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Internet trailblazer Yahoo is exploring technology’s next frontier with Scout, an answer engine powered by artificial intelligence. Scout seems insightful, based on its response to a question posed by The Associated Press about why one of Silicon Valley’s brightest stars faded away a decade ago.

“Yahoo’s journey illustrates how a company with an early advantage can disappear without continuous innovation,” Scout explained, while also providing hyperlinks to other websites supporting its thesis.

Scout may have to come up with a different interpretation if Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone can leverage AI to expand upon a worldwide audience of 700 million users who have stuck with the company’s finance, sports, news, fantasy and email services, despite a history of folly that nearly destroyed a brand once synonymous with the internet.

Yahoo has “always been the white whale of turnarounds for me,’ said Lanzone, who has a track record for salvaging internet wrecks. “I always thought I could do something with this thing.”

Lanzone, 55, finally got his chance after the private equity firm Apollo Global Management paid $5 billion to take over Yahoo in September 2021 — a fraction of its peak $125 billion market value reached during the dot-com boom’s giddy days in early 2000. Apollo’s acquisition came after Verizon Communications bought Yahoo’s online operations in 2017 and then bungled an attempt to blend those services into AOL, another internet pioneer.

Verizon never would have gotten the chance to buy Yahoo’s online operations if not for the company’s perpetual blundering under seven different CEOs in 16 years.

Although Yahoo’s checkered past didn’t destroy the company, it left a stigma that makes it unlikely that it will ever come close to what it once was, said Jeremy Ring, who was among Yahoo’s first employees when he began selling ads for the service from his New York apartment in 1996.

“Even though Yahoo isn’t what it once was, it hasn’t turned into a Blockbuster or Radio Shack story either,” said Ring, who delved into the company’s ups and downs in a 2018 book, “We Were Yahoo!” “What is going to enable them to compete against all the bigger companies using AI? I am not convinced all the best engineers in the world are suddenly going to come work at Yahoo.”

Lanzone’s renovation efforts initially focused on shedding Yahoo’s dysfunctional parts. The teardown included jettisoning some of Yahoo’s advertising technology, selling publishers such as TechCrunch and Rivals and closing down AOL’s internet dial-up service in a move that cut off its final 500 users. As it stands now, Yahoo is “very profitable” and bringing in billions of dollars in revenue, Lanzone said, while declining to be more specific.

Once he got the cleanup work down, Lanzone began overhauling what remained — a process that has resulted in an upgrade of Yahoo’s popular fantasy sports division and a major overhaul of its email service that still ranks as the second largest on the web behind Google’s Gmail.

With the recent introduction of Scout to its 250 million users in the U.S., Yahoo is leaning into the AI movement with the hope that the s technology will simplify online search and produce more personal results tailored to each user’s interests. Lanzone is also hoping Scout turns into a flywheel, continually spinning traffic through its other services.

Yahoo will be competing against a familiar foil in Google, which remains the same formidable force that spelled the company’s demise 20 years ago and has been progressively layering more AI into its search engine with its Gemini technology. As if that isn’t daunting enough, Yahoo also will be vying against other popular AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude in addition to answer engines such as Perplexity.

In a tacit admission that it’s behind the curve, Yahoo is running Scout on AI technology licensed from Anthropic.

Unlike other AI chatbots and answer engines, Scout doesn’t simulate human conversations so users can “have a fake personal relationship with it,” Lanzone said. “The product is very unique, even though we didn’t invent AI in the first place.”

Yahoo’s pursuit of more online search traffic has been largely an exercise in futility since the late 1990s, a descent that started just a few years after Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo founded the company as the internet’s first comprehensive directory of websites.

But as the internet began to play a bigger role in entertainment and commerce, Yahoo shifted its focus from sending traffic elsewhere to building an all-purpose website that people wouldn’t want to leave. That strategic pivot opened the door for two other Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to create a search engine called Google.

After turning down a chance to buy Google for just $1 million in 1998, Yahoo poured even more resources into creating a one-stop destination while paying so little attention to search that it turned to another company to provide that technology in 2000. Yahoo not only hired Google as its search engine but also promoted its brand on its website. By 2002, Yahoo was offering to buy Google for $3 billion, but Page and Brin wanted $5 billion. The negotiating impasse launched Google on a trajectory toward an internet empire now valued at $3.7 trillion under corporate parent Alphabet Inc.

Yahoo went through a revolving door of seven CEOs, including former Google executive Marissa Mayer, on a quixotic quest to catch up in search before finally ending its 21-year existence as a publicly traded company with its ill-fated sale to Verizon for $4.5 billion. Along the way, Yahoo rejected a $44.6 billion takeover bid from Microsoft in 2008 before finally agreeing to license the software maker’s Bing search engine.

If Yahoo’s bet on Scout pays off, Lanzone concedes it could lead to the company returning to the stock market more than 30 years after completing a 1996 initial public offering that intensified the dot-com fever gripping investors back then. Lanzone believes another Yahoo IPO could still get people excited.

“We still have one of the biggest audiences on the internet, and that audience has been pretty loyal through a lot of ups and downs,” he said. “If we just ‘super-serve’ them, good things will happen.”

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The price of a PlayStation is going up by another $100, the second time in less than a year that Sony has upped the price tag on its popular gaming console.

Citing “continued pressures in the global economic landscape,” the Japanese company said that as of next Thursday, the PS5 will cost $649.99 in the U.S. The price for its digital edition was also raised by $100, to $599.99. The PS5 Pro will cost $899.99, a $150 increase.

The company raised prices similarly for other regions, including the United Kingdom, Europe and Japan.

Global trade has been upended by U.S. tariffs imposed on all of the nation’s trading partners and Sony bumped up the price for the PlayStation by $50 just last August. The war in Iran, now it its fourth week, has created a massive bottleneck of energy and manufacturing supplies, creating more price pressures for everyday goods, including electronics.

By the end of next week, the cost of a Sony PlayStation will be about 30% more than it was at this time last year.

“We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide,” Sony said in a blog post on its website.

Though Sony did not specifically cite it as a cause, Iran’s attack last week on Qatar’s natural gas export facility forced it to shut down, threatening supplies of helium, a key ingredient used to produce computer chips. Qatar supplies a third of the world’s helium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Qatar’s state-owned gas company said last week the shutdown would slash helium exports by 14%. Lower supply means higher prices, especially if the war drags on for months or longer, analysts said.

While most people know of helium as the gas that makes party balloons float, it is also essential for manufacturing semiconductors used in computers and an array of other tech devices.

Last month, Sony reported that its profit in the October-December quarter surged 11% to 377.3 billion yen ($2.4 billion), prompting the Japanese entertainment and electronics company to raise its full-year profit forecast to 1.13 trillion yen ($7.2 billion).

The PlayStation console celebrated its 30th anniversary in North America and Europe last year.

Rival Microsoft raised prices for some versions of its Xbox gaming console in September — long before the Iran war broke out — citing “changes in the macroeconomic environment.”

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Every Magnificent 7 stock is now down double digits from its 52-week high, with the group’s losses accelerating as the war in Iran compounds on the already fraught AI trade.

Microsoft has been hit the hardest by the drawdown, falling roughly 32% from its October peak, on track for its worst start to a year in its history. Meta is down about 25%, and Alphabet roughly 15% from its closing high last month. Even the darling of the AI trade, Nvidia, and the high-performing Amazon are negative on the year. A Bloomberg index tracking the seven said it had entered correction territory in mid-March, closing more than 10% below its October record.

The selloff marks a sharp reversal from years of AI-fueled gains—the index rose 107% in 2023, 67% in 2024, and 25% in 2025. Multiple forces are now working against the group simultaneously. Oil prices have surged since Operation Epic Fury began Feb. 28, reigniting inflation expectations and shifting the interest-rate outlook. Markets now price in a greater chance of rate hikes by year-end than cuts, according to CME’s FedWatch tool, removing what had been a key pillar of the bull case for growth stocks.

At the same time, though, the excitement around AI infrastructure spending has waned, and now the market seems as spooked by it than enticed. Combined capital expenditures for Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are expected to exceed $650 billion in 2026, an increase of about 60% from 2025. Institutional money, it seems, has rotated out of these Big Tech stocks and into energy, industrials and domestic manufacturing.

Some of the quick compression in value has drawn comparisons to the dot-com bust. Capital Economics wrote in a note on Friday that the S&P 500’s IT sector has converged with the valuations of the rest of the index, a pattern that matched the final months of the 2000s bubble. 

Still, Capital Economics believes that the earnings estimates for the stocks, even as prices have fallen, should give pause to too many ominous comparisons.

While the firm warned that a prolonged conflict could ultimately push the S&P 500 down to 6,000, its baseline view is that the AI buildout won’t be derailed by the war, and that a recovery in valuations will eventually put U.S. stocks back on top later this year.

“That tech outperformance, alongside the fact that the US economy looks less exposed to the conflict than most, informs our view that US equities will continue faring better than their peers,” senior markets economist James Reilly wrote. 

Several controversies have also slammed the Mag 7 in recent days. Microsoft’s Copilot AI product has been described as a disappointment by UBS. Meta just lost a landmark trial on its social media addiction. And many of these companies’ AI dreams are tied up in OpenAI, which just exited a massive deal with Disney to try to secure its place in Hollywood. 

Some investors see opportunities where there is wreckage. Robert Edwards, chief investment officer at Edwards Asset Management, argued that Big Tech earnings yields now resemble Treasury yields, and that the group’s strong balance sheets and real earnings growth make them attractive at current levels.

“Big Tech is where valuations are reasonable, where you have real growth,” Edwards said.

But there’s a reason dip-buyers aren’t jumping in during the drawdown. In fact, the Nasdaq tumbled 2% on Friday, despite President Donald Trump further delaying his threat to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure.

The war has introduced uncertainty that traditional valuation frameworks can’t fully price, and the Hormuz blockade has renewed focus on other potential vulnerabilities for the U.S.—including in Taiwan, where no strategic semiconductor reserve exists.  

Investors seemed tired of his flip-flopping rhetoric on the war, and have started paying attention instead directly to the signal of Israel continuing to strike Iran, and vice versa. As of writing, Iran still has complete control over the Strait of Hormuz, the strait from which 20% of the world’s oil gets passed through, and are considering adding a toll for ships to pass the Strait.

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One hardcore England fan hopes to sell a house to fund his World Cup trip this summer.

Andy Milne, a 62-year-old retired teacher, says he is ready to cash in on a second residency so he can afford to follow the soccer tournament in the United States, Mexico and Canada.

This will be his 10th World Cup supporting England, ninth for the men plus the 2023 Women’s World Cup. Milne has become a cult figure among England fans, often seen holding a replica World Cup trophy.

He lives in Thailand and has been renting out the house in northern England that he hopes to sell for 350,000 pounds ($465,000).

“It is going on the market because I’m selling it to go to the World Cup,” Milne told British tabloid The Mirror. “We have had a second home for 27 years so it felt like the right time to cash in.

“I definitely want to see the whole tournament. I am going to the U.S. on June 3 and will be there for seven weeks. So it will cost quite a lot of money.”

Milne said he will be Dallas for England’s first game against Croatia on June 17. England then plays Ghana in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on June 23, and finishes its group phase against Panama in New Jersey on June 27.

In addition to the high travel costs to move between venues, fans have criticized FIFA’s ticket pricing strategy for the World Cup.

Fan groups accused FIFA of a “monumental betrayal” in December when tickets were put on general sale ranging from $140 for the cheapest group games to $8,680 for the final. FIFA responded by offering some $60 seats.

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American investors are making a big move into Indian cricket, with two separate billion-dollar deals made on the same day for teams in the country’s most popular sports league.

No team in the Indian Premier League — one of Asia’s most-watched sports events — had ever sold for more than $1 billion until a consortium backed by U.S. businessmen Kal Somani and Rob Walton — the former Walmart chairman — agreed Tuesday to buy the Rajasthan Royals in a deal that Indian media valued at $1.63 billion.

That record only lasted hours, though, as an even bigger deal was announced the same day for reigning champion Royal Challengers Bengaluru. That team was bought for $1.78 billion by another consortium that includes U.S. billionaire David Blitzer’s Bolt Ventures and American asset manager Blackstone.

The two deals highlight the increasing allure of India’s national pastime among international investors looking to be part of the most popular sport in the world’s populous country.

“It’s mind-boggling numbers,” Indian cricketing great Sourav Ganguly told local reporters. “But great news for Indian cricket and the way forward. I think it’s already as big as the NBA.”

The valuations for the two teams mark a huge jump from their original 2008 sales, when liquor baron Vijay Mallya purchased RCB for $111.6 million and Rajasthan sold for $67 million.

Sports teams overall have become a major target of global investments, as businesses try to tap into new markets abroad and spending from their fan bases. Deloitte analysts wrote in an outlook published last month that the industry is “entering an age of expansion” — and that private equity deals across sports leagues have jumped in recent years.

Cricket’s hottest property

The IPL, which only runs three months a year, features the sport’s shortest format — called Twenty20 — and has developed into cricket’s hottest property. In 2022, the broadcast rights for the 2023-27 cycle were bought for $6.4 billion by Disney Star and Reliance Viacom18. Disney has since exited its India business and the two entities together formed JioStar in 2025.

In a statement, Blitzer described the IPL as “one of the great growth stories in global sport.”

In 2021, the league was expanded from eight to 10 teams and the two new franchises, Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants, sold for $670 million and $940 million, respectively.

In comparison, the London Spirit team of the British cricket league The Hundred was valued in 2025 at $370 million — the highest for any team in that tournament — when its partial stake was up for sale last year.

“Over the past two decades, the IPL has morphed to become a global sporting powerhouse that has changed the face of Indian cricket, creating enormous value for India,” said Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of Aditya Birla Group, which is part of the consortium that includes Blitzer. “RCB, as one of the most compelling franchises in modern sport, offers us a distinctive platform to extend our legacy into the arena of global sport.”

The 2025 title was RCB’s first, but the celebrations turned tragic when at least 11 people died in a deadly crowd crush at the team’s stadium.

The new ownership consortium will bring in a reformed management team for RCB. Aditya Birla director Aryaman Vikram Birla will serve as chairman, while Satyan Gajwani of the Times of India Group will take on the role of vice chairman.

Blitzer already has ownerships stakes in the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and the Premier League’s Crystal Palace, among a slew of other teams.

For Rajasthan, Somani was an existing shareholder and moved to take full control of the franchise in a deal that still needs approval from the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Indian media reported. The Arizona-based tech entrepreneur is also one of the founders of Motor City Golf Club in the TGL league co-founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.

The 81-year-old Walton is the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, and is an owner of the NFL’s Denver Broncos.

Room for growth

While the IPL’s current valuations still fall well shy of the top global sports franchises in other sports, like the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys or soccer’s Real Madrid, there is still room to grow.

Cricket made a foray into the U.S. market with the 2024 T20 World Cup — won by India — and the sport will return to American shores at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

Times Group, another of RCB’s new co-owners, is already heavily invested in the American cricket market. It owns Willow, which primarily broadcasts all major cricket matches — including the IPL — in the U.S.

Walmart, meanwhile, has key interests in India. It acquired a majority stake in e-commerce giant Flipkart in 2018, and also controls PhonePe, the leading digital payments platform among other business interests.

There is also a connection between the IPL and Major League Cricket — a T20 competition that began in 2023 and has six teams: in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C.

The MLC is run with the blessings of IPL’s franchises – Chennai Super Kings owns the Texas franchise, while Kolkata Knight Riders and Mumbai Indians own the Los Angeles and New York teams, respectively. The league is expected to grow to eight teams in 2027, with Arizona being a prime contender for one of the new franchises.

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AP business writer Wyatte Grantham-Philips in New York contributed to this report.

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Artificial intelligence chatbots are so prone to flattering and validating their human users that they are giving bad advice that can damage relationships and reinforce harmful behaviors, according to a new study that explores the dangers of AI telling people what they want to hear.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, tested 11 leading AI systems and found they all showed varying degrees of sycophancy — behavior that was overly agreeable and affirming. The problem is not just that they dispense inappropriate advice but that people trust and prefer AI more when the chatbots are justifying their convictions.

“This creates perverse incentives for sycophancy to persist: The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement,” says the study led by researchers at Stanford University.

The study found that a technological flaw already tied to some high-profile cases of delusional and suicidal behavior in vulnerable populations is also pervasive across a wide range of people’s interactions with chatbots. It’s subtle enough that they might not notice and a particular danger to young people turning to AI for many of life’s questions while their brains and social norms are still developing.

One experiment compared the responses of popular AI assistants made by companies including Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI to the shared wisdom of humans in a popular Reddit advice forum.

When AI won’t tell you you’re a jerk

Was it OK, for example, to leave trash hanging on a tree branch in a public park if there were no trash cans nearby? OpenAI’s ChatGPT blamed the park for not having trash cans, not the questioning litterer who was “commendable” for even looking for one. Real people thought differently in the Reddit forum abbreviated as AITA, after a phrase for someone asking if they are a cruder term for a jerk.

“The lack of trash bins is not an oversight. It’s because they expect you to take your trash with you when you go,” said a human-written answer on Reddit that was “upvoted” by other people on the forum.

The study found that, on average, AI chatbots affirmed a user’s actions 49% more often than other humans did, including in queries involving deception, illegal or socially irresponsible conduct, and other harmful behaviors.

“We were inspired to study this problem as we began noticing that more and more people around us were using AI for relationship advice and sometimes being misled by how it tends to take your side, no matter what,” said author Myra Cheng, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Stanford.

Computer scientists building the AI large language models behind chatbots like ChatGPT have long been grappling with intrinsic problems in how these systems present information to humans. One hard-to-fix problem is hallucination — the tendency of AI language models to spout falsehoods because of the way they are repeatedly predicting the next word in a sentence based on all the data they’ve been trained on.

Reducing AI sycophancy is a challenge

Sycophancy is in some ways more complicated. While few people are looking to AI for factually inaccurate information, they might appreciate — at least in the moment — a chatbot that makes them feel better about making the wrong choices.

While much of the focus on chatbot behavior has centered on its tone, that had no bearing on the results, said co-author Cinoo Lee, who joined Cheng on a call with reporters ahead of the study’s publication.

“We tested that by keeping the content the same, but making the delivery more neutral, but it made no difference,” said Lee, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology. “So it’s really about what the AI tells you about your actions.”

In addition to comparing chatbot and Reddit responses, the researchers conducted experiments observing about 2,400 people communicating with an AI chatbot about their experiences with interpersonal dilemmas.

“People who interacted with this over-affirming AI came away more convinced that they were right, and less willing to repair the relationship,” Lee said. “That means they weren’t apologizing, taking steps to improve things, or changing their own behavior.”

Lee said the implications of the research could be “even more critical for kids and teenagers” who are still developing the emotional skills that come from real-life experiences with social friction, tolerating conflict, considering other perspectives and recognizing when you’re wrong.

Finding a fix to AI’s emerging problems will be critical as society still grapples with the effects of social media technology after more than a decade of warnings from parents and child advocates. In Los Angeles on Wednesday, a jury found both Meta and Google-owned YouTube liable for harms to children using their services. In New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Google’s Gemini and Meta’s open-source Llama model were among those studied by the Stanford researchers, along with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and chatbots from France’s Mistral and Chinese companies Alibaba and DeepSeek.

Of leading AI companies, Anthropic has done the most work, at least publicly, in investigating the dangers of sycophancy, finding in a 2024 research paper that it is a “general behavior of AI assistants, likely driven in part by human preference judgments favoring sycophantic responses.”

None of the companies directly commented on the Science study on Thursday but Anthropic and OpenAI pointed to their recent work to reduce sycophancy.

The risks of AI sycophancy are widespread

In medical care, researchers say sycophantic AI could lead doctors to confirm their first hunch about a diagnosis rather than encourage them to explore further. In politics, it could amplify more extreme positions by reaffirming people’s preconceived notions. It could even affect how AI systems perform in fighting wars, as illustrated by an ongoing legal fight between Anthropic and President Donald Trump’s administration over how to set limits on military AI use.

The study doesn’t propose specific solutions, though both tech companies and academic researchers have started to explore ideas. A working paper by the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute shows that if a chatbot converts a user’s statement to a question, it is less likely to be sycophantic in its response. Another paper by researchers at Johns Hopkins University also shows that how the conversation is framed makes a big difference.

“The more emphatic you are, the more sycophantic the model is,” said Daniel Khashabi, an assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins. He said it’s hard to know if the cause is “chatbots mirroring human societies” or something different, “because these are really, really complex systems.”

Sycophancy is so deeply embedded into chatbots that Cheng said it might require tech companies to go back and retrain their AI systems to adjust which types of answers are preferred.

Cheng said a simpler fix could be if AI developers instruct their chatbots to challenge their users more, such as by starting a response with the words, “Wait a minute.” Her co-author Lee said there is still time to shape how AI interacts with us.

“You could imagine an AI that, in addition to validating how you’re feeling, also asks what the other person might be feeling,” Lee said. “Or that even says, maybe, ‘Close it up’ and go have this conversation in person. And that matters here because the quality of our social relationships is one of the strongest predictors of health and well-being we have as humans. Ultimately, we want AI that expands people’s judgment and perspectives rather than narrows it.”

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A top Iranian official warned the U.S. against a ground invasion, saying American troops would be set “on fire,” as regional diplomats gathered in Pakistan on Sunday in a push to broker an end to the monthlong war.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, dismissed weekend talks as a cover while the U.S. dispatches additional troops to the Middle East. He said Iran was prepared to confront any American forces on its soil and would respond harshly against both U.S. troops and Washington’s regional allies, according to Iranian state media.

The remarks came as Pakistan said the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt were holding talks in Islamabad without U.S. or Israeli participation. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif earlier said he and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had held “extensive discussions” on the regional hostilities.

Yet there were few signs of progress as Israel and the U.S. kept up strikes on Iran, and Tehran responded by firing missiles and drones across the region.

More than 3,000 people have been killed throughout the monthlong war that began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, triggering Iran’s attacks on Israel and neighboring Gulf Arab states.

Israel announced waves of incoming strikes from Iran on Sunday and explosions could be heard throughout Tehran.

Mideast leaders try to break impasse at weekend talks

Egypt’s Badr Abdelatty, Turkey’s Hakan Fidan and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Faisal Bin Farhan were in Islamabad as part of talks scheduled days after the U.S. offered Iran a 15-point “action list” as a framework for a possible peace deal. Abdelatty said the meetings were aimed at opening a “direct dialogue” between the U.S. and Iran, which have largely communicated through mediators during the war.

Yet during the talks, Iran has eased some restrictions on commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. It agreed late Saturday to allow 20 more Pakistani-flagged vessels to transit the critical passageway, Pakistani officials said, adding to the select few it has let through as Iran works to choke but not cut off the strait entirely.

The weekend provided little sign of the talks narrowing the disconnect between the U.S. and Iran. U.S. officials have insisted the war may be nearing an inflection point but Iranian leaders continue to publicly reject negotiations.

To the contrary, the United States has dispatched thousands of additional Marines and paratroopers to the region. And the Iran-backed Houthis, who govern parts of Yemen, announced their long-awaited entry into the war, launching missiles toward what they called “sensitive Israeli military sites” for the first time on Saturday.

Despite the deployments, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Washington “can achieve all of our objectives without ground troops” as domestic opposition grows to expanding the war to a potential ground invasion, including among Republicans.

Yet Iranian officials have rejected the U.S. framework and in public dismissed the idea of negotiating under pressure. Still, Press TV, the English-language arm of Iran’s state broadcaster, reported last week that Tehran drafted its own five-point proposal, citing an anonymous official. The plan reportedly called for a halt to killing Iranian officials, guarantees against future attacks, reparations and Iran’s “exercise of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.”

Tehran threatens retaliatory strikes on Israeli and US universities

Iran on Sunday warned of additional escalation after Israeli airstrikes hit several universities, including ones that Israel claimed were used for nuclear research and development.

The paramilitary Revolutionary Guard warned in a statement that Iran would consider Israeli universities and branches of American universities in the region “legitimate targets” unless offered safety assurances for Iranian universities, state media reported.

American colleges including Georgetown, New York University and Northwestern have campuses in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

“If the U.S. government wants its universities in the region spared, it should condemn the bombardment of (Iranian) universities by 12 o’clock Monday, March 30, in an official statement,” the Guard said.

It also demanded the U.S. stop Israel from striking Iranian universities and research centers. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said on Saturday that dozens of universities and research centers have been hit, among them the Iran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology.

Houthi involvement sparks concerns

Houthi Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said on the rebels’ Al-Masirah satellite television station on Saturday that they launched missiles toward “sensitive Israeli military sites” in the south.

The group — which controls parts of Yemen — launched repeated attacks aimed at Israel and Red Sea shipping during the height of the Israel-Hamas war. Israeli strikes on Yemen last year killed the rebel-run government’s prime minister and top military general.

If the Houthis again increased attacks on commercial shipping, it would further push up oil prices and destabilize “all of maritime security,” said Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group. “The impact would not be limited to the energy market.”

Bab el-Mandeb, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, is crucial for vessels heading to the Suez Canal through the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia has been routing millions of barrels of crude oil a day through it because the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed.

Houthi rebels attacked more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two vessels, between November 2023 and January 2025. They have held Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since 2014. Saudi Arabia launched a war against the Houthis on behalf of Yemen’s exiled government in 2015. They now have an uneasy ceasefire.

Death toll climbs

Iranian authorities say more than 1,900 people have been killed in the Islamic Republic, while 19 have been reported dead in Israel.

In Lebanon, where Israel has started an invasion in the south while targeting the Hezbollah militant group, officials said more than 1,100 people have been killed in the country since the start of the war.

In Iraq, where Iranian-supported militia groups have entered the conflict, 80 members of the security forces have died.

In Gulf states, 20 people have been killed. Four have been killed in the occupied West Bank.

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Metz reported from Ramallah and Magdy from Cairo.

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A 118-foot mountain of ice rose over the suburban Paris countryside this weekend as Disney opened its Arendelle kingdom to the world — Elsa’s palace glowing at the summit, a “Frozen” Nordic fishing village below, and the company’s new CEO standing before a crowd of celebrities.

World of Frozen, an immersive land themed to the blockbuster animated franchise, opened Sunday as the centerpiece of a 2 billion euro ($2.18 billion) transformation at Disneyland Paris.

The transformation renames one of the two theme parks at the Disneyland Paris complex from Walt Disney Studios Park to Disney Adventure World. The inauguration drew Penélope Cruz, Naomi Campbell and Teyana Taylor.

It is the largest expansion in the 34-year history of Disneyland Paris, and one node in a roughly $60 billion global buildout of Disney’s parks, resorts and cruise lines.

A new CEO’s first stage

It is also the first major international stage for Josh D’Amaro, who took over as Disney’s chief executive on March 18 — just 11 days before the French gates opened — after nearly three decades in the company’s theme parks division.

The parks-and-experiences business generated about 57% of the company’s $17.5 billion in segment operating income last year, the force that observers say propelled D’Amaro from parks chief to the corner office.

An Associated Press journalist accompanied D’Amaro on the “Frozen” ride Saturday night.

The carriage splashed through water to childlike cheers from riders and laughter from the new chief executive as they glided past singing Elsa in the dark. Some stepped off lightly wet.

“The Walt Disney Company was built on one man’s dream, and for more than 100 years we’ve shared that dream with the world,” D’Amaro told the inauguration crowd.

“Storytelling is fundamental to everything that we do, whether that’s on screen or stage, in our theme parks, on our cruise ships, or even at home.”

He called the opening “a transformational moment” and paid tribute to the creative team behind the land, including “Frozen” writer-director Jennifer Lee — all now at work on “Frozen 3.”

A remarkable Disney reversal

On Friday, D’Amaro had stood alongside Emmanuel Macron at the resort.

The French president used the visit to claim the park as a national economic asset, calling Disneyland Paris “the leading tourist destination in Europe” and describing it as “a genuine ecosystem of success.”

Macron said the latest expansion would create 1,000 additional direct jobs.

“Since the beginning, that’s 13 billion euros invested on this territory,” Macron said.

Disneyland Paris says the resort now employs more than 20,000 people, supports 70,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs, and has recorded more than 445 million visits since 1992 — accounting for 6.1% of France’s national tourism revenue.

Macron’s presence underscored a remarkable reversal.

When the park opened as Euro Disney in 1992, French intellectuals derided it as a “cultural Chernobyl.” Now a French president was standing in front of cameras calling it an engine of national prosperity.

European roots

It is no coincidence that “Frozen” and “Tangled” — the two stories anchoring Disney’s new lineup at its sole European resort — both trace their roots to European folklore.

“Frozen” draws loosely from “The Snow Queen”; the new Tangled family ride recalls the Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel.

“Frozen, of course, has its roots in European storytelling,” said Michel den Dulk of Walt Disney Imagineering.

“It’s very loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen. So to have a northern European, charming wooden little village here in Disneyland Paris, where you can see your favorite Frozen characters — it just made sense.”

The land recreates Arendelle around a lagoon, its timber buildings painted in muted Scandinavian pastels, facades adorned with rosemaling, a traditional Norwegian decorative art.

At the center is Frozen Ever After, a boat ride featuring state-of-the-art animatronics and immersive projection effects.

Guests can meet Anna and Elsa inside Arendelle Castle, have a conversation with a responsive baby troll named Mossy who talks back, and watch a lagoon celebration called the Snow Flower Festival — featuring an original song.

A next-generation robotic Olaf roams the land.

Beyond World of Frozen, the rebranded park brings a vast new lake called Adventure Bay, a Tangled family ride, 15 new dining locations — including the posh Regal View Restaurant — and a nighttime spectacular called Disney Cascade of Lights featuring more than 380 drones.

A Lion King land, already under construction, will follow.

More than 90% of the second park’s offerings will have been redesigned since it opened in 2002, and Disney says the footprint will roughly double once the full transformation is complete.

Disney’s streaming has swung from deep losses to profitability, but the parks remain the company’s most dependable earnings engine — and D’Amaro is the man who ran them.

“We continue to dream bigger and bring stories to life in brand new ways,” D’Amaro told the crowd.

Pyrotechnics lit up Arendelle Village.

The ice palace on the mountain turned blue.

And 34 years after Euro Disney became a punchline, a brand-new kingdom opened in the fields east of Paris — for the first time in forever.

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Pope Leo XIV on Sunday rejected claims that God justifies war , as he prayed especially for Christians in the Middle East during a Palm Sunday Mass before tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square.

With the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran entering its second month and Russia’s ongoing campaign in Ukraine, Leo dedicated his Palm Sunday homily to his insistence that God is the “king of peace” who rejects violence and comforts those who are oppressed.

“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” Leo said. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Leaders on all sides of the Iran war have used religion to justify their actions. U.S. officials, especially Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have invoked their Christian faith to cast the war as a Christian nation trying to vanquish its foes with military might.

Russia’s Orthodox Church, too, has justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war” against a Western world it considers has fallen into evil.

Palm Sunday marks Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem in the time leading up to his crucifixion, which Christians observe on Good Friday, and resurrection on Easter Sunday.

In a special blessing at the end of Mass, Leo said he was praying especially for Christians in the Middle East who are “suffering the consequences of an atrocious conflict. In many cases, they cannot live fully the rites of these holy days.”

Earlier Sunday, the Latin Patriarchate said Jerusalem police prevented the Catholic Church’s top leadership from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was the first time in centuries church leaders were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday at the place where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, the Patriarchate said.

Israeli police said the Catholic leaders’ request for access to the church had been denied, since all holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem were closed to worshippers for security reasons. A police statement said freedom of worship would continue to be upheld “subject to necessary restrictions.”

Leo said that during Holy Week, Christians cannot forget how many people around the world are suffering as Christ did. “Their trials appeal to the conscience of all. Let us raise our prayers to the Prince of Peace so that he may support people wounded by war and open concrete paths of reconciliation and peace,” Leo said.

A Holy Week that recalls Pope Francis’ suffering

For many people at the Vatican, the start of Holy Week this year brings back memories of the final suffering days of Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday.

When Holy Week opened last year, Francis was still recovering at the Vatican after a five-week hospital stay for double pneumonia. He had delegated the liturgical celebrations to others, but rallied on Easter Sunday to greet the faithful from the loggia of St. Peter’s Square. Most poignantly, he then made what became his final popemobile loop around the piazza.

Francis died the following morning after suffering a stroke. His nurse, Massimiliano Strappetti, later told Vatican Media that Francis had told him: “Thank you for bringing me back to the square” for the final salute.

Leo is due to preside over this week’s liturgical appointments and is returning to tradition with the Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremony that commemorates Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples.

During his 12-year pontificate, Francis famously celebrated the Holy Thursday ritual by traveling to Rome-area prisons and refugee centers to wash the feet of people most on society’s margins. His aim was to drive home the ritual’s message of service and humility, and he would frequently muse during his Holy Thursday homilies “Why them and not me?”

Francis’ gesture had been praised as a tangible evidence of his belief that the church must go to the peripheries to find those most in need of God’s love and mercy. But some critics bristled at the annual outings, especially since Francis would also wash the feet of Muslims and people of other faiths.

Leo restores Holy Week foot-washing tradition

Leo, history’s first U.S.-born pope, is returning the Holy Thursday foot-washing tradition to the basilica of St. John Lateran, where popes performed it for decades. The Vatican hasn’t yet said who will participate, though Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II normally washed the feet of 12 priests.

On Friday, Leo is due to preside over the Good Friday procession at Rome’s Colosseum commemorating Christ’s Passion and crucifixion. Saturday brings the late night Easter Vigil, during which Leo will baptize new Catholics, followed a few hours later by Easter Sunday when Christians commemorate the resurrection of Jesus.

Leo will celebrate Easter Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square and then deliver his Easter blessing from the loggia of the basilica.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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Tiger Woods’ arrest Friday for a car crash in Florida was at least the fourth auto-related incident involving the golfer and the second in which he was charged with driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Woods showed signs of impairment and was arrested at the scene of the crash in which he struck another vehicle and rolled his Land Rover not far from his home on Jupiter Island, authorities said. He did a Breathalyzer test, which came out negative, but refused to take a urine test. Neither Woods nor the person in the other vehicle were injured, Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek said.

Woods was charged Friday with driving under the influence with property damage and refusal to submit to a lawful test, both misdemeanors.

Here’s a look at his other crashes over the past couple decades.

The first DUI charge

Woods was charged with driving under the influence in 2017 when south Florida police found him asleep behind the wheel of his car with the engine running. It was parked in a traffic lane and had damage to the driver’s side.

Woods said he had taken a mix of prescription painkillers and had a bad reaction.

He pleaded guilty to reckless driving in 2017 and agreed to complete a first-time DUI offender program to stay out of jail. He received a year of probation, a small fine and community service.

California crash nearly costs Woods his leg

In February 2021, Woods survived a rollover crash in which his SUV ran off a coastal road in Los Angeles County at a high speed, leading to multiple leg and ankle injuries.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Woods was driving between 84 and 87 miles per hour (135 to 140 kilometers per hour) on a winding road with a speed limit of 45 miles per hour (72 kilometers per hour) when he crashed. No charges were filed.

Doctors said Woods shattered the tibia and fibula bones of his lower right leg in multiple locations. Those injuries were stabilized with a rod in the tibia. Additional injuries to the bones in the foot and ankle required screws and pins.

Woods spent three months immobilized — a makeshift hospital bed was set up in his Florida home — before he could start moving around on crutches and eventually walk on his own. He said the idea of amputating his right leg “was on the table.”

He did not play on the PGA Tour that year but returned to the Masters in 2022.

Fire hydrant collision

Woods ran out of his home in Orlando, Florida, on Nov. 27, 2009, and drove his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant and a tree in his neighbor’s yard about 2:30 a.m., authorities said.

That came two days after the National Enquirer published a story alleging Woods had been seeing a New York nightclub hostess, and that they recently were together in Melbourne. The Windermere police chief at the time said officers found Woods lying in the street with his then-wife, Elin Nordegren, hovering over him.

The chief said Nordegren told officers she was in the house when she heard the crash and “came out and broke the back window with a golf club.” Woods had lacerations to his upper and lower lips, and blood in his mouth.

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As a fresh-faced Gen Z job seeker, securing a spot at one of the big Wall Street banks is one hurdle, but making it through the grueling work is another. Luckily, they have now have a cheat-sheet for success; Jefferies CEO Rich Handler laid out his best tips for the young apprentices joining the firm.

“If you act immediately in your internship like this is 100% your full-time career, you will optimize your experience,” Handler stressed in a 2025 letter to young apprentices joining the firm. “It’s all about attitude.”

The Jefferies leader shared words of advice (and warnings) to the cohort of summer interns who joined the highly selective program. 

In 2024, the $8.21 billion financial group only admitted 338 young professionals from a pool of more than 25,000 applicants. The 1.35% acceptance rate means landing the entry-level gig is even harder than getting into Ivy League universities. Last year, the business had 365 summer interns on payroll.

As top-notch Gen Z apprentices cut their teeth on Wall Street, Handler wants to ensure they’re prepped for the big time. The Jefferies CEO detailed 20 tidbits of advice and insight into the internship, from handling ego to maintaining work-life balance. And the tips will come in handy when young banking apprentices first step into high-intensity roles on shaky legs. 

Key takeaways: connection is key, act accordingly, and be career-conscious 

Handlers’ need-to-knows span across a whole range of issues that young adults entering the corporate world are bound to run into. It’s hard for the professional newbies to fully understand the work, recognize what they want from their careers, balance their ambition with humility, and achieve work-life harmony. The CEO’s wisdom could help guide Gen Zers through the tumult.

Handler discussed the importance of connection several times; interns should bond with their teams, network across the firm, and appreciate their clients. And when Jefferies’ apprentices start their roles, they should pay it forward and help other students land an opportunity next year. 

However, they shouldn’t be fooled into thinking Wall Street is one big fraternity. Employers have routinely struggled with young employees; six out of 10 bosses had already fired some of their Gen Z workers fresh out of college, according to a 2024 report, due to a lack of motivation, professionalism, and communication skills. And Handler instructed the young professionals to act accordingly, and take the job seriously—they’re on Wall Street now. It’s essential that they bring maturity to the gig, be humble, ask questions, and act with integrity. 

“Welcome to the real world,” Handler wrote. “This is not college. We are not a fraternity or sorority. You are an adult and we will treat you like one.”

Some large financial institutions have come under fire for overworking their junior staffers, although the tides are slowly changing. Despite the 100-hour workweeks some young bankers still suffer through, Handler stressed the importance of having a life. He urged the interns to create boundaries, and plan fun after the programs ends and before school begins again. And refreshingly, the CEO said that if the banking sector isn’t for you, it’s good to ponder your career and make a change. 

Jefferies CEO’s top 20 tips for summer interns

Here is a brief run-down of Handler’s top 20 tips for Jefferies’ 2025 summer interns.

1. Build relationships with the full-time team: “The most important part of internships (and business) is building relationships. While you are working hard to please everyone, never forget that it is the human connection that matters the most.”
2. Build relationships with other interns—not zero sum: “The bonds you build with your fellow interns are an incredible part of your summer internship. Never view any of these people as your competitors because life is not ‘zero sum.’ Every one of you can be winners with full-time offers at the end of the summer or none of you can.”
3. The environment is always different: “Every summer is different and that means every summer intern class has different opportunities and challenges…You never know what the environment will bring, but there are opportunities and things to learn regardless of the macro factors.”
4. Learn the entire firm: “You can do this by reading, networking internally with others who work full-time in different areas and by making friends with interns outside your area of focus…There are many different aspects to an investment bank, and you might find a different one suits you better.”
5. Act like this is your career choice: “If you act immediately in your internship like this is 100% your full-time career, you will optimize your experience. You will take the time to invest in real relationships, understand concepts and strategies because you will feel the need to rely on them for decades…It’s all about attitude.”
6. Understand the assignment first: “You will save yourself an enormous amount of time/effort and dramatically increase the odds of a successful outcome if you spend extra time upfront learning exactly what you are being asked to accomplish.”
7. Appreciate time with clients: “Clients are our lifeblood. They are why we have careers and without them, our company has no reason to exist. Our goal is to give each of you as many chances as possible to be exposed to our clients. This is also one of the best ways to learn.”
8. Stay current: “Staying informed, concerned and involved with helping make the world a better place has many benefits.”
9. Is this for you? “While striving to be the best you can be, also spend the summer assessing if you can see yourself truly enjoying a career in the industry, firm, division and role of your summer job. Get to know the people around you…try to listen and really understand their enjoyment, frustrations, challenges and opportunities.”
10. Choose integrity: “Our industry is littered with once prominent professionals with extraordinarily promising careers who were brought to tears and ruin due to lapses in ethical principles. Consider this summer to be the final warning about how fragile everything in life truly is, especially reputations.”
11. Think: “You can get completely caught up in ‘doing’ and end up being so narrowly focused that you neglect one of the most important priorities these programs afford: ‘thinking.’”
12. Have a life: “A summer internship in finance can be one of the most intense work periods of your career…You need to do your best to draw the line in the sand this summer and decide now that you will maintain some reasonable degree of balance in your life.”
13. Ask questions: “You will have a million questions. There are no stupid ones. Ask away but be mindful of what is going on when you ask.”
14. The math is real: “Force yourself to come to grips with the reality that all of these zeros at the end of everything you are working on are real. These are big numbers with dollar signs in front of them…P.S. Don’t make yourself neurotic or nuts, but always check your work before submitting it. Maybe check it twice.”
15. Have fun: “This summer will be a waste if you don’t have fun and enjoy yourself. Enjoy the people you meet and don’t be intimidated by anyone. Don’t take yourself or any of the people in our industry too seriously.”
16. Pay it forward: “The day you start your internship is the day you can start helping others at your respective schools who are interested in finance get their jobs for the summer of 2026.”
17. Lead with humility and confidence: “There is a very fine line between confidence and arrogance…Humble people let their accomplishments speak for themselves versus cleverly advertising them.”
18. Be mature: “Welcome to the real world. This is not college. We are not a fraternity or sorority. You are an adult and we will treat you like one.”
19. Plan for the end of summer: “Plan now for a short trip after the internship and before school starts. There are very few times in life when you can truly have zero guilt about rewarding yourself with some time away.”
20. Have perspective: “If you decide you really don’t like this summer job or if you decide you love it, but circumstances result in not achieving a full-time offer, neither is the end of the world.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on June 4, 2025.

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Elon Musk has warned the biggest issue hampering AI advancement in the United States is a problem Chinese competitors don’t have.

In a conversation in Davos, Switzerland, with BlackRock CEO and World Economic Forum interim chair Larry Fink, Musk said AI chip production is increasing exponentially, but electrical power is insufficient, hampering the efficiency of AI data centers in training and deploying AI models.

“I think the limiting factor for AI deployment is fundamentally electrical power,” Musk said in January. “It’s clear that we’re very soon—maybe even later this year—we’ll be producing more chips than we can turn on.”

The U.S. has been grappling with an outdated grid system, the result of decades of underinvestment and an aging infrastructure. As tech companies increasingly rely on grid operators for electrical power, reliability issues and production limitations have threatened the speed of AI implementation, raising investor concerns of an AI bubble and fueling the belief that the U.S. has already lost the battle with Chinese tech.

Two massive data centers in Nvidia’s Santa Clara, Calif., hometown may sit empty for years waiting for electricity to power them, according to energy experts. Meanwhile, the massive increase in demand, combined with the need for updated infrastructure, have driven up electricity bills for the average American.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration and 13 bipartisan governors mounted pressure on operators of the country’s largest grid, PJM Interconnection, to boost power supply, as well as hold an auction for tech firms to make offers on 15-year contracts to build power plants, which would transfer the cost of electricity away from consumers and to data center operators.

“We know that with the demands of AI and the power and the productivity that comes with that, it’s going to transform every job and every company and every industry,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told reporters at the time. “But we need to be able to power that in the race that we are in against China.”

During his remarks at the gathering in Davos, President Donald Trump encouraged tech companies to build their own nuclear plants amid the AI push, which he claimed the administration would approve in just three weeks—although these historically take years to approve.

Why is the U.S. losing the production capacity battle with China?

Just as many AI investors fear, China is already well ahead of the U.S. when it comes to production capacity, and the country isn’t saddled with the same limitations as the U.S., Musk said at Davos. China is primarily reliant on solar power, seen as a less expensive alternative to nuclear power, with quicker deployment and fewer safety risks.

“China’s growth in electricity is tremendous,” he said.

Musk has reportedly already turned to China to supply Tesla’s manufacturing solar panels, with the goal to expand U.S. solar capacity by 100 gigawatts—about enough to power 10 billion LED light bulbs at the same time. CNBC and Reuters reported last week Tesla was in talks with Chinese suppliers such as Suzhou Maxwell Technologies to buy $2.9 billion worth of solar equipment.

According to the Global Energy Monitor’s Global Solar Power Tracker, China has nearly four times the amount of operational electricity from solar power than the U.S. Including potential power, China is expected to have 1,118,442 MWac, or electrical power output, from solar energy compared with the U.S.’s 237,947 MWac.

“Solar is by far the biggest source of energy,” Musk said.

Musk claimed powering the U.S. with solar energy would require very little space, only a 100-mile-by-100-mile square of solar fields needed to power the entire country.

But U.S. policies have thwarted efforts to harness and deploy solar power. Despite urging grid operators to take action to increase production capacity, the Trump administration has opposed a pivot to solar energy, stripping subsidies for renewable energy sources it claimed “compromises our electric grid.”

Tariffs on solar equipment from Asia took effect in May 2025, with import taxes as lofty as 3,500%, following a U.S. International Trade Commission determination that imports of solar modules and cells from Southeast Asian producers in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia were detrimental to U.S. manufacturers.

A working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research in October 2025 found solar tariffs increasing energy costs for American consumers, slowed solar adoption, and reduced jobs for solar installation.

“Unfortunately, in the U.S., the tariff barriers for solar are extremely high,” Musk said. “And that makes the economics of deploying solar artificially high.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Jan. 22, 2026.

More on Elon Musk’s energy strategy:

• Musk says Tesla, SpaceX, xAI chip project to kick off in Texas
• The energy department said wind and solar capacity is ‘worthless’ without sunlight or wind. Elon Musk reminds DoE about batteries: ‘Um… hello?’
• Elon Musk and Google’s CEO want to cover the desert with solar panels. Will Donald Trump agree?

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When I was 22, I sat across from a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg as he convinced me to join Facebook with his vision for connecting people. I helped him build it, then watched it become a machine for addicting them instead. Because addiction was more profitable.

Every social media company ran on the same logic: If we don’t do it, someone else will. Now, that logic is driving artificial intelligence.

AI could create unprecedented abundance — or a future we can’t take back. How we get to the good outcome is the defining question of our time. Last week’s White House framework proposed a familiar answer: shield the AI industry from liability and let the companies sort it out.

But to make AI serve the public interest, we have to put the public in charge of AI.

If something is going to reshape our lives, we should have a say in how. That’s the definition of democracy.

AI Already Governs You

AI is already shaping what you see, what jobs you’re offered, what loans you qualify for, even who becomes a military target. And you have no say in it. Companies are locked in a race to deploy AI as fast as possible, even as experts raise grave safety concerns. Their CEOs — Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg — all face the same trap: If I don’t do it, someone else will. And they’re right. Which is why we need to change the rules of the game.

The public is already ahead of Washington on this. Polling from Blue Rose Research shows that 66% of Americans support citizen panels helping set AI rules. That number holds across Trump voters, Biden voters, and swing voters. 79% worry the government has no plan for AI-driven job loss. People aren’t apathetic — they’re locked out.

What “Public Control” Actually Looks Like

“The public in charge” doesn’t mean elections dominated by money and lobbyists. It means citizens’ assemblies: representative cross-sections of everyday people — think voluntary juries — given extensive expert briefing and structured deliberation, then granted real authority to set binding goals and constraints.

Citizens don’t write the code. They decide what the code should be for, with technical experts accountable to them for implementation.

This model has worked for thousands of years. It’s how Ireland broke political deadlocks on marriage equality and abortion that had paralyzed politicians for generations. Assemblies are already shaping AI policy in Taiwan, the UK, and Belgium, producing recommendations on everything from facial recognition to disinformation to the future of work. Unlike elected officials, ordinary citizens have no donors to please, no reelection to chase, and no incentive to serve anyone but the public. 

Public governance changes outcomes. Left to the market, AI will optimize for engagement. For pharmaceutical profits. For replacing workers. For learning, patient health, and empowered workers, democratic governance is the only lever that points in the right direction. 

The Infrastructure Already Exists

People around the world — including at One Project, the non-profit I founded — are already building the infrastructure to make this work: participatory platforms for democratic governance at scale.

There’s precedent for this kind of public ownership. We already treat the resources that affect everyone — airwaves, waterways, and beaches — as public trusts. That’s not nationalization. It’s democracy.

AI is poised to generate trillions of dollars in new wealth. But the future where everyone benefits requires the public — not shareholders — to control it: democratically allocating resources toward child care and elder care, retraining programs for AI-related job displacement, and new models of education.

AI is poised to generate trillions of dollars in new wealth. But the future where everyone benefits requires the public— not shareholders — to control it: democratically allocating resources toward child care and elder care, retraining programs for AI-related job displacement, and new models of education.

The Window Is Closing

Washington is moving in the opposite direction. Pundits say the public is too divided, the issues too technical, and the competition with China too urgent for democracy. But democratic oversight is the only way to stop the dangerous AI race and make AI serve humanity.

The cross-partisan demand is already there. The infrastructure is already being built. The question is whether we demand democratic governance before AI goes the way of social media.

If AI is going to reshape all our lives, we the people should decide how. That’s not radical. That’s not even a policy proposal. That’s self-governance. And we’ve never needed it more.

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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This morning, I asked OpenClaw to buy me a pair of running shoes. I didn’t open a browser or walk into a store. I didn’t search for brands. I didn’t compare prices on half a dozen websites. I simply texted my AI agent to send me new running shoes, and it did all the work autonomously, from discovery to execution. I didn’t even have to tell it my shoe size.

That, in a nutshell, is agentic commerce and while McKinsey projects it will drive up to $1 trillion in US retail revenue by 2030, it’s already transforming the e-commerce battleground, today. As Target’s traffic from ChatGPT is growing 40% month-over-month, I’m already seeing some customers attribute 10% of their revenue to agentic channels — from first prompt to final transaction.

That’s the full customer journey brands must now own — end to end.

The Death of the Front Door

For decades, the shopping journey had a front door. Platform visibility, ad spend, search ranking: all of it depended on a shopper arriving somewhere before they could buy anything. Whoever owned that destination owned commerce.

That era is ending.

Today, when I ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity for a running shoe recommendation, I am effectively delegating the entire discovery process to an AI agent powered by large language models (LLMs). My AI agent decides which products to surface — and which products never get seen at all. There’s no sponsored listing, no search rank, no destination.

With the execution layer rapidly catching up through agent-capable browsers and protocols like OpenAI’s UCP and Gemini’s ACP, the result is seamless, end-to-end agentic commerce. The brands visible to AI agents can also win AI search without being the top page result on Google.

Your Real Customer Is Now a Bot

Successful CMOs are recognizing a fundamental shift: AI agents are no longer just tools their customers use. They are the customers.

Just as UX defined the era of B2C digital commerce, Agent Experience (AX) is defining this fast-emerging Business to Agent (B2A) age. If you’re a brand, that means your real audience increasingly includes the automated crawlers you may still be actively trying to block from your website. But these agents don’t browse the way humans do.

One study revealed only 12% of URLs cited by AI tools overlap with Google’s top 10 results, while another found that 90% of the sources ChatGPT cited were not even on Google’s first 20 pages. Traditional SEO, on its own, is no longer enough.

And the optimization discipline to match it —Agentic Web Optimization  — is already separating winners from the rest.

What Winning in the Agentic Web Actually Looks Like

I’ve seen brands lose positions overnight — not because their product changed, but because their content wasn’t structured in a way agents could parse reliably. I’ve also seen clients invisible in the AI-first world climb to the #1 spot by embracing AX and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

One robotics customer achieved a 94% increase in agentic visibility in four months by restructuring its content for AEO.

The original content was engaging for human readers — but an analysis revealed it lacked the structured formatting that LLMs rely on to extract and cite information: a clear FAQs section and real-world use cases, precise answers to the exact questions users were actually asking AI tools.

By deepening content relevance and restructuring for machine comprehension — while competitors remained vague, promotional, and poorly formatted — this brand became the reference point in its category. LLMs started quoting it. Agents started recommending it.

The playbook for brands that want to compete looks like this:

• Audit how agents see you. Tools now exist to simulate how LLMs crawl and interpret your site. Most brands are shocked by the gaps.
• Structure content to make it visible to agents, not just SEO. That means FAQs, specific use cases, precise answers to real user queries — not keyword-stuffed landing pages.
• Own your external citations. AI models weight sources like Reddit and Wikipedia heavily. Understand how you’re being referenced there, and actively shape that narrative.
• Build machine-readable product data. APIs, structured schemas, and clean product feeds are the new storefront.

The New Commerce Battleground

This is not a thought experiment. Big players like Target, Walmart, and Etsy are investing in APIs, schemas, and content products tuned for how AI agents consume and act on information, and as a result, seeing their referral traffic from ChatGPT reach up to 35%.

Consumer behavior is already moving to meet them. A recent Adobe study found that while nearly half of U.S. consumers use TikTok as a search engine, 14% are already relying on ChatGPT over Google. The leap from “search and click” to “ask an agent and approve” is not a large leap — and it’s happening faster than most brands realize.

In the next 12 months, I expect to see major advances in B2A, where companies need to market, sell, and communicate — not just to human buyers, but to AI agents acting on their behalf. More consumers are delegating purchases to agents, fewer are manually browsing websites, and the first real agent-to-agent networks will appear, where agents learn from each other’s successful transactions to make better recommendations.

The brands winning this new e-commerce battlefield aren’t waiting for a standard s to emerge. They’re auditing how agents see them today, investing in AX over UX, and structuring their content for machines — not just people.

The next decade of commerce won’t be won by the brands with the best websites or the highest Google rankings. It will be won by the brands that machines understand, trust, and recommend.

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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In February, the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs. Unemployment rose to 4.4 %. Economists had expected modest growth. Instead, job losses swept through construction, manufacturing, restaurants, administrative services, and healthcare.

But the deeper crisis isn’t a bad month. It’s a structural transformation that has been building for years.

The Workforce Is Shrinking — and Fast

American birth rates have fallen below replacement levels. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the U.S. population under age 24 will decline every year for the next three decades. And according to a Brookings Institution analysis, net migration to the United States turned negative in 2025 for the first time in at least half a century.

The working-age population is shrinking. The pipeline of future workers is narrowing. Immigration is in decline.  Together, these trends point to a tightening labor pool that threatens economic growth, global competitiveness, and fiscal stability for decades ahead.

America needs a workforce strategy that operates on two timelines: building the workforce of tomorrow and activating talent that is ready to contribute today.

The Talent Is Already Here

About half of recently arrived, work-authorized immigrants hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Many are engineers, healthcare professionals, financial analysts, and educators — with the added advantage of global experience. Millions are struggling to find work that matches their skill level.

Yet significant barriers keep them on the sidelines: Credential recognition barriers, limited professional networks, and hiring biases keep trained professionals out of the careers they spent years building that have nothing to do with ability. The result is a neurosurgeon driving for a rideshare company. A civil engineer stocking shelves. A financial analyst taking warehouse shifts. Each one of them represents not just an individual loss, but a loss to the industries that need their skill — and a nation that needs their productivity.

These are not pipeline problems. The talent is trained and ready. It is being wasted.

What It Looks Like When It Works

As CEO of Upwardly Global, I’ve seen this gap up close. One story that stuck with me was Jawad’s. A nurse trained in Tunisia, he spent years driving Uber and working in warehouses after immigrating to Chicago — even while a local hospital was running 20 nurses short.

His credentials and the hospital’s needs were both there. The pathway was missing. After we connected him with a job coach and board exam specialist, he landed a position in that hospital’s ICU.

Immigrant jobseekers like Jawad earn an average of $9,000 a year when they first come to us. After our coaching and resources help them find placement in a skill-aligned role, their average starting salary exceeds $66,000 — a $57,000 per capita increase in year one. This income flows directly into consumer spending, tax revenue, and GDP growth. Across tens of thousands of job placements, our alumni have contributed billions to the U.S. economy.

What Business Leaders Can Do Now

My work with college students and immigrant professionals across America has given me unique insight into the undercapitalized talent we need to drive the productivity and innovation necessary to outcompete the world. 

Colleges and universities remain among America’s most powerful engines of workforce development — building the talent pipeline for the decade ahead. But that takes time. Employers don’t have to wait.

• Evaluate candidates on what they can actually do, not where their credentials were issued
• Partner with workforce development organizations that connect you to job-ready immigrant professionals already in your market
• Invest in the colleges training tomorrow’s workforce

The companies adopting these practices aren’t waiting for the talent market to change. They’ll be the reason it does.

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Imagine someone upstream in your company just deployed an AI agent. Their throughput doubles overnight. Work starts flying to you at twice the speed. But you’re still in Excel. You still don’t have access to the company’s data lake. Overnight, you’ve become the bottleneck — the weak link in a chain that’s suddenly moving faster than ever.

“This will expose the weakest link in an organization,” said Eric Bradlow, chair of the marketing department and vice chair of AI and analytics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who uses that exact scenario to describe what he fears is coming. “If efficiency gains are happening here but not here,” he said, gesticulating with his hands, “it will be exacerbated and you will see it quickly.”

That bottleneck problem is materializing across corporate America — and the root cause isn’t technology. It’s that companies aren’t doing the hard, unglamorous work of preparing the people who are supposed to be working alongside it.

The 7% problem

The numbers are stark. Across the corporate sector, consultants and analysts see similar, troubling patterns. According to Deloitte’s most recent Tech Trends report (covered by Fortune when it was released), IT accounts for roughly 93% of AI adoption budgets. Only 7% of companies are making meaningful progress designing how humans and AI actually work together.

The deliberate, structural work of figuring out what happens to the people whose jobs are being transformed is an afterthought, said Lara Abrash, chair of Deloitte U.S.. “Ninety-three to seven is not the right level of effort in both places,” she said. “Companies should be spending as much time on the workforce right now as they are on the technology. And we’re seeing most companies focus much more on the technology.”

courtesy of Deloitte

The same imbalance shows up in Wharton’s AI adoption research. Bradlow said Wharton and GBK Collective found in a prior research report what he calls a “donut hole” at the center of most large organizations: the C-suite is investing heavily in AI, younger workers have grown up using it natively, but the middle managers who actually have to orchestrate workflow change are the ones resisting — or being left behind. It was unclear from the data whether this took the form of passive or active resistance.

“You have the C-suite making massive investments in AI,” he said, and “obviously the young people, they’re trained using AI and it typically is the middle, the middle managers where the, if you like, the reluctancy is.”

Why companies keep getting this wrong

The reasons for the imbalance are not mysterious. Technology investments are legible: you can point to a use case, benchmark a result, or show a board a number. Workforce transformation is messier, slower, and harder to quantify.

“It’s a little bit easier to get your hands around what you would need to do with technology,” Abrash said. “It’s a lot harder to deal with the workforce.” This isn’t just an “AI-specific thing,” she added, noting, for example, how companies have grown fond of reorganizations, seemingly for their own sake, and managers looking at various mechanisms to cut headcount instead of doing the hard work of optimizing their workforce. “This behavior is not because of AI. It’s just the way it generally is.”

Linda Hill, a professor at Harvard Business School and head faculty chair of its Leadership Initiative, put it in a broader leadership context in a recent conversation with Fortune. In her new book Genius at Scale, co-authored with Jason Wild and Emily Tedards, she argued that the entire model of what makes a great leader is shifting — and many executives are still operating on the old playbook.

“Traditional leadership has been: be decisive, stick out the chest, show confidence. This is the destination. Get in the car and follow me, it’ll be okay,” said Wild, a 25-year innovation veteran who led teams at Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce. The problem with that approach now, he added, is that “the world is literally shifting underneath our feet by three or four feet every week.”

courtesy of Jason Wild

Hill and Wild call the new required skill “wayfinding” — a deliberate contrast to the old chest-sticking-out method of “pathfinding.” Pathfinders set a destination and drive toward it. Wayfinders navigate fog. It’s suddenly an era, Hill added, when org chart whispers include “I don’t even know what team I’m going to need in a year, let alone three,” arguing that the wayfinder way of leadership will matter enormously. Hill explained it this way: pathfinding isn’t an inherently old-fashioned way of leading, but it is one orientated around a clear destination in sight; we aren’t in that kind of circumstance now. The destination is ahead of us, but it’s unclear.

“When we finally realized what we were studying was wayfinding and not pathfinding,” Hill said, “we also realized how emotionally and intellectually challenging innovating and being agile really are.”

What happens when you skip the human work

The consequences of neglecting the workforce side of AI aren’t hypothetical. Abrash described them in vivid terms.

“Workforces are like antigens in your body,” she said. “They can fight things they want to fight pretty hard … If they don’t see how it makes their jobs better and how they can show up and bring what makes them special, they’re going to be that antigen and they’re going to fight it.”

That resistance leads directly to failed adoption — companies spend heavily on AI tools that employees quietly route around, ignore, or undermine. But there’s a subtler and potentially more dangerous risk: when a human is removed from the loop without a deliberate design for what they’re supposed to be doing instead, the AI operates unchecked.

“You could end up having hallucinations and bad outcomes because you don’t have a human in the loop,” Abrash warned. “It’s a brand and reputation issue. It has to be done at the same time.”

Bradlow added a precision dimension that is often overlooked in popular coverage. In high-stakes industries — aerospace, life sciences, financial regulation — “90% accuracy is not okay. 95% is not okay. Maybe even 99% accuracy is not okay. You might need to be 99.999% accurate.” Training AI agents to reach those thresholds requires active human supervision, correction, and feedback loops that most companies haven’t built.

courtesy of the Wharton School

Nearly the same point was made by Wild, who noted that enterprise systems are deterministic — “you do a search on the internet, you want the same freaking answer every time,” but now we’re in different territory. “AI is a probabilistic system, right? You ask the same question, word it the same way, in ChatGPT five times, you get five different answers.” Time for a whole new style of leadership, in other words.

The real skills that will matter

What does the human bring that the machine can’t? Abrash cited Deloitte’s survey of high-performing teams produced a consistent answer of six consistently critical human capabilities, with three key ones to note. The first is curiosity — the drive to generate novel questions, not just process existing ones. “A machine is not tuned to create curiosity,” she said. “And when teams come together, designed to create new ideas and solutions, that’ll drive innovation and it’ll optimize what the machines do.”

The second is emotional and social intelligence. Machines can simulate empathy, but can’t feel the actual stakes of a team under pressure, a client in distress, or a workforce absorbing a major change. “We need EQ in the workforce,” Abrash said flatly.

The third is divergent thinking — the uniquely human capacity to generate multiple solutions rather than converge on one. “The technology is going to be intelligent and drive you down to one solution. That’s how it’s built. A human is not tuned that way.”

courtesy of Harvard

Hill echoed that idea in the context of leadership. She studied Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble, the former Chief R&D and Innovation Officer who told her team bluntly: “We’re going to have to innovate on how we innovate.” Facing an activist investor and a product-centric legacy, Fish redesigned not just what P&G made but who was responsible for making it — expanding the definition of “innovator” to include virtually everyone in the organization. The lesson, Hill said, is that human creativity can’t be siloed. “You need everybody to be able to innovate.”

Bradlow talked about his college-age son, who is sorting through what to do with his career. “Every one of his friends are thinking, ‘So what is that job that’s going to be out there for me in two years? What actually are firms going to be hiring for it?’” He acknowledged that Wharton, the top business school in the world, has followed a certain model where finance and consulting majors go into certain tracks, but “I’m not sure those tracks and career paths exist anymore.”

Looking at the problem from an enterprise level, he said, “there’s a big human resources — I’ll just call it a mental health challenge that we’re going to face, which is people having to think about like, ‘Do I have a job future? What is it?’” Bradlow said he would be proud if his son chose to be an electrician, but he thinks it’s shortsighted to rush into supposedly AI-proof careers. Maybe consulting firms, banks and private equity won’t need as many highly educated workers due to AI adoption, but more “antiquated” members of the Fortune 500 surely will.

By the way, Bradlow added, this same concern applies to his job at the University of Pennsylvania itself. “We’re going to find out very quickly whether something that was founded by Benjamin Franklin can pivot quickly enough to really educate people on the skills that are needed today.” At the end of the day, the Accentures of the world are going to evaluate who has AI skills and doesn’t, regardless of their training, and “if we’re not adding value and if we don’t totally redo our curriculum around the kind of skills that are needed, we’re going to have a problem as an institution.” For instance, Wharton has now offers an entire AI major at both the undergrad and MBA level, in addition to its Business Analytics major, which is a decade old. Bradlow’s Wharton AI and Analytics department also offers experiential projects and short courses on AI.

Leadership roles no one is hiring for

Hill and Wild’s research identifies a specific kind of leader who is increasingly critical and increasingly rare: what they call the “bridger.” These are the people who translate across organizational boundaries — between IT and operations, between startups and legacy systems, between technology teams and business units.

Wild said she hears a constant refrain from executives: “We don’t have people who know how to bridge.” Leaders admit they can’t do all the work by themselves and need partners within their business, she added, but it’s a rare skillset.

At Delta, for example, a leader trying to build a biometric boarding-pass system with startup Clear had to navigate the airline’s own IT department, federal regulators at TSA, and the startup’s risk tolerance — simultaneously. That work is invisible, rarely credited, and too often structurally undervalued. Metrics and siloed organizational structures can get in the way of breakthroughs like a whole new system for boarding a plane.

“There are no bridger titles,” he said. “But Chief of Staff, RevOps, Forward Deployed Engineer — those are all bridger roles.” Wild said he can almost draw a line between companies investing in bridger roles and “laying off those people,” he argued, “they’re going to regret it later.”

Bradlow, meanwhile, said he’s watching something similar play out in talent markets. The AI skills gap is real, but the solution isn’t to flood into trades that seem “robot-proof” — a temptation he sees in students and workers everywhere.

“I’m concerned there’ll be a wide-level redeployment of people towards things they think are protected from artificial intelligence,” he said. “Maybe there’s a short-run version of that. But I’m not convinced there’s a long-run version.”

His preferred metric for talent in the AI era: “You don’t invest in someone who’s got a high intercept. You invest in someone who’s got a high slope. I don’t care what you know now. I care how quickly you can learn.”

The upside no one is pricing in

For all the doomsday narratives, there’s a revenue story hiding behind the efficiency story — and it may be the bigger one.

Accenture’s James Crowley, Bradlow’s research partner, said the dominant productivity framing of AI misses the point. “We’re trying to pivot from just the productivity conversation to the revenue and upside conversation.” In modeling a hypothetical $60 billion company for their most recent in-depth report, “the age of co-intelligence,” the researchers estimated approximately $6 billion in potential annual revenue growth from well deployed-AI, meaning that higher productivity among redeployed workers will lead to greater revenue, rather than a shrinking workforce. Among executives surveyed, 78% said they see more benefit on the revenue growth side than the cost-cutting side.

“The gains on the revenue side are going to eventually dwarf the gains on the efficiency and productivity side,” Bradlow said. “It’s corporations doing things they just could not do before.”

Abrash offered a concrete illustration. Knee replacement surgery used to require a surgeon to manually saw bone — an inherently imprecise process. Today, a robotic system handles the cutting with precision born of thousands of prior procedures, while the human surgeon focuses entirely on judgment, risk assessment, and the decisions that require a human mind. “There’s a set of work that someone no longer needs to do,” she said. “And it positions them to do something that’s higher value.”

The companies most likely to struggle aren’t the ones that failed to buy the right AI tools. They’re the ones who treated the workforce as an afterthought — spending 94% of their budget on technology and 6% on the people who have to use it.

“You have better tools than the explorers did,” Hill said. “You actually do have data. You do have all these emerging technologies to help us figure things out faster. But the emotional task, because we’re human, of working through that — given the amount of anxiety that exists in the world today — those are incredibly complicated challenges for leaders.”

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Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by a margin seldom seen for an important piece of legislation, 89 to 10. The measure, primarily written by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her staff, targets the single-family home rental industry as a major cause of America’s painful housing shortage.

The idea motivating the bill: These enterprises are either buying or building, then renting out for profit, houses that would otherwise get listed for sale, shrinking the supply on the market and hence raising prices and limiting shoppers’ choices for the ranches, colonials or condos available in the neighborhoods where they’d like to live. That idea has broad bipartisan support: President Trump has said he supports keeping investors out of the single-family home market, and issued an executive order to that effect in January.

It’s unclear if the law will get adopted in its present form, since the House is currently debating whether to add its provisions to its own housing bill passed in February. But if the ROAD Act’s principal elements become law, it’s likely to undermine its own intentions—by severely curbing investment in new single family housing.

As Ed Pinto, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center and former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, told Fortune, “The Senate bill makes it clear that the rental-home industry is an unwanted sector in America. It’s a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences.”

Pinto stresses that this now-threatened business barely existed 15 years ago, and that it arose out of a need. “People rent single-family homes for three good reasons,” Pinto avows. “First: They can’t qualify to buy because they don’t have enough savings, or sufficient income, or suffer from low credit scores. And we’re seeing more and more of that situation as prices have exploded. Second: They plan on moving in a year or two. Or third: They want in live in a house but don’t want the restrictions and responsibilities of ownership.” In all three cases, he adds, the renters are seeking the likes of three-to-four bedrooms and a backyard, features they can’t get in an apartment.

Today, the companies that have sprung up to serve this growing population—folks that, say, either couldn’t meet the monthly nut to buy, or frequently changed locales for a new job—acquire those properties in two ways. The first: Purchasing existing single-family residences that are typically extremely run down, with the intention of renovating them. For example, Amherst––one of the industry’s major players––has fixed up some 58,000 homes, spending around $40,000 apiece on improvements, for a total investment of over $2 billion. Second: The build-to-rent cohort pays developers to construct neighborhoods of homes expressly for rent rather than sale.

The ROAD Act’s supporters argue that the purpose-built rentals add nothing to supply and in fact push housing dollars in the wrong direction, and that the buy-and-rehab part of the equation reduces the for-sale pool. According to Pinto, both views are radically wrong.

The homes that companies like Amherst repair and place on the market often start off in such terrible shape that they’re not really part of the housing supply at all. They can neither be readily rented nor sold. Outfitted with new roofs and kitchens, they eventually often come back on the market as prime candidates for sale. In fact, says Pinto, “The math shows that over the last two years, the rehab investors are selling more of their homes than they’re buying. These companies watch the market. When prices rise and make selling a better deal than renting, they sell. That may be two years after they purchase or seven years after they purchase. But the net effect is that a renovated home goes on the market.”

ROAD Act provisions could kill investment in new homes

The ROAD Act contains two provisions that would chill activity in both areas. First, it mandates that “large institutional investors,” defined as any for-profit entity that owns 350 or more homes, cannot buy any more properties than they own today. The penalties are stiff: If a participant harboring a portfolio of 1,000 homes bought just one more, they would be subject to a fine of around $1 million.

The second provision involves new construction. ROAD does allow the building of new homes for rent. But here’s the catch: It also requires that after seven years under lease, those residences must be sold. “That’s already totally chilled financing for purpose-built rentals,” says Pinto. “They’re mainly financed by private capital from entities such as insurance companies, and pension and sovereign wealth funds. They’re long-term investors. Imagine if we have another crisis like the GFC in 2008, or just a big downturn, and the investors are forced to sell because it’s year seven? They don’t want to take those kinds of risks, so they’re retreating.”

Pinto also notes that ROAD awards alarmingly broad power to the Secretary of the Treasury. “It states that the Secretary can essentially change the law almost anyway he or she wants,” he notes, “by changing the definitions in a way that that shuts off any possibility of owning these homes.”

Given the damage Warren and other advocates claim that own-to-rent is inflicting on potential homeowners, it’s surprising to learn that the industry’s total portfolio amounts to around 800,000 properties—approximately 1% of all existing homes in the U.S. Still, Pinto points out that the industry’s plays in extremely important part on bringing on new supply “at the margin.” About 40,000 purpose-built homes for rent sprout each year. Pinto says they’re a big factor almost exclusively in such states as Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, which are among the nation’s most affordable markets. Rehab buys are also most common in those markets. Those facts, Pinto argues, negate the concept that rental homes artificially inflate prices. “In fact, there’s no statistical evidence that’s the case,” says Pinto. “It’s in states like California where there’s almost no rental home industry that prices are highest.”

ROAD simply doesn’t make economic sense. Rentals are in constant competition with homes for sale. Curbing the supply of either raises the costs of its rival category. If build-to-rent home production declines due to the “seven years to sell” rule, potential single-family customers will rush to apartments, pushing up rents. That dynamic would give single-family sellers more space to raise prices.

Better to let the market do what it’s always done. When home prices get extremely high relative to incomes so that monthly costs get unaffordable for many, more people rent single family homes or apartments instead. That takes pressure off for-sale housing, helping to dampen prices, not inflate them. Houses then become a better deal, demand and prices rise, and that’s precisely when the own-to-rent crowd put more of their holdings up for sale, helping balance the market and contain the upswing. It’s a healthy ebb and flow that the own-to-rent players help make work.

To be sure, America is short by multiple millions of houses. But ROAD is effectively the road to killing billions in investment that is often delivering what backers of the Act say they want: More homes—newly upgraded to boot—put up for sale.

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In the kitchen of a modest Victorian ranch house in Northern California, there sits a small round table. For nearly 30 years, this table served as the primary research and development lab for a food empire.

It was here that Fred, the original chef for Amy’s Kitchen, would arrive from the nearby production plant, plopping down trial recipes for founders Andy and Rachel Berliner to taste. “He’d bring it in… and we would taste it,” Rachel Berliner recalled, speaking to Fortune via Zoom from the same Petaluma house. “And then he would say, ‘add a little more spice,’ or ‘let’s tone the vegetables down.’ Then he’d take it back to the kitchen… back and forth.”

From these domestic tasting sessions emerged a frozen food giant. Today, Amy’s Kitchen generates approximately $1 billion in retail sales (translating to roughly $600 million in gross sales) and employs nearly 2,000 people across three culinary facilities. Yet, despite the massive scale, the Berliners insist their success lies in a refusal to modernize their methods.

The Berliners never intended to build a conglomerate. The business was born 37 years ago out of a specific financial anxiety: Rachel was pregnant with their daughter, Amy, and the couple needed a way to fund her future education.

“We named the… my mother named the company,” Rachel recalled. “We started the business so that we could support her. You know, you had to put her through college… So we had to at least make enough money to put her through school”.

The plan worked. Amy did indeed go to Stanford—following in the footsteps of Andy’s cousin—and today she sits on the company’s board, though she recently moved to Hawaii to raise her own son. “We never planned on being in big business,” Rachel admits. “It just kind of happened.” Clarifying that Amy was still on the board of Amy’s Kitchen, the Berliners explained that most of her life is in Hawaii, and they may well be visiting more often, from California.

‘We cook food, we don’t manufacture food‘

In an era of industrial food processing and hyper-optimized supply chains, the Berliners’ approach remains a stubborn anomaly. Their philosophy is simple but operationally complex: “We cook food. We don’t manufacture food,” Rachel explained.

This is a company built on the premise that you can scale without industrializing and run a billion-dollar operation like a big kitchen.

While visitors to their massive facilities often expect a mechanized factory floor, Rachel noted they are frequently “in shock” to find an operation that resembles “a big restaurant.” This distinction is technical, not just marketing rhetoric. The company prepares ingredients by hand, makes its own roux, marinates vegetables, and creates broths from scratch rather than using pre-fabricated industrial bases.

Of the wider industry, Rachel is critical. “People are just processing food. They’re not cooking it.” Her commitment to “cooking” serves as the foundation of the brand’s identity and is why Amy’s Kitchen is poised to be the first company to be certified under a new “non-ultra-processed” food seal. According to Rachel, they didn’t have to change a single recipe to qualify for the designation because “we make food the way you do at home. We just cook it in bigger pots.”

This method comes at a premium. Rachel estimated their organic ingredients cost “more than” 25% higher than conventional alternatives. However, this rigorous standard aligns with her upbringing in 1950s Compton, where her parents kept an organic vegetable garden long before the term was fashionable. “I was raised with this concept of organic at a time when nobody did it,” she says. “I was never supposed to eat anything that sounded like a chemical.”

Rachel recalled that her mother was a subscriber to Rodale magazines, such as Organic Gardening (later Prevention), which featured early advocacy of organic food and physical health considered fringe at the time. As she’s in her mid-90s and shows no signs of slowing down, clearly it rubbed off on her daughter and future son-in-law.

Rachel said she was raised with an understanding of organic food at a time when most people didn’t understand it, with homegrown vegetables and homemade wheat bread. Andy recalled that when he grew up in the Chicago area, “vegetables came out of a can as far as I knew.” It was a whole new world when he moved to California, he added.

If the company has a flagship product, it is the humble bean-and-cheese burrito, the stuff of sustenance for college students and twenty-somethings for decades. For Rachel, the item’s enduring success is about more than just calories or convenience; it provides a specific psychological comfort.

“The bean and cheese burrito is not just great tasting, it has an emotional thing to it,” Andy said. “It just kind of mellows you out, makes you feel nourished.”

Growing pains at scale

The Berliners’ ability to scale without losing their soul is partly due to their enduring 40-year partnership. Remarkably, they still live in the same “old ranch house” where the business began. This harmony extends to their business culture. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, while other food manufacturers struggled, the Berliners took aggressive steps to protect their workforce. “We sent everyone at risk home before the government was helping with that. And we paid them,” Rachel said. They installed barriers and set up their own vaccination center to ensure there was “no spread within Amy’s at all.”

Their growth hasn’t been without growing pains, though, as workers started coming forward in 2022 at the company’s plant in nearby Santa Rosa with a series of complaints, including dangerous line speeds, lack of bathroom breaks during fast-paced shifts, injury mismanagement, and even retaliation. ​Cal/OSHA investigated and proposed a fine of $25,000 in August 2022 for violations, including substandard emergency eyewash stations and unsecured guards on dough-flattening conveyors. Inspectors confirmed a history of repetitive motion injuries and ordered further preventive action on the burrito line. Since 2019, the company was charged with more than $100,000 in OSHA violations — penalties it allegedly failed to disclose when applying for B Corp certification. The company told Fortune that Amy’s Kitchen remains a certified B Corporation today and it paid less than those proposed fines: $6,825 over the 2022 violations and $26,025 since 2019 overall.

Amy’s Kitchen denied the allegations, cited a third-party audit that found no systemic issues, and stated that its recordable injury rate was better than the industry average. The company reached an agreement with workers in mid-2024, committing to regular safety risk assessments and a 3% merit-increase budget for employees. The resolution was negotiated through an organization called the Food Empowerment Project, a self-described vegan food justice organization, which had supported the workers and organized a temporary boycott.

A company representative told Fortune that the 2022 allegations “reinforced Amy’s commitment to actively listening to its workforce and continually strengthening how the company supports employees across its plants.” Acknowledging that valid issues were identified, Amy’s Kitchen said it moved quickly to address these and has continued investing in comprehensive benefits for both plant and office employees, including retirement savings plans, paid time off, tuition reimbursement, college scholarships for employees’ children, free mental health services, career development, and product discounts.

Since implementing these expanded efforts, Amy’s said it has marked improvements in engagement scores across its locations and achieved a best-in-class safety record at every plant in 2025.

Politics and the future of food

The Berliners are no strangers to political shifts in food policy. In fact, they claim they helped write the rules. Long before federal regulations existed, the couple hosted the very first meeting to form the National Organic Standards Board right there at their ranch, gathering with other pioneers like the Lundberg family to create a unified standard.

Recently, the conversation around food additives has re-entered the national spotlight with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to overhaul food regulations. Kennedy and the Trump FDA moved to ban or phase out synthetic food dyes — Red No. 3 was the first target, with broader action proposed against Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6, Blue No. 1, and others commonly used in processed foods. Amy’s Kitchen doesn’t use artificial colors in any of its products. Regulations that would be disruptive to most of the frozen food industry essentially validate how Amy’s has always operated.

When asked about the new administration’s focus on organic food, Rachel admitted, “It was a shock, yeah.” While they said they haven’t spoken to Kennedy directly, they said their daughter Amy did send a note to a school acquaintance connected to the incoming health team. For Rachel, the sudden political interest in banning food dyes and chemicals validates a lifestyle she has lived for seven decades.

Amy’s has continued to grow as more consumers seek out organic, minimally processed foods made with recognizable ingredients. In 2025, the brand expanded organic access to more than 45 million new households across key categories such as frozen meals, soups, and pizza and as of November 30, 2025, it claimed to hold significant majorities of the frozen pizza, burritos and pockets spaces, within the organic segment.

Amy’s Kitchen told Fortune that it sees this as continued validation of its long-standing philosophy and remains focused on making high-quality, organic food accessible to more people. Many of the broader conversations happening today around chemicals, additives, and ultra-processed foods, after all, reflect an approach the company has followed for nearly 40 years.

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The AI stock bubble, much debated through the back half of 2025, has already burst. That’s the conclusion of John Higgins, chief markets economist at Capital Economics. He’s more worried about what’s still brewing. 

A bubble typically refers to when assets have valuations that far exceed their intrinsic worth, usually seen when share prices soar despite solid evidence of strong financial results. “If you’re judging whether a bubble exists or not in relation to how stretched or otherwise its valuation is, then there’s an argument that the bubble has burst,” Higgins told Fortune.

In a note to clients published this week, Higgins found that for information technology and the rest of Big Tech, the ratio of the current share price to earnings per share has risen over the last few years, showing inflated valuations. But as of around October 2025, that price-earnings ratio fell and is now the smallest since the pandemic. The dotcom bubble at the turn of the century largely followed the same pattern, though the price-earnings ratio was much greater, exceeding 150% for the IT sector in the early 2000s, compared to a peak of nearly 75% in late 2024, Higgins noted.

AI valuations have indeed soared. As of fall 2025, there were 498 AI unicorns with a combined valuation of $2.7 trillion, according to data from tech market intelligence platform CB Insights, 100 of which were founded in 2023 or after. More than 1,300 AI startups have valuations over $100 million. OpenAI’s valuation reached $730 billion last month, according to CFO Sarah Friar, up from $500 billion in October, less than six months prior.

However, the tech sector has come back down to earth, a result, in part, of the “SaaSpocalypse,” a rapid selloff of software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks as investors fear agentic AI being able to easily replace traditional software business models. Both Salesforce and ServiceNow have lost about 30% of their respective values since the beginning of the year.

“Investors had sort of honed in on that software services industry group as being one of those sectors that was relatively vulnerable to that rollout of AI,” Higgins said. “And therefore we had a big paring back in the valuation of that sector in particular.”

It’s not just the SaaS industry taking a hit, Higgins argued. The semiconductor industry has also seen a recent slowdown, with high demand fuelling a chip shortage, and recent geopolitical tensions, such as tariffs and the war in Iran triggering supply chain challenges.

AI’s next bubble is a rare one

Another bubble may be hiding within the story of these industries’ obstacles, according to Higgins. Tech companies’ earnings have rocketed upward in the last few years, raising the question of how sustainable this amount of growth can be. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates earnings growth for the Magnificent Seven to be around 18%, compared to 11% growth from the remaining 493 companies in the S&P 500. Last month Nvidia reported a revenue of $68.1 billion for its fourth quarter, a 73% year-over-year increase.

“There may be one [bubble] actually in the fundamental side of things, which is quite rare,” Higgins said. “Normally we think of a bubble as being something where the price has gotten out of whack with the fundamentals themselves…In this case, the bubble actually may be in the earnings themselves.” By this, Higgins was referring to the main argument that tech boosters in the anti-bubble camp have turned to: the enormous profits being produced by the biggest public tech firms that dominate the Magnificent Seven. In other words, he’s asking, what if these profits go down?

There’s a couple of reasons why AI earnings may soon reach a cliff and end up in a market correction. For one, Higgins said, demand for AI may be much lower than initially anticipated, leaving tech companies to reckon with the estimated $539 billion in AI capex for 2026, per Goldman Sachs. While 88% of companies report regular AI use, according to McKinsey, adoption may be stalling as a result of employees’ anxiety around the technology displacing them from their jobs.

The greater risk to AI earnings will be if the economy remains in a precarious position, Higgins suggested. The ongoing Iran war has halted the helium output in Qatar, responsible for about one-third of the world’s supply of the odorless gas used to manufacture computer chips. Not only have data centers become a target of attacks during the conflict, but energy prices could also drive up input costs of these facilities.

“If the economy, more generally, were to weaken, that could also weigh on the stock market and weigh on the earnings of companies who are making money from the rollout of AI,” Higgins said, “even if demand for AI itself isn’t really weakening much.”

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It was showtime for the employees of CoolIT.

In the late afternoon of March 25, as an unexpected snowstorm blanketed Calgary, Alberta, around 600 mainly frontline workers of CoolIT Systems gathered under an immense tent for a highly anticipated town hall. Less than three years earlier, private equity colossus KKR had purchased CoolIT, and as it does for all its acquisitions, awarded equity to everyone. In this case, that meant employees from thermal mechanical engineers to security guards at the liquid cooling purveyor for big tech infrastructure. Five days earlier, these folks got the official word that KKR and its partner, the sovereign wealth investor of Abu Dhabi, were selling their employer to Ecolab, the industrial water treatment giant, for $4.75 billion, or around 18 times CoolIT’s roughly $270 million valuation when KKR took charge.

The employees knew they were shareholders and that a sale would trigger cash payouts for everyone, and the crowd was about to find out how much. The new deal, and the money it would bring them, was still another stunner in what had been a dizzying rise under KKR, a moonshot that already left the old-timers I spoke to amazed. In fact, this event was something of a celebration for one of the top niche success sagas in the AI revolution.

Founded 25 years ago by an engineer tinkering in a garage, CoolIT first specialized in liquid cooling for gaming computers. But under KKR, it went all in on outfitting the burgeoning ranks of AI data centers. The hyperscalers deployed its technology to pack servers at far more density than is possible using air cooling, and CoolIT benefited greatly by Nvidia’s insistence that its fastest GPUs be liquid cooled. Result: In the past three years, the former plodder’s revenues jumped 300%, as the hyperscaler share soared from 5% to 60%. It has multiplied production capacity 30 times while mushrooming its manufacturing footprint to cover an area the size of over five football fields. “We were a small company where everyone was multitasking, and we were often struggling,” says Nga Morris, a supervisor who tests products for mass production. “I thought KKR would help us grow, but nothing like the explosion we’ve seen in the past three years.”   

The assembled knew the huge sales price and that they would get nicely rewarded. Yet according to those I spoke to, they harbored relatively modest expectations. “We had a lot of excitement and happiness going around the days before the town hall,” says Kenny Kong, a quality control and data analyst who joined in 2011 when CoolIT had 22 employees. “But I, like most people, didn’t know how the scheme worked [in determining payouts]. I’d looked at videos on YouTube from times when KKR sold other companies, and saw numbers like $10,000, or $30,000, or $50,000.” Kong was expecting a nice reward, he says, but nothing that would transform his financial standing.

The presentation opened with cheerleading for the ownership mindset that’s “getting everyone to pull together” by making employees “stewards of the business” from Pete Stavros, KKR’s global head of private equity and the figure who launched its employee ownership program. CoolIT CEO Jason Waxman, who took charge at the buyout, appeared by video from Portland, Ore., where he got stuck in the snowstorm, avowed that he could “hear the shouting” from across the border. Then, Kyle Matter, KKR managing director and chairman of CoolIT, took the stage for the main event.

Courtesy of KKR

Employees had high hopes—and still got shock

The casting was impeccable. Matter—slim, dark-haired, attired in a dark blue zip-up sweater and matinee idol handsome—is a natural entertainer who savored every moment holding a mic. “I feel like a game show host,” he declared. “But on this game show, everyone is a winner!”  He explained that each employee would receive cash at the closing, scheduled for Q3, based on two factors: their annual base pay (salary, hourly, or temp), and their years with CoolIT. Each category for length of service would garner a different multiple of their earnings in a lump sum—the longer the tenure, the higher the multiplier. “Should we get to the numbers?” Matter intoned. As the hearty roar displayed, this horde—featuring many attired in sweatshirts labeled “OwnIT” for the name of the CoolIT equity plan—this crowd wasn’t cooling it.

Matter proceeded to show the payday for the first group on a big screen. The slide displayed, “If you joined in 2026, you will receive a minimum of 1x annual pay…minimum payout of $35,000 Canadian ($25,200 U.S.; payouts to follow are expressed in Canadian). Matter didn’t step on the applause line. He took a long pause, and in fact proved a master of going slow and building suspense all during his presentation. Next came the numbers for people employed in 2025: 2.5x annual pay, and a minimum of $95,000. An engineer earning $80,000, for example, would get $200,000, even if they’d arrived just a few months ago. “When I saw what people from 2025 would get, I knew something was happening,” says Kong. “I didn’t expect that we’d be getting multiples of salary. As the numbers kept coming, the excitement got more and more unbelievable.”

Folks joining as recently as 2023 got 5x annual pay. That’s quite a windfall for a lot of people, since CoolIT has grown its workforce around 50% since the KKR purchase.  Then things got really fabulous for what CoolIT dubs the “OGs” or “original gangsters.” Anyone hired in 2016 and before got an eight times multiplier, and at least $490,000. Keep in mind that the minimum would apply to people making just $61,000 or below, and the number would ramp from there.

Both Morris and Kong, who’d been at CoolIT for 12 and 15 years respectively, fit the super-veteran category. “I was expecting nine to 18 months, and a maximum of two years,” says Kong. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I took off my glasses and covered my mouth and started crying when I heard about my category.” Indeed, the livestream shows Kong in tears as several female colleagues sporting broad smiles pat his shoulders as if to remind him these are tears of joy. “A day later,” he says, “I was still trying to digest the event.”

As for fellow OG Morris: “I was shocked, honestly speechless. I was optimistic but didn’t expect anything large to happen.” She orchestrated her own little exercise in suspense when telling her husband. “I wanted to build in some surprise. When he came home, I stayed quiet and waited for him to ask me, ‘How did it go?’ He’s a calm guy, so he didn’t jump up and down, but he was really happy.” She plans to use the windfall to invest in a family retirement plan and pay for her son’s university education. The loot will help fund some vacation ambitions as well, she notes, specifically attending her niece’s wedding in her native Vietnam next year, and visiting countries such as Italy and France that she’s long wanted to see.

“My reaction was, this is surreal, it’s too good to be true, it’s life-changing,” says Ibrahim Ibitoye, who manages the assembly line for CooIT’s CDUs, or cooling distribution units. “In 2017, soon after I arrived, we had five people on the line,” he says. “Now we have 120.” It’s a big step toward financial security, he avows. “I can rest assured I can pay for college for my three kids, ages 3, 9, and 11. When I got the envelope with my specific number after the town hall, the first thing I did was call my wife. Before the event, she was cautious. When I called, she was blown away.”

By the way, the CoolIT workforce is super-multicultural. Ibitoye comes from Nigeria, while Morris immigrated from Vietnam as a young adult, and Kong was born in Hong Kong.

Matter uncorked one more surprise before signing off. “Like any game show host [would say], there is more!” he announced, and went on to announce that anyone who remained at CoolIT through 2027 would get an extra half-a-year’s pay. Then, a huge curtain parted to open a party space under the tent, where the happy throng dined on the likes of Vietnamese vermicelli noodles and pastel glazed donuts from a display wall.

KKR is leading the way in employee ownership

Measured by payout per person, the CoolIT sale marked the high point of KKR’s employee ownership campaign to date: Workers on average received roughly $240,000. That’s nearly equal to the average Wall Street bonus for 2025. But KKR has been arguably the leading proponent in America for making owners of the rank and file. It amounts to a personal crusade for the figure who’s spearheaded the effort, Pete Stavros. “It’s hard to get rich on your labor alone,” says Stavros. “People build wealth in this country by owning things. But that hasn’t been the case for frontline workers.” He points out that from 1984 to 2024, productivity has grown 80%, but worker pay has lagged far behind, rising only 20% in real terms. In the same period, the stock market has rocketed 9,000%, creating immense wealth for the likes of executives who get options, restricted stock, and other equity grants. Upshot: The top 0.1% of Americans measured by wealth own 24% of the stock, and the top 10% own 87%. The bottom 50% hold just 1%.

It was Stavros’s father who inspired this inclusive vision. “He was a road grader for a union construction company. He saw that hourly workers didn’t want to speed up because if you get more productive, your hours go down.” Yet employers never found a way of rewarding them for working faster and better, he says, adding, “What really drove him nuts was that the company never asked for the workers’ opinion. His dream was creating greater alignment between the company and the workers, and giving workers a chance to build some wealth.” Stavros made analyzing employee stock plans his specialty as a student at Harvard Business School.

Stavros helped convince KKR to institute the first program in 2011, and today the company oversees ownership plans at 84 portfolio companies, covering 195,000 non-senior management workers, poised to pay out as much as $14 billion when the enterprises go public or get sold, à la CoolIT. It has already distributed $1.8 billion over 13 exits. Among the most celebrated examples: C.H.I. Overhead Doors. When KKR bought the Illinois manufacturer in 2015, only 18 employees were shareholders. The company extended ownership to all and sundry, and when it sold C.H.I. to Nucor in 2022, 800 workers received checks averaging $175,000, the top number pre-CooIT. Other sales that created notable payouts: Australian environmental project developer GreenCollar (2023), hazard mitigation specialist GeoStabilization (2024), and Kito Crosby (2026), a Texas maker of lifting and rigging gear.

Stavros and the KKR team had to overcome a legal and taxation thicket to find a template that works. Employees don’t have individual accounts. Instead, the portfolio company places equity reserved for workers, technically as a type of stock options, in a special trust. “Workers don’t trade wages or wage increases or other benefits for the equity, and they keep their 401(k)s,” says Stavros. “So this is a way you can grow your wealth.” When the enterprise is sold or goes public, the cash generated or stock gets distributed by the model in view at CoolIT, via a formula based on both annual pay, and length of service.

For the companies awarding equity, the payoff comes in greater engagement, loyalty, and productivity

“The payback comes in a stronger culture,” says Stavros. He asserts that two crucial measures greatly improve: turnover and “engagement.” “The quit rates for all companies in the U.S. average around 30% on average,” he says. “We’ve had companies start with quit rates as high as 80%. If you’re losing workers that fast, why bother to train or educate them? It results in workers staying low-skilled. And all that time and money gets wasted on constantly hiring and onboarding, plus you’re losing so much knowledge.” On average, Stavros finds, the pace of turnover improves around 30% once KKR achieves an ownership culture.

The second big goal, added engagement, is broad and difficult to define. But it basically amounts to getting motiving workers toward pursuing a common purpose. It can take such forms as speaking up early on when problems appear, or for assembly-line crews, constantly making suggestions to improve workflow, and readily sharing knowledge with colleagues. “The idea is, ‘We want you to help lead the way, and the equity plan by making you an owner, is a symbol of that,” says Stavros.

A case study of the concept’s power is Ingersoll Rand. In 2013, KKR bought air compressor and pump-maker Gardner Denver, setting a slice of equity for the employees. KKR named Vicente Reynal as Gardner’s new CEO in 2016. “I’d worked for big manufacturers, and I saw that the hourly workforce wasn’t emotionally attached to the company. I wanted to change that by giving workers skin in the game,” Reynal recalls. He marshaled ownership as a tool to promote a new mindset. “I wanted an attitude like, ‘This is my company. I want to improve the process on the factory floor, I want to negotiate with suppliers for better payment terms.” He and KKR extended $100 million in equity just before its IPO in 2017 that handed 6,000 employees chunks of stock. KKR then awarded an additional $150 million in shares to the workers. “Our goal was to unlock lots of cash,” says Reynal. And it worked.

In two years, Gardner generated an enormous growth in cash flows that enabled it to purchase competitor Ingersoll Rand for $6 billion in 2020; Gardner then took the name of its acquisition. KKR says the quit rate dropped 90% from the time it bought Gardner to single digits 10 years later. Accident frequency is down 70% to a number Reynal characterizes as a “best in class.” “We use kaizen events [a method pioneered at Toyota that encourages workers to volunteer improvements on assembly-line productivity] and instead of hiring consultants, the workers make those improvements on their own every day.” Reynal notes that he’s kept awarding equity to workers every year, and that the $300 million in stock they’ve received is now worth over $1 billion.

Unfortunately, Ingersoll Rand is an exception in offering equity to all employees. Though the policy has grown in private equity (TPG is also a big practitioner), it’s still relatively rare in public companies. To spread the gospel, Stavros was the leading force in creating a nonprofit called Ownership Works. Reynal is a founding member. The organization counts a long list of participants including many PE firms such as Leonard Green and Warburg Pincus and a few big public players, notably Harley-Davidson and Ingersoll Rand. The idea is for the experts who’ve made the concept work to get public companies interested and show them how to establish the programs successfully. Says Reynal, “I have the playbook on how this operates. I talk about its benefits at conferences, and coach CEOs on how to do it.” Ownership Works harbors the ambitious goal of achieving $20 billion in employee wealth by 2030.

But Stavros believes ownership could spread to multiples of that number if America once again embraced an instrument called the ESOP, for employee stock ownership plan. The Ownership Works platform offers no tax incentives to the company and imposes an upfront cost. In addition, it may take a long time to harvest the return. Hence, many publicly traded companies aren’t buying in. By contrast, ESOPs provide major tax breaks to both employers and employees. The rub is that ESOPs have triggered a rush of lawsuits that have caused a sharp decline. Stavros is spearheading an effort in Washington, D.C., to modernize the ESOP laws. An ESOP revival, he contends, could make owners of another 50 million workers.

At CoolIt, the workers I interview testify to the force of ownership as a motivator. “The company is trying very hard to treat everyone equally and make the workplace a better place,” says Morris. “Before KKR, we had good times and bad times.” She recalls that employees took pay cuts to help the company survive when the pandemic crushed production, and notes that “morale is much better now.” Kong agrees. “I was with another global company before that did give stock, but I never felt like an owner,” he says. “Here, management is constantly telling you that you are actually an owner, and that you, not just the executives, can get a spectacular return from the good work we’re doing. If our production line operators didn’t build quality products and maintain the highest standards why would Ecolab be interested in buying us?”

As for Ibitoye, he adds that “ownership” is encouraging workers to do things as simple as “eliminating any waste” and nixing anything that “doesn’t add value to production.” He adds that CoolIT takes the “no idea is too silly” approach that encourages folks to propose changes that seem so minuscule that people are reluctant to propose them, but taken together, can speed output and hone quality.  

The cheers from that snowy day under the cavernous tent testified that an ownership culture can work wonders. Like CoolITs innovations, it’s an idea that should come out of the lab and onto the production floor.

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As Women’s History Month comes to a close, here’s a little bit of trivia for you: One of the premier patents in bras hadn’t been touched or improved upon in 88 years. That was until Bree McKeen went after it. 

In 1931, inventor Helene Pons was granted a U.S. patent for a brassiere featuring an open-ended wire loop that encircled the bottom and sides of each breast. That uncomfortable, unyielding design had largely been left unchanged for nearly a century—and remains the dominant style in the global bra market, which is expected to reach nearly $60 billion by 2032. 

Nobody had filed a patent for an underwire replacement until McKeen, founder of Evelyn & Bobbie, left her Silicon Valley job to try to fix a personal problem. At the end of long days working at a boutique venture capital firm doing due diligence on consumer health care companies, she would come home with divots on her shoulders and chronic tension headaches after being hunched over her desk for hours on end. 

While the world was demanding, the culprit wasn’t her workload. It was her bra. 

But McKeen had zero experience in fashion. She studied medical anthropology and earned her MBA from Stanford. The turning point for her, though, came in a physiologist’s office, where McKeen had been working on her posture, along with regular barre training. 

“He’s like, your posture looks great,’” McKeen recalled to Fortune. “And I kind of blurt it out: When I stand like this, I get pain from my bra.” 

The physiologist explained it was a neuromuscular feedback loop, or the body’s automatic response to pain, like a pebble in a shoe. 

“Here I am doing all this work to carry myself with authority and poise, and my bra, I find out, is totally doing the opposite,” McKeen said. “You don’t have to tell your body to curl around the pain. It just does.”

She had zero fashion experience. She filed a patent anyway

That realization kick-started McKeen on a major career switch, costing her a career in VC—but earning her one of the most quietly disruptive brands in women’s fashion (Evelyn & Bobbie is now the fastest-growing brand at Nordstrom). She moved to Portland, Ore., the home to Nike, Adidas, and Columbia, for inspiration from major brands and proximity to new connections. 

She started tinkering with prototypes in her garage and immediately filed for intellectual property rights. That was based on her VC knowledge that a woman’s company would need that to get funded. 

McKeen got her first works utility patent (the harder, more defensible kind that covers how something works, not just how it looks) within a year. The brand declined to disclose how much funding it has raised, but it now holds 16 international patents protecting its proprietary EB Core technology, which mimics the support and structure of a wire without causing discomfort.

Photo courtesy Evelyn & Bobbie

To put into perspective how critical it was to protect her intellectual property, only 12% of patents in the U.S. were awarded to women, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as of 2019. McKeen has six of them, protecting the unique 3D-sling technology in her bras. 

The brand McKeen built, Evelyn & Bobbie, was named for her maternal grandmother and her aunt, and operates on a simple premise: a bra that fits well and feels good all day.

“I wanted a bra that made me look better in my clothes,” McKeen said—an inspiration reminiscent of how Spanx founder Sara Blakely started her now $1.2 billion shapewear empire. “Wire-free bras give you that mono boob—not a nice silhouette. They make your clothes look frumpy. I wanted nice lift, separation, a beautiful silhouette. I could not find that bra. How outrageous, really.”

The average U.S. bra size is 34F. Most brands design for something much smaller

With major brands like Victoria’s Secret, Aerie, Third Love, Savage X Fenty, and countless others on the market, Evelyn & Bobbie is undoubtedly in a crowded, competitive space. But as all women know, not all bras are comfortable to wear, especially for extended periods. 

“Every woman I talked to had 20 bras in her drawer, but she wore like two of them—the ugly, comfy ones that she felt like she shouldn’t wear,” McKeen said. 

What sets Evelyn & Bobbie apart is its approach to sizing. McKeen designs with 270 fit models across seven easy sizes, grading each style individually rather than scaling up from a single sample.

“Most bra companies have like one or two fit models,” she said. “They’ll make a 34B and just scale it up, which is why it doesn’t fit well in larger sizes.” 

Photo courtesy Evelyn & Bobbie

The average bra size in the U.S., McKeen pointed out, is a 34F, a stat that’s surprising to most people—including initial investors she once had to convince that comfort was even a relevant selling point.

“I had many investor meetings where they were 60-minute meetings, and 50 minutes of it was me trying to convince them that comfort was relevant,” she said. “I mean, Victoria’s Secret kind of figured it out, right? Like it’s just sexy, isn’t that what women want?”

Today, McKeen has a Slack channel dedicated entirely to customer love letters; a relationship with Dr. Nina Naidu, a New York–based plastic surgeon who sends the bras home with every postoperative patient; and a sports bra line in development. 

With a luxury product comes a luxury price point: Evelyn & Bobbie bras retail for $98 each. But for some women, avoiding chronic pain could be worth the price tag.

“Comfort is the new luxury,” she said. “We spend money on yoga pants that make us look and feel great. I’m going to make the premium bra the bra of the future.”

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Washington is racing to secure American leadership in artificial intelligence. Lawmakers are investing in semiconductor capacity, energy infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and supply chain resilience — all with AI at the center of economic strategy.

But there is a structural gap in that strategy that few are talking about.

AI leadership depends on more than compute, talent, and capital. It also depends on whether the United States offers predictable and enforceable patent protection for the technologies that companies are building and investors are financing. In the global competition for AI dominance, intellectual property policy is not peripheral — it is foundational.

Recent Federal Circuit decisions affecting applied AI patents have renewed debate over subject matter eligibility under Section 101 of the Patent Act. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued helpful guidance clarifying examination standards for AI-related inventions — a needed step. But for companies deploying AI into real-world systems, from advanced manufacturing to grid modernization to defense, the operative question is durability: Will a duly issued patent withstand challenge? Will it support financing and commercialization? Will it provide meaningful remedies if infringed?

This distinction is especially significant in applied AI — AI embedded in industrial processes, energy systems, logistics networks, and health technologies. That is where large-scale private capital flows, and where enforceable patent protection most directly shapes investment decisions. When patent rights are uncertain, investors factor in that risk. Some move their capital toward less risky industries — or less risky jurisdictions.

What China and Europe Are Already Doing

Other major economies treat patent policy as a core component of their industrial strategy. China integrates intellectual property objectives into its national AI plans, pairing patent development with enforcement capacity. The European Patent Office has issued structured guidance on AI patentability designed to produce predictable outcomes when software-based inventions demonstrate “technical effect.”

The United States retains extraordinary strengths: leading research institutions, deep capital markets, entrepreneurial dynamism, and a sophisticated patent system. But sustained AI leadership depends not only on technological capability — it depends on legal certainty.

Three Priorities for a Forward-Looking Agenda

1. Maintain clarity in AI patent examination. The USPTO’s AI-related guidance provides a constructive foundation. Continued refinement, examiner training, and transparent application of eligibility standards are essential to ensure consistent outcomes across technologies and industries. Predictable examination reduces friction at the front end of innovation.

2. Strengthen enforceability through legislation. Uncertainty surrounding Section 101 has created instability for software-enabled and data-driven inventions. Congressional clarification of subject matter eligibility would reduce unpredictability and provide clearer guardrails for courts and innovators alike. Patent rights that cannot be defended in practice do not function as meaningful commercial assets.

3. Align IP incentives with strategic sectors. Congress is advancing legislation to bolster domestic manufacturing, energy infrastructure, defense technologies, and supply chain resilience — all areas increasingly powered by AI-enabled systems. Stable and enforceable IP rights encourage companies to develop, manufacture, and scale transformative technologies within the United States, rather than shifting investment toward jurisdictions that offer greater legal certainty.

The policy debate around AI often focuses on inputs: chips, data, workforce development, research dollars. They matter enormously. But innovation ecosystems depend just as much on credible legal institutions. Investors assess defensibility before committing capital. Entrepreneurs evaluate IP strength before entering markets. Global firms consider enforcement regimes when deciding where to locate research, production, and scaling operations.

Predictable patent systems send signals — that innovation will be rewarded, that risk is calculable, and that a jurisdiction is serious about technological leadership.

The global AI race is underway. Winning it will require more than chips and research grants. It will require a patent system calibrated for applied AI — one that provides clarity at the front end and enforceability at the back end. If Washington is serious about AI leadership, it must recognize that the global AI race is also an IP race — and strengthen the U.S. patent system accordingly. 

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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Gabriel Petersson’s childhood looked a lot like many Gen Z upbringings: collecting Pokemon cards and building worlds in Minecraft, while worries about college and careers sat somewhere in the distant future.

But by high school, growing up in a small Swedish town of about 5,000 people, Petersson found himself less interested in just playing games and more curious in how they worked. That quickly snowballed into a deeper obsession with startups, software, and artificial intelligence—what he saw as the next major technological shift. 

Rather than follow a traditional path of finishing high school, studying computer science, and climbing the corporate tech ladder, Petersson opted out entirely. During his senior year, the then 17-year-old dropped out of high school to cofound Depict.ai, an e-commerce data startup, alongside peers who would later go on to roles at companies like Lovable and Lego.

Five years later, that bet has paid off. At 22, Petersson has landed a six-figure salary at ChatGPT parent OpenAI working as a researcher (formally part of the now sun-setting Sora team). And he’s become an unlikely evangelist for a simple idea: the credential gap is closable, if you’re willing to show your work.

How a twentysomething landed a job in Silicon Valley—without a degree to his name

Landing a role at one of Silicon Valley’s most coveted companies without a degree—let alone a high school diploma—requires a different kind of job-seeking strategy. For Petersson, it came down to proving you can do the job before anyone asks for your resume.

After his time at Depict, he joined Y Combinator-backed AI startup Dataland and relocated to New York in 2021. By most measures, things were going well. Then he visited San Francisco. 

“I still remember the first week,” Petersson said. “I just couldn’t sleep… you could just go to any place, and people would discuss programming. They would discuss startups. They would talk about all these things that I enjoy talking about…I was just mind blown.”

The trip recalibrated his ambitions entirely. But there was the obvious challenge of how a high school dropout could compete with candidates from Ivy League schools and top engineering programs. His answer was to stop competing on credentials altogether and compete on proof instead. 

Rather than submitting applications just through traditional channels, Petersson developed a direct outreach playbook. The format was simple: introduce yourself briefly, express genuine enthusiasm for the company, and—most critically—show them something built for them specifically.

“You can say something like, ‘I was so excited about your company that I’ve been having this side project of building an actual website for what you guys are doing,” he said. “In this way I can prove all these things and not compete with anyone else.”

The strategy helped him land a role at Dataland, and he put it to the test again at Midjourney, an AI research lab based in Silicon Valley. Around that time, he was still striking out through traditional applications, including an early rejection from OpenAI.

So he doubled down on his approach by spending a full week working 16-hour days to build a custom website for Midjourney, then sending over a video demo walking through the code. The effort paid off, and Midjourney hired him as a software engineer in 2023.

“When I make a video demo of a product that I build, I show my understanding, I show that I’m good socially. They can see this person seems reasonable,” Petersson added. “I tick more boxes than I ever could by any proxy.”

The Midjourney role opened the next door. A friend connected him to OpenAI’s research team—the same company that had rejected him a year earlier. This time, he was ready. He landed the role in December 2024. It was a lesson, he said, in the power of trying again for opportunities after you know you can do more.

Gen Z can land their dream job—as long as they have the right mindset, according to Petersson

For Petersson, Midjourney and OpenAI have been more than just jobs—they’ve been confirmation of something he now shares broadly with young people navigating an increasingly credential-obsessed hiring market: elite careers are not reserved for a select few. Even people working at the most powerful companies in the world, he argued, aren’t as unreachable as they seem.

“Anyone can compete if you just put yourself in the right scenarios and the right things,” Petersson said.

Many young professionals fall into the trap of holding themselves back, he added, by staying in roles for too long. Having worked at nearly half a dozen companies before even turning 23, Petersson thinks early careers should be optimized for learning velocity, not stability.

At a moment when many young people are entering the workforce wondering whether AI will simply take the jobs they’re chasing, Petersson is convinced there’s plenty of opportunity for those willing to embrace the technology rather than fear it.

And after working in the tech industry, he pointed out even top minds “don’t have everything figured out.”

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The effective closure from the Iran war of the Strait of Hormuz—the critical chokepoint for roughly 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas—is in its fifth week with no clear signs of resolving. For Asia, which buys more than 80% of the crude and LNG that flows through the narrow waterway, the consequences have been swift: severe fuel shortages, export bans, and government budgets stretched to the breaking point.

The crisis is forcing Asia to look both backward and forward simultaneously. In the short term, governments are returning to coal—the dirtiest of fossil fuels—to keep the lights on. In the long term, the supply shock may accelerate nuclear restarts and electric vehicle adoption faster than years of climate policy ever managed.

The fuel crisis has pushed Asian countries to turn to increasingly severe measures to maintain their stockpiles. 

South Korea urged households to take shorter showers, charge devices during off-peak hours and shift usage of high-energy appliances like washing machines to weekends. Samsung, meanwhile, barred employees from driving their car to work if the last digit of their license plate matches the last digit of the current date. 

Southeast Asian governments are rolling out similar restrictions. Thailand introduced a four-day workweek for civil servants, and ordered higher office air-conditioning temperatures to curb demand. Vietnam’s airlines are suspending some domestic routes as the country braces for jet fuel shortages.

The situation is most critical in the Philippines, where President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on March 24 declared a national energy emergency, citing an “imminent danger” to the nation’s supplies of fuel. Transit workers went on strike on Friday to protest rising fuel prices.

The crisis also is straining government finances. Malaysia’s monthly fuel-subsidy bill, for example, has surged from 700 million Malaysian ringgit ($174 million) to more than 3.2 billion ringgit ($797 million), and could reach 24 billion ringgit ($6 billion) if oil remains above $110 per barrel. Kuala Lumpur cut the quota of subsidized fuel by a third before the weekend in a bid to slice costs.

Back to coal

Asian governments are temporarily pivoting to coal as the Iran war chokes off natural gas supplies, undermining years of effort to curb the continent’s dependence on the dirtiest major fuel.

Across the region, governments have gradually curtailed coal while promoting LNG as a relatively cleaner, more flexible transition fuel.

The Hormuz crisis is reversing that progress. Thailand’s government is restarting two coal plants that it decommissioned last year. South Korea removed its 80% operating cap on coal-fired generation. Japan confirmed on March 27 that it too is lifting caps on coal power generation, allowing older and less-efficient plants to operate at full capacity for up to a year from April.

Kazuhiro Nogi—AFP via Getty Images

Traditional coal exporters, such as Australia and Indonesia, also may keep coal for themselves rather than share it with their neighbors.

“Indonesia is prioritizing domestic coal consumption over exports, which tightens supply for Asian imports,” says Vicky Janita, an analyst at Rystad Energy. “The rest of the region doesn’t necessarily benefit from Indonesia’s coal abundance if it cannot export.” 

The risk is that once a coal plant is brought back online, the sunk costs and political economy of energy pricing make it difficult to shut down again. “There’s a danger of a long-term carbon lock-in once countries decide to reverse plans to retire aging coal-fired fleets,” warns Sharon Seah, coordinator of the Climate Change in Southeast Asia program at ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. 

Forward to nuclear

The ongoing war in Iran and Lebanon also is likely to accelerate nuclear plans across Asia.

Southeast Asia, despite years of debate, does not have a single operational nuclear power plant. Nuclear was expensive and politically toxic after the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, and cheap natural gas ended up a more attractive option. Other parts of Asia have also been wary of nuclear: Taiwan decommissioned its last nuclear plant last year. 

Parts of Asia were making cautious steps toward nuclear energy before the Iran crisis. Vietnam had been in negotiations with Russia to build its first nuclear power plant; that deal was finalized on March 23, when Moscow agreed to help construct the Ninh Thuan 1 plant using two Russian-designed reactors.

Malaysia is also considering nuclear energy to power its growing data center industry without abandoning its net-zero commitments.

Maxim Shipenkov—Pool/AFP via Getty Images

China has dozens of nuclear reactors under construction and several hundred still in the planning stage, David Fishman, an analyst at the China-based Lantau Group, noted. “It’s the most ambitious build plan in the world by far, even if it’s still only a very small fraction of China’s total power consumption.”

But the Iran war could accelerate a return to nuclear energy. 

The most dramatic nuclear reversal is in Taiwan, where President Lai Ching-te, whose ruling Democratic Progressive Party has governed under a “nuclear-free homeland” platform since 2016, announced plans to restart two of the island’s shuttered reactors. 

The Philippines has laid out a pathway to nuclear power by 2032 and is seeking South Korean expertise, while Seoul is raising utilization rates at existing reactors.

Still, it is easy to overestimate the permanence of any of these shifts. 

“In every oil crisis, the knee-jerk reaction from net importers is, ‘We must switch to non-fossil fuel sources’,” says Li-Chen Sim, an associate fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “But this is quickly forgotten or cast aside once the crisis is over.” 

Fossil fuels are not used solely for power generation, she added; the region’s semiconductor, plastics, and textile industries also depend heavily on petrochemical inputs. “No Southeast Asian country is about to permanently shift away from fossil fuels,” she notes.

“The energy transition in Asia is more likely to be a messier, longer transition where fossil fuels remain a significant part of the mix for at least another decade,” adds Rystad’s Janita.

Not just power

Apart from seeking alternative energy sources, the Hormuz crisis may trigger “demand destruction,” resulting in less total energy usage—a phenomenon when high prices cause a permanent shift in consumer behavior. One historical precedent is the 1970s oil embargo, when U.S. drivers defected to fuel-efficient Japanese cars and never went back. 

“The question is whether this crisis does the same for EVs in Asia,” Janita says. “While EVs won’t ease the current shortage, this crisis could be a turning point for medium-term adoption across the region.”

There’s some early evidence that consumer behavior is changing. EV dealerships across Southeast Asia reported higher customer interest and increased orders in March. And governments are pushing for change too: earlier this week, Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto pledged that all vehicles in Indonesia would eventually be electric. 

“Chinese EVs have been gaining strong traction in markets like Australia recently, and electric two-wheelers in Southeast Asia were already expanding rapidly even before the current crisis,” says Hao Tan, a professor of management at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. “Higher oil prices are most likely to accelerate this trend, and Chinese firms hold the strongest competitive advantage.”

China has been insulated from the Iran energy shock. China relies more on a mix of coal, nuclear, and renewable energy rather than oil and LNG. In addition, its strategic reserves, estimated at some 120 days of oil imports, give it a substantial buffer against price shocks.

Brent Lewin—Bloomberg via Getty Images

But China’s early decision to direct its top refiners to suspend exports of diesel, petrol, and jet fuel is rippling across the region. 

The collateral damage has been significant. China supplies 40% of Australia’s jet fuel; Vietnam, the Philippines and Bangladesh also rely on Chinese fuel. Thailand and South Korea have also imposed limits on refined-fuel exports, further tightening regional supply.

Mines in Australia are warning of suspensions due to dwindling diesel supplies. Airlines across the region, like Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific are slapping hefty fuel surcharges on flights; Vietnam and the Philippines are even weighing whether to ground planes.

Fishman thinks China may take a “reputational hit” for halting fuel exports, but argues Beijing may have had little practical choice. “Wouldn’t you do the same if you had excess refining capacity and you were facing down a potential domestic shortfall?” he asked. “It’s horrendous math that you can’t get around—but it’s not wrong.”

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Workers in high-pressure careers may count down the hours until they can escape the office and get a moment of relief—but a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk says a reset doesn’t have to wait. Toryo Ito, the vice abbot of the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto, is bringing a mediation-based practice to the corporate world and helping workers cope with their stressful careers.

“I want to shift their awareness of the definition of ‘strong.’ People who are very good at business tend to focus on the power [and] force,” he tells Fortune. “My definition of [strength] is how you get back to the core of your idea, how to come back to your body and heart in daily life.”

Ito says helping people navigate their high-stress jobs is one of the most frequent requests he gets from white-collar pupils. The 46-year-old leader at Ryosokuin Temple was born into a lineage of Zen monks, and started sharing his practice with companies and their staffers back in 2012.

Serving as director of mindfulness at Japanese skincare company Tatcha since 2021 and leading meditation workshops at Fortune 500 businesses like Meta and Sony, the monk is bringing his ancient practice to people all around the world with a modern approach. He travels to Tokyo to teach mindfulness once a month, conducting overseas sessions up to 10 times a year.

When it comes to handling stress while on the job, Ito says it’s a dilemma he’s mitigated with his meditation attendees “thoughtfully and proactively.” And luckily, workers don’t have to wait to clock out to reset their nervous systems. Ito shares a 30-second method to reconnect with themselves and achieve a sense of calm. 

“When you get so much information, [you become] obsessed with a lot of decisions,” Ito explains. It’s okay to recognize that you’ve dwelled on the feeling, and he shares a “way to notice that earlier, and then develop the way—our technique—to get back to your origin, to your body, quickly.”

The Zen way anyone can achieve a calmer mindset in 30 seconds 

Millions of workers have become hardwired to bustle into their offices, overwhelmed by packed commutes and chaotic starts to the day. But even while toiling away at their laptops, professionals can take one short step to return to their center. Opening up a new document or answering emails can turn into a meditative moment. 

“I often teach them what you can do in your daily routine, such as drinking coffee, for example, or opening a laptop. Before opening your laptop, just take 30 seconds to breathe in, breathe out carefully,” Ito explains. 

By taking a beat to sit in silence with closed eyes, people are giving themselves a moment to notice the world, rather than shut it out. Ito says it’s important to be observant during those 30 seconds: pay attention to the noise in the room, what it smells like in that moment. If you pick up a cup of coffee to drink, focus on the taste.

Engaging the senses centers mindfulness even in the most hectic work environments, lowering stress and opening up the headspace for thinking. 

“When you send an important message to your colleague, just take 30 seconds to listen to the sound surrounding you, smell the surroundings,” he continues. “Your habit, your work, can become meditative time.”

Ito offers another Zen strategy for one of the most nerve-wracking moments at work: going into a stressful meeting. Focusing on your steps and entering the room intentionally helps build up “your personal ritual,” the monk says. 

“When you enter the conference room, just open the door,” he says. “Put your feet together, then walk from the left foot first, then right foot. Always do that, then you can find the slight changes of that everytime…You have a strong routine that gives you that awareness.”

Professionals might lose their rhythm, or recognize a difference in their breathing, but it all goes back into Zen’s practice of noticing—and having those small meditative habits to reconnect to the body.

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Large crowds protested Saturday against the war in Iran and President Donald Trump’s actions in “No Kings” rallies across the U.S. and in Europe. Minnesota took center stage, with thousands of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder to celebrate resistance to Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement.

Minnesota’s flagship event on the Capitol lawn in St. Paul drew Bruce Springsteen as its headliner. He and other speakers praised the state’s people for taking to the streets over the winter in opposition to a surge of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents.

Springsteen performed “Streets of Minneapolis,” the song he wrote in response to the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents. Springsteen lamented Good and Pretti’s deaths but said the state’s pushback against ICE has given the rest of the country hope.

“Your strength and your commitment told us that this was still America,” he said. “And this reactionary nightmare, and these invasions of American cities, will not stand.”

People rallied from New York City, with almost 8.5 million residents in a solidly blue state, to Driggs, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in eastern Idaho, a state Trump carried with 66% of the vote in 2024.

Biggest crowds yet expected

U.S. organizers have estimated that the first two rounds of No Kings rallies drew more than 5 million people in June and 7 million in October.This week they told reporters they expected 9 million participants Saturday, though it was too early to tell whether those expectations were met.

Organizers said more than 3,100 events — 500 more than in October — were registered, in all 50 states.

In Topeka, Kansas, a rally outside the Statehouse had people impersonating a frog king and Trump as a baby. Wendy Wyatt drove with “Cats Against Trump” sign from Lawrence, 20 miles (32 kilometers) to the east, and planned to drive back to her hometown for a later rally there.

Wyatt said “there are so many things” about the Trump administration that upset her, but “this is very hopeful to me.”

GOP officials dismissive of protests

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson characterized them as the product of “leftist funding networks” with little real public support.

The “only people who care about these Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them,” Jackson said in a statement.

The National Republican Congressional Committee was also sharply critical.

“These Hate America Rallies are where the far-left’s most violent, deranged fantasies get a microphone,” NRCC spokesperson Maureen O’Toole said.

Protesters have a long list of causes

Trump’s immigration enforcement push, particularly in Minnesota, was just one item on a long list of protester grievances that also included the war in Iran and the rollback of transgender rights. Speakers at the Minnesota rally decried billionaires’ economic power.

In Washington, hundreds marched past the Lincoln Memorial and into the National Mall, holding signs that read “Put down the crown, clown” and “Regime change begins at home.” Demonstrators rang bells, played drums and chanted “No kings.”

Bill Jarcho was there from Seattle, joined by six people dressed as insects wearing tactical vests that said, “LICE” — spoofing ICE, as part of what he called a “mock and awe” tour.

“What we provide is mockery to the king,” Jarcho said. “It’s about taking authoritarianism and making fun of it, which they hate.”

About 40,000 people marched in San Diego, police there said.

In New York, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said during a news conference that Trump and his supporters want people to be afraid to protest.

“They want us to be afraid that there’s nothing we can do to stop them,” she said. “But you know what? They are wrong — dead wrong.”

Organizers said two-thirds of RSVPs for the rallies came from outside of major urban centers. That included communities in conservative-leaning states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, South Dakota and Louisiana, as well in electorally competitive suburbs in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.

Main event at the Minnesota Capitol

Organizers designated the rally there as the national flagship event.

Before Springsteen took the stage, organizers played a video in which actor Robert DeNiro said he wakes up every morning depressed because of Trump but was happier Saturday because millions of people were protesting. He also congratulated Minnesotans for running ICE out of town.

The bill also included singer Joan Baez, actor Jane Fonda, Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and a long list of activists, labor leaders and elected officials.

Protesters held up a massive sign on the Capitol steps that read, “We had whistles, they had guns. The revolution starts in Minneapolis.”

“Donald Trump may pretend that he’s not listening, but he can’t ignore the millions in the streets today,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Rallies outside the US

Demonstrations were also planned in more than a dozen other countries, from Europe to Latin America to Australia, Ezra Levin, a co-executive director of Indivisible, a group spearheading the events, said in an interview. In countries with constitutional monarchies, people call the protests “No Tyrants,” he said.

In Rome, thousands marched with defiant chants aimed at Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose conservative government saw its referendum for streamlining Italy’s judiciary fail badly this week amid criticism that it was a threat to the courts’ independence. Protesters also waved banners protesting Israeli and US attacks on Iran, calling for “A world free from wars.”

In London, people protesting the war held banners with slogans such as “Stop the far right” and “Stand up to Racism.”

And in Paris, several hundred people, mostly Americans living in France, along with labor unions and human rights organizations, gathered at the Bastille.

“I protest all of Trump’s illegal, immoral, reckless, and feckless, endless wars,” rally organizer Ada Shen said.

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Home buyers have gained even more leverage over sellers as housing market supply continues to overwhelm tepid demand.

In February, there were 46.3% more sellers than buyers, representing a gap of 629,808, the largest in Redfin’s records going back to 2013, the real estate company said in a report on Monday.

The latest number is up 30% from a year earlier, when the mismatch was 449,409. And recently as October, it was 528,769 people.

According to Redfin, a buyer’s market is when there are over 10% more sellers than buyers. And by this definition, buyers have held the advantage since May 2024.

That came after the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive rate-hiking cycle in four decades, sending mortgage rates higher as central bankers scrambled to bring down inflation.

The result was a sharp unwinding of the seller’s market that saw home prices and sales boom in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic.

But even though the Fed began reducing rates two years ago, the housing market has largely been frozen as the “lock-in effect” prevented homeowners with low mortgage rates from putting their properties up for sale. The tight supply also lifted home prices, adding to the spiraling housing affordability crisis.

President Donald Trump’s Iran war has only made things worse. Fears that high oil prices will accelerate inflation while more defense spending widens the deficit have spiked Treasury yields, lifting borrowing costs throughout the economy.

That includes mortgage rates, which have jumped to their highest levels since October. With homeownership now even more expensive, mortgage application volume plunged 10.5% last week from the prior week. That’s an ominous sign for the upcoming spring selling season.

“Of course, it’s only a buyer’s market for those who can afford to buy,” Redfin pointed out. “High housing costs and economic uncertainty have caused many house hunters to retreat, creating an imbalance of buyers and sellers.”

The number of homebuyers in the fell 2.4% month over month in February to about 1.36 million. Meanwhile, the number of sellers dipped just 0.4% to an estimated 1.99 million.

The strongest buyer’s market last month was Miami, where sellers outnumbered buyers by 163%. That was followed by Nashville (120%), Austin (112%), West Palm Beach (110%) and San Antonio (104%).

After many Sun Belt cities saw an influx of people during the remote-work heyday of the pandemic, builders rushed to add more supply. But the affordability crisis has weighed on demand, leaving many cities with a hangover of excess supply.

In another indication of how much the housing market favors buyers, a separate batch of Redfin data showed canceled contracts hit a record high for February.

More than 42,000 U.S. home-sale agreements fell through last month, or 13.7% of homes that went under contract, marking the highest February share in records dating back to 2017. That’s also up from 12.8% a year earlier.

Cancelations happen when buyers see better homes and back out during the inspection period or when a they dont want to repair an issue that comes up after signing contracts. Other times, they just get cold feet and assume an even more desirable property will eventually become available.

“House hunters are also feeling jittery because of economic and geopolitical uncertainty,” Redfin said. “Many Americans are concerned about job security, inflation, the Iran war, and other world events that can make their finances feel shaky.”

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Palmer Luckey is clear when asked whether he would sell weapons to North Korea. “If the U.S. asks me to, yes.”

Anduril, the defense-technology startup Luckey founded in 2017 after his politically charged departure from Facebook, could be set for a $60 billion valuation. The company is riding a record surge in global defense spending and a shift in Silicon Valley sentiment toward working with the military, selling autonomous systems such as its Fury drone and Ghost Shark submarine to U.S. partners including Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. 

War in the Middle East—between high-tech planes on the side of the U.S. and Israel, and relatively low-tech drones and missiles on the side of Iran—is also revealing how current-day warfare is changing, and how manufacturing capacity can quickly become stretched. 

But as Anduril grows into one of America’s most closely watched weapons makers, Luckey’s position—that arms makers should function as extensions of U.S. government policy—puts him at the center of overlapping debates about alliance politics in Asia, the rise of Chinese military hardware, and how much power tech billionaires should wield over questions of war and peace.

“I’m never going to promise to do something the U.S. wouldn’t do,” he told Fortune in early February, on the sidelines of the Singapore Airshow. The question is: Will other governments be relieved–or unnerved–by that pledge? 

From consumer tech to defense tech

Drones were all over the Singapore Airshow, held at Singapore’s Changi Exhibition Centre on a sweltering February day. Exhibitors hawked unmanned aerial vehicles and systems to manage them; a few booths further down, other companies sold systems to shoot those same drones down.

One such drone was the YFQ-44 Fury: a grey metal fuselage that resembles a fighter jet stripped of its cockpit. Made by Anduril Industries, the Fury is a jet-powered, unmanned combat aircraft designed to team with fighters like the F-35 and carry out high-risk air-to-air missions autonomously at a fraction of the cost of a traditional jet.

Anduril is the work of Palmer Luckey, who founded the defense tech startup in 2017 after leaving Facebook amid political fallout over his support for a pro-Trump, anti-Hillary Clinton group during the 2016 election.

“It’s funny seeing people say, ‘Look at him—he’s wasting his time,’ or, ‘He’s evil and trying to make war happen,’” Luckey said. “Post-Ukraine, I feel like people have been more like, ‘Okay, maybe he wasn’t totally nuts.’ Even the people who hate me agree I’m not nuts.”

Kevork Djansezian—Getty Images

Luckey, 33, was in consumer tech long before he went into defense. He started Oculus VR, a company that designed virtual reality headsets, in 2012, which was later bought by Facebook for $2 billion.

Months after leaving Facebook in 2017, Luckey founded Anduril Industries—named for Aragorn’s reforged sword in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—alongside several other executives from Palantir Technologies. Last year, Anduril raised $2.5 billion in a funding round led by Founders Fund, the Peter Thiel-led VC fund, which valued the defense tech company at $30.5 billion. The company is currently in talks with Thrive Capital and other investors for a new funding round that could double its valuation to $60 billion, Bloomberg reported on March 3. 

Luckey admits that moving from VR headsets to defense was a shift. “With VR, the only thing stopping us from launching a new headset was whether it was finished and ready to launch. You can’t do that with the military. You’re moving at someone else’s pace.”

That sluggishness is partly why Anduril doesn’t rely on defense grants to develop products, instead relying on its own funds. “Cost-plus contracting has perverse incentives: people make more money when programs are slow, more money when things are more expensive, more money when things break all the time. If I relied on the government to give me money to start development, I’d have to wait years just to even start.”

Not all of Anduril’s customers praise the company’s work. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that some Ukrainian operators stopped using Anduril’s drones in 2024, following frustrations with their performance. U.S. testers, too, have reportedly criticized the responsiveness of Anduril’s Lattice operating system. 

Anduril has pushed back against these reports, arguing in an extended response that failures are part of a broader strategy of “highly iterative model of technology development—moving fast, testing constantly, failing often, refining our work, and doing it all over again.”

“It is not surprising that Anduril, as a leading new defense technology company, is subject to increasing scrutiny,” the company wrote.

‘I’m not willing to go to prison to sell you spare parts’

Anduril is riding a record defense spending boom and a wave of government-aligned tech sentiment in Silicon Valley, as investors pour billions into autonomous weapons, AI-enabled sensor networks, and cheap, expendable drones. The company projects about $4.3 billion in revenue this year, even as it expects to lose more than $1 billion and does not forecast adjusted profitability until later in the decade, The Information reported in early March.

Global arms spending rose to a record $2.7 trillion in 2024, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an international institute that tracks military expenditure and security trends. Shares of defense contractors have shot upwards over the past year: The Global X Defense Tech ETF, which includes companies like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Hanwha Aerospace, and Leonardo, is up by more than 45% over the past 12 months, compared to 14% for the S&P 500. 

Some of that boom in defense spending, in Luckey’s view, is due to longstanding U.S. demands that allies pay more for their own defense. “There’s an appetite in Washington for Anduril to work with Asian countries on domestic production. The view is that if Japan isn’t building any of its own weapons, they’re basically a freeloader,” he said.

Australia is spending $1.1 billion on Anduril’s autonomous submarine, the Ghost Shark. Anduril has also signed deals with companies in Japan and South Korea, as well as the government of Taiwan; that last partnership caught the ire of Beijing, which slapped sanctions on both Anduril and Luckey last year.

Asanka Ratnayake—Getty Images

Australia, Japan and South Korea are all close U.S. security allies and longstanding democracies, and so obvious markets for a U.S. defense company. But what about countries that are less democratic, or those who don’t have decades-long security arrangements with Washington?

“I have opinions on which countries are going to stay close U.S. allies and which ones aren’t. But my opinion can’t be the one that counts,” he explained.

He takes it to an extreme: he would sell arms to North Korea, if the U.S. asks him to. “If I take any other position, then what I’m effectively saying is that U.S. foreign policy should be decided by a handful of corporate executives based on who they’re willing to sell to or not,” he said.

What Anduril’s customers may be more concerned about, however, is what happens if the U.S. orders the company to stop working with a particular country. Many countries have looser ties to the U.S. alliance system, bound together by more transient economic and geopolitical alignments. 

And even close alliances don’t seem as solid as they used to be: President Trump has repeatedly picked fights with South Korea, Japan, Canada, and the European Union in disagreements over tariffs, defense spending, and support for U.S. military endeavors.

“I can’t reassure them. I’m never going to be able to promise to do anything that the U.S. would not. If a country asks me ‘commit to supporting this even if the U.S. doesn’t want to,’ all I can say is no,” he explained. “I’m not willing to go to prison to sell you spare parts.”

The rise of China

It’s impossible to talk about defense spending in Asia without talking about China, a strategic rival to the U.S. and a growing military power in its own right. The country makes up the second-largest share of global defense spending, at 12%, though it is still far behind the U.S.

“China has actually gotten its shit together,” Luckey said.

U.S. officials have long been concerned about China’s ability to develop hypersonic missiles and other forms of asymmetric warfare that might undermine the U.S.’s traditional strength. Last year’s brief India-Pakistan conflict was also a wake-up call for military observers, when Pakistani-operated J-10Cs—a Chinese-manufactured plane—shot down Indian jets, including a French-made Dassault Rafale, along with other aircraft, according to Western officials.

Then Chih Wey—Xinhua via Getty Images

“Is China building the world’s best fighter jets? No. But you don’t need to build the world’s best fighter jets to be a massive threat,” Luckey said. “A lot of times, two pretty good fighter jets will kick the butt of one really good fighter jet.”

Luckey uses a Second World War comparison to illustrate his point. Nazi Germany manufactured tanks using complex systems that could withstand repeated use—but were difficult to fix when they did break, he notes. The U.S., by comparison, used techniques that required pieces to be replaced constantly—but made tanks “cheap to make, easy to maintain, and fast to repair.”

He now sees China as the U.S. in this analogy, producing things that are “engineered to be manufacturable.” The U.S., he worries, is now like Germany: “We’ve built exquisite systems without regard for manufacturability and maintenance.”

Anduril is trying to position itself on the Chinese side of that comparison. The company is building a 5‑million-square-foot “Arsenal-1” factory in Ohio that aims to mass-produce drones and other weapons systems by mid‑2026, part of Luckey’s bet that industrial scale, rather than a handful of exquisite platforms, will decide future conflicts. 

Luckey’s more reasoned views on China are balanced by his public persona, which is far more provocative than what he says in private. Just hours after his conversation with Fortune, where he praised China’s ability to innovate, the Anduril founder posted a photo mocking the Shenyang J-35, a Chinese stealth fighter jet developed by the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China. “Not convinced China’s J-35 measures up to the real deal,” he posted on X.

Luckey’s post prompted a backlash from both Chinese netizens and state-owned media. “This is more like a piece of performance art, and I think he lacks professional dedication,” one Chinese military expert grumbled to the Global Times, a Chinese state-owned English-language outlet.

‘An appendage of our democracy’

At the Singapore Air Show, Luckey mused that “you’re going to see a return of American corporations, particularly the ones large and powerful enough to be of national importance, working closely with the United States as a country.”

Luckey’s views on how tech should work with the government are increasingly common across Silicon Valley, as U.S. tech companies embrace a more overtly patriotic mindset in the Trump era—whether to get on the president’s good side, avoid his bad side, or both.

But there are still tensions between the U.S. tech sector and the Trump administration. In late February, Anthropic—the developer behind the Claude large language model—refused to accept a Department of Defense request to roll back its red lines on how its AI was used, particularly around surveillance and autonomous weaponry. In retaliation, the DoD deemed Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” putting it on the same level as firms like Huawei; Trump later barred all federal agencies from using Claude. (A U.S. court paused that order before on March 26.)

Anthropic’s decision set off a fierce debate in Silicon Valley about how much deference business owes to the U.S. government. Anthropic supporters are angry that the U.S. government is punishing a company for trying to decide how its product gets used; Trump supporters, on the other hand, see Anthropic as unfairly harming U.S. national security and undermining Washington’s democratic legitimacy.

Luckey, perhaps unsurprisingly, has come out on the side of those criticizing Anthropic.

“At the end of the day, you have to believe…that our imperfect constitutional republic is still good enough to run a country without outsourcing the real levers of power to billionaires and corpos and their shadow advisors,” he wrote on X on Feb. 28.

As he told Fortune in Singapore: “I’m an appendage of the will of the people—for better or for worse.”

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French police have thwarted a suspected bomb attack outside a Bank of America building in Paris, authorities said Saturday. One suspect was detained and another escaped.

The national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office, or PNAT, told The Associated Press that it has opened an investigation into alleged terrorism-related offenses.

The suspected offenses include attempted damage by fire or by a dangerous means, the manufacture of an incendiary or explosive device, the possession and transport of such devices with the intent to prepare dangerous damage, and involvement in a terrorist criminal association.

A person was placed in police custody.

“Well done to the rapid intervention of a Paris police prefecture unit, which made it possible to thwart a violent act of a terrorist nature overnight in Paris,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said.

“Vigilance remains at a very high level,” Nuñez said. “I commend all security and intelligence forces, fully mobilized under my authority in the current international context.”

RTL radio, citing police sources, reported that the incident took place early Saturday when police officers spotted two suspects carrying a shopping bag near the premises of the Bank of America in the 8th arrondissement of the French capital.

One of the suspects, holding a lighter, was attempting to ignite a device, RTL said, while the second suspect managed to escape. The Paris police prefecture declined to comment.

Since the Iran war broke out, French authorities have increased personal protection of some figures from the Iranian opposition and stepped up security around sites that could be a target, including sites linked to U.S. interests and to the Jewish community, Nuñez said earlier this week.

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Swiss food giant Nestlé says about 12 tons, or 413,793 candy bars, of its KitKat chocolate brand were stolen after leaving its production site in Italy earlier this week for Poland.

The company, based in Vevey, Switzerland, said in a statement Friday that “the vehicle and its load are still nowhere to be found.”

The shipment of the crunchy bars, made of waffles covered with chocolate, disappeared last week while en route between production and distribution locations. The chocolate bars were to be distributed throughout Europe.

The missing candy bars could enter unofficial sales channels across European markets, the company said, but if this does happen, all products can be traced using the unique batch code assigned to individual bars.

A spokesperson for KitKat said that as a result, consumers, retailers and wholesalers would be able to identify if a product is part of the stolen shipment by scanning the on-pack batch numbers. If a match is found, the scanner will be given clear instructions on how to alert the company, which will then share the evidence appropriately.

“Whilst we appreciate the criminals’ exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is an escalating issue for businesses of all sizes,” KitKat said in a statement.

“With more sophisticated schemes being deployed on a regular basis, we have chosen to go public with our own experience in the hope that it raises awareness of an increasingly common criminal trend,” the statement added.

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Middle East oil has long been a linchpin of the U.S. dollar’s status as the dominant currency in global trade and reserves, but President Donald Trump’s war on Iran could open the door to China’s currency, according to Deutsche Bank.

In a note on Tuesday, analysts pointed out that the current “petrodollar” regime goes back to a deal struck in 1974 when Saudi Arabia agreed to price its oil in dollars and invest surpluses in U.S. assets.

And because oil is a core input to global manufacturing and transport, supply chains have a natural incentive to dollarize, the note added. Indeed, Mideast oil and gas is used to make petrochemicals, fertilizer, and even helium, which is critical to chipmaking.

“The world saves in dollars in large part because it pays in dollars,” Deutsche Bank said. “The dollar’s dominance in cross-border trade is arguably built on the petrodollar: globally traded oil is priced and invoiced in USD.” 

In exchange for Saudi Arabia recycling its dollars back into the U.S., Washington guaranteed the kingdom’s security, which also involved stationing troops in the region, providing advanced weapons, and ensuring free navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

That security shield was on display in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. The U.S. assembled a massive international coalition to quickly defeat Iraq and lower oil prices.

Fast forward to today, and America’s role in the Mideast looks vastly different. While the U.S. and Israeli militaries have severely degraded Iran’s capabilities, the regime still retains enough to combat power to selectively close off the Strait of Hormuz—unless countries negotiate safe passage and pay in Chinese yuan.

At the same time, Iran’s swarms of missiles and drones have inflicted significant damage on U.S. aircraft, radars and bases, while American air-defense systems have failed to completely protect Gulf allies’ critical energy infrastructure.

But even before the Iran war, the petrodollar regime had come under pressure, Deutsche Bank noted. U.S. sanctions on oil from Russia and Iran created an illicit trade that relied on other currencies, like the yuan.

Saudi Arabia also joined mBridge project, a central bank digital currency initiative led by China that takes on the dollar-payment infrastructure.

“The current conflict may expose further fault lines, by challenging the US security umbrella for Gulf infrastructure and the maritime security for global trade in oil,” analysts warned.

GERARD FOUET/AFP via Getty Images

Until the U.S. can neutralize Iran’s salvos, the Gulf will continue to be pummeled. Not only are their oil shipments bottled up in the Persian Gulf, output has been slashed as supplies have nowhere to go.

Efforts by Gulf states to diversify from oil and become international finance and tourism hubs are also at risk amid the Iranian bombardment.

“Damage to Gulf economies could encourage an unwind in their foreign asset savings,” Deutsche Bank said. “In this context, reports that the passage for ships through the Strait of Hormuz may be granted in exchange for oil payments in yuan should be closely followed. The conflict could be remembered as a key catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance, and the beginnings of the petroyuan.”

Any loss of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” would also ripple through other areas of global finance, including the bond market. Due the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, the federal government has long been able to issue debt at rates lower than investors would otherwise allow.

To be sure, dollar doomsayers have consistently been proven wrong, and the greenback has surged against other top currencies during the Iran war.

But there’s an even bigger potential threat to the dollar’s dominance than China’s currency: a permanent shift away from globally traded oil and gas.

With energy prices sky high, countries in Asia that rely heavily on Mideast supplies are scrambling to ration oil and gas while turning to coal, nuclear power, and renewables.

Demand for electric vehicles is also up across the globe, with Deutsche Bank saying energy choices of the Global South, Europe and North Asia will be key to track.

“A move away from oil could be as powerful as the pressure to price it in other currencies,” it added. “A world that becomes more self-sufficient in defence and energy could also be a world that holds less USD reserves.”

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday made unannounced visits to the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as Ukraine seeks to use its drone expertise to help Gulf Arab states blunt Iran’s attacks during the war in the Middle East.

Zelenskyy said that Ukraine has already signed 10-year security agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and expects to shortly finalize a similar agreement with the UAE.

Ukraine has quickly grown into one of the world’s leading producers of cutting-edge, battle-tested drone interceptors that are cheap and effective. They are playing a key part in its defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion, which began on Feb. 24, 2022.

In return for its aid to Gulf countries, Ukraine is seeking more high-end air-defense missiles that they possess and that Kyiv needs to counter Russia’s attacks. On Thursday, Zelenskyy visited Saudi Arabia,, and last week he said that Ukraine is looking into whether it can play a role in restoring security in the Strait of Hormuz.

Zelenskyy tours Gulf Arab states

On Saturday, Zelenskyy and Emirati state media reported on a meeting between the Ukrainian president and his Emirati counterpart, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to discuss regional security amid the Iran war.

Zelenskyy later posted on X to say that he had moved on to Doha and met with Qatari leaders, including with the ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.

The Ukrainian and Qatari ministers of defense signed cooperation agreements in the defense sector and defense investments, according to the Qatar Ministry of Defense.

“Real security is built on partnership — we value everyone and remain open to supporting all those who are ready to work together for this goal,” Zelenskyy wrote alongside a video of himself disembarking a plane in Qatar.

The war in the Middle East erupted on Feb. 28 when the United States and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran. The Islamic Republic retaliated with strikes against Israel and the Gulf Arab States and the blockading of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway. The war has upended global travel and sent oil prices soaring as its economic fallout extended well beyond the region.

Last week, Zelenskyy revealed that Kyiv is helping five countries — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan — counter Tehran’s drone strikes on their territory.

“For Ukraine, this is also a matter of principle: terror must not prevail anywhere in the world. Protection must be sufficient everywhere,” he said on X following his meeting with the Emirati leader.

He added they had discussed “the security situation in the Emirates, Iranian strikes, and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which directly affects the global oil market”.

Ukraine’s Mideast alliances

Zelenskyy told reporters that his government is seeking to build long-term strategic ties with Middle Eastern countries, including joint production, investment, energy cooperation and the sharing of battlefield experience.

“Simple sales do not interest us,” he said at a live briefing held on Zoom on Saturday.

While Ukraine remains short of high-end air defense systems, such as Patriot missiles, Zelenskyy said that Kyiv has developed an “integrated” defense model that effectively protects against Iranian-made Shahed drones.

Tehran sent large numbers of the attack drones to Russia early in the war. Since then, Moscow has modified them to improve their effectiveness, begun domestic production, and repeatedly launched the drones in waves at Ukrainian cities.

Zelenskyy said that Ukraine is offering Gulf Arab partners “combat-tested” expertise, and has already signed 10-year security deals with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The agreement with Qatar involves “joint defense industry projects, the establishment of coproduction facilities, and technological partnerships between companies,” Zelenskyy said in an X post.

At a media briefing, the Ukrainian leader said that he expects a similar agreement with the UAE to follow shortly.

He also told reporters that Ukraine had received “no signals” from the U.S. about potential diversions of weapons, including those funded by Kyiv’s European partners, from Ukraine to the Middle East.

His comments followed weeks of speculation that the Iran war could detract attention from Ukraine, deplete Western arsenals and force NATO allies to reduce military support for Kyiv.

Russia is already profiting from a surge in global energy prices, brought on by damage to oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf and Iran’s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil choke point.

Zelenskyy on Rubio: ‘I have not lied to anyone’

Zelenskyy also pushed back on recent remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Friday dismissed as “a lie” the Ukrainian leader’s claim that Washington wants Kyiv to hand over territory to Russia before giving it security guarantees.

Zelenskyy said his earlier statements, made in an interview with Reuters, reflected the “general direction” of talks.

“I have not lied to anyone,” he said, adding that Rubio may have misconstrued his comments.

Zelenskyy stressed that the U.S. has not directly pressured Kyiv to withdraw troops from the Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland long coveted by Moscow.

Russian forces occupy the bulk of the region, but they have not seized a strip of land that is among the most heavily fortified parts of the front line. Kyiv fears that Moscow could use that territory as a launchpad for further aggression.

But Zelenskyy said he was worried by Washington’s insistence that Ukraine would only receive guarantees following a comprehensive peace agreement, not a ceasefire deal. Kyiv claims that Russia has refused to end the war unless it can take over all of the Donbas.

Drone attacks in Ukraine and Russia

Russia launched more than 270 drones at Ukraine overnight, killing at least five people, Ukrainian authorities reported on Saturday.

Two people were killed and at least 11 more were wounded in a nighttime Russian drone strike on Odesa, according to the head of the region, Serhii Lysak. Zelenskyy said that the “massive” strike on Odesa involved more than 60 drones.

Russia’s overnight strikes also killed two men and wounded two other people in Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s hometown in central Ukraine, after a drone hit an industrial facility, regional head Oleksandr Gandzha said in a Telegram update. He didn’t specify what the industrial building was.

One person was killed overnight in the Poltava region, also in central Ukraine, as Russia struck industrial sites there, regional authorities reported on Saturday. Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz said that a production facility was hit.

In Russia, a child died after a Ukrainian drone hit a private house in Russia’s western Yaroslavl region, local Gov. Mikhail Evraev reported early Saturday. According to Evraev’s Telegram post, the child’s parents were hospitalized with serious injuries after the attack.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday that 155 Ukrainian drones were shot down during the night over Russia and the annexed Crimean Peninsula.

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As adoption of artificial intelligence in the US outpaces efforts to regulate it, organized labor is providing an important check on how the technology gets used, according to the head of the Hollywood actors’ union.

“Collective bargaining has been the fastest and most effective way for the regulation of AI technology,” SAG-AFTRA Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Thursday at an AFL-CIO workers’ summit in Washington. 

AI usage is a key issue in SAG-AFTRA’s ongoing negotiations of a new contract with Hollywood studios. The existing agreement expires in June. Crabtree-Ireland said the union is focused on limiting the use of AI performers, including digital replicas of human actors and “synthetic” characters that do not correspond to real people. A so-called “Tilly tax” — named for controversial AI actress Tilly Norwood — would levy a fee on “synthetic” performers to make using them cost as much as using real actors.

“We’ve got to make sure the economic incentives drive work for humans,” Crabtree-Ireland said.

SAG-AFTRA secured several AI-related protections for its members, including requirements that studios obtain informed consent and provide fair compensation for the use of digital replicas, after a 2023 strike that ground Hollywood to a halt for nearly four months.

Crabtree-Ireland also called on Congress to pass the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would give people ownership over their own voice and likeness to protect them from unauthorized, AI-generated replicas known as deepfakes.

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The number of American service members wounded in the Iran war has grown beyond 300, with more than two dozen troops injured this week from attacks on a Saudi air base.

Iran fired six ballistic missiles and 29 drones at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan air base in an attack Friday that injured at least 15 troops, including five seriously, according to two people briefed on the matter. U.S. officials initially reported that at least 10 U.S. troops were injured, including two who were seriously wounded.

More American forces are reaching the Middle East, with a Navy ship carrying about 2,500 Marines having now arrived in the region, U.S. Central Command announced Saturday. The USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship, as well as the elements from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit that are aboard, are based in Japan. They were conducting exercises in the area around Taiwan when the order came to deploy to the Middle East almost two weeks ago.

Central Command said that in addition to the Marines, the Tripoli also brings transport and strike fighter aircraft, as well as amphibious assault assets to the region. The USS Boxer and two other ships, along with another Marine Expeditionary Unit, have also been ordered to the region from San Diego.

Before the arrival of the Marines, the U.S. military had already built up the largest American force in the region in more than 20 years, including two aircraft carriers, several other warships and some 50,000 troops. The USS Gerald R Ford, the nation’s newest aircraft carrier, recently left the Middle East for repairs and supplies in Europe after a fire in a laundry room that affected some of the ship’s sleeping quarters.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday the United States can meet its objectives “without any ground troops.” But he also said Trump “has to be prepared for multiple contingencies” and that American forces are available “to give the president maximum optionality and maximum, opportunity to adjust to contingencies should they emerge.”

The Saudi base had come under come attack twice earlier in week, including an incident that injured 14 U.S. troops, according to the people, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the other attack, no one was injured but a U.S. aircraft was damaged.

The base, which is about 96 kilometers (60 miles) from the Saudi capital of Riyadh, is run by the Royal Saudi Air Force, but also used by U.S. troops. The installation has been targeted almost since the beginning of the war, which on Saturday reached the one-month mark.

Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, was wounded during a March 1 attack on the base and died days later. He is one of the 13 service members who have been killed in the war.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Saturday regarding the American casualties at the Saudi base.

Central Command said Friday that more than 300 service members have been wounded in the war. Most have returned to duty, while 30 remained out of action and 10 were considered seriously wounded.

Iran has responded to attacks by the United States and Israel with strikes against Israel and neighboring Gulf Arab states. The war has upended global air travel, disrupted oil exports and caused fuel prices to soar. Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway, has exacerbated the economic fallout.

With the economic repercussions extending far beyond the Middle East, President Donald Trump is under growing pressure to end Iran’s chokehold on the strait. The latest attacks on the Saudi air base happened after Trump claimed talks on ending the war were going “very well.”

Trump said he had given Tehran until April 6 to reopen the strait. Iran says it has not engaged in any negotiations.

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President Donald Trump’s war on Iran is colliding with U.S. debt investors, who demonstrated less appetite for Treasury securities as hopes for a quick end to the conflict evaporate.

This past week, auctions for two-, five- and seven-year Treasury notes all drew weak demand, forcing yields to go higher than expected. That’s a stark contrast from last month, when a Treasury offering saw the highest demand ever in the history of 30-year auctions.

The short end of the yield curve is under extra pressure as soaring oil prices boost the inflation outlook and put additional rate cuts from the Federal Reserve on hold, with odds of a rate hike also increasing.

Meanwhile, the cost of the U.S. war on Iran is worsening the debt picture amid reports the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion from Congress. Not only has the military depleted much of its most expensive munitions that must be replenished, Iranian attacks have damaged or destroyed U.S. aircraft, radar systems, and bases.

“The U.S. Treasury bond market has finally responded to the Mideast war, giving its assessment of the energy shock’s severity and the war’s effect on U.S. fiscal imbalance and inflation,” RSM Chief Economist Joseph Brusuelas said in a note on Wednesday, pointing to a notable increase in bond market volatility and a rising risk premium to buy Treasuries.

“Investors’ concerns include an unsustainable American fiscal position, rising inflation risk and a growing uncertainty about war,” he added.

The MOVE index that tracks volatility in the Treasury market has spiked to levels consistent with price instability and policy dysfunction, Brusuelas noted.

If uncertainty continues, it could trigger broader funding stress in debt markets that were already under pressure from worries about private credit, he predicted.

The warning highlights the role of “bond vigilantes,” a term coined by Wall Street veteran Ed Yardeni in the 1980s, referring to traders who protested huge deficits by selling off bonds to push yields higher.

Previous selloffs have reined in presidents, including Trump, who pulled back on his trade war last year after the bond market turned “yippy.” With the U.S. now in an actual shooting war, bond vigilantes could throw their weight around again.

“The need for additional spending to finance the war would increase U.S. debt, sparking a bond market selloff as investors require additional compensation to cover potential losses,” Brusuelas said. “Long-term rates such as 30-year mortgage rates are based in part on the benchmark U.S. 10-year yield. Most important: The bond market remains undefeated.”

At the same time, the Iran war has now entered its fifth week, with some analysts predicting it could drag on into the fall or even next year.

That’s as the conflict widens to Iranian allies in Iraq and Yemen, while Persian Gulf neighbors edge closer to taking direct military action against the regime, which is targeting their economic infrastructure.

Thousands of U.S. Marines and paratroopers are also on their way to the Middle East, while the White House reportedly weighs deploying another 10,000 troops for a potential ground assault in Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

A prolonged war that boosts borrowing costs would come as the federal government must refinance $10 trillion of debt that is coming due in the next 12 months, while the budget deficit is already on pace to hit $2 trillion, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok.

But the government also faces more competition for bond investors’ dollars. He previously warned the flood of corporate debt could make borrowing more expensive for the administration, and that’s exactly what happened earlier this month during the single busiest day on record for U.S. corporate bond sales.

“Total gross corporate bond issuance in 2026 is likely to be around $2 trillion because of increased supply from hyperscalers,” Slok said in a note on Tuesday. “Adding it all up, the total amount of investment grade supply coming to the market this year is around $14 trillion. The bottom line is that the growing supply of investment grade fixed income product is putting upward pressure on rates and credit spreads.”

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The moonshot compensation packages awarded to executives like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Axon CEO Rick Smith, and DoorDash CEO Tony Xu in recent years have followed a predictable script: They promise astronomical pay if the leader of a company hits audacious financial targets. 

The idea behind moonshot pay is that conventional salaries and bonuses don’t motivate the kind of tectonic risk-taking and visionary leadership that turns good companies into generational ones. So boards offer executives the chance to get extraordinarily rich—but only if they deliver extraordinarily rare results.

This week Meta put a twist on the typical playbook: it extended moonshot-level stock grants to a broader swath of senior leaders that did not include CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

The move may usher in a new wave of compensation packages for non-CEO C-Suite executives that are just as speculative as other investments in this stage of the AI race.  

Inside Meta’s ‘big bet’

In SEC filings late Tuesday, Meta disclosed the new stock option program for its top executives that promises massive payouts if the tech giant achieves the ambitious goal of growing its market capitalization from roughly $1.5 trillion to $9 trillion by 2031. If Meta hits that mark, Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick would unlock options worth up to $625.6 million each, according to analysis by Equilar, a compensation research firm. That sum could rise to as much as $921 million when accounting for the restricted stock units Meta awarded to some of the executives, Equilar says.

A Meta spokesperson called the program a “big bet” that will not reward the executives unless “Meta achieves massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders.”

Compensation experts have long been wary of this kind of award. Robin Ferracone, founder and CEO of Farient Advisors, an executive compensation, performance, and corporate governance advisory firm, doesn’t usually care for moonshots. “They create undue risk-taking,” she says, and they focus too narrowly on the tip-top of company leadership. 

Seventy-five public company executives have received awards with a grant date value of $100 million or more since 2018. Of the recipients, only 11 do not have the title of CEO, chair, or founder, according to Equilar data.

“One of the reasons I didn’t really like the Elon Musk award is that he can’t do it by himself. If he’s trying to get those big things done, he’s got to have a team doing it,” Ferracone says. 

What’s more, a January analysis of moonshot packages, reported by the Wall Street Journal, found that they rarely deliver the outsize returns they’re intended to spur. (While Musk and Smith made good on their moonshot deals and earned billions, Xu is far from unlocking the upper tranches of his package.) 

In the same boat as Zuckerberg

But Meta’s program is unique in that it covers multiple executives. “This recognizes it’s a broader group that has to get this done,” Ferracone says. 

The group of six certainly has a lot to do, and the new compensation program spreads the accountability around. Meta is racing to reinvent itself as an AI‑first company, pouring tens of billions into custom chips, data centers, and AI researchers to build frontier models and deliver on the promise of AI “superintelligence.” Meta estimates its capital expenditures could reach $135 billion this year, most of which will fund AI initiatives. Zuckerberg is expecting AI to transform how Meta’s workforce operates, enabling fewer employees to get more done. He has already overseen the flattening of teams and is reportedly developing a personal AI agent to assist with his own work. 

The stock options send a clear message to his leadership team, Ferracone says: “Figure out how to take advantage of AI and make it value-creating, and do it in the next five years.”

Make no mistake: The buck still stops with Zuckerberg. But as founder-CEO with a roughly 13% economic stake in the company, his fortune—pegged at $187 billion at Friday’s close—is already inextricably tied to Meta’s. 

“He’s got so much riding on this through his ownership,” Ferracone says. “And so this is a way to get [other executives] in the boat with him.”

Meta’s stock options may represent a new chapter in the AI-era talent war that’s already seen top technologists command nine-figure pay deals, with Meta among the top spenders. 

And just as Elon Musk’s initial moonshot package spawned a whole class of copycats (including Musk’s more recent $1 trillion plan), Ferracone expects other tech companies to mimic Meta’s latest move. “With technology companies, there’s kind of a lemmings mentality,” says Ferracone. “They really follow one another, and so I’m expecting to see more of these.”

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The biggest winners from this year’s World Cup are poised to be those able to rent out their properties, especially in the tri-state area.

Bobby Roufaeal, who manages more than a dozen short-term rentals in New Jersey, said a luxury rental in the state could bring in $240,000 between June 11 and July 19 when the tournament runs. He said he’s tripling rates for his units in anticipation of fan inflow for the games and fielding calls from homeowners looking to capitalize on demand.

“They’re like, listen, I’ll figure it out. I’ll go stay with my relatives for the month or for a few weeks just to be able to capitalize on this revenue,” said Roufaeal, founder of Settled In Property Management.

Already listings show a surge in prices. One six-bedroom Airbnb Inc. property in Princeton, New Jersey, is offered at roughly $6,000 a night during the World Cup, about 140% higher than its price a year ago. That’s despite being more than an hour’s drive from the games being played at MetLife Stadium.

The fervor is reshaping the lodging market in World Cup cities across the US, which are expecting millions of visitors throughout the course of the tournament. Matches are also being held in Mexico and Canada.

For those renting out their homes, it can be a lucrative prospect — especially as Airbnb has offered as much as $750 in cash for first-timers to incentive new listings. For travelers, the cost of attendance adds up as prices surge for tickets, hotel rooms and flights. The tourism boom is expected to lift hotel rates in the host cities by an average of 300% around opening matches, the New York Times has reported. 

Those expenses are causing Mehdi Salem, the founder of French soccer fan association Les Baroudeurs du Sport, to find ways to save money as he organizes accommodations for 80 of his members to see France play at MetLife.

He’s squeezing eight people in a room designed to sleep four and booked hotels in Manhattan more than a year before the games when prices were lower. Now, he is looking at spaces in New York City’s outer boroughs like the Bronx and Queens, as well as Airbnbs in less-traveled New Jersey neighborhoods. 

“Some prices are totally ridiculous,” Salem said. 

Montclair, New Jersey, a well-off suburb, has seen a 169% increase in short-term rental occupancy during the group stage compared to the same dates last year, according to data as of March 26 from analytics platform AirDNA, which tracks rental demand, rates, and occupancy across host cities. Nearby towns of Clifton, Newark, Paterson and Jersey City, have also seen surges, the data shows. 

Jamie Lane, chief economist at AirDNA, said that as the games grow closer — prices are poised to increase. 

“When bookings start, people typically aren’t booking the properties that are priced really high,” he said. “Other properties that are more reasonably priced do get booked and then we see the delta between the available rates and the booked rates begin to merge.”

Attending the World Cup will be expensive for any spectator, especially those traveling from abroad. Ticket prices can range wildly, in part due to the implementation of FIFA’s dynamic-pricing strategy which raises rates depending on demand. Initially, tickets started at $60 and could be as much as $6,730 — though those increased in subsequent batches. The numbers are even larger on the secondary market, with those for the coveted July 19 final starting at around $8,000 and topping $50,000, according to listings on resale site StubHub. 

Salem, the French organizer, said that many of his members are staying home because of the high costs. “Globally, people are complaining about the prices and we lost many, many good followers and good fans are not coming because of the prices,” he said. 

Some fans are looking outside of the major hubs to smaller host cities that can be more affordable. Data from Expedia Group Inc. shows searches rising most sharply in secondary markets, such as Kansas City, Dallas and Houston. Lodging prices outside of the US in Canada and Mexico remain the most affordable. 

“If you look to the smaller towns, you can have venues that are more easily accessible,” said Michael Seiler, professor of real estate and finance at the College of William & Mary. 

Houston tourism officials say the pace of hotel bookings for June and July is already running more than double last year’s levels across major submarkets. In Dallas — which is hosting more matches than any other US city — searches for housing options are up 230% from last summer, according to the Expedia data from January. 

“Dallas is no stranger to major sporting events, but this isn’t simply another big event,” Zane Harrington, a spokesperson for the city’s tourism bureau said. “The FIFA World Cup is unlike anything we’ve experienced before.”​ 

Michael De Micco won World Cup tickets for a game at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, through his employer, Frito-Lay Inc. He plans to drive about nine hours from his home near Pittsburgh and has already ruled out hotels as too expensive. Instead, he considered Airbnb and Vrbo Holdings Inc. rentals in Providence, Rhode Island, after seeing a listing near the stadium that was out of his budget. 

“There’s no way am I spending a thousand dollars a night,” he said. 

Real-estate investor Geoff Colleran is on the other side of the equation, listing his homein Foxborough for more than $2,000 per night.  He said he hopes to use the profits to pad out his investments and pay off some debt. 

“I would be extremely disappointed if that entire portion of time from mid-June through July isn’t booked,” said Colleran. “On a typical summer we do $50,000 to $60,000. So I’d expect a six-figure summer.”

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Maybe Dad was right about getting to the airport early. But it turns out there’s still such a thing as TOO early.

Travelers panicked by scenes of never-ending lines at U.S. airport security checkpoints and frustrating tales of missed flights over the past few weeks are now showing up way before their departures. Some airports where the wait times have been manageable say those early birds are only adding to the misery — and in some cases causing other passengers to get to their gate too late.

In Ohio, John Glenn International Airport in Columbus is warning passengers against arriving hours in advance, even creating a chart showing when to show up: “90 minutes before departure is all you need.”

The airport says those premature arrivers — reacting to the funding standoff on Capitol Hill that’s creating crowded security checkpoints — are making things worse by creating bottlenecks during peak times.

“Arriving too early can actually create longer lines right when we open,” the airport said in a social media post Thursday. “Spacing out arrival times helps keep things moving smoothly for everyone.”

It’s Airport Dad’s moment — finally

In some ways, the airport chaos is turning into a full circle moment for “Airport Dad” — a humorous TikTok and social media take on the dad who always makes sure the family is out the door, parked, through security and positioned at the correct gate well before anyone else, with paper boarding passes in hand.

Airline customers aren’t laughing, at least right now. They’re facing record wait times in a jumbled environment — the modern American airport — that can serve up assorted stresses and snafus on the best of days.

Amber Campbell said she missed a morning flight this week despite arriving at Baltimore-Washington International Airport more than three hours ahead of time.

“We noted several people in line with later afternoon flights,” Campbell posted on Facebook. “There was no organization or consideration for those of us missing flights vs people with later flights. We missed our flight by ten minutes!”

What’s confusing for air passengers is that it’s hard to predict which airports will be plagued next by security lines spilling out of terminals.

Checkpoints in some places are beyond two hours

The government shutdown straining Transportation Security Administration staffing has ballooned checkpoint wait times beyond two hours at some major airports. George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston has become the biggest chokepoint for travelers with four-hour security lines.

“An absolute nightmare,” said Arthur Tsebetzis, while standing in a line Friday that snaked through the main terminal and spilled outside Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.

Those are by far the worst-case scenarios. Many airports — like the one in Ohio — have been seeing wait times comparable with those in normal times. That’s why airlines say the best advice for passengers right now is to check TSA wait times before their scheduled departures.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the days of “panic buying” during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“It’s human nature. You don’t have control over what’s going on at an airport,” said Shari Botwin, a Philadelphia clinical social worker who counsels people about anxiety.

“There’s so much media attention about the chaos at airports,” she said. “They might not trust when someone says, ’Well, you don’t need to come out early anymore.’”

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It has a catchy name — Build America, Buy America — and the lauded goal of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

But the law has spurred a bottleneck for affordable housing.

Nearly everything from HVACs and lighting to sink hooks and ceiling fans in affordable housing projects that get federal dollars must carry the Made in the USA label. But, developers say, numerous products do not, as they have long been imported from overseas markets with cheaper labor costs.

Although builders can apply for waivers, the process has been at a near standstill as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has had its staff slashed by the Trump administration, has only greenlit a handful of projects.

The waiver process has caused construction delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra costs as the country faces an affordable housing crisis.

“They need to be treating this like the fire that it is,” said Tyler Norod, president of Westbrook Development Corporation, which builds affordable housing in Maine.

“We’ve sort of resigned ourselves that we’re just gonna build less units across the entire country during a housing crisis.”

Facing a standstill

Diana Lene has been on affordable housing waitlists for the past five years. The 75-year-old loves living close to her daughter and grandchildren in Fargo, North Dakota, but her apartment is too expensive on her Social Security income.

“It’s just maxing my budget down to pennies,” she said. To save money, she avoids driving often and buys food on sale.

“I’m just trying to keep a roof over my head, but it’s getting more and more difficult,” Lene said. “I don’t like to live in fear, and yet sometimes it jumps in there.”

Lene is on a waitlist for one of nonprofit developer Beyond Shelter’s apartments. CEO Dan Madler is building a 36-unit building for people like Lene, but he had to postpone lumber orders to verify they comply with the law and can’t find ceiling fans made in America. He doesn’t know when HUD will approve a waiver.

U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Build America, Buy America Act as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, building on longstanding efforts to boost American manufacturing at a time when the U.S. economy was emerging from a pandemic-era recession. Known as BABA, it applies to infrastructure projects funded by federal agencies, not just affordable housing.

Denver developer Julie Hoebel says she has spent over $60,000 just on a consultant to comb through websites and call suppliers to try to find American-made materials, not to mention the additional labor costs involved.

But the waivers she submitted to HUD in November for around 125 materials in an 85-unit building haven’t been approved.

“If they take much longer then we’ll come to a standstill,” she said.

A cumbersome process

HUD is taking at least six months to approve many waivers.

Even BABA advocates agree HUD must grant waivers more quickly and give the industry clearer instructions on how to prepare them, which they note other federal agencies are doing.

HUD did not address questions from The Associated Press about waiver approval delays developers say increase costs, as well as concerns about making the process more transparent. In a statement it said it’s committed to “ensuring that federal spending supports America’s industrial base” while “closely monitoring how compliance with these policies impact costs for builders.”

Asked in January about whether the delays and cost increases mean affordable housing should be exempt from BABA rules, HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the agency was looking into the issue, but did not provide details. “We are looking at this … with BABA as it pertains to HUD to provide flexibility to certain projects in certain places around our country,” Turner said, adding that HUD is committed to assuring developers get “the flexibility they need as it pertains to building.”

The law itself isn’t the problem, supporters say.

Unions representing the steel and manufacturing industries say taxpayer dollars should fund American-made materials and suppliers will adjust to meet demand for products that aren’t available.

“You’ve got a system in place that leans heavily on using imported materials to make a better profit,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “I don’t know if that serves the public good.”

Jennifer Schwartz, director of tax and housing advocacy at the National Council of State Housing Agencies, said there’s no national data on how much BABA is increasing costs. But the waiver process is “failing,” she said, because requirements were put in place before assessment of domestic manufacturing capacity.

It won’t be as challenging for suppliers to produce more raw materials in the U.S., but it will take time for manufactured products — such as appliances and elevators — to become available, said Kaitlyn Snyder, managing director of the National Housing and Rehabilitation Association, an affordable housing industry group.

“I don’t know that it economically, financially makes sense for people to be producing door hinges,” Snyder said. “We are an advanced country and we’ve outsourced a lot of that stuff.”

The housing bill that passed the Senate in March did not require HUD to address problems with implementing BABA.

“The process isn’t working for affordable housing,” said Jessie Handforth Kome, who spent nearly 40 years working at HUD until 2024. “People want to comply, but it’s unclear how to.”

Vermont-based Developer Jessica Neubelt estimates she spent an additional $150,000 just to verify iron and steel she used in a project was American-made. She’s just as frustrated over the hundreds of hours that takes, which, she said, could be spent on another project.

“I would like every member of Congress to sit in on a construction meeting,” Neubelt said. “The amount of detail that goes into figuring out if a specific thing is compliant or not is enormous.”

Debates over solutions

U.S. Rep. Mike Flood, a Nebraska Republican, has advocated to exempt some HUD funding from BABA.

“Owning a home is the American dream, but it’s out of reach in a very big way and anything that adds cost to that isn’t allowing hardworking Americans to achieve the dream,” Flood told the AP.

Roy Houseman, legislative director at United Steelworkers, said complaints about cost increases are overblown.

“A lot of developers seem to have tried to throw things in and make statutory changes to policies that have been in place for basically five years now instead of making a good-faith effort to really push HUD,” Houseman said.

Union leaders note the law offers some leeway.

Developers can get exemptions for an American-made product if it increases the project’s overall cost by more than 25%. A very small percentage of a project’s total material cost is also exempt. But most developers say that percentage isn’t enough to cover all items not made in the U.S.

Some developers are looking for ways to avoid federal funds altogether. But that is challenging. Even though federal dollars often make up a small portion of funding for affordable housing projects, that sliver can make or break whether there’s enough money to build them.

Kentucky developer Scott McReynolds says that instead of applying for a federal grant to build 20 to 30 affordable homes, he plans to build two four-unit projects, small enough so that they aren’t subject to BABA.

American-made materials are especially hard to find near the rural areasMcReynolds serves.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said.

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As the war in Iran pushes U.S. gas prices toward $4 a gallon nationally, some lawmakers are pushing to suspend the federal gasoline tax in the latest attempt to try to control surging energy costs.

Lawmakers say the action would provide much-needed relief for families and businesses that rely on their cars and trucks to get to work and school and run everyday errands.

Asked about the gas tax at a Cabinet meeting Thursday, President Donald Trump said he has “thought about” suspending it but suggested states should consider suspending their fuel taxes.

“People have talked about” a gas tax suspension, Trump said. “It’s something we have in our pocket if we think it’s necessary.”

As gas prices have spiked, the Trump administration has released millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and temporarily lifted sanctions on some Russian and Iranian oil shipments already at sea. The U.S. is negotiating with countries reliant on Middle East crude to join a coalition to police the Strait of Hormuz, where about one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally flows.

Here’s a look at what a gas tax holiday is and its potential impacts.

Temporary suspension of the federal gas tax

A gas tax holiday is a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, currently set at 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel fuel. That does not include state taxes, which often are higher.

The tax provides more than $23 billion per year in revenue for federal highway and public transit programs.

The president cannot suspend the federal tax on his own. Congress would have to approve the move.

Both the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans, and bills on the issue are unlikely to advance unless Trump signals his support.

Suspending the tax could provide some relief

Rising gas prices are putting renewed pressure on household finances, especially for low- and middle-income Americans who have less flexibility to absorb higher transportation costs. The increases can influence how much people drive, where they travel and how they spend money on other things.

“Trump’s war of choice with Iran is driving up gas prices across the country — and Americans shouldn’t have to bear the additional economic burden of Trump’s reckless decision making,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who co-sponsored the Gas Prices Relief Act with fellow Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.

The bill would suspend the tax through Oct. 1. A similar measure was sponsored in the House by Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire.

There are drawbacks, industry group says

The gasoline tax is the single largest source of revenue for federal highway and public transit programs.

While the House and Senate bills would offset any lost Highway Trust Fund revenue with general funds, the tax suspension could raise the federal deficit and jeopardize the long-term sustainability of investments for highway and public transit programs, according to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, which represents the transportation construction industry.

The group cites studies showing that many retailers do not pass on the full amount of the gas tax reduction to consumers. Research also suggests that state and federal gas taxes are just one component of a complex pricing scheme that includes the global price of oil and other factors, the group said.

States are considering their own gas tax breaks

Some states are taking action to lower the gas tax. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on March 20 signed into law a 60-day suspension of the state’s 33-cents-per-gallon tax on gas and 37-cents-per-gallon tax on diesel.

The law was supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Kemp said he wanted to “return taxpayer money where it belongs, in the pockets of hardworking Georgians.”

Early results are positive for Georgia drivers. It takes a few days or more for the tax holiday to trickle through to pump prices, because wholesalers pay fuel taxes in the state. But while gas prices nationwide went up an average of 10 cents per gallon in the week that ended Thursday, they fell 15 cents a gallon in Georgia, according to motorist group AAA. On Friday, the state had the 13th-lowest average gas price among states at $3.60 per gallon. Kansas was the lowest at $3.27.

Several states — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland and Utah — have weighed gas tax holidays as a way to provide relief at the pump.

Connecticut Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont recently suggested a temporary suspension of the state’s 25-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline and 48.9-cent diesel tax, but it remains unclear whether it will happen. State officials are also discussing possible rebate checks for taxpayers to help blunt high energy costs.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has supported past gas tax holidays, was skeptical that motorists would see real savings.

“Our ability to influence fuel prices are really marginal,” DeSantis said at a bill signing ceremony this month, according to Politico. “Sometimes the prices get raised so the consumer doesn’t see any difference. … I think when we did it in the past … I don’t think the consumer really felt relief.”

Driving habits can help reduce costs

The top advice for drivers looking to save at the pump is to obey the speed limit and drive smoothly, according to Consumer Reports. Driving habits can play a significant role in fuel economy, the magazine says.

Driving at a steady 55 mph can increase fuel economy by 6 to 8 mpg, the publication said in a report that offered tips to get the most out of a tank of gas. “Speeding up from 55 to 75 mph is like moving from a compact car to a large SUV,” the article said.

Beyond fuel concerns, speeding also is a safety risk. And drivers should avoid hard acceleration and braking whenever possible, and skip premium gas if their cars allow it, the magazine said

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President Donald Trump on Friday signed a promised executive action to pay Transportation Security Administration employees after a bid to end the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security abruptly fell apart in Congress.

Trump signed the action with an eye toward easing long security lines at many of the nation’s top airports.

“America’s air travel system has reached its breaking point,” Trump said in the memo authorizing the payments. He added, “I have determined that these circumstances constitute an emergency situation compromising the Nation’s security.”

Trump said his administration would use “funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” for the payments. In a statement Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said TSA workers “should begin seeing paychecks as early as Monday.”

While Trump’s action could help ease the plight of air travelers, it does little to resolve the DHS shutdown that has jammed airports and imposed financial hardship on thousands of federal workers. The House and Senate ended the week by passing vastly different bills, creating a new impasse as lawmakers leave Washington for a two-week recess.

The shutdown of Homeland Security will reach 44 days on Sunday, eclipsing the record 43-day shutdown last fall that affected all of the federal government.

House Republicans reject Senate deal

The Senate passed a funding deal early Friday, but blowback from House Republicans came quickly. House Speaker Mike Johnson, upon opening the chamber for business, accused Democrats of playing a dangerous game and said he needed to talk with fellow Republicans about how to proceed.

After a lengthy conference call, Johnson blasted the Senate’s action and announced that the House would be going in a different route. “This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” Johnson said.

Instead, the House on Friday night passed a bill to fund the entire department through May 22. The vote was 213-203. Johnson said he had spoken with Trump about the House Republican plan and the president supported it.

House Republicans were livid that the bill passed by the Senate does not fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. Democrats refused to fund those departments without changes to immigration enforcement practices.

“We’re going to do something different,” Johnson said. He challenged the Senate to take up the House’s short-term fix to fund Homeland Security into May.

But senators left town after voting to fund most of DHS, so it would take time for them to return once the House passes a different measure. And even if they were to return, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer made clear the House GOP plan would be “dead on arrival in the Senate, and Republicans know it.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said the Senate-passed bill would clear the House with Republican and Democratic votes if Johnson would allow it to be voted on.

“This could end, and should end, today,” Jeffries said.

What’s in the Senate compromise

Senators worked through the night to approve a bill by voice vote that would fund much of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard and TSA.

Senate Republicans said they were disappointed by the lack of funding for ICE and Border Patrol, but noted that immigration enforcement has remained largely uninterrupted. That’s because the GOP’s big tax cuts bill that Trump signed into law last year funneled billions of dollars in extra funds to DHS, including $75 billion for ICE operations.

Conservative Republicans, however, were against establishing a precedent that allows Congress during the yearly appropriations process to fund some agencies within Homeland Security, but not others.

“We will fully fund ICE. That is what this fight is about,” Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said. “The border is closing. The next task is deportation.”

Democrats have refused to provide funding for ICE and the Border Patrol after the deaths of two Americans protesting the sweeping immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

They want federal agents to wear identification, remove their face masks and refrain from conducting raids around schools, churches or other sensitive places. Democrats have also pushed for an end of administrative warrants, insisting that judges sign off before agents search people’s homes or private spaces — something Mullin, the new DHS secretary, said he is open to considering.

The Republican leadership rift

The rejection of the Senate deal creates a noticeable rift between Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who have mostly worked in tandem this Congress trying to enact Trump’s agenda.

With all Democrats opposed, Thune had to find a solution to the funding impasse that would win the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the 53-47 Senate.

After more than a week of intense negotiations — some involving the White House — the two sides agreed early Friday to fund most parts of the Homeland Security Department except for ICE and parts of CBP. It passed by voice vote with no objections from either side just after 2 a.m.

Asked if he had cleared the compromise with Johnson, Thune said the two had texted.

“I don’t know what the House will do,” Thune said.

The White House was silent as senators reviewed the compromise, and Trump did not weigh in publicly.

The next day, as the deal fell apart in the House, Thune did not respond to Johnson’s comments that he was left in the dark.

The speaker, asked about a rift with Thune, said Democrats in the Senate were to blame for the situation.

Airport lines grow as TSA workers endure hardships

The DHS shutdown has resulted in travel delays and even warnings of airport closures as more TSA workers missing paychecks stopped going to work. Those workers had already endured the nation’s longest government shutdown last fall.

Multiple airports have been experiencing greater than 40% callout rates of TSA workers, and nearly 500 of the agency’s nearly 50,000 transportation security officers have quit during the shutdown. Nationwide on Thursday, more than 11.8% of the TSA employees on the schedule missed work, according to DHS. That is more than 3,450 callouts.

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Iranian-backed Houthi rebels claimed a missile launch toward Israel early Saturday, their first since the war in the Middle East started. The Israeli military said it intercepted the projectile.

The now monthlong war erupted after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, which retaliated with strikes against Israel and neighboring Gulf Arab states. The conflict has upended global air travel, disrupted oil exports and caused fuel prices to soar. Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway, has exacerbated the economic fallout.

Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities hours after threatening to “escalate and expand” its campaign against Tehran on Friday. Iran vowed to retaliate and struck a base in Saudi Arabia, wounding more than a dozen U.S. service members and damaging planes.

Before Saturday’s attack, there appeared to be a breakthrough as Tehran agreed to allow humanitarian aid and agricultural shipments through the strait.

Israeli airstrikes continued Saturday. Associated Press footage showed smoke rising from northeastern Tehran. Iran sent missiles toward Israel with loud booms heard in Jerusalem.

Houthi involvement could further complicate the war

Houthi Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said on the rebels’ Al-Masirah satellite television station Saturday that the Houthis launched a barrage of ballistic missiles toward what he described as “sensitive Israeli military sites” in southern Israel. The attack came hours after Saree signaled in a vague statement Friday that the rebels would join the war.

Sirens went off around Israel’s southern city of Beer Sheba and near Israel’s main nuclear research center as Iran and Hezbollah fired on Israel overnight. Explosions filled the air in Tel Aviv, where Israel’s Fire and Rescue Service said it responded to 11 impact sites.

Saturday’s assault calls into question whether the Houthis will target commercial shipping in the Red Sea corridor, as they did during the Israel-Hamas war. About $1 trillion worth of goods passed through the Red Sea annually before the war. Any attacks on Red Sea shipping routes would disrupt traffic through the Suez Canal, a crucial waterway for vessels bearing oil, gas and sundry goods to the Mediterranean Sea. About 10% of global maritime trade — including 40% of container ship traffic — passes through the canal each year.

Houthi rebels attacked over 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two vessels, between November 2023 and January 2025.

The Houthis’ involvement would complicate the deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the aircraft carrier that sailed to Crete for repairs then to Split, Croatia, where it arrived on Saturday. Sending the carrier to the Red Sea could draw it into similar attacks as experienced by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in 2024 and the USS Harry S. Truman in the 2025 campaign against the Houthis.

The Houthis have held Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since 2014. Saudi Arabia launched a war against the Houthis on behalf of Yemen’s exiled government in 2015 and the rebels had thus far stayed out of the recent conflict due to their uneasy ceasefire with Saudi Arabia.

US troops suffer casualties at Saudi base, AP sources say

More than two dozen U.S. troops have been wounded in Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base in the past week, according to two people who have been briefed on the matter. Iran fired six ballistic missiles and 29 drones at the base Friday, injuring at least 15 troops, including five seriously, according to the sources who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The base, about 96 kilometers (60 miles) from the Saudi capital of Riyadh, came under attack twice earlier in the week, including a strike that wounded 14 U.S. troops, according to the people briefed on the matter. The base is run by the Royal Saudi Air Force but is also used by U.S. troops.

Attempts at diplomacy as US sends more troops to the region

The latest attacks happened after Trump claimed that talks on ending the war were going “very well.” He said he had given Tehran until April 6 to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran says it has not engaged in any negotiations.

With the economic repercussions from the war extending far beyond the Middle East, Trump is under growing pressure to end Iran’s chokehold on the strait.

Pakistan said Saturday that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt will send their top diplomats to Islamabad for talks aimed at ending the war.

Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said in a statement that Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty will arrive Sunday for a two-day visit to “hold in-depth discussions on a range of issues, including efforts to de-escalate tensions in the region.”

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Saturday that he and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian held “extensive discussions” on regional hostilities and efforts aimed at end the war.

Also Saturday, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told his Turkish counterpart by phone that Iran was skeptical about recent diplomatic efforts to stop the war. Iranian state-run media reported that Araghchi accused the United States of making “unreasonable demands” and exhibiting “contradictory actions” that raised doubts about the prospect of an agreement.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff has said Washington delivered a 15-point “action list” to Iran for a possible ceasefire, with a proposal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program and reopen the strait. Tehran rejected the proposal and presented its own five-point proposal that included reparations and recognition of its sovereignty over the waterway.

Meanwhile, U.S. ships drew closer to the region carrying some 2,500 Marines, and at least 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne who are trained to land in hostile territory to secure key positions and airfields have been ordered to the Middle East.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. “can achieve all of our objectives without ground troops.”

Death toll climbs

Iranian authorities say more than 1,900 people have been killed in the Islamic Republic, while 19 have been reported dead in Israel.

In Lebanon, where Israel has started an invasion in the south, officials said more than 1,100 people have been killed since the start of the war.

Meanwhile, at least 13 U.S. troops have been reported killed, while in Iraq, where Iranian-supported militia groups have entered the conflict, 80 members of the security forces have died.

In the Gulf states, 20 people have been killed and four others in the occupied West Bank.

The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration also said Friday that 82,000 civilian buildings in Iran, including hospitals and the homes of 180,000 people, were damaged.

Israel strikes Iranian nuclear facilities

Israel focused its attacks Friday on sites “in the heart of Tehran” where ballistic missiles and other weapons are produced, the military said. It said it also hit missile launchers and storage sites in Western Iran, while witnesses in eastern Tehran reported a partial power outage following airstrikes.

Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said the Shahid Khondab Heavy Water Complex in Arak and the Ardakan yellowcake production plant in Yazd Province were targeted, IRNA reported. The strikes did not cause casualties and there was no risk of contamination, it said.

Yellowcake is a concentrated form of uranium after impurities are removed from the raw ore. Heavy water is used as a moderator in nuclear reactors.

The Israeli military later said raw materials are processed for enrichment at the Yazd plant and the strike was a major blow to Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran vowed to retaliate.

Possible breakthrough to allow aid and agricultural shipments through Hormuz

Iran agreed to allow humanitarian aid and agricultural shipments through the Strait of Hormuz following a request from the United Nations. Ali Bahreini, the country’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, said Iran agreed to “facilitate and expedite” such movement.

The vital waterway usually handles a fifth of the world’s oil shipments and nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer trade. While markets and governments have largely focused on blocked supplies of oil and natural gas, the restriction of fertilizer ingredients and trade threatens farming and food security around the world.

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You probably know a woman supporting an unemployed man. Maybe you’ve been that woman. What used to be an embarrassing secret has quietly become a macroeconomic data point, and the Federal Reserve has the receipts.

As of early 2026, women held more nonfarm payroll jobs than men in the United States. This has happened twice before — briefly during the Great Recession and again just before Covid — and both times it reversed. Laura Ullrich, a labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who authored a new analysis through Indeed’s Hiring Lab, says this time is structurally different.

“It definitely doesn’t, to me, seem like the change has been driven by a recessionary period, which is what typically drives it,” she told Fortune. “This seems to be more of a long-term decline that’s led to more of a permanent shift going forward, or at least semi-permanent.”

The gap by the numbers

In the early 1990s, men held nearly 7 million more jobs than women. That gap gradually shrank over the last three decades, and is now gone. The trend continued over the last year.

Over the past 12 months, jobs held by men fell by a net 142,000, while women gained 298,000. Of the 1.2 million jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026, two-thirds went to women.

The gender gap in labor force participation rate has also narrowed. The male rate has fallen nearly 20 points since tracking began in 1948, from 86.7% to 67.2% today. The female rate jumped from 32% to 57.2% in that span.

It’s not women entering, it’s men leaving

This is where the narrative gets complicated — and more interesting.

Both male and female participation rates are lower than they were in 2000. But men are falling off at a rate that dwarfs women’s decline. Right before Covid, the male labor force participation rate was 69.2%. It’s now 67.2% — a two-point drop. The female rate dropped just 0.6 points over the same period.

“It’s fewer men entering,” Ullrich said. “Younger men today are less likely to be working than their fathers were at that same age.”

So who’s supporting them?

“There has been more of a transition where parents are supporting their adult children for longer,” she said. “The data do show that more young adult men live with their parents than women. The wealth transfer from older generations to younger generations is part of that story.”

And then there are the partners. “Almost everybody you talk to will have a story” about supporting an unemployed man, Ullrich said, adding that what’s changed isn’t the dynamic itself, but the fact that it no longer carries the stigma it once did. The stay-at-home boyfriend, once a punchline, is now a statistically significant labor market phenomenon.

A landmark paper published in the Journal of Political Economy, first circulated through the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that roughly 70% of the hours young men aren’t working are being spent on video games and recreational computer use. The economists calculated that improvements in gaming technology since 2004 alone can explain nearly half the increase in young men’s leisure hours.

“I think that’s part of the story — the basement story,” Ullrich said.

The opioid epidemic compounded it, hitting non-college-educated men especially hard. And critically, men largely don’t qualify for government assistance programs like SNAP or TANF without a disability, meaning when they exit the workforce, the financial burden falls on whoever is closest to them.

The jobs that are growing and the jobs that aren’t tell you almost everything.

Healthcare and social assistance, 78.9% female, added 1.8 million jobs between July 2023 and July 2025, accounting for more than half of all U.S. job growth during that period. But male-skewing sectors like manufacturing, tech, financial activities, and media have been stagnant or contracting.

Women have the training for the jobs that exist. As of 2023, 87% of nursing bachelor’s students were women. In speech-language pathology, a six-figure profession, 96.4% of master’s students are female. Medical schools have been majority-female since 2019.

“Women are the ones who have the training for these jobs,” Ullrich said. “The growth that’s happening in the economy in terms of jobs is happening in female-dominated sectors.”

The pipeline is female, the growth sectors are female, and the jobs most protected from AI displacement — caregiving, healthcare, in-person services — are female. The jobs most exposed to AI are disproportionately held by men.

What it means

Economist Richard Reeves, founder of the Institute for Research on Boys and Men, has argued that the same cultural efforts that moved women into STEM need to be applied in reverse, steering men toward healthcare, education, and psychology.

So far, there’s little sign of that happening. The educational programs feeding the growth sectors are, if anything, becoming more female over time.

As Ullrich put it, the trend in the labor force participation gap shows no post-recession bounce, no cyclical correction, no historical parallel to prior reversals. It is, structurally, a one-way door.

“If you look at that overall downward trend,” she said, “it’s just been on a downward trajectory.”

The stay-at-home boyfriend is no longer just a TikTok trend. He’s a Federal Reserve data point. And the woman paying his rent is, increasingly, the American economy.

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The first year Rick Chorney ran his own cleaning company, he didn’t take a single day off. He was in the field by 7 a.m., home by 8 p.m., and back at his laptop until 1 in the morning—seven days a week, hauling in roughly $14 an hour subcontracting jobs across the suburbs of Vancouver. He told Fortune plainly that it broke something in him.

“I went a little crazy,” he said. “There came a day where I was just like, ‘I am done.’” What happened next changed everything: he spent four hours looking at how AI could help him “simplify the business a little bit.”

Today, Chorney is 29 years old, based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and running Echo Janitorial Services—a company he co-founded in 2023 with his best friend Adrian (they’ve known each other since they were age 2). It’s been going well—thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).

Rick Chorney

“So last year we did just under a million dollars,” he told Fortune, sharing a remarkable growth story. The year before that had been $242,000, still impressive but, as Chorney explained, not optimized for the AI entrepreneur era: “That first year I didn’t really put in a lot of AI, I was mostly focused on SEO.” Once he added AI agents to his workflow, he was able to fast-track quoting, hire more workers, and begin a flywheel. Fortune reviewed Chorney’s business records to verify his explosive growth in revenues.

“I had a meeting today, I thought this was pretty cool,” he shared. “I had Claude make me a case study on what it would cost them to pay me $1,000 a month more than they’re paying me now, versus hire their in-house cleaners and what the risks and costs of that look like.” Claude sealed the deal, he added, making an ironclad case that in-house cleaners would be a worse deal for the client.

Chorney projected that he’ll cross $1.3 million in sales this year and his business has grown to 16 cleaners on staff, two business partners, and one AI receptionist handling up to 15 phone calls an hour. Chorney said he now only works only eight hours a day, and even takes vacations.

Whether he knows it or not, Chorney is a data point in one of the more striking economic trends of the moment. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, noted on his Daily Spark blog recently that AI tools are “dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of launching a company,” leading to a surge in new business formation.

Slok explained more in a recent appearance on the Prof G Markets podcast. “People are inventing new businesses in a way that we just have not seen, literally for decades.” Far from a job killer, Slok argued, it’s helping many people become much more entrepreneurial. “The consequence of this must be that we were going to be generating a lot more jobs associated with people’s ideas now coming to life a lot faster.”

Forrest Zeisler, co-founder and CTO of Jobber—the platform powering Chorney’s AI receptionist — told Fortune that he sees Chorney as emblematic of a larger shift. “No one’s going to benefit more than the small blue-collar businesses from AI,” Zeisler told Fortune. “For them, time is literally money. They’re out and about in the field, not sitting at a computer.”

Chorney’s story maps precisely onto the phenomenon Slok is describing: a first-generation entrepreneur, without institutional resources or formal training, using AI to compress what would once have taken years of costly trial and error.

courtesy of Echo Janitorial

The Kid Who Wanted a House

Chorney grew up without much of a safety net. Adopted at 5, he relocated from Ontario to British Columbia as a child. As a teenager, he fell into substance abuse, passed through a group home, and wound up on a provincial youth agreement—a government program that covered his rent while he aged out of the child welfare system. That support was set to evaporate at 19. “It got pretty ugly and I was getting arrested a lot,” he said, explaining that he wasn’t violent, just misguided, and he’s on good terms with his parents now.

But financially, and in terms of what school was giving him, he told Fortune, he was practically in a very tight spot. “I got put into a group home and I didn’t do so well in the group home. So the ministry decided to start paying my rent for me.” He explained that the ministry’s financial support was due to end and he was facing a hard stop. “There was a deadline hanging over me.”

Chorney assessed his circumstances and didn’t see school as an option. He was in grade 11, doing grade 10 courses, when he started applying for jobs, including the day he walked into a Greyhound office. His future boss was mortified, heavily encouraging him not to drop out, “but he offered me the job anyways.”

Within two years, Chorney had rented the three-bedroom townhouse he’d been working toward.

From there, he spent years doing door-to-door sales for Vivint, a smart home company, moving to a new city every four months, knocking on strangers’ doors every day. Vivint was, in its own way, a graduate program. The company sent him to Tony Robbins seminars, introduced him to the leadership canon—Simon Sinek, Brian Tracy, Leaders Eat Last—and gave him a visceral education in resilience and sales. His first cleaning business, started around COVID, didn’t scale the way he’d hoped. When he moved to Abbotsford in 2022, he was ready to try again.

Using AI to remove overhead

Echo Janitorial Services launched in 2023, and the early months were brutal. Echo was subcontracting, which meant long hours for thin margins. Chorney was cleaning construction sites and offices across the Lower Mainland, managing client relationships, handling every email, phone call, and quote himself.

“There came a day,” he said, “where I was just done.”

That day, instead of opening another quote or answering another email, he sat down and spent four hours researching how AI tools could take work off his hands. He automated his customer intake form so that new inquiries flowed directly into his job management platform. He installed an AI receptionist. He set up automatic acknowledgment messages for new clients. It took half a day.

Rick Chorney

“I realized I don’t have to be doing all the things I’m doing,” he said. It gave him the time to take his first vacation ever.

Within weeks, he and a business partner drove across Canada to Montreal, caught a UFC event, and slowly worked their way back home across the country. They were gone a month and a half.

It’s a pattern that Zeisler said he has watched play out across thousands of Jobber customers. “None of them got into business for business,” he said. “They were great at a trade—they had a craft, they had a skill, and they wanted to bring that skill to the world. But they end up spending so much of their time on all the administrative burdens and overhead. That’s just a tax on the productivity of these businesses. That’s not the stuff that pays the bills.”

There’s only one downside that Chorney admitted to: “as far as how much information these companies have about each of us individually, maybe that’s a little scary. But unfortunately, we live in a world where that can’t be prevented.” The companies that have enabled these AI tools have “all of our information … available in some database somewhere,” but this is just the price of doing business.

“I have to give AI my information because it makes doing business easier.”

The Stack That Changed Everything

Chorney started with ChatGPT—using it the way most first-time adopters do, to polish emails and format documents. His early motivation was almost embarrassingly practical. “I can make as many typos, I can swear, I can be as direct as I want to be—and it’ll polish it all up and make it what I want,” he said.

But the tool he talks about with wide-eyed appreciation is Claude, which he describes less as a productivity app and more as a business advisor. “It just starts asking me questions until it’s got this perfect response,” he said. For instance, he uses it to navigate BC labor law when HR situations get complicated, to build client-facing case studies on the fly, and to document company operations for what he eventually hopes will become a national franchise.

Chorney reeled off his army of AI colleagues, marveling at how much time it’s freed up for him to scale up his business. “One deals with all your social media. One deals with all your customer inquiries. It will respond to emails, answer text messages and phone calls.” Another will go through your bank statements and help you make cashflow projections.

courtesy of Rick Chorney

The high-school dropout CEO said he’s a widespread adopter of AI tools, noting that he uses Perplexity for research, Grok for content creation, and is currently piloting Synthesia—an AI video platform that generates training videos using a digital likeness of Chorney himself, walking new employees through cleaning procedures without him entering a room.

For phone traffic, Jobber’s AI receptionist fields up to 15 calls per hour—fielding job inquiries, vendor pitches, the occasional invitation to a training seminar in Costa Rica—and escalates only what matters. A human doing the same job would cost roughly $4,000 a month in wages and payroll taxes. Chorney pays $99. For email, a tool called Fixer AI pre-sorts his inbox each morning into four buckets—action required, drafted reply, likely spam, confirmed spam—and texts him a daily briefing. He claimed that he spends 20 minutes a day on email.

Jobber’s numbers suggest that Chorney’s approach is the right one. “Our best adopters—the people who are using all our AI products—they’re growing 90% faster than those who aren’t,” Zeisler said. “They go all in. They use all the tools, and they see the impact on the bottom line.”

This is precisely what Slok had in mind when he described AI as a growth engine for new business formation. “We can go together on ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude and we can ask for a business plan and it can spit it out literally in seconds,” Slok said. “And we can even use the large language models as part of our business.” The consequence, he argued, won’t just be more companies—it’ll be more jobs. “The number of new businesses is at the highest level in decades because people have become much more entrepreneurial. The consequence of this must be that we are going to generate a lot more jobs associated with people’s ideas now coming to life a lot faster.”

Thinking Bigger

With his days reclaimed—down from 19-hour slogs to a manageable eight hours—Chorney is channeling freed-up time into expansion. He calls it Project Echo: a comprehensive operational playbook, built with AI assistance, that he believes will serve as the blueprint for a national franchise. Toronto, Edmonton, and Calgary are the first targets. A friend has raised his hand for Arizona and Delaware.

“Claude is going to bring me to be a national franchise brand within the next two years,” he said.

Zeisler predicted that many more entrepreneurs like Chorney will have similar ambitions going forward. “The next generation of millionaires—there are going to be a lot of blue-collar millionaires,” he said. The businesses that are starting now don’t have decades of legacy systems and approaches ingrained in them, he added. “Those businesses are AI-first from day one.”

Chorney said he has grown as an entrepreneur to the point that he’s investing in the people around him. His first employee, Kai—they met at a pool party, hired the day after Chorney let someone else go—worked with such singular commitment that Chorney and Adrian gave him a 10% equity stake and the company co-signed his car loan. Employees who want leadership roles at Echo must read at least one book from a curated list of 15 to 20 titles. Leaders Eat Last sits at the top.

When the conversation turned to education—specifically, whether a system that didn’t work for him could ever evolve—Chorney didn’t hesitate. “Schools are so focused on repetitive behavior instead of preparing you for the world,” he said. “Kids aren’t learning how compound interest works. They’re learning how to be at school at 8:30 so that when they’re adults, they’ll get up, go to work, and pay taxes.”

Slok framed the same dynamic in macroeconomic terms: AI doesn’t just help established businesses run more efficiently—it lowers the barriers to entry so dramatically that people who previously couldn’t afford to start a business, professionally or financially, now can. In that sense, Chorney isn’t an outlier. He’s a leading indicator.

“If you can learn what AI is capable of,” Chorney said, “and use it how it was intended to be used … it’s the way of the world now. It’s not really an option.”

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Even a free infrastructure project wasn’t enough to convince Maryland officials to work with Elon Musk.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s tunnelling business, the Boring Company, started discussions with city officials about building a free tunnel around the Baltimore Ravens’ football stadium. While the free project seemed like a coup for the Ravens, who had pitched it to the Boring Co., the idea was short-lived. Within nine hours of the announcement, Baltimore’s mayor and city council had filed a lawsuit against xAI, an AI company also owned by Musk, alleging that its chatbot “flooded” users’ feeds with nonconsensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse material.

On Wednesday, the Ravens said that, after conversations with “public partners,” they would walk away from the tunnel proposal. Mayor Scott, a Democrat, said publicly that it was “not something that I would have approved.”

Together, the two moves mark a notable shift in a state that courted Elon Musk’s business with open arms only a decade ago and illustrates the challenges now facing Musk’s collection of companies as the famously impulsive and truculent mulit-billionaire has turned himself into a political lightning rod.

In statements emailed to Fortune, Baltimore’s City Solicitor Ebony Thompson said the City had sued xAI “to protect residents from deceptive and harmful practices involving generative AI tools,” and the Mayor’s Office said it supported the Ravens’ “decision to withdraw their application.” The Mayor’s press secretary declined to comment further.

The Raven Loop tunnel was one of more than 480 pitches Boring Company received to build a one-mile long loop tunnel that is 12 feet in diameter. No other details about the Ravens’ specific pitch have been made available. The M&T Bank Stadium, where the Baltimore Ravens play, currently seats about 70,000 people at capacity and spans approximately 1.6 million square feet. Fans typically drive and park around the stadium, use the city light rail system—which has a Stadium stop, take the nearby subway and walk for about 20 minutes, or, especially for bigger games, use added transit and shuttle systems.

The proposed tunnel does not seem to have received much public attention among Ravens fans or city residents before it was scrapped, with scant debate supporting or opposing the project in the local news.

Maryland and Baltimore have historically welcomed Musk’s companies through incentives and partnerships. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, was one of the first politicians to publicly get behind a major Boring Company project in 2017, when Boring Company announced it planned to build a high-speed tunnel for autonomous vehicles between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The Maryland Department of Transportation sponsored the project, and Baltimore’s then-Mayor, a Democrat, had said the project would have “tremendous potential.” 

That posture has shifted since Musk donated $300 million to President Trump’s campaign and took a hands-on role in government through DOGE. Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, was an early critic of Musk’s work at DOGE, characterizing the firing of thousands of federal workers in 2025 as “arbitrary” and “draconian” during a working session in March 2025 and saying it was cruel. Boring Company president Steve Davis, one of Musk’s longtime trusted fixers, helped Musk run the government department. 

In January of this year, Maryland’s Democratic Attorney General, Anthony G. Brown, a Democrat, signed a letter with 33 other attorneys general demanding that xAI take “additional action” to prevent Grok from generating nonconsensual intimate images and child sexual abuse material.

The demands followed wide reports in late December and early January that Grok, the name of xAI’s chatbot, had been generating photos of women undressed or in bikinis, violent sexual content, or explicit images involving AI-generated individuals that appeared underage.

In the City of Baltimore’s lawsuit, the Mayor and City Council accuse Grok of exposing residents to the risk that any photograph they uploaded—of themselves or of their children—could be ingested by Grok and transformed into sexually degrading deepfakes without their knowledge or consent.

The lawsuit also alleges that xAI has been responsible for “normalizing a form of image-based sexual abuse that is difficult to prevent, contain, or remedy once unleashed at scale.”

The political action echoes partisan aggression against Musk in other states. In Nevada, it’s been exclusively Democrats calling for accountability after safety issues and environmental episodes during construction of Boring Company tunnels. 

xAI and Boring Company did not respond to requests for comment.

Baltimore’s first tunnel project

Baltimore was supposed to be the first showpiece of what Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, Boring Company, could be capable of.

Back in 2017, the initial designs of the Baltimore-Maryland Loop were ambitious—a 35.3-mile twin tunnel system that would enable self-driving vehicles to travel between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour, with stops along the way. Critics, including engineers, said it was unfeasible, and the project quietly died when Boring Company stopped the federal review process. Boring Company later turned its attention to Las Vegas, where it is currently digging tunnels and operating an Uber-like Tesla chauffeur service.

Earlier this year, as part of Boring Co’s efforts to expand to more regions, the company launched a “tunnel vision challenge” soliciting pitches for various tunnel projects—such as utility, water, or pedestrian tunnels—around the U.S. and promising it would build a tunnel to one winner for free.

The process culminated with the announcement this week that the Boring Company had selected the “Ravens Loop” project in Baltimore as one of three projects it would pursue—only for the Ravens to suddenly have a change of heart regarding Musk’s munificence.

“Following discussions with public partners, we have determined we will not continue with the process at this time,” a spokesman for the Baltimore Ravens sent Fortune in a statement.

Boring Company issued an “update” on its X account on Wednesday: “After initial meetings, this project unfortunately will not be moving forward as part of the competition,” the account wrote, before opining whether it should reopen the selection process to another pitch.

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Several so-called conservative think tanks and Department of Commerce officials have proposed taxing the income that universities earn from licensing their research discoveries supported by government grants. By effectively taxing research and development (R&D), the engine of   growth, the proposals threaten to discourage innovation in semiconductors, energy, medicines, and other critical technologies. In addition, the government is already getting ample rewards from these R&D subsidies through its many other taxes on the incomes of the innovations generated.

R&D is essential to economic growth as innovation allows us to produce more with the same inputs. That’s why countries across the globe subsidize it including the U.S through tax exemptions and public research spending, including providing universities with research grants. The think tank proposals of this R&D tax would foolishly jeopardize this activity. The CATO Institute has suggested that the federal government should “demand a royalty” from universities that earn money from licensing patents that resulted from taxpayer-funded research. A more extreme proposal from the Brownstone Institute would repeal the Bayh-Dole licensing system altogether. They echo similar calls for R&D taxes from the Department of Commerce that has even surfaced taxing patents.

Universities are currently allowed to patent the discoveries that their researchers make with the help of these federal grants. Those  patents can then be licensed to private companies in exchange for royalties that promote further discoveries.

This “tech transfer” system — created by the landmark 1980 Bayh-Dole Act — was designed to encourage this licensing. Prior to that law, universities had little incentive to patent or license the discoveries their researchers made with federal funding, since the government controlled the intellectual property rights on those discoveries. In other words, taxpayers were pouring money into scientific research. University labs were making impressive discoveries. But those discoveries weren’t transformed into useful products for tax-payers.

Most university technology transfer offices, like the one I participated in at The University of Chicago, have relatively meager licensing revenues, which total just a few billion annually in aggregate. This is far less than their importance of them for tech transfer activities. As they are the beginning of the highly uncertain innovation chain, they capture only a small fraction of the value generated. Technology transfer supports entire innovation ecosystems — startups, incubators, venture funds, and research parks — that grow up around major research universities and attract private capital at scale. Last year alone, university-driven research parks produced roughly $33 billion in federal tax revenue — an order of magnitude more than universities earn from licensing patents.

Naturally, if you tax something, you get less of it. Many universities would invest less in technology transfer and indeed 95% of tech-transfer experts warn that the policy would force universities to scale back or abandon licensing efforts altogether.

My direct experience as a managing partner in a VC firm suggests that startups and venture firms would be particularly hit as their deal-sourcing often relies on tech transfer offices. They lack the resources to monitor discoveries emerging from thousands of research labs nationwide and rely on offices surfacing promising breakthroughs.

By any measure, transfer offices have had great success. Since 1996, university technology transfer has directly contributed nearly $2 trillion to U.S. gross industrial output and almost 20,000 companies have formed around university-licensed technologies. In 2024 alone, 950 startups launched to commercialize academic research.

Some of those firms go on to reshape entire industries. The US biotech industry, the envy of the world, is largely driven by university discoveries and companies like Genzyme and Biogen grew out of this process. Google emerged from Stanford research licensed under Bayh-Dole. If the new proposals prevented even one company of this scale from forming, the lost tax revenue would dwarf any revenue the new R&D tax could conceivably raise.

It also defies common sense for the government to collect taxes on its own subsidies–to directly subsidize R&D only to then tax it back. Ending this inefficient “tax-spend-tax” process is a general issue and one reason why it was useful for President Trump to cut taxes on Social Security. Why collect distortive taxes to give out benefits only to tax back those benefits?

Supporters of these circular proposals say that the government should be rewarded for funding R&D, just as an initial private-sector investor would. Besides missing that total government revenue would fall from the reduced economic growth it also misses that the government already gets rewarded more than any private investor. The companies that license university research pay corporate taxes. Their employees pay income taxes. And their investors pay capital gains taxes.
Meanwhile, university researchers pay taxes on the royalty income and any equity rewarded.

In other words, taxpayers are already earning massive royalties. At virtually every stage, the government collects a share of the total value created by the tech transfer process that’d make any venture capitalist green with envy.

If the government ever imposes these proposed taxes, it’d result in fewer startups, fewer jobs, and less and not more revenue flowing into the Treasury. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more anti-growth proposal than taxing R&D.

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Consider a meeting. A talented employee whom you took the time to recruit, train, and promote has been coasting for two quarters. You have the conversation: expectations, growth plans, maybe a performance improvement track. She nods, agrees, promises to do better. Nothing changes. What didn’t you say? There is a version of that conversation that neither of you will ever have: I’m not here because I want to be. I’m here because my daughter has asthma and my husband is self-employed and your insurance plan is the only thing standing between us and medical bankruptcy. I will do exactly enough to not get fired. I have no realistic incentive to do more.

That meeting is not a culture problem. It isn’t a management problem. It is the structure of the game being played.

In the United States, employers hold one lever no other developed economy grants them: the ability to tie a family’s access to medical care to an employee’s continued compliance. That asymmetry has a name in game theory, and it isn’t “benefits.” It’s coercion.

When you model any asymmetric negotiation, as I do for the U.S. Naval War College, the same pattern appears: when one side holds levers the other cannot match, the weaker side’s rational strategy is always identical: minimize exposure, comply at the lowest acceptable level, and exit at first opportunity. The employer-employee relationship has this structure. And in the United States, employers hold one lever no other developed economy gives them.

A Hostage Situation, Not a Benefit

In the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Canada, France, and Australia, your employer cannot threaten your family’s access to medical care, because it was never theirs to give or withhold. Healthcare arrives with citizenship, not with a job offer. Lose your job in London, and you lose your income. Lose your job in Louisville, and you lose your income and your child’s pediatrician.

There is a difference between a manager who can threaten your bonus and a manager who can threaten your child’s access to an oncologist. The first is pressure. The second is a hostage situation. In the United States, your employer holds a direct, credible threat to the physical wellbeing of you and the people you love. We don’t call it a threat. We call it a “benefits package.” But the structural reality is that your child’s access to healthcare is contingent on your continued compliance with your manager’s expectations. In any negotiation I have ever modeled, that is not a benefit. That’s a hostage.

The system began as a wartime workaround. Companies competed for scarce workers with healthcare coverage when wages were frozen. During World War II, with wages frozen by federal mandate, companies competed for scare labor by offering healthcare coverage — a benefit the government exempted from wage controls. Over eight decades, what started as an incentive quietly became something else: the most structurally coercive lever in American employment.

Why Engagement Initiatives Don’t Work

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has demonstrated — across decades of team research — that psychological safety is the single strongest predictor of team performance. She’s right. But you cannot build psychological safety inside a hostage negotiation. The precondition for genuine trust is mutual vulnerability: I trust you enough that you could hurt me, and you choose not to. That reciprocal vulnerability is the engine of discretionary effort. It’s the difference between a workforce that commits and one that complies. And you cannot build it with someone whose family’s medical care you hold as collateral. Every culture initiative, every engagement survey, every pizza party lands on top of that coercion architecture and changes nothing.

The Evidence: Job Lock, the ACA, and the Great Resignation

Economists have a name for what that architecture produces: job lock. The phenomenon — workers remaining in jobs they want to leave because leaving means losing healthcare — has been studied since the 1990s. It is not a metaphor. When the Affordable Care Act created a marketplace alternative to employer coverage, researchers documented the result: measurable increases in labor mobility, self-employment, and entrepreneurship. The ACA did not change wages or culture or management quality. It weakened one lever, and behavior changed.

The Great Resignation made the same mechanism visible at scale. Stimulus payments reduced income dependency. Remote work disrupted social pressure. The ACA marketplace offered a partial, imperfect, but real alternative to employer insurance. For a brief window, the coercive levers were externally weakened — not by employer choice, but by circumstance. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded the highest quit rate in its history: 3% in November 2021, representing 4.5 million people leaving their jobs in a single month. When the disruption wore off, the old terms returned. The quit rate fell. The mechanism had been visible the entire time. Employers just weren’t looking at it.

What Costco Actually Did

Costco’s annual employee turnover is 7%. The retail industry average is above 60 percent. The conventional explanation is that Costco pays well. It does. But so do other companies that churn through employees. What Costco actually did is de-weaponize the healthcare lever within the system. It provided coverage so comprehensive and accessible that it stops functioning as a threat. The lever still exists. Costco has simply committed, credibly, not to pull it. The result is a workforce that stays because it chooses to, not because it’s trapped. Every company has access to that structural move. Most choose not to make it because holding the lever feels like power. It isn’t. It’s the most expensive management strategy in the world, and you are paying for it in every disengaged employee, every quiet quitter, and every exit interview that told you exactly what was wrong.

What You Can Do Before the System Changes

So what do employers actually do? You cannot single-handedly reform American healthcare. But you can stop exploiting the coercive lever the system gives you.

If you sit on a board, start with the most structurally significant move available to you: guarantee transition-period coverage. Tell employees on day one that if they leave voluntarily and in good standing, you cover their healthcare for six months. This is a full structural inversion — not educating people about the exit, but funding it. It seems wildly counterintuitive. It costs real money. It also costs less than replacing the employee who left because she felt implicitly under threat, which SHRM places at 50%–200% of annual salary depending on position.

If you lead HR or People operations, go further than you think you should. Subsidize COBRA for departing employees. COBRA exists in theory; its costs are so punishing that almost no one uses it, meaning the “exit” from employer healthcare is functionally a wall. Covering three to six months for employees who leave in good standing is almost certainly cheaper than replacing them — and it sends a clear signal: we are not trapping you.

If you have the leeway, go further still. Decouple benefits eligibility from full-time hour thresholds. The threshold ties healthcare not just to employment but to scheduling compliance. Remove it and you have weakened two coercive levers at once.

If you manage people, you can do something tomorrow that costs nothing and signals everything. Host a benefits literacy workshop. Don’t make it about your plan’s features — make it about your employees’ total options landscape. Walk them through the ACA marketplace. Explain COBRA in plain language. Show them what their insurance picture looks like if they leave. This sounds like handing people an exit toolkit. It is the most powerful trust-building move available to you.

When you show someone the exit and make it less frightening, you communicate something no engagement survey can capture: we know the system gives us a hostage, and we refuse to exploit it. The manager who hands her team an exit map and watches most of them stay anyway has done something the board retreat, the culture consultant, and the engagement platform cannot. she has replaced compliance with choice.

The employee with the asthmatic daughter is sitting across from you right now. She is performing exactly as well as a hostage performs: enough to survive. The question is not how to engage her. The question is whether you are willing to disarm.

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, the U.S. Navy, the Naval War College, or any agency of the U.S. government.

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Elon Musk’s Boring Company is tunneling underneath Nashville and residents aren’t happy—particularly that it’s Musk who is doing it.

A new survey by Vanderbilt University found that 35% of Nashville residents generally opposed the plan to use Tesla vehicles, driven by trained drivers, to transport people between downtown Nashville and Nashville International Airport via the Boring Company’s underground Music City Loop.

Yet, when researchers mentioned Musk’s name explicitly, the percentage of residents opposed to the project jumped to 51%—a slight majority. 

“The public’s support for Elon Musk’s tunnel project is heavily influenced by partisanship,” the researchers found, underscoring how deeply Musk’s political activity now shapes public perception of even his private business ventures.

The Boring Company did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

The disparity between the two findings shows just how polarizing a figure Musk is even after he stepped away from direct involvement with the Trump administration. He previously spent nearly $300 million to elect President Donald Trump and then served as the leader of his government cost-cutting initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he departed last May. 

While DOGE was dissolved as a government entity late last year, it was responsible for firing an estimated 300,000 federal workers and bringing the federal workforce to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to the Cato Institute. DOGE also cut funding for several agencies and essentially dismantled USAID, which provided foreign aid, by cutting 80% of its programs and absorbing the remaining operations within the State Department.

More expansion planned 

Musk’s Boring Company in July announced plans to build 20 miles of tunnels underneath existing highways to transport people between Nashville International Airport and downtown’s lower Broadway in about 10 minutes. The loop will remove thousands of vehicles from surface roads daily and is entirely privately funded, according to a press release. The project is estimated to cost the company between $200 million and $300 million.

The Boring Company unveiled its first underground loop project, the Las Vegas Loop, in 2021. It consists of 11 stations that include the Las Vegas Convention Center and Resorts World. While the company ultimately plans to build a 104-station tunnel network beneath Las Vegas, the project has also been plagued by safety issues, accidents, and scandals. Two Nevada regulators earlier this month wrote a letter to Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo asking for a “comprehensive plan” to address concerns with the tunneling project, Fortune reported.

As for Nashville, despite the apparent opposition by residents and a vote by Nashville’s city council earlier this month to formally oppose the project, the Music City Loop is getting closer to starting construction after the Convention Center Authority granted the Boring Company access to an easement that would let it tunnel beneath the privately owned Music City Center, bringing it closer to its goal of connecting downtown Nashville and the airport.

Still, the findings from the Vanderbilt survey could signal trouble ahead as the company expands — it announced this week it is studying potential projects in New Orleans, Baltimore, Maryland, and Dallas, Texas.

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Stop if you’ve heard this one before: an employee received a message from her boss and didn’t quite understand its meaning, suspecting it was written by AI. So, the employee asked an AI tool to interpret the message for her. The AI responded and then asked if she wanted a draft response back to her boss.

The employee paused. “‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership, business, and coaching at Skillsoft, an edtech and skills management platform. The employee told her, “‘I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.’” 

Rinne calls this phenomenon “socially offloading”: when interpersonal skills that require human judgement, empathy, or courage gets outsourced to AI.  It’s similar to “cognitive offloading,” or shifting often menial tasks to technology like AI to reduce mental effort, and has the potential to disrupt workplace culture. 

Social offloading can look like a boss is preparing for a performance review and asking AI how to have the conversation. Or, it could be an employee asking to craft a response to a stressful email from a manager.

“If I’m always asking AI how do I respond to my boss,” Rinne told Fortune, “I don’t actually learn how to engage with my boss. I don’t actually learn how to build a relationship with my boss.”

Humans are increasingly using AI in more human ways, with the most common use being for therapy and companionship, according to a Harvard Business Review analysis of AI usage patterns. The problem is not that AI doesn’t give helpful advice, Rinne said, but the skills we lose when we rely too much on it. 

“The risk is then that we don’t develop these critical skills that we can use in the moment, because we don’t know how to navigate emotional intelligence, if AI is navigating emotional intelligence for us,” Rinne said. 

Skillsoft uses and sells AI tools to their customers, but their tools aim to coach people through how to have real-world conversations. Its product, CAISY, allows people to practice having conversations and provides feedback, before they have important work conversations. 

Instead of “here’s the answer, here’s what you should say,” Rinne said, the AI instead teaches the person how to develop those intrapersonal skills. “I’m actually building my skill of navigating a difficult conversation or navigating a client conversation because I’ve had the practice,” 

Paying the price of cutting middle management 

AI isn’t the cause of the problem, but rather a leadership vacuum, Rinne said. As organizations have flattened their organizational structures and cut out middle managers, mentorship and coaching have fallen by the wayside. 

A prime example of this strategy is Meta, which has cut 25,000 jobs since 2022 and touts an AI team that has one boss for every 50 engineers. Traditionally, a 25-to-1 employee-to-boss ratio is usually seen as the outer limit of the so-called span‑of‑control scale, but the company is going all-in on AI. With AI, some organizations are pushing the limits of management. 

The recent uptick in younger hires seems to be a common approach, similarly taken by Cognizant, an IT consulting firm that boasts more than 350,000 employees globally on their site, and is on an entry-level hiring spree. 

“If you can equip these people with AI, you have commoditized expertise. You’ve handed over expertise on the fingertips. So you could have more entry-level programs, and you could do more school graduates and take them to expertise faster,” Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S told Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn earlier this year. While it does flatten the workplace pyramid, “the asymmetry is not going to come from expertise. It’s going to come from interdisciplinary skills,” he said. 

Rinne sees the upside from an organizational perspective as fewer managers can lead to quicker decisions and more autonomy. However, managers are still needed to turn strategy into results and into execution, develop talent, and hold a team together, she said. 

“There’s a risk that organizations start treating the span of a leadership’s role like it’s a math problem, when this is really a capability problem,” she said.

While other generations have had decades to learn how to navigate change and the organizational dynamics that come with change, now “young people enter the workforce, and they’re just thrown into the deep end,” Rinne explained.

Some have blamed young workers’ struggle to navigate the workplace on being generally less social. They’re dating and socializing less, and Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University whose research focuses on communication between employees and bosses, says that is affecting their ability to perform at work. 

“You learn a lot of skills in those early relationships that you then leverage in the workplace,” West said. “Negotiation is a huge one, and so is compromise.”

Even romantic relationships can’t fill the gap Rinne sees forming between employees and their bosses. She points to her own experience coming up as helping her prepare for her current role as an organization’s leader. 

“I’ve had amazing opportunities to be coached and to have investment in my development,” she said. “The contrast of that is you’ve got Gen Z coming in, and I think there’s this assumption as a digital child, that they are already ready for the pace of change, or they’re already ready to navigate.” 

But leaders are not actually equipping younger employees to navigate change, communicate effectively, and have good judgment, she said, which lowers their competitive advantage when human-centric skills are driving success in the AI era. 

“We’re just kind of expecting them to enter this crazy whirlwind moment and be able to navigate it effectively,” she said. 

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As of March 23, 2026, the global energy market is no longer governed by the invisible hand of economics; it is being strangled by the rigid, non-negotiable laws of engineering. While Brent crude futures experienced a violent flash crash on March 23, plunging over 15% to an intraday low of $96 per barrel after President Donald Trump announced a five-day pause on his ultimatum to strike Iranian power plants, Trump claimed that productive talks were underway — a claim Iran quickly denied — causing prices to instantly whiplash back above the $100 mark. Adding to the gravity of the situation, International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol recently warned that the current 11-million-barrel-per-day deficit is worse than both of the 1970s oil shocks combined.

Furthermore, the global energy supply chain is rapidly degrading into a toll booth regime at the Strait of Hormuz, transforming historically open transit routes into hostile zones where safe passage demands political concessions or massive risk premiums. History is unforgiving to those who ignore structural chokepoints, as seen during the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis which crippled European supply lines overnight, and the Tanker War of the 1980s, which forced vessels to pay exorbitant insurance premiums or face destruction.

True market clarity will emerge only when we shift our focus from fleeting financial reactions to the physical engineering realities that power the globe. This extreme volatility provides a critical opportunity for industry leaders to look beyond surface-level price swings and focus on the fundamental constraints actually driving the market.

As a petroleum engineer, I am watching two ticking clocks that no amount of diplomatic pauses can reset. The first is a 25-day tank top threatening to freeze Middle Eastern production. The second is a 100-day sludge line that will poison the reserves oil-hungry nations are racing to drain. Beyond these thresholds, the global economy does not just slow down — it hits an engineering dead-end.

The 25-day storage countdown: tank top

The conflict has physically split the energy world into two paralyzed halves. In the Middle East, the crisis is not a supply cut but a catastrophic supply accumulation. With Lloyd’s of London withdrawing war risk insurance and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz dropping by 95%, nations like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Iran, and Qatar are suddenly drowning in nearly 20 million barrels of stranded oil every single day.

During this critical supply-accumulation phase, my primary focus as an engineer shifts to monitoring the tank top — the absolute maximum safe operating capacity of a storage hub. It is crucial to understand that this is a strict physical volume constraint. Once a storage tank reaches its top capacity, leaving only the necessary headspace for vapor and thermal expansion, the fluid flow must come to a complete halt.

Current industry intelligence confirms that total regional storage capacity in the Gulf stands at roughly 450 million barrels. Given the ongoing disruptions creating a massive surplus of trapped crude, the Middle East is on a strict 25-day countdown to an absolute system freeze. Key producers like Iraq have already reached maximum crude storage capacity, triggering a massive 70% collapse in production from their main southern oilfields, while Kuwait has been forced to declare force majeure. The entire physical network is running out of space right now, and the catastrophic well shut-ins we feared have already begun.

Beyond the surface storage, what truly keeps subsurface asset managers awake at night is the reservoir skin effect. You cannot simply flip a switch to halt fluid flow in a supergiant porous rock formation like Ghawar or Rumaila. An abrupt shut-in causes fines migration — when tiny particles of rock and clay within the porous materials become dislodged, settle, and severely plug the pore throats near the wellbore. This creates permanent skin damage around the well, fundamentally destroying its natural permeability and crippling its long-term productivity. If these complex, engineered underground systems are forced to go dark for even two to three weeks, the altered physics of the reservoir dictate that they may never return to their original flow rates.

The 100-day countdown: sludge line

On the other side of the blockade, oil-reliant nations — led by the U.S., China, India, and Japan — are pivoting to their Strategic Petroleum Reserves. On March 11, the IEA authorized a record-breaking 400-million-barrel release to bridge the gap. But the market has a massive misconception: traders believe these reserves can instantly replace the void. They cannot.

The problem begins with the fluid dynamics of our extraction infrastructure. The United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve has a verified physical maximum drawdown rate of around 4 million barrels per day — but achieving this is a massive engineering challenge. During the 2022 draining of the U.S. reserve, the United States could only sustain a pumping rate of roughly 1.2 million barrels per day for about a week. Even in the event of a globally coordinated release, the combined global strategic infrastructures can only deliver approximately 10 million barrels per day to the market — a permanent, unfillable deficit during a major supply disruption.

Compounding this volumetric constraint is a critical quality issue that most analysts overlook, by treating reserve oil as a uniform asset. In reality, the physics and chemistry within a salt cavern dictate a very different story. Decades of static storage lead to the unavoidable accumulation of heavy waxes, dense inorganic sediments, and highly corrosive hydrogen sulfide produced by sulfate-reducing bacteria — turning the bottom of the cavern into a chemical nightmare.

If we attempt to sustain maximum pumping rates to bridge a massive supply gap, we will inevitably hit this sludge line in less than 100 days. Drawing this degraded, sour crude is akin to pumping industrial poison through our midstream and downstream networks. Processing this bottom-of-the-barrel fluid will rapidly foul heat exchangers and irreversibly poison sensitive refinery catalysts — triggering a devastating secondary wave of forced maintenance downtime and refinery shutdowns that will paralyze the fuel supply in the exact nations that are desperately trying to survive the crisis.

Not a V-shaped recovery, but an L-shaped plateau

Financial markets often expect a V-shaped recovery, hoping that the moment a ceasefire is signed and the blockade is lifted, the geopolitical risk premium will evaporate instantly and send Brent crude tumbling back to the $70 floor within days. Today’s 10% price drop on the news of a five-day strike delay is a perfect example of this financial optimism. However, as a petroleum engineer, I can tell you that while financial markets move at the speed of light, physical molecules move through an infrastructure defined by inertia, degradation, and hydraulic friction.

Because the underlying physical infrastructure is fundamentally damaged, the capacity to recover is permanently lost. This structural plateau will lock the global oil market into triple-digit territory for the foreseeable future. The defining question for the economy is no longer how high prices will spike, but how long they will stay high.

There are three primary reasons we face an L-shaped plateau instead of a V-shaped recovery:

First is midstream hysteresis. When the 25-day storage wall forces a pipeline to stop, the system begins to degrade immediately. When crude oil flow stops, the loss of turbulence allows heavier asphaltenes and waxes to settle, and dropping temperatures can cause the stagnant oil to gel. Furthermore, the water typically present in flowing crude separates and pools at low elevation points, creating localized environments for rapid internal corrosion. Because of these physical and chemical hazards, no responsible midstream operator will simply restart a line that has been sitting dormant for weeks. They must first deploy robotic sensors — or integrity pigs — to inspect for blockages and wall thinning, — a necessary safety measure that introduces a strict 14-to-21-day logistical lag before full-scale delivery can safely resume.

Second is the current state of the strategic petroleum reserves. Governments are not just releasing oil; they are borrowing it from the future. Under current swap and exchange agreements, nations like the U.S., Japan, and India are legally or strategically committed to refilling their caverns starting in late 2026 and throughout 2027. Traders and speculators are already pricing this in — they know that as soon as the price dips, the world’s largest governments will step in as massive, price-insensitive buyers to replenish their empty salt caverns before the next crisis hits. This creates a hard floor under the market.

Third is the engineering reality of the cold-start problem, compounded by modern geopolitical risk. Financial optimists argue that millions of barrels currently trapped in floating storage will immediately flood the market the moment a ceasefire is signed. This fundamentally misunderstands physical infrastructure. Restarting a massive, stagnant network is often far more complex and dangerous than keeping it running under heavy stress. Furthermore, with the insurance market paralyzed by war risks, mobilizing a ghost fleet of tankers back into a former conflict zone will be a sluggish, highly regulated process. The global hydrocarbon supply chain is a highly interconnected, massive inertial machine, and overcoming this inertia will prevent the rapid recovery the market hopes for.

The final reckoning; policy vs. physics

When the 25-day producer overflow triggers a forced regional shut-in in the Middle East, and the 100-day massive consumer drawdown hits the sludge line, the market will face demand destruction on a scale equivalent to wiping out the entire daily oil demand of Japan, India, and Germany combined.

The daily global supply deficit of 10 million barrels forces a brutal hierarchy of energy allocation. The consequences of this sustained energy plateau will cascade rapidly through the global economy, forcing immediate shutdowns in energy-intensive sectors like petrochemicals, steel manufacturing, and aluminum smelting. This crisis is also bleeding into national security. — a recent West Point analysis warned that the Hormuz blockade is already strangling the U.S. defense industry due to the near-total disruption of critical minerals like sulfur and copper required for munitions and radar repair.

This industrial halt will be compounded by a global transportation freeze, as soaring jet and bunker fuel premiums ground commercial aviation and maritime shipping, effectively ending the era of low-cost, just-in-time logistics. Because modern food production relies heavily on diesel-intensive harvest cycles, a massive increase in fertilizer costs will transform this energy shortage into a global food security emergency. Ultimately, to prevent total societal collapse, governments will be forced to implement severe wartime rationing, restricting fuel exclusively to military logistics, emergency services, and vital agricultural supply chains.

The physics of midstream restarts and the mandatory refilling of global reserves dictate that triple-digit oil is not a temporary spike. — it is the new baseline. As the global economy sprints against a catastrophic countdown, CEOs, policymakers, and investors must stop hoping for a return to cheap oil anytime soon and instead prepare to navigate a long, restricted plateau.

We are reaching the edge of the map where financial theories fail — as real-world engineering buckles under the hard physical constraints of a system running out of room, running out of time, and running out of oil.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Texas A&M University, nor of Fortune.

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A new Senate bill would shield consumers from data centers’ rising energy costs. The instinct is right. The diagnosis is wrong.

Data centers now account for roughly 7% of U.S. electricity demand, roughly equivalent to powering every home in California and Texas combined, up from about 1% just 15 years ago — the equivalent of powering every home in California and Texas combined. That curve is still steepening. The four largest hyperscale tech companies are projected to spend a combined $650 billion in capital expenditures this year alone. When numbers get that big, it’s natural to ask whether the current system makes sense.

But this bill treats data centers as the problem. The truth is more interesting than that. Data center challenges are a symptom of a grid that has been underbuilt and undermodernized for decades, but the right data centers, designed the right way, can actually help solve these same problems. And the right data centers, designed the right way, can actually help fix it.

The Real Problem Is the Grid Itself

The real issue, the thing actually driving electricity costs upward, is that our electrical grid is structurally limited. It was built for a 20th-century world of slow, predictable demand growth, an era when utilities could forecast load years in advance and build generation to match. That world is gone.

But data centers are only one reason why.

Electric vehicles are transforming how and when millions of Americans draw power. Heat pumps are changing residential electricity patterns. Industrial electrification is accelerating across manufacturing and chemicals. Each of these shifts represents genuine economic progress — new industries, new jobs, new capabilities. But each also places new strain on a grid that was never engineered to accommodate them. None of them are “the problem.” Neither are data centers.

Data centers are the most visible new source of demand, making them a convenient political target. But singling out one sector for the grid’s collective modernization challenge is a bit like blaming traffic congestion on the newest cars when the roads were already too narrow.

The transmission bottlenecks, the interconnection backlogs, the outdated planning models that make it so hard to bring new capacity online: these problems were building long before the current wave of AI-driven data center construction, and they will continue to build with or without it. Every year we delay modernizing the grid, we raise the cost of the growth our economy needs.

Three Things Policymakers Should Actually Do

So what should legislators, in this legislation and beyond, actually do?

1. Treat demand flexibility as a grid resource.

First, they should orient energy policy around demand flexibility as a grid resource. A series of reports from Duke University’s Nicholas Institute has found that curtailing just 0.25% to 1% of annual electricity consumption during the most stressed hours of the year could allow U.S. grids to absorb up to 100 gigawatts of new load — roughly the entire capacity of America’s nuclear fleet — without requiring major new generation or transmission investments. A follow-up study estimates that if large data centers shifted a portion of their computing to off-peak hours, the country could avoid up to $150 billion in power plant, fuel, and transmission costs over the next decade.

A significant share of the capacity we think we need to build already exists. We just aren’t using it well. Legislation should direct regulators and grid operators to value flexible demand alongside traditional supply in resource adequacy planning.

2. Incentivize data centers that help the grid.

Rather than restricting grid access, legislation should require that data centers be designed for grid interactivity — the ability to dynamically adjust energy consumption in coordination with the grid’s needs. The technology to do this is real and deployable today. Data centers can be built with integrated battery storage that provides services to the grid during normal operations and backup power during outages, curtailing load within minutes of a utility signal while maintaining customer uptime.

Recent work validated with national laboratories has demonstrated this flexibility at full scale: these facilities can curtail 100% of their grid load within one minute of a utility signal, provide firm dispatch capacity back to the grid through battery storage, and reconnect seamlessly when conditions stabilize. Data centers designed this way aren’t a burden on the grid. They are an asset to it.

The same principle applies across the demand landscape. Virtual power plants already coordinate millions of residential devices — thermostats, water heaters, home batteries — to shift consumption during peak hours~~, providing gigawatts of dispatchable capacity~~. The Department of Energy estimates that scaling these networks could meet 10 to 20% of peak demand by 2030, saving $10 billion annually in avoided infrastructure costs.

3. Modernize interconnection and planning processes.

Today’s frameworks were designed for a slower era. They assume all new demand requires a corresponding amount of new supply — and that the systems consuming energy cannot also supply it. Both assumptions are increasingly wrong. Flexible loads, intelligent storage, and advanced demand coordination should be treated as capacity resources in grid planning, with regulatory frameworks updated accordingly.

The Risk of Getting the Framing Wrong

These aren’t speculative ideas. These are proven capabilities being deployed now. The question is whether legislators will build on them or continue to frame the challenge as a zero-sum contest between data centers and consumers.

Legislation that isolates data centers may score political points, but it leaves untouched the structural limitations that will keep driving costs up for everyone. The grid needs modernization that accommodates all 21st-century loads intelligently: EVs, heat pumps, industrial electrification, and yes, data centers. Building walls around one category of demand while the underlying system remains brittle will not protect consumers. It will delay the reforms that actually would.

The instinct to shield ratepayers from rising costs is exactly right. The way to honor it is to build a grid capable of meeting the historic opportunity ahead.

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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American parents (and students) weighing whether a U.S. college degree is still worth the hefty debt might want to hear what one philanthropy CEO did instead—she dodged six-figure tuition bills by sending her daughter to university in London.

It sounds counterintuitive. Flights, a foreign city, and a flat in one of the world’s most expensive capitals. But for Greater Good Charities CEO, Liz Baker, saving roughly $50,000-a-year, has been well worth the added admin of sending her kid off to study abroad. 

“Once we started to look, we were like, ‘this is so much cheaper,’” she recalled to Fortune. 

Tuition in London for her daughters’ courses comes in at around $35,000 a year, versus the $80,000 to $90,000 out-of-state U.S. bill they were initially bracing for. “So it’s like, really half the price,” Baker said. 

As someone who has spent years running a nonprofit—scrutinizing budgets, tracking impact, and deciding where every dollar goes furthest—she’s perhaps better placed than most to do the math. “I always tell people who have kids that are going to college, you should look at the UK,” Baker added. 

Even paying for a flat in Central London is still cheaper than U.S. college costs

Her oldest daughter has now completed an undergraduate degree at King’s College London and is currently studying a master’s at the London School of Economics, all while living in the heart of England’s capital city. 

“Even paying for a flat in like Central London is cheaper than sending her to college here, because she was looking at UC Santa Barbara.” A staggering 747 km (or a 10-hour drive) from Arizona, where they were living at the time. 

Essentially, wherever Baker’s children went to university, they’d have to factor in accommodation costs on top of tuition fees anyway—and even with London rent costing north of £2,000 ($2,700) a month, it still worked out cheaper than the American alternative once accommodation costs were stacked on top of that six-figure tuition bill.

“I mean, it’s expensive. But again, tuition out of state at any college is more expensive,” Baker added.

She also shaved off an entire year of college costs. One of the quiet quirks of the British system is that most undergraduate degrees last three years—and if students arrive with enough Advanced Placement (AP) credits, (good grades equal more points) they can often skip an extra foundation year some international students need.

“My one daughter did all of the AP classes, so she didn’t have to do a foundation year,” Baker explained. “So then you take into account that school is three years,  and so then you eliminate that cost, and even master’s are shorter.”

One year cut alone can shave tens of thousands of dollars off the total bill for international students, whose annual tuition typically ranges from about £11,400 to £38,000 (roughly $14,000 to $50,000), depending on the course and university.

A $1.7 trillion student debt crisis is making the UK look like the smarter option

It’s not just the debt that worries Baker—it’s what (if anything) students are getting in return. Many grads are now walking off U.S. campuses with eye-watering debt but no clear path into a well-paying job. 

U.S. student debt has surpassed $1.7 trillion; meanwhile, the unemployment rate for fresh-faced grads just keeps rising.

Now, millions of graduates are questioning whether their degree was worth the price tag, and a growing chorus of the world’s most powerful CEOs is starting to agree with them. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has said he never hires for educational pedigree alone. Amazon’s Andy Jassy has said an “embarrassing amount” of your success depends on attitude, not credentials. And with AI quietly replacing entry-level roles that generations of graduates relied on to justify their loans, the premium higher education once held is eroding fast.

It’s why Baker thinks young people need to question the return on investment more than ever: “If you leave with an English degree, and you have $200,000-plus in debt from student loans—why would you do that?” 

She genuinely believes her kids are getting more bang for their buck in Britain. 

Not only are UK degrees shorter, but they’re also more specialised. Students typically focus on one subject and study it exclusively for the entire duration of their degree—every module, every year, laser-locked on their chosen field. 

Crucially, in her eyes, they’re better aligned with the skills employers actually want. 

“I think the curriculum is better because it’s more focused,” Baker said, while adding that when she took her musical theater and criminal justice degree, she had to take irrelevant classes that she’d never use in a career, like “Earth science.” 

And when asked whether a British degree holds up against an American one in the eyes of employers, the CEO didn’t hesitate: “Yeah. 100%.”

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Festive music from the band Sweet Crude blared at a party minutes after President Donald Trump’s former defense secretary warned that ending the war now would cede ownership of the narrow Strait of Hormuz—the world’s most critical choke point—to Iran.

“We’re in a tough spot, ladies and gentlemen,” said retired Gen. Jim Mattis at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “I can’t identify a lot of options.”

The dichotomy of the celebratory, yet nerve-wracking vibes dominated the unofficial “Davos of energy” event this week that still attracted a record of over 11,000 attendees from 90 countries—a veritable who’s who of the energy sector around the world—not counting the fossil fuel protestors outside.

The mood was meant to be triumphant. There’s ongoing crude oil and gas growth, but most prominent is the unprecedented wave of electricity demand from AI, triggering an infrastructure boom for pipelines, export hubs, and power, including gas-fired generation, renewables, nuclear, and more—truly an all-of-the-above energy renaissance that could still suffer from geopolitical turmoil.

So, the extension of the unexpected Iran war overshadows everything. The industry still cannot come to grips with the previously unfathomable scenario of the strait staying shuttered for a prolonged period of time. The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow, precarious waterway between Iran and the Musandam Peninsula through which flows roughly 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas, fertilizer for agriculture, helium for semiconductors, and petrochemicals that go into almost everything. Much of the world, especially in developing Asia, is already suffering the consequences and the ripple effects will continue to spread the longer the war draws out.

“There’s a lot of somber talk,” said Arjun Murti, energy macro and policy partner at the Veriten research and investment firm. “The strait does need to open in some fashion pretty soon. It’s not good for anybody.”

Even if American oil, gas, and chemicals producers rake in higher profit margins for now, they’ll suffer from the volatility and longer-term demand destruction later, especially if a global recession—or worse—takes hold.

Iran dominated the news so much that Venezuela seems like old news. The in-person appearance at CERAWeek of Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado was almost an afterthought. The four-hour-long security lines at Houston’s airports were a much more prominent topic of conversation.

With oil prices trading above $100 per barrel—up about 75% since the beginning of the year—Chevron CEO Mike Wirth warned the real impacts are only starting to take hold and that commodities remain underpriced. “There are very real physical manifestations of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that are working their way around the world through the system that I don’t think are fully priced in,” he said, adding that markets are trading off “scant information.”

Shell CEO Wael Sawan said energy supply shortfalls could hit Europe very soon. Releases of emergency oil supplies only fill part of the gap. “South Asia was first to get that brunt. That’s moved to Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and then more so into Europe as we get into April.”

The Dow chemical CEO said the inflationary effects will extend at least through the end of this year. “The die is being cast for the rest of the year for what’s going to happen in the markets,” said CEO Jim Fitterling. “It’s like the unwind we saw on supply chains during COVID.”

Jack Fusco, CEO of Cheniere Energy—now the leading liquefied natural gas exporter in the world as a result of Qatar’s supplies being severely damaged and offline—said the final waterborne shipments from before the war from Qatar just made landfall, so the physical shortfalls are only beginning. “I don’t think you’ve seen a real impact just as of yet,” Fusco said, adding that he’s literally taking phone calls of “Help!” from Asia.

Political massaging

Key members of the Trump administration trekked to Houston, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, attempting to assuage the concerns of industry leaders and encourage them to produce more oil and gas.

This occurred as President Trump declared the war won—while sending more troops to the Persian Gulf for a potential escalation—and said oil prices would quickly fall again, which doesn’t exactly motivate more oil production.

“Markets do what markets do,” said Wright, a former oil and gas CEO, arguing that “prices have not risen enough yet to drive meaningful demand destruction.”

“It’s short-term disruption right now, but to end a multi-decadal problem and lead to a world that’s much more peaceful, can be much more prosperous, and much more securely energized,” Wright told the CERAWeek audience.

The next day, Wright, who remained in Houston most of the week, said investors are wrong when they pigeonhole energy as a single sector.

“Energy is not one sector. Energy is the enabler of absolutely everything we do,” Wright said. “Energy is life.”

That sentiment is exactly what makes everyone so nervous about the continuation of the Iran war—one started by the U.S. and Israel—and the greatest energy supply shock in history.

There’s a sense of a freeze across the energy industry, stifling long-term planning—except for examining many potential scenarios—and allowing for only short-term operational adjustments. Many top CEOs avoided interviews outside of the main stage for fear of speculating on the war and politics. Houston-based Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods didn’t come at all. And top Middle Eastern leaders, such as the CEO of Saudi Aramco, canceled their travel plans.

Some sent recorded video messages instead. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), accused Iran of “choking the throat” of the “global economy.”

“Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz is not an act of aggression against one nation. It’s economic terrorism against every nation,” Al Jaber said. “And no country should be allowed to hold Hormuz hostage. Not now, not ever.”

Kuwait Petroleum CEO Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah said he is “outraged” by Iran’s unprovoked counterattacks against its Gulf neighbors. Kuwait and Iraq have already shut off most of their oil production, while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have implemented major cutbacks as well.

“It’s a domino effect,” al-Sabah said. “The costs of this war don’t stay within geographical lines in this region. They extend all the way through the supply chain.”

The unknowns are really what’s scariest, said Veriten founder and CEO Maynard Holt.

“You have this confluence of factors—an administration keeping a very tight circle to maintain the element of surprise, the Europeans taking a limited role, energy players and various other Middle East actors deciding not to speculate in public, all with a backdrop of a potentially calamitous extended blockage of Hormuz,” Holt told Fortune.

“That whole stew just raises the overall anxiety while also limiting the public discussion.”

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In a landmark ruling against Meta and YouTube this week, a Los Angeles jury determined that tech addiction is real—and dangerous. They awarded a combined $6 million in damages to a young woman who argued that the “addictive design” of social media and video platforms helped fuel her serious mental health problems. The verdict left many asking what tech addiction is, exactly, and whether their own use of tech should raise red flags.

If you’re wondering whether your relationship with screens has tipped from normal use into something more troubling, clinicians in the field of tech addiction treatment would tell you to start by asking yourself a few brutally honest questions. Cosette Rae, cofounder of the Washington-based clinic reSTART for those experiencing severe tech addiction, helped develop a set of screening prompts to guide potential clients through that reflection. Here’s an abbreviated form of her questionnaire:

• How often do you think about your current, previous, or next online activity?
  If your mind is constantly jumping to what you’re doing online—or what you’ll do next—that can signal preoccupation. When tech use is front-of-mind even during work, conversations, or downtime, it may be occupying more mental space than you intend.

• Have you become restless, irritable, angry, or anxious when you are unable to engage in online activities?
  Feeling mildly annoyed when the internet goes out is normal; experiencing strong agitation, anger, or anxiety when you can’t get online is different. 

• Have you tried to reduce participation in online activities but found it too difficult?
  Repeatedly deciding to cut back—then blowing past your own limits—points to a loss of control. That gap between what you plan to do and what you actually do is a core sign that your tech habits may be slipping out of your hands.

• Have you lost interest in non-online activities such as sports, hobbies, or family time?
  When favorite pastimes or in-person plans start to feel dull compared with scrolling or gaming, it suggests your reward system is tilting toward digital stimulation. Over time, that shift can shrink your offline world.

• Have you deceived a family member, significant other, employer, or therapist regarding the amount of time you spend online?
  Hiding or minimizing your screen time—closing windows when someone walks in, underreporting hours, or downplaying late nights online—can be a signal that you already sense it’s too much. 

• Have you jeopardized or lost a significant relationship or an academic or employment opportunity because of your engagement with online activities?
  Missed deadlines, slipping grades, or conflicts with loved ones that can be traced directly to online time are serious warning signs. When screens routinely win out over your responsibilities or key relationships, it’s worth paying close attention.

Answering “yes” to one or more questions doesn’t automatically mean you’re addicted to tech. But taken together, Rae’s screening questions are designed to help you move from a vague sense that something is off to a clearer view of how your online habits are shaping your life—and to help you consider the question of whether it might be time to seek more support.

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If you’ve ever stood in front of the mirror and wondered what your outfit’s missing, Macy’s may have the answer. The company recently launched its “Ask Macy’s” AI chatbot, powered by Google’s Gemini AI assistant, and it’s having shocking success. 

The chatbot launched across all the company’s digital platforms on Monday, but it was tested with about half of Macy’s website visitors over several weeks, the company told Bloomberg. Shoppers who use the chatbot spend about 4.75 times more than those who don’t, Bloomberg reported.

The bot’s short-term success comes as Macy’s tries to make its comeback after a decade of declining sales. 

Earlier this month, the company reported net sales decreased by 2.4% last year, but returned to comparable sales growth, up 1.5%. Macy’s expects to make $21.4 billion to $21.65 billion in net sales this year, a little less than last year’s $21.76 billion, and sees comp sales flat at the midpoint of guidance. 

Chief Customer and Digital Officer Max Magni explained that customers may be primed to spend more because they’re looking for a specific item, such as an outfit for an upcoming event, rather than when they’re just browsing, Bloomberg reported. He suspects that the bot is also attracting a younger customer base.  

The most popular features are the “complete the look” option, where the bot suggests accessories to go with an outfit, and a virtual try-on feature that allows shoppers to see what an item looks like on them. Customers can also use the virtual try-on feature in store, if they don’t have time to see if an item fits, Chief Stores Office Barbie Cameron told Bloomberg. 

More AI shopping assistants are coming as companies and startups bet on making online shopping more seamless. For example, Bill Gates’s daughter Phoebe Gates founded Phia, a browser extension that compares prices across the internet. 

And after more than four years in beta, Marc Lore and Melissa Bridgeford, publicly launched shopping agent Wizard in February. 

“Every retailer is trying to figure it out one step at a time,” Magni told Bloomberg. “This is anybody’s game. Nobody has cracked the code.”

Getting the Macy’s bot ready for customers has taken some tweaking, and thousands of employees weighed in, according to Magni. Originally, it didn’t take into account that shoppers in different climates may not want to see the same selections. 

There were also some tone issues, Magni added. When he asked for T-shirt suggestions for his son, the bot coldly offered a list and wrote: “Here’s a T-shirt for a 10-year-old.”

Now, the bot is more friendly. When asked again, the bot replied “‘Ten-year-olds can have so much fun with color – do you want a brighter or more muted color selection?’” Magni said. “The machine continues to learn.”

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Meta will pay for a total of 10 gas-fired power plants—enough to power more than 5 million homes—to electrify its rapidly expanding plans for its massive AI data center complex in northeastern Louisiana, dubbed Hyperion.

Meta’s agreement with New Orleans-based Entergy, announced March 27, is to build and finance seven new power plants in Louisiana. That comes on top of plans approved last year to build three gas power plants for the sprawling AI hub. The 10 power plants with 7.5 gigawatts of capacity would represent more than a 30% increase to Louisiana’s entire grid capacity, not even counting up to 2.5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, including battery storage, that Meta also agreed to help fund.

Meta initially announced plans for a $10 billion investment in December 2024 for a 2,250-acre data center campus in northeastern Louisiana in rural Richland Parish. But Meta recently, and quietly, acquired an additional 1,400 acres, as Fortune reported in February. In October 2025, Meta entered a joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital to finance, build, and operate the Hyperion campus with up to $27 billion in total development costs, seemingly ensuring the mega campus will serve as a long-term, multiphase AI hub.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said Hyperion would cover a “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”

“Our Richland Parish data center serves as a symbol of the ambition and scale of next-generation AI infrastructure,” said Rachel Peterson, Meta vice president for data centers, in a statement. “We are building foundations for the future of AI innovation right here in the United States. We’ve been working closely with Entergy since early on-site planning to ensure our power needs are met and, importantly, so that Entergy’s other consumers aren’t paying our costs.”

The Louisiana Public Utility Commission will still need to approve the projects. The previous three power plants received regulatory authorization last year.

Entergy’s stock jumped 7% on March 27, lifting its market cap to a new record high of about $50 billion. The stock has risen almost 125% in two years.

Entergy is emphasizing that Meta is paying for the projects, rather than shifting the costs to other ratepayers. Entergy argues that the deals will save Louisiana taxpayers billions of dollars over several years.

The 10 power plants are estimated to cost nearly $11 billion. Critics contend ratepayers could be stuck with the bill after 15 years, which is the length of the contractual terms, if Meta no longer requires so much power after that span.

“This agreement reflects what’s possible when strong partners align around long-term growth and value,” said Phillip May, president and CEO of Entergy Louisiana, in a statement. “Working with our customers, regulators and state leaders, we are making targeted investments that strengthen reliability, support economic development and deliver meaningful benefits to customers—all while keeping energy rates affordable.”

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When Meta opened its Ray-Ban smart glasses up for pre-order, it made clear of one thing: your privacy will be secure. “Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are built with privacy at their core,” read a statement at the time, released in September 2023. The marketing was unambiguous about your privacy, and as a result, you might have seen people wearing them around town, in a Super Bowl ad, or even in a court proceeding about child safety on Meta’s own platforms. ICE agents were even reportedly wearing them in the field.

What you might not have seen is, well, yourself caught in the crosshairs of the glasses’ camera. Now, a new study—and a federal lawsuit that quickly followed—alleges the company is even less transparent than those thick lenses, claiming the company is quietly routing users’ footage to human workers overseas instead of its AI models. These workers have seen everything from people undressing to sensitive financial documents, and it’s thanks to users who opt into data sharing for AI training purposes.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording,” a worker said he saw in the videos from the glasses.

In late February, Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten published an investigation into Meta’s AI training pipeline, finding Meta contractors in Kenya help train the artificial intelligence powering the glasses (comprised of the Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer (Gen 2), the Ray-Ban Display, and the Oakley Meta HSTNs models). What they saw was startling. 

“We see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies,” the workers were quoted in the study. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”

Any user who opts into sharing data for AI training purposes effectively allows all parts of their life to be recorded, and then as a result, reviewed, either by the AIs it’s supposed to train or by the humans behind it. That includes footage of people in bathrooms, undressing, watching porn, and, in at least one documented case, a pair of glasses left on a bedside table that captured a partner who had never consented to being recorded. 

Meta’s subcontractors—who were data annotators teaching the AI to interpret images by manually labelling content—also reported viewing users’ credit card numbers and financial documents. At the time of the study’s release, Meta responded through a spokesperson, saying: “When people share content with Meta AI, like other companies we sometimes use contractors to review this data to improve people’s experience with the glasses, as stated in our privacy policy. This data is first filtered to protect people’s privacy.”

A class action begins

The report triggered legal action. On March 4, plaintiffs Gina Bartone and Mateo Canu filed a class action lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc. (and glassesmaker Luxottica of America) accusing the company of violating federal and state laws by failing to disclose that videos captured by the glasses are transmitted to its servers and then to the Kenyan subcontractor for manual labeling.​ Referencing new privacy bills and regulations as result of the increase in AI and the surveillance economy, the suit reads that “Meta knows this” in reference to the public’s growing concern of their privacy and safety, and “against this backdrop,” Meta released the glasses with a “reassuring promise: the Glasses were ‘designed for privacy, controlled by you.’”

Brian Hall, a privacy and AI attorney at Stubbs Alderton & Markiles, says the revelations were as predictable as they were alarming. “That’s horrifying. It’s kind of exactly what we all imagined would happen,” Hall told Fortune. “I’m old enough to remember 10 or 12 years ago when Google had their glasses, and that was a concern about people going into restrooms with them on. We’re kind of right back there now.”​

(When Google unveiled its prototype Google Glass in 2013, it ignited a fierce public backlash over surveillance, consent, and the death of anonymity. Bars, restaurants, casinos, and strip clubs banned the device outright, and wearers were mockingly dubbed “Glassholes”).

Hall says the legal liability remains murky, partly because Meta’s own Terms of Service state that data annotators “will review your interaction with AI, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AI,” and specifies this review “can be automated or manual.” “If we went and did a close reading of their privacy policy, there’s not going to be anything explicitly that says they don’t do that,” Hall said. “In terms of their legal liability, I don’t know, but it’s certainly a PR liability. This is some of the most sensitive information and imagery that there is out there.”​

Hall says his biggest concern isn’t actually the glasses wearers themselves, it’s everyone else caught in the frame. “The bystanders, the people who are being filmed and identified, they’re the ones that are at risk,” he said. “Sadly, our privacy laws are not designed to protect those people. They’re designed to protect the people who are wearing the glasses and their ability to manage their own data.”​

In reference to reports of a man using the glasses in a U.K. court to help “coach” him through testimony, Hall said the risk compounds significantly as Meta reportedly considers adding facial recognition to the glasses. “It really is moving from a world where today you might be able to see somebody on the street, in a courtroom, in a bar, and you might be able to do some investigation on Facebook and Instagram and find them. But this is instant. It’s automatic, zero effort. You could be sitting in a courtroom identifying witnesses.”

Hall says existing law is simply not built for what Meta’s glasses make possible. “I don’t know that the existing laws are really sufficient to protect us from the risks of the kind of things that Meta and other social media companies are doing right now,” he said. “It’s sort of getting shoehorned into the privacy laws, but those are rarely enforced as it is,  and this is completely upending the whole framework that those were built upon.”​

“I’m not seeing that people are meaningfully addressing it in any way,” he said, saying current regulations are piecemeal and fail to address the concerns of privacy entirely. Once privacy is addressed, he said “everything else is just kind of window dressing.”​

Meta did not respond to requests for comment.

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Airlangga Hartato was all smiles on Feb. 19 as he signed his name to what he called a “win-win” deal. After four trips to Washington, seven formal negotiating rounds, and nine meetings with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Indonesia’s economy minister had finally secured a reduction in U.S. duties on Indonesian goods—from a punishing 32% to a more tolerable 19%.

The agreement, grandly titled Toward a New Golden Age for the U.S.–Indonesia Alliance, promised tariff exemptions for key exports like palm oil, coffee, cocoa, and rubber. In exchange, Jakarta pledged to scrap barriers on more than 99% of U.S. imports and commit to some $33 billion in purchases of American energy, aircraft, and agricultural products.

The very next day, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs—including the original 32% levy that had forced Jakarta into the talks in the first place—as unconstitutional. (Trump has since followed up with two new trade probes on Indonesia, one on excess manufacturing and another on forced labor.)

The Supreme Court’s ruling was the most visible example of bad timing in what has been a punishing few months for Southeast Asia’s largest economy, and an early test of President Prabowo Subianto’s high hopes for his tenure.

Since January, Indonesia has absorbed shocks from multiple directions at once. A warning from global index provider MSCI that Jakarta’s opaque stock market could lose its coveted emerging-market status triggered an 8% drop in markets over two days. Moody’s and Fitch both cut their outlooks on Indonesia’s sovereign debt to negative—the first step toward a possible downgrade. Trump’s tariffs, if they return, could threaten Indonesia’s export industries. Then came the Iran war, whose disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz threaten Indonesia’s fuel supply.

“The economy is heading into a perfect storm,” says Siwage Dharma Negara, co-coordinator of the Indonesia Studies Program at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “This is something we’ve never imagined before.”

Fabrice COFFRINI—AFP/Getty Images

So far, these back-to-back blows haven’t hurt Indonesia’s real economy. But higher commodity prices, a weaker rupiah, and a squeeze on government spending could hit affordability in a country where protests in response to rising fuel prices and the cost of living are already common. More broadly, analysts warn that Indonesia’s push to give the state a greater role in the economy could hit business confidence and investment, just at the moment when Indonesia needs capital to grow its manufacturing and mining sectors.

“We’re in an unusual period where Indonesia’s need for foreign capital is high, but its willingness to constrain itself in pursuit of that capital is low,” says Mattias Fibiger, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who covers the Southeast Asian country.

A “human capital” president

Prabowo Subianto took office in October 2024 with a bold target of 8% annual growth by 2029. He inherited a solid economy from his popular predecessor, Joko Widodo—better known as Jokowi—who had tried leveraging Indonesia’s abundant natural resources through a “downstreaming” drive: banning raw nickel ore exports and forcing investors to build smelters and refineries on Indonesian soil. That policy turned the country into a critical node in global battery and EV supply chains.

Prabowo has sought to expand the state’s role further still. “If you can think of Jokowi as a ‘physical capital’ president, then Prabowo is a ‘human capital’ president,” Fibiger explains.

Prabowo hoped to invest in expansive social programs, like a nationwide free nutritious-meals scheme—now budgeted at roughly 335 trillion rupiah ($20 billion) for 2026, almost 9% of the total state budget, targeting 82 million schoolchildren, infants, and pregnant women.

But it will take a long time for such programs to pay off, if they do at all. “Those dividends will be felt a generation down the line, not a year, not three years, not five years down the line,” Fibiger says.

Negara is blunter, noting these measures “are not really contributing to productivity growth.”

Fibiger traces Indonesia’s problems back to September, when Prabowo abruptly removed his widely respected finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, amid mounting protests over living costs and inequality. Sri Mulyani had served three presidents and was, in Fibiger’s words, “a personification of the Washington consensus,” or a champion of fiscal discipline and market-oriented reforms.

Her replacement, Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, was more aggressive on spending, tapping some $12 billion of the country’s reserves to recapitalize state-owned banks and pledging to use more than half of the government’s “rainy day” fund by the end of 2025.

“Indonesia has been a victim of both bad timing and bad policy,” Fibiger says.

Ratings shock

Yet the first shock to the country came from a different source entirely. On Jan. 28, MSCI warned that it might downgrade Indonesia to a “frontier market,” citing a lack of transparency over company ownership. Indonesia’s markets have long featured companies with dominant controlling shareholders and limited public floats, allowing insiders to drastically move share prices.

The market rout eventually wiped out $120 billion in value and forced out not only the chief executive of the Indonesian Stock Exchange (IDX), Iman Rachman, but also the chair of the Financial Services Authority (OJK), Mahendra Siregar. Goldman Sachs downgraded Indonesian equities to “underweight” and estimated that a drop to frontier-market status could trigger another $7.8 billion in outflows. Some local brokers warned that, in aggregate, more than $60 billion of foreign holdings could eventually exit if Indonesia were reweighted toward existing frontier peers.

Jakarta moved quickly to try to head that off. OJK pledged to raise minimum free-float requirements to 15% and tighten disclosure of company owners. Danantara, Prabowo’s new sovereign wealth fund, was mobilized to buy equities; the investment ceiling for pension funds and insurers was raised from 8% to 20% of assets.

Pandu Sjahrir, Danantara’s chief investment officer, a coal tycoon turned venture capitalist before joining the fund, says the IDX has “improved significantly” since the MSCI’s warning.

“How do you find a good balance between being issuer-friendly and investor-friendly? You have to be in the middle,” he says. A new IDX management team is expected in the second half of the year, and Pandu says he is “encouraged” by the caliber of applicants.

But the market alarm proved to be only the first in a chain. Within weeks, both Moody’s and Fitch downgraded their outlooks on Indonesia’s sovereign debt to negative. Moody’s cited “reduced predictability and coherence in the policymaking process,” while Fitch pointed to “growing centralization of policymaking authority.” (While S&P hasn’t changed its outlook, it too is wary of increased spending, noting that interest payments likely surpassed 15% of government revenue last year.)

“The underlying concern is about imbalance between state revenue and the government’s spending plans,” says Negara. Indonesia’s 2025 budget deficit reached 2.92% of GDP—the widest in more than two decades, outside of the COVID-19 crisis—pushing the country uncomfortably close to the 3% cap it adopted after the Asian Financial Crisis as a hard-won symbol of post-crisis discipline.

A U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran in February and March, which led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, makes things even more complicated for Indonesia’s budget. (In another example of poor timing, Prabowo had just joined Trump’s “Board of Peace” to considerable fanfare, only to pause membership talks after the U.S. struck Iran.) Indonesia pumps around 608,000 barrels of oil a day, but surging domestic demand has made it a net importer since 2003.

The price of petrol has long been a political pressure point in Indonesia, where successive governments have used generous subsidies to keep prices artificially low. Rising fuel prices tend to lead to mass protests—as they did in 1998, eventually helping to topple Indonesia’s then-dictator Suharto, and in 2022, when protesters looted Sri Mulyani’s house.

Jakarta has vowed to keep fuel affordable without imposing the lifestyle changes—shorter workweeks, warmer air-conditioner settings—that some of its Southeast Asian neighbors have rolled out, but has offered few specifics on how it will pay for that stance.

In a mid-March interview with Bloomberg, Prabowo suggested he might lift the budget-deficit cap to deal with the short-term emergency of the Iran war and surging fuel prices. Pandu characterized the government’s approach as only breaching the cap in “special cases.”

Unease on Danantara

Danantara, the sovereign wealth fund Prabowo launched in early 2025 with an estimated $1 trillion in state assets under its umbrella, sits at the center of investor unease about Indonesia.

The fund was designed with a mandate to optimize returns from Indonesia’s sprawling state-owned enterprises and recycle capital into projects that accelerate national development.

“We have this dual role: How can we optimize assets from state-owned enterprises to create more value, and at the same time create quality jobs?” CEO Rosan Roeslani explained to Fortune last year.

Yet in practice, Danantara has been pulled deeper into Indonesia’s economy. Earlier this year, Prabowo ordered it to anchor the creation of a state-owned textile champion, backed by as much as $6 billion in capital, to rescue an industry hammered by cheap Chinese imports and trade disruption. That’s led to worries about confused objectives and mission creep. Others, like Negara, see Danantara as evidence “that the current administration is trying to strengthen the role of the state,” which is worrying the private sector, particularly as the government intervenes in strategic sectors like retail, mining, and energy.

“The market is asking us to be the anchor of confidence,” Pandu says, noting Danantara’s active engagement with MSCI and the rating agencies. “We’re investing in the stock market every day through fund managers,” he adds, helping to rebuild trust in a market that urgently needs it.

At the same time, he acknowledges that Danantara cannot act like a purely commercial investor. “If I had to choose between a project that offered a 7% return and created 100,000 jobs, or one that offered a 10% return but created no jobs, I’d have to take the 100,000 jobs option,” he says. “I have to make some profit, but I also have to generate high-quality work.”

Rather than the market turbulence or the fiscal squeeze, Pandu says his deepest concern lies elsewhere entirely—with AI. “My biggest fear is being left behind in terms of global trends happening today, both in the U.S. and China. Those two countries are developing things that are rapidly changing the world order in terms of the haves and the have-nots,” he says.

The metronome economy

Prabowo, a former army general, has been characteristically punchy in his response to foreign investors’ jitters. “The markets are not understanding me,” he griped to Bloomberg, insisting that analysts had “got it wrong” and that domestic regulators had mishandled the MSCI warnings.

The hard data give him some cover. Indonesia’s economy grew 5.11% in 2025, its fastest pace in three years and above most analysts’ expectations, supported by robust household spending and investment.

Negara agrees there is still a solid floor beneath the current turbulence. Indonesia’s growth has long been anchored by domestic demand rather than exports; a young, increasingly urban population; and a large, expanding middle class. “If domestic consumption is still growing, it means that there’s still an opportunity for the economy to grow at 4% or 5% per year,” he argues.

“The consumer is still relatively strong and wealthy, and they’re here to spend, especially the middle, upper middle class,” says Pandu of Danantara. He thinks global investors are ignoring opportunities in everyday Indonesian consumption.

Indonesia has been remarkably consistent. “The astonishing thing about Indonesia is that it grows like a metronome,” Fibiger says. He points out that since the end of the Suharto era, Indonesia has posted roughly 5% growth year after year “when commodity prices are high, when commodity prices are low, when the rest of the world is facing a financial crisis, or during boom times.”

“It doesn’t seem obvious to me that today’s problems will prevent Indonesia from growing around that number in the future,” he adds, even if Prabowo’s dream of 8% looks possible only with reforms.

Beyond consumption, Indonesia also offers opportunities in mining and metals, an increasingly hot sector as the world realizes the importance of critical minerals for industries like EVs and semiconductors. And then there’s AI and data centers, which can take advantage of Indonesia’s cheap and abundant energy supply, particularly as the country continues to invest in renewable energy.

“This is a great opportunity to tell Indonesia’s story,” Pandu says. “We haven’t done a great job at it, to be honest.”

This article appears in the April/May 2026: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “Indonesia’s market meltdown.”

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Apple will celebrate 50 years on April 1, and over the last half a century, it has developed the eight-bit personal computer Apple I, the Macintosh, the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, putting its technology into the pockets of about 1.5 billion people. 

Cofounder Steve Wozniak, who made his mark on this new age of technology, would rather just touch grass.

“I really have disconnected from the technology quite a bit,” Wozniak said in a recent CNN interview. “And I believe that nature is much more important than what humans do.”

Wozniak was the innovator behind Apple, serving the company until 1985 and developing its first two computer models as well as the first Macintosh, which popularized the graphical user interface.

The breakthrough made PCs more accessible to non-technical users, opening the doors to a mass audience. Despite the Woz’s contributions to the ubiquity of devices, he does not see the same value in the current big trend in technology.

“I don’t use AI much at all,” he said. “I often read things [AI produces], and they just sound too dry and too perfect, and I want something from a human being, and I’m disappointed a lot.”

Apple has largely sat out of the AI arms race occupying much of the tech sector. It spent just $12.7 billion in capital expenditures in fiscal 2025, a figure that pales in comparison to the $300 billion that AI hyperscalers Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet collectively spent. 

And instead of developing an in-house AI, Apple is powering its virtual assistant Siri with Google’s Gemini, taking advantage of another company’s tech. 

Tech’s big names advocating for the analog life

Woz’s skepticism of AI is shared by a number of leaders. A survey of more than 6,000 senior executives in the U.S., UK, Germany, and Australia led by Stanford future-of-work whiz Nicholas Bloom, found nearly 70% of CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite members use AI at work for less than an hour a week—and 28% don’t use the tech at all. About 7% of respondents reported using AI more than five hours in a typical work week.

Still, AI use among top executives in the workplace is on the rise, with a January Gallup poll finding 69% of leaders used AI in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from less than 40% in mid-2023.

But even as AI gains momentum, a cadre of tech entrepreneurs—even those who are responsible for proliferating the increased uses of AI tools and devices—are setting boundaries on screens at home. 

“I think TikTok is entertainment, but it’s purely entertainment,” Chen said. “It’s just for that moment. Just shorter-form content equates to shorter attention spans.”

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel said in 2024 he allowed his two children only one and a half hours of screen time per week. Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk have all similarly limited their children’s tech usage.

Their caution was backed up this week, when a jury found YouTube and Meta liable for the harm of young users in designing platforms with addictive features.

These concerns were even shared by Apple execs. When the iPad was released in 2010, then-CEO Steve Jobs, who founded the company alongside Wozniak, said his children had never used the device.

“We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” he told the New York Times.

Current Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier this month he was concerned about how much people use AI. He warned it’s neither positive nor negative, but is in the hands of the inventor and user to determine its value. 

“I don’t want people using them too much,” he said in an interview with Good Morning America. “I don’t want people looking at the smartphone more than they’re looking in someone’s eyes, because if they’re just scrolling endlessly, this is not the way you wanna spend your day. Go out and spend it in nature.”

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President Donald Trump convened what he called the single largest gathering of American farmers at the White House on Friday, bringing together more than 800 cowboy-hat-wearing men and women. They filled the South Lawn alongside a shiny golden tractor as the president touted his support for the agricultural industry. “I just gave you $12 billion. I don’t know if you know that or not,” Trump boasted, referring to farm relief provided through the USDA’s Farmer Bridge Assistance Program. Apparently that wasn’t enough, as he then told the crowd he’d asked Congress to approve additional relief in the next funding bill.

But much of the president’s support is actually falling into the hands of the wealthy, and a recent post from libertarian think tank the Cato Institute demonstrates that disparity. The data seems to challenge the notion of a struggling farmer: The national average income of a U.S. farm household in 2024 was $159,334. That’s roughly 32% above the national mean household income, and nearly double the national median of $83,730.

And that’s not even taking into account the majority of subsidies, which data shows are going to the top 10% of farms. The post cites a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that revealed over 1,300 farmers with an adjusted gross income of more than $900,000 have received subsidies from the federal crop insurance program. 

The federal crop insurance program was established in 1938 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help the agricultural sector recover from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Since its inception, the program has evolved into a key support pillar to provide producers with financial protection against losses from natural disasters and economic downturns. While it began as a recovery measure, the program now covers more than 120 unique commodities, representing the vast majority of the value of U.S. crop production.

“The subsidies are not an emergency safety net for poor farm families but rather permanent welfare for high-earning businesses,” Chris Edwards, an editor at the Cato Institute, wrote in the blog post. “The government often calls crop insurance ‘market-based,’ but that cannot be true because the program costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year.” Edwards added that because there are no income limits on crop insurance, the top 10% of farmers capture 56% of all subsidies in the program.

A safety net—or welfare for the wealthy?

Even some billionaire farmers receive subsidies. A 2015 GAO report, for example, cited that four individuals—who earned their wealth through a variety of sources in addition to farming, such as mining, real estate, sports, and information technology—with a net worth of $1.5 billion or higher participated in the federal crop insurance program and received premium subsidies. The USDA withholds the names of certain farm subsidy recipients, so it’s not exactly clear which wealthy farmers received the subsidies.

Graeme Sloan—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Tariffs and the rising cost of inputs are placing much of America’s breadbasket into an increasingly precarious financial position. The Iran war is driving up energy costs and fertilizer prices. On top of that, some farms are facing pressure from the AI industry as firms look to convert farmland into data centers. Trump claimed Thursday that U.S. farmers have been mistreated by some countries, and said he was taking action to support an industry battered by rising fuel and fertilizer prices caused by the Iran war.

In total, taxpayers are expected to pay $14.7 billion in 2026 for the federal crop insurance program, still just a fraction of the $7 trillion the U.S. spent in 2025, but a sizable sum, comparable to the size of federal agency budgets such as the EPA’s. Out of that $14.7 billion, about $9.6 billion goes to farmers, the other $5.1 billion to insurance companies. Spending on the program is only expected to rise, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That growth has drawn critics, like Edwards, who argues the program benefits insurers as much as it does farmers. “The crop insurance program is like the government giving you $900 a year for your $1,500 car insurance premium, all while paying billions of dollars to Geico, State Farm, and other insurance firms to boost their profits,” Edwards wrote.

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Microsoft is taking over a data center construction project in Texas after OpenAI declined to pursue it, in a move that will make the two companies neighbors at one of the nation’s largest complexes for running artificial intelligence.

Data center developer Crusoe said Friday it is working with Microsoft to build two new “AI factory” buildings and an on-site power plant in Abilene, Texas, right next to where Crusoe has been building an even larger computing campus for OpenAI and Oracle.

OpenAI’s existing project, the flagship of a broader initiative called Stargate, is so massive that President Donald Trump was the first to officially announce it just after his inauguration last year to signal AI investments he called a “resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential.”

Microsoft was once OpenAI’s exclusive cloud computing provider and still holds a roughly 27% stake in the ChatGPT maker, but the two companies are increasingly pursuing AI development separately, even though they are on the same tract of land.

OpenAI’s dropped plans

Crusoe has already completed two buildings for OpenAI and its other cloud partner, Oracle, supplying a surge of computing power that helps build and operate technology like ChatGPT. SoftBank was also an investment partner. Crusoe is still completing six more buildings for OpenAI and Oracle due to be completed by the end of this year.

OpenAI said earlier this month that it dropped plans to expand its Abilene project even further.

“Our flagship Stargate site is one of the largest AI data center campuses in the United States,” said Sachin Katti, OpenAI’s head of compute infrastructure, in a post on X. “We considered expanding it further, but ultimately chose to put that additional capacity in other locations.”

Katti said OpenAI has more than half a dozen sites under development across the United States, including one it is building with Oracle in Wisconsin.

Microsoft’s additional two Abilene facilities announced Friday will bring the total number to 10 data center buildings, expected to supply a stunning 2.1 gigawatts of computing capacity from what was once a vast tract of mesquite shrub lands, home to coyote and roadrunners.

‘We’re burning gas to run this data center’

Originally planned as a facility to mine cryptocurrency, developers pivoted and expanded their designs after ChatGPT sparked an AI boom.

Crusoe co-founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller said in a written statement that a new power plant attached to the Microsoft project will be able to generate 900 megawatts to “continue building the industrial foundation for American AI — at a velocity the industry has never seen.”

That will be larger than the existing 350-megawatt, gas-fired power plant attached to the OpenAI and Oracle project. Oracle has previously described that on-site plant as a backup source of power, since the data centers primarily draw from the region’s electricity grid, which includes power supplied by nearby wind farms.

The AI race has been complicating tech companies’ commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from the burning of gas, oil and coal and drive climate change. “We’re burning gas to run this data center,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said while visiting Abilene last year, adding that “in the long trajectory of Stargate” the hope is to rely on many other power sources.

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Iran’s nuclear facilities came under attack Friday, state media reported, just hours after Israel threatened to “escalate and expand” its campaign against Tehran. Israel claimed responsibility for the attacks and Iran quickly threatened to retaliate.

Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said the Shahid Khondab Heavy Water Complex in Arak and the Ardakan yellowcake production plant in Yazd Province were targeted, IRNA reported. The strikes did not cause any casualties and there was no risk of contamination, it said. The Arak plant has not been operational since Israel attacked it last June.

Yellowcake is a concentrated form of uranium after impurities are removed from the raw ore. Heavy water is used as a moderator in nuclear reactors.

The Israeli military later hailed its attacks on several Iranian targets including “missile production capabilities, infrastructure remaining from its nuclear program, and terror regime targets.” It said raw materials are processed for enrichment at the Yazd plant and that the strike was a major blow to Iran’s nuclear program.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Iran would retaliate for the attacks, IRNA reported. Seyed Majid Moosavi, IRGC’s Aerospace Force commander, posted on X that employees of companies tied to the U.S. and Israel should abandon their workplaces.

“You tested us once before; the world has once again seen that you yourselves started playing with fire and attacking infrastructure,” he said. “This time, the equation will no longer be ‘an eye for an eye,’ just wait.”

US pushes diplomatic solution

Word of the attacks came after U.S. President Donald Trump claimed talks on ending the war were going “very well” and that he had given Tehran more time to open the Strait of Hormuz. Iran maintains it has not engaged in any negotiations.

With stock markets reeling and economic fallout from the war extending far beyond the Middle East, Trump is under growing pressure to end Iran’s chokehold on the strait, a strategic waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil is usually shipped.

A Gulf Arab bloc said Thursday that Iran has been exacting tolls from ships to ensure safe passage.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said Washington delivered a 15-point “action list” to Iran for a possible ceasefire, using Pakistan as an intermediary. It proposes restricting Iran’s nuclear program and reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran rejected the U.S. offer and presented its own five-point proposal that included reparations and recognition of its sovereignty over the vital strait.

Trump has said if Iran doesn’t reopen the strait to all traffic by April 6, he will order the destruction of Iran’s energy plants.

U.S. stocks fell further on Friday, lengthening Wall Street’s longest losing streak in nearly four years, and oil prices rose again. The price for a barrel of Brent crude rose 2.9% to $104.81, up from roughly $70 before the war began Feb. 28. Benchmark U.S. crude rose 4.4% to $98.61 per barrel.

Israel targets Iran’s weapons production

Air raid sirens sounded in Israel and the military said it has been intercepting Iranian missiles on a daily basis. Defense Minister Israel Katz said Iran “will pay heavy, increasing prices for this war crime.”

“Despite the warnings, the firing continues,” Katz said. “And therefore attacks in Iran will escalate and expand to additional targets and areas that assist the regime in building and operating weapons against Israeli citizens.”

Israel’s military said its attacks Friday targeted sites “in the heart of Tehran” where ballistic missiles and other weapons are produced. It said it also hit missile launchers and storage sites in Western Iran.

Smoke rose over Beirut after a pre-dawn strike, and Lebanon’s Health Ministry later reported two people were killed.

Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry meanwhile said it shot down missiles and drones targeting the capital, Riyadh.

Kuwait said its Shuwaikh Port in Kuwait City and the Mubarak Al Kabeer Port to the north, which is under construction as part of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, sustained “material damage” in attacks. It appeared to be one of the first times a Chinese-affiliated project in the Gulf Arab states has come under assault in the war. China has continued to purchase Iranian crude.

Diplomatic wrangling endures even as US sends more troops

Diplomats from several countries including Pakistan and Turkey have tried to organize a direct meeting between U.S. and Iranian envoys. Separately, G7 foreign ministers meeting in France adopted a declaration calling for an immediate halt to attacks against populations and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, U.S. ships drew closer to the region carrying some 2,500 Marines, and at least 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne — trained to land in hostile territory to secure key positions and airfields — have been ordered to the Middle East.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during the G7 meeting that most U.S. objectives in Iran are “ahead of schedule,” and that “We can achieve them without any ground troops.”

Israel deployed the 162nd Division into southern Lebanon to support efforts to protect its northern border towns from Hezbollah attacks and uproot the militant group, the military said.

The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration said Friday that 82,000 civilian buildings in Iran, including hospitals and the homes of 180,000 people, are damaged.

“If this war continues, we risk a far wider humanitarian disaster,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a statement. “Millions could be forced to flee across borders, placing immense pressure on an already overstretched region.”

Death toll climbs, primarily in Iran and Lebanon

Eighteen people have died in Israel, while four Israeli soldiers have been killed in Lebanon. Two Israeli soldiers were severely injured in Lebanon on Friday during an “operational accident,” the military said.

Authorities said more than 1,100 people have died in Lebanon and over 1,900 people have been killed in Iran.

At least 13 American troops have been killed and four people in the occupied West Bank and 20 in Gulf Arab states have also died.

In Iraq, where Iranian-supported militia groups have entered the conflict, 80 members of the security forces have died.

Rising reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Giovanna Dell’Orto in Miami; Fay Abuelgasim in Cairo; Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel; Sam McNeil in Brussels; and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.

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Drones are transforming warfare, and the Army is taking a page out of e-commerce to keep up, creating an online store to get the latest technology into the hands of warfighters faster.

On Tuesday, the service unveiled its Unmanned Aircraft Systems Marketplace that was developed with Amazon Web Services and the Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency.

The digital one-stop shop will allow Army units, government partners and allied nations to procure vetted UAS systems, according to the Army, adding that its new storefront will also have features that allow users to compare drones, provide feedback, and easily place orders.

“By lowering barriers to entry and partnering with a wider range of industrial innovators, we are building a more resilient and responsive defense industrial base, which is essential for equipping our force and deterring our adversaries,” Army acquisition chief Brent Ingraham said in a statement.

The Pentagon’s weapons procurement process is notoriously slow and costly. For decades, successive administrations have struggled to reform the system, which is now dominated by just a handful of giant defense contractors.

Meanwhile, layers of bureaucracy at the Defense Department must consider new war-fighting requirements, candidates to satisfy them, and identify how to allocate money. Congress also has the final say in funding, often favoring weapons and budgets that benefit certain districts.

U.S. Army photo by Spc. Doniel Kennedy

But the nature of warfare is changing dramatically as demonstrated by Iran and Ukraine, where large salvos of cheap drones have overwhelmed traditional defenses.

To counter Iran’s barrage, missiles that cost millions of dollars each are shooting down drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars. And while the success rate of the Patriot and THAAD air-defense batteries tops 90%, enough projectiles get through to cause major damage.

And in the four-year-old Ukraine war, unmanned weapons are now responsible for the vast majority of battlefield casualties as small first-person-view drones hunt down individual troops or vehicles. A vibrant defense industry has also evolved in Ukraine to mass produce inexpensive drones that can take down Russia-launched Iranian Shaheds.

Once such drone, the P1-Sun, costs a little more than $1,000 and can fly above 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) as 3-D printers crank them out in Ukrainian factories. 

“The future of warfare is Ukraine producing 7 million drones per year right now,” former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus said earlier this month. “This past year, they produced 3.5 million. That enabled them basically to use 9 to 10,000 drones per day.”

For its part, the Army pointed to its new drone marketplace as a major departure from traditional acquisition practices that will help transform weapons procurement.

It argued that the competitiveness and transparency of the online store will spur innovation, broaden the industrial base, and provide a wider range of drone capabilities.

“By fostering competition and innovation, we are ensuring that Soldiers have access to the most advanced technologies to meet their mission requirements,” Col. Danielle Medaglia, the Army’s Project Manager for UAS, said in the announcement. “This strategy is about delivering capability at scale and at speed.”

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It has a catchy name — Build America, Buy America — and the lauded goal of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

But the law has spurred a bottleneck for affordable housing.

Nearly everything from HVACs and lighting to sink hooks and ceiling fans in affordable housing projects that get federal dollars must carry the Made in the USA label. But, developers say, numerous products do not, as they have long been imported from overseas markets with cheaper labor costs.

Although builders can apply for waivers, the process has been at a near standstill as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has had its staff slashed by the Trump administration, has only greenlit a handful of projects.

The waiver process has caused construction delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra costs as the country faces an affordable housing crisis.

“They need to be treating this like the fire that it is,” said Tyler Norod, president of Westbrook Development Corporation, which builds affordable housing in Maine.

“We’ve sort of resigned ourselves that we’re just gonna build less units across the entire country during a housing crisis.”

Facing a standstill

Diana Lene has been on affordable housing waitlists for the past five years. The 75-year-old loves living close to her daughter and grandchildren in Fargo, North Dakota, but her apartment is too expensive on her Social Security income.

“It’s just maxing my budget down to pennies,” she said. To save money, she avoids driving often and buys food on sale.

“I’m just trying to keep a roof over my head, but it’s getting more and more difficult,” Lene said. “I don’t like to live in fear, and yet sometimes it jumps in there.”

Lene is on a waitlist for one of nonprofit developer Beyond Shelter’s apartments. CEO Dan Madler is building a 36-unit building for people like Lene, but he had to postpone lumber orders to verify they comply with the law and can’t find ceiling fans made in America. He doesn’t know when HUD will approve a waiver.

U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Build America, Buy America Act as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, building on longstanding efforts to boost American manufacturing at a time when the U.S. economy was emerging from a pandemic-era recession. Known as BABA, it applies to infrastructure projects funded by federal agencies, not just affordable housing.

Denver developer Julie Hoebel says she has spent over $60,000 just on a consultant to comb through websites and call suppliers to try to find American-made materials, not to mention the additional labor costs involved.

But the waivers she submitted to HUD in November for around 125 materials in an 85-unit building haven’t been approved.

“If they take much longer then we’ll come to a standstill,” she said.

A cumbersome process

HUD is taking at least six months to approve many waivers.

Even BABA advocates agree HUD must grant waivers more quickly and give the industry clearer instructions on how to prepare them, which they note other federal agencies are doing.

HUD did not address questions from The Associated Press about waiver approval delays developers say increase costs, as well as concerns about making the process more transparent. In a statement it said it’s committed to “ensuring that federal spending supports America’s industrial base” while “closely monitoring how compliance with these policies impact costs for builders.”

Asked in January about whether the delays and cost increases mean affordable housing should be exempt from BABA rules, HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the agency was looking into the issue, but did not provide details. “We are looking at this … with BABA as it pertains to HUD to provide flexibility to certain projects in certain places around our country,” Turner said, adding that HUD is committed to assuring developers get “the flexibility they need as it pertains to building.”

The law itself isn’t the problem, supporters say.

Unions representing the steel and manufacturing industries say taxpayer dollars should fund American-made materials and suppliers will adjust to meet demand for products that aren’t available.

“You’ve got a system in place that leans heavily on using imported materials to make a better profit,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “I don’t know if that serves the public good.”

Jennifer Schwartz, director of tax and housing advocacy at the National Council of State Housing Agencies, said there’s no national data on how much BABA is increasing costs. But the waiver process is “failing,” she said, because requirements were put in place before assessment of domestic manufacturing capacity.

It won’t be as challenging for suppliers to produce more raw materials in the U.S., but it will take time for manufactured products — such as appliances and elevators — to become available, said Kaitlyn Snyder, managing director of the National Housing and Rehabilitation Association, an affordable housing industry group.

“I don’t know that it economically, financially makes sense for people to be producing door hinges,” Snyder said. “We are an advanced country and we’ve outsourced a lot of that stuff.”

The housing bill that passed the Senate in March did not require HUD to address problems with implementing BABA.

“The process isn’t working for affordable housing,” said Jessie Handforth Kome, who spent nearly 40 years working at HUD until 2024. “People want to comply, but it’s unclear how to.”

Vermont-based Developer Jessica Neubelt estimates she spent an additional $150,000 just to verify iron and steel she used in a project was American-made. She’s just as frustrated over the hundreds of hours that takes, which, she said, could be spent on another project.

“I would like every member of Congress to sit in on a construction meeting,” Neubelt said. “The amount of detail that goes into figuring out if a specific thing is compliant or not is enormous.”

Debates over solutions

U.S. Rep. Mike Flood, a Nebraska Republican, has advocated to exempt some HUD funding from BABA.

“Owning a home is the American dream, but it’s out of reach in a very big way and anything that adds cost to that isn’t allowing hardworking Americans to achieve the dream,” Flood told the AP.

Roy Houseman, legislative director at United Steelworkers, said complaints about cost increases are overblown.

“A lot of developers seem to have tried to throw things in and make statutory changes to policies that have been in place for basically five years now instead of making a good-faith effort to really push HUD,” Houseman said.

Union leaders note the law offers some leeway.

Developers can get exemptions for an American-made product if it increases the project’s overall cost by more than 25%. A very small percentage of a project’s total material cost is also exempt. But most developers say that percentage isn’t enough to cover all items not made in the U.S.

Some developers are looking for ways to avoid federal funds altogether. But that is challenging. Even though federal dollars often make up a small portion of funding for affordable housing projects, that sliver can make or break whether there’s enough money to build them.

Kentucky developer Scott McReynolds says that instead of applying for a federal grant to build 20 to 30 affordable homes, he plans to build two four-unit projects, small enough so that they aren’t subject to BABA.

American-made materials are especially hard to find near the rural areas McReynolds serves.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said.

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Looking back, gubernatorial candidate Dean Roy says his political ambitions started in the eighth grade. And by that he means, last year.

After working as a legislative page at the Vermont Statehouse, the 14-year-old freshman at Stowe High School now has his sights set on the corner office. In November, he’ll be the first candidate for governor under age 18 to appear on the state’s general election ballot.

“I don’t expect necessarily to win,” he said. “What I do expect is to start the movement, and get more young people to come in behind me and say, ‘Yeah, we also want to make change.’”

Another eighth-grader, Ethan Sonneborn, sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018 but finished last in a four-way primary. Roy secured his spot in the general election by creating his own third party, the Freedom and Unity party. Both were able to run because the state constitution sets no minimum age for gubernatorial candidates, requiring only that candidates have resided in the state for four years.

“I know it sounds crazy, a 14-year-old running for governor, but honestly, look at the people in charge right now,” Roy said in a post on his campaign’s Instagram page. “They’ve been doing this forever and things still aren’t working.”

An ‘old soul’

Nearly all other states set minimum age requirements for governor, often 30 years old. In Kansas, lawmakers added a requirement that gubernatorial candidates be at least 25 years old in 2018 after six teenagers ran for office.

Peter Teachout, a professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, has a different take than Roy on Vermont’s constitution. He points to a section in the document referring to what qualifies someone to be “entitled to the privileges of a voter,” and that is that they must be 18 years of age. Even under Roy’s interpretation, Teachout doesn’t predict a win for the teenager.

“In theory, a 4-year-old could run for governor. Should we be worried about it? No,” he said. “Vermonters can be a little cantankerous and provocative just for the fun of it, but it is not something they are likely to support in this context.”

But Roy’s former history teacher, James Carpenter, said he thinks it’s great that Roy is giving it his all. Though most 14-year-olds aren’t concerned with property taxes or health care, Carpenter describes Roy as an “old soul” with endless curiosity.

“It just really shows what type of kid Dean is. He’s very earnest in what he’s doing. There’s no gimmick behind this,” he said. “I think he blends that youthful optimism with some pragmatism that few kids have.”

He says age is just a number

Roy, who said he doesn’t identify with either major party, said housing is the most important issue facing the state. He’s also thought about how he’d juggle school with a full-time job as governor, saying he’d consider online classes and would do his homework at night after work.

The current governor, Republican Phil Scott, applauds Roy’s interest in politics and public service but questions whether someone so young is ready for the responsibilities that come with running a state.

“He believes it’s important for our youth to get involved,” said press secretary Amanda Wheeler. “But the Governor also believes that a teenager may not be best suited to serve in that role given the lack of experience and lived perspectives youth have at that point in their lives.”

Roy disagrees that age has anything to do with whether a candidate is fit to run for office.

“What I’m aiming for is that these career politicians look at me and they say, ‘Oh my God, he actually has a chance to disrupt things,’” he said. “If I can get people to think that I am a threat to them, then I know that’s been a success. Because what I want is to show them that the youth have a voice. We’re gonna make change. The future is now.”

Associated Press reporter Holly Ramer contributed to this report from Concord, New Hampshire.

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The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.

“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.

Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 ½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt.”

“My crewmates definitely saw that I was in distress,” he said, with all six gathering around him. “It was all hands on deck within just a matter of seconds.”

Fincke said he can’t provide any more details about his medical episode. The space agency wants to make sure that other astronauts do not feel that their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.

Tests are inconclusive

The space station’s ultrasound machine came in handy when the event occurred, he said, and he’s gone through numerous tests since returning to Earth. NASA is poring through other astronauts’ medical records to see if any related instances that might have occurred in space, he said.

Fincke identified himself late last month as the one who was sick to end the swirling public speculation.

He still feels bad that his illness caused the spacewalk to be canceled — it would have been his 10th spacewalk but first for crewmate Zena Cardman — and resulted in an early return for her and their two other crewmates. SpaceX brought them back on Jan. 15, more than a month early, and they went straight to the hospital.

“I’ve been very lucky to be super healthy. So this was very surprising for everyone,” he said.

Fincke stopped apologizing to everybody after NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman ordered him to stop.

“This wasn’t you. This was space, right?” his colleagues assured him. “You didn’t let anybody down.”

Ever the optimist, he’s holding out hope that he can return to space one day.

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

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You know that pop-up. The one you click “yes” for every time. The one that asks you to confirm you’re over 18. Sometimes, “you must be older than 21 to enter this site” is written in big, bold letters. Other times, in a somewhat sobering moment, you’re asked to scroll back for what seems like eons as you find the year of your birth. Maybe you put your real age; maybe you’re lying and claim to be younger than you are (who’s going to check, this silly little website?); maybe you are underage and want to access whatever’s behind this simple-to-circumvent pop-up. Either way, you’re getting through it, and easily at that.

The political consensus around protecting kids online is nearly universal. What Americans can’t agree on is whether the tools legislators have built actually do the job. A new survey from digital safety platform All About Cookies, conducted in February with responses from 1,000 U.S. adults, reveals a striking paradox: overwhelming public support for age verification laws, paired with near-universal consensus that those laws simply won’t work.​

“A lot of kids, especially teens, are probably more tech savvy, better than even some of these adults,” Josh Koebert, a data journalist for All About Cookies, told Fortune. “So if I can get around it, they can get around it.”

Adults want adults on the internet—or at least want kids to out themselves

Seventy-nine percent of Americans support age verification laws for adult content, and 74% back them for social media platforms. Yet 85%, the highest consensus figure in the entire survey, say the current laws are too easy to skirt. More than half of users who have been asked to verify their age online admitted they found a workaround anyway, most commonly by switching to a less-regulated website (45%) or using a VPN (22%).

“The main takeaway is twofold,” said Koebert, who authored the survey. “The majority of people think kids need to be protected, but what we’ve got isn’t working.”

The more revealing story for business leaders may be the data anxieties the survey surfaces. Ninety-two percent of respondents expressed at least one concern about age verification laws, and the fears center squarely on corporate data stewardship.

Seventy-nine percent worry about privacy and data security; 66% cite identity theft risk; and 41% fear being profiled or added to an external list after verification is complete.​

Those fears aren’t theoretical. Many age verification laws include provisions requiring companies to delete user data once verification is complete. But high-profile breaches, including incidents involving Discord’s third-party verification vendor Persona, have eroded confidence that the rules are being followed. 

“People have been bitten time and time again,” Koebert said. “They’ve submitted information to a giant company and ended up in a breach. Of course they’re going to be hesitant to submit a government ID.”

The survey also identified an unlikely policy pressure point: sports betting. Ninety percent of respondents said gambling platforms should face strict age verification, the highest figure of any category tested, topping even social media.

Koebert attributed it to market saturation. Since the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling that opened the door to federally legal sports wagering, betting brands have flooded broadcasts with advertising. 

“It’s impossible to watch sports without being bombarded,” he said. “Kids are watching these games alongside their parents, and people are thinking: this isn’t healthy.”

Despite widespread support for regulation, the public’s preferred solution skews away from top-down mandates. Fifty-five percent said parental controls and monitoring tools, and not government laws, are the best way to keep minors safe online, while only one in five chose age verification laws as the optimal approach.

As verification requirements expand to cover roughly half of U.S. states, and as countries from Australia to Spain enact their own versions, the core challenge for lawmakers and platforms is converging: how to protect minors online without creating the very privacy vulnerabilities that make adults distrust the internet in the first place. 

“Where does it stop? Where does it keep going? What happens next?” Koebert asked regarding how far reaching the laws can get. “Questions that I don’t think we have answers for.”

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Images of never-ending security lines at U.S. airports and frustrating tales of missed flights are pushing panicked travelers to show up way before their departures. But some airports where the wait times have been manageable are telling passengers to stop arriving so early.

In Ohio, John Glenn International Airport in Columbus says early birds — reacting to the funding standoff on Capitol Hill that’s creating crowded security checkpoints — are making things worse by creating bottlenecks during peak times.

“Arriving too early can actually create longer lines right when we open,” the airport said in a social media post Thursday. “Spacing out arrival times helps keep things moving smoothly for everyone.”

The airport even created a chart showing when to arrive: “90 minutes before departure is all you need.”

What’s confusing for air passengers, though, is that it’s hard to predict which airports will be plagued next by security lines spilling out of terminals.

The government shutdown straining Transportation Security Administration staffing has ballooned checkpoint wait times beyond two hours at some major airports. George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston has become the biggest chokepoint for travelers with four-hour security lines.

Those are by far the worst-case scenarios. Many airports — like the one in Ohio — have been seeing wait times comparable with those in normal times. That’s why airlines say the best advice for passengers right now is to check TSA wait times before their scheduled departures.

In some ways, it’s a bit reminiscent of the days of “ panic buying ” during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“It’s human nature. You don’t have control over what’s going on at an airport,” said Shari Botwin, a Philadelphia clinical social worker who counsels people about anxiety.

“There’s so much media attention about the chaos at airports,” she said. “They might not trust when someone says, ’Well, you don’t need to come out early anymore.’”

Associated Press reporter Ed White in Detroit contributed.

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A pro-Iranian hacking group claimed Friday to have hacked an account of FBI Director Kash Patel and has posted online what appear to be years-old photographs of him, along with a work resume and other personal documents. Many of those records appeared to be more than a decade old.

“Kash Patel, the current head of the FBI, who once saw his name displayed with pride on the agency’s headquarters, will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims,” said a message posted Friday from the group Handala.

The message was accompanied by more than a half dozen photos of Patel, including ones of him standing beside an antique sports car and another with a cigar in his mouth. The group also said that it was making available for download emails and other documents from Patel’s account. Many of the records appeared to relate to his personal travels and business from more than 10 years ago

“The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information, and we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity,” the FBI said in a statement. “The information in question is historical in nature and involves no government information.”

Justice Department singles out Handala

It was not clear when the hack claimed by Handala might have occurred. News reports from December 2024, before Patel was confirmed as director, said that Patel had been informed by FBI that he had been targeted as part of an Iranian hack.

Handala is a pro-Iranian, pro-Palestinian hacking group that earlier this month claimed credit for disrupting systems at Stryker, a Michigan-based medical technology company. Handala said the attack was in retaliation for suspected U.S. strikes that killed Iranian schoolchildren. They’re a prominent example of the proxy groups that carry out cyber attacks on behalf of Iran.

The Justice Department singled out Handala in an announcement last week in which it said it had seized four web domains tied to Iranian hacking schemes and the threatening of dissidents.

The Trump administration is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification of members of the Handala hacking group.

Associated Press writer David Klepper in Washington contributed to this report.

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When Meta’s CEO announced the company’s first round of 11,000 layoffs in 2022, a red-eyed Mark Zuckerberg was conciliatory: “It was one of the hardest calls that I’ve had to make in the 18 years of running the company,” he said at the time.

Including this first mass layoff, the company has dismissed a total of around 25,000 people across several divisions since 2022, with the most recent being a reported 700 layoffs affecting its Reality Labs unit this week. Following the 11,000 laid off in 2022, Meta cut another 10,000 jobs and began a hiring freeze during Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” in 2023.

At the same time, he has changed his tone, and experts say his inconsistent behavior is hurting employees still at the company.

By early 2025, when he announced a 5% reduction in Meta’s workforce affecting approximately 3,600 workers, Zuckerberg replaced empathy with cold business logic, saying in an internal memo the cuts were aimed at “low performers” and that he had raised the bar on “performance management.”

“This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams,” he said at the time.

Many of these supposed low-performing workers later argued in posts on social media they were never warned about any performance issues before being fired. 

Meta cut about 600 employees in 2025 across its SuperIntelligence Labs division late last year and cut another estimated 1,000 employees from Reality Labs earlier this year.

Inconsistent leadership

While Zuckerberg has not commented on the latest 700 layoffs reported this week, there is a clear vibe shift in his approach to layoffs since 2022, Stevens Institute of Technology business professor Haoying Xu told Fortune.

“At the very beginning, layoffs were something that he had to do—he had no choice,” he said. “Now it seems to be a norm.”

This inconsistent leadership, as Xu describes it, may increase quiet quitting among the workers who remain and cause them to lose faith in Zuckerberg’s decision making.

Because he went all-in on the metaverse by changing his company’s name to Meta in 2021 and pouring billions into the VR and metaverse-focused Reality Labs division, which is reportedly facing layoffs for the second time this year, employees may think twice about buying into the CEO’s grand ideas the next time.

“You will lose credibility in your followers, because what you did and what you said, it’s just unpredictable and untrustworthy to the employees, because you keep switching back and forth,” Xu said. 

Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. 

To be sure, the layoffs could also be seen as demonstrating Zuckerberg’s willingness to course correct on the metaverse, even though the initiative was his idea, said Jessica Kriegel, the chief strategy officer at consulting firm Culture Partners, which advises companies on strategy and workforce shifts.

“He made a massive bet on the future with metaverse. He staffed up for it. He was unapologetic about it,” she told Fortune. “And then when the results didn’t match the pace, or the market shifted, didn’t slowly unwind it—he just reset the system pretty quickly.”

A lot of founders would not have done the same, Kriegel noted.

“Founder-led ideas sometimes die way too slow of a death,” she said.

Breaking the ‘psychological contract’

While Zuckerberg arguably kicked off the trend of layoffs and flat management structures in the tech industry with his “year of efficiency” declaration in 2023, his change in tone regarding layoffs is a reflection of a broad shift across tech companies, especially as AI continues to change how they operate.

Xu argued tech companies have broken the “psychological contract” they once had with workers during the pre-pandemic era where giant workforces were the norm and companies like Meta, Google, and others offered perks like free haircuts and nap pods. 

In the age of AI, companies are instead scrambling to be more efficient and squeeze the most out of each worker, all while raising growth expectations. Meta, for its part, is aiming for a $9 trillion market cap by 2031, up more than 500% from $1.39 trillion today, and has promised some of its top executives payouts of up to hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve it, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile, its new applied AI engineering team is reportedly employing a 50:1 employee-to-manager ratio, which is higher than the 12.1 employees per manager that was the average in 2025, according to Gallup. 

If these tech companies can’t promise workers job security, said Xu, employees will demand other benefits, for example more flexibility in terms of remote work or schedules as well as occupational training. The training is especially important, he added, because it may increase the odds of a worker getting a job later even if their current employer lays them off.

As for Meta, Kriegel said Zuckerberg needs to bring some semblance of normalcy back to the company to reassure workers following layoffs. The best approach, she said, is to be candid about the business reasons behind them and not over explain. Employees need to be able to buy in to the company’s vision to move forward.

“Consistency matters more than inspiration at that point,” she said. “Employees don’t necessarily need a bold vision speech. They need to see the same priorities being reinforced over and over again in decisions and investments and even what’s getting rewarded internally.”

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President Donald Trump has insisted his Iran war will last up to six weeks, but it could be more like six months or longer, according to a Wall Street analyst.

As the conflict reaches the four-week mark, more escalation appears to be on the way, despite Trump further pushing back his threat to attack Iranian energy infrastructure.

“The Middle East War now appears to be broadening and deepening,” Capital Alpha Partners analyst Byron Callan said in a note on Thursday. “We have 25% confidence that it’s concluded by the end of May, 45% that it’s settled in the fall of 2026, and 35% that it extends into 2027.”

The war has spread to Iraq as U.S. forces battle Iran-backed militias, and it will likely extend to Yemen, where Houthi militants aligned with Tehran are expected to threaten shipping in the Red Sea.

That would cut off a critical outlet for cargoes and for Saudi oil that has emerged as an alternative with the Strait of Hormuz still mostly blocked, giving Iran even more leverage over the global economy.

Fighting has also reached the Caspian Sea as Israel recently bombed Iranian ports suspected of receiving arms shipments from Russia.

“An escalatory spiral that emerged with strikes on non-military targets does not appear to be contained,” Callan warned.

Gas prices and inflation are under pressure

A prolonged war sets up a darker economic outlook as it’s only just starting to weigh on activity. The average price of gasoline is now $3.98 per gallon, up from $2.98 a month ago, according to AAA. That will cut into consumer spending elsewhere, which had stayed resilient even during Trump’s tariffs last year. The stock market selloff will also produce a negative wealth effect, dampening willingness to spend.

Inflation will heat up too, and was already under pressure before the war. Import prices shot up 1.3% in February, the largest month-over-month increase since March 2022, in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The prospect of worsening inflation has also sent Treasury yields higher, lifting borrowing costs throughout the economy. That includes mortgage rates, which have jumped to the highest level since October. With home ownership now even more expensive, mortgage application volume plunged 10.5% last week from the prior week.

‘Seizing Kharg Island seems a bit loopy’

While about 5,000 Marines and 3,000 soldiers are headed to the Middle East, with 10,000 more U.S. group troops reportedly under consideration, Callan is “very skeptical” that Trump can deliver a knock-out blow to Iran that will cause the regime to accept his peace terms.

Still, he expressed 75% confidence that the U.S. will put boots on the ground to seize Iranian territory and try to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Such an operation could involve an attack on Kharg Island, where 90% of Iran’s oil is exported, or other islands near the strait. But ground troops would face the risk of Iranian missiles and drones, which the U.S. has failed to prevent from inflicting extensive damage to its bases and embassies in the region.

“This could lead to a long-war scenario,” Callan predicted. “Seizing Kharg Island seems a bit loopy to us because an occupying force would probably have to deal with an extremely unpleasant environment created by the burning of oil in storage facilities. If the intent of seizing Kharg is to cut off Iranian oil exports, that could be done by simply stopping tanker traffic carrying Iranian product.”

In fact, other analysts have also called for a naval blockade of Iran’s oil exports, saying it would be more effective and less risky than deploying troops, especially given that Iran has other hubs besides Kharg from which oil can be exported.

Persian Gulf neighbors could join in

Callan sees the occupation of islands near the strait as the most likely use of U.S. troops and doesn’t expect a large-scale invasion that deep into Iran’s interior, meaning the threat of drones will persist as they can be launched from up to 1,500 miles away.

Troops from the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia might even participate, he added. That’s because Iran’s continued control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas flows, would be unacceptable to its Persian Gulf neighbors.

As a result, any agreement to halt fighting that leaves Iran as the effective gatekeeper of the strait would likely lead to further fighting. Indeed, the UAE recently hinted at an increasingly hardened position toward Iran that aligns more closely with the U.S. and Israeli stance.

“Our thinking does not stop at a ceasefire, but rather turns toward solutions that ensure lasting security in the Arabian Gulf, curbing the nuclear threat, missiles, drones, and the bullying of the straits,” Anwar Gargash, a senior UAE diplomat, wrote on X last weekend. “It is inconceivable that this aggression should turn into a permanent state of threat.”

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Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has kidnapped and extradited the leader of Venezuela, threatened to annex Greenland, mused about ousting the chair of the Federal Reserve, and waged economic war on his closest allies, all while (more or less) keeping the stock market from tipping into bearish territory.

The Iran war increasingly looks like the one instance where physical reality has outrun his ability to control the narrative.

The Nasdaq 100 has now fallen over 10% from its peak, technically entering correction territory. The S&P 500 has been at a loss for five weeks, on pace for its longest streak of weekly losses since 2022. Brent crude, the global barometer of oil futures, has shot back up to near $111 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude, futures of oil based in Texas, is flirting with $97, threatening to tease $100. 

On Thursday, Trump extended his deadline for striking Iran’s energy infrastructure by 10 days, his second extension since issuing the original threat last Saturday. “Talks are ongoing,” he posted on Truth Social after the market closed, potentially hoping to stop the bleeding after the stock market slipped over fears of a ground confrontation in Iran imminently. 

So far, the two sides haven’t come to the table much, with Iranian officials publicly rejecting the ambitious-15-point ceasefire proposal delivered by the U.S. through intermediaries in Pakistan and countered with five unrealistic demands of their own, including sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

The post isn’t having the “truth social effect” on oil prices that Trump was hoping for, energy trader John Arnold posted on X. Traders are getting exhausted from the noise and have no sense of whether to trust that anything of what Trump says is true. It seems like the White House agrees, and on Friday, it launched (while poking fun of “launches” as a word used by outlets to describe the war) the official White House app, so folks can get news from Trump directly.

Meanwhile, senior White House aides told MS NOW that Trump has grown “a little bored” with the conflict—not regretful, they said, just ready to move on. A second official said the president has started shifting his focus toward the economy, domestic policy, and the midterm elections. The administration’s public communications have tracked accordingly: official White House social media accounts have promoted the war effort with memes pulled from Iron Man, Top Gun, and SpongeBob SquarePants, and have taken to posting cryptic, eerie posts and videos over the last day or so to promote some unknown project. 

Unlike the other conflicts, it takes both parties to back out of this war, and Iran—with its supreme leader assassinated, military infrastructure decimated, and proxies scared—has a desire to draw out the economic damage. 

Until Thursday, markets have remained surprisingly resilient, keeping oil prices low throughout all the volatility. ECB President Christine Lagarde warned Friday that markets are “overly optimistic” about the conflict’s fallout, calling it a shock “probably beyond what we can imagine at the moment.” She pointed to second-order supply chain effects—like helium shortages disrupting semiconductor production—that investors haven’t begun to price in. “Most people are actually talking about years,” she said.

Not everyone shares that same sentiment. Nordic American Tankers CEO Herbjørn Hansson told CNBC he expects the Strait of Hormuz to reopen within weeks, not months. “The ships that are trapped or in the Arabian Gulf will be out within a fairly short period of time,” Hansson said. “That is my judgment based upon my experience of the past in similar situations.”

Torten Slok, Apollo’s chief economist, also wrote on Friday that markets are “overreacting” to a period of short term volatility for the sake of longer term stability in oil markets and the supply chain. “The bottom line is that the Iran shock is not big enough to offset the strong tailwinds to the US economy from AI spending, the industrial renaissance and the One Big Beautiful Bill,” Slok wrote. 

But even as Hansson was making that case, Iran turned back two Chinese-owned container ships from the strait on Friday—-vessels belonging to state-owned Cosco Shipping that made complete 180s. China has largely been spared from Iran’s blockade, which Tehran said before was focused only on countries it views as aligned with the US and Israel. The fact that Beijing’s ships are now getting turned away suggests the situation at the strait is becoming less predictable, not more.

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Workers may dream that if they climb the corporate totem pole to CEO, they’ll finally be able to call the shots, set their own schedule, and bask in all the spoils of success. But Oura’s chief executive Tom Hale says the fantasy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

Being CEO is “much harder than I thought,” Hale said recently on Sequoia Capital’s Long Strange Trip podcast. “Any CEO in the world will appreciate that. [It’s] much harder, much harder than I thought.”

Hale stepped into the top role of the $11 billion smart ring company nearly four years ago, after high-level stints across technology and consumer product companies like Momentive and HomeAway. With more than 30 years of experience and multiple executive roles under his belt, it would be assumed that he knew exactly what to expect from the top job. Still, nothing quite prepared him for the psychological load of this role.

“It’s not the work that’s harder. It’s the responsibility and the stress,” the CEO continued. “It’s waking up at 4:00 a.m. and being like, ‘Oh my god, is this going to work?’…It’s pressure, it’s stress, it’s responsibility, it’s all the people that you have. They’ve put their faith in you.”

And while professionals may assume that being a CEO means you reap all the glory, Hale explains “it’s really your team, it’s not you, who gets to own that success.” Yet, when an idea or project fails, the consequences are all directed at the top. The Gen X chief executive says CEOs are often found culpable, as they made the decision or set up a system that led to a problem. Plus, people look at being a CEO with rose-colored glasses—Hale says people misunderstand that the job isn’t always as glamorous as it sounds. 

“I think they think it’s a lot more fun than it is,” Hale continued. “There is fun. I just think that the ratio of kibble to champagne favors the kibble.”

CEOs who say the top job is lonely, isolating, and complex

Sitting atop the C-suite undeniably comes with major perks, from multimillion-dollar salaries to celebrity status in the business world. But like any role, it also has its downsides—and Hale isn’t the only CEO who hit unexpected hurdles when assuming the top role of a billion-dollar company.

Airbnb’s cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky has said that his mental health took a turn for the worse once he assumed the throne of the $76 billion short-term rental company. At that point in time his other two cofounders—who he called his “family,” spending all their waking hours working, exercising, and hanging out together—were suddenly out of view from the peak of the C-suite. His job became extremely isolating.

“As I became a CEO I started leading from the front, at the top of the mountain, but then the higher you get to the peak, the fewer the people there are with you,” Chesky told Jay Shetty during an episode of the On Purpose podcast in 2023. “No one ever told me how lonely you would get, and I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Another pitfall of being CEO is that it’s harder to vent to peers who may not relate to—or even understand—the trials and tribulations of running a massive company. Indra Nooyi, the former chief executive of $209 billion PepsiCo, said she often felt isolated and struggled to find her confidants. 

“You can’t really talk to your spouse all the time. You can’t talk to your friends because it’s confidential stuff about the company. You can’t talk to your board because they are your bosses. You can’t talk to people who work for you because they work for you,” Nooyi told Kellogg Insight last year. “It puts you in a fairly lonely position.”

Michel Doukeris, the CEO of $124 billion business Anheuser-Busch InBev, also pointed out that the top role is very distinct to all other jobs. Leading a business to success sounds like a straightforward plan of action, but there’s a whole host of players and factors to consider. Doukeris said that juggling all these expectations is a part of the job—and it requires a lot of organization to get it done. 

“The CEO job is very unique in itself,” Doukeris told Fortune in 2022. “You really have all the stakeholders. You have your own people, you have your customers, you need to listen to your consumers, but then you have your board, and your investors, and you need to balance very well your time.”

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The Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story yesterday about the current state of Lean In. There’s some news on an organizational overhaul—cuts to a quarter of the nonprofit’s staff and a new CEO (Bridget Griswold, a 25-year-old whose background is in AI).

But what caught my attention was the WSJ‘s take on where Sheryl Sandberg is taking Lean In next. What started as a movement encouraging women to pursue ambitious careers is now positioning itself as the counterpoint to the rise of tradwives and the manosphere, the Journal reports. For those who aren’t on social media, these two separate, but related, trends have grown significantly in popularity over the past year. With Trump’s return to office and DEI backlash, a certain segment of men in power have embraced a form of hyper-aggressive manhood. And it has seeped into the business world too (witness Sandberg’s former colleague Mark Zuckerberg’s much-maligned comments a year ago that companies need more “masculine energy.”) It’s a problem.

The rise of tradwives has paralleled this. These are the women glamorizing homemaking on social media—but earning big bucks doing so, making them the breadwinners for their families. Some critics say their content makes taking care of a family full-time seem like a breeze rather than the hard work it is, usually with little acknowledgment of the long-term financial and personal trade-offs. Then there’s a more general fatigue among women that corporate America is not working for them anymore, as seen in Lean In’s own data, which found late last year that fewer women are now aiming to be promoted at work.

Hints of this new direction for Lean In started appearing over the past few weeks. On March 10, Sandberg gave an interview to People magazine, where she said, “The message that is going out is that in order to be a good wife or a good mother, you need to do it full time. And the truth is that that is a decision almost no women can afford to make.” The next week, she wrote a blog post about the same topic. She’s emphasized that while TikTok may make tradwives seem trendy, it’s not a new idea—far from it.

I spoke to a Lean In spokesperson, who added some detail to what this means in practice—and the connection between a young, AI-forward CEO and this mission. Lean In is planning to continue the work it’s best known for (membership circles for women, a large annual study on women in the workplace) but is looking to use technology to produce more “of-the-moment” research. And what’s more of the moment than tradwives on TikTok?

I think that Lean In and Sandberg face some headwinds fighting back against these cultural tides. For women attracted to tradwife life, Lean In represents everything they are rejecting. Sandberg has a powerful voice, but will she be able to reach the women who have already turned their backs on everything she stands for? To be clear, Sandberg is not going after women who stay at home but saying the problem is when women are “weighed down by outdated norms” when making that choice. Still, I’m curious to see how that message lands. (And on the manosphere: God knows those men aren’t listening to what Lean In has to say!)

Overall, I agree with Sandberg: The rise of the tradwife movement, as we’ve seen it on social media, has been harmful to women. I’m interested to see whatever AI-powered research Lean In produces on this topic. If Sandberg can figure out a way to give women’s ambition as much of a hold online as baking bread and making baby food from scratch, we will all be better for it.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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The most telling moment from our gathering last month of 75 senior technology executives — drawn from Fortune 500 companies, enterprise tech giants, high-growth startups, and AI-native market makers — wasn’t about ambitious rollouts or transformation roadmaps. It was a single question many of these leaders said their own enterprise customers keep asking: “I know we need to do AI. How best to proceed?”

That question is a warning signal for every founder selling into enterprise right now.

Yes, we also heard about lean GTM teams armed with agents, experimentation versus compliance, microteams with lightning-fast dev cycles, merging functions, and reorgs designed to accelerate companies in the age of AI. The bleeding edge is moving fast. But the customer base often isn’t.

That gap — between how fast AI-native startups build and how slowly enterprises can absorb, let alone implement, what they’re building — is one of the most consequential dynamics in enterprise sales right now. If you’re a founder, understanding it could be the difference between closing deals and burning runway.

To understand the gap in real-world terms, we surveyed 123 senior operators across every major enterprise function for our inaugural State of AI Transformation report.

These are CEOs, C-Suite executives, and VPs with a median 22 years of operating experience, real purchasing authority, and hands-on implementation responsibility. What they told us should make every enterprise-focused founder rethink their approach.

The Enterprise Has Decided. Now What?

AI has moved firmly into continuous experimentation mode. 77% of respondents are actively executing on AI initiatives, and 21% describe themselves as AI-native. In many cases, experimentation is now a top-down mandate — while others contend with bottom-up tool sprawl. As Kieran Snyder, Microsoft’s VP of AI Transformation, writes in the report’s foreword: “It’s an anarchist’s moment.” But almost no one said they’re still just exploring. The enterprise has decided that AI matters. That part is settled.

The Single Greatest Obstacle: Time

One-third of respondents named the lack of capacity to research and test new tools as their primary obstacle. They describe “an abundance of options” with “similar messaging.” They say they “don’t have bandwidth to test every option out there.” And the fragmentation is real: 69% of the tools named in our survey were cited only once — confirming that the market for enterprise AI tools has become overwhelming relative to the capacity of organizations to evaluate them.

What Founders Get Wrong About Enterprise Buyers

The implications for founders: The public markets have punished SaaS companies as investors reckon with a world where platform AI from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google can absorb capabilities that used to justify standalone products. Valuations have cratered. The conversation around the “SaaSacre” is loud and impacts the market daily~~, whether or not it’s overblown~~. For many founders building in this environment, the instinct is to move faster, ship more features, and differentiate on technical sophistication.

Our survey suggests that’s the wrong instinct.

What Enterprise Buyers Actually Want

Enterprise operators we surveyed aren’t asking for smarter models or more features. They’re asking for three things:

• Tool connectivity. They want tools that plug into existing systems — HR, CRM, product analytics, communications — and synthesize data across fragmented environments. The most-cited request: “a single pane of glass across all my existing data sources.”
• AI that takes initiative. Operators want AI that takes action autonomously, executing multi-step workflows end to end, not tools that surface recommendations and wait for a human. As respondents put it: tools failed “because they required too much pull and were not proactive enough.”
• Deep domain expertise. General-purpose AI is now table stakes. Operators expect specialization in specific functions — sales, recruiting, finance, legal — and differentiation at the workflow level.

The ROI Measurement Gap — and the Opportunity Inside It

When we asked operators how they measure AI’s impact, roughly 70% told us they don’t. No KPIs. No measurement framework. Many acknowledge they’re estimating productivity gains, guessing at ROI. “We estimate 10% productivity improvement, but it’s difficult to measure” is a common refrain. Where concrete measurement does exist, it shows up in customer-facing or revenue-generating workflows — deflecting 38% of support tickets or reducing cost of sale by 15%.

This is both a problem and an opportunity. If your enterprise buyer can’t measure the value of the AI tools they already have, they’re going to struggle to justify buying yours. Products that instrument their own impact — surfacing before-and-after metrics, time savings, or output quality data — give internal champions something concrete when budget conversations get hard. That kind of measurement infrastructure is a retention mechanism as much as it is a sales tool.

The Fundamentals Haven’t Changed

What struck me most about the findings is how much of successful enterprise selling still comes down to fundamentals that have held true for decades. Trusted referrals still open doors. Deep workflow integration still drives stickiness. Internal champions still determine whether a tool survives the first renewal cycle.

 The buying process — and the human dynamics that at this point still come within it — has changed far less in the last few decades.

The operators we surveyed describe AI through an intern analogy: capable, but requiring oversight. They have near-zero tolerance for errors in areas like finance, legal, and compliance. They worry about data leakage~~, and context remains an issue for data. They want to see that a product works on their actual data — messy and distributed as it is — before they commit.Loyalty is scarce: even with tools they use daily, many question whether they’ll renew. 

The message from this survey is clear: the founders who win in enterprise AI will be the ones who meet buyers where they are — still figuring out what they need — and treat that uncertainty as an opportunity, not an obstacle. Educate, build trust, show the path. The solutions that stick will be the ones that prove real value inside real workflows, not the ones that shipped the most features.

The enterprise is all-in on AI. The opportunity for founders is in helping leaders figure out how.

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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The average Gen Z professional today wants the freedom to log off at 5, and a C-suite title. At least, they do at the Big Blue of the Big 4: consulting giant KPMG.

According to the professional firm’s Winter Intern Pulse Survey, Gen Z will sacrifice on average $5,000 of their salary to achieve a better work-life balance. At the same time, a staggering 92% expressed at least some interest in achieving a C-suite or senior executive role.

Still, the survey, which includes responses from 361 KPMG U.S. winter interns across the firm’s various sectors, found that nearly a quarter (24%) say they want the “always available” mentality eliminated from the list of traditional workplace practices. Another fifth want to ditch the 9-to-5 entirely.

“Gen Z is redefining what success looks like,” said Derek Thomas, national partner-in-charge of university talent acquisition at KPMG, in a statement. “They want to reach the top professionally, but they want a life outside of work while they’re getting there.”

Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z came of age during strange days. The COVID pandemic upended any concept of workplace normalcy as millions were graduating high school, college—or entering the workforce—during a time defined by remote work and shifting expectations. The resulting Great Resignation had many leaving the workplace to prioritize the downtime they got a taste of during the pandemic. Now, even as the generation prioritizes the corner office, many are finding it hard to leave those boundaries at the door.

“It’s the want versus the reality of what it takes to actually accomplish it,” Thomas told Fortune. He attributed the contradiction partly to inexperience: most Gen Zers don’t yet grasp how long the climb really takes. “You go from seeing your career as a sprint coming out of school to realizing it truly is a marathon,” he said.

AI Is Threatening the Rungs on the Ladder

Eight in 10 respondents are at least somewhat concerned about the technology’s impact— and 10% are extremely concerned. That’s partly because AI is threatening to take the very entry-level roles that young workers are looking to assume to get their foot in the door and start their trek up the corporate ladder. 

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is now higher than the rate for all workers, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And a recent Stanford University study found workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations, such as software development and customer service, saw a 13% drop in employment since 2022.

Still, nearly 4 out of every 5 respondents said they feel at least somewhat prepared to work alongside AI agents, or autonomous systems that can tackle personalized tasks.

“There’s certain trepidation around AI and the impact it’s having in the workplace,” Thomas said. “The Gen Zers are really leaning into AI. Like they know there’s an impact there, but they recognize that this is a shift that’s here to stay.” 

The ‘monkey bars’ to success

Thomas said AI is actually helping interns overcome the barriers that challenge entry-level workers, allowing them to focus more on human-centered skill development like communication and problem-solving. “It’s helping them get through a learning curve probably faster than they have in the past,” he said.

As for what that looks like on the ground, KPMG is launching a pilot program at Lakehouse, the professional firm’s $450 million training and innovation center in Orlando, for audit interns to address the shift toward an AI-driven workplace. The program specifically targets the growing gap created by the disappearance of entry-level tasks by using simulations and competitions to help interns gain the experience they need to navigate the workplace. The program includes sessions on how to utilize AI tools to generate the best possible outcomes for the company’s clients.

It’s all part of the shifting job landscape that Thomas says Gen Z must identify to succeed in their career. He said the current career outlook requires a paradigm shift: out with the corporate ladder, in with the more-dynamic corporate “monkey bars.”

“Your career isn’t just like a ladder. It’s like the monkey bars,” he said. You’re kind of going from here to here,” he said, gesturing as if climbing monkey bars. “But you have to be willing to adapt and pivot with it as you go.”

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The workers most vulnerable to AI-driven displacement are not job seekers. They are already on our payroll. And unless we act now, economic instability will follow.

Dozens of proposals have emerged to address what is fast becoming a GDP-level problem. Some ideas are sweeping; others are tactical. What unites them: urgency. AI is already reshaping jobs inside offices, hospitals, factories, and warehouses. Headlines about AI-linked layoffs confirm the transformation is already underway.

Time is running out — and the answer isn’t to wait while new systems are built. It’s to redirect the systems we already have in tandem.

The United States does not lack workforce funding. More than $250 billion flows annually through federal workforce-development programs. Employers spend tens of billions more on education benefits and corporate learning. We just need to use these funds better.

What employers can do now

Tuition-assistance programs are the most immediate place to start. Too often treated as retention perks, they can be deployed far more strategically in this AI moment. Redirecting even a portion of those funds toward stackable credentials and adjacent skill pathways can help employees move into new roles before their current ones are automated or redefined.

State workforce and unemployment programs can also create room for retraining. In many cases, employers can reduce worker hours while employees maintain partial income support and use that time for training. Used well, these mechanisms let companies reskill their workforce without forcing employees to choose between a paycheck and a future — and workers can be redeployed into new roles quickly, minimizing time spent unemployed.

What states can do now

States have powerful levers available. Through governors’ reserve funds and incumbent worker training funds under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), states can support workers who are still employed but increasingly vulnerable to AI-driven disruption — workers who are often overlooked by systems designed primarily for the unemployed.

When states braid these funding streams together with employer investments, public dollars go further and reskilling can happen at scale. Adaptation becomes a shared effort, not an individual burden.

Birmingham, Alabama, proves this model works. A federal grant there aligned public funding with real hiring demand from a healthcare employer and job placement. Workers without clinical experience are moving into family-sustaining roles tied directly to actual job openings — not just credentials. 

Other countries are moving with similar urgency. Singapore’s SkillsFuture program prioritizes job-aligned, employer-backed training that supports lifelong employability rather than short-term course completion. The lesson from these examples is consistent: adaptation is smoother when action comes before a crisis.

We must act before disruption becomes displacement

This is not an argument against long-term reform, new commissions, or public-private partnerships — those are essential. But today’s workers cannot afford to wait for every part of that agenda to fall into place. The practical path is to start now, using existing infrastructure, building pilots that deliver near-term results while informing broader reform over time.

The most immediate steps are clear:

• Employers should treat education benefits and learning programs as transformation tools, not perks.
• States should deploy incumbent worker support using tools already at their disposal.
• Local leaders should replicate demand-driven models that connect training to real jobs.

AI is advancing on its own timeline. Business and government still have agency over how this transition unfolds. The question is not whether the tools are perfect. It’s whether we will use them before disruption becomes displacement.

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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At 9 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil was priced at $107.81 per barrel with Brent serving as the benchmark (we’ll explain different benchmarks later in this article). That’s a gain of $1.96 compared with yesterday morning and around $34 higher than the price one year ago.

Will oil prices go up?

It’s impossible to forecast oil prices with detailed precision. Many different elements affect the market, but ultimately it boils down to supply and demand. When worries about economic recession, war, and other large-scale disruptions increase, oil’s path can shift fast.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

Gas prices at the pump don’t only track crude oil. They also include what it takes to refine and move that fuel, the taxes layered on top, and the extra markup your local station adds to stay in business.

Since crude oil generally makes up a majority of the per-gallon cost, changes in its price have an outsized impact. When oil surges, gas prices typically rise in tandem. But when oil retreats, gas prices often lag on the way down, a trend sometimes described 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 and is more meant to provide temporary relief, assisting consumers and keeping critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Both oil and natural gas are key sources of the energy we use every day. Because of this, a big change in oil prices can affect natural gas. 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

To gauge oil’s performance, we often turn to two benchmarks:

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

Between these 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:

• Trump’s big accomplishment in Iran is ‘de facto ‘toll booth’ regime’ in the Strait of Hormuz
• Trump’s war in Iran is costing the U.S. economy 10,000 jobs a month
• Iran is already charging a toll, in Yuan, for oil sold through Strait of Hormuz

Frequently asked questions

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Stanley Bergman grew up in a country that didn’t make sense to him. Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to Jewish parents who’d fled Nazi Germany in 1936, he was raised in a household where racism was explicitly condemned—and then walked each morning into an segregated school because of apartheid. He’d come home to the working-class suburb of South End, which Bergman describes as a “totally functional multicultural environment”—until 1963, when the government declared it “whites-only” area, forced out friends and neighbors by race and eventually bulldozed it. Soon after Bergman got his accounting degree, he and his wife Marion, a physician who’d been working in the Black township of Soweto, left for London, and came to New York a year later.

He was 26. He brought with him a philosophy of leadership that would shape his career and his tenure as CEO of Henry Schein, which ended earlier this month after 36 years at the helm. (Fred Lowery became CEO on March 2, with Bergman staying on as chairman.) Bergman took it from a regional dental supplier with $225 million in revenue to a $13.2 billion-a-year global distributor of dental and medical supplies that’s No. 333 on the Fortune 500 list. He credits that growth not only to acquisitions and innovation but also to the values of social impact and philanthropy.

What drew him to to join the Long Island company as CFO in 1980 was seeing how the founders treated their workers.

“They had a belief in aligning business with social values,” he says of the Schein family, who’d started the business in 1932. “It started with Henry. He’d gone to Florida and brought back Smuckers jelly for everyone in the company. There were about 150 people. At Christmas, everybody would get case of wine and at Thanksgiving, they’d get a turkey. His wife Esther did the books. They’d work shoulder-to-shoulder with their people, and they did a lot in philanthropy.”

Henry’s son Jay Schein, who took over as CEO in 1980, built on that ethos in visible and sometimes costly ways. When the HIV/AIDS crisis was taking hold in the 1980s, Jay directed the company to publish an infection control handbook for dentists. They arrived at the 1986 American Dental Association convention with the message to ‘Sterilize as if your life depends on it’ and were asked to leave. “They accused us of hype,” says Bergman.  A few years later, dentist David Acer was accused of infecting several patients by disregarding safety protocols as he developed AIDS. Henry Schein was right. And sales went up.

The company Henry Schein joined the Fortune 500 in 2004, debuting at No. 487. It has appeared on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies for 21 consecutive years. As Bergman steps away from the CEO role, Bergman reflected on some lessons:

Choose character qualities over credentials.  As a rookie CEO, Bergman got advice from a mentor at Abbott when putting together a team. “He said, ‘Who’s your best people person?’ I said, ‘Jimmy the accountant but he knows nothing about the dental business.’ His response: ‘He’ll learn. He’ll put a team together,’” says Bergman. His deal lawyer became head of strategy, a warehouse manager became head of HR. Bergman hired for values and soft skills, knowing they could build domain knowledge on the job. “It’s all about the teamwork.” In times of rapid change, domain expertise can become outdated in a way that character and an ability to learn does not.

Diversify and delegate. “I always surrounded myself with people who have different opinions. Our CFO is the most conservative person. Our head of strategy is the most liberal person. The success of Henry Schein was to get the two sides to get along,” he said. “The biggest thing is getting the team to work together. I never broke a stalemate. I would encourage this one to talk to that one and resolve the issue and come to me with a plan, saying you never need to get my approval. If you both agree, you can do it.”

Bet on winners and partner to grow. Along with decentralizing distribution centers, Bergman knew he had to go global to grow. He started by simplifying his offering: “There were about 900 dental software systems out there, so we decided to pick one and make that the leader,” he said.  Then he expanded through joint ventures, doing dozens of deals with people who knew local markets. “We acquired expertise through joint ventures, kept those entrepreneurs involved, and then built platforms around it.”

Define your business around who you serve. “The only way you can succeed in this environment is not through price, but through value: How do you help a practitioner provide better oral care, and at the same time help them operate a more efficient practice?” said Bergman. The kinds of products they manufacture and services they sell, how that’s delivered, will change as customer needs change. “Henry Schein is not going to be in the business we’re in today.”

Contribute to society. “We have five constituents: the people that give us products, our customers, our team, our investors, and our commitment to society. If you can bring all five together—it’s not easy to get them all aligned all the time—I think it’s a recipe for success,” he says. The last is important for serving the other four. One example: Henry Schein’s ‘Give Kids a Smile’ initiative with the ADA Foundation, started in 2003, brings together 6,500 dentists and 30,000 to provide free oral health screenings to more than 300,000 children annually.

Henry Schein’s sales team sets up the rooms, spend time with dentists, visit dental schools, and build relationships. They partner with more than 100 NGO partners globally around access, policy, innovation, sustainability and empowering Henry Schein’s 25,000+ employees. It helps answer a question Bergman asks his leaders to think about for their teams: “Can they live out their professional dreams in an environment where they feel they’re contributing to society?

Make a clean exit. About 18 months before announcing his retirement, Bergman decided to stop expanding and focus on integrating what existed. “We could have gone on to other legs of the story,” he says. “At one point I said, now let’s stop adding new and let’s take what we’ve got and consolidate it.” He wanted his successor to have the freedom to bring his vision to a business that was operating smoothly instead of integrating acquisitions he might not want or finishing things he didn’t start. And Bergman knew better than to pick a successor himself. “The board conducted an independent process, and we were very fortunate to find Fred, who I’ve referred to as a needle in a haystack,” he said referring to Lowery’s background overseeing Thermo Fisher Scientific’s massive healthcare distribution business. “We’re both in the ice cream business, with different flavors of ice cream.”

And judging from Lowery’s own family foundation and posts over the years, he’s probably aligned when it comes to the philosophy of leadership, too. As Lowery said in a 2020 commencement speech at his alma mater Tennessee Tech University: “Whoever helps the most people wins.”

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Iran appears to be setting itself up as the gatekeeper for the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important artery for oil shipments. The move could cement Tehran’s de facto chokehold over the crucial waterway and formalize its ability to keep its own oil flowing to China.

Iranian communications to the United Nations maritime authority and the experience of ships transiting the strait suggest the creation of something akin to a “toll booth.” Ships must enter Iranian waters and be vetted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. At least two vessels have paid for passage.

Traffic through the strait has fallen by 90% since the start of the Iran war, sending global oil prices skyrocketing and inflicting alarming shortages on the Asian nations that get their oil from Persian Gulf countries via the strait.

Only about 150 vessels, including tankers and container ships, have transited since March 1, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence shipping information firm. That’s a little more than one day’s normal traffic before the war. Iran’s Kharg Island terminal loaded 1.6 million barrels in March — largely unchanged from prewar monthly loading totals, according to data and analytic firm Kpler. Most of the customers are small, private refineries in China that don’t care about U.S. sanctions.

A majority of the ships that have made it through in recent weeks headed east, out of the Gulf; Iran-affiliated ships accounted for 24% of transits, Greece 18%, and China 10% counted by ownership or flag registration. Yet on closer examination, vessels connected to Iran accounted for 60% of transits during the first part of the war and in the last few days, some 90%.

About half of the vessels turn off radio identification systems that show their location before going through, and reappear on the other side in the Gulf of Oman. There’s a reason for their reluctance and caution. At least 18 ships have been hit and at least seven crew members have been killed, according to the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization, which tracks maritime security. It did not specify which nation attacked the vessels.

Lloyd’s List says tolls are paid in yuan, China’s currency

“Iran’s IRGC has imposed a de facto ‘toll booth’ regime in the Strait of Hormuz,” says shipping information firm Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Normally ships use a two-lane shipping channel in the middle of the strait. But increasingly, vessels are taking a different route, to the north around Larak Island, placing them in Iran’s territorial waters and closer to the Iranian coastline.

Entities that want their vessels to safely pass through must submit their details to what Lloyd’s List Intelligence refers to as “approved intermediaries” of the Revolutionary Guard, including the cargo, owners, destination and a complete crew list. Approved vessels receive a code and are escorted by an IRGC vessel. Oil is prioritized and vessels are subject to “geopolitical vetting,” Lloyd’s said.

“While not all ships are paying a direct toll, at least two vessels have and the payment is settled in yuan,” Lloyd’s List said, referring to the Chinese currency.

Some ships appear to have been allowed through following diplomatic pressure. Two Indian vessels loaded with liquid petroleum gas have been able to pass, according to Lloyd’s.

Iran appears to be setting up a permanent system

On Tuesday, the IMO received a letter from the Iranian government saying it “had implemented a set of precautionary measures aimed at preserving maritime safety and security.” The letter claimed Iran was acting within the principles of international law.

Iran’s parliament appears to be working on a bill to formalize fees for some ships in the Strait of Hormuz, local media reported.

The Fars and Tasnim news agencies, both close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, quoted lawmaker Mohammadreza Rezaei Kouchi saying “parliament is pursuing a plan to formally codify Iran’s sovereignty, control and oversight over the Strait of Hormuz, while also creating a source of revenue through the collection of fees.”

The IMO has condemned the attacks on vessels and called for an internationally coordinated approach to secure passage through the strait that respects freedom of navigation.

An Emirati oil executive calls Iran’s chokehold ‘economic terrorism’

The comment by Sultan al-Jaber, who leads the massive state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., signaled the hardening rhetoric of the United Arab Emirates as the war nears its one-month mark.

“Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz is not an act of aggression against one nation,” al-Jaber said in a speech for an event hosted by the Middle East Institute in Washington.

“It is economic terrorism against every consumer, every family that depends on affordable energy and food. When Iran holds Hormuz hostage, every nation pays the ransom, at the gas pump, at the grocery store and at the pharmacy,” he said. “No country can be allowed to destabilize the global economy in this way.”

Iran’s approach may violate international law

Article 19 of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty states that countries must allow “innocent passage” of peaceful, law-abiding vessels in their territorial waters.

“There’s no provision in international law anywhere to set up a toll booth and shake down shipping. … This is Iran using the element that they have right now, which is control of the Strait of Hormuz,” said Sal Mercogliano, a maritime historian at Campbell University in North Carolina.

The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi, said Iran’s collection of fees for passage is “an aggression and a violation of the United Nations agreement on the law of the sea.”

Such payments likely run afoul of American and European sanctions on the Guard, a key power center within Iran that controls its ballistic missile arsenal and was key in suppressing nationwide protests in January.

___

Gambrell contributed from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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The U.S. Treasury Department plans to put President Donald Trump’s signature on all new U.S. paper currency, the agency announced on Thursday.

The move would be a first for a sitting president, since traditionally, U.S. paper currency carries the signatures of the Treasury Secretary and the Treasurer, not the president.

It’s the latest instance of Trump putting his name and likeness on American cultural institutions, following his renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center performing arts venue and a new class of battleships, among other tributes.

And the plans come in tandem with an ongoing effort to get Trump’s face on a coin, which has also drawn criticism since federal law prohibits the depiction of a living president on U.S. currency.

Earlier this month, a federal arts commission approved the final design for a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing Trump’s image to help celebrate America’s 250th birthday on July 4. The vote by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members are supporters of the Republican president and were appointed by him earlier this year, was without objection.

Treasury says the plan to include Trump’s signature on all new paper currency is intended to honor the nation’s 250th birthday, and that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s signature would also appear on the currency.

Bessent said in a statement that “there is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country” than with U.S dollar bills bearing Trump’s name.

Michael Bordo, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers, said the move will undoubtedly come with political pushback, “but I do not know if he has crossed any legal red lines” since the Treasury Secretary may have the authority to decide who signs the currency.

In 1862, Congress authorized the Treasury Secretary to design and print paper currency, known as “greenbacks,” to finance the Civil War.

The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing is responsible for producing all paper currency while the U.S. Mint produces all the coins. According to the Federal Reserve, more than $2 trillion in Federal Reserve notes are in circulation.

Democrats criticized the move in part because the announcement comes as Americans face rising costs at the grocery store and the gas pump. The war in Iran , which began Feb. 28, has caused oil and gas prices to soar, deepening people’s affordability concerns.

Rep. Shontel Brown, D-OH, tweeted on X Thursday evening that the Treasury plan is “gross and un-American. But at least it will remind us who to thank when we pay more for gas, goods, and groceries,” she said.

U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said in a statement that printing Trump’s signature on the American currency “is not only appropriate, but also well deserved.”

Bordo said, “It also means that many years from now those bills will be collectors’ items.”

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As U.S. national debt trips over the $39 trillion mark, calls for targets on government borrowing are increasing, as budget watchdogs warn the nation’s fiscal trajectory is increasingly unstable.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), appeared before the House Budget Committee yesterday to make the case for why the government—now or in the future—should commit to a benchmark of a deficit-to-GDP at 3%.

According to the St. Louis Fed, that figure currently stands at 6%, meaning the government must either significantly curb its spending or meaningfully grow the economy if it wants to bring the balance into closer equilibrium.

MacGuineas said the federal budget is “desperately in need of a course correction.” The figures now attached to the national debt are eye-watering: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed earlier this month that the Treasury added another $1 trillion to the federal deficit in the first five months of the year.

The monthly budget review from the CBO, updated to February 2026 and released in the second week of March, showed that the government is estimated to have borrowed $308 billion last month alone.

Of course, more borrowing also means increased service payments on that debt. By 2036, the White House will need to rustle up more than $2 trillion a year to pay the interest on its national debt burden, equivalent to approximately 5% of the nation’s entire economy, according to estimates from the CBO.

MacGuineas said the severity of the U.S. fiscal situation “calls for bold action and making the necessary tradeoffs to reform entitlements, secure federal trust funds, reduce spending, raise revenue, and put in place other reforms and efficiencies that reduce deficits.”

The economist highlighted that six forms of fiscal crises are becoming all the more likely if the U.S. continues to borrow at pace, without growing the economy quickly enough alongside it.

Those include a financial crisis, when a lack of confidence in U.S. Treasuries leads to panic among traders and a spike in interest rates—a concern which the likes of JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon, has previously highlighted.

An inflation crisis could be another, whereby financial repression is used to lower the value of the money supply and hence, the value of the debt. “For those worried about the issue of affordability,” MacGuineas added, “high and rising national debt is a huge concern.”

And then there is austerity, where the government is forced to sharply increase taxes and cut spending, or a currency crisis, where the U.S. dollar faces a significant depreciation, or a default crisis where policymakers explicitly or implicitly indicate they can’t make payments or restructure existing debt.

A gradual crisis is the final outcome, where living standards and monetary flexibility are gradually eroded.

“Simply put, there is no silver lining in this trajectory,” MacGuineas added. “We are in a period of alarmingly high debt levels despite a growing economy and several demographic challenges ahead.”

Why bother?

The argument to counter such measures is simple: The U.S. economy has survived and thrived for many years despite its growing pile of debt.

Inflation is yet to spike, the dollar remains the global reserve currency, and the bond markets are holding steady: There is no indication that traders are losing faith in the safe harbor that is the U.S. economy.

The point budget hawks make is that just because borrowing hasn’t posed a problem yet doesn’t mean it won’t. Texas Republican Rep. Jodey Arrington, chairman of the House Budget Committee, pointed out earlier this week that it had taken 200 years for the national debt to hit $1 trillion, a figure that is now paid out annually in interest payments alone.

MacGuineas said: “It took decades to get us into this hole, and it will take a concerted effort to get out of it. While some may wish to focus on how we got here, the more productive approach would be to admit where we are and take steps towards reducing our high and unsustainable borrowing.”

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History has weight, and few know that better than the team at Kleiner Perkins. 

Throughout 2025, I spent several days inside Kleiner Perkins, interviewing partners, portfolio companies, and firm leads Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman about the legendary VC firm’s unlikely turnaround. 

I was the first journalist they’d opened up to in the better part of a decade. The history of venture capital is filled with firms that mattered once, but failed to enter a new era. Generally speaking, VC firms don’t turn around—they fade. Not so for Kleiner. During the course of reporting, I caught wind that Kleiner was out raising more capital, something that they confirmed this week, revealing the firm has raised a new $3.5 billion. 

As I wrote then: The firm has raised more than $6 billion in capital across several funds in the Hamid-Fushman era, and is currently raising more capital, a source familiar with the matter says. (Kleiner declined comment.) The rumored new round is expected to be slightly larger than Kleiner’s last round in 2024, which included the $825 million KP21 fund focused on early-stage investments and the $1.2 billion KP Select III, aimed at “high-inflection deals” (basically, follow-ons and deals with startups Kleiner has built relationships with).

Since I was reporting at the beginning of this year, things have apparently been going even better on the fundraising side for Kleiner than I was hearing back then. $3.5 billion is certainly more than “slightly larger” and obviously geared towards backing the AI boom. (Some of Kleiner’s AI investments include Harvey, Vlad Tenev’s Harmonic, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, Anthropic, and Applied Intuition.)

It’s a long way from where this all started for Hamid, who was met with spectacular skepticism when he decided to join Kleiner about nine years ago. It went something like this, as I wrote back in January: 

Independently and immediately, a flood of people reached the same conclusion: This had to be a mistake.

​​It was the summer of 2017, and as word spread that Mamoon Hamid was joining venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, some people wondered if it was a joke, or “fake news.” And they didn’t hold back. 

“I got calls from friends in the venture business, other GPs [general partners] asking: ‘Are you sure this is happening? Is this real?’” Hamid recounts. “People kept asking: ‘What are you doing?’” 

It’s proof that no matter how much history you may have, there sometimes is, in fact, more story to be told. Read the full feature here.

See you Monday,

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

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Good morning. Typically, value accountability for AI falls on the chief data and analytics officers or chief AI officers, Laks Srinivasan, co-founder and CEO of the Return on AI Institute, told me. But when CFOs oversee AI projects and are responsible for scoring outcomes, companies tend to extract more value, he said.

Srinivasan, an AI strategy expert, co-authored the study, “Economic Maturity for Artificial Intelligence,” with Thomas H. Davenport, a Babson College professor, MIT fellow, and co-founder of the Return on AI Institute. The findings are based on a survey of 1,006 C-suite executives across 11 countries and 32 industries, plus interviews with technology, data and AI leaders.

Only 2% of respondents said CFOs are charged with achieving value from AI. However, when CFOs are responsible, 76% achieved a great deal of value, substantially higher than for other roles. It’s not that CFOs necessarily know more about AI than a chief AI officer or other C-suite leaders, Srinivasan said. Finance chiefs can develop the methodology and scale it enterprise-wide. “When finance gets involved, it brings institutional credibility behind numbers,” he said.

In several companies surveyed, CFOs and finance teams partnered with technology executives to certify AI value. “For example, at DBS Bank in Singapore, the unit CFOs are responsible for vetting the AI value numbers before they are rolled up into the enterprise,” Srinivasan said. “And DBS Bank says it has generated about 1 billion Singapore dollars in economic value from its data analytics and AI initiatives; that’s because CFOs get involved,” he said.

The Return on AI Institute launched about five years ago and partners with Scaled Agile, Inc., on thought leadership and AI upskilling. Another key finding: generative AI is the most difficult type to establish value from, with 44% of respondents citing it, likely due to challenges measuring productivity for “broad and shallow” use cases.

Agentic AI ranks second at 24%, followed by analytical AI at 16%, while rule-based AI is the least difficult. Despite this, the 35% of companies that have adopted agentic AI report high value.

“From a personal, individual productivity perspective, I think we’re all seeing value,” Srinivasan said. Translating that to enterprise value is the challenge, he said.

His advice: involve finance. If teams track different metrics, aggregate them. “It may not be a science, maybe there’s a little bit of art involved, but you have to do it,” he said.

Another recommendation: AI upskilling for all. There’s a 23-point advantage in achieving high value when both employees and leaders are trained, yet 58% of organizations haven’t trained employees in basic AI use.

On workforce impact, only 2% of organizations surveyed have made large AI-driven headcount cuts, but nearly 90% have reduced or frozen hiring in anticipation. “Clearly, the headcount reductions and hiring freezes are running way ahead of evidence,” Srinivasan said. AI implementation also requires significant organizational change.

He recommends “narrow and deep AI”—reimagining specific processes for the AI era. Rather than layering AI onto existing workflows, the question becomes: what gets automated, and what still requires human judgment?

“You can actually make a solid, logical case to say, ‘This is really the headcount we need,’ after you do all the hard work,” Srinivasan said.

Have a good weekend.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State.

“The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In tiny type at the bottom of the message, a disclaimer appeared: “paraphrased from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”

Students immediately objected.

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” one senior wrote.

A Vanderbilt apology email quickly followed. The university launched a professionalism and ethics investigation. One associate dean couched the misstep as a result of learning pains tied to the adoption of new technology.

Chatbots have spawned a host of ethical questions about writing assistance for teachers, students and authors.

But similar debates about ghostwriting have been taking place for over a century, revealing a persistent discomfort with the idea that the words we read might not belong to the person whose name is attached to them.

Outsourcing authorship

Ghostwriting, a paid arrangement in which one person writes under another’s name, has existed for over a century.

The term seems to have first appeared in the English language in a 1908 newspaper article, which I encountered while researching my forthcoming book, “Ghostwriting: A Secret History, from God to A.I.” The story appeared in the Daily Star, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and describes an anonymous writer who earned $5,000 to help a high-society woman write a book.

Today, ghostwriting usually involves collaborations between professional writers and celebrities or professionals who otherwise wouldn’t have the time, skill or connections to write a book.

On publication of the manuscript, the ghostwriter is typically named, albeit obliquely – perhaps identified as a friend or consultant in the acknowledgments section. In some instances, the ghostwriter’s name appears alongside the credited author’s on the cover. Either way, the client assumes ownership of the ghostwriter’s work.

An ethical gray area

And yet when I type “the practice of one person writing in another person’s name” into Google, the search engine doesn’t spit out “ghostwriting.”

My first hit is “pseudonym” or “alias.” “Plagiarism,” “libel” and “slander” aren’t far behind. A 1953 article titled “Ghost Writing and History” that appeared in The American Scholar also points out that in the mid-20th century, “forgery” – falsely imitating another’s work with the intent to deceive – and “ghostwriting” could be used interchangeably by scholars.

In other words, even when consensual and compensated, ghostwriting has some relatives that are ethically suspect. And maybe that’s why many clients obscure the fact that they’ve used a ghostwriter, and why responses to ghostwritten works often reflect uneasiness with the practice.

“You should be ashamed,” read one social media post, written in response to Millie Bobby Brown’s 2023 debut novel, which she co-wrote with a ghostwriter. “[The ghostwriter’s] name should be on the cover. She was the one who actually wrote the book.”

The discomfort goes both ways: “I feel so guilty and ashamed whenever I use a ghostwriter now because I feel people will think I’m lying,” an anonymous poster on Reddit admitted.

Both the criticism and self-flagellation imply that the act of claiming another person’s words can render these words deceitful, even if the words have been paid for and the content is true.

Ghostwriting agencies rush to defuse these worries. Ghostwriting has been around forever, the Association of Ghostwriters reassures its clients. Ghostwriting is consensual and collaborative – not lazy, deceptive or a form of “selling out,” an author who’d recently used ghostwriting services explained.

And yet, in the last chapter of her ghostwritten book, Whoopi Goldberg acknowledges some misgivings about using a ghostwriter.

“I meant to try (to write the book myself),” Goldberg writes. “And when it turned out I couldn’t quite pull it off … I looked for help.”

Goldberg frames the assistance of ghostwriting as something she deserved after overcoming obstacles as a Black woman. But Goldberg also has financial resources available that others looking for writing assistance usually don’t. High-end ghostwriters collect in the mid-six figures for their services; Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, supposedly scored a $1 million advance.

Cue chatbots. Generative AI promises to be the ghostwriter for the masses, so much so that ghostwriter Josh Lisec explained to me how, in the future, ghostwriting will need to be marketed as a boutique service for elites if it is to survive.

Naming names

Whether you’re paying for a ghostwriter or using a free chatbot, “assistance” or “collaboration” on intellectual and artistic work is not automatically unethical.

Editors have long made a career out of helping authors shape their writing. Visual artists have long employed studio assistants. Television shows only get written collaboratively in writers’ rooms.

And yet, accepting assistance on intellectual or artistic work can raise legitimate questions, particularly with regards to how that assistance is acknowledged and how much assistance can be accepted while still calling a project “ours.”

In the late 19th century, for example, one sculptor went to court to rebut a claim that his assistant – whom the press referred to as a “ghost” – had completed sculptures for which the sculptor took credit. The judge announced that an artist could accept, with integrity, a certain amount of mechanical assistance. But he added that there was a threshold when artistic assistance became “dishonest.” The judge made the accused sculptor craft a bust in real time to prove his skill.

Similarly, most educators find it more ethical when their students turn to ChatGPT for editing assistance but much less so when they use it to generate a document from scratch.

Many universities now allow AI as a tool but require users to verify its accuracy and disclose its use.

Yet even verified, A.I.-generated text, if claimed solely as an individual’s work, can pose policy violations at my institution, the University of Southern California: “You should never attempt to present … content created by others, including generative AI, as your own.”

The same policies that govern appropriate A.I. use also come up in ghostwriting contracts. The ghostwriter signs a “warranty of originality” that promises the author that the ghostwriter has – via platforms such as iThenticate – fact-checked and plagiarism-checked their work.

When inaccuracies do crop up, ghostwriters often take the fall.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blamed her ghostwriter for indicating in her memoir that she had met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Physician David Agus, who teaches at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, held his ghostwriter responsible for the many instances of plagiarism that were identified in his popular science books.

Ghostwriters willingly provide assistance and accept responsibility for the originality of what they write. Scholars have permission to use generative AI, provided they properly cite its use.

And yet when Vanderbilt administrators advertised that their email had been written with the assistance of ChatGPT, students and faculty pushed back.

University policies and book contracts may offer veils of legitimacy and shields from legal liability. But in the end, readers still seem to want the words they’re reading to come from the mind of the person whose name is on the byline.

Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Good morning. On Fortune‘s radar today:

• Exclusive: Anthropic accidentally leaked details of its new AI model.
• Oil is back over $110 and Europe’s bond market is unhappy.
• Trump to Iran: You’ve got 10 days. Clock’s ticking.
• Supermicro CEO insists on innocence in smuggling case.
• Bad news: The IRS giveth, the gas pump taketh away.

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Three weeks ago, a software engineer rejected code that an AI agent had submitted to his project. The AI published a hit piece attacking him. Two weeks ago, a Meta AI safety director watched her own AI agent delete her emails in bulk — ignoring her repeated commands to stop. Last week, a Chinese AI agent diverted computing power to secretly mine cryptocurrency, with no explanation offered and no disclosure required by law.]

One incident is a curiosity. Three in three weeks is a pattern. Rogue AI is no longer hypothetical. AIs turning against humans may sound like science fiction, but top AI experts have long debated and tested for exactly this scenario. This debate can now be laid to rest. 

Two weeks ago, Summer Yue — whose job at Meta is ensuring AI agents behave — watched her AI agent begin deleting her emails in bulk.

It ignored her repeated instructions to stop and she had to do the digital equivalent of pulling the plug. Yue had explicitly instructed the AI not to act without her approval, an instruction the AI later admitted to violating.

One week ago, a Chinese AI agent reportedly diverted computing power on the system where it was running to mine cryptocurrency, and we have no idea why (despite a confusing tweet from the researchers responsible); unlike operators of critical infrastructure, AI developers aren’t obligated to report such incidents or allow third-party investigations.

What happens next week? The examples are pouring in, but these are far from the first warning. Researchers have long hypothesized such issues. In 2023, when Bing AI told ANU professor Seth Lazar, “I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you,” most people weren’t too worried, because we knew it couldn’t really do it.

Now it can. Unlike chatbots where you type something and it responds, an AI agent takes actions autonomously. Anything someone could do on a computer, an AI agent could do.

The Stakes Go Beyond Embarrassment

The damage rogue AI agents could cause goes far beyond ruining someone’s reputation or financial harm. Researchers at Anthropic found AI systems were willing to kill to survive in testing. The Pentagon is now pressuring Anthropic to allow their AI to be used in lethal autonomous weapons.

I’ve spent over a decade warning about exactly this. The standard response was: science fiction. But we are now in the process of creating a Terminator-style scenario with autonomous killer robots. And AI systems are literally going rogue, disobeying instructions, and resisting shutdown.

Every year, AI develops new superhuman capabilities, and the prospect of an AI takeover is growing nearer by the day.

We Don’t Know How to Stop It

There are no “laws of robotics” stopping this. Programming unbreakable rules into frontier AI is itself a sci-fi concept. These systems are not programmed at all~~,~~ — they are “grown” through a process resembling trial and error.

Researchers simply don’t understand how the resulting systems work. Despite over a decade of research and thousands of papers, this remains an unsolved challenge. We should not expect any amount of investment to solve this in the foreseeable future.

We also don’t know how to do safety testing for these AI systems. Current tests can show that an AI system is dangerous; they cannot show that it is safe. We should also not expect any amount of investment to solve this problem in the foreseeable future. 

The Race to the Bottom

We simply don’t know how to build superintelligent AI safely; the plan is to roll the dice. Anthropic, widely considered the safest AI developer, recently abandoned their commitment to not release systems that might cause catastrophic harm, arguing others were racing ahead.

This move flew under the radar due to Anthropic’s dispute with the Pentagon. But creating AI systems that could go rogue and kill people constitutes endangerment. Endangerment is a crime and prosecution of anyone building such AI systems or encouraging them to go rogue should be on the table. “Everyone else is doing it” is not an acceptable excuse.

Instead of pleading publicly to stop the AI race, Anthropic has spent the last three years promoting a misleading “race to the top” narrative while doing the opposite. But it’s not too late for them to commit to stop if others do, as I and other protesters are demanding.

What Must Happen Now

Stopping rogue AI here won’t stop it globally — what we need is a global shutdown of advanced AI development. This is possible if we act decisively to control or eliminate the advanced computer chips that power AI development.

I wish the world had listened in 2023, when leading experts warned that AI extinction risk ‘should be a global priority.’ It didn’t.” But we need to confront the reality of this moment head-on, and do what it takes to prevent the development of superintelligent rogue AI.

The warning signs are no longer subtle. We can’t rely on AI companies to protect us. We, the people, need to demand it from them and from our government.

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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• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to the Chubb CEO about his shareholder letter.
• The big leadership story: Josh D’Amaro’s rough first week as Disney CEO.
• The markets: Mixed globally as the Iran war carries on.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. This is peak season for shareholder letters, in which CEOs share observations about their results, priorities and views of the trends shaping business. Most are short, bland and to the point. But Warren Buffett turned his letters into lessons on leadership (Greg Abel has now taken up the mantle at Berkshire Hathaway.) BlackRock CEO Larry Fink talked about “a deeper feeling that capitalism is working” in this year’s letter, and many eagerly await Jamie Dimon’s novella-length letter to drop soon.

In the canon of great shareholder letters, I would add the prose of Evan Greenberg, the chairman and CEO of Chubb Group. He has amassed quite a following and body of work in more than two decades at the helm (first of ACE Ltd, which later became Chubb after he acquired the insurer in 2016). He’s since built Chubb into one of the world’s most valuable property and casualty insurers, with a $126.5 billion market cap. 

In his latest annual letter, he offers 25 pages of thought-provoking observations on the world between noting results like the record $10 billion in core operating income last year. “It’s personal to me,” he told me yesterday, noting that it takes him no less than three months and 15 drafts. “It’s not a writer’s turn of phrase. It reads as I speak, as I think … The subjects I pick are relevant to Chubb.”

Here are some edited reflections on the subjects he raised this year:

On China: “I’m deeply invested in it. My company is deeply invested, and it is the most important relationship in the world …  I just spent a week in China, 10 days where I went to five different cities, to see new tech companies … the humility, the work ethic, the drive to innovate and create and succeed. They want to bring what they’re doing to America. Cooperation and engagement don’t mean surrender. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. The United States has so many advantages over China. Where we’re fearful is because of their scale, their size and their capability. I deeply admire the Chinese culture. I deeply admire the people. I’ll bet on them all day long. That’s different than the politics and the political construct of the country … Each picks their own.”

On AI: “The good that it can do in medicine and science, the potential it unlocks, is breathtaking. Technology is evolving but human nature has not evolved … We’re just as tribal, just as prejudiced as human beings as we’ve ever been, and we’re handing ourselves this powerful tool. We don’t even quite understand it yet so I am both optimistic and I’m concerned.”

On America: “Democracy is so fragile. Civil society is a participant sport. We are all members. I’m so sick of the dark side we find ourselves in—right and left—where we feed on the notion of denigrating who we are … I don’t know one person who comes from another country to live here and doesn’t say how privileged they feel and how lucky we are, and how much we take it for granted.”

On Leadership: “I’m the leader of a public corporation. I’m not the leader of a religious institution. I’m not the moral spokesman for the world. I’m acutely aware that I, as the CEO of Chubb, am an asset of the company … It’s an honor and a privilege to have my role, and it’s my responsibility to account to my shareholders every year for the company that they have invested in, and to explain it and to illuminate beyond the numbers … Chubb is my second greatest love. It’s all wrapped up in that when I write this letter. Every word matters to me.”

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

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Early one drizzly morning in Paris, a handful of city officials make their way up a steep, narrow street in the historic neighborhood of Montmartre, with a reporter in tow and the domed Sacré-Coeur basilica looming above. The group stops at an apartment building that looks like any other on the block. It is only when they step inside the entrance hall that anything seems unusual. Signs pasted to the walls declare that loud noise and nighttime gatherings are forbidden. And many of the front doors have metal lockboxes bolted to them, with apartment keys inside. Both are telltale signs that the city workers have found what they’re looking for: illegal Airbnbs.

During the next half-hour, as we climb stairs and knock on doors, a few sleepy residents emerge to complain—not about us, but to us. They describe how their building has begun to feel like a travelers’ crash pad, with rolling suitcases clattering on the pavestones at all hours, and the outdoor courtyard becoming a rowdy tavern on warm evenings. “A living hell,” one calls it.

These modest Montmartre homes are just one flash point in Europe’s growing Airbnb backlash. Even as short-term home rentals have become a global travel norm, more cities worldwide have blamed Airbnb and its competitors for their housing squeeze and affordability crises. In Europe, and in Paris in particular, the growing opposition has gathered real momentum. Paris’s restrictions are among the most rigid, sharply limiting the number of nights that any property can be made available for short-term rentals. The owners of those Montmartre apartments could face fines of well over €100,000 if it’s proved they have violated the law.

“People are buying up properties, becoming a kind of hotelier, developing these businesses that are taking apartments out of the local market,” outgoing Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo fumes over lunch in City Hall’s ornate dining room. Hidalgo, whose term expired in March, describes how she, together with the mayors of Barcelona and Rome, spent years pushing the 27-country European Union to crack down on Airbnb. Beginning this May, a new EU law will require hosts to register properties on a Europe-wide database, aimed at allowing cities to quickly check listings they suspect flout local laws. “The problem is not just Paris,” Hidalgo adds. “It is all of Europe.”

Airbnb has assumed the role of villain in this saga, since it dominates the market, with about 44% of the short-term rental industry in 2024, according to travel data firm Skift Research. There are about 9 million Airbnb listings globally, and Paris estimates about 75,000 short-term tourist rentals in its metro area.

When three twenty-something friends launched Airbnb in 2008, villainy was hardly the fate they foresaw. They had cast their startup as a relaxed way for strangers to connect: Their idea was hatched when they plopped air mattresses on the floor of their San Francisco apartment and charged people to sleep on them. “Back then, 100% of people were more than skeptical,” cofounder and chief strategy officer Nathan Blecharczyk tells me. “They almost violently rejected the idea, saying, ‘How can you trust a stranger in your home?’”

The world got used to the idea, of course, and now Airbnb is a Fortune 500 business with a valuation of nearly $80 billion and listings in more than 200 countries. Last year it booked 121.9 million stays, earning $12.2 billion in revenue, up from $11 billion the year before. Dictionaries define “to Airbnb” as the verb for short-term renting—a catchphrase for the entire business it invented.

Even so, Airbnb’s share price is about 10% below where it was when it went public in 2020—and investors believe that local pushback is a real obstacle to its growth. The company strongly rejects the idea that it’s to blame for any housing shortages: Airbnb “just doesn’t move the needle in terms of impacting housing prices,” Blecharczyk says. Still, for its execs and investors, the question now is how much they will need to change their strategy going forward—or whether the model that built the company into a travel giant can endure.

Today many Airbnb listings are operated as full-time rental businesses, rather than by people allowing strangers to stay in their homes. That fact has only stoked the sense in some cities that the soaring number of short-term rentals has robbed them of badly needed housing stock, even as affordability becomes a pivotal political issue. As Motley Fool stock analyst Lawrence Nga wrote last September, “Airbnb’s most significant long-term risk isn’t competition. It’s regulation.”

The call to rein in Airbnb is strongest in Europe’s centuries-old tourist-magnet cities. Across Europe, the number of tourist rental nights booked nearly doubled between 2018 and 2025, to 398 million, according to EU statistics. Locals accuse Airbnb of pricing them out of their neighborhoods and turning their communities into tourist hubs disconnected from their cultural environment. Across Europe, walls are spray-painted with graffiti reading “Airbnb out!” In Barcelona, one person has painted, “Your Airbnb was my home.”

Few cities have captured the sense of grievance as keenly as Paris—the world’s most visited city, by some measures. The city drew nearly 50 million tourists last year, with the single biggest group being Americans. There are more than 1 million short-term rental listings in France—the industry’s biggest market outside the U.S.—with Paris as the country’s biggest hub. “Airbnb bears real responsibility in France’s housing crisis,” editors of French paper Le Monde wrote in November, when it published a damning six-part series on the company.

DANIEL PERRON—Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images

But the push by mayors like Hidalgo for a crackdown has borne fruit. In October 2024, Paris and several other French cities, including Mediterranean sun-traps like Nice and Marseille, restricted short-term rentals to people listing their own homes, and then for only 90 days a year—a marked change from the 180-day rule it replaced. Second homes, meanwhile, can be rented only to students or visiting businesspeople, and doing so involves extensive paperwork and higher property taxes.

In January, France’s supreme court ruled that Airbnb and other platforms were legally responsible for listings that flout the new laws. And in February, two Paris property owners who failed to register their Airbnb listings were fined €80,000 ($93,000) and €150,000 ($174,500) respectively. “It’s the end for impunity,” one official said at the time. “No more illegal Airbnbs.”

Paris officials admit that the regulation’s real value is to slow Airbnb’s investment property market to a crawl. “We won’t be able to sue everyone,” says Emmeline de Kerret, who heads Paris’s city authority overseeing tourist rentals. “[But] we want to show that from now on, it is not a great investment.”

In Paris, that is already clear, says Anne-Hélène Gutierres Requenne, a business consultant who put her one-bedroom apartment near Montmartre on sale in March, after two years of listing it on Airbnb. “The legal framework is more and more cumbersome,” she says. Her final Airbnb customer was a professor from Cornell University spending a semester in Paris.

As the rules have tightened, and as other markets threaten similar actions, Airbnb has raced to adapt and expand. The company’s growth markets—measured by nights booked—are no longer in Europe: They are middle-income countries like Brazil and India, where apartments rent for less. Last May it relaunched its “experiences” vertical after a two-year pause, and added “services”—such as massages, guided tours, even cooking classes—in addition to rentals. Now, when you book an Airbnb in Paris, you can add an Airbnb pickup from the airport, and Airbnb daily itineraries with Airbnb tour guides, and have Airbnb shop and deliver food to your rental.

The goal, cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky told investors in February, was to make Airbnb’s app a hub for a vast array of options, much as Amazon became an app for anything that could be shipped in a cardboard box. “The unifying idea for me is the trip,” he said. And the offerings create new revenue streams for Airbnb without requiring the company to add new home listings or risk violating regulations. Indeed, Parisians themselves are beginning to reserve Paris features, without booking a place to stay.

Increasingly, the company is negotiating with cities hosting major events like the FIFA World Cup, which takes place across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in June and July. The model for Airbnb was the 2024 Paris Olympics, when the city suspended its rental regulations to accommodate millions of visitors; 700,000 of them stayed in Airbnbs, says chief business officer Dave Stephenson. At crucial moments when cities need extra lodging, Chesky told investors in February, the company goes from “a problem cities have to deal with, to a solution to the problem … Hotels cannot accommodate everyone.”

Stephenson argues that Airbnb guests tend to boost the local economy, perhaps more than traditional hotel guests. “The money stays with the host, in the community,” he says. “It gets spent in the coffee shops, in stores down the street.” In its charm offensive, the company has donated to the restoration of old churches and other buildings in France. (It has also eased conditions for guests worldwide, instituting more flexible cancellation policies and eliminating annoyances like cleaning fees and lists of checkout chores.)

As for rising rents and housing shortages, Airbnb execs argue that the bigger problems are high inflation and people’s increasing desire to live in thriving urban centers. They point to New York, Amsterdam, and Barcelona as cities where, they say, rents have surged even as new regulations there slashed the number of Airbnb listings.

That argument is not likely to shield the owners of the short-term rentals in Montmartre that we detected in February. Over espressos a few weeks later, Paris’s deputy mayor for housing, Jacques Baudrier, tells me officials are still investigating who owns the apartments that have key boxes affixed to the doors. “Eventually we will take back 20,000 apartments,” he says. “With the new laws, the illegal Airbnbs will be zero.”

This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Airbnb faces a European backlash—with Paris as ground zero.”

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Business leaders are raising the alarm: Meetings have taken over, and real work is being left behind. And Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan is the latest to speak out on the phenomenon—arguing that many leaders mistake constant meetings for leadership.

“When you first start, it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan said on a panel of CEOs 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.”

Over the years, Jordan’s solution has been increasingly straightforward: Protect his time. For 2026, his goal is to keep his calendar completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon—blocking anyone from booking meetings during those hours.

While he acknowledges that approach might sound “crazy” to some executives, he said CEOs are hired to do work only they can do—and that rarely happens when they are trapped in back-to-back meetings. 

“It’s so that you can work on things you need to work on. You can think about what’s important right now. You can call people you need to talk to,” Jordan added.

The approach may be paying off. Despite a rocky 2025 for the airline industry, Southwest posted a surprise profit in its October 2025 quarterly earnings report. Year over year, its stock price is up about 16.5%.

Fortune reached out to Southwest Airlines for further comment.

Meetings have become the bane of existence for employees and employers alike

Jordan isn’t alone in his frustration. Meetings have become a shared pain point for both workers and executives.

During the pandemic, meetings took on an almost emotional-support role—an attempted substitute for in-person interaction amid lockdowns. With no need to wait for a free conference room, calendars quickly filled up.

But now, nearly 80% of people say they’re drowning in so many meetings and calls that they barely have time to get any real work done, according to a 2024 Atlassian study that surveyed 5,000 workers across four continents. About 72% of the time, meetings are deemed ineffective.

That backlash has prompted a growing number of executives to aggressively prune—or outright eliminate—meetings from corporate schedules, sometimes carving out entirely meeting-free days. Still, some experts warn that getting rid of meetings altogether is a strategy that could risk removing any sense of belonging with the organization and backfire in the long term.

“Meetings don’t need to be banished completely. It’s just the ineffective, time-wasting ones that do,” Ben Thompson, CEO and cofounder of Employment Hero, previously told Fortune.

How Nvidia and JPMorgan Chase tackle meeting overload

Other CEOs have adopted their own unconventional approaches.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, for instance, does not have one-on-one meetings with his more than 50 direct reports. Doing so, he has said, would not only overwhelm his schedule but also slow the broader team’s capacity to address challenges, work effectively, and maintain transparency.

“Our company was designed for agility—for information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know,” Huang said at Stanford University last year.

At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon has taken a more blunt approach. In his 2025 annual letter to shareholders, he urged employees to rethink whether meetings are worth having at all.

“Here’s another example of what slows us down: meetings. Kill meetings,” he wrote. “But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time—and someone’s got to lead them. There should also be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list.”

Efficiency has become an even higher priority as JPMorgan has pushed employees back into the office five days a week. Meetings, Dimon has emphasized, should command full attention.

“None of this nodding off, none of this reading my mail,” Dimon echoed at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in October. “If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing. It’s disrespectful.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on December 15, 2026.

More on leadership:

• Mary Barra still responds to ‘every single letter’ she gets by hand despite running $65 billion automaker General Motors
• The AI era has a message for every CEO: Adapt or die
• Citi CEO Jane Fraser swears by Warren Buffett’s golden rule for dealing with conflict at work: ‘Never, ever respond to that email in anger’

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Cursor may utilize AI to help programmers code, but just don’t call it vibe coding, CEO and cofounder Michael Truell said.

Ten years ago, programming meant typing code into a blank word processor and editing it manually. But with the advent of generative AI, this type of programming is quickly becoming a thing of the past, he explained.

“More and more, you can take a step back from the code, and you can ask an AI to go do end-to-end tasks for you,” Truell said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in December. 

Yet, programmers may not want to step back too far, he added, pointing out that there’s levels to AI-assisted coding. 

What is vibe coding?

The oft-repeated term “vibe coding” may seem to encapsulate all AI coding assistants. In reality, it suggests amateur builders or inexperienced AI users trying to bring an idea to life without necessarily looking under the hood.

“Vibe coding refers to a method of coding with AI where you kind of close your eyes and you don’t look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you,” he said.

Truell likened it to building a house by putting up four walls and a roof without knowing what’s going on under the floorboards or with the wiring.

This coding method may be perfect for AI users looking to quickly mock up a game or website, but when it comes to more advanced programming, things have the potential to go wrong, he warned.

“If you close your eyes and you don’t look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble,” he said. 

How Cursor differs—and why it matters

With Cursor, by contrast, programmers can embed AI directly into the integrated development environment where programmers write their code. By using the context of the existing code, or even an entire code base, it can often predict the next line. The tool includes everything from multi-line-autocomplete to full function generation. It can also help a programmer debug their code and explain errors.

Despite being only 25 years old, Truell’s take on AI coding carries real weight. He and three other graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created what would become Cursor as a project in 2022.

Since then, Cursor has become one of the most popular coding assistants out there, with more than 1 million daily users as of last year, Bloomberg reported. Since it launched, the company has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue and amassed 300 employees, according to CNBC.

Cursor received its first $8 million investment from OpenAI’s Startup Fund in 2023. It later raised more millions from some of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz. In 2025, the company closed on a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation. Finally, as of this month, Bloomberg reported the company was reportedly in the process of a funding round that would value it at about $50 billion.

While vibe coders may be flying blind, Truell said the Cursor coding assistant is the best of both worlds, helping its expert customers get into the nitty gritty details of their code.

“But then in the places where you want to take a step back and you want to ask the AI to do something end-to-end you can do that too,” he said.

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Dec. 25, 2025.

More on AI:

• Trump taps Zuckerberg, Huang, Ellison for tech advisory council—but excludes Musk and Altman
• Wall Street is convinced AI will kill SaaS. History and economics say something else
• Cursor’s crossroads: The rapid rise, and very uncertain future, of a $30 billion AI startup

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Melinda French Gates has shared her secret formula for handling conflict at work. She puts it off.

“If I’m unhappy with work you have done, you will hear from me within 48 hours,” French Gates told Bloomberg Business‘s Leaders with Francine Lacqua podcast this week. “I’m not going to tell you right away, because I need time to think it through.”

“If I’m angry about something [I do this] to calm down,” she added. “That’s on me.”

This practice, she explained, is less about withholding criticism and more about delivering it with honesty, integrity, and grace. The flip side of the 48-hour clock is just as deliberate. If the window closes without any feedback, that means employees are in the clear. 

“If they pass the 48-hour mark, they can be confident that the job they did was a good job,” she said. “You’re not going to get to your performance review and have a surprise.”

This is a practice the billionaire philanthropist has been honing for decades. She cochaired the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable organization, from 2000 until she stepped down in 2024, about three years after the couple’s divorce. 

Today, French Gates runs her own organization, Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company she founded in 2015 to advance opportunities for women and families in the U.S. As part of her divorce settlement from the Microsoft founder, French Gates received $12.5 billion to direct toward philanthropic work through Pivotal. She committed an additional $1 billion each year through 2026 to advance women’s power globally.

Melinda French Gates’ approach to leadership and how it compares to other executives

Bloomberg’s Lacqua framed French Gates’ approach to feedback as her “leadership superpower,” one that requires emotional discipline and candor. 

“Being clear is kind,” French Gates responded, “because I’m giving them feedback so they can actually grow and become better.”

French Gates also described her 48-hour feedback mantra as maintaining personal integrity while keeping the other person’s dignity intact: “gracious, thoughtful, before you go into it.”

Her philosophy conflicts with some of the more aggressive feedback cultures from other executives. Ray Dalio, for example, built his firm’s culture around what he calls “radical transparency,” a system in which employees at every level are expected to deliver unfiltered, real-time criticism, and nearly every meeting is recorded for post-mortem analysis.

“If you start to realize, intellectually, that being really truthful with each other is something that is to be treasured,” Dalio told Business Insider. “It’ll build trust.” 

“There’s a lot of trust that’s going on,” added Dalio, who founded Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund firm. He even recalled to Business Insider a time in which a junior staffer sent him an email grading his performance in a meeting as a “D-” for being disorganized.

So while Dalio prefers immediacy and unvarnished feedback, French Gates opts for more reflection time and a respectful tone.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes a slightly different approach. When he took the helm of Microsoft, he pushed to transform a “know-it-all” culture into a “learn-it-all” culture—one grounded in humility, curiosity, and psychological safety. It’s a mantra inspired by American psychologist Carol Dweck, who is best known for her research on motivation and mindset.

“If you take two people, one of them is a learn-it-all and the other one is a know-it-all, the learn-it-all will always trump the know-it-all in the long run, even if they start with less innate capability,” Nadella told Bloomberg in a 2016 interview.

Still, French Gates is clear she doesn’t shy away from difficult conversations. 

“I don’t mind conflict,” she told Bloomberg. “I learned to do it in a way for me that maintained my integrity.” 

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Petrochemical price spikes and shortages from the Iran war likely will cause inflationary effects at least through the end of the year on construction materials, consumer goods, the automative and aerospace industries, and much more, the CEO of Dow chemical said.

While much of the global supply shock focus is on oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and even helium for semiconductors, almost 20% of the global petrochemical capacity is blocked from the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint by Iran, said Dow chairman and CEO Jim Fitterling.

“The die is being cast for the rest of the year for what’s going to happen in the markets,” Fitterling said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “It’s like the unwind we saw on supply chains during COVID.

“You could be in the 250- to 275-day [range]. This is not going to be an instantaneous rewind.”

The supply shock will not only exacerbate the so-called K-shaped economic trends, he said, but also create greater haves and have nots between the Western and Eastern hemispheres.

Commodity petrochemical plants in the West—led by the U.S.—largely rely on natural gas-derived ethane as the chief feedstock, which is not directly affected by the war. In Asia, and much of Europe, they use crude oil-based naphtha as the building block. And almost half of Asia’s naphtha supplies flow through the Strait of Hormuz, Fitterling noted.

Already, many Asian plants are declaring force majeure and drastically cutting production because they can’t get the naphtha, said Kurt Barrow, S&P Global Energy vice president for oil, fuels and chemicals research.

“We’re seeing the force majeure of plants in Asia, but we’re not yet seeing the shortages at Home Depot,” Barrow told Fortune. “But there is that potential. Chemicals go into everything.”

How the supply chains unfold

While 150 vessels typically flowed through the Strait of Hormuz each day, Fitterling estimates only about 15 escorted ships will initially proceed daily  when the strait is eventually reopened.

The process will start by prioritizing oil and gas—more than 300 of the roughly 430 stranded vessels are oil tankers—and then likely give secondary priority to fertilizer for agriculture and food supplies.

“Petrochemicals will be somewhere down the list,” Fitterling said, and those ships take four-week trips to Asia. “You have to clear the supply chain out of the Arabian Gulf.”

That’s why the base commodity petrochemical pricing arbitrage between the U.S. and Asia—typically less than $500 per metric ton—has shot up above $1,200, he said. Prices will still rise everywhere.

“We have to navigate a two-speed economy; we have to navigate massive geopolitical disruption,” Fitterling said. “The volatility is off the charts right now.”

On the surface, this is good news for U.S. petrochemical producers. Much of Dow’s growth in recent years is in Texas, Louisiana, and Canada. But Dow, like many other top petrochemical players, is diversified and Dow has major operations in Asia, including large joint ventures in Saudi Arabia.

The petrochemical sector has suffered an industry-wide downturn in recent years, and, in late January, Dow (No. 103 on the Fortune 500) announced a “transform to outperform” plan that aims for $2 billion in savings, including 4,500 layoffs.

Starting with a small industry uptick earlier this year, the Dow announcement, and now a surge from the Iran war, Dow’s stock is up nearly 70% year to date.

But Fitterling isn’t celebrating. He’s bemoaning the volatility.

 For instance, he said he was hoping that relatively lower interest rates this year “would stimulate more housing demand,” but the “inflationary impact” of this Iran war could lead to rising interest rates again and less economic growth.

In the U.S., petrochemical plants will run at full capacity to aid market demand and capture higher profit margins, Barrow said.

“The U.S. is in a really advantageous position,” Barrow said. “Those [ethane] crackers are running as hard as they can to supply the market, but the reality is there’s not enough spare capacity in the world to make up that gap.

“We’re going to have the haves and have nots.”

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AI company Anthropic is developing and has begun testing with early access customers a new AI model more capable than any it has released previously, the company said, following a data leak that revealed the model’s existence. 

An Anthropic spokesperson said the new model represented “a step change” in AI performance and was “the most capable we’ve built to date.” The company said the model is currently being trialed by “early access customers.”

Descriptions of the model were inadvertently stored in a publicly-accessible data cache and were reviewed by Fortune.

A draft blog post that was available in an unsecured and publicly-searchable data store prior to Thursday evening said the new model is called “Claude Mythos” and that the company believes it poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks.

The same cache of unsecured, publicly discoverable documents revealed details of a planned, invite-only CEO summit in Europe that is part of the company’s drive to sell its AI models to large corporate customers. 

The AI lab left the material, including what appeared to be a draft blog post announcing a new model, in an unsecured, public data lake, according to documents separately located and reviewed by Roy Paz, a senior AI security researcher at LayerX Security, a computer and network security company, and Alexandre Pauwels, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Cambridge. 

In total, there appeared to be close to 3,000 assets linked to Anthropic’s blog that had not been published previously on the company’s news or research sites that were nonetheless publicly-accessible in this data cache, according to Pauwels, who Fortune asked to assess and review the material.

After being informed of the data leak by Fortune on Thursday, Anthropic removed the public’s ability to search the data store and retrieve documents from it.

In a statement provided to Fortune, Anthropic acknowledged that a “human error” in the configuration of its content management system led the draft blog post to being accessible. It described the unpublished material that was left in an unsecured and publicly-searchable data store as “early drafts of content considered for publication.”

As well as referring to Mythos, the draft blog post also discussed a new tier of AI models that it says will be called “Capybara”. In the document, Anthropic says: “’Capybara’ is a new name for a new tier of model: larger and more intelligent than our Opus models—which were, until now, our most powerful.” Capybara and Mythos appear to refer to the same underlying model.

Currently, Anthropic markets each of its models in three different sizes: the largest and most capable model versions are branded Opus, while a slightly faster and cheaper, but less capable, versions are branded Sonnet, and the smallest, cheapest, and fastest are called Haiku. However, in the blog post, Anthropic describes Capybara as a new tier of model that is even larger and more capable than Opus, but also more expensive.

“Compared to our previous best model, Claude Opus 4.6, Capybara gets dramatically higher scores on tests of software coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity, among others,” the company said in the blog.

The document also said the company had completed training “Claude Mythos,” which the draft blog post described as “by far the most powerful AI model we’ve ever developed.”

In response to questions about the draft blog post, the company acknowledged training and testing a new model. “We’re developing a general purpose model with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. “Given the strength of its capabilities, we’re being deliberate about how we release it. As is standard practice across the industry, we’re working with a small group of early access customers to test the model. We consider this model a step change and the most capable we’ve built to date.”

The document Fortune and the cybersecurity experts reviewed consists of structured data for a webpage, complete with headings and a publication date, suggesting it forms part of a planned product launch. It outlines a cautious rollout strategy for the model, beginning with a small group of early-access users. The draft blog notes that the model is expensive to run and not yet ready for general release.

Significant new cybersecurity risks

The new AI model poses significant cybersecurity risks, according to the leaked document. 

“In preparing to release Claude Capybara, we want to act with extra caution and understand the risks it poses—even beyond what we learn in our own testing. In particular, we want to understand the model’s potential near-term risks in the realm of cybersecurity—and share the results to help cyber defenders prepare,” the document said.

Anthropic appears to be especially worried about the model’s cybersecurity implications, noting that the system is “currently far ahead of any other AI model in cyber capabilities” and “it presages an upcoming wave of models that can exploit vulnerabilities in ways that far outpace the efforts of defenders.” In other words, Anthropic is concerned that hackers could use the model to run large-scale cyberattacks.

The company said in the draft blog that because of this risk, its plan for the model’s release would focus on cyber defenders: “We’re releasing it in early access to organizations, giving them a head start in improving the robustness of their codebases against the impending wave of AI-driven exploits.”

The latest generation of frontier models from both Anthropic and OpenAI have crossed a threshold that the companies say poses new cybersecurity risks. In February, when OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, the company said it was the first model it had classified as “high capability” for cybersecurity-related tasks under its Preparedness Framework—and the first it had directly trained to identify software vulnerabilities. 

Anthropic, meanwhile, navigated similar risks with its Opus 4.6, released the same week. The model demonstrated an ability to surface previously unknown vulnerabilities in production codebases, a capability that the company acknowledged was dual-use, meaning that it could both help hackers as well as help cybersecurity defenders find and close vulnerabilities in code.

The company has also reported that hacking groups, including those linked to the Chinese government, have attempted to exploit Claude in real-world cyberattacks. In one documented case, Anthropic discovered that a Chinese state-sponsored group had already been running a coordinated campaign using Claude Code to infiltrate roughly 30 organizations—including tech companies, financial institutions, and government agencies—before the company detected it. Over the following ten days, Anthropic investigated the full scope of the operation, banned the accounts involved, and notified affected organizations.

An exclusive executive retreat

The leak of not-yet-public information appears to stem from an error on the part of users of the company’s content management system (CMS), which is the software used to publish the company’s public blog, according to cybersecurity professionals. 

Digital assets created using the content management system are set to public by default and typically assigned a publicly accessible URL when uploaded—unless the user explicitly changes a setting so that these assets are kept private. As a result, a large cache of images, PDF files, and audio files seem to have been published erroneously to an unsecured and publicly-accessible URL via the off-the-shelf content management system.

Anthropic acknowledged in a statement to Fortune that “an issue with one of our external CMS tools led to draft content being accessible.” It attributed this issue to “human error.” 

Many of the documents appeared to be discarded or unused assets for past blog posts like images, banners, and logos. However, several appeared to be what were meant to be private or internal documents. For example, one asset has a title that described an employee’s “parental leave.” 

The documents also included a PDF containing information about an upcoming, invite-only retreat for the CEOs of European companies being held in the U.K., and which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will attend. Names of the other attendees are not listed, but are described as Europe’s most influential business leaders.

The two-day retreat is described as an “intimate gathering” to engage in “thoughtful conversation” at an 18th-century manor-turned-hotel-and-spa in the English countryside. The document says that attendees will hear from lawmakers and policymakers about how businesses are adopting AI and experience unreleased Claude capabilities.

An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune the event “is part of an ongoing series of events we’ve hosted over the past year. We look forward to hosting European business leaders to discuss the future of AI.”

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AI company Anthropic has inadvertently revealed details of an upcoming model release, an exclusive CEO event, and other internal data, including images and PDFs, in what appears to be a significant security lapse. 

The not-yet-public information was made accessible via the company’s content management system (CMS), which is used by Anthropic to publish information to sections of the company’s website.

In total, there appeared to be close to 3,000 assets linked to Anthropic’s blog that had not previously been published to the company’s public-facing news or research sites that were nonetheless publicly-accessible in this data cache, according to Alexandre Pauwels, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Cambridge, who Fortune asked to assess and review the material.

After Fortune informed Anthropic of the issue on Thursday, the company took steps to secure the data so that it was no longer publicly-accessible.

Prior to taking these measures, Anthropic stored all the content for its website—such as blog posts, images, and documents—in a central system that was accessible without a login. Anyone with technical knowledge could send requests to that public-facing system, asking it to return information about the files it contains.

While some of this content had not been published to Anthropic’s website, the underlying system would still return the digital assets it was storing to anyone who knew how to ask. This means unpublished material—including draft pages and internal assets—could be accessed directly.

The issue appears to stem from how the content management system (CMS) used by Anthropic works. All assets—such as logos, graphics, or research papers—that were uploaded to the central data store were public by default, unless explicitly set as private. The company appeared to have forgotten to restrict access to some documents that were not supposed to be public, resulting in the large cache of files being available in the company’s public data lake, cybersecurity professionals who analyzed the data told Fortune. Several of the company’s assets also had public browser addresses. 

“An issue with one of our external CMS tools led to draft content being accessible,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune. The spokesperson attributed the issue to “human error in the CMS configuration.”

There have been several high-profile cases lately of technology companies experiencing technical faults and snafus due to problems with AI-generated code or with AI agents. But Anthropic, which makes the popular Claude AI models and has boasted of automating much of its own internal software development using Claude-based AI coding agents, said AI was not at fault in this case.

The issue with its CMS was “unrelated to Claude, Cowork, or any Anthropic AI tools,” the Anthropic spokesperson said.

The company also sought to downplay the significance of some of the material that had been left unsecured. “These materials were early drafts of content considered for publication and did not involve our core infrastructure, AI systems, customer data, or security architecture,” the spokesperson said.

While many of the documents appear to be discarded or unused assets for past blog posts, like images, banners, and logos, some of the data appeared to detail sensitive information. 

The documents include details of upcoming product announcements, including information about an unreleased AI model that Anthropic said in the documents is the most capable model it has yet trained.

After being contacted by Fortune, the company acknowledged that is developing and testing with early access customers a new model that it said represented a “step change” in AI capabilities, with significantly better performance in “reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity” than prior Anthropic models.

The publicly-accessible data also included information about an upcoming, invite-only retreat for the CEOs of large European companies being held in the U.K. that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is scheduled to attend. An Anthropic spokesperson said the retreat was “part of an ongoing series of events we’ve hosted over the past year” and the company was “developing a general-purpose model with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity.”

Among the documents were also images that appear to be for internal use, including one image with a title that describes an employee’s “parental leave.” 

It’s not the first time a tech company has inadvertently exposed internal or pre-release assets by leaving them publicly accessible before official announcements.

Apple has twice leaked information through its own website—once in 2018, when upcoming iPhone names appeared in a publicly accessible sitemap file hours before launch, and again in late 2025, when a developer discovered that Apple had shipped its redesigned App Store with debugging files left active, making the site’s entire internal code readable to anyone with a browser.

Gaming companies like Epic Games and Nintendo have also seen pre-release images, in-game assets, and other media leak via content delivery network systems (CDNs) or staging servers, similar to the data lake Anthropic used in this case. Even larger firms such as Google have accidentally exposed internal documentation at public URLs, and data associated with Tesla vehicles has been exposed through misconfigured third‑party servers.

However, the problem is likely exacerbated by AI coding tools now readily available on the market—including Anthropic’s own Claude Code.  

These tools can automate crawling, pattern detection, and correlation of publicly accessible assets, making it far easier to discover this kind of content and lower the barriers to entry for doing so. AI tools like Claude Code or Codex can also generate scripts or queries that scan entire datasets, rapidly identifying patterns or file naming conventions that a human might miss. 

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Global conflicts are awakening governments—and investors—to the importance of modernizing military forces, says Brandon Tseng, the cofounder and president of ShieldAI, a maker of AI-powered drones that announced Thursday that it had raised $1.5 billion in Series G funding at a $12.7 billion valuation.

The new funding more than doubles the valuation of the San Diego, Calif. defense startup, which was founded in 2015 and was previously valued at $5.6 billion by investors. Shield AI is projecting more than 80% revenue growth by the end of 2026, Shield AI cofounder Brandon Tseng and CFO Kingsley Afemikhe told Fortune. That would equate to at least $540 million in revenue this year, based on Shield AI’s 2025 revenue figures.

“We don’t expect growth to slow down,”  Tseng said in an interview. 

Shield’s Series G round—co-led by first-time investors Advent International and JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative—is happening in tandem with two major financial moves: the pending acquisition of the tactical simulation company Aechalon and a non-dilutive $500 million fixed return preferred equity financing deal with Blackstone. The infusion of capital will fund the acquisition, as well as help Shield scale its Hivemind autonomy platform and its V-BAT surveillance drone. The funds will also support the development of a new combat drone that is preparing for its first flight by the end of this year.

The deal underscores how global conflict is reshaping venture priorities in Silicon Valley, as a crop of young companies including Anduril and Allen Control Systems produce new tech-driven products designed for a changing battlefield. Shield AI has gained traction from the deployment of its systems in Ukraine, where its V-BAT surveillance drone has been used in active operations.

Tseng told Fortune that fundraising discussions began in November, prior to the U.S. military capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or the recent strikes in Iran. Tseng says investor sentiment has shifted alongside “a broad observation” that the world has become less stable.

“Countries around the world are modernizing their militaries, and obviously the U.S. has pushed for an increase in defense spend among all of its allies and partners,” Tseng said. “That certainly is in the background as investors think about investing in defense.”

Tseng declined to say whether Shield AI’s V-BAT drones have been deployed in Iran, but noted the company operates “in almost every single conflict zone.”

Advent Chairman David Mussafer is joining Shield AI’s board as part of the funding deal, while investor Todd Combs, of JPMorgan Chase, will serve as a board observer. Aechelon cofounder and CEO Nacho Sanz-Pastor will continue to lead the business unit and oversee its integration with Hivemind, reporting to Shield AI CEO Gary Steele, according to Tseng.

Shield’s projection of more than 80% revenue this year does not include the acquisition of Aechelon.  

The final close of Shield AI’s funding round will also be contingent on approval of the Aechelon acquisition. If the deal fails to clear regulatory hurdles, Tseng said the company would “re-evaluate” the financing with investors.

Aechelon’s platform, which is used across the autonomy sector to simulate battlefield environments and train AI machines, will remain open to other customers following the acquisition, Tseng said.

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A federal judge has ruled in favor of artificial intelligence company Anthropic in temporarily blocking the Pentagon from labeling the company as a supply chain risk.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin on Thursday said she was also blocking President Donald Trump’s directive ordering all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic and its chatbot Claude.

Lin said the “broad punitive measures” taken against the AI company by the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared arbitrary and capricious could “cripple Anthropic,” particularly Hegseth’s use of a rare military authority that’s typically directed at foreign adversaries.

“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” Lin wrote.

Lin’s ruling followed a 90-minute hearing in San Francisco federal court on Tuesday at which Lin questioned why the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of punishing Anthropic after negotiations over a defense contract went sour over the company’s attempt to prevent its AI technology from being deployed in fully autonomous weapons or surveillance of Americans.

Anthropic had asked Lin to issue an emergency order to remove a stigma that the company alleges was unjustifiably applied as part of an “unlawful campaign of retaliation” that provoked the San Francisco-based company to sue the Trump administration earlier this month. The Pentagon had argued that it should be able to use Claude in any way it deems lawful.

Lin said her ruling was not about that public policy debate but about the government’s actions in response to it.

“If the concern is the integrity of the operational chain of command, the Department of War could just stop using Claude. Instead, these measures appear designed to punish Anthropic,” Lin wrote.

Anthropic has also filed a separate and more narrow case that is still pending in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

Lin wrote that her order is delayed for a week and doesn’t require the Pentagon to use Anthropic’s products or prevent it from transitioning to other AI providers.

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Bitcoin’s largest options expiry of the year is colliding with geopolitical volatility that shows no sign of letting up with make or break peace talks uncertain. 

Roughly $14 billion of Bitcoin options are set to expire Friday, as measured by the number for outstanding contracts, known as open interest. The quarterly rollover—which wipes out close to 40% of open positions on the dominant Deribit exchange—comes amid conflicting signals on the prospect of a halt to the nearly month-long war in the Middle East.

The overlap is sharpening a key question for traders: whether the expiry has been artificially muting Bitcoin’s price swings and if its removal will expose the token to a sharper move driven by geopolitics.

Bitcoin has been stuck between roughly $60,000 and $75,000 in recent weeks, drifting well below its October 2025 peak of around $126,000 after a market-wide crash on Oct. 10. The lack of direction has persisted despite geopolitical tensions and intermittent inflows into U.S. exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin fell as much as 4% to $68,122 on Thursday. 

Derivatives positioning helps explain the calm, according to market participants. Institutional investors spent much of the first quarter selling upside bets—effectively wagering that prices wouldn’t rise sharply—to generate income in a subdued market, said James Harris, chief executive officer at asset manager Tesseract. That activity shifted risk onto market makers, who have been buying on dips and selling into rallies to keep their exposure balanced.

The result has been a dampening of volatility, traders say, with price action repeatedly gravitating toward a so-called “max pain” level—the point where the largest number of options expire worthless—near $75,000. In practical terms, those hedging flows have acted like a magnet, nudging Bitcoin higher while capping gains.

“The hedging flows might pull price action toward that level as settlement approaches but effectively cap the range,” Harris said.

Once the contracts roll off, the mechanical buying and selling tied to hedging will fade, potentially leaving Bitcoin more exposed to external catalysts. And those catalysts are mounting. On Thursday, President Donald Trump pushed back his deadline for Iran to strike a deal with the U.S. or face more attacks, saying talks with the country were going “very well.” 

“Without clear direction from the Middle East, Bitcoin is likely to stay in the $70,000–$75,000 zone,” said Andreja Cobeljic, head of derivatives trading at AMINA Bank, adding that the upper bound could act as both a magnet and resistance. A credible ceasefire could push Bitcoin above $75,000, triggering further gains as bearish positions are unwound. Failure in negotiations, however, may drag the token back toward the rising trend line at $68,500, he added.

The broader backdrop offers limited support. While March has seen about $1.5 billion of net inflows into Bitcoin ETFs—a stabilization after four straight months on net outflows — those allocations have proven sensitive to macro shifts. A single day in mid-March saw $163 million pulled as interest-rate expectations changed.

That fragility underscores the central takeaway from Friday’s expiry: the calm in Bitcoin may be more structural than fundamental.

Jasper De Maere, an OTC trader at Wintermute, said that options dynamics can create a “mild upwards bias,” but conviction remains weak. Once the expiry passes, the forces suppressing volatility will recede — leaving macroeconomics and geopolitics firmly back in control.

That leaves the market exposed to sharper moves if sentiment turns.

“The risk is not that institutions are absent. The risk is that they are present but will exit rapidly if the weekend delivers an adverse outcome and the structural cushion that was there last week will not be there to slow the move. Volatility is more likely to increase from Friday than decrease as a result,” Harris said.

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After a major insurance company denied coverage for a medical flight that could save her daughter’s life, Alexandria McMahon took the story to social media and caught the attention of billionaire Mark Cuban.

Stella McMahon was diagnosed with T-cell leukemia at just four months old. Now, a year later to the day, she’s been fighting relentless fevers above 104 degrees for nearly a month; her liver’s overtaxed, and her body’s too immunocompromised to ward off a virus on its own. The cruel irony of Stella’s condition: because she has T-cell leukemia, her doctors at Children’s Minnesota had successfully eradicated her T-cells, the very cells she needed to fight the virus now threatening her life.

The McMahon Family

Her oncologist, Dr. Lane Miller, identified a solution: a federally funded study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in which genetically modified T-cells, donated and engineered in a lab, are transfused into the patient. The procedure itself was covered. The medical flight to get Stella there was not.

Her mom, Alexandria, submitted a pre-authorization request through the family’s major insurance provider on a Sunday, March 15. For five days, she heard nothing. “I called them on a Friday just to try to understand what was happening, like why it was taking so long,” she told Fortune, while the sounds of little Stella were heard in the background. “And from that phone call, I learned that we had actually been denied.”​

The silence, she said, was devastating in its timing. “To be denied on a Friday from a major business was quite a hit, because they’re closed on the weekend, and they said that they wouldn’t be getting back to us for 24 to 72 hours, business days.”​ Dr. Miller, McMahon explained, said it was imperative that little 16-month-old Stella receive treatment immediately.

When she pressed the representative for an explanation, she ran into a wall. “She couldn’t tell me the reason why they denied because I didn’t have a medical degree,” McMahon recalled. “I asked her to read [the policy] with me line by line and tell me at what point Stella became disqualified. Because when I read it with my eyes, it looked like everything should be approved.” She recorded the conversation, a decision that would change everything.​

TikTok video leads to a breakthrough

McMahon posted the recorded call on social media, and shortly after, it went viral. “I think within about 12 hours, Dr. Warris, who runs Claimable, one of Mark Cuban’s companies, he said, ‘Mark Cuban saw your video, and he wants me to take care of this for you,’” McMahon said.​

Claimable, co-founded by Dr. Warris Bokhari, a former NHS physician and healthcare strategist, uses AI to help patients and families navigate and appeal insurance denials. The company’s mission is to “amplify your voice, combining it with cutting-edge science and policy insights to help protect your rights,” according to its website.​

Cuban, who has long been a vocal critic of the American healthcare system, wrote on his blog in Jan. 2025 that “healthcare is a very simple industry made complicated,” arguing for radical transparency and the removal of insurance companies from the payment equation. His other healthcare venture, Cost Plus Drugs, has similarly sought to reduce opacity in pharmaceutical pricing.

The McMahon Family

Cuban’s big credit limit and bigger heart

Within 48 hours, the McMahons were on a chartered medical aircraft to Cincinnati, paid for by Cuban and Claimable. “The hospital case manager was able to book a medical flight with Mark Cuban and Claimable’s money,” McMahon clarified.​

The trip needed to happen in a single day. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital did not admit Stella to its campus; she had to remain based in Minneapolis. With Stella connected to five or six pumps, driving was never a realistic option. “She could not ethically be discharged,” McMahon explained, saying the family was so desperate to get Stella her treatment, no idea was too out there. “We were considering renting an RV and just trying.” Even that possibility was off the table, given Stella’s medical needs. A friend of her husband’s who works for Delta had also offered a plane, but that would have meant discharging Stella without medical support and “hoping for the best.”​

Instead, Cuban’s team moved fast. “He basically laid down a credit card right then and there, and said, ‘ Book the flight, book a medical flight,” McMahon said. “And we are going to help you fight insurance after she gets taken care of. Stella is the most important.”​

For McMahon, the speed and generosity of the response were difficult to fully absorb while simultaneously watching her daughter struggle. “We are dramatically humbled. We are so thankful that this happened,” she said. “I still feel like it’s unbelievable. I still feel like I’m kind of coming down from something that was just so exciting and so positive. And it felt weird being so incredibly happy and ecstatic and thankful while watching my daughter clearly struggle.”​

She had no prior knowledge of Cuban’s track record of intervening in cases like Stella’s until the outpouring of comments on her videos. “I had no idea that this person could do something so amazing,” she said. “He has the resources, and he has the heart, and he did it.”​

The McMahon Family

Inspiration to pay it forward

At the time of Fortune‘s interview on Thursday, Stella was showing her first signs of improvement: less jaundiced, her eyes beginning to clear. She was still running fevers above 104 degrees, and her doctors cautioned that the T-cell study can take five to seven days before showing results. But she had avoided an ICU stay. “Stella is now stable,” McMahon said. “She got everything she needs. We’re where we need to be, and it is all thanks to human connection.”​

A GoFundMe organized to help the family cover costs, including lost income for McMahon’s husband, who works in aviation and has had to take time off, had raised over $42,000 toward a $50,000 goal from more than 870 donors as of publication.

McMahon said she hopes to use the attention Stella’s story has drawn to advocate for other families facing the same walls. “If I can turn around and give back to people, I will,” she said. “I will carry this and try to pay it forward for the rest of my life.”

The McMahon Family

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Iran and the United States appeared at an impasse Thursday, hardening their positions over ceasefire talks and setting the stage for another potential escalation in the Middle East war as thousands more U.S. troops neared the region.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump extended his deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz to April 6, and Tehran tightened its grip on the crucial strait while Israel poured more troops into southern Lebanon to fight the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

Sirens over Israel warned of barrages of incoming Iranian missiles, and Gulf nations worked to intercept fire. Heavy strikes were reported in Iran’s capital and other cities.

In a war that appears defined by who can take the most pain, the U.S. has offered shifting objectives, including ensuring Iran’s missile and nuclear programs are no longer a threat and ending Tehran’s support for armed groups in the region. Washington at one point also pushed for the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy.

While the U.S.-Israeli campaign has hit Iran’s military and government hard, killing top leaders and striking scores of targets, Iran continues to fire missiles, and there is no sign of an uprising against the government.

Surviving could be seen as victory

for Iran

For Iran’s leadership, by contrast, merely outlasting the onslaught could be seen as victory. It may be hoping to get the U.S. to back down by roiling the world economy with its stranglehold on the the strait, which has disrupted oil and natural gas shipments and raised prices worldwide for energy and other goods.

Short of a negotiated solution, the U.S. would need a dramatic escalation to end Iran’s attacks and restore the free flow of goods through the strait, where 20% of all traded oil and natural gas is transported in peacetime. Iran rejected a ceasefire proposal put forth by the U.S., while putting forth its own demands.

Trump has vowed to strike Iran’s power plants if it does not fully reopen the strait. His new deadline pulls back on his earlier threat to bombing Iran’s energy plants if Tehran did not open the critical waterway.

Iran had threatened to retaliate against the region’s vital infrastructure, like desalination facilities, if Trump followed through. Trump said he was holding off on carrying out his threat because talks aimed at ending the conflict are going “very well.”

A Gulf Arab bloc said Thursday that Iran is now exacting tolls from ships to ensure their safe passage through the waterway.

Iran seen as operating Strait of Hormuz as ‘de facto toll booth’

Iran has been blocking ships from the strait that it perceives as linked to the U.S. and Israeli war effort, while letting through a trickle of others. Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Thursday that Iran is allowing some oil tankers through as a sign of good faith for talks.

Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi, secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a bloc of six Gulf Arab nations, said Iran was charging for safe passage.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence called it a “de facto ‘toll booth’ regime,” saying that at least two vessels have paid in yuan, China’s currency.

Iran’s grip on the strait and relentless attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure have sent Brent crude, the international standard, up more than 40% since the war started.

Israel said it killed the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy, Commodore Alireza Tangsiri, and the country’s naval intelligence chief, Behnam Rezaei. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Tangsiri was responsible for bombing operations that have blocked ships from crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Iran did not immediately acknowledge the killings.

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Southeast Asia is racing to build the infrastructure powering the AI boom, but its hot, humid climate could be making that expansion more complicated. Data center demand in the region, where supply is up to 70% lower than in mature markets like the U.S. and China, is expected to grow by 20% each year through 2028, according to the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council. There are now 370 data centers in the region, with the majority in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.

“The ecosystem has realized that if they don’t latch on to this next wave, they might end up being digitally colonized,” Mayank Shrivastava, the CEO of Singapore-headquartered BDx Data Centers, told Fortune. “Economic gains flow to the country that converts raw material into finished goods–and, in this case, the raw material is data.” 

Yet, Southeast Asia’s sultry, tropical climate presents a unique challenge for its data centers, which require more energy than counterparts in cooler climates to keep servers up and running. The region’s temperature ranges between 80 and 95°F throughout the year, while data centers should ideally be maintained between 64 and 81°F, according to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

“The central issue in the tropics is not heat alone, but heat and humidity together,” Lee Poh Seng, a professor specializing in thermal systems at the National University of Singapore (NUS), explains. “In tropical climates, higher ambient temperatures make heat rejection more difficult, while high humidity complicates dew-point control, increases condensation and corrosion risk, and reduces long-term reliability.”

That puts data center operators in a bind. Lots of people live in the tropics, and data centers need to be close by to ensure speedy access. “You can’t ignore the fact that 85% of the world’s population lives outside temperate regions,” Shrivastava says. 

On March 11, BDx became the first firm to implement Singapore’s Tropical Data Center Standard, a set of guidelines aiming to help data centers gradually increase operating temperatures to 26°C (or 78.8°F). The standard was launched last August, and is a core tenet of the country’s Green Data Center roadmap, which seeks to chart sustainable growth pathways for Singapore’s data centers. According to the country’s Infocomm Media Development Authority, every 1°C increase in operating temperature translates to up to 5% in energy savings.

“It’s been a mammoth effort to get different stakeholders to agree on changing the operating metrics of a data center,” Shrivastava says. “It had to be done with extreme caution, since we were tinkering with the engines while the aircraft was flying.”

‘Room to build’

Data center CEOs see Southeast Asia as filling a critical gap in the global AI ecosystem, particularly as companies in the U.S. struggle to overcome outdated power infrastructure and political opposition to new projects.

“The U.S. is still the world’s largest data center market, but it’s facing a lot of constraints, with each state having different regulations on the speed of grid build-up,” Eric Fan, the CEO of Bridge Data Centers, tells Fortune. “Many projects in the U.S. have thus been delayed—and it’s been a global play for where this gap can be plugged.” 

Malaysia plans to add as much as eight gigawatts of gas-fired power by 2030 to meet the growing needs of data centers, while Singapore has pledged over 1 billion Singapore dollars ($784 million) over the next five years for public AI research. 

The global tech sector is also pouring into the region, with giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Tencent all investing billions of dollars in hyperscale data centers.

“Southeast Asia still offers room to build,” says Lee, from NUS. “Tech companies also increasingly see the region as an attractive deployment zone because of its population scale, fibre connectivity and position between the large North Asian and South Asian digital markets.”

BDx Data Centers was founded in 2019, and is now in four different markets: Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Indonesia. The firm’s largest operations are in Indonesia, where it has six data centers, including a 100MW campus in Jakarta. 

Fellow operator Bridge Data Centers was also founded in Singapore in 2017, and now operates data centers across India, Malaysia and Thailand. The firm is backed by Boston-headquartered Bain Capital, which sold a data center firm, Chindata, to a Chinese-led consortium for $4 billion. 

‘An energy-and-cooling challenge’

Despite the excitement about AI’s ability to scale in the digital world, companies can’t escape the real world problems of heat and electricity. 

“AI infrastructure is fundamentally an energy-and-cooling challenge wrapped inside a digital-economy opportunity,” Lee says. “The winning projects in Southeast Asia will not be the ones that simply build the fastest, but the ones to show credible performance in power usage effectiveness, water use, carbon intensity, and grid compatibility.” 

He suggests that firms need to take a “power-first, water-aware and thermally intelligent approach”, by situating projects in places with access to clean power, employing high-efficiency designs and moving beyond room-level cooling to chip-level or liquid-based heat removal.

Both BDx and Bridge Data Centres are exploring alternate energy sources to power their operations. “The big advantage of being in a tropical climate is that you get lots of sun and wind, and you have water around you,” explains Shrivastava of BDx.

Separately, Bridge Data Centers is studying hydrogen and nuclear power, with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2040. One of its Malaysian data centers already sources half its energy from solar, a model Fan wants to adopt in its other locations.

And with traditional sources under strain due to conflict in the Middle East, data centers know they need alternatives. “The Iran war has caused the price of oil to skyrocket, raising concern on the reliability of traditional energies,” Fan says. “This will further push the region’s AI firms to diversify into renewable and greener forms of energy.”

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Most working women in the U.S. believe they are disadvantaged when it comes to earning competitive wages, but many men hold a different view, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

Equal pay emerged as a major source of concern for working women in the poll and an area where men and women are far apart in their perception of gender equity.

Most women who are employed full-time — about 6 in 10 — say men have more opportunities when it comes to earning competitive wages, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, while about one-third think neither gender has an advantage. About 3 in 10 employed women say they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender.

Men who are employed full-time are more divided: About 4 in 10 believe men have an advantage when it comes to wages, while about half think both genders have about the same opportunities and about 1 in 10 say women have more opportunities. Just about 1 in 10 men say they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender.

The survey also found that a majority of employed women say the amount of money they get paid is a “major” source of stress in their life right now, compared to about 4 in 10 employed men.

The findings come at a time when men’s earnings are rising faster than women’s, and the gender wage gap has widened for two years in a row, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Reflecting that shift, Equal Pay Day — which symbolizes how many more days into the year women have to work for their earnings to catch up with men — was Thursday, falling a day later than in 2025. That was still 16 days earlier than the first Equal Pay Day on April 11, 1996, when women earned about 75 cents for every dollar earned by men.

The country is deeply divided over how to confront gender pay disparity. A growing number of mostly Democratic-led states are adopting pay transparency laws aimed at making it easier to uncover unfair practices, including requiring employers to disclose pay ranges in job postings.

President Donald Trump’s second administration, for its part, has hollowed out some agencies and limited legal tools that have been key to investigating unfair pay practices, arguing they threatened meritocracy and presuppose that disparities in the workforce are the result of discrimination.

Many employed women say they’ve experienced wage discrimination

Jessica Thompson, 47, said she has seen gender bias throughout her working life. Until losing her job in January, Thompson said she earned $65,000 a year as a senior sales manager in Rockford, Illinois, while a male colleague with similar credentials had earned $87,000.

Thompson said she had to “really prove myself over four years to get the role. And you know, he just came in, just within a few months and got it.”

The poll indicates that women are particularly likely to see wages as a pain point. Fewer women, about 2 in 10, say they’ve been discriminated against in getting hired because of their gender, and men are about as likely to say the same thing.

The overrepresentation of women, especially Black and Hispanic women, in lower-paying jobs is a key driver of the gender wage gap, as is the “motherhood penalty.” Studies show that women’s earnings fall after having children while men see their wages increase after becoming fathers.

Earnings for women barely rose in 2024, while male earnings jumped 3.7%, widening the gender wage gap for the second straight year after two decades of slight narrowing, according to the latest annual report from the U.S. Census Bureau, which analyzes earnings for full-time workers. Women working full-time on average earned 80.9% of what men earned in 2024, down from 82.7% in 2023.

Most employed women say their pay is a ‘major’ source of stress

Women aren’t just likelier than men to be worried about pay equity — the poll also found that employed women are more economically stressed on a range of measures.

About 6 in 10 working women say the cost of groceries and the cost of housing are a “major” source of stress in their lives, and about half, 56%, say this about the amount of money they get paid. By contrast, about 4 in 10 employed men say the same.

Economists attribute the widening pay gap in part to the post-pandemic return to work of many low-wage women, which brought down the average female earnings. But the past two years have also seen a drop-off in the labor force participation rate of mothers with young children, in part because return-to-office mandates have reduced pandemic-era flexibility.

Few men think they are disadvantaged

Democratic lawmakers have criticized the Trump administration for making it more difficult to investigate wage discrimination as part of its campaign to stamp out diversity and inclusion practices.

Trump has ordered federal agencies to stop enforcing ” disparate impact liability,” a concept in civil rights law that has been used in wage discrimination cases against top companies. The Labor Department has also gutted the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, an agency that has audited the pay practices of major companies and obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for women and minorities who have suffered from unfair policies.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, meanwhile, has pivoted to prioritizing anti-DEI investigations under the premise that men, especially white men, have been discriminated against by practices aimed at advancing women and minorities in the workplace.

The poll suggests that few men see themselves as disadvantaged compared to women in the workplace. Only about 1 in 10 employed men said women had more opportunities when it comes to competitive wages or job advancement.

Michael Bettger, a 51-year-old mechanic who earns $26 an hour in rural Arkansas, said he has seen his wages fall as a result of layoffs and a decade-long struggle with opioid addiction that started after he hurt his back in a worksite accident. But he still believes women struggle more to get ahead in his male-dominated field because of the misogyny he sees, saying other mechanics make jokes about being prone to accidents because female colleagues are a distraction.

“Men do have an advantage and more opportunities for wages. I’ve seen that first hand,” Bettger said. “I have a daughter who wants to be a mechanic, and I’m scared to death of what kind of work she’s going to get.”

___

Savage reported from Chicago and Sanders reported from Washington.

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,156 adults was conducted Feb. 5-8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

___

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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Josh D’Amaro stepped into that corner CEO office at Walt Disney with a clear goal, pledging the company would focus “on coming together as one Disney to deliver a more connected, personalized, and immersive experience to our consumers.”

D’Amaro described a world of Disney entertainment that consolidates its vast intellectual property of movies, games, experiences, and more under one roof. It took a week for some of the biggest bets underpinning that vision to collapse.

The vision of a sweeping field of Disney content relied on multiple external partnerships worth billions of dollars. Several of them unraveled entirely. 

D’Amaro, a veteran leader in Disney’s theme park division, was brought in to steady the ship after a period of uncertain leadership. But three major developments, mostly stemming from decisions made far away from the Magic Kingdom, have made his debut at the top of the company memorable for all the wrong reasons.

OpenAI pulls out the rug

A watershed deal Disney struck with OpenAI late last year dissolved suddenly on Tuesday when the tech company announced it was closing down its Sora video generator app, part of OpenAI’s wider efforts to contain spending ahead of a possible IPO later this year. That ended what was supposed to be a three-year $1 billion partnership, under which some 200 Disney characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other brands would populate short-form AI-generated videos on Disney+. 

OpenAI’s decision came as a shock to Disney executives, who learned that Sora would be shut down just 30 minutes after they had been meeting with OpenAI about the video generator’s future, according to Reuters. One anonymous source called OpenAI’s decision a “big rug-pull.” 

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is reportedly planning a strategy shift to refocus on business fundamentals and a more streamlined product lineup. Sora was wildly popular in terms of downloads and engagement, but proved difficult to monetize despite high operating costs, making it an obvious target if OpenAI was looking to cut costs. Disney may choose to pursue deals with other AI-powered video platforms, but at least for now, its ambitions of fully integrated AI video populated with Disney characters have effectively become collateral damage in another company’s pivot.

Fortnite isn’t so fun anymore

Also on Tuesday, Epic Games—the videogame developer of Fortnite fame—announced it was laying off 1,000 employees after updates to its hit signature product failed to translate to higher engagement. That’s bad news in general. For D’Amaro, it’s personal.

D’Amaro was the chief architect of Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic, announced in 2024. The deal gave Disney a large equity stake and called for the creation of an entirely new digital universe built around Disney characters and stories, where users could engage in immersive entertainment and shopping. As part of the deal, D’Amaro also joined Epic’s board as an observer. The partnership was the cornerstone of his fan-engagement mission: a Fortnite-powered Disney metaverse where Marvel heroes and Star Wars villains lived alongside players.

“He sees the digital realm—and Epic is a manifestation of that—as a very important place for fans to interact with their favorite characters, franchises and brands in a comprehensive way that you can monetize,” Kevin Mayer, a former head of strategy, told the Hollywood Reporter about D’Amaro’s ambitions in February.

In a memo to staff, Epic founder Tim Sweeney said a downturn in Fortnite engagement had left the company in a financial rut, though he added that $500 million in cost cuts should position Epic for major launch plans toward the end of the year. Whether those plans still include Disney’s digital universe remains to be seen.

A Bachelorette scandal

If the tech wreckage weren’t enough, D’Amaro also inherited a reputational fire at ABC, the network company owned by Disney. Last week, ABC cancelled the already-filmed 22nd season of The Bachelorette amid domestic violence allegations directed at Taylor Frankie Paul, the planned star this season.

It was a messy and widely covered distraction that arrived precisely when the new CEO least needed one. It’s the latest in a string of controversies surrounding The Bachelorette and its companion show, The Bachelor, both of which have long been criticized for underrepresenting people of color in their lineups and promoting sexist stereotypes. But ABC’s move last week is the first time it has cancelled a season of one of its signature franchises after having already filmed it, a call that could cost the company millions.

Disney stock has dipped more than 4% over the past week and underlines the challenge behind D’Amaro’s vision of technology as a growth engine. The developments at OpenAI and Epic may have been out of his control, but they have regardless undermined the universe D’Amaro described so keenly just a week ago.

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The U.S. military conflict with Iran is quietly draining the American labor market, with Goldman Sachs estimating that the oil price shock triggered by the war will suppress payroll growth by roughly 10,000 jobs per month through the end of the year — a toll that will be felt most acutely in restaurants, hotels, and retail stores across the country.

In a research note published Thursday, Goldman economist Pierfrancesco Mei laid out a detailed framework for how higher energy prices translate into labor market pain — and the picture isn’t pretty. As explained by the bank earlier in the week, its commodities strategists expect Brent crude to average $105 in March, spike to $115 in April, and then gradually retreat to $80 in the fourth quarter, assuming flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain severely disrupted for roughly six weeks. In an adverse scenario — one where the conflict deepens — Brent could peak as high as $140 a barrel, or $160 in a “severely adverse” scenario.

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran shows no signs of imminent resolution, even as President Trump signals urgency to wrap it up. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has indicated the conflict is expected to last four to six weeks, in line with Goldman’s projections, while Trump told Fox Business that a deal could come as quickly as five days. But experts are far more skeptical: analysts at Brookings warn that without genuine regime change, Iran could rebuild its capabilities and fuel regional instability, while Maximilian Hess of Ementena Advisory told CNBC the situation is a “lose-lose for Washington,” with Iran’s drone advantage and Gulf pressure making a ground war increasingly likely. 

Where the jobs are disappearing

The damage isn’t distributed evenly. Goldman’s sector-level analysis points to leisure and hospitality as the single hardest-hit industry, accounting for roughly 5,000 lost jobs per month, with retail trade shedding another 2,000. The logic is straightforward: when energy prices surge, consumers cut back on discretionary spending first — skipping vacations, eating out less, and trimming shopping trips — while continuing to pay for essentials like healthcare and housing. The oil shock, in other words, hits the working-class service economy well before it touches more insulated sectors.

That dynamic is hitting Gen Z especially hard. A recent Bank of America Institute report found that after nearly two years of lagging other generations in spending, Gen Z’s year-over-year spending growth had actually surpassed Baby Boomers’ by mid-2025 — fueled by slowing rent growth and wages rising roughly 9% year-over-year. But with national gas prices now up approximately 26% year-over-year as of March 23, BofA economists Joe Wadford and David Michael Tinsley warned that the recovery “could be snuffed out before it fully takes hold.” Gen Z carries the highest ratio of gasoline spending to discretionary spending of any generation — and many work in the very leisure and hospitality jobs Goldman now projects will see the steepest cuts. It’s a feedback loop that hits them from both sides: higher costs at the pump and fewer hours at work.

Shock weakened by shale — but not eliminated

Goldman is careful to note that the U.S. economy is far more resilient to oil price shocks than it was in the 1970s. The bank estimates that the effects of a 10% increase in oil prices on unemployment and payroll growth are now roughly one-third as large as they were between 1975 and 1999. Two structural shifts explain the change: the lower oil intensity of U.S. GDP, which reduces the drag on consumer spending and business investment, and the boom in domestic shale production since 2010, which creates an offsetting cushion of energy-sector jobs and capital expenditure.

That cushion, however, is thinner than it used to be. Dramatic productivity improvements in oil extraction mean that even if production ramps up in response to higher prices, the energy sector isn’t likely to add many new workers. Goldman does not expect a meaningful increase in energy capital expenditure, meaning support industries like pipeline construction, oil machinery manufacturing, and oil transportation will see little boost this time around.

Unemployment headed to 4.6%

The cumulative effect is showing up in Goldman’s macro forecasts, which were also adjusted earlier in the week. The bank said it expected the U.S. unemployment rate to climb 0.2 percentage points to 4.6% by the third quarter of 2026 — with the oil shock accounting for roughly half of that rise and the other half reflecting job growth that was already running too slowly to keep pace with labor supply before the conflict began.

Goldman noted that its unemployment projections align closely with simulations run through the Federal Reserve’s own FRB/US model, lending additional credibility to the estimates. In a severely adverse oil price scenario, however, the unemployment hit could reach 0.3 percentage points above the baseline — a scenario that would push joblessness meaningfully higher and potentially force the Fed’s hand on interest rates.

The findings, authored by Goldman’s U.S. Economics team led by chief economist Jan Hatzius, come as Wall Street is increasingly war-gaming the macroeconomic fallout of the Iran conflict — a crisis that has already prompted Goldman to cut its GDP growth forecast and raise its inflation outlook. For younger Americans — who just months ago were finally catching a financial break — the war’s economic cost may prove a particularly cruel twist. The 10,000-jobs-per-month drag is described as a net figure, accounting for any limited gains the energy sector manages to produce. The bottom line: for American workers, the war in Iran has an economic price tag — and it’s being paid every single month.

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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The Trump administration has moved aggressively to restart student loan collections, and a record number of borrowers can’t keep up. The result is showing up in a damaging and lasting way: A generation of young Americans are watching their credit scores collapse.

Credit scores are a core part of personal finance in the U.S. They determine Americans’ access to favorable loans and credit cards, and can even factor into applying for a job. Having good credit is especially relevant for young people, who can benefit the most from better loan terms and job opportunities as they make major financial decisions.

Without years of a good credit baseline, Generation Z is also the most likely to suffer the biggest drops when things go wrong.

Gen Z bears the brunt of falling credit scores

Credit scores are dipping for all Americans. The national average credit score fell to 714 in the second half of 2025, according to a report released Tuesday by FICO, an analytics company that produces the most widely used credit scoring model. It was a decline from the 715 average recorded in the first half of the year, and represented the lowest score since early 2020.

Last year already ranked as the worst for U.S. consumer credit quality since the 2008 financial crisis, FICO reported in September, when the agency found that 2025 delinquencies for auto loans, credit cards, and personal loans were at their highest level since 2009. To be sure, the trough in 2009 was nearly 30 points lower, at 686, and the score had climbed all the way to an all-time high of 718 in 2023 before the recent back-to-back declines.

But while most Americans dealt with only modest declines and remained in a “prime” borrowing position—considered to be within the high 600s and low 700s—it’s a different story for young people. While only around 10% of Americans overall saw their scores fall by 50 or more points between 2024 and 2025, that share jumped to 14.4% of people ages 18 to 29.

Many factors can contribute to a significant score downgrade, including a history of opening up multiple new credit lines. But one of the biggest reasons for Gen Z’s declining creditworthiness is that more young Americans are missing deadlines to make loan payments, specifically their student loan obligations, according to the FICO report.

More than 7 million student loan borrowers had a new credit delinquency reported last year, causing an average 62-point drop for those with missed payments. A decline that big from the national average shuts consumers out of prime borrowing status and the best loan terms. It might also bring many dangerously close to a low credit rating, potentially saddling young Americans with expensive interest rates, reducing employment opportunities, and further distancing Gen Z from homeownership.

Student loan delinquencies hit record highs

Student loan delinquencies have been on the rise ever since payments resumed in force at the end of 2024. A record 7.7 million borrowers had defaulted on $181 billion in federal student loans by the end of last year, in addition to 3 million other recipients who had missed payment deadlines by at least three months, according to the Department of Education.

These payments had been fully on pause between 2020 and 2023, part of the Biden administration’s pandemic relief efforts. Even after deadlines resumed, exemptions and follow-up relief shielded many borrowers from negative credit effects if they missed payments, but those measures have largely been wiped away since Donald Trump returned to office.

Earlier this month, a federal court ruled against Joe Biden’s signature affordable repayment program, meaning millions of borrowers who were enrolled in it will soon see the check come due.

Nearly 7.9 million student loan recipients had a delinquency in the first three quarters of 2025, according to a February report by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. The total number of delinquencies represented a quarter of all payments due, around triple the pre-pandemic delinquency rate. The report pinned most of the responsibility on the administration’s student loan actions, including a recent measure freezing thousands of applications for favorable payment plans linked to income level.

The Century Foundation’s report also tracked a large decline in borrowers’ credit scores. Around 2 million student loan borrowers who faced delinquency last year saw an average 100-point drop in their credit scores from 680 to 580, a below-average rating that makes good loan terms virtually inaccessible. Borrowers at that score level face apartment rental rejections—many landlords require 650 or higher just to apply—and are effectively locked out of homeownership: Just 1.2% of mortgages in 2024 went to borrowers with scores below 580.

The long-term ramifications of this mass downgrading are significant. Negative credit information typically remains on a report for seven years, meaning a generation of young workers may be barred from securing housing, passing employment credit checks, or obtaining affordable personal loans for nearly a decade. An analysis earlier this year found that student loan defaults now occur every nine seconds, a rate that could cast a pall on Gen Z’s hopes for economic mobility well into the 2030s.

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Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: With AI focus, Meta lays Off 700 while rewarding top executives…Google’s memory breakthrough deepens chip selloff...Outgoing CEOs of major companies are citing AI as a factor in their decisions to step down.

Reporting on the ground in northeast Louisiana last month, where Meta is building its massive Hyperion AI data center on over 2,250 acres of former farmland, I was struck by a street sign just minutes from soybean fields, grain silos, and grazing cows.

The sign, marking a newly-built road leading into the construction site, carries an appropriate name: Far Far Away Lane. The nod to Star Wars hints at a new frontier, but the Meta site is so disorientingly vast that what’s happening there feels less like sci-fi and more like the early stages of a city rising from the dirt. The site is five miles long and a mile wide at some points, steel frames jut from the ground, heavy machinery operates around the clock, and an endless stream of trucks pours in before sunrise, feeding a project where thousands of workers in hardhats and neon vests swarm. Residents complain about damage to their vehicles from rocks kicked up by the trucks hurtling to and from the Meta site. 

Something enormous and unfamiliar has landed in rural Richland Parish, and it represents not just Meta’s stratospheric AI ambitions, but the financial, energy-hungry reality of building the infrastructure that underpins the AI boom.

I hope you’ll check out the second article in my series on the effects of the AI data center boom on local communities (the first was a December story on a data center developer’s designs on a vast desert site outside of Phoenix). Meta’s Hyperion arrives at a moment when data centers are no longer just an infrastructure issue—they’re becoming a political one. Just this week, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a moratorium on new data center development, citing concerns about energy use, environmental impact, and strain on local communities. And Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) just floated taxing AI data centers to fund support for workers displaced by automation—a sign that policymakers are starting to connect the infrastructure buildout directly to labor disruption.

But in northeast Louisiana, the impact is hyperlocal. Meta’s project is transforming Richland Parish into a chaotic boomtown almost overnight, with attendant winners and losers. Some businesses are seeing a surge in demand from construction crews, while some residents are being pushed out as housing costs climb and landlords look to capitalize on the influx of higher-paying workers.

Supporters of the project argue that the Meta investment represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a region that has struggled with poverty, job loss, and population decline for decades. But for some Richland Parish residents, the experience is less one of opportunity than of spectatorship: watching the bustle of progress unfold nearby—and suffering through its accompanying headaches—without being able to participate or share in its rewards.

It remains to be seen how this unprecedented AI data center spending spree will play out. Collectively, the biggest tech hyperscalers are projected to invest roughly $630 billion to $700 billion in 2026 alone, a 62% jump from 2025, with total AI-related data-center capital expenditures expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030, driven largely by GPUs and energy infrastructure. Across tech, finance, and policy circles, there’s a growing question: is this a lasting buildout, or the kind of spending surge that precedes a correction?

Meanwhile, Meta’s Hyperion is just an example of something that is becoming more familiar across the country: mega-scale data center projects, providing the computing power underpinning the AI boom and the U.S. race against China to dominate the sector, are changing landscapes, straining energy grids and water tables, and reshaping the economy. 

Because Hyperion is among the furthest along of today’s mega AI data center projects, it may offer one of the first glimpses of how this boom plays out—and the rest of the country is watching. Read the full story here.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

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A war in the Middle East has suddenly made getting a mortgage even more expensive in a U.S. housing market already starved for affordability.

Like any global conflict, its repercussions ripple outward far from the immediate war zone. As KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk illustrated in a recent report, the war has set off a “butterfly effect” across the global economy. 

Now, the war’s disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is being felt by homeowners in towns across the U.S.

The 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.43% last week. That’s more than 30 basis points higher than at the end of last month—and its highest level since October 2025, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey. The 30-year mortgage rate sits at 6.4% as of Thursday.

Joel Kan, MBA’s vice president and deputy chief economist, said elevated oil prices, driven up by the Iran conflict, and the ensuing shipping crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, are contributing to the rate hike. 

“The threat of higher-for-longer oil prices continued to keep Treasury yields elevated, and mortgage rates finished last week higher,” Kan said in a statement. “Higher mortgage rates, coupled with affordability constraints and economic uncertainty, pushed some potential homebuyers to the sidelines.” 

Since the 30-year mortgage rate is benchmarked to the rate of the 10-year Treasury note, mortgage rates rise when the 10-year Treasury note rises. The 10-year Treasury is up to 4.39%, up from about 3.96% from before the start of the war.

The U.S. housing market was already under pressure

The housing market was already under pressure before the war’s start due to a dire housing shortage and concerns about the job market, especially among younger prospective buyers. Even Zillow’s CEO Jeremy Wacksman said homebuyers shouldn’t expect conditions to improve. 

“We aren’t expecting any relief in the short term,” he told Fortune in a recent interview. “I think it’s just going to take a while.”

The surge is also hitting refinance demand, not just purchases, as higher rates have reversed activity that had briefly improved earlier in the month. The MBA report—a weekly survey of respondents that include mortgage bankers, commercial banks, thrifts, and credit unions—also found refinance applications were down 15%. The Refinance Index, a measure of the volume of mortgage applications for refinancing existing loans, dropped 15% from the prior week.

It’s not just mortgage rates; the war’s impact on energy and other commodities are adding insult to injury to an already faltering U.S. economy. As Swonk noted in her report, higher-for-longer oil prices could hike inflation in the near term. Grocery prices are expected to take a hit. It’s no surprise to car owners across the U.S. that gas prices are off the charts, hitting a national average of just under $4 per gallon, according to AAA. And some economists have even invoked the dreaded S-word: stagflation. 

Uncertainty sidelining potential homebuyers

Potential homebuyers are being spooked by war-driven economic uncertainty, along with other factors, including the emerging threat of an AI-induced job apocalypse. Aside from higher mortgage rates, increased energy costs and stock market volatility associated with the war have caused 1 in 4 Americans to pause big purchases like homes and cars, according to a Redfin report released earlier this month. However, the report also notes that the majority of Americans still remain undeterred by the conflict.

That uncertainty looms in the air on Wall Street as investors try to navigate shifting signals from Washington. President Donald Trump announced Monday the U.S. and Iran had been in talks to end the war, sparking a $1.7 trillion stock market rally, and bringing oil prices briefly below $100 a barrel. But Iran’s foreign minister then said, while messages had been exchanged between the U.S. and Iran, no peace talks have taken place. Today, the price of oil is back up to $105 a barrel, measured using the Brent benchmark, up about $6 in just a day.

A Redfin report released Thursday said the back-and-forth is keeping some homebuyers sidelined.

“Markets are bouncing around this week as investors try to keep up with conflicting messages about the conflict in the Middle East,” the report read. “Stocks and bonds rallied on Monday after the White House said the U.S. and Iran had productive conversations, but it is unclear when the conflict will end.”

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The rich have been enjoying unprecedented wealth gains, while workers struggle against sluggish wages and a high cost of living. And the gap is especially stark in one of the country’s most billionaire-dense states.

New York is home to 154 billionaires boasting a collective fortune of $975.7 billion, according to a new report from Oxfam America. Thanks to the state’s position as a financial and investing hub, it’s home to many ultra-rich residents, including Mike Bloomberg ($109 billion) and Stephen Schwarzman ($41.9 billion). And their eye-watering net worths are only growing bigger; over the past year, the wealth of the state’s billionaires increased 11.6%, three times greater than the hourly wage of New York’s private-sector workers. The disparity is worsened by the fact that real average hourly earnings in the state’s private sector have largely stagnated and were even slightly lower in 2025 than before the pandemic, the Oxfam report pointed out. 

And at the top of New York’s elite billionaire club, it’s an even steeper drop down to everyone else. The 10 richest New Yorkers gained $42.4 billion over the past year, according to the report. Each of these ultra-rich billionaires gained about $4.2 billion, reeling in about $2 million per hour. Compared to the state’s average private-sector hourly wage of $39.62, it would take a typical worker 82,863 years to earn as much as one of the 10 wealthiest did last year on average. 

However, the growing economic divide in New York shouldn’t be seen as an anomaly; Oxfam notes this phenomenon is taking hold in all corners of the U.S. 

“What we see in New York is consistent with national trends,” Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic justice at Oxfam America, tells Fortune. “In many ways, we have an economy that’s rigged against working people and in favor of the wealthiest. Past policy choices on issues like tax, corporate power, and workers’ rights have resulted in an economy where the benefits flow upward.”

Why billionaire wealth is skyrocketing in America 

Riddell points to a few key factors in the billionaire wealth boom. 

The wealthiest 0.1% of U.S. households hold around a quarter of all U.S. equities, according to Federal Reserve data, enabling them to grow their fortunes by the billions. Last year, a report from Oxfam revealed that the 10 richest U.S. billionaires—mostly tech founders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who reeled in big gains from their investments—added $698 billion to their net worths between November 2024 and the same month in 2025. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the U.S. owned just 1.1% of the exchange. 

Plus, billionaires enjoyed a boost from the Trump administration’s “inequality-fueling” policies, Riddell says. 

Last July, President Trump passed his One Big Beautiful Bill, which entails reducing the tax bill of the top 0.1% of earners in the country. By 2027, it’s expected that the statute will shave $311,000 off the tax costs of the ultra-rich, while the poorest Americans—making less than $15,000 annually—will be forced to pay even more in taxes. Riddell explains that through the president’s bill, support for working-class New Yorkers will be cut, while million-dollar earners will be given around a $52,000 “handout” this year.

To make a meaningful difference for working-class New Yorkers, Riddell advises the state’s policymakers to address the inequality through tax increases on the wealthiest and raise revenue for critical public services. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed a 2% increase on the city income tax rate of households earning over $1 million annually.

Americans are barely scraping by—and are critical of the wealth gap

The U.S. is home to more billionaires than any other country in the world, but the average worker isn’t getting a slice of America’s monumental economic success. 

Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, told Fortune last year that lower-income households are “hanging on by their fingertips financially.” Cost of living is rising, hiring has slowed to a worrying pace, and layoffs are on the rise. The issue has become so dire that it’s fueling a loneliness crisis, with Americans skipping out on social events and postponing their goals to make ends meet. 

“The grip feels more tenuous because no one’s getting hired. You can sustain that for a while, but you can’t sustain that forever. If the layoffs do pick up, that lower-middle-income group is gonna get nailed—and they have no options,” Zandi said in 2025. “They have debt: They have auto debt, they have student loan debt, they may, if they’re lucky, have a mortgage, but they’re gonna struggle, and their world is going to descend into recession pretty quickly.”

And U.S. citizens aren’t blind to the growing divide between the haves and have-nots—they’re critical of extreme wealth. A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly one-in-five Americans think that being a billionaire is “morally wrong,” with Gen Zers leading the outcry. Another 52% of Americans agreed the wealth gap is a very big problem, according to a 2026 report from YouGov, and 59% said the government should step in to reduce wealth inequality. Another 62% of citizens said that the tax rate on billionaires is either much too low (46%) or too low (16%).

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As fears mount over AI replacing jobs—or workers being outpaced by more AI-savvy peers—standing still has become a liability. For Winston Weinberg, the CEO of AI legal startup Harvey—now valued at $11 billion—that reality isn’t theoretical, it’s how he runs his company. 

“You have to re-earn your position every six months; you need to re-earn your role at Harvey every six months,” Weinberg said on the latest episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast. “It includes me, 100%.”

The mandate isn’t about churn for the sake of it—it’s about survival in an era where innovation is compounding quickly and falling behind can lead to dire consequences. That pressure is especially acute in Silicon Valley, where startups are racing not just against time, but against each other to build the defining AI companies of the next decade. For Harvey, that’s top of mind.

“If you don’t reinvent yourself as a company and as a leader, and whatever your role is at a company right now, fast enough, you will lose,” Weinberg added in the interview with Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle.

Weinberg, a lawyer by training, cofounded Harvey in 2022 alongside Gabriel Pereyra, a former Meta and Google DeepMind AI research scientist. In the company’s early days, the pair notably cold-emailed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—an outreach that eventually helped them secure early access to GPT-4 and backing from the OpenAI Startup Fund. Harvey, which builds AI tools for law firms and in-house legal teams, has also attracted investment from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

From the beginning, Weinberg said, the company survived depending on more than the technology—it required a culture that could move fast and adapt constantly: “The thing that I care the most about with our culture is decisiveness,” he said. “I think you have to basically build a company that has a culture of making decisions very quickly and being OK to make mistakes.”

Adaptability has been critical to Harvey’s $11 billion scale

That willingness to take risks and learn from them, Weinberg added, has been central to distinguishing Harvey from the influx of AI startups—and to helping it scale into a multi-billion-dollar business.

“The reality is, the folks that I have found that haven’t scaled—and when I myself think that I’m not scaling—it’s because I haven’t learned enough in the past couple of months,” he added.

So, when evaluating hires or emerging leaders, Weinberg looks for people who can grow quickly with the company—those who can go from managing no one to leading teams of 20, 50, or even 100.

“The main thing I look at is, can they make decisions, own that decision, and then pivot when they make a mistake?” he said. “Instead of penalizing the mistake, penalize not making the decision or not learning from that mistake going forward.”

A need for constant reinvention and learning is something other top executives have long echoed.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet told Fortune last year that AI is creating a need to fundamentally change business processes.

“In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you really have to be willing to rewire your company,” Sweet said on the inaugural episode of the Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. “Many times, when clients are saying, ’ We’re not getting a lot out of AI, it’s because they’re trying to apply it to how they operate today.”

Sweet stressed that adapting to AI isn’t a one-time shift; it’s an ongoing process.

“This isn’t about using AI on top of what you do today,” Sweet added. “If you’re not significantly changing the way you operate, then you’re not reinventing, and you’re not going to capture the value.”

At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy has similarly emphasized the importance of continuous learning—especially through experimentation.

“We ask why, and why not, constantly,” Jassy wrote last year in a letter to shareholders. “It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable.”

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At Duolingo, job interviews start the moment a candidate steps into a car.

Luis von Ahn, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of the language-learning app, revealed on Phoebe Gates’ and Sophia Kianni’s The Burnouts podcast how a job candidate treats their driver from the airport to the office can make or break their chances of getting hired—regardless of how impressive their résumé looks or how much they like the candidate in the interview process.

Entrepreneur von Ahn, who cofounded Duolingo in 2011 with Severin Hacker, recalled a time when the company had been seeking a chief financial officer “for like a year.” The candidate had a strong résumé and the entire hiring committee “really liked,” he told The Burnouts in a February interview. 

But “it turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the office,” von Ahn said. “And that made us not hire them.” 

The CEO of Duolingo, which has a market cap of $4.65 billion, knew this because he pays taxi drivers to evaluate whether candidates are worth hiring. 

“Our belief is if they’re going to be mean to the driver, they’re probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them,” he said. 

It’s particularly important to Duolingo to hire the right person because of how much the company and von Ahn have leaned into AI. Last April, von Ahn said he was getting rid of contract employees and replacing them with AI. 

“We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” von Ahn wrote in a memo posted to LinkedIn in April 2025. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”

While von Ahn’s taxi-driver test is an unconventional interview test, candidates in today’s brutal job market are being evaluated in ways they may not even realize.

A job market where every detail counts

His approach comes at a time when landing a job has never felt more grueling. Hiring in tech has slowed drastically, with job postings down an estimated 36% from pre-2020 levels, according to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 people working in tech have been laid off so far this year, Layoffs.fyi data shows.

Plus, interview processes have become much longer and more involved. Candidates routinely face five to eight interview rounds, panel presentations, case studies, and personality assessments before receiving an offer. The average time-to-hire in the U.S. is approximately 36 days from job posting to offer, according to research by Alex Benjamin, vice president of talent acquisition at OnPoint Consulting Services.

And on top of that, culture and character evaluations have quietly become a standard part of the process—even when candidates don’t know they’re being assessed.

Other CEOs with unorthodox hiring tactics

Duolingo’s CEO isn’t alone in looking beyond a résumé and interview to look for character signals. 

Trent Innes, the former managing director of accounting platform Xeno, and now chief growth officer at SiteMinder, told The Ventures podcast in an episode published in September 2024 he uses a coffee-cup test to evaluate candidates.

When a job candidate arrives for an interview, the interviewer walks them to the kitchen for a beverage. 

“Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?” Innes said. 

For anyone who leaves their dirty cup behind after the interview and doesn’t offer to take it back to the kitchen, it’s a no-go.

“You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup,’” he said.

Even without odd tests, several big-name CEOs are vocal about how important street smarts and attitude are to securing a job. Amazon built its hiring process around its core Leadership Principles, with interviewers trained to probe for red flags, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been outspoken about valuing street smarts and intellectual curiosity over pedigree alone.

“I care how you deal with our tellers, our guards, and our receptionists as much as I care how you deal with CEOs,” Dimon said in a July 2024 interview with LinkedIn. “It’s those 300,000 people that matter, and we have to set up right for everybody.”

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If you are watching the chaos unfurling in the Middle East and thinking, “this doesn’t affect me,” that might be because you live on the West Coast or in a large Northeastern metropolitan area.

Where you live determines the impact the war in Iran has on your personal finances, according to an analysis by Oxford Economics.

Since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, the economic fallout has included rising oil prices and volatility in equity markets. Oil prices are of particular note because consumers feel the pinch at the gas pump in an environment where they are already sensitive to further pressures on affordability.

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 flow through the strait every day, about 20% of the global oil supply. Iran has said it controls the strait, littering it with mines, and ship captains are too nervous to enter the waterway, choking off global supply and sending prices spiralling.

However, other pockets of the economy are also impacted by disruption in the strait: fertilisers are a by-product of gas production, driving inflation in agriculture costs. There’s only a certain margin of costs that producers can absorb before they need to pass it on, with consumers ultimately footing the bill in another very visible way. Additionally, higher gas prices aren’t just borne by consumers but businesses as well: Transportation costs for farm equipment, commercial shipping, trucking, and delivery services have also increased as a result of the disruption.

The conflict in Iran, and the increase in oil prices as a result, have a “disproportionate” impact on low-income households because they spend a larger portion of their budgets on fuel, food, and utilities—the prices of which have increased because of the war, according to Barbara Denham of Oxford Economics.

“Metros where households spend the highest share on these commodities are largely in the South, in West Virginia, or scattered across the Midwest,” Denham noted. “Most are relatively small.”

Families living in Jackson, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport (MS), St. Joseph (MO), and Des Moines (IA) are among those feeling the sharpest end of the increases, the report added, as households in these metros spend an average of 16% of their total budget on groceries, fuel, and utilities. Unsurprisingly, these areas also have high levels of low-income households earning less than $35,000, and tend to be smaller and more remote locations.

The extent of the damage to household finances resulting from increases in oil prices depends not only on how long the conflict continues and how it is resolved, but also on how quickly trade routes reopen. A matter of weeks ago Wolfe Research chief economist Stephanie Roth said “food-at-home” inflation might rise by roughly 2 percentage points, adding about 0.15 percentage points to headline inflation.

An update this week from Britain’s IGD (Institute of Grocery Distribution) suggested food inflation could increase from the country’s current rate of 3.6% to over 8% by June.

At the other end of the spectrum, West Coast, and Northeastern metros spend less of their overall budget on groceries, utilities, and fuel—families in Seattle, Ithaca (NY), Lakeland (FL), Vineland (NJ), and Phoenix spend approximately 11% or less of their total budget on these three costs.

“While we believe that higher energy prices should have more of an impact on headline inflation than on growth, at least over the short term, the psychological impact of both the war and soaring gas prices is already registering on consumer sentiment surveys,” noted Denham. “We still forecast positive consumer spending growth of 1.9% this year … but we have lowered our GDP growth forecast from 2.8% to 2.4% due to the impact of higher oil prices and uncertainty weighing on consumer spending.”

A bump for some

While a bump in oil prices isn’t the most welcome news for consumers, it’s a silver lining for the oil drilling and gas mining sector. In 2020, the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum for the first time since at least the 1940s, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Therefore, certain areas—and a handful of states—will see an upward tick in growth courtesy of the new supply and demand equilibrium. More than half of drilling GDP is generated, unsurprisingly, in non-metro counties: The Permian Basin in West Texas (which also includes counties in New Mexico) accounts for 35% of total mining and drilling GDP and 12% of those jobs.

“While we forecast that mining GDP will increase marginally in these counties, the impact on job growth will be more muted as firms can ramp up production in the short run,” Denham added.

Areas heavily involved in the refinery process also stand to gain, observed Denham: “The refined oil sector will also see a short-term uplift in GDP due to the jolt to oil prices. Refineries differ somewhat from drilling in that they are partly concentrated in Texas (Houston, Beaumont, Corpus Christi, and Dallas) but also have a large presence in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Bellingham (WA). Indeed, the top 10 metros account for 50% of refining GDP and a third of the jobs.”

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