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Good morning. Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, is making a bold, long-term wager, not just on his $69 billion hedge fund or his $2.5 billion Norman Foster-designed headquarters rising on Biscayne Bay. He’s betting on Miami as the next great American business capital.

That is the premise of a new Fortune feature by my colleague Shawn Tully, which explores Griffin’s efforts to reshape Miami and influence American politics. For CFOs weighing corporate footprint decisions, Griffin’s Miami playbook offers a compelling case study. In 2022, Citadel moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami, becoming one of several investment firms that shifted to Florida post-pandemic.

For Griffin, the relocation was a long-term financial strategy. He’s investing not only in his firm, but in Miami as a future financial hub that he believes could one day compete with New York City. The move highlights how location decisions have become a core lever for cost, talent, and growth.

Citadel now employs about 500 people in Miami, including Griffin; Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao and president Jim Esposito; and Sebastian Barrack, who has run the commodities trading franchise for a decade. New York and London remain larger by headcount, but Miami is Citadel’s fastest-growing outpost by far. Griffin told Fortune that he feels “optimism in the air here.”

Many other companies have also planted roots in Miami. Since the pandemic, a growing roster of large firms, including ServiceNow, Wells Fargo’s wealth management unit, Palantir, Thoma Bravo, and Thiel Capital, has committed substantial operations to South Florida. McKinsey’s Miami office has become one of its fastest-growing in North America, expanding to several hundred employees over the past four years, while Banco Santander is developing a 41-story tower in Brickell, notes Tully.

Still, there are risks. Miami’s growth is straining housing and infrastructure, which could erode some of its cost advantages over time. But the broader trend is clear: Companies are rethinking where and how they operate. Griffin’s bet may be unusually high-profile, but it reflects a broader corporate shift toward markets with lower costs, faster growth, and deeper talent pools. The data reinforces that trend: CoStar analysts project the U.S. office market will add roughly 10 million square feet of occupancy over the next year, with growth driven almost entirely by Sun Belt landlords.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Hours before U.S. missiles struck Tehran on Saturday, February 28, six Polymarket accounts placed bets that military action would begin. They were bang on the money right. Together, they raked in $1.2 million, with one account turning $61,000 into nearly $493,000—a whopping 821% return. Most of these accounts were created and funded within 24 hours of the strikes. The whiff stench of insider trading is unmistakable.

This was no isolated incident. Similar patterns emerged in January, when freshly created accounts netted over $400,000 betting on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, just hours before the operation went public.

This couldn’t have come at a worse time for Kalshi and Polymarket, which are facing a growing number of lawsuits demanding that prediction markets be regulated like gambling. With war-related betting stirring up scandal, a group of congressional Democrats has put forward the “Prediction Markets are Are Gambling Act”— legislation that seeks to ban prediction market bets on elections, government actions, war and sports. They are making a big mistake.

Prediction markets haven’t created the insider trading problem out of thin air. It has been an unsavory feature of financial markets for many a decade for decades. What Kalshi and Polymarket have done is drag this dirty secret out into the open with the help of transparent and immutable blockchain technology. Crypto transactions are recorded on a ledger that anyone can see and cannot be altered or obfuscated. This makes prediction markets the most useful and precise tool for eradicating exposing insider trading that has ever existed—a tool Congress should rely on heavily, not legislate out of existence.

Following the Breadcrumbs

Regulators already see the opportunity. On February 25, the CFTC’s Division of Enforcement issued a formal advisory after two cases of insider trading on Kalshi. The Commission is currently collecting public comments on how these markets should be regulated. But it’s clear that prosecution is the next step. As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton put it, “because it’s a prediction market doesn’t insulate you from fraud,” and federal prosecutors have since met directly with Polymarket to explore charges.

But prosecution in this area is only possible if these markets are allowed to function, unmasking insider trading that has, until now, largely happened behind closed doors. The system, as it currently stands, makes insider trading prosecution incredibly difficult. Perhaps that’s why no member of Congress—not even Nancy Pelosi, whose husband’s suspiciously well-timed trades became a national scandal—has ever been prosecuted for profiting off from privileged information.

Prediction markets, for the first time, create a trail of breadcrumbs that is hard to ignore. Timestamped, public, and—crucially—independent of established institutions. That independence matters: no institutional pressure can make inconvenient data disappear. No amount of political pressure can erase transactions on the blockchain. And so prediction markets, for all their flaws, can lead directly to the doorstep of those profiting from privileged information—prosecutors need only follow the breadcrumbs.

Nowhere to Hide

This isn’t theoretical. A recent, concrete example proves it can be done. In February, an Israeli Air Force reservist was indicted, along with an alleged accomplice, on suspicion of placing bets on Polymarket based on classified information about the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025.

Less than a year from wrongdoing to prosecution. That’s a faster timeline than virtually any comparable insider trading case in traditional finance.

And it doesn’t even require sophisticated infrastructure. Independent blockchain analysts like ZachXBT and Bubblemaps are already tracing these transactions voluntarily. In the latest case of war-related betting, Bubblemaps quickly identified that the funds came from a wallet called “nothingeverhappens911,” which was connected to another account called “Skoobidoobnj” through a shared Binance deposit address—and this account turned out to be connected to two further Polymarket accounts that placed similar trades. Little by little, the walls are closing in.

Granted, these are obviously anonymous accounts. There are ways traders can obfuscate their transactions and hide their locations. They can use crypto mixers in an attempt to “wash” the funds. In short, they can make prosecutors’ lives difficult. But many things can’t be hidden on-chain: funding patterns, timing of entry, fund flows, and connected wallet addresses. And if a bunch of independent enthusiasts can uncover this much information with public tools, this fast, imagine what a properly coordinated and resourced regulatory effort could achieve.

Eradicate It Once and For All

Yes, prediction markets gave insiders an opportunity to profit from disaster. But it would be naive to think that this hasn’t happened in the past. This time, however, we know exactly which bets were placed, when, and how much profit was made.

Now it’s time to follow the breadcrumbs to find the missing piece of the puzzle: the identity of these traders. The CFTC is ready to move, the forensic tools already exist, and the April 30 public comment deadline on prediction market regulation is an open invitation to get this right. Fund the enforcement, strengthen the penalties, mandate identity verification above meaningful trading thresholds—but keep prediction markets open. Congress should lean into this opportunity, instead of killing the very tool that shines a light on a problem they have struggled to eradicate for decades.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

America’s AI ambitions may be undone not by a lack of capital or computing power, but by a shortage of electricians.

That’s the emerging consensus between two disparate titans of the Fortune 500: Ford CEO Jim Farley, who has spent years sounding the alarm about a crisis in what he calls the “essential economy,” and Goldman Sachs, which is putting hard numbers on a labor crunch that threatens to slow the very AI buildout Wall Street has been banking on.

Farley has been the most persistent corporate voice warning the U.S. is sleepwalking into a workforce disaster. What he calls the essential economy, the blue-collar sectors that get things “moved, built, or fixed,” represents $12 trillion in U.S. GDP, per the Aspen Institute. But it is chronically understaffed and undervalued. The country is already short 600,000 factory workers and 500,000 construction workers, Farley wrote in a LinkedIn post last June. And he sees the situation getting worse, not better.

“I think the intent is there, but there’s nothing to backfill the ambition,” Farley told Axios in September 2025. “How can we reshore all this stuff if we don’t have people to work there?”

The irony, Farley argues, is the very technology disrupting white-collar work is creating a tidal wave of demand for the blue-collar workers America has neglected. AI could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs in the U.S. within a decade, he warned at last year’s Aspen Ideas Festival—gutting entry-level tech roles like junior programming and clerical work, the rungs many young Americans have been told to climb. Meanwhile, the skilled tradespeople needed to build the data centers that will run those AI systems simply don’t exist in sufficient numbers.

This dynamic suggests a disquieting loop. AI is eliminating the entry-level, white-collar jobs that have historically drawn young workers into technology careers—potentially shrinking the very talent pool that, with retraining, could feed the trades pipeline. The technology is simultaneously generating the infrastructure demand and undermining the workforce capacity to meet it.

“There’s more than one way to the American Dream, but our whole education system is focused on four-year education,” Farley said at Aspen. “Hiring an entry worker at a tech company has fallen 50% since 2019. Is that really where we want all of our kids to go?”

Now Goldman Sachs has quantified exactly how severe the constraint is.

In a Goldman Sachs Exchanges podcast appearance, Brian Singer, head of GS Sustain, warned the AI infrastructure buildout will require 500,000 new U.S. jobs just to build and power data centers—roughly 300,000 to supply electricity generation and another 200,000 for grid transmission and distribution work. The latter is the sticking point. GS Sustain is Goldman Sachs Research’s sustainability-focused framework, providing research and data tools exploring how innovation, regulation, and implementation of sustainability topics impact sustainable investing and broader capital flows

“Where we are more concerned about is on the transmission and distribution side,” Singer said, “because there electricians need four years of skilling.” The U.S. currently has approximately 45,000 energy apprentices, Singer noted—a number that needs to rise by 20,000 to 25,000 just to keep pace with projected demand.

Regional disparities

Those national figures, however, may obscure an even more acute regional crisis. Data center construction is heavily concentrated in a handful of markets: Virginia—which shoulders roughly 70% of the world’s internet traffic and has nearly 35 GW in development—along with Texas and Arizona’s Phoenix metro, which ranks third nationally for new capacity.

Matt Landek, global division president for data centers at JLL, warned earlier this year secondary markets “frequently lack the specialized construction expertise, skilled technical workforce, and operational support infrastructure that primary markets provide,” meaning the labor crunch follows the buildout wherever it goes. When multiple hyperscale campuses break ground simultaneously in a single region, local talent pools are exhausted within months—forcing contractors to import workers from other states. In Northern Virginia, the wage pressure is already measurable: Journeyman electricians now earn upward of $120,000 annually, and Microsoft has resorted to employing electricians commuting from 75 miles away.

Singer framed the labor constraint as the most worrying of his firm’s “6 Ps,” a framework of factors that could drive or throttle AI power demand, encompassing pervasiveness, productivity, price, policy, parts, and people. Of the six, he said, “people” keeps him up at night most.

The Goldman analysis arrives at essentially the same conclusion Farley reached through the windshield of Detroit: that America’s AI moonshot is running on a cracked foundation. All the hyperscaler capital in the world can’t conjure a licensed electrician out of thin air (Goldman estimates combined budgets rose by more than $300 billion for 2026 and 2027). And the cruel arithmetic of the AI moment means the technology eroding one workforce is depending on another workforce that America has spent decades failing to build.

Farley’s fix is systemic: more investment in vocational education, expanded apprenticeship pipelines, and a cultural reckoning with the prestige gap between four-year degrees and trade careers.

“On the surface, this looks like a people problem,” he told Axios. “But it’s actually not that simple. It’s an awareness problem. It’s a societal problem.”

Goldman’s Singer put it more bluntly: Without the workers to build the grid, the data centers don’t get built—and the AI revolution stalls on a transmission line.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Blend’s CEO Nima Ghamsari wants to talk less about the past decade’s fintech sugar high and more about recovering from the crash.

The company, founded in 2012 by Ghamsari, set out in the wake of the financial crisis to make applying for a mortgage “as easy as buying something online.” It now builds white‑label software that powers digital loan applications at major U.S. banks and credit unions across mortgages and other consumer banking products. The company rode the last boom to a 2021 IPO and a market cap north of $4 billion, but then rising rates crushed mortgage volumes and exposed how much of its growth had been surfing a once‑in‑a‑generation tailwind. Now, that market cap is hovering at $437.10 million.

“It probably gave me an inflated sense of how well I was executing,” Ghamsari told Fortune of that era. His biggest realizations post‑IPO: “I had overestimated my operating ability” and had to “go back to first principles” as multiples, mortgage volumes, and key banking customers like First Republic disappeared. 

For Blend, which went public (and remains so) near the peak of both fintech multiples and mortgage demand, that meant a “double whammy” of shrinking origination volumes and falling software valuations. The downturn became a multi‑year test for Blend of whether the underlying business—and its CEO’s operating chops—could withstand a very different market. Today, Blend’s shares trade in the low single digits, down more than 90% from their debut. But the company has returned to profitability for at least five consecutive quarters.

Privately, Blend had been a classic fintech VC magnet, raising money from Greylock Partners, Emergence Capital, 8VC, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Nyca, Temasek, and General Atlantic on its way to unicorn status. Those investors backed an expansion beyond digital mortgage origination, a broader platform pitch that helped large lenders digitize everything from mortgage applications to other consumer‑credit products.

When the market turned, that sprawl became a liability, and Ghamsari says he learned a painful lesson: “I made the company take on too many things,” prompting a reset toward being “really, really great at one thing.”

That “one thing” for 2026 is Autopilot, Blend’s new AI agent announced in early March. Autopilot reads borrower documents, checks them, updates the file, and kicks off follow‑ups—turning work that took days into seconds, while humans and existing systems still make the final call. Ghamsari frames it as a way to attack the roughly $11,000 in human cost and “hundreds of hours” that lenders currently spend per mortgage. Roughly 20% of Blend’s customers adopted the tech within the first month, Ghamsari told Fortune.

After several rounds of layoffs and restructuring, culture has been another test for the company. “The hardest thing about the layoffs is you still believe in the business, you just feel like you did the wrong things that led us to the point of the layoffs,” he says, arguing that owning those decisions is key to rebuilding trust—and completing the turnaround.

P.S. Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, confidentially filed to go public Wednesday, as reported by Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal. This could be the defining test of the IPO market in 2026, if OpenAI doesn’t get there first.

See you tomorrow,

Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Falling into conversation with a London-based American banking chief executive in the chaotic aftermath of the financial crisis, I was asked about the vagaries of the British establishment. “It is very difficult to understand where power really lies, there are all these networks and signals that hardly any of us are clear on,” he said. I agreed, it was indeed a tricky matter. Six months later, that chief executive had quit, returning with relief to a country where a spade is actually called a spade. 

Britain and America, George Bernard Shaw said, are “two countries divided by a common language”. The divide is becoming clearer. Not just between the U.S. and the U.K., but between the U.S. and the whole of Europe. 

Yesterday, President Trump pressed again on the bruise, already inflamed by the Gulf conflict. The act? Suggesting that King Charles would have backed the attacks on Iran if he were able to speak freely. For the U.K. establishment, such a suggestion is, as we say here, “below the salt” (a reference to medieval England where salt was a rare commodity only available at “high table”, leaving commoners left on “low tables” literally below the condiment). 

Read more: An Athens listing has created the world’s second largest gaming company. Finally, Europe has a No. 2 global player

“I like him,” Trump said of King Charles in the interview with the Telegraph, the right-leaning British news organization. “I always liked him as a prince. He’s a good man, a great representative for your country. I think he would have taken a very different stand [on the war against Iran] but he doesn’t do that. I mean he’s a great gentleman.” 

The headline duly trumpeted: “The King would have stood by me over Iran”. This is not the case, revealing that the role of the monarch in Britain is being lost in translation. In all matters of policy, the King reflects and aligns with the government of the day. Britain is a constitutional monarchy, where the sovereign has no political power apart from that bestowed on him or her by the elected government. 

Everything Charles says is approved. The words are jointly crafted by him, his team and government officials. Sir Kier Starmer, the U.K. Prime Minister, and Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, have a central role. 

At the end of the month, King Charles will arrive in the U.S. on an official state visit. The conflict in the Gulf could still be raging and tensions between the U.S. and the U.K. clear. Trump said that Starmer was “no Winston Churchill” after the U.K. refused to support the first wave of attacks. The U.K. PM has called for de-escalation and said that the conflict is “not our war”. 

The King, who will address Congress, could appear to be in an invidious position. Some British politicians say he should not be going at all. 

But that is not a matter for the monarch. That is a matter for the government. It was with good reason that the first sentence of the official announcement from the Royal Household of the American trip read: “On advice of His Majesty’s Government, and at the invitation of The President of the United States, the King and Queen will undertake a State Visit to the United States of America.” It certainly did not say “I have decided to go.” 

It is the right decision. Relationships between nations are much more important than the individuals of the moment. King Charles is going to the US to celebrate the country’s 250^th year of independence. Visits later in the year would have clashed with the World Cup and then the mid-term elections in America and Remembrance Sunday in the U.K. To not go in 2026 would have been a considerable diplomatic snub. 

What can we say about the relationship between the King and the President, whom the latter describes as “a friend”? First, it should be noted that the official announcement on the trip was closer to the actual date than is usual, suggesting a degree of delay given the geopolitical situation. This was not an invitation that was leapt at with enthusiasm. 

Second, the King is the head of the U.K.’s Armed Forces. When the President said in January that the U.S. “never needed” NATO and that non-U.S. NATO troops had “stayed a little back” from the front line in the war against Afghanistan, a message from the Palace was conveyed to the White House outlining the sacrifices of British troops. A few days later, Trump described U.K. soldiers as the “greatest of all warriors”. 

Third, the King has consistently promoted dialogue over conflict and sustainable solutions to climate change via his own Sustainable Markets Initiative. The tone is very different from the President’s, who has spoken of a “green scam”. 

On the day after the Artemis 2 space launch it is worth returning to Charles’ statement wishing “safe travels” to the astronauts. 

“In 2023, when I launched the Astra Carta [a framework to promote the sustainable exploration of space] at Buckingham Palace, I did so in the firm belief that our stewardship of the planet must now extend to the infinite wonders of the Universe.” 

“The Astra Carta urges us to navigate the celestial realms with wisdom, foresight and responsibility. Its fundamental principles are not mere aspirations; they are a solemn pledge to future generations. They remind us that the cosmos is not a frontier to be conquered, but a shared inheritance to be cherished and preserved.” 

“It is vital that the moon remains a beacon of peaceful scientific discovery. May the stars align in your [the astronauts] favour, and may your safe return inspire countless others to uphold the values of sustainability, cooperation and wonder that the Astra Carta enshrines.” 

The King and the President are far apart on tone and approach. Charles, of course, would never be so “below the salt” as to suggest such a thing. And would not be allowed to in any case. But he travels to the U.S. as Britain’s most senior government messenger. And, as such, the distance between the U.S. and U.K. on global matters will be very much in play. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. On Fortune‘s radar today:

• Wall Street hated Trump’s Iran speech.
• Elon Musk secretly files biggest-ever IPO.
• Say goodbye to insider trading on prediction markets.
• AI models have figured out a new way to tell lies.
• Chelsea FC is bleeding cash.
• Note to readers: I’ll be taking a break for the holiday weekend and return on Tuesday; in the meantime, you can still expect Alyson’s edition of Fortune 500 Digest on Saturday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com