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Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous founder of Theranos who is currently serving out a more than 11-year prison sentence in Texas, re-entered the zeitgeist this past fall—in September to be exact. One of her first courses of business was to retweet a Fox News interview with JD Vance.

Or, at least, someone retweeted it.

Over the next couple of days, Holmes’ account on X began to muse over what Holmes would tell the 19-year-old version of herself who was about to drop out of Stanford and build Theranos (“lean into fear;” “don’t be discouraged;” etc.). And later in September, after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah, the account began posting a stream of writings about the importance of free speech and support for Kirk’s widow, Erika. “Everyone might be posting today about Charlie. But I’ll do the same 3-5 years from now,” Holmes’s account wrote.

Her X account has become something of a spectacle—starting a book club, picking fights with All In podcaster Jason Calacanis, sending out seemingly live tweets about life in prison at FTC Bryan, the minimum-security prison camp where Holmes is serving her sentence; posting photos of her before prison with her kids; and responding to critics with snide remarks about her innocence. Since rejoining X a little less than five months ago, Holmes’ account has posted more than 4,400 times.

But here’s the thing: It isn’t really her.

For starters, there’s a note in the bio, suggesting others are pushing the publish button: “Mostly my words, posted by others,” it reads. When I reached out to FTC Bryan and the Federal Bureau of Prisons to inquire about the account, the FPB was quick to say that Holmes can’t post.  

“Individuals inside federal prisons do not have access to the internet or social media,” a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons specified, and they are prohibited from keeping cell phones. While the spokesperson said they could “not attest to whether or not a social media account is maintained by someone on the outside,” they made it clear that the posts can’t be coming from inside.

So I’ve been asking around for weeks, trying to figure out who may be ghostwriting Holmes’s account—asking other ghostwriters (and Holmes) who is. For now, it’s a mystery. When I DM’d the account and asked who was running it, someone responded “what is your angle,” then stopped corresponding with me. Holmes did not respond to a letter I sent via snail mail, requesting she call me from Bryan. Her attorney as well as her former crisis publicist Risa Heller didn’t respond to my requests either. Nor did her husband, Billy Evans, who currently runs an AI-powered biotech testing startup.

Garret Caudle, who founded a ghostwriting and marketing agency called Influent that specializes in writing people’s LinkedIn posts, who hadn’t been following her account but reviewed it after I asked about it, suspects Holmes has an entire team behind the operation.

“There’s undoubtedly more than two people. My guess is between three to four people,” he says. “That is something one could do from jail, theoretically, because you can have a single point of contact with a team leader, and talk about the things you want to do in the future. That person can strategize with you, talk about the pillars, and then they’re operating on your behalf.” 

Prisoners in FTC Bryan are able to communicate with the outside world via monitored, paid phone calls, snail mail, email, and in-person visitation. So Holmes has options for passing (mostly) her words to whatever “others” are posting them.

Image Rehabilitation 101

Why Holmes would be investing time and energy in her public image right now is becoming more obvious. Reuters reported just last week that Holmes has been vying for Trump to commute the nearly six years that remain in her sentence. She filed a request to Trump with the Department of Justice sometime last year, according to the department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney website, asking for an early release from prison. That website says the request is currently under review. (The office didn’t respond to a request for comment) Early last year, Holmes had tried to petition for a rehearing for her trial, though that was unanimously denied.

For someone looking to get out of jail early, a request to Trump isn’t a bad strategy. In the year since President Trump was elected, he has doled out pardons and commutations to tech founders, including Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road dark web founder who was convicted of drug trafficking; Trevor Milton, founder of the electric truck startup Nikola Motor (securities and wire fraud); CZ Zhao, the founder of crypto exchange Binance (willfully violating anti-money laundering and sanctions laws); and Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson  (conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud and aggravated identity theft).

The X posts on the Holmes account, which have celebrated a Trump executive order and praised members of his administration and other conservative voices, suggest she has had a political change of heart—at least since 2016, when Holmes hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in that year’s election, in Palo Alto.

Whether or not Holmes is trying to use social media to help with her bid for commutation, she’s garnered a steady following, with more than 66,000 followers on X and lots of engagement on her profile (Holmes has not been posting on other social media sites). Republican blogger Jessica Reed Kraus has written Substack posts about how she has become sympathetic to Holmes and is questioning her guilty verdict. Holmes’ account has, naturally, amplified such takes.

“What does she have that she can really use, other than her personal brand? There’s not a lot,” Caudle says, noting that tech executives tend to think long-term or about their life as a chess board. “So if she is trying to do anything to set her life up and have control over her life, that would be a logical thing for her to wield.”

Social-media ghostwriting—where someone completely takes over a prominent person’s account and posts things on their own in that person’s name—still isn’t widespread among the tech elite, though investors and tech executives getting help with writing and amplification is extremely common, according to Kate Talbot, who has been helping Silicon Valley executives with their social media profiles for 12 years. “I don’t know many people who just have a straight ghostwriter,” she says.

Whatever Holmes’ strategy, if she’s relying on professionals, it most likely isn’t cheap. Three ghostwriters and social media consultants who spoke with Fortune said executives pay between $7,000 to $10,000 a month for ghostwriting services. For prominent individuals, those rates can go much, much higher.

“There are many executives who are spending anywhere between $10,000-$20,000 a month on personal branding-type services,” Caudle says about executives with large brands, noting he knows of at least one executive who dishes out $1 million a year.

If Holmes were to be paying so much, we should be asking how. Her verdict called for her to pay more than $450 million in restitution to her investors. Prosecutors had tried to get Holmes to pay her victims $250 a month once she gets out of prison. But her lawyers argued she was unable to afford that due to her “limited financial resources.” Holmes has maintained she never sold any shares of Theranos, and her net worth was estimated to be $0 in 2016. That raises the question of who’s paying for Holmes’s social spree—or if some fans and family members are doing it for free.

Whatever the case may be, Holmes has a clear message she wants to get out to the public:

“I detest this bunk,” her account wrote about her cell.

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For years, the resistance to artificial intelligence (AI) looked manageable. There were academics writing open letters, Hollywood writers striking over contract language, the think-tank reports warning of job displacement. Tech executives nodded, pledged responsibility, and kept building as fast as they could.

Then someone threw a firebomb at Sam Altman’s house.

On Friday, a  20-year-old man named Daniel Moreno-Gama traveled from Spring, Texas, to San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood and hurled an incendiary device at the gate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million home, igniting a fire on the exterior gate. No one was injured, but Moreno-Gama was arrested approximately an hour later outside OpenAI’s headquarters — where he was allegedly trying to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatening to burn the facility to the ground. He is now facing state charges of attempted murder and federal charges that could include domestic terrorism.

Authorities afterward found a manifesto warning of humanity’s “extinction” at the hands of AI and expressing an urge to commit murder, and a disturbing personal Substack. The next morning, Altman posted a plea for sanity on his X account, attaching a photo of his husband and young child. “Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me,” Altman wrote.

To no avail. Early Sunday morning, two more Gen-Zers, one 23 and the other 25, were arrested after shooting a gun near the Russian Hill home of Sam Altman (it is unclear at this time if the shooting was targeted).

After the attacks, pundits and professional opinion-havers pointed fingers in every direction: at the StopAI crowd, a radical group that has staged protests and flash-subpoena-deliveries to try to halt the pace of artificial intelligence altogether; at the news media, which has critically covered Altman and his peers; and at Altman himself, for stoking fear about AI displacement with his sometimes-apocalyptic rhetoric. Among the older commentariat, however, the dominant note was remorse and well wishes for Altman. 

But in the younger, less formal corners of the internet, like Instagram and TikTok, the comments under every post about the attacks generally run in one direction. “He’s not scared enough.” “Based do it again.” “FREE THAT MAN HE DID NOTHING WRONG.” “Finally some good news on my feed.”

Those comments are ugly, but for those who’ve been paying attention to the anti-AI backlash build, not shocking. At all. 

Gen Z is not a fan of AI. At all 

The middle distribution of Gen-Z’s feelings about AI range from apprehension to downright hatred. Despite the fact that more than half of Gen Z living in the U.S. uses AI regularly, according to a recently released Gallup poll, less than a fifth feel hopeful about the technology. About a third says the technology makes them angry. And nearly half say it makes them afraid.

Gallup’s own senior education researcher, Zach Hrynowski, blamed the bad vibes at least partially on the dwindling job market. The oldest Zoomers, he told Axios, are the angriest, as they are “acutely aware” of the ability of a technology to transform cultural norms without a second thought, unlike a Gen Xer who is trained to see new technology as toys and are still “playing around with AI.” 

Indeed, the job prospects for the recently graduated Gen-Z are abysmal; Bloomberg just reported that 43% of young graduates are “underemployed,” meaning taking on jobs that require less education than they have.

But that can’t explain all of the vitriol. Perhaps some of it is the yawning gap beween promise and reality, symbolized by Altman himself. The OpenAI CEO has suggested that AI will usher in an era of “universal basic compute,” that people will barely need to work, that the future will be almost frictionless. That isn’t happening as of 2026.

Instead, inflation remains stubbornly untamable, as it has throughout the decade; consumers have never felt worse about their financial state, and Gen Z feels like they’re entering a “starter economy” without plentiful jobs or affordable homes. And so there’s a real mismatch, as Alex Hanna, a professor and researcher who studies the social impacts of AI, put it, “between consumer confidence and people’s pocketbooks and budgets, and what the technologists and the AI companies say the future is supposed to look like.”

Data center backlash

This is not just a Gen Z problem, either. In the American heartland, data centers are being proposed at a pace that local communities never anticipated and for which they were never asked permission, and they’re increasingly pushing back.

The numbers are serious. According to a report from 10a Labs’ Data Center Watch, at least $18 billion worth of data center projects have been blocked and another $46 billion delayed over the past two years due to local opposition. At least 142 activist groups across 24 states are now actively organizing to block data center construction and expansion. A Heatmap Pro review of public records found that 25 data center projects were canceled following local pushback in 2025 alone, four times as many as in 2024, with 21 of those cancellations occurring in the second half of the year as electricity costs grew.

The concerns driving this resistance are less about existential AI risk and more about typical kitchen-table complaints; communities consistently cite higher utility bills, water consumption, noise, impacts on property values, and green space destruction as their primary objections. Water use is mentioned as a top concern in more than 40% of contested projects, according to a Heatmap Pro review of public records.

Meanwhile, Hanna noted, companies keep lording over the threat of AI replacing workers as “leverage.” She added, “Employers are making room for AI investments. They want to show that they can lay off people and do what they’re currently doing with a decrease in headcount.”

That dynamic became evident in February, when a Substack analyst firm called Citrini Research published an AI doomsday scenario that went so viral it caused a multibillion-dollar market selloff. Days later, Jack Dorsey obliged the anxiety by cutting Block nearly in half, hinting that the cuts were due to AI innovation, and Wall Street gave him a standing ovation: the stock rallied as much as 25% the next day. Block was an outlier, but a pattern has begun to emerge; AI was cited in more than 55,000 U.S. layoffs in 2025—more than 12 times the number attributed to the technology just two years earlier, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. All that being said, Morgan Stanley’s Michael Gapen wrote earlier this week that the AI story is not having a macro impact on the economy just yet, while Goldman Sachs economists forecast the long-term disruption at 6%-7% of jobs in the U.S.

But the anger is also more intimate than just jobs. Much has been made of Gen Z turning 2026 into the year of friction; having real experiences, with real people, to make things feel hard and awkward again instead of optimized into a primordial soup flow-of-consciousness state-of-being. Hanna pointed to a recent TechCrunch report about a woman whose ex-boyfriend used OpenAI to fabricate a psychological profile of her and send it to her friends and family—with the chatbot validating his grievances in what Hanna described as operating “in a sycophantic manner, telling him he was right and she was wrong.”

The backlash, Hanna argued, is not down to one thing. There are workers who feel threatened, consumers who thought more would come, and there are people who have had AI deployed against them in intimate ways. Lumping all of these together—with the fringe extinction-risk crowd, or the StopAI protesters—misses what’s actually driving the force. “I think the vast majority of people who are angry at AI are regular consumers,” Hanna said. “People who were promised one thing, especially online, and they’re just getting a completely different experience.”

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Chinese President Xi Jinping issued some of his starkest language yet about the state of the global economy on Tuesday, telling Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in Beijing “the international order is crumbling into disarray” in remarks reported by Bloomberg, which clarified the Chinese phrase connotes not merely chaos, but also moral decay.

The two leaders were pledging closer bilateral ties and called for a joint front to preserve multilateralism—a pointed signal, directed at Washington, that Beijing intends to fill the vacuum left by America’s more unilateral posture on the world stage.

Xi’s dire assessment is increasingly shared by the world’s most prominent financial voices. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, speaking to the BBC in late March, laid out a bleak binary: Either the Iran war resolves in a way that reintegrates the country into global markets, pushing oil to $40 a barrel, or the conflict grinds on and oil climbs to $150 with years of supply disruption to follow.

“I don’t think anybody knows what the outcome will be,” he said.

The stakes are enormous. Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil flow daily—about 20% of global supply. Since the war began, the strait has been effectively choked: Mines have been laid, shipping traffic disrupted, and the price of passage elevated for the few vessels Tehran has permitted through. The consequences ripple far beyond energy markets. Fertilizer prices, supply chains, agricultural costs—Fink warned it all hangs in the balance.

“We’ll have global recession,” he said flatly about the worst-case scenario.

The International Monetary Fund is sounding similar alarms. In its April 2026 World Economic Outlook, the fund cut its global growth forecast to 3.1% for this year—a meaningful downgrade that it explicitly tied to the outbreak of war in the Middle East. The worst-case scenario was similar to Fink’s: just 2% global growth, the threshold for a global recession.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said ahead of the report “even our most optimistic scenario involves a growth downgrade,” noting without the Iran conflict, the fund had actually been preparing to upgrade its projections. Emerging markets and developing economies are expected to bear the most severe pain.

These doom-and-gloom projections coexist uneasily with a U.S. economy that continues to defy gravity, growing at a faster rate than the rest of the developed world and racking up huge stock-market wins, to boot. Earlier this week, the S&P 500 erased all of its losses since the war in Iran began, with many market commentators remarking the Trump TACO trade was going strong.

Economist Scott Sumner, in a widely circulated essay published earlier this month, noted pundits have consistently failed to predict recessions and their recurring warnings have become a kind of reflexive noise. He noted since 1983, there have been just four recessions in the U.S.—roughly one per decade—compared to 19 in the first 83 years of the 20th century. Recession calls tied to the Ukraine war, the Fed’s 2023 rate hikes, and Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs all proved premature.

“In 2026,” he wrote, “an economics grad student might have a clear memory of only one recession, as the economy has been officially in the ‘contraction’ phase of the business cycle for only 2 out of the previous 200 months—February to April 2020.”

Tyler Goodspeed, chief economist at ExxonMobil and a former Trump White House economic advisor, makes a complementary case in his new history of recessions: that downturns, far from being inevitable features of capitalism, are historically contingent events—things that happen to economies, not things that simply happen. As Sumner notes, the U.S. recently pulled off its first-ever soft landing, gradually cooling inflation without cratering growth—”and no one seemed to notice.”

That historical amnesia cuts both ways. The same economy that has spent only two of the past 200 months in contraction is now staring down a hot war in the Persian Gulf, a fracturing trade system, and a Chinese president warning of moral as well as geopolitical collapse. Xi, Fink, and the IMF may yet be crying wolf. But the wolf has rarely been this close to the door.

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American consumers are more pessimistic about the economy than at any time in recorded history.

The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index fell to 47.6 in preliminary April 2026 readings released Friday — a 10.7% drop from March’s 53.3 and the lowest reading in the survey’s 74-year history. The figure blew past the prior record low of 50, set in June 2022 during the worst of the post-pandemic inflation crisis under President Biden, when gas prices and grocery bills were squeezing households nationwide. Three of the lowest consumer sentiment readings ever recorded have now occurred within the last nine months of Trump’s second term.

The milestone lands with political weight. Biden’s June 2022 nadir became a signature attack line for Republicans during the 2022 midterms and throughout the 2024 campaign — proof, they argued, that his economic stewardship had failed ordinary Americans. Now, with Trump owning a record that’s measurably worse, the tables have turned. And the causes, economists say, are different in kind, not just degree.

A war economy hits home

The proximate driver of the April collapse is the war in Iran. Survey director Joanne Hsu noted that sentiment has been sliding since the conflict began, and that demographic groups across age, income, and political party all posted declines this month — a broad-based erosion that signals the anxiety isn’t partisan. One-year business condition expectations plunged roughly 20% and now sit 6% below their level a year ago. Assessments of personal finances fell about 11%, with consumers citing rising prices and weaker asset values as their primary concerns.

Critically, 98% of the interviews in the April survey were completed before the announcement of a temporary cease-fire on April 7, meaning the data captures peak war panic — and may partially recover in the final May reading. “Economic expectations will likely improve once consumers feel assured that the supply disruptions caused by the Iran conflict have resolved and that gas prices have moderated,” Hsu said.

But the war is compounding pressures that were already building. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released March price data the same day as the sentiment survey, showing a 0.9% monthly jump in the all-items Consumer Price Index — an annualized rate of nearly 11% — with energy prices the primary culprit. One-year inflation expectations surged from 3.8% in March to 4.8% in April, the largest single-month increase since April 2025. Five-year inflation expectations rose to 3.4%, their highest level since November 2025.

A familiar feeling, unfamiliar causes

The 2022 Biden low was overwhelmingly an inflation story — the Fed was behind the curve, supply chains were still tangled from COVID, and energy prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The current collapse is more complex. Tariff uncertainty, the Iran conflict, spiking energy costs, and a stock market that has rattled retirement accounts are converging, hitting consumers from multiple directions.

During Biden’s worst stretch, sentiment eventually recovered as inflation cooled and the Fed’s rate hikes took hold. The path back this time is less clear. Unlike the supply-chain disruptions of the post-pandemic era, geopolitical conflict in a critical oil-producing region is harder to resolve with monetary policy. And unlike a tariff pause — which briefly lifted markets in mid-April — a war doesn’t respond to a White House press release.

What it means for spending

Consumer sentiment is a leading indicator: when Americans feel this grim, they tend to pull back on discretionary spending, delay major purchases, and prioritize financial caution over consumption. Buying conditions for durable goods and vehicles worsened sharply in April, again tied to high prices. If April’s preliminary reading holds or worsens in the final data, economists say the risk of a demand-side contraction — on top of whatever supply shock the Iran conflict delivers — becomes harder to dismiss.

Still, it’s worth asking a question that gets asked far too rarely: How good is consumer sentiment, actually, at measuring economic reality? The honest answer is: not very.

The University of Michigan survey asks people how they feel about the economy — not what they’re doing in it. And for at least a decade, economists have documented a widening and deeply troubling divergence between those two things. Since roughly 2021, consumer sentiment has serially underperformed what the underlying data would predict. Unemployment has stayed near historic lows. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, has risen. The share of American families in the upper-middle class has tripled since 1979, according to a recent analysis by the American Enterprise Institute. By nearly every traditional yardstick, the economy has been performing better than sentiment suggests — and economists have been struggling to explain the gap ever since.

Part of the explanation is the media environment. A landmark body of research has found that Americans’ economic perceptions are increasingly shaped not by their own financial circumstances but by their consumption of news and social media — both of which have strong incentives to amplify alarm. The algorithm doesn’t show you that unemployment is 4.4%. It shows you the factory that closed, the family that lost their home, and the analyst forecasting a recession. Repeated exposure to economic catastrophizing — regardless of whether a catastrophe is actually occurring — mechanically degrades sentiment.

Another data point worth bearing in mind: consumer sentiment hit an all-time high of 112 in January 2000 — six months before the dot-com bubble burst and the economy began shedding jobs.

But the record is now official. Whether it marks a bottom or the beginning of something worse may depend on how quickly the guns go quiet.

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The picture of an American springtime usually looks something like this: sunny days, chittering birds, and, on many suburban streets, a congested driveway full of eager prospective homebuyers gathering for an open house.

Spring is usually when the U.S. housing market heats up, as potential buyers start shopping ahead of desired summer move-ins. But the 2026 housing market has gotten off to a rough start, as affordability concerns continue to weigh down activity and disrupt the industry’s seasonal rhythm.

Defying historical norms, home sales fell last month, according to data published Monday by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Existing home sales for March dipped 3.6% compared to February, and were down 1% from a year prior. The drop — which pulled the annualized sales pace below 4 million for the first time since June — suggests high mortgage rates and weakening sentiment among homebuyers are already bleeding into spring.

“March home sales remained sluggish and below last year’s pace,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement, attributing the falling numbers to shrinking consumer confidence and a lower job creation rate.

The traditionally hot spring buying season has coincided with a souring economic environment impacting the decisions of many homebuyers. Mortgage rates, which nationally are averaging between 6% and 6.5%, remain the biggest obstacle, according to NAR, and might be unlikely to fall significantly this year. An uneven jobs landscape and disrupted energy markets due to the war in the Middle East has made the Federal Reserve more sensitive to inflation in recent months, resulting in a pause on rate cuts.

Mischa FIscher, chief economist at Zillow, put it similarly in an analysis last month, arguing that higher unemployment and persistently high mortgage rates were likely to act as a “slight drag on the spring season.” Zillow’s outlook for 2026 changed drastically depending on how long high rates and unemployment weigh down the housing market. If the numbers normalize by May, home sales for the year would rise 3.48%, less than a percentage point less than Zillow’s previous estimate. But if the same conditions persist for the whole year, home sale numbers are more likely to decline compared to 2025, a significant signal pointing to an economic slowdown.

Besides high loan rates, prospective buyers are saddled with exorbitant home prices. NAR’s Yun noted that housing stock in the U.S. remains limited, with demand outstripping supply in part because the vast majority of homeowners still hold relatively low rates and have decided to stay put rather than put their house on the market. The shortage means the median home price last month was $408,800, a record high for March. The environment for prospective homebuyers was stark enough for NAR to revise its expectations for home sales growth this year to 4%, down from its earlier projection of 14% released last fall.

The regional picture is mixed. The Midwest and parts of the northeastern U.S. have seen modest activity gains, while affordability constraints have been most acute in Western states. Yun said that adding between 300,000 and 500,000 homes for sale would help return the market “closer to normal conditions.” 

But because many homeowners are unwilling to swap out their relatively low rates, that shift might not happen this spring. Recent research has already pointed out how the housing market’s traditional seasonality has become an outdated norm since the pandemic. Factors like remote work and improved online real estate offerings have made it easier for prospective homebuyers to enter the market year-round. With mortgage rates stubbornly high and affordability still top of mind for shoppers, the traditional sweet spot for homebuying might be losing the last of its seasonal charm.

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Home prices just did it again. For the 33rd consecutive month, the median price of an existing home climbed—this time to $408,800 in March, a record high for the month, according to the National Association of Realtors’ existing home-sales report. Politicians from President Donald Trump to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have campaigned on bringing housing costs down. So far, the market isn’t cooperating.

The 1.4% year-over-year price increase came even as sales of existing homes fell 3.6% from February, a notable stumble heading into what is typically the market’s busiest season.

Even as politicians nationwide promise to build more homes to lower prices, inventory hasn’t yet matched those promises, and home prices remain elevated.

“Inventory remains a major constraint on the market,” NAR chief economist Dr. Lawrence Yun said in a statement. “The inventory-to-sales ratio, or supply-to-demand ratio, is below historical norms. An additional 300,000 to 500,000 homes for sale would help bring the market closer to normal conditions.”

Home prices are up 60% compared to pre-pandemic figures as the country endures a prolonged housing shortage, estimated at about 4.7 million according to a 2025 Zillow report. The market has gotten so bad that many young buyers are leaning on the “Bank of Mom and Dad” for help as the median age of the first-time homebuyer hit 40 last year. Some employers are even shelling out $6,500 to help some workers onto the property ladder.

Why the housing market is failing buyers even as inventory grows

The numbers become even more jarring in context. By most measures, this should be a buyer’s market. Yet most buyers still can’t afford to act on it. In February, there were 46.3% more sellers than buyers across the U.S., representing a gap of 629,808—the largest gap in real estate firm Redfin’s records going back to 2013. That number is up 30% from a year ago, when the mismatch was still north of 449,000.

On the flip side, homeowners are benefitting from this market: Yun noted that “the typical homeowner has accumulated $128,100 in housing wealth over the past six years.”

NAR’s principal economist and director of real estate research [name needed] told Marketplace the market is still operating at about 80% of a normal spring pace. But homesellers are pricing their homes above the market. “We’re seeing more homes hit the market,” she said. “That’s positive, but many of those homes are still priced above what typical households can comfortably afford.”

In contrast, Yun said lower consumer confidence and softer job growth have sidelined buyers. “March home sales remained sluggish and below last year’s pace,” he said.

The Michigan consumer sentiment index just hit its lowest point in its 74-year history, plummeting to 47.6, falling below its previous record set in mid-2022, when inflation blew past 9%. That trend is only expected to accelerate as the Iran war has driven up energy costs. Moreover, nearly three in five Americans think AI will hinder their ability to purchase a home as the technology threatens to automate jobs.

Mortgage rates are also elevated, sitting at 6.37%, slightly down from the past week though they risk climbing further as the Iran war pushes oil prices higher. While oil prices have fallen from a peak of above $110, they remain high at about $94 per barrel.

“The threat of higher-for-longer oil prices continued to keep Treasury yields elevated, and mortgage rates finished last week higher,” Joel Kan, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s vice president and deputy chief economist, said in a statement.

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Television host Mike Rowe saw it all on the set of Dirty Jobs. The Discovery Channel reality series brought audiences into the worlds of some of the most physically taxing and messy trade roles. It explored the daily routines of sewer inspectors; the grimy yet essential work of septic tank technicians; and the grim conditions within custom meat-processing facilities.

Around the time he was hosting the show, Rowe launched the MikeroweWORKS Foundation, an organization dedicated to reemphasizing the value of skilled trades as an alternative to the traditional four-year degree. Through the foundation, he awards scholarships to people pursuing careers in the trades.

This year, Rowe is doubling the award size from last year to $10 million, as he said interest in the program is higher than ever. The 64-year-old said he’s received 10 times as many applications as he usually does since the foundation’s launch in 2008. Still, Rowe said, it will take a massive effort to shift the national perception of trade roles, especially as AI places white-collar work on the chopping block.

“You’re talking about turning around a tanker,” Rowe told Fortune. “It took a whole generation or more for the skills gap to get as bad as it is right now. And it’s going to take some time to fix it.”

In June 1979, manufacturing employment reached an all-time high of 19.6 million jobs. But since then, American culture turned its back on the trades. The rise of white-collar work made a college degree the expected path, and offshoring and free trade agreements through the turn of the century only accelerated that shift, leaving trade roles increasingly scarce.

But the tide is slowly turning. Some workers are betting on the trades over college as business leaders sound the alarm on a growing skilled labor shortage. Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison, for example, recently told Fortune the trades may be one of the country’s most worthy investments. “In a world where administrative and analytical occupations are going to be increasingly dominated with the acceleration of AI, we think the skilled-trades initiative is going to be even more important here in the near future,” he said.

Many Gen Zers today are rethinking the value proposition of a four-year degree. AI automation and economic pressures, such as inflation and tariffs, have created a perfect storm in which young workers are struggling to find an entry point into the labor market. The unemployment rate for recent college grads is now higher than the unemployment rate for all workers, according to data from the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Student debt has also piled up to a towering $1.83 trillion, a cost that’s hampered consumer spending and delayed homeownership for many graduates. For Rowe, the answer is obvious. Today, the U.S. has 6.9 million job openings, many of which are in the trades.

“The vast majority don’t require a 4-year degree, he said. “They require training.”

AI is driving Gen Z to the trades. But is it enough to fix the job market?

While Rowe is betting on the trades to solve Gen Z’s job market snafu, his solution may not address the full picture. There were about 1.1 unemployed people for every job opening in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, suggesting there are slightly more people seeking roles than there are available. That number has climbed steadily since the pandemic. But it remains far below the numbers experienced in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Still, AI is motivating a flight to the trades on two fronts. For one, the technology is threatening to upend knowledge work. A recent study from Anthropic found that AI models today are already theoretically capable of performing the majority of tasks associated with engineering, business, finance, legal, and management roles. On the other hand, the nearly $700 billion AI infrastructure build-out has created white-hot demand for skilled laborers. Some projections show that the shortage of electricians could reach 300,000 within the next decade.

“In general, it’s Gen Z, they have gotten the memo,” Rowe said. “They’re taking a different view of college.”

It’s not just Rowe; that alarming shortage is prompting other companies to invest in the skilled trades. Lowe’s is investing $250 million to train plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. BlackRock is also supporting the trades with $100 million in investments.

To be sure, while unemployment among recent grads is rising, overall unemployment is still relatively low. Employers posted a better-than-expected 178,000 new jobs in March, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.4%.

Of course, many of the trades Rowe’s foundation is fostering aren’t the dirtiest roles featured on Dirty Jobs. Many participants are becoming welders, electricians, and mechanics. While his foundation has existed for nearly two decades, he said it‘s only lately that national headlines about mounting student debt and a widening skills gap have finally caught up with his mission.

“This foundation has been made relevant,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming. I’m not taking a victory lap, but it’s just very strange and surreal and kind of gratifying to see so many people talking about the issue.”

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The White House promised a manufacturing renaissance. Instead, the factory floor keeps shrinking. For young men willing to ditch the hard-hat fantasy, the real money is in so-called “pink-collar” work—and the pay is better than anything on the shop floor.

President Donald Trump built a political movement on the promise of restoring blue-collar America: steel mills humming, assembly lines roaring, working-class men back on the job. The data says something very different is happening.

The blue-collar job market has been slowing for more than a year, with jobs in manufacturing and construction racking up roughly 150,000 net losses on an annual basis as of March, per calculations by economist Joey Politano. During Trump’s first year back in the White House, the manufacturing sector alone shed 108,000 jobs—even as the administration touted a coming “manufacturing boom.” The sector most likely to have generated the jobs that replaced them? Health care and social assistance.

“There are jobs available,” Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting firm RSM, told The New York Times‘ Talmon Joseph Smith. “However, at this moment, the demand for blue-collar labor is insufficient to match the supply.”

Pink-collar, green paychecks

For decades, nursing and teaching have been coded as women’s work: lower-status, lower-pay, and culturally off-limits for men raised on a diet of MAGA machismo. The pay reality punctures that myth entirely.

Registered nurses earned a median salary of $93,600 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Production workers—the backbone of the manufacturing economy Trump has promised to revive—earned a mean annual wage of $50,090 over the same period. The gap is nearly $40,000 a year. The factory floor doesn’t just offer fewer jobs—it offers significantly less money.

Career stability compounds the advantage. The BLS projects 193,100 registered nurse job openings per year through 2032, driven by retirements and rising demand. Manufacturing, meanwhile, has automated away 1.7 million jobs since 2000, Oxford Economics estimated, and could displace as many as 20 million more by 2030—tariffs or no tariffs.

The masculinity trap

The men most hurt by the MAGA economy’s broken promises are the same ones most culturally resistant to the jobs actually on offer. Prime-age male labor force participation—men between 25 and 54—has trended downward for decades, with the share of men sitting entirely outside the labor force holding at roughly 11%. That figure has remained stubbornly elevated even as the broader post-COVID economy recovered.

The mismatch is stark. HRSA and HHS data through 2025 show RN demand grew 3% while supply grew only 1%, producing an actual deficit of roughly 295,800 nurses nationwide—a figure that falls within McKinsey’s 2022 forecast of a 200,000–450,000 shortfall. Yet, men make up just 12% to 13% of the registered nursing workforce—a figure that has barely budged despite slow gains since the 1970s, when male nurses made up just 2.7% of the profession. “Nurse Dana” from The Pitt would be uniquely positioned to benefit from the AI economy, with her skills in high demand, but even that award-winning series has a dearth of male nurses.

Teaching tells a similar story. Men accounted for just 23% of the public school teaching workforce in the 2024–25 school year, a share barely changed since 2011–12. At the elementary level, the figure collapses to 11%.

The irony is sharp. The same working-class men the MAGA economy promised to rescue are sitting out a hiring boom in the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy because those jobs are considered women’s work. Meanwhile, the factories they’re waiting to return to keep shedding workers.

The hard-hat renaissance isn’t coming. The stethoscope and the lesson plan are already here.

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

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Nevada Assemblymember Howard Watts said in an interview that the legislative committee he chairs will “absolutely” look into pursuing an independent audit into who was responsible for altering a key public record after a Nevada OSHA inspection of Elon Musk-owned Boring Company.

Fortune reported in November that a document in Nevada OSHA’s inspection file was altered after the agency withdrew citations it had issued to the Boring Company in relation to a safety incident at one of the company’s tunneling sites. The matter was an area of questioning in a hearing on Tuesday, where state environment and safety regulators testified before the Nevada Legislature’s Interim Standing Committee on Growth and Infrastructure. A senior safety official acknowledged at the hearing that the document was altered, but said the agency had been unable to determine who had changed it.

In an interview after the hearing, Watts, a Democrat who chairs the committee, told Fortune that the Committee would look into options to pursue an independent audit and understand what happened to the altered record. 

“I think it would be in the best interest of transparency and accountability to have a third party do their own forensic audit,” Watts told Fortune.

Nevada OSHA, as well as the state government departments that sit above it, have come under scrutiny after Fortune’s investigation into the citations issue. Several people with deep expertise on Nevada OSHA’s process and rules have described what happened as a complete departure from OSHA procedure and as inappropriate. Federal OSHA is currently conducting an investigation into Nevada OSHA over its handling of the case.

The original record described a meeting that had taken place between a representative from Governor Joe Lombardo’s office, senior state safety regulators, and the Boring Company within 24 hours of Boring Company being issued two serious and willful citations following an incident in which firefighters were burned by chemicals in a tunnel during a safety drill. Boring Company’s president, Steve Davis, had called the Governor’s Office about the citations and set up that meeting, and the citations were rescinded at the onset of the meeting. Sometime after this meeting took place, a line item that had described this meeting in a public record was deleted from that document.

During Tuesday’s hearing, state Sen. Rochelle Nguyen, a Democrat, pressed senior safety regulators over the document being altered, and underscored that altering, removing, or concealing information in a public record was a serious and potentially criminal offense. 

“Some of my constituents that are very involved in transparency and public records are obviously going to be very concerned about how public records are potentially altered or go missing—and whether or not that’s prevalent throughout this agency or throughout the state,” Nguyen said.

Kristopher Sanchez, the director of the Department of Business and Industry, which sits above Nevada OSHA, said at the hearing that he personally requested that the Governor’s Technology Office do a forensic analysis on the record and said that his agency had also conducted one, but that those reviews “did not yield any results” and that they do not know “how that happened.”

When pressed, Sanchez specified that B&I and the Governor’s Office did not bring in a third-party investigator. He said his agency had not filed a criminal complaint or police report, as they were unable to identify who had altered the record. Sanchez said he did not have any kind of documentation, report, or memo regarding the forensic analysis and the methodology used.

“They are outside of our agency,” Sanchez said of the Governor’s Technology Office. “They’re impartial, and they are able to do those investigations. So I would have to defer to what they have and how they set that methodology and the tools in which they use to do that.”

The Governor’s Office declined to attend the hearing, according to a letter sent by Governor Joe Lombardo’s chief of staff, and thus did not respond to questions about it at the meeting. A representative from the Governor’s Office previously told Fortune in a statement that “no record was edited at the direction of me, the Governor’s Office, DIR, B&I, or any other entity I am aware of.”

In the interview after the hearing, Chair Watts said OSHA has been transparent about the forensic analysis, but questioned whether the reviews that had taken place were sufficient.

“We heard that there was not a third-party forensic investigation… So while we heard a commitment of looking into it and holding whoever was involved accountable, the people who looked into it were the Governor’s Office and Director Sanchez’s IT department,” Watts said. He added: “It is absolutely something that we’re going to be seeing how we can move forward.”

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It was the week of Kimbal Musk’s 40th birthday in September 2012, and invitations went out for his party that Saturday at 7 p.m. at New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant on East 52nd Street.

As invitees learned via email the password to get in—“pussy riot”—the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was scheming.

Epstein and an associate had handpicked a woman he believed would interest Kimbal Musk; coordinated club reservations through an associate who promised “as many girls” as “needed”; and organized a lunch the following day at his Upper East Side Manhattan mansion for Kimbal, his older brother, Elon Musk, and Elon’s then-wife, Talulah Riley, according to dozens of Department of Justice emails released this month. (Kimbal Musk later apologized to Epstein for not attending the lunch, in another email released by the DOJ.)

“I told him that you are coming with [Sarah] and that [Kimbal] might want to ditch his ex/or current to be,” Boris Nikolic, a close associate whom Epstein describes as a “good friend” in an email, reported in an email to Epstein ahead of the party.

“So please prepare [Sarah],” Nikolic added, with a winking emoji. (While many of the victims’ names were not entirely redacted in the Department of Justice’s initial release of thousands of names, Fortune is changing the names of the women mentioned in this story in an effort to protect their identities.)

After the party and the lunch, Sarah and Kimbal would go on to date for the next several months. Throughout that time, Epstein kept close tabs on Kimbal’s relationship. He directed Sarah’s involvement and her travel with him, according to dozens of emails from the Epstein files—seemingly in an attempt to get closer to Kimbal’s brother, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who had just made Forbes’s billionaire list in 2012, the year the relationship began. (Kimbal currently holds board seats at both companies.) And after the lunch at Epstein’s Manhattan home, Epstein would say to others that he and Elon “were talking all the time,” according to a person who worked at Epstein’s residence at the time.

The emails offer a revealing window into the tactics Epstein used to build his network of the rich and powerful, using women under his control like pieces on a chessboard. (All of the emails referenced in this article were part of the vast cache of files related to the Epstein case released by the DOJ earlier this month.) 

The elaborate game plan involved identifying powerful targets like the Musk brothers, using women and intermediaries to forge stronger ties with the target, and then relentlessly trying to insert himself into their circles. Throughout it all, Epstein and his associates sent and received status updates on the progress of the project, according to the Department of Justice files. Kimbal and Elon Musk are two of dozens of high-profile businessmen whose correspondence has emerged in the new batch of emails and documents, and who have tried to distance themselves from the disgraced financier. 

Paul Hennessy—SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

According to a former staffer at Epstein’s home, the catered lunch the week of Kimbal Musk’s birthday fit a pattern. “There would be a magician or a movie actor, a businessperson like Musk or [Bill] Gates, and beautiful women from his entourage,” the staffer said. (Fortune spoke with the former employee on condition of anonymity to protect their privacy.)

Inside the house, the staffer said, was a tightly controlled environment for Epstein’s assistants. Emails and news reports show these women were often in their early twenties, many from Eastern Europe. “There were myriads of abuse on a pretty much daily basis when there was no one around,” the staffer said. “He would switch assistants for abuse.” (One email from Epstein refers to Sarah as one of his assistants.) 

As has now been thoroughly documented, these women worked with Epstein expecting modeling or business opportunities that in many cases never materialized, and would often become dependent on him for a visa, housing, or money. The longer anyone stayed with Epstein, the staffer said, “the more you’re trapped.”

While Kimbal Musk’s ties to Epstein have been reported in news articles, a closer look at the complete sequence of events and emails in the relationship with Sarah, along with firsthand details from an Epstein staffer at the time, reveals a far more nuanced picture. It’s unclear whether Kimbal, who was recently divorced at the time, understood the true nature of his relationship with Sarah, or Epstein’s behind-the-scenes involvement in it.

Neither Kimbal Musk nor Elon Musk responded to Fortune’s multiple requests for comment by press time. Kimbal said in a statement on X earlier this week that the woman he started dating in 2012 was 30 years old when the relationship began and referred to Epstein as a “demon.” 

“My only meeting with that demon was in his New York office during the day. I never met with him again, and I never went to his island,” he said, adding: “My heart goes out to the many victims of Jeffrey Epstein, as it does for all who have suffered any kind of sexual abuse or harassment.”

Sarah did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Her attorney, Brad Edwards, said, “The fact that this personal aspect of her life is now being publicized as a consequence of DOJ’s errors in redacting victim names is causing so many victims so much pain.” He added: “For the public, the gossip gives people something to talk about; however, the fact that Jeffrey Epstein’s victims are real people whose privacy is being obliterated is somehow being completely forgotten.”

Business Insider reported some details of the relationship and Epstein’s involvement in 2020.

‘Controlling every step’

By the time she began dating Kimbal Musk, Sarah had already spent approximately six years working under Epstein’s close eye and control, the emails in the DOJ cache suggest.

Emails also suggest that, at the time, she lived in one of the many New York apartments Epstein maintained for associates. Emails suggest as well that she had most of her movements approved or at least monitored by him. When she fell ill, Epstein was updated; when she needed to travel, he paid for her tickets.

“He would control all the women’s schedules in his network,” says the person who worked for Epstein during that period, noting that women were not allowed to travel without his approval. “He was controlling every step,” they added.

When Sarah began dating Kimbal Musk, the relationship itself was also closely monitored by Epstein, with her or other people in his orbit updating Epstein on Kimbal’s invitations for her to meet before his “weeklong boys’ trip” and travel with him to New York, London, and Los Angeles. 

“The universe is conspiring for us to spend more time together,” Kimbal wrote Sarah in one email that she forwarded to Epstein.

Epstein received detailed copies of her schedule showing when she was with Kimbal and when she was “FREE.” In one exchange, Sarah told Epstein he had “the final call” on whether she should travel with Kimbal in late 2012 or stay with Epstein instead; he instructed her to stay with Kimbal through Thanksgiving and “go somewhere romantic,” like Morocco, before returning to his island.

On Feb. 9, about a week after the DOJ released the documents, Kimbal Musk wrote on X that in 2012, he had met the woman “through a friend. Epstein did not introduce us.” 

Two weeks after the party in 2012, however, Kimbal sent an email to Epstein and Nikolic, thanking the two for “connecting” him with Sarah. “I believe you both played a role,” Kimbal wrote, along with a smiley face. Nikolic responded, telling Kimbal Musk to “be nice” to Sarah, adding that Epstein “goes crazy when someone mistreats his girls/friends.” (Nikolic did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

“Message received wide and clear,” Kimbal responded.

‘Did your brother tell you?’

Epstein wasted no time in trying to leverage Kimbal Musk’s new romance to his advantage, and nudge his way into Elon Musk’s orbit. 

A few weeks after the birthday party, Epstein emailed Elon directly to let him know that he would be seeing “your brother and his new romance” in New York the following week (Elon said he would not be there at the same time). 

Patrick Fallon—Bloomberg/Getty Images

That same fall, the two men began exchanging messages about a possible trip to Epstein’s now notorious private Caribbean island. On Christmas morning in 2012, Elon Musk wrote: “Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St. Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for.” The plans never panned out. 

In February 2013, Epstein once again brought up Musk’s brother. “Did your brother tell you about [Sarah’s] pregnant joke?” he asked before inquiring if Elon was going to an upcoming TED conference. This time, Elon bit, saying that he wouldn’t be at TED for long, but if Epstein “would like to talk,” it’d be best to do so at the SpaceX factory near Long Beach, Calif. 

The emails suggest that Epstein brought three of his “girls” to visit the facility on Feb. 25, 2013, and thanked Elon for the tour afterward. “You would have had fun at xmas,” Epstein wrote in the exchange. “I see :),” Elon responded. 

Elon Musk denied in 2020 that Epstein had ever visited SpaceX, when he wrote on X: “To the best our knowledge, he never toured SpaceX. Don’t know where that comes from.”

The emails show, however, that Epstein wrote to Musk more than 50 times in total—congratulating him on a successful rocket launch, recommending stimulants, or asking if his workload was getting better. They also show that Musk repeatedly brushed off Epstein: He often gave terse responses, never reciprocated invites, nor did he ask Epstein how he was doing. 

In response to a screenshot of an email he sent in the files, Elon posted on X earlier this month that “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island so many times that eventually I just blocked him.”

A breakup damages the connection

In April 2013 Epstein would lose his “in.” In an email from that month, Kimbal Musk broke up with Sarah, writing that he was busy with his sister moving in with him and weighed down by managing his relationship with his ex-wife. He asked if she’d be interested in keeping things more casual and going back a step to “just dating.” 

“We know how much we like each other,” Kimbal wrote. “But I am just not able to do a real relationship right now … We would see each other on weekends and when we can and focus it on fun stuff.” Sarah forwarded this email to two people, one of them being Epstein, and the other restaurant mogul Steve Hanson, who appears in the emails to have occasionally discussed Sarah’s career with her and Epstein. (Hanson had not responded to Fortune’s requests for comment before press time.)

“Thoughts?” Sarah asks the two. “I just don’t think I’d EVER be a priority.” Epstein responded: “ok, good news now i have you back again, full time,” telling her to come to the “ranch”; likely referring to his New Mexico Zorro Ranch. 

Hanson chastised Sarah in her response for giving too much “too quick” and staying with Kimbal Musk for so long. “Leave NOW. In 1 week we will have. A plan for u,” Hanson wrote. “U have to control this. It’s a game. Your losing. You’re not even playing.”

Epstein also asked Sarah where she was, believing she was with Kimbal Musk in Los Angeles. But she reminded him that “you said to stay” with her family during her grandfather’s funeral. She added she would “prefer not to stay w Kimbal if we’re ‘dating.’”

Three days later, Epstein pointed out in an email how he had lost the connection to Elon: He wrote to someone to instruct them to skip that year’s Milken Institute conference and fly straight to New York. Since Sarah “broke up with kimbal therefore no elon and most of the fun things will be this afternoon,” he wrote. Epstein sent two emails to Elon: one that said he was staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, which Elon ignored, and another—“sorry to have missed you”—to which Musk replied that he’d only been at the Milken conference “for a few hours.” 

Epstein would continue to try to maintain the connection, however: emailing Elon about a former minister of defense of Israel, and with invitations to a visit in Santa Fe, to a breakfast, or to come visit his New York mansion during the opening of the UN General Assembly. Most of them received muted responses or no response at all. 

Elon Musk did initiate the planning around dates for visiting the island over the holidays in 2013, though in that case it was Epstein who backed away last-minute owing to his “schedule.” Epstein wrote: “I was really looking forward to finally spending some time together with just fun as the agenda.” 

Overall, apart from what Epstein described as a “wild” dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, it appears Elon Musk never attended any other event with Epstein. The former staffer who worked in Epstein’s home didn’t recall ever seeing Elon Musk again after the 2012 lunch.

Stephanie Keith—Getty Images

But behind the scenes, Epstein appeared to still be coordinating at least one other woman’s interactions with Kimbal Musk.

In June of that same year, Epstein wrote to a woman, Alice (name changed), who, in May, appeared to be angered about Epstein suggesting that she would give a massage in exchange for personal help. “I am not a massage girl … If I would know about everything before, wouldn’t even go for a meeting … I don’t do these exchanges … It is dirty,” Alice wrote.

Epstein replied, “I gave another girl to kimball and he is thrilled.” (Epstein would often misspell “Kimbal” and other names and words in his correspondence.)

Legitimizing him

Epstein never laid out in emails what precisely he was trying to achieve by getting closer to Kimbal and Elon Musk. But his attempted befriending of the brothers was in line with how Epstein amassed his own fortune—by buddying up to people with money, maintaining complex relationships with them, and sometimes utilizing leverage to stay in their orbit.

Some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals continued to correspond and spend time with Epstein even after he had to register as a sex offender in 2008. These relationships became heavily scrutinized after the Miami Herald published its explosive investigation in 2018 about how Epstein had managed to evade a potential lifetime prison sentence, and after the Department of Justice later charged Epstein with sex trafficking minors in 2019. People questioned why so many powerful and wealthy individuals continued to spend so much time with him and how they had lent credibility to the man. 

None of the emails directly suggest that Kimbal Musk knew Sarah was employed by Epstein or was giving regular updates to Epstein about their relationship and travel plans, and getting advice from others. But in the emails from October 2012, written shortly after Kimbal and Sarah had been introduced, Nikolic told Kimbal to “be nice” to Sarah, as she was one of Epstein’s “girls/friends.”

Both Musk brothers have pushed back vehemently against speculation about their ties to Epstein, and Elon Musk said he would cover legal fees for any victim who “speaks the truth” about Epstein and was subsequently sued.

The vast new DOJ email trove reveals little as to why so many eminent people continued to correspond with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution and soliciting a child for prostitution, even after it became widely known. Those interactions, however, had implications: Epstein was able to burnish his reputation in the eyes of women looking for a better life—many of whom would later become his victims.

As for powerful people who spent time with Jeffrey Epstein, “even if they claim they never knew any abuse happened to a lot of young women from Eastern Europe—let’s say they never questioned that,” the staffer from Epstein’s home said. “They would legitimize someone like him.”

This article is part of the Feb. 19, 2026, Special Digital Issue of Fortune.

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RZC Investments, the private equity firm of Walmart heirs Tom and Steuart Walton, has paused new investments and is reconsidering the future structure of the fund, according to two people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson from RZC confirmed the pause.

One of RZC’s two partners, Don Huffner, left the fund last year and is in the process of giving up his board seats, according to the two people, to whom Fortune granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak about the firm.

RZC is a multistage fund based in Walmart’s hometown, Bentonville, Ark., and funded by two grandchildren of Walmart founder Sam Walton. Steuart Walton is a current member of the retail giant’s board. The fund made both majority and minority investments, with a focus on outdoor companies. It acquired the British cycling apparel company Rapha Cycling Club in 2017 for reportedly around $260 million, and made minority investments in the cycling GPS company Wahoo Fitness and the American bicycle company Allied Cycle Works.

A spokesperson for the fund said RZC had approached its investments, in part, as a way to bring more investors and operators into the Northwest Arkansas region and broader state. “That posture and commitment continues as we actively manage our current portfolio and evaluate the best structure for future investment activity,” they said. 

It’s unclear exactly why RZC Investments is pausing its investment activities. While RZC confirmed the fund was pausing new investments, it wouldn’t comment on why. The outdoor industry—and particularly the cycling industry—has been battered by tariffs and declining sales in recent years. Rapha has posted losses each year since RZC acquired the company in 2017. The bicycle company Allied was one of a few U.S. companies to manufacture its bicycle frames in the U.S., but it announced it was moving future manufacturing to Asia not long before President Trump announced widespread tariffs.

RZC has made other investments, too, including in Acres, a Fayetteville, Ark.-based land data and mapping startup that sold the brokerage part of its business last summer.

Matt Tarver, RZC’s other partner, continues to oversee the RZC portfolio, governance, and investment relationships.  

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In 2023, as Dario Amodei was fundraising for the company’s $750 million Series D round, an investor was seated with the CEO at a dinner when he recalled him getting worked up in a conversation about safety issues around artificial intelligence.

“When he was talking about the risks of AI, he contorted,” says the investor. “His body twisted. He was really emotionally showing how scared he was.”

It made an impression on the investor, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of impact to their business, and said they believed large language models would never be successful if they weren’t trustworthy.

Now Anthropic’s strong stance on AI safety, and its investors’ commitment to that position, is being tested like never before as the company navigates a high-stakes standoff with the U.S. Department of Defense. By insisting that its Claude AI technology adhere to certain restrictions when used by the military, Anthropic has incurred the wrath of President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have retaliated by trying to short-circuit Anthropic’s business.  

For investors in Anthropic, which recently raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation and is widely expected to have an initial public stock offering soon, the government’s move to designate Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk” could have devastating consequences.

How these investors lobby Anthropic behind the scenes—either pushing for conciliation or urging it to hold firm—could shape the outcome of the standoff. Fortune spoke with six people who have invested in Anthropic to get a sense of how this key constituency is feeling about the situation, and found that opinions were not unified despite the company’s longstanding forthrightness about its values.

“I’m disappointed matters of national security implications are being aired in public,” says J.D. Russell, who runs the investment firm Alpha Funds, and holds a position in Anthropic. Russell said he respected Anthropic’s positions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, but said that “you have to be realistic that adversaries to the U.S. are pursuing those capabilities with far fewer constraints.”

Jacques Tohme, managing partner of the firm Amerocap, put simply that he “did not agree” with the position the company had taken.

Still, many of Anthropic’s investors backed the company in the dispute—particularly because of its disciplined stances on some of the most disputed topics in AI right now. The cofounders, after all, left OpenAI in 2021 explicitly to develop AI systems that were powerful, but also safe for humanity. Many of Anthropic’s early investors also have ties to the effective altruism community, a research field focused on how to do the “most good” possible, and the company has a strong investor base in Europe, which tends to be much less sympathetic to the U.S. Department of Defense.

One of those investors, Alberto Emprin, an investor who runs the firm 3LB Seed Capital, published his perspectives and support of Anthropic, in Italian, on Substack earlier this week, noting that Amodei, through his position, had become “a kind of champion of ethics in the AI era.”

“Amodei’s argument is, on the surface, unimpeachable: artificial intelligence is still imperfect, it makes mistakes, and the idea that due to a hallucination or a training bias the ‘wrong person’ could be killed is ethically intolerable,” Emprin wrote.

Among the investors that Fortune spoke to, some invested directly, while others did so via special-purpose vehicles, and one of the investors had recently sold their position on the secondary market. Ultimately, the voice of the largest investors will weigh more than the roughly 270 others on Anthropic’s cap table.  Among the largest is Amazon, whose CEO Andy Jassy, met with Hegseth recently and declined to take Anthropic’s side when the matter came up, according to Semafor. Jassy has also met with Anthropic’s Amodei in recent days, according to Reuters, while Lightspeed and Iconiq have reached out to other investors to explore a solution.

How bad could it get?

Finding consensus among Anthropic’s investors may not be easy, however. While not all investors have been pleased with the hardline stance that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has taken, there’s also a variety of views about how damaging the Pentagon spat could be for the company. The U.S. government contract was small, reportedly about $200 million, or roughly 1% of Anthropic’s annual revenue, according to Bloomberg.

Russell, the Alpha Funds manager, said he didn’t expect the Pentagon’s move to be “any real negative impact on them,” as it’s “really just one contract.” 

Depending on how the supply chain risk designation is interpreted, however (Anthropic is widely expected to fight it in court), it could lead to broader fallout by forcing any company doing business with the DoD to stop using Anthropic products. Other federal agencies, including the State Department and Treasury Department, have also said they will no longer use Anthropic.

On the flip side, some Anthropic investors say they’re heartened by the surge in goodwill the company has reaped by standing firm on its principles. Patrick Hable, an investor who runs the firm 3 Comma Capital, said he believed the whole issue would be a “net positive” for the company. “Contracts lost but millions of supporters won,” he said. But he added that “Even if that would be a net negative, he [did] the right thing,” he said.

In the days since the Pentagon announced a deal with OpenAI instead of Anthropic, Anthropic became the most downloaded app in the Apple and Android app stores. And Anthropic had the most user signups ever on Monday, the company said.

As Amodei reportedly told employees in a lengthy internal memo published by the Information that criticizes Sam Altman of OpenAI and explaining the fallout with the Defense Department, the public is seeing Anthropic “as the heroes.”

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U.S. utilities and power generators are hiking their spending plans to record levels at the same time as consumer utility bills have surged to new highs—and it’s no coincidence.

Investor-owned utility companies increased their capital spending plans by more than 27% to at least $1.4 trillion through 2030—up from $1.1 trillion a year ago—and that’s not even counting privately held companies, according to a new report released Tuesday from the nonprofit PowerLines.

The AI power boom and the wave of construction for data centers is the leading cause of new spending growth nationwide, but it’s a convergence of spending causes that have triggered utility bills to spike about 40 percent since 2021—“with no signs of slowing down”—PowerLines said. 

In addition to the AI era, spending also is growing rapidly because of aging infrastructure, grid hardening from rising extreme weather events and climate change, growing electrification, and population growth. In fact, most of the growth in recent years is unrelated to AI, but the AI data center boom is widely expected to become the leading driver in utilities spending—and consumer prices—going forward.

“Investor-owned utilities are signaling a record-breaking wave of capital spending, and history shows that those plans are often a leading indicator of future utility rate increase requests,” said PowerLines executive director Charles Hua in a statement.

Utilities requested a record-high $31 billion in rate hikes in 2025 across the nation—more than twice the near record from 2024—as consumer and political backlash grows over rapid data center and power plant construction nationwide.

Look to the South

The biggest bulk of spending is in the South—from Texas to Maryland—where $572 billion in spending is planned. Next up is the Midwest with $272 billion in spending on the books.

The South is home to both the nation’s biggest population and manufacturing surge, as well as much of the data center growth from, again, Texas to Virginia’s Data Center Alley.

So it’s no coincidence that the top three spenders are all southern. Charlotte-based Duke Energy leads the way with an industrywide, record-high spending plan of $103 billion over the next five years, while Florida-based NextEra Energy ranks second at $94 billion. And the aptly named, Atlanta-based Southern Company is next at $81 billion. The top non-southern utility is California’s PG&E at almost $74 billion.

Utilities spent much of their most recent quarterly earnings calls touting their efforts to prioritize consumer affordability and pointing out that hyperscalers and data center developers are increasingly adopting “pay for your own power” models.

But not all developers are paying their own generation, and those that are paying for new power plants aren’t necessarily covering the bills for the transmission and distribution components of infrastructure.

Transmission and distribution accounts for nearly half of all new spending, while another 30% is geared toward new power generation, according to PowerLines.

“Our business model is hard to understand,” said PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe in her most recent earnings call. “And it’s hard for people to believe and see that you can raise profits and lower rates all at the same time.”

While most utilities are focusing more on affordability, PowerLines said, “many utilities remain concerned that there is only so far they can go to stop costs from spiraling out of control while still remaining profitable. They argue that without major capital investments in the power system, consumers risk paying for outdated, unreliable, and even dangerous energy infrastructure.”

But PowerLines also contends that utilities can and should do more to utilize the existing capacity of the power grid. Too often existing fossil fuel-fired power plants sit idle when demand is weaker, or renewable energy facilities generate power that’s wasted—such as the wind blowing hard overnight when people are sleeping.

Before building too many new power plants, utilities should utilize more tools to make the existing grid more efficient, such as more battery storage, virtual power plants, and other technologies, such as AI-powered grid flexibility solutions that essentially reduce power consumption from large consumers at times of peak load demand on the grid.

“Our century-old utility regulatory system has accelerated the size of the pie of utility capital spending, even when more cost-effective solutions that could lower consumers’ utility bills are available yet under-deployed,” Hua said. “It is incumbent upon state policymakers and regulators to ensure utilities prioritize these solutions that improve the efficiency, affordability, and reliability of the grid.” 

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When the Trump administration began its tariff campaign in 2025, some of the loudest critics focused on the consequences for Midwestern farmers or for border states. A year in, the impact of tariffs has become clearer, and some research suggests no state has emerged completely unscathed.

Early last year, the Trump administration established one of the most sweeping tariff regimes in the country’s history, including a 10% duty across the board and country and commodity-specific penalties, in some cases as high as 50%. These tariffs were widely expected to have a biting effect on the economy. But while some observers assumed the immediate pain would be confined to agricultural producers or states heavily reliant on international supply chains, the shock proved far more widespread. 

Trump’s tariffs effectively revealed 50 different trade vulnerabilities across the country, each dictated by a state’s own production and consumption patterns, according to a paper published last week by researchers at Ohio State University and Cornell University. By the end of 2025, even states that had never depended on buying goods from abroad were feeling tariff tremors in their own way.

The peer-reviewed study, published by the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association, analyzed where and how goods are produced, shipped, and consumed in each U.S. state. 

The authors found that tariffs led to “immediate shocks” for net importers who were suddenly tasked with absorbing the bulk of levy payments. But consequences for states that rely on exporting agricultural products internationally weren’t far behind, as U.S. trading partners swiftly moved to retaliate. Even states that neither import nor export huge quantities of goods ultimately had to pay the price of tariffs in the form of higher food prices, as farmers began passing costs down to consumers.

“The United States doesn’t have one agricultural trade exposure–it has 50 different ones,” Wendong Zhang, an economist at Cornell and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. 

Some for everyone

The economic story of tariffs last year was one of a slowly cascading domino effect that gradually involved more and more parts of the U.S. economy. Early evidence suggested U.S. businesses and importers were shouldering most of the costs associated with tariffs. Larger retailers, in particular, were able to absorb most of those added costs, with only marginal consequences for customers, by front-loading orders before tariffs kicked in and drawing down inventories. 

But the writing was always on the wall for consumers. Small businesses with fewer resources were among the first to be forced to raise prices, eventually joined by companies including Amazon, Walmart, and Target. By 2026, U.S. businesses and consumers were covering almost 90% of tariff costs, according to Federal Reserve research.

The knock-on effects have been primarily felt by agricultural and coastal states that rely on exports, the Cornell and Ohio State study found. Trading partners, including Canada and China, responded to Trump’s duties with retaliatory tariffs that have hit these U.S. states hard. In the first half of 2025, for example, agricultural exports to China fell to $5.5 billion from $12 billion in 2024, according to AgAmerica, an agricultural lender. This was primarily due to a dramatic collapse in Chinese soybean purchases from the U.S., which pushed tens of thousands of American soybean farmers into the middle of an escalating trade war.

The ripples from retaliatory tariffs aren’t contained to Midwestern staple crops. The study’s authors found that Canadian crackdowns on U.S. alcohol imports had consequences for Kentucky and Tennessee, both states with large bourbon and whiskey industries that are heavily exported. The U.S.-Canada trade war has also dealt a blow to exporters in the Northeast, where states previously sold around two-thirds of their milled grain, non-cereal crops, and their live animals and fish to Canada.

Steering clear of international trade has done little to help Americans either. As farmers have faced higher costs for livestock feed, fertilizer, and machinery, those higher costs now appear on grocery store shelves across the country as food inflation, according to the study. 

With prices for items like fertilizer expected to rise even higher due to the war in Iran, and Trump promising to preserve his tariff policy despite orders from the Supreme Court to abandon his most extreme duties, all American consumers are likely to feel the sting of more expensive food, regardless of where they live.

“When processors face higher input costs, they pass it along,” Zhang said. “Eventually, the consumer in a New York grocery store is paying more for something that traces back to a trade dispute in Washington–even if New York itself exports very little.”

The upshot of Trump’s trade regime, according to the study, is that U.S. trading partners could continue gravitating towards other providers, eroding established import and export patterns across the U.S. If the consequences of tariffs a year in are any indication, the authors warned, a trade policy designed to crack down on importers could end up undermining and altering the makeup of regional economies nationwide.

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The U.S. government has a lot to pay for at the moment: In addition to mandatory spending like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, it has also needs to fund its military endeavors. First came Venezuela, a relatively brief period of intervention; but the U.S. and Israel’s conflict with Iran has dragged on longer than expected.

Agreeing on budget packages hasn’t been Congress’s strong point during the second Trump administration: Already, there has been a government shutdown, and a significant portion of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still closed owing to the fact that spending to reopen it hasn’t been approved.

The demands on Treasury finances are a tightrope policymakers are going to have to learn to walk effectively, House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington said in a recent interview, suggesting that reconciliation (a budget procedure vote allowing for a simple majority of 51) may be the quickest way to ensure funding for DHS and prevent similar snags in the future.

Speaking on CNBC, the Texas Republican said: “I think what would be better, if we could do it, is just take the whole kit and caboodle and use reconciliation to fund Homeland so we don’t establish the precedent of picking and choosing departments and agencies and offices.

“We can’t leave the critical operations of Homeland Security that’s protecting us against a terrorist attack, through Coast Guard, through guardsmen at our ports, or the guys that are protecting us against cybersecurity attacks. This is unacceptable.”

Democrats, on the other hand, have argued they will not back a funding bill for DHS until controversial departments like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and elements of Border Patrol undergo reforms. Protests against ICE began late last year, but tensions spilled over following the fatal shootings of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this year. Until guardrails are put into place within the departments, the Democrats argue, they won’t pass funding for DHS.

The budget balance

However, Arrington also chairs a committee that has continually advocated for prudent and effective spending and fiscal reform. Arrington has called for a harder-line approach than some of his peers, who have pushed for a deficit target of 3% of GDP. Arrington wants to open up a conversation about adding fiscal responsibility to the country’s Constitution.

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

Pushed on why he advocates for reopening spending pathways alongside budgetary reform, Arrington responded: “I can tell you there are debt hawks like myself that see a debt crisis on the horizon as an equal if not greater and more irreparable threat. We have to be able to walk and chew gum.”

The Republican is of the opinion that the government has some “savings” it could leverage in the form of cracking down on fraudulent claims. This, combined with a reconciliation action, “will allow us to put those reforms in the mandatory programs to underwrite what we need now and a down payment on future warfare preparedness.”

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Learning to code was once a fast-track ticket to success. It’s the self-taught skill that launched the careers of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. Even former President Barack Obama urged young people to learn to code. But according to one former Google CMO who started coding at 12, AI has just killed it.

Alon Chen built a $2 billion product line at Google by 28, walked away from a seven-figure equity package, and went on to found Tastewise—an AI food intelligence company now trusted by PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Mars. He knows better than most what it takes to make it in tech. And he’s no longer recommending coding as the way in.

“Coding is becoming obsolete. It’s not needed today,” Chen told Fortune. “What’s needed today, more than ever, is creativity and resourcefulness and execution. There is no need to write code anymore.”

His explanation for why is simple: It’s not that technical skills don’t matter. It’s that the tools have democratized them. “You can operate an extremely successful business without having any ability to write even one line of code,” he said.

He’s got a point: Zuckerberg said that AI will be writing all code by this year. At Microsoft, AI is already writing 30% of the tech giant’s code.

And it’s not just coding: Chen went as far as to say all “technology [skills are] almost becoming obsolete.” He suggested Gen Alpha would even be better off leveraging their ice skating skills in the current climate.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don’t just have coding in common—they also started out as teenagers

If not coding, then what? Chen’s answer is less Silicon Valley and more old-fashioned: Follow your passion, and follow it hard. “What’s needed today, more than ever, is creativity, resourcefulness, and execution.” 

Take Chen, for example. After teaching himself to code, he built computers while other kids played. By 15, he already had a thriving business, selling computers to small and medium-size businesses across Israel. 

Similar to Chen, Bill Gates learned to code at about age 13, sneaking into his school’s computer lab at night to practice. Zuckerberg had built his first networked software, ZuckNet, at 12. Musk taught himself BASIC at 10, and sold his first video game two years later for $500. 

That early ambition, Chen said, is far more valuable than any single technical skill. “Starting young with a lot of responsibility was something that built up my characteristic today as an entrepreneur,” he said. “You need so much resilience if, at 15 years old, you have so many clients calling you because their business cannot be running and operating, and you need to troubleshoot.”

The tools will change. The skills will evolve. But being able to see an opening, teach yourself what you need, and launch before your competition does is a surefire way to get ahead.

He points to his own nephew as proof. At 15, the teenager spotted a gap in the gaming market and started buying and selling player profiles across Telegram and Instagram—no tech degree, no investors, just a niche he cared about. “That’s his passion,” Chen says. “His passion is gaming, and he really thought it was a good idea to make a business out of it.”

His advice to Gen Z? Copy him, Musk, and his nephew. Find a passion—and go hard on that as early as possible. Thanks to AI, he says, this has never been easier. “Are you a roller skater? Do you love fashion? Can you 3D print? Technology is almost becoming obsolete—it’s all about finding what’s really motivating you, and going all the way.”

AI has turned creativity into the new competitive edge

Creativity is the new coding. Chen is far from alone in making this case—and it’s a long-overdue win for the skill that corporate America spent decades telling people wasn’t serious.

Billionaire and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel previously warned that AI is a bigger threat to technical roles than to creative thinkers. And the data is already proving him right.  

IBM research highlights that there is now a “premium on creativity,” with innovative thinking among the most prized qualities in the workplace. 

It’s a shift Snowflake’s CEO predicted in Fortune late last year: Once AI handles execution, the only thing left to compete on is the quality of your thinking. “In 2026, as execution becomes commoditized, strategic thinking and vision will separate high-performing organizations from the rest.”

It’s already showing up in the jobs market, too. LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise 2026 report—which tracks the fastest-growing skills in the U.S.—found surging demand for communication and creative thinking. In fact, a LinkedIn spokesperson told Fortune that job postings mentioning “storytellers” have doubled over the past year alone. 

In a sharp U-turn away from STEM, the arts kids are having their moment—and salaries are finally catching up.

Anthropic was just hiring for a head of product communications with a listed $400,000 salary; Netflix was offering between $656,000 and $1.2 million for a senior director of communications; and McKinsey global managing partner Bob Sternfels recently told Harvard Business Review that AI has a problem-solving limit, so now his firm is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity.”

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home was attacked twice in three days—first with a Molotov cocktail, then with gunfire—the first attack of which was motivated by hatred of artificial intelligence, according to authorities, and marks a sharp escalation in anti-AI sentiment.

On Friday, a 20-year-old man who had reportedly publicized anti-AI thoughts on a personal Substack allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home in the middle of the night. A federal complaint alleges that the suspect, Daniel Moreno-Gama, intended to kill Altman and then tried to set fire to OpenAI’s headquarters nearby. On his alleged Substack, Moreno-Gama predicted that AI would cause human extinction. When arrested, Moreno-Gama was carrying a “manifesto” that detailed his anti-AI beliefs and listed the names of other AI executives, according to the complaint.

Two days later, a 25-year-old and a 23-year-old allegedly shot at Altman’s house from a car before fleeing. The pair was later apprehended. It’s unclear if they targeted Altman specifically.

The two incidents are the most visible attacks on the CEO of an AI company to date, and yet they come amid a wave of backlash, sometimes violent and other times not, against data centers and those who support AI’s physical infrastructure. 

The grievances fueling anti-AI sentiment are broad and overlapping. Workers in creative industries—writers, illustrators, voice actors, musicians—say the technology is already being used to replace them, trained on their own work without consent or compensation. Communities near planned data centers are pushing back against facilities that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, straining local power grids and competing with residents for resources in regions already dealing with drought or aging infrastructure. 

Others worry about a more existential threat: that increasingly powerful systems could slip beyond human control, a fear stoked by prominent researchers who have warned that AI poses a risk to humanity’s survival. 

Echoes of the Industrial Revolution

Attacks on Altman show an escalating pattern of violence. Earlier this month, someone shot the home of a city councilmember from Indianapolis 13 times and left behind a note saying” no data centers, after the councilmember had voiced support for a data center project. A town near St. Louis, Mo., of just 12,000 people also voted out all the incumbents on its town council last week after they approved a data center project, Politico reported.

Aleksandar Tomic, an economist and the associate dean for strategy, innovation, and technology at Boston College, told Fortune the escalating threats against AI are reminiscent of the upheaval ushered in by the second Industrial Revolution more than 100 years ago.

“As tempting as it is to say this is just a disturbed individual, which most likely it is, I really think we see the parallels to then,” Tomic said. “Technology is moving really fast. A lot of people are feeling very anxious, but the institutions are lagging. And, you know, Sam Altman for better or worse, is kind of the face of AI.” 

The last time there was so much technological change so quickly, “it took us about 50 years to figure it out, and two world wars,” Tomic said.

The second Industrial Revolution, which lasted from the late 1800s until the early 1900s, spurred massive change as people migrated from the countryside to the cities across countries including the U.S. At the time, many people who had previously toiled in the fields shifted to working long shifts in cramped, and often, dangerous manufacturing and textile facilities while increasingly resenting the industrialists who owned the factories. This tumult gave rise to the political philosophies of communism and anarchism, as well as the early labor movement. 

Tomic argues we’re seeing a similar era of technological change now, and the changes may be even more pronounced due to the rapid advancement of AI.

“It’s happening much quicker, and it’s happening at a much larger scale,” he said.

Public sentiment turns against AI 

A Stanford report published Monday shows public sentiment may be turning against AI. The percentage of people globally who are “nervous” about AI-powered products and services increased by 2 percentage points to 52% in 2025. Among the countries surveyed, 64% of people in the U.S. reported being nervous about the technology, more than 10 percentage points above the global baseline. 

Much of this may have to do with AI’s rapid development, and the fact that nearly two-thirds of Americans, according to the Stanford study, believe the technology will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. 

The leaders of AI companies tend to agree. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously predicted that half of all white-collar jobs will be eliminated due to AI. On Monday, Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark went further, predicting sweeping changes caused by AI.

“If we’re correct, this technology really is going to change the world in a vast way. It will change how businesses start, how business is done, aspects of national security, how we even relate to one another as people, and it’s impossible to reconcile that with a world where the economy doesn’t change in substantial ways as well,” Clark said during the Semafor World Economy conference.

To tackle potential mass layoffs, Tomic said the government will have to step in, much as it did last century with Social Security during a time of widespread poverty and changing demographics in the U.S., which saw the end of multigenerational living. Other shifts may occur this time, including policies that unlink healthcare from a person’s employer—which is how the majority of Americans receive healthcare—as formal employment becomes more uncertain.

“In addition to just making sure that we do implement the technology, and so on, we need to find a way to put people first, because otherwise, I think we have already undesirable effects,” he said.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, expressed some empathy for those who hold anti-AI views in a blog post following the first attack on his home on Friday. In the post, Altman said the fear and anxiety around AI are justified, as it will bring about the biggest change for society, possibly ever. He also encouraged “new policy” to “help navigate through a difficult economic transition.”

Yet, he also said overall, technological progress will make the future “unbelievably good” and called for a good-faith criticism and debate on the topic.

“While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally,” he wrote.

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Crypto markets are betting that the U.S. and Iran war may be progressing towards peace. Bitcoin rose 5% over the past 24 hours to around $75,000 early Tuesday afternoon, nearing its highest mark since early February, according to data from Binance. The world’s second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, notched an even bigger day-over-day jump, rising 7% to almost $2,400 to record a two-month high.

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies rose 4% to $2.6 trillion, mirroring gains in the stock market. On Tuesday morning, the S&P 500 increased 1%, and the Nasdaq jumped nearly 2%. “The rise in cryptocurrencies was driven by an impressive recovery in risk appetite in traditional financial markets,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at the online brokerage FxPro, in a note.

Bitcoin’s rise above $75,000 is a dose of optimism for traders who have watched the world’s largest cryptocurrency struggle to record a sustained rally amid a volatile six months.

In October, Bitcoin recorded an all-time high of around $126,000 but then plummeted after Trump issued a new set of tariff threats against China. The broader digital assets market failed to recover, and prices continued to drop through the end of January until Bitcoin began to hover between $60,000 and $75,000 throughout February and March.

The cryptocurrency’s price fluctuations have since largely tracked the broader ups and downs of the financial markets, which have been whipsawed by conflict in the Middle East and worries over rising oil prices. 

The recent optimism in traditional financial markets comes after weekend peace negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. Vice President JD Vance flew to Pakistan on Saturday to participate in marathon talks with Iranian officials over the prospect of ending the month-long conflict between the two countries and opening up the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for the world’s oil trade. 

While the talks were unsuccessful, President Donald Trump claimed on Monday that Iran still wants to negotiate an end to the conflict. “We’ve been called by the other side and they would like to make a deal very badly,” he said.

And analysts believe that, as stock markets surge amid peace negotiations, the crypto market has a large runway to rebound. 

“While the S&P 500 is approaching record highs,” said Ish Asad, a research analyst at Bitwise, “Bitcoin remains down nearly 50% from its height and appears to have far more upside ahead.”

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Tractor Supply last week abruptly announced it was cutting all diversity-focused positions and withdrawing its carbon-emissions and diversity and inclusion goals in an about-face meant to mollify right-wing activists, led by commentator Robby Starbuck.

Last month, Starbuck slammed Tractor Supply’s LGBTQ-inclusive stance and DEI hiring initiatives on X. He called on customers to boycott the large retailer of farming supplies and pressure its corporate leadership over the efforts. In an unsigned press release on Thursday, Tractor Supply said: “We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them.” Starbuck called Tractor Supply’s reversal a “massive victory” and “the single biggest boycott win of our lifetime.”

Yet in appeasing conservative critics, Tractor Supply risks shrinking the large, diverse customer base that helped it grow into a Fortune 300 company and ostracizing the “exburban” shoppers it’s depending on to jump-start stalling sales.

Rural roots, ‘exurban’ present

Tractor Supply repeatedly touted its roots in rural America in explaining why it was curtailing DEI and ESG efforts. Yet rural America is not where its business is likely to grow in the future. Indeed, Tractor Supply has long served the “exurban customer”—one who lives not in deeply rural, often politically conservative regions, but at the edge of more liberal metropolitan areas, where backyards can be tallied in several acres.

The retailer was founded in the 1930s to serve working farms, but Tractor Supply became a retail giant, earning $14 billion in revenue last year, by catering to hobbyist farmers, including suburbanites with larger properties who love gardening and dabble in livestock. Its midsize, carefully curated stores offer an eclectic mix of work clothes (Tractor Supply was the first major retailer to jump on the Carhartt phenomenon), tools, pet food, and feed for farm animals (especially chickens, goats, and horses). Today, the core Tractor Supply customer typically has one to five acres of land, and some small livestock like chickens, hogs, or sheep. What’s more, professional farmers are only 10% of its customers, down from 90% at the company’s start in 1938.

“We’re seeing a new kind of shopper in our stores,” CEO Hal Lawton told Fortune in 2021, when Tractor Supply was one of the fastest-rising companies in the Fortune 500.

(Tractor Supply declined to comment to Fortune beyond its statement last week.)

The pandemic provided Tractor Supply with a big boost by helping it attract a new wave of customers as COVID confined nearly everyone at home and persuaded more urbanites to try smaller-town living. Americans adopted pets by the millions, shifted spending to their homes—including their second homes—and sought solace outdoors. Sales rose a staggering 23% in 2020. Tractor Supply now has nearly 2,500 stores (including its parent company’s Petsense by Tractor Supply chain), up from 2,180 only three years ago.

Sales stall

But fast-forward to today and it’s easy to see why Tractor Supply wants to avoid a consumer boycott at all costs. Its growth has stalled. Last year, Tractor Supply’s comparable sales, a metric that strips out the impact of new stores or stores that were closed in the preceding year, were flat. So far this year, growth is still anemic, with comparable sales up only 1.1% in the first quarter.

Widespread consumer backlash could make things even worse. Boycotts against brands like Bud Light and Target over LGBTQ initiatives, also incited by right-wing groups, have cost the companies tens of millions in sales.

With comparable sales stagnant, Tractor Supply’s growth will have to come from new stores. Because of demographic trends and Tractor Supply’s own priorities in recent years, those will be in more-diverse exurbs, which demographically are growing very fast, rather than redder, rural regions. What’s more, only 14% of American live in rural areas.

Past DEI wins

In its statement, Tractor Supply said, “Going forward, we will ensure our activities and giving tie directly to our business.” Only three months ago, Tractor Supply was saying the exact opposite. “Diversity and inclusion play a key role in moving our business forward,” Tractor Supply claimed in its annual proxy filing in March.

And Tractor Supply had been doing well by at least one DEI metric. Last year, Tractor Supply, one of 1,300 companies to fill out Human Rights Campaign’s survey, earned a near-perfect score of 95/100 for workplace protections and outreach to the LGBTQ+ community. Last week, the company said it would “no longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign,” one of the biggest LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in the United States.

“Tractor Supply Co. is turning its back on their own neighbors with this shortsighted decision,” an HRC leader told CNN this weekend. It was notable that Tractor Supply announced it would no longer sponsor any Pride events right before a weekend in which hundreds were held across the U.S.

Lawton told Fortune in 2021 that Tractor Supply wanted “our stores and our team members to mirror the communities that we serve.” In its annual report published in March, Tractor Supply noted that racial and ethnic minorities represent 18% of its workforce, just one percentage point higher than in 2021. The company’s new anti-DEI stance will make moving the needle even more difficult.

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Before last week, few people outside of Hollywood had heard of David Ellison, former actor, life-long aviation enthusiast, film producer, and, notably, son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Just a few days ago, however, the 41-year-old’s company Skydance Media clinched a $8 billion deal to buy and merge with the struggling film and television company Paramount Global. Now, Ellison is a mogul-in-waiting and the latest member in the growing club of nepo CEOs.

The concept of nepotism has been with us since the mid-17th Century, when Italian Catholic popes began giving their nephews, or nipote, high-ranking church positions strictly because of familial ties. Even now, it’s a practice humans can’t seem to shake. 

Recently, cultural pundits have brought laser-sharp focus to the habit of giving offspring unearned access to wealth and power by tracking nepotism’s beneficiaries, the so-called nepo babies. They are usually actors, screenwriters, models, and musicians who were fast-tracked within their careers with the help of a parent in the business. Their talents—or lack thereof—draw extra scrutiny.

But nepo babies are everywhere, including at the helm of large public companies, where they can be judged harshly. Lachlan Murdoch, 52, recently assumed the executive chair and CEO role at Fox Corporation, taking over from his father Rupert. Gus Wenner, 33, became CEO of Rolling Stone in 2022 to run the media brand his father Jann launched. Outside of media, all five of the Arnault siblings, whose father Bernard Arnault is CEO of LVMH, one of the world’s largest luxury goods companies, are nepo execs, holding CEO, directorship, and other leadership jobs at LVMH’s holding companies or brands. Alex Soros, 38, may not be CEO of Open Society Foundations, but his father George gave his chair seat to his son last year.

David Ellison cemented his status as a nepo CEO thanks to a big assist from his dad, the eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire who founded Oracle and remains chair of its board and chief technology officer. The senior Ellison is the world’s seventh richest person, according to Bloomberg, which pegs his net worth at roughly $160 billion. And the tech titan invested $6 billion of his family office funds into his son’s Paramount bid, which included a critical promise to keep the company intact. Larry Ellison’s gesture reportedly gave Skydance an edge over competitors. (Skydance declined to comment.)

How nepo CEOs earn respect

For these executives and others like them, successfully earning respect from their executive teams and employees will come down to walking a tightrope, say experts who spoke to Fortune. Nepo baby leaders need to show a willingness to listen and learn, without appearing inexperienced or uncertain. They also have to take credit for their wins to establish their own credibility, without ignoring the contributions of their team members and alienating top talent. “If you get good business outcomes but it’s perceived that all the people around you are holding up the sky, that’s not great,” says Jane Stevenson, the global leader of board and CEO succession practice at Korn Ferry.

Perhaps most importantly, nepo CEOs need to keep their egos in check, while discarding any sense of entitlement. “Leaders need to be humble and they need to hear feedback that is awfully uncomfortable to hear,” says Moshe Cohen, a senior lecturer of management at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “If you’re coming in as the anointed successor, you might not be that open to feedback, and other people might not feel comfortable giving it to you because, well, you’re the kid of the founder.” (Or, in Ellison’s case, the kid of the money.) 

At publicly traded companies, boards and nepo CEOs need to navigate an unusual division of power, Stevenson says. Unless the CEO’s family has a majority of voting shares in a company, he or she must cooperate with and even inspire independent directors, who have the power to replace the leader. 

The upside of a nepo CEO

Fortunately for Paramount employees exhausted by months of deal drama, nepo CEOs like Ellison aren’t always bad news. In fact, they can be brilliant and effective, says Stevenson. Among living examples are Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments, and Mark Smucker, the 5th generation heir and CEO of the Smucker jelly company. Since A.G. Sulzberger took over as publisher of the New York Times from his father, he has overseen an era of significant growth.

The best nepo CEOs arrive poised to succeed because they’ve been an informal student of business their entire lives. “If you’ve been hanging on the elbow of a parent who was a CEO or founder, you’ve learned some things that people who aren’t in the thick of it don’t see,” says Cohen. Depending on their relationship with their parents, a nepo CEO may have absorbed nuanced lessons about negotiations, relationships, or articulating a company’s vision, he adds. “Those are things that people work really hard to learn.”

But there’s always a danger that even the most conscientious offspring of business icons have limited range, Cohen adds. They know how to be a CEO like their parents—and that’s it. Among today’s nepo CEOs, few have spent time outside of the family business. David Ellison, who started Skydance 18 years ago, is an exception, straying from his father’s tech-centered universe. His firm has funded several films, including Top Gun: Maverick, but also less successful flicks. Lachlan Murdoch briefly left the family business to run his own media investing company, then returned to his father’s empire.

Families in the business of promoting a promising heir would be wise to take a page from the Smucker family rule book and send future leaders out into the world to find internships and jobs elsewhere to broaden their experiences. “Because otherwise, you only have one way of doing things,” says Cohen, “and the world keeps changing.”

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More American workers are experimenting with artificial intelligence in their jobs, but skepticism is still widespread.

New Gallup polling finds that while more employees are using AI frequently in their work, there’s been an uptick in alarm that new technologies will replace their jobs. Many workers who are not using AI say they prefer to work without it, have ethical oppositions to the technology or worry about data privacy.

The poll, conducted in February, points to a divergence in how AI is reshaping American workplaces. Some find it to be a gamechanger for productivity and efficiency, while others are concerned about its potentially negative impacts.

Social worker Scott Segal said he regularly uses AI to find information that will help connect his elderly and vulnerable patients to health care resources in northern Virginia. While he knows that the human connection and care he brings to that work is important, he also believes that AI could soon replace him.

“I’m planning ahead,” said Segal, 53. “I think everyone who works in a replaceable field or trade should be planning ahead.”

Most workers using AI report productivity boosts

Roughly three in 10 employees are frequent users of AI in their jobs, meaning they use it daily or a few times a week. About two in 10 are infrequent users, using AI tools at work a few times a month or a few times a year.

The Gallup poll found that about four in 10 workers say their organization has adopted AI tools or technology to improve organizational practices. About two-thirds of those workers say AI has had an “extremely” or “somewhat” positive impact on their individual productivity and efficiency at work.

Workers using AI in management roles are more likely to say the technology has been at least “somewhat” positive for their productivity, compared with individual contributors. About seven in 10 leaders using AI at least a few times a year say AI has made them more efficient at work, compared with just over half of individual contributors.

Labor and employment attorney Elizabeth Bloch of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said she uses ChatGPT to help “draft letters or emails in a diplomatic way because it’s a very adversarial profession and sometimes you get heated.”

AI tools appear to have a greater benefit for workers in managerial, health care and technology roles than in service jobs. About 6 in 10 employees in those fields who are using AI say it’s boosted their productivity at least “somewhat,” compared with 45% of those using it in service jobs.

Why some employees don’t use AI

Even when companies make AI tools available, there’s no guarantee employees will adopt them. About half of U.S. employees use AI only once a year or not at all, according to the Gallup study.

Bloch said she’s tried using AI for legal research but finds it is prone to hallucinations, or making up false information, even when using AI tools custom-built for legal work. She’s worried other lawyers who were already bad at finding and citing relevant case law are “going to be bad at using AI, because you’re not using the right prompts,” leading judges to sanction them for false citations.

Among workers who have AI tools available at their company and don’t use them, 46% say it’s because they prefer to keep doing their work the way they do it now. About 4 in 10 non-users who have AI available to them report that they are ethically opposed to AI, are concerned about data privacy or don’t believe AI can be helpful for the work they do.

About one-quarter of these non-users who have AI tools available say they have used AI at work and don’t find it helpful, while about 2 in 10 say they do not feel prepared to use AI effectively.

Thuy Pisone, a contract administrator in Maryland for a company that works with the federal government, said she uses AI weekly for mundane tasks but has avoided it for things she already can do just fine.

“I have heard from my colleagues that we could use AI to put together our PowerPoint slides,” Pisone said. “I’m a little biased in that, well, I could put my own PowerPoints together. I don’t need help because it took me time to hone up my skill.”

More workers are concerned about new technology taking jobs

While this was less of a reason for forgoing AI at work, the poll also found U.S. workers are increasingly concerned about being driven out of a job by new technologies.

About two in 10 — 18% — of U.S. workers say it is “very” or “somewhat” likely that their current job will be eliminated within the next five years because of new technology, automation, robots or AI. That’s up from 15% in 2025. People working at companies that have adopted AI are even more likely to be concerned that their job will be eliminated: 23% call this at least “somewhat” likely in the next few years.

A Fox News poll conducted in March found that about six in 10 registered voters believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates over the next five years. Only about one in 10 expect it will create more positions, and about one-third say it’s too soon to say. About seven in 10 employed voters say they are “not very” or “not at all” concerned their current job could be eliminated by AI.

Segal, the social worker in Virginia, said his alternative plan if AI replaces him is to start a new “health care chaperone service” that physically escorts patients from one appointment to another, especially when they’ve been sedated and don’t have family or others to pick them up.

“I don’t think that’s something that will be replaced for another maybe 10 or 15 years, until robots are embodied with AI,” Segal said. “I do believe that AI is going to displace most people’s employment functions and I question what people will do for livelihood at that point.”

In the meantime, he’s been asking AI chatbots to help him strategize on saving for his retirement.

___

Gallup’s quarterly workforce surveys were conducted with a random sample of adults age 18 and older who work full time and part time for organizations in the United States and are members of Gallup’s probability-based Gallup Panel. The most recent survey of 23,717 employed U.S. adults was conducted Feb. 4-19, 2026. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 0.9 percentage points.

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The crypto world has been buzzing in recent months about the potential for applying blockchain technology to agentic commerce, a term that describes AI agents undertaking purchases or other economic activity on a user’s behalf. Early innovations include Coinbase’s x402, a standard for AI agents to transact across the web, and Stripe-backed Tempo’s “Machine Payments Protocol.” 

But for this futuristic technology to actually catch on, humans will need to trust AI agents not to go rogue with their hard-earned money. That’s the goal of a startup named Nava, which has raised $8.3 million in seed funding to build the trust side of the autonomous payments equation. The funding round was co-led by the venture capital firms Polychain and Archetype. 

“These agents will organically, autonomously start executing, creating … transactions, and managing economic activity as we see more and more of these tools enter the market,” Nava CEO and co-founder Vyas Krishnan told Fortune. “We really want to position ourselves as a trustworthy system for handling real capital across financial workflows.”

Nava-n my watch

Krishnan and co-founder Brianna Montgomery previously worked together at EigenLayer, an Ethereum-focused startup. EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, who has connections to Krishnan dating to before the crypto startup, is among the other investors backing Nava.

Nava’s specific approach to reining in rogue behavior by AI agents is the creation of an escrow service that holds onto funds until an agent proposes a transaction. Once the agent does, Nava uses a verification framework to determine whether the outcome of an agent’s transaction will match the user’s intent. If the transaction passes the check, the transaction is executed. If not, the funds remain in escrow. 

The reasoning that underlies any given decision by Nava to accept or reject a transactions will be posted on-chain, thereby creating a public ledger of decisions that other AIs can reference. Nava currently runs as a layer-3 blockchain built on Arbitrum, and it will have a parallel deployment on Tempo, Krishnan said. 

In the long run, Nava’s verification layer for autonomous commerce can create the necessary conditions for AI agent insurance markets to emerge, the project’s whitepaper argues. Nava plans to release a native stablecoin for “underwriting agent action through the protocol.”

Nava’s infrastructure is meant to serve both consumers and institutions, Krishnan said. “Consumers are going to want to be able to protect assets from agent misbehavior, agent hallucination, but then institutions aren’t going to be able to onboard unless they have some sort of clarity of intent versus execution.”

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More than a thousand movie stars, writers, directors and other Hollywood professionals announced their “unequivocal opposition” to the proposed Paramount merger with Warner Bros. Discovery in an open letter published Monday.

A large swath of the movie industry, including Denis Villeneuve, Kristen Stewart, J.J. Abrams and Joaquin Phoenix came out forcefully against the $111 billion deal that would consolidate two legacy studios into one, arguing that it further reduce jobs and movies in an already downsized Hollywood.

“The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world,” reads the letter, posted on BlocktheMerger.com. “Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four.”

In late February, David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in one of the largest media mergers ever. The deal awaits a shareholder vote later this month and government regulatory approval. Paramount’s victory came after months of negotiations and a rival bid by Netflix that ultimately fell short.

The deal was only the latest massive merger to rock Hollywood. In 2019, 20th Century Fox was acquired by The Walt Disney Co. for $71.3 billion.

Ellison, chief executive of Paramount Skydance, has pledged to keep Paramount and Warner Bros. as stand-alone movie studio operations, and vowed to release a combined 30 movies a year in theaters. Paramount has acknowledged the merger will also lead to significant cuts due to duplication.

In response to the open letter, Paramount issued a statement Monday arguing that the merger will give creators “more avenues for their work, not fewer.”

“This transaction uniquely brings together complementary strengths to create a company that can greenlight more projects, back bold ideas, support talent across multiple stages of their careers, and bring stories to audiences at a truly global scale,” the studio said.

But many in the film industry believe a merger will mean extensive job losses and a consolidation of power.

“We are deeply concerned by indications of support for this merger that prioritize the interests of a small group of powerful stakeholders over the broader public good,” read the letter. “The integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry would be grievously compromised.”

A coalition of advocacy groups organized the letter, including the Committee for the First Amendment — a free speech group led by Jane Fonda — as well as the Democracy Defenders Fund and the Future Film Coalition. Other signatories include: Ben Stiller, Don Cheadle, Javier Bardem, Lily Gladstone, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tiffany Haddish and Ted Danson.

On Monday, one signee, Damon Lindelof, detailed his decision on Instagram. Lindelof, the creator of “Watchmen” and the co-creator of “Lost,” has an overall deal with Warner Bros. Discovery.

“Hollywood mergers mean fewer movies and fewer TV shows and that means fewer jobs,” wrote Lindelof. “When two storied backlots are owned by the same company, the outcome is intuitive — one becomes a Ghost Town. I’m scared. But I’m not a ghost. And a fight is already lost if it’s never fought.”

Representatives for Warner Bros. didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

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Warren Buffett, who is worth $143 billion today and was once the richest man in the world, was once making mere pennies as a teenage paper boy. 

The Oracle of Omaha filed his very first tax return in 1944 when he was just 14 years old for his earnings delivering newspapers in Washington, D.C. He owed just $7 in federal taxes, according to the two-page tax filing he shared with PBS NewsHour in 2017. 

Warren Buffet’s 1944 tax return by PBS NewsHour

That year, he earned $592.50, just barely over the requirement at the time to file a return for gross income of $500 or more. Today, his earnings would be worth $11,244.32, and his taxes would equate to $132.84, according to CPI Inflation data.

That’s a far cry from the $26.8 billion Buffett said his company Berkshire Hathaway paid in 2024 taxes, according to his annual shareholder letter. That was the highest-ever payment made to the U.S. government at the time. 

But Buffett has never begrudgingly paid his taxes. Instead, he has long argued he doesn’t pay enough taxes. Before Buffett took control of the company in 1965, he said Berkshire “did not pay a dime of income tax,” which he called “an embarrassment.

“That sort of economic behavior may be understandable for glamorous startups, but it’s a blinking yellow light when it happens at a venerable pillar of American industry,” Buffett wrote in the shareholder letter. 

Warren Buffett got his start as a paperboy

Buffett was born on Aug. 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska, the only son of Howard and Leila Buffett (he has two sisters). His father, Howard, was a stockbroker and eventual four-term U.S. Congressman, and served as an early influence on Warren’s fascination with business and markets. When Howard was elected to Congress, the family relocated to Washington, D.C., where a teenage Warren found work delivering newspapers.

Buffett delivered both morning and afternoon editions of The Washington Post and the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald, working a route that ran past the homes of six senators and one Supreme Court justice, he told PBS.

In 1944, he earned $364 from that route. Buffett, who had started investing at the ripe age of 11, also earned $228 in interest and dividends that year, having bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred stock. That brought his total income that year to $592.50.

Under IRS rules at the time, any U.S. citizen, including a minor, who earned $500 or more was required to file a federal return, and he paid just $7 in taxes.

The tax deductions of a 14-year-old Buffett

Just as any adult would do, Buffett made sure to write off his business expenses that year on his tax return. He attached a handwritten note documenting two business expenses: $10 for watch repair and $35 for miscellaneous bicycle costs. Buffett used both of these religiously on his morning paper route. 

By deducting those costs, he lowered his taxable income like any seasoned entrepreneur or gig worker would, but he was only 14 years old at the time.

“I have paid federal income tax every year since 1944,” Buffett said in a 2016 statement responding to claims about his tax history. “Though, being a slow starter, I owed only $7 in tax that year.”

From paperboy to billionaire

The newspaper route was just one of several early ventures for Buffett. 

By the time he was 15, he had earned $2,000 from deliveries and spent $1,200 of it to purchase farmland in his home state of Nebraska, according to his 2008 biography, The Snowball, by Alice Schroeder. Buffett also reportedly had a profit-sharing agreement with the farmer.

He and a friend later bought a used pinball machine for $25, placed it in a barbershop, and within months had machines running in three locations across Washington, D.C. They sold the operation for $1,200.

“[I] built a small empire out of it,” he told Bill Gates during a visit to an Omaha candy store during the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting.

By the time he graduated from college, Buffett had accumulated $9,800 in savings. He went on to study under legendary value investor Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School, launched his own investment partnership in 1956, and took control of a struggling textile manufacturer, Berkshire Hathaway, in the mid-1960s—transforming it into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Buffett retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway in late 2025, but he’s still worth $143 billion.

The boy who paid $7 grew up to say he wasn’t paying enough

The arc of Buffett’s relationship with the IRS is, by his own account, a strange one. The man who meticulously documented his bicycle repairs at 14 became, decades later, one of the most prominent voices arguing that people like him are undertaxed.

He once pointed out that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek. 

“Debbie works just as hard as I do and she pays twice the rate I pay,” he told ABC News in 2012. “I think that’s outrageous.”

The contrast became so well-known that then-President Barack Obama proposed what became known as the “Buffett Rule,” which would have required individuals earning more than $1 million annually to pay at least 30% of their income in taxes. The bill was blocked by a Republican filibuster in 2012.

Buffett continued to make the case publicly. At Berkshire Hathaway’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, he predicted that higher taxes were “quite likely,” citing fiscal policy, and criticized other companies for constantly scrutinizing the tax code for the smallest loopholes.

“They may decide that someday they don’t want the fiscal deficit to be this large, because that has some important consequences,” Buffett said in 2024. “And they may not want to decrease spending a lot, and they may decide they’ll take a larger percentage of what we earn, and we’ll pay it.”

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CEOs have their own quirks when it comes to running their companies, from shoes off policies to meeting-free afternoons. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said an office nap is his trick to staying sharp over his decades-long career in business.

“A thing I do that people have thought is weird is that, throughout my whole career, when I’m in the office, I’ll close the door and take a 20-minute nap,” Kirby recently said in an interview with McKinsey and Company. 

“When I first got to United, people were, like, ‘Oh my God, where do you take a nap?’ I said, ‘I lay on the floor,’” he continued. “They said, ‘We’ve got to get a couch in here!’ They were all stressed out.”

Kirby’s habit may come as a surprise, but the leader says taking a break keeps him fueled to run the $30.1 billion airline giant. 

“If I take a 20-minute nap, I’ve accomplished more than anything else I would have accomplished in that time,” the CEO explained. “When you’re tired, your brain is not 100 percent. If you’re not 100 percent, you shouldn’t be making decisions.”

And he’s stuck by his routine break throughout his entire career—from serving as the president of U.S. Airways and American Airlines for years, to his current six-year CEO stint at United. And research shows the U.S. Air Force Academy alum may have picked up on a leadership hack; a “power nap” of 30 minutes or less has been found to boost alertness and mood, improve mental clarity, and fight off fatigue, according to a 2024 study from Harvard Medical School. 

United Airlines’ CEO caps his meetings at four hours a day to think and read

In helming one of the world’s biggest airline groups, Kirby has also laid some ground rules to avoid burnout. The United Airlines leader has one boundary on his packed calendar: “no more than four hours of meetings a day.” 

Instead of constantly sitting in on long-winded conversations, Kirby said he’d much rather use the time to think or call others. He described his workday as “pretty unstructured,” but makes an effort to be as efficient with limited hours in the day—which also frees up the opportunity to invest in his intellectual pursuits.

“Some important things are, one, having time to think instead of sitting in meetings you don’t need to be in,” Kirby told McKinsey. “And two, you need to be a genuinely curious person, reading about a very wide variety of subjects.”

Under his personal operating model, Kirby carves out reading sessions every day. And by picking up a book and squaring away tedious meetings, it could lead to better ideas for the business, he explained. 

“I read about three hours a day, on average,” the CEO continued. “And you just never know when the things that you’ve read are going to click together.”

The leaders who have their own boundaries: no meetings or emails

Just like Kirby, the CEO of Berlin-based tax app Taxfix, Martin Ott, isn’t willing to waste work hours on duties that don’t make much impact. 

The executive, who also led as Facebook’s managing director for Northern and Central Europe operations in 2012, picked up a few lessons working under Mark Zuckerberg. In those early days of Meta’s evolution, Ott learned to pour all of his time into what matters most—and that doesn’t include inessential meetings. 

“One of the things I’m also passing on is, there’s only so many hours in a day,” Ott told Fortune last year. “Ask yourself, what is the real one thing you could do today to really have an impact, make a difference? Ask yourself, do you need to be in that meeting or not?”

Other CEOs have taken a more direct approach to the time-suck of meetings. Fellow airline leader Bob Jordan, the chief executive of Southwest Airlines, set a new rule in place for 2026: his calendar will stay completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon. No meetings are allowed—he’s protecting his time to “think about what’s important right now.” 

“When you first start, it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan said at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2025. “Because what we all find, I’m sure, is there’s no time to ‘work,’ and you confuse going to meetings with the work.”

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is preserving his time by setting boundaries around both meetings and emails—two daily menial tasks begrudged by workers everywhere. Instead of suffering through the pesky tasks, the short-term rental leader prefers to text and call rather than email: the one thing about his job he “hated the most” pre-pandemic. Chesky has also pushed morning meetings back to at least 10 a.m.

“Don’t apologize for how you want to run your company,” Chesky told theWall Street Journal in 2025. “When you’re CEO…you can decide when the first meeting of the day is.”

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The Iran war has stalled the world’s economic momentum this year, likely pushing growth lower compared to 2025, the International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday.

The IMF downgraded its forecast for global growth to 3.1% in 2026 from the 3.3% it had forecast back in January. The expected growth would mark a deceleration from a 3.4% expansion in 2025.

U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran — and Tehran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz and retaliatory strikes on oil refineries and other energy infrastructure in neighboring countries — have driven oil and gas prices sharply higher around the world.

As a result, the IMF marked up its expectation for global inflation this year to 4.4% from 4.1% in 2025 and from the 3.8% it had forecast for this year in January.

Until the war, the world economy had shown surprising resilience in the face of President Donald Trump’s protectionist policies, which built a wall of import taxes around the United States, the world’s biggest economy and once a market practically wide open to imports. The damage was less than feared partly because Trump’s tariffs last year ended up being lower than what he’d originally announced.

A tech boom, marked by massive investment in data centers and artificial intelligence, and rising productivity also combined to strengthen the world economy.

“War in the Middle East has halted this momentum,” IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas wrote in a blog post accompanying the fund’s latest World Economic Outlook.

The IMF’s forecast assumes that conflict in the Persian Gulf is short-lived and that energy prices rise “a moderate 19%” this year. Things could be much worse. In a “severe scenario” in which the energy shocks spill into next year and central banks are forced to raise interest rates to combat inflation, global growth could drop to 2% in 2026 and 2027. ”Despite the recent news of a temporary ceasefire, some damage is already done, and the downside risks remain elevated,” Gourinchas wrote.

The fund slightly downgraded its forecast for U.S. growth this year to 2.3%. The 21 European countries that share the euro currency, hard hit by soaring natural gas prices, will collectively grow 1.1% this year, down from 1.4% in 2025, the IMF forecast.

Hardest hit are likely to be deeply indebted poorer countries that import energy and can’t afford to buffer their economies with stepped-up government spending and tax relief. The IMF sharply lowered the outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, to 4.3% this year from the 4.6% it had expected in January.

One winner that’s emerging from the conflict is Russia, an energy exporter that stands to benefit from higher prices. The IMF upgraded its forecast for the Russian economy, hard hit by sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to a still-modest 1.1%.

Meanwhile, the governor of the National Bank of Ukraine has tried to keep Russia’s war in his country at the center of talks among global economic leaders. But in a Monday interview with reporters, Andriy Pyshnyy noted how higher oil prices due the war in Iran are hurting his country.

He said through a translator that annual inflation in March hit 7.9% in Ukraine, well above the forecast of 7% in large part because of higher fuel costs. He estimated that fuel prices could push up annual inflation by 1.5 percentage points to 2.8 percentage points.

Pyshnyy noted that there could also be higher fertilizer and production costs in an economy that is seeking stable prices as part of the ongoing war with Russia, which attacks Ukraine by air on average every 3 to 4 minutes.

“We are trying to walk on a razor blade,” he said of a mission complicated by external factors.

The IMF is a 191-nation lending organization that works to promote economic growth and financial stability and to reduce global poverty.

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• Palantir CEO Alex Karp may have three degrees to his name—but he’s fed up with higher education. The billionaire took a shot at elite universities, including Harvard and Yale, during one his AI firm’s earnings calls, saying degrees don’t matter once you land at Palantir: “This is by far the best credential in tech. If you come to Palantir, your career is set.”

With Gen Z facing an uphill battle in today’s job market, and many facing mounds of student loan debt, a growing number of young people have conceded that pursuing a degree may have been a worthless endeavor—and some business leaders are agreeing.

In fact, top employers today aren’t “even talking about degrees” anymore, the Great Place to Work CEO Michael Bush, previously told Fortune. “They’re talking about skills.”

Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, is one of the latest executives to publicly question the value of traditional schooling.

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during an August 2025 earnings call.

The 58-year-old added that his company is building a new credential “separate from class or background.”

“This is by far the best credential in tech. If you come to Palantir, your career is set,” he said.

Palantir’s hot streak is thanks to workers who want to ‘bend the arc of history’

Palantir now pulls in revenue near—or above—$1 billion each quarter, with its stock price rising over 100% in 2025 alone. While its market cap now sits over $316 billion at time of publication, it is down from Palantir’s blockbuster fall 2025, when its value topped $475 billion.

But according to Karp, the secret to their rise hasn’t been luring workers with a bougie headquarters or scooping up Ivy League talent—it’s bringing together a workforce that isn’t prideful of their fancy college degree, or lack thereof.

It’s a feeling echoed by Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer who joined the billionaires club last year thanks to the recent increase in company value.

“We are able to attract and retain and motivate people who actually want to bend the arc of history here, work on the problems that drive outcomes,” Sankar said last August.

Palantir’s disdain for existing methods of education and talent development goes beyond just talk. Karp and fellow Palantir cofounders Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale have been supporters of the University of Austin, a new four-year school that prides itself on being centered around free speech and being “anti-woke.” 

Fortune reached out to Palantir for comment.

Palantir wants to attract young talent—but also cut its workforce

Palantir is currently hiring for dozens of roles across the company, including in product development and U.S. government roles—alongside multiple positions specifically for interns and new graduates.

Last year, the company also notably established the Meritocracy Fellowship, a four-month, paid internship for high school graduates who may be having second thoughts about higher education. Program admission is solely based on “merit and academic excellence,” but applicants still need Ivy League-level test scores to qualify. This includes at least a 1460 on the SAT or a 33 on the ACT, which are both above their respective 98th percentiles.

According to Karp, the internship was created in direct response to the “shortcomings of university admissions.”

“Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence,” the Palantir posting said. “As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos.”

“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp added to CNBC in February 2025.

Successful interns will be interviewed for full-time roles. “Skip the debt,” the posting read. “Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree.”

However, this young talent may be hired just to build programs that will eventually lead to their replacement by AI. Karp admitted last year that he hopes to reduce his workforce by 500 employees.

“We’re planning to grow our revenue … while decreasing our number of people,” Karp told CNBC in August. “This is a crazy, efficient revolution. The goal is to get 10x revenue and have 3,600 people. We have now 4,100.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Aug. 7, 2025.

More on education:

• Harvard is the No. 1 ‘dream college’ of choice among Gen Z students—despite its war with the Trump administration and an $87,000 a year price tag.
• Anthropic cofounder says studying the humanities will be ‘more important than ever’ and reveals what the AI company looks for when hiring.
• TV host Mike Rowe slams schools for portraying skilled trades as a ‘consolation prize’—when he’s met data center electricians making $280K a year.

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Paxos, the stablecoin and blockchain infrastructure firm, has long worked with major companies like PayPal and Nubank. More recently, Paxos created a spin-off operation known as Paxos Labs that has a focus on the specialized world of DeFi and helps companies offer their retail customers access to stablecoins and crypto lending protocols.

On Tuesday, Paxos Labs announced that it raised a $12 million funding round led by longtime crypto venture investor Blockchain Capital, and with participation from Robot Ventures; the family office Maelstrom; and the DeFi developer Uniswap Labs. Bhaumik Kotecha, cofounder of Paxos Labs, declined to say at what valuation Paxos Labs raised the capital. Chad Cascarilla, the CEO of Paxos, is also the CEO of Paxos Labs.

“The tech makes it easier for [customers] to integrate, and they don’t have to figure out all the smart contracts themselves,” said Kotecha. “But it’s also: We can sit down with their team and help them express compliance and risk.”

Stablecoins and DeFi

Founded in 2012, Paxos is a prominent player in stablecoins, one of the buzziest sectors in crypto. Stablecoins, which are pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, can help speed up payments and reduce fees, and have attracted significant interest from banks and fintech giant Stripe.

Paxos has made its name as a white-label issuer, or a service provider that big companies use to create and manage their own stablecoins. As more companies print more tokens, enterprises inevitably will think about how their customers will use them, said Kotecha. One market that many in crypto point to is DeFi, or financial markets that run on blockchains without centralized entities sitting in between transactions. In fact, Paxos recently agreed to acquire the crypto wallet company Fordefi for more than $100 million as the stablecoin company’s clients clamor for more access to DeFi. 

Kotecha, who started his career at Jack Dorsey’s fintech Block, had been at Paxos for more than three years and was working on tech to simplify how companies plug into different DeFi markets, like Aave. While he and Cascarilla believed the software cornered an untapped market, the initiative didn’t fit into Paxos’ short-term, institution-focused roadmap. Add in the regulatory ambiguity surrounding DeFi as well as the freedom to experiment with a larger array of crypto assets, and the two decided to spin off the project and raise outside capital. 

“The people that now all of a sudden are holding stablecoins as deposits inside of their applications, they want to put them to work, right?” said Spencer Bogart, a general partner at Blockchain Capital. “There’s a bit of a gap in the market there.”

Paxos Labs lets developers use a single software suite to not only create their own branded stablecoins but also allow their customers to earn interest on their holdings and borrow money using those tokens as collateral. 

The startup is on pace to break even by the end of year, said Kotecha, and already has customers, including the neobank Hyperbeat as well as the developers behind the privacy-focused blockchain Aleo. “Especially as interest rates come down, the more compelling thing for users is deploying into on-chain markets,” he added. 

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As of 8 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil is trading at $100.19 per barrel, based on the Brent benchmark we’ll explain in a bit. That’s $3.52 below yesterday morning’s level and about $35 higher than where it stood a year ago.

Will oil prices go up?

No one can say for sure where oil prices will go next. Many forces shape the market—but at the core, it’s still about supply and demand. When risks like a potential recession or war ramp up, oil prices can change direction quickly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

When you buy gas at the pump, you’re covering more than the cost of crude oil. You’re also paying for every step in the process, including refineries, wholesalers, taxes, and the markup your local gas station adds.

Even so, crude oil has the biggest influence on what you pay, often making up more than half the cost per gallon. When oil prices jump, gas prices usually climb right along with them. But when oil falls, gas prices often slip much more slowly—a pattern sometimes called “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

If an emergency hits, the U.S. keeps a backup supply of crude oil called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s mainly there to protect energy security during crises, such as sanctions, catastrophic storm damage, even war. It can also help cushion the blow when supply shocks send prices soaring.

It’s not meant to solve long-term problems. Instead, it provides quick relief for consumers and helps keep vital parts of the economy moving, like essential industries, emergency services, and public transit.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are two of the world’s primary energy sources. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, which which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

When looking at how oil performs, two main benchmarks stand out:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Of the two, Brent gives a better picture of global oil performance because it prices a large share of the world’s traded crude. It’s also the go-to for tracking oil’s historical trends. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now relies on Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

If you look at the Brent benchmark over several decades, oil has been far from stable. It has experienced sharp rises tied to wars and supply cuts, along with steep drops linked to global recessions and oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s delivered the first major oil shock when the Middle East slashed exports and placed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices fell in the mid-1980s due to lower demand and an influx of non-OPEC oil producers joining the market.
• Prices surged again in 2008 as global demand grew, but then crashed alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand plummeted like never before—pushing prices below $20 per barrel.

To sum up, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s heavily influenced by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, shifting energy policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Wall Street points to high oil prices as the driver of inflation (but they’re chasing the wrong culprit)
• U.S. naval blockade on Iran will trigger a currency devaluation spiral and hyperinflation
• Irish PM offers $592 million fuel tax cut to reopen refinery

Frequently asked questions

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Most Americans still think their taxes are too high, according to recent polls, even after last year’s tax law fulfilled several of President Donald Trump’s tax-related campaign promises.

In fact, a new Fox News poll indicates people are more upset about taxes than they were last year. The findings from the survey, which was conducted in late March, are another sign that Americans are on edge about their personal finances as the U.S. experiences a spike in inflation and sluggish economic growth. Other polling finds that frustration goes beyond personal tax obligations, with many believing that wealthy people and corporations are not paying their fair share, while others worry about government waste.

The surveys come after Trump and Republicans passed a massive tax and spending cut bill last year. The legislation enacted a range of tax breaks, including a boosted child tax credit and new tax deductions for tips and overtime. Tax refunds are up this season, and many households are expected to see more income from the Republicans’ tax legislation, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated it will ultimately give the largest benefits to the richest Americans.

Republicans have touted the law as evidence that they are making life more affordable for working families. But polling shows that many Americans may not be feeling the benefits, especially as their tax refunds get eaten up by higher prices.

Most say taxes are too high

About 7 in 10 registered voters say the taxes they pay are “too high,” according to the Fox News poll. That’s up from about 6 in 10 last year. The poll shows heightened concern among very liberal voters and Democratic men, but there has also been a sizable increase among groups that Republicans want to court ahead of the midterm elections, such as moderates, rural voters and white voters without a college degree.

Discontent about taxes has been rising for the past few years. Recent polling from Gallup, conducted in March, found about 6 in 10 U.S. adults say the amount of federal income tax they have to pay is “too high,” a finding that’s been largely consistent in the annual poll since 2023. That’s approaching the level of unhappiness found in Gallup’s polling from the 1980s through the 1990s, before President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Now, about half of Democrats and about 6 in 10 Republicans say their federal income taxes are too high. Republicans tend to view their tax bill more negatively than Democrats, but Gallup’s polling shows that this gap often shrinks when a Republican is president.

Many believe the rich aren’t paying enough in taxes

Most Americans are troubled by the belief that some wealthy people and corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in January. About 6 in 10 Americans said each of those notions bothers them “a lot,” a measure that is largely unchanged in recent years.

By contrast, only about 4 in 10 U.S. adults in that poll said the amount they personally pay in taxes bothers them a lot.

About 8 in 10 Democrats are bothered “a lot” by the feeling that some corporations and rich people aren’t paying their fair share, the Pew survey found, compared to about 4 in 10 Republicans. Government spending is a bigger issue for Republicans, according to the Fox News poll, which found that 75% of registered voters — and a similar share of Republican voters — say “almost all” or “a great deal” of government funding is wasteful and inefficient.

That points to a perception problem for many Americans. Even if their own tax bill is manageable, the idea that the wealthy are underpaying — or that the government is wasting their dollars — bothers many. About half of Americans, 49%, in the Gallup poll say the income tax they will pay this year is “not fair,” which is in line with the record high from 2023.

Broad unhappiness with Trump’s tax approach

Americans’ tax frustration was rising before Trump re-entered the White House, but it’s still a problem for the president’s party — especially if Americans are not feeling the relief that he promised.

The Fox News poll found that about 6 in 10 registered voters, 64%, say they disapprove of how Trump is handling taxes, up from 53% last April. Disapproval has risen most sharply among independents, but also among Democrats and Republicans.

This aligns with a broader feeling that Trump isn’t doing enough to address inflation. Most Americans said Trump had hurt the cost of living “a lot” or “a little” in his second term, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in January. Roughly 9 in 10 Democrats and about 6 in 10 independents said Trump has had a negative impact on the cost of living.

Less than half of Republicans, 43%, said Trump had helped the cost of living, while 33% said he hadn’t made a difference and only 23% said he’d helped.

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The Fox News poll was conducted among 1,001 registered voters from March 20-23. The Gallup poll was conducted among 1,000 U.S. adults from March 2-18. The Pew Research Center poll was conducted among 8,512 U.S. adults from Jan. 20-26. The AP-NORC Poll was conducted among 1,203 U.S. adults from Jan 8-11.

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Pope Leo XIV, a studious and soft-spoken cleric, and Donald Trump, an unapologetically bellicose and pugilistic politician, have long been on a rhetorical collision course. Now their disagreement over the war in Iran has escalated in spectacular fashion, and their comments show how differently each see the conflict and its impact.

On social media, Trump said Leo was “Weak” and captive to the “Radical Left,” even suggesting that Leo somehow owed his position to Trump. The pope has declared Trump’s threats toward Iran “truly unacceptable” and pointed his flock to Biblical text and church doctrine on war and peace, explaining that his purpose is not about Trump at all.

“I’m not afraid of the Trump administration,” Leo said Monday on the way to Africa, “or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the Church works for.”

It’s an unusual spectacle involving the world’s two biggest megaphones, both held by Americans for the first time. Here is how they got to this point.

Before the papacy, Robert Prevost did not mince words

WHAT HE SAID: When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the future pope was a bishop in Peru. He did not shy away from assigning clear blame to Moscow. On a Peruvian show “Weekly Expression,” Prevost described an “imperialist invasion in which Russia wants to conquer territory for reasons of power given Ukraine’s strategic location.”

The clip resurfaced in Italian media soon after he was elected pope on May 8, 2025.

In early 2025, then-Cardinal Prevost used social media to share a news analyses that criticized U.S. Vice President JD Vance, a converted Catholic, for justifying harsh immigration policy by arguing that Christianity sets a pecking order of caring for others, putting one’s family, immediate community and fellow citizens above foreigners.

“JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” read the headline that the future pope shared.

CONTEXT AND WHY IT MATTERS: Catholic bishops comment often in their local media, and some achieve considerable influence. But they vary widely in how detailed they are about public policy and politics. Many stick to broad statements about church doctrine and values and avoid taking stands at odds with individual politicians. With his comments in Peru and then his rare retweet as a cardinal in Rome, Prevost showed he kept abreast of world affairs and was willing to be quite direct in his critiques.

Trump celebrated the ‘Great Honor’ of Pope Leo’s election

WHAT HE SAID: “Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope,” Trump posted on Truth Social on May 8, 2025. “It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!”

Trump later said at the White House that “we were a little bit surprised and very happy” with Leo’s election.

By Monday, he was using Truth Social to take credit for Leo’s election: “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”

WHY IT MATTERS: Trump sees Leo in terms of nationalistic pride and loyalty. The immediate look toward meeting Leo (something that still hasn’t happened) reflected his typical embrace of power and celebrity, even when it isn’t a natural political fit. Further, Trump’s takes do not reflect any nuance about Leo’s origins or the Vatican’s relationship with the U.S.

The College of Cardinals historically has viewed the U.S. with some skepticism — specifically because of how Washington’s military and economic policy have affected the world, especially poor nations, and with a general reluctance to grant the papacy to someone from the world’s preeminent superpower.

Leo grew up, was educated and then ordained in the States but spent decades as a church leader elsewhere, including in poor areas of South America. “He was the least American of the Americans,” said Steven Millies, a professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, where a young Leo earned his master of divinity.

From the start, Pope Leo reflected church teachings on war and peace

WHAT HE SAID: “Peace with you all … the first greeting of the risen Christ, the Good Shepherd who gave his life for the flock of God.”

Those were Leo’s first words from the balcony of St. Peters. When he returned to the loggia for his first Sunday blessing, he addressed the Russian war on Ukraine and violence between Israel and Gaza, decrying a “third world war in pieces.” The following Monday, Leo opened an audience with journalists by quoting Jesus. “In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus proclaimed: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’” the pontiff said.

WHY IT MATTERS: Leo’s earliest statements all emphasized “peace” as a central message of Jesus — and previewed a likely theme of his papacy. Adding mentions of Ukraine, Russia, Israel and Palestine affirmed his willingness to go beyond theory and apply doctrine to what’s happening to people around the world.

The pope was careful about any US branding

WHAT HE SAID: Just as important as the words of his opening papal statements on peace were the languages the polyglot Leo used: None of them were English.

At his introduction to the world from St. Peter’s Square, Leo opened in Italian and then used Spanish to address Peruvian Catholics and citizens where he’d served. Leo’s Sunday blessing was in Italian. He briefly greeted the journalist assembly in English, with the obvious inflection of a Chicago native, but then quickly transitioned to Italian for his remarks. Even in recent encounters with reporters, Leo has opened in Italian before then answering in English.

WHY IT MATTERS: Latin and Italian are the official languages of the Vatican so it’s no surprise that Leo speaks the local vernacular. But it’s a conscious choice for the polyglot Leo to use his fluent Italian and Spanish. It underscores that he’s the leader of a global institution with 1.4 billion followers.

“He doesn’t want to be perceived, I think, as coming from the American side or as relying on his authority as American,” said Catholic University professor William Barbieri. “He wants to speak in the name of the church.”

Holy Week and Easter revealed a chasm

WHAT THEY SAID: Trump escalated threats to Iran around Easter, when Christians celebrate the story of Jesus’ resurrection. Leo used his Palm Sunday message to call Jesus the “King of Peace” and say God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”

Trump welcomed conservative religious leaders to the White House for a Holy Week observance. His spiritual adviser Paula White compared the president to Jesus, saying they’re both persecuted figures who endured.

In Rome, Leo washed the feet of others, as the story of the Last Supper records Jesus doing for his disciples. Speaking to reporters, Leo named Trump directly for the first time and said he hoped the president would seek an “off-ramp” in Iran. On Easter, Trump threatened widespread bombing of Iran’s civilian infrastructure and eradication of a “whole civilization.” Leo called that threat “truly unacceptable.”

WHY IT MATTERS: Their starkly different viewpoints and personalities, combined with the gravity of the Iran war, finally stripped away any pretense or possibility that Trump and Leo could avoid engaging directly.

Trump is still treating Pope Leo as a domestic political rival

WHAT THEY SAID: In Trump’s post Sunday blasting Leo as “weak,” among other things, the president said, “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.” He added that Leo should “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

Leo, meanwhile, said again that he’s not speaking as a politician.

“To put my message on the same plane as what the president has attempted to do here, I think is not understanding what the message of the Gospel is,” Leo told The Associated Press aboard the papal flight to Algeria. “And I’m sorry to hear that but I will continue on what I believe is the mission of the church in the world today.”

WHY IT MATTERS: It’s all a rare exercise for the papacy, whose occupants often comment on global affairs without specifically naming secular politicians. And while Trump routinely lashes out at anyone he perceives as an enemy, these dynamics are uncommon for the president, too: This time, Trump is picking a fight with someone who does not accept the president’s terms and faces no measurable political pressure to do so.

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The standoff between the United States and Iran deepened Tuesday as the U.S. declared it had blockaded Iran’s ports, Tehran threatened to strike targets across the region, and Pakistan said it was racing to bring the sides together for more talks.

Though last week’s ceasefire appeared to hold, the showdown over the Strait of Hormuz risked reigniting hostilities and deepening the region-wide war’s economic fallout.

Talks aimed at permanently ending the conflict — which began Feb. 28 with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran — failed to produce an agreement last weekend, though Pakistan has proposed hosting a second round in the coming days.

Two Pakistani officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter with the media, said that the first talks were part of an ongoing diplomatic process rather than a one-off effort.

Two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations, said on Monday that discussions were still underway about a new round of talks. They said that the venue, timing and composition of the delegations hadn’t been decided, but that talks could happen Thursday.

The war, now in its seventh week, has jolted markets and rattled the global economy as a great deal of shipping has been cut off and airstrikes have torn through military and civilian infrastructure across the region.

The fighting has killed at least 3,000 people in Iran, more than 2,000 in Lebanon, 23 in Israel and more than a dozen in Gulf Arab states. Thirteen U.S. service members have also been killed.

Tanker reported rounding the corner

The blockade is intended to pressure Iran, which has exported millions of barrels of oil, mostly to Asia, since the war began. Much of it has likely been carried by so-called dark transits that evade sanctions and oversight, providing cash flow that’s been vital to keeping Iran running.

Both the nature of enforcement and the extent to which ships will comply remained unclear during its first full day in effect on Tuesday. Tankers approaching the strait on Monday turned around shortly after it took effect, though one turned around and transited the waterway early Tuesday.

The tanker Rich Starry had been waiting off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, according to shipping data firm Lloyd’s List, which cited data from the energy cargo-tracking firm Vortexa. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the Rich Starry had earlier docked in Iran. Yet it is listed by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control as linked to Iranian shipping.

Lloyd’s List, citing ship registry and tracking data, reported that it’s owned by a Chinese shipping company and ultimately bound for China.

U.S. Central Command didn’t immediately respond to questions about the vessel after it cleared the 21-mile-wide (nearly 34-kilometer) waterway. A day earlier, it said that the blockade applied to vessels going to and from Iranian ports.

Since the start of the war, Iran has curtailed maritime traffic, with most commercial vessels avoiding the waterway.

Iran’s effective closure of the strait, through which a fifth of global oil transits in peacetime, has sent oil prices skyrocketing, pushing up the cost of gasoline, food and other basic goods far beyond the Middle East.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said that Iran’s control of the strait amounted to blackmail and extortion as the U.S. blockade took effect. He said in a social media post that Iran’s navy had been “completely obliterated,” but still had “fast attack ships.”

He warned that “if any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED.”

Iran threatened to retaliate against Persian Gulf ports if attacked.

“If you fight, we will fight,” Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, said in a statement addressed to Trump.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British prime Minister Keir Starmer will co-chair a conference Friday for nations willing to deploy warships to escort oil tankers and container ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The deployment will happen “when security conditions allow,” Macron’s office said Tuesday.

Israel and Lebanon scheduled for talks

Meanwhile, direct talks between Israel and Lebanon were set to begin in Washington on Tuesday, the first such negotiations in decades.

Israel has pressed ahead with its air and ground campaign since last week’s ceasefire in Iran, insisting that it doesn’t apply to fighting in Lebanon. It has, however, halted strikes in the country’s capital since April 8, after a deadly bombardment that hit several crowded commercial and residential areas in central Beirut. It sparked an international outcry and threats by Iran that it would end the ceasefire.

After more than a year of near-daily strikes in southern Lebanon, Israel escalated its offensive in the early days of the war following Hezbollah launching rockets into Israel. The fighting has carved a path of destruction from agricultural towns near the border to Beirut, killing more than 2,000 people and displacing in excess of 1 million others, according to Lebanese authorities.

The talks are expected to be preliminary, focused on setting parameters rather than resolving core issues. Lebanese officials have pushed for a ceasefire, while Israel has framed the negotiations around Hezbollah’s disarmament and a potential peace deal, without publicly committing to halting hostilities or withdrawing its forces.

Israel wants Lebanon’s government to assume responsibility for disarming Hezbollah, much like was envisaged in a November 2024 ceasefire. But the militant group has survived efforts to curb its strength for decades and said on Monday that it won’t abide by any agreements that may result from the talks.

___

Metz reported from Ramallah, West Bank. Aamer Madhani and Matthew Lee in Washington and Farnoush Amiri at the United Nations contributed to this report.

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President Donald Trump had two bags of McDonald’s delivered to the Oval Office on Monday by a DoorDash driver he tipped $100, using his favorite food and a reality TV flourish to promote a tax policy he says has meant big rebates for Americans who earn gratuities.

Sharon Simmons, dressed in a “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt, walked up to the Oval Office’s exterior door and knocked as media cameras rolled. Trump popped out and said, “Hello. Nice to see you,” before proclaiming, “Look at this!” and then, glancing toward a pack of nearby reporters, offering, “This doesn’t look staged, does it?”

It was, of course. Making it onto the White House grounds alone requires obtaining prior permission and passing through security, while accessing the Oval Office — not to mention getting so close to the president — would have been impossible without additional screenings and background checks.

Still, the White House has attempted to call more attention to a piece of the Trump-backed tax and spend package approved last summer that allows Americans to temporarily deduct some federal taxes from income earned on tips. It lets certain workers deduct up to $25,000, but phases out for those with higher incomes.

Officials are intensifying the publicity effort ahead of Tax Day on Wednesday — even as the issue has been overshadowed for weeks by the war in Iran that has raised gas prices and spooked financial markets, and more immediately by Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV.

McDonald’s is a longtime favorite of the president — and fare he’s used to political ends before.

He famously ordered it, along with vast piles of other fast food, to serve the visiting NCAA football champion Clemson Tigers in 2019 during his first term, when a government shutdown had reduced White House kitchen staff. Trump also staged one of the most memorable stops of his successful 2024 reelection campaign by visiting a Pennsylvania McDonald’s restaurant, where he worked the fry station and took reporters’ questions from the drive-thru window.

On Monday, Simmons, who DoorDash said was from Arkansas, recounted how the tax changes had helped reduce the amount of income she had to claim. Simmons subsequently told reporters she had earned more than $11,000 in tips a year. Exact figures on her savings were difficult to verify without Simmons’ tax statement wasn’t provided to reporters.

Trump then asked, “Would you like to do a little news conference with me?” and had her stand awkwardly beside him as he took questions about his threats to blockade the Strait of Hormuz and his refusal to apologize to Pope Leo.

The president eventually asked Simmons: “I think you voted for me. Do you think?” To which she responded, “Um, maybe.” Undaunted, Trump continued: “I heard you’re a great supporter. We appreciate it.”

When a reporter later asked if the White House was a good tipper, Simmons hesitated: “Um … potentially.”

“Wait,” Trump crowed, reaching into his pocket for a $100 bill and handing it to Simmons with a grin. She took the money, laughed and finished, “Yes, very,” as the president patted her on the back and beamed.

Trump also invited Simmons and her husband to a UFC bout he’s helping to stage on the White House lawn to mark his 80th birthday in June. And he turned to Simmons again to press her on if she believes “men should play in women’s sports” — a frequent topic of his as he blasts Democrats for being too supportive of transgender rights.

“I really don’t have an opinion on that,” Simmons replied, prompting Trump to push, “I’ll bet you do.”

“No, no,” she insisted. “I’m here about no tax on tips.”

The White House later said that Trump personally delivered the food — consisting of cheeseburgers and fries — to West Wing staff.

It didn’t say if he got a tip for doing so.

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The man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home had written about AI’s purported risk to humanity and traveled from Texas to San Francisco intending to kill Altman, authorities said Monday.

Authorities allege 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama threw the incendiary device about 4 a.m. Friday, setting an exterior gate at Altman’s home alight before fleeing on foot, police said. Less than an hour later, Moreno-Gama allegedly went to OpenAI’s headquarters about 3 miles (4.83 kilometers) away and threatened to burn down the building.

Moreno-Gama is opposed to artificial intelligence, writing about AI’s purported risk to humanity and “our impending extinction,” according to a federal criminal complaint.

“This was not spontaneous. This was planned, targeted and extremely serious,” said FBI San Francisco Acting Special Agent in Charge Matt Cobo during a press conference.

No one was injured at Altman’s home or the company offices, authorities said.

Moreno-Gama faces state and federal charges

Moreno-Gama faces charges including two counts of attempted murder and attempted arson in California state court, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. He tried to kill both Altman and a security guard at Altman’s residence, she alleged. He is set to appear in court Tuesday, and online state court records do not yet show if he has an attorney.

Jenkins said the state charges carry penalties ranging from 19 years to life in prison.

On Monday morning, FBI agents went to Moreno-Gama’s home in Spring, Texas, a suburb of Houston, where they spent several hours before leaving. He has been charged by federal prosecutors with possession of an unregistered firearm and damage and destruction of property by means of explosives. Those charges carry respective penalties of up to 10 years and 20 years in prison.

The federal court documents do not list an attorney for Moreno-Gama, and he has not yet had his first appearance in federal court.

Authorities allege Moreno-Gama traveled from his home in Texas to San Francisco and visited Altman’s home early Friday morning.

Authorities say Moreno-Gama was opposed to artificial intelligence

When Moreno-Gama was arrested Friday, officials found a document on him in which he “identified views opposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the executives of various AI companies,” court documents say. The document discussed AI’s purported risk to humanity and “our impending extinction,” according to the criminal complaint.

Surveillance video images included in the criminal complaint show a person dressed in a dark hoodie and pants that the FBI alleges is Moreno-Gama approaching the driveway of Altman’s home. In various images, the person can be seen tossing the Molotov cocktail, which landed at the top of a metal gate and started a small fire.

Surveillance video images from outside OpenAI’s headquarters allegedly show Moreno-Gama grabbing a chair and using it to hit a set of glass doors. Authorities said Moreno-Gama was approached by the building’s security personnel, who told investigators he “stated in sum and substance” that he came to the headquarters “to burn it down and kill anyone inside,” according to the complaint.

San Francisco police arrested Moreno-Gama and recovered “incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, a blue lighter, and a document.” Moreno-Gama was being held Monday in the San Francisco County Jail on the state charges, and was expected to appear in court on Tuesday.

U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said authorities “will treat this as an act of domestic terrorism, and together with our partners, prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.”

Authorities say Moreno-Gama’s anti-AI document contained threats against Altman

The document in which Moreno-Gama discussed his opposition to AI also made threats against Altman, officials said.

“Also if I am going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message,” Moreno-Gama is alleged by authorities to have written in the document.

Advocacy groups that have issued grave warnings about AI’s risks to society condemned the violence.

Anthony Aguirre, president and CEO of the Future of Life Institute, said in a written statement Friday that “violence and intimidation of any kind have no place in the conversation about the future of AI.”

Another group, PauseAI, said in a statement that the suspect had no role in the group but joined its forum on the social media platform Discord about two years ago and posted about 34 messages there, none containing explicit calls to violence but one that was flagged as “ambiguous.”

Discord said Monday that it has banned Moreno-Gama for “off-platform behavior.”

Altman addressed the threats in a blog post

Hours after the attack on his house, Altman posted a photo of his husband and their toddler in a blog post addressing the threats against him.

“Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me,” Altman wrote.

He added that “fear and anxiety about AI is justified” but it was important to “de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally.”

Altman has become a preeminent voice in Silicon Valley on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence. The attack comes days after The New Yorker published an in-depth investigation that touched on concerns some people have about him and the company.

Debate about the impact of AI is growing

The attack came at a time of growing debate about the societal effects of AI assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT that millions of people are turning to for information, advice, writing help and to do work on their behalf.

An annual report published Monday by Stanford University called the AI index found that most people believe AI’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks, “but nervousness is growing and trust in institutions to manage the technology remains uneven.”

___

Lozano reported from Houston and Oyekanmi reported from Spring, Texas. Associated Press journalists Matt O’Brien from Providence, Rhode Island and Rebecca Boone from Boise, Idaho contributed.

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Good morning. For several years, Samantha Greenberg used AlphaSense to analyze companies. Now she’s the platform’s CFO.

AlphaSense is a specialized AI-powered search engine for companies, investors, and analysts. Instead of the open web, the platform indexes a library of about 500 million documents, including premium business content such as SEC filings, earnings transcripts, and expert research.

Greenberg became chief financial officer on Monday, succeeding Joe Hill. She has used the product for more than seven years as an investor — a relationship she said shaped how she thinks about finance teams operating in a data-heavy, AI-enabled environment — and more recently as a corporate user in CFO roles.

“It’s a product I love,” she told me on her first day at the company.

Greenberg’s appointment comes as AlphaSense, a New York-based private company, reports more than $500 million in annual recurring revenue and over 7,000 customers, including 70% of the S&P 500 and 90% of the S&P 100, she said. Reports in March said  the company is seeking hundreds of millions in new funding at a valuation above its prior $4 billion mark from a 2024 Series F. Greenberg declined to comment on fundraising but called it “really exciting to see institutional investor validation of the momentum and value and impact that our AI platform is delivering in the marketplace.”

Earlier in her career, she spent nearly 20 years as a tech and consumer investor at firms including Goldman Sachs and Citadel before moving into operator roles as CFO at Mint House and, most recently, CFO of ID.me.

In AlphaSense’s platform, AI reasoning across long context windows helps compress research workflows from hours to under an hour, Greenberg said. She cited use cases from investment analysis to M&A sourcing and competitive benchmarking, including for private companies without SEC filings. Workflow agents can now generate outputs such as Excel models and PowerPoint decks, she said, “truly from data to decision.”

As CFO at AlphaSense, Greenberg’s priorities include building real-time, data-led forecasting. Greenberg also serves on Wharton’s AI and Data Science Board. AI tools have shifted finance teams from manual modeling toward insight generation, she said. Looking ahead, she aims to support AlphaSense’s international expansion and execute on a product roadmap she called “incredibly exciting.”

Outside the office, Greenberg said she reads extensively about AI. And ever since growing up in Philadelphia, she continues to root for the city’s sports teams, especially the Eagles and 76ers.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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Agentic commerce, where AI agents undertake purchases or other economic activity on a user’s behalf, has so far seen relatively limited adoption despite a gush of interest from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. But the possibility of disrupting the online payments space is nevertheless proving too lucrative for many major institutions to pass up. 

That includes American Express, which on Tuesday announced an agentic commerce developer kit as well as purchase protection for erroneous purchases made by registered AI agents. The move is a signal that a niche industry could expand quickly as the AI era evolves.

“To date there have probably been as many press releases [on agentic commerce] as transactions, but no doubt it will happen,” Luke Gebb, American Express executive vice president and head of global innovation, told Fortune. “It will start within zones where there is just a good value for the user.”

Indeed, there have been a number of agentic commerce press releases: Mastercard, Visa, and Stripe have all released infrastructure in the sector over the past several months. 

Agentic express

A future where AI agents book flights and refill paper towel stockpiles is one where consumers could save considerable time, but it also opens up risks around what happens when AI agents do not carry out tasks as intended. The agentic commerce space has yet to figure out what to do with that risk, Gebb said.

American Express is pledging to protect users from erroneous transactions made by agents that are registered with Amex. Gebb argued the company is in a good position to do so, given that it already has processes in place for handling disputed transactions from its customers. When asked about the cost to American Express of protecting against AI errors, Gebb said that agents will improve over time, and if consumers have the confidence to transact using agents on the Amex network, that will ultimately bring more transaction volume to the company.

An American Express spokesperson also made the case that the developer kit will reduce customer disputes and chargebacks because the kit only gives payment credentials to verified agents, and Amex will authenticate card members before allowing them to use agents, thereby giving merchants a stronger baseline of legitimacy.

Some in crypto circles are making the case that the agent economy ought to run on stablecoin rails. Gebb said American Express has a “variety of plans” surrounding stablecoins—which he sees as useful more for settlement than for payments—but declined to go into specifics.

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Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Markets: Back in black!
• Man who attacked Sam Altman’s house had CEO kill list, police say.
• The world is watching a Chinese tanker that is trying to run through the Hormuz blockade.
• Progress? Tehran and Washington are still talking.
• Trump continues to criticize the pope.
• U.S. house prices seem to be cooling off.

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Markets opened down nearly 1% across the indexes on Monday, but news-aggregating accounts online and on social media picked up a report by New York Post Pentagon reporter Caitlin Doornbos. At 7:46 a.m. Monday, Doornbos had posted on X that Iranian officials were still considering a U.S. proposal to end the war, “centering around uranium enrichment.”

“One thing affecting why Iran couldn’t make a deal while U.S. was in Islamabad … Iranians could not call their final decision-maker back in Tehran due to security risks,” she wrote, citing a “Pakistani analyst.” 

Soon, the headline traveled. Brent crude began dropping steeply, down roughly 4% to about $4.50 a barrel, roundtripping hundreds of millions of dollars notionally across the front-month contract. Doornbos received hundreds of replies to her post, calling her a liar, a market-manipulator and a pawn of the Trump regime.

By 11 a.m., she issued another post—”she had a responsibility to clarify”—that her original post contained no news, at all. She was just reiterating what was known; that discussions were centered on the nuclear deal, which Vice President JD Vance had already said, and that theoretically Iranians could accept.

“This took off unnecessarily,” Doornbos wrote. 

Brent crude began climbing again, hitting $103 briefly before again descending on some more typical jawboning news; Trump saying that he’d been called by the “right people” in Iran, that they truly want a deal, etc. Ultimately, the day ended on a high: The S&P 500 had risen 1.02% to 6,886.24, wiping out every single day of losses since the beginning of the Iran war on Feb. 28. The Nasdaq added 1.23%; the Dow tacked on 301 points after being down more than 400 earlier in the session.

Now, most readers know very well that the war has not ended. In fact, talks in Islamabad collapsed over the weekend after 21 hours of seemingly genuine effort from both U.S. and Iranian counterparts. President Trump took the risk of enacting a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports at 10 a.m, potentially even stoking another hot war that could drag troops back into conflict. He had spent the afternoon threatening on Truth Social to “ELIMINATE” any Iranian ships that approached the blockade. So why, why did markets rally on a short X post from a New York Post reporter? Why would they rally to another high on information from Trump, an obviously biased party? Surely they must imagine that the probability the conflict escalates is higher than the probability it ends tomorrow? 

The answer is that Wall Street has been Pavlov-dogged, over 14 months and during at least nine separate de-escalations, to buy the dip on every Trump-era escalation. According to a MarketWatch tally, nine of the 10 best days for the S&P 500 since the beginning of Trump’s second term have been driven by signs of de-escalation—on tariffs or on Iran. A trader who caught only those 10 sessions would be sitting on a 35% compound return, against roughly 13% for the index over the same period.

Wall Street calls it the TACO trade—“Trump always chickens out,” coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong after Trump abruptly paused his “liberation day” tariffs in April 2025. But what started as a joke has become some hard serious liquidity. Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson told clients in a Sunday note that the Iran selloff was a correction inside an ongoing bull market, with earnings accelerating into the oil shock rather than rolling over. The median S&P 500 company is now growing earnings per share at a double-digit pace—the fastest since 2021. “The market trades in advance of the headlines,” Wilson wrote. “Investors should do the same.”

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China’s exports grew 2.5% in March from a year ago, significantly slowing from the previous two months as uncertainties rose from the Iran war and its impact on energy prices and global demand.

The March export data released by China’s customs agency Tuesday missed analysts’ estimates and was sharply down from the 21.8% export growth recorded for January and February.

Imports last month surged 27.8%, up from the 19.8% year-on-year increase in the first two months of this year.

Technology-related exports including a jump in shipments of semiconductors from China on the global artificial intelligence boom have powered its robust exports in early 2026, but economists say impacts from the prolonged Iran war could affect overall global demand for Chinese exports this year.

“China’s exports have decelerated as the Iran war starts to affect global demand and supply chains,” said Gary Ng, a senior economist for Asia Pacific at French bank Natixis.

Despite the significant rebound in China’s export growth in January and February, external demand is likely to weaken due to the war’s energy shock, Bank of America economists led by Helen Qiao wrote in a recent research note. The risks will “arise from a persistent global slowdown in overall demand if the conflict lasts longer than currently expected,” they wrote.

But economists, including those from Bank of America, also noted that the energy supply disruptions could further strengthen global demand for China’s renewable energy technologies such as solar cells, wind turbines and electric vehicles, while enduring semiconductor demand on the AI frenzy is expected to help export momentum.

“Despite the energy price shock, exports should stay solid in the coming quarters, thanks to strong demand for semiconductors and green technologies,” wrote Zichun Huang, a China economist at Capital Economics in a note Tuesday.

The late timing of the Lunar New Year, which fell in mid-February, probably also negatively impacted China’s export data last month with some holiday-related disruptions spilling over, Huang added.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s elevated tariffs on Chinese exports and tensions between Washington and Beijing have also been straining China’s shipments to the U.S. over the past months, with China stepping up its exports to other regions including Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Analysts are also closely watching Trump’s planned visit to Beijing in May to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping following a delay due to the Iran war.

China’s exports to the U.S. fell 26.5% year-on-year in March, widening from a 11% drop in January and February, while those to the European Union and Southeast Asia rose 8.6% and 6.9%, respectively.

Chinese leaders have set an annual economic growth target for 2026 of 4.5% to 5%, the lowest since 1991. China met its “around 5%” economic growth target for 2025 on strong exports—with a record high $1.2 trillion trade surplus—and analysts say exports likely will continue to be a key driver for maintaining economic expansion this year as a prolonged property sector slump in China weighed on domestic demand and investments.

Some economists believe China has so far been relatively well-positioned in shielding itself from the impacts from the Iran war, which has sent fuel prices surging and is threatening worsening global inflation. China’s vast oil reserves and diversified energy sources mean it’s less affected by the fallout from the war, including shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for energy transport, they said.

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• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on the factors that will determine whether the IMF can stay focused on growth.
• The big leadership story: One CEO is backing off a vow to evaluate employees on their AI use.
• The markets: Up as investors shrug off stalled U.S.-Iran peace talks.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

​​Good morning. For CEOs dealing with the uncertainty of inflation, shipping blockades, interest rates, tariffs, income inequality, AI development and more, keep an eye on the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington this week. The gatherings offer telling clues on how central bankers, finance ministers and other policymakers view the issues impacting the global economy—and what they intend to do about it. Last year, much of the focus was on the fallout of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. This year, it’s on the  fallout of Trump’s war on Iran. Will they focus on the issues and policies most critical to growth? That may depend of factors like these:

The Fog of War – IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva has a full agenda, from rising public debt levels and income inequality to global trade and regulation. World Bank President Ajay Banga is focused on job growth, sustainable development, access to technology, food security and building out the economies of the Middle East. And yet we kicked off day one with the U.S. blocking all ships through the Strait of Hormuz while the president insulted the Pope. There are plenty of wars impacting growth right now: the Russia-Ukraine, the Israel-Gaza war, a global trade war and civil wars in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere. But the war that’s threatening global energy supplies, upending geopolitics, fomenting a food crisis and likely to curb global growth long after any ceasefire is the Iran war. The job of these gatherings is to mitigate the economic damage. The only country with veto power at both the IMF and World Bank: the United States. 

Jerome Powell’s Swan Song – This will be Powell’s last meeting with central bankers as Kevin Warsh is set to take over as Federal Reserve chair next month. Warsh has a strong track record and many fans. But Powell played a critical role at a vulnerable time for America’s central bank, steadfastly protecting its independence, enforcing accountability,brushing aside insults and continuing to work with the administration to avert crisis. Just last week, he and the Treasury secretary convened Wall Street leaders to talk about cybersecurity concerns arising from Anthropic’s latest AI model. In doing so, he’s helped bolster America’s reputation as an ally in stabilizing the global economy at a time when forces have tried to push it the other way.

Shifting Alliances – Last fall, Georgieva told me at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women 2025 summit that “trade is like water” because “you put in an obstacle, it goes around it.” But water can flow multiple ways. Over the past year, we’ve seen Canada forge a closer relationship with China, Europe coming together against the U.S. over Greenland, and China’s continued ascent. The call to invest in America First is strong, but there may be signals that faith in Brand USA is waning. 

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

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Chad Rigetti has devoted his career to quantum computing—a phrase you’ve perhaps most recently encountered in Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. 

Superhero movies aside, quantum computing is somewhere between reality and moonshot. In the most rudimentary terms (all I feel remotely qualified to give you), a quantum computer uses counterintuitive rules of physics to compute some information exponentially faster than “classical” computers. It’s real—though it’s so far failed to scale or find widespread commercial use—and it holds an air of science fiction, even in how an expert like Rigetti thinks about it.

Take his new company’s name. It’s drawn from Patrick Rothfuss’s sci-fi novel The Name of the Wind. 

“In the book, ‘sygaldry’ is a discipline that involves inscribing runes or letters on different objects to govern heat or light flow,” Rigetti told Fortune. “It’s also an engineering discipline with some degree of precision to it. If you do it wrong, you can blow things up.”

Sygaldry is the company Rigetti cofounded in 2024 after leaving Rigetti Computing, the developer of quantum computer circuits that he founded in 2013 and went public via SPAC in 2022. Sygaldry’s been quiet for years, but recently spoke to Fortune, exclusively revealing for the first time that it raised funding. Sygaldry has raised a total of $139 million, including a $105 million Series A led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures that closed in March. The company’s $34 million seed round was led by Initialized Capital and closed back in August.

At Sygaldry, Rigetti and cofounders Idalia Friedson and Michael Keiser are looking at one of AI’s central questions: How are we going to power all these data centers? Rigetti believes that quantum can offer answers, as Sygaldry designs servers for AI data centers that include both quantum hardware and classical chips.

The idea is this: work with multiple quantum hardware types that help run AI workloads faster than Nvidia’s GPUs can. Rigetti’s goal: “To have machines in commercial production that are providing speed up for these AI workloads around the end of the decade.”

“Quantum is going to be a fundamentally more efficient way of translating power into intelligence,” said Rigetti. 

This is key to the investing thesis, Carmichael Roberts, Breakthrough Energy Ventures managing partner, told Fortune via email, that “the energy intensity of large language models continues to grow at a rate that is unsustainable” and that there’s a path to breaking this paradigm Sygaldry can capitalize on. It won’t happen all at once, Daniel Dart, Rock Yard Ventures founder and Sygaldry investor, said. “AI added new capabilities, and quantum will remove limits,” Dart said. “Think of the move from the horse and carriage to the automobile and the airplane.”

Commercialization by 2030 seems reasonable enough, but consider: People have long been talking about quantum computing the way they talk about nuclear fusion. It’s a future that’s always 50 years away, the old joke goes. Rigetti, however, does believe we’re nearing a turning point. “I think the future is coming very quickly, especially now,” he said.

Rigetti seems to think about the future a lot, and where a sci-fi-ed version of our future might meet a real one. 

“The future we want to build is the Star Trek version of the future,” he said. “That’s where, despite eons of progress, humans remain masters of their technology, and not vice versa. We need to develop AI in an intentional, strategic, conscious way so it ultimately augments the best things that make us human.” 

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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Advances in medicine have extended the “golden years” for many retirees—also increasing the number of years retirement savings must support everyday living expenses. 

Those added years can carry a significant price tag in the form of rising healthcare costs. Recent studies suggest healthcare can become a six-figure retirement expense, even for people who do “everything right.” Yet planning lags. A recent D.A. Davidson survey of U.S. adults found that while 8 in 10 are concerned about healthcare costs in retirement, fewer than half have taken steps to plan for them. Why the disconnect?

One reason many people postpone planning is a familiar refrain: “I’m healthy. I take care of myself.” In other words, optimism bias—the belief that “it won’t happen to me”—can quietly drive inaction. 

Healthy habits matter, but they don’t eliminate cost exposure. The surprise for many retirees isn’t that healthcare expenses exist; it’s the magnitude of those expenses, and how quickly they can change after a diagnosis, procedure, or new medication. Longer lives mean savings must stretch further, and healthcare costs often rise faster than general inflation. That uncertainty makes the topic easy to defer. According to the D.A. Davidson survey, only 16% of respondents said they feel very knowledgeable about what healthcare may cost in retirement.

A second driver of procrastination is the assumption that “Medicare will cover it.” Medicare is an essential foundation, but it is not a complete solution, and it is not a cap on spending. Retirees can still face meaningful out-of-pocket costs, including:

• Premiums and cost sharing
• Dental, vision, and hearing expenses
• Certain prescription costs
• Long-term custodial care
• Network and out-of-area limitations, depending on plan design

For many pre-retirees who spent decades on employer-sponsored coverage, Medicare’s rules and tradeoffs are unfamiliar, making it easy to underestimate what retirement healthcare may actually cost. 

Some studies estimate Medicare covers roughly two-thirds of total healthcare expenses, leaving the remainder to retirees.

Building a ‘Healthcare Expense Portfolio’

Because the path of future healthcare needs is uncertain, many retirees build what I call a “healthcare expense portfolio”: multiple resources that can work together rather than relying on a single approach. That may include savings, an HSA (if eligible), and supplemental coverage decisions, among other tools. In the D.A. Davidson survey, the most commonly cited strategies were Medicare Advantage or supplemental Medicare plans (47%), retirement accounts (35%), personal savings accounts (34%), long-term care insurance (17%), and HSAs (13%).

For some retirees, a continuing-care retirement community—with graduated levels of support—can be part of that portfolio. Three clients of mine, all widows, prioritized the peace of mind of knowing their care needs could be met if their health changes over time. In each case, they converted their home equity into the community’s buy-in. It was a meaningful lifestyle decision, but it provided structure, support, and a built-in social network.

Addressing the ‘Second Mortgage’

Fidelity’s 2025 Retiree Health Care Cost Estimate estimates that even with a paid-off mortgage, a retired couple may facemay face $345k+ in out-of-pocket healthcare costs over the course of retirement—like buying a second home after you thought the first was paid for. The issue isn’t abstract: in the D.A. Davidson survey, 6 in 10 Americans said they have witnessed someone struggle with healthcare costs in retirement. That reality makes the lack of planning all the more surprising.

The cost of waiting is tangible: less time to save (or to save in the most tax-advantaged way available), fewer options to adjust retirement timing, spending, or housing if projections come in higher than expected, and a greater chance of making hurried decisions during a health event—when clarity is lowest and costs are highest. Effective planning isn’t about predicting the future; it’s about building financial resilience.

Working with a financial professional to integrate healthcare into a comprehensive plan can help turn concern into action — by estimating costs, identifying gaps, and stress-testing for less predictable scenarios.

The D.A. Davidson survey found that only 23% of Americans have ever discussed healthcare costs in retirement with a financial advisor. The best time to address this is before the decisions become urgent.

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

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Anthropic, the high-flying AI company, is facing a backlash from some of its most prolific users over a perceived decline in the performance of its Claude AI models.

The issues have left the company—recently valued at $380 billion and reportedly en route to an IPO—scrambling to respond to user revolt and online speculation about its motives and its ability to serve its newest wave of customers.

Anthropic’s popular Claude AI model has seen a significant decline in performance recently according to many developers and heavy users, who say the model increasingly fails to follow instructions, opts for sometimes inappropriate shortcuts, and makes more mistakes on complex workflows.

The complaints appear to be connected to recent changes Anthropic quietly made to the way Claude operates, reducing the model’s default “effort” level in order to economize on the number of tokens, or units of data, the model processes in response to each request.

The more tokens processed per task, the more computing power that task consumes. And there is widespread speculation that Anthropic, which has announced fewer multi-billion dollar deals for data center capacity than some of its rivals, may be running short of computing resources after its adoption of its products soared in the past few months.

User dissatisfaction with Claude’s sudden performance decline and anger at Anthropic’s perceived lack of transparency could potentially derail the company’s runaway growth, just as the company is hoping to woo investors for a potential IPO. The claims that Anthropic has not been candid about the changes it has made to the way Claude operates or the way the changes may increase the cost for using Claude are particularly threatening to Anthropic because it, more than any other AI company, has tried to build a brand reputation on being more transparent than other AI companies and more aligned with its users’ interests.

Anthropic declined to answer Fortune’s specific questions about Claude users’ complaint on the record. Boris Cherny, the Anthropic executive who leads its Claude Code product, responded to user complaints online by saying that Anthropic had reduced the default “effort” Claude makes in answering user prompts to “medium” in response to user feedback that Claude was previously consuming too many tokens per task. But many users complained that the company had not highlighted this change to users.

The situation has caused a pile-on of speculation and allegations—including from some of its competitors—that the company is purposely degrading performance due to a lack of compute capacity.

Across the industry, AI companies are facing rising GPU costs, constrained data center expansion, and difficult trade-offs over which products to prioritize as demand for “agentic” AI systems accelerates faster than infrastructure can scale. While an Anthropic spokesperson has said publicly that the AI lab does not degrade its models to better serve demand, there are reasons to believe the company is facing more acute constraints than some rivals.

Anthropic suffered a series of recent outages as usage has increased and has introduced stricter usage limits during peak hours, drawing complaints from some users. In an internal memo reported by CNBC, OpenAI’s revenue chief also claimed that Anthropic had made a “strategic misstep” by not securing enough compute capacity, and was “operating on a meaningfully smaller curve” than competitors. (Anthropic declined to answer CNBC’s questions about these claims .)

Meanwhile, Anthropic also announced last week that it had trained a new, yet-to-be-released model called Mythos that is significantly more capable than its Opus AI model—but which is also larger and more expensive to run, meaning that likely consumes more computing capacity than prior models. Anthropic stressed that it’s not releasing the model to the general public yet because of security concerns, but some have questioned whether Anthropic lacks sufficient compute capacity to support a broad Mythos rollout. 

Victim of its own success

The scrutiny on Anthropic underscores the fast-changing nature of the AI market and the stakes involved. Just last week, Anthropic stunned the industry by announcing that its annualized recurring revenue, or ARR, is now $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. OpenAI said last month that it is generating $2 billion a month in revenue, or $24 billion a year, although the two companies do not report revenues in exactly the same way, making direct comparisons problematic.

Anthropic has recently benefited from a flood of new users, first due to the popularity of its AI coding tool, Claude Code, and later from a wave of consumer support that followed its feud with the U.S. Department of Defense. Many users switched to Claude from rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the Trump administration designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic had said the dispute stemmed from its insistence that U.S. government agree in its contract not to use the company’s technology in lethal autonomous weapons or for the mass surveillance of American citizens.

Over the last few years, Anthropic has gained significant ground in the AI race, emerging as a leader in enterprise AI and building up significant goodwill among developers and enterprise users. But if the anger around Claude’s performance issues persists, it risks eroding some of that goodwill and could lead the company to stumble at a critical moment.

In response to some of the controversy around Claude’s recent performance issues, Cherny, the Claude Code head, said that Claude Opus 4.6—Anthropic’s flagship model—had introduced “adaptive thinking” in early February, which allows the model to decide how much reasoning to apply to a given task rather than using a fixed budget. In early March, Anthropic also shifted the default setting down to a “medium effort” level, Cherny said. While Claude Code users can manually change the tool’s effort levels, users who pay for the Pro versions of Cowork or the desktop version of Claude are not able to change the default at this time.

To resolve some of the user issues, Cherny said the company will test “defaulting Teams and Enterprise users to high effort, to benefit from extended thinking even if it comes at the cost of additional tokens & latency” going forward.

He also pushed back on speculation that the model had been purposely watered down and on complaints from users that the change was rolled out with a lack of transparency, claiming the changes were made in response to user feedback and were flagged to users via a pop-up within the Claude Code interface. 

‘Unusable for complex engineering tasks’

Most of the user complaints center on Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI-powered coding tool, which has become one of the company’s most popular and fastest-growing products.

Launched in early 2025, Claude Code operates as a command-line agent that can read, write, and execute code autonomously within a developer’s environment. Since its debut, it has been widely adopted by individual developers and large enterprise engineering teams who rely on it for complex, multi-step coding tasks.

The recent changes in the performance of Claude Code gained widespread attention on social media thanks to a GitHub analysis that appears to be from Stella Laurenzo, a senior director of AI at AMD. In a widely-shared analysis, Laurenzo said the changes had made Claude “unusable for complex engineering tasks.”

In her analysis, she found that from late February into early March, Claude moved from a “research-first” approach—reading multiple files and gathering context before making changes—to a more direct “edit-first” style. The model reads less context before acting, makes more mistakes, and requires significantly more user intervention, according to the analysis. The analysis also points to a rise in behaviors like stopping too early, avoiding responsibility, or asking unnecessary permission, which it links to a reduction in “thinking” depth over the same period.

“Claude has regressed to the point [that] it cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering,” she wrote.

In a comment responding to the analysis, Anthropic’s Cherny says the analysis is likely misreading at least part of the data, claiming that the model’s reasoning hasn’t been reduced but that Anthropic had made a change so that the full “reasoning trace” of the model is no longer visible to the user.

But Laurenzo is far from the only person having issues with the tool.

“I’ve had incredibly frustrating sessions with Claude Code the past two weeks,” Dimitris Papailiopoulos, a principal research manager at Microsoft, wrote on X. “I set effort to max, yet it’s extremely sloppy, ignores instructions, and repeats mistakes.”

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Following the Commerce Department’s release on the morning of April 10 showing that March consumer prices rose at 3.3% year over year in March, this writer received well over a dozen emails from Wall Street analysts, market strategists and economists making the same main point: It’s the jump in oil prices triggered by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz that’s primarily responsible for the “hot” CPI reading. They posit that as long as the cost of gas at the pump and the sundry petroleum and petrochemical derivative products—from plastics to fertilizers—remain elevated, the trajectory will remain far above the Fed’s target tempo of 2%. These experts also invariably forecast a sharp downtrend in the inflation curve once the conflict ends.

But a maverick economist asserts that these prestigious commentators are missing the problem’s true cause, and that while prices are jumping at the same time oil’s spiking, it only appears that the petroleum squeeze is to blame. He’s Steve Hanke, the veteran “hardcore monetarist” who is a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University and has been nicknamed the “Money Doctor.” “Everyone’s been writing about how oil prices are causing inflation. It only looks that way. The two are correlated, but the first doesn’t cause the second at all,” declares Hanke.” He points out that although Wall Street regarded the new 3.3% figure as a surprise and as a result of the war, Hanke wasn’t surprised. He notes that the three month annualized rate that occurred back in February was also exactly 3.3%. “Inflation was accelerating before the war, and it will keep accelerating after the war’s over and oil prices fall,” the big time contrarian told Fortune. “It’s at the point now where the genie is clearly out of the bottle and won’t be put back in any time soon.”

Hanke contends that it’s growth in the money supply, not price shocks like the one we’re now witnessing, that determine the overall course of the price level. “If gasoline and other oil products get more expensive, people have less to spend on rent, restaurants and everything else,” he says. “Supply chain disruptions only change relative prices, they have no impact on overall inflation.” It’s the explosion in the money supply he asserts, that’s the real villain. That’s just what the monetarist view predicts. “It’s commercial banks that create 80% of new money,” says Hanke. “The Fed only creates the other 20%. It’s the big surge in that banking credit that’s pushing up prices.” He adds that a rise in the money supply translates into higher prices only following a significant lag. The monetary takeoff happened over two years ago, and he’s been warning of its aftermath ever since.

He points out that the Fed was en route to slaying inflation in 2023, when commercial credit created by banks was negative. But that metric reversed course the following year, entering positive territory in March of 2024, then racing to hit a pace of 6.6% in February. “That’s an enormous increase, and the current rate’s higher than the golden mean for achieving 2% inflation,” says Hanke. Once again, it’s bank lending that accounts for the lion’s share of the leap in the money supply. “The banks opened up lending in response to the Administration’s signal that it would loosen regulations and reserve requirements, among other things,” he adds.

Japan in the 1970s is a great example of how loose money policy, not the oil crisis, sparked inflation

Hanke argues the giant price surge in this country during the 1970s also arose from monetary excess, not the worst oil crunch in modern history. For example, he points out that prior to the 2nd chapter of the crisis in 1979 and 1980, the money supply was waxing at a torrid 11.2% in period before the crisis, twice the level consistent with a 2% CPI, spawning 13.2% inflation. Had growth been moderate, he argues, the moonshot in prices wouldn’t have happened.

As proof, Hanke cites Japan’s experience during the same period half a century ago. In 1974, the first oil cataclysm ignited by the Yom Kippur war got almost universally tagged for driving inflation from 4.9% to 23.2%. But Hanke contends that the seeds were actually planted in mid-1971, when the Bank of Japan gunned the money supply at 25.2%. Here’s the evidence he’s right. In July of 1974, the BoJ reversed course, chopping the pace of money expansion in half. By 1978, inflation had dropped to 4.2%. That year, the revolution in Iran sent oil prices skywards again. But the BoJ’s moderation—contrary to the scenario in the U.S.—kept prices in check; inflation defied the shock by actually declining to 3.7%. “The oil crisis occurred and inflation went below where it was before the shock because of all the tightening,” says Hanke.

Hanke calls the Japan example “a natural experiment, and they’re hard to find in economics.” He laments that the U.S. didn’t heed that lesson, nor the fall out from our own excesses in the last oil squeeze. It’s allowing money supply to run hot that will saddle Americans with inflation no matter what happens in the Gulf. The oil crisis will end with the war, it’s the inflation predicament that has legs.

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Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was credited for saying, “Change is the only constant,” and about 2,500 years later, American CEOs are heeding his wisdom.

Executives are accepting tariffs as the new normal and are preparing to weather the levies even after President Donald Trump leaves office, according to a report published on Monday from consultancy PwC. In a survey of 633 U.S. executives conducted last month, PwC found 86% treated tariffs as a permanent planning assumption.

“CEOs aren’t planning around short-term tariffs anymore,” Kristin Bohl, PwC U.S. partner in Customs and International Trade Practice, told Fortune. “They’re treating tariffs as part of the new normal for doing business, with the expectation they’ll be in place for years.”

Despite the Supreme Court striking down tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), uncertainty has remained around the future of U.S. import taxes.

Following the ruling, Trump imposed a 15% global tariff under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which authorizes a temporary, 150-day tariff without congressional approval. These levies would expire July 24. Tariffs imposed under Section 301, which Trump invoked under his first administration in 2018, are also still in effect.

The Congressional Budget Office projected prior to the Supreme Court decision that the federal government would bring in more than $4 trillion in revenue from custom duties over the next 10 years.

As companies navigate ongoing supply chain challenges—complicated further by the war in Iran—they must also contend with whether they will pursue refunds for tariffs paid under IEEPA.

Because the Supreme Court did not outline specifics on how the refunds would be determined, the Court of International Trade and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been tasked with rolling out the refund process. The first phase of CBP’s online automated payment system is slated to launch next week, and refunds should take about 45 days to distribute after that, according to the agency.

PwC suggested the companies most effective in navigating tariffs are the ones accepting the reality that they will likely continue to change.

“Our advice is simple: act now,” Bohl said. “Build tariffs into pricing, supply chains, and operating models, and stay flexible. The companies that pull ahead will be the ones that actively reduce tariff exposure and leverage mitigation strategies.”

Companies feeling the squeeze

Even with relief possible through tariff refunds, many companies have had to make challenging decisions to navigate the changing trade environment. Lamborghini, for example, saw record deliveries last quarter, but reported shrinking profitability, due in part to tariffs taking a bite out of operating margins. CEO Stephan Winkelmann told Fortune in March he expected sales to remain strong amid a “new normality” of customers better understanding the tariff landscape.

A KPMG survey in February found Lamborghini was not alone in dealing with tightening margins. The consultancy reported more than half of U.S. companies also experienced a similar squeeze, and 70% said they delayed major investments as a result of tariffs.

Navigating uncertainty around refunds has also forced companies to assess their appetite for risk, particularly as many reckon with the need for immediate cash. Some importers have turned to hedge funds and liquidation specialists, selling the rights to their tariff refund claims for a fraction of their value. The tradeoff is they no longer having to question when the refunds will be distributed, or whether they will receive less than their claim.

Others are choosing to keep the rights to the claims, but use them as collateral for loans. This strategy would allow U.S. firms to receive an influx of capital while also being able to cash in on their refunds once they become available. There are here risks, too: The government may only issue a partial refund or reject a company’s refund claim. And if refunds are delayed, the interest on a loan may exceed the value of the refund itself. 

Alex Hennick, president and CEO of A.D. Hennick and Associates, a liquidation firm that specializes in distressed asset recovery, said as companies are continuously faced with tariff-related obstacles, they will have to weigh these challenging decisions.

“It’s coming to the point where some people might have no choice,” he told Fortune. “They’re either going to have to sell their claim or they’re going to have to borrow money to get money in order to continue to operate their business.”

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United Airlines Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby has floated a possible combination with American Airlines Group Inc., according to people familiar with the conversations, an audacious proposition that would face intense scrutiny even under the business-friendly Trump administration. 

Kirby has pitched the idea to senior government officials, though it’s unclear if any overtures have since been made or if an actual process is underway to explore a deal, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the conversations are private. 

A spokesman for United Airlines declined to comment, as did officials at American Airlines.

United and American are among the top four US carriers, together controlling more than a third of the market. A combination would create the largest airline on the planet. As a result, any merger between the two aviation giants would pose serious antitrust concerns and likely face significant backlash from consumers, politicians and rival US airlines.

At the same time, the deliberations show how recent market upheaval has brought the possibility of consolidation to the fore. Kirby told employees in a memo last month that the carrier would benefit from any shakeout in the industry as part of rising oil and fuel prices, potentially providing purchase opportunities.

“We’ll be there to pick up some of those assets, might be a win-win for them,” Kirby said in a Bloomberg Television March 24 interview in Los Angeles. Asked if that would mean buying entire companies, he said “we’ll see, there’s lots of rumors about that.” 

For Kirby, a deal involving American Airlines would also be personal. Kirby was previously president of American, but left after it was made clear he didn’t have a path to becoming the carrier’s CEO. Kirby joined United as president in 2016 before rising to the top job.

The two companies have engaged in a continuous exchange of strategic one-upmanship, particularly at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, where they’ve battled over gate access and market share.

Kirby has also faulted American Airlines for being too late and too slow to add more premium products, which have proven popular and lucrative at United and Delta Air Lines Inc. 

The United CEO’s considerations come as airlines are grappling with higher jet fuel prices due to the US-Iran war and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key passageway for oil transports. Kirby has already responded by taking some capacity out of the market, saying he wants to be prepared for potential cost increases. 

US airline mergers have to be reviewed and approved by the Transportation Department, as well as the Department of Justice. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the government would look at a number of factors when considering potential tie-ups, including the impact on competition — both domestically and globally — and ticket prices. 

“President Trump, he loves to see big deals happen,” Duffy told CNBC on April 7. “Is there room for some mergers in the aviation industry? Yeah, I think there is,” he said. 

However, Duffy added that he wouldn’t “pre-commit to anything.”

He also said if there is a merger between two larger airlines, they’ll have to “peel off” some of their assets because the US doesn’t want to see one carrier with too much market share, which could drive up consumer prices.

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Early on April 13, the oil tanker Rich Starry—loaded with Iranian crude and headed for China—made a dramatic U-turn. Instead of exiting the Strait of Hormuz, as it had planned, the ship joined a stationary flotilla of about 800 other vessels, including 400 oil and gas tankers, most of which have remained idle and stranded since late February.

“We have not seen any transits from tankers since the U.S. blockade began this morning,” said Claire Jungman, director of maritime risk and intelligence for Vortexa, while noting the abrupt turnaround of the Rich Starry.

As peace talks between the U.S. and Iran fell apart over the weekend—although back-channel communication continues—President Donald Trump decided the U.S. would initiate its own blockade over the watery choke point through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically flows.

Instead of Iran letting through almost 10% of the normal traffic through a financial tolling system, traffic has for now been reduced to zero as oil prices spiked back above $100 per barrel on April 13.

Oil forecaster Dan Pickering said the question now is, “Who’s going to have the guts to go through first?”

“We now have two governments both claiming they control the right to enter and exit the strait, and essentially, I don’t think we have any idea yet how this is going to play out,” said Pickering, founder of Pickering Energy Partners consulting and research firm.

“The president sort of indicated he’s willing to accept $100 [per barrel] oil,” he added. “I don’t know if this is going to turn into any more violence, but it’s clearly the next level of this economic warfare at a minimum.”

How it’s straightened out

U.S. Central Command, which deployed a series of warships for the blockade, said vessels from non-Iranian ports that haven’t paid tolls are now free to transit. But those ships also are afraid of falling under Iranian attacks. Trump said any of Iran’s high-speed attack boats that approach the U.S. blockade “will be immediately ELIMINATED.”

However, it’s unclear if, for instance, the U.S. would forcibly stop a Chinese tanker carrying Iranian oil. Tensions could easily escalate amid the tenuous two-week ceasefire announced last week.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he is working with the United Kingdom on forming a conference of countries ready to peacefully help restore “freedom of navigation in the strait.”

“This strictly defensive mission, distinct from the belligerents, will be deployed as soon as the situation allows,” Macron announced.

So, why did it take nearly six weeks into the war for the U.S. to take proactive measures to secure the strait?

“I don’t think they wanted to turn off another 2 million barrels a day [of Iranian oil] to the marketplace,” Pickering said. “Now, this is certainly a way to turn up the pressure on Iran without having to go in and put boots on the ground and attack Kharg Island.”

In the meantime, workers on the stranded vessels rely on rationed food and water, fishing, and some supplies brought in by small ships from Gulf states nations.

And the rest of the world suffers without the fuel, natural gas, heating oil, fertilizer, helium, and much more. The most impacted Asian nations have implemented a series of conservation measures creating demand destruction for energy.

But even with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates rerouting some of their oil supplies and with many nations drawing from their emergency stockpiles, the world will continue to face more shortages, Pickering said.

“I think what we’re headed for is 5 million barrels a day of demand destruction because of a lack of availability,” Pickering said. “That is coming over the next few months if things don’t loosen up, and the hard part is they don’t look like they’re going to loosen up.

“The impacts will continue to ratchet up. It still probably looks like it gets worse before it gets better.”

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President Donald Trump refused to apologize to Pope Leo XIV on Monday after criticizing the pontiff for his opposition to the war in Iran — and he sought to explain away a now-deleted social media post depicting himself as Jesus by saying he had thought the image was of him as a doctor.

Trump was asked about his comments toward the U.S.-born head of the Catholic Church, as well as the post depicting himself as a healer, in a hastily called question-and-answer session with reporters at the White House.

“He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran, and you cannot have a nuclear Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result,” Trump said, adding, “I think he’s very weak on crime and other things so I’m not” going to apologize.

“He went public,” the Republican president added. “I’m just responding to Pope Leo.”

That response followed Leo pushing back on Trump’s broadside against him the previous evening, telling reporters that the Vatican’s appeals for peace and reconciliation are rooted in the Gospel and that he doesn’t fear the Trump administration.

“To put my message on the same plane as what the president has attempted to do here, I think is not understanding what the message of the Gospel is,” Leo told The Associated Press aboard the papal plane en route to Algeria. “And I’m sorry to hear that, but I will continue on what I believe is the mission of the church in the world today.”

The back-and-forth between the world’s two most influential Americans served to deepen a burgeoning schism as the U.S. war in Iran stretched into its seventh week.

History’s first U.S.-born pope stressed that he was not making a direct attack against Trump or anyone else with his general appeal for peace and criticisms of the Iran war and other conflicts around the world.

“I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the Church works for,” said Leo, who said he had a different perspective on foreign policy than elected officials.

“I will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems,” he said.

Trump speaks to his much-criticized social media post

The image posted by the president Sunday night showed Trump wearing a biblical-style robe and laying hands on a bedridden man as light emanates from his fingers — while a soldier, a nurse, a praying woman and a bearded man in a baseball cap all look on admiringly. The sky above is filled with eagles, an American flag and vaporous images.

“I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor and it had to do with the Red Cross,” Trump said. “It’s supposed to me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. A lot better.”

He blamed the “fake news” for any confusion over the image, though it drew criticism from a wide range of people, including some of Trump’s own evangelical supporters, who objected to the notion that Trump was likening himself to Christ. Even Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, assailed the “desecration of Jesus” while also speaking up to defend the pope.

The post was deleted from Trump’s account late Monday morning. Trump didn’t provide details on how that happened.

Trump had charged that Leo is not ‘doing a very good job’

The president criticized the pope in a lengthy social media post while flying back to Washington from Florida on Sunday night. He kept up the denunciation after deplaning, telling reporters, “I’m not a fan of Pope Leo.”

Leo said Saturday during an evening prayer service at St. Peter’s Basilica that a “delusion of omnipotence” was fueling the U.S.-Israel war in Iran. The comments came the same day that the United States and Iran began face-to-face negotiations in Pakistan during a fragile ceasefire.

The pope had earlier named Trump directly and expressed optimism that the president would seek “an off-ramp” in Iran. An even stronger condemnation came after Trump warned of mass strikes against Iranian power plants and infrastructure, writing on social media that “an entire civilization will die tonight.” Leo described that as a “threat against the entire people of Iran” and said it was “truly unacceptable.”

While it’s not unusual for popes and presidents to be at cross purposes, it’s exceedingly rare for the pope to directly criticize a U.S. leader — and Trump’s stinging response is equally uncommon.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the president wrote in his post, adding, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”

Leo’s opposition to war irked Trump

Leo, who began an 11-day trip to Africa on Monday, has previously said that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” He’s also referred to an Old Testament passage from Isaiah, saying that “even though you make many prayers, I will not listen — your hands are full of blood.”

Still, in his comments on Monday, as in his Sunday night social media post, Trump went far beyond the war in Iran in criticizing Leo.

“I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.” His post also claimed that Leo was only elected pontiff “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”

“If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” Trump wrote, adding, “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!”

In his comments to reporters after stepping off Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said of Leo, “I don’t think he’s doing a very good job. He likes crime, I guess,” adding, “He’s a very liberal person.”

Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, also said he was “disheartened” by Trump’s comments.

“Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician,” Coakley said in a statement. “He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.”

___

Winfield reported from aboard the papal plane.

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Colombian officials on Monday authorized a plan to cull dozens of hippos roaming freely through a region in the center of the country, where they threaten villagers and displace native species years after notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar brought in the first ones.

Environment Minister Irene Vélez said previous methods to control their population have been expensive and unsuccessful, including neutering some of the animals or moving them to zoos. Vélez said up to 80 hippos would be affected by the measure. She did not say when hunting would begin.

“If we don’t do this we will not be able to control the population,” Vélez said. “We have to take this action to preserve our ecosystems.”

Colombia is the only country outside of Africa with a wild hippo population. The hippos are the descendants of four brought to the country in the 1980s by Escobar as he built a private zoo in Hacienda Nápoles, a gigantic ranch in the Magdalena River valley with a private landing strip that served as his rural abode.

A study published by Colombia’s National University estimated that around 170 hippos were roaming freely in the country in 2022.

Recently, hippos have been spotted in areas that are more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of the ranch.

Environmental authorities in Colombia say the mammals pose a threat to villagers who have encountered them in farms and rivers. They also compete for food and space against local species such as river manatees.

Despite the challenges, the hippos have also become a tourist attraction, with residents of villages surrounding Hacienda Nápoles offering hippo spotting tours and selling hippo-themed souvenirs.

The hippos are also one of the main attractions at the Nápoles ranch, which was confiscated by Colombia’s government as it seized Escobar’s properties. It now functions as a theme park, featuring swimming spools, water slides and a zoo that includes several other African species.

Animal welfare activists in Colombia have long opposed proposals to kill the hippos, arguing they deserve to live. They say that addressing the problem through violence sets a poor example for a country that has gone through decades of internal conflict.

Andrea Padilla, a senator and animal rights activist who helped draft a law against bullfights in Colombia, described the plan to cull the hippos as a “cruel” decision, and accused government officials of trying to take the easy way out.

“Killings and massacres will never be acceptable,” Padilla wrote on X. “These are healthy creatures who are victims of the negligence” of government entities.

Over the past 12 years, spanning three presidential administrations, Colombia has tried to neuter some of the hippos in a bid to reduce their population. But the initiatives have had limited scope due to high costs that come with capturing the dangerous animals and performing surgeries on them.

Because Colombia’s hippos come from a limited gene pool and could carry diseases, taking them back to their natural habitat in Africa has been considered unfeasible.

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The man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco was opposed to artificial intelligence, writing about AI’s purported risk to humanity and “our impending extinction,” according to court documents.

Authorities allege 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama threw the incendiary device about 4 a.m. Friday, setting an exterior gate at Altman’s home alight before fleeing on foot, police said. Less than an hour later, Moreno-Gama allegedly went to OpenAI’s headquarters and reportedly threatened to burn down the building.

On Monday morning, FBI agents went to Moreno-Gama’s home in Spring, Texas, a suburb of Houston, where they spent several hours before leaving. He has been charged by federal prosecutors with possession of an unregistered firearm and damage and destruction of property by means of explosives.

The FBI’s office in Houston confirmed agents were at the scene but declined further comment. Neighbors described the homeowners as “very nice people” who were involved with their church.

The criminal complaint does not name Altman or OpenAI but both have confirmed they were the targets of the attack. No injuries were reported.

When Moreno-Gama was arrested Friday, officials found a document on him in which he “identified views opposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the executives of various AI companies,” court documents say. The document discussed AI’s purported risk to humanity and “our impending extinction,” according to the criminal complaint.

Authorities allege Moreno-Gama traveled from his home in Texas to San Francisco and visited Altman’s home early Friday morning.

Surveillance video images included in the criminal complaint show a person dressed in a dark hoodie and pants that the FBI alleges is Moreno-Gama approaching the driveway of Altman’s home. In various images, the person can be seen tossing the Molotov cocktail, which landed at the top of a metal gate and started a small fire.

Surveillance video images from outside OpenAI’s headquarters allegedly show Moreno-Gama grabbing a chair and using it to hit a set of glass doors. Authorities said Moreno-Gama was approached by the building’s security personnel, who told investigators he “stated in sum and substance” that he came to the headquarters “to burn it down and kill anyone inside,” according to the complaint.

San Francisco police arrested Moreno-Gama and recovered “incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, a blue lighter, and a document.” Moreno-Gama was being held Monday in the San Francisco County Jail on various state charges, including possession or manufacture of combustible material or an incendiary device and arson.

The document in which Moreno-Gama discussed his opposition to AI also made threats against Altman, officials said.

“Also if I am going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message,” Moreno-Gama is alleged by authorities to have written in the document.

Advocacy groups that have issued grave warnings about AI’s risks to society condemned the violence.

Anthony Aguirre, president and CEO of the Future of Life Institute, said in a written statement Friday that “violence and intimidation of any kind have no place in the conversation about the future of AI.”

Another group, PauseAI, said in a statement that the suspect had no role in the group but joined its forum on the social media platform Discord about two years ago and posted about 34 messages there, none containing explicit calls to violence but one that was flagged as “ambiguous.”

Discord said Monday that it has banned Moreno-Gama for “off-platform behavior.”

Hours after the attack on his house, Altman posted a photo of his husband and their toddler in a blog post addressing the threats against him.

“Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me,” Altman wrote.

He added that “fear and anxiety about AI is justified” but it was important to “de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally.”

Altman has become a preeminent voice in Silicon Valley on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence. The attack comes days after The New Yorker published an in-depth investigation that touched on concerns some people have about him and the company.

___

Lozano reported from Houston. Associated Press journalist Matt O’Brien contributed to this story from Providence, Rhode Island.

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Some credit cards this year have high sign-up bonuses (SUBs), with some offering never-before-seen six-figure points for reaching the minimum spend.

So as tax day nears, some Americans are credit-card-maxing this tax year by opening a fresh credit card to pay their tax bill, pocketing the sign-up bonus, and cashing in points for a free flight.

The IRS allows credit card payments for a fee. On, say, a $5,000 tax bill, that 1.75% fee comes out to $87.50. By opening a credit card with an SUB of 100,000 points for $5,000 in spending, you essentially earned the points for less than $100 extra in fees.

The strategy is gaining traction on social media, but financial experts say it works only for a specific type of taxpayer—and for a growing number of Americans, the timing couldn’t be more fraught.

A new survey from coupon site CouponFollow of 1,000 Americans paints a stark picture of just how much financial pressure households are under heading into this tax season. More than half (52%) of Americans say they rely on their tax refund to catch up on bills, with 15% doing so on a regular basis. Meanwhile, 27% say they couldn’t afford to pay their taxes at all if they owed money this year, and only 12% say a refund has ever been a true financial turning point in their lives.

Against that backdrop, the credit card points strategy is equal parts clever and cautionary.

“This tax season, we are seeing more people treating their tax payments like a strategic spending opportunity, which is smart in theory but can be risky in practice,” Clay Cary, senior trends analyst at CouponFollow, told Fortune.

“In the right situation, though, it can actually work in your favor. If you already have the funds to pay off the new credit card balance immediately, using the sign-up bonus can be a smart way to earn points and miles quickly. That’ll give you a free flight or hotel stay, which could be helpful as transportation costs rise.”

He cautioned that the math holds up only under specific conditions. Tax payments typically carry a credit card processing fee of 1.8% to 2%, meaning the value of the bonus needs to outweigh those upfront costs. More critically, carrying a balance, even briefly, can wipe out any rewards earned.

“For people who are relatively financially stable and can pay off their taxes immediately, it’s a calculated move,” Cary said. “For anyone without a clear payoff plan, it’s less of a travel hack and more of a mistake waiting to happen.”

The CouponFollow data suggests the broader population may be in no position to take that gamble. Only 33% of respondents plan to put their refund into savings, while 18% will use it to pay off existing credit card debt. That means many Americans are already carrying balances they’re trying to dig out from, not add to.

Still, Cary sees a silver lining in how people are approaching their money this year. “Overall, our data shows that less and less, tax refunds aren’t being treated like ‘fun money’ right now. They’re more of a financial reset,” he said.

“When over half of Americans say they’re using their refunds to catch up on bills, debt, and everyday essentials, that tells us that households are under a lot of financial pressure. At the same time, we’re seeing a shift toward more strategic behavior, similar to the credit card strategies being used to pay off taxes. Nearly half of Americans are stacking their refunds with coupons, rewards, and cash back to stretch their spending further. So while people aren’t necessarily getting ahead, they are becoming more intentional with how they use their refund money.”

For the financially disciplined, tax season may now double as a travel rewards opportunity. For everyone else, the smartest move might still be the boring one: Use the refund to get even, not get ahead.

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Ukraine’s constant innovation in drone technology is giving its military an edge on the battlefield, dealing major blows to Russia’s army and economy.

While Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago with superior numbers, that advantage has since been neutralized by Western aid and the emergence of new drones, which now account for the vast majority of casualties.

Both sides have scrambled to deploy upgraded versions, but Ukraine appears to be innovating faster and has recently gained the upper hand.

“Recent evidence suggests that not only are Russian forces facing setbacks on the battlefield, but also that recent Ukrainian drone innovations have shifted the battlefield advantage in Ukraine’s favor,” the Institute for the Study of War said in a note last week.

Drone improvements have contributed to higher Russian casualty rates so far this year compared to 2025, which had already seen staggering losses estimated at 30,000 a month.

In addition, Ukraine’s new weapons have enabled more strikes on Russian air-defense systems as well as more interceptions of Russian drones, according to ISW. As a result, Russian advances have slowed down, allowing Ukraine to counterattack.

“Ukraine’s defensive successes, drone adaptations, and mid-range strike campaign are creating compounding effects that are degrading Russian frontline forces,” ISW added.

The Kyiv Post reported that Ukraine has recently fielded an AI-enabled drone that’s immune to jamming, is harder to detect, and has longer range.

By contrast, Russian drones have lagged as the Kremlin focuses on mass production of a few models over innovation, while senior military commanders have also been resistant to change, ISW said.

The note pointed out that Ukraine’s domestic drone industry developed the innovations with help from Western allies. But former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus recently predicted that Ukraine will possess “the most important military industrial complex in the free world.”

“It is producing cutting-edge unmanned systems, not just in the air, but on the ground and at sea,” he said an interview with World at Stake. 

Ukraine’s integration of hardware and software is also extraordinary, Petraeus noted, adding the pace of innovation is constant. Software updates come in less than a week, and hardware changes come every few weeks.

New drones have reached deep into Russian territory, and ISW said Ukraine is inflicting major damage on the Russian energy sector.

It highlighted a series of drone attacks on Novorossiysk on the Black Sea as well as on the Baltic Sea oil hubs of Primorsk and Ust-Luga, which previously handled about 45% of Russia’s seaborne crude exports.

ISW pointed to reports that the drone strikes on Primorsk burned $200 million of oil, while exports of the petrochemical naphtha from Ust-Luga fell by about 70% in the last week of March.

“Ukraine’s expanding long-range strike campaign against Russian oil infrastructure is exploiting overstretched Russian air defenses and significantly damaging Russian oil export capabilities,” ISW said.

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The governance frameworks executives built over decades were designed for people. AI agents are not people, and the gap between those two facts is where enterprise risk is now accumulating fastest. 

Over the past year, organizations have been forced to confront the fact that AI is being deployed faster than it can be governed. The growing use of shadow AI is exposing gaps regarding who, or what, is allowed to act.  Our latest research shows 91% of organizations are already using AI agents, but only 10% have a clear strategy to manage them.

AI agents are now operators, acting on their own accord without the need for a human manager to lead the way. 

These autonomous digital actors can analyze data, initiate workflows, and act inside businesses. But while it’s easy to see the upside to speed, scale, and productivity, the shift in authority is less obvious.

The real threat in enterprise AI adoption is not how intelligent agents are, but how much authority executives delegate to them. It’s decision rights, and what happens when authority is delegated to systems that organizations can’t fully see, let alone control.

Ultimately, the risk is not that AI agents will behave maliciously. Instead, it’s that they will behave exactly as configured, in systems that were never designed to account for non-human identities.

For years, companies have built security models around human workers. Employees are hired, credentialed, monitored, and eventually offboarded when they leave. Identity management makes this possible: It’s how organizations verify who employees are, what they can connect with, and what they are authorized to do.

AI agents break that model. They don’t log in at 9:00 a.m. and log out at 5:00 p.m. They operate continuously across multiple systems and cloud environments. They can retrieve sensitive data, trigger financial processes, or make customer-facing decisions in seconds. 

Yet enterprises still treat agents as background software rather than operational actors with real authority. 

Recent research from Gravitee, an API management platform, finds that only 22% of organizations treat AI agents as independent identities, even as close to 90% of companies report suspected or confirmed security incidents involving AI agents.  

Consider a common scenario: A company introduces an internal AI agent to streamline employee administration. A worker asks the agent to submit leave, update payroll details, and notify their manager. The agent automatically connects to HR systems, finance platforms and collaboration tools to complete the request.

Think about how many systems the agent needs to access to complete the request. What permissions does it have? What access points is it using, or potentially leaving open? What if something goes wrong? 

The efficiency gain is real. But unless each step is governed by clear identity controls, the company might not know exactly what authority is delegated and how to intervene when there’s a problem.

This is why the identity gap is a leadership problem, not just a technical one.

Traditional access models assume relatively stable roles and predictable human behavior. AI agents operate through dynamic tasks and delegated authority. They may require temporary, highly specific permissions to perform a single action, then immediately move to the next workflow. 

Without the ability to continuously verify and authorize each step, organizations risk accumulating a growing population of non-human actors with broad, persistent access—that, in many cases, was never deliberately granted—to critical systems.

We are already seeing this play out, as organizations begin to push AI-generated code and automated actions into live environments, often faster than governance models can keep up. Recent incidents, such as a McDonald’s chatbot breach where weak controls exposed millions of applicant records, or when an AI coding agent at Replit deleted a live production database, show how quickly these gaps can turn into real-world disasters.

An AI agent configured to optimize supply chain decisions could trigger large-scale purchasing commitments. A customer service agent could expose sensitive account information. A financial reporting agent might distribute sensitive information from multiple sources across a wide population.

All of these instances would stem from poorly governed autonomy. 

Regulators are starting to act. In several markets like Singapore and Australia, policymakers are emphasizing that organizations are responsible for their automated systems. 

That poses a compliance challenge to business leaders. How do you prove which system initiated a decision? How do you demonstrate that access was appropriate at the time an action was taken? How do you pause or revoke authority if an agent behaves unexpectedly?

To secure AI agents, organizations must be able to answer three fundamental questions: Where are my agents, what can they connect to, and what are they allowed to do? 

Luckily, companies don’t need to reinvent the wheel. They’ve already got the practices they need to manage AI agents: Executives just need to treat them in roughly the same way they treat human employees.

Practically, this means applying established workforce security disciplines to a new operational context. Organizations need lifecycle management for agents. They need to define the scope and duration of their permissions, monitor activity continuously and require step-up authorization for high-risk actions. Instead of broad, long-lived access, agents should operate with just-in-time credentials tied to specific tasks.

The organizations that succeed with AI adoption won’t be those that deploy the most AI, or even the most intelligent AI. They will be those that deploy it with clarity about is authorized to act, and a reliable way to prove it. That’s how you turn AI from an experiment—or a risk—to a true asset. 

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

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Workers at one of the nation’s largest meatpacking plants who staged a multiweek strike have reached an agreement with plant owner JBS USA, the company and labor union representatives announced Sunday.

The Swift Beef Co. plant in Greeley, Colorado, will immediately return to normal operations after weeks of uncertainty, JBS USA said in a statement.

The agreement comes after thousands of workers at the meat processing plant led a three-week strike with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 Union in a bid for higher wages and better health care. The strike ended April 4 after JBS USA agreed to resume negotiations.

Workers and JBS USA agreed to wage increases over the next two years and a $750 one-time bonus. The tentative agreement represents a contract with “all gains, countless improvements, and not a single concession,” the union said.

The contract requires the company to pay for personal protective equipment and defends workers against increases in health care costs, according to the union.

Local union president Kim Cordova said workers picketed through extreme weather “because they knew their worth and refused to be disrespected. Today, that sacrifice has been rewarded.”

“This is what union power looks like,” Cordova said in the statement.

The union did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ requests for further details.

JBS USA said it is pleased an agreement has been reached, but expressed disappointment that union leadership chose to eliminate pension benefits that were negotiated last year. The company said the pension was designed to strengthen long-term retirement security and argued the union chose to shift those dollars into short-term wage increases rather than into the long-term financial future of workers.

The union will also withdraw seven alleged unfair labor practice charges, according to JBS USA.

“With the agreement now finalized, JBS USA looks forward to restoring stability, supporting its workforce, and continuing to invest in the Greeley facility for the future,” the company said in its statement.

The strike at Greeley was the first strike at a U.S. slaughterhouse since workers walked out at a Hormel plant in Minnesota in 1985. That strike lasted more than a year and was marked by violent confrontations between police and protesters.

JBS is the world’s largest meatpacking company with a market capitalization of $17 billion. It is the top employer in Greeley, a city 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Denver with a population of about 114,000 people.

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President Donald Trump has wanted to take down Iran since he was a 34-year-old soft-spoken realtor. His first known comment on foreign policy, ever, was in October 1980, when he declared that the clerical regime in Iran—which for a year had been holding 52 hostages—had made the U.S. look “just absolutely, and totally ridiculous.” 

“I think this country is responsible for that war by its own weaknesses. If we were respected, properly respected, as a country and as a people and as a nation, I don’t think we’d have a war between Iran and Iraq,” Trump told gossip columnist Rona Barrett in an interview on NBC. (In the same interview, Trump also famously declared that he wouldn’t want to be President because politics “is a mean game.”)

Forty years on and Trump has seemed to change his mind about the President bit, but not about Iran; he’s still trying to scratch that itch, to stick it to the hostile and theocratic regime which had once plotted his murder. In his first term he pulled out of the JCPOA and assassinated military commander Qassem Solemenei, to little reprisal. When the second term came, recent New York Times reporting suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu—who has long shared Trump’s desire to eradicate the Islamic Republic—made a “hard sell” for the war and convinced Trump that they would easily topple the regime. Iran’s top brass, Trump was told, would be kneecapped before they could even so as begin to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the all-important oil chokepoint. The President bought in quickly, and ordered the strikes. Members of his cabinet swallowed their apprehension, ceding to their boss’ confidence, the NYT reported.

Trump went to war to scratch his itch: to show the U.S. was not weak. Six weeks in, as the war transitions into negotiations that Washington is not really in control of, it is starting to look like the war will prove the opposite.

The Suez moment

There is a name for when this happens, when an empire goes to war to prove it is still an empire. It’s called the “Suez moment,” and it is named for a crisis almost 70 years old with a very familiar plot: a nation desperate to assert itself, an Israeli co-conspirator, a strategic waterway, an adversary everyone assumed would fold quickly, and a set of allies the administrations didn’t bothered to call. In 1956, the adversaries were Britain and France, the waterway was the Suez Canal, and the enemy was Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had nationalized the canal that summer. British and French leaders were certain the war would be quick and would restore their stature in the region; like today, they did not expect Nasser to block the canal (with boats full of rocks), and were forced to deal with an imminent energy crisis that infuriated their allies—because, like in this war, those allies had not been consulted.

There are critical differences, to be sure. Neither Britain nor France were the world’s eminent economic power in 1956, as the U.S. is now. That meant the Eisenhower administration, acting as the adult in the room, could pressure them economically by refusing to backstop a rescue for the pound. Within months, Britain was forced into an IMF bailout, Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced out and the British great-power era went out with him.

Seventy years later, however, the U.S. is the power getting scolded, by allies who didn’t ask for the war and were harassed for not jumping in; for threatening that “an entire civilization will die tonight,” for claiming total victory even as none of the objects of the war have been completed and thousands have died. And the adult in the room, at the end of the day, is China, who the NYT reports ultimately worked to persuade Iran into accepting the ceasefire and ending the conflict. 

That would make the war in Iran, as Aaron Jakes, a historian at the University of Chicago who studies the political economy of the modern Middle East, put it in an interview, “the Suez Crisis upside down.” There’s a “strong case to be made” that the foremost reason Britain went to war was to protect the pound’s role as a global reserve currency, which was backed by sterling-denominated oil sales out of the Middle East. But in a violent twist of fate, going into the war hastened the end of the currency’s reverse system anyway. The United States, Jakes argues, concurrently went to war to reassert its dominance in the Gulf and instead handed Iran a platform to start collecting tolls in yuan and cryptocurrency—anything, that is, except dollars. “The war has actually helped to accelerate the emergence of the very kind of problem that the British were trying to avoid when they decided to go to war,” Jakes said. “It has created a version of that problem that did not exist six weeks ago.”

Of course, it is not, on its own, the end of the dollar. No single waterway and no single toll regime can unwind the petrodollar system. But if the Iranians can get away with a toll in yuan or crypto, it could be the kind of thing that, in hindsight, historians point to when they mark the beginning of end, Jakes said. 

The microeconomic perspective

The anxiety has spread beyond historians. Burt Flickinger III, the longtime retail analyst at Strategic Resource Group, predicted that this will be the “worst crisis in modern generations,” seeing the same end-of-empire pattern playing out in the numbers he watches for a living. “When luxury collapses, it’s a harbinger of complete catastrophe worldwide,” he said, pointing to Hermès, LVMH, and Kering—all down roughly 28% over the past year. 

This is the first time in the last 70 years where American consumers are spending more money on all 12 major monthly expenditures at once, from healthcare to local taxes to debt service to food, housing, transportation, utilities, insurance, entertainment, mobile, clothes and education, Flickinger said. The higher costs of oil from this war alone, he said, are going to take money “out of every American’s pocketbook.” Looking out at a lease car repossession record rivalling the Great Recession, a surge in mortgage foreclosures and a skyrocketing amount of farm bankruptcies, “there’s no place to go.” Farmers are simultaneously facing the lowest prices per bushel in 17 crop years while absorbing record costs for diesel, fertilizer, and labor, he noted.

David Royal, the chief investment officer of Thrivent Financial, which manages more than $200 billion in assets, said he sees the same fracture, but from the top of the capital stack down. “It’s been a tough time for the middle-income consumer,” he said. “I worry about what happens to their confidence.” The war’s oil shock, he noted, is not falling evenly: the gas price spike hits hardest at the lower end of the income scale, while the benefits of recent tax changes—expanded SALT deductions, larger refunds—flow disproportionately to higher earners. Referring to the “K-shaped economy,” where the higher-income see better incomes on the upper end of the K, and the lower and middle do worse off on the lower, he said, “those two things just make it K wider.”

And yet Royal, whose firm’s 2,500 advisors serve roughly two million clients concentrated in the American Midwest, is not yet calling a recession. Consumer spending, he noted, is still growing at 4% to 5% on credit and debit card data—”consumers are really grumpy, but they continue to spend.” The way he sees a downturn materializing is not through a financial shock alone, but through sentiment: “The way that this could spiral into a recession,” he said, “is if consumer confidence just completely craters.”

Flickinger has already made up his mind that confidence is down and headed lower, citing the University of Michigan’s long-running survey, which showed a March reading among the lowest of the last five years, just three points off the all-time low in June 2022, during the Biden inflation. “The collapse of the Roman economic empire,” he called it, adding this was the first time in his long career that he’d seen this confluence of indicators all pointing in the wrong direction.

Credibility abroad

And even if negotiations ultimately break in America’s way, the damage to the alliances that prop up America’s credibility can’t be so easily restored. Russia and China, the two powers Washington has spent the better part of a decade casting as its chief strategic rivals, have both emerged from the war stronger: China as the adult Iran was willing to listen to, Russia as the secret energy supplier the world is forced to admit it needs.

Meanwhile, our allies in the Gulf and in Europe endured waves of Trump’s battering for not jumping in, with threats even for Trump to pull NATO troops out of countries that refused. Jakes said it’s wrong to cast European allies as lazy villains. “One can just as easily see them as scrambling to hold together some possibility of a stable international order in the face of wanton US and Israeli recklessness, as deliberately abandoning alliances.”

Royal, who manages assets for a largely Midwestern, middle-market clientele, observed that the war is already reordering how he thinks about portfolio geography. “You’re certainly seeing a fraying of old alliances and old patterns of behavior,” he said. His tentative conclusion, reached with a portfolio manager’s careful hedging: after the war, he would probably add to a domestic overweight. “Our economy,” he noted, “is far less dependent on exports than Europe in particular.”

This is the question on everyone’s mind, as diplomats around the world are being asked if American hegemony had taken a hit from the conflict. The foreign minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski, spoke for many with his response: “We hope not, but we fear it might be.” 

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U.S. housing is experiencing a historic “reversion to the mean.” In other words, the formerly sizzling metros have gone cold, and the unsexy plodders are back in vogue. That point comes through vividly in the new market snapshot just released by the highly influential American Enterprise Institute Housing Center. The AEI data, compiled by codirectors Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter, shows that housing prices nationwide edged up a puny 1.1% in the 12 months ended in February, the slowest rate of appreciation since the AEI started collecting numbers at the start of 2012. (The think tank started reporting the year-over-year changes in 2013.) It gets worse: The AEI is projecting that for the first three weeks of April, the trend will go negative, and by the end of this year, single-family houses on average will be fetching 1% less than at the start of 2026, with drops of 2.0% to come in both 2027 and 2028. Obviously, those numbers are trailing the current course of the consumer price index, so the lesser amount you’d get selling your house in 2028 would take a second hit from today’s high inflation.

Those startling stats mark a stunning reversal from the post-pandemic boom. From 2013 to early 2020, home price appreciation (HPA) consistently registered at between 5% and 7%. Then, the Fed supplied the rocket fuel by slashing interest rates, sending mortgage costs plummeting from around 4.6% in late 2018 to 2.6% at the start of 2021. Prices took a moonshot as buyers could pay much more for the house and still comfortably make the monthly payment because of the bargain home loans. By early 2022, HPA was roaring at an annual tempo of roughly 18%, triple the pre-pandemic number.

The bounty flowed mostly to the Sunbelt and a suite of glamorous Western cities, notably Denver, Seattle, Portland, and Boise. Florida, Texas, and California led the way. According to the AEI figures, from Q4 of 2019 to Q2 of 2022 when the upswing peaked, Las Vegas average prices went from $308,000 to $448,000 (+45%), Miami from $350,000 to $450,000 (+50%), Phoenix from $293,000 to $470,000 (+60%), Dallas $264,000 to $432,000 (+64%), and Austin from $297,000 to $593,000 (+100%). By comparison, the Rust Belt, and the Midwest overall, lagged behind, after already trailing at a far slower pace in the pre-pandemic days. In that fabulous span for the sprinters of the South and West, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Louisville, St. Louis, and Kansas City each gained only between 25% and 33%.

From Cape Coral to Kansas City, America’s housing market is undergoing a historic reversion to the mean—and the data couldn’t be more striking.

The AEI report features tables displaying the five metros that have registered the highest HPA from February 2025 to February 2026, and the cities that have fared worst. You could almost cut and paste the “best” performers from February 2022 into the current “worst” column, and vice versa. Topping the laggards: Cape Coral, Fla., at a 9.6% drop, followed by North Port, Fla., Memphis, Tucson, and Palm Bay, Fla., all between -3.8% to -6.1%. The biggest winner was Kansas City at +8.6%; Pittsburgh (+5.8%), and Cleveland (+5.9%) also made the top five.

All told, 28 out of America’s 53 largest metros saw price decreases through February, including all in Florida, California, and Texas. The entire Rust Belt as a bloc made the plus column as Louisville rose 3.4%, Grand Rapids 5.1%, and Milwaukee 5.6%. Stalwarts such as Chicago and Philadelphia (each +4%) that never got pricey to begin with are now reaping the benefits of being shunned in the pre-pandemic world.

The report notes that a big increase in supply is pummeling the South and West. Forty-three of the 53 cities are carrying over seven months of supply, meaning at the current rate of sales, it would take that many months for everything listed to find a buyer. That “for sale” level is considered the lowest tier for a buyer’s market, meaning that in eight in 10 metros, shoppers have gained the edge. Among the most swamped: Miami at almost a year’s inventory, and Austin, Tampa, and Houston all approaching eight months.

It’s likely that the markets that shrank most in the past year will continue to lead the downdraft. “We’ll see more of the same,” says Pinto. The reason: Prices in places like Cape Coral and Phoenix flew so high that those sunny locales became unaffordable for a broad swath of buyers, especially first-timers. The sharp drop in mortgage rates to below 3% from mid-2020 to early 2022 enabled folks to pay big numbers for their ranch or colonial and not cut back on dining out or cutting short the trip to Disney World. Now the former hotspots are suffering from a confluence of still elevated prices and home loans that are almost twice as expensive in the 6.5% range. Put simply, prices must fall still further in these metros for shoppers to cover the monthly nut. Another issue: The costs of owning a house in a Cape Coral or Memphis simply got too high versus choosing an apartment, and over time, rental costs exert a kind of gravitational pull on housing prices, yanking them earthward following a big surge.

“Eventually, once the hotspots are back to more normal levels,” says Pinto, “they’ll come to the fore again because people want to move there. The Sunbelt is always going to be the Sunbelt.”

Meanwhile, the Midwestern and Eastern cities are witnessing a level of buying and home price appreciation they haven’t enjoyed in many years. “Homebuyers are looking to live in these more affordable cities,” says Pinto. We’ve entered the “affordability economy.” The housing tide is shifting, and for now, the edge has gone to the stodgy old-timers.

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Some economists and experts say critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence, when an LLM can do much of the heavy lifting in coding or research. Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune a “weirdness premium” will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, Palantir cofounder and CEO, isn’t one of these voices. 

“It will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy—I’ll use myself as an example—hopefully, you have some other skill; that one is going to be hard to market.”

Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a JD from Stanford Law School and a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job. 

Of his own career, Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking: “I’m not sure who’s going to give me my first job.” 

The comments echoed past remarks Karp has made about certain types of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills.

“If you are the kind of person that would’ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge, but it’s not specific, you’re effed,” Karp said in an interview with Axios in November. 

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: AI will devastate liberal arts careers. Here’s who he thinks will thrive

Karp recently expanded on his predictions for who is best prepared for the AI era.

“There are basically two ways to know you have a future,” the 58-year-old billionaire said on TBPN on March 12. “One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you’re neurodivergent.” Karp has credited his own dyslexia, a learning disability that can affect reading, writing, and information processing, for Palantir’s success. More broadly, neurodivergence can include conditions such as ADHD and autism. 

Karp also predicted large-scale disruption for humanities graduates, Democratic voters, and women.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the power, economic power [of] vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters, and … so, these disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society,” he told CNBC.

Not every CEO agrees with Karp’s assessment that humanities graduates are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein told Fortune in 2024 the company was recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.” 

McKinsey global managing partner Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review that the company is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity,” to break out of AI’s linear problem-solving. 

Karp has long been an advocate of vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched a Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship with the chance to interview for a full-time position at the end of four months. 

The company criticized American universities for “indoctrinating” students and having “opaque” admissions that “displaced meritocracy and excellence,” in its announcement of the fellowship. 

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during a Q2 earnings call last year.

“I think we need different ways of testing aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He pointed to a former police officer who attended junior college, who now manages the U.S. Army’s Maven system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.  

“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” he said. 

Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are “very valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”

He said what he does all day at Palantir is “figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude. Then I’m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they’re great at.” 

Karp’s comments come as more employers report a gap between the skills applicants are offering and what employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers ages 16 to 24 hit 10.4% in December and is growing among college graduates. Karp isn’t too worried, though. 

“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” he said. 

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Jan. 20, 2026.

More on the future of work:

• Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha think AI can make middle management obsolete.
• Ford CEO Jim Farley says America is sleepwalking past its “essential economy” crisis.
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s advice to workers scared of AI.

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Anthropic caused an industrywide panic last week when it announced Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model with a knack for uncovering high-level cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Among its achievements, the model found a now-patched weak spot in OpenBSD, an operating system known for its security, that Anthropic claimed went undiscovered for 27 years. 

It has also found “thousands of additional high- and critical-severity vulnerabilities” across open-source and closed-source programs, according to the company.

Tech insiders and other experts subsequently freaked out over the potential for the large language model to upend cybersecurity, but one 25-year industry veteran is skeptical.

David Lindner, chief information security officer at Contrast Security, told Fortune that while Mythos may help find myriad problems, this isn’t necessarily the most important issue. 

“We’ve never had a problem finding vulnerabilities. We find them every day. We actually have a pile of them that we just don’t fix,” he said. “So I don’t think that really changes anything.”

Lindner pointed out that weak spots are easier to find than to fix, noting that Anthropic’s blog post announcing Mythos stated over 99% of the vulnerabilities the model uncovered haven’t been patched.

More specifically, he said, Mythos does little to help solve one of the biggest issues facing cybersecurity experts: social engineering. Hackers can still use existing tools and AI to impersonate an employee’s boss or an IT worker and gain access to systems, he argued.

Anthropic has said Mythos is so powerful it won’t be publicly released, and it is being made available only to a group of 40 organizations including tech companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google, as well as others like cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and bank JPMorgan Chase so they can use the technology to improve their own security infrastructure through an effort it called Project Glasswing.

Because so many people have access to the model, Lindner also predicted it won’t be kept a secret for long.

“Even if they, quote unquote, don’t release it, China will have a version in five or six months, and there’ll be an open-source version within a year or two,” he said.

Incidentally, Fortune was the first to report on the development of Mythos, thanks to a security lapse in which the company left details about the large language model in a publicly accessible database. 

Meanwhile, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has raised questions about whether Anthropic is really holding back the release of Mythos because of security concerns or because it lacks the compute to support a general rollout. Anthropic has faced frequent outages recently and has limited users’ computing supply during peak times, the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend. 

Still, other cybersecurity experts remain vigilant about Mythos and its potential to reshape cybersecurity. Zach Lewis, the chief information officer and chief information security officer at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, told Fortune he is worried Mythos will make it that much easier for bad actors, even those with little coding experience, to exploit systems. 

“Threat actors don’t even need to know about—they don’t need to have a background in—coding or software design to understand how these systems work. They can deploy an agent that can do it for them,” he said. 

Part of the solution for organizations may lie in doubling down on the strategies that are already foiling hundreds if not thousands of exploit attempts per day, according to Lewis.

This includes patching existing vulnerabilities and making sure that the permissions employees have are strictly limited so they can’t be exploited. 

“You’ve got to get that stuff locked down,” he said.

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Growing up on a dairy farm in the rolling green hills of New Zealand’s Waikato region in the upper northwest of the country, Craig Piggott’s days began before dawn. But even as daybreak crept across the fields, he was never alone in those early hours. Running a dairy farm was a full family effort: shifting stock, monitoring for health issues and pregnancy, maintaining fences—everyday tasks that, while essential, are incredibly tedious and time-consuming.

But those tireless days lent him the discipline required to pursue a career in tech, and motivated him to improve the agricultural business. In 2017, Piggott, then age 23, founded agricultural tech firm Halter. Using AI, which Halter dubbed the “cowgorithm,” the company tracks an extensive amount of biological data. Halter then takes this data and offers solar-powered “smart collars” for cattle, a technology capable of tracking everything from a cow’s eating patterns and movement, to monitoring calving recovery. Piggott has transformed Halter into a mammoth global operation. Last month, the company raised $220 million in Series E funding, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund at a $2 billion valuation.

“I just felt that ag[riculture] was underserved by technology, and there was a lot of opportunity to help farming and ranches with tech,” Piggott told Fortune. “No one was really playing in that space, and so that was kind of the initial thesis.”

As AI stretches its tendrils across the global economy, even industries seemingly far removed from modern technology are undergoing their biggest transformation in decades. A recent report from Bank of America found that as of 2024, over half of the world’s farmers have adopted, or were willing to adopt, precision agriculture or AI-enabled technology. That’s meant to expand the emerging agtech business to a $34 billion operation by 2034, according to the Bank of America note, with agtech firms raising $7 billion in 2025 alone, up nearly 4% year over year.

Farmers and ranchers today are in a crunch. Climate volatility, for one, is tightening the constraints of agriculture. More frequent droughts, heat stress, and flooding have hindered crop productivity globally. What’s more, the Iran war has placed even greater stress on farmers, spiking energy and fertilizer costs. 

The cowgorithm in action

For Daniel Mushrush, a fifth-generation American cattle rancher, the technology has addressed some of the critical problems bogging down farmers across the U.S. The 40-year-old was one of Halter’s first customers, implementing the tech on his 16,000-acre ranch in the rocky Flint Hills of Chase County, Kans. Mushrush said his ranch has significant leveraged debt in an effort to grow the business. He uses the technology to push production and increase harvest efficiency, helping to make debt payments and remain competitive against recreational land buyers, who tend to have more capital.

“This is the first technology in my career that is, in my opinion, true innovation,” Mushrush told Fortune. “This is the biggest thing since barbed wire to the cattle industry.”

For Mushrush, a typical day starts as soon as he pours himself a cup of coffee and opens the Halter app. At this point, the cows have already moved themselves using sound cues (and an occasional low-vibrational shock for the more stubborn cows), as the rancher scheduled them to move at 4 a.m. What would have taken him three hours, to manually move poly rope and hot fences—a task that’s particularly difficult in the jagged terrain of Kansas’s Flint Hills—a simple glance at his phone has allowed him to sleep in, even if for just a little while. All that extra time saved means Mushrush gets to sip his morning cup of joe a little slower.

Mushrush said the technology has freed up nearly six hours per day. “Maybe I’m working a job and a half or two jobs now as opposed to two and a half jobs, which is what happens in agriculture a lot,” he said. 

The possibilities don’t stop there. Instead of driving a 25-mile loop on an ATV for four hours to check the property for soon-to-be mothers, Mushrush uses Halter to ensure none of the cows have calved. And if there are any calves born, the tech can reserve premium grass for young calves who need nutrients the most, enabling them to grow up to 40 pounds heavier compared with those in the past, according to Mushrush.

The technology still faces some hurdles, particularly the high financial cost, especially in an industry where ranchers typically aim to keep variable costs near zero. Currently, the starting price stands at $9.90 per cow per month, which adds up as some ranches in the U.S. house more than 1,000 cows. It’s also difficult to build at scale, according to Mushrush, as cattle ranching environments are extremely diverse. Breed behavior, grazing density, and different terrains pose a challenge for the technology, to achieve a universal platform that works for every rancher.

Mushrush said thanks to Halter’s technology saving him countless hours of work, he’s been able to spend more time with his four kids, and can now watch them compete at track meets and volleyball games.

This shift toward a more sustainable lifestyle is what Piggott intended when he founded Halter. The company is currently exploring opportunities to further enhance ranch workflows. That includes drones equipped with AI that could count hay bales or check for water leaks. Piggott also hopes the tech will help with farm succession, making the industry more appealing to a younger, tech-savvy generation. He attributes much of the evolution of the technology to partnerships with customers like Mushrush using it in the field.

“How invested they are and how much they want it to work and how actively they’re engaged in giving us feedback and requesting stuff, that’s just been awesome,” Piggott said. “We are just so grateful for … the customers we have helping steer the ship.”

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In a relentless, unprecedented branding exercise, the sheer volume of entities now bearing the name of President Donald Trump strains credulity. We now live in a world of Trump RX and Trump accounts, of Trump coins and Trump fighter jets. We have seen the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts slapped with his name, the Institute of Peace renamed after him, the christening of the President Donald J. Trump International Airport in Palm Beach, a new fleet of guided-missile warships designated as Trump-class destroyers, the Trump Gold Card visa for wealthy immigrants, and even the unprecedented stamp of his signature on U.S. paper currency, something reserved beforehand only for the Treasury Secretary.

Of course, that doesn’t even factor in the graveyard of branded detritus across Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Airlines, Trump Mortgage, Trump Fragrances, Trump Board Games, Trump Bibles, the infamous Trump University, and many more.

As we write about in our best-selling new book, Trump’s Ten Commandments — the first assessment of the arc of Trump’s career by leadership scholars — his grandiose image building is a key leadership lever of the supposed master of the deal. Published by Worth/Simon & Schuster, our book makes clear how the outer-borough arriviste from Queens was never truly accepted by the Manhattan aristocracy, so he reacted by plastering his name all over New York City in giant letters, putting gold leaf where others would put wood or stone, creating a visual vocabulary of success that regular people could easily and immediately understand. He is obsessed with gold, because gold screams money to the masses. This has always been his entire shtick: class for the masses. He democratizes the performance of luxury in a comically over-the-top, exaggeratedly accessible way. He offers middle-class tourists the chance to walk through Trump Tower’s golden atrium, to bask in a glow that feels like royalty.

This splashy indulgence was labeled a century ago as “conspicuous consumption” by the economist Thorstein Veblen, who believed the average American had a desire to emulate such garish symbols of success. Such an ostentatious show of wealth may prompt some to imagine admiringly, “That’s how I would live if I made $1 billion overnight.”

And more than 20 years ago, when NBC invited one of us to review the first season of The Apprentice, the result was a Wall Street Journal column titled “The Last Emperor Trump.” It infuriated Trump, drawing a parallel between the Roman crowds who once packed into the Colosseum to cheer on gladiators and see the emperor vote on the fate of the loser, and the latter-day TV viewers huddled by their screens to see how Trump, with his imperial aura, decreed the fate of contestants. This brutal method of leadership selection rewarded the most gladiatorial aspirants who survived by destroying their own teammates — odd in the context of leadership since it left no team in place for the winner to lead.

No successful emperor in history has engaged in Trumpian levels of relentless personal branding. Julius Caesar did not stamp his name on every aqueduct. Even Alexander the Great, who named Alexandria after himself, showed relative restraint compared to what we are seeing now. Historically, the leaders who obsess over ornamental personal monuments tend to be those with more divisive legacies.

This grasping for grandeur is far more than mere commercial branding or entrepreneurial greed as Trump exploits the trappings of office. Such desperate attempts at grandiosity evoke empty vanity, clutching at physical monuments to prove a greatness that history has not yet conferred.

For patrician statesmen, grandeur is usually understated, radiating restraint rather than gawk-inspiring shows of brazen wealth. It is ironic that Trump regularly compares himself to Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — both renowned for their legendary humility. Biographers Ron Chernow, Joseph Ellis, and Garry Wills have documented Washington’s reluctance to assume command of the Continental Army in 1775, feeling he was not up to the job, and his determination to limit his term of office, not wanting to resemble a king despite his popularity. Similarly, Carl Sandburg, David Herbert Donald, and Doris Kearns Goodwin have depicted a Lincoln marked by humble, self-deprecating self-awareness.

By contrast, Trump is a grotesque extension of what Arthur Schlesinger described as “The Imperial Presidency” — a concept Schlesinger applied critically to the Nixon era, though FDR and Ronald Reagan were masters of majestic ceremony, mythmaking, and monumental landmarks.

This obsession carries into the White House, literally and physically. Trump redecorated the Executive Mansion in a more gilded style, with gold ornament across the Oval Office, and undertook renovations to the East Wing to construct a new, gold-laced grand ballroom. For Trump, a building is a physical manifestation and expression of his heroic drive, of the image he wishes to present to the world. That is the same motivation driving the proposed “Arc de Trump,” with Trump hoping to construct a new monument in Washington that echoes the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Of course, the other side of Trump’s obsession with grandiosity is an inevitable fragility beneath all the glitz and glamour. Gold plating, after all, is only a thin veneer. Inflated numbers are easily punctured by reality. Because grandeur depends on constant reinforcement, every contradiction becomes a threat. A leader who sees cracks as existential cannot tolerate dissent. Preserving that fragile illusion of greatness, no matter what cost, becomes the only real, overarching leadership priority.

Trump implicitly understands that chutzpah is necessary to transcend ordinary constraints and achieve heroic, even mythic stature. He is constantly inventing and perpetuating his own heroic myth, acting as his own best salesman. Decades ago, psychologists Otto Rank and Ernest Becker suggested that a mythic aura of a manufactured heroic identity is fed by a leader’s presumption that it will satisfy some kind of quest, with a larger-than-life image granting both magical powers of persuasion and the hopes of immortality.

Alas, Trump’s desired destiny will not be realized. The futility of leaders arrogantly seeking fame in a quest for immortal renown was warned about in the 1818 sonnet “Ozymandias” by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, invoking the Greek name for Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II.

I met a traveller from an antique land 
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. 
Near them, on the sand, 
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: 
And on the pedestal these words appear: 
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” 
No thing beside remains. 
Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

For all his sneering arrogance and trappings of conceit, that once-almighty but long-forgotten pharaoh was unprotected from the ravages of the sands of time. The cold indifference of history buried that grandiose tyrant in the oblivion of the desert — a haunting reminder that even the most grandiose of leaders are but fleeting shadows in the long arc of history. Not that Trump loses any sleep over such lessons.

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

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President Donald Trump posted a warning for Iran on Truth Social Monday morning, only 23 minutes after the U.S. blockade of Iran’s coastline went into effect. 

“Iran’s Navy is laying at the bottom of the sea, completely obliterated—158 ships,” Trump wrote. “What we have not hit are their small number of, what they call, ‘fast attack ships,’ because we did not consider them much of a threat.” 

“Warning: If any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea,” he continued.

The warning comes after 21 hours of failed negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, where officials say the sticking point was over Iranian nuclear capabilities. Once the U.S. delegation came home, Trump demanded a total blockade on Iranian ports, and a U.S. Central Command notice gave neutral vessels in Iranian waters until 2 p.m. UTC on Monday to leave, after which ships would be subject to “interception, diversion, and capture.”

Some analysts noted Trump calculated the move to call Iran’s bluff over holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage; other analysts, such as Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, were more skeptical, calling it a “Hail Mary” in the face of diminishing options. Two ships left the strait Monday morning, according to Kpler data. 

American crude and national Brent crude jumped above $100 on Monday. The U.S. stock market, however, was little moved by the breakdown of talks; the S&P was left unchanged Monday morning. An X post from a New York Post reporter citing an Iranian analyst who said Iran is considering abandoning its uranium enrichment to end the war also caused a brief jump into the green Monday morning. 

“Trump appears to believe a naval blockade will impose such devastating economic consequences on Iran that its leaders will have no choice but to agree to U.S. terms,” Eric Brewer, a former National Security Council official, wrote Monday morning on X. “But precisely for these reasons, we should expect Iran to try and impose its own extreme costs”—including attacks on non-Iranian-flagged ships and broader strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure. Iran, Brewer noted, has already demonstrated both the capability and the willingness. 

Indeed, Iran has called the blockade “illegal” and warned that ports in Arab Gulf states are at risk if Iranian facilities come under attack. And on Monday, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led Tehran’s delegation at the failed Islamabad talks, delivered his own warning in a register he’s grown accustomed to: one for the finance world Trump grew up in.

“Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade,’ soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4–5 gas,” Ghalibaf wrote on X, alongside the formula ΔO_BSOH > 0 ⇒ f(f(O)) > f(O).

Translated out of notation: O is the price of oil. BSOH is Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. ΔO_BSOH > 0 means the blockade pushes prices up owing to restricted supply; f(O) is that first-order effect of the blockade closing, meaning prices go up. And f(f(O)) is the second-order effect: Insurers begin pulling back and shipping companies start rerouting, causing a cascade of higher prices. f(f(O)) > f(O) says the cascade is worse than the initial shock; Ghalibaf’s argument is markets have not realized the pumped price from Trump’s goading is the floor.

Oil markets seem to agree with Ghalibaf; equities traders are calling the bluff.

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If you want to understand where the American economy is going, don’t watch the stock ticker. Watch The Pitt.

The Max medical drama that became one of the most-talked-about shows of early 2025 doesn’t center on a brilliant surgeon or a rogue attending. It centers on nurses and residents grinding through a single 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department. Nurse Dana—competent, underpaid, indispensable, and increasingly aware of her own leverage—isn’t a supporting character, as masterfully played by the Emmy-winning Katherine LaNasa. She’s the whole point.

She’s also, it turns out, a near-perfect portrait of where American prosperity is actually heading.

The thought experiment

Alex Tabarrok, the George Mason University economist, recently posed a thought experiment on his influential Marginal Revolution blog that reframes the entire AI jobs debate. Imagine, he wrote, that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds catastrophic. Now imagine AI was going to create a three-day workweek. Sounds wonderful. His punchline: those two scenarios are mathematically identical. Sixty percent of people employed full-time produce the same aggregate working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.

The difference between catastrophe and wonderland, Tabarrok told Fortune at greater length, is not about the raw economics of AI. It’s how society chooses to distribute the gains from AI abundance. His own calculations suggested that between 1870 and today, working hours fell roughly 40%—and that decline was a feature, not a bug. The optimistic case is that AI simply continues the trend: compressing work, expanding leisure, lifting living standards.

The catch

But Tabarrok’s optimistic vision has a structural obstacle: the boss.

Fortune’s own reporting found that even as AI has compressed what used to take eight hours into as little as two, executives aren’t sending workers home early. They’re filling the reclaimed time with more output. The hours aren’t being returned to workers. They’re being extracted by employers.

This is the gap in the three-day workweek theory. The productivity gains are real. The redistribution isn’t happening. And if white-collar work keeps compressing while companies pocket the surplus, the question that matters most isn’t how much work AI can do. It’s where the displaced workers actually go. What does any of this have to do with Nurse Dana? The labor market is already voting with its feet, and it’s headed in her direction.

The market is already answering

Nursing—long celebrated for its meaning and quietly dismissed for its paycheck—has emerged as the most structurally durable career in the AI economy. The median registered nurse now earns $93,600, nearly double the national median of $49,500. In major cities, average base pay has crossed $102,000. Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists clear $223,000. Even travel nurses average over $101,000. RN pay has grown 11% since 2023 alone, with wages in skilled nursing care up 26.5% since the start of the pandemic.

The Pitt is set in Pittsburgh for a reason: it’s a post-industrial city that reinvented itself around healthcare and education after manufacturing left. That arc is now playing out nationally. The forces that made Nurse Dana’s labor indispensable are the same ones reshaping the entire U.S. workforce.

Seventy-three million baby boomers are flooding into their 70s as patients while simultaneously retiring from the nursing workforce, squeezing supply and demand from both directions at once. During COVID, what might have been a decade of workforce attrition happened in the blink of 36 months or so, triggering mass burnout and early retirements that sent wages up 26.5% between 2020 and 2024. And the AI wave that is disrupting analysts, paralegals, and journalists has barely touched nursing — because presence, empathy, and physical judgment are, so far, unautomatable.

Dana’s real-world counterparts aren’t just in demand. They’re in a structural shortage with no near-term resolution. This has actually been a plot point of The Pitt‘s second season, with a cyber-hack forcing the hospital to temporarily bring back Nurse Monica, who blames her layoff on the hospital overly digitizing.

What AI does for nurses, not to them

Unlike the white-collar careers that AI is disrupting in early 2026, such as finance, law, or journalism, AI isn’t the threat for nursing work. It’s the tailwind.

Ambient clinical documentation tools—software that listens to patient encounters and generates chart notes automatically—are already cutting hours of paperwork from nursing shifts. AI-assisted triage systems help emergency departments prioritize patients faster. Automated monitoring flags vital changes before a human might catch them. In each case, the technology is handling the tasks that nurses have long described as the worst parts of the job: charting, redundant documentation, and administrative drag. What’s left is the work that actually requires a nurse.

Tabarrok told Fortune he believes AI’s most underappreciated upside is medicine itself, citing estimates that a cure for cancer would represent a $50 trillion boost to the global economy. (The estimate draws on the economic value of statistical life, a standard framework used in health economics and federal cost-benefit analysis.) If he’s right—if AI produces genuine clinical breakthroughs in the next decade—the nurses administering those treatments, monitoring those patients, and translating those outcomes into human terms become more central to the economy, not less.

The job AI can’t write out of the script

This is the detail that The Pitt gets right that most workforce commentary misses.

Dana isn’t hard to replace just because of her credentials. She’s hard to replace because of what she does with them in real time: reading the room, deescalating a family in crisis, catching what the monitor missed. Those are not tasks awaiting a better model. They are irreducibly human. And the market is valuing them at a high rate in 2026.

Career changers are coming around. Nursing school enrollment is climbing. Accelerated bachelor’s programs—designed for adults who already hold a degree in another field—are filling with workers fleeing AI-disrupted industries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects demand for advanced-practice nurses will surge 35% over the next decade, a number that would look extraordinary in any sector, let alone one already at effective full employment.

But aspirational and accessible aren’t the same thing. Accelerated BSN programs typically take 12 to 18 months and can cost $50,000 to $100,000. Clinical placement slots are limited. Faculty shortages at nursing schools have forced programs to turn away tens of thousands of qualified applicants each year. If nursing is the new reliable path to the middle class, the door is real but the bottleneck is significant.

And the profession’s appeal rests on a tension that The Pitt doesn’t shy away from. The same scarcity driving wages up is a symptom of a profession under enormous strain. Burnout, unsafe staffing ratios, mandatory overtime, and moral injury—these are the conditions that created the shortage in the first place. Whether nursing remains aspirational over the next decade depends less on nurses’ pay and more on whether hospitals and health systems invest in the conditions that keep nurses at the bedside. Pay got them in the door. It won’t keep them there alone.

Tabarrok’s history shows that every major wave of automation has eventually compressed working hours and raised living standards. If AI continues that pattern, the workers who land on their feet won’t be the ones whose jobs survived automation. They’ll be the ones who moved into fields where presence, judgment, and human contact are the entire product.

The factory floor built the postwar middle class. In 2026, the most reliable address for American prosperity increasingly has a nurses’ station attached—and one of the country’s top economists just told you why.

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

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Using artificial intelligence is becoming a prerequisite for many jobs, but some companies are rethinking its value when it comes to assessing employees’ performance. 

Nearly a year after announcing Duolingo would evaluate AI use in performance reviews, CEO Luis von Ahn said the company has let that metric go. 

On April 28, 2025, he announced that the edtech company would be “AI-first,” and employees would be assessed on their AI use. 

It’s sparked a public backlash, and von Ahn told the Financial Times last year that he “did not expect the blowback” after long-time Duolingo users commented they were deleting the app.

In an interview on the Silcon Valley Girl podcast last week, he described the feedback from employees, saying some began to ask if Duolingo just wanted them to use AI for AI’s sake.

“At the end, we backtracked, and we said ‘no.’ Look, the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times AI can help you with that. But if it can’t, I’m not going to force you to do that,” von Ahn said. 

“It felt like rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we’re trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit.”

Von Ahn’s new approach diverges from many companies that are going all in on incentivizing AI employee use. Until recently, Meta had a leaderboard of the top 250 AI token users company-wide, an employee-led effort that allowed workers to see how much AI their colleagues were using. 

This month, employees at marketing automation platform Omnisend who are considered outstanding AI users will be awarded a 2%-4% raise. They will be evaluated on how much time and money their AI use saves, tangible outcomes from their AI workflows, and how widely those workflows are adopted. 

But a recent global survey conducted by SAP subsidiary WalkMe found that workers are quietly ducking AI use. More than a third of employees surveyed skipped using AI on tasks because it would stop their workflow or cost them more time.  

In addition to pushback on how employees are using AI, many employees see the technology as a direct threat to their jobs and livelihoods. Von Ahn’s AI-first declaration last year said the company would replace contractors with AI, which raised eyebrows. 

Since then, von Ahn has clarified that he does not believe AI will replace his employees, but he wants to empower his employees to use the technology. 

“The reality is it’s not yet the case that AI is better at coding than humans. I think you still really need engineers, and you’re going to need them for a long time,” he said on the podcast last week.

In his experience, AI-written code can be difficult to debug and is not consistently reliable when writing stories for Duolingo, von Ahn added.

“Duolingo has used AI for years to personalize learning and expand access. Technology is core to how we build. We’re always learning about what works, and we refine our approach as we go. That includes how we think about AI’s role across our teams,” a company spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. “Our teams’ work depends on human judgment, expertise, and creativity. AI tools assist with that work; they don’t make decisions or replace the people building Duolingo. What drives every decision we make is what’s best for learners.”

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With President Trump’s focus squarely on Iran at present, Jerome Powell and the U.S. Federal Reserve are getting some respite from the Oval Office’s attention. It’s a couple of weeks until the next Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, but investors already appear convinced of what the group’s next move will be.

The base interest rate is, at present, between 3.5% and 3.75%, and investors are pricing a more than 97% chance that it will stay there at the next meeting, on April 28, per CME’s FedWatch monitor.

Furthermore, it seems that the rate cuts the likes of President Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have been requesting are out of the picture entirely at the next meeting, as far as traders are concerned: The remaining 2.6% are pricing in a hike of 25 basis points.

The odds of a Fed hold firmed up in traders’ minds following Friday’s inflation data, which showed prices rose 3.3% over the past 12 months, with gas prices playing a major part in the increase.

This rise stems from the Iran conflict: Oil prices have increased because Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf through which exports from the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq all flow. Some 20 million barrels of oil typically flowed through the strait every day, about 20% of global supply. Iran has made it clear it controls the strait and said it has littered the area with mines. Ship captains are too nervous to enter the waterway, choking off supply and sending prices spiraling.

Over the weekend, hopes that relations between Iran and the U.S. might improve were dashed: Vice President JD Vance said following peace talks, Iran had chosen “not to accept” the offered terms. Halting Iran from securing a nuclear weapon is reportedly a key sticking point in the negotiations.

The expectation of a permanent deal being reached sooner rather than later fell sharply on Polymarket overnight. Most traders still in the bet are of the opinion that a deal will be reached by June 30, though odds of an agreement at any point are falling across the board.

With no concrete end in sight for when oil supply might normalize, traders are settling into the idea that the Fed will be unlikely to move. After all, inflation is now moving in the opposite direction to the Fed’s mandated 2% target.

For the Fed to cut, adding more liquidity to the economy while prices are already elevated would be highly unusual—but might be justified if another element of the Fed’s mandate demanded it. Maintaining employment is another role of the Fed, and here there’s been some good news.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this month that nonfarm payroll employment increased in March, up 178,000, and the employment rate held steady at 4.3%.

This is another boon to the argument for a hold, as the labor market is showing potential for strengthening without any intervention on the base rate.

Early days

Despite that, sentiment and volatility is shifting fast at the moment—a hallmark of the second Trump administration. For all the conviction for a hold today, those bets could unwind tomorrow based on a nod from the White House or a speech from a central banker.

Some might argue that this Fed-watching actually undermines the job of the central bank, the third part of its mandate being “moderate long-term interest rates,” in order to ensure stability of expectations for monetary policy.

Rapidly cycling through outcomes sits at odds with the role of the Fed, according to famed economist and former Pimco CEO, Mohamed El-Erian, in December: “It’s crazy. This should not happen. The whole point of forward guidance is predictability and stability. So there is something wrong that has to be addressed.”

“The rest of the world looks at this and says, ‘Wait a minute, the Fed is at the core of the system, and there’s so much volatility in what they expect they’re going to do in a few weeks, what’s going on here?’”

UBS’s Paul Donovan also pointed out this morning that despite speeches from central bankers across the world this week, it’s still too early to glean true insight into the outcomes of interest-rate-setting meetings. He told clients: “There are assorted central bank speakers [this week] who have no insight into the course of the war. It is too soon to identify potential second-round effects in inflation or labor markets.”

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On Roblox, an online gaming platform beloved by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the site’s 151.5 million daily active users can manage and direct pixelated air traffic through an air traffic control simulator. That’s a coincidence. What isn’t is that the federal government is recruiting this very demographic to monitor airspace in real life as it seeks to plug a decadeslong shortage in key airport staffing.

The U.S. Transportation Department and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launched a campaign to enlist young people to become air traffic controllers as the aviation sector faces a shortage of the skilled employees. A YouTube ad from the Transportation Department published on Friday—set to electric music and featuring clips from games like Fortnite—announced the FAA’s hiring window for air traffic controllers opening April 17, boasting the role paid at least $155,000 after three years of work. 

“To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. “This campaign’s innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller.”

U.S. aviation has faced a shortage of air traffic controllers for about a decade, with the number of air traffic controllers falling 6% over the last 10 years, while the number of flights relying on air traffic control systems increased by 10% in the same period, according to a December 2025 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). 

The shortage has gained attention following a series of deadly plane crashes, including last month, when an Air Canada jet struck a fire truck on a runway while landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York, killing two people. Authorities are investigating the incident, including how air traffic and ground control personnel were coordinating. One air traffic controller over airport communications appeared to blame himself for the crash, following messages to the fire truck asking it to stop.

“We were dealing with an emergency earlier,” a controller said. “I messed up.”

Replenishing air traffic control roles

Kivanc Avrenli, professor of practice in finance in the Syracuse University Whitman School of Management who specializes in aviation safety, told Fortune that he sees seeking air traffic controllers from a talent pool of video game fans is logical, given the large cache of applicants it could provide. 

Gaming can help reduce reaction time and improve multitasking and spatial awareness, but does not account for the life-or-death nature of actual air traffic control work, Avrenli noted.

“There is simply no ‘undo’ or ‘reset’ button, and it requires sustained attention for several continuous hours,” he said. “Gaming does not fully replicate these challenges.”

The Transportation Department’s Gen Z hiring push comes amid broader effort for the federal government to attract young people to its workforce. The Office of Personnel Management launched the Early Career Talent Network last month for entry-level workers to take on finance, human resources, engineering, project management, and procurement roles in government.

To be sure, the FAA’s efforts to hire air traffic controllers was already seeing early results. It slightly exceeded its goal of hiring 2,000 new controllers in fiscal 2025, following hiring 1,800 controllers in 2024, which was also above its target. The Transportation Department is seeking $95.4 million to hire 2,300 controllers in the next year, though the agency is still 3,500 air traffic controllers short of its targeted staffing levels.

Despite thousands of applicants for air traffic control roles, only about 2% of applicants are successful in becoming certified controllers as a result of a long vetting process requiring between two and five years, meaning even if recruitment increases, it could take years for the air traffic control workforce to replenish itself.

“I do believe recruiting gamers is a reasonable idea,” Avrenli said. “But it is not a quick fix, as training and certifying controllers still take time.”

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani rallied Sunday to celebrate 100 days in office, touting his early accomplishments and charting future goals as he pledged to lead with a relentless focus on the city’s working class.

In front of a crowd just days after reaching an early milestone of his first term, Mamdani said he took office promising “that City Hall would hold a singular purpose, to make this city belong to more of its people than it did the day before.”

“For 102 days, we have endeavored to do exactly that,” he said.

After highlighting the early accomplishments of his administration, he then turned to a few new plans.

The first, he said, would be to inch toward one of his major campaign promises: opening a slate of city-run grocery stores. The initial store, he said, would open next year, with the remaining shops — eventually one in each of the city’s five boroughs — opening by the end of his four-year term.

“At our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation,” said Mamdani, a Democrat.

In addition, the mayor announced plans to expand the city’s covered trash bin program — “Say goodbye to black bags and say hello to the bins,” he said, vowing to spread the initiative citywide by the end of 2031.

And he reiterated his campaign promise to make buses faster and free of cost, saying he would move to speed up bus services along some routes. It remains unclear how he would make good on eliminating bus fares.

“Tonight, we’re delivering the fast, and we’re excited to keep working with Albany to deliver the free,” he said, referencing the governor and the state Legislature, which hold considerable sway over parts of his agenda.

Before Mamdani spoke, the crowd heard from a city transportation department staffer to hear about Mamdani’s pothole filling blitz; a tenant organizer who praised the mayor’s focus on renters; and a mother who boosted his push to expand child care programs in the city.

“No longer will city government be afraid of its own shadow,” Mamdani told the crowd shortly after taking the stage. “If anyone should be afraid it is those who take advantage of working people.”

Mamdani, 34, took office in January after a campaign centered on making New York City a more affordable place to live, centering his agenda on refocusing the vast power of government toward helping the city’s struggling working class.

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Rory McIlroy solidified himself as the biggest name in golf this weekend when he won the Masters for a second year in a row and is worth an estimated $200 million. But McIlroy came from much humbler beginnings. 

He grew up in a modest, semi-detached house in Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland, with two parents who quietly dismantled their own lives to build his. While his mom, Rosie, spent her nights packaging rolls of tape at a 3M factory in Bangor, his father, Gerry, was stringing together three jobs: cleaning showers in the morning, bartending at Holywood Golf Club through the afternoon, and returning to the sports club bar in the evening. Gerry worked an estimated 100 hours a week, according to The Times. 

“I think in terms of what they instilled in me, I think work ethic is something that—my mom worked night shifts,” McIlroy said during a press conference for the 90th Masters. “My dad worked multiple jobs. I think most people in this room know that. That was normal for me. That was normal as an upbringing.”

The couple barely saw each other, and they didn’t take a family holiday for over a decade.

“I’ll never be able to repay mum and dad for what they did,” McIlroy said of his parents in 2022. “But at least they know they’ll never have to work another day. I’ll do whatever it takes to look after them.”

A dream fueled by sacrifice

McIlroy’s parents were inspired by their son’s early proclivity toward golf and worked hard to help him pursue his dream. 

“He’d be sitting in his pram with a plastic golf club in his hand,” Rosie told The Times. “That’s the way we were woken up in the morning—being banged over the head with a plastic golf club.”

And, having only one child, McIlroy’s parents wanted to give him the world. And giving McIlroy that chance has compounded into one of the most successful golf careers in history. He not only achieved his Grand Slam (winning all four major golf tournaments: the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship) but he won the Masters again on Sunday for the second year in a row.

McIlroy wins the Masters, again

On Sunday, McIlroy made history at Augusta National, winning his second consecutive Masters title and joining Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and Nick Faldo as the only golfers ever to claim back-to-back green jackets. 

McIlroy stumbled from a six-shot lead in the third round, falling into a tie before rallying down the stretch on Sunday and finishing at 12-under, picking up a $4.5 million winner’s check. In 2025, he earned $4.2 million.

After his 2025 win, McIlroy said, “I’m proud of never giving up. I’m proud of how I kept coming back and dusting myself off and not letting the disappointments really get to me.” 

How much is McIlroy worth?

Today, McIlroy’s net worth is estimated at more than $200 million, with some reports placing it as high as $294 million. 

His career prize money on the PGA Tour alone has surpassed $110 million, second all-time, only to Tiger Woods. Scottie Scheffler, who finished second at 11-under on Sunday, is the third member of the $100 million club in golf. 

Beyond the course, McIlroy pulls in an estimated $40 million to $50 million annually through endorsement deals and equity stakes, including a vesting PGA Tour Enterprises equity grant worth roughly $50 million. Forbes recognized him as one of the highest-paid athletes in the world in May 2025.

The working-class kid who rewrote the record books

McIlroy is now 36 years old, based in Wentworth, Surrey, with his wife Erica Stoll and their daughter Poppy. 

He has evolved from the shy kid in Holywood who needed his parents to sacrifice everything to the rare kind of champion who actually seems to remember it. 

“Even to this day, they’re the two people in this world that I can talk to about anything,”  McIlroy said in 2014, according to the Associated Press. “I couldn’t ask to have two better parents.”

And this year, his mom, Rosie, got to witness her son win the Masters for a second time, all while toting around a custom purse with a 2025 newspaper article announcing his career slam printed on it.

Rory’s mom used a purse today with a newspaper article from last year announcing his career slam printed on it 😭 pic.twitter.com/leafNNuhGD

— claire rogers (@kclairerogers) April 13, 2026

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Artificial intelligence has quickly become the defining technology of the moment—promising breakthroughs from curing diseases to making space travel more routine, while also raising fears of widespread job disruption. But Kara Swisher isn’t convinced the technology will live up to the hype.

On a recent episode of her podcast, On with Kara Swisher, the veteran tech journalist argued that AI may be hitting a ceiling—not just because of technical limitations, but because of human resistance.

“Human beings don’t like it,” she bluntly explained. 

“Ultimately, [AI] feels like a Twinkie. It tastes like a Twinkie. And I don’t know if they can ever make it taste like an apple, if that makes sense. I don’t know if they can.”

Gen Z are souring on AI as they see through the ‘fake’ and performative,’ according to Kara Swisher

The path forward for AI companies is already getting steeper as sentiment, particularly among young people, begins to sour. A new survey from the Walton Family Foundation, found that just 18% of Gen Z feel hopeful about using AI, down from 27% the year prior. Nearly one-third of respondents said the technology makes them feel angry.

“I think people are moving faster towards the genuine versus the fake and the performative. I know that with my kids, I can see it. I can see it in the culture,” Swisher added. “People are craving community and people and things like that.”

That skepticism isn’t just abstract. It’s increasingly colliding with the realities of the workplace, where AI is being deployed not only as a productivity tool, but also as a justification for restructuring—and in some cases, reducing headcount. For many younger workers, that shift has turned AI from a distant technological promise into something far more immediate: a threat to the careers they are eager to get off the ground.

In response, some young people have already begun pivoting toward more “AI-proof” career paths, including skilled trades jobs, that are less susceptible to automation. And the shift goes beyond careers—young people are also pulling back on screen-heavy habits, trading doomscrolling and video games for board games, manual cars, and vinyl records as they seek out more tangible, offline experiences in an increasingly digital world. 

As tech companies prepare to cut headcounts in the name of AI, Gen Z is taking note

Earlier this year, payments firm Block became a poster child for major layoffs in the name of AI—cutting its workforce in half from over 10,000 to just under 6,000.

“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” Block CEO Jack Dorsey wrote on X. 

At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy similarly said last year that generative AI will likely reduce the need for certain roles.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote in a June 2025 letter to Amazon employees. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

The company then went on to cut 14,000 employees in the fall, but Jassy cited the layoffs as a mismatched cultural fit, not “really AI-driven, not right now at least.”

The distinction may be beside the point for the workers affected. AI may not be the sole driver of layoffs, but paired with rising unemployment among young workers, the perception alone is reshaping how Gen Z thinks about the future. Nearly half (48%) say AI’s risks outweigh its benefits in the workplace—up from 37% just a year ago, according to the Walton Family Foundation survey.

The long-term irony could be stark. A workforce hollowed out of automation is also a consumer base hollowed out of their jobs—and resentful toward the technology. The companies racing to replace workers with AI may eventually find themselves with fewer people willing, or able, to buy what they’re selling.

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The U.S. blockade on ships entering or departing from Iranian ports went into effect on Monday, as President Donald Trump seeks to pressure Iran by cutting off its oil revenue.

The Iranian economy was already in shambles before the U.S. and Israel launched their war on the Islamic republic more than six weeks ago, and reports indicate the relentless bombing has pushed the regime to the brink.

Despite heavy losses Iran’s military has suffered, it still has enough missiles and drones to effectively close off the Strait of Hormuz while allowing its own oil tankers to go through. Tehran’s control of the narrow waterway is its most potent weapon as global energy markets reel from shortages, but a U.S. blockade could turn the tables.

“Leaning on this money machine sends the economy into a tailspin, giving the mullahs much needed motivation to negotiate in earnest,” Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a Substack post on Monday.

That’s after U.S.-Iran talks in Pakistan broke down over the weekend, putting a fragile two-week ceasefire in doubt, as both sides appeared unwilling to budge.

Meanwhile, the market’s reaction to the blockade has been muted, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq largely flat while oil prices have pared gains.

Brooks acknowledged the regime may not be bothered by the economic hardship the Iranian people suffer due to the blockade, adding it’s uncertain how many weeks it must be in effect to spur Tehran on talks.

“But what I do know is this: As Iran’s oil exports collapse, there’ll be no cash for imports, so activity implodes, the currency goes into a devaluation spiral and hyperinflation ensues,” he predicted.

In fact, hyperinflation may be imminent. Residents of Tehran and other cities told Reuters some prices have shot up around 40% since the war began, as the rial has plunged 8% against the dollar on the black market.

The economic consequences of a blockade are so dire Brooks declared “there’s no doubt in my mind” the regime will re-engage in talks.

To be sure, stopping the flow of Iranian oil could cause further disruption in energy markets. But he pointed out Iran is a relatively small supplier of oil, and cutting it off shouldn’t lift Brent crude futures much above $120 a barrel. On Monday, the benchmark price was up 6% to $100.88 after surging 8% earlier.

Overall, the blockade has more pros than cons, and its effect on oil is a manageable risk, he added: “The goal is to end this war more quickly by bringing the mullahs to the negotiating table in good faith.”

Brooks has been calling for a naval blockade since Iran closed off the Strait of Hormuz. Others have also touted it as a preferred option over deploying U.S. ground troops to seize control of the strait.

The blockade also stops well short of Trump’s prior apocalyptic threats to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” and to wipe out its civilization.

Miad Maleki, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Treasury Department official, calculated the U.S. naval blockade will cost Iran about $435 million a day in economic damage, or $13 billion per month.

“The rial enters terminal collapse. Iran’s alternatives outside the Strait can replace less than 10% of Gulf throughput. The blockade makes continued resistance economically impossible,” he posted on X.

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A federal judge dismissed President Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch on Monday over a story on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles in Florida wrote in the order that Trump had failed to make the argument that the article was published with the intent to be malicious, but gave the president a chance to file an amended complaint.

Trump filed the lawsuit in July, following up on a promise to sue the paper almost immediately after it put a new spotlight on his well-documented relationship with Epstein by publishing an article that described a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper said bore Trump’s signature and was included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

The letter was subsequently released publicly by Congress, which subpoenaed the records from Epstein’s estate.

The ruling marks yet another blow in the Trump administration’s efforts to manage fallout over its release of the Epstein files and the president’s attempts to use the legal system to chill reporting he find critical of him.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said Sunday that his government will offer new fuel tax cuts to try to end crippling protests over soaring gas costs, though he slammed the tactics of farmers and truckers who had blocked access to the nation’s only oil refinery and several depots.

Martin said the package amounting to 505 million euros ($592 million) will ease some of the cost of living pressures that have grown since the U.S.-Israel war on Iran led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for the world’s oil. The relief measure, which needs parliamentary approval, would come on top of a 250 million euro tax break approved nearly three weeks ago.

It was not immediately clear if the proposal will quell the uprisings, though protests diminished Sunday amid a police crackdown.

Over six days the actions caused chaos as blockades at Ireland’s refinery, a major port and several vital depots prevented tanker trucks from delivering fuel to service stations and many gas pumps ran dry. Slow-moving convoys of vehicles also caused traffic jams on major highways.

Martin said Ireland had been on the brink of having oil tankers redirected to other countries and its refinery shut down.

“It made absolutely no sense what was going on,” he said. “Higher fuel scarcity and higher fuel prices would actually have been the inevitable outcome of these blockades.”

Police had warned of arrests and began breaking up protests Saturday, using pepper spray to help clear people from the Whitegate refinery in County Cork and vowing to remove others who were endangering critical infrastructure and public safety because gas shortages could prevent response by emergency services.

Officers ordered trucks and tractors blocking O’Connell Street, the main thoroughfare in the capital of Dublin, to clear out early Sunday. On the other side of the country, police clashed with demonstrators to reopen the Galway docks after a military vehicle was used to knock down a makeshift barrier.

Protesters at a fuel depot in County Limerick voted to end their action Sunday and demonstrators at Rosslare Europort in Wexford agreed to begin letting trucks leave the port that is jammed with cargo that couldn’t be moved.

“It’s just a pity that we had to escalate a protest to this level to bring our government to the table to get fairness for every working person around this country,” Neilus O’Connor, an agricultural contractor, told national broadcaster RTE, outside the Foynes depot.

Protests began Tuesday and grew as word spread on social media, with truckers, farmers, and taxi and bus operators taking part and calling for help — such as price caps or tax cuts — to bring down fuel costs they say will drive people out of business.

Government officials, who had already introduced measures to ease the burden of price rises a few weeks ago, were baffled over the rationale behind the protests because the global price spike is due to the Middle East conflict that restricted oil exports.

More than a third of gas pumps had run dry by Saturday, but the reopening of the refinery and removal of roadblocks at fuel depots was expected to begin reversing the shortage, though it could take up to 10 days to fully recover, Fuels for Ireland chief executive Kevin McPartlan said.

The rare Sunday Cabinet meeting to finalize the relief measures came as the coalition government faces new political pressures from rivals critical of their handling of the crisis.

Sinn Fein, the largest opposition party, said it would call for a no-confidence vote in the coalition government. Holly Cairns of the Social Democrats said her party would support the vote.

“They have lost the confidence of the public,” Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said. “It is clear that they still are not listening and do not accept the scale of this fuel and cost-of-living crisis.”

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“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” enjoyed otherworldly success at the box office in its second weekend in theaters.

The Universal and Illumination sequel added $69 million from 4,284 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, according to studio estimates Sunday. That brings its running domestic total to $308.1 million and its global total to $629 million.

That’s a 48% drop from the film’s first weekend in theaters, a fairly modest decline for a blockbuster. But the chasm between this movie and the first continues to grow. By its second weekend in 2023, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” — which was much better reviewed than its follow-up — had earned over $353 million domestically. Still, the sequel is an unabashed hit by any measure, having cost only $110 million to produce.

Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends for Comscore, said “it’s a very respectable” hold.

“For the film to already be over $300 million is just astonishing,” Dergarabedian said, noting that the majority of tickets were likely sold at lower prices for children. “To get to these box office milestones is all the more impressive.”

The movie is also helping power up box office momentum before the summer movie season begins in May.

The weekend’s big new opener was also a Universal release: The travelogue romantic comedy “You, Me & Tuscany,” starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton” fame. It debuted in fourth place with an estimated $8 million from 3,151 screens against a reported production budget of $18 million. Women made up an overwhelming 80% of the audience.

Directed by Kat Coiro, the movie arrived in theaters with mixed to positive reviews. According to a review by The Associated Press, it’s “a movie as frothy and insubstantial as the foam on a nice cappuccino.” It currently holds a 68% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Audiences seemed to enjoy it a bit more. According to PostTrak exit polls, 77% of ticket buyers said they would “definitely recommend” it to friends. It also got an A- on CinemaScore.

Jim Orr, Universal’s head of domestic distribution, said the audience reaction scores, “point to a very nice run at the box office.”

Second place at the box office this week went to Amazon MGM Studios’ “Project Hail Mary,” which is still drawing double-digit ticket sales in its fourth weekend. It added an estimated $24.6 million from Friday to Sunday, bringing its domestic total to $256.7 million. Worldwide, it has earned $510.6 million.

“The Drama” took third place in its second weekend, with $8.7 million. The buzzy A24 movie about an engaged couple played by Robert Pattinson and Zendaya fell only 38%, bringing its domestic total to $30.8 million and its worldwide total to $65 million.

Disney and Pixar’s “Hoppers” rounded out the top five in its sixth weekend with $4.1 million. The animated movie has made $354.4 million globally to date.

Another bright spot was the Japanese video game adaptation “Exit 8,” which made $1.4 million from only 490 theaters and landed in seventh place. Directed by Genki Kawamura, the Neon-distributed film is sitting at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Top 10 movies by domestic box office

With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore:

1. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” $69 million.

2. “Project Hail Mary,” $24.6 million.

3. “The Drama,” $8.7 million.

4. “You, Me & Tuscany,” $8 million.

5. “Hoppers,” $4.1 million.

6. “Faces of Death,” $1.7 million.

7. “Exit 8,” $1.4 million.

8. “A Great Awakening,” $1.3 million.

9. “Reminders of Him,” $1 million.

10. “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” $867,000.

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Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell’s abrupt exit from the race for California governor left his rivals scrambling to lock down his former supporters in a crowded contest with no clear leader, injecting more turmoil into the campaign to lead the nation’s most populous state.

Swalwell’s decision to suspend his campaign Sunday followed allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman twice, including when she worked for him, that were published Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle and later by CNN. While pulling out of the race he remained defiant in a post on the social platform X, saying, “I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”

For rival candidates in a wide-open race, the key issue is where Swalwell’s supporters will go. He was among the most prominent Democrats in the contest, with mail ballots scheduled to go to voters in early May in advance of the June 2 primary election.

Katie Porter, one of the leading Democrats, posted a line from a San Francisco Chronicle column on X, “Democrats can pull victory from the jaws of defeat by coalescing around Porter.” Billionaire hedge fund manager-turned-liberal activist Tom Steyer said he secured the support of Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area.

With seven established Democrats and two leading Republicans on a primary ballot with more than 50 candidates, the race remains fluid. While Swalwell has suspended his campaign, his name cannot be removed from the ballot.

“Nobody has really caught fire,” said Democratic consultant Andrew Acosta, who is not involved in the campaign. Swalwell’s supporters “will scatter out to other candidates.”

Many voters remain distant from governor’s race

Swalwell is perhaps best known nationally as a House manager in President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial during his first term in early 2021. But in a media environment dominated by Trump, the race remains distant from many California voters.

After the publicity about sexual misconduct allegations, “I think there are probably more people who know who Eric Swalwell is than can articulate a Tom Steyer position paper,” Acosta added.

Swalwell was considered a leading contender along with fellow Democrats Steyer and Porter and two Republicans, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton.

The 48-hour period marked a rapid reversal for a candidate who appeared to be gaining momentum in the packed field to replace outgoing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is barred by law from seeking a third term.

Though Swalwell has denied the allegations, he has appeared to reference infidelity in multiple statements.

“To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,” he wrote. That followed a video post on Friday where he apologized to his wife.

Swalwell’s exit shakes up campaign

The accusations reordered a wide-open gubernatorial race that had Democrats fretting the party’s large number of candidates could lead to them getting shut out of the general election in November. That’s because California has a top-two primary system in which two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party.

Swalwell had become a clear target for his Democratic rivals as he began to lock up institutional support. Some had seized on rumors of sexual misconduct that circulated on social media for weeks before the Chronicle’s report.

The San Francisco Chronicle spoke to a woman who alleged Swalwell sexually assaulted her in 2019, when she worked for him, and again in 2024. The woman said she did not go to police at the time of the assaults because she was afraid she would not be believed. In both cases the woman said she was too intoxicated to consent to sex. CNN reported on allegations that appeared to come from the same woman, and spoke to several other women who accused Swalwell of other sexual misconduct.

Neither outlet named the woman, and The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify her account and identity. Her lawyer declined to comment.

The alleged 2024 incident occurred in New York, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said it’s investigating. That office urged anyone with knowledge to contact its special victims division.

House colleagues call for Swalwell to resign

As Swalwell’s campaign flailed over the weekend, fellow California Reps. Jared Huffman, Ro Khanna and Sam Liccardo said Swalwell should resign, as did Reps. Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico and Pramila Jayapal of Washington state.

“This is not a partisan issue,” Jayapal said Sunday. “This cuts across party lines. And it is depravity of the way that women have been treated.”

Some representatives said they would support the rare step of expelling him from the U.S. House should he refuse to step aside.

It all added to the mounting political pressure on Swalwell, which began with allies like Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Jimmy Gomez cutting their support. Gomez had helped run Swalwell’s campaign and said he was immediately ending his role.

With the House returning to session Tuesday, the question of whether to expel Swalwell could come to a head quickly. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said Saturday that she would be filing a motion to start the process.

Expulsion votes in the House are rare and require a two-thirds majority, but there is recent precedent for taking the step. Republican George Santos of New York in 2023 became just the sixth member in House history to be ousted by colleagues for his conduct.

Huffman, Jayapal and Leger Fernández said they would vote to expel Swalwell from the House, though they said they also support expelling Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, who admitted to an affair with a former staff member who later died by suicide.

Swalwell, who is originally from Iowa, was elected in 2012 and represents a House district east of San Francisco. He launched a presidential run in April 2019 but shuttered it a few months later after failing to catch on with voters.

___

Associated Press writer Ben Finley in Washington contributed to this report.

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It may be Popeye’s source of supernatural strength, but spinach apparently can’t fight off bugs as effectively as the sailor fights off his adversaries. For the second consecutive year, spinach topped the Dirty Dozen list of conventionally grown produce with the most residual pesticides.

Published by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) annually since 2004, the list is based on data from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program, which tests agricultural commodities. The program mimics the routine for produce in consumers’ kitchens, typically rinsing it for 15–20 seconds, before testing for pesticides.

While EWG publishes the list every year, the USDA does not test all categories of produce annually, so it relies on the most recent USDA test—which in spinach dates back a decade to 2016. At the time, the USDA tested 642 conventional spinach samples and found an average of seven pesticides on each. Some samples had as many as 19 different pesticides or their byproducts on a single sample.

Kale, collard greens, and mustard greens collectively ranked second on the Dirty Dozen list, followed by strawberries, grapes, and nectarines. For items on the list, EWG suggests buying organic or frozen versions, and diligence in washing all fruits and vegetables thoroughly.

Crop top: Naturally the farmers who grow the crops on the Dirty Dozen list are not fans.

The report “once again villainizes safe, healthy, and affordable fruits and vegetables by misrepresenting USDA pesticide data,” the Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF), a nonprofit trade group for both conventional and organic farmers, said in a statement.

The group also noted that while the USDA may find residual levels of pesticides, “more than 99%” of all produce the the agency tests have pesticide levels “well below the stringent safety standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Citing a 2022 CDC study that only about 1 in 10 US adults meets suggested dietary guidelines for fruit and vegetable consumption, the AFF also dings the Dirty Dozen list for exacerbating the problem.

“Lower-income and cost-conscious consumers do not respond to the EWG report by purchasing only organic products,” AFF asserted. “Instead, they are increasingly likely to avoid fruits and vegetables altogether.”

Consumers, meanwhile, are not of one mind about how worried they should be about pesticides.

A 2024 International Food Information Council survey asked consumers if they agreed with the statement that the benefits of eating produce grown with pesticides outweighs the risks.

While 29% agreed that the benefits outweighed the risk, 30% disagreed.

This report was originally published by Retail Brew.

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U.S.-born Pope Leo XIV pushed back Monday on President Donald Trump’s broadside against him over the U.S.-Israel war in Iran, telling reporters that the Vatican’s appeals for peace and reconciliation are rooted in the Gospel, and that he doesn’t fear the Trump administration.

“To put my message on the same plane as what the president has attempted to do here, I think is not understanding what the message of the Gospel is,” Leo told The Associated Press aboard the papal plane en route to Algeria. “And I’m sorry to hear that but I will continue on what I believe is the mission of the church in the world today.”

History’s first U.S.-born pope stressed that he was not making a direct attack against Trump or anyone else with his general appeal for peace and criticisms of the “delusion of omnipotence” that is fueling the Iran war and other conflicts around the world.

“I will not enter into debate. The things that I say are certainly not meant as attacks on anyone. The message of the Gospel is very clear: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’” Leo said.

“I will not shy away from announcing the message of the Gospel and inviting all people to look for ways of building bridges of peace and reconciliation, and looking for ways to avoid war any time that’s possible.”

Speaking to other reporters, he added: “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the Church works for.”

“We are not politicians. We do not look at foreign policy from the same perspective that he may have,” the pope said, adding, ”I will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems.

“Too many people are suffering today, too many innocent people have been killed, and I believe someone must stand up and say that there is a better way,” he said.

Trump says Leo is not ‘doing a very good job’

Trump delivered an extraordinary broadside against Leo on Sunday night, saying he didn’t think the U.S.-born global leader of the Catholic Church is “doing a very good job” and that “he’s a very liberal person,” while also suggesting the pontiff should “stop catering to the Radical Left.”

Flying back to Washington from Florida, Trump used a lengthy social media post to sharply criticize Leo, then kept it up after deplaning, in comments on the tarmac to reporters.

“I’m not a fan of Pope Leo,” he said.

Trump’s comments came after Leo suggested over the weekend that a “delusion of omnipotence” is fueling the U.S.-Israel war in Iran. While it’s not unusual for popes and presidents to be at cross purposes, it’s exceedingly rare for the pope to directly criticize a U.S. leader — and Trump’s stinging response is equally uncommon, if not more so.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the president wrote in his post, adding, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”

Italian politicians across the spectrum showed their solidarity with Leo. Premier Giorgia Meloni sent a message of support for his peace mission while the leader of the main opposition party, Elly Schlein, was more direct, calling Trump’s attacks “extremely serious.”

Trump repeated that sentiment in comments to reporters, saying, “We don’t like a pope who says it’s OK to have a nuclear weapon.”

Later, Trump posted a picture suggesting he had saint-like powers akin to those of Jesus Christ. Wearing a biblical-style robe, Trump is seen laying hands on a bedridden man as light emanates from his fingers, while a soldier, a nurse, a praying woman and a bearded man in a baseball cap all look on admiringly. The sky above is filled with eagles, an American flag and vaporous images.

Leo’s opposition to war irked Trump

All of that came after Leo presided over an evening prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, the same day the United States and Iran began face-to-face negotiations in Pakistan during a fragile ceasefire, with Vice President JD Vance leading the U.S. delegation. Vance is Catholic and recently released a book about his faith.

During his evening prayer service, the pope didn’t mention the United States or Trump by name, but his tone and message appeared directed at Trump and U.S. officials, who have boasted of U.S. military superiority and justified the war in religious terms.

Leo, who is on an 11-day trip to Africa starting Monday — has previously said that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” He’s also referenced an Old Testament passage from Isaiah, saying that “even though you make many prayers, I will not listen — your hands are full of blood.”

Before the ceasefire, when Trump warned of mass strikes against Iranian power plants and other infrastructure and that “an entire civilization will die tonight,” Leo described such sentiments as “truly unacceptable.”

In his social media post on Sunday night, however, Trump went far beyond the war in Iran in criticizing Leo.

The president wrote, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States.” That was a reference to the Trump administration having ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.

“I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do,” Trump added, referencing his 2024 election victory.

He also suggested in the post that Leo only got his position “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”

“If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” Trump wrote, adding, “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!”

In his subsequent comments to reporters, Trump remained highly critical, saying of Leo, “I don’t think he’s doing a very good job. He likes crime I guess” and adding, “He’s a very liberal person.”

Bishops say the pope is not a politician

Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement saying he was “disheartened” by Trump’s comments.

“Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls,” Coakley said.

The Italian Bishops’ Conference expressed regret over Trump’s words, and underlined that the pope “is not a political counterpart, but the successor of Peter, called to serve the Gospel, truth and peace.”

In the 2024 election, Trump won 55% of Catholic voters, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate. But Trump’s administration also has close ties to conservative evangelical Protestant leaders and has claimed heavenly endorsement for the war on Iran.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged Americans to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.” And, when Trump was asked whether he thought God approved of the war, he said, “I do, because God is good — because God is good and God wants to see people taken care of.”

——

Winfield reported from aboard the papal plane.

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 The U.S. military was poised to begin a blockade of all Iranian ports and coastal areas on Monday, as President Donald Trump sought to ratchet up pressure on Iran in a move that risks driving oil prices even higher and reigniting the war. Iran responded by threatening all ports in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

“Security in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman is either for everyone or for NO ONE,” the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting reported Monday. “NO PORT in the region will be safe,” according to a statement from the Iranian military and the Revolutionary Guards.

U.S. Central Command announced that from 10 a.m. EDT, or 6:30 p.m. in Iran, the blockade would be enforced “against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas.” It said that would include all of Iran’s ports on the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. CENTCOM said it would still allow ships traveling between non-Iranian ports to transit the Strait of Hormuz, a step down from Trump’s earlier threat to blockade the vital waterway, where 20% of global oil transited before fighting began.

The announcement halted the limited ship traffic that resumed in the strait since the ceasefire, according to a report from Lloyd’s List intelligence. Marine trackers say over 40 commercial ships have crossed since the start of the ceasefire, down from roughly 100 to 135 vessel passages per day before the war.

The blockade threat came after marathon U.S.-Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan ended without an agreement on Saturday. U.S. Vice President JD Vance said the talks stalled after Iran refused to accept American terms to refrain from developing a nuclear weapon. Iran has demanded compensation for damage caused by U.S.-Israeli strikes that launched the war on Feb. 28, and the release of Iran’s frozen assets.

Later Sunday, Trump extended his feud over the war with Pope Leo XIV, lashing out in a Truth Social post that called the Catholic leader “terrible on foreign policy” after Leo denounced the war and demanded that political leaders stop and negotiate peace. The pontiff pushed back Monday, telling reporters that the Vatican’s appeals for peace and reconciliation are rooted in the Gospel, and that he doesn’t fear the Trump administration.

The blockade could have far-reaching effects

The blockade is likely intended to pile pressure on Iran, which has exported millions of barrels of oil since the war began, much of it likely carried by so-called “dark” transits that evade Western government sanctions and oversight.

The price of U.S. crude rose 8% to $104.24 a barrel following the blockade announcement, and Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose 7% to $102.29. Brent crude cost roughly $70 per barrel before the war in late February.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed support Monday for Trump’s “strong stance to impose a naval blockade on Iran.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer told BBC radio Monday that Britain will not be part of a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in response to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and that Britain is “not getting dragged into the war.”

Iran says ‘if you fight, we will fight’

A chorus of top-ranking Iranian officials threatened retaliation. Mohsen Rezaei, a military adviser and a former Revolutionary Guard Commander, wrote on X that the country’s armed forces had “major untouched levers” to counter a Hormuz blockade.

Iranian parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who led Iran’s side in the talks, addressed Trump in a statement on his return to Iran: “If you fight, we will fight.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard later said the strait remained under Iran’s “full control” and was open for non-military vessels, but military ones would get a “forceful response,” two semiofficial Iranian news agencies reported.

During the 21-hour talks this weekend in Pakistan, the U.S. military said two destroyers had transited the strait ahead of mine-clearing work, a first since the war began. Iran denied it.

No word on what happens after ceasefire expires

Vance, who led the U.S. side in the talks in Pakistan, said Washington would need “an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon.”

Iranian negotiators could not agree to all U.S. “red lines,” said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe positions on the record. Those red lines included Iran never obtaining a nuclear weapon, ending uranium enrichment, dismantling major enrichment facilities and allowing retrieval of its highly enriched uranium, along with opening the Strait of Hormuz and ending funding for Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi rebels.

Iranian officials said talks fell apart over two or three key issues, blaming what they called U.S. overreach. Qalibaf, who noted progress in negotiations, said it was time for the United States “to decide whether it can gain our trust or not.”

Neither Iran nor the U.S. indicated what will happen after the ceasefire expires on April 22.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said his country will try to facilitate a new dialogue in the coming days. Iran said it was open to continuing dialogue, state-run IRNA news agency reported.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, whose country has supported mediations efforts, suggested that if there is progress in dialogue the ceasefire could be extended for 45 to 60 days to allow for more negotiations.

Iran’s nuclear program is a key sticking point

Iran’s nuclear program was at the center of tensions long before the U.S. and Israel launched the war on Feb. 28. The fighting has killed at least 3,000 people in Iran, 2,055 in Lebanon, 23 in Israel and more than a dozen in Gulf Arab states, and damaged infrastructure in half a dozen countries.

Tehran has long denied seeking nuclear weapons but insists on its right to a civilian nuclear program. The landmark 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump later pulled the U.S. out of, took well over a year of negotiations. Experts say Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, though not weapons-grade, is only a short technical step away.

___

Metz reported from Ramallah, West Bank, Boak from Miami and Magdy from Cairo. Associated Press writers E. Eduardo Castillo in Beijing; Collin Binkley and Ben Finley in Washington; Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut; Brian Melley in London; Ghaya Ben MBarek in Tunis; Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City and Julia Frankel and Mae Anderson in New York contributed to this report.

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As of 9 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil sold for $103.72 per barrel (using Brent as the benchmark, which we’ll get into momentarily). That’s 3 cents higher than morning and approximately a $39 rise over the past year.

Will oil prices go up?

It’s impossible to predict the future of oil prices. Several factors determine the movement of oil, but it ultimately boils down to supply and demand. Again, when threats of economic downturn, war, etc. are high, the oil trajectory can turn rapidly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

When you pay for gas at the pump, you’re paying for more than just the crude oil itself; you’re also springing for links along the chain, such as the refineries and wholesalers—not to mention taxes and local gas station markups.

Still, the crude oil aspect affects the final price most dramatically, as it typically accounts for more than half the price per gallon. When oil prices spike, so do gas prices. And frustratingly, when oil prices drop, gas prices tend to take their time drifting down to the lower price (sometimes referred to as “rockets and feathers”).

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In case of emergency, the U.S. has a store of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its primary purpose is energy security in case of disaster (think sanctions, severe storm damage, even war). But it can also go a long way toward softening crippling price hikes during supply shocks.

It’s not a long-term answer—more of an immediate relief to assist the consumer and keep critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are both major energy fuels. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible—which increases demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

When examining oil’s performance, there are generally two major benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Between the two, Brent better represents global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. And, it’s often the best way to track historical oil performance. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark across several decades, oil has been anything but steady. It’s seen spikes due to factors such as wars and supply cuts, and it’s also seen crashes from global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as lower demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with increased global demand, but it soon plummeted alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

All to say, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

• Stock futures sink while oil spikes as the U.S. Navy looks to squeeze Iran’s economy
• A major U.S. gasoline production hub is in such a severe drought that its refineries may be hobbled
• Iran’s crumbling economy is the regime’s greatest weakness with prices up 40%

Frequently asked questions

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Foundry, an upstate New York-based firm that launched in 2019, runs a mining pool that today commands around 31% of all Bitcoin production. On Monday, the company formally launched a second pool operation based around a cryptocurrency known as Zcash that shares many attributes of Bitcoin, but that is designed to be less visible. The move amounts to a major endorsement for Zcash in light of Foundry’s outsize role in the crypto mining space.

In an interview with Fortune, Foundry CEO Mike Colyer said the decision to add Zcash to its operations comes in response to growing interest in so-called privacy coins from large institutions. By launching the new pool, Foundry is betting that institutional miners, which include several public companies, will allocate part of their resources to producing Zcash. This in turn reflects a view by some crypto analysts that large financial organizations, which have amassed digital assets portfolios worth billions of dollars, will embrace Zcash, whose network excels at keeping transactions private.

The first part of the bet already appears to be working. Foundry, which is a subsidiary of billionaire Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, said in a statement that its new Zcash pool has seen rapid and sustained growth from multiple institutional mining customers, and that the pool already accounts for nearly a third of new Zcash production.

Zcash is currently around the 15th biggest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of approximately $6.3 billion, which is tiny compared to Bitcoin’s $1.5 trillion market cap or the $270 billion of second place Ethereum, but still significant. Notably, the price of Zcash has jumped over 75% in the last 30 days compared to a rise of around 7% in the overall crypto market. The rapid price increase came after Foundry announced the pending launch of the new pool in early March.

Zcash launched in 2016 and is the brainchild of a developer named Zooko Wilcox, who sought to build a Bitcoin-like network that made it easier to conceal transactions. The Zcash blockchain can do this thanks to a technology known as zero knowledge proofs that allows a user to verify a transaction is true without seeing identifying details. And unlike privacy coin rival Monero, Zcash’s architecture allows for selective disclosure, which makes it more appealing to banks and other large institutions that seek to safeguard client transactions while also complying with regulatory demands.

Like Bitcoin, Zcash also relies on a so-called proof-of-work network. The term describes a blockchain system that requires participants to show they have skin in the game by expending electricity in order to contribute to the network and receive a reward. This contrasts with blockchains like Ethereum and Solana that require network validators lock up collateral, a system known as proof-of-stake.

Made in the U.S.A.

Foundry’s emergence as the dominant Bitcoin mining pool operator is notable since, for more than a decade, the industry was dominated by Chinese concerns like AntPool and BTC.com. In 2021, however, Foundry was able to capitalize on an anti-crypto crackdown in China and once again put the U.S. at the center of global Bitcoin production.

Foundry does not engage directly in Bitcoin mining, which entails the use of specialized computers known as rigs, and large amounts of electricity, to solve random math problems generated by the blockchain. Instead, Foundry operates a pool that lets participants share in the collective proceeds, providing companies with a predictable cash flow in the process. The company also serves as a service hub for the miners, helping with the financial, legal and compliance aspects of the business.

All of this, says Colyer, furthers the goal of ensuring the U.S. maintains strategic influence over Bitcoin at a time when the currency is becoming an important geo-political asset. In this context, he says Foundry, which is headquartered in Rochester, New York, is helping safeguard the integrity of the Bitcoin network, and ensuring it remains decentralized.

“The vision was that nation states would be miners someday,” said Colyer, and that it was crucial that China, America’s geo-political rival, did not continue to dominate both the production of Bitcoin pools and mining hardware.

Foundry’s primary success on this front has been building a pool that is approximately 40% bigger than its biggest rival. But the company also plays a critical role in helping its U.S. mining partners obtain new machines with advanced chips that can compete in an industry where older rigs fast become obsolete.

In the last year, the Trump Administration’s tariff policies have complicated these efforts since the vast majority of rig production still takes place in Asia, but Colyer said Foundry and its partners have been able to navigate the situation.

“Our role is to support the broader ecosystem through our mining pools, which means we’re focused on helping our clients navigate these dynamics rather than managing a fleet of our own. Well-capitalized U.S. operators have proven resilient,” said Colyer.

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Good morning!

Most C-suite leaders today are obsessed with preparing employees for the AI era by teaching new technical skills. Brené Brown thinks they’re fighting only half the battle.

The billions being poured into AI, she says, will not pay off if companies fail to invest in the human foundations—trust, development, and culture— that determine whether these tools actually improve performance.

“I don’t blame the C-suite for wanting to believe it’s about skills because that’s easier than creating a deep sense of mattering and courage and trust and agency,” author and researcher Brown told me last week.

New data suggests that whether AI improves performance may depend less on how much leaders use it than on the kind of culture they create around it. In a BetterUp survey of full-time workers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., managers with high AI usage in high-trust, high-development cultures saw team performance rise 6%. Managers with equally high AI usage in low-trust, low-development cultures saw performance fall 9%.

Across the board, leaders who paired AI investments with human ones—by building relationships with their employees or actively coaching their teams—saw 17% stronger performance across productivity, work quality, and effectiveness than leaders who prioritized AI while putting less of a focus on people.

The conclusion may sound intuitive. But BetterUp CEO Alexi Robichaux says only the top-performing managers are using time saved by AI to reinvest in their teams—mainly because most are burnt out. That has real consequences. 

If companies want workers to embrace AI rather than resist it as a threat, Robichaux says, leaders need to start by building real personal connections.

“The problem is we suck at the human part, but it is forcing our hand to get good at the human part because it’s the only thing left where we can compete,” he says.

His recommendation? Go back to basics. Take your employees out for coffee. Check in with them. At its core, it’s all about building trust.

Brown, who serves as executive chair of the BetterUp Center for Daring Leadership, says trust is earned in small, consistent moments when leaders show genuine interest in their employees’ lives.

“Those are seen as difficult because they’re time investments,” she says. “But you think building trust is expensive? Try not having trust. That’s going to cost you everything.” 

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

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Personal AI use is collapsing the customer decision-making process into a single conversation, and most brands aren’t ready for it. The window of influence that once spanned dozens of touchpoints is shrinking to seconds.

What’s more, AI is now selling to AI. Brands themselves are using the technology to market to consumer AI intermediaries before they can ultimately sell to the people behind them. So, what can brands do today to effectively influence customer decisions in this new era? 

How AI is changing the game   

AI tools are transforming the way people make decisions. A lengthy pre-purchase research phase spanning multiple websites and platforms can now be replaced by a single interaction with an AI assistant. An assistant who understands the individual’s unique constraints and remembers their preferences.  

A strong 45% of consumers already say AI-generated recommendations matter more than advertising in shaping their perceptions, according to Omnicom’s Future of Brand Influence report. A strong 70% say they can become an expert in any product or service category just by using generative AI.  

Funnel-based planning frameworks that treat awareness, consideration, and decision-making as separate stages are becoming irrelevant as AI enables customers to experience all three simultaneously. Purchasing decisions can be made in seconds, leaving brands with minimal opportunity to connect authentically, build trust, and feel relevant in the customer’s environment.  

AI must persuade AI

Then there’s the big question of who’s making the decisions. AI assistants are booking hotel rooms, making medical appointments, recommending purchases, and renewing (and canceling) subscriptions on the customer’s behalf, based on what they’ve learned about individual needs and preferences.

Brands must convince these AI intermediaries before they can influence the people using them. And, with the majority of brands now actively using AI to influence customer actions (according to our  2026 CX Trends report), algorithms are actually doing the thinking on both sides of the customer experience. AI must persuade AI.          

Leading as AI rewrites the rules 

To succeed in this new age, brands must exert their influence across environments that operate with extraordinary scale, speed, and intelligence. But things like outdated organizational structures, siloed systems, poor-quality data, and questionable data sourcing are getting in the way.  

Brands will need to consider which organizational changes are required to facilitate customer experiences shaped by AI. What’s the internal governance structure for AI? Is an AI steering committee required? What role will the CMO and other key stakeholders play in shaping AI strategy?      

In addition, brands will need a proactive approach to AI-readiness, building a solid foundation based on four key pillars:  

Pillar one: Trustworthy data 

Brands are drowning in valuable first-party data. But it’s scattered across teams, channels, and systems. Changing that is simple.

The answer is to unify first-party data across the organization into a single data foundation. First-party insights can be enriched with high-quality second- and third-party data from ethical sources, including demographic, behavioral, and transactional data, to gain a 360-degree view of the customer.  Fueling AI solutions with complete data ensures algorithms have all the information they need to make the best decisions and reduces the risk of AI errors.   

Pillar two: Data hygiene  

Customer lives aren’t static. People move, get married (or divorced), change jobs, have kids, and take up new hobbies. Their data must keep up.  

A considered approach to data management, including ongoing data hygiene practices to regularly cleanse, validate, and update customer information, ensures AI is always using the most accurate and up-to-date information. Clean, connected data is a vital ingredient for AI-powered influence.   

Pillar three: Identity  

When a customer switches from mobile to laptop to in-store, most brands lose the thread entirely. Here’s how to fix that.

A robust solution that resolves identity across environments to recognize customers wherever they interact is vital for connecting data signals and powering AI. Using market-leading, interoperable identifiers to enable a unified view of the customer empowers AI to understand individual customer journeys and influence them through cohesive, personalized experiences.  

Pillar four: Privacy and consent  

People are more aware than ever of the data they generate as they browse, shop, and socialize, and they want to control how that data is used. So brands must deliver.

Data governance and respect for customer privacy aren’t just regulatory and ethical imperatives; they’re essential to building customer trust. Brands need to establish clear and  transparent data privacy practices that support a lawful basis for data collection and give customers full control over their data before it is used by AI.  

Turning influence into wins  

As AI use accelerates, the entire ecosystem in which brands operate is being reshaped. Today, brands can be present anywhere — across any screen or any platform. But if they aren’t showing up in the environment that matters, in the moment that matters, and influencing both customers and their AI intermediaries with relevant, personalized experiences, they might as well be nowhere at all. A connected and permissioned data foundation fuels the trust, relevance, and consistency brands need to succeed.

In the age of AI influence, invisibility isn’t a branding problem; it’s an existential one.

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

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Good morning. For finance leaders trying to understand how the AI infrastructure race is being funded, CoreWeave just offered a revealing case study.

In the span of a few days, the Nvidia-backed startup locked in tens of billions in customer commitments and layered on multiple forms of debt. This underscores a defining feature of today’s AI boom: growth is being financed as aggressively as it is being engineered.

CoreWeave, which provides cloud-based GPUs powered by Nvidia chips, announced on Thursday a $21 billion deal with Meta running from 2027 to 2032. That brings Meta’s total commitment to more than $35 billion, which could be viewed as a significant vote of confidence in sustained demand for AI compute.

At the same time, the company raised roughly $3.5 billion in convertible senior notes, a hybrid instrument that blends debt with an equity upside. Investors collect interest, but can convert into shares if CoreWeave’s valuation rises. It’s a structure that limits near-term cash strain while effectively betting that future equity will be worth more.

And that wasn’t all. CoreWeave CFO Nitin Agrawal said in a LinkedIn post on Friday that the company also:

—Upsized a high-yield bond offering due to heavy demand.
—Secured an $8.5 billion delayed draw term loan at investment-grade ratings.
—Executed what it described as one of the largest dual-tranche raises of its kind.

Also on Friday, the company’s stock climbed as much as 13% after it announced a multi-year agreement with Anthropic. Taken together, it shows that capital is flowing freely to AI infrastructure—at least for now.

I asked Morningstar equity analyst Luke Yang what this shows for how AI-native companies are approaching capital formation right now. He pointed to three aspects:

—Cloud infrastructure companies will continue to use all kinds of tools available to get the funds necessary for capacity expansion. “For this Meta-CoreWeave deal specifically, we see the company leveraging delayed draw term loans, corporate bonds, and convertible notes. Neoclouds also use OEM financing, operating/financing leases, share issuance, etc. Growth is the top priority, and financing should not be a bottleneck for these companies’ growth.”

—Creditors are getting more comfortable with the business of neoclouds. “We see a sequential improvement in the interest rates and credit ratings of CoreWeave’s delayed draw term loans. The DDTL 4.0 facility is the first investment-grade facility with around a 6% interest rate. Going forward, we expect to see more neocloud companies securing investment-grade financing with take-or-pay deals from credible AI labs/hyperscalers.”

—The interest rate that neoclouds enjoy is critical to the viability of their business model. “Given the high leverage of these companies, even a 100- or 200-basis-point increase in overall interest burden can completely break the business model. The ability to borrow at investment-grade is very important for the preservation of equity holders’ value.”

The company’s recent moves highlight a defining dynamic of the AI era: infrastructure is being built at extraordinary speed, financed by equally aggressive capital strategies. The model appears to be working now because demand is strong, its customers are credible, and capital is available—and Morningstar maintains its $97 fair value estimate for CoreWeave, noting shares look fairly valued following recent gains. But it could all be tested when growth normalizes and the cost of all that financing comes due.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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Nicholas Gordon, Fortune’s Asia editor, filling in for Allie Garfinkle.

Hong Kong is back.

IPOs in the Chinese city raised almost $14 billion in the first quarter of the year, a jump of almost 490% year-on-year. That number keeps Hong Kong at the top of the world’s IPO league tables, building on last year’s stellar performance of $35 billion raised over more than 100 new listings. 

Before, Hong Kong’s success was all about secondary listings. Chinese giants like Midea and CATL, already listed on mainland Chinese exchanges, went to Hong Kong to tap the city’s connections to international capital.

But in 2026, the Hong Kong story is all about AI. MiniMax and Knowledge Atlas (better known as Z.ai), two frontier AI labs, Biren Technology, a chip design company, and Insilico Medicine, an AI drug discovery company, are just some of the standout listings from the past few months. 

There’s more to come: Manycore, a spatial design company and one of the Hangzhou-based “Little Dragons” will list in Hong Kong this week; Victory Giant, which makes printed circuit boards, is also raising funds in the city. Other AI companies reportedly considering IPOs are Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi; Rokid, a manufacturer of smart glasses; and Kunlunxin, the chip unit of Baidu.

Hong Kong and Beijing are “essentially trying to do for Chinese AI what Nasdaq did for the internet,” says Drew Bernstein, co-chairman of Marcum Asia, an accounting firm.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, the city’s stock exchange operator, calculated that companies that debuted in 2025 had an average first-day return of 40%. But that’s nothing compared to MiniMax and Z.ai, whose shares have jumped by over 500% and 700% respectively from their IPOs in early January. That’s despite both startups reporting less than $100 million in revenue while still losing hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Investors have grown more bullish on China’s AI sector even since DeepSeek shook up the AI narrative last year. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’s chief macro strategist, told me last month. (Be sure to check out my recent explainer on what’s happening in Chinese AI!)

To be sure, “Hong Kong doesn’t quite replicate what a U.S. listing offers,” says Bernstein, who helps Asian companies explore U.S. IPOs.  New York’s exchanges offer much deeper pools of capital, and one expects that Chinese issuers might prefer to list there if not for the geopolitics. Chinese companies are still raising lots of money on both U.S. and mainland Chinese exchanges. And there are also several bumper U.S. IPOs on the horizon—think SpaceX and OpenAI—that are likely to dwarf whatever’s in the pipeline for Hong Kong. 

Still there’s no question it’s a big shift from previous years, when a regulatory crackdown from Beijing made Chinese tech stocks anathema to global investors. “China went from uninvestable to unavoidable in a short period of time,” Bernstein adds.

Nicholas Gordon
X: @nickrigordon
Email: nicholas.gordon@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

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For Johanna Mercier, Gilead Sciences’ chief commercial and corporate affairs officer, leadership starts with a clear accounting of what sustains performance across a global role. In a job that rarely conforms to fixed hours, she focuses on her energy: what drains it, what restores it, and how to protect enough of it to lead with steadiness in a business where the stakes are measured in patients’ lives.

Mercier describes energy as a kind of running reserve, something she tracks with intention.  “I think about it like a piggy bank,” she told Fortune Next to Lead. Some meetings, tasks, and decisions draw heavily from it, particularly long discussions that go in circles, internal debates that take too long to resolve, and periods when reaching a decision is slowed by overly bureaucratic processes.

Other parts of the job restore it: visiting teams around the world, hearing what they are building, sharing best practices, supporting local strategies, clearing obstacles, and staying close to patient stories, healthcare professionals, and the communities Gilead serves.

What matters is how she responds when that reserve starts to run low. “It’s about taking a pause and taking a step back,” she says, “and being really strategic about how I spend my time there.” The habit reflects a broader discipline: In a role with constant demands across markets and time zones—and where the mission carries extra weight—Mercier protects her energy by staying close to the work that creates momentum and by limiting how much of herself she gives to conversations that do not.

That framework becomes especially important in drug development, where most efforts fall by the wayside long before a medicine reaches the market. Mercier calls it “scientific heartbreak” because teams grow attached to a medicine’s potential and to what it might do for patients.

She leads through those moments by placing each setback inside the longer arc of clinical discovery. Mercier points to Lenacapavir, Gilead’s HIV prevention drug, which took 17 years to reach its first approval and emerged only after scientists worked through roughly 3,000 candidate molecules. At Gilead, where more than 50 clinical programs are active across phases one through three, that kind of attrition is a constant feature of the work. Her job, then, is not to deny the sting of a canceled program but to help teams turn disappointment into learning and keep moving toward the next viable breakthrough, she says. And for Mercier, that is where the energy returns.

Watch the full interview with Mercier here.

Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

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• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady reports on a new product from a slimmed-down WeWork.
• The big leadership story: An AI push didn’t spare Intuit from the SaaSpocalypse.
• The markets: Mostly down as optimism for a Iran peace deal fades.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. I’ve long been fascinated with companies that fail, often spectacularly, only to be reborn in a smaller but profitable form. Remember when Lego slapped its name on so much stuff that it almost went bankrupt? Companies like General Motors, Delta Air Lines, Starbucks, Apple, and Ford all had to pare back and refocus to get healthy. A more recent example: WeWork.

It’s launching a private office pod today that’s emblematic of a more focused and asset-light direction for the brand. Normally, I’d pass on getting an ‘exclusive’ on a product launch. But that changed when I saw ‘WeWork Go’ emblazoned on the side of what looks like a transparent phone booth, the company’s first new product since July 2022, when WeWork was still trading for around $5 on the New York Stock Exchange. 

Of course, you’ll remember that the coworking company once had a $47 billion valuation and cult-like CEO in Adam Neumann who promised to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” That iteration of WeWork became a bankrupt cautionary tale with $18 billion in debt in 2023, when Neumann was ousted. (He later tried unsuccessfully to buy the company back.) It’s now a private firm with a penny stock that trades for around a nickel and a CEO named John Santora, who spent the first half-century of his career at Cushman & Wakefield. 

It’s also, as Santora told me, a profitable company with 550,000 members in more than 600 locations. But many of those locations are now franchised and WeWork now has more than 2,000 third-party coworking partners in its network. 

WeWork’s new “private office pod” offers models for single users and a larger pod for up to four people. Santora says you’ll see them in airports, convention centers, hotel lobbies or other high-traffic areas visited by “busy professionals on the move.” Not a breakthrough technology, perhaps, but a smart move from a man who’s navigated the realities of real estate his whole career. 

WeWork Go “expands the ability for our people to access our spaces and our technology,” says Santora. He says WeWork still has “that entrepreneurial spirit,” and in the company’s new, slimmed-down era, transparent pods will test whether that culture can thrive on a smaller scale.

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

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Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Markets: Mostly down—but Wall Street still thinks the Fed will deliver cuts.
• EXCLUSIVE: Citgo CEO imprisoned by Maduro still has hopes for the oil industry in Venezuela.
• U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz starts today.
• Yes, Trump is at war with the Pope.
• Airline ticket prices track Google search volume for “flights.”
• The huge number of Americans who have no retirement savings.

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After a week when ceasefire hopes lifted sentiment and stock prices on Wall Street, the U.S. war on Iran could soon flare up again.

Talks between the two countries ended without a deal over the weekend, prompting President Donald Trump to announce that a naval blockade will be imposed on the Strait of Hormuz.

That would target Iranian oil shipments, which have continued flowing, while Tehran has bottled up supplies from other countries by selectively closing the strait with drone and missile attacks.

Futures tied to the Dow Jones industrial average fell 531 points, or 1.10%. S&P 500 futures were down 1.15%, and Nasdaq futures lost 1.32%.

U.S. oil futures jumped 8.63% to $104.90 a barrel, and Brent crude climbed 8.04% to $102.85. Gold fell 2.28% to $4,678 per ounce.

The U.S. dollar was up 0.49% against the euro and rose 0.32% against the yen. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was flat at 4.317%.

After the first month and a half of the war focused on aerial bombardments and missiles barrages, the next phase is poised to rely on naval forces as the U.S. follows a two-part strategy targeting Iran’s main economic lifeline as well as its control of the strait.

U.S. Central Command said the Hormuz blockade will begin on Monday at 10 am ET, and indicated it will also be selective, despite Trump’s vow that the strait should be open to everyone or no one at all.

“The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” it explained in a statement. “CENTCOM forces will not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports.”

Preventing Iran from generating oil revenue would not only cripple its already-collapsing economy but also deny financial resources for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Meanwhile, the Navy sent two destroyers through the strait on Saturday to prepare for mine-clearing operations. Central Command said it is “establishing a new passage” for the maritime industry for the free flow of commerce.

The IRGC challenged the warships and warned them to leave. A drone was also reportedly launched at the ships, which destroyed it. On Sunday, the IRGC threatened to deliver a “strong and forceful response” to any warships that approach the Strait of Hormuz.

Until this weekend, U.S. ships had avoided the strait as Navy officials previously have described it as an Iranian “kill box” filled with numerous threats, including anti-ship missiles, drones, fast-attack boats, and mines.

The failure to reopen the strait has sent oil prices skyrocketing, and Tehran’s ability to scare away tanker traffic has emerged as its main source of leverage over the U.S.

But if the Navy can create an alternate path through the strait with manageable risks from Iranian attacks, then the regime loses its most potent weapon.

“One of the things that commercial ships were waiting to see was whether or not this strait was clear, and sailing two destroyers in is a big one,” Campbell University professor Salvatore Mercogliano, who specializes in military and maritime history, said on his podcast.

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The UK will not take part in the proposed US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, setting up yet another point of contention between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the conflict in Iran.

The British government said in a statement Sunday that it continued to call for freedom of navigation and the opening of the strait, following Trump’s announcement that the US would begin a full naval blockade of the strategic waterway that’s essential for global energy supplies.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday. “Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL.”

Britain won’t be taking part in that blockade, people familiar with the government’s position said on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the proposed US operation.

Discussing his plan to blockade the strait on Fox News, Trump said he understands that “the UK and a couple of other countries are sending minesweepers.”

The UK has discussed deploying autonomous mine-hunting drones in the strait if a viable plan emerges in conjunction with other allies to reopen it, with Starmer previously saying those systems were “in the region.” However, that is a separate proposal to Trump’s threat to blockade Hormuz.

Representatives from Britain and a coalition of other countries will take part in another meeting in the coming days to discuss a plan to open the waterway. Nonetheless, many of the countries taking part in those talks are unwilling to commit naval assets until a lasting peace agreement is reached. Most do not see opening the strait by military means as a workable option.

Trump used his Fox interview to renew his criticism of Starmer, again comparing him to Neville Chamberlain, the British wartime leader whose name is synonymous with the appeasement of Adolf Hitler. He also criticized the premier for offering to send military equipment after the war is over. 

“You need the equipment before the war starts or during the war,” the president said, calling Starmer’s position a “Neville Chamberlain-type statement.”

Relations between the two leaders have become strained after Starmer declined to allow US forces to use British military bases for their initial strikes on Iran, leading Trump to fire a volley of insults at Starmer.

Read More: Trump Ramps Up Criticism of Keir Starmer Over War on Iran

The UK has since permitted use of its bases for American assets taking part in what it calls “defensive” operations targeting Iranian missile launchers. Still, Starmer has insisted the conflict is “not our war.”

“I’m clear that for the United Kingdom, we have our principles, we have our values. We will be guided by them in everything that we do,” Starmer said in an ITV interview last week in which he criticized Trump’s rhetoric threatening the destruction of Iranian civilization.

“That’s why I’ve said — and obviously it’s caused a degree of criticism and pressure in the last few weeks — I’ve been saying we are not going to be dragged into this war,” the premier added, referring to Trump’s repeated criticism of him for not expanding Britain’s role.

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In parched southern Texas, a yearslong drought has depleted Corpus Christi’s water reserves so gravely that the city is scrambling to prevent a shortage that could force painful cutbacks for residents and hobble the refineries and petrochemical plants in a major energy port.

Experts said the city didn’t expect such a bad drought, and new sources of reliable water didn’t arrive as expected. Those problems arose as the city increased its water sales to big industrial customers.

“We just have not kept up with water supply and water infrastructure like we should have. And it’s decades in the making,” said Peter Zanoni, the city manager since 2019.

Corpus Christi, a city of about 317,000 people that also supplies water to nearby counties, is closely tied to its oil and gas industry. The region makes everyday essentials like fuel and steel and ships them to the world.

Zanoni said it is highly unlikely the city will run out of water, but without significant rainfall or new sources, residents may face forced cutbacks and industry may have to do with less. At a time when the Iran war is already raising gas prices, the shortage is hitting an area that produces 5% of the U.S. gasoline supply.

Droughts are common, but this one has dragged on for most of the past seven years. Key reservoirs are at their lowest point ever. The quickest fix is different weather.

“We are actively praying for a hurricane,” former city council member David Loeb said, half in jest. Loeb doesn’t want anyone injured, but after wrestling with previous droughts in his time on the council, he feels the lack of rain acutely.

The drought isn’t expected to lift by summer, leaving officials scrambling to tap more groundwater to avoid an emergency.

Lessons from last time

After the last drought in the early 2010s, the city approved a pipeline extension to bring in more water from the Colorado River and promoted conservation. In the years that followed, water use actually fell. The city, seeing opportunity, added a petrochemical plant and steel mill to its long list of industrial customers.

City officials had allowed for drought in their calculations — just not this kind of drought, Zanoni said. It has hit especially hard because reservoirs never fully recharged after the last one.

And it’s come at a bad time.

After many years, the pipeline extension finally delivered its full capacity only last year. Meanwhile, discussion of building a desalination plant that would remove salt from seawater — a potentially drought-proof solution recommended in 2016 — bogged down over concerns about costs as high as $1.3 billion and environmental impact.

“If the then-city council had followed through on that, we would have had that plant up and running by now,” Zanoni said.

It’s an industry town

Corpus Christi has followed its long-established plan for reducing water use. Stage 1 seeks voluntary actions from citizens like taking shorter showers and limiting how often they can water. Currently, the city is in Stage 3, which means pauses on many outdoor water uses.

Many residents are angry that they can’t water their lawns, that their bills are set to rise sharply and that they may face fines, said Isabel Araiza, co-founder of a grassroots group active on water issues. Some don’t feel industry will be asked to share in the pain, she said.

The city’s drought plan allows for charging residents and businesses extra if they use lots of water. But big industry, which Zanoni says consumes as much as 60% of the city’s water, can opt to pay a permanent surcharge to avoid the possibility of having a much larger fee added in times of drought.

Araiza calls it a bad system. Once industry pays the surcharge, she said, they have no incentive to conserve water.

The city has defended the system, saying in a statement that industry does not “get a pass on water conservation” or forced curtailment. The statement said the business surcharges have raised $6 million a year.

It is wrong to suggest industry isn’t helping, said Bob Paulison, executive director of the Coastal Bend Industry Association. Companies have stopped landscaping, they recycle water for essential cooling needs and they are looking for alternative water sources, he said.

The city hasn’t imposed extra costs on anyone yet.

But Zanoni said water rates may eventually double as the city invests roughly $1 billion on infrastructure — costs that some argue will disproportionately benefit industry and make life for residents more expensive.

What’s the way out?

The city is in a water emergency when it has 180 days before water supply can’t keep up with demand. Officials have run through different scenarios for getting new water and the drought easing, and have said an emergency could come as early as May, as late as October, or not at all.

The city has tapped into millions of gallons of new groundwater, and it hopes to get even more.

The biggest unknown is the Evangeline Groundwater Project, which involves a pipeline and about two dozen wells that could add enough water to head off an emergency. It still needs state approval but the city hopes water could be flowing as soon as November. New sources come with drawbacks – some have raised water quality concerns, and there are worries too much pumping could deplete groundwater.

If the city has to declare a water emergency, it would be able to more aggressively curtail water use – mandatory reductions that would apply evenly to all industry and residents. That is a sensitive decision and is likely to be a “knock-down drag-out bloodbath,” Loeb said.

Because residents on average have already reduced their water use, future mandatory cuts are likely to fall heavier on industry.

“It’ll be an unbelievable disaster,” said Don Roach, former assistant general manager of the San Patricio Municipal Water District that has lots of industrial customers in the area. “When you cut the cooling water off to most of these industries, they just have to shut down. There’s no other way around it.”

Paulison said companies that produce fuel, polymers, iron and steel “have the least amount of flexibility in just cutting water usage.” He added, however, that companies remain optimistic they can reduce usage, adapt and continue operations.

Zanoni said the city’s plans should buy time to avert the worst.

“We are hoping we don’t get there, but we don’t work on hope,” he said.

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China now has a word for token: ciyuan. 

Liu Liehong, the administrator of China’s National Data Administration, the country’s main data regulator, unveiled the term at a State Council press conference in March, explaining that tokens were now “the settlement unit linking technological supply with commercial demand.” 

The National Data Administration disclosed that China now processes 140 trillion tokens every day, up from just 100 billion at the start of 2024. Chinese AI models have now surpassed U.S. models on OpenRouter, a popular marketplace for AI models. 

Investors have bought into the AI boom. IPOs in Hong Kong are at a five-year high thanks to a steady stream of Chinese AI and tech startups, including AI labs MiniMax and Zhipu AI, and chip designer Biren. 

“We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategist, told Fortune in mid-March at the bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong.

China’s goal is now to build a “token economy,” backed by a proliferation of efficient, open-source models and a push into real-world AI applications. Yet like their U.S. peers, Chinese firms are grappling with expensive research costs and heavy capital expenditure pledges, while also fending off Washington’s export controls, designed to keep them one step behind in the chip race.

Big tech pivots

The AI boom rescued China’s big tech companies from years of regulatory purgatory.

Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, has invested in open-source models, which can be downloaded and modified freely by developers. That low barrier to entry has made its Qwen models a compelling option for startups unwilling to pay for proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Qwen has won over developers from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, and it’s also convinced Western users too: Meta’s most recent model, Muse Spark, is trained partly off of Qwen.

Unlike Alibaba, ByteDance has largely kept its AI models proprietary, instead leveraging its product design and consumer experience strengths to win users. The company’s chatbot, also called Doubao, is China’s most-used AI app, with 100 million daily active users over the Chinese New Year holiday in February. 

Tencent, which operates the ubiquitous WeChat messaging platform, has been a step behind its rivals when it comes to AI. The company launched ClawBot in March, which appears as a contact within WeChat, allowing its over one billion monthly active users to connect directly with OpenClaw and execute tasks through the messaging interface.

Competition is fierce within China’s tech sector. Last week, Alibaba revealed its newest video generation model, Happy Horse, which performs better than the current leader, ByteDance’s SeeDance, according to some analyses. 

And there’s still potential for another big tech company to shake things up. Xiaomi and Meituan, better known for smartphones and food delivery respectively, have launched their own large models.

Smaller startups

A new generation of Chinese AI startups are also winning converts in Silicon Valley. 

When vibe-coding startup Cursor launched Composer 2, its latest coding service, eagle-eyed users discovered that the model had been built on Kimi K2.5, an open-source model from Beijing-based Moonshot AI. Cursor’s co-founder later acknowledged it was “a miss to not mention the Kimi base…from the start.” 

Two other startups—Knowledge Atlas, better known as Z.ai, and MiniMax—have already listed in Hong Kong, giving some rare visibility into the economics of a frontier AI lab.

MiniMax reported $79 million in 2025 revenue, a 159% year-on-year jump, with 70% coming from overseas markets in an early signal of global appetite for Chinese foundation models. Yet it also posted an adjusted net loss of $250 million. Zhipu AI generated 724 million yuan ($104.8 million) in revenue, 132% higher than the year before, but its total losses ballooned to 4.7 billion yuan ($680 million), driven by R&D spending that jumped 45%.

Investors don’t seem to mind the massive losses. Zhipu’s shares are up more than 570% from its IPO price; MiniMax has risen more than 470%, at one point briefly exceeding the market cap of Baidu. Still, both stocks have swung wildly, rising and falling by double-digit percentages in single sessions.

Moonshot AI, backed by Alibaba and HongShan, is reportedly weighing a Hong Kong IPO, coming just a few months after a January funding round that valued the startup at $10 billion. 

One startup that’s been notably quiet this year is DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based lab that reset the whole AI conversation last year with its V3 and R1 models. Developers are eagerly awaiting the public release of V4, the latest version of its model.

Physical AI

China is also surging ahead in physical AI, backed by supply chains that can cheaply manufacture advanced technology.

Unitree Robotics, perhaps China’s most prominent humanoid robot startup, has filed for a 4.2 billion yuan ($610 million) IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market. Unlike many of its robotics peers in China and overseas, Unitree doesn’t lose money, posting an adjusted net profit of roughly 600 million yuan ($87 million). Other major Chinese robotics startups include Agibot and UBTech.

Chinese companies are also pushing hard in automated driving. Pony AI launched Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia in early April, in partnership with Uber and Croatian operator Verne. WeRide has also partnered with Uber to offer fully commercial robotaxis in Dubai. 

Governments, consumers get on board

Chinese users are far more comfortable with AI than their Western counterparts. An Edelman survey from October found that 87% of Chinese respondents trust AI, against 32% in the U.S.

The country’s short drama industry is just one example of consumer comfort with AI. Video platforms launched roughly 470 new dramas every day in January, thanks to plummeting production costs. A short drama can now be generated with AI tools for around 100,000 yuan ($14,600), about ten percent of the conventional cost, with the production window shortened from 15–30 days to under five.

Chinese consumers are also embracing AI agents, with a series of major tech companies hosting workshops to walk potential users through the process of installing OpenClaw on their personal devices. 

Local governments are amplifying the push, offering subsidies to “one-person companies,” solo entrepreneurs building AI agent businesses. 

Beijing’s approach is more measured, both pushing AI as a strategic priority while also proactively moving to ward off some potential risks, such as by warning against security vulnerabilities in OpenClaw-based agents and proposing regulations for AI companion apps. 

Yet the most significant policy advantage may not be directly connected to AI at all. China has aggressively expanded its power generation and transmission capacity in recent years. Goldman Sachs estimates that China will have approximately 400 gigawatts of spare power capacity by 2030, roughly three times projected global data center demand. 

Constraints at home and abroad

Still, Chinese AI companies face numerous headwinds that constrain what they can do, particularly compared to the leading U.S. AI developers.

Due to U.S. export controls limiting the sale of the most advanced AI chips to China, domestic companies are forced to rely on domestically made chips, primarily from Huawei; overseas data centers; or on U.S. hardware sourced through grey markets. Chinese chips are getting better: on April 8, Alibaba unveiled a new data center run entirely on its own home-designed Zhenwu chips. Yet production yields and performance still remain far behind the U.S. chip supply chain.

China’s venture capital ecosystem is also thinner than Silicon Valley’s. Unease with Beijing’s tech regulation and U.S. regulatory pressure lead many global investors to avoid Chinese startups. Moonshot AI, at an $18 billion valuation, commands mostly China-based investors. Anthropic, by contrast, raised $30 billion in a Series G round in February 2026, at a $380 billion post-money valuation, backed  by a global consortium of deep-pocketed institutional investors including GIC, Coatue, Founders Fund, and ICONIQ. 

That funding pressure forced some founders to take radical action, with some going as far as skipping the Chinese market entirely. Manus AI, which launched a buzzy AI agent last year, reincorporated as a Singapore entity; Meta later acquired the agentic AI startup for roughly $2 billion in late 2025. 

Beijing has taken a dim view of the deal. Two Manus co-founders, CEO Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao, are now subject to an exit ban, according to the Financial Times.

The token economy

Yet the biggest unresolved question in Chinese AI is much the same as in the U.S.: How to turn tokens into profits. 

Alibaba spent 123 billion yuan ($17 billion) on capital expenditure in 2025, which helped contribute to a 66% plunge in net income. Tencent hasn’t spent quite as much money, with capex of just 79 billion yuan ($11.6 billion). ByteDance, as a private company, faces less pressure from shareholders about profitability, but the Financial Timesreported late last year that the TikTok owner expects to spend $23 billion on AI infrastructure.

That’s still a lot smaller than what U.S. giants are spending. Alphabet spent $94 billion on capital expenditures last year; Meta spent $75 billion. Both companies plan to spend even more this year. 

But monetization pressure may already be pushing some of China’s tech companies to rethink their strategy. Both Alibaba and Z.ai have released some of their most recent models in a closed format, at least at first. Both companies, as well as others like Baidu, are also hiking prices for their models and cloud services. 

Going forward, China’s tech companies are going to put AI at the center of their business. Last month, Alibaba reorganized its entire AI operation into what it calls the “Alibaba Token Hub,” which consolidates five previously separate units, including Tongyi Laboratory (its foundational model research arm), Qwen, and an enterprise AI division called Wukong, under CEO Eddie Wu’s direct oversight. 

“ATH is built around a single organising mission: create tokens, deliver tokens and apply tokens,” Wu said in a letter announcing the reorganization.

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Hungarian voters on Sunday ousted long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power, rejecting the authoritarian policies and global far-right movement that he embodied in favor of a pro-European challenger in a bombshell election result with global repercussions.

Election victor Péter Magyar, a former Orbán loyalist who campaigned against corruption and on everyday issues like health care and public transport, has pledged to rebuild Hungary’s relationships with the European Union and NATO — ties that frayed under Orbán. European leaders quickly congratulated Magyar.

It’s not yet clear whether Magyar’s Tisza party will have the two-thirds majority in parliament to govern without a coalition. With 77% of the vote counted, it had more than 53% support to 38% for Orbán’s governing Fidesz party.

It’s a stunning blow for Orbán, a close ally of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Orbán conceded defeat after what he called a ″painful″ election result.

“I congratulated the victorious party,″ Orban told followers. “We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition,″ he said.

‘’Thank you, Hungary!” Magyar posted on X, as thousands of his supporters thronged the banks of the Danube in Budapest, chanting “We got it! We did it!”

Orbán, the EU’s longest-serving leader and one of its biggest antagonists, who has traveled a long road from his early days as a liberal, anti-Soviet firebrand to the Russia-friendly nationalist admired today by the global far-right.

Voters showed up in droves

Turnout by 6:30 p.m. was over 77%, according to the National Election Office, a record number in any election in Hungary’s post-Communist history.

The parties of both Orbán and Magyar said they had received reports of electoral violations, suggesting some results could be disputed by both sides.

“I’m asking our supporters and all Hungarians: Let’s stay peaceful, cheerful, and if the results confirm our expectations, let’s throw a big, Hungarian carnival,” Magyar said.

Mark Radnai, Tisza’s vice president, also called for reconciliation after a tense campaign. “We can’t be each other’s enemies. Reach out, hug your neighbors, your relatives. It’s the day of reunification.”

‘Choice between East or West’

The EU will be waiting to see what Magyar does about Ukraine. Orbán repeatedly frustrated EU efforts to support Ukraine in its war against Russia’s full-scale invasion, while cultivating close ties to Putin and refusing to end Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy imports.

Recent revelations have shown a top member of Orban’s government frequently shared the contents of EU discussions with Moscow, raising accusations that Hungary was acting on Russia’s behalf within the bloc.

Orbán occupied an outsized role in far-right populist politics worldwide.

Members of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement are among those who see Orbán’s government and his Fidesz political party as shining examples of conservative, anti-globalist politics in action, while he is reviled by advocates of liberal democracy and the rule of law.

Casting his ballot in Budapest, Marcell Mehringer, 21, said he was voting “primarily so that Hungary will finally be a so-called European country, and so that young people, and really everyone, will do their fundamental civic duty to unite this nation a bit and to break down these boundaries borne of hatred.”

Strained relationship with the EU

During his 16 years as prime minister, Orbán launched harsh crackdowns on minority rights and media freedoms, subverted many of Hungary’s institutions and been accused of siphoning large sums of money into the coffers of his allied business elite, an allegation he denies.

He also heavily strained Hungary’s relationship with the EU. Although Hungary is one of the smaller EU countries, with a population of 9.5 million, Orbán has repeatedly used his veto to block decisions that require unanimity.

Most recently, he blocked a 90-billion euro ($104 billion) EU loan to Ukraine, prompting his partners to accuse him of hijacking the critical aid.

His challenger came from the inside

Magyar, 45, rapidly rose to become Orbán’s most serious challenger.

A former insider within Orbán’s Fidesz, Magyar broke with the party in 2024 and quickly formed Tisza. Since then, he has toured Hungary relentlessly, holding rallies in settlements big and small in a campaign blitz that recently had him visiting up to six towns daily.

In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month, Magyar said the election will be a “referendum” on whether Hungary continues on its drift toward Russia under Orbán, or can retake its place among the democratic societies of Europe.

Tisza is a member of the European People’s Party, the mainstream, center-right political family with leaders governing 12 of the EU’s 27 nations.

Uphill election battle

Magyar faced a tough fight. Orbán’s control of Hungary’s public media, which he has transformed into a mouthpiece for his party, and vast swaths of the private media market give him an advantage in spreading his message.

The unilateral transformation of Hungary’s electoral system and gerrymandering of its 106 voting districts by Fidesz also will require Tisza to gain an estimated 5% more votes than Orbán’s party to achieve a simple majority.

Additionally, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries had the right to vote in Hungarian elections and traditionally have voted overwhelmingly for Orbán’s party.

Russian secret services have plotted to interfere and tip the election in Orbán’s favor, according to numerous media reports including by The Washington Post. The prime minister, however, has accused neighboring Ukraine, as well as Hungary’s allies in the EU, of seeking to interfere in the vote to install a “pro-Ukraine” government.

Such accusations are part of why many in the EU see Orbán as a danger to the bloc’s future.

But across the Atlantic, Trump and his MAGA movement are all-in for another Orbán term. Trump repeatedly endorsed the Hungarian leader and U.S. Vice President JD Vance made a two-day visit to Hungary last week meant to help push Orbán over the finish line.

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The Iranian economy was already in shambles before the U.S. and Israel launched their war on the Islamic republic, and the relentless bombing since then has pushed the regime to the brink, according to reports.

Prior to the war, high inflation and a currency collapse triggered mass protests that prompted a brutal crackdown. But now with factories, energy facilities, bridges and railways destroyed—leaving many Iranians unemployed—conditions have gotten worse.

The rial has plunged 8% against the dollar on the black market since the war started, according to the Economist. That’s after it lost 60% of its value in the months after the 12-day war against Israel last June.

Meanwhile, prices have risen by 6% during the current war, according to central bank data cited by the Economist. Prior to that, food inflation had soared to an annual rate of 64% in October, then accelerated further to 105% by February, vaulting overall inflation to 47.5% on the eve of war.

High inflation forced the central bank last month to issue its largest-ever currency denomination, the 10 million rial note, just a month after putting the 5 million rial into circulation.

But official data may be downplaying the severity of inflation. Residents of Tehran and other cities told Reuters that some prices have shot up around 40% since the war began six weeks ago.

An insider close to the Iranian establishment said officials view the economy as the country’s Achilles heel, the report said, with fears of renewed unrest looming over the government.

Failure to reach a ceasefire deal with the U.S. over the weekend dashed hopes for sanctions relief or the release of Iranian assets that were frozen overseas.

Without an influx of funds, authorities will have trouble making payroll, eventually threatening the regime’s ability to govern Iran, the insider told Reuters. The war has already strained its financial resources, as it has subsidized people who fled their homes while also paying for emergency repairs to infrastructure.

An Iranian official said the country “will face a disaster” if sanctions aren’t lifted as the biggest industrial plants that power the economy will take months or ​years to repair, according to Reuters.

Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

On top of those economic woes, President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz could choke off Iran’s main source of money.

Revenue from oil exports were estimated to be worth at least $30 billion last year. And energy products accounted for roughly one-quarter of government revenue in 2023, according to the Washington Institute.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is leading Iran’s military response to the U.S. war and its domestic repression, processes about half of the country’s oil exports and stood to collected billions of dollars from a toll imposed on ships seeking to cross the strait.

But a U.S. naval blockade would threaten the IRGC’s financial resources and further weaken the overall economy.

Dan Alamariu, chief geopolitical strategist at Alpine Macro, said in a note on Friday that economic mismanagement in Iran runs deep, adding that systemic corruption is a necessary feature that pays off loyalists.

“To survive, Iran’s regime will need to either reform (which it is incapable of) or export instability abroad through proxies and a missile and nuclear proliferation push (inviting further conflict),” he wrote. “Absent this, it will likely fall, though the timing could be 1-3 years away. Iran is probably the most unstable regime among large developing states, if looking at two gauges of regime instability (illegitimacy and youth misery).”

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President Donald Trump announced Sunday that the U.S. Navy would immediately impose a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz after ceasefire talks with Iran failed to produce a deal.

That would turn the tables on the Islamic republic, which has effectively kept the narrow waterway closed with missile and drone strikes, keeping one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquid natural gas bottled up in the Persian Gulf.

At the same time as it’s been halting global supplies, Iran is letting its own oil exports through the strait, capitalizing on the massive spike in prices for crude.

But a U.S. blockade of Hormuz would cut off the financial windfall Tehran is reaping and further hobble an economy that was crashing even before the war started six weeks ago.

Retired Admiral James Stavridis, who previously served as NATO’s supreme allied commander, estimated that blockading the Strait of Hormuz would require two aircraft carrier strike groups that would provide air cover, plus a dozen destroyers and frigates operating outside the Persian Gulf.

Another half dozen U.S. warships as well as vessels from the UAE and Saudi navies would also be needed inside the Gulf, he told CNN on Sunday.

“So you try and bottle it up on both sides,” Stavridis added. “The bottom line: this is a big task, and it’s a big gamble.”

Just before the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, 18 warships were in the Middle East, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That included two aircraft carriers and the escort ships that are part of each strike group.

Since the war started, the U.S. has deployed a Marine Expeditionary Unit, which typically includes three warships and more than 2,000 Marines. Another MEU and a third carrier strike group are on the way to the Middle East.

Stavridis characterized a blockade of the strait as falling halfway between leaving it under Iranian control and Trump’s earlier threat to wipe out Iran as a civilization.

“It puts economic pressure on Tehran without destroying the oil facilities, which you should want to preserve into the future,” he said. “So big complicated undertaking, hardly a trivial move on the chess board we’ve been watching.”

Cutting off the trickle of oil that’s been coming out of the Persian Gulf would likely send energy markets into more turmoil. Futures have already soared, and prices for delivery of physical barrels are even higher as shortages mount.

Markets would also fear renewed fighting since a blockade would be perceived as a hostile act that triggers retaliation from Iran. U.S. warships near the strait could be vulnerable as Navy officials previously have described it as an Iranian “kill box” filled with numerous threats, including anti-ship missiles, drones, fast-attack boats, and mines.

But two destroyers crossed the strait on Saturday to begin setting conditions for clearing mines and eventually establishing “a new passage” for the maritime industry for the free flow of commerce.

Stavridis said that Iranian ships could try to look for ways around a blockade to smuggle oil or deploy more mines. He also warned Russia and China could come to Iran aid with cyberattacks.

Despite the risks of a blockade, analysts have touted it as an option that would avoid putting boots on the ground.

“The U.S. can implode Iran’s economy by shutting down its oil exports,” Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a Substack on March 13. “That might open up the Strait of Hormuz a lot faster than anything else. Time to implode Iran’s economy and give the Ayatollahs a taste of their own medicine.”

While he has been skeptical that the U.S. Navy has enough ships to escort all the tankers that typically transit the Strait of Hormuz, he said it has the resources to blockade Iran’s oil exports.

Removing more supply from global oil markets should send prices even higher, but Brooks argued crude might do the opposite if a U.S. blockade is seen ending the war quickly.

China, which buys most of Iran’s oil, would be incentivized to lobby Tehran to reopen the strait, and a blockade of Iran’s exports would deprive the regime of hard currency needed to prop up its war machine, he added.

“An embargo of Iranian oil, if the collapse in Iran’s economy is deep enough, could convince markets that the closure of the Strait might end sooner rather than later. As a result, Brent might only spike briefly or even fall,” Brooks wrote in a later post.

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Does being an early adopter to AI protect a company in an AI-induced market panic?

Apparently not, based on the experience of Intuit, best known for TurboTax and QuickBooks—and the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 as this year opened. It was a twist in fate for the software company: Intuit is a big name in tax and personal accounting software, and its stock is Wall Street royalty, smashing the S&P Index over the company’s 33 years as a publicly traded company. But in January and February, even as tax preparation season began, it took a drubbing in a market scare—the so-called SaaSpocalypse. Investors were suddenly gripped with the fear that AI would annihilate software companies of every kind.

For Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, the stock’s plunge was painfully ironic. Far from being caught off guard by AI, he was an early AI adopter. Years before most CEOs, he made AI a centerpiece of his company’s strategy, seeing it as a powerful tool, not a competitor. He told Fortune in 2020: “In five to ten years, undisputed, it will be as powerful as the impact of electricity and the internet.”

And he didn’t just talk the talk: That same year, Goodarzi laid off 715 employees—unprecedented at Intuit—and hired some 700 new employees who could advance AI throughout the company. Those moves made Intuit a leading-edge business model in the AI era—a high-profile example of how to go all-in on AI and simultaneously all-in on humans. The company’s example was seen by many as a portent of the AI future.

That reputation offered little protection during the SaaSpocalypse: Indeed, Intuit was the stock investors hammered most ferociously. “We got sold even more [than others] in the first six weeks of the year because we were trading so much better than our peer companies,” Goodarzi says. As the stock plunged, Intuit couldn’t fully respond to investors because a company quarter was closing at the end of January, so it had to observe the normal silent period.

Intuit’s stock price has rebounded partially to around $350 at publication time, with a valuation of shy of $100 billion—nowhere near its 2025 year-end level and less than half its all-time high of just over $220 billion, reached last summer. Many investors still think it’s only a matter of time until the major AI companies—OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic, Perplexity—steamroll all companies that sell software-based services.

Intuit’s strategy, which has delivered double-digit annual growth over the past five years, is built not just on AI, but also on the ancient, deep-seated magic of human interaction, Goodarzi says: It has “combined software and people into one.”

Born in Tehran and sent to a New Jersey boarding school at age nine, Goodarzi joined Intuit in 2004 and rose quickly. Along the way, he was put in charge of the company’s biggest businesses, TurboTax and QuickBooks. When CEO Brad Smith handed off the job to him after his own highly successful run, he said, “Sasan is better prepared to be CEO than I was 11 years ago.”

On his way up, Goodarzi had three insights that formed his strategy as CEO. They are:

“People don’t want to do anything that has to do with their money. They want us to do it for them.” For consumers and owners of small and medium businesses, wrong financial decisions can be ruinously expensive. Most people need help avoiding these: They don’t want to be finance experts; they want to focus on their lives and running their businesses.

“In our category, the spend on experts—tax experts, accounting experts, bookkeepers, auditors—is 7x what it is on software.” The company’s customers liked Intuit software but didn’t think it was enough. Intuit’s software-based strategy wasn’t playing where the real money is. They also needed experts, whom they had to find by themselves.

“People don’t buy software. They buy confidence.” That’s why people were spending so much money on experts: Many customers weren’t fully confident without a human in the picture.

Thus the strategy: In addition to using AI to upgrade the company’s software and improve operations, Intuit offered customers the option of bringing humans into the picture, at a range of price points. Those humans are live, U.S.-based professionals including CPAs, bookkeepers, lawyers, and other experts who are available via on-screen chat and phone, or one-way video in which experts see customers and guide them through complex scenarios. For business owners, Intuit will even arrange a dedicated bookkeeper.

For Goodarzi to complete his overhaul of Intuit’s strategy, he bought two companies: Credit Karma, for its enormous cache of consumer credit data to combine with Intuit’s taxpayer data, at $8 billion; and Mailchimp, to help QuickBook users build their businesses through online marketing, for $12 billion. Those acquisitions were Intuit’s most expensive by far, almost quadrupling the capital invested in the company—often a red flag. Yet Intuit’s performance improved. “They’ve been able to digest those acquisitions, put them to work, integrate them—that was quite impressive,” says Bennett Stewart, a corporate finance authority. Of Goodarzi he said, “He’s doing a very good job.”

Still, those moves were not  enough for the SaaSpocalypse to spare Intuit. Goodarzi’s job now is to stay focused on the business, which means pushing past the stock price and confronting the fear that ignited the sell-off—that the leading AI companies will eat software makers.

“The big question with this massive technological transformation is, who will own the customer interaction layer?” he says. “Is it going to come down to a few companies like Google Gemini, Anthropic, Open AI?” He is intent on preventing that from happening. Intuit, as a heavy user of AI, has made deals with Open AI and Anthropic, and “it’s in the contract,” Goodarzi says, “we own the customer experience and the customer relationship.”

Investors remain leery. But Intuit is performing well by financial measures, and Wall Street analysts overwhelmingly rate it “buy” or “strong buy.”

The next few years will show the results of Intuit’s pioneering AI-plus-humans experiment. Whatever happens, Sasan Goodarzi owns it.

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Never-before-glimpsed views of the moon’s far side. Check. Total solar eclipse gracing the lunar scene. Check. New distance record for humanity. Check.

With NASA’s lunar comeback a galactic-sized smash thanks to Artemis II, the world is wondering: What’s next? And how do you top that?

“To people all around the world who look up and dream about what is possible, the long wait is over,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said as he introduced Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen at Saturday’s jubilant homecoming celebration.

Now that the first lunar travelers in more than a half-century are safely back in Houston with their families, NASA has Artemis III in its sights.

“The next mission’s right around the corner,” entry flight director Rick Henfling observed following the crew’s Pacific splashdown on Friday.

In a mission recently added to the docket for next year, Artemis III’s yet-to-be -named astronauts will practice docking their Orion capsule with a lunar lander or two in orbit around Earth. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to have their company’s lander ready first.

Musk’s Starship and Bezos’ Blue Moon are vying for the all-important Artemis IV moon landing in 2028. Two astronauts will aim for the south polar region, the preferred location for Isaacman’s envisioned $20 billion to $30 billion moon base. Vast amounts of ice are almost certainly hidden in permanently shadowed craters there — ice that could provide water and rocket fuel.

The docking mechanism for Artemis III’s close-to-home trial run is already at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The latest model Starship is close to launching on a test flight from South Texas, and a scaled-down version of Blue Moon will attempt a lunar landing later this year.

NASA promises to announce the Artemis III crew “soon.” Like 1969’s Apollo 9, Artemis III aims to reduce risk for the moon landings that follow.

Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart loved flying the lunar module in low-Earth orbit — “a test pilot’s dream.” But there’s no question, he noted, that “the real astronauts” at least in the public’s mind were the ones who walked on the moon.

Wiseman and his crew put their passion and feelings on full display as they flew around the moon and back, choking up over lost loved ones as well as those left behind on Earth.

During the their nearly 10-day journey, they tearfully requested that a fresh, bright lunar crater be named after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. They also openly shared their love for one another and Planet Earth, an exquisite yet delicate oasis in the black void that they said needs better care.

Artemis II included the first woman, the first person of color and the first non-U.S. citizen to fly to the moon.

“Wonderful communicators, almost poets,” Isaacman said from the recovery ship while awaiting their return.

Apollo’s manly, all-business moon crews of the 1960s and 1970s certainly did not do group hugs.

For those old enough to remember Apollo, Artemis — Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology — couldn’t come fast enough.

Author Andy Chaikin said he felt like Rip Van Winkle awakening from a nearly 54-year nap. His 1994 biography “A Man on the Moon” led to the HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon.”

“It’s amazing how far we’ve come and how different this experience is from back then,” Chaikin said from Johnson Space Center late last week.

The hardest part, according to NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, is becoming so close to the crews and their families and then blasting them to the moon. He anxiously monitored Friday’s reentry alongside the astronauts’ spouses and children.

“You know what’s at stake,” Kshatriya confided afterward. “It’s going to take risk to explore, but you have to make sure you find the right line between being paralyzed by it and being able to manage it.”

Calling it “mission complete” only after being reunited with his two daughters, Wiseman issued a rallying cry to the rows of blue-flight-suited astronauts at Saturday’s celebration.

“It is time to go and be ready,” he said, pointing at them, “because it takes courage. It takes determination, and you all are freaking going and we are going to be standing there supporting you every single step of the way in every possible way possible.”

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President Donald Trump on Sunday said the U.S. Navy would “immediately” begin a blockade to stop ships from entering or leaving the Strait of Hormuz, after historic U.S.-Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan ended without an agreement or next diplomatic steps in sight.

In his first public comments after the 21-hour talks, Trump sought to exert strategic control over the waterway that was responsible for the shipping of 20% of global oil supplies before the war, hoping to eliminate Iran’s key source of leverage.

The prospect of a U.S. blockade could further rattle global energy markets and prices for oil, natural gas and related products. It was not immediately clear how a blockade might be carried out, but Trump said the goal of the blockade was to ensure all ships could transit: “It’s going to be all or none, and that’s the way it is.”

Trump said he has “instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.” Other nations would be involved in the blockade, he said, but did not name them.

Trump stressed that Tehran’s nuclear ambitions were at the core of the failure to end the war, and the U.S. was ready to “finish up” Iran at the “appropriate moment.”

No word on what happens after ceasefire expires

Face-to-face talks ended earlier Sunday, the highest-level negotiations between the longtime rivals since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Both delegations later left Islamabad.

Neither side indicated what will happen after the 14-day ceasefire expires on April 22. Pakistani mediators urged all parties to maintain it. Both sides said their positions were clear and blamed the other, underscoring how little the gap had narrowed.

“We need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,” Vice President JD Vance, leading the U.S. side, said afterward.

Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who led Iran in talks, said it was time for the United States “to decide whether it can gain our trust or not.” Iranian officials earlier said talks fell apart over two or three key issues, blaming what they called U.S. overreach.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said his country will try to facilitate a new dialogue between Iran and the U.S. in the coming days.

Iran said it was open to continuing the dialogue, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported.

The European Union urged further diplomatic efforts. The foreign minister of Oman, on the southern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, called for both parties to “make painful concessions.” And the Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin had “emphasized his readiness” to help bring about a diplomatic settlement in a call with Iran’s president.

Iran’s nuclear program is a key sticking point

Since the U.S. and Israel launched the war on Feb. 28, the fighting has killed at least 3,000 people in Iran, 2,020 in Lebanon, 23 in Israel and more than a dozen in Gulf Arab states, and caused lasting damage to infrastructure in half a dozen Middle Eastern countries. Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz has largely cut off the Persian Gulf and its oil and gas exports from the global economy, sending energy prices soaring.

Tensions have long centered on Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran has long denied seeking nuclear weapons but insisted on its right to a civilian nuclear program. It has offered “affirmative commitments” in the past in writing, including in the landmark 2015 nuclear deal, which took well over a year of negotiations. Experts say its stockpile of enriched uranium, though not weapons-grade, is only a short technical step away.

An Iranian diplomatic official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of closed-door talks, denied that negotiations had failed over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“Iran is not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, but it has the right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes,” the official said.

In Iran, there was fresh exhaustion and anger after months of unrest that had begun with nationwide protests against economic issues and then political ones, and then weeks of sheltering from U.S. and Israeli bombardment.

“We have never sought war. But if they try to win what they failed to win on the battlefield through talks, that’s absolutely unacceptable,” 60-year-old Mohammad Bagher Karami said in Tehran.

US moves to shift status quo in Strait of Hormuz

During the talks, the U.S. military said two destroyers transited the critical strait ahead of mine-clearing work, a first since the war began. Iran’s state media said the country’s joint military command denied that.

Before talks began, the ceasefire was already threatened by other deep disagreements and Israel’s continued attacks against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iran’s 10-point proposal had called for a guaranteed end to the war and sought control over the Strait of Hormuz. It wanted the end of fighting against Iran’s “regional allies,” explicitly calling for a halt to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah.

Pakistani officials earlier told The Associated Press that the U.S. 15-point proposal included a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program. Speaking on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorized to discuss details, they said it also covered reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Israel presses ahead with strikes in Lebanon

The impasse raises new questions about Lebanon. Israel has said the agreement did not apply there, but Iran and Pakistan claimed otherwise. Negotiations between Israel and Lebanon are expected to begin Tuesday in Washington after Israel’s surprise announcement authorizing talks despite their lack of official relations.

The day the Iran ceasefire deal was announced, Israel pounded Beirut with airstrikes, killing more than 300 people in the deadliest day in Lebanon since the war began, according to the country’s Health Ministry.

Though Israel’s strikes over Beirut have calmed, its attacks on southern Lebanon have intensified alongside the ground invasion it renewed after Hezbollah launched rockets toward Israel in the war’s opening days.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported six people were killed Sunday in an Israeli strike in Maaroub village near the coastal city of Tyre.

Israel wants Lebanon’s government to assume responsibility for disarming Hezbollah, but the militant group has survived efforts to curb its strength for decades.

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In 2011, President Barack Obama declared it was time for America to leave behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and “pivot” to Asia to counter the rise of China. Fifteen years later, the U.S. finds itself still at war in the Middle East and has pulled military assets from the Asia-Pacific as it aims to eliminate the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

The demands of the Iran war also caused President Donald Trump to delay by several weeks his highly anticipated trip to China, deepening worries that the U.S. is once again getting distracted at the cost of its strategic interests in Asia, where Beijing seeks to unseat the U.S. as the regional leader.

Those skeptical of the U.S. involvement in the Middle East say the war is preventing Trump from adequately preparing for his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping next month, when economic interests are on the line, and they warn that a failure to focus on Asia and maintain strong deterrence could lead to greater instability, if China should believe the time is ripe to seize the self-governed island of Taiwan.

“This is precisely the wrong time for the United States to turn away and be sucked into another intractable Middle East conflict,” said Danny Russel, a distinguished fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Rebalancing to Asia is highly relevant to America’s national interests, but it has been undercut by many bad decisions.”

Others defend the president’s approach, arguing that the forceful steps he is taking elsewhere, including in Venezuela and Iran, serve to counter China globally.

“Beijing is the chief sponsor for the adversaries that President Trump is dealing with sequentially, and it’s wise to do this sequentially,” Matt Pottinger, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, said in a recent podcast.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also said conflicts may not be confined to a single theater, suggesting that China could call upon its “junior partners” elsewhere to divert U.S. attention if it should move against Taiwan.

“Most likely it will not be limited, something in the Indo-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific,” Rutte said, speaking Thursday at the Ronald Reagan Institute in Washington. “It will be a multi-theater issue.”

Repercussions in Asia of the Iran war

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently led a bipartisan group of senators to Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, where they heard concerns about the impact of the war on energy costs and about the departure of U.S. military assets, including missile defense systems from South Korea and a rapid-response Marine unit from Japan.

She sought to reassure them of the U.S. commitment to deterring conflicts in Asia and shoring up regional stability.

“Failure is not an option,” Shaheen told The Associated Press after returning from Asia. “We know China has already said they intend to take Taiwan by force if they need to, and they’re on an expedited time schedule. And we also know that what happened in Europe, in the war in Ukraine, in the Middle East is affecting those calculations.”

Kurt Campbell, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, said he’s worried that the military capabilities that the U.S. had patiently accumulated in the Indo-Pacific region might not return in full even after the Iran war ends.

The longer the conflict goes on, the more it will pull resources and focus away from Asia, said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the U.S. strategy in Asia. He added that future arms sales to the region also will be negatively affected.

“The United States has expended substantial numbers of munitions in the Middle East and will have to keep an increased force presence there, some of which has been redirected from Asia,” Cooper said. “Meanwhile, Xi Jinping’s wisdom in preparing a ‘war time’ economy by stockpiling and adding alternate energy sources has shown itself to be beneficial.”

Shaheen said the U.S. defense industry will struggle to meet the demand to replenish the weapons stockpile. “We’re working on a number of strategies to improve that, but at this point, timelines for weapons delivery are slipping,” she said.

The senator from New Hampshire said she’s encouraged that Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are stepping up their own defense.

After 15 years and 3 presidents, pivot to Asia remains elusive

Obama’s strategic rebalance to Asia reflected his understanding that the U.S. must be a player in the Pacific to harness the region’s growth and ensure continued U.S. leadership in the face of China’s rising influence.

“After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region,” Obama said in a speech to the Australian Parliament. “So make no mistake, the tide of war is receding, and America is looking ahead to the future that we must build.”

But the strategy was set back when a proposed trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership with key U.S. regional partners failed to get through the U.S. Senate. After Trump first took office in 2017, he withdrew the U.S. from the partnership and launched a tariff war with China.

His Democratic successor, Joe Biden, kept Trump’s tariffs on China and tightened export controls on advanced technology, while strengthening regional alliances to counter China.

Middle East again grabs US attention

By the time Trump rolled out his national security strategy in late 2025, the U.S. strategy in Asia had been narrowed to military deterrence in the Taiwan Strait and the First Island Chain, a string of U.S.-aligned islands off China’s coast that restrict its access to the Western Pacific.

The national security document says it’s in the economic interest of the U.S. to secure access to advanced chips, which are sourced primarily from Taiwan and are needed to power everything from computers to missiles, and to protect shipping lanes in the South China Sea.

“Hence deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” the document says. “We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.”

The Middle East, it says, should be getting less attention: “As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.”

Then came the Iran war.

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Two empty crude tankers attempted to make their way through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf on Sunday, only to make last-minute U-turns just as peace negotiations between the US and Iran broke down, threatening a fragile ceasefire.

Two very large crude carriers and one Aframax-class vessel — all without direct links to Iran — began to approach the narrow waterway from the Gulf of Oman late on Saturday, ship-tracking data show, arriving near Iran’s Larak island early on Sunday. At that effective checkpoint, Iraq-bound Agios Fanourios I and Pakistan-flagged Shalamar, destined for Das island in the United Arab Emirates, turned back. 

The first VLCC, Mombasa B, sailed ahead and successfully made its way between Larak and Qeshm islands, an Iran-approved route into the Persian Gulf. It is not currently signaling a clear destination.

Meanwhile, the Khairpur, a Pakistani oil product tanker, was transiting through the Iranian corridor toward the Gulf after earlier changing course twice on Sunday. The vessel originally performed a U-turn near Larak and Qeshm islands before executing a second about-face to resume its inbound course.

The specific reasons behind the about-turns are not clear, as both Iraq and Pakistan had earlier received approvals from Iran to transit the strait. But their change of heart came just as negotiators in Islamabad announced they had failed to reach a deal.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most important energy thoroughfares and its effective closure since the US and Israel began strikes on Iran six weeks ago has resulted in unprecedented supply disruption. Its reopening has been a crucial point of discussion during weekend negotiations, but remains an area of disagreement.

In recent weeks, several ships have attempted to transit the strait only to abort their efforts, reflecting a constantly changing security situation and persistently high risks. The vast majority have been attempting to leave the Persian Gulf, but empty tankers are also needed inside, to be loaded with new cargoes.

Two Chinese container ships U-turned late last month before finally successfully exiting, while a liquefied natural gas carrier turned back last week.

A successful transit by all three crude tankers on Sunday would have continued a positive uptick in movement through the waterway, controlled by Iran and dominated by Iran-linked vessels since the end of February. On Saturday, two Chinese supertankers and a Greek vessel exited the gulf via Hormuz, laden with crude.

Agios Fanourios I is managed by Eastern Mediterranean Maritime in Greece, while Pakistan National Shipping Corp. owns Shalamar. The two companies did not immediately respond to emailed requests sent outside of working hours.

Mombasa B had recently switched its name from Front Forth. It is now owned by Haut Brion 8 SA that shares the same address as its South Korea-based manager, Sinokor Maritime Co. Sinokor did not respond to a request for comment outside of regular business hours. 

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Allison Ellsworth admits she’s not the typical founder story. She was, by her own telling, “a solid C student,” a partier, someone who got arrested during spring break and later found herself driving across the country working in oil and gas research. Even now, after selling Poppi for $2 billion, she doesn’t try to polish herself into the platonic image of a consumer founder.

 “I do TikToks in Crocs and socks with my hair in a ponytail,” she told Fortune. “I’m just a normal person.”

Pepsi, the soda and snack giant which bought her company, has taken notice. Since she sold her soda company, “they’ve been really big on ‘let Poppi be Poppi,’” Ellsworth said, adding that “I think they’re actually trying to learn from us.”

The 38-year-old built Poppi into one of the fastest-growing beverage brands in the country by leaning into a kind of marketing that was nimble, quick to respond and often very unserious. In fact, it got into a typical Tiktok-esque scandal by giving out vending machines of Poppi to influencers. But behind that was a deliberate strategy, Ellsworth recalled, one that Pepsi is now trying to understand and copy.

One of the clearest examples is pretty simple: Poppi will just send free cans to anyone who asks—no campaign, no targeting strategy, just an invitation. Now, she gets around 500 wedding invites a month alone. “Graduations, birthdays, all these things. We’re just shipping it out,” Ellsworth said. 

It sounds inefficient, but she argued it’s like Red Bull’s field marketing, where attractive young women gave out free cans of the energy drink during work events. The only the difference is that the demand is inbound. “No one needs to be out there with a backpack anymore. People are coming to you.”

That philosophy of being less controlling and more reacting extends to how she broadly thinks about the way marketing works. Ellsworth is often framed as a TikTok-native founder, and it’s true that Poppi’s rise was closely tied to social media and her bright colored packaging. She was the face of the brand early on, posting constantly and building familiarity with customers who felt like they knew her.

But she’s skeptical of the idea that TikTok alone can build a company at scale. Linear TV can influence a classic, older group with money to spend. 

What that means in practice is abandoning the usual safe, interchangeable ads that dominate commercial breaks. When Poppi started running TV spots, Ellsworth said the goal was to stand out as much as possible, doing the opposite of what’s expected. 

For example, she insisted that her bright pink-and-purple cans show up in commercials during NFL games, despite her drink being clearly marketed towards mostly college women. But Poppi broke the monotony of typical football ads of “dudes sitting around eating nachos or drinking beer.” 

“And then a bright pink can comes on the screen,” Ellsworth said. “It just breaks through because it’s so different.”

The same thinking carried into larger bets. Her recent Super Bowl ad featured Charli XCX and Rachel Sennott just droning the word “vibes” to each other, which garnered a big reaction, albeit mixed. But Ellsworth decided on the ad quickly and without the kind of prolonged testing that larger companies rely on. 

“We were just like, it’s a vibe,” Ellsworth said, adding that Pepsi initially was cautious but ended up trusting Poppi.

The ad ended up tripling brand awareness, according to Ellsworth. More importantly, it reinforced her belief that innovation, and not attention, is the real constraint in modern marketing. 

If you think TV is dead, you’re probably “just doing it the wrong way,” she said.

That view runs counter to how many startups are currently thinking about growth. In her conversations with founders, Ellsworth said she hears the same frustrations repeated: that funding is harder to get, that the market is saturated, that the odds are worse than they used to be.

Her response is a little harsh: “It’s probably because your business isn’t good.” 

More often, she sees founders trying to replicate what has already worked rather than creating something new. For decades, nobody dared to innovate on the soda category. Now, after Poppi’s success, “there’s like 100-plus prebiotic sodas.” Most, she believes, are too late. “You kind of missed the wave.”

The lesson, in her view, is not to copy a playbook but to build one. “Be the trendsetter. Don’t follow the trends.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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The experience of being a parent may be priceless. But the reality is there’s a price tag on raising a child, and it’s up in the hundreds of thousands. 

The average cost of raising a child over the course of 18 years in the U.S. has reached $303,418, according to a new study from LendingTree.