Innovation has a blind spot — and it’s not in the boardroom. It’s behind the counter, in the clinic, and on the shop floor before sunrise. While much of the tech world races toward the next big breakthrough, it’s overlooking something even bigger: the 2.7 billion people who make up the global shift-based workforce. These are the people who clock in, not just log on.
I grew up watching two of them every day — my mother working long hours in a shoe factory, and my father driving a truck through all kinds of weather. Their work wasn’t glamorous, but it was essential. I saw first-hand how unpredictable schedules, physical demands, and economic pressures shaped not only their jobs but also our family’s daily life. Those experiences taught me about the gap between the way technology is designed and the way most of the world actually works.
This disconnect isn’t just personal — it’s systemic. The next era of innovation shouldn’t start with code or capital. It should start with people. When I look at how to bridge this gap, I keep coming back to Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to Be Done” theory: people hire products to solve real, everyday problems. But too many solutions are still dreamed up in conference rooms, far away from the break rooms and shop floors where those problems live.
Nearly 80% of the global workforce is shift-based, yet they remain largely invisible to the innovation economy. While knowledge workers enjoy the benefits of remote tools, flexible hours, and automation, frontline industries are still grappling with burnout, staffing shortages, and unpredictable hours. And that gap is only widening, with less than 1% of technology investment going toward the people who work on their feet.
What shadowing a barista showed me
Recently, I spent a day shadowing baristas at one of our customers’ locations. I watched how something as small as a confusing schedule or a delayed break could ripple through the day, affecting not just the worker’s mood but also the team’s energy and the customer’s experience. Real progress requires proximity; you have to see the friction to understand it.
One barista told me, “I want to be the person who guides you through your order and gets you exactly what you want.” That’s not just about coffee — it’s about pride in the work. The question for us as innovators is: Are we building systems that protect that pride or chip away at it?
Christensen’s framework offers a way forward: start with the real “job” people are hiring your product to do. Not the imagined job in your pitch deck, but the actual one in their lives. If we applied that lens to the workforce, we’d see the problem clearly: Many decision-makers have never experienced the unpredictability of shift work, the juggling of multiple jobs, or the anxiety of waiting for next week’s schedule — yet they’re designing solutions for these very challenges.
The goal shouldn’t be to replace people — it should be to make work more stable, predictable, and dignified for those whose jobs require them to be on site. Issues like unpredictable shifts and last-minute callouts aren’t just operational inefficiencies — they’re human costs. More than 85% of hourly workers say unpredictable scheduling impacts their health and ability to plan ahead. And for many, that unpredictability also ripples into their families. From the healthcare worker trying to arrange last-minute childcare to retail managers missing school pickup, or baristas trading shifts to care for an aging parent – these are real jobs technology must help solve if we want a society that can thrive inside and outside of work.
I’ve seen the difference when technology actually works for people: when workers can see their hours and earnings clearly, swap a shift without stress, and count on a schedule that doesn’t change at the last minute. The appetite for better solutions is clear: 80% of hourly workers believe digital tools would improve their performance, and 70% of frontline workers want better tech. The demand is there, and so is the opportunity.
My challenge to builders, investors, and innovators is this: broaden your definition of “user.” Go to the cafe at 6 a.m. Talk to a nurse on their break. Watch a store manager handle a last-minute change from the parking lot. Listen. Then design with that reality in mind.
The same care we bring to designing for desk workers – intuitive tools, real-time insights, delight in the details — should be the baseline for the people who keep the world running. When we start there, we don’t just make work better. We build a future of work that actually reflects how most of the world works.
Because if we’re serious about shaping the future, we have to start where the work actually happens — with the real jobs to be done.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
On the Mercator projection, one of the world’s most popular maps, Greenland and Africa appear to be about the same size. But on the Equal Earth projection showing continents in their true proportions, 14 Greenlands would easily fit inside the African continent.
Criticism that the Mercator projection does not accurately reflect Africa’s real size is not new.
However, a recent campaign by African advocacy groups is gaining momentum online as it urges organizations and schools to adopt the Equal Earth projection, which they say more accurately displays the size of the continent of more than 1.4 billion people.
The African Union, the continent’s diplomatic organization with 55 member countries, endorsed the campaign last week in what advocates call a major milestone.
Here is what to know about the effort to show Africa’s real size to the world.
Africa appears too small on most modern maps
The Mercator map was created in the 16th century by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Designed to help European navigators at sea, the map distorted landmasses by enlarging regions near the poles such as North America and Greenland while shrinking Africa and South America.
The 2018 Equal Earth projection is a modern map that follows the Earth’s curvature and shows continents in their true proportions, unlike the distorted Mercator map.
The Mercator projection is still common in classrooms and tech platforms. Google Maps dropped the widely used projection for a 3D globe on desktop in 2018, but users can switch back to the old map. The mobile app still defaults to the Mercator projection.
Groups campaign to replace the global map
Two African advocacy groups, Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, launched a campaign in April to push schools, followed by international organizations and media outlets, to use the Equal Earth projection, which it says more accurately reflects the true size of Africa.
“Correcting the map is not only an African issue. It is a matter of truth and accuracy that concerns the entire world. When whole generations, in Africa and elsewhere, learn from a distorted map, they develop a biased view of Africa’s role in the world,” said Fara Ndiaye, co-founder and deputy executive director of Speak Up Africa.
For non-Africans, a shrunken representation of Africa minimizes its demographic, economic and strategic significance, Ndiaye added.
The African Union endorsed the campaign on Aug. 14, the largest body to sign on to the campaign so far, marking a significant milestone for the Change The Map campaign.
Geographers say the Mercator projection is outdated
Mark Monmonier, a Syracuse University professor of geography, said the Mercator projection is obsolete and geographers have long advised people to not use it as a world map.
“It was a useful navigation tool in the 16th century, because it has straight lines, giving navigators a line of constant direction to sail along,” Monmonier said. “But outside of that very narrow navigation application, there is no point in using it.”
While maps following the curvature of the earth, like the Equal Earth projection, offer a more accurate scale of continents true sizes, he nonetheless warned that bar graphs remain the best way to compare the sizes of different continents.
“When you put irregularly shaped areas on a flat paper, people are going to have a hard time accurately comparing the size of landmasses,” Monmonier said.
Frank Caprio, a retired municipal judge in Rhode Island who found online fame as a caring jurist and host of “Caught in Providence,” has died. He was 88.
His official social media accounts said Wednesday that he “passed away peacefully” after “a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer.”
Caprio billed his courtroom as a place “where people and cases are met with kindness and compassion.” He was known for dismissing tickets or showing kindness even when he handed out justice.
Last week, Caprio posted a short video on Facebook about how he had “a setback,” was back in the hospital and was asking that people “remember me in your prayers.”
During his time on the bench, Caprio developed a persona at odds with many TV judges — more sympathetic and less confrontational and judgmental.
In his bite-sized segments on YouTube, Caprio is often seen empathizing with those in his courtroom. Many of the infractions are also relatively minor, from failing to use a turn signal to a citation for a loud party.
Caprio also used his fame to address issues like unequal access to the judicial system.
“The phrase, ‘With liberty and justice for all’ represents the idea that justice should be accessible to everyone. However it is not,” Caprio said in one video. “Almost 90% of low-income Americans are forced to battle civil issues like health care, unjust evictions, veterans benefits and, yes, even traffic violations, alone.”
Caprio’s upbeat take on the job of a judge drew him millions of views. His most popular videos have been those where he calls children to the bench to help pass judgment on their parents. One shows him listening sympathetically to a woman whose son was killed and then dismissing her tickets and fines of $400.
In another clip, after dismissing a red-light violation for a bartender who was making $3.84 per hour, Caprio urged those watching the video not to duck out on their bills.
“If anyone’s watching I want them to know you better not eat and run because you’re going to get caught and the poor people who are working hard all day for three bucks an hour are going to have to pay your bill,” he said.
His fame reached as far as China, where clips of his show have been uploaded to social media in recent years. Some fans there posted about his death, recalling and praising the humanity he showed in his rulings.
His family described Caprio “as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather and friend.”
“Beloved for his compassion, humility, and unwavering belief in the goodness of people, Judge Caprio touched the lives of millions through his work in the courtroom and beyond,” the family wrote online. “His warmth, humor, and kindness left an indelible mark on all who knew him.”
State and local politicians mourned his passing and celebrated his life.
“Judge Caprio not only served the public well, but he connected with them in a meaningful way, and people could not help but respond to his warmth and compassion,” Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee said in a statement. “He was more than a jurist — he was a symbol of empathy on the bench, showing us what is possible when justice is tempered with humanity.”
Robert Leonard, who co-owned a restaurant with Caprio, said he was “going to be sorely missed” and was “all around wonderful.”
“There is nothing he wouldn’t do for you if he could do it,” Leonard said.
Caprio retired from Providence Municipal Court in 2023 after nearly four decades on the bench.
According to his biography, Caprio came from humble beginnings, the second of three boys growing up in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island.
“I hope that people will take away that the institutions of government can function very well by exercising kindness, fairness, and compassion in their deliberations. We live in a very contentious society,” he said in 2017. “I would hope that people will see that we can dispense justice without being oppressive.”
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LeBlanc, an Associated Press journalist who retired in January, was the primary writer of this obituary. Associated Press writers Michael Casey in Boston, Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu and Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed.
Turn off the lights. The Nesting Ospreys have defeated the Apple Valley Eagles in Minnesota high school football.
They haven’t actually played each other, but the ospreys took charge when they built a huge nest to raise their chicks, high up on a light pole at the Apple Valley High School football field. Because of it, the migratory raptors that are protected under state and federal law forced the school, known as the Eagles, to rearrange their football and soccer schedules, switching to day games instead of night.
Turning on the hot floodlights would have risked cooking the birds and starting a fire.
“When you tell someone this story of ‘Wow, we have to reschedule because there’s an osprey nest in our stadium,’ they’re like, ‘You can’t make this type of stuff up, right?’” said Cory Hanson, athletic director at the school in the Minneapolis suburbs.
Working with the state Department of Natural Resources, the school has been sending up a drone twice a week to monitor the chicks so that once the young ospreys are old enough and fly off, crews can remove the nest and switch on the traditional Friday Night Lights.
“Luckily for Apple Valley, they should be able to remove the nest within probably a week because the birds have already taken some of their first flights,” Heidi Cyr, the department’s nongame wildlife permit coordinator, said Friday.
Hanson said he’s seen as many as four chicks in the drone photos. He said the school became aware of the nest around June.
“When you see these large birds flying across your field with these humongous sticks, you start to ask questions like, ‘What is going on here?’” he said. “And you take one look at that nest, right? And you’re like, ‘OK, this is not your average bird.’”
DNR officials confirmed it was an osprey nest, and told school officials that federal law made it clear that they could not disturb it for now.
So, Hanson said, they had no choice but to revise their schedules. But he said other schools have been great about finding alternate sites and times, despite their initial disbelief.
According to the DNR, ospreys are one of the larger birds of prey that inhabit Minnesota, with wingspans of 4.5 to 6 feet (1.4 to 1.8 meters).
They’ll return to their nests every year and will build them up with new materials every season. Their nests can get as large as 10 feet deep (3 meters) and 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) in diameter. Their diet is almost exclusively live fish. They’ll dive from high altitudes to grab fish with their sharp talons, plunging as deep as 3 feet (1 meter) underwater.
Ospreys like to build their nests in high places with clear views, including dead old trees and structures that resemble them, like utility poles, channel markers and cellphone towers. That sometimes creates fire hazards. So the DNR issues a number of nest removal permits every year. But permission to remove nests that still hold young ospreys is normally denied unless there’s a major health and human safety concern. Stadium lighting doesn’t qualify, Cyr said.
Efforts to restore their population, which have included building nest platforms, have been a success in Minnesota and elsewhere, Cyr noted. They came off the state’s special concern list in 2015. Depending on the time of year, they can now be found across most of North America.
Once the chicks at Apple Valley fly off for good, Hanson said, school officials and the DNR will relocate the nest from the light tower to a new platform on school grounds in hopes that the parents will return next year. But just to be safe, they’ll also erect deterrents on the lights so the ospreys don’t try to nest there again.
“So if anyone sees that happening, don’t worry,” Cyr said. “The birds are safe. They’ve successfully left the nest and they’re on their way to becoming adults themselves.”
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Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski reported from Minneapolis.
Hall of Fame jockey Ron Turcotte, who rode Secretariat to the Triple Crown in 1973, has died. He was 84.
Turcotte’s family said through his longtime business partner and friend Leonard Lusky that the Canada-born jockey died of natural causes Friday at his home in Drummond, New Brunswick.
He won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes twice each, most notably sweeping the three with Secretariat to end horse racing’s Triple Crown drought that dated to Citation in 1948.
“Ron was a great jockey and an inspiration to so many, both within and outside the racing world,” Lusky said. “While he reached the pinnacle of success in his vocation, it was his abundance of faith, courage, and kindness that was the true measure of his greatness.”
Secretariat’s record time of 2:24 in the Belmont, winning by 31 lengths at a 1 1/2-mile distance, still stands 52 years later.
“I still had a lot of horse when I passed the wire,” Turcotte said in 2023, nearly 50 years to the day since riding Secretariat in the Belmont. “He was not tired. … It was amazing.”
Turcotte won 3,032 races over a nearly two-decade career that ended in 1978 when he fell off a horse early in a race and suffered injuries that made him paraplegic. Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund chairman William J. Punk Jr. called Turcotte one of the sport’s greatest champions and ambassadors and praised him for his advocacy and efforts to help fellow fallen riders.
“While his courage as a jockey was on full display to a nation of adoring fans during that electrifying time, it was after he faced a life altering injury that we learned about the true character of Ron Turcotte,” New York Racing Association president and CEO David O’Rourke said. “By devoting himself to supporting fellow jockeys struggling through similar injuries, Ron Turcotte built a legacy defined by kindness and compassion.”
Turcotte was inducted into the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame in 1979.
“The world may remember Ron as the famous jockey of Secretariat, but to us he was a wonderful husband, a loving father, grandfather, and a great horseman.” the Turcotte family said in a statement through Lusky.
Turcotte was born in Drummond on July 22, 1941, as one of 12 children. He quit school to work as a lumberjack before moving to Toronto to get involved in horse racing, first as a hotwalker and then a jockey, becoming the leading rider at Woodbine Racetrack before rising to the Triple Crown level.
Woodbine chairman Jim Lawson said Turcotte was “a true Canadian icon whose impact on horse racing is immeasurable.”
“Ron carried himself with humility, strength and dignity,” Lawson said. “His legacy in racing, both here at Woodbine and around the world, will live forever.”
Turcotte won the Preakness in 1965 aboard Tom Rolfe and the Derby and Belmont in 1972 with Riva Ridge. But it was his time with Secretariat that made Turcotte a household name in racing, and he called it “love at first ride.”
“He was the type of horse that you’ll never see again,” Turcotte said two years ago. “He was doing something that you’ve never seen before and will probably never see again.”
Turcotte was the last surviving member of Secretariat’s team: The colt died in 1989, groom Eddie Sweat in 1998, trainer Lucien Laurin in 2000, owner Penny Chenery in 2017 and exercise rider Charlie Davis in 2018.
“Ron Turcotte was an icon and will forever be fondly remembered as the trusted partner of legendary Kentucky Derby and Triple Crown winner Secretariat, arguably the most popular thoroughbred in history,” Churchill Downs Racetrack president Mike Anderson said. “Ron’s many accomplishments on the racetrack and his deep passion for horse racing brought countless fans to the sport. He will be greatly missed.”
Canadian jockey Ron Turcotte riding American thoroughbred Secretariat (1970-1989), in blue- and white-checkered blinders, into the Winners' Circle after victory in the Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York, 9th June 1973.
Braxton Kimura dreads eating at restaurants. The California teenager is severely allergic to peanuts, shellfish and most tree nuts. Consuming even a tiny amount could send him to the emergency room.
“Eating out is definitely really dangerous. It’s something that I try to avoid,” Kimura, 17, said at his home in San Jose. “When dining out, obviously I always bring my EpiPens, and I’m really nervous all the time.”
Restaurant dining in California could soon become a little less stressful for Braxton and the growing number of Americans with severe food allergies.
State lawmakers are set to vote on legislation that would make California the first U.S. state to require restaurants to disclose whether a menu item contains any of the nine most common food allergens: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, sesame and soybeans.
Restaurants could post the allergen information on physical menus, an allergen chart, allergen-specific menu or other printed materials. They can also post a QR code to access a digital menu that lists allergens. Food trucks and carts wouldn’t be required to make changes.
In September, the Legislature is expected to vote on Senate Bill 68, known as the Allergen Disclosure for Dining Experiences Act (ADDE). If approved and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the new law would take effect on July 1, 2026.
“It’s really to protect the millions of people in California who have allergies like me,” said Democratic state Sen. Caroline Menjivar of the San Fernando Valley, who introduced the bill earlier this year.
Menjivar, who is severely allergic to most nuts and fruits, said she’s had to go to the hospital multiple times for anaphylaxis — a life-threatening allergic reaction — to something she accidentally consumed.
The Southern California lawmaker got the idea for the legislation last year while traveling in Europe, which has required restaurants to disclose food allergens since 2014.
Soon after Menjivar returned to the U.S., she was approached about sponsoring legislation by parents whose daughter has severe allergies.
Since then 9-year-old Addie Lao has become the bill’s most visible advocate, appearing in social media videos, news interviews and legislative hearings.
“I want to be able to eat out with my friends and family like everyone else,” the third grader told state senators in Sacramento in April. “I have to avoid the foods I’m allergic to since it’s like poison to my body and can harm me.”
The bill has the backing of numerous groups representing medical practitioners and people who suffer from asthma and allergies.
But the California Restaurant Association opposes the legislation. The group says the law would increase costs and burdens on restaurants that are already struggling with rising food prices, tariffs, labor shortages and cost-conscious consumers.
The restaurant industry wants more flexibility in how allergen information is posted as well as more liability protections.
“You get into a situation where the menu becomes unwieldy and it becomes incredibly impractical and expensive to be constantly converting menus out with each ingredient shift that may occur and the need to do a new allergy notification,” said Matthew Sutton, senior vice president at the California Restaurant Association.
Some restaurant chains — such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Olive Garden — already post allergen information on their menus.
Brian Hom, who owns two Vitality Bowl restaurants in San Jose, is one of the bill’s biggest backers. His oldest son died on his 18th birthday in 2008 after he accidentally ate peanuts at a resort in Mexico.
This legislation “is going to save lives,” Hom said. “I don’t want to see anybody suffer what my wife and I are suffering.”
An estimated 33 million Americans, including nearly 4 million in California, have at least one food allergy, according to the nonprofit Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE). And the numbers are rising.
Among them is Kimura, who was diagnosed with food allergies at 14 months old when he was rushed to the hospital in anaphylactic shock after eating a peanut off the floor.
“I always have to be cautious,” Kimura said.
Kimura, a high school senior and basketball player, launched an initiative called Beyond the Shell, which produced a documentary called “The Last Bite” that shows what it’s like to live with life-threatening allergies.
Even if SB 68 becomes law, Kimura says he’d still need to talk to restaurant staff to make sure dishes are allergen-free and there’s no cross-contamination, but allergen labels would reduce the stress of eating in restaurants.
“It would kind of give me more of a peace of mind and would overall just create a better environment and more awareness around food allergies as a whole,” Kimura said. “It’s definitely a step in the right direction.”
Elon Musk’s X has reached a tentative settlement with former employees of the company then known as Twitter who’d sued for $500 million in severance pay.
The parties disclosed the deal in a Wednesday court filing asking for a scheduled Sept. 17 hearing in the case to be postponed. The San Francisco federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to postpone the hearing so that both sides could finalize the settlement agreement.
The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The proposed class action lawsuit by former Twitter employees Courtney McMillan and Ronald Cooper, who said the company failed to pay them and other fired workers severance they were owed.
Musk took over the social media platform in 2022 and let thousands of employees go, eliminating entire teams dedicated to trust and safety, human rights and making the site accessible to people with disabilities. Other lawsuits, including one filed by Twitter executives including former CEO Parag Agrawal, are still pending.
The billionaire’s approach to gutting Twitter’s workforce served as a template for his months-long leadership of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as it cut tens of thousands of federal workers earlier this year.
An email announcing a “deferred resignation offer” to federal workers, promising pay through September without having to work, was titled “Fork in the Road,” echoing a similar email Musk sent to the Twitter workforce in 2022.
Musk’s drawn-out legal battles with more than 2,000 former Twitter workers were also a precursor to the court battles the Trump administration is now fighting over federal downsizing, though the circumstances are different.
Billionaire CEOs, like Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, proudly embrace not taking a day off of work. However, not taking PTO may do more harm than good for business, according to Bill Cassidy, CEO of Lactalis U.S. Yogurt (home to brands like Yoplait and Siggi’s). He tells Fortune he works to live—and encourages his team to take their dream vacations.
Each year, nearly half of U.S. workers forgo their dream vacation—like a trip to Paris or Hawaii—and instead log more hours in the office. The result: more than 700 million unused paid time off (PTO) days, according to a 2019 study.
For some employers, this culture of loving time in the office is good news for the bottom line, thanks to more than $65 billion-worth of benefits going unused. But for others, including Bill Cassidy, CEO of Lactalis U.S. Yogurt, the trend is a warning sign.
As the leader behind $750-million-a-year cooler-aisle names like Yoplait, Go-Gurt, and Siggi’s, Cassidy promotes a philosophy that runs counter to high-profile billionaires like Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, who proudly embrace 24/7 work.
Cassidy’s alternate stance is simple: “I work to live.”
“Work is an enabler to do all the other stuff that we want to accomplish in our lives,” he tells Fortune. “I love what I do. I love my family and friends more than work. But when you put the two together, you have that right level of balance.”
At a time when many CEOs view advancing technology and AI disruption as reasons to double-down on hustle culture, Cassidy said he believes striking the appropriate balance is what will lead to success for workers and leaders alike.
“To be a better leader, I also need that right amount of time to disconnect from the business, spend time with family and friends and come back—whether it’s a two-day vacation, a week’s vacation—that’s kind of irrelevant, but I come back recharge with more energy to drive the business,” he adds.
Encouraging employees to take PTO
While some business leaders may take pride in working all the time—seven days a week, with no vacations—Cassidy says that’s not a lifestyle he ever planned to embrace.
“One thing I never wanted in life was to have regrets that I did not spend the right amount of time with my kids, in particular,” he says.
In fact, even while climbing the corporate ranks, he continued to coach his kids’ football, baseball, and soccer teams—even if it meant he had to substitute responding to emails for team practice.
It’s a workplace culture he’s tried to build as CEO by encouraging all employees to use their full PTO benefits each year—and avoid being among the millions of workers who don’t.
That mindset even spilled into marketing. Earlier this year, Siggi’s launched a PTO-focused campaign with the goal of calling attention to the lack of vacation days throughout the business world. The company gave 10 winners $5,000 and a flight voucher to go take their time off—something Cassidy says all companies should encourage.
“Don’t feel as if you’re not here, work’s not going to get done,” Cassidy says. “It’s more about the culture of taking time off and it being okay to take time off.”
Younger workers in particular are taking this philosophy to heart and believe working to live is a top priority. More than 42% of all Gen Z and millennials say their managers should help set boundaries and facilitate work-life balance, according to a 2025 Deloitte study.
Striking the right PTO balance
Determining how much PTO is awarded for employees is a major consideration of many job seekers—and can even be a make-or-break factor. In fact, one survey found 1 in 5 workers would turn down a job without unlimited PTO, even though it’s only found at about 6% of companies, according to SHRM.
Beyond being an enticing perk for new-hires, unlimited PTO is viewed as something that could give companies a competitive edge. Some 57% of retail investors expressed the belief that companies offering unlimited vacation could fare better than the top 500 companies listed on the U.S. stock exchange, according to a survey by Bloomberg.
Netflix is considered one of the companies that brought the policy into the mainstream—thanks in part to an affinity for time off by its billionaire cofounder Reed Hastings. He takes around six weeks of vacation each year and hopes his employees will do the same.
“I take a lot of vacation and I’m hoping that certainly sets an example,” the former Netflix CEO said in 2015. “It is helpful. You often do your best thinking when you’re off hiking in some mountain or something. You get a different perspective on things.”
But other companies have tried unlimited PTO—and reversed course. A LinkedIn post from Ryan Breslow, the CEO of fintech startup Bolt, went viral earlier this year for announcing the death of unlimited PTO at his company due it causing more harm than good for employees.
“We just killed unlimited PTO at Bolt,” Breslow wrote. “It sounds progressive, but it’s totally broken. When time off is undefined, the good ones don’t take PTO. The bad ones take too much.”
And while Lactalis did not provide specifics of their PTO policy besides being “generous and flexible,” Cassidy said he believes the companies that thrive won’t be the ones that glorify constant work, but the ones that help employees take time off—without guilt.
With millions of PTO left on the table each year, Lactalis U.S. Yogurt CEO Bill Cassidy argues normalizing time off is a competitive advantage—not a concession.
Canada is dropping many of its retaliatory tariffs to match U.S. tariff exemptions for goods covered under the United States-Mexico-Canada trade pact, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Friday.
Carney said Canada will include the carve-out that the U.S. has on Canadian goods under the 2020 free trade deal that shields the vast majority of goods from the punishing duties, easing Canada’s previous stance on holding the line on punitive tariffs until U.S. President Donald Trump relents more on those imposed by the U.S.
Some Canadian politicians and union leaders characterized Carney’s move as capitulation, but the prime minister accentuated what he considered Canada’s favorable position so far and said that the exemptions would jump-start further trade talks with Washington.
“Canada currently has the best trade deal with the United States. And while it’s different from what we had before, it’s still better than that of any other country,” Carney said.
Carney and Trump spoke on the phone Thursday, and Carney met with his Cabinet on Friday before making the announcement.
“We had a very good call,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. “We are working on something. We want to be very good to Canada. I like Carney a lot. I think he’s a very good person.” He also said: “I am fighting for the United States, and Canada and Mexico have taken a lot of our business over the years.”
Carney said Trump told him that lifting the tariffs would reset trade negotiations. The United States-Mexico-Canada trade pact, or USMCA, is up for review in 2026, and Carney called the pact a unique advantage for Canada at a time when it is clear that the U.S. is charging for access to its market.
Carney said the commitment of the U.S. to the core of USMCA means that over 85% of Canada-U.S. trade continues to be free of tariffs. He said the U.S. average tariff rate on Canadian goods is 5.6% and remains the lowest among all its trading partners.
Canadian and Mexican companies can claim preferential treatment under the USMCA.
Canada and China are the only countries that have retaliated against Trump in his trade war. Canada imposed 25% tariffs on a long list of American goods in March, including oranges, alcohol, clothing and shoes, motorcycles and cosmetics.
Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau initially put on retaliatory tariffs in response to U.S. tariffs, but before the U.S. tariffs were applied the Trump administration exempted goods covered by the free trade deal.
Most imports from Canada and Mexico are still protected by the USMCA, but U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said, “I think the president is absolutely going to renegotiate USMCA.”
Preserving the free trade pact will be critical for Canada and Mexico. More than 75% of Canada’s exports go to the U.S. while more than 80% of Mexico’s exports go there.
Trump has announced some sector-specific tariffs that do apply for Canada despite the USMCA — known as 232 tariffs — which are having an impact on the Canadian economy. There is a 50% tariff on steel and aluminum imports, for example.
“Canada and the United States have reestablished free trade for the vast majority of our goods,” Carney said. “Canada will retain our tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos as we work intensively to resolve the issues there.”
Carney previously rescinded Canada’s plan to tax U.S. technology firms after Trump said he was suspending trade talks with Canada over those plans, which he called “a direct and blatant attack on our country.”
The prime minister disputed any notion that Canada is appeasing Trump, noting that Canada is matching what the U.S. is doing.
“The president and I had a long conversation,” Carney said. “There is a review of the free trade agreement in the spring. We’re starting our preparations.”
Lana Payne, president of Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, characterized Carney’s announcement as Canada backing down, and said the country shouldn’t back down unless the U.S. drops all punitive tariffs.
“Trump’s attacks on auto, steel, aluminum, and forestry sectors are hurting Canadian workers in real time,” she posted on social media. “Walking back counter-tariffs isn’t an olive branch. It only enables more U.S. aggression.”
Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called it a capitulation by Carney. Poilievre said he would have gone to the U.S. president and asked him respectfully to remove all the tariffs.
“Any small tariff on Canada, any amount, by the United States has an outsized effect because more than 20% of our economy is exports to the U.S.,” he said.
Now that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has signaled that the central bank could soon cut its key interest rate, he faces a new challenge: how to do it without seeming to cave to the White House’s demands.
For months, Powell has largely ignored President Donald Trump’s constant hectoring that he reduce borrowing costs. Yet on Friday, in a highly-anticipated speech, Powell suggested that the Fed could take such a step as soon as its next meeting in September.
It will be a fraught decision for the Fed, which must weigh it against persistent inflation and an economy that could also improve in the second half of this year. Both trends, if they occur, could make a cut look premature.
Trump has urged Powell to slash rates, arguing there is “no inflation” and saying that a cut would lower the government’s interest payments on its $37 trillion in debt.
Powell, on the other hand, has suggested that a rate cut is likely for reasons quite different than Trump’s: He is worried that the economy is weakening. His remarks on Friday at an economic symposium in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming also indicated that the Fed will move carefully and cut rates at a much slower pace than Trump wants.
Powell pointed to economic growth that “has slowed notably in the first half of this year,” to an annual rate of 1.2%, down from 2.5% last year. There has also been a “marked slowing” in the demand for workers, he added, which threatens to raise unemployment.
Still, Powell said that tariffs have started to lift the price of goods and could continue to push inflation higher, a possibility Fed officials will closely monitor and that will make them cautious about additional rate cuts.
The Fed’s key short-term interest rate, which influences other borrowing costs for things like mortgages and auto loans, is currently 4.3%. Trump has called for it to be cut as low as 1% — a level no Fed official supports.
However the Fed moves forward, it will likely do so while continuing to assert its longstanding independence. A politically independent central bank is considered by most economists as critical to preventing inflation, because it can take steps — such as raising interest rates to cool the economy and combat inflation — that are harder for elected officials to do.
There are 19 members of the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee, 12 of whom vote on rate decisions. One of them, Beth Hammack, president of the Federal Reserve’s Cleveland branch, said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press that she is committed to the Fed’s independence.
“I’m laser focused … on ensuring that I can deliver good outcomes for the for the public, and I try to tune out all the other noise,” she said.
She remains concerned that the Fed still needs to fight stubborn inflation, a view shared by several colleagues.
“Inflation is too high and it’s been trending in the wrong direction,” Hammack said. “Right now I see us moving away from our goals on the inflation side.”
Powell himself did not discuss the Fed’s independence during his speech in Wyoming, where he received a standing ovation by the assembled academics, economists, and central bank officials from around the world. But Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that was likely a deliberate choice and intended, ironically, to demonstrate the Fed’s independence.
“The not talking about independence was a way of trying as best they could to signal we’re getting on with the business,” Posen said. “We’re still having a civilized internal discussion about the merits of the issue. And even if it pleases the president, we’re going to make the right call.”
It was against that backdrop that Trump intensified his own pressure campaign against another top Fed official.
Trump said he would fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook if she did not step down from her position. Bill Pulte, a Trump appointee to head the agency that regulates mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, alleged Wednesday that Cook committed mortgage fraud when she bought two properties in 2021. She has not been charged.
Cook has said she would not be “bullied” into giving up her position. She declined Friday to comment on Trump’s threat.
If Cook is somehow removed, that would give Trump an opportunity to put a loyalist on the Fed’s governing board. Members of the board vote on all interest rate decisions. He has already nominated a top White House economist, Stephen Miran, to replace former governor Adriana Kugler, who stepped down Aug. 1.
Trump had previously threatened to fire Powell, but hasn’t done so. Trump appointed Powell in late 2017. His term as chair ends in about nine months.
Powell is no stranger to Trump’s attacks. Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that the president also went after him in 2018 for raising interest rates, but that didn’t stop Powell.
“The president has a long history of applying pressure to Chairman Powell,” Strain said. “And Chairman Powell has a long history of resisting that pressure. So it would be odd, I think, if on his way out the door, he caved for the first time.”
Still, Strain thinks that Powell is overestimating the risk that the economy will weaken further and push unemployment higher. If inflation worsens while hiring continues, that could force the Fed to potentially reverse course and increase rates again next year.
“That would do further damage to the Fed’s credibility around maintaining low and stable price inflation,” he said.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell walks outside of Jackson Lake Lodge during a break at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium in Moran, Wyo., on Friday, Aug. 22, 2025.
President Donald Trump is calling national security and privacy concerns related to TikTok and its Chinese parent company “highly overrated” and said Friday he’ll keep extending the deadline for the popular video-sharing platform until there’s a buyer.
Congress approved a U.S. ban on TikTok unless its parent company, ByteDance, sold its controlling stake. But Trump has so far extended the deadline three times during his second term — with the next one coming up on Sept. 17.
“We’re gonna watch the security concerns,” Trump told reporters, but added, “We have buyers, American-buyers,” and “until the complexity of things work out, we just extend a little bit longer.”
The first extension was through an executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, after the platform went dark briefly when a national ban — approved by Congress and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — took effect. The second was in April, when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to spin off TikTok into a new company with U.S. ownership that fell apart after China backed out following Trump’s tariff announcement.
His comments follow the White House starting a TikTok account this week.
“I used TikTok in the campaign,” Trump said.
“I’m a fan of TikTok,” he said. “My kids like TikTok. Young people love TikTok. If we could keep it going.”
As the extensions continue, it appears less and less likely that TikTok will be banned in the U.S. any time soon. The decision to keep TikTok alive through an executive order has received some scrutiny, but the administration has not faced a legal challenge in court — unlike many of Trump’s other executive orders.
Americans are even more closely divided on what to do about TikTok than they were two years ago.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that about one-third of Americans said they supported a TikTok ban, down from 50% in March 2023. Roughly one-third said they would oppose a ban, and a similar percentage said they weren’t sure.
Among those who said they supported banning the social media platform, about 8 in 10 cited concerns over users’ data security being at risk as a major factor in their decision, according to the report.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced the U.S. government has secured a 10% stake in struggling Silicon Valley pioneer Intel in a deal that was completed just a couple weeks after he was depicting the company’s CEO as a conflicted leader unfit for the job.
“The United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” Trump wrote in a post.
The U.S. government is getting the stake through the conversion of $11.1 billion in previously issued funds and pledges. All told, the government is getting 433.3 million shares of non-voting stock priced at $20.47 apiece — a discount from Friday’s closing price at $24.80. That spread means the U.S. government already has a gain of $1.9 billion, on paper.
The remarkable turn of events makes the U.S. government one of Intel’s largest shareholders at a time that the Santa Clara, California, company is in the process of jettisoning more than 20,000 workers as part of its latest attempt to bounce back from years of missteps taken under a variety of CEOs.
Intel’s current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has only been on the job for slightly more than five months, an d earlier this month, it looked like he might be on shaky ground already after some lawmakers raised national security concerns about his past investments in Chinese companies while he was a venture capitalist. Trump latched on to those concerns in an August 7 post demanding that Tan resign.
But Trump backed off after the Malaysian-born Tan professed his allegiance to the U.S. in a public letter to Intel employees and went to the White House to meet with the president, leading to a deal that now has the U.S. government betting that the company is on the comeback trail after losing more than $22 billion since the end of 2023. Trump hailed Tan as “highly respected” CEO in his Friday post.
In a statement, Tan applauded Trump for “driving historic investments in a vital industry” and resolved to reward his faith in Intel. “We are grateful for the confidence the President and the Administration have placed in Intel, and we look forward to working to advance U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” Tan said.
Intel’s current stock price is just slightly above where it was when Tan was hired in March and more than 60% below its peak of about $75 reached 25 years ago when its chips were still dominating the personal computer boom before being undercut by a shift to smartphones a few years later. The company’s market value currently stands at about $108 billion – a fraction of the current chip kingpin, Nvidia, which is valued at $4.3 trillion.
The stake is coming primarily through U.S. government grants to Intel through the CHIPS and Science Act that was started under President Joe Biden’s administration as a way to foster more domestic manufacturing of computer chips to lessen the dependence on overseas factories.
But the Trump administration, which has regularly pilloried the policies of the Biden administration, saw the CHIPs act as a needless giveaway and is now hoping to make a profit off the funding that had been pledged to Intel.
“We think America should get the benefit of the bargain,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said earlier this week. “It’s obvious that it’s the right move to make.”
About $7.8 billion had been been pledged to Intel under the incentives program, but only $2.2 billion had been funded so far. Another $3.2 billion of the government investment is coming through the funds from another program called “Secure Enclave.”
Although U.S. government can’t vote with its shares and won’t have a seat on Intel’s board of directors, critics of the deal view it as a troubling cross-pollination between the public and private sectors that could hurt the tech industry in a variety of ways.
For instance, more tech companies may feel pressured to buy potentially inferior chips from Intel to curry favor with Trump at a time that he is already waging a trade war that threatens to affect their products in a potential scenario cited by Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics for the Cato Institute.
“Overall, it’s a horrendous move that will have real harms for U.S. companies, U.S. tech leadership, and the U.S. economy overall,” Lincicome posted Friday.
The 10% stake could also intensify the pressure already facing Tan, especially if Trump starts fixating on Intel’s stock price while resorting to his penchant for celebrating his past successes in business.
Nancy Tengler, CEO of money manager Laffer Tengler Investments, is among the investors who abandoned Intel years ago because of all the challenges facing Intel.
“I don’t see the benefit to the American taxpayer, nor do I see the benefit, necessarily to the chip industry,” Tengler said while also raising worries about Trump meddling in Intel’s business.
“I don’t care how good of businessman you are, give it to the private sector and let people like me be the critic and let the government get to the business of government.,” Tengler said.
Although rare, it’s not unprecedented for the U.S. government to become a significant shareholder in a prominent company. One of the most notable instances occurred during the Great Recession in 2008 when the government injected nearly $50 billion into General Motors in return for a roughly 60% stake in the automaker at a time it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The government ended up with a roughly $10 billion loss after it sold its stock in GM.
The U.S. government’s stake in Intel coincides with Trump’s push to bring production to the U.S., which has been a focal point of the trade war that he has been waging throughout the world. By lessening the country’s dependence on chips manufactured overseas, the president believes the U.S. will be better positioned to maintain its technological lead on China in the race to create artificial intelligence.
Even before gaining the 10% stake in Intel, Trump had been leveraging his power to reprogram the operations of major computer chip companies. The administration is requiring Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, two companies whose chips are powering the AI craze, to pay a 15% commission on their sales of chips in China in exchange for export licenses.
Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend repeatedly denied to the Justice Department witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions with Donald Trump, according to records released Friday meant to distance the Republican president from the disgraced financer.
The records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with praise and denying under questioning from Blanche that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behavior. The administration was presumably eager to make such denials public at a time when the president has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the case.
The transcript release represents the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations that its own officials had created through conspiracy theories and bold pronouncements that never came to pass. By making public two days worth of interviews, officials appear to be hoping to at least temporarily keep at bay sustained anger from Trump’s base as they send Congress evidence they had previously kept from view.
After her interview with Blanche, Maxwell was moved from the low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas to continue serving a 20-year sentence for her 2021 conviction on allegations that she lured teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Her trial featured sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14 told by four women who described being abused as teens in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein’s homes.
Neither Maxwell’s lawyers nor the federal Bureau of Prisons have explained the reason for the move, but one of her lawyers, David Oscar Markus, said in a social media post Friday that Maxwell was “innocent and never should have been tried, much less convicted.”
‘Never inappropriate’
“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Maxwell recalled knowing about Trump and possibly meeting him for the first time in 1990, when her newspaper magnate father, Robert Maxwell, was the owner of the New York Daily News. She said she had been to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, sometimes alone, but hadn’t seen Trump since the mid-2000s.
Asked if she ever heard Epstein or anyone else say Trump “had done anything inappropriate with masseuses” or anyone else in their orbit, Maxwell replied, “Absolutely never, in any context.”
Maxwell was interviewed over the course of two days last month by Blanche at a Florida courthouse. She was given limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said except for in the event of a false statement.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department on Friday began sending to the House Oversight Committee records from the investigation that the panel says it intends to make public after removing victim’s information.
High-profile contacts
The case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financer’s social connections over the years to prominent figures, including Prince Andrew, former President Bill Clinton and Trump, who has said he had a falling-out with Epstein years ago and well before Epstein came under investigation.
Maxwell told Blanche that Clinton was initially her friend, not Epstein’s, and that she never saw him receive a massage — nor did she believe he ever did. The only times they were together, she said, were the two dozen or so times they traveled on Epstein’s plane.
“That would’ve been the only time that I think that President Clinton could have even received a massage,” Maxwell said. “And he didn’t, because I was there.”
She also spoke glowingly of Britain’s Prince Andrew and dismissed as “rubbish” the late Virginia Giuffre’s claim that she was paid to have a relationship with Andrew and that he had sex with her at Maxwell’s London home.
Maxwell sought to distance herself from Epstein’s conduct, repeatedly denying allegations made during her trial about her role. Though she acknowledged that at one point Epstein began preferring younger women, she insisted she never understood that to “encompass children.”
“I did see from when I met him, he was involved or — involved or friends with or whatever, however you want to characterize it, with women who were in their 20s,” she told Blanche. “And then the slide to, you know, 18 or younger looking women. But I never considered that this would encompass criminal behavior.”
The saga has consumed the Trump administration following a two-page announcement from the FBI and Justice Department last month that Epstein had killed himself despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, that a “client list” that Attorney General Pam Bondi had intimated was on her desk did not actually exist, and that no additional documents from the high-profile investigation were suitable to be released.
The announcement produced outrage from conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and Trump supporters who had been hoping to see proof of a government coverup. That expectation was driven in part by comments from officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who on podcasts before taking their current positions had repeatedly promoted the idea that damaging details about prominent people were being withheld.
Patel, for instance, said in at least one podcast interview before becoming director that Epstein’s “black book” was under the “direct control of the director of the FBI.”
The administration had an early stumble in February when far-right influencers were invited to the White House in February and provided by Bondi with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain.
After the first release fell flat, Bondi said officials were poring over a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the FBI and raised expectations of forthcoming releases.
But after a weekslong review of evidence in the government’s possession, the Justice Department determined that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” The department noted that much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”
Faced with fury from his base, Trump sought to quickly turn the page, shutting down questioning of Bondi about Epstein at a White House Cabinet meeting and deriding as “weaklings” supporters who he said were falling for the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”
The Justice Department has responded to a subpoena from House lawmakers by pledging to turn over information.
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Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
Audrey Strauss, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, during a news conference in New York on July 2, 2020.
The FBI on Friday searched the Maryland home and Washington office of former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton as part of a criminal investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information, a person familiar with the matter said.
Bolton, who emerged as an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump after being fired in 2019 and fought with the first Trump administration over a scathing book he wrote documenting his time in the White House, was not in custody Friday and has not been charged with any crimes, said the person who was not authorized to discuss the investigation by name and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
The searches, seemingly the most significant public step the Justice Department has taken against a perceived enemy of the president, are likely to elicit fresh concerns that the Trump administration is using its law enforcement powers to target the Republican’s foes. They come as the Trump administration has moved to examine the activities of other critics, including by authorizing a grand jury investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe that dogged Trump for much of his first term, and as FBI and Justice Department leaders signal their loyalty to the president.
Speaking to reporters during an unscheduled visit to the White House Historical Association, Trump said he had seen news coverage of Friday’s searches and expected to be briefed about it by the Justice Department but also insisted he didn’t “want to know about it.”
“I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer. But I feel that it’s better this way,” Trump said.
Bolton had said in interviews this year that he was mindful that he could be scrutinized, telling the AP in January shortly before Trump took office, “Anybody who ever disagrees with Trump has to worry about retribution. It’s a pretty long list.”
An FBI search like the one at Bolton’s properties requires authorization from a federal magistrate judge. It wasn’t immediately clear what information authorities submitted to demonstrate that they had probable cause of a crime, though the Justice Department years ago launched an investigation into whether Bolton improperly disclosed classified information in a book manuscript he had written. The inquiry was later closed.
Vice President JD Vance denied in an NBC News interview on Friday that Bolton was being targeted because of his criticism of Trump, “If there’s no crime here, we’re not going to prosecute it. If there is a crime here, of course, Ambassador Bolton will get his day in court. That’s how it should be.”
Bolton was in his office building at the time
Bolton was not home for the search of his home, but after it started, he was spotted Friday morning standing in the lobby of the Washington building where he keeps an office and talking to two people with “FBI” visible on their vests. He left a few minutes later and appeared to have gone upstairs in the building. Agents were seen taking bags into the office building through a back entrance.
Messages left with a spokesperson for Bolton were not immediately returned, and a lawyer who has represented Bolton had no immediate comment.
The Justice Department had no comment, but leaders appeared to cryptically refer to the searches in a series of social media posts Friday morning.
FBI Director Kash Patel, who included Bolton on a list of “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” in a 2023 book he wrote, posted on X: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” Attorney General Pam Bondi shared his post, adding: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.”
The Bolton searches also unfolded against the backdrop of a 2022 search for classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, an action that produced since-dismissed criminal charges but remains the source of outrage for the president and supporters who insist he was unjustly targeted despite the retrieval of top-secret records.
Patel said in a Fox Business Channel interview this week that the Mar-a-Lago search represented a “total weaponization and politicization” of the bureau, and Trump himself referenced it on Friday, telling reporters: “I guess his house was raided today, but my house was raided, also.”
Trump and Bolton have been at odds for years
Bolton served as Trump’s third national security adviser for 17 months and clashed with him over Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea.
He faced scrutiny during the first Trump administration over a book he wrote about his time in government that officials argued disclosed classified information. To make its case, the Justice Department in 2020 submitted sworn statements from senior administration officials, including then-National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone, asserting that Bolton’s manuscript included classified information that could harm national security if exposed.
Bolton’s lawyers have said he moved forward with the book after a White House National Security Council official, with whom Bolton had worked for months, said the manuscript no longer contained classified information.
The Biden administration Justice Department in 2021 abandoned its lawsuit and dropped a separate grand jury investigation, with Bolton’s lawyer calling the effort to block the book “politically motivated” and illegitimate.
Bolton’s harshly critical book, “The Room Where It Happened,” portrayed Trump as grossly ill-informed about foreign policy and said he “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government.”
Trump responded by slamming Bolton as a “crazy” warmonger who would have led the country into “World War Six.”
Bolton served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush and also held positions in President Ronald Reagan’s administration. He considered running for president in 2012 and 2016.
Trump, on his first day back in office this year, revoked the security clearances of more than four dozen former intelligence officials, including Bolton. Bolton was also among a group of former Trump officials whose security details were canceled by Trump earlier this year.
In 2022, an Iranian operative was charged in a plot to kill Bolton in presumed retaliation for a 2020 U.S. airstrike that killed the country’s most powerful general.
The handling of classified information by top government officials has been a politically loaded topic in recent years. Besides Trump, the Justice Department also investigated whether then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, mishandled classified information after serving as vice president in the Obama administration, and the FBI also recovered what it said were classified documents from the home of former Trump Vice President Mike Pence. Neither man was charged.
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Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price, Nathan Ellgren, Lindsay Whitehurst, Alanna Durkin Richer, Byron Tau and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy went fishing with U.S. Vice President JD Vance earlier this month and the closest thing he came to catching was a whopping fine.
Lammy was given a written warning for fishing without a license, an Environment Agency spokesperson said Friday.
As far as breaking the law goes, it was pretty small fry but could have netted him a fine of up to 2,500 pounds ($3,380) for the offense.
Lammy, whose spokesperson described it all as an “administrative oversight,” purchased a license after-the-fact and reported himself to the agency.
Lammy hosted Vance and his family, who were vacationing in England, at his country estate south of London on Aug. 8. The two men smiled and laughed as Vance provided what Lammy called Kentucky-style fishing tips.
Apparently, the pointers didn’t help Lammy land a fish.
“The one strain on the special relationship is that all of my kids caught fish, but the foreign secretary did not,” Vance later said.
The Environment Agency would not comment on whether Vance had a license, citing data protection rules. The vice president’s spokesperson did not immediately reply to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment.
The agency said it confirmed that Lammy was given a warning because he had publicized it. In England and Wales, anyone over 13 needs a license for freshwater fishing, the agency said.
In most cases, inexperienced anglers caught without a permit are given warnings — so in that sense, Lammy apparently had some beginner’s luck.
Vice President JD Vance, left, fishes with Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy in a lake in the grounds of Chevening House in Kent, England, Friday, Aug. 8, 2025.
What is a “sea change” and what does it have to do with worker productivity, the computer age, and the “productivity paradox?” The first phrase comes to us from Shakespeare, and it means a sort of mystical transformation, after which something is fundamentally different from before. The second phase comes from Nobel laureate Robert Solow, about how you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Bank of America Research thinks it sees a way that workers really are getting more productive—and AI is only one part of the puzzle.
The late plays by William Shakespeare are alternately called his “romances” or his “problem plays,” because of their ambiguity in tone, as they alternate from passages of magical realism to stark scenes that grapple with complex social issues. At times, they point the way toward the prestige TV of the early 21st century where, for instance, The Sopranos could range from broad comedy to intense violence to avant-garde dream sequences, all in one episode. It’s from the romances that we get phrases that stick with us today, like the description from The Tempest of a “sea change into something rich and strange.”
Full disclosure: The author’s brother is an eminent Shakespearean scholar, often quoted in The New York Times, although never previously in Fortune, and so I asked him to explain what this particular term means. “Toward the end of his career,” Drew Lichtenberg of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC, said in a statement to Fortune, “Shakespeare started writing genre-defying plays with sudden and miraculous changes of fortune.” Shakespeare used the phrase “sea change” to describe a “magical storm at sea that has the power to snuff out life or restore it in less than a second.”
What do Shakespeare’s plays of miraculous changes of fortune have to do with, well, Fortune? Bank of America Institute has projected a “sea change” in the economy. It sees a pivotal transformation in worker productivity at America’s largest companies, driven by lessons from post-pandemic inflation and supercharged by a wave of artificial intelligence and automation. The institute worked hand in hand with projections from Bank of America Research to project a rewiring of the fundamental valuation landscape of the S&P 500, with profound implications for investors and the “quality premium” that U.S. stocks traditionally command.
Fortune talked to BofA Research’s Head of US Equity & Quantitative Strategy, Savita Subramanian, to dig into this change, potentially to something rich and strange. It’s not quite that mystical, she said, but she still thinks it’s a big deal.
Finally, a productivity surge?
Subramanian explained that what her team has projected isn’t as exciting or dramatic as having actual wizards working at the gears of the economy. The more prosaic insight, she says, is that the combination of AI technology and lessons learned from the inflation wave of the 2020s mean that worker productivity is finally showing signs of increasing. That’s the sea change taking place.
At its heart, her work is all about the famous “productivity paradox” identified by Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow. “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” he said in 1987, long before the productivity crisis of the 21st century set in. As Fortune‘s Jeremy Kahn has discussed, workers still don’t seem to be getting more productive despite the bevy of new technologies at their disposal. In fact, McKinsey’s Chris White and Olivia White argued in 2024 that productivity has been dismal for nearly a generation, hovering around 1% a year, with a dip after the Great Financial Crisis. Subramanian agrees, telling Fortune that if you look at productivity measures, “they haven’t really improved all that much since 2001.”
Subramanian wrote on Aug. 8 that the end goal of the massive AI spending that’s rippling through the economy is a “sea-change” in the scale and scope of efficiency gains—and this productivity cycle is already under way. Post-pandemic wage inflation forced companies “to do more with fewer people,” she added, and now AI tools are due to kick that up a notch.
But the official stats don’t show a complete understanding of how productivity really functions, Subramanian explained. So BofA took sales, adjusted for inflation, and then divided sales by the number of people working at S&P 500 companies, showing real sales growth versus number of people, what she called a “decent proxy” for productivity, “because if you’re productive, you are doing things more efficiently, you need less labor. And this is more labor efficiency than anything else.”
Look at what she found.
This means companies are learning to do more with less, and that is kind of magical. Companies have had to do harder work to generate earnings and keep margins healthy, often by replacing their people with processes. “A process is almost free and it’s replicable for eternity,” she said, adding that she thinks this is why the companies exercising efficiency gains have tended to outperform. It’s not only about AI displacing workers, but a fundamental shift in how business is being done.
‘It feels like sorcery’
This discussion may seem on its face to be more boring than a tempest and a wizard, she said, but there is something supernatural about the current moment. “I think people love this AI technology because it feels like sorcery,” she said, before adding, “the truth is it hasn’t really changed the world that much yet, but I don’t think it’s something to be dismissed.”
Overall, Subramanian finds the S&P 500 has shifted from its 1980s model of asset- and labor-intensive manufacturing to asset- and labor-light innovation, namely tech and health care firms. Showing her work, she calculates that the S&P 500 firms with a focus on innovation, measured through high research and development expenditures, trade at structurally higher multiples of 29x forward earnings per share. More capital-intensive manufacturers, on the other hand, trade at a 21x multiple. The current AI boom is actually a bit risky, she wrote, because the massive data center investments represent a shift from an asset-light to an asset-heavier focus.
To be sure, BofA finds that the S&P 500 is now statistically expensive on 19 out of the 20 metrics that they track, including P/E, price to book, price to cash flow, and market cap/GDP. That’s where the sea change matters, because if the shift from manufacturing to innovation is real, then valuations have to shift as well. Hence the “innovation premium” from BofA’s research.
Excluding Tesla, Subramanian talks about the other members of the “Magnificent Seven” as evidence of firms losing some of their innovation premium as a result of a shift toward asset-heaviness. As a basket of stocks, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia and Apple’s average shareholder yield (i.e., dividends plus net buybacks) has dropped by over 1% since 2015.
There are other shifts afoot as well, she told Fortune. “We seem to be at least pausing on this globalization theme,” she said, citing China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 as a big driver of margin expansion, enabling cost-cutting as a huge lever to keep margins expanding. (It was also the year when worker productivity froze in its tracks.)
In the globalization regime, “you didn’t have to think too hard to make money and expand your margins,” she said. It was “very easy and fungible and frictionless” for companies to buy things from different places and contain costs. She also cited the low-interest-rate environment that persisted for much of the past few decades, enabling lots of “financial engineering.”
For example, Subramanian said it was common to see companies that knew they would miss their earnings estimates borrowing money and buying back stock to hit their targets, adding the caveat that “there are good reasons to do share buybacks and bad reasons to do share buybacks.” This all “really created a lot of bizarre behavior.”
Warren Buffett’s long-time fondness for stock buybacks has even come under fire from other investors, with Jeremy Grantham writing in 2023 that it facilitates stock manipulation and should be illegal. BofA Research found in July 2025, however, that stock buybacks had decelerated a bit, albeit they remained high by historical standards.
The situation now is harder in many ways, but companies aren’t able to financially engineer their way to earnings growth, she added. Now that’s a sea change.
One final note on the Shakespearean romances, from Drew Lichtenberg: that appellation came about in the late 1700s, nearly two centuries after Shakespeare’s lifetime, with the birth of the romantic movement. The word “romantic” had previously existed, but it didn’t have its current meaning until Samuel Taylor Coleridge elevated it to mean something that connects back directly to nature and the divine genius of humanity’s self-expression. This was largely a response to the Enlightenment’s elevation of reason and logic and its ultimate achievement: the Industrial Revolution that unleashed modern capitalism on the world. A sea change, indeed.
It was February 2024 when Noland Arbaugh, the first person to get Elon Musk’s experimental brain chip, rolled across the stage in a wheelchair during a Neuralink “all hands” meeting, revealing his identity for the first time.
The room, filled with Neuralink employees, erupted in applause as Arbaugh—who dislocated two of his vertebrae in a swimming accident in 2016 and has since lost sensation and movement below his shoulders—smiled ear-to-ear in his chair, a red Texas A&M hat planted on his head. He grinned as he began to speak: “Hello, humans.”
About a month before that town hall, Arbaugh had undergone surgery at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, about 2.5 hours from his home in Yuma, to get an experimental chip embedded into his brain which Neuralink had been working on and testing on animals for the past nine years. Arbaugh was anesthetized and, in a surgery that lasted just under two hours, a Neuralink-made robotic surgery device implanted the chip and connected tiny threads with more than 1,000 electrodes to the neurons in his brain. Now the device can measure electrical activity, process signals, then translate those signals into commands to a digital device. In layman’s speak, the BCI , or brain-computer interface, allows Arbaugh to control a computer with his mind. As a result, Arbaugh can do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body.
The first day that Arbaugh used his device, he beat the 2017 world record for speed and precision in BCI cursor control. “It was very, very easy to learn how to use,” he tells me in an interview.
When Arbaugh became Participant 1—or “P1” as he is often referred to by Neuralink employees and subsequent study participants—he joined a list of about 80 people to ever receive such a device. Brain chip interfaces have been a focus of neurological study for more than 50 years, and there’s a dozen companies in the U.S. and China that have been conducting limited human trials since 1998.
But becoming the first patient to get a Neuralink implant, in particular, is its own right of passage. For one, Neuralink’s device has threads with more than 1,000 electrodes, giving the device a much higher connectivity rate than most of the BCIs currently being studied in humans in the market. But Neuralink also places its electrodes in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement—a more invasive approach than competitors like Synchron or Precision Neuroscience, which also have ongoing studies of multiple patients. Neuralink’s device is also wireless, versus competitors like Blackrock Neurotech that require a wired connection from the implant through the skull to an external receiver for signal capture and decoding (BlackRock Neurotech sells a wireless processor that has been used for research). That means Neuralink participants can go cordless—but the device is battery powered because of it and does need to be charged: around every five hours or so, Arbaugh says. Neuralink heat treats the charger, a coil, into some of Arbaugh’s hats, so that he can recharge it while wearing a hat. In the beginning, Arbaugh couldn’t use the device while it charged, though that’s since been updated.
Of course, there is also the fact that Neuralink is Elon Musk’s brain chip company, which draws an entirely different level of scrutiny and attention to any study participant. Since Arbaugh revealed himself as “P1,” he has become a public figure, frequently invited on podcasts and having journalists show up at his home. His X account has been hacked, and he told me that a SWAT team showed up with AR15s after someone gave a false tip to the local sheriff’s office that Arbaugh was in danger.
When I first reached out to Arbaugh in early June to see how the BCI had changed his day-to-day 1.5 years in, it took a couple months for us to finally pin down a time. When we finally did hop on the phone, he laughed. “I’m just so busy all the time,” he says. “That is so different than what life was like before… I feel like I’m playing catch-up for eight years of not doing anything—kind of lying around, staring at walls.”
Since Arbaugh became the first Neuralink patient in January 2024, there have been eight more individuals, including one woman, to enroll in the company’s ongoing clinical trials, which are now open in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and the United Arab Emirates. So far, all of the surgeries have taken place at hospitals in the U.S., with two of the participants receiving the implant on the same day at the end of July. All of the study participants suffer from either paralysis or ALS, a nervous system disease that causes loss of muscle control. “Our goal is to really build a whole brain interface,” Neuralink cofounder and president DJ Seo, said during Neuralink’s summer update meeting.
For Arbaugh, the Neuralink device has been entirely transformative, he says. He uses it about 10 hours a day to control his computer so he can study, read, and game—and to handle things like scheduling an interview with me. Arbaugh enrolled in classes at his community college in Arizona, where he has started taking prerequisites he needs for a degree in neuroscience, and, as he tells Fortune, he’s working on starting his own business—paid professional speaking engagements and live talks.
As he talks about all of it with me, his excitement—and a newfound sense of purpose—is palpable. Before his surgery, “I would stay up all night and sleep all day, and I didn’t really [want to] bother anyone or ruin any plans or get in the way of anything,” he says. “I just had no purpose… I was just kind of going through the motions, waiting for something to happen.”
Arbaugh never lost the ability to think or speak due to his accident. But in the last year and a half, he has regained more of the autonomy he lost with his disability, and is able to do more things for himself. “I feel like I have potential again. I guess I always have had potential, but now I’m finding a way to fulfill that potential in meaningful ways. It’s a lot different.”
‘Never doubted for a second’
When you talk to Arbaugh, he makes all of it seem rather simple. He had never heard of a “BCI,” or Neuralink for that matter—until his friend from military school, an Elon Musk buff, learned of the first Neuralink clinical trial while researching SpaceX at the end of 2023, Arbaugh recalls. The friend, Greg Bain, reached out to Arbaugh, who signed up to join the very same day (though Bain spelled his name wrong on the application).
Arbaugh spoke to Neuralink founder Elon Musk before and after his surgery.
Apu Gomes/Getty Images
“I never doubted for a second that it would work,” Arbaugh, who personally didn’t have strong opinions of Elon Musk one way or another, says.
Arbaugh says he received an email from the Barrow Neurological Institute the day after he applied, and started going through the process. There was a screening call and an interview, and then about a month later, he was going into the nearby hospital for a full day of scans and testing. About three months after he applied, Arbaugh found out that he was going to be the first participant, and his surgery was scheduled a few weeks later. While Arbaugh is not paid, Neuralink covers the cost of the surgery and the implant, and the company reimburses him for travel to and from his check-ups or for expenses directly related to the study. (Arbaugh says that, with FDA approval, Neuralink did pay him for two talks he gave at Neuralink, including the February 2024 talk where he revealed his identity for the first time)
Despite the risks of being the first participant of an experimental clinical trial, Arbaugh says it was an easy decision for him. “I decided that, even if it didn’t work—even if something went terribly wrong—I knew that it would help someone down the road,” Arbaugh says. “And I knew that good or bad, they would learn something and push this technology forward.”
Technically I am a cyborg because I have been enhanced by a ‘machine’, but I still see myself as a regular guy
Noland Arbaugh, Neuralink’s first study participant
As you may imagine, it was a little harder for his parents. Arbaugh says he remembers sending his mother the consent forms he had to sign for her to read over, which contained a laundry list of potential risks associated with the surgery—and every imaginable thing that could go wrong with the experimental device. He said she read one or two items and then put them away, unable to read any further. But ultimately, both his parents supported his decision, he says, and never showed that the decision was hard on them. “I hadn’t really been excited about many things before that point, so they were just happy to help in any way they could,” he says.
Arbaugh was also extremely decisive in his choice to go public with his identity. He says he wanted to show people that he believed this device was safe, and what could be possible for those who used it.
“I wanted to share it with people, because I thought it was huge, and I still do,” Arbaugh says. “I think it’s one of the biggest leaps in technology that we’ve had in a really long time, and I think that it’s going to keep growing.”
Arbaugh insists that Neuralink has never tried to dictate what he can or can’t say publicly, and he says he has never been asked to sign any kind of non-disclosure agreement. It’s been the opposite, he says: Neuralink staffers have encouraged him to disclose whatever he’d like to. But he has voluntarily chosen not to talk about some things on occasion. For example, shortly after his surgery, some of the threads retracted, causing him to lose much of the control he had over the device. The incident was later published in the Wall Street Journal, and Neuralink published a blog post about it. It was a big deal, Arbaugh says, but he decided to wait for the team to figure out what had happened and how to repair it, which they did.
Revealing something like that at the time would have been “extremely rash of me, and it would have absolutely made people lose faith in the product,” he says. “That’s not what I want. I love this thing. I love what Neuralink is doing. I love all of it, and I’m really proud of it.”
Next up at Neuralink
In the summer update meeting Neuralink published publicly, Seo laid out what the company is focused on next. Neuralink is starting a trial in the United Arab Emirates, called “Blindsight,” that would help restore sight to the blind. Neuralink is already developing robotic arms for participants, and, during the presentation, Musk said that the company wants to give them sensory control to where they could essentially “inhabit an Optimus robot” and control it with their minds, or attach an Optimus arm or leg to a person to give them full control again of that part of their body.
“The future is going to be weird, but pretty cool,” he said.
The Optimus robots being developed by Tesla could eventually be used to help Neuralink patients
Stanislav Kogiku/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
As of right now, Neuralink is still adding patients to its various trials. At the end of July, Neuralink announced it had received approval to introduce a trial in Great Britain via University College London Hospitals and Newcastle Hospitals.
Neuralink still has plenty of critics for its more-invasive BCI approach and—true to form for all of Elon Musk’s companies—the high employee expectations and long work hours have led to high turnover as a result. Neuralink has also been accused of poor treatment of the monkeys it’s used to test its Link devices. (Regarding treatment of its animals, Neuralink says it works with animals in “the most humane and ethical way possible.” Several of the Neuralink study participants that I spoke also contested the claim of animal mistreatment).
While some of Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX and the Boring Company, have been accused of being lax when it comes to safety precautions, Musk is adamant that Neuralink is moving slowly and carefully as Neuralink tests its brain chips.
“We’re very cautious with the Neuralinks in humans,” Musk said during the summer update. “That’s the reason we’re not moving faster than we are is because we are taking great care with each individual to make sure we never miss.”
As more Neuralink patients become vocal about the Neuralink BCI and the company, Neuralink is garnering more global recognition, and investors are pouring in hundreds of millions of capital.
Indeed, there is something uniquely compelling about the vision at Neuralink and its mission to help those with disabilities. And there’s something uniquely compelling about Arbaugh, too. Perhaps it’s his sense of humor, his earnestness, or his humility—but it’s hard not to like him at once.
He speaks about his three conversations with Musk—once via FaceTime the day of his surgery, in person post-surgery, then later at the Austin Gigafactory—nonchalantly, saying Musk is a “cool dude” who “has done a lot of his life and is super impressive, but at the end of the day is just another guy.”
After our interview, I asked Arbaugh if he considers himself a “cyborg”—the scifi term coined in the ’60s to describe a human being who has been enhanced by a technological body part or device. “Technically I am a cyborg because I have been enhanced by a ‘machine,’” he says. “But I still see myself as a regular guy… But it’s fun to play around with.”
A year-and-a-half after his surgery, Arbaugh still has so much to say about all of it: about neuroscience, about his faith, and about what technology is making possible for paralysis. This whole ordeal has given him a new appreciation for what’s possible, he says: “I always thought that [paralysis was] going to be fixed through drugs, or some sort of new surgery, or something they discovered in science—stem cells or something of that nature.”
But now that he has been thrust into the tech world, Arbaugh says he’s thinking about it differently. “I see how the advancements in tech at this point are going to solve so many things. They are, I think, the future of medicine. I think a lot of disabilities, cures, and answers that we’ve been searching for a long time will come through tech—and that kind of surprised me.”
In the meantime, there is a lot for him to soak up in this new way of life—where he can play Mario Kart with his dad, go back to college, and build a business: “I definitely didn’t expect for this to ever happen,” he says.
Local higher-ed institutions are engaging in hand-to-hand combat to keep out fraudsters who are weaponizing AI to swarm their systems. Some are implementing new measures to keep the scammers out, from AI defense firms, to new barriers to entry, to manual application reviews.
The “ghost-student” epidemic that has been attacking California’s community college system is infesting the nation, with colleges in Arizona, Indiana, Oregon, New Jersey, and Michigan working to defend their institutions from AI-powered fraud rings trying to blend in with legitimate students heading back to school.
Synthetic or “ghost” students refers to masses of falsified or stolen identities scammers use to flood college application and enrollment portals with thousands of submissions in minutes—usually during holidays, weekends, or other times admissions staff will be bare bones. If they’re successful, the fraud rings will attempt to register the fake students for classes and apply for financial aid, often squeezing out real students who can’t get seats in the classes they need. The ghost wielders have even resorted to submitting homework through the use of AI—anything to try to keep from getting dropped from a class. Sometimes, all they’ll get away with is a college email address. But even that has value, security experts said, giving the scammers a veneer of legitimacy as a college student. A simple email address that ends in .edu allows for discounts on laptops, software, music streaming services and, critically, allows the scammers to use those student identities to fraudulently apply for jobs at companies.
The Department of Education launched a national program in June to root out identity theft at colleges and has required new identity verification steps for the Fall 2025 start of the school year. The DOE found $90 million had been disbursed to ineligible students, including $30 million that went to stolen identities of deceased individuals.
Kiran Kodithala, founder of tech firm N2N Services and the LightLeap.AI platform that has been rolled out among colleges across the country to ward against ghost students, said the percentage of fraudulent students in California’s community college system is about 26% across 75 colleges and 1.2 million applications. Outside of California, the LightLeap system has found about one in five applications to be a ghost student. That fraud rate applies to 24 non-California colleges with roughly 340,000 applications processed this summer.
In rural Oregon, officials at Lane Community College are bracing for the fall 2025 onslaught from ghost students, Dawn Whiting, associate dean of enrollment management, told Fortune. The college was first attacked in fall 2022 after it had just launched a new streamlined application process designed to simplify enrollment for students. That weekend, Lane saw about 1,000 applications fly through its system, which was highly unusual for a college with roughly 5,000 students.
Whiting and her team saw the usual fraud markers—similar area codes, email addresses, and phone numbers across hundreds of applications. Whiting disabled all 1,000 or so student email addresses and required additional identity-verification measures. But the scammers pivoted. By summer 2023, the ghosts took a new approach to infiltrating the system, filling up seats in courses with no prerequisites. The college moved to implement a $25 application deposit, even though the move went against the institutional belief in being a barrier-free community resource.
But the fraudsters zig-zagged again. In summer 2024, about 300 applications flowed in all at the same time, said Whiting, and the school dropped all of them from classes. Now, Lane is weighing whether to bring in a third-party AI firm to help strengthen its defenses. Its staff is on the prowl for fraud but it isn’t made up of cybersecurity experts, noted Whiting. Admissions and faculty are mostly focused on educating students and getting them into the right classes for their career path.
“We are open access,” said Colman Joyce, vice president of student services at Lane. “Having students go through more steps to enroll adds more barriers and we’re a community college. A number of our students are not tech savvy when they come here.”
In California, community colleges are required to accept any eligible student and there is no application fee to apply. Kodithala said there’s been debate about whether colleges in other states would see the same attack surges as California, particularly if there were additional hurdles to clear in applying, enrolling, and getting registered for classes such as an application deposit or fee. So far, it runs the gamut with or without a fee in place, he said. In schools outside of California, the rate is about 8% to 15% fraudulent applications, Kodithala said.
Craig Munson, Minnesota State’s chief information security officer who oversees 26 community and technical colleges and seven universities, said the state is using AI and has partnered with other schools and security consortiums to find out new tactics ghost students are using to try to infiltrate school systems.
“Just as we leverage AI to protect ourselves, the attackers also continue to leverage it in new and interesting ways,” Munson said. “It’s sort of like an arms race. Every six months, the attackers tend to stop one way of doing things and move to a different tactic.”
Munson and others in similar roles declined to comment on the specific fraud markers they’re seeing this fall, but the tactics of fake students a few years ago—which are no longer successful—involved made-up names, randomized email addresses that looked similar, and the same addresses and phone numbers tied to applications over and over again. The attackers have since changed gears.
For schools, the issue is wrought with complexity. Community colleges are meant to be open-access education institutions, affordable to those looking to get an associates degree, work toward a career change, or pursue a passion. As California has grappled with the ghost student swarms, officials have debated instituting a nominal fee to add friction to the system of applying.
Minnesota’s system includes three universities that charge a minimal application fee, four that don’t, as well as seven colleges with a fee and 19 that are free. However, Kodithala noted that adding in an application fee invites credit card and gift card fraud. Munson said he has seen the same issue in Minnesota. It also offers a false sense of security if schools believe a fraudster wouldn’t pay $15 or $25 dollars for the chance of thousands more easily, said Kodithala.
“It makes it easier for them to steal because they know that all they have to do is make a payment,” said Kodithala.
Travis Blume, vice president of student affairs and enrollment at Michigan’s Bay de Noc Community College, said the school hasn’t seen hordes of ghost students the way other schools in Michigan have, but he’s prepared if they do. And because the school has only about 2,000 students at its two locations, staff have implemented a manual application review process, he said. Any application that triggers suspicion gets an additional look and the prospective student is asked to confirm their identity through a notary or an in-person visit.
As a leader at a community education institution, Blume struggles with the same issues of adding more friction into a system that is meant to be as accessible as possible. “Community college is about getting people in and getting them educated,” he said.
Still, despite the vulnerability of community institutions against AI-enabled fraud schemes, experts are working to protect the financial aid available to students.
“Fraud in higher-education is something that should be looked at with all seriousness and should be part of an overall risk calculation,” said Minnesota’s Munson. “It’s important to have strong ties with both local and federal law enforcement and with information-sharing groups so that you can get appropriate threat intelligence and be flexible in your responses. As the attackers change, we need to change with them.”
Community colleges from coast to coast are bracing for a new onslaught of fake students who want a chance to steal financial aid and a freshly minted email address.
President Trump said Friday that Intel had agreed to give the U.S. government a stake equivalent to 10% of its market cap. Trump’s comments, scant on details, come as the administration has taken a more interventionist role in American companies including U.S. Steel and Nvidia.
President Donald Trump said Friday that American chipmaker Intel had agreed to give the U.S. government a 10% stake, worth roughly $10 billion.
“They’ve had some bad management over the years, and they got lost. I said, ‘I think you should pay us 10% of your company,’ and they said yes. That’s about $10 billion. I don’t get it; this comes to the United States of America,” he said at a press conference with reporters in the Oval Office.
Intel was previously allocated about $11 billion in grants to build out manufacturing in the U.S. under the CHIPS and Science Act passed by Congress during the Biden administration.
Under the new agreement with Trump, the government will take equity in return for the grant money allocated to Intel through the CHIPS Act, the New York Timesreported. The government will not be involved in company governance or claim a board seat, according to the Times.
Intel shares jumped 5.5%.
A spokesperson for Intel declined to comment to Fortune. The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick previously outlined plans for the U.S. government to receive equity in return for the CHIPS Act cash grants Intel has received.
“We should get an equity stake for our money, so we’ll deliver the money which was already committed under the Biden administration,” Lutnick told CNBC earlier this week.
Trump claimed the agreement came after a conversation with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, whom he previously called on to resign in a post on his social media website, Truth Social.
Trump said Friday he called for Tan’s ouster because of a letter Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sent to Intel’s chairman, expressing concern about Tan’s ties to Chinese companies. Following Trump’s post, Tan traveled to Washington for a meeting with Trump last week.
“He walked in wanting to keep his job, and he ended up giving us $10 billion for the American people,” Trump said Friday.
The Intel agreement comes as the Trump administration has shown a recent willingness to take a more interventionist role with U.S. companies. As a condition of the merger between Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel, the administration demanded that it name a board member to the combined entity and secure a “golden share,” giving it veto power over company decisions.
The U.S. also recently reached a revenue-sharing agreement with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD, giving the government 15% of sales generated through AI chip sales in China as part of its terms for granting export licenses to the companies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week similar agreements could be expanded to other industries.
Some Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have criticized Trump’s plan for the U.S. government to take a stake in Intel.
“If socialism is government owning the means of production, wouldn’t the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea,” Paul wrote Wednesday in a post on X.
Still, Trump was undeterred by the criticism and noted Friday that the government will continue its interventionist path as long as the agreements don’t hurt the U.S. military or security.
“We do a lot of deals like that. I’ll do more of them,” he said.
Jerome Powell set off a Friday boom in the crypto markets. After the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve indicated Friday morning that September rate cuts may be in the cards, Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, soared about 13% to more than $4,814, according to data from Binance. That is only slightly below its all-time high of $4,878 in November 2021.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, is also up. It’s jumped about 4% over the past day to around $117,000, per Binance. The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has risen 6% to more than $4.1 trillion, mirroring the broader surge in the stock market. The S&P 500 is up 1.5% since trading began Friday morning.
“The baseline outlook and the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance,” Powell said at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
Friday’s surge is the latest market shift in a high-stakes wager on whether the Fed will cut rates in September, which would prompt traders to embrace riskier, higher-yield bets, like crypto.
Last week, investors pushed markets higher after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation had only moderately increased 2.7% in July, a lower than expected increase that prompted traders to pile into riskier assets like crypto.
But two days later, the BLS reported a 0.9% increase in the producer price index, a measure of the price swings in the cost of goods produced in the U.S. It was the largest monthly increase in the index since June 2022, and traders withdrew from crypto out of fear that the Fed would likely keep rates steady in response.
As investors awaited Powell’s remarks at Jackson Hole, where Fed chairs have customarily spoken at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the crypto markets then dipped again.
But Friday’s markets wiped away much of the anxiety. Traders are now pricing in an 85% chance that the Fed will cut rates in September, according to CME FedWatch, which gives day-by-day estimates of the likelihood of rate hikes or cuts. It was 72% just before Powell spoke.
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