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Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary urges couples to think about their future together before they shell out for a big wedding. 

The investor and founder of O’Leary Ventures, who is known for his blunt takes on everything from remote work to Gen Z, has some characteristically frank advice for young couples: Save your wedding money.

“What’s the number one mistake that people make before they get married?” asked O’Leary in a video published Wednesday. “I’m talking about just before they get married, they plan a huge wedding. What a waste of money.” 

Instead, O’Leary said couples should think small for the sake of their future selves, opting for a civil ceremony and a party afterwards with just a small group of friends.

“Be very selective on who you invite. They got to be meaningful to you, and forget the big extravaganza,” he said.

O’Leary’s comments come as the price of a wedding in the U.S. has jumped to above $30,000. The average cost of an American wedding stood at $36,000 as of 2026, according to wedding planning platform Zola. This price tag includes renting a venue, the wedding dress, as well as flowers and photography. A separate Zola study of 11,500 couples from January found 84% also believe their wedding will cost more this year compared to two years ago because of the economy or tariffs.

Still, Zola’s head of brand Sammi Kobrin said when it comes to bringing family and friends together at their wedding, “the vast majority say it will be well worth the cost.” 

But when couples are dropping so much money on their weddings, and often going over budget, according to Zola, the strain has jumped not just for couples and their families—but also wedding guests, who are increasingly being asked to comply with demanding expectations related to the dress code and the gifts they receive.

In this context, O’Leary said couples should skip the stress and use the money they would have spent on their wedding for something big down the line.

“Instead of spending a lot of dough, you spend a small amount, take the difference and invest it in your mutual future, maybe a deposit on a house,” he said.

For couples looking to buy a home, skipping a wedding instead of resorting to a downpayment fund on their wedding registry, may make financial sense, even if it may not feel good emotionally. 

The average age of a first-time home buyer has risen to an all-time-high of 40 years old, which may be no surprise as the median sales price of an American home reached $405,000 in the last quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. A person looking to put up the optimal 20% down payment on a median priced home would have to save $81,000 to avoid paying private mortgage insurance (PMI).

While the conventional 30-year mortgage rate has fallen to about 6% from a high of 8% in 2023, home prices have risen so much that more than half of six-figure earners say buying a house is out of reach.

Even after the wedding, O’Leary said a dream honeymoon should also be out of the question. Why take a luxury vacation, he asked, if the couple is still not established financially? 

“Once you actually stabilize and you get yourselves in order, then take a vacation,” he said. “But putting yourselves in massive amounts of debt just to get married is really stupid.” 

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Sea mines are “simple, uncool weapons,” Scott Savitz, a naval marine warfare expert at RAND who was stationed in Bahrain in 2001, told Fortune. They predate World War I and haven’t advanced much since; they look like the spiky metal balls you’d imagine from the movies, small enough to slip neatly into a fishing boat and packed with TNT and ammonium nitrate. 

But when they go off, they can snap ships straight in half, Savitz said. They have a “much greater effect, typically, than a missile,” and can inflict millions of dollars worth of damage for just a few thousand bucks a pop. And they’re pretty effective too: naval mines have caused 77% of all U.S. Navy ship casualties since 1950, per the Strauss Center at the University of Texas. 

As the 13th day of the Iran conflict draws to a close and with no end in sight, Iran is looking towards old tech to elevate its position in a war that has so far been dominated by hypersonic missiles. The sea mine isn’t flashy, but right now it could be Iran’s most dangerous weapon in the military conflict against the United States.

Some U.S. intelligence officials told CNN that Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that carries a fifth of the world’s oil and is currently the subject of the standoff between Iran and the U.S. Iran has attacked several oil tanker ships in and around the Strait in recent days, including two Iraqi oil tankers in the Persian Gulf that left one crew member dead. Nearly a quarter billion barrels per day of crude has been stranded in the Gulf since the war began nearly two weeks ago, commodity expert Rory Johnston has estimated. Crude oil prices have spiked, at the time of writing hovering just under $100 a barrel, and gas is up 20% due to the blockage. Across the Pacific, the situation is more dire: Pakistan has closed schools and mandated 4-day-work weeks; India is closing restaurants and hotels across the country to preserve oil for cooking; and Thailand has asked government bureaucrats to forego the elevator. 

The Strait of Hormuz isn’t actually “closed” by Iran, Savitz said. “It’s the decision of individual users whether or not they are willing to bear the risk. If they can raise the risk, or the perceived risk, to a level such that commercial traffic decides that they will not go through that strait, then that’s sufficient.”

The current risk level in the Strait has already scared off most major marine war insurers, who have pulled their coverage of ships in the Strait. Freight rates have soared to record highs, and a very large crude carrier heading from the strait to China can earn half a million in revenue a day. Yet, if true that Iran has laid mines in the Strait, that would turn a temporary blockade into something even harder to undo.

The psychological warfare of the sea mine

Sea mines are so powerful, in part, because they have “disproportionate psychological effects,” designed to prey on the fear of the unknown. The mines are nearly invisible at every stage and are incredibly difficult to detect—unlike missiles, where sailors can use heat signatures or trails picked up by radars. But for a mine, all that needs to happen is a vessel pulls up, shoves one overboard, and moves on. “There’s a splash in the water,” Savitz said. “Ships are dropping things in the water all the time.” 

There’s even more psychological warfare at play. Some mines are programmed to ignore the first ship that passes, detonating only on the fifth, just so that the mine-clearing team goes through safely and the tanker behind it takes the hit. 

Ship operators often fall into one of two traps: they either say, “’Well, I can’t see it, so I’m just going to ignore it’ and blindly find themselves in trouble,” Savitz explained, “Or they say, ‘Well, the waters might be mined,’ and they overreact and are unwilling to assume any risk from mines, even as they’re assuming other types of risk.” 

Some of the worst incidents have been due to the latter mistake. During the tanker war of the ’80s, Iran and Iraq attacked 450 ships in the Persian gulf, and their most devastating weapon was the mine. In 1988, ten Navy sailors were severely injured on the USS Samuel Roberts after hitting an Iranian M-08 mine designed exactly 80 years earlier. “All three of the US warships that were damaged by mines in 1988 and 1991 did not know they were in a minefield when it happened,” Savitz said. The U.S. responded with Operation Praying Mantis, the largest American naval surface battle since World War II, sinking half of Iran’s operational navy in a single afternoon. The repairs cost $90 million, all for a weapon approximated to be worth $1,500. 

The U.S. has had decades to prepare since the disaster. Yet, “The U.S. has been underinvesting in mine warfare for many decades,” Savitz said. The Navy decommissioned its last dedicated minesweepers in the Persian Gulf last September. Their replacements were supposed to be the littoral combat ship—a program Savitz called “a disaster,” because they built tiny metal ships that could set off the mines as opposed to the traditional wood and fiberglass minesweepers.

More so, mines are too boring to compete for budget. “A hypersonic missile is exciting and gets attention. Mines don’t.” The last time a U.S. warship was damaged by a mine was in 1991.

Hormuz escalation 

The question is if the conflict in the strait will escalate that far. Savitz is cautiously optimistic. “Yes, we will be able to get it open,” he said. The U.S. has divers, unmanned systems, allied minesweepers from Europe—even Navy dolphins trained to detect mines, he said. But the timeline depends entirely on what else is happening around them. Mine countermeasures forces move slowly, in predictable patterns, through waters that may also be covered by Iranian missiles, explosive boats, and drones. “Can we suppress those threats well enough that mine countermeasures forces can operate without undue hindrance?” Savitz said. “That’s the challenge.”

And even under ideal conditions, clearing mines is agonizingly slow. Savitz estimated the cost ratio between laying and clearing at “between one and three orders of magnitude”—essentially, up to a thousand times more expensive to remove a mine than to deploy one. 

“A hasty clearance”—opening just one single narrow lane for tankers to push through—could happen in days, Savitz said. Getting the strait to a safety level where tanker operators are willing to accept the risk could take weeks. But to fully remove and sweep the entire waterway, where tankers feel fully confident nothing is left, could take far longer; or could never come. There are still World War II mines in the Baltic Sea and the Pacific because they aren’t fully cleaned up.

Eventually, the calculus will shift. During the Tanker War, ships ran through minefields anyway. About 1% took a hit, Savitz said, “but the risk was deemed to be justified by the reward.”

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Soaring oil prices won’t just cause you trouble at the tank. 

Energy is one of the most critical inputs for the food supply chain, which means the impacts of the war could show up on your grocery receipt. “There’s a very strong correlation between the movement of energy prices and the movement of food prices,” Dr. Ricky Volpe, an agricultural economist and professor of agribusiness at Cal Poly, told Fortune. “We’ve seen oil top $100 a gallon before and that happened to coincide with significant food price inflation.”

The war in Iran is adding another layer of volatility to an already shaky U.S. economy. Goldman Sachs has increased the chance of a recession occurring within 12 months to 25%, up five percentage points. And food affordability has been a top concern for many Americans, with food prices still on the rise despite efforts to cool inflation. Food prices have risen nearly 24% above pre-COVID levels and consumer sentiment remains near historic lows.

An energy-rich supply chain

The longer the war extends, the more drastic the impact on food prices. But if the war does end by the end of the month, as Trump has stated he’s hoping to be the outcome, it’s unlikely you’ll see a spike in grocery prices, according to experts. “If we’re talking just a few weeks, very likely you’re not going to see this show up in your grocery receipts,” Dr. David Ortega, an agricultural economist and professor at Michigan State University, told Fortune. “But if we’re talking a month or more, a few months, then it’s a different story.”

It’s not exactly clear when the war will relent. Trump has offered conflicting messages as to when it could end, telling Axios Wednesday there is “practically nothing left” to target. But Iran has said it’s ready to fight a “long-term war of attrition,” signaling the war could extend beyond the framework Trump has suggested.

However, prices aren’t expected to increase just yet. Ortega said it could take time to see any impact in the short-term. “There’s a lag between when the shock happens and when you see the full effect on your food prices,” he said. “It could be the better part of a full year before we’re seeing the full impact show up at the grocery store.”

Still, the food supply chain is incredibly energy-intensive, with high sums of energy required at each stage of the process. “Energy is required to grow and harvest food, and then to manufacture it, to transport it, and to store it, and then to sell it,” Volpe said. “It compounds down the supply chain, and it’s problematic.”

Shipping—just one stage of the food supply chain requiring a massive amount of energy—includes rates that are largely determined by diesel prices. FedEx Ground and home deliveries, for example, add a fuel surcharge of 24.25% when diesel prices reach $4.54 a gallon. Diesel was above $4.80 as of Sunday.

A blog post Thursday from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis finds high correlation between crude oil prices and the global price of food index. While the post cautions against implying a direct causal relationship, it notes changes in oil prices could signal broader price changes. “Taken together, these two graphs suggest that large and sustained oil price movements have historically coincided with changes in both food prices and broader consumer inflation,” the report reads.

“We’ve seen oil top $100 a gallon before and that happened to coincide with significant food price inflation,” Volpe said. “Most [food companies] operate on very thin margins, so that means that when important sources of costs increase, they have no choice but to pass those along downstream, to consumers.”

The war is also impacting another critical supply chain that feeds into your grocery bill: fertilizers. More than one-third of the global seaborne fertilizer travels through the Strait of Hormuz. Since the start of the war, the price of urea, the nitrogen-rich compound present in most fertilizers, has spiked 35%. That’s made inputs pricier for American farmers. And the price spike is untimely. Farmers are just starting to plant crops for the season, meaning fertilizer is in high demand, including for America’s favorite crop: corn.

“Corn is king in the US,” Volpe said. “If fertilizer disruptions or inflation drives higher corn prices, that is going to be felt everywhere throughout the food supply.”

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A massive AI breakthrough is coming in the first half of 2026—and Morgan Stanley says most of the world isn’t ready for it.

In a sweeping new report, the investment bank warns that a transformative leap in artificial intelligence is imminent, driven by an unprecedented accumulation of compute at America’s top AI labs. Researchers specifically highlighted a recent interview with Elon Musk, citing his belief that applying 10x the compute to LLM training will effectively double a model’s “intelligence”—and say the scaling laws backing that claim are holding firm.

Executives at major U.S. AI labs are telling investors to brace for progress that will “shock” them. The gains are already outpacing expectations: OpenAI’s recently released GPT-5.4 “Thinking” model scored 83.0% on the GDPVal benchmark, placing it at or above the level of human experts on economically valuable tasks. And Morgan Stanley says the curve only gets steeper from here.

A Power Crisis Is Choking the Buildout

The intelligence explosion comes with a brutal infrastructure constraint. Morgan Stanley’s “Intelligence Factory” model projects a net U.S. power shortfall of 9 to 18 gigawatts through 2028—a 12% to 25% deficit in the power needed to run it all.

Developers aren’t waiting for the grid to catch up. They’re converting Bitcoin mining operations into high-performance computing centers, firing up natural gas turbines, and deploying fuel cells to stay ahead. The economics are staggering: an emerging “15-15-15” dynamic is taking hold—15-year data center leases at 15% yields, generating $15 per watt in net value creation.

Jobs Are Already Disappearing

The economic shockwaves won’t stop at infrastructure. Morgan Stanley predicts “Transformative AI” will become a powerful deflationary force, as AI tools replicate human work at a fraction of the cost. The bank says executives are already executing large-scale workforce reductions because of AI efficiencies.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has gone further, envisioning entirely new companies built by just one to five people that can outcompete large incumbents. The report also cites xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba, who suggests recursive self-improvement loops—where AI autonomously upgrades its own capabilities—could emerge as early as the first half of 2027.

Morgan Stanley’s conclusion is stark: the “coin of the realm” is becoming pure intelligence, forged by compute and power. The explosion is arriving faster than almost anyone is prepared for.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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It began with a simple magazine cover, and then involved into one of the most valuable companies on the planet with technology that is used in virtually every part of daily life. 

In January 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen spotted the Altair 8800 personal computer on the front of Popular Electronics and saw something most people didn’t: a machine desperately in need of software. That realization became Microsoft, a portmanteau of “microprocessors” and “software,” sometimes hyphenated in its earliest days as “Micro-Soft.” What started as a two-person operation in Albuquerque, New Mexico would, over the next five decades, reshape how the entire world not only works, but communicates, plays, and builds.

Now, 40 years to the day since the company went public in 1986, many investors are riding on a high never-before-envisioned for a simple concept that came from that magazine cover decades earlier. 

How Microsoft took the world by storm

Microsoft’s foundational years were built on a single insight: Personal computers were coming for everyone, and they would all need software. In 1981, IBM introduced its landmark personal computer bundled with a suite of Microsoft products. That deal didn’t just put Microsoft on the map—it made the company the invisible infrastructure of the entire PC industry. While IBM made the hardware that sat on your desk, Microsoft quietly owned the language that made it run.

In November 1985, the company launched Windows, a graphical operating environment layered on top of its operating system MS-DOS, which is primitive by modern standards, but radical for its time. The same year, Microsoft debuted its first retail version of the Excel that would eventually become the backbone of financial work across the globe.

The (5.5) million dollar investment

Exactly 40 years ago today, Microsoft made its debut on March 13, 1989, on the Nasdaq stock exchange at $21 per share. By the end of that first trading day, shares had surged to $35.50. The offering raised growth capital, rewarded early employees, and gave everyday investors the chance to buy into the future of computing. But most of them had no idea what they were actually holding.

A $1,000 investment at the IPO price of $21 per share would have purchased approximately 47 shares. That number seems modest, but what happened next was anything but.

If you held for all four decades, that simple $1,000 investment would have turned into $5.5 million today, all thanks to a few splits that kept the share price accessible to investors and increased the number of shares people owned. 

Over the following four decades, Microsoft executed nine stock splits, which would have turned those 47 shares into approximately 13,700 shares. And with Microsoft trading around $400 per share by today, a $1,000 investment made on IPO day would be worth approximately $5.5 million.

In addition to the splits, the return is almost double the market average. That represents an annualized total return of roughly 21.8% compounded over the life of the stock—compared to the S&P 500’s historical annualized return of approximately 10.8% over the same period. It is one of the greatest long-term wealth creation stories in stock market history.

And the appreciation alone doesn’t capture the full picture. Microsoft initiated a quarterly dividend in 2003, meaning a buy-and-hold investor would have collected an additional $341,513 in dividends on top of their principal gains by 2022. Today, that same investor would be collecting roughly $36,000 per year in dividend income—36 times their original investment, simply in annual cash payments.

The ride did require some nerve. After the dot-com bubble burst and Microsoft’s final stock split in 2003, shares entered a long holding pattern that lasted nearly a decade. An investor who sold during those flat years would have walked away with around $288,000—less than 7% of what never-sell investors would come to hold. The lesson was brutal and simple: The people who won biggest were the ones who never touched the sell button.

A $3 trillion company

Microsoft’s modern-day scale is almost incomprehensible when measured against the $197 million annual revenue the company generated around the time of its IPO. In its second quarter of the fiscal year 2026, which ended on Dec. 31, 2025, Microsoft reported revenue of $81.3 billion—a 17% year-over-year increase. Operating income reached $38.3 billion, up 21%, and net income hit $38.5 billion .

Microsoft returned $12.7 billion to shareholders in Q2 FY2026 through dividends and share buybacks, up 32% from the same period a year earlier. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, reflecting on the company’s AI momentum, said: “We are only at the beginning phases of AI diffusion and already Microsoft has built an AI business that is larger than some of our biggest franchises.”

Forty years ago, a $1,000 check written for a scrappy software company would be worth roughly $5.5 million today. 

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Legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla believes if you follow your passion, you’ll never work a day in your life.

On a recent episode of Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, he opened up about his work-life philosophy: even at age 71—and with $12 billion to his name—he has no intention of slowing down.

“At age 71—health permitting—next 25 years, I’ll be doing exactly the same thing because I like working 80 hours a week learning,” he told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. “And nobody can take that away from me.”

But while Khosla has spent his career following his interests, he admits that the classic advice to “follow your passion” isn’t always practical today—especially for younger generations navigating a rapidly changing job market.

For many people, the expected path is still traditional: study hard, get into college, and land a stable job that can support a family.

Khosla believes artificial intelligence could soon upend that formula.

Khosla predicted that artificial intelligence will eventually be able to handle about 80% of today’s jobs, ranging from physicians and radiologists to accountants and sales professionals. As AI takes over much of this work, he said labor costs could effectively fall to near zero, dramatically lowering the prices of goods and services. In that scenario, Khosla suggested that the youngest generation may not need a college degree to build a livelihood—or even need traditional employment at all.

“Fifteen years from now, you will say—what is bad advice today or used to be … ‘Follow your passion,’” Khosla said. “‘Follow your passion’ comes second to surviving. I think that surviving part will go away, and you’ll tell every 5-year-old kid, ‘Follow your passion.’”

Khosla’s career, from software to AI 

For Khosla, the freedom to pursue what interests him is something he admits he’s been unusually fortunate to have throughout his career—especially since he’s never written a resume, applied for a job, or even worked for a boss.

After earning his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, a master’s in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and an MBA from Stanford, he jumped straight into following his fascination with tech. Khosla made his first fortune cofounding computer hardware firm Sun Microsystems, which helped shape the early internet era and gave him enough financial security to “never need money again.”

Today, Khosla’s long work weeks are dedicated to his passion—Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm he founded in 2004. It has backed hundreds of companies in their early stages, including Square and DoorDash.

His interest in AI has also shaped his investment priorities. Khosla Ventures placed early bets on Radical Health, a company using AI to help patients navigate the cancer treatment process, and Replit, an AI-powered software development firm. It was also notably one of OpenAI’s first institutional investors in 2019.

For Khosla, prolonging his career is now less about finances—it’s about curiosity and the freedom his success has afforded him. 

“I care about my freedom,” he told Fortune. “…I decided I would do what I want and say what I want, and I want to feel good about where I stand. I would say most people don’t have that luxury. It’s almost an indulgence to be able to do what I do.”

How AI is upending career advice 

The existential question hovering over every college campus right now isn’t which major to choose — it’s whether the old rules of higher education still apply at all. Some of the most influential names in business have been sounding off on exactly that, and their answers might make younger generations reconsider a traditional path. 

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky has told students point-blank that having a five-year career plan is “outdated” and “a little bit foolish” given how quickly AI is reshaping the workplace. 

Not everyone is sounding the alarm. Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI, has said that if he were 22 and graduating today, he would “feel like the luckiest kid in all of history.” 

Altman told video journalist Cleo Abram that by 2035, today’s college graduates “could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system — in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job.” The caveat, of course, is that Altman added: “if they still go to college at all.”

Alexandr Wang—the 29-year-old Scale AI founder-turned-Meta chief AI officer—has perhaps the most specific and urgent advice for young people.

Speaking on the TBPN podcast and covered by Fortune, Wang told teens that “vibe coding” is today’s equivalent of 1980s teens spending their nights in a computer lab: “If you are 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe coding. That’s how you should live your life.”

Wang argued that 10,000 hours of deep, hands-on experimentation with AI tools now can become a “huge advantage.”

Khosla’s advice to Gen Z isn’t to panic, but to embrace the single skill that cannot be automated: the ability to learn rapidly and continuously.

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This Sunday will be the biggest night of the year for Los Angeles: Tinseltown’s stars will turn out en masse for the Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, to celebrate the magic that only this storied city can create.

But a look into the field for the Best Picture Oscar reveals an uncomfortable surprise: Not a single one of the 10 nominated movies was produced on the famous soundstages or studio lots of Hollywood. While some post-production was done in L.A.-based facilities, all were entirely or largely filmed elsewhere, from Marty Supreme (New York) to Sinners (Louisiana) to Hamnet (U.K.).

Hollywood, the name for the entertainment industry headquartered and operating in Los Angeles County, is disintegrating. 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. Some 41,000 of the workers who make the industry function left from 2022 to 2024, the most recent data available—some by choice, some by necessity. The industry’s most powerful person is not a traditional studio boss but Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of streaming giant Netflix, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley.

And yes, that remains true even after Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison outbid Netflix to purchase the legendary studio Warner Bros. Discovery. Indeed, the outcome of that intensely watched deal negotiation looks likely to be another nail in the coffin for the film industry as a dominant economic force in Los Angeles—with Ellison, Hollywood’s newest mogul, promising to find $6 billion–plus in “synergies” following the acquisition. He has promised that the majority of these cost cuts will affect “nonlabor sources”—but the Town (as the film industry based in Los Angeles is often called) is bracing for large-scale layoffs.

Meanwhile, the threat of AI reshaping the business of making films looms, and the specter of industry collapse, of American cities hollowed out by manufacturing jobs going overseas and workers made obsolete by new technologies, hangs heavy over the boulevards and palm trees of Los Angeles. “The sunny version of Detroit,” was the assessment of Michael Lynton, former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, on a recent visit to his previous stomping ground. “It was crickets,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s nothing going on.”

The collapse of an entire industry is a sad story no matter how you slice it. The collapse of Hollywood is also something more. For years, movies were a major American export, sending not just celluloid film but also an American worldview around the globe. Now, measured strictly in dollars, the $20 billion–plus the U.S. earns from exporting films and television shows each year is dwarfed by other exports—oil, cars, and industrial machinery among them. But still, these quintessentially American products—action movies, bingeable streaming shows, and a bevy of dashing superheroes and impossibly glam movie stars—punch far above their weight in establishing the nation’s “soft power” internationally, seeding American language, culture, fashion, and societal mores into living rooms from Seoul to São Paulo in a way no container ship full of LNG can match. When we say, “an offer he can’t refuse” or “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” everyone knows what it means, and where it came from.

The cluster effect

For 100 years Hollywood was among the world’s most successful and famous examples of what is called an “industry cluster.” The Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, who coined the term in 1998, described such clusters as “critical masses—in one place—of unusual competitive success in particular fields.” Other examples are high-performance car companies in southern Germany; pharmaceutical companies near Philadelphia; and high-fashion shoe companies in northern Italy. But in his writings, Porter singled out the two starriest examples: “Silicon Valley and Hollywood may be the world’s best-known clusters.” 

Such clusters foster success because they create virtuous circles: When an industry’s best people and companies become concentrated in an area, the industry’s other people and companies want to be there. Those who join the cluster gain knowledge, relationships, and motivation “that distant rivals cannot match,” Porter said. The result is an upward cycle that draws in more industry players and further strengthens the industry.

Hollywood emerged as an industry cluster when early 20th‑century filmmakers fled New York and New Jersey to escape Thomas Edison’s aggressive enforcement of his patents on motion‑picture cameras, projectors, and other technologies, and to take advantage of Southern California’s cheap land and year‑round sunshine. Between roughly 1910 and the early 1920s, dozens of independent producers consolidated into vertically integrated studios—Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., Fox, Universal—concentrating production in and around Los Angeles and locking in a dense ecosystem of stages, back lots, labs, equipment houses, and skilled labor. Worldwide distribution and exhibition were likewise managed from L.A. By the late 1920s and 1930s, this agglomeration had become a self‑reinforcing cluster: The “Golden Age” studio system produced hundreds of films a year; recruited and developed “bankable” stars beloved around the world; and drew in talent and suppliers from everywhere, elevating Hollywood from geographic neighborhood to dream factory.

Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Today, Hollywood’s upward cycle seems to be reversing. It didn’t happen all at once or from one single cause. It’s partly a story of technology barriers coming down, enabling more consumers to choose from and stream more sources of entertainment than ever—much of it not from Hollywood.

From the consumer’s perspective, an economist might applaud the abundance of choice and competition in the streaming era. More options at lower cost? What’s not to like? But in the real world rather than the theoretical one, today’s transition is miserable for thousands of talented middle-class people who are living in the downward cycle—and for anyone who loves films and TV. The loss of the industry’s talent pipeline may well result in a decline in the quality of the product the industry produces and unleash an abundance of AI slop. And in an era where politicians on both sides of the aisle pay lip service to the goal of Americans getting back into the business of making things, it’s worth noting that the nation’s most culturally significant export industry is in a state of spiraling crisis.

What’s left of the Hollywood dream job?

Consider Jason Lazarcheck, a writer who came to Hollywood from New York City in 2008, right after college. He got a job on a Lifetime show called Army Wives—“the last show on earth I would have picked,” he says, but it offered a sustainable writing life. In those pre-streaming years, most shows produced 22 or 23 episodes per season, “so that meant a lot of jobs for writers,” he says. Even more important, his writing job continued through the production of all the episodes, including the filming, in case changes had to be made on the fly. Through it all, the showrunner mentored him on all aspects of getting those episodes done. The result, he recalls, was “I learned more about writing and producing TV than a lot of writers ever do.”

An eager young writer arriving in Los Angeles today would be unlikely to find such a career springboard. “One of the darkest things that changed about TV for writers is that now most shows have fewer episodes,” Lazarcheck says. In the streaming world there is no requirement of a given number of episodes, so virtually no shows produce 22 episodes anymore; some make as few as four or five episodes at a time. “The last show I was staffed on was a limited series at Apple,” he says. The producers told the writers to write all the scripts, and then Apple would decide whether to make the show, called Lure. Apple passed, though the project could still be produced elsewhere. Even if the show gets a green light, the writers won’t be hired through production.

The streaming era just doesn’t offer the steady flow of work many directors, cinematographers, writers, gaffers, sound mixers, and other workers have relied upon. “There’s no need to fill eight o’clock on Wednesday night,” says Mark Goffman, a producer and writer, so today, “[producers]will order one script, then six months later they’ll approve a second script. A very precious few are on the timeline where they get green-lit and move at light speed. Everything else kind of lumbers along with no real urgency.”

©Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection

The upshot is that landing a writers’ room job today is no longer such a golden opportunity. With “fewer episodes, fewer writers in the room,” and no role in production, Lazarcheck says, it’s a meager version of the screenwriter’s previous job. For those trying to eke out a living in Hollywood, he says, “I feel like it’s never been harder.” That reality became even more starkly obvious after 2023, when the writers’ and actors’ labor unions went on strike—going without salaries for almost five months to ensure better pay, minimum staffing requirements, better health insurance, and protections against AI.

Like many others in Hollywood’s once mighty workforce, Lazarcheck has had to find work outside the industry. He recently took a job as an expert writing consultant for AI companies—the industry that threatens to take over his previous job function. “If you had asked me on the picket line at the Disney lot if I’d be comfortable doing that with an AI company, I would have said, ‘Hell no!’” he says. “But a few years go by, and I just need to earn money.”

Lazarcheck still lives in the Los Angeles area, but many other industry workers are leaving, some giving up on the industry, others working remotely from places less expensive than L.A. Lazarcheck offers this advice to his peers: “Don’t define yourself by Hollywood.”

Hollywood’s broken business model

Veteran Hollywood denizens, when asked about the decline of the Hollywood industry cluster,  often say the same thing: “Netflix changed everything.”

But the shift away from traditional filmmaking started before the streaming giant began to eat the grand old studios’ lunch by producing its own films and shows in the 2010s. Hollywood’s primary business ceased to be movies long ago, says Jeff Bewkes, former CEO of Time Warner, where he oversaw HBO, Warner Bros., Turner Broadcasting, and New Line Cinema. “For the last 30 years, the biggest business for most legacy media companies, in terms of the number of people employed and profit and return on money invested, has been television series production, not movie production,” he explains. “The exception may be Disney, with its huge franchise films and revenues not just from exhibition, but also from consumer products and onsite parks and cruise line experiences.”

Hollywood’s large studios had been making TV shows for years before, but for most of that time there were only three TV networks—not a huge market. Then, starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, cables and set-top boxes were installed in millions of homes, enabling dozens of new channels to reach large audiences. All those channels needed programming, and Hollywood stood ready to help.

In the mid-1990s, the government rescinded an old rule that prohibited distributors (the TV networks) from owning the programs they showed. The goal had been to get more producers with more perspectives and ideas on TV’s “big three” channels, but cable had solved that problem. Since cable channel owners could now own the programs they showed, they started producing more—ramping up in‑house and affiliated production; increasing vertically integrated ownership of primetime and cable programming; and opening the door to more business for Hollywood, and more consolidation.

As consumer technology advanced, still more revenue for Hollywood, in the form of royalties, rolled in from Blockbuster and similar companies renting VHS tapes and DVDs to consumers in those same years.

Little noticed in 1997 was the founding of Netflix, which at the time seemed just an evolution of Blockbuster’s sector, renting DVDs by mail. The revolution—what changed everything—was Netflix’s introduction of streaming media over the internet in 2010. At the time, the preeminent cable channel for high-quality proprietary entertainment was HBO, with The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire, Band of Brothers, and more.

But when Netflix started reaching consumers over the internet, HBO faced a major competitive disadvantage. It reached its subscribers through local cable companies, which charged HBO a fee. If subscribers paid the cable company $15 a month for HBO, the cable company kept $5. Netflix, reaching subscribers directly online, received all the money its subscribers paid. It wasn’t much help that HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, was a major supplier of home internet—one of the “pipes” streamers relied upon to deliver content to consumers. The Obama administration’s “net neutrality” rule prevented the internet providers favoring their own products or “throttling” their competitors’.

Even more important, as it turned out: Netflix could collect vast amounts of data on every subscriber—what genres, actors, and directors they like, what scenes they replay or skip, and countless other data points. It used all that data to design a powerful algorithm, presenting popular shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Arrested Development to users based on the tastes their viewing habits revealed. That data also guided the streamer’s original content spend, including the famous $100 million bet it made to green-light two seasons of David Fincher’s House of Cards in 2013, sight unseen. And many have speculated that Netflix’s vast trove of data informs certain narrative habits on its shows (cliff-hangers to encourage bingeing, for example, and frequent restating of plot points to engage viewers distracted by their phones). Until they had their own streaming platforms, HBO and other channels reaching subscribers through a cable company had none of that data.

Blanca CRUZ—AFP/Getty Images

Competition intensified—with Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV+, among others, entering the fray—and the 2010s’ Streaming Wars led to a golden age of TV as premium cable channels and streaming upstarts feverishly outspent one another for top talent.          

That fire hose of money has slowed considerably since, and so far the original streamer has come out on top: Netflix is by far the world’s largest streaming company, with 325 million subscribers. In the U.S. last year it attracted 59% of all streaming viewing time; 10 other streamers shared the rest, says Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Film & TV Report. And it is now competing on a larger scale: Its recent market value of $358 billion makes it more valuable than the next two most valuable companies in Hollywood, Disney and Sony, combined. In a December 2025 ranking of Hollywood’s most powerful people, assembled by industry journal Variety, No. 1 is Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. No one seems to dispute it—even with the inroads David Ellison has lately made.

Another disorienting element in Netflix world is the company’s approach to paying actors, writers, and others. Studios traditionally have offered upfront fees and residuals based upon a film’s or TV show’s earnings—sustaining payments that sometimes continue for years, based on its success. But Netflix, which hoards its user data like gold in Fort Knox, offers a larger lump sum upfront, with no residuals and no performance data released. This is perhaps understandable given how precious that data is, Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions, wrote in the New York Times in 2022. “But the system leaves creators with precious little visibility into whether their works succeed in drawing viewers,” Blum explained. “By typically paying an upfront flat fee, Netflix buys out the usual success-based incentive compensation (known as the back end in Hollywood).”

A well-known agent, who prefers to stay anonymous because he still negotiates with Netflix and other companies, seems almost traumatized by the new order: “The big hits of the past that paid off, don’t pay off anymore,” the agent explains. “Therefore, all these people in the business are not working at the rate that they used to and for the money they used to get.”

“I didn’t want to go live in Bulgaria”

The Los Angeles area is an expensive place in which to live and to produce movies and TV shows, so it makes sense that productions and workers are looking elsewhere. The Atlanta area has been a major production locale for many years, offering producers lower costs and even subsidies in some cases. Disney has produced many of its Marvel films there, including Black Panther and Captain America: Civil War. Movies in the Hunger Games and Fast & Furious franchises have been made there, along with hundreds more projects. Vancouver is another attractive and growing alternative to Hollywood, especially when the Canadian dollar is low.

Many projects go to other countries offering subsidies and low costs while absorbing Hollywood know-how. “In the last couple of years I’ve been to Taiwan several times,” says Goffman. “I’ve been to parts of Asia and the Middle East where they’re ramping up production. A lot of Eastern European countries have built up productions.”

The globalization of filmmaking may be healthy for the industry in the long run—expanding markets, lowering costs, and spreading know‑how to new filmmaking hubs—but for Los Angeles–based crews, uprooting to live on far‑flung sets for months at a time can be profoundly disruptive and deeply undesirable. “Often you’ll be asked if you want to do a series,” Goffman says, “but you’ll need to move to another country that’s on another continent for six to nine months, away from your family.” Marjorie David, a producer and writer with 40 years in the business, says: “There’s a whole show I didn’t do, because I didn’t want to go live in Bulgaria.”

Silicon Valley devours Hollywood

Why does it matter if movies are made in Hollywood or in Atlanta or Dublin? Perhaps, in the age of online collaboration and Zoom meetings, it doesn’t. But with the disintegration of Hollywood, one of the world’s greatest industry clusters, something more than jobs and income is lost.

For a century, Hollywood’s geographic specificity meant writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, actors, and executives were all working in close proximity, moving from project to project and swapping ideas, techniques, and contacts on sets, over martinis at Musso & Frank’s or at coffee shops in Silver Lake. That self-propelling upward spiral built a small patch of Southern California into the center of an industry and, culturally, the world.

If that cluster scatters to cheaper locations, the city will lose those everyday collisions—shared stages, repeat partnerships, in‑person mentorship—that helped knit individual talents into an ecosystem of innovation. The knowledge built over decades won’t be handed down as it once was, nor improved in the process of close cooperation and competition.

What replaces it is likely to be more fragmented: Great work can still happen, but it becomes harder to sustain the same level of collective craft and experimentation. And unfortunately, a downward spiral is also self-propelling.

For now, Netflix and the other streamers are clearly ascendant—and continuing to pay professionals to make films and TV shows around the world—but the picture could change dramatically, and soon. Teenagers spend more time watching user-generated videos on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and other social media than they do any other type of video, according to research by eMarketer, the Pew Research Center, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. YouTube reports that users are uploading 500 hours of video every minute; that’s more product in a day than all the movies and TV shows that Hollywood produces in a year. As AI roars ahead, billions of people worldwide will have the tools to make increasingly high-quality videos all by themselves.

This Sunday’s telecast on Disney’s ABC TV network will be a celebration of everything that is Tinseltown—fabulous gowns on the red carpet, heartfelt speeches by celebrated creatives, and wall-to-wall coverage of the after-parties. But come 2029, the 100^th anniversary of the Oscars, the gala will leave the television network that has carried the Oscars every year since 1976. It will then be shown exclusively by YouTube, owned by Alphabet, parent of Google. And it might well be consumed largely via next-day clips of viral moments.  

As Michael Porter said, the world’s two most famous industry clusters are Hollywood and Silicon Valley. With one of them fading, it seems the other may be devouring it.

Bewkes—once a Hollywood mogul himself—describes it as the end of an era. “The most powerful people controlling the media now, and determining its future, are the tech oligarchs,” he says. “That’s not a prediction, it’s a description of what’s happening now.”

This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune.

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The U.S. national debt is nearly $39 trillion. One of the country’s top fiscal economists says the real number is closer to $100 trillion — and that Washington’s own accounting rules are designed to hide it. (As this went to press, the national debt clock stood at $38.92 trillion, per Treasury data.)

According to Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model and one of the country’s most respected fiscal economists, that $39 trillion number is a polite fiction. The real tab, he argues, is closer to $100 trillion.

It has to do with the accounting distinction between explicit obligations — legally binding debts the government must repay — and implicit “pay-as-you-go” obligations — expected future spending commitments that carry moral or political, but not legal, force. “What we call implicit obligations are twice the size of explicit obligations,” Smetters told Fortune in a recent interview, referring to the unfunded liabilities buried inside programs like Social Security and Medicare.

If the U.S. government were required to report its finances under the same accounting rules as a publicly traded corporation, Smetters pointed out, the debt-to-GDP ratio wouldn’t be the current level of 100%, which is bad enough. “We’d be reporting a debt-to-GDP ratio closer to 300%.” The gap between those two numbers, he warned, is not a rounding error — it is the deliberate product of federal accounting standards designed to keep the full picture hidden from the public.

‘A shell game, not a Ponzi scheme’

Smetters is careful about the language he uses. Critics of Social Security have long compared the pay-as-you-go structure to a Ponzi scheme, in which early investors are paid with money from later ones. Smetters rejects that framing.

“It’s not a Ponzi scheme,” Smetters said, “it’s a shell game,” insisting that this distinction matters. A Ponzi scheme implies fraud, but Social Security never promised a higher return than market returns. It’s more of a shell game because Social Security and entitlement reforms can be moved obligations “off book”, from explicit Treasury obligations to implicit pay-as-you-go liabilities, because federal budget rules do not account for implicit liabilities. In 2001, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attempted to explicitly book the value of pay-as-you-go liabilities but several events later that year – including the 9/11 attacks and the Enron meltdown – shifted the focus toward more immediate challenges. The newer accounting framework was outlined in a 2003 book published by the American Enterprise Institute.

In Washington’s case, Smetters said, that misdirection is written directly into federal law. His Beltway credentials include a stint as an economist at the Congressional Budget Office and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Treasury, and PWBM is widely used in Washington DC to analyze the fiscal and macroeconomic effects of federal policy proposals. So he knows what he’s talking about when he rattles off, from memory, accounting legislation from 1985 as the origin of this shell game.

By statute, Smetters pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office is required to analyze Social Security on what’s known as a “scheduled benefits basis” — meaning its models assume the program will pay out full promised benefits indefinitely, even after the trust fund is completely exhausted. The problem, of course, is that current law also requires benefits to be automatically slashed the moment the fund runs dry, while the CBO is legally barred from modeling that reality.

This accounting quirk has enormous political consequences. It allows lawmakers to craft Social Security “reform” bills that appear, on paper, to close the program’s long-term funding gap — while actually doing nothing of the sort. Smetters points to the Social Security 2100 Act as a prime example. The bill was widely celebrated for eliminating the program’s 75-year actuarial shortfall. In reality, he argued, it actually worsened the long-term picture by increasing implicit debt by more than $1 for every $1 of reduction in explicit debt. Smetters said he believes this was an unintentional effect; it can just happen when working with an incomplete accounting framework that focuses on explicit federal debt.

This bill simply shifted costs from the explicit ledger — where they show up in official debt projections — to the implicit ledger, where they vanish from public view entirely. “They reduced these explicit liabilities, but it actually increased implicit liabilities by even more. And so instead of helping future generations, instead of incentivizing saving and labor, it ultimately, in the end, did the opposite.”

Handcuffed accounting

As a longtime budget watcher, Smetters attributed the issue to something almost mystical in the gears of government, “remnants” of legislation that remain even as Congress keeps writing new bills to supposedly correct the errors from previous regimes. In particular, he pointed to powerful “remnants” rooted in the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act, which effectively prevent the agency from projecting discretionary spending to grow faster than inflation over the budget window. During his own three-year tenure at CBO, Smetters claimed, staff recognized this constraint as unrealistic and effectively required CBO to consistently produce debt projections that were too optimistic

“One of the things that’s left over from Gramm-Rudman-Hollings,” Smetters explained, “is that CBO by law is not allowed to grow discretionary spending faster than inflation over the next decade, over the budget window. And if you were to ask them, does this modeling make sense? They’ll be the first to say, ‘No, this absolutely makes no sense.’” In practice, this means the CBO’s long-range models have a structural problem built into them. “They constantly underestimate the growth in the debt,” Smetters said.

Congress passed the 1985 law in a moment of genuine fiscal panic: deficits had exploded during the early Reagan years, and lawmakers desperate for a mechanism to enforce discipline created a statutory framework that required automatic spending cuts — “sequestration” — whenever the deficit exceeded preset targets. To make that system work, the law needed a standardized, apples-to-apples definition of what counted as a “deficit,” so Section 257 codified the rules governing CBO’s official budget baseline. The political logic was straightforward: by locking in assumptions about what programs were “supposed” to spend, Congress could measure any new legislation against a fixed ruler.

The agency also faces restrictions on dynamic scoring — the practice of modeling how a policy change ripples through the broader economy — for any measure that affects fewer than 1 million people. “This is a pretty nutty one, too,” Smetters said. This blinds budget analysts to hundreds of billions of dollars in potential tax revenue generated by high-skilled immigrants over their lifetimes, he explained. Even high-skilled STEM workers who pay much more in taxes than they receive in benefits are scored as losing the government money on average, he explained, pointing to a 2024 analysis of this published by PWBM from former CBO director Douglas Elmendorf and MacArthur “genius grant” awardee Heidi Williams.

Setting aside the politics, Smetters argued, the economics suffer. “Suppose that we were to shift immigration away from low-skilled to high-skilled workers … even though we know those high-skilled STEM workers, for example, they’re going to pay a lot more taxes, CBO is not allowed to account for that.” The result is a federal budgeting apparatus that, through an accumulation of outdated rules and political compromises, consistently produces rosier projections than reality warrants.

Six years to a Social Security reckoning

For Social Security specifically, the law directed CBO to assume that scheduled benefits would be paid in full, indefinitely. It was a conservative modeling choice at the time because the trust fund was healthy following the 1983 reforms. What nobody fully reckoned with was that this assumption would become permanently embedded in law, transforming what was meant as a neutral accounting convention into a tool that could make structurally insolvent legislation appear fiscally responsible on paper.

At one time, according to Smetters, there simply wasn’t a “budget problem” in the United States, because there wasn’t an “automatic stabilizer” like in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation to keep benefits from growing at the same rate. If you just look at the data, he added, “discretionary spending clearly grows with the size of the economy. I mean, it grows clearly faster than inflation,” but it can’t do that by law. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was never explicitly overturned, just parts of it bit by bit, “and so CBO just is not allowed to grow discretionary spending faster than inflation.”

The stakes of these accounting games are about to become very real. The Social Security trust fund — which covers Old-Age and Survivors Insurance — is now projected to be depleted by 2032, one year earlier than the CBO estimated just months ago, a revision driven in part by recent tax legislation. When that happens, the program is legally required to cut benefits to whatever level incoming payroll taxes can support — a figure currently estimated at roughly 84% of scheduled payments. Tens of millions of retirees would face automatic cuts with no congressional action required to trigger them.

That looming deadline should be forcing urgent reform debates in Washington. Instead, Smetters said, turning inwardly critical, although he said he doesn’t believe PWBM is a bad offender in this regard, years of alarmist rhetoric about crisis from think tanks and budget hawks have left lawmakers cynical and disengaged. “They’re kind of tired of the boy who cries wolf,” he says. They’ve been “saying the sky is falling for the longest time,” but the sky hasn’t exactly fallen yet, he said, likening it to predictions that the world was supposed to be underwater by now. “That’s a dangerous approach,” he said, adding that “what really needs to be done is really serious, thoughtful discussions of modeling and explaining to people.”

That fatigue is dangerous, because time is the one resource that fiscal reformers are rapidly running out of. The longer Congress waits, Smetters warned, the narrower the range of available solutions becomes. A structural fix implemented today could be spread gradually across generations — modest adjustments to the retirement age, phased benefit recalibrations, incremental revenue increases. A fix implemented in 2031, under pressure of imminent insolvency, will look very different: steep, sudden, and politically brutal. Think a steep tax hike, rather than a gradual, structural adjustment.

The deeper problem

Underlying all of it, Smetters argued, is an epistemic failure in how Washington evaluates fiscal policy. The simplified models and politically convenient scoring rules that dominate budget debates don’t just misrepresent the debt — they actively mislead the policymakers who are supposed to fix it.

The Treasury’s own Financial Report of the United States Government puts the 75-year unfunded shortfall at $73.2 trillion, driven entirely by Social Security and Medicare. The reason the distinction matters is compounding urgency: the longer these implicit liabilities remain off the official ledger, the less pressure lawmakers feel to address them, while the actual cost of closing the gap grows larger each year. 

The CBO already projects that deficits will hit $1.9 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and balloon to $3.1 trillion by 2036 under current law — and that projection still assumes Social Security pays full benefits even after the trust fund is projected to run dry around 2032, obscuring just how much worse the trajectory actually is.

Without transparent, micro-founded economic models that capture the true generational transfer of costs, he warns, lawmakers will keep falling for proposals that shuffle liabilities from one column to another without changing anything fundamental. “They’re just going to get duped into simplistic solutions that really don’t do much,” he said.

The United States is not, Smetters insisted, on the verge of imminent collapse. The debt is manageable — in theory. But the window for a managed solution is closing. And the accounting rules that were supposed to help Washington navigate a path forward are, by design, pointing in the wrong direction.

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“Typically,” Morgan Stanley observed in a big research note earlier this week, “headcount growth has been required for revenue growth but AI is changing that relationship.” It’s the latest puzzle piece in the paradox of productivity under AI: it seems to be making work more intense, not less, and despite all the doomsday predictions of massive job loss and an impending white-collar recession, many CEOs insist they are still planning to hire more people.

The investment bank, drawing on takeaways from its annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, identified three distinct areas where AI is actually creating demand for workers—even as it threatens to hollow out others.​

The findings arrive at a pivotal moment. Corporate America is increasingly signaling a “decoupling” between revenue growth and headcount growth, Morgan Stanley noted, with executives from companies like Snowflake and Shopify describing how AI tools are allowing them to do more with smaller teams. But Morgan Stanley’s analysts argue the picture is more nuanced than a straightforward displacement story—and that three areas of the labor market in particular are experiencing a surge in demand driven directly by AI.​

“While some companies have reduced headcount, the majority of discussions [at the TMT conference] around AI’s impact on white collar work centered on productivity transformation and growing results without growing headcount,” they said.

In a related thought exercise last month, the Deutsche Bank Research Institute decided to ask AI how many human jobs it was going to displace, and the robot answered back that it saw 92 million jobs on the chopping block. On the other hand, it said AI would create 170 million new roles, more than offsetting the losses. “However, this transition will be disruptive,” Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid and Adrian Cox predicted. But for Morgan Stanley, analysts said the disruption is happening right now.

Skilled Trades: The Hidden Bottleneck

The most urgent and underappreciated jobs sector, according to Morgan Stanley, is in skilled trades. The unprecedented scale of the AI infrastructure buildout—spanning data centers, power delivery systems, and networking equipment—is driving demand for electricians, electrical engineers, and construction workers that “far exceeds supply,” the bank said.​

Executives from CoreWeave described a shortage of “thousands of skilled-trade workers” needed for data center construction, warning that because relevant skills take years to acquire, the supply-demand gap will persist. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang echoed the concern, noting electrician shortages in key markets like Texas as a constraint on expansion. The bottleneck, CoreWeave noted, isn’t just about available power—it’s about having the human capital to physically deliver that power into racks and servers.​

AI Training and Reskilling: A Market Exploding in Real Time

The second area of surging demand is workforce education and reskilling. As companies restructure roles around AI tools, enterprises are racing to upskill employees—and the numbers are striking. Coursera reported that AI-content enrollments reached 15 enrollments per minute in 2025, up from 8 per minute in 2024, a near-doubling in just one year.​

The buyers are increasingly corporate rather than individual, with CTOs and Chief Data Officers turning to platforms like Coursera to equip their workforces with skills in generative AI, data science, and software development. Docebo, a learning management software provider, described AI as “fundamentally causing every organization to re-skill their workforce,” calling learning management systems a critical tool for delivering that training at scale.​

AI Supervisors and Orchestrators: The New White-Collar Role

The third category isn’t a traditional trade or training job—it’s a newly emerging class of knowledge worker. As AI agents take over routine tasks, companies are redefining white-collar roles around supervising, orchestrating, and providing context for those systems.​

C.H. Robinson told conference attendees it is being transparent with employees that “future jobs will involve managing standard operating procedures and context for AI agents rather than running operations directly.” Salesforce introduced a new productivity metric—”Agentic Work Units”—to capture the value that AI agents and the humans who manage them are delivering, as the company moves beyond measuring simple token consumption. Across industries, the message from Morgan Stanley’s conference was consistent: the workers who thrive will be those who can direct AI, not just use it.​

A Tale of Two Labor Markets

The three growth areas exist alongside a more sobering dynamic for traditional white-collar employment. Snowflake cut roughly 200 positions in Q4 tied to AI-driven efficiencies, adding only a net 37 workers despite revenue reaccelerating to 30% growth. Shopify has seen headcount decline for eight to ten consecutive quarters.​

Morgan Stanley frames this as a “diverging trends” story—one in which AI is simultaneously eliminating certain jobs, elevating others, and creating entirely new categories of demand that didn’t exist a few years ago. The companies and workers best positioned for what comes next, the bank suggests, are those already adapting to all three.

“Companies are increasingly allowing natural attrition to reduce staffing needs, reallocating resources toward technical talent, or shifting spending from labor to technology while maintaining headcount,” Morgan Stanley concluded. At the same time, it noted that this transition is reshaping job definitions, moving workers toward roles that supervise, orchestrate, and contextualize AI systems.

The new economy is arriving—and soon.

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Moving up the career ladder at Accenture comes with a requirement: You must be using the company’s AI tools.

In a recent episode of the “Rapid Response” podcast, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said AI proficiency is a mandatory part of working at the consultancy and moving up its ranks. The company announced in September it has invested more than $865 million in a “six-month business optimization program,” including reskilling thousands of employees—and showing the door to those who refused to adapt to using evolving workplace technology.

“If you want to get promoted, you’ve got to do the things that we do in order to operate Accenture,” Sweet said.

“These are the new tools to operate a company,” she added. “We didn’t go from zero to ‘you won’t get promoted’ in a month. It’s over a three-year period of getting used to the technology, making sure it’s user-friendly, making sure we have the right workbench for people to use, and then saying, ‘Hey, this is Accenture and how we operate.’” 

The mass reskilling effort is part of Accenture’s three-year, $3 billion push to integrate AI first announced in 2023. One goal of the effort was to double the company’s AI talent to 80,000 professionals through hiring, acquisitions, and training. Accenture has more than 770,000 employees.

But Accenture’s embrace of AI has been an exception rather than the rule. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, 38% of companies reported integrating AI to improve workplace productivity, efficiency, and quality, according to a Gallup poll, a 1% increase from the quarter before. To be sure, AI adoption is still on the rise, with 69% of workplace leaders using AI as of 2025’s fourth quarter, up from less than 40% as of 2023’s second quarter.

CEOs and other executives have approached AI adoption and impact with skepticism. A study published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 C-suite executives, two-thirds used AI, but that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week. About 90% of those respondents reported over the past three years, AI had no impact on employment or productivity. 

That could all soon change. Those same executives also forecasted a 1.4% increase in productivity and 0.8% increase in output over the next three years. The education company Pearson estimated that augmenting jobs with AI and reskilling employees could add between $4.8 trillion and $6.6 trillion to the U.S. economy within the next decade, per a report published in January.

Why Accenture went all in on AI

According to Sweet, integrating AI into the workplace is a natural extension of when computers become ubiquitous. The typewriter classes of yesterday are analogous to the AI reskilling of today, she suggested.

“No one would have said that requiring someone to use a computer is coercion,” Sweet said. “It’s how the companies were going to get work done. Today, AI at Accenture is how we do work.”

Still, Sweet has empathy toward companies resistant to making the sweeping changes Accenture has made to accommodate an AI future. She previously told Fortune Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell that companies’ failed attempts to integrate the technology in the office were a result of using AI as a tool in a previously established workflow, when it was really most effective when workplace systems were built with the technology in mind.

“First of all, I think we’re a good lesson in something that I’m advising CEOs all about: In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you really have to be willing to rewire your company,” Sweet said. 

Accenture’s own employees hit snags in embracing AI, she noted. Welcoming change associated with the new slate of tools was challenging, for both employees and old business.

“For our people and our clients, it was hard,” Sweet said. “How do you have the courage to do that? That’s where you have the humility, but also this idea of embracing change and innovation.”

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The U.S. Mint unveiled new designs for the country’s 250th anniversary and it left out one key detail: the olive branch from the newly designed dime. The new reverse shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right, with beneath, the inscription “Liberty over Tyranny.”

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental.

Unchanged since 1946, the Roosevelt dime is now replaced by a modern Liberty figure on the front, solely for one year as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. The U.S. Mint is marking the Semiquincentennial with a sweeping redesign of the coinage, something not undertaken since the 1976 Bicentennial. Authorized by Congress, the change touches the dime, quarter, half dollar, penny, and dollar coin, all bearing 1776–2026 dates.

The olive branch has anchored American iconography for 250 years—its absence from the very coin marking that anniversary is a curious choice, if not a telling one.

What does the olive branch mean?

When the Great Seal of the United States was finalized in 1782, it contained what the Founding Father’s held as the country’s most esteemed values. The eagle holds 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right, its head turned toward the branch—the side which the eagle preferred to err on.

The arrows—not for lack of symbolism, take a wild guess why there are 13 of them—are in the eagle’s left talon, the traditionally thought-of weaker and subordinate side. Meant to represent the power of war and military preparedness, the arrows clutched in the left talon signal that although the U.S. is always armed and ready, force is not its first instinct.

Charles Thomson, who shepherded the final design, was explicit: the arrows represented the power of war, the olive branch the power of peace, and together they carried a single message: the United States had a strong desire for peace, but would always be ready for war.

The eagle’s head facing the olive branch was not incidental. It was a statement of national preference, drawn directly from the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, Congress’s last diplomatic appeal to King George III before the war escalated beyond return.

Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn’t just a design choice: it’s a cultural signal. The Founders spent six years perfecting the balance between peace and war on the Great Seal. Erasing half of that equation, on a coin meant to celebrate their legacy, and especially 250 years after they fought for “Liberty over Tyranny,” says something about which half the country currently feels like.

What was the coin design process?

The U.S. Mint is also redesigning other currency. Five new one-year-only quarter designs trace American history from the Mayflower Compact to the Gettysburg Address. Acting Mint Director Kristie McNally said the goal was for every American to hold 250 years of history in their hands.

“The designs on these historic coins depict the story of America’s journey toward a ‘more perfect union,’ and celebrate America’s defining ideals of liberty. We hope to offer each American the opportunity to hold our nation’s storied 250 years of history in the palms of their hands as we Connect America through Coins.”

In 2025, the U.S. Mint brought the coin designs to the public, with the top rated coins reviewed and recommended by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) and U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA). The CCAC, established in 2003, advises the Secretary of the Treasury on themes and designs of all U.S. coins and medals, the latter of which are used in commemoration and neither hold face value nor are legal tender. The CCAC, an informed and impartial resource for the Secretary, essentially, is meant to represent the interests of all Americans. The Secretary then approves all final suggestions.

In Sept. 2024, the coin designs were put into review. Each coin design will depict a special Semiquincentennial Liberty Bell with the numeral “250” marked on the coin.

Coins and their symbolism

In Dec. 2025, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent nixxed some of the quarter designs that were approved by then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during the Biden Administration for focusing “on DEI and Critical Race Theory policies.” One of the coins featured a line of people with arms linked, in between the words “We shall overcome.”

At the time, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said the coinage design is supposed to “celebrate American history and the founding of our great nation,” but that imagery was scrapped because “the Biden Administration and Secretary Yellen remained focused on DEI and Critical Race Theory policies.”

“The Trump Administration is dedicated to fostering prosperity and patriotism. We have no doubt these new designs will be wildly popular with the American people.”

U.S. Mint

It’s interesting to note, however, the 1916 Standing Liberty Quarter, a medal that also will be released this year in commemoration of the 250th anniversary (dubbed by the Mint as the SemiQ), features a standing Liberty holding an olive branch on the front, and on the back, the talons of an eagle gripping an olive branch.

Perhaps the most famous dime is the Mercury dime which was minted between 1916 and 1946. Designer Adolph Weinman chose to use a Roman fasces—an axe bound tightly in a bundle of rods—wrapped in an olive branch, together symbolizing military readiness tempered by a desire for peace, in a nod to the Roman Republic. Three years after the Mercury dime debuted, Benito Mussolini adopted the fasces as the emblem of his Italian fascist movement, even where the name derived from. It was then replaced in 1946 by the Roosevelt dime, in honor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt following his death. The dime remains the one in use today.

The eagle didn’t always err on the side of peace, and instead, faced the arrows between 1877 and 1945, until President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9646 on Oct. 25, 1945, which changed the direction of the eagle from the arrows to the olive branch. Reportedly, according to the Winston Churchill archives, the president was very happy about the change, and told the British prime minister “The eagle used to face the arrows but I have re­designed it so that it now faces the olive branches.”

Churchill’s response? “With the greatest respect, I would prefer the American eagle’s neck to be on a swivel so that it could face the olive branches or the arrows, as the occasion might demand.”

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Amazon repurposed its regular weekly retail technology meeting Tuesday to figure out why its retail website keeps breaking. The answer, buried in internal documents and then quickly deleted, according to the Financial Times: its own AI initiatives.

Four high-severity incidents hit its retail website in a single week, including a six-hour meltdown last Thursday that locked shoppers out of checkout, account information and product pricing. The meeting, run by the senior vice president who oversees Amazon’s ecommerce infrastructure, was framed as a “deep dive” into what went wrong. What went wrong, it turns out, involves the very AI tools Amazon has been pushing its own engineers to adopt, according to the FT.

An internal document prepared for the meeting initially identified “GenAI-assisted changes” as a factor in a pattern of incidents stretching back to Q3. That reference was deleted before the meeting took place, according to the Financial Times, which viewed both versions of the document. 

Amazon has pushed back on the reporting. In a blog post, the company said only one incident involved AI tools, that “none of the incidents involved AI-written code,” and that the cause was “an engineer following inaccurate advice that an agent inferred from an outdated internal wiki.” Amazon also told Fortune the meeting was a routine weekly operations review, not an emergency gathering. The company also said it is not accurate that it introduced new approval requirements for engineers working with AI tools, and that AWS was not involved in any of the incidents.

“As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement,” an Amazon spokesperson told Fortune.

The internal documents, obtained and reported by CNBC, tell another story. Dave Treadwell, SVP of eCommerce Foundation, laid it out for staff:. Site availability had not been good recently, he wrote, and the string of Sev 1s—the most severe classification for incidents that take down important systems—demanded immediate attention.

But the internal documents, as initially written, according to CNBC, tell a more complicated story. Treadwell acknowledged in his note that “best practices and safeguards” around generative AI usage haven’t been fully established, and wrote that the company would introduce “controlled friction” into deployments involving the most critical parts of the retail experience, according to CNBC. Either way Amazon calls it, the message to engineers was that AI-assisted changes now get more scrutiny.

The timing for that kind of admission is brutal for Amazon. The company, which just surpassed Walmart to top the Fortune 500, is spending more on AI infrastructure than any company on Earth—$200 billion in projected capital expenditures this year. 

Amazon is also aggressively thinning out its workforce. The company laid off roughly 14,000 corporate workers in October — mostly middle managers — followed by another 16,000 in January. That’s on top of more than 27,000 employees cut between 2022 and 2023. In June, Jassy wrote in an internal memo that Amazon would need fewer employees thanks to AI-driven “efficiency gains,” repeating his drumbeat emphasizing the AI future of less workers needed at the giant retail platform. When the October cuts came, Jassy reframed the rationale on an earnings call to be about “culture,” saying that the company had grown too fast during the pandemic, and Amazon needed to be “lean” and “move fast.”

But a separate Amazon memo announcing the same layoffs cited the need to adapt to “transformative technology,” the kind of language that maps a lot more cleanly onto an AI-driven workforce reduction than a spring cleaning. But it seems that either way, Amazon has found itself in need of more humans in the process.

It’s an interesting narrative violation in a world of AI-related layoffs. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut nearly half its workforce last month — 4,000 employees — and tied the decision explicitly to AI-driven productivity gains. Dorsey said most companies would reach the same conclusion within a year. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff said he needed fewer heads after cutting 4,000 support roles. The C-suite consensus is that increasing AI investment will pay for itself with smaller workforces.

But the promise that AI would lighten the load isn’t playing out— at least, not for the workers who remain, and not for the systems they manage. A new analysis reported by the Wall Street Journal of 164,000 workers by ActivTrak found that AI is increasing the speed, density, and complexity of work rather than reducing it. Time spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled after workers adopted AI tools. Time devoted to focused, uninterrupted work—the kind required for solving complex problems—fell 9%. Meanwhile, new research from Anthropic suggests the gap between what AI can theoretically automate and what it’s actually automating is enormous. Even in software and math — where 94% of tasks could theoretically be handled by AI, only about 33% are being automated today. Legal constraints and institutional troubles are all slowing deployment, Anthropic said. Amazon’s outages could be a live demonstration of why.

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AI chatbots and search engines are sometimes negative about brands, and the end result—while arguably good for the end consumer—is a wake-up call for companies.

A study of hundreds of millions of prompts across three industries (apparel, electronics, and education) conducted by search engine optimization company BrightEdge found Google’s AI Overviews was 44% more likely to display negative information about a brand than OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Still, when consumers prompted ChatGPT to decide between the two products, the roles flipped, with ChatGPT being more negative.

While the overwhelming majority of responses analyzed in the study were either positive or neutral, a small percentage of responses were negative for both Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, 2.3% and 1.6%, respectively.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu told Fortune while these percentages may seem small, multiplied across hundreds of millions of results, they can still equate to loads of negative queries, which can affect a company’s image in the eyes of potential consumers. For every million queries, an estimated 23,000 would yield a negative response by AI Overviews, based on the data from the study.

Google, in particular, Yu said, is pulling out negative information associated with products that can sometimes be years old because of the way it pulls information from the internet. These searches, though, depend heavily on what people search for and what is publicly available about a company.

“Instead of it being on the back pages that’s way further down, now it’s pulling it into the front page, as people are looking for things about your brand,” he said. “That’s a huge change for businesses.” 

A spokesperson for Google told Fortune the report used a flawed methodology to make sensational claims and found a negligible difference of 1% between AI Overviews and ChatGPT in terms of negative responses.

“It also misunderstands how AI Overviews work: They’re based on what sources on the web say about a topic and change depending on what someone is searching for,” said the spokesperson in a statement.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Courtesy of BrightEdge

To mitigate the negative information being brought to the forefront of AI, companies need to make it a priority to respond to nearly every negative review published by people online, Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Markup.AI, a tech company that uses AI to review marketing content, told Fortune. 

“I do think it’s more important than ever, because those things are getting picked up more, and they’re getting picked up in different ways by different AI applications,” Blumberg said.

The study shows a clear shift in how AI presents information to people. Consumers are using AI to become better researchers and to get a clearer and arguably more objective picture of the positives and negatives of any product, Yu said.

For companies, this new reality of search means companies need to be pushing out fresh content to cater to AI’s preference for newer content, while also being strategic about where they place it. 

“It’s a new dynamic that they do have to really think about,” Yu added.

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The biggest new restaurant trend is small.

Special menus with petite, less expensive portions are popping up all over, from large chains like Olive Garden and The Cheesecake Factory to trendy urban eateries and farm-to-fork dining rooms.

Restaurants hope that offering smaller servings beyond the children’s menu will meet many different diners’ needs. Some people want to spend less when they go out. Others are looking for healthier options or trying to lose weight. Younger consumers tend to snack more throughout the day and eat smaller meals, said Maeve Webster, the president of culinary consulting firm Menu Matters.

“These are really driven by, I think, changes in the way people are thinking about their relationship with food, the way they spend money on food, what is a good value and what’s not,” Webster said.

Looking for value

Beth Tipton, the co-owner of Daniel Girls Farmhouse Restaurant in Connersville, Indiana, introduced an eight-item Mini Meals menu last fall after several customers requested smaller portions. The menu, which includes daily specials like a half piece of meatloaf with green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy for $8, now accounts for about 20% of the restaurant’s orders, she said.

Older adults make up about half of the restaurant’s clientele, Tipston said, and some customers told her the regular menu was a stretch for their budgets. As someone who underwent weight-loss surgery, she also knew from experience that many restaurants won’t allow adults to order from their children’s menus.

“We wanted it to be available to all without the word ‘kids meals’ attached,” Tipton said. “With the rising costs all around us we wanted to help in any way we can, and this is a great option.”

Eating out and GLP-1s

Some restaurants are adding menus to court users of GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes drugs like Zepbound, Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro.

Last fall, restaurateur Barry Gutin ran into two different friends who told him they were taking GLP-1s and struggling to find restaurant meals that met their dietary needs and smaller appetites. GLP-1 users tend to eat less, so they need nutritionally dense foods that are low in fat and high in protein and fiber.

Gutin, the co-owner of Cuba Libre Restaurant and Rum Bar in Philadelphia, Washington, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Orlando, Florida, reached out to a doctor who specializes in weight loss and to Cuba Libre’s culinary director, Angel Roque. Over the next month, they developed the chain’s GLP-Wonderful menu, which is available during dinner.

The menu has five classic Cuban options. Roque said the pollo asado on Cuba Libre’s regular menu has nearly 1,000 calories; on the GLP-1 menu, that’s slimmed down to 400 calories, but heavy on protein and fiber. He said it was also important to keep the GLP-1 meals flavorful and colorful, to stimulate appetites.

“Many times when people are on those kind of regimes, they feel that they can’t do the same as everybody else. So we wanted to show them, yes, at Cuba Libre, you can,” Roque said.

Gutin said the menu has increased business. He estimated that 10 to 20 groups at each location every week have at least one person who requests the GLP-Wonderful menu.

“People say, ‘Thank you for serving us’,” Gutin said.

Big chains go small

Olive Garden, whose seven-item “Lighter Portions” menu rolled out nationwide in January, said GLP-1 users were one consideration. The Italian-style restaurant chain also wanted to appeal to patrons pursuing healthier diets or more affordable meals, said Rick Cardenas, the president and CEO of Olive Garden’s parent company, Darden Restaurants.

“There is a consumer group out there that believes in abundance, but abundance is different for everybody,” Cardenas said in September during a conference call with investors. “So consumers can choose. We’re not changing our entire menu to make it a smaller portion.”

The Asian fusion chain P.F. Chang’s began offering medium-sized portions last fall. The Cheesecake Factory added smaller, lower-priced Bites and Bowls to its menu last summer, while TGI Fridays recently began testing an “Eat Like A Kid” menu with smaller portions.

A long-term change

Smaller portions aren’t a new concept. Twenty years ago, small-plate tapas restaurants were all the rage, for instance.

But to Webster, the menu consultant, the scaled-down dishes appearing now feel like a longer-term shift. For one thing, the trend is not tied to any particular cuisine. Webster also thinks consumers are thinking more about food waste than they used to, and smaller portions can alleviate some of their concerns.

“I think it is a core need that consumers have, and a demand that has been lingering under the surface for a long time because restaurant meals, particularly at chains, have become so large,” she said. “Sure, it sounds great to take leftovers home, but they never taste as good.”

During a recent visit to Shelburne, Vermont, from his home in North Carolina, Jack Pless was delighted to see the Teeny Tuesday menu at Barkeaters Restaurant, which specializes in locally sourced food. Pless, who’s in his 60s and used to own a restaurant, said he can’t eat as much as he used to at meals.

“So many times you go out to restaurants, especially me or my wife, and we’ll take home a box and it’ll sit in the refrigerator for two, three days and start to grow a beard,” he said.

Julie Finestone, the co-owner of Barkeaters, said she introduced the Teeny Tuesday menu last month to bring in more weekday business during the winter. She was concerned about the cost of offering lower-priced food options, like $12 reuben sliders, but said the decision has brought in more business than she expected.

Finestone said she’s pretty confident Teeny Tuesday will become a year-round fixture.

“Some people, it’s dietary. Some have smaller appetites. Some people don’t like to overindulge in the middle of the week,” Finestone said. “I think that it just spoke to people.”

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AP Video Journalists Mingson Lau in Philadelphia and Amanda Swinhart in Shelburne, Vermont, contributed.

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Iran’s secretive new supreme leader on Thursday vowed to keep up attacks on Gulf Arab countries and use the effective closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz as leverage against the United States and Israel. It was his first public statement since being chosen to succeed his father, who was killed in an Israeli strike.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, who Israel suspects was wounded in the opening salvo of the war, has not appeared in public since then. In the statement read by a state TV news anchor, he vowed to avenge those killed in the war, including in a strike on a school that killed over 165 people.

The statement signaled a willingness to continue the war that has disrupted global energy supplies, international travel and the relative safety enjoyed by the Gulf Arab states. Iran’s unrelenting attacks on shipping traffic and energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf had earlier pushed oil back above $100 a barrel.

Both sides dig in as fighting escalates

U.S. and Israeli strikes have exacted a heavy toll on Iran’s leadership, military and ballistic missile program but have failed to topple the government, which U.S. President Donald Trump has at times suggested is his goal.

Iran is trying to inflict enough global economic pain to pressure the United States and Israel to halt their bombardment, which began on Feb. 28. Those strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — Mojtaba’s father — and the younger Khamenei’s wife.

Trump has meanwhile promised to “finish the job,” even though he claimed Iran is “virtually destroyed.” He said in a social media post Thursday that ensuring Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon was a higher priority than soaring oil prices.

Iran-backed Hezbollah militants meanwhile launched some 200 rockets from Lebanon at northern Israel while sirens rang out and loud booms from the interception of Iranian missiles could be heard in other areas. Israel launched another wave of attacks on Tehran and in Lebanon, where 11 people were killed.

The U.N. refugee agency said up to 3.2 million people in Iran have been displaced by the ongoing war. It said most have fled from Tehran and other major cities toward the north of the country or rural areas. Around 800,000 people have been internally displaced in Lebanon, prompting fears of a humanitarian crisis.

Khamenei warns of ‘opening other fronts’ if war continues

Khamenei’s first statement signaled a continuation of his late father’s strategy in confronting the United States and Israel. He called on Gulf Arabs to “shut down” U.S. bases in the region, saying protection promised by Washington was “nothing more than a lie.”

He also said Iran has studied “opening other fronts in which the enemy has little experience and would be highly vulnerable” if the war continues. He did not elaborate, but Iran has been linked to previous attacks on U.S., Israeli and Jewish targets around the world.

Khamenei is close to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and is widely seen as even less compromising than his father. His location is unknown, and he is likely a prime target for the U.S. and Israel.

In addition to attacking energy infrastructure across the region, Iran has also effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway leading from the Persian Gulf toward the Indian Ocean through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil flows.

The price of Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose another 9% to more than $100 a barrel, up some 38% over what it cost when the war started. Prices have swung back and forth in recent days, at one point surging to around $120 a barrel.

Israel and Hezbollah trade heavy fire

It was a sleepless night for many in Israel and Lebanon as Hezbollah launched some 200 rockets into Israel, according to the Israeli military. Israeli warplanes carried out simultaneous airstrikes on areas in Beirut’s southern suburbs and struck a car near the capital.

“The noise was extraordinary, it was really scary,” said Naama Porat, a resident of the rural Israeli community of Klil, some 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the Lebanese border. As the sound of explosions and interceptions rang out, she dashed with her son to a shelter and spent the night there.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned Lebanon that if its government does not prevent Hezbollah from attacking, Israel “will take the territory and do it ourselves.”

Lebanon’s government has ramped up calls for Hezbollah to disarm since the group’s last war with Israel was halted by a 2024 ceasefire, and earlier this month declared Hezbollah’s military activities illegal. But it has been reluctant to confront the militants directly.

More than 20 killed in strikes on Lebanon and Iran

The Israeli military struck a building in a busy residential and commercial district in central Beirut after issuing a warning for residents to evacuate. The strike hit in a neighborhood that is close to Lebanon’s parliament, United Nations offices and international embassies.

Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee said they were targeting a “facility affiliated with Hezbollah.”

Israel earlier hit a car in a seaside area of Lebanon’s capital, killing eight and wounding 31, the Lebanese Health Ministry said. The Israeli military said it was “not aware” of a strike at that location.

Israel’s military on Thursday warned residents of an even larger area of southern Lebanon to leave their homes. It said they should move north of the Zahrani River, which at its midpoint is about 35 miles (56 kilometers) away from the border with Israel.

Separately, Israel said it struck a nuclear facility in Iran in recent days that it had destroyed with an airstrike in October 2024. Earlier this year, satellite photos raised concerns that Iran was working to restore the facility.

The U.S. and Israel say that destroying whatever remains of Iran’s nuclear program is one of the central aims of the war. They have long suspected Iran seeks nuclear weapons, while the Islamic Republic says its nuclear program is peaceful.

Iran fires at Gulf Arab countries and hits ship in Persian Gulf

British officials said several U.S. personnel were injured in drone strikes in northern Iraq on Wednesday night.

Brig. Guy Foden said a number of drones hit a base in Erbil that houses both British and American troops. Another officer, Lt. Gen. Nick Perry, said there were no British casualties, while the U.S. sustained some casualties but “nothing too serious.”

Early Thursday, a container ship was hit with a projectile off the coast of Dubai, sparking a small fire, according to British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center. It said the crew were safe.

An Iranian attack sparked a major fire on Muharraq Island, home to Bahrain’s international airport. Kuwait authorities said an Iranian drone smashed into a residential building, wounding two people, and that a drone damaged Kuwait International Airport but caused no casualties.

The UAE said it had activated air defenses twice to protect the futuristic city of Dubai from attacks, and firefighters extinguished a blaze at a tower after a drone hit.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, said it shot down a drone targeting the diplomatic quarter in its capital, Riyadh, and other drones in the east, including at least one trying to target its Shaybah oil field.

Iran’s latest attacks on its Gulf neighbors flouted a U.N. Security Council resolution approved Wednesday.

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Melzer reported from Mitzpe Hila, Israel, Rising from Bangkok and Corder from The Hague, Netherlands. Associated Press writers Sally Abou AlJoud and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, and Jill Lawless in London, contributed to this report.

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When Kevin Ketels bought an electric 2026 Chevrolet Blazer last year, he wasn’t thinking about the cost of gas. He just thought EVs were better and “wanted to be part of the future.” Now that the Iran war is spiking prices at the pump, the Detroit man is happy he is no longer filling up his 11-year-old gas-powered SUV.

“Electricity can go up, but it won’t go up nearly as much as gas will and it won’t go up nearly as fast, either,” said Ketels, 55, an assistant professor of global supply chain management at Wayne State University.

Experts say prolonged high gas prices may drive some EV interest and sales, especially if drivers assume their electricity prices won’t be affected by the crises.

But many factors influence consumer EV purchases — and electricity rates.

Are EV owners truly insulated from price hikes?

Drivers of gas-powered vehicles are much more vulnerable to fluctuating prices that result from global conflict than those who charge their cars. The national average for a gallon of regular gas this week was $3.57, up from $2.94 a month ago, according to AAA.

Meanwhile, “residential electricity prices are regulated and are much less volatile than gasoline prices,” said University of California, Davis economics professor Erich Muehlegger. “As a result, EV owners are largely unaffected by oil price shocks.”

But experts say electricity prices have been increasing nationally for a variety of reasons, including surging power demand from new data centers.

“This is an inflationary event,” Holt Edwards, principal in Bracewell’s Policy Resolution Group, said of the war. “Is this the driver in electricity prices? I think probably not. But it’s certainly a contributing factor.”

To what extent oil and gas conflicts could translate to the electricity sector is yet to be seen.

What about how different grids are powered?

When it comes to the electricity an EV owner is tapping, much of the cost depends on which sources of electricity are in a local grid’s power mix, experts say.

Because regulators set residential electricity prices annually, most households are sheltered from month-to-month changes in natural gas costs. Though experts say higher natural gas prices can increase the cost of generating electricity, natural gas prices haven’t risen as quickly or as much as oil prices have recently.

Those are just two of many energy sources — including coal, nuclear and renewables — that power the electric grid.

“The energy component varies depending on the energy you’re using and the price of the energy that you’re using to generate electricity,” said Pierpaolo Cazzola, an energy expert at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “What happens is that in the U.S., the variation of the price of the energy component is smaller than it is elsewhere.”

The experts said persistent war could affect electricity bills in the future. And that is all the more reason for countries to transition to clean power, they said.

“Clean power and electrification combined is what provides the most security,” said Euan Graham, an analyst at energy think tank Ember.

Michael B. Klein, a 56-year-old software developer in Evanston, Illinois, has driven EVs for the past eight years to save on fuel costs and because of environmental concerns.

Every time electrical grid efficiency improves — especially as renewables are added — “I get that benefit no matter what,” said Klein, who drives a Chevy Bolt. “They can improve the efficiency of gas engines, but you have to get a new car in order to reap the benefit of that.”

So will EV demand rise?

Several experts say high gasoline prices are a strong driver of EV sales, particularly if high prices persist. Drivers also consider more gasoline-efficient hybrid vehicles during these times.

Car-shopping resource Edmunds analyzed consumer shopping data for the week starting March 2, after the Iran war had begun. They found that interest in hybrids, plug-in hybrids and battery EVs accounted for 22.4% of all vehicle research activity on their site that week, up from 20.7% the previous week. Analysts also looked back at the last major nationwide fuel price surges in 2022, and they saw that consideration of electrified vehicles consideration rose sharply then, too.

But whether this means more EV purchases depends on whether buyers expect to save not just now but in the future, experts say.

Adding to the complexity: A sudden increase in EV demand could drive up prices, Graham said.

“I think the real step change would be in whether this causes governments to shift tax, tariff policies around EVs,” Graham said. Doing so would help reduce fossil fuel dependence, he said.

Does driving electric really save money?

Pretty much.

People who buy EVs have a “really substantial” gas savings over the life of their vehicles even without government tax credits, said Peter Zalzal, an attorney with Environmental Defense Fund.

“We’re talking about thousands and thousands of dollars” in savings, Zalzal said. “And as gas prices increase, those savings are only greater. Fuel costs are a big piece of overall vehicle costs, and increases in fuel prices have significant impacts on people.”

However, the upfront cost of a new EV is still more than that of a gasoline-powered vehicle; new EVs sold for an average of $55,300 last month, while new vehicles overall sold for an average $49,353, according to auto-buying resource Kelley Blue Book. Some experts also expressed national security concerns with EVs because China dominates significant parts of the EV supply chain.

Ketels, the EV owner and professor, said he believes EVs and renewable energy should be a strategic priority for individuals and the U.S. because they could be produced domestically “and we don’t have those fluctuations and those worries.”

But because the federal government has withdrawn many incentives for both, “it puts us at a disadvantage globally,” Ketels said. “I think it’s been a terrible mistake to withdraw these incentives and to attack the sustainable energy industry,” and the war “is just making it that much more obvious.”

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With no clear end in sight, the war with Iran is sending oil prices back to $100 per barrel, and stocks are sinking worldwide on Thursday.

The S&P 500 fell 1.1% and is returning to sharp swings following a couple days of relative calm. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 575 points, or 1.2%, as of 12:15 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.4% lower.

The center of action was again the oil market, where the price of a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, climbed 7.9% to $99.25 after briefly touching $101.59. Worries are worsening that the war could block the production of oil in the Persian Gulf for a long time and cause a debilitating surge of inflation for the global economy.

Iran’s new supreme leader released his first statement Thursday since succeeding his late father, saying his country would keep up attacks on Gulf Arab neighbors and use the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz as leverage against the United States and Israel. A fifth of the world’s oil typically sails through the strait, and oil producers in the region are cutting production because their crude has nowhere to go.

Countries around the world are trying to make up for that, and the International Energy Agency said Wednesday that its members would release a record amount of oil, 400 million barrels, from stockpiles built for such emergencies.

But such moves are short-term fixes, and they do not clear the long-term risks. Analysts have said that if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil prices could jump to $150.

To be sure, the U.S. stock market has a history of bouncing back relatively quickly from military conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, as long as oil prices don’t stay too high for too long. Even with all the up- and- down swings of the last couple weeks, many rocking markets hour to hour, the S&P 500 is still just roughly 4% below its all-time high set in January.

What’s made this jump for oil prices frightening is not only the degree — prices jumped near $120 earlier this week to their highest level since 2022 — but that they’re also occurring during an uncertain time for the economy.

Last month’s report on hiring by U.S. employers was surprisingly weak, which raised worries about a possible worst-case scenario for the economy called “stagflation.” That’s where economic growth stagnates while inflation remains high, and it’s a miserable mix that the Federal Reserve has no good tools to fix.

A more encouraging signal arrived Thursday. A report said that the number of U.S. workers applying for unemployment benefits inched lower last week. That’s a sign that layoffs are potentially remaining low around the country.

Dollar General, meanwhile, reported better profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. But the retailer with relatively low prices, whose customers often have the least cushion to absorb higher gasoline prices, gave forecasts for revenue this upcoming year that indicated a potential slowdown in growth. Its stock fell 4.4%.

Some of Wall Street’s worst losses again hit companies with big fuel bills. Cruise-ship operator Carnival fell 6.2%, and United Airlines sank 3.8%.

Worries about the private-credit industry continued to hurt the market. Investors have been rushing to pull money out of some funds and companies that have lent to businesses whose profits are potentially under threat. Many of the worries are focused on business that could be made obsolete by new AI-powered rivals and may not pay back their loans.

Morgan Stanley fell 3.9% after its North Haven Private Income Fund said it allowed investors to redeem only 5% of its total shares instead of the nearly 11% they had requested. That 5% cap is the advertised limit.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across Europe and Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1%, and France’s CAC 40 sank 0.9% for two of the world’s bigger moves.

In the bond market, Treasury yields continued to climb because of upward pressure from rising oil prices. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.24% from 4.21% late Wednesday and from just 3.97% before the war started.

Higher yields make all kinds of borrowing more expensive, such as mortgages for potential U.S. homebuyers and bond offerings for companies looking to expand. They also push down on prices for all kinds of investments, from stocks to crypto.

Because of the spike for oil prices, traders have pushed back forecasts for when the Fed could resume its cuts to interest rates. President Donald Trump has been angrily calling for such cuts, which would give the economy and job market a boost but also potentially worsen inflation.

A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude rose 9.3% to $95.34.

___

AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

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Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: a preview of Nvidia GTC…the end of computer programming as we know it…Atlassian cuts 10% of its workforce in AI drive…AI money floods into the U.S. midterms...McKinsey rushes to fix AI system after hacker exposes flaws. 

As basketball fans gear up for March Madness next week, AI industry watchers turn to their own late-winter frenzy: Nvidia GTC, the annual developer conference of what is now the world’s most valuable company.

For the past two years, I’ve headed to San Jose for what has become far more than a gathering of the Nvidia faithful. It has evolved into a highly-anticipated moment for CEO Jensen Huang to step on stage before nearly 20,000 attendees at the packed SAP Center and hit the equivalent of dozens of three-pointers in his keynote—with loud cheers at every “swish” of Nvidia news. There’s even a three-hour “pre-game” show, which this year features the CEOs of several Nvidia partners. 

And that’s just the first day. The event has grown so popular that last year I struggled to find space to meet people, or even to sit down for a minute.

While I won’t be able to attend in person this year, I’ll be watching the announcements—as well as playing what has become a game of “Which black leather jacket will Jensen wear?”

There has already been a stream of previews, strong hints and rumors about what will be shared at GTC. Here’s a sampling: 

• AI as a “5 layer cake.” On Tuesday, Nvidia released a blog post by Huang called “AI is a 5 Layer Cake.” In the blog, Huang argues that AI depends on five layers—energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications—and that all five need to scale together to enable the massive buildout of AI across the economy. Nvidia, not coincidentally, sits squarely in the middle of that stack, and connects most of the layers together. 

• More investments and partnerships. Nvidia has invested in dozens of AI companies since last year, deploying billions of dollars across the ecosystem. This week, in advance of GTC, the company announced it has invested $2 billion in AI cloud firm Nebius and is also backing former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines with over 1 GW in Nvidia chips.

• Open-source models—with a strategic goal. In the wake of an announcement this week of a new open source model, Nvidia is reportedly investing up to $26 billion in open-source models and it is rumored that the company will unveil something called NemoClaw, an open-source AI agent platform for enterprises, at GTC. The strategy is less about competing with frontier AI labs and more about keeping developers building inside Nvidia’s software ecosystem—and ultimately driving demand for more chips.
• Autonomous driving ambitions. Nvidia is also continuing to expand its push into autonomous vehicles, where its chips and software platforms are increasingly being used by carmakers building self-driving systems. Yesterday, the company released a video showing Huang taking a 2.5-hour ride across San Francisco in a Mercedes using its Alpamayo autonomous driving system.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

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Forty-four years ago, Howard Schultz packed up his life, loaded his golden retriever, Jonas, into his 1979 Audi, and drove cross-country from New York City to Seattle with his wife, Sheri. He was headed toward a city he barely knew, but would eventually become where he built his massive coffee empire and a brand we all know today: Starbucks. 

At the time, Sheri was the “breadwinner,” with a design career, Shultz said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. But Sept. 7, 1982, changed the course of the couple’s lives: It was the day Schultz started a new job “at a place called Starbucks.”

“Back then, the Pike Place Starbucks only sold whole bean coffee,” Schultz said. “Today, it’s the most visited Starbucks in the world. The history of the company is bound up in the very foundation, walls, and floorboards of our first store in the city’s historic market.”

And that company would make Schultz a billionaire (he’s worth about $6.6 billion today). 

Building the Starbucks empire

Schultz joined Starbucks in 1982 as director of retail operations and marketing, when the company was still a small Seattle roaster selling whole-bean coffee. 

The turning point in Schultz’s career came a year later when he took a trip to Milan. He was struck by the culture of Italian espresso bars—the ritual, the community, the craft. He came back to Seattle convinced that the model could also work in America. This was also the inception of the idea of “third places,” which Starbucks continues to pursue today.

But Starbucks wasn’t originally convinced the idea would work, so Schultz left the company.

“’You’re out of your mind. This is insane. You should just go get a job,’” Schultz was told, according to his own book, Pour Your Heart Into It. “In the course of the year I spent trying to raise money, I spoke to 242 people, and 217 of them said ‘no.’”

But after Schultz raised the money, he opened his own coffeehouse, Il Giornale, in 1986, and acquired Starbucks itself for $3.8 million in 1987. The company went public in 1992.

What followed was one of the great American business expansions of the 20th century: Starbucks went from just a handful of Seattle stores to more than 35,000 locations in 80 countries. 

Schultz served as CEO three times: from 1987 to 2000; from 2008 to 2017; and again briefly in 2022-2023, returning each time to steady the company. 

“I came back this past year because the company really did lose its way, and it lost its way culturally,” Schultz said in an interview with CNN in February 2023. Schultz’s third stint as CEO from 2022 to 2023 was largely defined by an aggressive, legally contentious battle against worker unionization. 

He left Starbucks for the last time in 2023, handing the reins to Laxman Narasimhan, who only served as CEO from April 2023 to August 2024. Brian Niccol (Chipotle’s former CEO) became chief executive in September 2024. 

Still, Schultz’s legacy is hard to beat. He took a regional bean roaster and turned it into a global cultural institution. Today, Starbucks has more than 32,000 stores in 80 countries, dwarfing other chains like Dunkin’ Donuts, which has about 14,000 stores globally. 

He also popularized the “third place” concept, an idea Niccol is attempting to revive by bringing back handwritten notes on coffee cups, more seating in coffee shops, and more options to enjoy a coffee at an actual Starbucks location rather than only taking it to go. 

Schultz took a regional bean roaster and turned it into a global cultural institution, popularizing the “third place” concept — the idea that people needed somewhere between home and work to gather, linger, and connect. He also championed employee benefits that were unusual for the service industry at the time, including health insurance for part-time workers and a free college tuition program.

And while union drama was an undercurrent of Schultz’s third tenure, in particular, Starbucks was still one of the first companies to provide comprehensive health care to part-time employees, starting in 1988.

“I knew I wanted to build the kind of company my father never got to work for,” Schultz wrote in a 2022 Instagram post. “That year, I decided we would offer full health benefits to eligible full- and part-time Starbucks employees.”

Closing the Seattle chapter

More than a year after his retirement from Starbucks, Schultz decided it was time to leave Seattle. He announced in his LinkedIn post this week that he and Sheri were leaving Seattle.

“Last year we traveled to dozens of places around the world—places we were too busy to see when building Starbucks and raising kids,” Schultz wrote. “And we have moved to Miami for our next adventure together. We are enjoying the sunshine of South Florida and its allure to our kids on the East Coast as they raise families of their own.”

The timing of Schultz’s announcement drew attention because it coincided with Washington state lawmakers advancing legislation targeting high-income earners, including a proposed wealth tax that would apply to residents with significant investment assets. Schultz’s move is reminiscent of California billionaires who have also fled the West Coast for Florida due to a proposed one-time 5% tax on billionaires. 

The former Starbucks CEO hinted at the proposed tax in his LinkedIn post, although never directly denied it.

“It is our hope that Washington will remain a place for business and entrepreneurship to thrive, creating essential opportunity for those in Seattle and the surrounding areas,” he wrote. 

Like others, Schultz’s destination is Miami, where he reportedly paid $44 million for a penthouse. It’s a state that has no income tax and a booming luxury real-estate market that’s also attracted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.

Schultz leaves behind a massive legacy for a penthouse on the water. 

“We will be forever grateful for the memories made in Seattle and the relationships built along the way,” he wrote. “To the family, friends, and partners who made Seattle our home for so many years, thank you.”

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President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran is rattling global oil markets, threatening to reignite inflation—and according to Morgan Stanley’s Global Investment Office, it could cost Republicans their Senate majority and send the national debt into overdrive.​

The firm’s investment strategist and head of U.S. policy, Monica Guerra, published a detailed analysis Thursday warning about the obvious: The incumbent’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections, and this particular conflict has triggered one of the most consequential energy-supply shocks in recent memory. The implications stretch from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate path all the way to November’s midterm ballot box.​

The Strait of Hormuz is closed—and oil just hit $100

On Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces launched coordinated missile strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and senior leadership. Iran retaliated against Israel, U.S. bases, and regional allies—and the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of global oil supply flows, or approximately 21 million barrels per day, effectively shut down.​

Crude prices surged above $100 a barrel almost immediately. Oil is now up over 51% for the year to date. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield has jumped 27 basis points since the conflict began, reflecting renewed inflation fears and growing concern about deficit spending.​

This is now an inflation problem—and a Fed problem

Guerra’s team warned oil shocks of this magnitude have historically delivered a 70-basis-point boost to headline CPI within three months. Core inflation, by contrast, would see only a modest impact—but that calculus changes fast if elevated prices persist.​

“If higher oil prices persist,” the report warned, “the Fed’s reaction function could be complicated, supporting a higher fed funds rate for longer.” That’s bad news for an economy already navigating tariff pressures and a ballooning deficit.​

Why Republicans should be worried about the Senate

Here’s the political math Morgan Stanley lays out: Since 1922, the sitting president’s party has lost an average of 30 House seats and four Senate seats in midterm elections. Republicans currently hold a 53–47 Senate majority—a margin Morgan Stanley says could narrow significantly with a prolonged energy shock.​

The firm’s base case is that the GOP loses the House and keeps the Senate. But a sustained oil shock could tighten the Senate race in ways that scramble that forecast.​

The reason is simple and visceral: gas prices. The bottom 20% of consumers spend four times more of their budget on energy than the top 20%. Rising prices at the pump, Morgan Stanley notes, are “one of the most visible signs of daily affordability for most voters”—and affordability is the top voter concern heading into the midterms.​

On a related note, UBS chief economist Paul Donovan warned on Thursday not to underestimate one key indicator of inflation: the price of a Snickers candy bar.

“The lived reality is somewhat different from the headlines,” he wrote on Thursday. It’s true that owners’ equivalent rent helped lower inflation, but he called that “a fantasy price no one pays.” Used car prices fell, too, but people don’t buy a used car every month.

“Grocery price inflation has accelerated recently, with big increases for beef, coffee, and chocolate,” he wrote. “A Snickers bar’s price is important in shaping inflation perceptions.”

The war could turbocharge the debt

Guerra also noted the fiscal dimension in voters’ concerns. The conflict has injected fresh momentum into Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense spending request for fiscal year 2027—a proposal that would push military outlays to 4.6% of GDP, the largest annual increase in at least 60 years. The U.S. reportedly spent $5.6 billion on munitions in just the opening 48 hours of the war, accelerating bipartisan pressure for $50 billion in supplemental defense spending.​

Morgan Stanley warns that elevated war-driven government spending will “modestly weigh on debt and deficits” and push up U.S. Treasury term premiums—the additional yield investors demand to hold longer-term government bonds. In plain terms: Borrowing gets more expensive just as Washington needs to borrow more.​

Markets are holding—for now

Despite the turbulence, U.S. equities have remained largely flat since the conflict began, buoyed by strong energy sector performance and a global rotation into dollar-denominated assets. International stocks, as measured by the MSCI World ex-U.S. Index, are down 6%—reflecting Europe and Asia’s greater exposure to the energy shock.​

History offers some comfort: The S&P 500 has gained an average of 8.4% in the 12 months following major geopolitical risk events over the past 75 years. But Morgan Stanley was explicit that duration is the key variable. The longer the Strait stays closed and the bombs keep falling, the harder those historical averages are to count on.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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Daymond John didn’t become a $350 million Shark Tank mogul by playing it safe—or by cutting corners. The FUBU founder went from flipping used cars and waiting tables at Red Lobster to backing hits like Bombas, one of the show’s most successful bets ever—and he says one Ice‑T mantra about shortcuts has quietly guided every step.

“Here’s the truth: If you keep cutting corners…all you end up doing is going in circles,” John wrote on X last week. “Every corner you cut creates a problem you’ll eventually have to come back and fix. The time you think you saved today becomes the wall you face tomorrow. Real progress comes from doing the full lap.”

“Since Ice-T shared it with me, I’m sharing it with you: ‘Cutting corners doesn’t move you forward. It just keeps you going in circles.’”

Leaning in on his own team is one way John said he’s put that lesson into practice. 

You can only operate a business in one of two ways: reduce costs or increase sales,” he said in 2024. “Cutting corners on team training isn’t the place to do it and investing in your team is one of the greatest ROIs you can make.”

The stakes for people who try to rush the process can be high: Only one-third of small businesses survive for more than a decade, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. 

Work-life balance does not exist, according to Daymond John—and Mark Cuban and Barack Obama agree

John has also been blunt about the level of commitment required to beat those odds, arguing that the traditional notions of work-life balance don’t always align with the demands of building a successful company—or career.

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance,” John said.

Instead, he advises a focus on carefully structured time and finding what he calls “work-life harmony.”

“My biggest piece of advice to all of you on achieving work-life harmony is to schedule out your entire day,” he added. “Ask yourself what you are going to dedicate your time to and how you are going to steal away moments.”

For John, that can mean blending personal time with productivity. For example, when he walks for exercise, he’s taking calls on the phone, and instead of eating out at restaurants, he often eats at home so he can get back to work quicker.

He’s not the only business leader who has warned that getting ahead often requires a level of focus that stretches beyond the traditional 9-to-5.

His former Shark Tank co-star Mark Cuban has said that ambitious people can’t afford to lose sight of their goals.

“If you want to work nine-to-five, you can have work-life balance,” Cuban told Sports Illustrated last year. “If you want to crush the game, whatever game you’re in, there’s somebody working 24 hours a day to kick your ass.”

Even former President Barack Obama has acknowledged that intense focus is often part of exceptional achievement.

“If you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there’s going to be times of your life when you’re out of balance, where you’re just working and you’re single-minded,” he said on The Pivot Podcast.

Shark Tank’s Daymond John 3-step path to wealth 

Ultimately, building wealth doesn’t have to start with a big windfall—those who come from little means just need to make small, disciplined financial decisions, according to John. 

His rule of thumb starts with breaking every dollar into three buckets.

“If you have $3, $3 million, or $3 trillion, the first dollar goes for what you have to pay for,” John previously told Fortune in an interview. This includes necessary living expenses like rent, medical bills, heat and electricity, and any debts or loan repayments.  

The second dollar—or the second million or trillion—should be invested, but that doesn’t mean it has to be made in the stock market alone.

“Investment can be into a book, into a business, or into the public market,” John added.

The third dollar, or whatever is left over, can go toward enjoyment.

“Buy what you would like to have, but don’t have to have,” John said. “And if you don’t want it, put it back in number two. And over the years, number two will start flowing into bucket number three and number one. And that’s how you really simply look at things.”

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On Wednesday, some of the most prominent names in American education and workforce policy gathered in Washington to deliver a blunt message: the United States is failing its workers, its students, and its economy — and the window to fix it is closing fast.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group of bipartisan national and state policymakers, business leaders, and education experts, released a sweeping report produced by a 24-member commission that spent more than a year examining the country’s broken education and workforce pipeline. The report, entitled “A Nation at Risk to a Nation at Work: The Case for a National Talent Strategy,” told a sombering story of a nation headed towards severe economic instability as an unready workforce becomes all the more unprepared in the midst of rising AI technologies in the workplace.

The Numbers Are Alarming

By late 2025, estimates showed that 57% of current U.S. work hours could be automated with technology that already exists—nearly double McKinsey’s projection from just two years prior. Half of college graduates from the last decade were underemployed a year after graduation, and nearly three-quarters stayed that way for a decade. Some 37.6 million American adults under 65 have some college credits and no credential to show for it. 

“The World’s Changed”

Former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who co-chaired the effort and were joined on Wednesday by former U.S. Secretary of Education and BPC President Margaret Spellings and former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The two governors spoke to Fortune about the need to update our laws for the current dire situation. 

The key laws governing how Americans pay for college and access job training—the Higher Education Act and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act—were last updated in 2008 and 2014, respectively, predating the rise of generative AI, the gig economy, and widespread remote work.​

“This is not just about AI,” Haslam told Fortune. “This is about making certain that we have a workforce training system that was designed 100 years ago for a very different economy than we have now. It’s about having a system that lets people know, hey, the world’s changed — here’s the skill sets that you are probably going to need going forward, and here’s how to get them.”​

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the trend reveals that “the U.S. workforce system is not fully aligned with the demands of an AI-driven economy,” with a growing skills mismatch leaving many employers unable to find qualified workers even as unemployment fluctuates. Education systems, the report notes, “remain largely built around traditional college-only pathways, while the modern labor market increasingly requires a wider range of options such as apprenticeships, technical credentials, short-term training programs, and opportunities for lifelong learning.” What makes the current moment different from past technological disruptions, the BPC argues, is its pace: “Previous tech waves automated routine tasks, while this disruption is different—changing in real time.”

Who Gets Left Behind

Patrick, who served two terms as Massachusetts’ governor before leading Bain Capital Double Impact and later joining the Harvard Kennedy School faculty, was clear that the report’s ambitions stretch well beyond the AI debate. “We’re at a period of rapid change in the workforce, in our economy that comes from a lot of different places, but it affects all of us—workers, learners, employers.”

Central to the commission’s diagnosis is the question of who gets left behind. Patrick invoked the research of Stanford economist Raj Chetty to illustrate the stakes. “Raj Chetty’s work on ‘lost Einsteins’ shows us that genius, creativity, and innovation exist equally across zip codes and income levels,” Patrick said. “Yet too many talented young people from low-income and working-class communities never get the chance to develop their gifts because they lack access to great schools, mentorship, and career pathways,” he said. 

“We’re leaving untapped talent on the sidelines. If we’re serious about strengthening America’s competitiveness and expanding opportunity for everyone, we have to be equally serious about ensuring that every child can discover and develop their talents. That’s not charity — that’s smart policy and moral imperative.”

A Model From Tennessee

Haslam brought his own track record to the table. As governor of Tennessee, he launched Tennessee Promise, making community college and technical school free for all high school graduates—a program the report holds up as a model for what aligned state-level policy can achieve. “When Tennessee made community college and technical school free for all high school graduates, we weren’t just opening doors—we were transforming the entire state’s economic trajectory,” Haslam said. 

“Employers had a deeper talent pipeline. Communities saw young people stay and build careers at home instead of leaving for opportunity elsewhere,” he continued. “Combined with our investments in K-12 and our commitment to employer partnerships, free community college became a linchpin of a statewide talent ecosystem. That’s what happens when you align education policy with workforce and economic development.”

The Fix: A National Talent Strategy

The report’s central structural fix is the creation of a Talent Advisory Council within the Executive Office of the President—modeled on the National Security Council — that would coordinate education and workforce policy across more than a dozen federal agencies that currently spend over $230 billion annually across 150+ programs with no cohesive strategy. “What we have experienced is a system that is very fragmented, that is hard to access—that you kind of have to know about in your little corner of the economy to take advantage of,” Patrick said. “We need a strategy, and that strategy needs to be national in scope. Because the challenge is national in scope.”

“This feels like—different parts of the country, different political parties—but this feels like an issue that has some increasing national urgency, and it needs some leadership to address it,” said Haslam.

The report arrives at a fraught political moment, with the current administration cutting federal education spending and Congress showing little appetite for sweeping reform. But Patrick rejected the idea that funding battles would doom the effort. “Washington will act on this if the people are mobilized,” he said. “Funding always matters. I don’t want to downplay that. But this is not solely an issue about funding. This is about how you allocate the resources and assets to properly train the next generation workforce. If we get stuck in a funding conversation, that does evolve into the old battle. This is about how do we think differently.”​

That cross-partisan determination is the summit’s animating spirit. “There are a lot of things that are just immediately polarized in today’s world,” Patrick said. “This is one of those that everybody, I think, understands: the future is going to look a lot different. And I don’t know if we’re ready for it.”​

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Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tackled the growing public skepticism surrounding artificial intelligence, acknowledging the warning from President Donald Trump that AI is facing a major public relations problem. Moreover, the tech executive validated widespread anxieties about the future of employment, admitting that the traditional balance between labor and capital is shifting drastically.

Addressing the current backlash, Altman noted that AI has become a widespread scapegoat for corporate downsizing and rising utility costs. “Data centers are getting blamed for electricity prices hikes. Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI,” Altman explained, recalling his recent warning that some companies were engaging in what’s called “AI washing,” in blaming layoffs on new tech regardless if that was the reason for those layoffs in the first place. However, while some of the immediate blame might be misplaced, Altman confirmed that the underlying threat to traditional employment is grounded in reality.

He said he saw a quote online that’s been sticking in his head, around how for centuries, maybe millennia, humans have learned how to structure society to manage scarcity, and now we have to quickly learn the opposite, managing “abundance.” “So that’s, like, a real change to how capitalism has worked,” he said, noting that capitalism has also depended on at least something of a power balance between labor and capital. “But if it’s hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes.” He said it, frankly, stumps him. “If there was an easy consensus answer, we’d have done it by now, so I don’t think anyone knows what to do.”

The AI landscape has crossed a threshold into “major economic utility” over the last few months, Altman claimed, rapidly evolving from simple coding assistance to executing complex tasks across various fields of knowledge work. Altman warned that the pace of this evolution is disorienting, and very soon, AI agents will be trusted to handle multi-day and multi-week tasks, operating proactively much like a senior human employee.

This shift is already altering corporate behavior. A new generation of startups is deliberately avoiding large head counts, preferring instead to invest their capital heavily into computing power. In places like India, Altman observed entrepreneurs attempting to build “zero person” startups, relying entirely on AI prompts to write software, handle legal work, and manage customer support.

Even the C-suite won’t be immune to this transformation, Altman warned. He predicted a future where the cognitive capacity inside data centers will eclipse human capacity outside of them, potentially by late 2028, implicitly recalling his rival Anthropic’s warning that each AI cluster would have the brainpower of 50 million Nobel prize winners. Ultimately, Altman said he foresees a threshold where the leaders of major organizations—including CEOs, presidents, and top scientists—will be entirely unable to perform their duties without heavy reliance on AI supervision and assistance.

To fuel this intelligence revolution, Altman said OpenAI is pursuing massive infrastructure buildouts, including gigawatt data center campuses, with the ultimate goal of making artificial intelligence “too cheap to meter.” He said, “We want to flood the world with intelligence, we want people to just use it for everything.”

To address the physical bottlenecks of this expansion, OpenAI has partnered with North American building trades unions to expand pathways for skilled construction workers, highlighting that massive physical infrastructure is necessary to support AI’s digital growth. Altman envisions a future where intelligence is sold as a basic utility, like water or electricity, flooding the global market and fundamentally rewriting the rules of the economy.

However, achieving this era of abundance will not be easy. Altman predicted that traditional economic metrics like GDP might plummet in a “forever deflationary world,” forcing society to rethink how it measures quality of life. Spookily, Altman was echoing the viral doomsday AI essay from Citrini Research that warned of spiralling deflation and “ghost GDP,” leading to economic chaos within 18 months.

While Altman insisted, back in December, he is “not a long-term jobs doomer” and believes humanity will eventually invent new roles, he did not sugarcoat the immediate future. He warned that “the next few years are going to be a painful adjustment,” heavily marked by “very intense and uncomfortable debates” over how to reshape society. Several weeks ago, one of Altman’s AI counterparts, Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, a Nobel prize winner himself, told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that AI abundance will lead to a “kind of new renaissance,” but there will be a shakeout over the next 10 years en route to it.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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At 9 a.m. Eastern Time on March 12, 2026, oil reached $98.76 per barrel, measured using the Brent benchmark. That’s $7.80 more than it cost yesterday morning around the same time—and more than $27 above its price a year earlier.

Will oil prices go up?

Oil prices are inherently unpredictable. While many variables come into play, the basic push and pull of supply and demand is what ultimately matters. In times of heightened concern about recession, war, or other major disruptions, oil can swing suddenly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

Each gallon you pay for at the pump bundles together several costs. Crude oil is one piece, but you also pay for refineries, wholesalers, government taxes, and the price markup set by gas stations.

Because crude oil usually accounts for more than half of the price per gallon, it tends to move the needle the most. Sharp increases in oil almost always show up quickly at the pump. Declines in the price of oil, on the other hand, often translate into slower, more delayed drops in gas prices—the “rockets and feathers” effect.

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

When an emergency arises, the U.S. has a reserve of crude oil called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its chief function is to secure energy during disasters like sanctions, severe storm damage, or war. It can also help take the edge off brutal price spikes when supply gets hit.

It’s not a solution for the long haul. It’s more of an immediate safety net to support consumers and keep crucial sectors of the economy running (think key industries, emergency services, public transportation, and the like).

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are two of the main fuels that keep the world running. A big change in oil prices can end up affecting natural gas. As an example, if oil prices increase, some industries may sub natural gas for certain areas of their operations wherever possible. This can increase demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

The oil market typically tracks two benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil (the main global oil benchmark)
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) (the main benchmark of North America)

Between the two, Brent offers a clearer view of global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. It’s also often the preferred gauge for tracking historical oil trends. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark over multiple decades, you’ll find oil has been anything but stable. It’s seen sharp rises due to factors like wars and supply cuts, along with steep declines tied to global recessions and oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s saw the first major oil shock when the Middle East slashed exports and placed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices fell in the mid-1980s for reasons including lower demand and the entry of more non-OPEC oil producers.
• Prices jumped again in 2008 with increased global demand, but then plunged alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

Bottom line, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. It’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay abreast of the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Oil went over $100 again after the U.S. admitted it cannot control the Strait of Hormuz
• Trump says the U.S. will open its first new oil refinery in nearly 50 years
• $100-a-barrel oil has huge downstream consequences

Frequently asked questions

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As large enterprises invest in blockchain technology, they quickly discover the need for accounting software that can help them track a growing hoard of digital assets. Cryptio, a crypto accounting startup, has benefited from that wave of institutional interest and announced Thursday that it’s raised $45 million in a Series B funding round. 

The company provides software to help customers track what digital assets they own and where they’re stored. Cryptio also helps clients manage their crypto loans and monitor other blockchain-related assets. The venture firms BlackFin Capital Partners and Sentinel Global led the startup’s fundraise, which closed three weeks ago. Other participants included 1kx, BlueYard Capital and Ledger Cathay Capital. Antoine Scalia, founder and CEO of Cryptio, declined to specify at what valuation his startup raised its most recent round of capital.

“We wanted to make a bet on corporate adoption of crypto,” said Scalia, who founded Cryptio eight years ago. His gamble now seems to have paid off. “We’ve been seeing more and more activity and more and more clients on the traditional side,” he said.  

Corporate adoption

Especially after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, large financial institutions have grown more comfortable experimenting with digital assets in a more permissive regulatory environment for crypto than the one under former President Joe Biden. 

In July, the investment bank Goldman Sachs, a relative crypto latecomer, announced that it and the financial institution BNY Mellon planned to tokenize, or put into blockchain wrappers, money-market funds. And in September, the banking giant Morgan Stanley, long a blockchain skeptic, decided to partner with a crypto infrastructure provider to let its brokerage customers trade cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in the first half of 2026. 

When Scalia first founded Cryptio, his customers weren’t large enterprises. Fresh out of business school in Paris, the entrepreneur was courting startups and other smaller companies. Now, Cryptio has 110 employees and more than 450 clients, including digital asset titans like the stablecoin issuer Circle as well as the blockchain subsidiary of the French bank Société Générale.

Cryptio isn’t the only crypto accounting platform on the market. There are other competitors, including TRES Finance, which the crypto infrastructure company Fireblocks acquired for $130 million in January.

Still, Cryptio’s backers believe the startup has an edge. “They’ve invested the time to explain things, show how it works, and instill trust with very high-end institutions,” said Jeremy Kranz, the founder and managing partner of Sentinel Global.

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In an uneven economic climate where myriad factors have made change the only constant, one message to employees seems universal across business leaders: Do better. 

Leaders expect employees to produce more, increase efficiency and maximize impact — particularly on the front lines. Many leaders, though, forget or fail to build the necessary cultural engagement to motivate employees and unlock that discretionary effort.

But performance missives without culture, collective purpose and the tools to get the job done fall flat with the workers that former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz says are critical to operational excellence: the front line. 

“Essential workers are the first to detect bullshit a mile away. Excellence is the outcome of the belief they have in you as a leader, and you earn their belief with action,” Munoz said in a recent interview. 

The Frontline Is Where Performance Lives or Dies

I had the opportunity to work alongside Munoz as he transformed United Airlines from the inside out, aligning a largely disgruntled 85,000-person workforce whose discontent was hemorrhaging into the customer experience. 

In doing so, Munoz had a composite audience in mind – the guy with the wrench. 

“When mechanical issues delay a flight, it’s not the middle managers with the desk jobs who fix it. It’s the guy with the wrench,” Munoz told me as we traveled from O’Hare to Newark in October 2015, part of a multi-hub charm offensive tour. 

How fast he moves, how motivated he is to apply his very best work at that exact moment with purposeful precision can be the difference as to whether the flight gets out on time, Munoz said. 

The domino effect of the mechanic’s discretionary effort can determine whether the plane connects to the next one to take off, whether the crew reaches its next assignment, whether the airline reaches its on-time departure goals, whether the customers choose United for their next flight and whether the company’s revenue trajectory meets investor expectations. 

With a great deal of reverence for blue collar and frontline workers, Munoz said he knew that unlocking operational excellence began with listening to essential workers and understanding what they needed to feel connected to corporate mission with the tools to perform their jobs. 

This was the first of many trips I would take with him over the next several years, which always included an impromptu stop to the inner canal of airport operations, the place where Munoz said the real work was done, where he would pull up a folding chair for an unscripted listening session

Culture Is Infrastructure, Not a Perk

In those days of traveling with Munoz, making our way from the gate to curbside pickup often took nearly an hour. Aviation’s new Elvis had entered the building. Gate agents cheered. Wheelchair assistants stopped for selfies. 

This kinetic energy was about more than high-fives and fist bumps; it was part of long, intentional campaign to build operational excellence through a unified, purpose-driven culture campaign.

“Culture,” Munoz said, “can either be quicksand or the scaffolding of an operating system.”

Most Frontline Workers Don’t Feel Like They Belong to the Company

Nowhere is that truer than for frontline workers, who often feel far removed from corporate headquarters. A 2025 survey by Workvivo by Zoom said 87% of frontline workers are unsure whether company culture applies to them. Forty-two percent said company leadership wasn’t good at communicating with them, while 69% said they wanted to better understand company strategy and what it means for their roles. 

Culture is a critical piece of the operations framework that ultimately delivers the financial and efficiency metrics investors prioritize. Leaders who ignore culture, particularly in its power to cultivate discretionary effort from the frontline, are leaving a critical tool untouched in the management toolbox.

Why This Moment Is Different

Frontline workers are disproportionately affected by myriad societal dynamics – economic uncertainty, inflation, decreased social services and an education system that is only just beginning to build pipelines for vocational skills, particularly those being fueled from rather than threatened by AI. 

A recent study from The How Institute said 94% of employees believe the need for moral leadership is more important than ever, but that only 6% of CEOs and 9% of managers deliver the kind of purpose-driven leadership that helps scale human contribution to create value. 

Companies that bring people together around shared purpose, Munoz echoed, particularly succeed together. Critical to that environment is transparent, authentic and consistent leadership to neutralize the agita felt from external forces at play and cultivate internal unity. 

“People are worried about their money, worried about their future, worried about technology,” Munoz said. “In today’s polarized times, the concept of consistency is the real courage.”

Beyond the culture scaffolding’s impact on singular company’s success, the U.S. economy would broadly benefit from greater engagement with and celebration of essential workers. 

The GDP Cost of Ignoring Essential Workers

A June 2025 Aspen Institute study found that that U.S. GDP would be 10% higher if the essential economy had kept pace. 

The essential economy – which includes sectors like agriculture, construction, energy, manufacturing, transportation, logistics and repair – contributes $7.5 trillion dollars in output per year, 27% of the U.S. GDP, according to the institute. However, from 2015 to 2023, productivity in the white-collar economy rose 28% while productivity in the essential economy decreased.

Among the many solutions the Aspen Institute recommends for boosting essential economy productivity is bolstering human capital by investing in employees through ongoing learning and development, salary increases and rewards. 

The fear of unemployment due to obsolescence is just one factor that could be driving potential hires away from essential roles. A January 2026 University of Michigan study found 62% of consumers expect unemployment levels to worsen this year. 

Meantime, Republican political strategist Bruce Mehlman noted in his Age of Disruption Substack that consumer sentiment among blue collar workers, which the Michigan study placed at 51 percent, is at a record low – below the Regan Recession of 1982, the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, peak COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2022’s inflation spike. 

The anxious essential worker is also a student unlikely to upskill, and a consumer unlikely to spend. 

Engaging your frontline as part of an operational system doesn’t just unlock discretionary effort; it spurs a domino effect to bolster talent pipeline and consumer confidence that will build a more sustainable business. 

Today’s CEOs must connect all employees to the business mission and strategy through authentic, consistent, value-driven communications to earn the performance that will deliver the results investors want to see. 

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

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Is it luck when an entrepreneur hits big? It is not the lottery, but the returns can feel like it.

I learned this early. At 31, I exited one of the most successful real estate deals in Metropolitan New York history: the redevelopment of the Harborside Financial Center in Jersey City. At the time, it was the country’s largest commercial renovation. For me, it was my first substantial wealth moment and I had no idea what to do next: What to do with the new capital I acquired and how would I make it matter? 

The more wealth one accumulates, the more fragile one can feel. What begins as a quest for freedom can morph into a fortress mentality. I have seen peers—brilliant, driven individuals—become distracted by the fear of losing what they have built. Instead of leaning into the adaptability that made them successful, they retreat behind walls, both literal and figurative. 

Today we are in a similar societal position: We are on the precipice of the largest societal wealth transfer in history, where an estimated $84 trillion is set to pass down to younger generations over the next two decades. What will we do next? What happens now will define the future of American innovation and entrepreneurship, and that’s why we all should be paying attention. 

For the last 26 years, I have been studying some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs through my founding of TIGER 21, and I’ve learned a lot about how entrepreneurs find success and how investors create impressive returns. 

Two points are poignant today as we think about our future: One, being a successful founder and entrepreneur rarely ever translates into being an equally successful investor, and two, once wealth is accumulated, the fear of losing wealth can cause loss and inaction. Combined, these two learnings have the potential to shift our entire wealth and societal landscape: It turns out that managing capital is just as important as figuring out how to create it. 

During my teens I tried a dozen different ways to hit the entrepreneurial lottery, from shoveling snow to slinging milk at the local Dairy Barn. Some of my endeavors paid off; others did not. In many ways, that experience reflects something uniquely American: a country structured, culturally and economically, to encourage people to take risks, start businesses, accept failure and accumulate learning as the byproduct of each venture to maximize success the next time around. 

So why do so few entrepreneurs hit it big? The answer lies in how success is spread out. Entrepreneurs often start with very little and build something valuable from scratch. Investors, on the other hand, spread their money across many existing opportunities. Most entrepreneurs don’t make much money, but a tiny number hit it big—so big that they re-shape the entire wealth landscape.

Investor returns, on the other hand, typically preserve wealth with safer investments yielding 8-10% returns, and generally a point or two less for family offices that, unlike most institutional investors, have to maintain cash and liquidity. But even at 10% return over the same 30 years, $1 only grows to $18.  Eighteen times very little is very little, but if you inherit $10 million, that can turn into $180 million at 10% for 30 years, and that’s a horse of another color. 

The key difference is to set expectations based on the shape of likely outcomes, not hopeful pipedreams.  Investor returns tend to follow a bell curve—most people earn around the average. Entrepreneurial outcomes, however, follow a power law distribution. That means a lucky few (Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk etc) earn massive amounts—so much so that they skew the average. It’s like city populations: most cities are small, but a handful are enormous because people flock to them–drawn by opportunity, talent, capital and more—making them even bigger. 

Our country was built on the resilience and creativity of entrepreneurs, people who are willing to take risks, adapt and innovate. Success, in its truest form, is something to celebrate. But there is a troubling shift that occurs when success hardens into excess and gives way to fear, a paradox that emerges all too often. 

Defensive wealth behaviors, however, create ripple effects that weaken social fabric. Communities fracture as inequality deepens. Public trust erodes when resources concentrate at the top. Ironically, the very effort to secure one’s position can destabilize the society that enabled success in the first place.

Why does this happen? Partly because wealth magnifies risk perception. The stakes feel higher, and the margin for error smaller. But the mindset that built success—adaptability, openness and a willingness to embrace uncertainty—remains the antidote. When we lose that, we trade creativity for control and generosity for guardedness. And in doing so, we diminish not only our own sense of purpose but the collective resilience of our communities.

There is another way. Ultimate security does not come from building taller walls or deeper moats. A society can become stronger, more successful and more resilient by strengthening the networks of trust and opportunity that bind us together. That means investing in shared systems—education, healthcare, energy, infrastructure, entrepreneurship—that allow all of us to thrive. We must resist the temptation to see privilege as a prize to defend and instead view success as a platform for meaningful contribution and mentorship. True leadership in this era is not simply about accumulation; it is about stewardship.

As someone who understands the allure of control, I know that the entrepreneurial spirit prizes independence, and wealth amplifies that instinct. But independence without interdependence is an illusion. If we allow fear to dictate our choices, we risk creating a society defined by walls that separate, harden and ultimately collapse under their own weight.

As we look back at the first 250 years of American entrepreneurship and look ahead to our shared future, fear cannot win. We must better understand how we can make an impact, as both investors and entrepreneurs. America’s extraordinary wealth must become focused on creating an entrepreneurial prism refracts into a broader spectrum of responsibility, opportunity and stewardship. This is not a left wing fantasy but centrist reality. When the United States has invested in finding societal solutions, we have all benefitted(social security, education, and even fixing the ozone layer in the 1990s). 

The challenge before us is cultural as much as economic. We must redefine what it means to be secure—not as just owning more, but as belonging to a society that works for all. That requires the same courage that sparked our first ventures to let go of the illusion that more is always better. In the end, resilience is not measured by what we keep, but by what we are willing to invest in others. And the future of our country depends on that choice.

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

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Every morning starts the same way: A 6 a.m. alarm and an hour to prepare for the day before her kids get up. By 7 a.m., it’s time to get the kids ready for school and her turn to carpool to school. Then, a full day at the office. 

By 5 p.m., it’s time to pick up the kids from after-school childcare and to soccer practice and make time to run to the grocery store before it’s time to pick them up again. When they all finally get back home, it’s time for dinner, homework, and answering emails, before bath time. If she’s lucky, the kids will be down by 9 p.m.—just enough time for a little more work before knocking out at 10 p.m. And that’s only Monday. 

Women with children under 6 spend an average of 8.15 hours on weekdays and 10.5 hours on weekends caring for their child, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The work women do to support their families is almost always unpaid, despite being worth billions of dollars. 

If American women were paid for all their caregiving labor, it would be worth $683 billion, according to an analysis from the National Partnership for Women & Families (NPWF). Nearly two-thirds of caregiving is done by women, and they average nearly 300 hours of unpaid care work worth $4,900 each year. If both men and women were paid for caregiving, they would earn $1.1 trillion.

This is a conservative estimate, says Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the NPWF. The analysis used the average between childcare workers and home health aides wages, which is $16.38, but this work is typically underpaid, she said. 

One in four Americans is a caregiver, and they are spending more time than ever before caring for their children and older family members as the 65-plus population grows at record rates. 

Caregivers often have to choose between taking unpaid time off or going to work while missing leaving loved ones who are sick or need them, Robbins told Fortune. 

“Often, it means you can’t be in the labor force at all, and we especially see this happen for moms,” she said. 

Women are less likely to get hired after having children, and mothers lose an average of $237,000 in lifetime earnings, 15% of what they would earn if they did not provide any family care, according to a 2025 Urban Institute analysis. Loss of earnings directly impacts benefits from Social Security and employment-based retirement plans.   

“That’s a big deal. That’s a lot of cash,” Robbins said. 

How companies are responding and offering working caregiver support

Some companies are trying to ease the burden of caregiving for employees by expanding childcare and paid leave. 

Levi Strauss & Company offers immediate access to parental leave to both corporate and retail hires, regardless of whether they are hourly or salaried workers, according to the NPWF. Many companies require employees to work for several months to be eligible for parental leave. Their policy earned them a spot on NPWF’s list of companies leading paid-leave policy. 

“As a result, [Levi Strauss & Company] has experienced higher retention rates and greater employee satisfaction as employees feel supported and encouraged to return after taking leave,” according to NPWF. 

Aside from leave for newborns, management consulting firm PwC offers employees “Just-in-Case” benefits and reimburses up to $50 for emergency care for up to 20 weekdays and unlimited weekend days each year. In fiscal year 2025, PwC employees used more than 8,000 back-up care days and received $5 million in reimbursements, according to HRM America. 

AARP also offers employees up to two weeks of paid time off to care for family members who are older than 50 or have serious health conditions. AARP didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for more information about the program. 

Employees lead the way

These policies often come from employee advocacy. 

While working at Airbnb in Mexico and Brazil, Chio Paniagua and her colleagues in Latin America realized their American counterparts were getting egg-freezing benefits, she told Fortune. Paniagua is now a Big Tech and crypto strategic advisor, having also previously worked in communications for Instagram, Coinbase, and Uber.

“We were able to internally advocate for ourselves so that every woman in the company across the country could get access to the same type of care,” she said.

A representative from Airbnb told Fortune the company offers egg preservation globally for eligible employees. 

In 2019, more than 1,800 moms at Amazon directly lobbied founder Jeff Bezos for emergency day care assistance, after seeing employees quit because they couldn’t find childcare. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon began temporarily offering employees up to 10 days of subsidized emergency child or adult care. Employees could pay $25 a day for in-center childcare or $5 per hour for in-home child or adult care.

“We’ve heard from our employees that access to affordable family care, for both children and adults, is particularly challenging during the COVID crisis, and we are committed to support them in this unprecedented time,” Beth Galetti, then-senior vice president of human resources, said in a statement at the time. 

Amazon now gives employees free memberships to Sittercity and Years Ahead, platforms where people can seek both child and elder care and access background checks and references for caregivers. 

Remote work isn’t enough

Common policies, such as remote or hybrid work, may help caregiving by offering more flexibility, but also can exacerbate inequalities for certain workers, Robbins of NPWF said. 

“Flexible work, in general, is a really important complement when possible to other family-supportive policies,” she said, adding it’s no substitute for childcare, support services for disabled people, or paid family leave.

Remote and hybrid work is also not available to many people, from service to health care workers, many of whom tend to have lower-wage jobs and less access to paid leave and childcare, she said. 

“I think it’s an important compliment that we should leverage when we can, but we also should be attentive to the inequities that it can exacerbate,” she added. 

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Gen Z is entering the toughest job market in years, and millions are struggling with unemployment, with a record number classified as NEETs (not in education, employment, or training). So now they’re bringing a parental plus-one to interviews to vouch for their skills and talents.

New research from the career platform Zety shows that 1 in 5 Gen Z candidates have brought a parent to a job interview, and some are even letting mom or dad negotiate their salary.

But the trend is raising eyebrows among employers—and Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary says candidates who do it risk seeing their résumé go “right into the garbage.”

Some parents are even negotiating their child’s salary

You might assume these parents are quietly dialling into first-stage Zoom calls to hold their child’s hand through the nerves. But the reality is far more brazen—most are showing up in person, taking time out of their own working day to sit across the table from their child’s potential employer.

And the coddling doesn’t stop there. 

1 in 5 say a parent has contacted a potential employer or recruiter on their behalf. Think cold-calling a hiring manager to put in a good word, or emailing a recruiter to chase up an application their child never followed up on.

A third of respondents said their parents helped them negotiate their salary, with 10% letting mom or dad negotiate directly with the boss themselves.

Even once their adult children have gotten the jobs, the involvement continues: More than half (56%) have had parents visit their workplace outside of formal events.

Employers say it’s a red flag

It comes as Gen Z workers are getting fired just months after being hired—with managers citing a lack of basic workplace readiness, poor communication skills, and an inability to take feedback.

And this new research suggests employers may have a point: if a young person can’t handle a job interview alone, how will they handle a difficult client, a high-stakes presentation, or a performance review? 

It’s a concern that’s already playing out in real hiring rooms. Shark Tank‘s O’Leary recently slammed a young applicant after their parent gatecrashed a Zoom interview uninvited.

In an interview with Fox Business, the multimillionaire businessman called the trend a “horrific signal”—questioning whether someone who needs a parent by their side can be trusted to make a decision on their own.

He’s got a point: Nearly 70% of Gen Zers admit they get regular career advice from their parents, and a third say their parents have the greatest influence over their career choices. 

For this generation, mom and dad aren’t just cheerleaders from the sidelines—they’re the first call, the safety net, and increasingly, the plus one. 

But ultimately, the very involvement they’re hoping will help get them hired can backfire. When advice trickles into action, it stops looking like support—and starts looking like a red flag. A parent editing a résumé is one thing. A parent sitting across from a hiring manager is another thing entirely.

Just ask O’Leary, who has a blunt warning for anyone thinking of bringing a parent to sit in on their interview: Your résumé is going “right into the garbage.”

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