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When Five Guys’ 40th birthday promotion collapsed under its own weight, most CEOs would have issued a polished apology and moved on. Instead, Jerry Murrell wrote his employees a check—1,500 of them to be exact. Now, the 82-year-old longtime founder of the franchise joked it wasn’t altruism: he was worried about his safety. 

“I didn’t want anybody shooting me in the back or anything after the first day, because we really screwed it up. We had no idea that we were going to get that kind of response,” he joked.

In a candid phone call with Fortune, Murrell wove his quick wit between genuine concern for his employees, following what would otherwise be a logistical nightmare that would send CEOs reeling to their crisis comms teams. Instead, Murrell stepped up, apologized first to his employees and then to the public, and said they would do it again—this time, correctly. 

“I was gonna buy my wife a new fur coat, and I spent it on [the bonus] instead,” Murrell said in a dry pan usually reserved for the likes of Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen. “She still looks at me like I’m stupid. But I thought it was worth it. They worked so hard. They were so overwhelmed.”​

Katherine Frey/The The Washington Post via Getty Images

The problem started when the chain launched a BOGO deal on Feb. 17 to celebrate its 40th birthday. Almost immediately, the giveaway had gone awry: stores ran out of food, workers were overwhelmed, and lines stretched out the door.

The response “was unlike anything we’ve seen,” the chain said in a press release. “You visited our restaurants in overwhelming numbers, and we weren’t ready for you.  We didn’t meet our own standards, and that’s not something we take lightly. So, we’re asking for a do-over,” the statement continued, giving details of a “40th After Party” that took place between March 9 and 12.

The turnout was particularly impressive for Murrell, who said he never really believed in promotions in the first place. “I’m a funny guy,” he said. “I always think it’s funny when people go to sales. I never thought they worked. We tried this one, buy one, get one free. Holy smokes. I couldn’t believe all the people that jumped on that. I thought maybe increased sales like 20% or something—that was like 130%. So I felt I screwed up.” 

Rather than let his workers bear the consequences of his miscalculation, he distributed $1.5 million in bonuses—$1,000 per store—to the frontline crew that had held things together. Then, “we did it over again, and the crew did good that day, because they were prepared, but they worked so hard that I thought, now I better give them a bonus.”

Five Guys has a history of generosity

The $1.5 million bonus wasn’t a one-off moment. It reflects a broader philosophy that has been baked into Five Guys since the beginning. According to its website, the chain donates 20% of sales from in-store community events to local organizations and charities, and corporate and franchise teams are active participants in groups like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Individual franchise owners have donated tens of thousands of dollars back to their communities through the company’s fundraising program. 

Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Like the rest of the interview, Murrell brushed off his actions with another joke. “I had a dream the other night of what I thought heaven might be like. And I got up to heaven, and there was a guy in front of me, he was from McDonald’s. And St. Peter said to him, ‘What do you want here?’ The guy from McDonald’s says, ‘I want to get into heaven.’ So St. Peter said, ‘Spell cat.’ And then it was my turn. I’m from Five Guys, and St. Peter says to me, what do you want? I said, I want to get into heaven. He says, spell chrysanthemum.”

Five Guys remains one of the last major fast-food chains that are fully private and family-run. The name itself tells the story: Murrell and his wife Jamie have five sons, and the next generation is already embedded in the business. “We got 14 grandkids and 11 great grandkids, and I think nine or 10 of the grandkids are in the business too, so they seem to like the business. Looks like it’s going to carry on the way we have built it,” he said.​

“We’ve just been real, real lucky, real fortunate.”​

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The job market is frozen in place, and it may still be a while until it thaws, said Nicholas Bloom, the Stanford economist whose research explained why millions left their jobs during the Great Resignation. 

His advice for people with a job right now? “don’t leave it,” Bloom said during a webinar at the Harvard Kennedy School last week titled “The Economic Consequences of the Iran War.”

Employers, despite eye-catching exceptions, are laying off employees at a historically low rate but are still reluctant to hire, meanwhile employees are “job-hugging,” essentially not leaving their positions at the lowest rate in years—a combination that’s stalling the job market, Bloom told Fortune in an email. 

Yet, employees who may not be satisfied with their job for any reason such as their location or problems with their manager should be extra cautious about leaving, Bloom added in the email.

“Folks that want to change jobs should line one up before quitting their current role. You don’t want to quit a job to find that what you thought would be easy – getting another job – turns out to be a massive struggle,” he wrote.

The top economist, who previously worked for both consulting firm McKinsey and the U.K. Treasury, said the Iran war and its effects have also played a role in the current icy job market.

“This jobs market slowdown is driven in large part by rising economic and policy uncertainty, with policies against trade, immigration and wars making conditions unpredictable,” he wrote in the email to Fortune. “This uncertainty leads business to slow hiring.”

Bloom’s comments on the stalled job market stand in contrast to his research during the Great Resignation when job hopping became the norm as workers sought out better benefits and higher pay while employers struggled to recruit talent. In November 2021 alone, a record 4.5 million people left their jobs, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While Bloom had predicted the rise of remote work since before the pandemic, he noted in research done during the Great Resignation in 2022 that hybrid work policies could reduce quitting rates at companies by 35%. Allowing two days of working from home during a six month trial of more than 1,000 employees at Trip.com improved worker satisfaction and internal communication rates while slashing its churn rate, he and his coauthors found.

The tables turn

The tables have now turned. While recent data has shown the economy is still growing, job openings fell to 7.1 million in November, according to the most recent JOLTS report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February, employers shed 92,000 jobs, far above the 60,000 economists expected, while the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% from 4.3% in January. 

Artificial intelligence is compounding the freeze, according to Bloom, particularly as some firms have used the technology as a reason to pause hiring. Earlier this month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said job creation is “pretty close to zero,” partly because of the increase in AI adoption that has led to layoffs and hiring pauses on the part of corporations. Large employers, he said, are talking less about expanding headcount. Instead, “much of the time they’re talking about AI and what it can do,” Powell told reporters during a press conference following the Fed’s interest rate decision earlier this month.

The Iran war has only added more uncertainty to the mix for workers. While oil prices are trading below the psychological level of $100 per barrel partly due to President Trump’s announcement earlier this week of a five-day pause on Iran strikes pending negotiations, a sustained increase in oil prices, as some analysts such as Goldman Sachs have predicted, could increase inflation and directly affect companies nationwide. 

In the context of the oil market’s instability due to the Iran war, the Federal Reserve earlier this month opted to keep interest rates steady after having cut rates consistently since September. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s Market Probability Tracker now shows the possibility of a rate hike is more likely than a rate cut in the next three months. 

For workers already struggling to find new jobs in a frozen labor market, the prospect of higher borrowing costs on top of geopolitical uncertainty could not have come at a worse time, as it directly affects businesses who already don’t want to make a costly mistake in overhiring. 

“It’s costly to hire somebody and if you then discover, say, demand is lower than you expected [it’s] hard to reverse. So when you are uncertain you pause,” Bloom told CNBC in an interview.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

With Qatar’s liquefied natural gas shipments taken offline from the Iran war, Houston-based Cheniere Energy has become the world’s leading LNG exporter and CEO Jack Fusco said he is literally answering phone calls of “Help!” from Asia as a potential supply crisis begins to unfold.

“We’re going to try to get as many molecules as we can to those countries in Asia that really need it. But it’s a 28-day journey from the Gulf Coast to anywhere in Asia, so it’s not going to happen overnight,” Fusco said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston.

Cheniere is planning to start bringing on production for export cargoes from its newest LNG facility—known as a “train” in industry lingo—in Corpus Christi, Texas by the end of this week, Fusco said. Natural gas must be liquefied through the LNG trains to be safely exported over water. Two more Corpus trains are slated to come online later this year. Cheniere (No. 275 on the Fortune 500) is even looking at potential maintenance delays to keep production running at full capacity for longer, he said.

“We are trying to do whatever we can. We’re looking at our maintenance schedules really hard,” Fusco said. “But, at the end of the day, we have to be safe, and we have to be reliable. We don’t want to sacrifice anything to get that last drop out.”

The last waterborne LNG shipments from Qatar to Asia that were shipped before the war began were recently delivered, so the physical supply shortages of natural gas have not yet begun, although many Asian nations have implemented conservation efforts, including mandating work from home and closing schools. “I don’t think you’ve seen a real impact just as of yet,” Fusco said.

Qatar produces about 20% of the world’s LNG that’s offline at least in the short term. But, because of damages from Iranian attacks at Qatar’s Ras Laffan facilities, Qatar said 17% of its supplies could remain offline for five years for repairs while waiting for gas turbine deliveries. And, unlike the worldwide efforts to dip into global crude oil emergency supplies, there are few strategic reserves of natural gas, which is used for power, heating, and cooking.

Meanwhile, in 10 years, the U.S. has gone from zero LNG exports to leading the world. Cheniere’s very first cargo export was in February 2016. With a wave of U.S. construction underway, the U.S. is projected to double its LNG export capacity from 2025 to 2030, growing to roughly 30 billion cubic feet per day.

Even though the growth is rapid, that help cannot come as quickly as it’s needed in the current crunch. “We saw demand really pick up in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Egypt. Unfortunately, at these high prices, those emerging markets are the ones that are going to suffer. The rich countries are going to pay whatever they have to pay,” Fusco said.

LNG growth boom

The vast majority of the LNG growth is along the U.S. Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, but an Alaska LNG project is in development, and Canada became an exporter last year from British Columbia with the Shell-led LNG Canada project, offering a shorter route to Asia, with plans to grow other facilities significantly.

While there have been mounting concerns of an LNG capacity overbuild in the U.S, the domestic industry’s financial picture is now benefitting from the U.S.’ position as a secure supply for other countries.

“The current conflict has reinforced a critical lesson for LNG buyers: cost competitiveness alone is insufficient if supply security is vulnerable to single‑point‑of‑failure risks,” Morningstar analysts wrote in a March 25 report. “As a result, LNG buyers are increasingly prioritizing jurisdictional stability, contractual certainty, and diversified supply chains—criteria that strongly favor North American LNG.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has spent all week in Houston meeting with energy executives and repeatedly stating that natural gas is America’s “superpower.”

Despite the sharpest gas supply crisis being in Southeast Asia, most of Cheniere’s exports are still going to Europe on long-term contracts. The same applies to fellow exporter Freeport LNG.

“Europe would be at a standstill already” without U.S. LNG,” said Freeport LNG founder and CEO Michael Smith, pointing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Russia’s shutting off its gas supplies to the continent. “That continues today through this crisis, which hopefully will be over very soon.”

The only saving grace from the current war is the fact that winter is over, Smith said, and natural gas demand isn’t at a peak. The crisis would be much more dire if the war unfolded right before winter.

If the war hasn’t ended though in another month or two though, Smith warned, gas supplies will really run short, and prices will spike much more in a lot of the world. “That’s a scary thing.”

“Gas demand in the world is going to continue to grow at a very high clip. There’s no way around it,” Smith said. “We offer energy security that no other country can provide”—backed by the U.S. military.

Fossil fuels debate

For advocates of renewable energy and the environment, the war underscores the need for the world to hasten its transition away from fossil fuels. Perhaps not surprisingly, the industry executives at the Houston conference had a different analysis.

Toby Rice, the CEO of leading U.S. natural gas producer EQT, which supplies a lot of the LNG export hubs with gas, sees the war only increasing global demand for U.S. fossil fuels.

“International gas prices have gone up by $10. In the U.S., they went up 10 cents,” Rice told Fortune. “What is the value of our energy independence? You’re seeing it right now. We’ve insulated American from supply shocks around the world on the natural gas side.”

And, more U.S. exports mean more U.S. gas demand and production, Rice said. “We should care about providing energy security to the world, because that is providing even more energy security to Americans.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Muddy Waters made its name as a short-selling firm that exposed accounting trickery at publicly-traded Chinese firms. On March 17, the firm took aim at a new target: It accused SoFi, known for home and student loans, of a host of book-keeping shenanigans designed to enrich top executives at the expense of shareholders. These are the sort of accusations that, if true, could tank a company’s stock. But so far the market doesn’t appear to be buying Muddy Waters’ latest tale.

The short-seller set out its allegations on March 17, blasting out a report to journalists and social media that claimed SoFi had not actually sold a $312 million loan package but kept it on the company’s books with a sleight-of-hand financing arrangement. The Muddy Waters report also alleges that SoFi has been assigning the wrong discount rate to its student loan portfolio—essentially overvaluing it—as well as understating its exposure to loans in default.

“We believe SOFI is a financial engineering treadmill—not a healthy origination business. SOFI shareholders are incessantly diluted so management can hit bonus targets through GE Capital-style loan marks and Enron-esque off-balance-sheet structures that disguise borrowings as revenue,” said the report.

While such reports by Muddy Waters and others have in the past proved devastating, this one appears to be a misfire. While the report produced a minor dip in SoFi’s stock when it was published, the stock has since performed more or less in line with the S&P 500, while faring better than its fintech peer Chime.

The likely reason why SoFi stock has not cratered is that the allegations set forth in Muddy Waters’ report appear to be off the mark. In a research note by Mizuho, prominent analyst Don Dolev notes the report “has an impressive amount of detail and analysis” but that it misunderstands or mischaracterizes key facts related to the loan sale, discount rate and more.

In an interview, a person close to SoFi, who asked not to be named due to legal constraints, told Fortune that the company had concluded the short seller’s allegations were wrong, but decided not to publicly address them since they did not appear to be having an impact on the market. The person added that SoFi has told Muddy Waters it is contemplating legal action, potentially for defamation, but has not decided if it will take that step.

In response to questions about the Mizuho analyst’s conclusions, Muddy Waters founder Carson Block told Fortune by email that the analyst had misunderstood its findings.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Regardless of whether AI will lead to a “job apocalypse” or make work optional, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) is warning “the battle of our time will be AI”—and he predicts it’ll be particularly difficult for new grads entering the workforce, who face an 5.6% unemployment rate. 

 “I will bet anybody in the audience that goes to 30 or 35% within the next two years,” Warner said. “And if we don’t figure this out—I say this as a pro-AI, pro-tech guy—we’re going to get screwed.”

Warner’s estimate may seem extreme, but it tracks with AI leaders who are towing the line between warning the public of their tech predictions and  starting widespread panic. 

“If you take Dario, Sam, you take all the evangelists. I think they are literally consciously pulling back on their predictions because of the short-term economic disruption,” Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a panel at the Hill and Valley Forum, a conference bringing together Washington policymakers and Silicon Valley executives on Tuesday. 

Warner, speaking at the panel entitled “From Capital to Capability: Rebuilding U.S. Industrial Strength” at the event, has often made statements to similar effect.Last week, Warner blasted the White House’s framework to regulate AI, saying it “lacks significant substance.” The Trump administration laid out general policy areas for Congress to address, including children’s privacy, intellectual property rights, and developing “an AI-ready workforce.” In a statement, Warner faulted the White House for shutting down the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bill on national security threats from advanced AI and ignoring AI-powered misinformation entirely.

The senator warned that it’s in the companies’ hands, not the government’s, if they want to reduce the adverse effects of AI. 

“If you expect the government officials alone to solve this, you’re missing the boat. We desperately need your input and ideas and suggestions,” Warner, who is the former founder and managing director of venture capital firm Columbia Capital.

Warner pointed toAnthropic’s Claude’s footprint on software and HR job losses as reasons for AI executives to temper their public comments. Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that companies are “AI-washing” layoffs and using the technology as a scapegoat for workforce reductions. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has pulled back since his declaration last May that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs. In more recent comments, he’s shied away from specific predictions about the scale of AI-related job loss, and instead, wrote the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption in a wide-ranging 20,000-word essay in January. Yet, a recent survey of CFOs found that only 0.4%, or about 502,000 roles out of about 125 million roles, are expected to be lost this year.

Warner explained that AI disruption is different from the labor transformation that globalization caused because it will affect white-collar jobs. 

“If we go way back in time, like three or four years ago, we would have said the policy prescription is, ‘let’s make everybody learn how to code.’ At least that was well intentioned, but completely the wrong answer,” Warner said. 

Warner says the government ‘desperately’ needs industry input 

Warner acknowledged the limits of the federal government to handle the potential economic fallout of AI disruption. 

“We’re going to need the capabilities of the AI community to help us figure it out, and candidly, the largest players help pay for it, because I think this transition will be exponentially bigger than I believe today is going to be exponentially bigger and quicker than even what I believed five months ago.” 

Students are already thinking of potential AI job displacement-proof careers before they even graduate. He gave the example of business: 1.63 million students, or nearly 9% of students, were enrolled in business bachelor’s degrees in 2025, making it the most popular degree in the U.S. Yet, the business and financial services industry is one of the most AI-exposed sectors. 

“Those are where jobs are going to go. Maybe, Anthropic and OpenAI ought to go ahead and put up a fund to convert people from being business administration majors to nurses, at least in the short term,” but advised against government retraining programs, like Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers., which he said, “have mostly been bullshit.”

He pointed to how the government has struggled to regulate social media with dozens of bills that have failed to pass. 

“Social media is tiny compared to AI,” he said. “I cannot stress enough that if we don’t get this transition right, all of the innovation opportunities, all of the healthcare opportunities, could get snuffed out.” He pointed to immigration barriers against international talents, such as the Trump administration’s $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, typically held by Indian and Chinese tech workers.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Economists are only growing more antsy about the state of the economy as the conflict in Iran continues.

Moody’s Analytics raised its recession outlook for the next 12 months to 48.6%, following the same pattern as Goldman Sachs, which now forecasts a 30% risk of recession, and EY-Parthenon, which put recession odds at 40%. The baseline probability of a recession sits around 15% to 20%.

Prior to the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran at the end of February, economic indicators were already suggesting precarious economic conditions. A dismal February jobs report showed the economy unexpectedly lost 92,000 jobs in the previous month, defying estimations of a 60,000-job increase and dashing hopes of a labor market recovery after the U.S. added just 181,000 jobs in 2025. Moreover, the unemployment rate is eking toward 4.5%, up from 3.4% three years ago, coinciding with decelerating wage growth, particularly for lower-income Americans.

On top of those factors, an ongoing war in the Gulf has raised concern among analysts of an oil shock being the tipping point to send the U.S. into a slump, one top economist warned.

“Even before the conflict, I thought recession and risks were on the rise,” Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, told CNBC on Wednesday. “Recession risks are very high—and unless the hostilities are coming to an end now, the president figures out a way to stand down, declare victory and move on, and Iranians follow suit—I think recession is more than likely by the second half of the year.”

Why the war in Iran is driving up chances of a recession

Zandi warned earlier this week if the cost of oil continues trending upward, a recession is all but imminent. The cost of Brent crude has been hovering at around $97 per barrel, but reached a record-breaking $115 per barrel last week.

“Based on simulations of our global macroeconomic model, oil prices would only need to average close to $125 per barrel in the second quarter of this year,” Zandi said in an X post on Monday. “With tensions still elevated, that’s not a stretch.”

Despite President Donald Trump postponing plans on Monday to strike Iranian energy infrastructure and power plants (a move that added $1.7 trillion to stocks and brought down the price of oil by $17), Iran rejected the U.S. proposal to end the war on Wednesday, according to state television reports, and the Pentagon has reportedly ordered 2,000 Paramilitary troops to be sent to the Middle East.

Today’s rising energy prices—including a $1 per gallon increase at the pump—has prompted comparisons to the 1970s oil shock, when Arab state members of OPEC declared they would slash oil production and exports to countries in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. President Richard Nixon subsequently advocated for rationing U.S. oil supplies to keep prices from spiking, but the cost of gas still skyrocketed about 40%.

The Paris-based intergovernmental agency International Energy Agency (IEA), has cautioned the ongoing turmoil in the Gulf has exceeded that of a half century ago. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said the world is losing 11 million barrels of oil today compared to 5 billion during the crises in 1973 and 1979.

“The depth of the problem was not well appreciated by the decision makers around the world,” Birol told the National Press Club of Australia this week. “If you want to put in a context, this crisis as it stands now: two oil crises and one gas crisis put all together,” he said.

There’s also evidence the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz is impacting industries beyond energy. The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint for about one-third of the world’s global fertilizer. Minimal exports have already hiked fertilizer prices, threatening to impact which crops U.S. farmers grow, and potentially eventually driving up the price of groceries.

“There’s a very strong correlation between the movement of energy prices and the movement of food prices,” 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.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Iran’s supreme leader is dead. Much of its military infrastructure is destroyed. Its allies are alienated. But the war against Israel and the U.S. has given Tehran something it might not have otherwise appreciated: the unprecedented leverage it holds over the Strait of Hormuz. Now, Iran is trying to milk it.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the hardline military force that has consolidated power within what remains of the Iranian regime following Khamenei’s death, has communicated a list of cease-fire conditions to the Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal. The two sides aren’t in direct contact, and the Journal reported that these conditions were sent through Middle Eastern intermediaries, though the U.S.’s recent fifteen-point-plan was sent through Pakistan. President Donald Trump, the “master of the deal” who has championed his ability to jawbone other nations through tariffs, has now insisted that his administration has been in fruitful negotiations with Iran, a claim Tehran has mocked by asking if the President was talking to himself. 

The demands are sweeping: closure of all American military bases in the Persian Gulf; full reparations for U.S. strikes on Iranian territory; and the complete lifting of sanctions. Iran also seeks full preservation of its missile programs and guarantees that the war won’t restart, for itself and for Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

But one demand stands apart from the rest.

Tehran wants a new order for the Strait of Hormuz—one that would let Iran collect fees from every ship that transits the waterway, modeled on the toll Egypt collects from vessels passing through the Suez Canal. The Suez uses a somewhat complex formula based on the tonnage of each ship, but on average, cargo ships pay $250,000 to cross. Since the Suez is a manmade canal, Egypt collects the toll to pay for the costs of constructing and maintaining it. 

The Strait of Hormuz, on the other hand, is a natural waterway, and Tehran essentially wants to charge ships for the privilege of crossing it without being bombed. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Strait: roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through it each day. It is the single most important chokepoint in global energy markets,and though oil future markets have taken to bullishness with all the talks about peace talks (as of writing, Texas crude is at $89,), oil analysts are losing their voices from warning about the physical reality of the Straits’ closure catching up. Only two vessels crossed the Strait on March 24, according to figures from the S&P Global Market Intelligence team, much less than the usual 150-160 vessels that cross. And if those vessels would be required to pay a  permanent Iranian toll, it would reshape the economics of global energy and hand Tehran a lever it could pull any time it wanted concessions from the West.

Iran has already started charging ships approximately $2 million to cross the Strait, which Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed. Analysts say that the premium is a “bargain” compared to the price of traditional shipping insurance premiums, which have skyrocketed since the war began. ut it effectively means that Tehran is leveraging the threat of its own missiles and mines to capture the profits of the insurers. Plus, an unconfirmed Iranian plan to require the ships to pay their toll in yuan, instead of dollars, would pose a great threat to the dominance of the American petrodollar, long considered the key to the U.S holding its reserve currency status. 

A U.S. official called the demands ridiculous and unrealistic, and told the Journal the posturing will make reaching a deal harder than before Trump authorized the strikes that started the war. 

That may be true. But the demands, of course, aren’t designed to be accepted at face value—rather, they’re designed to set a negotiating floor amidst whipsawing energy markets. 

The IRGC is also flexing its influence, anchoring the negotiation on its terms and signaling to domestic audiences that Iran emerged from the war unbowed. The regime’s information council called the U.S. peace plan a wishlist of objectives that hadn’t been achieved on the battlefield. The semi-official news outlet Press TV said Iran doesn’t accept a ceasefire at all—only an end to the war “when it decides to do so” and when its strategic objectives are met. Trump’s 15-point-counterplan is equally maximalist, demanding a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program and the end of their funding proxies, according to Israel Channel 12.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A jury found both Meta and YouTube liable in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that aimed to hold social media platforms responsible for harm to children using their services, awarding the plaintiff $3 million in damages.

After more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, California jurors decided Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms. The jury also decided each company’s negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who says her use of social media as a child addicted her to the technology and exacerbated her mental health struggles.

The multimillion-dollar verdict will grow, as the jury decided the companies acted with malice, or highly egregious conduct, meaning they will hear new evidence shortly and head back into the deliberation room to decide on punitive damages.

Meta and Google-owned YouTube were the two remaining defendants in the case after TikTok and Snap each settled before the trial began.

Jurors listened to about a month of lawyers’ arguments, testimony and evidence, and they heard from the plaintiff herself, a 20-year-old woman identified as KGM in documents, or Kaley as her lawyers have called her during the trial, as well as Meta leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri. YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan, was not called in to testify.

Kaley says she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9 and told the jury she was on social media “all day long” as a child.

Lawyers representing Kaley, led by Mark Lanier, were tasked with proving that the respective defendants’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing Kaley’s harm. They pointed to specific design features they said were designed to “hook” young users, like the “infinite” nature of feeds that allowed for an endless supply of content, autoplay features, and even notifications.

The jurors were told not to take into account the content of the posts and videos that Kaley saw on the platforms. That’s because tech companies are shielded from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

Meta consistently argued that Kaley had struggled with her mental health separate from her social media use, often pointing to her turbulent home life. Meta also said “not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause” of her mental health issues in a statement following closing arguments. But the plaintiffs did not have to prove that social media caused Kaley’s struggles — only that it was a “substantial factor” in causing her harm.

YouTube focused less on Kaley’s medical records and mental health history and more on her use of YouTube and the nature of the platform. They argued that YouTube is not a form of social media, but rather a video platform akin to television, and pointed to her declining YouTube use as she got older. According to their data, she spent about one minute a day on average watching YouTube Shorts since its inception. YouTube Shorts, which launched in 2020, is the platform’s section of short-form, vertical videos that have the “infinite scroll” feature the plaintiffs argued was addictive.

Lawyers representing both platforms also consistently pointed to the safety features and guardrails they each have available for people to monitor and customize their use.

The case, along with several others, has been randomly selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies play out.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center and the counsel of record for Kaley, said this trial was “a vehicle, not an outcome” during deliberations.

“This case is historic no matter what happens because it was the first,” Marquez-Garrett said, emphasizing the gravity of getting Meta and Google’s internal documents into the public record.
Marquez-Garrett said social media companies are “not taking the cancerous talcum powder off the shelves,” likely in reference to a past case that Lanier and his firm worked on, securing a multi-billion-dollar verdict. “And they’re not going to because they’re making too much money killing kids.”
Still, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the parents who trace their children’s deaths or harms back to social media will continue to keep fighting, Marquez-Garrett said, wearing several rubber wristbands in honor of victims that have not come off since the trial began.

The trial was one of several that social media companies face this year and beyond. They are the culmination of years of scrutiny of the platforms over child safety, and whether the companies make them addictive and serve up content that leads to depression, eating disorders or suicide.

Some experts see the reckoning as reminiscent of cases against tobacco and opioid markets, and the plaintiffs hope that social media platforms will see similar outcomes as cigarette makers and drug companies, pharmacies and distributors.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

2026 is the year many C-suite technology leaders will have to finally prove that their artificial intelligence investments are paying off. 

But at Everpure, a data storage and cloud services provider, tracking AI’s return on investment comes with some key caveats. “I tend to think that measuring ROI and the efficacy of AI technology really depends on the use case,” says Rob Lee, Everpure’s chief technology and growth officer. “We have some use cases where it’s very clear, and it’s very objectively measurable.” 

Some of the more straightforward AI deployments are easier to monitor. An AI bot that can autonomously handle vendor invoices with internal purchase orders, ensuring the reports are accurate before payment is issued, is one such case. Everpure’s “Bestie Bot,” an internal AI tool that helps employees self-service questions that would have been fielded by the human resources team, has strong ROI indicators, but is a bit harder to measure. 

And then, there are the third-party AI coding assistants, which Lee says he is taking a closer look at in 2026. While Everpure’s engineers may report that they are saving time using these tools, Lee wants to be sure that the time saved by generating code faster isn’t just being reallocated to debugging because of code quality issues. “That’s an area that we are spending a bit more time this year, trying to sharpen our pencils,” says Lee. 

A sharper focus on AI’s ROI comes as Everpure caps a fairly busy first quarter of the year. Last month, the company completed a corporate rebranding that involved changing its name from Pure Storage and announced a deal to acquire the data intelligence and security company 1touch. Everpure also reported fiscal year 2026 revenue of $3.7 billion, up 16% year-over-year. And for the new fiscal year, the top line is projected to increase by between 17% and 20%.

When placing AI bets, Lee says that other than a heightened degree of focus on governance and security, the factors he considers in the buy-versus-build debate are no different than those of any other technology investment. When push comes to shove, Everpure prefers the easier route of  “buy” when an off-the-shelf AI tool can be minimally customized and generate desirable business results. But Everpure is also open to creating its own AI tools from scratch, especially if the application of AI would also integrate into the company’s external product offerings.

“That’s something that we’re more likely to want to own and develop over time,” says Lee.

Lee, a 12-year company veteran who initially served as chief architect of the company’s storage platform called FlashBlade, says the AI tools that he’s internally deployed for Everpure’s workforce frequently come from a dedicated, cross-functional team that sits under the CTO’s office and works with various business functions to explore priority AI use cases. 

Working closely with vendors is also an option. Everpure’s Bestie Bot was built on top of enterprise AI startup Glean’s AI-powered search software, trained on the company’s corporate policies. That tool is saving HR one hour each day, according to Niki Armstrong, Everpure’s chief administrative and legal officer. She also worked closely with tech startup Eudia to build a contract review tool for the legal department. 

“When I think about how we’re using these tools, it’s less time hunting for answers and more time exercising that independent, personalized judgment,” says Armstrong.

“Time saved” is a popular way that C-suite leaders tend to boast about the efficiency savings they get from AI, but what’s not always clear is what employees can do with their extra free time. Armstrong says she has specific tasks that the HR team can tackle with Bestie Bot in action. Her team will spend more time on success planning, pathways to support lateral moves and promotions, improving interview training, and mapping out the skills needed to support the company’s future.

“We can spend more time on the complex, high-stakes cases,” says Armstrong.

Lee says Everpure’s initial approach to generative AI was fairly cautious after the launch of ChatGPT, as the company wanted to take time to set up governance protocols around data privacy and security. Similarly, he has been slower to adopt agentic AI despite all the buzz. One in four enterprises were actively using AI agents by the end of 2025, up from just 11% in the first quarter of the year, according to a survey by accounting giant KPMG.

Everpure is further along in building out agentic workflows that fold into the company’s external product portfolio. But internally, Lee is waiting to get a clearer picture on the agentic tools offered by his enterprise resource planning, payroll, customer relationship management, and other software providers.

“It doesn’t do me any good to spend a bunch of effort to develop an agent if six months later, those vendors come out with their own agents that can largely do the same tasks,” says Lee.

John Kell

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com