Troy Pospisil loved working for private equity firm H.I.G. Capital where, as an investment professional, he looked at hundreds of deals. But one thing Pospisil hated was the high volume of routine legal contracts, including non-disclosure agreements, that he and other executives had to review and negotiate. Pospisil estimates that he spent about 15% to 20% of his day on this “most painful aspect of workflow.” His solution was to quit PE and start a company to automate these time-sucking tasks.
“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had to give it a go,” said Pospisil, who made good on his plans and founded a firm called InCloudCounsel.
In 2014, Pospisil launched the company, which is today known as Ontra, with one product: Contract Automation, which streamlines routine legal agreements used in private capital markets and investments. Today, Ontra also offers products for contract negotiation, to simplify fundraising, and to modernize entity management as part of a suite that seeks to make the back office more efficient.
On Tuesday, Ontra announced it has raised $70 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank, a unit of First Citizens Bank. In total, Ontra has collected $325 million in financing and equity from investors including Blackstone, Battery Ventures and Mike Paulus, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who cofounded Assurance IQ. Because the financing was a credit instrument, there is no valuation available for Ostra, Pospisil said.
Ontra ran a dual track process, considering both debt and equity providers, Pospisil told Fortune. Lenders that were interested in partnering with Ontra were offering attractive interest rates, prompting Ontra to pick SVB because it was a “far better deal,” he said.
“We are bringing in a great partner with SVB and we [didn’t] suffer any equity dilution for employees and existing investors,” he said.
Ontra currently has roughly 850 customers including the largest investment banks and private equity firms like Blackstone, Warburg Pincus, and Motive Partners, as well as asset manager AllianceBernstein.
Legal AI is growing fast
Ontra is one of several legal tech startups, including Ironclad and Juro, that use AI to automate routine legal processes for private markets and investment firms. Ontra currently employs about 385 people and has processed over 1.5 million documents.
Based in Concord, California, the startup plans to use much of the financing for R&D and to launch new products. In September, it plans to launch another three products to streamline due diligence questionnaires, to simplify processes for customer verification, and to further speed contract negotiation timelines.
Ontra is looking to scale rapidly with plans to launch two new products a year for the foreseeable future, Pospisil said. “We want to be the indispensable, ubiquitous infrastructure provider for the private markets,” he said.
But when it comes to a possible IPO, Pospisil appeared hesitant. The IPO market has been very slow since a record 397 companies listed their shares in 2021. But a recent surge of strong deals, capped by a blowout performance from crypto firm Circle on June 5, means the public equities market may be open to high-growth tech companies. “We may IPO if it’s the right thing for the business. We don’t view an IPO as a goal in itself,” Pospisil said.
It was an unusual question coming from a police officer. Heather Brady was napping at home in San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon when the officer knocked on her door to ask: Had she applied to Arizona Western College?
She had not, and as the officer suspected, somebody else had applied to Arizona community colleges in her name to scam the government into paying out financial aid money.
When she checked her student loan servicer account, Brady saw the scammers hadn’t stopped there. A loan for over $9,000 had been paid out in her name — but to another person — for coursework at a California college.
“I just can’t imagine how many people this is happening to that have no idea,” Brady said.
The rise of artificial intelligence and the popularity of online classes have led to an explosion of financial aid fraud. Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy “ghost students” — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check.
In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real. Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits. And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased.
On Friday, the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity. It will apply only to first-time applicants for federal student aid for the summer term, affecting some 125,000 borrowers. The agency said it is developing more advanced screening for the fall.
“The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program,” the department said in its guidance to colleges.
Public colleges have lost millions of dollars to fraud
An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target.
Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports.
Colleges typically receive a portion of the loans intended for tuition, with the balance going directly to students for other expenses. Community colleges are targeted in part because their lower tuition means larger percentages of grants and loans go to borrowers.
Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time.
In January, Wayne Chaw started getting emails about a class he never signed up for at De Anza Community College, where he had taken coding classes a decade earlier. Identity thieves had obtained his Social Security number and collected $1,395 in financial aid in his name.
The energy management class required students to submit a homework assignment to prove they were real. But someone wrote submissions impersonating Chaw, likely using a chatbot.
“This person is typing as me, saying my first and last name. … It’s very freaky when I saw that,” said Chaw.
The fraud involved a grant, not loans, so Chaw himself did not lose money. He called the Social Security Administration to report the identity theft, but after five hours on hold, he never got through to a person.
As the Trump administration moves to dismantle the Education Department, federal cuts may make it harder to catch criminals and help victims of identity theft. In March, the Trump administration fired more than 300 people from the Federal Student Aid office, and the department’s Office of Inspector General, which investigates fraud, has lost more than 20% of its staff through attrition and retirements since October.
“I’m just nervous that I’m going to be stuck with this,” Brady said. “The agency is going to be so broken down and disintegrated that I won’t be able to do anything, and I’m just going to be stuck with those $9,000” in loans.
Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes’ pervasiveness.
In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.
Identify fraud victims who never attended college are hit with student debt
Brittnee Nelson of Shreveport, Louisiana, was bringing her daughter to day care two years ago when she received a notification that her credit score had dropped 27 points.
Loans had been taken out in her name for colleges in California and Louisiana, she discovered. She canceled one before it was paid out, but it was too late to stop a loan of over $5,000 for Delgado Community College in New Orleans.
Nelson runs her own housecleaning business and didn’t go to college. She already was signed up for identity theft protection and carefully monitored her credit. Still, her debt almost went into collections before the loan was put in forbearance. She recently got the loans taken off her record after two years of effort.
“It’s like if someone came into your house and robbed you,” she said.
The federal government’s efforts to verify borrowers’ identity could help, she said.
“If they can make these hurdles a little bit harder and have these verifications more provable, I think that’s really, really, really going to protect people in the long run,” she said.
Delgado spokesperson Barbara Waiters said responsibility for approving loans ultimately lies with federal agencies.
“This is an unfortunate and serious matter, but it is not the direct or indirect result of Delgado’s internal processes,” Waiters said.
In San Francisco, the loans taken out in Brady’s name are in a grace period, but still on the books. That has not been her only challenge. A few months ago, she was laid off from her job and decided to sign up for a class at City College San Francisco to help her career. But all the classes were full.
After a few weeks, Brady finally was able to sign up for a class. The professor apologized for the delay in spots opening up: The college has been struggling with fraudulent applications.
Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges—like Los Angeles Pierce College, above—California is a particularly large target.
In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to her digital AI twin.
The big story: Trade talks with China.
The markets: It’s pretty quiet out there.
Analyst notes from Wedbush on Musk and Tesla, JPMorgan on Apple, Goldman Sachs on Switzerland’s negative interest rates, and Joachim Klement on defense stocks.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning from the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, where a lot of the conversation was focused on how leaders are using AI and preparing their companies to embrace it. We created some multi-agent systems in real time with Babak Hodjat, who is chief technology officer, AI, for Cognizant, our founding and knowledge partner for the summit. Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright said his company will open a new restaurant almost every 24 hours thanks to AI, and leaders like LRN founder Dov Seidman talked about how to create more human-centered organizations in this next wave of transformation.
I had an opportunity to interview my digital twin on stage. It—or should I say, she?—was created by Delphi cofounder and CEO Dara Ladjevardian, whose company has created thousands of digital clones for clients who want to, as he put it, “scale their minds.” That could be consultants who are using digital clones to engage potential clients in conversation or CEOs who want to help employees understand their thinking on a range of issues. The goal, says Ladjevardian, is to train these digital replicas to “be predictive of you.”
What’s fun, and disconcerting, is how these clones can engage in conversation. Mine knew my sister’s name, thanks to a podcast from a decade ago that I hadn’t realized it found, and it cited my own phrases back to me. (Note to self: the alliteration that seemed clever on a LinkedIn bio can sound trite when you hear it said out loud.) And, unlike me, my twin could instantly call up facts and anecdotes from past stories and serve up observations about current affairs in my voice.
Did it capture the essence of who I am? No. I thought it was more humorless and way more superficial than I am in real life. There’s a mildly creepy quality to my video avatar—the movie Cats comes to mind—where my mouth and eyes didn’t seem quite in sync. But—hey—maybe that’s because I never look at myself as I talk. I presume the technology will get better at capturing tone, personality and empathy. But let me know what you think. You can speak with digital Diane yourself by clicking on this link.
Change the World is Fortune’s annual list featuring companies that are doing well by doing good. These companies are using the creative tools of business to help the planet and tackle society’s unmet needs—and they’re earning a profit while doing so. You can see last year’s honorees here. The deadline for applications this year is Tuesday, July 29; the list will be published in late September, and will appear in the October/November issue of Fortune magazine.
In his confirmation hearings to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya pledged his openness to views that might conflict with his own. “Dissent,” he said, ”is the very essence of science.”
That commitment is being put to the test.
On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the Bethesda Declaration, challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”
In a capital where insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly, 92 NIH researchers, program directors, branch chiefs and scientific review officers put their signatures on the letter — and their careers on the line. An additional 250 of their colleagues across the agency endorsed the declaration without using their names.
The letter, addressed to Bhattacharya, also was sent to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH. White House spokesman Kush Desai defended the administration’s approach to federal research and said President Donald Trump is focused on restoring a “Gold Standard” of science, not “ideological activism.”
The letter came out a day before Bhattacharya is to testify to a Senate committee about Trump’s proposed budget, opening him to questions about the broadside from declaration signers, and it stirred Democrats on a House panel to ask the Republican chair for hearings on the matter.
Confronting a ‘culture of fear’
The signers went public in the face of a “culture of fear and suppression” they say Trump’s administration has spread through the federal civil service. “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” the declaration says.
Bhattacharya responded to the declaration by saying it “has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months,” such as suggestions that NIH has ended international collaboration.
“Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive,” he said in a statement. “We all want the NIH to succeed.”
Named for the agency’s headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world’s premier public health research institution over the course of mere months.
It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants.
In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients.
In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,” it says, “it wastes $4 million.”
The mask comes off
Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what’s happening at the NIH.
At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration.
“I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,” Norton told The Associated Press.
His declaration drew together likeminded infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists who dissented from what they saw as excessive COVID-19 lockdown policies and felt ostracized by the larger public health community that pushed those policies, including the NIH.
“He is proud of his statement, and we are proud of ours,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute who signed the Bethesda Declaration.
Cancer research is sidelined
As chief of the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch, Kobrin provides scientific oversight of researchers across the country who’ve been funded by the cancer institute or want to be. Cuts in personnel and money have shifted her work from improving cancer care research to what she sees as minimizing its destruction. “So much of it is gone — my work,” she said.
The 21-year NIH veteran said she signed because she didn’t want to be “a collaborator” in the political manipulation of biomedical science.
Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow with the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, also signed the declaration. “We have a saying in basic science,” he said. “You go and become a physician if you want to treat thousands of patients. You go and become a researcher if you want to save billions of patients.
“We are doing the research that is going to go and create the cures of the future,” he added. But that won’t happen, he said, if Trump’s Republican administration prevails with its searing grant cuts.
The NIH employees interviewed by the AP emphasized they were speaking for themselves and not for their institutes nor the NIH.
Dissenters range across the breadth of NIH
Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.
The letter asserts “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who “braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.”
The Trump administration has gone at public health research on several fronts, both directly, as part of its broad effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion values throughout the bureaucracy, and as part of its drive to starve some universities of federal money.
At the White House, Desai said Americans “have lost confidence in our increasingly politicized healthcare and research apparatus that has been obsessed with DEI and COVID, which the majority of Americans moved on from years ago.”
A blunt ax swings
This has forced “indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,” the declaration says.
Some NIH employees have previously come forward in televised protests to air grievances, and many walked out of Bhattacharya’s town hall with staff. The declaration is the first cohesive effort to register agency-wide dismay with the NIH’s direction.
The dissenters remind Bhattacharya in their letter of his oft-stated ethic that academic freedom must be a lynchpin in science.
With that in place, he said in a statement in April, “NIH scientists can be certain they are afforded the ability to engage in open, academic discourse as part of their official duties and in their personal capacities without risk of official interference, professional disadvantage or workplace retaliation.”
Now it will be seen whether that’s enough to protect those NIH employees challenging the Trump administration and him.
“There’s a book I read to my kids, and it talks about how you can’t be brave if you’re not scared,” said Norton, who has three young children. “I am so scared about doing this, but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it’s only going to get harder to speak up.
“Maybe I’m putting my kids at risk by doing this,” she added. “And I’m doing it anyway because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”
Eurostar Group Ltd. plans to launch direct train services from London to Frankfurt and Geneva next decade, connecting the UK’s capital to two of Europe’s key financial centers.
The journeys would each take roughly five hours, a spokesperson for the operator said. As part of the new services, Eurostar, which is majority-owned by France’s state rail company SNCF, said it would invest approximately €2 billion ($2.3 billion) to increase its fleet by around 30%.
Eurostar’s plans come as it faces criticism over high prices and reliability. It could also face opposition from other operators pushing to launch rival services to end its 31-year monopoly on international trains from Britain. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and FS Italiane Group are among the companies seeking to challenge Eurostar on its flagship route between London and Paris.
Offering direct trains from London to Frankfurt and Geneva would allow bankers and other finance professionals to continue their work and make calls during their journeys, unlike on planes.
Eurostar currently operates services in five countries: the UK, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The most popular route, London to Paris, attracted more than 280,000 passengers last year.
The company behind St Pancras, the London train station where Eurostar operates, and Getlink SE, the Channel Tunnel operator, said earlier this year they wanted to open more services to France and new routes to Germany and Switzerland.
Last year, a report from campaign group Transport and Environment (T&E) rated Eurostar the worst-performing of 27 European rail services. The survey considered factors such as ticket prices, reliability and experience. Eurostar disputed the findings.
Offering direct trains from London to Frankfurt and Geneva would allow professionals to continue their work and make calls during their journeys, unlike on planes.
Sly Stone, the revolutionary musician and dynamic showman whose Sly and the Family Stone transformed popular music in the 1960s and ’70s and beyond with such hits as “Everyday People,” “Stand!” and “Family Affair,” died Monday at age 82
Stone, born Sylvester Stewart, had been in poor health in recent years. His publicist Carleen Donovan said Stone died in Los Angeles surrounded by family after contending with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments.
Founded in 1966-67, Sly and the Family Stone was the first major group to include Black and white men and women, and well embodied a time when anything seemed possible — riots and assassinations, communes and love-ins. The singers screeched, chanted, crooned and hollered. The music was a blowout of frantic horns, rapid-fire guitar and locomotive rhythms, a melting pot of jazz, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, soul and the early grooves of funk.
Sly’s time on top was brief, roughly from 1968-1971, but profound. No band better captured the gravity-defying euphoria of the Woodstock era or more bravely addressed the crash which followed. From early songs as rousing as their titles — “I Want To Take You Higher,” “Stand!” — to the sober aftermath of “Family Affair” and “Runnin’ Away,” Sly and the Family Stone spoke for a generation whether or not it liked what they had to say.
Stone’s group began as a Bay Area sextet featuring Sly on keyboards, Larry Graham on bass; Sly’s brother, Freddie, on guitar; sister Rose on vocals; Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini horns and Greg Errico on drums. They debuted with the album “A Whole New Thing” and earned the title with their breakthrough single, “Dance to the Music.” It hit the top 10 in April 1968, the week the Rev. Martin Luther King was murdered, and helped launch an era when the polish of Motown and the understatement of Stax suddenly seemed of another time.
Led by Sly Stone, with his leather jumpsuits and goggle shades, mile-wide grin and mile-high Afro, the band dazzled in 1969 at the Woodstock festival and set a new pace on the radio. “Everyday People,” “I Wanna Take You Higher” and other songs were anthems of community, non-conformity and a brash and hopeful spirit, built around such catchphrases as “different strokes for different folks.” The group released five top 10 singles, three of them hitting No. 1, and three million-selling albums: “Stand!”, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” and “Greatest Hits.”
For a time, countless performers wanted to look and sound like Sly and the Family Stone. The Jackson Five’s breakthrough hit, “I Want You Back,” and the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You” were among the many songs from the late 1960s that mimicked Sly’s vocal and instrumental arrangements. Miles Davis’ landmark blend of jazz, rock and funk, “Bitches Brew,” was inspired in part by Sly, while fellow jazz artist Herbie Hancock even named a song after him.
“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewelry,” Questlove wrote in the foreword to Stone’s memoir, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” named for one of his biggest hits and published through Questlove’s imprint in 2023. “He was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”
In 2025, Questlove released the documentary “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius).”
Sly’s influence has endured for decades. The top funk artist of the 1970s, Parliament-Funkadelic creator George Clinton, was a Stone disciple. Prince, Rick James and the Black Eyed Peas were among the many performers from the 1980s and after shaped in part by Sly, and countless hip-hop artists have sampled his riffs, from the Beastie Boys to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. A 2005 tribute record included Maroon 5, John Legend and the Roots.
“Sly did so many things so well that he turned my head all the way around,” Clinton once wrote. “He could create polished R&B that sounded like it came from an act that had gigged at clubs for years, and then in the next breath he could be as psychedelic as the heaviest rock band.”
A dream dies, a career burns away
By the early ’70s, Stone himself was beginning a descent from which he never recovered, driven by the pressures of fame and the added burden of Black fame. His record company was anxious for more hits, while the Black Panthers were pressing him to drop the white members from his group. After moving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in 1970, he became increasingly hooked on cocaine and erratic in his behavior. A promised album, “The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone” (“The most optimistic of all,” Rolling Stone reported) never appeared. He became notorious for being late to concerts or not showing up at all, often leaving “other band members waiting backstage for hours wondering whether he was going to show up or not,” according to Stone biographer Joel Selvin.
Around the country, separatism and paranoia were setting in. As a turn of the calendar, and as a state of mind, the ’60s were over. “The possibility of possibility was leaking out,” Stone later explained in his memoir.
On “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” Stone had warned: “Dying young is hard to take/selling out is harder.” Late in 1971, he released “There’s a Riot Going On,” one of the grimmest, most uncompromising records ever to top the album charts. The sound was dense and murky (Sly was among the first musicians to use drum machines), the mood reflective (“Family Affair”), fearful (“Runnin’ Away”) and despairing: “Time, they say, is the answer — but I don’t believe it,” Sly sings on “Time.” The fast, funky pace of the original “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” was slowed, stretched and retitled “Thank You For Talkin’ to Me, Africa.”
The running time of the title track was 0:00.
“It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger,” critic Greil Marcus called the album.
“Riot” highlighted an extraordinary run of blunt, hard-hitting records by Black artists, from the Stevie Wonder single “Superstition” to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” album, to which “Riot” was an unofficial response. But Stone seemed to back away from the nightmare he had related. He was reluctant to perform material from “Riot” in concert and softened the mood on the acclaimed 1973 album “Fresh,” which did feature a cover of “Que Sera Sera,” the wistful Doris Day song reworked into a rueful testament to fate’s upper hand.
By the end of the decade, Sly and the Family Stone had broken up and Sly was releasing solo records with such unmet promises as “Heard You Missed Me, Well I’m Back” and “Back On the Right Track.” Most of the news he made over the following decades was of drug busts, financial troubles and mishaps on stage. Sly and the Family Stone was inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 1993 and honored in 2006 at the Grammy Awards, but Sly released just one album after the early ’80s, “I’m Back! Family & Friends,” much of it updated recordings of his old hits.
He would allege he had hundreds of unreleased songs and did collaborate on occasion with Clinton, who would recall how Stone “could just be sitting there doing nothing and then open his eyes and shock you with a lyric so brilliant that it was obvious no one had ever thought of it before.”
Sly Stone had three children, including a daughter with Cynthia Robinson, and was married once — briefly and very publicly. In 1974, he and actor Kathy Silva wed on stage at Madison Square Garden, an event that inspired an 11,000-word story in The New Yorker. Sly and Silva soon divorced.
A born musician, a born uniter
He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California, the second of five children in a close, religious family. Sylvester became “Sly” by accident, when a teacher mistakenly spelled his name “Slyvester.”
He loved performing so much that his mother alleged he would cry if the congregation in church didn’t respond when he sang before it. He was so gifted and ambitious that by age 4 he had sung on stage at a Sam Cooke show and by age 11 had mastered several instruments and recorded a gospel song with his siblings. He was so committed to the races working together that in his teens and early 20s he was playing in local bands that included Black and white members and was becoming known around the Bay Area as a deejay equally willing to play the Beatles and rhythm and blues acts.
Through his radio connections, he produced some of the top San Francisco bands, including the Great Society, Grace Slick’s group before she joined the Jefferson Airplane. Along with an early mentor and champion, San Francisco deejay Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, he worked on rhythm and blues hits (Bobby Freeman’s “C’mon and Swim”) and the Beau Brummels’ Beatle-esque “Laugh, Laugh.” Meanwhile, he was putting together his own group, recruiting family members and local musicians and settling on the name Sly and the Family Stone.
“A Whole New Thing” came out in 1967, soon followed by the single “Dance to the Music,” in which each member was granted a moment of introduction as the song rightly proclaimed a “brand new beat.” In December 1968, the group appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and performed a medley that included “Dance to the Music” and “Everyday People.” Before the set began, Sly turned to the audience and recited a brief passage from his song “Are You Ready”:
Senate Republicans are proposing the elimination of penalties for not abiding by certain fuel efficiency standards. These penalties would render regulatory credits, an incentive for auto companies to abide by the standards, essentially useless. Tesla relies on these credits for a chunk of its revenue, racking up $2.67 billion from them in 2024.
As Tesla stock sputters following CEO Elon Musk’s feud with President Donald Trump, the EV maker is facing yet another threat from the administration. Republicans are doubling down on efforts to weaken carbon emission standards for the auto industry, which have provided opportunities for companies producing eco-friendly vehicles, such as Tesla, to receive and sell regulatory credits for profit.
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation proposed last week eliminating penalties for companies not meeting certain economy fuel standards set to mitigate carbon emissions. The proposal is included in the committee’s portion of Trump’s sweeping budget bill.
After Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards were introduced in 1975 as a means of setting standards for fuel efficiency, a credits program emerged following lobbying efforts from auto companies looking to be paid to produce lower emission vehicles. Auto companies that produce a certain amount of energy-efficient cars are given a number of credits, depending on how eco-friendly their manufactured vehicles are. Companies are required to have a certain number of credits annually.
While Tesla is able to easily attain these credits as a producer of cars that don’t run on gas, other manufacturers, like Ford and Stellantis, are not. Therefore, they buy credits from Tesla, who can sell those credits for practically 100% profit.
The Senate committee’s proposal would eliminate certain CAFE penalties, rendering the need to have credits useless, Chris Harto, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports, told Fortune in an email.
“It also would essentially turn the CAFE standards into nothing more than a reporting requirement with no consequences for automakers who fail to improve the efficiency of the vehicles they sell,” he said.
The committee argued the provision would “modestly” bring down the cost of cars by eliminating CAFE penalties.
These CAFE credits have been a boon for Tesla, which has been battered by CEO Musk’s controversial involvement in—and departure from—the Trump administration. The EV-maker made $2.76 billion from regulatory credits in fiscal 2024 and $595 million in the first quarter of 2025, according to earnings reports. Tesla reported $420 million in net income the same quarter, meaning without the regulatory credit, the company would not have been profitable.
“A key element of Tesla’s profitability has been its ability to generate credits because it makes zero emissions, and sell those credits to more polluting car companies like GM and Ford and Stellantis—primarily gas-guzzlers that don’t really want to make clean cars,” Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Fortune.
“By taking away these credits, they’re taking away a key element of Tesla’s profitability,” he added.
Tesla did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Tesla’s credit headaches
The Senate committee’s proposal is one of several efforts by the Trump administration to cut auto sustainability standards. Last month the Senate passed legislationblocking a California effort to ban gas-powered vehicles and mandate sales of only zero-emission cars and light trucks by 2035. The bill, should it be signed by the president, would take a $2 billion bite out of Tesla’s revenue, according to JPMorgan analysts.
Also in Trump’s massive budget bill is the elimination at the end of this year of tax credits up to $7,500 for buyers of certain Tesla and other EV models, which would cost $1.2 billion of Tesla’s full-year profit, the analysts calculated.
Tesla’s credit headaches extend across the Atlantic Ocean. Regulatory credits are common in Europe and Asia, and the European Union, for example, gives credits to European automakers who sell a certain number of zero-emission cars.
But as Tesla sales crater overseas—including falling by 49% in April—the EV maker may not be able to reach the number of sales necessary to gain credits. As of April, Tesla—grouped with Ford and Stellantis in a manufacturing pool to achieve the EU’s emission standards—are still short of the target, according to a report from the International Council on Clean Transportation. Poor sales could jeopardize Tesla’s ability to rack up credits.
“If things go bad for Tesla and they don’t sell enough cars this year, they might not have enough credits for what they promised Stellantis and the others,” ICCT managing director Peter Mock told Politico in March. “Tesla is under pressure.”
The UK’s FTSE 100 index was set to close at a record high for the first time since March, recouping its tariff-induced slump thanks to an improving economic outlook and easing trade tensions.
The export-heavy index rose as much as 0.4% to 8871.41 level, surpassing its March peak of 8,871.31points. The UK gauge is catching up to a global equities benchmark and a key European peer in Germany’s DAX index, which have both reclaimed their record highs after April’s rout.
The UK benchmark is still 0.4% below its intraday record of 8,908.82, and sentiment remains fragile as London faces an exodus of companies moving listings to the US and shelving initial public offerings. Defense contractors Babcock International Group Plc and BAE Systems Plc, as well as precious metals miner Fresnillo Plc, are among the biggest gainers in the index this year.
The FTSE 100 rebounded strongly after President Donald Trump paused some of the highest tariffs in a century in April and the UK secured a trade framework with the US. Economic data have also improved, with UK business confidence surging to a nine-month high in May.
“UK stocks are among the cheapest in Europe,” said Georges Debbas, head of European equity derivatives strategy at BNP Paribas Markets 360. “The country is also the most friendly to the US, as it’s the only one to have a firm trade agreement in place. That allows you to have a more constructive view on the market.”
Still, the gauge has trailed other European benchmarks, which benefited from lower interest rates and heavy fiscal stimulus plans led by Germany.The FTSE 100 has advanced 8.5% in 2025, far behind a 21% rally in the German benchmark. Meanwhile, Spain’s IBEX 35 Index is up 23%, while Italy’s FTSE MIB has jumped 18%.
The UK’s stock market has shrunk in recent years amid deal-related delistings, compounded by a lean flow of IPOs and some companies shifting their primary listings to the US in search of more trading liquidity.
By the close of Circle Internet Group’s first trading day on Thursday, June 5, its stock had rocketed to $88, a 180% jump from the price institutional investors paid for their shares in the underwriting led by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup. The upshot: The company and insiders combined left a gigantic amount of money on the table by agreeing to a price far below what investors were willing to pay. As Fortune previously noted, that “left on the table” figure was the seventh largest in the history of all IPOs since 1980, exceeded only by the debuts of Visa, Airbnb, Snowflake, Rivian, DoorDash and Coupang, the latter nicknamed “The Amazon of South Korea.”
Circle was just revving up. On Friday, June 6th, its stock jumped another nearly 30% to $107.5. That additional leap hurtled the issuer for the USDC stablecoin to an historic record. Jay Ritter—professor at the University of Florida and world’s leading expert on IPOs—confirmed that for all go-public events since 1980 that raised $500 million or more, Circle’s two day moonshot of nearly 250% ranks as by far the highest. The crypto favorite’s showing easily eclipsed the 2nd place “pop” sounded by software provider C3.ai of 209% at its 2020 entry on the Nasdaq.
All told, Circle sold 39 million shares, raising $1.145 billion after underwriting fees of $67 million. Had the shares fetched the $107.5 close on June 6 instead of the $31 (excluding fees) paid in the pre-sale by the likes of mutual and hedge funds, the company and insiders combined would have collected $4.144 billion. Hence, as of the second day of trading, the IPO had left a staggering $3 billion on the table. Put simply, for every $1 going to the sellers, $3 went in two-day gains flowed to the underwriters’ Wall Street clients as a windfall.
At a market cap of $22 billion, Circle’s selling at 140 times earnings. Given that treacherous valuation and the onslaught of stablecoin rivals invading its space, Circle’s the epitome of an ultra-high risk stock. Money that might have been sitting in its treasury as a buffer against tough times vanished in this mind-bending spectacle that only the confluence of crypto craziness and Wall Street’s genius for underpricing IPOs could have staged.
Jeremy Allaire, chief executive officer of Circle Internet Financial Ltd., center, during the company's initial public offering (IPO) on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Thursday, June 5, 2025.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, whoturns 53 today, recently celebrated two decades with the tech giant. Reflecting on his career, he offered advice to younger workers who want to become leaders someday. He encouraged them to work with others who outshine them.
Today—Tuesday, June 10—one of the world’s most significant leaders in tech turns 53. During Sundar Pichai’s two-decade career with Google, he’s worked on many of the company’s major products including Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, and Chromebook. In 2019, he became CEO of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google. His current net worth is estimated at about $1.1 billion.
As one of the most powerful leaders in tech, Pichai recently reflected on how he got to where he is in his career. On a recent podcast by Podium VC, he said it took “a lot of luck along the way,” but added “it’s important to listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it.”
While Pichai sits at the helm of one of the largest tech companies in the world, his path to the top wasn’t a completely smooth ride. His advice to young people who aspire to be in leadership positions like him someday is to surround themselves with people who outshine them.
“At various points in my life, I worked with people who I felt were better than me,” Pichai said. “Get yourself in a position where you’re working with people who you feel are stretching your abilities. [It’s] what helps you grow. [Put] yourself in uncomfortable situations. I think often you’ll surprise yourself.”
How Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google
Pichai was born and raised in Chennai, India, to a father who was an electrical engineer and a mother who worked as a stenographer. They were considered to be a middle-class family; Pichai toldYahoo Finance he was fortunate to have grown up in a household where education was valued.
He said he had minimal access to computers growing up—and even recalled being on a waitlist for five years to get a rotary phone. He said experiencing technology for the first time changed his life.
“It was a vivid moment for me as to how access to technology can make a difference,” Pichai told Yahoo Finance, adding that his limited exposure to computers during childhood is something he’s carried with him throughout his career, serving as inspiration for the rollout of Chromebooks to students in the U.S.
Pichai moved to the U.S. in 1993 to earn his master’s degree in materials science from Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley. He briefly worked for a semiconductor materials company after graduating, but then went back to school to earn his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Pichai had a brief stint at McKinsey & Co. after earning his MBA and landing at Google in 2004.
“I think it’s tough to find things you love doing, but I think listening to your heart a bit more than your mind [helps] in terms of figuring out what you want to do,” Pichai said during the podcast.
Reflecting on 20 years at Google in April 2024, Pichai said a lot had changed about the company since he first joined, like the technology, the number of people who use Google products, and his hair.
“What hasn’t changed—the thrill I get from working at this amazing company,” Pichai wrote in an Instagram post. “20 years in, I’m still feeling lucky.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.
Major physicians and public health groups criticized the move to oust all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Kennedy, who was one of the nation’s leading anti-vaccine activists before becoming the nation’s top health official, has not said who he would appoint to the panel, but said it would convene in just two weeks in Atlanta.
Although it’s typically not viewed as a partisan board, the entire current roster of committee members were Biden appointees.
“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”
When reached by phone, the panel’s now-former chair — Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot of Vanderbilt University — declined to comment. But another panel member, Noel Brewer at the University of North Carolina, said he and other committee members received an email late Monday afternoon that said their services on the committee had been terminated but gave no reason.
“I’d assumed I’d continue serving on the committee for my full term,” said Brewer, who joined the panel last summer.
Brewer is a behavioral scientist whose research examines why people get vaccinated and ways to improve vaccination coverage. Whether people get vaccinated is largely influenced by what their doctors recommend, and doctors have been following ACIP guidance.
“Up until today, ACIP recommendations were the gold standard for what insurers should pay for, what providers should recommend, and what the public should look to,” he said.
But Kennedy already took the unusual step of changing COVID-19 recommendations without first consulting the committee — a move criticized by doctors’ groups and public health advocates.
“It’s unclear what the future holds,” Brewer said. “Certainly provider organizations have already started to turn away from ACIP.”
Kennedy said the committee members had too many conflicts of interest. Currently, committee members are required to declare any potential such conflicts, as well as business interests, that arise during their tenure. They also must disclose any possible conflicts at the start of each public meeting.
But Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Kennedy’s actions were based on false conflict-of-interest claims and set “a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe” by potentially reducing vaccine access for millions of people.
“Make no mistake: Politicizing the ACIP as Secretary Kennedy is doing will undermine public trust under the guise of improving it,” he said in a statement. “We’ll look back at this as a grave mistake that sacrificed decades of scientific rigor, undermined public trust, and opened the door for fringe theories rather than facts.”
Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called Kennedy’s mass ouster “a coup.”
“It’s not how democracies work. It’s not good for the health of the nation,” Benjamin told The Associated Press.
Benjamin said the move raises real concerns about whether future committee members will be viewed as impartial. He added that Kennedy is going against what he told lawmakers and the public, and the public health association plans to watch Kennedy “like a hawk.”
“He is breaking a promise,” Benjamin said. “He said he wasn’t going to do this.”
Dr. Bruce A. Scott, president of the American Medical Association, called the committee a trusted source of science- and data-driven advice and said Kennedy’s move, coupled with declining vaccination rates across the country, will help drive an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases.
“Today’s action to remove the 17 sitting members of ACIP undermines that trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives,” Scott said in a statement.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a doctor who had expressed reservations about Kennedy’s nomination but voted to install him as the nation’s health secretary nonetheless, said he had spoken with Kennedy moments after the announcement.
“Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion,” Cassidy said in a social media post. “I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.”
The committee had been in a state of flux since Kennedy took over. Its first meeting this year had been delayed when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed its February meeting.
During Kennedy’s confirmation, Cassidy had expressed concerns about preserving the committee, saying he had sought assurances that Kennedy would keep the panel’s current vaccine recommendations.
The webpage that featured the committee’s members was deleted Monday evening, shortly after Kennedy’s announcement.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a news conference on the Autism report by the CDC at the Hubert Humphrey Building Auditorium in Washington, April 16, 2025.
Indonesia revoked permits on Tuesday for four of the five mining companies operating in the eastern archipelago of Raja Ampat after activists shared videos of islands damaged by nickel extraction.
The cluster of islands and shoals in Southwest Papua Province sits in the Coral Triangle and is thought to be one of the world’s most pristine reefs, with its clear blue waters making it a popular diving spot.
Indonesia has the world’s largest nickel reserves and is the biggest producer of the metal, which is used in electric vehicle batteries and stainless steel, and a 2020 export ban has spurred a domestic industrial boom.
Last week, Greenpeace Indonesia published videos showing environmental damage to three islands because of nickel mining projects, including one clip which racked up more than 15 million Instagram views.
President Prabowo Subianto “decided that the government will revoke the mining business license of four companies in Raja Ampat”, state secretariat minister Prasetyo Hadi told reporters.
Energy and mineral resources minister Bahlil Lahadalia said “they have violated” regulations.
“We believe this region must be protected,” he said.
Greenpeace said nickel exploitation on the islands of Gag, Kawe and Manuran had led to the destruction of more than 500 hectares (1,200 acres) of forest and vegetation.
Environmentalists say coral reefs and marine life are threatened by the operations, but Bahlil denied the surrounding environment had been harmed.
“If people say the coral reefs and the ocean have been damaged, you can see for yourself. Please be careful to differentiate which one is real and which one is not,” he said.
‘Make sure they stop’
The NGO’s campaign led to growing calls by politicians and celebrities for the licenses to be withdrawn.
The four companies impacted by the immediate ban are PT Anugerah Surya Pratama, PT Nurham, PT Kawei Sejahtera Mining and PT Mulia Raymond Perkasa.
PT Nurham received its mining permits this year and has not started production but the other three have had them since 2013, according to the energy ministry.
One more company—PT Gag Nikel—will continue to operate on Raja Ampat’s Gag island but be closely monitored, said Bahlil. It received its operational permit in 2017.
The three affected islands are categorized as small islands that under Indonesian law should be off-limits to mining, Greenpeace said.
Greenpeace Indonesia said the decision was a good start but the government needed to take further action.
“We appreciate this decision but we need to make sure the decision will be implemented. We need to make sure they stop,” forest campaign team leader Arie Rompas said.
He warned the government could reissue the permits later or the companies could appeal the decision in court.
The activist said the government should also revoke the operating permit for the fifth company.
A report last week by Climate Rights International alleged the Indonesian government was allowing environmental damage and violations against Indigenous people to go unchecked by nickel mining firms in the eastern Maluku islands.
Processing and mining operations have grown there around Weda Bay, the world’s largest nickel mine by production, but have led to locals reporting a spike in air pollution from smelters and rivers polluted by nickel tailings in soil carried by rain.
An AFP report last month detailed how the home of the nomadic Hongana Manyawa tribe was being eaten away by that mine, with members issuing a call for nickel companies to leave their tribal lands alone.
Papuans hold placards reading "revoke all nickel mining permits in Raja Ampat immediately" during a protest march to the Southwest Papua Governor's office in Sorong on June 10, 2025.
Private investment could suffer as investors increasingly allocate funds to finance the government rather than firms and consumers, Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk has warned. This phenomenon, known as crowding out, could become a bigger problem as the cost of servicing the $37 trillion national debt increases.
Wall Street seems increasingly antsy about how a ballooning federal deficit could weigh on both companies and consumers.
As the national debt grows faster, so does the pace of government borrowing—which could start to dominate credit markets. U.S. Treasuries accounted for $28.3 trillion, or roughly 60%, of the country’s $46.9 trillion fixed-income market at the end of 2024, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Some believe the government binge is now competing with private companies and consumers for available dollars to borrow.
“This is not healthy,” Torsten Sløk, chief economist at private equity giant Apollo Global Management, wrote in a note on Sunday. “Half of credit issued in the economy should not be going to the government.”
That’s because private investment could suffer, Sløk explained, as investors allocate more and more of their funds to finance the government rather than firms and consumers. Borrowing costs rise with less loanable funds to go around, a phenomenon termed “crowding out.”
“The bottom line is that if the level of government debt were significantly lower,” Sløk wrote, “more dollars would be available for consumers to buy new cars and new houses, and for companies to build new factories.”
Jay Hatfield, the CEO of Infrastructure Capital Advisors, estimates this will reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $300 billion, or just over 1% of total GDP, based on the nearly $2 trillion deficit and assuming a 15% return on corporate investment after taxes.
“Deficit spending always crowds out private investment and hurts economic growth,” Hatfield, who manages ETFs and a series of hedge funds, told Fortune in a text message. “Particularly since it is impossible to cut politically post-[2008] recession as we have seen after the pandemic.”
Others aren’t sure if that is visible just yet. Corporate borrowing continues to grow at a fast pace, Matt Sheridan, lead portfolio manager of income strategies at AllianceBernstein, told Fortune. Mortgage lending has been sideways over the past five years, but that’s because homeowners don’t want to refinance at higher interest rates, not because banks don’t want to give them loans.
“We’re not seeing a lot of stress yet,” Sheridan said, “but it might be early days.”
Avoiding a ‘debt death spiral’
Few in finance, of course, are probably more famous for sounding the debt alarm than Ray Dalio. The billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, has long warned about the increasing costs of servicing the $37 trillion national debt.
Interest payments on the debt will crack $1 trillion this year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, and only trails Social Security as a share of government spending.
As these payments get larger, it increasingly crowds out productive spending, Dalio recently toldFortune’s Diane Brady. Meanwhile, interest rates are pushed higher, weighing on markets and the economy, or the government “prints money” and buys debt to pay its bills, which causes inflation.
“You get both the central government and the central bank creating debt to pay for debt and you begin a spiral,” he said. “There are no easy answers.”
Recent turmoil in the bond market may put a spotlight on some of these big questions. Long-term yields remain elevated, partly because investors have priced out fewer interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, with strong “hard data” suggesting the economy remains resilient despite uncertainty introduced by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Investors might also be demanding a premium for holding U.S. debt because of growing fiscal concerns. Despite Elon Musk’s objections, Republicans are working to pass a “Big, Beautiful” spending bill, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated will increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next decade.
If borrowing costs remain high, companies might find it more difficult to finance themselves with long-term credit. So far this year, Sheridan said, firms are issuing fewer 30-year bonds and more intermediate-duration and floating-rate securities.
“So that crowding out effect might be starting to play out with where on the U.S. yield curve corporations want to borrow at,” he said.
More expensive lending, of course, may lead to more companies going under. Since 2022, when the Fed dramatically hiked rates to fight inflation, an annual study by Deutsche Bank has argued the global economy is slowly leaving an “ultra-low default world.”
“While we haven’t yet seen a cyclical spike in defaults—largely due to the avoidance of a U.S. recession—there are clear signs that higher-for-longer funding costs, especially in the U.S., are taking a toll,” Jim Reid, the bank’s global head of macro and thematic research, wrote in a note with colleagues Monday.
The pressure could keep building if Uncle Sam can’t stem its borrowing.
After stumbling out of the starting gate in Big Tech’s pivotal race to capitalize on artificial intelligence, Apple tried to regain its footing Monday during an annual developers conference that focused mostly on incremental advances and cosmetic changes in its technology.
The presummer rite, which attracted thousands of developers from nearly 60 countries to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters, subdued compared with the feverish anticipation that surrounded the event in the last two years.
Apple highlighted plans for more AI tools designed to simplify people’s lives and make its products even more intuitive. It also provided an early glimpse at the biggest redesign of its iPhone software in a decade. In doing so, Apple executives refrained from issuing bold promises of breakthroughs that punctuated recent conferences, prompting CFRA analyst Angelo Zino to deride the event as a “dud” in a research note.
More AI, but what about Siri?
In 2023, Apple unveiled a mixed-reality headset that has been little more than a niche product, and last year WWDC trumpeted its first major foray into the AI craze with an array of new features highlighted by the promise of a smarter and more versatile version of its virtual assistant, Siri — a goal that has yet to be realized.
“This work needed more time to reach our high-quality bar,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s top software executive, said Monday at the outset of the conference. The company didn’t provide a precise timetable for when Siri’s AI upgrade will be finished but indicated it won’t happen until next year at the earliest.
“The silence surrounding Siri was deafening,” said Forrester Research analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee said. “No amount of text corrections or cute emojis can fill the yawning void of an intuitive, interactive AI experience that we know Siri will be capable of when ready. We just don’t know when that will happen. The end of the Siri runway is coming up fast, and Apple needs to lift off.”
Is Apple, with its ‘liquid glass,’ still a trendsetter?
The showcase unfolded amid nagging questions about whether Apple has lost some of the mystique and innovative drive that has made it a tech trendsetter during its nearly 50-year history.
Instead of making a big splash as it did with the Vision Pro headset and its AI suite, Apple took a mostly low-key approach that emphasized its effort to spruce up the look of its software with a new design called “Liquid Glass” while also unveiling a new hub for its video games and new features like a “Workout Buddy” to help manage physical fitness.
Apple executives promised to make its software more compatible with the increasingly sophisticated computer chips that have been powering its products while also making it easier to toggle between the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
“Our product experience has become even more seamless and enjoyable,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told the crowd as the 90-minute showcase wrapped up.
IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said Apple seemed to be largely using Monday’s conference to demonstrate the company still has a blueprint for success in AI, even if it’s going to take longer to realize the vision that was presented a year ago.
“This year’s event was not about disruptive innovation, but rather careful calibration, platform refinement and developer enablement —positioning itself for future moves rather than unveiling game-changing technologies,” Jeronimo said.
Apple’s next operating system will be iOS 26
Besides redesigning its software. Apple will switch to a method that automakers have used to telegraph their latest car models by linking them to the year after they first arrive at dealerships. That means the next version of the iPhone operating system due out this autumn will be known as iOS 26 instead of iOS 19 — as it would be under the previous naming approach that has been used since the device’s 2007 debut.
The iOS 26 upgrade is expected to be released in September around the same time Apple traditionally rolls out the next iPhone models.
Playing catchup in AI
Apple opened the proceedings with a short video clip featuring Federighi speeding around a track in a Formula 1 race car. Although it was meant to promote the June 27 release of the Apple film, “F1” starring Brad Pitt, the segment could also be viewed as an unintentional analogy to the company’s attempt to catch up to the rest of the pack in AI technology.
While some of the new AI tricks compatible with the latest iPhones began rolling out late last year as part of free software updates, the delays in a souped-up Siri became so glaring that the chastened company stopped promoting it in its marketing campaigns earlier this year.
While Apple has been struggling to make AI that meets its standards, the gap separating it from other tech powerhouses is widening. Google keeps packing more AI into its Pixel smartphone lineup while introducing more of the technology into its search engine to dramatically change the way it works. Samsung, Apple’s biggest smartphone rival, is also leaning heavily into AI. Meanwhile, ChatGPT recently struck a deal that will bring former Apple design guru Jony Ive into the fold to work on a new device expected to compete against the iPhone.
Regulatory and trade challenges
Besides grappling with innovation challenges, Apple also faces regulatory threats that could siphon away billions of dollars in revenue that help finance its research and development. A federal judge is currently weighing whether proposed countermeasures to Google’s illegal monopoly in search should include a ban on long-running deals worth $20 billion annually to Apple while another federal judge recently banned the company from collecting commissions on in-app transactions processed outside its once-exclusive payment system.
On top of all that, Apple has been caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, a key manufacturing hub for the Cupertino, California, company. Cook successfully persuaded Trump to exempt the iPhone from tariffs during the president’s first administration, but he has had less success during Trump’s second term, which seems more determined to prod Apple to make its products in the U.S.
The multidimensional gauntlet facing Apple is spooking investors, causing the company’s stock price to plunge by 20% so far this year — a decline that has erased about $750 billion in shareholder wealth. After beginning the year as the most valuable company in the world, Apple now ranks third behind longtime rival Microsoft, another AI leader, and AI chipmaker Nvidia.
Apple’s shares closed down by more than 1% on Monday — an early indication the company’s latest announcements didn’t inspire investors.
Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, has borne the brunt of U.S. restrictions since 2019, when Washington barred it from acquiring advanced components. Export controls passed in 2022 further constrained Huawei’s ability to get advanced chips.
But despite U.S. pressure, Huawei is returning to the forefront of China’s tech sector, with new successes in smartphones, AI processors and EVs. Observers, in and out of China, see Huawei as proof that the country can succeed even if cut off from advanced technologies produced in the West.
Yet Huawei’s founder is cautioning against reading too much into the tech giant’s progress. Ren Zhengfei, in a Tuesday interview with People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, said that the U.S. was overstating Huawei’s successes. He suggested the company’s chips were still a generation behind the U.S.
“Huawei is not that great. We have to work hard to reach [the U.S.’s] evaluation,” he said.
Nevertheless, Ren batted away concerns that U.S. export controls will constrain the growth of both Huawei and the Chinese tech sector.
The Biden administration argued that chip export control measures would slow China’s tech developments and maintain the U.S.’s edge in industries like AI. U.S. rules now bar Chinese companies from buying the most advanced chips, as well as the equipment and software needed to design and manufacture them.
Yet Ren countered that chip packaging and stacking techniques could help Chinese semiconductor firms keep up with the most advanced chips. (Stacking involves bundling multiple chips into a package to get higher performance).
Ren also argued that an increasingly open-source environment will benefit the country in the future.
Chinese tech companies are reportedly embracing RISC-V, an open-source platform that can be used for chip design.
Several of China’s leading tech companies, like e-commerce giant Alibaba and startup DeepSeek, have also made their AI open-source, allowing other developers to download, run and tweak the models themselves. That’s encouraged more widespread adoption, including outside of China.
Export controls to the fore
Ren’s comments come as export controls start to dominate U.S.-China trade conversations.
Trade officials from both countries are meeting in London for a second day of trade talks. The U.S. has accused China of slow-rolling its shipments of rare earths, critical minerals used in an array of sophisticated products, including smartphones and cars.
China holds a dominant position in the production of rare earths. Beijing restricted exports of these metals in April, requiring companies to apply for a license to export rare earths out of the country. These regulations are snarling supply chains for some manufacturers, particularly in the auto industry.
It’s an odd reversal of positions for the U.S., which increasingly uses export controls to leverage its edge in strategic technologies. Chinese officials have long complained about U.S. tech export restrictions, arguing–among other things–that they undermine globalization and threaten China’s development.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is taking part in the London talks, which could be an indication that some U.S. restrictions could be up for negotiation.
Another 2,000 National Guard troops along with 700 Marines are headed to Los Angeles on orders Monday from President Donald Trump, escalating a military presence local officials and Gov. Gavin Newsom don’t want and the police chief says creates logistical challenges for safely handling protests.
An initial 2,000 Guard troops ordered by Trump started arriving Sunday, which saw the most violence during three days of protests driven by anger over Trump’s stepped-up enforcement of immigration laws that critics say are breaking apart migrant families.
Monday’s demonstrations were was far less raucous, with thousands peacefully attending a rally at City Hall and hundreds protesting outside a federal complex that includes a detention center where some immigrants are being held following workplace raids across the city.
Trump has described Los Angeles in dire terms that Mayor Karen Bass and Newsom say are nowhere close to the truth. They say he is putting public safety at risk by adding military personnel even though police say they don’t need the help.
Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said in a statement he was confident in the police department’s ability to handle large-scale demonstrations and that the Marines’ arrival without coordinating with the police department presented a “significant logistical and operational challenge” for them.
Newsom called the deployments reckless and “disrespectful to our troops” in a post on the social platform X.
“This isn’t about public safety,” Newsom said. “It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego.”
The protests began Friday in downtown Los Angeles after federal immigration authorities arrested more than 40 people across the city. The smell of smoke hung in the air downtown Monday, one day after crowds blocked a major freeway and set self-driving cars on fire as police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades.
Additional protests against immigration raids continued into the evening on Monday in several other cities including San Francisco and Santa Ana in California and Dallas and Austin in Texas.
California pushes back against presence of federal troops
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit over the use of National Guard troops following the first deployment, telling reporters in his announcement Monday that Trump had “trampled” the state’s sovereignty.
“We don’t take lightly to the president abusing his authority and unlawfully mobilizing California National Guard troops,” Bonta said. He sought a court order declaring Trump’s use of the Guard unlawful and asking for a restraining order to halt the deployment.
Trump said Monday that the city would have been “completely obliterated” if he had not deployed the Guard.
U.S. officials said the Marine troops were deployed to protect federal property and personnel, including federal immigration agents. Trump’s Monday order put more National Guard members on active duty, but one U.S. official warned that the order was just signed and it could take a day or two to get troops moving. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss troop movements.
Despite their presence, there has been limited engagement so far between the Guard and protesters while local law enforcement implements crowd control.
Bass criticized the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines as a “deliberate attempt” by the Trump administration to “create disorder and chaos in our city.”
She made a plea to the federal government: “Stop the raids.”
Early protests remained peaceful
On Monday, thousands flooded the streets around City Hall for a union rally ahead of a hearing for arrested labor leader David Huerta, who was freed a few hours later on a $50,000 bond. Huerta’s arrest on Friday while protesting immigration raids has become a rallying cry for people angry over the administration’s crackdown. He is the president of the Service Employees International Union California, which represents thousands of the state’s janitors, security officers and other workers.
Early protests had a calm and even joyful atmosphere at times, with people dancing to live music and buoyed by Huerta’s release.
Protesters linked hands in front of a line of police officers outside the downtown federal detention center where Huerta was being held. Religious leaders joined the protesters, working with organizers at times to de-escalate moments of tension.
There was a heavy law enforcement presence in the few square blocks including the federal detention facility, while most in the immense city of some 4 million people went about their normal business on peaceful streets.
Chanting against a line of National Guard troops with Homeland Security officers behind them surrounding the federal buildings ramped up in the afternoon as people yelled, “Free them all!” and “National Guard go away.”
As the crowd thinned, police began pushing protesters away from the area, firing crowd-control munitions as people chanted, “Peaceful protest.” Officers became more aggressive in their tactics in the evening, occasionally surging forward to arrest protesters that got too close. At least a dozen people remaining in the busy Little Tokyo neighborhood were surrounded by police and detained.
Other protests took shape Monday across LA County. Outside a Los Angeles clothing warehouse, relatives of detained workers demanded at a news conference in the morning that their loved ones be released.
The family of Jacob Vasquez, 35, who was detained Friday at the warehouse, where he worked, said they had yet to receive any information about him.
“Jacob is a family man and the sole breadwinner of his household,” Vasquez’s brother, Gabriel, told the crowd. He asked that his last name not be used, fearing being targeted by authorities.
Several dozen people were arrested in protests throughout the weekend. Authorities say one was detained Sunday for throwing a Molotov cocktail at police and another for ramming a motorcycle into a line of officers.
Guard deployment is a nearly unprecedented escalation
The deployment appeared to be the first time in decades that a state’s National Guard was activated without a request from its governor, a significant escalation against those who have sought to hinder the administration’s mass deportation efforts.
The last time the National Guard was activated without a governor’s permission was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
In a directive Saturday, Trump invoked a legal provision allowing him to deploy federal service members when there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
A Chinese lender’s stunt to woo depositors with gifts including the wildly popular Labubu dolls has been barred by financial regulators, underscoring the increasingly fraught battle among banks for customers as interest rates and profit margins fall.
The Zhejiang branch of the National Financial Regulatory Administration has asked local banks to refrain from giving non-compliant perks to attract deposits, according to people familiar with the matter.
The guidance came in the wake of a promotion by Ping An Bank Co., which has been offering Labubu collectibles—blind box toys endorsed by celebrities including Lisa from the K-pop group Blackpink—in multiple cities for new depositors who can park in 50,000 yuan ($6,960) for three months.
Such a practice, which often involves offering free items like rice or small home appliances, as well as e-gifts such as memberships at Internet platforms, was seen as driving up costs at banks and hurting their margins, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a private matter.
While Ping An Bank’s marketing campaign went viral on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu and sparked strong interest from potential savers, it also drew criticism from state media which said it was “not a long-term solution.”
Chinese lenders are walking a tightrope as they balance between deposit taking and protecting margins that are now at record-low levels across the sector. The nation’s big banks just conducted a new round of deposit rate cuts in May, with smaller peers following suit and pushing term deposit interests down to just a little above 1%.
The Zhejiang banking regulator has urged the immediate suspension of any products involved in non-compliant deposit-gathering practices, along with the removal of related promotional materials, the people said. It remains unclear whether the regulator’s other local divisions have issued similar guidance.
The regulator didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Ping An Bank said the initiative started off as a small-scale project launched by a local branch, declining to comment further.
China said in a 2018 rule that commercial banks shouldn’t attract deposits through “inappropriate means” such as giving away physical gifts or returning cash.
Ping An Bank offered Labubu collectibles—blind box toys endorsed by celebrities including Lisa from the K-pop group Blackpink—for new depositors who could park in 50,000 yuan ($6,960) for three months.
President Donald Trump has long wanted to reprivatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have been under government control ever since they needed a $191 billion bailout during the Global Financial Crisis. For Wharton finance and real estate professor Susan Wachter, heavy regulation of utilities and insurance carriers is the best model for the mortgage giants.
No members of the Fortune 500 saw their shares surge last year like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did. Hedge funds who bought nearly worthless stakes in the mortgage giants after the Global Financial Crisis could stand to make billions if President Donald Trump fulfills his goal to take both firms public.
Several experts, meanwhile, remain focused on how to free Fannie and Freddie from government control without repeating the mistakes that helped lead to the 2008 meltdown.
Uncle Sam bailed out both government-sponsored enterprises, which provide crucial liquidity to housing markets, when both teetered on the brink of insolvency. After being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in 2010, their shares continued to trade over the counter.
Billionaire hedge fund owners Bill Ackman and John Paulson are among those who snapped them up, betting the U.S. government would eventually make good on its pledge to reprivatize both agencies. With Trump raising the issue on his social media platform last month, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that both men have backed the president.
“The subtext of the media stories is that [Fannie and Freddie] shareholders, which include many supporters of [Trump], are looking for a gift from the President,” Ackman wrote in a lengthy post on X last week. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Paulson did not respond to a request for comment.
A ‘utility model’ for Fannie and Freddie
Ackman, the CEO of hedge fund Pershing Square, has said ending government conservatorship could reward taxpayers while maintaining widespread home availability and affordability.
A host of thorny issues need to be sorted out before executing what would be the largest public offerings in history, many experts warn. Those debates aside, however, there’s an even weightier question about how the biggest players in American mortgage markets should operate as private companies.
For Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the heavily regulated model for utilities—where state agencies decide how much companies can charge consumers—has proven its worth. She also sees parallels to the insurance industry, where regulators oversee rates to protect customers while also preventing risk from being underpriced.
“It helps insure against another bailout,” she told Fortune, “and it helps maintain profits in the long run.”
Fannie and Freddie support 70% of America’s mortgage market, according to the National Association of Realtors, by purchasing mortgages from lenders and packaging them into mortgage-backed securities, freeing up originators to make more loans. They also guarantee payment on those securities if borrowers default, charging a premium for providing that insurance.
There are many explanations floated for why the housing bubble spelled doom for Fannie and Freddie’s balance sheets. The main problem, Wachter said, is that when housing prices tanked by about 20% in 2008, many of the loans Fannie and Freddie insured were “underwater,” meaning the value of the homes securing those packaged loans had fallen below the amount borrowers owed.
As they competed for business, Fannie and Freddie had not collected adequate fees to compensate for taking on this risk, Wachter said.
“If these entities go private without oversight, there is a risk of a race to the bottom,” she said.
Both institutions also got into trouble by buying large amounts of riskier, private-label mortgage-backed securities to hold as investments. They financed these purchases with cheap debt accessible thanks to the so-called “implicit guarantee,” or the belief among investors—which ultimately proved correct—that the government wouldn’t let the enterprises fail.
In short, Fannie and Freddie both juiced profits by “chasing yield,” becoming what many commentators called the world’s largest hedge funds helped by what was, in effect, a government subsidy. Taxpayers paid the price when these bets on risky assets collapsed.
A path forward
Wachter believes reforms instituted under conservatorship have made Fannie and Freddie much more resilient while remaining relatively effective at encouraging middle-class homeownership.
The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic provided a major test, she said, when a massive spike in unemployment briefly sparked fears of another mortgage market collapse.
“Fannie and Freddie could go on, continue to lend,” said Wachter, co-director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, “even as it offered forbearance to borrowers.”
Both enterprises remain central to a fixture of the American dream: the 30-year, fixed-rate, prepayable mortgage. Of course, some question whether continuing to favor that New Deal-era invention is still worth the cost.
Last month, Trump said the U.S. government “will keep its implicit GUARANTEES,” though what he exactly meant remains unclear. Continuing to federally back Fannie and Freddie as private firms would spark fears about a repeat of 2008. Put them completely on their own, however, and mortgage rates likely go higher as investors demand compensation for taking on more risk when buying both enterprises’ packaged loans.
“But I think what that debate misses is that if you keep the government backing to these giants, you are going to restrict [the] private market and private competition,” Amit Seru, a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told Fortune. “And that means giving up on lots of innovative products.”
For example, the U.S. housing market’s pandemic boom eventually stalled, partially due to what has been dubbed the “lock-in effect.” Existing homeowners who bought before mortgage rates skyrocketed in 2022, when the Federal Reserve dramatically hiked borrowing costs to fight inflation, have been reluctant to sell and take out a new mortgage at a higher rate.
In many European countries, Seru noted, that’s less of a problem thanks to products that allow people to sell their house, buy a new one, and take their existing mortgage with them. That’s typically not possible in the U.S., he said, because Fannie and Freddie’s dominance means originators can’t stray too far from the industry standard.
“No one can compete with the government,” said Seru, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank.
Ackman, meanwhile, sees Fannie and Freddie remaining at the core of the American mortgage market. To facilitate a public offering, Ackman has suggested the Treasury cancel its roughly $350 billion worth of senior preferred shares, meaning it would forgive its right to repayment and dividends. That would remove a massive liability from the enterprises’ balance sheets, making them much more attractive to private investors.
But the government wouldn’t get wiped out. Separate from the preferred shares, it also has warrants that give it the right to buy nearly four-fifths of Fannie and Freddie’s common stock at one-thousandth of a cent, or $0.00001, per share. Fannie stock currently trades at about $9, and Freddie is around $7.
If Washington cancelled its entire senior preferred stake, the value of the warrants would increase by roughly $280 billion.
That would be the most lucrative outcome for Ackman, who alternatively could see the value of his common stock diluted to almost zero if Fannie and Freddie go public without the Treasury cancelling most of its senior stake.
“[Fannie and Freddie] shareholders don’t have their hands out,” Ackman wrote in his social media post last week. “The opposite is the case. Hundreds of billions of dollars of funds that belonged to [Fannie and Freddie] were unilaterally taken by the government years ago, and the companies never received credit for these payments.”
The U.S. government has collected at least $301 billion in profits from Fannie and Freddie, earning nearly 60% on the $191 billion it paid to bail the mortgage giants out in 2008. Ackman says his plan could pave the way for a similarly sized payday for Uncle Sam in a much shorter window.
Wachter and Seru don’t necessarily disagree. Still, they ultimately see the government’s senior preferred shares as a sideshow compared to bigger questions about what Fannie and Freddie should look like as private enterprises.
“There is a lot at stake here,” Seru said, “which I think goes well beyond Ackman’s investments.”
China is inviting American influencers to join a 10-day, all-expense paid trip through the country this July, as part of Beijing’s efforts to boost people-to-people exchanges and showcase the “real China.”
The initiative, titled “China-Global Youth Influencer Exchange Program,” seeks to enlist young social media influencers with at least 300,000 followers to collaborate with Chinese content creators, according to recruitment posts by Chinese state-affiliated media outlets, including the China Youth Daily.
While relations between China and the U.S. have deteriorated in recent months over issues including geopolitics, technology and trade, the program marks an effort to boost cultural exchanges. Last year, President Xi Jinping had called for more exchanges between Chinese and American universities, after previously announcing a plan to welcome 50,000 American students to China.
Another post in College Daily, a publication particularly targeting Chinese students in North America, specified that applicants for the exchange program based in the U.S., should be active on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X, and should “love Chinese culture” and “have no history of bad behaviors.”
It called on Chinese students overseas to encourage influencers in their circle to apply, and said the successful candidates will get China’s official invite as well as special assistance from the state to process their visas.
The trip intends to take the participants across five Chinese cities—Suzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Handan and Beijing, and will cover China’s e-commerce hubs, the headquarter of companies such as Xiaohongshu Technology Co. and BYD Co.
The influencers will also partake in cultural activities such as Taichi and be able to live-stream their trip to the Great Wall, according to the posts. Working with Chinese social media influencers on ideas, and getting their content promoted by China’s state media will be part of the deal.
Social media content from western influencers traveling through China post-Covid have won praise from the state media for their authentic portrayal of everyday life in the country. In April, American streamer IShowSpeed’s visit to China sparked widespread curiosity among fans about advancements in Chinese technology.
Authorities have tapped social media influencers to check negative information and promote positive contents. In 2023, think-tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyzed over 120 foreign influencers, mostly active on Chinese social media, received the state’s help to grow their influence in return for content that praises and spreads Beijing’s narrative.
When children of wealthy families reach adulthood, they often benefit from the largesse of parents in the form of a trust fund. It’s another way they get a leg up on less affluent peers, who may receive nothing at all — or even be expected to support their families.
But what if all children — regardless of their family’s circumstances — could get a financial boost when they turn 18?
That’s the idea behind a House GOP proposal backed by President Donald Trump. It would create tax-deferred investment accounts — coined “Trump Accounts” — for babies born in the U.S. over the next four years, starting them each with $1,000. At age 18, they could withdraw the money to put toward a down payment for a home, education or to start a small business. If the money is used for other purposes, it’ll be taxed at a higher rate.
“This is a pro-family initiative that will help millions of Americans harness the strength of our economy to lift up the next generation,” Trump said at a White House event Monday for the proposal. “They’ll really be getting a big jump on life, especially if we get a little bit lucky with some of the numbers and the economy.”
While the investment would be symbolically meaningful, it’s a relatively small financial commitment to addressing child poverty in the wider $7 trillion federal budget. Assuming a 7% return, the $1,000 would grow to roughly $3,570 over 18 years.
It builds on the concept of “ baby bonds,” which two states — California and Connecticut — and the District of Columbia have introduced as a way to reduce gaps between wealthy people and poor people.
At at time when wealth inequality has soured some young people on capitalism, giving them a stake in Wall Street could be the antidote, said Utah Republican Rep. Blake Moore, who led the effort to get the initiative into a massive House spending bill.
“We know that America’s economic engine is working, but not everyone feels connected to its value and the ways it can benefit them,” Moore wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner. “If we can demonstrate to our next generation the benefits of investing and financial health, we can put them on a path toward prosperity.”
Families of all income levels could receive ‘Trump Accounts’
The bill would require at least one parent to produce a Social Security number with work authorizations, meaning the U.S. citizen children born to some categories of immigrants would be excluded from the benefit. But unlike other baby bond programs, which generally target disadvantaged groups, this one would be available to families of all incomes.
Economist Darrick Hamilton of The New School, who first pitched the idea of baby bonds a quarter-century ago, said the GOP proposal would exacerbate rather than reduce wealth gaps. When he dreamed up baby bonds, he envisioned a program that would be universal but would give children from poor families a larger endowment than their wealthier peers, in an attempt to level the playing field. The money would be handled by the government, not by private firms on Wall Street.
“It is upside down,” Hamilton said. “It’s going to enhance inequality.”
Hamilton added that $1,000 — even with interest — would not be enough to make a significant difference for a child living in poverty.
A Silicon Valley investor who created the blueprint for the proposal, Brad Gerstner, said in an interview with CNBC last year that the accounts could help address the wealth gap and the loss of faith in capitalism that represent an existential crisis for the U.S.
“The rise and fall of nations occurs when you have a wealth gap that grows, when you have people who lose faith in the system,” Gerstner said. “We’re not agentless. We can do something.”
Critics say poor families have more immediate needs
The proposal comes as Congressional Republicans and Trump face backlash for proposed cuts to programs that poor families with children rely on, including food assistance and Medicaid.
Even some who back the idea of baby bonds are skeptical, noting Trump wants to cut higher education grants and programs that aid young people on the cusp of adulthood — the same age group Trump Accounts are supposed to help. Pending federal legislation would slash Medicaid and food and housing assistance that many families with children rely on.
Young adults who grew up in poverty often struggle with covering basics like rent and transportation — expenses that Trump Accounts could not be tapped to cover, said Eve Valdez, an advocate for youth in foster care in southern California. Valdez, a former foster youth, said she was homeless when she turned 18.
Accounts for newborn children that cannot be accessed for 18 years mean little to families struggling to meet basic needs today, said Shimica Gaskins of End Child Poverty California.
“Having children have health care, having their families have access to SNAP and food are what we really need … the country focused on,” Gaskins said.
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