David Cote has already had one career most executives would envy. As CEO of Fortune 500 industrial giant Honeywell, he spent 15 years engineering a revival that delivered shareholder returns 150% greater than the S&P 500. 

Now, after coming out of retirement, he is executive chairman of Vertiv, an 80-year-old cooling company whose market cap has surged from under $11 billion to $109 billion since going public, writes my colleague Shawn Tully.

His route to the top might look preordained from where he sits today, but it includes the kind of setback that could make an executive question whether they’ll ever be fit for the corner office.

Cote began his 25-year GE career as a night-shift worker at an aircraft engine plant in New Hampshire, eventually rising to run its appliance business. In 1999, then-CEO Jack Welch approached him in the company dining room and told him he wanted him out by year-end. Cote repeatedly asked what he had done wrong. He says Welch never answered.

Three years later, Cote was CEO of Honeywell. One of corporate America’s most celebrated CEOs had effectively told him he had no future at GE. Another major industrial company soon handed him its top job.

After 15 years at Honeywell, Cote retired in 2018. Retirement did not stick. Convinced he had another chapter in him, he teamed up with Goldman Sachs to hunt for a company to acquire. They considered more than 1,000 companies before choosing Vertiv, a struggling cooling business that was entirely new to Cote.

The choice proved prescient, but the payoff was anything but immediate. Cote saw digital data growing much faster than the data centers needed to support it and positioned Vertiv in the middle of that expansion.

Then the bet faltered. COVID hit three weeks after Vertiv’s NYSE debut, and a later surge in orders exposed that the company was underpricing its equipment by 20% to 30%. Profits cratered, and by early 2023 the stock had fallen roughly 55% from its previous high.

Cote became heavily involved in day-to-day management, and the board installed a new CEO. As Vertiv repaired its operations, it kept investing in direct-to-chip liquid cooling and acquired cooling startup CoolTera in late 2023. It ramped up production as demand from AI data centers took off.

There is an irony in Cote’s trajectory. Welch’s decision to push him out of GE looked like a judgment on his prospects. Vertiv’s early struggles threatened to derail his second act. In both cases, what looked like a defining setback proved temporary.

The same can be true when a career, company, or idea hits a wall. A bad outcome can tell you that something needs to change without telling you how high the person behind it can ultimately climb.

Read the full piece here.

Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Cat Gioino here. Everyone wants safer neighborhoods, right?

That was Flock CEO Garrett Langley’s pitch to VCs after he built Flock’s first prototype. The Georgia Tech electrical engineer was not yet 30 when a string of break-ins in his own Atlanta neighborhood convinced him local police lacked the right tools. Recruiting two former colleagues, Matt Feury and Paige Todd, he built what started at first a simple license-plate camera and has now expanded to include video, gunshot detection, drones, and AI-powered search software. Launching Flock in his hometown of Atlanta in 2017, Langley promised to create a network of camera data that could be compiled together to solve any department’s cases. Homeowners associations were the company’s earliest customers, all before law enforcement contracts came to dominate the business. Today, the company operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states. Flock told Fortune the company has since raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation and crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue in the first half of this year.

Andreessen Horowitz was an early backer, leading Flock’s Series D in 2021, with a16z general partners David Ulevitch and David George calling the company an “n of 1″ startup,”effectively the only game in town.” Tiger Global led the Series E in February 2022, a $150 million round at a $3.5 billion valuation, joined by new investors 776 and Spark Capital alongside returning backers a16z, Bedrock, Matrix, Meritech and Initialized. By March 2025, Flock raised $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in a round led again by a16z, with participation from Greenoaks, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global and Y Combinator.

But in recent months, Flock has been caught up in a swirl of intensifying controversy, with privacy experts and civil liberties groups alleging officers used the cameras to stalk people, including exes, or that departments shared data across jurisdictions, including with ICE and in violation of state law. Vandalism has increased: across the country, people are dousing cameras in paint, ramming into them with their cars, smearing unknown substances across the camera front, or even chopping them down with chain saws, as documented in at least 36 states.

The biggest sticking point is who actually owns the data that Flock collects. Flock says it’s its customers: the police departments, the HOAs, the private customers who hold that data for a certain amount of time, up to customer discretion. Privacy experts say instead that Flock’s contracts allow it to retain certain data to train its models, and are pointing to an LAPD’s inspector general report as reason why that police department—like many other customers of Flock—are now renegotiating their contracts to specifically include language barring the company from using collected data. In March, cities like Boston, Flagstaff and Santa Clara all dropped Flock following a now-viral Super Bowl ad from Amazon’s Ring, which subsequently pulled its Flock integration. For its part, Ring never blamed the ad but said the integration with Flock would require more resources than anticipated. 

More recently, in July, the LAPD said it was renegotiating its Flock agreement over data-ownership concerns. The city’s own Inspector General audited the department’s Flock contracts this summer and quoted the actual signed language: one agreement lets Flock “retain the right to use the foregoing for any purpose in Flock’s sole discretion,” while a separate agreement grants the company rights to use anonymized footage for “training of machine learning algorithms.” Two privacy attorneys Fortune interviewed each independently described this same pattern from their own review of Flock’s contracts elsewhere. The experts say the stakes are beyond what one private company’s contract dictates—and they even pointed to cities that had pulled its contract with Flock only to sign on with one of its competitors, some of which are even less transparent regarding data collection. The experts sounded the alarms about what this means cross-jurisdictionally: once a department’s data can be pooled with other agencies’ data, what was once cross-jurisdictional collaboration now becomes a whole nationwide network that can let agencies (like ICE, for example) search the database, even in violation of state law or beyond the parameters of the initial contract.

Flock last week set out a new set of guardrails intended to curb abuse of its system, including advocating for a seven-day data retention policy for its customers.  Previously, Flock’s default was 30 days, and the company maintains on its website that the shortened week-long window will still cover “over 90% of searches.” But still, it’s a recommendation and not a rule, meaning each city’s contract can set its own number. LAPD’s, for example, guarantees five years. 

Garrett Langley told Fortune the company is “growing our customer base at ten times the rate of customer churn,” and stands by its record solving crimes and finding missing people. Flock built a business on the idea that watching everything makes communities safer. The question its contracts now raise is: safer for whom?

See you tomorrow,

Cat Gioino
X: @CatGioino
Email: catherina.gioino@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• In today’s CEO Daily: The U.S. imposes 50% tariffs on a wide range of Canadian imports
• The big leadership story: ‘Dads’ and ‘duds’
• The markets: Asia markets are down with big drops by Alibaba and Samsung
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. America’s trade war against its closest ally has escalated again, with the Trump administration invoking section 338 of a notorious 1930 law to impose 50% tariffs on a wide range of Canadian imports. The sticking points were both economic and cultural, with Quebec’s French-language laws even coming under attack. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is being praised for his response while Trump was criticized, even by members of his own party. This is not a war that America, or American business, is likely to win. Here’s why.

Trump’s options are limited. There’s a reason this latest missive only impacts 5% of Canadian imports. The Supreme Court already decided the president can’t invoke emergency powers to impose tariffs. Walmart is now using its tariff refund to lower prices. The Iran war has increased demand for Canada’s oil, aluminum and fertilizer; Saskatchewan is known as the Saudi Arabia of potash, with more than a third of global supply. And Trump’s priority is to lower costs for inflation-weary consumers ahead of the midterms, just suspending tariffs on imports of up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to bring cheaper foreign meat into the market. As Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer told me over the weekend: “There’s still time to walk this back … Trump not taking a public victory lap makes last-minute resumption of talks possible.”

Canada is becoming more resilient. The Canadian government is diversifying trade, letting in companies like Chinese EV giant BYD, and can borrow money at 4.2% for 30 years while comparable U.S. Treasury yields have risen to 5.3%. As a dual citizen who often travels north of the border, though, I think the biggest shift is psychological. Canadians now see the U.S. as a greater threat to their security than Russia or China, according to a survey by Nanos Research Group. “Canadian opinion has turned largely on the direct attacks from Donald Trump,” founder and chief data scientist Nik Nanos told me yesterday. “At the same time, a very strong majority of Canadians want to have a trade deal.”

Just as the Luftwaffe’s bombing of London during the Blitz of 1940 strengthened British resolve in World War II, Washington’s repeated attacks on Canada have consolidated support for Prime Minister Mark Carney. Carney’s approval rating now hovers around 60%, while Trump’s approval rating has sunk to around 35%. From his fiery speech in Davos to his comments this weekend, the prime minister has turned each assault into a rallying cry. “America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” Carney said at a press conference on Saturday. “That will never, ever happen.”

This is a dumb trade war. From Florida tourism operators to automakers with integrated supply chains, most U.S. companies view Canada as a partner in prosperity. The Canadian American Business Council estimates the successful renegotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement could create an additional 137,000 U.S. jobs and 98,000 Canadian jobs next year. Business Roundtable CEO Joshua Bolten issued a statement saying that “new tariffs and retaliation risk raising costs for American businesses and families.”

Canada used to be America’s best friend. Despite Trump’s claims, the world’s longest undefended border is not a pain point for illegal immigration, drug traffic or security threats. With bilateral cooperation, it’s the opposite. The economies remain intertwined, with the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor officially opening just days before the latest rift. U.S. officials weren’t invited. As one Canadian CEO told me recently: “In a dumb trade war, you eventually work out the trade but you never regain the trust.”

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. The Big Apple has a new claim to fame. According to a recent report, New York City has overtaken Silicon Valley to become North America’s top market for tech jobs. The report, by commercial real estate firm CBRE, found that the New York metro area had 394,000 techies at the end of last year, while the San Francisco Bay area’s total dipped to roughly 375,000.

The reason: Wall Street’s voracious appetite for AI talent combined with a slow, but continual drip of layoffs at many of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech firms. But CBRE notes that the Bay Area still ranks No.1 for its overall “Tech Talent” ranking which includes things like wages and AI strength. And we still have better burritos in San Francisco!

Today’s tech news below. —Alexei Oreskovic

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

MacKenzie Scott has been one of the most generous philanthropists during the past few years, and an episode in college may help explain why. 

After finalizing her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, Scott ended up with a load of shares she earned from helping to build the e-commerce giant during its early days, when she helped with business plans and contracts. Upon their divorce, Scott received roughly a 4% stake in Amazon, or about 139 million shares at the time. 

Since 2020, Scott has reduced her stake by 42%, selling or donating about 58 million shares. The philanthropist is still worth about $37 billion today, despite having donated $26 billion through her philanthropic platform Yield Giving during the past few years. Yield Giving has donated to thousands of organizations, focused on issues including DEI, education, disaster recovery, and more.

Last fall alone, she donated well over $400 million to several education- and DEI-focused organizations, many of which received the largest gifts in their respective histories—and her grand total for 2025 exceeded $7 billion, making her the biggest megadonor that year.

Scott sees the value of and need for support, especially during someone’s early, formative years. After all, she had to borrow money from her college roommate when she was struggling. 

“It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible,” Scott wrote of giving in an essay published to her Yield Giving site last October. “Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give?

“It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”

After graduating from Princeton University, Scott went on to become a talented novelist—a product of none other than Toni Morrison’s teaching. And in 2005, Scott published her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, which won an American Book Award in 2006. Morrison reviewed the book as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.” Scott, as of recent, is actually returning to her roots and publishing a novel chapter by chapter on Substack.

Her roommate from Princeton saw the difference that the $1,000 gift had made in her life, and that inspired her roommate to start a company 20 years later that offers loans to low-income students without a cosigner. 

That roommate was Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, who went on to found Funding U, which has provided $80 million in low-interest loans to about 8,000 students who needed help to pay for college, according to Princeton. Tarkenton still plays it cool, though, when asked about how she changed Scott’s life. 

“I’ve always said she would have graduated without that grace, as would probably a lot of the thousands of kids I help because they are hardworking people who kind of try to figure it out,” Tarkenton told Princeton Alumni Weekly. “But small graces everywhere add up—or big graces, when it comes to MacKenzie’s [giving].”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on November 16, 2025.

More on MacKenzie Scott:

• MacKenzie Scott’s donations have turned philanthropy on its head—why her style of giving actually works
• MacKenzie Scott is using her $26 billion philanthropy push to rescue organizations in danger after the Trump administration’s funding cuts
• MacKenzie Scott has donated more than $19 billion—but it’s barely made a dent in her net worth because of the power of Amazon shares

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In June, a crowd packed into Italie Deux, a Paris shopping center owned by Ikea’s real estate arm, to watch adults hurl pillows at each other in a padded ring. The event marked the French debut of the Pillow Fight Championship, a U.S.-based combat sport league. Onlookers were invited to join in, with professional fighters offering free lessons to anyone willing to jump in.  

The event was sponsored by Ingka Centres, the real estate arm of the largest Ikea franchisee, Ingka Group. It’s an unusual investment for a real estate company. But it’s part of a deliberate strategy at Ingka Centres, part of Ingka Group, which is ranked No. 88 on Europe’s Fortune 500 list. The real estate group operates 38 properties, all of which include an Ikea store, across 15 markets in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. As physical retail competes with online shopping, and concerns grow over a broader loneliness epidemic, the company is betting that hosting community experiences can help its shopping centers thrive and grow. 

“A shopping mall should be like an amusement park,” says Sebastian Hylving, chief executive at Ingka Centres. “If there’s no queue outside, you need to change what you’re offering.” A mall’s location is a relatively minor factor for people when determining whether to visit, he adds. “The rest comes down to what’s inside, and whether it’s worth returning to.” 

In Sweden, the company has partnered with the Svenska E-sportförbundet to host e-sports events and tournaments. In 2025, it hosted a Pippi Longstocking–themed storytelling experience at its Livat shopping and community centers in China, which drew more than 24 million visitors. This year, Ingka is bringing the experience to the rest of its shopping international centers.  

“Visitation is not something you can rely on anymore,” Hylving says. “It’s something you need to earn. You need to give people a reason to visit, to stay longer, and come back.” 

Europe’s physical retail sector has weathered a turbulent stretch, including the shutdown of stores during the pandemic and the rise of online shopping. In the U.K., 13,500 retail stores closed in 2024, according to the Centre for Retail Research.  

But the sector is showing signs of recovery: European cities saw a 39% year-on-year rise in store openings in 2025, according to the real estate firm JLL. CBRE’s 2026 European Real Estate Market Outlook predicts a rising trend among shopping centers of courting visitors with experiences, such as event spaces and in-store fitness classes, rather than relying on retail alone. 

“We’re seeing a shift back to analog experiences,” Hylving says. Whether it’s cinemas, buying records, or people moving away from online dating and back towards in-person matchmaking events, he says, “we’re starting to remember how enjoyable it is to share experiences with others in real life.” The challenge, Hylving stresses, is whether a shopping complex can become a genuine fixture in people’s daily routines, rather than a one-off visit.  

Eight in 10 adults believe everyone deserves time to play, according  to a survey of 3,000 adults by Ingka Centres. Yet 30% cite reduced access to suitable spaces as a barrier. Nature zones, calm corners, and community hangouts topped the list of spaces people wanted. 

In response, Ingka is weaving natural gathering spots into its properties. At one of its India locations, currently under construction, a garden is being designed for local visitors to eat and gather.  “We want to build a network of playful spaces, a sort of living room for the community,” Hylving says. “If a place can become part of everyday life, visitation and growth will naturally follow.” 

However, a lack of time, money, and social norms can prevent adults playing in public spaces. Three in four people surveyed listed at least one barrier to playing in shopping centers, and a third say they simply want to run their errand and leave. 

Even so, there are signs Ingka’s approach is working. “We’re having a very good year,” Hylving says. “Visitation is above goal, and sales in our meeting places are above goal.” The company’s most recent figures show footfall across its portfolio reached 320 million in 2025, an 18% increase on the year before. 

Special attention is given to architecture and design. “The more relaxed and happier you are, the looser the grip on your wallet,” Hylving says. “Our shopping centers are designed as a figure of eight loop, so visitors can see where to go next, with natural stops along the way to rest and refuel,” he says. Natural light and sightlines matter, too. The more you can see from any given point, Hylving explains, the more likely you are to keep walking.  

That design philosophy has paid environmental dividends, too. Over the past decade, Ingka Centres has cut its operational climate footprint by 77%, a reduction Hylving attributes in part to prioritizing natural light over artificial lighting and sourcing local materials rather than shipping them in. 

Ingka has proven it can turn European shoppers into a captive, playful audience, riding a broader recovery in physical retail. Whether the same formula holds in a market with an entirely different culture is the next test. 

The company has named India one of its top three priority markets worldwide, with two mega-projects under construction near Delhi—in Gurugram and Noida— the latter is set to become Ingka’s first property to include a hotel. The developments are large even by Ingka’s own standards, Hyvling says, and early operational snags have already surfaced on-site. Feeding roughly 3,000 construction workers a hot meal daily has become logistically complicated amid gas shortages, he explains. 

“We’re humble that stepping into India is very different,” he says. “You cannot apply all what we have learnt in other markets straight off. You need to adapt.”  

Between the pressures of online competition and a broader economic squeeze, shopping centers cannot afford to stand still, says Hylving. “Every day is game day. You can’t rest on your laurels.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Apple’s foldable iPhone lands next month.
• Shein launches $27 billion IPO—a fraction of its peak price.
• Markets: Mixed as traders await market-moving events from Bessent, Warsh, and Nvidia.
• Midterm predictions.
• 20 million Americans have opted out of work.
• AI is comically bad at drawing maps.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might win points with his boss, President Trump, for his intervention in the market for U.S. Treasuries — doubling its buybacks to at least $4 billion — but he will earn no points from the bond vigilantes.

The history of such market interventions is littered with failures. Given Bessent’s participation in the Soros raid on the pound in 1992, when the Bank of England and the U.K. Treasury were forced to devalue sterling, one would have thought that Bessent knew that markets have a way of outsmarting government officials.

The Treasury is engaged in a new version of “Operation Twist,” buying long-term debt to keep longer-term yields down and selling an equal amount of short-term debt, which tends to raise short-term yields. Overall, this will tend to flatten or “twist” the yield curve — at least initially.

The key distinction to make is whether Operation Twist is conducted on its own as a part of fiscal policy, or whether it is accompanied by a change in monetary policy.

The reason is that two main factors drive yields. First, is the supply and demand of credit, including the size of the fiscal deficit and corporate and household demand for credit. Second is inflation, which is almost entirely determined by monetary policy.

When implemented on its own with no change in monetary policy, there is a possibility that Operation Twist can succeed temporarily, but only if market players agree that the moves engineered in rates are roughly acceptable. However, if they are not – for example, if the government fails to narrow the deficit – all that will happen is that holders of longer-term debt will shift their positions along the yield curve until they can earn the returns that reflect their outlook.

If Operation Twist is implemented against a background of changing monetary policy, the chances of success are very different.

There have been three previous attempts at implementing Operation Twist: two in the U.S., each by the Fed in 1961-65 and 2011, and one by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) from 2016 until 2024.

In the 1961 case, U.S. authorities sought to boost capital spending by lowering long-term rates, while stimulating inflows of funds from abroad by raising short-term rates. The policy failed because underlying monetary policy proved too expansionary. Between the start of 1961 and October 1965, the annual rate of broad US money growth (M3) accelerated continuously from 3% to 10%. By 1964-65, inflation was on the rise, and bond vigilantes demanded higher yields. Their demands torpedoed the policy. 

In the second case, as a part of its QE strategy, the FOMC decided in September 2011 to extend the average maturity of the Fed’s portfolio by selling short-term and purchasing longer-term Treasury securities. Its aim, under Chair Ben Bernanke, was to stimulate housing and corporate investment by lowering long-term rates in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008-09.

Unlike the 1961 episode, this time, the U.S. economy needed faster money growth to escape the effects of the Great Recession. Between January 2011 and May 2012, annual growth of M2 surged from 4% to 10%. This assisted in generating a gradual economic recovery in 2013 and 2014. Without the acceleration in money growth, it is doubtful whether the Fed’s Operation Twist in 2011-12 would have had any effect.

The third case involves Japan, where YCC, or yield curve control, was implemented by the BOJ as part of its grandiosely titled QQE, or Qualitative and Quantitative Easing, between 2013 and 2024. Along with zero and negative interest rates, YCC was a component of an attempt at monetary easing by the BOJ under Governor Kuroda. This operation must be viewed as a failure. Even though the Bank of Japan purchased very large volumes of securities under QQE, driving the Bank’s holdings of Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs) up to 46% of net Japanese government debt outstanding, most of the time broad money growth (M2) remained below 3% per year, a rate too low to boost either economic activity or inflation.

The underlying reason for the failure of YCC in Japan was that QQE was poorly designed. Instead of purchasing securities from firms and households, which would have boosted M2 growth, the BOJ bought securities mainly from banks. This resulted in nothing more than an asset swap between the commercial banks and the BOJ, with no upturn in money growth.

In the 1961-65 U.S. case, Operation Twist was overwhelmed by sustained rapid money growth, which resulted in inflation. In the 2011 U.S. case, Operation Twist was a minor component of a much-needed QE policy that boosted broad money growth. This aided an economic recovery and an escape from deflation. In Japan’s case, YCC was a component of a failed QQE strategy.

Scott Bessent’s version of Operation Twist can only succeed if monetary growth is supportive of his action. During the first half of 2026, broad money has been growing at nearly double-digit rates. This fact will torpedo Bessent’s interventions, making them pointless. For Bessent to reach the promised land of lower long-term rates, the Fed must tighten monetary policy and slow the rate of growth in the money supply.

Steve Hanke is a Senior Contributing Columnist at Fortune and a professor of applied economics at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book, co-authored with Matt Sekerke, is Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System, Wiley 2025. John Greenwood is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.

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

• Multimillionaire Big Bang Theory star Rajesh Koothrappali breaks down his work-life balance routine—including 16-hour days on set with just 6 hours of sleep. The mantra that gets him through tough days? “Take a breath. Take a pause. Let’s just see what happens.”

Kunal Nayyar has a life most would describe as a dream. He landed his breakthrough role as Rajesh Koothrappali on The Big Bang Theory at just 26, rose to global fame almost overnight, and went on to earn around $1 million per episode at the height of the show’s success—becoming one of the highest-paid actors on television ever. 

Today, the 45-year-old actor, producer, and entrepreneur has an estimated net worth of $45 million, a résumé spanning film, television, publishing, and tech. But none of that has insulated him from difficult days. 

When things start to unravel, Nayyar doesn’t reach for motivational podcasts or productivity hacks. He repeats one word to himself instead: Surrender.

“Sometimes, if I find myself really banging my head against something, and it’s just one of those days where everything’s going wrong, I just tell myself surrender,” Nayyar told Fortune. 

“Take a breath. Take a pause. Let’s just see what happens.”

The practice is more than simply having a mindful moment. He’s challenging his inner critic.

“Our minds work in such a way where on a difficult day, it keeps going to the worst-case scenario,” the actor explained, adding that the reality is rarely as bad as you imagine. And even in the very worst case, you always come out the other side. “So in those moments, you have to really just look at your mind and say, stop. Take a breath. Surrender to this moment and let’s see what happens.”

Nayyar admits he uses the mantra “quite often, to be honest.” Especially after auditions, in between waiting to hear how you did, and trawling the internet to see if someone else got the job—something any job seeker can relate to.

“I don’t think anything is in our control other than how we perceive things.”

Kunal Nayya’s daily routine

The British-Indian actor has a string of ventures to his name, including Good Karma Productions and, most recently, the document-storage app IQ121. He’s also still acting, most recently leading Christmas Karma—and it’s a career that keeps him relentlessly busy.

“I don’t have a regular nine-to-five job, so it’s different. When I’m shooting, then I’m a slave to whatever my schedule is,” Nayyar said. “Those days can lead into 16-hour days, with six-hour turnarounds.”  

That means he might only get six hours of sleep and rest before the next call time. It’s why even when he’s off work, he sticks to a disciplined routine: “Otherwise, it’s easy to just sleep all day—or not sleep all day, but relax all day—because you’re exhausted from shooting.”

5:30 a.m.—Wake up

“I do nothing for the first hour—hour and a half,” Nayyar explained. “I have coffee. I sit on the patio, check my phone, maybe talk to the family. But I really do nothing. I don’t get into work mode. I go to the gym, I come back, and I probably start my work day around 9:30 a.m.”

The afternoon—Recharge time

“I have the weirdest thing where I don’t do anything in the afternoon, I need that time in the afternoon to recharge,” Nayyar said. On days he’s not filming, he’ll take his last meeting at 2:30 p.m. and then rest from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. “I try to do nothing,” he added. “If I can take a nap, I’ll take a nap. And then after 5pm I’m back on.”

On set, he’s equally intentional about protecting his focus. Rather than scrolling between takes, Nayyar brings a book, often choosing something his character might read to stay in the zone.

5 p.m.—Unwind

In the evenings, if Nayyar isn’t working he’ll make time to see a friend. Instead of trying to squeeze time in their calendars, he’ll just call them or invite them over for a cup of tea. Otherwise, you’ll find him sitting on his patio: “With my dog, sitting in silence, maybe watching some sports–I love watching golf, NFL, EFL. It really calms me.”

7:30 p.m.—Dinner

“I like to have dinner during the week at home, no matter what.” Does he cook for himself? No.

9:45 p.m.—“I’m in bed.” 

Nayyar keeps a strict bedtime, with the aim to be asleep no later than 10:30 p.m.—and he has a daily wind-down routine to make sure that happens. “When I’m lying in bed, I put my phone down, and right before I sleep, I just like to go completely quiet. I don’t try to think about tomorrow or anything. Just go completely silent until I fall asleep.”

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Melinda French Gates have mantras for when they’re overwhelmed too

It’s not just a Hollywood problem. Even the world’s top leaders have shared that between messy return-to-office politics, scrambling to keep up with AI, and an unforgiving schedule, work gets too daunting for them, too, sometimes. 

When that happens, billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates says she “replays” Warren Buffett’s words of wisdom in her head.

“I remember what he said to us originally, which is, ‘You’re working on the problems society left behind, and they left them behind for a reason.” French Gates previously revealed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “‘They are hard, right? So don’t be so tough on yourself.’”

The Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, take a more aggressive approach by confronting the cause of his anxieties head-on. 

“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over,” he said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement. “I find as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call, or send off the first e-mail message…The mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.”

Meanwhile, Google’s CEO repeats this mantra to himself when he’s overwhelmed: Most decisions are inconsequential.

“It might appear very tough at the time. It may feel like a lot rides on it, [but] you look later and you realize it wasn’t that consequential,” Sundar Pichai said at Stanford’s Business School. “There are few consequential decisions, and judgment is a big part of leadership.”

Essentially, most of us aren’t surgeons saving lives at work—that font color or PowerPoint presentation you’re worrying about probably won’t matter in 10 years’ time.

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on January 15, 2026

Read more executives’ work-life balance routines from Fortune’s Orianna Rosa Royle:

• Arianna Huffington swears by one boundary to switch off from work every night—and Ralph Lauren’s CHRO says it’s the best thing she’s ever done too
• $38 billion Twilio CEO wakes at 4:30 a.m., works Sundays, and runs laps around his house between meetings to blow off steam
• Multimillionaire musician Will.i.am says work-life balance is for people ‘working on someone else’s dream’ and not for visionaries—he grinds from 5-to-9 after his 9-to-5
• Billionaire chipmaker CEO Lisa Su holds meetings on weekends and sends feedback after midnight because leaders aren’t born: ‘They’re trained’
• Craving work-life balance is a huge red flag, says Fortune 500 Europe CEO—and like Barack Obama, he happily works through weekends

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Why do disagreements about vaccines, climate change or elections often feel so personal? Our research suggests it is not simply because other people have different beliefs. It is because we think those beliefs are mistaken.

We are behavioral scientists who study the role of beliefs in politics and everyday life. Our new research finds that people are more disturbed by others’ beliefs when they feel those beliefs are not merely different from their own but are based on incorrect information.

For example, two people may disagree about the ideal level of immigration, but if one believes immigrants commit more crime than U.S.-born residents and the other is convinced the statistics show otherwise, their disagreement becomes a conflict over reality and truth.

That distinction matters because public debate over polarization often starts with a simple idea: People prefer others who think like them – “birds of a feather flock together,” as the saying goes. Social scientists call this belief homophily, and many researchers have studied how these shared beliefs shape friendships, neighborhoods, media habits and political life.

The idea has strong intuitive appeal: People often live near others who share their politics. People also tend to consume news and social media that fit their existing views, a pattern linked to echo chambers and political polarization.

Our research, based on four studies with more than 2,000 U.S. adults, suggests that the story that we and others have formulated is incomplete. People do not react the same way to all disagreements: They are especially bothered when they are convinced that someone is wrong.

Wrong beliefs fuel avoidance

In one study, we asked participants to recall a situation in which another person believed one thing and they believed something else. Some participants described a situation involving different beliefs, while others recalled one with incorrect beliefs. For example, one participant recalled a disagreement about whether couples should live together before marriage, viewing it as a difference in priorities rather than a dispute over reality. By contrast, another participant recalled disagreeing with a friend who believed drinking soda and eating fast food was harmless, a belief the participant considered factually wrong.

Their emotional reactions were dramatically different: Participants who saw the other person’s belief as incorrect reported having felt more disturbed, frustrated and upset than participants who saw the belief as simply different.

In another study, participants first reported their views on divisive topics, such as climate change, capital punishment and policing. Then they saw a hypothetical social media post that opposed their view. The more confident participants were that the author’s belief was incorrect, the more disturbed they felt. They also said they would be more likely to avoid, distrust or block that person. By contrast, being confident that the other person’s belief was simply different – not wrong – did not predict avoidance.

Finally, we gave participants short fictional stories – for example, about a neighbor who believed that a politician was corrupt. All participants read the same basic facts. The only change was how we framed the other person’s beliefs.

We told participants that their fictional neighbor had either different beliefs or incorrect beliefs about the politician’s alleged corruption. Though they were given the same information, people were substantially more disturbed when the other person’s belief was framed as incorrect.

Why false beliefs make people frustrated

Our studies point to several possible reasons for why false beliefs feel so upsetting. One is consequences.

False beliefs can often lead to bad decisions. For example, someone’s incorrect beliefs about vaccines or climate change can affect not only us, personally, but also other people we care about, including, in some cases, the person holding the seemingly false belief.

A second possibility is that false beliefs threaten people’s sense of shared reality. People rely on others to make sense of the world. When someone appears to deny what feels obvious or true, the conflict can feel more disturbing than merely having different perspectives.

A third possibility is that people treat false beliefs as signals about the person holding them. When we are convinced that someone is wrong, we may conclude that they are biased or irrational. Psychologists have described this as a sign of naive realism, the belief that we see the world objectively, while those who disagree with us are distorted by bias or self-interest. That kind of judgment can make a false belief feel socially threatening.

Difference may still matter for close relationships

Our findings do not mean that people are indifferent to differences.

In our social media study, participants were less able to imagine having close relationships, such as family or romantic relationships, with someone whose beliefs differed from theirs, even if they did not consider those beliefs to be false. Shared beliefs and values may matter more when people think about spouses, relatives or close friends than when they think about neighbors, colleagues or strangers online.

But for less intimate relationships, the perception of wrongness was the key predictor of negative feelings and avoidance. People did not want to avoid those who disagreed with them; they wanted to avoid those they believed were mistaken.

This helps explain why some debates become so emotionally intense, especially online. A disagreement about taste or sports may stay harmless, but a disagreement about vaccines, climate change or election integrity can feel different because people often see one side as factually wrong and potentially harmful.

The paradox of fact-based debate

Public discussions often call for more fact-based debate, but we believe such a drive for hard truths may be counterproductive. Facts matter, and empirical evidence should guide debates, but our findings suggest a paradox: When people use facts to defend their preferences, tastes or values, they may turn a disagreement over priorities into a dispute over who is right and who is wrong, potentially turning up the emotional heat.

That shift can make disagreement harder to tolerate. A person can “agree to disagree” about which school policy reflects the right priorities or which candidate best represents their values. It is much harder to agree to disagree when facts are at issue. The nastiness of intellectual disputes, therefore, depends in part on how people frame their positions. Even if the contents of the disagreement are the same, it is very different to say “we disagree” than to say that “you are wrong.”

Andras Molnar, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan and George Loewenstein, Professor of Economics and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

You tell an artificial intelligence agent, an AI capable of autonomous reasoning and multistep actions, “Find me a shirt for less than $30, but do not buy it.” The agent finds one – and places the order anyway.

You challenge the charge. The retailer shows the order came through your account. The AI agent provider shows your instruction not to buy. The payment service shows the charge. Each record may be accurate. But nothing in those records links the charge to the task you gave the agent to find – but not buy – a shirt.

A conventional chatbot suggests a shirt and waits. An agent can use your account, contact other services and complete the transaction. One sentence sets off a string of actions across systems run by different companies. Each company can verify only the part it sees. Settling the dispute takes an answer that spans all three: Did this agent, acting for this person, take this action within the limits of this task?

A Senate bill points toward the problem. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced the AI AGENT Act, S. 5051 on July 21, 2026. It defines a “custodial user agent” as one authorized to act for a user in a transparent, documented, limited and revocable manner, and generally requires such agents to keep real-time records of actions taken for users. It also directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology, known as NIST, to identify protocols or develop technical standards for verifying that a user delegated authority to an agent and for keeping auditable records of the actions an agent takes.

But the bill would not expressly require a verifiable evidence chain across the different systems involved, from when a user initiates a task to the final outcome. In the shirt scenario, such a chain would link the user’s instructions to the agent, the agent’s actions and the records held by the retailer and the payment service.

A look at how a verification system could be designed offers some insight into some of the technical challenges AI agents are poised to introduce.

What the marketplace can see

My doctoral research used years of data breach records to follow organizations over time. It depended on stable identifiers, which are labels or numbers that point to the same organization or event across different records. When the identifiers changed or failed to match, one history fractured into several incomplete ones.

An agent purchase has the same weakness: The retailer may recognize the AI agent provider without identifying the particular agent, and the payment service may label the same customer differently. Matching the user, provider and particular agent across those records gets investigators to the transaction – but they still need something to show that the user granted authority for that task.

In technical systems, a credential is data that a system accepts as evidence of identity or authority. Many websites use OAuth, an industry-standard security protocol for delegating authorization to access online services in a way that protects users’ credentials such as passwords. It generates an access token that an application presents to gain access to a protected service.

That standing authorization may have been approved weeks earlier. The application may still obtain or present a valid access token that permits checkout today, even when the current instruction says to search but not buy. The retailer sees a usable token and carries out the transaction. In that arrangement, the task-specific restriction against buying remains inside the AI agent provider.

The evidence has to travel

For this kind of accountability to work, five things would have to be in place: a verifiable binding among the user’s account, the agent at a specific time and the task; limits specific to that task; verifiable linkage across the transaction; a check before each action; and records whose later alteration can be detected. Payment systems have begun assembling those pieces.

The first record identifies the authenticated user account that approved the task and the agent that received the authority. The retailer cannot rely only on the AI agent provider’s name. The provider binds the account, agent and task in an authorization record and digitally signs it, allowing the retailer and payment service to verify who issued it and whether it has been altered.

The AI agent provider also preserves the original request and converts it into limits that other systems can enforce. For the shirt task: search for 15 minutes, no purchase, no passing purchasing power to another agent. Before the agent begins, the user sees and approves that structured version. If the translation is wrong, investigators can compare the rule against the words behind it.

One way to create that linkage is for a task reference to travel with each request. It is unique to one job, encodes no name, account number or other direct identifier, and appears in every participating company’s record. Engineers already use a related device, a trace identifier, to correlate events from one operation as it moves between services.

The task reference links scattered records to one job. It does not itself confer authority. The task reference must therefore be bound to the user’s approved rule in the agent provider’s digitally signed authorization record. Because even a random identifier can link activity across services, it should be short-lived and visible only to companies participating in the task.

Someone then has to check the rule where the money moves. At checkout, the retailer validates the signed authorization record and evaluates the proposed purchase against it. A prohibition on buying stops the transaction even when the application has broader account access. A bank transfer or release of medical records could trigger fresh confirmation. Any authority passed to another agent must retain the same task reference and remain within the original limit.

After the decision, the retailer’s system records the agent, task reference, rule evaluated, time, decision and outcome. The payment service retains the same reference, and the provider keeps the instruction and approved rule. Each company keeps a tamper-evident record, so later changes can be detected. The user gets a plain-language receipt: “Your agent searched three stores and attempted checkout. The purchase was blocked because buying was not authorized.”

Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2, meets some of these requirements. It creates records that can show the user’s approved limits and the information presented to each participant when a transaction is disputed. AP2 shows how the evidence could travel. It does not decide who bears the loss or specify how long each company must keep that evidence and how it can be retrieved later.

Beyond NIST’s initial scope

NIST is reviewing comments on its February 2026 draft concept paper about agent identity and permission. It asks how an agent can prove its authority, connect that authority to a person and produce verifiable records.

Its proposed initial effort covers agents operating inside organizations, where greater control and visibility can be maintained over the agents and the systems they access. The paper excludes agents arriving from untrusted outside sources from this initial effort, though it says public-facing or individual agents could be addressed later.

Consumer agents crossing company boundaries represent the case NIST deferred. Each company keeps its own identifiers, authorization language and retention rules. A dispute can stay unresolved even when each company produces its records exactly as stored.

A dispute over a $30 shirt might be easy to wave off, but the records can fail in the same way when an agent moves $40,000, submits a benefits appeal or requests a prescription refill in your name. In those disputes, it might not be difficult to prove that the agent was allowed into the service. It’s another matter to prove whether you did or did not authorize the agent to do what it did on your behalf.

Aashis Luitel, Associate Teaching Professor of Artificial Intelligence, University of the Cumberlands

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The federal government is injecting millions of dollars into efforts to combat feral hogs – and it’s considering spending even more in the coming years. The problem has grown for decades, but our research has found that a recently revived federal effort offers the potential for bringing the hogs under control.

Feral swine roam in 35 states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The most recent population figures, from 2016, estimated that 7 million feral pigs were loose in the nation then. That number may be much higher today: Feral hogs breed year-round and each year can produce up to two litters of four to 12 piglets per litter. Feral hog populations have been estimated to be able to double in just four months.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that wild pigs do between US$2.5 billion and $3.4 billion in property damage each year. At least $800 million of that is destruction of crops.

Beyond crops, feral hogs spread disease to livestock, damage farm infrastructure such as fences and roads needed for agricultural production, destroy recreational parks and cause extensive environmental damage to wildlife habitats, water quality and plant ecosystems.

They’re hard to control because feral hogs roam across large areas of privately owned land. If neighboring landowners don’t work together, the hogs just move rather than being killed or contained. Basic economic theory says landowners would wait for others to spend the time, money and energy to control hogs – which means nobody does, and the problems grow.

An initial test

In the 2018 Farm Bill, a major piece of legislation covering wide areas of agricultural policy, Congress agreed to spend $75 million to encourage private landowners to step up together to kill feral hogs.

That program was active in selected counties in 10 hog-plagued states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. Starting in 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture funded private landowners’ purchases of trapping equipment, on-farm trapping efforts and restoration of land the hogs had damaged.

Originally slated to end in 2023, the program was given $105 million more to spend through 2029 in the major budget and immigration package Congress passed in July 2025. Through Sept. 21, 2026, the government is accepting grant applications for the first $35 million allocation from that money.

The Farm Bill that has passed the House and is awaiting debate in the Senate would increase that funding by $150 million and extend the effort through 2031.

A useful question, before spending all that money, is how effective the first test of the program was.

Reducing hogs’ damage to cornfields

Our research team of agricultural economists at the University of Tennessee and the University of Arkansas set out to examine the program’s performance.

We used federal data on crop insurance claims to compare crop damage in counties where the program was active against counties where it was not, both before and after the federal trial began.

Not all the counties reported crop damage from wildlife. Among those that did, counties where the program wasn’t operating had crop insurance claims for wildlife damage to corn that averaged 70 acres (17.5 hectares) per policy.

In counties where hog eradication efforts were coordinated, however, the average claim for cornfield acres damaged from wildlife declined to 10 acres per policy. That is a statistically significant result – and given the scale of corn production across the study region, it represents a meaningful reduction in losses.

When comparing crop insurance claims for soybeans, wheat, cotton and peanuts, however, we found no difference between counties with active hog control efforts and those without.

A way forward

Corn is reportedly the crop most commonly damaged by feral swine. That could help explain why we found cornfields to have the only statistically significant reduction in damage.

More generally, the program’s effectiveness may have been more limited because it launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, which restricted the community meetings and public outreach that could have boosted landowner participation. Also, the fact that it was a pilot effort may have made people reluctant to commit, fearing the program might disappear in a few years.

It is likely our study underestimates the benefits of the program. Some farmers have crop damage that is not severe enough to warrant an insurance claim, so those numbers are excluded from our analysis. And our study did not evaluate any potential changes in noncrop damage from feral hogs, such as to property, livestock, recreational parks and the environment in general.

Our research indicates the hog control program can be effective and offers several ideas for improving it, both over time and with more funding. For instance, if the efforts focused specifically on corn-producing counties, it might yield more success per dollar invested. And expanding participation through additional outreach efforts could mean more hogs are caught or killed across a wider area, amplifying the return further.

Feral hogs will be nearly impossible to eradicate completely, and the damage they cause isn’t going away either. The data suggests that with the right design and sustained investment, the federal government has a program that can make a real difference for America’s farmers.

Chris Boyer, Professor and Department Head, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Tennessee; Aaron Smith, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Tennessee, and Eunchun Park, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, University of Arkansas.

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

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Eight Sleep, the startup behind the $2,999 mattress cover that puts both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to sleep, wants to stop being known for the celebrities who use it. Instead, the company is pursuing FDA clearance to detect and treat sleep apnea, a pivot it hopes will turn a bougie tech gadget into a business that insurers, not just billionaires, will pay for.

Matteo Franceschetti, Eight Sleep’s cofounder and chief executive, told Fortune the company’s filing with the FDA is progressing “fairly smoothly.” The company began pursuing clearance with the FDA for its sleep apnea detection and mitigation technologies in 2025 and is conducting clinical studies in support of its submissions.

Currently, the company has only published one independent study on the Pod’s benefits, alongside several study preprints that were both directionally positive but not yet independently verified. There are several studies, however, funded by Eight Sleep, on sleep apnea that have been published in scientific journals. Eight Sleep also collects and has a massive cache of user data that, when aggregated and de-identified, can be used to identify broader trends and support research, reports, and studies on sleep and health. 

FDA clearance for sleep apnea detection would likely put Eight Sleep in more rigorous regulatory lane as Apple’s Watch and Samsung’s Galaxy Watch and Ring, both cleared by the FDA since 2024 to flag sleep apnea “risk.” The FDA has a lower bar for the detection of apnea—snoring so bad that the sleeper stops breathing—than diagnosis.

Eight Sleep is pursuing the more clinical prescription-based diagnostic aid of which there are also existing home sleep-testing devices. While the Apple Watch can tell users they have signs of apnea, Eight Sleep is hedging it will be able to quantify apnea events per hour.

In August 2026, Eight Sleep also began a clinical trial with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health, testing whether its product, the Pod, can automatically reposition sleep apnea patients, and therefore become an alternative to a CPAP machine. U.S. consumer health-tech firms are increasingly using the emirate’s Department of Health as a springboard for medical credibility. Just weeks before Eight Sleep’s announcement, Oura signed its own joint research program with DoH on women’s health and cardiometabolic risk, while Whoop landed a $75 million investment and research partnership with Mubadala to validate its biomarker labs in what became its first market outside the US.

The goal, Franceschetti said, is to get insurers to treat the Pod like a medical device rather than an out-of-pocket luxury. The company told Fortune it’s actively working on making the Pod more affordable, though it isn’t yet clear how it gets there without a different cost structure.

Eight Sleep’s Pod already qualifies for HSA and FSA reimbursement through the fintech Truemed. Whether regulators ultimately agree it treats a condition, rather than merely tracking one, remains an open question.

Courtesy of Eight Sleep

The Pod sits atop your mattress and connects to a hub that pumps heated or cooled water through internal tubing, with each side of the bed running its own heat zone. Built-in sensors track heart rate, breathing, and movement, and an AI model adjusts temperature through the night and generates a sleep score. Automatic control and tracking require an ongoing $199-to-$399 annual subscription; without it, users get manual temperature buttons only.

Both billionaires are among executives, athletes, and celebrities who credit the company with transforming their sleep. Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc is on its investor cap table and F1’s Aston Martin Aramco signed on as a team partner in February 2026 in a reportedly “eight-figure” deal. 

In March, Eight Sleep raised $50 million from Tether, the company behind the world’s biggest stablecoin, at a $1.5 billion valuation. Last year, the company was profitable. Franceschetti’s ambition, he told Fortune, is to become “the biggest health technology company in the world.”

From Milan to San Francisco

Franceschetti is neither an engineer nor a doctor. He trained as a securities lawyer at a large Milan firm, in a family of lawyers, judges and doctors, and describes himself as “the bad guy” for straying into business; his father’s death at the end of 2008 pushed him toward something riskier. He calls himself part race car driver, bold and ambitious, and part lawyer, intellectually disciplined, a combination he credits for keeping a hardware startup alive against long odds.

In 2014, Franceschetti, Massimo Andreasi Bassi, and Alexandra Zatarain started Eight Sleep out of a garage, where the team built its first prototype and threw a “pajama party” to demo it for investors. Zatarain, then 24, wrote the pitch deck in a few hours and joined that night; she is married to Franceschetti and now runs brand and marketing, while Bassi became chief technology officer. An Indiegogo campaign brought in more than $1.2 million (well over the $100,000 goal) and about 8,000 pre-orders before the product existed, proof of demand the founders used to get into Y Combinator’s 2015 class after two rejections.

The decade since has been a steady climb through funding rounds rather than one big break: a $14 million Series B in 2018 led by Khosla Ventures, an $86 million Series C in 2021 near a $500 million valuation, a $100 million Series D in August 2025 near $1 billion, and the Tether round in March 2026 that pushed the valuation to $1.5 billion.  The company has raised more than $310 million total.

The numbers behind the hype

Eight Sleep has never disclosed revenue, and Franceschetti dodged specifics with Fortune. Third-party estimates pegged 2025 revenue at roughly $264 million, flat with 2024, though Franceschetti disputes that, saying revenue has grown “close to 30x” since the Pod’s 2019 launch, that the company was profitable in 2025, and that cumulative Pod sales exceed $500 million. Eight Sleep now sells in 35 countries, including a 2026 launch in China.

“If you look at the DNA of our people, the way we think, probably Oura, Whoop, Garmin, we’re probably in the same ballpark,” Franceschetti said, noting roughly 85% of Eight Sleep customers already own a wearable. His pricing analogy is Tesla: the Pod is the Model S, a premium flagship meant to fund cheaper models later. “We don’t want to be luxury at all,” he said.

The smart-mattress category Eight Sleep wants to escape just delivered a cautionary tale. Sleep Number, the unit-share leader, filed for Chapter 11 in June 2026 with $672 million in debt after net sales fell 16%; Sleep Country Canada bought its assets a month later for $701 million. Eight Sleep, direct-to-consumer with roughly 100 employees, says it has avoided that trap.

Market-size estimates vary widely, from a $1.87 billion global smart mattress category to nearly $5 billion by other counts. Franceschetti’s preferred comparison is wearable-health brands: Oura, valued around $11 billion, and WHOOP, valued at $10.1 billion. “We see ourselves as a completely different market that literally doesn’t exist,” Zatarain told Fortune.

The problem Eight Sleep is chasing is real regardless of which market number is right. Roughly 30.5% of American adults sleep fewer than seven hours a night, per the CDC, and RAND Europe estimates insufficient sleep costs the U.S. up to $411 billion a year. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says undiagnosed sleep apnea alone costs the country nearly $150 billion a year, the exact condition Eight Sleep’s FDA filing targets.

From charity to business plan

Franceschetti said the most consequential part of Eight Sleep’s future has nothing to do with billionaires or race cars. He recalled a doctor at a major U.S. medical institution emailing him about an underage patient whose medical condition prevented her from regulating her own body temperature; her family couldn’t afford a Pod. 

“Cancer will be a big market for us,” he said, describing patients whose hormone-related treatments disrupt temperature regulation.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When the July Jobs Report was released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the headlines were understandably dominated by the drop in overall nonfarm payroll employment. Look beyond the headlines, however, and you’ll find an economic comeback story that was easy to miss: the growth of temporary help services. 

The facts are clear. Out of more than 300 industries analyzed by BLS, temporary help services has added the second-highest number of jobs in 2026. It’s also shown growth every month this year, including 3,400 jobs in July. One in ten jobs created this year have been temporary positions.

So what’s driving the return of temporary work? 

As the chief economist at the American Staffing Association, which represents third-party staffing and recruiting firms, I’ve been closely tracking the return of temporary help services after a multi-year decline. I believe this recovery goes beyond the staffing industry. It coincides with shifting perceptions of work with the potential to change the way employers and employees interact with each other.

Contract employment is becoming a popular avenue for young adults seeking an entry point into the workforce. When the BLS last examined contingent work in 2023, young adults under the age of 24 were four times more likely than prime age workers and six times more likely than older workers to hold contingent jobs. An ASA-i360 survey suggested that 40 percent of temporary workers in 2025 were between the ages of 18 and 29.

This format of work is uniquely appealing to young job seekers in an uncertain labor market. The ability to hold multiple assignments at once, or in addition to a full-time job, aligns with young job seekers’ aversion to relying on one employer for economic security. The autonomy afforded by such arrangements also resonates with a generation of young workers who are less willing to trade their time and well-being for the uncertain promise of a long-term career.

But young workers are not embracing temporary employment by themselves. Their choices are coinciding with employers’ own preferences for such arrangements as well. At a time of rising inflation as well as increased economic uncertainty, employers are turning towards project-based hiring as a way to limit costs and avoid another episode of over-hiring like the Great Reshuffle.

That shift is visible in the business received by staffing companies today. Demand for temporary workers is rising in many segments of the labor market such as construction, transportation, professional services, healthcare and government – not because these industries have suddenly embraced contract work, but because employers are seeking the ability to adjust their workforces as conditions change.

Together, shifting preferences among employers and young job seekers in favor of contract work are reshaping the terms of employment around greater autonomy and adaptability. Employers are willing to trade the stability of a permanent workforce for the flexibility to adjust to volatile market conditions like rising cost pressures as well as economic uncertainty. At the same time, young workers are willing to trade the stability of a traditional career path for flexibility over how they work and what they gain from it.

Naturally, this kind of rugged individualism poses risks to the broader labor market. As workers gain more autonomy over where they build their careers, employers will have to fight for their headcount through investments in culture and retention. Otherwise, they could realize substantial disruptions to their knowledge pipelines and productivity, just as increased retirements as well as lower levels of immigration constrict the number of eligible job-seekers available to them.

As employers exercise their freedom to execute short-term adjustments in headcount, workers will have to assume more accountability for building long-term careers out of each assignment and every experience. They will also require robust safety nets to seamlessly transition between contracts. Initiatives like microcredentialing programs, unemployment insurance, and portable benefits could limit the severity of future labor market downturns by supporting this growing cohort of workers.

Temporary help services employment often stands at the forefront of changes within the broader labor market, and its recent pickup signals more than a mere rebound in demand. It is just beginning to rise at a time when both employers and young adults are increasingly viewing contract work as a new kind of security within an uncertain labor market.

But with the flexibility afforded by contract work comes responsibilities for both sides. Employers will have to compete more aggressively to attract the employees they need, while workers will have to be more deliberate about turning short-term assignments into long-term careers. As permanence becomes harder for either side to promise, the flexibility to adapt might become the most valuable form of security in the labor market of tomorrow.

Noah Yosif serves as Chief Economist at the American Staffing Association (ASA). He is also a member of the Economic Advisory Committee of the World Employment Confederation (WEC).

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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On Dec. 13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing. Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates. But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since December 1st. “We were able to find the vehicle on Flocks, actually get the actual plate, learn that it was a car rental,” said the Providence police chief. Police tracked the car thanks to Flock and traced him to a storage unit in New Hampshire less than a week after the shooting.

Somewhere in Florida, at almost the same time, a different man was looking into Flock-collected data, but for an entirely different reason. Officer Christopher Goodson wasn’t hunting a stranger, but was watching for his estranged wife. Using his department’s access to Flock, he logged more than 700 unauthorized inquiries into her vehicle between Sept. 2024 and June 2026, and was arrested just last week.

Flock Safety has spent nine years promising to solve crime. At the same time it may have built the most pervasive surveillance network in American history—one that is increasingly drawing loud pushback from advocates worried about what’s been collected, and who has access to the data.

Flock’s network of solar-powered cameras doesn’t just record license plates, they log the make, model, color and identifying details of every vehicle that passes in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states. Then law enforcement offers can search that data using natural-language descriptions (for example car color or a bumper sticker) across thousands of jurisdictions simultaneously. Theoretically any police department with a Flock contract can reconstruct where you drove, when, and how often. The company says data belongs to its customers and is typically deleted in 30 days. But Fortune found the LAPD’s own Inspector General discovered that at least one Flock contract lets the company retain data for five years and use it for “any purpose in Flock’s sole discretion.”

The backlash is intense, and keeps growing: Residents in 36 states have vandalized or destroyed the automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras, 82 contracts have been terminated since 2021, and city council chambers from Boston to Santa Clara have become battlegrounds over a technology most residents didn’t know was watching them. Says Anne Toomey McKenna, a privacy attorney and visiting law professor at the University of Richmond: “Our Fourth Amendment was not designed for the persistent and pervasive surveillance environment which we live” in. She called it a “Catch 22″—the Supreme Court has ruled that accessing someone’s location data is a search requiring a warrant, “but then we step into this gray area” once police simply buy the data instead of compelling it.

When reached for comment regarding the controversy, Flock CEO Garrett Langley told Fortune that the company was started to solve crimes. “Every day, Flock helps solve crimes that would otherwise go unsolved. From finding missing children, to solving murders, violent crime, and recovering stolen vehicles, Flock gives investigators leads they didn’t have before,” Langley said. “That impact is why we started Flock, and it drives every decision we make about how this technology should be built and governed.”

It has been a very lucrative enterprise thus far. Flock is backed by blue-chip VC investors including a16z and Tiger Global. The nine year old startup told Fortune in April it had raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, has taken in $1.2 billion total, and crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue in the first half of 2026. The company has now expanded into video, gunshot detection, drones, and AI-powered search software. The company confirmed to Fortune that over half of new revenue is non-license plate readers.

“We are setting a baseline that we believe the industry should follow with our recent privacy enhancements and measures to proactively address officer abuse,” Langley continued. “Local communities, not Flock, decide their sharing rules, offense filters, and retention windows,” he continued. “Our job is to give them better tools that reflect their needs and values of their communities and to help hold individuals accountable when someone misuses the system.”

But one thing is clear: The technology that made Flock a billion dollar business is turning it into what some see as a villain.

A significant funding background

Langley was an electrical engineer in metro Atlanta, hit by a string of break-ins, when he started asking why local police had so little to work with. “Due to a lack of investigative evidence, over 80% of property crime is never solved,” he later wrote in a company profile posted on Y Combinator’s site. “There was a clear gap in the market, left unfilled by ineffectual alarm systems and expensive, outdated traditional security cameras,” he wrote. “With the right team, technology, and policies, we could actually not only solve, but eliminate crime.”

Langley recruited two former colleagues—Matt Feury and Paige Todd. According to a16z’s announcement of Flock’s Series D (which the VC firm led in 2021), the three built their first prototype at Langley’s kitchen table in three weeks. Homeowners associations were the earliest customers, making up more than 40% of Flock’s business four years in before law enforcement contracts came to dominate. At the time of the funding, a16z general partners David Ulevitch and David George called the company an “n of 1” startup, noting it was “effectively the only game in town.” Tiger Global led the Series E in February 2022, a $150 million round at a $3.5 billion valuation, joined by new investors 776 and Spark Capital alongside returning backers a16z, Bedrock, Matrix, Meritech and Initialized. By March 2025, Flock raised another $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in a round led again by a16z, with participation from Greenoaks, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global and Y Combinator. Neither a16z nor Tiger responded to Fortune’s requests for comment.

Investors have no doubt been thrilled with the growth, but some residents in Flock-patrolled areas are rebelling. In July, angry citizens cut down Flock cameras with an electric saw in upstate New York; they threw paint on them in Oakland, California; and rammed a truck into one in Idaho. One man in Florida has taken to sitting in a lawn chair holding a piece of cardboard on a pole to block a camera’s view. Just this week, a man dressed up as Darth Vader showed up at a San Diego meeting to “praise” the city’s use of Flock cameras. Flock cameras have now been vandalized in at least 36 states, according to NPR. Asked about the vandalism, Langley said that people engaging in it likely aren’t being told they may be committing a felony, and said residents with concerns about the technology should raise them with their city council rather than the cameras themselves.

Furthermore a Washington Post investigation found nearly 50 cases of officers charged with or accused of misusing the cameras, many involving tracking current or former romantic partners. The Institute for Justice keeps a public database of more than 150 documented cases nationwide, sorted into four types—stalking, non-law-enforcement use, misread errors, and other misuse—drawn from media reports and public records. IJ says this is likely an undercount, since officers rarely have to give a specific reason for a search.

In March, Boston, Flagstaff and Santa Clara all suspended or ended their Flock contracts after Amazon’s Ring pulled its Flock integration in the wake of backlash to a Super Bowl ad. Reporting by the San Francisco Standard found 82 Flock contracts terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of them in just the first five months of this year alone. Still, Langely told Fortune these were not affecting business. “Flock continues to bring on significantly more customers than are leaving. We are growing our customer base at ten times the rate of customer churn, and agencies are turning more to Flock every day to help deter crime and make their communities safer.”

Not every city ends up on the cancellation list, even after loud public pressure. Peter K. Jackson, counsel at Greenberg Glusker, pointed to West Hollywood, which he said renewed its Flock contract without amendment “despite a tremendous public rancor at various city council meetings.” Jackson told Fortune that outcome is partly due to a structural quirk: West Hollywood doesn’t run its own police department, relying instead on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for policing, meaning the city council isn’t the only party with a say in whether the cameras stay. Jackson suggested that may have given council members reason to hesitate before cutting a tool the county sheriff’s office had come to rely on, even as residents packed meetings to object.

Many of the cities that are, however, cancelling contracts have city council meetings that sometimes share similar themes: a growing resentment against surveillance technology and data collection.

Privacy advocates are particularly worried about long or lax retention periods that mean data is searchable for months or even years. “Flock’s standard retention period is thirty (30) calendar days from the date of capture. This standard retention period applies to all customer data, unless otherwise specified in the individual customer’s agreement,” read Flock’s Evidence Policy. Then last week, Flock recommended a default to seven days, and introduced “Evidence Mode,” letting detectives preserve specific data past that window for active cases. Langley wrote that Flock’s own analysis found “over 90% of searches without a full plate are done within a week,” and that “every community will continue to choose the retention period that fits its public safety strategy.” But Tom Bowman, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security & Surveillance Project, told Fortune that the policy changes still leaves it up to the customer. “This is just a recommendation,” he said. “This is not legally binding.” The real retention period for that city is whatever its own contract says.

That’s something confirmed by a government audit of one of Flock’s largest customers. In July, the Los Angeles Police Department was renegotiating its own Flock agreement over data-ownership concerns. Around the same time, the department’s own Inspector General audited its Flock contracts and published the findings. One of its agreements lets Flock “retain the right to use the foregoing for any purpose in Flock’s sole discretion,” while a separate agreement grants the company rights to use anonymized footage for “training of machine learning algorithms.” The report continued quoting the agreement: “Flock shall retain all data collected for five years at no charge to the Department or City”—60 times longer than Flock’s “standard” 30-day policy, and more than 260 times longer than the 7-day figure the company spent last week promoting publicly.

Privacy advocates say this is the real danger: a simple surveillance camera tracks your passing of a certain location at that point in time. This, on the other hand, can potentially follow your every move. “ALPR systems have become so ubiquitous that they are not just tracking your location at a single point in time, but they are tracking your pattern of movements,” Bowman explained. “They can essentially reconstruct your entire daily life: where you go to sleep, where you go to work, where you go to service, so on and so forth.”

In response to the LAPD’s ongoing renegotiation, Langley told ABC7 that “the technology is really simple.” He explained: “A car drives by, we take a picture. It’s a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That’s what the technology is. It’s actually not that complicated, it’s pretty simple.”

Both Jackson and McKenna say Flock’s language of “customers own the data” can be true, but that also doesn’t mean Flock also can’t retain the data and use it to train its technology. Currently, LAPD responded to its audit by drafting new contract language that would explicitly bar any vendor from using city data “to train, fine-tune, or improve any algorithm or artificial-intelligence system” going forward.

Michael de Dora, U.S. advocacy lead at Access Now, told Fortune a larger issue is what happens once that data crosses jurisdictions. Once police departments have a contract with Flock, he said, they “can then go to other police departments and agencies and say, ‘Hey, let’s pull all this Flock information together,’” creating what he called “a searchable, shareable historical database of the whereabouts of Americans” that is, in his words, “a totally unregulated space right now.” A retention limit set by one city’s contract, in other words, doesn’t necessarily bind what happens to that same data once another agency has pulled a copy of it.

The question of cross-jurisdictional data sharing is already playing out. IJ’s database documented a Johnson County, Texas sheriff’s deputy who ran a nationwide Flock search for a woman suspected of having had an abortion, in May 2025. Another case stems from Wisconsin in which officers, in released court records under probable cause, searched for a man because his “vehicle travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source state for marijuana as it is legal there” and searched his car for marijuana.

Is this backlash or is there a legal argument to be made?

Both McKenna and Bowman connect the contract fight to a bigger, unresolved legal one. Courts have long held that a driver on a public road has no reasonable expectation of privacy, but McKenna argues that no longer holds up cleanly.

Bowman pointed to United States v. Chatrie, decided this year, which held that police accessing precise location history is a search requiring a warrant regardless of scope, precedent he argues could extend to ALPR networks that, at scale, can rebuild someone’s entire daily movement rather than capturing one plate at one intersection.

“Law enforcement can circumvent the Fourth Amendment simply by pulling out their wallet and buying that data,” he said, a gap privacy advocates have been trying to close for years. “The Fourth Amendment’s Not For Sale Act is a bill that has been introduced in multiple Congresses that continuously receive support and then gets blocked at the last minute,” Bowman said. If it ever passed, he argues, it would functionally require a warrant before police could buy the kind of location data ALPR networks generate, which is why he doesn’t expect Flock to support it.

“ALPR systems have become so ubiquitous that they are not just tracking your location at a single point in time, but they are tracking your pattern of movements,” Bowman said, “They can essentially reconstruct your entire daily life: where you go to sleep, where you go to work, where you go to service.”

Flock cameras are helping police catch criminals and potentially act as deterrents before a crime is even committed. But citizens and courts are now deciding what price to put on Americans’ freedom to move without being watched.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Luis Manuel Aviles was arrested by immigration authorities, his son was entering his ninth month on the USS Abraham Lincoln with the Navy— a vessel that set a U.S. military record for uninterrupted time at sea, stirring concerns about supply shortages and deteriorating mental health among soldiers.

Luis Manuel Aviles, 48, was arrested after leaving his house to take his car to the mechanic, according to his wife, Argelia Aviles. She said her husband, a handyman in Key West, Florida, has a permit to work in the United States. Originally from Nicaragua, he has lived in the U.S. for 19 years.

“He dedicates himself only to work so he can put food on the table at home. He is a good father. He loves his children with all his soul,” said Argelia, 47.

Aviles’ arrest comes as the Trump administration rolls back immigration protections for military families to pursue its mass deportation agenda, detaining at least dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops.

At least six family members have been deported and one self-deported, the AP found in the first accounting of such detentions, which the government does not track. One spouse, the wife of a U.S. soldier who spent more than a month in federal immigration detention, was removed from a deportation flight to Brazil after the AP’s reporting.

One of the military’s most highly advertised immigration benefits is “military parole-in-place,” which allows the spouses, children and parents of active-duty service members and veterans to obtain legal immigration status from within the country. Not everyone qualifies: those who overstayed visas or who already applied for legal status at the border, for example.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Border Patrol agents arrested Luis Aviles on Saturday in Key West and that he will remain in ICE custody while the government seeks to deport him.

“Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws,” the department said Sunday, adding that the Trump administration “does not pick and choose which laws to enforce.”

Aviles’ son said he has been working 12-hour work shifts for more than 250 days without a break on the USS Lincoln, which is deployed in the Middle East. The deployment has raised widespread concerns about the impact on service members who are away from land for long periods, food shortages, as well as the increasing strain on the ship and its equipment.

The Pentagon referred all questions to the Navy. The Navy didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Sunday afternoon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously called conditionsaboard the Lincoln “completely misrepresented.”

Joshua Aviles wrote in a Facebook post Saturday that he was still on the USS Lincoln “fighting for a country that has given me everything” when he got a call about his father’s detention on Saturday morning.

“This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly treated like a criminal,” Joshua Aviles wrote.

Katherine Delgado, 28, Joshua Aviles’ sister, said that Joshua joined the military in part because he thought it would improve his father’s chances of getting citizenship and so that he would “no longer be living in fear of being arrested.”

She said being apart from Joshua, who she calls her “best friend” and her “ride-or-die,” has been devastating.

“I spent weeks without knowing where he was,” Delgado said. Once she heard from him, and was told that he wasn’t getting enough food, she said, she has spent hundreds of dollars to send him care packages with food and hygiene products — some of which never arrived.

Joshua is “supposed to come home soon,” Delgado said, referring to news that the ship her brother is on will soon be brought out of service in the Middle East. “And he’s gonna come home without his father.”

The son’s lengthy deployment has been challenging for Luis Aviles, according to his wife. He told her that he was looking forward to the deployment finally coming to an end. When six months passed and his son didn’t come back, Aviles was distraught, she said.

“He was excited,” she said. “He wanted to hug his son, as he hadn’t seen him for nine months.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Michael Burry criticized Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. shares as overvalued and disclosed that he recently exited his position in the Chinese tech giant in order to build a “large” position in rival online retailer JD.com Inc. 

“I planned to move most of it back after a month or two. No longer,” Burry said in a post on Substack, adding that Alibaba’s share price would have to “fall by half for me to get interested again.”

The remarks by the Scion Capital Management founder, made famous in The Big Short for his bets against the US housing market prior to the the 2008 global financial crisis, follow Alibaba announcing its plan to raise about HK$80 billion ($10.2 billion) via a share sale to fund its AI investments — which would be Hong Kong’s largest follow-on offering by a company on record.   

Read More: Alibaba Seeks $10 Billion From Share Sale for AI Expansion

“I cannot bless share issuances,” he said, adding that he expects return on invested capital from the company to continue declining.  

Alibaba reported a 75% profit decline for the quarter ended in June as it ramped up AI-related capital spending, further spooking investors about future returns from the Chinese tech sector.  

The company’s American Depositary Receipts are down 18.6% for the year and fell 8.6% Friday. Its Hong Kong-listed shares are also down 13.9% for the year so far.  

Burry had disclosed in April that he built a new position in Alibaba. The Chinese firm said separately on Sunday that it priced the offering at HK$112.70 per share, compared with the Hong Kong market closing price of HK$123 on Friday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Fifty-six million years ago, Earth’s forests reached a tipping point. They had grown dense, lush canopies at the start of one of Earth’s most intense episodes of greenhouse warming. But those canopies began to thin.

As global temperatures rose by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius), heat and drought put stress on the forests, killing large numbers of trees. Forest canopies opened, exposing the ground to more sunlight and altering the movement of water through the landscape.

In southern Wyoming, ferns briefly flourished where relatives of elms, walnuts, dawn redwood and avocado trees once thrived. Then palms and other warmth-loving plants spread northward.

In a new study in the journal Science, my colleagues and I show how those Wyoming forests lost 60% of their canopy during this period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, and how it took them well over 100,000 years to recover.

The PETM was Earth’s closest natural analog to the warming the world is experiencing today, although humans are releasing carbon dioxide roughly 10 times faster than the planet’s natural processes did then.

Understanding what happened to the forests may help humanity recognize similar thresholds before the planet crosses them again.

Reading the forest from fossil leaves

As paleobotanists, my colleagues and I use plant fossils to identify which species once lived in a place. We wanted to answer a harder question: What did the forest itself look like and how did it change?

The structure of a forest – and importantly its canopy – controls the amount of light that reaches the forest floor, the temperature, water habitat and amount of carbon the forest can store, making it one of the clearest indicators of ecosystem function.

But how do you measure the density of a forest that disappeared 56 million years ago?

Ecologists measure canopy density using what’s known as leaf area index. Dense forests with multiple layers of leaves intercepting sunlight have a high leaf area index score, while open forests that allow more light to reach the forest floor have a lower score. Because the forest canopy influences shade, temperature, water loss and photosynthesis, the index provides a powerful measure of forest function.

Our clues to the density of forest canopies millions of years ago came from microscopic plant cuticles – the thin, waxy outer skin of leaves that can survive for millions of years in organic-rich sediments.

You can still see the shapes of epidermal cells in these fossil leaf fragments, and that’s important.

The cell shape reflects the amount of sunlight the leaf received while growing. Leaves that grow in shade develop longer, more elongated cells as they stretch out seeking sunlight. Those exposed to more sun develop shorter, rounder ones.

We turned that relationship into a tool for reconstructing ancient forests. To calibrate it, we collected soils from forests across Central and South America spanning a wide range of canopy densities. Each handful of soil contains cuticles shed by many different plants across the canopy, reflecting the structure of the forest as a whole.

The fossil record preserves this same fragmented leaf litter. Comparing the shapes of thousands of epidermal cells with the leaf area index we measured revealed a remarkably strong relationship: The more elongated the cells, the denser the forest canopy above them.

That relationship allowed us to reconstruct the structure of Wyoming’s forests millions of years ago and show how they changed over time.

When forests reach their limits

One of the most surprising discoveries was that the forests did not enter the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum in decline.

Just before rapid warming began, the forest canopies reached their greatest density in hundreds of thousands of years, likely reflecting favorable growing conditions as atmospheric carbon dioxide began to increase. A leading theory for the source of that carbon dioxide involves volcanic eruptions.

That flourishing forest did not last, however. As temperatures climbed, heat and drought overwhelmed the benefits of higher carbon dioxide levels. The canopy rapidly thinned as trees died, and it remained much thinner for over 100,000 years.

The forests functioned very differently in this diminished state, and that affected the surrounding environment. Ancient soils gave way to coarser river deposits, suggesting that the loss of canopy altered how water and sediment moved through the basin.

The changing climate changed the forest, and the forest changed the landscape.

Lessons for today

This sequence carries an important lesson for today.

Higher carbon dioxide levels like the world is experiencing now can stimulate plant growth, but only while temperatures and water remain within the limits that trees can tolerate.

Beyond those limits, heat, drought, insects, pathogens and wildfire can overwhelm any fertilization effect that would boost growth.

Around the world, many forests are already showing signs of diminishing as temperatures rise, in addition to deforestation for timber, crops and rangeland that further reduce their resilience.

Forests recovered, but it took over 100,000 years

The story of the ancient forests of 56 million years ago does not end with collapse.

Over time, the increased breaking down of rocks in the warmer climate, known as weathering, gradually pulled carbon from the air, storing it in marine sediments. That allowed the climate to cool and water to become more available.

Forest canopies recovered, eventually becoming even denser than before the warming began. As the forests expanded, they likely restored their ability to stabilize soils, regulate the water cycle and draw carbon from the atmosphere, helping reduce the greenhouse effect and boost the planet’s long-term recovery.

Our study shows that carbon dioxide emissions have pushed forests beyond their physiological limits before, triggering changes that ripple from vegetation to rivers and across entire landscapes. It also shows that forests are remarkably resilient when given time to recover, but what counts as time is far longer than a human lifespan – it requires thousands of generations.

Today, human-caused carbon emissions and warming are unfolding vastly faster than during the PETM. The fossil record reminds us that forests can recover, but only if humanity avoids pushing them beyond thresholds from which recovery takes tens of thousands of years.

Regan E. Dunn, Associate Curator at La Brea Tar Pits and Museum; Adjunct Professor of Earth Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who is increasingly seen secluding herself at home, said on Saturday that she is using her official residence next to her office more for work to maximize efficiency.

In December, Takaichi moved into the official residence, a brick-and-stone mansion that opened in 1929 used to be the original prime minister’s office until its replacement was built right next to it.

Takaichi said on X that living in the official residence, or “kotei,” is good because its proximity requires no commute and lets her immediately get down to work in time of an emergency.

Takaichi said she has reinforced office functions at the residence so she can work and have meetings there remotely or in person with her staff whenever needed, even after office hours. She also takes home documents to read.

“To me, the official residence is also a workplace,” she said.

But Takaichi, whose work mantra and her recent revelation on X of zero to three hours of sleep at night because of her homemaking burden on top of her heavy workload as prime minister, triggered criticisms that Japan’s first female leader was setting a wrong example for a work-life balance and gender-equality.

Takaichi has seen her support ratings rapidly drop as she pushed unpopular policies such as a revision to the Imperial House Law to reinforce a male-only succession system, while delaying economic measures to address rising prices.

Media reports have said that Takaichi was avoiding parliamentary sessions and largely holed up at the residence at night and on weekends, saying that she’s having significantly less interactions and communication with other lawmakers and officials than her predecessors. Takaichi frequently posts comments and policies on X instead of talking to the media.

The official residence was the site of two bloody coup attempts in the 1930s, and legend has it that the building is haunted by ghosts.

Takaichi apparently doesn’t mind spending long hours at the residence despite that.

“I’ve never seen a ghost, but I have often screamed because of my encounters with cockroaches,” she said. “I was shocked when a cockroach ran past my feet.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In between morning feedings, the gibbons begin to sing — loudly.

Ranging from the sound of emergency sirens and birds screeching to low grunts and guttural hoots, their vocalizations reverberate from a sanctuary in the hot, dry hills of the Santa Clarita Valley, north of Los Angeles.

Over the past 50 years, the Gibbon Conservation Center has transformed from housing a small assortment of animals to becoming a globally recognized institution dedicated solely to the care and well-being of gibbons. Known for their signature singing, they are among the rarest and most critically endangered primates on Earth.

Today the center cares for some 40 gibbons across five species. Their singing can sometimes be heard a mile away by the few neighbors in the sparsely inhabited outskirts of Santa Clarita.

The center was founded by the late Alan Mootnick, a self-taught primatologist who would go on to become a leading expert on gibbons, all while running a home painting and remodeling business. He published papers in scientific journals, hosted researchers from around the world, and fielded questions from other scientists about gibbon care and identification.

“Sometimes they would just send him a picture of a rescued gibbon asking what species, or they will play him a vocalization,” Director Gabi Skollar said.

Skollar moved from Hungary to the U.S. in 2005 to learn from Mootnick and work at the center. She has carried on his mission since his sudden death from heart surgery complications in 2011.

Skollar, who had initially planned to leave the job to continue her education, said there was no way she could abandon the gibbons.

“We have to keep going and take care of this place,” she said.

Now, she lives on-site with another caretaker, waking up every morning to the cacophony of gibbons at sunrise. They’re her children, she said.

The center contributes to global research on gibbons

The gibbons are full of personality and individual quirks, and Skollar knows them well after decades at the center. A young, northern white-cheeked gibbon named Pepper always leads the group in beginning their singing, and a pileated gibbon named Violet finishes the chorus with her partner Truman. Pierre, a rescued gibbon, does not like men.

The small apes sing three to four times a day for 20 to 30 minutes at a time.

“There’s a lot of things that we can learn in a captive setting that can be shared with conservationists in the field and also with people working in sanctuaries rescuing gibbons,” said Skollar, who is studying gibbon vocalizations in a doctorate program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gibbons face increasing threats from habitat destruction where they’re normally found, in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia. Wildlife trade is also a threat, with gibbons being captured from their parents as babies and sold as pets.

Mootnick acquired his first gibbon, named Spanky, in 1976, when he responded to a newspaper ad of someone selling a pet. Some gibbons at the conservation center were born there; others were traded with different institutions to ensure diversity in breeding programs.

Some of the species at the center have a population of less than 2,000 in the wild.

The center was the first to successfully breed Javan gibbons, an endangered species only found on the Indonesian island of Java, and they are soon sending a pair of northern white-cheeked gibbons to the Pittsburgh Zoo.

How human caretakers connect with the apes

On a recent morning, on-site caretaker Jodi Kleier was making the rounds with buckets of washed lettuce, steamed sweet potatoes and bananas. She handed a young gibbon, Rocky, a piece of chopped banana as he reached out through the fence.

Rocky was hand-reared by Kleier after being abandoned by his mother after birth at the center, which can happen with first-time mothers if they went through a difficult birth.

Kleier has worked at the center for a decade, and started out as a volunteer. She has a tattoo of Rocky on her thigh.

She fell in love with gibbons after coming to the center for a primatology course in school.

“I love watching any primates play, because I think they’re so natural to us, we kind of see ourselves in them,” she said.

Kleier and volunteers who come by during the week are constantly washing and cooking produce because they feed the gibbons five to six times a day to imitate the pace of their foraging behavior in the wild.

“The Javans, they’re my favorite species and the male Javan is singing … one of my favorite songs,” Kleier said of a ghostly vocalization. “In Javanese folklore, they’re known as these spirits that live in the forest because you can always hear them.”

Students, volunteers and families can visit the animals

While the center is only open to visitors for guided tours on the weekends, they receive steady interest from schools, tourists and senior centers. They also work with local organizations such as The Teaching Zoo at Moorpark College to help students receive hands-on experience in animal care. The college takes first-year students on a field trip to the Gibbon Conservation Center every year, and many have gone on to work there after they graduate.

“When I went out there for the first time in the 1990s, I didn’t know what a gibbon was,” said Mara Rodriguez, a development coordinator who’s been with the zoo for decades. “Now I’ve raised four gibbons in my career.”

Anyone who visits “will leave with a lasting impression and begin to care about the species,” she said.

Skollar’s long-term goal is to raise more money to build larger enclosures for the gibbons and construct an education center for visitors. She hopes to continue honoring Mootnick’s legacy and dedicating her life to the gibbons — one of which is named after him.

“When he passed away, I just felt that he’s around and helping us keep this center going,” she said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas governor’s daughter who became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate without following a spouse into office, has died. She was 94.

Kassebaum Baker died Friday of natural causes, according to her son, Bill Kassebaum.

“She loved Kansas. She loved people from Kansas and representing Kansas for 18 years in the U.S. Senate,” he told The Associated Press. “She was an independent-minded Republican who was willing to stand up for what she thought was right, even if that meant going against the party.”

She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1978 and served three terms. Her modest demeanor endeared her to voters of all political stripes, though she shared the moderate, progressive Republican politics of her father, Gov. Alf Landon, the unsuccessful 1936 GOP nominee for president. Even after leaving the Senate early in 1997, she continued taking on public service roles.

She married former Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, in 1996. He died in 2014.

Kassebaum Baker remained an icon for Kansans generally. She could work with Senate colleagues of all political philosophies, and a 1996 health insurance law bore her name, along with that of liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.

A centrist politician from America’s heartland

Her election to the Senate brought her immediate national attention. When she announced her retirement, she was among eight women senators and the only one to chair a Senate committee, the Labor and Human Resources panel.

She was also in a dwindling bloc of moderate-to-liberal Republicans, having supported for example a ban on assault weapons championed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Yet she never polarized Kansas conservatives as other GOP moderates did. She connected with voters because she never seemed caught up in the trappings of power, and when she retired, she acknowledged, “I’d rather cuddle up and do needlepoint all day.”

She was born on July 29, 1932, as her father, an oilman from Independence, was running for the first of his two terms as governor. She earned a political science degree from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in diplomatic history from the University of Michigan in the mid-1950s.

She was a radio-station executive, spent a year in the 1970s on the staff of Kansas Sen. James Pearson and served on the school board in the Wichita suburb of Maize. She had four children with her first husband, Phil Kassebaum, including Bill, who served a term in the Kansas House. The marriage ended in divorce in 1979.

A moderate who sought sensible solutions

When Kassebaum Baker decided to run for the U.S. Senate, she figured that “a woman with a background different from a man might be appealing” to people growing weary of politics. Pundits at the time estimated a Senate race would require the then-huge-for-Kansas sum of $1 million. In the first quarter of 1978, she spent less than $12,000 on her campaign, and saw herself “at the bottom of the totem pole.”

However, nine candidates crowded the primary field, including three state senators and a prominent Wichita businessman. Kassebaum Baker won the GOP nomination with less than 31 percent of the vote.

Running as Nancy Landon Kassebaum, she won almost 54 percent of the vote that November against former two-term Democratic congressman Bill Roy.

Her moderate politics quickly came to the fore, when only months later, she refused to endorse an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to require a balanced budget.

“We should be wary of the seemingly simple solution,” she said.

Her father, who would die at age 100 in 1987, still cast a long political shadow during her first years in office. Though he’d overwhelmingly lost the 1936 presidential race to Democratic incumbent Franklin Roosevelt, he later became an elder statesman for the party. A lecture series named for him at Kansas State University attracted presidents and foreign leaders.

Kassebaum Baker became even more popular in her time. She won re-election in 1984 with 76 percent of the vote and in 1990 with 74 percent of the vote.

But she frustrated conservative activists, despite her popularity. She said her vote in favor of the assault weapons ban inspired the angriest mail of her career.

A public servant to the end

She’d contemplated not seeking a third term, but Republican leaders had prevailed upon her to run one more time. In 1996, when she decided not to seek re-election, she said she would return to a ranch and 90-year-old farmhouse in Kansas’ scenic Flint Hills and babysit her grandchildren — she had seven, as well as two great-grandchildren.

When there briefly was talk of naming a new highway in Topeka after her, she said, “Oh, goodness. Absolutely not — no.”

She and Baker kept their romance low-key, and speculation about a possible marriage didn’t emerge until mid-1996, in a Washington Post story. They married that December.

It was the first time a man and a woman who had both served in the Senate had wed. Baker was elected to three terms and served from 1967 to 1985 before becoming President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. His first wife, Joy, had died in 1993 after a long battle with cancer.

After the marriage, public service still beckoned, including as a member of a bipartisan commission on campaign finance reform under Clinton and on a British commission in Africa in 2004-05.

President George W. Bush named her husband ambassador to Japan in 2001, and she went with him for the four-year posting. Baker said she became an important figure in the Asian nation.

Before she left for Tokyo, she told a reporter she saw her stint in Japan as an adventure but added, “All I can say is, I will miss the Kansas prairie.”

Not a fan of Trump

Later in life, Kassebaum Baker broke with the Republican Party as it became more conservative, endorsing Democratic candidates for Kansas governor and U.S. senator, including Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly both times — even though Kelly’s 2022 GOP opponent, then state-Attorney General Derek Schmidt, had worked on her Senate staff.

She also declared in 2021 that President Donald Trump should be impeached after Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol hoping to stop congressional certification of Trump’s defeat in 2020 by Democrat Joe Biden.

“This just has gone too far,” she told Kansas City’s KMBC.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump has urged a federal judge to reject the BBC’s request for the court’s help in securing testimony and documents from three family members in response to his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster.

The BBC is trying to gain “politically-driven leverage” over Trump by serving subpoenas on daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and son Donald Trump Jr., personal lawyers for the Republican president argued in a court filing Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz in Miami did not immediately rule on the dispute.

Kuntz, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, inherited the president’s lawsuit from another judge less than a week ago. Court filings did not immediately specify a reason for the case’s reassignment. The previous judge has set a February trial date.

In May, a process server working for the BBC tried to serve subpoenas on Ivanka Trump and Kushner at their residence but encountered Secret Service agents who said they were not authorized to accept it, according to the president’s lawyers. They said the process server also visited Trump Tower in New York several days later in a failed attempt to serve Donald Trump Jr.

In a court filing last week, the broadcaster asked for the court’s permission to serve subpoenas on Trump’s family members by certified mail instead of in person.

Trump’s lawsuit, filed in December, accuses the BBC of deceptively editing portions of the speech that he delivered near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. The suit claims the BBC spliced together separate parts of Trump’s speech to intentionally misrepresent what he said.

The lawsuit alleges the BBC aired its documentary a week before the 2024 presidential election in “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the outcome to Trump’s detriment.

“The relief that the BBC’s Motion seeks cannot be segregated from the politically charged discovery campaign that it is based on, and which has already been ruled as improperly overbroad by this Court,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.

The BBC has apologized to Trump for the misleading edit, but it denies defaming him.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The fast-growing Hawk Fire spread from the Sierra foothills toward the center of Reno early Sunday, growing to more than 10,500 acres. Nearly 14,000 homes were ordered evacuated, and the “G0 NOW” zone reached the edge of the University of Nevada campus.

Washoe County, Nevada emergency officials opened the Reno-Sparks Convention Center to evacuees, but said they couldn’t bring their pets — small animals and large animals were to be left at two other locations.

Gov. Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency in Washoe County, and mobilized the Nevada National Guard to support aerial firefighting with two helicopter crews as well as 60 troops to help police safeguard evacuated neighborhoods.

The fire apparently began Saturday and grew significantly throughout the day, fueled by strong, gusty winds, low humidity and dry vegetation, according to a statement from Truckee Meadows Fire & Rescue, which joined the fight from just across the California state line.

“Approximately 400 personnel are currently working on the incident, with resources coming together from local, state and federal agencies, including ground crews and air resources,” the Truckee Meadows statements said.

Nearly 10,000 homes and businesses were without power in Washoe County on Sunday. Portions of U.S. Route 395, a major north-south highway, were closed due to the fire.

“If you have been told to evacuate, please don’t wait!” Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve said in a statement posted on social media late Saturday night. “Structures have already been burned in this fire and your life is more important than a building. Evacuating before the fire arrives also allows our firefighters to focus their efforts on battling the blaze.”

Authorities also were keeping watch on a county detention facility that was several blocks from the outer edge of the evacuation warning area.

“We have those inmates in mind and we are making sure that we have plans in place in case we may have to evacuate the facility,” Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam said.

Earlier this month, three wildfires fueled by hot, dry and windy conditions north of Reno forced more than 13,000 residents from their homes, according to the Nevada National Guard.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A lip-licking alligator, a smiling moose and a hat-wearing bear are among the many cartoon animals to have found themselves in the crosshairs of Buc-ee’s, the popular Texas convenience store chain that has a penchant for protecting its buck-toothed beaver.

But now Buc-ee’s has set off a Buckeye backlash across Ohio and beyond after taking on a beaver in the city of Beavercreek.

It’s yet another Buc-ee’s Ltd. trademark infringement lawsuit. Supporters of Beaver’s Mini Mart have attacked Buc-ee’s online and boycotted the stores, and the mini mart’s home city passed a resolution making the beaver an official part of its history. British comedian John Oliver has even weighed in on the kerfuffle.

On an episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” the comedian detailed Buc-ee’s aggressive history of trademark lawsuits targeting various woodland creatures and launched a website hawking merchandise bearing a knockoff “Buc-off” logo and a squirrel mascot named Mr. Nutterbutter. On X, #boycottbucees trended.

Buc-ee’s sued Beaver’s Mini Mart in late July, four months after the chain known for its extensive food offerings and massive restrooms opened its first Ohio store less than a half-hour’s drive away.

Buc-ee’s argues the shop’s beaver logo too closely resembles the convenience store giant’s branded Buc-ee (“Bucky”) beaver. The Texas-based company asked for a jury trial in federal court in Ohio.

Buc-ee’s claims a right to protect its valuable logo

Beaver’s Mini Mart occupies a long, low building with a shingle roof at a suburban intersection. In contrast, the new 74,000-square-foot (6,875-square-meter) Buc-ee’s off Interstate 70 near Dayton has more than 100 gas pumps, 24 electric vehicle chargers and 700 parking spaces. A second Ohio store has been approved to open in 2028.

While preparing to enter the state in February, Buc-ee’s sued the northern Ohio holding company for Mickey Mart gas stations, arguing its Mickey the Moose logo could be confused with Buc-ee. (The company’s response: “A moose is not a beaver.”)

The Buc-ee’s beaver logo features the face of a beaver with prominent buck teeth wearing a red ball cap against a yellow backdrop. The Beaver’s Mini Mart mascot is a full beaver, unclothed, waving and smiling against a white background.

Customers have been critical of Buc-ee’s decision to target the much smaller store.

“I love Buc-ee’s, but I don’t plan on going back until they start making better business decisions,” Austin Collins, 32, a project manager from Fairborn, said outside Beaver’s, where he was making his first visit to protest the lawsuit.

He called targeting a beaver-named business in Beavercreek “a little spiteful.” License plates from three states were visible in the parking lot.

Buc-ee’s has defended the lawsuit as protective of its valuable trademark. In a statement on its website, the company said it first learned of Beaver’s Mini Mart when its owner, Vic Boparai, filed a trade name registration on Oct. 23.

The small business, incorporated in 2017, changed its name from Hanes Road Carryout to Beaver’s Mini Mart in January 2025, according to the paperwork. That was about four months after Buc-ee’s broke ground near Dayton. Recognizing a conflict, the company said it repeatedly attempted to reach Boparai without success, so it was forced to sue.

Boparai has since issued a statement of his own, though without addressing the company’s concerns nor the merits of the lawsuit.

“We want to say thank you to the community and the entire country for supporting us and our business,” he said. “We are overwhelmed by your support for our business and other small businesses everywhere.”

The Associated Press has been unable to reach Boparai at Beaver’s Mini Mart or by calling the store.

Beavercreek adopts the beaver as part of city history

Beavercreek City Council responded to the dust-up by passing a resolution Aug. 10 making the beaver a permanent and official part of its 200-plus-year history. Bucky the Beaver, mascot of the Beavercreek Local Schools, visited the meeting ahead of the unanimous vote.

On social media, images lampooning the fight are rampant. One showed the Ohio State University football mascot, Brutus Buckeye, tackling Buc-ee the beaver.

Support has taken other forms, too. One was a GoFundMe campaign aimed at assuring that costs associated with the lawsuit don’t put Beaver’s Mini Mart out of business, as has happened to other establishments Buc-ee’s sued. It had raised at least $69,000.

The mini mart gave permission to The Original Goodie Shop bakery in Upper Arlington to use its logo on a signature cookie, with $1 from each one sold going to support Beaver’s legal fees. Cake, Hope & Love, a Beavercreek bakery, also is offering cookies adorned with buck-toothed beavers that urge shopping local.

Other Dayton-area businesses — including a Lego store and a root beer shop — temporarily altered their logos to include beavers in a show of solidarity. Dozens of businesses in Beavercreek already incorporate the city name or word beaver in their names.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who attended and praised the grand opening of the Dayton-area Buc-ee’s store in April, described the lawsuit as “absurd.”

“It is Beavercreek, for heaven’s sake,” the governor told reporters.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

College administrators read an adjunct professor’s comments to students on personal essays. Managers told a pharmacist to spend less time with patients after tracking the number and length of her appointments. Scanners on a warehouse conveyor belt monitored the pace of workers to ensure they inspected hundreds of items per hour.

Thousands of employers are keeping tabs on the whereabouts, productivity and communications of workers with technology that was adopted widely during the coronavirus pandemic. A vast array of digital tools still are being used to track locations, collect data on task completion rates, and access work-issued smartphone and laptop cameras, raising concerns about how much privacy employees have relinquished, even in their own homes.

Employers have always monitored workers, but recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science enable them to create extensive data sets or “dossiers” that can be used to punish workers or attempt to predict employee behavior, said Wilneida Negrón, director of research and policy at Coworker, a nonprofit that helps workers organize to improve working conditions.

“Oftentimes, the workers with the least amount of power in the labor markets tend to be testing grounds for some of the more intrusive forms of data collection,” Negrón said.

Some of the most common workplace monitoring programs have shared names, email addresses and other personal worker data with hundreds of outside data brokers and technology companies without clearly disclosing the practice, according to an investigation by Vanderbilt University, Northeastern University and the University of California at Berkeley.

That investigation tested this firsthand: researchers signed up as an employer, deployed nine widely used monitoring platforms — including Hubstaff, Deputy and Time Doctor 2 — then logged in as a worker to capture what the apps actually sent out. Every single platform shared identifying worker data, including names and emails, with outside companies, producing 121 documented instances involving Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the ad-tech firm AppLovin. Separately, the nine apps sent workers’ online activity — IP addresses, device information, browsing data — to 145 third-party domains, among them Yandex, the Russian search company. A third of the platforms could track a worker’s precise location even when the app was running in the background or the employee was off the clock, and three of the nine required access to a phone’s motion sensors just to clock in.

Data privacy experts and workers who say they’ve been closely monitored spoke with The Associated Press about what they see as the risks of employer surveillance and the steps employees can take to protect their personal information.

Team up with like-minded colleagues to advocate for yourself

Pharmacist Lannie Duong’s job at a medical clinic involved meeting with patients who had chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. She reviewed their medical histories, blood work and symptoms, and adjusted their medications. She frequently enlisted interpreters to help her communicate with patients who had limited English language skills.

Duong said her employer tracked the length of her phone calls and appointments, and in performance evaluations questioned why she took so long with each patient.

“Everything was counted. How many minutes you’re on the phone. The minutiae of it was ridiculous,” Duong said. “We’re just tasked to do what feels like the impossible.”

Under what she described as unrelenting pressure, Duong felt “not trusted, not appreciated, almost completely hopeless. It was so depressing.” She eventually went on medical leave and began volunteering with other pharmacists to organize a union.

“I spoke up, hoping others would voice their concerns as well, but that didn’t really pan out,” Duong said. She says her employment was terminated after the medical leave.

Many of the employers using surveillance tools do so transparently and engage employee boards in reviewing how the tools are used, Negrón said. But there are also employers tracking, ranking and scoring employees in ways that are not transparent to workers, she said.

“Workers are going to have to come together because the forces of centralizing this kind of tracking and monitoring are moving too fast,” Negrón said.

Find out what kind of data your employer is collecting about you

As awareness about surveillance tools grows, some workers are pushing back on tools that track how long it takes to fulfill tasks, saying such monitoring contributes to injuries, and questioning what personal information is being collected and how it’s being used, said Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on digital privacy.

“Unfortunately, if you are on a machine that’s been issued by your workplace, you should expect that there’s some type of monitoring,” Tsukayama said.

Researching data collection and surveillance trends in your industry is a good idea, according to Negrón. Without that knowledge, workers may find themselves unprepared when confronted with information unearthed during surveillance.

While teaching a college writing class, Arianna Anaya discovered that an administrator was reading the papers her students uploaded to the school’s learning management software and the comments Anaya made on the work. The students often wrote about intimate topics, including abuse, eating disorders and family trauma.

“The school essentially used the online learning system to allow administrators and staff to read student work that was often immensely private and personal, something we were specifically told students should not know about,” Anaya said.

A colleague who printed out the comments criticized the casual tone Anaya used with students and accused her of not sticking to the course syllabus. A few months later, Anaya’s teaching contract wasn’t renewed, although she doesn’t know the exact reason.

“It made me quite paranoid,” Anaya said. “It made me feel less safe in the world.”

Check state laws to see what’s required of employers

Some states, including New York, Connecticut, Delaware and Maine, require employers to notify workers if they’re being monitored. Maine’s law goes further, prohibiting visual monitoring in employees’ homes or personal vehicles unless that kind of observation is required for the duties of the job, said Edward Halle, a privacy and AI compliance manager.

“The question becomes, what does the law mean by ‘the duties of the job’?” Halle said. “A telehealth nurse needs a camera; the camera is the job. A productivity webcam bolted onto ordinary desk work almost certainly isn’t. Where that line falls is the first thing the Department of Labor will be asked to sort out.”

If you work in a state without a notification requirement, it’s difficult to find out if an employer is using technology to monitor your performance.

To raise the issue with managers, Tsukayama suggests coordinating with a union. If that’s not an option and you’re asking managers individually, approach the topic cautiously and take a curious tone, she advised. You could say you’ve noticed something on the computer and have questions, such as “How is this information being used within the company? How might it get out of the company?” Tsukayama said.

One place to start is asking what specific employee data your organization collects, said Aiha Nguyen, director of the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society, a nonprofit institute studying the impacts of technology. If your manager doesn’t know, the information technology department may have answers, since the people working there often are the ones turning on the features, Nguyen said.

Some common software programs such as Microsoft Office and Zoom have tools that can be used for tracking worker productivity, but the tracking features aren’t always activated. Knowing whether those tracking features are turned on can be difficult, because they’re built into the programs, Nguyen said.

“It’s automatic. It’s considered something that employers have been able to say, ‘This is necessary for work. You have to use these tools,’” she said.

To help safeguard personal information, don’t use work devices to handle family matters or sensitive personal information such as medical conditions, experts advise.

“I think most people know that,” Nguyen said. “But it can become tedious to switch between phones, or people don’t really think it’s that harmful. … You don’t want to potentially put yourself at risk.”

Additional reporting contributed by Nick Lichtenberg.

___

Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Bitcoin and gold shot higher this week, with both getting a boost from some frantic action surrounding the bond market, and the cryptocurrency also benefiting from activity in Washington.

Bitcoin had dropped from a January high of around $95,000 to below $60,000 at the end of June. Investors shied away from speculative assets earlier in the year and crypto supporters were concerned about the lack of movement on proposed regulation of the industry. On Friday, bitcoin rose above $77,000.

Gold hit a high above $5,300 in January but dropped to around $4,000 in June as rising rates made interest-bearing investments more attractive. Gold rose to $4,661 on Friday.

The first jolt arrived Wednesday when the Treasury Department announced plans to significantly increase its buybacks of long-term Treasurys, or government debt. On the same day, President Donald Trump, who made about $1.2 billion last year from various crypto holdings, urged Congress to move quickly on crypto legislation.

There was an almost immediate reaction, which included a dollar sell-off and a jump in the value of gold and bitcoin as investors moved toward alternative assets.

How these two investments caught fire can be understood in the context of several developments this week.

The Treasury stepped into the bond market — forcefully

In a surprise announcement Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury Department said that it would at least double the size of its planned purchases of longer-term government debt. The maneuver was intended to calm bond markets after a sustained sell-off, meaning investors were asking for higher yields to lend money to the U.S., which investors suddenly viewed as riskier

That’s because while the Treasury intervention worked, at least for a short period, it also raised questions about whether the government is trying to push borrowing costs lower despite inflationary pressures. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is attempting to lower long-term borrowing costs, a move that can put upward pressure on inflation at a time when inflation is already elevated. Bessent’s maneuver could handcuff the Federal Reserve, which fights inflation by raising interest rates.

Debt, inflation, and the “debasement trade” heat up

Then there’s the national debt, which surpassed a record $40 trillion on the same day that the Treasury’s actions unfolded. The milestone figure was recorded just five months after the U.S. hit a record $39 trillion debt in March. It reached $38 trillion five months before that, in October.

There is already a lot of anxiety over inflation, particularly because of the conflict in Iran and soaring energy prices. If yields on U.S. bonds are not truly reflecting risk, you can often see that play out in the value of the U.S. currency, which took a significant downward swoop Wednesday.

So where does the money that was invested in the dollar or Treasurys go? This week, it appears to have been funneled into what is known as the “debasement trade,” when investors flood into alternative assets such as gold, which rose more than 2% Wednesday. The debasement trade now includes bitcoin. Bitcoin jumped more than 20% this week.

Crypto had a very good week in Washington

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump, who banked nearly $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses last year, held a crypto currency conference at the White House where he called on Congress to pass the crypto-friendly Clarity Act, saying that it would “keep us ahead of China, keep us ahead of everyone else.”

Trump then yielded the floor to Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig, who vowed to “use every tool available” to advance Trump’s agenda.

Selig’s comments came ahead of a CFTC meeting Thursday examining ways the agency can use its existing authority to ease crypto rules. A day earlier, other regulators proposed rules making it easier for crypto companies and projects to raise money from the public.

Since taking office, Trump has pushed policies friendly to the crypto industry and reversed a Biden administration regulatory crackdown.

Bitcoin’s big squeeze sent prices even higher

Bitcoin can sometimes get a bump when the U.S. dollar is on the ropes as investors try to unload the U.S. currency. But you don’t typically see the kind of related movement that was observed with bitcoin this week.

The price of bitcoin had been stuck between $62,000 and $67,000 for weeks. Investors seized on that weakness, many placing bets that the cryptocurrency would be stuck in that range for some time to come.

However, on the day the Treasury announced its buybacks, Treasury yields fell, as did the dollar, and bitcoin blasted through that upper level of $67,000.

The Treasury’s actions negatively affected the money investors could make on U.S. bonds and the dollar, and boosted the value of bitcoin. That meant that many investors who had shorted bitcoin, or bet that its price would remain subdued, were forced to close their positions as bitcoin surged. Closing those bearish positions required buying back the digital asset, adding even more upward pressure to bitcoin’s price.

By Friday, more than $4 billion in bearish crypto positions had been liquidated during the rally, according to CoinGlass, which tracks cryptocurrency derivatives markets.

And because bitcoin was already rising, those forced purchases added fuel to the rally, potentially triggering still more liquidations as prices climbed.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At daybreak, rancher Martín Alfonso Ibarra takes advantage of the cooler hours in northern Mexico’s desert to oversee the milking of his cows and tend to 16 prized calves. Soon, he hopes, they will be headed north to the United States as a yearlong ban on Mexican cattle imports comes to an end.

The ban, imposed over concerns about a flesh-eating parasite known as the New World screwworm fly, dealt a blow to cattle and beef industries on both sides of the border, exacerbating a livestock shortage in the U.S. and hurting a Mexican ranching sector already weakened by drought and a cattle export business that generated $1.2 billion for Mexico last year.

Now, the U.S. is set to resume livestock imports from Mexico beginning Aug. 24 at the Douglas, Arizona, border crossing, which borders Agua Prieta in Mexico’s Sonora state. If the reopening goes smoothly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture could allow imports through additional ports, though shipments will initially be subject to restrictions aimed at preventing the spread of the parasite — which has already crossed the border, with authorities battling cases in Texas and New Mexico.

The screwworm gets its name from the maggots’ habit of burrowing — or screwing — into a wound, according to the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Any warm-blooded animal, including wildlife, pets and occasionally even humans, can be infested.

In Mexico, the screwworm outbreak was detected in November 2024 and has spread to 30 of the 32 states — most recently in Sonora, where the first case was reported Wednesday in the community of Munihuasa, near the borders with Chihuahua and Sinaloa, states where infections have also proliferated.

To date, Mexico has 1,969 active screwworm cases, which represent less than half of the infections reported a year ago, a decline that authorities say shows progress in containing the outbreak. Still, they acknowledge eradication will take time.

New US controls are expected to slow shipments

Against that backdrop, Ibarra and thousands of other ranchers in the northern state of Sonora are preparing to resume live cattle exports. But optimism is tempered by new U.S. controls expected to slow shipments across the border.

“This is not over yet,” said the 58-year-old rancher, adding that the export halt cut his income by 40% last year.

According to the protocol defined by U.S. authorities, in the first week of reopening, only 700 cattle per day will be allowed through; this will rise to 900 in the second week and will gradually increase until reaching 1,300 cattle per day, veterinarian Arturo Ruiz, responsible for animal health for the state of Sonora, told The Associated Press.

The new rules also require cattle to be fitted with radio-frequency identification tags in their ears and screened by electronic readers and trained dogs. Officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will conduct the inspections before allowing the Mexican cattle to cross into Arizona, Ruiz explained.

Mexico accepted the U.S. protocols, but the restrictions have frustrated some local ranchers.

“We are at a complicated moment when we need authorities to think less politically and more technically and reasonably,” said Juan Carlos Ochoa, president of the Regional Livestock Union of Sonora, referring to tensions between the Mexican and U.S. governments when the ban was first imposed in May 2025.

Ochoa said the new U.S. restrictions would limit shipments and argued that a greater flow of cattle across the border is needed to address supply shortages in both countries.

A cautious optimism as imports resume

Although both countries felt the effects of Washington’s decision, the impact was greater in the U.S., particularly for consumers facing record-high beef prices that led some to cut back on meat.

Juan Carlos Anaya, general director of agricultural consulting firm Grupo Consultor de Mercados Agrícolas, said U.S. ranchers were unable to make up the supply shortfall, contributing to closures at some meat-processing plants and hurting feedlot operations.

Before the border closure, Mexico exported about 1.2 million head of cattle to the United States each year, mainly from its northern states. When exports were suspended, Mexican ranchers turned to the domestic market, where they sold their cattle for nearly 40% less than they had received in the U.S. — a loss of income that forced many to sell some of their cattle or cut spending and investment.

Back in Sonora, in the stifling August heat of the capital, Hermosillo, Ibarra was cautiously optimistic about finally sending his 16 calves to the U.S. But he said he would temper his expectations until October, when the cattle have gained enough weight and the sale could be finalized.

“There’s no need to get too excited,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The billionaire exodus from the West Coast to Florida is underway as the ultrawealthy seek refuge from wealth taxes in states like California and Washington.

Google cofounders Larry Page (net worth $295 billion) and Sergey Brin (net worth $275 billion) rushed to leave California last year before the Jan. 1 deadline for the California billionaire tax. Both have purchased property in Florida. Meanwhile, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, whose net worth is $3.4 billion, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth is $196 billion, also both bought property in the Sunshine State earlier this year. 

The tech titans and Schultz join Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, PayPal and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, Citadel founder Ken Griffin, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who have all bought property or moved their companies’ operations to Florida in the past several years.

The rush to buy in Florida has been fueled partly by California’s proposed Billionaire Tax Act, which, if passed, would charge billionaires who resided in California after Jan. 1, 2026, with a one-time tax on 5% of their total net worth.

The bill, which would reportedly affect about 200 people, aims to collect $100 billion in revenue that would go toward funding healthcare in the state, as well as education and food assistance, to a lesser extent. A simple majority in the November elections would make the effort pass and amend the state’s constitution to put it into place. According to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, voters are seemingly split on the proposal, with 48% of likely voters saying they would support the measure versus 41% who said they would not support it.

Among the ultra-wealthy, the proposal is almost universally unpopular. Many wealthy individuals in California have come out against the tax, including Brin, who earlier this month donated an additional $20 million to a PAC, Building a Better California, which is promoting its own three counter measures, that, if approved by voters in November, would potentially kill the billionaire tax on arrival, even if the tax also passes. Brin has reportedly donated $102 million total to the group since it was created in January.

Thiel, for his part, donated $3 million to the California Business Roundtable, a group opposing the billionaire tax. 

There are also doubts about whether the bill, even if it is passed, will reach its goal of collecting $100 billion. With Page and Brin arguably having left the state before Jan. 1, along with Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, who left for Texas, the tax could be robbed of a fourth of its $100 billion goal, according to a calculation by Fortune.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation using the 5% wealth tax metric puts the dollar figure of taxes owed by Page at about $14 billion and Brin at about $13 billion. Meanwhile 5% of Kalanick’s and Thiel’s wealth adds another $1.8 billion or so that brings the total potentially lost revenue to about $29 billion. 

Still, the potential California billionaire tax isn’t the only effort pushing billionaires to migrate South. Washington State’s wealth tax may have also played a role. Both Bezos and Schultz left Seattle before Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson in March signed into law a high-earners income tax, or so-called “millionaire’s tax,” that would charge 9.9% on earnings of more than $1 million. The tax aims to bring in $3 billion to $4 billion per year from wealthy individuals while eliminating some sales taxes on items like diapers and expanding funding for childcare and health care.

Griffin, the lone former Chicago resident, left Illinois, moving Citadel to Miami in June 2022 after nearly three decades. At the time, Griffin pointed to the city’s crime and politics as the reason. Since then, Griffin and Citadel have together invested billions in Florida real estate.

Some of the reasons for the billionaires’ departure is the attractiveness of Florida’s low taxes as well as its nice weather. The state has no income tax and no capital gains tax, and Miami, in particular, has branded itself as a business-friendly alternative to high-tax cities in California and elsewhere. The billionaires who have moved to Florida can also easily afford to buy in the state’s most exclusive areas and secure increasingly pricey waterfront properties. 

Miami, especially, is one of the most expensive luxury markets in the U.S. Yet, in 2025, ultra-luxury home sales surged in Miami, with a record of 361 homes sold at $10 million or higher last year, according to the New York Times. While the median listing price in Miami fell about 3% year-over-year to $495,000, according to Realtor.com, demand is growing at the high range. Five years ago no home in Miami sold for $50 million, but in 2025, sales in this range made up 7% of the market, the Times reported. 

Mark Zuckerberg

The Meta cofounder and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, reportedly secured a $170 million waterfront mansion on the west side of Indian Creek Island, a man-made refuge for the ultrarich located in Biscayne Bay, west of Miami Beach. Zuckerberg’s property is only a few houses down from Bezos’s under-construction compound and includes a gym, hair salon, and massage room, according to the Wall Street Journal. Indian Creek, also known as the Billionaire Bunker, has a mere 41 residents and 24/7 security, which adds to its exclusivity. The property would add to Zuckerberg’s myriad properties across the U.S., including in Hawaii and Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains between Nevada and California.

Jeff Bezos

The Amazon founder and executive chair has purchased three multimillion-dollar properties on Indian Creek Island. The world’s third-richest man bought two adjoining properties on the western side of the 41-person island in 2022 and 2023, for $68 million and $79 million, with plans to combine the lots into a mega-compound. Meanwhile, Bezos lives on the other side of the island in a Mediterranean-style home he bought for about $90 million in 2024. The billionaire’s combined properties cost him more than $230 million in total. 

Larry Ellison

Ellison made a 16-acre oceanfront property in Manalapan, Fla., in Palm Beach County, his primary residence earlier this year. The property, which Ellison purchased for $173 million in 2022 is conveniently located fewer than 10 miles from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Ellison is a major Republican donor and hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley in 2020, according to SFGate. Just after Trump’s inauguration last year Ellison stood by Trump as he, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, announced a $500 billion initiative dubbed Stargate to invest in U.S.-based AI infrastructure. 

In 2024, Ellison purchased the Eau Palm Beach Resort and Spa for $277 million, quickly pushing remodeling plans and installing his favorite Japanese and Peruvian fusion restaurant, Nobu. Ellison also owns another waterfront property in North Palm Beach he purchased for $80 million in 2021.

By moving his primary residence from Lanai, Hawaii, to Florida, before selling Oracle stock and collecting dividends, Ellison saved an estimated $1 billion in taxes, according to Forbes.

Larry Page

With his purchases in recent months, Google cofounder and former CEO Larry Page has amassed more than $180 million worth of properties in the Sunshine State as he looks to build his own mega-compound in Miami’s upscale Coconut Grove community. The Google cofounder purchased two adjacent properties in late December and early January for $101.5 million and $71.9 million. One of the homes includes 13 bedrooms and 15.5 bathrooms. Page snapped up another property in the same area for $14.97 million in January, South Florida Business Journal reported. 

Sergey Brin

Page’s cofounder Brin snagged his own slice of Florida in recent months. The billionaire bought a $51 million home on Allison Island, near Miami Beach, earlier this year, Business Insider reported. The 10,000-square-foot property has seven bedrooms, a waterfront pool, and a private dock. The island has 24-hour security and fewer than 50 homes, according to Realtor.com. 

Ken Griffin

Griffin made a splash when he announced he was moving his hedge fund Citadel to Miami in 2022. But even before then, Griffin was building up his Florida real-estate empire. For the past 10 years, the hedge funder has poured $450 million into a 50,000-square-foot waterfront compound in Palm Beach County, which, when finished, will be the most expensive residence on the planet, according to the New York Post. The financier also purchased a $106.9 million compound in Coconut Grove in 2022.

Apart from Griffin’s personal purchases, his company, Citadel, is also reportedly pouring billions into real estate in Miami, including a 54-story headquarters for Citadel in downtown Miami that is estimated to cost $2.5 billion.

Peter Thiel

While Peter Thiel’s Florida footprint is relatively more modest than his fellow billionaires, he has still purchased nearly $40 million worth of property in the Miami area. Thiel in 2020 purchased a compound made up of two homes for $18 million on Miami’s Venetian Islands, man-made islands that sit between Miami Beach and downtown Miami in Biscayne Bay. Late last year, the billionaire’s Thiel Capital opened an office in Miami. Palantir also announced it was moving its headquarters to Miami in February.

Howard Schultz

Schultz and his wife, Sheri Schultz, purchased a penthouse in Surfside, Fla., north of Miami Beach, earlier this year for $44 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. The purchase was made public shortly after Schultz announced he was leaving Seattle, where he has lived for 44 years, for Miami, in a statement on LinkedIn.

The 5,500-square-foot property has five bedrooms, a rooftop terrace, and an oceanfront cabana, according to the Journal. 

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on April 2, 2026.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Taxing all 938 billionaires at 100% wouldn’t stop the $40 trillion national debt, says Elon Musk. Bernie Sanders says taxing them 5% cuts you a check

The richest person in the world and the most well-known person leading the cause against creating more people like him have many differing views on taxing the ultrawealthy.

But now, Elon Musk and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), two men on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, are using the same math to make opposite arguments for how much billionaires should be taxed, and how that money should be allocated.

In Musk’s view, collecting every cent billionaires rake in pales in comparison to federal debt, which just hit $40 trillion and counting.

“Even if you tax every billionaire in America at 100%, it barely makes a dent in the national debt,” Musk wrote on X in 2023. “In the end, the government will be forced to tax everyone to pay the debt.”

Sanders agrees—but he’s not looking to tax billionaires for all their worth and he’s not trying to eliminate the debt. Instead, he wants enough to give nearly three-quarters of the nation a nice check, offset cuts to federal health programs, and fund social services. 

How many billionaires are in the country?

Sanders, along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), introduced a billionaire tax earlier this year and suggested there are only 938 billionaires in the country, who, combined, hold a net worth of $8.2 trillion. 

Simple math would prove Musk’s logic correct: $8.2 trillion will barely plug a fifth of the national debt. 

But that’s not what Sanders and Khanna are suggesting: The two put forward the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act,” which proposed an annual 5% wealth tax on individuals with a net worth of $1 billion or more.

Sanders estimates the bill would generate $4.4 trillion over its first decade. And in the first year, that revenue would fund a one-time $3,000 check for every American in a lower- or middle-income household, defined as those earning $150,000 or less annually, or roughly 74% of the nation.

In the years that follow, Sanders believes the revenue from the tax would reverse the $1.1 trillion in Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts, establish a $60,000 minimum salary for public school teachers, and cap childcare payments at 7% of household income for working parents.

“At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said in the press release, “this legislation demands that the billionaire class in America finally pay their fair share of taxes so that we can create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”

How much is the U.S. paying in debt service?

The U.S. is paying nearly $1 trillion per year just to service the debt—a figure that has nearly tripled over five years and has surpassed what the government spends on Medicare. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects interest payments will exceed $1.5 trillion by 2032. America is, at an accelerating pace, borrowing money to pay interest on money it already borrowed.

Musk and Sanders are making two different arguments. Musk’s framing casts a billionaire tax as a debt solution, and by that measure, it fails. Sanders’s framing casts taxing billionaires as a redistribution mechanism, a way to put money back in the pockets of working Americans and fund social services. By that measure, a 5% annual wealth tax generating $4.4 trillion over a decade is significant. 

Musk has warned more broadly America is on a path to going bankrupt “1,000%” if spending isn’t curtailed. The debt crisis is structural, rooted in decades of spending that outpaces revenue, and no single tax can undo that. The national debt has grown by more than $11 trillion over the last five years alone.

But Sanders’s counter is equally pointed: The debt crisis and the affordability crisis are not the same problem, and solving one doesn’t require ignoring the other. A $3,000 check won’t fix the national debt. But for a middle-class family barely keeping up with inflation, it may fix something more immediate.

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on March 17, 2026.

More on the billionaire tax:

• Wealth taxes on billionaires and $30 minimum wages are part of the same plan
• These venture capital and crypto billionaires are bankrolling the fight against California’s wealth tax
• Bernie Sanders calls out Bezos, Musk, Bloomberg, and Buffett in billionaire tax push

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Carter Grandbois was 16 years old, working for a junk-removal operator in Johnstown, Colorado, when he noticed the cash. His boss kept a thick stack of it in the center console of his truck. Grandbois went home and talked to his dad, and within days, they bought a trailer. The first job paid $500 for 30 minutes of work. “That was kind of an eye-opener,” Grandbois, now 18 and working for himself full-time, told Fortune.

Carter’s Junk Away bills as much as $15,000 a month in peak season, Grandbois said. His W-2 employees are his high school friends, but he admits that he wasn’t able to scale up and reach profitability until he created a pricing calculator, started tracking data, and started using systems to get consistent lead flows.

“I’m really into vibe-coding and creating software,” he explained. “After that, we were able to be profitable on every single job,” he said proudly. “When our team is out… they’re bidding jobs spot-on every single time. So every time they complete a job, I mean, we’re making anywhere from $50 to $200 without being on the truck.” He said he earns about $125 to $1,000 per junk-removal job and he is increasingly overseeing the business from home as he scales, which is what he means by not “being on the truck.”

Grandbois wants to share the wealth, too, via social media. (He’s on TikTok at american.junkremoval.) “I was like, ‘Hey, like everyone else could totally use this for their business.’” Now he has two calculators—a universal one for everyone and another, “private junk-removal calculator,” which he described as detailed for a “more experienced junk-removal business.” When asked about potentially creating his own rivals, he shrugged. “That is one of the things with giving away stuff for free. You never know who’s watching the content. But at the end of the day, I know I’m doing something good for anyone else who’s trying to start.”

After all, he explained, it was his inspiration. Where another generation might have read about, say, Warren Buffett in Fortune magazine, he reflected, “it’s probably just like Instagram reels where you’re scrolling and you’re like, ‘That guy has a Lamborghini. That dude has a McLaren. Why can’t I have one of those?’”

Sam Pillar, the 44-year-old CEO and co-founder of Jobber, a home-services software company that serves over 100,000 businesses and 400,000 service professionals, sees a connection. “I think a lot of people would like to be influencers,” he told Fortune. “You kind of own your own business. You control everything.” There are a lot of overlaps, he added, between the life of an influencer and starting your own business in a blue-collar industry. (Grandbois is a Jobber client himself.)

Pillar didn’t want to “scratch too deep” on Gen Z’s famously socialistic political identity, but he does run a SaaS company for blue-collar entrepreneurs, many of them 20-somethings. He said he thinks they’re “frustrated” that “there aren’t as many opportunities to participate in the upsides of capitalism.” So they’re figuring out a new path, one that often skips college and goes straight into earning cash, with a large side dose of social media.

“One of my favorite ones is poop-scooping,” Pillar said. If you’re a 16- or 17-year-old kid with some ambition and some drive, maybe ride your bike over to a rich neighborhood, “pick up dog shit in rich people’s backyards, charge them money, you know, put the crap in their own garbage, in the garbage can. That’s a very low barrier-to-entry opportunity.” Jobber serves businesses like this, he added. “They’re million-dollar businesses now. And they were started just in that kind of a way.”

The CEO who has to replace 80% of his staff every school year

Levi Boyd has lived the overlap from both sides. The 20-year-old founder and CEO of Algo Landscaping started posting on Instagram around the same time he made his first $10,000, and says the exposure “pushed me further than anything.” He claimed he answers “every single comment, every single DM,” walking newer operators through basic questions such as which lawnmower to buy, while he also comments on bigger creators’ posts for advice.

The landscaping CEO recalled riding in a truck with the landscaper he apprenticed with as a teenager, watching the older man from another generation seethe. “He’d look at another landscaper and be like, ‘I hate that guy. Why is he working over here?’ Just pure hatred for for the other guys in the industry.” Boyd said that actually inspired him to go the other way—he’s mentored contractors that he’s never met in person, including one operator in Chicago who went from nothing to a “big truck, trailers, employees, fancy equipment. He’s doing basically what I do.”

Boyd shrugged when asked why he’s so benevolent on social media with his ostensible competitors. “There’s no shortage of work,” he said. He has grown his business tremendously with AI tools and social media, he added, disclosing revenue of roughly $28,000 (Canadian dollars) in year one, $110,000 in year two and $323,000 so far this year, figures confirmed by Fortune. “I really want to do a million,” he said, “That’s the goal. We’re gonna do a million next year, for sure.” Boyd added that he was a finance major and many of his friends from school stuck with it. “They’re working at banks now, and it just sounds miserable.” He said he thinks he’s making more mowing lawns, at least for the time being.

Grandbois and Boyd are part of a movement toward small-business entrepreneurship. Americans filed 5.6 million new business applications last year, per the Census Bureau—nearly double the pre-pandemic pace and the highest level on record. The Small Business Association says these companies account for 99.9% of all U.S. businesses and nearly nine in 10 net new jobs from 2023-2024, while they comprise 45.9% of private-sector workers. At the same time, as the Financial Times‘ John Burn-Murdoch recently noted, long-term labor-market trends have made non-college-educated young men the worst-performing cohort for decades running — making either Grandbois and Boyd into notable exceptions, or perhaps a sign of things to come.

‘A lot of this is the problem of the parents as well’

The consequences of these cultural changes hit home for Dr. Lee Bowes, who has been watching the consequences walk through the door of her for-profit workforce-placement organization, AmericaWorks, for roughly 40 years. The young people she tries to place, by and large, “don’t really, don’t have a specific goal in mind of what they care about, what their passion is for.” They arrive in her pipeline as churn—job-hopping every six months, having been told to seek their passion and instead finding a communications degree and a bad job market.

They’re “very concerned” about being able to work remotely, being able to have lots of vacation and personal time, she added, but very little sense that they have to earn those privileges. “A lot of this is the problem of the parents as well,” Bowes said, adding that she herself came from a family of “very confused bohemians”—her parents opened Boston’s first theater company, her oldest brother was a writer and her younger brother is a painter.

Bowes has actually developed a passion in her line of work: helping former convicts find meaningful work. She has spent decades helping build the prison-to-work pipeline. “The best thing in the world is to see the reality of someone’s life being changed through work.” she said. “It’s what I believe in. It’s what happened to me.” When asked if she’d say that directly to Gen Z—that she was once a skeptic and work changed her life—she didn’t hesitate. “I would be more than happy to say that to anyone.”

Bowes described a different example in an employee, the daughter of immigrants (“thank God for immigrants,” she said), who she said was very practical when it came to choosing a major. Not only is that a rare kind of intentionality, but the federal government has gone missing. She said she often talks with the Department of Labor about how its federal framework governing workforce placement is unchanged since 1973: “hasn’t changed at all.”

The parental influence

The parental shift is becoming visible in the data. Three years ago, 79% of Gen Z respondents told Jobber’s Blue Collar Report that their parents had steered them toward four-year college, and only 5% considered vocational school an option. Today, 92% of the parents of younger children say they would encourage a skilled-trade career if their child expressed interest. Now, long-term job stability comes first, but 40% of Gen Z also say they learned about the trades too late to seriously consider them.

Levi Boyd’s parents lived the reversal in real time. They were “never really super financially literate,” he said, part of why they pushed him toward a four-year business degree. “They did not want me to mow lawns,” he said. He was a good student and finished two years of post-secondary education but he doesn’t regret dropping out.

“I was just a good regurgitator,” Boyd said, “I wasn’t actually learning much, but yeah, I had a good GPA.” He couldn’t get over how expensive it was and doesn’t expect to go back. “I get way more way more information from just scrolling on Instagram, honestly in a couple hours every day—way more applicable knowledge is just at my fingertips.” He said it’s helping him land deals, too—he learned from Instagram how to apply a big logo to his trailer and landed a big commercial property as a client afterward. “Our biggest contract to date.”

Scott Shaw spent over a decade in private equity before 22 years at the trade-school operator Lincoln Tech, based in New Jersey, where he is now the CEO. He said the biggest change that he’s observed, by far, was social media. Welders and electricians began posting about their workdays, and those videos served as more effective recruitment than decades of messaging from institutions like his. “I’m surprised that they attract so much attention,” he said, “but they’re educating folks.”

There’s always been an entrepreneurial vein in America, Shaw allows, and the default has been becoming a tech millionaire (or more). “People realize that going into the trades, you can be your own boss, too,” he said.

It’s the realization that Grandbois had at 16 standing next to his boss’ truck and Boyd had when he started scaling his landscaping crews—and it’s the thesis on which Pillar built his tech company. Jobber’s survey of Gen Z workers this year found that 77% say they want to become business owners, and nearly twice as many see that happening through the trades than college (46% vs. 24%).

Junk removal is physical work, and Carter is betting on a body that is 18 years old. Carter doesn’t have traditional employer health insurance, 401(k) or other credentials to fall back on.

In the corporate sector, according to Shaw, it seems that “companies in general have lost the skill of onboarding, training, mentoring people.” Then Gen Z gets blamed, sometimes by sources like Bowes, for being disloyal and job-hopping. Shaw argues that the retention crisis was created by employers and gets blamed on workers, and many of his students are opting out of that.

Grandbois may not have a Lamborghini yet, but he was able to buy a Ford F-250 (lightly used, 10,000 miles) and his business has expanded into a kind of junk consulting. “We’ve started to do coaching to help other people who are interested in junk removal scale really quick,” he said, estimating that it was a 50-50 split for his business, and he’s made about $40,000 this year from junk coaching. Thanks to social media, he added, “we have a bunch of 40-year-old dads who are also interested in starting a business like this.”

Boyd is trying to engineer his own obsolescence. “I just want to automate this this whole thing and be completely separated from it,” he said. An avid AI user—including Jobber’s AI receptionist—he said he’s shifting his company away from landscaping installs toward recurring commercial-maintenance contracts, with the goal of fully removing himself from day-to-day-fieldwork. He’s guessing he’s about two-and-a-half years out. The hard part isn’t scaling anymore, but stepping back from the work that made his money in the first place. “It’s more with your head than it is with your hands.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Behind the glitz of multimillion-dollar funding rounds that define today’s unicorns are often years of founder sacrifices and barely-there paychecks. Kirill Bigai, the cofounder and CEO of online education marketplace Preply, paid himself virtually nothing for an entire year while getting his now $1.2 billion business off the ground.

“We agreed to not pay each other salaries, because we didn’t have a lot of capital,” Bigai tells Fortune. “We wanted to really make it successful. We had jobs on the side…But the majority of our time was still spent with Preply.”

The first year of scaling the language-learning platform was extremely tight. Bigai was 26 when he created the company with cofounder Dmytro Voloshyn in 2012. Preply raised a small amount of pre-seed funding in its early days, but within a year it was nearly spent, forcing them to bootstrap the business. Keeping their costs lean, the founders decided to run their company operations out of their hometown of Kyiv, Ukraine. Keeping overhead low came at a personal cost: The founders had to work two careers to pay their bills.

In the first year, after its pre-seed funding dried up, the Ukrainian entrepreneurs earned no income from the operation. They spent 60 hours a week working on their start-up, juggling side-hustles to earn just enough to live. Bigai worked as an implementation consultant at software company Creatio, with prior engineering experience at Nokia Siemens Networks. Meanwhile, Voloshyn pursued a PHD in machine learning and AI, also moonlighting as a software developer for AB InBev. With little to spare, the founders ran a lean operation as they worked to prove the business could survive.

Language tutors and learners began flocking to the site, but it wasn’t until six months later that they afforded themselves a $100 monthly salary. Their take-home gradually ticked up over time, and after about two years into their founding journey, they were finally able to pay themselves $500 and quit their jobs to focus on Preply full-time. One decade later, their learning platform is a $1.2 billion unicorn connecting more than 150,000 tutors with learners across 180 countries and more than 90 languages.

How the CEO’s search for an English tutor became a $1.2 billion business

Like legions of founders before him, the Preply cofounder drew his business inspiration from a personal problem he knew firsthand.

As the son of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, Bigai grew up in Ukraine’s capital, aspiring to get into business like his parents. But he knew that a “miracle” wouldn’t suddenly make him a founder—he had to get out there and do something about it. And the process of trying to learn English himself sparked the idea for Preply. Like millions of other bilingual learners, Bigai sought a tutor to improve his English skills in an internet era with limited options. He eventually found a tutor who taught him remotely on a 2000s-era communications platform, Skype, where users could video call online. The service was so new that Bigai spotted a real business opportunity: creating a central hub where language teachers and learners could find and connect with each other.

“We were really excited about the opportunity here,” Bigai says. “We thought that if only there were a platform that can connect you to the world’s best tutors, that would be just phenomenal, and we decided to build it.”

During the first three weeks, Preply registered 100 tutors through Google Forms, with Bigai cold-calling customers to join the platform. The company then quickly launched payment and messaging services between the tutors and learners, with the language-learning offerings limited to English. But as dozens of requests poured in daily, they quickly expanded their offerings. Soon, Preply users could become fluent in Spanish with a native speaker on the other side of the world, or find a French tutor to help them gear up for finals. In 2016, a $1.3 million seed funding round helped Preply transform its product; now, the platform has a vast international network and builds out products for teachers and students.

The Ukraine-based edtech startup now employs 800 full-time employees, and hosts 150,000 tutors on its platform. It has hundreds of tutors for each language offering, from Mandarin and Arabic to Greek and Norwegian. The business is also growing its base of millions of curious thinkers with non-language subjects; Preply now covers math, computer science, and chess. Earlier this year, its successes propelled it into the unicorn club.

This January, Preply raised $150 million in a Series D funding round led by WestCap, almost tripling its valuation to $1.2 billion. It brought the company’s total funding to more than $299 million; with the new cash injection, the business set out to develop AI tools and expand its engineering department, especially in New York and London. Reaching that valuation took more than a decade of experimentation—and, eventually, a realization that the company needed to double down on a problem its founders knew intimately.

“It came to us through a few tries and failures, and I think it really clicked to us when we started to focus on the problem that we deeply understood and that we can relate to,” the CEO says. “English learning was a big part of our journeys, and we understood how big this problem is, and how important it is to many individuals.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Ian Bell was 15 the first time he went looking for birds in Central Park alone in 2021, waking most mornings before school to walk the park with a pair of binoculars, oftentimes the only teenager doing so.

“I remember starting birding and being very lonely,” Bell told Fortune. “I had no one to bird with who wasn’t 20 years older than me.”

But now, five years later, he co-runs a Discord server with 4,400 members who alert each other about bird sightings—one small sign of a boom that shows up everywhere from Cornell University’s suddenly crowded birding club to federal surveys showing birding participation among 25-to-34-year-olds has quadrupled since 2016.

While birding is joining a Gen Z analog hobby boom as more young people are trying to go offline after the screen exhaustion of the pandemic, technology has also played a role in making birding more accessible.

Merlin, the free bird-identification app run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, went from over 279,000 U.S. users in July 2019 to over 4.8 million in July 2026 and helps beginners identify common bird species using Cornell’s eBird database. 

“Bird watching, I think, used to be sort of a very, very niche thing, and now it is a cool thing,” Christopher Wood, the director of eBird, told Fortune. “It’s a mechanism that gets people outside and gets people in touch with nature, and then a percentage of those people start really understanding, learning those birds, and then they put their phone away completely.”

While Merlin doesn’t track age data, more young people showing up to bird is evidenced by the National Audubon Society’s growing presence on college campuses. Its campus chapter count has gone from zero to 117 in the past six years, and the organization is seeing “a surge in our supporters in their 20s and 30s” on social media, a spokesperson told Fortune over email.

But ask young people how they actually started birding, and few mention a bird at all.

Birding meets Gen Z’s yearning for mentorship and community

More than identifying birds and sitting in nature, part of birding’s appeal as a hobby is the people who set off the initial interest.

Shawn Wallace, 22, didn’t plan on becoming a birder, but got into it after his college resident advisor invited him to go fishing and find a tufted duck, common in Europe but rare in New York.

“We spent like four hours looking for it, and we didn’t find it,” Wallace told Fortune. “But then after that, whenever he went out, I tried to go out with him and I just continued down the rabbit hole.”

Jennifer Lodi-Smith, a psychologist at Canisius University who has spent four years collecting birders’ origin stories, encountered similar examples again and again.

She said more than two-thirds of the roughly 600 stories in her data set—including 96 from Gen Z respondents—are interpersonal rather than about the bird themselves, something that also applies to Lodi-Smith’s birding journey.

“I don’t have a single spark-bird moment,” she told Fortune. “I have spark people.”

Indeed, Wallace’s advisor, Robert Buckert, helped connect him to other birders who showed Wallace the ropes and the spots to go, with even the older crowd of birders being “great people.” 

Buckert, a long-time birder himself, explained that birding’s strength is its “giving and wonderful community full of mentors” that welcomes young people and gives them a place to learn and belong, something they’re missing in the digital age.

“When you’re surrounded by all these people that take you under their wing, pun intended, and mentor you so strongly, then you just get kind of swept into that,” he told Fortune. “It’s not just the craving for the outdoors. It’s also that one-on-one mentor to mentee thing that people are dying for. It’s a great avenue for camaraderie and to learn from your elders.”

Now Wallace, who was Buckert’s first mentee, tries to get other people into birding as well.

“I’ve convinced at least, or maybe helped convince, three people to buy a bird feeder for their backyard, or at least 10 people to download the Merlin app,” he said. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In 2026, the SEC has moved on two fronts that will define the next chapter of American public markets. On January 28, it confirmed that tokenized securities remain securities. In May, it proposed the most significant overhaul of the registered-offering framework in more than 20 years. Both are part of a story 250 years in the making.

As CEO of OTC Markets Group, which operates regulated markets for U.S. and international securities, I have a direct view into why both matter. That view is rooted in two-and-a-half centuries of market evolution.

In 1792, a handful of brokers gathered beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and agreed to trade securities among themselves, a private club where prices were negotiated in person. Information moved slowly, unevenly, and often not at all. That opacity was the defining feature of early American public markets, and improving the quality and availability of information has been the central project of every generation since.

The history of American public markets is a history of expanding access.

From the New York Price Current in 1795 to our predecessor, the National Quotation Bureau, in 1911, telegraph, ticker tape, and telephone each moved information faster and widened the market.

The securities reforms of the 1930s gave that expanding market a legal foundation. Larger companies seeking public capital would register with the SEC, file financial statements, and give investors the information they needed to make rational decisions. The disclosure-based principle was clear: let investors decide the merits and value of investments. Public markets function when buyers and sellers have access to the same material facts. Without that, price discovery breaks down and capital flows to noise rather than fundamental value.

For decades, the OTC market operated largely outside that framework. The “Pink Sheets” of the mid-20th century were exactly what the name suggests: printed lists of broker-dealer daily quotations, a phone book distributed by messenger every morning, with little standardized disclosure and no electronic infrastructure.

The electronic trading revolution changed the architecture of markets. In 1971, Nasdaq launched the world’s first electronic stock quotation system, connecting OTC market makers across the country through a decentralized network and bringing real-time price transparency to thousands of securities.

The internet enabled market operators and regulators to extend that same logic from private networks for price discovery, to corporate disclosure and financial data. OTC Markets Group leveled the playing field, with a digital platform where companies publish financial information, submit to ongoing disclosure standards, and earn placement on the OTCQX Best Market or OTCQB Venture Market. In 2021, the SEC reinforced that principle, requiring that current issuer information be available before a broker-dealer posts a quote.

Today our markets facilitate trading in more than 12,000 securities. In the first half of 2026, according to OTC Markets Group data, $453 billion traded across those markets, on track to reach $900 billion for the year. International companies, cross-traded from exchanges in Tokyo, London, Toronto, Paris, and Sydney, represent nearly 95% of total dollar volume. These established global enterprises choose to access U.S. investors through a market structure designed to accommodate public companies at every stage of their journey and from every jurisdiction.

The SEC’s proposed registered-offering reform would extend that access further. By opening shelf registration and at-the-market capital-raising to roughly 81% of public companies, the proposal advances a principle this market was built on: that disclosure standards, not the size of your balance sheet or the prestige of your listing venue, should determine your access to public capital. Growth-stage companies currently forced into private placements at steep discounts and significant dilution to existing shareholders would gain a transparent, public alternative. The policy is catching up.

Every generation rewrites what a market can be. The current rewrite is about ownership itself. Digital technology could make securities programmable, connecting companies directly with a class of participants that traditional market infrastructure was never designed to reach. Still the same principles for fair dealing and materiality remain. Market operators are enabling broker-dealers to trade digital asset securities. The trading, settlement, and custody infrastructure to support it at institutional scale is being built. The work now is ensuring the transparency principles that have governed public markets for decades travel with the technology, not behind it.

Public markets work best as an ecosystem. From OTC Markets through Nasdaq to the NYSE, each market plays a role in capital formation, price discovery, and investor choice. Democracy thrives in sunlight, and capitalism goes hand in hand with the transparency and tradability of public companies, where an average citizen can own a share in the future. Democratic, disclosure-based regulation reinforces that continuum, offering graduated benefits and responsibilities as companies mature and encouraging businesses to grow in public rather than remain private.

Over two centuries of American market evolution produced a system that reaches every corner of the global economy, built on disclosure, modernized by technology, and sustained by the confidence of investors worldwide. American market dominance was never guaranteed. It was built by making room for new companies, new technologies, and new investors at every stage of the country’s economic history.

If the SEC’s shelf-registration reform is finalized, growth-stage companies currently relying on discounted, dilutive private placements will gain a public, transparent alternative for the first time in decades: a structural shift in who gets to build in public, not just a procedural one.

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

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No one seems to love the great outdoors as much as billionaires do. 

America’s wealthiest are snapping up huge swathes of farmland, and while some are using it for their elaborate hobbies, agriculture advocates worry the broader trend of the rich purchasing tillage is putting the livelihood of actual farmers at risk.

Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Alexis Ohanian have effectively dubbed themselves amateur yeoman, putting the ultrarichs’ hobby of tending to the land in the spotlight. In an episode of the Idea Generation podcast published last month, the Meta CEO said he is working to create the perfect steak by raising wagyu and angus cattle on his ranch on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Called Ko’olau Ranch, the $300 million property has expanded to about 4,000 acres after he first bought land on the island in 2014.

“I’m very into the genetics of the cattle,” Zuckerberg said.

Investor and Reddit cofounder Ohanian offered a tour of his family farm in Jupiter, Florida, in a LinkedIn post on Thursday, showing off banana shoots, an herb garden, and apiary. He has owned the farm for six years.

But these ventures are tiny compared to the ranchlands, timberlands, and cropfields many one-percenters are nabbing. According to the 2025 Land Report 100, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates owns 275,000 acres of land, the 44th most of any American landowner. Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has 462,000 acres, and Stan Kroenke, Los Angeles Ram owner and husband to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke, owns 2.7 million acres. Neither Zuckerberg nor Ohanian crack the top 100 landowners.

In fact, farmland has become a $4.3 trillion asset class as it grows in popularity, according to Steve Bruere, president of agricultural real estate firm Peoples Company. For many of the ultrawealthy, farmland has become a way to hedge against inflation and the volatility of other, more traditional assets: Last year, the value of U.S. farms was an average of about $4,350 per acre, a 4.3% year-over-year increase, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

But as demand goes higher, the rising cost of farmland could also spell trouble for actual farmers.

“It makes it much harder for farmers to compete, especially beginning farmers who are maybe trying to acquire their first farm, or even an existing farmer who might want to grow and expand,” Erin Foster West, policy campaigns director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, told Fortune earlier this year.

How did farmland become a popular asset among the wealthy?

About 20 years ago following the 2008 financial crisis, investors went in search of alternative safe-haven assets, finding greener pastures to traditional investments on, well, greener pastures. The demand for farmland mirrored the real-estate boom of the 1970s, with investors working to hedge against inflation with a physical asset, much like gold. 

Land is a finite resource and positively correlated with inflation, continuing to appreciate as costs go up. Because of the close relationship between land use and food scarcity, there’s also a theory that farmland will only become more precious as the population grows.

“If you believe you want diversification, and you also believe we’re going to have underlying inflation—which is what a lot of people want right now—then farmland is a great option for them,” Bruere told Fortune. “Getting your hands on some farmland where the number of arable acres in the world declines every year, that’s why a lot of people like it.”

That’s on top of the growing demand for land from AI hyperscalers, who are looking for large swaths of earth, including farms.

For many of the ultrarich, there’s also a less strategic benefit to owning the land, as exhibited by Zuckerberg and Ohanian: their own enjoyment.

“A lot of people started to appreciate the non-financial benefits of farmland,” Bruere said. “You can hike it, you can walk on it, you can fish it, you can hunt it, you can grow food on it. That trend really emerged coming out of the Covid area, where people were stuck in their homes and apartments and started looking for alternative investments.”

What does this emerging asset class mean for American farmers?

For others, being a major landowner can mean being a landlord. Nearly 40% of U.S. farmland is now leased to farmers and operators, according to the USDA.

Renting isn’t necessarily a bad thing for farmers, particularly those just starting out, Foster West said. Rent for farmers is increasing more slowly than land prices, with average rent for U.S. cropland ticking up just 0.6% annually, per the USDA Land Values survey.

However, renting also means farmers don’t have full control over their land, making it challenging to make long-term investments to improve soil quality or building wash-and-pack stations for vegetables, which could take years to pay off.

The problem, according to Foster West, is when farmers are renting because they have been outbid on purchasable land and have no choice but to be a tenant. It means farmers aren’t able to use their land to get loans for their operations, borrow for their kids’ college expenses, or leverage for their own retirement.

“The control over that land, having that asset in your possession, really can make a difference for a farmer to be successful,” she said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The world’s most powerful economies are increasingly alarmed by their declining birthrates, and there’s no shortage of theories on why. SpaceX founder Elon Musk suggests society is “teaching a fear of pregnancy,” while policymakers in France seem to believe young people are simply forgetting to procreate, and sent reminder letters to 29-year-olds as a result.

Other suggestions are more banal: the cost of raising a child is too high, or would-be parents worry that the world is already running out of resources needed to support population levels.

A working paper by Claudia Goldin, a Nobel prize-winning economic historian at Harvard University, proposes an alternative: Perhaps hardworking, highly educated women are concerned about the autonomy they would sacrifice if their partners don’t share the workload of raising children.

“Women who undertake greater investments in themselves will be more likely to have children if they can reap the financial and personal rewards from their education while raising their children,” Goldin writes. “In the absence of that assurance, they will be more likely either not to have children or not to undertake the initial investment in themselves.”

She adds: “The more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable ‘dads’ and not disappointing ‘duds,’ the more investment in women’s education and careers, and the higher will be the birthrate in the face of greater female agency.”

The theory is neat, and subject to criticism as a result. Some point out that birthrates have continued to fall despite household work being carried out more equitably. In the decade between 2026 and 2016, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the hours men spend on household activities have fractionally increased, while the hours carried out by women have slightly decreased. Birthrates have still continued to decline. Other critics suggest the data used in the research is inconsistent, with skeptics also questioning what “dependability” in dads entails.

But Goldin doesn’t claim to have all the solutions to the questions her work raises. “When women did not have any choice, [having children] is what they did,” she tells Fortune. “But now they are given a choice.” So do men, she adds: How to demonstrate whether they are a dud or a dad. But “we don’t really know the answer [to] what sort of commitment mechanisms [men] have,” Goldin says.

Goldin, perhaps attuned to this dynamic because of her research, says she can spot anecdotal indicators among her students: “I can pretty much tell who the good dads are. There’s no question—they are the individuals who are clearly going to share and [are] going to engage in what I would call couple equity.”

“Couple equity doesn’t mean equality—it doesn’t mean you’re doing exactly the same things … but it does mean that each of them has decided that they’re willing to give up a certain amount of income and prestige to raise a child or two, or three together.”

No new phenomenon

While Goldin’s methodology can be debated (and indeed, the historian is open to feedback), the research is nevertheless making waves. On a superficial level, Google searches for Goldin’s name have increased 400% over the past year compared to a year prior. More broadly, the topic of birthrates is ascending the political agenda—President Trump even suggested he’d be known as the “fertilization president” courtesy of policies aimed at supporting birthrates, such as increasing access to IVF.

So why the sudden focus? The trends driving Goldin’s formula are nothing new: Women have been investing in their education in increasing numbers over the past 50 years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) latest reporting, for the year 2024, found that among recent high school graduates ages 16 to 24, 69.5% of women were enrolled in college, and 55.4% of men had done the same. Meanwhile, Census data from 50 years prior shows that in 1974, 45.87% of 14 to 24-year-olds enrolled in college were women.

In addition to women wanting to build careers for their enjoyment and fulfillment, there’s also been an increasing economic need for them to do so. Brookings found in a 2020 study that without women’s earnings, middle-income households would have seen virtually no income growth between 1979 and 2018.

Myra Strober, a labor economist and Professor Emerita at the School of Education at Stanford University, sees an answer both simpler and broader than the data from the past half-century suggests: The need for children has shifted from the household level to the societal.

“Historically, people had children because they needed them,” Strober tells Fortune. “In an agricultural economy, you needed children to do the work … as agriculture has become a less and less important part of our economy, people don’t need children the way they did before. 

“And people had lots of children because the infant mortality rate was high. You couldn’t be assured that the children you had would live to adulthood, and so you better ensure you have plenty of children to help around the farm. Once agriculture declines and the infant mortality rate goes way down … people don’t need children in the way that they did.”

Strober founded the famous Stanford course “Women and Work” (later renamed “Work and Family”), where she met student Abby Davisson, now an entrepreneur and consultant. The pair co-authored their book ‘Money and Love’ in 2023, which is now required course reading at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

At the end of the duo’s book, they examine the extent to which public policy trickles down into household decision-making, “yet we have not changed our policies around … work expectation or cultural norms. It’s much easier to change policy than it is to change culture,” Davisson tells Fortune.

“There is a cultural conversation piece that’s tricky here, even if we have the best geopolitical policies and …. everyone holds hands and agrees on that, if the culture—the expectations for parents do not change, if the expense for raising children does not change—I don’t see how we’re going to see different behaviour at the individual level, because it’s not just this one piece of policy.”

“We should be thinking about the economy as a whole and public policy rather than bedroom policy,” Strober echoed.

An economic boon

Whether or not equity in partnerships is the cause of declining birth rates, Goldin, Strober, and Davisson are united in advocating for it—the latter duo even includes checklists to prompt conversations between couples in their book. But that doesn’t mean equity is no longer a significant economic concern.

“If you begin with the thought that you have a distribution among women and men of talent and creativity, why would you not want to use both distributions and take the top of each to run your economy and your society?” Strober poses. “In terms of economic well-being, social well-being, use of resources, you want to look equally among men and women.”

Davisson, mom to two boys, chimes: “I really value the fact that my children see their father in food preparation mode all the time—he’s the family chef—like they’re going to grow up thinking that that is totally normal. The value is both for the workplace and for the citizens in that workplace.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Mark Walter’s sports empire made him one of the most recognizable owners in American sports. His financial empire was considerably less visible, even though it was hiding in plain sight. But recent developments now have the business mogul facing scrutiny over the financial machinery behind his sports empire, raising much bigger questions about the entire private credit sector.

Walter, the controlling owner of the Dodgers and until recently the majority owner of the Lakers, is at the center of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, according to regulatory filings first reported on by Bloomberg in July.

The probe is looking into whether companies tied to his financial empire improperly handled billions of dollars in loans from insurance companies that he separately controls. No criminal charges have been filed against Walter, and the investigation does not allege that the Dodgers or Lakers committed wrongdoing. However, more than $1.2 billion of the financing for Walter’s purchase of the LA Dodgers came from insurance companies controlled by Walter through Guggenheim, according to a breakdown of the transaction by the Los Angeles Times. 

Walter did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune. Guggenheim Partners declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors and the SEC are examining whether Walter’s insurance companies improperly lent money to businesses connected to him without adequately disclosing the relationships. Delaware Life Insurance Co. and Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co. conducted internal reviews after receiving federal grand-jury subpoenas and significantly restated what they described as errors in prior financial reporting. Transactions between “related parties,” or life insurance money essentially being routed elsewhere within Guggenheim, were not $1.4 billion, or 3% of investments, but were actually over $17 billion, or at least 39% of total invested assets. 

Related-party transactions are not inherently illegal, but they can create conflicts of interest and are subject to disclosure and regulatory scrutiny, particularly when insurance companies are involved because they hold money intended to pay policyholders’ future claims. A week after the Lakers sold in a headspinning bombshell, Walter is reported in English newspapers to be considering exiting another trophy asset, Chelsea Football Club. 

The scrutiny has already produced a concrete financial response. Delaware Life, which Walter controls, agreed to reduce its exposure to businesses connected to him by swapping as much as $6.5 billion of related-party investments for assets classified as independent. But this does not eliminate whether Walter will eventually need to sell his sports assets to satisfy lenders, regulators or investors. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walter has been trying to unwind portions of his empire amid the investigation, potentially also including the Dodgers and Cadillac’s Formula One operation.

Walter also reportedly sought to extract cash from another valuable LA asset. Before selling the Lakers, he held discussions with Charter Communications about ending the Lakers’ and Dodgers’ local television agreements early in exchange for lump-sum payments. Those discussions did not produce a deal. The Dodgers’ television agreement runs through 2038, while the Lakers’ agreement runs through 2031. 

Is private credit running on life insurance?

The private credit market—loan and debt financing extended by non-bank lenders—has grown to more than $1 trillion in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Walter’s case raises new questions of just what else is going on under the surface. The risk flagged by regulators and the IMF is not private credit itself, but structures where the same firm sits on multiple sides of a deal—the private-credit firm takes in premium money via an insurer that it controls, then directs that money into loans it originates or that flow back to its own funds and portfolio companies.

The reporting on the federal investigation points out that Walter’s insurers held private-credit investments connected to other Walter-controlled businesses. In other words, the same billionaire could sit on multiple sides of the same transaction—controlling an insurance company on one side, while also controlling the businesses receiving financing on the other. A retiree’s annuity payment can sit on an insurer’s balance sheet—but that money didn’t travel in one straight line from a policy to Dodger Stadium, it traveled through layers of insurers, asset managers, funds, loans and affiliated companies.

Guggenheim is not the only private-credit firm building an empire around the convergence of insurance and private markets. Apollo has made the model central to its business through Athene, its retirement-services and insurance business. “Athene and Apollo have seen tremendous mutual benefit from our longstanding strategic relationship,” Jim Belardi—CEO of Athene—said in a January 2022 press release when they merged, “and now with full alignment our value will be significantly stronger than the sum of our parts.”

Yankee Global Enterprises announced a $2.6 billion financing arrangement with affiliates of Apollo Sports Capital, a permanent-capital platform of Apollo. The transaction combines credit and equity and will be used to support the growth of the New York Yankees and refinance existing debt.

KKR has built a similar insurance connection. The company acquired a majority stake in Global Atlantic in 2021 and bought the remaining stake in 2024. KKR explicitly describes the relationship as mutually reinforcing—the firm can use its investment capabilities and origination network for Global Atlantic, while the insurance business gives KKR access to long-duration capital.

KKR separately agreed in February to acquire Arctos Partners for about $1.4 billion. Arctos is a specialist sports investment firm whose portfolio includes minority interests in professional sports franchises such as the NFL’s Buffalo Bills. KKR’s own investor presentation described the acquisition as a way to establish a sports platform while expanding its ability to raise capital and use its insurance network.

Life insurers have become particularly important players because their liabilities can stretch decades in the future. They need investments that bankroll over long periods, making loans and other private assets attractive. A 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago working paper estimated private credit accounted for about $849 billion—or 14%—of life insurers’ balance sheets in 2024. Life insurers across the country have been increasing their exposure to private credit as they search for higher yields. S&P Global reported this year that U.S. life insurers are increasing private-credit allocations for higher returns and portfolio diversification.

If all of this sounds like a bank, borrowing short and lending long — well, yes and no. Life insurers’ obligations are typically tied to future claims or contracts that can be expensive or impossible to surrender early, so they are not “runnable” in the same way a bank is. The Federal Reserve says insurers are therefore “typically less exposed to traditional liquidity risk than banking organizations,” although certain annuities and institutional funding products can still be runnable at times.

On both the equity and insurance side, the pattern is stable—capital that was raised for insurance ends up cross-financing the sponsor’s other sports or business interests, often with limited transparency. Insurers as a captive funding source for a broader financial empire is now a mainstream private-credit playbook, and the SEC probe is effectively its first stress-test if existing rules can catch it before it’s brought into public view.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX is hiring a trader to build and lead a natural gas trading team to support the space flight company’s growing fuel and power needs.

Job postings for the role, which “focuses on physical and financial natural gas trading,” further underscores the importance of the power-plant and manufacturing fuel to support the company’s ambitions in chipmaking and space exploration.

SpaceX earlier this month said it plans to build its own gas-fired power plants to support the electricity requirements of the massive semiconductor manufacturing facility it’s developing in Texas with Tesla Inc. Surging power demand from data centers and new factories has driven demand for new gas plants, and Musk has long been a fan of vertical integration.

Read More: SpaceX to Build Natural Gas Power Plants for Texas Chip Factory

SpaceX also plans to build its own gas pipelines, and is even looking to drill for natural gas, the company’s president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC in June. These represent “huge investments to develop our own propellant and bring it to the rocket,” she said.

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket uses super-chilled methane — the primary ingredient in natural gas — combined with liquid oxygen as propellant.

Other prominent technology companies, including Meta and OpenAI, have recently indicated plans to foray into power trading as their energy needs expand. 

Read More: OpenAI Is Hiring a Power-Trading Lead for Data Center Portfolio

Postings for the SpaceX gas trading role say that it is either based in Cape Canaveral, Florida, or Starbase, Texas — not the traditional gas-trading hubs of Houston, Calgary or Stamford, Connecticut. Remote work won’t be considered, the postings say.

SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump made more than 1,000 securities trades in June, including significant purchases of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc. and Cintas Corp., according to a financial disclosure published Saturday.

The transactions totaled between $78.1 million and $263.1 million in the filing published by the US Office of Government Ethics, which shows a range for each transaction rather than exact numbers. 

The largest transaction was a June 22 sale of between $5 million and $25 million of shares in a Vanguard Group Inc. exchange-traded fund.  

Trump made more than 21,000 securities trades in 2025, often in bursts tied to market events he created. The total value of the trades he made in 2025 was between $600 million and $1.86 billion, occasionally showing buying and selling of the same security on the same day.

Read More: Trump Financial Disclosure Shows 21,000 Trades in 2025

The White House says there are no conflicts of interest because Trump’s investments are independently managed. Trump’s son Eric, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, has said the assets were in a blind trust.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Even the wealthiest parents in America are worried about their kids’ financial futures. Millions of Gen Zers face unemployment as entry-level hiring has slowed, competition has become fiercer, and AI takes over tasks that were historically performed by recent grads.  

In a world where seemingly no one is immune to the impacts of AI on the workforce and an increasingly stiff job market, ultra-high net worth people are starting to have the same concerns as middle-class and low-income families: Will my kid be able to get a job and support themself?

“Billionaires have the financial resources to support their children, but they sometimes struggle to determine what else is needed for their children to succeed,” Tom Thiegs, managing director of leadership and legacy at Ascent Private Capital Management with U.S. Bank, told Fortune.

Millionaires and billionaires “are recognizing this is not the same game they had to play,” wealth manager Patrick Dwyer told CNBC earlier this year. “Families have to rethink … what it means to support their children. And we’re not talking about spoiling your kids. We’re talking about: What if your kid needs retraining at 33?” Dwyer is managing director at Aligned by NewEdge Wealth, a boutique wealth management firm based in Miami. He works with clients with net worths between roughly $100 million and more than $1 billion.

Dwyer said his clients are concerned their children, typically between age 22 and 35, are struggling to secure and hang on to jobs that are historically associated with security and status, including technology, law, and health care. That means the wealthy will have to plan for a future in which they’re passing on more of their fortune to their kids.

“[They’re] realizing that if they don’t pass on more meaningful wealth to their children, or their children are not able to accumulate wealth … their kids could have [less] agency over their lives than they did,” he told CNBC.

While this may sound like an irrational fear from America’s wealthiest, it’s a reality more wealth managers recognize.

“This is a very real concern I’m hearing from ultra-affluent families right now,” Thiegs said. “On the surface it can sound irrational: ‘Why would a billionaire worry about their child getting a job?’ But realistically, no matter how much money you have, parents still want their children to succeed and lead fulfilled lives.”

Why are parents of Gen Zers so stressed about the job market?

The job market jitters Gen Zers face directly impacts how their parents can help them plan for their financial futures. 

But the crux of the problem isn’t that parents fear they won’t financially be able to help their children, it’s more that they’re worried they won’t have the same career outcomes and sense of fulfillment as past generations. 

“They’re not usually worried about the financial security of their children; rather they worry that the job market will impact their child’s sense of purpose, identity, and confidence,” Thiegs said. “They also worry that significant wealth will dampen their drive or desire to work.”

But that doesn’t mean Thiegs encourages his clients just to bankroll their kids for the foreseeable future. Instead, estate planning, investing, and other long-term financial planning is a must. 

“When parents are worried about their children’s job security, we recommend creating a system that provides opportunities for growth and development rather than just a financial safety net,” he said.

It’s more important to implement plans that support a child’s self worth than just their net worth, he added. 

Trent Von Ahsen, a certified financial planner and managing partner at Cedar Point Capital Partners, also says his ultra-high net worth families view the risks of today’s job market as less of a financial stability concern, but more about whether they’re setting their kids up to be indefinitely dependent on them.

“This cohort of parents seem more concerned about over-supporting their children, than under-supporting them,” Von Ahsen told Fortune.

How is Gen Z getting ahead of the job market?

The shift away from historically high-paying, white-collar jobs is already evident in the choices Gen Z is making. Facing mass layoffs in white‑collar sectors and anxious about AI, many young workers are peeling away from traditional corporate routes in favor of jobs they think might offer more control or faster cash—from becoming creator careers to opting for blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, electrical work, and other technical work.

In some cases, college‑educated Gen Zers are even competing for six‑figure nanny and tutor roles in elite households, chasing financial “freedom” outside of a traditional office career. A 2025 Deloitte global survey found just 6% of Gen Z respondents cite reaching a corporate leadership role as a primary goal. Instead, most prioritize work‑life balance, personal fulfillment, and learning.

This all means, though, billionaires and other high-net worth individuals have to financially plan differently from how they might have in the past. They have to design financial plans that “encourage growth and responsibility” instead of only making large inheritances all at once, Von Ahsen said.

“We see more emphasis on education funding flexibility, mentorship, and phased wealth transfers,” he said. It’s “really an attitude moving toward providing opportunity without removing initiative.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on February 11, 2026.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Rob Minnick fell into debt for the first time at age 19. Sitting in the back of his classroom during a freshman year math class, the now-27-year-old placed a wager on the New York Yankees during an MLB spring training game that sent him into the red. He assured his parents it wouldn’t happen again.

“Then it would happen five more times over the next five years,” he told Fortune.

Minnick gambled away the unemployment checks he received from his college campus job as he waited out the COVID lockdown from his parents’ house. When the stock market tumbled at the beginning of the pandemic, he yanked money from his stock portfolio and sold his Bitcoin and Ethereum, using the money to stoke the flames of a growing gambling addiction.

“My thought was, I need to get this money out and make it back right now, and then I’ll buy double what I just had, and then I’ll hold it,” he said.

Minnick will admit his myopia now, but his financial habits surrounding his gambling disorder are far from singular. A new wave of studies has found an increasing number of Americans are dumping stocks and draining savings in order to fuel sports betting habits—and finding themselves in financial turmoil as a result.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018—effectively legalizing sports betting—U.S. sports betting revenue has exploded from $441 million in revenue in 2018 to more than $16.6 billion in 2025, according to Sportsbook Review. 

The industry has minted billion-dollar deals between leagues and online platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel. And Americans placed about $30 billion in legal bets during the 2025 NFL season. That’s a big payday for the sports book and sports industry, yet it’s a hole burned in the pocket of many gamblers.

“This is a money-losing proposition for most of these individuals,” Scott Baker, an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Fortune. “On average, this is representing a drain to people’s finances.”

Baker authored a study, set to be published next month in the Journal of Financial Economics, that found that household bets increased $1,100 per year in states that legalized online sports betting. Meanwhile, the study also found a nearly 14% decrease in net investments in households after the introduction of legal online sports betting. 

These gamblers are not just funneling money from other parts of an entertainment budget to sustain their betting habits, Baker said. Instead, they’re also using funds to attend sports games or watching sports in restaurants or bars, creating a snowball effect of money spent on sports betting and its accompanying entertainment activities.

“We’re seeing that this gambling plus increases in consumption are both detracting from some of the longer run equity investments—or positive, easy, risky investments that people have been making—and tend to put more pressure and strain on their budgets in general,” Baker said.

A colleague in the field, Brett Hollenbeck, a marketing professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, can back up Baker’s findings. His paper found that credit scores fell an average of 0.3% in states that had legalized sports betting four years after the activity became legal.

Using consumer credit data in the 38 states that have legalized sports betting in some form, the study also found increased rates of bankruptcy, debt collections, debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies following legalization.

“What’s really unique about this is not just that sports gambling is a big, important industry,” Hollenbeck told Fortune. “But it gives us a window into how gambling causes people’s behavior to change.”

This practice may become more prevalent. Betterment’s 2026 Retail Investor Survey released earlier this month found that of 1,000 retail investors, from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, more than one-quarter of Gen Z investors treated sports bettings as part of their long-term financial strategy; more than half redirected money originally intended to go into stocks toward sports betting instead.

Sounding the alarm on the sports betting era

These behavioral changes are alarming to experts, who are concerned that the proliferation of sports betting is increasing the prevalence of gambling disorders. 

“I’ve seen people end up losing their houses, losing everything—not just because of sports wagering, just because of where gambling disorder will take them,” Michelle Malkin, a criminal justice and criminology professor at East Carolina University, told Fortune.

Because legalized sports betting is a relatively recent development, it is difficult to know the extent of its consequences for gambling addiction, she said. But early studies are starting to paint a picture. In Connecticut, which legalized online sports betting in 2021, 71% of state legal gambling revenue comes from problem or at-risk gamblers—who make up just 7% of residents, a Gemini Research study conducted by University of Massachusetts professor Rachel Volberg found.

Malkin believes problem gambling will become a bigger issue so long as sports betting remains under-regulated. “We can’t be winning everything off the backs of the people who are suffering most,” she said. 

But for states that have legalized sports betting and are able to heavily tax winnings, the legal online gambling platforms have been a boon. In July alone, the Connecticut Lottery Corporation, the state’s official lottery, made $587,000 in gross revenue from over $4.8 million in patron winnings from sports retail wagers. A spokesperson from CT Lottery told Fortune the revenue is used in the state’s general fund, which invests in public health, libraries, and public safety. But advocates for greater gambling regulation warn this is only one piece of the puzzle.

“It’s a marriage of the sports leagues, teams and players, media, online technology companies, the gambling companies—all under the partnership with the state government,” Harry Levant, clinician and director of gambling policy with the Public Health Advocacy Institute, told Fortune.

But it’s not just the legalization of sports betting that has led to its widespread popularity, Levant argued. Rather, it’s the growth of online platforms and apps that allow users to place frequent bets and experience the rush of instant gratification that accompanies them.

“What has happened since sports betting has been legalized—and now online casinos in seven states—is that the product is delivered as rapidly and as instantaneously as possible,” he said. “You can bet on the speed of every single pitch in every single baseball game.”

Sports betting apps hook users with aggressive sign-up bonuses and incentives to place the first bet and trust that the convenience and ease of their platforms will help them retain users.

“It gives them just another activity they can do on their phone,” marketing professor Hollenbeck said.

What the gaming industry is doing

Growing concerns about gambling disorder is top of mind for online sportsbooks and their partners. The NFL has a $6 million, three-year partnership with the National Council on Problem Gambling to expand visibility of resources and educational materials. 

The trade group American Gaming Association (AGA) has touted its efforts to increase consumer awareness of responsible gaming resources, such as wager and deposit limits. DraftKings offers a stat sheet to users to allow them to track their spending, while FanDuel has partnered with financial literacy nonprofit Operation HOPE. Both are members of the Responsible Online Gaming Association (ROGA).

“Currently, there is a misinterpretation that responsible gaming programs are intended only for those with a gambling problem, causing these programs and tools to be underutilized or ignored,” Jennifer Shatley, ROGA executive director, told Fortune. “In reality, the target audience for [responsible gaming] programs is the entire customer base, as these programs are designed to assist players with keeping gaming within their own personal limits.”

At the same time, the industry is skeptical of early data on what they say is an outsize relationship between the legalization of sports betting and gamblers’ financial behaviors. Not only is legal sports betting in its infancy, but data collected on personal finances following its legalization could be confounded by the pandemic, Shatley said. 

Joe Maloney, senior vice president of strategic communications at AGA, told Fortune previous data on gambling—albeit in physical casinos instead of online sites—and financial outcomes like bankruptcy have not shown a significant relationship between the two. Moreover, gamblers understand that sports betting is a form of entertainment and set their financial expectations accordingly, he argued.

“Consumers in today’s legal, regulated market for sports wagering view this activity as a good value for their entertainment dollars, not as an expected, positive value investment,” Maloney said.

Who are Gen Z’s big spenders?

Minnick’s own gambling habit was jump-started by the 2018 legalization of sports betting, followed by the proliferation of dozens of apps seemingly tailored just for him. He and his group of college friends mirrored sports’ predominantly male fan base, and it wasn’t lost on him that he was the target for betting apps’ marketing.

“It’s pretty obvious who it’s trying to appeal to if Vanessa Hudgens is walking you through [a virtual casino], right?” Minnick said, referring to a Disney Channel actor from the early 2000s who was recently featured in a BetMGM advertisement. “It’s not a big secret.”

While the open floodgates of sports betting can be a danger to anyone, early, conservative findings from Hollenbeck’s research suggests men—who experience gambling disorders at nearly twice the rate of women—and particularly Gen Z men are at higher risk of falling into financial disarray as a result of gambling. This could be because they are more interested in sports gambling and are sent targeted advertising from sports gambling platforms, he said.

The “Oracle of Wall Street” Meredith Whitney has even gone so far as to say young men’s love of sports betting will impact the housing market because they have no interest in getting married and moving out of their parents’ homes.

“It’s all young men [betting on sports],” she said in a December 2023 CNBC interview. “And I dovetailed that with Pew Research which says that 63% of young men are single. And that’s the highest it’s ever been. And 50% of those young men have no interest in dating, not even casually.”

Minnick, who hasn’t placed a bet in a couple years now, is battling against the stacked odds of Gen Z men getting hooked on sports betting. He’s a full-time content creator, working with teletherapy firms and state councils to design marketing for gambling disorder resources for young people. 

“The root goal of everything is to try to help other people avoid making the same mistakes that I made,” he said.

He’s ditched the sportsbook apps and has ditched investing altogether, fearing a backslide into risky options trading that might as well be gambling. In place of the ricochet of emotions and funds that once defined his life, Minnick has opted for sturdier financial ground.

“At this point, the only thing I have is a solo 401(k),” he said. “And I haven’t even funded it yet.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Aug. 27, 2024.

More on sports betting:

• Billionaires John and Laura Arnold have already donated nearly half their wealth. Now they’re funding a hunt for the health risks of sports betting
• Prediction markets have made betting easier than ever—and young men are paying the price
• Credit card delinquencies among millennials and Gen Z have soared because of sports betting—even in states where it’s illegal, new Fed study finds

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Business leaders and investors face a deepening paradox: Companies are pouring more money into artificial intelligence than ever, but they’re not seeing the gains in productivity that they expect.

Even CEOs are starting to admit this disconnect. One Atlanta Federal Reserve study found that about 90% of executives believe AI has not yet boosted productivity at their companies. Other evidence suggests that the broader increase in productivity seen since 2021 is more likely due to remote work or factors other than AI, like downsizing in sectors such as technology.

I study how technology is changing the way businesses operate, and the research I’ve conducted with colleagues offers an important explanation for why these expected gains don’t materialize: AI-driven layoffs and the resulting job insecurity are actively destroying the very conditions needed for AI to make workers more efficient. In fact, these job cuts damage employee sentiment toward AI – which is one of the strongest predictors of firm productivity when AI is used.

Managers and investors should take note. Laying off employees in the name of AI investment is a self-defeating strategy that offsets any expected productivity increase.

When layoffs are the strategy

U.S. companies have poured billions of dollars into AI adoption in the hope of goosing productivity. But our research suggests that managers should treat the AI hype with caution.

My colleagues and I analyzed millions of job satisfaction reviews and thousands of reports of corporate financial performance, as well as hundreds of AI investments and layoff announcements made by U.S. public companies over the past five years. We discovered a clear pattern: As the frequency of AI investment announcements rises, so too do announcements of job cuts caused by AI.

This correlation is unlikely to be coincidental. Instead, it reflects a corporate strategy that sees workforce reduction as an integral part of their AI strategy.

Managers at publicly traded firms typically make decisions based on whether a new investment improves short-term profitability and share price. So after investing heavily in AI, managers face pressure to show a strong financial return. The expectation is that if AI makes employees more efficient, the company will need fewer of them to complete the same work.

As a result, a quick way for managers to help businesses realize that anticipated return is by cutting headcount and lowering labor costs. Some of the companies we studied even started to lay off employees before pouring money into AI, as a way to free up capital for future AI investments.

Managers expect that both AI investment and job cuts will enhance the company’s value. Yet when we examined stock market reactions to these layoff announcements, the average return was close to zero. This is in line with our earlier research that showed proclamations of AI investment don’t consistently boost a company’s share price.

That said, there are some companies, such as the financial tech platform Block, that saw stock prices jump on the news it would trim staff due to AI. But overall, the market reaction was negative or close to zero for more than half of these events.

Such a muted response suggests that these decisions carry significant hidden costs that undermine the gains of the AI adoption.

Why employee sentiment matters

We found that one of the biggest of these hidden costs is that it makes employees fear for their jobs. On one hand, workers are at the center of this AI revolution and must adopt AI in their daily routines to improve their efficiency. On the other hand, AI is threatening their careers and job security.

To see how employees perceive and react to AI adoption, we analyzed millions of employee-satisfaction reviews on the workplace review site Glassdoor.com. By identifying and analyzing AI-related comments, we found them to be much more negative than the overall tone of employee reviews.

This negativity reflects widespread concerns over corporate AI adoption and anti-AI sentiment among workers. At the same time, there’s a strong association between employee sentiment toward AI and firm productivity based on the employer’s financial information. This suggests that anti-AI sentiment among workers actually lowers productivity and offsets the potential efficiency gains caused by AI.

To uncover what drives this hostility, we took a close look at employee reviews. Along with fears over losing their jobs due to AI, they cited the lack of appropriate training, few chances to upgrade skills, and poor corporate AI leadership, as well as doubts over whether AI actually improves productivity. Among those topics, comments about job security concerns were the most critical by far.

To confirm this negative effect of these fears, we then tested how AI sentiment changes when companies announce layoffs due to AI – and discovered a sharp decline in sentiment. In effect, many employees are resisting AI because they have watched their colleagues lose jobs to it or fear they will be next. This is in line with a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that found half of Americans fear AI could put someone in their household out of work.

We found a different picture when it comes to management’s sentiment. We analyzed the tone of management discussions related to AI in about 10,000 earnings-call transcripts and found it to be consistently optimistic. At the same time, that sunny outlook bore no significant relationship to productivity outcomes.

In short, employee sentiment plays a more important role in unlocking the benefit of AI than any optimism among managers.

A guide for managers

Our findings should deliver a clear and urgent message to managers and investors: Using AI to justify cutting jobs is, in our view, a strategic miscalculation that cuts against the benefits of AI. For too many companies, riding the AI wave has become an AI hunger game that spreads fear rather than engagement.

Because employees are encouraged to use AI tools while their companies cite those same innovations as grounds for cuts, the touted benefits of AI often work against themselves. And companies find themselves left with a demoralized workforce and an underwhelming return on AI investment.

What businesses need to understand, I believe, is that managing how employees feel is key to unlocking AI’s benefits. In turn, that means creating an environment where workers feel that AI is working with them, not against them. Managers can do so by making a genuine commitment to share AI gains with their employees – investing in skills and expanding opportunity rather than simply laying them off.

Companies that take this approach and understand the great cost of job insecurity are the ones most likely to profit from their AI investment.

Mark Ma, Professor of Business Administration, University of Pittsburgh

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Abdul El-Sayed won a hard fight in Michigan’s Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate against Rep. Haley Stevens. He eked out a win by 15,000 votes, or about 1% of the almost 1.5 million votes cast during the election on Aug. 4, 2026.

El-Sayed had a consistent populist message during the primary campaign. He told The New York Times, “I can walk into almost any room, and I can say: ‘Money out of?’ and everybody’s like: ‘Politics.’ ‘Money in your?’ ‘Pocket.’ ‘Medicare for?’ ‘All.’ People know what we’re about.”

Now El-Sayed, the former director of the Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services of Wayne County, has to shift his effort and messaging to a general election campaign against Republican Mike Rogers.

I am a political scientist who studies campaigns and elections, both nationally and in the key swing state of Michigan where I live and teach.

El-Sayed ran a prototypical primary campaign, positioning himself as a progressive outsider against a moderate insider. Like Stevens, he appealed to specific segments of the Democratic electorate in an attempt to assemble a winning coalition.

But a run against a Republican with prior campaign and governing experience and the support of President Donald Trump is a different challenge – especially with the control of the U.S. Senate at stake. Republicans currently holds a three-seat advantage in that chamber; the Democrats are hoping to pick up four seats to gain control.

Historically expensive campaign

This election was the third-most expensive on record and the second-most expensive this year, following the Texas Senate primary. Based on end-of-July ad bookings, almost US$81 million was spent in the Michigan Senate Democratic primary race, but it was not close to evenly divided.

A total of $63.9 million was spent in support of Stevens, most coming from sources from outside Michigan, while $7.3 million was spent in support of El-Sayed. That’s a ratio of 9 to 1 in Stevens’ favor.

About 97% of Stevens’ ad placements came from groups supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a powerful lobbying group that supports pro-Israel policies. This became a significant point of attack for El-Sayed’s campaign. He said he was not taking any funds from corporate political action committees, while at the same time portraying Stevens as a Washington insider beholden to special interests. Most of the ads paid for by AIPAC did not have anything to do with U.S.-Israel affairs or El-Sayed’s position on ending aid to Israel.

El-Sayed overcame funding disadvantage

The stark contrasts in candidate funding led to differences in advertising strategies and appeals to different groups of voters.

Stevens made implicit appeals to Black voters, concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, by including news clips of Barack Obama during his presidency touting her support for an auto bailout, although the former president never explicitly endorsed her. Other negative ads suggested El-Sayed had made disparaging comments about Michelle Obama.

AIPAC ads in support of Stevens suggested that El-Sayed is misogynistic and said he disrespects women, although independent fact checks concluded that his prior comments cited in the attack ads were taken out of context.

Because he had less money, El-Sayed produced a lot of social media content, much of it designed to get the attention of younger voters at a lower cost than TV ad rates. Some of his ads were produced by the Fight Agency, which also worked for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York City.

Some of El-Sayed’s content looked like music videos. Other content contained traditional pleas to small-dollar donors.

Support from different wings of the party

Both candidates assembled an impressive array of political elites backing their candidacy, but the groups were quite different.

Stevens was endorsed by the Michigan Democratic establishment, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, current U.S. Sen. Gary Peters and former U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, as well as many Democratic elected officials from Michigan. She was also endorsed by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi of California.

Most visible among El-Sayed’s endorsements were Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. They all campaigned alongside El-Sayed at various Michigan rallies to demonstrate his progressive bona fides. Each visit produced extensive local media coverage for his campaign.

Divides across religion, race and education

There were no exit polls conducted during the primary, but analyses of aggregate vote returns suggest important differences in patterns of voting behavior.

El-Sayed won more than 70% of the vote in the main Arab-American areas of southeastern Michigan: Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck. At the same time, Stevens carried Black voters in Detroit and other parts of Wayne County – although her 58% of the vote was not as much as Biden’s 78% of the vote in the 2024 presidential primary.

El-Sayed did better among young voters, as he won every one of the college towns in the state, including Ann Arbor and East Lansing.

And there seemed to be distinct differences in their supporters’ methods of voting. El-Sayed performed better among voters who cast their ballot on Election Day, which is typically favored by young adults. Early voting, whether in person or by mail, were methods typically favored by older Michigan voters who chose Stevens.

Looking to November

El-Sayed now has to turn to the general election campaign, where early post-primary polls suggest the race is a dead heat.

Michigan was considered a toss-up race before the primary, and it remains that way with El-Sayed’s victory. His first task is to unite the Democratic Party behind him. Prominent Michigan Democrats pledged their support during a rally held in Detroit on Aug. 7. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a possible 2028 presidential candidate, expressed support for El-Sayed at the rally, as did Whitmer, who had endorsed Stevens before the primary.

One notable absence, however, was Dana Nessel, the state’s attorney general. She associates El-Sayed’s concern about arming Israel as an expression of antisemitism and claims that she won’t feel safe at the state’s nominating convention because she is Jewish.

The Democratic candidate understands the affordability issue and is comfortable campaigning on it.

Since June, Trump has been calling Democratic candidates “Communists” – even those, like El-Sayed, who do not label themselves as “democratic socialists.”

El-Sayed will also likely face Islamophobic attacks. After the primary, the Republican candidate Rogers said El-Sayed is someone who “believes America deserved 9/11” and “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood.” In recent Senate testimony, Sen. Ted Cruz focused on El-Sayed’s alleged family connections to organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. These claims are not true but may still influence voters who are just beginning to pay attention to the campaign.

Rogers is a skillful campaigner who might continue to capitalize on this strategy. It is too early to tell whether El-Sayed can inoculate himself against this characterization.

For his part, El-Sayed will likely try to link Rogers as closely to Trump as possible because of the president’s low approval ratings. Rogers will have to weigh carefully whether to invite Trump to Michigan to campaign with him.

One thing is certain. Michigan voters can expect a long, negative campaign between now and November.

Michael Traugott, Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Harvard Medical School says it agreed to pay $53 million to settle class action lawsuits by relatives of body donors whose remains were sold on the black market by its former morgue manager.

Harvard Medical School Deans George Q. Daley and Bernard S. Chang announced the development in a letter to the community on Tuesday, calling the actions of former morgue manager Cedric Lodge “despicable, abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community.”

Pending court approval, Harvard said that two class action settlement funds totaling $53 million will be established to resolve the lawsuits. A Harvard Medical School spokesperson on Thursday referred to the letter when asked for comment and said they had no additional information to share.

The lawsuits were brought by 47 relatives of people whose remains were potentially mishandled and sold. The remains were donated for research and education.

Harvard has said it cannot determine precisely which donors’ remains Lodge stole. After he was charged in 2023, the school said it reviewed information from federal investigators along with records showing when donors’ remains were sent for cremation and when Lodge was on campus to determine which donors may have been affected. The settlement covers relatives or designees of people who donated their remains to Harvard Medical School between Jan. 1, 2018, and March 31, 2023.

Last year, Lodge was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling body parts “as if they were baubles.” Authorities said Lodge was at the center of a ghoulish scheme in which he shipped brains, skin, hands and faces from cadavers to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

His wife, Denise Lodge, was sentenced to just over a year in prison for assisting him. Six other people who bought remains from Cedric Lodge also pleaded guilty and have been sentenced, according to Harvard.

In one example, Cedric Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book, a “deeply horrifying reality,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin said in a court filing.

After Harvard finishes using a donated body for research or teaching, the body typically is returned to the family or cremated. Lodge acknowledged removing body parts before cremation. Harvard has said he acted without the school’s knowledge or permission.

In their letter, Daley and Chang said Lodge’s actions “do not reflect the reverence we hold for the altruistic individuals who selflessly donate their bodies” to the school’s Anatomical Gift Program.

“We reaffirm our deep sorrow and empathy for the families of donors who may have been impacted,” they said.

In addition to the payments, Harvard Medical School agreed to provide families with a statement condemning Lodge’s actions and summarizing improvements made to the Anatomical Gift Program. The school also plans to establish an annual financial aid scholarship for medical students beginning in the 2027-28 academic year to honor anatomical donors.

Harvard said it has enacted recommendations from a panel of outside experts appointed in 2023 to review the program after Lodge was charged.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At daybreak, rancher Martín Alfonso Ibarra takes advantage of the cooler hours in northern Mexico’s desert to oversee the milking of his cows and tend to 16 prized calves. Soon, he hopes, they will be headed north to the United States as a yearlong ban on Mexican cattle imports comes to an end.

The ban, imposed over concerns about a flesh-eating parasite known as the New World screwworm fly, dealt a blow to cattle and beef industries on both sides of the border, exacerbating a livestock shortage in the U.S. and hurting a Mexican ranching sector already weakened by drought and a cattle export business that generated $1.2 billion for Mexico last year.

Now, the U.S. is set to resume livestock imports from Mexico beginning Aug. 24 at the Douglas, Arizona, border crossing, which borders Agua Prieta in Mexico’s Sonora state. If the reopening goes smoothly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture could allow imports through additional ports, though shipments will initially be subject to restrictions aimed at preventing the spread of the parasite — which has already crossed the border, with authorities battling cases in Texas and New Mexico.

The screwworm gets its name from the maggots’ habit of burrowing — or screwing — into a wound, according to the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Any warm-blooded animal, including wildlife, pets and occasionally even humans, can be infested.

In Mexico, the screwworm outbreak was detected in November 2024 and has spread to 30 of the 32 states — most recently in Sonora, where the first case was reported Wednesday in the community of Munihuasa, near the borders with Chihuahua and Sinaloa, states where infections have also proliferated.

To date, Mexico has 1,969 active screwworm cases, which represent less than half of the infections reported a year ago, a decline that authorities say shows progress in containing the outbreak. Still, they acknowledge eradication will take time.

New US controls are expected to slow shipments

Against that backdrop, Ibarra and thousands of other ranchers in the northern state of Sonora are preparing to resume live cattle exports. But optimism is tempered by new U.S. controls expected to slow shipments across the border.

“This is not over yet,” said the 58-year-old rancher, adding that the export halt cut his income by 40% last year.

According to the protocol defined by U.S. authorities, in the first week of reopening, only 700 cattle per day will be allowed through; this will rise to 900 in the second week and will gradually increase until reaching 1,300 cattle per day, veterinarian Arturo Ruiz, responsible for animal health for the state of Sonora, told The Associated Press.

The new rules also require cattle to be fitted with radio-frequency identification tags in their ears and screened by electronic readers and trained dogs. Officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will conduct the inspections before allowing the Mexican cattle to cross into Arizona, Ruiz explained.

Mexico accepted the U.S. protocols, but the restrictions have frustrated some local ranchers.

“We are at a complicated moment when we need authorities to think less politically and more technically and reasonably,” said Juan Carlos Ochoa, president of the Regional Livestock Union of Sonora, referring to tensions between the Mexican and U.S. governments when the ban was first imposed in May 2025.

Ochoa said the new U.S. restrictions would limit shipments and argued that a greater flow of cattle across the border is needed to address supply shortages in both countries.

A cautious optimism as imports resume

Although both countries felt the effects of Washington’s decision, the impact was greater in the U.S., particularly for consumers facing record-high beef prices that led some to cut back on meat.

Juan Carlos Anaya, general director of agricultural consulting firm Grupo Consultor de Mercados Agrícolas, said U.S. ranchers were unable to make up the supply shortfall, contributing to closures at some meat-processing plants and hurting feedlot operations.

Before the border closure, Mexico exported about 1.2 million head of cattle to the United States each year, mainly from its northern states. When exports were suspended, Mexican ranchers turned to the domestic market, where they sold their cattle for nearly 40% less than they had received in the U.S. — a loss of income that forced many to sell some of their cattle or cut spending and investment.

Back in Sonora, in the stifling August heat of the capital, Hermosillo, Ibarra was cautiously optimistic about finally sending his 16 calves to the U.S. But he said he would temper his expectations until October, when the cattle have gained enough weight and the sale could be finalized.

“There’s no need to get too excited,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

One day there was a roof. The next morning it was gone.

Jeffrey Huber still remembers the day some 34 years ago when Hurricane Andrew blew off the roof of his childhood home, one of tens of thousands damaged and destroyed across southern Florida. For days, first responders couldn’t get to them. For a month and a half, they relied on food donations. For more than a year, he lived with his family in a trailer.

“It wasn’t just about the storm itself, but it was about the aftermath of that storm and how we begin to design for those aspects,” said Huber, a landscape architect and professor who was 12 in 1992 when the Category 5 hurricane hit. “We are seeing extreme storms, extreme scenarios like this that are becoming much more common.”

Some 129 million people — nearly 40% of the U.S. population — live in coastal counties. Recent research shows that a rise in sea level driven by humans has increased the frequency of extreme coastal flooding around the world.

As climate change threatens communities, Florida is showing how to build to adapt. Throughout the state, architects and designers are merging infrastructure with urban design to create residential buildings, parks and more. The goal is to better withstand rising waters, worsening storms, saltwater intrusion, heat heaves and other climate impacts.

“In places like Miami, we’re dealing with a combination of tidal flooding, storm surge and long-term sea level rise,” said Huber, professor in the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University. “So the question isn’t about how we stop water, but it’s how we live on, with and over it.”

Seawalls that double as reefs

As global average temperatures climb because of fossil fuel emissions, so do sea levels, making low-lying coastal cities vulnerable to flooding.

Frequent flooding and intensifying storm surges got so bad in Miami Beach that when it rained, Anya Freeman rushed home to move her car because her street filled with knee-deep water and she couldn’t get car insurance for flooding.

“But nobody was doing anything practical about it,” she said. So in 2024, she left behind her career as a lawyer to launch Kind Designs, a startup creating 3D-printed living seawalls to protect shorelines from flooding.

These seawalls are meant to be affordable so they can be scaled, and also serve as marine habitat. They’re made faster and with a nontoxic concrete mixture and can be custom shaped for the ecosystems where they’re installed. On a recent August day, workers in neon-green shirts and yellow construction hats installed one mimicking mangroves at a waterfront church in Fort Lauderdale, north of Miami.

Traditional seawalls are flat, but theirs can be designed to mimic natural coastal features like the mangrove roots you’d find in Miami or barnacle clusters in New York.

“We have a whole library of designs for different marine habitats, and the point is to attract the native species… create caves where they can hide from predators and also to dissipate waves,” she said.

Their technology dissipates at least 45% of wave energy, making it more resilient to overtopping and erosion. On one wall, researchers from Florida International University identified 51 species living in it one year after installation, including filter feeders like oysters and tubeworms that clean water.

They’ve since installed 16 living seawalls across Florida for residential, commercial and government clients, she said. Soon they’ll put their first ones in California and New York and will be fortifying coastal bases for the U.S. Navy.

Affordable housing project and park

The Vista Breeze affordable senior housing project in Miami Beach by the architectural firm Brooks Scarpa Huber is a real-world application of how to live with the threats of water.

The 119-unit, two-building complex is elevated 10 feet (3.05 meters) from sea level and is designed to withstand storm surges of up to 20 feet (6.10 meters). Concrete is mixed with a crystalline, water-proof powder that blocks water from penetrating into it, protecting structures and extending their life. Rebar coated in zinc shields it from rust and corrosion.

They’re “some of the most simple, easy steps and they don’t cost that much,” said Huber, the project’s principal architect. “But they’re going to make our buildings more resilient starting up front.”

From a heat-mitigation standpoint, the buildings are oriented southeast to the prevailing breezes, passively cooling themselves.

There are also community rooms, courtyards and terraces to promote socializing. The elevators are hidden, and the stairs made prominent to encourage their use.

About 30 miles north, a former parking lot was transformed into a public space that doubles as flood infrastructure. DC Alexander Park in Fort Lauderdale has a 25-foot artistic overlook that provides shade on hot days.

Along the park’s perimeter, a native maritime forest absorbs rainfall and saltwater flooding while providing recreational opportunities and species habitat.

These designs build on Huber’s research on adapting coastal cities to rising seas, which he wrote about in his 2024 design manual “Salty Urbanism.”

Miami, he said, is a testing ground for it.

“The ideas that we’re working on here… designing for, you know, these extreme scenarios like 5, 9 feet of sea level rise are going to become increasingly relevant to any coastal cities around the world,” he said.

Visions for the future

Financing, policy and community support are just some of the challenges architects and urban planners face with implementation.

About a decade ago, architectural designer, urban planner and Future Vision Studios founder Aaron DeMayo began developing The Coastline, a regional resilience master plan proposal to protect Southern Florida from storm surge and sea level rise.

Funding it will have a large price tag, but “the need and the urgency I think merits this type of infrastructure solution,” he said.

“We have a massive amount of low-lying property and property that could be impacted from storm surge,” he said. “And what we’re presenting here is going to have a very large return on investment because we’re protecting hundreds of miles of direct waterfront property, as well as property behind that waterfront property.”

At the University of Miami’s Center for Urban and Community Design — founded after the 1992 hurricane that damaged Huber’s home — designer, architect and the center’s director Thomas Klein is working to address a problem: a lack of assistance to help lower-income communities afford climate resilient projects.

They’re putting together a community design fund that would do a call out for project proposals, work with communities to identify which would have the most impact, then bring in university experts to help develop them with residents.

For Klein, funding scarcity for climate resilient infrastructure is an opportunity to build in a way that provides multiple services.

“In 2026, is it acceptable to just build a road to move cars? Or does the road need to also move bicyclists and have a bus rapid transit lane, but also manage stormwater and ameliorate for heat island issues?” he said. This fall, they’re also launching an initiative to conceptualize and design “sponge parks” in South Florida that use green and other infrastructure to absorb rain and manage stormwater.

Florida is a challenging regulatory environment, he added, but the solutions evolving there are “uniquely replicable” to other states. “Because we have to rely on a narrower band of potential approaches to actualizing solutions for resilience in our cities, that those solutions might be a little bit more, I guess, resilient.”

___

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

TikTok has reached a $400 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, ending a 2024 lawsuit alleging the company violated federal children’s privacy laws.

The DOJ said Friday that TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and another $100 million after an order vacates an earlier consent decree against its predecessor company, Musical.ly.

“This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents,” said U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. in a statement. “The Department’s priority is ensuring that children are protected online and that companies entrusted with their personal information meet their legal obligations. This resolution secures a substantial recovery while reinforcing the protections that families expect and deserve.”

Since the DOJ’s lawsuit in 2024, TikTok has undergone major changes, most notably in the ownership structure of its U.S. arm. In January, the social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture.

Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to a message for comment Friday.

The latest lawsuit focused on allegations that TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13. It also says the companies failed to honor requests from parents who wanted their children’s accounts deleted, and chose not to delete accounts even when the firms knew they belonged to kids under 13.

The settlement comes as social media companies face an avalanche of lawsuits over children’s safety and privacy and a growing number of countries are banning young kids and teens from social media apps. Instagram’s parent company, Meta Platforms, is currently on trial in federal court in Oakland, California, over allegations it violated the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, along with various state statutes.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

 The United States imposed 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian products early Saturday, and Canada immediately said it would retaliate after last-ditch negotiations failed to resolve the latest strain in relations between the historic allies.

President Donald Trump’s import taxes will hit about 5% of what Canada ships to the United States every year, including products ranging from hockey sticks to tongue depressors.

“Canada will match those tariffs dollar for dollar to protect our workers and businesses,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement. The retaliation escalates the trade conflict and calls into question the future of a North American trade agreement covering the United States, Canada and Mexico that is crucial to industry in all three countries.

Canada had sought concessions on tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos and lumber.

“Tonight, Canada declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week. Despite the U.S. offer to Canada to receive the best treatment of any major exporter to our market, new demands and walk-backs of other commitments by Canada have upended the careful balance reached in the past days,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement read to reporters shortly before midnight.

Carney blamed the Republican administration for the breakdown, saying “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” He said he had suspended negotiations and directed Canada’s negotiating team to return to Ottawa.

Carney said his government would announce additional support for Canadian workers and businesses in the coming days.

Greer said the U.S. offer was “forward-looking” and included “a historic economic and national security partnership.”

No further talks are planned.

The breakdown in negotiations marked a sharp reversal from two days earlier, when officials from the two countries sounded as if they were headed toward a compromise.

Carney said Canada’s goal throughout the negotiations had been to secure the best possible agreement, “never a deal at any price or on any deadline.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who leads Canada’s most populous province, backed Carney’s response, saying the prime minister had his “full support” for retaliation “tariff for tariff, dollar for dollar” and that “everything needs to be on the table.”

A typically cooperative alliance goes sour

The political impact will likely be even bigger than the economic fallout. The countries sold each other $880 billion worth of goods and services last year.

The tariffs were initially supposed to kick in at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. Trump extended the deadline for three days to allow talks to continue, but the countries could not reach an agreement in time.

The U.S. and Canada have wrangled for decades over trade, poking each other over sore spots such as Canadian softwood lumber imports and U.S. access to Canada’s protected dairy market.

Somehow, they still managed to remain friends, allies and trading partners. Canadian soldiers fought alongside Americans in Afghanistan after 9/11. The 5,525-mile U.S.-Canada border is undefended, and nearly 330,000 people and $2 billion worth of goods cross it every day; 800,000 Canadians live in the United States.

Trump’s approach to dealing with Canada marks an extraordinary departure from the traditionally cooperative relationship between the two countries. Trump has imposed tariffs on Canadian goods in a push to bring manufacturing back to the United States and made inflammatory comments about turning Canada into America’s 51st state.

Carney said Canada had recognized that “America has changed” and that the two countries would “not return to our old relationship.”

Canadians and Americans are frustrated

The Canadian public is fed up. A petition to expel U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, a Trump ally, has collected nearly 248,000 signatures since July 21. It accuses the former Republican congressman from Michigan of having “normalized’’ Trump’s talk of annexing Canada, among other things.

The two countries had good reasons to find a compromise.

Nearly 72% of Canada’s goods exports last year went to the United States. The Trump administration might be wary of imposing new tariffs — paid by U.S. importers who try to pass along the cost to consumers via higher prices — before the November’s midterm elections. American voters are already frustrated with the high cost of living.

“Canada likely wanted further sector-specific relief than the U.S. was willing to offer, or Canada’s concessions did not go far enough,” said Ryan Majerus, a partner at King & Spalding and a former U.S. trade official. “Either way, I think both sides will be under immense pressure in the coming days to still find an off-ramp. But if Canada has agreed to also impose tariffs, the off-ramp may be even harder to find.”

Candace Laing, president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, called the tariffs “a body blow to North American competitiveness” and warned they would raise costs for Americans while threatening Canadian customers, investment and small businesses.

Trump has turned to Depression-era trade penalties

Trump has made tariffs the centerpiece of his second-term economic agenda. Last year, he imposed double-digit import taxes on almost every country, justifying them by declaring the long-standing U.S. trade deficit a national emergency. The Supreme Court in February ruled that he had overstepped his authority. The justices struck down the trade penalties and set the stage for the federal government to pay refunds to importers.

So Trump has looked for other legal authority to justify tariffs.

To punish Canada, he reached back to the Great Depression, invoking Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to threaten 50% tariffs on products that account for about 5% of Canadian exports to the United States.

Nearly a century ago, with the U.S. and world economies in collapse, Congress passed the 1930 tariff law, imposing taxes on imports from around the world. Known as the Smoot-Hawley tariffs after their congressional sponsors, they are notorious among economists and historians for limiting world commerce and making the Great Depression worse.

Section 338, which has never been used before to impose tariffs, authorizes the president to slap import taxes of up to 50% on imports from countries that have discriminated against U.S. businesses. No investigation is required to justify the levies. Nor is there any limit on how long they can stay in place.

The rift comes as the United States, Mexico and Canada are trying to renew a trade agreement that Trump negotiated in his first term and once praised as a triumph. The United States has begun formal talks with Mexico over revamping the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, known as USMCA. But talks with Canada have not begun and escalating trade conflict casts doubt on whether they will.

“Canada told the Americans in advance that if these tariffs landed, it would stop negotiating and retaliate,” said Barry Appleton, senior fellow at the Center for International Law at New York Law School. ”The American trade representative said publicly he would not tolerate retaliation. Both sides have now committed themselves in public, which is how escalation stops being a choice.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The bond market is one of the few forces in the world strong enough to get politicians to snap to attention. It also helps dictate how much ordinary people have to pay on their mortgages and car loans, as well as how much they earn from their savings accounts and 401(k) plans.

This week rising bond yields forced the U.S. Treasury Department into an unusual intervention and raised the specter of higher borrowing costs putting the brakes on consumer spending, the lifeblood of the economy. It also sparked concerns that investors might finally be thinking twice about financing a seemingly endless flow of government borrowing.

Here’s a look at what’s going on and how it affects everyone:

First, a reminder of what the bond market is

When governments and big companies borrow money, they don’t ask a bank for a loan. Instead, they sell IOUs to investors and promise to repay the money with a certain interest rate. If those IOUs are set to be repaid many years from now, they’re called bonds. (IOUs the U.S. government will repay more quickly are more often called bills or notes.)

Investors in the bond market often buy and sell these bonds after they’re issued, and they continue to pay the same interest rate. But if the bond starts to look less attractive, a buyer can get bonds that were earlier worth $100 for less than that. Such a drop in price means the new buyer will get a bigger return, percentage-wise, on their money than the interest rate the bond pays on its face value. Those payments are called the bond’s yield.

The U.S. bond market is the biggest but investors have other options

The world’s biggest and most important bond market is for IOUs from the U.S. government, which are called Treasurys. The total size of it was $31.5 trillion, as of July, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Yet Treasurys are facing more competition from higher-yielding bonds overseas than in recent decades. After years of near-zero interest rates, even 30-year Japanese government bonds are now paying more than 4%. Yields on U.K. bonds have reached 5.81%, and German bonds are also paying 3.76%, versus 5.27% for a comparable U.S. bond. It’s a big reason U.S. rates have been drifting higher.

Ira Jersey, chief U.S. interest rate strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, said that large global investors such as pension funds and life insurers used to have little choice to invest in Treasurys because most other overseas bonds paid so little interest.

“Now the U.S. 30-year yield has to compete with all these other sovereign bonds,” Jersey said. “The U.S. is not the only game in town anymore.”

The U.S. government bond market helps set interest rates that affect regular people

The easiest example is mortgage rates. Rates for these loan tend to follow the path of yields for Treasurys that will get repaid in 10 years.

The 10-year Treasury yield is the centerpiece of the bond market, and it shot higher through the summer after the war with Iran sent oil prices higher and worries about inflation upward, adding to longstanding concerns about the size of the U.S. government’s debt.

That in turn made mortgages more expensive for people looking to buy a house. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is near its highest level in a year, discouraging people already worried the price of homeownership may be too high.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement Wednesday that the government would double its buybacks of longer-term bonds was intended to bring down the 10-year Treasury yield and lower mortgages. Yet the move brought only temporary relief, with the 10-year yield rising back to 4.74% Friday, matching its highest point in more than a year.

Thierry Wizman, global rates strategist at Macquarie Group, said higher mortgage rates will likely discourage some consumers from buying homes. At the same time, higher yields generally should draw more investment into bonds issued by large tech firms investing in AI infrastructure.

“The private sector wants to have the AI revolution,” Wizman said. “Who’s going to take a step back? It’s going to be the consumer. And higher yields are going to do that a little bit.”

Other parts of the market, including where the Federal Reserve sets its interest rate for very short-term overnight loans, affect rates for everything from credit cards to savings accounts to auto loans.

Generally, higher yields and rates benefit people who are savers. It means they are earning more from lending money to the U.S. government or sticking their cash in a high-yield savings account.

Higher yields and rates, meanwhile, tend to hurt people who are borrowing money. They also drag on prices for stocks, gold and even cryptocurrencies. The thought is: Why should anyone pay high prices for riskier investments when U.S. Treasurys, which are supposed to be safer, are paying more than before?

Higher yields mean U.S. taxpayers will have to pay more for their government’s bills

Washington continues to spend far more than it brings in through revenue, so it has to borrow money to cover the gap. That has sent its total debt over $40 trillion, a staggering record, and the number keeps climbing by the day.

When yields are rising, the U.S. government has to pay higher interest rates to entice buyers for its bonds when it auctions off Treasurys.

The federal government has already paid $931 billion in interest on its debt through the first 10 months of its fiscal year, which ends in September. That’s more than it spent on health, national defense or veterans benefits and is just behind Social Security and Medicare.

Concerns have been brewing in the bond market for a long time

It’s no secret that the U.S. government has a lot of debt. Officials at the Federal Reserve, economists, investors and many other voices have been saying for years that the U.S. government is on an unsustainable path with how much it spends versus what it brings in.

Everything from tax cuts to increased military budgets adds to the deficit.

The unknown has always been when or if a tipping point would arrive that turns the worries about the U.S. government’s debt into a panic. That would cause investors to quickly dump their Treasurys, which would sent yields surging.

And while yields have climbed this summer, they haven’t done so at such a pace to suggest a tipping point is here. The climb in yields for government bonds has also been worldwide. It’s not just Washington feeling pressure but also bond markets in Japan, France, Germany and elsewhere.

Importantly, a measure in the bond market that shows how worried bond investors are about potential defaults by several big economies’ governments on their bonds has not risen excessively, according to strategists at Macquarie.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

I came of age in finance in investment banking in the U.S. during the boom and bust of dotcom era.  I continued in finance by shifting into private equity, working for a multibillion-dollar fund, and it was a tough time, a really tough time. 

I was in London, which in the year 2000 was the new frontier, doing debt-to-equity conversions of high yield bonds for telcos, basically telling founders and shareholders that they now owned 1% of these formerly highly valued companies that they used to own and here was their new option plan and me and my debt owned the rest and also, by the way, I need to fire a third of your employees. 

It was rough, and I matured quickly — too quickly, really. I looked up after three years and I realised that I was 250 pounds and I hadn’t seen my family in longer than I care to admit. So I did the only thing I could do: I retired. I moved to Gibraltar/Sotogrande, the de facto British enclave in southern Spain, and I became a resident there. Although the sunshine that I hadn’t seen in years was lovely, but I got bored very quickly. 

It was the early days of digital finance, I met some new friends that were having a similar experience to me and wanted to do something interesting.  We applied for — and got — one of the first E-money licenses ever issued in Europe and passported it to more than 20 countries over a few years. We were soon offering card services, virtual bank accounts through cards programs, P2P transactions, remittance and convincing paper hungry southern European corporations to stop using cheques and leverage digital banking and card solutions.  We grew and grew fast,  and after another four years we sold the company to The Bancorp (TBBK), where I had to move to the northeast US again and I ran Institutional Banking in the snow instead of the sun.  

Then a call came in from the West Coast. There was a small team looking to buy a bank or banks — and one of their investors had recommended me. 

I flew out and found this young, upstart bank sitting in California — the fourth or fifth largest economy on the planet — with less than a hundred employees, a minimal market cap, and roughly less than $1 billion in quality assets. On the traditional banking front, it was going precisely nowhere.

My job was to bring in the people and the products around Institutional Banking, deposit aggregation, get Principal Member relationships with Visa/MasterCard and create global payments solutions that the bank simply didn’t have. Also, my role included finding other banks to acquire that were in a similar position.  Our shared problem was blunt. How does a little bank in California compete with Wells Fargo and Citi or some of the super regionals? 

You can’t out-muscle them. You have to out-think them. So we got creative, we connected with customers the giants ignored, and we built products the big banks either couldn’t or wouldn’t. We leaned into the EB-5 immigrant investor program, building products that made it genuinely useful for international investors to bring capital into the US through the bank. We used esoteric mortgage products to derive cash gains after selling them to Wall Street. 

We created institutional banking products for trading and financial management firms to enhance thor liquidity.  The afore-mentioned although not valuable from a valuation perspective allowed us to build the rest of the banking infrastructure.  This same cash flow allowed us to enter the acquisition game.

It was the kind of thing that didn’t fit the standard playbook — which was exactly why it worked. That was the Banc of California (BANC) story. From its beginnings, Banc of California grew from about 60 employees to 2,000, from $600 million in assets to $17 billion and from a $60 million market cap to $1.7 billion — the fastest-growing bank in America for three consecutive years. 

When I left Banc of California, I tried to retire, again. I went out to Las Vegas, I hung out, but I got bored again. I wanted to get back in, but not in an operational role.  

I had noticed something: The corporate money that used to flow to television networks and glossy magazines was quietly re-routing to individuals: creators, founders, freelancers, people building real global businesses out of a laptop and an audience. I saw the marketing spend shifting from the famous people, the athletes, to these creators. 

And every one of them was being served by financial products designed for somebody who has a single employer and a paycheck every two weeks. 

Most banks want the doctor, the lawyer, the salaried journalist. They look at someone earning across five platforms, three currencies, and a dozen countries and they see a problem they don’t know how to price and also compliance and risk department that are not educated or prepared for these entrepreneurs, not employees. It is the same problem that the world had with the underbanked between 2005 and 2009.

I ran the numbers and landed on a sub-market worth somewhere between $40 billion and $60 billion of the now $400 billion Creator Economy. I like markets like that — the ones where even a few percentage points of penetration mean something real. So I did what I always do: I called the same people I’d built things with before, at Transact, at TheBancorp, at Banc of California, and we went into stealth for two years. That work eventually became MAKE.

We built a banking platform for the way people actually earn today: creators, influencers, freelancers, digital entrepreneurs, remote workers, and internationally minded SMBs that live in several currencies at once, move it across borders quickly, and manage it through technology built for this life rather than retrofitted from the last one. 

We have put most of our effort into the unglamorous half — the compliance, the risk, the banking infrastructure — because that’s the part that earns trust, and trust is the whole game. If you think of how a bank works: Whatever assets you have under management, if you make 1% ROA, that’s success. But the more time you spend on compliance and risk and back office and treasury and did this come from Spain, Singapore or Japan and in what currency, and this from the United States, that decreases ROI.

We leveraged technology to make sure that we could trace and understand and ensure that those funds were legitimate and through innovative and very compliant AML, KYC, KYB, Global Transaction monitoring, that we could facilitate people with income streams on a global basis or people that were getting money from platforms across the world. 

That was that genesis to have the patience to understand that they were underserved and it wasn’t really that hard to focus on them.

We funded it ourselves, to the tune of around $5 million, precisely so we could build the right thing before we built the fundable thing. Outside capital will come when the product deserves it, not before. 

My message to the big players, and I say it with respect, because I’ve sat in those buildings, is that the opportunity in front of you is not to digitize the products you already sell. 

The way human beings earn a living is changing at the foundations, and any institution that keeps designing for a workforce that no longer exists is going to miss one of the fastest-growing customer bases in the global economy. You have something we spent decades earning and can’t buy overnight — trust. Use it to build for the world as it is, not the one you were built for.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In 2014, Annabel, 40, and Emily Lui, 47, were down to their last £15,000 after a promising start to their bakery side hustle suddenly fell apart. The British sisters had built Cutter & Squidge in 2012 around their signature Biskies and landed accounts with two of London’s biggest department stores, but just as they hired a small team, rented production space and bought a van to support the business, both retailers pulled back. Harrods decided cupcakes were selling better, while Selfridges pulled the plug on Cutter & Squidge’s pop-up, wiping out almost all of the sisters’ income.

“There were a lot of tears,” Annabel told Fortune, recalling that they sat on the sofa for what turned into a 15-hour conversation about what to do with their remaining savings, knowing there was no more money coming. The sisters had built high-powered white-collar careers in finance and law, but Annabel had already walked away from hers in 2013 while Emily was still working as a lawyer. “Do we just take the £15,000?” Annabel remembered asking. “Or do we give it one shot?”

That one shot was a pop-up of their own in London’s vibrant Soho neighborhood. Their father disapproved of the plan, but he still rolled up his sleeves to help sand the floors and build the counter, on the condition that his daughters paid for the materials. They borrowed a battered coffee machine; Annabel painted and cleaned the space while Emily kept working at the law firm.

Their pop-up eventually became the foundation for a business that has grown to nearly £8 million in revenue as of last year. Cutter & Squidge now employs around 50 people—and a dozen more during peak periods—and has served more than 1 million customers. The entirely bootstrapped company expects revenue to grow another 12% this year and is aiming to cross £10 million by the end of 2027.

For Annabel, the CEO of Cutter & Squidge, and Emily, the COO, the challenge now is scaling a business shaped by their Chinese immigrant parents without losing the family identity behind it.

The restaurant kids 

Long before they were running Cutter & Squidge, Annabel and Emily were working for their Chinese immigrant parents, who ran an English-French restaurant in London for more than 20 years. By age 11, Annabel was working in the kitchen while Emily worked front of house. Christmas and Easter weren’t days off — they were some of the busiest days of the year. 

“When other people are off, our parents were like, ‘That’s when we make our money. That’s when we work,’” Emily said.

When Annabel told her father at 13 that she wanted to become a pastry chef, he said “over my dead body.” He wanted her to go to university and establish a career first, and she duly attended the London School of Economics before joining KPMG’s mergers and acquisitions team. Emily became a real-estate lawyer and eventually became the youngest partner at her firm.

But 25-year-old Annabel was miserable. One Chinese New Year, a deal in New York kept her from going home for one of her family’s biggest celebrations. “If I’m going to be working 24 hours a day,” Annabel remembers thinking, “I should be working for myself.”

She began what was supposed to be a one-year sabbatical from corporate finance to give Cutter & Squidge a shot. Cake was already part of the sisters’ lives. Their family home was where everyone gathered, sometimes 20 or 30 people at a time, and the sisters were expected to bring dessert. “If there was no Lui sisters cake, it’s just a meeting—not a party,” Emily said. 

Their Soho pop-up stuck around and grew into a larger flagship on Brewer Street, which still stands. By early 2020, Cutter & Squidge had grown to three stores.

The COVID pivot

Cutter & Squidge was still a largely traditional bakery business when COVID hit. When the pandemic closed all three locations, the sisters were left with no customers coming through the doors and only so much money in the bank. They decided to “fight” for what they’d built, “Annabel said. “We’re Lui sisters.”

Their answer was to find a new way to reach customers. Working with a small core team, they created an afternoon-tea-at-home kit that could be shipped beyond London. Annabel said it became the “hero product” that helped turn Cutter & Squidge into an online gifting bakery, as their online website went from 25% of revenue to almost 100%, Anabbel said, estimating it grew over 1,600% over the next 12 months.

The sisters spent the next two years figuring out packaging, couriers and logistics. A brownie box introduced during that period became Cutter & Squidge’s highest-volume product, and last year the company sold 2 million brownies. “We’re now a totally different business than we were pre-COVID,” Emily said. “How we run the business and how we get our customers is totally different.”

About 80% of Cutter & Squidge’s revenue now comes from direct-to-consumer sales, compared with 7% from its Soho store and 13% from wholesale and corporate customers. Emily estimates up to 95% of customers are buying something to send to somebody else. That gifting has expanded beyond birthdays and Valentine’s Day, with the bakery increasingly creating products around Chinese New Year, Diwali, Eid and Ramadan. Hamper sales jumped 175% between June 2025 and June 2026, the company told Fortune.

Scaling the business

As Cutter & Squidge shifted online, technology became a much bigger part of how the sisters ran the company, even as the products themselves remained handmade. 

“At heart, as a business, we are a bakery,” Annabel said. “The product is still made by a person. But everything in between is technology.” Emily explained that the 100% bootstrapped, family-owned company is lean, and so AI makes sense for analytics.

But technology can only solve so much. In the age of inflation and tariffs, the price paid for cocoa and chocolate has increased 175%, while electricity costs have risen 15% and rates are up 25%. Pistachios and matcha have each become about 50% more expensive, and annual increases in labor costs add another 4% to overall costs.” Now a passing mention of bad weather in the Ivory Coast on The Economist’s podcast is enough to make Emily think about what it could mean for their next chocolate order. Even with costs climbing, though, the sisters say cheaper flavorings or substitutes aren’t an option.

Cutter & Squidge expects revenue to grow 12% this year after bringing in close to £8 million in 2025. The sisters are aiming to reach £10 million by the end of 2027 without taking outside investment.

Their father, meanwhile, has come a long way. When they won Online Bakery of the Year at the Baking Industry Awards, he actually said he was proud of what they’d accomplished.

“We’ve got Asian parents,” Emily said, “they don’t really believe in saying ‘well done.’ Oh my God. That’s like the Oscars of the baking world.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Branden Jenkins was out to dinner when he pulled out his phone, glanced at his AI usage dashboard, and realized his weekend coding session had just cost him $1,000 — charged automatically, in $1,000 increments, to a card set on auto-renew.

Jenkins is the CEO of Maxio, a private-equity-backed software company headquartered in Atlanta that’s on a path toward $100 million in annual revenue over the next couple of years. He’s also, by his own admission, near the top of his company’s internal AI spending leaderboard — an odd place for the chief executive to land. “A thousand is not that much, I would say, but for one weekend, it’s pretty annoying,” he said in an interview with Fortune. Describing his agent as “cooking away,” he described his response as “Wow, I just got here quickly.”

The episode has become something of a parable inside his company — and inside corporate America more broadly — for how quickly “agentic” AI tools can consume money without anyone quite noticing until the bill lands. But Jenkins said the surprise invoice isn’t what’s keeping him up at night. The deeper problem is something messier and more human: his own employees’ “insecurity” about being outpaced by the technology — and by him.

How a weekend turned into a $1,000 lesson

Jenkins, a self-described technical CEO who builds his own agents and automations, said he can write code from his phone using Claude even while away from his desk — which is how he ended up debugging and iterating on a project at dinner. The token wallet he’d set up to fund those sessions was configured to auto-refill by $1,000 every time it ran dry, silently recharging his card without requiring a second thought — until he saw the total.

“I don’t have governors where a lot of my staff hits limits, and they have to ask for approval,” Jenkins said, describing his own unlimited internal budget as both a perk and a liability. “So I started leaning in and going, ‘What does this look like?’”

What he found, he said, is that a lot of the waste comes down to model selection and runaway conversational drift — an AI system wandering a user down paths they never intended to go. “A lot of times it’s the agent’s own mistakes that’s burning your money,” Jenkins said. “You kind of find yourself just chatting, and [things] getting away from you.” Casting his mind back to his dialogues with his bots, he said, “You’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I like it, more of that, more of that.’ All of a sudden you end up in who-knows-where, and you’re like, ‘No, I don’t want that at all.’ So some of that money is just wasted because it took you there.”

His experience mirrors a pattern now well documented across the industry. Gartner has estimated that agentic AI models can require between 5x and 30x more tokens per task than a standard chatbot exchange, and a WitnessAI survey found that 68% of U.S. companies say at least some of their AI initiatives ran over budget in the past year, with a third saying overruns happen “mostly or always.” George Sivulka, CEO of Hebbia, put it memorably when he wrote that using agents means “you just hired a million bad employees.”

Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget within four months, and Amazon reportedly spent $500 million on AI in a single month after rolling out access without usage caps. That was the month “tokenmaxxing” died. Jenkins’s $1,000 weekend is a rounding error by comparison — but the point is, that’s real money. “There’s no refund button. There’s no dispute button in Claude,” Jenkins said, adding that maybe there should be.

Tricks of the trade

After the dinner incident, Jenkins said he looked for ways to cut his own token burn — much of it, by his account, learned from AI-optimization tips circulating on TikTok rather than from his own engineering team. He started routing different tasks to different models based on complexity: lighter models like Claude’s Haiku for basic math, mid-tier models for routine coding, and reserving the most expensive, highest-reasoning models for genuine strategic planning.

He also adopted what he called orchestration layers — third-party tools, often distributed as free GitHub repositories, designed to compress AI output and cut wasted tokens. One, which he called “Caveman mode,” forces an AI assistant to reply in short, blunt sentences instead of long, elaborated answers, which Jenkins estimated cuts token use by 70%. Another mode he described, “grunt mode,” compresses replies to a word or two: “It’s very trite.”

He named other tools, including “Superpowers” and “Ponytail,” as part of the same underground ecosystem of cost-saving hacks.

The catch, Jenkins said, is that none of it is accessible to a typical employee. “These are nerdy things,” he said. “Do we need sales leaders and service leaders and marketers finding this stuff?” That gap—between what power users like himself know and what the rest of the workforce can access —is where he says the real organizational risk begins.

Why he warns insecurity, not cost, is the bigger threat

Asked to rank the problems he’s encountered rolling out AI across his several hundred employees, Jenkins didn’t lead with cost. He named three forces he says he has to actively manage: inefficiency, inequality, and — the one he returned to repeatedly — insecurity.

Jenkins explained that he’s proud that everyone’s becoming a builder with vibe-coding permissions in his company, but it’s disruptive in a very human sense.

“[Token overspend] is really not the problem, but it could easily be the excuse,” Jenkins said. He described building tools and automations inside his own leadership team’s departments, unprompted, simply because he’d learned how — and watching the reaction turn uneasy. “One of them came to me and said, ‘This put me on edge. I should be coming to you with these things. I’ve got to catch up. I feel so behind.”

Jenkins said the dynamic repeated itself down through multiple layers of management: “Am I doing my job? Am I keeping up? Will this replace my job? Will this replace my team members?”

He also pointed to a version of the same anxiety playing out at the departmental level, rooted in unequal access to tools. His company initially rolled out ChatGPT company-wide, then began licensing the pricier Claude for a smaller group of roughly 50 employees concentrated in sales and marketing — prompting pushback from teams left out. “People were like, wait a minute, why don’t I have Claude? Why do they get that and we don’t get that?” he said. “That’s an inequality.”

Jenkins argues that the anxiety is ultimately more corrosive to a company’s culture than any single runaway invoice, because it shapes whether employees engage with the tools at all — or quietly resist them out of fear.

Building an org chart for humans and agents

Jenkins said his company’s response has been structural. His entire executive leadership team went through a formal org-design exercise in which each executive mapped out their department not just in terms of the people who report to them, but the AI agents those people now manage directly. The result, he said, is a literal hybrid org chart — human names and agent functions layered together — that the company treats as a living management document.

He’s also expanded his DevOps organization specifically to govern the growing number of employee-built, informally coded internal tools — what he and others in the industry call “vibe-coded” software — that have become load-bearing parts of the business despite originating as side projects. “It can’t just be with Tim that vibe-coded it on the weekend,” Jenkins said, citing continuity risk if the employee who built a critical internal tool leaves or gets sick, along with unresolved questions about security and scalability.

The bigger financial story, in his telling, isn’t the occasional four-figure token overrun but a shift in his company’s underlying labor math. Jenkins said his company’s headcount has stopped scaling with revenue the way it once did, driving up its ratio of annual recurring revenue per employee — a metric he calls the clearest signal of what AI is actually doing to his cost structure, as opposed to the more visible but comparatively minor token bill.

“I’m not arguing that we want to reduce a whole bunch of headcount because of AI, but we should not be growing the headcount at the same rate that we were before,” Jenkins said. “That’s a big change in our business, and it’s all attributed to AI.” He also agreed that the occasional ping of $1,000 token burn at dinner is like a tax you pay — an AI agent colleague just got the wrong idea of what the job was.

Jenkins said he doesn’t see any of that as a reason to pull back. “Right now there’s so much good that outweighs a lot of this,” he said, arguing that the efficiency gains from AI adoption are large enough that occasional waste, hallucination-driven detours, and even four-figure surprise bills are simply the cost of getting there. His head of engineering, when first told about Jenkins’s token-saving tricks, waved them off, telling him the company was “not at the level of we’re spending more on A.I. than [on] people, because there are examples of that out there. We’re nowhere close to that.” Jenkins said he didn’t disagree — but he’s convinced that day is coming. “It probably will be a thing.”

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

America’s child care crisis costs the economy an estimated $172 billion each year in lost earnings, productivity and tax revenue. Nearly half of young children in the United States live in communities where licensed child care supply falls far short of demand.

Yet for all the attention paid to what families spend on child care, considerably less attention has been paid to a more basic constraint: In many communities, there simply are not enough classrooms.

The ramifications don’t just stop at the doors of a child care center. They extend directly into the workforce.

In a national poll conducted for the First Five Years Fund, 59% of part-time or non-working parents said they would return to full-time work if they had access to quality child care at a reasonable cost. Separate polling found that 52% of voters said they or someone they know had missed a shift or reduced their working hours because of a child care problem.

For employers, those individual decisions add up. When parents cannot find reliable care, businesses lose available workers, employees miss shifts and experienced professionals scale back careers they might otherwise continue.

That makes America’s child care crisis more than an affordability problem. It is also a supply problem.

After years spent helping early education operators find and build the facilities they need to grow, I have had a front-row seat to a strange contradiction: Operators can have families waiting for seats and still struggle to find the real estate and capital necessary to open another school.

I also have a financial interest in this issue. Fortec develops and invests in early education real estate and manages a fund that invests in the sector. I believe more institutional capital should enter this market, and my company may benefit as the sector attracts additional investment. At the same time, my experience investing in the sector is what has shown me the scale of the supply problem — and why solving it will require far more capital and development than any one company can provide.

Families need more options. Operators see demand and want to expand. But getting from that demand to a functioning school requires something the child care conversation often overlooks: land, buildings and investment.

We would never address a housing shortage by focusing only on rent subsidies while ignoring the need to build more homes. Yet that’s often how we approach child care.

Financial assistance can help a family pay for a seat, but it cannot create one where a classroom does not exist. Part of the reason more capacity has not been built is that early education has historically fallen between categories in the investment world.

Investors know how to evaluate apartments, warehouses, shopping centers and office buildings because those sectors have decades of data behind them. Child care centers are more specialized, and the market has never developed the same depth of familiarity or transaction history investors rely on elsewhere. That has made the sector easy to dismiss as too niche, even when the underlying demand is hiding in plain sight: growing numbers of young families, schools with waiting lists, operators seeking additional locations and communities where available seats have failed to keep pace.

As e-commerce expanded, institutional capital poured into logistics facilities. The rise of artificial intelligence has driven billions of dollars toward data centers. Housing shortages continue to put multifamily development at the center of national economic discussions.

Early childhood education has its own persistent supply-demand imbalance. The difference is that investors are only beginning to recognize it.

Even a strong education operator may lack the capital or real estate expertise needed to open a new facility. When the real estate side of the equation breaks down, expansion stalls even when families are waiting for seats.

The consequences also extend to the communities trying to attract employers and young families. We already plan for roads, utilities and housing because businesses and families depend on them. Early education belongs in that same conversation.

Child care is often discussed as a household expense or a social service. It is both. But it is also workforce infrastructure.

America has spent years debating the cost of child care while millions of families continue competing for a limited number of seats. Creating more of them will require strong providers, public support and significantly more private capital. For investors willing to understand the sector, early education offers a familiar business equation: persistent demand and constrained supply.

America’s $172 billion child care problem will not be solved by real estate alone. But it cannot be solved without 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.

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Two celestial bodies orbiting each other trace stable, predictable paths. Add a third, and the system turns chaotic: each body is large enough to bend the others’ paths, and a small nudge by one can swing the trajectory of all three. That is how I have come to see the AI economy in 2026 — as three bodies pulling on one another: the closed-source frontier labs, led by OpenAI and Anthropic; open-weight models, mostly out of China; and the application companies built on top of both. Each is powerful enough to reshape the others’ orbit, but none can dictate where the system finally settles.

A few events over the last few weeks and months have increased the instability in the system. The most dramatic shift is the momentum built – and new obstacles faced – by the frontier labs. Led by Anthropic, they have seen unprecedented demand and, with it, extraordinary revenue growth. On the one hand, that has diffused AI’s benefits more broadly through the economy; on the other, it has sharpened the focus on demonstrable ROI and the search for cheaper alternatives. Spending on AI now runs, by my estimate, to somewhere between 0.5 and 1 percent of all white-collar salaries in the United States. At this scale, it deserves to be scrutinized. In July, Palantir’s Alex Karp told CNBC that “something has gone completely wrong” with how the labs sell their product: enterprises, he argued, are “tokenmaxxing” — spending furiously on tokens with no matching gain in productivity. And in the same period competition at the frontier has intensified, with Meta (Muse Spark 1.1) and xAI (Grok 4.5) both fielding increasingly capable models alongside Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.

Then there is the improvement in open models, especially from Chinese companies. Zhipu’s GLM 5.2 and Moonshot’s Kimi K3 now perform at or near the frontier on several important benchmarks. Priced at a fraction of comparable closed models while sitting so close in capability, they have created strong momentum for the open-weight ecosystem. Meanwhile US open-weight models are adding credibility of their own. Led by Thinking Machines’ Inkling and Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 — highly capable, if not yet quite at the frontier — they offer a domestic alternative to the Chinese releases. 

And finally, there is the reaction to these developments from AI application companies. Many of the leading ones have ramped up efforts to build on top of open-weight models, targeting lower costs and greater control.

Three-body systems are notoriously difficult to predict. Nevertheless, I think it is possible to discern some broad trajectories over the course of the second half of 2026:

Firstly, the discomfort with frontier pricing will ease — partly because competition will push prices down, and partly because the returns on AI spend will begin to show. Much of today’s anxiety is a timing mismatch: adoption is running ahead of utility. For most prior technologies, like cars and cell phones, mass adoption followed decline in prices. In the case of AI, adoption happened much faster. The payoff will come, as faster growth for some companies and cost savings for others, and eventually as higher productivity across the economy.

Secondly, the shift toward a multi-model world will continue, driven by competition and, ideally, by real differentiation in what each model does best.

Thirdly, U.S. open-weight models will become genuine alternatives to the Chinese ones and win real adoption as a result. They will also have a clearer business model, making it easier for customers to take longer-term bets. Eventually I expect the distinction between open and closed to diminish, as the frontier labs themselves support model personalization for specific needs of the customers. 

In other ways, too, the players will converge frontier labs going deeper into the product stack to widen their moats and sustain high margins; and application companies going deeper into the model stack to build moats of their own. That convergence is rational: software companies typically enjoy 70%+ gross margins while customers feel they get their money’s worth from the product. 

Given these moves and countermoves, we remain in a three-body system, and its equilibrium is still unsettled. Much of today’s noise — like the debate over open vs. closed, China panic, and the hand-wringing over returns — looks temporary. The genuinely interesting question is not whether AI pays off, but who captures the value when it does: the labs at the frontier, the open models nipping at their heels, or the applications that own the customer.

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

NASCAR Hall of Fame racer Jimmie Johnson built a career on split-second decision-making at 200 miles per hour. But one habit he credits most for his success has nothing to do with speed or winning the most trophies—it’s showing up early.

“Being 10 minutes early for a meeting is on time,” Johnson recently told Fortune in an interview. “I can’t tell you how many times that left an impression, and I stood out of a crowd for whatever it was, even just sponsor visits or actually showing up for a real interview.”

It’s the kind of advice Johnson now offers Gen Z workers trying to get ahead: focus on the small things. Since retiring from full-time racing in 2020, Johnson has moved into team ownership and other business ventures, building an estimated net worth of over $150 million. Along the way, he’s learned that showing up—and showing up polished—oftentimes matters more than raw talent.

Johnson learned that lesson about appearances when he was trying to join a golf club. The head of the new-member committee was the father of a close friend, and he had some immediate feedback.

“’Son, you’re dressed so well, but damn, you need to shine those shoes,’” Johnson recalled him saying. “‘That looks terrible. Always shine your shoes. People notice.’”

He took the advice to heart—and still shines his shoes today. And while the habit of dressing for the job you want, not that you have, may sound minor or even cliche, Johnson said it can help someone stand out in a crowded field.

“The small things matter and help you cut from the fray in the very congested space,” he said.

The mindset helped carry him to a Hall of Fame career: 83 Cup Series wins, including the Daytona 500, and a share of the NASCAR record for most championships: seven, tied with Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt. In 2009, he became the first racer ever named Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year.

From trailer park kid who loved dirt bikes to one of NASCAR’s greatest racers

Johnson grew up in a trailer park in El Cajon, California—a small town northeast of San Diego—with his father working in construction and his mother driving a school bus. The oldest of three children, he started riding dirt bikes at 5 and was collecting trophies before he reached double digits.

“My parents sacrificed themselves for me and my brothers to experience the joy of racing,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have the nicest house, the nicest cars… but we had new motorcycles and traveled the country, taking dirt bikes all the time.”

That hobby eventually became a career. He skipped college after graduating from high school and went straight into professional racing—beginning with motorcycles before moving into off-road cars and, eventually, NASCAR. 

Johnson said his parents never pressured him to pursue racing; instead, they kept a simple rule: “If we’re not having fun first, we’re not doing this.”

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

By age 30, Johnson had won his first NASCAR Cup Series championship, in 2006, driving the No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet. He would win six more championships over the next decade, cementing himself as one of the most successful drivers in NASCAR history.

His career wasn’t defined by wins alone. Johnson endured crashes, blown tires and other setbacks, but said those failures were just as important to his development as the victories.

“All the failures and mishaps and all of that shaped me,” he said. “I’m really one shaped by failure. Lessons are easiest learned that way through my experience.” 

Even into racing semi-retirement, Jimmie Johnson is still trying to figure out work-life balance

After hundreds of thousands of miles behind the wheel, Johnson eventually decided the demands of racing were taking their toll. In 2019, he announced he would retire from full-time racing at the end of the following season and recalled that his “fun meter was stuck on life support.”

The pandemic made for an unusual final season, with races held without fans. But stepping away gave Johnson a new perspective on what he had sacrificed for his career. He and his family later spent the two years living in London, giving him more time away from the racetrack—and more time to reflect on what he had missed.

He admitted he wished he was more available emotionally and physically, noting that he missed weddings and even funerals because of his commitment to racing.

“I’m out of the seat, and yeah, my schedule’s busy, but there was a layer of constant pressure that I couldn’t recognize as an elite athlete—and the selfishness required for that—and I say all this with full buy-in from my wife and support like you wouldn’t believe.” 

In 2023, Johnson became the majority owner of Legacy Motor Club, a NASCAR Cup Series team, adding another demanding job to his plate.

Now, as he’s taken on more of an executive role expanding the group—and is even planning for one last NASCAR race at the 2027 Daytona 500—he says the push for work-life balance is back on.

“I’m failing at it right now,” he said.

“There are these moments that pop up … where I’m like, man, I’m way out of balance here,” Johnson added. “I’ve got to put some intent into this. So I think it’s a journey.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

If asked to name the top-performing stocks powered by the AI boom, most investors would probably guess Nvidia (correct), maybe Meta (wrong) and a bunch of other hyperscalers (also wrong). You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would answer Vertiv, an 80-year-old AC maker. But since Vertiv went public in early 2021, its market cap has exploded almost 10x from under $11 billion to $109 billion. Over that six-and-a-half year span, its annualized return of 50.5% stands third in the S&P 500, exceeded only by Comfort Systems (55.2%) and Nvidia (54.9%).

And the story gets better from there. The man responsible for this unlikely turn of events is a retired industrialist who almost didn’t take the job. Back in 2019 David Cote was looking for a new project. He had just retired from an illustrious career running Honeywell, where he engineered a spectacular revival after a failed acquisition by GE left the industrial giant rudderless. But he felt like he had another chapter left in him. So he brokered an unusual arrangement with Goldman Sachs: they’d present Cote with lots of acquisition candidates, and raise the funding once he found a choice that the investment bank also favored. Cote’s an ace at spotting overlooked comers; he’d bought over 100 companies at Honeywell, deals that substantially quickened its expansion and enhanced its profitability. In fact, Cote was looking for enterprises that met the same criteria that he’d successfully applied at the aircraft and auto equipment maker. The target would need to occupy a dominant or potentially dominant position in an industry that’s either fast-rising and profitable now or en route; promise plenty of room to grow both internally and through takeovers; stand rife for expanding margins; and perhaps most important, offer the opportunity to forge a sector-leading new technology.

“I had weekly phone calls with the Goldman group, and we looked at over 1,000 companies, and it was Goldman that found them,” recalls Cote. The company in question was Vertiv, an eighty-year old industrial AC purveyor that, under his leadership pivoted as a provider of a revolutionary technology that’s critical to accelerating the rise of AI. To deploy Nvidia GPUs and other superpowered intensive gear, data centers need to keep the servers super-cool, as never before. It’s Vertiv’s system using newly-introduced direct-to-chip liquid rather than traditional air cooling, more than any other solution on the market, that’s making it happen.

Says Cote: “It was not like I was an AI savant, but I knew that if I positioned myself in the middle of the data industry there was a good chance something good would happen.” For companies and executives who’ve spent years anxiously bolting an AI strategy onto their business, Cote’s story is a useful outlier. He didn’t chase a hot technology, he noticed a huge trend and quietly became indispensable to it. 

Cote wanted a place at the center of the digital age, but Vertiv got off to a rocky start

Surprisingly, Cote’s blithe, down-home style actually fits the freewheeling AI ethos. This hip-hop loving, Harley-Davidson sporting raconteur’s persona has long been hewed closer to Silicon Valley than mainstream Big Corporate. As I related in a 2012 Fortune story on how he revived Honeywell, Cote (pronounced Co-tee) grew up in a small New Hampshire town where his eighth-grade educated dad ran a garage. “I didn’t know what success was because it was hard to find anyone in town you’d describe as successful,” he told me. Dave took a one-year break from college to buy a 33-foot lobster boat with a buddy, and trawl for cod in Maine, an experience that convinced him that “You can work very hard and accomplish absolutely nothing.” 

Starting as a night-shift worker at a GE aircraft engine plant in his native New Hampshire, Cote rose through the dishwasher and silicone divisions to head the appliance franchise. But his 25-year career at GE ended through his explosive firing by its legendary CEO, Jack Welch. As Cote relates the 1999 incident, Welch strode up to Cote at the HQ dining room in Fairfield, Conn., and remained standing and didn’t bother with niceties. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘Dave, I want you out of the company by year end!’” Cote recalls. Cote asked his boss what he’d done wrong, “And Jack then repeated, even louder, ‘You don’t understand, I want you out of the company by year end!’’’ Cote says he kept asking for an explanation. “And each time I asked, Jack would yell the same words, only louder each time. Jack had a high, squeaky voice, and the louder he yelled, the higher and squeakier his voice got. I got plenty of squeaking, I just never got an answer on what Jack didn’t like.” 

In 2002, Cote took the helm at Honeywell, the conglomerate that made such staples as avionics, specialty chemicals, and auto parts from turbochargers to spark plugs, and over the next 15 years, delivered shareholder returns that beat the S&P 500 by 150%. At Honeywell, Cote regularly went to work, and even to board meetings, in a beat-up bomber jacket, baggy jeans and work boots. His office featured a gurgling, 210 gallon fish tank, and a continuous stream of music from his iTunes playlist of 10,000 songs. “The music never stops!” he intoned. Every couple of months, Cote would spend a full day isolated in his office––no phone calls or meetings––to ponder a big strategic idea. While Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” or Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” played in the background, he’d weigh such issues as the best design for a new generation of turbochargers. 

Cote had never heard of Vertiv when the Goldman team brought it to his attention. Founded in 1946, Vertiv’s forerunner became the “network power” arm of Emerson Electric that developed the first precision cooling system for IBM mainframes. By the time Cote found it, Emerson had dumped Vertiv to California private equity firm Platinum Equity. “Emerson said it was a horrible business, they hated it,” says Cote. “They couldn’t wait to get out of it.” Under Platinum, Vertiv was struggling in its traditional trade: supplying air cooling for the then-routine functions of data centers, such as primary storage, running business software, and furnishing cloud computing for website hosting.

In early 2020, Cote and an investor group assembled by Goldman bought Vertiv for what proved an ultra-bargain $4 billion via a “special-purchase acquisition company,” and simultaneously took it public on the NYSE. Cote acknowledges that SPACs—where renowned “sponsors” raise money for an acquisition before choosing what they’re going to buy––even then had a “tawdry reputation,” and they’ve since disappeared. But this one worked: Vertiv’s one of the few SPACs that launched an enduring enterprise.

Cote found Vertiv so attractive for a simple reason: It had a big foothold in what he perceived as one of the great industries of the future, digital data, and with the right products, could ride the train to glory. “The two biggest twentieth-century trends are biotech and the digital age, and I thought the latter had 50 or 60 years to go.”

In part, Vertiv was lagging because it concentrated on the wrong customers. “Their largest customers were the major banks, while their competitors were working with Google and Microsoft,” says Scott Davis, an analyst at Melius Research. “That’s why they were poorly positioned and losing market share. One of Dave’s first moves was repositioning Vertiv to serve the hyperscalers.

At the time, the AI craze was still several years away. But Cote reckoned that the existing industry was on the cusp of a huge upswing. “When I got to Vertiv, pre-AI data generation was growing at 20% a year, but data centers were growing at 4%,” he says. “It didn’t make sense to me when all that data is being created and increasing everywhere. Machine learning, the predecessor to AI, was already requiring far more data. Eventually, the capacity of the existing centers was going to fill up, and we’d need a lot more of them. Data center growth has to approximate digital data growth. It was a tailwind no one was paying attention to.”  

It also encouraged Cote that Vertiv looked an awful lot like Honeywell before Cote dove in. Vertiv suffered from anemic sales growth, and its operating margins stood at a lowly 8% to 9%. “They could have been 25% to 30%,” states Cote. All of that underperformance provided rich territory for an expert operator like Cote to mine.

At first, Vertiv seemed headed not for glory, but disaster. Three weeks after Vertiv’s debut on the NYSE, COVID struck. “The stock dropped, and Wall Street thought we were going bankrupt,” says Cote. Then, business bounced back fast as folks in the stay-at-home economy spent much more time on their cellphones and PCs. But the surge in orders failed to benefit Vertiv. “We were getting all this business from competitors, but the reason was that we were underpricing our equipment by 20% to 30%,” says Cote. Profits cratered. By early 2023, the stock was hovering as low as $13, down roughly 55% from its high of nearly $29 in the eighteen months earlier.

To repair the problem, Cote effectively suited up by getting heavily involved in day to day management. In January of 2023, the board replaced the then-CEO with Giordano Albertazzi, a mechanical engineer trained in Milan and at Stanford, and a veteran of the Emerson years who’d harvested the kind of experience Cote craves, starting as a plant manager, and keeping that conviction that the best solutions for making things are found not in the c-suite, but on the shop floor mapping workflows and speeding assembly lines.

“It’s one thing to have the wind at your back as Dave did in the first couple of years. But companies almost always hit a big speed bump early on, and the really good ones are those that can fix it, and that’s what Dave did,” says Ethan Brown, portfolio manager for Omega Advisors, the family office for fabled investor Leon Cooperman that’s a top 25 holder of Vertiv stock via a position exceeding $500 million. “Like me, Lee’s long been a big admirer of Dave Cote. In fact, our initial investment in 2020 was a bet on Dave, and when the stock cratered Lee and I swung hard, and tripled our position.” 

Vertiv adopted an all-new cooling technology from the outside—via acquisition

Even during dark periods, Cote and Albertazzi were already nurturing the strategy that would transform Vertiv: Hatching groundbreaking products. “When I got to Honeywell, 20% of the engineers were in software. By the time I left, we’d increased the number of engineers by 4x, and 50% were doing software,” Cote recalls. So from the start, Cote aimed to reprise the R&D-driven quest for new products he’d used in his old job. At the time of the public offering, Vertiv was devoting a slender 3% of sales to R&D, and Cote installed a program aimed at raising that number to the 6% it’s reached today, on far higher revenues. But the decisive move came from the outside, from another Cote specialty of using small, snap-on acquisitions to gain fresh technologies. And this one would prove a game-changer.

Around 2021, Vertiv began collaborating with a British startup called CoolTera on a promising new process called liquid direct-to-chip (DTC) cooling. Around the same time, Vertiv began a collaboration with Nvidia to discuss the cooling technology its hyperscaler customers would need to deploy Nvidia’s GPUs in their new data centers, the chips that could reach new frontiers in output and efficiency. “Nvidia helped us understand the technology that would be needed,” says Cote. Adds Albertazzi, “Nvidia knew about the CoolTera products through us. It was clear that Nvidia’s comfort level with their products was quite strong.”

The technology is complicated to build, but simple to visualize. The problem with air cooling is that its not sufficient to prevent dense racks of GPUs from overheating, severely curtailing their efficiency. But the breakthrough is a water and glycolic compound that travels through tubes about the width of straws into a “cold plate” that sits directly over the semiconductors. The liquid absorbs the heat, and through a heat-exchange process, transfers it to a “cool tower” chilling system on the roof or outside the facility resembling a supersized AC condenser unit. DTC maintains the GPUs at a temperature of between 65 and 75 degrees. It uses no new water; the same blend keeps re-circulating. The technology reduces the data center area required for an equivalent amount of computing by 50 to 70%. As Albertazzi puts it, “It’s like moving from a Toyota to a racing car.”

In December of 2023, Vertiv bought CoolTera. Even before the acquisition, Cote and Albertazzi were betting big on direct-to-chip (DTC), and planned to use the CoolTera system. “Starting in 2023, orders were really starting to take off, and I thought it would continue,” says Cote. “It was the sunburst we’d been waiting for.” In early 2023, Vertiv launched a plan to increase all production three-fold in three years, primarily for new DTC products.” Vertiv added production lines and extra shifts at several existing plants, and then erected a 215,000 square foot greenfield facility in South Carolina that opened in October of 2024. This year, Vertiv hit the production goal, and it’s now embarked on phase two, a drive to triple capacity again by 2029.

Vertiv effectively commercialized the CoolTera DTC product that was pretty much a prototype before the acquisition, practically from scratch. Says Albertazzi, “It was the beginning of the re-architecture of data center infrastructure to accelerate higher and higher density compute.” Today, Vertiv battles important rivals in DTC, including Schneider Electric and Eaton, but reportedly holds the biggest market share both in that new technology, and the overall data center cooling market that’s running at over $30 billion today, and expected by Grand View Research to reach $128 billion by 2033, for a 22% annual growth rate.

Cote’s versatility greatly impressed Brown of Omega Advisors. “Dave switched from fixing operations to seizing on an unbelievable growth opportunity. He saw it clearly early on, and made sure Vertiv invested in the supply chain, distribution, production and R&D to take full advantage of probably the most important secular change we’ll see in my lifetime.”

For Vertiv’s leaders, the best way to make the products powering AI is the old-fashioned way: By nurturing a culture of listening

Cote and Albertazzi are hawks at ingraining a distinct culture that they claim worked great in their old-line manufacturing roles, and provides the same benefits in the realm of AI. It comes in two related parts: Get everyone comfortable about frankly airing problems, sans retaliation, and empower—and rely on—the folks on the shop floor to find the quickest, most reliable, and highest-quality ways to make your product. Says Cote, “Before, no one complained about anything. I want them bitching about crummy processes. The sales people, the hourly people on the floor. How do I make sure I have better processes? By having a thinking company. We have 20,000 people. If they all think every day about making the company better, and not just doing what they’re told, the better you’ll be.”

They’ve also instituted a “lean” template called the Vertiv Production System modeled on the one Cote installed at Honeywell modeled on the “kaizen” or continuous improvement principles pioneered at Toyota in Japan. It’s also close to the method that Larry Culp—whom Cote greatly admires—deployed to revive GE and that he now uses at GE Aerospace. It’s all about getting managers and engineers down to the assembly lines where they brainstorm with mechanics and machine operators to design the most efficient workflows. Observes Albertazzi, “The idea is that the best ideas come from the people who actually do the job. That’s Dave’s mantra, and I’m a firm believer.”

So is Cote worried about the Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek that may prove much cheaper to use than the U.S. versions, and curb what the hyperscalers can earn selling their processing enterprise tokens? You’d think that’s a potential threat to the flood of orders Vertiv’s now getting from the likes of Microsoft and co-location giant Equinix. Not so, says Cote. “It’s all about how much you’re billing customers for the AI they’re using,” he says. “Go back 24 months to when China announced DeepSeek. It was supposed to undermine the hyperscalers. But if you take something that’s valuable to people and make it less expensive, they’ll use more of it. If you find a way to process data more cheaply you’ll process a lot more data.”

This veteran can barely believe the triumph of his Chapter Two. As Cote told this writer in a reflective moment, “When something this wonderful happens you wonder how long it will last. But I did my research, and I found that what we do is fundamental to the digital age, and will go on for a long time.” From GPUs to memory disk drives to Vertiv’s DTC gear, AI is in large part a manufacturing business. And as Cote shows, yesterday’s best practices still point the way forward in this dizzying new adventure.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For 60 years, Ormat Technologies strategically built geothermal power plants where nature allows—over underground reservoirs of high-pressure water or steam—including around the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire” from Asia to the Americas. Doing so made Ormat the largest geothermal operator in the world.

Today, Ormat hopes to grow exponentially with the AI data center boom, aiming to build baseload, clean power plants throughout the Western United States utilizing both new technologies and old. The goal is called EGS—enhanced geothermal systems—marrying the traditional geothermal business with the newest oil-drilling and fracking techniques. The idea is that EGS will allow for the construction of next-generation geothermal power almost anywhere the customer desires by tapping into deeper, higher-temperature underground reservoirs much more easily.

While the science is proven, Ormat and competitors are racing to show they can build the plants economically and efficiently enough to contend with other sources of power generation, including gas-fired power, renewables, and nuclear. That’s why Ormat is launching two separate EGS pilot projects with different partners—a geothermal startup, Sage Geosystems, and the century-old, largest oilfield services firm in the world, SLB. Ormat also is working closely with Google and data center developer Switch.

“We’re in a very rare situation where all the stars are aligned exactly on time,” Ormat CEO Doron Blachar told Fortune. “We have the hyperscalers and the AI demand. This basically puts us in a situation where we see endless demand for our product. The more electricity we can generate, the more we sell, and we’ve been doing a lot of exploration in the U.S. over the last few years.”

Blachar’s thesis is that Ormat already combines traditional geothermal growth and a newer battery energy storage business that’s growing with renewable solar power installations nationwide. Even if the push into enhanced geothermal systems fails, he says, Ormat will be successful. But Blachar is confident that the EGS business—the company’s biggest potential growth driver—will thrive and that Ormat is better positioned than any other geothermal player to do EGS at scale.

“We know how to buy land positions. We have [contracts] with hyperscalers, with utilities, for hundreds of megawatts,” Blachar said. “We know how to get the permits. We know how to get the interconnections.

“The uniqueness is we have all the ingredients to develop EGS. Once the pilots are successful, we’ll start running,” he added.

On Wall Street, Ormat is now most closely compared to EGS startup Fervo, which went public in May with the biggest clean energy IPO ever in the U.S. Fervo’s market cap quickly jumped to $10 billion but, after some modest setbacks, has since plunged down to $5 billion, despite its strong longer-term potential.

Ormat, on the other hand, has seen its stock rise almost 20% in 12 months, up to a market cap of about $6.75 billion—down a little from an all-time high in early June. And Blachar is quick to point out that Ormat is profitable outside of its pilot projects. Ormat posted revenues of $662.7 million for the first half of 2026, up 43% from last year, on a net profit of $71.2 million, up 4% year-on-year.

“There is no company in the industry that can take advantage of EGS better than Ormat,” he said. “We have been here for 60 years. We are big in power plants. We know how to build them efficiently and how to operate them. And once the pilots are successful—either of them, or both of them—we will be able to develop multiple EGS projects.”

Steady growth before the sprint

Ormat was founded in Israel and grew globally before moving its headquarters to Reno, Nevada over 20 years ago.

Nevada is a hotspot for geothermal energy and both of its EGS pilots are located there. The pilot with Sage is at Ormat’s Blue Mountain power plant in Nevada, while the SLB pilot is located at Ormat’s Desert Peak plant. Ormat has also acquired new acreage in New Mexico, Oregon, and Idaho. Blachar said he’s bullish on Texas too. Sage’s milestone first pilot—a precursor to its Ormat project—just came online in August near San Antonio.

Blachar, who joined Ormat in 2013 as chief financial officer and became the CEO in 2020, still works out of his home city in Tel Aviv, and he speaks in thickly accented English, routinely traveling the world for Ormat projects, from Reno to Indonesia, Turkey, and New Zealand. Apart from the U.S., Indonesia is Ormat’s largest targeted growth area. “We are developing [in Indonesia], but it is taking a longer time. The processes are longer, and we are much more cautious, versus the U.S. where we are willing to take more risk in this environment.”

Ormat’s power portfolio in operation worldwide is 1.85 gigawatts—enough to power 1.4 million U.S. homes or roughly two large data center complexes. The 2028 growth target is to achieve up to 2.8 gigawatts through traditional geothermal and battery storage, not counting EGS.

But that’s still small potatoes versus what EGS could potentially build underground. Ormat was developing roughly 100 megawatts of geothermal power per year, Blachar said. Each EGS project with a hyperscaler could easily be 500 megawatts.

There is less political doubt—with Republicans attacking wind and solar and Democrats targeting fossil fuel emissions—because geothermal is beloved by both parties for now. Democrats want the clean energy, and the GOP likes how traditional oil and gas companies profit from expanding into the geothermal business. SLB, for instance, is pushing to expand in geothermal, lending its expertise in subsurface analysis and drilling wells.

Ormat’s pilot projects with SLB and Sage will be drilled next and could be online by late 2027, Blachar said. “Once they finish, we will start developing EGS projects.”

Twenty years ago, Ormat experimented with EGS, but it was too costly and difficult, he said. The drilling technologies have rapidly advanced since then as U.S. oil producers can drill 5-mile-long horizontal wells underground to maximize oil and gas production volumes.

Earlier this year, Ormat launched its Ormega100 power plant unit, a standardized, simplified power plant design with fewer moving parts that is intended to scale up economically with EGS.

“EGS today is becoming a much more realistic outcome,” Blachar said. “When you take Ormat experience and business development in the design of a power plant, and the amount of land and positions we have in the U.S., we are going to take advantage of this new technology and grow much faster.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Amazon has raised prices for several of its first-party devices, including its Echo smart speakers and Fire TV line, making it the latest big tech company to increase consumer costs as memory chip shortages pressure several industries.

The company overnight raised prices across its hardware product line, according to a review by Fortune. This includes raising the cost of its base Echo Dot from $49.99 to $79.99 and its Echo Show 11 from $219.99 to $249.99. It also raised its 16-gigabyte Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99 and its 16-gigabyte Kindle Paperwhite from $159.99 to $199.99.

Its Fire TV Stick HD model increased from $34.99 to $39.99, and its Fire TV Stick 4K Max went from $59.99 to $84.99. The Amazon eero 7 wireless mesh networking system increased from $349.99 to $399.99, and the eero Pro 7 rose from $699.99 to $799.99. Notably, Amazon did not increase prices for its Ring products. The website Pocket-lint earlier reported on the Fire TV increases.

An Amazon spokeswoman, who confirmed the price increases, said in a statement that the consumer electronics industry is “facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines.”

The spokeswoman said the company aims to continue to offer products at accessible prices, and that Amazon will also offer promotions across its lineup throughout the year.

Companies big and small have been increasing prices due to a memory chip shortage brought on by immense demand for AI compute. In June, Apple was forced to raise prices for its Macs and iPads to account for the increased cost of memory chips. Chief Executive Tim Cook characterized the move as a “100-year flood on memory pricing.”

Microsoft also said recently it will increase the price of its Xbox game consoles by $100 to $150, depending on the version, and that it would no longer sell Xbox consoles with 2 terabytes of memory, its highest-end configuration. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus have also raised prices or reduced the amount of memory in their products.

Amazon’s price increases are especially notable given the company’s reputation for low costs and cheap hardware. The move also comes as the company prepares for an upcoming fall event to show off its newest devices.

In late July, Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy told investors that Amazon now expects to devote $220 billion this year to capital expenditures, primarily to build and equip the data centers that power AI services, up from its prior estimate of $200 billion, owing to higher memory costs. Even at the elevated level, however, Jassy said Amazon still won’t “have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026. And I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027, too.”

The company’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, posted $42.2 billion in revenue in its second quarter, up 37% from $30.9 billion a year ago, marking its fastest growth in 18 quarters. Jassy called the results the fifth consecutive quarter of accelerated growth.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Last winter was tough for marmots living high in the Colorado mountains, where researchers say two-thirds of one population died while hibernating because of insufficient snow cover.

Those that survived are doing well, fattening up in time not just for fall and hibernation season but … drumroll, please … the very first Fat Marmot Week.

Just like Fat Bear Week, an online contest to vote for Alaskan brown bears plumped up for winter, Fat Marmot Week — beginning Monday — is mostly just for fun, but it also has a serious side: Scientists need to drum up donations for their long-running research into the rodents to keep it going through federal funding cuts.

“In some sense, we’re going to be laughing our way down as the Titanic sinks,” said Dan Blumstein, leader of the project launched decades ago at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. “Because what else are you going to do?”

But wait. What’s a marmot?

A marmot is a cat-sized, furry ground squirrel that lives in burrows in North America, Europe and Asia. The 15 or so species worldwide include groundhogs, which have their own special day, Feb. 2, in the U.S. and Canada.

In the Rocky Mountains, yellow-bellied marmots are plentiful. Hikers often spot these charismatic creatures perched on boulders or scurrying through wildflowers.

Marmots aren’t shy near trails popular with people. Watch out: A bold one might swipe your snack.

Like people, marmots have personalities and are “flexibly social,” meaning some like to intermingle in colonies of up to 30 animals while others prefer solitude, according to Emily Renkey, a master’s program student at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We kind of understand these marmots just by looking at them sometimes, because we can kind of tell who’s who just by how they behave and how they interact with one another,” said Katie Adler, a UCLA doctoral student.

Some marmots are difficult to study because they are wary of researchers’ efforts to trap them using wire boxes baited with an enticing mixture of oats and peanut butter, Renkey said.

“Others, you could trap three or four times in the same morning,” she said.

Marmots are big-time snoozers

While hibernating bears snooze in a state called torpor, allowing them to wake up — or be woken up — every now and then, marmots slip into a far deeper form of hibernation. Their body temperature drops from about that of a human to as low as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), not much warmer than their burrows in winter.

“You pick up a hibernating marmot and it’s this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur. It’s completely surreal,” Blumstein said. “They breathe once a minute or two.”

To prepare for winter, the animals do a tremendous amount of fattening. They double their weight to as much as 13 pounds (6 kilograms), then lose all of that bulk during half a year or more of hibernation.

“Marmots come out of the ground really skinny, relative to what they look like now, at least,” Adler said.

A poor snowpack affects more than the ski season

Last winter, scant snowfall and warm temperatures due to global warming deprived many Colorado marmots of an insulating blanket of snow over their burrows. Researchers believe their hibernation quarters got too chilly, causing many to die of cold.

“We had over 160 animals and we ended with 60 at the start of this season,” Blumstein said. “Most of them died because of the lack of snow cover.”

This year’s snowpack was the worst on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which includes Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. Human-caused climate change made the snow drought about 14 times more likely, a new study confirms.

Hundreds of researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have observed changes including fewer bees and other pollinators, and sagebrush encroaching in valleys once dominated by wildflowers.

Precipitation changes, meanwhile, literally cascade downstream to where farmers and communities need water to survive.

“The snowmelt here impacts the Colorado River which impacts our drinking water,” Renkey said. “What happens in these mountains doesn’t stay in these mountains. It impacts all of us.”

Mouseketeers, musketeers and marmoteers

The study in Gothic, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Aspen, is run by researchers from UCLA and the University of Ottawa in Ontario. It was launched in 1962, making it one of the world’s longest-running studies of individual mammals.

The marmot researchers affectionately call themselves “marmoteers.”

“It allows graduate students and other people to come in and suddenly capitalize on this knowledge and ask questions. Without doing all the grunt work,” Blumstein said.

Funding cuts have caused Blumstein’s UCLA department to lose one-third of its graduate students. Fat Marmot Week is one approach to attract interest — and hopefully donations — to keep the work going. Among the rodents on display: Stonehenge, who chirps at mountain bikers; and Citroen, whose mate is a leader of this matriarchal marmot motherland. Voting opens Monday.

The researchers have also been posting marmot videos to the OnlyFans adult content platform. To capitalize on the attention those posts have garnered, a “super fan” created a meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency, called $OnlyMarms, and donates transaction fees to the research program. That alone has raised around $100,000.

The team needs to bank three years of funding — over $200,000 — to ensure marmot research can continue next summer.

“People have to find funding in ways that we’ve never really thought of before,” Adler said. “Like reaching out to the broader community to get people engaged.”

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental 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

YouTube is offering millions of dollars to popular channels if they upload their videos to the site exclusively for a certain period of time, in an effort to halt Netflix Inc.’s pursuit of its biggest stars, according to people familiar with the conversations.

The payment would come in a couple of different forms. YouTube has discussed directly financing some programs, and it has also offered to allot a portion of major brand deals to creators. Though YouTube hasn’t finalized deals with any creators, it is close an agreement with several partners, said the people, who declined to be identified because the negotiations are sensitive and ongoing.

Creators who do sign deals with Netflix face consequences, YouTube has said, according to the people. YouTube will be less likely to feature them in marketing campaigns or at events if they release videos on Netflix at the same time. YouTube would also exclude those creators from collecting a share of proceeds from some major brand campaigns.

Netflix has been pursuing agreements with dozens of prominent YouTubers, paying creators such as Alan Chikin Chow and Nick DiGiovanni to post their videos on YouTube and Netflix concurrently. The company remains in active conversations with dozens of other creators, channels and programs, such as , a celebrity talk show.

The Netflix deals appeal to creators because they are a way to get paid millions of additional dollars for videos they are already making and expose their programming to new viewers. Netflix has more than 325 million subscribers.

Yet YouTube has told creators cross-posting on its platform and Netflix hurts viewership on YouTube and conveys the idea that channels are deprioritizing the streaming platform as their primary distribution outlet.

Some creators have already decided not to work with Netflix. The service requires them to deliver videos days in advance, which is not how many creators operate. It has also asked creators to remove certain brand sponsorships from their videos.

YouTube and Netflix have been the leaders in streaming video for the last 20 years. For most of that time, they have been friendly competitors largely operating in separate universes.

Netflix was the king of subscription streaming, focused on more expensive, Hollywood-style films and TV shows. YouTube was the undisputed leader in user-generated content, birthing a new generation of stars that people primarily watched on mobile devices. Its past efforts to fund original programming failed to produce many hit programs. One of those shows, , went on to be a big hit for Netflix.

Yet the line between the two sites has blurred in recent years. YouTube prioritized getting people to watch on TV and now accounts for more viewership on those devices than any other service. It has chased TV advertising dollars and taken the rights to major live events like the Academy Awards and the National Football League.

Netflix, which has long promoted its titles on YouTube, licensed the rights to popular shows like CoComelon and . It sees YouTube stars as a way to draw in younger viewers and boost the amount of time its users spend on Netflix.

The competition has intensified over the past year as Netflix has stepped up its pursuit of YouTube’s most popular channels. 

YouTube has weighed whether or not to respond. Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan has long said that creators who do deals with competitors, be they Instagram or Amazon Prime Video, tend to drive viewers back to YouTube. Few of these creators are leaving YouTube, which is still their primary distribution outlet. Funding any individual channel also risks aggravating the thousands of channels that don’t get any cash.

YouTube still doesn’t want to serve as a studio for creators, which would involve funding and providing creative direction. But in recent weeks Mohan and his team have decided that the steady stream of creators now posting on YouTube and Netflix at the same time was a problem that needed to be addressed. It’s harder to sell advertisers on the appeal and value of a video on YouTube if it is also available on Netflix.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has responded to competitors in this manner. It offered money to creators who didn’t do deals with Vessel, a startup co-founded and formerly led by Jason Kilar that was trying to get social media creators to post on its app before YouTube. YouTube also created a product for short-form video to compete with TikTok.

To contact the author of this story:
Lucas Shaw in Los Angeles at lshaw31@bloomberg.net

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday allowed the White House to continue construction on President Donald Trump’s $400 million ballroom project for now, as the Supreme Court considers the Trump administration’s emergency request to intervene in lawsuits over the project.

The temporary order came hours before lower-court rulings would have forced a halt to aboveground construction of the project because Trump didn’t get congressional approval.

It will remain in place until the Supreme Court issues a more durable decision, though the one-page document does not detail Roberts’ reasoning or indicate when another ruling will be handed down. Roberts signed the order because he oversees emergency appeals of cases filed in the capital.

Ballroom case tests the limits of presidential power

The case is coming before the nation’s highest court as Trump, a Republican, exercises unparalleled assertions of presidential power and increasingly seeks to mold the capital in his own image.

The administration has argued that the president has total authority to renovate the White House and other federal buildings as he sees fit and that the ballroom project must be completed due to national security concerns.

When Trump first announced the plans for a new ballroom, he did not emphasize national security. He said the project would be funded by private donations, including from himself.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation argues that Trump has no unilateral authority to undertake the work, which has included demolishing the East Wing. Lawyers for the preservation group accused the White House of trying to “outrun the courts” by accelerating construction.

A spokesperson for the trust said Friday that the order from Roberts is not a final decision and the group is awaiting further action. The full Supreme Court will likely weigh in next on whether construction can continue for the potentially long duration of the lawsuit.

Trump said his administration is grateful for Friday’s decision, writing in a social media post that the project is “under budget and ahead of schedule.”

While litigation plays out, the ballroom is going up quickly

The Trump administration says 65% of the work has already been completed on the planned 90,000-square-foot (8,400-square-meter) ballroom, where the East Wing stood before the president ordered its demolition.

Crews are working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, on the project, where about $200 million in private donations has been spent or committed, according to court documents filed by the Justice Department.

The work has proceeded against the backdrop of the litigation winding through the courts.

In April, a district court judge ordered a stop to the aboveground construction of the planned ballroom. That ruling was briefly suspended, then upheld by an appeals court panel. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington allowed work to continue only belowground on bunkers and military installations. Leon was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican.

Leon’s decision was upheld by an appeals court panel, as two judges appointed by Democratic presidents found the project was for Congress to decide and “not a matter for Executive self-help.” A third judge, appointed by Trump, found that the preservationist group challenging the project had no legal standing to sue.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer picked up on that argument, calling the decision halting the work “extraordinary and unlawful.” He said the completion of the project was “vitally required by national security.”

The Trump administration has scored a series of victories on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, though the justices have ruled against some of the president’s signature policies after fuller review.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump announced Friday that his administration will allow more beef to be temporarily imported into the U.S. without triggering higher tariffs, which drew swift pushback from cattle producers and conservative rural-state Republicans.

Beef prices have climbed to record highs amid a drop in the number of U.S. cattle, consistent consumer demand and limits on cattle from Mexico, where the animals are facing a flesh-eating pest. The U.S. president has also imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil, a major beef exporter.

Trump remains under pressure to cut costs and address affordability issues ahead of November’s midterms. But ranchers, normally some of the president’s biggest supporters, are enjoying some rare profitable years and worry cheap beef imports will reduce cattle prices — and with it, the incentive to increase herd sizes.

“We all want lower grocery prices, but as I’ve said for months, we cannot do it at the expense of American producers,” Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., said in a statement. “Flooding the market with foreign beef hurts our livestock industry and undermines the long-term solution: growing the U.S. cattle herd to meet demand.”

Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., said in a social media post just hours after Trump’s announcement that the president’s “heart is in the right place,” but importing beef will “harm our ranching families who feed the nation.”

And Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., said that while he appreciates the administration’s focus on grocery prices, “short term policy shifts do not equal long term solutions.”

The deal, Trump said, allows up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be imported into the U.S. for the next 90 days without activating an “out of quota” tariff, which is a tax that goes into effect once a certain quantity of that product enters the country.

The president said on social media that he had committed to ensuring the imported beef would be sold at 25% below current market rates, making it cheaper for American consumers. A White House official said the deal is with foreign beef exporters who have agreed to the discount on beef.

“You don’t put America first by putting U.S. cattle producers last,” U.S. Cattlemen’s Association President Justin Tupper said in a statement. “This move will weaken our markets and gamble with food safety in the process.”

The president’s announcement and other market interventions sacrifice “long-term stability for short term messaging,” Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said in a statement.

Glynn Tonsor, a professor at Kansas State University who focuses on the cattle and beef industry, said he would like to see more details about the latest deal but that his immediate assessment was that it wouldn’t have a big effect on prices.

That’s because 300,000 metric tons amounts to roughly 3% of what Americans eat yearly, he said. “The relative magnitude we are talking about is pretty small.”

David Anderson, professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University, said he was skeptical other countries could redirect so much beef to the U.S. in such a short time period.

“Is that even achievable?” he questioned in a phone interview.

The White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a plan that has yet to be finalized, said the beef in question is lean beef trimmings that are used for ground beef production. Trump plans to sign an executive order formalizing the directive within two weeks, the official said. The administration made a push last year to buy more beef from Argentina to try to bring down prices.

The president said Friday that his plan would help grow the U.S. cattle supply, which is the smallest it’s been in decades. Some ranchers and experts said the opposite effect was more likely.

“Imports have been a major contributor to the decline in the U.S. cattle inventory,” said Bill Bullard, the CEO of the R-CALF USA, which represents independent cattle producers. “Using more imports today will exacerbate that decline and will prevent herd expansion.”

___

Associated Press writers Sarah Raza in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A Texas court on Friday slashed a $50 million judgment that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay families of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre over his false claims that one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history was a hoax.

The Infowars founder can only be forced to pay about $6 million, the Texas Third Court of Appeals ruled in a unanimous opinion, citing state laws that limit lawsuit damages.

The ruling does not affect a separate $1.25 billion judgment against Jones in Connecticut, where he was also found liable for defaming and causing emotional distress to relatives of the 20 first-graders and six educators killed in the Newtown shooting.

The punishing financial verdicts against Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, in recent years have forced him into bankruptcy, led to some of his personal property being put up for auction and led to him leaving his Infowars platform. For decades, he used the platform to push conspiracy theories about the United Nations, the federal government, gun control and more.

Sandy Hook families have yet to collect any money from Jones, who has waged lengthy appeals in state and bankruptcy courts as his company faces liquidation. He remains on air after moving onto new websites and streaming platforms.

Friday’s ruling did not throw out the trial court’s finding of defamation against Jones. Still, he called it “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment,” and said he will continue to appeal the case to the state Supreme Court to get the remaining damages thrown out.

“I got lawyers who are good constitutional lawyers and they are not backing down,” Jones said.

Jones has already tried to appeal the Connecticut judgment to the U.S. Supreme Court but was denied last year.

The decision by the Texas Third Court of Appeals left intact more than $4.1 million in compensatory damages awarded by a jury to Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis for defamation and emotional distress. But it slashed more than $45 million in additional punitive damages down to $1.5 million to comply with the state’s $750,000 cap for each plaintiff.

The court found Heslin and Lewis did not show evidence that the harassment following Jones’ hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the cap. It also said the trial judge improperly allowed the parents to seek higher damages after trial.

Mark Bankston, an attorney for Heslin and Lewis in the Texas lawsuit, shrugged off the appeals court ruling as “irrelevant” given that Jones still faces massive financial judgments in Connecticut.

“The families care not at all about this irrelevant ruling which affects only two of the 19 claims they all share. Jones still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing. All it does is highlight the absurdity of Texas law,” Bankston said.

Newtown families harassed as Jones claimed the massacre was a hoax

Heslin and Lewis’s 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was among those killed in the Sandy Hook attack. Their lawsuit against Jones and the 2022 verdict marked the first time he was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws.

Jones portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his First Amendment rights, but conceded during the trial that the shootings were “100% real” and that he was wrong to have lied about them.

At the Texas and Connecticut trials, victims’ relatives testified that Jones’ followers — believing his claims that the shooting didn’t happen — subjected them to death and rape threats, in-person harassment and abusive comments on social media. Jones argued there was no proof that linked him to those actions.

Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology wouldn’t suffice and initially called on them to make Jones pay more than $150 million for the years of suffering he has put them and other Sandy Hook families through.

Almost immediately after the punitive damages in Texas were announced, Jones’ trial attorney predicted the award would be reduced to $1.5 million on appeal.

Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families in the Connecticut lawsuit, said Friday’s ruling has no bearing on the ongoing lower court proceedings in Texas involving the liquidation of Infowars’ parent company.

The Onion steps in to mock Jones and help frustrated families

Jones and his company have filed for bankruptcy, and those legal proceedings continue. The satirical website The Onion also moved to take over Jones’ Infowars platforms and turn his bullhorn of conspiracy theories into parody sites.

Jones gave up the Infowars brand in April and moved to a new location, switching his shows to new websites and posting them on his personal X account. The Onion, meanwhile, has set up its own Infowars webpage on its website, running videos of shows parodying Jones.

A proposed licensing deal that would give The Onion temporary authority to use Infowars’ trademarks, copyrights and intellectual property has been put on hold because the liquidation proceedings have been stayed during Jones’ appeals.

In November 2024, the Chicago-based satirical outlet was named the winner of a bankruptcy court auction of the assets of Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, aimed at helping pay some of the defamation judgments. A federal judge overturned the auction results, citing problems with the process and The Onion’s bid.

___ This story has been corrected to show that Jones is still liable for $4.1 million in compensatory damages in addition to $1.5 million in punitive damages.

___ Dave Collins contributed from Hartford, Connecticut.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Long before Phoebe Gates cofounded the AI personal shopping assistant Phia, she was a student at Stanford University working towards a bachelor’s degree in human biology. While her transcript reflects coursework in epidemiology and health policy analysis, Gates attended one secret winter-quarter class that reportedly helped her establish Phia. 

The 10-week off-the-record course, titled “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” or simply referred to as “Rule” among Stanford students, required a referral from another student and wasn’t available through the college’s official course registration, The Stanford Daily reported in May.

The course teaches “how to essentially hack any kind of power structure or bureaucratic structure and get what they want in a system of people,” a former student, who preferred to remain anonymous, told the student newspaper. 

The unofficial course focused on prisoner’s dilemmas, multipolar traps, and readings by Peter Thiel and Paul Graham. It admitted only six women and six men per quarter, selected by its professor Justin Lewis-Weber, a 2020 Stanford graduate and founder of insurance technology startup Assured. 

Lewis-Weber began teaching the course during his junior year at the college. Scrutiny of “Rule” includes allegations of a “cult of personality” and the inspiration for a memoir by 2026 Stanford graduate Theo Baker, titled “How to Rule the World,” published in May. 

“Justin’s class, it turned out, wasn’t a real class in the sense of earning course credit, although there were lectures, discussions, and guest speakers, and it was held each week on Stanford’s campus,” Baker wrote in his memoir. “It was more like a secret society, a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite.”

Baker interviewed for the course with Lewis-Weber in November 2022, while Gates was in the cohort, but was ultimately denied from participating. Baker described the bizarre interview process with the professor, who he believes aimed to confuse and harangue potential students.

“Justin was networking with teenagers he expected to be useful in the future,” Baker continued, adding the professor “knew that a certain elite cohort of Stanford students wouldn’t be able to resist the mystique he cultivated, the notion of this insider class no one would speak about, where only the very best of the best congregated to learn the secrets of the billionaires they aspired to become.”

Baker’s memoir explains that the objective of Lewis-Weber’s class is to teach students how to take advantage of others and find loopholes within rules, a very different approach to leadership compared to Stanford’s typical entrepreneurship classes. 

Lewis-Weber often preached that “for a select group of people—those with increased agency—a great amount of value can be extracted from the people around you,” a former student told Baker.

A source who interviewed for the course told Fortune that Lewis-Weber’s interviews consisted of the professor asking the same question repeatedly and testing how candidates responded, likening the process to epistemologically breaking down contenders. The source said they knew someone who completed the source and used skills gained from Lewis-Weber’s lectures to deceive venture capitalists, without getting into details exactly how.

How Gates applied the course to her advantage

Gates turned to the network of students to recruit employees for her then-budding startup, Phia, according to the Stanford Daily.

“Stanford completely changed my life path, not because of the classes, but because of the people I met and the connections I made,” Gates told Stanford’s student newspaper last year. “They gave me the confidence to build Phia. I never intended to start a business.”

Phia was founded in a Stanford dorm room by Gates and her roommate Sophia Kianni, officially launching in April 2025. Gates moved to New York City during her junior year, continuing to study at Stanford via the online night school program, while establishing the Phia office in Union Square. The name Phia is a portmanteau of the founders’ names Phoebe and Sophia. Gates is the daughter of billionaires Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates.

“We wanted to create something that could do all of our shopping for us,” Kianni told Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle last year on the Term Sheet podcast. “Do it instantly and effortlessly, rather than all the manual price comparison and tab-opening we were doing on our computers.” 

The fashion shopping app initially raised $8 million in seed funding in 2025, backed by star-studded investors including Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sheryl Sandberg, Spanx’s Sara Blakely, and more. In January, Phia raised over $35 million in Series A funding backed by Hans Tung. Today, the company is valued at around $185 million.

Phia’s controversy

But the startup now faces accusations of cookie stuffing after a recent Bloomberg report found the affiliate fraud accounted for over half of Phia’s revenue in June. Cookie stuffing is an illegal practice where tracking codes are nonconsensually implemented onto users’ devices. It’s a form of fraud that allows the company to claim credit for more affiliate sales and gain commission, even if the user didn’t use Phia to shop. It’s a violation of Google’s Chrome Extension policy, and can even result in up to 20 years of prison time if prosecuted.

“Any features causing misattributions were immediately removed over a month ago on July 7,” a Phia spokesperson told Fortune. “We are reviewing every transaction, we are fully committed to and have already begun issuing all transaction reversals to brand partners as a result of any misattribution, and we are hiring a head of compliance to make sure something like this never happens again.”

Internal company Slack channels obtained by Bloomberg tell a different story. Slack messages indicate that Phia’s founders were aware of the cookie stuffing as early as December, whereas the company alleges it was only aware of it in early July.

Cofounder Kianni suggested that a Phia program dropped cookies every time users closed a Phia popup, regardless of if the user was utilizing the app. A coworker reminded Kianni that doing so would be a violation of Google’s Chrome Extension Policy, to which Kianni responded: “I guess we could say that the user is trying to open us and roll it back if they complain,” via Slack.

“Can u confirm auto pop for cookie drop is live on ALL sites w a coupon to confirm we are monetizing on all [gross merchandise volume,]” Gates wrote in the December 18 Slack channel, later adding that “we should capture every transaction, if the cookie drop was working.” 

While this feature never got implemented, a Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg, Kianni was in support of the cookie stuffing practices, and encouraged team members to implement shady practices. 

“Whatever we can do to keep these cookies dropping will be amazing, thank you,” Kianni wrote on Slack.

If proven that both Gates and Kianni knew about Phia’s fraud for at least seven months, criminal intent will have to be ruled in court to drive the Phia founders to prison, however the app will experience fallout from the wire fraud scandal—including much more than an immediate drop in revenue.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Jeff Bezos has spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying his way into one of Miami’s most exclusive neighborhoods. But even the founder of Amazon, which sits atop the Fortune 500, has yet to squeeze his way into the private club at the center of it.

Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, remain outside the membership rolls of Indian Creek Country Club, an invitation-only club on Indian Creek Island—the ultrawealthy Miami enclave commonly known as the “Billionaire Bunker.” Bezos owns three properties on the island that he purchased for a combined $234 million, according to public records.

The buying spree began in 2023, when he paid $68 million for a property on the island. He later bought the roughly 19,000-square foot home next door for $79 million and added a third property in 2024 for $87 million. The purchases have made Bezos one of the most prominent newcomers to an enclave built around privacy, security and extreme wealth.

Indian Creek Village, which is separate from the club, is an incorporated municipality on a roughly 300-acre island accessible by gated bridge or boat. It maintains its own police force, and the vast majority of the island’s land belongs to the country club.

But owning property there does not make someone a member of the Indian Creek Country Club.

That distinction became particularly clear this year. Bezos and Sanchez Bezos attended the club’s annual dock party in February as special guests, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bezos mingled with members at the party, including real-estate executive Richard LeFrak and businessman Eddie Lampert, the report said.

People who attended the event told the Journal Bezos was using the gathering as an opportunity to meet members and improve his prospects of being admitted. 

Six months later, however, he is still not a member of the club. 

Jeff Bezos and Indian Creek Country Club did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Fortune.

Being rich isn’t enough

Indian Creek Country Club was founded in 1929 and is centered around an 18-hole golf course, clubhouse and other private amenities. The club has roughly 350 members and has historically attracted doctors, attorneys, financiers, real-estate developers, entrepreneurs and other prominent South Florida figures. 

People connected to the club told WSJ the initiation fee is close to $1 million, with annual dues of about $44,000. Applicants need sponsorship from two existing members and letters of recommendation from five others before being considered by a six-person membership committee. Nominees then go before a 15-member board for a vote.

But admission requires more than arriving with a nine-figure property portfolio and a globally recognizable name.

The Journal reported the club’s longtime members are wary of wealthy newcomers who could change the character of the community. It describes a clash between an established “old guard” and a newer generation of billionaires moving into South Florida. 

The club’s exclusivity has also put Bezos in company with several other extraordinarily wealthy people who have not managed to get through the gates. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump—Bezos’ fellow Indian Creek residents—have not been admitted as well. Zuckerberg paid $170 million for an unfinished estate on the island after the property’s previous owner, celebrity plastic surgeon Aaron Rollins, reportedly spent years trying unsuccessfully to obtain club membership.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump have likewise spent years cultivating relationships with the community. The couple bought land on Indian Creek and later expanded their holdings. According to the Journal, Trump has played golf with members and the couple has attended club events, while Kushner has become involved in local government and efforts to address the island’s aging sewage system.

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

Others have managed to make it inside. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon eventually secured membership after a difficult application process, according to WSJ. NFL legend Tom Brady and Jersey Mike’s Chairman Peter Cancro have also been accepted, while longtime members have included financier Carl Icahn and other prominent figures from Miami’s business and political establishment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are returning to the U.K. after living in the U.S. for the past six years. They’re moving from their Montecito mansion to a private residence outside of London, but the timing of their surprise homecoming could mean they miss out on tax breaks. Experts say that they’re leaving potential savings on the table, which could be worth millions. 

“Whilst their return is welcome news, staying away a bit longer would have given them a much better tax result,” Dhana Sabanathan, leading partner in the tax, trusts and succession team at national law firm Michelmores, tells Fortune. 

Under certain U.K. tax rules, the couple forgoes major benefits by returning home. Because Harry spent only six years away, he missed two key tax advantages tied to a 10-year non-residence period: four years of Foreign Income and Gains (FIG) relief, and the inheritance-tax advantages available to someone who has broken their long-term U.K. residency. For example, if their U.S.-based investments grew in value and they sold them after returning to England, they could have sold those investments and brought the money into the U.K. without owing U.K. tax on those qualifying foreign gains, under the FIG regime. Now, his qualifying foreign income or investment gains could be subject to U.K. tax. 

And because inheritance tax can be as high as 40%, that could mean millions of dollars of his overseas assets could be exposed, as estimates put Harry and Meghan’s collective fortune at $60 million. If they had waited 10 years before returning home, Harry’s non-U.K. assets—take his Montecito home and U.S. investments, for example—could potentially have stayed outside inheritance tax for years after his move. 

“If they had remained non-UK tax resident for 10 consecutive tax years before returning, they could have enjoyed relief on their non-UK income and gains for the first four years of their return,” Sabanathan explains. “Staying away for 10 years could have also enabled Harry to protect his non-UK assets from inheritance tax.”

There are also no public reports of Harry obtaining U.S. citizenship, so he is not subject to the country’s taxation upon leaving their Montecito home for the U.K. California-born Meghan will still have to deal with her home country’s tax affairs while living across the pond. Additionally, since stepping back in 2020, Harry hasn’t collected the public money working royals receive for official duties.

A potential tax upside: skirting the U.K.’s “temporary non-resident” tax hit

While they may miss out on some tax breaks by returning after six years rather than waiting 10, experts note that the timing of their move also offers advantages. 

The Michelmores partner points out that the couple hit six full years of non-U.K. residency, which allowed them to handle rules around “temporary non-resident” capital gains tax. 

The country’s rule—designed to keep people from moving abroad temporarily—means that if a resident leaves the U.K., makes profits on investments abroad, and returns within five years, the country can still potentially tax those gains as if the person hadn’t left for tax purposes. Their six-year timing puts them beyond the scope of this rule; the CEO of London tax and advisory firm Blick Rothenberg, Nimesh Shah, said that the “timing of their move back to the UK is immaculate” for that reason.

“They have saved some tax in that by staying outside the U.K. for more than 5 tax years,” Sabanathan says. “Any non-UK disposals they made or non-UK income earned (potentially from Netflix and Spotify deals and Meghan’s As Ever brand) during their time as non-residents should not be subject to UK tax on their return.”

The couple’s surprise move back from America to the U.K.

Harry and Meghan’s decision to move back to the U.K. came as a surprise for some.

Six years ago, the couple chose to step back from their roles as senior working royals, seeking greater privacy and independence while moving away from the pressures of life within the highly public family. They moved to California, where they have been earning money through various media ventures and commercial deals, including contracts with Netflix and Spotify. They have starred in and produced shows like the documentary series Harry & Meghan and the Netflix show With Love, Meghan, while Meghan has also launched her lifestyle and food brand, As Ever.

However, recently, Harry has said he wants to reconcile with his royal family. Additionally, his father, King Charles III, is currently grappling with an undisclosed cancer diagnosis. Some also speculate that the couple’s family catch-up with King Charles and Queen Camilla last month at the royal’s private Gloucestershire country residence may have helped drive the decision to return to the U.K.; it was the first time the monarch had been reunited with his grandchildren in four years. 

According to various sources, the couple’s children—7-year-old Prince Archie, and 5-year-old Princess Lilibet—have already been enrolled in British schools. It’s still unknown exactly which estate Harry and Meghan will settle down in, but it’s reported they’ll live in a non-royal residence right outside of London. The famous duo is also reportedly keeping their Montecito property as a U.S. home base.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Artificial intelligence chatbots have become the bane of teachers everywhere, but to prepare for the new school year, a group of educators in Charleston, South Carolina, packed into a high school auditorium and talked about inviting AI into the classroom.

The teachers and principals watched as an instructor prompted an AI tool to “create a map of the world.”

The result drew gasps of disbelief and laughter. Projected on a large screen was a map riddled with bizarre errors. Mali was spelled “Mail.” Egypt was identified as “Sopth.” In place of Libya was something simply called “Africa.” Dozens of other countries’ names were misspelled or written in pure gibberish.

“If you ever want kids not to over trust these tools, try the map demo,” said the instructor, Amanda Bickerstaff, founder and CEO of AI For Education, an organization that helps schools draft AI policies and train teachers and students in what she calls safe, ethical and effective use of the technology.

After initially trying to ban AI use, a growing number of U.S. public schools are trying a new strategy: encouraging classroom experimentation, partly so students can see its shortcomings, including generative AI’s notorious tendency to “hallucinate,” or fabricate information.

AI literacy has become a buzzword of this back-to-school season as educators try to strike a balance between equipping students with the skills they need for an AI-driven future while preventing them from outsourcing their thinking to chatbots.

There is no single definition of what AI literacy means, or how it should be taught. Tech giants like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic offer schools training sessions in how to use their AI tools. But for educators, there is a growing consensus that AI literacy is about more than learning how to use generative AI and write good prompts.

“Good AI literacy,” said Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, “includes knowing when not to use it.”

Some districts build their own approaches on AI literacy

Thirty-seven states have now published official AI guidance that schools can use as a blueprint. South Carolina is not one of them.

So the state’s second-largest school district set out to do it on its own, said Lucas Clamp, deputy superintendent of the 50,000-student Charleston County School District. “It has been a huge endeavor.”

A year ago, the district contacted AI for Education, which helped draft guidance for Chicago Public Schools, Houston and dozens of other districts.

Phase 1 was laying the foundation. The district developed an AI policy, seeking input from teachers, students and parents.

The district organized student focus groups and learned that student AI use was ubiquitous but unguided. Teachers and students said they were navigating the technology on their own and wanted clear rules and instruction.

Studies show a majority of teenagers and teachers nationwide are using AI for schoolwork, but they’re teaching themselves how to use it; very few say they have a technical understanding or have received formal training on how it works.

Schools and parents are eager to avoid mistakes made with social media, where kids were left to explore the online world without learning about addictive algorithms, comparison culture and other downsides that have been linked to a youth mental health crisis and dwindling attention spans.

As the school year begins in Charleston, Phase 2 kicks in: training. Teachers and middle and high schoolers will get a mix of online and in-person instruction on how AI tools work and how to use them effectively.

The student course walks through familiar scenarios — like asking a chatbot to help with a research paper — to show that generative AI might deliver wildly inaccurate information, including made-up studies, with unflinching authority. “Always verify any factual information you get from GenAI, especially for your classwork,” the course advises.

A section on data privacy cautions against sharing personal information with AI tools because conversations can be stored, used for data training and potentially leaked.

High school teacher Ray Knauer attended the summer training and left with “teachable moments” for his AP Research class. He plans to show examples of AI bias and hallucinations to fuel student discussions.

“We’re all trying to figure this out right now: What’s the right balance so we don’t scare students away from AI but don’t encourage them to run to it,” Knauer said. “We have to teach students: You can’t just get an answer and move on. You have to use analytical skills and dig deeper.”

Some states offer top-down guidance on AI in classrooms

Utah was an early pioneer in taking a statewide approach to AI in education.

In 2024, the board of education named Matt Winters as its AI education specialist, making Utah the first state to create a full-time position overseeing the technology in schools.

Over the past year, Winters led AI training for over 7,000 teachers, almost a third of Utah’s public school instructors. He is helping districts shape AI policies, which they are required by state law to have in place by July 2027.

“There is a clear method from the top in Utah,” said Chris Agnew, director of the Generative AI for Education Hub at Stanford University. “When you’re tackling big change, it’s easier to have coherence if everyone is singing from the same hymn book.”

A handful of other states have since replicated Winters’ post, including Maine, West Virginia and Georgia.

In other states, a patchwork of AI approaches has emerged, with variance from one school district to another. Extensive AI literacy training requires steep investment, raising concerns that kids in under-resourced districts might not get the same attention.

In Utah, training starts with the basics of how AI works to teach an understanding of AI bias, hallucinations, ethical concerns and data privacy needs, Winters said. Teachers can then pursue additional training on specific tools.

“If I had to give advice: Figure out how to make training accessible to everyone,” said Emma Moss, who oversees AI at the Canyons School District and also led an eight-person team that traveled the state doing over 150 AI literacy trainings. The training was funded by a $500,000 AI literacy grant from a local healthcare provider. “We said, ‘We will come to you.’ Whether you are in a rural area or urban, it didn’t matter.”

The state has also played a key role in procuring AI tools, Winters said. He negotiated data privacy agreements along with discounted prices, which has allowed rural and under-resourced districts to get access.

“Everyone needs to understand what this technology is and how it works,” said Winters, who cautions against blanket bans. “AI literacy is much larger than saying: ‘Don’t use AI.’ It’s about how we can prepare kids for the future.”

Changing adult mindsets is also key, said Kristina Yamada, the state Board of Education’s digital technology specialist.

“I think teachers need to change their mentality about students using AI to cheat,” Yamada said. There has always been cheating, she said. It’s up to teachers to speak students’ language and convince them they can’t rely on AI for all the answers.

For younger kids it means starting to talk about AI early, with conversations like, “People can lie. A program can lie. A robot can lie,” Yamada said. “For older students it’s different: ‘Sure, you can use ChatGPT to write computer code. But when the program stops working, you need to be able to fix it.’”

___

Gecker reported from San Francisco.

___

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

While interest in women’s sports is booming and Olympic sports organizers lock in preparations for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, advocates worry that the college athletic programs that feed both those systems may be strained further by increased demands from bigger sports.

Olympic sports haven’t had the opportunity to thrive on their own, according to Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Danette Leighton, because the business has centered one product: college football.

Leighton is calling on donors to set the agenda. Philanthropy can protect those teams, she said, by endowing scholarships for women’s gymnastics or men’s tennis.

“There are a lot of philanthropists that are really passionate about women’s sports or men’s Olympic sports,” she said. “They should make sure that that’s where their funding is going directly.”

College sports programs produce around three-quarters of the U.S. Olympians at a typical Summer Games, but some are on uncertain footing in the wake of the $2.8 billion House settlement that allows schools to share more than $20 million in revenue directly with their athletes every year. Most of that money goes to football and basketball. A bill before the Senate would require protections — and funding — for Olympic and women’s sports.

Some worry that efforts to commercialize the most lucrative sports are creating a bit of a Catch-22. Schools risk losing the whole athletic department if they fail to keep up with name, image and likeness opportunities, according to Celene Funke.

“You lose donors, you lose ticket sales, you lose all those things. Unfortunately, yes, that does have to come first,” said Funke, a former Louisville softball player who helps athletes navigate this new world as a financial adviser. “The problem is there’s not enough guardrails to ensure the back end looks all right as well.”

Tennessee Education Lottery CEO Rebecca Paul established a $12 million estate gift last year for Butler University to create an endowed fund for women’s athletics.

Paul, who graduated from Butler with a bachelor’s degree in 1970 and later earned her masters, competed as a gymnast before Title IX protections. That was back when she said “girls weren’t supposed to sweat.” She recalled that the women’s gym was “far inferior” to the men’s gym. Very few women her age had the opportunity to participate in organized sports — and develop the leadership skills she believes they provide.

She and her late husband decided on the gift long before name, image and likeness rights were established, according to Paul. As a Butler trustee, though, she said she hears concern from her peers at other schools about what might be lost as universities shift resources.

“I’ve always felt that it was fair that if you could be paid to work in a lab as a student, you should be able to earn money on the basketball court,” she said. “I think maybe how it’s done needs to be reassessed.”

___

Staff writer Glenn Gamboa contributed reporting from Cleveland.

_____

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

An Alabama jury on Thursday awarded $9.25 million in damages after finding that The New York Times defamed a college basketball player by incorrectly reporting that he was at the scene of a fatal shooting in Tuscaloosa.

Kai Spears, who played for the University of Alabama men’s team, sued the Times in 2023 after it published a report, citing a person familiar with the investigation, that indicated he was a passenger in a car involved in the shooting. The Times reported that the person had spoken “on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”

Days later, the Times acknowledged its error in an editor’s note and corrected the story.

The eight-person jury delivered its verdict after a nine-day trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. Matt Glover, an attorney for Spears, said he was pleased with the decision and believes “this verdict will improve journalism throughout the country.”

The Times was reviewing its legal options after losing in court, spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said.

“We’re disappointed the jury found The Times liable for an honest mistake,” Stadtlander said in a statement Thursday. “We thank the jury for its service, but believe the verdict and award of damages are contrary to law and not supported by the evidence.”

Three other basketball players from the school were present at the January 2023 shooting, which killed a 23-year-old mother. In the lawsuit, Spears claimed the inaccurate reporting had caused him emotional distress and forever linked him with a murder.

A Times article reporting on the verdict Thursday said the newspaper “had not lost a defamation lawsuit brought in the United States over one of its articles in more than 50 years.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Black nonprofit fundraisers are turning to their own communities for support this month, stressing everyday donors’ power at a time when philanthropy is growing more concentrated among the affluent and some major funders have de-prioritized diversity in their grantmaking.

The BackBlack initiative has directed more than $12 million toward Black-led nonprofits over the past three years, according to founder Floyd Jones. A GivingTuesday -style campaign that runs in August, the appeal invites online donation platforms to center typically underfunded, Black-led nonprofits. Last year’s efforts drew more than 130,000 unique donors, according to Jones, with the majority of their gifts falling under $100.

This year, for the first time, organizers are also leveraging content creators to reach a new audience: Black Gen Zers. The goal is to show that philanthropy belongs to them, too — not just the historically wealthier and predominantly white charitable institutions that tend to dominate narratives about philanthropy.

“Our people have always taken care of our people,” Jones said. “I want people to feel empowered.”

The campaign could bring a boost for smaller, Black-led organizations that, according to research released earlier this year, saw no significant changes to their funding after the racial reckoning of 2020. Only a subset of larger nonprofits got temporary increases in the years that followed, according to an analysis by Candid and ABFE.

BackBlack aims to flip that narrative from one of “deficit” to one of abundance. Jones is heartened by the example of Madam C.J. Walker, a Black beauty entrepreneur widely considered America’s first female self-made millionaire. She supported Black educational efforts such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and African American branches of the YMCA. She also contributed to the NAACP ‘s anti-lynching fund shortly before her death in 1919.

Jones doesn’t care if today’s donors have millions in their bank accounts, though. “It’s about doing your best,” he said.

One of BackBlack’s partnering creators pointed to the Free African Society. The nondenominational Philadelphia group, founded in 1787 by Black leaders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, was one of the country’s first mutual aid organizations.

“We’ve always had to pool our money and resources to help each other,” said Ernest Crim III, a former schoolteacher who posts Black history videos for his 118,000 Instagram followers.

But, he added, allies must also pitch in — especially in communities that “might not have the sustainable market or income to consistently give.”

Crim is asking followers to support Black nonprofits that work on issues of youth employment. Other participating pages are focused on nonprofits providing sports access, improving health outcomes and ensuring civil rights.

Matching up to $6,000 in donations is For Good, a charitable giving platform that helps move money from more than 20,000 donor-advised funds to over a million nonprofits filtered by ZIP code. GivingTuesday manages BackBlack’s data, Jones said. Other partners include online fundraising platforms GiveButter, Every.org, Bonterra and Fundraise Up.

For Good provides back end infrastructure for consumer-based campaigns including YouTube’s fundraising pages and Patagonia’s point-of-sale donations. The creator-driven donation strategy stemmed from the platform’s success with YouTubers who launch fundraisers for the issues they discuss in their videos.

Grassroots fundraisers face competing headwinds, according to For Good interim president Tamara Mahal. The concentration of wealth has increased the share of high net worth individuals in the donor pool. But, she said, there are more ways than ever to give locally from the bottom up.

She welcomes the BackBlack campaign’s efforts to include more small-dollar givers so that nonprofits aren’t overly beholden to any one individual benefactor.

“The cause is important in and of itself. Find a nonprofit that’s doing work in your community,” she said. “And that will actually help us to diversify.”

Kaci Patterson is the founder of Social Good Solutions, a social impact consulting firm that works with funders to build support for Black-led organizations outside of “trend funding.” She finds that Black Philanthropy Month, celebrated in August, is a reminder that philanthropy is more than just “institutional” giving “held within the walls of wealth and power.”

It was fish fries and chicken dinners, she noted, that funded alternative transportation systems during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Growing up, her own family received groceries from their community during times of hardship.

“That was philanthropy. That was someone else looking at us and investing in us and wanting us to be whole and wanting us to be well,” she said. “We’ve always had this kind of ‘we got us’ philanthropy. Let’s step into that role more confidently.”

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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

University of Louisville athletic director Josh Heird says there is no “silver bullet” that will help his department’s current revenue race.

To compete in the increasingly commercialized world of college sports, programs of its size might spend more than $40 million a year on talent acquisition, revenue sharing and other costs, according to experts. But just five of Louisville’s 23 sports generate any revenue, according to the athletic department. Only football and men’s basketball turn profits.

Louisville, like a growing number of major conferences ′ public universities, is trying to narrow that spending gap and its supporters are trying to help by creating a new organization to oversee everything from third-party multimedia deals to hospitality packages.

This spring, Louisville launched Cardinal Ventures, a nonprofit designed to help the athletic department leverage its brand to generate new revenue streams, all to keep pace with the multibillion-dollar market around compensating athletes for the use of their name, image and likeness.

“We live in a highly, highly competitive environment and industry,” Heird said. “And if there’s anything that anybody can do to try to create even the smallest sort of competitive advantage, then they’re gonna look to do that.”

The University of Kentucky also has a revenue-raising nonprofit. The University of North Carolina is actively discussing a limited liability company. So, too, is Louisiana State University.

There’s “feverish” interest from higher education in these offshoots, according to Clay Grayson, whose South Carolina law firm designed Clemson University’s in-house venture. There’s also scrutiny from Congress. Widespread privatization could further transform universities into profit-driven businesses resembling professional sports franchises, weaning them off fatigued donors and opening the door to private capital.

“Governmental universities don’t do commercial very well,” Grayson said. “Those nonprofits are the ones that kind of can get out into that space.”

Record high gifts underscore the spending spree. Virginia Tech touted an “unprecedented” $75 million commitment intended to “ensure a strong start” for its nonprofit Hokie Ventures. Michigan State bolstered its athletic department with a $401 million contribution that included an investment in its own Spartan Ventures.

Louisville’s Heird said he frequently finds himself discussing these new organizations with peers as they all look to boost their bottom lines.

At his school, he has found some “low-hanging fruit” with concerts. Louisville’s 60,000-seat football stadium largely sits dark outside of home games.

Country music star Zach Bryan recently lit up the field. The rapper Ludacris headlines an upcoming hip-hop billing. Planning is already underway for next year’s shows — each of which could bring seven-figure profits for the hosts.

Athletic directors seek flexibility, control and a ‘commercial engine’

These new efforts may not provide a “silver bullet,” but they do offer new revenue and something many athletic directors may value even more — more control.

The nonprofits and LLCs offer greater flexibility to crack the financing puzzle than the previous system. Bureaucracy can drag decision-making out for months. Key components of the fan experience — tickets, parking, merchandise, concessions— are often outsourced to vendors they don’t fully run.

“There is an unstoppable train that is college sports,” said Jason Belzer, a Sequence Equity partner who advises schools on NIL deals. “The reality is that you need to create new platforms and paradigms to be able to successfully operate a business that no longer really sits with the original mission of college athletics — at least at the higher levels.”

Everything is on the table for Syracuse University. Athletic director Bryan Blair sees an opportunity to corner New York’s college sports market. It’s the state’s only Power Four conference school. And all five ticketed sports play under a 50,000-seat dome that brings what he called a “big state school feel.”

The question is how to build a “commercial engine,” Blair said, whether it exists within his department or outside it.

“We’re trying to educate young people, give them a great experience. We’re trying win on whatever day of the week it is for whatever competition it is. We’re trying to be great stewards and ambassadors for our university,” Blair said. “But to do a lot of those things requires more revenue than ever before.”

Nonprofits join growing number of affiliates

Commercial affiliates aren’t new to higher education. Some universities use them to monetize drug patents or manage copyright.

Take the University of Kentucky, believed to be the first school to convert its athletic department into a limited-liability holding company. Trustees already managed separate health systems through a not-for-profit that was primed to take ownership of its athletics offshoot.

Athletic director J Batt, who recently joined the Wildcats from Michigan State, expects these formations will become the norm rather than an exception. “And everybody will do the one that’s right for your campus,” he added.

Grayson, the legal architect behind many such models, said he mostly hears from members of the Power Four. Those 67 schools tend to be the only ones with large, competitive enough programs to spend beyond the revenue-sharing cap of $21.3 million this year. His firm has helped create affiliated entities at an estimated one in seven schools competing in the Southeastern Conference, the Big Ten, the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big 12.

His model strays from the traditional nonprofit. He proposes smaller, seven-person boards in order to expedite decision-making. Some of the athletic ancillaries even own for-profits that handle taxable activities such as stadium concerts.

Another big difference: they’re not registered to fundraise because their focus is programmatic revenue. He recommends aligning these new ventures with existing fundraising organizations — like “two pedals of a bicycle.”

“If you get them moving in sync, you’ve got a powerful, powerful motor,” he said.

Questions about charitable purpose and donor fatigue

It remains to be seen whether these new entities will alleviate donor pressure to bankroll costly football programs. Moreover, they raise the same question that murky NIL collectives did: what is the charitable purpose of an institution whose main goal is to generate more revenue for athletics?

The Internal Revenue Service decided many nonprofit NIL collectives were erroneously given charitable status. They served players, not the public good, so their activities were likely not exempt from taxes.

These affiliates are similar, in the view of an NIL tax consultant who previously worked at the IRS. Thad Madden, who studied NIL compliance issues for the agency, said he doesn’t see any “charitable connotation.”

“It’s to serve the financial interest of the athletes so that they make the most possible money with the goal of putting the best team on the field,” Madden said.

That financial interest has fatigued donors, according to consultants who advise schools on issues of NIL. They’re fielding more athletics solicitations even as universities continue fundraising for student scholarships, research projects and other functions.

It used to be that development officers could leverage donor interest in athletics to direct some funds towards academics. That’s not so nowadays, according to University of Pennsylvania professor Karen Weaver, a former athletic administrator who studies the evolving college sports landscape.

“Athletics doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem,” Weaver said. “So, whatever dollar they bring in is gonna be spent on trying to get an advantage in athletics.”

___

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

Twenty-five years ago, multinationals found themselves facing an affordability crisis. Emerging economies were growing at 3x to 4x the rate of developed economies (they are still growing ~2x faster now). The collective purchasing power of billions of potential consumers and the growing middle class in emerging markets presented an enormous business growth opportunity. Many multinationals initially floundered by offering rich-market solutions to poor customers, or stripping features to make cheap product variants. Successful companies focused on delivering value—products that offered the core performance and quality users desired at a price point they could afford. They did this by assessing the unique requirements of emerging market users and designing solutions to suit their wants and needs.

Affordability is the key issue in the upcoming midterm elections. Families, reeling from years of price hikes and inflation following the pandemic, are desperate for products and services that they can afford, but that are not “cheap.” We are living in an era when companies must find solutions that are not just lower-cost, but rather higher value, offering adequate or even improved performance at a lower price.

There are some affordability strategies that America has already exhausted, and if pursued further, may turn customers away or cause economic havoc. The first is what we call “Costcofication.” Costco’s business model is predicated on making products more affordable to customers through bulk sales. They do not compromise the performance or quality of name brand products, but rather leverage economies of scale in packaging. Consumers can buy their favorite Coca-Cola beverages, Charmin toilet paper, and Dawn dish soap… if they want them by the case. This sales model has scaling limits—it’s unlikely consumers will want to tow a tanker full of Skippy peanut butter home. It also depends on shoppers being able to afford the Costco membership, large payout for bulk purchases, and have room to store them in their home. Costco is already inaccessible to many Americans, as the average household income of its members is $125,000/year, yet the median income for the country is $80,000/year. 

The second cost-saving strategy that is likely maxed out is what we call “Walmartfication.” Charles Fishman has written widely about “The Wal-Mart Effect,” including how the company often pressures its suppliers to lower quality to achieve affordability through “everyday low prices.” Suppliers have had to go so far as to design look-alike but cheaper versions of popular brands to meet Walmart’s demands, like Levi Strauss’ “Signature” jeans, which have lighter weight denim than the premium Levi’s brand. Further lowering the quality and performance of products to make them more affordable could damage brand reputation, dissatisfy consumers, and hurt Walmart’s bottom line.

The third cost-saving strategy we call “Taxpayerfication.” This is when the government makes services more affordable to consumers by subsidizing costs, only to turn around and have them still pay for it through tax increases. This strategy only gives the appearance of improved affordability by either placing the financial burden directly on society, or by kicking the can down the road by increasing the national deficit, which must be paid by Americans someday. The real issues behind the national affordability crises of healthcare, housing, higher education, and childcare are spiraling costs. Without addressing costs directly, shifting who pays them won’t change the underlying problem or save society any money.

Innovators must look at the new, affordable products and services demanded by Americans with fresh eyes. Adapting existing offerings will likely not work; disrupting them is the only way to address the affordability crisis. We need to provide solutions that deliver high performance at low cost, offering value to consumers. Fortunately, a playbook already exists from which there are many lessons to learn: innovating for emerging markets.

When GE Healthcare set out to sell CT scanners in China and India, its premium Revolution scanner—costing roughly $650,000 to manufacture—was a nonstarter. Rather than strip features, GE followed a “reuse, revise, redesign” discipline: it reused amortized components like the base structure, patient table, and software. It identified the image detector as a pain point driving cost: the Revolution scanner used 128 curved X-ray collectors that could capture the contours of a patient’s body. Rather than using expensive hardware, GE utilized only six, much cheaper flat detectors and invested in improved software to render accurate 3D images. The resulting Brivo CT scanner could perform 75% of the CT procedures that the Revolution could, at a manufacturing cost of only $56,000, making it a commercial success across emerging markets.

Gillette initially tried, and failed, to launch the Vector razor in India—a model considered “cheap” in the eyes of Americans because it was old and obsolete, but still much too expensive for the Indian mainstream. They quickly wised up and realized they had to understand the unique requirements and value propositions of Indian users. The company sent its engineers into consumers’ homes—logging 3,000 hours with more than 1,000 men—and discovered that Indians shave differently than Americans: less often, with thicker stubble, seated in dim light, and rinsing in a cup rather than under running water. Gillette designed the Guard with bump-flattening ribs to avoid cuts and the stress of shaving in low light, and large flush channels to clear hair particles with a little swishing. The Guard has only four parts to keep the price down; it sold for about 25 cents, with blade cartridges at roughly 8 cents. Within four years, the Guard accounted for two of every three razors sold in India.

Peru’s Innova Schools show the same innovation approach applied to high-value education. Chairman Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor and his team elucidated four requirements for improved schools in Peru: tuition no higher than $130 a month, quality equal to or better than the country’s $15,000-a-year private schools, a model scalable to hundreds of campuses, and profitability. Working with the design firm IDEO, Innova Schools built a “flipped classroom”: 70% teacher-led group work, 30% self-directed online learning supported by a central library of more than 20,000 lesson plans. This model enabled less-expensive teachers to deliver top-tier results. Utilizing modular, reconfigurable buildings slashed construction costs. Today, Innova Schools students outscore both public schools and far pricier private ones. In 2025, 63 Innova Schools in Peru served 64,000 students, with 20 additional schools operating in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador.

Each of these solutions delivered the core performance customers wanted at a fraction of the price of prior offerings. This disruption was achieved by understanding the unique requirements of emerging market customers and tailoring solutions that delivered the right price and performance. America’s innovators should run this playbook at home to create the affordable, valuable solutions the public demands.

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. On Fortune’s radar today:

• Exclusive: Venezuela likely to go for dollarization of its currency to cure hyperinflation.
• Bond traders say Bessent’s ‘band-aid’ is ‘a heinous financial crime.’
• Markets: Bitcoin is back! (A bit.)
• The 60/40 portfolio, RIP.
• What 5 million tons of seaweed did to Mexico’s hotel industry.
• Tim Cook added $32 million per hour to Apple’s market cap, every single hour of his 15-year tenure.
• Seafood truck crash creates 8-hour-long ‘Squidpocalypse.’

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Good morning. Did you hear about China’s robocop? The 6-foot-2-inch droid, deputized by the authorities in Hangzhou, is more mall cop than terminator (its limited duties include waving traffic and admonishing jaywalkers). But following Wednesday’s blockbuster IPO of Unitree, a Chinese robotics company whose shares popped 460% on their first day trading, it’s clear that China is having a humanoid moment.

All the buzz coming out of China is likely to spur calls for America to up its humanoid game (we got humanoids too!), lest we get left behind. So, get ready for the next big trans-Pacific rivalry: the U.S.—China humanoid race.

Today’s tech news below. —Alexei Oreskovic

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• In today’s CEO Daily: Can the U.S. grow its way out of its fiscal burden?
• The big leadership story: Walmart will use its $3 billion tariff refund to lower prices
• The markets: Trending positive heading into the U.S. market open
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. The era of cheap money is officially over. The bond market, not the Fed, is giving the clearest signal to CEOs that their borrowing costs are going up. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s $4 billion buyback plan for longer-dated government debt managed to calm bond markets for barely a day before we saw another sell-off, pushing up the yield on the 30-year Treasury. With the U.S. national debt now topping $40 trillion, few seem to share Bessent’s view that “we can grow our way” out of the fiscal burden.  

To some extent, skittish bond markets are another example of growing risks—and costs—in the U.S. economy. It’s even more likely that the Fed will raise interest rates when it meets again in September. Higher yields mean Washington is now paying close to $3.2 billion a day in interest on the debt. It raises the mortgage rates that are weighing on consumers and builders like KB Home, which CEO Rob McGibney recently spoke about in this column.

Other implications to think about? First, the Trump Administration’s fiscal policy.  Lower taxes and regulatory burdens have certainly helped to fuel corporate spending, with the Treasury department reporting that business investment rose nearly 10% in the first half of the year.  But there are trade-offs to every decision. The evaporating tariff windfall was a $200 billion hit to this year’s budget. Add in an atmosphere of overall uncertainty, America’s record level of debt and deep concern over this administration’s commitment to ethics and rule of law. They point to higher borrowing costs in the longer term and other sources of friction for leaders.

And then there’s AI spending. Companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle are issuing record amounts of debt to fund AI infrastructure. There’s been about $500 billion in AI-related debt issuance so far this year, according to Goldman Sachs. Alphabet raised almost $32 billion in debt in 24 hours in February, including a 100-year bond. As with the equity markets, the gap between the hyperscalers and the rest of corporate America is widening. Yes, investors are starting to distinguish between the platforms and the infrastructure around them, between proven cash flows and promises that have yet to materialize. But they’re gravitating to the same haves and have-nots of the equity markets, which means tech giants are likely to continue driving up costs and tightening credit for other companies—especially in the current climate.

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Before we built our current startup, we spent seven years building retail investment platforms that introduced millions of people to investing for the first time. 

Sharesies and Lightyear were highly regulated companies that now manage more than £7 billion in assets, and time and time again customers would ask us: what should I invest in? It frustrated us that we couldn’t help them in any meaningful way. 

In moments of extreme volatility, the Trump tariffs, the pandemic, all we could do was send an email that said, in effect, “don’t panic.” Markets go up, markets go down. That was as far as we could go because we had no way to give real advice. So, we watched customers buying high and selling low. It was incredibly frustrating because we just couldn’t help.

In the background, customers were making incredibly complex financial decisions – about retirement, growing a family, inheritance or buying their first home – which weren’t just investment questions but life changing moments, where good advice was critical.

And yet most people weren’t getting it. 

That was why we built our company, Marloo. Not so we could provide financial advice, but to make life easier for those who could — financial advisors. These are people drowning in admin and paperwork that removes them from what they love: working with customers. 

Just 15 months later, we are averaging 37% monthly revenue growth since inception, have onboarded more than 900 paying advisory firms across eight countries, and are expanding into the U.S. We’re not aware of another company doing this across as many markets as we are. We’ve raised $13 million ($3 million pre seed, $10 million seed), with the two rounds only six months apart.

We started with the hardest, most regulated markets. That groundwork is what let us move into eight countries in 15 months. A new market now takes days, not months.

It is no coincidence that that growth has come at a time when the investment landscape is more complicated than ever. For decades, financial advisors built portfolios by dividing a client’s money across fixed categories such as shares, bonds, property, and alternative investment vehicles. But now, asset classes once off limits to all but the very rich are on the table too. 

Assets that were institutional-only are now packaged and sold to ordinary investors, and the minimum ticket has fallen from millions to thousands. The exposure has spread and the labels have not kept up. Millions of people can now buy things nobody has ever had to explain to them.

What that means is that the profile of customers for financial advisers has shifted too. A parent who is about to start paying school fees needs a different portfolio from an entrepreneur preparing to sell a company, even with the same wealth and appetite for risk. 

Advisers have to ask more practical questions: Can the client access their money quickly? How does it provide them with income? How might it perform during a crisis? Can they leave it untouched for 10 years? 

That has practical consequences, because personal advice takes more time per client than fitting someone into a model portfolio. The best advisers are already full. More personal advice to a broader range of clients means more time — and time was always at a premium. 

It has been said repeatedly that AI isn’t going to take human jobs but change them, and that those who learn to harness it will be those that succeed as it improves. But — at least when it comes to financial advice – that is absolutely true. 

An advisor cannot easily answer the question of which of their 200 clients an interest rate move will affect the most: their relative exposure is not sitting somewhere in a labelled box. You need to go client by client: what AI can do is narrow that list down to a handful and let the adviser decide what to do for each and own that call.

AI can help advisers model these individual circumstances without spending hours rebuilding every portfolio manually. Human judgement though is what will always be needed to understand which goals matter, and which compromises a client can accept. 

This means that as investment categories converge, portfolios must become more personal and not more complicated. The industry must stop fitting people into rigid allocations and start fitting their clients’ money around the lives they want to lead.

We started this company because we couldn’t help the people asking us for advice. Now, by giving advisers back their time, we believe we’re part of a generational shift, one where personal, human advice finally reaches far more people than it ever has.

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