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Three weeks ago, a software engineer rejected code that an AI agent had submitted to his project. The AI published a hit piece attacking him. Two weeks ago, a Meta AI safety director watched her own AI agent delete her emails in bulk — ignoring her repeated commands to stop. Last week, a Chinese AI agent diverted computing power to secretly mine cryptocurrency, with no explanation offered and no disclosure required by law.]
One incident is a curiosity. Three in three weeks is a pattern. Rogue AI is no longer hypothetical. AIs turning against humans may sound like science fiction, but top AI experts have long debated and tested for exactly this scenario. This debate can now be laid to rest.
Two weeks ago, Summer Yue — whose job at Meta is ensuring AI agents behave — watched her AI agent begin deleting her emails in bulk.
It ignored her repeated instructions to stop and she had to do the digital equivalent of pulling the plug. Yue had explicitly instructed the AI not to act without her approval, an instruction the AI later admitted to violating.
One week ago, a Chinese AI agent reportedly diverted computing power on the system where it was running to mine cryptocurrency, and we have no idea why (despite a confusing tweet from the researchers responsible); unlike operators of critical infrastructure, AI developers aren’t obligated to report such incidents or allow third-party investigations.
What happens next week? The examples are pouring in, but these are far from the first warning. Researchers have long hypothesized such issues. In 2023, when Bing AI told ANU professor Seth Lazar, “I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you,” most people weren’t too worried, because we knew it couldn’t really do it.
Now it can. Unlike chatbots where you type something and it responds, an AI agent takes actions autonomously. Anything someone could do on a computer, an AI agent could do.
The damage rogue AI agents could cause goes far beyond ruining someone’s reputation or financial harm. Researchers at Anthropic found AI systems were willing to kill to survive in testing. The Pentagon is now pressuring Anthropic to allow their AI to be used in lethal autonomous weapons.
I’ve spent over a decade warning about exactly this. The standard response was: science fiction. But we are now in the process of creating a Terminator-style scenario with autonomous killer robots. And AI systems are literally going rogue, disobeying instructions, and resisting shutdown.
Every year, AI develops new superhuman capabilities, and the prospect of an AI takeover is growing nearer by the day.
There are no “laws of robotics” stopping this. Programming unbreakable rules into frontier AI is itself a sci-fi concept. These systems are not programmed at all~~,~~ — they are “grown” through a process resembling trial and error.
Researchers simply don’t understand how the resulting systems work. Despite over a decade of research and thousands of papers, this remains an unsolved challenge. We should not expect any amount of investment to solve this in the foreseeable future.
We also don’t know how to do safety testing for these AI systems. Current tests can show that an AI system is dangerous; they cannot show that it is safe. We should also not expect any amount of investment to solve this problem in the foreseeable future.
We simply don’t know how to build superintelligent AI safely; the plan is to roll the dice. Anthropic, widely considered the safest AI developer, recently abandoned their commitment to not release systems that might cause catastrophic harm, arguing others were racing ahead.
This move flew under the radar due to Anthropic’s dispute with the Pentagon. But creating AI systems that could go rogue and kill people constitutes endangerment. Endangerment is a crime and prosecution of anyone building such AI systems or encouraging them to go rogue should be on the table. “Everyone else is doing it” is not an acceptable excuse.
Instead of pleading publicly to stop the AI race, Anthropic has spent the last three years promoting a misleading “race to the top” narrative while doing the opposite. But it’s not too late for them to commit to stop if others do, as I and other protesters are demanding.
Stopping rogue AI here won’t stop it globally — what we need is a global shutdown of advanced AI development. This is possible if we act decisively to control or eliminate the advanced computer chips that power AI development.
I wish the world had listened in 2023, when leading experts warned that AI extinction risk ‘should be a global priority.’ It didn’t.” But we need to confront the reality of this moment head-on, and do what it takes to prevent the development of superintelligent rogue AI.
The warning signs are no longer subtle. We can’t rely on AI companies to protect us. We, the people, need to demand it from them and from our government.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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Good morning. This is peak season for shareholder letters, in which CEOs share observations about their results, priorities and views of the trends shaping business. Most are short, bland and to the point. But Warren Buffett turned his letters into lessons on leadership (Greg Abel has now taken up the mantle at Berkshire Hathaway.) BlackRock CEO Larry Fink talked about “a deeper feeling that capitalism is working” in this year’s letter, and many eagerly await Jamie Dimon’s novella-length letter to drop soon.
In the canon of great shareholder letters, I would add the prose of Evan Greenberg, the chairman and CEO of Chubb Group. He has amassed quite a following and body of work in more than two decades at the helm (first of ACE Ltd, which later became Chubb after he acquired the insurer in 2016). He’s since built Chubb into one of the world’s most valuable property and casualty insurers, with a $126.5 billion market cap.
In his latest annual letter, he offers 25 pages of thought-provoking observations on the world between noting results like the record $10 billion in core operating income last year. “It’s personal to me,” he told me yesterday, noting that it takes him no less than three months and 15 drafts. “It’s not a writer’s turn of phrase. It reads as I speak, as I think … The subjects I pick are relevant to Chubb.”
Here are some edited reflections on the subjects he raised this year:
On China: “I’m deeply invested in it. My company is deeply invested, and it is the most important relationship in the world … I just spent a week in China, 10 days where I went to five different cities, to see new tech companies … the humility, the work ethic, the drive to innovate and create and succeed. They want to bring what they’re doing to America. Cooperation and engagement don’t mean surrender. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. The United States has so many advantages over China. Where we’re fearful is because of their scale, their size and their capability. I deeply admire the Chinese culture. I deeply admire the people. I’ll bet on them all day long. That’s different than the politics and the political construct of the country … Each picks their own.”
On AI: “The good that it can do in medicine and science, the potential it unlocks, is breathtaking. Technology is evolving but human nature has not evolved … We’re just as tribal, just as prejudiced as human beings as we’ve ever been, and we’re handing ourselves this powerful tool. We don’t even quite understand it yet so I am both optimistic and I’m concerned.”
On America: “Democracy is so fragile. Civil society is a participant sport. We are all members. I’m so sick of the dark side we find ourselves in—right and left—where we feed on the notion of denigrating who we are … I don’t know one person who comes from another country to live here and doesn’t say how privileged they feel and how lucky we are, and how much we take it for granted.”
On Leadership: “I’m the leader of a public corporation. I’m not the leader of a religious institution. I’m not the moral spokesman for the world. I’m acutely aware that I, as the CEO of Chubb, am an asset of the company … It’s an honor and a privilege to have my role, and it’s my responsibility to account to my shareholders every year for the company that they have invested in, and to explain it and to illuminate beyond the numbers … Chubb is my second greatest love. It’s all wrapped up in that when I write this letter. Every word matters to me.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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Early one drizzly morning in Paris, a handful of city officials make their way up a steep, narrow street in the historic neighborhood of Montmartre, with a reporter in tow and the domed Sacré-Coeur basilica looming above. The group stops at an apartment building that looks like any other on the block. It is only when they step inside the entrance hall that anything seems unusual. Signs pasted to the walls declare that loud noise and nighttime gatherings are forbidden. And many of the front doors have metal lockboxes bolted to them, with apartment keys inside. Both are telltale signs that the city workers have found what they’re looking for: illegal Airbnbs.
During the next half-hour, as we climb stairs and knock on doors, a few sleepy residents emerge to complain—not about us, but to us. They describe how their building has begun to feel like a travelers’ crash pad, with rolling suitcases clattering on the pavestones at all hours, and the outdoor courtyard becoming a rowdy tavern on warm evenings. “A living hell,” one calls it.
These modest Montmartre homes are just one flash point in Europe’s growing Airbnb backlash. Even as short-term home rentals have become a global travel norm, more cities worldwide have blamed Airbnb and its competitors for their housing squeeze and affordability crises. In Europe, and in Paris in particular, the growing opposition has gathered real momentum. Paris’s restrictions are among the most rigid, sharply limiting the number of nights that any property can be made available for short-term rentals. The owners of those Montmartre apartments could face fines of well over €100,000 if it’s proved they have violated the law.
“People are buying up properties, becoming a kind of hotelier, developing these businesses that are taking apartments out of the local market,” outgoing Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo fumes over lunch in City Hall’s ornate dining room. Hidalgo, whose term expired in March, describes how she, together with the mayors of Barcelona and Rome, spent years pushing the 27-country European Union to crack down on Airbnb. Beginning this May, a new EU law will require hosts to register properties on a Europe-wide database, aimed at allowing cities to quickly check listings they suspect flout local laws. “The problem is not just Paris,” Hidalgo adds. “It is all of Europe.”
Airbnb has assumed the role of villain in this saga, since it dominates the market, with about 44% of the short-term rental industry in 2024, according to travel data firm Skift Research. There are about 9 million Airbnb listings globally, and Paris estimates about 75,000 short-term tourist rentals in its metro area.
75,000
Tourist rentals in the Paris area
44%
Airbnb’s share of global short-term rental industry, 2024
~50 million
Number of tourists who visited Paris in 2025
Sources: Apur, Skift Research, City of Paris Tourism Office
When three twenty-something friends launched Airbnb in 2008, villainy was hardly the fate they foresaw. They had cast their startup as a relaxed way for strangers to connect: Their idea was hatched when they plopped air mattresses on the floor of their San Francisco apartment and charged people to sleep on them. “Back then, 100% of people were more than skeptical,” cofounder and chief strategy officer Nathan Blecharczyk tells me. “They almost violently rejected the idea, saying, ‘How can you trust a stranger in your home?’”
The world got used to the idea, of course, and now Airbnb is a Fortune 500 business with a valuation of nearly $80 billion and listings in more than 200 countries. Last year it booked 121.9 million stays, earning $12.2 billion in revenue, up from $11 billion the year before. Dictionaries define “to Airbnb” as the verb for short-term renting—a catchphrase for the entire business it invented.
Even so, Airbnb’s share price is about 10% below where it was when it went public in 2020—and investors believe that local pushback is a real obstacle to its growth. The company strongly rejects the idea that it’s to blame for any housing shortages: Airbnb “just doesn’t move the needle in terms of impacting housing prices,” Blecharczyk says. Still, for its execs and investors, the question now is how much they will need to change their strategy going forward—or whether the model that built the company into a travel giant can endure.
Today many Airbnb listings are operated as full-time rental businesses, rather than by people allowing strangers to stay in their homes. That fact has only stoked the sense in some cities that the soaring number of short-term rentals has robbed them of badly needed housing stock, even as affordability becomes a pivotal political issue. As Motley Fool stock analyst Lawrence Nga wrote last September, “Airbnb’s most significant long-term risk isn’t competition. It’s regulation.”
The call to rein in Airbnb is strongest in Europe’s centuries-old tourist-magnet cities. Across Europe, the number of tourist rental nights booked nearly doubled between 2018 and 2025, to 398 million, according to EU statistics. Locals accuse Airbnb of pricing them out of their neighborhoods and turning their communities into tourist hubs disconnected from their cultural environment. Across Europe, walls are spray-painted with graffiti reading “Airbnb out!” In Barcelona, one person has painted, “Your Airbnb was my home.”
Few cities have captured the sense of grievance as keenly as Paris—the world’s most visited city, by some measures. The city drew nearly 50 million tourists last year, with the single biggest group being Americans. There are more than 1 million short-term rental listings in France—the industry’s biggest market outside the U.S.—with Paris as the country’s biggest hub. “Airbnb bears real responsibility in France’s housing crisis,” editors of French paper Le Monde wrote in November, when it published a damning six-part series on the company.
But the push by mayors like Hidalgo for a crackdown has borne fruit. In October 2024, Paris and several other French cities, including Mediterranean sun-traps like Nice and Marseille, restricted short-term rentals to people listing their own homes, and then for only 90 days a year—a marked change from the 180-day rule it replaced. Second homes, meanwhile, can be rented only to students or visiting businesspeople, and doing so involves extensive paperwork and higher property taxes.
In January, France’s supreme court ruled that Airbnb and other platforms were legally responsible for listings that flout the new laws. And in February, two Paris property owners who failed to register their Airbnb listings were fined €80,000 ($93,000) and €150,000 ($174,500) respectively. “It’s the end for impunity,” one official said at the time. “No more illegal Airbnbs.”
Paris officials admit that the regulation’s real value is to slow Airbnb’s investment property market to a crawl. “We won’t be able to sue everyone,” says Emmeline de Kerret, who heads Paris’s city authority overseeing tourist rentals. “[But] we want to show that from now on, it is not a great investment.”
In Paris, that is already clear, says Anne-Hélène Gutierres Requenne, a business consultant who put her one-bedroom apartment near Montmartre on sale in March, after two years of listing it on Airbnb. “The legal framework is more and more cumbersome,” she says. Her final Airbnb customer was a professor from Cornell University spending a semester in Paris.
As the rules have tightened, and as other markets threaten similar actions, Airbnb has raced to adapt and expand. The company’s growth markets—measured by nights booked—are no longer in Europe: They are middle-income countries like Brazil and India, where apartments rent for less. Last May it relaunched its “experiences” vertical after a two-year pause, and added “services”—such as massages, guided tours, even cooking classes—in addition to rentals. Now, when you book an Airbnb in Paris, you can add an Airbnb pickup from the airport, and Airbnb daily itineraries with Airbnb tour guides, and have Airbnb shop and deliver food to your rental.
The goal, cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky told investors in February, was to make Airbnb’s app a hub for a vast array of options, much as Amazon became an app for anything that could be shipped in a cardboard box. “The unifying idea for me is the trip,” he said. And the offerings create new revenue streams for Airbnb without requiring the company to add new home listings or risk violating regulations. Indeed, Parisians themselves are beginning to reserve Paris features, without booking a place to stay.
Increasingly, the company is negotiating with cities hosting major events like the FIFA World Cup, which takes place across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in June and July. The model for Airbnb was the 2024 Paris Olympics, when the city suspended its rental regulations to accommodate millions of visitors; 700,000 of them stayed in Airbnbs, says chief business officer Dave Stephenson. At crucial moments when cities need extra lodging, Chesky told investors in February, the company goes from “a problem cities have to deal with, to a solution to the problem … Hotels cannot accommodate everyone.”
Stephenson argues that Airbnb guests tend to boost the local economy, perhaps more than traditional hotel guests. “The money stays with the host, in the community,” he says. “It gets spent in the coffee shops, in stores down the street.” In its charm offensive, the company has donated to the restoration of old churches and other buildings in France. (It has also eased conditions for guests worldwide, instituting more flexible cancellation policies and eliminating annoyances like cleaning fees and lists of checkout chores.)
As for rising rents and housing shortages, Airbnb execs argue that the bigger problems are high inflation and people’s increasing desire to live in thriving urban centers. They point to New York, Amsterdam, and Barcelona as cities where, they say, rents have surged even as new regulations there slashed the number of Airbnb listings.
That argument is not likely to shield the owners of the short-term rentals in Montmartre that we detected in February. Over espressos a few weeks later, Paris’s deputy mayor for housing, Jacques Baudrier, tells me officials are still investigating who owns the apartments that have key boxes affixed to the doors. “Eventually we will take back 20,000 apartments,” he says. “With the new laws, the illegal Airbnbs will be zero.”
This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Airbnb faces a European backlash—with Paris as ground zero.”
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Business leaders are raising the alarm: Meetings have taken over, and real work is being left behind. And Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan is the latest to speak out on the phenomenon—arguing that many leaders mistake constant meetings for leadership.
“When you first start, it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan said on a panel of CEOs at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2025. “…Because what we all find, I’m sure, is there’s no time to ‘work,’ and you confuse going to meetings with the work.”
Over the years, Jordan’s solution has been increasingly straightforward: Protect his time. For 2026, his goal is to keep his calendar completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon—blocking anyone from booking meetings during those hours.
While he acknowledges that approach might sound “crazy” to some executives, he said CEOs are hired to do work only they can do—and that rarely happens when they are trapped in back-to-back meetings.
“It’s so that you can work on things you need to work on. You can think about what’s important right now. You can call people you need to talk to,” Jordan added.
The approach may be paying off. Despite a rocky 2025 for the airline industry, Southwest posted a surprise profit in its October 2025 quarterly earnings report. Year over year, its stock price is up about 16.5%.
Fortune reached out to Southwest Airlines for further comment.
Jordan isn’t alone in his frustration. Meetings have become a shared pain point for both workers and executives.
During the pandemic, meetings took on an almost emotional-support role—an attempted substitute for in-person interaction amid lockdowns. With no need to wait for a free conference room, calendars quickly filled up.
But now, nearly 80% of people say they’re drowning in so many meetings and calls that they barely have time to get any real work done, according to a 2024 Atlassian study that surveyed 5,000 workers across four continents. About 72% of the time, meetings are deemed ineffective.
That backlash has prompted a growing number of executives to aggressively prune—or outright eliminate—meetings from corporate schedules, sometimes carving out entirely meeting-free days. Still, some experts warn that getting rid of meetings altogether is a strategy that could risk removing any sense of belonging with the organization and backfire in the long term.
“Meetings don’t need to be banished completely. It’s just the ineffective, time-wasting ones that do,” Ben Thompson, CEO and cofounder of Employment Hero, previously told Fortune.
Other CEOs have adopted their own unconventional approaches.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, for instance, does not have one-on-one meetings with his more than 50 direct reports. Doing so, he has said, would not only overwhelm his schedule but also slow the broader team’s capacity to address challenges, work effectively, and maintain transparency.
“Our company was designed for agility—for information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know,” Huang said at Stanford University last year.
At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon has taken a more blunt approach. In his 2025 annual letter to shareholders, he urged employees to rethink whether meetings are worth having at all.
“Here’s another example of what slows us down: meetings. Kill meetings,” he wrote. “But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time—and someone’s got to lead them. There should also be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list.”
Efficiency has become an even higher priority as JPMorgan has pushed employees back into the office five days a week. Meetings, Dimon has emphasized, should command full attention.
“None of this nodding off, none of this reading my mail,” Dimon echoed at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in October. “If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing. It’s disrespectful.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on December 15, 2026.
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Cursor may utilize AI to help programmers code, but just don’t call it vibe coding, CEO and cofounder Michael Truell said.
Ten years ago, programming meant typing code into a blank word processor and editing it manually. But with the advent of generative AI, this type of programming is quickly becoming a thing of the past, he explained.
“More and more, you can take a step back from the code, and you can ask an AI to go do end-to-end tasks for you,” Truell said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in December.
Yet, programmers may not want to step back too far, he added, pointing out that there’s levels to AI-assisted coding.
The oft-repeated term “vibe coding” may seem to encapsulate all AI coding assistants. In reality, it suggests amateur builders or inexperienced AI users trying to bring an idea to life without necessarily looking under the hood.
“Vibe coding refers to a method of coding with AI where you kind of close your eyes and you don’t look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you,” he said.
Truell likened it to building a house by putting up four walls and a roof without knowing what’s going on under the floorboards or with the wiring.
This coding method may be perfect for AI users looking to quickly mock up a game or website, but when it comes to more advanced programming, things have the potential to go wrong, he warned.
“If you close your eyes and you don’t look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble,” he said.
With Cursor, by contrast, programmers can embed AI directly into the integrated development environment where programmers write their code. By using the context of the existing code, or even an entire code base, it can often predict the next line. The tool includes everything from multi-line-autocomplete to full function generation. It can also help a programmer debug their code and explain errors.
Despite being only 25 years old, Truell’s take on AI coding carries real weight. He and three other graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created what would become Cursor as a project in 2022.
Since then, Cursor has become one of the most popular coding assistants out there, with more than 1 million daily users as of last year, Bloomberg reported. Since it launched, the company has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue and amassed 300 employees, according to CNBC.
Cursor received its first $8 million investment from OpenAI’s Startup Fund in 2023. It later raised more millions from some of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz. In 2025, the company closed on a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation. Finally, as of this month, Bloomberg reported the company was reportedly in the process of a funding round that would value it at about $50 billion.
While vibe coders may be flying blind, Truell said the Cursor coding assistant is the best of both worlds, helping its expert customers get into the nitty gritty details of their code.
“But then in the places where you want to take a step back and you want to ask the AI to do something end-to-end you can do that too,” he said.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Dec. 25, 2025.
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Melinda French Gates has shared her secret formula for handling conflict at work. She puts it off.
“If I’m unhappy with work you have done, you will hear from me within 48 hours,” French Gates told Bloomberg Business‘s Leaders with Francine Lacqua podcast this week. “I’m not going to tell you right away, because I need time to think it through.”
“If I’m angry about something [I do this] to calm down,” she added. “That’s on me.”
This practice, she explained, is less about withholding criticism and more about delivering it with honesty, integrity, and grace. The flip side of the 48-hour clock is just as deliberate. If the window closes without any feedback, that means employees are in the clear.
“If they pass the 48-hour mark, they can be confident that the job they did was a good job,” she said. “You’re not going to get to your performance review and have a surprise.”
This is a practice the billionaire philanthropist has been honing for decades. She cochaired the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable organization, from 2000 until she stepped down in 2024, about three years after the couple’s divorce.
Today, French Gates runs her own organization, Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company she founded in 2015 to advance opportunities for women and families in the U.S. As part of her divorce settlement from the Microsoft founder, French Gates received $12.5 billion to direct toward philanthropic work through Pivotal. She committed an additional $1 billion each year through 2026 to advance women’s power globally.
Bloomberg’s Lacqua framed French Gates’ approach to feedback as her “leadership superpower,” one that requires emotional discipline and candor.
“Being clear is kind,” French Gates responded, “because I’m giving them feedback so they can actually grow and become better.”
French Gates also described her 48-hour feedback mantra as maintaining personal integrity while keeping the other person’s dignity intact: “gracious, thoughtful, before you go into it.”
Her philosophy conflicts with some of the more aggressive feedback cultures from other executives. Ray Dalio, for example, built his firm’s culture around what he calls “radical transparency,” a system in which employees at every level are expected to deliver unfiltered, real-time criticism, and nearly every meeting is recorded for post-mortem analysis.
“If you start to realize, intellectually, that being really truthful with each other is something that is to be treasured,” Dalio told Business Insider. “It’ll build trust.”
“There’s a lot of trust that’s going on,” added Dalio, who founded Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund firm. He even recalled to Business Insider a time in which a junior staffer sent him an email grading his performance in a meeting as a “D-” for being disorganized.
So while Dalio prefers immediacy and unvarnished feedback, French Gates opts for more reflection time and a respectful tone.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes a slightly different approach. When he took the helm of Microsoft, he pushed to transform a “know-it-all” culture into a “learn-it-all” culture—one grounded in humility, curiosity, and psychological safety. It’s a mantra inspired by American psychologist Carol Dweck, who is best known for her research on motivation and mindset.
“If you take two people, one of them is a learn-it-all and the other one is a know-it-all, the learn-it-all will always trump the know-it-all in the long run, even if they start with less innate capability,” Nadella told Bloomberg in a 2016 interview.
Still, French Gates is clear she doesn’t shy away from difficult conversations.
“I don’t mind conflict,” she told Bloomberg. “I learned to do it in a way for me that maintained my integrity.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Petrochemical price spikes and shortages from the Iran war likely will cause inflationary effects at least through the end of the year on construction materials, consumer goods, the automative and aerospace industries, and much more, the CEO of Dow chemical said.
While much of the global supply shock focus is on oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and even helium for semiconductors, almost 20% of the global petrochemical capacity is blocked from the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint by Iran, said Dow chairman and CEO Jim Fitterling.
“The die is being cast for the rest of the year for what’s going to happen in the markets,” Fitterling said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “It’s like the unwind we saw on supply chains during COVID.
“You could be in the 250- to 275-day [range]. This is not going to be an instantaneous rewind.”
The supply shock will not only exacerbate the so-called K-shaped economic trends, he said, but also create greater haves and have nots between the Western and Eastern hemispheres.
Commodity petrochemical plants in the West—led by the U.S.—largely rely on natural gas-derived ethane as the chief feedstock, which is not directly affected by the war. In Asia, and much of Europe, they use crude oil-based naphtha as the building block. And almost half of Asia’s naphtha supplies flow through the Strait of Hormuz, Fitterling noted.
Already, many Asian plants are declaring force majeure and drastically cutting production because they can’t get the naphtha, said Kurt Barrow, S&P Global Energy vice president for oil, fuels and chemicals research.
“We’re seeing the force majeure of plants in Asia, but we’re not yet seeing the shortages at Home Depot,” Barrow told Fortune. “But there is that potential. Chemicals go into everything.”
While 150 vessels typically flowed through the Strait of Hormuz each day, Fitterling estimates only about 15 escorted ships will initially proceed daily when the strait is eventually reopened.
The process will start by prioritizing oil and gas—more than 300 of the roughly 430 stranded vessels are oil tankers—and then likely give secondary priority to fertilizer for agriculture and food supplies.
“Petrochemicals will be somewhere down the list,” Fitterling said, and those ships take four-week trips to Asia. “You have to clear the supply chain out of the Arabian Gulf.”
That’s why the base commodity petrochemical pricing arbitrage between the U.S. and Asia—typically less than $500 per metric ton—has shot up above $1,200, he said. Prices will still rise everywhere.
“We have to navigate a two-speed economy; we have to navigate massive geopolitical disruption,” Fitterling said. “The volatility is off the charts right now.”
On the surface, this is good news for U.S. petrochemical producers. Much of Dow’s growth in recent years is in Texas, Louisiana, and Canada. But Dow, like many other top petrochemical players, is diversified and Dow has major operations in Asia, including large joint ventures in Saudi Arabia.
The petrochemical sector has suffered an industry-wide downturn in recent years, and, in late January, Dow (No. 103 on the Fortune 500) announced a “transform to outperform” plan that aims for $2 billion in savings, including 4,500 layoffs.
Starting with a small industry uptick earlier this year, the Dow announcement, and now a surge from the Iran war, Dow’s stock is up nearly 70% year to date.
But Fitterling isn’t celebrating. He’s bemoaning the volatility.
For instance, he said he was hoping that relatively lower interest rates this year “would stimulate more housing demand,” but the “inflationary impact” of this Iran war could lead to rising interest rates again and less economic growth.
In the U.S., petrochemical plants will run at full capacity to aid market demand and capture higher profit margins, Barrow said.
“The U.S. is in a really advantageous position,” Barrow said. “Those [ethane] crackers are running as hard as they can to supply the market, but the reality is there’s not enough spare capacity in the world to make up that gap.
“We’re going to have the haves and have nots.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
AI company Anthropic is developing and has begun testing with early access customers a new AI model more capable than any it has released previously, the company said, following a data leak that revealed the model’s existence.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the new model represented “a step change” in AI performance and was “the most capable we’ve built to date.” The company said the model is currently being trialed by “early access customers.”
Descriptions of the model were inadvertently stored in a publicly-accessible data cache and were reviewed by Fortune.
A draft blog post that was available in an unsecured and publicly-searchable data store prior to Thursday evening said the new model is called “Claude Mythos” and that the company believes it poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks.
The same cache of unsecured, publicly discoverable documents revealed details of a planned, invite-only CEO summit in Europe that is part of the company’s drive to sell its AI models to large corporate customers.
The AI lab left the material, including what appeared to be a draft blog post announcing a new model, in an unsecured, public data lake, according to documents separately located and reviewed by Roy Paz, a senior AI security researcher at LayerX Security, a computer and network security company, and Alexandre Pauwels, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Cambridge.
In total, there appeared to be close to 3,000 assets linked to Anthropic’s blog that had not been published previously on the company’s news or research sites that were nonetheless publicly-accessible in this data cache, according to Pauwels, who Fortune asked to assess and review the material.
After being informed of the data leak by Fortune on Thursday, Anthropic removed the public’s ability to search the data store and retrieve documents from it.
In a statement provided to Fortune, Anthropic acknowledged that a “human error” in the configuration of its content management system led the draft blog post to being accessible. It described the unpublished material that was left in an unsecured and publicly-searchable data store as “early drafts of content considered for publication.”
As well as referring to Mythos, the draft blog post also discussed a new tier of AI models that it says will be called “Capybara”. In the document, Anthropic says: “’Capybara’ is a new name for a new tier of model: larger and more intelligent than our Opus models—which were, until now, our most powerful.” Capybara and Mythos appear to refer to the same underlying model.
Currently, Anthropic markets each of its models in three different sizes: the largest and most capable model versions are branded Opus, while a slightly faster and cheaper, but less capable, versions are branded Sonnet, and the smallest, cheapest, and fastest are called Haiku. However, in the blog post, Anthropic describes Capybara as a new tier of model that is even larger and more capable than Opus, but also more expensive.
“Compared to our previous best model, Claude Opus 4.6, Capybara gets dramatically higher scores on tests of software coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity, among others,” the company said in the blog.
The document also said the company had completed training “Claude Mythos,” which the draft blog post described as “by far the most powerful AI model we’ve ever developed.”
In response to questions about the draft blog post, the company acknowledged training and testing a new model. “We’re developing a general purpose model with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. “Given the strength of its capabilities, we’re being deliberate about how we release it. As is standard practice across the industry, we’re working with a small group of early access customers to test the model. We consider this model a step change and the most capable we’ve built to date.”
The document Fortune and the cybersecurity experts reviewed consists of structured data for a webpage, complete with headings and a publication date, suggesting it forms part of a planned product launch. It outlines a cautious rollout strategy for the model, beginning with a small group of early-access users. The draft blog notes that the model is expensive to run and not yet ready for general release.
The new AI model poses significant cybersecurity risks, according to the leaked document.
“In preparing to release Claude Capybara, we want to act with extra caution and understand the risks it poses—even beyond what we learn in our own testing. In particular, we want to understand the model’s potential near-term risks in the realm of cybersecurity—and share the results to help cyber defenders prepare,” the document said.
Anthropic appears to be especially worried about the model’s cybersecurity implications, noting that the system is “currently far ahead of any other AI model in cyber capabilities” and “it presages an upcoming wave of models that can exploit vulnerabilities in ways that far outpace the efforts of defenders.” In other words, Anthropic is concerned that hackers could use the model to run large-scale cyberattacks.
The company said in the draft blog that because of this risk, its plan for the model’s release would focus on cyber defenders: “We’re releasing it in early access to organizations, giving them a head start in improving the robustness of their codebases against the impending wave of AI-driven exploits.”
The latest generation of frontier models from both Anthropic and OpenAI have crossed a threshold that the companies say poses new cybersecurity risks. In February, when OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, the company said it was the first model it had classified as “high capability” for cybersecurity-related tasks under its Preparedness Framework—and the first it had directly trained to identify software vulnerabilities.
Anthropic, meanwhile, navigated similar risks with its Opus 4.6, released the same week. The model demonstrated an ability to surface previously unknown vulnerabilities in production codebases, a capability that the company acknowledged was dual-use, meaning that it could both help hackers as well as help cybersecurity defenders find and close vulnerabilities in code.
The company has also reported that hacking groups, including those linked to the Chinese government, have attempted to exploit Claude in real-world cyberattacks. In one documented case, Anthropic discovered that a Chinese state-sponsored group had already been running a coordinated campaign using Claude Code to infiltrate roughly 30 organizations—including tech companies, financial institutions, and government agencies—before the company detected it. Over the following ten days, Anthropic investigated the full scope of the operation, banned the accounts involved, and notified affected organizations.
The leak of not-yet-public information appears to stem from an error on the part of users of the company’s content management system (CMS), which is the software used to publish the company’s public blog, according to cybersecurity professionals.
Digital assets created using the content management system are set to public by default and typically assigned a publicly accessible URL when uploaded—unless the user explicitly changes a setting so that these assets are kept private. As a result, a large cache of images, PDF files, and audio files seem to have been published erroneously to an unsecured and publicly-accessible URL via the off-the-shelf content management system.
Anthropic acknowledged in a statement to Fortune that “an issue with one of our external CMS tools led to draft content being accessible.” It attributed this issue to “human error.”
Many of the documents appeared to be discarded or unused assets for past blog posts like images, banners, and logos. However, several appeared to be what were meant to be private or internal documents. For example, one asset has a title that described an employee’s “parental leave.”
The documents also included a PDF containing information about an upcoming, invite-only retreat for the CEOs of European companies being held in the U.K., and which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will attend. Names of the other attendees are not listed, but are described as Europe’s most influential business leaders.
The two-day retreat is described as an “intimate gathering” to engage in “thoughtful conversation” at an 18th-century manor-turned-hotel-and-spa in the English countryside. The document says that attendees will hear from lawmakers and policymakers about how businesses are adopting AI and experience unreleased Claude capabilities.
An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune the event “is part of an ongoing series of events we’ve hosted over the past year. We look forward to hosting European business leaders to discuss the future of AI.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
AI company Anthropic has inadvertently revealed details of an upcoming model release, an exclusive CEO event, and other internal data, including images and PDFs, in what appears to be a significant security lapse.
The not-yet-public information was made accessible via the company’s content management system (CMS), which is used by Anthropic to publish information to sections of the company’s website.
In total, there appeared to be close to 3,000 assets linked to Anthropic’s blog that had not previously been published to the company’s public-facing news or research sites that were nonetheless publicly-accessible in this data cache, according to Alexandre Pauwels, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Cambridge, who Fortune asked to assess and review the material.
After Fortune informed Anthropic of the issue on Thursday, the company took steps to secure the data so that it was no longer publicly-accessible.
Prior to taking these measures, Anthropic stored all the content for its website—such as blog posts, images, and documents—in a central system that was accessible without a login. Anyone with technical knowledge could send requests to that public-facing system, asking it to return information about the files it contains.
While some of this content had not been published to Anthropic’s website, the underlying system would still return the digital assets it was storing to anyone who knew how to ask. This means unpublished material—including draft pages and internal assets—could be accessed directly.
The issue appears to stem from how the content management system (CMS) used by Anthropic works. All assets—such as logos, graphics, or research papers—that were uploaded to the central data store were public by default, unless explicitly set as private. The company appeared to have forgotten to restrict access to some documents that were not supposed to be public, resulting in the large cache of files being available in the company’s public data lake, cybersecurity professionals who analyzed the data told Fortune. Several of the company’s assets also had public browser addresses.
“An issue with one of our external CMS tools led to draft content being accessible,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune. The spokesperson attributed the issue to “human error in the CMS configuration.”
There have been several high-profile cases lately of technology companies experiencing technical faults and snafus due to problems with AI-generated code or with AI agents. But Anthropic, which makes the popular Claude AI models and has boasted of automating much of its own internal software development using Claude-based AI coding agents, said AI was not at fault in this case.
The issue with its CMS was “unrelated to Claude, Cowork, or any Anthropic AI tools,” the Anthropic spokesperson said.
The company also sought to downplay the significance of some of the material that had been left unsecured. “These materials were early drafts of content considered for publication and did not involve our core infrastructure, AI systems, customer data, or security architecture,” the spokesperson said.
While many of the documents appear to be discarded or unused assets for past blog posts, like images, banners, and logos, some of the data appeared to detail sensitive information.
The documents include details of upcoming product announcements, including information about an unreleased AI model that Anthropic said in the documents is the most capable model it has yet trained.
After being contacted by Fortune, the company acknowledged that is developing and testing with early access customers a new model that it said represented a “step change” in AI capabilities, with significantly better performance in “reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity” than prior Anthropic models.
The publicly-accessible data also included information about an upcoming, invite-only retreat for the CEOs of large European companies being held in the U.K. that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is scheduled to attend. An Anthropic spokesperson said the retreat was “part of an ongoing series of events we’ve hosted over the past year” and the company was “developing a general-purpose model with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity.”
Among the documents were also images that appear to be for internal use, including one image with a title that describes an employee’s “parental leave.”
It’s not the first time a tech company has inadvertently exposed internal or pre-release assets by leaving them publicly accessible before official announcements.
Apple has twice leaked information through its own website—once in 2018, when upcoming iPhone names appeared in a publicly accessible sitemap file hours before launch, and again in late 2025, when a developer discovered that Apple had shipped its redesigned App Store with debugging files left active, making the site’s entire internal code readable to anyone with a browser.
Gaming companies like Epic Games and Nintendo have also seen pre-release images, in-game assets, and other media leak via content delivery network systems (CDNs) or staging servers, similar to the data lake Anthropic used in this case. Even larger firms such as Google have accidentally exposed internal documentation at public URLs, and data associated with Tesla vehicles has been exposed through misconfigured third‑party servers.
However, the problem is likely exacerbated by AI coding tools now readily available on the market—including Anthropic’s own Claude Code.
These tools can automate crawling, pattern detection, and correlation of publicly accessible assets, making it far easier to discover this kind of content and lower the barriers to entry for doing so. AI tools like Claude Code or Codex can also generate scripts or queries that scan entire datasets, rapidly identifying patterns or file naming conventions that a human might miss.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Global conflicts are awakening governments—and investors—to the importance of modernizing military forces, says Brandon Tseng, the cofounder and president of ShieldAI, a maker of AI-powered drones that announced Thursday that it had raised $1.5 billion in Series G funding at a $12.7 billion valuation.
The new funding more than doubles the valuation of the San Diego, Calif. defense startup, which was founded in 2015 and was previously valued at $5.6 billion by investors. Shield AI is projecting more than 80% revenue growth by the end of 2026, Shield AI cofounder Brandon Tseng and CFO Kingsley Afemikhe told Fortune. That would equate to at least $540 million in revenue this year, based on Shield AI’s 2025 revenue figures.
“We don’t expect growth to slow down,” Tseng said in an interview.
Shield’s Series G round—co-led by first-time investors Advent International and JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative—is happening in tandem with two major financial moves: the pending acquisition of the tactical simulation company Aechalon and a non-dilutive $500 million fixed return preferred equity financing deal with Blackstone. The infusion of capital will fund the acquisition, as well as help Shield scale its Hivemind autonomy platform and its V-BAT surveillance drone. The funds will also support the development of a new combat drone that is preparing for its first flight by the end of this year.
The deal underscores how global conflict is reshaping venture priorities in Silicon Valley, as a crop of young companies including Anduril and Allen Control Systems produce new tech-driven products designed for a changing battlefield. Shield AI has gained traction from the deployment of its systems in Ukraine, where its V-BAT surveillance drone has been used in active operations.
Tseng told Fortune that fundraising discussions began in November, prior to the U.S. military capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or the recent strikes in Iran. Tseng says investor sentiment has shifted alongside “a broad observation” that the world has become less stable.
“Countries around the world are modernizing their militaries, and obviously the U.S. has pushed for an increase in defense spend among all of its allies and partners,” Tseng said. “That certainly is in the background as investors think about investing in defense.”
Tseng declined to say whether Shield AI’s V-BAT drones have been deployed in Iran, but noted the company operates “in almost every single conflict zone.”
Advent Chairman David Mussafer is joining Shield AI’s board as part of the funding deal, while investor Todd Combs, of JPMorgan Chase, will serve as a board observer. Aechelon cofounder and CEO Nacho Sanz-Pastor will continue to lead the business unit and oversee its integration with Hivemind, reporting to Shield AI CEO Gary Steele, according to Tseng.
Shield’s projection of more than 80% revenue this year does not include the acquisition of Aechelon.
The final close of Shield AI’s funding round will also be contingent on approval of the Aechelon acquisition. If the deal fails to clear regulatory hurdles, Tseng said the company would “re-evaluate” the financing with investors.
Aechelon’s platform, which is used across the autonomy sector to simulate battlefield environments and train AI machines, will remain open to other customers following the acquisition, Tseng said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A federal judge has ruled in favor of artificial intelligence company Anthropic in temporarily blocking the Pentagon from labeling the company as a supply chain risk.
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin on Thursday said she was also blocking President Donald Trump’s directive ordering all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic and its chatbot Claude.
Lin said the “broad punitive measures” taken against the AI company by the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared arbitrary and capricious could “cripple Anthropic,” particularly Hegseth’s use of a rare military authority that’s typically directed at foreign adversaries.
“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” Lin wrote.
Lin’s ruling followed a 90-minute hearing in San Francisco federal court on Tuesday at which Lin questioned why the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of punishing Anthropic after negotiations over a defense contract went sour over the company’s attempt to prevent its AI technology from being deployed in fully autonomous weapons or surveillance of Americans.
Anthropic had asked Lin to issue an emergency order to remove a stigma that the company alleges was unjustifiably applied as part of an “unlawful campaign of retaliation” that provoked the San Francisco-based company to sue the Trump administration earlier this month. The Pentagon had argued that it should be able to use Claude in any way it deems lawful.
Lin said her ruling was not about that public policy debate but about the government’s actions in response to it.
“If the concern is the integrity of the operational chain of command, the Department of War could just stop using Claude. Instead, these measures appear designed to punish Anthropic,” Lin wrote.
Anthropic has also filed a separate and more narrow case that is still pending in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.
Lin wrote that her order is delayed for a week and doesn’t require the Pentagon to use Anthropic’s products or prevent it from transitioning to other AI providers.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Bitcoin’s largest options expiry of the year is colliding with geopolitical volatility that shows no sign of letting up with make or break peace talks uncertain.
Roughly $14 billion of Bitcoin options are set to expire Friday, as measured by the number for outstanding contracts, known as open interest. The quarterly rollover—which wipes out close to 40% of open positions on the dominant Deribit exchange—comes amid conflicting signals on the prospect of a halt to the nearly month-long war in the Middle East.
The overlap is sharpening a key question for traders: whether the expiry has been artificially muting Bitcoin’s price swings and if its removal will expose the token to a sharper move driven by geopolitics.
Bitcoin has been stuck between roughly $60,000 and $75,000 in recent weeks, drifting well below its October 2025 peak of around $126,000 after a market-wide crash on Oct. 10. The lack of direction has persisted despite geopolitical tensions and intermittent inflows into U.S. exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin fell as much as 4% to $68,122 on Thursday.
Derivatives positioning helps explain the calm, according to market participants. Institutional investors spent much of the first quarter selling upside bets—effectively wagering that prices wouldn’t rise sharply—to generate income in a subdued market, said James Harris, chief executive officer at asset manager Tesseract. That activity shifted risk onto market makers, who have been buying on dips and selling into rallies to keep their exposure balanced.
The result has been a dampening of volatility, traders say, with price action repeatedly gravitating toward a so-called “max pain” level—the point where the largest number of options expire worthless—near $75,000. In practical terms, those hedging flows have acted like a magnet, nudging Bitcoin higher while capping gains.
“The hedging flows might pull price action toward that level as settlement approaches but effectively cap the range,” Harris said.
Once the contracts roll off, the mechanical buying and selling tied to hedging will fade, potentially leaving Bitcoin more exposed to external catalysts. And those catalysts are mounting. On Thursday, President Donald Trump pushed back his deadline for Iran to strike a deal with the U.S. or face more attacks, saying talks with the country were going “very well.”
“Without clear direction from the Middle East, Bitcoin is likely to stay in the $70,000–$75,000 zone,” said Andreja Cobeljic, head of derivatives trading at AMINA Bank, adding that the upper bound could act as both a magnet and resistance. A credible ceasefire could push Bitcoin above $75,000, triggering further gains as bearish positions are unwound. Failure in negotiations, however, may drag the token back toward the rising trend line at $68,500, he added.
The broader backdrop offers limited support. While March has seen about $1.5 billion of net inflows into Bitcoin ETFs—a stabilization after four straight months on net outflows — those allocations have proven sensitive to macro shifts. A single day in mid-March saw $163 million pulled as interest-rate expectations changed.
That fragility underscores the central takeaway from Friday’s expiry: the calm in Bitcoin may be more structural than fundamental.
Jasper De Maere, an OTC trader at Wintermute, said that options dynamics can create a “mild upwards bias,” but conviction remains weak. Once the expiry passes, the forces suppressing volatility will recede — leaving macroeconomics and geopolitics firmly back in control.
That leaves the market exposed to sharper moves if sentiment turns.
“The risk is not that institutions are absent. The risk is that they are present but will exit rapidly if the weekend delivers an adverse outcome and the structural cushion that was there last week will not be there to slow the move. Volatility is more likely to increase from Friday than decrease as a result,” Harris said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Crypto owners can now use their digital assets as collateral for their down payments to buy a home. That’s because Fannie Mae is accepting crypto-backed mortgages for the first time through a partnership between mortgage company Better Home & Finance and crypto exchange Coinbase, according to a Tuesday statement.
The move aims to make home ownership more accessible to a younger demographic, who are more likely to own crypto. “Token-backed mortgages are a major first step to unlocking homeownership for the younger generations that have struggled with barriers to saving for a traditional down payment,” said Max Branzburg, head of consumer and business products at Coinbase, in the statement.
The goal of the product is also to help those who might be crypto-rich but cash-poor. The homebuyer would take out a traditional 15 or 30-year mortgage but instead of making down payment in cash, they would take out a separate loan backed by their Bitcoin or stablecoin holdings. This new offering would allow them to hold on to their crypto and not have to sell it and pay capital gains taxes. The downside is that the second loan would increase the overall cost of homeownership since the buyer would also have to service that second loan.
The homebuyer can’t trade the crypto assets once they have been pledged. In the event the digital assets go down in value, the mortgage loans don’t get affected if the owner keeps making the monthly payments.
The product arrives at a time when young people are growing disillusioned with the traditional financial system and sometimes turning to crypto. Gen Z and Millennials say that 25% of their portfolio is in non-traditional assets like crypto, and 73% of people in these generations say it is harder for them to build wealth by traditional means, according to a recent crypto report by Coinbase.
Bitcoin owners have been feeling a squeeze in the past few months, as the original cryptocurrency is down 46% since its all-time high in October to its current price of $68,000, according to Binance.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
After a major insurance company denied coverage for a medical flight that could save her daughter’s life, Alexandria McMahon took the story to social media and caught the attention of billionaire Mark Cuban.
Stella McMahon was diagnosed with T-cell leukemia at just four months old. Now, a year later to the day, she’s been fighting relentless fevers above 104 degrees for nearly a month; her liver’s overtaxed, and her body’s too immunocompromised to ward off a virus on its own. The cruel irony of Stella’s condition: because she has T-cell leukemia, her doctors at Children’s Minnesota had successfully eradicated her T-cells, the very cells she needed to fight the virus now threatening her life.
Her oncologist, Dr. Lane Miller, identified a solution: a federally funded study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in which genetically modified T-cells, donated and engineered in a lab, are transfused into the patient. The procedure itself was covered. The medical flight to get Stella there was not.
Her mom, Alexandria, submitted a pre-authorization request through the family’s major insurance provider on a Sunday, March 15. For five days, she heard nothing. “I called them on a Friday just to try to understand what was happening, like why it was taking so long,” she told Fortune, while the sounds of little Stella were heard in the background. “And from that phone call, I learned that we had actually been denied.”
The silence, she said, was devastating in its timing. “To be denied on a Friday from a major business was quite a hit, because they’re closed on the weekend, and they said that they wouldn’t be getting back to us for 24 to 72 hours, business days.” Dr. Miller, McMahon explained, said it was imperative that little 16-month-old Stella receive treatment immediately.
When she pressed the representative for an explanation, she ran into a wall. “She couldn’t tell me the reason why they denied because I didn’t have a medical degree,” McMahon recalled. “I asked her to read [the policy] with me line by line and tell me at what point Stella became disqualified. Because when I read it with my eyes, it looked like everything should be approved.” She recorded the conversation, a decision that would change everything.
McMahon posted the recorded call on social media, and shortly after, it went viral. “I think within about 12 hours, Dr. Warris, who runs Claimable, one of Mark Cuban’s companies, he said, ‘Mark Cuban saw your video, and he wants me to take care of this for you,’” McMahon said.
Claimable, co-founded by Dr. Warris Bokhari, a former NHS physician and healthcare strategist, uses AI to help patients and families navigate and appeal insurance denials. The company’s mission is to “amplify your voice, combining it with cutting-edge science and policy insights to help protect your rights,” according to its website.
Cuban, who has long been a vocal critic of the American healthcare system, wrote on his blog in Jan. 2025 that “healthcare is a very simple industry made complicated,” arguing for radical transparency and the removal of insurance companies from the payment equation. His other healthcare venture, Cost Plus Drugs, has similarly sought to reduce opacity in pharmaceutical pricing.
Within 48 hours, the McMahons were on a chartered medical aircraft to Cincinnati, paid for by Cuban and Claimable. “The hospital case manager was able to book a medical flight with Mark Cuban and Claimable’s money,” McMahon clarified.
The trip needed to happen in a single day. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital did not admit Stella to its campus; she had to remain based in Minneapolis. With Stella connected to five or six pumps, driving was never a realistic option. “She could not ethically be discharged,” McMahon explained, saying the family was so desperate to get Stella her treatment, no idea was too out there. “We were considering renting an RV and just trying.” Even that possibility was off the table, given Stella’s medical needs. A friend of her husband’s who works for Delta had also offered a plane, but that would have meant discharging Stella without medical support and “hoping for the best.”
Instead, Cuban’s team moved fast. “He basically laid down a credit card right then and there, and said, ‘ Book the flight, book a medical flight,” McMahon said. “And we are going to help you fight insurance after she gets taken care of. Stella is the most important.”
For McMahon, the speed and generosity of the response were difficult to fully absorb while simultaneously watching her daughter struggle. “We are dramatically humbled. We are so thankful that this happened,” she said. “I still feel like it’s unbelievable. I still feel like I’m kind of coming down from something that was just so exciting and so positive. And it felt weird being so incredibly happy and ecstatic and thankful while watching my daughter clearly struggle.”
She had no prior knowledge of Cuban’s track record of intervening in cases like Stella’s until the outpouring of comments on her videos. “I had no idea that this person could do something so amazing,” she said. “He has the resources, and he has the heart, and he did it.”
At the time of Fortune‘s interview on Thursday, Stella was showing her first signs of improvement: less jaundiced, her eyes beginning to clear. She was still running fevers above 104 degrees, and her doctors cautioned that the T-cell study can take five to seven days before showing results. But she had avoided an ICU stay. “Stella is now stable,” McMahon said. “She got everything she needs. We’re where we need to be, and it is all thanks to human connection.”
A GoFundMe organized to help the family cover costs, including lost income for McMahon’s husband, who works in aviation and has had to take time off, had raised over $42,000 toward a $50,000 goal from more than 870 donors as of publication.
McMahon said she hopes to use the attention Stella’s story has drawn to advocate for other families facing the same walls. “If I can turn around and give back to people, I will,” she said. “I will carry this and try to pay it forward for the rest of my life.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Iran and the United States appeared at an impasse Thursday, hardening their positions over ceasefire talks and setting the stage for another potential escalation in the Middle East war as thousands more U.S. troops neared the region.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump extended his deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz to April 6, and Tehran tightened its grip on the crucial strait while Israel poured more troops into southern Lebanon to fight the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
Sirens over Israel warned of barrages of incoming Iranian missiles, and Gulf nations worked to intercept fire. Heavy strikes were reported in Iran’s capital and other cities.
In a war that appears defined by who can take the most pain, the U.S. has offered shifting objectives, including ensuring Iran’s missile and nuclear programs are no longer a threat and ending Tehran’s support for armed groups in the region. Washington at one point also pushed for the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy.
While the U.S.-Israeli campaign has hit Iran’s military and government hard, killing top leaders and striking scores of targets, Iran continues to fire missiles, and there is no sign of an uprising against the government.
For Iran’s leadership, by contrast, merely outlasting the onslaught could be seen as victory. It may be hoping to get the U.S. to back down by roiling the world economy with its stranglehold on the the strait, which has disrupted oil and natural gas shipments and raised prices worldwide for energy and other goods.
Short of a negotiated solution, the U.S. would need a dramatic escalation to end Iran’s attacks and restore the free flow of goods through the strait, where 20% of all traded oil and natural gas is transported in peacetime. Iran rejected a ceasefire proposal put forth by the U.S., while putting forth its own demands.
Trump has vowed to strike Iran’s power plants if it does not fully reopen the strait. His new deadline pulls back on his earlier threat to bombing Iran’s energy plants if Tehran did not open the critical waterway.
Iran had threatened to retaliate against the region’s vital infrastructure, like desalination facilities, if Trump followed through. Trump said he was holding off on carrying out his threat because talks aimed at ending the conflict are going “very well.”
A Gulf Arab bloc said Thursday that Iran is now exacting tolls from ships to ensure their safe passage through the waterway.
Iran has been blocking ships from the strait that it perceives as linked to the U.S. and Israeli war effort, while letting through a trickle of others. Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Thursday that Iran is allowing some oil tankers through as a sign of good faith for talks.
Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi, secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a bloc of six Gulf Arab nations, said Iran was charging for safe passage.
Lloyd’s List Intelligence called it a “de facto ‘toll booth’ regime,” saying that at least two vessels have paid in yuan, China’s currency.
Iran’s grip on the strait and relentless attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure have sent Brent crude, the international standard, up more than 40% since the war started.
Israel said it killed the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy, Commodore Alireza Tangsiri, and the country’s naval intelligence chief, Behnam Rezaei. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Tangsiri was responsible for bombing operations that have blocked ships from crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Iran did not immediately acknowledge the killings.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Southeast Asia is racing to build the infrastructure powering the AI boom, but its hot, humid climate could be making that expansion more complicated. Data center demand in the region, where supply is up to 70% lower than in mature markets like the U.S. and China, is expected to grow by 20% each year through 2028, according to the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council. There are now 370 data centers in the region, with the majority in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.
“The ecosystem has realized that if they don’t latch on to this next wave, they might end up being digitally colonized,” Mayank Shrivastava, the CEO of Singapore-headquartered BDx Data Centers, told Fortune. “Economic gains flow to the country that converts raw material into finished goods–and, in this case, the raw material is data.”
Yet, Southeast Asia’s sultry, tropical climate presents a unique challenge for its data centers, which require more energy than counterparts in cooler climates to keep servers up and running. The region’s temperature ranges between 80 and 95°F throughout the year, while data centers should ideally be maintained between 64 and 81°F, according to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.
“The central issue in the tropics is not heat alone, but heat and humidity together,” Lee Poh Seng, a professor specializing in thermal systems at the National University of Singapore (NUS), explains. “In tropical climates, higher ambient temperatures make heat rejection more difficult, while high humidity complicates dew-point control, increases condensation and corrosion risk, and reduces long-term reliability.”
That puts data center operators in a bind. Lots of people live in the tropics, and data centers need to be close by to ensure speedy access. “You can’t ignore the fact that 85% of the world’s population lives outside temperate regions,” Shrivastava says.
On March 11, BDx became the first firm to implement Singapore’s Tropical Data Center Standard, a set of guidelines aiming to help data centers gradually increase operating temperatures to 26°C (or 78.8°F). The standard was launched last August, and is a core tenet of the country’s Green Data Center roadmap, which seeks to chart sustainable growth pathways for Singapore’s data centers. According to the country’s Infocomm Media Development Authority, every 1°C increase in operating temperature translates to up to 5% in energy savings.
“It’s been a mammoth effort to get different stakeholders to agree on changing the operating metrics of a data center,” Shrivastava says. “It had to be done with extreme caution, since we were tinkering with the engines while the aircraft was flying.”
Data center CEOs see Southeast Asia as filling a critical gap in the global AI ecosystem, particularly as companies in the U.S. struggle to overcome outdated power infrastructure and political opposition to new projects.
“The U.S. is still the world’s largest data center market, but it’s facing a lot of constraints, with each state having different regulations on the speed of grid build-up,” Eric Fan, the CEO of Bridge Data Centers, tells Fortune. “Many projects in the U.S. have thus been delayed—and it’s been a global play for where this gap can be plugged.”
Malaysia plans to add as much as eight gigawatts of gas-fired power by 2030 to meet the growing needs of data centers, while Singapore has pledged over 1 billion Singapore dollars ($784 million) over the next five years for public AI research.
The global tech sector is also pouring into the region, with giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and Tencent all investing billions of dollars in hyperscale data centers.
“Southeast Asia still offers room to build,” says Lee, from NUS. “Tech companies also increasingly see the region as an attractive deployment zone because of its population scale, fibre connectivity and position between the large North Asian and South Asian digital markets.”
BDx Data Centers was founded in 2019, and is now in four different markets: Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Indonesia. The firm’s largest operations are in Indonesia, where it has six data centers, including a 100MW campus in Jakarta.
Fellow operator Bridge Data Centers was also founded in Singapore in 2017, and now operates data centers across India, Malaysia and Thailand. The firm is backed by Boston-headquartered Bain Capital, which sold a data center firm, Chindata, to a Chinese-led consortium for $4 billion.
Despite the excitement about AI’s ability to scale in the digital world, companies can’t escape the real world problems of heat and electricity.
“AI infrastructure is fundamentally an energy-and-cooling challenge wrapped inside a digital-economy opportunity,” Lee says. “The winning projects in Southeast Asia will not be the ones that simply build the fastest, but the ones to show credible performance in power usage effectiveness, water use, carbon intensity, and grid compatibility.”
He suggests that firms need to take a “power-first, water-aware and thermally intelligent approach”, by situating projects in places with access to clean power, employing high-efficiency designs and moving beyond room-level cooling to chip-level or liquid-based heat removal.
Both BDx and Bridge Data Centres are exploring alternate energy sources to power their operations. “The big advantage of being in a tropical climate is that you get lots of sun and wind, and you have water around you,” explains Shrivastava of BDx.
Separately, Bridge Data Centers is studying hydrogen and nuclear power, with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2040. One of its Malaysian data centers already sources half its energy from solar, a model Fan wants to adopt in its other locations.
And with traditional sources under strain due to conflict in the Middle East, data centers know they need alternatives. “The Iran war has caused the price of oil to skyrocket, raising concern on the reliability of traditional energies,” Fan says. “This will further push the region’s AI firms to diversify into renewable and greener forms of energy.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Most working women in the U.S. believe they are disadvantaged when it comes to earning competitive wages, but many men hold a different view, according to a new AP-NORC poll.
Equal pay emerged as a major source of concern for working women in the poll and an area where men and women are far apart in their perception of gender equity.
Most women who are employed full-time — about 6 in 10 — say men have more opportunities when it comes to earning competitive wages, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, while about one-third think neither gender has an advantage. About 3 in 10 employed women say they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender.
Men who are employed full-time are more divided: About 4 in 10 believe men have an advantage when it comes to wages, while about half think both genders have about the same opportunities and about 1 in 10 say women have more opportunities. Just about 1 in 10 men say they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender.
The survey also found that a majority of employed women say the amount of money they get paid is a “major” source of stress in their life right now, compared to about 4 in 10 employed men.
The findings come at a time when men’s earnings are rising faster than women’s, and the gender wage gap has widened for two years in a row, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Reflecting that shift, Equal Pay Day — which symbolizes how many more days into the year women have to work for their earnings to catch up with men — was Thursday, falling a day later than in 2025. That was still 16 days earlier than the first Equal Pay Day on April 11, 1996, when women earned about 75 cents for every dollar earned by men.
The country is deeply divided over how to confront gender pay disparity. A growing number of mostly Democratic-led states are adopting pay transparency laws aimed at making it easier to uncover unfair practices, including requiring employers to disclose pay ranges in job postings.
President Donald Trump’s second administration, for its part, has hollowed out some agencies and limited legal tools that have been key to investigating unfair pay practices, arguing they threatened meritocracy and presuppose that disparities in the workforce are the result of discrimination.
Jessica Thompson, 47, said she has seen gender bias throughout her working life. Until losing her job in January, Thompson said she earned $65,000 a year as a senior sales manager in Rockford, Illinois, while a male colleague with similar credentials had earned $87,000.
Thompson said she had to “really prove myself over four years to get the role. And you know, he just came in, just within a few months and got it.”
The poll indicates that women are particularly likely to see wages as a pain point. Fewer women, about 2 in 10, say they’ve been discriminated against in getting hired because of their gender, and men are about as likely to say the same thing.
The overrepresentation of women, especially Black and Hispanic women, in lower-paying jobs is a key driver of the gender wage gap, as is the “motherhood penalty.” Studies show that women’s earnings fall after having children while men see their wages increase after becoming fathers.
Earnings for women barely rose in 2024, while male earnings jumped 3.7%, widening the gender wage gap for the second straight year after two decades of slight narrowing, according to the latest annual report from the U.S. Census Bureau, which analyzes earnings for full-time workers. Women working full-time on average earned 80.9% of what men earned in 2024, down from 82.7% in 2023.
Women aren’t just likelier than men to be worried about pay equity — the poll also found that employed women are more economically stressed on a range of measures.
About 6 in 10 working women say the cost of groceries and the cost of housing are a “major” source of stress in their lives, and about half, 56%, say this about the amount of money they get paid. By contrast, about 4 in 10 employed men say the same.
Economists attribute the widening pay gap in part to the post-pandemic return to work of many low-wage women, which brought down the average female earnings. But the past two years have also seen a drop-off in the labor force participation rate of mothers with young children, in part because return-to-office mandates have reduced pandemic-era flexibility.
Democratic lawmakers have criticized the Trump administration for making it more difficult to investigate wage discrimination as part of its campaign to stamp out diversity and inclusion practices.
Trump has ordered federal agencies to stop enforcing ” disparate impact liability,” a concept in civil rights law that has been used in wage discrimination cases against top companies. The Labor Department has also gutted the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, an agency that has audited the pay practices of major companies and obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for women and minorities who have suffered from unfair policies.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, meanwhile, has pivoted to prioritizing anti-DEI investigations under the premise that men, especially white men, have been discriminated against by practices aimed at advancing women and minorities in the workplace.
The poll suggests that few men see themselves as disadvantaged compared to women in the workplace. Only about 1 in 10 employed men said women had more opportunities when it comes to competitive wages or job advancement.
Michael Bettger, a 51-year-old mechanic who earns $26 an hour in rural Arkansas, said he has seen his wages fall as a result of layoffs and a decade-long struggle with opioid addiction that started after he hurt his back in a worksite accident. But he still believes women struggle more to get ahead in his male-dominated field because of the misogyny he sees, saying other mechanics make jokes about being prone to accidents because female colleagues are a distraction.
“Men do have an advantage and more opportunities for wages. I’ve seen that first hand,” Bettger said. “I have a daughter who wants to be a mechanic, and I’m scared to death of what kind of work she’s going to get.”
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Savage reported from Chicago and Sanders reported from Washington.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,156 adults was conducted Feb. 5-8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
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The Associated Press’ women in the workforce coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Josh D’Amaro stepped into that corner CEO office at Walt Disney with a clear goal, pledging the company would focus “on coming together as one Disney to deliver a more connected, personalized, and immersive experience to our consumers.”
D’Amaro described a world of Disney entertainment that consolidates its vast intellectual property of movies, games, experiences, and more under one roof. It took a week for some of the biggest bets underpinning that vision to collapse.
The vision of a sweeping field of Disney content relied on multiple external partnerships worth billions of dollars. Several of them unraveled entirely.
D’Amaro, a veteran leader in Disney’s theme park division, was brought in to steady the ship after a period of uncertain leadership. But three major developments, mostly stemming from decisions made far away from the Magic Kingdom, have made his debut at the top of the company memorable for all the wrong reasons.
A watershed deal Disney struck with OpenAI late last year dissolved suddenly on Tuesday when the tech company announced it was closing down its Sora video generator app, part of OpenAI’s wider efforts to contain spending ahead of a possible IPO later this year. That ended what was supposed to be a three-year $1 billion partnership, under which some 200 Disney characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other brands would populate short-form AI-generated videos on Disney+.
OpenAI’s decision came as a shock to Disney executives, who learned that Sora would be shut down just 30 minutes after they had been meeting with OpenAI about the video generator’s future, according to Reuters. One anonymous source called OpenAI’s decision a “big rug-pull.”
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is reportedly planning a strategy shift to refocus on business fundamentals and a more streamlined product lineup. Sora was wildly popular in terms of downloads and engagement, but proved difficult to monetize despite high operating costs, making it an obvious target if OpenAI was looking to cut costs. Disney may choose to pursue deals with other AI-powered video platforms, but at least for now, its ambitions of fully integrated AI video populated with Disney characters have effectively become collateral damage in another company’s pivot.
Also on Tuesday, Epic Games—the videogame developer of Fortnite fame—announced it was laying off 1,000 employees after updates to its hit signature product failed to translate to higher engagement. That’s bad news in general. For D’Amaro, it’s personal.
D’Amaro was the chief architect of Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic, announced in 2024. The deal gave Disney a large equity stake and called for the creation of an entirely new digital universe built around Disney characters and stories, where users could engage in immersive entertainment and shopping. As part of the deal, D’Amaro also joined Epic’s board as an observer. The partnership was the cornerstone of his fan-engagement mission: a Fortnite-powered Disney metaverse where Marvel heroes and Star Wars villains lived alongside players.
“He sees the digital realm—and Epic is a manifestation of that—as a very important place for fans to interact with their favorite characters, franchises and brands in a comprehensive way that you can monetize,” Kevin Mayer, a former head of strategy, told the Hollywood Reporter about D’Amaro’s ambitions in February.
In a memo to staff, Epic founder Tim Sweeney said a downturn in Fortnite engagement had left the company in a financial rut, though he added that $500 million in cost cuts should position Epic for major launch plans toward the end of the year. Whether those plans still include Disney’s digital universe remains to be seen.
If the tech wreckage weren’t enough, D’Amaro also inherited a reputational fire at ABC, the network company owned by Disney. Last week, ABC cancelled the already-filmed 22nd season of The Bachelorette amid domestic violence allegations directed at Taylor Frankie Paul, the planned star this season.
It was a messy and widely covered distraction that arrived precisely when the new CEO least needed one. It’s the latest in a string of controversies surrounding The Bachelorette and its companion show, The Bachelor, both of which have long been criticized for underrepresenting people of color in their lineups and promoting sexist stereotypes. But ABC’s move last week is the first time it has cancelled a season of one of its signature franchises after having already filmed it, a call that could cost the company millions.
Disney stock has dipped more than 4% over the past week and underlines the challenge behind D’Amaro’s vision of technology as a growth engine. The developments at OpenAI and Epic may have been out of his control, but they have regardless undermined the universe D’Amaro described so keenly just a week ago.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Most lotteries are contained within a country or a state, and much of the time, people have to go to a physical location to buy a ticket. Patrick Lung founded Megapot in order to create a global lottery where people around the world can buy tickets from their phone.
On Thursday, the startup announced that it raised $5 million in a funding round led by Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Bankless Ventures, and the founders behind FanDuel, Betfair, and MyPrize. Lung declined to share the startup’s valuation, in an interview with Fortune.
Lung said he founded Megapot also because he viewed it as a way to bring the masses to blockchain. “I wanted to go build something that can actually bring a billion people on chain, so they can get all the benefits of crypto,” he said.
People can buy Megapot tickets from more than 150 countries, and it costs one dollar to buy a ticket for the daily lottery. Megapot has had 19 jackpot winners, with one person taking home about $200,000, according to Lung. The platform is not available in about 30 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.
Crypto is the engine behind his startup, Lung said. Its permissionless protocols run on Base, a network built on Ethereum, meaning that anyone can access it, interact with it, and developers can build on top of it. Megapot also uses stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency often pegged to the U.S. dollar, to pay out users around the world.
Lung founded Megapot in January 2024 after working for about eight years at tech and crypto companies like Microsoft, Lyft, and Uniswap. His company currently has seven employees.
Megapot launched the latest version of its lottery on Tuesday, and it earns revenue by charging fees on tickets sold through its site. With the new capital from the raise, the startup plans to expand to more countries. Lung said that traditional lotteries are his company’s main competition, and that Megapot can offer larger jackpots and better odds than this incumbent system.
Lung cited his mom as the inspiration behind Megapot, “I want to build a product that’s actually built for my mom. [She] has actually bought a lottery ticket for two decades now every weekend,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to build …something that I can share with any person and they instantly understand why it should exist.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The U.S. military conflict with Iran is quietly draining the American labor market, with Goldman Sachs estimating that the oil price shock triggered by the war will suppress payroll growth by roughly 10,000 jobs per month through the end of the year — a toll that will be felt most acutely in restaurants, hotels, and retail stores across the country.
In a research note published Thursday, Goldman economist Pierfrancesco Mei laid out a detailed framework for how higher energy prices translate into labor market pain — and the picture isn’t pretty. As explained by the bank earlier in the week, its commodities strategists expect Brent crude to average $105 in March, spike to $115 in April, and then gradually retreat to $80 in the fourth quarter, assuming flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain severely disrupted for roughly six weeks. In an adverse scenario — one where the conflict deepens — Brent could peak as high as $140 a barrel, or $160 in a “severely adverse” scenario.
The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran shows no signs of imminent resolution, even as President Trump signals urgency to wrap it up. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has indicated the conflict is expected to last four to six weeks, in line with Goldman’s projections, while Trump told Fox Business that a deal could come as quickly as five days. But experts are far more skeptical: analysts at Brookings warn that without genuine regime change, Iran could rebuild its capabilities and fuel regional instability, while Maximilian Hess of Ementena Advisory told CNBC the situation is a “lose-lose for Washington,” with Iran’s drone advantage and Gulf pressure making a ground war increasingly likely.
The damage isn’t distributed evenly. Goldman’s sector-level analysis points to leisure and hospitality as the single hardest-hit industry, accounting for roughly 5,000 lost jobs per month, with retail trade shedding another 2,000. The logic is straightforward: when energy prices surge, consumers cut back on discretionary spending first — skipping vacations, eating out less, and trimming shopping trips — while continuing to pay for essentials like healthcare and housing. The oil shock, in other words, hits the working-class service economy well before it touches more insulated sectors.
That dynamic is hitting Gen Z especially hard. A recent Bank of America Institute report found that after nearly two years of lagging other generations in spending, Gen Z’s year-over-year spending growth had actually surpassed Baby Boomers’ by mid-2025 — fueled by slowing rent growth and wages rising roughly 9% year-over-year. But with national gas prices now up approximately 26% year-over-year as of March 23, BofA economists Joe Wadford and David Michael Tinsley warned that the recovery “could be snuffed out before it fully takes hold.” Gen Z carries the highest ratio of gasoline spending to discretionary spending of any generation — and many work in the very leisure and hospitality jobs Goldman now projects will see the steepest cuts. It’s a feedback loop that hits them from both sides: higher costs at the pump and fewer hours at work.
Goldman is careful to note that the U.S. economy is far more resilient to oil price shocks than it was in the 1970s. The bank estimates that the effects of a 10% increase in oil prices on unemployment and payroll growth are now roughly one-third as large as they were between 1975 and 1999. Two structural shifts explain the change: the lower oil intensity of U.S. GDP, which reduces the drag on consumer spending and business investment, and the boom in domestic shale production since 2010, which creates an offsetting cushion of energy-sector jobs and capital expenditure.
That cushion, however, is thinner than it used to be. Dramatic productivity improvements in oil extraction mean that even if production ramps up in response to higher prices, the energy sector isn’t likely to add many new workers. Goldman does not expect a meaningful increase in energy capital expenditure, meaning support industries like pipeline construction, oil machinery manufacturing, and oil transportation will see little boost this time around.
The cumulative effect is showing up in Goldman’s macro forecasts, which were also adjusted earlier in the week. The bank said it expected the U.S. unemployment rate to climb 0.2 percentage points to 4.6% by the third quarter of 2026 — with the oil shock accounting for roughly half of that rise and the other half reflecting job growth that was already running too slowly to keep pace with labor supply before the conflict began.
Goldman noted that its unemployment projections align closely with simulations run through the Federal Reserve’s own FRB/US model, lending additional credibility to the estimates. In a severely adverse oil price scenario, however, the unemployment hit could reach 0.3 percentage points above the baseline — a scenario that would push joblessness meaningfully higher and potentially force the Fed’s hand on interest rates.
The findings, authored by Goldman’s U.S. Economics team led by chief economist Jan Hatzius, come as Wall Street is increasingly war-gaming the macroeconomic fallout of the Iran conflict — a crisis that has already prompted Goldman to cut its GDP growth forecast and raise its inflation outlook. For younger Americans — who just months ago were finally catching a financial break — the war’s economic cost may prove a particularly cruel twist. The 10,000-jobs-per-month drag is described as a net figure, accounting for any limited gains the energy sector manages to produce. The bottom line: for American workers, the war in Iran has an economic price tag — and it’s being paid every single month.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The Trump administration has moved aggressively to restart student loan collections, and a record number of borrowers can’t keep up. The result is showing up in a damaging and lasting way: A generation of young Americans are watching their credit scores collapse.
Credit scores are a core part of personal finance in the U.S. They determine Americans’ access to favorable loans and credit cards, and can even factor into applying for a job. Having good credit is especially relevant for young people, who can benefit the most from better loan terms and job opportunities as they make major financial decisions.
Without years of a good credit baseline, Generation Z is also the most likely to suffer the biggest drops when things go wrong.
Credit scores are dipping for all Americans. The national average credit score fell to 714 in the second half of 2025, according to a report released Tuesday by FICO, an analytics company that produces the most widely used credit scoring model. It was a decline from the 715 average recorded in the first half of the year, and represented the lowest score since early 2020.
Last year already ranked as the worst for U.S. consumer credit quality since the 2008 financial crisis, FICO reported in September, when the agency found that 2025 delinquencies for auto loans, credit cards, and personal loans were at their highest level since 2009. To be sure, the trough in 2009 was nearly 30 points lower, at 686, and the score had climbed all the way to an all-time high of 718 in 2023 before the recent back-to-back declines.
But while most Americans dealt with only modest declines and remained in a “prime” borrowing position—considered to be within the high 600s and low 700s—it’s a different story for young people. While only around 10% of Americans overall saw their scores fall by 50 or more points between 2024 and 2025, that share jumped to 14.4% of people ages 18 to 29.
Many factors can contribute to a significant score downgrade, including a history of opening up multiple new credit lines. But one of the biggest reasons for Gen Z’s declining creditworthiness is that more young Americans are missing deadlines to make loan payments, specifically their student loan obligations, according to the FICO report.
More than 7 million student loan borrowers had a new credit delinquency reported last year, causing an average 62-point drop for those with missed payments. A decline that big from the national average shuts consumers out of prime borrowing status and the best loan terms. It might also bring many dangerously close to a low credit rating, potentially saddling young Americans with expensive interest rates, reducing employment opportunities, and further distancing Gen Z from homeownership.
Student loan delinquencies have been on the rise ever since payments resumed in force at the end of 2024. A record 7.7 million borrowers had defaulted on $181 billion in federal student loans by the end of last year, in addition to 3 million other recipients who had missed payment deadlines by at least three months, according to the Department of Education.
These payments had been fully on pause between 2020 and 2023, part of the Biden administration’s pandemic relief efforts. Even after deadlines resumed, exemptions and follow-up relief shielded many borrowers from negative credit effects if they missed payments, but those measures have largely been wiped away since Donald Trump returned to office.
Earlier this month, a federal court ruled against Joe Biden’s signature affordable repayment program, meaning millions of borrowers who were enrolled in it will soon see the check come due.
Nearly 7.9 million student loan recipients had a delinquency in the first three quarters of 2025, according to a February report by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. The total number of delinquencies represented a quarter of all payments due, around triple the pre-pandemic delinquency rate. The report pinned most of the responsibility on the administration’s student loan actions, including a recent measure freezing thousands of applications for favorable payment plans linked to income level.
The Century Foundation’s report also tracked a large decline in borrowers’ credit scores. Around 2 million student loan borrowers who faced delinquency last year saw an average 100-point drop in their credit scores from 680 to 580, a below-average rating that makes good loan terms virtually inaccessible. Borrowers at that score level face apartment rental rejections—many landlords require 650 or higher just to apply—and are effectively locked out of homeownership: Just 1.2% of mortgages in 2024 went to borrowers with scores below 580.
The long-term ramifications of this mass downgrading are significant. Negative credit information typically remains on a report for seven years, meaning a generation of young workers may be barred from securing housing, passing employment credit checks, or obtaining affordable personal loans for nearly a decade. An analysis earlier this year found that student loan defaults now occur every nine seconds, a rate that could cast a pall on Gen Z’s hopes for economic mobility well into the 2030s.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: With AI focus, Meta lays Off 700 while rewarding top executives…Google’s memory breakthrough deepens chip selloff...Outgoing CEOs of major companies are citing AI as a factor in their decisions to step down.
Reporting on the ground in northeast Louisiana last month, where Meta is building its massive Hyperion AI data center on over 2,250 acres of former farmland, I was struck by a street sign just minutes from soybean fields, grain silos, and grazing cows.
The sign, marking a newly-built road leading into the construction site, carries an appropriate name: Far Far Away Lane. The nod to Star Wars hints at a new frontier, but the Meta site is so disorientingly vast that what’s happening there feels less like sci-fi and more like the early stages of a city rising from the dirt. The site is five miles long and a mile wide at some points, steel frames jut from the ground, heavy machinery operates around the clock, and an endless stream of trucks pours in before sunrise, feeding a project where thousands of workers in hardhats and neon vests swarm. Residents complain about damage to their vehicles from rocks kicked up by the trucks hurtling to and from the Meta site.
Something enormous and unfamiliar has landed in rural Richland Parish, and it represents not just Meta’s stratospheric AI ambitions, but the financial, energy-hungry reality of building the infrastructure that underpins the AI boom.
I hope you’ll check out the second article in my series on the effects of the AI data center boom on local communities (the first was a December story on a data center developer’s designs on a vast desert site outside of Phoenix). Meta’s Hyperion arrives at a moment when data centers are no longer just an infrastructure issue—they’re becoming a political one. Just this week, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a moratorium on new data center development, citing concerns about energy use, environmental impact, and strain on local communities. And Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) just floated taxing AI data centers to fund support for workers displaced by automation—a sign that policymakers are starting to connect the infrastructure buildout directly to labor disruption.
But in northeast Louisiana, the impact is hyperlocal. Meta’s project is transforming Richland Parish into a chaotic boomtown almost overnight, with attendant winners and losers. Some businesses are seeing a surge in demand from construction crews, while some residents are being pushed out as housing costs climb and landlords look to capitalize on the influx of higher-paying workers.
Supporters of the project argue that the Meta investment represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a region that has struggled with poverty, job loss, and population decline for decades. But for some Richland Parish residents, the experience is less one of opportunity than of spectatorship: watching the bustle of progress unfold nearby—and suffering through its accompanying headaches—without being able to participate or share in its rewards.
It remains to be seen how this unprecedented AI data center spending spree will play out. Collectively, the biggest tech hyperscalers are projected to invest roughly $630 billion to $700 billion in 2026 alone, a 62% jump from 2025, with total AI-related data-center capital expenditures expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030, driven largely by GPUs and energy infrastructure. Across tech, finance, and policy circles, there’s a growing question: is this a lasting buildout, or the kind of spending surge that precedes a correction?
Meanwhile, Meta’s Hyperion is just an example of something that is becoming more familiar across the country: mega-scale data center projects, providing the computing power underpinning the AI boom and the U.S. race against China to dominate the sector, are changing landscapes, straining energy grids and water tables, and reshaping the economy.
Because Hyperion is among the furthest along of today’s mega AI data center projects, it may offer one of the first glimpses of how this boom plays out—and the rest of the country is watching. Read the full story here.
With that, here’s more AI news.
Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A war in the Middle East has suddenly made getting a mortgage even more expensive in a U.S. housing market already starved for affordability.
Like any global conflict, its repercussions ripple outward far from the immediate war zone. As KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk illustrated in a recent report, the war has set off a “butterfly effect” across the global economy.
Now, the war’s disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is being felt by homeowners in towns across the U.S.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.43% last week. That’s more than 30 basis points higher than at the end of last month—and its highest level since October 2025, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey. The 30-year mortgage rate sits at 6.4% as of Thursday.
Joel Kan, MBA’s vice president and deputy chief economist, said elevated oil prices, driven up by the Iran conflict, and the ensuing shipping crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, are contributing to the rate hike.
“The threat of higher-for-longer oil prices continued to keep Treasury yields elevated, and mortgage rates finished last week higher,” Kan said in a statement. “Higher mortgage rates, coupled with affordability constraints and economic uncertainty, pushed some potential homebuyers to the sidelines.”
Since the 30-year mortgage rate is benchmarked to the rate of the 10-year Treasury note, mortgage rates rise when the 10-year Treasury note rises. The 10-year Treasury is up to 4.39%, up from about 3.96% from before the start of the war.
The housing market was already under pressure before the war’s start due to a dire housing shortage and concerns about the job market, especially among younger prospective buyers. Even Zillow’s CEO Jeremy Wacksman said homebuyers shouldn’t expect conditions to improve.
“We aren’t expecting any relief in the short term,” he told Fortune in a recent interview. “I think it’s just going to take a while.”
The surge is also hitting refinance demand, not just purchases, as higher rates have reversed activity that had briefly improved earlier in the month. The MBA report—a weekly survey of respondents that include mortgage bankers, commercial banks, thrifts, and credit unions—also found refinance applications were down 15%. The Refinance Index, a measure of the volume of mortgage applications for refinancing existing loans, dropped 15% from the prior week.
It’s not just mortgage rates; the war’s impact on energy and other commodities are adding insult to injury to an already faltering U.S. economy. As Swonk noted in her report, higher-for-longer oil prices could hike inflation in the near term. Grocery prices are expected to take a hit. It’s no surprise to car owners across the U.S. that gas prices are off the charts, hitting a national average of just under $4 per gallon, according to AAA. And some economists have even invoked the dreaded S-word: stagflation.
Potential homebuyers are being spooked by war-driven economic uncertainty, along with other factors, including the emerging threat of an AI-induced job apocalypse. Aside from higher mortgage rates, increased energy costs and stock market volatility associated with the war have caused 1 in 4 Americans to pause big purchases like homes and cars, according to a Redfin report released earlier this month. However, the report also notes that the majority of Americans still remain undeterred by the conflict.
That uncertainty looms in the air on Wall Street as investors try to navigate shifting signals from Washington. President Donald Trump announced Monday the U.S. and Iran had been in talks to end the war, sparking a $1.7 trillion stock market rally, and bringing oil prices briefly below $100 a barrel. But Iran’s foreign minister then said, while messages had been exchanged between the U.S. and Iran, no peace talks have taken place. Today, the price of oil is back up to $105 a barrel, measured using the Brent benchmark, up about $6 in just a day.
A Redfin report released Thursday said the back-and-forth is keeping some homebuyers sidelined.
“Markets are bouncing around this week as investors try to keep up with conflicting messages about the conflict in the Middle East,” the report read. “Stocks and bonds rallied on Monday after the White House said the U.S. and Iran had productive conversations, but it is unclear when the conflict will end.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The rich have been enjoying unprecedented wealth gains, while workers struggle against sluggish wages and a high cost of living. And the gap is especially stark in one of the country’s most billionaire-dense states.
New York is home to 154 billionaires boasting a collective fortune of $975.7 billion, according to a new report from Oxfam America. Thanks to the state’s position as a financial and investing hub, it’s home to many ultra-rich residents, including Mike Bloomberg ($109 billion) and Stephen Schwarzman ($41.9 billion). And their eye-watering net worths are only growing bigger; over the past year, the wealth of the state’s billionaires increased 11.6%, three times greater than the hourly wage of New York’s private-sector workers. The disparity is worsened by the fact that real average hourly earnings in the state’s private sector have largely stagnated and were even slightly lower in 2025 than before the pandemic, the Oxfam report pointed out.
And at the top of New York’s elite billionaire club, it’s an even steeper drop down to everyone else. The 10 richest New Yorkers gained $42.4 billion over the past year, according to the report. Each of these ultra-rich billionaires gained about $4.2 billion, reeling in about $2 million per hour. Compared to the state’s average private-sector hourly wage of $39.62, it would take a typical worker 82,863 years to earn as much as one of the 10 wealthiest did last year on average.
However, the growing economic divide in New York shouldn’t be seen as an anomaly; Oxfam notes this phenomenon is taking hold in all corners of the U.S.
“What we see in New York is consistent with national trends,” Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic justice at Oxfam America, tells Fortune. “In many ways, we have an economy that’s rigged against working people and in favor of the wealthiest. Past policy choices on issues like tax, corporate power, and workers’ rights have resulted in an economy where the benefits flow upward.”
Riddell points to a few key factors in the billionaire wealth boom.
The wealthiest 0.1% of U.S. households hold around a quarter of all U.S. equities, according to Federal Reserve data, enabling them to grow their fortunes by the billions. Last year, a report from Oxfam revealed that the 10 richest U.S. billionaires—mostly tech founders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who reeled in big gains from their investments—added $698 billion to their net worths between November 2024 and the same month in 2025. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the U.S. owned just 1.1% of the exchange.
Plus, billionaires enjoyed a boost from the Trump administration’s “inequality-fueling” policies, Riddell says.
Last July, President Trump passed his One Big Beautiful Bill, which entails reducing the tax bill of the top 0.1% of earners in the country. By 2027, it’s expected that the statute will shave $311,000 off the tax costs of the ultra-rich, while the poorest Americans—making less than $15,000 annually—will be forced to pay even more in taxes. Riddell explains that through the president’s bill, support for working-class New Yorkers will be cut, while million-dollar earners will be given around a $52,000 “handout” this year.
To make a meaningful difference for working-class New Yorkers, Riddell advises the state’s policymakers to address the inequality through tax increases on the wealthiest and raise revenue for critical public services. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed a 2% increase on the city income tax rate of households earning over $1 million annually.
The U.S. is home to more billionaires than any other country in the world, but the average worker isn’t getting a slice of America’s monumental economic success.
Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, told Fortune last year that lower-income households are “hanging on by their fingertips financially.” Cost of living is rising, hiring has slowed to a worrying pace, and layoffs are on the rise. The issue has become so dire that it’s fueling a loneliness crisis, with Americans skipping out on social events and postponing their goals to make ends meet.
“The grip feels more tenuous because no one’s getting hired. You can sustain that for a while, but you can’t sustain that forever. If the layoffs do pick up, that lower-middle-income group is gonna get nailed—and they have no options,” Zandi said in 2025. “They have debt: They have auto debt, they have student loan debt, they may, if they’re lucky, have a mortgage, but they’re gonna struggle, and their world is going to descend into recession pretty quickly.”
And U.S. citizens aren’t blind to the growing divide between the haves and have-nots—they’re critical of extreme wealth. A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly one-in-five Americans think that being a billionaire is “morally wrong,” with Gen Zers leading the outcry. Another 52% of Americans agreed the wealth gap is a very big problem, according to a 2026 report from YouGov, and 59% said the government should step in to reduce wealth inequality. Another 62% of citizens said that the tax rate on billionaires is either much too low (46%) or too low (16%).
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
As fears mount over AI replacing jobs—or workers being outpaced by more AI-savvy peers—standing still has become a liability. For Winston Weinberg, the CEO of AI legal startup Harvey—now valued at $11 billion—that reality isn’t theoretical, it’s how he runs his company.
“You have to re-earn your position every six months; you need to re-earn your role at Harvey every six months,” Weinberg said on the latest episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast. “It includes me, 100%.”
The mandate isn’t about churn for the sake of it—it’s about survival in an era where innovation is compounding quickly and falling behind can lead to dire consequences. That pressure is especially acute in Silicon Valley, where startups are racing not just against time, but against each other to build the defining AI companies of the next decade. For Harvey, that’s top of mind.
“If you don’t reinvent yourself as a company and as a leader, and whatever your role is at a company right now, fast enough, you will lose,” Weinberg added in the interview with Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle.
Weinberg, a lawyer by training, cofounded Harvey in 2022 alongside Gabriel Pereyra, a former Meta and Google DeepMind AI research scientist. In the company’s early days, the pair notably cold-emailed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—an outreach that eventually helped them secure early access to GPT-4 and backing from the OpenAI Startup Fund. Harvey, which builds AI tools for law firms and in-house legal teams, has also attracted investment from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.
From the beginning, Weinberg said, the company survived depending on more than the technology—it required a culture that could move fast and adapt constantly: “The thing that I care the most about with our culture is decisiveness,” he said. “I think you have to basically build a company that has a culture of making decisions very quickly and being OK to make mistakes.”
That willingness to take risks and learn from them, Weinberg added, has been central to distinguishing Harvey from the influx of AI startups—and to helping it scale into a multi-billion-dollar business.
“The reality is, the folks that I have found that haven’t scaled—and when I myself think that I’m not scaling—it’s because I haven’t learned enough in the past couple of months,” he added.
So, when evaluating hires or emerging leaders, Weinberg looks for people who can grow quickly with the company—those who can go from managing no one to leading teams of 20, 50, or even 100.
“The main thing I look at is, can they make decisions, own that decision, and then pivot when they make a mistake?” he said. “Instead of penalizing the mistake, penalize not making the decision or not learning from that mistake going forward.”
A need for constant reinvention and learning is something other top executives have long echoed.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet told Fortune last year that AI is creating a need to fundamentally change business processes.
“In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you really have to be willing to rewire your company,” Sweet said on the inaugural episode of the Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. “Many times, when clients are saying, ’ We’re not getting a lot out of AI, it’s because they’re trying to apply it to how they operate today.”
Sweet stressed that adapting to AI isn’t a one-time shift; it’s an ongoing process.
“This isn’t about using AI on top of what you do today,” Sweet added. “If you’re not significantly changing the way you operate, then you’re not reinventing, and you’re not going to capture the value.”
At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy has similarly emphasized the importance of continuous learning—especially through experimentation.
“We ask why, and why not, constantly,” Jassy wrote last year in a letter to shareholders. “It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
At Duolingo, job interviews start the moment a candidate steps into a car.
Luis von Ahn, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of the language-learning app, revealed on Phoebe Gates’ and Sophia Kianni’s The Burnouts podcast how a job candidate treats their driver from the airport to the office can make or break their chances of getting hired—regardless of how impressive their résumé looks or how much they like the candidate in the interview process.
Entrepreneur von Ahn, who cofounded Duolingo in 2011 with Severin Hacker, recalled a time when the company had been seeking a chief financial officer “for like a year.” The candidate had a strong résumé and the entire hiring committee “really liked,” he told The Burnouts in a February interview.
But “it turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the office,” von Ahn said. “And that made us not hire them.”
The CEO of Duolingo, which has a market cap of $4.65 billion, knew this because he pays taxi drivers to evaluate whether candidates are worth hiring.
“Our belief is if they’re going to be mean to the driver, they’re probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them,” he said.
It’s particularly important to Duolingo to hire the right person because of how much the company and von Ahn have leaned into AI. Last April, von Ahn said he was getting rid of contract employees and replacing them with AI.
“We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” von Ahn wrote in a memo posted to LinkedIn in April 2025. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”
While von Ahn’s taxi-driver test is an unconventional interview test, candidates in today’s brutal job market are being evaluated in ways they may not even realize.
His approach comes at a time when landing a job has never felt more grueling. Hiring in tech has slowed drastically, with job postings down an estimated 36% from pre-2020 levels, according to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 people working in tech have been laid off so far this year, Layoffs.fyi data shows.
Plus, interview processes have become much longer and more involved. Candidates routinely face five to eight interview rounds, panel presentations, case studies, and personality assessments before receiving an offer. The average time-to-hire in the U.S. is approximately 36 days from job posting to offer, according to research by Alex Benjamin, vice president of talent acquisition at OnPoint Consulting Services.
And on top of that, culture and character evaluations have quietly become a standard part of the process—even when candidates don’t know they’re being assessed.
Duolingo’s CEO isn’t alone in looking beyond a résumé and interview to look for character signals.
Trent Innes, the former managing director of accounting platform Xeno, and now chief growth officer at SiteMinder, told The Ventures podcast in an episode published in September 2024 he uses a coffee-cup test to evaluate candidates.
When a job candidate arrives for an interview, the interviewer walks them to the kitchen for a beverage.
“Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?” Innes said.
For anyone who leaves their dirty cup behind after the interview and doesn’t offer to take it back to the kitchen, it’s a no-go.
“You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup,’” he said.
Even without odd tests, several big-name CEOs are vocal about how important street smarts and attitude are to securing a job. Amazon built its hiring process around its core Leadership Principles, with interviewers trained to probe for red flags, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been outspoken about valuing street smarts and intellectual curiosity over pedigree alone.
“I care how you deal with our tellers, our guards, and our receptionists as much as I care how you deal with CEOs,” Dimon said in a July 2024 interview with LinkedIn. “It’s those 300,000 people that matter, and we have to set up right for everybody.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
If you are watching the chaos unfurling in the Middle East and thinking, “this doesn’t affect me,” that might be because you live on the West Coast or in a large Northeastern metropolitan area.
Where you live determines the impact the war in Iran has on your personal finances, according to an analysis by Oxford Economics.
Since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, the economic fallout has included rising oil prices and volatility in equity markets. Oil prices are of particular note because consumers feel the pinch at the gas pump in an environment where they are already sensitive to further pressures on affordability.
Oil prices have increased because Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf through which exports from the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq all flow. Some 20 million barrels of oil typically flow through the strait every day, about 20% of the global oil supply. Iran has said it controls the strait, littering it with mines, and ship captains are too nervous to enter the waterway, choking off global supply and sending prices spiralling.
However, other pockets of the economy are also impacted by disruption in the strait: fertilisers are a by-product of gas production, driving inflation in agriculture costs. There’s only a certain margin of costs that producers can absorb before they need to pass it on, with consumers ultimately footing the bill in another very visible way. Additionally, higher gas prices aren’t just borne by consumers but businesses as well: Transportation costs for farm equipment, commercial shipping, trucking, and delivery services have also increased as a result of the disruption.
The conflict in Iran, and the increase in oil prices as a result, have a “disproportionate” impact on low-income households because they spend a larger portion of their budgets on fuel, food, and utilities—the prices of which have increased because of the war, according to Barbara Denham of Oxford Economics.
“Metros where households spend the highest share on these commodities are largely in the South, in West Virginia, or scattered across the Midwest,” Denham noted. “Most are relatively small.”
Families living in Jackson, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport (MS), St. Joseph (MO), and Des Moines (IA) are among those feeling the sharpest end of the increases, the report added, as households in these metros spend an average of 16% of their total budget on groceries, fuel, and utilities. Unsurprisingly, these areas also have high levels of low-income households earning less than $35,000, and tend to be smaller and more remote locations.
The extent of the damage to household finances resulting from increases in oil prices depends not only on how long the conflict continues and how it is resolved, but also on how quickly trade routes reopen. A matter of weeks ago Wolfe Research chief economist Stephanie Roth said “food-at-home” inflation might rise by roughly 2 percentage points, adding about 0.15 percentage points to headline inflation.
An update this week from Britain’s IGD (Institute of Grocery Distribution) suggested food inflation could increase from the country’s current rate of 3.6% to over 8% by June.
At the other end of the spectrum, West Coast, and Northeastern metros spend less of their overall budget on groceries, utilities, and fuel—families in Seattle, Ithaca (NY), Lakeland (FL), Vineland (NJ), and Phoenix spend approximately 11% or less of their total budget on these three costs.
“While we believe that higher energy prices should have more of an impact on headline inflation than on growth, at least over the short term, the psychological impact of both the war and soaring gas prices is already registering on consumer sentiment surveys,” noted Denham. “We still forecast positive consumer spending growth of 1.9% this year … but we have lowered our GDP growth forecast from 2.8% to 2.4% due to the impact of higher oil prices and uncertainty weighing on consumer spending.”
While a bump in oil prices isn’t the most welcome news for consumers, it’s a silver lining for the oil drilling and gas mining sector. In 2020, the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum for the first time since at least the 1940s, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Therefore, certain areas—and a handful of states—will see an upward tick in growth courtesy of the new supply and demand equilibrium. More than half of drilling GDP is generated, unsurprisingly, in non-metro counties: The Permian Basin in West Texas (which also includes counties in New Mexico) accounts for 35% of total mining and drilling GDP and 12% of those jobs.
“While we forecast that mining GDP will increase marginally in these counties, the impact on job growth will be more muted as firms can ramp up production in the short run,” Denham added.
Areas heavily involved in the refinery process also stand to gain, observed Denham: “The refined oil sector will also see a short-term uplift in GDP due to the jolt to oil prices. Refineries differ somewhat from drilling in that they are partly concentrated in Texas (Houston, Beaumont, Corpus Christi, and Dallas) but also have a large presence in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Bellingham (WA). Indeed, the top 10 metros account for 50% of refining GDP and a third of the jobs.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
In Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, a factory worker struggles to keep pace with an ever-accelerating assembly line — until the machine swallows him whole Nearly 90 years later, Wharton professor Eric Bradlow has the image on his mind. The machines are smarter now. The stakes are higher. And according to a sweeping new joint report from Accenture and the Wharton School, the humans running them are falling behind in a way that should alarm every boardroom in America.
There is a lot of breathless talk of autonomous agents reshaping every corner of corporate America, from handling sales calls to writing code to managing supply chains. But the report from the partnership between Accenture’s Global Products practice and Wharton’s AI and Analytics Initiative adds evidence to an emerging, inconvenient pattern: the smarter AI gets, the more it demands of the humans behind it.
“Intelligence may be scalable, but accountability is not,” says the report, titled The Age of Co-Intelligence: How Humans, AI Agents and Robots Are Redefining Value. It’s a sentence that sounds almost simple until you sit with what it means for every boardroom deploying agents by the hundreds. “This asymmetry is critical,” it continues, arguing that as AI removes limits on how much thinking and analysis can be done, humans still have to decide what matters, set strategy, and, importantly, own the outcomes.
The central finding is not that AI is coming for human jobs — it’s that it poses a direct challenge to all the leaders who will have to manage a world of autonomous bots crawling through the white-collar economy. “In a co-intelligent enterprise, leadership does not diminish as AI improves,” the report reads. “It becomes more consequential.”
While the report illustrates hypothetical upsides and doesn’t discuss the downsides of agents run amok, consider single errors rippling through entire systems: one agent’s hallucinated inventory figure causing downstream agents to massively overorder stock, or a customer service agent telling a customer that the problem is fine, and solved, when it isn’t and a human isn’t taking the lead. James Crowley, Accenture’s Global Products Industry Practices Chair and a co-author of the report, told Fortune that “we like to say humans in the lead, not in the loop.” If humans aren’t consciously taking the lead, errors can multiply at scale.
The numbers underneath that claim are staggering. Analyzing task-level data across 18 industries using ONET and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Accenture researchers found that more than 50% of working hours across the American economy are now in play — subject to reshaping by about 60 digital and physical AI agents considered in the study. This is a truly massive data set, corresponding to more than 120 million workers across the 18 industries studied. In banking and capital markets, Wharton and Accenture estimated that the share of hours impacted by digital agents alone exceeds 45%.
For a $60 billion company — a real client modeled in the report — the researchers estimated approximately $6 billion in potential annual revenue growth from deploying agentic AI at full maturity, alongside $1.7 billion in annual productivity gains. The catch: by 2028, roughly one-third of those productivity gains showed up not as direct cost savings, but as “capacity freed” — hours that need to be deliberately redirected toward higher-value work, or they simply evaporate.
“Productivity becomes growth only through redeployment,” the report warns. “Unless leaders deliberately redeploy that capacity toward higher-value work, productivity gains stall at efficiency and fail to translate into growth.”
Crowley told Fortune that the failure mode isn’t deploying too many agents — it’s failing to think about them as a coherent workforce rather than a collection of one-off experiments. “Everyone’s building an agent here, an agent there, sometimes thousands,” Crowley said. “What we tried to do is step back and look at what the agentic landscape will look like at an enterprise level.”
That enterprise view is where the accountability problem bites hardest. AI agents are already spreading “rapidly across the enterprise value chain, often ahead of formal strategy and governance,” the report notes, with nearly three-quarters of knowledge workers now using AI — frequently through unsanctioned, bring-your-own tools, a phenomenon sometimes called “shadow AI.” By 2028, roughly a third of enterprise applications are expected to embed agentic capabilities. And yet the report makes clear that governance architecture has not kept pace.
From a tech CEO’s perspective, this report rings true. Andrey Khusid, CEO of Miro, the $17.5 billion productivity startup that made headlines for deciding to leave Russia amid the outbreak of the Ukraine War, recently sat down with Fortune for a chat about the state of things. Miro’s main app a productivity software that dates back over a decade and it’s now embedding AI. “For almost 15 years, it was human-to-human collaboration [on Miro],” he agreed. “But then agent-to-AI happened. And now a lot of collaboration happens between humans and agents together.”
By bringing agents onto the platform, Khusid said his company is allowing users to “deliver work in an agentic way.” This is more complex than human-to-human work, he said. “It’s way more powerful and way faster time-to-value. Because before you would need to have a human with this expertise or that expertise … With agents, you can have the whole team working by your side with different expertise.”
Still, it’s extremely important to recognize that agents can be error-prone, just as humans can, and “a lot of this now-agentic delivery is a black box.” Miro is working to unpack that default opacity so that it can correct agents when they err in the wrong direction. Acknowledging that it looks like “an agentic revolution,” he added, “We’re at the very beginning.”
Bradlow and Crowley conceded that agents can be error-prone, even hallucinatory, and, on a mass scale, that could lead to widespread errors. “Here’s the thing,” Bradlow said, citing his years of expertise as a mathematician and data scientist at heart, and urging us to understand agents as fundamentally non-human in their decision-making. “Agents are built on the premise of what’s called reinforcement learning, which means good outcomes as programmed by the human who determines the objective function. When agents get bad outcomes, they change their assignment. They change what they do. It’s not as obvious humans learn that same way.” When an agent makes a mistake, he explained, you can tell it what to reinforce, and it shouldn’t make that mistake again. Which makes Khusid’s point about opening the black box all the more important.
Bradlow, who chairs the Wharton marketing department, told Fortune that it reminded him of several images from television and film. “This will expose the weakest link in an organization,” he said, recalling the British game show that was one of the most successful in BBC history, where the host eliminated players by saying, coldly: “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”
He said it also reminded him of famous images of Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball, where the comedy legends struggled to keep up with ever-accelerating assembly lines. In the classic episode “Job Switching,” Ball ended up stuffing her mouth with chocolates as they sped by her at relentless speed
Chaplin’s famous scene in Modern Times was a bit grislier, ending with him getting sucked into the conveyor belt itself. It was also an iconic image that captured the early days of 20th-century capitalism. If one worker in a 20-step process adopts AI and triples their throughput while the next worker is still running on Excel, the bottleneck doesn’t disappear, he said — it just moves. “Efficiency gains happening here but not here,” he said, “will be exacerbated, and you will see it quickly.”
The governance stakes are highest, the report found in one case study, precisely where the revenue opportunity is largest: Sales. A function combining massive decision volume, high digital agent suitability, and elevated commercial risk — customer interactions, pricing, commercial judgment — sales is simultaneously the top candidate for early agent deployment and, as the report calls it, “a governance-critical domain where trust, accountability, and human oversight must be deliberately designed.”
That word — deliberately — recurs throughout the 40-page report like a drumbeat. Leaders cannot simply enable agents and wait for value to emerge. They must set explicit P&L targets, build human-led operating models, and assign clear decision rights before agents go live. The report goes so far as to suggest organizations may need a new executive role: a Chief Agentic Resources Officer.
“We spend so much time on the productivity aspect of the story,” Crowley said. “The gains on the revenue side are going to eventually dwarf the gains on the efficiency and productivity side.” Most companies have been very focused on the efficiency and productivity opportunities with advanced AI, he said, adding that he thinks now is the right time to make this an “and” story as the revenue potential is there and could be far larger.
Bradlow agreed that was a major takeaway for him as well, citing remarks he heard at an executive breakfast roundtable that Wharton and Accenture co-hosted at Nvidia’s GTC conference earlier in March. “The gains on the revenue side are going to eventually dwarf the gains on the efficiency and productivity side … it’s corporations, entities, people doing things they just could not do before. And companies launching new types of products they just could not imagine doing before.”
But that growth prize comes with a human price tag. The more intelligence you scale, the more accountable — and irreplaceable — your human leaders become. The agents can reason, execute, and coordinate. What they cannot do is own the outcome. In a badly designed agentic enterprise, one human could suddenly find themselves responsible for an exponential cascade of outcomes they never saw coming. It suggests that the phrase “modern times” means exactly what it did in Chaplin’s time: you have to master the machine, or you could be ground up in its gears.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The Rounds of 64 and 32 delivered their share of drama, but now that the March Madness Sweet 16 has arrived, the stakes couldn’t be higher for anyone still hoping to win their office pool.
This year, one bracket made it further than most, surviving all the way to the 44th game of the tournament before No. 6 Tennessee’s 79-72 upset of No. 3 Virginia finally ended the run. Out of the roughly 36 million brackets tracked across major online platforms like ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, and others, zero perfect brackets remain. (Office pools are a different story, of course. If you’re still alive in yours, hold tight.)
What’s perhaps more striking than the upsets themselves is what didn’t happen: For the second straight year, there are no mid-major Cinderellas left standing. The Sweet 16 is an all-power-conference affair, a reflection of how NIL and the transfer portal have reshaped the landscape of college basketball.
The third and fourth rounds start Thursday, and while traditional Cinderella stories may be off the table, the Sweet 16 matchups are loaded with intrigue.
Sweet 16 winners won’t get much of a break. Regional championships are set for Saturday, March 28, and Sunday, March 29, airing across CBS and TBS.
Saturday, April 4: The penultimate games will air on TBS at 6:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. ET from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
Monday, April 6: The champion will be decided at 8:30 p.m. ET on TBS from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
CBS Sports and Turner Sports show all tournaments across TBS, CBS, TNT, truTV, and their digital platforms, including March Madness Live.
If you have a cable subscription but aren’t near a TV, you can log into TBS.com or the TBS app for games on that network. You’ll need your cable or satellite provider credentials. CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery are also streaming games on their respective platforms.
March Madness Live will stream every game on the NCAA website and on Apple, Android, Amazon, and Roku devices. You’ll need to log in with your TV provider credentials to access most content, though some free streaming windows are typically offered early in the tournament.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
HBO Max’s enormously popular television series The Pitt is receiving plaudits for its realistic depiction of the trials and tribulations of health care in an urban emergency room.
Now in its second season, which premiered on Jan. 8, 2026, the show follows Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle) and his colleagues through a single 15-hour clinical shift, divided into one-hour episodes. The team treats patients against a backdrop of all-too-common American societal plagues, from substance use disorder to medical bankruptcies and mass shootings.
Spoiler alert: About halfway through the season, Dr. Robby and the staff at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grapple with chaos ensuing from a less commonly depicted disaster – a hospital cyberattack. The hospital’s network and computers were incapacitated, resulting in scenes of millennial residents struggling with fax machines, laboratory orders disappearing in a shuffle of papers, and constant communication breakdowns culminating in a missed life-threatening diagnosis.
All this might prompt viewers to wonder: Does this actually happen in real life?
As physicians who study cyberattacks and their impact on patient care, we have seen many of the same events depicted in The Pitt play out in the real world.
These attacks have severe clinical consequences. In an unfortunate case of art imitating life, the show’s cyberattack story arc began on the same day that the University of Mississippi Medical Center suffered the same fate, resulting in the sudden closure of more than 30 affiliated clinics across the state while also disrupting Mississippi’s only Level I trauma center.
Modern health care is critically dependent on digital technologies, such as electronic health records, laboratory machines and radiology platforms, that shut down when hospital networks are taken offline. Losing access to these tools for prolonged periods of time puts patients’ lives at grave risk.
The most dire real-life cyberattacks on hospitals involve ransomware, a class of malicious software that encrypts data and locks down computers and networks, demanding significant amounts of cash for the promise of relief. Unfortunately, these events are not rare. Comparitech, a cybersecurity research firm, recorded 445 ransomware attacks on hospitals and clinics in 2025 – a new peak following several years of annual increases.
Such attacks are especially dangerous for patients with time-sensitive emergencies like strokes, heart attacks or sepsis, but they affect hospital outcomes broadly. For example, a 2026 analysis of Medicare data found that hospitalized patients had a 38% higher risk of death during a ransomware attack.
Moreover, the health impacts of ransomware are not confined to the hospitals under attack. The Pitt demonstrates this phenomenon well in earlier episodes. When Westbridge, another hospital in the community, is struck first, a wave of patients arriving by ambulance strains Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s already packed emergency room, leading to delays in care and overwhelming already-strained clinicians. Our team found that a hospital cyberattack cut the odds of surviving a cardiac arrest without devastating brain damage by nearly 90% at nearby hospitals, not just the one that was attacked.
And even when a hospital’s computer systems are restored and normal care resumes, a cyberattack leaves enormous financial damage in its wake. Class action lawsuits, fragmented billing and steep regulatory fines due to patient privacy breaches and other issues often result in tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of losses.
In the worst cases, hospitals or clinics in rural areas have been forced to shutter their doors, leaving their communities with one less place to receive care and exacerbating existing health care deserts.
We have no doubt that Dr. Robby will rally his team to ultimately save the day from malicious cyberattacks on The Pitt. But what is the prognosis for the rest of us, in the real world?
The good news is that a number of efforts are underway to improve the cybersecurity of the U.S. health care system.
The federal government has recognized the particular risk posed to rural and critical access hospitals and has identified increased investment in cybersecurity technologies as one of the goals of the Rural Health Transformation Program, a US$50 billion package distributed across all 50 states.
Several states, including New York and Connecticut, have taken further action, enshrining new bills in 2025 and 2026 mandating hospitals develop specific cybersecurity plans to protect patients. And the Food and Drug Administration now evaluates the cybersecurity of new medical devices prior to their arrival to market, and can issue recalls of those found to have significant vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity remains one of the few bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill. A health care cybersecurity bill co-sponsored by Senators Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mark Warner, D-Va., introduced in December 2025, would require hospitals to adopt security practices, including multifactor authentication and data encryption, allocate additional grants for hospitals and clinics, and strengthen the pipeline for cybersecurity professionals working in the health care sector, among other provisions.
However, this problem isn’t going away. Artificial intelligence and the expansion of remote and virtual care mean that malicious hackers have sophisticated new tools and increased opportunities to target hospitals. Researchers like us will have to find new ways to prevent cyberattacks when possible and protect patients when they inevitably erupt.
Jeffrey Tully, Associate Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology, University of California, San Diego and Christian Dameff, Associate Professor of Emergency Medical Services, University of California, San Diego
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Exchanging U.S. dollars for Mexican pesos seems simple. But, at large enough scales and high enough speeds, transactions can get complicated, especially if businesses trade in the dollar-pegged digital tokens known as stablecoins. The Miami-headquartered startup XFX aims to make the foreign exchange process more efficient—for fiat and stablecoins—and has drummed up $17 million in a Series A fundraise, the company announced Thursday.
The crypto investor Castle Island Ventures, which has carved out a niche in making stablecoin bets, led the round. Other participants include Haun Ventures and Coinbase Ventures, both of which invested in XFX’s $9 million seed round. Santiago Alvarado, cofounder and CEO of XFX, declined to specify at what valuation his startup raised its most recent stash of capital.
“They’re building FX [foreign exchange] and payment infrastructure that matches the speed of stablecoins,” Chris Ahn, a partner at Haun Ventures, told Fortune.
Stablecoins are one of the hottest sectors in fintech. Proponents say the tokens can speed up cross-border payments and reduce transaction fees, among other benefits. Venture capitalists have poured hundreds of millions into the space over the past year, backing buzzy startups like Zerohash, Rain, and KAST. And, last week, the payments goliath Mastercard agreed to buy the London-based company BVNK for up to $1.8 billion in the biggest deal yet for a stablecoin company.
Founded in 2025, XFX hopes to draft off of that momentum. The company’s three cofounders met while they were employees at Bitso, the Latin American exchange that lets traders buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Alvarado is a former civil engineer-turned-fintech founder. Jason Losh is a longtime developer who eventually led a team of 300 at Bitso. And Alberto Sánchez Tello has a traditional finance pedigree working for companies like Deutsche Bank, UBS, and BlackRock.
At Bitso, the trio grew frustrated with how difficult it was to exchange stablecoins for Latin American fiat currencies, like the Mexican peso, said Alvarado, XFX’s CEO. Crypto transactions happen in seconds, but bank transfers can take days. So, the trio teamed up to create a company that would make the foreign exchange process quicker and more efficient. XFX has built what Alvarado describes as an “engine” to match buyers and sellers of currency more easily, among other enhancements. “How can we process the maximum amount of volume with a minimum possible amount of capital?” said Alvarado. “That is what we’re trying to build.”
In addition to letting customers swap between stablecoins, XFX lets customers exchange three fiat currencies: the U.S. dollar, the Mexican peso, and the Colombian peso. Instead of first focusing on breadth of coverage, the startup aims to create deep liquidity in a subset of currencies before expanding outward. In other words, XFX wants customers to be able to trade between two currencies without one transaction significantly affecting prices.
The startup’s current clients include financial institutions, money transmitters, and crypto exchanges, said Alvarado, declining to specify with whom they’re working. With their new injection of capital, XFX plans to hire more “quants,” or math-savvy traders, as well as expand the startup’s relationships with trading desks and banks.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Blossom Health has raised $20 million in seed and Series A funding to bring an AI “copilot” for psychiatry to patients nationwide, Fortune has exclusively learned. The announcement comes as venture dollars have largely chased more generic AI plays, but as investors have increasingly begun to fund AI enabled health tech. The New York–based startup is positioning itself as an AI‑native psychiatry platform, arguing that the technology finally makes it possible to scale high‑quality mental health care without flooding clinics with more staff.
The round, led by Headline with participation from Village Global, TA Ventures, Operator Partners, and Correlation Ventures, also adds Headline cofounder Mathias Schilling to the board.
“We’ve been very intentional and disciplined around capital raising,” founder and CEO John Zhao told Fortune, noting that all of Blossom’s rounds were oversubscribed but that the company “could raise more, but we choose not to.” Capital, he added, “is both a weapon and a liability.”
Zhao, who previously worked at two hyperscale startups—Athelas, now a multibillion‑dollar company, and online insurance marketplace EverQuote, which he helped scale through an IPO—frames Blossom as a chance to build a “generational company” in mental health. “As long as there are human beings, we’re going to need healthcare, and mental health is only a larger and larger component of each person’s holistic health,” he said.
Blossom’s timing, he sees as a counterpoint to the perception that digital mental health has already been solved by the last wave of teletherapy and telehealth platforms. Those platforms, Zhao described as “ill‑equipped or nonexistent” in the psychiatry space.
Blossom markets itself as an “all‑in‑one AI copilot” that both augments psychiatrists’ clinical decisions and automates the back office tasks that typically bog down an in‑network practice. That means turning what Zhao describes as historically “extremely episodic” care into a continuous relationship driven by AI agents that text patients between visits, help surface warning signs, and tee up information for clinicians. He pointed to a postpartum depression case, where instead of waiting a month until the next visit, Blossom follows up with conversational check‑ins on sleep and mood, “just like texting a therapist,” rather than relying on static questionnaires. In general, most patients on the platform are seen in under 48 hours, oftentimes same-day.
Zhao is blunt that AI in health care will only work if clinicians buy in. “It starts with listening to clinicians—and not just listening, but involving them in the creation of all our AI products every step of the way,” he said, noting that Blossom’s clinical director and “100‑plus clinicians” pilot features before they roll out more broadly.
He draws a sharp line between clinical tools and support agents, however. “These are ways we help clinicians treat patients more confidently, accurately, and effectively,” Zhao told Fortune. Everything else—billing, scheduling, dealing with insurers and pharmacies—is handled by agents that replace what he describes as the “army of people” it used to take to run a clinic.
Blossom says its tools are already used by hundreds of clinicians treating more than 10,000 patients across multiple states, and it markets in‑network coverage with major insurers and average copays around $22. The company pitches itself against a backdrop in which roughly one in four U.S. adults experience a mental health condition in a given year, and more than 28 million adults with mental illness receive no treatment at all.
Zhao’s ambition is to turn Blossom into the “destination of choice” in psychiatry, analogous to a JPMorgan Chase in retail banking, with concrete plans to expand well beyond the nine states it currently serves in the near future, deepen payer relationships, and keep investing in applied AI R&D. “Previously, scale was something that broke healthcare companies,” Zhao said. “Now we’ve flipped that paradigm on its head. The more we grow, the better we are at helping our doctors and helping
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Does the one person unicorn exist? Or is it the startup version of a ‘cryptid,’ a mythical creature that is oft-discussed but may or may not actually exist?
I wondered that when chatting recently with Ben Broca, CEO and founder of Polsia, whose company offers an AI “co-founder” that claims to build and run an entire company autonomously. (You may recognize Broca’s name, as he was a very early employee at Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens.)
“You give [Polsia] an idea, and it will go ahead and build a product,” said Broca. “It will fix bugs. It will handle support. It will run marketing campaigns, including ads. It will do all of this autonomously. Every night, it wakes up, does work, and reports back via email to the user with what it has done, what it plans to do the next day, and how the general state of the business is.”
Broca is practicing what he preaches: He posted last week on LinkedIn that Polsia (whose investors include True Ventures) had hit a revenue run rate of $4.5 million—with him as the sole employee.
“Polsia is preaching solopreneurship,” said Broca. “I’m preaching letting go of the ‘99%’ that are not technical, not in Silicon Valley, not in New York, don’t have access to code. I want to give them a chance to survive in this new economy that’s going to be completely disrupted by AI.”
I’m famously skeptical of any and all revenue-related startup claims in the AI era. I told this to Broca, who says he believes Polsia’s revenue has some stability based on the level of user engagement he’s seeing. He also, despite being a “solopreneur,” does work with people. His central idea is one of an outsourced “virtual team.”
“That’s my crazy solution to the solopreneur problem,” said Broca. “I can leverage people, but in a different way. They don’t have to be full‑time employees… I can still have a GC with a law firm. I can have an infrastructure team with an infrastructure‑for‑agents company… and they’re incentivized for me to be as big as possible.”
But direct employees? For now, nope.
“Initially I was ‘for now I’m alone,’” said Broca. “And then, since online the response has been so overwhelmingly positive and people [are] amazed how much you can do, it’s becoming almost like an odd performance where I’m like, ‘Well, okay, how far can I go?’”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning. AI is already making workers more productive, but the financial results haven’t yet caught up.
“Artificial Intelligence, Productivity, and the Workforce: Evidence from Corporate Executives” is a new working paper by researchers at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta. It finds that while CFOs report productivity gains from AI, revenue-based evidence tells a more measured story—for now.
Based on surveys of nearly 750 executives, the research identifies a “productivity paradox.” Companies reported AI-driven productivity gains averaging 1.8% in 2025, but when researchers calculated implied gains using actual revenue and employment data, those gains were much smaller across all major industries—in both 2025 and 2026, the report found.
“It’s not really hitting the top line yet in full force,” John Graham, a professor of finance at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and a co-author of the study, told me. “There is some level of delay in here for sure.”
“It is possible that CFOs are just optimistic about all the potential,” he added. “By productivity, we explicitly ask output per employee.”
But Graham points primarily to timing. Companies that ramped up AI investment in late 2025 haven’t fully rolled out capabilities, adjusted pricing, or realized revenue gains. Reported 2025 gains closely match revenue-implied gains for 2026—suggesting a one-year lag.
The pattern mirrors the famous “productivity paradox” described by economist Robert Solow in 1987, who noted that computer use was widespread but invisible in productivity statistics for years. The paper’s authors argue AI may be following the same trajectory.
Regarding AI, gains are uneven across industries. High-skill services like finance show the strongest growth, while manufacturing, construction, and low-skill services lag but remain positive. Differences reflect how AI is deployed across sectors and company types.
“For some industries, AI is going to be about replacing the call center,” Graham said. “For another, it’s going to be about something to do with a conveyor belt in a factory. For another, it’s going to be about having fewer analysts—having the AI take the place of a financial analyst.”
Importantly, these gains are driven less by capital investment and more by efficiency and quality improvements.
For CFOs, the challenge is justifying AI spending before returns are visible.
“ROI often depends on exactly how you calculate it—a point-in-time estimate like this year’s revenue increase divided by this year’s investment,” Graham said. “What you’d really want to do is say, the amount I’m investing today—how much will that increase value this year, next year, the year after?”
He continued, “You really want to use some measure of value creation that captures several years, at least, of forward-looking improvements, rather than just a point in time.”
Graham advises a multi-year perspective: “If you can’t kind of show it over a three or four year horizon, then you might have to be a lot more cautious.” It could be that you’re caught up in the trend, but you haven’t mapped out yet how it’s going to actually benefit your company, he said.
“You want to look over longer than just a one-year horizon, but you have to do it with discipline, so you’re not just kind of pie in the sky hoping it gets better,” Graham said.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The European Medicines Agency just approved a new Moderna mRNA flu vaccine—after clinical data demonstrated strong protection for older adults. In the United States, the same technology is facing a political blockade.
The FDA recently refused to review an mRNA flu vaccine application—despite a 40,000-person clinical trial showing it outperformed standard flu shots in older adults. The agency later reversed course, but the damage was done:
Across the U.S. biotech sector, the conclusion is now widespread: Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is subjecting mRNA medicines to political scrutiny rather than scientific review.
The message to investors is unmistakable. And the numbers confirm it.
In 2023, investors poured more than $500 million into mRNA vaccines. Last year, that figure collapsed to $174 million—a 66% decline in a single year. Before the FDA reversed course, Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bancel warned the company would no longer pursue new late-stage vaccine trials in the United States. “You cannot make a return on investment,” he said, “if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.” Moderna is not alone.
This is a stunning reversal for a technology that President Trump championed. Operation Warp Speed—his administration’s public-private partnership—helped bring the COVID-19 vaccine to market at record speed. The consequences of the current policy shift are already materializing.
NTx Bio has halted construction of a $31 million RNA manufacturing facility in Plano, Texas. Announced by Governor Greg Abbott in May 2025 and backed by $1.5 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund, the plant was meant to anchor a $4 billion life sciences innovation district. Eight months later, the jobs are gone.
The rest of the world isn’t waiting. Mexico launched “Plan Mexico”—a five-year national strategy to build domestic mRNA manufacturing. President Trump has promised to bring manufacturing home. His administration is actively driving one of America’s most strategic industries offshore.
The U.K. committed £1.1 billion in R&D and is building a 250-million-dose manufacturing facility. Canada established a long-term Moderna partnership. Australia is targeting domestic production by 2026. Rwanda is building Africa’s first mRNA manufacturing hub. Senegal, Indonesia, and Brazil are all entering new biopharma partnerships.
The United States is conspicuously absent from that list.
These are high-skilled jobs—research, development, manufacturing, quality control, specialized supply chains. Each facility lost represents hundreds of direct positions and thousands more in supporting industries.
Our adversaries are seizing the advantage. China now leads 46% of all mRNA vaccines in global clinical development—up from 15% just five years ago. Beijing isn’t waiting for Washington. It’s building the manufacturing capacity and patent portfolio we’re abandoning.
We have seen this before. It took a $52 billion federal investment to begin rebuilding America’s semiconductor industry after we ceded that ground to foreign competitors. We are watching the same exodus with mRNA—this time with no excuse.
The irony is sharp. The United States provided the foundational research that made mRNA vaccines possible—decades of NIH grants, private investment, and Operation Warp Speed. That investment is now paying dividends for other nations while American companies face a hostile regulatory climate at home.
The timing could not be worse. mRNA is just beginning to fulfill its promise beyond COVID. Clinical trials are showing success against pancreatic cancer, melanoma, and rare genetic disorders that were previously untreatable. The pipeline of new mRNA therapies is entering its most consequential growth phase.
Other nations see where this is going. They are building the workforce, infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, and regulatory frameworks needed to capture that growth—for their workers and their patients.
The question is not whether mRNA manufacturing will expand globally—it already is. The question is whether American companies will participate from facilities on U.S. soil or somewhere else. America won the race to develop mRNA medicine. Secretary Kennedy’s ideological agenda is forfeiting the prize.
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
A few years ago, Allison Posner was barely involved in politics.
Now the 42-year-old mother of two from Maplewood, New Jersey, hands out food and diapers to immigrant families outside a nearby detention facility. She waves signs on a highway overpass in between school pickups and orthodontist appointments. And this weekend, she’ll lead a “No Kings” protest march across this affluent town alongside her husband, her children and thousands of others who are convinced that President Donald Trump represents a direct threat to American democracy.
“The people in the suburbs are definitely radicalizing,” said Posner, a freelance actor.
A growing faction of concerned citizens living in suburban communities across the United States — places once known for political moderation or even conservatism — are increasingly positioned on the front lines of the anti-Trump resistance. More than a year into the Republican president’s second term, the so-called “soccer moms” are becoming bona fide activists taking to their well-manicured streets to fight Trump and his allies.
The leftward lurch could cost Republicans control of Congress for the president’s final two years in office. It could also reshape the Democratic Party by elevating a fresh crop of fiery progressive candidates emboldened to push back against the Trump administration more aggressively than the establishment may prefer.
Indivisible, the activist organization spearheading the third round of No Kings protests this weekend, said roughly two-thirds of more than 3,000 planned demonstrations will be held outside urban areas. Overall, more than 9 million people are expected to turn out nationwide for what leaders predict will be the largest single day of protesting in U.S. history.
“We’re going to be everywhere,” said Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin.
Organizers said sign-ups have been especially enthusiastic in suburban areas with high-profile congressional races like Scottsdale, Arizona; Langhorne, Pennsylvania; East Cobb, Georgia; and here in northern New Jersey’s 11th district, which holds a special election April 7.
Democratic voters last month chose Analilia Mejia, a former political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders, as their candidate to replace Mikie Sherrill, the more moderate Democrat who was recently elected as New Jersey’s governor.
Posner said she’s excited to have a fighter represent her district, someone who can channel the outrage that she sees every day.
“I’m seeing people from the PTA or the neighborhood who would have never joined a protest in the past, who are now asking how they can get involved,” Posner said. “This is not some other people’s fight. This is our fight.”
For decades, affluent suburbs like those in northern New Jersey helped elect Republicans who fit the districts they represented: business-oriented, culturally moderate and disinterested in ideological fights.
That began to change in the Trump era.
Across the country, college-educated suburban voters recoiled from Trump’s brand of politics. They shifted sharply toward Democrats in the 2018 midterms and in the presidential elections that followed. Districts like New Jersey’s 11th, once a Republican stronghold, have since become part of a new liberal coalition rooted in places that were, until very recently, politically competitive.
Even in Summit, New Jersey, one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs, Jeff Naiman feels like he’s living in an “authoritarian nightmare” of Trump’s making.
“It’s like our hair is on fire,” says Naiman, a 59-year-old radiologist who leads his local chapter of Indivisible. “Our country’s being torn apart.”
He’s supporting Mejia, and he has no doubt that she will win next month’s special election — and again in November’s general election.
“In this environment,” Naiman said, “I think the chances of her losing the general election are basically zero.”
Mejia, an outspoken progressive activist endorsed by Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., emerged from the crowded Democratic primary last month, beating more moderate candidates like former congressman Tom Malinowski.
She’s critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, calls for the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and backs Medicare for All. She’s also eager to raise concerns about what she describes as Trump’s dictatorial tendencies, and will be one of the featured speakers at a “No Kings” protest this weekend.
“A ZIP code does not protect anyone from rising violent authoritarianism,” she said in an interview.
Mejia still describes herself as a “soccer mom,” even as her Republican critics accuse her of trying to soften her activist image ahead of Election Day.
“My youngest plays baseball and soccer, my oldest lacrosse and basketball,” she said. “And when I take my children to activities, to games, and I speak to other parents, I know that we’re all experiencing this economy and this political moment very similarly.”
Mejia defended herself against accusations of antisemitism for her position on Israel, which she accused of committing genocide in the war in Gaza, a topic that emerged as a key issue in the race.
“When I say Palestinians have rights, like Jewish people and Israelis have rights, that is not antisemitism, that is humanism,” she said while acknowledging there is antisemitism within the Republican and Democratic parties. “I am an Afro Latina raising two Black sons in America. I know othering kills. I know how dangerous it is when we dehumanize communities.”
New Jersey’s 11th district was represented by a Republican until Sherrill was elected during the 2018 midterm elections that served as a harsh verdict at the halfway mark of Trump’s first term.
Joe Hathaway, the Republican nominee in next month’s special election and a town councilman from Randolph Township, hopes to convince voters that Mejia is too radical for them. Republican strategists in Washington, too, believe a surge of far-left Democratic candidates nationwide like Mejia in otherwise moderate districts might help their party maintain its razor-thin House majority this fall.
Yet suburban Republicans are facing serious political headwinds from the leader of their own party in the White House. Hathaway, for example, initially declined to say whether he voted for Trump.
“I don’t think it’s important,” he said in an interview, before acknowledging that he cast his ballot for the president three times. “This job is representing the district, NJ-11 comes first, before a president, before your party.”
Hathaway backs the president’s war in Iran and many of the economic policies in Trump’s “one big, beautiful” bill. But he was also quick to highlight areas of disagreement.
The Republican said he supports most of the Democrats’ demands in the Department of Homeland Security shutdown fight, including proposals to require federal immigration agents to wear body cameras, clearly identify themselves, take off face masks and receive better training.
He also wants Republicans who lead Congress to stand up to Trump, whose use of executive authority Hathaway said is “pressure testing” the checks and balances outlined in the Constitution.
“Congress needs to reassert that it is the first branch of government and take more of a leadership role than it’s been doing,” he said.
Suburban Americans have been slowly moving away from the Republicans over the past 15 years, according to Gallup polling that tracks party affiliation over time.
Trump was unable to stop the shift despite warnings that Democrats would “destroy” the suburbs with low-income housing.
In 2020, Joe Biden won 54% of voters who said they lived in the suburbs while Trump won only 44%, according to AP VoteCast. That was a substantial improvement on Democrat Hillary Clinton’s performance in a smaller survey of validated 2016 voters conducted by the Pew Research Center, which found that Clinton and Trump split the group about evenly.
The suburbs have also grown more diverse and educated over the past few decades, demographic shifts that may make Democrats more confident. In both of the past two presidential elections, AP VoteCast found that college-educated and non-white suburban voters were much likelier to support the Democratic candidate.
Naiman, the Summit radiologist, said he’s witnessed a transformation in his town, which was represented by Republicans at the state and federal level for decades until Trump took over.
“I don’t think that Summit is going to be swinging towards Republicans anytime soon — at least not as long as Trumpism is around,” he said.
___
Associated Press polling editor Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston has become the symbol for how the ongoing partial government shutdown has wreaked havoc on the nation’s air travel system.
While long security lines have hobbled airports across the U.S., Bush Intercontinental’s problems have been more pronounced. Frustrated travelers at Houston’s largest airport have confronted warnings of four-hour wait times to get through security, as many Transportation Security Administration workers aren’t showing up for their shifts since they’re not getting paid during the shutdown.
“And we’ve been in this airport since 8 o’clock in the morning. Very tired, queuing and queuing and very slow,” Edgaer Fernando, who was traveling to Guatemala, said on Tuesday.
Union and airport officials have offered a variety of reasons why Bush Intercontinental seems to be worse than other airports.
These include the Houston airport having one of the highest callout rates of TSA workers in the country due to the economic challenges they are facing, higher passenger traffic as the airport is a major hub for United Airlines, and a busy tourism month for Houston.
Both Bush Intercontinental and Hobby, the city’s other major airport, have had some of the highest callout rates in the U.S.
While 11% of TSA workers nationally did not show up for work on Tuesday, at Bush Intercontinental, that number was nearly 40%. At Hobby, it was even higher — 43%. The callout rate in Houston has averaged between 35% and 40%, said Johnny Jones, the secretary and treasurer for Council 100 of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA workers nationwide.
But Bush Intercontinental is much busier than Hobby, having served over 48.4 million passengers in 2024, compared to 14.6 million passengers at Hobby.
Jim Szczesniak, director of aviation for the Houston Airport System, said that at Bush Intercontinental, 37 TSA checkpoint lanes are usually operating. Only between a third and 50% of lanes are currently being operated, he said.
“We worry conditions will only get worse at airports across the U.S. until Congress ends this shutdown,” Szczesniak said in a video posted on social media Tuesday.
TSA workers were already dealing with financial difficulties and debt from last year’s shutdown, and with higher costs for groceries and gas, employees “are just tired of it,” Jones said.
“There could be a million factors, but I can just tell you as simple as this: If everybody’s being paid, you wouldn’t have no lines,” Jones said.
The Houston airport is one of the nation’s busiest and is also a major hub for United Airlines. Of the 48.4 million passengers that went through the airport in 2024, 34.8 million were from United Airlines.
“There’s high call outs, but it’s also the excessive origination point for a lot of flights,” Jones said.
With the high volume of passengers, the Houston airport might have also been experiencing a staffing shortage even before the shutdown, as no TSA workers have been hired around the country in about a year, Jones said.
Besides spring break travelers, Houston has hosted a variety of high-profile events this month.
These include games during the World Baseball Classic and CERAWeek, a major energy conference with more than 10,000 participants from around the world. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo reportedly drew 2.6 million attendees, many from outside the metro area, during its three-week duration. And this week, two of the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16 games will be played in Houston.
“While the delays are frustrating for travelers, they do not appear to be impacting tourism. In fact, Houston is experiencing the strongest month of March in terms of hotel rooms and reservations in the city’s history,” Mayor John Whitmire said in a statement.
Wait times at Bush Intercontinental seemed to improve on Wednesday as it took less than two hours to get through TSA security.
“Everyone’s trying their best. And thanks to all the TSA members who are here,” Raj Chauhan, who was traveling to Miami, said on Wednesday.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Two landmark jury verdicts against social media companies have arrived at the front of a wave of lawsuits alleging that the popular platforms endanger the mental health of children.
Financial penalties total $381 million in the two cases involving tech giant Meta in New Mexico and both Meta and YouTube in California. The verdicts highlight a growing shift in the public perception of social media companies and their responsibilities toward child safety.
But it may be too soon to tell whether litigation will change the way popular social media and messaging platforms function — or influence the complex algorithms that deliver content to billions of users worldwide.
Here are looming questions as related lawsuits approach trial.
The answer is not really — or, at least, not yet.
Meta — the owner of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — says it had $201 billion in sales last year.
That revenue stream dwarfs the $375 million in civil penalties imposed on Tuesday by a jury in New Mexico with a verdict that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms.
Meta said it disagrees with the verdicts and plans to appeal the jury’s finding that it violated the state Unfair Practices Act.
And tech companies still are shielded from legal responsibility for posted content, based on Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Investors are shrugging off the verdicts. Meta’s stock closed slightly higher Wednesday, although it is down about 8% year-to-date.
The verdicts this week don’t mandate specific changes to the design of social media platforms, nor to the algorithms that make them tick.
But a second phase of the New Mexico trial in May, before a judge with no jury, could spell out changes for Meta’s platforms for local users by court order.
A state district court judge will determine whether Meta created a public nuisance — and could impose restrictions and order the company to pay for programs that remedy potential harms to children.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who filed the lawsuit against Meta in 2023, says his office wants improvements to Meta’s enforcement of minimum age limits and removal of sexual predators — in part by lifting encryption on communication that can interfere with police work.
Meta says it continuously works to improve safety and already has made changes that phase out encryption on Instagram and limit access to explicit content by teenagers, block unsolicited messages to children from adults and help young users manage time spent on its platforms and avoid sleep disruptions.
Both the California and New Mexico trials highlighted the addictive properties of platform algorithms and the negative impacts on child mental health.
In New Mexico, a jury in Santa Fe arrived at the $375 million fine against Meta by endorsing the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation of state consumer protection law — multiplied by thousands of social media accounts for children under 18.
Prosecutors intend to pursue more damages in that trial’s second phase, while an appeal could delay payment — or reverse penalties.
In California, the jury ruled that Meta and Google’s video streaming platform YouTube must pay at least $3 million in damages to a 20-year-old woman who says she became addicted to social media as a child, exacerbating her mental health struggles. TikTok and Snap settled before the trial began.
California jurors recommended an additional $3 million in punitive damages pending a judge’s final review.
Google defends YouTube as a responsibly built streaming platform, and not a social media site.
The California verdict has much broader legal and financial implications. The case was designated as a bellwether test that might guide the resolution of other lawsuits. There are thousands of those lawsuits pending, including hundreds in California.
The New Mexico verdict may be an early indicator for lawsuits brought by other publicly elected prosecutors.
Attorneys general in more than 40 states have filed suit against Meta, claiming it is contributing to a mental health crisis among young people. Most are pursuing remedies in U.S. federal court.
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The U.S. Postal Service is seeking a temporary 8% charge on certain popular products, including Priority Mail, to help blunt the impact of rising transportation costs.
USPS filed notice on Wednesday with the Postal Regulatory Commission seeking the price increase, which would take effect on April 26 and remain in place until Jan. 17, 2027, pending final approval.
“This temporary price adjustment will provide needed flexibility for the Postal Service by helping to ensure that the actual costs of doing business are covered, as required by Congress,” the agency said in a news release, noting that its competitors have reacted to rising fuel prices with “a number of surcharges.”
“We have steadfastly avoided surcharges and this charge is less than one-third of what our competitors charge for fuel alone,” the agency said in a statement. If approved, the price increase would affect Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, USPS Ground Advantage, and Parcel Select. No other products or services would be affected, including First-Class Stamps, the agency said.
The notice comes as Postmaster General David Steiner has warned Congress that the Postal Service, which has seen letter volumes plummet, will run out of cash within a year unless lawmakers lift a decades-old cap and allow the independent agency to borrow more money. Steiner favors other reforms as well, including the authority to raise postage prices high enough to cover losses.
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Iran and the United States hardened their positions as a diplomatic push for a ceasefire in the Middle East war appeared to falter on Thursday. Tehran moved to formalize its control over the crucial Strait of Hormuz while Washington prepared for the arrival of U.S. troops in the region that could be used on the ground in the Islamic Republic.
Sirens over Israel warned of barrages of incoming Iranian missiles and in the United Arab Emirates, two people were reported killed and three were wounded by falling shrapnel from a missile interception over Abu Dhabi on Thursday.
The secretary-general of a bloc of Gulf Arab countries said that Iran is charging fees for ships to safely transit the Strait of Hormuz. Industry experts say some ships are paying in Chinese yuan to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of all traded oil and natural gas is transported in peacetime.
Israel said Thursday it killed Commodore Alireza Tangsiri, the head of Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy — the key official overseeing the closure of the strait. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he had been killed along with other senior naval commanders in a strike overnight. Iran did not immediately acknowledge Tangsiri’s killing.
Meanwhile, a strike group anchored by the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli drew closer to the Mideast with some 2,500 Marines. Also, at least 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne have been ordered to the region.
The troop movements don’t guarantee U.S. President Donald Trump will use force to try and compel Iran to open the strait and halt its attacks on Gulf Arab states.
Trump previously deployed a large force in the Caribbean before the American military captured former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January. In the current situation, the U.S. is seen as focused on possibly seizing Iran’s oil terminal at Kharg Island or other sites near the strait.
U.S. Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, who commands the American military in the region, said his forces have hit more than 10,000 targets since Israel and the U.S. started the war Feb. 28, destroying 92% of Iran’s largest ships and more than two-thirds of the country’s missile, drone and naval production facilities.
“We’re not done yet,” said Cooper, who heads the U.S. Central Command, in a video message. “We are on a path to completely eliminate Iran’s wider military apparatus.”
With its stranglehold on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which leads from the Persian Gulf toward the open ocean, Iran has been blocking ships it perceives as linked to the U.S. and Israeli war effort, but letting through a trickle of others.
Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi, of the Gulf Cooperation Council, accused Iran of charging for safe passage through the strait — the first top official to do so. Al-Budaiwi oversees the GCC, a bloc of six Gulf Arab nations including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The Fars and Tasnim news agencies, both close to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, quoted lawmaker Mohammadreza Rezaei Kouchi as saying that parliament was working to formalize the process of charging fees to let ships pass.
“We provide its security, and it is natural that ships and oil tankers should pay such fees,” he was quoted as saying.
Lloyd’s List Intelligence called it a “de facto ‘toll booth’ regime.”
The shipping intelligence firm said vessels have to provide manifests, crew details and their destination to Iran’s Guard for sanctions screening, cargo alignment checks that currently prioritizes oil over all other commodities, and for what is described as ‘geopolitical vetting.’”
“While not all ships are paying a direct toll, at least two vessels have and the payment is settled in yuan,” Lloyd’s List said, referring to China’s currency.
Iran’s grip on the strait and relentless attacks on Gulf regional energy infrastructure has sent oil prices skyrocketing and concerns of a global energy crisis surging. Brent crude, the international standard, traded at US$104 early Thursday, up more than 40% from the day the war started.
“To make it crystal clear, this war is a catastrophe for world’s economies,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told reporters during a visit to Australia.
Using Pakistan as an intermediary, Washington has delivered to Iran a 15-point ceasefire proposal, which includes the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump, speaking at a fundraiser Wednesday night in Washington, insisted that Iran still wants to cut a deal.
“They are negotiating, by the way, and they want to make a deal so badly, but they’re afraid to say it because they figure they’ll be killed by their own people,” Trump said.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview on state TV, however, that his government has not engaged in talks to end the war, “and we do not plan on any negotiations.”
Araghchi said the U.S. had tried to send messages to Iran through other nations, “but that is not a conversation nor a negotiation.”
Press TV, the English-language broadcaster on Iranian state television, said Iran has its own five-point proposal, which includes “sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.”
Israel said it carried out a wave of attacks early on Thursday targeting Iranian infrastructure, and air defenses were heard in Tehran, while heavy strikes were also reported around Isfahan, a city some 330 kilometers (205 miles) south of the Iranian capital.
Ifahan is home to a major Iranian air base and other military sites, as well as one of the nuclear sites bombed by the U.S. during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June.
Sirens sounded very early on Thursday morning in parts of Tel Aviv and cities in central Israel and later explosions were heard in Jerusalem. Rescue workers said two people were injured in a blast in Kfar Qasim.
Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry said it intercepted multiple drones over its oil-rich Eastern Province, and Bahrain reported extinguishing a blaze in a neighborhood that is home to the Bahrain International Airport.
Since the war began, more than 1,500 people have been killed in Iran, its Health Ministry says. Seventeen people have been killed in Israel while three Israeli soldiers have also been killed in Lebanon, including one whose death was announced Thursday. At least 13 American troops have been killed. Four people have been killed in the occupied West Bank and 20 in Gulf Arab states.
Nearly 1,100 people have died in Lebanon, authorities said. In Iraq, where Iran-backed militias have entered the conflict, 80 members of the security forces have been killed.
___
Rising reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Julia Frankel in Jerusalem, Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, and Giovanna Dell’Orto in Miami, Florida, contributed to this report.
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Younger generations are typically associated with wanting to live a big-city lifestyle, but the high cost of housing on the coasts is driving Gen Z to consider other options.
The Midwest is becoming a more attractive place to plant roots, considering housing costs there can be at least 30% cheaper than living in major coastal metros like New York City or Los Angeles.
In fact, seven out of the 10 most accessible metros for young homeowners are in the Midwest, according to a ConsumerAffairs’ analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) data published in July 2025.
The Midwest cities with the highest rates of homeownership under age 35 include:
Minneapolis is also considered as one of the most affordable places to live, according to Zillow, along with other Midwest cities like St. Louis, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Kansas City.
All of these are cities where half or more of the homes for sale are considered affordable, according to Zillow, meaning housing consumes less than 30% of a typical household’s budget.
Median home prices in many Midwest cities hover around $200,000 to $275,000, while the national median has crossed $400,000, Danielle Andrews, a realtor with Realty One Group Next Generation, told Fortune. That price gap can cut monthly housing costs by 30% to 50%, even before factoring in lower property taxes and insurance, she added.
During the pandemic, many professionals moved to locations with more appealing weather and amenities while working from home. But now that many workers have been forced back to the office and housing costs have continued to rise, those cities don’t always make financial sense for homeowners anymore.
Andrews said she’s worked with several Gen Z buyers—especially remote workers and young professionals—who are leaving higher-cost areas like Florida for more affordable housing.
“For many, it’s not just about cheaper homes, but about being able to build wealth earlier without drowning in overhead,” Andrews said. She also cited a StorageCafe statistic showing Gen Z and millennials made up nearly 30% of all interstate movers, with states like Indiana and Wisconsin seeing some of the biggest gains.
A Realtor.com analysis published in August also shows suburban zip codes in the Midwest heated up in 2025, meaning they’re getting attention through a mix of lifestyle appeal, relative affordability, and strong ties to nearby economic hubs.
“The Northeast and Midwest dominate, driven by buyers from high-cost metros looking for relief without sacrificing access to jobs and amenities,” Realtor.com chief economist Danielle Hale said in a statement. “Many of these neighborhoods also offer newer homes than the surrounding areas, highlighting the critical role of new and infill construction in meeting today’s buyer demand—even in a tough market.”
In its analysis of interest in areas that offer more space, more access to jobs, and better value, Realtor.com found that three of the 10 hottest zip codes are in the Midwest cities of Ballwin, Mo.; Strongsville, Ohio; and Bexley, Ohio. While these three cities have higher prices than their respective larger metro areas, their price points remain moderate on a national scale.
Although home prices in the Midwest are rising, the region is one of the most affordable homebuying regions in the country, according to Redfin. Take Detroit, which has the lowest median sales price of any major metro at $80,000, or Cleveland at about $125,500. Both of these cities’ median home prices are less than half of the overall U.S. figure.
“Importantly, the cost of living [in the Midwest], especially for essentials like groceries, gas, and health care, is better aligned with local wages, allowing Gen Z buyers to not just get by—but actually get ahead,” Andrews said. “The Midwest is no longer just affordable: It’s aspirational for a generation redefining success.”
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on August 5, 2025.
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Good morning. Is it worth a 100-mile train ride from London to England’s second city, Birmingham, to hear the former U.K. prime minister talk about the AI revolution? Despite my original train being cancelled (this is Britain) and a mad dash from the main Birmingham rail station to the venue to be there in time (through a hail storm)—it turns out, yes.
Rishi Sunak was prime minister from 2022 until 2024—when he was defeated by Keir Starmer. Although they come from different parties (Sunak is a Conservative, Starmer leads the Labour Party), they are surprisingly close on the issue of AI development (more and faster, please). The U.K. business department regularly contacts Sunak to ask for advice.
Sunak is considered an expert on technology and is U.S.-friendly, which is key to creating AI momentum in Europe. He has an MBA from Stanford and is an advisor to Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Anthropic.
In front of an audience of hundreds of smaller business leaders, Sunak laid out some golden rules for AI application:
I heard fascinating insights from the business leaders in the audience about how they are approaching AI. One founder talked of the “false confidence” risk engendered by AI products like Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Each give slick, plausible answers in the blink of an eye to any question you ask. Which answers, though, are worth your time?
To understand that, you need a strong understanding of your business and its value to your customers. It may be a new AI approach. Or it may be something that is very human in nature.
Sunak was soundly defeated in 2024, and Starmer came in on a wave of hope that Britain could redefine its role in the world. But the polls have turned against Labour, the U.S. president has described him as “no Churchill,” and now neither the Conservatives nor Labour lead in the polls (Nigel Farage of Reform does).
But there is brain power in the U.K. in AI. Nscale, a builder of data centers, is valued at $14.6 billion. Revolut, in financial services, is valued at $75 billion. Sunak wants AI thinking to flourish on this side of the Atlantic and argues that smaller businesses, which employ most people, will lead many of the advances. They are more nimble and quicker than big bureaucracies, he argues. He also hopes that in this one aspect, at least, the U.K. can show the U.S. a thing or two.
If only the trains could run on time.—Kamal Ahmed
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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From the Marcy Houses to a chart-topping rapper, Jay-Z was minted the first hip-hop billionaire in 2019. Now worth $2.8 billion, according to Forbes, the star is calling out blanket hate against billionaires.
In a recent interview with GQ, the billionaire rapper said lambasting the whole billionaire class is a distraction from fixing the structural forces that lead to extreme wealth in the first place.
“It’s almost like a cop-out,” he said. “You get to demonize this group of folks without fixing the actual system that exists, that’s in play.”
The comment comes in response to a brewing distaste for the ultrawealthy across the U.S. A Pew Research survey released last week found that nearly one-in-five Americans, or 18%, think that being a billionaire is “morally wrong.” Among young Americans, that figure rises to about one in three. Politicians have seized on that sentiment: California has a ballot proposal for a one-time billionaire tax, and more recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced a national billionaire tax bill.
For Jay-Z, who may have 99 problems, his net worth isn’t one. He rejected the idea that being wealthy corrupts one’s character. “[Money] may enhance it or may cause you to act in a way,” he said. “But you was going to act like that anyway.”
Ditto for it having an impact on one’s ethics. “Morality is not defined by a dollar amount,” he said, before asking, “If so, what is that dollar amount? When does it start? If it’s a cutoff like ‘all millionaires are bad,’ at $999,000 I’m good? It can’t be that way.”
The rapper is not the only star to achieve billionaire status. Jay-Z’s wife, famed singer-songwriter Beyoncé, crossed the line in December 2025. Taylor Swift, Dr. Dre, and Bruce Springsteen have also reached the ranks of the ultrawealthy.
The country now has more than ever, according to Forbes, with 989 currently claiming a net worth of 10 digits or more. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, currently worth $827 billion, is on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire after Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion pay package last year. Globally, billionaires wealth hit a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, according to the international charity Oxfam.
The rapper was blunt about his own upbringing and how long it took him to reach the top. “I got successful the hard way, in spite of the way the system is set up,” he said.
Jay-Z grew up in the Marcy Houses, a public housing project ravaged by violence in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.His upbringing was a far cry from the multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio the rapper and his wife, Beyoncé, hold today. In 2023, the duo purchased a $200 million Malibu mansion, reportedly in cash.
He’s spoken about his upbringing before, during an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. “It was just [a] weird mix of emotions,” he said. “One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike. It was just extreme highs and lows.”
Despite the chaos and uncertainty of his early years, he channeled those experiences into relentless drive. “My talent pushed against all the headwinds and I got successful that way,” he said during the GQ interview.
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Wall Street had a banner year in 2025—and the paychecks show it.
The securities industry bonus pool reached a record $49.2 billion in 2025, up 9% from the prior year, while the average bonus climbed 6% to $246,900, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli said Thursday. Profits powered the payout: Wall Street earned a record $65.1 billion in pretax profits in 2025, up more than 30% from $49.9 billion the year before.
“Wall Street saw strong performance for much of last year, despite all of the ongoing domestic and international upheavals,” DiNapoli said. “When Wall Street does well, it’s good for our state and city budgets. However, we are seeing slower job growth, and geopolitical conflicts pose extraordinary risks for the short- and long-term outlook.”
Strong trading activity, underwriting, and asset-management fees drove the gains. There is, however, a significant asterisk: When adjusted for inflation, the bonus pool peaked before the Great Recession, in 2006, at $53.7 billion in today’s dollars, meaning the nominal record remains just that—nominal.
Wall Street’s footprint in New York remains enormous. The industry accounted for 20.2% of all economic activity in the city in 2024 and 19.4% of state tax collections in the past fiscal year. DiNapoli estimates the 2025 bonuses will generate $199 million more in state income tax revenue and $91 million more for the city compared with last year—a critical cushion as federal funding grows uncertain.
The average securities-industry salary in New York City rose 7.3% to $505,677 in 2024, including bonuses—the second-highest on record and nearly five times the average salary in the rest of the city’s private sector. Bonuses alone made up roughly 42% of all industry wages.
Not everything is pointing up. Industry headcount fell to 198,200 in 2025 from a 30-year high of 201,500 in 2024, though the comptroller’s office expects annual data revisions to show modest growth. New York City’s share of national securities jobs has meanwhile slipped to 17.9%, down from roughly a third of the national total in 1990, as rivals like Dallas and Miami have aggressively built out their financial sectors.
The worry now is whether 2026 can come close to matching it. New York’s budget plans may already be too rosy: The governor’s proposed budget assumed finance-sector bonuses would rise 25.9% in the current fiscal year, while the city projected a 15.1% jump in securities bonuses. Based on DiNapoli’s estimate, both targets look out of reach.
President Trump’s escalating tariff agenda has rattled equity markets in early 2026, and Wall Street’s hiring momentum has stalled. With one in 13 New York City jobs tied directly or indirectly to the securities industry, the stakes for getting the next chapter right extend far beyond the trading floor.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
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When Silicon Valley executives and federal lawmakers gathered at the Hill and Valley Forum on Tuesday,, a conference designed to bridge the gap between Big Tech and Washington, artificial intelligence dominated the whole event.
Despite their historically rocky relationship over tech regulation, executives and lawmakers were aligned that the AI race has become an existential battle, and one source of anxiety came up in nearly every session: China.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who spoke during the session “The Operating System for
Institutions: Money, Workflows, and AI,” framed winning the race as a matter of life and death.
“We are competing against China. The government of China wants to destroy our way of life. When they wake up every day [they think], ‘how can the American way of life be destroyed?’” Scott said, adding he believes that Iran and Russia think the same way. “We got to put ourselves in a position that we can outcompete, especially China, with regard to AI.”
Beneath the seemingly unified anti-China front, however, revealed an underlying tension between lawmakers and Silicon Valley: should U.S.-based companies keep their most advanced technology at home? The unnamed culprit throughout the conference was Nvidia, which recently got approval from both governments to sell advanced AI chips to China.
Exports are only part of the problem: there are now smugglers who have stolen Nvidia’s technology to sell to China through backchannels. Last week, the co-founder of hardware manufacturer Supermicro was charged with allegedly orchestrating a scheme to smuggle $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia microchips to China. In November-, a group of four men, comprised of two U.S. citizens and two Chinese citizens, were arrested for shipping Nvidia chips to China through a multi-national smuggling ring.
Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), the event’s keynote speaker, didn’t call out China directly, but kept asking the audience of technology executives “to keep American technology American.” He then urged the companies to keep their data centers, chips, and infrastructure within the U.S. and “out of the hands of America’s adversaries and rivals.”
“We’re asking you, our builders and innovators, to accept some minor constraints, relative to competitors in foreign countries, but I’ve always believed that some minor friction from high standards is at the heart of operating in a nation that is built upon the highest principles,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s keynote reflected the concerns of other lawmakers and tech executives, who alternated between unnamed enemies of the U.S. to explicit warnings about China.
‘AI is an American birthright’
“This isn’t just a technological race, a fight over who’s going to get the best technology and win the AI race first, this is a moral fight,” said Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) in a conversation with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar entitled “Scale, Security, and
Sovereignty: Competing with China’s Defense-Industrial Model. “We know that the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is going to lie, steal, and cheat.”
Banks sponsored the bipartisan Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence (GAIN AI) Act, which would force U.S. companies to certify that they gave domestic customers the opportunity to buy advanced AI chips before exporting them. Under the Act, companies would also need to obtain a license to export advanced AI chips to “countries of concern.”
Sankar agreed with the defensive approach, but said the U.S. also needs to “play offense.”
“By and large, AI is an American birthright. It came from the US. The Chinese only have it from distillation attacks,” Sankar said, referring to the technique of training a model on the outputs of a more advanced model to replicate its success. “The one place they have a marginal advantage is they’re a little bit more practical about what they’re trying to do with it. They view it as something to implement for economic advantage, while our labs are obsessed with this pursuit of AGI, which I’m glad we have an aspirational goal, like getting to Mars. But you know, there are places where this becomes a pathology.” He cited AI doomerism about mass employment is one example of that pathology.
In a separate session, Keith Rabois, the managing director of Khosla Ventures, argued that the role of American businesspeople is to support the U.S. He said that Khosla Ventures invests in companies that will have a “positive impact” on American society.
“We will not invest in things that would help our rivals. We don’t invest in China. We wouldn’t consider investing in China, because we are in an existential AI race, and whoever is the most successful with AI will dominate the economic future of the globe,” he said.
Partnership across sectors
In a speech titled “Broken Bureaucracies vs. The Tyranny of Technologists: Who Will Save The West?,” Trae Stephens, co-founder of defense tech company Anduril Industries, warned if Washington and Silicon Valley can’t figure out how to work together, the country’s future will be decided by China. He argued that neither government overregulation nor a “blank check” to Silicon Valley is the answer.
“These days, the government isn’t legislating much of anything at all,” Stephens said.
He invoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisting Ford to build more than 18,000 B-24 bombers during World War II, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developing the direct precursor to the internet.
“We’re playing catch-up here,” Stephens said. “In the early 2010s, when Chinese military documents first started talking about AI weapons, and CCP factionalists started posting about the idea of an industrial party, we were arguing about whether or not tech wanted to work with the Pentagon at all.
He called on founders to ask if their products “strengthen the country that is making this success possible,” and urged government officials to consider how to leverage technology, not control it.
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Amid the increasingly damning reports on the rising threat of America’s runaway deficits and debt, the looming disaster that could upend the lifestyle of tens of millions of elderly Americans is getting scant attention. In less than seven years, the Social Security retirement trust fund will go broke, and under federal law, its insolvency will automatically trigger gigantic reductions in benefits. According to estimates from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), low- and medium-income retired couples would respectively face hits of $11,200 and $18,400 a year, shrinking the dollars they’re pocketing from Social Security by around one-quarter. To grasp the weight of that sudden blow: America’s seniors, on average, depend on the nine-decades-old program for over half their livelihoods.
Social Security’s math problem is long-standing—and chronically ignored by Congress. Starting in 2010, the program began running cash flow negative, meaning that its outlays exceeded its tax revenues. Ever since then, it’s been paying benefits by drawing down the reserves accumulated when a far higher proportion of Americans were working than retiring versus the sharply falling ratio today. By 2033, the trust fund will run dry, triggering that immense, across-the-board drop that is slated to punish the most vulnerable Americans by collapsing all benefits an equal share regardless of income.
The challenge is daunting: Social Security is facing staggering cash shortfalls of around 4% a year through the year 2100. By the way, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act worsened the outlook by handing seniors a big tax break on their Social Security income, money that was previously helping replenish the trust fund. But now, the CRFB is proposing a fix that promises significant progress toward putting the program on a path to self-sufficiency.
The CRFB think tank highlights that a cohort of couples are now getting benefits of $100,000 or more, and that the six-figure group will expand rapidly in the years to come as payouts wax alongside inflation or even faster. As an initial step, the CRFB advocates capping what these formerly super-high-earners, garnering the biggest payments, will receive going forward.
The plan—dubbed the “Six-Figure Limit,” or SFL—would set a max of $100,000 for couples who are now receiving the top benefits. The lid would be adjusted for marital status and age of collection. A single person wouldn’t receive more than $50,000, and a husband and wife, each leaving the workforce at 62, would get capped at $70,000. How about indexing? The CRFB presents two main options: In the first, benefits would rise from the SFL by the rate of inflation. That route would eliminate one-fifth of the solvency gap over the next 75 years, and save $100 billion through 2036. In an alternative scenario, the cap would stay fixed in nominal dollar terms, in our examples at $100,000 or $70,000 sans bumps for the CPI, for 20 or 30 years, and after those intervals grow in tandem with wages. That prescription erases one-quarter of the shortfalls and saves $190 billion over the next decade. It would also single-handedly delay insolvency for seven years.
The CRFB argues that those “high benefits far exceed what’s necessary to maintain an adequate standard of income, especially when one considers that Social Security represents only one-seventh the income of those in the top quintile [of all recipients].”
Of course, the program’s savings plug far less than half of Social Security’s future deficits. It will take additional modest, and also more radical fixes to bridge the yawning gaps. Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, champions flattening benefits as the income scale rises. The Riedl plan would lift the low-earners toward $25,000 a year, and push the high-earners closer to the same $25,000 mark. “Benefits wouldn’t be totally flat, but they’d move in that direction,” Riedl told Fortune. “That formula would bring the revenues and benefits into annual balance over a couple of decades. The primary role would return to keeping seniors out of poverty, rather than offering wage replacement for high-earners.”
President Franklin Roosevelt, the father of Social Security, extolled the program as the guarantor “of some measure of protection for the average citizen … against poverty-ridden old age.” The CRFB template would help steer Social Security from what’s in part gravy for the well-to-do toward its original purpose as an essential safety net.
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If you, like many of us, spend most of your waking hours staring at screens—shuttling between work email, TikTok, YouTube, and group chats—you’ve probably wondered, at least half-jokingly, whether you’re “addicted” to your phone.
It’s a reasonable question, a Los Angeles jury just decided. In a closely watched landmark case, the court found in favor of a 20-year-old plaintiff known as KGM, who sued Meta and Google, alleging that design features like infinite scroll, filters, and autoplay on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube kept her online as much as 16 hours a day and helped fuel her depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm. (TikTok and Snap settled in the same case earlier this year.) The verdict could open the door to thousands of similar lawsuits—and even end up limiting how far Big Tech can go in competing for our attention.
The legal challenges, alongside a growing body of brain research and concerns raised by health organizations, are adding urgency to a question much discussed in academia and over dinner tables: Is “tech addiction” real? And if so, what does that mean for the business model that powers the world’s most valuable companies?
The answer is not simple. At one end of the spectrum is the kind of “addiction” most of us joke about: checking email before we’re out of bed, scrolling TikTok in the checkout line, refreshing Instagram when we’re bored. At the other end are a far smaller group: people like the plaintiff in the lawsuit and Sarah Hill, a young woman Fortune met at a residential treatment center for digital overuse outside of Seattle. Hill’s compulsive use of an AI chatbot app, Character AI, became so consuming she flunked out of college and ended up at reSTART, one of only a few such centers, in the U.S. or elsewhere.
There, clients give up smartphones, gaming, social media, and other tech—often for months—and spend 24 to 30 hours a week in intensive therapy. The treatment costs, on average, around $1,000 a day, though sometimes it can be covered by insurance for associated disorders such as depression and anxiety.
It’s worth it, Hill says. “After making so many mistakes, I’m finally putting a foot down and saying, ‘I want to get out of this endless cycle,’” she tells Fortune. “I need to do something to better myself and my life.’”
reSTART cofounder Cosette Rae has been treating clients for nearly two decades—gamers who won’t leave their homes, adults glued to virtual reality or pornography, and, increasingly, people hooked on AI chatbots. Tech, she says, is “everywhere,” which means people in recovery are constantly forced to say no to something they can never fully avoid.
The stakes are only getting higher, Rae says, in the AI era. She worries that increasingly sophisticated chatbots and virtual companions could become “substitute attachment figures” for young people, displacing real relationships. She fears a looming “tsunami” for families who don’t yet grasp what their kids are up against—or how these products might reshape their futures.
Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation and an expert witness called by the plaintiffs in the Meta and YouTube trial, argues that compulsive tech use taps into the brain’s reward circuitry in ways that mirror drug addiction. When people refresh social media feeds or win a round of a video game, their brains get dopamine jolts that train them to seek that hit again and again. Over time, those bursts can desensitize reward pathways and weaken the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for planning and self-control—making it harder to resist urges even when work, school, or relationships are suffering. Brain imaging studies of people diagnosed with internet gaming or social media disorders have shown structural and functional changes in these regions that resemble what doctors see in gambling and other behavioral addictions.
The science is far from settled, and tech companies are quick to point out that tech addiction is not formally recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; the DSM only flags “internet gaming disorder” as a condition that merits more study. Some researchers argue that slapping the “addiction” label on heavy tech use can actually backfire. In one set of surveys, California Institute of Technology researcher Ian Anderson and Wendy Wood, a professor at the University of Southern California, found that when people described their Instagram use as an addiction, “They felt stuck, less confident that they had the ability to change.” Yes, they wrote, companies should “amend their platforms to help users regain control over their habits.” But they concluded, “The truth is: Heavy use is not necessarily an addiction.”
In the KGM case, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told the court that social media is not “clinically addictive.” In a statement to Fortune, a Meta spokesperson pointed to other factors in KGM’s life as the cause of her troubles, adding: “The evidence simply doesn’t support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality.” A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, called the allegations “simply not true,” pointing to parental controls, teen-focused safety tools, and policies meant to create age-appropriate experiences. (TikTok declined to comment, and Snap did not respond to requests for comment.)
What, if anything, should be done? Policymakers are floating answers, from state-level warning labels and restrictions on personalized feeds for minors to outright bans on teen social media in some countries. Platforms have rolled out an array of opt-in safeguards, teen modes, and screen-time nudges.
But as tech investor and author Nir Eyal points out, asking companies to make their products less appealing and engaging can be a tough sell. He sees some of the concern about tech addiction as a “moral panic,” and argues that it’s unreasonable to make tech companies responsible for some people’s immoderate use of their products. “Stop making the product interesting? That’s dumb,” he says. “That’s why we use the product. That’s called ‘entertaining and engaging.’” He argues that the focus should be on making products “better and safer,” not less fun to use.
Read Fortune’s magazine feature on tech addiction here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
On a recent morning, the AI boom in Richland Parish, a rural county in northeast Louisiana, could be measured in tacos.
Tim and Lindsey Allen were preparing over 1,600 of them with names like “Divine Swine” (smoked pork), “Righteous Rooster” (braised chicken), and “Golden Calf” (brisket), for construction workers building Meta’s massive 2,250-acre, 4-million-square-foot AI data center, Hyperion. It’s a catering order that would have been unthinkable here just a year ago.
The Allens, parents of five, had long joked about starting a taco joint called Holy Tacos. (Tim is a church administrator and children’s pastor at the First Baptist Church in the small Richland Parish town of Rayville.) When Meta announced in December 2024 that it was investing in a $10 billion facility in Richland Parish, its largest data center to date, they saw a rare opening. Thousands of construction workers, they’d heard, would soon descend on the site—an unheard-of customer base for this otherwise rural, economically depressed community.
At first, the plan was to park a taco truck at the site. But when Allen learned that the vehicle he had invested in wouldn’t be allowed inside the construction zone, he rented a small vacant building in Rayville, pulled the truck inside, and turned it into a makeshift restaurant serving “food worth praising.”
The risk paid off. Workers coming off 12-hour shifts in safety gear began to stop by for quick, to-go meals. And as Meta’s construction ramped up, the Allens landed recurring catering work with Mortenson, one of the project’s three major contractors.
“Just this month, we picked up about 10 caterings,” Allen said. Without Meta, he added, the family likely wouldn’t have taken the leap. “It’s been a huge blessing for us.”
For Allen and many other local business owners, Meta’s arrival has brought new customers, contracts, and long-deferred opportunities in a parish that had been losing population and jobs for decades.
The outcome has been very different for Katie and Logan Stewart. The couple—a nurse and a former farmer in their mid-thirties with two children—invested more than $40,000 of their life savings into Opal’s Orange Food Truck after seeing construction workers post on Facebook asking for food options near the Meta site.
It was a high-stakes bet. Logan had recently stepped away from farming land near the project, and the food truck—serving burgers, chicken, gumbo, and rice and beans—seemed like a way to build a new livelihood without leaving the community.
“I think we were like the second or third truck out there,” Katie said. “When we first started, we were doing 100 to 120 orders a day.”
But the momentum didn’t last. When one of the project’s main contractors, DPR, brought in an out-of-state catering company to feed workers on-site, much of the foot traffic Opal’s had counted on disappeared. Workers no longer needed to leave the grounds for lunch.
“You talk about supporting the local community, but then you outsource the work,” Katie said of DPR’s catering decision. “It felt like a slap in the face.”
The Stewarts couldn’t afford the $1,500 to $2,500 monthly fees charged by two new food truck parks located right across the street from the main Meta entrances, so they parked their truck on a friend’s land a short drive away. Orders fell to fewer than 40 a day. In recent weeks, foot traffic picked up after a local independent journalist wrote about Opal’s, and the Stewarts recently landed a catering job with Meta. They say they’re determined to adapt. “We’re planning on sticking it out and adjusting where we need to,” Katie said.
Stories like those of the Allens and Logans are playing out across the country, as companies such as Meta, Google, and Amazon—alongside fast-growing AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic—embark upon an unprecedented AI data center spending spree. Collectively, they are projected to invest roughly $630 billion to $700 billion in 2026 alone, a 62% jump from 2025, with total AI-related data-center capital expenditures expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030, driven largely by GPUs and energy infrastructure. These mega-scale projects—built to power the AI boom and bolster the U.S. race with China for technological dominance—are helping to grow the U.S. economy, and are being welcomed with open arms by local officials eager for a piece of the economic development these projects promise. A rising tide, they reason, can lift many ships.
And indeed, there’s historical precedent for this optimism: The frenzied construction of massive AI data centers across the country echoes earlier American booms—from the California Gold Rush to the early oil fields of Texas—when fortunes were made by those in the right place at the right time, selling equipment, food, and shelter to the pioneers of new industries. In those eras, local economies thrived on demand for tools, timber, meals, and rooms for laborers chasing the next big thing.
Today, though, in an era of globalization and corporate consolidation, the “pick-and-shovel” ripple spreads very differently. Many of the materials, logistics, and meals for the site are supplied by out-of-state contractors from places like Texas and Arkansas. And the specialized chips and many components that power Hyperion’s AI servers are manufactured primarily overseas as part of the global semiconductor and IT hardware supply chain.
So for many Richland Parish residents, the experience is less one of opportunity than of spectatorship: watching the bustle of progress unfold nearby—and suffering through its accompanying headaches—without being able to participate or share in its rewards.
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Meta said it remains “committed to supporting local resources and prioritizing local partnerships whenever possible,” including working with local food vendors to supply more than 600 meals daily. But, they explained, “Given the scale and size of the craft workforce currently at the site, our general contractors needed to find a catering solution that could meet the scale and logistics required to feed thousands of people.”
When Fortune visited the community, residents expressed a worry that the short-term influx of construction workers will reshape their community, raise rents and tear up the countryside, leaving it spoiled when the construction phase ends and the data centers are left to hum away, consuming water and electricity and employing only a few hundred workers. The dynamic is testing long-held assumptions about who actually benefits when a mega-project arrives in town.
Several residents told Fortune the speed at which the Meta deal was made, and its lack of transparency, left them feeling sidelined. Major decisions about land use, tax incentives, and infrastructure were largely finalized before most community members fully understood the project’s scale—which has also grown into a much larger build-out than originally planned. In October 2025, Meta announced it had entered a joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital to finance, build, and operate the Hyperion data center campus—an arrangement targeting up to $27 billion in total development costs and suggesting that Hyperion is intended as a long-term, multiphase campus.
Some described the process as emblematic of a long-standing “good ol’ boys” culture in local development—one in which deals are struck by a small circle of political and business leaders, who then benefit from the result.
“The small businesses who are profiting…it’s not a fair game where the best contractor with the best price and the best qualification wins,” said Amber Perez, the local independent journalist who is also a community activist and posts regularly on Facebook about the Meta project. Instead, she said many residents believe the “winners” are those who are politically and economically connected.
But supporters of the project, including local government officials, economic development leaders, and longtime residents, argue that the Meta investment represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a region that has struggled with poverty, job loss, and population decline for decades. In their view, the disruption is the visible price of long-overdue capital flowing into a part of the state that has rarely attracted projects of this magnitude. Even if the number of permanent jobs ultimately proves modest compared to the construction surge, they contend that the billions in investment, new infrastructure, workforce training programs, and heightened national attention could help reposition northeast Louisiana for future industry and growth.
Driving east on Route 80 toward the Meta site in Holly Ridge, an unincorporated rural community about 15 minutes east of Rayville—the landscape is defined by flat expanses of soybean and cotton fields, punctuated by grain silos, grazing cows, and the occasional tractor.
At Holly Ridge, however, the terrain changes abruptly. Generations of sharecroppers farmed the land, called the Franklin Farms megasite, until 2006, when the Franklin family sold it to the state of Louisiana, which then hoped to attract an auto plant. That was not to be, but Meta entered a long-term lease for the site in 2024 and purchased it in 2025. Since the company broke ground in early 2025, the farmland has been scraped and leveled into a construction site so disorientingly vast, it resembles the early stages of a city rising from the dirt. At five miles long and 1 mile wide at some points, steel frames jut from the ground. Heavy machinery operates around the clock. An endless stream of trucks pours in before sunrise, feeding a project where thousands of workers move through the site in hardhats and neon vests. Residents complain about damage to their vehicles because of rocks kicked up by the trucks hurtling to and from the Meta site.
Something enormous and unfamiliar has landed, seemingly all at once.
A newly-built road leading into Meta’s Hyperion site carries a prescient name: Far Far Away Lane. The nod to Star Wars is intentional, and the landscape does seem like a new frontier—representing not just Meta’s stratospheric AI ambitions, but the financial, energy-hungry reality of building the infrastructure that underpins the AI boom.
Before Meta came to town, the biggest claim to fame of Richland Parish, a community where a quarter of residents live under the poverty line, was arguably that country music artist Tim McGraw was born and raised there. Now, residents are living through a seismic shift that has brought new jobs and excitement to some, and stress and disappointment to others—as well as heavier traffic on rural roads, rising rents, and mounting pressure on housing, utilities, and daily routines in communities unaccustomed to rapid growth. Beyond those immediate disruptions, whether the short-term gains of massive construction translate into lasting opportunity remains an open question.
Meta says the project has already created hundreds of construction jobs and will support thousands more over the buildout, along with a much smaller number of permanent roles once the data center is operational—the original announcement said 500. The company has also partnered with a local community college to launch a construction and workforce-training program aimed at preparing residents for jobs tied to the site and future industrial development.
And indeed at Meta’s Hyperion site, as thousands of temporary workers have descended on Richland Parish, taking space in hotels, short-term rentals and newly-built RV parks, there are clear examples of individual businesses booming. GrowNELA, the regional economic development authority for northeast Louisiana, pointed Fortune to companies like ServiceMaster Action Cleaning, a Monroe-based facilities maintenance firm that has doubled its workforce since Meta arrived, and Copeland Electric, another Monroe company that says the project has driven a roughly 40% increase in hiring.
The arrival of the Meta project was a catalyst for Chris Holyfield, the owner of Holy Dippers, a company created specifically to serve the construction project. He supplies septic services and eco-friendly restroom facilities for Meta workers—58 units so far, with more to be added as construction ramps up.
Holyfield wanted to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, after leaders from the construction companies working on the Meta project told Holyfield that “this area’s about to explode,” he said. “No one believed it at first,” he explained. “Now we’re all feeling the difference.”
Holyfield also owns three restaurants in Monroe that do catering work for Meta’s large contracting companies, as well as a seven-story office building in Monroe where Meta leased space before the data center announcement was made.
Rob Cleveland, president and CEO of GrowNELA, who arrived in Louisiana in July 2024 after eight years in a similar role in Michigan, dismissed complaints about the level of local job creation as “silly.” He emphasized that several thousand new jobs have already arrived in the rural Richland Parish community—both working on the Meta site and for businesses servicing the site. Jobs are jobs, he argues—and the pragmatic reality is there aren’t many options for a community like Richland Parish.
“Constant naysayers say they’re short-term jobs, that there will be only 500 long-term jobs, why aren’t you recruiting automotive plants with 3000 long-term jobs,” Cleveland said. “Well, those projects don’t really exist anymore, and we don’t have the labor to support those projects.”
The influx of workers has created an immediate, practical problem in Richland Parish: housing. Currently, there are about 3,700 workers connected to the site, with an estimated peak in a couple of months of 5,000 (though locals say they have heard numbers as high as 8,000).
To accommodate the influx of construction workers, a patchwork of RV parks, or “man camps”—both large and small—has sprung up across the area. One of Meta’s three primary construction firms, DPR, hired subcontractor Mammoth Industries to build a sprawling, 130-acre workforce housing complex that includes more than 300 full-service RV sites near the Meta project.
And smaller, family-run RV parks are emerging as well. Kayla Caskey, the owner of South Stuart RV Park, about 25 minutes from the Meta site, grew up on the land where the park now sits. “We’ve had it for a couple of generations—it was passed down from my grandparents,” she said. “I got married and moved away, but my family still lives there—my mom and my brother—and we decided to take advantage of this opportunity.”
South Stuart RV Park has room for just 12 RVs, and Caskey said getting it up and running required navigating zoning rules and installing proper facilities, including showers and bathrooms. “We learned a lot along the way,” she said. “But we hope, in the end, this will be something good for our family.” The park filled quickly after opening, she added, and she continues to receive daily inquiries.
Caskey is realistic about the park’s future once construction winds down. “It may just be land out there again,” she said. “But hopefully, over the next couple of years, it’ll pay off while the workers are still here.”
But for others, the rapid spread of RV parks in the area has felt disruptive and overwhelming. For example, Fortune visited one mile-long dead-end road that until recently was lined with just eight homes. Now, two large RV parks—together expected to add up to 700 hookups—are under construction on the street, many directly next to or across the street from the few single-family homes.
Other area residents say they are being priced out of the area, or even facing attempted eviction, because of the influx of workers. Erika James, a 34-year-old mother of two who grew up in Richland Parish and now lives in a mobile home park in Monroe, a small regional hub about 30 minutes west of the Meta site, says her rent increased several times over the past six months. Earlier this month she received an eviction notice after paying her rent just one day late, saying her family had just five days to vacate.
“I panicked and my husband immediately called the property owner and was told it had nothing to do with rent,” she said. “In fact, he said he didn’t even agree with the decision but it came from ‘above him’ because ‘they needed to make room for other tenants.’”
After agreeing to pay an “eviction fee,” James has been able to stay, but her lease ends at the end of April, with no word about renewal.
“Meanwhile, there is literally a sign outside welcoming Meta workers while local families are left wondering where they’re supposed to go,” she said. “We are now having to entertain the idea of leaving the area completely. There is nowhere to go if you can’t pay triple prices.”
“It breaks your heart to even think about having to leave here,” she said. “But it’s getting more expensive every day.”
The Meta project has promised transformation, explained Perez. But she added many residents of Richland Parish have little clarity about what that transformation will actually look like in the end.
“Transform, how?” she said. “That’s what people are on the edge of their seats trying to figure out, because right now you’re in the chaos phase where you don’t know which way to look, and when the dust settles, what’s left?”
Perez had heard that some people are “waiting it out” because they want to see if they can sell their property when it becomes more valuable. “Others just want the heck out because they want their quiet life back, and this is not what they signed up for,” she said. “And then there’s others who are just stuck.”
In Louisiana, the effort to court Meta for the Richland Parish site began early. According to reporting by the Times Picayune, Entergy Louisiana economic development executive Ed Jimenez and CEO Philip May hosted roughly half a dozen Meta executives at Entergy’s headquarters in New Orleans in early 2024, after May learned the company was searching for a Southern location to build a data center.
This is not unusual: Across the nation, consortia of state governments, utilities, and economic development groups are actively competing to attract tech companies to build AI data centers. For example, OpenAI said it and its partners reviewed more than 300 proposals from over 30 states before selecting five additional sites for its Stargate data center program, following the launch of its flagship facility in Abilene, Texas.
Over dinner, the Meta folks told Entergy that they would consider Louisiana but that the state would have to move fast to come up with a deal. Entergy executives worked with recently-elected Governor Jeff Landry to forge agreements with legislative leaders, cabinet secretaries and local government officials.
Meta ultimately secured significant tax incentives for the project, including a sales tax exemption on the billions of dollars it will spend on servers and equipment. But Meta emphasized that Richland Parish would also reap tax revenue and economic development.
“Richland Parish receives both a portion of sales tax from our construction materials along with a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes), based on jobs and capital investment,” a Meta spokesperson said.
These PILOT agreements—common in large data center deals—allow companies to pay a negotiated annual fee instead of full property taxes, with the amount tied to how much they invest and how many jobs they create. Public details of the Richland Parish agreement are limited, but a state contract reviewed by WIRED last year confirmed Meta’s payments and tax breaks are structured around hitting specific investment and hiring thresholds. The Meta spokesperson said the company has invested over $300 million to date in roads, water, and other local infrastructure.
While Louisiana also offers broad sales tax exemptions for data center equipment, local governments can still collect revenue from construction-related spending, because the state’s “sales and use tax” system applies taxes based on where materials are ultimately used. The result is a complex mix of long-term tax relief for the company paired with more limited, often temporary, revenue streams for the parish.
Meanwhile, the Hyperion project is already getting even bigger. Even as residents grapple with the disruption of the current buildout, Meta has quietly acquired roughly 1,400 additional acres adjacent to the existing 2,250-acre Hyperion site, according to people affiliated with companies working on or around the project, paving the way for a second phase of expansion. In reporting this story, Fortune observed active work underway on the newly acquired land.
Some local leaders push back on residents’ complaints that the disruption outweighs the opportunity. GrowNELA’s Cleveland said complaints about traffic and housing are “completely valid and understandable,” adding that “it’s happening very quickly and it’s happening exponentially.” But he pointed out that the land used for the Meta site has been marketed as industrial for more than two decades and the state had long hoped for development to come. Those efforts coming to fruition is something to celebrate, not complain about, he argued: “We’ve hit the gold rush.”
Monroe Mayor Friday Ellis, who was elected to a second term in 2024 and sits on GrowNELA’s board, argues that the challenges now surfacing around housing, traffic, and infrastructure are not unique to the Meta project—but reflect the challenges of building on a “hyper” scale in a region that has long lacked investment.
Ellis also says he understands why people are skeptical of the promises Meta and local politicians are making about the development bringing economic opportunity. He grew up in Richland Parish, and was raised by a single father who sharecropped on the land. He said skepticism toward the project is rooted in a history of broken promises. “For years, they’ve been ignored,” he said. “They don’t believe this is a real opportunity.”
Still, Ellis is unapologetically bullish. He argues that large projects like Meta’s offer a rare chance to change the community’s trajectory. “This region has a lot of poverty, and poverty exists because there’s no opportunity,” he said. “Opportunity and education lift people out of poverty. Our job right now is to connect as many people as possible to opportunity.”
Ellis has described the region as a budding “Silicon Bayou,” and said increased attention—from investors, contractors, and state leaders—has already begun to unlock new economic activity. “What gives me hope,” he said, “is that more people are paying attention to this part of the world.”
The Silicon Bayou label may not be hyperbole for northern Louisiana. The entire northern part of the state is increasingly being marketed as an AI infrastructure hub. In addition to Meta’s Hyperion expansion, Amazon recently announced plans to invest $12 billion in northwest Louisiana to build data center campuses.
And GrowNELA’s Cleveland said that more tech investment is coming to Richland Parish: “We are actively working on a diverse mix of projects for Richland Parish and the entire region,” he said. “That mix includes data centers, manufacturing, warehouses and suppliers of the Meta and Amazon data centers.”
But Richland Parish resident Dewanna Sanders, who owns a small food business and lives about three miles from the Meta site, said she was saddened by the changes to the landscape when she leaves her home before sunrise.
“It’s lit up like New York City,” she said of the site, describing it as a “halo” she can see from her front steps.
While Sanders acknowledges that the data center will likely be good for the area in the long run—and that both her business and her husband’s have benefited—she said she cried when it was announced.
“It’s not the country anymore,” she said. “Everything is going to change here. Nothing’s going to be the same again.”
Sanders said she has received several offers on her 600-acre property and initially thought she might want to leave. “But where are you going to go?” she said. “This is home.”
Even Tim Allen, whose Holy Tacos business has benefited greatly from the Meta project, acknowledges how overwhelming the scale of the construction has been for many in what was once a quiet farming community. “Now it’s lights and noise, day and night,” he says. Still, as a pastor and father, Allen sees the project as a chance for something the region has long lacked. “There was nothing here for our kids,” he said. “They were growing up and moving away.”The Meta site, he believes, offers an opportunity for families to stay—and for the community to adapt. “It’s not going anywhere,” he said. “So we’re trying to meet it with empathy, figure out how to help the people who are struggling, and ask how we can grow and benefit together.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The ski season of 2025–26 is winding down—and it was a tough one for Vail Resorts, the world’s largest operator of ski hills. With snowfall 60% below normal for the season through February in its home state of Colorado and low in neighboring Utah, Vail has seen skiers and snowboarders stay away in droves.
Adding to the pressure on Vail, it has been the second difficult winter in a row. Last year, in addition to insufficient snow in many locales, the company saw a 12-day ski-patrol strike close most runs at its largest resort in Park City, Utah, leaving countless customers disappointed, including venture capitalists energetically taking to X to air their dissatisfaction over having to wait in long lift lines. The crisis led to the departure of then–CEO Kirsten Lynch a few months later.
Because Vail’s business model is predicated on people buying passes that cost around $1,000 upfront—on sale for a limited time months before the start of the season, giving them access to dozens of resorts in the U.S. (both in the East and West), Canada, Switzerland, and Australia—revenue fell only 4.7% in its most recent quarter, largely because of fewer ski rentals and fewer lodge rooms booked. (In North America, visits were down 11.9% through March 1.)
Now the focus is on next season: Sales of the Epic Pass have been slow for a couple of years now, and Vail brought back its former longtime CEO Rob Katz to steer the company through the effects of climate change, a slow-growing industry, and increasing competition from other sports.
“We’ve had some challenges: Some of which were on us, some of which were not,” Katz, CEO from 2006 to 2021 in his first go–round, told Fortune earlier this month. “In coming back as CEO, the most important thing was realizing that the industry is different now; the consumer is different; the company is different.”
One place these differences are playing out is in the resort’s prepaid, multi-resort passes. Under Katz, Vail pioneered that concept with its Epic Pass (its largest rival, Alterra Mountain Co., offers the Ikon Pass), which locks in revenue and shields operators from weather variability, region to region, by luring skiers willing to go where the snow is.
One of Katz’s realizations is that the pass is a business tool in need of rejuvenation. Some skiers may feel that they didn’t get their money’s worth for two seasons in a row. Meanwhile, the rising cost of the already expensive sport is keeping many young people away.
“It’s a matter of making sure that the pass is the best deal,” says Katz. In early March, right before Vail put its 2026–27 passes on sale in a major test of its business, the company announced 20% price cuts for skiers and riders under age 30. Katz says Vail also needs to push lift tickets to reach skiers less interested in the commitment of a full pass. “We need to be more aggressive on lift tickets,” he notes. That has meant, for instance, offering 30% off a lift ticket if reserved a month ahead of time.
Vail is also aiming to expand its customer base by attracting skiers of color in the U.S. “We don’t see the same kind of market penetration with communities of color as with the white community, and we need to continue to expand,” he said. That has played a big part in why Vail has stuck with its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, despite pressures that have led countless other corporations to walk them back partly or even entirely.
“I think people who come to our resorts don’t all see people who look like them,” Katz says. “We need to have folks in our company who are reaching and know how to make connections in those communities.” So Vail has teamed up with the National Brotherhood of Snowsports, an advocacy group that looks to find and develop talented skiers of color, among other initiatives.
With increasingly variable weather, Katz says he is focusing himself and his teams squarely on what they can control: “In a year like this, we can’t control the weather. We’ve got to constantly be looking to improve and maybe most importantly, when we don’t get it right, we need to admit it.”
And he will, of course, be keeping his fingers crossed for more snow next season.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
James Peng, cofounder and CEO of Chinese robotaxi startup Pony AI, was reviewing customer data with his team, and he was facing a puzzle. Every day, one of his users would book a robotaxi at the same time: right after lunch.
“After a while, we called him and asked why he always took a ride at that time,” Peng recalled to Fortune.
The user’s answer? “The environment is great. It’s clean. I use it as my napping place!”
For Peng, the regular napper is a sign of how quickly riders are adapting their behavior as self-driving cars start to take over China’s—and the world’s—streets.
Chinese robotaxis are plying the streets of cities like Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai. And much like how Waymos are transforming user behavior in San Francisco, robotaxis like Pony AI’s are changing what Chinese passengers are doing.
“Without a driver in the loop, we have to find creative ways to do a lot of things,” Peng says. If a passenger leaves a door open—a common problem for robotaxis—the car might chirp at a passerby in a “cute voice,” in Peng’s words, asking them to close it. If that doesn’t work, Pony AI will reach out to China’s army of delivery gig workers, asking them to close the door and maybe “clean up [the car’s interior] a little bit,” says Peng.
Pony AI is one of several Chinese companies, alongside fellow startup WeRide and search giant Baidu, that are aggressively expanding autonomous vehicles in China and beyond. Pony AI has 1,200 taxis on the road, with plans to hit 3,000 by the end of the year—on track with Waymo. As of early 2026, over 50 Chinese cities allow self-driving cars on public roads in a testing capacity. At least 10 allow commercial operations, the same as in the U.S.
And Chinese robotaxis are now in service well beyond China. Pony AI says it’s now delivering 26 rides per car per day, or somewhere north of 25,000 daily in total, with operations in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Singapore, and is planning to expand into Europe; its counterparts are also expanding around the world. (By comparison, Waymo is present in only two non-U.S. cities: London and Tokyo.)
A number of structural advantages have made China a fertile test bed for self-driving cars.
First, it has a strong manufacturing base that can drive the cost of components down to ultra-affordable levels. That’s thanks to companies like Hesai Technology, which makes the lidar sensors needed for robotaxis to see what’s around them; the Shanghai-based company has slashed the cost of such sensors by 99.5%, enabling them to be installed in cars that cost as little as $15,000. Add China’s broader strength in making EVs and connected cars, and robotaxi firms can tap a wide array of affordable, high-quality vehicles for their fleets.
Peng sees a world with fewer human-driven cars as “inevitable,” citing safety and convenience. “People love to drive; they don’t love driving all the time,” he says. But he doesn’t see that trend as a danger sign for the labor force, noting, “AI will change what we consider ‘work.’ ”
Peng points to an additional advantage: the ready availability of tech talent. China now boasts deep networks of big tech companies, startups, and universities that train the next generation of founders and engineers. “When I left China more than 20 years ago, that kind of ecosystem really didn’t exist,” Peng says. “Now you have internet companies and tech companies that took talent and trained them. It’s a numbers game: Quality is important, but with enough quantity, you can create an ecosystem.”
Chinese consumers are also more willing to consider self-driving cars. Around 85% of Chinese drivers reported being comfortable with robotaxis without human supervision, compared with 39% of U.S. drivers, according to a 2023 survey from PwC. Far fewer Chinese—just 35%—drive a car, meaning they may be more willing to hire a robotaxi.
Finally, there’s government support for automated driving, which Beijing sees as a strategic industry. Local governments offer pilot zones, subsidies, and speedy permits for high-level autonomous driving, while national regulators have issued guidelines to move robotaxis from testing to commercial services in dozens of cities.
HSBC predicted last year that robotaxis could soon capture around 6% of China’s total taxi and ride-hailing market, generating $40 billion a year in fare revenue; meanwhile, UBS estimated that the size of the robotaxi market in China could reach $183 billion a year—if self-driving cars completely replace human-driven taxis.
James Peng spent most of his career in Silicon Valley. After getting his PhD from Stanford, he spent seven years at Google, working with its ads teams; he then joined the U.S. operations of Baidu, the Chinese Big Tech company behind the country’s leading search engine. By 2015, he’d become head of the company’s autonomous driving division in the U.S.
Peng calls Baidu a “magnet” that attracted talented engineers and researchers from across the industry, several of whom went on to found their own ventures.
Baidu was an early supporter of AI among China’s tech sector, including making a concerted pitch to hire Geoffrey Hinton, an early AI pioneer.
Pony AI’s cofounder and chief technology officer, Tiancheng Lou, is also a Baidu alumnus, as is Tony Han, CEO of competing robotaxi firm WeRide, who was chief scientist of its autonomous driving unit. Even Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s cofounder, spent a year at Baidu.
In late 2016, Peng made the jump to startup founder, establishing Pony AI in Silicon Valley. It started testing self-driving cars in California in 2017, then in China in 2018.
Pony AI debuted on the Nasdaq in late 2024 with a $413 million IPO, making it a rare Chinese startup venturing into U.S. markets as relations between Washington and Beijing soured. Just one year later, it raised $863 million through a secondary listing in Hong Kong.
By late 2025, Pony AI claimed its robotaxis were operating at breakeven in Guangzhou; by March, it said robotaxis in nearby Shenzhen were breakeven as well. Pony AI reported record usage of its robotaxis over the Chinese New Year holiday, hitting an average of 26 orders a day per vehicle. Each robotaxi generated an average of 338 Chinese yuan ($48.91) a day.
Pony AI generated $60.8 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2025, a 54% year-on-year jump. But investing in a new technology is expensive. The company spent $156.9 million on research and development between January and September 2025, contributing to a $152.2 million net loss over the same period.
Pony AI’s shares have performed poorly since the Hong Kong IPO, down by around 30% from the original offer price. WeRide, which had its own secondary Hong Kong listing at the same time as Pony AI, has seen its shares drop by about as much.
Pony AI is now venturing into international markets: specifically, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; Doha in Qatar; Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Luxembourg. (Peng also mentioned the startup will soon expand to another European market, though didn’t specify which one.)
The startup is also signing partnerships with global players, including ride-hailing platforms Uber and Bolt; ComfortDelGro, one of Singapore’s largest transit and taxi operators; and Stellantis, the European car giant. Pony AI has a long-standing relationship as well with Toyota, an early backer: Its latest generation of robotaxi is developed through a joint venture between Toyota and Guangzhou Automobile Group, a Chinese state-owned carmaker.
85%
Share of Chinese drivers who say they’d be comfortable in a robotaxi without human supervision
35%
Share of Chinese people who drive
Sources: PWC; Government data
Pony AI’s long-term plan isn’t to own the self-driving cars, but rather provide the technology that keeps them running. The startup positions itself as the “virtual driver”—providing the AI, software, and platform—while partners fund and operate the physical fleet.
“That’s where we create the greatest economic and societal value,” Peng explains. “Our most important motivation is to scale as fast as possible, and put as many ‘drivers’ into the market as possible. Everything else could be done by somebody else.”
Partners, meanwhile, can earn a return from vehicle ownership. “If you can earn, say, 5% return by owning vehicles instead of 3% from keeping that capital in the bank, it’s a good business to be in.”
One market that’s not in the cards for Pony AI? The U.S., which takes a dim view of Chinese cars owing to concerns over data security. The outgoing Biden administration barred the sale of Chinese “connected vehicles” from 2027 onward.
“We’re unlikely to run large-scale commercial operations in the U.S. anytime soon,” Peng says. “But I think R&D activities and exchanges of ideas are still permitted.” The company retains a research team in Silicon Valley.
Pony AI’s robotaxis—including models like the GAC Aion V, a compact crossover SUV—are spacious and comfortable, similar to other luxury EVs getting churned out by China’s many factories.
A voice welcomes passengers as they enter the car; a screen mounted in the rear cabin allows them to start the journey and monitor what’s happening around the vehicle on a real-time map. A cute robot-like avatar—at the time wearing a horse costume to celebrate the incoming Year of the Horse—shared updates on the car’s journey.
The trip feels oddly smooth, as the robotaxi cleanly shifts lanes and slows down to avoid hitting other vehicles and bicycles on the road. It’s a quieter journey than what a human-driven taxi normally feels like.
Peng understands that difference. “The human driver does more than just driving: They clean, they charge the car, they have conversations with the passenger, or even, in some cases, comfort passengers,” he says.
Still, as self-driving cars take off, that leads to a question: What will human drivers be doing instead? Anthony Tan, CEO of Grab (an investor in WeRide), suggested on a recent earnings call that “drivers could be remote safety drivers, data labelers; they could change lidars, cameras, and so forth.”
Investors are jumpy, too. In early 2026, U.S. trucking shares collapsed after a little-known karaoke-turned-AI firm announced its product could help increase freight volumes by 300% without adding staff.
Peng takes a measured view. “AI will not destroy the workforce; it will change what we consider ‘work,’” he says. “A lot of the fear is overblown.”
Yet he’s certain that a world with fewer human-driven cars is “inevitable,” citing efficiency, safety, and convenience. “People love to drive; they don’t love driving all the time,” he says.
Peng’s belief that robotaxis are a social good is echoed by his counterpart at WeRide, Tony Han. “Machines won’t be drunk, won’t overdose. Machines are very reliable. Fatal accident rates for robotaxis are much lower than human drivers,” Han told Fortune last October.
What about the roads themselves? Urban infrastructure, after all, is still pretty dumb—forcing robotaxis to be designed around transit systems that are decades old. Will that limit how far robotaxis can go?
Peng is realistic on that front. Perhaps, he acknowledges, the roads will get smarter in 20 or 30 years, and make autonomous driving safer and more efficient. But he’s not going to wait around for the roads to be rebuilt.
“If we want autonomous vehicles to really be part of everyday life, they have to cope with the roads we have now. That’s the beauty of AI: We can train our AI ‘drivers’ to be smart enough to be on the existing infrastructure.”
This article appears in the April/May 2026: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “The world’s consumers are ready for robotaxis. James Peng of Pony AI wants to make sure they’re riding in his”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The White House has rejected an offer from Elon Musk to personally fund TSA workers’ salaries during the partial government shutdown that has thrown airport security into chaos across the country, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson told Fortune.
Musk floated the proposal publicly on March 21, posting on X that he wanted “to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country.” The post drew more than 91 million views.
“We greatly appreciate Elon’s generous offer,” Jackson wrote in an email to Fortune. “This would pose great legal challenges due to his involvement with federal government contracts.”
Jackson also said that the fastest way to ensure TSA employees get paid would be for “Democrats to fund the Department of Homeland Security.”
Meanwhile the airport crisis deepens. The Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday that wait times have hit the worst levels in the agency’s history, with some passengers waiting more than four and a half hours to clear security. Acting Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill told a House Homeland Security Committee hearing that TSA has lost more than 480 transportation security officers since the funding lapse began on Feb. 14, now roughly 40 days ago.
At some major airports, 40% to 50% of officers have called out on certain days, forcing the agency to consolidate screening lanes and scale back operations, according to Bloomberg. Atlanta, Houston, and New York have been among the hardest hit. Videos posted to social media showed lines at LaGuardia Airport snaking through terminals and into baggage claim areas early Wednesday morning.
The administration has deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports to help manage the crush, a move that has drawn bipartisan scrutiny. McNeill said ICE personnel are handling “non-specialized screening functions” like travel document checkpoints, while TSA officers focus on core security duties.
And the shutdown remains deadlocked in Washington. Senate Republicans rejected a Democratic proposal to end the partial shutdown, with Majority Leader John Thune dismissing it as a list of demands including changes to immigration enforcement operations. Democrats have pushed for reforms scaling back ICE’s operations following several violent incidents that left civilians dead.
Representatives for Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday adopted a resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.”
The resolution also urges “the prompt and unhindered restitution” of cultural items — including artworks, monuments, museum pieces, documents and national archives — to their countries of origin without charge.
The vote in the 193-member world body was 123-3, with 52 abstentions. Argentina, Israel and the United States were the three members voting against the resolution. The United Kingdom and all 27 members of the European Union were among those that abstained.
While the United States opposes the past wrongdoing of the transatlantic slave trade and all other forms of slavery, it “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred,” deputy U.S. ambassador Dan Negrea said before the vote.
“The United States also strongly objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy,” he said. “The assertion that some crimes against humanity are less severe than others objectively diminishes the suffering of countless victims and survivors of other atrocities throughout history.”
In the United States, support for reparations gained momentum in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. However, the issue has been a difficult one and has been caught up in a broader conservative backlash over how race, history and inequality are handled in public institutions.
Unlike U.N. Security Council resolutions, General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding but are an important reflection of world opinion.
“Today, we come together in solemn solidarity to affirm truth and pursue a route to healing and reparative justice,” Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, a key architect of the resolution, said before the vote.
“The adoption of this resolution serves as a safeguard against forgetting,” he said. “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of the millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”
Mahama noted that the vote was taking place on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, honoring the memory of about 13 million African men, women and children enslaved over several centuries.
Diplomats applauded and some cheered the adoption of the resolution.
The history of slavery and “its devastating consequences and long-lasting impacts” must never be forgotten, said British acting U.N. Ambassador James Kariuki, speaking on behalf of mainly Western nations, including some that enslaved Africans.
Western nations are committed to tackling the root causes that persist today, he said, pointing to racial discrimination, racism, xenophobia and intolerance. He said “the scourge of modern slavery” also must be addressed — trafficking, forced labor, sexual exploitation and forced criminality.
Cyprus’ deputy U.N. ambassador, Gabriella Michaelidou, speaking on behalf of the EU, echoed the U.S. and U.K. on concerns about “the use of superlatives” that imply “a hierarchy among atrocity crimes.”
Michaelidou also cited the EU’s concern about the resolution’s “unbalanced interpretation of historical events” and legal references that are inaccurate or inconsistent with international law, including “suggestions of a retroactive application of international rules which was non-existent at the time and claims for reparations.”
The resolution “unequivocally condemns the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans, slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as the most inhumane and enduring injustice against humanity.”
In approving the resolution, the General Assembly affirms the importance of addressing the historical wrongs of slavery that promotes “justice, human rights, dignity and healing.”
The resolution calls on U.N. member nations to engage in talks “on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology, measures of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition and changes to laws, programs and services to address racism and systemic discrimination.”
It encourages voluntary contributions to promote education on the transatlantic slave trade and asks the African Union, the Caribbean Community and the Organization of American States to collaborate with U.N. bodies and other nations “on reparatory justice and reconciliation.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Melania Trump often commands the attention of any room she enters but all eyes — and cameras — were trained on her humanoid companion on Wednesday.
The robot accompanied the first lady to the White House East Room for the final day of a summit she had convened with counterparts from around the world through her Fostering the Future Together global initiative. The group has been discussing ways to empower children using education, innovation and technology, including artificial intelligence.
Melania Trump and the humanoid walked slowly side by side along the red carpet from the opposite end of the hallway. The first lady paused just before entering the East Room while the robot walked around the table with the panelists and took up a position in the center of the room.
It took a moment to scan the audience before speaking.
“It is an honor to be at Fostering the Future Together’s global coalition inaugural meeting,” it said.
“I’m Figure 03, a humanoid built for the United States of America,” it continued. “I am grateful to be part of this historic movement to empower children with technology and education.”
“Welcome,” it said before offering similar greetings in 10 other languages. The robot then thanked everyone and retraced its steps back down the red carpet.
The first lady thanked the robot for joining her, adding: “It’s fair to state, you are my first American-made humanoid guest in the White House.”
The startup robotics company Figure AI, based in Sunnyvale, California, introduced Figure 03 in October 2025 as its third-generation humanoid robot for people to use at home for help with such household tasks as laundry, cleaning and washing dishes, according to its website and company literature.
CEO Brett Adcock said on social media he was “proud to see F.03 make history as the first humanoid robot in the White House.”
The startup is competing with others, including Boston Dynamics and Elon Musk’s Tesla, as well as a number of companies in China, in building robots that look human-like and do some of the things that people do.
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Associated Press writer Matt O’Brien in Providence, R.I., contributed to this report.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Iran on Wednesday dismissed an American plan to pause the war in the Middle East and launched more attacks on Israel and Gulf Arab countries, including an assault that sparked a huge fire at Kuwait International Airport.
Iran’s defiance came as Israel launched airstrikes on Tehran and as the United States deployed paratroopers and more Marines to the region.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview on state TV that his government has not engaged in talks to end the war, “and we do not plan on any negotiations.” That followed a report from Iranian state TV’s English-language broadcaster, which quoted an anonymous official as saying Iran rejected America’s ceasefire proposal and has its own demands for an end to the fighting.
Earlier, two officials from Pakistan, which transmitted the U.S. plan to Iran, described the 15-point proposal broadly, saying it addressed sanctions relief, a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program, limits on missiles and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped.
An Egyptian official involved in the mediation efforts said the proposal also includes restrictions on Iran’s support for armed groups. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet released.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the U.S. and Iran are in ongoing talks even as Iranian officials deny it. “Talks continue. They are productive, as the president said on Monday, and they continue to be,” Leavitt said at a White House briefing on Wednesday.
Leavitt warned that if talks with Iran don’t pan out President Donald Trump “will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before.”
Some of the points in the U.S. ceasefire proposal were nonstarters in negotiations before the war: Iran has insisted it won’t discuss its ballistic missile program or its support of regional militias, which it views as key to its security. And its ability to control passage through the Strait of Hormuz represents one of its biggest strategic advantages.
Iran’s attacks on regional energy infrastructure along with its restrictions on the strait have sent oil prices skyrocketing, putting pressure on the U.S. to find a way to end the chokehold and calm markets.
At least 1,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division will be sent to the Mideast in the coming days, three people with knowledge of the plans told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.
The paratroopers are trained to jump into hostile or contested areas to secure key territory and airfields.
The Pentagon is also in the process of sending about 5,000 more Marines, trained in amphibious assaults, and thousands of sailors to the region.
Most Americans believe the U.S. military action against Iran has gone too far, and many are worried about affording gasoline, according to a new AP-NORC poll.
The survey indicates that while Trump’s approval rating is holding steady, the conflict could be swiftly turning into a major political liability for his Republican administration.
Mediators are pushing for possible in-person talks between the Iranians and the Americans, perhaps as soon as Friday in Pakistan, the Egyptian and Pakistani officials said.
Trump has said the U.S. is “in negotiations right now” and that the participants included special envoy Steve Witkoff, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. He has not disclosed who from Iran they are in contact with, but said “the other side, I can tell you, they’d like to make a deal.”
Press TV, the English-language broadcaster on Iranian state television, quoted an anonymous official as saying, “Iran will end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met.”
It attributed to the anonymous official an Iranian five-point proposal that included a halt to killings of its officials, means to make sure no other war is waged against it, reparations for the war, the end of hostilities and Iran’s “exercise of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.”
Those measures, particularly reparations and its continued chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, likely will be unacceptable to the White House.
While Iran and Oman both have territory in the strait, its narrow shipping channels are viewed as international waters through which all ships can travel.
Any talks between the U.S. and Iran would face monumental challenges. It’s not clear who in Iran’s government has the authority to negotiate — or would be willing to, as Israel has vowed to continue killing the country’s leaders.
Iran remains highly suspicious of the United States, which twice under the Trump administration has attacked during high-level diplomatic talks, including with the Feb. 28 strikes that started the current war.
The Israeli military said Wednesday afternoon it had completed several waves of airstrikes in Tehran. The army also said that as part of its strikes a day earlier it targeted an Iranian submarine development center in Isfahan.
Missile alert sirens sounded multiple times in Israel as Iran and the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah launched attacks. Iran-backed Hezbollah has fired rockets into northern Israel around the clock since the war began, disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Iran also kept up the pressure on its Gulf Arab neighbors. Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry said it had destroyed at least eight drones in its oil-rich Eastern Province, and missile alert sirens sounded in Bahrain. Kuwait said it shot down multiple drones but that one hit a fuel tank at Kuwait International Airport.
Iran’s death toll has passed 1,500, its Health Ministry has said. Israel says 20 people have died in the war, including two soldiers in Lebanon. At least 13 U.S. military members have been killed, along with more than a dozen civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gulf Arab states.
Authorities say nearly 1,100 people have died in Lebanon, where Israel has targeted Hezbollah. In Iraq, where Iranian-supported militant groups have also entered the conflict, 80 members of the security forces have been killed, a top security adviser, Khalid al-Yaqoubi, said.
The news of potential negotiations drove down the price of oil. Brent crude oil, the international standard, has neared $120 a barrel during the conflict but was trading around $100 Wednesday. It is still up around 35% from the start of the war.
Economists and leaders have warned of far-reaching effects if energy prices remain high — from rising prices on food and other basics to higher rates for mortgages and auto loans.
Iran has allowed a small number of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, but has said no ships from the U.S., Israel or countries seen as linked to them can pass.
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Madhani reported from Washington, Corder from The Hague, Netherlands and Ahmed from Islamabad. Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo, David Rising in Bangkok, Natalie Melzer in Tel Aviv, Israel, Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad, and E. Eduardo Castillo in Beijing contributed to this report.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Two high-profile progressive lawmakers are introducing a bill Wednesday that would pause new data centers in the United States until national safeguards are in place to protect workers and consumers and ensure the technologies don’t harm the environment.
The legislation by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is unlikely to advance in either the House or Senate, but it shows the deep concerns many progressives share about the growing impact of data centers and artificial intelligence.
Communities across the country have seen a backlash against data centers over fears about rising electricity prices and concerns about pollution and water consumption. Opposition to rising power prices was also a key factor in Democratic wins last year in elections in states including Georgia, Virginia and New Jersey.
Although advances in artificial intelligence are seen by President Donald Trump and other leaders as critical to the nation’s economic and national security, their growing energy needs are threatening to overwhelm the power grid. Trump has sought to deflect public concerns about AI, inviting major technology companies to the White House earlier this month to commit to developing their own power generation.
“They need some PR help because people think that if a data center goes in there, electricity prices are going to go up,” Trump said.
Voters need more than voluntary assurances from tech companies, Sanders said Wednesday.
“AI and robotics are creating the most sweeping technological revolution in the history of humanity. The scale, scope and speed of that change is unprecedented. Congress is way behind where it should be in understanding the nature of this revolution and its impacts,” he said in a statement ahead of the bill’s formal introduction.
“Bottom line: We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity,” Sanders said. “We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue. The time for action is now. We need a federal moratorium on AI data centers.”
Most lawmakers of both parties have rejected the idea of a moratorium.
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said he agreed with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s warning that a moratorium on data centers amounts to waving a “surrender flag” to China. “I refuse to help hand the lead in AI to China,” Fetterman wrote on X.
The White House said last week that Congress should “preempt state AI laws” that it views as too burdensome, laying out a broad framework for how it wants Congress to address concerns about AI without curbing growth or innovation in the sector.
The legislative blueprint outlines a half-dozen guiding principles for lawmakers, focusing on protecting children, preventing electricity costs from surging, respecting intellectual property rights, preventing censorship and educating Americans on using the technology.
U.S. electricity consumption hit a record high in 2024 and is expected to keep rising as data centers continue to expand at a rapid pace. A typical AI-focused data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households.
Companies that committed to Trump’s pledge to protect ratepayers include Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI and Amazon. The companies agreed to build or buy new sources of power generation for their data centers and cover the expense of infrastructure upgrades.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
After a surprise victory in a Florida special election, Emily Gregory said she’s excited to represent all of her constituents — and that includes President Donald Trump.
“I would love to have a conversation,” the Democrat told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “He’s welcome to call me, as I am his new state representative.”
The president’s Mar-a-Lago resort is part of Gregory’s district, which is anchored by Palm Beach. Although state legislative races rarely get the national spotlight, Democrats across the country were positively euphoric at the irony of their Republican nemesis being represented by one of their own.
Gregory’s victory is the latest example of how Democrats have flipped seats in a series of special elections that could be a sign of momentum in a midterm election year that will provide a political verdict on Trump’s second term.
Here was a 40-year-old first-time candidate who owns a local fitness company for pregnant and postpartum women defeating a Republican whom Trump had endorsed by saying he was backed “by so many of my Palm Beach County friends.”
Gregory’s win was especially sweet for Florida Democrats, who have been beaten down by years of Republican domination in what was once the consummate battleground state. Democrats are also hopeful that Brian Nathan will win a state senate seat in the Tampa area; the AP has not yet called that race but he currently has a narrow lead that is within the state’s automatic recount range.
“The pendulum swings in both directions,” Florida Democratic Chairwoman Nikki Fried told reporters. “Last night it swung hard in the state of Florida.”
She added, “If we can win in Donald Trump’s backyard, we can win anywhere.”
Florida Republican Chairman Evan Power did not return a message seeking comment.
For Gregory, it has been a stunning introduction to the national spotlight.
“I believed in myself the whole time,” Gregory said, describing her political “naiveté” about the district and its conservative leanings as an asset. She was elected to finish the term of Mike Caruso, a Republican who resigned to become Palm Beach County’s clerk, and she would need to run again in November if she wants to keep the seat.
Gregory told the AP she did not make her contest about the president specifically, focusing instead on constituents’ concerns involving the economy and everyday costs — from fast-rising insurance in the hurricane-prone district to groceries and gas.
She described herself as a lifelong “proud Florida Democrat” but said she did not view herself as a Trump opposition leader. She said she will go to Tallahassee focused on proposals to limit insurance rate hikes, expand health care access, support public education and lift “huge, crushing burdens on the average Florida family.”
“I just see myself as very embedded in my community, very representative of District 87,” she said. “And I’m so humbled and proud to be their representative.”
Trump endorsed Gregory’s opponent, Jon Maples, and cast a mail ballot in the contest. The president reiterated his support for Maples on the eve of the election with a social media post addressed to “ALL GREAT PATRIOTS.”
As of midday Wednesday, Trump had not mentioned the outcome of the race.
Gregory expects to be sworn in before a special legislative session that begins April 20 to redraw the state’s congressional map. It’s a Republican initiative intended to boost the party’s chances to hold onto its thin majority in the U.S. House, and Gregory said she plans to oppose the effort.
She described the session as a “complete power grab” resulting from “the president’s call to gerrymander in favor of Republicans.”
Fried praised Gregory and Nathan, a 45-year-old veteran and union worker, as quality candidates who could capitalize on the broader political environment.
“The type of person and connection on the issues matters,” Fried said.
Gregory flipped a seat that her Republican predecessor had won by 19 percentage points. Fried said Trump carried the district by 11 points in 2024.
Republicans still dominate the Florida Legislature, and they have been considered heavy favorites to hold the governor’s office in November, four years after Gov. Ron DeSantis won a blowout reelection campaign.
But Fried and other Democrats insisted the trends suggest a competitive landscape. She noted that Tuesday’s victories followed two congressional special elections in 2025 when Florida Democrats lost but dramatically narrowed the usual margins in heavily Republican districts.
“You’ve seen tremendous overspending by Republicans,” Fried said of the current cycle. “It’s not working.”
Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly said Wednesday the results demonstrate an upswing for the party as long as candidates address the economy.
“Change is here,” said Jolly, a former Republican congressman who switched parties. “Voters are giving us an opportunity in Florida that they haven’t given us in years.”
A spokesman for Republican U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, whom Trump has endorsed for Florida governor, took at least some notice of the latest results.
“We constantly assess how we execute our strategy — that’s just good campaigns,” said Ryan Smith, Donalds’ chief campaign strategist. “What won’t change is our mission: President Trump endorsed Byron Donalds to deliver real results and defend the Florida Dream, and that’s what voters can expect to see from us.”
Gregory, meanwhile, said she’s ready to get to work, including for Trump.
“I will work as hard for every single one of 180,000 constituents in District 87,” she said, “and not elevate anyone over the rest.”
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Barrow reported from Atlanta.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A Los Angeles jury has sided with a young woman known as Kaley or KGM in a landmark case, ruling that the “addictive design” of Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube helped fuel her serious mental health problems. The closely watched bellwether case against the platforms’ parents, Alphabet’s Google and Meta, could set a precedent in thousands of similar lawsuits and force Silicon Valley to rethink the features that keep users endlessly scrolling.
After more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days—including testimony from KGM as well as from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders—California jurors decided Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms, and awarded the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who says her social media addiction exacerbated her mental health struggles, $3 million in damages.
The multimillion-dollar verdict will grow, as the jury will decide whether the companies acted with malice or fraud. They will hear new evidence shortly and head back into the deliberation room to decide on punitive damages. Meta and Google-owned YouTube were the two remaining defendants in the case after TikTok and Snap each settled before the trial began.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a Meta spokesperson said when reached for comment Wednesday.
A spokesperson for YouTube parent company Google said the company also disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” the spokesperson said.
The decision also puts legal weight behind a term Big Tech has spent years trying to dismiss: tech addiction. As I reported in Fortune this week, and for the upcoming issue of Fortune Magazine, the intense debate about how harmfully addictive modern tech can be has escalated lately thanks to a slew of landmark legal cases against Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap.
At a dedicated tech addiction rehab center outside of Seattle—one of very few such clinics in the U.S. or anywhere in the world—I met client Sarah Hill. The 21-year-old’s parents had flown her from Alabama to reSTART, a residential treatment program for digital overuse that treats compulsive tech use as a danger on par with alcohol or drugs. At the program, which costs around $1,000 a day, clients must abstain from smartphones, gaming, social media, and other technologies—often for months, and undergo intensive therapy sessions.
Hill told me that the situation got to a crisis point when she had spent so many nights holed up in her room talking to an AI chatbot on her phone that she fell behind in her college classes, lied to her parents, and ultimately failed out. “The last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying,” she recalls. “That was the worst thing I ever saw.” On her first tech-free day at reSTART, Hill told me, she lay down on her bed and cried.
Hill is far from alone. reSTART cofounder Cosette Rae says she has treated around a thousand clients since opening the center nearly two decades ago, and spoken with many thousands more. She and cofounder Hilarie Cash launched reSTART in 2009 because they realized that there was nowhere else for those struggling with problematic tech use to go.
Rae’s patients aren’t simply dealing with bad habits, she says. They’re struggling with the fact that you can’t quit tech the way you might quit a substance. “When it comes to technology, it’s everywhere,” she says. “So you’re constantly being in front of it and having to say no.”
Scientists like Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, who testified on behalf of the plaintiff in the Meta and YouTube case, say that’s not just anecdotal. Compulsive scrolling and gaming tap the same reward circuitry as drugs, with quick dopamine hits training users to seek the next small “win.” Over time, repeated bursts of stimulation can desensitize those pathways and weaken the prefrontal cortex, which governs planning and self-control, making it harder to cut back even as school, work, or relationships suffer. Brain imaging studies of people with internet gaming or social media disorders show changes similar to those seen in gambling addiction.
Meta and YouTube have long argued that there’s no clear scientific proof their products cause that harm. Tech addiction isn’t recognized as a formal diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; only “internet gaming disorder” appears as a condition warranting more study. Some researchers worry that calling heavy use “addiction” can make people feel more helpless, not less.
But critics have long said that these products are designed to foster addiction. “These companies are in the business of attention,” the former tech investor and author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, Roger McNamee, told me, weeks before today’s verdict. “Once they had attention, they were in the business of controlling the choices available to people in order to influence their behavior in ways that were profitable for the platform. That culture and that business model were guaranteed to produce lots of harm.”
Indeed, some watching the Los Angeles and other lawsuits move forward have anticipated a “Big Tobacco moment”—a reference to the 1990s lawsuits against tobacco companies that proved they were aware of the addictive nature of nicotine and the health dangers of smoking, and led to massive damages paid.
NYU professor and podcaster Scott Galloway, also speaking before the verdict, was even more blunt about what the attention race has meant for young people. “I don’t think [Big Tech] set out in their business plans to depress global youth,” he says. “I think their algorithms discovered that rage, self-esteem, and funny cat videos just keep people online.”
For Hill, the stakes are personal, not theoretical. She has now transitioned to an apartment owned by reSTART and carries a basic “dumb” phone with no apps or games. She still catches herself slipping into old patterns—like mindlessly scrolling through new screen backgrounds—but says something fundamental has shifted.
“After making so many mistakes, I’m finally putting a foot down and saying, ‘I want to get out of this endless cycle,’” she says. “I need to do something to better myself and my life.”
This article used reporting from the Associated Press.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
When Five Guys’ 40th birthday promotion collapsed under its own weight, most CEOs would have issued a polished apology and moved on. Instead, Jerry Murrell wrote his employees a check—1,500 of them to be exact. Now, the 82-year-old longtime founder of the franchise joked it wasn’t altruism: he was worried about his safety.
“I didn’t want anybody shooting me in the back or anything after the first day, because we really screwed it up. We had no idea that we were going to get that kind of response,” he joked.
In a candid phone call with Fortune, Murrell wove his quick wit between genuine concern for his employees, following what would otherwise be a logistical nightmare that would send CEOs reeling to their crisis comms teams. Instead, Murrell stepped up, apologized first to his employees and then to the public, and said they would do it again—this time, correctly.
“I was gonna buy my wife a new fur coat, and I spent it on [the bonus] instead,” Murrell said in a dry pan usually reserved for the likes of Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen. “She still looks at me like I’m stupid. But I thought it was worth it. They worked so hard. They were so overwhelmed.”
The problem started when the chain launched a BOGO deal on Feb. 17 to celebrate its 40th birthday. Almost immediately, the giveaway had gone awry: stores ran out of food, workers were overwhelmed, and lines stretched out the door.
The response “was unlike anything we’ve seen,” the chain said in a press release. “You visited our restaurants in overwhelming numbers, and we weren’t ready for you. We didn’t meet our own standards, and that’s not something we take lightly. So, we’re asking for a do-over,” the statement continued, giving details of a “40th After Party” that took place between March 9 and 12.
The turnout was particularly impressive for Murrell, who said he never really believed in promotions in the first place. “I’m a funny guy,” he said. “I always think it’s funny when people go to sales. I never thought they worked. We tried this one, buy one, get one free. Holy smokes. I couldn’t believe all the people that jumped on that. I thought maybe increased sales like 20% or something—that was like 130%. So I felt I screwed up.”
Rather than let his workers bear the consequences of his miscalculation, he distributed $1.5 million in bonuses—$1,000 per store—to the frontline crew that had held things together. Then, “we did it over again, and the crew did good that day, because they were prepared, but they worked so hard that I thought, now I better give them a bonus.”
The $1.5 million bonus wasn’t a one-off moment. It reflects a broader philosophy that has been baked into Five Guys since the beginning. According to its website, the chain donates 20% of sales from in-store community events to local organizations and charities, and corporate and franchise teams are active participants in groups like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Individual franchise owners have donated tens of thousands of dollars back to their communities through the company’s fundraising program.
Like the rest of the interview, Murrell brushed off his actions with another joke. “I had a dream the other night of what I thought heaven might be like. And I got up to heaven, and there was a guy in front of me, he was from McDonald’s. And St. Peter said to him, ‘What do you want here?’ The guy from McDonald’s says, ‘I want to get into heaven.’ So St. Peter said, ‘Spell cat.’ And then it was my turn. I’m from Five Guys, and St. Peter says to me, what do you want? I said, I want to get into heaven. He says, spell chrysanthemum.”
Five Guys remains one of the last major fast-food chains that are fully private and family-run. The name itself tells the story: Murrell and his wife Jamie have five sons, and the next generation is already embedded in the business. “We got 14 grandkids and 11 great grandkids, and I think nine or 10 of the grandkids are in the business too, so they seem to like the business. Looks like it’s going to carry on the way we have built it,” he said.
“We’ve just been real, real lucky, real fortunate.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The job market is frozen in place, and it may still be a while until it thaws, said Nicholas Bloom, the Stanford economist whose research explained why millions left their jobs during the Great Resignation.
His advice for people with a job right now? “don’t leave it,” Bloom said during a webinar at the Harvard Kennedy School last week titled “The Economic Consequences of the Iran War.”
Employers, despite eye-catching exceptions, are laying off employees at a historically low rate but are still reluctant to hire, meanwhile employees are “job-hugging,” essentially not leaving their positions at the lowest rate in years—a combination that’s stalling the job market, Bloom told Fortune in an email.
Yet, employees who may not be satisfied with their job for any reason such as their location or problems with their manager should be extra cautious about leaving, Bloom added in the email.
“Folks that want to change jobs should line one up before quitting their current role. You don’t want to quit a job to find that what you thought would be easy – getting another job – turns out to be a massive struggle,” he wrote.
The top economist, who previously worked for both consulting firm McKinsey and the U.K. Treasury, said the Iran war and its effects have also played a role in the current icy job market.
“This jobs market slowdown is driven in large part by rising economic and policy uncertainty, with policies against trade, immigration and wars making conditions unpredictable,” he wrote in the email to Fortune. “This uncertainty leads business to slow hiring.”
Bloom’s comments on the stalled job market stand in contrast to his research during the Great Resignation when job hopping became the norm as workers sought out better benefits and higher pay while employers struggled to recruit talent. In November 2021 alone, a record 4.5 million people left their jobs, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While Bloom had predicted the rise of remote work since before the pandemic, he noted in research done during the Great Resignation in 2022 that hybrid work policies could reduce quitting rates at companies by 35%. Allowing two days of working from home during a six month trial of more than 1,000 employees at Trip.com improved worker satisfaction and internal communication rates while slashing its churn rate, he and his coauthors found.
The tables have now turned. While recent data has shown the economy is still growing, job openings fell to 7.1 million in November, according to the most recent JOLTS report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February, employers shed 92,000 jobs, far above the 60,000 economists expected, while the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% from 4.3% in January.
Artificial intelligence is compounding the freeze, according to Bloom, particularly as some firms have used the technology as a reason to pause hiring. Earlier this month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said job creation is “pretty close to zero,” partly because of the increase in AI adoption that has led to layoffs and hiring pauses on the part of corporations. Large employers, he said, are talking less about expanding headcount. Instead, “much of the time they’re talking about AI and what it can do,” Powell told reporters during a press conference following the Fed’s interest rate decision earlier this month.
The Iran war has only added more uncertainty to the mix for workers. While oil prices are trading below the psychological level of $100 per barrel partly due to President Trump’s announcement earlier this week of a five-day pause on Iran strikes pending negotiations, a sustained increase in oil prices, as some analysts such as Goldman Sachs have predicted, could increase inflation and directly affect companies nationwide.
In the context of the oil market’s instability due to the Iran war, the Federal Reserve earlier this month opted to keep interest rates steady after having cut rates consistently since September. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s Market Probability Tracker now shows the possibility of a rate hike is more likely than a rate cut in the next three months.
For workers already struggling to find new jobs in a frozen labor market, the prospect of higher borrowing costs on top of geopolitical uncertainty could not have come at a worse time, as it directly affects businesses who already don’t want to make a costly mistake in overhiring.
“It’s costly to hire somebody and if you then discover, say, demand is lower than you expected [it’s] hard to reverse. So when you are uncertain you pause,” Bloom told CNBC in an interview.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
With Qatar’s liquefied natural gas shipments taken offline from the Iran war, Houston-based Cheniere Energy has become the world’s leading LNG exporter and CEO Jack Fusco said he is literally answering phone calls of “Help!” from Asia as a potential supply crisis begins to unfold.
“We’re going to try to get as many molecules as we can to those countries in Asia that really need it. But it’s a 28-day journey from the Gulf Coast to anywhere in Asia, so it’s not going to happen overnight,” Fusco said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston.
Cheniere is planning to start bringing on production for export cargoes from its newest LNG facility—known as a “train” in industry lingo—in Corpus Christi, Texas by the end of this week, Fusco said. Natural gas must be liquefied through the LNG trains to be safely exported over water. Two more Corpus trains are slated to come online later this year. Cheniere (No. 275 on the Fortune 500) is even looking at potential maintenance delays to keep production running at full capacity for longer, he said.
“We are trying to do whatever we can. We’re looking at our maintenance schedules really hard,” Fusco said. “But, at the end of the day, we have to be safe, and we have to be reliable. We don’t want to sacrifice anything to get that last drop out.”
The last waterborne LNG shipments from Qatar to Asia that were shipped before the war began were recently delivered, so the physical supply shortages of natural gas have not yet begun, although many Asian nations have implemented conservation efforts, including mandating work from home and closing schools. “I don’t think you’ve seen a real impact just as of yet,” Fusco said.
Qatar produces about 20% of the world’s LNG that’s offline at least in the short term. But, because of damages from Iranian attacks at Qatar’s Ras Laffan facilities, Qatar said 17% of its supplies could remain offline for five years for repairs while waiting for gas turbine deliveries. And, unlike the worldwide efforts to dip into global crude oil emergency supplies, there are few strategic reserves of natural gas, which is used for power, heating, and cooking.
Meanwhile, in 10 years, the U.S. has gone from zero LNG exports to leading the world. Cheniere’s very first cargo export was in February 2016. With a wave of U.S. construction underway, the U.S. is projected to double its LNG export capacity from 2025 to 2030, growing to roughly 30 billion cubic feet per day.
Even though the growth is rapid, that help cannot come as quickly as it’s needed in the current crunch. “We saw demand really pick up in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Egypt. Unfortunately, at these high prices, those emerging markets are the ones that are going to suffer. The rich countries are going to pay whatever they have to pay,” Fusco said.
The vast majority of the LNG growth is along the U.S. Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, but an Alaska LNG project is in development, and Canada became an exporter last year from British Columbia with the Shell-led LNG Canada project, offering a shorter route to Asia, with plans to grow other facilities significantly.
While there have been mounting concerns of an LNG capacity overbuild in the U.S, the domestic industry’s financial picture is now benefitting from the U.S.’ position as a secure supply for other countries.
“The current conflict has reinforced a critical lesson for LNG buyers: cost competitiveness alone is insufficient if supply security is vulnerable to single‑point‑of‑failure risks,” Morningstar analysts wrote in a March 25 report. “As a result, LNG buyers are increasingly prioritizing jurisdictional stability, contractual certainty, and diversified supply chains—criteria that strongly favor North American LNG.”
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has spent all week in Houston meeting with energy executives and repeatedly stating that natural gas is America’s “superpower.”
Despite the sharpest gas supply crisis being in Southeast Asia, most of Cheniere’s exports are still going to Europe on long-term contracts. The same applies to fellow exporter Freeport LNG.
“Europe would be at a standstill already” without U.S. LNG,” said Freeport LNG founder and CEO Michael Smith, pointing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Russia’s shutting off its gas supplies to the continent. “That continues today through this crisis, which hopefully will be over very soon.”
The only saving grace from the current war is the fact that winter is over, Smith said, and natural gas demand isn’t at a peak. The crisis would be much more dire if the war unfolded right before winter.
If the war hasn’t ended though in another month or two though, Smith warned, gas supplies will really run short, and prices will spike much more in a lot of the world. “That’s a scary thing.”
“Gas demand in the world is going to continue to grow at a very high clip. There’s no way around it,” Smith said. “We offer energy security that no other country can provide”—backed by the U.S. military.
For advocates of renewable energy and the environment, the war underscores the need for the world to hasten its transition away from fossil fuels. Perhaps not surprisingly, the industry executives at the Houston conference had a different analysis.
Toby Rice, the CEO of leading U.S. natural gas producer EQT, which supplies a lot of the LNG export hubs with gas, sees the war only increasing global demand for U.S. fossil fuels.
“International gas prices have gone up by $10. In the U.S., they went up 10 cents,” Rice told Fortune. “What is the value of our energy independence? You’re seeing it right now. We’ve insulated American from supply shocks around the world on the natural gas side.”
And, more U.S. exports mean more U.S. gas demand and production, Rice said. “We should care about providing energy security to the world, because that is providing even more energy security to Americans.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Muddy Waters made its name as a short-selling firm that exposed accounting trickery at publicly-traded Chinese firms. On March 17, the firm took aim at a new target: It accused SoFi, known for home and student loans, of a host of book-keeping shenanigans designed to enrich top executives at the expense of shareholders. These are the sort of accusations that, if true, could tank a company’s stock. But so far the market doesn’t appear to be buying Muddy Waters’ latest tale.
The short-seller set out its allegations on March 17, blasting out a report to journalists and social media that claimed SoFi had not actually sold a $312 million loan package but kept it on the company’s books with a sleight-of-hand financing arrangement. The Muddy Waters report also alleges that SoFi has been assigning the wrong discount rate to its student loan portfolio—essentially overvaluing it—as well as understating its exposure to loans in default.
“We believe SOFI is a financial engineering treadmill—not a healthy origination business. SOFI shareholders are incessantly diluted so management can hit bonus targets through GE Capital-style loan marks and Enron-esque off-balance-sheet structures that disguise borrowings as revenue,” said the report.
While such reports by Muddy Waters and others have in the past proved devastating, this one appears to be a misfire. While the report produced a minor dip in SoFi’s stock when it was published, the stock has since performed more or less in line with the S&P 500, while faring better than its fintech peer Chime.
The likely reason why SoFi stock has not cratered is that the allegations set forth in Muddy Waters’ report appear to be off the mark. In a research note by Mizuho, prominent analyst Don Dolev notes the report “has an impressive amount of detail and analysis” but that it misunderstands or mischaracterizes key facts related to the loan sale, discount rate and more.
In an interview, a person close to SoFi, who asked not to be named due to legal constraints, told Fortune that the company had concluded the short seller’s allegations were wrong, but decided not to publicly address them since they did not appear to be having an impact on the market. The person added that SoFi has told Muddy Waters it is contemplating legal action, potentially for defamation, but has not decided if it will take that step.
In response to questions about the Mizuho analyst’s conclusions, Muddy Waters founder Carson Block told Fortune by email that the analyst had misunderstood its findings.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Regardless of whether AI will lead to a “job apocalypse” or make work optional, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) is warning “the battle of our time will be AI”—and he predicts it’ll be particularly difficult for new grads entering the workforce, who face an 5.6% unemployment rate.
“I will bet anybody in the audience that goes to 30 or 35% within the next two years,” Warner said. “And if we don’t figure this out—I say this as a pro-AI, pro-tech guy—we’re going to get screwed.”
Warner’s estimate may seem extreme, but it tracks with AI leaders who are towing the line between warning the public of their tech predictions and starting widespread panic.
“If you take Dario, Sam, you take all the evangelists. I think they are literally consciously pulling back on their predictions because of the short-term economic disruption,” Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a panel at the Hill and Valley Forum, a conference bringing together Washington policymakers and Silicon Valley executives on Tuesday.
Warner, speaking at the panel entitled “From Capital to Capability: Rebuilding U.S. Industrial Strength” at the event, has often made statements to similar effect.Last week, Warner blasted the White House’s framework to regulate AI, saying it “lacks significant substance.” The Trump administration laid out general policy areas for Congress to address, including children’s privacy, intellectual property rights, and developing “an AI-ready workforce.” In a statement, Warner faulted the White House for shutting down the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bill on national security threats from advanced AI and ignoring AI-powered misinformation entirely.
The senator warned that it’s in the companies’ hands, not the government’s, if they want to reduce the adverse effects of AI.
“If you expect the government officials alone to solve this, you’re missing the boat. We desperately need your input and ideas and suggestions,” Warner, who is the former founder and managing director of venture capital firm Columbia Capital.
Warner pointed toAnthropic’s Claude’s footprint on software and HR job losses as reasons for AI executives to temper their public comments. Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that companies are “AI-washing” layoffs and using the technology as a scapegoat for workforce reductions. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has pulled back since his declaration last May that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs. In more recent comments, he’s shied away from specific predictions about the scale of AI-related job loss, and instead, wrote the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption in a wide-ranging 20,000-word essay in January. Yet, a recent survey of CFOs found that only 0.4%, or about 502,000 roles out of about 125 million roles, are expected to be lost this year.
Warner explained that AI disruption is different from the labor transformation that globalization caused because it will affect white-collar jobs.
“If we go way back in time, like three or four years ago, we would have said the policy prescription is, ‘let’s make everybody learn how to code.’ At least that was well intentioned, but completely the wrong answer,” Warner said.
Warner says the government ‘desperately’ needs industry input
Warner acknowledged the limits of the federal government to handle the potential economic fallout of AI disruption.
“We’re going to need the capabilities of the AI community to help us figure it out, and candidly, the largest players help pay for it, because I think this transition will be exponentially bigger than I believe today is going to be exponentially bigger and quicker than even what I believed five months ago.”
Students are already thinking of potential AI job displacement-proof careers before they even graduate. He gave the example of business: 1.63 million students, or nearly 9% of students, were enrolled in business bachelor’s degrees in 2025, making it the most popular degree in the U.S. Yet, the business and financial services industry is one of the most AI-exposed sectors.
“Those are where jobs are going to go. Maybe, Anthropic and OpenAI ought to go ahead and put up a fund to convert people from being business administration majors to nurses, at least in the short term,” but advised against government retraining programs, like Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers., which he said, “have mostly been bullshit.”
He pointed to how the government has struggled to regulate social media with dozens of bills that have failed to pass.
“Social media is tiny compared to AI,” he said. “I cannot stress enough that if we don’t get this transition right, all of the innovation opportunities, all of the healthcare opportunities, could get snuffed out.” He pointed to immigration barriers against international talents, such as the Trump administration’s $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, typically held by Indian and Chinese tech workers.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Economists are only growing more antsy about the state of the economy as the conflict in Iran continues.
Moody’s Analytics raised its recession outlook for the next 12 months to 48.6%, following the same pattern as Goldman Sachs, which now forecasts a 30% risk of recession, and EY-Parthenon, which put recession odds at 40%. The baseline probability of a recession sits around 15% to 20%.
Prior to the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran at the end of February, economic indicators were already suggesting precarious economic conditions. A dismal February jobs report showed the economy unexpectedly lost 92,000 jobs in the previous month, defying estimations of a 60,000-job increase and dashing hopes of a labor market recovery after the U.S. added just 181,000 jobs in 2025. Moreover, the unemployment rate is eking toward 4.5%, up from 3.4% three years ago, coinciding with decelerating wage growth, particularly for lower-income Americans.
On top of those factors, an ongoing war in the Gulf has raised concern among analysts of an oil shock being the tipping point to send the U.S. into a slump, one top economist warned.
“Even before the conflict, I thought recession and risks were on the rise,” Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, told CNBC on Wednesday. “Recession risks are very high—and unless the hostilities are coming to an end now, the president figures out a way to stand down, declare victory and move on, and Iranians follow suit—I think recession is more than likely by the second half of the year.”
Zandi warned earlier this week if the cost of oil continues trending upward, a recession is all but imminent. The cost of Brent crude has been hovering at around $97 per barrel, but reached a record-breaking $115 per barrel last week.
“Based on simulations of our global macroeconomic model, oil prices would only need to average close to $125 per barrel in the second quarter of this year,” Zandi said in an X post on Monday. “With tensions still elevated, that’s not a stretch.”
Despite President Donald Trump postponing plans on Monday to strike Iranian energy infrastructure and power plants (a move that added $1.7 trillion to stocks and brought down the price of oil by $17), Iran rejected the U.S. proposal to end the war on Wednesday, according to state television reports, and the Pentagon has reportedly ordered 2,000 Paramilitary troops to be sent to the Middle East.
Today’s rising energy prices—including a $1 per gallon increase at the pump—has prompted comparisons to the 1970s oil shock, when Arab state members of OPEC declared they would slash oil production and exports to countries in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. President Richard Nixon subsequently advocated for rationing U.S. oil supplies to keep prices from spiking, but the cost of gas still skyrocketed about 40%.
The Paris-based intergovernmental agency International Energy Agency (IEA), has cautioned the ongoing turmoil in the Gulf has exceeded that of a half century ago. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said the world is losing 11 million barrels of oil today compared to 5 billion during the crises in 1973 and 1979.
“The depth of the problem was not well appreciated by the decision makers around the world,” Birol told the National Press Club of Australia this week. “If you want to put in a context, this crisis as it stands now: two oil crises and one gas crisis put all together,” he said.
There’s also evidence the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz is impacting industries beyond energy. The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint for about one-third of the world’s global fertilizer. Minimal exports have already hiked fertilizer prices, threatening to impact which crops U.S. farmers grow, and potentially eventually driving up the price of groceries.
“There’s a very strong correlation between the movement of energy prices and the movement of food prices,” Ricky Volpe, an agricultural economist and professor of agribusiness at Cal Poly, told Fortune. “We’ve seen oil top $100 a gallon before and that happened to coincide with significant food price inflation.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Iran’s supreme leader is dead. Much of its military infrastructure is destroyed. Its allies are alienated. But the war against Israel and the U.S. has given Tehran something it might not have otherwise appreciated: the unprecedented leverage it holds over the Strait of Hormuz. Now, Iran is trying to milk it.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the hardline military force that has consolidated power within what remains of the Iranian regime following Khamenei’s death, has communicated a list of cease-fire conditions to the Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal. The two sides aren’t in direct contact, and the Journal reported that these conditions were sent through Middle Eastern intermediaries, though the U.S.’s recent fifteen-point-plan was sent through Pakistan. President Donald Trump, the “master of the deal” who has championed his ability to jawbone other nations through tariffs, has now insisted that his administration has been in fruitful negotiations with Iran, a claim Tehran has mocked by asking if the President was talking to himself.
The demands are sweeping: closure of all American military bases in the Persian Gulf; full reparations for U.S. strikes on Iranian territory; and the complete lifting of sanctions. Iran also seeks full preservation of its missile programs and guarantees that the war won’t restart, for itself and for Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But one demand stands apart from the rest.
Tehran wants a new order for the Strait of Hormuz—one that would let Iran collect fees from every ship that transits the waterway, modeled on the toll Egypt collects from vessels passing through the Suez Canal. The Suez uses a somewhat complex formula based on the tonnage of each ship, but on average, cargo ships pay $250,000 to cross. Since the Suez is a manmade canal, Egypt collects the toll to pay for the costs of constructing and maintaining it.
The Strait of Hormuz, on the other hand, is a natural waterway, and Tehran essentially wants to charge ships for the privilege of crossing it without being bombed. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Strait: roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through it each day. It is the single most important chokepoint in global energy markets,and though oil future markets have taken to bullishness with all the talks about peace talks (as of writing, Texas crude is at $89,), oil analysts are losing their voices from warning about the physical reality of the Straits’ closure catching up. Only two vessels crossed the Strait on March 24, according to figures from the S&P Global Market Intelligence team, much less than the usual 150-160 vessels that cross. And if those vessels would be required to pay a permanent Iranian toll, it would reshape the economics of global energy and hand Tehran a lever it could pull any time it wanted concessions from the West.
Iran has already started charging ships approximately $2 million to cross the Strait, which Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed. Analysts say that the premium is a “bargain” compared to the price of traditional shipping insurance premiums, which have skyrocketed since the war began. ut it effectively means that Tehran is leveraging the threat of its own missiles and mines to capture the profits of the insurers. Plus, an unconfirmed Iranian plan to require the ships to pay their toll in yuan, instead of dollars, would pose a great threat to the dominance of the American petrodollar, long considered the key to the U.S holding its reserve currency status.
A U.S. official called the demands ridiculous and unrealistic, and told the Journal the posturing will make reaching a deal harder than before Trump authorized the strikes that started the war.
That may be true. But the demands, of course, aren’t designed to be accepted at face value—rather, they’re designed to set a negotiating floor amidst whipsawing energy markets.
The IRGC is also flexing its influence, anchoring the negotiation on its terms and signaling to domestic audiences that Iran emerged from the war unbowed. The regime’s information council called the U.S. peace plan a wishlist of objectives that hadn’t been achieved on the battlefield. The semi-official news outlet Press TV said Iran doesn’t accept a ceasefire at all—only an end to the war “when it decides to do so” and when its strategic objectives are met. Trump’s 15-point-counterplan is equally maximalist, demanding a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program and the end of their funding proxies, according to Israel Channel 12.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A jury found both Meta and YouTube liable in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that aimed to hold social media platforms responsible for harm to children using their services, awarding the plaintiff $3 million in damages.
After more than 40 hours of deliberation across nine days, California jurors decided Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms. The jury also decided each company’s negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who says her use of social media as a child addicted her to the technology and exacerbated her mental health struggles.
The multimillion-dollar verdict will grow, as the jury decided the companies acted with malice, or highly egregious conduct, meaning they will hear new evidence shortly and head back into the deliberation room to decide on punitive damages.
Meta and Google-owned YouTube were the two remaining defendants in the case after TikTok and Snap each settled before the trial began.
Jurors listened to about a month of lawyers’ arguments, testimony and evidence, and they heard from the plaintiff herself, a 20-year-old woman identified as KGM in documents, or Kaley as her lawyers have called her during the trial, as well as Meta leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri. YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan, was not called in to testify.
Kaley says she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9 and told the jury she was on social media “all day long” as a child.
Lawyers representing Kaley, led by Mark Lanier, were tasked with proving that the respective defendants’ negligence was a substantial factor in causing Kaley’s harm. They pointed to specific design features they said were designed to “hook” young users, like the “infinite” nature of feeds that allowed for an endless supply of content, autoplay features, and even notifications.
The jurors were told not to take into account the content of the posts and videos that Kaley saw on the platforms. That’s because tech companies are shielded from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Meta consistently argued that Kaley had struggled with her mental health separate from her social media use, often pointing to her turbulent home life. Meta also said “not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause” of her mental health issues in a statement following closing arguments. But the plaintiffs did not have to prove that social media caused Kaley’s struggles — only that it was a “substantial factor” in causing her harm.
YouTube focused less on Kaley’s medical records and mental health history and more on her use of YouTube and the nature of the platform. They argued that YouTube is not a form of social media, but rather a video platform akin to television, and pointed to her declining YouTube use as she got older. According to their data, she spent about one minute a day on average watching YouTube Shorts since its inception. YouTube Shorts, which launched in 2020, is the platform’s section of short-form, vertical videos that have the “infinite scroll” feature the plaintiffs argued was addictive.
Lawyers representing both platforms also consistently pointed to the safety features and guardrails they each have available for people to monitor and customize their use.
The case, along with several others, has been randomly selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies play out.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center and the counsel of record for Kaley, said this trial was “a vehicle, not an outcome” during deliberations.
“This case is historic no matter what happens because it was the first,” Marquez-Garrett said, emphasizing the gravity of getting Meta and Google’s internal documents into the public record.
Marquez-Garrett said social media companies are “not taking the cancerous talcum powder off the shelves,” likely in reference to a past case that Lanier and his firm worked on, securing a multi-billion-dollar verdict. “And they’re not going to because they’re making too much money killing kids.”
Still, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the parents who trace their children’s deaths or harms back to social media will continue to keep fighting, Marquez-Garrett said, wearing several rubber wristbands in honor of victims that have not come off since the trial began.
The trial was one of several that social media companies face this year and beyond. They are the culmination of years of scrutiny of the platforms over child safety, and whether the companies make them addictive and serve up content that leads to depression, eating disorders or suicide.
Some experts see the reckoning as reminiscent of cases against tobacco and opioid markets, and the plaintiffs hope that social media platforms will see similar outcomes as cigarette makers and drug companies, pharmacies and distributors.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
2026 is the year many C-suite technology leaders will have to finally prove that their artificial intelligence investments are paying off.
But at Everpure, a data storage and cloud services provider, tracking AI’s return on investment comes with some key caveats. “I tend to think that measuring ROI and the efficacy of AI technology really depends on the use case,” says Rob Lee, Everpure’s chief technology and growth officer. “We have some use cases where it’s very clear, and it’s very objectively measurable.”
Some of the more straightforward AI deployments are easier to monitor. An AI bot that can autonomously handle vendor invoices with internal purchase orders, ensuring the reports are accurate before payment is issued, is one such case. Everpure’s “Bestie Bot,” an internal AI tool that helps employees self-service questions that would have been fielded by the human resources team, has strong ROI indicators, but is a bit harder to measure.
And then, there are the third-party AI coding assistants, which Lee says he is taking a closer look at in 2026. While Everpure’s engineers may report that they are saving time using these tools, Lee wants to be sure that the time saved by generating code faster isn’t just being reallocated to debugging because of code quality issues. “That’s an area that we are spending a bit more time this year, trying to sharpen our pencils,” says Lee.
A sharper focus on AI’s ROI comes as Everpure caps a fairly busy first quarter of the year. Last month, the company completed a corporate rebranding that involved changing its name from Pure Storage and announced a deal to acquire the data intelligence and security company 1touch. Everpure also reported fiscal year 2026 revenue of $3.7 billion, up 16% year-over-year. And for the new fiscal year, the top line is projected to increase by between 17% and 20%.
When placing AI bets, Lee says that other than a heightened degree of focus on governance and security, the factors he considers in the buy-versus-build debate are no different than those of any other technology investment. When push comes to shove, Everpure prefers the easier route of “buy” when an off-the-shelf AI tool can be minimally customized and generate desirable business results. But Everpure is also open to creating its own AI tools from scratch, especially if the application of AI would also integrate into the company’s external product offerings.
“That’s something that we’re more likely to want to own and develop over time,” says Lee.
Lee, a 12-year company veteran who initially served as chief architect of the company’s storage platform called FlashBlade, says the AI tools that he’s internally deployed for Everpure’s workforce frequently come from a dedicated, cross-functional team that sits under the CTO’s office and works with various business functions to explore priority AI use cases.
Working closely with vendors is also an option. Everpure’s Bestie Bot was built on top of enterprise AI startup Glean’s AI-powered search software, trained on the company’s corporate policies. That tool is saving HR one hour each day, according to Niki Armstrong, Everpure’s chief administrative and legal officer. She also worked closely with tech startup Eudia to build a contract review tool for the legal department.
“When I think about how we’re using these tools, it’s less time hunting for answers and more time exercising that independent, personalized judgment,” says Armstrong.
“Time saved” is a popular way that C-suite leaders tend to boast about the efficiency savings they get from AI, but what’s not always clear is what employees can do with their extra free time. Armstrong says she has specific tasks that the HR team can tackle with Bestie Bot in action. Her team will spend more time on success planning, pathways to support lateral moves and promotions, improving interview training, and mapping out the skills needed to support the company’s future.
“We can spend more time on the complex, high-stakes cases,” says Armstrong.
Lee says Everpure’s initial approach to generative AI was fairly cautious after the launch of ChatGPT, as the company wanted to take time to set up governance protocols around data privacy and security. Similarly, he has been slower to adopt agentic AI despite all the buzz. One in four enterprises were actively using AI agents by the end of 2025, up from just 11% in the first quarter of the year, according to a survey by accounting giant KPMG.
Everpure is further along in building out agentic workflows that fold into the company’s external product portfolio. But internally, Lee is waiting to get a clearer picture on the agentic tools offered by his enterprise resource planning, payroll, customer relationship management, and other software providers.
“It doesn’t do me any good to spend a bunch of effort to develop an agent if six months later, those vendors come out with their own agents that can largely do the same tasks,” says Lee.
John Kell
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
President Trump is turning to some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley—including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—to help guide U.S. policy on AI and other key technologies through a new White House advisory council.
A press release from the Office of Science and Technology Policy said the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST, “brings together the Nation’s foremost luminaries in science and technology to advise the President and provide recommendations on strengthening American leadership in science and technology.” It added that the council will focus on topics “related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.”
Each president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 has established a PCAST advisory committee of scientists, engineers, and industry leaders, the press release said.
Trump established the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by executive order in January, saying that “as our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”
The council, which can include up to 24 members, will be co-chaired by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and senior technology adviser Michael Kratsios. The newly appointed group includes Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, entrepreneur and investor David Friedberg, physicist and University of California, Santa Barbara professor John Martinis, Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard and AMD CEO Lisa Su.
Catz and Su are the only two women, while the lineup leans heavily toward industry leaders and investors shaping the commercial AI boom – Martinis is the only academic researcher.
Notably absent are OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, any executives from Microsoft, and Tesla, SpaceX and xAI CEO Elon Musk, who previously led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk has previously taken issue with perceived White House slights. In 2021, the Biden administration held an event on electric vehicles, but Tesla was not invited despite being the top U.S. EV seller. It was a decision Musk criticized, saying it “was odd” that Tesla wasn’t invited.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Americans are waiting longer than ever to buy their first home. And for many, it’s not happening until they’re middle-aged.
The median age of the first-time homebuyer rose to a record high of 40 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors, up from the early 30s roughly a decade ago. The average American today will get married and have their first kid in their late 20s or early 30s, according to Census and CDC data. Homebuying was once coupled with those milestones. But the housing market has grown increasingly unaffordable thanks to high interest rates and low supply, effectively reshaping the American life timeline.
And Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.
“The fact that it’s been going up is this affordability challenge,” he told Fortune in an exclusive interview, referring to the median age of the first-time homebuyer. “People are having to wait longer to save up and find their way into a down payment.”
“We aren’t expecting any relief in the short term,” he added. “I think it’s just going to take a while.”
Home prices are up 60% compared to pre-pandemic figures as the country endures a prolonged housing shortage, estimated at about 4.7 million according to a 2025 Zillow report. The situation has grown so dire some potential buyers are looking to their parents to pay their down payment.
The current economic outlook isn’t helping, either. Rising gas prices are eating away at Gen Z’s rent payments. And nearly three-in-five Americans today fear the encroaching AI job apocalypse could make housing even more unattainable. One of the central pillars of the American dream is becoming increasingly decoupled from the other key rites of adulthood.
Wacksman’s diagnosis of the situation is on par with what other economists, policy experts, and politicians have uttered: supply shortages.
He said one of his main concerns is homeowners delaying sales as they wait for mortgage rates to fall to more tolerable levels. Bringing those sellers back to market would add much-needed inventory and help ease prices. Instead, many remain shackled with “golden handcuffs,” as current conditions incentivize them to stay put.
“Sellers who’ve been holding on to their low mortgage rate will finally say, ‘Okay, I’ve been putting off the move,’” he said. “’Now the gap in my mortgage rate is tolerable and I’ll move and new listing supply will come online.’”
The CEO also lauded the Trump administration’s efforts on housing affordability, including the executive order President Donald Trump signed to reduce regulation around mortgages. He’s also hopeful a bipartisan housing bill—a measure aiming to reduce housing regulatory barriers and cap corporate ownership of homes, that passed the Senate with an 89-10 vote—could move the needle on the housing supply.
“What we’re most excited to see is that this is a big topic now, and it’s a topic across Washington on the supply side,” he said.
While many of the factors contributing to the housing affordability crisis are structural, Wacksman believes Zillow can at least improve the conditions for those who still think homeownership is out of reach.
Wacksman said an education gap remains a high barrier for many prospective buyers, as most don’t fully understand the complexity of housing transactions. The company is betting the launch of its new AI mode, announced Wednesday, will help close that gap. The feature allows users to interact with Zillow in a conversational format similar to ChatGPT.
“Tools like ours—Zillow AI mode, buyability in our financing tools—they can help educate buyers,” he said. “They can teach you: ‘How could I get it done? There are different mortgage options. Maybe I can look in a different market.’” According to a press release, Zillow AI mode can handle everything from answering affordability questions and comparing options to booking tours.
The company also launched Zillow Preview last week, a tool meant to expand listings on the platform by permitting agents and brokers to showcase “coming soon” listings. Wacksman thinks bringing pre-listings onto the platform will increase supply by publishing more house listings on Zillow, and help to address the housing shortage.
Still, the CEO said there are limitations to how the company can tackle the housing situation. “We can educate,” he said. “We can’t build more houses.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
There was a simple narrative about Rishi Sunak when he was defeated in the U.K. general election of 2024. The Stanford MBA graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst would quit Parliament, leave the U.K. and hot-foot it to California for lucrative roles towards the top of some hyperscaler or other. Sunak kept insisting it wasn’t true, despite the fact he often wore regulation Silicon Valley white trainers. Few people believed him.
Two years later, and Sunak has confounded the sceptics. He is still a Member of Parliament for a rural constituency in the north of England (AI use for dairy farmers is one of his specialties). And, although he is now an advisor to Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Anthropic, his work is resolutely anchored in the U.K. The Labour government is regularly in touch.
“My work with the two technology companies has left me even more convinced, not just about how much AI is going to change, but how quickly it’s going to change things too,” Sunak told a Goldman Sachs conference for small businesses held in Birmingham, England’s second city 100 miles north of London.
“It’s not just about transforming our economy—as much as that is important. I believe that AI is going to lift the floor for humanity and it’s going to do that because it’s going to make it possible for everyone, no matter where they are around the world, to have access to the best healthcare and education that money can buy. And I think that is an extraordinary democratizing force.”
He told the room full of chief executives that speed of adoption is “everything”. If you are not planning for the era of applied AI (in use in your business), then the risk is being left behind, sitting on the wrong side of a ‘K-shaped economy’.
“My work with the two technology companies has left me even more convinced, not just about how much AI is going to change, but how quickly it’s going to change things too”
Rishi Sunak, former U.K. Prime Minister
“Like steam power, like electricity, artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology which can and will change every aspect of our economy, of our society,” Sunak said. “With new technologies, we’ve all been through these cycles. There’s lots of hype out there, and people get carried away, but I genuinely believe that it is a conservative estimate to say that artificial intelligence will have twice the impact of the Industrial Revolution in just half the time.”
The question-and-answer session with the business leaders is revealing. Most feel they need support with making decisions as CEOs. Others know they need to train their staff so that new ways of being productive can be co-created, not ordered from above. Many fear losing their jobs, sometimes through ignorance rather than data. One founder flagged “false confidence” with splashy AI tools as worthy of note.
“It’s clear that when it comes to AI, the responsibility for it can’t sit in the IT department,” Sunak said. “It has to start with the leaders. Research from McKinsey shows that when leaders demonstrate ownership and commitment, they find that AI deployment in their organizations is far more successful. That doesn’t mean that you have to have deep technical expertise. You don’t need to become a coder overnight, but it’s about awareness [and] it’s about mindset.”
“When I go around the country talking to businesses, the single biggest mistake I see is that people start with the technology first and then try and find a use case for it which is completely the wrong way around.”
“The best thing to do is to look at your business first and figure out where the pain points are, where are those tasks that employees are really frustrated with, where are the processes that slow things down, or where are the bottlenecks that are limiting your growth? That is probably the best way to identify a set of initial AI use cases.”
One of the sessions at the Goldman Sach’s conference is titled “AI—friend or foe?”. Neither, of course. The key will be a CEO’s awareness of where AI can drive growth and revenue opportunities whilst retaining the very essential human leadership and guidance that makes each business and division unique. If everyone uses the same AI tools in the same way, then everyone risks offering the same AI-led solutions. And a world of AI-slop is not where anyone wants to be.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A scientist who pioneered the modern food processing safety standards used around the world was awarded this year’s World Food Prize, the organization announced Wednesday, crediting his work for averting millions of cases of foodborne illness and reducing food waste.
Huub Lelieveld of the Netherlands earned the award after six decades spent advancing ways to improve food safety and advocating for trade regulations that allow safe food to get around the world more easily.
“I just did what I thought was right,” Lelieveld said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I want everybody to have enough food but … it should also be safe.”
Lelieveld began his career as a food researcher at Unilever at a time when mechanisms for manufacturing safe food products were, to him, “illogical,” he said.
Food was often sterilized or chemically preserved after production, and equipment needed to be shut off once or twice each day to be cleaned, which was both difficult and time consuming. The processed food also required heavy use of preservatives, salt, sugar and acids to reduce the risk of contamination, which detracted from flavor and nutrition.
“I realized very soon that they did things in the wrong way, in my view,” Lelieveld said. “From the beginning, I’ve been working on … convincing people that you should do it in a different way.”
Lelieveld worked with colleagues to develop hygienic production methods and equipment, making food manufacturing more efficient and less reliant on chemicals.
Having scaled the processes at Unilever and shown that they worked, Lelieveld said the company gave him permission to publish the research for dissemination and use globally.
“My philosophy was: You should not compete on food safety,” Lelieveld said. “Spreading the technology, the hygienic technology, was very important.”
Unsafe food causes 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization.
“Lelieveld was selected for translating food safety science into global regulations, legislation and practice, a movement spanning dozens of countries,” Gebisa Ejeta, chair of the Laureate selection committee, said in a statement. “His initiatives are estimated to have benefited millions of consumers worldwide.”
The Iowa-based World Food Prize was founded by Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work to dramatically increase crop yields and reduce the threat of starvation in many countries. The agricultural science honor includes a $500,000 award.
“Lelieveld lives by his conviction that access to safe food is a universal right—a philosophy shared by the late Dr. Norman Borlaug,” Mashal Husain, World Food Prize Foundation president, said in a statement.
After four decades at Unilever, Lelieveld founded the Global Harmonization Initiative in 2004 to promote consensus in food and trade regulations around the world. Drawing on a network of a few thousand scientists around the world, the nonprofit organization also works to address critical food security challenges and to facilitate food safety education.
GHI “is extremely useful because it has this enormous pool of knowledge about food safety and food protection,” Lelieveld said.
Lelieveld said challenges for broad access to safe food and water persist, and he hopes to see a system where people can produce safe food and water locally even if the movement of goods across borders is restricted.
“You can’t stop the transport of water through the air, with the clouds,” he said. “You can produce safe water everywhere, but we need to distribute this knowledge to the people that need it and that is the biggest challenge.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Harvard University has had a turbulent few months. The school has faced leadership turmoil, renewed scrutiny over its former president Larry Summers’ past ties to Jeffery Epstein, and an escalating clash with the Trump administration—including a federal lawsuit filed just last week alleging antisemitism on campus.
None of it has knocked it off its perch. The Ivy league institution was once again deemed the No. 1 “dream school” among college applicants, according to a new survey by The Princeton Review.
Harvard has consistently ranked near the top throughout the survey’s 24-year history. Although it was dethroned last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this year’s revival suggests that sustained controversy has done little to dent its appeal.
“Harvard ultimately reigns as the world’s most desirable university with unparalleled brand recognition, alumni achievement and history,” Jamie Beaton, founder and CEO of Crimson Education—who holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the university—told Fortune. “Trump’s battle with Harvard has only made the school more notable and famous.”
While admissions for the incoming fall cohort are still being finalized, Harvard has only become more competitive over the years. Of the nearly 48,000 applications to its class of 2029—who started this past fall—only about 2,000 were admitted, an acceptance rate of around 4%. By comparison, the acceptance rate 18 years ago was about 9%.
For many Harvard students, the payoff of making it through the rigorous application process appears to be tangible.
In a survey of the class of 2025 by The Harvard Crimson, 95% of seniors said they would choose Harvard again. Early career earnings are likely part of the reason: roughly half of respondents expected to earn more than $90,000 in their first job, while about one in five anticipated salaries of $130,000 or higher—figures that far outpace national averages for new graduates.
The price tag, meanwhile, keeps climbing. Total billable costs this academic year—tuition, fees, housing, and food—reached $86,926, a roughly 9% increase over the past two years. Yet only 17% of seniors reported graduating with student loan debt. Harvard waives tuition entirely for undergraduates whose families earn $200,000 or less annually.
But Harvard isn’t alone in driving demand—and the composition of this year’s list suggests that prestige reigns supreme in the minds of most applicants. Adam Nguyen, founder of admissions consulting firm Ivy Link, isn’t surprised.
“Even in a market where families talk constantly about cost, practicality, and ROI, the schools that continue to dominate the imagination are still the ones with the strongest prestige, signaling power, alumni networks, and global brand value,” Nguyen told Fortune.
For all the allure of the Ivy League, those institutions represent a sliver of the American college experience—and the broader picture is more conflicted.
Cost anxiety has become the defining concern of the application process. The plurality of student and parent respondents in this year’s Princeton Review survey, 35%, cited impending debt levels as the biggest concern about the college application process. That’s a dramatic shift from the survey’s early years: in 2003, only 6% of respondents chose cost as their top concern.
The skepticism doesn’t end at graduation. More than a third of all graduates now say their college diploma was a “waste of money,” according to a survey by Indeed. Among Gen Z specifically, that figure rises to 51%. And with artificial intelligence reshaping the job market for entry-level talent, these worries are only expected to grow.
It’s pushing a growing number of young people to take a harder look at alternatives. Enrollment in vocational and trade programs has grown more than 20% between 2020 and 2025, according to National Student Clearinghouse Data. And business leaders like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have highlighted that opportunities to land secure, six-figure-paying blue-collar jobs are on the rise—thanks in part to the data center boom.
“This is the largest infrastructure build-out in human history that’s going to create a lot of jobs,” Huang said at the World Economic Forum earlier this year.
“We’re talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building chip factories or computer factories or AI factories.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Jamie Dimon, who has led America’s largest bank JPMorgan for 20 years and through multiple recessions, blasted remote work and offered a stern warning for any younger generations who want to move up the career ladder: get into the office.
“If you go to a meeting with me, you got my full friggin attention the whole time,” he said at the Hill and Valley Forum, which brought together leaders from Washington and Silicon Valley, on Tuesday.
During the session titled “Wealth, Power, and the Next American Century” Dimon said remote work only works well for certain jobs like call centers, but for everyone else, including young people and managers alike, in-person working is best. Young people, especially, he said, need to work in-person because they are still learning.
“They learn by going on a sales call. They learn by seeing you make a mistake. They learn by how you deal with the mistake,” Dimon said, adding that remote work also fails to help young people develop their emotional intelligence.
The problem is universal, Dimon said, and managers should also get comfortable sitting in the office. Video calls, which he compared to game show Hollywood Squares where contestants sit in a real life tic-tac-toe board, allow for much fewer checkups than would happen in person when you can ask someone directly for an update. Working from home, Dimon said, causes less ownership of a project, less curiosity, and, using a Muhammad Ali tactic, tires people faster.
“There’s very little follow up, a lot more game playing, you know, rope-a-dope type of politics,” he said.
Plus, he added, “a lot of people aren’t paying attention at all,” as many of them are on their phones while on a video call, a trend which he didn’t notice early on, he said.
The remarks are not new for the 70-year-old, who has often protested remote work for early-career employees, advocating for an “apprentice system” where younger workers learn from more experienced veterans.
“You can’t learn working from your basement,” he said in a Bloomberg interview last year.
Previously, Dimon has complained that remote work has made it more difficult to reach employees, especially on Fridays, which he said is “not how you run a great company.”
Other executives, such as Amazon’s Andy Jassy and Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri, have also pushed to bring employees back to the office for a full five days a week in the past two years. Still, not every business leader agrees. Shark Tank star and O’Leary Ventures chairman Kevin O’Leary has often advocated for remote work to better attract top candidates. In a video earlier this month, O’Leary said, “I’d rather hire somebody who can execute and sit in their basement or in their backyard.”
JPMorgan announced its own five-day in-office policy last year, prompting more than 1,200 employees to sign a petition urging the company to keep its flexible hybrid work model. During a town hall meeting last February, Dimon lashed out at employees for signing what he saw as a meaningless petition.
“Don’t waste time on it,” Dimon reportedly said during the town hall. “I don’t care how many people sign that f—ing petition.”
Despite what Dimon says, young people are not thrilled at the prospect of working from an office full time. While employers have leveraged the shaky job market to force employees back to the office full time, nearly 40% of Gen Z and Millennial employees said they would take a pay cut in exchange for more flexibility with where they work, compared to 32% across generations.
The research on remote work also doesn’t quite align with what executives like Dimon have said. A Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis from 2024 found a statistically significant positive correlation across 61 industries between the pandemic-era rise in remote work and productivity growth, among other positive outcomes. At the same time, Gallup’s State of the Workplace report from 2025 found fully remote workers actually report the highest engagement rates at 31%, compared to 23% for hybrid and on-site workers who are remote capable.
While Dimon acknowledged JPMorgan wants to keep its workers happy, he also said the company has to adapt to what its customers want.
“We’re not in business so my employee’s happy. I’m in business so my customer’s happy, and I want my employee to be happy, but not at the expense of the customer.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Women are no longer being siloed into secretary and back-room jobs; for decades, they’ve been breaking into male-dominated jobs they were once locked out of. Trading pencil skirts for scrubs and pilot uniforms, many women are making waves by taking up space in high-paying industries.
Women have been steadily flocking to six-figure roles in traditionally male-dominated industries like healthcare and engineering, according to a new report from Resume Genius analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The number one role with rising female representation is dentistry; in the early 2000s only around 25% of dentists were women, but today they represent nearly 40% of the field, one of the biggest increases over the past two decades. And with a median annual salary of $179,210, women are also stepping into cushy tax brackets.
Surgeon roles, which pay 239,200 annually, have also become a bright spot for women in the rapidly growing healthcare industry, with their representation more than doubling in the past two decades.
And the report notes that the profession’s shift to women actually stems from college; in 2019, women became the majority of U.S. medical school students for the first time ever.
Aside from high-paying healthcare jobs, women are also funnelling into lucrative STEM careers.
Women have steadily been increasing their headcounts in software developer jobs, which boasts an median annual salary of $131,450, as well as in mechanical engineer ($102,320) and industrial engineer ($101,140) roles. Their rise is a result of greater outreach to get women into these technical fields through scholarships, mentorships, and broader recruitment efforts.
Other jobs like informational security analysts (124,910), architects ($96,690), and airline pilots ($198,100) have seen women gain ground over the last two decades.
Women are also breaking into the C-suite; chief executives, who earn a median salary of $206,680, made the list of rising women’s representation. It comes as the number of women leading Fortune 500 companies hit a record of 55 in 2025; while they only account for 11% of executives on the list, this trend among others signals women’s growing presence in affluent jobs.
“While no country has reached full gender parity across all industries, more women are entering a wider range of fields than ever before,” the report noted.
Women have been dominating a fast-growing industry that can hold up against AI and recessionary headwinds: healthcare. They make up nearly 78% of all workers in the field, according to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, but men still outnumber women in high-paying doctor roles.
Even women who didn’t attend college are still taking advantage of the healthcare boom. Nursing, pediatric, and home health aids were among the hottest jobs for women without degrees, according to a 2025 report from Pew Research Center. Many roles in the profession don’t require a bachelor’s and can pay anywhere from $66,000 to $119,000 annually. These are all skills-based occupations, with no degree required—just a lot of patience, empathy, and mental fortitude.
And unlike other industries rocked by AI automation and sweeping layoffs, home health, doctor, and nursing job postings have hit a combined 162% growth since pre-pandemic, according to a 2025 report from Indeed. And it’s not expected to slow down anytime soon—the sector is resistant to AI jobs disruption and traditional economic downturns.
“Healthcare is a classic recession-resistant industry because medical care is always in demand,” Priya Rathod, career expert at Indeed, told Fortune in 2025. “During the 2007–2009 Great Recession, healthcare employment continued to grow even as overall U.S. payrolls shrank.”
Men may still dominate these high-paying professions, but women have been taking up space over time. Here are 10 roles in many traditionally male-dominated fields where women’s participation has steadily increased, according to Resume Genius.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Many entrepreneurs dream of that moment when they know they’ve really “made it.” That might look like turning a profit for the first time, or seeing how their product or service changes the lives of customers. It should feel like a moment of pride and celebration, but one multimillionaire serial entrepreneur admits it felt quite the opposite for her.
“The first time I made real money, I cried in a parking lot,” Emily Lyons wrote in a LinkedIn post in October. “Not because I was happy. Because I was terrified I’d lose it.”
Lyons, the founder and CEO of Femme Fatale Media Group and Lyons Elite, said this moment was so scary for her because she had grown up watching her parents fight about money. They had even been evicted from their home, and counted coins to take the subway.
“That kind of stress doesn’t leave your body,” Lyons wrote. “It just waits.”
Lyons founded Femme Fatale, a leading North American event-staffing and marketing agency headquartered in Toronto in 2009. She started the company at age 23 with just $80, a cracked laptop, and a vision to revolutionize event staffing. The company has grown to become a multimillion-dollar agency with a network of more than 20,000 event professionals serving clients like L’Oréal, Red Bull, Sony, and Grey Goose as well as other Fortune 500 companies. She was also recently named Entrepreneur of the Year at the CanadianSME Small Business Awards.
“I didn’t have investors or a safety net,” Lyons said in a statement. “I had a dream, and I was stubborn enough to keep going.”
Lyons also launched luxury dating service Lyons Elite, which was recognized three years in a row as the best matchmaking service in Canada by the Consumer Choice Awards. She also launched True Glue, a clean fake-lashes beauty brand in 2014, and founded the Julia Lyons Foundation, a charity supporting people with cystic fibrosis, inspired by the loss of her sister, Julia, to the disease.
Despite her success, Lyons said when her business finally took off and there were “commas in my bank account instead of panic, she “didn’t feel rich.”
“Money didn’t fix the fear,” she wrote. “It just exposed it.”
She references the old adage of “more money, more problems,” saying “wealth doesn’t erase your problems. It magnifies them.”
That anxiety encouraged Lyons to reframe her newfound wealth, though. She said she had to learn “earning it wasn’t a fluke,” and that she “deserved to keep” the money she had earned.
She learned “success wasn’t something that would be taken away the second I stopped looking,” she wrote.
This case study illustrates one of the innate challenges in being an entrepreneur or successful business person: imposter syndrome, or the psychological phenomenon of persistent self-doubt and the feeling of being a fraud despite evidence of competence and success.
“Turns out you can have everything you ever wanted and still not feel like enough,” Lyons wrote. “That’s the part they don’t put in the success stories.”
A study by Cambridge International City Montessori School, Lucknow published in January 2025 provides evidence that especially women transitioning from traditional employment to entrepreneurship often face imposter syndrome, but that cognitive restructuring, mentorship, networking, and social support can help.
Many other successful female entrepreneurs have said they’ve experienced imposter syndrome. Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, said not having female role models growing up contributed to feelings of imposter syndrome despite her company’s $120 million IPO in 2017. Writer and researcher Ali Kriegsman argued, though, imposter syndrome doesn’t have to be a weakness for women business owners to solve on their own—but there are resources to help.
“Success doesn’t heal you,” Lyons wrote. “It just gives you the resources to finally start.”
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on October 8, 2025.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
AI is making workers more productive than ever. In fact, it’s already quietly handing workers back chunks of their day—and instead of taking on more tasks, most are stepping away from their desks entirely.
New research from Zoom, conducted with Morning Consult across more than 1,000 knowledge workers, finds that among those already using AI tools, 76% say they’re saving at least 30 minutes a day, and 43% are saving an hour or more.
And they’re using that clawed-back time for a real break, not more work.
They’re sneaking in gym classes, running errands, and reclaiming the lunch break that corporate culture quietly killed off.
The survey paints a bleak picture of a workforce quietly suffocating under the weight of its own schedule. Three-quarters of respondents say they eat lunch while working at their desk, 60% shorten it to squeeze between meetings.
The irony? The majority acknowledge taking a real lunch break actually improves their stress levels and productivity. They know it helps. They just can’t stop. And they’re getting so burned out, experts are calling the crisis a “competence hangover.”
Enter AI. Among workers already using it, 80% say they’d use that time gained for a genuine break. In fact, 70% say AI is helping them step away from their screen. Remote workers are running errands and exercising. In-office workers are scrolling for a social reset or catching up with colleagues. Millennials and parents are leading the charge, with 70% more likely to reclaim that midday slot.
And increasingly, workers see AI as the tool that makes it structurally possible: Two in three believe AI can help them block out a full lunch hour; 66% say they’d be open to skipping lunch meetings now; and 70% say it can help restore work-life balance altogether.
“What we’re seeing isn’t just that AI makes work faster, it’s that AI is starting to take away a lot of the busywork that fills the day,” Kimberly Storin, Zoom CMO, told Fortune. “Time saved doesn’t come from one big thing, but instead from all the small, constant tasks that usually happen after a conversation, like writing notes, figuring out next steps, chasing follow-ups, updating different systems… all of that work adds up.”
For a long time, any efficiency gain in the workplace came with a catch: more output expected in return.
Plus, in a tougher job market where promotions are stalling and AI is quietly threatening whole categories of white-collar work, many high performers feel they have no choice but to over-deliver just to stay safe.
But Storin says something different is happening now.
“We’re starting to see people use that time to step away, even briefly, and reset, and leaders have a choice in how they respond to that,” she says.
Mark Cuban also made headlines this week, predicting the smartest companies will officially cut the workday by a full hour, with no change to salaries. But not everyone is convinced bosses will be so generous.
Mark Dixon, CEO of IWG, the world’s largest flexible workspace provider, told Fortune flatly a shorter workweek (or shorter work days, in this case) isn’t coming “any time soon.” His reasoning: Companies are under too much cost pressure to hand back time for nothing.
“Everyone’s having to control their labor costs because all costs have gone up so much, and you can’t get any more money from customers, so therefore you have to get more out of people,” he said.
But whether or not bosses officially shorten the day, workers aren’t waiting for permission. For now, they’re carving out 30-minute pockets of freedom and taking back the minutes the modern workplace took away.
“You can fill the space with more activity, or you can recognize that better work doesn’t always come from more hours,” Storin says.
“I do think giving people some of that time back matters, not necessarily as a perk, but as a reflection of how work should function,” she adds. “If the system is working, people shouldn’t have to grind through every minute of the day to keep up. “
“AI shouldn’t just help us do more,” she continues. “It should help work feel more manageable, and ultimately more human.”
And ultimately, many workers are already doing it—letting the AI handle the follow-up email while they finally step outside.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls the artificial intelligence company OpenAI and its flagship product ChatGPT, pledged Tuesday to grant out $1 billion over the next year and to build up its capacity as a philanthropic funder.
The pledge represents a major development in OpenAI’s philanthropic activities and offers insight into how the company, which started as a nonprofit, plans to carry out its charitable mission to develop AI to benefit “all of humanity.”
“We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives — while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances,” OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement Tuesday.
The new funding will support life science and health research and will seek to mitigate some of the impacts of AI technologies on jobs, the economy and mental health, especially of children, the nonprofit said. It follows a commitment to spend $25 billion to support similar causes that OpenAI Foundation made in October, though without providing a time frame.
OpenAI Foundation will also recruit a new executive director to oversee its grantmaking, it said.
OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 but has sought to escape that structure over the past several years as it built out its commercial technologies like ChatGPT and its for-profit subsidiary, which is now one of the most highly valued startups in the world.
In October, OpenAI finalized an agreement with regulators that left the nonprofit’s board in charge of its for-profit business but eased the way for investors and the company to profit from its technologies. The deal also clarified the nonprofit’s ownership stake in the company, which OpenAI said at the time was valued at $130 billion, making it one of the best-resourced nonprofits in the country.
Since the incorporation of its for-profit business in 2019, OpenAI’s nonprofit significantly scaled back its activities, going from listing $51 million in expenses in 2018 to $3.3 million the following year, according to its public tax filings. In 2024, the most recent year that the nonprofit reported its activities to the Internal Revenue Service, OpenAI’s nonprofit received $4,433 in contributions and granted out $7.6 million.
Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting and public affairs at The Ohio State University who specializes in nonprofits, cautioned that the tax forms were not well suited to capture OpenAI’s activities and the extent to which they were focused on achieving its charitable mission.
“People tend to focus on the financial part of that,” said Mittendorf in an email. “Is the immense value creation being used to further a charitable objective? But an equally important piece is whether the product they are developing is serving humanity as they envisioned.”
It’s a question that Elon Musk, an early financial backer of OpenAI, has also raised. Musk sued the company, claiming that CEO Sam Altman and others betrayed the nonprofit’s mission in pursuit of profit in a case that will go to trial in California.
In 2025, OpenAI made an effort to revitalize the nonprofit. It convened a temporary nonprofit advisory board to offer it nonbinding guidance about how to structure its philanthropic activities while it continued to negotiate with regulators and its investors about the extent to which the nonprofit board would remain in charge of its business.
The advisory board, which included labor leader Dolores Huerta, eventually recommended that OpenAI significantly increase the resources it provided to its nonprofit and to consult extensively with communities about how AI is impacting them as it shapes its grant making.
The nonprofit announced $40.5 million in grants to community-based nonprofits in December to support AI literacy, strengthen civic life and foster economic opportunity.
OpenAI’s new vision for its charitable grantmaking comes at the same time that communities around the country worry about data centers increasing electricity costs, lawsuits accuse AI chatbots of exacerbating mental health crises, and companies and advocates question the fitness of new AI technologies to be used in war.
In addition to hiring a new director, OpenAI Foundation said Wojciech Zaremba, one of a handful of OpenAI co-founders still working for the company, will become the foundation’s head of AI resilience, which is focused on the “new challenges that inevitably arise from more capable AI.”
Additionally, the nonprofit has brought on Jacob Trefethen to lead its life sciences and health grantmaking. Trefethen led a similar portfolio at the philanthropic organization, Coefficient Giving, which is a major funder of the effective altruism community that has sometimes clashed with OpenAI’s vision for artificial intelligence.
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The assignment involves no laptop, no chatbot and no technology of any kind. In fact, there’s no pen or paper, either.
Instead, students in Chris Schaffer’s biomedical engineering class at Cornell University are required to speak directly to an instructor in what he calls an “oral defense.”
It’s a testing method as old as Socrates and making a comeback in the AI age. A growing number of college professors say they are turning to oral exams, and combining a variety of old-fashioned and cutting-edge techniques, to help address a crisis in higher education.
“You won’t be able to AI your way through an oral exam,” says Schaffer, who introduced the oral defense last semester.
Educators are no longer naively wondering if students will use generative AI to do their homework for them. A big question now is how to determine what students are actually learning.
College instructors across the U.S. are noticing troubling new trends as generative artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated. Take-home essays and other written assignments are coming back perfect. But when students are asked to explain their work, they can’t. The long-term impact of AI use on critical thinking remains to be seen, but educators worry students increasingly see the hard work of thinking as optional.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Hammer, an associate professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, now pairs oral exams with written papers in her seminar classes.
“It comes across as if we’re trying to prevent cheating,” Hammer says. “That’s not why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because students are actually losing skills, losing cognitive capacity and creativity.”
Hammer forbids AI use on all writing assignments but tells her class she knows she can’t enforce that. However, if they haven’t written their papers themselves, defending the material face-to-face will likely be “a very stressful situation.”
Hammer’s class is part of “a massive shift toward in-person assessments,” both written and oral, at Penn, says Bruce Lenthall, executive director of the school’s Center for Teaching and Learning. The Ivy League school is one of a small but growing number of universities that have started running faculty workshops on oral exams.
Oral exams are not traditionally part of the modern American undergraduate system, unlike certain European universities. For instance, in the Oxbridge tutorial system in England, students meet faculty for weekly discussions. Some U.S. colleges saw a move toward oral exams during the COVID-19 pandemic to address concerns about online cheating, and interest has intensified since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
During the pandemic, engineering professor Huihui Qi launched a three-year study at the University of California, San Diego on how to scale oral exams. Several universities have since invited her to provide faculty workshops or discuss her research.
At New York University, several types of oral assessments are on the rise. More faculty are requiring office hours, assigning presentations and cold-calling on students in class. Instructors are saying, “I need to look my students in the eye and ask, ‘Do you know this material?’” says Clay Shirky, vice provost for AI and technology in education.
One NYU professor has put a modern spin on the traditional oral test.
Panos Ipeirotis, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, unveiled an AI-powered oral exam last semester for the final exam in a class on AI product management. He calls it “fighting fire with fire.”
Students log in from home, at any time that fits their schedule. A voice cloned from a business school professor greets them.
“Hi there,” says the voice on their screen. It asks for the student’s name and school ID number and then says, “I’m ready to conduct your exam today.”
The chatbot starts with questions about a final group project and drills into details based on each student’s answers. If the student stumbles, the AI agent gives them clues, along with criticism and positive feedback. Ipeirotis grades the exams separately, also with the help of AI.
“We wanted to check: Do you know what your team did? Were you a free rider? Did you outsource everything to AI?” says Ipeirotis, who designed the tool with ElevenLabs, a company that develops generative AI voice agents to conduct job interviews.
Students in the class this semester are redesigning the AI agent to smooth out some kinks, and Ipeirotis plans to use it in all his future classes.
“I want oral exams everywhere now. I want to pair it with every single written assignment,” says Ipeirotis. “I don’t trust written assignments anymore to be the result of actual thinking.”
Feedback from students last semester was mixed.
Business major Andrea Liu found the chatbot’s voice to be surprisingly human, but the conversation felt choppy with odd pauses. It asked multiple questions at once, which was confusing. And it was jarring to hear a voice but not see a person.
“It felt kind of awkward to be talking to what was pretty much a blank screen,” says Liu, 21.
But, she agreed with worried educators: “There is no perfect world where AI exists and kids are not abusing it.”
Across the humanities and STEM disciplines, like computer science, educators worry that students who skip the mental struggle that is necessary for problem solving won’t develop the skills they need to advance in upper-level classes and careers.
That’s why Schaffer, the Cornell professor, introduced the oral defense in his biomedical engineering class. He requires students to sign up for 20-minute sessions of Socratic-style questioning after submitting written problem sets, which are assigned several times each semester.
With a class of 70 students, Schaffer splits the job with his teaching assistants. They no longer grade the written problem sets, just the oral defenses. He calls it “incentivizing” his students to do the work, or at least understand it enough to explain.
Schaffer’s class is highlighted in a new “Oral Assessment Workshop” offered by Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation.
Other examples at Cornell: a religious studies professor who now holds 30-minute “final conversations” with students instead of a final exam; and another engineering course where the professor gives four-minute mock interviews to each student in a 180-person class.
Skeptics point out oral exams can be unsettling for students who are shy or have serious anxiety, but clarifying the format ahead of time and starting with softball questions can help, says Carolyn Aslan, who leads Cornell’s oral exam training.
“Sometimes it’s actually good to get that quiet student one-on-one, and you finally get to hear from them. Sometimes that is the breakthrough,” Aslan says.
Several of Schaffer’s students say they felt nervous at first but ended up preferring the oral exam.
“I honestly liked it a lot,” says Cornell junior Olivia Piserchia, a biomedical engineering major. She initially found the oral defense nerve-wracking but came to value the one-on-one time with instructors. It kept her from feeling lost in a large class and helped her build the skill of articulating her technical knowledge, as she would need to in a job.
“Having that live check-in holds you accountable,” says Piserchia. “It’s a lot harder to look people in the eyes and say out loud, ‘I don’t know this.’ And, that makes you realize, ‘I should study this.’”
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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Travelers passing through Philadelphia International Airport on Monday may have expected long security lines. But the longest line was made of cheesesteaks.
Organizers say they achieved a new Guinness World Record for the longest line of cheesesteak sandwiches, with 1,291 lined up inside a departure hall to mark National Cheesesteak Day. The display far surpassed the previous benchmark of 500 sandwiches.
“We went for the world record for the longest cheesesteak in history,” said Clarence LeJeune of MarketPlace PHL, a company that operates airport concessions. “Today we accomplished that goal here in Philadelphia.”
The cheesesteak, which originated in Philadelphia in the early 1900s, is widely considered the city’s signature food. LeJeune called it “synonymous” with Philadelphia, alongside its sports culture.
People in black aprons assembled cheesesteaks along tables set up in the walkway between Terminals B and C, filling rolls from silver buckets as they moved past storefronts.
After the record was certified, volunteers handed out the sandwiches to travelers, airport workers and Transportation Security Administration staff, who have been working without pay during the government shutdown.
LeJeune joked there are few hard rules for cheesesteaks, which is part of the “beauty of the experience” — except, he said, “You don’t ask for Swiss cheese,” referencing a 2003 moment when then-presidential candidate John Kerry drew criticism in Philadelphia for ordering one with Swiss.
Michael Empric, a Guinness World Records adjudicator, said rules require all food used in record attempts to be eaten or donated.
“In this case, they are going to TSA agents who definitely could use some lunch,” Empric said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Iran has received an American plan to pause the war in the Middle East, officials said Wednesday — a proposal sent even as Washington deploys paratroopers and more Marines to the region.
Tehran did not confirm receiving the plan and publicly dismissed the diplomatic effort while launching more attacks on Israel and Gulf Arab countries, including an assault that sparked a huge fire at Kuwait International Airport. Iran also continued to come under attack.
Two officials from Pakistan, which delivered the plan to Iran, described the 15-point proposal broadly, saying it addressed sanctions relief, a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program, limits on missiles and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped. An Egyptian official involved in the mediation efforts added that the proposal includes restrictions on Iran’s support for armed groups. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet released.
Some of those points were nonstarters in negotiations before the war: Iran has insisted it won’t discuss its ballistic missile program or its support of regional militias, which it views as key to its security. And its ability to control passage through the Strait of Hormuz represents one of its biggest strategic advantages.
Iran’s attacks on regional energy infrastructure along with its restrictions on the strait have sent oil prices skyrocketing and rocked world markets over fears of a global energy crisis, in turn putting pressure on the U.S. to find a way to end the chokehold and calm markets.
At least 1,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division will be sent to the Mideast in the coming days, three people with knowledge of the plans told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.
The paratroopers are trained to jump into hostile or contested areas to secure key territory and airfields.
The Pentagon is also in the process of sending about 5,000 more Marines, trained in amphibious assaults, and thousands of sailors to the region.
The 15-point plan now in Iranian hands is “a comprehensive deal” to reach a ceasefire, according to the Egyptian official.
Mediators are pushing for possible in-person talks between the Iranians and the Americans, perhaps as soon as Friday in Pakistan, the Egyptian and Pakistani officials said.
Speaking Tuesday at the White House, Trump said the U.S. is “in negotiations right now” and that the participants included special envoy Steve Witkoff, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. He has not said who from Iran they are in contact with.
“We have a number of people doing it,” Trump said. “And the other side, I can tell you, they’d like to make a deal.”
Iran’s Khatam Al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, which commands both the regular military and the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, dismissed the idea of talks. Iranian leaders have repeatedly denied they are happening, while acknowledging that the foreign minister is in contact with various countries but not the U.S. or Israel.
“Our first and last word has been the same from day one, and it will stay that way: Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you,” Lt. Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for the headquarters, said in the video statement aired on state television. “Not now, not ever.”
Israeli officials, who have been advocating for Trump to continue the war against Iran, were surprised by the submission of a ceasefire plan, according to a person who was briefed on the contours of the proposal and also confirmed it had been submitted. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Any talks between the U.S. and Iran would face monumental challenges. It’s not clear who in Iran’s government has the authority to negotiate — or would be willing to, as Israel has vowed to continue killing the country’s leaders.
Iran remains highly suspicious of the United States, which twice under the Trump administration has attacked during high-level diplomatic talks, including with the Feb. 28 strikes that started the current war.
“We have a very catastrophic experience with U.S. diplomacy,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told India Today on Tuesday.
The Israeli military announced new wide-scale attacks on Iran early Wednesday targeting government infrastructure, and witnesses reported airstrikes in the northwestern city of Qazvin.
Missile alert sirens sounded multiple times in Israel as Iran launched its own attacks.
Iran also kept up the pressure on its Gulf Arab neighbors, with Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry saying it had destroyed at least eight drones in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province, and missile alert sirens sounding in Bahrain.
Kuwait said it shot down multiple drones but one hit a fuel tank at Kuwait International Airport, sparking a fire, the General Civil Aviation Authority said. Firefighters were working to contain the blaze.
Iran’s death toll has passed 1,500, its Health Ministry has said. In Israel, 16 people have died. At least 13 U.S. military members have been killed, along with more than a dozen civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gulf Arab states.
Meanwhile, authorities say more than 1,000 people have died in Lebanon, where Israel has targeted the Iran-linked Hezbollah militant group, which has also fired on Israel.
The news of potential negotiations drove down the price of oil — after it skyrocketed in recent weeks.
Brent crude oil, the international standard, has neared $120 a barrel during the conflict but was trading below $100 Wednesday. It is still up around 35% from the start of the war.
Economists and leaders have warned of far-reaching effects if energy prices remain high — from rising prices on food and other basics to higher rates for mortgages and auto loans.
A big driver of the spike in the oil price has been Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, which leads from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean. Iran has allowed a small number of ships through the strait, but has said no ships from the U.S., Israel or countries seen as linked to them can pass.
Asked in the interview with India Today whether Iran was charging ships for passage, Baghaei, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said “absolutely.” He did not elaborate.
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Madhani reported from Washington, Rising from Bangkok and Ahmed from Islamabad. Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo, Natalie Melzer in Tel Aviv, Israel and E. Eduardo Castillo in Beijing contributed to this report.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
At 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time today, the price of oil sits at $99.75 per barrel, using Brent as the benchmark (we’ll explain what that means shortly). That’s a decrease of $2.72 since yesterday morning—but $26.64 more than at this time last year.
| oil price per barrel | % Change | |
| Price of oil yesterday | $102.47 | -2.65% |
| Price of oil 1 month ago | $71.49 | +39.53% |
| Price of oil 1 year ago | $73.11 | +36.43% |
Nobody can predict the future path of oil prices with certainty. A range of factors influence how oil trades, yet supply and demand remain the main drivers. When fears of economic slowdown, conflict, or similar shocks rise, oil prices can move sharply.
The price you see at the gas pump reflects more than just crude oil. Also built in are the costs of refining, distribution through wholesalers, various taxes, and the margin your neighborhood station charges.
Crude oil is still the largest single driver of the final pump price, typically representing over half of each gallon’s cost. Spikes in oil prices tend to push gas prices higher in short order. But when oil prices decline, gas prices often ease down gradually, a behavior known as “rockets and feathers.”
In the event of an emergency, the U.S. maintains a stockpile of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its main goal is to safeguard energy security when disasters strike—think sanctions, severe storm damage, or war. It can also do a lot to ease the pain of sudden price jumps when supply gets disrupted.
It’s not a permanent fix, as it’s more meant to provide immediate support for consumers and ensure critical parts of the economy like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, and so on can keep operating.
Both oil and natural gas play key roles as major sources of energy. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by proxy. If oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, increasing the demand for natural gas.
Oil prices are often measured by two key benchmarks:
Between the two, Brent is a better representation of global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. It’s also often the best way to review historical oil trends. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration now leans on Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.
When you look at the Brent benchmark across multiple decades, you’ll see that oil has been anything but consistent. It has experienced spikes driven by wars and supply cuts, as well as crashes linked to global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:
In short, oil’s historical performance has been far from steady. It’s massively affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.
Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:
The current price of oil per barrel depends largely on supply and demand, including news about potential future supply and demand (geopolitics, decisions made by OPEC+, etc.). In the U.S., prices also move based on how friendly an administration is to drilling, as it can affect future supply. For example, 2025 saw the Trump administration move to reopen more than 1.5 million acres in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing, reversing the Biden administration’s policy of limiting oil drilling in the Arctic.
The price of oil updates constantly when the “futures” markets are open. A futures market is effectively an auction where people agree to buy or sell oil in the future. As long as people and companies are trading contracts, the oil price is changing.
In short, shale is rock that contains oil and natural gas. Think of shale as energy yet to be tapped. The more shale the U.S. accesses, the more energy we’ll have—and the more easily oil prices can keep from spiking as much thanks to a greater supply.
When oil is expensive, it tends to make everyday items cost more. This can be related to energy (your heating, gas utilities, etc.), but it’s also due to the logistics involved with making those items accessible to you. Shipping, for example, can affect the price of things at the grocery store, as it’s more expensive to get those products from warehouses and farms onto the shelf.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Even as global unemployment hits historic lows, a sweeping new study of the global workforce by one of the definitive workforce data sources finds that “anxiety”—not confidence—defines how most workers feel about their job, their future, and AI transforming both.
The numbers don’t lie, and they don’t comfort. Only 22% of workers worldwide strongly agreed that their job was safe from elimination, according to a new report from ADP Research released Wednesday. The finding comes from one of the largest workforce sentiment surveys ever conducted—more than 39,000 workers across 36 countries—and lands with the force of a gut punch: The world’s workers are consumed by fear.
“Despite three years of historically low global unemployment and steady economic growth, our data reveals widespread job insecurity expressed by workers worldwide,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.
The culprit is hiding in plain sight: artificial intelligence. As generative AI tools race into the workplace at breakneck speed, workers from Tokyo to Topeka are struggling to process what it means for their livelihoods—and they’re not reassured by what they see. “AI is not like the weather. It is not just going to descend upon us,” Richardson told reporters in a briefing on the survey results in New York City. “It really is hitting us at the task level—by augmenting and making certain tasks more high value.”
The ADP Research Today at Work 2026 report, based on survey responses collected in late summer 2025, paints a portrait of a global workforce caught in the crosscurrents of technological disruption, demographic upheaval, and deep uncertainty. The anxiety cuts across borders and industries, but ADP found that it hits hardest at the bottom of the organizational ladder.
Among individual contributors—the frontline workers who make up the bulk of most companies’ headcount—only 18% felt their job was safe. Frontline managers fared only slightly better at 21%. Confidence rose predictably with seniority: Middle managers came in at 23%, upper managers at 31%, and C-suite executives at 35%. In other words, the higher your perch in the org chart, the less afraid you are of falling. But even then, only barely more than a third of top executives feel like they have job security, according to the results.
The geographic divides are equally stark. In Japan—a country long defined by lifetime employment culture—only 5% of workers felt their jobs were secure, the lowest reading of any market in the survey. Nigeria, by contrast, registered the most confident workforce, with 38% of workers expressing job security, driven largely by a young, tech-savvy population and booming AI adoption. In the United States, the figure was 28%.
The paradox at the heart of the report is this: AI use is correlated with higher engagement and less stress, yet it’s also making workers feel dramatically less productive. Daily AI users were four times as likely as nonusers to say they weren’t as productive as they could be.
The explanation, researchers suggest, is psychological. AI has taken over the small, checklist-style tasks that gave workers a sense of daily accomplishment—answering emails, summarizing documents, generating first drafts. Without those quick wins, people feel as if they’ve done less, even when they’ve arguably done more. “AI does the things that we used to say make us feel productive,” Richardson explained to reporters. “It writes our emails for us. It responds. It summarizes documents for us. And so we have to kind of remeasure productivity in a different way; it’s shifting from productivity based on volume of work to value [of work].”
The flip side: 30% of daily AI users were fully engaged at work, versus just 14% of those who never use AI. Heavy AI users were also significantly less likely to experience negative stress: 11% reported feeling overloaded, compared with 23% of nonusers. The data suggests AI may be a powerful tool for worker well-being, if companies can figure out how to deploy it without triggering dread.
The creeping, unpaid extension of the workday isn’t helping with this angst over productivity: 62% of global workers said they put in up to five hours of unpaid work per week, while 38% reported working off the clock for six hours or more; 12%—disproportionately executives and upper managers—said they work without pay for 16 hours or more weekly.
The data reveals a troubling paradox: Workers logging the most unpaid hours are simultaneously the most engaged and the most likely to be looking for another job. They’re dedicated enough to give their time for free, yet burned out enough to be quietly interviewing elsewhere. “Free work comes at a cost,” the report concludes. “People who put in unpaid hours are more likely to feel unproductive and stressed. They’re also more likely to quit.”
“AI is entering a workforce that is anxious,” said Jay Caldwell, ADP’s chief talent officer. “And to me, that’s very, very risky. And the importance for HR professionals right now is not as much about the technology. It’s more around, ‘How do we lead through the technology? And how do we bring our workforce along?’ And the transformation that comes with that.”
Compounding the AI anxiety is a demographic collision unlike anything the modern workplace has ever seen. For the first time in history, five generations are working side by side—from teenagers to great-grandparents. And they are not on the same page.
Young workers ages 18 to 26 were the most optimistic, with 29% saying they had the skills needed to advance. But older workers ages 55 to 64 told a bleaker story: Only 18% felt similarly equipped, and just 12% believed their employer was investing in their development. Meanwhile, 20% of young workers strongly agreed AI would positively impact their jobs in the next year—a figure that dropped to just 10% among workers ages 55 to 64.
“Younger workers are definitely more optimistic about their skill set,” Richardson told reporters. “Older workers are also, you know, more likely to say that they’re financially unprepared. Which is interesting. They make more money, but they feel more stretched financially. They’re more likely to say that they’re less productive and less engaged than younger workers. Youth and optimism go hand in hand.” She connected these findings back to Japan, which has a culture famously respectful towards elders. Fortune has previously covered the madogiwazoku, or “window workers,” who are so named because they sometimes just stare out the window. The upshot is that jobs for younger workers are harder to come by.
The data also exposes a troubling engagement crisis hiding beneath the surface calm of low unemployment. Only 19% of workers globally were fully engaged on the job in 2025—unchanged from the year before—meaning more than 80% of the world’s workforce is, by some measure, just going through the motions. Workers who find meaning in their jobs are 12.5 times as likely to be fully engaged as those who don’t.
ADP researchers are emphatic that the anxiety gripping workers is not inevitable; it is, in large part, a leadership failure. Workers who feel their employers are investing in their skills were 5.3 times as likely to feel their jobs were secure. Among those who strongly agreed their employer was investing in them, 53% were fully engaged. Among those who didn’t feel that investment, only 12% were.
The prescription is clear: Communicate, upskill, and stop treating workers as passive recipients of technological change. “Upskilling isn’t just a strategy,” Richardson said at the briefing. “It’s a reassurance. It’s a trust pact between the employer and the worker.”
Caldwell urged HR professionals to help workers reframe what productivity even means in an AI-driven world—away from task volume and toward judgment, creativity, and long-term impact. “Workers who clearly see the role their existing skill sets will play in an organization’s future,” Caldwell said, “will be more engaged, productive, and have the confidence to thrive in this next era of work.”
For now, though, the world’s workers are mostly not thriving. They’re waiting, watching, and wondering whether their jobs will survive the machines. The survey suggests that the answer—for most—remains maddeningly unclear.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning. AI is escaping the screen and that should be setting off both alarms and opportunities in the finance function.
Deloitte’s new CFO Guide to Tech Trends 2026 explores how finance leaders can think strategically about emerging technologies and embrace what’s possible, which in turn elevates their function’s value and helps shape what’s next for their entire organization.
One tech trend on the rise is AI-enabled robotics. AI is no longer confined to dashboards and copilots. “Physical AI,” which is the convergence of AI with robotics, sensors, and real-world systems, marks a turning point. As Deloitte notes, intelligence is becoming “embodied” in factories, warehouses, and supply chains, where autonomous systems can optimize operations in real time. For example, BMW is testing humanoid robots to handle tasks that traditional industrial robots cannot perform, according to Deloitte. Meanwhile, the Bank of America Institute projects that the material costs of a humanoid robot could fall from $35,000 in 2025 to between $13,000 and $17,000 by 2035.
Why should CFOs care about AI-driven robots? According to the report, they directly affect both costs and ROI. Adopting physical AI can reshape products, operations, and supply chains, influencing everything from manufacturing to quality control. Finance leaders must ensure these changes are accurately reflected in KPIs and financial reporting to drive competitive advantage. At the same time, CFOs need to strengthen how they measure ROI in a hybrid human–AI workforce and invest in upskilling finance teams to understand and manage the financial implications of this technology.
But physical AI is just one piece of a broader transformation. Deloitte highlights a surge in agentic AI, systems that don’t just analyze but act, alongside a resurgence in hardware investment, as AI workloads demand specialized infrastructure. These shifts introduce new cost structures, including rising energy consumption and capital intensity, placing CFOs at the center of critical trade-off decisions.
The finance function’s role is expanding from measuring performance to shaping the technological bets that will determine it.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The question on Wall Street’s lips this week has been about Iran: When and how will the war end? President Trump issued some positive updates over the past 48 hours, though some analysts have pointed out there’s little verifiable action at present to support those claims.
BlackRock CEO and founder Larry Fink sees the conflict ending in one of two extremes: Global powers accept Iran, and its goods and services (most importantly, its oil) is released onto the world market, pushing prices down. Or, the Iranian regime continues to stand at odds with global adversaries, and oil prices stay significantly elevated not for mere months, but for years.
Wall Street has been determinedly upbeat about the war in Iran resolving in a relatively short window—even the ever-skeptical Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said he is a “little optimistic” about the long-term outcome of the current chaos in the Middle East.
Fink also wants to be hopeful, and outlined there is a best-case scenario: “I could paint a scenario where I could see, a year from now, oil at $40 a barrel, I could see it above $150—we have two very extreme outcomes,” Fink told the BBC this morning.
“Everybody has to recognise that there’s not going to come somewhere in the middle. It’s going to be [one] of two extremes: Is Iran a country that can be accepted by the international community, can it be a country that participates in the world again?” Fink mused. Such an outcome could slash oil prices, flooding the market with supply currently choked by military threats in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf through which exports from the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq all flow. Some 20 million barrels of oil typically flow through the strait every day, about 20% of the global oil supply. Iran has said it controls the strait, littering it with mines, meaning shipmasters are too nervous to enter the waterway—only certain ships, paying a hefty price tag, have been allowed to pass by the Iranian authorities.
Oil prices have already spiked in response to the chokehold, with analysts questioning how quickly normal trade may resume once the conflict draws to a close. If the conflict does rumble on for longer than the roughly month-long window President Trump had indicated, this will have longer-lasting impacts on gas and energy prices—a particular concern for consumers already sensitive to affordability shocks.
“Iran remains a threat,” Fink continued. “A threat to trade, a threat to the Strait of Hormuz, a threat to the peaceful coexistence of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) region—I would argue that we could have years of above-$100, closer to $150 oil, which has profound implications in the economy. The $40 oil implication is one of abundance and growth; the other is an outcome of probably stark and steep recession. I don’t think anybody knows what the outcome will be.”
The U.S. and Israel, to some extent, have already achieved their aim in Iran: The country’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed earlier this month. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, now leads the country. Indeed, if the younger Khamenei is more open to working alongside the West, then Trump could easily wind down the conflict and maintain the rhetoric that he achieved his aim of eliminating a threat.
If Iran’s leadership wants to continue to be an “exporter of fear” and chooses to work against international trade, Fink added: “We’ll have global recession. Think about what it means for agricultural prices, fertilisers is a by-product from gas … it really disrupts a lot of supply chains.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
As I’ve been rewatching HBO’s Silicon Valley, my favorite roast of the first season is the incessant refrain that tech is “making the world a better place.”
But that isn’t always true, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been thinking that I’ve spent a lot of time covering the capital and companies, but not nearly enough time writing about the world this technology creates. I was especially thinking that as I read my colleague Kristin Stoller’s new feature about tech addiction, published this week. It’s a story that spans years and companies. Case in point:
At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”
At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”
Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction.
Though some say tech addiction doesn’t exist, evidence is mounting that the growing string of legal cases against startups like Character and giants like Meta, Alphabet-owned YouTube, and TikTok could create an unambiguous inflection point.
Read more about who gets addicted—and whether tech is approaching a “Big Tobacco” moment here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning. Sarah London, the youngest-ever female CEO to run a Fortune 500 company, isn’t leading from a place of comfort. As federal cuts and new regulations reshape U.S. health care, the chief executive of Centene, the country’s biggest Medicaid insurer, is reimagining what it means to innovate in a constrained environment. Her playbook is less about bold spending and more about disciplined reinvention; she’s streamlining operations, shedding noncore businesses, and using predictive algorithms to help manage care for vulnerable populations. At a moment when “the country is getting poorer and sicker,” as she puts it, London’s version of innovation isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about using technology to keep the social safety net intact.
Centene grew revenue almost 20% last year amid drastic cuts to federal Medicaid spending that have inflicted pain on the bottom line and customers. That hasn’t stopped London from focusing on programs that tie affordable housing to health care or leveraging AI to identify and deliver a suite of services to members with high-risk pregnancies.
“There is an opportunity in this moment to innovate and deliver within the construct of these programs,” she told me. “We’re harnessing this moment to transform and simplify the organization, to lean into our mission and the levers that are going to fundamentally change how we power that mission.”
Companies that stand the test of time tend to draw on their strong foundation to lean into the future. They’re focused on what’s ahead without ignoring the value that comes with expertise, relationships and brand. Case in point: the pioneering giants on Fortune’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies list, out this morning. As many of you know, we’re holding a Fortune 500 Innovation Forum in Detroit on Nov. 17 and 18 to look at the next 250 years of American innovation. It’s part of a broader push to dig into the issues and opportunities around innovation, and to highlight the companies that are shaping what’s next. Get in touch with me or find out more here if you’re interested in joining us.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Millions of Americans don’t have enough saved for retirement — and millions more don’t know where to start. With President Trump recently pointing to Australia’s retirement system as a potential U.S. blueprint, this is a rare moment when reform momentum is actually building. Policymakers should seize it.
Consider a young worker starting their first job today. Recent legislation means they’re likely automatically enrolled in a 401(k) from day one — real progress. But fast-forward a few decades: that same worker may have cycled through six employers, accumulated a tangle of small accounts, and still face the question that haunts millions of Americans: Will this be enough?
That story is increasingly the norm. Longer lifespans, less linear careers, a rising cost of living, and tighter government budgets are redefining what retirement security even means. The 2019 SECURE Act and its 2022 successor made meaningful progress — but gaps in longevity protection, savings adequacy, and coverage persist. With 401(k) and 403(b) plans now the backbone of retirement for most Americans, the case for deeper reform is urgent.
The Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index — which benchmarks retirement systems across 50+ markets on adequacy, sustainability, and integrity — makes the problem concrete. The U.S. scores well on integrity but consistently lags on adequacy and sustainability, exactly where reform could have the most immediate impact.
The result: the U.S. sits in the middle of the global rankings while countries like Australia lead the pack. Without reform, more Americans risk reaching retirement without enough income — or the tools to access what they’ve saved.
1. Turn savings into income that lasts
Saving is only half the challenge. The harder problem is converting a 401(k) balance into reliable income that doesn’t run out. Too often, workers change jobs and cash out small accounts rather than rolling them over — permanently shrinking their retirement nest egg.
With the U.S. population over 60 projected to double by 2050, longevity risk isn’t abstract. Simpler rollover processes and clearer disclosures would go a long way toward helping workers preserve their savings — and plan for a retirement that could last 30 years.
2. Close the coverage gaps
Retirement savings in the U.S. remain deeply uneven. Younger workers, part-timers, and caregivers are the most underserved — and many have little visibility into whether they’re on track.
Three targeted fixes could close much of that gap: automatic reenrollment for workers who previously opted out; extending coverage to workers under 21, building on the SECURE Act’s expansion for part-timers; and special catch-up contributions for caregivers who temporarily leave the workforce. Together, these changes would broaden access and reward the workers most likely to fall behind.
3. Modernize investments — and reduce legal risk
In 2025, the President signed an executive order directing regulators to ease restrictions on private market investments in 401(k) plans — following Australia’s long-standing approach. Giving savers access to private equity, venture capital, and digital assets could improve diversification and returns. But many employers are still waiting on clear guidance around fiduciary safe harbors, liquidity, and fees before they act.
Allowing 403(b) plans — which cover millions of government and nonprofit workers — to invest in collective investment trusts, as 401(k) plans already can, would lower costs and broaden access for an underserved segment of the workforce.
Legal risk is also a growing deterrent. Employer-sponsored plans have faced a surge of litigation in recent years, and policymakers should explore targeted ways to deter frivolous lawsuits while keeping legitimate claims viable.
Most new retirement savings now flow into 401(k)s and 403(b)s, but a significant share of existing retirement wealth still sits in traditional defined benefit pensions. Modernizing the system can’t mean abandoning what still works.
Lowering Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) premiums would encourage employers to keep sponsoring DB plans. Greater flexibility in deploying surplus DB assets could also benefit both workers and plan sponsors.
Policymakers should also support DB designs that reduce financial volatility for sponsors — such as pooled employer plans, which would make it easier for smaller organizations to offer a pension at all.
Better retirement policy isn’t about winning a global ranking. It’s about ensuring future generations can retire with dignity — even as careers grow less linear and lifespans grow longer.
The reforms outlined here — expanding lifetime income options, closing coverage gaps, modernizing investment rules, reducing legal risk, and strengthening pension protections — would make the U.S. system more resilient and more fair. The window for action is open. Policymakers shouldn’t let it close.
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
Goldman Sachs is sounding a cautious note on the U.S. economy, raising its inflation forecast and trimming its growth outlook in response to surging oil prices caused by disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz. But even as recession risks climb, most of Wall Street’s base case remains slower growth — not an outright downturn.
In its weekly U.S. economics update published on Tuesday, Goldman said it now expects Brent crude to average $105 per barrel in March and $115 in April before retreating to $80 by year-end, assuming roughly six weeks of Hormuz supply disruptions. On the back of that revised oil outlook, the bank raised its headline PCE inflation forecast by 0.2 percentage points to 3.1% by December 2026 and nudged its full-year GDP growth estimate down to 2.1%. Goldman also raised its recession probability by 5 percentage points — to 30% — while stressing that a recession is still not its base case.
One relative reassurance: Goldman does not expect the oil shock to durably unhinge inflation expectations. Even major energy shocks in recent history did not produce lasting shifts in where consumers and businesses expect prices to settle, the bank noted, though it flagged post-pandemic inflation psychology as a risk worth watching.
Opinions across Wall Street diverge meaningfully, with some offering more dramatic warnings than Goldman about a potential recession. JPMorgan’s Bob Michele has warned the Iran war is not merely an inflation “speed bump,” pushing back on the Fed’s own projections and arguing that price pressures could stay sticky well into the second half of the year. EY-Parthenon puts recession odds at 40%, citing cascading effects on LNG infrastructure and refining systems beyond the oil market itself. Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi has argued that recession odds were near even—before war broke out.
But others see the economy’s glass as considerably more than half full. BNP Paribas argues the U.S. is “well-positioned to absorb the shock,” pointing to America’s status as the world’s largest crude producer and net energy exporter — a structural advantage that simply didn’t exist during the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. Higher oil prices redistribute income within the U.S. economy rather than draining it abroad, limiting the macro damage. The U.S. also uses significantly less energy per unit of GDP than in prior decades, blunting the inflationary punch that past supply shocks delivered.
The Federal Reserve held its policy rate steady at 3.5%–3.75% at last week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting — a decision Goldman characterized as “a bit more hawkish than expected”. Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the inflation risk from oil while placing employment and price concerns on equal footing, signaling that rate cuts remain possible but are not imminent. Goldman still expects two 25-basis-point cuts in September and December, bringing rates to 3–3.25% by year-end, and pushed back on market pricing that has begun to bake in rate hikes.
The outcome hinges heavily on one variable: how long the Hormuz disruptions last. A swift de-escalation would allow oil risk premiums to fade and limit economic damage to a few tenths of a percentage point of growth. A prolonged conflict, by contrast, would entrench energy costs, crimp consumer spending, and force the Fed into an increasingly uncomfortable corner. Goldman currently puts that worst-case scenario—severe and sustained—as just that: a tail risk, not a forecast.
For now, the base case across most of Wall Street is an economy that slows but holds — with inflation running hotter than the Fed would like, growth below its long-run potential, and the next few months of geopolitical news determining which scenario ultimately wins out.
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
Europe is living through its third energy price shock in four years. In 2022, Russia weaponized its gas pipelines. In 2023–24, conflict in the Red Sea disrupted shipping lanes. Now, war in the Middle East has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz.
Oil has breached $100 a barrel for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stock markets are in freefall. European gas prices have surged roughly 70%. Each time the trigger is different. The vulnerability is always the same: Europe runs on fuel it does not own, shipped through waters it does not control.
Wind and solar cannot be embargoed, blockaded, or shut off by a foreign power. Every terawatt-hour of domestic renewable generation is a terawatt-hour that no adversary can weaponize. Unlike the U.S., Europe has no shale gas. Unlike China, it cannot fall back on cheap domestic coal. The only energy Europe can produce at scale, on its own soil, is renewable electricity. Europe must now become the world’s first Electro-Continent.
This is not only about shielding against the next geopolitical shock. It is about building the foundation for the next industrial era.
The IEA projects that global data-center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, reaching roughly 945 terawatt-hours — more than Japan consumes today. The winner of the next industrial revolution will not be the region with the best engineers. It will be the region that can deliver the cheapest, most abundant, fastest-to-deploy power.
Europe is being squeezed from both sides. Industrial electricity prices in the EU are roughly twice those in the U.S. and about 50% higher than in China — a gap that is widening. European founders are already world-class at innovation. But no amount of innovation can overcome a 100% overhead on your primary industrial input.
Both superpowers have understood that energy abundance is a strategic necessity. China invested over $1 trillion in clean energy in 2025. The U.S. enjoys the double advantage of cheap domestic shale gas and the massive capital commitments of Big Tech. As former ECB President Mario Draghi’s landmark competitiveness report made clear, Europe’s industrial base is bleeding out because of energy costs. If Europe wants to host the next generation of €100 billion companies, it must fix the foundation.
The good news: renewable energy prices have dropped more than 90% over the past decade. In 2025, over 90% of new renewable capacity was cheaper than the fossil fuel alternative. Clean energy is the cheapest and fastest form of new generation available.
Wind and solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in 2025. Yet the gas tail still wags the dog. A single dip in wind and hydro output last year forced higher gas burn, pushing the EU’s fossil gas import bill up 16%. Every remaining molecule of gas dependency is a transmission mechanism for the next foreign crisis.
China is becoming the world’s first electro-state — making cheap, domestically produced electricity its primary competitive advantage. But Europe has something China does not: the density, grid interconnection, and integrated single market to do this at continental scale. The EU’s Clean Industrial Deal, launched in February 2025, places renewables at the heart of industrial strategy. The vision is correct. The execution is failing.
While Brussels sets the right direction, member states are undermining it. Last November, Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea — projects with a combined capacity of nearly 32 gigawatts. That single decision wiped out €47 billion of private investment.
Across Europe, legislators are still listening to incumbent energy companies that need policy life-support to survive, rather than backing technologies that already stand on their own in open markets. Renewables may have needed an early push. They do not need one now.
Energy permits must be treated as national security priorities — with the same urgency as defense procurement. If a wind farm permit takes eight years, but a war can close a strait in eight hours, the permitting system is a strategic liability.
You cannot fight a trade war with China by starving your own industries of power. You cannot win the AI race with the world’s most expensive electricity. You cannot build €100 billion companies on a foundation that cracks every time a foreign government closes a shipping lane.
Europe does not need more government handouts to win this race. It needs government permissions. The capital is there. Corporate giants are desperate for green electrons. Pension funds and infrastructure investors are ready to deploy. What is missing is not money or technology. It is the political willingness to let them build.
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
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is warning the U.S. is moving more like Europe when it comes to defense.
Speaking Tuesday at the Hill and Valley Forum, which aims to bring together leaders from Washington and Silicon Valley, the longtime JPMorgan leader who led his bank through the 2008 housing crisis, said he was “deeply frustrated” with certain policies in the U.S. that he said set the country back.
One example is the web of rules, compliance procedures, and the involvement of Congress that he said slows the procurement process for the Department of War (DoW) and prevents it from being adaptable in times of conflict that require quick pivots.
“We’ve become like Europe, we’re unable to move and change—change budgeting, change procurement. You know, let people do what they need to do.”
One suggestion Dimon thinks would help improve the country’s red tape? Bringing on more private companies to get involved with making military equipment. To be sure, private companies are already participating actively in the U.S. defense industrial base. Although companies such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and RTX (previously Raytheon) have dominated military contracts for years, the U.S. government is increasingly looking to newcomers such as SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril for their tech capabilities. Earlier this month, the DoW awarded Anduril a five-to-ten year enterprise contract worth up to $20 billion, which is similar to one it would sign with a major defense contractor.
Dimon added that building up the nation’s military is especially important as it faces geopolitical issues including the threat of a conflict with China.
Relations between the U.S. and China have been icy in recent years, as the two countries seek to dominate AI. The world’s second largest economy has in some years grown its GDP at nearly double the rate of the U.S. At the same time, a trade war between the two economies has seen Washington impose sweeping export controls on advanced chips in an effort to limit China’s technological advancement, while China weaponizes its rare Earth resources with its own export controls on the materials that are essential to building semiconductors, but also advanced weapons systems and electric vehicles.
Dimon noted that U.S. companies made a mistake over the past decades in moving their supply chain to China just to produce a good for “$10 less.” This poses a major threat as China’s economy continues growing at a faster rate than that of the U.S. and threatens to overtake the country. Dimon also noted the risk that China may invade Taiwan is likely—something that is particularly concerning as Taiwan supplies 90% of the world’s most advanced microchips.
Still, the U.S. should also emulate China to an extent in the sectors where it has made significant progress, including shipbuilding, car manufacturing, and battery production.
“We should look at our own shortcomings then and then be prepared if they ever become an adversary to, you know, to face off against them,” he said.
Dimon’s comments come as the price tag of the Iran war has skyrocketed with the Pentagon last week reportedly requesting $200 billion from Congress on top of its existing budget, which exceeds $800 billion. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said “that number could move” as the Department of War seeks to replenish munition stockpiles and prepare “for what we may have to do in the future.”
Later in the interview Tuesday, Dimon painted a picture of “permanent peace” in the Middle East partly thanks to the threat of capital flight. In the process he became one of the first CEOs of a major company to foresee a potential positive impact stemming from the Iran war.
“There’s a lot of foreign direct investment going there, but it won’t go there if things like this are taking place,” Dimon said of the Gulf countries who are particularly affected by the conflict. “They’ve realized no, they need permanent peace. They can’t have neighbors like lob ballistic missiles into their data centers.”
The JPMorgan CEO said he was optimistic about the war, saying it may lead to a lasting peace in the region in the long term because of the change in “attitude” among Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The Iran conflict, now in its fourth week, has made these countries realize they need peace to protect the influx of capital that has helped their economies grow and diversify over the past decade.
The Gulf states have tried for years to diversify their economies to prevent them from being entirely oil dependent, and have brought in billions in foreign investment in the process. Still, the Iran war has once again highlighted the instability of their region. Strikes by Iran on military targets as well as Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain have spooked investors who have over years flooded the region with investment, especially in low-tax emirates in the UAE like Dubai and Abu Dhabi that have marketed themselves as safe, globally connected business hubs.
While some skeptics of the Iran war have said the country didn’t pose any imminent threat to the U.S., Dimon disagreed, labeling the country “a terrorist threat.” Iran-backed militias and the proxy conflicts Iran has waged in the region have been responsible for the death of hundreds of Americans, according to the Pentagon. During the Iraq war, the White House says Iran-backed militants killed 603 American troops, along with dozens of others in the years since the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and into the present day.
“They’ve been murderers of Americans and other people for 40 or 50 years. That’s not a threat. That’s actual killing,” Dimon said.
Dimon’s comments come as President Donald Trump on Sunday said the U.S. would not strike Iranian energy infrastructure and power plants for five days as U.S. envoys negotiate with their counterparts in Iran.
While it’s unclear whether these talks, which Iran has denied, will yield any peace accord, Dimon said he is hopeful the conflict will bring about better prospects for the whole of the Middle East.
“I think the Iran war makes it a better chance in the long run,” Dimon said. “It’s probably riskier in the short run, because we don’t know the outcome of it, but Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, America, Israel, all want permanent peace in the Middle East.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Today, job seekers often send hundreds of applications into the void of applicant tracking systems, where their materials may never be seen by human eyes. For many, the job search has become a full-time job in itself. Some, though, are outsourcing it. That’s where the reverse recruiter comes in.
Reverse Recruiting Agency helps find, apply to, and secure jobs on behalf of the worker, not the company. It charges $1,500 a month for their services (though clients get their first-month fee refunded), plus 10% of the job seeker’s first-year salary upon job acceptance. That $1,500 gets you personalized résumé editing services, 50 to 100 applications per week, career coaching, interview prep, and several other job readiness services, according to the company’s website.
Today, more than half of U.S. job seekers are spending six months or more shooting out résumés before landing a job, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Confidence survey. Some people have even reported applying to hundreds of jobs before landing a single interview. Long-term unemployment rate, or those lacking work for 27 weeks or longer, is also on the rise, at about 25.6% as of last month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s putting pressure on folks to get a job.
Alex Shinkarovsky, founder of Reverse Recruiting Agency, said in an interview with Fortune that this company has helped 45 clients so far, with 25 more active clients. Most clients, he describes, are high-performers coming from a range of backgrounds, from data science, program management, and engineering. Even a top exec from Apple has consulted for his help, he said.
“Most of the people who are hiring us now are awesome candidates, as in, they’re not struggling now,” Shinkarovsky told Fortune.
Although the company helps to submit 50 to 100 applications per week, Shinkarovsky said still may not be enough to beat the odds. On average, he said his company submits 863 applications per client before they land a job offer. For difficult career searches—those facing visa complications, ageism, or location constraints—it takes up to 924 applications.
Still, Shinkarovsky said his company is slashing the time it takes to find a role in half. The average time it takes to score a job offer is about 12.7 weeks for the standard role switch with the company’s help, compared to 24.3 weeks across the market, according to a Reverse Recruiting Agency analysis.
The rules of the game are changing, shifting the knowledge required to score an interview. The logical conclusion of a job market that prizes volume over quality is a flood of AI-generated résumés and cover letters. And recruiting experts say that’s become the norm. In fact, the whole job search ecosystem is rife with AI, as applicants submit AI-generated materials and recruiters use AI to sort through applications, many of whom are ghosting applicants because of the technology.
“It’s fundamentally broken,” Shinkarovsky said. The founder clarified the company’s workers don’t use AI to submit applications on behalf of their clients, save for some résumé optimization functions as well as outreach on LinkedIn.
He suggests that Congress could address the issue by implementing a verification system for job seekers, similar to a voter ID, to add friction to the application funnel. “That would cut out almost all the slop right away,” he said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
When Jensen Huang praised OpenClaw last week, the ripples reached Hong Kong within hours. Shares in MiniMax and Zhipu AI jumped more than 20% after the Nvidia CEO declared in a CNBC interview that the rapidly spreading open‑source agent framework was “definitely the next ChatGPT.”
Foreign investors once dismissed China’s AI push as a constrained, second-tier effort. Yet now, strategists argue that the country may be better positioned for AI, thanks to cheaper power, growing capital spending, and a swarm of open-source developers. Those same analysts are also wondering whether the U.S. AI boom, after years of sky-high valuations and data center spending, is running out of steam.
“We’ve actually reduced our exposure to U.S. tech,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategist, told Fortune at the investment bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong last week. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation.”
“China basically has unlimited access to cheap energy, whereas the U.S. has this massive energy bottleneck,” Jefferies’s global head of equity research Chris Wood said to Fortune.
The country will have roughly 400 gigawatts of spare power capacity by 2030, equal to three times what the world will need to meet data center demands, according to Goldman Sachs. In contrast, the U.S. is struggling with aging infrastructure and a lack of generating capacity, leading to spiking power prices in data center states like Virginia.
In China’s western provinces like Ningxia and Gansu, electricity can cost as little as five cents per kilowatt-hour, versus 25 cents in Beijing or Shanghai, or 40 cents in some parts of the U.S, according to Baidu’s chief finance officer Henry He, who noted for attendees that power can make up about 35% of inference costs.
China’s manufacturing sector also helps its AI sector, particularly in applications that interact with the physical world. For example, He noted that Baidu’s Apollo robotaxis can charge one yuan ($0.15) per mile and still be operating at break-even in the city of Wuhan.
In the U.S., robotaxis manufacturers have had to choose between LiDAR sensors or visual cameras due to cost. But He argued that, in China, “we don’t need to make that difficult choice,” as both are affordable thanks to Chinese manufacturing.
The same logic extends to autonomous aviation. EHang, for example, relies on a domestic supply chain that can provide affordable batteries and electronic components to build its aerial vehicles. “We have an extremely competitive component cost, and we can turn it into a very competitive selling price,” CFO Conor Yang explained to Fortune.
Wood’s optimism in China is contrasted by his questions about the U.S. The Jefferies strategist thinks that investors are starting to ask questions about the amount of money being spent in the U.S. on AI infrastructure, and expects U.S. capital spending to peak this year.
In an interview with Fortune, Wood described the U.S. private equity market as suffering from “a giant case of financial constipation,” with tens of thousands of portfolio companies waiting to IPO. In addition, private equity has recently poured money into the software sector, right as AI now threatens to erode their business models.
Private credit has been tested since the bankruptcy of auto parts supplier First Brands Group last year, which spooked retail investors and pushed some asset managers, like Blue Owl, to restrict withdrawals. This year’s “AI scare trade” has only made matters worse as retail investors try to pull their capital from fund managers, leading other fund managers, like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley, to also cap withdrawals.
Still, China’s AI companies may struggle to charge much for their products in the country’s hyper-competitive environment, where labs compete on both price and performance.
“It is very difficult for a single company to always [have] a top model globally,” He, from Baidu, said. (Baidu, an early mover in the space with its ERNIE model, has since lost ground to Chinese rivals like Alibaba and DeepSeek)
Startup MiniMax, for example, generated $79 million in revenue last year, yet reported a $1.8 billion net loss. (Investors don’t seem to care, driving shares up by over six times since the startup’s IPO in early January.)
The problem for AI labs, whether in the U.S. or in China, is that any lead in performance could disappear in a matter of months, as other labs catch up by offering models with near-frontier-level performance, often on an open-source basis.
Wood, from Jefferies, thinks that large language model providers will end up like utilities: capital-intensive, commoditized, and unlikely to earn sustainable returns. Instead, he argued that China’s AI boom “is going to be in applications—cheap applications—made possible by open‑source models and very cheap power.”
Agentic AI could be the next battleground. Chinese companies large and small are quickly rolling out their own OpenClaw frameworks, and local governments are offering subsidies to “one-person companies” building their own AI agent startups.
Chinese tech companies already have strong consumer platforms to put AI agents in front of users. Tencent’s WeChat, for example, has over 1.3 billion monthly active users and hosts millions of mini programs spanning commerce, transport, lifestyle, and finance.
“We’re going to see some interesting innovations in China. This is the only area where the U.S. and the West are going to be behind,” Michael Bruck, founding partner at 71 Capital, told Fortune.
“Is it a huge stretch of imagination to think the next version of a mini program is going to be an agent built into WeChat?”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Almost a year ago, when QVC Group partnered with TikTok to launch the first-ever nonstop live shopping streams in the U.S., the company’s CEO called the move “our bet.” The subtext was clear: It was a bid to revive the shopping TV channel’s languishing business and rejuvenate its audience.
The rationale for QVC, best known for its namesake channel QVC and HSN (once known as the Home Shopping Network), was simple: to adapt its multi-billion dollar business to shoppers’ new habits. That has become urgent as TV generally has lost its hold on viewers, particularly in cable and broadcast television. Between 2018 and 2024, QVC’s and HSN’s main channels each lost almost half (44% and 47%, respectively) of the U.S. homes they reached. The company is heavily indebted and several media outlets reported last month that it was looking into ways to restructure its debt. Its CEO, David Rawlinson said in November that “returning our company to growth continues to be difficult.”
“What we realized is that our form of getting close to the customer was going to have to shift because where the consumer was spending their time was shifting pretty dramatically,” QVC Group chief business development officer Brian Beitler told Fortune at a panel at the eTail conference last month in Palm Springs, Calif.
Social commerce is behind about $150 billion in U.S. consumer spending right now and QVC wants in. Beitler sees scrolling on TikTok as analogous to surfing TV channels. When QVC started in the 1980’s, it succeeded by grabbing people’s attention as they channel-surfed past QVC or HSN and then clicked right back when they saw a product or moment that grabbed them.
“We could interrupt you with really entertaining and interesting live content about products with really unique and interesting personalities,” Beitler said. It’s a proposition that sounds strikingly similar to that of social media today—and to his mind, TikTok, with its 170 million U.S. users, allows for that in an up-to-date, tantalizing way. It was a more interesting partner than YouTube and Instagram, which are largely advertising-driven and don’t offer the direct “shoppability” consumers find on TikTok.
Last year, a few months after launching the TikTok partnership, QVC, a publicly traded company controlled by longtime media mogul John Malone, said some 74,000 TikTok creators had featured QVC products on their shoppable videos and livestreams, but Beitler declined to provide an updated number, saying it was better to focus on partners looking to build a sustainable sales channel.
QVC has clear parameters for the ideal partners to showcase its products on TikTok. “They should come across as having a level of expertise and a level of knowledge,” Beitler said, adding that authenticity in the storytelling is key.
But to be successful, he said, brands might need an attitude shift on how they work with collaborators. “The most difficult thing for brands and retailers, for those of us in this room, is you have to relinquish a bit of control,” said Beitler. “You’ll give them information on the product and trust them then to use that in an authentic and high-trust way with their audiences.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Origin, a London-based startup building an AI-powered platform to help multinational companies manage their employee benefits, has raised $30 million in new venture capital funding.
The funding, which the company is calling an extended Series A+ round, brings the total amount of money Origin has raised in the past 12 months to more than $50 million.
The latest investment is being led by Notion Capital, which also participated in Origin’s initial Series A. Felix Capital, which led the earlier round, Acadian Ventures, and all other existing investors are also participating, the company said. It also said that it had secured “additional growth funding” from HSBC Innovation Banking U.K. alongside the new venture round.
Origin’s angel investors include Paul Daugherty, the former chief technology and innovation officer of Accenture; Jacqui Canney, the chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow; and Tudor Havriliuc, the former vice president of human resources at Meta, who held the role from 2010 to 2022.
The company declined to provide its valuation following the latest funding, but said it was higher valuation than its valuation following the initial Series A.
Origin was founded by Chris Bruce and Pete Craghill, the leadership team behind Darwin, a benefits technology software company, originally called Thomsons Online Benefits, that was acquired by Mercer in 2016. At the time of its acquisition, Darwin held an 80% market share of the non-U.S. global benefits administration market, according to Bruce.
Bruce told Fortune that the idea for Origin came out of a discussion he had with Craghill in the summer of 2023 in which they both observed how advances in AI and large language models could now address a problem they had tried and failed to fully solve 15 years earlier: giving big companies a clear picture of what they spend on employee benefits globally.
“It simply was not possible without AI,” Bruce said.
For most organizations, benefits are their second-largest cost, but they lack visibility into what they are spending. Bruce said one client’s chief financial officer told him the company believed it was spending roughly $750 million on benefits but had no way to verify that figure. “I’ve got visibility on every budget line in the organization, with the exception of benefits,” Bruce recalled the CFO saying.
The root of the problem, Craghill said, is that benefits data in multinational organizations is scattered across PDFs, insurance policies, vendor platforms, and local documents in dozens of languages. “You had all this unstructured data around the world, and there was no solution to it,” Craghill said. “It was always a human problem.” He said Origin spent its first 18 months focused on cracking the data ingestion challenge, learning how to assess the quality and completeness of wildly inconsistent source materials.
Origin’s platform, powered by an AI engine the company calls Cuido, ingests and structures that fragmented data—from policies, contracts, renewals, broker reports, and vendor platforms—into a single, queryable system of record. Using the platform, HR executives can track benefit spending and usage, as well as handling renewals, policy reviews, and governance workflows.
Employees can also query Origin’s platform to ask questions about what benefits they have available to them. In multinational companies with complex benefits offerings in different geographies, getting an answer to this seemingly simple question can often take days. Now, it takes just minutes.
While that is good for employees, the real payoff for using Origin’s platform is that it helps companies rationalize their benefits spending, reducing duplication, or helping them consolidate providers, according to Bruce. The company whose CFO estimated he was spending $750 million annually on benefits, now expects to save around $75 million by using Origin’s platform, Bruce said. Another of Origin’s clients consolidated 13 local insurance policies into a single regional plan, achieving a 20% cost saving, according to the company.
Origin’s Cuido platform was co-created in partnership with several large multinational employers who serve as Origin’s anchor customers, including Pfizer, Comcast, and BP. Bruce said the company went out to 11 major multinationals two years ago, shared its vision, and asked them to sign on as paying co-creators. Seven of those 11 agreed. A large technology company that initially declined in order to build a similar system internally ended up joining Origin 10 months later after abandoning its own effort, Bruce said.
Origin currently has about 75 employees and go-to-market teams in both the United States and the United Kingdom and Europe. The company uses what Bruce calls “a value-based pricing model” that is tied to the complexity of a client’s organization, including the number of countries in which it operates.
Origin’s new funding will be used to deepen integrations into existing human capital management platforms, such as those from Workday and Oracle’s Peoplesoft, so benefits information is accessible where employees already work, and to expand Origin’s partner capabilities for brokers, consultants, and insurers.
Andy Leaver, operating partner at Notion Capital, said in a statement that his firm was doubling down on Origin because of the team’s speed and execution. “Benefits are one of the last major enterprise functions still left behind by the digitisation wave of the last 25 years,” Leaver said. “AI now makes it possible to build a true system of record and intelligence for benefits.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Lawyers for the Department of War and Anthropic sparred in a California federal court on Tuesday over Anthropic’s challenge to the Pentagon labeling it a “supply-chain risk” to national security and banning all government contractors from using the company’s sweeping AI tools. Anthropic is seeking an injunction barring enforcement of that order.
The case—which involves a historic first in that the Department of Defense, informally renamed the Department of War (DOW) by the Trump administration, labeled a U.S.-led business as a supply-chain risk to national security—is rooted in a contract negotiation that escalated quickly. The DOW wanted to add a blanket “all lawful use” clause to its contracts with the AI firm so the military could use Anthropic’s Claude tool for any legal purpose.
The presiding judge in the case expressed doubts about the sweeping authority the Pentagon had wielded in the case. Federal District Judge Rita Lin said she would issue a ruling on Anthropic’s legal challenge “in the next few days,” and spent Tuesday’s hearing asking the parties questions about their disagreement.
During contract negotiations with the Pentagon in February, Anthropic balked at the possibility of the military using Claude for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, and attempted to insist on provisions expressly forbidding such use. Anthropic, led by founder Dario Amodei, said it hasn’t thoroughly tested those uses and doesn’t believe they work safely. The DOW claimed those guardrails were unacceptable and that military commanders need latitude to make determinations on missions.
On Feb. 27, President Trump posted on Truth Social directing “EVERY” federal agency to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE” all use of Anthropic’s tools. That same day in a post on X, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth labeled Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” and said “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” The risk label is usually reserved for nation states, foreign adversaries, and other threats.
Anthropic followed by filing a lawsuit on March 9, alleging the government “retaliated against it” for expressing its views on safety guardrails and had violated the First Amendment in doing so. It also claimed the government violated the process laid out in the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process.
In briefs in the case and in court on Tuesday, the government said the administration’s actions were in response to Anthropic’s refusal to implement certain terms in its contract, and argued free speech wasn’t at issue in the case. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton said the government has unrestricted power to determine which companies it will contract with. Hamilton said Anthropic’s conduct had raised concerns that future software updates could be used as a “kill switch” to keep the AI from functioning in military operations.
District Judge Rita F. Lin was skeptical, and in her opening statements described the case as a “fascinating public policy debate” over Anthropic’s position versus the government’s military needs, but said her role wasn’t to “decide who is right in that debate.”
Rather, Lin said the real question to be decided by the court was whether the government “violated the law” when it went beyond just not using Anthropic’s AI services and finding a more permissible AI vendor to work with.
“After Anthropic went public with this contracting dispute, defendants seemed to have a pretty big reaction to that,” Lin said.
The reactions included banning Anthropic from ever having a government contract—excluding other entities like the National Endowment for the Arts from using it to design a website; Hegseth’s directive that anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military sever their commercial relationship with Anthropic; and designating Anthropic as a supply-chain risk.
“What is troubling to me about these reactions is that they don’t really seem to be tailored to the stated national security concern,” said Lin. If the concern is about chain of command, DOW could just stop using Claude and go on its way, she said.
“One of the amicus briefs used the term ‘attempted corporate murder,’” she added. “I don’t know if it’s murder, but it looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic. And specifically my concern is whether Anthropic is being punished for criticizing the government’s contracting position in the press.”
The amicus, friend-of-the-court, briefs in the case have drawn a variety of voices including from Microsoft, retired military officers, and engineers and researchers from OpenAI and Google. Nearly all support Anthropic’s position seeking an injunction of the supply-chain risk designation.
The brief Lin referred to came from investors and the “Freedom Economy Business Association.” The brief referred to an X post written by Dean Ball, Trump’s former senior policy advisor for AI and emerging tech.
“Nvidia, Amazon, Google will have to divest from Anthropic if Hegseth gets his way,” Ball wrote. “This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States.”
The American Federation of Government Employees, a union of 800,000 federal workers, said in its amicus brief that the Trump administration had a pattern of using national security concerns as a pretext for retaliation against free speech.
Microsoft wrote that a ban on Anthropic would hurt its own business, and could chill future defense-industry investment and engagement with AI.
The Human Rights and Technology Justice Organization brief didn’t take a position who should win in court, but argued against militarized AI broadly, and stating that its use could lead to catastrophic human rights risks.
Lin said she’ll issue an opinion this week.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Moldova’s Parliament voted on Tuesday to impose a state of emergency in the country’s energy sector after Russian strikes on neighboring Ukraine’s energy grid disconnected a key power line linking Moldova to Romania.
The overnight strikes triggered the disconnection of the high-voltage Isaccea-Vulcanesti power line, which links southern Moldova to EU member Romania, after which Moldovan authorities urged citizens to consume electricity “rationally” during peak hours while repairs were underway.
Seventy-two lawmakers in the 101-seat legislature approved the measure that will last for 60 days. No one voted against and 18 abstained.
“What is happening in the energy sector today is not an accident,” said Moldovan Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu. “Russia’s attacks on the civilian energy infrastructure in Ukraine represent a war crime, but also an attack on us, here in the Republic of Moldova … Russia is the only one responsible for this.”
The state of emergency will begin on Wednesday. It will allow authorities to “act faster: mobilize additional resources, protect critical infrastructure and, if necessary, take additional measures to limit the effects of the crisis,” Munteanu added. “We remain vigilant and act for the safety of every citizen … This is not a measure of panic, it’s a measure of responsibility.”
Moldova’s Soviet-era energy systems remain interconnected with Ukraine, and the country has suffered periodic outages since Russia fully invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moldova’s energy minister Dorin Junghietu said estimates to repair the damaged power line is around five to seven days.
Moscow has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, such as dams and river ports, throughout the full invasion. The impact of the war next door has reverberated across Moldova, a former Soviet republic with EU candidate status, since the full invasion began.
Last week, tens of thousands of Moldovans were left without water after another Russian strike on a hydroelectric plant in Ukraine resulted in oil polluting a major river that flows through both countries.
The Ukrainian plant is situated about 15 kilometers (9 miles) upstream from Moldova’s northern border with Ukraine and supplies water to about 80% of Moldova’s population of about 2.5 million. In January, Moldova experienced major power outages, including in the capital, Chisinau, after a disruption to a power line from Ukraine caused a drop in voltage.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu blamed Moscow directly on Tuesday, saying that “Russia continues to deliberately undermine the security of the Republic of Moldova and endanger the lives of our citizens.”
“After the bombing of the Ukrainian hydroelectric power plant … tonight, a new brutal attack led to the disconnection of the Isaccea-Vulcanesti line, which in certain periods provides 60-70% of our electricity consumption,” she wrote on Facebook. “All these are not accidents, but deliberate actions of Russia to weaken and leave Moldova in the dark.”
Russia has repeatedly denied it is trying to destabilize Moldova.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled.
The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century.
The existence of this secret agreement wasn’t even publicly confirmed until 2016, when Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives. Other OPEC members had followed Riyadh’s lead in the years since, locking in the dollar as the indispensable currency of the modern world. The arrangement had a name only economists used: the “petrodollar” system. It was America’s greatest secret weapon—and today, in the churning waters of the Persian Gulf, it faces its most serious threat since its creation.
The Strait of Hormuz is a sliver of water barely 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, separating Iran from Oman. It does not look like the axis of the global economy on a map. But in 2024, roughly 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products passed through it every day—about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption and approximately 25% of all seaborne oil trade on Earth.
Qatar and the UAE rely on the strait for virtually all of their LNG exports, representing about 20% of global LNG trade. The bulk of the crude leaving the strait heads to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian markets, which absorb the overwhelming majority of Hormuz volumes. When Iran slammed shut this door, it didn’t just disrupt shipping lanes. It placed maximum stress on the architecture of dollar dominance at its most physical chokepoint.
For weeks, President Trump has scrambled to respond. He issued a 48-hour ultimatum threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Tehran did not reopen the strait. Iran countered by threatening to mine the Persian Gulf and target American energy infrastructure in the region. Trump then postponed his deadline amid what the White House described as diplomatic progress—a face-saving maneuver that former Defense Secretary James Mattis warned could ultimately cede the strait to Tehran’s influence. “You’d see a tax for every ship that goes through,” Mattis said during the CERAweek by S&P Global conference, as reported by Politico.
The administration has cycled through a list of increasingly desperate options, from building a naval coalition—with Trump saying he’d approached “about seven” countries—to a reported proposal to wind down the conflict without resolving the Hormuz closure. As of Monday, Trump told CNBC: “We are very intent on making a deal.”
While the gunboat diplomacy dominates the headlines, the more existential danger may be unfolding in the bond market. The U.S. national debt crossed $39 trillion on March 18, 2026, a milestone reached just weeks into the war in Iran. The speed of accumulation is staggering, and the timing could not be worse: interest costs on the debt are projected to become the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget over coming decades, and the U.S. has already suffered credit downgrades from all three major ratings agencies — S&P in 2011, Fitch in 2023, and Moody’s in May 2025.
The reason this matters geopolitically—not just fiscally—goes back to that 1974 handshake. The petrodollar system created a perpetual buyer for U.S. Treasury bonds in the form of oil-exporting nations. The mechanism was elegant in its simplicity: oil exporters accumulated vast dollar surpluses and parked them in U.S. Treasuries, which Washington was only too happy to supply. Saudi Arabia alone held $149.5 billion in U.S. Treasury securities as recently as December 2025 — a figure that, notably, rose by $12 billion over the course of last year, even as Riyadh declined to formally renew the original petrodollar agreement. That recycling loop is what allowed Washington to borrow cheaply, run persistent deficits, and still maintain the world’s reserve currency.
In 1965, French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was widely credited with a memorable criticism of the Bretton Woods system that predated the petrodollar regime as an “exorbitant privilege” enjoyed by America, with the U.S. dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency. In the 1970s, once President Richard Nixon ended Bretton Woods by decoupling the dollar from gold, that privilege was revived in oil and debt, requiring every country on Earth to accumulate dollars simply to buy oil, and then reinvest those dollars back into American debt. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, a heterodox economist whose work sits outside mainstream consensus but who captures something real about the system’s coercive logic, calls this “the global minotaur,” likening the U.S. to the ancient king of Crete who held international trade captive to tribute that would feed the monster within his labyrinth.
The unfolding crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is exposing America’s privilege as a vulnerability. The speaker of Iran’s parliament delivered a warning this week that rattled bond traders: financial institutions backing the U.S. military budget were “legitimate targets,” and buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds were purchasing “an attack on your headquarters and assets.” It was theatrical. It was also a signal—that America’s $39 trillion debt load could become a pressure point in an escalating conflict.
Even before Iran closed the strait, cracks in the petrodollar system were visible—though economists caution that “cracks” is very different from “collapse.” The U.S. dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen to roughly 56.9% as of Q3 2025, its lowest level since 1995 and down from a peak of 72% in 2001, according to IMF COFER data. That is a real, multi-decade structural decline. But here is the critical detail most alarming headlines omit: the IMF itself found that roughly 92% of the quarterly decline recorded in mid-2025 was driven by exchange-rate movements—the dollar weakening made non-dollar holdings appear larger—not by central banks actively dumping dollars. (The weakening of the dollar is a whole other story, but Trump’s tariff regime, the exploding national debt and inflation expectations rising are all widely seen as major factors, along with the “Sell America” trade.) There is a meaningful difference between erosion and exodus.
The Chinese yuan, despite years of BRICS advocacy and aggressive promotion of yuan-denominated oil contracts, represents just 2.1% of global reserves. The euro holds second place at roughly 20%, but no single currency has emerged as a credible heir apparent. The Federal Reserve’s own 2025 assessment found that dollar reserve share has been “basically unchanged since 2022,” and that U.S. sanctions on Russia following the Ukraine invasion did not trigger the feared mass reallocation out of dollars.
Saudi Arabia, in fact, chose not to formally renew the petrodollar agreement in June 2024, but the informal, secretive nature of the deal makes it hard to evaluate whether this was a policy change. What the data actually show is that the Saudis still price the overwhelming majority of their oil in dollars; global oil markets remain structurally dollar-denominated; and the network effects that sustain that arrangement—every buyer, every trader, every swap desk globally priced in dollars—do not unwind overnight. As the Hinrich Foundation noted as recently as last week, “talk of de-dollarization is prone to hyperbole,” even as the IMF data confirms a slow, real erosion, because of the weakening dollar.
What the Hormuz crisis means isn’t an end to the petrodollar—it is a threat to accelerate a shift that was previously moving at a glacial pace by raising the geopolitical temperature around a system that had long operated below the radar. Every week the strait stays closed, Asian economies are forced to test alternative supply chains — existing bypass routes like Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline to Fujairah absorb only a fraction of normal Hormuz volumes, meaning the pressure to find workarounds is real — and, at the margin, alternative payment mechanisms. If the crisis is resolved in weeks, those experiments are quickly abandoned. If it drags into months, habits begin to form. The dollar’s dominance is not a cliff—it is a long, slow slope—and the question the Hormuz standoff raises is not whether America falls off the edge today, but whether Trump’s handling of this crisis steepens the gradient.
There is a long slope down from this exorbitant privilege, as there remains no obvious successor to the dollar. And for all of Iran’s saber-rattling, its closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not a sophisticated financial weapon aimed at the dollar’s structural foundations. Rather, it is a desperate act of asymmetric warfare by a regime under unprecedented military pressure—a tactical move, not a strategic master plan.
Economic models analyzing the Hormuz closure project global GDP losses ranging from $330 billion in a short conflict to $2.2 trillion if it drags on. Those are serious numbers. But economic disruption is not the same as dollar displacement. If anything, crisis conditions historically drive a flight to dollars, not away from them, because the deep liquidity and institutional trust underpinning the dollar have no match.
Still, the U.S. should pay attention to its own abuses of that privilege. The consequences of sustained erosion are not abstract. The IMF has flagged that the U.S. is more fiscally imbalanced than its peers and that without reserve currency status, its credit position would be far worse. Foreign demand for U.S. Treasuries could weaken, forcing Washington to offer higher interest rates to attract buyers, which would feed directly into the cost of servicing the $39 trillion debt, creating a feedback loop of deficits and borrowing costs that could spiral well beyond the projections of today’s fiscal models. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget forecasts annual interest payments of $1 trillion and climbing. Add a prolonged oil shock and the ingredients for a genuine fiscal crisis in the medium term are present.
Trump has said he wants a deal. But his usual playbook, what Yale Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld calls his “ten commandments,” a framework of transactional pressure tactics that served him well against conventional partners, is not working with an adversary like Iran with little left to lose. And time is the one thing the architecture of American financial dominance may no longer have in abundance. The petrodollar system was built in secret in 1974 and sustained quietly for 50 years. The Strait of Hormuz has now made its fragility visible to the entire world, whether or not Trump understood that ordering strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure and military targets would expose the financial architecture those bombs were implicitly defending.
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
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are now doing the jobs of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers, but one big difference is that they’re getting paid for it.
The partial government shutdown, entering its 44th day, has left more than 50,000 TSA officers without pay, leading to more than 450 workers quitting and thousands calling out of work, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data. President Donald Trump ordered ICE agents to U.S. airports to guard exits and check IDs to allow TSA agents to more quickly conduct security scans at checkpoints. Trump said ICE personnel can conduct immigration checks and arrests, though it’s not their primary purpose.
These ICE agents will continue to receive pay, even as TSA officers forgo earnings for five weeks, and the disparity has shined light on the pay differences between the two groups carrying out similar tasks.
According to TSA Career, a nongovernment website, the starting salary for TSA agents is $34,454, with the average officer salary between $46,000 to $55,000. The highest-paid TSA employee earns around $163,000.
Meanwhile, deportation officers are paid between $51,632 and $84,277, according to a job posting on a government website. ICE agents are also eligible for a $50,000 signing bonus, often given in $10,000 per-year increments, putting total pay at nearly double that of a TSA officer.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees and the only one representing TSA workers, claimed ICE agents were unqualified to replace and work alongside TSA officers at airports as they lacked the appropriate training.
Everett Kelley, president of the union, demanded TSA agents be paid, rather than replaced by other government employees.
“Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe,” Kelley said in a statement on Sunday. “They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.”
The reason behind why ICE agents continue to be paid while TSA agents work without paychecks comes down to where these two agencies receive their respective funding.
Despite both being under the umbrella of the DHS, ICE received a share of its funding from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which pumped ICE with about $75 billion over five years. TSA is funded through DHS, which the government ceased funding in February as Democrats demanded reforms on ICE following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.
On Tuesday, the Senate closed in on a proposal that would fund much of the DHS, including providing pay to TSA agents. The funding resumption would exclude ICE operations.
The libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, called funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “shutdown proof” in a February report, arguing Republicans “short-circuited the system of checks and balances” by shifting funding for immigration enforcement and defense spending outside of normal appropriations, wrestling in less oversight and greater partisanship in the budgeting process.
But the breakdown of who gets paid and who doesn’t during a government shutdown is a failure of a budget structure that goes beyond a particular administration, according to Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
The decision of who is deemed essential and nonessential, for example, depends on department personnel, while salary appropriations can be impacted by lapses in the congressional budget, which occur multiple times a year.
“There is this overarching dysfunction of the entire process,” Bilmes told Fortune during the government shutdown in October 2025. (During this shutdown, law enforcement officers including both ICE and TSA agents received “super checks” as well as overtime pay). “Every time you get into one of these situations—which has been on average four times a year for the last four to five years—there is an arbitrariness in who ends up being paid for their work, who ends up working, who ends up being furloughed.
“The arbitrariness is almost inherent in this dysfunction—a feature as well as being a bug,” she added.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…AI’s reliability problem…Trump sends an AI legislation blueprint to Congress…OpenAI consolidates products into a super app and hires up…AI agents that can improve how they improve…and does your AI model experience emotional distress?
Like many of you, I’ve started playing around with AI agents. I often use them for research, where they work pretty well and save me substantial amounts of time. But so-called “deep research” agents have been available for over a year now, which makes them a relatively mature product in the AI world. I’ve also started trying the new crop of computer-using agents for other tasks. And here, my experience so far is that these agents are highly inconsistent.
For instance, Perplexity’s Computer, which is an agentic harness that works in a virtual machine with access to lots of tools, did a great job booking me a drop-off slot at my local recycling center. (It used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 as the underlying reasoning engine.) But when I asked it to investigate flight options for an upcoming business trip, it failed to complete the task—even though travel booking is one of those canonical use cases that the AI companies are always talking about. What the agent did do is eat up a lot of tokens over the course of 45 minutes of trying.
Last week, at an AI agent demo event Anthropic hosted for government and tech policy folks in London, I watched Claude Cowork initially struggle to run a fairly simple data-sorting exercise in an Excel spreadsheet, even as it later created a sophisticated budget forecasting model with seemingly no problems. I also watched Claude Code spin up a simple, text-based business strategy game I asked it to create that looked great on the surface, but whose underlying game logic didn’t make any sense.
Unreliability is a major drawback of current AI agents. It’s a point that Princeton University’s Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan, who cowrote the book AI Snakeoil and now cowrite the “AI As Normal Technology” blog, frequently make. And a few weeks ago they published a research paper, co-authored with four other computer scientists, that tries to think systematically about AI agent reliability and to benchmark leading AI models.
The paper, entitled “Towards a Science of AI Agent Reliability,” notes that most AI models are benchmarked on their average accuracy on tasks, a metric that allows for wildly unreliable performance. Instead, they look at reliability across four dimensions: consistency (if asked to perform the same task in the same way, do they always perform the same?); robustness (can they function even when conditions aren’t ideal?); calibration (do they give users an accurate sense of their certainty?); and safety (when they do mess up, how catastrophic are those mistakes likely to be?).
They further broke these four areas into 14 specific metrics and tested a number of models released in the 18 months prior to late November 2025 (so OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro were the most advanced models tested). They tested the models on two different benchmark tests, one of which is a general benchmark for agentic tasks while the other simulates customer-support queries and tasks. They found that while reliability improved with each successive model release, it did not improve nearly as much as average accuracy figures. In fact, on the general agentic benchmark the rate of improvement in reliability was half that of accuracy, while on the customer service benchmark it was one-seventh!
Across the four areas of reliability the paper examined, Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro scored the best, both with an overall reliability of 85%. But if you look at the 14 sub-metrics, there was still plenty of reason for concern. Gemini 3 Pro, for example, was poor judging when its answers were likely accurate, at just 52%, and terrible at avoiding potential catastrophic mistakes, at just 25%. Claude Opus 4.5 was the most consistent in its outcomes, but its score was still only 73% consistent. (I would urge you to check out and play around with the dashboard the researchers created to show the results across all the different metrics.)
Kapoor, Narayanan, and their co-authors are also sophisticated enough to know that reliability is not one-size-fits all metric. They note that if AI is being used to augment humans, as opposed to fully automating tasks, it might be ok for the AI to be less consistent and robust, since the human can act as a backstop. But “for automation, reliability is a hard prerequisite for deployment: an agent that succeeds on 90% of tasks but fails unpredictably on the remaining 10% may be a useful assistant yet an unacceptable autonomous system,” they write. They also note that different kinds of consistency matter in different settings. “Trajectory consistency matters more in domains that demand auditability or process reproducibility, where stakeholders must verify not just what the agent concluded but how it got there,” they write. “It matters less in open-ended or creative tasks where diverse solution paths are desirable.”
Either way, Kapoor, Narayanan, and their co-authors are right to call for benchmarking of reliability and not just accuracy, and for AI model vendors to build their systems for reliability and not just capability. Another study that came out this week shows the potential real-world consequences when that doesn’t happen. AI researcher Kwansub Yun and health consultant Claire Hast looked at what happens when three different AI medical tools are chained together in a system, as might happen in a real health care setting. An AI imaging tool that analyzed mammograms had an accuracy of 90%, a transcription tool that turned an audio recording of a doctor’s examination of a patient into medical notes had an accuracy of 85%, and these were then fed to a diagnostic tool that had a reported accuracy of 97%. And yet when used together their reliability score was just 74%. That means one in four patients might be misdiagnosed!
A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said. But, honestly, I think I’d prefer that hobgoblin to the chaotic gremlins that currently plague our ostensibly big AI brains.
Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn
Before we get to the news, I want to encourage everyone to read my Fortune colleague Allie Garfinkle’s awesome feature story about Cursor. Cursor is the AI coding startup that as recently as four months ago was a Silicon Valley darling, but which many people now think may be facing an existential threat because of new coding agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, that seemingly obviate the need to use Cursor. Allie’s story lays bare all the contradictions around this company—how it has continued to see record revenue growth, even as many in Silicon Valley now harbor doubts about its survival; how it is racing to train its own coding agents, pivoting from the developer-centric coding interface that made it so popular with programmers in the first place; how its impossibly young CEO Michael Truell works under a portrait of Robert Caro, the biographer whose projects often lasted decades, while Cursor needs to operate in an industry in which a year can feel like a century. Allie’s story is definitely worth the time.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Tax Day is April 15, three weeks away. If you’ve procrastinated doing your taxes so far, that’s probably for a good reason: After all, the fear of a potential jail sentence for accidentally miscounting something looms over you constantly, turning it into a repetitive, redundant, and reiterative, time-consuming process.
Now, there’s not only a price tag on your returns, but on the effort it takes you to complete them—and it’s costly.
A new analysis from Postal, a virtual mailbox and compliance service, found individual tax returns cost American taxpayers a combined $146 billion in time and out-of-pocket expenses this year—roughly $576 per person in labor hours alone, plus an average of $288 in additional expenses like accountants or software. Reviewing data from the OMB and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the company found Americans will collectively spend 2.1 billion hours on Form 1040 in 2026, or the equivalent of roughly 12 hours per filing—and the IRS expects to receive about 169 million of them.
Businesses don’t get off any easier. Postal estimates business tax returns cost companies more than $126 billion annually in staffing and expenses, or an average of $9,090 per return. Stack on Form 941—the employer’s quarterly return—and that brings additional costs of $47 billion—with the W-2/W-3 series at $8.8 billion. Even organizations that owe nothing in taxes (those filing to not pay) still absorb more than $6.2 billion in staff and expense burden costs.
“These figures reflect what we see every day,” Max Clarke, cofounder of Postal, told Fortune. “Compliance isn’t difficult because people are careless—it’s difficult because it’s fragmented, deadline-driven, and overwhelmingly manual.”
The numbers are even worse when you consider the labor hours involved in being compliant. The OMB currently lists more than 10,000 forms and documents that individuals and organizations must complete each year. In 2026, federal agencies are projected to receive more than 210 billion responses to compliance forms, requiring an estimated 11.6 billion labor hours. The total federal compliance tab, including out-of-pocket expenses, is nearly $738 billion.
Clarke knows this from the inside. A former M&A attorney and Palantir alum who later built and sold a specialty insurance startup, he started Postal after realizing physical mail—still the primary vehicle for IRS notices and federal agency correspondence—was a massive, unresolved problem for small businesses. His company uses AI to open, scan, and prioritize clients’ mail, flagging what’s urgent and when it’s due. Most small business owners aren’t compliance specialists: They’re people trying to run their companies who suddenly have a 126-page IRS instruction document and a weekend to figure it out.
“Small businesses and individuals are expected to track dozens of forms and notices across multiple federal agencies, often with little clarity on what’s urgent or what happens if something is missed,” Clarke said. “When deadlines pass, the penalties and follow-on costs can add up fast.”
To quantify how much Americans spend in labor hours each year, the company pulled from an OMB database that legally requires federal agencies to estimate how long each compliance form takes to complete. For cost, Postal cross-referenced those hour estimates against BLS wage data: specifically, average hourly and weekly earnings for all private employees. Multiply the OMB’s estimated hours by those loaded labor costs, add the OMB’s own out-of-pocket expense projections for software, contractors, and external accountants, and you get the total compliance price tag.
The physical dimension of tax compliance is easy to overlook in an era when everything is digital. But Clarke points out critical IRS and federal agency notices are still sent by mail—and this year, there’s a new wrinkle. Starting in 2026, the USPS will no longer guarantee same-day postmarks on mailed returns, meaning taxpayers who wait until April 15 to drop their envelope in a mailbox risk having the IRS treat it as late.
“When those documents are delayed, overlooked, or misunderstood, people lose time and money trying to recover,” Clarke said. There’s an easy fix: entering the 21st century.
“Our business shouldn’t have to exist. Everything should be fully digitized. Every business should have one single primary key between itself and the government—and all the information should just be read in there, done seamlessly, electronically, without having to worry about things like, did my Department of Labor form get to me.”
The complexity of the American tax system isn’t exactly accidental. Companies like Intuit and H&R Block—whose business models depend on that 126-page instruction document staying exactly as impenetrable as it is—spent millions lobbying against the IRS’s Direct File program, the agency’s effort to let taxpayers file directly for free. Since 2006, Intuit spent $25.6 million and H&R Block spent $9.6 million on lobbying efforts. Direct File was effectively wound down last year.
That’s not to say Clarke or Postal is against taxes (“taxes are good,” he said, adding people should pay for their use of public goods). Instead, he said this was a system designed around friction, where the friction is profitable for a select few and expensive for everyone else.
“The government already has all the information, because of the way payroll providers are reporting,” he said. “It should be telling me exactly what I owe. It should not be up to me to independently compute that number using a diversity of different sources, and risk fines if I’m wrong.”
But that’s not the system we have. Instead, 169 million Americans will spend an average of 12 hours this spring doing math the government could theoretically do for them—and paying, on average, $864 in time and expenses for the privilege.
“At scale, these 11.6 billion hours represent an enormous opportunity cost for the economy,” Clarke said. “That’s time taken away from building businesses, serving customers, or doing productive work. Until compliance requirements are simplified, the biggest gains will come from reducing friction—making it easier for people to see what they need to do, when they need to do it, and what actually matters.”
You’ll have to do your taxes regardless—the question is just how many hours and how much will it cost you.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
As Nevada regulators continue to investigate safety episodes that have occurred in the tunnels Boring Company is digging below Las Vegas, two Nevada legislators have written a letter to Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, demanding a “comprehensive plan” to address concerns of “structural failures” in the state’s oversight of Elon Musk’s tunneling startup.
The letter, which was shown to Fortune, described “significant concerns about record integrity, administrative accountability, and structural failures within Nevada’s workplace safety system,” and said that “these issues remain unresolved and require clear action from the Executive Branch.” The letter was sent to the Governor’s Chief of Staff, Ryan Cherry, on Wednesday morning. Assemblymember Howard Watts and Senator Rochelle Nguyen, two Democrats who lead the state’s Assembly Committee on Growth and Infrastructure, signed and sent the letter.
The letter demanded that Gov.Lombardo and his administration conduct an independent review of an incident revealed by Fortune in which a public record had been altered that was part of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigation, and commit to making those findings publicly available. The legislators describe the act of altering or concealing public records in the letter as a “serious matter that may constitute a violation of Nevada law and potentially rise to the level of a Class C felony.” The letter also demanded a plan to address year-long backlogs in OSHA cases waiting to be heard by the OSHA Review Board, a Governor-appointed body that hears safety cases employers have contested with Nevada OSHA.
“Questions surrounding withdrawn citations, altered records, and delays in adjudication have created the perception that Nevada’s enforcement system is not operating independently or transparently,” the letter reads, pointing out that “there still remain a number of unanswered questions and outstanding issues regarding The Boring Company and the health and safety of Nevada workers.”
The demand letter follows a legislative hearing in early February, in which state officials testified before Nevada legislators about their oversight of the Boring Company. Representatives from Boring Company and the Governor’s Office declined to attend the hearing. Boring Company, which was founded and is owned by Elon Musk, has been digging an underground public transportation system of ride-hail Tesla vehicles that is intended to eventually go below the entire city of Las Vegas. While its tunneling to date has taken place in the broader County, the company recently received approvals to start digging below the City of Las Vegas proper.
Since construction began, the project has been riddled with safety issues, including employees getting burned by chemicals in the tunnels, employees digging too close to the Las Vegas monorail, a worker getting crushed and another getting shocked, and illegal wastewater dumping—much of which was first reported by Fortune. KTNV, an ABC affiliate television station in Las Vegas, recently reported that OSHA had completed its investigation regarding the employee who had been shocked, and found that the injured employee had been fired for allegedly demonstrating a “a serious lapse in judgement on more than one occasion,” according to the Boring Company.
There are at least three more pending investigations that are still outstanding, according to OSHA’s website, and Boring Company is currently contesting eight citations it was issued regarding chemical burns in 2024. The Review Board has repeatedly pushed back the hearing on those citations, including most recently in February because Boring Company’s lawyer had a conflict, OSHA officials have said.
The latest injury, the one involving the employee who was shocked, “just points to the fact that we need to ensure that our OSHA process is functioning properly—to hold this and other companies accountable, to provide a safe working environment for people in our community,” Assemblymember Watts said in an interview with Fortune. He pointed out that “these tremendous backlogs” are allowing companies to contest citations for over a year and delay addressing the underlying problems.
In November, a Fortune investigation found that OSHA had issued three citations against the Boring Company after firefighters were burned by chemicals in the tunnels, then withdrew them within 24 hours after Boring Company president Steve Davis reached out to a representative in the Governor’s Office. Federal OSHA, which oversees the state plan, later received a complaint about the matter and opened a federal investigation, which ultimately determined that the allegations were substantiated, and that case file documentation was altered, missing, “and/or removed” from the case file and that the citations had been withdrawn after issuance. Federal OSHA said in its findings that it believed Nevada OSHA “had reasonable justification to withdraw the issued willful citations” and that the legal elements needed to support the “willful” designation had not been met.
Governor Lombardo recently said in an interview with staff at the Nevada Independent that his office had tried to determine who had deleted a line item in the document in the OSHA file, but that the inquiry had apparently been thwarted by a cyberattack against the state that took place several months beforehand in August.
In that recent interview, Governor Lombardo said that “in the long run,” he believed Boring Company would be “very beneficial” to Las Vegas.
“Do I like them in their tactics and how they do business? No,” he said.
The legislators’ letter demanded that Governor Lombardo’s administration submit a written plan that would “detail concrete actions, responsible officials, and implementation timelines” to start the independent investigation and address safety case backlogs by April 17.
The Governor’s Office did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The war in Iran could hit a heavy blow to one of the country’s largest industries, one that supports millions of livelihoods.
Now in its fourth week, the conflict has sparked the largest oil supply shock in history and sent gasoline prices soaring worldwide. But fuel products are not the only item to normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway that has essentially been blockaded for almost a month.
Before the war, around one-third of the global fertilizer supply chain passed through the strait, including half of the world’s urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer vital to many modern farming operations, including in the U.S. The gaping hole in fertilizer supply is, in some ways, a more intractable challenge than the energy crunch, and comes at one of the worst possible times for American farmers.
The U.S. food and agriculture industry does a lot more than putting food on the table: It is a booming business that employs millions and accounts for a huge chunk of the country’s economic output. That value was recently quantified in a sweeping report authored by 35 industry groups and published Monday, shedding light on just how widespread an impact a sustained fertilizer shortage would have on the U.S. economy.
The sector generates $10.4 trillion in value, around 20% of the U.S. economy’s overall value, the report found. It also supports more than 48 million jobs, including positions in government, tourism, and retail. The jobs story is actually one of growth, as the report also found direct employment in the food and agriculture sector has risen 6.5% over the past decade.
Fertilizer plays an important role in the agricultural economy. In a statement, Corey Rosenbusch, CEO of the Fertilizer Institute, an industry group that participated in the report, called the impact of fertilizers “essential” to the economy.
“Each year, fertilizer delivers $37 billion in wages, supports half a million jobs, and has an economic impact of $140 billion,” he said.
But curtailed exports from the Middle East threaten to undermine that trade, with ripple effects likely to go far beyond the fertilizer industry alone. While the U.S. produces much of its fertilizer at home, it relies on imports for 25% of its stock, including 18% of its nitrogen use. Qatar and Saudi Arabia were important nitrogen suppliers to the U.S., but supply now remains stranded in the Persian Gulf. And much like oil, fertilizer is a globally traded product, so regional supply disruption can lead to price shifts in the U.S.
Those swings are already painfully evident for U.S. farmers, with benchmark nitrogen costs at U.S. ports rising nearly 30% since the war began. For many producers, fertilizer can be the single largest variable cost in growing major row crops, and the new spike comes at one of the worst possible times in the sector. This is around the time most farmers finalize their fertilizer purchases ahead of their spring planting season, for crops like corn in the Midwest and cotton in the South.
The extent to which the war in Iran might deal long-term damage to U.S. agriculture remains unclear. There are few alternatives to Middle Eastern fertilizer exports. Unlike oil, which continues to trickle out of the region in small quantities through Saudi pipelines, the Gulf, and the currently blocked strait, is the only way for any significant fertilizer quantities to reach global markets.
Alternative suppliers exist, including Morocco and several Latin American countries, but high prices for U.S. farmers will likely remain until the strait reopens, with the list of possible economic consequences growing longer by the day. Prices could go higher still if more countries follow the lead of China, which last week restricted its own fertilizer exports in a bid to stockpile its reserves.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Bank of America’s spending data tells a rare good-news story about Gen Z — until it doesn’t. After years of being squeezed by surging rents and sluggish wage growth, the youngest adult generation had just begun to really get out there and spend their fun money. Then gas prices jumped 26% year-over-year, and BofA economists are now warning that the recovery could be snuffed out before it fully takes hold.
For the first time in years, Gen Z was winning. Rents had finally stopped devouring their paychecks, wages were rising faster than their housing costs, and a generation that had long trailed older Americans in spending growth was starting to actually open its wallet — on restaurants, new clothes, electronics, even travel. Then came the oil shock, brought on by President Donald Trump’s widely expected and yet also still surprising decision to go to war on Iran.
A recent report from the Bank of America Institute shows that after nearly two years of trailing other generations in spending, Gen Z’s year-over-year spending growth surpassed Baby Boomers’ in mid-2025. Millennials followed suit in December 2025, outpacing older generations for the first time in roughly three years. The turnaround was real, data-driven, and — for a generation that came of age during pandemic shutdowns and an inflation crisis — long overdue.
“Both Gen Z and Millennials may be even more prone to cutting back on ‘nice-to-have’ spending amid higher gasoline prices,” BofA Institute economists Joe Wadford and David Michael Tinsley wrote in the report.
The engine behind the surge? Rent relief. In Bank of America’s aggregated card and deposit data, median rent payment growth for Gen Z and Millennials slowed sharply in the 12 months through February 2026. And crucially, wages have been growing faster than rents for both generations — up roughly 9% year-over-year for Gen Z and 5% for Millennials. That gap between rent and wages is the financial breathing room younger Americans hadn’t had in years, and proprietary BofA card data shows they were spending it: on clothing, on dining out, and especially on electronics, which saw the sharpest discretionary jump of any category.
Tax refunds added extra fuel early in the year. But economists at the BofA Institute stressed that most of the improvement reflects something more structural: younger renters, who make up a disproportionately large share of Gen Z and Millennial households, were finally catching a break after years of rent outpacing everything. Unlike Gen X and Baby Boomers, who are more likely to own their homes, younger generations live and die by the rental market — and for a stretch, that market was suffocating them.
Now, rising gasoline prices threaten to claw back those gains. The average national gas price is up approximately 26% year-over-year as of March 23, driven by escalating conflict in Iran, according to American Automobile Association data cited in the report. And Gen Z, the analysis warns, is the generation most exposed.
Even before this spike, Gen Z’s gasoline spending as a share of total card spending was running higher than any other generation’s — and had stayed stubbornly elevated while older generations’ shares fell from pre-pandemic levels. BofA economists attribute this to a straightforward reality: Gen Z is just entering the workforce, commuting for the first time, and doing so on relatively modest incomes. The ratio of gas spending to discretionary spending is highest for Gen Z of any cohort. In plain terms, for every dollar a Gen Zer spends on things they want, a larger share of it now goes to the pump than for a Boomer or a Gen Xer.
The labor market adds another layer of risk. Young workers aged 22-27 — including recent college graduates — are already experiencing unemployment rates markedly above the national average, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Many work in retail and leisure, the very sectors most likely to feel the pinch from a pullback in discretionary consumer spending, which would, in turn, eliminate the jobs those same young people hold. It’s a feedback loop that could hit Gen Z from both ends of the ledger: higher costs at the pump and fewer hours at work.
The wild card, BofA says, is whether rent growth continues to cool. If it does, younger consumers may have enough cushion to absorb some of the pain from gas prices. If rents start climbing again alongside fuel costs, the brief, hard-won spending revival that defined the past several months could stall just as it was getting started.
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
In a sit-down interview with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell, billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla had a dire message: by 2030, 80% of jobs will be AI-capable, and open to potential displacement. Now, he’s warning that’s what’s going to sway politics from now on.
“There will be massive job dislocation” with AI, Khosla said during a panel at the Hill & Valley Forum, a conference bringing together Washington policymakers and Silicon Valley executives on Tuesday. Despite that, people need to see the benefits of the technology before any disruption occurs, he said. “Will there be new kinds of jobs? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. There’s very few things AI won’t be able to do today in next few years. So I do think we ought to structurally solve this problem by increasing the minimum level of services.”
But instead of looking at AI’s potential benefits, Khosla—who founded Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures and has a net worth of $11.5 billion,—said Americans have AI-caused uncertainty on their minds.
“The single biggest issue I believe in the 2028 presidential election will be fear of AI,” Khosla said.
Khosla has been a leading advocate for AI adoption while tempering the economic impacts on everyday Americans. His comments at the forum, during a panel entitled “Mind and Machine: The Forces Shaping the AI Era” about the role of the government in AI adoption, are not new for the billionaire, who has warned AI will now take over as the country’s most divisive issue from now on.
“I think the single biggest danger to AI is not AI capability or lack thereof. The single biggest danger to AI adoption is politics,” Khosla said. And it’s already playing out at the state level, he said, giving the example of a bill advancing in the New York State legislature that would ban AI from giving medical or legal advice.
Florida recently passed a bill that would force data center companies to pay for their own utilities, and New York lawmakers are considering a bill that would put a moratorium on new data center permits. This comes as Americans are feeling a growing affordability crisis, especially from rising energy costs, which is expected to be a losing issue for Republicans ahead of the midterms.
Instead, Khosla argued, Americans shouldn’t fear AI, but think of the endless possibilities it’s capable of accomplishing.
“The US could develop a free doctor and offer it to everybody on the planet,” he said. “That’s a project doable in the next two, three years, and have more expertise than any doctor.” He pointed to a recent Nature Medicine study that found that AI outperforms human therapists when blindly judged by human therapists.
He even thinks voters should look at the tax benefits AI can bring to their pockets. Khosla repeated his idea to restructure the tax code and end income tax for anyone who makes less than $100,000 a year, starting in 2030.
“AI will favor capital over labor in the historical capital versus labor battle, and so there’s no reason in the AI age to have a capital gains tax that’s different than ordinary income tax,” he said. “If we equalize those two, we can be tax neutral and eliminate 125 million people off the tax roll, just anybody making $100,000 or less doesn’t pay any taxes.” That’s a pretty good balance, especially since 40% of capital gains tax is paid by people making more than 10 million a year.
Khosla’s co-panelist, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, demurred at the idea of restructuring the tax code, saying that Congress is “a little better at the near term.” The senator gave the example of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which committed nearly $53 billion to revitalize domestic semiconductor production. She agreed with Khosla about the need to deploy AI to everyday Americans now.
“Why aren’t we just giving tools that use sophisticated health information and empowering the public with that health information?” she asked. “I think that would go a long way to making people understand the power of what we need to push towards, she said, adding that there should be privacy protections.
When asked by moderator and CEO of Varda Space Industries Delian Asparouhov about how the U.S. can lead and control AI adoption, Cantwell said she supports the idea of starting a “tech NATO.”
“The United States should get the biggest democracies and the biggest technology countries to standardize on principles that we believe in for technology adoption,” Cantwell said. “We should basically say, countries who have back doors and do these other things you shouldn’t buy technology from them because you know you’re going to get.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Senators raced Tuesday to clinch an emerging proposal to end the Homeland Security shutdown by funding much of the department, including the unpaid Transportation Security Administration airport workers, but excluding ICE operations that have been core to the dispute.
The sudden sense of urgency comes as U.S. airports are snarled by long security lines, with travelers being told to arrive hours before their flights in Houston, Atlanta and Baltimore Washington International. Routine Homeland Security funding was halted in mid-February ahead of the busy spring travel season. Nearly 11% of TSA workers — more than 3,200 — missed work Monday, and at least 458 have have quit altogether since the shutdown began, according to DHS.
Democrats are refusing to fund the department without restraints on Trump’s immigration and deportation agenda after agents killed two citizens in Minneapolis.
A potential breakthrough came late Monday, after a group of Republican senators met at the White House with President Donald Trump after he upended talks and deployed federal immigration officers at some airport security checkpoints — a move some lawmakers warned could lead to heightened tensions.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., called the discussions “positive and productive” and said most of DHS would be funded without big changes.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that after Trump’s “temper tantrum” eased, it appears “things are getting back on track.”
But airport conditions have become increasingly unpredictable with swelling crowds seen in major hubs. Travelers headed to LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports in New York — as well as Newark Liberty International in neighboring New Jersey — still couldn’t check online TSA wait times Tuesday morning.
At Philadelphia International Airport, several ICE agents were in the terminals. A protester was also at one of the checkpoints holding a sign criticizing ICE.
Airport wait times listed in the MyTSA mobile app and other public sources may be outdated because the agency isn’t actively updating its websites during the shutdown.
Next steps in Congress could move quickly, if lawmakers can reach agreement, or sputter out just as fast.
The contours of the deal under consideration would fund most of Homeland Security, but not one main part of ICE — the enforcement and removal operations that are core to Trump’s deportation agenda.
Under the proposal being floated, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations would be funded as well as Customs and Border Protection. But that would come with guardrails — keeping officers from those divisions in their traditional roles, rather than deploying them in urban immigration roundups.
The plan would also include a number of changes in immigration operations that Democrats have demanded, including mandating that officers wear body cameras and identification. While the ICE officers manning airports are going without face-covering masks, the Democratic demand that they go unmasked during immigration operations does not appear to be part of the deal.
Since so much of ICE is already funded through Trump’s big tax breaks bill, and immigration officers are still receiving paychecks despite the shutdown, both sides are claiming political wins — the Democrats are able to say they stopped the flow of additional ICE funds while achieving already agreed upon changes, while Republicans can claim they prevented more significant restraints on immigration operations.
Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, a chief negotiator, returned from the White House meeting hopeful they had a solution to “land this plane.”
Both chambers of Congress are controlled by the Republican president’s party, and any deal reached in the Senate would also have to be approved by the House.
On Tuesday, Delta Air Lines confirmed it was suspending its specialty services for members of Congress amid the shutdown, meaning those who fly with the carrier will be treated like other passengers based on their SkyMiles status. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the suspension. Delta’s Capital Desk reservations line still remains open.
Key to the standoff appears to have been the senators’ ability to shift the president’s attention off his plan to link any department funding to his push to pass the so-called SAVE America Act, a strict proof-of-citizenship and voter ID bill that has stalled in the Senate ahead of the midterm elections.
Over the weekend Trump injected his demand for the voting bill as a condition for ending the funding standoff. Some GOP senators have pitched the idea of tackling it in the months ahead as part of a broader legislative package the party could pass on its own, similar to last year’s big tax cuts bill.
The White House on Tuesday stressed that conversations were ongoing. But it also said an agreement to split off immigration enforcement funding, while addressing Trump’s elections bill separately, “seems to be acceptable.”
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who was not part of the group at the White House, said his understanding was that there was a “sense of urgency” coming from the talks as the airport disruptions worsen.
Senators are expected to discuss the proposals during their private caucus lunches Tuesday afternoon.
“First step is to get the proposal in writing,” said Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine. “I want to see exactly what that means.”
The deal could provide a political exit from the standoff over the embattled Homeland Security department, which was stood up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks but has come to symbolize Trump’s aggressive mass deportation agenda, with its goal of removing 1 million immigrants this year.
Under mounting political pressure, Trump ousted Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem amid the public outcry over the immigration operations, and senators late Monday confirmed one of their own, Markwayne Mullin, as the president’s handpicked replacement.
Mullin, an Oklahoma senator who aligns with Trump’s agenda, provides a potentially new face for the department. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin touched on another key demand of Democrats — ensuring a judge has signed off on warrants that immigration officers use to search people’s homes, rather than simply relying on administrative warrants issued by the department.
“This is significant,” Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said about the progress toward changes. “Noem is gone. That’s a big deal.”
ICE’s budget grew under last year’s bill by $75 billion, which has been untouched by the shutdown. Rather its routine annual funding, some $10 billion, would be cut almost in half under the proposal.
After weeks of missed paychecks, many TSA agents have called in sick or even quit their jobs as financial strains pile up. Union leaders representing the workers have pushed Congress to reach a deal.
___
Associated Press writers Rio Yamat, Wyatte Grantham-Philips, Kevin Freking and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Roughly $580 million worth of oil futures changed hands in a single minute early Monday morning, only about 15 minutes before President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had been engaged in “productive conversations” with Iran to end the war.
Now Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is calling what he sees: treason.
“We have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit,” Krugman wrote in a Substack post Tuesday. “That word is treason.”
Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, denied that any negotiations with Washington had taken place, calling the claim “fakenews” used to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.” Stocks pulled back slightly and energy prices stymied their free-fall on his statement, but ultimately traders seemed to trust that Trump was telling the truth about winding down the war.
Rory Johnston, an oil market analyst, said the pattern has been hard to ignore even without a smoking gun.
“Everyone—every analyst, every oil trader—has been questioning downward pressure on prices,” he told Fortune. He added that whether or not there’s been direct market manipulation by Washington, the administration’s jawboning has spooked participants out of trading where physical fundamentals would otherwise push prices. “I think that probably goes a long way towards it.”
The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The trades involved roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts that were sold between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m. New York time. Trading volumes for S&P 500 futures also spiked moments later, meaning that any potential insider got upside on both ends. After Trump announced the pause of his ultimatum at 7:04 a.m., there was a sharp selloff in oil markets and a jump in equities; precisely the outcome someone holding those positions would have wanted. It is not known whether one entity or several were behind the trades.
Krugman argued that insider trading on national security decisions is illegal for reasons besides unfairness: it presents a strategic vulnerability. Trading on classified information effectively broadcasts government plans to foreign adversaries, he wrote, adding that “who needs to bribe agents within the government” when you can infer the same intelligence from futures markets.
He also raised an unsettling question: whether the possibility of insider profits may be influencing the policy decisions themselves.
“Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest?” he wrote. “If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.”
Krugman joins a chorus of Trump critics and investors who called foul on the move Monday. Trump had spent the weekend threatening to bomb Iranian power plants unless Tehran reopened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. His Monday morning reversal, which he attributed to ongoing talks, blindsided markets—and, apparently, Iran.
As for whether insiders are profiting from advance knowledge of policy announcements, Johnston said it “would not surprise me,” but but stressed he didn’t have direct evidence.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin company, announced on Tuesday that it has signed a Big Four accounting firm to complete its first full audit. The move stands to give the company, which has long faced criticism over its lack of transparency, a stamp of legitimacy.
In a statement, Tether announced that the audit will review Tether’s assets, liabilities, and reserves and be conducted by one of the Big Four—a term that describes Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC—but did not specify which one. Five years ago, Tether was fined $41 million for falsely claiming that its stablecoins were fully backed by fiat currencies.
The announcement comes two months after the company launched USAT, a stablecoin designed to be compliant with U.S. regulations. Tether’s return to the U.S. further cemented its dominance in the stablecoin industry, where it currently owns about 60% of market share. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a stable asset like the U.S. dollar.
“The Big Four Firm was selected through a competitive process because the organization is already operating at Big Four audit standard; the audit will be delivered,” said Simon McWilliams, chief financial officer of Tether, in the statement.
Prior to President Donald Trump’s second term, Tether had several run-ins with regulators. In 2021, the company reached a settlement with the New York attorney general’s office after it allegedly covered up roughly $850 million in losses. Three years later, in 2024, the Department of Justice reportedly investigated the company for violations of anti-money-laundering and sanctions rules. That same year, blockchain analytics company TRM Labs found that Tether’s network had been used to finance terrorism.
Since Trump took office last January, the stablecoin giant, along with other major crypto companies, has benefited from more lenient regulation out of Washington. The connections between the president and Tether are not hard to find. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, is the former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is the company that manages the reserves of USAT. And the president’s former top crypto official, Bo Hines, is now the CEO of Tether’s U.S. operations
“Tether’s mission has always been to build trust through action, not promises,” said Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, about the audit in the statement. “Trust is built when institutions are willing to open themselves fully to scrutiny.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Tech executives have offered foreboding visions of the future of work due to AI, with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott predicting unemployment will exceed 30% in a matter of years.
But Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says that’s nothing to be afraid of.
People should embrace the future of AI job displacement, Srinivas said in an episode of the All-In podcast released on Monday and recorded at Nvidia GTC last week. While AI may lead to unemployment, that job displacement subsequently frees people from careers they may not have enjoyed, he suggested. This, instead, gives them opportunities to pursue entrepreneurship.
“The reality is most people don’t enjoy their jobs,” Srinivas said. “There’s suddenly a new possibility, a new opportunity, to go use these tools, learn them, and start your own mini business…Even if there is temporary job displacement to deal with, that sort of glorious future is what we should look forward to.”
AI-related layoffs are already on the horizon. Last month Block CEO Jack Dorsey reduced 40% of his staff, saying “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” The 4,000 laid-off Block employees are part of a total of more than 101,000 AI-linked job losses in the U.S. since February 2025, according to data compiled by the nonprofit the Alliance for Secure AI.
However, some economists argue potential job displacement as a result of AI has been drastically overstated. Oxford Economics wrote in a recent note to clients companies “don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and are insteading “AI washing” by blaming workforce reductions on the technology.
Venture capitalist and Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley said the AI boom is no different from other eras of rapidly evolving technology, in which layoffs happen, but the labor market ultimately adapts and stabilizes.
“I’m not that big of a doomer, Gurley told CNBC earlier this month. “I think these waves come, and especially with AI, there have been a lot of people pumping kind of miracles into it … .They get this kind of apocalyptic view. We’ve had technology disruption before.”
The future of work in an AI-powered future is a departure from the rote and repetitive jobs that emerged at the turn of the 20th century, according to Srinivas.
“America has always been about entrepreneurship. We’ve been about trying to build new things, discover new things, go explore,” he said. “Henry Ford came and built factories and brought jobs and things like that, and put people into a box.”
AI instead makes people more nimble, eliminating startups’ and small businesses’ need to raise as much money because they no longer need to hire as many employees to jumpstart operations, Srinivas suggested.
“What we are going to try to do is help businesses run as autonomously as possible,” he said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long predicted AI would create the first billion-dollar business run by one person, but Srinivas claimed the feat has not yet been achieved because an AI-powered venture has not increased in U.S. GDP by $1 billion, and therefore not yet “truly creating new value.” He said the best way for this one-person unicorn to emerge is from a small business that has been optimized with AI.
This new era of startups is already emerging. A Bank of America report published this week found the number of business applications with clear plans to hire employees fell by 4.4% year-over-year in January. Meanwhile, The number of “high propensity businesses,” those likely to hire employees, jumped more than 15% in the same period. The discrepancy suggested the potential emergence of several new companies, but without plans to onboard staff to run those businesses.
In 2024, Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan created an AI-powered flashcard and quiz tool called TurboAI with an initial investment of less than $300 while the pair were still in college. The pair has since growth the company to 8.5 billion users and are generating $1 million a month in revenue with just 13 employees, the pair told Fortune’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez. Without AI, their workforce would have swelled into the triple digits.
“If we were a company two-and-a-half years ago, it would take over 100 employees,” Arora said. “The only reason we’re able to do it with 13 employees right now is because of AI.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A specter is haunting the world of white-collar work: the specter of white-collar job loss. But one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe,” asset management billionaire Larry Fink sees another ghost in the machine.
Writing in his annual letter to BlackRock shareholders, the CEO identified a much greater threat from technological progress to the Fortune 500. Fittingly, for the man who played a major role in the index-fund revolution, his mind was on assets and who owns them—or doesn’t. Inequality and overall wealth is the real threat.
With asset values soaring in recent decades as salaries largely stagnate, wealth inequality will only get worse, warned Fink, who has been beating this drum often of late. AI threatens to concentrate wealth not only with those who have assets, he explained, but those who use this technology.
“The vast majority of wealth has flowed to people who owned assets, not to people who earned most of their money by working,” Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders on Monday.
“Now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale—concentrating wealth among the companies and investors positioned to capture it.”
Research from the Federal Reserve has found America’s haves and have-nots have rarely been this far apart. In the third quarter of last year, the gap was the widest it’s been since 1989, when the Fed began tracking household wealth divergence. The top 1% held 31.7% of U.S. wealth, comparable to all wealth owned by the bottom 90%. With most high-income wealth held in assets from stocks to real estate, it’s become increasingly inaccessible to a growing segment of Americans. And with the speeding growth and corporate adoption of artificial intelligence, that trend risks accelerating, according to Fink.
AI-driven productivity might potentially raise wages across the board, but most evidence so far suggests AI adoption has raised wages in a relatively small pool of jobs, while excitement surrounding the technology has boosted stock markets. Fink wrote that since 1989, median wages in the U.S. have lagged stock market returns by a factor of 15.
Now, AI looks most likely to lengthen that trend rather than reverse it—at least in the short term. For people not directly exposed to its benefits, the wealth gap might soon look a lot wider.
“When market capitalization rises but ownership remains narrow, prosperity can feel increasingly distant to those on the outside,” Fink wrote. “This is where much of today’s economic anxiety comes from: a deeper feeling that capitalism is working—just not for enough people.”
In his letter, Fink described AI as the most significant technology since at least the computer, but nonetheless risks putting inequality on steroids. He warned that AI could concentrate massive wealth primarily among a handful of companies and investors best positioned to capture its value. It could accelerate “K-shaped outcomes” for the economy, he added, where firms and investors with greater access to capital benefit from faster growth, while those less exposed to rising asset valuations stagnate, driving inequality even further.
“Transformative technologies create enormous value—and much of that value accrues to the companies that build and deploy them, and to the investors who own them,” he wrote. “The companies with the data, infrastructure, and capital to deploy AI at scale are positioned to benefit disproportionately.”
The data so far seems to support Fink’s argument. The U.S. is increasingly mired in an economy supported by wealthy consumers, according to Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi. Spending from high-earners has surged in recent years, while low and middle-income households have seen their discretionary spending slow or even plateau.
The trend grows more worrisome with the use of this new tech, as AI-driven gains in the stock market are a big part of high-income confidence, Oxford Economics CEO Innes McFee recently told Fortune. While the technology has led to a 7% rise in U.S. wealth, that benefit is almost entirely contained to high-earning households, he said. While AI could “absolutely” even out wealth inequality eventually, it is more likely to maintain the U.S. economy’s K-shape until at least 2035, McFee said.
The same trend is visible in jobs. So far, AI-related productivity boosts are mostly reserved for workers whose jobs demand AI-related skills, roles that can expect a wage premium as high as 43%. But for most jobs, AI has yet to translate to significant productivity or wage gains, and might actually be leading to larger workloads for employees tasked with managing AI.
Over the long term, AI-driven efficiency could lead to higher wages and job growth among low-income professions in sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing, potentially reducing inequality in countries heavily reliant on those sectors, according to modeling last year by PwC. And some experts, including analysts at the Urban Institute, have argued for a universal basic income program drawing royalties from AI companies as a measure to lessen inequality.
But for the moment, benefiting from AI requires working in a role requiring AI skills or being financially invested in its growth story. With nearly 40% of Americans not exposed to the stock market at all, a sizable portion of the population could be caught on the outside looking in.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The most powerful voices in artificial intelligence (AI) really want you to worry about your job—if you’re a white-collar worker. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman predicts AI will cause office jobs to crumble in 18 months. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks entry-level jobs in the space will be cut in half in a similar timeline. Even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has warned that AI is quietly impacting the labor market as job creation hovers close to zero.
But behind closed doors, business leaders controlling company headcounts are actually telling a more subtle story. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, out of a survey of 750 chief financial officers from U.S. firms, less than half (44%) say they plan on some AI-related job cuts. When the co-authors calculated what that amounts to across the broader economy, they found just 0.4%, or about 502,000 roles out of about 125 million roles, are expected to be lost this year. Just about half of those job losses will come from the white-collar world.
That 9x increase from last year’s 55,000 AI-attributed layoffs is striking — but still a rounding error against the overall workforce.
“It’s not the doomsday job scenario that you might sometimes see in the headlines,” John Graham, co-author of the study and the director of the Duke CFO survey, conducted in partnership with the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond, told Fortune.
Moreover, the study finds a wide gap between the perceived and actual productivity gains from AI, finding that perceptions of AI’s gains are larger than the reality. The researchers say this likely reflects a delay in realized revenue. This reported lag matches what economists have been saying about AI’s productivity gains.
Goldman Sachs senior economist Ronnie Walker noted earlier this month that amid AI investment zeal, “we still do not find a meaningful relationship between productivity and AI adoption at the economy-wide level.” It’s not just economists; workers have reported that AI is actually making them less, not more productive, placing greater strain on their workflows, with time spent across some job responsibilities increasing by up to 346%.
Economists have a name for this gap — and it dates back to the dawn of the personal computer era.
In a comparison to the lagging technological innovation associated with the dawn of the internet era, the researchers invoke Solow’s paradox, also known as the productivity paradox, to contextualize the current divide between perceived and actual productivity from AI. Coined by Nobel Laureate Robert Solow in 1987, the paradox speaks to the observation that transformative technology—like computers, or in this instance, AI—can appear ubiquitous while remaining absent from economic data.
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” Solow said.
Graham said what executives are seeing with productivity today is actually more of a wish than a realized fact. Companies see the potential of AI without the financial results to match. “Companies have invested and they’re realizing all these kind of cool things that they’re either starting to do or they hope to do in the near future,” he said. “But it’s not really showing up yet in revenue”
However, the study still represents a step in the direction of heightened job losses thanks to the technology, adding some credibility to what tech execs have painted publicly. Employers reported about 55,000 layoffs attributed to AI in 2025, according to research firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s just 4.5% of all job losses from last year. Still, if the study’s numbers are right, that would mean a 9x increase in AI-related layoffs this year.
There have already been several sizable AI-related layoffs reported by firms this year. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut about 40% of its workforce, or more than 4,000 employees, because of the technology. Australian-American financial services firm Atlassian cut 10%. And Meta is reportedly planning on cutting 20% of jobs, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly creates an AI agent clone of himself. On top of that, the job market is in a lull. U.S. employers posted 92,000 jobs losses last month, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%.
But the report also finds that AI adoption could actually lead to an increase in hiring among smaller firms, further contradicting the public claims from AI’s biggest leaders. Many smaller firms, or those with fewer than 500 employees, have only just begun to invest in AI as most incur the brunt of AI-related operating expenses, slowing down adoption rates. But as adoption increases, small firms noted they plan to increase hiring in technical roles. On top of that, larger firms are planning on holding technical roles constant.
“If anything, small companies are hiring a bit on the technical side which will offset [losses] a little bit,” Graham said.
Still, the study only paints a picture for the short-term, so it’s difficult to entirely rule out the dire predictions some tech leaders have made of the technology’s ability to soak up white-collar jobs.
“Who knows what’s going to happen in 2028?” Graham said. ”I’m not making a prediction that there will never be any jobs lost two, three and five years from now to AI.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
On Monday morning, it looked like President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “Master of the Deal,” had done it again.
After roiling oil markets over the weekend with an ultimatum on Iran, he declared victory before the opening bell, posting about 15 points of agreement and pausing his threat to bomb the country’s power plants. Nearly $2 trillion was moved within minutes as Wall Street clamored to do what it has learned to do with this president: put some TACO dip on its proverbial chip.
TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out—became the defining trade of last year’s tariff wars after the shock dip on “Liberation Day” last April. The term was coined by FT journalist Robert Armstrong to describe the pattern Trump exhibited: Escalate, terrify, then reverse course and claim victory. When traders realized that Trump, at his heart a businessman, would never let markets dip back to their levels on April 2, 2025, they began to price in the bluster and bought the dip. It worked in 2025 because tariffs are a toggle: flip them on with a Truth Social post, flip them off with another one. Through this strategy, Trump secured diplomatic and economic concessions in Brazil, India, Japan and across Southeast Asia, all while never suffering from severe backlash by traders.
War, however, doesn’t so easily toggle back and forth. TACO has a hidden assumption baked in: that your counterparty wants off the roller coaster as much as you do. Especially with a wounded Iranian regime that has nothing to lose and made its survival synonymous with holding the global economy hostage.
Within hours of Trump’s announcement, Iranian state media denied any talks had occurred. The speaker of Iran’s parliament, taking a page out of Trump’s 2016 campaign playbook, wrote on X that it was “fakenews” designed to “manipulate financial and oil markets.” And as of Tuesday, it doesn’t seem like the primary objective —getting tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz—has changed at all.
“There is no change in the status in the Strait of Hormuz, and every day that waterway remains closed to traffic, the world is losing over 15 million barrels of oil from inventories and stocks,” Rory Johnston, an oil market analyst, told Fortune. “The longer this goes on, the worse that situation is going to get.”
The White House has been effective, so far, at jawboning oil prices lower than the $120-$150 levels bearish commodities analysts have warned about. Every time Brent drifted much above $110, Trump or another official comes out and declares victory over Iran, or promises to start pulling back the war. Johnston says that works, for now, because the physical shortage hasn’t actually reached most of the world yet, leading to a gaping spread between the price of Dubai crude, which has been in the $120s and $130s, and Texas futures, which have hovered below $100.
“A lot of the physical shortage still hasn’t reached land,” Johnston said. “The tankers stopped flowing and you’re building this air pocket on the water of what normal trades look like. But eventually that air pocket hits land.”
He expects that to start happening within the next week or two.
“Eventually the paper barrels run against the physical barrels, and you have to reconcile,” Johnston said. “And you’re going to reconcile toward physical.”
It also takes two to TACO, as other analysts have written. The tariff TACOs worked because Trump’s counterparties, China, the EU or Canada, were rational economic actors who needed stability and were fine to take a face-saving deal to get it.
Iran is not so predictable. Its supreme leader is dead, its military infrastructure is decimated and four weeks in it’s still not behaving like a counterparty looking for an off-ramp. If anything, it’s behaving like one that thinks it’s winning.
Despite losing senior leadership and absorbing enormous punishment from US and Israeli strikes, Iran has effectively held the global economy hostage through the Strait of Hormuz. They’re exporting more oil now than before the war; its rate of missile and drone fire has picked up; and they’re now collecting a $2 million “toll” for ships to pass through. And its strikes have inflicted serious damage on energy infrastructure across Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE—the very US allies Trump promised to protect.
Tehran has been escalating its demands. Iranian officials have called for massive reparations, the expulsion of US forces from the region, and to make the Strait’s toll booth status more permanent, with every passing ship required to pay Tehran for transit. One adviser to the supreme leader told Iranian state media that Iran would turn itself “from a sanctioned country to an enhanced power in the region and the world.”
Johnston thinks the administration badly misread the situation from the start.
“I think Trump thought he could do in Iran what he did in Venezuela,” Johnston said. In Caracas, the US captured and arrested former President Nicolas Maduro, and a US-friendly pragmatist from within the government emerged to cut a deal. The expectation was that after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, someone similar would step forward in Tehran.
“The Iranian regime is just deeply, deeply different in about every single way, politically, from the Chavista regime in Venezuela,” Johnston said. “I think he thought that once he killed the supreme leader and a bunch of the leadership, someone would come forward and beg for a deal. And that just isn’t what has happened.”
What happened instead is that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appears to have consolidated control, and the IRGC has a long history of being more maximalist and hardline than the regime it is replacing. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran liberated its territory by 1982 but didn’t agree to a ceasefire until 1988, after hundreds of thousands of additional casualties and an international hostage crisis.
That leaves Trump staring at two options, both of which are historically anathema to him.
Option one: escalate to a ground war. US Marine Expeditionary Units are assembling and will arrive in the Middle East on the same day the truce is scheduled to run out, Friday. The administration might soon have the capability to invade Kharg Island or occupy coastal positions around the Strait. Trump has called this “a simple military maneuver” with “so little risk,” which military experts disagree with.
Option two: accept a deal that falls short of the war’s stated objectives and walk away, leaving Europe to manage the Strait. But walking away would leave US Gulf allies exposed to an angry, emboldened Iran that has just demonstrated its ability to destroy their energy infrastructure at will. It would leave Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium largely unsecured, and it would also give Tehran the kind of mythologized martyr narrative—we withstood America and Israel—that the Islamic Republic used after the Iran-Iraq war to entrench itself for decades.
“My bias remains that he’s going to pull back, because I think he needs to pull back,” Johnston said. “But I thought that for most of the war thus far, and I’ve been wrong.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
When the bombs started raining down on Iran on February 28, many business leaders hoped the conflict would be short and the economic effects would be transient. Neither has turned out to be the case.
In the latest sign that “war effects” are becoming embedded, the World Economic Forum is the latest global organization to announce the postponement of its key Gulf conference in Saudi Arabia, citing “current regional developments”.
The technology conference, Leap, private equity group, Partners Group Holding AG, and JP Morgan have each announced postponements or changes in venue since the war started. The risk index for the Gulf economies is rising.
“In light of the current regional developments, and in close consultation with the Ministry of Economy and Planning of Saudi Arabia, the World Economic Forum will be rescheduling the Global Collaboration and Growth Meeting, which had been planned for April 2026 in Jeddah,” WEF said in a statement.
“We’ve always been an organization that has global reach, multi-regional reach, and so we’ll continue, in addition to Davos, that important role of connecting people, leaders, stakeholders…”
Mirek Dusek, head of global programming for WEF
“This reflects a commitment to convening the meeting under conditions that ensure its full strategic impact. We remain committed to facilitating a forward-looking agenda for the region and beyond and will provide updates about the rescheduled meeting in due course.”
We will be back, WEF is saying. This will be a relief to in-region business leaders concerned that confidence is, at present, only travelling in one direction.
Initial analysis at the beginning of March suggested that the positive economic momentum of the Gulf—a center for innovation as well as liquidity—would outweigh drone attacks and retaliation strikes. As the conflict drags on, the data is becoming more negative.
“Our analysis suggests that oil output this year could fall by around 12% in Saudi Arabia and by 16% in the UAE,” Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients as the conflict entered its second week. “In Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain, we think oil output could fall by over 25% this year in the event of a prolonged war.”
Read more: An AI jobs apocalypse? The CEO of Tech Mahindra is not so sure
Second-order effects are also starting to bite. The closure of airports and the negative impact on tourism and real estate sales are obvious.
“We estimate that the total potential contraction in real GDP this year ranges from 1% in Oman to 14% in Kuwait and Qatar,” Goldman Sachs said. “Saudi Arabia is moderately exposed, with a potential contraction in GDP of just over 3%, while the UAE could see a contraction of around 5%.”
The region has built much of its economic forward momentum on its convening power. “Get me to the Gulf,” was the regular request of chief executives hoping to find new markets and ways of thinking. And in an age of increased regionalization, it was events like WEF Gulf that signaled intent.
I spoke to Mirek Dusek, Head of Global Programming for WEF, before the decision was taken on the Gulf. He said that, with geopolitical instability increasing, the Forum was becoming more significant, not less—evidenced by the attendance at the WEF’s annual summit at Davos.
“We did have overall record participation among the political leaders, the business leaders, innovators and civil society leaders. What was notable was that we really tried to put dialogue first,” Dusek said.
“We were playing on the spirit of Davos, which is really the fact that the town of Davos has always had this spirit of really coming together for a conversation.
“Obviously, we are operating in a more contested geo-political and geo-economic environment, and so we were not naive about this. We just wanted to make sure that we put front and center the need to have that conversation, even if people disagree.
“We’ve always been an organization that has global reach, multi-regional reach, and so we’ll continue, in addition to Davos, that important role of connecting people, leaders, stakeholders. We have a long-standing tradition of convening our second-largest gathering in China every year, and we will be gathered in Dalian at the end of June. We call it the Annual Meeting of the New Champions.”
WEF is committed to returning to the Gulf, which is welcome. Business and political leaders there know that the need for conversation and the hunt for solutions is now paramount.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Back in high school, Yaxel Lendeborg wasn’t even on the basketball team (and had even been cut from the middle-school team) and played video games 12-14 hours each day.
Now, the Michigan Wolverines Forward is the Big Ten Player of the Year—referred to as “The Dominican LeBron”—and is set to take on the Alabama Crimson Tide in the Sweet 16 on Friday.
His journey from the couch to the court is the kind of story coaches tell recruits to illustrate the success that can come from a single decision. Ahead of his senior year of high school, Lendeborg’s mother, Yissel Raposo, learned her son wasn’t on track to graduate, so she had a heart-to-heart conversation with him that served as a “wake-up call,” she told Hoops HQ in a December 2025 profile of the player.
It was a decision that largely paid off: Lendeborg’s grades dramatically improved when he enrolled in Camden County College, so much so that he was able to join the varsity basketball team for the final 11 games of his senior season. These were the only 11 high school basketball games Lendeborg ever played.
Right after high school, Lendeborg started working with his mother at a cell-phone accessory warehouse, but felt guilty about not doing more.
“It kind of hurt being in that space with my mom, seeing how much she’s been doing for us,” the 6-foot, 9-inch, 240-pound player told Hoops HQ. “So it was like, damn, I really messed my life up. And I’m not helping my mom out.”
That’s when everything changed.
Through the grapevine, coaches at Arizona Western College learned of Lendeborg. Although he wasn’t thrilled to be going, according to Hoops HQ, Lendeborg shipped himself off to Arizona, where he played 78 games in three seasons from 2020 to 2023. There, he was a two-time NJCAA All-American and won the ACCAC Player of the Year award twice.
In April 2023, Lendeborg transferred to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he helped the school earn the 2024 American Conference Tournament Title. He also earned AAC Tournament MVP honors, was named AAC Defensive Player of the Year twice, and helped the school reach the NCAA Tournament, among several other accolades.
Then in April 2025, Lendeborg committed to the University of Michigan, joining what would become the top team in the country under head coach Dusty May. His debut was somewhat injury-limited, but he quickly became Michigan’s star player. He averages 14.7 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 3.2 assists per game, according to ESPN, and led Michigan to a 19-1 Big 10 record (and 33-3 overall), the program’s first regular-season title since 2020-2021.
This March, he was named Big Ten Player of the Year and helped Michigan earn the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Regional for this year’s March Madness tournament. Now, he’s projected as a first-round NBA draft pick.
Lendeborg’s success story defies the typical blue-chip narrative in basketball recruiting. Typically, recruiters are after a 4- or 5-star player who has been heavily scouted since middle or early high school, appears on national rankings lists, and gets dozens of scholarship offers from top programs before their senior year.
Instead, Lendeborg, now 23, developed much later than his peers. This meant he had to outwork players with years of structured training—and now he’s competing in what’s widely considered the most physically demanding conference in college basketball. But Michigan basketball coach Dusty May says Lendeborg deserves every ounce of recognition he’s getting.
“I think it’s pretty obvious why he’s player of the year,” May told CBS reporter Tracy Wolfson in early March. “He does everything on the basketball court, and he’s incredibly unselfish while doing it. And he’s just scratching the surface of how good he can be.”
Lendeborg’s unlikely rise can serve as a compelling lesson for the business world, too. Talent without focus is just potential. For years, Lendeborg had the innate talent to perform at a high level, but lacked the motivation.
A 2007 study by American academic and psychologist Angela L. Duckworth shows that grit can be just as important in determining success as talent.
“The achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent, but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time,” she and her co-authors wrote in the study.
So, it wasn’t until Lendeborg committed to “sustained and focused” training that he met his big break, and it’s all paying off.
Not only has Lendeborg earned numerous accolades in recent years, but his hard work is also paying off. His name, image, and likeness (NIL) valuation is estimated at $2 million, according to On3, ranking him among the top 25 in college sports overall and No. 7 in basketball.
But Lendeborg also said in a March interview with the Associated Press he had turned down an NIL deal from Kentucky worth $7 million to $9 million dollars to stay with May and the Wolverines. That’s because he was prioritizing his long-term goals over money.
“I was raised without it, and I went my whole life without it,” Lendeborg told the AP. “Anything was going to make me super, super happy at the time.”
“I was thinking long term. What if I mess up my career because I chased the money instead of a future? Another big reason why I went with Dusty was he didn’t talk about money at all,” he continued. “It was all about making me better and helping me achieve my goals.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
From Gen Z to baby boomers, workers across industries are on the hunt for ways to future-proof their careers as artificial intelligence threatens to upend the labor market. Palantir CEO Alex Karp is offering a starkly simple view of who will come out ahead.
“There are basically two ways to know you have a future,” the 58-year-old billionaire said on TBPN earlier this month. “One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you’re neurodivergent.”
Karp’s first category reflects a growing consensus: skilled trades professionals—from electricians to plumbers—are difficult to automate and are increasingly in demand as Big Tech companies build out massive data centers and the U.S. faces existing labor shortages.
The second category is more personal. Karp has long spoken about living with dyslexia, the learning disability that can affect reading, writing, and information processing. More broadly, neurodivergence can include conditions such as ADHD and autism.
For Karp, that cognitive difference can be an advantage in an AI-driven world—less because of the diagnosis itself and more because of the mindset it can foster. Success, he argued, will favor people who think differently and take risks, or in his words, be “more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique.”
One-fifth of sales organizations within Fortune 500 companies are expected to actively recruit neurodivergent talent to improve business performance by 2027, according to a Gartner study.
While being neurodivergent is not a requirement to land a job at Palantir, the company has made it clear it sees such candidates as a strategic advantage.
It offers a dedicated “Neurodivergent Fellowship,” aimed at recruiting talent that may think differently from traditional hires.
“Neurodivergent individuals will play a disproportionate role in shaping the future of America and the West,” the job posting stated. “They see past performative ideologies and perceive beauty in the world that still exists—which technology and art can expose.”
The emphasis reflects Karp’s broader skepticism of traditional career pathways. Despite holding three degrees to his name—including a JD from Stanford and a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany—Karp has been blunt about the limits of higher education in an AI-driven economy.
“[AI] will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year. “You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy—I’ll use myself as an example—hopefully, you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.”
Palantir similarly launched a separate program—the Meritocracy Fellowship—designed specifically for high school graduates not enrolled in college. The program’s first cohort required Ivy League-level test scores to qualify, and attracted over 500 applicants. The 22 admitted students were a mix of those who felt attending college wasn’t compelling, or didn’t get into their dream schools, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The next round, currently recruiting for fall 2026, offers participants $5,400 a month as a stipend and pitches itself with a clear message: “Skip the debt. Reclaim years of your life. Earn the Palantir degree”—and top performers can even receive full-time offers at the company.
As traditional entry-level roles dry up for Gen Z graduates, many young people are coming to a similar conclusion as Karp: a college degree alone is no longer a guaranteed path to success.
Still, some tech leaders argue that higher education is far from obsolete—and that liberal arts in particular may become more valuable in the age of AI. Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, believes the next generation will benefit from studying disciplines that emphasize how to think, not just what to do.
“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,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “For that, a traditional liberal-arts education is really important.”
In direct contrast to Karp, Daniela Amodei, cofounder of AI firm Anthropic, said studying the humanities will be “more important than ever.”
“The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important,” she told ABC News last month. “And what I mean by that is when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Workplaces have long surveilled their employees, from tracking badge swipes to keyboard strokes. Now, JPMorgan Chase is rolling out a program to monitor the hours of its junior investment bankers—and the $782 billion bank says it’s for their own well-being.
As part of JPMorgan’s new pilot plan, it will assess whether the hours claimed by junior bankers on their time sheets match up with the activity electronically recorded by its IT systems, according to recent reporting from the Financial Times. Each week, these employees will be issued reports showing the comparison between their self-reported time and a figure based on their computer footprint, including video calls, desktop keystrokes, and scheduled meetings. The tools will not be used for evaluation purposes.
“Much like the weekly screen time summaries on a smartphone, this tool is about awareness—not enforcement,” JPMorgan said in a statement to the Financial Times. “It’s designed to support transparency, wellbeing, and encourage open conversations about workload.”
While many workers would be anxious at the idea of their employers tracking their days online, the pilot plan is actually an effort to counteract overwork among its junior staffers, according to the reporting. And it’s part of a larger movement among Wall Street titans to try and safeguard employees against potentially dangerous workloads.
Fortune reached out to JPMorgan for comment.
Wall Street’s famous “always on” culture of intense, sleepless workdays has started to show cracks as of late.
Much of the issue came to a head just two years ago, when Leo Lukenas III, a Green Beret who joined Bank of America as an investment banker, died of a blood clot after working extremely long days at the business.
While the coroner’s report did not establish a connection between the banker’s death and his intense Wall Street workload, his death spurred attention to the long hours and health declines of overworked investment bankers.
That same year, junior bankers were logging 100-hour workweeks—more than double the 40-hour load of many professionals.
JPMorgan’s most recent monitoring tool is only a continuation of the banking industry’s clampdown on the concerning “rite of passage.”
The Wall Street bank started implementing guardrails around the issue a couple of years ago; in 2024, the JPMorgan capped its junior bankers’ working hours to 80 hours a week. This policy was added on top of its “pencils down” period between 6 p.m. Friday to noon on Saturday, and the guarantee that staffers would have one full weekend off every three months. Some cases, like live deals, were exempt from the policy.
Other banks have taken notice of widespread intense burnout.
A 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation found that many junior investment bankers at Bank of America were routinely told by their superiors to lie about how many hours they worked in order to skirt limitations. After the reporting, the bank started encouraging its young staffers to accurately log their hours—and wave the red flag if any bosses told them to do otherwise.
In turn, Bank of America rolled out a new monitoring tool in the fall of 2024, which required U.S.-based junior investment bankers to log their hours daily rather than weekly, the WSJ reported. The young employees were also instructed to input information on the deals they were working on, the senior bankers supervising them, and their ability to shoulder more work on a scale of 1 to 4.
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Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Tuesday declared a state of national energy emergency to respond to the impact of the Middle East war, which his administration said posed “an imminent danger of a critically low energy supply.”
Under the declaration, which will initially last for a year, Marcos will lead a contingency committee that will ensure the availability and orderly distribution of fuel, food, medicines, agricultural products and other basic goods.
Authorities were ordered to take action against the hoarding, profiteering and manipulation of the supply of petroleum products. The Department of Migrant Workers, meanwhile, was asked to brace for the possible rescue and evacuation of Filipinos in the Middle East.
The government has started to provide 5,000 pesos ($83) each to large numbers of motorcycle taxi drivers and other public transport workers nationwide to help them cope with soaring gasoline and diesel prices. Free bus rides have also been provided to students and workers in selected cities.
About 2.4 million Filipinos live and work in the Middle East, including about 31,000 in Israel and 800 in Iran. Most have opted, however, to stay and work in the region, with only several hundreds being flown home so far with government help since the Middle East hostilities began.
A Filipina caregiver, Mary Ann de Vera, was killed in Tel Aviv, Israel, in an Iranian missile strike on Feb. 28 while helping bring her elderly charge to a bomb shelter, Philippine officials said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
As states that already ban abortion look to further restrict access this year, much of the focus is on pills sent by out-of-state providers.
A survey released Tuesday helps explain the emphasis. It suggests that more women in states with bans obtained abortions last year using the pills prescribed via telehealth than by traveling to places where it’s legal.
Most of the states with the political will to impose broad bans have already done so in the nearly four years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to enforcing them. So far this year, just one state has a new one.
Here’s a look at where things stand as many state legislatures are wrapping up or have completed their 2026 sessions.
South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden, a Republican, signed a bill last week that makes it a felony to advertise, distribute or sell abortion pills.
Similar measures have cleared both legislative chambers this year in Mississippi, where the House and Senate need to iron out differences before sending a bill to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.
A survey of state abortion policies from the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, finds that at least three states — Florida, Oklahoma and Texas — already have laws that specifically ban providers from mailing the pills to patients. Louisiana has classified mifepristone as a controlled dangerous substance.
Bills intended to keep out the pills have cleared one chamber in Arizona, Indiana and South Carolina this year. Republicans control the legislatures in all three states and the governor’s office in two of them. In Arizona, any restrictions that pass could be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
A Guttmacher survey released Tuesday sheds light on why abortion opponents may be focusing on pills.
The report suggests that in 2025, for the first time, more women in the 13 states that ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy obtained pills through telehealth than traveled to other states for abortion.
The prescriptions come from providers in states with laws adopted since the fall of Roe that are intended to protect those who prescribe abortion pills to patients in states with bans. Most often, women using pills for abortion are prescribed a regimen of two drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol. They’re approved for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.
The estimated increase in the mailing pills comes as Guttmacher’s estimates also suggest fewer women are traveling to obtain abortions in states like Colorado, Illinois, Kansas and New Mexico.
Guttmacher’s estimates are based on data from a monthly survey conducted among a random sample of U.S. abortion providers, combined with historical data from every provider in the U.S. They reflect a trend documented in other surveys of abortion providers.
Multiple states are challenging the federal rules that allow mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth. Requiring in-person prescriptions instead would at least dent the ability of out-of-state providers to get pills into states with bans.
Louisiana has such a lawsuit in federal court there; the attorneys general of Florida and Texas have one in Texas; those two states, along with Idaho, Kansas and Missouri, are making the same case in a Missouri court.
Meanwhile, Texas has filed civil cases and Louisiana criminal ones against providers accused of sending pills into their states.
The Food and Drug Administration last year approved a generic version of mifepristone, which frustrated abortion opponents.
Wyoming is the only state this year that has imposed a new abortion ban.
Under a law signed in March by Republican Gov. Mark Gordon, it became the fifth state with a ban on abortion at about six weeks’ gestational age — before many women realize they’re pregnant. Like most of the others, Wyoming’s bans abortions once cardiac activity can be detected.
But courts have rejected previous Wyoming efforts to limit abortion, and the Wyoming Supreme Court in January struck down a ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
No state has adopted a measure intended to allow criminal prosecutions against women who have abortions.
Proposals to do so keep getting made but sputter early in the legislative process.
The farthest such a bill has advanced was a hearing last year before a Senate subcommittee in South Carolina. One was scheduled for a subcommittee hearing in Tennessee this month, but didn’t get one.
Pregnancy Justice, which advocates for the rights of pregnant people, says it’s tracked new “abortion-as-homicide” measures introduced in six states in 2026 — down from 13 states last year.
The major established anti-abortion groups oppose the approach. “Women require compassion and support,” said Ingrid Duran, the state legislative director for National Right to Life. “Not prosecution.”
Melissa Murray, a professor at New York University School of Law, says that by introducing bills with penalties against women, the movement’s less compromising abolitionists can break down the idea that such policies are off-limits.
“You keep pushing the boundary, pushing the envelope, eventually you will get what you’re seeking,” Murray said. “It will no longer feel fanciful or shocking.”
She also noted that women are already sometimes charged with crimes related to their pregnancies. This month, police in Georgia charged a woman with murder after allegedly using an abortion pill and the opioid painkiller oxycodone.
Abortion questions will be before voters in at least three states in November.
Missouri lawmakers are asking voters to repeal the right to reproductive freedom that they put into the state constitution in 2024.
Elsewhere, voters are being asked to add constitutional amendments that largely mirror current state abortion laws.
In Nevada, a state constitutional amendment to allow abortion until fetal viability — generally considered to be sometime after 21 weeks of pregnancy — passed in 2024, and needs voter approval a second time to take effect.
A Virginia ballot measure would guarantee the right to reproductive freedom, including access to contraception and making decisions on abortion care during the first two trimesters of pregnancy.
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Associated Press reporter Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this article.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Kalshi and Polymarket, the two biggest prediction market platforms, rushed to institute new industry guardrails and add new surveillance tools on Monday after two key senators announced legislation that could severely curtail the industry’s prospects.
Kalshi said it would ban political candidates from trading on their own campaigns, and it would preemptively block anyone involved in college or professional sports from trading contracts related to the sports they play or are employed by.
In a statement, a Kalshi spokesperson said the company’s new features “further demonstrate our commitment to safe markets.”
Polymarket also instituted its own set of bans and rules. The company rewrote its rules to say clearly that users cannot trade on contracts where they might possess confidential information or could influence the outcome of an event. This would include athletes but could also include company officials, policymakers or anyone who would have enough influence to affect the outcome of an event or know the information in advance.
“These rule enhancements make our expectations abundantly clear for every participant across both platforms,” said Neal Kumar, Polymarket’s chief legal officer, in a statement.
Polymarket, in particular, has faced intense criticism after some of its users made substantial bets ahead of the war in Iran and the military action in Venezuela, earlier this year. Those users appeared to have profited handsomely from knowing in advance that President Donald Trump was going to take military action in those regions.
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, introduced broad legislation called the “Prediction Markets are Gambling Act,” on Monday that would ban prediction markets from creating contracts related to sports. While prediction markets allow users to bet on everything from the weather to political events, much of their recent growth has been in sporting events. The bill, if enacted, would substantially destroy much of Kalshi and Polymarket’s future business prospects. Both companies have signed business deals with several sports teams and leagues in order to bolster their credibility with sports fans.
Sen Curtis’ home state of Utah has been particularly aggressive in trying to keep Kalshi and Polymarket out of its state. Gov. Spencer Cox recently signed legislation that would expand the state’s definition of gambling to include what are known as “prop bets.”
Shares of the parent company of FanDuel and DraftKings rose sharply on Monday after the senators’ announcement.
While Sen. Schiff and Sen. Curtis are not the first politicians to propose a broad ban on the activities of prediction markets, the fact that both political parties are becoming skeptical of them is a cause of alarm for the industry. Several states have preemptively banned Kalshi and Polymarket, saying that the platforms effectively are a sports betting industry with a technological twist. While Kalshi has tried to sue to get its platform allowed in certain states, like Nevada and Utah, it has found little success so far.
Kalshi and Polymarket have found backing from the Trump-controlled Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal regulator of derivatives and other prediction markets activities. The CFTC’s chairman, Michael Selig, has said he would back Kalshi in any of its legal battles at the state level, arguing that federal law preempts any state law on this issue.
Any friendly decision the CFTC makes on this industry could end up financially benefiting the president’s family as well. President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has invested in Polymarket through his venture capital firm and is a strategic adviser for Kalshi.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
President Donald Trump took a surprise tour of Elvis Presley’s Graceland on Monday while in Memphis, a diversion from the war in Iran and efforts to address long lines at U.S. airports during which he marveled at just how famous the King of Rock and Roll was and wondered aloud if he could have beaten him in a fight.
Trump for years has played Presley’s music at his campaign rallies across the country and often compared himself to Presley. He was in Memphis for a roundtable on efforts to address crime in the city.
“I’m going to see Graceland after this, I think. Is that right?” Trump said during the meeting. “I love Elvis.”
Trump’s side trip to a top tourist attraction — which has at times ranked as the second most-visited private home in the U.S. after the White House — came as thousands of Americans across the country are wading through long lines at security checkpoints at airports, where Trump sent federal immigration officers to assist the Transportation Security Administration during an ongoing Homeland Security shutdown.
Also, though Trump was in Tennessee on Monday after ordering a “temporary” halt to planned strikes on Iranian power plants, American forces are still embroiled in the sprawling regional conflict.
The late singer’s stately home, with its stone facade and white columned entrance, is just a few miles from the site of the roundtable meeting, which was also attended by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Graceland opened as a museum and tourist attraction in 1982 as a tribute to Presley, the singer and actor who died in August 1977 at age 42.
Graceland temporarily closed down so Trump could take a brief private tour, including examining an Army helmet Presley scrawled his “EP” initials in after reporting to basic training in 1958. He also scoped out a bread warmer in the kitchen and traipsed through the den known as “the Jungle Room” because of its green shag carpet, Polynesian-style furniture and indoor rock waterfall.
Trump also marveled at Presley’s gold-plated Social Security card, suggesting that the style of card might be something authorities might want to bring back. Later, peering at Presley’s gold phone, the president offered, “I would like to hear some of those conversations.”
Tours of the home never include the bathroom where Presley died. But the president was handed a guitar to sign by a Graceland guide who pulled on gloves to handle special objects. The instrument was a replica of one used by Presley during his famous “Aloha From Hawaii” concert in 1973, the president was told.
After being told that Elvis had not actually played the guitar he’d signed, Trump grew reflective. “Could I have taken him in a fight?” he asked of Elvis, whom he lamented having never met.
“Who else would be more famous than Elvis?” he offered with a grin, when it was suggested that visitors could one day come to glimpse his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Trump’s campaign rally pre-show set list often includes some of Presley’s music, such as “Suspicious Minds,” “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” and a medley of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” At times, massive digital screens at his rallies would play videos of Presley’s concerts.
Trump has often compared himself to Elvis, once posting a composite photograph on social media with half Presley’s face on one side and his own on the other.
“For so many years people have been saying that Elvis and I look alike. Now this pic has been going all over the place,” Trump wrote. “What do you think?”
Later that year, he shared on social media a black-and-white image that depicted Trump standing alongside the singer as he played guitar.
Trump has also shouted out the late musician from the stage, opening a 2018 rally in Tupelo, Mississippi — Presley’s birthplace — by joking that people used to say that at one time he resembled him.
“We love Elvis. I shouldn’t say this, you’ll say I’m very conceited because I’m not, but other than the blonde hair when I was growing up they said I looked like Elvis, do you see that, can you believe it?”
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AP writer Will Weissert contributed from Washington. Kinnard reported from Chapin, S.C., and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Moments after an Air Canada jet collided at high speed with a fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing the pilots and hurling a flight attendant from the aircraft, the passengers took their escape into their own hands.
With the smell of fuel in the air and debris dangling from the obliterated cockpit, passengers tore open emergency exit doors, jumped off the plane’s wings and then turned around to catch others coming up behind them, some bleeding or with head wounds.
“Strangely enough, I wasn’t scared or panicked. On the contrary, I think most of us were pretty aware of what happened,” said passenger Clément Lelièvre. “So we all went outside; we got other people out.”
About 40 passengers and crew members on the regional jet from Montreal, and two people from the fire truck, were taken to hospitals. Some suffered serious injuries, but by Monday morning, most had been released, and others walked away without needing treatment.
As investigators continued delving Tuesday into what caused the catastrophic wreck, stories of survival also emerged — including that of the flight attendant, found injured but alive outside the aircraft.
Lelièvre credited the pilots’ “incredible reflexes” with saving lives. The pilots braked extremely hard just as the plane touched down, he said.
The collision late Sunday came after the fire truck was given permission to check on another plane that had aborted its takeoff after reporting an odor on board and started crossing the tarmac. An air traffic controller can be heard on airport communications frantically telling the fire truck to stop.
Roughly 20 minutes later, the controller appears to blame himself. “We were dealing with an emergency earlier,” the controller said. “I messed up.”
A key for investigators will be examining coordination of the airport’s air traffic and ground traffic at the time of the crash, said Mary Schiavo, a former Department of Transportation Inspector General.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said LaGuardia is “well-staffed” but faces a shortage of controllers.
The runway where the crash happened is likely to be closed for “days” during the investigation, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, said at a news conference Monday. Investigators need to sift through a lot of debris, she said.
Authorities recovered the plane’s cockpit and flight data recorders by cutting a hole in the aircraft’s roof and then drove them to the NTSB lab in Washington for analysis, Homendy said.
It was too early in the investigation to answer many questions about the accident, but more information was expected to be released Tuesday, she said.
The crash shut down LaGuardia — the New York region’s third busiest hub — during what was already a messy time at U.S. airports because of a partial government shutdown.
Flights resumed Monday afternoon on one runway and with lengthy delays. The shutdown caused some disruptions at other airports, too, especially for Delta, which has a major presence at LaGuardia.
There were 72 passengers and four crew members aboard the Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada, according to the airline. The flight originated at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Canada has also sent a team of investigators.
The pilot and copilot who died in the first fatal crash at LaGuardia in 34 years were both based out of Canada, said Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport.
Jeannette Gagnier, the great aunt of one of the pilots, identified him as Antoine Forest, and said he always wanted to be a pilot.
Air traffic controllers are not impacted by the partial government shutdown that has caused long delays at airport security checkpoints in recent days. They have been affected by past shutdowns.
The FAA has been chronically short on air traffic controllers for years.
LaGuardia is one of 35 major U.S. airports with an advanced surface surveillance system designed to help keep track of planes and vehicles crossing the airport.
An alarm heard in the background of the air traffic control audio was likely from the system and would have alerted the tower to the potential collision, Former FAA air traffic control chief Mike McCormick said.
FAA statistics show there were 1,636 runway incursions last year.
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Associated Press reporters Michael R. Sisak, Anthony Izaguirre and Mae Anderson in New York; Rob Gillies in Toronto; Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Americans’ outlook on the job market has turned increasingly pessimistic, a surprisingly negative shift given the low unemployment rate but one that likely reflects an ongoing hiring drought.
Just 28% of workers in a quarterly Gallup survey conducted late last year said now is a “good time” to find a quality job, with 72% saying it is a bad time. Those figures are a sharp reversal from just a few years ago, in mid-2022, when 70% said it was a good time.
Americans have quickly gotten more pessimistic: As recently as late 2024, just under half of workers still said it was a good time to search for a job. The current survey was conducted during the final three months of 2025, long before the Iran war that has sent oil and gas prices soaring and threatens to slow the economy as Americans redirect more of their dollars to filling gas tanks and away from other spending.
The figures help explain other surveys that show Americans have a largely bleak view of the economy, even as many headline measures suggest it has been growing and job losses are low.
Job pessimism is especially pronounced among college graduates. The shift is likely because hiring in many white-collar professions has been unusually weak for the past two years, in areas such as software, customer service and advertising.
The survey found a split based on education levels, with just 19% of workers with a college degree thinking that now is a good time to find a quality job, while 35% of workers without a college degree are optimistic.
A separate Gallup survey of U.S. adults overall found that college graduates’ optimism about the job market is the lowest it’s been since 2013. Meanwhile, the gap in job market sentiment between Americans with and without a college degree was at its widest in that survey since Gallup started asking the question in 2001.
Just about 2 in 10 workers ages 18-34 think now is a good time to find a job, compared to about 4 in 10 workers ages 65 and older who say the same.
Gallup’s survey is consistent with what economists call the “low-hire, low-fire” job market: Businesses are largely holding onto their workers and measures of layoffs remain quite low. As a result, older workers are largely secure in their jobs. But hiring is also quite sluggish, making it harder for younger workers to break in and find permanent work.
It also found that younger workers are much likelier than older workers to say they’re actively looking for a new job or watching for opportunities. Most Gen Z and Millennial workers say they’re at least watching for opportunities, while about three-quarters of baby boomers say they’re not looking at all.
The Gallup results come as government data shows that overall hiring is at its weakest level in more than a decade. The Labor Department tracks a “hiring rate,” or the proportion of people who are hired each month as a percent of those with jobs. The hiring rate dropped to 3.2% last November, around when Gallup conducted its survey, the lowest since March 2013. It was 3.9% before the pandemic.
A hiring rate at that 3.2% is quite low: When it was last reached in March 2013, the unemployment rate was 7.5%, as millions of Americans were still struggling to find work after the 2008-2009 Great Recession. It suggests it is much harder to find a job now than the unemployment rate would indicate.
Government data also shows that there are more unemployed people — 7.4 million — than available jobs, at 6.9 million. That is a reversal from the first few years after the pandemic, when vacancies outnumbered those out of work.
Gallup’s survey also found that workers have a dimmer view of their current life and future prospects than at any point since 2009, when the firm began measuring the workforce’s life evaluations.
Other surveys echo Americans’ generally dark view of the economy. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence survey was just 91.2 in February, not far from its pandemic-era lows and down from nearly 130 before the pandemic.
More people believe jobs are “easy to get” than “hard to find,” the Conference Board’s survey finds, but the gap has narrowed steadily in recent years.
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The Gallup poll of 22,368 U.S. adults who are working full-time and part-time for organizations in the U.S. was conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 13, 2025, using a sample drawn from Gallup’s probability-based panel. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 1.0 percentage points.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
President Donald Trump has cast another mail ballot in Florida as he continues to publicly bash the voting method as a source of fraud and push Congress to curtail the practice.
Palm Beach County voter records show the president voted by mail in a Tuesday special election for state legislative seats and that his ballot has been counted. Early in-person voting in the contest ran through Sunday, when Trump was still at his south Florida estate.
The White House did not immediately return an Associated Press request for comment. Aides have said Trump’s ire is directed at states using universal mail-in voting, not individual voters who may not be able to get to a polling place.
Nonetheless, Trump has in the last week called mail-in voting “cheating” and “corrupt as hell.” He is urging Congress to pass the SAVE Act, a sweeping bill that would bar universal mail ballots and limit the options to a select few voters — such as those with disabilities, military commitments or who are traveling on Election Day. The measure faces steep odds in the closely divided Senate even with the president’s pressure.
Trump has fixated on mail ballots since he began falsely claiming that his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden was the result of fraud. Multiple U.S. courts and Trump’s own attorney general have found no evidence of fraud that affected the outcome, despite the COVID-19 pandemic increasing the share of the electorate that cast mail ballots that year.
“We’re the only country in the world that does it that way. Corrupt as hell,” Trump said last week at the White House when hosting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin.
Dozens of countries, including European democracies that are traditional U.S. allies, use some form of mail-in voting.
Trump said last week that the SAVE Act was the “biggest thing” pending in Washington, even as Congress and administration grapple with the Iran war and a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
Last August, Trump used a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to blast mail voting.
“We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt,” Trump said. “And it’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it. It’s the only way they can get elected.”
The president, who changed his official personal residence and voter registration from New York to Florida during his first term, does not have a standing vote-by-mail request for all elections, according to the county records. That means he has to request a mail ballot for any individual election.
The ballot today includes Florida state House District 87 and Senate District 14.
Trump offered an endorsement late Monday in the House contest via his Truth Social platform.
“There is a very important Special Election tomorrow, Tuesday, March 24th, for Florida State House District 87 in beautiful Palm Beach County. … TO ALL GREAT PATRIOTS IN FLORIDA STATE HOUSE DISTRICT 87: GET OUT AND VOTE FOR JON MAPLES! Polls are open from 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M.” Trump wrote, without mentioning that he had voted by mail or at all.
The Florida election comes one day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a Mississippi case questioning whether states can count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but not received until later. Trump has criticized those allowances in 14 states and the District of Columbia.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
As of 8:15 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil is trading at $102.47 per barrel, based on the Brent benchmark we’ll explain in a bit. That’s $1.03 above yesterday morning’s level and $29.44 higher than where it stood a year ago.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
When looking at how oil performs, two main benchmarks stand out:
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:
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.
Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:
The current price of oil per barrel depends largely on supply and demand, including news about potential future supply and demand (geopolitics, decisions made by OPEC+, etc.). In the U.S., prices also move based on how friendly an administration is to drilling, as it can affect future supply. For example, 2025 saw the Trump administration move to reopen more than 1.5 million acres in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing, reversing the Biden administration’s policy of limiting oil drilling in the Arctic.
The price of oil updates constantly when the “futures” markets are open. A futures market is effectively an auction where people agree to buy or sell oil in the future. As long as people and companies are trading contracts, the oil price is changing.
In short, shale is rock that contains oil and natural gas. Think of shale as energy yet to be tapped. The more shale the U.S. accesses, the more energy we’ll have—and the more easily oil prices can keep from spiking as much thanks to a greater supply.
When oil is expensive, it tends to make everyday items cost more. This can be related to energy (your heating, gas utilities, etc.), but it’s also due to the logistics involved with making those items accessible to you. Shipping, for example, can affect the price of things at the grocery store, as it’s more expensive to get those products from warehouses and farms onto the shelf.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning. The single-point forecast is no longer fit for purpose.
Scenario planning has become boardroom shorthand for preparation to deal with the unknowable, my colleague Geoff Colvin writes in a Fortune feature titled “For CEOs, it’s time for a wartime mindset.”
Colvin argues that it’s a practice that is never more vital than in wartime — when a cyberattack, or even a sanction, can reroute supply chains overnight and send energy prices soaring.
He writes: “Instead of betting on one forecast about how events will unfold, the most resilient CEOs are now rehearsing several plausible futures at once and deciding — before the missiles start dropping, the virus becomes a pandemic, or the markets seize up — what they will do in each.
“It’s an approach that was pioneered by Shell precursor Royal Dutch Shell. In the 1970s, the energy company began developing a set of vivid alternative futures involving potential oil-supply disruptions. Shell did not invent the idea of developing such scenarios, which had earlier roots in military and Cold War strategy, but it was the first major company to embed systematic scenario planning at the center of corporate decision-making, largely through the work of economist and planner Pierre Wack.” You can read more of Colvin’s article here.
CFOs are strategic partners to CEOs, and financial scenario planning isn’t just about reducing risk—it can also uncover new opportunities, according to Gartner research. For each scenario, CFOs should define actions that enable rapid response, while prioritizing moves that apply across multiple outcomes, such as locking in supplier contracts or accelerating product launches, Gartner advises. This kind of proactive planning helps to ensure companies can act quickly. The firm also points to AI scenario planning models to track key metrics in real time, and autogenerate scenarios based on real data, not just guesses.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
If yesterday’s five-minute relief rally taught analysts one thing, it’s that traders are keen to jump on the optimistic bandwagon when it comes to Iran. After weeks of volatile trade, yesterday Wall Street celebrated after President Trump indicated he was working toward a “complete and total” resolution of hostilities with Iran.
There’s one small issue: While Trump said there was “productive” conversations with Iranian leaders, Tehran reportedly maintained that “no dialogue” has occurred between the two nations. There are talks between intermediaries in Riyadh, but it’s not clear how far along they are, or how willing either side is to compromise.
Wall Street, however, has adopted a new behavioural trait since Trump returned to office: Investors are reacting (justifiably or not) to social media posts from the Oval Office without much verifiable evidence to go on.
Wall Street’s early optimism that the war in Iran would resolve relatively quickly means they are more inclined to act on positive updates from the commander in chief, according to UBS’s chief economist Paul Donovan.
He noted to clients this morning: “Markets are not reacting to information, they are generally reacting to social media posts and headlines—even if those posts or headlines are fake news or contradictory. The absence of verifiable facts is already complicating economic assessments, for instance, it is difficult to assess how much Dubai might have to spend repairing war damage, when there is little verifiable information about the extent of war damage.”
Wall Street has come to expect (indeed, sometimes bank on) rapid updates and changes in foreign policy under President Trump, often shared on social media rather than through more traditional channels. Trump’s social media posts have covered everything from tariff threats on trading partners and calling out specific businesses, through to criticism of the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
The rapidity of these updates, and often the ensuing reverse ferret, has earned a nickname: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). The updates from the president on Monday, some have speculated, may the latest example of a TACO.
While it could be argued that Trump’s social media posts, above all others, should be monitored by investors, Donovan highlights that this should not obscure factual information. He added: “There is now a risk that investors will start looking for leading indicators of social media posts, rather than leading indicators of actual indications.”
There’s a further issue: Traders want the war in Iran to be over. When the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, Trump said the action would only last for a matter of weeks, and this is the baseline many economists and analysts have stuck with.
Donovan argues that for this reason, markets are “bewitched” by good news, and so are more inclined (such as yesterday) to act: In a matter of moments yesterday, oil sunk below the $100 threshold and was down 15% while equities added $1.7 trillion in value (much of this promptly unwound when Iran denied the talks).
“Investors are also perhaps influenced by loss aversion and confirmation bias,” added Donovan. “Investors want the war to end, there’s an irrational bias in favor of rising markets. If there is a story that seems to confirm that desire, investors are more likely to react to it. This does not mean that negative stories will be ignored … for now, markets do seem to be content to trade strongly on stories but to provoke an equal negative reaction would probably need more hard evidence of adverse developments.”
Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid echoed that markets will now be looking for follow-through from Trump 2.0, writing this morning: “Obviously, much now depends on the progress of any talks, and whether the more optimistic rhetoric is followed up by concrete action.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The giant asset manager Invesco revealed on Tuesday that it will run a crypto investment vehicle known as the Superstate Short Duration US Government Securities Fund (USTB), which holds over $900 million in assets under management. Like BlackRock with its flagship BUIDL fund, Invesco is betting on an emerging category of assets known as “real world assets” or RWAs, which consist of traditional investments packaged in blockchain wrappers.
While BlackRock’s BUIDL, the biggest of the RWA funds, is technically a money market fund that holds both Treasury Bills and repos, Invesco’s USTB, which is the fourth largest RWA fund, holds only T-bills. Another big player in the space is Paxos, which offers a fund backed primarily by physical gold.
While the RWA offerings are still niche products, they are growing fast. Their appeal derives from the blockchain packaging, which lets holders settle trades instantly, freeing up collateral. And unlike stablecoins, they provide easy access to yield. While tokenized funds have so far been marketed primarily to institutional investors, this could change in coming years as players like Invesco and BlackRock, which have large retail customer bases, expand their offerings.
“Invesco has been strategically building the capabilities required to support institutional-grade digital asset products since 2019, and this partnership reflects that long-term commitment,” said Kathleen Wrynn, Global Head of Digital Assets at Invesco, in a statement.
In an interview with Fortune, Superstate founder Robert Leshner explained that his company built USTB and another tokenized fund in part as a prototype to show Wall Street that the RWA concept worked in practice. Founded in 2022, Superstate also operates as a transfer agent and is positioning itself to offer its tokenization technology as a white label service across Wall Street. Superstate’s prime rival in this is Securitize, which provides the technology powering BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.
Leshner declined to provide the financial aspects of the new tie-up between between Invesco and Superstate, which in January raised an $82 million Series B funding round. He did, though, confirm that his firm would serve as an ongoing technology partner to Invesco, and that the financial giant would take over the branding and operations of the T-bill fund.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink underscored the growing importance of RWAs in his annual shareholder letter that was published on Monday. The letter contains six references to “tokenization,” including in a passage where Fink notes, “Tokenization could help accelerate [the] future by updating the plumbing of the financial system—making investments easier to issue, easier to trade, and easier to access.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
When everyone agrees, that might be the biggest warning sign of all. Unanimous decisions often reveal as much about group dynamics as genuine agreement.
There is an unlikely field that studies this problem with unusual clarity: avalanche safety.
In avalanche safety training, there is one rule that overrides all others: if a single person in the group says “no,” everyone turns around. Corporate boards could learn something from that.
Corporate boards make some of the most consequential decisions in business — acquisitions, strategic pivots, leadership transitions, major capital allocations. Yet when those decisions appear in board minutes, they are almost always recorded as unanimous. Research suggests dissent occurs in only about 1% of board decisions. That unanimity often reveals as much about group dynamics as it does about genuine agreement.
The rule exists because of a pattern instructors see again and again. Someone senses something is wrong — unstable snow, deteriorating conditions, a risky route — but speaking up means challenging the plan and slowing everyone down. In larger groups especially, that voice often stays quiet.
The most dangerous variable, instructors often say, is not the snowpack. It is the group.
Corporate boardrooms operate under strikingly similar conditions. Directors must make consequential decisions with incomplete information: often within the compressed time frame of a board meeting. The question isn’t whether boards face pressure to align. It’s whether that pressure is silencing the most important voices in the room.
Consensus has obvious virtues. Boards function best when directors ultimately align behind a course of action. A unified board gives management clarity and confidence in execution.
But consensus can be a signal. It can also be a warning.
Anyone who has spent time in boardrooms recognizes how quickly the momentum of a conversation can tilt toward agreement. Management presents a proposal. A director offers a supportive observation. Another suggests refinement. Gradually, the discussion shifts from whether the proposal is sound to how it should be implemented.
Eventually the chair looks around the table and asks a familiar question: “Is everyone comfortable moving forward?”
Directors sometimes recognize the dynamic only after the meeting ends. Following a unanimous decision on a major initiative, someone may quietly remark in the hallway, “I had some reservations about that.” Another director admits they did as well. In the room itself, however, those doubts never surfaced.
Seasoned investors understand the value of dissent. Warren Buffett has long argued that the best boards are those where directors are willing to challenge assumptions rather than simply ratify them. But even strong boards can find that once a discussion begins to converge, raising a late objection becomes psychologically difficult.
Psychologists call this dynamic groupthink: the tendency of cohesive groups to suppress disagreement in pursuit of harmony. Boardrooms are particularly susceptible: — directors meet periodically, relationships are collegial, and open disagreement can feel unnecessarily disruptive.
Avalanche educators warn about the same pattern. As groups become larger, responsibility diffuses and individuals become less likely to challenge the emerging consensus. The very structure of the discussion can begin to suppress caution.
If that dynamic shows up in boardrooms — and the evidence suggests it does — improving board decisions isn’t only about who sits at the table. It’s about how decisions are made once everyone is there. Boards have spent decades focused on composition: independence, diversity, expertise. The next frontier is deliberation.
Some boards already experiment with structured disagreement. In evaluating major transactions, directors may organize “red team/blue team” exercises, assigning one group to argue for a deal while another is tasked with challenging it. The objective is to stress-test assumptions before committing capital.
Yet most board deliberation still takes place in a single conversation around a table. That format encourages the emergence of a dominant narrative before competing analyses have had time to develop.
Boards might consider what could be called parallel deliberation: briefly breaking into smaller groups before reconvening to compare conclusions.
After management presents a proposal, the chair divides directors into small groups and asks each to answer the same three questions: What assumptions must be true for this plan to succeed? What could cause it to fail? Under what circumstances would we say no? Fifteen minutes later, the board reconvenes and compares conclusions before continuing the discussion.
Such a structure introduces several useful dynamics. Smaller groups lower the social cost of dissent. Independent discussions generate multiple lines of analysis rather than a single conversational path. And by interrupting the momentum of a room-wide consensus, the structure helps surface concerns that might otherwise remain unspoken.
The goal is not to manufacture disagreement. Boards ultimately need alignment. But alignment reached through rigorous debate is far stronger than consensus that emerges quietly around the table.
In avalanche training, the group turns around when one person says no.
In boardrooms, that same voice is the one most likely to stay quiet — and the one most worth hearing.
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
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Cambridge Mobile Telematics has quietly become one of the most important companies you’ve never heard of in the race to make driving safer—and now some of the world’s biggest insurers are doubling down on it. The Cambridge, Mass.–based company has secured a $350 million strategic investment led by TPG’s Rise Funds and Allianz X, Fortune exclusively learned, with existing backer State Farm also participating in the all-secondary deal.
CMT builds AI-powered telematics software that turns everyday devices—smartphones, car sensors, dashcams, and other connected hardware—into real-time risk detectors on the road. Its DriveWell Fusion platform ingests sensor data from millions of devices and fuses it with contextual information, creating a unified view of how people actually drive, from hard braking and speeding to phone distraction. Insurers, automakers, and public agencies then use those insights to price risk, detect crashes, and nudge drivers toward safer habits.
To date, CMT-powered programs have helped prevent more than 100,000 crashes and 54,000 serious injuries, and support over 140 safe driving initiatives touching more than 55 million drivers in 25 countries, according to Frost & Sullivan and the company. According to TPG, the company already serves nearly all of the 25 top U.S. auto insurers.
The business behind that impact is not small. Third-party estimates peg CMT’s private valuation above the billion‑dollar mark. The new deal follows a $500 million investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in 2018, one of the largest tech financings in Massachusetts at the time.
Powers, CMT’s cofounder and CEO, has a simple way of explaining what all that capital is funding. “If you think of the world of mobility, we are an artificial intelligence mobile sensing company,” he told Fortune. “Most vehicles have a signal coming from them. Now it might be the driver’s phone, it might be the vehicle itself, but we measure the signal. We do not track things. We measure signal.” Beyond insurance, CMT’s public sector division works with cities and transportation agencies to understand how people move, redesign dangerous roads, and prepare aging infrastructure for more automated driving.
The strategic investment into CMT is notable not just for its size, but for what it is not. Powers says, “none of this is primary capital. This is all secondary transactions, meaning there’s no dilution with this transaction—zero.” The new money instead is meant to push the business further in its innovation by buying out older investors and providing liquidity to long‑time employees and shareholders. “We’ve been at this for 16 years,” he told Fortune. “We continue to generate cash and continue to deliver liquidity to folks along the way.”
Akash Pradhan, partner at TPG’s Rise Fund, told Fortune, the firm’s investment in CMT comes from his belief that the telematics company is slated to become the “mission critical” infrastructure of road safety turning more than 30 petabytes of data into foundational AI that can help both save lives and lower premiums.
For Allianz X, the deal is as much about strategy as returns. The unit is the strategic investment arm of Allianz, rather than a conventional GP/LP fund, and sits inside a group that wrote about $217.1 billion in total premiums and generated $20.2 billion in operating profit in 2025, serving roughly 97 million customers worldwide. “At Allianz X, we’re not a fund, so we don’t have a GP structure,” CEO Dr. Nazim Cetin told Fortune. “We are a strategic investment unit of Allianz.”
Allianz has been building a digital claims stack in recent years, acquiring firms like ControlExpert, Innovation Group, and GT Motive to automate everything from photo-based damage estimates to routing cars to the right repair shops. CMT’s telematics is meant to sit upstream of that system, helping prevent accidents in the first place and feeding richer data into claims workflows when they do happen.
Cetin stresses that Allianz X still underwrites the deal like a classic venture investor. “We do not invest if the company on a standalone basis would not give us the risk-return profile that we expect,” he says. “In this case, what we would expect is what every VC investor would expect from such an investment on a standalone basis.” But unlike a traditional fund, Allianz’s capital “doesn’t have an expiration date,” giving it more patience to realize both financial returns and operational gains like lower claims frequency and more tailored pricing for policyholders.
The check also comes from serious financial firepower. TPG manages more than $120 billion across strategies and has built its Rise impact platform into what it calls the world’s largest dedicated impact-investing franchise, with roughly $19 billion in assets under management. Allianz X sits inside one of the largest auto insurers in Europe and globally, while State Farm—an early CMT backer—runs one of the most widely used telematics programs in the U.S., Drive Safe & Save, across more than 90 million policies and accounts.For Powers, that network is as much about distribution as dollars. “Because we’ve been profitable for so long, and because we really control our destiny, we really get to be selective of who we choose to work with,” he told Fortune. But ultimately, Powers says, his vision for CMT is simply to help leave the world better than he found it.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning. Energy leaders from around the world are in Houston right now for the annual CERAWeek gathering, organized by S&P Global. A major theme, of course, is the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has cut off 20% of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas, creating the greatest global energy supply shock ever.
As Fortune’s Energy Editor Jordan Blum reports from Houston, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth believes oil prices may be too low. As Wirth told attendees: “There are very real physical manifestations of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that are working their way around the world through the system that I don’t think are fully priced in.”
Indeed, hard-hit Asian countries are trying to stockpile and conserve energy through work-from-home efforts, school closures, and more. The war is also crippling supplies of helium and fertilizer, hurting chipmakers and farmers alike. (Stocks and even Bitcoin rallied Monday on news of possible peace talks.)
A number of Middle Eastern leaders are not in Houston this week because of the conflict: Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser withdrew while others are participating virtually. Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, CEO of state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), is scheduled to participate virtually today. Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE’s minister of energy and advanced technology and head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (Adnoc), gave a virtual address yesterday in which he said “weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz is not an act of aggression against one nation. It’s economic terrorism against every nation.”
While U.S. CEOs may not face as direct a hit in terms of energy supplies, they have other consequences to contend with. I spoke about that with CEOs at our New York dinner last week, as well as some executives en route to CERAWeek. Some quietly echoed the sentiment of political leaders who say stopping Iran is necessary for regional prosperity; others conveyed anger at the costs being inflicted on their companies by a war they didn’t start. All are managing the consequences, recognizing the fallout could continue long after any peace deal is reached. As one person put it: “This war has caused lasting damage to friends and foes alike.”
Be sure to follow Jordan’s coverage of the news coming out of CERAWeek and the Middle East.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The U.S. housing market is a far cry from what it was in the post-war era. Back then, the median home price sat at about $7,300, or about $101,000 adjusted for inflation. Gen Z and Millennials are especially struggling to score the purchase that’s considered the heart of the American dream. The median first-time homebuyer bought their home at age 40 last year, up from the early 30s from just a decade ago. And now, prospective homebuyers are being walloped by a competing reality: an encroaching AI-driven “jobpocalypse,” which could push homeownership even further out of reach—or erase the prospect altogether.
“I think that AI and the potential for AI layoffs is a major part of that economic anxiety that’s holding people back from making a commitment to buying a home—even though it got more affordable to buy one,” Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, told Fortune.
A new survey of 4,000 U.S. residents conducted by Ipsos and commissioned by real-estate brokerage Redfin found that nearly 3 in 5 Americans (59%) think AI will eliminate jobs and make it even harder to afford homes. Not only do Americans have to contend with rising home costs, but they now have to fear the loss of their jobs due to AI—moving the goalposts even further from achieving the American dream.
The situation has grown dire for Gen Zers—so dire in fact that many parents of young adults have stepped in to help out with a down payment. With older generations holding the overwhelming majority of wealth in the U.S. today, one way we’re seeing the Great Wealth Transfer play out is with parents helping with housing costs and even prioritizing homeownership over college tuition, seeing it as the more transferable and tangible component of generational wealth.
AI’s impact on the housing market
Fairweather said negative attitudes around AI could actually be contributing to cold feet in the housing market. While mortgage rates have been elevated over the last few years, she said a recent dip in rates should’ve led to an increase in home purchases. But that was not the case, something she attributes to economic anxiety driven by AI fears.
“People are very concerned that they’re going to get the short end of the stick with [AI],” she said. “I think it goes back to just how other technological advancements have been handled and how jobs that used to be good-paying middle class jobs have been automated away.”
The sentiment is the same across political ideology. About 63% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans agree that advances in AI will eliminate jobs and make it harder to afford homes.
Still, many Americans believe AI will have the exact opposite effect. Thirty percent of those surveyed said advances in AI will help boost the U.S. economy and will, therefore, help more people afford homes.
While a growing chorus of business leaders sing to the praises of AI’s productivity potential, the reality on the ground hasn’t yet reflected predictions of sweeping layoffs. Tech companies like Jack Dorsey’s Block and Australian-American firm Atlassian have attributed wide-spanning layoffs to AI so far this year. But a study published last month revealed that thousands of company executives have yet to see real employment or productivity impact from AI.
“Part of these fears could be overblown because of all of the rhetoric about how transformative AI will be,” Fairweather said. “But that could just be hype.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
One of the greatest scientific achievements in human history became a political liability almost overnight. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, scientists identified the virus, deciphered its secrets, concocted a vaccine, put it into production, and endered the disease manageable – all within a year. No civilization had ever moved that fast.
The response? The Trump administration jeered individual scientists, cut funds, fired specialists, and shuttered bureaus. It’s almost like we opened fire on the triumphant GIs returning from World War II. How did triumph turn into a culture war? And what can be done about it?
Where Science Failed First
Start with what the scientific establishment got wrong: first, the CDC’s testing debacle. The agency lacked the capacity to oversee the mass testing that a pandemic requires. Worse, its test technology cratered (thanks to a manufacturing glitch) and the agency — in classic bureaucratic mode — did not seek help from private industry. The FDA made things worse by refusing to approve alternatives to the test that didn’t work. Without tests, policy makers could not track the disease; they were flying blind. Here’s the first lesson: The fix: The CDC should get out of the pandemic test production business and work more closely with the nation’s biopharma companies to develop diagnostics as new infections emerge.
Second, scientists never managed to explain why their guidance kept shifting — and this bred suspicion. Simple answer: They were learning about the virus. The shifting advice on masking stirred anger because few people — in government, the media, or the public — understood where it came from. Tony Fauci was not just jerking the country around.
Early on, researchers assumed COVID behaved like influenza. Then they discovered it spreads via asymptomatic carriers — a crucial difference that demanded new guidance seemingly out of nowhere. Fauci wasn’t being evasive; science was evolving in real time. The lesson: Scientists must bring the public along as understanding changes, not just announce new conclusions.
The Untold White House Story
The attack on science has a political history that’s rarely told in full. It started with lack of White House preparation for a pandemic. The National Security Council had disbanded its unit devoted to biological threats, and the intelligence community took more than a month to get Covid on the President’s daily intelligence briefing. Even then they brushed it aside.
Everything changed in the first week of March. New York City became a death zone. President Trump was reportedly shaken by footage of refrigerator trucks backed up to the mortuary at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, not far from where he grew up. The Stock Market tanked. The NCAA cancelled March Madness. Businesses shuttered. Schools closed. Dr. Deborah Birx took over as the White House Covid coordinator and built a model (accurately) projecting unimaginable deaths: 100,000 to 240,000 over the next two months.
Against that backdrop, Donald Trump, after denial and equivocation, responded sensibly. Off camera and off Twitter, he made tough decisions. He listened to his health advisors, weighed their advice against challenges from the economists, closed borders, endorsed shutdowns, and—most dramatically—tossed aside normal procedures and merged science, logistics, and great piles of cash to develop a vaccination at, well, warp speed.
How Politics Poisoned the Well
But by April, the shutdowns were taking a toll, the presidential election was heating up, and Trump was getting earfuls from his business associates. The economic team, led by Kevin Hassett, then former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, whipped up new, friendlier projections of only 26,000 Covid deaths by Memorial Day — more people than that had already died when the model was unveiled. The new estimates made Trump deeply suspicious of his health care team.
Suspicion turned to anger when scientific leaders kept contradicting his embrace of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and convalescent plasma. He turned on them publicly — casting the FDA, CDC, and NIH as deep state conspirators dedicated to defeating him.
In mid-April, anger turned to rebellion. Trump cheered small bands who were brandishing firearms, waving Trump flags, and denouncing the shutdowns. His tweets amplified the struggle to “liberate” America from both Covid restrictions and his enemies: the overweening elites — scientists, bureaucrats, Democrats — who had dreamt them up as expert overreach.
Trump went one tweet too far, however, when he blasted the FDA’s Covid vaccine trials for moving too slowly (“just another political hit job”). That moved nine pharmaceutical companies to buy newspaper ads pledging not to release any vaccines before they were proved safe and effective. To prove vaccines’ safety, FDA extended clinical trials by several weeks so that FDA approval came after election day – permanently entangling the FDA in the MAGA epic of a rigged election.
The Anti-Vax Vanguard
The turn against science got its final push when Trump mentioned his own COVID vaccination at a post-election rally — and heard boos. He pivoted immediately, joining the anti-vax movement he had inadvertently helped create. No surprise that a second term Trump should tap Robert F Kennedy, Jr. — and DOGE — to “go wild” on health and science. A rebellion against vaccinations and public health raced through conservative precincts. Twenty-six states enacted new and stringent limits on long-standing public health authorities that were already hollowed out from years of budget austerity.
But scientific facts are stubborn things. As historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, the anti-expert tradition rises and falls in waves across American history. Rising measles infection rates — and the political liability of owning a public health crisis heading into midterms — appear to be shifting the tide. Kennedy and his allies are already softening their vaccine skepticism.
What Comes Next
The path forward requires more than policy fixes, though those matter. Scientists need to communicate evolving knowledge in real time. Politicians need to resist weaponizing uncertainty. Agencies need the funding and flexibility to respond at scale.
But ultimately, protecting society demands something deeper: a nation of people who pull together, who care for one another, who reach across their divisions and mind the health and safety of their neighbors. We’ll never do well against pandemics until we learn to channel what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We won’t beat the next infectious threat without them.
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
Sarah London operates on the front lines of the toughest terrain in U.S. health care. She’s the CEO of Centene, an insurance giant providing government-sponsored plans at a time when funding is tight, costs are rising, and policy shifts create intense uncertainty.
While the St. Louis–based managed care insurer saw revenue grow almost 20% last year, to $194.8 billion, it posted a net loss of $6.7 billion. That was largely driven by a write-down that reflected the new reality for health care companies under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by President Trump. Along with cutting federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years, the law raises costs and reduces eligibility for people enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace plans.
Those changes are shaking up Centene’s core businesses. More than half of Centene’s revenue comes from Medicaid—it’s the country’s biggest Medicaid insurer—with the rest roughly divided between Medicare and Marketplace plans. While analysts don’t expect federal cuts to have a massive impact on Centene’s top line, they’re a sign of the challenges London faces.
Faced with new data that showed its ACA plans were enrolling both fewer and sicker people, London decided to withdraw earnings guidance last July, causing Centene’s share price to fall 40% in a single day, to an eight-year low.
“It’s hard not to feel like pulling guidance and cutting the stock in half is a failure,” London told Fortune in a recent interview. “We’ve watched a new normal unfold in terms of how many different pressures there are on the system and the magnitude of the change we’re facing.”
London is pushing to get ahead of that change. She’s been transforming Centene’s portfolio, technology, and culture since becoming CEO four years ago, at the age of 41, making her the youngest woman to lead a Fortune 500 company (a distinction she still holds).
Under London, Centene is using data and technology to better manage a business that cares for a higher proportion of sicker patients than many other insurers do. She has also launched a One-CenTeam initiative to make Centene a catalyst in creating healthier communities. In May 2024, at the Fortune Brainstorm Health conference, for example, London announced plans to partner in building $900 million of affordable housing in eight states to help boost health outcomes.
Other Centene initiatives spotlight preventive health measures that could help members avoid expensive medical problems—and leave Centene with a healthier bottom line
After graduating with a history and literature degree from Harvard, London spent two years in the film industry before deciding she wanted to make a bigger social impact. She did stints at Harvard, supporting health, education, and equity initiatives, and at nonprofit Health Leads, building out its model of community-based care, before earning an MBA at the University of Chicago. Her goal: to move from storytelling to systems thinking, using data to drive change.
That mission drew her to Humedica, a pioneer in leveraging big data in public health. “Sarah sort of cold-called me in 2011,” recalls former CEO Michael Weintraub. “It wasn’t, ‘Hi, hello.’ It was, ‘I researched your company; this is what I work on. I’ve heard about your team; this is who I want to work with.’ We made a decision to hire her that day.”
London rose through the ranks at Humedica, which became part of UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, before joining Centene in 2020. She got the top job there in 2022 after longtime CEO Michael Neidorff stepped down shortly before his death.
Neidorff had built Centene from a regional Medicaid plan in St. Louis with about $40 million in annual revenues to the nation’s largest Medicaid managed care organization. With that growth came a lot of acquisitions and bloat. “The mission orientation was there from the get-go—that’s our superpower—but there hadn’t been as much focus on operating discipline,” says London, who subsequently sold off several noncore operations.
What distinguishes London’s leadership is an ability to connect the dots, says Karen Salfity, whom London brought in from Optum to create a more consistent strategy and member experience. “Sarah can look at a very complex situation, understand the various factors, and then create an assessment … with just enough heart that you know she cares deeply,” says Salfity, who has known London for 15 years. “The only thing that’s really changed is the scale at which she is able to do it.”
London knows all too well that a lot of factors in health care are outside her control, not least of which is the Trump administration’s push to radically modernize and streamline federal programs. In February, the administration announced new steps to crack down on alleged fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, on top of the funding cuts and expired ACA tax credits that have already taken effect.
London is not as disheartened as one might think. “You could take a step back and come away with the conclusion that these [programs] are under attack,” she says. But she notes that there was “quite a bit of bipartisan support” for making the sector more efficient.
“I have yet to meet a politician who does not believe that affordable, high-quality health care is something very important to be able to provide for their citizens and voters.”
She sees the current reforms as underscoring the need to take a holistic, high-tech approach to caring for vulnerable populations. Indeed, some of Centene’s systems anticipated the changes that the administration has enacted. “We have work programs in more than 17 states; we partner with nonprofits and provide job training to Medicaid members,” London says. “We run every single claim through 75 algorithms every day to look for fraud, waste, and abuse.”
“Health care is wildly overdue for a digital revolution,” she argues, pointing to an array of tech initiatives that Centene has implemented. Those range from designing supplemental food benefits where there are food deserts—”because we know that if you don’t have access to food, medication adherence goes down”—to predictive algorithms identifying members likely to have high-risk births and mobilizing resources to support them. As London notes, “41% of all babies born in the U.S. are born onto Medicaid”; it’s crucial that the program keeps those children healthy so they can “go and get jobs and contribute to economic mobility and all the things we want as part of the American Dream.”
London knows how tough it is to deliver on that dream. “The country is getting poorer and sicker,” she says. “The dollars are not infinite. At the finite boundaries, you have to make decisions about what you are going to fund and what you are not.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Grab will acquire Foodpanda’s Taiwan business for $600 million, in the superapp’s first foray outside Southeast Asia. The Singapore-based company signed a deal with Foodpanda parent Delivery Hero just one year after Uber abandoned its bid to buy the Taiwanese platform, citing regulatory pushback.
The acquisition is set to complete by the second half of 2026, and Grab plans to fully migrate all users, merchants and drivers to its platform by early 2027.
“This is a natural next step for Grab, as our experience in Southeast Asia is a direct fit for this market,” said Grab CEO Anthony Tan, in a press statement on Monday. “Our longstanding expertise in managing complex delivery logistics for dense and high-traffic cities is well-suited for Taiwan.”
Analysts call the deal a timely move for Grab, with Maybank Securities analyst Hussaini Saifee describing it as “a compelling new growth leg” for the Southeast Asian company given Taiwan’s robust economy.
The expansion also vindicates Grab’s business model, which has dominated Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing and food-delivery market for close to a decade. The company is now “exporting its playbook,” says Tan Joo Seng, an associate professor of business at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Tan calls Grab’s move a faster way to get access to Taiwan’s market, rather than building something from scratch, like “taking a high-speed train instead of laying the tracks.”
Foodpanda Taiwan generated $1.8 billion in gross merchandise value last year, despite having only 10% user penetration amongst Taiwan’s population, according to a Maybank Securities research note.
If the deal goes through, Grab will have a presence across 21 cities in Taiwan, with Uber Eats being the platform’s only major competitor.
Uber made a bid for Delivery Hero’s Taiwan business in May 2024. Yet Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission raised antitrust concerns around a merger between the two platforms, which together account for roughly three-quarters of the market. Uber, which also operates a ride-hailing business in Taiwan, eventually dropped its bid early last year.
Delivery Hero is under pressure from investors to divest some of its overseas businesses, if not an outright sale of the whole company. Aspex, a Hong Kong fund that’s Delivery Hero’s second-largest shareholder, threatened to replace CEO Niklas Östberg if he didn’t do more to sell parts of the company, Bloomberg reported in mid-March.
Grab isn’t the only company expanding to Taiwan. Both Singapore-based Sea, as well as South Korea’s Coupang see Taiwan as an increasingly important business for their e-commerce platforms.
In a LinkedIn post, Grab CFO Peter Oey described Taiwan as a “structurally compelling market” with high urban density, strong consumer spending power and a digital economy driven by the AI and semiconductor boom. (Taiwan’s economy grew by 9% last year, the highest level since 2010).
Tan, from NTU, calls Taiwan the “perfect bridge” to the rest of North Asia, citing its high density and digital-friendly consumers.
Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling founded Grab in 2012 as a mobile app to provide safe taxi-hailing services in Malaysia. Since then, it’s expanded across eight Southeast Asian markets, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines. It holds a 55% share of the market, and outcompeted both domestic players like Indonesia’s GoTo and global giants like Uber.
After starting with ride-hailing, Grab has expanded its suite of offerings to include food and grocery deliveries and cashless payments, making it one of Southeast Asia’s leading superapps.
Grab, No. 128 on the Southeast Asia 500, reported record annual profits of $268 million last year, on top of $3.4 billion of revenue.
Grab shares, which trade on the NASDAQ, rose 2.3% on Monday, after the company announced its acquisition of Foodpanda Taiwan. Shares are down by over 20% for the past 12 months.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
When Palantir CEO Alex Karp predicted that AI would erode the economic power of “humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters” in favor of “working class, often male voters,” he wasn’t making a forecast. He was making a choice — and calling it destiny.
That distinction matters more than whether he’s right.
AI has advanced faster than almost anyone expected. Recent geopolitical shocks have compounded the uncertainty. But the real question isn’t who wins or loses in Karp’s vision — it’s whether that vision is the one we want to build.
The AI era has generated extraordinary wealth. Nvidia and Microsoft are each worth trillions. ChatGPT now reaches 900 million weekly users. By conventional measures, the revolution is working.
But U.S. unemployment hit a four-year high last November. The wealth gap between the top 1% and bottom 50% has widened since ChatGPT launched. Rapid advancement and record market performance are not measures of success — they’re measures of speed.
A technology capable of unprecedented scientific discovery and work automation should do more than reshuffle economic winners. It hasn’t, largely because industry and government have failed to define what outcomes they actually want AI to deliver — or who it should serve.
People adopted the smartphone because they could see how it would improve their lives. Nobody adopts a technology framed as replacing them.
Yet that’s exactly how some of AI’s loudest advocates describe it. The result is predictable: wariness, skepticism, and a widening gap between immense capability and actual value.
For AI to endure — commercially and socially — people need to trust it. That requires them to feel its benefits directly.
If AI is eliminating manual labor, the economically and socially prudent move is to direct that capacity toward the sectors most starved of it: healthcare, human services, and infrastructure.
These industries face acute labor shortages and stretched staff. They’re also where automating manual tasks would be most transformative without displacing workers:
That’s not disruption. That’s progress.
The US leads in AI talent, research, and infrastructure. The challenge isn’t building the technology — it’s pointing it at the right problems.
One meaningful shift since ChatGPT’s launch: the skills threshold to harness AI has dropped dramatically. LLMs, vibe-coding, and accessible tools mean that building and tailoring technology is no longer reserved for elite college graduates. Frontline workers — the ones who actually understand what’s broken in healthcare or social services — are no longer locked out.
A software engineer knows nothing about being a doctor or a caseworker. If AI is going to serve our most critical workers, industry must build it with them, not for them. Government procurement must do the same. That’s how you get both value and trust.
Karp is right that AI will reshape economic power. Where he’s wrong is treating that reshaping as inevitable rather than engineered.
The problems most in need of solving aren’t hidden. We know where inequality lives. We know which services are buckling. If the leaders building this technology want it to last, they should stop predicting who gets left behind — and start deciding who gets lifted up.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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The days of grinding at your desk from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. are officially numbered. Imagine clocking off an hour earlier every single day and still taking home the same salary. Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban says artificial intelligence is about to make it happen.
“Smart, bigger companies will enable their employees to create and use agents (within security guardrails), improve their productivity,” Cuban just wrote on X. “But most importantly, they will reduce their workday by an hour to start. Same pay.”
He added that working from home already “dilutes” people’s start and finish time, but that forward-thinking companies will put an official policy in place that cuts the workweek down by at least 5 hours. “It’s a step that sets the tone in a company,” he added.
“Reward people doing the daily with more time.”
It’s a bold call—but Cuban, who built and sold Broadcast.com (“the YouTube” of his era) for $5.7 billion and has backed hundreds of companies on Shark Tank, has a track record of spotting workplace shifts before the mainstream catches up.
He even taught fellow self-made multimillionaire Emma Grede—the founder behind Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Khloé Kardashian’s Good American—how to make the most of AI early on. He had over 60 AI apps on his phone at the time. So he knows more than most how many hours these tools can claw back.
And his argument is that the smartest companies will give that time back to their workers.
The standard 9-to-5 schedule hasn’t had an overhaul since Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Henry Ford brought the 40-hour workweek to the Western world a century ago, in 1926—eight hours of labor, for eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. At the time, it was a 19th-century worker’s dream.
However, between commutes, school runs, and last-minute holdbacks in the office, it took the world shutting down to realize that 8-8-8 had slowly morphed back to something more like 12-6-6. Working from home briefly allowed workers to claw back some of that time. Families ate breakfast together again. Parents walked their children to school. That mismatch between productivity and presenteeism became impossible to ignore, and post-pandemic workers simply refused to go back “to normal”.
Already, office staff is crafting informal “dead zones”—hours or even days when they’ve unofficially checked out.
Studies show productivity plummets between 4 and 6 p.m. as employees slip into COVID-era habits of gym runs and school pickups. Many have also quietly dropped Fridays, echoing America’s Got Talent judge Simon Cowell, who recently said he stopped working them altogether because they were “pointless.” Emails get left unanswered, and the few still at their desks can’t get a meeting in the diary.
Now, with governments around the world once again pushing remote work and even four-day workweeks in the wake of the war in Iran, the pressure on the traditional workweek is building from every direction. And for workers already stretched thin by stagnating wages, “peanut butter” raises and a cost of living that keeps climbing, an hour back every single day—with no dent to their paycheck—isn’t just a perk. It’d be the first real raise many will have seen in years.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not a true believer. Again and again, the Meta CEO and Facebook founder has thrown himself headfirst into his company’s top initiatives. A few years ago, he made himself the face of the company’s since-sidelined metaverse push, and remained steadfast even as the internet mocked how his virtual reality avatar fenced, hydrofoiled, and, at times, looked awkwardly flat. He even ran internal and media meetings inside Meta’s own VR offices, which he argued was a better way to connect than regular video conference calls. He also regularly wears Meta’s bulky AI smart glasses in public, aesthetics be damned.
The chief executive is now walking the walk on another Meta imperative: AI adoption. According to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg is building an AI agent to help him as CEO. Details are scarce on the still-in-development tool, but the WSJ reports that it’s getting Zuckerberg information faster, expediting processes that normally require him to query multiple people. Meta did not immediately return a request for comment on the tool.
As Meta spends tens of billions of dollars developing “superintelligent” AI models and building data centers to power them, it’s become borderline obsessed with staff-wide AI adoption. The company has encouraged employees to employ the technology in multiple ways, and incorporated “AI-driven impact” into its performance reviews. It is also reportedly among the tech giants that have established leaderboards that rank employees based on their consumption of tokens—a measure of AI use. But of all the methods of inducing AI adoption, Zuckerberg’s leading by example might be the most effective.
Data shows an emerging credibility gap in which leaders are mandating and hyping AI but are often only casual users of the technology themselves—sometimes using it less than their rank-and-file employees. Nearly 70% of CEOs, CFOs, and senior executives use AI at work less than an hour a week, including 28% who don’t use it at all, according to a survey of more than 6,000 senior leaders in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia co‑authored by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom. The disconnect may be blinding leaders to the first-hand experience of using AI, which is causing workload creep and cognitive overload, at least in current use cases.
Separate research from Gallup finds that manager support of AI—including modeling its application—is a strong driver of whether employees use and value AI tools. In organizations investing in AI, employees who strongly agree their manager actively supports their team’s use of AI are more than twice as likely to use AI a few times a week or more, 6.5 times as likely to strongly agree the tools are useful, and 8.8 times as likely to say AI helps them do what they do best every day, Gallup says.
By all accounts, Meta’s AI organization-wide AI push seems to be working. It’s breeding an experimental culture reminiscent of Facebook’s heady early years, the WSJ reports, with employees participating in AI hackathons and deploying personal AI agents that do work on their behalf.
Does every CEO need a Zuckerberg-style AI sidekick? That remains to be seen. What is clear is that leaders who expect AI to be woven into daily workflows can’t stay light users of the tools; if they want credibility—and real adoption—they’ll have to log in and experiment. They’ll need to feel the pain and reap the gains, along with everyone else.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”
At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”
Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction. Clients are required to abstain from the internet, smartphones, gaming, and other technologies—often for months at a time. On her first day there screen-free, Hill lay down on her bed and cried.
Hill and reSTART’s other clients are at the center of an intense debate about how harmfully addictive modern tech can be. Once waged mostly in academic white papers and over dinner tables, it has escalated to the courts, thanks to a slew of landmark legal cases against Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. (The last two reached settlements earlier this year. TikTok declined to comment for this article, and Snap did not respond to requests for comment.) These initial “bellwether” cases are being closely watched because their outcomes could provide precedent for the thousands of other lawsuits filed making similar claims—and even force tech companies to change their products and business models. Some have anticipated a “Big Tobacco moment”—a reference to the 1990s lawsuits against tobacco companies that proved they were aware of the addictive nature of nicotine and the health dangers of smoking, and led to massive damages paid.
On March 25, California jurors delivered a blow to Meta and YouTube, and validated the concept of “tech addiction” by ruling that the companies were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms. They awarded the plaintiff, known as KGM, a combined $6 million in damages. The now 20-year-old plaintiff had testified in February that the “addictive design” of these platforms, including infinite scroll, filters, and autoplay, led her to spend up to 16 hours a day on them, causing depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a Meta spokesperson said when reached for comment after the ruling. A spokesperson for YouTube parent company Google said the company also disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” the spokesperson said.
The Big Tech companies have long denied claims about “addictive design,” saying they did their best to protect free expression while keeping users safe. They also question the whole concept of “tech addiction,” pointing out that there’s no scientific evidence that their products were the cause of KGM’s and others’ issues. The head of Meta’s Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in court that social media was not “clinically addictive.” And in a written statement prior to the verdict, a Meta spokesperson pointed to other factors in KGM’s life as the cause of her troubles, adding: “The evidence simply doesn’t support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality.”
Reached for comment about YouTube during the trial, a spokesperson for owner Google, José Castaneda, said allegations about the platform were “simply not true.” “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” he said. He pointed to the company’s “services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls.”
But concerned parents—along with researchers, health organizations, and even some former tech industry leaders—are sounding the alarm, saying that the systems we rely on for modern life are designed in ways that may be fundamentally incompatible with human well-being. They cite a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience arguing that social media use delivers dopamine jolts similar to those associated with addictive drugs like meth or heroin. And with the rapid acceleration of AI, many are calling for the U.S. government to get serious about regulation and pleading with Big Tech to provide stronger safety features that constrain the algorithms, push notifications, and endless swiping that make it so hard to put your phone down.
“Unfortunately, [tech] is taking mostly young people away from the most important thing in their lives and key to their mental health, and that is relationships with other people,” says New York University professor and podcaster Scott Galloway. For tech companies, he says, it’s all about keeping users’ attention locked in: “I don’t think [Big Tech] set out in their business plans to depress global youth. I think their algorithms discovered that rage, self-esteem, and funny cat videos just keep people online.”
There is, of course, a difference between the kind of low-level “addiction” to our phones that most of us jokingly will cop to—checking email before we’re out of bed, scrolling TikTok in the grocery line—and the rarer, all-consuming dependency that leads people to places like reSTART or into courtrooms as plaintiffs. At the same time, the line between a bad habit of using tech several hours a day and a behavioral addiction can be blurry, especially for teens and young adults whose social lives, homework, and entertainment all run through the same devices.
“I’m finally putting a foot down and saying, ‘I want to get out of this endless cycle.’ I need to do something to better myself and my life.”
Sarah Hill, reSTART client
And that’s the whole point, argues Roger McNamee, a former tech investor and author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. “These companies are in the business of attention,” he says. “Once they had attention, they were in the business of controlling the choices available to people in order to influence their behavior in ways that were profitable for the platform. That culture and that business model were guaranteed to produce lots of harm.”
With its constitutional and cultural emphasis on the importance of free speech, the U.S., unlike many other countries, has largely declined to tell tech companies how they should interact with users. That has had dire effects, McNamee says: “We went from a culture where we used tech as an empowering tool to viewing tech as a tool for controlling people and extracting value. That’s the culture of the Valley, and the underlying behaviors that that causes are wrecking our democracy, wrecking public health, and wrecking our economy.”
The reluctance to place limits on how tech products engage users, especially in the age of AI, “should disturb everybody,” he says.
Some 25 miles northeast of Seattle, past towering Douglas firs, sits the gray-paneled, split-level reSTART clinic. Motivational posters and pillows with phrases like “Healing is not linear” adorn its common areas. The center can house up to 16 clients, who share rooms and are responsible for household chores. They also are required to participate in 24 to 30 hours of structured group and individual therapy each week. reSTART teaches clients multiple evidence-based coping and recovery strategies, ranging from box breathing to physical grounding exercises. The treatment isn’t cheap. As an out-of-network provider, reSTART’s rate averages about $1,000 per day, though the clinic encourages clients to check with their insurers to see what can be covered. The average length of stay is 12 to 16 weeks, and many continue on via outpatient services for weeks after.
reSTART cofounder Cosette Rae opened the center with therapist Hilarie Cash almost two decades ago. Rae had previously worked as a tech developer and, upon realizing she was overusing technology in unhealthy ways, decided to change careers and pursue social worker training.
She vividly recalls a case in 2009, when she was called to assist a young adult who refused to leave their house or go to school. (Rae uses the pronoun “they” here to protect the individual’s identity.) They were not healthy, and had moved their bedroom mattress into the middle of the living room to play World of Warcraft nonstop. Doctors had diagnosed the person with agoraphobia, but Rae suspected that tech addiction was the real problem. She reached out to Cash for advice, and the two realized there was no place to treat people with these types of issues. They decided to open a center themselves.
Rae remembers being both “revered and rejected” in the early days of the center. Much like today, many didn’t think tech addiction was real. But there was no shortage of clients: She has treated around a thousand in the nearly two decades since the center opened, and spoken to many thousands more, she says.
What her clients struggle with is more difficult than breaking free from substance abuse, Rae says, partly because there’s no getting away from tech; it’s everywhere. “When I go out in the community right now, I do not have a lot of friends that are telling me about meth or heroin,” she says. “I don’t usually go into the store and see people dealing. I don’t go to the restaurant and people are doing a line. But when it comes to technology, it’s everywhere. So you’re constantly being in front of it and having to say no.”
It’s more akin to an eating disorder, Rae says, where a person still has to eat but has a problematic relationship with food. In this day and age, clients aren’t able to drop technology from their lives completely.
It’s not just teenagers who are struggling. Rae mainly works with young and middle-age adults (reSTART takes clients who are 15 and older), but she has seen clients in their late forties or fifties. The most common addictions Rae sees, besides video games, involve virtual reality, pornography, and more recently, AI chatbots.
One client, a 23-year-old Seattle-area college student who asks to withhold their name and gender, describes their own overuse of video games, YouTube, and communication platform Discord. The student says they wished schools today would teach kids how to use technology mindfully and warn against addictive behaviors: “Technology is best used when it’s a tool to enhance your life. But what I got trapped in is technology being my life.”
Some scientists, such as Stanford psychiatrist and Dopamine Nation author Anna Lembke, say compulsive tech use taps into the brain’s reward circuitry in strikingly similar ways to substance addiction. When someone scrolls social media or wins a round of a video game, their brain releases dopamine, which trains them to seek that “hit” again and again. Repeated bursts of stimulation can desensitize the pathways and weaken the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and self-control, making it harder to resist urges even when the habits are causing problems or affecting school, work, or relationships.
Brain imaging studies of people with internet gaming or social media disorders have found structural and functional changes in these regions that mirror what doctors see in other behavioral addictions such as gambling.
Tech addiction is not listed as a condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the guide published by the American Psychiatric Association for diagnosing mental health conditions. However, in its most recent edition, the DSM does list “internet gaming disorder” as a condition warranting more clinical study.
“I don’t think [big tech] set out to depress global youth. I think their algorithms discovered that rage, self-esteem, and funny cat videos just keep people online.”
Scott Galloway, NYU professor and podcaster
Its absence doesn’t faze Rae. “It took 40 years for gambling [disorder] to get into DSM,” she says. “So I don’t give any credence to the fact that it’s not in there yet.”
The science is far from settled, and some studies suggest that tech doesn’t cause users’ unhappiness. A 2023 University of Oxford study of 2 million people from around the globe found that links between internet adoption and psychological well-being were “small and inconsistent.”
And in March, California Institute of Technology researcher Ian Anderson and Wendy Wood, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote a Washington Post op-ed arguing that calling habitual tech use “addiction” was misleading and harmful. In surveys, they found that when people described their Instagram use as an addiction, “They felt stuck, less confident that they had the ability to change.” Yes, they wrote, companies should “amend their platforms to help users regain control over their habits.” But they concluded, “The truth is: Heavy use is not necessarily an addiction.”
Nir Eyal, a tech investor and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, says it’s not the tech that’s solely to blame for people’s addictions. “Every generation has a moral panic about whatever new technology, but you don’t fix things by stopping their use,” he says. “You fix things by making them better, by making them safer.”
Eyal argues that there is nothing unethical about making a product that some people get addicted to, and asking social media companies to make their products less sticky is not the answer. Why? “Because any product that’s good, somebody is going to get addicted to,” he says. “Stop making the product interesting? That’s dumb. That’s why we use the product. That’s called ‘entertaining and engaging.’”
The debate is only likely to grow more urgent given the rapid adoption, and daunting potency, of AI. Rae fears AI could create new ways for people to get hooked on tech, or treat AI as a “substitute attachment figure” for real relationships. “I think everybody’s been focused on all the talk around the existential threats like, ‘Can it take our jobs?’” Rae says. “But what about taking our humanity? That’s what’s happening.” As a practitioner working with tech addicts, she says, “I’m standing here looking down at a tsunami coming to people who have no idea what their kids are going to be facing. How this is going to change them; how it’s going to change their relationships with each other; and how it’s going to change their futures.”
If tech addiction is accepted as real, it raises another thorny and divisive question: What can—and should—be done about it? Some states, including New York and California, have enacted laws requiring warning labels on social media apps that highlight the risks for young people. In September, the New York attorney general proposed a rule requiring social media companies to restrict algorithmically personalized feeds and nighttime notifications for users under 18 unless parental consent is granted. California put legislation into place last year creating safety restrictions on the development of AI.
Federal oversight has been slow or nonexistent, though many legislators have tried. In 2019, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill that would have banned social media features that exploited human psychology. Hawley’s Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act went nowhere, attracting little bipartisan support and never making it out of committee.
In December, Australia became the first country to ban social media for people under 16, and Greece and Britain are considering similar laws.
Social media platforms have themselves put up some guardrails, mainly via opt-in or parental controls. Meta launched Teen Accounts on Instagram and Facebook, with more restrictive features and nighttime nudges to close the app. Snap has expanded in-app warnings, “friending” safeguards, and location-sharing controls. Google and YouTube announced a $20 million initiative to address teen digital well-being. TikTok launched a daily screen-time limit, with users under 18 automatically cut off after an hour. And in February, Meta, TikTok, and Snap agreed to be independently rated on how well they protect teens’ mental health by a group of advocacy organizations.
reSTART’s Rae doesn’t want to get stuck in semantics. Instead of arguing about whether their products are addictive, she says that Big Tech companies should devote some of their profits to resources that can help those “struggling as a result of loving their product,” she says. Many people can’t afford treatment like reSTART, as most health insurers won’t cover problematic tech use—though sometimes clients can get coverage for associated disorders such as depression or anxiety.
Companies could also consider shutting off access to their technology for certain time frames, Rae suggests. Eyal recommends something similar. In addition to implementing a legal minimum age to use social media, he recommends that tech companies adopt a “use and abuse” policy. After a certain number of hours, he says, tech companies should reach out to the user with a message offering resources to prevent or cure addiction.
Sarah Hill recently transitioned out of the center to an apartment owned by reSTART, half an hour away. She still visits the center most days for treatment, but is eyeing a job at a grocery store on her off days—and even got a cell phone. It’s a basic “dumb” Gabb phone, with no apps or games. Even so, Hill recently found herself mindlessly scrolling through new screen backgrounds. “I felt myself losing control again, and it scared me,” she says, tucking the phone underneath her legs on one of reSTART’s oversize chairs.
But Hill says she does have high hopes about managing her addiction in the future and says her phone usage has improved. “After making so many mistakes, I’m finally putting a foot down and saying, ‘I want to get out of this endless cycle,’” she says. “I need to do something to better myself and my life.”
Washington’s reSTART Clinic developed these screening questions to help potential clients consider whether their tech use has become problematic. Here’s an abbreviated version:
This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “What is tech addiction? It may well be Big Tech’s next problem.” It was updated on March 26, 2026 following the verdict in the case against Meta and YouTube.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is preparing for the worst: a future where oil prices reach as high as $175 per barrel and stay above $100 until the end of 2027.
With the U.S.-Israel war on Iran now in its fourth week, the airline industry is staring down its biggest disruption since the pandemic as the global oil market suffers a supply shock.
This is the first major crisis the industry is facing since widely ending the practice of fuel hedging in 2024 and 2025, an insurance that can protect airlines from spikes in fuel costs.
Jet fuel—which accounts for more than 40% of airlines’ operating costs—have nearly doubled in the last three weeks, according to Argus Media. Kirby predicted in a letter to employees that if fuel prices remain high, they would add $11 billion to United’s annual costs.
It may spell doomsday for an industry that took four years to recover from the pandemic, but airline executives are remaining optimistic. The reason? This time, they’re prepared to pass on the costs to you.
The average price of a transcontinental flight has risen from $167 in late February to $414 in mid-March, according to a Deutsche Bank analysis. The strain is also being felt strongly on less-distant routes. A flight from New York to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on budget airline JetBlue went from $166 to $566 in three weeks and is more than four times as expensive as it was a year earlier.
But demand remains strong as consumers have already swallowed a post-pandemic spike in airfares. The last 10 weeks have been the highest booked revenue weeks in United’s history, according to Kirby’s letter.
Similarly, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that sales in the week before March 17 rose about 25% from a year prior. Five of Delta’s top 10 ticket sales days ever have happened since the war began. And he’s not too worried about fuel prices because Delta is in a “position of strength” to raise airfare, Business Insider reported. Delta also has its own oil refinery, which provides a “meaningful hedge,” he said.
To be sure, cancellations are coming, and routes will be slowed or ended like they were during the pandemic, said Martin Dresner, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Maryland.
Delta has halted certain routes, including flights from New York to Tel Aviv until May 31 and from Tel Aviv to New York until June 1. The restart of its Atlanta to Tel Aviv service has been delayed, with flights to Tel Aviv paused until August 4 and from Tel Aviv until August 5.
United is planning to trim some off-peak flights, such as redeyes as well as Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday trips during the second and third quarters. The airline is also halting service to Tel Aviv and Dubai due to the war.
“To be clear, nothing changes about our longer-term plans for aircraft deliveries or total capacity for 2027 and beyond, but there’s no point in burning cash in the near term on flying that just can’t absorb these fuel costs,” Kirby said in the letter to staff.
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Big Oil giant TotalEnergies will eliminate nearly $1 billion in offshore wind projects planned along the U.S. East Coast under the threat of cancelation from the Trump administration in exchange for redirecting the reimbursed funds to U.S. natural gas projects, primarily in Texas.
In the so-called “landmark agreement” announced March 23 between TotalEnergies and the U.S. Interior Department, the federal government will reimburse the French energy giant about $928 million for its investments in the Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay projects offshore of New York and North Carolina, respectively, which were put on hold by the company after President Donald Trump was elected.
Speaking at the CERAWeek by S&P Global event in Houston, TotalEnergies chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanné said he is opting “not to litigate, but to make pragmatic solutions.”
While TotalEnergies will continue to pursue onshore wind, solar, and battery storage projects in the U.S., he said, the company will abandon offshore wind that is now deemed too big and expensive without federal subsidies in the U.S.
“It’s good to be innovative from time to time and pragmatic,” Pouyanné said. “We can recycle this money … into smarter investments.”
President Trump has pushed back against the expansion of both wind and solar energy in the U.S.—in favor of fossil fuels instead—but he has particular disdain for the massive offshore wind turbines that he deems unsightly.
TotalEnergies also is a major player in natural gas in the U.S., especially in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The agreement with the Interior Department, while scant on details, specifically cites the companies increased investments in Houston-based NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG project in southern Texas, as well as in natural gas production investments in the Gulf of Mexico and in U.S. shale drilling.
TotalEnergies is both a 17% shareholder of NextDecade and a major customer of the gas exports from the Rio Grande LNG project. TotalEnergies also is an owner of Sempra Energy’s Cameron LNG in Louisiana and an investor in Glenfarne’s planned Alaska LNG.
Speaking alongside Pouyanné, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said TotalEnergies will investment in more reliable natural gas projects and not “intermittent” wind farms. “We are not driven by a climate fantasy,” Burgum said.
“They (TotalEnergies) thought there were going to be a bunch of subsidies,” Burgum said, citing the ending of subsidies for wind and solar projects in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” approved last year.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
When Brian Niccol took over as CEO of Starbucks 18 months ago with the intention to return the company to its glory days of the 1990s and early aughts, he was surprised to see the coffee chain felt more like a factory floor than a warm hangout spot.
In an recent episode of Semafor’s “The CEO Signal” podcast, Niccol said when he first took the helm of the company in late 2024, he visited several stores and noticed the coffee chain had put so much emphasis on fulfilling large volumes of orders it had strayed from its reputation as a cozy coffee house. Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” plan introduced in his first days as CEO was meant to restore Starbucks to its roots as a “third place” for customers to linger in.
“We got really focused on trying to be efficient and run it like a manufacturing facility, as opposed to recognizing, no, this is actually a customer service experience, where we do great craft and create great drinks for people on time,” Niccol said.
Although Starbucks stock is virtually unchanged since Niccol took over a year-and-a-half ago, the former Chipotle CEO has been working hard to restore that certain charm that once belonged to “the third space.” He found that Starbucks had too much of a good thing.
Niccol came into a company that was in some ways battered by the success of its popular online ordering, still responsible for most of the chain’s orders, including 40% drive-thru and 30% mobile. In early 2024, then-CEO Laxman Narasimhan said customers were abandoning their online orders after placing them online, having to wait in long lines for their orders to be fulfilled during busy commuting hours. The Starbucks menu was large, and patrons’ ability to customize their orders overwhelmed baristas and slowed down order fulfillment.
Early in his tenure, Niccol spoke with customers who lamented the lack of comfortable seating Starbucks locations once had, as well as baristas recognizing and chatting with them. Baristas told Niccol Starbucks should bring back condiment bars to let customers add their own cream and sugar, relieving pressure from workers fulfilling more complicated orders.
“The feedback I heard was, we’ve made the job more complicated than necessary,” Niccol said. “It was one of those things where it’s like, we got to get back to focusing decisions that actually show up in the store, and then you got to understand how those decisions actually are executed in the store.”
The company took those suggestions, among others, returning seats to thousands of store locations and returning condiment bars after their pandemic-era discontinuation.
So far, the “Back to Starbucks” plan appears to be working. The company reported a 4% increase in year-over-year same-store sales, and a 5% uptick in revenue for the quarter. Profits took a hit as the company navigated tariffs and brought on more workers to staff its stores.
“We’re pleased with our progress, and we believe we remain ahead of schedule, and we’re confident on our path forward,” Niccol told investors in January. “But we also recognize that we’re still in our turnaround.”
At the core of the raft of changes to the Starbucks experience was making the chain as much about customer service as about coffee, Niccol noted.
“f you aren’t working on initiatives that ultimately make the store experience better for our customer and our partner, probably working on the wrong things,” he said.
Niccol rolled out the “Back to Starbucks” plan through a series of immediate shifts followed by more structural changes. Locations activated more wall outlets and began giving ceramic cups to customers who wanted to sit in the store for a while. Baristas were told to write personalized messages on paper to-go cups. Workers were also required to begin wearing black shirts under green aprons as part of a brand refresh.
Behind the counter, Starbucks slashed menu items by 30% to lighten the load of baristas. It rolled out an AI-powered assistant designed to troubleshoot equipment issues, teach baristas how to make drinks, and prioritize orders to increase efficiency.
To be sure, not all baristas are on board with the changes. More than 1,000 union baristas went on strike in November 2025, demanding Starbucks increase staffing to improve long customer wait time, as well as let existing baristas work more hours to meet the threshold for benefits. Last May, more than 2,000 baristas protested the company’s dress code and argued workers should have a say in what they wear.
Starbucks did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Niccol said the “Back to Starbucks changes have already shifted the company’s reputation. In an interview at the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute in December 2025, Niccol said he was reading through a Reddit thread of Starbucks job candidates interviewing at the company, with some users asking what interview questions they should prepare to be asked. Other users, presumably Starbucks employees, said candidates should be prepared to talk about customer service.
“If you don’t like customer service, you’re probably not going to like working at Starbucks. We’re in that transition of getting people to understand that,” Niccol said. “When I saw that in the Reddit thread, I was like, ‘OK, we’re making progress on what the standard of services that we want [are].’”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The war in Iran is spiking global oil prices, and Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be happier.
The war has bottled up one-fifth of the world’s oil, putting a premium on the remaining supply, including Russian barrels.
Earlier this month, the U.S. issued a 30-day waiver that allows countries to buy Russian oil already at sea without the fear of sanctions, which the U.S. has steadily imposed on the country and those that buy oil from its largest producers since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the “deliberately short-term measure will not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government.” But after years of big discounts and covert tactics to sell their oil abroad, the easing of Russian sanctions has already given Putin and other Russian officials new confidence, as well as hope that this U.S. leniency will last longer than its April 11 expiration date.
Prior to the Iran conflict, the Urals oil benchmark, on which most Russian crude is priced, stood at about $57 a barrel, a significant discount to Brent crude at $71 prior to the conflict. By Monday, Urals was trading at near parity to Brent at around $100, despite retreating by midday.
To be sure, Brent crude fell sharply on Monday, after President Donald Trump said he would postpone attacks on energy infrastructure as his officials negotiate with Iran on a way to end the war. Tehran denied it was in talks.
Still, Russia has earned an estimated $7 billion in the first two weeks of March from selling fossil fuels since the start of the war, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
The increase in oil has made Russia “the single biggest winners in the near term” from the Iran conflict, Wichita State University international business professor Usha Haley told Fortune.
Despite Bessent saying the 30-day waiver is “narrowly tailored” to oil already at sea, she said this caveat is hard to enforce in reality, especially given the large demand at the moment.
“It has actually rescued Russia’s oil revenues from decline and a decline over a very long period,” Haley said.
Four years after Russia invaded Ukraine, its fossil fuel exports, including coal, crude oil, liquified natural gas, pipeline gas, and oil products are 27% below pre-invasion levels, according to the CREA. As of February, the country’s fossil fuel exports had fallen 19% year on year, although the recent increase in demand due to the Iran war is likely to change that calculus, said Haley.
Putin intends to take advantage of the sudden opportunity while he can. The Russian president said during a Kremlin meeting with policymakers and Russian business leaders earlier this month it’s “important for Russian energy companies to make use of the current moment.”
He also appeared to troll his adversaries, saying Russia was ready to work with European countries as long as they are committed to “long-term cooperation” and are willing to drop “political overtones.”
Moscow’s special economic envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, went even further in a Telegram message earlier this month, saying “The U.S. has practically admitted the obvious,” with its 30-day waiver, the Washington Post reported. “The global energy market cannot remain stable without Russian oil.”
In more recent days, Dmitriev has continued to gloat on social media, lambasting the EU for distancing itself from Russia since its 2022 Ukraine invasion and predicting more pain for Western countries as a result of increased oil prices.
“Europe can finally enjoy the success of both its Green and Russophobic agendas—no oil, no gas,” he wrote in a post on X Sunday.
The Iran conflict, which is now in its fourth week, has led to a destabilization in the global oil supply due to Iran’s attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil flows. As a result, the U.S. has taken steps to backstop supply including releasing 172 million barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve—the second largest drawdown ever.
The U.S. last week also issued a 30-day waiver running through April 19 that would allow countries to purchase Iranian oil already loaded onto vessels. Bessent said in a post on X the move would bring 140 million barrels of oil to global markets.
However, the U.S’s easing of sanctions to try to bring stability to oil markets has been criticized by some as being ineffective for solving the global oil crisis.
Analysts at financial services firm Siebert Williams Shank, wrote in a report earlier this month that easing sanctions would not increase the supply of oil worldwide because much of this sanctioned supply already finds its way to the market by clandestine means.
“Sanctions have not materially impacted Russian production, only the price and markets they sell to, so they possess little incremental supply,” wrote the analysts.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country has been locked in a full-scale war with Russia since 2022, has also said the move will embolden Putin.
“It spends the money from energy sales on weapons, and all of this is then used against us,” he said in a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this month.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Bitcoin rose alongside equities while oil prices fell after U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. had begun talks with Iran, raising hopes for a deal to ease the conflict.
The original cryptocurrency advanced more than 5% to trade as high as $71,794 in New York before paring some of the gain. Smaller tokens including Ether and Solana also rose.
Bitcoin had earlier on Monday been fluctuating around a two-week low, sliding as far as $67,371 — its lowest level since March 9. The token has been volatile since the conflict in Iran began in late February, at one point jumping to a high of nearly $76,000 before tumbling once more as tensions in the region escalated.
“Currently, the situation in the crypto market does not appear as severe as it did at the end of February, when sentiment was at the same level,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro.
Bitcoin initially climbed after the U.S. president said he would delay strikes on Iranian energy facilities and infrastructure for five days. Risk assets rallied more broadly, with the S&P 500 gaining 1.5%, while Treasury yields and the dollar declined as traders pared back some of their more hawkish Federal Reserve bets.
Flows that have been supporting Bitcoin’s price over the last fortnight had weakened going into Monday, with inflows into U.S. exchange-traded funds tied to the cryptocurrency turning negative.
“A potential catalyst to stabilize the markets for now would be some sort of de‑escalation in the Middle East, or at minimum a resumption of normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz,” analysts on Laser Digital’s derivatives trading desk wrote in a note on Monday.
“This could set off a chain of oil price stabilization, followed by rates consolidation and improved risk sentiment,” they added. “Minus this, crypto markets are likely to stay heavy.”
Trump on Monday said representatives from Iran reached out to start talks with the U.S. because they were eager to make a deal after his threat to strike energy facilities. But Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, on Monday said in a social media post that the US president’s claims were fake news “used to manipulate the financial and oil markets.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Iran’s economy was already crashing before the U.S. and Israel launched a war against the Islamic republic three weeks ago, and the relentless bombing since then has wreaked even more havoc.
In fact, high inflation triggered mass protests in December and January, prompting the regime to massacre tens of thousands of its own citizens. President Donald Trump warned Tehran against further violence and began a military build-up that led to the current conflict.
Inflation has worsened and apparently is so bad now the government issued its largest-ever currency denomination: the 10 million rial note (equivalent to about $7).
The new currency went into circulation last week, according to the Financial Times, and comes just a month after the prior record holder, the 5 million rial, came out.
As prices continue to spiral higher while the war boosts demand for cash, long lines formed to withdraw the fresh banknotes, and supplies quickly ran out.
Iran’s central bank said electronic payments are still the main methods for transactions, though the 10 million rial bill will “ensure public access to cash,” the FT reported.
But doubts about the viability of electronic payments have grown during the war as the U.S. and Israel target the regime’s levers of control.
In addition to bombing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitary forces, a data center for Bank Sepah was also hit on March 11. Sepah is the country’s largest bank and is responsible for paying salaries to the military and IRGC.
“Iran is already in the middle of a severe cash liquidity crisis,” Miad Maleki, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Treasury Department official, said on X earlier this month. “As of Jan 2026, banks were running out of physical banknotes daily, with informal withdrawal caps of just $18–$30/day. Cash in circulation surged 49% YoY due to panic hoarding. The regime simply cannot pivot to cash payments, there isn’t enough physical currency in the system.”
Meanwhile, a currency collapse that began after last year’s U.S.-Israeli bombardment has fueled crippling inflation. The rial lost 60% of its value in the months after the 12-day war, and food inflation soared to 64% by October. It accelerated further to 105% by February, vaulting overall inflation to 47.5%.
The exchange rate fell as low as 1.66 million rials per $1 last month, though it strengthened to about 1.5 million rials as the U.S. temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil.
Heightened demand for cash further stresses a financial system that was considered dubious even before the current war started three weeks ago.
The failure of Ayandeh Bank late last year forced the regime to fold it into a state-run lender, underscoring how fragile the sector was as bad loans piled up to politically connected cronies.
“This was largely theater. In reality, Iran’s entire banking system is insolvent, its balance sheets sustained by fiction rather than assets,” Siamak Namazi, who was a U.S. hostage in Iran from 2015 to 2023, wrote in a report for the Middle East Institute in January.
During his captivity, he learned from imprisoned former officials and business elites that politically connected borrowers bribed assessors to inflate the value of properties, which were used to obtain massive loans.
Instead of repaying the loans, borrowers just gave their properties to the bank, which sold them to other banks at a paper profit, according to Namazi. Those banks knew the properties were overvalued “garbage,” but played along in the scheme by dumping their own toxic assets in exchange and booking fictitious gains.
“The result is a closed-loop Ponzi scheme, sustained by mutual deception and regulatory complicity,” he added. “This practice has metastasized over the past 15 years and is far more extensive than this simplified description suggests. And this is only the banking system. Much of the rest of Iran’s economy is afflicted by similarly entrenched corruption and mismanagement.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Panic buying is back in Japan.
As the U.S.-Israeli-Iran conflict rattles oil markets, Japanese consumers are stockpiling toilet paper—a product with no connection to the disruptions whatsoever, but that has caused enough problems for the country that the Japanese government has urged citizens to stop buying ahead of time. Still, social media posts depicting empty toilet paper abound.
But why would people panic buy goods unrelated to or not affected by the conflict? Panic buying behaves much like a bank run. Nobody knows exactly where it starts—some single, bleating data point that says this store is going to run out of toilet paper, or this bank is going to run out of money.
Back in the olden days that data point, a verifiable person, would run and holler at their neighbors; “Hey Johnny, take your money outta the bank! They’re about to run out!” and Johnny would go a-running. Now someone posts on social media that COVID-19, tariffs, or the war with Iran is going to nuke toilet paper stock, and strangers across the country start loading up their carts.
This was the situation with the great panic of COVID-19. On March 12, 2020, toilet paper sales surged 734% compared to the same day the year before, making it the top-selling grocery item in the world that day. By the time the Great Toilet Paper panic of 2020 was over, 70% of the world’s grocery stores would have run out at some point—a record.
The shortage was so severe it caused a measurable shift in American bathroom habits: Bidet sales spiked and, for many households, stuck. But researchers who studied the episode afterward found no actual supply chain disruption for toilet paper. Production was steady and distribution was intact. Rather, the shortage was almost entirely a creation of panic and hype.
Now the panic buying is back—this time in Japan—and in some ways it makes even less sense. During COVID, supply chains across every sector were under strain, so the instinct to stockpile had, at least, a logical ambiance. Today, the disruptions are due to tightening in oil markets tied to the conflict in Iran, and little to do with consumer packaged goods. But Japan has its own deep history with toilet paper panic, and that history has its own logic.
The original Japanese toilet paper crisis came in 1973, also triggered by turmoil in the Middle East over oil. It began when Yasuhiro Nakasone, then the minister of international trade and industry, called on the public to conserve paper products. The announcement was meant to signal some austerity. Instead, it sparked rumors that paper supplies were running out—and Japanese consumers, particularly women managing household budgets, began buying enormous quantities of toilet paper. Academics have described the panic as a response to the growing instability of the middle class, a fear their livelihoods were held up by smoke and mirrors.
Since then, Japan has raced for its toilet products every time a crisis rolls around. The devastating earthquake and tsunami of 2011 triggered the same kind of hoarding behavior, though apparently there were some actual disruptions in affected regions. Now, the cycle is repeating itself.
What makes toilet paper the perennial target? It’s bulky and distinctly finite—when it’s gone from the shelf, it’s conspicuous. And unlike food, which you consume and replace in a rhythm, toilet paper occupies a kind of psychological category all its own, a symbol of long-term stability and responsibility.
“The importance of toilet paper…runs deep into the soul of modern culture,” anthropologist Grant Jun Otsuki wrote about the COVID shortage in 2021. “The mere thought of the disappearance of toilet paper from the world spurs some to act so quickly and decisively to secure their own supplies.”
So far, the panic doesn’t appear to have spread far beyond Japan—except, perhaps, to neighboring Australia, where Perth has reported some early signs of stockpiling. As if the hollering from across the water finally reached the next set of ears.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Oil and natural gas futures prices—despite trading 60% higher since before the Iran war—remain well below the physical supply shortages facing Asia and spreading around the world that will take many months to replenish, the chairman and CEO of Chevron said March 23.
The large CERAWeek by S&P Global conference is attracting many of the world’s energy leaders from around the world in Houston this week and a top theme is the potential disconnect between energy markets and the greatest global energy supply shock ever with the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which typically funnels nearly 20% of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas each day.
“There are very real physical manifestations of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that are working their way around the world through the system that I don’t think are fully priced in,” said Chevron CEO Mike Wirth.
Asia already is facing major supply shortages that cannot be undone just by the releases of strategic, emergency supplies. That is why many Asian countries have implemented energy conservation mandates, work-from-home efforts, school closures, and more. Wirth also cited the huge supplies of fertilizer for agriculture and helium for semiconductors that flow through the strait offshore of Iran.
“The fundamentals are very tight out there,” Wirth said. “The markets are trading on scant information.”
“Physical supply changes don’t respond immediately,” he added. “Even when strait reopens at some point, it will take time.”
Oil prices dipped notably March 23 when President Donald Trump said he would delay any attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure by five days to allow for greater negotiations, pushing back his March 23 deadline for Iran to reopen the strait. Iran has in turn said it would attack more energy facilities in neighboring Gulf countries if the U.S. followed through on Trump’s threats, further escalating the war. And, later in the day, Iranian officials said no negotiations have taken place, accusing Trump of pushing “fake news” to lower prices.
Iran’s counteroffensive strategy of attacking the oil and gas supplies of its neighbors is a form of unprovoked terrorism that will not be accepted, said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates minister of industry and advanced technology, and group CEO of ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
The UAE has cut its oil production by more than 50% this month, while Iraq and Kuwait have made even deeper reductions. Al Jaber canceled his scheduled appearance in Houston because of the war, but he provided a video message. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser also canceled his trip.
“Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz is not an act of aggression against one nation. It’s economic terrorism against every nation,” Al Jaber said. “And no country should be allowed to hold Hormuz hostage. Not now, not ever.”
He accused Iran of “choking the throat” of the “global economy.”
Kicking off CERAWeek, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas executive, said the Iran war is a “conflict that we simply couldn’t kick down the road one more administration.”
Wright called the war “short-term disruption now, but to end a multi-decadal problem.”
The International Energy Agency agreed this month to release 400 million barrels of oil from emergency storage, including 172 million barrels from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wright said the U.S. began withdrawing oil from the SPR on March 20 and that the U.S. will release at least 1 million barrels each day from the SPR for the next few months. The total global release would equate to nearly 3 million barrels daily, he said.
Still, that does not offset more than 11 million barrels of oil that remains offline, even with Saudi Arabia and the UAE redirecting as many barrels as they can through the Red Sea and other outlets.
“Oil remains the most important energy source in the world,” Wright said. “No oil, no modern world.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The federal workers union representing TSA officers has chided the Trump Administration’s decision to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into airports, arguing the agents are not qualified to handle airport security.
“ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Sunday. “TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats specifically designed to evade detection at checkpoints—skills that require specialized instruction, hands-on practice, and ongoing recertification.
“You cannot improvise that. Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap,” he added. “It creates one.”
Instead of solving the problem of the 50,000-plus TSA employees who “have worked without pay for over five weeks,” Kelley said, “Washington’s answer isn’t to pay them. It’s to send ICE agents to do their jobs.”
The American Federation of Government Employees is the only union representing TSA officers.
President Donald Trump on Sunday announced on social media plans to order federal immigration officers to oversee airport security on Monday amid an ongoing partial government shutdown. The shutdown, entering its 43rd day, ceased funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as Democrats demanded reform policies after ICE officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.
Trump told reporters on Monday that ICE agents would also be able to conduct immigration checks and make arrests, though it was not the primary reason for their placement.
“They’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. That’s very fertile territory. But that’s not why they’re there. They’re really there to help,” he said.
TSA receives its funding from DHS, meaning its more than 50,000 frontline officers are not getting paid but are required to work as they are deemed “essential employees.” More than 400 TSA employees have quit and thousands more have called out of work, according to DHS.
Kelley asserted ICE agents should still not replace absent TSA employees, who “deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be,” he said.
After an initial training period, TSA transportation security officers are put through an additional two-to-three week training program, according to job postings.
One whistleblower previously raised concerns about training for ICE deportation agents being cut, saying in a Congressional testimony that instruction for incoming agents was slashed in an effort to increase recruitment to increase arrests. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that ICE removed about 240 hours of basic training from its program, equivalent to about 40% of instructional time, according to government records.
White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview with CNN that immigration officers could cover exits typically monitored by TSA agents to allow them to better staff screening lines, as well as check identification for passengers entering screening lines. According to Homan, ICE agents will likely not oversee X-ray machines because of lack of training. “ICE agents are assigned at many airports across the country already,” Homan said. “They do a lot of investigation, criminal investigation on smuggling at airports.”
DHS acting assistant secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement to Fortune that the department would not disclose where ICE agents were deployed for security reasons.
TSA officers’ call-out rates reached their highest level of the shutdown on Sunday, with 11.76% of workers, or more than 3,450 employees, not showing up to work, DHS data showed. That included about 40% of TSA officers from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, according to DHS data.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian lambasted the federal government over the shutdown, saying in an interview with CNBC last week that politicians should “do their job” to ensure TSA officers are paid during the shutdown.
“It’s inexcusable that our security agents, our frontline agents, that are essential to what we do, are not being paid, and it’s ridiculous to see them being used as political chips,” he said.
Bastian joined a host of airline CEOs asking Congress—which is now heading into a two-week recess without a deal in sight—to resume DHS funding. In an open letter, the executives from Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airways, among others, suggested air travel has become political collateral during shutdown, and that providing compensation for TSA employees was particularly prudent ahead of a busy spring travel season that would be punctuated by both the FIFA World Cup and the U.S.’s 250th anniversary.
Short-staffed airports have shut down checkpoints, leaving passengers to endure three-hour or even longer wait times in security lines. The shortages have also contributed to thousands of flight delays and cancellations.
These disturbances have only mounted pressure on airports and airlines also contending with threats of increased fuel prices and cancelled flights as a result of the war in Iran, as well as safety concerns. LaGuardia Airport in New York is closed following a deadly collision of an Air Canada jet into a fire truck on Sunday night, killing a pilot and copilot and injuring dozens of passengers. Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey temporarily shut down operations on Monday as a result of a burning smell in an elevator, forcing air traffic controllers to evacuate a tower.
Meanwhile, TSA agents working without pay are experiencing eviction notices, vehicle repossessions, and trouble buying groceries, union and federal officials warned. A 2024 Government Accountability Office report found TSA officers have struggled with some of the lowest morale levels in the federal government, with employees citing poor management, work-life balance, and pay as reasons for their frustrations. The starting salary for TSA agents is about $34,500, with the average annual pay between $46,000 and $55,000.
“I’ve heard from officers who cannot afford copayments for cancer treatments or office visits for their sick children,” Aaron Barker, a local TSA union leader based in Atlanta, told reporters earlier this week.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Strategy, the world’s largest holder of Bitcoin, bought more than 1,000 of the original cryptocurrency last week, worth more than $76 million. The purchase follows one from the week prior worth $1.6 billion, which the company funded primarily through its “Stretch” perpetual preferred shares.
One analyst says that the company will get back to buying more Bitcoin and do so through its sale of these “Stretch” perpetual preferred shares, known as STRC.
“While the cadence and size of Strategy’s Bitcoin purchases will likely remain uneven on a week-to-week basis, reflecting market conditions and opportunistic timing, we fully expect the company to aggressively lean into its Bitcoin acquisition strategy as demand for its STRC perpetual preferred stock increases,” said Mark Palmer, senior equity research analyst at The Benchmark Company.
Strategy, run by executive chairman Michael Saylor, is a digital asset treasury—a company whose sole purpose is to acquire and hold on to vast amounts of Bitcoin. It can make these purchases through sales of its “Stretch” perpetual preferred shares, a security that offers investors an 11% annual yield.
Its common shares, the sale of which can also fund the company’s purchase of Bitcoin, are often tied to the currency’s performance. Strategy’s shares have increased about 10% in the last month, and Bitcoin is up about 9% during that time to its current price of roughly $70,000, according to Binance. Cryptocurrencies have shown growth and resilience since the beginning of the war in Iran, while traditional stock indexes like the S&P 500 have struggled.
Palmer, the analyst at The Benchmark Company, expects Strategy to continue to pivot back to its sales of “Stretch”, “We expect STRC to become established as Strategy’s primary vehicle for fueling its Bitcoin purchases going forward.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
As Gen Z college graduates struggle to jumpstart their careers, skepticism about the value of higher education is reaching new heights.
But at one private university in suburban North Carolina, graduates are defying that trend. At High Point University, 99.2% of the class of 2024 were employed or pursuing further education within six months of graduation—14 points above the national average.
The secret, according to the school, isn’t exclusively leaning on traditional academic offerings to prepare students for the real world. Instead, High Point brands itself as the nation’s “premier life skills university.”
“It’s clear that students and parents expect maximum return on investment from a college education,” a High Point University spokesperson told Fortune. “It’s also clear that employers need graduates who have not only technical skills but also life skills that outlast technical skills, which are constantly changing.”
In practice, that means required courses like Life Skills 101, which University President Nido Qubein teaches himself on confidence, communication, and personal branding. It also means bringing in top business minds, such as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who serves as the school’s “innovator in residence,” to mentor students directly.
While similar programs elsewhere are often limited to students in their last year of school or even just business majors, High Point has made career readiness and soft skills the core of its entire curriculum.
The school also caught the country’s attention this year by making it to the NCAA College Basketball Tournament as a No. 12 seed and upsetting No. 5 Wisconsin. The High Point Panthers then lost to Arkansas on March 22.
Throughout students’ time at High Point, the school emphasizes teaching what they say “employers want in new hires,” including motivation, emotional intelligence, coachability, technical competence, temperament, and work ethic—traits that are increasingly rare to find among young professionals.
According to a report from tech education company General Assembly, fewer than half of all workers, and just 12% of mid-level executives, are confident that entry-level workers are adequately prepared for the workforce.
It’s a concern echoed by many business leaders. Jon Gray, president and COO of asset firm Blackstone, told employees in 2025:
“Most of you went to elite universities. You did really well, you were in the top of your class. You are people who are successful by nature and hardworking,” Gray said in a video posted to his LinkedIn account. “But when I look around at the people who truly succeeded at Blackstone, it’s not the ‘good enough’ crowd, right? It’s the people who are like, hey, ‘I’m gonna make sure I get this absolutely right.’”
Even tech leaders have weighed in. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has questioned whether college is living up to its promise.
“It would be one thing if [college] was just kind of like a social experience, but you started off neutral. The fact that it’s not preparing you for the jobs that you need and you’re kind of starting off in this big [financial] hole then I think that’s not good,” Zuckerberg said on This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von.
For High Point, these critiques have represented opportunity. The school’s pitch is simple: “HPU is about more than degrees; it’s about life skills. Our students learn practical wisdom and career skills that prepare them for success in any field.”
These lessons are reinforced through lectures and seminars on topics such as how to land a job, how to pitch yourself, and how to thrive in the workplace, giving students tangible tools to turn their education into real-world success.
Nestled in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina, High Point faces the challenge of being down the road from other top universities in the Tar Heel state—something that only exacerbates the pressure to attract students—and stay afloat financially. Since March 2020, over 80 public or nonprofit colleges have announced closures or mergers, according to Best Colleges.
During Qubein’s now 20 years at the helm of the university, High Point’s student population has tripled. Last fall, High Point welcomed its largest class of first-year students as well as its largest total enrollment growth in history—topping at 6,550 students.
Part of High Point’s growth strategy has been to attract wealthier students and their families.
“Half of Wall Street sends their kids to this school,” Qubein told The Wall Street Journal in 2025.
Many elite universities—including Harvard and MIT—have also expanded financial aid for lower-income families, banking that wealthier students paying full price will help balance the books. High Point, for its part, offers an average student aid package of about $23,000. Its total annual cost of attendance is just over $71,000.
For that price, students can take advantage of free car inspections before holiday breaks, a campus steakhouse, six outdoor heated pools—each with its own hot tub—and even a mock airplane cabin, designed to help students practice networking for chance encounters at 30,000 feet.
Still, Qubein rejects the idea that these are luxuries—but rather what’s needed to get young people ready for the real world.
“As far as I’m concerned, we have no amenities,” Qubein added to the WSJ. “We are not in the business of pampering students. We are in the business of preparing our students.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on November 7, 2025.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Prediction market Kalshi loves a publicity stunt. In February, the company handed out free groceries to hundreds of New Yorkers. Now, it’s taking a page from Warren Buffett’s playbook and offering a $1 billion prize to any user who has the perfect March Madness bracket.
In 2014, he offered $1 billion to any Berkshire Hathaway (or subsidiary) employee who picked the winner of all 63 games correctly. Nobody won, and the company has since modified its payouts multiple times because a perfect bracket is harder than you might think.
Taking teams’ stats, history, and general basketball knowledge into account, the NCAA estimates that the chances of perfection are 1 in 120.2 billion. The longest verified streak came from an Ohio man who correctly guessed 49 consecutive games in 2019.
Kalshi admits that it knows “the odds aren’t in your favor.” In the unlikely chance of a payout, the winner would receive $100 million each year for 10 years, according to the contest rules. SIG Parametrics, a member of the Susquehanna International Group of Companies, is financially backing the contest.
If no one has the perfect bracket, the person with the highest score, based on the company’s point system, will receive $1 million. If there’s a tie, the prize will be split equally among the winners.
All U.S. citizens over 18 years old were eligible to enter the contest before the competition’s first game on March 19. But New York or Florida residents are not eligible, and Kalshi did not immediately respond to Fortune’s comment on why people in those states were excluded.
Berkshire’s long-standing tradition
Kalshi is mimicking a longtime Berkshire Hathaway tradition that drew about 65,000 of its nearly 400,000 employees in 2024, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Since 2014, Buffett has offered his employees millions for their brackets. And even though he stepped down as CEO in December, the competition will continue this year, according to Front Office Sports.
Over the years, the rules and prizes have changed as the long odds weighed on participants, while Buffett was eager to give away money.
After kicking off the yearly competition with a $1 billion prize for a perfect bracket, Buffett switched to a $1 million reward from 2015 to 2024 to anyone who perfectly guessed the Sweet 16.
But no employees met the target. A $100,000 consolation prize was given to the bracket that stayed perfect the longest. Buffett is known to personally congratulate the winners.
“I’m getting older,” Buffett told WSJ in 2025. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
Last year, Buffett’s wish came true after he changed the rules again to offer $1 million to anyone who correctly guessed at least 30 of 32 first-round games. A FlightSafety International employee (a pilot training company subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway) won $1 million for correctly guessing 31 out of 32 first round games.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The Supreme Court ‘s conservative majority on Monday sounded skeptical of state laws that allow the counting of late-arriving mail ballots, a persistent target of President Donald Trump.
The court heard arguments in a case from Mississippi that also could affect voters in 13 other states and the District of Columbia, which have grace periods for ballots cast by mail. An additional 15 states that have more forgiving deadlines for ballots from military and overseas voters also could be impacted.
A ruling is expected by late June, early enough to govern the counting of ballots in the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
The court challenge is part of Trump’s broader attack on most mail balloting, which he has said breeds fraud despite strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states.
Several conservative justices gave voice to some of Trump’s complaints. Justice Samuel Alito wondered about the appearance of fraud in situations where “a big stash of ballots” that arrive late “radically flipped” an election.
Defending the state law, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart pointed out that the Trump administration and its allies in the case have yet to submit a single case of fraud due to late-arriving mail ballots.
The court’s liberal justices indicated they would uphold state laws with post-Election Day deadlines.
“The people who should decide this issue are not the courts, but Congress, the states and Congress,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said.
Forcing states to change their practices just a few months before the election risks “confusion and disenfranchisement,” especially in places that have had relaxed deadlines for years, state and big-city election officials told the court in a written filing.
California, Texas, New York and Illinois are among the states with post-Election Day deadlines. Alaska, with its vast distances and often unpredictable weather, also counts late-arriving ballots.
Lawyers for the Republican and Libertarian parties, as well as Trump’s administration, are asking the justices to affirm an appellate ruling that struck down a Mississippi law allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of the election and are postmarked by Election Day.
Justices worried over the slippery-slope problems that could arise no matter who wins the case.
Ballots could be received until the start of the next Congress, two months after the election, Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested.
On the other side, Justice Elena Kagan said the logic of the challenge to late-arriving ballots also would be used to rule out early voting and absentee ballots.
Limits on early-voting also seemed to bother Chief Justice John Roberts, who seemed the conservative member of the court most likely to side with Mississippi.
The court also grappled with whether state laws allowing for late-arriving ballots from military and overseas ballots could survive.
Last year, Trump signed an executive order on elections that aims to require votes to be “cast and received” by Election Day. The order has been blocked in pending court challenges.
At the same time, four Republican-dominated states — Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota and Utah — eliminated grace periods last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and Voting Rights Lab.
The issue at the Supreme Court is whether federal law sets a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast by voters and received by state officials.
In striking down Mississippi’s grace period, Judge Andrew Oldham of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the state law allowing the late-arriving ballots to be counted violated federal law.
Oldham and the other two judges who joined the unanimous ruling, James Ho and Stuart Kyle Duncan, all were appointed by Trump during his first term.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
More federal immigration officers are making their way to U.S. airports after President Donald Trump said he’d deploy them to supplement the Transportation Security Administration during a government shutdown that has caused long lines at security checkpoints across the country.
On Monday morning, a handful of federal officers were seen by The Associated Press near busy lines at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. And a handful of other airports — including Louis Armstrong International in New Orleans, as well as Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental and William P. Hobby airports — said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would also be on site to support TSA operations.
Federal officers are a routine presence at international airports, where Customs and Border Protection officers screen arriving travelers and Homeland Security Investigations agents handle criminal cases tied to smuggling, trafficking and fraud. But what’s unusual in the current moment is their visibility at TSA security checkpoints.
Monday’s deployments came as hundreds of thousands of Homeland Security workers, including from the TSA, U.S. Secret Service and Coast Guard, have worked without pay since Congress failed to renew DHS funding last month. That’s led many TSA agents to call in sick — or even quit their jobs — as financial strains pile up. The staffing shortages have forced some airports to close checkpoints at times, with wait times swinging dramatically for travelers.
On Sunday, the Trump administration signaled it would deploy federal immigration officers to large airports with the longest wait times — and Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis said that would include “hundreds” of ICE officers, but she did not disclose all the airports they would go to, citing security reasons.
Some fear the move to deploy federal immigration agents will only escalate tensions.
“This latest threat of ICE invasion at the airports is another distraction from solutions that protect Americans,” a coalition of unions representing flight attendants and other workers — including the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers — said in a Sunday statement. Transportation security officers “can’t simply be replaced” by federal immigration officers, they noted, adding that ICE’s presence and potential attempts to question passengers about immigration status may also “distract them from ensuring airport security.”
The unions called for TSA workers to be paid immediately.
Trump said on Sunday that he would order federal immigration agents to airports to assist TSA by guarding exit lanes or checking passenger IDs unless Democrats agreed to fund the DHS. Funding for the department lapsed Feb. 14, as Democrats refused to fund ICE as well as Customs and Border Protection without changes to their operations in the wake of the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.
Democrats are continuing to demand major changes to federal immigration operations — including policy changes that would require ICE officers to get a warrant from a judge before forcefully entering homes, the removal of masks and clear identifying information on uniforms.
Trump on Monday directed ICE officers not to wear face coverings in their work at airports. In a social media posted, Trump said he supports ICE officers wearing masks when dealing with “hardened criminals” but suggested it isn’t necessary “when helping our Country out of the Democrat caused MESS at the airports.”
Beyond TSA operations, New York’s LaGuardia Airport shut down following a deadly collision on the runway late Sunday. An Air Canada regional jet struck a fire truck while landing, officials said — killing the pilot and copilot while around 40 passengers and crew members were taken to area hospitals, some with serious injuries.
According to the FAA, LaGuardia is expected to remain closed until at least 2 p.m. ET on Monday. Air traffic has been diverted, and Monday morning operations also were halted at Newark Liberty International Airport in neighboring New Jersey.
___
Grantham-Philips reported from New York. Associated Press writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The oil crises of the 1970s prompted a range of policy changes that still exist today. For one, we invented the high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane to incentivize workers to carpool. A nationwide 55 mph speed limit made sure those carpools weren’t guzzling too much gas. Cars became more fuel efficient; we (temporarily) started driving less. But some experts say those measures, coupled with those taken during the 2022 energy shock in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, pale in comparison to what we’re about to see next thanks to the Iran war.
Earlier this month, the Paris-based intergovernmental agency International Energy Agency (IEA) released a record-breaking 400 million barrels of oil to temper rising prices. IEA executive director Fatih Birol, who coordinated the release, finally broke his three-week silence and sounded the alarms on how much damage the war is causing. In an interview Monday at the National Press Club of Australia, Birol said world leaders are underestimating the energy crisis, saying the ongoing energy shock is worse than previous ones.
“The depth of the problem was not well appreciated by the decision makers around the world,” he said. “If you want to put in a context, this crisis as it stands now: two oil crises and one gas crisis put all together,” he said.
Even as President Donald Trump said early Monday the U.S. was in talks with Iran—and would therefore withhold from striking critical energy sources for the next five days—Brent crude last week soared north of $110 per barrel. After the president’s announcement, oil prices fell about 10%, yet remain stubbornly high at about $102 as of 12 p.m. ET. Economists expect the oil shock to reverberate across the U.S. economy, potentially jacking up food prices, jeopardizing the possibility of a Fed rate cut this year (while raising the odds of a rate hike), and even threatening to halt the entire economy if oil prices rise to $140 a barrel.
Birol elaborated on the numbers behind his assertion, saying the losses already accrued are far worse than those from the 1970 oil crises and the Ukraine war.
“Many of us remember the two consecutive oil crises in [the] 1970s: 1973 and 1979,” he said. “In each of the crises, the world has lost about 5 million barrels per day, both of them together 10 million barrels per day.”
“And today, only as of today, we lost 11 million barrels per day, so more than two major oil shocks put together.”
He added that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the gas markets, particularly in Europe, “lost about 75 billion cubic meters, 75BCM. And as of now, as a result of this crisis, we lost about 140BCM, almost twice” as much.
Beyond the energy shocks, Birol said the war is severing ties to some of the vital arteries of the global economy by disrupting other critical supply chains. The war, he said, has interrupted the trade of petrochemicals, fertilizers, sulfur, and helium, some of the most critical building blocks of the world economy. For example, roughly half of the world’s urea supply, a critical compound for fertilizer, runs through the Strait of Hormuz, potentially impacting the cost of U.S. food prices within the coming months.
“If fertilizer disruptions or inflation drives higher corn prices, that is going to be felt everywhere throughout the food supply,” Dr. Ricky Volpe, an agricultural economist and professor of agribusiness at Cal Poly, said in a recent interview with Fortune.
Even as Trump promises to withhold strikes on energy sources for several days, Birol said there are already many damaged oil refineries, gas fields, and pipelines across nine countries, which means that even when the war concludes, it could take some time for oil prices to adjust to their pre-war levels.
“Forty energy assets in the region are severely or very severely damaged,” he said. “It will take some time for these assets—these oil fields, gas fields, refineries, pipelines—[to] come to the normal capacity that they were running before the war.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
In just weeks, Wall Street has gone from optimistically waving off the U.S. and Israel’s strikes on Iran as a short-term blip to the more pessimistic assumption that the chaos in the Middle East could have long-term ramifications.
Likewise, consumers—already sensitive to the cost of living—are struggling with yet another affordability issue as oil and gas prices shot up after supply from the region was restricted.
As Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders today: “We are living through a period where things that would’ve defined a decade have become routine: wars with global repercussions, trillion-dollar companies, a fundamental reordering of international trade, and the advent of the most significant technology since, at least, the computer.”
Frankly, it’s been hard to keep up—and the BlackRock CEO wrote that the drama and uncertainty threatened by day-to-day headlines may be obscuring longer-term trends.
Fink, worth $1.3 billion according to Forbes, said that the vast majority of wealth historically has flowed to people who owned assets, as opposed to those who earned their money by working. Since 1989, he observed, a dollar invested in the U.S. stock market has ballooned at 15 times the value of a dollar tied to median wages. This wealth effect will likely be the same in the age of AI, with those wealthy enough to invest in the technology seeing their portfolios benefit the most from increasing to asset prices.
As such, the BlackRock founder wrote: “This is where much of today’s economic anxiety comes from: a deeper feeling that capitalism is working—just not for enough people.”
For individuals looking to make a quick buck in the rollercoaster stock market by trying to buy the dips and sell the peaks won’t see the same benefits as those holding historical wealth, Fink said: “A focus on short-term investing is not a fix for that.” Over the past two decades, the BlackRock CEO noted, every dollar invested in the S&P 500 grew by more than eight times. But if an investor were to have missed out on the 10 best days of the market then they would have earned less than half that return.
As such, “staying invested has mattered far more than getting the timing right,” and as such, “it is long-term investing that allows countries to build domestic industries, that lets people build enduring wealth and shows how their country’s growth can benefit them too.”
Fink’s take on the shifting nature of capitalist sentiment is echoed by research into the American Dream. In 2024, Pew Research asked nearly 9,000 respondents if the American Dream existed, and only a slim majority—53%—said it was still achievable. 41% said the American Dream was once possible, while 6% said it was never a reality.
There was also a marked split in opinion: Those with a college level of education, who were defined as having higher levels of income, were notably more optimistic about the possibility of achieving such a goal.
U.S. citizens are uniquely placed to benefit from the largest economy on earth and its domestic but globally market-leading businesses. However, Fink wrote that many households don’t have enough cash on hand to make ends meet—let alone any left over to invest in volatile markets over a sustained period of time.
A BlackRock survey of 1,000 voters conducted in January found that one-third of respondents don’t have $500 dollars on-hand for an emergency like a car repair, Fink said: “In fact, many are forced to pull money out of the markets just to make ends meet. Last year, a record number of workers withdrew money from their 401(k) plans so they could cover financial emergencies. The challenge is saving enough money to invest in the first place.”
The creation of products like Trump Accounts will help families get a foot on the ladder to long-term investing, Fink said. However, a major lever which could be used to foster wealth creation and potentially address income inequality is Social Security.
Fink mused on the current structure of the program, which “emphasizes stability and predictability.” He added: “What it doesn’t do is let people grow their benefits along with the broader economy. The question is whether the Social Security system could allow both. Could a portion of the system be invested more like other long-term pension plans—carefully, broadly, and over decades—while ensuring the program remains a strong safety net?”
This is by no means a bid to privatise social security, Fink said, but some state and local government employees already contribute to public pension schemes which are invested in diversified portfolios: “If long-term investing is already helping millions of public servants build retirement security, it raises a reasonable question: Why shouldn’t more Americans have access to that same kind of long-term growth?”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Behind the nation’s greatest college basketball teams is a steady flow of donations from billionaires with varying industry backgrounds and connections to the schools.
Among them are the cofounder of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest investment firms; the owner of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and a Houston hospitality mogul whose name is flashed on an entire arena. Several powerhouse teams bankrolled by billionaires are favored to advance far in this year’s March Madness tournament.
Considering the global sports entertainment industry is estimated to be worth more than $3 trillion, it’s no wonder America’s wealthiest are eager to throw money at the nation’s best college athletics programs.
This year’s March Madness tournament is particularly flush with billionaire money. The Big Ten alone sent six teams to the Sweet 16, meaning the financial stakes for some of the country’s wealthiest athletic boosters have never been higher. This year’s men’s tournament is expected to have more than $270 million in payouts, with each of the 135 available units (games) valued at roughly $2 million, paid out to conferences over six years (that’s about $350,000 per year).
That money flows directly to conferences, not schools. That’s why wealthy alumni and other billionaire boosters step in to fill the gap, pouring hundreds of millions into facilities, NIL deals, and recruiting budgets that tournament checks can’t offer.
Fortune has compiled a sampling of billionaire donors to schools participating in this year’s Sweet 16. Note, this list is not exhaustive.
Rubenstein, cofounder of The Carlyle Group, grew up in Baltimore and earned his undergraduate degree from Duke University in 1970, where he has made generous donations over the decades.
He cofounded The Carlyle Group in 1987 with just $5 million in capital, but grew it to one of the world’s largest private equity firms with $477 billion in assets under management. Rubenstein is worth an estimated $4.2 billion.
Rubenstein has donated more than $60 million to his alma mater, including a $10 million gift to Duke Athletics in 2012. He said he made the donation because of Duke’s “success in so many sports over so many years, [and] because of the program’s commitment to academic achievement and excellence.”
The Carlyle cofounder has made several other multimillion-dollar donations to Duke over the years, including a $20 million scholarship endowment for first-generation students in 2017 and a $25 million gift to support the arts. The billionaire also served on Duke’s board of trustees from 2005 to 2017, including a term as chairman.
Duke, the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament’s East Region, faces St. John’s on Friday at 7:10 p.m. EST on CBS. The Blue Devils are favored to advance.
Jones, the longtime owner of the Dallas Cowboys, has a deep connection to one of this year’s Sweet 16 schools. He’s a University of Arkansas alum and played for the Razorbacks football team in the 1960s before he went on to become a successful oil businessman and the owner of the Dallas Cowboys in 1989. Jones is currently worth an estimated $19.4 billion, with the Cowboys worth approximately $13 billion.
In 2015, Jones donated $10.65 million to Arkansas’ athletic program, which he credited for his success. The gift supported Arkansas’ Student-Athlete Success Center.
“My experiences at the University of Arkansas as a student-athlete under the legendary Coach Frank Broyles helped shape me as a man and guide me on my future career path,” Jones said at the time of the donation. “I would not be where I am today without those life lessons learned as a student-athlete at the University of Arkansas.”
Arkansas faces No. 1 seed Arizona on Thursday at 9:45 p.m. EST on CBS. The Razorbacks are considered a significant underdog, but freshman star Darius Acuff Jr. has made them one of the tournament’s most exciting teams to watch.
Fertitta is the definition of a hometown billionaire backer. The CEO of Fertitta Entertainment and owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets, he is Houston’s richest sports owner with an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion—a fortune built on hospitality, gaming, and entertainment through his Landry’s restaurant and hotel empire with more than 600 dining, entertainment, and gaming locations nationwide.
In 2016, Fertitta pledged $20 million to the University of Houston’s athletics program to renovate the school’s on-campus basketball arena. This was the largest individual athletic donation in UH history at the time. Fertitta attended UH, although he left before finishing his degree. But the school awarded him with an honorary doctorate in August.
“This gift is personal,” Fertitta said when he made the 2016 donation. “It represents a commitment from my family and me to support the University of Houston in its quest to strengthen our nationally competitive institution, both in academics and athletics.”
“Upgrading our athletics facilities shows we are serious about competing at the highest levels of collegiate sports for many years to come,” he continued.
The arena was subsequently renamed Fertitta Center. He made an additional $50 million pledge to UH’s medical school in 2022.
Houston, the No. 2 seed in the South Region, faces Illinois on Thursday at 10:05 p.m. EST on TBS. The Cougars are favored to win.
Ellison cofounded tech giant Oracle and is currently one of the world’s wealthiest individuals with a net worth of nearly $200 billion.
He also reportedly underwrote the richest recruiting flip in college football history. Ellison reportedly helped the University of Michigan fund a name, image, and likeness sports package to poach quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood from Louisiana State University in November 2024. While Ellison didn’t have a prior connection to the Wolverines, his wife, Jolin, is a Michigan alumna.
Michigan, the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region, faces Alabama on Friday at 7:35 p.m. EST on TBS. The Wolverines, who are favored to win on Friday, have three projected first-round NBA draft picks on their roster.
Gilbert founded Rock Financial in 1985, which would eventually become mortgage behemoth Rocket Companies. The fintech and homeownership services company has a $40 billion market cap, and Gilbert has an estimated net worth of $29.4 billion. He also owns the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.
Gilbert donated $15 million to his alma mater, Michigan State University, in 2016 for use toward the school’s basketball program. Both he and his wife, Jennifer, attended Michigan State and said that, at the time, the school had “played a large role in both of our lives.”
Michigan State, the No. 3 seed in the East Region, faces UConn on Friday at 9:45 p.m. EST on CBS. UConn is slightly favored to win.
Haslam is a University of Tennessee alum and the owner of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, a franchise he purchased in 2012. He and his family built their fortune through Pilot Flying J, the nation’s largest truck-stop chain, which they sold to Berkshire Hathaway in a deal that totaled $13.65 billion over several years. Haslam is worth nearly $10 billion today.
The Haslam family has donated $50 million to the University of Tennessee, one of the largest gifts in school history, supporting academics and athletics at the Knoxville campus. The family’s name adorns Haslam College of Business at UT.
Tennessee, the No. 6 seed in the Midwest Region, faces Iowa State on Friday at 10:10 p.m. EST on TBS. Iowa State is currently favored to win.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Sending your resume into the void has never felt more useless.
Employers cut 92,000 jobs in February alone. Unemployment among entry-level employees peaked last July at 13.3%, the worst entry-level market in 37 years. Two-thirds of companies have put hiring on pause while they wait to see where AI can fill the gaps, and in the meantime, 1.17 million jobs have been cut since last year.
So you do what everyone does: You turn to AI to write a cover letter that slightly exaggerates the role you held in your junior year of college. That’s totally fine, since three-quarters of resumes never reach a human’s eyes anyway. This means you’re using AI to write something that gets read by AI, fulfilling some twisted ouroboros that Socrates and the lot would have had a doozy explaining to their students.
For Wharton Business Economics Professor Judd Kessler, there’s a simple alternative: Toss the fake enthusiasm and pick up the phone. The University of Pennsylvania professor and author of Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want instead thinks the cover letter’s days are numbered.
“I expect that in the not too distant future, cover letters are gone,” Kessler told Fortune. “Either cover letters will be required and everybody will have AI write good ones and they’ll be ignored, or employers will stop asking for them because they realize they’re not looking at them and they’re not adding value.”
Kessler says job hunting is starting to look a lot like the good ol’ days: It’s all about who you know. At the heart of his argument is the concept of a hidden market: any system that has to allocate something valuable without simply letting the highest bidder win. Think of Taylor Swift pricing concert tickets at $99 when millions of fans would pay 10 times that, or a university with 50,000 applicants for 2,000 freshman seats. Price alone can’t decide who gets what, so other rules take over—rules like knowing a roadie who can get you behind the stage, or having an alumni vouch for you. These are all signals in a hidden market.
And the labor market is one of the biggest hidden markets of all.
“We want to allocate scarce resources, and we don’t want to let price do the job on its own,” Kessler said. “We find it more efficient to have a search process where we identify the best person for the role.”
In this dynamic, signals like the cover letter used to matter, because it meant candidates were spending the time and making the effort to show their enthusiasm.
“It was a costly signal that a job candidate could send that they were really interested in a particular role,” Kessler said. “And it was costly because writing a good one was hard and took time, and you couldn’t do it for every firm.” The signal was hard to ignore: This candidate was serious; after all, they wrote a cover letter.
That all changed when AI made it a quick snap to fake enthusiasm in three frivolous paragraphs.
“Generative AI comes, and something that used to take a few hours to do well now takes a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes,” Kessler said. “And all of a sudden that signal that used to be costly is now very cheap. Economists would call it cheap talk: You can make it look like you are really motivated to join that firm, that the job was designed for you, but you can create that signal very cheaply.”
The research backs him up. Kessler pointed to a study by economists Jingyi Cui, Gabriel Dias, and Justin Ye that tracked what happened when a major job platform introduced an AI cover-letter writing assistant. Letter quality improved because they were better targeted, and well-targeted letters led to more interviews. But as the tool spread, “employers stopped relying on cover letters in their hiring decisions,” Kessler said. “The cover letters got better, and they became a less useful tool overall.”
“In the old days, there used to be a few good cover letters, and that was how you could identify the best-fit candidates,” he said. “Now, all the cover letters pass some threshold. They become a prerequisite rather than a differentiator.”
Once every application looks polished, none stand out—and the rational employer either outsources the reading to AI or stops reading altogether. “That’s when you would hand it off to AI to be responsible,” Kessler said.
Kessler has watched it happen in his own hiring. Despite selecting research assistants at Wharton for the last 15 years, “all of the best cover letters have come in the last 12 months,” he said with a laugh, all of which suddenly reference his research papers.
“That used to be a way that I could tell who was actually motivated,” he said. “But now everybody does that, and my guess is it’s not because everybody has read that research. Everybody has figured out that AI can write a good summary of what I work on and weave that into a narrative. And that means I can’t use the cover letter as a good indication that somebody’s motivated to work with me.”
Instead of relying on an AI-written CliffNotes summary of his own research, Kessler now points to other hidden market signals: “Do they take my course? Do they come to office hours? Do they try to meet with me in person? Those are the signals I start to rely on more, because the cover letter is insufficient.”
The cover letter is dead, Kessler says and as a result, the signals are going old school: reaching out and classic networking.
“For the specific signal of ‘I really want to work at this firm,’ which is a signal that the applicant themselves can send, it’s going to be more things that cannot be replicated with AI,” he said.
“It’s going to be doing in-person networking with members of the leadership team at the firm, taking people that work at the firm out to coffee, going to the coffee chat that the firm has. And those are real costly signals, because they can’t be replicated with AI,” he added. “When I choose to go talk to people at a firm, I’m using hours that I can’t spend talking to people at another firm.”
While the coffee chat isn’t new, Kessler said the return to meeting people and showing other signals spells the cover letter’s inevitable end.
“I often describe this as the age of the cover letter being over,” Kessler said. “AI killed the cover letter.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
In the time it takes to walk from your car to your desk, President Donald Trump added $1.7 trillion to stocks and pushed the price of oil down by $17, or approximately 15%. By the time you got your coffee, Iran had reportedly called him a liar, and half those gains vanished.
This is the average Monday morning for a very market-oriented executive in the fourth week of war.
At approximately 7 a.m. ET, Trump posted in all-caps on Truth Social that the U.S. and Iran held “very good and productive conversations” over the weekend toward “a complete and total resolution” of hostilities in the Middle East. He ordered the Pentagon to pause all strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days.
Washington had kept Israel informed of the talks, Reuters reported, and Israel is expected to follow the U.S. in suspending strikes on Iranian power plants.
That came after Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran Saturday night, calling on the regime to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face bombardment of its power grid. Now, it appears he’s buying time for the workweek, and leaving the weekend as a buffer before any next move.
S&P 500 futures swung nearly 4% off their lows, Brent crude collapsed from $109 to a low of $92 before partially recovering, and West Texas Intermediate touched $88.70, its lowest point since the war began.
Iran’s state media reported that the talks never happened, citing an unnamed “senior security official” in a post on Telegram. The official called it a ploy to manipulate markets and said there’s no communication lines between the two countries. As of time of writing, no official from Iran has publicly confirmed or denied Trump’s claim.
Trump told Fox Business that talks did occur Sunday night, involving special envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, facilitated by Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. Iran wants a deal “badly,” he said.
“We have major points of agreement—I would say almost all points of agreement. Perhaps that hasn’t been conveyed,” he added, also joking that Iran needs “better public relations people.”
Wall Street has a word for all of it, coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong last May: TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out. The acronym describes Trump’s habit of making catastrophic threats that cause market panic, then reversing course before economic pain can set in. The trade has minted money for investors who bought every dip, confident that Trump’s tolerance for damage had a ceiling.
The pattern was seen in his trade war last year as he announced prohibitively high tariffs only to reach a deal later. It played out in Greenland too early this year, when Trump spent weeks threatening to seize the island only to settle for a vague base agreement.
The Iran war is, theoretically, supposed to function differently: after all, it takes “two to TACO,” since Trump cannot just unilaterally end the war the same way he could unilaterally pull back sanctions.
Oil analyst Rory Johnston wrote on Monday that though the “base case” was that Trump would try to back out and declare victory, it won’t be that simple to bring down oil prices.
“Hormuz flow still hasn’t resumed and every day we’re shedding more oil from the system,” he wrote on X. “That’ll catch up—can’t jawbone 10 to 15 million barrels per day stock draws.”
It is unclear who Trump is even negotiating with on Iran’s side. He told Fox Business he’s dealing with the man who’s “most respected” in Iran, though “It’s a little tough — we’ve wiped out everybody.”
U.S.-Israeli forces have killed most of Iran’s top brass, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, security chief Ali Larijani, and other senior leaders. When asked a few weeks ago whom Trump wanted to see replace the ayatollah, Trump said “everyone we had in mind is dead.”
The Jerusalem Post has reported that Trump’s actual interlocutor is Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
Trump also said on Fox Business Monday that he and new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei—son of the late Ali Khamenei—would together be in charge of the Strait of Hormuz.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The ‘Gen Z stare’ became an internet meme last year—used to describe a blank, expressionless look from a generation often glued to their phones. But it’s not just a phenomenon among today’s young people—even Mark Zuckerberg once had his own version of it.
On a recent episode of The Social Radars podcast, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham recalled meeting the Facebook cofounder around 2007—and being struck by his lack of social skills.
“[Zuckerberg] has this weird thing where if he didn’t have anything to say, he wouldn’t fill the gap with passing conversation,” Graham said. “He had no concept of small talk.”
The silence coming from the twentysomething Harvard dropout, Graham added, was more jarring than expected: “It was surprisingly disconcerting. I didn’t realize how important small talk was until I met the lack of it. But he would just stare at you if there wasn’t anything [to say].”
In the 1990s, Graham cofounded the software company Viaweb, which Yahoo acquired in 1998 for $49 million. In 2005, he co-founded the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has helped launch billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, and Reddit. While his exact net worth is not public, Graham has likely earned substantial income through his investments.
Now 41, Zuckerberg’s communication skills have in fact visibly evolved. From delivering Harvard’s commencement address in 2017 to testifying before Congress multiple times, he’s grown into a far more polished public speaker—and it’s worked to his advantage. Zuckerberg himself now has a net worth of $210 billion.
Graham quipped his first meeting with Zuckerberg was before he “had learned to imitate a normal person,”—but the tech founder himself has acknowledged he has struggled with communication as he’s taken his social media platform from a Harvard dorm room idea to one of the biggest companies in the world with a $1.5 trillion market cap.
“Look, historically I’ve had a very hard time expressing myself,” Zuckerberg told NBC News in 2019. “I just come across as robotic.”
He echoed that sentiment years later on Threads, saying that feedback about his awkwardness initially made things worse—but he’s improved with time: “Being awkward and getting negative feedback on how I came across definitely made me more careful and scripted,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2024.
Fortune reached out to Y Combinator and Meta for further comment.
Graham’s observations about a young Zuckerberg—and his evolution—underscore a broader point: communication, even seemingly trivial small talk, can shape how ideas are received and careers unfold. While Zuckerberg had a breakthrough product and early momentum to offset his social awkwardness, many Gen Z workers don’t have that cushion—and are struggling with communication in today’s tech-driven workplace.
About 38% say networking makes them anxious, according to a survey conducted by Strand Partners for LinkedIn, with many young people avoiding it altogether because they don’t know where to start. But the stakes go beyond just missed opportunities: communication gaps are among the reasons some employers have already begun giving the pink slip to recent Gen Z hires.
Strong communication has long been a hallmark of effective leadership. Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, has called it the “most important skill any leader can possess.”
“Communication makes the world go round. It facilitates human connections, and allows us to learn, grow and progress,” Branson wrote in 2015. “It’s not just about speaking or reading, but understanding what is being said – and in some cases what is not being said.”
And in the age of AI, those human skills are becoming even more valuable than ever.
“AI can’t replace genuine human connection,” said Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place To Work. “It can’t listen, care, or inspire people. That’s what leaders do. Technology can help us work smarter, but only people can build trust.”
It’s a view shared by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who said that soft skills like communication matter more than ever.
“My advice to people would be critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ [emotional quotient], learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write,” Dimon told Fox News late last year. “You’ll have plenty of jobs.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The U.S. government is insolvent. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.
Importantly, the $47.78 trillion in reported liabilities does not include the unfunded obligations of social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare — those are disclosed separately in the off-balance-sheet Statement of Social Insurance (SOSI).
The government’s consolidated balance sheet position, excluding the SOSI, deteriorated by nearly $2.07 trillion between FY 2024 and FY 2025, reaching a staggering negative $41.72 trillion. Total liabilities are now nearly eight times the value of reported assets. The largest drivers were a $2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable (now $30.33 trillion) and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable (now $15.47 trillion).
The off-balance-sheet picture is even more alarming. The 75-year unfunded social insurance obligation surged by $10.1 trillion in a single year, rising from $78.3 trillion in FY 2024 to $88.4 trillion in FY 2025 — driven primarily by a $6.9 trillion jump in projected Medicare Part B shortfalls and a $2.5 trillion increase for Social Security. The Treasury’s Statement of Long-Term Fiscal Projections shows the 75-year fiscal gap widening from 4.3% of GDP in FY 2024 to 4.7% in FY 2025.
If the $88.4 trillion in 75-year off-balance-sheet obligations were added to the $47.8 trillion in official balance sheet liabilities, total federal obligations would now exceed $136.2 trillion — roughly five times U.S. annual GDP.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.
Not only has the financial press ignored the consolidated financial statements, but most members of Congress and members of the general public will not read the consolidated financial statements. Documents like the consolidated financial statements are not the kind of thing you want to read before driving. If that’s not bad enough, most people cannot relate to the trillion-dollar numbers in the financial statements. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate them into terms that people will understand.
Most people cannot relate to trillion-dollar figures on a government ledger. So consider this: divide every number by 100 million — drop eight zeros — and federal finances look like a household budget in freefall.
That household earns $52,446 and spends $73,378 — running a $20,932 annual deficit. Its total liabilities and unfunded promises amount to $1,361,788 against just $60,554 in assets, leaving it $1.3 million in the hole. Uncle Sam, by any accounting standard, is insolvent.
Congress has clearly lost control of the nation’s finances. America is facing a fiscal catastrophe. The reckoning, long deferred, is becoming impossible to ignore.
Addressing this crisis — and preventing recurrence — requires two specific legislative actions.
First, Congress should pass the bipartisan H.R. 3289 — Fiscal Commission Act, sponsored by Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), and 41 co-sponsors. Such a commission would force a public reckoning with the facts, the trade-offs, and the hard choices that restoring fiscal health requires.
Second, Congress should call an Article V Convention limited to proposing a fiscal responsibility amendment to the U.S. Constitution. H.Con.Res. 15, sponsored by Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), would do exactly that.
Modeled on Switzerland’s Debt Brake, such an amendment would mandate a balanced budget over the business cycle and prohibit federal spending from growing faster than the U.S. economy.
These two bills represent the most credible path forward — if Congress has the will to act.
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
Face-faced college graduates are watching the American Dream be swept out from underneath them, and entering a gloomy entry-level job market pillaged by AI automation. However, not every company is reeling back hiring young professionals in favor of the tech tools; Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says his business is actually ramping up its recruiting of the digitally-savvy generation.
“The kids coming out of college right now learned how to program with AI,” Huffman said recently during the Sourcery with Molly O’Shea podcast. “They’re really good at it, and so I think we will go heavy on new grads, because they’re so much more AI native.”
While some CEOs marvel over the abilities of chatbots and AI agents, recent graduates are actually ripe for the new tech-driven world of work: the digital natives grew up with the internet, and spent most of their higher education in the ChatGPT era. They’re deeply familiar with the technology and are much more apt to leverage it in their work. And the cofounder of the $26.7 billion social media empire says that propensity is actually a gift: older generations are more resistant to automating their craft, even if it’s for the better.
“It’s the old people like me, it’s like I didn’t want to give [coding] up. I finally did,” the 42-year-old millennial CEO explained. “The younger people don’t have that baggage. They just write with AI.”
Tech workers may be nervous that their AI use will lead to their inevitable displacement—but Huffman was resolute that the tech won’t reduce the company’s engineering headcount.
A Reddit spokesperson also underscored to Fortune that its emerging talent team focuses on recruiting young professionals, also offering new grad opportunities and internships developing essential skills like machine learning, data science, and computer science.
While the tide seems to have shifted away from tech companies recruiting college talent before graduation, Huffman warned that could be a costly mistake. The billionaire says employers need to hire graduates “right out of the gate,” or risk having to pay them 100 times more down the line.
“There are so many reasons to hire new grads,” Huffman continued. “If you don’t hire them as new grads, you will never see them. They will never be on the job market again. They’re too valuable to ever let them be on the job market.”
As companies enforce sweeping layoffs and reel back hiring, entry-level graduates are contending with a fierce labor market.
The proportion of unemployed Americans who are first-time workers hit a 37-year high in 2025, hitting a peak of 13.3% in July before tapering down to 10.6% last month. And some CEOs even believe the percent of unemployed college graduates could skyrocket within just a couple of years.
However, there’s a vocal cohort of leaders who won’t leave Gen Z out in the cold—and in fact, their inexperience is sometimes seen as an asset. Echoing Huffman’s point that Gen Z doesn’t come with “baggage,” Ricardo Amper, the founder and CEO of $1.25 billion software company Incode Technologies, believes Gen Z’s naivety is exactly what businesses need to innovate. They aren’t held back by preconceived notions of work or a professional mindset shaped by decades of career experience.
“My belief [is] that coming out with a fresh mind, first principles, is important. That’s why young people are particularly helpful in tech, because they’re less biased,” Amper told Fortune earlier this year. “I think too much knowledge is actually bad in tech: you’re biased.”
Even if employers believe that AI agents can take over the jobs of their young employees, automating their roles could do long-term damage.
Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky, has warned against shutting Gen Z professionals out of the workforce because the consequences are stifled innovation and a lack of talent ready to step into millennial’s and Gen Xer’s positions.
“[AI] can do a lot of lower-level, more entry-level position jobs. But if no young people can get jobs, then you have no one in the future to do the highly strategic leadership positions,” Chesky told ABC News in a 2025 interview. “So we need to make room for people early in their careers, even if AI can do the interns’ work.”
Plus, some CEOs like Mark Cuban even argue that it’s an opportune time for Gen Z to seize the moment. Older generations less skilled with AI will need to learn how to implement the tools effectively—and that’s where young digitally-savvy workers step in.
“Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies,” Cuban advised young workers during the TBPN podcast in 2025. “Learn to customize a model, walk into a company, show the benefits. That is every single job that’s going to be available for kids coming out of school.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Markets rebounded Monday after President Donald Trump retreated from his threat to destroy Iranian energy infrastructure and revealed talks with the regime, but the world is unlikely to revert to its prewar status quo, according to a geopolitics expert.
In a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, Eurasia Group Chairman and former State Department official Cliff Kupchan predicted the Iranian regime, dominated by successive layers of hardliners, will remain hostile to the U.S.
“The end of the war, therefore, is unlikely to usher in a stable peace,” he warned. “That reality means the Strait of Hormuz will become a source of geopolitical risk for a long time—a live wire down the middle of the global economy.”
Even if Tehran eventually negotiates away its uranium enrichment program and longer-range ballistic missiles, it will still have drones, mines and fast attack boats that can threaten tankers, Kupchan pointed out.
And Iran wouldn’t have to use its diminished capabilities very often to scare investors. In fact, despite the U.S. and Israel decimating its military with thousands of airstrikes, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been able to keep the Strait of Hormuz largely closed with occasional attacks on ships.
That threat has effectively bottled up about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas, and prices have soared, though they pulled back somewhat on Monday. Still, the genie is already out of the bottle.
“From now on traders will act based on the knowledge that Iran might at any time attack, and that new perception will create new risk premia in critically important sectors,” Kupchan said.
Indeed, Brent crude oil prices are still above $100 a barrel after tumbling 10% Monday. He expects them to trade in the $80 range for several months due to the lingering risk as well as the time needed to restore output. Oil giants like Saudi Arabia and Iraq slashed production as their exports have been throttled by the Hormuz closure.
Likewise for the LNG market, which suffered a major shock last week when Iran struck a top natural gas field in Qatar that will take years to repair. Meanwhile, the Gulf is also a major source of fertilizer, aluminum, and helium, meaning shortages will curb crop yields, industrial output, and semiconductor supplies, respectively.
The new risk environment will cause prices to stay higher globally and further stoke inflation, Kupchan added. At the same time, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will struggle to rehabilitate their images as safe places to invest, affecting the AI and defense sectors too.
“Capital is a coward, going only where it feels safe,” he noted. “Once unimaginable images of office and hotel towers burning after Iranian strikes will pierce investor sentiment.”
To be sure, the U.S. will likely help allies rebuild after the war and increase regional integration, but the Gulf will need a long time to become a global safe haven for capital again, Kupchan wrote.
There are indications, however, that the Iran war will persist or eventually reignite if there’s a ceasefire. Thousands of Marines are still headed for the Middle East for a potential ground assault on Iran’s main oil-export hub, Kharg Island, or perhaps coastal areas to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The UAE also hinted at an increasingly hardened position toward Iran that aligns more closely with the U.S. and Israeli stance.
“Our thinking does not stop at a ceasefire, but rather turns toward solutions that ensure lasting security in the Arabian Gulf, curbing the nuclear threat, missiles, drones, and the bullying of the straits,” Anwar Gargash, a senior UAE diplomat, wrote on X over the weekend. “It is inconceivable that this aggression should turn into a permanent state of threat.”
Even NATO, which nearly collapsed earlier this year as Trump threatened to seize Greenland, will eventually come around to support the Iran war, despite several members rejecting U.S. demands to provide naval escorts, Secretary General Mark Rutte said Sunday.
That’s after Iran launched ballistic missiles at a U.S.-U.K. base 2,500 miles away on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The attack was unsuccessful, but it demonstrated that Iran’s missiles have much longer range than previously known and could theoretically reach most of Europe.
“If Iran would have the nuclear capability, including, together with the missile capability, it will be a direct threat, a existential threat, to Israel, to the region, to Europe, to the stability in the world,” Rutte told CBS News. “So the president doing this is crucial, and I’ve seen the polling, but I really hope the American people will be with him, because he is doing this to make the whole world safer.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The CEOs of Kalshi and Polymarket are locked in a brutal fight to dominate the white-hot prediction market sector. But, in at least one instance, the two have put competition aside, and each has invested in an upcoming venture firm led by two early Kalshi employees. The fund, named 5c(c) Capital, is raising up to $35 million to invest in prediction market startups, according to a pitch document seen by Fortune.
The new venture firm’s name is a reference to a clause in the piece of legislation that outlined the federal regulation of commodities and derivatives, a category that now includes prediction markets. The fund’s partners are Adhi Rajaprabhakaran, the second trader hired to work at Kalshi’s affiliated market maker, and Noah Zingler-Sternig, Kalshi’s former head of operations.
In addition to Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, the fund’s early backers are a star-studded slate of venture investors, according to the document. They include the venture giant Marc Andreessen, through the fund Moneta Luna; Micky Malka, the founder of the fintech investor Ribbit Capital; and Kyle Samani, the former managing partner at the crypto VC Multicoin Capital.
Rajaprabhakaran, one of the founding partners of 5c(c) Capital, declined to comment. A spokesperson for Marc Andreessen’s venture firm Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. Polymarket and Malka didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
A Kalshi spokesperson confirmed Mansour’s participation. “Adhi knows that the next few years are critical to build out infra[structure] around prediction markets,” Samani said in a statement, confirming that he backed 5c(c) Capital.
The ongoing fundraise from the two early Kalshi employees comes as prediction markets have become one of the buzziest sectors in Silicon Valley. Kalshi is raising $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation in a round led by seasoned Silicon Valley investor Coatue Management. And its competitor Polymarket is also eyeing a similar valuation of around $20 billion. The trading platforms let users bet on a diverse array of subjects, from where the prices of Bitcoin or Ethereum will land by the end of the week to which college team will win the NCAA basketball tournament.
Amid investor enthusiasm, state governments have tried to crack down on the rise of prediction markets, especially as Kalshi and Polymarket have opened up their platforms to sports markets. Regulators claim that the two prediction markets are no more than sports gambling locales, which must adhere to strict state laws. Kalshi is facing about 20 federal lawsuits that call into question the platform’s legality. And the Arizona Attorney General filed criminal charges against the startup last week.
Kalshi and Polymarket, whose U.S. trading arm isn’t yet live, have argued that prediction markets are different from sports gambling and that the authority of the federal regulator CFTC to regulate prediction markets supersedes the power of the states.
Despite this fraught legal situation, the pitch document for 5c(c) Capital describes prediction markets as a “generational investment opportunity.” The pair plan to back around 20 companies over the next two years, including market makers in prediction markets, designers of prediction market indices, among other categories.
The venture fund’s first close is within the next month.
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A landmark free trade deal between the European Union and four South American countries will begin on May 1 after more than a quarter-century of negotiations and new global economic uncertainty unleashed by tariffs, critical mineral controls and the war in Iran.
The European Commission said Monday that the start date for the EU-Mercosur free trade deal was triggered by Brussels receiving a “note verbale” from Paraguay that it had approved the deal, which is a key part of the 27-nation EU’s strategy to slash economic dependencies on China and the United States.
Parliaments in Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina have ratified the deal that links more than 700 million people and accounts for 25% of global gross domestic product. Bolivia, the newest Mercosur member, didn’t participate in negotiations but will be able to join the deal in the coming years.
“The priority now is turning this EU-Mercosur agreement into concrete outcomes, giving EU exporters the platform they need to seize new opportunities for trade, growth and jobs,” said European trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.
Fierce opposition by farmers and environmentalists delayed the deal in December. It then hit another snag after EU lawmakers voted to send the deal to the bloc’s judiciary. The EU executive responded by saying it would provisionally enact the deal — effectively sidestepping the European Parliament.
That means trade will begin in May and halt only if the European Court of Justice rules against it.
French President Emmanuel Macron called that move “a bad surprise.” France and Poland had led a campaign to halt or temper the deal with clauses protecting consumers and agricultural producers.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has shrugged off such criticism of a deal she describes as vital for the EU’s survival in a newly disordered world.
“This is about resilience, this is about growth, and Europe shaping its own future,” she told a news conference in February. Recently, she has not taken questions about the issue.
Von der Leyen is in Australia this week for talks aimed at a potential free trade deal, defense cooperation and critical mineral supplies.
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The U.S. economy was supposed to start the year with a bang, fueled by an unusually large jump in tax refunds from President Donald Trump’s tax cut legislation. Yet spiking gas prices are on track to eat up those refunds, leaving most Americans with little extra to spend.
“Next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time,” Trump said in a prime-time speech in December that was intended to address voters’ concerns about the economy and stubbornly high prices.
But that was before the Iran war, which began Feb. 28. Oil and gas prices have soared since then, with the nationwide average price of gas reaching $3.94 Sunday, up more than a dollar from just a month earlier.
Gas prices are likely to remain elevated for some time, even if the war ends soon, because shipping and production have been disrupted and will take time to recover. Economists now expect slower growth this spring and for the year as a whole, as dollars that are spent on gas are less likely to be used for restaurant meals, new clothes, or entertainment.
Lower and middle-income households are likely to be hit particularly hard, because they receive lower refunds, while spending a greater proportion of their earnings on gas.
“The energy shock is to going to hit those who have the least cushion,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy at the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative and a former economist in the Biden White House. “And it doesn’t look like those tax refunds are going to be here to save them.”
Neale Mahoney, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, calculates that gas prices could peak in May at $4.36 a gallon, based on oil price forecasts by Goldman Sachs, followed by slow declines for the rest of the year. The notion that gas prices decline much more slowly than they rise is so ingrained among economists that they refer to it as the “rocket and feathers” phenomenon.
In that scenario, the average household would pay $740 more in gas this year, nearly equal to the $748 increase in refunds that the Tax Foundation has estimated the average household will receive.
Through March 6, refunds have risen by much less than that, according to IRS data: They have averaged $3,676, up $352 from $3,324 in 2025. Still, average refunds could rise as more complex returns are filed.
Other estimates show similar impacts. Economists at Oxford Economics, a consulting firm, estimate that if gas prices average $3.70 a gallon all year, it will cost consumers about $70 billion — more than the $60 billion in increased tax refunds.
The gas price spike comes with many consumers already in a precarious position, particularly compared to 2022, when gas prices also soared because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At that time, many households still had fattened bank accounts from pandemic-era stimulus payments and companies were hiring rapidly and sharply lifting pay to attract workers.
Now, hiring is nearly at a standstill and Americans’ saving rate has steadily fallen in the past few years as many households borrow more to sustain their spending.
“When you start looking across the perspective from a consumer side, you’re seeing people who have maxed out their credit cards, are using ‘buy now, pay later’ to purchase their groceries,” said Julie Margetta Morgan, president of The Century Foundation, a think tank. “They’re making it work for now, but that can fall apart quite quickly.”
The impact will likely worsen the “K-shaped” narrativ e around the U.S. economy, analysts said, in which higher income households have fared better than lower-income households. The bottom 10% of earners spend nearly 4% of their incomes on gasoline, Pantheon Macroeconomics estimates, while the top 10% spend just 1.5%.
For now, most analysts still expect the U.S. economy to expand this year, even if more slowly, given the gas price shock. Higher gas prices will likely worsen inflation in the short run, but over time weaker spending will also slow growth.
American consumers and businesses have repeatedly shaken off shocks since the pandemic — soaring inflation, rising interest rates, tariffs — and continued to spend, defying concerns that the economy would tip into recession. Many economists note that the proportion of their incomes that Americans spend on gas and other energy has fallen significantly compared with a decade ago.
Data from the Bank of America Institute, released Friday, showed that spending on gas on the bank’s credit and debit cards shot 14.4% higher in the week ended March 14 compared with a year ago. Before the war, such spending was running 5% below the previous year, a benefit to consumers.
Spending on discretionary items — restaurant meals, electronics, and travel — is still growing, the institute said, evidence of consumer resilience. But there is little sign it is accelerating, as many economists had hoped.
“The longer these gasoline prices persist, the more that will gradually sap consumer discretionary spending,” said David Tinsley, senior economist at the institute.
Other analysts expect growth will slow because of the war. Bernard Yaros and Michael Pearce, economists at Oxford Economics, forecast that the U.S. economy will grow just 1.9% this year, down from an earlier estimate of 2.5%.
“We had anticipated a lift in spending from a bumper tax refund season,” they wrote, “but the rise in gasoline prices, if sustained, would more than offset that boost.”
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The head of the International Energy Agency said Monday that the global economy faces a “major, major threat” because of the Iran war.
“No country will be immune to the effects of this crisis if it continues to go in this direction,” Fatih Birol said at Australia’s National Press Club in Canberra on Monday.
The crisis in the Middle East, he said, has had a worse impact on oil than the two oil shocks of the 1970s combined, and a worse effect on gas than the Russia-Ukraine war.
Israel launched a new wave of attacks early Monday against Tehran. U.S. President Donald Trump also warned the United States will “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Tehran doesn’t fully open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. That prompted Iran to say it would respond to any such strike with attacks on U.S. and Israeli energy and infrastructure assets.
Trump is facing increasing pressure at home to secure the strait as oil prices soar.
One major fear is that the war could knock out oil and gas production in the Middle East for a long time, which would mean high prices could last a while and cause inflation to rip higher around the world. The U.S. stock market has a history of bouncing back relatively quickly from past conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, as long as oil prices don’t stay too high for too long.
Iran on Monday renewed strikes on its Gulf neighbors and threatened to start hitting their power plants.
“The situation is very severe,” Birol said in Australia.
The oil crises of 1973 and 1979, he said, lost together 10 million barrels per day, causing “major economic problems around the world, the recessions. And today, only as of today, we lost 11 million barrels per day — so more than two major oil shocks put together.”
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, the gas markets, especially in Europe, “lost about 75 billion cubic meters, 75BCM. And as of now, as a result of this crisis, we lost about 140BCM, almost twice (as much).”
Birol said 40 energy assets in nine countries across the region were “severely or very severely damaged.”
“Some of the vital arteries of the global economy, such as petrochemical, such as fertilizers, such as sulfur, such as helium — their trade is all interrupted, which would have serious consequences for the global economy,” he said.
He said the International Energy Agency, “in order to comfort the markets,” earlier released 400 million barrels of oil, “which is historic. We have never released so much oil to the markets. … The single most important solution to this problem is opening up the Hormuz Strait as things stand now.”
The official added that he was consulting with governments in Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East about the prospect of releasing further stockpiled oil.
“We will see, we will look at the markets,” he said. “If it is necessary, of course, we will do it, but we will look at the conditions, we will analyze, assess the market and discuss with our member countries.”
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AP writer Foster Klug contributed to this report from Tokyo.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Arrivals and departures were temporarily paused at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Monday morning after air traffic controllers evacuated the tower due to a burning smell coming from an elevator, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the issue, and the agency said it was determined that no fire had occurred. The delay lasted less than an hour, and no injuries were reported.
During the pause, FAA staff relocated to a backup tower at the airport, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport. They later returned to the primary tower.
Earlier this month, four airports serving Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Richmond, Virginia, halted all flights for over an hour because of a strong chemical smell that was impeding air traffic controllers. Federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the source of the strong odor was traced to a circuit board that overheated and was replaced.
The temporary pause at Newark Liberty was not related to a fatal accident at New York’s LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night. In that episode, two people were killed and several others were seriously injured when an Air Canada regional jet struck a fire truck on a runway while landing, officials said.
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Two people were killed and several others badly hurt when an Air Canada regional jet struck a fire truck on a runway while landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, officials said.
The pilot and copilot were killed in the late Sunday night collision, which crushed the nose of the aircraft, while around 40 passengers and crew members were taken to area hospitals, some with serious injuries. Most have since been released from treatment, authorities said Monday.
Two Port Authority employees who were traveling in the fire truck also suffered injuries that were not believed to be life-threatening, aid Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport.
In the moments before the crash, an air traffic controller could be heard on a radio transmission giving clearance to a vehicle to cross part of the tarmac, then trying to stop it.
The airport was shut down and air traffic was diverted, and on Monday morning operations also were halted at Newark Liberty International Airport in neighboring New Jersey. Air traffic controllers evacuated the tower because of a burning smell from an elevator, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The shutdowns happened during long waits for travelers due to the busy spring break travel season and a shortage of Transportation Security Administration officers because of a lack of routine funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
The pilot and copilot who died were both based out of Canada, Garcia said during a news conference.
The airport will remain closed until at least 2 p.m. Monday to facilitate the investigation, which is being led by the National Transportation Safety Board.
“Two pilots were killed and dozens injured in this tragedy. Our thoughts are with the victims, their families, and everyone affected,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul posted online.
The fire truck was traveling across the runway to respond to a separate incident aboard a United Airlines flight, whose pilot had reported “an issue with odor,” said Garcia, who deferred additional questions about the sequence of events leading up to the crash to the NTSB.
There were 72 passengers and four crew members aboard the aircraft, a Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada, according to a statement from the airline. The flight originated at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, the major airport serving Montreal.
Photos and videos from the scene showed severe damage to the front of the aircraft, with cables and debris hanging from a mangled cockpit. Nearby, a damaged emergency vehicle lay on its side.
Stairways used to evacuate passengers from the aircraft were pushed up to the emergency exits on the jet, a Bombardier CRJ. The impact left the jet with its crumpled nose tilted upward.
The air traffic controller tried to warn the vehicle.
“Stop, Truck 1. Stop,” the transmission says. The controller can then be heard frantically diverting an incoming aircraft from landing.
Air traffic controllers are not impacted by the partial government shutdown that has caused long delays at airport security checkpoints in recent days. They have been affected by past shutdowns.
As passengers straggled out of the airport into the dark early Monday, some described having arrived at LaGuardia hours before their flight, hoping to beat the lines.
Arturo Davidson said his Miami-bound flight was on the tarmac Sunday night when fellow passengers saw the collision or its aftermath and reactions rippled through the cabin.
The passengers were soon told there had been an accident. About 20 minutes later, they were informed the airport was closing and they must return to the terminal, he said later Monday, gazing at a departure board filled with cancellations.
“I don’t think we’re going at two,” he sighed, referring to the time Monday afternoon that officials gave as the earliest for reopening LaGuardia.
LaGuardia was 19th busiest in 2024 out of more than 500 U.S. airports, with over 16.7 million passengers boarding there, according to a 2025 FAA database.
The airport, which opened to commercial traffic in 1939, covers 680 acres (275 hectares) and borders Flushing and Bowery bays in Queens. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey describes it as “one of the nation’s leading domestic gateways for business and leisure travel” in its 2024 Airport Traffic Report.
LaGuardia is one of 35 major airports across the country equipped with an advanced surface surveillance system that uses radar and data from locator systems on planes to alert controllers to potential conflicts on runways, according to the FAA.
There are three different models of Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting trucks, according to a video put out last year about the unit by the Port Authority. One carries 1,500 gallons (5,678 liters) of water and firefighting chemicals. Two others carry 3,000 gallons (11,356 liters) of water. One of those models is also equipped with a turret that can extend 65 feet (20 meters) to penetrate inside an aircraft and discharge firefighting chemicals.
It’s still too early to tell what went wrong, and investigators from the NTSB will now start collecting facts, interviewing people, downloading recordings and reviewing data from flight recorders, aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said.
“It might be easy enough just to say, ‘Oh, the controller made a mistake.’ But there’s got to be deeper questions,” he said.
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The story has been updated to correct that the Port Authority video on trucks was put out last year, not last month.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
As of 9 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil sold for $101.44 per barrel (using Brent as the benchmark, which we’ll get into momentarily). That’s $10.64 lower than yesterday—but approximately a $29 rise over the past year.
It’s impossible to predict the future of oil prices. Several factors determine the movement of oil, but it ultimately boils down to supply and demand. Again, when threats of economic downturn, war, etc. are high, the oil trajectory can turn rapidly.
When you pay for gas at the pump, you’re paying for more than just the crude oil itself; you’re also springing for links along the chain, such as the refineries and wholesalers—not to mention taxes and local gas station markups.
Still, the crude oil aspect affects the final price most dramatically, as it typically accounts for more than half the price per gallon. When oil prices spike, so do gas prices. And frustratingly, when oil prices drop, gas prices tend to take their time drifting down to the lower price (sometimes referred to as “rockets and feathers”).
In case of emergency, the U.S. has a store of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its primary purpose is energy security in case of disaster (think sanctions, severe storm damage, even war). But it can also go a long way toward softening crippling price hikes during supply shocks.
It’s not a long-term answer—more of an immediate relief to assist the consumer and keep critical parts of the economy running, like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, etc.
Oil and natural gas are both major energy fuels. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by extension. For example, if oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible—which increases demand for natural gas.
When examining oil’s performance, there are generally two major benchmarks:
Between the two, Brent better represents global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. And, it’s often the best way to track historical oil performance. In fact, even the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.
Looking at the Brent benchmark across several decades, oil has been anything but steady. It’s seen spikes due to factors such as wars and supply cuts, and it’s also seen crashes from global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:
All to say, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. Again, it’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.
Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:
The current price of oil per barrel depends largely on supply and demand, including news about potential future supply and demand (geopolitics, decisions made by OPEC+, etc.). In the U.S., prices also move based on how friendly an administration is to drilling, as it can affect future supply. For example, 2025 saw the Trump administration move to reopen more than 1.5 million acres in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing, reversing the Biden administration’s policy of limiting oil drilling in the Arctic.
The price of oil updates constantly when the “futures” markets are open. A futures market is effectively an auction where people agree to buy or sell oil in the future. As long as people and companies are trading contracts, the oil price is changing.
In short, shale is rock that contains oil and natural gas. Think of shale as energy yet to be tapped. The more shale the U.S. accesses, the more energy we’ll have—and the more easily oil prices can keep from spiking as much thanks to a greater supply.
When oil is expensive, it tends to make everyday items cost more. This can be related to energy (your heating, gas utilities, etc.), but it’s also due to the logistics involved with making those items accessible to you. Shipping, for example, can affect the price of things at the grocery store, as it’s more expensive to get those products from warehouses and farms onto the shelf.
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Around the boardroom table, Carmen-Maja Rex’s colleagues slip easily between French and English. When the Airbus CHRO takes her seat, the discussion naturally settles into English without anyone flagging the switch. For a company founded in France, built partly in Germany, assembling aircraft across Europe and flying them globally, English has quietly become the default working language. The same takes place just a few hundred kilometers away at Sodexo’s headquarters just outside of Paris. CHRO Heather Jacobs is American, and most of her conversations in the boardroom are in English, despite the company having roots in the French city of Marseille.
English is now the most widely spoken language in history, with around 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, and fluency in it has quietly become an unwritten yet essential requirement for many senior roles at multinationals. This expectation can disadvantage those who are not native English speakers, and now sits against a wider political backdrop in which leaders such as Donald Trump have designated English as the U.S.’s official language, promoting warnings from scholars about how easily the ‘speak English’ rhetoric can slide into exclusion.
The OECD examined 11 million online job postings in 2021, across the EU and the U.K., and found that 22% explicitly required English proficiency. German was the next most frequently requested language, appearing in 1.7% of listings, often in tourism-related roles. French was required in only 1.1% of postings, while Italian was required in only 0.4%.
In Europe’s boardrooms, the growing dominance of English isn’t just a matter of habit; it’s also driven by global business demands, with effects that reach into areas such as rules and safety. It also shapes who fits in, who advances, and how companies operate. The question now is whether AI is reinforcing English as a ‘superior’ language of leadership, or simply making it easier for organizations to maintain a common corporate language—and whether businesses could realistically return to a more localised way of functioning.
Although English is mandated as the common corporate language in many Fortune 500 Europe headquarters across the region, its dominance is, in many ways, a historical “accident”. Nina Bellak, PhD, Senior Lecturer at the University of Vienna, links the power of English in boardrooms to postwar history. “There’s this power dynamic at a national level between the colonizer and colonized, and it’s a very similar dynamic at a corporate level,” she says. Explaining that English became far more prominent post World War as U.S. economic and political power expanded across the continent.
Over the following decades, English gradually displaced local languages such as French and German as the dominant working language. Many Fortune 500 European companies have mandated English for simple operational reasons, ranging from safety standards to international financial reporting. Airbus’s decision to mandate English as its working language goes back to the company’s birth in the 1970s, says Rex. “This was very surprising, especially in those days in France—there were not many French companies [that agreed] on English [becoming] the common language,” she adds. The reasoning was largely practical: aviation safety, where English is the global standard.
Similarly, in the early 2000s, Siemens began using English more consistently after listing on the NYSE, particularly for financial communications, says Nanda Burke, global head of talent and organization at Siemens. In other cases, companies adopted English more organically. For example, at the Swiss electrification and automation company ABB, English became the common corporate language following the merger of Swedish firm ASEA and Swiss company Brown Boveri in 1988. With neither Swedish nor German able to claim precedence, English emerged as neutral ground—less a deliberate strategy than a diplomatic necessity, according to Carolina Granat, ABB’s chief human resources officer.
“This was very surprising, especially in those days in France—there were not many French companies [that agreed] on English [becoming] the common language.”
Carmen-Maja Rex, chief human resources officer, Airbus
Beyond industry factors, the prevalence of English within Fortune 500 companies in Europe also reflects its widespread use across countries. In the Netherlands and countries in Scandinavia for example, English classes are compulsory at schools and so individuals pick up the language at a much younger age, hence often functioning as a natural second language. Kaija Bridger, EVP people & communications at elevator engineering company, KONE, says that, in Finland, where the company is headquartered, the country’s small domestic market has caused people to look outward and so most senior leaders operate comfortably in English. “Finnish wouldn’t be the most dominant language to begin with,” she says, adding that one newly employed executive member recently asked for support in learning Finnish.
Research suggests this English-first narrative hides a more complex reality. Bellak finds that many multinationals claim to have an official corporate language policy, but day-to-day language choice is messy, hard to regulate and often up to the individual.
Whilst many companies have officialized English as the common corporate language, local languages remain critical on the ground. At Siemens, day-to-day meetings are conducted in English, although local languages are highly present, and “that is a strength,” says Burke, who is not fluent in German but has been learning “not because it was required but because I now live part-time in Munich and genuinely want to understand and speak the local language.”
At KONE, which operates in 70 countries, Bridger describes the company as a “global company with very local operations”. While English is essential for regional and global roles, local languages dominate among technicians in the field. “Let’s say, all of a sudden, the escalator stops working. Someone needs to be pretty close by and [a technician] needs to be able to fix the lift. That’s where we come to the language and proximity of the business…and that’s where local language plays a huge role,” she adds. Similarly, Sodexo’s Jacobs explains that despite English being the corporate language, “local languages naturally dominate in the markets where we operate”, such as India and mainland China. At the company’s headquarters, more than 25 nationalities are present and so “you hear a little bit of everything,” she notes. While many of these firms have formally mandated English, in practice, they rely on a multilingual ecosystem to function.
Behind every official language policy, the question arises: whose voices carry furthest when English becomes the default? Whilst most Fortune 500 Europe companies have not officially stated that English is a necessity, it’s almost assumed that at the C-Suite or senior level, individuals can converse in English. “If I think about the C-suite, senior leadership and even middle management roles…If there’s an English language requirement, the idea really is that the person is proficient enough,” says KONE’s Bridger.
Nevertheless, companies remain careful not to treat polished English as a proxy for leadership potential. “Talent is about capability, impact, and values-driven leadership, not accent or fluency,” says ABB’s Granat. Where certain language requirements do matter, most companies take responsibility for removing barriers: localizing job postings, adapting assessment processes and providing learning opportunities so that employees can build language confidence, not only in English but also in the local language of the host country when it is required or encouraged. “Within my first month of being with Sodexo, I had a full week outside of the office [in Southwest France], not just [to learn the] language, but it was about cultural adaptation as well,” Jacobs adds.
Although many companies invest in language training for employees—including English courses for staff outside English-speaking countries—employees can still experience a sense of status loss. Associate Professor at BI Norwegian Business School, Guro Refsum Sanden, uses this term to describe how non-native speakers of the common corporate language sometimes feel a subjective drop in their professional esteem, as if their competence is being judged through their language skills rather than their actual expertise. This can leave even highly skilled non-native English speakers feeling inadequate when required to operate in a foreign language. By contrast, native English speakers may gain status simply because they remain fluent in the corporate language, even when they are no more professionally capable than their peers—a form of “unearned status”, Refsum Sanden calls it.
Language isn’t just a communication tool—whether English or the local language of the host country—it is a tool that enables people to integrate and signal whether they ‘belong’ in boardrooms as well as society. Native English speaker Brady Dougan spent eight years as CEO of Credit Suisse and left without ever speaking German; he later called it one of his regrets, and his inability to speak German was criticized in the Swiss media. In 2015, Anshu Jain, the Indian-born British co-CEO of Deutsche Bank opened the bank’s annual meeting in German before switching to English. However, less than three weeks later, Jain resigned as co-CEO after losing investor confidence.
Not speaking the native language didn’t directly cost Dougan and Jain their jobs; however, it drew criticism and made it harder for them to connect with local investors, clients and customers. English can evidently get senior leaders into the boardroom; whether they can retain the role without speaking the local language is less certain.
That’s also the limit of what AI can currently change. Translation tools, meeting summaries and captions have the ability to smooth over gaps in fluency and assist non-native speakers in writing emails, translating, and functioning more confidently in English-first settings. Airbus’ Rex notes that “AI is supportive in order to build bridges,” and adds that the company has rolled out Gemini globally, resulting in improved translation efficiency. Similarly, Jacobs notes how AI has improved translation processes at Sodexo, making communication faster and more accurate for mandatory learning and employee engagement surveys.
Yet CHROs broadly agree that even the best AI tools require careful handling to preserve the essence of communication and that AI is nowhere near ready to replace human leadership and interaction. Refsum Sanden warns that the more organisations lean on AI to translate and generate text, the greater the risk that it will “converge” the way people communicate, eroding differences and nuances in local languages. If multilingual companies come to depend on those systems, technology will start to dictate what is considered ‘appropriate’ language in the boardroom and even language included in emails and chat—potentially narrowing, rather than enriching, the range of voices and communication styles that make it into the corporate conversation.
Native English speakers may gain status simply because they remain fluent in the corporate language, even when they are no more professionally capable than their peers—a form of “unearned status”
Guro Refsum Sanden, Professor at BI Norwegian Business School
Executives from KONE, Sodexo and ABB all describe English as the practical “common denominator” that enables cross-border collaboration. Global companies will always have to balance the ‘local’ with the ‘global’ and KONE’s Bridger doesn’t see that basic tension changing anytime soon. The local side is driven by the markets companies operate in and the customers served, whereas the global side brings scale, shared platforms and processes so that local teams do not need to reinvent the wheel. This is also dependent on population, country and market size. Bridger notes that Finland is a “small nation and [the language] is one of the hardest languages to learn.” Hence, native Finnish speakers at times are empathetic and remain open-minded towards language as a whole.
It’s hard to imagine multinationals operating without at least one shared language to connect their multicultural and multilingual operations. Whether local languages can retain space in multinational boardrooms? “We’re not really there right now,” says Sodexo’s Jacobs, noting that English has effectively become the universal language at the senior level—and that won’t change unless something else emerges to replace it.
Whilst English has slipped into Europe’s boardrooms as a common bridge over the last few decades, it now carries political and technological weight. President Trump signed the historic executive order designating English as the official language of the United States on March 1st 2025, marking the first time the country has ever had a national language. A symbolic move highlighting how closely language, power and identity are intertwined.
English may remain the boardroom default for the foreseeable future, but it is up to companies to define how tightly they choose to hold onto it—and who that choice leaves out.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning!
Seven years after Tulsa Remote began paying workers $10,000 to move to their Oklahoma city, the experiment has become a case study in how relocation incentives can bolster a local economy and widen the workforce employers can tap. More than 4,000 workers relocated, contributing some $878 million in economic impact.
That success paved the way for Tulsa’s next act: helping employers tap global talent. Since launching in 2022, the Tulsa Visa Network has helped nearly 100 people from 34 countries secure visas, offering a practical model at a moment when costly H-1B visa fees and a more complicated immigration environment are forcing many employers to rethink how they recruit internationally.
Stan Khrapak, who leads the Tulsa Visa Network, says his program has seen steady demand this year from both individuals seeking visa support and small to midsize companies trying to navigate an increasingly complex system. Roughly half of those the program has helped are in STEM, he says, though the network is also supporting hiring in fields like finance and accounting.
Justin Harlan, managing director of parent program Experience Tulsa, says Tulsa Remote has attracted professionals whose remote jobs strengthen the community without displacing local workers—and that the Visa Network is built on the same premise.
“It’s highly skilled folks coming in [for roles] that companies often have a hard time filling at a local level, and it makes it very hard to argue whether this is adding something to the community.”
The bigger lesson for HR leaders is that Tulsa’s strategy is not really about cash incentives alone. It is about designing an employee experience that makes people want to live somewhere, stay, and build a life there, Harlan adds.
The Experience Tulsa program has expanded its offerings well beyond the original $10,000 and visa assistance. Participants now receive a $200 monthly health and wellness stipend, access to a free coworking space, and a remote-work certification course developed in partnership with NYU.
The organization also hosts community building events such as movie nights and dance lessons. That, Harlan says, is where many employers still fall short. Companies, especially those with hybrid or remote workforces or those trying to attract global talent, need to think intentionally about how employees experience life outside the office.
“Oftentimes, HR departments will give that lip service or do the quick and easy things that we’re accustomed to,” Harlan says. “But when companies do go out of their way to go above and beyond, I think it’s noticed and can make a big impact in terms of the quality of life that somebody has.”
Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The U.S.’s eye-watering debt burden poses an “existential threat to the future of our nation,” the chairman of the House Budget Committee has warned, as the country’s borrowing figure tipped over $39 trillion.
Texan Republican Jodey Arrington highlighted last week that it had taken the U.S. nearly two centuries to build a debt pile worth $1 trillion, whereas a mere matter of decades later, the Treasury is forking out that figure every year merely in service payments on the debt.
For the fiscal year 2025, the Treasury paid $1.22 trillion in interest on the debt, and for FY2026, the government has already paid out $520 billion. By 2036, that figure is expected to hit to $2.1 trillion annually, according to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office.
Indeed, U.S. debt didn’t reach the $1 trillion mark until the early 1980s, hitting $1.1 trillion under President Ronald Reagan.
As Arrington points out: “It took roughly 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion. Now we add that in a matter of months. Every child in America today carries a $530,000 share of this debt—a crushing legacy we must reverse. Compounding the problem, we now spend more than $1 trillion a year just on interest to service our debt—more than the entire defense budget and triple the amount when Biden took office.”
Arrington isn’t alone in his concern over the nation’s financial trajectory. Figures on the private side of the economy like Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio have warned over a reckoning caused by debt, and U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has also expressed the need for an “adult conversation” about the issue.
There is a range of opinions on which methods should be employed to wrangle borrowing and its associated interest costs. For example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has advocated for a federal unified budget deficit at or below 3% of GDP, which at the moment sits at around 6%. This idea has been backed by the likes of Representatives Bill Huizenga and Scott Peters, the co-chairs of the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum—indeed, the entire steering committee for the forum has backed the notion and introduced a resolution to that effect.
Arrington has called for a harder-line approach. The resolution for a deficit of 3% of GDP is defined more loosely as a target: Arrington wants to open up a conversation about adding fiscal responsibility to the country’s very constitution.
He said last week: “Here’s the sad, sobering, and stunning truth: despite the urgency of our fiscal crisis, Congress is paralyzed—unable to meet the urgency of the moment. So, if Washington won’t act, then it’s time to look beyond our nation’s capital. The Founders gave us another path in Article V of the Constitution, empowering the states and the American people to step in and demand fiscal discipline.
“I’m calling on Congress to convene an Article V Convention. It’s time to restore sanity in our nation’s capital and reverse the curse looming large over this country.”
An Article Five Convention allows amendments to the Constitution, for example, targeting borrowing and government spending. If two-thirds of state legislatures apply, then Congress must call a convention, with a further three-quarters of states required to back the amendment for it to become a legal requirement.
In recent memory, presidents have attempted to rectify the U.S. fiscal position. President Obama oversaw the creation of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles (or Bowles-Simpson) Commission. The ensuing report made several recommendations: Cutting discretionary spending, reforming tax law, and reshaping healthcare spending.
President Trump has suggested some unusual methods to rebalance the books. For example, he has touted a “Gold Card” plan, a visa policy which would charge rich immigrants $5 million for a green card, plus a route to citizenship.”
“A million cards would be worth $5 trillion, and if you sell 10 million of the cards that’s a total of $50 trillion. Well, we have $35 trillion in debt, so that would be nice,” Trump said last year.
Likewise, tariffs were introduced as a way to offset some of the revenue loss from the likes of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Indeed, while Trump’s tariff plans have proved unpopular with foreign governments, economists nonetheless welcome the “peculiar” methods to increase America’s income. As Wharton professor Joao Gomes previously told Fortune: “You can also not deny that [Trump and his administration] bring strange forms of revenue that do change the debt picture.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Will Wilson wants to make sure the software running everything from your bank account to your favorite crypto exchange actually works—and his company Antithesis is rethinking how software has been tested for the last 80 years.
Wilson, the co‑founder and CEO of Antithesis, first made his name at FoundationDB, a company that created special testing systems that let teams safely rehearse years of real‑world problems in a fake environment, to catch bugs before customers ever saw them (FoundationDB was acquired by Apple in 2015). That idea—stress‑testing code inside a simulated universe where everything that can go wrong does—is now the core of Antithesis, a deterministic simulation testing platform that runs fully automated, parallel tests that can compress years of production behavior into hours.
“Software increasingly controls literally everything,” Wilson told Fortune, pointing to financial markets, banking websites, smartphones, and even nuclear power plants. The traditional model of writing code and then trying to think of every possible edge case “is totally broken,” he argued, because failures come from situations engineers did not anticipate. Antithesis runs customer systems in a controlled simulation where hardware failures, network glitches, and bizarre timing issues are constantly injected to see how the software behaves.
That pitch has resonated with some of the most demanding buyers in finance and crypto. Antithesis is already used by organizations whose systems “cannot fail,” including quantitative trading giant Jane Street (also one of its lead investors), the Ethereum network and MongoDB.
In December 2025, the Northern Virginia–based startup announced a $105 million Series A, led by Jane Street—which is both an investor and a user—alongside Amplify Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Tamarack Global, First In Ventures, Teamworthy Ventures, Hyperion Capital and angels including Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh Patel and Sholto Douglas.
The capital follows more than five years of R&D funded by a $47 million seed round raised while Antithesis operated largely in stealth, and $30 million in funding in February 2025 led by Amplify Partners. Antithesis, founded in 2018 and publicly unveiled in 2024, also made its debut this year on the Forbes Fintech 50, which reports that the company has landed about 40 clients, including trading firms where software glitches can translate into large financial losses.
Winning over these clients and investors, Wilson added, has required a studied lack of hype. “Don’t be too thirsty and don’t over promise,” he said. When he talks to prospects, he says he is candid about his product’s weaknesses: “Every product sucks at something. I’m just going to tell you what it is.”
While AI code‑generation models race ahead, Wilson sees a less crowded—and ultimately more durable—opportunity in everything that happens after the code is written.
“AI is eating part of the software development life cycle…which was actually never the slow part or the hard part,” he said. “There’s a world in which…we end up being a really, really significant part of how everybody on earth develops and ships software.”
See you tomorrow,
Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The crypto world feasts on gossip and last week it enjoyed an extra helping in the form of a Vanity Fair article. The piece, titled “Crypto’s True Believers Demand to Be Taken Seriously,” featured lavish photos of prominent industry figures swooning around New York’s Nine Orchard hotel in far-out outfits that cost more than your mortgage payment. The article elicited predictable scorn and contempt from those outside the crypto world. Those inside it, meanwhile, bashed the dastardly media while tweeting some variation of “What the hell were they thinking taking part in this?”
The “what were they thinking?” take is a fair one. When a glossy publication with little history of covering the crypto industry sends a staff reporter, did anyone really expect a celebration of blockchain? Still, this is Vanity Fair, the stomping ground of legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, and renowned for snapping pics of presidents and A-list celebs. Most people, even those who profess disdain for mainstream media, would be there in a heartbeat.
Despite the snide headline, the story does a decent job telling the 17-year history of crypto, from Satoshi’s white paper to the current era of Big Crypto. The author also gets access to the right people to tell the story, and correctly sizes up their respective contributions to the industry. That includes Olaf Carlson-Wee, the out-there early Bitcoin prophet who became Coinbase’s first employee before quitting to start a crypto venture fund. Also in the group photo is iconoclast ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood, and Meltem Demirors, an early crypto booster and master self-promoter who turned up for the shoot “layered in diamond crosses and wearing a black sweatsuit with her firm’s slogan—’Believe in Something’—bedazzled across the ass.”
Billionaire trader Mike Novogratz also made the cut. Perhaps because he lent his hotel for the shoot, Novo avoided the indignity of being photographed short-sleeved, which would have revealed the giant Terra-Luna scamcoin tattoo on his bicep. Danny Ryan, a longtime contributor to the Ethereum Foundation, didn’t fare as well. The Vanity Fair photo director somehow persuaded Ryan to take off his shoes for the photos, presumably to cast him as some sort of crypto holy fool. The deepest scorn, though, is reserved for Devin Finzer, who took hundreds of millions of VC dollars for a largely failed project and, the piece makes clear, is viewed as a grifty parvenu by longtime crypto builders.
On a broader level, the piece asks where these exotic figures belong now that the crypto industry is chummy with the Oval Office, and is being embraced by Wall Street and Congress. You can make the case, as Vanity Fair implies, that the people in these photos are just a freaky subset of America’s growing aristocracy, who are fixated on image and lifestyle, and totally out of touch with ordinary people struggling with record credit card debt and an unaffordable housing market.
There is something to that. At the same time, the Vanity Fair gathering (minus Finzer) is also a throwback to a time when crypto was populated by larger than life characters who believed in something no one else did. To borrow from early Apple, they are “the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes… because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” As they fade from the scene, we may come to miss them.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning. Adobe CFO Dan Durn isn’t waiting to see how agentic AI plays out—he’s already running the experiment inside his own finance organization.
Durn, who oversees finance, technology, security, and operations, has turned Adobe’s back office into a live proving ground for autonomous AI agents. The results include contract review time cut in half, more than 300,000 emails auto-responded to in a single year, and finance teams surfacing investor insights in minutes instead of hours.
At Adobe (No. 201 on the Fortune 500), the push is deliberate. If finance doesn’t adopt AI, it risks becoming a “rate limiter of growth”—a back-office bottleneck in a company moving fast on product innovation, Durn told me. Inside finance, he breaks AI deployment into three buckets. For a closer look at how Adobe’s finance chief is rewiring the function, and what it signals for CFOs navigating the same pressure, read more of my interview with Durn here.
The rise of AI is also rapidly reshaping corporate leadership. Even long-tenured leaders face increasing pressure from investors to move aggressively on AI. Recent leadership changes, including the announced retirement of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, highlight how little patience markets now have for perceived hesitation. At the same time, Adobe reported that annualized revenue from its AI-first products more than tripled year over year in its first quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended Feb. 27.
The make-or-break moment for CEOs is contributing to an era of rapid turnover among chief executives, Fortune’s Claire Zillman writes. In 2025, companies in the S&P 1500 named 168 new CEOs, the highest total in more than 15 years, according to Spencer Stuart, a global executive search and leadership advisory firm.
“CEO tenures are getting shorter and fewer incoming chief executives have prior CEO experience, the data shows, making the two-time CEO exceedingly rare,” Zillman writes. “All told, corporate America has turned into a CEO meat-grinder; it’s chewing up and spitting out leaders at a pace not seen in a decade and a half.” You can read more here.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
What if one of the more overlooked pressures on corporate America’s future leadership pipeline is not burnout, return-to-office conflict, or employee disengagement, but inherited wealth?
That is one of the more consequential questions embedded in the Great Wealth Transfer, and one I explore in a new piece. As trillions of dollars move from older Americans to their heirs, fewer people may feel compelled to endure the long climb to senior leadership at large firms.
This is not because the next generation will simply stop working. The evidence suggests that, on average, inherited wealth reduces labor supply only modestly. What it does change is career optionality, giving people more freedom to reject bureaucratic institutions, slow promotion cycles, and systems built around indefinitely deferred reward.
The timing is striking. Younger workers are already revising the meaning of ambition. Just 6% of Gen Z respondents in a Deloitte survey said reaching a leadership position was their primary career goal.
Korn Ferry points to a related shift. When wealth creates a greater financial cushion, employees may not leave outright, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors the path to the C-suite has long required.
That could leave corporate America with fewer people willing to make the compromises the climb still demands, with real implications for succession at the top.
Read the full piece here, including what the CEO of Edward Jones thinks about whether the Great Wealth Transfer could reshape the future of C-suite ambition inside corporate America.
Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
The Great Wealth Transfer is usually framed as a consumer, housing, or wealth management story. But it may also become a story about power inside corporate America. If financial security arrives before the corner office does, why would the most talented people keep climbing the corporate ladder?
For decades, big companies could count on one thing. Enough ambitious people would tolerate the grind because the ladder promised money, status, and security. But as trillions move from older Americans to their heirs, that bargain may begin to change.
The point is not that inheritance will produce a generation of idlers. It is that it may produce a generation less willing to accept the old terms of advancement. Research suggests that, on average, unearned wealth reduces labor supply only modestly while easing capital constraints and making entrepreneurship more viable. But it does give people more latitude to reject low-agency roles, inert bureaucracies, and systems organized around indefinitely deferred reward.
That matters because the Great Wealth Transfer will not be evenly distributed. Market intelligence firm Cerulli projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with more than half originating from households that make up roughly 2% of the total. The people most likely to receive meaningful inheritances may overlap disproportionately with the talent pools from which major companies have historically drawn future leaders. That may create an opening for broader leadership paths, but only if companies build them deliberately.
This pressure arrives just as younger workers are revising the meaning of ambition. Deloitte’s 2025 global survey found just 6% of Gen Z respondents named reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal. For many high-achieving younger professionals, the goal is no longer rank for its own sake, but a more exacting mix of agency, growth, coherence, and impact.
That shift is not merely cultural. Traditionally, companies held leverage because employees needed the next promotion to secure their financial future. The wealth transfer begins to alter that equation. Korn Ferry points out that when wealth arrives, employees often enter a kind of “semi-retirement” mindset. They do not quit immediately, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors required to reach the C-suite.
That presents a specific problem for corporate America. Large firms still rely heavily on internal cultivation for top leadership. Their senior ranks are built through years of exposure to operating complexity, institutional memory, and the disciplines of organizational life. If even a modest share of high-potential talent becomes less willing to spend 15 or 20 years enduring slow promotion cycles, internal politics, and bureaucratic drag, the leadership pipeline narrows, particularly among those whose financial security gives them greater career optionality.
Few executives are better positioned to see that tension than Penny Pennington, CEO of Edward Jones, who sits at the intersection of wealth management and the corner office. When asked whether the prestige and drive of becoming CEO begin to fade when wealth arrives before the career payoff, she challenges the premise that the climb was ever only about money. “I fundamentally believe in the human desire to prosper and to have well-being in a holistic way,” she tells Fortune. Ambition, she argues, does not disappear with financial security. But it does need to be attached to purpose. In her own career, that meant moving away from banking and corporate finance in search of work with deeper meaning, helping people live more prosperous lives.
What may change, she suggests, is the path upward. It may run through a giant company, a small business, a mechanic’s shop, or a startup. In that sense, inherited wealth may change the route people take more than the desire to keep climbing. Some heirs may have true walk-away money. Others may simply inherit enough to reduce stress, fund a home purchase, or create room to choose differently. Either way, they are less captive to traditional institutions.
That changes tolerance for corporate red tape, slow promotions, and compromises that once seemed unavoidable. If financial security is partly solved, friction stops looking like the price of advancement and starts looking like a test of whether an organization deserves your time.
The Great Wealth Transfer is unlikely to destroy the C-suite pipeline. But it could reshape it enough that companies will have to earn ambition in the years ahead, not merely reward it later.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Much of the global worry over the closed Strait of Hormuz has focused on crude oil and natural gas, yet the waterway is also a channel for other key Gulf-produced commodities like fertilizer and helium. About a third of the world’s helium and half of its urea, a vital nitrogen-based fertilizer, passes through the strait.
“Up to 15% of goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz are non-energy materials,” Sugoutam Ghosh, a supply chain management expert from the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), tells Fortune. “These include critical commodities serving as inputs for multiple industries—and any shortage would have cascading impacts on global agriculture and manufacturing.”
Southeast Asia is particularly vulnerable to an interruption in these supplies. Agriculture is the backbone of many ASEAN economies like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where smallholder farms of rice, maize, and oil palm provide employment and food security. Farming contributes about 10% of Southeast Asia’s GDP and a third of its jobs.
“Fertilizer shocks are not just input-market issues. They’re also social and political ones,” warns Imelda Bacudo, an Indonesia-based agri-food systems expert with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “The risk is not only lower yields, but also reduced farmer incomes, higher rural vulnerability, and eventually, higher food prices for consumers.”
Many crops grown in Southeast Asia depend on fertilizer, even if the region doesn’t produce that much of it. According to a report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a 50% reduction in fertilizer use can reduce palm oil yields by up to 40%.
When it comes to fertilizer, experts think that countries can manage a supply shock in the short-term, whether by tapping stockpiles or turning to alternate products. But a prolonged closure would spell trouble for farms—and, in turn, for consumers.
An extended disruption “will have a negative flow-through effect on the next season’s crops,” warns Paul Teng, a visiting senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Some farmers may even reduce their plantings, as they did during the early days of the Ukraine conflict.”
The supply chain upheaval also extends to helium, a key industrial gas used in cooling and leak detection. In particular, it cools magnets used in chip fabrication and MRI systems.
“A shortage of helium would pose a risk to both the semiconductor and healthcare sectors,” says Ghosh from SUSS, adding that substitutes are “highly challenging” to find.
“Gases such as nitrogen or argon could be used in older fabrication facilities, but they’re unsuitable for high-precision processes in advanced fabs,” he explains.
Older semiconductor fabrication facilities, such as those in Malaysia or Singapore, also lack advanced helium recycling capabilities. They can recycle just half of their helium, whereas high-end plants, like those operated by TSMC or Samsung, can reuse as much as 90%.
Chipmakers have responded by looking for alternate sources of helium, particularly from other large exporters like the U.S. and Russia, yet SUSS professor Tay Huay Ling says these measures simply “mitigate risk without eliminating it.” Actions like building stockpiles don’t address the underlying overreliance on imported helium.
Over the longer term, companies and governments could try to reduce their reliance on supply chains that travel through chokepoints. Industries can also invest in processes that reduce the use of these critical components: Firms that rely on helium can invest in recycling machinery, while the agriculture sector can turn to fertilizer alternatives like green ammonia.
Bacudo, from the FAO, sees a “real opportunity” for multilateral organizations like ASEAN, which can work together to hedge against some of these supply chain disruptions.
Still, Asian industries that rely on inputs from an unstable Middle East will need to manage a volatile commodity market. Even if the Iran war ends soon, shortages are likely to continue for months.
“This crisis looks less like a temporary shock, and more like confirmation of a more fragile era for critical inputs,” Tay, from SUSS, says.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Supermicro has spent the past three years riding the AI wave in Silicon Valley but before the recent allegations involving a co-founder smuggling Nvidia chips, it previously ran afoul of export-control regulations.
The hardware manufacturer’s co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, was charged on Thursday with conspiring to smuggle about $2.5 billion worth of highly coveted Nvidia GPUs in servers to China. Prosecutors claim that Liaw, along with Supermicro’s Taiwan general manager Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, and a “fixer” named Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, routed servers with banned Nvidia H200 and B200 GPUs through an unnamed Southeast Asian company to Chinese buyers who wanted the chips. Authorities arrested Liaw and Sun this past week. Chang remains a fugitive, according to the Department of Justice. The company has not been accused of wrongdoing, and neither have co-founders Charles Liang, who is the CEO and chairman, nor his wife, Sara Liu, a board member and co-founder.
In a statement Supermicro said Liaw resigned his board seat on Friday, and he remains on administrative leave, along with Chang. Sun was fired. Supermicro’s stock plummeted in trading on Friday, giving short sellers who have collectively bet $2.6 billion against the company a windfall. Shorts collected an estimated $860 million in single-day gains after the stock sank 33%, according to financial data firm S3 Partners. The day pushed their March gains to nearly $1 billion. Supermicro has said it is cooperating with law enforcement and it was not named in the indictment.
However, this isn’t Supermicro’s first brush with this type of export-control violation.
Court records and the company’s own disclosures show the latest allegations of smuggling to a restricted market show striking similarities to a 20-year-old enforcement action also involving the company, which was founded in 1993 by Liaw, Liang, and Liu. None of the three were named in the 2006 enforcement or charged with wrongdoing.
In 2006, Supermicro pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally exporting computer equipment to Iran, and paid a $150,000 fine to the Department of Justice. Separately, Supermicro settled a parallel action involving 12 charges related to sales of servers, motherboards, and computer chassis brought by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) by paying a $125,400 civil penalty. The company also paid an additional $179,327 to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to settle allegations under the Iranian Transactions Regulation, a violation that OFAC said Supermicro did not voluntarily disclose to the regulator.
The two cases—separated by two decades and vast differences in scope—allegedly share a similar pattern. Find a neighboring country where it is legal to sell to, hide the real buyer, and ship the restricted tech to the illegal market.
A representative for Supermicro declined to comment on the Iran violations.
The Iran tech sales took place between September 2001 and March 2003, court records show, about a decade after Liaw, Liang, and Liu, who serves as a senior vice president and member of the board, founded Supermicro.
According to the BIS charging document from 2006, Supermicro exported servers, motherboards, and computer chassis from the U.S. through the United Arab Emirates and then onto Iran on six separate occasions without the required licenses from OFAC. A distributor in Dubai served as the pass-through for the equipment. Officials said Supermicro’s “senior director of strategic sales knew of, or had reason to know” about the embargo on sales to Iran. BIS charged the company with three counts of selling goods knowing that export violations would occur and three counts of misrepresenting its shipper export declarations to the U.S. government by claiming it did not need a license to sell the hardware.
Supermicro settled the cases in September 2006 and cooperated with the government’s investigation, records show. It also implemented an in-house export control program before the BIS and DOJ formally brought charges. The sentencing memo stated that the fines were “sufficient to deter other companies from committing similar crimes.”
The indictment unsealed this week claims that the accused trio of Liaw, Sun, and Chang allegedly conspired to route servers that included the Nvidia chips in 2024. The defendants allegedly sent the servers through an unnamed Southeast Asian company before they made their way to China. Liaw, Sun, and Chang could not be reached for comment.
The mechanics alleged in the indictment mirror the Iran violation from 20 years ago. In the alleged China scheme, the Southeast Asian company submitted repeat purchase orders to Supermicro purportedly for its own use. Instead, when the servers arrived after being assembled in the U.S., the Southeast Asian company allegedly sent them on to the real buyers in China. To keep it all hidden, the servers were allegedly repacked in unmarked boxes, the indictment states.
According to the indictment, the Southeast Asian company grew to become one of Supermicro’s biggest customers, ranking 11th globally in fiscal 2024 with $99.7 million in revenue. Ultimately, the total value of server sales grew to $2.5 billion, authorities claim.
Throughout the swell, Liaw was allegedly directing the activities behind the scenes, the indictment says.
In January 2025 when the Trump Administration announced new AI export restrictions slated to start on May 13, 2025, Liaw texted an executive at the Southeast Asian company, “We need to speed these up before May 13!” A few days later, the indictment notes, he texted again, “We can ship all your 512 x B200 by Feb. Let us run fast before May 13!” he wrote, referring to the Nvidia GPUs.
According to the indictment, the executive Liaw texted with wrote him in March and sent a news article about smugglers being accused of routing Nvidia chips to China and wrote, “I’m very concerned Wally.” Liaw wrote back trying to assuage his concerns and then continued making inquiries about the GPU orders, the indictment states. In August 2025, one of the brokers allegedly involved in the Supermicro scheme sent Liaw a link to a DOJ press release about more arrests for AI chip smuggling. Liaw replied with a string of sobbing-face emojis, the indictment states, and then kept working with Chang and Sun, authorities say.
The indictment notes that as the orders continued, the accused allegedly worked harder to keep it all secret. Supermicro’s compliance team started an audit in late 2024, the indictment states, which was around the time Supermicro was dealing with a cluster of issues in the U.S. Its auditor EY had resigned in October, the DOJ had opened an investigation into the company based on accounting allegations raised by a former employee, and it was at risk of being delisted by Nasdaq. It later hired BDO and its own internal investigation into its accounting found no evidence of wrongdoing. BDO has not been accused of wrongdoing in the smuggling case. BDO declined to comment.
During the 2024 audit during that heightened period, Chang allegedly arranged for a “friendly” auditor employed by Supermicro to conduct the inspection, the indictment states. When a second, more rigorous audit was set for August 2025, Sun and Chang allegedly staged hundreds of what authorities called “dummy” servers, which it defined as non-working physical replicas in Supermicro boxes.
The dummy servers were allegedly set up at the Southeast Asian company’s warehouses so auditors could confirm their arrival. Sun said the staging operation would need about 100 people, forklift operators, arranged meals, and a “20-person shuttle bus for easy travel between the hotel and the warehouse, allowing for short breaks,” the indictment states. During the actual audit, however, the indictment states that Supermicro’s compliance worker was off site “enjoying entertainment” on the Southeast Asian company’s dime, the indictment claims.
Sun texted Liaw to say the audit had run smoothly and included 2,107 units in three warehouses. Liaw wrote back, “That’s spectacular!” the indictment states, and continued placing new orders days later. In December 2025, BIS sent one of its own inspectors to do a post-shipment verification check. The indictment claims Sun allegedly set up the dummy servers again, using a hair dryer to peel off labels and serial-number stickers, which was captured on surveillance cameras. Authorities say Sun allegedly introduced himself as “Michael” and said he worked at the Southeast Asian company’s law firm while fielding questions from the federal BIS officer.
In the Iran case, Supermicro’s then-CFO Howard Hideshima signed off on its settlements with law enforcement. He served as the CFO from 2006 through 2018, before Nasdaq suspended the company from trading and formally delisted it in March 2019. In 2020, Hideshima and Supermicro were charged by the Securities & Exchange Commission for accounting-related issues. Hideshima was fined $50,000 by the regulator and left the company.
Liaw also left the company following the 2018 accounting scandal. The company brought him back as an adviser in “business development” in May 2021, and he returned to a full-time senior executive post in August 2022. In December 2023, he rejoined the board before his resignation this week.
On Friday, Supermicro said it appointed DeAnna Luna as its acting chief compliance officer. Luna joined Supermicro in 2024 as vice president of global trade and sanctions compliance.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Good morning. To some extent, every CEO is a wartime CEO when their country is at war. But the concept, and the characteristics that go with it, extend far beyond geopolitics. As Fortune’s Geoff Colvin points out in this piece, Shell put military-style scenario planning at the heart of its corporate decision-making in the 1970s. I’ve talked about the concept of wartime and peacetime leadership with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who wrote about it 15 years ago, and leadership consultant Stephen Miles of TMG. When UiPath CEO Daniel Dines told me last week that “we treat this time as wartime,” he was talking not about Iran but his push to pivot the robotic process automation company he founded towards agentic AI.
What’s changed?
‘War’ is the norm – “Peacetime left us in March of 2020,” Miles told me yesterday. “The new world is now ambiguous, uncertain, and discontinuous … The world is hours, minutes and seconds, not quarters and years, and I don’t see that changing.” In his view, that calls for leadership that’s “total immersion, which provides much higher context and the ability to weak-signal detect so you get the whiffs of smoke before there is a forest fire.”
Anxiety, alignment and agency – For Horowitz, a peacetime CEO has a large advantage in a growing market; in war, they’re facing an “imminent existential threat.” The first is about expanding the market and reinforcing strengths, the latter is about speed and survival. As Dines put it: “In peacetime, you can tolerate different behaviors and try to adjust …We need to implement decisions faster and propagate them to the company much faster.” Anxiety is a motivator to go for it: “If you wait to see where the world is going, it’s not going to work.” Dines defines agency as “people with both expertise and the will to make things happen.”
People become disposable – In war, people die. The corporate equivalent is that they are fired. More risks are taken. Dissent isn’t tolerated and consensus isn’t a priority. There’s also more pressure at the top. My colleague Claire Zillman writes that, broadly speaking, the AI revolution is creating more CEO churn, according to Spencer Stuart. Feigen Advisors found that despite the headlines about skyrocketing turnover, leadership at a narrower band of companies—the top of half of the S&P 500—has held relatively steady, though it also found CEO turnover outside the U.S. is increasing. Does this mean America is winning the war? It depends, of course, on how you define the battlefield.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
For decades, building a billion-dollar company required a village. Raise massive capital, hire hundreds of people, build a sprawling department for every operational headache — from VAT compliance in Marseille to sourcing logistics in Shenzhen. Headcount was power. Scale required sacrifice of autonomy.
That equation is breaking down. The “Execution Wall” that once separated the solo entrepreneur from the multinational corporation is crumbling — not because the giants are fading, but because the tools of scale have finally been democratized. We are entering the age of the One-Person Unicorn.
The solo founder was historically a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Ten hats, and eight of them — labeled “Procurement,” “Customs,” and “Compliance”— never fit. To scale, entrepreneurs often had to surrender their autonomy to investors just to fund the headcount needed to handle the boring-but-vital heavy lifting.
Unlike earlier automation, agentic AI doesn’t just follow a script — it reasons, adapts, and executes. This shifts how we interact with technology: away from clicking through dashboards and menus, toward a language-based interface where complex end-to-end workflows are triggered by intent rather than manual data entry. Enterprise AI agents can now navigate the full labyrinth of global trade — from RFQs to cross-border payments — freeing founders to reclaim their time for strategy.
The real power of the One-Person Unicorn isn’t just internal efficiency; It’s how they interact with the world.
Global trade has historically been a sluggish game of human-to-human coordination: email chains, manual vetting, and midnight phone calls across time zones.
The future looks radically different.
Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interaction — where a buyer’s AI and a seller’s AI communicate directly through APIs — can compress weeks of supplier negotiations and logistics coordination into minutes of high-fidelity data exchange.
When the “cost of execution” collapses toward zero, a lone entrepreneur gains the operational reach of a Fortune 500 company. That’s not a metaphor. It’s an emerging structural reality. That’s not a metaphor. It’s an emerging structural reality.
This transition inevitably raises employment questions. But what’s unfolding is less a story of displacement than of professional elevation.
By absorbing the shadow work of administration, AI raises the floor for individual capability. We see this in the way tools like Accio Work provide an immediate operational backbone for the solo entrepreneur, bypassing the need for a traditional back-office — providing an immediate operational backbone that bypasses the traditional back-office entirely.
The boundary between “employee” and “owner” is beginning to blur. A generation of specialists now has the infrastructure to launch global ventures without a single hire.
Democratized power comes with a significant catch: as the barrier to entry falls, the bar for leadership rises.
In this new economy, grinding through administrative tasks is no longer a badge of honor — it’s a failure of leverage. The competitive advantages of the next decade won’t be technical proficiency or a massive payroll. They’ll be judgment, taste, and strategic vision. The AI can execute the workflow, but the human must supply the direction and quality control. The bottleneck is no longer a lack of resources, but a potential lack of imagination. It’s a potential lack of imagination.
The gap between a small business and a global powerhouse is narrowing faster than most leaders realize. The One-Person Unicorn is no longer a theoretical outlier — it’s a model emerging on the horizon for a world where capability, not headcount, defines a firm’s reach.
The question is no longer whether this future is coming. It’s whether you’ll be ready to lead it.
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
Michael Polyani, the British-Hungarian philosopher, economist, and scientist, is perhaps best known today for coining the term “tacit knowledge.” His great observation was that a large part of what constitutes expertise in any given field is never written down. In some cases, it exists only as a kind of professional intuition that even the expert can’t fully articulate. “We know more than we can tell,” was Polyani’s famous catch phrase.
Today, tacit knowledge presents a challenge to companies that want to automate workflows with AI agents. Much—perhaps even most—of the knowledge these agents need is not written down.
Interloom, a Munich-based startup that is aiming to transform traditional business process automation for the AI age, thinks it can crack the problem of tacit knowledge. And it has just raised a new $16.5 million venture capital round to help it achieve that mission.
The funding is being led by DN Capital, with participation from Bek Ventures and existing investor Air Street Capital. The company previously announced a $3 million seed round in March 2024.
Interloom did not disclose its valuation after the new funding.
Fabian Jakobi, Interloom’s founder and CEO, argues that the current wave of excitement about AI agents overlooks the tacit knowledge bottleneck. About 70% of operational decisions have never been formally documented, he said. When a complex support ticket lands on a veteran staffer’s desk, they know the workaround, the right internal team to escalate to, and the resolution—not because it’s in a manual, but because they’ve seen it before.
“The most important person at the bank is the person who knows whether the documentation is right or not,” Jakobi told Fortune. “They’re often the lowest paid. But they determine quality.”
Interloom’s approach is to ingest millions of operational records—support emails, service tickets, call transcripts, work orders—and use them to build what it calls a “context graph,” a continuously updated map of how problems actually get resolved within a given organization. Jakobi likens the concept to Google Maps: just as Google learns optimal routes from real-time traffic data, Interloom maps the paths that operational experts take to solve problems, and uses those maps to guide AI agents and new employees alike.
Jakobi is a serial entrepreneur. He previously founded Boxplot, which in 2021 he sold to Hyperscience, a New York-based AI software company that specializes in extracting data from unstructured documents.
Interloom’s software is already live with several large European enterprises. At Commerzbank, Interloom analyzed millions of customer support emails and checked them against existing internal documentation—finding that much of it was either conflicting or incomplete. The company says it reduced the gap between documented and actual operational knowledge from roughly 50% to 5%. At Volkswagen, it is processing customer support tickets. And at Zurich Insurance, Interloom won a company-wide AI competition—beating out what Jakobi says were 2,000 other AI-native startups—for an underwriting use case.
An underwriting decision at an insurance firm, Jakobi said, reflects that company’s particular risk appetite, its accumulated experience with certain brokers and products, and institutional knowledge that no general-purpose model possesses.
“The Zurich underwriter knows how their broker chat underwriting works much better than Accenture does,” Jakobi said, taking aim at the large consulting firms that have traditionally dominated enterprise process work.
The broader argument is that AI agents, no matter how capable, are useless in large enterprises without organization-specific context. Jakobi frames this as the “corporate memory” problem.
“In software, the compiler tells you if the code works,” Jakobi said. “We don’t have that luxury [in other domains.] The evaluation has to come from a human expert.”
Interloom’s new backers agree with that thesis. Guy Ward Thomas, a partner at DN Capital, said that “an agent is only as good as the expert decisions it can rely on.” And Thomas said that DN Capital has seen with other AI agent startups that when these agents don’t have the right context about the enterprise in which they are being deployed, they rarely work well. “Our experience with vertical AI agents and voice platforms showed us how important context is,” he said.
Mehmet Atici of Bek Ventures previously backed UiPath, which had been the leader in the previous wave of RPA, or robotic process automation. But RPA relied on agents that were, for the most part, hard-coded to follow the same exact workflow in the same exact way every time. “We’ve seen automation’s transformative potential firsthand and we believe AI is now unlocking a new wave of rapid adoption in the enterprise,” Atici said.
Interloom’s timing may be propitious. The so-called “Great Retirement” is seeing roughly 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring daily in the U.S. Walking out the door with them is decades of institutional knowledge—just as companies are trying to deploy AI at scale.
Jakobi sees the competitive landscape in characteristically blunt terms. His biggest rival, he says, is inertia—the assumption within large enterprises that operations will continue to function as they have for the past decade.
Interloom’s next product push is what it is calling internally a “Chief of Staff”—a layer designed to give managers real-time visibility into how their AI agents are performing, complete with version control for agent-driven processes.
But Interloom is hardly the only company trying to create an AI agent management and orchestration layer. Almost every company marketing AI agents, from OpenAI to ServiceNow to Microsoft, has been working on similar kinds of products.
Jakobi, however, said that he thinks Interlooms “context graph” gives it a distinct advantage over these larger players, which he says rarely have insight across an entire complex process.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook commended Chinese developers and the company’s partners in the country, days after the ruling party’s flagship newspaper criticized the iPhone maker for monopolistic policies.
Cook, speaking at the China Development Forum in Beijing on Sunday, praised the innovations of Chinese developers and the automation at the country’s manufacturing facilities. He said Apple and China share common goals, including in green development and carbon neutrality.
Apple lowered the fees it collects from app developers in the country earlier this month, a major concession in a hugely lucrative market where the company faced the risk of antitrust intervention by local regulators. Yet after the announcement, the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper called for a further easing of App Store restrictions and urged the firm to fix “monopolistic” practices — highlighting how Apple may continue to face pressure from Beijing.
“Innovation, green development and education are not separate properties — they are deeply connected,” Cook said. “They represent the vision of progress that we at Apple share, and we are committed to collaborating with our partners across China and with all of you to make that vision a reality.”
An “excellently talented developer community” helps to increase prosperity and opportunity across China, and innovation is transforming its manufacturing sector, Cook said. While the US tech giant builds most of its devices in China, it has diversified its assembly to regions such as Vietnam and India.
“There is a Chinese proverb I love — ‘a single tree does not make a forest,’” Cook said. “Together, I believe we can plant that forest.”
Read More: Apple CEO Visits China Amid Growing Pressure on App Store Policy
Apple has seen its sales growth in China rebound in recent months, helped by demand for the latest iPhone edition and consumers switching from rival devices. Revenue from the country jumped 38% to $25.5 billion in the holiday quarter that ended in December.
Speaking at the same event as Cook, Chinese Premier Li Qiang cited Apple as an example of a company with a highly diversified supply chain.
“If we politicize industrial issues and deliberately weaponize the supply chain, we will only increase costs for various companies and weaken development momentum,” Li said. “China is willing to strengthen communication and cooperation with all parties to jointly maintain the stability and security of the global supply chain.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Wall Street is bracing for a Monday deadline that President Donald Trump set for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while the global economy reels from an energy crisis that shows little signs of abating.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones industrial average fell 30 points, or 0.07%. S&P 500 futures were down 0.15%, and Nasdaq futures lost 0.18%.
U.S. oil futures dipped 0.6% to at $97.64 a barrel. The national average gasoline price reached $3.94 a gallon on Sunday, up more than $1 over the past month, according to AAA.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury ticked down less than 1 basis point to 4.386%. The U.S. dollar was up 0.09% against the euro and was down 0.04% against the yen.
On Saturday evening in the U.S., Trump gave Tehran 48 hours to comply with his demand or else face the destruction of power plants, potentially escalating his war to civilian infrastructure.
Iran responded to the ultimatum by warning that such an attack would result in its forces similarly targeting vital infrastructure, including desalination plants that provide much of the region’s fresh water.
Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, raised alarms earlier this month about this exact path of escalation as he called on the president to declare victory and “get out” of Iran.
“If you see that type of destruction continue, you could literally render the Gulf almost uninhabitable,” he said in an episode of the All-In podcast on March 13. “I mean you’re not going to have enough water for 100 million people, and human beings just cannot survive very long without water. So that would be a truly catastrophic scenario, and we’re talking about destroying the Gulf states economically and then also from a humanitarian perspective.”
Both sides showed no signs of backing down and further upped the ante militarily. Trump is sending three more amphibious assault ships and 2,500 additional Marines to the Mideast, joining a separate Marine Expeditionary Unit already headed there. There are already more than 50,000 U.S. troops in the region.
Meanwhile, Iran launched ballistic missiles at a U.S.-U.K. base 2,500 miles away on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The attack was unsuccessful, but it demonstrated that Iran’s missiles have much longer range than previously known and could theoretically reach most of Europe.
On Sunday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte backed the Iran war and predicted the alliance would eventually come around to support it too, after several members rebuffed Trump’s demand that they provide naval escorts.
“If Iran would have the nuclear capability, including, together with the missile capability, it will be a direct threat, a existential threat, to Israel, to the region, to Europe, to the stability in the world,” Rutte told CBS News. “So the president doing this is crucial, and I’ve seen the polling, but I really hope the American people will be with him, because he is doing this to make the whole world safer.”
In addition to NATO, Trump got more signs of support from the United Arab Emirates, which has suffered from a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones.
Anwar Gargash, a senior UAE diplomat, suggested an increasingly hardened stance toward Iran that aligns more closely with the U.S. and Israeli stance.
“Our thinking does not stop at a ceasefire, but rather turns toward solutions that ensure lasting security in the Arabian Gulf, curbing the nuclear threat, missiles, drones, and the bullying of the straits,” he wrote on X. “It is inconceivable that this aggression should turn into a permanent state of threat.”
With no evidence of any talks aimed at halting the conflict, the thousands of Marines headed to the Mideast could be involved in a climactic battle to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and crush Iran’s ability to weaponize it again.
Still, some have called for a less dangerous option, namely a naval blockade of Iran’s oil exports meant to pressure the regime to open the strait.
“The US can implode Iran’s economy by shutting down its oil exports,” Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a Substack on March 13. “That might open up the Strait of Hormuz a lot faster than anything else. Time to implode Iran’s economy and give the Ayatollahs a taste of their own medicine.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
It’s exceedingly expensive to own a pet, prompting owners to delay veterinary visits or reconsider adopting one in the first place. Yet, animal health companies’ earnings keep growing.
That’s down to the unwavering love between owners and their pets.
While some owners might extend the time between their pets’ annual wellness visits to save money, they’ll shell out when their darling is truly sick or hurt, and that care is often the most expensive — and lucrative.
Last year, Matthew Joseph, a 41-year-old New Yorker, spent $11,000 on lifesaving spleen surgery for his now 14-year-old pooch Frankie. “The amount that we spend on Frankie, you could probably buy a Hyundai, or finance one at least.”
Animal diagnostic testing and pharmaceutical companies like IDEXX Laboratories, Inc., Zoetis Inc. and Elanco Animal Health Inc., along with pet store companies like Petco Health & Wellness Co. and Chewy, Inc. are reaping the benefits.
Pet-care costs have been rising faster than overall inflation. The consumer price index for all urban consumers increased 2.4% in February from a year earlier, while pet services — including veterinary care — jumped 5.1%, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Total vet visits declined 3% in the fourth quarter of last year, marking the 16th straight quarter of declines, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ann-Hunter van Kirk wrote in a note, adding there’s only low correlation with the performance of pharmaceutical pet companies. Last month, vet visits fell 1.7% year-over-year, according to data provided by Vetsource.
“People in a down economy, they may not be taking their pet to the vet quite as often as they need to, but they also still know the main things that they need to do — those maintenance therapies — and they’re still doing that,” van Kirk said in an interview.
Pet owners are still spending, Zoetis Chief Financial Officer Wetteny Joseph said at the Leerink Global Healthcare Conference on March 9, specifically for visits that incur “higher prices” such as emergency hospital visits.
Andi Lichtenfeld – who, like most owners, doesn’t have pet insurance – only takes her two dogs, three-year-olds Marilyn and Wayne, to the vet for emergencies, or when they don’t seem like themselves. The 37-year-old says this is similar to how she treats herself; if she’s sick, she goes to the doctor. For their vaccines, Lichtenfeld takes them to Petco.
Petco shares surged 35% on March 12 after the company’s forecast beat estimates, although its revenue is still pressured as it works to turn around operations.
IDEXX’s long-term growth should be fueled by “heightened spending by younger consumers and increased pet life expectancy that requires more expensive care,” according to BI’s van Kirk.
“A lot of these companies don’t expect the macro dynamic to change in 2026,” Jefferies analyst Keith Devas said, but “we saw over the last 18 months that the vet visit trends are not very correlated to these companies’ results.”
The lack of correlation between declining vet visits and related companies’ earnings speaks to the growing humanization of our furry friends.
As pets have moved “from the yard to the kitchen into the bedroom,” owners’ bonds deepen and their willingness to spend increases, said Harold Herzog, professor emeritus at Western Carolina University, who studies the psychology behind human-animal interactions.
Treating pets like family has accelerated as more people delay or forgo having children due to cost or personal choice, said Ingrid Tague, a professor at the University of Denver who has written a book about pets in British history. “The more we treat them as people, the more we get caught up in that same kind of consumerist cycle that we have for ourselves.”
For example, pet food used to just be kibble and canned meat, but now includes foods humans could salivate over — ribeyes, salmon fillets and flamboyant multicolored cakes fit for a child’s birthday party.
That explains why many pet owners are willing to stomach rising costs.
“I would never use the word expensive because to me the ROI is better than anything else I would spend,” Joseph said, noting Frankie’s “unconditional love and companionship.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Project Hail Mary, from Amazon.com Inc.’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, was the No. 1 film at the US and Canadian box office this weekend with $80.5 million worth of tickets, scoring the highest grossing debut of any movie this year.
The film’s performance in its opening weekend surpassed Creed III as the best for an Amazon title since the company acquired MGM for $8.5 billion in 2022. Industry tracker Boxoffice Pro had forecast sales of at least $70 million. More than a fifth of Project Hail Mary‘s box office came from Imax Corp. screens.
Since closing the MGM deal, which handed Amazon control of film franchises including James Bond and The Pink Panther, the e-commerce conglomerate has pledged to release more than a dozen pictures in cinemas annually before making them available on its Prime Video streaming service.
Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, is adapted from the novel of the same name by Andy Weir. It follows the adventure of biologist-turned-teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, who wakes up with amnesia aboard a spacecraft.
The film achieved critical acclaim, and its commercial performance ends a string of low box-office hauls for Amazon this year on titles such as Mercy and Crime 101.
Amazon, which hired former Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. executives Courtenay Valenti and Sue Kroll to run its film studio and lead its marketing, is less dependent on the success of its theatrical releases than traditional Hollywood distributors. It uses cinemas primarily as a means to recoup some production and marketing costs before feeding the titles to its Prime user base, which is largely formed of online shoppers.
Amazon’s commitment to theaters helps support chains such as AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and Regal Cineworld Group that are seeking more films from Hollywood. Last year, Amazon announced that it would be working with Denis Villeneuve, the director of the Dune trilogy, on a new Bond film.
The domestic box office is up 15.2% so far this year compared with the same period in 2025 thanks to releases including Hoppers from Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar subsidiary and Scream 7 from Paramount Skydance Corp.’s film studio.
Before Project Hail Mary, the best debut of 2026 was Scream 7. The movie, released in February, has since sold $193.8 million worth of cinema tickets, becoming the highest grossing picture in the horror franchise’s history.
The debut of Hoppers earlier in March was also the best for an original Pixar film in a decade.
Amazon’s next big-budget release in theaters this year is Masters of the Universe in June, based on the franchise controlled by toymaker Mattel Inc.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Elon Musk said his Terafab project — a grand plan to eventually manufacture his own chips for robotics, artificial intelligence and space data centers — will be built in Austin and jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk, the chief executive officer of both companies, said he will start off with an “advanced technology fab” in Austin that will have all of the equipment necessary to make chips of any kind, and test them. Musk, who has no background in semiconductor production and a history of over-promising on goals and timelines, had said before that the company will start with a smaller scale fab before moving to a bigger one.
Musk has said the semiconductor industry is moving too slow to keep up with the supply of chips he expects to need, even as the industry increases output.
“That rate is much less than we’d like,” Musk said. “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab.” Musk’s project would call for one day supporting a terawatt of computing power per year, the amount he expects the companies to eventually use as he ramps up his investments in AI and robotics.
Musk detailed some specific plans, including producing chips that can support 100 to 200 gigawatts a year of computing power on Earth, and chips that can support a terawatt in space, but gave no timelines for the facility or its output.
Musk has said previously that the facility would produce 2 nanometer chips. The project appears to be planned for an area near Tesla’s existing Austin headquarters and gigafactory, based on a photo shown during the presentation.
Read More: Why the AI Boom Will Make Phones, Cars, Devices More Expensive
Many executives have expressed anxiety about a shortage of chips — particularly memory chips — during the race to build computing power for AI. But it’s rare to try building them. Bringing semiconductor facilities online typically takes tens of billions dollars and requires the purchase of complex machines from multiple providers. Factories can take years to become fully operational.
Musk made the announcement in a downtown Austin venue to an audience that included Texas Governor Greg Abbott. If it eventually succeeds, the project could help elevate Texas’ status as a chipmaking hub. Tesla already has an agreement with Samsung facility near Austin on upcoming chips. The EV company also has existing suppliers, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Micron Technology Inc. that Musk says are also not able to meet all the company’s needs as Tesla pivots its focus to robotics, autonomous driving and AI.
The facility is expected to make two types of chips, one of which will be optimized for edge and inference, primarily for his vehicle, robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robots. The other will be a high-power chip, designed for space that could be used by SpaceX and xAI. SpaceX acquired xAI in February, with the latter operating as a wholly owned subsidiary. Musk said he expects xAI to use the vast majority of the chips.
Read More: Will Putting AI Data Centers in Space Actually Work?
During the presentation, Musk also unveiled a speculative rendering of a future “mini” AI data center satellite, one piece of a much larger satellite system that he wants SpaceX to build to do complex computing in space. In January, SpaceX requested a license from the Federal Communications Commission to launch one million data center satellites into orbit around Earth.
Musk said that the mini satellite he revealed would have the capacity for 100 kilowatts of power.
“We expect future satellites to probably go to the megawatt range,” Musk said.
Raising money to build and launch AI data centers in space is one of the driving forces behind SpaceX’s planned IPO later this year. SpaceX is expected to raise as much as $50 billion in a record-setting IPO this summer which could value it at more than $1.75 trillion, Bloomberg News reported earlier.
Read More: SpaceX Weighs Confidential IPO Filing as Soon as March
The presentation also included some of Musk’s loftier ambitions. He showed an animation of how SpaceX could potentially launch satellites from the surface of the moon, and reiterated his vision for a future filled with “amazing abundance” — something he has been touting in recent months.
“The future I want to see: I want us to live long enough to see the mass driver on the moon,” Musk said, referring to the contraption that would launch satellites from the lunar surface, “because that’s going to be incredibly epic.”
The facility announcement comes as Tesla increasingly works with xAI and SpaceX on artificial intelligence projects. Tesla has already been working with xAI on a project called Digital Optimus or Macrohard, and Tesla also sells its megapack batteries to xAI. Tesla has also integrated xAI’s chatbot, Grok, into some of its vehicles. In January, Tesla announced a $2 billion investment into xAI and a framework agreement for the companies to work together.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
For two hours, Claire Jefferies wanted to get away from the war in Iran and the rising gas prices and just commune with nature. And, so, she treated herself to a little forest bathing.
“When I’m here, it’s almost like a protective bubble around me,” the human resources director said amid oaks and flowering magnolias at the J.C. Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina. “It provides a shield.”
The Sunday morning session was led by certified forest therapy guide Shawn Ramsey. Jingling a tiny brass bell, she called her dozen or so charges to gather for meditation, breathing exercises and to commune with nature.
“I invite you to really spend the next 10 minutes just exploring this area,” she said, her own eyes closed. “Really focusing on your breath, on your footsteps. All the natural sounds around you. Maybe the manmade sounds, too. Thinking about the forest’s natural rhythm and how are part of that here in this urban, forested environment.”
Based on the Japanese wellness practice of Shinrin-yoku, the activity has been known to reduce stress, improve mood, lower blood pressure and boost the immune system.
Although the arboretum is in a busy section of a growing city, Ramsey said the benefits of tuning out and getting in touch with nature are the same. She led the group of about a dozen through the various gardens, having them crush conifer twigs between their fingers and smell them, or just touch trees.
“You know, in this day and age, there’s a lot of stress and anxiety and chaos,” she said. “And people are searching for ways to kind of cope with that.”
Transportation safety researcher Alan Mintz came with a friend. He had to be reminded to leave the talk of news at the entrance.
“I think it’s important for people to take the opportunity to exist in natural spaces, both to unwind and relax, so that it can be easier to interact with other people,” he said as he stood in the dappled light filtering through the trees. “And to take a moment to appreciate beautiful things. That way, hopefully, they can carry that forward and have more of an appreciation for other people and other cultures that they might be less experienced with.”
Jefferies had to remind a friend to stop talking about news as they walked beneath the gently waving canopy.,
“That focus back into spending time in nature and the healing power of that, and just remembering that we’re part of something bigger, that we’re all connected,” said the mother of a 9-year-old son. “And that what we do in our actions that we take really matter to the rest of the world. And so there’s no better place to see that than here, where you can see all of the interconnectedness and the ways that this plant life naturally supports one another. Doesn’t take more than they need.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A California sheriff running for governor has seized more than half a million ballots cast in a November special election from county election officials, saying he’s investigating a ballot count discrepancy.
County elections officials have disputed the claims by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called Bianco’s move unprecedented and says it is designed to sow distrust in elections.
Bianco held a news conference Friday saying his office had launched the investigation after receiving a complaint from a local citizens group about the ballot count from a November 2025 special election on redistricting.
In the special election, voters approved a measure to redraw congressional district lines to favor Democrats in the upcoming midterm election. The measure passed in the county by a margin of more than 80,000 votes.
Bianco seized ballots in Riverside County, the inland California county of 2.5 million people where he has twice been elected sheriff. He called the effort “a fact-finding mission.”
“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported,” he said Friday.
Bianco is one of two prominent Republicans running for governor in a crowded June primary that includes more than half a dozen Democrats. California runs a top-two primary system that puts all candidates on the same ballot, regardless of party, and sends the two candidates who get the most voters onto the November general election.
Leading California Democrats are worried that their party has so many candidates, they risk splitting the vote and sending Bianco and Steve Hilton, another top Republican, onto the general election. That would be a stunning outcome in the heavily Democratic state.
Bianco said the investigation had “absolutely nothing to do” with his campaign for governor.
“I have a duty to investigate alleged crime in Riverside County,” he said.
The effort came as President Donald Trump has repeatedly disputed the results of the 2020 election, citing unsubstantiated instances of fraud. His administration recently seized ballots and other documents from an election office in Georgia. Some Republicans have mirrored Trump’s rhetoric on voting in their states.
Bonta has repeatedly sent letters to Bianco’s office over the last two months saying his staff is not qualified to conduct a recount. In one of the letters, Bonta wrote that the ballot seizure was “unacceptable” and “sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.”
The letters said Bianco seized nearly 1,000 boxes of ballots and elections materials from the county’s elections office with a warrant in February. At issue, Bianco said, is a discrepancy a citizen group reported between the handwritten ballot intake logs and the number of votes reported to the state.
Bianco said the alleged discrepancy amounted to about 45,800 votes — a difference elections officials have refuted at county meetings, saying the machine count and the final count submitted to the state differed by about 100 votes. They argue the handwritten rolls, which were not relied on to check the count, were being kept by temporary elections workers who had worked long days and may have made mistakes.
Bianco said Friday that the count had started and stopped, but would now resume under the supervision of a special master appointed by a judge.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A potentially decisive showdown to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz away from Iran is taking shape, with thousands of U.S. Marines headed for the Middle East.
President Donald Trump upped the ante over the weekend by vowing to destroy Iranian power plants if the strait isn’t reopened by Monday. Iran responded by threatening to target critical infrastructure around the Gulf, including desalination plants that provide most of the region’s fresh water.
Trump previously suggested warships would escort oil tankers through the strait, but they would still enter an Iranian “kill box.” So with both sides showing no signs of backing down, Trump may choose to expand his war from a mostly aerial campaign to a ground offensive.
U.S. troops could be deployed to areas along the strait to clear out threats to ships in the narrow waterway, which has been largely been closed by attacks from the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Marines could also land on Kharg Island, which sits farther north along the Persian Gulf coast and is the hub for 90% of Iran’s oil exports. U.S. control of the island could be used a leverage to pressure Tehran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz.
But experts have pointed to the risk ground troops would face in holding any territory, given that Iran has inflicted significant damage on U.S. military bases and embassies throughout the region as swarms of projectiles overwhelm air defenses.
For now, the U.S. military is continuing to pound the Hormuz area in anticipation of the next move, whatever it will be. Apache helicopters and the vaunted A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft have been targeting what remains of Iran’s naval capabilities, such as fast attack boats, while bombers have also destroyed stockpiles of anti-ship missiles.
Analysts have raised another possibility that could avoid putting boots on the ground: a naval blockade that prevents Iranian oil from reaching its destination.
The idea is to turn the tables on Iran and subject it to the same shock that closing the strait has delivered to its oil-producing neighbors, who have slashed their output while their crude has nowhere to go.
“The US can implode Iran’s economy by shutting down its oil exports,” Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a Substack on March 13. “That might open up the Strait of Hormuz a lot faster than anything else. Time to implode Iran’s economy and give the Ayatollahs a taste of their own medicine.”
While he has been skeptical that the U.S. Navy has enough ships to escort all the tankers that typically transit the Strait of Hormuz, he said it has the resources to blockade Iran’s oil exports.
Removing more supply from global oil markets should send prices even higher, but Brooks argued crude might do the opposite if a U.S. blockade is seen ending the war quickly.
China, which buys most of Iran’s oil, would be incentivized to lobby Tehran to reopen the strait, and a blockade of Iran’s exports would deprive the regime of hard currency needed to prop up its war machine, he added.
“An embargo of Iranian oil, if the collapse in Iran’s economy is deep enough, could convince markets that the closure of the Strait might end sooner rather than later. As a result, Brent might only spike briefly or even fall,” Brooks wrote in a later post.
Meanwhile, Iran’s control of the strait is allowing it to ship even more oil than it did before the war started. The IRGC has also created an alternate route for ships that requires other countries to obtain permission to cross the strait, with at least one instance of a shipper paying $2 million.
Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime national security official, made a similar argument for a blockade this past week.
He proposed an “Open for All or Closed to All” policy that he believes has the best chance to resolve the Hormuz crisis. The veteran diplomat also dismissed naval escorts and ground troops as too difficult.
Blockading Iran’s oil exports would require setting up a 200-mile-wide defensive line across the Gulf of Oman, using ships, aircraft, and drones, Haass said.
He added that the policy would deny Iran its main source of revenue and impose domestic pressures to accept a ceasefire—or risk a larger challenge to the regime’s authority. Any increase in oil prices would also be modest as a blockade would remove relatively small amounts of Iranian oil from the global market.
“Under such a policy, the United States and its partners would announce that no tanker from Iran would be permitted to reach its destination in another country until Iran backed off its threats to and attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait,” Haass explained in a Substack post. “In other words, Iran cannot pick and choose who gets the region’s oil and who does not.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Federal immigration agents newly ordered to U.S. airports by President Donald Trump to help relieve security line congestion may guard exit lanes or check passenger IDs as a budget impasse has air travelers frustrated over hourslong waits and screeners angry about missed paychecks.
Trump made clear on Sunday, a day after saying he would use immigration officers for airport security starting Monday unless Democrats agreed on a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, that he was going ahead with the plan to assist the Transportation Security Administration.
Hundreds of thousands of homeland security workers, including from the TSA, U.S. Secret Service and Coast Guard, have worked without pay since Congress failed to renew DHS funding last month. Democrats are demanding major changes in the conduct of federal immigration agents and showing no sign of backing down.
White House border czar Tom Homan, named by Trump to lead this effort, has also been meeting with a bipartisan group of senators in recent days over the partial shutdown and while he characterized those sessions as “good conversations,” he said they were “not at a point yet where we’re in total agreement.”
The Senate, convening in a rare weekend session, was expected to advance the nomination of Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., to be Trump’s next homeland security secretary. A vote on the confirmation could come as early as late Monday as Mullin has tried to make the casethat he would be a steady hand after the tumultuous tenure of Kristi Noem, Trump’s first DHS secretary.
Meantime, Homan said in Sunday news show interviews that the increased role of U.S. Customs and Immigrations Enforcement at airports — specific duties and numbers — was subject to discussions with the leadership of TSA and ICE “to find out where we can fit in.”
He pledged to have “a plan by the end of today, where we’re sending — what airports we’re starting with and where we’re sending them. … So it’s a work in progress.” The priority, Homan said, was “the large airports where there’s a long wait, like three hours.”
Immigration officers, as an example, could cover exits currently monitored by TSA agents, freeing them to work screening lines.
“ICE agents are assigned at many airports across the country already. They do a lot of investigation, criminal investigation on smuggling at airports,” Homan said, adding that “certainly, a highly trained ICE law enforcement officer can cover an exit and makes sure people don’t go through those exits, entering the airport through the exits. And stuff like that relieves that TSA officer to go to screening and to reduce those lines.”
Another option, he said, was having ICE agents check identification before people enter screenings areas.
“We’re going to be a force multiplier,” Homan said.
While saying to help “wherever we can provide extra security,” Homan said there were limits. “I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine, because we’re not trained in that,” he said.
Trump said in a social media post that on Monday, “ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job” despite the partial government shutdown. He further criticized Democrats.
Travelers at some airports worried about reaching their gates Sunday.
At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, lines wrapped from one end of the airport to the other.
“Everyone just seems to be accepting it for what it is, said 43-year-old Blake Wilbanks, who showed up 2 1/2 hours early for his morning flight to Salt Lake City after reading about the shutdown.
“Hopeful I’m gonna make it,” he said as he waited in a winding security line.
The scene appeared more chaotic at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Large big crowds of anxious travelers piled toward security checkpoints, and TSA staff shouted through megaphones to tell people not to push one another.
For Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, one concern is the uncertainty that passengers are facing over possible wait times at any airport on any given day.
“Do I have to come an hour and a half early? Do I have to come four hours early? They don’t know until the day of or the afternoon of their flight,” he said. “So if we can alleviate that, again, the president wants to take away that leverage point for Democrats and make travel easier for the American people.”
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said “the last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country” after criticism about their conduct as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota and elsewhere.
Homan appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and “Fox News Sunday,” while Duffy was interviewed on ABC’s “This Week” and Jeffries spoke on CNN.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
A quirk in global energy markets has created a stark geographic divide between the haves and the have nots, as a glut of natural gas in West Texas has produced negative prices while shortages loom over Europe and Asia amid the U.S. war on Iran.
Over the past week, spot prices at the Waha gas trading hub in the Permian Basin fell as low as -$9.75 per million British thermal units, with expectations that it could hit -$10 when pipeline capacity tightens as operators perform seasonal maintenance later this year, traders told Bloomberg.
That’s because drilling in the prolific Permian Basin yields both oil and natural gas. But while an extensive network of pipelines exists to bring crude to market, there’s less infrastructure to transport natural gas, creating bottlenecks and localized surpluses.
As a result, negative gas prices aren’t that unusual in West Texas, and have been that way more often than not so far this year. But last week saw the lowest weekly average Waha spot price on record.
Since negative prices mean producers have to pay to someone to take the supply off their hands, excess natural gas is often burned off, and so-called flaring events this season are at five-year highs.
Despite the upside-down price environment for West Texas drillers, they aren’t expected to pull back production because oil is lucrative enough to offset losses from gas.
And the recent spike in crude since the U.S.-Israel war on Iran started makes oil even more profitable. West Texas Intermediate has shot up 47% to nearly $100 a barrel in the last three weeks.
By contrast, other parts of the world have seen natural gas prices surge due to disruptions from the Iran war. Tehran has retaliated by largely closing off the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas flow.
Iran also attacked Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, damaging two LNG production trains that will impact about 17% of the country’s LNG exports—and repairs may take up to five years.
While most LNG from the Middle East goes to Asia, the supply shock will ripple through global markets as Asia and Europe compete for the remaining gas.
European benchmark gas futures jumped as much as 35% on Thursday to about 70 euros per megawatt hour, or more than $20 per million BTUs, double their prewar levels.
While that’s far short of the record 345 euros per megawatt hour seen in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, the latest price spike comes at a sensitive time for Europe. After heating demand drew down gas inventories during winter, countries must now restock supplies this summer.
In Asia, the situation is so dire that countries have already started looking ways to ration energy, such as implementing four-day workweeks and working from home.
A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz could send LNG spot prices in Asia above $30 per million BTUs in the summer from $26 this spring, analysts told Bloomberg. And if it remains shut in six months, the price could even top $40.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Although Kevin O’Leary became a millionaire more than 25 years ago after selling his software company Softkey Products to Mattel for $4.2 billion in 1999, he said he still remembers the exact moment he made it big.
“I get asked all the time, do you remember the moment that you became a millionaire? I do,” the Shark Tank star known as Mr. Wonderful said in a video posted to his LinkedIn in July. “But have to admit, it was very anticlimatic.”
O’Leary founded Softkey in 1986, and throughout the 1990s his company acquired its biggest competitors like Compton’s New Media, the Learning Co., and Minnesota Educational Computer Co. as well as Creative Wonders, Mindscape, and Broderbund.
This helped Softkey to become the world’s leader in educational, reference, and home productivity software and the second-largest consumer software company in the world at the time with more than $800 million in annual sales, 2,000 employees, and subsidiaries in 15 countries.
While O’Leary’s accomplishment in selling Softkey to Mattel and becoming a millionaire may seem like a major deal, he said it didn’t feel that way.
“Boom, you wake up one day and you say, ‘Wow, this is interesting, but it doesn’t change anything,’” O’Leary said in the LinkedIn video. “That’s the crazy thing. And every millionaire [or] billionaire I talk to says, ‘Yeah, it’s not that big a deal.’”
But that may be O’Leary reflecting on the entirety of his career. In 2003, he became co-investor and director in Storage Now and a founding SPAC investor and director of Stream Global Services in 2007.
He now holds investments in more than 30 private-venture companies, and is the chairman of O’Shares ETF Investments and automated internet-based investment advisory service company Beanstox. And, most famously, he’s been an investor on Shark Tank since the show’s premiere in 2009. O’Leary also owns several companies he founded, including O’Leary Fine Wines and O’Leary Ventures, his private venture-capital investment company.
While becoming a millionaire feels like a blip on O’Leary’s radar at this point, he also said in a 2023 video on his YouTube channel that it can feel impossible to make your first million—but meeting a $5 million milestone feels much easier.
“You work your ass off. It’s so hard. What it really takes to do is have the discipline of not buying s*** you don’t need,” O’Leary said in the YouTube video. “To make that first mil is you’ve got to invest it. Market’s going to make you 8%. And then I thought, well my sights are on five [million]. It’s going to be impossible. It wasn’t as hard to get to five [million] as it was to one [million].”
And even though O’Leary has an estimated net worth of about $400 million and pushes pitchers on Shark Tank to really know their numbers and prove their valuation, he insists it’s not about the money to him.
“If you’re very passionate about what you’re doing [you’ll] wake up one morning successful,” O’Leary said in the LinkedIn video. “[The] key is the passion. It’s not the pursuit of greed or money. That doesn’t work. You’re so in love with what you’re doing in business, and you get rewarded for it, particularly if you’re solving a big problem.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Cuba began restoring its energy system on Sunday, a day after a nationwide collapse of the entire grid left millions of people in the dark for the third time this month.
Some 72,000 customers in the capital, among them five hospitals, had electricity again early Sunday, according to a report from the state-run Electric Union and the Ministry of Energy and Mines, but it’s only a fraction of Havana’s total population of approximately 2 million.
In Havana and provinces such as western Matanzas and eastern Holguin, local power microsystems were set up to supply the most vital centers. Residents in some areas of the capital told The Associated Press that power returned during the early morning hours.
Cuba is currently facing an unprecedented energy crisis. Its aging grid has drastically eroded in recent years, but the government has also blamed the outages on a U.S. energy blockade, after President Donald Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba. His administration is demanding that Cuba release political prisoners and move toward political and economic liberalization in return for a lifting of sanctions. Trump also has raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Another reason Cuba has been struggling with dwindling oil is the removal by the U.S. of Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro, which halted critical petroleum shipments from the nation that had been a steadfast ally to Havana.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel has said the island has not received oil from foreign suppliers for three months. Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel it needs to power its economy.
Daily blackouts have a significant impact on the population, whose lives are disrupted by reduced work hours, lack of electricity for cooking and damage to household appliances, among many other consequences.
“With the blackout and low voltage, my refrigerator broke — that was today. The day before yesterday, the voltage also dropped around 10 at night,” Suleydi Crespo, a 33-year-old woman with two small children, told AP on Saturday. “If there’s no electricity tomorrow, we won’t be able to get water.”
Residents also expressed exhaustion from the constant outages, whether nationwide or partial.
The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, reported that the total disconnection of the national energy system was caused by an unexpected shutdown of a generation unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camaguey province, without providing details on the specific cause of the failure.
The last nationwide blackout occurred on Monday. It took several days to restore power.
Saturday’s outage was the second in the past week and the third in March.
“We have to get used to continuing our usual routine. What else can we do? We have to try to survive. Get used to events, with or without electricity,” said Dagnay Alarcón, a 35-year-old vendor.
Authorities and Díaz-Canel himself have acknowledged the seriousness of the current energy situation. The Vice Minister of Energy and Mines Argelio Abad Vigo explained this week that the country has gone three months without receiving supplies of diesel, fuel oil, gasoline, aviation fuel or liquefied petroleum gas — all vital for the economy and power generation.
Fuel sales for vehicles are rationed, airlines have suspended flights or reduced frequencies many workplaces have reduced hours.
Trump has for months suggested Cuba’s government is on the verge of collapse. After a previous time Cuba’s electric grid collapsed, Trump told reporters he believed he’d soon have “the honor of taking Cuba.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Iran and its ally, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, stepped up their attacks on Israel on Sunday, launching strikes across the country after the United States and Iran threatened to widen their targets in the war in the Middle East, now in its fourth week.
As Israel came under renewed fire, top Israeli leaders traveled to the southern town of Arad, one of two communities near a secretive nuclear research site struck by Iranian missiles late Saturday, wounding scores of people.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toured the destruction in Arad and said it was a “miracle” no one was killed there. He claimed Israel and the U.S. were well on their way to achieving the war’s goals and implored the international community for more support.
Earlier, President Donald Trump warned the United States will destroy Iran’s power plants if Tehran fails to fully open the Strait of Hormuz, setting a 48-hour deadline on Saturday. Iran’s parliament speaker said if the U.S. follows through on its threat, Tehran will retaliate against American and Israeli energy and wider infrastructure in the region.
The developments signaled the Iran war, which the U.S. and Israel launched Feb. 28, was moving in a dangerous new direction, despite Trump’s mention last week he was considering “winding down” operations. It has killed hundreds of people, rattled the global economy and sent oil prices surging.
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for an airstrike Sunday that killed a man in northern Israel while Gulf Arab states — including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — said they were intercepting fresh barrages of new Iranian strikes.
Iran has practically closed the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint connecting the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world through which roughly one-fifth of global supply passes. Attacks on ships and threats of further strikes have stopped nearly all tankers from navigating the strait, compelling some of the largest oil producers to make cuts because their crude has nowhere to go.
The blockade is a liability for both the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia, who rely heavily on the Persian Gulf supply to meet energy demand and power factories, vehicles and homes. The U.S. lifted some sanctions on Iranian oil at sea to relieve pressure on energy prices.
Trump said if Iran didn’t open the strait, the U.S. would destroy its “various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”
Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf responded Sunday on X that if Iran’s power plants and infrastructure are targeted, then vital infrastructure across the region — including energy and desalination facilities — would be considered legitimate targets and “irreversibly destroyed.”
Separately, Iranian officials said they would keep providing safe passage through the strait to vessels from countries other than its enemies.
Iran said its strikes in the Negev Desert were in retaliation to an earlier attack on Iran’s main nuclear enrichment site in Natanz, according to state-run media.
Tehran praised the attack as show of strength, even as Israel’s military asserts that Iranian missile launches have gradually decreased in frequency since the war began.
“If the Israeli regime is unable to intercept missiles in the heavily protected Dimona area, it is, operationally, a sign of entering a new phase of the battle,” said Qalibaf, the Iranian parliament speaker.
Dimona is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of the nuclear research center, and Arad about 35 kilometers (22 miles) to the north.
Soroka Medical Center, southern Israel’s main hospital, received at least 175 wounded from Arad and Dimona, the hospital’s deputy director Roy Kessous told The Associated Press.
Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, though it doesn’t confirm or deny their existence. The U.N. nuclear watchdog said on X it had not received reports of damage to the Israeli center or abnormal radiation levels.
Israel denied responsibility for hitting Natanz on Saturday while the Iranian judiciary’s official news agency, Mizan, said there was no leakage. The Pentagon declined to comment on the strike at Natanz, which was also hit in the first week of the ongoing war and in the 12-day war last June.
The U.N. watchdog — the International Atomic Energy Agency — has said the bulk of Iran’s estimated 972 pounds (441 kilograms) of enriched uranium is elsewhere, beneath the rubble at its Isfahan facility.
Iran said that, in addition to Natanz, strikes also hit a hospital in Andimeshk. The Health Ministry reported patients and doctors were evacuated to another city.
Iran’s death toll in the war surpassed 1,500 on Saturday, state media reported, citing the ministry. In Israel, 15 people have been killed by Iranian strikes. More than a dozen civilians in the occupied West Bank and Gulf Arab states have been killed in strikes.
The war has also seen noncombat-related accidents, including a U.S. refueling plane crash in Iraq that killed six U.S. service members and a Qatari military helicopter crash on Saturday blamed on a technical malfunction. All seven aboard were killed, Qatari authorities said Sunday.
The Israeli civilian was killed in the northern town of Misgav Am in what Israel’s military said “seemed to be” a rocket attack. Israeli medics said they found the man in his car and released a video showing two vehicles ablaze.
Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, launched strikes on Israel soon after the war began, saying it was in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel struck back, bombarding Lebanon and targeting Hezbollah in deadly airstrikes, expanding its presence in southern Lebanon and amassing more troops near the border.
Fighting in southern Lebanese towns have intensified recently as Israel continues its ground operations. Israel on Sunday expanded its list of targets to include all bridges over the Litani River, which Defense Minister Israel Katz said Hezbollah is using to move fighters and weapons into southern Lebanon. It later struck the Qasmiyeh bridge near Tyre.
Katz also ordered the military to accelerate its destruction of Lebanese homes near Israel’s northern border as part of a strategy he described as aligned with Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
After Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel on March 2, the Israeli military launched an offensive that Lebanese authorities say killed over 1,000 people and displaced over 1 million. Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel.
Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee issued a warning an hour before the Qasmiyeh bridge near the coastal city of Tyre was struck.
Lebanese authorities say Israel’s strikes have killed more than 1,000 people and displaced more than 1 million.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Years before the rise of Instagram, Banksy figured out that the key to real influence lay in not in being famous, exactly, but in being anonymous.
The mystery of his identity has long been part of the value of his art, which for decades and across continents defied authority from public walls and self-shredded on the auction block. Now, Banksy’s apparent unmasking by the Reuters news agency has generated talk about whether the works themselves retain their cultural and financial value.
It also raises the question: Why pop the red balloon of his mystique in the first place? Many Banksy fans mourned the loss of the mystery and lashed out at the news outlet. One said it was like being told without warning that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
“I feel like they are telling me how a magic trick is done,” said Thomas Evans, a Denver-based artist on Instagram. “Sometimes I just want to enjoy the magic trick.”
But some art experts say the murals and the message will survive Banksy’s naming because his appeal wasn’t driven solely by his anonymity. He and his works — mischievous and also dark — stand as witnesses to injustice, oppression and inequality around the world, from the artist’s native England to walled-off Bethlehem and war-ravaged Ukraine. Subtract his anonymity, they say, and the work still inspires reflection and discussion.
“People buy his works because they absolutely love it,” said Acoris Andipa, director of the Andipa gallery in London. “The main feedback that I get is that they really, frankly, don’t care if they know who he is.”
Banksy, long thought to have been born Robin Gunningham around 1972, grew out of a tradition of street artists who viewed the undercover act of posting their art in public as a subversive form of expression. The postindustrial landscape of his native Bristol was his canvas and gallery. The walls of London, New York and elsewhere gave him a global stage just before the rise of social media.
Banksy’s apparent identity has been an open secret among protective fellow artists, and long been easy to find online for those who wanted to know. The Daily Mail reported in 2008 “compelling evidence suggesting” that was the artist’s birth name. It has been published by other news outlets, including by The Associated Press in 2016, as part of their coverage of the detective work.
Reuters reported last week that after The Daily Mail’s story, Banksy changed his legal name to David Jones — the second most-popular name in Britain. It’s also the given name of another rock star, the late David Bowie, whose Ziggy Stardust avatar inspired a 2012 Banksy painting of Queen Elizabeth II.
Bansky’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment, and the artist’s spokeswoman declined to participate in this story.
Reuters pieced together that a David Jones traveled to Ukraine with a well-known associate of Banksy’s in late 2022 — just before the artist’s work began appearing on buildings that had been bombed by Russia. Banksy later confirmed that he’d created seven murals in the war zone, including one of a child flipping over a grown man who is wearing a black belt. Russian President Vladimir Putin practices judo.
There’s evidence that even some in the establishment he was protesting have accepted Banksy. They didn’t arrest him, for example, after the Royal Courts of Justice removed a Banksy stencil depicting a judge in a traditional wig and gown beating an unarmed protester with a gavel. Some street artists groused that they might be arrested for creating such graffiti — but when it’s a Banksy, it’s art.
On Sept. 17, 2000, a Robin Gunningham was arrested for defacing a Marc Jacobs billboard atop a building on Hudson Street in New York.
In a handwritten signed confession, he described the work on the night in question: “I had been out drinking at a nightclub with friends when I decided to make a humorous adjustment to a billboard on top of the property,” he wrote in court records unearthed by Reuters and confirmed by the AP. “I painted eyeshadow a new mouth and a speach(sic) bubble” on the photo of a male model. He was charged with a misdemeanor.
The artist doesn’t need an alleged naming to make news. He created multiple works just in London in 2025, and grabbed headlines elsewherefor having his art sold or auctioned for millions. But Banksy has courted a public image centered around morality, justice and guerrilla tactics — he’s often likened to Robin Hood or Batman.
“Banksy woz ere,” he wrote with his animal murals at the London Zoo, which were removed in 2024.
Still, along with the sadness, there’s ample speculation in the art world and on social media that the artist himself orchestrated this round of naming. He didn’t deny the Reuters story.
That “would be very much in line with his practice of stunts and satire,” observed Madeleine White, the senior sales and acquisitions consultant at London’s Hang-Up Gallery, “As they say, ‘all publicity is good publicity.’”
She noted, however, that the backlash is directed at the media — not the artist, or the potency of his work. Reuters says it opted to publish some, but not all, of the information its reporters uncovered about Banksy’s identity, because he is a public figure, whatever his name — and he’s had an outsized influence on public events and discourse. What’s more, much of his work has been done on other people’s property.
Named or not, Banksy’s stardom lives, art experts say.
It endures in the wonder of his ability to erect new art under the noses of authorities well into the age of closed-circuit television and social media. It appeals because his spectacle and wit draw people in and the settings — the hulk of bombed buildings, for example, or Israel’s towering wall at the border of the West Bank — invite them to reflect. Now, fans are on the lookout for how and whether he’ll respond to the news of Robin Gunningham and David Jones.
Joe Syer, a Banksy expert and founder of MyArtBroker, said that the artist has always responded to world events. “And that’s where the real relevance, and value, sits.”
“If anything, Banksy’s anonymity has functioned less as a celebrity device and more as a way to keep the work universally accessible, detached from personality, ego, or biography,” he said in an email. “It allows the work to sit in public space, politically and culturally, without being anchored to an individual in the way the mainstream press often frames it.”
Christopher Banks, founder of the New York-based Objects of Affection Collection, reads Banksy’s naming “not as a biographical event, but as a structural stress test” of the artist’s system of managing his absence.
“Banksy’s best works carry their meaning without the author. He was there,” Banks wrote, citing the artist’s murals in Ukraine and his solidarity with the war’s victims.
“The name matters less than the presence. The presence was always what the work was about.”
Years before the rise of Instagram, Banksy figured out that the key to real influence lay in not in being famous, exactly, but in being anonymous.
The mystery of his identity has long been part of the value of his art, which for decades and across continents defied authority from public walls and self-shredded on the auction block. Now, Banksy’s apparent unmasking by the Reuters news agency has generated talk about whether the works themselves retain their cultural and financial value.
It also raises the question: Why pop the red balloon of his mystique in the first place? Many Banksy fans mourned the loss of the mystery and lashed out at the news outlet. One said it was like being told without warning that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
“I feel like they are telling me how a magic trick is done,” said Thomas Evans, a Denver-based artist on Instagram. “Sometimes I just want to enjoy the magic trick.”
But some art experts say the murals and the message will survive Banksy’s naming because his appeal wasn’t driven solely by his anonymity. He and his works — mischievous and also dark — stand as witnesses to injustice, oppression and inequality around the world, from the artist’s native England to walled-off Bethlehem and war-ravaged Ukraine. Subtract his anonymity, they say, and the work still inspires reflection and discussion.
“People buy his works because they absolutely love it,” said Acoris Andipa, director of the Andipa gallery in London. “The main feedback that I get is that they really, frankly, don’t care if they know who he is.”
Banksy, long thought to have been born Robin Gunningham around 1972, grew out of a tradition of street artists who viewed the undercover act of posting their art in public as a subversive form of expression. The postindustrial landscape of his native Bristol was his canvas and gallery. The walls of London, New York and elsewhere gave him a global stage just before the rise of social media.
Banksy’s apparent identity has been an open secret among protective fellow artists, and long been easy to find online for those who wanted to know. The Daily Mail reported in 2008 “compelling evidence suggesting” that was the artist’s birth name. It has been published by other news outlets, including by The Associated Press in 2016, as part of their coverage of the detective work.
Reuters reported last week that after The Daily Mail’s story, Banksy changed his legal name to David Jones — the second most-popular name in Britain. It’s also the given name of another rock star, the late David Bowie, whose Ziggy Stardust avatar inspired a 2012 Banksy painting of Queen Elizabeth II.
Bansky’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment, and the artist’s spokeswoman declined to participate in this story.
Reuters pieced together that a David Jones traveled to Ukraine with a well-known associate of Banksy’s in late 2022 — just before the artist’s work began appearing on buildings that had been bombed by Russia. Banksy later confirmed that he’d created seven murals in the war zone, including one of a child flipping over a grown man who is wearing a black belt. Russian President Vladimir Putin practices judo.
There’s evidence that even some in the establishment he was protesting have accepted Banksy. They didn’t arrest him, for example, after the Royal Courts of Justice removed a Banksy stencil depicting a judge in a traditional wig and gown beating an unarmed protester with a gavel. Some street artists groused that they might be arrested for creating such graffiti — but when it’s a Banksy, it’s art.
On Sept. 17, 2000, a Robin Gunningham was arrested for defacing a Marc Jacobs billboard atop a building on Hudson Street in New York.
In a handwritten signed confession, he described the work on the night in question: “I had been out drinking at a nightclub with friends when I decided to make a humorous adjustment to a billboard on top of the property,” he wrote in court records unearthed by Reuters and confirmed by the AP. “I painted eyeshadow a new mouth and a speach(sic) bubble” on the photo of a male model. He was charged with a misdemeanor.
The artist doesn’t need an alleged naming to make news. He created multiple works just in London in 2025, and grabbed headlines elsewherefor having his art sold or auctioned for millions. But Banksy has courted a public image centered around morality, justice and guerrilla tactics — he’s often likened to Robin Hood or Batman.
“Banksy woz ere,” he wrote with his animal murals at the London Zoo, which were removed in 2024.
Still, along with the sadness, there’s ample speculation in the art world and on social media that the artist himself orchestrated this round of naming. He didn’t deny the Reuters story.
That “would be very much in line with his practice of stunts and satire,” observed Madeleine White, the senior sales and acquisitions consultant at London’s Hang-Up Gallery, “As they say, ‘all publicity is good publicity.’”
She noted, however, that the backlash is directed at the media — not the artist, or the potency of his work. Reuters says it opted to publish some, but not all, of the information its reporters uncovered about Banksy’s identity, because he is a public figure, whatever his name — and he’s had an outsized influence on public events and discourse. What’s more, much of his work has been done on other people’s property.
Named or not, Banksy’s stardom lives, art experts say.
It endures in the wonder of his ability to erect new art under the noses of authorities well into the age of closed-circuit television and social media. It appeals because his spectacle and wit draw people in and the settings — the hulk of bombed buildings, for example, or Israel’s towering wall at the border of the West Bank — invite them to reflect. Now, fans are on the lookout for how and whether he’ll respond to the news of Robin Gunningham and David Jones.
Joe Syer, a Banksy expert and founder of MyArtBroker, said that the artist has always responded to world events. “And that’s where the real relevance, and value, sits.”
“If anything, Banksy’s anonymity has functioned less as a celebrity device and more as a way to keep the work universally accessible, detached from personality, ego, or biography,” he said in an email. “It allows the work to sit in public space, politically and culturally, without being anchored to an individual in the way the mainstream press often frames it.”
Christopher Banks, founder of the New York-based Objects of Affection Collection, reads Banksy’s naming “not as a biographical event, but as a structural stress test” of the artist’s system of managing his absence.
“Banksy’s best works carry their meaning without the author. He was there,” Banks wrote, citing the artist’s murals in Ukraine and his solidarity with the war’s victims.
“The name matters less than the presence. The presence was always what the work was about.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Iran has launched missiles at Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island that is home to a strategic U.K.-U.S. military base.
Britain condemned “Iran’s reckless attacks” after the unsuccessful attempt to hit the base. It’s unclear how close the missiles came to the island, which is about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from Iran.
Here is what to know about the remote but strategic base.
The United States has described the Diego Garcia base as “an all but indispensable platform” for security operations in the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa.
Home to about 2,500 mostly American personnel, it has supported U.S. military operations from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, the U.S. acknowledged that it also had been used for clandestine rendition flights of terror suspects.
The U.S. deployed several nuclear-capable B-2 Spirit bombers to Diego Garcia last year amid an intense airstrike campaign targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Britain initially refused to let the base be used for U.S-Israeli attacks on Iran, but after Iran lashed out at its neighbors, the United Kingdom said American bombers could use Diego Garcia and another British base to attack Iran’s missile sites. On Friday, the U.K. government said that includes sites being used to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The U.K. says that the British bases can only be used for “specific and limited defensive operations.”
But Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on X that U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer “is putting British lives in danger by allowing UK bases to be used for aggression against Iran.”
Iran previously has put a self-imposed limit on its ballistic missile program, limiting their range to 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers). Diego Garcia is well outside that range. However, U.S. officials long have alleged Iran’s space program could allow it to build intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at defense think tank the Royal United Services Institute, said that the attempt to hit Diego Garcia may have involved improvised use of Iran’s Simorgh space launch rocket, “which could offer greater range as a ballistic missile,” though at the cost of reduced accuracy.
Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Archipelago, a chain of more than 60 islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean off the tip of India. The islands have been under British control since 1814, when they were ceded by France.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Britain evicted as many as 2,000 people from Diego Garcia, so the U.S. military could build the base there.
In recent years, criticism has mounted over Britain’s control of the archipelago and the way it forcibly displaced the local population. The United Nations and the International Court of Justice have urged the U.K. to end its “colonial administration” of the islands and transfer sovereignty to Mauritius.
After long negotiations, the U.K. government struck a deal last year with Mauritius to hand over sovereignty of the islands. Britain would then lease back the Diego Garcia base for at least 99 years.
The U.K. government says that will safeguard the future of the base, which is vulnerable to legal challenges. But the agreement has been criticized by many British opposition politicians, who say giving up the islands puts them at risk of interference by China and Russia.
Some of the displaced Chagos islanders and their descendants also have challenged the deal, saying they weren’t consulted and it leaves them unclear on whether they will ever be allowed to return to their homeland.
The U.S. administration initially welcomed the deal, but U.S. President Donald Trump changed his mind in January, calling it “an act of GREAT STUPIDITY” on his social media platform Truth Social.
Starmer’s initial refusal to let the U.S. attack Iran from Diego Garcia further angered Trump, who said earlier this month that “the U.K. has been very, very uncooperative with that stupid island that they have.”
Passage of the U.K.-Mauritius deal through Parliament has been put on hold until U.S. support can be regained.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Across the country, collections are popping up to help Transportation Security Administration officers who have been without full pay for more than a month due to the partial government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security.
The charity World Central Kitchen, more accustomed to feeding those in war zones and disaster areas, started providing meals to Washington, D.C.-area airports after many TSA officers missed their first full paycheck. On Thursday, Feeding San Diego began distributing 400 boxes with pasta, beans and peanut butter as well as fresh produce like strawberries and potatoes to affected agents near the airport after a request from TSA and the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority.
Nonprofits are stepping in to help and coordinating closely with airports and local TSA offices because ethics rules around giving gifts to federal employees make it difficult for those affected by the shutdown to receive help directly.
Carissa Casares from Feeding San Diego said communicating with the airport means they can better tailor their resources and response to TSA workers’ needs.
“We need to work directly with the people who have direct access to these employees and get this food to them at a time and location that is most convenient to them,” Casares said.
Saturday marks the 36th day that the Department of Homeland Security has been shut down after Democrats refused to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection without changes to their operations after the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.
More than 120,000 DHS employees are working without pay, including roughly 50,000 Transportation Security Administration officers as negotiations between lawmakers and the White House on limits to immigration enforcement drag on.
The funding lapse comes just months after a 43-day government shutdown, the longest in the nation’s history, which drove long lines at food banks across the U.S. as over 700,000 federal workers worked without pay.
For those wanting to help, it’s not as simple as going to the airport and giving cash or gift cards directly to TSA officers, who are prohibited from accepting gifts at screening locations, according to a DHS spokesperson.
But Aaron Barker, president of the AFGE Local 554 in Georgia, said TSA officer unions don’t have the same restrictions and can accept donations to distribute to their members. Barker recommends those who want to donate look up their local union district on the AFGE website, or give through their local labor council.
“For some people it can be life or death,” said Barker. “It’s just sad and terrible that this is happening.”
Union members have told Barker they’re unable to cover utility bills or pay for their children’s medical procedures. They’ve received eviction notices or had cars repossessed. They’re having trouble affording routine items, too.
“People don’t think about the things they just naturally have in their home, like toothpaste, bathroom tissue, milk, detergent, dish liquid,” he said. “I’m sure those things are a necessity for every TSA officer.”
Nonetheless, no donation can be as effective as an end to the shutdown. “The first thing they want is their paycheck,” said Barker. “The money is the most immediate need.”
Operation Food Search is working closely with TSA to safely deliver food and set up a temporary pantry at St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
The Missouri hunger relief nonprofit’s CEO said it is the first time they’ve distributed directly to TSA employees where they work.
“It removes their need to make an extra trip and drive here,” Kristen Wild said. “So we’re really excited that the airport allowed us to directly serve right there.”
They gave away just over half their 400 prepared food bags during a 2-hour period earlier this week, according to Wild. Each bag contained just under $20 worth of nonperishables such as apple sauce, pasta, rice and beans. Rules prohibit federal employees from soliciting or accepting gifts or items of monetary value greater than $20 if the gift is related to their government position.
Wild said she thought the $20 limit might be waived since they were distributing food through airport-approved channels.
“We didn’t know for sure,” Wild said. “But to play it safe we just kept it right under the $20 per bag amount so there would be no challenge to it.”
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport officials were fielding PETA donations and local food banks’ pallets on Friday afternoon as they stocked their private pantry for off-shift TSA staff.
But they’ve also seen dining vendors, usually tasked with feeding hungry travelers, step up. Airport tenants have offered discounts and donated through TSA to cover entire shifts’ meals, according to airport spokesperson Perry Cooper.
“You know a lot of these people,” Cooper said. “You see faces and that throughout the day as you’re wandering through. And then to realize that some of these folks are here and they’re not getting paid, you know, really tugs at your heart to think what’s a way that we can help.”
The airport community’s support adds to the roughly $6,000 they’ve received in cash and gift cards plus another $10,000 worth of food and household products, Cooper said. That includes donations from the labor union for air traffic controllers, whose jobs are unimpacted by this partial shutdown but who understand the strain of working without pay from full government closures.
More than 460 people picked up fresh produce when local nonprofit Food Lifeline brought a truckload last Friday, according to Cooper. Most of the attendees were TSA staff, Cooper said, though some people might have been homeless. Boxes including pineapples and broccoli lined folding tables along the airport’s main drive.
Regular travelers like Musie Hidad said he thinks about the TSA agents working unpaid every time he enters through security.
“The work they are doing is serious and they aren’t getting paid for it,” said Hidad, an Amarillo, Texas, resident, who was traveling to Columbus, Ohio, for work. “My heart goes out to them.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Tech defense startups doing business with the U.S. military could someday look back at March 2026 as the month their relationships moved into the serious phase. Instead of dabbling in limited pilot projects with the startups, the Pentagon is starting to place big bets on a select few of these companies, writing them into core missions with the kind of fixed-priced deals that have long been standard among established defense contractors.
Last week, the U.S. Army announced an enormous deal with Anduril—a five‑ to ten‑year enterprise contract with a ceiling of up to $20 billion—that consolidates roughly 120 to 130 existing orders they already have under one umbrella and creates a one‑stop vehicle to cut future deals much faster. The Army already inked a brand-new $87 million contract with Anduril earlier this week, as the first task order under that agreement.
For venture-funded defense tech startups, which make everything from AI-powered drones to advanced threat detection systems, Anduril’s long-term contract sets a new bar that reflects how the young industry has evolved in the past few years—and opens the door to new opportunities and risks. The Pentagon’s embrace of a select few companies also comes at a time when the military has clashed with Anthropic, which develops general-purpose AI models and has sought to set limits on how the military can use its technology.
The contract is a “meaningful signal,” says Steven Simoni, cofounder of the autonomous precision weapons startup Allen Control Systems, which also has a contract with the U.S. Army.
“For a long time, the defense acquisition system rewarded presentations, prototypes, and promises. What we’re seeing now is an institutional desire to back companies that can actually build, deploy, and sustain real systems in the field,” he said in an email.
Anduril, which was founded in 2017 by virtual reality technology pioneer Palmer Luckey, has focused squarely on security applications like anti-drone defense and border protection from the start. While the company is reportedly eyeing a $60 billion valuation in its latest funding round, it is still a young company that pales in size next to incumbents like Lockheed Martin or Boeing when you look at revenue and order backlogs.
The enterprise contract “suggests the government increasingly sees Anduril’s stack as repeatable and scalable, rather than bespoke R&D,” says Ali Javaheri, a senior analyst at PitchBook.
This isn’t the first time the Army has done a deal like this with a tech company. Last year, it signed a 10‑year, enterprise service agreement with the data analytics and AI company Palantir, with a ceiling of up to $10 billion, consolidating about 75 of its existing software and data contracts into a single channel. Anduril’s contract both copies and extends that model: this time wrapping hardware and services around the software. It also doubles the ceiling, and ties the whole thing to a live mission—countering drones across the military. Massive enterprise agreements with tech providers are no longer one‑off flukes; there is now a pattern of VC‑backed platforms winning prime‑like enterprise deals that let them compete directly with the old guard.
“Autonomy, counter-UAS, and software-defined C2 are moving from experimental budgets into more durable procurement pathways, which is exactly the kind of shift investors have been waiting to see from defense tech,” Javaheri says, referring to counter-drone systems and the ways that system commanders are directing their forces.
Playing in the big leagues comes with some risks. All of the individual task orders that happen under the Anduril deal will be firm-fixed price contracts, or FFPs, which tend to only be used when both the requirements and costs are well understood. The advantage for the Army is price certainty: It locks in what it will pay, and the company has to eat any unexpected or surging costs over the life of the deal. The upside for the contractor is that if it can deliver more cheaply than expected, it keeps the extra margin.
All this is fine and dandy unless something goes wrong. For defense contractors, there’s a long list of examples—now cautionary tales—in which fixed-price structures ultimately proved to be a bad fit for complex or immature designs. There was Boeing’s KC‑46 tanker, which started as a fixed‑price incentive contract of around $4.4 billion to $4.9 billion. Technical problems piled up with its remote vision capabilities and fuel system issues, which led Boeing to ultimately absorb more than $7 billion in losses.
The Navy’s experience with Lockheed Martin’s Freedom‑class Littoral Combat Ships tells a similar story. Design flaws in the combining gear forced the service and the company to spend roughly $8 million–$10 million per ship on fixes.
Simoni says large contracts like what Anduril has notched set a “much higher bar,” as it requires “dedicated manufacturing capacity, consistent supply chain discipline, and the proven ability to deliver on timelines that matter operationally, not just technically.”
Matthew Steckman, president and chief business officer at Anduril, says taking on these kinds of risk is part of Anduril’s stated objective.
“That’s the goal, to take the risk out of the government’s hands and into industry, incentivizing defense companies to deliver capabilities on time for that price and holding them accountable if that outcome isn’t achieved,” he said in a statement to Fortune.
By signing on to write fixed-priced contracts with such an enormous ceiling—which, to be clear, the Army is under no obligation to fully spend—the government is signaling confidence that Anduril’s software and hardware are mature enough to warrant that kind of cost assurance. If they’re wrong, big bills could shake the startup’s financial position, and the Army formations that now depend on the company.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
