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Indonesia’s richest man, Michael Bambang Hartono, who helped turn the Djarum cigarette company into one of the country’s largest business empires and later became a controlling shareholder of Bank Central Asia, Indonesia’s biggest private lender, died Thursday. He was 86.

Hartono died at a hospital in Singapore on Thursday afternoon, the Djarum Group said in a statement.

“With deep sorrow, the extended family of PT Djarum announces the passing of one of our company’s leaders, Michael Bambang Hartono,” the statement said. “We extend our gratitude for his dedication and service.”

The family has not revealed the cause of his death. He had previously acknowledged suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a heart attack.

Hartono and his brother Robert Budi Hartono grew their inherited family business into a conglomerate based in Central Java’s Kudus regency, operating in banking, palm oil plantations, properties, electronics, telecommunications, and an e-commerce platform.

Their flagship company PT Djarum produced dozens of domestic and international brands, primarily kretek, or clove cigarettes, including Djarum Black, Djarum Super and L.A. Lights. The brothers also are the biggest shareholders in Bank Central Asia, Indonesia’s largest bank, which had revenue of 57.5 trillion rupiah ($3.43 billion) last year.

Their net worth was more than $43.8 billion, making the Hartono brothers the wealthiest in Indonesia. Michael Hartono had about $25.1 billion in December 2024, making him the 76th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

In 2004, they won the right to redevelop Hotel Indonesia, a historic site in the heart of Jakarta. They transformed the property into a shopping mall, office, luxury hotel and apartment complex called Grand Indonesia.

Through its parent company, PT Dwimuria Investama Andalan, better known as the Djarum Group, the company has diversified into non‑tobacco businesses, including banking, technology and food.

Djarum also owns PB Djarum, one of Indonesia’s most prominent badminton clubs, whose players have won numerous world championships for Indonesia, and the Italian football club Como. The company was a major sponsor of Indonesia’s top soccer league from 2005 to 2011.

Hartono was also a champion bridge player and the president of the South East Asia Bridge Federation. He received an award from the World Bridge Federation in 2017 for his efforts in making bridge a category in the Asian Games.

He represented Indonesia at the 2018 Asian Games in bridge, winning a bronze medal with his team, making him the oldest Indonesian Asian Games medal winner.

When he and other athletes were honored at the presidential palace for Indonesia’s performance at the Games that year, Hartono received a reward of about $16,700, which he donated to the development of his beloved card game.

Born Oct. 2, 1939, Hartono watched his father roll tobacco with a native clove spice to make the cigarettes Indonesians call “kretek” for the crackling sound made by the burning scented spice. The brothers took over the business upon their father’s death in 1963, worked on developing new blends and began exporting in 1972 to many countries, including the U.S.

They created their first machine-made kretek, the Djarum Filter, in 1976, and introduced the machine-rolled Djarum Super, in 1981.

It is one of the most popular brands in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, where more than 64 million adults smoke daily.

Djarum’s clove products are now marketed as “filtered cigars” and are wrapped in tobacco leaf instead of black paper since the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act banned most flavored cigarettes in the U.S.

Today, about 60,000 workers at their factories manually roll Djarum’s cigarettes, which are sold mostly to lower-income earners.

Hartono is survived by his wife and a son.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

European leaders doubled down Thursday on refusing to join the United States and Israel military campaigns in the Middle East as they met in Brussels to grapple with rising oil and gas prices caused by the war.

European leaders have deflected entreaties from U.S. President Donald Trump to send military assets to secure the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for the global flow of oil, gas and fertilizer. However, rising energy prices because of the war and fears in Europe of a new refugee crisis have pushed leaders to make the Middle East a priority at the summit.

“We are very worried about the energy crisis,” said Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever ahead of the summit. He said that energy prices were too high before the war, but that the conflict “created another spike.”

“If that becomes structural, we’re in deep trouble,” he said.

The summit was initially expected to center on overcoming Hungary’s opposition to a massive loan for Ukraine, but the conflicts in Iran and Lebanon reset the agenda.

European leaders have no ‘appetite’ for joining the war

European leaders have been deeply critical of the Iranian government, but none have offered immediate help to the U.S. Britain is flat-out refusing to be drawn into the war. France says the fighting would have to die down first.

Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said that Europe “will not allow itself to be blackmailed” into joining the United States and Israel military campaign in the Middle East.

“Europe — and Austria as well — will not allow itself to be blackmailed,” he said ahead of the European Council summit of the leaders of the 27 EU nations. “Intervention in the Strait of Hormuz is not an option for Austria anyway.”

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said there was “no appetite” among leaders to expand a European naval force in the Red Sea to help secure the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise join the fray.

Looking ahead to the war’s end

Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the war must end before his country can help with matters such as keeping shipping lanes clear.

“We can and will commit ourselves only when the weapons fall silent,” he said of potential German military support to secure shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. “We can then do a great deal, up to opening sea lanes and keeping them clear, but we’re not doing it during ongoing combat operations.”

He said that would require an international mandate, among other complicated steps, “before we can even consider such an issue.”

While the EU isn’t a party to the conflict, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said he understood the U.S. and Israeli reasons for launching the campaign against the “brutal” Iranian government. He called for the EU to increase both sanctions on Iran and support for Iranian opposition groups

But others blasted the war as “illegal” and destabilizing.

“We are against this war because it is illegal,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said: “It’s causing a lot of damage to civilians, of course, refugees and the economic consequences that the whole world, especially the global south, is already suffering.”

Trump had mentioned NATO support for clearing the Strait of Hormuz but has not officially requested it, said Evika Silina, prime minister of Latvia, one of the 23 out of the 27 EU nations that are NATO members.

“When there will be some official requests, I think we always have to evaluate those requests.”

No single fix for the EU’s diverse energy markets

The European Commission has told leaders it has a mix of financial instruments that member nations could deploy to lower energy prices, which will be up for discussion. No single policy will likely work to blunt the economic shocks from the war across the bloc’s myriad markets from Romania to Ireland.

EU leaders are hoping their experience weaning off of Russian energy in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and of building up the bloc’s military spending towards self-sufficiency will enable to them to do the same for energy independence.

While some European capitals have called for the suspension or scrapping of climate policies to stave off the worst of the recent spike in energy prices because of the war, others have argued that the EU’s long-term energy strategy should be home-grown sustainable energy decoupled from vulnerable fossil fuel markets.

European Council President Antonio Costa said that “energy means security” and that the EU should “build our own capacity to produce our own energy, because it’s the only way to be secure.”

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Associated Press writers Pietro De Cristofaro, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Your next laptop, smartphone, or even refrigerator is going to cost more — and you can thank AI for that. The AI boom has triggered what insiders are calling “RAMageddon”: a gold rush on high-bandwidth memory chips that is squeezing out nearly every other buyer in the global market, driving up prices across consumer electronics and straining industries from automotive to healthcare. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned about the pressure AI infrastructure costs are placing on hardware margins.

The biggest AI players have effectively imposed a tax on the entire economy — and most people have no idea it’s happening.

How the once-affordable memory chip became a luxury good

Modern computing relies on several types of memory. SRAM is the fastest and most expensive; it’s used in small amounts inside processors. DRAM is the workhorse of the group: cheap, abundant, found in everything from laptops to cars to refrigerators. Then there’s High Bandwidth Memory or HBM. This is a specialized, premium form of DRAM that stacks chips die-to-die to achieve dramatically faster data transfer speeds. The cost for this premium memory is quite steep: a single silicon wafer provides 3x as much commodity DRAM as HBM. Fab processing time for HBM is significantly longer too, making the supply problem worse. As a result, producing more HBM equates to fewer total memory chips produced.

For AI training and inference, HBM has become the essential ingredient. It’s the jet fuel that powers the GPUs running today’s largest and most advanced models. 

Memory manufacturers have a limited number of wafers they can produce from each fab, or silicon factory. The same production lines that churn out commodity DRAM for the devices consumers use every day are being allocated to building HBM. It’s a rational business decision: HBM commands premium prices in a volatile industry and comes with massive guaranteed purchase orders. In fact, AI firms and their peers have already locked up HBM supply well into 2027. The result is a tightening of commodity memory supply, rising prices, and longer lead times with ripple effects that touch almost every industry. And right now, the industry’s biggest players have cornered the supply, creating the core tension driving the memory shortage. The AI industry is effectively taxing the entire economy in order to build its own.

The memory wall explained

The scale of AI’s memory appetite is staggering. As model sizes have grown from millions to billions to trillions of parameters and context windows have grown from thousands of tokens to tens of millions of tokens, memory requirements have increased in step, and the architecture of data centers has struggled to keep pace. This is the industry’s “memory wall”: a fundamental bottleneck where memory bandwidth and capacity can’t keep up with the processors demanding it.

HBM was an elegant solution to an earlier version of this problem. When models were smaller (such as GPT-2 and GPT-3), placing memory adjacent to the processors and delivering data at extreme speeds worked well. But we’ve since blown past that era. Today’s frontier models exceed two trillion parameters and the next generation will be over five trillion. A single HBM stack holds about 24 gigabytes. That’s roughly one percent of what today’s workloads actually need and far less than that for the next generation of workloads.

The result is that data centers must now scale out exponentially. They chain together hundreds of processors across servers and racks. At that point, HBM’s killer feature of extreme local bandwidth gets strangled by the comparatively slow links connecting all of these machines. The industry has built a gold-plated solution to the problem: AI companies pay the HBM premium while realizing only diminishing returns on performance.

The AI gold rush leaves most behind

The prevailing narrative frames AI infrastructure investment as broadly good: better for memory makers, better for chip companies, better for innovation everywhere. The reality is more lopsided.

Memory manufacturers may profit in the short term. But the true winner is concentration itself. When the HBM supply is locked up by a handful of hyperscalers, it functions as a moat. Startups, enterprises, and established industries all face higher hardware costs and more limited access to the advanced AI capabilities they need to compete. The companies that can afford to stockpile chips don’t just win today; they entrench advantages that could become impossible to dislodge.

Everyone else is caught in the crossfire. Consumers will pay more for devices with less capability. Businesses face a hardware cost environment that has become more taxing and volatile. And the broader technology ecosystem is competing for memory resources against an industry that has essentially unlimited capital to outbid them.

Charting a more sustainable path for AI and memory

The AI industry loves to talk about democratization: open models, accessible tools, intelligence for everyone. That story is increasingly disconnected from the hardware reality being constructed underneath it.

The current trajectory isn’t sustainable. Pouring more investment into HBM capacity addresses a symptom while ignoring the underlying disease. The industry needs to move beyond its fixation on a single memory architecture designed for an earlier era of AI and invest seriously in new approaches—ones that can meet AI’s demands today, and as they grow a hundredfold in the next few years.

Solving this requires more than ramping up additional HBM fabs. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how memory is architected for AI. What’s needed are memory systems that are smart, fast, and compact — architectures that can scale alongside model growth without requiring brute-force resource consumption. Most importantly, the emerging architecture must make AI accessible to more than just a handful of companies.

The memory wall isn’t just an engineering footnote in AI’s rise. It’s the defining infrastructure challenge of this era. The industry’s current answer of “more HBM, faster, at any cost” is a perilous road that risks eroding competition, innovation, and consumer trust. As an industry, we must find a way to do better, and quickly, before it’s too late. The most immediate relief available is a pivot away from HBM dependency toward commodity DRAM architectures engineered specifically for AI’s requirements. The window to act — before the gap between AI haves and have-nots becomes unbridgeable — is closing fast.

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

President Donald Trump is facing perhaps the most daunting question of the war with Iran, one that could define his time in office: Will he put U.S. troops on the ground in Iran to secure some 970 pounds of enriched uranium that Tehran could potentially use to build nuclear weapons?

Trump has offered shifting reasons for launching the war, but he has been consistent in articulating that a primary objective in joining Israel in the military action is ensuring that Iran will “never have a nuclear weapon.”

The president has been more circumspect about how far he’s willing to go to follow through on his pledge to destroy Iran’s weapons program once and for all, including seizing or destroying the near-bomb-grade nuclear material that Iran possesses.

Much of it is believed to be buried under the rubble of a mountain facility pummeled in U.S. bombings Trump ordered last June that he had claimed “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear program.

It’s a risky, complicated project that many nuclear experts say cannot be done without a sizable deployment of U.S. troops into Iran, a dangerous and politically fraught operation for the Republican president, who has vowed not to entangle the U.S. in the sort of extended and bloody Middle East conflicts that still loom large on America’s psyche.

At the same time, lawmakers and experts remain concerned that if Iran hard-liners emerge from the fighting, they’ll be more motivated than ever to build nuclear weapons as they look to deter the U.S. and Israel from future military action, a dynamic that makes taking control of Iran’s enriched uranium even more critical. That stockpile could allow Iran to build as many as 10 nuclear bombs, should it decide to weaponize its program.

Some lawmakers, like Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., say they remain deeply fearful that the president has put the nation on a path that will require putting troops inside Iran for what he called Trump’s confused and chaotic objectives.

“Some of the objectives that he continues to espouse simply cannot be achieved without a physical presence there — securing the uranium cannot be done without a physical presence,” said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Meanwhile, Republican allies of Trump stress that there are plans in place to deal with the enriched uranium. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman James Risch, R-Idaho, on Wednesday cited “a number of plans that have been put on the table.” He declined to elaborate.

Others acknowledged the complications of deploying troops into Iran.

“No one has given me a briefing on how you would do it without boots on the ground,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It doesn’t mean you can’t. But no one’s ever briefed me about it.”

Scott added it’s not tenable to allow the stockpile to remain: “I think it would be helpful to get rid of it.”

Trump and his advisers are rigidly obtuse

Nearly three weeks into a conflict that’s left hundreds of people dead, tested longtime alliances and brought pain to the global economy, Trump and his top advisers have been rigidly obtuse about their deliberations over Iran’s uranium stockpile.

“I’m not going to talk about that,” Trump said last week when asked about the enriched uranium. “But we have hit them harder than virtually any country in history has been hit, and we’re not finished yet.”

Later that day, during an appearance in Kentucky, Trump appeared to claim the strikes had already neutralized the threat. “They don’t have nuclear potential,” he said.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters earlier this week that the administration sees no point in telegraphing “what we’re willing to do or how far we’re willing to go” while asserting “we have options, for sure.”

Experts say it’s doable but won’t be easy

Richard Goldberg, who served as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, said that seizing or destroying the enriched uranium is certainly doable, if the president decides to go that route.

The U.S. and Israeli forces have been making strides toward creating the conditions — namely, establishing total air superiority — that would allow for special operations forces operators, who are trained in blowing up centrifuges and dealing with nuclear material, to conduct such an operation if the president decides to go that route.

To be certain, a troops-on-the-ground effort is expected to be far more complicated than other recent high-profile, lightning-strike insertion operations, such as the January capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro or the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, Goldberg said. And the likely need to remove rubble to get to the canisters of enriched uranium adds another layer of complexity, because it would require heavy construction equipment.

“But if you actually own the airspace and you can have close air support and drones and everything else up in the sky for pretty wide perimeter, presumably you could do a lot,” said Goldberg, who is now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi told reporters in Washington this week that the assumption is much of the enriched uranium remains in the trio of Iranian nuclear sites bombarded last year by the U.S.

“The impression we have … is that it hasn’t been moved,” said Grossi, adding that a bulk of the material is beneath the rubble at Iran’s Isfahan facility while lesser amounts are at the Natanz and Fordow facilities that were destroyed in last year’s American strikes.

Testifying before a Senate committee on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in her prepared remarks said that the U.S. attacks on Iran had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and buried underground facilities.

Gabbard said the U.S. has been monitoring whether Iran’s leaders will try to restart its nuclear program but said that they have not tried to rebuild their nuclear enrichment capability. She added that the clerical authority overseeing Iranian government has been degraded in Israel’s strikes on its leadership but remains intact.

Brandan Buck, a senior foreign policy fellow at the Cato Institute, said that an effort to extract or dilute the enriched material would likely take more than 1,000 troops at each Iranian site and would take time to complete.

On the other hand, not acting to secure the enriched uranium also comes with risk. Should Iran’s hard-liners remain in power, and with enriched material, they will now have greater motivation to build a nuclear weapon.

“Trump has put himself between a rock and a hard place,” Buck said. “Throughout this, he has had maximalist aims, but he’s wanted to maintain minimal effort in order to keep the costs low.”

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Associated Press writers Stephen Groves, Matthew Lee and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Adobe’s longtime CEO Shantanu Narayen announced he was stepping down last week, a move caused, at least in part, by investors’ impatience with the software company’s AI transition. Abode’s stock has been crushed in the “SaaSpocalypse” market selloff that has hit companies whose per-seat software tools are especially vulnerable to automation. Shares are down 25% year-to-date, and investors weren’t impressed with Adobe’s AI-driven quarterly revenue. 

Narayen’s exit is a stark reminder that, after years of hyping the technology, CEOs now must turn their AI rhetoric into results—or risk being shown the door. The make-or-break moment for CEOs is contributing to an era of rapid turnover among chief executives. Last year, 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. Already this year, the CEOs of several companies including Lululemon, Disney, Target, and Walmart, have left their roles. 

CEO tenures are getting shorter and fewer incoming chief executives have prior CEO experience, the data shows, making the two-time CEO exceedingly rare. 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.

“What we’re seeing right now is clearly a sign of stress,” says Dirk Jenter, professor of finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. AI is only one part of the reason why.

AI hype is becoming a career hazard for corporate leaders

CEOs have been quick to blame recent layoffs of rank-and-file employees on AI, but their own departures are rarely explained so simply. Still, there’s little doubt that expectations around AI are factoring into chief executives’ more frequent departures in one way or another. 

There are circumstances like Narayen’s in which shareholders are displeased with a CEO’s ability to deliver on an AI vision. “Investors are not necessarily super patient,” Jenter says. “They see billions being spent on AI investments, and they see sort of very little in short-term return on investment, and that puts a lot of pressure on company leadership.”

But investors are also expecting CEOs to achieve overall growth on par with the extraordinary gains recorded at companies at the center of the AI revolution, the so-called “Magnificent 7.” 

“There’s increasing pressure on all CEOs to be growing at similar kinds of rates,” says Anthony Nyberg, a management professor at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. “[It’s] not actually sustainable or manageable for those companies.”

A surge in shareholder activism is another sign of investors’ growing impatience. Activist campaigns hit an all-time high of 255 last year, surpassing the 2018 record, according to Barclays. U.S. campaigns rose 23%. 

Activists are increasingly targeting CEOs. “Five or ten years ago, activism was largely about corporate policies,” Jenter says. “Now they’re going directly after the top leadership of companies.” Thirty-two U.S. CEOs resigned within a year of an activist campaign, a 38% increase over the four-year average, Barclays’ data shows. 

And then there are instances in which boards tap fresh (often younger) blood to guide companies through the AI transition. Doug McMillon, Walmart’s highly-respected former CEO who, by all accounts, left on his own terms, cited AI in explaining his decision to step down in January. He said his successor, John Furner, was “uniquely capable of leading the company through this next AI‑driven transformation.”

Another force behind the churn: Today’s board directors are less likely to be current or former CEOs than in the past, studies show. Nyberg argues that these less CEO‑centric boards tend to be less sympathetic to sitting chiefs—and perhaps less attuned to the full scope of the job—making them more inclined to support a leadership change.

Experts also argue that CEO turnover is catching up after a backlog from the COVID era, during which boards favored continuity. 

All told, CEOs are getting less time to deliver on their visions. The average tenure for S&P 1500 CEOs hit 8.5 years last year, down from 9.2 years in 2024—and the shortest since 2019. 

The broader CEO churn trend 

The rapid turnover is requiring boards to fulfill their succession planning responsibilities, and they’re increasingly dipping into their companies’ own ranks to replace chief executives. 

The share of externally hired CEOs hit 60% in 2025, up from 57%, a historic low, in 2024. But there are signs that boards have been caught off-guard by the pace of CEO turnover. Nineteen new CEOs were appointed from their company’s board last year, the most since 2020, according to Spencer Stuart, “suggesting that some companies are not ready for succession.” 

Almost always, internal CEO hires lack prior chief executive experience, a trait that shows up in the data. In 2025, 84% of newly appointed S&P 1500 CEOs in 2025 were serving in their first enterprise CEO role, reversing a multiyear trend toward CEOs with prior public-company experience.

Boards often view experienced CEOs as a safer bet, but Spencer Stuart research shows that, compared to veteran chief executives, rookies led their companies to higher market-adjusted total shareholder returns, with less volatility in the stock price.

As the number of first-time CEOs has increased, the age of new CEOs has dropped, hitting 54.4 in 2025, down from 55.8 in 2024. The share of incoming CEOs 60 and above fell to 18%, after hovering near 30% for the past two years.

Even with higher stakes and higher turnover, today’s CEOs are unlikely to garner much sympathy from the wider public. Median chief executive compensation hit $16.5 million in the S&P 500, according to 2025 proxy filings. (Exorbitant pay may actually be one reason two-time CEOs are so rare; few need the money.) 

Still, rapid CEO churn should raise alarm bells outside the boardroom. CEOs who hold onto the job past year ten beat the S&P 500 over the course of their time in the job, more than those in any other length of tenure, Spencer Stuart research shows. “That’s where the greatest shareholder value creation comes in,” says Jim Citrin, chair of the firm’s global CEO practice. “Longer is better.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Global energy prices soared Thursday after Iran attacked two oil refineries in Kuwait and a key natural gas facility in Qatar that can supply one-fifth of the world’s liquified natural gas.

The attacks added to fears the energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic may be longer and more extensive than feared, with lasting damage to oil and gas production.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose nearly 6% to $113.77 per barrel, up from less than $73 per barrel on the eve of the war. U.S. benchmark crude was less affected by the latest attacks in the Middle East, rising less than 1% to $96.26 per barrel.

The European TTF benchmark for natural gas prices traded 17% higher on Thursday and has doubled in the past month.

The Iranian attack hit the Ras Laffan terminal for shipping out liquefied natural gas in Qatar. Qatar normally supplies some 20% of the world’s consumption of LNG, which can be carried by ship. The facility shut down after a drone attack. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz to most tanker traffic also left the gas with nowhere to go.

If the disruptions from Iran’s attacks on its Gulf Arab neighbors’ energy infrastructure keep oil and gas prices high for long, they could create a debilitating wave of inflation for the global economy.

Markets on Wall Street slipped before the opening bell. Futures for the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average each fell a 0.1%, while Nasdaq futures dipped 0.3%.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve opted to leave its benchmark interest rate alone and projected just one more quarter-point cut this year due to ongoing elevated inflation and uncertainty about the ramifications the Iran war will have on the global economy.

Prices for gold and silver also tumbled, dragging down major mining stocks with them. Gold fell 4% to $4,697 an ounce, while silver slipped 8.7% to $70.80. Most industrial metals also saw their prices fall.

Shares in miners Hecla and Newmont slid 7.8%, while Freeport-McMoRan fell 4.6%.

Markets in Europe and Asia were getting hit much harder than U.S. markets. Germany’s DAX lost 2.4% by midday, the CAC 40 in Paris fell 1.7% and Britain’s FTSE 100 shed 2.1%.

In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 fell 3.4% to 53,372.53 as the Bank of Japan also opted to keep its benchmark interest rate on hold at 0.75%, citing the war with Iran as one factor.

In its monetary policy statement the BOJ said that “in the wake of increased tension in the Middle East, global financial and capital markets have been volatile and crude oil prices have risen significantly; future developments warrant attention.”

Higher oil prices are a heavy burden for Japan, which like South Korea and Taiwan depends on imports of most raw materials for industries that rely heavily on oil and its derivatives.

The Kospi in Seoul lost 2.7% to 5,763.22.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng slipped 2% to 25,500.58, while the Shanghai Composite index shed 1.4% to 4,006.55.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 1.7% to 8,497.80 and Taiwan’s Taiex fell 1.9%. In India, which has also suffered from shocks to supplies of oil and gas, the Sensex lost 2.7%.

“The combination of higher oil, rising U.S. yields, and a stronger dollar is acting as a macro wrecking ball across Asian assets and currencies,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.

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Business Writer Matt Ott reported from Washington; McHugh contributed from Frankfurt, Germany.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, a senior administration official says.

The department sent the request to the White House, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private information.

It’s an extraordinarily high number and comes on top of extra funding the Defense Department already received last year in President Donald Trump’s big tax cuts bill.

Congress is bracing for a new spending request but it is not clear the White House has transmitted the request for consideration. It is unclear the spending request would have support.

The new funding request was first reported by The Washington Post. Asked about the figure at a press conference Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not directly confirm the figure, saying it could change. But he said “we’re going back to Congress and our folks there to to ensure that we’re properly funded.”

“It takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“What torments of grief you’ve endured from evils that never arrived,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19^th-century American philosopher and writer. Millions of workers are feeling similar. How many jobs will artificial intelligence destroy? And are we all worrying unnecessarily? 

“The demand for human labor will not go away,” Mohit Joshi, the chief executive of the Indian information technology giant, Tech Mahindra, tells me. The world is entering an era of technology complexity and new business opportunities. The changes are likely to increase demand for ‘humans in the lead’, even though the job specifications will be radically different.  

Joshi has data and historical precedent to back up his assertion. In the 1990s, many companies, spooked by the threat of the Millennium Bug, invested heavily in technology updates as a protective measure. The bug—linked to the New Year date change from the 20^th century to the 21st—never materialized, leading to predictions that tech spending would fall back to 20^th century levels. It went in the opposite direction and the ‘trend to spend’ continued. 

Similar momentum is apparent in 2026 when it comes to the effects of artificial intelligence on workforces. “We think the productivity gains will not result in immediate headcount impacts,” Joshi says. “There is a lot of investment that will need to happen over the next couple of years to drive simplification, modernization and optimization. And, especially on the data side, investment will be required beyond the three to five years that it will take to modernize and simplify systems.” 

“In the best case beyond that, I feel the complexity of organizations will increase dramatically. And, if the AI premise gets realized fully, the economic growth is going to be so much more significant. It should create more opportunity, because you will have a much larger landscape.” 

Read more: AI is capable of remarkable feats. And has the power to kill. Meet one woman warning about the dangers ahead

Elon Musk talks of an era of abundance, ushered in by an applied AI revolution where a robot can do your shopping and energy comes from space. The journalist Ezra Klein has written a book of the same name, Abundance, arguing that governments have a key role to play in ending the age of scarcity. Products and services will change so radically that demand for employees will increase. 

“My own advice to my teams is that there will always be somebody who’s a winner,” Joshi says. “And my sense is that the people who are winning will have a few attributes. The first is that they will be fast, because there’s a gigantic premium for speed. You need to be able to pivot very quickly.” 

“The second is curiosity. And the final thing is, at a time of great change, leaders will need a degree of empathy and kindness to be able to carry teams along with them.” 

The ‘waterfall method’ of change is well known to business leaders—a sequential plan where projects are strictly defined and work is often driven through divisional silos with little opportunity for re-assessment. Most now lean towards the ‘agile method’, a more flexible approach to project management which encourages working between teams across the business. 

How to build AI into the agile process is the key question. “What can you do to drive productivity and efficiency in your business?” Joshi says. “What is it that you should be doing to drive revenue in your business? Because productivity is nice, but revenue is really the most important piece.” 

Return on AI investment is the key metric boards will want to see. “It’s very clear that organizations are going to get a lot flatter,” Joshi says. “You will have people at the top who will have a lot more in terms of span of control. You will have maybe a bulging middle instead of the traditional pyramid that we’ve had.” Employees with five to ten years’ experience will become ever more valuable. 

Not everything is digital. Joshi laughs as we notice that we both write with pens on paper (it helps me think more clearly). He encourages his children to read physical books, with a small pocket-money boost for each one completed. 

“What I tell my kids, almost obsessively, is that the ability to read and write well will never go away. So read as widely as you can early in life, because you will never again get this opportunity of unbroken periods of time where you can read, nor will your memory ever be as good to absorb as much as you can today. Learn to speak and write beautifully, and I think everything else will fall into place.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. In today’s Fortune:

• Global stock market selloff as Iran war expands to attacks on major gas fields.
• Trump admits he ‘knew nothing’ about Israel attack on Iran site.
• The Marines are coming. Get ready for boots on the ground.
• Inside Iran’s war strategy: Survive and resist.
• China is sitting back to watch the chaos.
• AI: Sales tripled at chipmaker Micron.
• Chart: There is a record number of objects orbiting Earth.
• Women are underrepresented in AI as workers and users.
• Perk watch: Some companies pay private school fees for CEOs’ kids.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Event platform Posh raised a fresh $37 million to solve one of the quintessential “tarpit” startup ideas: turning the “what are we doing tonight?” group chat into an actual plan.

Founded in 2019 by then‑New York University students Avante Price and Eli Taylor‑Lemire, Posh began as software they built to run their own events after getting cheated by promoters and hitting the limits of Eventbrite. “I was using Eventbrite and other products to manage events, and then realized that the technology components were missing a ton of the capabilities that I needed,” Price told Fortune. That pain point became Posh’s product: a business‑first platform where organizers, not the marketplace, sit at the center.​ The company is already capturing corners of the events industry which is on track to be worth more than $2 trillion by 2028.

Now, the company has raised its $37 million Series B led by FirstMark Capital with Causeway Ventures, Goodwater Capital, Companyon Ventures, and Epic Ventures, Fortune has exclusively learned.

Posh’s model is straightforward: Posh takes about a 10% cut on paid tickets plus a 99‑cent fee per ticket, its primary revenue stream. In 2024, the company generated roughly $10 million in revenue on more than $83 million in ticket sales (the same year it raised $22 million in Series A funding). Today, the business has grown to an estimated $40 million in cumulative revenue, according to Price, processing $350 million in GMV and 25 million tickets since inception, with top organizers generating over $10 million on the platform. “What you have to do is you have to own the transaction first,” Price told Fortune. 

Posh already powers everything from Palm Tree Festival and We Belong Here to brand activations with Lamborghini, Adidas, the NBA, Celsius, HBO, and Complex. The company has also poached talent from Meta, Reddit, Amazon, Hinge, Spotify, Block, and Canva to accomplish its goals. For the first four years, Posh was essentially “Shopify for events,” focused on tooling for nightlife: white‑label pages, SMS CRM, referral kickbacks, linked ticket tiers, and instant payouts. Now, with roughly 50,000 organizers and nearly 8 million users, the center of gravity has shifted toward demand—what Price calls a “Netflix‑style feed” that surfaces parties, activities, food and drink, and other categories based on where your broader social graph is actually going. 

“The solved problem is your core group chat,” he says. “The harder problem is those 10 or 20 people you’d love to catch up with but never text. We’re trying to reintroduce that serendipity.”​

See you tomorrow,

Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Sunway Healthcare shares rose 28% in their first day of trading, following the company’s 2.9 billion ringgit ($732 million) IPO, the country’s largest in nearly a decade. Shares of the Kuala Lumpur-based hospital operator, previously the healthcare arm of Malaysian conglomerate Sunway Group, closed at 1.85 ringgit on Wednesday, up from the offer price of 1.45 ringgit. The listing is Malaysia’s biggest since 2017’s IPO of Lotte ​Chemical Titan Holdings.

Sunway Group previously said the spin-off will help unlock shareholder value and improve the business’s access to capital markets. In Sunway Healthcare’s IPO prospectus, Sunway described the health business as a “distinct and viable business of its own.”

Sunway Healthcare generated 1.6 billion ringgit ($403 million) in revenue during the first nine months of 2025, a 17.8% year-on-year jump, according to its prospectus. Yet the company’s profits over the same period declined by 22% year-on-year to hit 140 million ringgit ($35.4 million).

Following its IPO, Sunway Healthcare will continue to operate its network of private hospitals, ambulatory care services and ancillary services, with plans to expand to eight hospitals totalling over 3,400 beds by 2032. Sunway Group will also retain majority control of its healthcare offshoot, owning 69.4% of the shares. 

Sunway Group, No. 190 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500 list, posted record revenue of 9.8 billion ringgit ($2.5 billion) in 2025, up 24.5% from the year before. The revenue jump was fueled by strong performance across most of its business segments, including property investment and construction.

Malaysia’s greying population

Sunway hopes to tap growing healthcare demand in an aging and wealthier Malaysia. “The outlook for Malaysia’s private healthcare services industry remains positive,” Sunway Group wrote in its Q4 2025 earnings report. “Malaysia has one of the largest middle-income populations in ASEAN, coupled with rising life expectancy and a growing incidence of non-communicable diseases.”

Malaysia has a rapidly aging population, with 14.5% of its population set to be 65 and older by 2040, according to the Malaysian Department of Statistics. Over 2 million Malaysians are living with non-communicable diseases including diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and obesity.

Investors are eager to invest in Malaysia’s healthcare boom. KPJ Healthcare, No. 303 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500, hit a record share price of 3.53 ringgit during intraday trading on March 18.

Malaysia’s stock exchange, the Bursa Malaysia, has also been having a blockbuster year. The KLCI Composite Index is up by 14.1% over the past 12 months, and breached a six-year high in mid-January. According to Deloitte, Malaysia had more IPOs than other Southeast Asian markets, with 59 IPOs raising 5.5 billion ringgit ($1.4 billion) in 2025.

The Malaysian ringgit has also risen to its strongest value in five years, propelled by AI optimism and rising energy prices. “The Ringgit should be one of the best performing currencies in Asia this year,” wrote Goldman Sachs strategists in a March 14 research note.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

My oldest daughter starts an internship at Deloitte this year. She’s capable and motivated. She’s also walking into a professional environment that is wildly different from what it was even a few short years ago.

I started my career more than a few short years ago. Back then, success had a simple formula: be the first one in, be the last one out, and always ask for more work. Effort was measured in hours. Visibility was measured in face time. That commitment still matters — I’m not going to tell my daughters that hard work doesn’t matter. But I am going to tell them that hard work alone won’t cut it anymore.

They need to work differently — and so does everyone else.

What working differently actually looks like

From my experience as both a CEO and a father, I’m genuinely impressed by Gen Z’s fluency in digital communication. They text. They message. They send voice notes. That’s very useful when communicating with each other. But it has its limits, even in this hyper-digital moment. Building trusted relationships is more important than ever.

A workplace includes people who came up through email culture, phone call culture, and even memo culture. Every generation connects differently, and each method has its place. My daughters will need to adjust their approach to fit the preferences of the people they work with, rather than expecting everyone else to adapt to them.

I’ve told them this directly: figure out how your manager prefers to communicate — even ask them — then use that method. Figure out how the finance team operates, how the field team talks, how the executives want information delivered. This isn’t about abandoning your style. It’s about building range. Be a communicative chameleon.

Building that range also means building capacity for adaptation. Gen Z’s digital fluency will seem outdated to the generations behind them — and they don’t even have to wait for Gen Alpha to enter the workforce. Things are changing much faster than that. Adaptation isn’t a strategy. It’s the baseline.

Where AI fits in

AI has become one of the most practical tools available for exactly this kind of adaptation — and most people entering the workforce aren’t using it this way yet.

I do this in my own work. Before major presentations, I feed my deck into an LLM and ask how my message might land with different audiences — the board, my direct reports, a customer. It doesn’t do the work for me, but it surfaces perspectives I might not have considered, helping me tailor my communication for maximum impact. If a Fortune 500 CEO is using AI to pressure-test how his message will land before a board meeting, a 22-year-old starting her first job should be doing the same thing.

For someone entering the workforce, this is a practical starting point. You’re walking into rooms — virtual or otherwise — full of people who think differently than you do, communicate differently than you do, and have expectations you haven’t learned yet. AI can help you anticipate how a message will be received before you send it. It can help you build emotional intelligence across departments and age groups — skills that used to take years to develop through experience, trial and error.

The tool is new. The goal isn’t. You’re still trying to connect with people — AI just gives you a way to rehearse before the stakes are real.

There’s no substitute for showing up

AI can help bridge communication gaps, but it’s still just a tool. There are people on both ends of every interaction, and there’s no substitute for human connection at work.

“Showing up” looks different in many companies now, with in-office, remote, and hybrid work physically separating colleagues. But digital elements are facilitators — not replacements. Showing up means more than logging into meetings; it’s about turning your camera on, engaging actively, and looking for ways to add value. True presence, whether virtual or in-person, requires intentional effort to connect, build trust, and participate fully.

My daughters will enter a workforce where building relationships across teams takes deliberate effort. Nobody’s going to bump into them in a hallway and offer career advice. They’ll need to seek it out and cultivate a circle of trusted advisors to help them through every stage of their careers.

The advice I keep coming back to

Early in my career, someone told me: look for ways to take on more than your job description. Don’t wait to be asked. Find the gap and fill it.

That advice hasn’t changed. Work ethic is still the foundation. But outworking your peers today means something different than it did in 1995. It means adapting. It means communicating in ways that land with people who think differently from you. It means using the tools available to sharpen your judgment, not replace it.

My daughters are smart enough to figure most of this out on their own. But the rules of the game have changed fast enough that even people 30 years into their careers are still catching up. The advantage goes to whoever adapts first.

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

• In today’s CEO Daily: UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon talks to Fortune’s Diane Brady on the company’s new UL 3115 standard
• The big leadership story: How to earn $18.4 million without working a single day
• The markets: It’s bad out there
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. For more than 120 years, UL has put its mark on products from tree lights to toaster cords to convey a promise: This won’t kill you. Last week, for the first time, the $3 billion-a-year safety science company issued a new certification for AI-embedded products. As UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon told me: “Innovation without safety is failure.”

Rarely has there been a technology that’s evolved so fast with so little oversight. (The patchwork of emerging state laws adds to the confusion.) This week, the spotlight is on OpenClaw, the autonomous virtual agent that’s spawned a new craze in China. It got a shout-out from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his developers conference this week, where he announced NemoClaw and declared OpenClaw framework to be “the next ChatGPT.”

Can private-sector safety standards do what Washington has not: provide guardrails to fast-moving technologies with potentially profound consequences? The UL mark already goes on about 22 billion products worldwide every year. This latest standard, UL 3115, evaluates whether an AI-enabled product is safe, robust and well-governed with a “human in control” throughout a product’s lifecycle. “Whether or not there’s government regulation around this, our customers are coming to us because they need broader protections and assurances,” Scanlon told me. “They’re clamoring to have at least a standard that they can adhere to that gives them the confidence in how they’re getting out in front of their customers.”

UL’s expertise is in functional safety. As Scanlon puts it: “When you turn the radio on in your car, you do not want your brakes to slam. So how is that embedded software being tested and proven? They’re embedding AIs in toys. How do we know those toys are safe for kids?”

That’s why UL’s AI Center of Excellence set out to apply its safety protocols to the new world of AI-embedded physical products. “We start with an outline of investigation, which is a precursor to safety. That’s our engineers and scientists working with customers to understand what they’re worried about, what they believe the challenges are—and then we come at it from the scientific perspective, which is: what else should you worry about?”

“In the case of AI‑embedded products, they started thinking about: How transparent is the algorithm? How much bias is built into those algorithms? What’s the veracity of the training data? And if some of that training data is not true, how do you eliminate it from the learning model? And type of human oversight and verification—that essential final check—is in place? What are those processes?”

Thus far, two products have been AI‑certified: Qcells’ Energy Management System, an AI-enabled control engine for data centers, and the Omniconn Platform 4.0, a smart building solution. It’s one part of the puzzle in a world where leaders are trying to match speed with safety.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com