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Checking a partner’s credit score used to be something people joked about before a third date. Now it’s closer to standard practice. According to TD Bank’s 2026 Love & Money Survey, which polled 2,000 adults, 46% of Americans say someone’s debt or financial habits would influence whether they pursue a serious relationship with them—and Millennials (51%) and Gen Z (49%) are more likely to say so than Gen X or Baby Boomers (39% each).

That reversal runs counter to the usual assumption that younger generations are more relaxed, more collaborative, and less judgmental about money than their parents were. Ashley Weeks, a wealth strategist at TD Bank who works directly with clients on the survey’s findings, said the shift reflects economic conditions rather than a change in values.

“There’s a pretty big divide between Gen X and Boomer responses versus Millennials and Gen Z,” Weeks told Fortune. “What we take from that is likely these are just a response to the existing stimuli that are out there in the economic space.” That includes things like student debt, inflation, and housing costs that have made personal finance inseparable from other parts of younger people’s lives, including who they choose to date.

Weeks said he sees the pattern firsthand. TD Wealth advisors often meet separately with older and younger generations within the same family, and the conversations diverge sharply. “The conversation for younger individuals does seem to focus more around the fact that someone’s ability to survive and be financially independent is an important factor now when evaluating the long-term prospects for a relationship,” he said.

He added that older relatives don’t always grasp the pressure younger people are under: “Sometimes senior generations—it seems like parents or grandparents—fail to grasp what the younger generations are going through.”

Prenups go from taboo to standard practice

More than half of respondents nationally (54%) said they would consider signing a prenuptial agreement, a number well above what prenups have historically polled at. Weeks attributed the shift to generational exposure to divorce. “People have seen their parents, and maybe their grandparents, go through a divorce, and the situation might not have transpired in a way that a younger generation thought was equitable,” he said. Weeks noted this dovetails with broader coverage of the trend—millennial and Gen Z women in particular have driven a cultural shift toward treating prenups as a wealth-planning tool rather than a sign of distrust.

“By at least considering it, that’s one way you can create your own rules,” Weeks said. “Versus essentially having to live with the default rules in the state you happen to be living.”

Anecdotally, he said, clients who go through the process of drafting a prenup seem less likely to divorce. “I don’t know if that’s because they have the communication skills on the front end to actually have that conversation,” he said. “That portends a healthy relationship, but that’s what I’ve observed.”

Miami feels the most pressure to keep up appearances

The survey oversampled six metro areas—New York, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, Charlotte and Washington, D.C.—and Miami stood out as the most financially anxious city surveyed. More than seven out of 10 (73%) of Miami respondents said they feel pressure at least sometimes to appear more financially successful in their personal lives, the highest share of any metro in the survey. Miami residents were also more likely than the national average to say they have at least one financial secret (65% vs. 56% nationally), and 58% said they’re at least sometimes scared or embarrassed to discuss finances with a partner, compared with 48% nationally.

That pressure appears to be reshaping life decisions in Miami more than almost anywhere else surveyed. Eighty-two percent of Miami respondents said they’ve delayed at least one major life milestone because of their finances, compared with 69% of New Yorkers. Miami residents were also considerably more likely to have received financial help from family—75%, compared with 59% in New York.

New York, notably, reported lower rates of financial secrecy and delayed milestones than Miami, but New Yorkers were still more likely than the general population to say they make financial decisions independently: 30% of New York respondents said they mostly make financial decisions on their own, compared with 21% nationally. More than half of New Yorkers (56%) said they’d consider a prenup, in line with the national trend TD documented.

“I don’t think humans have changed,” he said. “I just think that the economic environment is such that that’s the obvious thing to do when it takes so much to buy a house now, or to save up, or to get credit, or to pay off loans.” He connected the dynamic to reporting on young adults increasingly relying on family for financial support and a labor force participation rate that has fallen to its lowest level in 50 years outside the pandemic—both signs, he said, that the financial stakes of any given relationship are higher than they used to be.

“If you’re commingling finances with someone, their debts become your debts. Their spending habits you’re largely tied to,” Weeks said. “I think it’s an awareness of that. The fact that that is going to have a major impact over your relationship satisfaction and your life satisfaction.”

Financial secrecy is widespread and hard to explain

Nationally, 30% of respondents admitted to hiding a purchase or financial decision from a partner or family member, and 11% said they keep a bank account hidden entirely from the people closest to them — a number that stood out to Weeks. “That takes some level of subterfuge to, especially if you’re married and filing a joint tax return,” he said. “That level of deviance. That one did stand out and surprise me.”

Weeks said credit card debt, gambling and bad credit scores were the most common things people admitted hiding from partners, and attributed the pattern to a fear of judgment rather than deliberate deception. “There are concerns about sharing with a family member about spending habits, and obviously there are issues with communication, where people feel like if they’re upfront about what they’ve done, there’s going to be some judgment,” he said.

Support flows both ways

The survey also found that financial help within families isn’t one-directional. Roughly two-thirds of respondents said they’ve received financial assistance from family or someone close to them, and about 70% said they’ve given it—evidence, Weeks said, that money moves across generations rather than strictly downward from parents to children. “As people grow and as they age, they both receive help, and then when they’re in a position to give it, the data suggests that a vast majority do,” he said, pointing to examples ranging from parents funding a down payment to something as small as keeping an adult child on a family phone plan. About a third of respondents identified as part of the “sandwich generation,” supporting both children and aging relatives at the same time.

Overall, the data seems pretty spot on with current events. “I think that these are typically rational considerations, given that the stakes are so high financially.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It’s no secret teachers in the U.S. are widely underpaid. Despite putting in far more work hours than other adults each week, teachers in many states make less than the U.S. median salary of about $64,220. 

So one philanthropist decided to do something about it. Last week, more than 100 teachers, counselors, and advisors from a school in a suburb of San Francisco were asked to attend a last-minute meeting, according to The San Francisco Standard—and each was handed a check for $9,161.70.

Longtime local philanthropist Maja Kristin donated $1 million to make that happen. 

“We, as citizens, can write a direct check, Kristin told TV station KRON4. “My hope was … word would get out, and Marin residents who value public education would step forward one way or another, whether it’s a direct gift or a political act, or foundation pull or something.” 

Even though Marin County is one of the wealthiest suburbs of San Francisco, with a median household income of nearly $150,000, teachers in the Ross Valley School District were paid only about $64,000. Meanwhile, other starting salaries for teachers in Marin County are as high as almost $80,000, according to data from Ross Valley School District. And, mid-range salaries can be as high as about $142,000 in Marin County, but Ross Valley trails behind at just $102,000, the data shows.

So, Kristin believes teachers being just about $64,000 in Ross Valley is gross underpayment. 

“I have three kids, and there’s lots of activities that they want to do that we can’t always afford to pay for because of my salary,” teacher Anna Schnell told KRON4.  “And it’s with this kind [of] money that there are things I can say yes to that they want to do, so it’s really exciting and huge for our family.”

Kristin isn’t the only donor bypassing institutions to put money directly in educators’ hands. Last year, an anonymous San Francisco tech worker gave $1.6 million so that all 6,000 teachers and paraeducators in San Francisco Unified received a $250 gift card. Businessman and TV personality Marcus Lemonis also cut $18,000 checks to every staff member at his Miami high school alma mater in 2021.

“I’m not going to wait for the government or private institutions to do what we think is right,” Lemonis said, similar to Kristin’s own case that “we, as citizens, can write a direct check.”

Who is Maja Kristin and why did she donate $1 million to teachers?

Kristin started her professional career in law, specializing in civil cases for survivors of sexual abuse, and is known for her work against the Catholic Church involving priest molestation. 

She later taught negotiation and mediation at law schools including Stanford Law School, UC Berkeley School of Law, and UC Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco).

Kristin grew up in San Francisco’s public housing projects, raised by a single mother, and worked her way through college and law school. She founded her own firm just two years after passing the bar, and was later named one of America’s top 10 women lawyers by Time.

In a podcast interview, Kristin described a philosophy she calls “the last breath, the last dime,” which is a plan to distribute her wealth while she’s alive rather than pass it to heirs. 

While her net worth is unknown, Kristin has made several multimillion-dollar donations, including a $3 million gift to the American Red Cross in January and $3 million to UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center in 2023. That same year, she also donated a 120-acre Nicasio property (in Marin County) to Halleck Creek Ranch, which connects children and adults living with disabilities to horseback riding and equine therapy. Before that, she had been a consistent donor to Halleck Creek Ranch for more than a decade. 

“The timing was just perfect,” Kristin told the Point Reyes Light. “Halleck is right there, and when I reached out, they said they were looking to expand their outreach and wanted to preserve the land.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital named Dr. Charles W. M. Roberts its new president and chief executive officer Tuesday, replacing Dr. James R. Downing, who led the nonprofit for 12 years.

Roberts, who has been director of St. Jude’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and an executive vice president, will begin his new job on Jan. 1, as Downing moves into a faculty role in the hospital’s Global Pediatric Medicine department.

When actor and philanthropist Danny Thomas founded St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1962, the survival rate for childhood cancer patients was around 20%. Today, it is more than 80% and Roberts says the hope is for all childhood cancers to be easily treatable someday, with major strides toward that goal are within reach.

“I’m really excited because I think we are at the dawn of a new era,” Roberts told The Associated Press in an interview. “In the next several years, I believe we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve much more of Danny’s dream than ever before. And I’m excited to take us there.”

The opportunity comes through a convergence of technological advances that are creating treatments that kill childhood cancers more effectively, while also reducing the impact on the patient, Roberts said. Technology is also helping create treatments for more catastrophic childhood diseases beyond cancer.

Judy Habib, chair of the St. Jude Board of Governors, said Roberts’ emphasis on new treatment discoveries played a significant role in convincing the board to choose him as the hospital’s next leader after a global search.

“He combines the rigor of a researcher, the care of a clinician, and passion for our mission, making him the perfect person to lead one of the most accomplished pediatric research institutions in the world,” Habib said in a statement.

Roberts plans to continue his research as CEO

When he takes on his new role as St. Jude CEO, Roberts said he plans to continue his research, which has included confirming that certain genes suppress the growth of tumors.

“Keeping my hand in that is really important to make sure that I’m still at the cutting edge of understanding where the field is, what the opportunities are,” he said. “Working with other researchers is very useful input to me in helping steer our priorities. I’m a big believer in learning and growing and having input from others.”

Downing, who recruited Roberts from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2015 to head St. Jude’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, said Roberts has built the center into a “national treasure,” according to the National Cancer Institute.

“Charlie represents a unique combination of physician, researcher and leader,” Downing said in a statement to The Associated Press, adding that Roberts is “the right person at the right moment to lead this institution into the future.”

Donations offset St. Jude’s financial constraints, but not completely

Part of that future will require dealing with the financial constraints of treating childhood cancers, which receive less research investment from pharmaceutical companies that focus more on adult cancers, as well as federal cuts to scientific research funding. Roberts said St. Jude will maintain its policy of providing treatment at no cost to patients or their families. The hospital also plans to expand its services to make treatment available to more children around the world.

He said St. Jude is able to continue this work with philanthropic support from ALSAC, the hospital’s fundraising arm. According to an analysis by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, ALSAC raised an average of $2.3 billion a year in donations between 2021 and 2023, making it the second-largest fundraiser in the United States, behind only United Way.

“We can’t go all the way and completely replace what pharma does,” Roberts said. “But (donations) will for sure help us get more things to be successful.”

Ike Anand, president and CEO of ALSAC, said he welcomes Roberts’ partnership in their shared mission.

“Few people embody the promise of St. Jude quite like Charlie Roberts,” Anand said. “He understands the urgency that patients and families feel, the extraordinary possibilities emerging at the intersection of science and technology, and the trust that donors place in this mission every day.”

Marlo Thomas, St. Jude’s national outreach director and daughter of founder Danny Thomas, said Roberts embodies the hospital’s mission.

“We are closer than ever before to realizing my father’s dream that no child should die in the dawn of life, thanks in large part to the work of Charlie Roberts over the past decade,” she said in a statement. “I wish my father were here for this remarkable passing of the torch.”

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Surprise U.S. tariffs. A war involving Iran. New American tech bans and Chinese export controls. The list of geopolitical shocks that CEOs must be mindful of, let alone plan for, keeps getting longer.

“We’re in a world where all the assumptions about international institutions, free trade, a rules-based order—that’s all going away,” said Dominic Barton, strategic counselor to Eurasia Group and chair of Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.

Barton spoke with Fortune days after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods including autos, dairy, and alcohol. The president had also threatened tariffs in response to wildfire smoke drifting across the border. “Fifteen years ago, there would have probably been diplomats bringing this forward,” he said. “Now it’s just tweeted.”

(Just to show how changeable things are, on Aug. 19 Trump announced—on social media—that he will delay the new Canada tariffs by three days as the two countries near a deal).

Barton is a veteran McKinsey leader turned Canadian diplomat turned Rio Tinto chairman; that experience gives him a well-informed perspective on how executives need to think about geopolitical scenarios. “There’s a lot more risk, but there’s also a lot more upside,” he said. “You can whine about it—’I hope it’ll go back to the way it was.’ I just don’t think it will.”

Moving away from the after-dinner speaker

Barton argued that many companies still treat geopolitical risk as something on the side, rather than a core part of the business.

“You have to move away from the after-dinner speaker. You’d get a former politician or someone at a board to give a talk at dinner and say, ‘let me tell you about my experience,’” he said. “That’s kind of over.”

Barton spent decades at McKinsey, eventually leading its Asia business as the firm expanded across China and the region. He then moved into government when then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed him ambassador to China in 2019—a posting that put him at the center of the “Two Michaels” crisis, in which Beijing detained two Canadian citizens on espionage allegations widely seen as retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou at Washington’s request.

China released the “Two Michaels”—Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor—in 2021, after the U.S. agreed to defer prosecution of Meng.

“CEOs are going to have to spend more time with governments, and in government relations, than they ever have before,” he said. He pointed to Temasek chief executive Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara, former Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Tesla’s Elon Musk as leaders who have built that muscle—spending real time trying to understand how foreign governments think.

More broadly, Barton argued that geopolitics needs to be deeply embedded in how companies think through their operations. “What’s your balance sheet look like? How much debt do you want to have? Are you able to withstand periods when you may have problems with customers, or with supply chain security? Where is your data going to be managed? Where do you incorporate yourself? You can’t just do it anywhere anymore,” Barton said. 

Rio Tinto’s China shift

In addition to his work with Eurasia Group, Barton also chairs Rio Tinto. Mining has always been a politically fraught business, as governments often claim ownership of natural resources. Miners, for their part, need to balance earning profits with minizing political blowbakc.

Barton declined to discuss Rio Tinto in significant detail, citing the company’s July 29 earnings release. Rio Tinto has since reported a 43% jump in underlying earnings over the first half of the year, citing higher copper and aluminum prices amid growing demand tied to data centers.

He did, however, discuss one way Rio Tinto’s operations are now changing in response to one global change: The rise of China as a technological powerhouse. “China’s a competitor, but it’s also a humongous source of IP now,” Barton said. “For Rio Tinto, the amount of purchasing we’re doing from China has gone up significantly. It’s more expensive than some of the traditional Western suppliers. But it’s better. It lasts longer. It doesn’t break down.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Department of Defense has ordered 30 U.S. universities to audit their partnerships with mostly Chinese universities and military training institutions as the Trump administration scrutinizes the country’s growing global influence.

If the schools don’t complete a review and terminate any arrangements deemed problematic within the next two weeks, they face losing funding. The goal is to protect taxpayer-funded research from theft and exploitation, the Pentagon said Monday.

“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, said in a news release.

The release didn’t name the schools, but a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters said they include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University.

The schools didn’t immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Sarah Spreitzer, vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents college and university presidents, raised concerns that the announcement suggests, without any evidence, that the schools are engaged in wrongdoing.

The order comes after the Pentagon last month released an updated list of 130 foreign institutions it accused of engaging in “activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.”

While the vast majority were Chinese, such as the University of Science and Technology of China and the country’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, several Iranian and Russian institutions also appeared on the list.

The first version of the list was developed during Trump’s first term, with the help of the American Council on Education, Spreitzer said.

She said most of the council’s member institutions moved away from research partnerships with those institutions in the years that followed. She said she worries U.S. schools will be held liable for partnerships that predate the creation of the list.

“We don’t appreciate the implication that we are not good partners on research security, given that we helped create this list, and given that we’ve always partnered with the federal government when there has been national security concerns,” she said.

The audit comes as the Trump administration continues to express deep concern about China’s activities in the Americas, pushing back on Chinese ownership of ports at either end of the Panama Canal, infrastructure projects funded by China’s Belt and Road initiative in the region and Chinese investment in the telecommunications sector.

The Justice Department also is investigating whether Harvard University is allowing Chinese donors to create scholarships that exclude American students, adding to the barrage of federal inquiries the Trump administration has opened in its battle against the Ivy League school.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy said in a statement that the country opposes what it described as the politicization of “normal scientific, educational, and academic exchanges.”

“The U.S. side,” the statement continued, “should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair, and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific, and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States.” ___

Associated Press writer Collin Binkley contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Oslo, with its neatly painted houses and serene waterfront, is not known for high drama. But in 2020, Norway’s capital erupted in controversy over one spectacularly wealthy investor, a splashy event in Philadelphia—and the biggest sovereign wealth fund on the planet. 

That spring, Nicolai Tangen, the Norwegian founder of London hedge fund AKO Capital, was picked by Norway’s central bank to be the next CEO of its gargantuan oil-and-gas-financed investment fund, whose value had soared above $1 trillion. It soon emerged that months before his selection, Tangen had flown a private-planeload of guests to a gathering he had organized with his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The event featured seminars, fancy dinners, and a $1 million performance by Sting—all at Tangen’s expense. The then CEO of the oil fund, Norway’s trade minister, and the country’s attorney general had all attended.

Such finance-nerd blowouts may be standard fare on Wall Street, but they were a jolt in discreet, low-key Norway. The news ignited a media frenzy and even a parliamentary inquiry over favoritism and conflicts of interest. Above all, the affair was at odds with the country’s squeaky-clean reputation—and with the perception of Norges Bank Investment Management, or NBIM, the fund’s asset manager, as a champion of better corporate governance.

“It got very messy,” says Anja Bakken Riise, executive director of Future in Our Hands, a Norwegian environmental NGO that fiercely opposed Tangen’s appointment. “He’s quite different from what we’ve seen in previous directors.” 

When I visit Oslo—four years later—the brouhaha is still among the first things Norwegians mention when Tangen’s name comes up. But now it’s viewed more as a culture clash than a scandal (no formal allegations of wrongdoing were ever lodged). Inside NBIM’s sleekly modern headquarters, it seems to have largely faded from consciousness. Even so, the CEO remains “quite different” from Norway’s gray-suited bureaucratic class. He’s a voluble extrovert whose ease in the public eye is drawing renewed attention to the fund—now worth a stunning $1.7 trillion—and its potential to influence how companies behave. 

Tangen, who turns 58 in August, has begun the day with his year-round morning ritual: a 6 a.m. swim in Oslo’s ice-cold fjord, then a sauna at home and an electric-scooter ride to the office, where he plops his helmet on the coatrack and gets to work. Oslo is a world away from the London luxury of his hedge fund days. Yet he claims the moment he heard about the NBIM job, he badly wanted it. “I was like, ‘Wow, incredible, three things I love,’ ” Tangen says: “management, organizational development, and doing something great for the country.”

Tangen launched AKO in 2005 and built it into one of Europe’s biggest hedge funds; after NBIM hired him, he and his wife, Katya, placed their personal fortune of about $700 million into a charitable foundation. He describes his new, simpler life as idyllic. “You are close to the water, the ski slopes,” he says. “It is just fantastic.”

The relaxed style belies serious business. Founded in 1996, Norway’s oil fund now plays a key role in global finance—one starkly disproportionate to the tiny country of just 5 million people to whom the money belongs.

NBIM’s enormous holdings are equivalent to about 1.4% of the value of all public companies globally; in Europe, the fund’s share is closer to 2.6%. Its portfolio, which includes stakes in nearly 9,000 companies, is up about 60% in value since Tangen arrived in 2020; a live tracker shows the value changing by billions of Norwegian kroner per second during trading hours. 

The shorthand “oil fund” is becoming a misnomer: While NBIM’s original assets came from Norway’s oil and gas revenues, only about one-third now do; the rest are derived from the fund’s market performance, according to Tangen. The fund also owns some of the world’s priciest real estate, from Manhattan to Paris’s Champs-Élysées, including about one-quarter of Regent Street, London’s stratospherically expensive commercial district.

Arithmetically, the fund adds up to about $300,000 for each Norwegian. Its ultimate purpose is to finance Norway’s social services, so that no citizen ever need worry about health care costs or retirement income. “It’s kind of like the national team in making money,” Tangen says. 

The national team, ironically, is forbidden from investing directly in Norway itself, a restriction designed to prevent the economy from overheating. That marks a sharp difference from other sovereign entities, like Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion Public Investment Fund, which seeds homegrown industries like tourism and sports.

Instead, NBIM is constructed as a global index fund, with stakes in the world’s most influential companies. But Tangen—who holds graduate degrees in social psychology (earned in his thirties) and in art history (earned in his fifties)—has interests far beyond investing. In fact, his mind seems abuzz with almost anything but the nuts and bolts of financial returns. He’s engaging company—even before delving into his culinary passions (he’s a Cordon Bleu–trained chef) or his collection of about 5,000 Nordic artworks, for which he recently funded a museum in his hometown of Kristiansand. 

Among Tangen’s current fascinations: what he believes is a uniquely Indian business attitude among CEOs like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen. “They talk about the importance of being in the here and now,” Tangen says. “Most people don’t talk like that.” Another: Norway’s decision to ban digital devices from schools, citing students’ distractedness. “It’s a fantastic decision,” says Tangen, even though NBIM owns billions in stock in Meta, Alphabet, and other attention-economy giants. “We’re not just talking about kids here,” he adds. “We’re talking about everybody. You cannot multitask the way you think you can.”

Tangen’s relentless curiosity was one motivation for launching a podcast, In Good Company, in 2022. The show features freewheeling interviews, 70 or so to date, with members of his ultra-elite circle, including Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, who muse about leadership, business, and life. “Friendly, open-ended questions can get you pretty far,” he says. 

Tangen believes the podcast has hugely boosted the fund’s profile, especially in the U.S.; he cites the roughly 1,500 résumés NBIM received for three summer internships in New York. When I ask what he has learned about leadership from his interviews, he says, “Empathy is the next big thing in management. It has been lacking for a while.”

Despite a track record of hedge fund success, Tangen has little opportunity to flex his investment skills in Oslo. The fund’s exceedingly cautious management style leaves almost no room for independent stock picks. 

NBIM is overseen by the Finance Ministry, whose strict mandates dictate that the fund maintain a long-term-oriented, balanced portfolio with 70% equities and 30% bonds. Any adjustments to the mix require approval from Norway’s parliament, which has been deeply reluctant to grant them. “Every Norwegian knows Nicolai Tangen by name, but no more than a half-percent would know the name of the head of the asset management department of the Finance Ministry, who is probably 20 times more powerful,” says Sony Kapoor, an economist and former investment banker and an expert on sovereign wealth funds.

The slow, steady approach has yielded about 6% average annual returns. That might be unsexy, but its predictability has won Norwegians’ trust, says Espen Henriksen, associate finance professor at BI Norwegian Business School. “It’s one of those rare instances where a public entity has [tapped into] the biggest financial trend of the past 20 years: the global index fund.”

Even so, some analysts believe NBIM could be doing far better. Kapoor argues that the fund should invest some of its money in private equity, and greater amounts in emerging markets like India and Brazil. Its conservatism “has long-term costs not only for the Norwegian economy,” he says. “At a time when the world desperately needs funding for the green transition, it is contributing almost nothing to it.”

Tangen argues that the fund can catalyze change in other ways. Its ethics council scrutinizes companies, and forbids investments in coal, tobacco or cannabis producers, companies that violate human rights, or those involved in nuclear weapons development.

NBIM also pushes for changes within companies—a longtime hallmark of the fund that Tangen has made more visible. It has backed a growing number of shareholder resolutions at annual meetings, especially on climate action and governance, which Tangen says directly impact the fund’s long-term returns. He estimates his staff holds 3,000 in-person meetings a year with company executives. Since Tangen became CEO, the fund has started publishing its voting decisions five days ahead of annual meetings, greatly amplifying its influence. Henriksen says NBIM has helped rally other shareholders to its causes: “The fund can push the needle a little bit in terms of better corporate governance.”

Lately, it has been pushing harder. NBIM vehemently opposed a lawsuit that Exxon Mobil (of which it owns 1.23%) filed against climate-activist shareholders. And in June, two months after Musk appeared on Tangen’s podcast, it voted against Musk’s humongous, much-criticized pay package at Tesla, in which it holds a stake of about 1%. 

A U.S. judge dismissed Exxon’s lawsuit. But despite Norway’s pressure, Musk won his compensation vote. Still, for Tangen, investor activism goes beyond short-term wins and losses: Socially responsible businesses are ultimately better investments, he says. “We don’t try to have influence because we want influence,” he notes. “We are trying to do all this in order to make more money in the long term.”

This article appears in the August/September issue of Fortune with the headline, “Norway’s Nicolai Tangen runs the world’s biggest sovereign fund. Can he leverage its assets to change business for the better?“

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Singaporean venture capitalist Jenny Lee’s track record features the biggest names in Asian tech, including e-commerce giant Alibaba, ride-hailing companies Didi and Grab, and phone maker Xiaomi.

Yet Lee’s path to becoming one of Asia’s most prominent venture capitalists started in the hangars of Singapore’s air force, as an engineer working on fighter-jet engines. That hands-on experience helps her today as an investor, giving her a “common language” that allows her to talk to technology entrepreneurs about projects from their conceptual stages through their final delivery.

Lee got an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management right at the nadir of the dotcom bust in 2001. But that only encouraged her: “It can’t get worse, right?” she says. She borrowed 300,000 Singapore dollars ($220,000) to reimburse the firm that paid for her business degree and moved to Hong Kong to tap into the booming Chinese internet sector. She set up GGV Capital’s first China office in 2005.

Almost two decades later, as the senior managing partner behind Granite Asia—a spinoff of GGV Capital with $5 billion in assets under management—Lee ranks No. 33 on the Fortune Most Powerful Women Asia list.

Granite Asia owes its start to geopolitics. In July 2023, a U.S. House of Representatives committee said it would probe investments by U.S. venture capital firms, including GGV Capital, into China’s AI and semiconductor sectors.

Two months later, GGV announced that it was splitting in two: It divided into a U.S.-based fund, called Notable Capital, and a Singapore-based fund focused on China and Southeast Asia.

In March, Lee took the reins of the now-independent Asian fund, named Granite Asia as a callback to GGV Capital’s original name, Granite Global Ventures.

What’s your strategy, now that Granite Asia is in charge of its own destiny?

Lee: We always felt there was a lack of capital focus in Asia toward Asian companies. You have a diverse region, both an aging population and a young population, climate change issues, geopolitical concerns, all that stuff.

With the rebranding, our vision is to become the dominant capital platform for startups, founders, and businesses across the region: capital for the region that’s anchored in the region.

How is the U.S.-China relationship changing the world of investment? Do investors need to be worried about political risk?

As investors, we need to have the ability to read the tea leaves. In Asia, the tea leaves are pointing to a very obvious bifurcation. As we go forward, the globe is going to go into cluster economies. Today, it’s the U.S. and China. Tomorrow, it may be a different region.

This is a pretty dynamic game of chess. Products have to be a bit more nuanced, a bit more regional, and a bit more country-specific. It helps to bring in the right talent, attract the right deal flow, and also achieve the objective that the country wants to set up. A one-fund-fits-all model is not going to work going forward.

The real consideration will be exits and liquidity, whether any political policy or action reduces a company’s ability to go public, whether locally or overseas.

Granite Asia is expanding to new types of financing like private credit. Is that a better fit for what Asian firms need?

Enterprise-grade companies in Asia are going into their second or third generation of succession planning. Historically, they have grown their businesses by bootstrapping with local bank loans. But as they navigate the next 20 years, there’s a willingness and openness to engage with venture capital.

How can they now ensure the company is going to transition to the next generation with the right construct? It may be opening up the board to independent or financing investors who have the experience to help them grow. And maybe they will take on credit as a way to get to know these investors.

In Hong Kong, and even in Singapore, there’s a generation where the owner may not want to sell completely. There’s a gap between a buyout and the tech-centered world of venture capital.

What opportunities in Asia are you looking at?

One theme is around health. We cannot rely on the West to do all the sequencing and drug discovery, because not all the discoveries will be completely suitable for Asia.

With geopolitics, a new opportunity has arisen: diversifying your supply chain. It could be manufacturing IP in Singapore and the Middle East, then assembling in larger markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, even down to India.

It’s leveraging the Global South and the broader Asia region to offer an alternative supply chain to businesses around the world.

Private equity deal value in Southeast Asia was down about 40% last year, according to Bain. What needs to be done to unlock investment in the region?

It’s a demand and supply issue. You need to ensure that Asia has capital across the stages of company evolution and growth to ensure that the capital is there when companies need to grow.

You need to have the Taylor Swift of IPOs, one that everyone is eager to join. But that, by itself, is not enough. You need good issuers: startups from Asia that want to list in Asia. The founders probably want to be here: The brands and products have more appeal here. But if you don’t resolve the issues with capital and investment here, companies can’t close the loop. Having a lot of capital, but no great issuers, doesn’t solve the issue.

Is gender representation in the Asian tech sector improving? Are you seeing more female founders?

Yes, we are. I just met a woman entrepreneur. She’s in her fifties. She’s been a housewife and a caretaker the last 30 years. She’s now an empty nester and therefore has time for her passion. She’s starting a new food brand in the healthy snack space.

Diversity is good. Women leaders who were so focused on building their careers in large companies now, in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, have the opportunity to be mentors.

This article appears in the October/November 2024: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “Capital for Asia, rooted in Asia.”

More from the October/November issue of Fortune:
–See who made the 2024 Fortune Most Powerful Women Asia list
–Meet Martha Sazon, who leads the Philippines-based finance superapp GCash
–Women in Asia are reaching the top of the corporate world
–Xiaohongshu and its young, female, Chinese user base are transforming travel and shopping

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Lindsay Clancy was “begging for help” in the months leading up to killing her three children and attempting to end her own life, Clancy’s former mother-in-law testified for the defense Tuesday in the fourth week of her murder trial.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

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“Lindsay was struggling — we were all concerned,” said Susan Clancy. Her son, Patrick Clancy, found the Massachusetts couple’s children after they had been strangled in the family basement in January 2023. Lindsay Clancy also attempted to take her own life that night and was left paralyzed. Lindsay and Patrick Clancy are now divorced.

The trial centers not on whether Lindsay Clancy killed her children on Jan. 24, 2023, which her lawyers do not dispute, but on her state of mind at the time. Her attorney argues she should not be held criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.

Former mother-in-law says Lindsay was open about her struggles

Susan Clancy’s testimony echoed emotional accounts the day before from Lindsay Clancy’s mother and sister, who recounted for jurors how they saw her become increasingly anxious, paranoid and suicidal starting in the fall of 2022.

Susan Clancy, who, like Lindsay, worked as a labor and delivery nurse, said in Plymouth Superior Court that she and her former daughter-in-law were close and described Lindsay as a “wonderful mother” who was “very nurturing, very loving.”

Susan Clancy said that Lindsay was open with her about struggling and asked for her mother-in-law’s support. The jury was shown texts between Lindsay and Susan Clancy in which Lindsay spoke about fears that she had developed a dependence on benzodiazepines, but couldn’t sleep without taking them.

“I’m not okay and I’m terrified of taking meds tonight,” Lindsay texted her mother-in-law on Nov. 30, 2022, two months before the killings.

On Monday, Lindsay Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, said her daughter was scared of sleeping alone, became increasingly paranoid and believed the medications she was taking “were destroying her mind.”

That December, Lindsay Clancy told her mother and her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, that “she had thoughts of harming the children,” Musgrove said. Lindsay Clancy’s sister Allison Ozga testified that at the end of December, Lindsay told her she had experienced suicidal thoughts every day for a month.

Psychologist who visited Lindsay in the hospital said there’s no evidence she’s lying

Prosecutors argue that Lindsay Clancy planned the killings and contrived to get her husband out of the house by sending him out on errands. They have pointed to normal activities she performed that day, including taking her children to the doctor and playing with them in the snow.

Lindsay Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, has argued that in addition to suffering from postpartum psychosis, she had bipolar disorder and that antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child worsened her condition.

Dr. Paul Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who visited Lindsay Clancy in the hospital in early February 2023, described seeing her handcuffed to a hospital bed and unable to move below her sternum. Her memory of what had happened was “fuzzy and foggy,” he said, and she was taking medication for significant pain following surgery.

Zeizel said Clancy knew who she was but didn’t know where she was and wasn’t sure of the time. She asked about Patrick, how he was doing and whether she could speak to him. Two days later, she spoke to Patrick using Zeizel’s cellphone.

“She told Patrick that she loved him very much,” Zeizel testified. He said Lindsay Clancy then told Patrick “that she heard a male voice ordering her,” telling her she had no choice but to kill her children and then herself.

Zeizel has met with Lindsay Clancy dozens of times since then. He testified that psychological testing administered by a government doctor found no evidence she was faking or exaggerating psychiatric symptoms.

Zeizel also testified that before the killings, Lindsay Clancy described having “horrible thoughts” and believing her thoughts were so loud other people could hear them.

He testified that psychotic symptoms can come and go, and that a person experiencing psychosis can still perform ordinary activities such as making a phone call or driving a car.

If convicted of murder, Lindsay faces life without parole

Clancy’s livestreamed trial has generated intense public interest. Over the prior weeks, jurors visited the home where she killed her children, and heard emotional testimony from Patrick Clancy.

At the start of the trial, Patrick Clancy described the horror of returning home to find his dead children. Prosecutors played a seven-minute 911 call in which he can be heard finding the bodies and telling a dispatcher, “She killed the kids!”

If convicted of murder, Lindsay Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty because of a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.

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This story was first published on Aug. 18, 2026. It was updated on Aug. 19, 2026 to correct the spelling of the name of a clinical and forensic psychologist who testified for the defense. The correct spelling is Dr. Paul Zeizel, not Zeisel.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

On the morning of Sept. 8, 2020, Meredith Kopit Levien’s first day as CEO of the New York Times, she opened her laptop in the living room of her pandemic rental in Calabasas, Calif., as her 9-year-old son remotely attended fourth grade nearby. She stared into a world on fire.

Much of the publication’s 4,700-person staff was working from cramped apartments, taking meetings on Zoom, or reporting from the streets—some in harm’s way. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer a few months earlier had ignited a summer of rallies and a national reckoning on race and power. Inside the Times, an incendiary op-ed calling for military force to subdue Black Lives Matter protests had led to the abrupt ouster of the opinion editor.

Meanwhile, Levien’s longtime mentor, Mark Thompson—the British chief executive credited with transforming the Times into a digital subscription powerhouse—was gone. For years, the two were in constant contact as COO and CEO; Now, she was alone in the chair.

At age 49, Levien (pronounced Lev-EE-yen) was the youngest person and second woman to lead the business in its 173-year history. “I didn’t really understand, as COO, how profoundly different the CEO role would be,” she tells Fortune now. “It took me at least a year—maybe two—just to have any confidence that I could do the job. And that I could maybe even do it well.”

The demands were immediate and unrelentingly high-stakes: Make the big strategic calls. Choose who stays and who goes. Defend every decision to the newsroom, to shareholders, to the unions, to the public. And at the Times—a public company where editorial integrity and business imperatives often collide—those decisions rippled far beyond the building walls.

“You’re on the hook for everything,” Levien says. “I spent a lot of my first year sort of holding my breath and just not wanting to get it wrong… not wanting to let the board down, not wanting to let the publisher down, not wanting to let my own team down.”

Part of that pressure was to keep up the publication’s remarkable momentum. The Times had crossed several milestones with initiatives Levien helped set in motion as chief revenue officer and later COO. By mid-2020, digital subscription revenue had surged 24% year-over-year to $276 million, surpassing print for the first time. The company ended the quarter with 5.7 million digital-only subscriptions—6.5 million total—making steady progress toward its goal of 10 million by 2025. Wirecutter, the Times’ product recommendation site, had a growing affiliate revenue stream. And the Cooking app saw a spike as people hunkered down at home, hungry for guidance in the kitchen.

But that early success soon gave rise to a more existential question: What’s next? Levien’s answer, in a word: the bundle. By doubling down on the all-access subscription—offering not just news, but also Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, The Athletic, and more—she reenergized the Times. No longer just the storied “Gray Lady,” it has morphed into a lifestyle subscription platform, a daily companion that moves with readers through their routines: morning headlines over coffee, the Spelling Bee on a commute, product reviews at lunch, and analysis of the Lakers game by night. As one marketing campaign put it, the Times wants readers to go “all in.”

Gabby Jones–Bloomberg via Getty Images

So far, the bundle strategy has borne fruit. In fact, of the Times’ 11 million-plus digital subscribers, only 1.9 million pay for news alone. Levien calls it “the essential subscription for every curious person.” The Times doesn’t want drive-by traffic, she says. It wants daily, habitual engagement.

But critics worry that the Times risks straying from its core: rigorous, high-brow journalism. Levien insists the inverse is true, arguing that the bundle is designed to sustain the newsroom, not distract from it. “The first dollar always goes to journalism,” she often says.

The stakes for journalism

That commitment to the work of journalism is particularly necessary at a time when the profession is under siege: Political hostility toward the press is intensifying under a resurgent MAGA movement, and the ad-supported, platform-reliant business model that once propped up the media industry continues its free fall. At the same time, the rise of generative AI threatens to unravel the very concept of authorship, burying real journalism beneath a flood of synthetic content and algorithmic noise.

Against that backdrop, trust in the media has become both more fragile and more consequential. Public confidence in traditional news organizations has eroded sharply in recent years; just 31% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the press, according to Gallup. The result is a precarious information ecosystem where falsehoods sometimes outpace truths, and the very institutions designed to hold power to account are increasingly dismissed, doubted, or directly attacked. It’s amid this disruption and distrust that Levien is staking her strategy.

Unlike peers, such as the Washington Post and the LA Times, the New York Times doesn’t have a billionaire owner with unlimited wealth as a backstop. (Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim provided a $250 million loan at a steep 14% interest rate during the company’s financial crisis in 2009, but that loan was repaid in 2011.) Levien holds the CEO title, but ultimate control still rests with the Ochs-Sulzberger family, who hold most of the company’s voting shares and are known among industry insiders for their cautious approach to risk, measured pace of growth, and complex family dynamics that require company leaders to navigate with finesse and a keen sensitivity to legacy and bloodlines.

“[Levien] has an incredibly complicated job that involves a lot of diplomacy,” says Ben Smith, cofounder of Semafor and a former media columnist at the New York Times. “I do think she has been incredibly successful.”

Her mission, Levien says, is to build a durable business model that makes the hard work of independent journalism commercially viable. To date, the results are unmatched by peers. Still, sustainability is a moving target when trust is fragile, attention is fleeting, and political headwinds are growing stronger.

Hardwired to win

Shortly after then-CEO Thompson announced that he would depart in 2020, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher—who at the time was launching a Times podcast—invited Levien to her home in Washington, D.C. Sitting in the living room, Swisher recalls asking her directly: “Are you going to be the next CEO?”

Levien, Swisher recounts, responded modestly, saying she’d welcome the role but wasn’t the one making the decision.

“I said, ‘Excuse me? What did you just say to me? Don’t do that. That’s such a typical woman thing to say,’” Swisher recalls. “Then I told her, ‘I need you to yell at me right now: I am going to be the CEO of the New York Times. I am the CEO.’”

Levien obliged. “We laughed and laughed,” Swisher says. “Because she knew she was going to be CEO—she was just being polite.”

Levien has spent her career on the business side of journalism, working behind the curtain to build institutions that she says she had never expected to lead: “I never wanted the top job,” she explains. “I just wanted to do the biggest version of the work I loved.”

She grew up in Richmond, Va., with a mother who worked in sales and a teacher father, and she spent her early years feeling like a jack-of-all-trades: competent, but never the standout. She wasn’t the star athlete, the gifted artist, or the straight-A student, by her own account. “There was no one thing that people said, ‘Oh, she is awesome at that,’” recalls Levien. “I think that served me because it made me work harder at everything.” Her edge, Levien says, isn’t necessarily innate talent. It’s sheer willpower and a relentless, almost obsessive, hunger to win.

She’s not a journalist, but she has had an acute curiosity about the world from an early age. The Iran Hostage Crisis, which began in 1979 when Levien was 8, ignited in her a fascination with current events, magazines, and “serious topics,” she says. She attended the University of Virginia—drawn in part by its affordable in-state tuition—where she wrote for one of the campus newspapers.

After college, Levien hoped to find a foothold in the profession doing fact-checking in New York, but her parents, wary of the city’s cost of living and the industry’s meager starting salaries, talked her out of it. Instead, she took a job at the D.C.-based consulting firm Advisory Board, rising to director of member services and forging a close bond with its founder, David Bradley.

When Bradley bought the Atlantic in 1999, Levien saw a path to journalism and asked him for a reporting job. He offered her a role on the business side, with a deal: If she didn’t love it, she could switch to editorial in a year. She never made the switch.

Levien went on to hold senior roles at the Atlantic, rising from advertising director to publisher of its now-defunct magazine 02138, and later became chief revenue officer at Forbes. Then, in 2013, the New York Times came calling, offering her the chance to lead its advertising business. Friends warned her against it. The business side didn’t carry weight there, they said, and it wasn’t run like a company. The Times’ golden age had passed, she was told, and its future was murky at best.

But Levien saw untapped potential and a once-in-a-career opportunity to reinvent an institution. “The Times should win,” she recalls thinking then. “It makes a product that’s unique at a different scale and level of quality. It should easily have a business model that works.”

The bundle is the business

Levien’s first 18 months in the Times’ iconic midtown Manhattan headquarters were focused on reviving its advertising strategy, but the writing was already on the wall: Big tech platforms were swallowing most digital ad dollars, leaving publishers with diminishing returns. The Times’ leadership had seen the shift coming earlier than most. Advertising alone wouldn’t sustain the institution. The only viable path forward was subscriptions, at scale.

In 2015, Levien was promoted to chief revenue officer, responsible for all business streams, including subscriptions, advertising, and live events. At the time, the Times had just under one million paid digital subscribers. That year, it set a goal to double its digital subscriber base and its nearly $400 million in digital revenue by 2020.

Today, the New York Times has more than 11.5 million subscribers across digital and print, and says it’s on track to reach 15 million by 2027. And Levien, who insists she never chased power, is now arguably the most successful media CEO in America.

If she played a supporting role in the Times’ initial shift to subscriptions, she now takes center stage in its next act: transforming a storied newsroom into a multi-platform bundle of brands that reach readers well beyond traditional news. Part of that strategy is continuously enriching the bundle. In 2022, the company acquired the sports media outlet The Athletic and snapped up the viral word game Wordle, made by a software engineer as a gift for his girlfriend, for a reported low seven figures—a move Smith calls “obviously brilliant.”

Jakub Porzycki—NurPhoto via Getty Images

Levien says her strategy rests on three pillars: lead in news, win in lifestyle, and make the bundle indispensable. The logic appears simple. The more often readers engage across the Times’ ecosystem, the more likely they are to subscribe, stay, and engage. Every product is built to reinforce that habit.

Her strategy is also powered by editorial curation and predictive tech, blending journalist-selected stories with a more dynamic, visual, and personalized feed across the Times’ website and apps. “We’re getting better at surfacing the next best thing for you,” Levien says. “And making it more engaging.”

Despite rising concerns about news fatigue and avoidance, the company says it is seeing direct traffic growth across all products, due in part to the post-2016 election spike in readership that is known across the industry as the “Trump bump.” In 2024, its websites and apps averaged about 137 million monthly unique visitors globally, according to internal estimates. Subscriptions, both print and digital, now account for the bulk of the company’s $2.59 billion in annual revenue, but advertising, affiliates, and licensing are inching up too. Advertising, while significantly down from its peak, generated about $506 million in 2024.

Lifestyle products like Cooking, which drew more than 456 million visits in 2024 across its site and app, and Wirecutter, are produced by journalists. And as editor-in-chief Joe Kahn tells Fortune, the editorial sensibility of the Times infuses all its products. “Cooking and games grew directly out of the newsroom, and actually, those are still within the purview of the newsroom,” Kahn explains. “So there’s a cooking editor and a games editor who are journalists, and they came from the traditional New York Times newspaper.” Meanwhile, the writers, photographers, and editors of The Athletic give the Times credibility in sports media.

The Games app was downloaded 10 million times in 2023, and its puzzles were played 11 billion times last year, led by Wordle’s 5.3 billion plays. “Three times as many people play our games every single day as watched the White Lotus season finale,” Levien told advertisers at a media showcase in May.

Smith scoffs at journalism purists who have side-eyed the rise of “softer” business verticals, pointing out that Levien’s bundling strategy has kept the Times on a steady growth track—and, more importantly, provided a financial bulwark against the political pressure that has challenged other outlets. “The only real defense against that kind of pressure, which is economic pressure that Trump is putting on news organizations, is having a strong business,” he tells Fortune.

Swisher agrees. It’s naive, she says, to think the Times can thrive on news alone, especially as overall news consumption plateaus. “If you’re just a pure news organization, well, that’s lovely—if you have a billionaire owner,” she tells Fortune. “Even then, you’re probably screwed because that billionaire has their own agenda. What you need is a 360-degree media offering.”

Public company, private guardrails

Levien remains convinced that the Times is far from hitting subscription saturation. The real challenge, she maintains, is breaking through an information ecosystem dominated by gatekeepers like Google and social media platforms. These tech companies not only control how people discover content but also prioritize their own, often competing, material. Levien’s offense is not to extract more from the existing Times audience, but to expand it. “We’re not pulling more and more from a fixed pie,” she says. “We’re building a bigger one.” In her view, anything that captures attention and focus—Netflix, TikTok, even a wellness app—is competition.

All told, the Times is thriving while much of the media world retrenches, a resilience that Levien attributes to two pivotal choices. First, a steadfast commitment to investing in journalism. Second, a deliberate focus on building direct relationships with readers. While many publishers chased scale through social platforms, the Times prioritized audience ownership, insulating itself from some of the volatility of tech giants.

Today, the vast majority of the Times’ users come through owned channels—including newsletters and apps—a rarity in an industry still largely reliant on fickle third-party traffic. The site has over 150 million registered users; a flagship newsletter, the Morning, is delivered to 16 million people; and The Daily ranks among the most-listened-to news podcasts in the world, drawing some 4 million listeners weekly on average.

Not having a wealthy benefactor to cushion the risks has its advantages, too, Levien points out. She says the Times’ distinctive governance structure—publicly traded yet family-controlled—offers a rare balance of market accountability and editorial commitment.

“The scrutiny of being a public company has made us sharper,” Levien says, noting her decade of experience on earnings calls. That pressure, she contends, enforces a discipline and day-to-day rigor that private ownership doesn’t always demand.

The Sulzberger family’s majority control and focus on protecting the editorial mission also buffer the Times from short-termism, she says. Whether that model is replicable—or even desirable—for other outlets remains an open question.

Calibrating power and principles

With President Donald Trump back in power, the Times is once more in his crosshairs. Elsewhere in the media, companies appear to have already softened their posture, retreating from confrontational coverage, shedding journalistic muscle, or making deals with the Trump administration. As others backpedal, Levien’s response is unequivocal: “We will not be cowed,” she says. “Not now. Not ever.”

If Levien’s mission is to lead in the business of news, her colleagues in editorial—Kahn, the editor-in-chief, and opinion editor Katie Kingsbury—are charged with upholding its substance. All three report to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Running the Times, Levien says, is a constant calibration between business urgency and newsroom deliberation, and though she is responsible for the former, she says she takes the latter very seriously. “If you break the newsroom,” she warns, “you can’t remake it.”

Levien shrugs at criticism of coverage from both the left and the right. “We’re not going to tailor our journalism to please a party or win over a particular audience,” she says. “That’s not the job. It’s to pursue the truth.”

David Dee Delgado—Getty Images for The New York Times

Levien says she’s focused on making the Times’ journalistic process more transparent, showing not just what it reports, but how. The goal, she says, is to increase the public’s understanding of why independent journalism still matters.

That mission has never been more difficult. The press today faces both subtle obstructions and overt hostility, from exclusion at White House briefings to targeted harassment of reporters.

The Times has contingency plans across various functions—legal, operational, financial—to ensure it never has to choose between its values and its survival, Levien says. Her bet is that the Times’ long-game strategy focused on financial strength and original reporting will carry it through an era when facts are contested and journalism is under attack. “We have a very strong balance sheet, so I feel like we are as well prepared as we could be to weather whatever storms come and to do so in a way that does not compromise our principles.”

The AI conundrum

Meanwhile, a new existential challenge looms: artificial intelligence. What happens when machines provide the answer, but erase the source?

In 2023, the Times became the first major news organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they used its copyrighted journalism without permission to train large language models. “We are vigorously enforcing our intellectual property rights,” she explains. “Not just for ourselves, but for the principle that high-quality journalism deserves protection—and compensation.” (OpenAI argues that its use of publicly available internet data to train AI models constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.)

Inside the Times, AI is viewed as both a threat and an opportunity. Teams are prototyping new features, from voice-rendered stories to intelligent cooking tools. In the newsroom, AI is already playing a role. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into bomb use in Gaza used AI to help verify visual evidence from the ground.

“We’re not replacing human journalism,” Levien says. “We’re using AI to make it stronger, more accessible, and more scalable.”

That dual-track approach—defending the journalism while reimagining how it’s delivered—is at the core of Levien’s tech-assisted strategy. And her conviction that the future belongs to publishers that cultivate direct, habitual relationships with their audiences has only deepened in the age of AI.

Even so, Levien is pragmatic about the scale of disruption AI could unleash. “We are in a moment of real transformation,” she says. As platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and large language models become dominant entry points for information, the threat to journalism isn’t just reduced visibility—it’s the erosion of value. When AI delivers answers without attribution, original reporting loses its power, and the public loses connection to the source.

That’s why the Times is trying to reimagine its products for an AI-native world. It’s also why Levien views financial independence as more essential than ever. “A strong business is what allows us to assert the value of the work and protect it,” she says.

We will not be cowed. Not now. Not ever.

Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO, the New York Times

Bend the world

Not every bet Levien has made has been a slam dunk. Nearly four years after acquiring The Athletic, the jury is still out on the wisdom of that deal. The outlet was losing money at the time of the acquisition, and while the Times anticipated continued investment, it set a goal to reach profitability by 2025. In fiscal year 2024, the Athletic generated $172.1 million in revenue—a 31% increase from the year prior but still a $5 million loss. It did clear a critical hurdle, however, by turning a profit in both the third and fourth quarters.

Levien isn’t interested in meeting expectations for The Athletic, she says. She wants to far exceed them. “I’ll be bummed if it just becomes a niche part of the whole,” she says. “The ambition is bigger than that.”

So, where does future growth lie? The same place it always has, Levien says: high-quality journalism and a near-stubborn refusal to believe the ceiling has been reached. She has heard every reason that growth should have stalled—political polarization, news fatigue, shrinking attention spans, the dominance of video, a fractured nation allergic to nuance. And yet, the Times keeps adding subscribers. Earlier this month, the company announced that in the last quarter, it added 250,000 digital-only subscribers and digital subscription revenue jumped more than 14% during that period.

“Persistence,” she says, “is believing the thing matters enough to see it through and then bringing others with you.” Those close to Levien say that that mindset defines her leadership style. She jokes that she was born trying to bend the world to her will.

That conviction runs deep, personally and professionally. Levien says she throws herself fully into both her job and parenthood, commuting weekly from Washington, D.C. to New York while raising her now-teenage son, whom she shares custody of with her former husband. “I have this belief that I can give 150% to both,” she says. “Even though anyone will tell you it’s not possible.”

Still, even she knows that passion and stamina alone can’t shield an institution from economic headwinds, political backlash, or technological disruption. Whether the New York Times can continue to grow on its own terms and at its current scale remains to be seen.

For now, Levien is still pushing. And the world is still bending.

This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Bend the world to your will.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

CEO Agenda provides unique insights into how leaders think and lead and what keeps them busy in a world of constant change. We look into the lives, minds and agendas of CEOs at the world’s most iconic companies.

Mark Read doesn’t fear change—he embraces it. In 2018 he took over WPP, one of the world’s largest advertising groups by revenue, and was immediately forced to navigate the toughest chapter in its 40-year history. Today, he announced his departure, sending shockwaves through the advertising world. Fortune exclusively spoke with Read ahead of the announcement to discuss his legacy and his views on the future of the industry.

Becoming CEO wasn’t on Read’s strategic road map. Seven years on, speaking exclusively to Fortune on the eve of announcing his departure from the role, he reflects back on the experience as “a journey.” Replacing the group’s founder, Sir Martin Sorrell, who left following a series of allegations about his conduct in office, at a time when the industry was still coming to terms with the rise of adtech platforms from Meta and Alphabet, was a task for only the bravest of leaders. What followed was a series of consolidations, cost-cutting, and the fresh economic turmoil created by the Trump government’s tariffs. 

Today, the group boasts many of the Fortune Global 500’s biggest household names as clients, including Unilever, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and L’Oréal.

Read began his career at WPP in 1989. A decade later, around the time of the dotcom bubble, he left to step into the world of startups, cofounding WebRewards, a U.K.-based loyalty platform, which went on to be sold to a competitor in 2001.

That entrepreneurial experience had a lasting impact on his leadership style: “If you’re not on top of the details, it’s a problem.” Today, at 58 years old and as CEO of WPP through to the end of 2025, he has led the way in embracing AI, spearheading WPP’s own AI platform.

Speaking to Fortune at WPP’s headquarters on the banks of the River Thames in London, he showed off WPP Open, a suite of AI tools developed in-house, of which Read says he is one of the most engaged users. His enthusiasm for AI is infectious. Today, 48,000 of WPP’s global staff use AI for coming up with ideas, content production across print and digital, and media strategy. Almost every leader is dabbling in AI, but Read has put it front and center.

For Read, who is fueled by Nespresso coffee (he values consistency), it’s not all been smooth sailing. During his tenure, WPP’s share price has nearly halved, knocking the holding company market valuation to $8.59 billion as it navigates flatlining revenue growth among its myriad of agencies and a wave of staff anger over its controversial return-to-office policy: “We knew it wasn’t going to be a popular decision with everybody, but we think it’s the right thing for the long-term success of the company,” he says.

Today, advertising is undergoing its next transformational shift. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has repeatedly taken aim, claiming that “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”

Read is tackling Altman’s audacious claim head-on by embracing the opportunities that AI offers while leaning into WPP’s strengths: “Creativity will be important, if not more important, in the future.” In contrast to Altman, Read believes AI will augment, not replace, the talent behind one of the world’s largest advertising groups.

This interview has been edited for brevity.

Down to business

Fortune: How have your startup experience and being a digital leader influenced your role as a CEO today? 

I learned pretty quickly in a startup that if you’re not on top of the details, it can be a bit of a problem. I asked the CFO one day whether our invoices had been paid, and he told me he forgot to send them out! You have to take time to understand the technology, what’s happening, how things work, and how it’s going to impact the business. I do get involved in how we’re deploying technology in the business [and hold] a weekly AI meeting every Friday. For many entrepreneurs, they’re intimately involved in the details, particularly in technology, and that is critical.

Which long-term trend are you most bullish about for society and the economy at large?

AI is going to be transformative to our business.

We showed WPP Open, our AI platform, to Sam Altman’s CMO, and she asked if she could get access to it. When the CMO of OpenAI says, “I’d love to use your platform,” you know you’re onto something.

The foundational models like Google Gemini and OpenAI are so powerful, the trick is to build a proprietary application on top of them, one that you can use to make your business better. And that’s what we’re doing. I think that we can see enough about how the world works to know that [AI] is going to make our people much more productive. 

How do you demonstrate the value of creativity in the age of AI?

Creativity will be important, if not more important, in the future. The ability to produce stuff is obviously going to increase, but the ability to cut through is going to be harder. And we see that in every medium. AI will augment human creativity. The machine will bring us inside. It will help us come up with ideas. It is not going to replace human beings as the ultimate judge for those ideas. If you think about what a brand is, it’s a series of rules, a color, a tone of voice, a name, a design system, [and AI] is very good at understanding that. So I think it’s going to be very good at producing work. Is it going to produce ideas? I don’t think so.

Richard Bord—Wireimage Via Getty Images

How can European leaders address the productivity gap with the U.S.?

AI is part of it. Europe’s productivity challenge is obviously deeper, although we’re not one market like America.

The U.K. is in a more challenging position, because we’re not located in the U.S. or in continental Europe. There’s large parts of the economy where I think more deregulation and more cross-border cooperation could create bigger, stronger global businesses. You go to America, and you see a lot of people working hard because the safety net is not there. You go to a restaurant, there are seniors working in America. Europe is a great continent in which to be a student, to retire, be treated in a hospital, to go to university. There’s many aspects of European life that are, say, better than American life, but I think that there’s a different motivation to succeed in America.

Being productive

What time do you get up in the morning, and what sets you up for the day?

My alarm goes off at 6:45 a.m. I have a lot of coffee—I’m a great believer in Nespresso—followed by breakfast with my kids. Each morning, I drive myself to the office, chat to people in the car. Sometimes I might listen to a client earnings call or a podcast. I find my time in the car a very productive time to talk to people. 

What time do you usually clock off work? Do you check email afterward or prefer to fully switch off in the evenings?

I can’t disconnect in the evenings. I usually end up multitasking, juggling emails while watching TV. I tend to leave the office at 7 p.m. and finish off emails in the evening. If I’m traveling, I’ll have dinner with clients or colleagues.

I try not to do too much on the weekend but often have calls on Sunday afternoon and tend to catch up with work. I came across a Harvard statistic saying the average CEO works at least seven hours over the weekend. I don’t do that many in a typical weekend.

Do you have a sports ritual that’s built into your week?

I’ve got a running machine and a Peloton bike. If I’m going to exercise, I try to get it done in the morning. I have more of a cardio approach than a weights approach.

What apps or methods do you use to be more productive?

I mostly use email and WhatsApp. I use email as my primary to-do list, and WhatsApp is more about keeping in contact with people. We have a company WhatsApp group in which we share ideas, insights, and articles. I spend a lot of time on my phone. 

Getting personal

Who is on your “personal board”?

I learn the most from my clients. They talk about what’s on their mind, how we’re doing, and what they need to see. 

What is your favorite ­company and why? 

The brand I probably engage with most is Apple. Apple has a simplicity and an unrivaled sense of interoperability. 

What’s your favorite cuisine to cook or eat?

Definitely Chinese food. I just spent two weeks in China with my family. My kids have become addicted to Szechuan food. Sometimes we cook it at home; my daughter loves it and has a Chinese hot pot.

CEO Agenda provides unique insights into how leaders think and lead, and what keeps them busy in a world of constant change. We look into the lives, minds and agendas of CEOs at the world’s most iconic companies. Dive into our other CEO Agenda profiles.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A Massachusetts woman who told police that she brought homemade firebombs to the U.S. Capitol to kill Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was sentenced on Tuesday to just over six years in prison.

Riley English, a 26-year-old transgender woman, said she was in the grips of a mental health crisis and abusing drugs when she drove to Washington in January 2025 and told Capitol police that she was there to kill Bessent on the day of his Senate confirmation.

“I never wanted to hurt anyone,” she told U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras. “I’m not a political person. I’m not a violent person.”

Contreras, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, sentenced English to six years and one month of imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release. English has remained jailed since her arrest and will get credit for the nearly 20 months that she already has spent in custody. She pleaded guilty in March to two weapons charges.

“You’ve had a very difficult life,” Contreras told English. “Hopefully, the progress you’ve made in jail to this date has set you on the right path.”

Nobody was injured, and Contreras said her plan to harm Bessent had an “exceedingly low or non-existent” chance of success. Bessent wasn’t at the Capitol when English arrived on Jan. 27, 2025. The Molotov cocktails that English brought to the Capitol appeared to be incapable of igniting, the judge noted.

Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of 10 years and one month for English. Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan Horan said English had been planning the “attempted political assassination” for at least a month at a time when the threat of politically motivated violence has been mounting in the U.S.

“This was not a chance encounter or an impulsive act,” Horan said.

The case against English fits a pattern of politically motivated violence that has plagued the U.S. over the past decade. In a letter addressed to the judge, Bessent said he worries the country “cannot survive this assault.”

“Political violence is an attack on the rule of law and on representative government itself,” Bessent wrote. “It also deprives our country of service by talented men and women with ability and integrity who may reasonably decide that no job is worth threats to themselves and their families.”

English’s prosecution drew comparisons to the case against California resident Sophie Roske, who was sentenced last October to over eight years in prison for attempting to assassinate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his Maryland home. Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of no less than 30 years for Roske, a transgender woman. They appealed Roske’s sentence by U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman, calling it unreasonably lenient.

Defense attorney Maria Jacob said English was “terrified and traumatized” by fears of what would happen to transgender people under the second Trump administration.

“Our argument is that she was in a diminished mental state,” Jacob said.

Investigators said they found a folding knife, two homemade firebombs and a lighter in English’s possession at the Capitol.

English, of South Deerfield, Massachusetts, told police that she was influenced by Luigi Mangione, the man who was charged with fatally shooting the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. She said she was “on a mission” and “had been thinking about this for a while because of Luigi Mangione,” prosecutors said. English told officers that she was terminally ill and “wanted to do something before I go,” according to prosecutors.

English also said she traveled from Massachusetts to Washington intending to kill other Republican political figures — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson — and to burn down the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, according to police. English changed her target to Bessent after reading an internet post about his confirmation hearing, police said.

Jacob said English’s actions last year were “a cry for help.”

“There was no indication that she was acting rationally that day,” the judge said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Adoptions are on hold for thousands of dogs and cats in Texas, potentially putting the animals at risk of being euthanized, because of efforts to stop the spread of the New World screwworm, an insect that has crossed the border from Mexico into the United States for the first time in 60 years.

The flesh-eating parasite threatens the nation’s $113 billion beef industry, prompting federal officials to close the border to cattle movements. Because the screwworm also can infect pets, most states have restricted the movement of animals from infested areas of Texas, leading to crowded conditions in state shelters that rely on adoptions to other regions of the country.

“It’s thrown a wrench into things, for small rescues as well as the bigger shelters,” said Mia Bendixsen, executive director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network, which promotes animal welfare laws.

The screwworm can lay eggs that hatch into flesh-eating larvae in the wounds or mucous of any mammal, and of the dozens of infections in southern Texas and southeastern New Mexico, several have been in dogs. Forty-four states have restricted the movements of pets from infested areas, creating a hardship for shelters from Texas that typically send thousands of animals to other states each year.

In Corpus Christi, the Gulf Coast Humane Society couldn’t get rescued dogs into New York state for weeks, causing the shelter’s animal population to climb from around 325 to nearly 450.

The shelter, which sends about 500 dogs a year outside Texas, created more space in outdoor exercise areas until New York again allowed dogs from Texas — if a veterinarian first certified that each one wasn’t infected with the screwworm.

She added that if her shelter doesn’t have space to take animals from municipal shelters, “then they have to euthanize more animals.”

Texas has a surplus of dogs and cats for adoption

Moving dogs and cats from Texas to other states, particularly in the Northeast or Great Lakes region, has become crucial to saving stray and abandoned animals.

In 2025, Texas had more unadopted dogs transferred out of its shelters than any other state — nearly 89,000, according to the American Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals. Texas also euthanized about 45,000 dogs — more dogs than any other state, according to the data.

And Texas led in the number of cats transferred out of its shelters — nearly 53,000 — and was second to California in those euthanized, with almost 29,000.

Texas has more stray dogs and cats than any state other than California — about 439,000 in 2025 — largely because of its high population and size. Warm weather also allows stray animals to survive longer and breed more, said veterinarians and animal welfare advocates. They added that Texas pet owners seem less willing to spay or neuter their dogs.

“There are people with working ranch and farm dogs, both male and female, who feel like the animal will lose some of its drive,” said veterinarian Lori Teller, executive director of the Texas Veterinary Medical Association.

Both shelters and animals are stressed

In Houston, Humane Society shelter Director Aaron Grady said an inability to send animals out of state has left them more stressed.

“If an adopter comes through and they’re going from kennel to kennel and they see one dog who may be sitting calmly and contentedly in one kennel and then in the next kennel, there’s one dog who’s bouncing off of the walls and barking because of how stressed they are, first one may be looking more desirable,” Grady said.

The Houston shelter has worked to keep its animal population — mostly cats and dogs — at about 200 by tapping a network of foster homes for up to 300 more and by helping pet owners keep their animals even a little longer.

Most states have tightened rules for importing animals

Restrictions on animal transports followed efforts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to keep the New World screwworm fly from crossing the border with Mexico.

Those efforts include construction of a $750 million fly factory in southern Texas that’s set to open in April 2027 for breeding billions of sterile males. The U.S. had largely eradicated the fly by the early 1970s by breeding sterile males and releasing them from planes to mate with females, who laid eggs that wouldn’t hatch.

Smaller facilities in Texas and southern Mexico have been dispersing sterile flies bred in Panama, and another is planned for Arizona.

Florida — where the screwworm fly can thrive — banned imports of rescued dogs and cats from Texas and New Mexico just a week after the first reported case in Texas this year. Other states required veterinarians to inspect animals and declare them free of the parasite. Many shortened the period that a certification was valid from the typical 30 days to as little as three days.

Shelters worried about space long before the return of the screwworm

State restrictions hit an animal welfare system that’s long been short of the money and other resources, said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.

She said shelters need more money and space, but communities also should require animals to be spayed or neutered — and have programs to provide those services if people cannot afford them.

“If we could provide them just with some basic support, they might be able to keep those animals in their homes, and that’s one less animal in a shelter, one less animal being killed,” she said.

COVID-19 stressed the system, too, in part because pandemic restrictions put spaying and neutering on hold. Cost-of-living increases are another reason people turn animals over to shelters.

“A lot of them are just saying, ‘I just can’t, I just can’t do it anymore,’” said Brandon Krodle, animal control supervisor in Greenville, Texas, a fast-growing city northeast of Dallas.

A trip from Texas to Indiana saved her dog’s life

Mills, the Corpus Christi shelter director, has a dog who would have died in 2015 but for a nearly 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) trip from Paris, Texas, to Angola, Indiana, where Mills was working at the time. Zuri, a young female Shepherd-pit bull mix, was on a list of dogs set to be euthanized, and Mills’ counterpart in Texas asked Mills to add Zuri to a transport.

Zuri’s right ear doesn’t fully straighten up, and the puppy had “the cutest face,” Mills said, but she was sold on Zuri because Zuri looked as if she “was actually thinking things through” as Mills spoke to her. Mills broke a personal rule against taking her shelter’s animals home.

When Mills moved to Corpus Christi in 2020, Zuri returned to Texas.

“The shelter that I was at in Indiana, we transported from Texas and Southern states every week,” Mills said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A NASA spacecraft circling the moon is providing the sharpest views yet of the crater carved by a crashing SpaceX rocket.

The space agency released before-and-after photos of the impact area on Tuesday.

The Falcon rocket’s upper stage plowed into the moon at 5,400 mph (8,700 kph) on Aug. 5 after drifting through space for more than a year. It launched a pair of private moon landers with experiments and even a tiny rover in 2025 as part of NASA’s push to commercialize lunar exploration.

Based on these new photos by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the fresh crater appears to be 60 feet (18 meters) across and less than 10 feet (3 meters) deep, according to scientists.

Dark and bright streaks are clearly visible emanating like butterfly wings from the crater. The darker lines represent excavated material that was close to the surface and shaped by eons of solar wind, cosmic rays and micrometeorite strikes. The brighter rays indicate fresh rocks and dirt that were hurled from farther down.

The spacecraft photographed the crater a week after the collision from 60 miles (96 kilometers) up, while zooming along at one mile per second. Flight controllers had to tilt the spacecraft so its cameras pointed toward the impact scene.

The orbiter completes a lunar polar orbit every two hours, as the moon rotates beneath. It took six days before the crash scene came into view.

South Korea’s Danuri spacecraft was first on the scene to beam back photos.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been orbiting the moon since 2009, serving as NASA’s up-close eyes as the space agency works to return astronauts to the lunar surface.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In a bubblegum pink bouclé skirt suit, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser must have felt as if she was speaking into a void as she pitched Wall Street, via livestream, on the future she envisioned for one of the world’s largest banks.

It was March 2022. Fraser was a year and a day into her job. She was the first woman ever to lead a major U.S. bank. And Citi was in a bad spot: Its stock had dropped 15% during her tenure, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 10% growth. It was the only big U.S. bank trading below its book value. There also had been a humiliating blunder in which the bank sent $900 million to the wrong place and struggled to get it back.

To make matters worse, just hours before Fraser strode onstage for the bank’s first investor day in five years, Citi had suffered another indignity: Two executives had caught COVID, and the entire event had gone virtual. Fraser was forced to deliver her remarks into a camera, eyes trained on a teleprompter in the largely empty auditorium.

“We have an urgent need to address the issues that have kept our firm from living up to its full potential,” she said, then spoke bluntly: “It’s frankly not a surprise that we’ve been outperformed by our peers and that we failed to meet the expectations of our investors.” She vowed to change how the bank was run, instilling crisp decision-making and real discipline on execution and delivering results.

Unfazed, Fraser ticked through her recovery plan with the ruthless precision of a seasoned McKinsey consultant (she’s an alum). Her vision for Citi: to be the preeminent banking partner for institutions with cross-border needs; a global leader in wealth management; and a valued personal bank in our home market. Anything that didn’t serve these purposes may end up on the chopping block. And the bank’s culture of mediocrity had to change: “Good enough was good enough for far too long,” she said.

Fraser’s no-nonsense strategy for Citi was a demonstration of the new kind of leadership she was bringing to Wall Street: historical by definition and displaying a vulnerability that bucked the stoic boys’ club culture that had always dominated banking. Here was a CEO who, when I profiled her after her appointment was announced in 2020, talked about empathy, balance, and her desire for a personal and family life—alongside results; one who wore a fuchsia scarf to match her suit. As she told me when we spoke again this April: “I think you can make tough decisions. It does not mean you need to be an asshole.”

Five years into her tenure, the grades for Fraser’s turnaround plan are in: The new Citi is very much here. In April, Citi logged its highest quarterly revenue in a decade, with all five of its divisions recording gains, led by services and markets. The bank’s return on tangible common equity hit 13.1% in the first quarter, the highest since 2021. Citi stock is up about 83% since Fraser took over as CEO. It has risen 7.8% this year, ahead of rivals JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, but slightly behind the S&P 500’s 8% growth. And it has largely addressed regulatory reporting issues, and shed management layers and bureaucracy.

VCG via Getty Images

“Turnaround” can be a loaded term when it comes to female leaders. The well-documented glass-cliff phenomenon—in which boards turn to women when the cleanup job is exceedingly difficult or impossible—can be a trap for female execs who accept a no-win challenge.

Fraser’s CEO appointment looked at first as though it largely fit that script, but then she flipped it: If she faced any sort of metaphorical precipice, she looks likely to stick the landing.

But the very metrics that vindicate Fraser’s turnaround also raise the stakes for what comes next. Cleaning up a sprawling bank is one job; growing one is another. She now faces the question dogging every CEO who inherits a fixer-upper: Can she shift Citi out of repair mode and into a genuine growth story—one that helps Wall Street believe Citi can lead again?

Citi’s investors had reason to be skeptical in 2022; they had heard promises of turnarounds before. For decades, Citi had tried and failed to shed its reputation as Wall Street’s slacker bank that had long trailed rivals in profitability. The board had tasked Fraser, a Citi veteran with a track record of reviving troubled divisions, with streamlining the bank, which had still not fully dismantled the unwieldy and lumbering financial supermarket former CEO Sandy Weill had bolted together in an ill-advised acquisition spree.

Fraser’s blueprint was classic consultant-style triage—divest the sideshow businesses, simplify the org chart, and redirect capital to the divisions that could actually win. Early on, she funneled Citi’s varied operations into five distinct business lines, flattened its management structure, and began exiting retail banking in 14 international markets. It’s now more specialty grocer than sprawling supermarket.

Mike Mayo, a long-time analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, says this reorganization was the moment Fraser set Citi on the right course. “When you look back in 10 years, you’re likely to say this was the most powerful change made at Citi,” he said, praising Fraser for removing bureaucracy and red tape, and eliminating Citi’s mishmash global matrix structure.

Now, Mayo says, “there’s nowhere to hide.”

Citi director Peter Blair Henry likes to compare Fraser to an elite athlete. He’s an ex-Division I wide receiver himself, and in his telling, the 58-year-old Scottish-born Brit and University of Cambridge graduate is either an NFL quarterback vowing that a 1–16 team will make it to the next Super Bowl, or famed Boston Celtic Bill Russell, a legendary player-coach, who could draw up a final play and sink the winning shot. “Champions,” he says, “believe they’re going to win. But then they do the work. She’s done the work, and she’s been in the trenches.”

She has indeed: Fraser’s most formative assignment came during the 2008 financial crisis when, as Citi’s global head of strategy and M&A, Fraser executed 25 deals in 18 months to shrink the bank in exchange for much-needed capital. During that period, the bank sold nearly a trillion dollars worth of assets and cut 100,000 jobs.

Fraser’s McKinsey training gave her the know-how to structure a turnaround campaign; the financial crisis experience gave her the fortitude to pull it off.

“So many of the things we were selling we were not the right owner of,” she recalls. “That gave me not only the courage to make tougher decisions but also utter determination that the bank would just be run differently, with discipline, with accountability and focus.”

Fraser says her ability to make a judgment call — and then, in British fashion, get on with it—is a trait that’s served her well. But just because she has stuck to her guns doesn’t mean all the decisions have been easy or painless. The bank will eliminate 20,000 jobs by the end of this year as part of its turnaround. And the plan involves parting ways with businesses that have been in the bank’s portfolio for decades, such as retail banking in Russia, China, and Mexico.

Some of Fraser’s big-name hires have also come under fire, with allegations of bullying leveled at Citi wealth chief Andy Sieg, whom Fraser recruited from Bank of America, and head of banking Viswas Raghavan, who was reportedly accused of bullying at his previous employer, J.P. Morgan. A former managing director accused Sieg of harassment in a lawsuit filed in January. (Citi has said the lawsuit has no merit and, after an investigation into complaints against Sieg, Citi stood by him. The bank also defended Raghavan as “a proven leader with a well-earned track record for driving results.”)

At times Fraser’s revamping of Citi’s culture has seemed to clash with her efforts to lead what she has called a “human bank.”

Lately, Fraser has used pointed language to signal a cultural reset. In 2023, she urged employees who weren’t on board with her overhaul to “get off the train.” In January, Fraser told her 226,000 staffers that she would no longer be grading them with A’s for effort; they would be judged on results. “I expect to see the last vestiges of old, bad habits fall away, and a more disciplined, more confident, winning Citi fully emerge in 2026,” she wrote.

That language is in stark contrast with the notes of empathy that she hit around the time she was named CEO. She was candid then about the demands of parenthood — mentioning that she worked part-time for her entire McKinsey partnership, for example. And she framed her willingness to discuss the personal side of the job—and relate to her team on that level—as an edge she possesses based partly on gender norms. “I can be more vulnerable in certain areas,” she told me in an interview at the time, “talking more about the human dimensions of this than some of my male colleagues are comfortable [with].”

It would be easy to assume Fraser traded that human touch for gritty pragmatism once she faced the demands of the CEO hot seat. But Fraser has always maintained that both traits can coexist. “Empathy is not being nice,” she said in an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in February. “It’s just being thoughtful about the other side of the table.”

Still, it’s not easy to be a fixer who’s also an outlier. Fraser remains the sole woman leading a major bank. “Nobody’s going to love you for everything that you do,” says Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist and author of Wall Street Women. “She’s doing it for a business and for economic reasons, like probably any CEO is in that position, but because she’s the first female to do it, I think she’s being held to a higher standard.”

Fraser acknowledges that her job requires some code-switching: “There are messages that are appropriate for different times, but it’s still authentic, it’s coming from me,” she says. “I know who I am,” she adds. “Maybe it’s the benefit of there not being as many female leaders around, you know? You have to have a strong sense of self.”

This conviction has been necessary in high-stakes moments, as Citi was criticized by some for rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Fraser called that decision “hard” and tied it to Citi’s work for the U.S. government, which, during the Trump administration, has cracked down on diversity initiatives among its contractors.

As a global bank, Citi “sits on all these fault lines,” says Jon Gray, COO of the alternative asset manager Blackstone. He lists Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank; Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs; and the Iran conflict as crises Fraser has had to manage. “Navigating that is very tough, but having somebody like Jane, who’s got this equanimity about her — incredibly calm, taking a long-term view—that, I think, has been very helpful to their organization.”

Close colleagues and associates say Fraser is a thoughtful ally and reliable friend.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet recalls being touched when Fraser visited her at home following a mastectomy. “She just shows up at my house,” Sweet said. “You know, she talks a lot about empathy, but like, at that moment, I lived that empathy.”

Fraser is also known as a prankster. She once pulled an April Fools joke in which she persuaded her senior management team to sign waivers for a fictional group skydiving outing.

Fraser says the purpose of her jokes is simple: “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” She notes dryly that her team has not yet pranked her back: “They don’t dare while I’m in this job.”

Ahead of Citi’s investor day this year, on May 7, analysts had framed the event as yet another inflection point for Citi—but this time it wasn’t about a turnaround. Instead, the questions were focused on whether Citi could transition its strategy from fix-it mode to growth.

But the mood in the room at Citi’s Tribeca headquarters was more subdued than expected. Citi had underwhelmed investors hours earlier when it published modest medium-term profitability targets of 14% to 15% return on tangible common equity by 2031. Citi’s stock dropped in premarket trading.

So when Fraser strode onstage, again in a vibrant pink suit, she was in the familiar position of having to sell investors on her plan. This time, at least, she played to a full house.

Citi’s five distinct business units will generate a flywheel effect for clients that would serve each one’s bottom line and fuel higher returns and stronger growth bank-wide, she said. “A client can have their global cash managed by services, currency hedge by markets, a strategic acquisition advised on and financed by banking, and the personal wealth of its executives managed by the private bank, with their spending supported by cards.”

Citi is also investing in AI to increase efficiency. AI-assisted code reviews have already freed up 100,000 hours of capacity per week on Citi’s engineering team, Fraser said.

By the afternoon, Fraser had, once again, won investors over, with shares closing up 1.2% for the day.

The one person Fraser never had to convince about the validity of her turnaround was herself. Years ago, Fraser talked to me about moments of self-doubt; how, for instance, she initially thought she wasn’t good enough for the role of global head of strategy and M&A when it was offered to her.

But the best cure for self-doubt is doing the hard work. “I went out and listened,” Fraser said, to Citi’s people — investors, clients, regulators, and board.

“Some of that’s uncomfortable. [But] that gave me real confidence in the vision we had to be the preeminent bank for clients with cross-border needs,” she said. “I never had a lack of conviction. This was the right path.”

This article appears in the June/July 2026 issue of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As airlines continue to shorten seat sizes and leg space, it may come as a surprise when they offer some amenities that don’t involve spending much earned money or miles. Now, American Airlines is bringing back one amenity it cut nearly a decade ago: seatback screens. 

The airline announced on Tuesday it will install 4k screens at every seat on all new narrow-body aircrafts from Airbus and Boeing starting in 2028. The new screens will feature improved USB-C fast charging ports and bluetooth audio connectivity. And for those who were splurging on their seats, the company is wooing higher-spending travelers by increasing premium seating across all aircrafts.

“From next-generation seatback entertainment at every seat to substantially more premium seating options, these enhancements will give our customers more ways to relax, stay connected, and enjoy their journey,” Heather Garboden, American’s chief customer officer, said in a statement. 

The upgrades come as CEO Robert Isom looks for new ways to close the profit gap with rivals United Airlines and Delta Air Lines. He told CNBC recently that the company’s “long-range plan is certainly making up the margin gap.” 

Starting next year, American is also implementing a Starlink wifi system into 500 of its narrowbodied aircrafts. The Starlink system is the fastest Wi-Fi available on-board, providing fliers with advanced multigigabit connectivity. 

Last year, American raked in over $54 billion in revenue. Its competitors beat the airline by a steep profit gap. United generated about $3 billion more in profit than American in 2025, according to CNBC, while Delta hauled in nearly $5 billion more than American.

American’s about-face on seatback screens also comes years after the airline and other competitors shifted to streaming entertainment on passengers’ personal devices. Airlines said the lack of screens offset weight, hardware maintenance, and costs for short-haul flights. 

“I haven’t flown American in so many years,” one Reddit user wrote on the subreddit r/americanairlines. “I just flew with them recently. They had no screens, it felt like an old flight from back in the day.”

The no-screen strategy has long frustrated some frequent fliers accustomed to seatback entertainment. American already offers screens on more than 140 long-haul aircraft, and the company allegedly has been “seriously considering” the upgrade to narrowbody planes for months, according to a CNBC report.

Airline premium wars

American Airlines is not alone in its attempt to win travelers willing to pay more for extra space and upgraded amenities. Nearly every major airline in the U.S. has taken steps to improve their premium ticket options and perks in recent years, drawing a stark divide between the curtain separating economy and premium classes. 

American is now focused on more premium experiences, creating larger airport lounges, new business-class suites, and refurbishing its Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners, used primarily for its long-haul international flights. 

It joins the ranks of Delta, which in April debuted the Delta One suite on its new Airbus A350-1000 aircrafts, featuring a luxury 180-degree flatbed cushioned with Italian designer Missoni bedding. The airline aims to equip all suites with sliding privacy doors by 2030.

“Delta is not a low-cost airline,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian told Fortune‘s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in an episode of the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. “We can’t win by trying to provide the cheapest. We have to be able to win by providing the best.”

Southwest, long known for its low prices and single-cabin fleet, ended its open-seating policy and introduced premium options including extra-legroom seats, making it easier for families to sit together.

“We knew that 80% of our customers wanted assigned seating, and 88% of customers that would not fly us wanted assigned seating,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told ABC News in April. “You’ve gotta follow your customer.”

The push for premium comes as higher fuel costs put further pressure on the economics of airlines. The International Air Transport Association projected in June that jet fuel prices could increase by 70% this year, leaving a $100 billion bill for airlines. Carriers United and American both projected they would need to pay an extra $6 billion in fuel costs this year. 

“There’s been a tremendous amount of volatility in the fuel curve,” Isom said on American’s Q2 earnings call this year. “American is well-poised to operate in an environment of volatility. We’re set up for this, and I look forward to being able to tackle the problem as we go forward.”

The amount of low-cost travel options for consumers has also decreased after Spirit Airlines shut down operations in May. There were talks to secure $500 million in a federal bailout package after the company filed consecutive Chapter 11 bankruptcies amidst rising jet fuel costs, but the bailout never materialized.

“We apologize most specifically to those Americans who may now be priced entirely out,” Spirit lawyer Marshall Huebner said in a May court appearance, before thanking Spirit customers who “could not otherwise have afforded air travel.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com