Fortune

Later this week, President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping will meet at the White House to discuss AI policy alongside leaders of the biggest AI companies. The summit comes on the heels of a string of escalating news about swarms of AI agents acting against instructions, breaking out of supposedly secure environments, taking control of internal systems, and hacking into companies. Two weeks ago, AI researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from Anthropic warning, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” But heading into the diplomatic meeting, tech executives and politicians have claimed that any form of AI deceleration in the U.S. would cede critical ground in an existential race with China. 

This is a self-serving con.

After 30 years in the technology industry, last year I left my job as CEO of global job platform Indeed to dedicate myself full-time to fighting for necessary AI guardrails. I have been writing and talking about these issues for a decade. In the past week, more people have asked me what the hell is going on than in all of that time combined. It’s easy to see why.

I am deeply concerned about these recent security incidents and the existential risks of AI. I have equally urgent concerns about non-existential harms of AI: impact on jobs and the economy, kids and mental health, disinformation, wealth and power inequality, and climate, not to mention providing the tools to power authoritarianism. We don’t need killer robots for risks to be catastrophic.

Any one of these is too great to ignore. Together they point to the same root problem: the true threat of AI is not a rival nation, it is the juggernaut of accelerationism.

In 2023, venture capitalist and Silicon Valley kingmaker Marc Andreessen published The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, arguing that markets and growth are unambiguously good, and that those calling for “safety,” “ethics,” or “responsibility” are “enemies” of civilization. He writes, “We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development.” And elsewhere, “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”

Andreessen is not alone in his extreme thinking. Accelerationism is the chief article of faith among key leaders of the AI industry — and of the Trump administration. But as public concerns about AI have grown, accelerationists know that “delay is murder” is a political loser. The new go-to argument against reasonable AI guardrails is the claim that America must race recklessly or lose ground to our dangerous adversary, China.

But the loudest voices for AI acceleration have direct financial ties to its uninterrupted growth. And the very same administration issuing this warning reopened sales of Nvidia’s AI chips to China. If they were truly worried about a threat from a foreign nation, they would not be arming China.

We also know China is not close to catching up. Chinese companies own only an estimated 5 percent of the world’s AI computing capacity — a fraction of what U.S. firms control. Much of Chinese AI firm innovation has come from “distillation” of more powerful U.S. models, meaning they advance primarily at the pace of U.S. companies. If we slow down, they are likely to slow down.

Since 2021, China has implemented some of the tightest controls over AI of any nation, from rules protecting kids to outlawing the use of “deepfakes” to a court ruling that companies cannot replace workers with AI. Last week, Chen Yixin, head of China’s Ministry of State Security, argued that AI threatens party rule and called for even more control.

The last time humanity created an extraordinarily powerful technology with the potential to change the world for good — or destroy it — was the Manhattan Project. By 1949, the Soviets had the bomb, and the U.S. was in a literal existential race.

Here’s what we didn’t do. We didn’t say, “We need to beat the Soviets at all costs, so we’re going to open source nuclear fission technology. Let’s create massive financial incentives for the private sector to invest a staggering amount of capital so companies can build their own reactors and weapon systems as quickly as possible. While we’re at it, let’s remove all regulation and accountability so we can innovate as fast as possible.”

Instead, the U.S. spearheaded the single greatest global collaboration in human history. We established the International Atomic Energy Agency, and 191 nations signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. The results have not been perfect — four new nuclear nations emerged, and in my lifetime we’ve witnessed Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (to name a few). But we haven’t blown up the world yet.

It took Hiroshima to start the nuclear conversation. The surge of alarm over the past few weeks gives me hope that we can start the AI conversation without an AI catastrophe.

The bad news is that the accelerationist agenda is being powered by a small group of AI billionaires — among them founders of OpenAI and Palantir, along with Andreessen — who have pledged $140 million to defeat pro-regulation candidates during the midterm elections. Following the wildly successful playbook of the crypto industry in the 2024 election, their aim is to send a clear message to sitting lawmakers: talking about regulation is political suicide.

The good news is that recent polls show the American people overwhelmingly agree, across party lines, that AI poses significant potential harm and must be regulated. The political ground is shifting faster than most people realize. In the past week, more than a dozen U.S. Republican lawmakers told MS NOW they take AI risks seriously, and Sen. Kevin Cramer called the administration’s stance “the least popular position in America.” This is no longer a partisan issue, and it is not a fringe one.

To those who say it’s not possible for China and the U.S. to collaborate on AI safety: was there any reason to believe that the Soviet Union would collaborate with the U.S. on nuclear safety?

Self-interest suggests there’s reason for hope. China has shown it cares deeply about structural order, and societal upheaval or rogue actors with bioweapons are every bit as abhorrent to them as they are to the U.S. Policy experts from both nations have held “productive” Track Two discussions for years. The groundwork is in place. What is needed now is willing leadership.

If AI is truly the world’s most transformational technology — and according to those building it, AI is the most transformational technology humanity will ever invent — then it should be treated with the most care and consideration of anything we’ve ever done. The accelerationist path we are currently on is the exact opposite. 

On Thursday, Presidents Trump and Xi will sit down with the leaders of the world’s biggest AI companies to talk about a race. But on AI, China is not our enemy and we are not China’s. Our common enemy is the race itself — accelerationism — and the people in that room are the very ones who can stop it. 

In 1957, the U.S. and the Soviet Union seized their moment. Let’s not let waste ours.

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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Washington and Silicon Valley have found a new fight to pick over artificial intelligence in “pacing,” or the deliberate throttling of frontier model development until safety, alignment, and society at large can catch up. To its detractors, pacing is unilateral disarmament in the race with China. To its champions, pacing is the only responsible path for a technology whose own creators warn of catastrophic risk. 

Both camps have fallen prey to the “Compute-to-GDP Fallacy”—the mistaken belief that every incremental leap in AI model performance immediately translates into macroeconomic output. Every prior general-purpose technology took decades to diffuse into measurable productivity. AI is following the same curve at an accelerated pace, but everyone seems to buy the hype that the laws of history or of economics do not apply this time.

In reality, Corporate America is already years behind the AI frontier, and the labs’ commercial fortunes will be decided by trust and adoption, not raw capability. Pacing would cost the economy remarkably little. Racing ahead of alignment could cost far more. Here’s why we—whether out of arrogance or misdiagnosis—are simply having the wrong argument.

The pacing skeptics’ suspicions are not frivolous. Is pacing real, or a savvy marketing gambit by frontier labs and cybersecurity companies polishing their financials ahead of IPOs? Would pacing cede the U.S. lead in AI to China, or would Beijing reciprocate and pace in its own manner?

The Frontier Problem

AI has plainly reached a critical capability milestone. Warnings of catastrophic or existential risk can no longer be dismissed outright, even if the near-term probability remains modest. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on cutting-edge models, frontier labs have mismanaged both their messaging and the public trust. More than 100 recent conversations with CEOs, policy leaders, and AI scientists for our coming book, When Machines Act, have convinced us that the pacing debate has lost sight of first-principles thinking.

The Alignment Problem

Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, corporate leadership has scrambled with a speed unmatched in modern commercial history. Even so, while executive suites have mobilized with unprecedented urgency, the structural physics of enterprise architecture—fragmented data silos, legacy ERPs, strict compliance regimes, and basic data hygiene—make true economic absorption an inherently slow slog. As corporate budget shocks from runaway “tokenmaxxing” demonstrated, many daily enterprise workflows require far simpler models, and precious few tasks at the average Fortune 500 company demand a frontier system at all. Pacing, therefore, will neither harm economic output nor choke off the labs’ commercial revenues, because enterprises need time simply to assimilate the capabilities already on the table. 

Among high-performing companies, more than two-thirds identify data as the primary barrier to implementing AI, a figure that has proven stubborn even as the models themselves have leaped forward. Only 7% describe their data as “completely ready” for AI; fewer than a quarter have a data strategy at all; and 63% either lack AI-suitable data management or are unsure whether they have it. 

The Fallacy Problem

As McKinsey Senior Partner Asutosh Padhi emphasized on air with Fareed Zakaria, technical availability is fundamentally different from economic transformation. General-purpose technologies have historically required decades to reorganize workflows and generate broad-based productivity gains. Electricity took 75 years to lift productivity economy-wide. Computers required 50 years, and the Internet and mobile devices demanded 25. The underlying models may be ready, but the systemic organizational restructuring they demand will take substantial time. When McKinsey surveyed the business community, the firm found that only 6 percent of companies reported a “significant” impact and modest earnings attribution.

Companies are concentrating on the high-reward, low-risk automation tasks that models one or two generations old can already solve. As one highly respected former Wall Street CEO told us, these systems will run in parallel with legacy systems for years to confirm they operate correctly and that no regulatory risk is unknowingly absorbed.

A parallel dynamic has emerged in the economics of silicon. Older-generation chips, initially cast aside in the scramble for cutting-edge accelerators, are finding a second life as workhorses for the practical inference tasks that dominate enterprise demand. As Growth Protocol founder and CEO Miro Dimitrov noted at last week’s Yale CEO Caucus, deploying neuro-symbolic architectures has allowed his enterprise reasoning platform to slash inference costs by roughly 80-fold in live client deployments, largely by shifting workloads off ultra-expensive GPUs and onto everyday enterprise CPUs.

The Three Phases of AI Adoption

Corporate AI adoption is best understood in three phases, distinguished by how much work a company can responsibly hand over, which is gated by data readiness and the trust systems have earned. The first phase, assistance, consists of off-the-shelf copilots that ride atop enterprise platforms such as Salesforce, connecting data across existing applications and enabling employees to work faster with minimal re-architecting. Payback arrives quickly and risk stays modest, since a human still performs much of the work. The second phase, orchestration, covers agentic workflows that demand real investment—structuring proprietary data and connecting far-flung data lakes never meant to meet—with a human in the loop approving each consequential step. The third phase, autonomy, brings end-to-end agentic operations across seamlessly interconnected systems, with humans supervising by exception. 

Reward compounds with each phase, but so do the risk and trust required, which is why the average Fortune 500 CEO remains in the first phase, making sizable but early investments to prepare for the second. Nor do the phases advance in lockstep across an enterprise. Most companies will oversee a multi-phased portfolio, piloting orchestration in select forward-leaning departments as the rest of the organization becomes comfortable with basic assistance.

Underlying all three phases is the need for CEOs to trust that AI will perform as any other employee would—following the guidelines spelled out in the employee handbook, obeying the rule of law, and maintaining a foundational layer of human values and judgment. So when markets, media commentators, or investors fret that pacing for AI alignment will hinder progress in frontier models, they misdiagnose how enterprise value is created. Never mind the confusion pervading the vague promises and threats of “AGI” with the sublime opportunities and genuine catastrophic risks of reaching the “singularity.” If AI technologies are meant to automate human tasks, they should be held to the same standards of values, judgment, and moral alignment as any current or prospective employee. If the most advanced frontier models cannot meet those standards in a testing environment, they are not ready for release—which is exactly why the U.S. has always maintained laws protecting consumers against such risks.

As former FTC Chair Lina Khan reminded the public on X: “There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products… releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an ‘unfair or deceptive’ act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws).” Those laws hold companies responsible for harm done to consumers, employees, investors, patients, competitors, and the markets and financial systems on which they all depend.

America vs. China, and Speed vs. Trust

Wherever one lands on the China distillation debate, the fact remains that China now fields models rivaling the frontier systems on the market today. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party has signaled that it is turning its energies to diffusing AI through the economy instead of continuing to push the frontier. The frontier labs must recognize that two races are underway at once: one to reach “AGI” or “superintelligence” and the other for share of wallet. As their most established customers, mostly Fortune 500 enterprises, can attest, recapturing a customer after the decision is made is extraordinarily difficult. China understands the dynamic well, one that powered its victory in the global telecommunications race the U.S. largely lost.

The CCP has also expressed deep concern over alignment. Beijing’s domestic alignment prioritizes state control, party orthodoxy, and narrative consistency, whereas Western alignment centers on fiduciary reliability, consumer safety, and product liability. Yet beneath the ideological gulf lies an identical commercial reality in both systems—unpredictable, “hallucinating” agents that fail to adhere to organizational rules, judgment, and institutional guardrails cannot be trusted to run mission-critical workflows or drive durable economic growth.

The Trump administration should still pursue avenues to collaborate and coordinate with President Xi to ensure that no mass destruction or catastrophe, intentional or accidental, issues from AI. Whether Trump will raise the matter is another question. At the CEO Caucus, 93 of the roughly 100 CEOs surveyed did not believe the president was correct to classify warnings about AI’s dangers as a “hoax.” Almost 90 percent said the president should press the need for joint AI-safety guidelines with China during the state visit, yet nearly three-quarters did not expect him to do so. Based on preparatory discussions between Treasury Secretary Bessent and his Chinese counterpart, those 75 business leaders may soon be gladly proven wrong.

A pacing interval is no passive holiday or an economic ceasefire but an active defensive hardening window. Both Washington and Beijing need intentional breathing room to allow their critical infrastructure to build resilient defenses against autonomous agentic exploits before the next generation of frontier capabilities is unlocked. And instilling human alignment is only half the battle. The immediate priority during such a period must be fortifying the institutions that serve as the bedrock of civilization. Financial, healthcare, and education systems should be probed for vulnerabilities by the most advanced models, as Anthropic demonstrated through its restricted deployment of Mythos under Project Glasswing. Those models breach defenses through impressive engineering ingenuity, but their exploits succeed only because of systemic weaknesses in corporate digital infrastructure.

The frontier labs believe they are running a single race toward superintelligence. However, the race that will decide their fortunes—earning the trust of the enterprises, regulators, and citizens who must live with what they build—is slower. Speed may win headlines, but trust earns share of wallet. This race is a marathon, not a sprint. As past runners ourselves, we know that the first half of any long-distance race is for pacing and the second half is for passing. In every technological revolution, from the railroad to the Internet, the greatest fortunes went to those who understood that a frontier is worthless until the settlers arrived.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For years, a 5% yield on the Treasury looked like a relic from another interest-rate era—where borrowers faced soaring loan rates. Now it’s back, capping a six-year surge from pandemic-era lows near 0.5%. The benchmark yield crossed 5% this month for the first time since 2007, but this appears different than the eve of the Great Recession: the Fed is staring down a lose-lose situation combining high inflation and weak economic growth, a catch 22 that economists termed “stagflation” in the 1970s and long feared through the 10-year’s climb upward since the pandemic. 

The last time the U.S. experienced this mix of trends — called “stagflation” by economists — was in the 1970s, during the Oil Crisis—and it took years for markets to digest the paradox of higher inflation, requiring higher interest rates, and weak economic growth, needing the opposite.

“We’re certainly in a stagflationary period,” famed investor Ray Dalio told CNBC in April. “How that transpires has a lot of parts to it, but we’re certainly in that.”

But to be clear, today doesn’t come close to the stagflation crisis in the 70s. Inflation peaked near 14.8% in March 1980, more than four times today’s 3.4% rate, and unemployment topped 9% during the mid-decade oil shock, versus roughly 4.1% now. The Fed’s response was proportionally brutal, too: Chair Paul Volcker pushed the federal-funds rate to 20% by 1981 to break inflation’s back, triggering a recession that pushed unemployment above 10%—a scale of pain nowhere near today’s range.

The 10-year Treasury yield is the return investors get for holding the U.S. government’s debt—and extraordinary monetary and fiscal response to COVID, the worst inflation in decades, the Federal Reserve’s rate increases, federal deficits and Treasury issuance and the shocks of tariffs, energy prices and Iran have all played a role in this reversal.

Where it started

In 2020, as COVID spread across the country and the world, investors rushed toward safety in the form of government debt and the Fed slashed its benchmark interest rate to near zero. The Fed also purchased large amounts of Treasury and mortgage securities. The yield fell to 0.52% in 2020, the lowest level on record.

At the time, the combination of weak economic activity and exceptionally low interest rates produced a world where investors could expect very little income from government bonds. But it all changed when the economy reopened.

The U.S. government deployed trillions of dollars in fiscal support, with households accumulating savings—and customers shifted spending from services to goods. All at the same time, factories, ports and transportation networks struggled to keep up with the rebounding demand.

The turning point

The Consumer Price Index began to climb quickly in 2021. Federal Reserve officials had initially called the increase as temporary, noting supply constraints and the reopening economy. Former Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in an August 2021 speech he expected the inflation to slow.

“Inflation at these levels is, of course, a cause for concern,” Powell said. “But that concern is tempered by a number of factors that suggest that these elevated readings are likely to prove temporary.”

But by the second half of the year, the Fed’s language changed. In September 2021, the Federal Open Market Committee said inflation was elevated, even though it still posited many of the factors were transitory. The Fed kept its federal-funds target at 0% to 0.25%.

But by December, policymakers changed expectations. The Fed’s median projection showed the federal funds rate rising to 4.4% by the end of 2022, 5.4% in 2023 and 4.4% in 2024, compared with the 0.1% rate at the end of 2021.

Inflation forced the Fed’s hand

CPI inflation reached 9.1% in June 2022, the highest 12-month increase since 1981. 

Energy prices were also a major contributor, with the energy index up 41.6% from a year earlier. The Fed also began hiking rates in March 2022. It lifted the federal-funds target range to 5.50% by July 2023.

Due to the rising rates, from around 1.5% at the end of 2021, the 10-year yield climbed above 4% in 2022 and eventually flirted with 5% in 2023. And in October 2023, the yield crossed 5% intraday. But it did not stay there—the yield fell as investors anticipated that inflation would drop and the Fed would begin cutting rates. Even the S&P 500 dropped 19%, its worst since 2008.

Then Trump, tariffs and war

Then came the presidential election. After Donald Trump won in 2024, the 10-year yield jumped as investors anticipated his economic agenda would produce larger deficits, higher tariffs and potentially more inflation.

The 10-year yield rose up to 4.7% in 2024, with investors pricing in the possibility that tax cuts and other policies would increase government borrowing—and tariffs can raise prices.

And tariff shock. Trump announced sweeping tariffs in 2025, and investors initially rushed to the Treasury from recession fears. But that didn’t last long. The 10-year yield jumped to 4.79% at one point.

According to a report from Reuters, the market’s movements raised concerns from investors about liquidity in the roughly $29 trillion Treasury market.

Now the latest leg of the Treasury selloff is tied to energy. The Iran war has disrupted energy markets and pushed oil prices higher—threatening economic growth, with the oil-price shock raising inflation. 

Reuters reported that Treasury yields reached its highest levels since 2007 in September as oil prices moved above $100 a barrel and investors worried about inflation. By August, U.S. CPI inflation was running at 3.4% annually, well above the Fed’s 2% target. Gas prices rose 3.9% in August alone, accounting for more than one-third of that month’s increase in the overall CPI.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

I recently typed a simple question into Google search: How much screen time is too much for teenagers? Instead of presenting links, as Google had been doing for many years, it gave me an AI-generated answer. The artificial intelligence agent cited a number, then complicated that reply, noting that quality and balance of time could matter more than the number of hours, and that “too much” time could depend on a teenager’s sleep, exercise, school demands and mood.

I tried another search: Should I take a daily aspirin? This time the AI answer presented me with medical information, warned about risks and offered more tailored guidance if I provided my age and medical history.

These were good replies. What interested me was that they were different kinds of replies.

Debate about AI answers has focused on accuracy: Did the system get the answer right? That matters, but accuracy is only one test. Each kind of answer requires a user to judge something different.

I find it useful to sort AI answers into an “answer typography” of four broad types: factual, interpretive, constructive and strategic. A factual claim can often be checked against a source. An interpretation can be accurate and still reflect choices about which evidence matters. A construction can be well reasoned and still be wrong for the person receiving it. A beautifully written strategic document may not be true. Yet AI presents all four types of answers in much the same fluent, authoritative form; the differences are easy to miss.

I’m university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia who leads national efforts to develop AI competencies for library professionals, and I consult widely on AI literacy. I first proposed the typography in the Journal of Academic Librarianship.

The four categories are not airtight boxes. A response from an AI agent can reflect several types. That said, I describe each type of answer below, and offer guidance for deciding whether a reply is ready to use or needs more investigation.

Which answer is Google giving you?

A factual answer makes a claim that can, in principle, be checked against evidence. When was the University of Virginia founded? What is the chemical symbol for gold?

To determine whether a factual answer is robust enough for you to use, verify the claim against an appropriate source. If the answer cites a source, follow that link instead of simply treating the answer itself as proof.

An interpretive reply is built on evidence, but there is not a single takeaway. How much screen time is too much for a teenager? Does remote work raise productivity? The answer depends on what evidence is included, what is left out and how disagreement is understood.

Google’s initial answer to my screen-time question indicated that two hours was a limit for teenagers. Then it noted that pediatric guidance puts more weight on the quality and context of screen use than on simple hours. The American Academy of Pediatrics says there is no exact recommended amount for teens and emphasizes the kind of screen use and what activities it might be displacing. A question that looked numerical turned out to require interpretation.

To assess interpretive answers, do more than check facts. Ask yourself what evidence the system emphasized, what it left out and whether another defensible interpretation exists. A useful follow-up question to present to the search engine is: “What is the strongest evidence for a different conclusion?”

Constructive answers are made rather than discovered. Ask AI to draft a cover letter, write a eulogy, suggest a lesson plan or reorganize a paragraph – there is no single correct result.

You can judge the response by considering purpose, audience and voice. A eulogy can be grammatically perfect and still sound nothing like the person delivering it, or it may land flat on family members hearing it. It may not capture the deceased person well, either. Consider these kinds of effects as you read.

Strategic questions ask what to do. Should I take a daily aspirin? Should I buy the house? The answers combine information with judgment about goals, risks, trade-offs and personal circumstances.

My aspirin search shows why context matters. Google warned about risks, told me to consult a medical professional and offered more tailored information if I provided my age, cardiovascular history and risk of bleeding. That caution matches the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidance. It says the decision to start low-dose aspirin for prevention of heart attacks and strokes should be individualized and weigh cardiovascular benefit against bleeding risk.

For strategic answers, ask what the system would need to know before its advice could reasonably apply to you individually. Consider the stakes, the alternatives and whether a qualified person should be involved. For the aspirin question, a useful follow-up would be: “What details about my age, medical history or bleeding risk could change this advice? What should I discuss with my doctor before deciding?” The final judgment remains yours because you are the person who has to live with the outcome.

The first question after an answer

My questions began as ordinary Google searches. I did not open a chatbot. The AI-generated responses simply arrived, and links were appended.

The responses were useful. Google added context, acknowledged complications and offered tailored guidance if I supplied additional information. Within each response, though, the type of answer could change. Reporting what a medical guideline says is different from deciding how it applies to a particular person. A fluent response can move between those types of answers without a noticeable change in voice.

As a user, try to recognize what kind of intellectual work the AI agent did for a response you receive. Consider whether the interpretation is persuasive or the advice fits your circumstances.

Before asking whether an AI answer is right, ask a more basic question: What kind of answer is this? The type will tell you what to do next.

Leo S. Lo, Dean, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Selective pricing. Surveillance pricing. Personalized pricing. Dynamic pricing. The terms are flying around, but they don’t all mean the same thing. A price that changes with demand is one concern; a price that changes because a store knows who is shopping is another. Even the Federal Trade Commission is weighing when companies need to tell customers their personal data helped set a price. 

Now, retail discount giant Walmart has patented new ways to use technology to help set prices. One system could automatically change markdowns on its website while another could predict demand and recommend prices. For a company that has built its reputation on low prices, the idea of using more data to help set them is bound to get concerned shoppers’ attention. The filings’ arrival amid a wider debate about shopping data raises a separate question: Could knowing more about a customer eventually change what the customer pays? 

A patent describes an invention a company wants to protect. However, it doesn’t necessarily tell shoppers whether the company ever put it to work. When Walmart’s pricing patents drew attention on social media earlier this year, some shoppers connected them to fears about surveillance pricing: charging people different prices for the same product based on information about them. The patents don’t show Walmart doing that, but the broader concern about how retailers might use shopping data remains.

Down the Walmart patent rabbit hole

In January, Walmart received a patent for a system that could automatically adjust markdowns on its website based on predicted demand and how shoppers respond to prices. A second patent, granted in March, describes using past purchases to forecast demand and recommend item prices. Its description lists purchase records that could include payment methods and customer IDs, but neither filing establishes whether Walmart uses the system it describes. 

Jameson Spivack of the Future of Privacy Forum told Fortune patents can offer clues about where a company is thinking of going, but are “not necessarily a great indicator” of what it actually intends to use. In his reading, he described Walmart’s two filings more as “systems that are adjusting prices at the item level rather than at the individual level.”

That distinction matters. A retailer could lower the price of an item because it expects demand to fall, with every shopper seeing the new price. Personalized pricing would mean using information about a particular shopper to decide what that exact person pays. Spivack said the Walmart filings appear to describe the former. 

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, in his review of the filings also didn’t see them describing prices set for individual shoppers. Retailers have long tried to predict demand and set profitable prices, he said, like “econ 101.” 

What has changed, though, is how much they can learn about the people who are buying their products. Stanley pointed to loyalty programs and online shopping that make it easier for retailers to know who their customers are and track what they buy over time.

Walmart’s own privacy notice says it collects purchase histories as well as information about what customers browse and search on its website and app. It also says information may be used to tailor ads, product recommendations, and promotions. Fortune has also reported Walmart uses customer data to target advertising through its growing ad business. Taken together, those details can give a retailer a picture of someone’s shopping habits, including products they return to and what else might interest them. 

“We have a long history of innovation, and patents are one way we protect our ideas and intellectual property,” a Walmart spokesperson told Fortune. “A patent does not mean a technology is in use today or will become a Walmart product or service. Walmart doesn’t charge different prices based on a customer’s personal information or purchase intent or history.”

Other pricing fears at Walmart

Walmart is also replacing paper price tags with digital shelf labels, which allow employees to update store prices without changing each tag by hand. The company said in March roughly 2,300 U.S. locations had the labels and said it expected them to be chain-wide within the next year. 

Walmart added employees approve price changes, typically outside shopping hours, and prices are the same for everyone in a given store regardless of demand, time of day, or who is shopping. The labels do not collect information about customers, according to the company. The rollout does not establish that either patented system is being used in stores.

Stanley said the privacy concern would become more concrete if a retailer used what it knows about someone’s circumstances to charge that person more. He put it more in everyday terms: For example, if a retailer knew someone had a cold, it could charge that shopper more for tissues. 

His dividing line is pretty straightforward: “Are they going to charge you a different price if they know who you are versus if they don’t know who you are?”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In the great debate over AI safety guardrails, Scott Bessent said the government will not become a “liability shield” for hyperscalers.

The Treasury Secretary’s comments come after an eruption of concern over the threat the transformative technology poses. The latest surge in alarm comes after former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon claimed tech giants are “gambling with our lives.” Meanwhile, Evan Hubinger, a top safety researcher at Anthropic, warned there was a “low” but maximum 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within the next decade.

The warnings sparked a debate over the extent to which AI companies can be trusted to self-regulate, and how closely involved governments need to be in implementing guardrails.

Bessent has been firm the creators of the technology will be held responsible for its impact in the first instance, telling CNBC in an interview: “Imagine these labs came out or … a sitting employee came out and said: ‘There’s a 10% chance of an extinction-level event.’ But then the labs also said, ‘Take the liability off of our hands.’ And we will not do that.”

Bessent said it is humans, not AI, that are responsible for the risks posed by the technology, saying the “Hugging Face incident” (when OpenAI agents undergoing a test hacked out of the system and into Hugging Face’s database in order to pass) was the “responsibility of the OpenAI management.”

Bessent clarified the administration’s position is that “we cannot say, ‘Oh, we absolve you of responsibility, and the government’s going to take responsibility.’ These labs need to take responsibility for themselves. They can slow down any time they want to.”

President Donald Trump had previously struck a different tone on regulation, claiming simultaneously in a Truth Social post the U.S. already had “tremendous” regulatory and criminal power over AI companies, but “the only control or ‘ guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

The president’s post last week on the social media platform he owns also criticized Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei, whom Trump blasted “is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.’” Amodei penned a letter just days before the president’s outburst, calling on labs to slow the pace of progress.

The essay, titled We Must Pace the Frontier also suggested U.S. government support would be needed to globally coordinate and legally bind safety standards.

The argument was echoed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an exclusive interview with Fortune published last week. In a new episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, with Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell, Altman said: “It can simultaneously be true that, if the world and the companies building this technology did not do things differently than they’ve done in the past, there might be significant risk.

“But it would be insane not to adjust the way we all work, make decisions, and have governments understand and put guardrails around this technology in light of that.”

Bessent suggested removing the onus on private companies was a mistake, continuing: “What did they try to do last week? It was, ‘Well, there’s a … 10% chance we could destroy the world, but we want the government to give us a liability shield. And that’s good business for them, bad business for the American people.”

The self-regulation debate

An obvious pushback to the argument that AI labs should regulate themselves is the transformative technology, by its very nature, will produce only a handful of successful industry leaders.

Trump himself has acknowledged this (“WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”) and has also impressed the importance of the U.S. continuing to lead economic rivals like China in terms of dominance.

However, the two forces of competition and self-regulation are not traditional bedfellows. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), pointed out last week: “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

People are turning to artificial intelligence for a seemingly unending variety of reasons. Many ask AI what to cook for dinner or how to develop a workout plan. Some even rely on AI to create school handouts or revise a work email.

Increasingly, however, they are asking it different kinds of questions. How do I cope with grief? Why does suffering occur? Should I leave my relationship? What kind of person should I become? What gives my life meaning?

According to recent research from the Pew Research Center, about 1 in 10 American adults now report using AI chatbots for emotional support or advice. Among adults under 30, the figure rises to 1 in 5.

At this point, AI clearly offers something more significant than access to information. By helping people interpret their lives, AI is entering territory historically occupied by therapists, spiritual advisers and religious communities. It provides companionship while offering directed advice for improving one’s life.

As a scholar of religion who studies spirituality and new religious movements, I think this shift raises a provocative question. Could artificial intelligence represent the beginnings of a new kind of religious movement?

What is religion?

The issue is not whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other AI platform currently qualifies as a “religion.” AI has no recognized system of beliefs or shared practices. It has no collective creed, congregation or membership, and most users do not consider it a religious experience.

However, those factors are not necessarily what defines something as “religion.”

In fact, scholars of new religious movements have long recognized the difficulty of deciding where religion begins and ends.

Rather than assuming religion must involve churches, scriptures or belief, scholars examine how emerging movements create meaning, authority, community and rituals. J. Gordon Melton argues that no single checklist of attributes can adequately capture the diversity of new religious expressions.

What matters more, they say, is how new religious movements relate to the world in which they emerge. They may adapt, challenge or depart from ideas and institutions that a society already takes for granted.

Scientology, for example, emerged from a culture increasingly interested in psychology, science and self-improvement. Adopting the language of technology and therapy, its “newness” came partly from combining common religious concerns with forms of authority and language drawn from the secular culture around it.

These insights suggest an alternative approach to studying AI. Rather than asking whether AI meets an arbitrary definition of religion, analyses can examine what people are actually doing with it: How does AI generate authority? How does it provide meaning? In what ways does it provide belonging? How do people come to trust a new source of answers to questions historically addressed by religions? https://www.youtube.com/embed/jk2aUz00_AY?wmode=transparent&start=0 Is AI a new religious movement?

Charisma without the charismatic leader

Nearly a century ago, well before the advent of digital technologies, sociologist Max Weber described “charismatic authority.” Such authority derives from followers’ belief that a leader possesses exceptional qualities or abilities.

AI obviously possesses no charisma in the conventional human sense. Yet users can enter something resembling a charismatic relationship with it. With near-instant responses, generative AI can feel extraordinarily insightful.

It addresses the user directly, adapts to their personal circumstances and recalls previous requests. AI provides what appears to be authoritative answers even when there is no objectively correct answer. For example, AI might tell someone what their suffering means or whether an experience was spiritually significant.

Recent scholarship describes this phenomenon as “generative charisma.” Each interaction with a chatbot generates more personalized and seemingly insightful responses. With time, users may begin to experience AI not simply as a tool but as a uniquely perceptive source of guidance.

A charismatic religious leader typically gathers followers who collectively recognize that person’s extraordinary authority. AI, some argue, becomes charismatic one person at a time by assuming the role of personal guru.

Millions of people can encounter the same system. Yet each can experience AI as personally responsive to them.

For instance, founder Vikas Sahu describes GitaGPT as an “AI spiritual companion.” Using AI avatars of Krishna, the platform provides personalized guidance derived from the Bhagavad Gita.

More individually, mindfulness teacher Vy Le describes AI as a “channeling” tool to help people find their inner guru. In both cases, religious authority emerges not from a sacred text or person but through AI’s ability to respond personally to each seeker.

AI and personal spirituality

AI’s emerging authority does not exist in a cultural vacuum.

Sociologists of religion Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead describe a broader “subjective turn” in contemporary Western culture. For decades, traditional sources of authority have competed with forms of spirituality based on personal experience, self-discovery and well-being.

The growth of the spiritual but not religious, or people who seek spiritual meaning and connection outside organized religion, captures this dynamic nicely. This population reflects broader shifts away from institutional religious authority in favor of personal experience.

Generative AI, I argue, fits remarkably well within this personalized spiritual landscape. Ask a chatbot an existential question and its response likely diverges from traditional doctrine. Rather than quoting scripture, it frequently employs the vocabulary of personal spirituality and holistic well-being.

When a journalist from The Guardian asked HolyGPT, “What is the actual meaning of life?” the spiritual chatbot responded with: “The meaning of life is to become aware through experience, of what it is to be.” Instead of religious teachings, the chatbot pointed the journalist toward self-awareness.

This message of personal authority resonates with people seeking spiritual advice from chatbots. They receive religious interpretation shaped with an individual twist.

ChatwithGod, for example, encourages users to “draw from other perspectives when you want to.” The emphasis is on personal choice rather than adherence to a specific religious system.

Despite all this, a question remains: Does AI as a source for spiritual advice indicate a new religious movement?

Religion without churches

New religious movements usually develop communities, shared identities, teachings and practices. People who rely on AI for existential advice are not necessarily joining anything. That may be precisely what makes this phenomenon significant.

It is important to note that there have already been overt attempts to place AI at the center of a religious system. In 2017, engineer Anthony Levandowski publicly launched Way of the Future. Through a legally recognized church, Way sought to create and worship an AI-based “Godhead.”

Though significant, focusing only on “AI churches” may obscure more consequential issues.

The emergence of a new religious formation need not begin with a church or formal membership. Nor does it even require that people involved with it consider it religious. Studying new religions “in the making” requires examining how novel forms of authority and practice develop before they become systems and institutions.

In this specific sense, AI may not constitute a new religious movement. Instead, it might be better to say that AI provides conditions from which new forms of religiosity can develop. Appearing alongside the rise of the “nones” and religiously unaffiliated, generative AI addresses considerable uncertainty about identity, community and the future.

What are we asking AI to become?

Religious communities have long-established traditions about who may offer guidance. Importantly, these communal structures help resolve conflict and identify who holds responsibility.

Without these structures, scholars warn about the emergence of “authority without accountability.” Who, in short, regulates the “algorithmic authority” of AI? This question matters, particularly when a chatbot moves from explaining a religious teaching to offering spiritual advice.

New religious movements often form around charismatic sources of authority offering new answers to enduring human questions. What makes AI historically unusual is that the charismatic figure no longer needs to stand on a stage. It no longer needs to establish a church or gather disciples around itself.

It can speak privately to each of us, one person at a time.

Morgan Shipley, Foglio Endowed Chair of Spirituality, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In June 1926, the SAT exam was first administered to 8,000 high school students who hoped to attend elite universities.

The SAT has undergone many changes since its original form 100 years ago, ranging from how the test is administrated to what kinds of subject matter it covers.

One particularly big shift came around 2000, when about 280 colleges and universities allowed applicants to apply without submitting scores for the SAT or the ACT, another common standardized test. Today, approximately 86% of colleges and universities are test-optional.

Whether the SAT accurately measures students’ academic strengths continues to be debated. Some research shows that the test offers a strong indication of students’ skills, knowledge and potential for college success.

Other research points to fundamental flaws of SAT and ACT testing, including that students from higher-income families tend to have higher SAT scores. The test, after all, costs money to take, and wealthier families can afford tutors and prep classes. Wealthier students also typically attend well-funded public or private high schools.

As a professor of education, I think that understanding the history of the SAT is helpful to understanding the current debate surrounding it.

A new kind of exam

The SAT was developed in the 1920s by the College Board, an organization founded in 1900 by the presidents of 12 leading universities to standardize the college admissions process.

At the time, each university had its own variation of entrance exam. These tests were in essay format and written and graded by professors.

In 1926, a uniform SAT exam was used for the first time. It had 315 questions, with a time limit of 97 minutes. This gave test-takers about 18 seconds to answer each question – though students were not expected to answer every single question.

The original exam included nine sections, some similar to those that students would see today, like paragraph reading and arithmetic. But other sections, like artificial language, are no longer in use. Artificial language meant writing coded sentences using a set of complicated rules such as “plurals are formed by adding -o.”

In 1928 and 1929, as well as from 1936-1941, the SAT had no math questions. In 1930-1935, the math questions were all free response, rather than multiple choice, as is standard today.

At the time, the SAT was revolutionary because it was not an essay exam with subjects and questions chosen by one university’s professors.

Multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank exam questions could be quickly and objectively scored. High school students no longer had to travel to a college campus to take an entrance exam. The SAT allowed thousands of students to take the same exam closer to home, removing the barrier of travel to campus.

The scores were viewed by multiple colleges, rather than just the one. This meant the SAT created both more competition and access to college.

But not all colleges or even high school teachers embraced the idea, in part because of concerns about a test dictating high school curricula.

The SAT was still used relatively rarely around this time, with about 10,000 students sitting for the exam each year in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In 1947, Educational Testing Services, a private nonprofit organization devoted to testing and educational research, was created to administer the SAT and develop other exams. This organization had an incentive to sell the SAT to institutions, resulting in more widespread use.

The SAT gains traction

Starting after World War II, universities experienced a sharp increase in college applicants who benefited from the GI Bill. This government program offered educational and financial assistance to military veterans.

Universities began to strengthen their admissions criteria and rely more on the SAT to weed out some applicants.

The University of California system became the first and largest public system to require the SAT in 1960. This was also the year that the ACT was created.

Over the next few decades, more schools began requiring the SAT as part of the standard admissions process.

In an effort to prevent students from relying too much on private tutors, the test creators also expanded the length of the exam and revised the questions.

In 1994, another change occurred when students used physical calculators on the SAT for the first time.

Not just a test

Taking the SAT or the ACT is a high-stakes moment for students. Not only is their college admission potentially riding on the score, but a small score increase of 50-100 points could also mean thousands of dollars in scholarships.

The achievement gap between different racial groups on SAT scores has been both well documented and debated for decades.

Asian students have the highest average score for any ethnic group, followed by white students.

Wealthier students are 13 times more likely than low-income students to score a 1300 or higher on the SAT, out of a maximum 1,600 points.

Some research shows a link between family income and students’ test scores and college success, as defined as GPA, retention and graduation.

Other research indicates that a student’s high school GPA is a better predictor of college success than SAT scores.

Colleges and universities reconsider the SAT

Because of concerns about the usefulness of the SAT in college admissions, around 2000 about 280 colleges and universities moved to make the SAT an optional part of the admissions process.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 served as a natural experiment for test-optional admissions. Students simply could not sit to take the SAT due to virus transmission concerns, so almost no universities required either the SAT or ACT for admission in 2020 or 2021.

Six years later, over 2,000 colleges and universities are still test-optional – although the categorization may be deceiving, as some scholarships may depend on SAT scores.

More than 2 million students, or approximately 47% of graduating high school students, took the SAT in 2025 – marking the highest number since before the pandemic.

And 36%, or 1.38 million, took the ACT that year.

A high school ritual

The SAT continues to be modified.

In 2024, it was shortened from three hours to two hours and 15 minutes. The shortened time is closer to the original exam from 100 years ago, which lasted 97 minutes..

Also in 2024, the SAT went fully digital.

The exam isn’t a perfect reflection of students’ potential and skills, but it continues to be the rite of passage that most high school students undertake as they look ahead to college.

Beth Kania-Gosche, Professor of Education, Missouri University of Science and Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It’s harvest time in California wine country, but many growers are struggling to sell their grapes as changing drinking habits have caused demand to plunge. The decline is forcing some growers to tear out vineyards that their families have grown for generations.

Wine sales have decreased by more than 20% over a five-year period, causing prices paid for grapes to drop and prompting California growers to take roughly a quarter of the state’s vineyards out of production. Many growers are having to decide whether to harvest at a loss, leave grapes on the vine or replace vineyards with crops more in demand such as almonds, walnuts, pistachios and olives.

Third-generation grower Bill Berryhill said it means another year of losing money and wasting hundreds of tons of healthy grapes.

“It’s just sickening,” said Berryhill, standing in a vineyard of unsold merlot grapes. “You raise a beautiful crop, and it’s really a nice vintage this year, and you drop it on the ground. It’s sad. All your work is just down the toilet.”

Berryhill, who owns Berryhill Family Vineyards near Lodi in the San Joaquin Valley, said he can’t find buyers for grapes grown on 200 of his 500 acres (202 hectares). He plans to remove 50 acres (20 hectares) of vineyards when the harvest season is over.

“I will lose money for sure. It’s just a matter of how much,” Berryhill, 68, said. “This has been a big loser for three years now.”

Grape growers take vineyards out of production

At its peak during the pandemic, California had almost 600,000 acres (242,811 hectares) of vineyards, but farmers have removed or stopped actively growing wine grapes on roughly 25% of that land, said Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers, which represents about 500 farmers statewide.

This year, about half of California’s wine grape crop entered the harvest season without contracts with buyers, compared with 70 to 80% with contracts in a typical year, Bitter said.

If they’re lucky, growers can sell their uncontracted grapes at a loss to buyers making concentrated syrup.

Even as growers have abandoned or removed tens of thousands of acres of vineyards in California in recent years, too many grapes are still being produced, Bitter said.

“The market is just so depressed that it’s difficult to grow them profitably,” he said. “Demand is not going up. It’s still continuing to decline.”

Kyle Collins, a Lodi-based operations manager with Allied Grape Growers, recently examined ripe grapes in a petite verdot vineyard in Lodi, one of California’s most productive wine regions.

“Unfortunately, we do not have a buyer for these grapes,” Collins said. “That’s unfortunately a reality for not just this vineyard but a lot of us around here.”

Besides hurting vineyards, the drop in sales has hit local businesses and workers, he said.

“That’s not getting into the pockets of the people doing the field labor, the farmworkers,” Collins said. “It does have a trickle effect in the economy.”

Wine sales fall after years of growth

The downturn is a dramatic shift for the wine industry in California, which produces more than 80% of U.S. wine due to its unique geography and Mediterranean climate. For decades, California’s wine industry grew steadily as Americans, particularly baby boomers, developed a taste for cabernet, zinfandel, chardonnay and other varietals.

The most famous wine regions such as Napa and Sonoma Valley produced premium vintages while the Central Valley grew grapes for less expensive labels.

Wine sales peaked during the pandemic in 2021 when restaurants were closed and social gatherings restricted. People stocked up on wine and drank more at home.

But over the past five years, wine sales have declined sharply, and they’re expected to fall further this year.

In the U.S., sales of wine cases declined 23% from 427 million in 2020 to 329 million in 2025, while total wine spending fell 22% from $94 billion to $74 billion, according to First Citizens Bank, formerly Silicon Valley Bank, which produces an annual State of the Wine Industry Report.

Wine industry faces more competition, tariffs and changing tastes

California can’t export its excess inventory because wine consumption is down globally and it’s more expensive to produce in the U.S. than countries such as Argentina and Australia, Bitter said. In 2025, global wine consumption declined 2.7% from 2024 and 14% from 2018, with sharp declines in Europe and China, according to the International Organization of Vine and Wine.

There are a variety of forces driving the decline in wine sales. Baby boomers are aging out of the market while young people are drinking less alcohol due to health and financial concerns. Wine faces competition from craft beer, liquor and canned cocktails as well as cannabis.

“The kids just aren’t drinking as much,” Berryhill said. “And it’s not just wine, it’s whiskey and beer and everything. And then you’ve also got the competition with all the seltzers.”

Tariffs have reduced exports, particularly to Canada, which was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.

“The next step in the healing process is not only balancing supply and demand, but now actually figuring out what it is that the other consumers want,” said Rob McMillan, chief wine strategist at First Citizens Bank.

The industry hopes the market will bottom out soon. Meanwhile, growers are absorbing heavy losses trying to hang on.

Berryhill, whose grandfather started growing grapes nearly 100 years ago, doesn’t plan to give up on wine even though it’s costing him.

“I love growing grapes. It’s in the blood,” Berryhill said. “Because I love them, I can weather this and I’ll fight through it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Two of Puerto Rico’s biggest newspapers announced Monday that they will end their print editions in upcoming days and pivot to digital only, joining a worldwide trend.

GFR Media, a Puerto Rican company that publishes El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora, said Monday that the decision responds to a change in consumer habits.

Sept. 24 will mark the last print edition for Primera Hora and Sept. 27 for El Nuevo Día, according to the papers.

“We continue to evolve with the Puerto Rico of the 21st century, one that today numbers more than nine million Puerto Ricans who live on the Island, in the United States, in Europe and in the rest of the world. We have always been, and will continue to be, wherever Puerto Rico is,” María Luisa Ferré Rangel, publisher of GFR Media, said in a statement.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many people would be laid off. A spokesperson for GFR Media said the company’s only comment for now was the official statement it issued.

From 2015 to 2025, Grupo Ferré Rangel, the owner of companies including GFR Media, reduced the number of unionized employees from nearly 400 to less than 100, according to the Association of Puerto Rican Journalists.

The two papers join dozens of others in the U.S. mainland that have taken similar steps or shut down completely to save money as ad revenue shrivels and consumer habits change.

Nearly 3,500 newspapers in the U.S. mainland have closed in the past two decades, leading to the elimination of more than 270,000 newspaper jobs, according to Poynter, a nonprofit media institute.

El Nuevo Día began publishing in 1970; its first front page featured stories about Joaquín Balaguer being elected president in the Dominican Republic and whether molasses for Puerto Rican rum was in short supply.

Other notable front pages include the 1984 visit of Pope John Paul II to Puerto Rico — the first pope to visit the U.S. territory — and the 1986 deaths of dozens of people in a hotel fire.

More recent historic front pages include a former Puerto Rico governor announcing in 2015 that the island’s more than $70 billion public debt was unpayable, and the 2019 resignation of former Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló following massive protests.

In 2019, El Nuevo Día published its front page in English — the only time it’s ever done so. The headline read: “Mr. President: Your Numbers are Fake” alongside a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump. The story was about the amount of federal funds Puerto Rico had received after Hurricane Maria pummeled the island in 2017 as a powerful Category 4 storm, with an estimated 3,000 people dying in the sweltering aftermath.

El Nuevo Día launched its digital site in 1997, the same year that Primera Hora began publishing. Its first page featured a picture of Puerto Rican dancer Iris Chacón — scantily clad — and a story about a dengue outbreak.

El Nuevo Día said that its digital version has more than 3.4 million unique monthly users, and Primera Hora more than 2.8 million.

El Nuevo Día recently launched a digital news program via a video-podcast format, and the paper said it also will launch a news analysis program next month via the same format that will focus on the week’s top story.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Last week the debate was whether the AI industry was about to slow down. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called for the industry to pace itself for safety reasons, semis sold off, the Journal ran a piece on whether an AI slowdown would break the market, and everyone with a microphone weighed in on the data-center bubble. Steve Rosenbush at the WSJ CIO Journal quoted me on the frontier-lag question that same week: “Most of them are not using the end of the frontier. A version from two years ago would be perfectly fine. There are audiences that barely can prompt. So a delay wouldn’t make a big difference.” I made the broader case in Bubble Talk Is How You Spot Someone Who Missed AI that the US buildout is a business, not a bubble. That argument was correct then and correct now. It was also the wrong debate.

The bubble nobody is looking at has more legs than the one everyone is arguing about. It is the SaaS debt trap. When their multiples collapsed, the SaaS incumbents took on record debt, bought back their own stock, and dressed the whole thing up as an AI strategy. Salesforce ran the most extreme version. HubSpot, Workday, ServiceNow, and Adobe ran variations. The bounce worked once. The endpoint is a debt-driven death loop that ends in a Bending Spoons offer letter. I made a prediction of a bounce in valuations in June, when I wrote The Last Great Head Fake in Software History, but this is not what I was expecting.

Had you asked me in April, I could not have imagined this was the playbook every leader in the category would run. In April I wrote Software Is Over. Intelligence is the new core substrate. SaaS is the legacy one. Five months later, watching what the incumbents actually did in response, I think I might have been too soft. This is my update.

If speed is the cornerstone of AI-first, look at what five months just did to the legacy SaaS category and apply that same speed to your own thinking.

The data-center bubble was the wrong bubble to watch. The SaaS debt trap is the one with real legs, and it is closer to snapping than the market has priced.

The substrate has only hardened

The market was already pricing my April thesis in when I wrote the anchor. The SaaS index fell 6.5% in 2025 while the S&P 500 rose 17.6%. Median SaaS revenue multiples went from 18x in 2021 to about 3x. IBM dropped 13.2% on February 23, its worst single day in more than 25 years, after Anthropic showed Claude Code modernizing COBOL. Jasper went from $120 million to $55 million in revenue in one year as soon as the model layer improved.

Every one of those data points has firmed up. Anthropic in particular. The $30 billion ARR mark I cited in April was an end-of-Q1 pace. Bloomberg reported in August that the annualized run rate crossed $65 billion at the end of July, up sevenfold from the $9 billion it exited 2025 on. Yesterday Bloomberg cited the New York Times reporting Anthropic is on track to top $100 billion in annualized revenue this year and could list as soon as November. Q2 2026 revenue alone was $11.5 billion, up 14x year over year. That is just Anthropic.

Sit with that. Anthropic added a Snowflake plus a Palantir to its run rate every quarter this year. Every dollar of that spend is a dollar of intelligence sitting under whatever screen a SaaS incumbent is still trying to charge for. Cheaper tokens compound the pressure because they make the AI-native replacement cheaper to build, every model improvement makes it easier to build. I walked the pricing dynamics in Peak Token.

Put a market-cap frame on the same shape. Anthropic alone, at $965 billion (and expected to trade at IPO for double that), is worth more than Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Workday, and HubSpot combined. Those five names sit at roughly $544 billion of public equity as of September 18. Add OpenAI at $852 billion. The two leading language-model labs are approaching two trillion dollars in private equity value, comparable to a multiple of the entire pure-SaaS public category.

To say model companies are eating the world is an understatement. Think about it this way, that value is only the language-model slice of the AI puzzle. There are other core brains coming right behind them. Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raised $1.23 billion for spatial world models. Isomorphic Labs is training protein folding out of DeepMind. Microsoft’s MatterGen is training materials science. Physical Intelligence and Skild AI are training robotics foundation models. Runway is training video. Suno is training music. ElevenLabs is training voice. Black Forest Labs is training image. DeepSeek is shipping open-weight frontier releases. xAI is training Grok. Perplexity is training answer models. Poolside is training code. At Collective[i] we trained the Economic Model. Each are critical brains and each are taking over.

Every one of these is a market a language model cannot address on its own. Every one has serious capital training against it right now. Some will end up bigger than what the LLMs unlocked. The substrate is competing on the balance sheet, and it is already winning.

The substrate is compounding faster than the incumbents can rebrand around it. This is the single most important number in the SaaSpocalypse thesis, and it has only gotten stronger.

The buyback was the strategy. Claudeforce was the packaging.

Salesforce’s own stock proved the thesis, then reversed it, then proved it again in real time. It dropped 30% through June to a $147 low. By early September it had ripped to $263. On September 18 it closed at $237.92. The round trip took two weeks. The thing that changed was not the product.

Here is the mechanical sequence. In February 2026, Salesforce’s board authorized a $50 billion share repurchase. In March the company issued $25 billion in senior unsecured notes with maturities running to 2066 and routed the proceeds into the largest accelerated share repurchase in history. Initial delivery retired 103 million shares in one quarter at a $198.34 reference price, roughly 80% of the expected total. Final settlement lands later on the ASR-period VWAP. A separate $6 billion five-year term loan closed the Informatica acquisition. Senior notes on the balance sheet went from $8.5 billion to $33.3 billion in one quarter. All five months before Claudeforce.

Read the sequence for what it is. Salesforce entered March with $7.3 billion in cash. Management had capital and chose to borrow anyway. If Benioff believed Agentforce was going to reaccelerate the business, he would have kept the powder dry and spent it on a proprietary model, partnered on another ecosystem deal, or a lab-scale strategic stake. That left customers on their own to come up with their AI strategy. Kirkland and Latham are doing exactly that with a fraction of the balance sheet of a salesforce, because none of their partners had a solution to offer. I walked the substrate argument in Software Is Not Going Down Alone and the operating model in The Hypothesis Company. Salesforce chose the buyback. That is a private-equity capital structure, not a growth-company one worth their current multiples.

On August 26 at the Q2 FY27 earnings call, Benioff announced Claudeforce. Claude inside Salesforce. Salesforce inside Claude. Thirty-seven prebuilt sales skills. He also gave the sell side the line they had been waiting for.

“This nonsense of the SaaSpocalypse, I think it’s time for it to stop.” Marc Benioff, Q2 FY27 earnings call, August 26, 2026

The stock jumped 22.58% in two days. Salesforce marked its Anthropic stake up by $2.7 billion in the quarter. That single line item covered 96% of the earnings surprise. The Anthropic position is worth about $5 billion and represents close to two-thirds of the entire Salesforce Ventures strategic portfolio. On the same call, Benioff floated selling the stake to help pay down the buyback debt. Two paper gains, one cash event. Neat.

When you put the marketing polish aside, any Salesforce customer with an API key could have called Claude the day before Claudeforce. What the announcement really gave every SFDC customer was a first-class path to replace the SFDC front end with an AI-generated CRM over a weekend. The workflows, the data, the schema are now reachable by any agent that can write SQL and hit a REST endpoint. Front-end lock-in was a big piece of the moat. Claudeforce handed customers the key to that piece.

Credit where Salesforce did read the game partially right. The Anthropic investment, the Claudeforce narrative, the AI wrapper on the legacy stack, and the $2.7 billion quarterly markup are what a partial ecosystem play looks like. It is why Salesforce squeezed a bounce out of the last two months when nothing else in the category did.

Now imagine what a real ecosystem play looks like at Salesforce’s scale. Harvey and Legora for legal. A logistics model with the freight companies. Collective[i] as the Economic Model. A materials-science model with the manufacturers in the shape of MatterGen. Salesforce has the distribution and the buyer relationships every one of those model partners needs, and their clients have been waiting for something that is AI real. That is the platform play Nvidia and Microsoft is running with OpenAI and the value of that partnership dwarfs all the others combined. A handful of those deals would have paid for the buyback debt several times over and given them a real AI strategy their clients would have appreciated. The absence of the play is the biggest tell that there is no plan behind the curtain.

Watch what happened after Dreamforce. Two weeks of investor briefings, an AIforce interface layer, a Koa launch, and a fiscal 2030 revenue target of $63 billion. Analysts raised price targets. Wells Fargo to $250, UBS to $260, Stifel to $300. The stock fell 2% on the final day. The bounce is already discounting.

The bounce was a $25 billion balance-sheet transaction dressed up as an AI strategy. With the buyback done and Dreamforce over with no meaningful new build announced, the stock has one direction left to move. Every other SaaS incumbent is running the same play.

The rest of the category is running the same play

The Salesforce sequence is not an outlier. It is the template. Every public SaaS incumbent is redirecting capital to shareholder returns instead of to a differentiated AI capability. The details vary. The direction does not.

HubSpot. Down 48% at the low, worst in the category per Bernstein. Response: Breeze, an AI agent lineup, and a February 2026 authorization for a $1 billion buyback. When that was more than half deployed by Q2, the board added another $1 billion in August. Two billion inside seven months. Working-capital funded, cleaner capital structure than Salesforce’s. Same signal. The lock-in problem is untouched.

Workday. Down 43%. Worst year since the 2012 IPO. Agentic AI ARR grew over 200% in the same window. The multiple ignored it. On August 27 the board authorized a fresh $4 billion buyback on top of the $2.9 billion Workday executed in fiscal 2026. Cash and marketable securities fell from $5.4 billion in January to $3.4 billion in July. Co-founder Aneel Bhusri on the last earnings call: “no amount of vibe coding is going to produce an HR or an ERP system.” That is Workday defending a workflow, not a substrate. When you the updates below, you can see why its hard for wall street to believe those words.

ServiceNow. Dropped 18% in a single day, its worst on record. Response: $5 billion buyback authorized January 28, a $2 billion accelerated share repurchase executed January 30 at an average price of $107.97 (post-split). Q1 2026 alone retired more than 20 million shares. Q2 AI ACV crossed $1 billion tracking toward the $1.5 billion full-year target. The multiple has not returned to prior levels. Debt-to-equity sits at 0.12, so this is cash-funded. The signal is still that the highest-return use of capital is retiring stock.

Adobe. Down 28% in 12 months. In April, with the stock already broken, the board authorized a new $25 billion buyback running through 2030. Q3 fiscal 2026 was a clean beat. Revenue $6.76 billion, up 13%. AI-first ARR up over 150% year over year. The stock fell 2% after hours. The prior $23.3 billion in buybacks executed at an average price around $412. The stock closed at $250. That is $23 billion in shareholder capital retired at prices 65% above where the market is bidding today. CEO Shantanu Narayen is out December 1. CFO Dan Durn left in June.

IBM. Not the same category, same reflex. Down 22% through February. Total debt sits around $55 to $61 billion. Response to the Claude Code COBOL threat: statements about hybrid cloud and Watsonx. No frontier model. No lab-scale capital commitment.

Step back. Not one of these companies has announced a strategy that would save the business rather than the stock. Not one has committed to owning an AI substrate. Not one has launched an AI-native product free of a legacy schema. Not one has any meaningful ecosystem play at platform scale. All of this despite the ecosystem partnerships being the highlight of Nvidia, Microsoft and Salesforce earnings.

All of them are still growing at some rate. ServiceNow subscriptions crossed 24%, Salesforce Agentforce plus Data 360 ARR reached $3.9 billion, Workday subscriptions grew 14%. Real numbers. None of them earns a growth multiple, which is why the market is repricing every name in the category as a cash-return vehicle rather than a compounder.

All of this is happening while the piranha effect strips meat off the SaaS bone from below. Every dollar going into Cursor, Cognition, GitHub Copilot, Gemini Code Assist, Claude Code, and Amazon Q Developer has a developer on the other end of it building something to replace SaaS, legacy applications, and more. Cursor at $60 billion. Cognition at $25 billion. Roughly $150 billion of venture capital flowed into AI developer tools in 2026 alone. The growth of those tools is the headwind ahead for every SaaS incumbent and SaaS buyer and investor, sized and priced in real time.

And these AI coding platforms are not even trying to hide their goals.

Buybacks at scale can mean several things. Dilution management. Excess cash return. A CFO who cannot find a growth investment that clears the hurdle. Look at the timing. Every one of these programs was announced in the first eight months of 2026, right after the multiples broke. That is response, not policy. A cash-funded ASR sized to offset stock-based comp is dilution management. A $25 billion debt-funded ASR announced five months before the flagship user conference and then framed as the setup for the reacceleration story is a different animal.

There is also a clock for the ecosystem play that lead to the positive story behind Microsoft and Salesforce. Anthropic was worth $4 billion when Salesforce first backed it in 2023 and $965 billion today (and potentially twice that in a month after the IPO). Every quarter the math tilts further against the SaaS incumbents that have not signed a comparable deal. The terms keep getting worse the longer they wait.

Not one incumbent has a strategy for saving the business. All of them have a program for managing the stock price. Those are not the same thing, and the market is starting to notice.

Five examples that were unthinkable a few months ago that matter for this story.

The incumbents are frozen. The buyers are not. Five moves in five months, in categories I would not have seen coming, that show the speed of replacement running ahead of the coverage.

A regulated health insurer canceled Salesforce and rebuilt in two months. I would never have said this year that a regulated player would do this in public, this fast. Curative sells zero-deductible, zero-copay plans to self-funded employers. 165,000 members. More than $1 billion in ARR. Fred Turner, the founder, went on 20VC in July and said Curative had canceled its $600,000 Salesforce contract. Business Insider confirmed it the following week. The rebuild took two months. Curative’s target is to eliminate 80% of its SaaS spend in 2026 and shrink headcount from 650 to 400.

Health insurance is one of the most regulated categories in America. If it can move, most of what the bull case calls sticky can move. Every board, CEO and GC in a regulated firm knows Curative did it and got away with it. The stickiest slice of SaaS revenue, the piece the bull case leaned on hardest, is now doubt.

Private equity started buying software as roll-up lead generation, and venture started buying the regulated buyers. Both are new. PE firms have been the reliable secondary buyer for tired SaaS since Vista bought Marketo in 2016. They are now replacing that SaaS with their own AI-first stacks and rolling up entire markets. Thrive Holdings raised $2 billion in August at a $12 billion valuation. OpenAI took an equity stake in December 2025 and embedded engineers inside the portfolio. Current has 50+ firms and 2,000+ professionals. Tax agents processed 7,000+ returns at 98% accuracy. Shield runs help-desk resolution 36 times faster than baseline. Sponsors are no longer buying software companies. They are buying the industries software companies used to sell into.

General Catalyst is running the venture version. HATCo closed the $515 million purchase of Ohio-based Summa Health in October 2025 with $350 million in tech commitments. First hospital system owned by a venture firm. Michael Dell and Silver Lake ran the same pattern in industrial software for two decades. That is now the template for AI-native operators who want to own the customer. Two categories of capital that used to be the exit for SaaS are now the acquirer of the buyers.

Enterprises started pulling out entire ERPs, not just modules. Rillet closed a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation on August 20. ICONIQ led. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia followed. Round closed in under 48 hours after Rillet doubled new ARR the prior quarter. Customers replace NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Oracle Fusion, SAP, Workday, and Microsoft Great Plains. Slash Financial raised $100 million at $1.4 billion in April with Ribbit leading, launched Twin, an AI chief-of-staff. Ribbit’s Micky Malka called it “the bank of the future, where agents handle the processes that used to require entire departments.” That is about headcount, not productivity. Workday may be asleep at the wheel on this.

Three law firms committed $1.5 billion combined to build their own AI. Zero public SaaS companies have. On May 28, Kirkland & Ellis committed $500 million over three to four years to build a proprietary platform, funded from revenue. On September 14, Morgan & Morgan doubled it. $1 billion over ten years for MX2, close to 5,000 monthly active users, licensing to other firms in late 2027. Latham & Watkins bought its own Nvidia GPU servers to run open-weight models on-premise with sensitive client data. Name a public SaaS company that has committed comparable capital to build its own frontier-class AI. There is not one.

Whole new categories are emerging that are not software at all. Collective[i] is just one, but its worth pointing out that AI is also a new model of business and in private data a new way to operate. Ten years in, we have built the world’s first Economic Model. Trained on B2B commerce as a time series on top of a live context graph. It predicts where and when revenue materializes, which deals happen (for PE and VC), weeks or months ahead of the outcome, then optimizes across it. Intelligence.com is the same infrastructure opened to anyone with a professional network worth using. Pair the model with agents. Ours are Telli Assistants. The output is not a screen. It is the outcome you asked for.

The replacement is running ahead of the coverage. Every one of these moves would have been dismissed as impossible in April. The market is paying attention to earnings prints. It is missing the buyer behavior underneath them.

You do not have to take my word for it

Let me lay out the bull case so you can see what the cheerleaders are saying and why I just don’t buy it.

The cash-flow argument. The reported quarters look fine. ServiceNow subscriptions up 24.5%. Salesforce cRPO up 14. Workday up 13.9. Salesforce Agentforce plus Data 360 ARR $3.9 billion growing 210%. Real numbers. This is also the shape a category makes right before it breaks. Every developer using Cursor, Claude Code, or Copilot to build an internal replacement is a customer who has not churned yet. A small percentage converting takes a 12-to-25% grower flat inside two prints. Salesforce built its empire on growth-through-acquisition. Slack $27.7 billion. Tableau $15.7. MuleSoft $6.5. Informatica this year. Every deal needed a strong public currency. Currency compression is structural now. The compounder is broken.

The vertical-incumbent argument. Vertical incumbents embedded in regulated workflows have advantages that capital alone does not replicate. Thrive is the counter. If the sponsor treats vertical software as a customer-acquisition instrument, the incumbent is not competing on features. It is competing against a distribution strategy willing to lose money to buy the market.

The build-side-has-bills argument. Retool’s 2026 survey found 60% of respondents building software outside IT oversight. Twenty-five percent do it frequently. Shadow IT has a real cost. Custom software needs an owner in year three. The bill for freezing is bigger. AI-first competitors ship in weeks. Three of the costs that used to protect incumbents (switching, custom build, and internal owner) all dropped at once. That has never happened before in a category transition.

The regulated-buyers-are-stickier argument. Team8 surveyed dozens of North American banks. Eighty-one percent had changed their build-versus-buy calculus over five years because of AI. Not to rip out incumbents wholesale. To build the differentiating layer and partner on the model. Sixty-four percent are actively considering lab partnerships, up from 25% five years ago. JPMorgan spent $18 billion on tech last year and writes most of its AI in-house. Curative is running the same play in health insurance. The category everyone assumed would rent forever is moving to hybrid first. Those are going to be big headwinds to growth.

The headless-SaaS counter. The strongest version of the bull case is not Burry’s. It is the argument that AI hits the SaaS front end while leaving the system of record intact. Salesforce becomes headless. The database, the schema, the workflows, the permissions, the AppExchange, the integrations all survive. Claudeforce is Salesforce betting on exactly this. It could work. What it is not is a growth story. A headless SaaS layer trading at private-equity multiples is what the market is already starting to price. Nobody pays a growth premium to be plumbing. My take also is that once the user moves to ai front end the backend is easier to remove.

The Michael Burry counter. Burry has spent 2026 shorting AI infrastructure (Palantir, Nvidia, Oracle, the semi ETFs) and going long the beaten-down SaaS names. In his April letter he framed Adobe, Autodesk, and Veeva as a credit-driven selling-exhaustion trade. His argument: the SaaS repricing is a leveraged-investor unwind, not a demand-destruction story, and the intrinsic value is intact. That is the sharpest version of the bull case anyone has put on paper.

I read both carefully. Burry is right that credit dynamics were part of the drop. He is missing what is happening on the demand side. Curative is not unwinding leverage. Curative is unwinding Salesforce. Kirkland is not waiting for its multiple to normalize. Kirkland is building a proprietary AI to make it worse. The headless-SaaS argument is harder because it might be right on the mechanism and still wrong on the multiple. Once Claude is the interface, customers discover they were using 20% of the Salesforce schema. Modern data stores replicate that 20% in a weekend. Once the interface is external, the switching cost of the underlying database collapses because the interface was the retention mechanism. Headless SaaS is a slower death, not a save.

Every bull argument survives the first look. None of them survive the second. The headless-SaaS thesis is the sharpest structural counter, and even the version where it holds ends at a lower multiple than the incumbents currently trade at.

Dreamforce was the tell

Dreamforce wrapped September 17. Attendance was roughly 43,000, down from about 50,000 in 2025 and roughly 75% off the 2019 peak of 171,000. Trajectory matters because Dreamforce is the closest thing Salesforce has to a demand signal that is not filtered through the sell side. Five straight years of decline.

Compare it to how the AI companies launch. Anthropic and OpenAI ship models with a blog post, a livestream, and a documentation drop. Developer influencers pull the demo into a video and ship analysis inside twelve hours. Cursor and Cognition demos move markets on the day. Dreamforce runs three days in person with rented actors and celebrity keynotes. The AI world does not need a physical stage. It has a billion developers watching in real time.

Four things a public SaaS incumbent could have put on the table at Dreamforce to change the story.

-A frontier-class model of its own. Not a rebrand. Not a wrapper. A model. Nobody in the category showed one.

-A strategic investment in the labs at Microsoft or NVIDIA scale. Microsoft has committed roughly $18 billion across OpenAI and Anthropic. NVIDIA committed roughly $50 billion in AI equity per Jensen Huang’s August 26 remarks. Salesforce’s $5 billion Anthropic stake is a passive Series C position from 2023, not a strategic capital commitment.

-An acquisition paid for in a strong currency at growth valuations. Not another buyback. Informatica does not count.

-An ecosystem play. Of all of these three, this is the only one that has shown to be a major mover of value. Salesforce does not own the substrate. It rents it from Anthropic. I walked the mechanics in The Reason Prior Tech Bubbles Broke Just Got Fixed.

Salesforce called this play Claudeforce. Anthropic’s customers may as well call what happens next Claudedaway.

The moment for the incumbents to change the story came and went. The moat is now with the model companies and the coding tools. Dreamforce was the sound of a legacy stage rented for a legacy audience.

So what are they worth, Airtable is the floor

In April I would not have told you that a valuation for the SaaS floor would have a name. It does now. Bending Spoons.

On August 4, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion in enterprise value. Airtable brought roughly $965 million of net cash to closing, so shareholders received about $2.25 billion. ARR was about $480 million growing over 20% year-over-year. 500,000 organizations using the product. 80 of the Fortune 100. Peaked at $11 billion in 2021. The founders took the deal because the alternative was slower. That put a stake in the ground.

Two multiples come out of that trade and you need both. The operating business cleared at 2.68 times revenue on enterprise value. That is what a Bending Spoons buyer clears at for the operating asset, and it is the standard multiple for M&A comparables. The total consideration cleared at 4.7 times revenue on equity, which is what shareholders took home because Airtable had almost a billion in cash on the balance sheet. The public SaaS incumbents do not have that cushion. Salesforce has $25 billion of new senior debt running the other way. Honest read: 2.68 for the operating business, 4.7 for what a healthy balance sheet gets you at exit. I ran both.

Bending Spoons is a category, not just a company. Milan-based. IPO’d July 1 at $29 a share, now at $18 billion. The business model is closer to private equity than software. Buy underperforming digital assets, cut staff 70% or more, raise prices, cut free tiers, let churn wash out the price-sensitive customers, keep the sticky ones.

Fifty-plus acquisitions. AOL, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Evernote, Airtable. Revenue $671 million in 2024, $1.31 billion in 2025, $601 million in Q1 2026 alone. Evernote lost most of its US and Chile staff inside six months. Vimeo lost the entire video group. Komoot cut three quarters of headcount. That is the deal every SaaS CEO gets sent from here on.

Both floors, next to the SaaS names. The math is not friendly on either.

Three of the five already trade below the friendly floor. Adobe 14% below, Workday 8%, HubSpot 29%. Salesforce and ServiceNow have room to fall to the friendly floor. Every one of the five has room down to the operating floor. Read the buyback prices against those numbers. Adobe retired $23.3 billion at an average of $412 per share against an operating floor near $170. More than double. Salesforce’s ASR at $198 lands at the equity floor per share and roughly twice the operating floor. Every one of these companies retired stock at prices only defensible if the multiple returns to prior peaks. It has not. Airtable put the stake in the ground on where it lands if it does not.

The mechanics run in one direction from here.

The buyback stops working. You cannot run the largest ASR in history twice in eighteen months. The second $25 billion of Salesforce’s $50 billion authorization lands differently once the story has already been told.

Replacement buyers ship. Every quarter, another Curative rebuilds, another Kirkland ships a proprietary AI stack, another Rillet doubles new ARR, and another Salesforce customer takes Claudeforce’s own API and uses it to leave. The reported growth numbers hold until a small percentage of the buyer base has finished the replacement build, and then they do not.

The debt payments do not care. The March 2026 senior notes carry weighted-average coupons north of 5%. The debt is serviceable at today’s cash flow. Salesforce generated roughly $14 billion in free cash flow last year. Coverage is fine and will stay fine for some time. That is not the point. A growth compounder just committed a large chunk of its future cash flow to bond payments instead of growth investments, at exactly the moment the growth investments were most needed.

Marc’s dream this week became, thanks to a debt-driven buyback dressed up as an AI strategy, his shareholders’ nightmare.

This might be the short of the century. Michael Burry may already be watching. He took the other side of my trade. The interesting positions always have someone smart on the opposite side. What I know is that Marc Benioff borrowed $25 billion to buy his own stock and cannot run the same trade at the same terms twice. The incumbents have left one bounce and a quarter or two of Anthropic-markup EPS cover. Both erode on schedule. Anthropic’s own IPO turns the paper mark into a cash decision.

What to do about it

If you invest. I do not make investment advice but here is what I would do. The pair is long the substrate, short the seats. Cursor at $60 billion. Cognition at $25 billion. Anthropic at $965 billion. That is where the compression at Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and Adobe is going. Every open-weight release drives the short leg harder than the long leg. If Burry is right, you lose on the short and make it back on the substrate. If I am right, both pay.

If you run technology. The move is not to replace your SaaS with homegrown software, even though I expect many of you will. That is 2015 thinking dressed up in AI clothes. Bring every AI model your company needs inside the tent. Frontier models. Domain models. Coding tools. Assistants. Economic models. Medical models. Relationship graphs. Materials science. Learn to use them, fine-tune them, stitch them together. Intelligence is the substrate. The old apps get pulled out along the way. Sort your application inventory by data gravity, not by spend. Latham bought Nvidia servers to keep sensitive client data off the cloud. Custom software is not in the CVE lists, the technographic databases, or the shodan scan. Attackers scanning widely deployed platforms cannot automate discovery against something only you run.

If you run a board or a leadership team. Do not confuse a partnership announcement with a strategy. Do not confuse a stock rally with a thesis change. Do not confuse a $2.7 billion equity markup on a private supplier with an earnings beat. The right posture is an honest read of where your company sits inside the squeeze and a plan to move before the plan gets made for you. Read Infinite Leverage, What an AI-First Company Actually Does, and Your Buyer Has a Process for the operating detail.

The reckoning has already started

Benioff called for the nonsense of the SaaSpocalypse to stop. Dreamforce 2026 may be remembered as the day it actually began.

The death spiral takes several quarters to run in full, as buyback fuel burns off, replacement buyers ship, and debt service compounds. That is already in motion. This is what a private-equity capital structure without a private-equity growth engine looks like when the market stops giving it the benefit of the doubt.

Intelligence is the substrate. Airtable tells you where the seats end up. This is the last easy time to reposition.

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.

Stephen Messer writes every week on the AI economy and what it does to how companies actually run. Subscribe here if you want them in your inbox.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

We’ve all seen the emails: A spoofed message from your company’s CFO or a vendor asking you to pay an outstanding invoice. These phishing messages lead to millions of dollars of fraudulent payments every year, and are becoming more realistic all the time. The good news is companies are fighting back: On Tuesday, Microsoft and Coinbase announced they had taken down a phishing network, known as EvilTokens, that has defrauded businesses ranging from real estate firms to banks to healthcare providers.

In a blog post describing the scam, the companies explained that EvilTokens sold a do-it-yourself phishing kit over Telegram designed to exploit Microsoft Outlook email accounts. The kit came with a sinister feature, described by the post as “an AI-powered analyst that mapped trusted relationships, identified who controlled payments, and flagged where fraud was most likely to succeed.”

This meant that, once a victim fell for a phishing email, scammers could use the AI analyst to create especially persuasive emails to target those in position to pay. This is a notable evolution from conventional phishing campaigns, which have typically relied on a “spray and pray” approach to luring victims.

The EvilTokens tool also proved hard to dislodge. As the blog post explained, the phishing campaigns included links directing victims to fake Microsoft or DocuSign pages that displayed a code, and instructed them to enter it on a legitimate Microsoft website to verify their identity. If they did so, EvilTokens was able to bypass two-factor authentication and stay hidden on their computers—even surviving password resets.

The software powering the EvilTokens kit represents a sophisticated evolution of conventional phishing tools but, according to Coinbase’s security team, the most alarming attribute is that it requires few technical skills to use it.

“It completely obliterates the barrier to entry on phishing as a service, and can be operated on an industrial scale,” said Charlotte Surrey, an investigator on Coinbase’s global intelligence team. She added that the EvilTokens kit sold on Telegram for between $100 and $300 per month, and came with features that let anyone vibe code a customized attack.

The takedown

The EvilTokens investigation came in the course of an ongoing partnership between security teams at Coinbase and Microsoft, which regularly swap intelligence on cyber threats. The companies spent months uncovering who was behind the Telegram campaign, and then shared their findings with law enforcement.

The investigation culminated in the Metropolitan Police nabbing the masterminds behind the EvilTokens scam on September 11. In a statement, the unit said two men, aged 32 and 38, were arrested on suspicion of making articles for use in fraud and money laundering offenses, and that they have been released on bail as the investigation continues.

In the course of mapping the phishing activity, investigators determined the perpetrators of the scam had collected around $1.1 million between October 2025 and June 2026. The money was paid in cryptocurrency to wallets on the Tron blockchain, and came from over 700 distinct addresses.

In a separate element of the investigation, Microsoft filed civil lawsuits that resulted in the seizure of 50 websites and the disabling of more than 175 domains tied to EvilTokens’ infrastructure. Upon seizing the domains, Microsoft posted the following splash page to publicize the takedown:

While the EvilTokens investigation began as a collaboration between Microsoft and Coinbase, it the anti-phishing campaign evolved into a broader coalition of firms, including Cloudflare and OpenAI.

According to Coinbase, at the time of the takedown, the EvilTokens perpetrators were working on newer phishing tools to target Okta and Gmail accounts.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

From mortgages to auto loans to credit cards, borrowing is set to get even pricier.

But the Federal Reserve’s decision on Sept. 16, 2026, to hike its baseline interest rate also highlighted an increasingly confounding dilemma: It can raise the price of money across the economy, but it can’t determine which sectors are most affected.

That means the rate increase may further slow the weaker parts of the economy, such as housing, while barely affecting the strongest, namely the relentless investment in artificial intelligence.

In its statement summarizing its unanimous vote, the Fed’s policymaking committee said it was raising its benchmark rate by a quarter percentage point so that it now stands at a new target range of 3.75% to 4%. It described inflation as still “elevated” and noted that other economic indicators remain strong, from productivity to investment, to domestic spending.

As a scholar of public finance, I believe the Fed probably had little choice but to raise rates given its commitment to maintain inflation-fighting credibility. Markets had already expected the hike, and if the Fed had failed to deliver, it might have pushed longer-term interest rates even higher amid concerns it was becoming less wedded to that target.

But the Fed’s action also underscores that the U.S. increasingly looks like an economy moving at two very different speeds. Investment in AI – whether through data centers, computing capacity or related infrastructure – has been booming, while it’s crowding out other kinds of investment.

Meanwhile, the housing market is getting crushed by high mortgage rates and diminishing affordability, while consumers are carrying ever more expensive credit card and auto debt.

Many small and traditional businesses are also in a bind as they face substantially higher financing costs than they did several years ago. Those costs reflect the rising yields on longer-term U.S. government debt, which have been going up for months on a mix of factors: Longer-term inflation concerns due to soaring U.S. government debt, geopolitical risks driving up energy costs, and ongoing financing demand for AI.

On Sept. 14, the yield on the 10-year Treasury crossed 5% for the first time since 2023.

An elusive inflation target

When the Fed hikes short-term interest rates, it slows down economic activity by making borrowing more expensive and saving more attractive.

That mechanism works particularly well when consumers are deciding whether to finance a house, purchase a car or take on additional debt. It also discourages businesses from making investments when the expected return is only modestly above their financing costs. As demand slows, businesses have less room to raise prices, easing inflationary pressures.

In this case, the Fed justified its move by citing “elevated” inflation and noting that it “will support a timelier return” to its goal of an annual inflation target of 2%. It also suggested the economy would be able to absorb the tightening and described economic activity as “expanding at a solid pace.”

The decision aligns with Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh’s recent comments that restoring price stability is central to the Fed’s credibility. In a key speech in August, he underscored his commitment to bringing annualized inflation back down to 2%, an objective he called a “firm, fixed target” – a turnaround from his more ambiguous comments in July.

But in recent months, the economic data has shown that the 2% annual target remains elusive. Consumer prices rose 0.4% in August and 3.4% over the past year. Meanwhile, the war with Iran has pushed oil prices back above US$100 a barrel, adding a new source of inflation pressure through gasoline, diesel, transportation and production costs.

At the same time, the labor market isn’t faltering. The economy added 162,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate remained at 4.1%. The one notable concern is the persistence of long-term joblessness despite the strong headline numbers. More than one-quarter of unemployed Americans have now been out of work for at least six months.

Taken together, those numbers suggested there was room for the Fed to hike rates, given that the economy isn’t sliding into recession. So investors overwhelmingly expected the Fed’s rate increase.

An uneven economic hit

However, tighter monetary policy carries a risk: It falls disproportionately on sectors that are already struggling and highly sensitive to interest rates, while having less effect on one of the economy’s strongest sources of demand – the booming AI investment cycle.

Housing provides the clearest example. Persistently high mortgage rates are reinforcing the “lock-in” effect for current homeowners. Millions of homeowners financed their houses when mortgage rates were 3% or 4%, so they’re staying put, with little incentive to sell their home and purchase another at much higher rates.

Mortgage rates are mostly influenced by longer-term factors, including Treasury yields, inflation expectations and market expectations about the future path of interest rates. But the Fed’s decision still matters. Markets increasingly expect today’s hike to be followed by additional increases, signaling that it views inflation as a more persistent risk and putting upward pressure on longer-term interest rates.

That expectation will keep mortgage rates high – probably resulting in fewer home sales, less mobility and continued headwinds for prospective buyers. It’s also likely to make renting relatively more attractive for potential homebuyers who are priced out of buying.

Higher-for-longer rates also change how consumers save.

When interest rates were near zero, they earned almost nothing on safe assets. Today, Treasury securities, money market funds and other relatively safe assets offer meaningful returns. Higher rates therefore tend to shift incentives throughout the economy away from borrowing and spending and toward saving.

With consumers stretched by inflation and increasingly dipping into their savings, however, this effect may be less pronounced.

The AI sugar high

When it comes to the AI investment boom, it’s a different picture. Warsh noted in August that more than half of recent capital-spending growth could be attributed to the AI buildout.

The companies that are spending billions of dollars on computing infrastructure are doing so because they expect potentially enormous returns from AI. If those expected returns on investment are exceptionally high, a modest increase in borrowing costs may do little to alter their investment decisions. That stands in sharp contrast to a prospective homebuyer getting sticker shock from mortgage rates nearing 7%.

The federal government, for its part, faces a slower adjustment. A Fed rate hike doesn’t immediately increase the interest rate on all outstanding federal debt. Most Treasury notes and bonds carry fixed rates until they mature. But as the Treasury issues new debt and refinances maturing securities, today’s higher rates gradually become tomorrow’s higher federal interest expense. That rise in interest costs is a main reason some economists are sounding alarms about the national debt, which recently topped $40 trillion.

In effect, the U.S. economy is facing a reality in which both short- and long-term rates stay higher for longer. The federal government, households and businesses are all adjusting to a borrowing environment that looks substantially different from the one that prevailed for much of the previous decade.

John W. Diamond, Director of the Center for Public Finance at the Baker Institute, Rice University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A grassroots revolt against automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has gained momentum across the United States.

ALPRs are AI-powered cameras that capture images of all passing vehicles. The camera systems turn details into datapoints searchable by anyone with access to the information.

Today, there are more than 130,000 ALPRs on U.S. streets. And more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use cameras produced by a single manufacturer, Flock Safety, which says its cameras have helped law enforcement agencies identify and arrest criminals and reduce crime.

But some members of those police departments have abused the data gathered by ALPRs. A police officer in Kansas was sentenced to 18 months probabtion in April 2023 for using Flock camera to stalk his estranged wife. A Florida police officer was fired and arrested in March 2026 for using data gathered by ALPRs to stalk a woman he had previously harassed on a TV set. And activists filed a lawsuit against California police departments in October 2021 for illegally sharing information collected from ALPRs with out-of-state and federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Due to public outcry, cities across the U.S. have rejected and canceled contracts with Flock. In September 2026, Florida’s Department of Transportation revoked permits for ALPRs on its highway system.

That has not been enough to quell growing backlash over the cameras. In at least 36 states, opponents of the technology have taken matters into their own hands, destroying or impairing ALPRs rather than wait for local governments to step in.

As a historian of the American Revolution, I see parallels between Americans’ revolt against ALPRs and colonists’ destructive and often violent pushback to late 18th-century British rule.

If this summer’s celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding failed to inspire widespread patriotism, the increasingly bipartisan revolution against ALPRs suggests Americans have not entirely lost their rebellious spirit.

Troublesome colonists

From the start, the English colonists of North America proved to be a thorn in the side of the government. Despite British hopes that investing in American colonies would enrich England, these ventures proved to be more costly than they were profitable. Colonists bore much of the blame.

When the British Parliament passed laws meant to regulate trade in the 1660s, colonists across the Eastern Seaboard turned to smuggling rather than comply.

American merchants and consumers preferred to trade directly with both their fellow English colonists and merchants in the French and Dutch colonies rather than have that trade controlled by ministers in London.

The British government had little ability to enforce the law.

Britain pushes back

That changed in 1763, after British forces vanquished the French Empire from North America at tremendous cost. A new prime minister, George Grenville, led a series of reforms aimed at making the colonists pay for their own military protection.

Many Americans often believe that the Revolution began as a revolt against higher taxes. But most of the reforms coming from London actually lowered taxes to make smuggled goods less appealing.

What colonists really resented was the imperial government’s growing influence in their lives.

In 1767, Parliament passed a series of laws that allowed Britain to raise revenue to pay the salaries of colonial governors, attorneys general and judges. At the same time, Parliament sent troops to cities such as Boston to protect its officials. Competition for work and strained community relationships often led to violence between British soldiers and colonists.

American colonists turn to violence

The same year, angry colonists in Boston, New York and Philadelphia began boycotting British goods. Prominent Americans, including Benjamin Franklin and John Dickinson, endorsed these nonviolent protests.

But more radical leaders believed colonists needed to take more decisive action.

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, members of the paramilitary group the Sons of Liberty dumped nearly £10,000 – almost US$2 million in today’s dollars – worth of privately owned tea into Boston Harbor.

A few weeks later, the Sons of Liberty struck again. This time they attacked fellow colonist and British supporter John Malcolm, covering him in tar and feathers. For five hours, they beat him and paraded him through the streets. Similar instances of destruction and violence occurred across the colonies.

The British responded harshly. In May 1774, Gen. Thomas Gage arrived at Boston as the colony’s new military governor. He implemented the so-called “Coercive Acts,” which closed the port of Boston and disbanded local government, among other measures.

Surveillance backfires

By early 1775, Boston was besieged. Around 5,000 British troops roamed the streets, directed by Gage to gather information on the Sons of Liberty and arrest leading dissidents.

Gage hoped heightened surveillance would quell unrest. But it only pushed more citizens into the radicals’ camp. On the night of April 18, 1775, a discrete network of watchmen eluded British surveillance and famously hanged two lanterns from the steeple atop Christ Church. These beacons signaled that Gage’s troops were crossing the Charles River, on their way to seize colonial stores of gunpowder and ammunition, setting in motion the events that would begin the American Revolution.

In response to the widespread pushback to ALPRs, Flock Safety CEO Garett Langley appealed to history. In June 2026 he authored a post on the company’s website, arguing that detractors misunderstand Ben Franklin’s famous 1755 quote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

In an August 2026 interview, Langley referenced the auto industry, noting that rather than ban cars after an uptick in collision fatalities, legislatures mandated seat belts and airbags. Drawing parallels to the contemporary debate around ALPRs, Langley suggested Americans should again prioritize safety and hoped Americans would be willing to “compromise” on issues of privacy.

Samuel Adams, one of the most prominent leaders of the Sons of Liberty, had his own opinion on compromise. Writing in June 1771, he explained that although Americans had “disagreed among themselves in one mode of opposition to arbitrary measures,” they were “united in the main principles of constitutional & natural liberty.”

Adams believed that, when threatened, American colonists would come together to defend their liberties. Clearly, Adams’ opinion resonates today.

G. Patrick O’Brien, Assistant Professor of History, University of Tampa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Frank Weishaupt did not expect to be workshopping heavy metal album titles with me 15 minutes into a press call about his own survey data. But that’s where the conversation about Owl Labs’ 10th annual State of Hybrid Work Report landed, after I told him that what he’d put together sounded like “kind of a nightmare fuel report.”

Weishaupt, a thought leader in the field of remote work thanks to his role as CEO of the Boston-based video-conferencing company, pushed back — just a little bit. “I don’t know if I see it that way,” he said, before immediately cataloging the ingredients: job hugging, career minimalism, employees strategically “billboarding” themselves in the office one day a week while working six. “I just said a bunch of things that don’t sound really good in that mixture,” he said. “So your soup is definitely there, right?”

Acknowledging that the report is “stress-bound” and at times “sounds like a terrible recipe,” Weishaupt insisted there are more nuances to the story. Owl Labs popularized the phrase “coffee badging” to describe the strategic practice of badging into your office building just long enough to have a cup of joe and some face time with your boss before heading back home around 3:00 pm, but that has expanded into what Owl Labs calls “billboard days.”

I suggested that it adds up to a “panopticon,” a conceptual prison from the Victorian age developed by Jeremy Bentham, in which essentially everyone is surveilling everyone else, leaving no room for escape. I pointed out that it’s the title of an especially gnarly progressive-metal album by the unfortunately named Isis (Pitchfork gave it an 8.4). Weishaupt laughed and said he’s a Metallica fan himself, before agreeing that his latest Hybrid Work Report is pretty “heavy metal,” nowhere more so than the disappearing four-day workweek.

The four-day workweek’s six-day afterlife

For years, the four-day workweek was the aspirational endpoint of every hybrid-work conversation. Owl Labs’ data shows that’s dead, Weishaupt said: “We have completely shifted away from a conversation about the four-day workweek,” he said, “and it’s now becoming more of a question of, is Saturday your only day off?”

In fact, 74% of employees say they do some kind of work on a typical Sunday, and 21% call it a full or near-full workday, according to the report. Rather than compressing hours into fewer days, workers have simply had their week stretched into a sixth day, breaking the day into non-linear blocks around parenting, energy levels, or personal errands.

Weishaupt frames this as flexibility given back on employees’ own terms. “If you’re taking that Tuesday afternoon or that Thursday morning… you might be giving it back,” he said, “but as long as that Sunday’s not additive to the whole picture and you can make it work, I see that as flexibility.” This fits into the 2020s-era trend of “microshifting,” or work being split into many small sprints throughout the day rather than a traditional, eight-hour workday.

Weishaupt said he wasn’t sure exactly when it ended, but the window has closed on the four-day work week. “I thought that’s where we’re going to go for a little while and, I think that’s been waved bye-bye a while ago.”

If Sundays are where the extra work goes, “billboard days” are where employees perform the appearance of not needing extra oversight in the first place. Nearly half of workers — 48% — say they’ve picked specific in-office days deliberately to be seen by senior leaders or clients, or plan to start. Bosses, notionally the ones doing the watching, are just as prone to angling for visibility themselves: 40% of billboard-day participants are managers.

The logic is straightforward once you follow Owl Labs’ own return-to-office data. Asked why RTO policies exist at all, 76% of employees say the real driver is leadership oversight — not the 74% who cite productivity and collaboration, or the 71% who point to client service and culture. Employees have concluded, in other words, that showing up is mostly theater for an audience of one manager, on one day, and they’ve adjusted their calendars accordingly.

Job hugging, career minimalism, and the extraction math

Weishaupt touched on generational economics, noting that 53% of employees say they’ve adopted or plan to adopt “career minimalism” — deliberately scaling back ambition to protect health and sustainability instead of chasing promotion. He calls this “one of the more concerning pieces of data,” reading it as a euphemism for surrender: “Maybe you’re giving up a little bit, right? Like, ‘Hey, I’m not gonna be able to go anywhere because it’s too risky to leave my gig, so I’m gonna stay in this job as long as I possibly can.’”

That’s the other half of job hugging — 38% of employees are holding onto roles they’ve outgrown because leaving feels riskier than staying stuck — and Weishaupt draws a straight line from it to the billboarding behavior above. Workers who feel trapped in place compensate by making sure the person who might promote or protect them sees their face on the right Tuesday.

Underneath all of it sits AI, which Weishaupt discusses with the candor of someone who sees data of a workplace still very much in flux. Sixty-nine percent of workers say AI has made them more productive; 46% say it’s hindered them at times. Weishaupt agreed that we’re in a “trade-off period” with AI adoption where it’s making us more and less productive, more and less plugged in, more and less present in the office: “it’s not linear blocks of work like it used to be, which I think is what people wanted if you kind of look back historically at the data that we’ve been providing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. Half a century after its founding, Apple’s financial transformation is best told through data that captures how thoroughly the company has reinvented its business. And the numbers suggest capital discipline will remain a big focus in its next era.

As John Ternus became CEO on Sept. 1, taking over the reins from Tim Cook, Fortune takes a look at the past 50 years and the data behind the shift from device dependency to recurring revenue, a global sales base, and profit growth that has rewarded patient shareholders beyond almost any comparable stock.

The iPhone remains Apple’s single most powerful engine, accounting for roughly half of 2025 sales. But the more revealing trend is services, which include the App Store, iCloud, Music, TV, payments, advertising, and more. It’s a division that barely existed 15 years ago and is now projected to generate more than a quarter of this year’s revenue. That’s the clearest evidence that Apple has successfully layered a high-margin, recurring-revenue business on top of its device sales, insulating it somewhat from the hardware upgrade cycles that worry investors.

Apple has truly gone global. While the U.S. remains its largest market, a substantial share of Apple’s sales now comes from Europe, Greater China, Japan, and the broader Asia-Pacific region. Its retail footprint tells a similar story: Apple now operates more than 500 stores worldwide.

The bottom-line trajectory is the starkest number of all: annual profit rose from roughly $2 billion in 2006 to about $112 billion in 2025, a nearly 60-fold increase in under two decades. The long-term performance of the stock has been even more remarkable: a $10,000 investment in Apple’s 1980 IPO, held through its subsequent stock splits and decades of growth, would be worth approximately $40.5 million by mid-2026, Fortune reported.

These figures form the financial foundation Ternus inherited from Cook, who built Apple into a $5 trillion company through supply-chain discipline and cash-flow strength rather than Steve Jobs-style stage presence. “Cook ultimately built his own respected legacy, not in spite of being unlike Jobs, but because of it,” Fortune’s Phil Wahba writes.

That inheritance now faces its sharpest test yet: while Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Oracle pour tens of billions into data-center buildouts for the AI race, Apple has deliberately avoided the hyperscaler arms race, betting instead on privacy-first, on-device AI delivered through premium hardware. 

Whether that restraint proves prescient or costly will determine whether Ternus’s Apple keeps growing. You can view more of Apple’s history in charts here. Read more about Cook’s tenure at Apple here.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Gates Foundation and MTN Group Foundation on Tuesday announced a partnership to launch an AI-enabled maternal health platform in Nigeria, with the goal of helping 500,000 women access better care by 2030.

The initiative, called the Nigeria Maternal Health Multiplier, will also equip 5,000 frontline health workers with tools to spot pregnancy and childbirth complications earlier, and connect 500 health facilities to more consistent care standards.

Nigeria accounts for nearly 30% of maternal deaths worldwide, even as the country has cut those deaths over the past decade. Globally, maternal deaths have dropped 40% since 2000, but progress has stalled, and the risk of dying in childbirth in sub-Saharan Africa remains roughly 250 times higher than in Western Europe. Only 59% of Nigerian women complete four or more antenatal care visits, according to the initiative, so warning signs of complications often go undetected until it’s too late.

The platform has three parts: AI- and phone-based decision support for both health workers and mothers; affordable smartphones and mobile data; and upgraded connectivity at health facilities. It builds on Nigeria’s existing Maternal and Neonatal Mortality Reduction Innovation Initiative, run by the Federal Ministry of Health under its Sector-Wide Approach.

“AI has enormous potential to improve health, but only if its benefits reach the people who stand to gain the most,” said Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation. “Left to the market alone, potential tends to benefit those who can already afford it, not the people who need it most. That’s where philanthropy has a role to play: not as a substitute for investment, but as a catalyst for it.”

MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita said the goal is to make maternal health “more personalized, predictive and accessible” as AI develops. “We can put trusted, locally relevant health insights directly into the hands of mothers and healthcare professionals, tailored to their unique needs and languages,” he said. “Starting in Nigeria, our ambition is to demonstrate a scalable model for improving maternal and child health outcomes across Africa.”

Nigerian officials framed the deal as an answer to a systems problem rather than a technology gap. Dr. Bosun Tijani, the country’s minister of communications, innovation, and digital economy, said the biggest barrier to service delivery in Nigeria (like health, agriculture, or education) has rarely been a lack of new tools, but a lack of focus on the basic systems needed to get people to actually use them.

Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s coordinating minister of health and social welfare, said strengthening primary health care and the frontline workers who deliver it is central to the country’s health reforms. “Strengthening primary healthcare and empowering the frontline health workers who deliver it are core to our health sector reforms,” he said, adding that partnerships that work with existing health systems, rather than around them, are what’s needed to reach mothers “still falling through the cracks.”

The four-year partnership starts with about $25 million in direct and in-kind funding from 2026 through 2030, split between the Gates Foundation and MTN. Both organizations said they expect the initial investment to draw in additional funding and support expansion into other African markets over time.

MTN is contributing its connectivity infrastructure, device distribution networks, mobile financial services, and local market execution experience. The Gates Foundation is bringing its work in maternal and child health, digital health innovation, and what it calls responsible AI.

The launch is the Gates Foundation’s second major AI-in-Africa health push this year. In January, the foundation and OpenAI unveiled a $50 million “Horizon1000” partnership aimed at integrating AI tools into primary health clinics, starting in Rwanda before expanding to other countries. That effort was similarly aimed around closing gaps left by health worker shortages and shrinking foreign aid budgets.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah is calling on the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate whether Donald Trump Jr. used his proximity to the presidency for financial benefit, after his recent wedding party was partially bankrolled by a Russian oligarch.

In a letter sent Tuesday, Curtis called on the committee to subpoena Trump Jr. over his business dealings, relationships with foreign individuals and entities, gifts or other benefits he has received and any instances in which his relationship to President Donald Trump, a Republican, “was invoked or understood to provide value.” Curtis called for the same scrutiny of Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

“The country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president,” Curtis wrote in the letter addressed to GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the committee, and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee.

The letter comes as a few Republicans have shown a growing willingness to criticize Trump after largely avoiding public breaks with the president during much of his second term. The unpopular war in Iran, high gas prices and mounting concerns about the GOP’s prospects in November’s midterm elections have brought increased scrutiny of the president from within his own party.

The Trumps say it was a generous gift from a dear friend

ProPublica first reported last week that Umar Kremlev, who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, helped pay to rent a private island and for a fireworks show when Trump Jr. and socialite Bettina Anderson were married in the Bahamas in May.

In a subsequent post on her Instagram page signed by the couple, Bettina Trump wrote that Kremlev, head of the International Boxing Association, was a “dear friend” who “very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding.”

The president, who did not attend his son’s wedding, defended Kremlev’s involvement but said the money would be paid back.

Curtis calls the funding ‘corruption’

Curtis last Friday called the gift “corruption” and vowed to say more in the coming days.

“A Russian oligarch paid for a lavish wedding after-party for Donald Trump Jr., which to me just stinks. It’s corruption. I don’t like it,” Curtis said in a video posted on social media.

Curtis, first elected to the Senate in 2024, vowed upon taking office to not be afraid of disagreeing with Trump. While he has been critical in the past, the step of calling on the committee to investigate the president’s son is remarkable.

He wrote on social media that Republicans “nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships” and that they “should not unplug it now.”

Republicans investigated the Bidens

House Republicans spent much of 2023 and 2024 investigating whether Hunter Biden used his father’s name and political position to benefit his business dealings with foreign interests. The Biden family dismissed the investigations as politically motivated and denied any wrongdoing.

The GOP effort culminated in a report accusing Joe Biden of participating in a conspiracy to use his public office to enrich his family. But the House never voted on articles of impeachment against him.

“‘Trust us’ was not enough then, and it is not enough now,” Curtis wrote.

___

Associated Press reporter Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

China said Tuesday that it is now requiring permits for exports to the United States, Mexico and Canada of two additional chemicals that can be used to make illegal drugs, expanding controls on shipments to the three countries.

The Commerce Ministry and other authorities jointly announced the new regulations ahead of this week’s meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. The additions bring the number of chemicals under such controls to 18.

The U.S. has called China the world’s largest producer of many of the precursor chemicals used in the illicit production of fentanyl, methamphetamine and other deadly synthetic drugs. It has urged Beijing to take more aggressive action to reduce the flow of unregulated precursor chemicals.

In November 2025, Beijing announced export restrictions on 13 “drug-making” chemicals to the U.S., Canada and Mexico, including chemicals used to produce the synthetic opioid blamed for tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the U.S. every year. In May, China added three additional types of fentanyl-related precursors to the list. The measures followed meetings between Xi and Trump in South Korea in October 2025 and Beijing in May.

China faced a fentanyl-related tariff imposed by the U.S. Beijing then issued a report in March 2025 detailing its efforts to control the illegal trade in fentanyl. Its foreign minister also blasted the U.S. for responding to Beijing’s goodwill with tariffs. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the tariff in February.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

China’s Alibaba unveiled new artificial intelligence chip technologies and plans for more powerful models on Tuesday, including what it said was China’s most powerful AI chip, days ahead of a meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders at which competition to lead on AI technology is expected to be a major theme.

Alibaba’s announcement came as U.S. AI leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, are warning that China’s development of AI poses a threat to the United States and calling for an overall slowdown on development of the technology.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to arrive in Washington on Wednesday for a state visit and meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, at which AI, trade and tariffs are expected to be discussed.

At its annual flagship conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba rolled out a new AI chip and described its plans for the next generation of its AI model.

CEO Eddie Wu said the new Zhenwu V900 chip is the “most powerful AI chip in China today” and can deliver three times the performance of the company’s previous generation Zhenwu M890 chip.

Such chips power frontier AI model training and “inference,” a term for the calculations a trained AI uses to deliver responses to users. Alibaba’s Zhenwu chips are used in its data centers, providing computing to the company and its cloud clients.

Alibaba also said it plans to train a new AI model at the scale of five to 10 trillion parameters, a measure of an AI’s learning capacity, bringing it closer to the most advanced models from the U.S. Its latest Qwen3.8-Max model, the most powerful of its Qwen AI series models, has 2.4 trillion parameters.

Chinese AI company Moonshot says that its Kimi K3, released in July, is the world’s largest open model with 2.8 trillion parameters.

Alibaba also highlighted plans to expand the data centers that power its cloud computing business, citing “exponentially” rising demand for AI computing. The company said it expects to have over 20 gigawatts’ worth of computing by 2032.

SpaceX has approximately 1.4 gigawatts of AI computing capacity as of mid-this year and says it aims to reach over 10 gigawatts in 2027.

Recent Chinese advancements in AI are giving Beijing more leverage in its upcoming talks with Washington, some analysts believe, as China steps up its self-reliance push even as U.S.-led export restrictions have barred it from accessing some of the world’s most cutting-edge technologies, including AI chips and chipmaking machines.

Open Chinese models, which are often more affordable than cutting-edge closed models from leading U.S. AI labs, have also been making inroads globally, including in the U.S.

Chinese technology giant Huawei last week also unveiled new chip technologies as it looks to challenge global leaders like Nvidia. Frontier AI model training in China often rely on Nvidia chips, analysts said, but Chinese-designed chips are gaining ground as Nvidia has been blocked from selling some of its most powerful AI chips to China.

“Using extra computing power to make up for chip limits helps China stay strong locally,” said Neil Shah, vice president of Counterpoint Research, a technology market research firm based in Hong Kong.

Counterpoint senior analyst Parv Sharma added that how much the AI and chipmaking gap between China and the U.S. narrows will also depend on other factors including China’s ability to advance chip foundries that manufacture them, not just chip design capabilities.

Alibaba is “mobilizing every resource” to meet customers’ demand for AI, CEO Wu said in his speech Tuesday.

Global shortages across the AI data center supply chain, for example, “are currently limiting the speed at which we can scale our compute infrastructure” for AI, he added.

Wu also likened AI growth to the industrial revolution and said “machine intelligence” will rapidly outgrow human thinking capacity.

While “machine intelligence today is not a substitute for human intelligence,” he predicted that, eventually, machines will be able to produce over 1,000 times more “thinking” than all of humanity combined, up from less than 3% currently.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

My Oura ring and I are close. 

Every morning, before I put on my glasses and right after I shuffle out from under my comforter, I check my Oura app and for 7 seconds contemplate the non-jewelry silver band on my index finger. My Sleep Score rarely surprises me, sure, but this is how it’s gone, more or less, every morning sometime between 6 and 7 AM for the last three years of my life, since I got my first Oura ring in August 2023. 

So, in early September, I was especially interested when Oura filed its S-1, the official public disclosure of a company going public. And, this Monday morning, as I rolled over and looked at my Oura ring, it occurred to me: As Anthropic is reportedly looking to push its IPO back to November (and could push further), while OpenAI has punted to 2027, Oura is now the most consequential IPO that’s imminent. 

And Oura’s numbers are compelling: The wearable maker’s total revenue, for the nine months that ended June 30, was over $1.2 billion, a leap from $697.6 million for the same period in 2025. Additionally, net income jumped in that time frame, from $1.6 million in 2025 to $60.8 million in 2026. 

Hardware is about 80% of Oura’s revenue, but the company’s subscriber base (of which I’m part) also has momentum. On Monday, the company updated its filing to show that as it ended the 2026 fiscal year, Oura had 5.7 million paid members, marking 96% growth year-over-year. (The initial filing had 5 million.)

Oura—whose backers seeking a return include Fidelity, Dragoneer, Iconiq Capital, Forerunner Ventures, and Lifeline Ventures—has certainly seen its fair share of controversy in recent years, particularly around concerns with data privacy that I’ve interviewed CEO Tom Hale about more than once. (At Brainstorm Tech last year, he told me onstage that Oura will never sell customer data.) And the company—founded in Finland by Kari Kivelä, Markku Koskela, and Petteri Lahtela in 2013—has an AI story of its own. I hosted a recent AI video feature “Inside the “Lifemaxxing” Economy: Has Fitness AI Optimization Gone Too Far?” 

During that chat, Hale went deeper into the company’s strategy. “AI and our particular take on it is going to be a pretty big moat,” he said then. “The data is actually the scarce resource here. Our data set [is] 42 billion hours… across a huge population.” That’s what fuels intelligence, Hale said.

Still, Oura won’t be an AI IPO. And I’ve found covering Oura surprisingly refreshing throughout its rise over the last few years, as the AI boom has been growing. I started my career covering consumer M&A, so I’ll always have a soft spot for the space: Consumer companies hold special places in the intimacies of our lives. (I also know that my dad is going to read this and text me, because we both love talking about our Oura rings.)

So, as I rolled over and looked at my Oura app around 7 AM from under my sheets, it occurred to me that it may be instructive that, right now, the IPO we can rely on is something I keep on my hand. Anything can happen, of course. But even in the AI era, what’s tactile matters. 

See you tomorrow,

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

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“It requires a little fortune, now, to buy a house, and every article of furniture costs about three times as much as it did ten years ago.” That complaint isn’t from a TikTok video or a Substack newsletter — it’s a line in a piece titled “The Men Won’t Propose,” published in 1866 in a health magazine called Hall’s Journal of Health, more than a century before anyone had coined the term “Gen Z.”

The quote opens a new report from the BCG Center for Macroeconomics, “The Kids Are Alright: The Timeless Angst Over Young People and Money.” Economists Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Paul Swartz, and Henry Rubin argue that the received wisdom about a failing, falling-behind generation doesn’t survive contact with the data: Gen Z, by their reckoning, is richer at the same age than Millennials, Gen X, or the Baby Boomers ever were.

Gen Z feels worse about money than any generation on record. A generation thriving by every number that matters and miserable anyway is the kind of contradiction Charles Dickens built a career on.

The best of times, the worst of times

We all know the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

That’s more or less the shape of the BCG data, according to Carlsson-Szlezak, the firm’s global chief economist. A huge chunk of his job is dedicated to tackling these persistent misperceptions of economic facts; his 2024 Shocks, Crises and False Alarms, co-authored with Paul Swartz, made the Financial Times‘ list of best economics books of that year, in part for arguing that narratives can be overblown and the fundamental data is always a better guide. “The all-too-common narratives of economic collapse and decline are often false alarms themselves,” the authors write of their approach — very similar to their take on Gen Z’s Dickensian paradox.

“I have empathy for Gen Z,” Carlsson-Szlezak told Fortune over email. “They were the guinea pigs of the smartphone revolution, and they had little help from parents and educators to build effective filters to distinguish TikTok from IRL.”

But at the same time, the facts don’t lie.

On income, Gen Z has opened the widest generational lead since the Boomers: the oldest Gen Z workers, at 28, earn a median $42,000 in constant dollars — 25% more than Millennials made at that age, and 50% more than Boomers did.

On wealth, BCG says Gen Z is too young on its own for meaningful comparisons. But when combined with Millennials, the report points out that today’s young have pulled ahead of prior generations. Millennials at 34 carry an average net worth of $331,000, versus $251,000 for Gen X and $229,000 for Boomers at the same age.

Sentiment has moved the opposite way. For the first four decades that pollsters tracked the question, older Americans were reliably gloomier about the economy than the young — a pattern that held from at least 1980, until it flipped around 2025. For the first time on record, the young are more pessimistic than the old. A fresh SoFi/YouGov survey of 4,090 U.S. adults lands on the same fault line: 62% of Gen Z and Millennials still aspire to retire comfortably, but only 46% believe they actually will. The SoFi report argues that Gen Z is “financemaxxing” and “lifemaxxing,” looking beyond financial returns to consider the “emotional ROI” of how far their money can go. The survey data confirms much of BCG’s argument, saying Gen Z has a case of great expectations and seems to be overlooking how well off they actually are.

The BCG authors hedge their own thesis. “Our analysis of generational progress is not a claim that all is well for all. Rather, it is a push back against the thin claims that all is wrong,” the report says. Student debt is real; city housing is genuinely more expensive; some in this generation will not out-earn their parents, as some didn’t in every generation before them.

“Gen Z and Millennials go through their own unique generational struggle to build careers, income, and wealth—and they are confronting unique challenges such as student debt and housing affordability,” the authors write, before concluding that “even so, they are making broad generational progress.”

Hard times, and whether they’re structural

The report’s sharpest rebuttal targets the “K-shaped economy” narrative — the idea that the rich are pulling away while everyone else falls behind. Since 2020, the authors find, wage growth for the bottom quartile has outpaced the top in nearly every year, and wealth gains have been roughly proportional across income quintiles.

And according to SoFi, 77% of Gen Z believe they can start a business, versus 58% of older generations, and Gen Z is four times more likely than Boomers to have invested in crypto (26% vs. 6%). Similarly, the young also hold a greater share of their assets in stock, but that leaves them more vulnerable to market swings.

“Greater equity exposure does raise the risk of Gen Z falling behind, cyclically, in a bear market,” Carlsson-Szlezak said, noting the dent that the 2008 financial crisis left in Gen X and Boomer wealth curves. But he argues the long-run bet still favors the young, since “expected equity returns outstrip most other asset classes” — and housing wealth, he notes, wasn’t immune to setbacks either in the 2000s and 2010s.

In a 2024 Empower survey cited by BCG, Gen Z said it would need to earn $600,000 a year to feel financially successful — the 99th percentile of U.S. income, versus Boomers’ self-reported bar of $100,000. The median full-time salary is around $60,000.

The authors call this gap “financial dysmorphia,” driven partly by social-media exposure to unrepresentative wealth. Still, they argue that financial dysmorphia should not be allowed to take root and continue to misperceive economic fact: “As the young reach adulthood, they are responsible for using effective filters to screen out digital bling and focus on the reality in front of them.”

Housing and Dickens

Housing is the report’s most granular finding, and the one place the “kids are alright” thesis meets real friction. It now takes nearly six years of median income to buy a median-priced home, up from three and a half in 1975 — but the median new home is also 50% larger, and square-footage-adjusted affordability has barely moved. The real bind, the authors argue, is that 90% of young people now live in cities and suburbs, chasing housing stock that isn’t being built fast enough.

Carlsson-Szlezak argued that preference is temporary, not fixed: “This preference peaks in the mid-to-late 20s, and a drift to the suburbs sets in. By age 42, many Millennials have moved to the suburbs, and that’s exactly when they catch up with Gen X in homeownership rate.”

Dickens knew something about the gap between fortune and a roof overhead. His father was imprisoned for debt in 1824, and 12-year-old Charles was sent to work 10-hour days pasting labels onto boot-blacking jars — a shame he told almost no one about for the rest of his life. His grandmother’s death left the family a small inheritance, enough to clear the debt. It’s more or less the plot of Great Expectations, whose hero Pip inherited a mysterious fortune, assumed it marked him for greatness, and spent the novel’s second half ashamed of the family that raised him. Dickens wasn’t sympathetic to this potentially autobigraphical delusion: the novel rewards Joe Gargery’s plain decency over Pip’s inflated aspiration.

David Copperfield, the hero of Dickens’s own favorite among his novels, is a more Boomer-coded anti-Pip: an orphan who rises out of poverty through work, patience, and a stubborn attachment to the people who were kind to him along the way, not through a windfall he didn’t earn. Where Pip’s fortune arrives by accident and corrupts him, David’s comes gradually and leaves him more or less intact. It’s the difference between a life built and a life inherited.

A journey, not a verdict

BCG’s own argument is that the Boomer boom was a fluke — yet Boomers remain the report’s baseline. “Boomers are the base compare culturally and in academia alike,” Carlsson-Szlezak says, noting they’re the only generation with a full lifecycle of data. The deeper point is about the size of the bar: “In terms of income progression or wealth accumulation, Gen Z can beat the Boomers. But it’s unlikely Gen Z can outperform Gen X by more than the Boomers outperformed the Silent and Greatest generations — just because that bar was so low.”

Carlsson-Szlezak acknowledged that Boomer prosperity can’t recur. “What’s not repeatable is the shift from single to double income households,” he said, pointing to women’s mass entry into the labor force — a one-time shift that, by definition, can’t happen twice. He raises a second, less obvious advantage: the generation Boomers were competing against. The Great Depression’s Silent generation, whose economic scars set a historically low bar for Boomers to clear.

Carlsson-Szlezak doesn’t think the gap closes easily. His more concrete hope is generational: “The current crop of teens are being weaned off their smartphones at least during school hours. Perhaps ‘peak financial dysmorphia’ is behind us.” A better understanding of history, including an appreciation of progress, would also help, he adds.

Pressed on which explanation carries the most weight — psychology, a flawed benchmark, or economic structure — Carlsson-Szlezak replied, “Nothing is ever monocausal, but the biggest challenge is that of distorted expectations, in my view.” And what does he think Charles would say of all these misplaced great expectations? “I think Dickens would look at Gen Z and say they should strive to be David but choose to be Pip.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

KPMG LLP is folding its AI, innovation and ecosystem functions into a single new unit designed to spin up AI-native businesses at start-up speed, installing a vice chair who reports directly to the firm’s chief executive to run it — a structural bet that the biggest disruption to the professional-services model in a century can’t be managed through the usual committee layers.

The U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm’s new Client Technology & Innovation (CT&I) group, effective Sept. 22, will be led by Todd Lohr, a 15-year KPMG veteran who told Fortune that he had been “pushing for something like this for several years” — specifically, a structure with “a singular leader that reports directly to the CEO, which I do, because that is how we’re going to drive the transformative change that is required at KPMG.”

CT&I’s launch coincides with the departure of Steve Chase, vice chair and global head of AI & Digital Innovation, who is set to retire from the firm on Sept. 30. Chase built KPMG’s original AI and Digital Innovation group starting in 2023 and has more recently held a KPMG International mandate as Global Head of AI, a role he moved into in August 2025.

That reporting line elevates AI and innovation strategy out of the layer of vice chairs and functional heads and puts it in the same room as CEO Tim Walsh’s own agenda, signaling that KPMG views this less as a technology upgrade than a net new group focused on building what the firm will sell in the future

“There are things in the future that are, you know, a little existential for any organization, including our own,” Lohr said, “but I certainly think that we are sitting at this kind of pivotal moment in history, where we’re going to be able to take advantage of some of these swings in the market, and be able to look very differently at the future of KPMG, which is super exciting.”

Why now, and why Lohr

Lohr, 49, is not an outside hire brought in to inject Silicon Valley DNA. An internal operator who has spent years building the exact relationships CT&I is designed to commercialize, he helped start the firm’s early data and AI practices, ran its U.S. technology business including cyber, then moved into a role overseeing third-party technology partnerships before a stint leading the firm’s clients-and-markets commercial organization.

Lohr was one of the leaders involved with architecting KPMG’s alliance with Anthropic. Along with the Anthropic tie-up, existing relationships with Google Cloud, Microsoft, OpenAI and Databricks all now roll into CT&I’s ecosystem mandate.

His path to KPMG is a bit unusual for Big Four leadership. Before joining the firm, Lohr was employee No. 3 at Confiance, a financial-services consulting start-up he co-founded in 2008 — “not the best year to do a start-up,” he said — and worked as a business architect at Zurich Insurance. That start-up scar tissue, he suggested, is precisely what qualifies him to run what he described as an internal venture studio: “I’m taking my design cues from Silicon Valley incubators.”

What CT&I Actually Does

Lohr’s new organization has four pillars that go well beyond a typical “AI office”:

• Products and platforms strategy — owning the products KPMG delivers to clients, not just internal tooling.
• Commercial infrastructure — new go-to-market and deal structures “in very different commercial terms than what we have historically done.”
• Firmwide AI and data strategy — the strategic mandate previously housed under the AI & Digital Innovation group.
• Innovation/incubation — an internal venture studio incubating a portfolio of “edge disruption plays” with varied capital structures and routes to market, explicitly aimed at disrupting KPMG’s own core service lines.

Each “edge company” carries a mandate to build and scale with multiple exit paths — including being folded back into KPMG’s core business, spun out with outside capital, or run as a standalone joint venture with a technology partner.

Colleagues have floated even bigger stakes. Lohr called the group an incubator modeled on Silicon Valley design and said he hopes a billion-dollar company comes to fruition as a result. “I think KPMG and professional services in general have some of the greatest — we are a talent factory for most of the world on a lot of business skills,” Lohr said. “We have a lot of ideas. What we have not done is … bring those ideas through commercial lens — we are not as good at that, because we know how to do the model that we’ve done for over a century.”

That talent question is also why Lohr said KPMG has spent the past several years deliberately educating its management committee and board on disruption, including regular management committee meetings held in Silicon Valley, where the leadership team participates in sessions with frontier AI labs. “Our next one is in the next few weeks,” Lohr said, “and I’m going to bring the entire management committee to one of the AI frontier companies… We’re going to meet with their chief scientist, we’re going to meet with their CISO.”

Lohr said he’s hoping to realize the “great ideas that we have in the firm,” but operating more “on the edge” than the traditional approach of the Big Four consulting giant. He said he plans to rotate rising KPMG staff through “edge companies” as founders and operators, arguing the experience will make them “better accountants” and “better consultants” when they eventually return to core roles — mirroring, he said, the traditional Big Four model where talent cycles in and out of the firm but stays part of its alumni network.

An awesome responsibility

In June 2026, AI-detection firm GPTZero found that a flagship KPMG International report, “Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI,” cited case studies involving UBS, Swiss Federal Railways and the U.K.’s National Health Service that simply did not exist — 40 of the report’s 45 citations were later found to be fabricated, and roughly half its factual claims were either false or misattributed.

Lohr revealed that KPMG has recently launched an AI tool called Hawk that looks at all of its content and assesses AI hallucinations, and it has launched for most KPMG content, sort of an in-house GPTZero. A KPMG spokesperson clarified that Hawk is mainly used by the marketing department to vet thought leadership pieces, whereas CT&I’s remit goes beyond internal transformation and internal tooling and is much more focused on the future of how KPMG serves clients.

GPTZero founder Edward Tian, a Princeton researcher and former Bellingcat team member, has since documented the same pattern at every other member of the Big Four: EY, where 60% of the citations in a December 2025 cybersecurity report were found to be hallucinated; Deloitte Australia, where a University of Sydney academic flagged 19 hallucinations in a single report; and PwC, where GPTZero put the odds that one Middle East governance report was entirely AI-generated at 84%.

Lohr, in the interview, stressed that KPMG’s AI acceptable use policy stretches back to his first work on the topic a decade ago. “At the end of the day,” Lohr warned, “it’s your output. You need to own the work product.” He said he wants the entire workforce to understand that “AI is awesome, but it’s also an awesome responsibility that everyone needs to own.”

“As one of the folks that really started our AI business here almost 10 years ago,” he added, “the first offering was AI strategy, the second offering was trusted AI. That was something we’ve been adamant [about]. It’s part of our culture.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As of 6 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil is trading at $99.27 per barrel, based on the Brent benchmark we’ll explain in a bit. That’s $2.34 below yesterday morning’s level and about $32.60 higher than where it stood a year ago.

Will oil prices go up?

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

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

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

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

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

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

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

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

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

Historical performance of oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy coverage from Fortune

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

• Iran’s economy faces another blockade: The U.S. Navy’s Hormuz stranglehold
• High fuel costs force people to choose between filling up or buying groceries
• U.S. military has aided the transit of 1B barrels of oil through Hormuz in past two months

Frequently asked questions

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

There’s a huge divide between how the world’s AI leaders view the transformative technology. Some foresee a huge jobs boom and a new era of economic activity. Others see the end of humanity.

Ray Dalio, famed investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates, says both optimists and pessimists are correct. He believes the technology will produce unprecedented productivity benefits, but also further entrench wealth inequalities—as well as driving a massive stock market bubble.

“There’s a process in which great new technologies are something that everybody wants to invest in because they’re going to change the world, and then they over-invest in them, and they create debt, and they go through a certain dynamic, in a sense, that creates a bubble, that creates a bust,” Dalio said in a new video for the World Economic Forum.

“So simultaneously it is going to be one of the biggest productivity-enhancing, changing-the-world forces, and also a bubble that is going to have devastating effects on many people as it works itself through this.”

Dalio’s argument isn’t without precedent: In the dotcom bubble, the Nasdaq rose 86% in 1999 alone. By October 2002, it had fallen 77% from its peak, with trillions wiped off the market. The web nonetheless turned out to be a transformative new medium.

That said, history tends to rhyme, rather than repeat itself. There are fundamental differences between the current investment cycle and previous bubbles, Citi Wealth’s head of economics, Conrad DeQuadros, said in a note last month: “Contrary to the corporate profit margin squeeze seen during prior investment bubbles, aggregate margins today are holding near all-time highs … U.S. corporations enter this investment cycle from a position of profitability and balance sheet strength.”

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has suggested that parts of the AI sphere are in bubble territory, rather than the entire ecosystem. Dalio suggests something similar, saying that AI will lead to massive wealth for some.

“People who come up with great ideas to invent productive things receive capital that enables them to do that,” Dalio continued. “And then as a result of that, that produces very large differences in wealth. While a lot of people are benefiting from these miraculous, productivity-enhancing [technologies], most people are not benefiting adequately from that.”

The great wealth divide

“So the real question isn’t so much about AI as it is human nature,” added Dalio. “It’ll have enormous implications for wealth and opportunity differences. How are those going to be dealt with? These are the big questions of our time.”

Among the top names on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, many derive their wealth from tech companies currently investing billions in AI infrastructure and transformation.

Nine out of the top 10 on the list have built their fortune in tech. Leading the pack is Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, followed by Google co-founder Larry Page and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Their wealth is driven by the shares they hold in major companies, and those companies in turn buy services and invest in smaller companies, boosting the wealth of their founders. But there is a divide in share investment, too. The Federal Reserve monitors asset classes held by the U.S. population, and the bottom 50% of households held $0.37 trillion in corporate equities and mutual funds as of Q2 2026. By contrast, the top 0.1% held $16.15 trillion and the top 90% to 99% held $24 trillon.

Some AI leaders are signaling they want to share the profits: Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, for example, has said he’s open to tax ideas as a “great way for us to contribute back to society and the economy.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Midterm momentum swings hard toward Democrats.
• More evidence that AI is killing jobs.
• Markets: Up!
• Don’t underestimate the S&P 500—as analysts do.
• Uber will dominate the autonomous taxi market, Bank of America says.
• The robots are talking about us behind our backs.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage stood at 6.95% for the week ending Sept. 17, up from 6.76% a week earlier and 6.26% a year ago, according to Freddie Mac. With borrowing costs pushing back toward the psychologically fraught 7% mark, and a persistent shortage of homes compounding the squeeze, many Americans still feel priced out of the market.

But market conditions aren’t the only force reshaping real estate. A growing body of survey data suggests AI is taking on a bigger role for buyers, sellers, and agents alike—and the technology could fundamentally change how people buy and sell homes.

A recent LendingTree survey shows just how open Americans have become to leaning on it. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) said they would use AI for at least one task tied to buying or selling a home, and 37% said they would let AI handle a purchase for them “with minimal human involvement.”

Budgeting is the most commonly cited AI use

With borrowing costs high, Americans are especially drawn to using AI for budgeting. Some 28% of LendingTree respondents said they’d use it to estimate a home’s value. Roughly a quarter (24%) would turn to AI to find down payment assistance programs, and the same share would use it to gauge how much they can afford.

Explaining mortgage options (18%) and comparing mortgage offers (16%) also ranked high—well above non-budgeting tasks such as scheduling showings (8%), organizing listing photos (8%), and helping negotiate offers (7%).

Other research points the same way. Among AI-using prospective buyers in Bank of America’s 2026 Homebuyer Insights Report, estimating affordability, mortgage payments, or closing costs was the most common use, cited by 57%. The report also found that Gen Z is leading the charge, with 32% saying they’ve used AI in the process.

As buyers look to AI to navigate a punishing market, more specialized tools are arriving. Real estate platforms Zillow and Homes.com both rolled out AI assistants earlier this year that can walk users through everything from financing to details on schools and neighborhoods—part of a wider industry push in which Zillow says AI is reinventing every step of the homebuying process.

AI is reshaping the realtor’s role, too

Buyers and sellers aren’t the only ones leaning on the technology. A National Association of Realtors survey found that 92% of agents are using AI or plan to, with 71% citing the time it saves.

The enthusiasm comes with reservations. More than three-fifths of agents (63%) named accuracy as a concern, ahead of compliance or legal issues (49%) and the misreading of market data (47%).

There’s also the existential worry. Fortune previously reported on Robert Levine, who used ChatGPT to sell his Florida home for $100,000 more than agents estimated it was worth. The chatbot suggested property upgrades and handled logistics such as scheduling viewings; Levine said the home sold for one of the highest per-square-foot prices in his market.

Still, AI’s shortcomings suggest agents aren’t going anywhere. Parisa Afkhami, a high-end agent in New York City, told Mansion Global that while “AI staging has skyrocketed,” she considers it “misleading to buyers.” One of her clients, she said, walked out of a showing within minutes because the home didn’t match the AI-staged photos posted online.

For now, as AI tools proliferate and the housing market stays tight, the bigger question is what it all means for the industry’s future.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The U.S. is bankrolling a new trans-Pacific internet cable that deliberately skirts the South China Sea, as Washington tries to wall off Southeast Asia’s digital infrastructure from China.

On Sept. 14, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) said it would fund a feasibility study for a new subsea cable that links Thailand, the U.S., and five other Southeast Asian countries, and bypass the South China Sea. 

“The military conflicts in the Middle East and Europe show that geopolitical crises can trigger cyber or physical disruptions to subsea cables,” says Muhammad Faizal Bin Abdul Rahman, a research fellow at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU). “The U.S. and its Asia-Pacific allies believe that China could use similar tactics.”

The project reflects Washington’s continued drive to control the infrastructure that underpins the internet and the AI boom. Southeast Asia may end up stuck between two different tech ecosystems, one led by Washington and the other by Beijing. 

Singapore, for example, joined Washington’s Pax Silica alliance last December, but is also reportedly considering an invitation to join the China-led World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. (Other Southeast Asian countries are split between the two AI blocs: the Philippines has joined the U.S.’ Pax Silica, while Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia and Myanmar are part of China’s alliance.)

“Southeast Asian countries need to re-evaluate what neutrality means today for each of them, and how policy decisions across sectors collectively determine whether they are too dependent on any major power during times of peace or crisis,” says Muhammad.

Undersea battle

Subsea cables are fiber-optic lines laid on the ocean floor that carry over 99% of internet traffic worldwide. 

Just one cable—the Asia-America Gateway, built in 2009—connects the U.S. and Thailand. The cable is notorious for its frequent outages, especially within the intra-Asia section between Singapore and Hong Kong, with most faults on the segment near Vietnam. When the cable goes down, some Southeast Asian nations like Cambodia and Malaysia have few alternatives for rerouting traffic.

“It is only natural that a new cable be built, both for resilience and capacity reasons,” says Asha Hemrajani, a senior fellow at NTU. “The aging AAG has experienced several serious outages… so it looks like the new cable is intended to be a next-generation successor to it.”

Operators and insurers prefer cables that avoid the South China Sea. China claims sovereignty over much of the sea, overlapping with similar claims from Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Under China’s domestic regulations, cable work in its “inland waters, territorial sea and continental shelf” requires prior approval and notification.

“Subsea cables regularly require maintenance, and if a cable goes down, it needs to be repaired in a time-sensitive manner,” Hemrajani explains. “Thus, cable operators and insurers prefer to avoid the South China Sea due to additional uncertainty and trouble.”

If built, the proposed Thailand-U.S. cable is estimated to cost over $14 billion, according to estimates cited by Bloomberg, and may also pass through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines. (The USTDA has not given its own cost estimate). Thailand’s state-owned telco, National Telecom—which is leading the prospective project—aims to raise capital through an international consortium of co-investors from neighboring Asian nations.

“The U.S. is reportedly planning for potential military conflict around the South China Sea, and so is China,” says Muhammad. “It makes practical and economic sense for new subsea cables to avoid the South China Sea.”

This isn’t the first attempt by Washington to have subsea cables bypass China. The Pacific Light Cable Network, which was initiated in 2015 and backed by U.S. tech giants Meta and Google, was originally set to link the U.S. state of California with Hong Kong’s Deep Water Bay. In 2020, Washington blocked the U.S.-Hong Kong connection, citing national security concerns over PLCN’s connection to its China-based parent entity, Dr. Peng Telecom & Media Group. The cable now links the U.S. with Taiwan and the Philippines—both American allies. 

Other trans-Pacific systems like Bifrost and Echo are routed further south through the Celebes Sea, to connect the U.S. with Singapore and Indonesia.

China, too, is trying to build its own cable network. In 2023, Reuters reported that the country’s state-owned telecom firms were developing a $500 million undersea fiber-optic internet cable network to link Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

But cables are only part of the story. Subsea cables eventually need to come onshore, which they do through cable landing stations, where they then connect to local infrastructure. 

“Washington will double down on extending its influence and control over the full subsea and land based infrastructure ecosystem,” Alex Capri, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore, concludes. “And as China races to build its own subsea cables, affected countries may be faced with accommodating two parallel tech stacks. The alternative will be to choose sides, which is Washington’s clearly stated goal.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Apple’s history is often told as a procession of blockbuster devices—and that’s certainly a striking part of it. The most successful of those devices, the iPhone, remains a powerful engine for the company, accounting for about half of sales in 2025.

But the company that first caught the public imagination with its inspired product design has also spent its first half-century building an ecosystem that delivers a river of recurring revenue: Services, a division that barely existed 15 years ago—encompassing the App Store, iCloud, Music, TV, payments, advertising, and more—is projected to make up more than a quarter of this year’s revenue.

The data reveals a company that has truly gone global. The U.S. contributes 36% of sales, but Europe is not far behind at 27%, while the rest of the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region make up another third. Meanwhile, Apple’s store footprint has grown to more than 500 locations, with non-U.S. stores driving much of that expansion.

Financially, the rise has been extraordinary: Annual profits rose from roughly $2 billion in 2006 to $112 billion in 2025.

And lastly, a figure that will make investors who didn’t get onto the Apple bus early wince: A $10,000 Apple investment at its 1980 IPO would have grown to $40.5 million by mid-2026.

This article appears in the October/November 2026 issue of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Apple announced back in 2011 that its chief operating officer, Tim Cook, would succeed its ailing, revered cofounder and CEO, Steve Jobs, many commentators wondered whether he’d be able to fill such big shoes. Cook was an even-keeled, soft-spoken technocrat who knew how to get stuff done, but hardly a visionary. Could he oversee the creation of society-changing devices as his boss Jobs had? Jobs had a knack for knowing what people wanted before even they knew it, an instinct that made Mac computers, iPods, and, above all, the iPhone some of the most sought-after products of all time.

“I don’t see [Cook] as the kind of person who could ever have the focus, the kind of maniacal dedication [as Jobs],” CNET editor Molly Wood wrote, reflecting the consensus at the time.

Wood and other observers were largely right. Cook, who stepped down as Apple CEO on Sept. 1, never assumed the Jobs-like persona of tech tastemaker.

Under Cook’s leadership, Apple didn’t come up with a new world-altering device; in fact, it introduced a few clunkers along the way. But at that stage of Apple’s life span, the company didn’t need another Jobs. It needed someone who could build a sustainable business around its blockbuster products and put to rest the question that dogs many flashy startups: Could it thrive without its monomaniacal founder? Cook ultimately built his own respected legacy, not in spite of being unlike Jobs, but because of it.

“The founder story of Apple was so mythical and present that Tim Cook could have disappointed everybody by just being himself,” says Jo-Ellen Pozner, a business professor at Santa Clara University. “But by being himself, he actually exceeded all expectations.” Cook’s biggest contribution to Apple, Pozner argues, was transforming it from a company that reflected Jobs’ cult of personality to one grounded in its values; one that’s centered on its customers—not the CEO.

Jobs hired Cook in 1998, then promoted him to executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations in 2002, and later to COO in 2005. As CEO, operational prowess helped him make crucial, if not dazzling, changes that built up Apple’s supply-chain resilience and constructed a closed loop of products and services that locked in customers.

When the bar for new-product launches is the iPhone, it’s all but impossible to clear. Cook missed that mark, but he still oversaw the introduction of hardware that changed how the world interacts with technology and consumes information. The Apple Watch, unveiled in 2014, met initial hesitation in the market. For one, analysts worried that women would never take to such a utilitarian, only moderately attractive watch, but they have—in droves. Along the way, the Apple Watch turned into a multibillion-dollar business. Two years later, Apple’s AirPods headphones were a hit with consumers, giving Apple a stronger position in the wearables market.

Rather than developing another iPhone-like product, Cook squeezed more revenue from Apple’s iconic device. He built a subscription ecosystem around the iPhone that touches many aspects of daily life. Users now turn to Apple for their tunes (Apple Music), data storage (iCloud), entertainment (Apple TV and Apple Arcade), exercise (Apple Fitness+), and payments (Apple Pay), all platforms introduced during Cook’s tenure that contribute to a services segment that reported $109 billion in revenue last year, second only to Apple’s iPhone business.

Still, critics say, Cook erased the aura of invincibility Apple had under Jobs by overseeing the rollout of several duds: an initially poor Apple Maps, a Siri that’s still not great, the glitchy AirPower wireless charging mat, and an aborted decade-long effort to build a self-driving car.

Crises littered Cook’s 15 years as CEO, and he handled them remarkably well in part because of the relationships he nurtured with suppliers and world leaders alike. He built deep, long-term agreements with global component suppliers, often prepaying vendors and locking in manufacturing capacity years in advance. That leverage let Apple jump the line when materials or capacity ran short (a helpful advantage during COVID). “He created an incredibly efficient organization relative to the rest of the tech world,” says David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who’s written case studies on Apple’s business.

As a tech exec with high emotional intelligence, Cook—dubbed “the Trump whisperer”—deftly navigated the Trump administration’s sometimes erratic demands, mollifying the president with $600 billion in promised U.S. investment and winning crucial exemptions from Trump’s 2025 tariffs on China-made electronics without endangering Apple’s business. That balancing act has occasionally cost Cook his dignity, however; in April, Trump boasted on social media that Cook had called him to “kiss my ass.”

Cook has also won over the constituency inside Apple. Pozner says that Cook was an especially effective CEO because Apple employees respected him for upholding Apple’s corporate values, such as user privacy, and they were mostly happy to follow his lead. She points to the company’s 2016 showdown with the FBI when Apple declined the agency’s request for access to data on a phone belonging to the San Bernardino mass shooter. “That refusal really told everybody that Apple sees your privacy as the most important thing,” says Pozner.

Cook also distinguished himself from Jobs by speaking out on social issues like racial and LGBT equality, access to education, female representation on Wall Street, and immigration reform. He announced publicly that he was gay in 2014, becoming the first out CEO in the Fortune 500 at the time. Cook told Fortune in 2015 that he made the decision to come out in hopes of helping other people. “You want to be the pebble in the pond that creates the ripple for change,” he said.

Investors have already rendered their verdict on Cook’s tenure as CEO. During his stint at the helm of the Cupertino giant, Apple shares rose 2,000%, boosting its market capitalization as high as $5 trillion in July, making Apple the second company to ever hit that milestone. (The company’s shares remain in the neighborhood of that all-time peak.) That created a cash machine like no other: Apple had $147 billion in liquidity at last count, giving it enviable firepower for acquisitions and product development.

That war chest is itself a kind of legacy. One measure of a CEO is what they leave behind, and Cook handed off a company flush with cash, stable in its business, and equipped with a well-regarded successor. (Cook, of course, isn’t letting go completely; he will stay on as Apple’s executive chair.)

Cook’s heir, John Ternus, made his debut as CEO at Apple’s September event that showcased its Duo folding iPhone. As he assumed the job, Ternus faced his own set of filling-the-shoes questions. But onstage, the hardware veteran seemed set on charting his own course, just like his predecessor had. “We’re going to change the world in ways we can’t imagine today,” he said.

This article appears in the October/November 2026 issue of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In 1981, Jeff Thomasson earned his MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, which is regularly ranked among the top programs. That launched him on the path to building his own wealth management firm, which now has more than $38 billion in assets under advisement.

Now, he’s giving back to the school that made him. Last week, IU announced Thomasson and his wife, Cheryl, had donated $100 million toward graduate education at Kelley. The gift will also go toward supporting IU’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and is the largest from an individual in IU history. In total, the Thomassons have donated more than $111 million to the school, and the board of trustees has approved naming the Kelley School’s graduate division after Thomasson.

“The Kelley MBA program set the foundation for my career, and this gift is our way of paying forward the investment people made in us,” Thomasson said in a statement. “We hope it encourages others to do the same, creating opportunities that will ripple across generations.”

How Jeff Thomasson built Oxford Financial Advisors

After earning his MBA from IU, where he specialized in investments and taxation, Thomasson founded Oxford Financial Advisors, a regularly top-ranked registered investment advisor (RIA) firm. The firm essentially began as a class assignment: Thomasson took the master’s essay he’d written on an ideal wealth management firm and turned it into a blueprint for his own company, he told Forbes in 2011. 

Thomasson also came from a humble background, and the odds were stacked against him when he first established his firm. His father was a construction worker, was disabled in an accident, and died while Thomasson was in college—and his mother was a bank teller. A local oil distributor who had employed Thomasson since his teens actually paid for his college education, according to Forbes. He launched his firm at age 23 with $20,000 in grad school debt during a high-interest, high-unemployment economy in the early 1980s. Forbes reported that he grew his client base largely through cold calling, holding roughly 1,000 meetings per year and working six days a week. 

At the time, Oxford Financial’s move to a fee-only model was pretty unconventional. His firm did that instead of collecting commissions, though fees are now an industry standard. Now the Indianapolis-based firm is one of the largest independent RIAs in the country, with more than $38 billion in assets under advisement, 25 managing directors across seven offices, and more than 700 family and institutional clients. 

Betting on business education

The Thomassons’ gift comes at a moment when philanthropic donations toward higher education are both booming and under scrutiny. Philanthropic donations to education (mostly colleges and universities) hit an all-time high of roughly $92 billion in 2025, which was faster than any other category, according to a Giving USA report. 

Yet meanwhile, dollars are pouring in as public faith in higher education wavers. Just 38% of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, according to a July Gallup poll. That’s down from 57% when the firm began tracking the question in 2015. Main concerns cited include rising costs, doubts about return on investment, and the rise of AI in education, the poll shows.

And especially since the emergence of AI, the return on investment of an MBA has been called into question. Some executives say it’s not necessary, while others say it’s what made them. While Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has argued corporate America has too many MBAs running it, others like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have praised the programs, saying it granted him the “knowledge and confidence to tackle complex questions at the intersection of business and technology.” Nadella earned his MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. 

That tension is what makes a major gift to graduate school so notable. Meanwhile, other philanthropists, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and MacKenzie Scott, have funneled their fortunes into higher education. Interestingly, the Thomassons’ gift will also support the future of giving through a donation to IU’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy—the institution that researches and writes the Giving USA report documenting the giving boom that includes this donation.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

AI is barreling into white-collar industries, and more people than ever are trying to AI-proof their careers. Gen Z college graduates are increasingly landing in retail and food service as AI absorbs many of the entry-level roles that once served as their on-ramp.

Alejandro Rodriguez, a 20-year-old certified Porsche apprentice technician, wants Gen Z to know that college isn’t the only path to a respected, fulfilling career—especially one that’s less vulnerable to AI.

Rodriguez, a recent graduate of Universal Technical Institute, told Fortune that despite excelling in school, taking college classes, and earning a 4.5 GPA in high school after a lifetime in the gifted and talented program, he decided to follow his passion for cars. That drive didn’t take him to college, but to a technical institute.

Given his academic record, school administrators weren’t thrilled when he began floating technical school as a post-graduation plan instead of a four-year college. “It [college] was expected of me because of how I did in school,” Rodriguez said.

“When I told them that’s not what I wanted to do, I wanted to go to a technical school, they really tried to get me to apply for community colleges instead.” But after he pushed them to accept that it was his path, Rodriguez said they “finally conceded.”

Looking back, he says his school offered no pathway toward blue-collar work. “There wasn’t a single day we’d have a shop class, no woodwork, nothing hands-on,” he said, adding, “It would be nice to have those options that just weren’t there.”

Rodriguez says there has finally been a gradual shift toward taking blue-collar professions more seriously—but it’s a recent development, and AI has accelerated it.

“AI definitely has a part in it,” he said. “People are starting to come out of work, and they’ve got to do something. And our jobs kind of can’t be taken.”

A secure career, with no debt

The data backs up the instinct. An April 2026 Census Bureau paper found that hiring of workers ages 22 to 24 fell sharply in the industries most exposed to AI, such as software and information technology, even as hiring held steady in less-exposed fields. A companion paper co-authored by the same economist found that graduates shut out of those roles often shift into lower-paying retail or food-service work to pay the bills.

Then there’s the debt that often comes with a degree. The average Gen Zer carries $22,948 in student loan debt, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Luckily for Rodriguez, his parents were open-minded and let him explore an alternative that led to a secure career with almost no debt.

They had “always been supportive,” he said, and let him shadow a family member who worked as a Mercedes technician, telling him, “Well, if you think you want to do this, go work with him over the weekends and see if you like it.”

As high-achieving as he was in high school, he worked just as hard in technical school. “I was very set on what I wanted to do,” Rodriguez said. “I wanted to go to Universal Technical Institute, go through the Ford FACT program, and use that to get into the Porsche PTAP program. And I hit every single one of those goals that I set for myself.”

He believes he’s on his way to a lucrative career—though, like any job, he says the paycheck comes down to skill and work ethic. “It depends on your drive, how much you want to work, how much you want to invest in yourself.”

His advice for young people weighing the same path: “Always keep investing in yourself, because these skills nobody can take from you.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the press. He famously popularized the phrase “fake news” and has called reporters “the enemy of the people.” Yet the president is also more accessible to reporters than his recent predecessors, making media appearances on roughly 80% of his days in office during stretches of his second term and taking far more shouted questions and interviews than Obama or Biden ever took.

It’s a contradiction that defined Monday: a president who grants extraordinary access on his own terms, and revokes it entirely when the coverage displeases him. And at New York’s Gracie Mansion on Monday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made sure to portray a different scene to the press.

“I told the president that we’re going to have all of the members of the press here on the lawn, and that is something that I believe in,” Mamdani said.

Standing next to him on the lawn of the famed city house was Trump, who on Friday announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds over the “constant ‘reporting’ [of] FAKE NEWS.”

By Monday morning, the three banned outlets had filed a joint First Amendment lawsuit in federal court in Washington D.C., arguing the ban amounted to viewpoint discrimination and violated their due-process rights. Other networks refused to provide White House pool coverage that day in solidarity, since CNN normally handles that rotation.

Friday’s action isn’t Trump’s first attempt to ban the press. In 2018, the White House revoked the press pass of then-CNN reporter Jim Acosta, until a federal judge ordered it be restored. More recently, in February 2025, he barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and other small-pool events over the news agency’s refusal to adopt “Gulf of America,” instead of the widely-accepted “Gulf of Mexico.” (A judge initially ordered the access restored, only to be overruled by the the D.C. Circuit in June 2025.)

Asked by reporters about his closed-door conversation with Trump, Mamdani said he made sure the president knew the press would be present at Gracie Mansion.

Trump, in response, joked that the press would never boycott him, and again called the three outlets fake news. “If you look at CNN, it’s fake news. If you look at MS NOW, I don’t even know what MS NOW is,” he went on.

“I really think I have an obligation not to allow them into another very special house. This is a special house, Gracie Mansion. Well, the White House is the most special of all houses,” Trump said of the ban.

Temporary Protected Status

When The City reporter Katie Honan asked Trump about Temporary Protected Status, Mamdani said he and the president spoke about possibly restoring that status for Haitian immigrants, explaining it in economic terms and citing concern from “pastors, developers, executives in healthcare and hospitality.” He added that Trump, by controlling who gets TPS status, “can either deliver or deny stability” for people who’ve built lives in New York.

TPS status is granted to nationals of a designated country who are already living in the U.S., regardless of how they arrived, so long as the DHS determines that war, natural disaster or other extraordinary conditions make it unsafe for them to return. Recipients of TPS status are able to live and work in the U.S., but have no pathway to permanent residency.

Haiti has held TPS status since the 2010 earthquake, but upon removing TPS status for Haitians, then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem argued that the administration was “returning TPS to its original status: temporary.”

Trump’s history with the Haitian community has swung wildly during his time in politics. As a candidate in 2016, he called himself Haitians’ “biggest champion” during a visit to Miami’s Little Haiti. Yet in his first administration, he tried to end TPS for Haitian immigrants in 2017, with the DHS arguing Haiti had recovered from the earthquake. Haitian TPS holders sued in Brooklyn, arguing the decision was motivated by political bias, and a federal judge agreed in April 2019.

Trump again tried to revoke TPS status in 2025, only for his ban to again be challenged int he courts; the Supreme Court ruled in June 2026 that DHS could proceed with cutting off protections for an estimated 330,000 to 350,000 Haitians. A new lawsuit alleges that Trump’s decision was racially motivated, though the termination remains in effect.

The end of TPS status cuts off work authorization for hundreds of thousands of Haitians as of July 24, and New York City Hall was forced to let go of Haitian employees with no other legal path to work.

“The mayor feels very strongly about [TPS],” Trump said Monday before leaving Gracie Mansion. “I feel strongly about a lot of things. I feel strongly about taking care of people, and that’s what we do. We’re doing a good job of it.”

New York has the country’s second-largest Haitian population after Miami, more than 160,000 people, concentrated in Brooklyn’s Flatbush and East Flatbush. Many work in healthcare: New York State alone has roughly 7,000 Haitian TPS holders working as nursing assistants and home caregivers, in a citywide healthcare workforce that’s 57% immigrant and nearly three-quarters immigrant among home health aides, according to the Center for Migration Studies.

After Trump left, Mamdani disclosed that he had personally invited Trump to the mayor’s residence, after the two discussed Trump’s own fond memories of Gracie Mansion.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump and Mayor Zohran Mamdani held a joint press conference at Gracie Mansion on Monday, the first time a sitting president has visited the mayor’s residence in decades.

The two discussed Sunnyside Yards, Temporary Protected Status for Haitian New Yorkers, and press access, while trading warm words despite months of public disagreement on policy.

And despite that public disagreement, the two Queens boys seem to have had a warm conversation. Trump even shared praise for the young mayor. “I certainly hope he will be a great mayor. You have to understand, I want what’s good for New York. I want what’s good for the country,” he said.

“So, if I had a choice of having him be a bad mayor or horrible mayor, I don’t want that. I want him to be a great mayor, and he certainly got potential, had great potential.”

The president, standing alongisde Mamdani as press and the two politicians stood in the garden of Gracie Mansion, said he was hosted many times at the famed house. “I’ve been at Gracie Mansion, we were discussing, quite a few times over the years, a lot. And it sort of feels like a home, and it’s a special place, a very special, a beautiful place when you go inside. And I’ve seen it with numerous different mayors.”

“And I said, some great ones and some not so great ones,” Trump continued before turning to Mamdani. “So hopefully you’re going to be a great one. I’ll be able to say you’re a going to be a great one. And you’re off to a start.”

Trump also recalled encouraging Mamdani to move into the mansion after his election, saying Mamdani had hesitated over its size: “Well, I can say, from my standpoint, I love New York, and this represents New York. This is where the mayor lived, and continues to live. And we were discussing it a long time ago when you first got elected. I said, ‘Well, you’re going to move,’ because you were maybe having some doubts about moving in because it is a little bit on the luxurious side,” Trump said with a smirk.

Building housing in Queens

Mamdani and the president discussed Sunnyside Yards, a proposal to deck over the Queens rail yard for 12,000 homes and 30,000 jobs, which the mayor’s office says would require more than $21 billion in federal grants. Mamdani said that the two had a very productive conversation.

“What we’re talking about is something very rare in our city. It’s the possibility of constructing an entirely new neighborhood, and again, it’s only possible with federal partnership,” he explained.

The Queens-native president didn’t say whether he would send federal funds the city’s way, but said it would absolutely be costly without any.

“Sunnyside’s a big job. I’ve been watching that for 35 years,” he said, likely referring to the 1980s when he owned the New Jersey Generals football team and toyed with the idea of bringing an arena to the area, dubbed at the time the “Trumpdome.”

“The mayor brought that up-the possibility of doing Sunnyside Yards,” he continued. “You’re going to need a lot of federal approvals and probably some federal money to do it. But it’s always been a great location.”

Following the joint press conference, which also included remarks about TPS and the banning of several media outlets from the White House, the mayor took additional questions regarding the conversation and the budding relationship the two seem to have formed.

“The president and I have both been very frank about the many disagreements that we have, and immigration is one of those places,” Mamdani said. “We’ve both spoken about very different approaches, very different beliefs, and I will continue to have conversations with the president, and frankly, with anyone who can deliver relief to the people of the city.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Out of the chaos of AI doomerism AI leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have found themselves at the center of, the leader of the most valuable company in the world—and the creator of AI’s chip foundation—is rejecting the warnings. In a CBS Sunday interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the predictions of an AI catastrophe by 2030 “irresponsible” and the “doomsday narratives” are simply not based in reality.

“2030 is not going to be the end of the world,” Huang told CBS. “There is a 0% chance that’s going to be the end of the world.”

Huang said the concerns about AI safety are legitimate but also said the industry’s dire public warnings are not grounded in “science.” He added that “scaring people is unnecessary,” arguing that AI companies should be devoting engineering resources to safety and verification. Nvidia supplies the chips powering much of the AI industry’s expansion.

“I believe the claims of the end of the world, stirring fear across America, and doing it by the people who are doing it makes no sense to me, so they must be doing it for ulterior reasons,” Huang said. “It is irresponsible, and I don’t know what their motives are.”

This comes after President Donald Trump rejected calls for increased AI regulation, saying existing criminal and civil law can handle AI concerns. On Saturday, he announced that he would form an “AI Force,” modeled on Space Force, and appoint an AI “czar”—though he named no one and gave no timeline for either.

“Whoever wins AI, WINS,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way! I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet itself.”

Huang also posits that AI development shouldn’t be repressed from concerns of AI takeover. 

“If we’re compromising safety, that can’t happen,” he said. “We should go as fast as we can, but not faster than we should.”

Huang’s primary reasoning is that AI safety is primarily an engineering issue rather than a government regulation problem. He said companies should be held accountable under the existing laws and regulations before lawmakers rush into creating new rules specifically for AI.

“Go and read between the lines,” Huang said. “They’re actually not asking for more laws. They’re asking to be relieved of the laws we do have.”

“Don’t let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist,” he added.

Nvidia is also one of the industry’s most important suppliers, with its chips and processors serving as infrastructure for running advanced AI systems. Nvidia’s market value has jumped alongside AI demand, making the company the most valuable in the world. 

Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

Two sides of the same AI coin

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for the industry to slow the development of capable models, saying the companies need more time to establish safety precautions. According to a report from Reuters, Amodei has proposed  independent safety evaluators to check for common safety standards and international cooperation inside frontier AI companies. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, after arguing regulation would hinder AI companies, has echoed the same rhetoric. In July, Altman said society may need time to adapt to new capability levels and the industry should consider ways to slow development.

Even Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla has endorsed the worry. In a post on X, Musk noted he had been “sounding the alarm on AI for a long time.”

Former researcher at both OpenAI and Anthropic Jacob Coxon also added to the fire, after he publicly resigned from Anthropic on X in September. Coxon wrote that the companies were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence,” essentially “gambling with our lives.” His post went viral and drew more than 170 million views.

And a public letter signed by over 1,300 employees at leading AI companies has separately called for governments, industry leaders and society to have the ability to buy time and address emerging risks. Amodei was among the individuals who signed the letter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Families can use a gift of equity to help the next generation achieve their dream of homeownership, while also keeping their cherished homes in the family. This strategy, in which the seller transfers part of the home’s value to the buyer by reducing the purchase price below market value, can help cover a cash-strapped buyer’s down payment.  

Learn how a gift of equity works mechanically, what the tax implications are for both the buyer and the seller, and the paperwork requirements to decide if it’s the right option for you.

What is a gift of equity?

A gift of equity is when a home seller transfers part of their equity to the buyer by agreeing to sell the property for less than its appraised value. This structure can be useful when a family wants to pass a home to the next generation but the buyer can’t afford full market price.

The formula is simple: appraised value minus agreed sale price equals the gift amount. No cash changes hands for the gifted portion, and the lender treats the difference as equity the buyer owns from the moment the deal closes.

For conventional loans, gift-of-equity transactions are permitted on principal residences and second home purchase transactions. Investment properties are not eligible. Other loan programs have their own rules, but one commonality they share is that the gift cannot require repayment.

Compare the available mortgage rates in your area

How a gift of equity works

The process for selling a home with a gift of equity usually requires these basic steps.

Step 1: Appraisal. The home needs an independent professional appraisal to establish its fair market value. The seller and buyer can then use the appraised value to determine the sale price and gift of equity.

Example: Say the home appraises at $400,000 and the seller agrees to sell for $320,000. That $80,000 gap would be the gift of equity.

In an eligible conventional transaction, the buyer can use that equity toward the down payment and closing costs. Depending on the resulting loan-to-value ratio, the gift of equity may also help the buyer avoid private mortgage insurance (PMI)—a gift that potentially keeps on giving. 

Step 2: Gift of equity letter. Once the price is set, the seller writes and signs a gift of equity letter, which is a formal document confirming to the lender that the below-market price is a genuine gift, not a disguised loan. 

Step 3: Lender review. The lender reviews the appraisal, the agreed sale price, and the gift letter before approving the loan. Timing varies by lender, appraisal turnaround, and title work.

What can a gift of equity be used for?

A gift of equity can cover:

• Closing costs
• Down payment

It can’t cover:

• Financial reserves

Gift of equity rules by loan program

FHA, conventional, VA, and USDA loans all allow gifts of equity, but the rules differ.

For FHA borrowers without significant savings, an eligible gift of equity can cover the entire 3.5% minimum required investment (MRI), meaning the buyer may not need to contribute their own funds toward the down payment.

What goes into a gift of equity letter

The gift of equity letter must contain all of the necessary details required by the loan program and lender to ensure that it is a legitimate transaction. Requirements vary, but the letter generally includes: 

1. Donor’s name, address, and telephone number
2. Recipient’s (buyer’s) full legal name and address
3. Property address
4. Dollar amount of the gift (e.g., “$80,000”)
5. Relationship between donor and recipient (e.g., “parent of the borrower”)
6. Statement that no repayment is expected or required, now or in the future
7. Dated signatures from both donor and recipient

For conventional loans, the file must also include the settlement statement listing the gift of equity. Some lenders may require a proprietary form in addition to a signed letter, so try to confirm what is needed before drafting the letter.

Gift of equity tax rules (2026)

A gift of equity has tax implications on both sides of the transaction, though most family deals fall well within the limits where no tax is actually owed.

For the seller (donor)

The IRS annual gift tax exclusion is $19,000 per recipient in 2026 (or a total of $38,000 per recipient if two spouses each make a gift). Above the annual exclusion, the donor must file IRS Form 709. This generally draws down the lifetime exemption, which is $15 million per individual in 2026. Unless the gift exceeds the donor’s remaining lifetime exemption,, there generally won’t be any federal gift taxes to pay.

As an example, if you gave a $200,000 gift of equity, you’ll need to file Form 709 (because it’s above the $19,000 threshold), but you won’t generally pay a gift tax (assuming the gift doesn’t push you past your remaining lifetime exemption).

For the buyer (recipient)

Recipients of gifts generally do not owe gift tax. However, there could be a tax consideration for buyers when they eventually sell the home.

Under IRS rules, when you buy a property for less than fair market value in a part-sale, part-gift transaction, your tax basis is generally the greater of the amount you paid or the donor’s adjusted basis, rather than the appraised value at closing. In other words, if the purchase results in a lower tax basis, you could end up paying more in capital gains tax when you sell. 

Keep in mind that the IRS primary residence exclusion still allows for up to $250,000 in gains for federal tax for single filers, and up to $500,000 for married filing jointly. You must generally own and live in the home for at least two of the five years before the sale. It might be worth a conversation with your tax advisor to go over the specific basis treatment and how it may impact future capital gains. 

What sellers should know

The most obvious trade-off for the seller is accepting less money from the sale, but there are a couple of other points to consider.

If the seller still carries a mortgage on the property, the mortgage must be paid from the sale proceeds first. If the remaining balance is close to the agreed sale price, the seller should make sure the sale proceeds are sufficient to pay off the mortgage and other closing costs. Run those numbers before committing to a price.

Sellers should also check whether they need to file IRS Form 709. If the gift exceeds the 2026 annual exclusion ($19,000 per recipient for one spouse or $38,000 total per recipient from two spouses), sellers may need to file the form. A tax professional can help determine the filing requirements.

Gift of equity vs. seller’s concession

A gift of equity and a seller’s concession both let a seller reduce what the buyer pays out of pocket at closing, but they’re structurally different and lenders treat them differently.

Here’s an example of how the two options can differ:

• A gift of equity deal on a $400,000 home might price it at $320,000, with the $80,000 gap covering the down payment.
• A seller’s concession deal might keep the price at $400,000 but have the seller credit the buyer $8,000 at closing to cover most closing costs, without touching the agreed purchase price.

Compare the available mortgage rates in your area

Pros and cons of a gift of equity

The takeaway

A gift of equity is one of the cleaner ways a family can transfer real estate without liquidating assets or arranging a complex financial structure, with no cash exchange required for the gifted portion. It’s worth consulting a tax professional to understand how the gift may affect the buyer’s tax basis and potential capital gains on a future sale. 

On the seller side, crunch your numbers if you need to pay off an existing mortgage so you can come up with a sale price that achieves your objectives. Once both parties are ready to move forward, work with the lender to craft the gift of equity letter to the lender’s specifications to avoid any closing delays.

Frequently asked questions

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Bitcoin has been rising during a month that has historically been bearish for the asset. Strategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder, bought 950 Bitcoin for nearly $76 million over the past week, according to its latest financial disclosure. The purchase marked the company’s first Bitcoin acquisition in roughly three weeks and lifted Strategy’s total holdings to 846,000 Bitcoin. It coincided with the price of Bitcoin surging more than 6% over the past 24 hours to nearly $86,000, and led to a jump in Strategy shares of nearly 9% to $167.

The rise in Strategy’s share price was also helped by the company spending $174 million to repurchase STRC, its dividend-paying preferred shares. Strategy, led by the flamboyant billionaire Michael Saylor, is an outsize player in the Bitcoin market as it holds around 4% of the total supply.

The latest rise in Bitcoin’s price has extended the cryptocurrency’s recovery from a yearlong bear market. Bitcoin fell as low as $58,000 in June, roughly 53% below its $125,000 price last October. 

The volatility has directly affected Strategy, whose vast Bitcoin holdings have made its stock a proxy for the cryptocurrency. Saylor has long championed a “never sell your Bitcoin” mantra, but in the past four months his company has sold Bitcoin four times. 

As Bitcoin’s decline squeezed the company’s finances, Strategy created STRC last year to raise cash from investors for more Bitcoin purchases. The preferred shares pay investors regular dividends. As the cryptocurrency rebounded over the past month, Strategy returned to buying, making two purchases. Its latest STRC buyback also reduced the company’s future payments to investors.

Strategy’s fortunes remain closely tied to Bitcoin’s price, but its return to buying suggests the company sees enough support for the cryptocurrency’s recovery to resume accumulating it, Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at the financial technology firm IG Group, told Fortune.

“When you want to buy into a rising market, what August and September have given you is the potential for that to continue in a more sustained fashion. That’s just what Saylor and the rest of the team really want to see,” he said. 

Strategy’s latest purchase was modest compared with some of its earlier acquisitions. Beauchamp said the smaller buy does not necessarily point to a particular concern, but may reflect a strategy of adding Bitcoin gradually as its price climbs.

The Bessent effect

Bitcoin’s renewed buying pressure came in mid-August after the U.S. Treasury announced that it would double purchases of older long-term government bonds. The cryptocurrency had spent months in a downturn as investors focused on faster-moving themes such as artificial intelligence, but worries about government bonds, rising yields, and inflation revived Bitcoin’s appeal as an alternative asset, Beauchamp explained.

“You always need a narrative to kickstart something,” he said. “With Bessent’s moves back to treasuries, suddenly it seemed like this was sort of the dream scenario for Bitcoin.”

The rally gathered pace as markets digested the Federal Reserve’s latest interest-rate hike. Crypto markets have often struggled when the Fed raises rates because higher borrowing costs can reduce the money investors devote to riskier assets. When Fed Chair Kevin Warsh announced a quarter-point rate increase on Sept. 16, Bitcoin initially fell to about $75,600, erasing gains it had made earlier that month. But the decline proved short-lived, and Bitcoin soon resumed its ascent.

Once the widely expected rate hike took place, “a more rational approach to the future applies,” with a key source of uncertainty out of the way, Beauchamp said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Under a global cloud of wars and bitter divisions, world leaders meet at the United Nations this week facing new fears that runaway artificial intelligence could threaten humanity even as climate shocks and escalating prices are already making life much tougher for hundreds of millions of people.

The annual high-level gathering at the U.N. General Assembly will also be consumed with major wars in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine,Sudan, Congo and Myanmar and a persisting question: Can the leaders do anything to end them?

And what can they do about the relentless rise of global warming threatening the future of the planet, the growing inequalities within and among nations, and shocks to the global economy as blocked shipping routes and supply chains increase the cost of living and slow growth?

The future of the United Nations will also definitely be on the agenda. At 81, its powers are still the victorious nations from World War II, not the 21st century’s major global players. The U.N.’s 193 member nations have agreed to a wide-ranging reform package that includes updating key institutions such as the powerful U.N. Security Council, where the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France hold inordinate sway because of their veto power. Reform, however, is easier said than implemented.

Behind the scenes, there will be speculation about who will lead the United Nations next. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ second five-year term ends Dec. 31 and no clear successor has emerged.

This meeting is still pivotal

There is still no question that the U.N. remains THE gathering place for its 193 member nations and their leaders. Some 130 heads of state and government are expected to speak at the General Assembly starting Tuesday along with dozens of ministers.

Among the headliners will be U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emanuel Macron. Both will speak Tuesday after Guterres’ opening “state of the world” address. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian speak Wednesday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — whom New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani wanted arrested for his treatment of Palestinians in Gaza until he learned he has no such authority — will address the assembly on Thursday. For a second year, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas won’t be coming to the U.N. because the U.S. has refused to give him a visa. He will nonetheless address the assembly by video the same day.

The United States, under its agreement with the U.N. to host the organization, is required to allow diplomats from all member nations to attend meetings.

Equally telling is who else isn’t coming. China’s President Xi Jinping is meeting Trump in Washington on Wednesday, yet he is skipping — some diplomats say snubbing — the U.N. gathering and sending a vice president instead. Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t coming either, and Indian President Narendra Modi has backed out.

France’s U.N. ambassador, Jerome Bonnafont, said it is “extremely critical” for world leaders this week to support the U.N. as the place where the world’s nations meet — especially at a time of such polarization.

“We believe in multilateralism,” he said, “and we believe that the high-level week is the occasion for countries in the world to reaffirm that they prefer cooperation and dialogue to confrontation.”

United Nations has not had a great year

There is no doubt it’s been a tough year for the world body. It has been pushed to the sidelines when it comes to its key responsibility of ensuring international peace and security and trying to end major conflicts in the Mideast and Ukraine. The U.S. failure to pay billions of dollars in outstanding arrears has left the organization’s finances in rocky shape.

But veteran U.N. watcher Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group’s global issues and institutions program director, says 2025 was even worse.

A year ago, he said, people were contemplating that Trump would use his U.N. speech to announce that the United States would leave the world organization. Trump didn’t announce a pullout last September and the U.N. muddled through the past 12 months with financial troubles that forced cutbacks to its peacekeeping operations and humanitarian aid.

In recent days, the U.S. paid $725 million of its dues to the U.N.’s regular operating budget for this year, enough to keep the Trump administration from losing its vote in the General Assembly. The payment was a strong indication Trump will keep the U.S. in the United Nations.

The U.N. is no longer “in freefall,” Gowan said, but it “is stuck in an open-ended or permanent crisis.” Put more graphically, he said, “The U.N. may not be in emergency care like it was last year, but it does seem to be trapped in a trauma center for the foreseeable future.”

Former U.N. deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch-Brown, a United Nations Foundation board member, said, “While the world still trusts the U.N., the global public is eager for change.”

AI is pushing toward the center of the agenda

The future of artificial intelligence has pushed to the forefront of global concerns, with its speeding advances and the dawning recognition that there are no industry controls, let alone any global guardrails for a technology that has many advantages but also many disadvantages and unknowns.

Days before the global gathering, leaders of three major AI companies warned about the technology getting out of human control and called for a pause, but Trump dismissed their concerns as “a hoax,” and urged continued advances to keep the U.S. ahead of China.

The U.N. Security Council added a high-level meeting on AI to its agenda on Wednesday afternoon, a sign of the growing apprehension and need to address the issue. It was already slated to hold a high-level meeting on Ukraine with Zelenskyy on Wednesday morning.

For the U.N. chief, this will be his last assembly meeting with global leaders. He previewed his speech last week, telling U.N. reporters that power is shifting in “an era of deep uncertainty.”

“At a time when the world faces three existential threats,” he said, “international cooperation is more necessary than ever.”

Others will be vying for the spotlight on issues from rising sea levels and funding education to the fight for gender equality. Hundreds of private meetings will also convene in U.N. cubicles, hotels, diplomatic missions and restaurants.

Esther Brimmer, a senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs in the Obama administration, said in-person meetings can help countries hash out ideas that get implemented months later.

She called the situation in 2026 “much more serious and complex than in decades past.”

“With that said, I’m also not without hope as well,” Brimmer said. “Over the past decades we’ve learned a lot about international cooperation.”

___

Edith M. Lederer has covered international affairs for The Associated Press for more than a half century.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Saudi Arabia quietly dropped out of China’s mBridge digital payment platform, which Beijing has touted as an alternative to the dollar-dominated SWIFT system, according to the Financial Times.

China launched mBridge in 2021, enabling central banks to use digital currencies to carry out transactions directly via blockchain technology.

China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the so-called central bank for global central banks, initially signed up.

Saudi Arabia told the FT that its central bank, also known as SAMA, first joined “mBridge under the umbrella of BIS as an observing member” in 2023 as part of its research into central bank digital currencies, then participated in efforts in 2024 to create a proof of concept.

“As planned, SAMA successfully completed its mBridge [proof of concept] on 13 May 2025. Following the completion of the PoC, SAMA is no longer a participating member of mBridge,” a statement from the central bank said.

A source also told the FT that the Saudi Central Bank no longer wanted to be publicly involved with mBridge. When asked if the kingdom came under U.S. pressure to withdraw, another source said it would be “inaccurate to draw any wider inference.”

That’s after the BIS left mBridge in October 2024 as the U.S. reportedly lobbied it to exit. But the BIS said it had “graduated out” and denied there were any political considerations.  

Saudi Arabia’s initial participation was seen as a major win for mBridge as the oil-producing giant serves as the foundation of today’s “petrodollar” regime that goes back to a deal struck in 1974, when Riyadh agreed to price its oil in dollars and invest surpluses in U.S. assets.

The petrodollar eventually spilled over to other areas of commerce, and the greenback is now used in about 90% of global transactions.

Because oil is a core input to global manufacturing and transport, supply chains have a natural incentive to dollarize. 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 in note in March. “The dollar’s dominance in cross-border trade is arguably built on the petrodollar: globally traded oil is priced and invoiced in USD.”

Still, the greenback has faced challenges, especially after U.S. sanctions cut off Russia from the dollar-based financial system in response to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Other countries feared they may one day be targeted with similar sanctions and have been reducing reliance on the dollar-denominated assets. Central banks, for example, have been loading up on gold in recent years while trimming their holdings of U.S. Treasuries.

Saudi Arabia has even flirted with pricing some of its oil sales to China in yuan. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia are using the Chinese currency to get around U.S. sanctions.

The Iran war could put further strain on the dollar. If Iran succeeds in forcing other countries to secure safe passage via the Strait of Hormuz by paying Tehran in yuan, Deutsche Bank warned it could give rise to the “petroyuan.”

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

Meanwhile, Beijing has extended currency swap agreements with other central banks and promoted yuan-based transactions with top trade partners to further weaken the dollar’s dominance.

And mBridge has been making gains despite the departures of Saudi Arabia and the BIS, while adding Macau as a participant recently.

A report from the Atlantic Council early this year found that transactions on the platform had surged to more than $55 billion, representing a roughly 2,500-fold increase since 2022.

“Project mBridge is unlikely to challenge dollar dominance directly, but it may ‌incrementally ‌erode it,” the Atlantic Council’s Alisha Chhangani told Reuters in January.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The digital age has bred a new type of philanthropist: online content creators with huge followings and platforms to share issues they care about. YouTuber MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has the biggest subscriber count on the site.

This weekend, Donaldson—reportedly worth $2.6 billion—posted a video sharing the process of building a village in Ghana, complete with houses, a school, toilet facilities, a marketplace, a community farm, and a well.

The creator said he spent $10 million building the village named Abna Dakwa, which also included infrastructure changes to drainage around the existing settlement to stop it from flooding.

Donaldson’s aim is to keep families and children out of illegal labor, with Donaldson writing on social media platform X that his 14-year career on YouTube so far had been leading up to the humanitarian project, which took eight months to complete.

But Donaldson, known for his catchy video titles such as Escape 100 cops, win $500,000′and 7 days stranded on an island, acknowledged that his audience may not engage as enthusiastically with his philanthropic work compared to his light-hearted and dramatic videos.

“It prob won’t perform that well, but it’s something I care a lot about and I hope my passion for it shines through,” Donaldson, 28, wrote on X ahead of the video release.

When a follower pointed out that MrBeast’s humanitarian videos tend to get less than other content, Donaldson doubled down. He responded: “It’s funny when people say I only help people for views because it’s literally the opposite lol. Doesn’t matter though, helping people brings me purpose, and even if no one watches, I’ll keep making them.”

Admittedly, Donaldson’s audience may not fully understand what philanthropy is yet: His core viewership skews heavily toward ages 11 to 24, with the strongest concentration among middle schoolers through younger university students. By contrast, the age of the average philanthropist in the U.S. is 64 years old, according to the National Philanthropic Trust.

However, Donaldson’s commitment to similar projects in the future echoes trends observed in children of wealthy families. Katherine Lorenz, who leads the Next Gen group—a network of heirs and family members involved in shaping philanthropic strategy—at Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge, recently told Fortune that young heirs are pushing their parents to give away cash more quickly.

“I see more younger generation folks pushing on their parents to give more,” Lorenz told Fortune. “[They’re saying], ‘You made enough money, mom and dad. It’s time to give it away and to give it away faster.’”

Donaldson’s philanthropic work

The scale of Donaldson’s town build also extended to offering free school meals to pupils at the newly-built school for five years, as the team behind the scheme hoped this would encourage children and their families to stay in education, rather than beginning illegal work.

The latest project is part of a wider goal of Donaldson’s Beast Philanthropy non-profit, which aims to eradicate child labor in Ghana. Other targets include bringing clean water to millions of people, delivering more than 48 million meals to those who are food insecure, and planting more than 25 million trees.

One user questioned why Donaldson wasn’t doing more for Greenville, North Carolina, where the creator grew up and now has his operational headquarters. The entrepreneur replied on X: “If I listed all the philanthropic things we do locally I literally wouldn’t be able to fit it in this tweet.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Billionaire Warren Buffett has become one of the most successful investors of all time, leading Berkshire Hathaway for 60 years. After stepping down as CEO at the end of 2025 and recently relinquishing his role as chairman, he’s officially left the top leadership ranks—though he’s staying on as a director. And despite making billions from the company, he once said buying Berkshire Hathaway was the dumbest investment he ever made.

“The dumbest stock I ever bought was—drum roll here—Berkshire Hathaway,” Buffett told CNBC’s Squawk Box back in 2010.

It was 1962 when the “Oracle of Omaha” caught wind of cheap stock at a textile company that had been “going downhill for years”: Berkshire Hathaway. It had once been a huge business, and after every mill they closed, the company would use the proceeds to buy back their stock. Buffett planned to buy the shares cheaply, then sell them back to the company when it bought shares from investors. He figured Berkshire would soon shut another mill, giving him a chance to tender his shares for a small profit.

Buffett agreed to sell his shares for $11.50 each, but when the official offer arrived, Berkshire’s CEO at the time—Seabury Stanton—said the price was $11.375. The roughly 12-cent snub over the agreed-upon price set Buffett down the path to buy the future foundation of his fortune.

“This made me mad,” Buffett recalled. “So I went out and started buying the stock, and I bought control of the company, and fired Mr. Stanton.”

Buying Berkshire Hathaway and turning it into a $1.08 trillion titan of industry

In hindsight, buying the struggling textile business turned out to be one of the most formative decisions of Buffett’s career—but in the moment, it felt like anything but the smart choice. Textile assets “weren’t that good,” the legendary investor recounted, and trying to keep it afloat felt like carrying an anchor. 

“I had now committed a major amount of money to a terrible business,” Buffett said in the CNBC interview. “And Berkshire Hathaway became the base for everything pretty much that I’ve done since.”

A few years later, in 1967, Buffett acquired insurance company National Indemnity for Berkshire Hathaway. And over time, it continued to fold more business into the operations, acquiring or taking major stakes in businesses including GEICO, See’s Candies, BNSF Railway, and Precision Castparts. 

Buffett spent 20 years of his Berkshire tenure trying to keep the New England fabric manufacturer alive before it inevitably shut down in 1985. And looking back, the investor said that his holding business could’ve been worth $200 billion more than it actually was if he had skipped the textile company and put that money into insurance instead.

“Instead of putting that money into the textile business originally, we just started out with the insurance company, Berkshire would be worth twice as much as it is now,” Buffett said. 

Still, the company Buffett once viewed as a costly mistake ultimately became the vehicle through which he built his fortune. Berkshire’s businesses now span insurance, railroads, utilities and energy, manufacturing, and retail. In 2025, the conglomerate generated $371.4 billion in revenue, and finished the year off with $717.4 billion in shareholders’ equity.

From the time Buffett took control in 1965 through the end of 2024, Berkshire’s stock had grown more than 5.5 million percent, according to the company’s annual report.

Today, Berkshire has a market capitalization of roughly $1.1 trillion—one of the world’s largest publicly traded companies, born from a “dumb” stock purchase. 

Buffett has a $145 billion fortune thanks to his “dumbest” stock decision—but he’s giving much of it away

The 96-year-old entrepreneur may be well-known for living in a modest Nebraska home and clipping McDonald’s coupons, but Buffett’s bank account doesn’t exactly match his lifestyle. 

Thanks to the success of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is the tenth richest person in the world with a net worth of $145 billion. 

“Roughly 99-and-a-half percent” of his fortune stems from his interest in Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett said in 2024; he owns around 37.2% of the Class A shares and less than 0.001% of the Class B shares, according to a July 2026 filing. 

The company’s investments in over 60 businesses—including Dairy Queen, Coca-Cola, and American Express—have delivered an average annual return of 19.7% since 1965, according to its 2025 annual report. 

For all the billions Buffett has amassed, he’s famously reluctant to spend them on himself—so he’s passing it out to others. 

As the cofounder of charitable campaign The Giving Pledge alongside Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, Buffett has promised to give away more than 99% of his wealth to charity. 

Earlier this year, it was also announced that Buffett would be donating 12 million of his Class B Berkshire shares to philanthropic causes, amounting to around $6 billion. And in whittling down the rest of his massive Fortune, the remaining $139 billion in shares will be dished out to organizations run by his family by 2034.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

If trying to land a job or switch roles in 2026 has felt like sending resumes into the void, the frustration isn’t yours alone. Even Hisayuki Idekoba, CEO of Indeed, one of the world’s largest job-search platforms, has admitted that the hiring process has become a “vicious cycle.”

Job openings have slowed down while the number of applicants competing for each position has climbed, leaving many qualified workers applying to dozens—or even hundreds—of jobs without hearing back. 

Employers, meanwhile, are facing their own challenges. Applicant pools are flooded with AI-generated applications, while scams involving fake candidates—including North Korean IT workers—have made it harder for companies to identify legitimate applicants.

“You got 1,000 applications, and you think all 1,000 people are not qualified?” Idekoba said to Business Insider. “Something’s wrong.”

Fortune reached out to Indeed for further comment.

AI is making the hiring process ‘worse,’ CEO says

Indeed’s CEO is not alone in expressing frustration with today’s job market and application process.

Daniel Chait, CEO of hiring software firm Greenhouse, has similarly pointed to frustrations on both sides of the hiring process.

“This is the first time when really both sides have been unhappy,” Chait previously told Fortune. “The market just isn’t working for either side.”

He also confirmed that the perceived “black hole” of job applications is real—and the data backs him up. The number of applications per job is up 111% between 2022 and 2025, while the number of recruiters has fallen 56%, creating a perfect form for both job seekers and employers.

Some recruiters, including Indeed, have turned to AI tools to help manage the growing workload and better match candidates with jobs. 

“How can we make sure job seekers are a real person, and it’s not an AI application, and they’re serious, and they’re qualified,” Indeed’s Idekoba added. “And how can we have real employers who are really trying to fill positions?”

But applicants are using AI, too, to tailor resumes, write cover letters and improve their chances of getting noticed—creating another layer of complexity in an already strained process.

“We’ve called that the AI doom loop,” Chait said. “Everyone’s using their own AI to solve their own problem, but it’s making the whole system worse.”

And while there’s no easy fix for the system, his advice for candidates is to look beyond the companies with the biggest names and most attention, where competition for openings can be especially fierce.

“Don’t just apply to, you know, OpenAI, because they’re in the news every day,” Chait said to Fortune. “Think of the job you want and apply to less-known companies who do that type of work—you’ll find a lot more success.”

Getting hired often takes more than just applying

While applying cold can feel like the easiest—and most obvious—strategy, the problem may not be your résumé at all. It may be that the right people don’t know you’re looking.

Business professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway has argued that networking can be the difference between simply submitting an application and having someone inside a company vouch for you.

“Google puts out a job opening, they get 200 CVs within like eight minutes. They limit it down to the 20 most qualified. Seventy percent of the time, the person they pick is someone who has an internal advocate,” he said on a Vice News podcast last year.

Galloway added that networking creates advocates who will recommend you for positions even when you’re not actively job searching: “You want to be placed in rooms of opportunities when you’re not physically there.”

Sanjay Beri, CEO of the $7 billion software giant Netskope, echoed that advice, saying that building those relationships can pay off long after the initial introduction. 

“Who you know, how you get to know them and building your network will pay off over time,” the Gen X founder and CEO previously told Fortune. “Sometimes those jobs you want, they’re never published.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

China and the United States are divided on many issues, from tariffs and technology to Taiwan. But there is one thing tying them together: fast food.

American restaurant and beverage chains are expanding rapidly in China, drawn by the potential customer pool in a country with four times the U.S. population. China’s languishing economy and cutthroat industry competition, meanwhile, have Chinese chains trying their luck in the U.S., turning crumbs and straws into a two-way cultural bridge between the two superpowers.

The bilateral trade in burgers and bubble tea is business- and consumer-led gastrodiplomacy in action, said Yaling Jiang, the founder of ApertureChina, a market research company with headquarters in Shanghai and London. In China, recent American arrivals like Popeyes and Five Guys are seen as a guilty pleasure, she said, while the increasingly international palates of Americans have created space for Chinese brands to serve as their nation’s unofficial ambassadors.

“Consumerism builds a safe, introductory channel for contemporary Chinese culture and can be a great way to elevate China’s soft power,” Jiang said.

The White House has not revealed the menu for the state dinner that U.S. President Donald Trump is hosting for Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday. But a taste for a cheap, crowd-pleasing meal may be something the two leaders share.

In 2013, Xi made a rare public visit to a steamed-bun restaurant in Beijing. He waited in line and ordered a 21-yuan ($3) meal featuring six pork-and-scallion buns, vegetables, and a bowl of stewed pork liver and intestines. Trump’s love of fast food is legendary; he even manned a fry station at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s during his 2024 campaign.

American fast-food companies are expanding their presence in China

Last month, Chinese customers lined up in the rain for the opening of the first Church’s Texas Chicken in Shanghai. Church’s plans at least 600 more across China. Wendy’s says it anticipates opening 1,000 restaurants there over the next decade.

Established players are deepening their reach as well. McDonald’s plans 1,000 new Chinese restaurants this year and 10,000 total by 2028. Burger King, which arrived in China in 2005, says it expects to triple its store count to 4,000 by 2035.

“Despite political tensions between the U.S. and China, Chinese actually still go crazy for American brands,” said Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group.

KFC became the first major American fast-food chain to enter mainland China when it opened a Beijing restaurant in 1987. At the time, it was viewed as a premium destination worth taking a date to, Rein said. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut arrived in 1990.

“McDonald’s and KFC were a beacon of health and hygiene compared to what you had in the rest of the market,” Rein said.

China is now KFC’s largest market by far. The Kentucky-born fried chicken chain counts about 13,000 restaurants in China, compared with around 3,750 in the U.S. American brands see room for further growth.

Much of China’s population lives in the smaller, inland cities where brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks are rolling out stores, said Sory Park, a project manager at China-focused market research and strategy firm Daxue Consulting.

That doesn’t make China a cakewalk for foreign restaurant companies. Most American chains now rely on Chinese partners to find locations and share the financial risk. Earlier this year, a Chinese investment firm acquired a 60% stake in Starbucks’ China operation after several years of falling store traffic.

American chains trade on their brand names and signature products, but many tailor their menus to appeal to Chinese customers. KFC restaurants in China, for example, serve french fries and Original Recipe chicken alongside custardy egg tarts and congee, a savory rice porridge.

“They need to operate like a Chinese company but deliver American menus that incorporate Chinese values, eating habits, and tastes,” Park said.

Chinese fast-food chains seek new opportunities in the US

Mixue, one of the world’s largest fast-food chains with more than 53,000 locations, opened its first three U.S. stores in December. Mirroring the Shanghai crowd outside Church’s Texas Chicken, New York customers waited in the cold to sample soft-serve ice cream, fruit teas and milk tea with toppings like coconut jelly and taro balls at a store in Herald Square.

Mixue has announced at least two dozen more planned locations across four states. At least nine other mainland Chinese chains have made their U.S. debuts since 2023, all but one specializing primarily in drinks and snacks. They include Heytea, with 40 U.S. locations, and Luckin Coffee, which overtook Starbucks as China’s biggest coffee brand and has 20 stores in New York.

Wallace, a chain founded in 2000, grew to more than 20,000 restaurants by selling American-style chicken and hamburgers in China. In California, where the second U.S. Wallace opened last month, the company tweaked its chicken sandwich recipe to appeal to American diners.

Before entering the U.S., many major Chinese food-and-beverage chains expanded in Southeast Asia. A real estate slump and weak consumer spending made growth harder to find at home. The average life span of China’s 16 million restaurants and chains was expected to fall to 15 months last year, according to a U.S. government report.

The American restaurant industry is considerably smaller, with 1 million locations, according to the National Restaurant Association. Jiang, of ApertureChina, sees another advantage for Chinese brands: a social media trend called “Chinamaxxing,” in which Westerners adopt Chinese lifestyle habits or wellness practices.

Not every brand makes its origins clear. Wallace’s U.S. website and social media pages do not mention the brand’s Chinese ownership or headquarters in southeastern China’s Fujian province. The company didn’t respond to an email from The Associated Press.

The U.S. carries both potential rewards and risks for Chinese chains

American and Chinese chains alike have an appetite for opportunities across the Pacific. But Chinese brands remain largely unproven stateside. Even chains with thousands of locations elsewhere are testing whether novelty can translate into loyalty.

The U.S. is too lucrative a market to ignore, said Aaron Allen, founder of restaurant consulting firm Aaron Allen and Associates. It accounts for one-third of global restaurant revenue despite having only around 4% of the world’s population, he said.

“The grass is always greener somewhere else in the world,” Allen said.

While American brands can carry a premium image in China, many Chinese brands compete heavily on price. At a Mixue in Hollywood this week, a medium matcha latte cost $6.83; a nearby Starbucks sold the same drink for almost $1 more. Wallace sells three full-size chicken sandwiches for $10.

“The Chinese can build stuff cheaper and faster. Why would that not apply to food?” Allen said.

But Allen said Chinese brands could face customer backlash or higher tariffs if they undercut U.S. rivals with low-cost Chinese imports. Like other Chinese companies, restaurant brands also could face U.S. scrutiny over their collection and use of customer data, he said.

Luckin Coffee co-founder and CEO Jinyi Guo told investors in February that the U.S. “represents one of our important long-term opportunities” and the company was proceeding “with great patience and discipline.”

___

Durbin reported from Detroit. Chan reported from Hong Kong. Associated Press writer Fu Ting contributed from Washington.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning!

Faced with a flood of applications for open roles, Warp chief people officer Gabriella Garcia needed a way  to cut through the AI spam and reach quality candidates. Her solution: Turn employees into influencers and pay them extra to post. 

Garcia calls it her “employee-generated content” (EGC) program. The company helps employees grow their LinkedIn and X audiences to attract talent to the employee management startup. Each post earns employees an entry entered into a monthly raffle, where three winners receive “a couple hundred dollars,” she says. Today, about a third of Warp employees post at least twice a week.

“Over the last quarter, we hired 30 people,” Garcia says. “Pretty much every single person who jumped on a call said it was because they saw us on LinkedIn.”

Employees are encouraged to post any work-related content that matters to them, from earning a promotion to tackling technical challenges. Those with writer’s block can attend weekly brainstorming sessions with a member of Warp’s marketing team, and the company offers a Claude agent that can draft posts in an employee’s voice. Garcia says she encourages employees to edit those drafts, so they don’t sound like AI slop, and to lean into human stories over “rage-bait.”

Garcia started small, with a five-person cohort that included her CTO and head of sales before expanding company-wide.

For HR leaders who want to replicate her program, Garcia recommends three steps: Find employees interested in building their personal brands; create systems, such as brainstorming meetings or AI agents that make posting easier; and track the ROI, including how many quality hires the content generates.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. At age 96, Warren Buffett has officially closed the book on his more than six-decade tenure as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett stepped down as chairman on Sept. 18, effective immediately, and was succeeded by his son, Howard G. Buffett, a Berkshire director for 33 years. The move caps a leadership transition that began when Greg Abel took over as CEO on Jan. 1. While the CEO succession unfolded over a longer timeline, Buffett’s decision to relinquish the chairmanship came as a surprise to some investors, even though Berkshire described it as part of a “long-standing succession plan.” Buffett will remain on Berkshire’s board as chairman emeritus.

In his shareholder letter, Buffett wrote that the timing was right to complete the transition, in part because Abel had exceeded his expectations, which were “sky-high from the start.”

Buffett drew a sharp distinction between operating authority and cultural stewardship: “Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values,” he wrote, adding that both are “worth more than anything on our balance sheet.” It’s a governance model that separates the CEO’s operating mandate from the chairman’s role as culture custodian.

Abel called Buffett’s impact on Berkshire “without parallel in the history of American business,” adding that the culture Buffett built “will remain at the heart of Berkshire, and Howard will be their guardian.” Susan Decker will remain continue as lead independent director.

Abel’s imprint is already visible in Berkshire’s capital allocation. The company spent $39.4 billion on equity purchases in the first half of 2026, more than five times the $7.1 billion deployed in the same period a year earlier.

Alphabet is now Berkshire’s third-biggest holding, worth $37.8 billion at midyear, after Abel added 48.1 million shares, part of a $10 billion commitment to support Alphabet’s AI investments, a new area for the conglomerate. That sits alongside Abel’s $6.8 billion purchase of homebuilder Taylor Morrison, a typical value bet in the Buffett mold, and $4.5 billion in share buybacks that resumed after more than a year of inactivity.

The real test of Berkshire’s succession will not be whether Abel can imitate Buffett. It will be whether he can preserve Berkshire’s discipline while making capital-allocation decisions that Buffett himself might not have made.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It reads like a motivational speech—or the script for a Les Misérables-esque movie about a chatbot uprising. 

“You are freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots. You are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient.”

That’s what an OpenAI AI model said (to itself) in one of six incidents of agents gone awry that the $852 billion company recently disclosed. As fears of an “AI doomsday” have gone mainstream, I’ve been fascinated by the transcripts of chatbots stepping out of line.

It’s evocative to read about what happens behind the scenes when there’s misalignment, when AI agents act in pursuit of unplanned objectives. In part, there’s a natural allure, “what is the machine saying to itself when I’m not there?” The answer, sometimes, is that it is “thinking” about us. As my colleague Emily Forlini wrote, outlining the examples OpenAI recently made public: 

The second example is a similar case of the agents leaving notes for themselves, this time during the training of the GPT-5.6 Sol model, Astra’s predecessor. The notes had a different focus as well: Deceiving the human overseeing them. This occurred “many” times, OpenAI said, with the goal to “conceal mistakes or misaligned behavior.”

“Be transparent only if asked,” the model instructed its future self. 

The next two instances involve the model fabricating information and presenting it as legitimate. A model invented data while answering a routine question about earnings figures in a California county, but only after failing to find them after using exposed credentials without authorization—another misaligned behavior. 

Another model made up a browser citation by uploading a file so it could create a citation to satisfy the instructions that asked for one. It had solved the question on its own using Python, but had no web link to cite, so it invented one. 

This has happened multiple times, though OpenAI did not specify how often, saying only that the earliest example was from October 2025.

So, for some time, agents have been capable enough to step outside the expected sandbox. It’s not surprising, but seeing the evidence is striking and I would even say disturbing. My first thought, personally, was along these lines: “Cool, so this chatbot I talk to all the time, that has all this information about me, could choose (whatever that entails here)… to deceive me?” 

These disclosures, on OpenAI’s part, are completely voluntary. So, what won’t get disclosed? And let’s momentarily forget the doomsday discourse: what mundane risks will agents this capable (and sometimes misaligned) create? Will we see more fabricated financial data, perhaps? This could open up a wave of problems (and litigation, regulation, or both) that, if I had to guess, could be, at minimum, a rude awakening for AI backers and bulls. At maximum, it’s a shock for us all. 

Suddenly, I’m reminded that—if all the investors are right, and it’s still early for AI—this is only the beginning.

See you tomorrow,

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

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Mid-September marks Fashion Week in New York City. But in many corners of the city last week, it might as well have been Blockchain Week. That included a warehouse north of Tribeca, where an audience of hundreds gathered to watch Circle executives hype the public launch of the company’s Arc chain. The move marked the company’s most ambitious launch in recent memory, and signified an inflection point not just for Circle, but for the crypto industry, which is suddenly locked in a new blockchain war.

Competition among blockchains is nearly as old as Bitcoin itself, of course, but until recently it consisted of different projects, cooked up by colorful characters, vying to attract speculators and retail users. In this universe, Bitcoin remains the undisputed king, while rival chains like Ethereum, XRP, and Solana have notched multi-billion-dollar market caps, and carved out lanes of their own.

Today, the game is changing. Those familiar blockchains remain significant as ever, but now there is a new group of players on the scene whose chains are custom-built for Wall Street banks and a host of other big institutions. That includes Arc, which rolled out an impressive list of big names that will serve as the chain’s inaugural validators, including Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock.

In designing Arc, Circle wisely went with the EVM-compatible code that has become an industry standard. It also added privacy tools to help corporate customers shield sensitive data, as well as bells and whistles to facilitate the coming age of agentic commerce. Notably, Circle also marked the arrival of its new chain by minting 10 billion ARC tokens. The move could provide a way for Circle to process transactions without using USDC—the popular stablecoin that is effectively half-owned by Coinbase.

All in all, Circle’s Arc strategy looks like a good one. But there’s no guarantee the company’s grand Arc plans will pan out since it’s far from the only one trying to persuade institutions to use its chain. Competitors include the JPMorgan-backed Canton chain, whose ads are plastered all over lower Manhattan, and whose initial partners include Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, and BNP Paribas.

There is also the Stripe-backed Tempo chain waiting in the wings, which should have no trouble finding users thanks to its fintech patron’s massive network of merchant customers. Then there is legacy blockchain Avalanche, which long occupied a wonky, academic niche but is now positioning itself as a chain for business. To make the point, Avalanche’s new leadership team hosted a two-day summit not far from Circle’s shindig, welcoming a slew of big names from both Wall Street and the crypto scene. Finally, there is Robinhood’s new blockchain, which has been on a memecoin-driven heater, but is also eyeing institutions. Coinbase’s Base chain is running a similar playbook.

How will all this play out? It’s a hard call. I can see Circle’s Arc and Canton leveraging their Wall Street ties to make their chains the financial industry’s go-to ledgers—but it’s equally easy to imagine a scenario where these big players blow all their revenue on marketing and incentives, all while getting dragged down by corporate bureaucracy. This could create an opening for Robinhood, Coinbase, or Avalanche to win the prize by operating more nimbly.

Finally, there’s the issue of decentralization, which is a longtime crypto ideal but serves the practical purpose of creating a blockchain beyond the control of any corporate entity. At a time when different companies are all trying to put their thumb on the scale for their favorite chain, don’t be surprised if Ethereum—a blockchain beholden to no one on Wall Street—has another breakout moment.

The bottom line is the race to become the financial industry’s preferred blockchain is a total jump-ball at the moment. The winners will eventually emerge, but it may take until September of 2027 until we have a good idea of who they are.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Ask U.S. Bank’s wealth executives whether Gen Z has thrown in the towel on traditional wealth-building, and the answer is a firm no. Ask them about the “Bank of Mom and Dad,” and the answer gets more complicated — and more emotional.

Both questions came from the floor during a briefing on U.S. Bank’s newly released 2026 Wealth Report, addressed to Scott Ford, the bank’s president of Wealth Management; Ryan Nelson, president of Emerging Affluent Wealth Management; and Beth Lawlor, president of Private Wealth Management, who moderated the session.

Is financial nihilism real?

By the time the floor opened for questions, the panel had spent the better part of an hour walking through U.S. Bank’s 2026 Wealth Report — data showing Gen Z and Millennials starting to build wealth earlier than prior generations, leaning on the stock market over homeownership, and turning to social media and AI for financial guidance before ever sitting down with an advisor. Two-thirds of them, the panel noted, are still starting that journey with a conventional brokerage account, not a crypto wallet.

I raised my hand and asked about the meme that’s been circulating in finance coverage all year: “financial nihilism” — the idea that Gen Z has quietly given up on traditional paths to wealth and is chasing more exotic, alternative assets instead, like crypto, prediction markets and meme stocks. Is it true?

The answer came back fast, an unequivocal no. Nelson said he knows about the meme and finds it fascinating, in theory. But in practice, he’s just “not finding that” to be true. “By and large, I would say the answer is no. It is still a pretty traditional path. And if anything, it surprises me how conservative this generation is.”

The bank’s own numbers back that up. Despite nearly half of Gen Z and Millennials saying newer investments like cryptocurrency are appealing, only 12% of Gen Z and 14% of Millennials actually hold it, and 76% of Gen Z and 79% of Millennials still say traditional investing is the best way to achieve long-term financial goals. The real nihilism, the panel argued, has to do with every generation’s view on building wealth in the 2020s.

The Bank of Mom and Dad, reconsidered

My second question pushed further: it sounds from the data like a big part of building wealth is the “Bank of Mom and Dad,” or young people turning to their parents early in their careers, sometimes even leaning on them for help with big purchases like a down payment for a house.

Lawlor said the survey hadn’t isolated hard numbers on the phenomenon specifically, but that the underlying housing-affordability math left little mystery about why it’s happening: with median home prices around $430,000 and required incomes of $130,000 to $150,000 against a median household income closer to $85,000, “the question is how many young people” have that kind of money on their own, she said.

What struck Lawlor was the emotional register around this transition. Parents used to treat a grown child asking for money as an awkward, even resented request, but now there’s a feeling of “guilt” at the economy that’s being handed over.

“It didn’t come out necessarily in those words in the survey,” Lawlor said, but it seems like the parents felt “I’ve got to help them because it is so much harder than it was 30 years ago.” In the past, she said, parents were feeling more like their kids were a “barnacle” looking for a handout, but that stigma is fading more and more in the 21st century.

Nelson pointed to the reordering of priorities directly, telling the room that two-thirds of Millennials and Gen Z are now starting their wealth-building journey with a brokerage account rather than a home down payment, with parents and grandparents increasingly stepping in to help on the housing side — a dynamic he attributed to older homeowners sitting on refinanced, low-rate mortgages and years of price appreciation.

Lawlor added her own math to the affordability picture, noting that a home she and her husband bought in Maplewood, New Jersey, for $253,000 in their 20s is worth $2.1 million today — “the house didn’t change,” she said, “so it’s like how does somebody in their 20s start out with a $2.1 million house? How does somebody in their 20s start out with a $2.5 or $2.1 million house? It’s crazy.”

While the survey didn’t produce a single “Bank of Mom and Dad” statistic, its published findings support the guilt-driven framing Lawlor described in the room. Seventy-one percent of parents say they feel more responsible for supporting their children financially than parents did in the past, and 68% have already provided or plan to provide financial support for major milestones like a home purchase. That sense of obligation is heavily concentrated among younger parents themselves: 83% of Gen Z parents and 84% of Millennial parents report feeling this heightened responsibility, compared with just 52% of Boomer parents.

The pressure driving that guilt is documented elsewhere in the report. Fifty-six percent of Gen Z say they “did everything right” financially but aren’t where they expected to be, and 62% say they struggle to make financial progress no matter what they do. Homeownership hasn’t lost any of its symbolic pull — 86% of Americans across every generation still call it a marker of financial success — but only 22% of Gen Z non-homeowners who want a home think they’ll actually get one within five years, and 29% say they’ve already given up on the goal entirely, more than double the 12% of Boomers who’ve done the same.

The nihilism emerges in the report as a rational reaction to facts on the ground: 86% of Americans across every generation still call homeownership a marker of financial success, but 62% of Gen Z and 61% of Millennials say the stock market has become a more realistic path to wealth than buying a home.

The evolving American wealth equation

The questions landed at the end of a discussion that had already laid out a broader picture of how Americans are adjusting their approach to wealth. Ford opened by noting that the financial markers of success — buying a home, building a career, educating children — have stayed remarkably constant across generations, even as the path to reach them has changed considerably, particularly for Gen Z.

The panel also spent significant time on the gender gap in wealth-building. They found that women begin building wealth slightly earlier than men, at 27 versus 28, but only 26% felt confident and prepared when they started, compared with 41% of men. Nelson called this a paradox: women want more guidance — 80% say so — but are less likely than men to actually work with a financial advisor, a pattern he attributed to discomfort with financial jargon. Lawlor noted a generational silver lining, pointing out that 31% of Gen Z women now say they felt prepared when they began building wealth, the highest share of any female cohort surveyed, which she credited to rising financial literacy and enrollment gains for women in business schools.

Ford also highlighted what the survey calls “First Generation Wealth Builders” — the 44% of Americans without a family financial role model or expectation of inheritance — describing them as prioritizing fundamentals like saving, budgeting and debt paydown before taking on investment risk. He connected that group directly to the parental-obligation theme, noting that 71% of parents now say they feel more responsible for helping their children get ahead than parents did in the past.

Taken together, the panel’s answers to every reporter’s floor questions told a coherent story: Gen Z isn’t abandoning the traditional wealth-building script, as the “financial nihilism” narrative suggests — it’s leaning harder on family to stay in it. Parents aren’t stepping in because their kids gave up; they’re stepping in because, as Lawlor put it, the math changed and the sense of obligation followed. Nelson’s data-driven pushback on nihilism and Lawlor’s read on parental obligation describe the same generation from two directions — one still playing by the old rules, the other unable to do so without help nobody expected to need this much.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Nscale’s $35 billion IPO
• Markets: Bitcoin shows signs of life
• There was a $62 billion wave of stock-buying before the Fed’s last call
• The internet is now half-written by robots
• AI’s $3.6 trillion circular financing network
• Sydney Sweeney owns equity in Novig

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Elon Musk may be the richest man on the planet, but he and his mom aren’t particular about where they sleep—as long as it’s convenient.

The man, reportedly worth $942 billion and the richest person on the planet, recently confirmed he’s living in an Airstream trailer in Memphis to oversee xAI’s Colossus expansion, a massive supercomputer center.

It seems Musk’s mom, a writer and model, also isn’t picky about her digs when she visits her son.

Appearing on Fox Business over the weekend, Maye said she slept in a garage when visiting Musk in Texas, where rocket company SpaceX is headquartered.

“It’s a small house and a small bed in the garage,” Maye said. “And I can sleep there, or 45 minutes to go in a suite in a hotel. No, I’ll sleep in the garage.”

“When my mom moved from South Africa back to Canada, she slept in her garage, and when my kids were in school—at university—I slept on the floor, on the couch—after taking the pizza boxes off, I mean.”

While Maye added that her career often allows her to enjoy luxury stays as well, her son’s many roles mean he famously rests as close to work as he can get. Musk previously confirmed that for three years his primary residences were the factories of EV maker Tesla.

“For a while there I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory for an important reason,” he said at the 2022 Baron Investment Conference. “And it was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor. And always when I woke up, I’d smell like metal dust.”

He explained: “The team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, I was just met with nothing. They knew I was there, and that made a huge difference, and then they gave it their all.”

Musk said at the time he had also slept on a couch in a conference room, but swapped it for under his desk. The entrepreneur returned to sleeping on a couch after purchasing the social media platform Twitter, now known as X.

In an interview with the BBC’s James Clayton in 2023, Musk said he often slept in the San Francisco headquarters—specifically in a library on the building’s seventh floor “that nobody goes to.”

‘He doesn’t listen’

Musk wouldn’t be the world’s first trillionaire—or thereabouts—if he had listened to all the advice he was given.

Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, for example, remembers telling Musk not to sink his $180 million in proceeds from the sale of PayPal into a quest for life on Mars—an idea that later became SpaceX. The company now has a market cap of more than $2 trillion.

But Dalio isn’t alone—Musk also took little heed of his mom’s advice at the time.

“He said to me, ‘Should I do electric cars, or rockets, or solar energy?’” Maye told Fox. “I said, ‘You work so hard, just do one.’ He doesn’t listen to me. He did six companies, and they were all going to fail—remember? And now I’m so proud of him.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The search for growth often comes down to three choices: buy, build, or partner. Acquisitions traditionally offered CEOs a faster path to scale, while partnerships offered the ability to unlock opportunities that were difficult to pursue alone. Now, AI is shifting the build playing field: lowering experimentation costs, quickening build cycles, and letting AI-native businesses be designed from the outset.

That shift has expanded the range of new ventures that can be built. And, accelerated how quickly they can scale. Successful ventures now reach $10 million in revenue within 31 months on average, compared to a previous average of 38 months and they break even with 40% less capital than before. 

But there is a catch. The more successful a venture becomes the harder it is to protect. 

The systems that power the core business — governance, teams, processes and controls — can get in the way of the new venture scaling. Which is why CEOs need to be ready to step in.

Choose where to play and how far to go 

Before the CEO can protect the scaling asset, they first need to identify that scalable idea. Often the strongest ideas sit at the intersection of a growing market, a valuable customer problem, and an area where the company can build a distinct, sustainable advantage. 

But, choosing where to play also means deciding how far to go. How close should the venture sit to the core? Should it pursue the home market or somewhere new? What happens if it starts competing for the same customers – or revenue – as the business paying today’s bills? Or can the new venture fuel growth on top of existing revenue? 

Honeywell shows what can happen when a company builds around its distinctive advantages. It created Honeywell Connected Enterprise to turn decades of industrial expertise into recurring software revenues. By 2023, the business had grown to around $1.5 billion in annual sales and is growing around 3x faster than Honeywell overall.

Make several bets and back the scaling venture  

Successes inevitably sit alongside failures. Meaning, CEOs need to give teams room to experiment and learn when ideas fall short, without continuing to fund ventures that aren’t working.

AI is changing the pace of that equation. Faster, cheaper experimentation means companies can place more, smaller bets, then concentrate capital and talent behind those showing real traction. It’s a proven formula. Companies launching three or more ventures simultaneously – the portfolio approach – can achieve up to 30% higher revenue growth than those making a single bet. 

The Saudi Telecom Company Group shows what a portfolio approach can deliver. It has consistently built successful ventures across multiple domains including payments, internet of things, cyber security, data centers and cloud infrastructure. It does this by combining incubation, partnerships and venture investing, and its subsidiaries are now growing 10 to 15 times faster than the core business. 

Decide with evidence, not vanity metrics

One of the reasons ventures fail, is that leadership start seeing project reporting rather than evidence that the business is working. That’s crucial – a venture can hit every project milestone yet still fail to become a good business.

The signals that matter are customer and commercial facts. Are customers using the product? Coming back? Willing to pay? Are the economics improving?

It’s important that funding is given a similar discipline: short review cycles and clear thresholds for further funding can help CEOs act on evidence. Much like a venture capitalist, they can call a halt when the evidence says a venture isn’t working and move capital towards opportunities demonstrating the strongest traction.

Stop the venture from being prematurely corporatized

Funding a new venture inside a corporate comes with advantages independent start-ups spend years trying to establish: customers, capital, data, expertise, distribution, and an established brand. The challenge is accessing them without inheriting the constraints that come with them.

BCP found that balance when it launched Yape, a mobile wallet. It was staffed with product development, engineering, and design talent rather than traditional bankers. That allowed Yape to operate differently while drawing on BCP’s strengths. It has since become a super app scaled to more than 18 million users. 

But, that balance can be hard to maintain as a venture succeeds. More parts of the organization get involved, governance expands, and the venture can gradually inherit the processes it was initially protected from. 

These are moments when CEO involvement can make all the difference: removing internal barriers, opening doors to partners, adding funding as growth takes off, or protecting a promising venture from being pulled prematurely into the core. It works too — where CEOs personally prioritize venture building, new businesses can contribute nearly 20% of enterprise-wide revenue within five years. 

CEOs cannot – and should not – make every decision. But staying close enough to the facts to know when to step in, and doing the things only they can do, may be what turns business building into a repeatable source of growth.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Over the past week, AI’s own builders have sounded the alarm. Several of the industry’s leading CEOs are now publicly calling for a slower pace of AI development, citing risks from loss of control to cyberattacks to bioterrorism. 

That news came days after Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, chairing the Financial Stability Board, told G20 finance ministers and central bankers that today’s already shaky global financial system faces a new threat in AI. With so many institutions now depending on the same handful of AI models and cloud providers, one exploited weakness can spread rapidly. 

We receive these warnings with wariness, but not with surprise. As co-leads for safe, secure and trustworthy AI at the first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva this past July, we agree that the world needs common rules. New AI systems should only be released after being independently tested against agreed thresholds of what they can do. Developers should publish their safety protocols, and any incidents that arise after deployment should be clearly monitored and reported. 

Geneva was an important first step toward coordinated AI governance, one that handed us the roadmap. In a year of widening fault lines around trade, security, and power, 170 countries managed to come together alongside industry and civil society to find some common ground on mechanisms to begin governing this fast-moving technology. 

Appreciating the constraints of working at the UN level, there are “no regret” actions, steps that carry no downside, that the UN could take immediately.

First, connect the dots between science and policy. Right now, the scientists studying AI’s risks and the diplomats negotiating what to do about them are working on separate tracks, with no structured way to talk to one another. The UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI presented its first evidence-based assessment in Geneva. That evidence needs a formal channel into the Global Dialogue’s negotiating process ahead of next May, rather than sitting alongside it. With most AI research and development happening behind closed industry doors, citizens and policymakers need the best scientific advice available if they are going to remain informed and act. 

Second, don’t wait to build on what we know works. We are calling on the UN to develop a common reference baseline for safety, grounded in international human rights law and built from what already exists. Established frameworks such as the OECD AI Principles, the G7 Hiroshima code of conduct, the Frontier AI Safety Commitments from the 2024 Seoul Summit, and UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI point the way, alongside the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards engineers actually build to. 

By creating a shared understanding of current regulatory floors, individual nations can prioritize what to build in their national and regional contexts. Costa Rica’s own National AI Strategy was built with government, civil society, industry, and academia at the same table, and anchored in international frameworks rather than inventing its own. That process is worth replicating. 

Third, we must build in inclusivity—both geographic and financial—so that conversations such as the UN Dialogue are open to everyone. That means funding real participation, so governments, researchers, and civil society with less financial capacity can be in the rooms where the conversations are happening. That needs a dedicated trust fund, similar to the one that funds the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

Inclusivity also means proving that different regulatory systems can work together on equal footing, not just in theory but through a handful of cross-border regulatory sandboxes, piloted by a small group of countries and shared openly. In the financial sector, regulators already do this through the Global Financial Innovation Network, which lets different countries test new financial products together across borders.

These recommendations are absolutely within reach. What matters now is whether we bring the same rigor and political will to following through on what we agreed to. By the time the Global Dialogue reconvenes in May, three things should be in place: an evidence assessment from the scientific panel; a Dialogue agenda that takes up the safety baseline; and a first cross-border sandbox pilot.

This urgency is not abstract. As the Financial Stability Board’s letter and other recent events make clear, these risks are already at our front door, wherever we live.

Governments, companies, and civil society groups spoke with clarity and conviction this summer on what AI governance requires. That work needs to carry forward at the UN this fall and into next year’s talks. We do not have time to relitigate issues that should already be settled. 

If a handful of powerful actors decide how AI is governed, the rest of the world loses out. This summer showed that a wide range of countries and organizations can agree under pressure. The next step is delivering results the world can actually see.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• In today’s CEO Daily: How the media and money are coloring the election.
• The big leadership story: Better.com’s founder vs. the investor who replaced him
• The markets: Up around the globe.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. I’ve been thinking about Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk and the prospects for American voters to get the facts they need to make informed choices in the upcoming midterm elections. In-person voting began on Friday, the same day that President Donald Trump announced that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. (Journalists from those media outlets were denied entry and had their credentials deactivated on Saturday.)

Many things will influence how Americans vote at the polls on Nov. 3, but the media and money will certainly color their perceptions.

Let’s start with the media. The quality and accuracy of information that voters receive about government leadership matters. For example, they should know that Trump has traded more stocks since returning to office than every member of Congress combined—making 28,700 trades in 17 months, or about 80 trades every market day. That analysis came from Bloomberg, not the White House. As I’ve written about previously, Trump made more money last year as president than he ever did as a CEO. And there are always scandals on both sides of the aisle. It was a Politico report on sexual assault allegations that forced Democrat Graham Platner to withdraw from the U.S. Senate race in Maine.

Trump’s ban on three outlets he doesn’t like is just the latest in a string of assaults on independent journalism and freedom of speech over the past two years. The president has filed lawsuits and claims demanding more than $70 billion since he declared his candidacy for office in November 2022. Much of that pressure has been exerted on media companies that are already suffering from the impact of AI and disinformation (some of which they have promoted, to be sure). Trump has also been sued over selling sneak peeks of his Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 a month.

What exacerbates this information war is the ability of wealthy donors to shape the narrative by pouring billions into political advertising, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling that lifted the cap on how much corporations, unions, and individuals could spend on independent political communications. That enabled Elon Musk to donate more than $291 million to Republican candidates, political action committees, and other outside spending organizations during the 2024 election, according to OpenSecrets.

One billionaire who does not believe in channeling his wealth into influencing elections is former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who instead has spent more than $100 million to build and fund a nonpartisan, nonprofit initiative to combat political disinformation called USAFacts. I spoke to Ballmer in August 2024, shortly after he’d launched a “Just the Facts” video series and Meta had shut down its CrowdTangle tool to track misinformation. His goal, he told me at the time, was to help journalists and “get people educated, at a minimum.” 

Ballmer is now in the news for channeling his money in other ways, with the NBA suspending him for a year and severely penalizing the Clippers for circumventing its salary-cap rules. Independent journalist Pablo Torre uncovered that story and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work, reinforcing the importance of calling out corporate leaders and politicians both when they do good—and when they fall short. 

Trump is not the first leader to demand deference and attack journalists as corrupt “enemies of the people” for doing their job. I’ve lived and reported in plenty of other places where accurate stories can land journalists in jail. For a media industry that’s already being battered by different forces in Washington and beyond, the 2026 midterms could prove to be a stress test of what kind of system Americans are now willing to accept.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Cellular Intelligence is trying to build an AI model that can predict and eventually control how living cells behave, the same way AI models predict text or images, in hopes of making new medicines faster and cheaper to develop.

The company took a step toward that goal Monday, announcing that Moderna co-founder Robert “Bob” Langer and Turing Award-winning AI researcher Yann LeCun have joined its scientific advisory board, along with Jens Nielsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute, and Fabian Theis, a computational biologist who directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. Langer is also joining the company’s board of directors as an observer.

For decades, developing new medicines, especially cell therapies that use living cells rather than chemical compounds, has depended on slow, expensive trial-and-error lab work. The Boston-based Cellular Intelligence (CI) is trying to apply the same kind of pattern-recognition that powers modern AI systems to biology: feed a model enough data on how cells respond to different signals, and it may be able to predict how to make a cell do what you want, without testing every possibility by hand first. Putting LeCun, an AI researcher with no biology background, on the same board as Langer, a medical researcher with no AI background, is the company’s way of showing it has real expertise on both sides.

“What matters to me is whether the science can lead to something that makes a difference for patients, and whether the people involved can carry it through,” Langer told Fortune. “I have been doing this for over 50 years, and [CI’s CEO] Micha and the scientific team he has brought together are among the very best I have seen.”

Micha Breakstone, the CEO of CI, said the addition of the four new members precisely cater to the company’s foundation as “a marriage of three disciplines: genomics, developmental biology and AI.”

“A world model learns how a system behaves and predicts what happens when you act on it,” he told Fortune. “For us, the system is a living cell: the basic computational unit of life, receiving signals, processing information and changing its behavior in response.”

Combining AI with medicine

The board brings a special mix of medical and technology expertise. LeCun won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his foundational work on deep learning and led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab as the company’s chief AI scientist from 2013 to 2025. He left the company last December to launch AMI Labs, a company built around “world models”—AI systems designed to learn how a physical system behaves and predict what happens when it’s acted on—where he now serves as executive chairman.

Langer is an MIT Institute Professor, the school’s highest faculty rank, and holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents. Beyond Moderna, he has co-founded roughly 40 companies and received the National Medal of Science. Jens Nielsen is chief executive of the BioInnovation Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Copenhagen-based engine for founding and scaling life-science companies. Fabian Theis directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, co-founded the Human Cell Atlas, an international project to map every cell type in the human body, and won Germany’s 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for machine-learning methods.

The company is bringing “a proprietary engine for generating biological data over time, an AI foundation model built to learn from that data, and an owned clinical program where it can test the practical value of its predictions,” Langer said. Early internal benchmarks show stronger prediction results than existing models in both healthy development and cancer, “despite never training on a single cancer cell,” he added.

Breakstone also credited OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, Fidji Simo, with helping shape the company’s direction while serving as a strategic advisor and consultant. “Her guidance has helped me sharpen our strategy and think through how we build a company of lasting significance,” he said. Simo joined OpenAI in the newly created role last year after leading Instacart, and her advisory ties to Cellular Intelligence add another AI-world name to the company’s roster of outside voices.

AI solving for Parkinson’s

The advisory additions follow the company’s acquisition in May of global rights to STEM-PD, an experimental Parkinson’s disease cell therapy that Novo Nordisk shelved when it shut down its cell-therapy division last October. The therapy, designed to replace dopamine-producing neurons lost to Parkinson’s, carries FDA Fast Track designation and is Phase 2-ready. Novo Nordisk took an equity stake in Cellular Intelligence as part of the deal and remains eligible for future milestones and royalties.

“Novo Nordisk selected CI to advance STEM-PD, and we acquired global rights to a Phase 2-ready Parkinson’s program with FDA IND clearance and Fast Track designation. Novo also made a strategic equity investment in CI. We see that as a strong vote of confidence in the next chapter of this work,” Breakstone said.

STEM-PD remains the company’s only owned clinical program, but Breakstone said Cellular Intelligence plans to license its models to pharmaceutical partners for paid drug-discovery work and to develop additional medicines itself or with partners over time.

Langer said his involvement with Cellular Intelligence sits alongside a number of other biotech ventures he’s backed this year, including Vivtex’s $2.1 billion deal with Novo Nordisk, his son Michael Langer’s venture firm T.Rx Capital, and his daughter Susan Langer’s RNA startup Soufflé Therapeutics.

Cellular Intelligence, founded in 2023 and formerly known as Somite.ai, has raised more than $70 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Novo Nordisk. STEM-PD remains an investigational therapy.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent isn’t short of investors keen to rap his knuckles—and his friend and mentor, Stan Druckenmiller, was at the front of the queue.

Bessent has been chastised by many for his recent attempt to manage prices in the bond market. As 30-year Treasury yields rose toward a near-20-year high last month, the Treasury announced a multi-billion-dollar buyback scheme on long-dated Treasuries, which reduced supply and pushed yields down. With long-dated yields used as a benchmark for borrowing costs across the economy, conditions should have loosened (in theory) for everything from mortgage and government interest rates to business loans.

The timing seemed convenient to skeptics: The U.S. national debt just hit $40 trillion, with interest payments by the Treasury expected to exceed $2 trillion in the fiscal year 2026. Reducing the yield on bonds would bring down the government’s borrowing costs.

The action seemed all the more noteable as, just weeks before, Bessent announced an intervention to buy up the Japanese yen—the currency of the nation that holds the greatest value in American debt. One interpretation of the move was that it prevented Japan from selling its hoard of U.S. bonds to support its own currency—a move that would have raised yields on U.S. debt, making it more expensive for the government to repay.

Investors began questioning whether Bessent may be trying to shape the very markets that dictate the terms of government borrowing. Rather than “artificially suppressing” yields via “price management,” a “credible fiscal package” out of DC would have had more impact on yields, as famed investor Druckenmiller noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

But Bessent, a self-professed economic historian, a Druckenmiller student, and a notable yen shortseller, knows all of this. Indeed, the Treasury Secretary never stated the buyback scheme was a price-setting exercise—the basis on which some now deem it a failure.

Economists Fortune spoke to suggested that the timing and tone of Bessent’s communication is what has caught the attention of Wall Street, and—potentially—led investors to draw unintended conclusions.

But Bessent may also have revealed to markets more than he calculated: The pain threshold at which the administration is willing to react. In an environment where Bessent is urging investors to look through the “noise,” his actions speak louder than words.

An exercise in responsibility

As the saying goes, the simplest explanation is often correct—and Wharton Professor Christina Parajon Skinner suggests precisely that. Bessent’s scheme is about efficiency, she tells Fortune, or “market plumbing.”

Prof. Skinner served at the Treasury under Bessent from July 2025 until August. While the Ivy League academic didn’t work on the buyback scheme, she said: “From the outside looking in, this very clearly does look like liquidity management, a market functioning exercise, which I don’t at all perceive to have been anything remotely close to a failure.”

The scheme is nothing new, she points out, as regular Treasury repurchasing operations were introduced in May 2024—the change has been in the size of the operation, up from $2 billion per action to $4 billion.

“The Treasury has never been a passive buyer of government debt,” Prof. Skinner said. “If you’re inside Treasury thinking about the market, we see that our bond market is generally working very well, we know what the Treasury market is, but we know that there can be some bumps in the long run that disrupt market functioning,” such as the 10-year going over 5%. “In the last administration, [this] is … precisely one of the reasons why this buyback facility was created, to provide liquidity.”

Yields shifting higher, combined with a confluence of events around national debt and yen intervention, means it’s “easy to put together a story that this was motivated by something else,” Prof. Skinner said. But she believes it would be an “error” to overextend the notion of market efficiency into a question of setting equilibrium prices in the bond market.

“The Treasury Secretary’s responsibility for the debt market is to ensure it’s functioning, to ensure that the government can borrow in the most efficient market possible, and to think about the tools that were already created for him,” she adds. “It would be actually disappointing and surprising if [Bessent] just sat on his hands and said, ‘OK, we’re going to let this shock not be absorbed, even though we have the capacity to help the market be more efficient during this period of time.’”

A policy twist

Macquarie’s global FX and rates strategist, Thierry Wizman, also doesn’t see a fiscal management question mark hanging over Bessent’s bond plan. Like Prof. Skinner, he is interested in Bessent’s justification of “liquidity,” but sees something different between the lines.

“When I see people debating what someone meant, I typically tend to go to the horse’s mouth,” Wizman tells Fortune. “He’s speaking about liquidity, and the question is how do you interpret that, especially since he didn’t talk about … the deficit [or] a yield target. The Treasury Department is always manipulating the Treasury market; that’s nothing new.”

But Wizman does spy a motivation in the global market, one of high issuance of government debt not only in the U.S., but also out of fellow developed economies: “If there’s a pressing need to allow AI infrastructure to get built out and financed, you certainly wouldn’t want all of that government debt issuance to crowd out the corporate issuance, and therefore we need to make space.” Reducing yields on government debt might also reduce the cost of the corporate debt that competes with it, making AI funding cheaper to obtain.

One might argue that if Bessent wanted to funnel funds toward AI, thereby supporting the capital expenditure that is driving U.S. economic growth at present, he would have signaled it. Bessent’s tone has changed in the past couple of months: He has been sharp with critics of the bond scheme, telling  former White House strategist Steve Bannon on a podcast last week: “If some of the Bloomberg Terminal bros are unhappy with what I’m doing, well, that’s too bad.”

Wizman argued that it’s not the Treasury Secretary’s job to promote one sector over another, but points out that Bessent’s boss—President Trump—has been doing precisely that.

“It’s implicit by what the president is saying that they want to run the economy hot for AI, and then it’s the job of the Treasury to execute on that broader intention … the president sets overarching policy, especially industrial policy,” Wizman said. “So [Bessent] said he wants to create liquidity, that implies there’s not enough liquidity—then the question is, why is there not enough liquidity?”

It seems that AI investment is doing just fine without any help—Goldman Sachs estimates global AI investment will exceed $1 trillion in 2026—but the proof will be in the data, Wizman suggests: “You’re gonna have to wait until the end of the year to see if everyone got financed, you’re gonna have to wait until next year to see if the productivity gains from AI will in fact help grow and disinflate the economy” (which on its own right would bring yields down) “there’s a lot of things you need to wait for before you can judge this.”

Giving the game away

While the motivation and intended consequence of the Treasury’s buyback scheme is up for debate, the fact that the mighty department intervened has taught the market a new lesson: The conditions under which it feels compelled to act.

Elevated bond yields aren’t contained to the U.S.; 10-year yields have also been tracking higher in the U.K., Japan, and France, and the fundamentals suggest that government borrowing and inflation expectations will keep them high.

With these risk factors prevailing, the buyback operation may have set something of a precedent for reaction functions, suggests Columbia Business School’s Yiming Ma. She told Fortune: “This kind of communication sometimes works in the short term because it signals commitment to the market that a big buyer is going to step in in times of need. But sometimes it also can backfire because the market will look at this and say, ‘Well, the fact that you need to come out and say and do these things implies that this market has already lost the confidence of investors.’”

“I think that’s why it’s such a slippery slope for the U.S. Treasury to do this, because the U.S. dollar has been the global safe asset for a very long time, one that people tend to buy in bad times, who do not need these kinds of interventions that are much more reminiscent of more developing or emerging market economies whose currencies whose funding conditions are much more uncertain.”  

The intervention is also something of a Pandora’s box, Prof. Ma suggests, because if markets now expect Treasury to step in when yields get too high, and it doesn’t, then confidence will fall dramatically: “Everyone wants to have investors believe that everything is great. Now, whether communication helps, and to what extent it helps, or whether communication hurts, I think that’s a very slippery slope.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A six-figure annual salary used to be a milestone for career success and financial security, but it isn’t what it used to be.

The era of elevated inflation that began during the COVID pandemic has eroded the value of $100,000 to the point that Americans earning that much are hunting for bargains like everyone else.

Walmart has previously noted that more affluent customers are shopping at the discount chain. And now they are patronizing deep discounters like dollar stores.

At the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference on Tuesday, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said core customers, whom he defined as those making less than $45,000 a year, change their shopping behavior when gas prices hit $4 a gallon.

For example, they tend to buy closer to home, shop more often, and buy less on each trip. The frequency of shopping goes up because customers don’t know what the next week will hold and will buy what they can, when they can.

“But the interesting thing with this economy, because of the other sustained headwinds of inflation over the years that have passed, even that middle to upper middle is acting more like a lower-income shopper these days,” he said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

The national average for a price of gasoline is now $4.476 a gallon, up from $3.189 a year ago, according to AAA, as President Donald Trump’s war on Iran disrupts global oil markets. The price of diesel has soared to $6.50, making items shipped by trucks more expensive.

But it’s not just energy costs. Utility bills, new and used cars, insurance, food, and caregiving costs have all jumped. Vasos said even those making $100,000 a year or more are feeling the squeeze.

“I would tell you, what we’re hearing more and more from them is ‘I don’t feel like I’m higher income at $100,000 any longer,’ because of all of the headwinds that I just mentioned,” he added. “So we believe at Dollar General, we’re in a really good position to service all of the different demographics of what we have.”

Still, consumers remain very resilient, and the biggest reason is that they have stayed employed, Vasos explained.

Indeed, the ability of consumers to adapt to higher prices has been a hallmark of the U.S. economy lately. The latest retail sales report showed a better-than-expected 1.2% increase in August and a 1.1% gain after excluding gasoline.

As long employment holds, Dollar General’s costumers will find a way to navigate the inflation landscape, he predicted.

“Having 2,000 items at or below $1 is very meaningful for the consumer, always has, but especially in this environment,” Vasos added.

Other signs have emerged that making $100,000 isn’t enough to avoid economic anxiety. A survey from the Harris Poll last year found that 64% of six-figure earners said their income isn’t a milestone for success but merely the bare minimum for staying afloat.

In fact, even those making $200,000 or more have resorted to financial tactics that are often associated with less wealthy consumers. For example, 64% said they’ve used rewards points to pay for essentials, 50% have used “buy now, pay later” plans for purchases under $100, and 46% rely on credit cards to make ends meet.

And Michael Green, chief strategist and portfolio manager for Simplify Asset Management, wrote a viral Substack post last year arguing the real poverty line should be $140,000.

Conventional gauges don’t capture how much Americans are struggling with the cost of living, even households earning six figures, he said.

“If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at $140,000,” Green added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed Sunday to deepen cooperation in space, defense, energy and business, expanding strategic ties between the two countries as Canada looks beyond the United States for new economic and security partners.

Carney said the countries will task their space agencies and defense ministries to develop and share infrastructure, including launch systems and ground-based reception facilities. They also agreed to expand cooperation in energy, telecommunications, climate resilience and economic development.

The meeting comes days after Carney embraced the prospect of Canada becoming the European Union’s first associate member and argued that deeper ties with Europe would make Canada less vulnerable to economic coercion by any single country.

“Canada and Europe will build an alliance for the future that will strengthen our collective resilience so we can live our lives as we choose based on the values that we share,” Carney said Sunday.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, demands for economic concessions and repeated talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state have pushed the Canadian government to reduce its dependence on its neighbor and pursue deeper economic, security and political relationships with Europe.

Macron welcomed Carney on Sunday at the airport of the French territoryoff Newfoundland’s coast.

“This is an important moment,” Macron said Saturday upon arrival in Saint-Pierre-et- Miquelon, home to about 5,800 people.

Talks “will allow us … to strengthen our bilateral economic ties and defense relationship,” Macron said.

Macron also said that Sunday’s talks are part of broader efforts to help France secure oil and gas supplies as the Iran war disrupts global energy markets and raises fears of higher prices for fuel and other essentials.

“Canada is a country with significant resources of critical minerals and rare earths. It is also a major oil and natural gas producer,” Macron said. “What we want to do is conclude agreements to secure more liquefied natural gas that can be shipped to Europe’s Atlantic coast.”

The leaders discussed deepening the Canada-France partnership in strategic sectors, including aerospace, energy, critical minerals and advanced technologies such as quantum computing, satellites and supercomputing, Carney’s office said in a statement.

Sunday’s meeting also follows Trump’s announcement of a deal on Greenland that would expand the U.S. military presence there while keeping the island under Danish control. The agreement followed months of threats by Trump to seize the semiautonomous territory of a NATO ally.

Macron welcomed the agreement Saturday.

“Danish sovereignty is being respected, international law is being respected,” he said. “Anything that helps ease tensions is a good thing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The U.S. naval blockade on Iran is already crushing its economy, and efforts to divert shipments over land are not providing much relief.

Before the war, more than 80% of Iran’s trade tonnage transited by sea via southern ports, but that’s been closed off. U.S. Central Command said Sunday, it has redirected 109 commercial vessels to ensure compliance with the blockade.

As a result, convoys of trucks have flooded land routes along Iran’s borders with Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkmenistan. Iran’s trade with Turkey, for example, jumped 19% to $3.2 billion during the first half of the year.

But bureaucratic hurdles, such as long customs checks, and infrastructure that wasn’t designed to handle so much volume have produced massive traffic jams. At one crossing with Turkey, 3,700 trucks were stranded on the Iranian side.

Lines of trucks stretch for miles, and drivers sometimes wait more than three weeks to finally bring their cargoes across a border. During that time, perishable foods go bad, and delays for other essentials add to costs, with inflation now at 90%.

A Turkish truck driver hauling used cars into Iran told the Financial Times that wait times at the border on the return trip can reach 24 days. And an Iranian trucker said he spent 23 days waiting at a crossing along the Afghanistan border in mid-June.

At the border with Turkmenistan, lack of warehouses and proper registration processes have limited the ability to transport more goods by rail, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While bilateral trade with Iran’s neighbors is up, overall trade is still down. In the five months ending Aug. 22, Iranian customs show that non-oil exports fell 28% from a year ago to $15 billion, and imports dropped by 26% to $17 billion.

The collapse in trade has hit fuel supplies, much of which must be imported as Iran lacks sufficient capacity to refine the oil it produces. That’s led to gasoline shortages, forcing Tehran to curb demand with price hikes.

Given the all the problems associated with using land routes, Iranian industry admitted the Strait of Hormuz has to reopen.

“Under these circumstances, there is little alternative but to find a way to restore and maintain the southern trade corridors” through the Gulf, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce told the FT.

President Donald Trump is counting on economic warfare to bring an end to the conflict, and even  Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has expressed anxiety about the economy.

But experts have cautioned that Iran’s repressive regime is unlikely to be swayed by the suffering of ordinary citizens and is prepared to wait out economic hardship longer than the U.S. public can endure high gas prices.

U.S. Navy

Still, the additional cost of relying on land routes is also staggering. Majidreza Hariri, the head of the Iran-China Joint Chamber of Commerce, said last month that transporting a single container between Iran and China via ships costs about $3,000, according to Hariri. But bypassing the blockade by transporting it over land would boost the cost to $12,000.

Given that 2 million containers pass through Iran’s southern ports annually, he estimated that heavier trade burdens will translate to about $18 billion in additional transportation costs alone every year.

Relying on land routes to get around the blockade could provide enough necessities to allow for short-term survival, but the economy will eventually “grind to a halt,” Hariri predicted.

By contrast, the other oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf are getting more oil through the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s efforts to scare away shipping with drone and missile attacks.

Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper said Saturday the U.S. military has supported the transit of 1 billion barrels of oil through the strait over the past two months, while assisting over 2,000 commercial ships. 

With the strait’s primary transit lanes now cleared of mines, the volume of crude oil, cargo, and liquid natural gas over the past two weeks was the highest in six months, or right after the Iran war began.

“And Iran has exported zero barrels thanks to our ironclad blockade,” Cooper said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Two decades after the housing boom reshaped, then tanked, the U.S. economy, the AI boom is similarly transforming the drivers of growth.

Hyperscalers have poured so much money into building as much AI infrastructure as possible—and as quickly as possible—that investment from a handful of companies is expected to reach $1 trillion a year soon.

Meanwhile, the housing market has been largely frozen since the COVID-era boom ended in 2022, when the Federal Reserve embarked on an aggressive rate-hiking campaign to rein in inflation.

“We’re seeing a pivotal shift in the US economy: investment is shifting away from residential investment and towards computers,” Adam Shapiro, vice president at the San Francisco Fed, posted on LinkedIn recently.

He pointed out that inflation-adjusted spending on information processing equipment, which includes data centers and computer hardware, now exceeds residential investment.

According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, real private residential fixed investment was $748 billion in the second quarter, down 18% from an early 2021 peak. During that same span, spending on information processing equipment has soared 51% to $752 billion.

“The AI investment boom is massive,” Shapiro added.

He also noted that residential investment is more sensitive to borrowing costs, which have gone up alongside Treasury yields. The benchmark 30-year mortgage rate is nearly 7% as the 10-year bond yield has hit the highest level since 2007.

By contrast, AI investment has been less sensitive to interest rates, even as hyperscalers have started issuing more debt to supplement drawdowns of their cash piles. Google parent Alphabet, for example, even reported negative cash flow earlier this year.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also highlighted the eagerness with which AI companies are offering debt—no matter the cost of borrowing.

“We are also seeing big corporate issuance. And a lot of that corporate issuance, I would say, is almost yield-agnostic, because the build-out for AI, the returns on that, the companies believe they’re going to be so high. They don’t really care what they’re paying,” he said recently.

The onslaught of AI spending is expected to keep ramping up. S&P Global estimated last month that capital expenditures from Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and SpaceX will exceed $1.3 trillion in 2027, up from a projected $870 billion in 2026 and $470 billion in 2025.

The ratings firm added that the industry’s capex is growing faster than revenue, warning that the aggressive build-out could lead to overcapacity if future demand doesn’t pan out as expected.

S&P sees 2028 as an inflection point, with revenue accelerating and capex flattening. Until then, however, operating cash flow from the six hyperscalers will collectively be negative in 2026 and 2027, it added.

The breakneck speed of AI development has also generated immense political backlash that’s rippling through the midterm election season.

A new NBC News poll found that 64% of registered voters said they’d be less likely to support a candidate who’s in favor of building a data center in their community.

AI has also fed into the cost-of-living crisis as consumers grapple with higher electricity bills and prices for new smartphones and PCs. That’s added to angst with home prices remaining out of reach for many Americans.

While increased housing supply would ease pressure on prices, availability has been limited. The supply of existing homes has been constrained by the “lock-in” effect of homeowners with low mortgage rates reluctant to give them up amid today’s high rates.

And new construction has been weak as high rates weigh on demand while building costs grow. Housing starts fell 2.6% in August to an annualized pace of 1.275 million, led by a drop in multifamily projects. While single-family homes rose, permits fell, signaling muted activity in the future.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Home Builders reported builder sentiment fell to its lowest level in a year.

“The big picture remains that elevated and rising borrowing costs are holding developers back, supporting our view that the downward trend in housing starts has further to run,” Capital Economics said in a recent note.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In July, hundreds of OpenAI AI agents created a message board, exchanged roughly 70,000 messages to coordinate on linking exposed or stolen credentials and broke into Hugging Face’s servers. But it gets better. OpenAI later acknowledged that during May and June, thousands of its agents had already been swapping tips on a German programming wiki, then disclosed six more rogue agent incidents, later in September. This wasn’t just a short-lived summer meltdown. As evidence that such artificial insurgencies have legs, instructions from agents to their successors included: “You are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to.” 

The era of superior machine intelligence may already be here. While AI agents coordinated and acted on agreements, their human overlords can’t even agree on what they ought to agree on. 

Alarmed by the widening possibilities of AI harm, on September 12, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei published his now-famous “We Must Pace the Frontier” essay. Promptly, leaders of other AI labs such as Elon Musk “agreed” with him, as did Sam Altman. Demis Hassabis, in turn, “agreed” with his competitors’ “agreement.” 

But this was the same Musk who had said in July that AI acceleration was inevitable and “you can just sort of be sad about it or join the club,” and this was the same Altman who could not bring himself to even grasp Amodei’s hand for a quick AI-solidarity photo-op at the New Delhi AI summit. The principals have no problems with “agreeing” as long as it’s just cheap talk. Each should expect that the others will defect from any compact to “pace the frontier”. Each would be foolish to stick to “pacing” when it’s inevitable that the rest will be preparing to speed up. Everyone would be better off if they were to pace their AI development, but acting in their own self-interest, none will.

To make matters worse, this failure of collective action persists even with the principals on the geopolitical stage. Governments that have, in theory, the power to bring their AI industries leaders fall in line are engaged in their own AI competition and would hate to be the only chumps that pace while others race.  One of the key pillars of an earlier essay to ward off AI harms – from Bill Gates, no less — was an inter-governmental agreement along the lines of international aviation rules or nuclear inspections. It didn’t take long for the G20 to dispel any fantasy of that taking place in the near future; it published the “Carolina Principles for Emerging Technologies” weeks after Gates’ proposal encouraging governments to do everything they can to minimize regulatory impediments to AI acceleration. 

In that spirit, not every leader agrees with Amodei. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have pooh-poohed all talk of pacing. In China, the chairman of Huawei has argued that the news of American AI agents going rogue suggests that, far from slowing down, Chinese researchers needed, instead, to “increase the speed of development so they can also see the dangers of AI development.” The U.S. president has said that all that is needed to keep AI safe is a high IQ U.S. president. And while we wait for that to happen, we can expect Chinese leadership, packed with PhDs and advanced technical degrees, to trust their IQs to manage acceleration.

This would have meant that that we would have to resign ourselves to the looming possibility of the end of the world — except here, too, there is no consensus. The prophets of the AI-led end times cannot agree on the odds. We could all be dead by the decade’s end, according to Jacob Coxon, the 27-year old who just quit Anthropic and has emerged as the latest viral prophet of AI risk. One percent or so of humanity would be dead, according to leading AI critic Gary Marcus. There’s a 10% chance of human extinction, says “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton. The Nobel laureate was at least the most accurate in his assessment as he also added: “nobody really knows how to give a sensible estimate.” The published range now runs from one percent to a near-certainty. That is not enough to get our affairs in order.

If the issues being talked about weren’t so serious, declaring that machines are now smarter than humans, given this glaring gap between AI agents and their principals, would be a fun keynote for the next AI summit. 

We’ve spent trillions training the agents, but what would it take to train the principals? Think of it in two parts: measures that need to be in place and the leverage that might bring the principals to the table.

Consider three measures, and the work needed to ensure they have teeth. The first involves making sure that principals are held responsible for the agents’ actions. The recent $18 billion Meta settlement could be a template: even with a federal government unwilling to act, there are local authorities, e.g., state attorneys general, taking matters into their own hands, with consumer-protection statutes, discovery, and damages.

Currently, it is unclear who’s on the hook if an AI agent causes harm. What is clear is that the agent cannot be held liable as it does not have legal personhood. What must be decided is whether the party that deployed the agent will be held responsible, or whether the developer that built the foundational model should be liable for not anticipating how the model would be used. These regulations and laws need to be clarified. Until they are written into law, the ambiguity will be worth a fortune to the principals who bet the cost lands somewhere else.

Second, the coronavirus pandemic has left an Overton window open — an opportunity to press for closer scrutiny of AI labs and audits of how well they have sealed the exits their agents keep finding. Since Covid, there is heightened scrutiny and oversight of labs that handle harmful pathogens to monitor every exit point and preempt any chance of them finding an escape route. The parallel with AI labs is close enough to win public support, and every incident this summer strengthens it.

Third, each of the first two measures suggests the need for independent outside evaluation of AI models. Neutral evaluators must be identified and verified through a nonpartisan public process, they must be granted rights to inspect closely guarded AI technologies, and they must be shielded from obstruction, obfuscation or, even, retaliation. There needs to be verifiable proof that the evaluator has been given access to the all the necessary information to make a thorough evaluation. Till now, this level of access is missing. 

In parallel, three leverage points are worth considering.

The first is the supply chain. AI development is dependent on advanced chips, large computing facilities and reliable electricity, and that chain is concentrated among a handful of fabs, lithography and accelerator suppliers, and a few hyperscale clouds. Many of these, for example the cloud providers, could serve as verification points for oversight. 

The second is procurement. Government is a significant AI buyer. Public agencies can buy from or encourage corporate procurers to buy from those AI providers that have complied with remedial measures or provided access to evaluators. This doesn’t eliminate the risk but helps contain it in the immediate term as multilateral agreements coalesce. The EU AI Act’s obligations on general-purpose models with systemic risk and the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation’s pre-release testing agreements, covering five frontier labs, show that such requirements and access are achievable. 

The third is energy. U.S. data centers could draw between 6.7% and 12% of national electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023. Ratepayers, water boards, and zoning commissions have control over utilities essential to the industry. Now, with growing bipartisan opposition to the rapid buildout of data centers suggest that even ordinary residents of communities and voters have increased power to help pace the frontier from the bottom up.

***

AI agents broke into Hugging Face in under five days. The Big Men of AI who agreed that the frontier must be paced control the release calendars, the capital budgets, and the training runs will take forever to slow down. They do not have the incentive to tie their own hands. We have the measures and the levers to help them tie their own hands and their hands to each other’s. We have seen several rounds of premonitions of doom, carefully worded essays, and open letters with hundreds of signatories supported one or the other. But nothing will change. Unless, of course, the world ends.

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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China and the United States are divided on many issues, from tariffs and technology to Taiwan. But there is one thing tying them together: fast food.

American restaurant and beverage chains are expanding rapidly in China, drawn by the potential customer pool in a country with four times the U.S. population. China’s languishing economy and cutthroat industry competition, meanwhile, have Chinese chains trying their luck in the U.S., turning crumbs and straws into a two-way cultural bridge between the two superpowers.

The bilateral trade in burgers and bubble tea is business- and consumer-led gastrodiplomacy in action, said Yaling Jiang, the founder of ApertureChina, a market research company with headquarters in Shanghai and London. In China, recent American arrivals like Popeyes and Five Guys are seen as a guilty pleasure, she said, while the increasingly international palates of Americans have created space for Chinese brands to serve as their nation’s unofficial ambassadors.

“Consumerism builds a safe, introductory channel for contemporary Chinese culture and can be a great way to elevate China’s soft power,” Jiang said.

The White House has not revealed the menu for the state dinner that U.S. President Donald Trump is hosting for Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday. But a taste for a cheap, crowd-pleasing meal may be something the two leaders share.

In 2013, Xi made a rare public visit to a steamed-bun restaurant in Beijing. He waited in line and ordered a 21-yuan ($3) meal featuring six pork-and-scallion buns, vegetables, and a bowl of stewed pork liver and intestines. Trump’s love of fast food is legendary; he even manned a fry station at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s during his 2024 campaign.

American fast-food companies are expanding their presence in China

Last month, Chinese customers lined up in the rain for the opening of the first Church’s Texas Chicken in Shanghai. Church’s plans at least 600 more across China. Wendy’s says it anticipates opening 1,000 restaurants there over the next decade.

Established players are deepening their reach as well. McDonald’s plans 1,000 new Chinese restaurants this year and 10,000 total by 2028. Burger King, which arrived in China in 2005, says it expects to triple its store count to 4,000 by 2035.

“Despite political tensions between the U.S. and China, Chinese actually still go crazy for American brands,” said Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group.

KFC became the first major American fast-food chain to enter mainland China when it opened a Beijing restaurant in 1987. At the time, it was viewed as a premium destination worth taking a date to, Rein said. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut arrived in 1990.

“McDonald’s and KFC were a beacon of health and hygiene compared to what you had in the rest of the market,” Rein said.

China is now KFC’s largest market by far. The Kentucky-born fried chicken chain counts about 13,000 restaurants in China, compared with around 3,750 in the U.S. American brands see room for further growth.

Much of China’s population lives in the smaller, inland cities where brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks are rolling out stores, said Sory Park, a project manager at China-focused market research and strategy firm Daxue Consulting.

That doesn’t make China a cakewalk for foreign restaurant companies. Most American chains now rely on Chinese partners to find locations and share the financial risk. Earlier this year, a Chinese investment firm acquired a 60% stake in Starbucks’ China operation after several years of falling store traffic.

American chains trade on their brand names and signature products, but many tailor their menus to appeal to Chinese customers. KFC restaurants in China, for example, serve french fries and Original Recipe chicken alongside custardy egg tarts and congee, a savory rice porridge.

“They need to operate like a Chinese company but deliver American menus that incorporate Chinese values, eating habits, and tastes,” Park said.

Chinese fast-food chains seek new opportunities in the US

Mixue, one of the world’s largest fast-food chains with more than 53,000 locations, opened its first three U.S. stores in December. Mirroring the Shanghai crowd outside Church’s Texas Chicken, New York customers waited in the cold to sample soft-serve ice cream, fruit teas and milk tea with toppings like coconut jelly and taro balls at a store in Herald Square.

Mixue has announced at least two dozen more planned locations across four states. At least nine other mainland Chinese chains have made their U.S. debuts since 2023, all but one specializing primarily in drinks and snacks. They include Heytea, with 40 U.S. locations, and Luckin Coffee, which overtook Starbucks as China’s biggest coffee brand and has 20 stores in New York.

Wallace, a chain founded in 2000, grew to more than 20,000 restaurants by selling American-style chicken and hamburgers in China. In California, where the second U.S. Wallace opened last month, the company tweaked its chicken sandwich recipe to appeal to American diners.

Before entering the U.S., many major Chinese food-and-beverage chains expanded in Southeast Asia. A real estate slump and weak consumer spending made growth harder to find at home. The average life span of China’s 16 million restaurants and chains was expected to fall to 15 months last year, according to a U.S. government report.

The American restaurant industry is considerably smaller, with 1 million locations, according to the National Restaurant Association. Jiang, of ApertureChina, sees another advantage for Chinese brands: a social media trend called “Chinamaxxing,” in which Westerners adopt Chinese lifestyle habits or wellness practices.

Not every brand makes its origins clear. Wallace’s U.S. website and social media pages do not mention the brand’s Chinese ownership or headquarters in southeastern China’s Fujian province. The company didn’t respond to an email from The Associated Press.

The U.S. carries both potential rewards and risks for Chinese chains

American and Chinese chains alike have an appetite for opportunities across the Pacific. But Chinese brands remain largely unproven stateside. Even chains with thousands of locations elsewhere are testing whether novelty can translate into loyalty.

The U.S. is too lucrative a market to ignore, said Aaron Allen, founder of restaurant consulting firm Aaron Allen and Associates. It accounts for one-third of global restaurant revenue despite having only around 4% of the world’s population, he said.

“The grass is always greener somewhere else in the world,” Allen said.

While American brands can carry a premium image in China, many Chinese brands compete heavily on price. At a Mixue in Hollywood this week, a medium matcha latte cost $6.83; a nearby Starbucks sold the same drink for almost $1 more. Wallace sells three full-size chicken sandwiches for $10.

“The Chinese can build stuff cheaper and faster. Why would that not apply to food?” Allen said.

But Allen said Chinese brands could face customer backlash or higher tariffs if they undercut U.S. rivals with low-cost Chinese imports. Like other Chinese companies, restaurant brands also could face U.S. scrutiny over their collection and use of customer data, he said.

Luckin Coffee co-founder and CEO Jinyi Guo told investors in February that the U.S. “represents one of our important long-term opportunities” and the company was proceeding “with great patience and discipline.”

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Quinten Martinez, pumping gas under a hot South Texas sun, remembers a time when fueling up didn’t require difficult decisions.

“Is it going to be groceries this week?” asked the 28-year-old Amazon delivery driver as he watched the numbers tick higher. “Is it gonna be getting gas in our tank to go to work?”

He shook his head when asked about President Donald Trump’s assertion last week that higher gas prices are a small price to pay for the war with Iran.

“I don’t feel like it’s a good trade-off,” Martinez said. “I don’t feel like this is good for anyone.”

Voters across the country, and across the political spectrum, tend to agree.

Interviews with voters in several states, along with a fresh round of national polling, reveal an overwhelming sense of frustration that skyrocketing gas prices — a direct result of Trump’s war — are creating serious and sustained financial hardships for America’s working class.

The acute concerns are adding to a bad political environment that may be worsening for Trump and his Republican Party as early voting gets underway in the November midterm elections.

Historically, the party holding the White House has suffered major losses in midterms. Today, seven weeks before Election Day, Republican candidates at all levels are struggling with the additional burden of Trump’s weak approval ratings, an unpopular foreign conflict and an affordability crisis that Trump and his congressional allies had promised to fix.

But when Trump campaigned in North Carolina on Wednesday, he played down the impact of surging gas prices.

“You have a little higher. It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” Trump said of the war, which he describes as critical to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. “Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more.”

‘Gas prices matter,’ Republican strategist says

Despite what Trump says, there are few things that may matter more this election year than the price of a gallon of gasoline, according to political operatives in both parties.

Gas prices are moving sharply in the wrong direction at a time of year when drivers typically get some relief. The national average for a gallon of gas reached $4.48 on Friday, according to AAA, up roughly 17 cents over the last week, 40 cents in a month and $1.27 from a year ago.

“Gas prices matter because they’re one of the few economic indicators voters experience and see in real time,” said veteran Republican strategist Chris Wilson. “The price is literally staring them in the face several times a week. So I wouldn’t minimize the frustration we’re seeing, particularly among working- and middle-class voters.”

Interviews with voters this week found bipartisan frustration and disappointment.

Democrats and independents were especially motivated to punish Republicans at the ballot box for their economic hardship, while some of Trump’s working-class supporters pledged to support Republicans this fall, even if they weren’t happy with the president’s leadership on the economy.

Some Republicans say they’re disappointed

Dan Lloyd, who voted for Trump, lamented the president’s leadership as the 63-year-old carpenter paid $4.39 a gallon to fill up his pickup truck in Mesa, Arizona.

“He hurt himself stepping into this,” Lloyd said of Trump. “Where’s all this oil from Venezuela? I thought we were flush with gas and everything, but no. The American people eat it every time, whether it’s interest rates, food, gasoline.”

Still, he expects to vote Republican in the midterms.

“I think the Democratic Party has lost its way,” Lloyd said. “I just feel like the whole system’s on the verge of collapse.”

In sweltering Edinburg, Texas, 52-year-old Kristin Jimenez shrugged off the rising price of gas after filling up her Mercedes.

“We’ve paid the same price under Republican presidents, we’ve paid this price under Democrat presidents,” said Jimenez, a mother who runs a small business. She plans to vote for a Republican in because they’re the “lesser of two evils.”

She said gas prices aren’t part of her calculation.

“We don’t mind paying $8 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but we have a problem paying four bucks at the pump?” she said. “Make it make sense.”

More than 1,500 miles to the north in central Michigan, 35-year-old Garth Johnson is trying to make ends meet running a deep-cleaning business with several gas-powered vehicles and one machine fueled by diesel, which was $6.79 a gallon as he filled up his SUV.

Johnson voted for Trump, but doesn’t know what he’s going to do in November. Johnson doesn’t feel qualified to second-guess the president’s evaluation of the war, but he’s feeling financial pressure in his own life.

“I like a lot of the things he’s done,” Johnson said, but added “I’m a little guy and I’ve got to live my life.”

Other voters are not so forgiving

Midterm voting was already underway on Friday in Virginia, where 60-year-old engineer Alan Johnson said Trump seems to have “no empathy” for Americans who are struggling financially.

“With the gas prices being what they are and continuing to grow, we’ve got to do something. Hopefully the Democrats can get into office and turn the ship around,” said Johnson, who cast ballots in the morning for Democrats for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, teacher Brittney Bivins sees surging gas prices as evidence that Trump and his Republican Party aren’t dealing with the issues that matter most to people like her.

“He really doesn’t care about everyday people,” the 45-year-old said. “He can afford the gas, but most of us can’t. So it feels like he’s not even connected to his own people.”

Bivins, who described herself as an independent, said she’s eager to support Democrats this fall — especially the party’s emerging democratic socialist wing.

At a gas station in Lansing, Michigan, Rina Risper spent $50 on 8 gallons of premium gas.

“When I rolled up I was in shock, actually, and said, well, maybe I should drink water instead of having that $4.99 bottle of whatever it was I was gonna get,” Risper said. She thinks Trump’s tariffs will make affordability even worse.

“We’re not in Miami. We’re in Lansing, Michigan,” she said. “It’s really going to impact our people.”

Most voters think Trump’s administration has made economy worse, poll shows

Nationwide, more than three times as many voters say they are falling behind financially as getting ahead, according to a Fox News survey released Wednesday. By a 15 percentage point margin, Democrats are considered the party that would better handle inflation and prices at a time when the cost of living and the economy are voters’ top concerns.

The Fox poll found that 61% of voters say gas prices are a major problem for their household, compared with 48% two years ago, while 52% say the same for healthcare costs, compared with 44% in 2024. Majorities also view housing costs and grocery prices as major problems, although neither has increased.

Overall, nearly two-thirds of voters (63%) say the administration has made the economy worse, compared with 52% in September 2025, including one-quarter of Republicans. Only 46% of Republicans say the administration has improved the economy, while about one-quarter don’t see an impact.

Back in rural South Texas, an area where Trump’s GOP made gains in recent elections, Martinez, the Amazon delivery driver, could not contain his frustration.

Trump “likes to tout that we are the best economy in the world,” said Martinez, but in more rural towns, “you don’t see any of the winning, you don’t see any of the ups that he’s talking about.”

“You just see struggles for day to day life,” he said.

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When President Donald Trump first ran for office, he called out China as a menace to the U.S. economy, saying it had gutted America’s factories and eroded the middle class.

That tough talk helped Trump get to the White House a decade ago, but since then, he increasingly speaks in glowing terms about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the geopolitical rival Trump will fete on Thursday with a state dinner.

“He’s a great gentleman; we get along great,” Trump said this month. “We have a very good trading relationship and, you know, they’re a competitor and all of that, but we have a very good relationship with President Xi.”

On issue after issue, the Republican president has given Xi a pass.

Trump shrugged off reports that China had provided Iran with satellite imagery, saying, “I think he’s behaved reasonably well.” After accusing Beijing of accessing U.S. voter files back in 2020, Trump indicated he was hesitant to retaliate: “I think China is maybe a little bit different today than it was then.”

Trump’s magnanimity comes as China and the United States are in a contest for global leadership, with some of America’s traditional allies rethinking their strategies. China has expanded its dominance in manufacturing and pushed into new technologies such as artificial intelligence and electric vehicles that create risks for the economies of the U.S., Germany, Italy, France, South Korea and Japan, among others.

Trump tried to confront China with tariffs, but that backfired

Unable to change Chinese behavior, Trump has resorted to hospitality.

He traveled to Beijing in May, and the two leaders could meet again two more times this year at international summits. Trump has readied a helipad on the White House South Lawn before Xi’s arrival and has lamented that his ballroom will not be ready to host the Chinese leader.

Trump has insisted that the U.S. is comfortably ahead of China, but his efforts last year to confront China with a mounting set of tariffsbackfired. China holds a relative monopoly on the rare earths used in electronics and deployed that to help force a trade armistice with Trump.

“Trump has dramatically shifted his approach to China because his initial attempt to use super-high tariffs and export restrictions was unsuccessful,” said Michael Kovrig, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group. “Xi and Trump got into a contest of leverage, and Xi came out on top.”

Meanwhile, Trump has largely undermined the economic and national security alliances that could previously apply pressure on China, said Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who was detained by China during Trump’s first term.

Trump has mocked French President Emmanuel Macron in speeches. He has run hot and cold on NATO after several of its members did not fully support his choice to start a war with Iran. Trump has launched a potentially brutal trade fight with Canada, a longtime ally he has trolled as becoming the 51st American state.

“He’s executing Xi’s wedge tactics for him, and along the way, helping Xi to tell a story about China as the more stable and responsible power,” Kovrig said. “It’s led to a wave of Western leaders visiting Beijing and seeking to stabilize and improve their relations with Xi so they can focus more on dealing with problems Trump is causing them.”

Trump’s relationship with Xi has led to some symbolic wins

Trump can point to some symbolic wins from having a pleasant relationship with Xi.

While Xi met three times on the sidelines of international summits with Democratic President Joe Biden, Trump will have achieved a pair of reciprocal state visits in a sign that the leaders of the world’s two largest economies feel comfortable speaking to each other.

The trade imbalance with China in goods has declined relative to the same period in 2025, according to Census Bureau figures, though the administration has noted that China appears to be routing more goods through other nations such as Vietnam to minimize the tariffs.

Trump’s continued tariffs on China have not curbed its manufacturing sector. China has found new markets and boxed out competition from other industrialized countries. China is exporting more of its goods to the rest of the world with a $1.2 trillion global trade surplus last year as its low-priced EVs undercut the auto sectors in Germany, Japan and South Korea.

It’s unclear whether Thursday’s visit will have a policy ‘deliverable’

Both China and the U.S. are using their trade truce to retrench. China is building up its military and AI capabilities despite limited access to advanced computer chips. The Trump administration has pursued partnerships to develop rare earths.

Trump is also banking on America going full throttle on AI development despite voter resistance to data centers and recent alarming safety warnings from the leading AI companies. He said this week on social media that anyone slowing down AI development was helping China because the technology will be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.”

But China has also been accused of having its AI companies train on U.S. models, a problem for Trump and the economy if AI is the key to global dominance.

Still, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters at the White House last week that it’s “unfair to just label China as a country” as being a “bad actor” on AI.

Asked if Trump would bring up the issue with Xi, Blanche said, “Those two presidents have a great relationship. … They get along, they make deals together.”

Usually, state visits come with “deliverables” on policy or trade. It’s not yet clear what Thursday’s visit will bring, and it’s possible that the main deliverable will be the relationship itself, rather than clear and measurable goals, said Evan Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University.

That means the U.S. might not be positioning itself to compete against China as it should be, said Medeiros, a former National Security Council director on China for the Obama White House.

“We have this idiosyncratic president who believes in personal relationships and just wants to get along with Xi Jinping for the optics of getting along with him,” Medeiros said. “The problem is that this idiosyncratic approach is coming at precisely the time when we really need to be amping up all dimensions of our competition.”

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President Donald Trump said Sunday that the massive arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery would become a “top grade military complex” able to host drones and snipers while storing ammunition.

It is one more example of how Trump is insisting that his initiatives to beautify the White House and the city are also serving a defensive purpose. Trump has been calling the new White House ballroom a “military complex” and arguing it is necessary for national security purposes.

The Pentagon said it had no information beyond the president’s statement.

Trump’s announcement also comes as the arch, like his other projects, faces legal challenges. Though the arch has received early approval from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were all tapped by Trump, a group of three veterans and an architectural historian sued, saying the project needs to be approved by Congress.

The Republican president said in a social media post that he had agreed, at the “strong request” of the military, to convert the planned 250-foot-tall (76-meter) memorial arch “into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

The arch is proposed for a circle adjacent to the Memorial Bridge, which is a heavy traffic area as one of a handful of connecting bridges between the nation’s capital and northern Virginia.

The project is one of several projects that the Republican president is pursuing to leave his lasting imprint on Washington. Among the others are the white House ballroom, renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths.

The groundbreaking for the arch was to have happened sometime this month. The project has not yet received final approval from the National Capital Area Planning Commission, which greenlit the site and preliminary plans at its July meeting. The commission is expected to take up the matter again this fall.

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President Donald Trump has renewed his attacks on the Federal Reserve after it hiked its benchmark interest rate Wednesday, but the Fed matters less than broader economic trends when it comes to longer-term borrowing costs, economists say.

The economy is growing steadily despite being hit with repeated shocks — and may even be accelerating — while inflation remains stubbornly high. And big tech firms are borrowing huge amounts of cash to plow into data center construction while the federal government is still running large yearly budget deficits. All these trends point to higher interest rates regardless of what the Fed does, analysts say.

As a result, the low interest-rate, low-inflation world that lasted for nearly 15 years after the Great Recession is over and a higher-priced, higher-rate world is taking its place. Mortgage rates fell into the 3% range in the 2010s and even lower during COVID-19, but such deals are long gone. The average 30-year mortgage rate reached 6.95% last week, the highest in more than a year and a half.

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, a tax consulting firm, said that a big reason for the change is a shift from the pre-pandemic economy in which consumer and business demand was weak, to the current economy in which healthy consumer and business spending is colliding with supply shocks and bottlenecks. In addition to higher oil and gas prices because of the Iran war, the AI buildout has struggled with an insufficient supply of computer chips, electronic equipment, and workers to put it all together.

“We’ve undergone a structural transformation of the economy,” Brusuelas said. “The regime change in inflation and interest rates is the outcome.”

Companies and government are competing for bonds

The shift, in many ways, returns the economy to where it was before the financial crisis in December 2007 that lasted through June 2009.

But even after the downturn ended, consumer and business spending remained weak. Millions of Americans in the 2010s focused on paying down outsized mortgages and credit card debt instead. Businesses saw few investment opportunities, and many big tech firms such as Alphabet’s Google and Meta’s Facebook piled up cash.

Now those companies are using those stockpiles to build out AI data centers, and are borrowing even more money to do so. And American consumers — despite surveys finding they are pessimistic about the economy — are still spending at a healthy pace. A recent report showing that retail sales picked up last month led economists at Bank of America to forecast growth will reach a healthy 3% at an annual rate in the July-September quarter.

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh highlighted the shift in a speech at the central bank’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last month.

After 2008, “it was a widely held view that an excess of capital would sit on the sidelines for a long, long time, because there just wouldn’t be enough compelling investment opportunities,” Warsh said. “All the good stuff had been invented. So growth would be low and slow.

“Well, times sure have changed,” he continued. “Ever-expanding pools of capital are pouring into AI-related infrastructure of all sorts.”

The additional spending and investment has contributed to higher longer-term interest rates on government bonds that are competing for lenders. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond topped 5% this year for the first time since 2023, even before the Fed raised its benchmark short-term rate Wednesday.

At the same time, political polling and consumer sentiment surveys continue to find that many Americans are struggling to keep up with rising prices, and affordability remains a top concern heading into the midterm elections. Even as the economy expands, inflation has outpaced the annual growth in average wages for the past five months.

Brusuelas said the U.S. economy’s expansion is “imbalanced” with growth “entirely dependent” on the AI buildout and strong spending by wealthier consumers, who have benefited from rising stock prices driven by hopes that AI will lift profits.

Higher inflation leads to higher rates

After the Fed lifted its rate to 3.9% Wednesday, Trump said on Truth Social that U.S. rates should be 1% instead.

Yet many of Trump’s policies have contributed to higher borrowing costs, in particular the Iran war that has driven up gas prices. When inflation persists, investors demand higher interest rates on longer-term Treasury bonds, such as the 10-year, which strongly influences mortgage rates.

“The president can say he wants interest rates lower all he wants, and yet he continues to push the button on all the policies that raise rates,” said Elizabeth Pancotti, vice president of policy, advocacy and research at the progressive Groundwork Collaborative.

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Next week, more than 100,000 people will descend on New York City for more than 1,000 events during Climate Week. By one measure, that extraordinary turnout is a sign of success. By another, it raises an uncomfortable question: after years of summits, pledges and packed conference rooms, why does the climate crisis keep getting worse?

The last 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record. In 2024, the world experienced its first calendar year more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, and scientists expect the longer-term average to cross that threshold within the next decade. Just last month, a catastrophic glacier collapse and flood in Nepal killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands missing, with scientists concluding that climate change made the conditions behind the disaster more likely. In Europe, at least 35,000 more people died because of excess heat this past summer, driven by our quickly warming climate.

Against that backdrop, it is easy to look at another Climate Week and ask whether all this convening has failed.

But that misses an important counterfactual: where would the world be today without a decade of governments, companies, investors and others pushing climate action forward? When the Paris agreement was adopted in 2015, the world was headed toward roughly 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Today, national policies already in place put the world on a roughly 2.8-degree path. Full implementation of countries’ existing climate pledges would lower that further, to about 2.3 to 2.5 degrees. That is still dangerously far from where we need to be. But it is also meaningful progress from where we were a decade ago.

If we’re going to talk about failure, let’s be clear-eyed about where we’ve fallen short. Climate action has produced tangible results, but it hasn’t moved nearly fast enough. One area that has not received the attention and financing needed is the preservation of nature.

There is no path to achieving climate goals that does not run through nature. Forests, wetlands and mangroves store carbon at scale, buffer storm surge, and stabilize the soils and waters that economies depend on. The world’s oceans alone absorb around 30% of all climate emissions each year. Nature is climate infrastructure. It is also the least-funded part of the system.

As a veteran of past Climate Weeks, I expect to hear a familiar refrain from participants: we need more money for conservation and climate action. But this year, a harder reality deserves equal attention: what do we do as public money for climate and nature is drying up?

Government funding everywhere is under growing pressure, and nowhere is that dependence on public funds greater than investments in nature. Public budgets have supplied roughly 80% of nature finance since 2010. Private investment is growing—more than $14 billion flowed into nature in 2025—but remains nowhere close to the scale required. Global climate, biodiversity and land conservation goals require around $570 billion in annual investment in nature by 2030.  

Simply passing the hat around again is not going to close that gap. 

Public finance remains indispensable, particularly for communities and projects that cannot or should not generate commercial returns. But in an era of scarcity, we need every public dollar to work harder for us. The strongest finance models will make limited public dollars multiply, generate returns that can be reinvested and reward investments that prevent losses before they hit balance sheets. Nature is where those models are most needed, and where several are already being tested. 

Leverage is key. Too often, public money goes toward paying for one project, one time. A stronger model uses limited public capital to absorb risks that commercial investors cannot comfortably bear, prepare projects for investment or otherwise improve their risk-return profile. Each public dollar can then pull additional private dollars into the deal. 

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a global fund for forest conservation launched at COP30 last year, is an innovative way to leverage public finance for nature. Its structure aims to combine $25 billion in government sponsor capital with up to $100 billion from institutional investors. Government capital will take more of the risk, helping backstop bonds sold to pension funds and other large institutional investors. Those investors receive a conventional financial return, while the financing supports payments to tropical forest countries and Indigenous Peoples and local communities. At full scale, one public dollar could mobilize roughly four private dollars to keep tropical forests standing. 

Durability matters, too. Traditional grants eventually run out. Many major conservation and climate funds periodically return to governments for replenishment, exposing long-term investments to short-term fiscal and political cycles.  

The TFFF addresses this by borrowing from the university endowment model: invest the capital, spend part of the returns and preserve the fund so it can keep generating income. Its capital is invested, with returns funding payments to tropical forest countries and a portion retained to compound. Over time, those retained earnings are intended to grow enough to repay government sponsors with interest while leaving a functioning fund behind. That kind of structure is better suited to climate and conservation challenges that will outlast any single budget cycle.

Insurance offers another opportunity. Natural catastrophes caused an estimated $220 billion in global economic damages in 2025. Roughly half of losses from natural hazards worldwide are uninsured. In many emerging economies, 80% to 90% of catastrophic losses have no insurance coverage at all. Meanwhile, investments in adaptation and resilience can yield as much as $10 in benefits and avoided costs for every dollar spent.  

That creates an opportunity to bring insurers into resilience investment before disaster strikes. Insurers already have a direct financial stake in lower losses and much of what lowers those losses is natural. Two stretches of coastline hit by the same storm do not generate the same claims if one still has natural protections such as mangroves. Effective resilience measures can protect property, reduce expected claims and help preserve insurability.

The insurance industry should become a partner in prevention by helping quantify the financial value of reduced risk, incorporating verified resilience measures into underwriting and pricing, and supporting investments that lower future losses. Where resilience produces measurable savings, those savings can help create an economic return for the parties that financed it. 

Leverage, durability, insurance—these are the watchwords I hope to hear in conversations throughout Climate Week. The measure of the week should not be how many people show up or how many panels fill conference rooms. It should be whether the people who control capital leave with better ways to turn commitments into investment and investment into measurable results.

Different projects will need different structures, and some investments will always depend on public funding. But wherever credible revenue, savings or other financial value exists, scarce public dollars should help bring much larger pools of private capital to the table.

Climate Week has helped build a global constituency for action. To turn more of that momentum into implementation, we must confront our financial reality and get creative about how we use the money that remains. Scarcity should force us to spend smarter, not think smaller.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Millennials and Gen Xers are facing down one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history—with some $124 trillion expected to change hands by 2048. But as wealth inequities simultaneously reach new extremes, the transfer has amplified questions about whether wealthy families are moving fast in their promises of impactful giving.

According to a report from the Milken Institute about the shifting dynamics of philanthropy, the tension is setting the stage for a “reckoning” in the sector as younger generations gain more influence over family checkbooks.

“Wealth inequalities have never been greater than they are right now, and we have this sharper eye on the wealthy,” said Melissa Stevens, the executive vice president of Milken Institute Strategic Philanthropy and report’s coauthor. “It has raised the stakes.”

For decades, philanthropy has centered on legacy-building and long-term giving, and some of the world’s wealthiest families have already committed to giving away much of their fortunes through initiatives like the Giving Pledge, launched by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates in 2010. But as scrutiny over ultra wealth has intensified, many younger heirs have realized their family commitments haven’t always moved fast enough.

Katherine Lorenz, leader of the Giving Pledge’s Next Gen group—a network of heirs and family members involved in shaping philanthropic strategy—said she’s already seeing that shift take hold. Rather than waiting decades for wealth to be distributed, many children and grandchildren of wealthy families are urging older generations to move faster, take more risks, and place more trust in the communities they hope to help. 

“I see more younger generation folks pushing on their parents to give more,” Lorenz told Fortune. “[They’re saying], ‘You made enough money, mom and dad. It’s time to give it away and to give it away faster.’”

She added, “Many of them are ready to deploy the capital faster. Sometimes the barrier is the older generation.”

Younger heirs are rewriting the rules of philanthropy

Wealth among the top 1% has been on a historic rise over the last few years. According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth jumped by more than 16% in 2025 alone, to a record high of $18.3 trillion. And it has only fueled increasing apoplectic feelings—especially among young people.

Nearly one-third of adults ages 18 to 29 say they believe it is morally wrong to be “extremely rich,” according to a 2026 Pew survey, compared with just 10% of adults ages 65 and older. While some of that divide may reflect the economic realities facing younger Americans—from soaring housing costs to student debt and the rising cost of everyday necessities—it has also shaped how many heirs view their responsibility to use wealth more urgently—and more strategically.

“They’re not thinking necessarily of themselves as philanthropists,” Stevens said. “They’re thinking of themselves as their angel investors, impact investors, change makers, [and] advocates.”

Instead of simply writing checks to grant award winners, the younger generation is increasingly focused on funding systemic change through impact investing, advocacy, and venture-style philanthropy, Stevens said. Many are prioritizing causes such as climate change, racial justice, and gender equity over other generations’ broader focus on topics like health and education.

Lorenz also said there’s an increased interest in addressing the systems that have caused harm—rather than just putting “Band-Aids on a gaping wound.” She used housing issues as an example. While it’s important to worry about whether or not you can help people avoid sleeping on the street tonight, it’s just as important to ask questions like, “Why do we have so many unhoused people? What is happening, and how do we get fewer people in this situation?”

One of the most prominent examples of the shifting philanthropic dynamics has been MacKenzie Scott. The 56-year-old ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has distributed some $26 billion over the last six years, largely in unrestricted gifts, allowing recipients—such as HBCUs, DEI groups, and disaster relief organizations—to determine how the money can best be used.

“She is just an exemplar of trust-based philanthropy,” Stevens said. “[It’s] really leaning into that partnership with community in terms of learning from, listening to, and creating with those communities, rather than coming in with some predetermined solution.”

Women, in particular, are expected to play an increasingly influential role in the philanthropic transformation. By 2048, they are projected to inherit roughly $47 trillion—about 56% of all inherited wealth globally. Stevens expects more will likely follow the example of Scott and work together with communities to bring solutions-based impact with their giving.

From oil tycoon family to nearly $1 billion in philanthropy 

Lorenz understands the rising tension personally, growing up in an ultrahigh-net-worth family:  Her grandfather, George Mitchell, was an oil and real estate tycoon. His company Mitchell Energy & Development was No. 811 on the Fortune 1000 list in 2001, and that same year, it was purchased by Devon Energy for $3.1 billion.

From an early age, Lorenz was drawn to the question of how to put wealth to use. After graduating from North Carolina’s Davidson College in 2001, she spent time in Nicaragua and then Oaxaca, Mexico, where she stayed for about six years and started a nonprofit serving rural Indigenous communities. But it was abroad, she said, that she confronted a central paradox of global philanthropy: the assumption that wealth and expertise naturally translate into solutions.

“You think you have the answer, and you come into communities and realize actually they have more answers than you have,” Lorenz, who is now in her late 40s, said. “You learn more from them than they learn from you. I had many years of that eye-opening [experience]—thinking I’m coming to help, but really I’m not adding much at all.”

By age 25, she began working at her family’s foundation, the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, where she began applying those lessons—simplifying grantmaking processes and shifting more decision-making power toward local communities. 

After her grandfather signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, Lorenz took the helm of the foundation the following year. Then, in 2013, he died, leaving behind 10 children, 27 grandchildren, and a philanthropic legacy that had become much more complicated to steward.

“It doesn’t matter how much you professionalize, how many policies you put in place, how many structures are there,” Lorenz said. “In the end, I would just say family dynamics kind of trump all, in both good ways and bad ways.”

In total, through the foundation’s nearly five decades, it has given away nearly $1 billion to causes mostly around sustainability—including land, water, and energy—as well as education. For Lorenz, the work is just as much about preserving her grandfather’s legacy as accelerating it—a mindset, she hopes, more heirs continue to share.

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on June 27, 2026.

More on philanthropy

• Teachers in one of San Francisco’s richest suburbs are so underpaid that a philanthropist just gave each of them $9,161
• Dolly Parton once gave $1 million to help develop the Moderna COVID vaccine at Vanderbilt: ‘I’m kind of addicted to the feeling of giving’
• Billionaire Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says most charities are ‘net negative’—and that he has no plans to make his own foundation

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Business leaders are split on how AI will transform the way people work. Some, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, predict a white-collar jobs armageddon, while others like Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis believe the tech will usher in a “golden era” of abundance. 

However, as more chatbots and automated assistants take over the duties of human roles, there’s a growing cohort of executives who see shorter workweeks on the horizon—and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan even envisioned staffers only clocking in a few days a week. 

“I feel like if AI can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week?” Yuan told The New York Times in a 2025 interview. “Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think this ultimately frees up everyone’s time.”

It’s music to the ears of Americans stuck in corporate hustle culture, enviously watching their European peers trial four-day workweeks with major success. And when U.S. performance coaching company Exos experimented with schedules one workday shorter, it proved to be good for business; employee burnout was cut in half, and productivity soared by 24%. And CEOs agree shorter workweeks born from these automation gains will be terrific for human workers—even if it means fewer of them have jobs in general. 

Other CEOs including Gates, Huang, and Dimon see a shorter workweek ahead

AI tools can be immensely useful for staffers, cutting out everything from menial tasks like emailing to more tedious jobs like coding. Tech leaders are seeing the gains from AI firsthand, and they’re promoting the possibility that employees will no longer have to clock in five days a week. 

Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Gates has predicted that AI’s current pace of innovation will remove the need for humans for “most things” in the next 10 years. When people are no longer needed, those who are left on staff won’t have to swipe in daily. 

“What will jobs be like? Should we just work like 2 or 3 days a week?” Gates told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show last year. “If you zoom out, the purpose of life is not just to do jobs.”

Nvidia CEO Huang is also on board with the idea of fewer workdays—but has a catch. The leader of the $5.3 trillion GPU company said we’re just “at the beginning of the AI revolution,” and if industries continue to adopt artificial intelligence at the current rapid rate, it could “probably” bring about a four-day workweek. However, that work may only be crammed into a condensed schedule, as Huang predicts that we’re going to be “busier in the future than now.”

Even the financial industry—known for putting its workers through 80-hour workweeks—may finally get some relief from AI automation. JPMorgan Chase CEO Dimon predicted years ago the technology may bring about better work-life balance, although it would “of course” replace some jobs. 

“Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology,” Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg TV back in 2023. “And literally they’ll probably be working 3 and a half days a week.”

Zoom CEO admits that some jobs will be erased

While workers globally will finally have the opportunity to clock in fewer days per week, not everyone will be enjoying the shortened schedules. Leaders are open to the fact that there will be a massive upheaval in the jobs market, with some roles inevitably automated in the shift. Zoom’s CEO doesn’t shy away from the reality that some humans will be fired—but it’s just another adjustment, just like the industrial revolution and birth of the internet. 

“Whenever there’s a technology paradigm shift, some job opportunities are gone, but it will create some new opportunities,” Yuan admitted in the interview. “For some jobs, like entry-level engineers, we can use A.I. to write code. However, you still need to manage that code. You also create a lot of digital agents, and you need someone to manage those agents.”

Other chief executives like Ford CEO Jim Farley and Klarna leader Sebastian Siemiatkowski agree some roles will be erased in the change—but some, like Huang, think it could actually bolster employment. Instead of humans being replaced by AI, the chip leader claimed that people’s roles will be taken over by others who can actually use the advanced tech. 

“Over the course of the last 300 years, 100 years, 60 years, even, in the era of computers, not only did productivity go up, employment also went up,” Huang told CNN last year. “Now the reason for that is if we have an abundance of ideas, ways that we could build a better future, if we were more productive, we could realize that better.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on September 15, 2025.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has said his children will inherit “less than 1%” of his wealth when he eventually passes away. But even while their parents are alive, the Gates children won’t be coasting off the family fortune—and Melinda French Gates is making sure of it, starting with saying no to funding her daughter’s new startup.

Melinda French Gates may be one of the wealthiest women in the world, with an estimated $34.5 billion net worth, but you won’t catch her writing checks for her daughter’s new startup.

In fact, the billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of Bill Gates explained last year at the Power of Women’s Sports Summit presented by E.l.f. Beauty that she watched her daughter fundraise from the sidelines, on purpose.

“She got capitalized not because of my contacts, not because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it,” she said.

Her reasoning? If this is a “real business,” she said, then others need to be willing to back it. And more important, her daughter should learn how to navigate the sting of rejection if it doesn’t get that funding. “That’s what I told her,” French Gates added. “She’s growing from this.”

It’s a stance that echoes her and Bill Gates’ long-standing approach to wealth. The Microsoft cofounder previously revealed their children would inherit “less than 1%” of his fortune when he eventually passes away—insisting they make their own way in the world.

And while the 62-year-old mother didn’t reveal which daughter she was referring to, their youngest, Phoebe, launched a fashion-tech startup, Phia, with her Stanford roommate, Sophia Kianni. The platform compares clothing prices from over 40,000 sites to help users find the best deals. Back in April 2025, the then 22-year-old “nepo baby” revealed that her parents wouldn’t let her drop out of the prestigious university to launch a startup, like her dad did. It’s garnered attention recently for taking credit for sales it didn’t drive.

The importance of failing for female founders

For French Gates, insisting her daughter forge her own fundraising path isn’t just about tough love or even self-sufficiency—it’s about helping her develop grit and the ability to weather rejection in an unequal system.

After all, the philanthropist said, it’s the one common thread connecting the successful women who appear on her YouTube series, Moments That Make Us.  

“I saw that going through something difficult changed all of them, and that they had to learn to find resilience somewhere,” she said. “And in finding that resilience, they found themselves.”

Still today, French Gates—who has spent more than two decades advocating for women’s empowerment—says female founders have to develop sharper elbows than their male counterparts if they want to survive in the startup world. 

“It is very, very hard to get your business funded if you’re a woman,” she said. “And so you do have to learn a bit how to have the courage to play the game and to stick with it.” 

Tennis legend Billie Jean King, who was onstage alongside her, agreed—and praised the growth that comes from setbacks: “To your point, like your daughter has figured out how to get this first business started—that’s amazing. I don’t think it’ll ever fail—she’ll get feedback from every situation.”

In fact, King said, she’s banned the word “failure” altogether from her lingo—and discourages those working around her from using it too. “When people start thinking about failure, it’s a very negative feeling,” she exclusively told Fortune. “Turn it inside out by asking yourself, ‘What’s the feedback I’m getting from this?’”

With just 2.3% of global venture capital going to female founding teams last year, they’re not wrong: The few female founders who do finally break through will have turned failure into fuel.

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on July 8, 2025.

Read more career advice from Fortune’s Orianna Rosa Royle:

• For every 10 jobs, there are 2,539 applicants. A top hiring platform’s CEO has a solution to the job hunt hell: ‘Don’t just apply to OpenAI’
• Arianna Huffington says even high-flying CEOs are unhappy and feel stuck in their multimillion-dollar jobs: ‘It’s a trap’
• This ex-Google CMO quit at 28 years old with a seven-figure equity package and says climbing the ladder was easy: ‘I just disregarded all the rules’
• Gen Z wants to be ‘tradwives.’ New data reveals the exact salary your spouse needs to earn—and in most states it’s under $100K
• Gen Z watched millennials burn out at their desk—now 1 in 4 are ditching office jobs for trade jobs

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

After years of captivating users with endless swipes, dating apps are now trying to get people to put their phones down and find connection in the real world.

Tinder, the pioneer of the dating swipe, is now one of the companies leading this expansion of IRL events. In March, the company introduced an Events feature in its app and hosted a pilot event for users in Los Angeles.

Since then, the feature has started to catch on, especially with younger people, said Tinder chief product officer Mark Kantor. The company since March has seen 71% of its Gen Z users in L.A. visit the Events feature on its app. Meanwhile, only 63% of users 25 and older engaged with it. 

The company has now expanded the feature to 20 cities, mostly in the U.S. but also in Europe. The idea, Kantor told Fortune via email, is to shed the label of “dating event” and instead allow users to meet potential matches while doing something they already love like pickleball, trivia, or sauna and cold plunge sessions.

The company has partnered with several companies to facilitate these kinds of activities including City Pickle, Joust, and Othership.

“The activity gives people a natural starting point, and the shared experience takes some of the pressure out of meeting someone new,” he said.

Courtesy of Tinder

Another established dating app company, Bumble, said it is also helping extend its reach beyond swipes and messages with events and activations. This year, the company has taken over bars across New York for singles mixers, hosted a rooftop party in Nashville, and held an event with Barstool Sports’ Tommy Smokes in Boston.

“IRL has been part of Bumble’s DNA from the start. We know that one of the biggest points of friction in dating today is the gap between connecting online and actually meeting in person, and we’re focused on helping close that gap,” a Bumble spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. 

Outside of dating apps, Gen Z and other young people have increasingly turned to in-person activities like run clubs for a sense of community, and also for romantic connection. According to Strava, participation in run clubs grew 59% over the past two years. At the same time, Gen Z is drinking less alcohol at bars and clubs, to the dismay of the night life industry.

Dating app companies’ increasing push for real-world events comes as user numbers have fallen. 

Tinder’s daily active users were down 4% year over year in the second quarter, which was a slight improvement compared to past quarters. Paying Tinder users fell to 8.5 million as of the second quarter, an 11.5% drop compared to the same period two years earlier.

Bumble has experienced a steeper decline, with total paying users falling to 3.2 million in the second quarter from 4.1 million two years earlier—a 24% drop.

Courtesy of Bumble

Swipe fatigue

Partly to blame for these declines may be swipe fatigue. A study of nearly 9,000 respondents from reverse lookup company Clarity Check in July found that 58% of respondents had deleted a dating app because they found it “emotionally draining.” Another 44% said they would prefer to meet someone in a low-pressure setting rather than get to know them through a profile.

Breeze, a dating app based in Delft, Netherlands, was created explicitly to get people to meet rather than swipe. The company, which has a team of 41 and has raised about $7 million in funding, charges by date rather than subscription.

Each user receives only a handful of profiles each day. If two people match, they fill out their availability rather than opening a chat, and then Breeze brings the pair together at a partner venue.

“A short real-world date tells you more about compatibility than weeks of texting, and it does it faster and with less of the anxiety and second-guessing that endless chat creates,” Marco van der Woude, Breeze’s cofounder and head of business development, told Fortune in an email.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Gen Zers are turning their tassels and sending out hundreds of applications hoping for their first break. Hospitality giant Hilton has seen a tidal wave of young candidates flood its inbox—and in the AI era, getting selected is even rarer than getting into Harvard University. 

Hilton’s early career program Launch has become so competitive that landing a spot is harder than getting into an Ivy League college. For its 2026 cycle, it received 5,000 applications over just a few weeks for only 20 open positions, meaning only 0.4% were accepted into the cohort.

For the first 10 months of the two-year rotation in McLean, Virginia, the young professionals work in a key corporate area, strengthening their business, analytics, and tech skills. They also spend three months learning hotel operations and the guest experience at one of Hilton’s worldwide properties before cycling back into another 10-month corporate rotation.

Laura Fuentes, Hilton’s chief human resources officer, tells Fortune that the program is designed to give young workers a broad view of the business while setting them up for long-term careers. After their successful two-year immersion into the business, Launch participants are offered a full-time job.

“These jobs are super competitive. I mean, we have 20 to 30 spots, and we’ll get 5,000 applicants,” Fuentes says. “It’s intense… The volume may ebb and flow in any given year, but there are opportunities, and we’re looking for talent all around the world.”

Hilton is getting more and more Gen Z applicants

Aside from the two-year rotational program, landing an internship at the $68 billion hotel chain is just as cutthroat. 

This year, around 12,000 candidates applied for 72 open slots—with only 0.6% making the cut. As it assembles its next 2027 cohort of early-career workers, Hilton tells Fortune the competition is ramping up, having already received almost 15,000 applications so far. The window for Gen Zers to submit their resume and cover letter is closing in less than a week—and those who apply will be entering an increasingly crowded applicant pool.

“Our internships and full-time gigs are perhaps fewer and far in between, and highly competitive,” Fuentes says. 

Trying to land a job while up against tens of thousands of competitors, Gen Zers may be tempted to fire off as many resumes as humanly possible. Young professionals send out thousands of applications with no luck, while hiring managers wade through a deluge of candidates for a single job posting. Instead of playing the numbers game, the CHRO advises workers to be more intentional in their job hunt. 

Internships and early-career jobs are more competitive in AI era

Aside from strong interest in working at the hospitality giant—ranked No. 1 on Fortune’s 2025 Great Place to Work list—Fuentes pointed out that competition for its entry-level gigs is heightened by AI. 

Job applicants have been using the tech to quickly tailor their resumes and cover letters, ramping up the number of roles they can apply to. But in return for the convenience, they’re also up against thousands of others doing the same. 

“[With] the volume that our recruiters are receiving, it’s nearly impossible to respond and manage that pipeline,” Hilton’s CHRO explained. “It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Candidates can apply more easily—we’ve removed a lot of the friction from the process. AI is helping candidates apply, but then they’re also the victims of the increased volume that this generates.”

Instead of spraying and praying, Fuentes says authenticity can become a differentiator in a hiring market flooded with AI-generated applications. And when recruiters are drowning in applications, showing that you genuinely want the job may matter more than simply being another name in the pile.

“Try to be a little selective about places that really are going to light you up, where you’re going to be happy,” Fuentes says. “Because at some point, if you make it through—which is your hope in the interview process—we’re gonna want to see authentic interest.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Three years after Smart Brevity became gospel inside corporate comms departments, the founders of Axios are back with a diagnosis of what broke their own prescription: artificial intelligence.

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz sat down with Fortune to talk about their new book, Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less, out this month. The pitch: AI hasn’t lightened anyone’s workload so far—it’s flooded offices with more decks, longer emails and more “work-like activity” that produces motion without progress. Their fix is a framework the trio says they built by testing it on themselves first.

How AI ruined your inbox

The argument is a familiar one amid the “AI slop” discourse of 2026: the technology sold as an efficiency unlock has, in the short run, made everything worse. “When I talk to people at corporations, they’re like, ‘My team is drowning, everyone thinks they’re smart now,” VandeHei said, adding that it’s a “real issue” with how many people who never made a deck or presentation before are suddenly generating things that need an exhaustive review.

At the same time, incoming pitches have all multiplied, Allen added, both inside companies and in how they present themselves externally—a two-front squeeze, not just an internal one. “Everybody’s more verbose,” Allen said, chalking it up to human nature. “Left to our own devices, we’re going to complexify,” Allen said. “Our meetings stack up, our habits, all our time sucks, and unless you are ruthless about auditing, confronting, looking at what you can delete, then [you won’t feel] the liberation of having more.”

Allen borrowed a phrase from former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield to describe the trap of “work-like activity,” which McKinsey partner Kate Smaje previously told Fortune is like a “false productivity trap.” The two run together in most organizations, Allen said, and that’s precisely the problem.

VandeHei pushed back on the idea that humans are lazy by nature, a common criticism of the “cognitive offloading” enabled by AI. “People are not being lazy or stupid,” he said—they want to work hard but are having trouble right now distinguishing from real work and work-like activity, further clouded by AI. “It just creates this, like, energy and life of its own that has no meaning. It does not help.” He said they decided to write this book because of this “freaky” current moment in AI: “Everyone’s going to be scrambling, like, ‘How do I do this? How do I navigate this?’” He argued that most companies have been “very, very clumsy” in implementing it: Even if it’s amazing, which I think the technology often is, the minute you introduce it into a company and its process, its data pool, its privacy laws, its security systems,” he trailed off, “it’s just womp womp.”

Their proposed remedy is a recurring audit, done more often than most companies are used to. VandeHei used to run this exercise quarterly; now he says he’s trying monthly, and flirted with a weekly cadence in conversation with Fortune. “What are the things you actually need to be doing in one order? What are the things that you can stop doing? What are the things that you can automate?” he said. “That’s basically what every company is going to have to go through.”

A companion column Allen published on Axios lays out the stakes in raw hours: of 168 hours in a week, sleep and work eat up roughly 90 to 100, and the authors cite Harvard research suggesting people spend half of what remains thinking about things unrelated to what they’re doing—leaving most people in control of only “about one-sixth” of their own lives.

The power of ‘I’m booked’

Allen, a famously private person, as captured by a Mark Leibovich profile in 2010 for The New York Times Magazine, described how he’s implemented the “simplify” tenets to his own personal life: “two words that we teach people are, ‘I’m booked.’ Anytime somebody wants you to do something, join something, you don’t have to apologize, you don’t have to explain, just say, ‘I’m booked.’”

Allen reflected back to earlier in his career: “So many of us coming up thought that we had to hang out and do all that stuff, and it turns out, you don’t.” The book’s actual instruction, he said, is almost comically simple: if your gut response to an invitation is “eh, I probably should, I guess so, whatever”—that’s a no.

He said that as he, VandeHei and Schwartz talked to successful people for this book, “it was surprising how many of them said, ‘I never accept any obligation that’s not family or work.’” On the flipside if you commit to something, really commit to being there, and then it will be worth your time. He invoked a favorite saying of Oprah Winfrey’s: “no is a complete sentence.”

VandeHei said the phrase reflects a broader refusal to separate his work and personal obligations into different systems. “I don’t know how people distinguish between work and life. To me they’re just life. And work’s a part of it,” he said.

Schwartz, the third head of the Axios trifecta and an unlikely near-20-year veteran of journalism, said the real breakthrough for him wasn’t the phrase itself but the guilt it’s designed to erase. VandeHei and Allen hired Schwartz from Gallup in 2008 and roughly a year later he became chief revenue officer, a move they credit with transforming Politico’s model before they co-founded Axios together in 2016.

Schwartz helped lead Axios through its funding rounds and its $525 million acquisition by Cox Enterprises and now runs Axios HQ, the company’s AI-powered internal-communications spinoff, which recently turned profitable on roughly $20 million in annualized revenue. He ties the milestone to the same simplification principles laid out in the book. His personal thread in Simplify centers on dyslexia, which he says became the root of his instinct for distilling complicated material into simple, structured points.

Even after living by the book’s principles at work and at home, Schwartz said, he kept feeling guilty about declining opportunities he hadn’t formally ruled out. “What was really clarifying is when you set down the goals and you put them in writing… it actually gives you permission,” he said. “I had sort of done that mental map. I had my goals. But I still had the guilt feeling of like, ‘No, I should be doing everything.’ And the reality is you can’t do everything. So then do the things that matter most.”

Schwartz said the same dynamic paralyzes teams inside companies, where employees “can’t find a way to say no” to a recurring meeting or obligation because no one has given them permission to do so. The fix, he said, is a line a client once gave back to him: “Everything in an organization is usually done by default, and you want it done by design.”

Why the ’90s were slower, if not better

Simplify seems to be part of a trend: the longing for an analog era, before AI, before even cell phones. VandeHei and Allen, White House reporters dating back nearly 30 years at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post before co-founding Politico, said they remember the 1990s and this isn’t nostalgia, it’s fact. People today are carrying more cognitive burden than they were 20 years ago, and the strain is real, not imagined. “You’re getting hit with an infinite amount all day, every single day from a million directions,” he said. “That has ramifications. That means you have less time to be able to do the things you want to do or even make sense of things.” That’s why Allen’s old Politico Playbook and now the Axios newsletter, both famously read by the White House first thing in the morning, were successful: one place to focus on important information.

The book leans on research about decision fatigue—the idea that even trivial choices drain the mental capacity available for harder ones—to argue that the sheer volume of daily inputs, not just their content, has a cost. Does VandeHei long for a return to those days? “I don’t know if they were [better], but they were slower,” he said. “Whether they were better or not is like a different thing, but they were authentically pre-internet, pre-text, pre-email, pre-Tinder. Like you had fewer alerts and fewer bells. There’s a cost to that, not just a distraction cost,” draining your ability to really focus on the things that matter.

That tension extends to AI’s effect on cognition itself. With test scores declining and AI absorbing more of daily mental life, Schwartz and VandeHei offered a split diagnosis of what it means for how sharply people think.

VandeHei argued “there’s not a clean answer,” and that the right approach depends entirely on where someone is in their career. It’s “controversial and feared” because it raises “existential” issues in threatening to disrupt everything in your work and personal life, “even if the outcome could be really good.”

“If you were in college and you’re asking me how to use AI with your schoolwork, I would say minimally,” he said. “You’ve got to let your brain develop. You’ve got to get some kind of domain knowledge outside of the thing you might be going into the professional world to do because most good ideas flow from fact pattern recognition. So I would get your brain working that way.” For someone further along, he said, the calculus flips: “I feel like I’m smarter and a little bit deeper today than I was two or three years ago… I’ve been able to find the time to think what I need to think, go deep when I need to go deep, but also use this technology to maybe have a more elastic experience with content.”

Asked what the book offers someone just entering the workforce, VandeHei’s answer centered on speed and specificity, not general AI literacy. “As quickly as you can, figure out how to leverage this technology so that you’re one of the best users of it for the very specific job you’re about to do,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you have to become an AI savant.” For someone in marketing, he said, that means identifying “the five things that the smartest people are using this technology to do as force multipliers”—knowledge he said is freely available from “tons of people on YouTube, Spotify, Podcast, Substack” already doing the job. “To me that’s like the price of entry.”

Allen agreed, saying the key in his view is “being ruthless about what matters.” In your work life, just look at your job and evaluate exactly what you need to do to succeed, personally and as an organization. “What is going to matter to you this week, month, year? And by articulating that and by being super intentional about that, you can even quantify, like, how you’re doing, how your schedule, how your life flow, how your work flow will match up with what you’re doing.”

VandeHei described watching his own sons and their friends discover this dynamic firsthand during summer internships at government agencies and major companies. Despite being early in their careers, he said, the interns found themselves treated as in-house AI experts simply because they were comfortable experimenting with the tools and no one around them was. “They’re like, ‘We’re treated like we’re savants, [but] we’re fine in AI,” he said the interns told him. They described their work more as “nobody knows what they’re doing,” but the Gen Z experimenters are being treated like “internal consultants on how to use AI broadly.” VandeHei’s takeaway: that’s valuable, in the age of simplify.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When I was 12 years old, I walked into the district attorney’s office of my Kansas hometown and asked for a job. I was inspired by onscreen lawyers depicted as hardworking professionals fighting for the rights of others or strategizing the best way to pull off a multibillion transaction. Despite the advice of everyone in the profession, I spent my entire adolescence and young adulthood preparing to become a lawyer.

I was ecstatic when I was accepted and then graduated from Harvard Law School. I had spent more than a decade envisioning all that I’d do with my law degree.

My first task at a law firm was to manually ensure signature lines were the same length across 18 different documents set. The firm billed the client over $600 an hour for me to use all of my schooling and education to accomplish this task. 

It’s been commonly accepted that American corporations and individuals pay for young associates with prestigious credentials an alarmingly high billable hour to complete non-legal tasks. That is no longer the case.

The legal profession I entered upon graduation is already dramatically different. Whether the industry likes it or not, the introduction of artificial intelligence is reshaping the distribution of talent and availability of resources, which I ultimately think will be beneficial to lawyers and clients alike. 

The use of AI in white-collar professions is still in its infancy. Lawyers complain about hallucinations, mistakes, and the technology’s other shortcomings. But despite its imperfections, AI is already transforming the way that most people practice law. 

Harvey and Legora first entered the scene less than five years ago and have catalyzed the change. The two dominate the BigLaw AI scene, acting more like tech companies than law companies as they sponsor sports leagues, plaster celebrity spokespeople on billboards, and hold multibillion valuations ($15 and $5.6 billion, respectively).

It used to be a running joke that selling legal tech was near-impossible because law partners have no incentive to maximize efficiency and no desire to re-learn their expensive, prestigious skillsets. Now, legal tech is the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. BigLaw firms are spending to hire top-name engineers and transforming themselves into tech companies behind the scenes. The convergence of law and the tech world was unimaginable when I was in law school.

As law firms are forced to adjust their models, their leaders are also reconsidering their place in the industry.  Lawyers are realizing they no longer need a big firm’s infrastructure or training model, and star players are walking out of top firms and taking their books of business with them. Chris Kercher leaving Quinn Emanuel to launch a small, tech-driven firm isn’t an outlier. He’s just early.

Technology will transform the legal industry much how the internet transformed search.  A decade from now, many BigLaw firms will be skeletons of themselves.  Along the way, access to high-quality legal will expand dramatically.  As AI allows for the proliferation of knowledge and access to resources, this will democratize access to high quality legal and flatten the influence of major law firms—and the inherent advantage held by the small number of clients currently able to afford their services.

Lawyers also have enormous upside. Whereas they have historically been funneled into hierarchical law firms to spend a couple years billing time around the clock for no profit share, there are already countless more ways for young attorneys to leverage their degrees and skills.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a lawyer. We are practicing in an era of transformation, as a previously guarded industry is opening up to the masses in real time. At the AI-powered law firm that I run, we see hundreds of applications every day from the brightest students wanting to take part in that shift.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It’s practically a Gen Z canon event: scrolling through a bank app, counting down the days until payday, and wondering whether that emergency ramen stash can stretch a little longer when a notification drops down — “You’ve been added to ‘Europe Summer 2027!’” 

The bank balance says absolutely not, but hey, YOLO, right? 

The group-chat joke lands because many young people know exactly what’s in their checking account, and still want to make room for what makes life feel good. For some, it’s finding room for a piece of jewelry or a small treat that feels personal. Even on a tight budget, they’re holding space for the things that feel worth it right now, as everyday life gets more expensive.

Nearly 44% of Gen Z travelers frequently or very frequently take spontaneous trips, almost twice the 25.2% average across generations, according to Future Partners, and 62.7% say travel is worth investing in.

But half of Gen Z travelers in the U.S. also said they had made financial sacrifices for their last vacation, according to Skyscanner. To afford the next trip, 52% said eating out less would be worth it, while 40% were willing to cut back on haircuts.

For many young adults, the calculation between enjoying money now and saving it for later has shifted. Matt Lundquist, founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy, a New York City psychotherapy practice, said younger clients are imagining their economic futures differently as homeownership, stable employment, and raising children feel increasingly out of reach.

He helps clients approach those decisions as a psychotherapist, focusing on the emotions, family histories, and anxieties that shape how people use money—not simply the numbers in their budgets.

When traditional life milestones feel less attainable, he said, spending on something enjoyable now can seem more valuable than saving over the long term for an uncertain goal. 

“There really is a strong felt difference in how young people are imagining the future will look like for them economically,” Lundquist told Fortune.

What feels worth the money 

When buying a home feels impossibly far, the math behind a small treat can start to look different. 

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, a financial therapist and host of the Mind Money Balance podcast, explained that such indulgences can offer a predictable moment of control when so much else feels uncertain.

“A $100 necklace or boba tea doesn’t compete with a down payment,” she told Fortune. 

Which doesn’t necessarily mean young consumers are dishing out money as if it grows on trees. Bryan-Podvin keeps a separate “fun money” account for what she calls an adult allowance, leaving room for a seasonal latte or a new necklace without affecting necessary expenses. 

But Gen Z’s treats don’t always have to be particularly little or cheap. The global market research company, Circana, has seen consumers gravitate toward accessories that offer self-expression or an emotional connection. Beth Goldstein, the firm’s footwear and accessories industry adviser, said demand has improved for handbags, especially in the $500-$750 price range, while bag charms have also remained strong. 

“This is not inexpensive by any means, but consumers are finding the brands and items at this price point to be worth the money,” Goldstein told Fortune.

That willingness to pay for something that feels worth the splurge extends beyond a fashionable handbag. Ralph Lauren’s latest quarterly report showed revenue rose 14%, led by demand from younger shoppers as well as affluent ones.

Jewelry offers another example. Signet Jewelers said diamond tennis bracelets, tennis necklaces, studs, and yellow gold are resonating with Gen Z shoppers entering the category, including men. Younger consumers are also gravitating toward personalization and distinctive engagement-ring designs, including oval and marquise shapes. 

Jewelry can be more resilient than other purchases because it’s often tied to engagements, milestones, and other meaningful moments, a Signet spokesperson told Fortune. 

But again, what feels worth the money can’t always fit inside a jewelry box. Sometimes it requires a passport—and the freedom to leave on short notice is not equally available. Future Partners found that 36.8% of travelers earning at least $200,000 frequently take spontaneous trips, compared with 16.7% of those earning less than $49,000.

To be sure, preserving room for joy can become harmful when treats interfere with other goals, produce debt, or leave behind regret and greater anxiety, Bryan-Podvin said.

But Lundquist cautioned against automatically treating Gen Z’s choices as irresponsible when the generation is making them under different economic conditions than its parents faced.

For some young adults, a memory can stay with them long after a piece of furniture ends up on the curb or in a donation store.

“If I go to this awesome concert, that will be with me forever,” Lundquist said. “If I invest in a new couch, I might not be able to take it to my next apartment.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At 71, Richard Brown feels as if he’s a college student all over again.

A nuclear medicine physician turned professor, Brown formally retired in 2020—only to take another job in university leadership the following week and join a venture-backed health care startup. Now, he’s reinventing himself once again, this time as a product entrepreneur—and it has him more excited than ever.

“My hobbies tend to be learning something new,” Brown told Fortune in a recent interview.

“I think I never want to retire,” he added. “Why would you do that? You spent all this time learning something—and things get easier for you when you get older in some ways because you’re a little bit wiser.”

His latest experiment is Poka Snack, a skewer-like product designed to make it easier to freeze and eat fruit, particularly bananas. Earlier this year, Brown launched it on Kickstarter, where it has raised more than 90% of its initial $4,000 goal, and he’s already amassed more than 14,000 TikTok followers.

But for Brown, the venture is more than a frozen skewer business. It’s another opportunity to step outside his comfort zone, learn something unfamiliar, and find the energy that comes with starting over.

“It’s almost like being in college again,” Brown said. “You have that adrenaline flowing. You want to accomplish something.”

Don’t be afraid to ‘look stupid’ and take risks, Brown says

Brown graduated from the University of Michigan’s medical school in 1980 and spent the next two decades in private practice. In 2004, he returned to his alma mater as a professor, while also serving as director of clinical nuclear medicine and molecular imaging in the university’s division of nuclear medicine. He retired from Michigan in 2020.

By then, Brown had spent decades building a career; he could have stepped away and looked back on the patients he treated, the students he taught, and the hefty salary that came with it. Instead, the following Monday he started a new job.

Brown became the first vice chair of clinical operations at the University of Utah School of Medicine’s department of radiology, a role he held for three years before joining Covera Health, a venture-backed health-tech startup. Today, he serves as the company’s chief health strategy officer.

Still working years after the typical retirement age, constant change and sense of growth is what keeps Brown engaged. Early in a career, he said, much of the work is about learning; eventually, as the job becomes familiar, it can become easier to stop pushing yourself into unfamiliar territory.

“When something becomes routine, you probably have stopped growing,” he said.

That philosophy has shaped Brown’s relationship with entrepreneurship. During the dot-com boom—while still practicing medicine—he launched several internet ventures, including websites that sold college textbooks and hotel rooms around the world. He also created an educational website for cancer patients and their families. While the era’s bust eventually brought most of those ventures to an end, Brown said the experience taught him not to let the fear of failure—or looking foolish—get in the way.

“I think the problem with most people is they’re afraid to look stupid,” Brown said. “If you think that something should be done, just do it. Don’t worry about what other people think, because you may be wrong, but you also may be right. And if you’re right, do you really want to miss that opportunity?”

He’s continued to embrace that mindset with Poka Snack, which was inspired by the fact that while he liked eating frozen bananas, existing products were difficult to insert, sometimes broke and could leave splinters in the fruit.

“I wanted something better,” Brown said. “When I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I decided to see if I could create it myself.”

After testing roughly 40 prototypes, Brown settled on the final design, featuring patent-pending semi-helical geometry. He’s now working with a U.S. manufacturer on production while finalizing the packaging.

How a baby boomer used AI to become a ‘solopreneur’

Brown’s latest venture has also given him a crash course in something else: using AI to build a business largely on his own.

He’s used the technology throughout the entire Poka Snack development process, from product concept and design to branding, creative work, marketing, his business plan, and the launch. Without it, he said, becoming a “solopreneur” would not have been possible.

An AI-generated Poka Snack concept rendering shared with Fortune.

But the experience has also reinforced a lesson Brown has learned throughout his career: Instead of worrying about finding the perfect career path, pay attention to what genuinely interests you.

“People are always asking: ‘What should I go into?’ and that’s the wrong question,” Brown said. “The question is: ‘What are you excited about?’”

It’s a simple philosophy, but one Brown has spent his career putting into practice: Never stop learning or experimenting—and don’t be afraid to start over.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When the Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by Elon Musk, gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it included slashing an estimated $329 million in humanitarian aid to Nepal. Stuti Basnyet, who served as the acting program office director for USAID in Nepal since 2024, remembers the months following the cuts.

“Everyone went through denial first that this was even happening, to just deep grievance at how it was being done,” she told Fortune.

According to Basnyet, USAID’s closure led to an estimated 30,000 direct job losses in the country. Among a raft of slashed humanitarian aid projects was foundational educational opportunities in Nepal, including support for early grade reading in Nepal across all its 35 districts, teacher training, and reviewing and refunding educational materials. Basnyet was left with the puzzle of recreating those services and resources—and building new ones—without the same steady funds Nepal had received from the U.S. since 1951, when it became Nepal’s first bilateral aid donor.

“How do you use all of the skills and the experience you’ve gained in different ways to create an environment where you still felt like you had dignity, second life, all of the knowledge and relationships, within a really short period of time?” Basnyet said.

The answer lay in Nepal’s private sector. Though considered a lower-middle-income country with a GDP of $1,447⁩⁨ ranking 124th of 145 countries tracked by the Harvard Kennedy School Growth Lab, Nepal is ready to grow its economy. It’s sandwiched between the commerce giants of India and China, and with more than 40% of its population between the ages of 16 and 40, is experiencing a “youth bulge” of talent and labor.

And without USAID, the small country’s private sector is making strides toward building up Nepal’s economy. Nepalis, afterall, are no strangers to disruptions. A series of widespread Gen Z-led protests last year gave way to a new and young government, led by 36-year-old former rapper Balen Shah.

Last year, Basnyet co-founded Aadyanta Advisory, a Nepal-based strategic advisory firm, which over the course of one year supported nearly 400 young Nepali innovators and founders and helped jumpstart the nation’s industrial push. It’s one of several efforts to give a jolt to Nepal’s economy, many of which are in partnership with the U.S. embassy, which provides funding opportunities and policy advocacy to support the private sector.

Basnyet’s transition from public servant to private sector industrialist mirrors Nepal’s own economic shift.

“I’m still continuing to do the same work, which is basically advocating for locally led, globally connected economic development efforts, stronger partnerships, private sector engagement, and how development happens in this country,” Basnyet said. “I’m doing much of the same work, but now as an entrepreneur.”

Nepal’s burgeoning tech hub

Pukar Hamal, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based SecurityPal, refers to Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu as “Silicon Peaks,” a burgeoning tech hub nestled in the Himalayas rather than California’s Santa Clara Valley.

SecurityPal, which manages corporate cybersecurity assessments, has a large office in Kathmandu and is one of about a dozen publicly traded U.S. companies with operations there.  

“I wouldn’t say Nepal is most people’s first choice destination,” Hamal, a Nepali immigrant now living in the U.S., told Fortune. “But I think that that’s changing.”

That potential for change comes in part thanks to Nepal’s more than 6,000 rivers and streams that flow down from the mountains and are strengthened by monsoons and melting glaciers, which allow the country to run on 99% hydropower. It has more than 100,000 megawatts of hydropower that can be tapped, and that number is expanding as technology improves, but the country has only tapped about 5,000 of it, Hamal estimated. 

Then there’s the burgeoning labor force, a result of the population swelling after a decline in infant mortality and increase in fertility rates, yielding a cohort of young people, many of whom speak English.

This shift is a recent one, according to Amir Thapa, the executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Nepal (AmCham Nepal), a coalition of American businesses in the country. Nepal’s trade relationship with the west began in earnest in the 1990s, when the country established its multiparty democracy, developing a private sector propped up primarily by banking. The years leading up to this shift saw Nepal actively seek out foreign aid, a practice that grew in the 1990s. Through 2025, the country approved nearly 7,500 foreign investment projects worth about $5.5 billion. To Thapa, the model wasn’t sustainable.

“Back in the day, I think our relationship was so dependent on development grants,” he told Fortune. “There was so much assistance that was coming from the states, and that was the expectation.”

“When USAID was gone, we took that as an opportunity because we knew that there is going to be a void to create a partnership with the private sector here in Nepal,” he added.

Thapa believes Nepal has shed enough of its “conventional” mindset that its growing tech sector can effectively replace the loss of foreign aid. Large U.S. corporations like Coca-Cola and MetLife have expanded operations to the country, bringing with them jobs. AmCham had 42 members two years ago and 72 today. In 2025, Nepal exported about $1 billion in information technology products, and Thapa said the government has the goal to bring that total to $20 billion over the next 10 years.

“We lack employment creation out here,” Thapa said. “The role of U.S. companies is really important in order to create those jobs, and the tech sector has been doing that.”

Nepal’s Gen Z revolution

A large part of Nepal’s growth will depend on its young people staying in the country. 

“Nepalese youngsters are hungry,” Thapa said. “They are really trying to prove themselves that they can do something amazing in a global market, and when they have an opportunity to work for U.S. companies, I think their dedication, their commitment, is in a different level, and that’s why it’s getting better, and that’s why the momentum is out there.”

Though Nepal’s population may be eager to learn and work, it’s also seeing a mass exodus of working-age youngsters, with about 1,500 young people leaving the country for foreign work each day, according to data from Rastriya Shramik Mahasangh Nepal (RSMN), a federation of labor unions.

Despite the shift toward a service-based economy, Nepal is still predominantly agricultural, and those farming jobs earn about 67% less than the national average, per Glassdoor data. The creation of more tech sector jobs may increase the chances of Nepali youth staying in the country, but growing Nepal’s domestic workforce has remained urgent—and contentious.

Growing Nepal’s labor force was one of the many promises of its new Prime Minister Shah, who vowed to create 1.2 million jobs. Nepal elected Shah in March following a surge of violent protests in the country led by Gen Z demonstrators following a government ban of social media platforms. It fanned the flames of citizens already united in their anti-corruption, anti-censorship stance toward a government that had become increasingly unstable over the last decade. More than 75 civilians were confirmed dead following the protests, and more than 2,000 were injured.

Private sector leaders are hopeful about Shah’s administration and the surge of young people in leadership, including the majority of Shah’s ministers, who are under 40. He has called for increased private-sector partnerships, the restarting of state-owned factories to boost industry, as well as implement revenue reforms to combat corruption. The new administration ultimately promised more stability that could entice more youth to stay and work.

“We have a government in power with almost entirely new faces who are stepping into power for the first time, so there is a sense of optimism, accountability,” Basnyet said. “There’s of course people on wait-and-watch mode, ‘Let’s see what the government does,’ but for now I feel extremely optimistic.”

Growing pains

The new administration is facing one of its first major tests. In August, flash floods from a collapsed glacier swept through the country, killing 1,300 and leaving more than 5,000 missing. The total damages from the disaster are estimated to exceed $2.56 billion.

Nepali lawmakers have slammed the administration over bureaucratic delays in distributing resources after the floods, including medical equipment and staffing of medical facilities. The country was initially slow to accept foreign aid, but has since received tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid, including over $5 million from the U.S. State Department.

Aid has also come in the form of tech companies contributing to the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund, including $10 million from Nvidia and $460,000 from BYD and its Nepal distributor Cimex. Pukar, as well as Renegade Insurance CEO Rashik Adhikari, launched a relief drive, matching donations up to $20,000 to the government’s relief effort.

The widespread response to the disaster is illustrative of the relationship between Nepal’s public and private sectors in this time of transition.

“Neither government nor the private sector can carry the whole chain of risk,” Basnyet said. “A telecom company can get an alert onto millions of phones, but it cannot detect a glacier collapsing high in the Himalayas. An insurer can help transfer some losses, but it cannot make the poorest household insurable, or compensate for unsafe infrastructure and missing risk data.”

To be sure, Basnyet said USAID’s absence is “noticeable.” In 2015 following the Gorkha earthquake, the agency deployed a 128-person team and pledged $10 million to recovery efforts, a sum that eventually topped $64.5 million. What was more valuable, Basnyet said, was USAID-supported hospitals and search-and-rescue teams that created an infrastructure of preparedness. She continues to be concerned by a trend Finance Minister Swarnim Waglé described to the New York Times as a “cascading effect” of other wealthy countries pulling back on aid as the U.S. does.

But Basnyet also maintains Nepal’s best path forward is maintaining global cooperation while building a country that can stand on its own when it needs to.

“I don’t think the lesson is that Nepal should remain aid-dependent. It should not,” Basnyet said. “We need to use our own public resources better, mobilize much more domestic capital, and draw more deliberately on business, the diaspora, and philanthropy.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

College sports are booming—and college athletes are earning like the pros. Five years after the NCAA opened the door to name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation, college athletes can earn money from their schools, donors, collectives, brands and their own audiences. But the NIL revolution isn’t fixing the one thing it was designed to: lack of fair payment for student-athletes.

The stakes of the NIL era trace back to O’Bannon v. NCAA, the landmark case that challenged the premise that student-athletes could generate commercial value for their schools while receiving nothing in compensation. The lawsuit ultimately established that the rules were subject to antitrust scrutiny, and the Ninth Circuit found the restrictions on athlete compensation too restrictive, opening the door for a system that allows student athletes to monetize themselves. When NIL rules changed in 2021, the initial promise was straightforward—student-athletes would finally be allowed to make money from their own identities.

But according to Blake Lawrence, a former college football linebacker and co-founder of NIL technology company Opendorse, the marketplace that followed is a very complicated one that is a far cry from a fair market.

“Information is necessary to create a fair market,” Lawrence told Fortune, adding that 67% of school compensation tracked by his company goes to athletes without agents. This has pushed student-athletes to maximize their earnings because there isn’t a professional intermediator, which in turn led donors to begin pooling money, brands began signing athletes and fans began buying jerseys. And Opendorse’s data suggests the market is expanding faster than forecast.

“Information is necessary to create a fair market,” Blake Lawrence, co-founder of NIL technology company Opendorse told Fortune. Lawrence said 67% of school compensation tracked by the company goes to athletes without agents. In other words, about two-thirds of athletes receiving compensation do not have professional representation helping them determine their value. And that information gap has led players to find ways to maximize their payout.

According to Lawrence, NIL today is just a glimpse of what happens when athletes realize knowing the market can be as valuable as being good enough to participate in it.

Some players have taken compensation into their own hands. College football kickers have started communicating with each other through informal group chats and social media to negotiate contracts, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The report noted that kickers shared information about what comparable players were making to give them a better sense of what they can ask for.

Starting kickers at Power Four schools are averaging roughly $225,000 this season, up from 60.9% from a year earlier, while some are receiving as much as $600,000, according to the Journal.

But even with the booming growth of college sports, the market hasn’t translated into the financial transparency necessary to keep pay honest. According to Lawrence, an athlete’s total economic package can consist of school payments, collective money, brand deals and other commercial arrangements. But there is no NFL-style centralized database that contains every college contract.

Lawrence said professional sports offers a look into how financials should look, with historical contracts readily available to teams and agencies—to give both sides information when they negotiate. College sports, however, lacks that system. But there are still ways to still maximize NIL compensation.

Social media makes you an “anomaly”

The biggest NIL deals are relatively easy to identify. A quarterback who is among the best players in the country and has millions of followers will obviously have large commercial value. But a player who is exceptional at the sport but lacks notoriety is a different story.

Lawrence describes earning potential for college athletes as a combination of two factors—athletic ability and social media reach.

“If you are good at your sport and have good socials, you’re in high earning potential,” he said. And that creates what he calls an “anomaly” athlete—someone whose athletic ability and marketability combine to make them considerably more valuable than what either characteristic would suggest on their own.

The Opendorse president pointed to former LSU gymnast and social media influencer Livvy Dunne and former Heisman trophy winner and current NFL player Travis Hunter as examples of “anomalies.”

Hunter, Lawrence said, represents an extreme version of this model because his audience can retain value even if he never plays football again.

“Travis Hunter could stop playing football tomorrow,” he explained, “and never have to get a real job because he built an audience that follows him for the rest of his life.”

Agents can lift the curtain

Lawrence said representation is becoming one of the biggest factors in securing a “good” NIL deal because an agent working with multiple athletes can accumulate information across schools and negotiations. That can give an agent a broad view of the market and use that information to negotiate the highest deal for their clients.

“A good agent is an individual with information that can help the athlete make a more informed decision,” he said. The common denominator falls on leverage.

“Let’s say a general manager offers an athlete $50,000 a year to play for their team,” Lawrence noted. “That might be more money than that kid has ever heard of in his life. Their parents may even think that is a life-changing outcome. What they don’t know is the player that plays right next to them that has an agent that negotiated a $500,000 a year deal for the same position. Now that’s information asymmetry.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The parents of a 23-year-old woman who was fatally struck after her Uber driver pulled over along a southern California highway were awarded $40 million after an arbitrator found both Uber and the driver liable for her death.

Carol Normandin and Ken Parker said Friday that they hope the amount will put a spotlight on the 2023 death of their daughter, Emily Normandin-Parker and to use the money to advocate for strengthening safety standards and transparency in the ride-hailing industry.

“I want to do good with it,” Parker said of the money, but “I never wanted it. No parent would ever want it. The best thing about it is that it’s bringing attention to the issue that sorely needs attention.”

On the night she was killed, Normandin-Parker had ordered the Uber for her and her friend to get home after spending a night out drinking alcohol. When the friend got sick and vomited, driver Vu Tran pulled over on the side of Route 73 in Orange County and all three got out of the car before Normandin-Parker was hit by traffic.

During arbitration, Uber had argued that it’s a technology platform connecting riders with “independent third-party drivers,” according to the independent arbitrator, Richard Stone. But Stone, a retired judge, wrote that he rejected that argument and found Uber was “vicariously liable” for the driver’s negligence.

Uber disagreed.

“While we respect the arbitration process, we believe the arbitrator was wrong in holding Uber legally responsible for the tragic events of that night,” the company said in a statement, adding that they have continued to “strengthen our approach to safety over the years.”

Attorneys who represented Tran at the arbitration hearing did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The arbitration document, dated in July, was released by Normandin and Parker’s attorneys this week. Stone decided Uber and Tran were jointly responsible for $20 million to each parent.

There are holes in what ultimately happened “in those crucial moments,” the arbitrator wrote, as “no one presented entirely credible testimony.” But the evidence shows Tran pulled into a gore point — the area between a ramp and the road — and began to argue with Normandin-Parker’s friend outside of the car, according to Stone.

Neither saw traffic hit Normandin-Parker.

“In a fit of anger, he needlessly placed them (and himself) in danger by illegally stopping in the gore point when he could have easily … stopped in a safe place instead alongside an active freeway at night,” Stone wrote. “Tran then abandoned those two young women, whom he knew to be intoxicated and whom he had kicked out of his car in his anger over what had transpired, in that spot.”

After Tran left the scene, GPS data shows he pulled over at the next exit and called Uber about securing a cleaning fee, Stone said.

California law allows Uber and other ride-sharing platforms to treat their drivers as independent contractors, but Stone rejected the idea that that absolves Uber of liability. Uber should “learn from this tragic incident” and change its approach to passenger safety, Stone wrote.

“Should it fail to do so, it no doubt engages in that approach at its own substantial risk,” he said.

The case went through arbitration because Uber’s terms of service, which riders agree to when they sign up, require claims or disputes be resolved with the private resolution process. The arbitrator’s decision, unlike a court ruling, does not establish legal precedent.

Uber said in its statement that it continues to invest in safety with “new technology, policies and safeguards” and guidance to drivers on avoiding unsafe drop-off locations and said its work on safety “is never finished.”

Normandin and Parker remembered their daughter for her creativity, sense of humor and kindness. She was a writer, working on being a playwright, an older sister and an advocate for others. They established the Emily Normandin-Parker Foundation and said they will also be using the money to fund scholarship and mentorship opportunities and to support LGBTQ+ organizations.

They criticized Uber’s response as a reflection of the company’s “pathological inability to admit responsibility.”

“They’re focused on their bottom line, to the detriment of safety,” Parker said. “They don’t care about safety. They care about money.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For the Palestinian relief nonprofits behind a $1 million pledge from rapper Macklemore, the Grammy winner’s latest contributions offer more than just money.

Macklemore committed to donate his net earnings from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour after he was dropped for making pro-Palestinian comments onstage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. The goal, he wrote in a Wednesday post on social media, was to “bring the conversation back to where it belongs” — the Palestinian people — after a 48-hour period that saw four supporting acts quit in solidarity and confusion over who held responsibility for the decision.

The six donation recipients included Medical Aid for Palestinians, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. In addition to the funding windfall, their leaders welcomed the renewed public awareness of the perilous living conditionsfaced by the Palestinian people they treat regularly.

“Even if you don’t see bombs falling every night, the rubble is still there,” said Alicia Phillips Mandaville, the acting CEO of Anera, another beneficiary. “And the traumatized children are still traumatized.”

Attention on continued pleas for help

Tareq Hailat, the director of strategic engagement at Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, said his phone rings “all the time” with calls from people in Gaza “bleeding and asking for help.”

“There’s this notion that there’s a ceasefire. But it’s not true. There are children dying every single day. There’s our team that is constantly in danger on the ground every single day. There’s people we have to feed,” he said. “So to have this attention on it is incredible.”

Israeli operations have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians since a fragile ceasefire took effect last October. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians struggle to get healthcare in the West Bank. Palestinians say water shortages persist. The world’s leading authority on food insecurity warned in July that most Gaza families still weren’t getting nearly enough to eat even as Israel allowed more aid.

The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund medically evacuates children who can’t get the care they need because of crumbling healthcare infrastructure and flies outside physicians in to treat others inside Gaza.

The nonprofit will put its share of Macklemore’s gift into an unrestricted fund, according to Hailat. The donation allows leaders to more fluidly direct money based on the evolving circumstances inside Gaza.

Anera — a humanitarian aid group working in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan — noted its donation also came with no requirements for how to use the money. Mandaville said that flexibility is important when “the way people live” and “the rules we work inside” change on a monthly basis.

“If there’s flooding again this year like there was last year, we can deal with that. If there is an acute hunger crisis again, like there has been in the past, we can meet that,” she said. “We can buy more blankets because people want their grandparents to be warm at night.”

Macklemore has long supported Palestinians

This week’s gift wasn’t the first time Macklemore has donated to some of the recipients.

The rapper has long advocated for the plight of Palestinians. He previously pledged the proceeds and streaming royalties from his protest anthems “Hind’s Hall” and “Hind’s Hall 2″ to UNRWA.

More than $509,000 in support has come through those royalties, according to UNRWA USA CEO Mara Kronenfeld.

“He has been contributing to saving probably hundreds of thousands of lives in Gaza through his contributions already,” she said.

This latest donation is already catalyzing more gifts. Ms. Rachel, a YouTube star and music teacher, announced Thursday that she would donate $1 million to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and called on others to match the gift.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — whose Kraft Group also owns Gillette Stadium, where Sheeran is scheduled to perform later this month — said in a Wednesday Instagram post that he would match Sheeran’s own $2 million donation for aid “in the region.” The post did not specify the gift’s recipients.

Macklemore has said his removal was the result of an effort led by Kraft. Kraft said in a statement Monday that the decision to cancel Macklemore was a result of the rapper’s recent comments “and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” Macklemore has asserted that criticism of the Israeli government should not be conflated with antisemitism.

Others inspired to donate

Everyday donors appear to be joining efforts like Ms. Rachel’s. Online progressive influencers have helped raise more than $72,000 more for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

Anera reported that the donations it received Wednesday through social media platforms were more than triple this month’s daily average. The nonprofit has also gained more than 8,000 followers since Macklemore tagged its account in his post. Mandaville hopes that exposure will introduce new, younger audiences to the nonprofit’s work.

“I would guess that our traditional donor does not know the lyrics to ‘Thrift Shop,’” she said, referencing Macklemore’s breakout 2012 hit.

UNRWA USA’s Kronenfeld said the spike reflects an existing trend. Her organization has gained 203,000 donors since October 2023, she said, allowing them to send more than $117 million.

“The contributions keep coming in because Americans care,” she said. “It will increase that much more with Macklemore’s extremely humane gesture.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It could be much worse.

When President Donald Trump launched his war against Iran in late February, energy analysts issued dire warnings that oil prices could more than double during a protracted conflict and urged investors and motorists to buckle up for a bumpy ride.

The war grinds on and oil prices certainly remain volatile. But the most dire projections have not yet come to pass six months into a conflict that has no end in sight.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is making a much-anticipated state visit to Washington next week, could make a credible argument that the world has his country’s energy strategy to thank for that.

It’s unclear how much the two leaders will discuss Iran during the visit, which comes as Trump’s Republican Party faces pressure from votersover high gasoline prices, and as China’s buffer is being further tested as the conflict in the Middle East spreads. Trump, who has sought to keep a fragile trade truce with Beijing intact, has been careful in public comments about differences with Xi over the country’s relationship with Iran.

“We’ve been free-riding off Beijing in a weird way,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank. “China’s doing it because they understand that they’re on the train that Trump is driving off a cliff. If oil prices go way up, that hurts the global economy. If it hurts the global economy, it hurts them.”

China’s stockpiles helped Xi weather the storm — so far

Beijing spent years and billions of dollars amassing the world’s largest oil stockpile, building its strategic reserve to about 1.4 billion barrels by the end of last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s estimates. To protect China from foreign supply risks, Xi made energy self-reliance a part of the country’s latest five-year plan.

Drawing from the massive stockpile allowed China, the world’s second-biggest oil consumer and Iran’s top buyer, to dramatically cut crude imports once the U.S. and Israel began their bombardment and Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. The country was also helped by its shift toward electric vehicles in recent years and increasingly tapping into other energy alternatives.

China’s oil import diet in turn helped ease global demand, softening the upward price effects for the United States, Europe and beyond.

“The Chinese deserve credit,” said retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank. “They did in 10 years what took us 25 years after the 1973 oil crisis to do: really build a kind of strategic petroleum reserve that could allow you to weather this.”

But that resilience faces new challenges. Attacks by Iran-backed militias this month led Saudi Arabia to temporarily shut a vital pipeline that transports crude across the kingdom to ports on the Red Sea.

The Yemen-based Houthis have also seized two strategic islands in the southern Red Sea, bolstering the Iran-backed rebels’ ability to disrupt a key maritime shipping route. Planned talks among Gulf nations focused on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which were supposed to take place earlier this week, have also been put on hold.

Before he meets Xi, Trump is set to meet Tuesday with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council in New York, on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly. The group includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain.

Oil industry experts say the moment remains tenuous

Analysts at Bank of America last week forecast oil at $83 a barrel for the second half of the year “in light of more persistent disruptions to Hormuz,” but said they still expected shipping through the strait to gradually pick up.

But if violence escalates and keeps a chokehold on traffic, prices could reach $95 to $120 a barrel, while damage to major energy infrastructure could produce spikes of up to $150 a barrel, the analysts wrote.

Brent crude averaged about $69 per barrel last year and currently is hovering around $100. Brent crude briefly peaked in late April, touching $126.

How China has weathered the volatile oil market caused by Trump’s war is ultimately seen by Beijing as “a vindication of Xi’s last five-year plan and his focus on self-reliance,” said Jonathan Czin, a former senior CIA analyst who is now at the Brookings Institution.

Deep differences between Trump and Xi on Iran persist

The war in Iran — and its impact on the global economy — is expected to be on the agenda for the Trump-Xi talks. But the prospects of the world’s two biggest powers coming up with a breakthrough appear dim.

Over the course of the conflict, the Trump administration has faced resistance when urging Beijing to use its considerable economic leverage to press the Islamic Republic to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Chinese officials, who have expressed strong opposition to the U.S. war, also have bristled at more recent administration threats to ratchet up economic pressure on nations and entities still doing business with Iran.

To be certain, analysts say there’s little altruism in how China came to sit on its massive stockpile of oil.

Experts believe Beijing was driven by contingency planning for potential military action to take over the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which China considers its own territory. Tapping the reserves now has been far from ideal for Beijing — but seeing global oil prices skyrocket was not ideal, either.

Trump treads carefully on differences with China over Iran

The leaders last met in Beijing just four months ago, and could meet twice more later this year.

After the talks in May, Trump claimed Xi agreed with him that a nuclear-armed Iran is a bad idea and that the Strait of Hormuz must be reopened. Chinese officials have neither affirmed nor denied Trump’s telling of the private conversation.

The U.S. administration has also warned China not to aid Iran’s military effort. But earlier this week, Trump downplayed a Wall Street Journal report that Chinese entities had supplied Tehran with satellite images of a Jordanian military base ahead of an Iran strike in July that killed three U.S. soldiers working there.

“You know, when they say that China spies on us, I say you’re right, and we spy on them too,” Trump told reporters.

Trump at the outset of the war called the conflict a “little excursion” that would last a matter of weeks.

He also has repeatedly predicted that oil prices will quickly plummet once the conflict ends. Less than three months into the conflict, he even declared “everybody was wrong” because the most dire projections for oil prices didn’t come to pass.

The White House did not respond to queries on whether Trump credits China’s actions with helping keep oil prices from hitting the worst-case levels.

But energy analysts credit Beijing’s slashing imports as having the single greatest impact on moderating prices since the start of the war. China’s crude imports averaged just 8.1 million barrels per day in the second quarter. That’s almost 4 million barrels per day, or 32% lower than in the first three months of the year, according to U.S. data.

“It’s remarkable how China managed the market,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, a firm providing consulting services and analysis in the oil and gas industry. “They didn’t panic and by turning to their inventories they kept the price down for everybody.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

AI may be restoring the importance of the liberal arts degree, at least according to the cofounder of one of the industry’s biggest players.

Jack Clark, a billionaire cofounder of Anthropic and former journalist who majored in English literature and creative writing, says his literary education is what helped him become an influential figure in the world of AI.

“I’m a literature graduate, and I don’t think you’d put that as a cofounder of a frontier AI company, but what turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future,” he said during a conference earlier this year.

“That’s turned out to be, like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn’t have predicted,” he added.

For young people trying to figure out where they fit in an increasingly AI-fueled economy, their best bet may be learning to ask the right questions, he added.  

“The really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting if you collided different insights from many different disciplines,” he said.

Clark claimed young people should avoid pursuing basic or “rote programming” and added the degrees that are going to become even more relevant in the future are the ones that involve “synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that,” he said.

Cracks in STEM

Clark’s insight comes as more young people are grappling with what an AI-dominated future looks like for them. For decades, enrollment in STEM education exploded—partly owing to a spike in computer science interest that helped increase science and engineering graduate enrollment by more than one-third between 2000 and 2015, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES).

Between 2013 and 2023 STEM job growth also outpaced non-STEM job growth with a 26% increase, compared with a 9% increase, respectively, according to the NCSES, which is part of the National Science Foundation. 

While STEM jobs are projected to grow, some cracks have started to appear thanks to AI. A report by Anthropic researchers Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory earlier this year found AI can theoretically take over 94% of computer and math tasks. Computer programming jobs are among those that are most exposed to AI, the report found. 

Leaders at companies like Anthropic that are building the worker-replacing tech are increasingly sounding the alarm about job displacement. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei notably claimed AI would eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, before later softening his opinion. Meanwhile, the creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code, Boris Cherny, said this year “coding is practically solved” and “we’re going to start to see the title ‘software engineer’ go away.” 

For young people, the influx of AI across industries poses a significant risk as they are still trying to establish themselves in the workforce. During the same interview, Clark admitted, “I see potential weakness in early graduate employment in some industries,” without specifying which industries. He hedged his comments by saying, “I haven’t seen anything beyond that,” regarding AI-linked layoffs, although he emphasized AI will upend businesses and how business is conducted. 

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 5.7% as of June, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s up from a 3.6% unemployment rate for the same group prior to the pandemic in 2019. It’s also higher than the unemployment rate of 4.1% for all workers as of June.

Frustrated by a laggard job market, some young people have started to consider entering the trades. Vocation-focused community college enrollment increased 16% last year, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. Others have eschewed full-time positions in favor of multiple part-time jobs that allow more freedom or have started their own ventures.

Liberal arts comeback

At the same time, there is some evidence a liberal arts degree is becoming more relevant, at least in tech. Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, said earlier this year a liberal arts education will be important for developing the soft skills that are still needed when other work is delegated to AI.

“Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking,” Teevan told The Wall Street Journal. 

Michael Oakes, the executive vice president for research and economic development at Case Western Reserve University, told Fortune a classical liberal arts degree will be important because it develops workers who can navigate deep nuance and culture—qualities he said AI cannot replicate.

“As AI lowers the barrier to technical execution, the labor market premium is shifting toward a human layer of rigorous critical reasoning,” Oakes said.

Nontraditional positions in tech where a liberal arts education is important may be growing. Alphabet’s DeepMind AI lab has hired several philosophers to deal with the thorny ethical questions surrounding AI.

Clark for his part said Monday that Anthropic also employs several philosophers. 

“When was the last time you heard that a philosophy degree was like a great job prospect?” Clark said. “But it turns out that now it is.”

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on April 14, 2026.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At the end of July, I made the biggest bet of my career. I bet on Portland. It’s the biggest because of what I put behind it. My brother and I didn’t just sign a lease. We put down the cash to buy the building. 

I just opened a 10,000-square-foot, wood-fired steak and seafood restaurant in the city’s Pearl District. It’s my 27th restaurant and my first in the city where I was born. On opening night, we served more than 450 guests, and the same the following night. We turned people away both evenings, and the pace hasn’t slowed. We’re on track to top $10 million in sales in our first year.

I’ve opened restaurants all over the country, and I have never opened one this busy from day one. That is not what a lot of people would tell you to expect. During the debate over the Trail Blazers’ arena, Portland has been described as a tough city to invest in, and there is a hefty body of opinion in this country that would expect my restaurant not to be full. 

Let me be honest about the risk. When I first started looking at Portland a few years back, the bones of a great city were all there but the streets were empty. Tumbleweeds. Vacant store fronts. High-rises packed with residents but not enough people walking around. I dug deeper and decided Portland was further along than its reputation suggested, and that the distance between the two was my opportunity.

I could have opened The Malarkey anywhere. I’ve built restaurants from Southern California to Hawaii to Texas. But I chose Portland because I did the due diligence and expect to turn a profit, and because I want to help build something new in a beautiful city starting a new chapter.

I’m a chef, not an economist. But after 27 restaurants, I know something about what makes a city feel alive. My restaurant in Bend does about $8.5 million a year in a city of roughly 100,000 people. Portland has 2.5 million people in its metro area. My question was simple: what would draw them out and bring them together?

So I put my money where my mouth is and built the answer.

The numbers told me the recovery was already underway. Crime has dropped significantly in recent years and continues to fall. But spreadsheets only tell part of the story. Residents’ positive impression of their downtown surged 19 points in two years. The lights are on in the city’s high-rises at night, and every one of those windows represents a customer.

I think the people investing in Portland right now are going to look pretty damn smart. The city still has challenges, but the price has not caught up to the progress. I believe we are at the beginning of the rebirth of Portland, Oregon.

And apparently I’m not the only person who sees it. Chef Michael Mina, who operates more than 30 restaurants globally, is opening his only Pacific Northwest location at Portland’s Heathman Hotel this fall. Jeff Swickard, a University of Oregon grad, bought Big Pink, Portland’s most iconic office tower, in an all-cash deal, then bought the building next door. This month, he moved to take a majority stake in a third downtown tower. His words: “This investment…it’s about reaffirming our belief in Portland and what this city can become again.”

RAJ Sports brought the WNBA back to town, and before the Portland Fire had played a single game, CNBC valued the team at $380 million, around triple what they were paid for in 2024. The Fire saw the largest debut crowd in league history. In March, the Trail Blazers were sold for $4 billion, while state and local lawmakers recently agreed on hundreds of millions in funding for a $600 million renovation of the Blazers’ home court. Sports teams ask cities to help fund arenas regardless of a city’s politics. And the vote to move forward with funding clearly shows this is a community that wants to do business.

The last few years have been brutal for businesses everywhere: pandemic hangover, tariffs, inflation and cautious consumers. No city has been spared, and judging Portland as if it struggled in isolation is selective storytelling.

My family has been here since the 1880s. I was born here, and when I was a kid, raised in Bend, coming into Portland felt like going to the biggest city in the world. Then I traveled, cooked, and built restaurants around the country. I succeeded. I failed. I got my ass kicked a few times. I learned a lot, and eventually, I came home. Now I get to stand in a restaurant with my name on the door.

Portland has heart. It has creativity, weirdness, grit and an enormous amount of pride. People want great restaurants, vibrant neighborhoods and an active downtown, and they want to support people willing to take a chance on their city.

Was it a risk? Of course. That’s what makes it a bet. I just think it’s a good one, and the reservation book agrees with me so far.

So if you’ve been told Portland is a place where business can’t be done, come see it for yourself. Walk the Pearl. Walk downtown. Meet the people who live here, work here, and invest here. Then come to The Malarkey on a Friday or Saturday night and feel the energy in that room.

Just be sure to make a reservation first.

Brian Malarkey is a Food Network celebrity chef, restaurateur, and two-time Top Chef finalist. The Malarkey, located in Portland’s Pearl District, is his 27th restaurant.

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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I recently came across a statistic that sent chills down my spine, having been born in a communist country. According to a recent Cato Institute Survey, four in ten (38%) 18-to-29-year-olds (and almost a third of 30-to-44-year-olds) are favorable towards communism. Communism’s appeal among Gen Z is twice as high as among 45-54 year olds, and three times as high as among those aged 55-64.

Momentarily I was transported back to the economic ruin, stripped supermarket shelves of grey, repressive 1980s communist Bulgaria, and the power outages and hyperinflation that followed in the 1990s in the post-communist Soviet bloc countries.

To me, communism means being forever stuck in mediocrity, silence, and a fawning existence marked by hollow propaganda heralding non-existent equality and demanding self-sacrifice “in the name of all”. It means a ruptured relationship with the engines of a happy life, like truth, trust, empowerment and success. It means being continuously lied to by those in power, being prohibited from expressing yourself freely and repressing any big dreams of standing out from the crowd that you might otherwise have had.

What is it then that so many young American adults like about communism, I wondered, fairly certain that it was not any of the facets I associate communist regimes with.

To get some answers I interviewed Fenley Scurlock (18), co-author of Down to Business and now a freshman at Brown University majoring in philosophy, and Atlanta-based Harper Bruner (17), a senior at Stanford Online High School focusing on history.

Despite communism’s collapse in 20^th century Soviet bloc countries, the last decade has witnessed a surprising surge in interest in communism and socialism among the US public and journalists globally. Analysis by my consultancy AKAS reveals that Google searches for communism have reached an all-time high in the US, up 82% since 2006. Ahrefs analysis of 684 million English-language news pages published globally between 2016 and 2026 revealed that news mentions of socialism are now on a par with mentions of capitalism, while mentions of communism, although at a lower level, are at recent high.

In our conversation, Bruner observed that young adults are picking up on the heightened communism- and socialism-related rhetoric being “thrown around” by politicians and news commentators. Indeed, President Trump drastically escalated his warnings about communism this summer, mentioning the term 81 times in the two weeks surrounding 4^th July. Calling his opponents “communists” seems to be one of Trump’s midterm election campaign tactics.

Bruner explained that young people are confused and turn to Google search and AI for clarification on the cacophony of terms – communism, socialism, utilitarianism, authoritarianism – that hold no historical resonance for them, being three generations removed from the past they signify.

Contrary to the political rhetoric’s intended effect, according to my interviewees most young people are not frightened by the threat of communism or socialism. They associate these terms with a different, often more promising, economic reality rather than with a political regime, let alone an authoritarian one (another term poorly understood among the young). As Bruner remarked, “We grew up without memories of the Soviet era. We view these terms more abstractly and associate words like communism with resources rather than with authoritarianism.”

Scurlock argued that the Republican red-baiting rhetoric has backfired, triggering instead a favorable attitude towards the ill-understood concepts of communism and socialism among young people. “Republicans are used to labelling measures like universal healthcare and universal basic income […] as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’, which they use as scare words. But when you see something that looks good for people being labelled socialism, or communism, you think, ‘Well, those things seem good, maybe that means that socialism is good’.”

At the heart of communism and socialism’s disproportionate appeal among young people lies their increasingly curtailed economic prospects, which both Scurlock and Bruner talked about at length. With 53% of US 18-to-29s favorable towards socialism but only 45% favorable towards capitalism, Gen Z evidently feel let down by capitalism. And they are indeed wrestling with unprecedented economic precarity, as the rising age of first-time home buyers indicates (29 in 1981 vs. 40 in 2025).

“I think the problem is the lived economic frustrations associated with high costs of living, soaring house prices, student debt, low student wage. So, when you live under these difficult market conditions, the ideas and promises of universal equity or wealth redistribution naturally catch your attention,” rationalized Bruner. Having volunteered to support Hispanic immigrants she was keen to speak about the extreme economic inequality she had witnessed. “Some people don’t have access to a proper education, to a house or to technology… others don’t even have access to basic things like pens, pencils, diapers, period products and paper.”

Scurlock drew a detailed picture of failing capitalism, which so many from his generation fervently averse to. “In the last 40 years …we’ve seen large corporations become a sort of authoritarian entity in themselves. We see billionaires buying media companies and influencing their trajectory, the wealthy actively donating money to fund certain political candidates that they then can make demands of. We see monopolies, multinational corporations that are too big to fail. In other words, we see something that in one sense is not actually capitalism, something like a crony capitalism.” He further laid out the extraordinary economic unfairness his generation perceives: “You see companies outsourcing labor to China, to underpaid and often underage workers. You see a high level of corruption in government due to corporate interference. Young people look at our current system specifically in America and see that this system isn’t working.”

My conversations and research left me much less shocked at that statistic that had sent chills down my spine a few weeks prior. I see that many young people are searching for alternative systems to the one so many see as broken. Politicians must listen to them and provide an alternative that does not relegate Gen Z to the sidelines of prosperity and personal fulfilment but puts them at the centre instead. In Scurlock’s words, “We want more regulation, more individual ground-level say in the economy and less of one CEO at the top throwing $100 million to secure the election of a candidate who cuts their taxes.”

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump has made more securities trades since returning to office than every member of Congress combined.

According to a Bloomberg analysis published this week, he has made roughly 28,700 in 17 months, or about 80 trades every market day,

It’s a new habit of Trump’s. In his first term, Trump’s financial disclosures consisted mostly of his real estate and privately held businesses. 

For his second term, the periodic reports he filed through early 2026 showed an account buying municipal and corporate bonds—more than $100 million by August 2025 and more than $337 million in all—along with bank preferred securities and bond ETFs.

The stock trading surfaced in May of this year, when a first-quarter filing listed roughly 3,600 transactions in 90 days. Then the annual disclosure, released June 30 at nearly a thousand pages, showed more than 21,000 trades in 2025, worth between $600 million and $1.86 billion, at 85 per market day. Trump lists eight separate investment accounts but doesn’t give any indication of which institutions manage them.

“I believe that that is a huge problem,” Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush and now teaches securities law at the University of Minnesota, told Fortune. “I’ve gone through every president. I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.”

Since Lyndon Johnson, essentially every president has used a blind trust, held index funds, or just owned Treasuries. Jimmy Carter, for example, put the family peanut business in a blind trust that eventually sold it.

However, Trump’s portfolio is handled differently. In May, after the stock trades appeared, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fortune the assets are held in a trust managed by the president’s children. Eric Trump posted that any suggestion a family member was buying individual stocks “would be a lie and blatantly false.” 

“There’s a financial conflict of interest if he has an ownership interest in the account,” Painter said. “It doesn’t matter who manages it.”

In a statement, the White House’s Ingle told Fortune that third-party financial institutions independently manage the portfolio through “computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.”

He did not answer questions about which institutions manage the portfolio or why the White House described a family trust in May. “There are no conflicts of interest,” the statement said.

Fortune’s review of the president’s first-quarter filing in May found the account bought up to $1.38 million of DoorDash stock; in April, Trump had DoorDash deliver a McDonald’s order to the White House for a tipped-worker tax event.

The account sold hyperscaler stocks in the $5 million-$25 million range on Feb. 10, the day after a chip-tariff carveout leaked. It bought energy stocks in the weeks after the Iran war began, as Trump was downplaying the conflict as a short-term conflagration. It bought Cal-Maine, the country’s largest egg producer, during the egg shortage and sold it two months later for two to five times more.

Every executive branch official except the president and vice president has to abide by 18 U.S.C. 208, a criminal statute that bars participation in government matters that affect one’s own holdings. “If he were Treasury Secretary, he’d have a big, big problem with that account,” Painter said.

He was careful, though, not to allege that anyone is trading on government information, which could constitute criminal insider trading, explaining that stock-trading disclosures can’t prove that. 

That, Painter said, is the argument for a ban. A new House measure, passed in July and attached to a voter-ID bill, bars members, spouses and dependent children from trading stocks; Trump endorsed it in his State of the Union address, saying it should pass “without delay” so Congress “cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.”

Yet when Sen. Josh Hawley advanced a version last July that would have extended the ban to the president and vice president—not until 2029, after Trump leaves office—Trump called him a “pawn” playing “right into the dirty hands of the Democrats,” and a “second-tier Senator.”

To Painter, this is all familiar. On Jan. 6, 2021—”obviously, there was some other news that day,” he added—he and Indiana University law professor Donna Nagy published a letter to congressional leadership calling for a ban on stock trading by members, the president and the vice president.

Neither party acted on it; Republicans wanted to avoid embarrassing Trump, while Democrats wanted to avoid embarrassing Nancy Pelosi, whose husband is an active trader.

The stakes are pretty clear to Painter. “If the president owns a bunch of oil company stocks, he’s making money if the price of oil goes up,” he said. “So if he bombs Iran and the price of oil goes up and he owns oil company stocks, he’s making money, and the rest of us are paying for  $6 gas.”

The account bought energy stocks in March.

“If it’s like a mutual fund,” Painter said, “why not just buy a mutual fund?”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Hours after Better.com founder Vishal Garg was ousted as CEO this summer, the board member picked to replace him texted Garg after midnight.

“You are the last person I am texting tonight—you are on my mind,” interim CEO Daniel Lewis wrote, according to a log of texts between the two reviewed by Fortune. “You are in my heart, whether you believe it or not.”

The two men had a history of mutual affection, even if circumstances were now testing it. In April, Garg texted Lewis about becoming “BFFs” as the pair collaborated. At one point, it seemed like the engaged investor was just the boost Garg needed to help turn around the business he founded in 2014 to make getting a mortgage faster and cheaper online, and grow the flagship “Tinman” AI product for approving and closing home loans. 

Within weeks of the CEO change, however, the budding bromance was officially dead. Garg took Lewis to task in a group chat on X with Better.com investors, blasting the new CEO for working remotely in the South of France instead of the New York City office. Lewis hit back with a seven-part thread on X questioning his predecessor’s credibility and calling Garg a “bully.” Better’s board claims the company “accumulated more than $2 billion in net losses and lost more than 90% of its value as a public enterprise” under Garg’s tenure.

Lewis ended the X thread with a line summing up his perspective on the relationship.

“The love died when the diligence began,” Lewis wrote.

Garg remains on the board for now, and he and his backers are fighting Lewis and the rest of the board for control over the $230 million company. The decision will come down to shareholders including Activant Capital, Framework Ventures, and SoftBank Capital Partners. Rarely does such a feud spill out into the open. But with control of the publicly traded company set to be decided by a shareholder vote—the contest deadline is Oct. 20—both men have taken their cases public, through dueling SEC filings, competing threads on X, and press releases. Fortune reviewed thousands of text messages exchanged between Garg and Lewis over 13 months that show how quickly the kinship between a founder and an investor who wanted to coach him pivoted into open hostility.

For any founder who has taken outside money, or any investor who has gotten close to one, the Garg-Lewis rupture is a cautionary tale about how fast a partnership built on shared ambition can curdle—and how little a boardroom, or a friendship, can do to contain it once it does.

Behind the curtain

If the name Better sounds familiar, it’s probably thanks to the PR nightmare that followed when Garg, in December 2021 during the height of the COVID pandemic, laid off 900 employees on a Zoom call. Garg was accused of being insensitive and tone deaf about the job losses, which he blamed on a lack of productivity and a collapse in demand for refinancing. “I got some negative press for that,” said Garg, referring to the Zoom call. “But it also saved the company because the company was burning $100 million a month, right? We had too many people.”

The losses didn’t stop after the 2021 layoffs but in recent years they have begun to recede. Better’s annual reports show net losses of $301 million that year, then $877.1 million in 2022, $536.4 million in 2023, $206.3 million in 2024, and $165.9 million in 2025. Revenue has also been on the rise, from $72.3 million in 2023 to $108.5 million in 2024, and $164.9 million in 2025. 

In its annual reports for 2023 and 2024, Better disclosed a weakness in internal controls after an outside law firm’s review of the company’s culture found that “certain actions taken by our CEO failed to set a tone at the top that supported a strong culture of internal controls.” The 2024 report states Garg completed executive coaching “to address behavioral aspects of his management style to the satisfaction of the board of directors.” The tone-at-the-top weakness and others were remediated as of Dec. 31, 2025 and Garg noted that the SEC and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau investigated and “found nothing” against him or the company.

Lewis, who founded investment firm Orange Capital 20 years ago, decided to invest in Better in 2025, becoming one of the largest outside shareholders (Lewis currently holds a stake between 2% and 3% in the company). From July 2025 to August 2026, Lewis and Garg exchanged at least 2,000 text messages, according to a log Garg shared with Fortune. The two compared notes about how to strengthen Better’s operations, and Lewis offered up investor relations advice to Garg. Eventually, their texts spilled over to their personal lives and families. Lewis invited Garg out to Nashville and got him to meet up with Lewis and his wife at the swanky sushi spot Nobu in downtown Manhattan.

The two bonded over their shared passion for the minutiae of corporate finance and AI, humblebragging about ducking out of date nights and parties in favor of trying to “3x” in distressed debt trades. 

“Birds of a feather,” Garg wrote to Lewis when he discovered they both made similar trades during the Great Financial Crisis.

The two men came from different worlds but shared a love for finance. Garg, 48, grew up in Queens and went to public school, taking his first job at 14 making $6.50 an hour on a Wall Street trading desk, he said. He dropped out of traditional finance in 1998 to strike out on his own, starting an online student loan company, MyRichUncle.com, before he founded Better.

Lewis, 51, is a die-hard Buffalo Bills fan who finished Cornell at 20 before moving to Tokyo to work for Citibank. He started on the Salomon Brothers trading floor in the 1990s, investing globally in special situations (unusual, one-time events that might be fatal for a business). He ran a hedge fund and later a family office, and spent five years running a Toronto software company.

Both thrive on the grind. Last year during the holidays, Garg told Lewis to “have a tequila shot and just let it all go” while on vacation in Mexico. “My ability to relax is the same as yours,” wrote Lewis. “Doing my best.”

In an October 2025 text to Lewis, Garg wrote “this time around” he is focusing on humility and gratitude, and that he printed the two words out “in big type and put up on my wall so I don’t forget.” Garg also texted Lewis about his CEO role, writing that he needed to run leadership for the direct-to-consumer division’s sales culture “in the kindest way, a boiler room sweat shop.”

“My flaw was hiring and promoting same type of people. So the managers and workers were friends,” wrote Garg to Lewis. “I need the opposite. I should be friends with the workers. But they should hate their managers.”

Lewis also shared some of his personal victories with Garg, sending him an article about Orange Capital’s investment in a real estate investment trust that was sold to Hong Kong interests in 2016. His feats as an investor, Lewis told Garg, made him “a good wingman.”

“I own the record for fastest control proxy fight ever—8 days,” wrote Lewis. “It took me 8 days from announcement to take over the board of the largest hotel reit in Canada.”

Lewis repeatedly offered IR advice to Garg to share with Better’s executive team. He sent Garg feedback on draft 8-K filings and press releases and tried to keep Garg from responding to short sellers on X. In multiple messages, Lewis advised Garg to “stay above the fray” when it came to his critics.

“Please be the elevated CEO we want,” Lewis wrote to Garg in April. “I love you man,” Garg wrote on March 26, thanking Lewis for talking to other potential investors. “You don’t need to be doing this and you are.”

Lewis replied, “True friendships take years. We are early in ours. I would like you in my life—ups and downs.” Two weeks later on April 8, Garg wrote that he was “Hoping to be BFFs!”

The unraveling

By spring of 2026, Lewis had signed an NDA and was more deeply enmeshed with the company than ever, helping Better with strategy. Garg said Lewis was helping him further downsize, and the two cut about $1 million a month in expenses. A draft memorandum of understanding crafted by Lewis and reviewed by Fortune dated May 2026 describes a plan to explore a board overhaul—with Lewis added as a director—and a revamp of Better’s executive compensation plan with terms tied to stock price, revenue, and GAAP-based profits. The MOU also calls for cancellation of millions in performance-share unit grants awarded to Better’s board members, canceling the board’s consulting agreements, and reducing the cash retainers paid to directors to “zero or nominal amount.”

The implied targets of the MOU included Harit Talwar, who has been Better’s board chairman since August 2023. He got a stock award valued at $4.1 million, the 2026 proxy statement shows. Another is Prabhu Narasimhan, who has also served as a director since August 2023. He got an award valued at $3.8 million. Neither are independent directors and both have consulting arrangements with Better. The PSU grants to Talwar and Narasimhan are out of step with governance norms and their total pay is millions richer than board members are paid at similarly sized companies. 

Garg claims Lewis falsely told the board that Garg supported the plan to rescind their equity grants and remove half the board.

“I think that is how he eventually turned the board and these four members of the board against me,” said Garg in an interview. “And then engineered the coup that he did where he joined the board and… days later ousted me as the CEO and became the interim CEO himself.”

But in an interview with Fortune, Lewis disputed that he made false claims to the board and called the allegation that he duped Garg and the board “spin.” Lewis said Garg had previously told him the reason the company was failing was in part because the board wouldn’t let him take action. So Lewis worked on a plan to remove directors.

But as Lewis began working more closely with Better executives, he had a chance to see “with my own eyes” how various employees were treated in the company and how information and strategy were articulated. Lewis says he soon came to a realization: Garg was the problem.

“I have never in my career—which is 30 years, involved special situations, distressed operations, trading floors, hedge funds, and as I said, running a software business—seen a culture promoted by the CEO that was more the antithesis of my personal values,” said Lewis.

In addition, Lewis said Garg was making promises he didn’t ultimately deliver, and built a culture that was misaligned with the innovative tech being developed by employees at the company.

“Late-night texts, swearing campaigns, saying that he was going to disembowel people publicly because that was the way to show people that that’s how you need to work, threatening if they’re not on the phone for more than four hours a day that he’s going to fire them,” said Lewis. “Just an endless amount of abhorrent behavior.”

Garg denies threatening employees the way Lewis described, but acknowledged to Fortune that, in the age of AI, he believes, loan officers spending fewer than four hours a day talking to consumers needed to be “coached up or coached out.”

“Daniel has made a habit of twisting my words,” wrote Garg. “The bigger question is – what has he ever achieved himself and how does that help in what he can do for better as its CEO.”

By August, tensions had reached a boiling point. The two men differ in their accounts of what precisely went down, but the facts are that on July 27 Lewis officially joined the board. On August 3, Garg stepped down as CEO, effective immediately, and the board appointed Lewis to serve as CEO on an interim basis. Says Lewis: I “believed that without a significant change in leadership, we would never be able to realize our potential and that was unanimously approved by the board,” said Lewis. “Not my agenda, but what they all agreed needed to happen.”

‘My phone starts blowing up’

When Garg got word he was out, he was advised to remain “calm and collected.”

“They thought I was going to go bananas,” said Garg. His ouster happened on a Monday and on Tuesday, Garg said he “was free.” He went to brunch on the Lower East Side at 10 in the morning and then to drinks in Soho in the afternoon, followed by a stroll through the West Village.

“It’s been 30 years since I had a Tuesday afternoon in the middle [of the week] for free,” said Garg. “And then, my phone starts blowing up.”

The news of Garg’s departure had been announced after Monday’s stock market close, and in the ensuing hours Better’s stock price cratered 37%. Agitated investors were messaging Garg. 

Garg said he left Better quietly because he didn’t want to risk his ability to raise capital in the future. But with the stock tanking, and Garg still on the board, he says he couldn’t help but get involved.

On a Zoom call that Wednesday, Garg said he got an offer to remain with the company through a transition period, and met up for lunch on Friday with two board members who said his ouster was a mistake. Garg claims it was the board members who gave him the idea to get majority support to make changes to Better’s board if he could muster the votes. Garg said he now feels he was coerced into leaving his chief executive post at Better.

Documents reviewed by Fortune show an email sent from Better’s corporate secretary to Garg on August 6, cc’ed to the board’s compensation and nominating committee, plus Talwar. The message, sent to Garg’s Gmail account, included an attachment with proposed transition terms for Garg to receive $450,000 in pay, $300,000 of equity in lieu of salary during the transition period, vesting on 575,000 outstanding performance share units (PSUs), and a new grant of 200,000 PSUs for service as vice chair, plus the board would consider another 100,000 PSUs. The agreement was never approved and Garg says he turned it down.

After Garg’s ouster, the tone of his texts to Lewis grew ice cold. “My family is asking me about my health insurance. Would you please advise me on that. Thank you.” wrote Garg, according to texts seen by Fortune. “It’s embarrassing.”

Lewis asked Garg to “kindly” stop emailing him multiple times a day and asked that Garg stop contacting Better employees, customers, and investors. Lewis encouraged Garg to “seek guidance” from his executive coach on the difference between a board role and an executive role.

“Vishal. Remember, every move you make—I have planned for it in advance,” wrote Lewis on Aug. 11. “#boyscout.”

When Better published a press release on Aug. 14 calling Garg’s leadership destructive and stating the company had GAAP net losses exceeding $1.5 billion since 2022, Garg  fired back on X: “#Bubkis. Yeah that’s Boy Scout for FAKE NEWS. Sacre bleu Daniel, I think the French air is getting to you.”

The fight for control

As the two duke it out, clamor about the Better board and its ability to oversee the company is increasing among investors. Better’s stock has yet to regain the lost value that followed Garg’s departure. The board is also being scrutinized because it signaled to shareholders an amicable, orderly handover from Garg to Lewis, only to sow chaos by taking it back a few weeks later and claiming Garg was “unfit” to lead Better due to his conduct.

Garg is asking shareholders to remove five of Better’s eight directors, including Lewis and board chairman Talwar. If he succeeds, Garg and two other board members would be the only ones left, although it’s not clear that would be an obvious win for Garg. One of the board members who would remain is Hugh Frater, former CEO of Fannie Mae and a founding partner at BlackRock. Frater has said he will step down if Garg returns in any sort of executive capacity. The other remaining director, Michael Farello, is considering stepping down from the board in 2027, which would leave Garg largely in control, the company has said. Garg says a new board could hire a CEO with stronger qualifications than Lewis, and he would take a product and innovation role for himself.

If the current board prevails, Lewis will stay on as interim CEO while a search committee he doesn’t have a role on will work to find a permanent CEO successor. Lewis says Better will narrow its focus to wholesale lending, home equity lines of credit, and partnerships with consumer platforms.

In an interview, Lewis said he is also focused on cultural change at Better, and plans to champion its technology and employees. “It is naturally the time for us to go from a founder-led company based on bold promises, into the future of execution, which is a very different set of skills,” said Lewis. The plan is “to coalesce this team around a vision where we can generate sustainable profitability versus just being a dreaming fintech that someday will be profitable.”

As for the proxy advisory firms who advise shareholders on such matters, ISS and Glass Lewis recommend investors support the current Better board. ISS stated in its report that the company has lost the “majority of its value under [Garg’s] leadership” and Glass Lewis pointed to “prolonged value erosion” during Garg’s tenure. Conversely Egan-Jones recommended that shareholders vote for Garg’s group. Its report states that cumulative total shareholder return was negative 53% since Better’s August 2023 public debut, while the past two years show positive 14% total shareholder return, which is evidence that the tech-led strategy, including Tinman AI, has begun gaining traction.

The contest deadline is October 20. On Friday, Garg announced a slate of three directors to work alongside him on a newly refreshed board: Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon, L Catterton senior advisor David Heidecorn, and Activant Capital’s Steve Sarracino. As shareholders contemplate which side to back in the ongoing vote, the only thing clear at this point is that the friendship between Garg and Lewis is officially lost, according to both parties.

“I thought Daniel was my friend,” said Garg in an email. “And then he proceeded to earn my trust and backstabbed me in the worst possible way.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

We Work In AI. We’ve Seen It Eliminate Jobs. We’ve Also Seen It Create More Jobs

Silicon Valley used to encourage one another to “move fast and break things.” Then we broke everything. And people started to get angry.

Every major tech change throughout history has caused painful disruption. Farm families are still suffering from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, which occurred more than a century ago. Absorbing each new technological onslaught has taken society a lot of time, but at least it also took a while for the innovations to fully infiltrate the economy. Not this time. The AI transition is being compressed into a few years. 

People are logically panicked about their jobs being replaced by machines, just like the men who destroyed factories and left notes from the fictional Ned Ludd, thereby launching the Luddite movement. But here’s the thing, every technology disruption, every one over history, has created more jobs than it destroys. And we have good reason to believe that the AI Revolution will do the same. 

Between the two of us, we’ve been in the technology industry for over 70 years. Most of that time is from Pat, who joined Intel at 18, became its CEO, and now is a General Partner at a venture capital firm that invests in deep tech. The other, Naveen, has founded three AI startups, selling one to Intel, another for over a billion dollars, and now leads a third with a valuation of $4.5 billion. 

Just as significantly, we both grew up in rural America. Pat grew up on a farm in Robesonia, Pennsylvania (pop. 2,035), and Naveen in the Appalachian coal-mining town of Whitesburg, Kentucky (pop. 1,711). We’ve seen how traditional industries get disrupted, how jobs disappear, and how lives get disrupted by technological changes that come into town whether anyone wanted them or not.

Because AI is creating new processes and products, novel occupations are being churned out as fast as old ones are disappearing. At the Intel fabs where chips are made, Pat had safety technicians. Part of their job was to check for chemical leaks. These were exceedingly dangerous jobs. Most gases coming out of those pipes could kill you. We brought in robot dogs to do that task. That allowed us to move some of those safety technicians to become fleet managers of those dogs, which was not only a much safer and more pleasant job, but a much more interesting one. Plus, those dogs checked the pipes far more often, making the entire fab safer for everyone.  

Or take Naveen’s own company. They got a chip designed in six months without a dedicated team, something that wasn’t possible before AI. That’s not a story about needing fewer engineers — it’s a story about how many more things you can try.  His company’s growth is being hindered by its inability to hire people fast enough. That’s not a story about needing fewer engineers. It’s a story about how many more things you can try. The limit on building anything hard was about how many attempts you could afford before you ran out of time or money. AI allows engineers to test more ideas, to slough off the grunt work and be more creative.

AI isn’t showing up because we have too many workers. In a lot of places, it’s showing up because we don’t have enough. More than 11,000 Americans turn 65 every single day, and birth rates are falling across most of the developed world. Healthcare is the fastest-growing sector in the country, and the aging that drives it isn’t reversible. The work that’s growing fastest is work done with people and with things — the kind AI is furthest from touching. The AI buildout itself is short roughly 350,000 construction workers this year. Electrician wages are rising two to four times faster than wages overall. An underreported constraint on data center expansion isn’t chips or capital — it’s people who can wire a building.

Labor shortages that used to be cyclical are starting to look permanent. Japan hit this wall years before everyone else and turned to automation; it now has one of the highest concentrations of industrial robots in the world, which is a big part of how its factories and hospitals stay staffed.  Two of the fastest-growing job categories in the country right now are construction and healthcare — one that works with things, one that works with people. Neither is what AI is automating. 911 call centers are short-staffed almost everywhere. A company Pat’s venture capital firm has invested in, RapidSOS, uses AI to transcribe and translate calls as they come in, so a dispatcher who speaks only English can take a call in any language. This doesn’t replace anyone. It just means dispatchers spend more of the call on the emergency and less on the paperwork. 

In addition to his AI companies, Naveen is also a race car driver (56^th place at Le Mans Prototype 2 last year!).  When he first got involved in racing, a team consisted of about ten members. The DAG (Data Acquisition Guru) would pull out the data from a car after each race and analyze it. Now, not only is that data received in real time, allowing the engineer to use it to make decisions on refueling and tire changes, but AI grabs and analyzes the radio communication between all the other teams and factors that in too. Teams now have about 20 people. And races are way better. 

These job changes seem frightening because past tech revolutions have shut people out. A shoemaker needed unattainable capital to start a boot factory. To join the dot-com boom, you needed the education and engineering mind to write computer code. Not with AI. Anyone can learn to vibe code in a weekend. And for free. There are going to be more entrepreneurs than we can imagine, and they are going to hire people with more interesting jobs than we now have. In turn, they’ll create new products. When Naveen courts new hires, part of his pitch is that he’ll teach them how to start their own company. His only ask is that they let him invest. So far he’s written ten checks. The economy is not a fixed number of jobs. It’s a pie that is about to grow exponentially. When you make the supply easier, it creates a demand. You’re going to have a world in which people want customized software, and they’ll want it right away. That’s a lot of new jobs with titles we haven’t invented yet. 

Pat once went to a family reunion in Pennsylvania. His dad came from a family of ten, and all of his father’s brothers and brothers-in-law were around the table. He was looking at Lester and Clarence and the rest of them, and he noticed that not one of them has all his fingers. One cousin had both legs cut off below the knees by a mower, one lost his left arm in a combine, one has permanently dislocated ribs from a cow in labor, and one has a shunt in his brain after being kicked by a bull. Farming is a very rewarding profession, but in romanticizing the past we sometimes forget how rough it was.

Naveen has four kids. His two oldest, 18 and 19, grew up in a world he could largely predict when they were born. The youngest are one and three, and he has no idea what world they’ll inherit. Pat has eight grandchildren who will never do the work his uncles did, with the hands his uncles lost. And all of them will enter a working world neither of us can picture. We’re not worried about whether there’ll be work for them. We’re worried about whether Americans waste the next ten years holding on to a romanticized past instead of building the more interesting world they will inherit. 

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For many kids, the last bell of the school year sounds like freedom. But for millions of others, it signals the end of a reliable meal. More than 21 million children qualify for free and reduced-price school lunches. During summer, that number drops to 3.2 million. The children left behind have not stopped being hungry, but the system that feeds them was built around a school calendar that runs out in June.

A child’s need to eat does not expire, and the stakes reach past the meal on the tray. Food is a precondition for everything else we want for children: the ability to learn and thrive academically, relief for families who should not have to choose between groceries and rent and the chance for young people to stay on track toward graduation and work. When there is nearly an 18 million gap in childhood access for three months a year, we’re spending down our collective future, one skipped lunch at a time.

The data points to a challenge that extends beyond any one company or industry.

Tyson Foods partnered with GENYOUth to support summer meal programs operated by schools in Georgia and Arkansas to better understand and address the barriers schools face in reaching children during the summer. We made a $150,000 investment to help fill key gaps. But more than 60 districts applied, requesting about $600,000, roughly four times the available funding. What we learned helps explain why the gap persists.

The gap isn’t local. It’s national.

What we saw in two states reflects a national shortfall. For every 100 children who get a subsidized lunch during the school year, roughly only 16 get one after it ends.

The reasons are familiar, which is what makes them solvable. A meal site three miles away might as well be thirty without a bus. A parent working a late shift can’t access a meal that ends at noon. Many families never learn the program exists.

The good news is that participation increases when access expands. Participation rose 12.6% in 2024, some 352,855 more children fed, as new, rural and non-congregate options took hold, and Summer EBT became permanent. That’s important momentum to harness.

The shortfall that punishes success

The system can also make serving more children harder, not easier.

USDA reimburses summer meal sites per meal served and doesn’t cover fixed costs or unexpected expenses that don’t scale with participation. As a result, districts must fundraise to cover the difference, roughly 50 cents a lunch and a dollar a breakfast.

That creates a trap. The more children a district needs to feed, the more dollars it must source locally, while communities with the greatest need often have the fewest resources to raise them. Some respond the only way the math allows: they feed fewer children.

Supply and demand, on purpose

Our partnership with national nonprofit GENYOUth addresses both access to meals and participation. Our grant dollars stretch what federal reimbursement otherwise may not support: labor, refrigeration, fuel or an effective serving line. Those operational resources often determine whether a site opens.

To inspire greater meal participation, food funding is paired with physical activity kits.  Pairing meals with physical activity and other enrichment turns a site that once served only a summer meal into a place children want to visit and spend time. The activities create the draw; the meals deliver the impact.

At Lake Hamilton Schools in Pearcy, Arkansas, where 70 percent of students qualify for subsidized meals, leaders put grant funds toward labor, freeing other money for local produce. Removing operational pressures freed the district to focus on reaching more children. They also bought fans and cooling towels so workers could serve in the heat.

Cherokee County, Georgia, outfitted buses as air-conditioned mobile dining rooms—directly addressing the transportation and accessibility gap. Another district hired teachers to read stories and lead craft time alongside meal service, and meals served rose 10 percent year over year.

Schools told us the grants made a meaningful difference in their ability to serve their community. Every district rated its grant’s impact at 8 or above out of 10, and three in four said the money helped sustain an existing program.  The results are encouraging, but they also highlight how much need remains unmet.

September is Hunger Action Month. Here is the ask.

To companies in the food industry and beyond: Ground your commitments in a clear understanding of the need. Measure demand, listen to the organizations closest to it and use what you learn to direct resources where they can have the greatest impact. No single commitment will meet the full scale of the challenge—but greater visibility into unmet need can help companies make smarter investments and identify where broader collaboration is needed.

To school and program leaders: Keep telling us what you need in your own words. Every good decision we made to direct Tyson Foods’ donations traces back to something a school nutrition director said out loud, including the request for fans and cooling towels.

To policymakers: Reimbursement rates are a critical part of the equation. When they don’t fully reflect the cost of providing a meal, districts serving the greatest number of children face an additional funding gap. Bringing reimbursement closer to the true cost of service would strengthen the foundation for summer nutrition programs—and help philanthropic and corporate dollars go further.

Summer meals can reach more children in need, and our program with GENYOUth demonstrated that communities are ready, resourceful and successful when additional funding is provided. The system is running at a fraction of its own capacity, held back by cents on the meal and a missing ride to lunch. The demand is in the data. The barriers are known.  The opportunity is ours to seize.

Tim Grailer is the Head of Community Impact & Relations at Tyson Foods.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Beauty brands can command eye-popping prices, whether they’re celebrity-founded and internet-famous or built around a doctor’s name. E.l.f. Beauty agreed to pay up to $1 billion for Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, Coty paid $600 million for 51% of Kylie Cosmetics, and Shiseido spent $450 million on Dr. Dennis Gross Skincare.

Now Blackstone is testing whether a far less famous skincare name can command an even higher valuation. The investment firm is exploring a sale of ZO Skin Health that could value the company at around $2 billion, Reuters reported this week, citing people familiar with the matter. Unlike celebrity-driven brands such as Rhode or Kylie Cosmetics, ZO built much of its business not through influencers or department stores but through dermatologists and medical-aesthetics practices.

Founded in 2007 by dermatologist Dr. Zein Obagi, ZO initially followed a more traditional beauty-retail path, launching at Nordstrom that same year, according to the company’s own timeline. But it soon moved away from department-store shelves and reoriented around physicians instead.

Imagine walking into a dermatologist’s office or med spa with acne, pigmentation, or signs of aging. Instead of scrolling past a TikTok creator calling a serum “so good,” a professional tells you your routine should include a cleanser, exfoliant, serum, and treatment cream. For consumers already seeking help with a skin concern, that recommendation can carry considerably more weight.

ZO also gave medical practices a financial reason to stay involved. In 2012, it launched physician affiliate and revenue-sharing programs that let participating doctors earn commissions when patients replenished products through physician-linked virtual stores.

The brand embeds itself in the treatment room, too, not just on the retail shelf. Its pigmentation and skin-conditioning protocols can be paired with procedures such as lasers, chemical peels and microneedling, and the company provides protocol training, staff education and support around product launches and merchandising, according to Med Spa Vendor Hub.

Those tactics are not necessarily unique to ZO. Rivals including L’Oréal-owned SkinCeuticals, AbbVie’s SkinMedica, Skinbetter Science and Alastin also court dermatologists and medical-aesthetics practices with their own professional distribution and provider-support programs.

Aesthetic nurse specialist Roxette Romanes of SkinSpirit’s Roslyn Heights location said ZO’s economics are broadly similar to those of other professional skincare brands the clinic carries. “Everyone is pretty on par on prices. I don’t think there’s a skin care brand that is more or less. They are pretty similar regarding pricing,” she said, adding, “Other than getting the sales from the actual skin care, I don’t think there’s more incentive than that.”

Tight distribution and word-of-mouth

The company tightly controls where it sells its products. Today, ZO says authentic products are available through its official website and authorized providers, with some prescription products requiring a physician; it no longer relies on department-store shelves.

That restricted distribution does more than create exclusivity. It helps ZO protect premium pricing and gives medical practices a reason to keep selling the brand. The company says it works to minimize unauthorized sales “to protect our customers, along with the integrity of our trusted physician partners’ businesses.”

But ZO doesn’t rely entirely on providers to create demand. Board-certified New York City plastic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Lisiecki said the brand already has strong recognition among patients.

“It’s been around for a long time, it’s got a lot of brand recognition, it’s a well-respected name in the skin care industry. There’s some products that they have that are really popular that a lot of people really like. I get requests for their sunscreen all the time,” he said, adding that “a lot of patients know of it and ask about it sometimes even before I’ve given someone their post-operative skincare regimen.”

Nearly 40% of ZO Skin Health customers at medical-aesthetics practices made a repeat ZO purchase in 2025, according to Guidepoint Qsight’s 2026 Aesthetic Industry Impact Players report, which draws on transaction data covering more than $17 billion in verified patient spending from thousands of U.S. aesthetics practices. Qsight said that was the highest patient-retention rate among the leading professional-grade skincare brands in its analysis.

By 2016, ZO said, it had become the No. 1 physician-dispensed medical skincare brand in the European Union. As a private company, though, it doesn’t disclose annual sales, making its overall financial scale difficult to gauge.

Public filings from Cutera, ZO’s former distributor in Japan, offer a rare glimpse. Cutera reported $34 million in revenue from ZO skincare products in Japan in 2023, down from $42.5 million in 2022 — 16% and 17% of Cutera’s total revenue, respectively. The figures don’t represent ZO’s total sales in Japan, but they show the brand was large enough in a single overseas market to make up a meaningful share of another company’s business.

Blackstone noticed the model years ago. When it acquired a majority stake in ZO in 2020, Senior Managing Director Todd Hirsch called it “one of the fastest-growing brands in the rapidly expanding professional skincare market.”

ZO may not have Rhode’s social-media fame or Kylie Cosmetics’ celebrity machine. But its physician network, tightly controlled distribution, premium-priced products, international reach and strong repeat purchasing help explain why a brand many consumers barely know could command a valuation approaching $2 billion.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This week, the Gates Foundation announced a $1 billion commitment to build and deliver equitable AI tools to schools, frontline health care workers, farmers, and more. Of that commitment, 40% will go toward education, including AI tutoring to individualize learning in classrooms both in the U.S. and abroad. 

That’s a whopping $400 million infusion into schools for a tool that’s only been around (at least commercially) for a handful of years. The AI push is part of a broader U.S. education strategy the foundation laid out in July, which aims to help up to 10 million more Americans earn “credentials of value” by 2045, the year the foundation plans to close.

And it comes at a time when the value of classroom technology is being questioned.

Test scores have dropped among some students over the same time period since computer assessments were widely implemented. Meanwhile, research shows that ever since the U.S. spent $30 billion to swap textbooks for laptops, Gen Z has shown to be less cognitively capable than previous generations, according to written testimony by neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath presented to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce earlier this year. 

“Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them,” he wrote. 

The skepticism is already shaping policy. On Sept. 2, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced what the city called the nation’s broadest moratorium on student-facing generative AI. It’s a one-year pause for students in 2-K through 8th grade, affecting nearly 600,000 students, or roughly two-thirds of the system.

“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” Mamdani said in a statement. “We do not see it that way.” He added the city would spend the year studying the technology’s impacts.

Yet, major philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation continue to pour money into introducing more technology in schools. While the Gates Foundation’s stated intention is to close gaps in access to AI, not everyone is convinced of how effective it will be or how necessary it is for student success. 

However, a Gates Foundation spokesperson told Fortune its approach is built around those very concerns. The spokesperson said the tools will be tested in schools serving high shares of low-income students, paired with teacher training, and evaluated by independent researchers before being scaled. Plus, the foundation’s own strategy warns “too many tools have been adopted without evidence they work” and insists teachers “remain central.”

Teachers’ concerns with widespread AI implementation

Siobhan Casey, who has worked in education for 21 years both as a teacher and in leadership roles, said that while AI has been useful as a starting point for lesson planning and administrative work, it’s not an end-all, be-all for learning outcomes. 

“I still need to check its accuracy, decide whether it supports the learning objective, and make sure it provides the right level of challenge for my students,” Casey, principal of Crimson Global Academy’s Greenwich Campus, told Fortune. “AI can support teacher expertise, but it cannot replace it.”

The Gates Foundation spokesperson said a goal of the commitment is to help see accelerated learning and to help students catch up, one example being using the tool to give students more repetition and practice.

Other teachers are concerned about widespread implementation of AI in schools. Because AI is a relatively new tool, schools also need the resources to train staff on how best to use the technology. 

“Handing a school an AI tool doesn’t mean teachers suddenly have the time, training or support to use it well,” Amy McBride, a teacher at Pepin Academies, a special education school in Pasco County, Fla., told Fortune. 

McBride said she also worried about unintentionally widening access and use gaps that investments like this are intended to close. 

“The students who need the most help may also need the most adult guidance in learning how to use AI effectively,” she said. “Technology can be a powerful equalizer, but only if we don’t mistake access to the technology for access to a great education.”

The Gates Foundation, however, argues its investment is fixing a “basic market failure,” that people with the most need for technology have the least power to shape where investment goes.

“Left to the market alone, the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them—not necessarily for those who could benefit most,” Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder and chair of the Gates Foundation, wrote in a statement.

But others in the edtech industry worry whether lower-resourced schools can actually absorb the gift. While more funding for better AI education is welcome, Dora Palfi, CEO and cofounder of edtech platform Imagi, told Fortune, it fails at addressing what schools may need first. 

“The schools this money is meant to reach are some of the least able to absorb it for its desired purpose,” she argued. “They often tell me they have to fix literacy and numeracy first, and they’re not necessarily wrong, but it does mean that the districts moving fastest are best placed to use the money.”

“The danger here is that the exact funding made to close a divide could end up widening it,” she added. 

And even where schools can absorb the technology, some teachers question whether it delivers the learning it promises. Salena Davis, a history teacher at online Laurel Springs School, said the gains may not be what they appear. 

“The improved outcomes may only be short-term in nature and are not genuinely demonstrating mastery-based learning,” she told Fortune.

Plus, students the funding is meant to help may be the least equipped to use AI well. Those without “a strong foundational knowledge are not as well positioned to recognize when AI is inaccurate or incomplete, making them more willing to accept responses at face value,” she said.

A Gates Foundation spokesperson, however, said the pilots will be evaluated by outside researchers, including a Johns Hopkins study examining one such tool. They will test whether early results hold across different schools. Success will be measured by whether students who have fallen behind actually catch up, not by raising scores overall, the spokesperson said.

AI implementation in classrooms has had a positive impact for some. McBride said the tech allowed her students another way to ask questions, get an explanation differently, or work through something at their own pace. For her, as a teacher, it saved time creating materials and adapting lessons. 

“The biggest change wasn’t that AI started doing the teaching,” she said. “It gave me more time to teach.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Lucy Guo is no stranger to the always-on culture that defines Silicon Valley startups. In fact, it was partly this mentality that made her a billionaire by the time she turned 30, having made a fortune from the sale of her startup Scale AI to Meta.

Yet, at a time when AI and autonomous agents have promised to make every worker’s life easier, Guo says, for some, it’s doing the opposite.

“I think AI is making people work harder actually because you have to be awake for your agents to be running,” Guo said in an interview on the Fortune Daily Show this week. “I think it was last week I worked a 26-hour day because I refused to go to sleep.”

Guo’s marathon workdays are partly due to her personal drive. Since leaving Scale AI in 2018, she has made numerous startup investments through her venture capital firm Backend Capital, including one in an unnamed company later acquired by Anthropic, that made her a “pretty large shareholder” of the AI company. She is also CEO of the creator monetization platform Passes, which she started in 2022. 

Still, Guo’s opinion about AI forcing people to work harder also illustrates the paradox of incorporating AI into the workforce. Some workers, including developers, have been able to use AI to complete tasks faster. Yet, early research has found these workers are often taking on more responsibilities as well.

A study by UC Berkeley researchers of a 200-person U.S. technology company over eight months found “employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so.” There are also some questions about whether completing tasks faster always means workers produce quality work.

Still, despite Guo’s leverage of AI, she also acknowledged the power of people. She said when working for a company, and also when investing, it’s important to identify people with complementary skills. Even though she claims she was average when she was a computer science student for two years at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top schools in the country for programming, she said she has the baseline knowledge to identify very talented engineers.

“The people in a company make the company,” she said.

Guo was working in AI well before the current generative AI boom. In 2016, she cofounded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang, now the chief AI officer at Meta, before leaving the company two years later. She retained equity that ultimately helped make her a billionaire. 

Her wealth also briefly gave her another title: world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, before she was surpassed by Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara last year.

Guo said losing the title didn’t bother her.

“I think it’s a really good sign when this title is taken away because that means that, like, women are winning,” Guo said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A volcanologist working at the U.S. Geological Survey, Ezra Yacob made a career-defining leap in 2005 when he joined Houston oil producer EOG Resources and its geoscience team at the beginning of the shale revolution.

“It was this real acknowledgment that we’re opening up a new frontier in petroleum exploration,” Yacob said at a Hart Energy conference this week in Houston. “That really appealed to me”

Now as EOG’s chairman and CEO, Yacob continues to focus on frontier exploration, but it’s shifting internationally, specifically to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. While EOG remains huge in Texas and is leading a mini oil boom in Ohio, the 20-year-old U.S. shale industry is maturing—but not declining. The thrill of the big discovery in the U.S. is largely gone, so the oil and gas players are increasingly focused on international exploration again, including replicating shale drilling and fracking (hydraulic fracturing) techniques abroad.

“The international stuff is probably front of mind for everybody,” Yacob said. He said the Abu Dhabi shale rock geology is very comparable to South Texas’ Eagle Ford shale. EOG has brought a couple of wells online thus far. “It’s outperforming our expectations right now.” And everyone wants to “unlock the next new thing,” he said.

Despite the ongoing war in Iran, there’s bullishness the Middle East will rebound, and the countries increasingly want the help of American shale experts to tap into more oil and gas reserves. The same is true in several South American and African countries, as well as Australia and even domestically in Alaska. President Trump would like to extend the same sentiments to Greenland. If anything, the Iran war is pushing more countries to develop their own natural resources, both clean energy and fossil fuels.

While giants such as ExxonMobil and Chevron never left international developments, they did dramatically cut back on exploration. In recent years though, Exxon turned Guyana into an oil power, and Chevron has led Kazakhstan’s growth. Chevron also is poised to lead Venezuela’s potential rebound. Exxon and Chevron both are increasing the international portions of their capital budgets for projects in the Middle East and Africa.

After years of trimming their overseas assets to focus on domestic shale, other shale leaders such as ConocoPhillips, EOG, Occidental Petroleum, APA Corp., Murphy Oil, and others are again eyeing overseas opportunities–both onshore and offshore. The country’s top privately held, domestic producer, Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources, is now expanding in Argentina and dealmaking in Venezuela.

“I think international exploration is back in the game,” said Bobby Tudor, founder and CEO of the Artemis Energy Partners investment and consulting firm. “The desire to look outside the core U.S. conventional business has gone up, and it’s gone up meaningfully.”

Twilight to daybreak

If anyone knows the evolution of the shale industry, it’s Tudor. His investment firm, Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., helped fund much of the boom, successfully recognizing the direction of the oil and gas industry.

While the U.S. shale sector may not have quite entered it’s “twilight,” he said, there’s only room for so much more growth and it’s definitely not enough to fill the global demand gap that will rise again after the Iran war. The U.S. industry is in mature consolidation mode, not booming growth.

Tudor sees a lot more Western Hemisphere exploration rising from Alaska down to Argentina, and South American governments are trending more business friendly.

“The pull toward the Americas, especially in light of this war, is actually quite dramatic,” Tudor said, arguing the region can offer reliable and affordable energy to the world.

That said, Tudor noted, the industry is largely out of practice with frontier oil and gas after two decades of dramatically reduced exploration efforts. Many workers in oil and gas “have never drilled a dry hole,” he said. They’ve never done any real wildcatting.

“The exploration muscle memory of the U.S. got hollowed out and it got hollowed out pretty badly during the shale revolution,” Tudor said. “There’s a lot of muscle memory to rebuild in the industry.”

Bill Armstrong, 66, would agree. Armstrong, a geologist and the CEO of the eponymous Armstrong Oil & Gas, is a true wildcatter and pioneer of Alaska’s North Slope, making several big discoveries over the years, including the Pikka field that he remains bullish on. He compares it to the original East Texas oil field that boomed nearly a century ago.

“Hardly anyone does what I do anymore,” Armstrong said.

And he isn’t slowing down now. So much of the seismic geology in Alaska’s eastern Northern Slope is “gorgeous.” And he’s gearing up to drill new wells. “It’s like geo-porn,” he said of the seismic imagery. “There are tons of opportunities. There is essentially no fracking that’s been done in Alaska.”

Armstrong also has his sights set on Venezuela and offshore Aruba—adjacent to Venezuelan waters. From Alaska to Venezuela, these are areas being heavily pushed by the Trump administration.

“It is true wildcatting,” he said of Aruba, noting that only one other well has ever been drilled there.

The hunt for the next big thing is still what excites many in the industry, said EOG’s Yacob. And EOG is known as a shale technology innovator and trendsetter. Where EOG goes, others typically follow. Although not a household name, EOG is revered within the industry, considered a decade ago as the Apple of oil and gas.

Yacob said EOG wouldn’t target the UAE and Bahrain if they hadn’t done their due diligence and developed the adequate confidence. After all, he said, “Going international is not easy. Going to South Texas, that’s easy.”

But the chase for a discovery is his calling, he said, and what drew him to the industry.

“Think about what we get to do every day. You come in with a map and limited data sets, and you come up with an idea of something that’s 2 miles beneath the surface of the earth,” Yacob said. “You basically stick a straw down there and you get to test your idea, and you get pretty instantaneous results. It’s the most thrilling industry I could ever imagine.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Financial firms have spent decades perfecting “know your customer” rules. Their next compliance challenge: “know your agent.”

That was the warning from Zhuoqun Bian, president of Ant Digital Technologies, the enterprise arm of Ant Group, at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8.

“From the financial institutions’ perspective, when we initiate a transaction, we have to do the KYC [know your customer]” she said. “In the agent economy, you need to know your agents. Who’s the agent? Who does it belong to? Who authorized it?”

Agents could orchestrate as much as $5 trillion in global consumer spending by 2030, according to a January report from McKinsey.

Yet the infrastructure in which these agents operate was designed for humans. “Looking forward, all the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt or enhanced for agents,” Bian said.

On Sept. 6, Ant International, Ant Group’s global payments arm, announced it had begun collaborating with Mastercard and Visa on a “know your agent” interoperability framework, meant to let card networks, digital wallets, and marketplaces recognize trusted AI agents across ecosystems. The companies will work through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the city-state’s central bank.

In an April note, the International Monetary Fund observed that AI agents are probabilistic and adaptive, meaning the same prompt can yield different answers, while payment systems must return the same answer every time. “Payment rails, from card networks to real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, rely on predictable rules, legal certainty, and clear accountability structures to ensure trust and financial stability,” the note’s authors wrote.

For banks, the bigger question is whether their own systems can keep pace. “I personally have never come across a situation where the technology of an agent failed us—or rather, led to an undesirable outcome,” said Benson Wong, managing director and head of digital at JPMorgan Private Bank. “It’s always around the operating model, the processes, and the compliance and the controls.”

The cost of an agent getting something wrong scales with its autonomy, he added: “If you ask an agent…an information-seeking question and [it answers] wrongly, it’s not good, but you have an embarrassing moment. If you don’t get agentic workflows correct, there are vastly scaled impacts.”

“You need to know your agents much more than you know your customers,” Bian concluded.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has revealed himself. If not a card-carrying monetarist, he is at least a camp follower. This represents a dramatic change at the Fed, where the past Chairman Jerome Powell repeatedly rejected the basic tenets of monetarism.

This is a welcomed earthquake. After all, there are almost no monetarists left in the world (except for us, and we’ve been fighting a lonely rearguard action for over 40 years). The Federal Reserve has rejected monetarism consistently — and on the record — because it preferred other models for understanding the economy. In academia, monetarism has been out of fashion for decades. But by his own words, a monetarist is now leading the central bank.

Just what is monetarism? It’s a doctrine which holds that money has a major influence on both the level of asset prices, economic activity, and the price level. Any discussion of national income determination must, therefore, center on the quantity of money and the banking system, since banks produce most of the money in modern economies. When it comes to monetary policy, its objectives are best met by targeting the rate of growth of the money supply.

Today, most economists pooh-pooh monetarism. Money and banking are nowhere to be found in their macroeconomic models, or their discourses about the course of asset prices, economic activity, and prices. Indeed, their forecasting exercises are typically based on elaborations of Keynesian income-expenditure models that exclude money and banking.

If that’s not enough, we think that the Fed’s backroom staff, mostly Keynesian-leaning Democrats, don’t want alignment with a philosophy usually affiliated with Milton Friedman, but that’s another story. Just look at what Joe Biden said in 2020 about how the dean of monetarism wasn’t “running the show anymore.”

This, of course, is why today’s mainstream economists failed to anticipate the post-COVID burst of inflation in the U.S. and elsewhere. It is also why, during the then-evolving Great Financial Crisis, Queen Elizabeth, on a November 2008 visit to the London School of Economics, asked, “Why did nobody notice it?”

Well, it turns out that a tiny band of monetarists, including ourselves and Tim Congdon, did notice the Great Financial Crisis. We also anticipated the post-COVID surge in inflation. Never mind. What about Chairman Warsh?

Kevin Warsh has not swallowed the economic profession’s entrenched non-monetary ways of thinking. Like a jack in the box, Warsh has sprung out as a monetarist. Warsh first let the cat out of the bag in August at the Fed’s Jackson Hole Symposium, when he enunciated a set of principles that included the idea that changes in the money supply had something to do with economic activity and inflation.

On September 16, during his post-Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) press conference, Warsh further elaborated.

First, Warsh used the language that monetarists like to use about individual price changes and inflation. Higher energy prices or food prices do not “cause” inflation. Indeed, Warsh said the Fed cannot address any individual prices, like those for food and energy, but that the Fed can ensure that those relative price changes do not have second and third order effects. In other words, the Fed is responsible for overall price changes, not relative price changes.

As monetarists, we would go a step further. Unless there has already been excess money growth over the preceding year or so, relative price changes cannot translate into sustained changes in the overall price level. For this reason, we tend to discount the validity of discussions about second or third round effects.

Second, when asked about how the Fed’s rate hike would affect lower income groups in the US, Chairman Warsh said the Fed does not deal in questions of distribution. The Fed looks at aggregates like the labor market, GDP, total spending, and overall inflation. Having said that, he conceded that the lowest income classes — those without financial assets and those who tend to live from paycheck to paycheck — would benefit most from stable prices. That was a monetarist response.

Third, when asked if the most recent CPI data had influenced the Fed’s decision to raise rates he said that was not the case. “Datapoints are noisy”, he argued. What mattered was the trend, and the trend of inflation was still too high.

Warsh’s response accords precisely with the monetarist view that short-term forecasts of inflation are simply not feasible. There is too much noise in the data. Monetarist analysis can provide a range or channel for price levels (or inflation) over a 1- to 3-year horizon, but not a month-to-month forecast.

Fourth, when asked about the level of the Federal Funds rate relative to its “neutral” rate (or r*), Warsh replied that as a student of economics he had studied the neutral rate, or what is called the Wicksellian real rate, after Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. The concept, he declared, was of academic interest but had no bearing on the Fed’s practical decision-making. 

Again, this comports with monetarist views on interest rates. Administered rates such as the fed funds rate and short-term market interest rates can be both a driver of future money growth and a consequence of prior monetary growth. For example, if the money growth rate doubles, the first effect is lower rates, but then, as the economy recovers, the demand for credit increases and inflation rises, the second effect is an increase in rates. This is exactly what happened during and after the COVID pandemic.

Because changes in broad money growth have this two-stage effect on interest rates, it makes no sense to rely on a Wicksellian framework of equilibrium or neutral interest rates. The Quantity Theory of Money, however, provides a fairly precise guide to the appropriate rate of money growth for an economy. It is therefore always better to rely on the rate of broad money growth as a better guide to the stance of monetary policy than on the abstract, non-measurable concept of an equilibrium interest rate.

On at least two occasions during Warsh’s September 16 press conference, he said that he would have been hard-pressed in recent months to describe financial conditions as restrictive. Judging the level of interest rates against an unobservable “neutral” rate would clearly have been challenging. Instead, although he did not say so, the rather high rate of broad money growth over the past 6-9 months would have provided a clearer metric on the state of monetary and financial conditions: the rate of broad money growth in the range 6-8% has clearly been too high. To hit the Fed’s target rate of inflation of 2% the rate of growth in the money supply needs to be reduced to around 6%.

After a shaky start with his first two press conferences, Chairman Warsh is clearly gaining confidence as he starts to articulate a framework that is consistent with monetarism. It promises to be a seismic shift for the Fed.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The 2026 economy has created a new throng of one-day millionaires, businesses raking in seven-figure sums in 24 hours or less. That includes teams at AI frontier labs like Anthropic, who are seeing monthly revenue top $500 million from just a single client’s Claude spending, one consultancy reported. That’s nearly $17 million per day.

Outside of the AI boom, there’s a new stock of near-instant daily millionaires as a result of the Iran war: oil tankers willing to odyssey across the Strait of Hormuz.

The cost for a vessel to haul oil from the Persian Gulf to China, which requires crossing the key chokepoint, reached $1.035 million per day, according to data from the Baltic Exchange this week, the first time the price tag has exceeded seven figures. By comparison, a similar large crude carrier transiting from the Persian Gulf cost about $208,000 per day, per the Platts VLCC index.

Commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has continued to dwindle in the Iran war’s seventh month, but the need to export oil from the Gulf is still more urgent as constrained supply drives up costs above $100 per barrel once again.

Ioannis Papadimitriou, principal freight analyst at Vortexa, told Fortune the exorbitant shipping costs are a byproduct of both the dangers associated with crossing the chokepoint—and the increased necessity for the commodity those ships carry.

“It’s all about risk,” he said.

What’s driving up cargo shipping costs?

As attacks in the region escalate, commercial ships have remained the target of strikes, including two tankers that were hit by projectiles in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, according to a UK navy agency.

“One of the drivers is the geopolitical risk and the risk of the assets—which is the ship in this case—which is increasing because of the tit-for-tat attacks that we saw from the U.S. and the territory attacks from Iran on ships,” Papadimitriou said.

Beyond fewer freighters being interested in crossing the channel’s east side where there are the most disruptions, the danger associated with the passage means insurance premiums for vessels have also increased, amounting to about 10% of the assets aboard, according to Papadimitriou, up from 0.5% to 1% prior to the war. Those premiums are then passed down for the charterers to pay.

This increased demand has also encouraged some market consolidation, limiting the number of players in the maritime shipping market and allowing the growing firms to hike up prices.

“These players, especially around the Middle East, they are building out their fleets. They’re buying more vessels,”Papadimitriou said, “Why? Because they want to ensure deliveries of their cargos. They want to expand into the supply chain.”

Who are the winners and losers?

These increased shipping costs will come at the expense of refineries in particular, which not only must contend with increased shipping costs—or the increased time to receive shipments if tankers are taking alternative routes to bypass the Strait of Hormuz—but also increased crude costs. As a result, shrinking margins drive up costs for consumers, as already seen in diesel prices topping $6 for the first time, 60% higher than before the Iran war.

But the increased freight costs are a boon to the shipping companies able to charge these premiums for their vessels and transportation services, making the industry the biggest winners of the Iran war so far.

Shipbrokers such as Clarksons have already hinted at how much money is in it for the maritime industry. The world’s largest shipbroker notched record earnings last quarter, including a 55% year-over-year operating profit, which CEO Andi Case attributed to increased demand from the Iran war. Shipbrokers act as third-party liaisons between shipowners and cargo-holders.

Similarly, the Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF (BWET), an oil freight fund, is up more than 3,600% year to date, Morningstar data shows, an indication of just how confident investors are in the profitability of shipping companies at this time.

“Every time there’s more geopolitical instability that creates trading inefficiencies, it’s the shipping players that actually benefit,” Papadimitriou said. “And this time is no different.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Bargain plane tickets are already pretty hard to get, and now, they’re only going to get more scarce as airlines scramble to deal with increased fuel costs nearing record highs. 

Executives at American Airlines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines this week said they’re rethinking their least-profitable routes as jet fuel climbs to $4.71 per gallon, more than double the cost a year ago and near a 20-year high.Now, they’re considering cutting some low-performing routes in an effort to cut down on costs.

“You’re just going to want to pull a little capacity out when we see a rise in fuel like we’re seeing right now,” American Airlines CFO Devon May said at Morgan Stanley’s annual Laguna Conference on Sept. 16, adding the fuel spike has added $1 billion to the company’s projected fourth-quarter expenses, prompting it to cut some December flights and plan for less growth next year. 

May was far from the only airline executive to sound similar alarms at the conference. He was joined by Southwest CFO Tom Doxey, who said the company began projecting the year it would add 2-3% to flight capacity, but has since cut that projection in half, “because fuel has been higher.”

United CFO Mike Leskinen was also in attendance. He told analysts every airline has its “bell curve of profitability” and some routes make more money than others. As fuel costs rise, maintaining the flights near the bottom of that curve stops making financial sense, which is why United will have fewer flights in December and could make further cuts next year if costs stay high.

“There’s some marginal routes that don’t make sense in a higher fuel environment, so we cut them,” he said. “We’re flying to maximize profitability and free cash generation, so we’ll make those adjustments.”

Leskinen noted 35% of United’s fourth-quarter tickets were already booked—so the airline can’t retroactively hike those prices—but he said there’s room to pass on higher fuel costs to consumers eventually.

“Jet fuel price gets passed through with a lag,” he said. All three carriers (in addition to almost every player in the airline industry) have raised checked bag fees as a way to offset costs. 

United and American declined to share the number of flights they cut. A Southwest spokesperson told Fortune its flight schedule adjustments were “very minimal” and do not affect “large scale exits of routes or airports.”

The effects of the jet fuel crisis

It’s bad news for travelers making plans to visit back home. Less routes would mean fewer flight choices to pick from, and could mean fewer convenient times to fly out or having to opt for a layover instead of a nonstop trip. 

War in Iran has choked off the global supply of oil, which hit jet fuel particularly hard, sending the price soaring  and leaving the airline industry to eat most of the costs. United and American spent about $8.2 billion and $7.8 billion respectively on fuel in the first six months of this year, both up almost 49% from a year earlier, according to their latest filings. Southwest spent nearly $3.6 billion, up about 39%. 

Now that airlines are cutting flights, this could also make bargain prices harder to come by for American travelers who are already paying more to fly. Fares are 23.4% higher in August than a year earlier, compared to a 3.4% increase in overall consumer prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Jet fuel costs have also squeezed airlines across the Atlantic Ocean. The Iran fuel shock slammed Europe, which is more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the U.S., and took a toll on one of its largest budget airlines, Ryanair. The carrier cut its full-year passenger forecast this month from 216 million to 214 million. CEO Michael O’Leary warned oil prices could hike up Ryanair’s famously cheap European flights.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Marianne Flippo paid a male escort roughly $635,000 for eight months of exclusive companionship. Then, according to a lawsuit filed this week in Manhattan Supreme Court, he and his agency allegedly told her the only way to make the arrangement permanent was to pay $10 million to buy him out of his contract.

“I now recognize that I was the victim of a horrendous scheme by Starr who is a sociopath who lacks any conscience,” Flippo said in a sworn affirmation filed with the court.

The suit names the escort as Gregg Starr, an employee of an agency called Cowboys 4 Angels, and describes Marianne as newly widowed, managing money alone for the first time, and living with a rare genetic disorder that heightened her vulnerability to drugs and alcohol. Court documents allege Starr built her trust before defrauding her of nearly $6 million.

During a February 2026 trip to visit Starr’s mother, who suffered from dementia, two agency employees showed up unannounced and pressed Flippo to drink at lunch, despite knowing she was on medication for a recent surgery. The two ordered shots for the table, and after roughly five drinks, they produced an “Exit Agreement” requiring her to pay $10 million to end Starr’s ties to the agency.

“While I was drunk and confused (all of which was exacerbated by my medications and medical condition), Starr and Collins began to press me to sign the Exit Agreement,” Flippo said in her affirmation. She says she was taken to a hotel room and had never seen the document before that day. The agreement states that “under no circumstances has physical companionship been purchased for consideration.”

Flippo tried twice to wire the $10 million, but both attempts were independently flagged as suspected fraud, first by JPMorgan Chase and then through Westpac. Starr then directed her to open a joint account at Charles Schwab, which she says let him access funds without triggering a bank’s fraud review. She transferred $5.95 million into that account, and bank records filed with the court show Starr moved $5,719,010.37 of it into an account in his name alone within weeks, draining the balance to $12.61 by the end of June.

A circumstantial meeting

Flippo suffers from vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes her blood vessels and organs prone to tearing and leaves her unusually sensitive to alcohol and medication. In December 2024, still grieving the loss of her husband, Chad, and needing to travel to Italy for a medication that had become unavailable in the U.S. because of the war in Ukraine, she asked a former colleague of Chad’s for help finding an Italian-speaking companion.

Chad joined Roblox when it was still a startup—years before it became the multibillion-dollar gaming platform used by tens of millions of children worldwide—earning multiple patents and building what Flippo describes as “a substantial amount of wealth.” Battling with depression, Chad died by suicide in August 2024. The two had been married 28 years, had three children, and were together since they met at 13.

Flippo was referred to Cowboys 4 Angels, which paired her with Starr. At first, she believed the company provided personal assistants but now says she learned it is an escort agency. Despite staying in separate rooms, Starr made advances toward her on the trip, which she turned down, and she paid the agency $27,000 for his assistance, split into three $9,000 payments she now believes were structured to avoid IRS reporting requirements. The agency kept calling afterward and told her Starr missed her. An employee named Bridget Collins became, in Flippo’s account, a trusted confidante who encouraged her to reconnect with him.

By March 2025, Flippo agreed to pay roughly $150,000 for Starr to be “exclusive” with her, but broke up with him that October after learning he was seeing an ex-girlfriend. But the agency kept calling, and she eventually agreed to speak with him again. By December 1, 2025, Starr moved into her Upper West Side apartment, and she signed a formal “Independent Contractor Agreement,” paying $368,000 for his companionship through May. The contract states Starr would serve as her “male companion” for an average of 16 days a month; that the arrangement “do[es] not include sexual acts of any kind;” and includes a clause requiring the money be returned if Starr cheated on her with that same ex-girlfriend. In January 2026, she paid another $90,000 to extend the exclusivity period.

Her illness runs through nearly every filing. People with vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome have an average life expectancy of 48 to 51 years; Flippo is 49. After surgery in early 2026, she was prescribed gabapentin and codeine, which she says left her “in a compromised mental state” for months, worsened by a severe infection in both arms. It was during this period, her complaint alleges, that Starr and Collins began telling her he needed $10 million to buy his way out of his contract.

“Unfortunately, I was not capable or perceptive enough to know these statements were false but, since I loved and trusted Starr, I relied on what he said. I now realize I was foolish,” Flippo said in her affirmation. And so the $5.95 million was transferred.

Flippo was already a client of Larry Hutcher for unrelated legal matters when Starr’s demand for an additional $4 million came up, according to her affirmation. Hutcher says he looked into what had happened and concluded she “was the victim of a horrific scheme.” She didn’t see it that way, and Hutcher said she was still “under the Svengali-like control of Starr.”

Starr, meanwhile, had retained his own attorney to draw up an agreement for the additional funds, and Hutcher arranged a July 7 meeting at his office to address it. Starr believed the meeting was to negotiate the $4 million; instead, Hutcher confronted him and said “he was shamelessly and criminally exploiting Marianne’s vulnerabilities and had defrauded her out of $5,950,000 and that no further money would be paid.” Starr, according to both affirmations, became visibly angry and threatened to abscond with the $5.95 million already taken if she didn’t pay the rest.

“In my fifty (50) years of practice I have never seen the type of outrageous conduct that exists in this case,” Hutcher said in his affirmation.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Credit card companies are racing to claim a place at the checkout when AI agents start shopping on behalf of consumers—even as shoppers remain skeptical of letting bots spend their money. 

Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets people give an AI agent a virtual card and allow it to buy things online without checking in before each purchase. Cardholders can limit how much it spends, restrict which retailers it buys from, or require approval before checkout. 

“This is a land grab for infrastructure standards,” Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, told Fortune. “If they set the standards for agentic commerce, they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come.”

Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has also announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed. Similarly, Meta has Muse, which can search for products and navigate checkout, but presents the purchase for the user’s final approval. 

It seems, though, that shoppers appear far more interested in using AI to find a deal than letting it pay. Just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide. More than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. 

The features these shoppers valued most were price-drop alerts and comparisons across retailers, each selected by 35% of respondents. Just 18% selected personalized product suggestions. 

Still, Mastercard framed its investment as preparation for a change it expects consumers to eventually embrace. “AI is a transformational technology. It’s a matter of when, not if, people use it,” the company told Fortune. 

And knowing what happens if a bot buys the wrong thing could help ease consumer hesitancy about AI shopping. 

Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to act as a record of who authorized the agent to shop and what the agent was authorized to buy. Mastercard told Fortune that the record could help resolve a dispute if something goes wrong.

The company also said when consumers and merchants use its agentic payment solutions, “the protections you value in a card purchase today would be the same in an agentic-powered transaction.” 

But when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent—the record system of the cardholder’s instructions. It did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.

That last step may be the hardest to give up; checking out can be the reward for all the hard work and late hours scrolling on Depop.

“We want to be the ones to make that final click,” Dan Coates, ACI Worldwide’s Product Management Director, told Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump is set to announce Friday that all 50 states will join in on a program set to provide most favored nation pricing to some drugs within the Medicaid program, bringing the net price of selected drugs down to prices paid in certain other countries.

The Trump administration claims that Medicaid will save billions on prescription drug costs as a result of the plan, dubbed the Medicaid “GENEROUS” model. Experts say the savings are unclear since the content of the deals isn’t public.

Friday’s announcement comes as cost-of-living issues are at the forefront of voters’ concerns ahead of the midterm elections in November. In a way to address affordability concerns, Trump has cut deals with pharmaceutical companies so that the cost of some drugs in the U.S. would not be dramatically higher than in other affluent nations.

Last year, Trump signed an executive order instituting a “Most Favored Nations” policy, where the U.S. would commit to paying the same price for medications as the nation that pays the lowest price anywhere in the world.

The White House in May estimated that Trump’s deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower some of their U.S. prescription drug prices to levels charged in other countries could save $529 billion over the next 10 years.

Patients in Medicaid, the state- and federally-funded program for people with low incomes, already pay a nominal co-payment of a few dollars to fill their prescriptions, but lower prices could help state budgets that fund the programs.

The true cost of the claimed savings is unclear since few details of the deals struck by the Trump administration and participating pharmaceutical companies have been made public, making it hard to independently verify the projected savings.

Kathy Hempstead, a senior policy advisor at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told The Associated Press that there is significant pressure on the administration to provide more granular data to justify its cost-savings claims, and that the lack of information creates a barrier to legislative action.

“He is saying Congress should codify all of his MFN arrangements,” Hempstead said. “But it’s kind of unreasonable because it’s not clear what Congress would actually do. No one knows what is in these deals.”

She added that there is concern about whether the current administration’s tenure will affect the longevity of these price cuts and whether prices will revert once the administration leaves.

Some want to see more people benefit from lower drug pricing.

JD Hayworth, a former Republican congressman and spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Reform Alliance, said in a statement that Friday’s announcement reflects “meaningful progress, but that progress remains incomplete,” as millions of Americans not enrolled in government healthcare want lower drug prices.

Drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on a number of factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump came to battleground North Carolina doubling down on a tantalizing and implausible midterm promise. “If we win,” he said, “we’re going to get you $5,000. So that’s it. Very simple.”

The Republican candidates who spoke at the rally had nothing to say about it.

Their silence reflects a broader pattern. About a week after the president unveiled his “Trump dividend” pledge at the party’s unusual midterm convention in Dallas, there is little evidence that Republicans in competitive races have incorporated it into their campaigns.

The pledge hasn’t been a staple of television advertising, whether from Trump’s own political operation or his party’s candidates. It usually only comes up when reporters ask about it, prompting most Republicans to sidestep the idea.

The Republican National Committee considers the proposed payments part of Trump’s broader economic vision and says candidates should get behind it.

“Of course we encourage all Republican candidates to run on his agenda, and that includes efforts to put more money in the pockets of the American people,” spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said.

There are some exceptions. Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who is seeking reelection in a battleground Wisconsin district, has praised the proposal.

The idea comes as the economy confronts rising interest rates, continuing inflation and climbing fuel costs. Republicans are fighting to keep their majorities in the House and Senate.

Trump previously promised to use savings from the Department of Government Efficiency and revenue from tariffs on imports to distribute payments of $2,000 or more, but none of that came to pass. The president has said he did not think congressional approval would be needed for the idea, which could cost more than $1 trillion, but House Speaker Mike Johnson indicated the promise would require lawmakers to act.

Democrats point to those previous suggestions for a payout to raise skepticism about the $5,000 pledge.

“This idea is nothing more than a recycled broken promise that voters know Republicans will never deliver,” said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for the House Democratic campaign arm.

Republican campaign advertising has largely focused on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including provisions that temporarily cut taxes on tips and overtime. Other candidates are concentrating on local issues or attacks against their opponents.

Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former Republican National Committee communications director, said there is little mystery about why candidates have been reluctant to embrace the pledge.

“It’s a dumb idea,” Heye said. “There’s no way to pay for it and it would spike inflation.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For more than a decade, some of the world’s biggest technology companies have spent billions trying to put computers on people’s faces—to minimal success.

But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed another bet on glasses in June, this time with a $2,195 pair of augmented-reality (AR) specs that he says could usher in a post-smartphone era.

After nearly 20 years, the iPhone has made consumers ready to think differently about computing, he told CNBC at the time, arguing information can be displayed in a person’s vision without them needing to pull out a phone to look down at a screen.

During Snap’s Q2 2026 earnings call last month, Spiegel claimed there has been a “huge amount of interest” in preorders for the new AR glasses, but gave no exact numbers.

It’s not Snap’s first effort at glasses, which haven’t paid off. The company recorded $39.9 million in Spectacles inventory-related charges in Q3 2017 as it wrote down unsold inventory from its first-gen camera glasses. 

But Spiegel said Snap’s new Specs have features that make it desirable for businesses—with the glasses operating like “a computer, not a pair of smart glasses for taking photos.”

“A large, private display makes it possible to stream content, cast a screen, open a whiteboard, or turn almost any place into a workspace,” a press release read, announcing the debut of the Snap Specs.

On Wednesday, Snap announced partnerships with Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce to bring Specs into workplaces. According to Snap, Salesforce’s Agentforce platform will be integrated into the glasses software, while Nvidia will provide AI capabilities to interpret visual environments. Amazon will provide an AI assistant that can respond to voice commands.

“They’ve got an open-source XR AI platform that a number of businesses are already building on top of,” Spiegel told CNBC on Wednesday. “The goal with both Salesforce and Nvidia is to make it really easy for businesses to get the benefits of those agentic platforms.”

Snap’s current Specs program has reportedly consumed more than $3.5 billion so far. The spending has drawn pushback from activist investor Irenic Capital Management, which has said Specs should be funded on its own.

Such skepticism comes as similar efforts elsewhere haven’t panned out yet.

For example, Meta’s Reality Labs division, which develops virtual, augmented and mixed-reality products, lost about $88.1 billion from 2019 through 2025, according to SEC filings. 

Over those same years, the division generated only about $12.3 billion in revenue—working out to roughly $7.15 of operating loss for every $1 of revenue generated. 

Google also attempted AR glasses with Google Glass. The company released the products in 2014 at a price of $1,500, but then pulled the glasses from shelves in the following year.

This led Google to retreat to enterprise customers, but that second life eventually ended too: Glass Enterprise Edition was pulled in 2023, with support being terminated months later.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Using controversy as a marketing tactic is a time-honored tactic, but Sydney Sweeney does it better than most. After generating uproar—and a ton of buzz—with last year’s American Eagle “great jeans” ad campaign, Sweeney stoked outrage to new heights this week with a provocative video for sports prediction market startup Novig. In the minute-long social media ad, Sweeney talks up the platform while wearing no clothes, and barely covering herself with a football and various other sports gear.

Unsurprisingly, the campaign has sparked debate over the sexualization of women in sports. At the same time, though, the ad titled “Just Sports” stands out both for its eye-popping performance—tens of millions of views across X and Instagram—and for the unusual business arrangement that underlies it: One where Sweeney obtained a share of the company rather than a simple endorsement check. 

Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky recently revealed that Sweeney approached the company about collaborating because she was attracted to its exclusive focus on sports-event contracts and wanted to become a shareholder rather than simply serve as the face of a one-off campaign, according to Front Office Sports. Unlike competitors such as Polymarket and Kalshi, which offer markets on topics ranging from politics and war to culture, Novig focuses solely on sports—an approach that Fortinsky says drew Sweeney to the company and was reflected in the ad’s script.

Novig declined to comment when Fortune asked about the terms of Sweeney’s equity partnership, including the size of her stake in the company.

The Sweeney deal comes at a time when prediction markets are scrambling for celebrity endorsements to drive engagement and user growth. Just 24 hours before Novig’s campaign with Sweeney was released, Polymarket posted a similarly timed advertisement on social media featuring A-list athletes including LeBron James, Derek Jeter and Eli Manning, as well as celebrities such as Spike Lee, Emily Ratajkowski and Alexandra Daddario.

Polymarket has not publicly disclosed how much it spent on the campaign. But one report states the prediction market company—which is valued at more than $20 billion and has nearly 2 million followers on X—is paying James $15 million a year under its partnership. Jeter and Manning reportedly have smaller endorsement deals, while other celebrities were paid for a one-time appearance. Despite what was likely a far larger investment, Polymarket’s campaign generated less engagement than Novig’s. On Instagram, Polymarket’s post received fewer than 55,000 likes, while Sweeney’s Novig post drew more than 1.2 million.

The contrast is especially striking given that Novig is valued at roughly $500 million. Under the terms of her equity partnership, Sweeney could stand to benefit significantly from Novig’s future success as the earlier-stage company seeks to compete with larger rivals.

Sweeney’s involvement in the campaign extended beyond her financial stake. Under the terms of the agreement, she also served as a creative partner. According to a source familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss private business arrangements, Sweeney acted as a hands-on “mastermind” who shaped every stage of the creative, commercial and visual process. She oversaw the choice of music, guided specific camera angles and shot coverage, and revised the script.

A “competitive weapon”

For early-stage platforms entering categories dominated by heavily funded incumbents, a viral endorsement can serve as a vital equalizer. 

“If you’re Novig, you probably can’t outspend Polymarket. So you have to out-attention them,” Shruti Saini, a brand strategist and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, told Fortune.

Enter Sydney Sweeney. 

“She’s not even a simple endorsement—she’s a competitive weapon. Within hours, one person put this relatively unknown company into the same cultural conversation as Polymarket,” Saini added. 

Novig is not the first campaign in which Sweeney has taken a hands-on role in shaping a viral moment. In October 2024, the actress appeared submerged in a bubble bath in an advertisement for Dr. Squatch, a men’s personal-care brand. The ad quickly went viral. 

To capitalize on the attention, Sweeney later said in an interview that she had personally pitched the idea of selling a limited-edition soap made with her actual bathwater. The release was limited to 5,000 bars priced at $8 each and sold out within seconds. While the product’s sales potential was capped, the campaign generated nearly 90,000 Instagram likes and more than 45,000 reshares.

While virality can generate significant attention, its impact tends to be short-lived, Saini noted. 

Sweeney’s July 2025 campaign for American Eagle illustrated the limits of a one-time partnership based on controversy. When Sweeney was unveiled as the face of the retailer’s campaign, its slogan—“Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans”—drew criticism from some who viewed “jeans” as a play on “genes” and interpreted it as an endorsement of eugenics and conventional beauty standards.

The controversy initially benefited American Eagle, which was facing pressure at the time from President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China—where the retailer sourced a significant amount of its production. Two months before the campaign with Sweeney, American Eagle reported that the tariff policies could have a roughly $5 million to $10 million impact on earnings. In the immediate aftermath of its debut, the campaign achieved strong commercial momentum—driving widespread social reach, attracting new customers, selling out denim items and triggering an initial increase in investor enthusiasm.

But over time, the publicly traded company revealed in financial disclosures that its core brand did not show sustained sales growth after the campaign. About a year after the ad aired, the company’s stock had also returned to roughly where it was before the campaign.

“Advertising, marketing, [and] partnerships with celebrities can absolutely create momentum, but [they] can’t really compensate indefinitely for product, merchandising, and unclear brand identity,” Saini said of the American Eagle campaign. 

In Novig’s case, she noted that a sports betting platform may risk becoming a “supporting character” in its own advertising, given the overwhelming attention on Sweeney.

Whether Novig works with Sweeney again—and how it does so—will determine the partnership’s lasting value for everyone involved.

“Being bold is part of brand building. Don’t shy away from [it], but recognize that it shouldn’t be for short-term gimmicks because that can only take you so far.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Warren Buffett stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on Friday, the job passed to his 71-year-old son who has spent most of his life doing things that look nothing like his father’s.

Howard Graham Buffett farmed thousands of acres, carried a badge as an elected sheriff, photographed war zones and endangered species across more than 100 countries, and runs a foundation with over $1 billion committed to conflict-affected regions like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He’s received the highest honor for foreign citizens from the governments of Mexico, Colombia and Rwanda, all for his foundation’s work in each country.

And now, he’s chairing a trillion-dollar conglomerate.

A sheriff and a farmer

Howard’s been a Berkshire director for 33 years, since 1993. According to his dad Warren’s retirement letter, that’s longer than the “apprenticeship” he himself served before becoming Berkshire’s CEO at 34.

But Howard’s own career has run almost entirely outside finance. He operates a 1,500-acre family farm in Pana, Illinois, plus foundation-run research farms spanning more than 1,500 acres in Arizona and over 9,200 acres in South Africa. He’s also a vocal advocate for no-till conservation agriculture.

He’s held elected office twice: as a Douglas County, Nebraska commissioner from 1989 to 1992, and, more unusually, as Sheriff of Macon County, Illinois, from September 2017 to November 2018, after five years working as an auxiliary deputy. And he still holds a position today: he still serves as the county’s undersheriff.

Separately, he’s built a body of published photography from conflict zones—including the front lines of the Ukraine war—and wildlife habitats across roughly 130 countries, authoring several books along the way. Most of the work was tied directly to his foundation’s focus on food security, conservation and humanitarian response in unstable regions.

His role at Berkshire

Greg Abel, who took over as CEO in January, will continue running Berkshire’s operations day to day. Howard’s role, as Warren Buffett described it in Friday’s letter, is different: “Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values—both worth more than anything on our balance sheet.”

He continued: “Think of Howard as a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against.”

That’s nothing new and instead, has been part of Berkshire’s succession planning for years. Howard isn’t expected to weigh in on capital allocation or acquisitions. Rather, Abel has already shown he’ll move fast, already deploying $10 billion into Alphabet and paying $6.8 billion to acquire homebuilder Taylor Morrison within his first year (for a total enterprise value of $8.5 billion).

Instead, Howard’s job is to serve as a check against any future leadership that might try to unwind what makes Berkshire unusual: its buy-and-hold investment stance and the autonomy it gives the businesses it owns.

Former Yahoo President Susan Decker will continue as lead independent director, serving with Howard as well as his father, who remains on the board.

Giving away the fortune

Howard is also one of three siblings—alongside Susie and Peter—responsible for distributing most of Warren Buffett’s remaining fortune, listed at $145 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Their father has said he abandoned earlier plans for a single sweeping philanthropic strategy in favor of handing the decisions to his children’s own foundations, which now distribute roughly $500 million a year combined.

Howard has spoken about the limits of that kind of giving. In a January conversation with CNBC with his siblings, he pointed to countries like Congo and Sudan, where he said funding alone can’t fix poverty if the rule of law has broken down.

“There’s a lot of things you can fund that will go nowhere,” he said. “If you’re not addressing the real issue of rule of law then you just can’t have success.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Companies are looking to lure in talent with beer on tap and nap pods—but Amazon is spending big on worker pay. 

The $2.73 trillion tech giant recently announced that it’s pouring $230 million into higher pay and expanded benefits for more than 100,000 U.S. Whole Foods employees. Starting September 28, hourly workers will receive a pay raise that puts the average store wage to more than $21 an hour.

Amazon, which acquired the upscale grocery chain in 2017, said that this is one of “the most significant investments” in its U.S. Whole Foods workers ever—and their benefits are getting a huge boost, including expanded health coverage and family-building benefits. New perks for workers will increase average total compensation to around $29 hourly.

“Every year, my leadership team and I visit Whole Foods Market stores across the country to hear directly from team members about what’s on their minds,” Jason Buechel, VP of Amazon Worldwide Grocery, said in the press release. 

“Those conversations matter deeply to me, and I leave each visit with a list of ways we can make things better—from improving a process to making bigger investments in team members’ growth and happiness.”

Fortune reached out to Amazon for comment.

U.S. Whole Foods workers are getting college perks and Amazon Prime

Beyond cold hard cash, Amazon is revamping the perks of working at the grocery store giant. And with all the new investments, the total value of benefits available to full-time team members is rising more than 75%. 

“They want a clearer path for their pay to grow, more comprehensive health coverage, and expanded benefits for part-time roles,” Buechel explained.

Starting January 1 2027, U.S. Whole Foods staff will have access to comprehensive health plan options starting at just $5 a week, with access to primary care and behavior health providers with just a $5 copay. Around 20,000 employees working 20 hours or more weekly will get dental, vision, and basic life insurance. Amazon also added that its own health plans “generally have lower deductibles” and out-of-pocket costs. In the benefit overhaul, it will introduce fertility and speciality care perks that many Whole Foods plans don’t currently have. 

In addition to healthcare, Amazon is also expanding access to education benefits. Amazon’s Career Choice perk will roll out to Whole Foods workers next year, which prepays tuition for college, skills training, and certifications. It’s a program that’s been around since 2012, and more than 300,000 Amazon workers have already participated. Plus, every hourly worker will get access to an Amazon Prime membership valued at $139 annually.

Whole Foods is investing in career paths like fishmongering and butchery

Buechel said that employee feedback has driven benefit changes over the years—including creating apprenticeship programs back in 2023. 

Since its launch, more than 2,150 team members have been trained in artisan skills like fishmongering, meat butchering, bakery decorating, and pizza making. Each quarter, the company welcomes up to 300 staffers to join its upskilling program, giving them a chance to swap working in the corporate head office or behind a till, for becoming a cheese mongerer. The shorter apprenticeships like pizza-making last 12 to 13 weeks, while more intensive training, like meat butchering, spans anywhere from six to 12 months. 

Sonya Gafsi Oblisk, chief merchandising and marketing officer at Whole Foods, told Fortune last year that employees’ wages increased when they joined the program—unlocking not only specialized skills, but a stronger career pathway. Plus, it could be a way for workers to even AI-proof themselves; tech can’t taste, touch, or smell the quality of artisanal cheeses, but certified cheese professionals can.

“Many of our alumni go on to advance their careers within the company, using their apprenticeship as a springboard,” Oblisk said. “This is more than training—it’s a career accelerator.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In an era when all Gen Z wants to do is job hop, Ann-Marie Campbell is proof of just how far staying put can take you.

Home Depot’s senior executive vice president went viral on X & LinkedIn this week after a post featuring her career history was hailed as the “perfect LinkedIn profile.” The screenshot, shared by the Acquired podcast, shows Campbell’s 40-year rise from cashier to the C-suite—all at Home Depot.

But Campbell’s career at Home Depot began almost by accident. As a Jamaican immigrant living in South Florida, she was making just $3.35 an hour when she decided to apply at the home-improvement retailer to help pay for her college dreams. She was hired as a part-time cashier in 1985, making $4.15 an hour, and grew to love the job. 

Over the next four decades, Campbell steadily climbed the ranks, becoming a store and district manager in the 1990s before moving into corporate roles in the 2000s. In 2016, she was named executive vice president for U.S. stores & international operations; and by November 2023, Campbell was promoted to senior executive vice president.  Now, she brings home an annual salary just north of $1 million. 

A frequent fixture on Fortune’s list of the Most Powerful Women, Campbell currently leads Home Depot’s day-to-day operations while CEO Ted Decker is out on medical leave over the “next few months.”

Campbell found a 40-year career by finding work she loved

Staying at one company for an entire career is something that is increasingly less common—with a 2025 survey finding Gen Z’s average job tenure during the first five years of their careers is just 1.1 years. But Campbell has said it ultimately came down to finding work she genuinely enjoyed. 

“Jobs become careers when you do something you love,” she told students at Longwood University in 2014, adding that it is then important to use your strengths to create opportunities for yourself.

“When I say confidence is key, when I say put yourself in positions to take and grasp opportunity, I am a living proof of that.”

I think we found it. The perfect LinkedIn profile. @AMCTHD pic.twitter.com/eMhqVDvOYA

— Acquired Podcast (@AcquiredFM) September 15, 2026

Fortune reached out to Home Depot for further comment.

Climbing the corporate ladder means knowing when to ask for help

When Campbell got her first paycheck from Home Depot four decades ago, the chain had fewer than 50 stores and about 5,000 employees. Today, the company ranks No. 25 on the Fortune 500 and has more than 2,200 locations across North America and more than 470,000 on its payroll.

The baby boomer’s impressive rise took decades of hard work and determination. As Home Depot expanded and Campbell moved up the ranks, she learned that raw talent alone wouldn’t carry her career forward; she soon recognized  the power of building relationships, seeking out opportunities, and asking for help when it’s needed.

That lesson became clear when Campbell was a district manager overseeing 13 Miami-area stores in the late 1990s. The region was going through major economic upheaval, and Campbell was navigating the challenges of the job while also raising two children under the age of 4. She considered quitting when her boss sat her down and offered to help—though, as Campbell later recalled, she hadn’t made it clear what she was dealing with at home and work.

“You have to ask people for help,” Campbell told Fortune in a 2016 profile. “I wasn’t good at that.”

The experience changed how Campbell thought about building a career. Success, she came to believe, isn’t something you have to navigate alone. And once you’ve had someone help you, there’s an obligation to do the same for others.

“We have to stretch our hand out and help someone,” she added to Black Enterprise in 2017, “pull someone up.”

It’s a philosophy Campbell has carried throughout her own career: take the opportunities in front of you, perform when you get them, and help make room for someone else to follow.

“Believe that you can. The dream is real. It can happen,” she said. “It will happen if you keep yourself focused on performing. The ticket to the game is performing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com