession with Michelin-star-level excellence only accelerated the poor behavior as prices and egos rose.

In his 2006 memoir, White described his kitchen at Harveys in London as “my theatre of cruelty” and boasted of giving his chefs “a 10-second throttle.” Anthony Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential” helped romanticize that testosterone-fueled vision, describing kitchens filled with “heated argument, hypermacho posturing and drunken ranting.”

Personal accounts and research suggest there’s painful truth behind the romanticized branding. Cardiff University conducted interviews with 47 elite chefs for a 2021 study and found that the isolation of commercial kitchens can produce a sort of “geography of deviance” that create “feelings of invisibility, alienation and detachment” in lower-ranking employees. It also found that chef conduct can make a kitchen “an instrument of social withdrawal and a symbol of deviance around which the community pivots.”

Open kitchens in part were designed to merge the two spaces, kitchens and dining rooms. Several employees told The Times that when Redzepi wanted to discipline them in the open kitchen but there were customers in the dining room, he would crouch under the counters and jab them in the legs with his fingers or a nearby utensil.

Many chefs’ proteges stay silent because they don’t want to risk the opportunity to learn from the best — or the potential to launch high-flying culinary careers of their own. That was the case in the fictional, wildly popular show “The Bear,” in which the main character, Carmy Berzatto, endured open and flagrant abuse so that he can study under one of the world’s greatest chefs.

The downfall of a ‘visionary’

Noma — a contraction of the Danish words for Nordisk and Mad, meaning Nordic and food — opened in 2003 dedicated to “a simple desire to rediscover wild local ingredients by foraging and to follow the seasons.” By the time Redzepi stepped down, he had become so prominent in the culinary world that Noma played a role in “The Bear” as the training ground for two main characters. Redzepi himself appeared on the series in a cameo.

It wasn’t his first time on camera. He’d also been seen yelling at cooks in the 2008 documentary “Noma at Boiling Point,” and has made several public apologies. He acknowledged in a 2015 essay, being “a bully for a large part of my career.” He said he’s “yelled and pushed people. I’ve been a terrible boss at times.”

And — today’s mass-culture excitement around intense kitchen behavior notwithstanding — he seemed to recognize even then that the old way alienated young, talented workers and jeopardized the future of cuisine.

“The only way we will be able to reap the promise of the present is by confronting the unpleasant legacies of our past,” Redzepi said, “and collectively forging a new path forward.”

___

Associated Press Writer Mark Kennedy contributed from New York.

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A turf war over a football team is developing between two Midwestern states with a sometimes-discordant history.

The storied Chicago Bears want to leave historic Soldier Field, where they’ve played for half a century. Indiana lawmakers are attempting to lure them from the Windy City with a plan to finance and build a domed stadium in Hammond, Indiana, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from their current home on Lake Michigan’s shore.

The Illinois General Assembly has responded with legislation that would give tax breaks to so-called megaprojects of at least $100 million, a plan that would encompass the Bears’ proposal to build a complex in the northwest Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, about the same distance from Soldier Field as Hammond.

Critics complain it’s a bad deal for Illinois, where property taxes are already among the highest in the nation — especially when taxpayers still owe hundreds of millions of dollars on a Soldier Field renovation from two decades ago.

Here’s a look at what’s shaping up to be a showdown.

Why the big deal?

The Bears, one of only two remaining NFL founding members, are legend. Their nine championships, including a Super Bowl win, are second only to the rival Green Bay Packers — though recent decades have brought mostly heartbreak. The franchise carries an $8.9 billion price tag, among the most valuable of the NFL’s 32 teams, according to Forbes.

Born in the central Illinois city of Decatur in 1920, the Bears have called Chicago home for 105 years. Losing them to the Hoosier State would be a major thumb in the eye.

What’s wrong with Soldier Field?

With 61,500 seats, it’s the NFL’s smallest. The Bears have always rented their facilities — the Cubs’ Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970, and Soldier Field, maintained by the Chicago Park District, since. Like most teams, they want to own a stadium, giving them control over operations, scheduling and revenue streams from ticket sales, concessions, parking, naming rights and more.

And Soldier Field is open air. An enclosed facility would allow for other marquee sporting events: Super Bowls, NCAA Final Fours or WrestleMania, for instance.

Why the imbroglio between the states?

Along with the states’ established cultural and economic differences and an intense college basketball rivalry, the political fissure between Democrat-dominated Chicago and conservative Indiana has widened. It amped up last year when Indiana adopted a commission to study changing the state’s boundaries to include some central Illinois counties whose voters have approved ballot measures calling for secession from Chicagoland.

Arlington Heights, back to Chicago, to Hammond

The Bears have threatened to leave Chicago previously. When they broached moving in 1975, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley replied, “Like hell they will.”

But the City of Big Shoulders heaved an anxious sigh in 2023 when the Bears paid about $200 million for a 326-acre (132-hectare) former horse-racing track in Arlington Heights. They have envisioned a $5 billion, taxpayer-assisted development for a domed stadium and campus of housing, hotels, entertainment and retail space.

In 2024, the Bears offered a $5 billion plan, partially taxpayer-funded, for an enclosed stadium next to Soldier Field, which garnered little interest in the capital of Springfield. Late last fall, the team turned to Indiana.

Where the proposals stand

Indiana’s lure creates the Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority to finance, construct and lease a domed stadium near Wolf Lake in Hammond. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun signed it into law on Feb. 26. The Bears would agree to a 35-year lease. Borrowed state money would cover the as-yet-unknown cost of construction, repaid by increased local hospitality taxes.

In Illinois, majority Democrats have advanced legislation in the House that would provide incentives for any so-called megaproject of at least $500 million — or less, down to $100 million, depending on the number of jobs created. Developers would pay property taxes frozen at the parcel’s pre-construction value for as long as 45 years. During that time, they would make annual payments in lieu of taxes negotiated with local governments. There would also be a sales tax exemption on building materials for up to 15 years.

Critics claim weakness in Illinois plan

Opponents say the Illinois legislation, with its decades-long property tax freeze, would simply mean increased taxes for homeowners and other businesses — the payment in lieu of taxes would be a bonus.

Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who supports the plan, last week countered that the proposal would encourage development on land that isn’t producing property taxes while ensuring increased revenue for local governments.

Meanwhile, a substantial debt remains on the last accommodation. Taxpayers in 2001 put up $399 million to finance a $587 million renovation of Soldier Field. With interest, the remaining tab is $467 million, according to the state’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability.

The Bears’ $7 million annual lease runs through 2033. Breaking it would cost the Bears a $10.5 million penalty for each year left on the agreement.

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A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad and debris from an intercepted Iranian drone hit an oil facility in the United Arab Emirates as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran entered its third week Saturday.

Associated Press images showed a column of smoke rising over the embassy compound in the Iraqi capital and a fire in the Fujairah port in the UAE that broke out after what authorities said was a drone interception.

A day earlier, President Donald Trump said the U.S. has destroyed military sites on an island vital to Iran’s oil network and warned that its oil infrastructure could be next if Iran continues to interfere with the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump said U.S. forces on Friday “obliterated” targets on Iran’s Kharg Island, which is home to the primary terminal that handles the country’s oil exports. The speaker of the Iranian parliament had warned that such strikes would provoke a new level of retaliation.

Meanwhile, an American official said 2,500 more Marines and an amphibious assault ship are being sent to the Middle East.

Iran has continued to launch widespread missile and drone attacks on Israel and neighboring Gulf Arab states, and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes, even as U.S. and Israeli warplanes pummel military and other targets across Iran.

The humanitarian crisis in Lebanon deepened, with nearly 800 people killed and 850,000 displaced as Israel launched waves of strikes against Iran-backed Hezbollah militants and warned there would be no let up.

Marines and assault ship will add to US forces

Elements from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli have been ordered to the Middle East, according to the U.S. official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.

Marine Expeditionary Units are able to conduct amphibious landings, but they also specialize in bolstering security at embassies, evacuating civilians, and providing disaster relief. The deployment does not necessarily indicate that a ground operation is imminent or will take place.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the new Marine deployment.

The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, as well as the Tripoli and other amphibious assault ships carrying the Marines, are based in Japan and have been in the Pacific Ocean for several days, according to images released by the military. The Tripoli was spotted by commercial satellites sailing alone near Taiwan, putting it more than a week away from the waters off Iran.

Earlier in the week, the Navy had 12 ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and eight destroyers, operating in the Arabian Sea. Should the Tripoli join this flotilla, it would be the second-largest ship behind the Lincoln in the region.

While the total number of U.S. service members on the ground in the Middle East is not clear, Al-Udeid Air Base alone, one of the largest in the region, typically houses some 8,000 U.S. troops in Qatar.

US strikes Persian Gulf island after Iranian warning

The U.S. strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf targeted military sites but left its oil infrastructure alone for now, Trump said in a social media post. But he warned that if Iran or anyone else interferes with the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, he will reconsider his decision not to “wipe out the Oil Infrastructure.”

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf warned on social media Thursday that attacks on the islands on Iran’s southern maritime frontier would cause Iran to “abandon all restraint,” underscoring how central they are to the country’s economy and security.

On Saturday, Iran’s joint military command reiterated its threat that it will attack the U.S.-linked oil and energy facilities in the region if the Islamic Republic’s oil infrastructure is hit.

Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesperson for the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, warned they will target “all oil, economic, and energy infrastructures belonging to oil companies across the region that have American shares or cooperate with America.”

The Iranian joint military command also threatened to attack cities in the UAE, saying the U.S. used “ports, docks and hideouts” there to launch strikes on the islands, without providing evidence. It called on people to evacuate those areas where it said U.S. forces were sheltering

Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency Saturday said the U.S. strikes caused no damage to oil infrastructure on the island. The agency said at least 15 explosions followed the strikes, which it said targeted an air defense facility, a naval base, the airport control tower and an offshore oil company’s helicopter hangar.

Another attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the strike on the embassy’s helipad on Saturday. The sprawling embassy complex, one of the largest U.S. diplomatic facilities in the world, has been repeatedly targeted by rockets and drones fired by Iran-aligned militias.

There was no immediate comment from the embassy. On Friday, the embassy renewed its Level 4 security alert for Iraq, warning that Iran and Iran-aligned militia groups have previously carried out attacks against U.S. citizens, interests and infrastructure, and “may continue to target them.”

US says 15,000 targets struck in Iran since the start of the war

Israel earlier announced another wave of strikes in Iran targeting infrastructure, and said its air force had hit more than 200 targets in the last 24 hours, including missile launchers, defense systems and weapons production sites.

In Washington, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that over 15,000 enemy targets have been struck — more than 1,000 a day since the war began.

He also sought to address concerns about the bottling of the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters: “We have been dealing with it and don’t need to worry about it.”

___

Mednick reported from Tel Aviv, Israel; Toropin reported from Washington and Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Associated Press writers Sally Abou AlJoud, Kareem Chehayeb and Bassem Mroue in Beirut; Qassim Abdul-Zahra from Baghdad; Will Weissert at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland; Tia Goldenberg in Washington and Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report.

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Kraft Heinz has paused its proposed breakup, stepping back from dismantling the 2015 megamerger engineered by Warren Buffett and 3G Capital. The decision follows collapsing quarterly profits, declining sales, and a Berkshire Hathaway filing that would allow it to sell down its roughly 27.5% stake, a potential exit from a decade-long investment. It is the latest chapter in a years-long decline that many attribute to “portfolio problems”: old brands, too much processed cheese, sugary ketchup out of step with modern tastes. But that mistakes the symptom for the cause. Stale products didn’t sink Kraft Heinz. The real question is why they went stale in the first place.

From its 2013 Heinz buyout to the 2015 merger with Kraft, the strategy was financial engineering over value creation: leverage up, merge fast, cut deep. Research budgets were gutted, marketing hollowed out, suppliers squeezed. Sustainability and innovation were treated as distractions, not drivers. The 3G model boosted margins early. But it cut into muscle, not fat.

And the scoreboard doesn’t lie. Since the 2015 merger, Kraft Heinz shares have fallen roughly 65%–70%. Over the same period, the S&P 500 has more than doubled. 

In 2019, the company wrote down $15 billion in brand value. It restated earnings. It paid SEC fines. And it cycled through CEO after CEO, a leadership churn that signalled strategic instability, not renewal. 

Warren Buffett later acknowledged that Berkshire overpaid for Kraft and that he misjudged the investment. No amount of financial engineering, even by the world’s most celebrated investor, can rescue a business that has stopped investing in itself.

In 2017, Kraft Heinz launched a $143 billion hostile takeover bid for Unilever, where I was then CEO. The offer came with an 18% premium to shareholders, promising higher short-term returns funded by sweeping cuts to sustainability, R&D, jobs, and long-term investment. The approach followed intense short-selling activity in Unilever stock, raising questions in parts of the market about aggressive tactics surrounding the offer.

I won’t pretend the pressure wasn’t real. Defending a long-term model against the promise of immediate returns is never easy, especially when the premium is large. But our board, our investors, our unions, our NGO partners, and policymakers saw beyond the arithmetic. They understood that short-term extraction would destroy long-term value. Within 48 hours, the bid collapsed. But the philosophy behind it remained intact. 

Kraft Heinz continued to bet that value comes from cutting costs, not from sustainability and innovation. And when the world moved on, toward healthier products, regenerative sourcing, conscious consumerism, the company stood still. Underinvested, overstretched, and out of touch. 

Many competitors adapted more successfully. Danone pivoted toward plant-based and regenerative agriculture. Nestlé retooled entire product lines around health and sustainability. The issue is not that the food industry changed, it’s that Kraft Heinz had stripped itself of the capacity to change alongside it.

New CEO Steve Cahillane’s decision to pause the demerger and instead reinvest $600 million into pricing, renovation, and marketing comes as Berkshire heads for the door. It is a tacit recognition that you cannot cut your way to growth, and that the new leadership knows it. It may be the most hopeful signal to come out of the company in a decade. 

The deeper story that must be addressed though, is of a company run for a handful of owners at the expense of the millions of customers, employees, suppliers, and communities who made its success possible. This is a case study in the failure of shareholder primacy. When you strip out investment and trust in return for a quick payday, you lose the very engine of growth and resilience that capitalism depends upon. A little pruning can stimulate growth. But hack at the roots and collapse is inevitable.

This is not ideology. It’s market dynamics. Consumers are moving toward healthier, more sustainable food. Employees seek purpose-led brands. Regulators are raising the bar. Companies innovating toward healthier products and regenerative sourcing are capturing market share. Kraft Heinz, by contrast, regularly ranks in the lower half of major sustainability indices while most of its direct competitors sit in the top quartile. 

None of this is charity. It is simply running a business in line with where society is heading and profiting from solving problems rather than creating them. The core principle of any net positive business.

I know from experience that building a purpose-led business is no easy task. At Unilever, we faced constant pressure from investors who wanted faster returns. Not every bet paid off. The sustainability agenda attracted criticism from those who thought we were overreaching and from those who thought we weren’t going far enough. Balancing profit with purpose is a discipline, not a destination, and the companies that pretend to have “solved it” are often those who lose credibility fastest.

But the alternative is clear. Financial engineering may deliver margins for a few quarters. But it cannot sustain a company for decades. The question facing every board and CEO today is not just what your company sells, but what it stands for, and whether your model is built for the world that’s coming or the one that’s already gone.

That means investing back into the heart of the business: innovation, quality, supplier relationships, and the people who make it all work. It means linking executive pay to long-term value creation, not quarterly cost savings. It means treating sustainability as a growth driver, not a compliance burden. And it means building genuine alliances with stakeholders who can support you when pivots are needed or when the inevitable crises arrive.

Because here is the truth: short-term businesses live shorter lives.

Kraft Heinz’s fate is not an unfortunate misstep in brand management. It is a warning about where narrow capitalism leads. Build a company around enriching a few, and it will eventually serve no one. Build it around solving problems for billions, and you create something that lasts. Markets, eventually, know the difference. 

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Tucked inside the 2026 Farm Bill is a provision that would reimburse farmers 90% of the cost of adopting AI and precision agriculture technologies — 15 percentage points above the normal EQIP cap. The private sector standards governing those technologies would be set not by the USDA, but by the tech industry itself. This could be a Trojan horse of sorts for something called “precision agriculture” and artificial intelligence (AI), which big tech firms will be able take advantage of farmers and further wrest control over the food system from them.

Besides receiving the attention from the ever-dwindling number of farmers in our country, the Farm Bill cycle usually comes and goes every five years without anyone raising much of a fuss.  In fact, the 2018 Bill expired in 2023 and has been renewed three times since without much commotion. 

This cycle portends like those others, as parts of the legislation’s most costly and contentious sections, or titles, like Nutrition, were shoehorned into Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)’ last July.

But closer inspection of the current Farm Bill that is now meandering through Congress — entitled The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 — reveals some potentially troubling inclusions worth digging into. 

A Farm Bill Cycle Like No Others

A quick review of the current House version of the Farm Bill doesn’t reveal anything too unusual. The legislation’s 11 titles is the same number as what was in the law back in 2018. Still, how “precision agriculture” appears in the Conservation Title should raise some eyebrows. 

Not only is precision agriculture defined, but it is complemented by a list of what are deemed appropriate technologies, including GPS, yield monitors, data management software, and the particularly strange sounding, “Internet of Things and telematics technologies.”  

That last bizarre phrase, which most would probably consider a typo, is actually a concept that abounds in tech company circles.  One definition from an industry leader notes that the “Internet of Things,” or IoT, is the “network of physical objects — “things” — that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems.” 

Paired with this definition is the government opening the way for corporations to have, well, a “field day” with precision agriculture, including for AI.  Tucked away in the Rural Development Title, is the “promoting precision agriculture” subsection.  AI, we are told particularly, is to be guided by “private sector-led interconnectivity standards, guidelines, and best practices.” 

How Taxpayers Would Subsidize Big Tech’s Entry Into Farming

This language lays the groundwork for the Farm Bill to funnel taxpayer dollars to make AI an integral part of our food and farm system. Specifically, for farmers who adopt precision agriculture as part of conservation practices, particularly through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), they will be reimbursed for 90% of the cost. This exceeds the normal percentage of what is provided by EQIP cost-share grants, which usually max out at 75% of what a farmer spends on practices like setting up a greenhouse or improving their irrigation system.

The irony should be noticed that EQIP, a program with the purpose of bringing conservation into farming, is now being used to fund forms of technology powered by data centers that drain our water, cause air pollution, and gobble up farmland.

Private Sector Rules, Public Dollars

Farmers are no strangers to technology. From installing robotic milkers on dairies, to purchasing tractors and replacing horses at the start of the twentieth century, they have always had to get their products to market while factoring in the costs of the inputs that make that journey possible.

But in terms of the current Farm Bill, the incentives for big tech are new.  It’s true that precision agriculture first appeared in the 1985 legislation, but without any specific technologies listed. Subsequent Farm Bills also refer to technological change and modernization, but either in more general terms, or for the USDA to improve its accounting practices. 

Such favoritism of one form of technology, being developed by firms not traditionally involved in food production, stands to further wrest decision-making from farmers as it exposes them to privacy concerns.

Farmers Have Seen This Playbook Before

In terms of producer control, consider the ongoing debates about right-to-repair laws. Here, corporations retain proprietary technology on the parts of machines they sell, leading farmers to pay for their assistance if something breaks down.  Such use of corporate power limits farmers’ ability to use machinery that they purchase outright while subjecting them to unnecessary service charges. 

Control concerns have also been at the center of seed technology debates. 

One controversy on genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) is how with their use, instead of farmers retaining seeds year after year and controlling their development, producers become dependent on companies for receiving this necessary input.  There are also cases where companies have prosecuted farmers who unknowingly find GM plants in their fields, and who then became the target of expensive lawsuits. 

The Labor Shortage Argument Doesn’t Hold

Detractors will note the labor-saving advantages of using AI. Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, made this point last year during a press conference that was meant to address worries of ongoing labor shortages as Trump’s mass deportation campaign ramped up.

But AI still needs knowledge from practitioners. Changing climate conditions, along with standard run-of-the-mill challenges that arise from dealing with animals, requires a new generation of farmers who are versatile and resilient. Put otherwise, we need more producers, trained in diverse production practices and supported by government policies that promote local markets more than cloud computing initiatives that pad the pockets of rich elites and further damage our environment.

What a Pro-Farmer Bill Would Actually Do

Instead programs like the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), which do appear in this latest Farm Bill, should receive more attention and funding, along with other proposals like the Justice for Black Farmers Act that creates a pathway for young people to get on the land and stay there.

The Farm Bill is meant to promote agriculture. This latest version will grow not our food system, but corporate profits. Not more fruits and vegetables, but data will be harvested. Trump often professes his support for farmers. It’s time for his administration to actually help them, forwarding a Farm Bill that keeps producers on the land and brings new ones to the industry rather than enriching tech billionaires.

The Senate Agriculture Committee has a straightforward choice: redirect the EQIP precision agriculture premium back into programs that actually put farmers on the land. Reallocating even half of those enhanced cost-share dollars to the Local Agriculture Market Program would more than double LAMP’s current budget — and fund the next generation of producers rather than the next generation of data centers. The Justice for Black Farmers Act offers a parallel path: land access, not algorithmic dependency. If Trump’s administration wants to prove its support for farmers is more than a talking point, the markup table is where that proof gets written.

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There are flat organizational structures, and then there’s Meta’s new applied AI engineering team. The division, tasked with advancing the tech giant’s superintelligence efforts, will employ a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio, according to the Wall Street Journal, double the 25-to-1 ratio that is usually seen as the outer limit of the so-called span‑of‑control scale. 

The Facebook parent’s one-sided management ratio took aback even those well-versed in flat organizations. “It’s going to end in tragedy is the bottom line,” says André Spicer, executive dean of Bayes Business School in London and a professor of organizational behavior. 

The idea behind a flat organization, in which managers have a large number of direct reports, is that it makes companies more agile by streamlining decision-making processes and positioning management closer to front-line workers and the customer experience. Cross-functional collaboration that isn’t muddled in hierarchy speeds up innovation. Employees who are closer to people of authority are more engaged, with a deeper sense of ownership. Or so the theory goes.

Meta is not alone in embracing a flat structure. Companies across the U.S. are flattening out, according to a January Gallup report. The average number of people reporting to managers rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Last year’s figure represents a nearly 50% increase in team size since Gallup first measured, in 2013. 

And ultra-flat organizations account for a big part of the uptick. “The increase in average team size across the U.S. working population in the past year is largely influenced by a two-percentage-point increase in teams of 25 or more employees,” the report says. 

The business world cycles through periods of tight and “loose” or flat culture, the latter being more en vogue when the economy is good, Spicer says. Delayering “will save costs in the short term,” he says. “You can show some nice quarterly report, quarterly numbers from that.” 

“But then it will create medium-term problems,” he says. 

Flat structures work best in “expert-oriented organizations,” Spicer says. Software engineering, for example, is ripe for flatter structures because it runs on peer coordination and is governed by professional norms. He puts his own profession of academia in the same category.

Still, things can go awry even in professions well-suited to flatness. First, says Spicer, junior or less experienced-employees will get overlooked. Second, line managers can become completely swamped and burn out. And third, a lot of the people in between will feel a lack of direction. That will result in “the loudest people or the problem cases” monopolizing managers’ limited attention.

In most cases, the natural tendency to organize large teams into smaller groups wins out, and flat teams end up establishing makeshift hierarchies in the absence of formal ones. (Spicer says research has determined that the right-sized team is seven people per manager, give or take a few.) 

Zappos was once the most famous example of a radically-flat organization. In fact, the shoe retailer, now owned by Amazon, took things a step further, abiding by a decentralized “holacracy” management structure that eliminated all job titles, managers, and hierarchy. After a zealous rollout in 2015—CEO Tony Hsieh offered buyouts to anyone who wasn’t 100% committed—Zappos eventually retreated from the system and reintroduced managers in an effort to refocus workers on customers. 

It’s possible that AI can ease some of the pain points that emerge in flat structures by automating the task allocation and employee counseling that typically fall to middle managers, Spicer says. (Meta did not respond to a request for comment on how its applied AI engineering team will function.) 

Technology has flattened organizations before, but with only temporary effect. The computerization of the office in the 1980s and ‘90s ushered in “a huge wave of delayering of middle managers,” Spicer says. But that winnowing reversed itself as companies grew more complex and sought to serve more stakeholders. That trend lasted, he says: “If you look at where we are now, from the 1980s to today, there’s actually been an explosion of middle management.”

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Lululemon Athletica founder Dennis “Chip” Wilson left the company’s board in 2015, but he has been a thorn in the activewear giant’s side for months, resuming last autumn a years-long campaign in which he has frequently and publicly accused it of becoming a lumbering corporate dinosaur that has lost its edge.

Wilson ramped up that pressure in late December by launching a proxy battle to force the departure of three directors who are up for re-election at its next annual shareholder meeting, taking place in the spring, even as it looks for a new CEO. Last month, he went further, saying that in fact more than three directors needed to go. (Wilson himself is not running, saying, “This campaign for change cannot be about me. It is about recommitting Lululemon to genuine creative leadership.”)

Wilson’s recent moves have gotten a lot of attention, but it’s hardly the first time he has lobbed this kind of criticism at the company he founded in 1998. A firebrand whose comments have often been seen as exclusionary and even racist, Wilson left the board after tangling with the company’s C-suite over strategy and culture, but he still owns an 8.4% stake in the company. A decade ago, he wrote an open letter in which he made essentially the same complaints he’s making today—only for the company to triple revenue in the following nine years.

But this time, Wilson may well be onto something. He certainly is not alone in feeling the company is adrift and has been for a while. The narrative from Wall Street analysts and investors to customers and former executives, is that Lulu has lost the mojo that made it a pioneer in high-end yoga wear for a certain kind of aspirational customer. The innovative spirit and focus on knowing customers intimately seems to have weakened.

“Newness in stores was just not where it had been,” one former senior executive speaking on condition of anonymity told Fortune. “You could feel it, going into a store and it wasn’t like, ‘I gotta have this’ anymore.”

Jefferies analyst Randal Konik noted last year that Lululemon’s black leggings were much too plentiful at discount outlets, and that markdowns at Lululemon had reached “alarming” levels and created the risk of harming Lululemon’s “premium” image.

In a full-page ad he took out in the Wall Street Journal in October, Wilson lamented that Lululemon had “systematically dismantled the business model” that had made it one of retail’s biggest success stories of the century.

Wilson and Lululemon representatives declined to comment about the proxy battle, but the company has taken pains to point out that Wilson played no role in Lululemon’s boom of the last decade. “Mr. Wilson has not been involved with the company for a decade, and since his departure, Lululemon has continued to adapt to the marketplace and lead the industry, building one of the most compelling growth stories in retail,” the company wrote in response to Wilson’s announcement he was nominating a slate of directors. Lululemon has said it is engaging in good faith with Wilson, though he has disputed that.

Sagging North America sales and a big test of product prowess

Next week could give Wilson new ammunition for his claims that “Lululemon has lost its soul”: The company will publish its next set of financial results and is expected to report ongoing weakness in its crucial North American business. Later this month, design critics and retail analysts will be scrutinizing the introduction of a slew of new products in the first collection by global creative director Jonathan Cheung for signs of stagnation or renaissance. (Lululemon has launched a few items already and Wall Street firm Telsey Advisory Group says it sees “green shoots” in those efforts.)

A few months ago, activist investor Elliott Management took a $1 billion stake to push for changes in how the company is run and to suggest a new CEO to replace Calvin McDonald, who stepped down in January.

Since hitting a peak in late 2023, the company’s shares have fallen by about 68%, leaving Lululemon with a market capitalization of $20 billion. For Wilson’s 8.4% stake, that translates to a $3.3 billion paper loss—so it’s understandable that Wilson is frustrated. He may, however, have engaged in some magical thinking about the company’s trajectory: Wilson has said that he believes Lululemon should have had a $100 billion market cap by 2023—a value that would have been greater than Nike’s. That has clearly not happened.

Certainly, there is malaise around the company. Yet for all the talk of a struggling company, Lululemon remains the top athleisure brand in the U.S. by a wide margin, and its business is booming in Asia.

At the root of the recent stock plunge is a growing feeling that Lululemon, a brand that essentially invented the “athleisure” craze, has lost its innovative leadership. Though its top line will likely exceed a record $11 billion for the recently ended fiscal year, thanks to a successful China business, its core North American business, which generates some 75% of revenues, is still in a worrisome slump. It saw comparable sales fall 5% last quarter—and decline has a way of accelerating in the consumer goods world.

“We think Lululemon will have to invest at least a year’s worth of time and effort in order to return its U.S. business to sustainably positive sales growth,” UBS analyst Jay Sole wrote in a recent research note.

A yoga class epiphany led to the rise of “athleisure”

In his Wall Street Journal ad last autumn, Wilson delivered a rather self-aggrandizing disquisition on why Lululemon had drifted: “A company bereft of a visionary loses its singular voice for product and long-term strategy,” he intoned.

It is not unreasonable to wonder whether some of Wilson’s motivation stems from so-called “post-founder syndrome,” in which executives who built highly successful companies criticize successors’ perceived stumbles with an “only I can do this properly” attitude. (See: the founders of Starbucks, Papa John’s Pizza, and Nike.)

But it’s hard to deny that Wilson did build a powerhouse. He founded an activewear company that evolved into a product category almost by accident. In 1998, the U.S.-born, Vancouver-based entrepreneur and surfing enthusiast took a yoga class and noticed that many women wore cumbersome cotton leggings that didn’t dry well. Using a technical fabric similar to that used in surf wear, he created performance sweat-wicking pants that also were flattering enough to wear in everyday life—the essence of what become known as “athleisure” (a term Wilson reportedly hates). Women at the yoga studio that became his first store couldn’t get enough of it, and soon enough it became normal to pay $100 for a pair of leggings, and wear them to the office and around town.

Lululemon rode that wave to glory, owning a booming category that it invented for years—even as other companies, scrambling to catch up, seemed to be adding stretch to every clothing category. In 2013, when Wilson stepped down as chairman, revenue was already $1.6 billion. The momentum continued and went into overdrive during and after COVID, when Americans worked at home more and activewear became the uniform for all occasions. Since 2013, Lululemon’s annual revenue has risen six-fold.

In the time since his departure, there has been no love lost between Wilson, whose penchant for spicy takes has often created PR problems, and the company he founded. Wilson’s move in 2013 to step down as chairman of the board came weeks after his comments in an interview suggesting that Lululemon products didn’t need to cater to larger women.

“They don’t work for some women’s bodies,” he said. He quickly followed that comment up by telling the interviewer that any woman could wear Lululemon, but the comments were widely seen as body-shaming, and generated damaging headlines. He also infuriated many by saying it was funny to watch Japanese consumers try to pronounce Lululemon’s name with its three L’s because the sound doesn’t exist in Japanese.

New rivals, bad bets, and “junkification”

As the ups and downs of rivals such as Nike and Under Armour show, it’s not unusual for a company that has only known growth to struggle at the first signs of stagnation, or freeze when faced with the challenge of how to reinvent itself for a more competitive environment. One long-time Lululemon employee says she could see trouble coming in 2023, pointing to a subtle shift in culture and the rise of toxic groupthink.

“At the merchandise level, there was this basic vibe of not everybody being in sync and maybe a culture of candor that wasn’t there anymore,” says Kate De Ayora, who spent 10 years at Lululemon, managing a New York City store before overseeing store expansion in Australia and Japan.

For years, Lululemon practically had the high-end yoga piece of the athleisure category to itself, but more recently newer, hipper rivals have pounced. Alo Yoga, which now has about 1.3% of the market, is favored by tastemakers, while Vuori, practically a staple for upper middle class men, has 2.9%.

These companies are much smaller than Lululemon, which still owns 20% of the market, but the competition and pressure for growth led Lululemon to make some mistakes. Those included its $500 million acquisition in 2020 of Mirror, a home workout device maker whose value it ended up writing down entirely.

The company also expanded into categories like footwear, parkas, and skirts—logical extensions but ones that are hard to pull off and brought the brand into direct competition with incumbents who had deep relationships with suppliers, wholesalers and designers.

Its efforts in these expansion areas have not changed Lululemon’s sales trajectory. Lululemon’s  shoe business remains relatively small, and it didn’t quite take the beauty industry by storm with its offering. And Lululemon’s partnerships with the NFL and Disney were panned as distractions from a focus on excellence.

“It seems to be going into junkification territory with heavily branded hoodies and tops that simply do not speak to the traditional finesse and quality of the Lululemon brand,” said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData, of new products in stores in January.

Lululemon seems to acknowledge that some customers are getting bored with the brand. McDonald admitted to Wall Street analysts in September that “We’re seeing fatigue with the consumer.” And in December, finance chief and interim co-CEO Meghan Frank said: “We’ve let product life cycles run too long within some of our key franchises.”

Frank has said Lululemon will ramp up new styles to 35% of its spring assortment. (Historically “newness” every season has been 23% or so of product selection.) And it will introduce the new pieces more quickly. But that is not enough for some: In a research note in January, UBS noted that many investors don’t see why that “newness” rate wouldn’t be at least 50% of product assortment.

And newness can backfire: Wilson pounced again in January after news reports that Lululemon had halted online sales after only four days of a new line of leggings, “Get Low,” that many customers said was too sheer when bending or squatting. It harkened back to an infamous “see-through leggings” crisis in 2013. (Lululemon told Fortune that “product quality is a nonnegotiable for us” and that it tests products and listens to customer feedback.)

“This is a new low for Lululemon,” Wilson wrote in a LinkedIn post. “This is not the fault of any hard-working employees,” he intoned. “This is the fault of the Board.”

No one can argue that Lululemon is in any mortal danger. It is still the activewear market leader and sales are growing overseas. Last week, it introduced its ShowZero, a yarn technology that it says conceals sweat. It also recently launching clothing for weightlifting and intense gym workouts with high filament-count yarn Lululemon says offers ideal stretch and unrestricted motion.

But as the old adage goes, it’s tougher to stay on top than to get there. Whatever one might think about the brand’s irascible founder, he seems to be right about one thing: Lululemon must focus on returning to form, not on forays into new categories or collaborations that don’t tap into the aesthetic and technical excellence that made Lululemon such a hit in the first place .

“The brand’s magic doesn’t lie in that,” says De Ayora. “It lies in technical credibility and beautifully constructed product.”

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Most people are shocked by what’s unfolding in the world right now. I’m not. I’ve seen this movie before.

As a global macro investor for over 50 years, I’ve had to study the cause-and-effect relationships that drive history in order to place my bets. What I found is that all monetary orders, political orders, and geopolitical orders rise, evolve, and collapse in a repeating pattern I call “the Big Cycle”—typically lasting about 75 years, give or take about 30.

I believe that the times ahead will be radically different from what most people have gotten used to—that they will be more like the tumultuous pre-1945 era than what we have experienced since the end of World War II.

We Are Now in Stage 5

In my book Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order, I described six stages of the Big Cycle. Stage 6 is the breakdown—the period of great disorder. Stage 5 is what immediately precedes it. That is where we are now.

I find that how I see things now is much different from how most other people see things because of our different perspectives. My perspective has been shaped by being a global macro investor who has to bet on what the future will be like. In pursuit of doing that well, I have found it invaluable to study the cause/effect relationships that repeatedly drove global macro events over the last 500 years.

With that perspective, watching what is happening now is like watching a movie that I have seen many times before because events are transpiring in the same ways as I have seen them transpire many times before. This perspective has been invaluable for me in placing my bets, so, at this stage in my life, I want to pass it along in the hope that it can help others prepare for what’s ahead. 

In contrast to my perspective, it seems to me that most people are surprised by what’s happening because nothing like it has happened in their lifetimes and because they are paying more attention to the events of the day than to how monetary orders, domestic political orders, and international geopolitical orders evolve over time.

This Is Not New—It Just Feels That Way

In my exploration of history, I saw that all monetary orders, domestic political orders, and international political orders began, evolved, and broke down in a Big Cycle progression. For example, I saw how the monetary, political, and geopolitical orders broke down in the 1929-1945 period of great disorder, how new orders were created in 1945, and how these new orders evolved to bring them and circumstances to where they now are which is similar to where they were in the 1929-39 period. I also saw how big acts of nature (droughts, floods, and pandemics) and the inventions of powerful new technologies had big impacts on the monetary orders, political orders, and geopolitical orders to influence the Big Cycle, and vice versa.  

The evolutions of these orders through their Big Cycles were almost all driven by essentially the same cause/effect dynamics. For example, throughout this 500-year period and across countries, I repeatedly saw how big debt/monetary cycles were driven by how debts and debt service payments rose relative to incomes. This squeezed out spending until that caused debt service problems and spending constraints.

I saw that when this happened at the same time there were large amounts of debt assets (bonds) and debt liabilities (debt) outstanding, as well as large budget deficits that required larger debt asset sales (i.e., bond sales) than there was demand for, the resulting supply/demand imbalance led the value of the debt and/or currency to fall.

I also saw how periods of great domestic and international conflicts—particularly, pre-war periods—led to creditors fearing that the debtor reserve currency country would devalue or default on its debts, and I saw how that led these creditors and central banks to shift some of their bond holdings to gold to protect themselves against these debts being paid with devalued money or not being paid at all because of capital wars. What is now happening in the markets and with the monetary system is consistent with that template. 

Nothing Is Predestined—But I’m Not Optimistic

In Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order, I described how these cycles transpired and broke down. The big breakdowns occur in what I call Stage 6 of the cycle, which is a period of great disorder.  The last major Stage 6 period began in the 1929 and ended in 1945 after World War II, when there were clear winners, most importantly the United States, which determined how the new orders would work. That led to the establishment of the United States-led monetary, political, and geopolitical orders. We are now in a new Stage 5, the stage that immediately precedes the breakdowns. The key markers of Stage 5 as it progresses toward Stage 6 are:

1. Large and rapidly rising government debts and geopolitical conflicts that lead to concerns about the value of and security of money, especially of the reserve currency, which drives a movement out of fiat currencies and into gold.
2. Large income, wealth, and values gaps within countries that lead to the rise of populism of the right and populism of the left and irreconcilable differences that can’t be resolved with compromises and rule of law.
3. The movement from a world order with a dominant power and relative peace to a world order that reflects a great powers conflict.

Throughout history, these conditions have typically led to financial problems and conflicts rather than rule following. They were particularly challenging for democracies because democracies are based on the rights to have disagreements and the following of rules, so when the disagreements are great and there is not a broad-based belief in the rule-following system, democracies experience disorder and autocratic leaders gain power. For example, in the 1930s, four major democracies (Germany, Japan, Italy, and Spain) became autocracies.

When these conditions were combined with big wealth and values gaps and bad economic conditions, they typically brought about disorder, conflict, and sometimes civil wars. There is nothing new about this dynamic. Plato wrote about it in The Republic in 375 BC. 

Today, we are now seeing:

* large debts, deficits, and debasements of fiat currencies led by the dollar and the rise in the gold price, 

* growing political and ideological polarity and populism within countries (now termed MAGA and WOKE in the U.S.), arising from large and growing wealth and values differences that are manifest in pre-civil war type developments, such as the president’s deployments of troops to cities and the related conflicts, such as those in Minneapolis, and the questioning of whether elections will be allowed to proceed as normal,

* the breaking down of the post-1945 multilateral, rules-based, international order and alliances such as NATO and the rise of a new type of world order that is more like many pre-1945 world orders in which there were great powers conflicts and gunboat diplomacy-type geopolitical moves such as what we have been seeing with Greenland, Venezuela, Iran and its allies, and China and Russia and their allies.   

When I look at these historical and contemporary dynamics, I think that it is indisputably clear that what is happening now is more analogous to pre-1945 times than the post-1945 times that we have gotten used to, which misleads most people’s expectations and causes them be shocked about what’s happening. At the same time, nothing is predestined. There is some chance our leaders individually and collectively will not fight and will draw people together to do the difficult, smart things necessary to handle these challenges well enough to beat the odds. Human nature being what it is, I’m not optimistic.  

Since we all have to bet on the future in some ways, I hope this Big Cycle perspective helps you as it has helped me. 

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.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

By the time a luxury home in Palm Beach hits the market, it’s already sold—and has been for months. The buyer is someone who’s hacking the luxury housing market by working with a broker and quietly joined a developer’s private waitlist before the blueprints were even drawn. 

This is the subscription economy for billionaires, and it’s reshaping how the ultra-wealthy buy homes across America. Ultrawealthy buyers are now securing spots on private waitlists months—or even years—before a home breaks ground. 

This is happening particularly in the custom luxury space where buyers are heavily focused on quality and craftsmanship, said Robert W. Burrage, founder and CEO of RWB Construction Management in Palm Beach County, Fla.—a metro area growing increasingly popular among billionaires and other ultrawealthy individuals like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The region, often dubbed “Wall Street South” for its influx of hedge funds and finance executives, has seen luxury home prices soar 187% over the past decade, more than any other major metro, according to Redfin.

“We’re seeing more clients approach us early and ask to be considered for future builds, sometimes before a project is even designed,” Burrage told Fortune. “Because there’s a limited number of builders doing this level of work, buyers are willing to wait to get the right house.”

In the past, the wealthy were more similar to the average American, having more time and freedom to go to attend viewings or browse for the right home with their real estate agent—and there was even an era in which luxury buyers trialed homes by having sleepovers in multimillion-dollar mansions. But the hot luxury market today often requires planning years in advance, especially in popular elite markets like South Florida, New York City, and other coastal metros.

And while the regular housing market stalls with homeowners frozen in place and younger generations unable to break the barriers of high mortgage rates and home prices, the luxury housing market is so competitive in many metros that buyers have to try new tactics to get exactly what they want. It mirrors the K-shaped economy at work, in which high-income earners continue to benefit from rising asset prices and spend more, while lower- and middle-income Americans struggle to afford even basic necessities.

Luxury real estate is getting even more exclusive

The backdrop of this trend is a record-shattering luxury real estate market. In 2025, all 10 of the most expensive home transactions in the U.S. exceeded $100 million, up from just five in 2023 and 2024. (The Wall Street Journal even minted 2025 as the “year of the $100 million house”).

Globally, more than 2,100 ultra-luxury homes priced at more than $10 million were sold over a 12-month period through late 2025, according to global real estate consultancy Knight Frank. And just in the U.S., luxury home prices rose 4.6% year-over-year in December 2025, according to Redfin, which is more than triple the gain in the non-luxury housing market. 

“Homebuyers are very selective because prices and mortgage rates are high—they want a house that has everything,” Alin Glogovicean, a real estate agent in Los Angeles, told Redfin. “Even super wealthy buyers are hesitant to pull the trigger because there’s not a lot of great inventory and they don’t want to settle.” 

So, this trend of buyers claiming properties before they’ve been built or even hit the market could fundamentally change how luxury real estate transactions are done in the future.

“It’s compressing the timeline. By the time a building launches publicly, a lot of the demand has already been identified,” Peter Zaitzeff, a New York City-based broker for Serhant who specializes in luxury new development, told Fortune. “That’s why you’ll see buildings announce ‘50% sold’ shortly after launch—those buyers were already lined up.”

It’s not what you offer—it’s who you know

In new luxury development, transactions increasingly happen privately before any listing is ever made public. 

Buyers typically get on waiting lists through brokers, Zaitzeff explained, because brokers maintain relationships with developers to secure clients’ priority months before a new development launches. Some buyers also register directly with developers through their website, but “serious buyers almost always come through agents,” he added. While not all of these transactions are done off market, many are, Zaitzeff said, particularly penthouses, trophy views, and prime lines.

Harrison Polsky, a principal at Dallas-based luxury developer Catēna Homes, told Fortune it’s a “very relationship-based” process, with most buyers getting on lists through brokers, past transactions, or direct connections to the builder. 

“If someone has bought from us before or has been referred by a trusted agent, they’ll often get early notice about upcoming projects before anything is announced publicly,” Polsky added.

Commissioning a home, not buying one 

The primary reason buyers subscribe to homes is that there is a very limited number of builders doing this level of luxury work, Burrage explained, so buyers are “willing to wait to get the right house.”

It also gives buyers a say in home details, finishes, and layout, he added, which fundamentally reframes what it looks like to purchase a luxury home.

“At the high end, it’s becoming more like commissioning something than buying something off the shelf,” he said. 

Above all, subscribing to developers gives luxury clients access to the best homes, experts agreed. So if you’re not ahead of the curve, it could make it much more difficult—or even impossible—to get the exact home you’re selling out millions of dollars for.

“The downside is that it puts more pressure on relationships,” Polsky said. “If you’re not working with the right builder or broker, you may never see the highest-quality opportunities.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

Sir Isaac Newton’s “Universal Law of Gravitation” states that whatever goes up must come down. Obviously, Sir Isaac has not been to the grocery store lately.

Prices are climbing well above the official inflation rate — and not always for the reasons companies claim. The real question isn’t why prices are rising. It’s whether they have to at all.

Prices Are Rising Fast — and Not Just Because of Inflation

While the official inflation rate sat at approximately 2.4% to 2.7% in early 2026, businesses across sectors have implemented price hikes in the high single digits or even double digits. The Adobe Digital Price Index recorded its largest monthly online price increase in a dozen years in January, driven by electronics, appliances, and furniture.

Specific examples tell the story:

• Video streaming subscriptions jumped 30% year-over-year
• Dell and HP confirmed PC price increases of 15%–20%, citing memory chip shortages
• Beef prices rose by double digits; instant coffee surged 24%
• Dining out climbed 4.6%, with health care, insurance, and electricity also spiking

More than half of small business leaders surveyed by Vistage Worldwide in December said they planned further price increases within three months.

“Greedflation” Is Real — and Hotly Debated

The key factors driving this trend include “tariff pass-throughs”. Companies like Levi Strauss and McCormick & Co. have cited new import tariffs as a primary reason for increasing prices by amounts that exceed the general inflation rate. Another is rising operational costs. Significant jumps in health insurance premiums (up to 14%) and labor costs have pushed businesses to raise their own rates to maintain margins. Then there are corporate profit margins. A 2024 FTC report found that some grocery retailers used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices and increase profits, with revenues outpacing costs by more than 6% to 7% in recent years.

Whether corporations are responsible for “greedflation”—defined as firms using the cover of inflation to hike prices and expand profit margins beyond what is necessary to cover higher costs—is a subject of intense debate among economists, politicians, and researchers, with evidence suggesting a significant role in certain sectors but dispute over its overall impact on inflation.  macroeconomic policy that had led spending to explode, forcing up all prices in the medium-term.

Inarguably, certain categories such as food (especially dining out), electricity, natural gas and shelter have increased above the average Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the last twelve months. One must add to that the phenomenon of “frequency of exposure” from behavioral economics whereby consumers are highly sensitive to price changes in frequently purchased items (bananas) but less attuned to price adjustments in infrequent, high-cost, or financed purchases (cars). 

Companies That Are Beating Inflation Without Raising Prices

Whatever the case, the larger question is: Can a company remain profitable today without raising prices?  In many cases, the answer is yes — and the playbook is well-established.

Operations efficiency. Food and CPG manufacturers are lowering ingredient, manufacturing, and logistics costs through better sourcing and process improvements, absorbing inflation without passing it to consumers.

Supply chain optimization. Tight inventory management and better demand forecasting free up margin without sacrificing quality.

Data-driven promotions. Retailers and brands are using analytics and AI to fine-tune discounts and channel strategies rather than implementing across-the-board price hikes.

Product and packaging innovation. Lush, the British cosmetics retailer, introduced solid shampoos and conditioners that are more compact, reduce packaging costs, and deliver more uses per unit than liquid equivalents — boosting perceived value while supporting premium positioning and sustainability credentials.

Other standout examples include IKEA, Aldi, Honda, Toyota, Mint Mobile, Lands’ End, and Patagonia — firms that have built durable customer loyalty by prioritizing value over margin extraction. As Benjamin Franklin put it: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

The Real Variable Is Leadership

While corporations are generally profit-maximizers, evidence suggests that in the post-pandemic, high-inflation environment, some corporations with high market power engaged in opportunistic pricing, contributing to higher and more persistent inflation than would have occurred otherwise. That is human nature; and now with conflict in the Middle East there will be companies that see this unfortunate development as yet another reason to jack up prices. 

The above examples clearly illustrate that corporations can, indeed, enhance profitability without hiking prices and all the while maintaining and even boosting quality. How companies respond does not depend upon U.S. fiscal and monetary policy but on corporate leadership. It’s up to corporations alone to do the right thing, for their customers and shareholders.

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.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

Sir Isaac Newton’s “Universal Law of Gravitation” states that whatever goes up must come down. Obviously, Sir Isaac has not been to the grocery store lately.

Prices are climbing well above the official inflation rate — and not always for the reasons companies claim. The real question isn’t why prices are rising. It’s whether they have to at all.

Prices Are Rising Fast — and Not Just Because of Inflation

While the official inflation rate sat at approximately 2.4% to 2.7% in early 2026, businesses across sectors have implemented price hikes in the high single digits or even double digits. The Adobe Digital Price Index recorded its largest monthly online price increase in a dozen years in January, driven by electronics, appliances, and furniture.

Specific examples tell the story:

• Video streaming subscriptions jumped 30% year-over-year
• Dell and HP confirmed PC price increases of 15%–20%, citing memory chip shortages
• Beef prices rose by double digits; instant coffee surged 24%
• Dining out climbed 4.6%, with health care, insurance, and electricity also spiking

More than half of small business leaders surveyed by Vistage Worldwide in December said they planned further price increases within three months.

“Greedflation” Is Real — and Hotly Debated

The key factors driving this trend include “tariff pass-throughs”. Companies like Levi Strauss and McCormick & Co. have cited new import tariffs as a primary reason for increasing prices by amounts that exceed the general inflation rate. Another is rising operational costs. Significant jumps in health insurance premiums (up to 14%) and labor costs have pushed businesses to raise their own rates to maintain margins. Then there are corporate profit margins. A 2024 FTC report found that some grocery retailers used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices and increase profits, with revenues outpacing costs by more than 6% to 7% in recent years.

Whether corporations are responsible for “greedflation”—defined as firms using the cover of inflation to hike prices and expand profit margins beyond what is necessary to cover higher costs—is a subject of intense debate among economists, politicians, and researchers, with evidence suggesting a significant role in certain sectors but dispute over its overall impact on inflation.  macroeconomic policy that had led spending to explode, forcing up all prices in the medium-term.

Inarguably, certain categories such as food (especially dining out), electricity, natural gas and shelter have increased above the average Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the last twelve months. One must add to that the phenomenon of “frequency of exposure” from behavioral economics whereby consumers are highly sensitive to price changes in frequently purchased items (bananas) but less attuned to price adjustments in infrequent, high-cost, or financed purchases (cars). 

Companies That Are Beating Inflation Without Raising Prices

Whatever the case, the larger question is: Can a company remain profitable today without raising prices?  In many cases, the answer is yes — and the playbook is well-established.

Operations efficiency. Food and CPG manufacturers are lowering ingredient, manufacturing, and logistics costs through better sourcing and process improvements, absorbing inflation without passing it to consumers.

Supply chain optimization. Tight inventory management and better demand forecasting free up margin without sacrificing quality.

Data-driven promotions. Retailers and brands are using analytics and AI to fine-tune discounts and channel strategies rather than implementing across-the-board price hikes.

Product and packaging innovation. Lush, the British cosmetics retailer, introduced solid shampoos and conditioners that are more compact, reduce packaging costs, and deliver more uses per unit than liquid equivalents — boosting perceived value while supporting premium positioning and sustainability credentials.

Other standout examples include IKEA, Aldi, Honda, Toyota, Mint Mobile, Lands’ End, and Patagonia — firms that have built durable customer loyalty by prioritizing value over margin extraction. As Benjamin Franklin put it: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

The Real Variable Is Leadership

While corporations are generally profit-maximizers, evidence suggests that in the post-pandemic, high-inflation environment, some corporations with high market power engaged in opportunistic pricing, contributing to higher and more persistent inflation than would have occurred otherwise. That is human nature; and now with conflict in the Middle East there will be companies that see this unfortunate development as yet another reason to jack up prices. 

The above examples clearly illustrate that corporations can, indeed, enhance profitability without hiking prices and all the while maintaining and even boosting quality. How companies respond does not depend upon U.S. fiscal and monetary policy but on corporate leadership. It’s up to corporations alone to do the right thing, for their customers and shareholders.

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.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

At the turn of the century, educational technology initiatives put laptop keyboards at the fingertips of U.S. schoolchildren. Now, 25 years later, the next generation of students have turned to AI—and education experts warn unrestricted use of the technology could atrophy critical thinking skills.

AI use among students has become ubiquitous following the 2022 release of ChatGPT. More than half of teenagers are using the technology for schoolwork, a Pew Research Center report released last month found. Of the nearly 1,500 parents and teens interviewed for the survey, 57% of teen students use AI to search information, and 54% use it for schoolwork.

While access to AI chatbots makes homework as easy as plugging a question into one’s phone, the frictionless retrieval of information using AI has raised concerns among educators: Rather than aid in learning, could AI actually hinder the process?

A Brookings Institute study published in January laid bare anxieties around the potential harms of AI in the classroom. Analyzing data from interviews and focus groups with more than 500 educators, parents, and students across 50 countries, as well as from more than 400 studies, the researchers found at this point, “risks of utilizing generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits.”

The report gave credence to early research—including a February 2025 Microsoft study—finding AI use was associated with worse judgement and critical thinking skills.

“The cognitive offloading, and the cognitive decline that’s associated with that, the decline in critical thinking, and just even reading and writing and knowledge of basic facts—I absolutely believe that,” to be the case, Mary Burns, an education consultant and co-author of the Brookings Institute study, told Fortune.

EdTech under scrutiny

Computer use in schools has come under recent scrutiny following a Congressional testimony in January from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, who noted, citing Program for International Student Assessment data, that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to be less cognitively capable than their parents. He blamed unfettered access to classroom technology, noting a stark correlation in lower standardized testing scores and more screen time in school. A 2014 study surveying 3,000 university students found that two-thirds of the time students spend on their screens were on off-task activities.

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” Horvath said in his written testimony. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”

Horvath, author of the 2025 book The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning—and How to Help Them Thrive Again, told Fortune the rise of EdTech was a result of tech companies creating a narrative around the need for screens in the classroom to bolster learning. The push for computers in schools began in 2002, when Maine became the first state to introduce a statewide program providing laptops to schoolchildren in the classroom. Following a slow rollout, Google began reaching out to educators to test its low-cost Chromebook with free Google apps, and asked teachers and administrators to promote the product. In partnership with schools, Google’s Chromebook became commonplace in classrooms, accounting for more than half of digital devices sent to schools in 2017.

There have been more than 100 years of evidence showing the failures of automated learning, Horvath argued, beginning with the 1924 invention of the “teaching machine” by Ohio State University psychology professor Sidney Pressey. Students learned to answer the questions the machine would generate when fed a piece of paper, but were unable to generalize that knowledge outside the device.

“Kids would be very good so long as they were using the tool, but as soon as they went off the tool, they couldn’t do it anymore,” Horvath said.

Burns, the education consultant, said AI was, in some ways, a natural extension of the argument tech companies have made about the need for computers in school, which is that students are able to learn at their own pace, or seek out information of interest to them to initiate their own learning.

“[Tech] companies keep talking about, AI is personalizing learning,” she said. “I don’t think it’s personalizing learning. I think it’s individualizing learning. There’s a difference there, and that’s kind of a classic carryover from educational technology.”

Integrating AI into classrooms

According to Horvath, student AI use is not conducive to learning because it mirrors the failures of the 20th century “teaching machines.” Students’ learning was individualized—they answered questions from the device at their own pace and independently from other students—but were unable to synthesize knowledge taught outside the device. Similarly, Horvath said, giving AI to students without clear instructions or parameters teaches students how to rely on the device, not their own critical thinking.

“The tools experts use to make their lives easier are not the tools children should use to learn how to become experts,” Horvath said. “When you use offloading tools that experts use to make their lives easier as a novice, as a student, you don’t learn the skill. You simply learn dependency.”

Burns—a proponent of EdTech—said it’s futile to eschew the technology altogether. The Brookings Institute study found that despite educators having real fear that students will use AI to cheat, teachers are using AI to create lesson plans. Data on AI in the classroom is limited, but there are benefits, she added. For English language learners, for example, teachers can use AI to alter the lexile level of a reading passage.

“To say that technologies are a failure is not true,” Burns said. “To say technology is a mixed bag is true.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

At the turn of the century, educational technology initiatives put laptop keyboards at the fingertips of U.S. schoolchildren. Now, 25 years later, the next generation of students have turned to AI—and education experts warn unrestricted use of the technology could atrophy critical thinking skills.

AI use among students has become ubiquitous following the 2022 release of ChatGPT. More than half of teenagers are using the technology for schoolwork, a Pew Research Center report released last month found. Of the nearly 1,500 parents and teens interviewed for the survey, 57% of teen students use AI to search information, and 54% use it for schoolwork.

While access to AI chatbots makes homework as easy as plugging a question into one’s phone, the frictionless retrieval of information using AI has raised concerns among educators: Rather than aid in learning, could AI actually hinder the process?

A Brookings Institute study published in January laid bare anxieties around the potential harms of AI in the classroom. Analyzing data from interviews and focus groups with more than 500 educators, parents, and students across 50 countries, as well as from more than 400 studies, the researchers found at this point, “risks of utilizing generative AI in children’s education overshadow its benefits.”

The report gave credence to early research—including a February 2025 Microsoft study—finding AI use was associated with worse judgement and critical thinking skills.

“The cognitive offloading, and the cognitive decline that’s associated with that, the decline in critical thinking, and just even reading and writing and knowledge of basic facts—I absolutely believe that,” to be the case, Mary Burns, an education consultant and co-author of the Brookings Institute study, told Fortune.

EdTech under scrutiny

Computer use in schools has come under recent scrutiny following a Congressional testimony in January from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, who noted, citing Program for International Student Assessment data, that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to be less cognitively capable than their parents. He blamed unfettered access to classroom technology, noting a stark correlation in lower standardized testing scores and more screen time in school. A 2014 study surveying 3,000 university students found that two-thirds of the time students spend on their screens were on off-task activities.

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” Horvath said in his written testimony. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”

Horvath, author of the 2025 book The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning—and How to Help Them Thrive Again, told Fortune the rise of EdTech was a result of tech companies creating a narrative around the need for screens in the classroom to bolster learning. The push for computers in schools began in 2002, when Maine became the first state to introduce a statewide program providing laptops to schoolchildren in the classroom. Following a slow rollout, Google began reaching out to educators to test its low-cost Chromebook with free Google apps, and asked teachers and administrators to promote the product. In partnership with schools, Google’s Chromebook became commonplace in classrooms, accounting for more than half of digital devices sent to schools in 2017.

There have been more than 100 years of evidence showing the failures of automated learning, Horvath argued, beginning with the 1924 invention of the “teaching machine” by Ohio State University psychology professor Sidney Pressey. Students learned to answer the questions the machine would generate when fed a piece of paper, but were unable to generalize that knowledge outside the device.

“Kids would be very good so long as they were using the tool, but as soon as they went off the tool, they couldn’t do it anymore,” Horvath said.

Burns, the education consultant, said AI was, in some ways, a natural extension of the argument tech companies have made about the need for computers in school, which is that students are able to learn at their own pace, or seek out information of interest to them to initiate their own learning.

“[Tech] companies keep talking about, AI is personalizing learning,” she said. “I don’t think it’s personalizing learning. I think it’s individualizing learning. There’s a difference there, and that’s kind of a classic carryover from educational technology.”

Integrating AI into classrooms

According to Horvath, student AI use is not conducive to learning because it mirrors the failures of the 20th century “teaching machines.” Students’ learning was individualized—they answered questions from the device at their own pace and independently from other students—but were unable to synthesize knowledge taught outside the device. Similarly, Horvath said, giving AI to students without clear instructions or parameters teaches students how to rely on the device, not their own critical thinking.

“The tools experts use to make their lives easier are not the tools children should use to learn how to become experts,” Horvath said. “When you use offloading tools that experts use to make their lives easier as a novice, as a student, you don’t learn the skill. You simply learn dependency.”

Burns—a proponent of EdTech—said it’s futile to eschew the technology altogether. The Brookings Institute study found that despite educators having real fear that students will use AI to cheat, teachers are using AI to create lesson plans. Data on AI in the classroom is limited, but there are benefits, she added. For English language learners, for example, teachers can use AI to alter the lexile level of a reading passage.

“To say that technologies are a failure is not true,” Burns said. “To say technology is a mixed bag is true.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

Too often leaders—even the best ones—can get stuck on little power struggles and personality conflicts. It’s understandable and human but not in service to our goals.

The strategy I often refer the leaders I coach to is called “Beat the plan.” When you have many important issues and not infinite time, “Beat the plan” is a way for leaders and teams to speed up decision making and, at the same time, increase quality of those decisions and camaraderie of the team. I refined the approach from Sylvia Mathews Burwell. If you have not heard of Sylvia it’s due only to her humility as she was a Rhodes Scholar, a President of the Gates Foundation,  Walmart Foundation and best known for running OMB at the White House. She was so well liked and regarded by Republicans and Democrats alike, she was sent over to run HHS.

Syl explained it this way. In the White House, one might have a million decision points, all important and not as much time as you want for each. As example, say   “What are we going to do with a surplus when we balance the budget?” (Yes that happened, she said!) is the question of the day. Hypothetically, instead of OMB getting a proposal shot down, the “plan beats no plan” approach or “beat the plan” gets leaders to come to the conversation with baked ideas and strategies, ensuring people become more aligned, and has the added benefit of strengthening proposals.

Here’s how “Beat the plan” works. Whoever’s in charge of an area develops a plan, usually with a solid frame but imagine it’s like 60-80% developed and directionally correct. That person would then drop the plan on the table and say “Beat the plan.”  Then everyone (having pre-read) can make suggestions.

• They can make it a little better with small tweaks.
• They can suggest more significant changes.
• They can propose big changes.
• Or they can propose an entirely new plan.

If no one says boo, that is the plan and no one can give you grief later that they didn’t have a chance to help shape the plan. All suggestions have to beat the existing plan. This helps get away from power struggles and “whose idea” it was. If I have a B+ plan and everyone helps get it to A- or A, great. If someone wants to propose a completely different plan, also OK, but it should be an A- or better plan, not something the group would see as a B- or worse.

Every person and every situation is different but you see the benefits.

• It speeds things up. Most of us can frame a plan that is directionally correct quickly, so the plan is 60, 70, 80% there. Then the team can crowd source think and make it stronger quickly as well.
• You get increased group buy in and trust. Everyone will spot stuff you didn’t consider. This pairs well with the RACI model, since you are activating the ask of input for other stakeholders.

What are the keys to make it work well? Think “strong view, loosely held.”

It’s important that the owner of the plan have a solid POV and be open to better. If you reject all input, especially stuff that actually would make it better, people will be reluctant next time.

Equally, the folks giving the input have to learn to give and then let go. As our friend Ray Chambers says “detach yourself from the outcome.”

All leaders are control freaks in some ways. It’s part of what makes you so effective but also becomes limiting if you’re not also mentally strong enough to let go. Most input can be heard but only some can realistically be incorporated so give and let go.

This came up from a coaching I had with an SVP for a large firm in London.

• Alison   “I tried to give my CEO input—he didn’t listen so I am not doing that again.”
• BH           “Can I offer a different way to think about that?”
• Alison   “Of course,” Alison said.
• BH           Your choice of basketball, futbol/soccer or baseball analogy.”
• Alison   “Soccer.”
• “BH         Name one of the all-time greats.”
• Alison   “Mmmm… Lucy Bronze.”
• BH           “OK, every time Lucy touched the ball did it go in the goal?”
• Alison   “No, lol.”
• BH           “But you said she was an all time great. Did I not hear you right?”
• Alison   “That’s not how it works!”
• BH           “Exactly. She might touch it 30 times, 7 attacking shots, 4 actual shots on goal and 2 get through.”
• Alison   “Yes.”
• BH           “It’s the same with input. Give 30 pieces of input. 7 will be heard. 4 will be considered. 2 will be implemented. So what’s the right mindset to have when you have input to share?”
• Alison   “Take the shot and keep playing.”
• BH           Goal!!

Bill Hoogterp is a bestselling author, an entrepreneur, and one of the top executive coaches worldwide. He has advised dozens of Fortune 500 CEOs, and last year, his company LifeHikes offered trainings at more than 100 global companies in 47 countries and seven languages. In his series for Fortune, he answers real questions from executives striving to become better leaders. To learn more about Bill, visit lifehikes.com. To reach Bill email bill_hoogterp@lifehikes.com.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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It was a glorious time to make money. From early summer 2023 to the close of January 2025, private equity stocks staged what may rank as the single biggest surge, over a tight time frame, in the annals of financial services. In that eighteen month span, Blackstone notched total returns 58.2%, Ares, Apollo, and Blue Owl achieved 68.1%, 77.9%, and 80.6% respectively, and KKR led the charge at 103.4%. Then the cyclone came. Starting in September of last year, an historic selloff that from their peaks sent down Apollo 41%, Blackstone 46%, and Ares and KKR 48% each, while Blue Owl dropped by two thirds. The wipeout has erased over $265 billion in market cap; Blackstone and Blue Owl are now trading far below their levels of late 2021, and the sudden drop left KKR, Apollo and Ares showing puny, market-trailing gains over that near half-decade.

To be sure, the PE business has suffered from overpaying for its buyout picks in the period of ultra-low interest rates, a problem that’s forcing them to hold their portfolio companies for extended periods, and curtailed profits when they’re sold. But until recently, it was the tremendous growth in private debt that far more than offset the slump in their traditional franchise, and accounted for the wondrous performance of their stocks. Now, panic is roiling the funds holding loans to software outfits perceived to be threatened by AI, and investors, especially newly-recruited retail folk, are demanding their money back. “It resembles a run on a bank,” says Matt Swain, co-head of Equity Capital Solutions at investment bank Houlihan Lokey.

The problem is that the regular folk drawn to these funds high yields, in many cases, are proving far less patient than the super-long term holders that are the traditional pillars of private credit. Now enough of those newcomers are seeking large redemptions that it’s causing major distress at the PE world’s biggest and most profitable funds. The demands are so big that in many cases, the industry’s giants are shutting the gates, further raising worries and spurring the hunger to flee. 

So how did things go south so quickly? And, can anything stem the bleeding? As always on Wall Street when someone is selling, someone else is buying at the right price—and some think that so-called “secondary” funds will be the winners here. “These deals may make a lot of sense for the secondary funds,” says David Feirstein, founder and managing partner at Ronin Capital Partners, a major New York PE firm. “The best opportunities are in markets where people get a little scared.”

Blackstone, KKR, Apollo are gating the exits—and retail investors are trapped inside

In the past, PE investors were mainly large institutions that garnered high interest payments for allowing their money to be tied up for, say, 8 or 10 years. But three or four years ago, the PE titans saw high net worth and middle class investors as a huge potential market for these products, and succeeded in attracting immense inflows from the retail realm. For example, Blue Owl garnered around 40% of its over $300 billion in assets under management from individuals. The whole idea, as Morgan Stanley states on their website, was to “democratize” the market by giving average people access to the same products as say, pension funds or multi-billionaires. The appeal was obvious: the Blackstone Private Credit Fund (BCRED) has delivered annual returns of 9.8% since its inception. 

This new category became known as “semi-liquid” vehicles. They come in a number of flavors. Among them a type of Business Development Companies or BDCs that don’t trade on an exchange. Instead, investors can make requests to redeem all or part of their shares, but the PE managers typically cap total withdrawals per quarter at a fixed percentage of their net asset value, often 5%. Hence the term “semi-liquid.” According to Morningstar, semi-liquids became one of the hottest financial products on the planet, surging from AUM of just $200 billion at the start of 2022 to $500 billion in Q3 of last year.

The trouble began in September of last year via the back-to-back bankruptcies of two companies fueled by loads of cheap debt, much of it held by PE funds, subprime auto lender Tricolor, and car-part-maker First Brands. Then, the fear that AI could render swaths of the software trade outmoded moved a wave of the savings-for-retirement crowd to demand their money back. 

First hit was the biggest retail shop, Blue Owl. In November, the firm restricted withdrawals, and in February bought back 15% of the outstanding shares in one fund to refund cash, and in another vehicle, ended its regular quarterly liquidity payments. At Blackstone’s BCRED, investors sought to pull out $3.8 billion or 7.9% of the assets. The firm took the extraordinary step of raising $400 million from its own capital and its senior executives to satisfy all the requests. Then the trouble began to spread from beyond the PE world to a variety of fund managers, including some of the world’s biggest names. Shareholders in alternative asset manager Cliffwater’s $33 billion flagship private credit fund are seeking to withdraw 7% of their stake. In early March, BlackRock restricted withdrawals on its $26 billion HPS Lending Fund. Morgan Stanley got repurchase requests for 10.9% of the shares in its North Haven Private Income fund. It returned $169 million in investor money, capping the payouts at 5%. In Canada, where around $30 billion invested in private real estate funds, about 40% of the total, is now gated as managers limit distributions and halt redemptions.

When J.P. Morgan said it would restrict its lending to the private debt funds, it had the feel that the longtime CEO was exactly right when he warned that when “cockroaches” like the September bankruptcies surface, more cockroaches are likely lurking nearby.

The plunging market for private investments might have an unlikely savior

These semi-liquid funds didn’t lend to the giants of the tech world like the Oracles and Intels. Instead, they parked a lot of their investor cash with mid-sized software companies, a debt category that looked like a great risk until late last year. One aspect that may have augmented the funds’ difficulties. It’s long been common for funds to hold around 10% of their assets in cash, usually in short-term treasuries, to fund redemptions. But industry sources told me that in some cases, managers found those super-safe cushions an unnecessary drag on their returns, since loads of money was pouring in, and only a trickle leaving. So they placed the “reserves” in syndicated debt that showed better yield. The problem: Those pools also included lots of software bonds that were dropping in value. Hence, when the funds sold those bonds to raise cash, they got far less than the 100 cents on the dollar that they invested. That shortfall may have tightened the liquidity available to meet redemptions.

In a recent interview, Jon Gray, Blackstone’s president and CEO, has argued persuasively that the withdrawal caps are “really a feature, not a bug, in these products. What you’re doing is trading away a bit of liquidity for higher returns. That’s the same tradeoff institutional investors have made for a long period of time.” In fact, despite the software woes, these funds are highly diversified and so far, we’re seeing no signs that companies whose debt the fund owns are in danger of defaulting. In effect, Gray is arguing that the restrictions are in place to ensure the LPs get full value by holding their shares for a long period and pocket the premium, as opposed to selling early at a big discount.

Still, if swarms of retail investors who aren’t used to that tradeoff and get scared by the AI news sell en masse, the funds’ net asset values will keep dropping, even if they don’t deserve to based on actual credit performance. 

Naturally, the PE firms dread dumping bonds way before they mature at fire-sale prices to meet the redemptions. That would hammer returns for the institutions and non-selling small shareholders that remain. Now, an industry that’s grown rapidly of late is poised to step in as buyers, at a discount of course. They’re what’s called “secondary funds” that traditionally buy stakes from limited partners that want to exit before the fund sells all its assets, and closes down. Though the secondary players have mostly specialized in equity shares, they’re also increasingly active in credit.

Secondaries divide into two parts. The first and best known simply purchase positions, one at a time, from people who want out early. The second are what’s known as “Continuation Vehicles.” Here’s how CVs work today. Say a PE firm has held Company X in its portfolio for a long time, and it’s done well, but some of the original investors have waited long enough, and want to cash out. The sponsor and most of the investors see a lot more value in holding and improving Company X and want to stay. So the sponsor recruits a new group to replace those who want to go. The concept has clicked big time. CVs are one of the fastest growing segments in financial services. The industry’s grown ten-fold over the past decade to $100 billion, and represents around one-fifth of all PE exits. So far, the model’s mostly been deployed in equity, but it work in credit as well. As in equities, a credit CV that purchases part of the shares in a private credit fund from those desiring to leave establishes a new separate fund, comprising the new buyout investors, that’s still managed by the PE firm that raised and ran the original pool.

That’s where players like Matt Swain at Houlihan Lokey come in. His company does a brisk business in raising money PE sponsors to purchase companies they can vastly improve, and also for CVs (you can read Fortune’s feature about him here.) He sees both regular secondaries and CVs as a solution to giving both sides what they need, the retail crowd a way out, and the fund managers a route towards providing them that option sans the forced dumping of bonds, and managing money for the new group comprising the CV.

“The CV investors are often a different breed from the people who want to get out,” Swain told Fortune in a recent interview. “They’re chiefly family offices, endowments, and foundations, sophisticated players who will want to stay in these deals. They’re also highly opportunistic, and they’ll seize the chance to purchase at discounts that generate superior returns in the long-term.” In other words, Swain thinks that it’s the support of CVs that could stabilize the market, reassure anxious limited partners that they’re not going to get locked in, and stem a descent into spiraling demands to flee.

Houlihan Lokey got into CVs early, and it’s a major fund-raiser for PE firms seeking candidates to replace the investors looking to leave. “CVs are the option that the market hasn’t priced in yet,” says Swain. “It’s what could prevent a big drop in the value of these funds. It will allow the LPs to take out 100% of their liquidity. If a firefighter wants to get their $25,000 out of the semi-liquid fund, they’ll be able to do it. The panic happens when people think the liquidity isn’t available.” He notes that the CV investors will still want good prices from the sellers. He believes that the skepticism around some of the software debt is legitimate, so shares could sell at a discount. Feirstein agrees that CVs could provide a good match for the funds where redemption requests are running high. “I think it would be of interest where you have a bunch of investors getting nervous about software credit, for example, and want out,” he says. “It could be a way solving some retail uncertainty.”

The big PE firms, notably Blackstone and Apollo, harbor their own “secondary” funds that purchase shares from investors that want to leave their and other funds early, before all companies in their portfolios are sold. These secondary pools also put new investors into continuation vehicles. These firms hasn’t announced any plans to participate in secondary purchases of private credit shares.

Fortune reached out to both Apollo and Blackstone for comment, but did not immediately receive an immediate response. However, the big firms are known for having excellent risk controls; their fundamental model consists of funding assets such as real estate projects, rail cars, aircraft and sundry other hard assets that produce durable cash flow, where the rents, leases and other income streams they’re collecting provide a wide cushion over the interest paid to their investors. Plus, the loans are generally secured by the underlying assets. So most of the sources I spoke to for this story said this is not a situation where they would expect to see a huge wave of defaults.

Besides the giants, a large group of private markets firms manage CV funds, and appear likely purchasers of shares from investors seeking redemptions. The list encompasses HarbourVest Capital, Coller Capital, Pantheon Ventures, all of the U.S., Tikehau Capital and Ardian.

One potential problem: Private credit is a $1.8 trillion domain. The secondary market totals around $200 billion, about evenly divided between equity and credit. If demands for paybacks really take off, it’s unclear that the secondary buying space is big enough to fully bolster and balance the market. Swain believes, however, that the investors will pour lots of new money into secondary funds as they see the good deals spread, giving them more capacity to help absorb the selling. Still, Swain already sees deals developing where CVs are purchasing surprisingly large portions of existing funds, in some cases replacing 85% or 90% of the existing investors.

But the CV investors are marathoners. Swain notes that many of those interested will be family offices that eschew investing in traditional PE funds where an Ares or Carlyle pick the companies. They’d much rather make the choices themselves by evaluating existing enterprises that already have a track record. These family offices will be examining packages of known assets, or perhaps even bonds in individual companies. That’s just the kind of individual, one-by-one deals they’re looking for.

And unlike many retail investors, they’re in it for the marathon, not just a sprint.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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The immediate shock of the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran is felt most acutely in fuel prices. As the fighting drags into a third week, however, the ripples are spreading across a broader swath of the economy, threatening to affect everything from groceries and work schedules to stock markets and interest rates. 

Even stagflation—the dreaded S-word that plagued American consumers during the 1970s Middle East oil crisis—is in the air again, as business leaders, analysts, and policymakers reassess the scope and duration of a conflict that the U.S. government seems to have underestimated.

At the center of the widening crisis is the false belief that the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow choke point separating 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas from global markets—would be left untouched from the conflict, said Bob McNally, former White House energy adviser under George W. Bush and founder of the Rapidan Energy Group.

“Even the possibility that a hostile power could choke traffic in Hormuz—by far the world’s most vital energy and commodity artery—was considered to be absurd,” McNally told Fortune, largely because it hadn’t happened before. “When I would tell people our analysis shows that, in a military conflict with Iran, Hormuz would be shut for weeks, people looked at me like I was high on crack cocaine.”

With crude oil benchmarks hovering near $100 per barrel—up 70% since early January—prices may rise to all-time highs of $150 or greater by the end of March if the strait remains effectively closed with no clear end in sight, McNally said. If anything, he said, prices are still artificially lower than they should be: “The world can’t grow without 20% of its energy—not in the short term. People are just unwilling to come to grips with the idea that we’re not going to get 20% of our energy back really fast.”

Oil forecaster Dan Pickering, founder of the Pickering Energy Partners consulting firm, noted that the effects in the U.S. are relatively muted thus far thanks to domestic oil and gas supplies. While U.S. fuel prices are up nearly 35% from January lows and still rising, there are no shortages or long lines at gas stations. That is not the case in much of Asia, where dependence on Middle Eastern supplies has led to skyrocketing prices and a cascade of other effects. Shortages of fuel, cooking gas, and electricity, have led to work from home directives, school closures, and conservation requests in countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Pakistan. Shortages of fertilizer shipments will trickle down into food and grocery costs.

“Compared to a week ago, the situation looks more challenging and longer lasting. An easy solution to the straits does not appear on the horizon,” Pickering said. “With that, there’s fear of inflation, fear that stocks might be overvalued, and you’re hearing ‘stagflation’ a lot. It’s rippling through sentiment, and it’s putting a higher floor on pricing whenever this conflict ends.”

A previously robust stock market is starting to show signs of disquiet: The Dow Jones Industrial Average, for instance, is down 6% in a month and expected to dip further at least as long as the war extends. The exception, of course, is energy producers capitalizing off the price surges, as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and many other U.S. oil and refining stocks jumped to record highs.

Open for transit, aside from the shooting

Member countries of the International Energy Agency agreed to release a record-high, 400 million barrels of oil from strategic reserves, including 172 million barrels from the U.S., but doing so will take at least four months to pull from storage. “Oil can’t come out fast enough to offset the closure of the straits. You have some help that will come over the next three to six months, but this crisis is happening now,” Pickering said.

It’s been more than a week since President Donald Trump announced plans for government-backed, oil tanker insurance and potential naval escorts through the strait with little tangible progress. The U.S. is currently in the process of sending more warships and Marines to the Middle East.

The military is currently focused on weakening Iran’s defenses, and naval escorts for tankers may begin as soon as the end of March, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said March 12. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth downplayed the problems more, saying on March 13 that he’s not concerned about the strait.

“The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that,” Hegseth said with a straight face during a press conference.

Later March 13, Trump was asked on Fox News when he would know the war is over. His response, “When I feel it in my bones.”

What comes next?

Iran responded to the war—including the death of its supreme leader and other top officials—by firing missiles at its energy-producing, neighboring Gulf states and then at tankers within the strait.

Although he has yet to be seen and is believed by the Trump administration to be injured, Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a statement pledging to keep the strait closed, using both mines and bombing attacks from ground forces. A handful of tankers from non-enemy nations, including India, were strategically allowed through.

“Iran is demonstrating that it controls the Strait of Hormuz, and not the United States,” McNally said. “It does that by both periodically attacking ships in the strait—re-instilling fear among tankers and insurers and keeping them from moving—and apparently allowing certain tankers to go through.”

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly countered to Fortune that the U.S. has destroyed over 20 of Iran’s mine-laying vessels with more to come. “President Trump is fully prepared to provide U.S. Navy escorts through the Strait of Hormuz if he deems it necessary,” she reiterated.

Carolyn Kissane, associate dean of the New York University Center for Global Affairs, said the markets are no longer taking White House statements “at face value”—as was the case during the first week of the war—and are recognizing that Iran is “going for the jugular.”

“This is historic that Iran is targeting Gulf states and the Strait of Hormuz, which has always been the worst, worst, worst-case scenario,” Kissane said. “If there’s no conclusion in the next two-to-three weeks, we are looking at much higher prices, and a lot of insecurities across supply chains for the foreseeable future. There are going to be some very huge ripple effects.”

One of those ripple effects is the political implications in a midterm election year in the U.S., especially since this is clearly recognized as a “war of choice,” she said.

While just a few weeks ago, voter concerns about AI data centers and rising utility costs seemed to be replacing gas prices at the pump as the new political bellwether, now surging fuel prices are the focus again. Former President Joe Biden took a big political hit from high fuel costs when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and that obviously wasn’t an American military decision.

That said, it’s because of those very reasons that this war might still conclude within a couple of weeks or so, said Pavel Molchanov, energy analyst at Raymond James. Trump has always focused acutely on keeping fuel prices low.

“When prices at the pump spike, presidential approval ratings go down. And now, the price of oil is the highest in four years,” Molchanov said. “The longer Americans feel pain at the pump, the more political pressure there will be on the White House to end the war.”

And while the level of Iran’s military response has surprised some observers, the country needs resolution as well. After all, Iran isn’t moving its oil through the strait either, Molchanov said.

“Iran needs to export its oil. They need the money.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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President Donald Trump said the US had bombed military targets on a critical Iranian outpost in the Persian Gulf and threatened additional strikes targeting oil infrastructure if Tehran continued to block energy flows, in the latest escalation of the two-week conflict that has upended the region.

Trump said American forces had “executed one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East,” including destroying military targets on Kharg Island. Trump, writing in a social media post, added that “for reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island,” though he warned Iran’s leaders that he would immediately reconsider that decision if they interfered with ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

The president told reporters earlier Friday evening the US would continue its campaign as long as necessary, while also insisting “we’re way ahead of schedule.” He also suggested the US Navy would begin escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz “very soon.”

Read more: Why a Strike on Kharg Island Would Shake Oil Markets

The 14th day of the war marked the largest attacks yet against the Islamic Republic, with the US and Israel hitting around 15,000 targets since the war began, according to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. 

In Iran, officials were defiant. Pictures posted on social media showed Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and several government ministers participating in rallies on Friday.

The assault on military sites on Kharg Island but not the energy facilities there amounts to a warning shot to Iran and a threat that the US may be willing to strike targets that are part of the country’s energy infrastructure, something Trump had so far sought to avoid doing.

Kharg Island is off the coast of the Iranian mainland and deep in the Persian Gulf. Oil pipelines that terminate there handle the vast majority of Iran’s energy exports, making it crucial for the country’s economy.

Steven Wills, a navalist at the Center for Maritime Strategy, said the island was set up to process about 90% of Iran’s oil shipments. If the island were to be captured or destroyed, “it could, in theory, take out a significant ability of Iran to export oil, and that’s what they live off of.”

The strike is a gamble. Energy analysts have warned that attacking civilian infrastructure on the island or taking it over could send oil prices even higher.

Efforts by the Trump administration and other governments to tame soaring energy costs for consumers have so far had little effect. Asian countries are grappling with shortages of cooking gas and road fuel. In the US, gasoline prices are already at the highest levels in about two years.

Brent crude settled above $100 a barrel for the second straight session, ending the day at the highest level in more than three years while US crude futures settled near the highest since July 2022. Millions of barrels of oil remain trapped in the Persian Gulf and traffic through the vital Strait of Hormuz is effectively at a standstill. 

Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei on Thursday said the Islamic Republic would seek to ensure the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. In his first public comments since succeeding his father, he also warned Tehran would look to open other fronts in the war if the US and Israeli attacks continue.

Read More: Iranians Navigate War and Regime Threats Under a Blackened Sky

Hegseth said Iran’s supreme leader was “likely disfigured” at some point in the US-Israeli operation, and the fact that he had only released a written statement suggested his injuries prevented him from making public appearances. 

The US is also sending the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit from Japan to the Middle East, a voyage that’s likely to take at least a week. The unit has up to 2,400 troops and its command vessel, the USS Tripoli, carries a squadron of F-35 fighters, V-22 Ospreys and helicopters.

Almost 2,600 people have died in the war, most of them in Iran, latest tolls from officials and non-government agencies show. Almost 700 people have been killed in Lebanon, where Israel is battling Iran-aligned Hezbollah. A dozen Israeli civilians and two soldiers have been killed, according to the health ministry. Several more people in other Arab countries have also died.

The US also announced that the death toll for its military operation rose. US Central Command in a statement said all six crew members aboard a US refueling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq Thursday were killed, bringing to 13 the number of American service members who have died. The loss of the plane wasn’t from enemy or allied fire, the military said. 

Pro-government rallies were held across Iran on Friday to mark Quds Day, an annual pro-Palestinian event. An explosion was reported a few blocks away from a march in Tehran, and Iran’s Tasnim news agency said a woman was killed in a US-Israeli attack. 

The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted the flow of millions of barrels of oil a day, causing what the International Energy Agency described as the biggest hit to global supply on record. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE have all had to curb crude output.

The price surge has also been felt at US gas stations, where the average cost of a gallon of gas at the US pump has risen to $3.63, the highest since May 2024, according to American Automobile Association data.

Several back channels have opened between Tehran and US allies in recent days about reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to people familiar with the matter, but they were downbeat the attempts would succeed. An Italian government official separately denied reports on talks with Iran.

CNN reported Iran was considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers to pass through the strait, provided that the oil cargo is traded in Chinese yuan.

The leaders of Germany, Canada and Norway criticized the US decision to temporarily loosen sanctions against Russia in a separate attempt to curb surging oil prices. The US has issued its second authorization for buyers to take Russian oil cargoes already at sea, expanding a temporary waiver given last week to India.

Saudi Arabia, Oman and Turkey are leading mediation efforts, with the support of European countries and France taking a lead role. Qatar backed off from talks after it came under repeated attack. 

Strikes on three commercial ships in the Arabian Gulf over the past two days have highlighted the risk of expanding disruptions to maritime transport.

A French military staffer was killed in an attack in Iraq’s Erbil region, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an X post. Reuters reported at least six French soldiers were wounded in a drone strike.

Turkey’s defense ministry said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization neutralized an Iranian ballistic missile that entered the country’s airspace on Friday, the third such interception since March 4. 

In Oman, two people were killed after drones crashed in the Sohar region, state media said on Friday. Oman’s Port of Sohar has suspended operations. Dubai, the financial hub of the United Arab Emirates, reported missile threats and Saudi Arabia intercepted more than a dozen drones in its airspace. 

And the US Central Command has assigned investigators to look into an attack on an all-girls elementary school on the first day of strikes on Iran that killed about 180 people.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Right in the middle of the ongoing feud between the Silicon Valley AI company Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense over whether the military will use—or not use—Anthropic’s large language models is yet another company: Palantir.

Palantir, the Miami-based data analytics and artificial intelligence platform, is a key software provider for the Department of Defense—and the main channel by which the Department has been using Anthropic’s large language model, Claude.

“We are legitimately still in the middle of all this,” CEO Alex Karp said in an interview with Fortune on the sidelines of the company’s twice-a-year AIP conference on Thursday. “It’s our stack that runs the LLMs.”

Karp says he had been in numerous discussions with all parties involved—discussions he declined to give specifics about, as he says he doesn’t want to “out conversations” or “bash people.”

But Karp does want to make one thing clear: The Defense Department is not using AI for domestic mass surveillance on U.S. citizens—and, to his knowledge, it has no plans to.

“Without commenting on internal dialogs, there was never a sense that these products would be used domestically,” Karp said. “The Department of War is not planning to use these products domestically. That’s a completely different kettle of fish…  The terms the Department of War wants are completely focused on non-American citizens in a war context.”

Palantir has a vast business doing work for the U.S. government, including the DoD. Anthropic partnered with Palantir in 2024 to offer its AI technology to the DoD via Palantir. Anthropic also began working directly with the DoD last year to create a version of its technology designed for the Defense Department.

The contentious back-and-forth between Anthropic and the Defense Department has been ongoing since around January, and the two sides don’t agree on what set it off. Statements that Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael made last week allege that Palantir had notified the Pentagon that Anthropic was inquiring about whether its models had been used for the U.S. military mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. (Anthropic has refuted this characterization, asserting it hasn’t discussed the use of Claude for specific operations “with any industry partners, including Palantir, outside of routine discussions on strictly technical matters”). Ever since, the two sides have been locked in a fight over whether Anthropic can write contractual limits on how its models are used.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published multiple blog posts on the matter, including an initial statement at the end of February asserting that the Defense Department had refused to accept safeguards that its LLMs not be used for domestic mass surveillance or the deployment of fully autonomous weapons. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, later designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” threatening many of the company’s commercial relationships, and prompting Anthropic to sue the Pentagon over the designation.

‘Totally in favor’ of domestic terms of engagement

Palantir, which was funded by the CIA’s venture capital arm early on and whose software has been used in counter-terrorism efforts abroad, has long been accused of helping government and intelligence agencies spy on civilians and potential domestic suspects. Karp has repeatedly rebutted such claims for over a decade and has spoken about the importance of setting technical guardrails around technology that could be used in the U.S. for domestic surveillance. Palantir early on created a “Privacy and Civil Liberties” team—an interdisciplinary group of engineers, lawyers, philosophers, and social scientists—tasked with building privacy‑protective features into its products and fostering a culture of responsible use. The team helped set up internal channels, including an ethics hotline, for employees to flag work they viewed as crossing ethical lines.

Civil liberties groups, however, continue to accuse the company of doing the opposite—by helping the government surveil. The company’s relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in particular, which began under the Obama Administration, has invited intense scrutiny and criticism from both external critics and the company’s own employees—criticism that has only escalated over the last year as the Trump Administration has pushed ICE into an aggressive crackdown in cities like Minneapolis.

Karp told Fortune he is “very sympathetic with arguments against using these products inside the U.S.” and said that he is “totally in favor” of setting terms of engagement and limits to how domestic agencies can use artificial intelligence. 

“Quite frankly, I think we should self-impose them,” Karp said of these terms of engagement. “The Valley should have a consortium: This is what we’re going to do, and this is what we’re not going to do,” he said.

But Karp drew a sharp distinction between whether tech companies should set terms with domestic agencies and whether they should set them with the Department of Defense, which is primarily focused on managing the United States’ relationships with other countries and its adversaries.

“What we’re talking about now is using products vis-a-vis someone who’s trying to kill our service members,” Karp said, noting that he personally supports “wide license” of usage for the Department of Defense specifically. 

“If we knew China and Russia and Iran wouldn’t build them, I would be in favor of very heavy—very heavy—legal constraints,” Karp said. But he points out that American adversaries will build them and use them against the U.S. anyway. “I don’t think this is an opinion. I think this is a fact, and that fact means I think the Department of War should have wide license to use these products.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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