In the traditional playbook of corporate ascension, general counsel isn’t typically seen as a springboard to the CEO suite, especially not at a global technology consultancy. And yet, Julie Sweet has not only defied that assumption, she’s redefined what modern CEO readiness looks like in an era when domain expertise is being eclipsed by intellectual agility.
Before she took the helm of Accenture, the $176 billion consulting powerhouse, Sweet was a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the elite Manhattan law firm where partners rarely leave and even more rarely leap into a completely different industry. She had built a career there closing high-stakes M&A deals, not architecting cloud transformations or negotiating AI partnerships.
But in 2010, when Accenture approached her to become its general counsel, Sweet made the jump. Her father had recently died at age 68, a personal loss that left her reflecting on what she wanted her career and life to look like. “It reminded me to make sure I was living life to the fullest,” she told my colleague, Lila MacLellan, in a newly published Fortune magazine feature.
At the time, Accenture was shifting its growth strategy and looking to become more acquisitive. It saw in Sweet a business-savvy legal partner who could help execute on that ambition. Still, she joined with no formal background in technology and admits she didn’t know what the cloud was when she started.
Rather than seeing that gap as a liability, Sweet treated it as a learning opportunity. She enlisted Bhaskar Ghosh, now Accenture’s chief strategy and innovation officer, as a personal tutor. They met every two weeks for 18 months. It was a deliberate, sustained effort to build fluency in an area that would soon become central to Accenture’s future and her own.
Sweet has emphasized that understanding technology isn’t optional for executives; it’s foundational. Leaders today, she says, must understand how tech is changing products, industries, and customer expectations.
In 2019, following the untimely death of CEO Pierre Nanterme, Sweet was named chief executive. Her ability to connect the dots across legal, strategic, and operational domains has proven an asset, especially as the company scales up partnerships with firms like Nvidia and Palantir to embed AI across both commercial and government clients.
In interviews with Fortune, analysts credited her with positioning Accenture for the next wave of enterprise transformation. Clients described her as highly engaged, detail-oriented, and deeply prepared. Former colleagues also highlighted her ability to synthesize complex information and her tendency to keep pressing until she fully understands an issue.
Although Sweet’s path from law to CEO of a consulting and tech services company may be atypical, it reflects what modern leadership demands. Increasingly, the most effective CEOs aren’t those who simply follow a linear path up a single function, but rather those who can cross disciplines, absorb new knowledge quickly, and operate with intellectual range.
In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on that time Jack Welch claimed the job numbers were being manipulated.
The big story: Trump continues to make false claims about the employment numbers.
The markets: Recovering from Friday’s collapse.
Analyst notes from Analysts ING on the Fed, Goldman Sachs on U.S. GDP, and JPMorgan on corporate earnings.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. I’ve never liked how the U.S. measures joblessness. The official unemployment rate doesn’t include the number of people who have given up looking for work or are stuck in low-paid jobs that don’t match their skills and aspirations. It doesn’t capture the difference between long-term vs. short-term employment, contract or full-time jobs. Economists at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) understand that frustration and publish a range of measures to capture the nuance of labor underutilization.
President Trump agrees that the number doesn’t reflect the reality of unemployment, though he reached a very different conclusion last week in deciding the numbers were “phony” and “rigged” to underrepresent the robustness of the labor market. He was so mad about the July jobs report, which showed unemployment ticking up to 4.2%, that he decided to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday.
I immediately thought about the reaction when former GE CEO Jack Welch tweeted his disdain about the job numbers under the Obama Administration back in October of 2012. Welch, a lifelong Republican, was skeptical that the unemployment rate had fallen below 8% for the first time in four years with an election looming. He tweeted: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”
Welch had been retired from GE for more than a decade at that point and had plenty of opinions as a columnist for Fortune. Nevertheless, there was outrage that a leader of his stature was attacking the integrity of a vital nonpartisan government agency and the integrity of the U.S. itself by suggesting that core economic data was politicized. Welch quit the Fortune gig amid uproar over the tweet.
But he didn’t back away from his assertion. “I’m not the first person to question government numbers, and hopefully I won’t be the last,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He likened the blowback he was facing to Soviet Russia and Communist China. What Welch, a man who famously claimed to cut the bottom 10% of GE’s workforce every year, did not do: Call for the BLS commissioner to be fired.
Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates says the ability to use AI tools is both “fun and empowering,” and he encourages Gen Z to embrace it early. But whether that adoption is enough to save graduates from the pace of workplace disruption remains unclear. In response, applicants are already shifting their strategy in response.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has advice for recent graduates: Embrace AI tools, but don’t expect any stability when it comes to the job search.
Gates said smart systems have generally unearthed opportunities that are “fun and empowering,” he told CNN. However, that may not mean ambitious college graduates will land their dream jobs just by using AI; it’s still a tough job market despite understanding these applications.
“Embracing [AI], and tracking it, will be very, very important,” Gates said. “That doesn’t guarantee we’re not going to have a lot of dislocation.”
Gates said he hasn’t changed his recommendations for young people: “Be curious, read, and use the latest tools,” he said.
AI has shaken up entry-level careers
Gen Z is increasingly burnt out from job hunting before even getting started. Frustrated applicants have lamented on TikTok about the number of rejection emails they have received from companies and expressed fears that the job market feels broken. And recent data backs them up: Entry-level job postings in the U.S. overall dwindled by about 35% since January 2023, and roles that are easily automated by AI are experiencing a disproportionately large impact.
AI replacing entry-level work is already being felt across all industries. At global investment firm Carlyle, previous entry-level hires who evaluated deals used to turn to Google for articles and request documents manually. Now, the work is being done by AI, and the firm is shifting toward hiring junior-level employees who can ensure the work is accurate.
CEOs have also iterated their hiring strategy. Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, told The Wall Street Journal he decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social-media copy through ChatGPT instead.
How Gen Z is positioning itself
For Gen Z entering the workforce, the career game is shifting. Much like investors turn to Treasury bonds during times of economic uncertainty, many younger workers are reveling in the security of blue-collar work and roles rooted in human connection, creativity, and physical skills.
A recent survey of 1,000 Gen Z workers showed 53% are gravitating towards skilled or licensed trades in construction, plumbing, and electrical. Jobs installing elevators earn up to six figures and don’t require a college degree, for instance. Next in line are people-focused professions, such as healthcare, education, and social work.
Gen Z job applicants are facing headwinds when entering the job market due to AI. Tech billionaire Bill Gates encourages younger generations to embrace the tool, but can’t guarantee it won’t cause any “dislocation.”
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer sounded a cautiously optimistic note on discussions with China on rare earth flows, following trade talks that further steadied ties between the economies.
Greer said the key industrial components were a focus of negotiations in Stockholm last week that Beijing said led to an extension of their tariff truce. Without going into detail, he said the U.S. secured commitments about their supply on CBS’s Face the Nation aired Sunday.
“We’re focused on making sure that magnets from China to the United States and the adjacent supply chain can flow as freely as it did before the control,” Greer said in the interview, which was taped Friday. “And I would say we’re about halfway there.”
That assessment came some four months after China imposed export controls on rare earth magnets—used in products from home appliances to missiles—in retaliation for U.S. tariff threats. Beijing has agreed to speed up their shipments after Washington suspended sky-high levies on Chinese exports.
U.S. President Donald Trump is set to make the final call on maintaining the tariff truce, which expires Aug. 12, Greer said.
“We’re working on some technical issues, and we’re talking to the president about it,” he said.
Flows of rare earth magnets from China to the U.S. rose to 353 tons in June, up from just 46 tons in May, according to the latest customs data. Total shipments were still substantially lower than before Beijing launched export controls in early April.
Greer earlier said Trump’s trade team hopes to be done discussing magnets with China, after he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrapped up a third round of trade talks with Beijing in the Swedish capital end of July. If the U.S. can get over the magnets issue, it can move to a further discussion of the U.S.-China relationship, he added.
The discussions have helped stabilize relations between the world’s two largest economies, although many frictions remain, including over the U.S.’ curbs on exporting advanced AI chips to its main competitor.
Beijing authorities on Thursday summoned Nvidia Corp. to discuss alleged security vulnerabilities related to its H20 chips. The Trump administration only recently pledged to drop export restrictions on the less-advanced technology to China, in a reversal that spurred talk of a potential broader deal with Beijing.
The Cyberspace Administration of China cited comments by U.S. lawmakers about the need to install tracking capabilities into advanced chips sold to other countries. The agency asked staff at the world’s most valuable company to explain potential risks and provide documents as needed, the CAC said without elaborating.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Sunday that the key industrial components were a focus of negotiations in Stockholm last week that Beijing said led to an extension of their tariff truce.
The North Korean IT worker conspiracy is ramping up in intensity, with the regime’s software developers getting hired at hundreds of new companies in the past year, despite scrutiny from law enforcement and security firms. Crowdstrike cybersecurity expert Adam Meyers said the company investigates about one incident a day at this point because the attacks have grown so prolific.
Terrifying new fronts have emerged in a highly successful employment- fraud scheme in which trained North Korean operatives get jobs at companies around the globe under fake or stolen identities.
The number of companies that hired North Korean software developers grew a staggering 220% during the past 12 months—and most of their success is due to automating and optimizing the workflow involved in fraudulently obtaining and holding tech jobs, Crowdstrike’s 2025 Threat Hunting report released on Monday revealed. The IT workers infiltrated more than 320 companies in the past 12 months.
To level set: The North Korean IT worker scheme is a vast conspiracy to evade punishing financial sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea due to authoritarian ruler Kim Jong Un’s human-rights abuses and relentless quest to develop weapons of mass destruction. To dodge the sanctions and make money to keep funding its nuclear program, North Korea now trains young men and boys in tech, sends them to elite schools in and around Pyongyang, and then deploys them in teams of four or five to locations around the world including China, Russia, Nigeria, Cambodia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The workers are each required to earn $10,000 a month, according to a defector, and have managed to do so by getting remote jobs doing IT work at U.S. and European companies while earning good salaries, court records show. Since 2018, the UN estimates, the scheme has generated between $250 million to $600 million per year on the backs of thousands of North Korean men.
For the Fortune 500, the IT worker scheme has been a flashing red alert about the evolution of employment-fraud schemes. Court records show hundreds of Fortune 500 companies have unknowingly hired thousands of North Korean IT workers, in violation of sanctions, in recent years. In some cases, the IT worker scheme is purely about generating stable revenues for the regime. In others, FBI investigators have found evidence IT workers share information with more malicious hackers that have stolen nearly $3 billion in crypto, according to the UN.
Under siege
Crowdstrike’s investigations revealed North Korea’s tech workers, an adversary Crowdstrike dubs “Famous Chollima,” used AI to scale every aspect of the operation. The North Koreans have used generative AI to help them forge thousands of synthetic identities, alter photos, and build tech tools to research jobs and track and manage their applications. In interviews, North Koreans used AI to mask their appearance in video calls, guide them in answering questions, and pass technical coding challenges associated with getting software jobs.
Critically, they now rely on AI to help them appear more fluent in English and well-versed in the companies where they’re interviewing. Once they get hired, the IT workers use AI chatbots to help with their daily work—responding in Slack, drafting emails—to make sure their written offerings appear technically and grammatically sound and to help them hold down multiple jobs simultaneously, CrowdStrike found.
“Famous Chollima operatives very likely use real-time deepfake technology to mask their true identities in video interviews,” the report states. “Using a real-time deepfake plausibly allows a single operator to interview for the same position multiple times using different synthetic personas, enhancing the odds that the operator will get hired.”
Crowdstrike investigators have observed North Korean IT workers searching for AI face-swapping applications and paying premium prices for subscriptions to deepfake services during active operations.
“Laptop farms” move beyond U.S. borders
Adam Meyers, senior vice president of CrowdStrike’s counter adversary operations, told Fortune his team generally investigates one incident a day related to the North Korean IT worker scheme. The program has broadened beyond U.S. borders as U.S. law enforcement has cracked down on domestic operations with indictments and advisories, and as more U.S. companies have tightened their security practices and girded their defenses.
Last month, a 50-year-old Arizona woman, Christina Chapman, was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison in July after pleading guilty for her role in operating a “laptop farm” from her home. Prosecutors said she accepted and maintained 90 laptops and installed remote-access software so North Koreans could work for U.S. companies, prosecutors said. Authorities revealed Chapman’s operation alone helped the workers get 309 jobs that generated $17.1 million in revenue through their salaries. Nearly 70 Americans had their identities stolen in the operation, authorities said. These weren’t just attacking smaller companies with looser hiring infrastructure; Nike was one of the companies impacted, according to its victim impact statement in Chapman’s case. The sneaker and activewear giant unwittingly hired a North Korean operative affiliated with Chapman. Nike did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
“U.S. law enforcement has put a big dent in their ability to operate the laptop farms, so as it gets increasingly expensive or difficult to get remote jobs here in the U.S., they’re pivoting to other locations,” said Meyers. “They’re getting more traction in Europe.”
Meyers said Crowdstrike has seen new laptop farms established in Western Europe across to Romania and Poland, which means the North Korean workers are getting jobs—typically as fullstack developers—in those countries and then having laptops shipped to farms there. The scheme is the same as it works in the U.S.: A supposedly Romanian or Polish developer will interview with a company, get hired, and a laptop will get shipped to a known laptop-farm destination in those countries, he said. In other words, instead of shipping devices and onboarding materials to an actual resident where the supposed developer works, the laptop gets shipped to a known farm address based in Poland or Romania. Typically, the excuse is the same type that has proven effective at U.S. companies, said Meyers. The developer will claim to be having a medical or family emergency necessitating a change in the shipping address.
“Companies need to stay vigilant if they’re hiring overseas,” said Meyers. “They need to understand these risks exist not just domestically, but overseas as well.”
AI advancements will neutralize defenses
Amir Landau, malware research team leader at defense firm CyberArk, told Fortune traditional cyber defenses are likely to eventually become insufficient against the threat as genAI used by the North Koreans becomes advanced enough to break through companies’ defense wards. Therefore, what companies need to do to defend themselves requires a fundamental shift in thinking in terms of how much trust and access companies grant their own employees.
The military and intelligence principle of a “need-to-know basis,” which originated during World War II, will become more important, said Landau. Not every developer needs to know or have access to certain assets or documents, even after they’ve been with a company for a certain amount of time, he explained.
Landau also advocates for minimum and limited-time privileges for developers, giving them a short window of time for work, rather than unlimited access that could eventually make a company vulnerable.
Landau also said companies should take some additional common-sense measures in the hiring process. If a job applicant gives a reference, don’t call the phone number or message the email address you’ve been given. Look them up and get in touch with what you see from public databases, he advised. If someone’s personal information sounds bizarre or inconsistent, pay attention. Use the internet to double check what you can find against what you’ve been told.
“There are a lot of small things you can do to defend against these threats,” he said.
And ultimately, while small companies are typically more vulnerable, that doesn’t mean larger companies aren’t also susceptible to fraud schemes, Landau said. Meyers said as long as the IT workers can find work, they’ll keep evolving their tactics through the use of genAI.
“These are basically exploited people from North Korea making money for the regime,” said Meyers. “As long as they can continue to generate revenue, they’re going to keep doing this.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un attending a meeting with a committee of the Workers' Party of Korea about the test of a hydrogen bomb, at an unknown location. North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb designed for a long-range missile on September 3, 2017 and called its sixth and most powerful nuclear test a "perfect success", sparking world condemnation and promises of tougher US sanctions.
U.S. stocks were poised for gains as futures on Sunday evening signaled a rebound after investors digested jobs data that upended their notions of what previously looked like a more resilient economy. Some analysts on Wall Street are warning that the U.S. is now on the brink of recession.
Markets were pointing toward a rebound Sunday evening after startling jobs data delivered a rude awakening to Wall Street bulls.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average reversed higher, rising 114 points, or 0.26%. S&P 500 futures were up 0.34%, and Nasdaq futures added 0.38%.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed 3.3 basis points to 4.253% after plunging Friday on greater expectations for Fed rate cuts. The U.S. dollar was down 0.09% against the euro and down 0.29% against the yen.
Gold rose 0.17% to $3,405.70 per ounce. U.S. oil prices dropped 0.15% to $67.23 per barrel, and Brent crude fell 0.2% to $69.53, as OPEC+ announced another surge in production.
Combined with separate indicators showing deterioration in consumer spending, housing, and manufacturing, the overall picture is one of an economy “on the precipice of recession,” according to Mark Zandi from Moody’s Analytics. That followed a similar warning from economists at JPMorgan.
Analysts have also raised concerns about the potential politicization of data after Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, who headed the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Others had previously sounded the alarm on glaring red flags in the economy. But in the days leading up to the jobs report, some top commentators were still trying to explain why doomsday predictions about Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs had yet to materialize.
On Thursday, former White House economic adviser Jason Furman attributed it in part to “tariff derangement syndrome.” And last Sunday, Rockefeller International Chair Ruchir Sharma said the negative effects of tariffs were likely being offset by other factors like the AI spending splurge and lower inflationary pressure from housing, cars and energy.
With Wall Street now more attuned to economic risks like Trump’s trade war, the tariffs that will go into effect on Thursday may get more scrutiny. That includes steeper duties on trading partners like Canada and Switzerland.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Sunday that tariff rates are “pretty much set” and are unlikely to change in the coming days, though Trump had pushed back the last deadline to Aug. 7 from Aug. 1, which was also a delay from another deadline on July 9.
Meanwhile, the calendar of economic reports thins out in the coming week after several big ones last week. On Tuesday, the trade deficit for June comes out, providing an update on how much tariffs are impacting imports. On Thursday, second-quarter productivity is due.
Earnings season has passed its peak, but several top names will issue quarterly reports. Palantir Technologies reports Monday after securing a $10 billion software and data contract from the Army.
Chip giant Advanced Micro Devices will report on Tuesday—potentially offering hints at Nvidia’s results, which don’t come out until Aug. 27.
Other companies scheduled to release earnings in the coming week include Caterpillar, Disney, and McDonald’s. It will also be a busy time for pharmaceutical and biotech giants like Amgen, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly as Trump weighs steep tariffs on drugs.
President Donald Trump’s firing of the chief labor statistician was criticized by her predecessor, who called it an unfounded move that will undermine confidence in a key data set on the US economy.
“This is damaging,” William Beach, whom Trump picked in his first term to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
Trump on Friday fired Erika McEntarfer hours after labor market data showed weak jobs growth based in part on steep downward revisions for May and June. The move by Trump, who claimed the latest monthly report was “phony,” prompted an outcry from economists and lawmakers.
“I don’t know that there’s any grounds at all for this firing,” said Beach, whom McEntarfer replaced in January 2024. “And it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility in BLS.”
Studies indicate that the agency’s data is more accurate than 20 or 30 years ago, including any revisions of the initial data, Beach said. Even so, he said he’ll trust future BLS data because people working for the agency are “some of the most loyal Americans you can imagine,” making the bureau “the finest statistical agency in the entire world.”
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, speaking Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, urged the US government to improve its data collection to avoid revisions that engender distrust.
“We watch what consumers really do. We watch what businesses really do,” Moynihan said, while not addressing the politics of the firing. “They can get this data, I think, other ways, and I think that’s where the focus would be.”
He noted the revision for May and June data, while not unusual, was one of the largest in seven years. “That creates doubt around it,” he said. “Let’s spend some money. Let’s bring the information together. Let’s find where else in the government money is reported.”
McEntarfer was confirmed by the Senate in a bipartisan 86-8 vote. Vice President JD Vance, then a senator, voted to approve her nomination.
Kevin Hassett, Trump’s chief economic adviser at the White House, alleged that the large jobs data revisions were poorly explained and were evidence enough for a “fresh set of eyes” at BLS. He sought to contradict Beach’s portrayal of the agency as politically neutral.
“The bottom line is that there were people involved in creating these numbers,” Hassett said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The economic commission of Iran’s parliament revived long-delayed plans on Sunday to cut four zeros from the country’s plunging currency, as part of efforts to simplify financial transactions.
“Today’s meeting of the economic commission approved the name ‘rial’ as the national currency, as well as the removal of four zeros,” said the parliament’s website ICANA, quoting Shamseddin Hosseini, the commission’s chairman.
Under the proposed system, one rial would be equivalent to 10,000 at the current value and subdivided into 100 gherans, according to ICANA.
The proposed redenomination was first mooted in 2019 but then shelved. The current bill will have to pass a parliamentary vote and gain the approval of the Guardian Council, a body empowered to vet legislation.
It was not immediately clear when the parliamentary vote would take place.
In May, Iran’s Central Bank Governor Mohammad Reza Farzin said he would pursue the plan, noting that the Iranian rial “does not have a favourable image” in the global economy.
The move comes as Iran faces deepening economic challenges, including runaway inflation, a sharply devalued currency, and the prolonged impact of international sanctions.
As of Sunday, the rial was trading at around 920,000 to the US dollar on the street market, according to local media and the Bonbast website that monitors unofficial exchange rates.
In practice, Iranians have long abandoned the rial in everyday transactions, using the toman instead. One toman equals 10 rials.
Iran’s economy has long been under severe strain due to sweeping US sanctions since Washington’s 2018 withdrawal from a landmark nuclear deal during US President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Upon returning to office in January, Trump revived his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on Tehran.
In June, Iranian lawmakers approved new economy minister Ali Madanizadeh after his predecessor, Abdolnaser Hemmati, was ousted in a no-confidence vote for failing to address the country’s economic woes.
The same month Israel launched an unprecedented attack on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, beginning a deadly 12-day war.
New US tariff rates are “pretty much set” with little immediate room for negotiation, Donald Trump’s trade advisor said in remarks aired Sunday, also defending the president’s politically driven levies against Brazil.
Trump, who has wielded tariffs as a tool of American economic might, has set tariff rates for dozens of economies including the European Union at between 10 and 41 percent come August 7, his new hard deadline for the duties.
In a pre-taped interview broadcast Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said “the coming days” are not likely to see changes in the tariff rates.
“A lot of these are set rates pursuant to deals. Some of these deals are announced, some are not, others depend on the level of the trade deficit or surplus we may have with the country,” Greer said.
“These tariff rates are pretty much set.”
Undoubtedly some trade ministers “want to talk more and see how they can work in a different way with the United States,” he added.
But “we’re seeing truly the contours of the president’s tariff plan right now with these rates.”
Last Thursday, the former real estate developer announced hiked tariff rates on dozens of US trade partners.
They will kick in on August 7 instead of August 1, which had previously been touted as a hard deadline.
Among the countries facing steep new levies is Brazil. South America’s largest economy is being hit with 50 percent tariffs on exports to the United States — albeit with significant exemptions for key products such as aircraft and orange juice.
Trump has openly admitted he is punishing Brazil for prosecuting his political ally Jair Bolsonaro, the ex-president accused of plotting a coup in a bid to cling to power. The US president has described the case as a “witch hunt.”
Greer said it was not unusual for Trump to use tariff tools for geopolitical purposes.
“The president has seen in Brazil, like he’s seen in other countries, a misuse of law, a misuse of democracy,” Greer told CBS. “It is normal to use these tools for geopolitical issues.”
Trump was “elected to assess the foreign affairs situation… and take appropriate action,” he added.
Meanwhile White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said that while talks are expected to continue over the next week with some US trade partners, he concurred with Greer’s tariffs assessment in that the bulk of the rates “are more or less locked in.”
Asked by the host of NBC’s Sunday talk show “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” if Trump could change tariff rates should financial markets react negatively, Hassett said: “I would rule it out, because these are the final deals.”
Legal challenges have been filed against some of Trump’s tariffs arguing he overstepped his authority.
An appeals court panel on Thursday appeared skeptical of the government’s arguments, though the case may be ultimately decided at the Supreme Court.
Just as Wall Street was warming up to the hope that the U.S. economy was bulletproof amid President Donald Trump’s trade war, the recent batch of indicators has punctured that notion. But not everyone was surprised, as some economists had previously sounded the alarm on various red flags that are associated with downturns.
The recent batch of indicators has punctured the notion on Wall Street that the U.S. economy is bulletproof and can withstand headwinds like President Donald Trump’s trade war.
But not everyone was surprised, as some on Wall Street had previously sounded the alarm on overoptimism and various red flags that are associated with downturns.
In a note on Tuesday, James St. Aubin, CIO of Ocean Park Asset Management, warned that investors were leaning too heavily on the narrative of economic resiliency.
The idea of a “Kevlar economy” had fueled complacency that was showing up in stretched valuations, tight credit spreads, and an underpricing of risk, he added, referring to the synthetic fiber used in bulletproof vests.
One of the risks is political pressure creeping into the Federal Reserve’s decision-making, St. Aubin said. For months, Trump and the other White House officials have demanded Fed rate cuts, even suggesting that cost overruns on a headquarters renovation project are grounds for Chairman Jerome Powell to be ousted.
Another risk is that stock market investors viewed tariffs as a temporary speed bump that would be offset by tax cuts and the tech sector’s capital spending splurge on AI. But St. Aubin pointed out that tariffs hit businesses unevenly, with some are far more exposed than others.
“If you believe in resiliency too much, you’re not being fully compensated for the risks you’re taking,” he added. “Something always goes wrong eventually — whether it’s a risk hiding in plain sight or something you couldn’t see coming.”
Consumer spending on services
To be sure, the U.S. economy had previously demonstrated surprising durability. In 2022, after the Fed launched its most aggressive rate-hiking campaign in more than 40 years, Wall Street widely assumed a recession would follow. But it never came, and inflation cooled sharply.
And earlier this year, economists feared Trump’s tariffs would fuel a big spike in inflation. But while some import-sensitive areas have seen an uptick, the overall rate has been more muted, so far.
However, a deeper dive into some of the headline numbers revealed troubling signs. Last month, economists at Wells Fargo pointed out that although discretionary spending on goods had held up, spending on services dipped 0.3% through May on a year-over-year basis.
“That is admittedly a modest decline, but what makes it scary is that in 60+ years, this measure has only declined either during or immediately after recessions,” they wrote in a note.
Spending on food services and recreational services, which includes things like gym memberships and streaming subscriptions, were barely higher.
Meanwhile, transportation spending was down 1.1%, led by declines in auto maintenance, taxis and ride-sharing, and air travel, which had the steepest drop at 4.7%.
“The fact that households are putting off auto repair, not taking an Uber and cutting back or eliminating air travel points to stretched household budgets,” Wells Fargo said.
“We would be wise to heed his warning,” Citi said.
In fact, residential fixed investment shrank 4.6% in the second quarter, according to data released Wednesday, after contracting 1.3% in the first quarter.
And overall construction spending continued to decline in June, led by a steep plunge in new single-family homes. That’s as mortgage rates remain elevated, representing a major obstacle to affordability, while home prices are still high.
“Residential fixed investment is the most interest rate sensitive sector in the economy and is now signaling that mortgage rates around 7% are too high to sustain an expansion,” Citi said in May.
Labor market
Citi economists have long been among the less bullish on Wall Street, and before Friday’s startling payroll data, they had already sniffed out signs of weakness.
In particular, they flagged a dip in the labor force participation rate, which had suppressed the unemployment rate as it meant fewer people were looking for work.
Citi downplayed the notion that Trump’s immigration crackdown was primarily responsible for the lower participation rate. Instead, economists pointed to low hiring as an indication of weaker demand for workers.
On Friday, Citi saw its prior warnings play out and predicted Wall Street would start to come around.
“Softness that had been evident in details of the jobs report is now apparent in the headline numbers,” the bank said. “Markets and Fed officials should now more closely mirror our view that a low-hiring labor market, together with slowing growth create downside risk to employment and reduce the risk of persistent inflation.”
Indicators from the past week paint an overall picture of an economy on the edge of a downturn, according to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. Not only is the labor market weakening, but consumer spending is flat while construction and manufacturing are shrinking, he warned, adding that the Federal Reserve will have a hard time reviving growth with inflation still above its target.
The shocking jobs report on Friday wasn’t the only red flag. Indicators from the past week paint an overall picture of an economy that’s headed for a downturn, according to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.
After months of looking remarkably resilient in the face of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the economic outlook has suddenly turned gloomier.
“The economy is on the precipice of recession. That’s the clear takeaway from last week’s economic data dump,” Zandi wrote in a series of posts on X on Sunday. “Consumer spending has flatlined, construction and manufacturing are contracting, and employment is set to fall. And with inflation on the rise, it is tough for the Fed to come to the rescue.”
Payrolls grew by just 73,000 last month, well below forecasts for about 100,000. Meanwhile, May’s tally was revised down from 144,000 to 19,000, and June’s total was slashed from 147,000 to just 14,000, meaning the average gain over the past three months is now only 35,000.
While Trump has claimed without evidence that the jobs data was “rigged” and fired the head of the agency that produces the report, Zandi noted that data often gets big revisions when the economy is at an inflection point, like a recession.
Separate reports also held warning signs. GDP rebounded more robustly than expected in the second quarter, but a metric that strips out the impact of foreign trade and looks instead at final domestic demand indicated slowing.
The personal consumption expenditures report showed core inflation accelerated to 2.8%, further above the Fed’s 2% target, and that consumer spending rose less than expected in June. Fed policymakers have held off on interest rate cuts as they wait to see how much tariffs impact inflation.
Meanwhile, construction spending continued to decline in June amid a sharp drop in single-family homes. And the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing activity index for July dipped, indicating the sector contracted at a quicker pace.
For now, the Atlanta Fed’s GDP tracker points to continued growth, though it’s expected to decelerate to 2.1% in the third quarter from 3% in the second quarter.
There are also no signs of mass layoffs, and the unemployment rate has barely changed, bouncing in a tight range between 4% and 4.2% for more than a year.
But Zandi said the jobless rate is still low only because the size of the labor force has stagnated. That’s as the foreign-born workforce has plunged by 1.2 million in the last six months amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, while the overall labor participation rate has slipped.
As the supply of labor has softened, so has the demand. Zandi pointed to an “economy-wide hiring freeze, particularly for recent graduates.” The upshot is that the so-called neutral level of job gains needed to absorb new workers—and keep the unemployment rate steady—is now much lower.
“It’s no mystery why the economy is struggling; blame increasing U.S. tariffs and highly restrictive immigration policy,” Zandi added. “The tariffs are cutting increasingly deeply into the profits of American companies and the purchasing power of American households. Fewer immigrant workers means a smaller economy.”
On Friday, economists at JPMorgan similarly sounded the alarm on a potential downturn. They noted that jobs data show hiring in the private sector has cooled to an average of just 52,000 in the last three months, with sectors outside health and education stalling.
Coupled with the lack of any signs that unwanted separations are surging due to immigration policy, this is a strong signal that business demand for labor has cooled, they explained.
“We have consistently emphasized that a slide in labor demand of this magnitude is a recession warning signal,” JPMorgan added. “Firms normally maintain hiring gains through growth downshifts they perceive as transitory. In episodes when labor demand slides with a growth downshift, it is often a precursor to retrenchment.”
The head of the agency that compiles the closely watched monthly jobs report usually toils in obscurity, but on Friday, the current holder of that job was loudly fired by the president of the United States.
Erika McEntarfer, a longtime government employee, bore the brunt of President Donald Trump’s unhappiness with Friday’s jobs report, which showed that hiring had slowed in July and was much less in May and June that previously estimated. He accused her without evidence of manipulating the job numbers and noted she was an appointee of President Joe Biden.
McEntarfer, a longtime government worker who had served as BLS head for a year and a half, did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press. But her predecessor overseeing the jobs agency, former co-workers and associates have denounced the firing, warning about its repercussions and saying McEntarfer was nonpolitical in her role.
Here’s what to know about Erika McEntarfer:
McEntarfer has a strong background on economics
McEntarfer, whose research focuses on job loss, retirement, worker mobility, and wage rigidity, had previously worked at the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy and the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a nonpolitical role.
She has a bachelor’s degree in Social Science from Bard College and a doctoral degree in economics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
She was confirmed as BLS head on a bipartisan vote
McEntarfer was nominated in 2023 to serve as BLS head, and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions recommended that her nomination go to the full Senate for a vote.
She was confirmed as BLS commissioner in January 2024 on a bipartisan 86-8 Senate vote. Among the Republican senators who voted to confirm her included then-Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who is now Trump’s vice president, and then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is now Trump’s secretary of state.
Before her confirmation hearing, a group called the Friends of the BLS, made up of former commissioners who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, members of statistical associations and credentialed economists, said McEntarfer’s background made her a great choice for the job.
“The many reasons to quickly confirm Dr. McEntarfer as the new BLS Commissioner all boil down to this: the agency, like the entire statistical system, is undergoing an intense, significant period of change and Dr. McEntarfer’s wealth of research and statistical experience have equipped her to be the strong leader that BLS needs to meet these challenges,” Friends of the BLS wrote.
Her former associates and co-workers decry her firing
William Beach, who was appointed BLS commissioner in 2019 by Trump and served until 2023 during President Joe Biden’s administration, called McEntarfer’s firing “groundless” and said in an X post that it “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.”
Former Labor Department chief economist Sarah J. Glynn, who received regular briefings from McEntarfer about BLS findings, said McEntarfer was generous with her time explaining what conclusions could or couldn’t be reached from the data.
If the data didn’t support something an administration official was saying, McEntarfer would say so, Glynn said. She also never weighed in on how the administration should present or interpret the data, Glynn said — she would simply answer questions about the data.
“She had a sterling reputation as someone who is concerned about the accuracy of the data and not someone who puts a political spin on her work,” Glynn said.
Heather Boushey, a senior research fellow at Harvard University, served with McEntarfer on the White House Council of Economic Advisers and said McEntarfer never talked politics at work.
“She showed up every day to focus on the best analysis and the best approach to her field and not get political. That is what I saw from her time and again. She is brilliant and well-respected among labor economists generally,” Boushey said. “She wasn’t coming into my office to talk politics or the political implications of something. She definitely wasn’t engaging on that side of things.”
President Donald Trump’s tariff onslaught this week left a lot of losers – from small, poor countries like Laos and Algeria to wealthy U.S. trading partners like Canada and Switzerland. They’re now facing especially hefty taxes – tariffs – on the products they export to the United States starting Aug. 7.
The closest thing to winners may be the countries that caved to Trump’s demands — and avoided even more pain. But it’s unclear whether anyone will be able to claim victory in the long run — even the United States, the intended beneficiary of Trump’s protectionist policies.
“In many respects, everybody’s a loser here,’’ said Barry Appleton, co-director of the Center for International Law at the New York Law School.
Barely six months after he returned to the White House, Trump has demolished the old global economic order. Gone is one built on agreed-upon rules. In its place is a system in which Trump himself sets the rules, using America’s enormous economic power to punish countries that won’t agree to one-sided trade deals and extracting huge concessions from the ones that do.
“The biggest winner is Trump,” said Alan Wolff, a former U.S. trade official and deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization. “He bet that he could get other countries to the table on the basis of threats, and he succeeded – dramatically.’’
Everything goes back to what Trump calls “Liberation Day’’ – April 2 – when the president announced “reciprocal’’ taxes of up to 50% on imports from countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and 10% “baseline’’ taxes on almost everyone else.
He invoked a 1977 law to declare the trade deficit a national emergency that justified his sweeping import taxes. That allowed him to bypass Congress, which traditionally has had authority over taxes, including tariffs — all of which is now being challenged in court.
Winners will still pay higher tariffs than before Trump took office
Trump retreated temporarily after his Liberation Day announcement triggered a rout in financial markets and suspended the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to give countries a chance to negotiate.
Eventually, some of them did, caving to Trump’s demands to pay what four months ago would have seemed unthinkably high tariffs for the privilege of continuing to sell into the vast American market.
The United Kingdom agreed to 10% tariffs on its exports to the United States — up from 1.3% before Trump amped up his trade war with the world. The U.S. demanded concessions even though it had run a trade surplus, not a deficit, with the UK for 19 straight years.
The European Union and Japan accepted U.S. tariffs of 15%. Those are much higher than the low single-digit rates they paid last year — but lower than the tariffs he was threatening (30% on the EU and 25% on Japan).
Even countries that saw their tariffs lowered from April without reaching a deal are still paying much higher tariffs than before Trump took office. Angola’s tariff, for instance, dropped to 15% from 32% in April, but in 2022 it was less than 1.5%. And while Trump administration cut Taiwan’s tariff to 20% from 32% in April, the pain will still be felt.
“20% from the beginning has not been our goal, we hope that in further negotiations we will get a more beneficial and more reasonable tax rate,” Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te told reporters in Taipei Friday.
Trump also agreed to reduce the tariff on the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho to 15% from the 50% he’d announced in April, but the damage may already have been done there.
Bashing Brazil, clobbering Canada, shellacking the Swiss
Countries that didn’t knuckle under — and those that found other ways to incur Trump’s wrath — got hit harder.
Even some poorer countries were not spared. Laos’ annual economic output comes to $2,100 per person and Algeria’s $5,600 — versus America’s $75,000. Nonetheless, Laos got rocked with a 40% tariff and Algeria with a 30% levy.
Trump slammed Brazil with a 50% import tax largely because he didn’t like the way it was treating former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing trial for trying to lose his electoral defeat in 2022. Never mind that the U.S. has exported more to Brazil than it’s imported every year since 2007.
Trump’s decision to plaster a 35% tariff on longstanding U.S. ally Canada was partly designed to threaten Ottawa for saying it would recognize a Palestinian state. Trump is a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The Swiss probably wish that they had camped in Washington” to make a deal, said Wolff, now senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re clearly not at all happy.’’
Fortunes may change if Trump’s tariffs are upended in court. Five American businesses and 12 states are suing the president, arguing that his Liberation Day tariffs exceeded his authority under the 1977 law.
In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized court in New York, agreed and blocked the tariffs, although the government was allowed to continue collecting them while its appeal wend its way through the legal system, and may likely end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a hearing Thursday, the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sounded skeptical about Trump’s justifications for the tariffs.
“If (the tariffs) get struck down, then maybe Brazil’s a winner and not a loser,’’ Appleton said.
Paying more for knapsacks and video games
Trump portrays his tariffs as a tax on foreign countries. But they are actually paid by import companies in the U.S. who try to pass along the cost to their customers via higher prices. True, tariffs can hurt other countries by forcing their exporters to cut prices and sacrifice profits — or risk losing market share in the United States.
But economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that overseas exporters have absorbed just one-fifth of the rising costs from tariffs, while Americans and U.S. businesses have picked up the most of the tab.
“This is a consumption tax, so it disproportionately affects those who have lower incomes,” Appleton said. “Sneakers, knapsacks … your appliances are going to go up. Your TV and electronics are going to go up. Your video game devices, consoles are going to up because none of those are made in America.’’
Trump’s trade war has pushed the average U.S. tariff from 2.5% at the start of 2025 to 18.3% now, the highest since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. And that will impose a $2,400 cost on the average household, the lab estimates.
“The U.S. consumer’s a big loser,″ Wolff said.
____
AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this story.
Demonstrators wearing masks in the likeness of, from left, Sao Paulo's Governor Tarcisio de Freitas, U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro protest the 50% U.S. tariff on Brazilian goods outside the U.S. consulate in Sao Paulo, Friday, Aug. 1, 2025.
The best of the internet’s cat videos are coming to the big screen this weekend. Cat Video Fest is a 73-minute, G-rated selection of all things feline —silly, cuddly, sentimental and comedic—that’s playing in more than 500 independent theaters in the U.S. and Canada.
A portion of ticket proceeds benefit cat-focused charities, shelters and animal welfare organization. Since 2019, it’s raised over $1 million.
The videos are curated by Will Braden, the Seattle-based creator of the comedically existential shorts, Henri, le Chat Noir. His business cards read: “I watch cat videos.” And it’s not a joke or an exaggeration. Braden watches thousands of hours of internet videos to make the annual compilation.
“I want to show how broad the idea of a cat video can be so there’s animated things, music videos, little mini documentaries,” Braden said. “It isn’t all just, what I call, ‘America’s Funniest Home Cat Videos.’ It’s not all cats falling into a bathtub. That would get exhausting.”
Now in its eighth year, Cat Video Fest is bigger than ever, with a global presence that’s already extended to the UK and Denmark, and, for the first time, to France, Spain, Japan and Brazil. Last year, the screenings made over $1 million at the box office.
In the early days, it was a bit of a process trying to convince independent movie theaters to program Cat Video Fest. But Braden, and indie distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories, have found that one year is all it takes to get past that hurdle.
“Everywhere that does it wants to do it again,” Braden said.
Current theatrical partners include Alamo Drafthouse, IFC Center, Nitehawk, Vidiots, Laemmle and Music Box. The screenings attract all variety of audiences, from kids and cat ladies to hipsters and grandparents and everyone in between.
“It’s one of the only things, maybe besides a Pixar movie or Taylor Swift concert, that just appeals to everybody,” Braden said.
And the plan is to keep going.
“We’re not going to run out of cat videos and we’re not going to run out of people who want to see it,” Braden said. “All I have to do is make sure that it’s really funny and entertaining every year.”
Flaco Jimenez, the legendary accordionist from San Antonio who won multiple Grammys and helped expand the popularity of conjunto, Tejano and Tex-Mex music, died Thursday. He was 86.
Jimenez’s death was announced Thursday evening by his family on social media. He was surrounded by family members when he died in the San Antonio home of his son Arturo Jimenez.
“Dad was in peace when he left. He started saying his goodbyes several days before. He said he was proud of himself for what he had done and he just leaves memories for the public to enjoy. He said he was ready to go,” Arturo Jimenez told The Associated Press in a phone interview on Friday.
Arturo Jimenez said a cause of death has not yet been determined. His father had been hospitalized in January after getting a blood clot in his leg. Doctors then discovered he had some vascular issues.
Born Leonardo Jimenez in 1939, he was known to his fans by his nickname of Flaco, which means skinny in Spanish.
He was the son of conjunto pioneer Santiago Jimenez. Conjunto is a musical genre that originated in South Texas and blends different genres and cultural influences.
According to the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin, the development of conjunto “began more than a century ago when Texans of Mexican heritage (Tejanos) took an interest in the accordion music of German, Polish, and Czech immigrants. The ensuing Tejano accordion music, accompanied by the bajo sexto (replacing the European tuba) soon came to represent the Tejano way of life, which was closely associated with working in the agricultural fields. The music remains unchanged and serves as a symbol that binds many Tejano communities in South and Central Texas.”
Jimenez refined his conjunto musical skills by playing in San Antonio saloons and dance halls. He began performing in the 1960s with fellow San Antonio native Douglas Sahm, the founding member of the Sir Douglas Quintet. Jimenez would later play with Bob Dylan, Dr. John, Ry Cooder and the Rolling Stones.
Throughout his career, Jimenez added other influences into conjunto music, including from country, rock and jazz.
“He always wanted to try to incorporate accordion into all sorts of different genres and how to make the accordion blend in. That was always a fascination of his and he was able to,” Arturo Jimenez said.
In the 1990s, Jimenez was part of the Tejano supergroup the Texas Tornados, which included Sahm, Augie Meyers and Freddy Fender. The group won a Grammy in 1991 for the song, “Soy de San Luis.”
Jimenez also won another Grammy in 1999 as part of another supergroup, Los Super Seven.
Jimenez earned five Grammys and was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015.
He was also inducted into the National Hispanic Hall of Fame and NYC International Latin Music Hall of Fame and was named a Texas State Musician in 2014.
Arturo Jimenez said his father was a humble man who never wanted to be a showman and was focused on playing music for his fans.
“I’ve seen where fans come up to him and they literally cry and they thank my dad for all the good music and how dad’s music has been there for them in multiple situations, either happiness or sadness,” Arturo Jimenez said.
When Jimenez was named a 2022 National Medal of Arts recipient, the White House said he was being honored for “harnessing heritage to enrich American music” and that by “blending Norteño, Tex Mex, and Tejano music with the Blues, Rock n’ Roll, and Pop Music, he sings the soul of America’s Southwest.”
“We appreciate the gift of your musical talent, which brought joy to countless fans. Your passing leaves a void in our hearts,” the Texas Conjunto Music Hall of Fame and Museum said in a post on social media.
Kyle Young, the CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, said Jimenez “was a paragon of Tejano conjunto music” who “drew millions of listeners into a rich musical world they might not have discovered on their own.”
Jimenez lived all his life in San Antonio, a city that was “very close to his heart,” his son said.
“They call him ‘el hijo de San Antonio’ and my dad always was proud of that,” Arturo Jimenez said, quoting a Spanish phrase that means the son of San Antonio.
His family plans to have a private funeral service followed by a celebration of his life with the public.
On July 28, President Donald Trump’s attorneys filed an urgent motion in federal court demanding the expedited deposition of Rupert Murdoch—a move justified, they argued, by both Murdoch’s central role in News Corp’s decision-making and his allegedly precarious health.
Murdoch is 94. He could die at any moment, Trump’s lawyers argued.
The legal maneuver, connected to the president’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the mogul and the Wall Street Journal over a story about Trump’s alleged letter to Jeffrey Epstein, has thrown the king of modern media’s longevity and his empire’s future into question.
Trump’s lawyers seem to believe the titan is in no condition to testify at trial, citing a litany of health issues including a severe back injury, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, a torn Achilles tendon, a serious case of COVID-19 in 2022, and an incident in February 2025 when Murdoch collapsed and fainted at breakfast with a journalist.
“Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
For decades, Murdoch’s iron grip steered titanic assets—Fox Corporation and News Corp—across continents, through scandal, boardroom intrigue, and relentless media cycles. Yet the court’s focus on his fragility, and the legal assertion that his control has been contingent on his ability to act, accelerates what could become the defining story of the next era in global media: the fractious, uncertain, and high-stakes succession battle for one of the most powerful empires in news and entertainment.
Much of the Murdoch media dynasty’s fate hangs in the balance of the Murdoch Family Trust. Established in 1999, after Rupert’s second divorce, the trust was created to control the family’s significant stake and voting power in both Fox Corporation and News Corp. Although the trust owns only about 14% of News Corp’s equity, it controls roughly 40-41% of the company’s voting shares, giving the Murdoch family effective control over these major media businesses through a dual-share structure.
Tom Stoddart—Getty Images
The trust was designed so that Rupert himself holds four votes during his lifetime, while his four eldest children—Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence—hold one vote each. Upon Rupert’s death, his four votes will be distributed equally to these four children, so each will then have two votes, ensuring shared control. At the moment, Lachlan is the sole chair of News Corp and the CEO of Fox Corporation, having taken over for his father after his retirement in 2023.
Ultimately, the trust enables the Murdoch family to control its media empire by concentrating voting power among the four eldest children following Rupert’s death. But its irrevocability and the principle of equal control have sparked ongoing legal and familial conflict that stand to jeopardize the media powerhouse Murdoch built.
In late 2023, Murdoch attempted to alter the trust to grant sole posthumous control to his eldest son, Lachlan, allowing him to take over the family business entirely. This move was legally contested by the other three children, who argued it violated the original mandate of equal control. A Nevada probate court ruled in December 2024 against Rupert’s attempt, but the mogul’s legal team has since filed an appeal.
“Lachlan is having to pay his siblings a higher and higher value to get out of his way. … So he’s in a real bind.”
Paddy Manning, Australian journalist and Lachlan biographer
The trust also contains a 2030 expiration date that has only contributed to the ongoing contentious family dynamics that impact the Murdochs’ businesses. The deadline could decide the fate of Fox Corporation and News Corp. Should the trust expire, its terms and centralized structure will dissolve, forcing the Murdoch heirs to determine among themselves the future structure of ownership and control over the family’s immense assets.
Above all, the legal battle over the trust has caused an immense divide in the family. Lachlan and Rupert’s attempt to maintain control has galvanized Lachlan’s three other siblings. “They’ve unified them in a way that they weren’t unified before and so it has been in some ways a miscalculation,” Australian journalist and Lachlan biographer Paddy Manning told Fortune.
Given the long history of Murdoch sibling infighting, succession in a post-Rupert world stands to have significant impacts on the media empire. With control of the businesses passing equally to the four eldest children, boardroom gridlock—if the siblings are unable to reach consensus—could potentially paralyze key business decisions. And ongoing family divisions may shake shareholder confidence.
Majority rules
Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff foresees Lachlan’s three vote-holding siblings ultimately aligning against him and relieving him of his command over News Corp and Fox, and eventually an implosion of the Murdoch media empire we know today.
“The voice of the three would rule. And right now that appears to be that the three would relieve their brother of control and then make a determination about what happened to the remaining assets,” he told Fortune. (James, it’s worth noting, has denied there has even been a secret conspiracy between the siblings to unseat Lachlan in a rare interview with the Atlantic.)
The children, Wolff predicts, will then sell off some of the assets, namely those within News Corp which includes the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London, and James could take over and pivot the editorial slant of Fox News.
“This all comes down to four people, and whether they get along or they don’t get along.”
Michael Wolff, Murdoch biographer
James, who is deeply involved in social-justice initiatives and left-leaning politics, has long been outspoken about his deep disagreements with the editorial direction of both News Corp and Fox News, having resigned from the News Corp board in 2020, explicitly citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” In interviews, he’s criticized his family’s business for “legitimizing disinformation.”
James Murdoch declined a Fortune request for comment.
Even if James were to take over Fox, he would face an uphill battle with the Fox Corporation board that has aligned itself with Lachlan and Rupert’s vision. Since taking over, Lachlan has appointed two of his own directors, including former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. According to Manning: Abbott’s role on the board is largely to buttress Lachlan’s leadership. And shareholders, Manning told Fortune, would be pretty concerned about a strategy that tampered with the editorial line, or the programming, in a way that could dilute its earnings potential.
Fox Corporation declined a Fortune request for comment.
As for the remaining businesses in the Murdoch portfolio, finding a suitable buyer for the myriad lesser-known assets within News Corp would be a significant undertaking. The Wall Street Journal, Wolff said, would be somewhat of an exception. “You have vanity buyers to strategic buyers,” he added, throwing Michael Bloomberg’s name into the mix.
News Corp did not respond to a Fortune request for comment.
Billion-dollar buyout:
Acquiescing to his siblings isn’t Lachlan’s sole option. The eldest Murdoch son could buy out his siblings, but past attempts, in 2019 and 2023, were unsuccessful. Lachlan has never been willing to offer his siblings more than 60% of the market value of their shares.
Manning sees Lachlan buying out his siblings as the most logical move, one made by Rupert himself in the 1990s. But, according to Manning, Lachlan’s successful leadership at Fox and News Corp would allow his siblings to ask a high price, into the several billions of dollars, for control of the companies.
“Lachlan is having to pay his siblings a higher and higher value to get out of his way, and he’s having to pay them for effectively the fruits of his strategy, which they have criticized. So he’s in a real bind,” Manning told Fortune.
Under Lachlan’s leadership, Fox Corporation’s stock has performed well, even rising throughout the initial months of his appointment. Although the stock has seen some fluctuation due to ongoing legal battles, its price reached an all-time high of $58 in February 2025. In its third-quarter financial reporting, the company disclosed $4.37 billion in revenues, a 27% year-over-year increase.
As for News Corp’s performance, the company’s stock has soared, reflecting steady financial performance and strong growth. In 2024, the company’s earnings jumped nearly 79%.
Jackie Luna—REUTERS/Redux
Business as usual
Author and journalist Claire Atkinson, who has covered the Murdochs extensively and is writing a forthcoming book on the media dynasty, points to Lachlan’s business wins as a potential reason for Lachlan’s siblings to allow him to remain in control. She doesn’t view sweeping changes to the Murdoch businesses as inevitable following Rupert’s death.
“Lachlan has run it for more than five years. The stocks have done better than other media stocks,” she told Fortune.
Aside from the stock’s performance, Lachlan has also helped propel Fox News’ success. Fox News remains the top-rated cable news channel, leading primetime and outpacing ABC, NBC, and CBS. And he has continued Fox’s expansion into streaming following the company’s 2020 acquisition of Tubi, which as of July 2025, has since surpassed 100 million monthly active users.
But beyond Lachlan’s success, Atkinson doesn’t see Elisabeth and James attempting to reclaim power at their family’s enterprise. “They’ve got these billion-dollar fortunes of their own to create whatever media companies they want,” she said, something Elisabeth has long been doing. The youngest Murdoch daughter started her global TV and film production and development company, Sister Pictures, in 2019.
Elisabeth Murdoch did not immediately return a Fortune request for comment.
Regardless of the potential outcomes, both Atkinson and Manning expect Lachlan to fight tooth and nail to remain heir to the Murdoch empire. “I don’t see him stepping aside or stepping down or relinquishing that position anytime soon at all. I think he is absolutely committed to his role,” Atkinson said.
Wolff, however, questions Lachlan’s willingness to go above and beyond for control over the businesses. “There’s always the sense that he would rather be doing something else, spear fishing,” he said, referring to Lachlan’s favorite hobby.
How hard Lachlan will have to fight to remain atop his father’s enterprise is ultimately dependent upon his siblings, with whom his relationships have been strained by the weight of the Murdoch legacy and divided ideals.
“This all comes down to four people, and whether they get along or they don’t get along, and whatever accommodation they can come to with each other. Nothing else matters, nothing except what these four people will want at a given moment in time,” Wolff said.
Housing affordability in the U.S. remains at crisis levels due to a combination of stubbornly high mortgage rates and home prices. Even if mortgage rates dropped substantially, the core problem is persistently high prices, particularly in major metro areas. Affordable inventory remains tight as current homeowners hold onto low-rate mortgages.
There are several factors affecting housing affordability in the U.S.—and stubbornly high mortgage rates are something felt across the country.
During the pandemic, buyers enjoyed sub-3% mortgage rates, which ushered in a wave of first-time homeowners. But by late 2023, mortgage rates had peaked at 8%, and today still remain near 6.5% to 7%. That—in combination with home prices that are more than 50% higher than 2020—has locked out new home buyers from entering the market and current homeowners from selling.
Zillow reported this week it would take mortgage rates dropping to about 4.43% to make an average home affordable for a typical buyer. But Zillow economic analyst Anushna Prakash said this was “unrealistic” considering the massive dip required to get there.
But even if mortgage rates dropped to 0%, Prakash said, an average home would remain unaffordable in some major metro areas, according to Zillow.
Those include:
New York
Los Angeles
Miami
San Francisco
San Diego
San Jose
That’s because high home prices “are the bigger hurdle,” Michelle Griffith, a luxury real-estate broker with Douglas Elliman based in New York City, told Fortune.
“The reality is that buying into the market especially in Manhattan or prime Brooklyn still requires a significant amount of cash upfront,” Griffith said. “Inventory is tight and competition is high, so the cost of the property itself is what keeps most buyers on the sidelines.”
Between May 2020 and May 2025, the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which is widely used to measure U.S. residential real estate prices, jumped more than 51%.
While mortgage rates certainly make monthly payments more expensive, Griffith said, affordability “is more about the overall price tag.”
“Buyers care about rates, of course, but what really matters is having enough for the down payment and closing costs,” she added. “A small shift in rates doesn’t suddenly make that million-dollar apartment feel attainable.”
Another issue contributing to the housing crisis is a lack of lower-priced inventory. Salim Chraibi, founder and CEO of homebuilding company Bluenest Development, told Fortune he sees pre-approved and motivated buyers in Miami, but there just aren’t enough homes available in their price range. Chraibi’s company focuses on building homes for lower- and middle-income families.
“For sellers, many are holding onto homes because they don’t want to lose the lower interest rates they locked in years ago, which keeps inventory tight and the cycle going,” he said. “The biggest issue is inventory of the types of homes that are considered affordable for middle-income families.”
Dealing with sticker shock
When it comes to the U.S. market, tipping one scale doesn’t necessarily fix the housing affordability problem.
The median home price in San Jose has hovered consistently above $1.6 million, he said, which significantly strains most households before mortgage financing costs are even considered. So even if mortgage rates dropped to 0%, a median-priced home in San Francisco, San Jose, or anywhere else in the Bay Area would still require an extremely high down payment and monthly payments, he explained.
While “many buyers here are extremely rate-sensitive, running numbers at every shift in the market,” Kalla said, “the main barrier is that house prices have massively outpaced local incomes since before rates rose.”
Rents and home prices have been rising faster than incomes across most regions of the U.S., according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Americans now need to make more than six figures to afford a median-priced home, according to Realtor.com, but the average U.S. salary is only slightly more than half of that.
“Until we tackle prices, supply, and local wage growth, affordability will remain a challenge, no matter what happens with rates,” Kalla said.
AI is replacing human hiring managers in job interviews—and candidates are pushing back. Despite being unemployed, professionals told Fortune they’re refusing to take calls with bots, calling it an “added indignity” and a red flag for company culture. Still, stretched-thin HR teams say it’s the only way to handle thousands of applicants.
The next time you get buttoned-up and sit down for a long-awaited job interview, you might not find a human on the other end of the call. Instead, job-hunters are now joining Zoom meetings only to be greeted by AI interviewers. Candidates tell Fortune they’re either confused, intrigued, or straight-up dejected when the robotic, faceless bots join the calls.
“Looking for a job right now is so demoralizing and soul-sucking, that to submit yourself to that added indignity is just a step too far,” Debra Borchardt, a seasoned writer and editor who has been on the job-hunt for three months, tells Fortune. “Within minutes, I was like, ‘I don’t like this. This is awful.’ It started out normal…Then it went into the actual process of the interview, and that’s when it got a little weird.”
AI interviewers are only the newest change to the hiring process that has been upended by the advanced technology. With HR teams dwindling and hiring managers tasked to review thousands of applicants for a single role, they’re optimizing their jobs by using AI to filter top applicants, schedule candidate interviews, and automate correspondence about next steps in the process. AI interviewers may be a god-send for middle-managers, but job-seekers see them as only another hurdle in the intense hunt for work.
The experience for some job-hunters has been so poor that they’re swearing off interviews conducted by AI altogether. Candidates tell Fortune that AI interviewers make them feel unappreciated to the point where they’d rather skip out on potential job opportunities, reasoning the company’s culture can’t be great if human bosses won’t make the time to interview them. But HR experts argue the opposite; since AI interviewers can help hiring managers save time in first-round calls, the humans have more time to have more meaningful conversations with applicants down the line.
Job-seekers and HR are starkly divided on how they feel about the tech, but one thing is fact—AI interviewers aren’t going anywhere.
“The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that—we’re seeing the opposite.”
Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers
Social media has been exploding with job-seekers detailing their AI interviewer experiences: describing bots hallucinating and repeating questions on end, calling the robotic conversations awkward, or saying it’s less nerve-wracking than talking to a human. Despite how much hiring managers love AI interviewers, job-seekers aren’t sold on the idea just yet.
Allen Rausch, a 56-year-old technical writer who has worked at Amazon and Electronic Arts, has been on the job hunt for two months since getting laid off from his previous role at InvestCloud. In looking for new opportunities, he was “startled” to run into AI interviewers for the first time—let alone on three occasions for separate jobs. All of the meetings would last up to 25 minutes, and featured woman-like cartoons with female voices. It asked basic career questions, running through his resume and details about the job opening, but couldn’t answer any of his questions on the company or culture.
Rausch says he’s only open to doing more AI interviews if they don’t test his writing skills, and if human connection is guaranteed at some point later in the process.
“Given the percentage of responses that I’m getting to just basic applications, I think a lot of AI interviews are wasting my time,” he tells Fortune. “I would probably want some sort of a guarantee that, ‘Hey, we’re doing this just to gather initial information, and we are going to interview you with a human being [later].’”
While Rausch withstood multiple AI interviews, Borchardt couldn’t even sit through a single one. The 64-year-old editorial professional says things went downhill when the robotic interviewer simply ran through her resume, asking her to repeat all of her work experiences at each company listed. The call was impersonal, irritating, and to Borchardt, quite lazy. She ended the interview in less than 10 minutes.
“After about the third question, I was like, ‘I’m done.’ I just clicked exit,” she says. “I’m not going to sit here for 30 minutes and talk to a machine… I don’t want to work for a company if the HR person can’t even spend the time to talk to me.”
Alex Cobb, a professional now working at U.K. energy company Murphy Group, also encountered an AI interviewer several months ago searching for a new role. While he’s sympathetic towards how many applications HR has to sift through, he finds AI interviewers to be “weird” and ultimately ineffective in fully assessing human applicants. The experience put a bad taste in his mouth, to the point where Cobb won’t pursue any AI-proctored interviews in the foreseeable future.
“If I know from looking at company reviews or the hiring process that I will be using AI interviewing, I will just not waste my time, because I feel like it’s a cost-saving exercise more than anything,” Cobb tells Fortune. “It makes me feel like they don’t value my learning and development. It makes me question the culture of the company—are they going to cut jobs in the future because they’ve learned robots can already recruit people? What else will they outsource that to do?”
AI interviewers are a god-send for squeezed hiring managers
While many job-seekers are backing away from taking AI interviews, hiring managers are accepting the technology with open arms. A large part of it comes from necessity.
“They’re becoming more common in early-stage screening because they can streamline high-volume hiring,” Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, tells Fortune. “You’re seeing them all over. But for high-volume hiring like customer service or retail or entry-level tech roles, we’re just seeing this more and more… It’s doing that first-stage work that a lot of employers need in order to be more efficient and save time.”
It should be noted that not all AI interviewers are created equal—there’s a wide range of AI interviewers entering the market. Job-seekers who spoke with Fortune described monotonous, robotic-voiced bots with pictures of strange feminized avatars. But some AI interviewers, like the one created by Braintrust, distribute a faceless bot with a more natural sounding voice. Its CEO says applicants using the tech are overall happy with their experience—and its hiring manager clientele are enthusiastic, too.
However, Jackson admits AI interviewers still have their limitations, despite how revolutionary they are for HR teams.
“It does 100 interviews, and it’s going to hand back the best 10 to the hiring manager, and then the human takes over,” he says. “AI is good at objective skill assessment—I would say even better than humans. But [when it comes to] cultural fit, I wouldn’t even try to have AI do that.”
To land the historic job as the first Egyptian, Arab, and African woman to go to space, Sara Sabry trained and researched every morning before her full-time tech job and didn’t see daylight for years. The grind to space isn’t for the faint of heart—and it’s a reality check, she suggests, for work-life balance-loving Gen Z. In an exclusive interview with Fortune, she shares the brutal routine that helped her defy a “0.0%” chance of becoming an astronaut.
Sara Sabry became the world’s first Egyptian astronaut after flying to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on Aug. 4, 2022—marking the first time an Arab or African women has ever gone to space, all before even turning 30.
It’s a common childhood dream, but one that few realize. For starters, you need access to a plane just to rack up the 1,000 flight hours required to apply to programs like NASA.
For Sabry, the mission was even more impossible. She wasn’t born into a country with a space agency. There were no astronauts who looked like her. And she didn’t have elite connections or deep pockets.
So to get her foot in the door, the then 28-year-old had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to squeeze in early-morning training and bioastronautics research, all before reporting to her full-time job as CTO of a Berlin-based tech startup by 9 a.m.
Then after work, she’d work some more on her own start-up and space training—and it’s the kind of gruelling discipline she says young people today shouldn’t shy away from if they want to unlock their dreams.
“Back then it was, it was really, really, it was really tough,” she recalls in those early days of her career, speaking exclusively to Fortune during her stay in London for the 2025 American Express Leadership Academy. “You would wake up at night, and then you would go back at night, so you barely see the daylight ever.”
She says that she’d tackle the most important tasks of the day before 10 a.m., when others start to trickle online.
“I see a lot of young people now they’re wanting to take the easy route without working so hard. But the truth is, you have to make sacrifices. You have to put yourself through a lot of discomfort,” Sabry adds. “Of course, it’s not easy to wake up 4:30 a.m. every morning and be completely isolated from the world, right? But it goes to show that you can really transform your life—and you have so much control over your life.”
Sabry says the experience radically shifted how she viewed limitations tied to class, geography, and identity.
She didn’t have the passport, the platform, or the privilege, but she pushed through anyway. And in doing so, proved what’s possible when ambition is backed by relentless effort.
“It changed the way I see things now. Having gone to space and having done the thing that was impossible, honestly the likelihood of that happening was around 0.0%, unless I changed my nationality.”
She beat the odds—and over 7,000 other applicants for that Blue Origin flight—to make history.
Now, she’s made it—but still pulling 13-hour days and has a jet-setter schedule
Despite finding success, you still won’t find Sabry kicking up her feet.
On top of being an astronaut, the now 32-year-old is also the executive director of Deep Space Initiative—a nonprofit she founded to make space more accessible—co-founder of the Egyptian Space Agency’s Ambassador program, and is completing a PhD in aerospace engineering. She is also conducting research on the engineering of the next generation of planetary spacesuits at the NASA-funded Humanspaceflight lab.
If that wasn’t enough, Sabry is building new ventures and growing a speaking career that’s taking her around the world. And with such a packed, jet-setting schedule, she’s learned to adapt her rigid routine into something more flexible. But that doesn’t mean she lies in.
“I haven’t lived in a one place in three years,” she says. “I have to live out of my suitcase, so you have to adapt.”
Nowadays, Sabry starts her day at around 6 a.m. with a workout, before responding to emails and doing “admin stuff.”
“It’s not 4:30 a.m. anymore, because I have to work late these days,” she explains, adding that the time difference for international calls she has to take while often based in Egypt pushes her work schedule back, bringing her total workday to 13 hours.
“My first meeting is at 9 a.m. and my last meeting is from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. so I can’t be waking up too early,” Sabry continues. Eight hours of sleep is non-negotiable—and so is having every task for the day blocked out in her calendar.
“Because I’m balancing a PhD, two companies, my public speaking, and more, I think it’s really about scheduling. As soon as tasks are scheduled in my calendar, I don’t have to think about them,” she adds.
“It’s so easy to get distracted when you’re working on other things, and you think, ‘Oh I have to work on my research or I have to answer emails.’ But no, emails are going to stay in the inbox until the scheduled time for me to be looking at emails. Sometimes, of course, you have to do urgent things. But the things that are not super urgent? You pre-schedule.”
Eyes on the prize: The cure for exhaustion
If you feel exhausted just reading about Sabry’s routine, let alone copying it, she says there’s only one way to survive it: become obsessed by your mission.
Sabry said she had no other choice because the alternative was not giving it all and risk not achieving her dream.
“It was always this fight,” she explains. “I was never going to be given an opportunity. Having grown up knowing that things are just not going to be given to me, I never expected anything. It makes you work so much harder. But I never really resented it, or felt like, ‘Oh, I’m doing too much,’ because that was just the necessary thing to do to move forward. There was no other option.”
And she says having a packed schedule helped her move forward with her goals because she didn’t even have time to think about anything else.
“Most of the day you’re in the dark, but you’re so consumed by it—having that focus and not having time to look at what’s going on in different places was really, really key,” she tells Fortune.
“So being so consumed and having just a really packed schedule, and knowing that I was investing in myself. When you’re working on things that you know are towards your purpose, it just gives you so much peace.”
Ultimately, she’d only be kicking herself today if she knew there was an extra hour or two in the day that she hadn’t used to push herself forward.
“If I wasn’t doing everything that I can and I could do more, then I wouldn’t feel at peace. Then I would kind of go through like the other rabbit hole of, you know, being kind of like extra tough on yourself. So by doing so much, it gave me peace.”
As remote work lingers, employees are doubling, even tripling, their paychecks by secretly juggling multiple full-time jobs—and not even having to pull overtime. The overemployed workers Fortune spoke to are working up to five jobs and pulling in more than $725,000 a year, all within a standard 40-hour week.
If you’ve grown suspicious of your coworker’s away status on Teams or their refusal to turn their camera on during meetings, there’s a chance they might be trying to earn two salaries at once—and fit it all into a normal workweek.
The practice went viral on social media last month when a single software engineer was found to be working at multiple Silicon Valley startups at once, prompting other companies to check whether they had fallen victim to similar deceitfulness.
However, holding down more than one gig at a time—sometimes even up to five—may be bigger than some companies expect. After all, the continued prevalence of remote work has made it more challenging for employers to know exactly what their workers are up to.
“If you’ve worked in corporate America, it is a lot of fluff and not a lot of substance,” said one worker who spoke anonymously with Fortune. They currently work three gigs, making about $725,000 altogether.
At one point, they were balancing five roles total, something they said has been made possible by AI productivity enhancement, with new tools making it easier than ever to send emails, compile meeting notes, and draft deliverables—and get it all done under relatively normal work hours.
“At this point it kind of became a game to me, how many jobs can I do at once and stay sane?” they recalled.
Maxing out on jobs certainly paid. off. While juggling five at once, they estimated bringing in more than $1 million a year.
“I have zero loyalty to a corporation,” they added.
No regrets about taking work from others
Fortune spoke to a second worker who currently holds two jobs in the healthcare technology industry. And despite being a full-time worker making a combined amount of nearly $250,000, they are able to get all the work completed within 40 hours. They don’t have concerns over taking jobs away from those struggling in today’s rocky job market.
“They’re hiring me for my knowledge and my expertise, not for hours worked,” they told Fortune.
And while holding more than one job may raise eyebrows next time you have to put your work history on a resume, they said they will just write the best full-time role they had at a current period to avoid having to answer for holding two jobs at once. However, the demand for talent in the healthcare tech industry has not made it much of an issue.
“I don’t go look for jobs, jobs come and look for me,” they said. “To be honest, I don’t remember the last time I went to apply for a job. And since 2017, I’ve had four different positions.”
In fact, they said they got so many recruitment offers from firms trying to snatch up talent, the companies practically enabled overemployment behavior.
Holding more than one job might be legal, but some people like Lewis Maleh, CEO of executive recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, don’t recommend people emulate the behavior.
“If someone is doing a full-time perm job and being paid accordingly, they should not be doing another full-time perm role unless the company is OK with it,” Maleh previously told Fortune. “I don’t think it’s ethical and will cost you down the road if you get found out. If you are doing a few part-time gigs, that’s of course a different story.”
A trend that might continue, but maybe not for long
Though both of the sources Fortune spoke with are fully-remote employees, some users on the overemployment Reddit community have deemed it possible to secretly work at a second job while on site elsewhere. But by and large, working multiple full-time jobs has been enabled by the ability to work from home.
Despite calls for workers to return to the office from large Fortune 500 companies like JPMorgan Chase, remote work is still common. In fact, 33% of all workers worked from home in 2024, down just slightly from 35% in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s latest American Time Use Survey.
Remote work has stuck around far more than Jerry Jacobs, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, expected—but now bosses are slowly getting better at gauging workers’ productivity realities.
“The longer (remote work) lasts, the more I think people will get used to this as just being, you know, one way that people work,” Jacobs tells Fortune. “And I think the longer it lasts, the more you know, people are going to get good at managing it.”
And as a result, he doesn’t expect the trend of having multiple full-time jobs to carry on—but rather something people are experimenting with.
“It’s hard to convince people on your first job, that you’re really doing your job, if you’re spending a lot of your time and energy on your second job,” he adds.
Similarly Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor–human relations at Penn State University Abington, believes working more than one full-time job has the potential to grow, but it remains to be seen what that will actually look like.
“The question is, will the ethics, the productivity, the rules and regulations catch up with this?”
Holding multiple full-time jobs may sound impossible, but these overemployed remote workers are managing to squeeze in two to three jobs within a regular workweek—no overtime needed.
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![](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/GettyImages-842418008.jpg?w=300 "North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un attending a meeting with a committee of the Workers' Party of Korea about the test of a hydrogen bomb, at an unknown location. North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb designed for a long-range missile on September 3 and called its sixth and most powerful nuclear test a "perfect success", sparking world condemnation and promises of tougher US sanctions.")
![](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/GettyImages-842418008.jpg?w=2048 "North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un attending a meeting with a committee of the Workers' Party of Korea about the test of a hydrogen bomb, at an unknown location. North Korea said it detonated a hydrogen bomb designed for a long-range missile on September 3 and called its sixth and most powerful nuclear test a "perfect success", sparking world condemnation and promises of tougher US sanctions.")
