– Verdict’s in. In an era of #MeToo backlash, with hyper-masculinity ruling from Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley, the retrial of Harvey Weinstein could serve as a kind of litmus test—would his guilty verdict hold up in 2025?
Yesterday, a jury found the former Hollywood producer and convicted sexual predator guilty on the top charge he faced in New York—but acquitted him of the second and failed to reach a verdict on the third.
Three women—former production assistant Miriam Haley, former model Kaja Sokola, and Jessica Mann, who aspired to become an actress—brought claims forward against Weinstein. These weren’t the most headline-grabbing of Weinstein’s dozens of reported offenses—no celebrities involved—but they were what ultimately brought him to justice in 2020 (as did a trial in Los Angeles, which Weinstein is appealing).
Weinstein’s attorneys were counting on the vastly different cultural moment we are in to protect the ex-mogul. As the New York Times put it, his lawyers bet that the “#MeToo movement had waned enough to cast doubt on the motives and credibility of his accusers.” Attorney Arthur Aidala previously said that the women who accused Weinstein were “were trying to take advantage of [him]”—because of the impact of the #MeToo movement. Weinstein has continued to deny the allegations against him.
While accusations against Weinstein sparked the #MeToo movement, they weren’t its sum-total. The movement led to the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, which allowed victims of years-old abuse to come forward—including musician Cassie, leading to Diddy’s ongoing trial today.
The jury is expected to return today to deliberate on the third charge. Whatever the outcome, #MeToo is bigger than Weinstein—but the movement can still count his partial verdict as a measured victory during a hostile political moment.
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
Spotify has found a new HR leader: Anna Lundström.
The native Swede and New York City dweller was appointed as CHRO of the music streaming giant in April of this year. She previously served as VP of HR, and has been with the company since 2016.
One of Lundström’s most notable contributions to the company so far was the formation of the company’s “work from anywhere” policy, which launched in 2021. A Spotify spokesperson previously toldFortune that the remote work strategy led to a 50% drop in attrition.
In her new role, Lundström oversees all aspects of the company’s human resources department, including people strategy, and managing a workforce of 7,000 employees across 180 markets. And her appointment comes at an exciting time for Spotify: the company celebrated its first full year of profitability since it was founded in 2008.
Lundström sat down with Fortune to discuss her vision for the CHRO role, plans to integrate AI into her department’s workflow, focusing on employee mental health, and connecting people strategy with business strategy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Fortune: What first brought you to Spotify?
Anna Lundström: I was with NASDAQ for almost a decade before joining Spotify. I still had about 20 years in HR, but was obviously working in more of a financial services environment. I loved it, but Spotify reached out and was just starting to expand in the U.S.
[Spotify] is obviously a product that I love and use, so that was important for me as I took my next step, but also the match with me being a Swede in the U.S. and being part of the Spotify journey and expansion here, was really attractive.
You’ve said that one of the goals is to make AI a key focus across the organization. How are you planning to integrate AI into your HR department?
My team partners closely with the product and technology team. A couple weeks ago, Gustav [Söderström], our chief product officer, and I, went out to the full organization with a set of guiding principles around not only the importance of AI, but [how] we are taking the learning approach.
A lot of companies are missing out [by] saying, ‘Get on the AI train!’ But they’re not really doing that. They just want to be fast and out there with the world.
We launched a set of trainings for our employees—everything from prompt trainings to more advanced ones, based on your role. It’s not about rolling out [AI]. It’s rolled out, and now everyone is working on learning.
Leaning fully into the learning, making our employees future ready, providing them with AI literacy skills—that will position them really well. We don’t know what the future will hold, but the bet we’re taking is making everyone AI ready.
In HR specifically, we have also been early adopters. We’ve had a couple of people analytics tools for about two years. Disco is one of them, which gives us real time data. So no more Excel spreadsheets. We go into a Disco feature we’ve built ourselves that gets real time attrition, engagement, and more. We have another platform, Echo, that is built on machine learning and serves as our internal LinkedIn.
What are some of your other priorities as CHRO?
Another big focus is mental health. We’re really leaning into that. We have doubled down on more support for our employees. This year we launched a new mental health platform that provides a more personalized experience, Modern Health. We believe that a sustainable and healthy workforce is a competitive advantage. Retaining our top talent is a massive focus of mine.
Culture is always evolving. Product and business have evolved a lot one year into profitability. For me, a genuine people experience is when you really tie people strategy to business strategy, and they are one.
One of Spotify’s hallmarks is its “Work from Anywhere” policy. How do you view the RTO debate in 2025?
Fun fact: My colleague, Alexander Westerdahl, and I were the architects of that policy. We launched early in 2021. One of our key success factors, as a product but also in our employee offerings, is that we do not look at other companies that much. Of course we set benchmarks. But we have always believed that we have really talented, driven employees with high agency—motivation to work hard, have fun and deliver on the results. Then we don’t necessarily care where you work from. What we have found in the years since we started “Work from Anywhere” is that we need to have those touch points where people come together.
We recently implemented what we call “Core Week,” which is one week per year when your core team comes together and you work from an office of your choosing. The whole purpose is coming together, working, socializing, and planning together.
What mistakes do you think leaders are making when it comes to RTO?
When we launched Work from Anywhere, we said that [companies] need to do what’s right for their business. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. If you really trust and respect your employees, as long as you’re able to explain the reasoning, then you can pick whatever works for you.
Which Spotify benefits are you most proud of?
Parental leave is huge. Our employees love it. Six months, all paid. For all parents: men, women, same sex couples, those carrying a child via surrogacy—it’s for everyone.
One of our most beloved ones is what we call Wellness Week. That came out of the pandemic. Everyone was at home and getting Zoom fatigue. So we came up with an idea to offer one week where the whole company is off. So now we are, for the fifth year in a row, closing all our offices in the first week of November. All 7,500 people, including executive management—no emails, no slacks, no WhatsApp. People go and spend their time recharging, being with their families.
People love that because usually, when you’re on vacation, you come back to a full inbox and a long to-do list. But here, everyone’s off at the same time.
Sometimes CHROs can be left out of conversations around the C-suite. What is your relationship like to the other executive leaders at Spotify?
One of the key success factors of being an effective HR professional, at all levels, is obviously your capability to build relationships, to harness the relationships, act with high integrity. But it’s also about being able to connect the dots between business, product priorities and people strategy—that’s high level.
I’ve been with the company for 10 years. I’ve supported almost all teams in the organization. I know the business and product inside and out. I’ve spent a lot of time with our C-suite and executive team.
Once a week, the “E-team,” or executive team, meets for three hours every Tuesday afternoon. We discuss top priorities, how we’re tracking progress on these priorities, people and culture items, whatever that may be. That has made us so connected and collaborative and fast as an organization. I feel extremely well positioned for the job based on my tenure here and where I’ve worked in the organization and the relationships I’ve had.
“I thought I was never going to raise that fund,” said Senkut. “I had my first son coming, and it was a really tough time…So, when I heard that first ‘yes,’ I thought it was a miracle.”
The year was 2009, and Aydin Senkut—a Turkish immigrant who’d first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1995—had been investing since he left Google in 2005, where he’d been the company’s first product manager and was official employee number 63. He wanted to prove he wasn’t just lucky, but that he could engineer luck, both for himself and for others. Determined to build something from scratch like his entrepreneurial parents, Senkut in 2006 launched Felicis Ventures, a firm named after the Latin word for “good fortune.” His fortune wasn’t very good at first, as he tells it—rejected by former Google colleagues almost unanimously, he forged ahead fundraising, drowning in nos. That first institutional fundraise, finally, pulled together $41 million, with early backers like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. At a moment when little else was in his control, Senkut focused on what he could: his business card.
“I was so into details, like Steve Jobs,” laughed Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis. “I literally found this specific printing shop in South San Francisco. They were the only ones that took heavy card stock and embossed business cards.”
He still keeps that card—it’s even got a QR code that to this day, links back to his contact information. Now, three logos, nearly 20 years, and nine funds later: Felicis has raised its tenth fund at $900 million, the firm’s largest to date, Fortune can exclusively report. It comes two years after the firm announced its ninth fund of $825 million in 2023, and the size of the 35-person team has remained consistent since. The firm’s current portfolio includes Notion, Plaid, and Canva, along with AI startups like Supabase, Mercor, Runway, Poolside, Revel, and Skild AI. Credit Karma, Adyen, Shopify, and Weights & Biases are some of Felicis’s key exits over the years. But Senkut remains acutely attuned to the version of himself that was rejected by dozens of other VCs and LPs at the very beginning.
“You can do one of two things,” he said. “You can either admit defeat, let people put you in a box, like you’re a loser. Or you can take that and say ‘No, I’m not a loser.’ And the way to show them they’re wrong is that you have to pull magic tricks out of nowhere…That’s why there will never be a victory lap.”
Senkut is often described as being in “founder mode”—a term originated via Brian Chesky and Paul Graham to describe a relentless, hands-on leadership style. That ethos carries through in how Felicis engages with startups: The firm includes a unique clause in its term sheets promising never to vote against a founder, contractually aligning itself with the entrepreneur.
“We kept saying we were founder-friendly,” said Senkut. “One of our founders was like: What the hell does that even mean? Just commit. So, it’s now in our term sheet.”
I tell Senkut that I could easily see that going wrong, and he doesn’t flinch.
“It could go really wrong,” he said. “We’ve made hundreds of investments and there were only two in the history of Felicis where things have gone drastically wrong. But you can’t be successful on fear. You’ll only be successful on the companies that work out…That’s the most misunderstood aspect of venture. People think we sit at a table, eliminating risk. And no, actually—you’re taking it on. You’re running into the risk. It’s like F1. One driver says, ‘I can crash, but that’s what it’s gonna take to cut another 0.01 second and get over the finish line first.’ That’s the mindset.”
Felicis was notably active during the ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) era, when markets were frothy and valuations were especially high. According to prior TechCrunch reporting, Felicis funded 50% more deals in 2022 than in 2021. Senkut isn’t worried how that might shake out—that’s part of the race, too.
“If you’re not active, you’re actually going backwards,” he told Fortune. “We can’t say that we’ll just sit it out for a while: Nobody’s going to care about you in nine months. So we never stop investing…The big fabric that people are missing is this: The only thing that matters in this business is not the stages, ownership, whatever. It’s all about how you look after you invest. Is there a hockey stick growth?”
One of the most dramatic growth stories in AI right now is recruiting startup Mercor, which raised a $100 million Series B led by Felicis in February. Mercor CEO and cofounder Brendan Foody wasn’t planning to raise at the time—but when Felicis invited him and his cofounders to race Ferraris in Las Vegas, he figured, “why not?”
“They’ve got incredible hustle—like very few other firms,” Foody told Fortune. “They asked what valuation we thought made sense, we gave them a range of $1 billion to $2 billion, and they went straight to the top. We closed the deal.”
Foody sees Felicis as uniquely poised to help Mercor—whose revenue surpassed $75 million over about two years—in its next phase of growth, citing the firm’s deep understanding of frontier AI research and hiring help. Felicis managing partner Sundeep Peechu and partner James Detweiler have been taking calls with “almost every candidate” as Mercor has been hiring, Foody said. The firm doesn’t disclose ownership, but told Fortune it varies—Mercor was the largest check of Felicis’s last fund at $50 million, while the smallest was $100,000.
Supporting these types of AI companies is key to Felicis’s future and, to this end, the firm this year hired OpenAI’s Peter Deng as a general partner. (Deng was a consumer VP leading the team working on ChatGPT.) Katie Reister, Felicis managing director and GP of fund of funds investing, said that Felicis is actively making choices to stay competitive in a venture space that, over the last two decades, has become more ferociously competitive.
“We’re constantly evolving what our platform looks like, and does it match the game that’s being played today,” said Reister, who was a Felicis LP herself for seven years while an SVB director. “I actually don’t like to think of venture as gambling, so that’s not the association I’m making. I think of it as getting to play a game over and over, but the game changes every time. How do you keep winning? You have to constantly change. You have to be aware of that, recognize that ego doesn’t matter. The fact you’ve won before doesn’t matter.”
To win, Felicis is ultimately looking to underwrite without reservation, going all-in, come what may. Data bears this out: In fund nine, 94% of Felicis’s investments were at the seed or Series A stage, and 87% of the capital deployed went into rounds where the firm led or co-led. They expect a similar breakdown for fund ten. When Senkut was raising the first institutional Felicis fund, he heard 50 nos before landing his first yes—from Judith Elsea, managing director at Weathergage Capital.
“Felicis has reinvented itself from a small, scrappy seed stage investor to a large, scrappy multi-stage investor who regularly leads deals,” says Elsea.
While startup investors often catch an “innovation wave” and reap big profits, Elsea wrote Fortune in an email, the VCs who stay relevant are the ones who are already paddling out for the next wave as the first one reaches the beach: “Being a VC investor is hard to do well and particularly hard to do well over long periods of time. Felicis is showing that kind of stamina.”
Senkut goes to waves too, and we talk about the HBO series, The 100 Foot Wave. You have to be ready to wipe out seriously in order to succeed spectacularly.
“If you ask me, like, our biggest fail mode is we need to take more smart risks,” said Senkut. “So, you have to really unwind your brain, like that surfer in Portugal. I used to say we’re wave surfers. But I realized there are too many good surfers, and too many waves. So, now I’m saying we’re tsunami surfers.”
A string of recent cyberattacks and data breaches involving the systems of major retailers have started affecting shoppers.
United Natural Foods, a wholesale distributor that supplies Whole Foods and other grocers, said this week that a breach of its systems was disrupting its ability to fulfill orders — leaving many stores without certain items.
In the U.K., consumers could not order from the website of Marks & Spencer for more than six weeks — and found fewer in-store options after hackers targeted the British clothing, home goods and food retailer. A cyberattack on Co-op, a U.K. grocery chain, also led to empty shelves in some stores.
Cyberattacks have been on the rise across industries. But infiltrations of corporate technology carry their own set of implications when the target is a consumer-facing business.
Beyond potentially halting sales of physical goods, breaches can expose customers’ personal data to future phishing or fraud attempts.
Here’s what you need to know.
Cyberattacks are on the rise overall
Despite ongoing efforts from organizations to boost their cybersecurity defenses, experts note that cyberattacks continue to increase across the board.
In the past year, there’s also been an “uptick in the retail victims” of such attacks, said Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit.
“Cyber criminals are moving a little quicker than we are in terms of securing our systems,” he said.
Ransomware attacks — in which hackers demand a hefty payment to restore hacked systems — account for a growing share of cyber crimes, experts note. And of course, retail isn’t the only affected sector. Tracking by NCC Group, a global cybersecurity and software escrow firm, showed that industrial businesses were most often targeted for ransomware attacks in April, followed by companies in the “consumer discretionary” sector.
Attackers know there’s a particular impact when going after well-known brands and products that shoppers buy or need every day, experts note.
“Creating that chaos and that panic with consumers puts pressure on the retailer,” Steinhauer said, especially if there’s a ransom demand involved.
Ade Clewlow, an associate director and senior adviser at the NCC Group, points specifically to food supply chain disruptions. Following the cyberattacks targeting M&S and Co-op, for example, supermarkets in remote areas of the U.K., where inventory already was strained, saw product shortages.
“People were literally going without the basics,” Clewlow said.
Personal data is also at risk
Along with impacting business operations, cyber breaches may compromise customer data. The information can range from names and email addresses, to more sensitive data like credit card numbers, depending on the scope of the breach. Consumers therefore need to stay alert, according to experts.
“If (consumers have) given their personal information to these retailers, then they just have to be on their guard. Not just immediately, but really going forward,” Clewlow said, noting that recipients of the data may try to commit fraud “downstream.”
Fraudsters might send look-alike emails asking a retailer’s account holders to change their passwords or promising fake promotions to get customers to click on a sketchy link. A good rule of thumb is to pause before opening anything and to visit the company’s recognized website or call an official customer service hotline to verify the email, experts say.
It’s also best not to reuse the same passwords across multiple websites — because if one platform is breached, that login information could be used to get into other accounts, through a tactic known as “credential stuffing.” Steinhauer adds that using multifactor authentication, when available, and freezing your credit are also useful for added lines of defense.
Which companies have reported recent cybersecurity incidents?
A range of consumer-facing companies have reported cybersecurity incidents recently — including breaches that have caused some businesses to halt operations.
United Natural Foods, a major distributor for Whole Foods and other grocers across North America, took some of its systems offline after discovering “unauthorized activity” on June 5.
In a securities filing, the company said the incident had impacted its “ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders.” United Natural Foods said in a Wednesday update that it was “working steadily” to gradually restore the services.
Still, that’s meant leaner supplies of certain items this week. A Whole Foods spokesperson told The Associated Press via email that it was working to restock shelves as soon as possible. The Amazon-owned grocer’s partnership with United Natural Foods currently runs through May 2032.
Meanwhile, a security breach detected by Victoria’s Secret last month led the popular lingerie seller to shut down its U.S. shopping site for nearly four days, as well as to halt some in-store services. Victoria’s Secret later disclosed that its corporate systems also were affected, too, causing the company to delay the release of its first quarter earnings.
Several British retailers — M&S, Harrods and Co-op — have all pointed to impacts of recent cyberattacks. The attack targeting M&S, which was first reported around Easter weekend, stopped it from processing online orders and also emptied some store shelves.
The company estimated last month that the it would incur costs of 300 million pounds ($400 million) from the attack. But progress towards recovery was shared Tuesday, when M&S announced that some of its online order operations were back — with more set to be added in the coming weeks.
Other breaches exposed customer data, with brands like Adidas, The North Face and reportedly Cartier all disclosing that some contact information was compromised recently.
In a statement, The North Face said it discovered a “small-scale credential stuffing attack” on its website in April. The company reported that no credit card data was compromised and said the incident, which impacted 1,500 consumers, was “quickly contained.”
Meanwhile, Adidas disclosed last month that an “unauthorized external party” obtained some data, which was mostly contact information, through a third-party customer service provider.
Whether or not the incidents are connected is unknown. Experts like Steinhauer note that hackers sometimes target a piece of software used by many different companies and organizations. But the range of tactics used could indicate the involvement of different groups.
Companies’ language around cyberattacks and security breaches also varies — and may depend on what they know when. But many don’t immediately or publicly specify whether ransomware was involved.
Still, Steinhauer says the likelihood of ransomware attacks is “pretty high” in today’s cybersecurity landscape — and key indicators can include businesses taking their systems offline or delaying financial reporting.
Overall, experts say it’s important to build up “cyber hygiene” defenses and preparations across organizations.
“Cyber is a business risk, and it needs to be treated that way,” Clewlow said.
Good morning. The dual role of chief financial officer and chief operating officer is becoming more common, and the experiences of two industry-leading executives demonstrate that the CFO and COO positions can be complementary.
When Gina Goetter joined Hasbro—the largest publicly traded toymaker in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world—in 2023, she was hired as both CFO and COO, a combination that immediately drew her interest. It was her second CFO role, following her time at Harley-Davidson.
Earlier in Goetter’s career at General Mills, she developed the view that finance is inherently operational. “I was kind of born and bred into this mindset that every operational decision is linked to a financial one—they just go hand in hand,” she explained during a panel session at the Fortune COO Summit on Tuesday.
Hasbro has the same philosophy, Goetter said. “When you’re working with a company that is manufacturing a product, that is making real cost decisions—real investment decisions—there is no path that isn’t either operational or financial,” she said.
Panelist Amrita Ahuja, CFO and COO of Block, a Fortune 500 fintech company, shared that during the first half of her career, she was much more of a generalist, starting in strategy and corporate development. The second half of her career focused on finance, where she developed strong analytical skills and a passion for driving insights from data.
Ahuja joined Block in 2019, later adding COO responsibilities in 2023. The company offers customers financial options such as payment plans through Afterpay, various lending choices for Square sellers, and the ability for Cash App users to split paycheck deposits among cash, Bitcoin, or stocks.
In addition to overseeing finance, Ahuja leads the legal and people functions, oversees communications and policy, and serves as chair of Square Financial Services, the company’s industrial bank.
Of the dual CFO-COO role, Goetter explained: “It’s very blended. You can’t do one without the other, and I find combining them actually creates a lot of simplicity across the organization.”
Are there some complexities in serving in the dual role? “The tension in the role is aspiration and discipline,” Ahuja noted. As CFO, you advocate for growth while ensuring responsible capital allocation, she explained. As COO, you enable the business to move quickly but responsibly. “No COO role is alike,” she said.
Some large companies are going beyond the dual CFO-COO role and combining the functions to create a hybrid position. Bridging finance and operations is strategic in an increasingly complex business environment.
You can watch the Fortune COO Summit panel session here.
Scammers disguised as thousands of fake students are flooding colleges across the U.S. with enrollment applications. The “students” are registering under stolen or fabricated identities, getting accepted to schools, and then vanishing with financial aid and college-minted email addresses that give the fraudsters a veneer of legitimacy.
Dr. Jeannie Kim went to sleep thinking about budgets and enrollment challenges. She woke up to discover her college had been invaded by an army of phantom students.
“When we got hit in the fall, we got hit hard,” Kim, president of California’s Santiago Canyon College, told Fortune. “They were occupying our waitlists and they were in our classrooms as if they were real humans—and then our real students were saying they couldn’t get into the classes they needed.”
Kim worked quickly to bring in an AI firm to help protect the college and strengthen its guardrails, she said. Santiago Canyon wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students, said Kim. By spring 2025, ghost student enrollments had dropped from 14,000 since the start of the spring term to fewer than 3,000.
Ghost students
Across America’s community colleges and universities, sophisticated criminal networks are using AI to deploy thousands of “synthetic” or “ghost” students—sometimes in the dead of night—to attack colleges. The hordes are cramming themselves into registration portals to enroll and illegally apply for financial aid. The ghost students then occupy seats meant for real students—and have even resorted to handing in homework just to hold out long enough to siphon millions in financial aid before disappearing.
The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House’s Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure’s client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts.
“Imagine a world where 20% of the student population are fraudulent,” said Burris. “That’s the reality of the scale.”
At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. “It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school’s enrollment system,” said Burris.
The scheme has also proven incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire, the DOE announced this month that it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms.
“Every dollar stolen by a ghost is a dollar denied to a real student attempting to change their life,” Burris explained. “That’s a misallocation of public capital we really can’t afford.”
Under siege
The strikes tend to unfold in the quiet evening hours when campuses are asleep, and with surgical precision, explained Laqwacia Simpkins, CEO of AMSimpkins & Associates, an edtech firm that works with colleges and universities to verify student identities with a fraud-detection platform called SAFE.
Bryce Pustos, director of administrative systems at Chaffey Community College, recalled last fall’s enrollment period when faculty members reported going to bed with zero students registered for classes and waking up to find a full class and a mile-long waitlist.
Michael Fink, Chaffey’s chief technology officer, said the attacks took place at scale and within minutes. “We’ll see things like 50 applications coming in within two seconds and then somebody enrolling in all 36 seats in a class within the first minute,” Fink told Fortune.
Simpkins told Fortune the scammers have learned to strike on vulnerable days on the academic calendar, around holidays, enrollment deadlines, culmination, or at the start or end of term when staff are already stretched thin or systems are more loosely monitored.
“They push through hundreds and thousands of records at the same time and overwhelm the staff,” Simpkins said.
Plus, enrollment workers and faculty are just that, noted Simpkins; they’re educators who aren’t trained in detecting fraud. Their remit is focused on access and ensuring real students can get into the classes they need, she added, not policing fraud and fake students who are trying to trick their way to illicit financial gain. That aspect also makes the institutions more vulnerable to harm, said Simpkins.
“These are people who are admissions counselors who process applications and want to be able to admit students and give everybody an equal chance at an education,” she said.
Sadly, professors have dealt with cruel whiplash from the attacks, noted John Van Weeren, vice president of higher education at IT consulting firm Voyatek.
“One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section,” recalled Van Weeren. “When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people.”
Follow the FAFSA
In a nightmare twist, community and technical colleges are seen as low-hanging fruit for this fraud scheme precisely because of how they’ve been designed to serve and engage with local communities and the public with as few barriers to entry as possible. Community colleges are often required to accept every eligible student and typically don’t charge fees for applying. While financial-aid fraud isn’t at all new, the fraud rings themselves have evolved from pandemic-era cash grabs and boogeyman in their mom’s basement, said Burris.
“There is an acceleration due to the proliferation of these automated technologies,” he said. “These are organized criminal enterprises—fraud rings—that are coming both from within the U.S., but also internationally.”
Maurice Simpkins, president and co-founder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi, Kenya that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges.
The attacks specifically zero in on coursework that maximizes financial-aid eligibility, said Mike McCandless, vice president of student services at Merced College. Social sciences and online-only classes with large numbers of students that allow for as many credits or units as possible are often choice picks, he said.
For the spring semester, Merced booted about half of the 15,000 initial registrations that were fraudulent. Among the next tranche of about 7,500, some 20% were caught and removed from classes, freeing up space for real students.
The human cost
In addition to financial theft, the ghost student epidemic is causing real students to get locked out of classes they need to graduate. Oftentimes, students have planned their work or child-care schedule around classes they intend to take—and getting locked out has led to a cascade of impediments.
“When you have fraudulent people taking up seats in classes, you have actual students who need to take those classes who can’t now, and it’s a barrier,” said Pustos.
The scheme continues to evolve, however, requiring constant changes to the algorithms schools are using to detect ghost students and prevent them from applying for financial aid—making the problem all the more explosive. Multiple school officials and cybersecurity experts interviewed by Fortune were reluctant to disclose the current signs of ghost students, for fear of the scheme further iterating.
In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.
Maurice Simpkins noted an uptick this year in the use of American stolen identities as more schools have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the fraud rings. He’s seen college graduates who have had their identities stolen get re-enrolled at their former university, or have had their former education email address used to enroll at another institution.
Scammers are also using bizarre-looking short-term and disposable email addresses to register for classes in a 10-minute period before they can get their hands on a .edu email address, said Simpkins. That verified email address is “like a gold bar,” Simpkins explained. The fraudster then appears legitimate going forward and is eligible for student discounts on hardware, software, and can use the college’s cloud storage.
“We had a school that reached out to us because some fraudsters ordered some computers and devices and other materials and then had them delivered overseas,” said Simpkins. “And they did it using an account with the school’s .edu email address.”
McCandless said initially it was easy to tell if a fake student was disguised as a local applicant because their IP address was generated overseas. But just a few semesters later, IP addresses were local. When the college’s tech team looked deeper, they would find the address was from an abandoned building or somewhere in the middle of Lake Merced.
Every time the school did something to lock out fraudulent applicants, the scammers would learn and tweak, McCandless said. The school’s system is now designed to block ghost applicants right out of the gate and at multiple stages before they start enrolling in classes.
McCandless said professors are assigning students homework for the first day of class, but the ghost students are completing the assignments with AI. Faculty have caught the fake homework, however, by noticing that half the class handed in identical work, or detecting the use of ChatGPT, for instance.
“They’re very innovative, very good at what they do,” said McCandless. “I just think the consistency with which they continue to learn and improve—it’s a multimillion-dollar scheme, there’s money there, why wouldn’t you invest in it?”
‘Rampant fraud‘
According to the DOE, the rate of financial fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that “imperils the federal student assistance programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act.” In a statement, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the new temporary fix will help prevent identity theft fraud.
“When rampant fraud is taking aid away from eligible students, disrupting the operations of colleges, and ripping off taxpayers, we have a responsibility to act,” said McMahon.
Ultimately, what schools are trying to do is put in place hurdles that make it unappealing for scammers to attack because they have to do more front-end work to make the fraud scheme efficient, explained Jesse Gonzalez, assistant vice chancellor of IT services at Rancho Santiago. However, the schools are attempting to balance the delicate issue of accepting everyone eligible and remaining open to vulnerable or undocumented students, he said. “The more barriers you put in place, the more you’re going to impact students and it’s usually the students who need the most help.”
Dr. Kim from Santiago Canyon College fears too many measures in place to root out fraud could make it more difficult for students and members of the community—who for various reasons might have a new email, phone number, or address—to access education and other resources that can help them improve their lives.
“Our ability to provide that democratic education to those that would not otherwise have access is at stake and it’s in jeopardy because of these bad actors turning our system into their own piggy banks,” said Kim. “We have to continue to figure out ways to keep them out so the students can have those rightful seats—and keep it open access.”
An Air India passenger plane bound for London with more than 240 people on board crashed Thursday in India’s northwestern city of Ahmedabad, the airline said.
Visuals on local television channels showed smoke billowing from the crash site in what appeared to be a populated area near the airport in Ahmedabad, a city with a population of more than 5 million and the capital of Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state.
Firefighters doused the smoking wreckage of the plane, which would have been fully loaded with fuel shortly after takeoff, and adjacent multi-story buildings with water. Charred bodies lay on the ground.
“The scenes emerging of a London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city of Ahmedabad are devastating,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement.
Modi called the crash “heartbreaking beyond words.”
“In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected,” he said in a social media post.
The airline said the Gatwick Airport-bound flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew. Of those, Air India said there were 169 Indians, 53 Britons, seven Portuguese and one Canadian.
Faiz Ahmed Kidwai, the director general of the directorate of civil aviation, told The Associated Press that Air India flight AI 171, a Boeing 787-8, crashed into a residential area called Meghani Nagar five minutes after taking off at 1:38 p.m. local time. He said 244 people were on board and it was not immediately possible to reconcile the discrepancy with Air India’s numbers.
All efforts were being made to ensure medical aid and relief support at the site, India’s Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu posted on X.
The 787 Dreamliner is a widebody, twin-engine plane. This is the first crash ever of a Boeing 787 aircraft, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.
Boeing said it was aware of the reports of the crash and was “working to gather more information.”
The aircraft was introduced in 2009 and more than 1,000 have been delivered to dozens of airlines, according to the flightradar24 website.
Air India’s chairman, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, said at the moment “our primary focus is on supporting all the affected people and their families.”
He said on X that the airline had set up an emergency center and support team for families seeking information about those who were on the flight.
“Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of all those affected by this devastating event,” he said.
British Cabinet minister Lucy Powell said the government will provide “all the support that it can” to those affected by the crash.
“This is an unfolding story, and it will undoubtedly be causing a huge amount of worry and concern to the many, many families and communities here and those waiting for the arrival of their loved ones,” she told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
“We send our deepest sympathy and thoughts to all those families, and the government will provide all the support that it can with those in India and those in this country as well,” she added.
Britain has very close ties with India. There were nearly 1.9 million people in the country of Indian descent, according to the 2021 U.K. census.
The last major passenger plane crash in India was in 2020 when an Air India Express Boeing-737 skidded off a hilltop runway in southern India, killing 21 people.
The worst air disaster in India was on Nov. 12, 1996, when a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight collided midair with a Kazakhastan Airlines Flight near Charki Dadri in Haryana state, killing all 349 on board the two planes.
The crash comes days before the opening of the Paris Air Show, a major aviation expo where Boeing and European rival Airbus will showcase their aircraft and battle for jet orders from airline customers.
Boeing has been in recovery mode for more than six years after Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 Max 8, plunged into the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. Five months later, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing 737 Max 8, crashed after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, killing 157 passengers and crew members.
Shares of Boeing Co. tumbled nearly 9% before trading opened in the U.S.
The impact of tariffs will depend on who bears their cost, says Jeff Klingelhofer, managing director at Aristotle Pacific—but it doesn’t have to be the consumer, who is “tapped out.” Corporations can better handle an import tax hit because margins “have never been higher,” he says.
With U.S.-China talks ending in essentially a tariff stasis, investors are once again looking at the economy to figure out just how much of a shock the tariffs are going to be.
“The system is incredibly, incredibly fragile,” Jeff Klingelhofer, managing director and portfolio manager at Aristotle Pacific, told Fortune. However, the amount of shock tariffs ultimately deliver will depend on who bears the cost, he said.
Typically, that’s the end user. Importers and economists have for months been saying that the consumer usually pays the cost of import taxes.
“Most suppliers are passing through tariffs at full value to us,” a chemical products company told the Institute of Supply Management in a survey last month. “[T]axes always get passed through to the customer.” Studies of the 2018-2019 tariffs, which were much smaller, found nearly 100% of the added costs were passed on to the consumer. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that tariffs will cost the typical household $2,836 over the year.
Except, Klingelhofer said, this time could really be different.
“It doesn’t have to be the U.S. consumer” that pays tariffs. “You’re likely to see companies ultimately bear more of the pain of tariffs than consumers.”
Indeed, after absorbing four years’ worth of price hikes and shrinkflation on everything from household staples to housing, consumers may not be able to take much more pain. A record 77% are holding some debt, according to the Federal Reserve.
“The state of consumers is tapped out,” Klingelhofer said. However, “Corporate balance sheets are incredibly strong — margins have essentially never been higher in the history of humankind.”
Indeed, corporate profits as a portion of national income, a figure that never exceeded the single-digits until about two decades ago, surged to a record 13.6% in 2021. At they start of this year, they were just slightly lower, at 12.8%.
Companies have an additional incentive to absorb the cost of at least some of the tariffs, he said—the president, whom CEOs have been loath to cross, is watching. Trump’s spat with Walmart in May, directing the retailer to “eat” the cost of tariffs, is a prime example of the type of public policy via social media Klingelhofer said will be much more common if tariffs start to get passed on.
While the exact level of tariffs that companies, consumers and everyone else will pay is still up in the air, Klingelhofer says the direction is clear: “iIt’s going up notably.”
“I find it very hard to believe we exit this presidency with tariffs anywhere below the low teens, versus 1.7% of GDP,” their average level at the beginning of 2025, he said.
Kroger, whose CEO Rodney McMullen is pictured here in 2024, was one of many large companies accused of running up margins during the post-pandemic inflation surge.
Over a two-year span, the Southern Co.’s Plant Vogtle power complex repeatedly made history, potentially changing the entire economics of the nuclear industry with a new uranium fuel.
In 2023, Georgia’s Vogtle brought online the nation’s first new nuclear reactor built from scratch in more than three decades. Last year, a second new reactor turned on, transforming Vogtle into the nation’s second-largest power station.
Now, one of Vogtle’s legacy reactors quietly marked another major nuclear milestone that experts say could shake up the rules for the industry.
Engineers loaded the old reactor with a new type of uranium fuel enriched above the traditional threshold and designed to withstand all kinds of accidents, last longer without refueling, and generate less radioactive waste. In April, the reactor powered up to full capacity, becoming the first commercial reactor in the U.S. to run on next-generation fuel.
It’s the first time in U.S. history a commercial reactor is running on fuel enriched above 5%. That may not sound like much, but many industry analysts recognize the redesigned uranium fuel as a monumental step change for the nuclear sector.
“This is enabling us to get more out of those existing reactors than in the past,” Jonathan Chavers, Southern’s director of nuclear fuel and analysis, told Fortune exclusively. “It’s a significant game changer for the industry.”
There’s a lot of excitement in the nuclear world now with the Trump administration promising to remove nuclear regulatory hurdles and new nuclear technologies ready to take hold, including small modular reactors that use coolants other than water. These are considered fourth-generation models in a world where most reactors in use are second or third gen.
Asked whether the leap from traditional uranium fuel to the pellets Southern (ranked 161 in the Fortune 500) rolled out this spring represented the same jump in technology from third to fourth gen, Ken Petersen, the former president of the American Nuclear Society, laughed.
“This is like going from a Generation I to a Generation IV,” said Petersen, a retired fuel executive from Constellation, the nation’s largest nuclear utility. “It’s really breathtaking. We’re breaking barriers.”
What’s not clear is how widely adopted the new fuel could be in the short term with existing nuclear facilities other than Vogtle. Companies may not want to make the financial investment for older reactors.
Brett Rampal, a nuclear engineer and consultant who previously worked on core design at Westinghouse, called the new fuel program a “big waste of time”—for now.
“As a guy who sold fuel to existing reactor operators, it didn’t matter what I was selling to my customer or utility. It didn’t matter what improvement to the fuel there was,” he said. “The bottom line they asked me is, ‘You’re going to sell this to me at the same price, right?’ Why would we sell you new and improved fuel for the same price? Then they’d say, ‘We’re not interested.’”
How it works
The nuclear fuel that goes into reactors is not the same uranium that comes out of the ground. Once mined, uranium ore is crushed, sorted and compacted into yellowcake, which is then converted into uranium hexafluoride through a chemical process. That grayish solid material is put through a centrifuge to enrich a small percentage of the uranium into uranium-235, the unstable isotope that can split to release energy in the form of heat.
At the end of the enrichment process, gummy bear-sized pellets of fuel are loaded into fuel assemblies like PEZ candy in a dispenser and placed into a reactor that can spark the chain reaction called atom splitting, and the resulting heat is harnessed.
At that point, a nuclear power plant functions just like the coal-fired stations that came before it: the heat turns water into steam that spins turbines and generates electricity.
Since the dawn of the nuclear industry in the U.S., the enrichment process has capped the amount of U-235 present in the fuel at 5%—an artificial industry threshold set decades ago and retained out of what experts said was a sense of inertia in an industry whose tight rules offered little room for innovation. All the atomic energy contained in the other 95% of the uranium that isn’t split contributes to the leftover radioactive waste at the end of the fuel cycle.
In 2012, the year after the Fukushima disaster crushed public support for nuclear power, Congress established the Department of Energy’s accident-tolerant fuel program. At the time, Plant Vogtle was preparing to start construction on the first Westinghouse AP1000, a new generation of reactor with safety features that made a meltdown like the one in Japan almost impossible. The fuel program promised to make uranium pellets themselves that much safer.
The pellets are “doped,” meaning the uranium blend in the nuggets of fuel is modified with materials such as chromium oxide and alumina to improve performance under high heat.
In other words: all the highly radioactive materials that form during the fission process are better contained in the new fuel.
But the next breakthrough in Southern’s novel fuel is newer. The actual cladding in the fuel assemblies—the part that you load the candy into in a PEZ dispenser—is now coated in a zirconium alloy that can withstand more intense heat.
“That helps the rod protect itself in a high-temperature environment,” Chavers said. “[Let’s] say a Fukushima-style event occurred at a nuclear reactor. The coating would protect the rod for an additional amount of time so we could get cooling into the core.”
With those features in place, the reactor can run hotter, allowing it to burn up more U-235. That means the new fuel can be enriched higher—up to 8%. It may not sound like a lot, but the effect is nuclear reactors that must be refueled every 18 months can instead run for 24 months or longer without taking costly breaks to swap out the rods of uranium pellets.
Still, of all the major commercial nuclear operators Fortune contacted to ask about Southern’s breakthrough, none indicated immediate plans to buy the new fuel.
While the new fuel could be commercially manufactured relatively soon, commercial versions of the so-called cladding are likely at least a decade away, according to Southern.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the owner of California’s last nuclear plant Diablo Canyon, said it “remained focused on operating to 2030 with our current fuel design.” New Jersey-based PSEG declined to comment.
The Tennessee Valley authority said only that it “supports accident-tolerant fuels developments” and believes “Southern’s achievement is a good step towards bringing higher assay fuels to market.” Xcel Energy called the milestone “a significant achievement that will enhance safety and reliability,” but declined to say whether it would buy the fuel.
On the other hand, Virginia’s Dominion Energy said it was “considering using [fuel] similar to what’s being piloted by Southern.”
And, while Baltimore-based Constellation said it had “no current timeline for the large-scale use of newer fuels” in its reactors, the nuclear utility said, “We would deploy these newer fuels in our reactors once they make the transition from research and development to a commercial offering.”
New nuclear plants won’t come online anytime soon, so maximizing existing facilities is critical. “If you look at U.S. capacity factors, we’re higher than anybody else,” Petersen said. “We’re pushing up against those limits, and that’s why we need this additional enrichment.”
A new class of young graduates is getting ready to enter the workforce this summer, but they’re likely to face a chilly reception.
In one social media post after another, entry-level workers are bemoaning the state of the labor market and how hard it is to find a job. “It feels more likely to win the lottery right now than get a job,” said one young TikTok poster. “This is not what I expected,” said another young woman on Instagram as she held a stack of resumes and wiped tears from her eyes. “But I can’t be delusional anymore, I literally need to make money.”
The current labor market appears strong on the surface—unemployment is still low at 4.2%, wage growth is steady, and the U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. A deeper look beneath the surface reveals a much different jobs market for entry-level workers. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22-27 was 5.8% as of March, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And a May report from Oxford Economics found that 85% of unemployment since the middle of 2023 could be attributed to people just entering the workforce.
“Top-line job openings and unemployment statistics aren’t, in practice, reflecting the experience of new grads entering the workforce,” Mischa Fisher, an economist at Udemy, a provider of online training courses, tells Fortune. “Because entry-level roles are in short supply.”
It’s no surprise, then, that employee confidence amongst entry-level workers just hit an all-time low, according to a recent report from Glassdoor. And more than half (56%) of this year’s college graduates feel pessimistic about starting their careers in the current economy, according to another survey from jobs platform Handshake.
A few different factors are likely contributing to such a tough job market for young people right now. Experts tell Fortune that a combination of factors including a cooling labor market, a hiring pullback prompted by shifting tariff policies, and the long-promised of integration of AI into the workforce, are all creating massive problems for a new generation of job seekers.
“There are now clear trends in the data, not just vague whisperings, that more and more people are getting left behind,” says Cory Stahle, an economist at hiring platform Indeed’s Hiring Lab.
The ‘lock-in’ effect
The COVID pandemic kicked off a major workforce reshuffling, unofficially dubbed the “Great Resignation,” during which workers were successfully able to switch jobs for higher wages.
But that era is long gone. The labor market has become more stagnant, and quit rates fell from 3% in March of 2022, the highest in over two decades, to around 2% as of April 2025, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Workers who switch roles are also less likely to make more money if they do so. People who stay in their jobs are seeing an average of 4.4% wage growth, while those who leave are getting just 4.3% more, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That lack of turnover means that there are fewer opportunities for entry level workers to nab a role. “We’re seeing the labor market’s version of the housing market’s ‘lock-in’ effect, where employees are too nervous to make moves,” says Fisher. “This freeze is blocking normal opportunity flow, so early career workers can’t break in, experienced workers can’t move up, and burned-out employees are staying put.”
Tariff uncertainty
Trump’s tariff policy changes, and their subsequent impact on the economy, is also creating problems for entry-level workers in the labor market.
With an uncertain economic outlook thanks to on-again-off-again levies for major U.S. trading partners, many companies have pulled back on hiring until they get further clarity on what kind of economy will take shape in 2025.
Around 30% of small and mid-size business owners say tariffs are directly impacting their organizations in a negative way, and 42% say they plan to pull back on hiring as a result, according to a May survey from coaching and advisory firm Vistage, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal.
“Business leaders are uncertain and when that happens they don’t do as much hiring because they don’t know what the next week is going to look like, let alone the next month,” says Allison Shrivastava, a labor economist also at Indeed’s Hiring Lab. “They’re going to wait, especially for those jobs in what we think of as, traditionally, white collar sectors, which are often difficult and costly to hire for.”
The new AI reality
The promise of AI has been a looming threat to human workers for years, but there are now signs that companies are using the new tech to take over work previously done by entry-level employees.
Many of the tasks that used to serve as a training ground for junior employees, like data entry, research, and handling basic customer or employee requests, are already being delegated to AI. Technical fields like computer science and finance are getting hit especially hard. While employment for people older than 27 in computer science and mathematical occupations has grown a modest 0.8% since 2022, employment for those aged 22-27, or recent graduates, has declined by 8%, according to a May report from labor market research firm Oxford Economics. That’s compared to college graduates in all other occupations, who saw 2% employment gains.
“We concluded that a high adoption rate by information companies along with the sheer employment declines in these roles since 2022 suggested some displacement effect from AI,” the report reads.
LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer Aneesh Raman, echoed that thought in a recent New York Times op-ed. “In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging—the ways junior developers gain experience,” he wrote.
Companies are under pressure from investors to show that they can do more with less because of AI, says Sam Kuhn, an economist at Appcast, a job advertising company. Cutting jobs, or freezing hiring, are ways to do that. “We are starting to see the ripple effects of companies that have invested a lot of money into artificial intelligence, wanting to show that they’re actually getting something out of it,” he says.
Meta reportedly plans to use AI to review the platform’s privacy and societal risks instead of human staffers.AtMicrosoft, CEO Satya Nadella said in April that around 30% of code is now written by AI, a reality that likely factored into recent layoffs. And the CEO of payments platform Klarna has openly admitted last month that AI helped the company cut its workforce by around 40%. AI company founders are also getting more candid; Dario Amondei, the CEO of leading AI company Anthropic, has said outright that the technology could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
“It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it,” he said. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
What’s a new grad to do?
New job seekers can comfort themselves with the knowledge that it’s not just their imagination—the hiring landscape really is tougher for them than it was a few years ago.
That means they need to be more resourceful than their predecessors when it comes to outsmarting the labor market. That might include things like pivoting their job search to consider other industries or roles outside of what they studied in school. They also need to work harder to show employers that the skills they learned in college are a perfect fit for a given role.
“In the current labor market, new graduates need to find additional signals of skill beyond just a degree,” says Fisher. “From certificates to demonstrated soft skills like communication, the candidates who stand out show they’re already bridging the gap between school and skills acquisition.”
Because the hiring process skews towards Zoom interviews and AI-driven recruiting, young people also need to take the initiative and reach out to hiring managers on their own, whether that’s on LinkedIn, at a local job fair, or tapping into an alumni network. “There are fewer opportunities now to engage on a human level with employers up front,” says Steve Rakas, executive director of the Masters Career Center at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.
There remains, however, a reason for young people to hold out hope. Labor market trends are cyclical, and there are still opportunities out there for young people who want them, notes Rakas—even if they’re not ideal.
“We’re coaching them to think about not just plan A, but also plan B, C and D,” he says. “To be pragmatic, and also to pivot.”
A new report by the World Bank claims global economic growth could slow to its weakest level since the 1960s. The report pointed to an environment of trade obstacles and tariff policy uncertainty as the underlying reason for sluggish growth as President Donald Trump continues to threaten tariffs against America’s biggest trading partners.
A new era of global tariffs spurred by President Donald Trump could make the 2020s the slowest decade of world economic growth on average in more than 50 years, claims a new report from the World Bank.
The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report, published Tuesday, paints a bleak picture of the world economy over the first seven years of the 2020s—although it stopped short of predicting another global recession such as that caused by the pandemic.
The international financial institution predicted 70% of the world’s economies would see lower-than-expected growth and that overall global growth would top out at 2.3% in 2025, nearly half-a-percentage-point lower than expected at the start of the year.
“The sharp increase in tariffs and the ensuing uncertainty are contributing to a broad-based growth slowdown and deteriorating prospects in most of the world’s economies,” the report states.
Although Trump was not mentioned by name in the report, one expert said the uncertainty the president has brought to U.S. trade policy as well as the possibility that burdensome tariffs could be implemented on major trading partners could play a major role in slowing world economic growth.
Tariffs will both raise prices for businesses and consumers, causing pressure on both the demand and supply side of the economy. This effect could cause customers to spend less and businesses to supply fewer products to those consumers, effects that ripple across economies. At worst, it could lead to stagflation, the double whammy of low growth and high inflation which plagued the U.S. economy during the 1970s, said Rebecca Homkes, a lecturer at London Business School and faculty at Duke Corporate Executive Education.
“If tariffs to the level the administration is proposing do go into effect, it will have a tangible and noticeable impact on the economy, and the U.S. economy has implications for the global economy,” Homkes told Fortune.
If countries are able to mitigate the effects of tariffs with trade deals such that tariff levels are halved from what was announced in May, a month after Trump’s so-called “liberation day,” world economic growth would increase 0.2 percentage points on average between 2025 and 2026, the World Bank wrote in its Tuesday report.
However, Homkes said the most pressing need right now is to decrease uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration’s careening policy decisions.
“Every time a tariff announcement or the possibility of a deal is announced, it’s met with a lot of skepticism that that’s going to be the same one in a few weeks, let alone a few years. So this level of uncertainty makes it incredibly difficult to plan, to model, to think about future growth, future jobs, hiring, etc.,” said Homkes.
In today’s CEO Daily: Peter Vanham on L’Oréal’s radical innovation.
The big story: Former Sen. Loeffler’s quiet financial holdings.
The markets: Glum over trade prospects and Mideast tensions.
Analyst notes from UBS, BofA, and Deutsche Bank.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Peter Vanham writing from Geneva. L’Oréal has been in the beauty business since 1909, but these days the company—No. 348 on the Fortune Global 500—is squarely in the innovation business. The French cosmetics company has long been known for its iconic brands like Lancôme, Garnier, and Maybelline. But in today’s competitive global landscape, its CEO Nicolas Hieronimus told me recently, that radical innovation is propelling the company forward, with new products totaling 10-15% of its global business each year.
“We have always considered our business model was to bring to market products that are state of the art, charge a bit more, and globalize,” Hieronimus told me. But in the AI era, the “state of the art” bit has taken more of a front seat than ever at the company, which now invests over €1.3 billion per year in research, and even more in technology.
It’s that mindset that propelled L’Oréal to claim the top spot in Fortune’s inaugural Europe’s Most Innovative Companies ranking, which we published today. In it, Fortune and Statista ranked Europe’s 300 most innovative companies, considering product and process, as well as innovation culture.
The real driver of L’Oréal’s innovation, Hieronimus stressed, is technology. “Technology is an augmentor upstream for research but also downstream for the consumer,” he said. Upstream, AI now allows the company to scan hundreds of new molecules per year, whereas in the past it took months to do one.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity,” he said. “Our labs are powered by AI. It is an advantage. We have 16 terabytes of proprietary data on beauty. We use AI in research to scan new molecules, using digital twins.”
The commercial result, Hieronimus said, is that “[AI] allows us to reformulate faster, but also to come up with new products.” He pointed to the new Laroche Posay Mela B3 anti-dark spot serum containing one such new molecule, Melasyl, as one such example.
Downstream, the use of agentic generative AI is also starting to yield results, Hieronimus said. After experimenting with virtual try-outs and other tech-enabled online offerings, L’Oréal last year launched its L’Oréal Paris Beauty Genius, an AI agent that advises consumers on their purchases.
More than 100,000 consumers already use the Beauty Genius, Hieronimus said, leading to benefits for both consumers and the company. “If you recommend the right product, [your consumers] remain loyal,” he said. These loyalists, the company finds, purchase up to eightfold the amount of L’Oréal products another consumer would. Other Fortune Global 500 companies that made it to the top 10 of our Most Innovative Companies list include aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce (No. 3), pharma giants GSK (No. 5), Sanofi (No. 6), and Novo Nordisk (No. 7), and Europe’s largest tech company, SAP (No. 9). You can find the full list here.
Nicolas Hieronimus, chief executive officer of L'Oreal SA, during the International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) conference in Paris, on Dec. 17, 2024.
President Trump’s tariff strategy was based on the belief that China, heavily reliant on the US market, would absorb higher export costs and be forced to negotiate. However, recent data shows Chinese exports to the U.S. have sharply declined as China diversifies to other markets, undermining Trump’s leverage and casting uncertainty over the future of U.S.-China trade relations despite a temporary truce.
When President Trump announced his tariff regime, he said China would have to “absorb” the increases to export prices and would be forced to the negotiating table to agree new trading terms.
After all, he reasoned, China is reliant on the U.S. as its greatest export market and would have to reshape its entire economy if it didn’t agree to a deal.
So, despite wanting to rebalance trade with economic partners, Trump’s strong hand relied somewhat on the notion that Chinese businesses needed to keep selling to U.S. companies and consumers.
But as negotiations rumble on and evolve, that foundation has shifted. Data released Monday reveals Chinese exports to the U.S. fell by more than 34% in May 2025 when compared year-on-year (YOY).
Exports to the U.S. also dropped a little over 20% in April, signaling a conscious shift away from the reliable U.S. consumer towards other markets.
These new pockets of potential for Chinese exporters include Africa, where exports were up more than 30% in May YOY, and Canada, where exports are up 20% in May compared to the same month last year, per analysis from FX and international payments specialists Convera.
The diversification away from the U.S. for Chinese exporters could be interpreted as undermining Trump’s seat at the negotiating table in Beijing, said Convera’s lead FX and macro strategist, George Vessey.
He tells Fortune: “I think the data may be seen as undermining Trump’s position and ability to hurt China. Still, given the disinflationary impact this is expected to have on other countries, it raises the risk of the trade war escalating elsewhere with other countries forced to impose their own tariffs on China.
“There was already growing evidence that China is successfully diversifying its trade relations, becoming less dependent on the U.S. as the destination of its manufactured goods. The share of the U.S. in overall Chinese exports has fallen from around 23% at the beginning of the century to 16%.”
He also provided a caveat to the data, saying: “It’s worth noting that Chinese exports to the U.S. always fall around the Chinese New Year (generally February) but usually rebound strongly by now. This year, the post-Chinese New Year rebound simply hasn’t happened. Although there was a surge in U.S. imports in Q1, nearly all came from Europe rather than from China.”
To recap, currently the tit-for-tat trade war between Beijing and Washington D.C. has entered something of a truce, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announcing a 90-day pause in May.
Both sides agreed to lower their rates by 115%, meaning Bejing faces a 30% tariff and the U.S. faces a 10% tariff.
As officials met in the U.K. this week, analysts had hoped for some further evidence about what an eventual deal would look like.
Instead, they received a reiteration of the truce already announced and a framework with little detail about future proceedings.
President Trump said that a deal was “done,” pending sign-off from President Xi. Rare earth and magnets would be “up front” in the agreement, he added, leading some to speculate that the U.S. had agreed to commitments such as letting Chinese students into its universities.
As Deustche Bank’s Jim Reid wrote in a note sent to Fortune this morning: “Overall, this left a sense that the two sides had re-established the trade truce that was signaled in Geneva last month, but with the path forward towards any genuine trade normalisation still unclear.”
Vessey chimes: “Trade talks between major economies remain pivotal, shaping inflation and global market dynamics. We’ve heard some positive developments over the past week, but until there’s more clarity, investor sentiment may pivot back to macro drivers.”
Ride-hailing firm Uber will launch self-driving taxis in London next year when England trials new driverless services, the firm and the UK government said on Tuesday.
Under the Uber pilot scheme, services will initially have a human in the driver’s seat who can take control of the vehicle in an emergency, but the trials will eventually transition to being fully driverless.
The government announcement will see companies including Uber allowed to trial commercial driverless services without a human presence for the first time in the UK.
They will include taxis and “bus-like” services.
Uber COO Andrew Macdonald described London’s roads as “one of the world’s busiest and most complex urban environments”.
“Our vision is to make autonomy a safe and reliable option for riders everywhere, and this trial in London brings that future closer to reality,” he said.
Members of the public will be able to book the transport via an app from spring 2026, ahead of a potential wider rollout when new legislation — the Automated Vehicles Act — becomes law from the second half of 2027, the Department for Transport added.
The technology could create 38,000 jobs, add £42 billion ($57 billion) to the UK economy by 2025, and make roads safer, it said.
“The future of transport is arriving. Self-driving cars could bring jobs, investment, and the opportunity for the UK to be among the world-leaders in new technology,” Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said.
“We can’t afford to take a back seat on AI…. That’s why we’re bringing timelines forward today,” added Technology Secretary Peter Kyle.
The wider rollout will also allow the sale and use of self-driving, private cars.
Driverless vehicle trials have been underway in the UK since January 2015, with British companies Wayve and Oxa “spearheading significant breakthroughs in the technology”, the ministry said.
“These early pilots will help build public trust and unlock new jobs, services, and markets,” said Wayve CEO Alex Kendall.
According to the government the forthcoming legislation will require self-driving vehicles to “achieve a level of safety at least as high as competent and careful human drivers”.
“By having faster reaction times than humans, and by being trained on large numbers of driving scenarios, including learning from real-world incidents, self-driving vehicles can help reduce deaths and injuries,” it said.
Driverless taxis with limited capacity are already on the roads in the United States and China, most notably in the central Chinese city of Wuhan where a fleet of over 500 can be hailed by app in designated areas.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign a measure Thursday that blocks California’s first-in-the-nation rule banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, a White House official told The Associated Press.
The resolution Trump plans to sign, which Congress approved last month, aims to quash the country’s most aggressive attempt to phase out gas-powered cars. He also plans to approve measures to overturn state policies curbing tailpipe emissions in certain vehicles and smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution from trucks.
The timing of the signing was confirmed Wednesday by a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to share plans not yet public.
The development comes as the Republican president is mired in a clash with California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, over Trump’s move to deploy troops to Los Angeles in response to immigration protests. It’s the latest in an ongoing battle between the Trump administration and heavily Democratic California over everything from tariffs to the rights of LGBTQ+ youth and funding for electric vehicle chargers.
“If it’s a day ending in Y, it’s another day of Trump’s war on California,” Newsom spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor said in an email. “We’re fighting back.”
According to the White House official, Trump is expected to sign resolutions that block California’s rule phasing out gas-powered cars and ending the sale of new ones by 2035. He will also kill rules that phase out the sale of medium- and heavy-duty diesel vehicles and cut tailpipe emissions from trucks.
The president is scheduled to sign the measures and make remarks during an event at the White House on Thursday morning.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin are expected to attend, along with members of Congress and representatives from the energy, trucking and gas station industries.
The signings come as Trump has pledged to revive American auto manufacturing and boost oil and gas drilling.
California, which has some of the nation’s worst air pollution, has been able to seek waivers for decades from the EPA, allowing it to adopt stricter emissions standards than the federal government.
In his first term, Trump revoked California’s ability to enforce its standards, but President Joe Biden reinstated it in 2022. Trump has not yet sought to revoke it again.
Republicans have long criticized those waivers and earlier this year opted to use the Congressional Review Act, a law aimed at improving congressional oversight of actions by federal agencies, to try to block the rules.
That’s despite a finding from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, that California’s standards cannot legally be blocked using the Congressional Review Act. The Senate parliamentarian agreed with that finding.
California, which makes up roughly 11% of the U.S. car market, has significant power to sway trends in the auto industry. About a dozen states signed on to adopt California’s rule phasing out the sale of new gas-powered cars.
The National Automobile Dealers Association supported the federal government’s move to block California’s ban on gas-powered cars, saying Congress should decide on such a national issue, not the state.
The American Trucking Associations said the rules were not feasible and celebrated Congress’ move to block them.
Chris Spear, the CEO of the American Trucking Associations, said in a statement Wednesday: “This is not the United States of California.”
It was also applauded by Detroit automaker General Motors, which said it will “help align emissions standards with today’s market realities.”
“We have long advocated for one national standard that will allow us to stay competitive, continue to invest in U.S. innovation, and offer customer choice across the broadest lineup of gas-powered and electric vehicles,” the company said in a statement.
Dan Becker with the Center for Biological Diversity, in anticipation of the president signing the measures, said earlier Thursday that the move would be “Trump’s latest betrayal of democracy.”
“Signing this bill is a flagrant abuse of the law to reward Big Oil and Big Auto corporations at the expense of everyday people’s health and their wallets,” Becker said in a statement.
President Trump and White House Senior Advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk deliver remarks next to a Tesla Model S on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, 2025 in Washington, D.C. The South Lawn became a kind of Tesla showroom, as Trump—holding a Tesla pricelist—spoke out against calls for a boycott of Musk’s companies and said he would purchase a Tesla vehicle in what he called a ‘show of confidence and support’ for Musk.
Britain’s goods exports to the US fell in April by the largest amount for any month since records began in 1997 after President Donald Trump launched his global trade war.
Goods shipments to the US including precious metals fell by £2 billion ($2.7 billion) from March, which the Office for National Statistics said was “likely linked to the implementation of tariffs on goods imported to the United States.” It left sales to the US at £4.1 billion, the lowest since February 2022.
Trump hit the UK with 10% tariffs on all goods on his April 2 “Liberation Day.” Imports of steel and aluminium, and cars and car parts were subject to a higher 25% tariff.
There were decreases in exports of most commodities to the US in April, the ONS said. Exports of machinery and transport equipment decreased by £800 million because of a drop in car shipments. Chemical exports fell by £300 million. Imports from the US slid by £400 million to £4.7 billion.
The UK struck a deal with the US on May 8 lowering car tariffs and removing them on aluminium and steel but the new regime has yet to be put in place.
The total goods and services trade deficit with the rest of the world widened by £4.9 billion to £11.5 billion in the three months to April 2025.
ONS Director of Economic Statistics Liz McKeown said: “After increasing for each of the four preceding months, April saw the largest monthly fall on record in goods exports to the United States with decreases seen across most types of goods, following the recent introduction of tariffs.”
Trump hit the U.K. with 10% tariffs on all goods on his April 2 “Liberation Day.” Imports of steel and aluminium, and cars and car parts were subject to a higher 25% tariff.
Billionaire Mark Cuban, who has been an active Bluesky user and supporter for several months now, said this week he thinks the social media platform has gotten “ruder and more hateful.” Its liberal-heavy user base makes it challenging to raise questions or have debates with other users, even if their political ideologies align, he said.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) in late 2022, the vibes on the platform started changing, and many accounts that were verified lost their status. But the mass exodus from X came in late 2024 following the U.S. presidential election and Musk throwing his support—and millions—behind Donald Trump.
By December 2024, the platform had lost about 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in just two months, with competitor Bluesky absorbing nearly all of those users. Colloquially, it became somewhat of a safe haven for liberal users who wanted to drown out the noise of President Trump’s reelection.
“It’s people wanting to just try something new. It’s people finding their community here,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told Vox Media’s Peter Kafta in a June 4 podcast. “I think in general it’s both people looking for something and people looking to get away from something.”
Between November 2024 and this May, Bluesky grew from about 10 million users to 30 million, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Many news influencers—people who regularly post about current events on the platform—lean left politically, according to the analysis.
One such figure was billionaire Mark Cuban, who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential run in 2024, although he didn’t give her a penny for her campaign, he said. Cuban became a regular Bluesky user, having posted nearly 2,000 times since November 2024. When he first joined the platform, he famously posted: “Hello Less Hateful World.”
But Cuban has changed his tune. In a series of posts this week, Cuban argued Bluesky has become too much of an echo chamber, and is sending more users back to X.
“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote. “We are forcing posts to X.”
The former Shark Tank star and Dallas Mavericks owner also said he thinks Bluesky users have “grown ruder and more hateful.”
“Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a grey area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” said Cuban, whose current net worth is about $8.33 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Bluesky did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Cuban also reposted a Washington Post opinion article published Sunday titled “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes.” Author Megan McArdle argued Bluesky’s left-leaning user base segregates it into a political silo. Cuban agreed.
“The lack of diversity of thought here is really hurting usage,” Cuban wrote in a separate Bluesky update including the Washington Post article. “The moderation and block tools on here are so advanced, if you see someone you don’t want to see on here, just block them. Don’t attack them.”
“There used to be great give and take discussions on politics and news. Not so much any more,” Cuban added. “Doesn’t have to be this way.”
OpenAI hit $10 billion in annualized revenue on Monday, almost doubling its 2024 ARR in six months. Investor Mark Cuban believes the ChatGPT creator’s massive sales growth reflects its standout brand in a crowded start-up market.
Mark Cuban is bullish on ChatGPT.
The chatbot’s creator, OpenAI, said its annual recurring revenue reached $10 billion on Monday, almost doubling its $5.5 billion in ARR last year. While whispers of a potential IPO ripple through the investor community, AI advocate and investment luminary Cuban said he prefers the chatbot over competitors like Gemini and Claude, which he also uses.
“This is still a race in the first inning, but ChatGPT has done the best job of building a brand, and it shows in their sales,” he told Fortune in an email.
The San Francisco startup said its $10 billion figure includes ChatGPT business products, consumer products, and its application programming interface, or API.
“(OpenAI) earned every penny of it,” Cuban said of the company’s revenue landmark.
ChatGPT became the fastest-adopted app in history when it launched in 2023, gaining a million users in five days. OpenAI now supports 500 million weekly active users, it said in late March.
The company announced earlier this month that it has 3 million paying business users, a 50% increase from the 2 million it reported in February. Customers of ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Edu, which are all workplace-specific versions of the chatbot with separate subscription tiers, comprise the 3 million users.
But the company’s growth hasn’t been profitable. OpenAI lost about $5 billion last year.
Still, the company forecasts continued growth, and targeted $125 billion in revenue by 2029, The Information reported in April.
OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round in March, penning the largest private tech deal on record—its valuation now 30 times its annualized revenue.
In early October 2024, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion funding round that Cuban could’ve contributed to, the former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks revealed during an appearance on the “All-In” podcast.
Cuban told FortuneGoogle Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity AI are some of the chatbots he uses, noting he uses ChatGPT daily. The Information recently reported that ‘AI native’ companies’—businesses fundamentally built around AI—annualized revenue have seen exponential sales in 2025, but OpenAI has taken the lion’s share, accounting for over two-thirds of revenue.
Anthropic hit $3 billion in annualized revenue in May, tripling its $1 billion figure from December 2024. The company said it’s on track to become profitable in 2027.
OpenAI’s massive growth is a testament to “just how explosive the (AI) market is,” Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney said.
But, if he were to guess, he said it’s likely the company doubled its losses along with its annualized revenue.
But Cuban is now a believer, having experienced the growth of OpenAI’s influence firsthand.
“I often ask the question at talks and panels, ‘how many of you use ChatGPT.’ The responses have gone from just a few a year ago, to pretty much all but (two) people in a large room,” Cuban said.
The EPA also proposed weakening a regulation that requires power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants that can harm the brain development of young children and contribute to heart attacks and other health problems in adults.
The rollbacks are meant to fulfill Republican President Donald Trump’s repeated pledge to “ unleash American energy ” and make it more affordable for Americans to power their homes and operate businesses.
If approved and made final, the plans would reverse efforts by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to address climate change and improve conditions in areas heavily burdened by industrial pollution, mostly in low-income and majority Black or Hispanic communities.
Zeldin said Wednesday the new rules would help end what he called the Biden and Obama administrations’ “war on so much of our U.S. domestic energy supply.”
“The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November,” he added in a speech at EPA headquarters. “They wanted to make sure that … no matter what agency anybody might be confirmed to lead, we are finding opportunities to pursue common-sense, pragmatic solutions that will help reduce the cost of living … create jobs and usher in a golden era of American prosperity.”
Environmental and public health groups called the rollbacks dangerous and vowed to challenge the rules in court.
Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician and executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health, called the proposals “yet another in a series of attacks” by the Trump administration on the nation’s “health, our children, our climate and the basic idea of clean air and water.”
She called it “unconscionable to think that our country would move backwards on something as common sense as protecting children from mercury and our planet from worsening hurricanes, wildfires, floods and poor air quality driven by climate change.”
“Ignoring the immense harm to public health from power plant pollution is a clear violation of the law,” added Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If EPA finalizes a slapdash effort to repeal those rules, we’ll see them in court.”
It’s by no means guaranteed that the rules will be entirely eliminated — they can’t be changed without going through a federal rulemaking process that can take years and requires public comment and scientific justification.
Even a partial dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead — and especially more tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs and cause health problems, the AP analysis found. It would also mean higher emissions of greenhouse gases, driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels.
Biden, a Democrat, had made fighting climate change a hallmark of his presidency. Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a strict EPA rule issued last year. Then-EPA head Michael Regan said the power plant rules would reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting a reliable, long-term supply of electricity.
The power sector is the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change, after transportation.
In its proposed regulation, the Trump EPA argues that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-fired power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change and therefore do not meet a threshold under the Clean Air Act for regulatory action. Greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired plants “are a small and decreasing part of global emissions,” the EPA said, adding: “This Administration’s priority is to promote the public health or welfare through energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.”
The Clean Air Act allows the EPA to limit emissions from power plants and other industrial sources if those emissions significantly contribute to air pollution that endangers public health.
If fossil fuel plants no longer meet the EPA’s threshold, the Trump administration may later argue that other pollutants from other industrial sectors don’t either and therefore shouldn’t be regulated, said Meghan Greenfield, a former EPA and Justice Department lawyer now in private practice at Jenner & Block LLP.
The EPA proposal “has the potential to have much, much broader implications,” she said.
Zeldin, a former New York congressman, said the Biden-era rules were designed to “suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment,” with the intent to regulate the coal industry “out of existence” and make it “disappear.”
National Mining Association president and CEO Rich Nolan applauded the new rules, saying they remove “deliberately unattainable standards” for clean air while “leveling the playing field for reliable power sources, instead of stacking the deck against them.”
But Dr. Howard Frumkin, a former director of the National Center for Environmental Health and professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said Zeldin and Trump were trying to deny reality.
“The world is round, the sun rises in the east, coal- and gas-fired power plants contribute significantly to climate change, and climate change increases the risk of heat waves, catastrophic storms and many other health threats,” Frumkin said. “These are indisputable facts. If you torpedo regulations on power plant greenhouse gas emissions, you torpedo the health and well-being of the American public and contribute to leaving a world of risk and suffering to our children and grandchildren.”
A paper published earlier this year in the journal Science found the Biden-era rules could reduce U.S. power sector carbon emissions by 73% to 86% below 2005 levels by 2040, compared with a reduction of 60% to 83% without the rules.
“Carbon emissions in the power sector drop at a faster rate with the (Biden-era) rules in place than without them,” said Aaron Bergman, a fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research institution and a co-author of the Science paper. The Biden rule also would result in “significant reductions in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, pollutants that harm human health,” he said.
Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ visionary and fragile leader whose genius for melody, arrangements and wide-eyed self-expression inspired “Good Vibrations,” “California Girls” and other summertime anthems and made him one of the world’s most influential recording artists, has died at 82.
Wilson’s family posted news of his death to his website and social media accounts Wednesday. Further details weren’t immediately available. Since May 2024, Wilson had been under a court conservatorship to oversee his personal and medical affairs, with Wilson’s longtime representatives, publicist Jean Sievers and manager LeeAnn Hard, in charge.
The eldest and last surviving of three musical brothers — Brian played bass, Carl lead guitar and Dennis drums — he and his fellow Beach Boys rose in the 1960s from local California band to national hitmakers to international ambassadors of surf and sun. Wilson himself was celebrated for his gifts and pitied for his demons. He was one of rock’s great Romantics, a tormented man who in his peak years embarked on an ever-steeper path to aural perfection, the one true sound.
The Beach Boys rank among the most popular groups of the rock era, with more than 30 singles in the Top 40 and worldwide sales of more than 100 million. The 1966 album “Pet Sounds” was voted No. 2 in a 2003 Rolling Stone list of the best 500 albums, losing out, as Wilson had done before, to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The Beach Boys, who also featured Wilson cousin Mike Love and childhood friend Al Jardine, were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.
Wilson feuded with Love over songwriting credits, but peers otherwise adored him beyond envy, from Elton John and Bruce Springsteen to Katy Perry and Carole King. The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, fantasized about joining the Beach Boys. Paul McCartney cited “Pet Sounds” as a direct inspiration on the Beatles and the ballad “God Only Knows” as among his favorite songs, often bringing him to tears.
Wilson moved and fascinated fans and musicians long after he stopped having hits. In his later years, Wilson and a devoted entourage of younger musicians performed “Pet Sounds” and his restored opus, “Smile,” before worshipful crowds in concert halls. Meanwhile, The Go-Go’s, Lindsey Buckingham, Animal Collective and Janelle Monáe were among a wide range of artists who emulated him, whether as a master of crafting pop music or as a pioneer of pulling it apart.
An endless summer
The Beach Boys’ music was like an ongoing party, with Wilson as host and wallflower. He was a tall, shy man, partially deaf (allegedly because of beatings by his father, Murry Wilson), with a sweet, crooked grin, and he rarely touched a surfboard unless a photographer was around. But out of the lifestyle that he observed and such musical influences as Chuck Berry and the Four Freshmen, he conjured a golden soundscape — sweet melodies, shining harmonies, vignettes of beaches, cars and girls — that resonated across time and climates.
Decades after its first release, a Beach Boys song can still conjure instant summer — the wake-up guitar riff that opens “Surfin’ USA”; the melting vocals of “Don’t Worry Baby”; the chants of “fun, fun, fun” or “good, good, GOOD, good vibrations”; the behind-the-wheel chorus “’Round, ’round, get around, I get around.” Beach Boys songs have endured from turntables and transistor radios to boom boxes and iPhones, or any device that could lie on a beach towel or be placed upright in the sand.
The band’s innocent appeal survived the group’s increasingly troubled backstory, whether Brian’s many personal trials, the feuds and lawsuits among band members or the alcoholism of Dennis Wilson, who drowned in 1983. Brian Wilson’s ambition raised the Beach Boys beyond the pleasures of their early hits and into a world transcendent, eccentric and destructive. They seemed to live out every fantasy, and many nightmares, of the California myth they helped create.
From the suburbs to the national stage
Brian Wilson was born June 20, 1942, two days after McCartney. His musical gifts were soon obvious, and as a boy he was playing piano and teaching his brothers to sing harmony. The Beach Boys started as a neighborhood act, rehearsing in Brian’s bedroom and in the garage of their house in suburban Hawthorne, California. Surf music, mostly instrumental in its early years, was catching on locally: Dennis Wilson, the group’s only real surfer, suggested they cash in. Brian and Love hastily wrote up their first single, “Surfin,’” a minor hit released in 1961.
They wanted to call themselves the Pendletones, in honor of a popular flannel shirt they wore in early publicity photos. But when they first saw the pressings for “Surfin,’” they discovered the record label had tagged them “The Beach Boys.” Other decisions were handled by their father, a musician of some frustration who hired himself as manager and holy terror. By mid-decade, Murry Wilson had been displaced and Brian, who had been running the band’s recording sessions almost from the start, was in charge, making the Beach Boys the rare group of the time to work without an outside producer.
Their breakthrough came in early 1963 with “Surfin’ USA,” so closely modeled on Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” that Berry successfully sued to get a songwriting credit. It was their first Top 10 hit and a boast to the nation: “If everybody had an ocean / across the USA / then everybody’d be surfin,’ / like Cali-for-nye-ay.” From 1963-66, they were rarely off the charts, hitting No. 1 with “I Get Around” and “Help Me, Rhonda” and narrowly missing with “California Girls” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” For television appearances, they wore candy-striped shirts and grinned as they mimed their latest hit, with a hot rod or surfboard nearby.
Their music echoed private differences. Wilson often contrasted his own bright falsetto with Love’s nasal, deadpan tenor. The extroverted Love was out front on the fast songs, but when it was time for a slow one, Brian took over. “The Warmth of the Sun” was a song of despair and consolation that Wilson alleged — to some skepticism — he wrote the morning after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “Don’t Worry Baby,” a ballad equally intoxicating and heartbreaking, was a leading man’s confession of doubt and dependence, an early sign of Brian’s crippling anxieties.
Stress and exhaustion led to a breakdown in 1964 and his retirement from touring, his place soon filled by Bruce Johnston, who remained with the group for decades. Wilson was an admirer of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” productions and emulated him on Beach Boys tracks, adding sleigh bells to “Dance, Dance, Dance” or arranging a mini-theme park of guitar, horns, percussion and organ as the overture to “California Girls.”
By the mid-1960s, the Beach Boys were being held up as the country’s answer to the Beatles, a friendly game embraced by each group, transporting pop music to the level of “art” and leaving Wilson a broken man.
The Beach Boys vs. The Beatles
The Beatles opened with “Rubber Soul,” released in late 1965 and their first studio album made without the distractions of movies or touring. It was immediately praised as a major advance, the lyrics far more personal and the music far more subtle and sophisticated than such earlier hits as “She Loves You” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” Wilson would recall getting high and listening to the record for the first time, promising himself he would not only keep up with the British band, but top them.
Wilson worked for months on what became “Pet Sounds,” and months on the single “Good Vibrations.” He hired an outside lyricist, Tony Asher, and used various studios, with dozens of musicians and instruments ranging from violins to bongos to the harpsichord. The air seemed to cool on some tracks and the mood turn reflective, autumnal. From “I Know There’s an Answer” to “You Still Believe in Me,” many of the songs were ballads, reveries, brushstrokes of melody, culminating in the sonic wonders of “Good Vibrations,” a psychedelic montage that at times sounded as if recorded in outer space.
The results were momentous, yet disappointing. “Good Vibrations” was the group’s first million-seller and “Pet Sounds,” which included the hits “Sloop John B” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” awed McCartney, John Lennon and Eric Clapton among others. Widely regarded as a new kind of rock LP, it was more suited to headphones than to the radio, a “concept” album in which individual songs built to a unified experience, so elaborately crafted in the studio that “Pet Sounds” couldn’t be replicated live with the technology of the time. Wilson was likened not just to the Beatles, but to Mozart and George Gershwin, whose “Rhapsody in Blue” had inspired him since childhood.
But the album didn’t chart as highly as previous Beach Boys releases and was treated indifferently by the U.S. record label, Capitol. The Beatles, meanwhile, were absorbing lessons from the Beach Boys and teaching some in return. “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper,” the Beatles’ next two albums, drew upon the Beach Boys’ vocal tapestries and melodic bass lines and even upon the animal sounds from the title track of “Pet Sounds.” The Beatles’ epic “A Day in the Life” reconfirmed the British band as kings of the pop world and “Sgt. Pepper” as the album to beat.
All eyes turned to Wilson and his intended masterpiece — a “teenage symphony to God” he called “Smile.” It was a whimsical cycle of songs on nature and American folklore written with lyricist Van Dyke Parks. The production bordered on method acting; for a song about fire, Wilson wore a fire helmet in the studio. The other Beach Boys were confused, and strained to work with him. A shaken Wilson delayed “Smile,” then canceled it.
Remnants, including the songs “Heroes and Villains” and “Wind Chimes” were re-recorded and issued in September 1967 on “Smiley Smile,” dismissed by Carl Wilson as a “bunt instead of a grand slam.” The stripped down “Wild Honey,” released three months later, became a critical favorite but didn’t restore the band’s reputation. The Beach Boys soon descended into an oldies act, out of touch with the radical ’60s, and Wilson withdrew into seclusion.
Years of struggle, and late life validation
Addicted to drugs and psychologically helpless, sometimes idling in a sandbox he had built in his living room, Wilson didn’t fully produce another Beach Boys record for years. Their biggest hit of the 1970s was a greatest hits album, “Endless Summer,” that also helped reestablish them as popular concert performers.
Although well enough in the 21st century to miraculously finish “Smile” and tour and record again, Wilson had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and baffled interviewers with brief and disjointed answers. Among the stranger episodes of Wilson’s life was his relationship with Dr. Eugene Landy, a psychotherapist accused of holding a Svengali-like power over him. A 1991 lawsuit from Wilson’s family blocked Landy from Wilson’s personal and business affairs.
His first marriage, to singer Marilyn Rovell, ended in divorce and he became estranged from daughters Carnie and Wendy, who would help form the pop trio Wilson Phillips. His life stabilized in 1995 with his marriage to Melinda Ledbetter, who gave birth to two more daughters, Daria and Delanie. He also reconciled with Carnie and Wendy and they sang together on the 1997 album “The Wilsons.” (Melinda Ledbetter died in 2024.)
In 1992, Brian Wilson eventually won a $10 million out-of-court settlement for lost songwriting royalties. But that victory and his 1991 autobiography, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story,” set off other lawsuits that tore apart the musical family.
Carl Wilson and other relatives believed the book was essentially Landy’s version of Brian’s life and questioned whether Brian had even read it. Their mother, Audree Wilson, unsuccessfully sued publisher HarperCollins because the book said she passively watched as her husband beat Brian as a child. Love successfully sued Brian Wilson, saying he was unfairly deprived of royalties after contributing lyrics to dozens of songs. He would eventually gain ownership of the band’s name.
The Beach Boys still released an occasional hit single: “Kokomo,” made without Wilson, hit No. 1 in 1988. Wilson, meanwhile, released such solo albums as “Brian Wilson” and “Gettin’ In Over My Head,” with cameos by McCartney and Clapton among others. He also completed a pair of albums for the Walt Disney label — a collection of Gershwin songs and music from Disney movies. In 2012, surviving members of the Beach Boys reunited for a 50th anniversary album, which quickly hit the Top 10 before the group again bickered and separated.
Wilson won just two competitive Grammys, for the solo instrumental “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” and for “The Smile Sessions” box set. Otherwise, his honors ranged from a Grammy lifetime achievement prize to a tribute at the Kennedy Center to induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2018, he returned to his old high school in Hawthorne and witnessed the literal rewriting of his past: The principal erased an “F” he had been given in music and awarded him an “A.”
Original members of The Beach Boys, from left, David Marks, Bruce Johnston and Brian Wilson appear onstage during ABC's "Good Morning America" summer concert series, June 15, 2012, in New York.
Login
