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Around the boardroom table, Carmen-Maja Rex’s colleagues slip easily between French and English. When the Airbus CHRO takes her seat, the discussion naturally settles into English without anyone flagging the switch. For a company founded in France, built partly in Germany, assembling aircraft across Europe and flying them globally, English has quietly become the default working language. The same takes place just a few hundred kilometers away at Sodexo’s headquarters just outside of Paris. CHRO Heather Jacobs is American, and most of her conversations in the boardroom are in English, despite the company having roots in the French city of Marseille.

English is now the most widely spoken language in history, with around 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, and fluency in it has quietly become an unwritten yet essential requirement for many senior roles at multinationals. This expectation can disadvantage those who are not native English speakers, and now sits against a wider political backdrop in which leaders such as Donald Trump have designated English as the U.S.’s official language, promoting warnings from scholars about how easily the ‘speak English’ rhetoric can slide into exclusion. 

The OECD examined 11 million online job postings in 2021, across the EU and the U.K., and found that 22% explicitly required English proficiency. German was the next most frequently requested language, appearing in 1.7% of listings, often in tourism-related roles. French was required in only 1.1% of postings, while Italian was required in only 0.4%. 

In Europe’s boardrooms, the growing dominance of English isn’t just a matter of habit; it’s also driven by global business demands, with effects that reach into areas such as rules and safety. It also shapes who fits in, who advances, and how companies operate. The question now is whether AI is reinforcing English as a ‘superior’ language of leadership, or simply making it easier for organizations to maintain a common corporate language—and whether businesses could realistically return to a more localised way of functioning.

A language born of power, not policy

Although English is mandated as the common corporate language in many Fortune 500 Europe headquarters across the region, its dominance is, in many ways, a historical “accident”. Nina Bellak, PhD, Senior Lecturer at the University of Vienna, links the power of English in boardrooms to postwar history. “There’s this power dynamic at a national level between the colonizer and colonized, and it’s a very similar dynamic at a corporate level,” she says. Explaining that English became far more prominent post World War as U.S. economic and political power expanded across the continent. 

Over the following decades, English gradually displaced local languages such as French and German as the dominant working language. Many Fortune 500 European companies have mandated English for simple operational reasons, ranging from safety standards to international financial reporting. Airbus’s decision to mandate English as its working language goes back to the company’s birth in the 1970s, says Rex. “This was very surprising, especially in those days in France—there were not many French companies [that agreed] on English [becoming] the common language,” she adds. The reasoning was largely practical: aviation safety, where English is the global standard. 

Similarly, in the early 2000s, Siemens began using English more consistently after listing on the NYSE, particularly for financial communications, says Nanda Burke, global head of talent and organization at Siemens. In other cases, companies adopted English more organically. For example, at the Swiss electrification and automation company ABB, English became the common corporate language following the merger of Swedish firm ASEA and Swiss company Brown Boveri in 1988. With neither Swedish nor German able to claim precedence, English emerged as neutral ground—less a deliberate strategy than a diplomatic necessity, according to Carolina Granat, ABB’s chief human resources officer.

Beyond industry factors, the prevalence of English within Fortune 500 companies in Europe also reflects its widespread use across countries. In the Netherlands and countries in Scandinavia for example, English classes are compulsory at schools and so individuals pick up the language at a much younger age, hence often functioning as a natural second language. Kaija Bridger, EVP people & communications at elevator engineering company, KONE, says that, in Finland, where the company is headquartered, the country’s small domestic market has caused people to look outward and so most senior leaders operate comfortably in English. “Finnish wouldn’t be the most dominant language to begin with,” she says, adding that one newly employed executive member recently asked for support in learning Finnish. 

Lost in translation

Research suggests this English-first narrative hides a more complex reality. Bellak finds that many multinationals claim to have an official corporate language policy, but day-to-day language choice is messy, hard to regulate and often up to the individual. 

Whilst many companies have officialized English as the common corporate language, local languages remain critical on the ground. At Siemens, day-to-day meetings are conducted in English, although local languages are highly present, and “that is a strength,” says Burke, who is not fluent in German but has been learning “not because it was required but because I now live part-time in Munich and genuinely want to understand and speak the local language.”

At KONE, which operates in 70 countries, Bridger describes the company as a “global company with very local operations”. While English is essential for regional and global roles, local languages dominate among technicians in the field. “Let’s say, all of a sudden, the escalator stops working. Someone needs to be pretty close by and [a technician] needs to be able to fix the lift. That’s where we come to the language and proximity of the business…and that’s where local language plays a huge role,” she adds. Similarly, Sodexo’s Jacobs explains that despite English being the corporate language, “local languages naturally dominate in the markets where we operate”, such as India and mainland China. At the company’s headquarters, more than 25 nationalities are present and so “you hear a little bit of everything,” she notes. While many of these firms have formally mandated English, in practice, they rely on a multilingual ecosystem to function.

KONE

Behind every official language policy, the question arises: whose voices carry furthest when English becomes the default? Whilst most Fortune 500 Europe companies have not officially stated that English is a necessity, it’s almost assumed that at the C-Suite or senior level, individuals can converse in English. “If I think about the C-suite, senior leadership and even middle management roles…If there’s an English language requirement, the idea really is that the person is proficient enough,” says KONE’s Bridger. 

Fluency, status and who gets ahead

Nevertheless, companies remain careful not to treat polished English as a proxy for leadership potential. “Talent is about capability, impact, and values-driven leadership, not accent or fluency,” says ABB’s Granat. Where certain language requirements do matter, most companies take responsibility for removing barriers: localizing job postings, adapting assessment processes and providing learning opportunities so that employees can build language confidence, not only in English but also in the local language of the host country when it is required or encouraged. “Within my first month of being with Sodexo, I had a full week outside of the office [in Southwest France], not just [to learn the] language, but it was about cultural adaptation as well,” Jacobs adds. 

Although many companies invest in language training for employees—including English courses for staff outside English-speaking countries—employees can still experience a sense of status loss. Associate Professor at BI Norwegian Business School, Guro Refsum Sanden, uses this term to describe how non-native speakers of the common corporate language sometimes feel a subjective drop in their professional esteem, as if their competence is being judged through their language skills rather than their actual expertise. This can leave even highly skilled non-native English speakers feeling inadequate when required to operate in a foreign language. By contrast, native English speakers may gain status simply because they remain fluent in the corporate language, even when they are no more professionally capable than their peers—a form of “unearned status”, Refsum Sanden calls it. 

Language isn’t just a communication tool—whether English or the local language of the host country—it is a tool that enables people to integrate and signal whether they ‘belong’ in boardrooms as well as society. Native English speaker Brady Dougan spent eight years as CEO of Credit Suisse and left without ever speaking German; he later called it one of his regrets,  and his inability to speak German was criticized in the Swiss media. In 2015, Anshu Jain, the Indian-born British co-CEO of Deutsche Bank opened the bank’s annual meeting in German before switching to English. However, less than three weeks later, Jain resigned as co-CEO after losing investor confidence. 

Not speaking the native language didn’t directly cost Dougan and Jain their jobs; however, it drew criticism and made it harder for them to connect with local investors, clients and customers. English can evidently get senior leaders into the boardroom; whether they can retain the role without speaking the local language is less certain.

The translator in the room 

That’s also the limit of what AI can currently change. Translation tools, meeting summaries and captions have the ability to smooth over gaps in fluency and assist non-native speakers in writing emails, translating, and functioning more confidently in English-first settings. Airbus’ Rex notes that “AI is supportive in order to build bridges,” and adds that the company has rolled out Gemini globally, resulting in improved translation efficiency. Similarly, Jacobs notes how AI has improved translation processes at Sodexo, making communication faster and more accurate for mandatory learning and employee engagement surveys. 

Yet CHROs broadly agree that even the best AI tools require careful handling to preserve the essence of communication and that AI is nowhere near ready to replace human leadership and interaction. Refsum Sanden warns that the more organisations lean on AI to translate and generate text, the greater the risk that it will “converge” the way people communicate, eroding differences and nuances in local languages. If multilingual companies come to depend on those systems, technology will start to dictate what is considered ‘appropriate’ language in the boardroom and even language included in emails and chat—potentially narrowing, rather than enriching, the range of voices and communication styles that make it into the corporate conversation. 

Executives from KONE, Sodexo and ABB all describe English as the practical “common denominator” that enables cross-border collaboration. Global companies will always have to balance the ‘local’ with the  ‘global’ and KONE’s Bridger doesn’t see that basic tension changing anytime soon. The local side is driven by the markets companies operate in and the customers served, whereas the global side brings scale, shared platforms and processes so that local teams do not need to reinvent the wheel. This is also dependent on population, country and market size. Bridger notes that Finland is a “small nation and [the language] is one of the hardest languages to learn.” Hence, native Finnish speakers at times are empathetic and remain open-minded towards language as a whole.

It’s hard to imagine multinationals operating without at least one shared language to connect their multicultural and multilingual operations. Whether local languages can retain space in multinational boardrooms? “We’re not really there right now,” says Sodexo’s Jacobs, noting that English has effectively become the universal language at the senior level—and that won’t change unless something else emerges to replace it. 

Whilst English has slipped into Europe’s boardrooms as a common bridge over the last few decades, it now carries political and technological weight. President Trump signed the historic executive order designating English as the official language of the United States on March 1st 2025, marking the first time the country has ever had a national language. A symbolic move highlighting how closely language, power and identity are intertwined.

English may remain the boardroom default for the foreseeable future, but it is up to companies to define how tightly they choose to hold onto it—and who that choice leaves out.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning!

Seven years after Tulsa Remote began paying workers $10,000 to move to their Oklahoma city, the experiment has become a case study in how relocation incentives can bolster a local economy and widen the workforce employers can tap. More than 4,000 workers relocated, contributing some $878 million in economic impact.

That success paved the way for Tulsa’s next act: helping employers tap global talent. Since launching in 2022, the Tulsa Visa Network has helped nearly 100 people from 34 countries secure visas, offering a practical model at a moment when costly H-1B visa fees and a more complicated immigration environment are forcing many employers to rethink how they recruit internationally.

Stan Khrapak, who leads the Tulsa Visa Network, says his program has seen steady demand this year from both individuals seeking visa support and small to midsize companies trying to navigate an increasingly complex system. Roughly half of those the program has helped are in STEM, he says, though the network is also supporting hiring in fields like finance and accounting.

Justin Harlan, managing director of parent program Experience Tulsa, says Tulsa Remote has attracted professionals whose remote jobs strengthen the community without displacing local workers—and that the Visa Network is built on the same premise.

“It’s highly skilled folks coming in [for roles] that companies often have a hard time filling at a local level, and it makes it very hard to argue whether this is adding something to the community.” 

The bigger lesson for HR leaders is that Tulsa’s strategy is not really about cash incentives alone. It is about designing an employee experience that makes people want to live somewhere, stay, and build a life there, Harlan adds.

The Experience Tulsa program has expanded its offerings well beyond the original $10,000 and visa assistance. Participants now receive a $200 monthly health and wellness stipend, access to a free coworking space, and a remote-work certification course developed in partnership with NYU.

The organization also hosts community building events such as movie nights and dance lessons. That, Harlan says, is where many employers still fall short. Companies, especially those with hybrid or remote workforces or those trying to attract global talent, need to think intentionally about how employees experience life outside the office.

“Oftentimes, HR departments will give that lip service or do the quick and easy things that we’re accustomed to,” Harlan says. “But when companies do go out of their way to go above and beyond, I think it’s noticed and can make a big impact in terms of the quality of life that somebody has.”

Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The U.S.’s eye-watering debt burden poses an “existential threat to the future of our nation,” the chairman of the House Budget Committee has warned, as the country’s borrowing figure tipped over $39 trillion.

Texan Republican Jodey Arrington highlighted last week that it had taken the U.S. nearly two centuries to build a debt pile worth $1 trillion, whereas a mere matter of decades later, the Treasury is forking out that figure every year merely in service payments on the debt.

For the fiscal year 2025, the Treasury paid $1.22 trillion in interest on the debt, and for FY2026, the government has already paid out $520 billion. By 2036, that figure is expected to hit to $2.1 trillion annually, according to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office.

Indeed, U.S. debt didn’t reach the $1 trillion mark until the early 1980s, hitting $1.1 trillion under President Ronald Reagan.

As Arrington points out: “It took roughly 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion. Now we add that in a matter of months. Every child in America today carries a $530,000 share of this debt—a crushing legacy we must reverse. Compounding the problem, we now spend more than $1 trillion a year just on interest to service our debt—more than the entire defense budget and triple the amount when Biden took office.”

Arrington isn’t alone in his concern over the nation’s financial trajectory. Figures on the private side of the economy like Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio have warned over a reckoning caused by debt, and U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has also expressed the need for an “adult conversation” about the issue.

There is a range of opinions on which methods should be employed to wrangle borrowing and its associated interest costs. For example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has advocated for a federal unified budget deficit at or below 3% of GDP, which at the moment sits at around 6%. This idea has been backed by the likes of Representatives Bill Huizenga and Scott Peters, the co-chairs of the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum—indeed, the entire steering committee for the forum has backed the notion and introduced a resolution to that effect.

Arrington has called for a harder-line approach. The resolution for a deficit of 3% of GDP is defined more loosely as a target: Arrington wants to open up a conversation about adding fiscal responsibility to the country’s very constitution.

He said last week: “Here’s the sad, sobering, and stunning truth: despite the urgency of our fiscal crisis, Congress is paralyzed—unable to meet the urgency of the moment. So, if Washington won’t act, then it’s time to look beyond our nation’s capital. The Founders gave us another path in Article V of the Constitution, empowering the states and the American people to step in and demand fiscal discipline.

“I’m calling on Congress to convene an Article V Convention. It’s time to restore sanity in our nation’s capital and reverse the curse looming large over this country.”

An Article Five Convention allows amendments to the Constitution, for example, targeting borrowing and government spending. If two-thirds of state legislatures apply, then Congress must call a convention, with a further three-quarters of states required to back the amendment for it to become a legal requirement.

Other approaches

In recent memory, presidents have attempted to rectify the U.S. fiscal position. President Obama oversaw the creation of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles (or Bowles-Simpson) Commission. The ensuing report made several recommendations: Cutting discretionary spending, reforming tax law, and reshaping healthcare spending.

President Trump has suggested some unusual methods to rebalance the books. For example, he has touted a “Gold Card” plan, a visa policy which would charge rich immigrants $5 million for a green card, plus a route to citizenship.”

“A million cards would be worth $5 trillion, and if you sell 10 million of the cards that’s a total of $50 trillion. Well, we have $35 trillion in debt, so that would be nice,” Trump said last year.

Likewise, tariffs were introduced as a way to offset some of the revenue loss from the likes of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Indeed, while Trump’s tariff plans have proved unpopular with foreign governments, economists nonetheless welcome the “peculiar” methods to increase America’s income. As Wharton professor Joao Gomes previously told Fortune: “You can also not deny that [Trump and his administration] bring strange forms of revenue that do change the debt picture.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. In today’s Fortune:

• The war: Oil is at $113 and markets are in meltdown as Trump threatens to escalate the war in Iran tonight if Tehran doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In response, Iran has threatened to start taking out its neighbors’ water supplies. The damage to the oil market is greater than that of 1974 and 2022 put together, the IEA says.
• Exclusive: Supermicro’s dark history of smuggling chips to Iran.
• AI isn’t replacing as many jobs as you’d think.
• Tim Cook’s likely successor at Apple.
• Aye, robot! Mark Zuckerberg is building an AI agent for himself.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. Adobe CFO Dan Durn isn’t waiting to see how agentic AI plays out—he’s already running the experiment inside his own finance organization.

Durn, who oversees finance, technology, security, and operations, has turned Adobe’s back office into a live proving ground for autonomous AI agents. The results include contract review time cut in half, more than 300,000 emails auto-responded to in a single year, and finance teams surfacing investor insights in minutes instead of hours.

At Adobe (No. 201 on the Fortune 500), the push is deliberate. If finance doesn’t adopt AI, it risks becoming a “rate limiter of growth”—a back-office bottleneck in a company moving fast on product innovation, Durn told me. Inside finance, he breaks AI deployment into three buckets. For a closer look at how Adobe’s finance chief is rewiring the function, and what it signals for CFOs navigating the same pressure, read more of my interview with Durn here.

The rise of AI is also rapidly reshaping corporate leadership. Even long-tenured leaders face increasing pressure from investors to move aggressively on AI. Recent leadership changes, including the announced retirement of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, highlight how little patience markets now have for perceived hesitation. At the same time, Adobe reported that annualized revenue from its AI-first products more than tripled year over year in its first quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended Feb. 27.

The make-or-break moment for CEOs is contributing to an era of rapid turnover among chief executives, Fortune’s Claire Zillman writes. In 2025, companies in the S&P 1500 named 168 new CEOs, the highest total in more than 15 years, according to Spencer Stuart, a global executive search and leadership advisory firm.

“CEO tenures are getting shorter and fewer incoming chief executives have prior CEO experience, the data shows, making the two-time CEO exceedingly rare,” Zillman writes. “All told, corporate America has turned into a CEO meat-grinder; it’s chewing up and spitting out leaders at a pace not seen in a decade and a half.” You can read more here.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

What if one of the more overlooked pressures on corporate America’s future leadership pipeline is not burnout, return-to-office conflict, or employee disengagement, but inherited wealth?

That is one of the more consequential questions embedded in the Great Wealth Transfer, and one I explore in a new piece. As trillions of dollars move from older Americans to their heirs, fewer people may feel compelled to endure the long climb to senior leadership at large firms.

This is not because the next generation will simply stop working. The evidence suggests that, on average, inherited wealth reduces labor supply only modestly. What it does change is career optionality, giving people more freedom to reject bureaucratic institutions, slow promotion cycles, and systems built around indefinitely deferred reward.

The timing is striking. Younger workers are already revising the meaning of ambition. Just 6% of Gen Z respondents in a Deloitte survey said reaching a leadership position was their primary career goal.

Korn Ferry points to a related shift. When wealth creates a greater financial cushion, employees may not leave outright, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors the path to the C-suite has long required.

That could leave corporate America with fewer people willing to make the compromises the climb still demands, with real implications for succession at the top.

Read the full piece here, including what the CEO of Edward Jones thinks about whether the Great Wealth Transfer could reshape the future of C-suite ambition inside corporate America.

Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Great Wealth Transfer is usually framed as a consumer, housing, or wealth management story. But it may also become a story about power inside corporate America. If financial security arrives before the corner office does, why would the most talented people keep climbing the corporate ladder?

For decades, big companies could count on one thing. Enough ambitious people would tolerate the grind because the ladder promised money, status, and security. But as trillions move from older Americans to their heirs, that bargain may begin to change.

The point is not that inheritance will produce a generation of idlers. It is that it may produce a generation less willing to accept the old terms of advancement. Research suggests that, on average, unearned wealth reduces labor supply only modestly while easing capital constraints and making entrepreneurship more viable. But it does give people more latitude to reject low-agency roles, inert bureaucracies, and systems organized around indefinitely deferred reward.

That matters because the Great Wealth Transfer will not be evenly distributed. Market intelligence firm Cerulli projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with more than half originating from households that make up roughly 2% of the total. The people most likely to receive meaningful inheritances may overlap disproportionately with the talent pools from which major companies have historically drawn future leaders. That may create an opening for broader leadership paths, but only if companies build them deliberately.

This pressure arrives just as younger workers are revising the meaning of ambition. Deloitte’s 2025 global survey found just 6% of Gen Z respondents named reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal. For many high-achieving younger professionals, the goal is no longer rank for its own sake, but a more exacting mix of agency, growth, coherence, and impact.

That shift is not merely cultural. Traditionally, companies held leverage because employees needed the next promotion to secure their financial future. The wealth transfer begins to alter that equation. Korn Ferry points out that when wealth arrives, employees often enter a kind of “semi-retirement” mindset. They do not quit immediately, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors required to reach the C-suite.

That presents a specific problem for corporate America. Large firms still rely heavily on internal cultivation for top leadership. Their senior ranks are built through years of exposure to operating complexity, institutional memory, and the disciplines of organizational life. If even a modest share of high-potential talent becomes less willing to spend 15 or 20 years enduring slow promotion cycles, internal politics, and bureaucratic drag, the leadership pipeline narrows, particularly among those whose financial security gives them greater career optionality.

Few executives are better positioned to see that tension than Penny Pennington, CEO of Edward Jones, who sits at the intersection of wealth management and the corner office. When asked whether the prestige and drive of becoming CEO begin to fade when wealth arrives before the career payoff, she challenges the premise that the climb was ever only about money. “I fundamentally believe in the human desire to prosper and to have well-being in a holistic way,” she tells Fortune. Ambition, she argues, does not disappear with financial security. But it does need to be attached to purpose. In her own career, that meant moving away from banking and corporate finance in search of work with deeper meaning, helping people live more prosperous lives.

What may change, she suggests, is the path upward. It may run through a giant company, a small business, a mechanic’s shop, or a startup. In that sense, inherited wealth may change the route people take more than the desire to keep climbing. Some heirs may have true walk-away money. Others may simply inherit enough to reduce stress, fund a home purchase, or create room to choose differently. Either way, they are less captive to traditional institutions.

That changes tolerance for corporate red tape, slow promotions, and compromises that once seemed unavoidable. If financial security is partly solved, friction stops looking like the price of advancement and starts looking like a test of whether an organization deserves your time.

The Great Wealth Transfer is unlikely to destroy the C-suite pipeline. But it could reshape it enough that companies will have to earn ambition in the years ahead, not merely reward it later.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Much of the global worry over the closed Strait of Hormuz has focused on crude oil and natural gas, yet the waterway is also a channel for other key Gulf-produced commodities like fertilizer and helium. About a third of the world’s helium and half of its urea, a vital nitrogen-based fertilizer, passes through the strait. 

“Up to 15% of goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz are non-energy materials,” Sugoutam Ghosh, a supply chain management expert from the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), tells Fortune. “These include critical commodities serving as inputs for multiple industries—and any shortage would have cascading impacts on global agriculture and manufacturing.” 

Southeast Asia is particularly vulnerable to an interruption in these supplies. Agriculture is the backbone of many ASEAN economies like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where smallholder farms of rice, maize, and oil palm provide employment and food security. Farming contributes about 10% of Southeast Asia’s GDP and a third of its jobs.

“Fertilizer shocks are not just input-market issues. They’re also social and political ones,” warns Imelda Bacudo, an Indonesia-based agri-food systems expert with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “The risk is not only lower yields, but also reduced farmer incomes, higher rural vulnerability, and eventually, higher food prices for consumers.” 

Many crops grown in Southeast Asia depend on fertilizer, even if the region doesn’t produce that much of it. According to a report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a 50% reduction in fertilizer use can reduce palm oil yields by up to 40%. 

When it comes to fertilizer, experts think that countries can manage a supply shock in the short-term, whether by tapping stockpiles or turning to alternate products. But a prolonged closure would spell trouble for farms—and, in turn, for consumers.

An extended disruption “will have a negative flow-through effect on the next season’s crops,” warns Paul Teng, a visiting senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Some farmers may even reduce their plantings, as they did during the early days of the Ukraine conflict.”

Helium, semiconductors and manufacturing

The supply chain upheaval also extends to helium, a key industrial gas used in cooling and leak detection. In particular, it cools magnets used in chip fabrication and MRI systems. 

“A shortage of helium would pose a risk to both the semiconductor and healthcare sectors,” says Ghosh from SUSS, adding that substitutes are “highly challenging” to find.

“Gases such as nitrogen or argon could be used in older fabrication facilities, but they’re unsuitable for high-precision processes in advanced fabs,” he explains.

Older semiconductor fabrication facilities, such as those in Malaysia or Singapore, also lack advanced helium recycling capabilities. They can recycle just half of their helium, whereas high-end plants, like those operated by TSMC or Samsung, can reuse as much as 90%. 

Chipmakers have responded by looking for alternate sources of helium, particularly from other large exporters like the U.S. and Russia, yet SUSS professor Tay Huay Ling says these measures simply “mitigate risk without eliminating it.” Actions like building stockpiles don’t address the underlying overreliance on imported helium. 

Over the longer term, companies and governments could try to reduce their reliance on supply chains that travel through chokepoints. Industries can also invest in processes that reduce the use of these critical components: Firms that rely on helium can invest in recycling machinery, while the agriculture sector can turn to fertilizer alternatives like green ammonia. 

Bacudo, from the FAO, sees a “real opportunity” for multilateral organizations like ASEAN, which can work together to hedge against some of these supply chain disruptions. 

Still, Asian industries that rely on inputs from an unstable Middle East will need to manage a volatile commodity market. Even if the Iran war ends soon, shortages are likely to continue for months. 

“This crisis looks less like a temporary shock, and more like confirmation of a more fragile era for critical inputs,” Tay, from SUSS, says. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Supermicro has spent the past three years riding the AI wave in Silicon Valley but before the recent allegations involving a co-founder smuggling Nvidia chips, it previously ran afoul of export-control regulations.  

The hardware manufacturer’s co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, was charged on Thursday with conspiring to smuggle about $2.5 billion worth of highly coveted Nvidia GPUs in servers to China. Prosecutors claim that Liaw, along with Supermicro’s Taiwan general manager Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, and a “fixer” named Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, routed servers with banned Nvidia H200 and B200 GPUs through an unnamed Southeast Asian company to Chinese buyers who wanted the chips. Authorities arrested Liaw and Sun this past week. Chang remains a fugitive, according to the Department of Justice. The company has not been accused of wrongdoing, and neither have co-founders Charles Liang, who is the CEO and chairman, nor his wife, Sara Liu, a board member and co-founder.

In a statement Supermicro said Liaw resigned his board seat on Friday, and he remains on administrative leave, along with Chang. Sun was fired. Supermicro’s stock plummeted in trading on Friday, giving short sellers who have collectively bet $2.6 billion against the company a windfall. Shorts collected an estimated $860 million in single-day gains after the stock sank 33%, according to financial data firm S3 Partners. The day pushed their March gains to nearly $1 billion. Supermicro has said it is cooperating with law enforcement and it was not named in the indictment.

However, this isn’t Supermicro’s first brush with this type of export-control violation. 

Court records and the company’s own disclosures show the latest allegations of smuggling to a restricted market show striking similarities to a 20-year-old enforcement action also involving the company, which was founded in 1993 by Liaw, Liang, and Liu. None of the three were named in the 2006 enforcement or charged with wrongdoing.

In 2006, Supermicro pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally exporting computer equipment to Iran, and paid a $150,000 fine to the Department of Justice. Separately, Supermicro settled a parallel action involving 12 charges related to sales of servers, motherboards, and computer chassis brought by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) by paying a $125,400 civil penalty. The company also paid an additional $179,327 to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to settle allegations under the Iranian Transactions Regulation, a violation that OFAC said Supermicro did not voluntarily disclose to the regulator.  

The two cases—separated by two decades and vast differences in scope—allegedly share a similar pattern. Find a neighboring country where it is legal to sell to, hide the real buyer, and ship the restricted tech to the illegal market.

A representative for Supermicro declined to comment on the Iran violations. 

The scheme

The Iran tech sales took place between September 2001 and March 2003, court records show, about a decade after Liaw, Liang, and Liu, who serves as a senior vice president and member of the board, founded Supermicro.

According to the BIS charging document from 2006, Supermicro exported servers, motherboards, and computer chassis from the U.S. through the United Arab Emirates and then onto Iran on six separate occasions without the required licenses from OFAC. A distributor in Dubai served as the pass-through for the equipment. Officials said Supermicro’s “senior director of strategic sales knew of, or had reason to know” about the embargo on sales to Iran. BIS charged the company with three counts of selling goods knowing that export violations would occur and three counts of misrepresenting its shipper export declarations to the U.S. government by claiming it did not need a license to sell the hardware. 

Supermicro settled the cases in September 2006 and cooperated with the government’s investigation, records show. It also implemented an in-house export control program before the BIS and DOJ formally brought charges. The sentencing memo stated that the fines were “sufficient to deter other companies from committing similar crimes.”

DOJ: The China conspiracy

The indictment unsealed this week claims that the accused trio of Liaw, Sun, and Chang allegedly conspired to route servers that included the Nvidia chips in 2024. The defendants allegedly sent the servers through an unnamed Southeast Asian company before they made their way to China. Liaw, Sun, and Chang could not be reached for comment.  

The mechanics alleged in the indictment mirror the Iran violation from 20 years ago. In the alleged China scheme, the Southeast Asian company submitted repeat purchase orders to Supermicro purportedly for its own use. Instead, when the servers arrived after being assembled in the U.S., the Southeast Asian company allegedly sent them on to the real buyers in China. To keep it all hidden, the servers were allegedly repacked in unmarked boxes, the indictment states. 

According to the indictment, the Southeast Asian company grew to become one of Supermicro’s biggest customers, ranking 11th globally in fiscal 2024 with $99.7 million in revenue. Ultimately, the total value of server sales grew to $2.5 billion, authorities claim.

Throughout the swell, Liaw was allegedly directing the activities behind the scenes, the indictment says. 

In January 2025 when the Trump Administration announced new AI export restrictions slated to start on May 13, 2025, Liaw texted an executive at the Southeast Asian company, “We need to speed these up before May 13!” A few days later, the indictment notes, he texted again, “We can ship all your 512 x B200 by Feb. Let us run fast before May 13!” he wrote, referring to the Nvidia GPUs. 

According to the indictment, the executive Liaw texted with wrote him in March and sent a news article about smugglers being accused of routing Nvidia chips to China and wrote, “I’m very concerned Wally.” Liaw wrote back trying to assuage his concerns and then continued making inquiries about the GPU orders, the indictment states. In August 2025, one of the brokers allegedly involved in the Supermicro scheme sent Liaw a link to a DOJ press release about more arrests for AI chip smuggling. Liaw replied with a string of sobbing-face emojis, the indictment states, and then kept working with Chang and Sun, authorities say. 

The indictment notes that as the orders continued, the accused allegedly worked harder to keep it all secret. Supermicro’s compliance team started an audit in late 2024, the indictment states, which was around the time Supermicro was dealing with a cluster of issues in the U.S. Its auditor EY had resigned in October, the DOJ had opened an investigation into the company based on accounting allegations raised by a former employee, and it was at risk of being delisted by Nasdaq. It later hired BDO and its own internal investigation into its accounting found no evidence of wrongdoing. BDO has not been accused of wrongdoing in the smuggling case. BDO declined to comment.

During the 2024 audit during that heightened period, Chang allegedly arranged for a “friendly” auditor employed by Supermicro to conduct the inspection, the indictment states. When a second, more rigorous audit was set for August 2025, Sun and Chang allegedly staged hundreds of what authorities called “dummy” servers, which it defined as non-working physical replicas in Supermicro boxes. 

The dummy servers were allegedly set up at the Southeast Asian company’s warehouses so auditors could confirm their arrival. Sun said the staging operation would need about 100 people, forklift operators, arranged meals, and a “20-person shuttle bus for easy travel between the hotel and the warehouse, allowing for short breaks,” the indictment states. During the actual audit, however, the indictment states that Supermicro’s compliance worker was off site “enjoying entertainment” on the Southeast Asian company’s dime, the indictment claims. 

Sun texted Liaw to say the audit had run smoothly and included 2,107 units in three warehouses. Liaw wrote back, “That’s spectacular!” the indictment states, and continued placing new orders days later. In December 2025, BIS sent one of its own inspectors to do a post-shipment verification check. The indictment claims Sun allegedly set up the dummy servers again, using a hair dryer to peel off labels and serial-number stickers, which was captured on surveillance cameras. Authorities say Sun allegedly introduced himself as “Michael” and said he worked at the Southeast Asian company’s law firm while fielding questions from the federal BIS officer. 

In the Iran case, Supermicro’s then-CFO Howard Hideshima signed off on its settlements with law enforcement. He served as the CFO from 2006 through 2018, before Nasdaq suspended the company from trading and formally delisted it in March 2019. In 2020, Hideshima and Supermicro were charged by the Securities & Exchange Commission for accounting-related issues. Hideshima was fined $50,000 by the regulator and left the company. 

Liaw also left the company following the 2018 accounting scandal. The company brought him back as an adviser in “business development” in May 2021, and he returned to a full-time senior executive post in August 2022. In December 2023, he rejoined the board before his resignation this week. 

On Friday, Supermicro said it appointed DeAnna Luna as its acting chief compliance officer. Luna joined Supermicro in 2024 as vice president of global trade and sanctions compliance.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on how a wartime mindset is the new default.
• The big story: Is Cursor dead?
• The markets: Down big as Trump and Tehran exchange threats.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. To some extent, every CEO is a wartime CEO when their country is at war. But the concept, and the characteristics that go with it, extend far beyond geopolitics. As Fortune’s Geoff Colvin points out in this piece, Shell put military-style scenario planning at the heart of its corporate decision-making in the 1970s. I’ve talked about the concept of wartime and peacetime leadership with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who wrote about it 15 years ago, and leadership consultant Stephen Miles of TMG. When UiPath CEO Daniel Dines told me last week that “we treat this time as wartime,” he was talking not about Iran but his push to pivot the robotic process automation company he founded towards agentic AI.

What’s changed?

‘War’ is the norm – “Peacetime left us in March of 2020,” Miles told me yesterday. “The new world is now ambiguous, uncertain, and discontinuous … The world is hours, minutes and seconds, not quarters and years, and I don’t see that changing.” In his view, that calls for leadership that’s “total immersion, which provides much higher context and the ability to weak-signal detect so you get the whiffs of smoke before there is a forest fire.”

Anxiety, alignment and agency – For Horowitz, a peacetime CEO has a large advantage in a growing market; in war, they’re facing an “imminent existential threat.” The first is about expanding the market and reinforcing strengths, the latter is about speed and survival. As Dines put it: “In peacetime, you can tolerate different behaviors and try to adjust …We need to implement decisions faster and propagate them to the company much faster.” Anxiety is a motivator to go for it: “If you wait to see where the world is going, it’s not going to work.” Dines defines agency as “people with both expertise and the will to make things happen.”

People become disposable – In war, people die. The corporate equivalent is that they are fired. More risks are taken. Dissent isn’t tolerated and consensus isn’t a priority. There’s also more pressure at the top. My colleague Claire Zillman writes that, broadly speaking, the AI revolution is creating more CEO churn, according to Spencer Stuart. Feigen Advisors found that despite the headlines about skyrocketing turnover, leadership at a narrower band of companies—the top of half of the S&P 500—has held relatively steady, though it also found CEO turnover outside the U.S. is increasing. Does this mean America is winning the war? It depends, of course, on how you define the battlefield.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For decades, building a billion-dollar company required a village. Raise massive capital, hire hundreds of people, build a sprawling department for every operational headache — from VAT compliance in Marseille to sourcing logistics in Shenzhen. Headcount was power. Scale required sacrifice of autonomy.

That equation is breaking down. The “Execution Wall” that once separated the solo entrepreneur from the multinational corporation is crumbling — not because the giants are fading, but because the tools of scale have finally been democratized. We are entering the age of the One-Person Unicorn.

From Busywork to Strategic Command

The solo founder was historically a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Ten hats, and eight of them — labeled “Procurement,” “Customs,” and “Compliance”— never fit. To scale, entrepreneurs often had to surrender their autonomy to investors just to fund the headcount needed to handle the boring-but-vital heavy lifting.

Unlike earlier automation, agentic AI doesn’t just follow a script — it reasons, adapts, and executes. This shifts how we interact with technology: away from clicking through dashboards and menus, toward a language-based interface where complex end-to-end workflows are triggered by intent rather than manual data entry. Enterprise AI agents can now navigate the full labyrinth of global trade — from RFQs to cross-border payments — freeing founders to reclaim their time for strategy.

The Shift From B2B to A2A

The real power of the One-Person Unicorn isn’t just internal efficiency; It’s how they interact with the world.

Global trade has historically been a sluggish game of human-to-human coordination: email chains, manual vetting, and midnight phone calls across time zones.

The future looks radically different.

Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interaction — where a buyer’s AI and a seller’s AI communicate directly through APIs — can compress weeks of supplier negotiations and logistics coordination into minutes of high-fidelity data exchange.

When the “cost of execution” collapses toward zero, a lone entrepreneur gains the operational reach of a Fortune 500 company. That’s not a metaphor. It’s an emerging structural reality. That’s not a metaphor. It’s an emerging structural reality.

What This Means for the Workforce

This transition inevitably raises employment questions. But what’s unfolding is less a story of displacement than of professional elevation.

By absorbing the shadow work of administration, AI raises the floor for individual capability. We see this in the way tools like Accio Work provide an immediate operational backbone for the solo entrepreneur, bypassing the need for a traditional back-office — providing an immediate operational backbone that bypasses the traditional back-office entirely.

The boundary between “employee” and “owner” is beginning to blur. A generation of specialists now has the infrastructure to launch global ventures without a single hire.

The Leadership Bar Just Got Higher 

Democratized power comes with a significant catch: as the barrier to entry falls, the bar for leadership rises.

In this new economy, grinding through administrative tasks is no longer a badge of honor — it’s a failure of leverage. The competitive advantages of the next decade won’t be technical proficiency or a massive payroll. They’ll be judgment, taste, and strategic vision. The AI can execute the workflow, but the human must supply the direction and quality control. The bottleneck is no longer a lack of resources, but a potential lack of imagination. It’s a potential lack of imagination.

The Invisible Office Is Already Open

The gap between a small business and a global powerhouse is narrowing faster than most leaders realize. The One-Person Unicorn is no longer a theoretical outlier — it’s a model emerging on the horizon for a world where capability, not headcount, defines a firm’s reach.

The question is no longer whether this future is coming. It’s whether you’ll be ready to lead it.

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