Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives said Apple needs to acquire the $14 billion startup Perplexity in order to catch up and ultimately prevail in the AI race. While the company has an advantage because of the popularity of its iPhone and other iOS devices, it ultimately needs to look outside instead of building out an AI product in-house, Ives wrote in a Wednesday note.
Apple is falling behind in the AI race, and the only way it can catch up is by buying the AI startup Perplexity, according to a top analyst.
Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said it’s clear Apple is incapable of producing its own AI in-house, despite a company culture that strives to build superior products internally. In recent days, some of Apple’s top AI talent has also been poached by increasingly aggressive AI talent recruiter Meta, Bloombergreported.
Meanwhile, competitors are increasingly outdoing the company.
“Apple is at a highway rest stop on a bench watching this 4th Industrial Revolution race go by at 100 miles an hour,” wrote Ives in a Wednesday note.
Apple did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
Ives was more hopeful about Apple’s AI prospects in January, despite writing that the company was facing a “fork in the road” year on the technology. At the time, he highlighted Apple’s clearest advantage in the AI arms race: its existing base of 1.5 billion iPhones and 2.3 billion iOS devices used by people around the world.
In his Wednesday note, Ives struck a more apprehensive tone, adding Apple still retained the advantage of its widespread devices and could eventually win the AI race, but that its “window is narrowing.” Apple’s most recent WWDC, its annual event for showcasing new tech, also “was a snoozer,” Ives wrote, and barely mentioned AI.
“Apple is way too behind and does not have the AI technology to compete. The clock has struck 12, they need to acquire Perplexity or risk getting further behind,” Ives told Fortune in an email.
Even if Apple has to pay around double what it is currently worth, it should acquire Perplexity, he wrote. The San Francisco-based startup, reportedly worth $14 billion, has made strides among AI enthusiasts for citing links to articles and other information when its AI responds to queries. Perplexity on Tuesday also launched Comet, an AI-based web browser, for select subscribers, in its latest effort to compete with tech giants Google and Microsoft.
Yet, Tomasz Tunguz, the founder of Theory Ventures, which invests in early-stage enterprise AI startups, said acquiring Perplexity would come with myriad privacy considerations for Apple. The company is used to providing end-to-end encryption for products like iMessage and FaceTime, and would need to find a solution for how Perplexity would run, either locally or on a secure cloud architecture.
“They would need to have a lot of confidence they could build an architecture from end to end that had that privacy component,” Tunguz told Fortune.
Kevin Novak, founder and managing partner of early-stage AI investment firm Rackhouse Ventures, said it’s unclear whether a large acquisition would work for Apple. The company has tried to maintain the pro-building ethos of Steve Jobs for much of its history, and has been shy to acquire. Among its largest acquisitions was its $3 billion purchase of Beats electronics in 2014.
“This would be challenging for any company, but especially given Apple’s sort-of corporate ethos around perfectionism, may be especially challenging for Apple,” Novak told Fortune.
Still, Ives, for his part, said he believes Perplexity could be a natural fit for Apple and could especially help level up Siri to make it many people’s most frequent exposure to AI.
“If Apple acquires Perplexity, the combined forces of Cupertino with Perplexity would be a game changer on the AI front and rival ChatGPT given the scale and scope of Apple’s ecosystem,” wrote Ives in the note.
Oak View Group co-founder Timothy Leiweke is facing 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for allegedly reaching a secret backroom deal with the CEO of a competitor to land a sports arena contract for the University of Texas at Austin, authorities said on Wednesday. He has stepped down as CEO of Oak View, the company announced. A spokesperson for Leiweke said the executive has “done nothing wrong and will vigorously defend himself and his reputation for fairness and integrity.”
Timothy Leiweke, co-founder mogul of entertainment venue developer Oak View Group (OVG), is facing a decade in prison following an indictment returned on Wednesday. Leiweke is accused of allegedly conspiring with the CEO of competitor Legends Hospitality to make sure Oak View Group was the only bidder on a project to develop the 15,000-seat, $338 million Moody Center, which hosts the University of Texas’ mens and women’s basketball games and musicians such as Leon Bridges, Willie Nelson, George Strait, and Kali Uchis.
According to the Department of Justice, Leiweke allegedly told colleagues back in 2017 he wanted to figure out a way to get OVG’s competitor to “back down” in bidding for the arena project. In February 2018, Leiweke allegedly struck a deal in which the competitor CEO at Legends Hospitality agreed to stand down on bidding for the project. In exchange, Leiweke allegedly told the Legends CEO, unnamed by the DOJ, that OVG would give them some of the business through subcontracts. That left OVG as the only bidder for the development contract.
Officials called the alleged deal “bid rigging” and said it allowed the company to land a highly lucrative contract without an arm’s-length competitive process. The arena opened in 2022, and authorities said OVG continues to receive “significant revenues” from the project to date. OVG has agreed to pay $15 million in penalties while Legends Hospitality will pay $1.5 million, both “in connection with the conduct alleged in the indictment against Leiweke,” DOJ announced.
The antitrust division charged Leiweke with violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws bid rigging. The maximum penalty is 10 years in prison and a $1 million criminal fine, although it could be increased to twice the gain from the alleged crime or twice the losses suffered by victims if either is greater than the statutory maximum, authorities said. The criminal penalty for a corporation is up to $100 million, according to the Federal Trade Commission. OVG was not charged.
“Timothy Leiweke allegedly led a scheme designed to steer the contract for entertainment services at a public university’s arena to his company. Public contracts are subject to laws requiring an open and competitive bid process to ensure a level playing field,” said assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office Christopher G. Raia in a statement. “The FBI is determined to ensure that those who disregard fair competition principles do not benefit from a rigged bidding process targeting our communities and public institutions.”
On Wednesday, OVG announced Leiweke would relinquish the CEO role and transition into a vice chairman role on the board. The company is the largest developer of sports and live entertainment venues worldwide and was founded in 2015 by Leiweke and Irving Azoff. The latter is former CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment and executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment. OVG has 30,000 employees across hundreds of venues and has committed more than $5 billion to developing new arenas in the next three years.
A spokesperson for Leiweke said the veteran exec had “done nothing wrong and will vigorously defend himself and his well-deserved reputation for fairness and integrity.”
“The Antitrust Division’s allegations are wrong on the law and the facts, and the case should never have been brought,” Leiweke’s spokesperson said. “The law is clear: vertical, complementary business partnerships, like the one contemplated between OVG and Legends, are legal. These allegations blatantly ignore established legal precedent and seek to criminalize common teaming efforts that are proven to enhance competition and benefit the public.”
In another statement, Leiweke said he was pleased the company resolved the DOJ’s inquiry without any charges or admission of wrongdoing.
“[T]he last thing I want to do is distract from the accomplishments of the team or draw focus away from executing for our partners, so the Board and I decided that now is the right time to implement the succession plan that was already underway and transition out of the CEO role,” Leiweke said. “ In my new role as Vice Chairman of the Board and as an OVG shareholder, I remain as committed as ever to the long-term success of the company, and I know OVG, our valued partners and our customers are in great hands with Chris and the rest of our stellar leaders.”
Oak View Group said in a statement it cooperated fully with the DOJ’s inquiry and is pleased the matter has been resolved with no charges against OVG.
“We support all efforts to ensure a fair and competitive environment in our industry and are committed to upholding industry-leading compliance and disclosure practices,” OVG’s stated.
Legends did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Oak View Group's Tim Leiweke attends the groundbreaking ceremony for the new University of Texas event facility, the "Moody Center" on December 3, 2019 in Austin, Texas.
President Donald Trump singled out Brazil for import taxes of 50% on Wednesday for its treatment of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, showing that personal grudges rather than simple economics are a driving force in the U.S. leader’s use of tariffs.
Trump avoided his standard form letter with Brazil, specifically tying his tariffs to the trial of Bolsonaro, who is charged with trying to overturn his 2022 election loss. Trump has described Bolsonaro as a friend and hosted the former Brazilian president at his Mar-a-Lago resort when both were in power in 2020.
“This Trial should not be taking place,” Trump wrote in the letter posted on Truth Social. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”
There is a sense of kinship as Trump was indicted in 2023 for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The U.S. president addressed his tariff letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who bested Bolsonaro in 2022.
Bolsonaro testified before the country’s Supreme Court in June over the alleged plot to remain in power after his 2022 election loss. Judges will hear from 26 other defendants in coming months. A decision could come as early as September, legal analysts say. Bolsonaro has already been ruled ineligible until 2030 by the country’s electoral authorities.
Brazil’s vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, said he sees “no reason” for the U.S. to hike tariffs on the South American nation.
“I think he has been misinformed,” he said. “President Lula was jailed for almost two years. No one questioned the judiciary. No one questioned what the country had done. This is a matter for our judiciary branch.”
For Trump, the tariffs are personal
Trump also objected to Brazil’s Supreme Court fining of social media companies, saying the temporary blocking last year amounted to “SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders.” Trump said he is launching an investigation as a result under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which applies to companies with trade practices that are deemed unfair to U.S. companies.
Among the companies the Supreme Court fined was X, which was not mentioned specifically in Trump’s letter. X is owned by Elon Musk, Trump’s multibillionaire backer in the 2024 election whose time leading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency recently ended and led to a public feud over the U.S. president’s deficit-increasing budget plan. Trump also owns a social media company, Truth Social.
The Brazil letter was a reminder that politics and personal relations with Trump matter just as much as any economic fundamentals. And while Trump has said the high tariff rates he’s setting are based on trade imbalances, it was unclear by his Wednesday actions how the countries being targeted would help to reindustrialize America.
The tariffs starting Aug. 1 would be a dramatic increase from the 10% rate that Trump levied on Brazil as part of his April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement. In addition to oil, Brazil sells orange juice, coffee, iron and steel to the U.S., among other products. The U.S. ran a $6.8 billion trade surplus with Brazil last year, according to the Census Bureau.
Trump initially announced his broad tariffs by declaring an economic emergency, arguing under a 1977 law that the U.S. was at risk because of persistent trade imbalances. But that rationale becomes problematic in this particular case, as Trump is linking his tariffs to the Bolsonaro trial and the U.S. exports more to Brazil than it imports.
Trump also targeted smaller trade partners
Trump also sent letters Wednesday to the leaders of seven other nations. None of them — the Philippines, Brunei, Moldova, Algeria, Libya, Iraq and Sri Lanka — is a major industrial rival to the United States.
Most economic analyses say the tariffs will worsen inflationary pressures and subtract from economic growth, but Trump has used the taxes as a way to assert the diplomatic and financial power of the U.S. on both rivals and allies. His administration is promising that the taxes on imports will lower trade imbalances, offset some of the cost of the tax cuts he signed into law on Friday and cause factory jobs to return to the United States.
Trump, during a White House meeting with African leaders, talked up trade as a diplomatic tool. Trade, he said, “seems to be a foundation” for him to settle disputes between India and Pakistan, as well as Kosovo and Serbia.
“You guys are going to fight, we’re not going to trade,” Trump said. “And we seem to be quite successful in doing that.”
On Monday, Trump placed a 35% tariff on Serbia, one of the countries he was using as an example of how fostering trade can lead to peace.
Trump said the tariff rates in his letters were based on “common sense” and trade imbalances, even though the Brazil letter indicated otherwise. Trump suggested he had not thought of penalizing the countries whose leaders were meeting with him in the Oval Office — Liberia, Senegal, Gabon, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau — as “these are friends of mine now.”
Countries are not complaining about the rates outlined in his letters, he said, even though those tariffs have been generally close to the ones announced April 2 that rattled financial markets. The S&P 500 stock index rose Wednesday.
“We really haven’t had too many complaints because I’m keeping them at a very low number, very conservative as you would say,” Trump said.
Tariff uncertainty returns with Trump’s letters
Officials for the European Union, a major trade partner and source of Trump’s ire on trade, said Tuesday that they are not expecting to receive a letter from Trump listing tariff rates. The Republican president started the process of announcing tariff rates on Monday by hitting two major U.S. trading partners, Japan and South Korea, with import taxes of 25%.
According to Trump’s Wednesday letters, imports from Libya, Iraq, Algeria and Sri Lanka would be taxed at 30%, those from Moldova and Brunei at 25% and those from the Philippines at 20%. The tariffs would start Aug. 1.
The Census Bureau reported that last year that the U.S. ran a trade imbalance on goods of $1.4 billion with Algeria, $5.9 billion with Iraq, $900 million with Libya, $4.9 billion with the Philippines, $2.6 billion with Sri Lanka, $111 million with Brunei and $85 million with Moldova. The imbalance represents the difference between what the U.S. exported to those countries and what it imported.
Taken together, the trade imbalances with those seven countries are essentially a rounding error in a U.S. economy with a gross domestic product of $30 trillion.
The letters were posted on Truth Social after the expiration of a 90-day negotiating period with a baseline levy of 10%. Trump is giving countries more time to negotiate with his Aug. 1 deadline, but he has insisted there will be no extensions for the countries that receive letters.
The tariff letters are worded aggressively in Trump’s style of writing. He frames the tariffs as an invitation to “participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States,” adding that the trade imbalances are a “major threat” to America’s economy and national security.
The president threatened additional tariffs on any country that attempts to retaliate. He said he chose to send the letters because it was too complicated for U.S. officials to negotiate with their counterparts in the countries with new tariffs. It can take years to broker trade accords.
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Associated Press writers Mauricio Savarese in Rio de Janeiro, David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany and Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributed to this report.
Alan G. Hassenfeld, a renowned philanthropist and former CEO of iconic toy company Hasbro Inc., the maker of G.I. Joe and Play-Doh, has died. He was 76, according to the toy company.
Hasbro, the nation’s second largest toy company behind Mattel based on annual sales, declined to offer more details. Hassenfeld’s family foundation, Hassenfeld Family Initiatives, wasn’t immediately available to comment.
Hassenfeld was born in Providence, Rhode Island and graduated from Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He received an undergraduate arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. Upon graduation, he joined the Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based family business in 1970. Hasbro was founded in 1923, by Hassenfeld’s grandfather, Henry. Known initially as Hassenfeld Brothers, it sold textile remnants but expanded into school supplies and later toy manufacturing under the Hasbro name in the 1940s, according to Hasbro’s website. It went public in 1968.
Hassenfeld rose quickly in the family business serving as special assistant to the president and worked his way up the ranks. He became one of the key architects of Hasbro’s international operations and spent extensive time traveling overseas. He was named executive vice president in 1980 and became president in September 1984.
Hassenfeld labored for years in the shadow of his older brother Stephen. His brother’s death of pneumonia in June 1989 at age 47, however, moved Hassenfeld into the position of chairman and chief executive officer.
Hassenfeld stepped down as CEO in 2003 and in August 2005, he retired from his chairman position and became emeritus chairman. He stepped away from that role last year. Hassenfeld was the last family member to sit on the board, according to Hasbro.
“All of us who have ever had any connection to Hasbro today are mourning the profound loss of Alan Hassenfeld, our beloved former Chairman & CEO, mentor, and dear friend, ” Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks in an e-mailed statement to The Associated Press. “Alan’s enormous heart was, and will remain, the guiding force behind Hasbro — compassionate, imaginative, and dedicated to bringing a smile to the face of every child around the world. His tireless advocacy for philanthropy, children’s welfare, and the toy industry created a legacy that will inspire us always.”
Hassenfeld was involved in many charitable and social causes both nationally and locally in Rhode Island. His concerns ranged from childhood hunger to issues involving refugee settlement in the state. As chairman of the Hassenfeld Family Initiatives, he oversaw the foundation’s mission of globalizing safety and human rights within the area of children’s products; empowering women in developing countries; and enhancing the economy, education and business opportunities in Rhode Island.
Hassenfeld was also founding benefactor of Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, and his family’s contributions helped to establish the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute at Brown University.
Traders seem untroubled by the possibility that tariffs’ return to the spotlight could lead to another market crash. As stocks rose, Nvidia became the first company ever to reach a market cap of $4 trillion.
Stocks rose on Wednesday after two days of declines. Those downturns proved to be little more than blips in the continuous—albeit choppy—march the stock market has had since its recent nadirs in April. Meanwhile, tech juggernaut Nvidia hit a historic new $4 trillion milestone.
The S&P 500 rose 0.6%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq climbed 0.9%. While the Dow Jones ticked up 218 points, good for a 0.5% increase, after taking the worst of the two-day slump.
Traders seemed to ignore this latest round of tariff news—a stark contrast to their reaction in April when President Donald Trump’s initial burst of tariff policies caused a broad market selloff that hit equities, the U.S. dollar, and the bond market. When tariffs returned to the forefront right before the July Fourth holiday last week, investors had already braced themselves. Markets dipped a little but stayed largely in the range of their recent highs.
Wednesday, July 9 marked the deadline for a 90-day pause on tariffs. However, Trump has since extended the deadline to Aug. 1. On Wednesday, the president sent “tariff letters” to seven new countries including the Philippines, Moldova, and Brunei.
Asian markets were mostly down on the news of renewed tariff policies. Shanghai’s SSE Composite dipped 0.13%. Stocks in Hong Kong dropped 1.06% during the session. The ASX 200 and the Nifty 50 slipped 0.61% and 0.18% respectively. A rare bright spot was the Nikkei, which is up 0.33% on the day.
Nvidia’s historic $4 trillion market cap
Back in the U.S., stock market darling and semiconductor juggernaut Nvidia became the first company with a $4 trillion valuation.
Shares rose 1.8% on Wednesday hitting a share price of $162.86. Nvidia became the poster child for the AI market rally that led the S&P 500 to back-to-back years of more than 20% growth.
The company’s shares shot up as soon as markets closed. Investors were eager to scoop up shares after they fell slightly over the past week. After that initial exuberance, the price tailed off before plateauing around 11 a.m. Shares remained stable throughout the rest of the session.
Nvidia beat other legendary tech giants Apple and Microsoft to the $4 trillion mark. Since the start of the year, Nvidia’s stock is up 17%—though that proves a relatively calm performance for the chipmaker, which has seen its stock rise 1,453% over the past five years.
The chances the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by 50 basis points in December are growing, according to Oxford Economics. The June jobs report showed strong headline numbers, but the underlying data pointed to a weakening labor market. If it cratered unexpectedly the Fed would be forced into such a large rate cut.
Interest rate cuts will be a crystal ball.
Amid a cloudy outlook, they’ll reveal either good economic fortune or a downturn.
On the one hand, interest rate cuts could mean the Federal Reserve has finally deemed the threat of inflation has passed and economic forecasts stable again after the tariff-induced uncertainty. That is the outcome investors and President Donald Trump would most welcome. But until any of that uncertainty subsides, interest rates will remain where they are.
There is, however, one scenario, in which rate cuts aren’t a sign of eagerly awaited relief but of the start of a long-feared downturn. In the event the labor market suddenly starts to go south, the Fed would have to step in and cut rates. In that case, investors and the president would get more than they bargained for: an interest rate cut of 50 basis points.
A rate cut of that size, double the usual 25 basis points, would only come if unemployment spiked and companies stopped hiring later in the year. The Fed started its holding pattern, largely worried Trump’s tariffs would reignite inflation. But in recent weeks, there has been a greater focus on unemployment—the other side of its dual mandate. Investors, too, are worried the labor market may be teetering.
“We think the risk is growing that the first cut is 50 basis points,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.
Oxford Economics still forecasts a single rate cut of 25 basis points in December. But the fact the firm is entertaining a jumbo rate cut points to genuine fears the bottom may fallout from the labor market quickly, even dramatically. It’s the nature of the labor market slump that matters more than anything else.
If it is “unexpected in a shock kind of way, that would motivate a 50-basis-point reduction at the end of the year,” said Jose Torres, senior economist at Interactive Brokers. “You would need things to go bad really quickly towards the end of the year for that to happen.”
If the bad news is swift and severe, then the Fed will have to scramble.
“We do see a growing risk that the first move is larger, i.e. 50 basis points, because we think the Fed at that point may have some catching up to do” with the labor market, Vanden Houten told Fortune.
The current labor market is remarkably stable despite the market turbulence that surrounded the original tariff announcements in April. Under the surface, though, there are some subtle changes indicating it is loosening. In June, the unemployment rate actually ticked down to 4.1% from 4.2%, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That headline number—which came alongside 147,000 new jobs—belied slowing momentum in the job market. Private sector jobs grew at the lowest level in eight months; 130,000 people dropped out of the labor force; and individuals out of a job were staying unemployed for longer.
Those nuances don’t point to a labor market in imminent danger, but one that is shifting beneath the economy’s feet.
“The numbers aren’t horrible, allowing the Fed to focus more on inflation right now,” Vanden Houten said. “The latest data allow the Fed to breathe a little easier, although there were definitely some quirks in the June employment data that probably made the labor market look a little better than it is.”
Economic growth would have to significantly underperform expectations and hiring levels would need to be below 50,000 a month in October and November for the economic picture to worsen quickly enough to force a 50 basis point cut, according to Torres.
The possibilities of both happening are unlikely at the moment. Investors expect growth and the labor market to slow later in the year, but not to those levels. Wall Street firms and economists lowered their forecasts for year-end growth and raised those for inflation, mainly citing tariffs. Some have revisited those projections, lowering them further, as Trump’s looming tariff deadline looms.
That said, markets have remained steady amid a renewal of Trump’s tariff whirlwinds. Markets seem to have largely already priced Wall Street’s lower forecasts for the rest of 2025. In fact, markets were largely unmoved earlier this week as Trump announced a series of new and possibly definitive tariffs on a host of countries—all of which came after the S&P 500 hit a new all-time high at the start of July.
Turns out Donald Trump gauges his esteem for presidential predecessors by how well their portraits fit into his White House redecorating scheme. Or sometimes how well the frames around those portraits do.
“I’m a frame person,” Trump said Tuesday during a meeting with his Cabinet. “Sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures.”
Trump wrapped up a 90-plus-minute session by explaining how he personally worked to redecorate the Cabinet Room, seeming to take real joy in choosing which portraits were hung. The president also said he helped choose the room’s drapes and polled those present about whether he should repaint the room in gold leaf. (Cabinet members think he should.)
“I actually spent time in the vaults. The vaults are where we have a lot of great pictures and artwork. And I picked it all myself,” Trump said. “I’m very proud of it.”
The president said that meant “a lot of time, effort” and “very little money.” He even recounted having gone to Secretary of State Marco Rubio ‘s office and directing that a grandfather clock there be moved to the White House.
“As president, you have the power — if I go into the State Department, or Department of Commerce or Treasury — if I see anything that I like, I’m allowed to take it,” Trump said, drawing laughs. He offered the anecdote despite there not being any record of Trump having paid a public visit to the State Department during Rubio’s tenure.
Trump also pointed out each portrait and shared what he thought of each ex-president depicted. He started by indicating “the great Andrew Jackson ” and went from there — renewing his frequent praise for William McKinley and getting in a dig about how Bill Clinton once offered donors overnight stays in the Lincoln bedroom in exchange for campaign contributions.
Here’s what Trump said about some past presidents:
James K. Polk (1845-49):
“That’s a gentleman named — and we call him — President Polk. He was sort of a real-estate guy. He was — people don’t realize — he was a one-termer. But he was a very good president. But, and I’m not sure I should be doing this, he actually gave us the state of California.”
Then Trump revealed that his choice of Polk’s picture might have had more do with the portrait’s frame being almost the same size as the frame surrounding Jackson’s portrait, which he suggested was especially aesthetically pleasing: “Polk is actually a very good president who’s got the same frame that I needed, OK.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61):
“A very underrated president. Built the Interstate (Highway) System. And he was the toughest president, I guess, until we came along. But I don’t mind giving up that crown, because, I don’t want to be too tough on it. But we want to be humane. But he was the toughest president on immigration. He was very strong at the borders. Very, very strong. And, sometimes you can be too strong. He was strong at the borders and, during a certain period of time, there was so strong that almost every farmer in California went bankrupt. And we have to remember that. We have to work together. We have to remember that. But he was a very good president, and a very good general and a very good president and I thought he deserved a position somewhere on this floor.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45):
“He was not a Republican, to put it mildly. But he was, you know, a four-termer. He was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And, if you notice, we have a lot of ramps outside. You have a ramp. People say, ‘It’s an unusual place for a ramp.’ It was because of him. He was wheelchair bound. But he was an amazing man.”
Abraham Lincoln (1861-65):
“Over there is ‘Honest’ Abe Lincoln. And that picture was in his, ugh, in his bedroom. And we thought this would be a very important place because this is where wars are ended. I’m not going to say wars are declared. I’m going to say wars are ended. OK? We’ll be positive. And, that’s the picture of Abe Lincoln from his bedroom, sat in the bedroom for many, many years. That was his favorite picture of himself. And the Lincoln Bedroom’s very famous. You remember when Bill Clinton had it and he rented it out to people. We don’t do that.”
John Adams (1797-1801):
“They were the first occupants of the White House. 1800. And John Quincy Adams, Mrs. Adams, they were the first occupants. So we have them looking at each other and, in between their stares is Abraham Lincoln trying to make peace.”
(Trump is correct that John Adams, the nation’s second president, and his wife Abigail, were the first first couple to move into the White House in 1800. But he was mistaken about John Quincy Adams, who was John and Abigail’s son and the sixth president. He served from 1825 to 1829).
William McKinley (1897-1901):
“McKinley was a great president who never got credit. In fact, they changed the name of Mount McKinley and I changed it back because he should have been — the people of Ohio, he was the governor of Ohio — the people of Ohio were very happy when I did that. I heard they were very insulted. They took the name of Mount McKinley off. That was done by Obama a little while ago and I had to change it back. I changed it back. He actually was a great president. He was a president. He was the tariff, the most, I guess since me — I think I’m gonna outdo him — but he was a tariff president. He believed that other countries should pay for the privilege of coming into our country and taking our jobs and taking our treasure. That’s the way he explained it. They took our jobs and they took our treasure. And for that he should pay. And he made them pay. And he built a tremendous fortune.”
A “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, has been blocked by a federal appeals court just days before it was set to go into effect.
The Federal Trade Commission’s proposed changes, adopted in October, required businesses to obtain a customer’s consent before charging for memberships, auto-renewals and programs linked to free trial offers.
The FTC said at the time that businesses must also disclose when free trials or other promotional offers will end and let customers cancel recurring subscriptions as easily as they started them.
The administration of President Joe Biden included the FTC’s proposal as part of its “Time is Money” initiative, a governmentwide initiative that was announced last year with the aim of cracking down on consumer-related hassles.
The FTC rule was set to go into effect on Monday, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said this week that the FTC made a procedural error by failing to come up with a preliminary regulatory analysis, which is required for rules whose annual impact on the U.S. economy is more than $100 million.
The FTC claimed that it did not have to come up with a preliminary regulatory analysis because it initially determined that the rule’s impact on the national economy would be less than $100 million. An administrative law judge decided that the economic impact would be more than the $100 million threshold.
The court decided to vacate the rule.
“While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission’s rulemaking process are fatal here,” the court wrote.
The FTC declined to comment on Wednesday.
The agency is currently moving forward with its preparations for a trial involving Amazon’s Prime program. The trial stems from a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that accused Amazon of enrolling consumers in its Prime program without their consent and making it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions.
Almost 8 million federal student loan borrowers who enrolled in a Biden-era repayment program will soon see interest accruing on their debt again, even as their payments are paused due to an ongoing legal battle.
Starting Aug. 1, interest will begin accruing on loans that are currently enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, repayment plan, the Education Department announced Wednesday. Some 7.7 million borrowers are enrolled in the plan, which was created under the Biden administration in 2023 and faced immediate backlash from conservatives.
In fact, the future of the SAVE repayment plan has been in legal limbo for months, following a lawsuit brought by seven Republican-led states. While the lawsuit plays out, borrowers enrolled in the plan have not had to make payments, and interest has not accrued. Now, interest will restart, though enrolled borrowers still do not need to make payments, the Education Department says. That means their balance could grow as they wait for the lawsuit to play out—and when forbearance ends, borrowers will be need to make monthly payments on the new, higher loan totals.
The Student Borrower Protection Center, a student loan advocacy group, estimates this will cost the typical borrower $3,500 per year, or $300 per month, in interest payments.
The SAVE plan allowed some low-income borrowers to pay $0 per month on their loans. Debts could be forgiven after 25 years in repayment, even if that monthly payment never increased.
But the Trump administration is taking a significantly different approach to federal student loans than his predecessor. Blanket forgiveness—a cornerstone of the Biden approach—is off the table.
“Congress designed these programs to ensure that borrowers repay their loans, yet the Biden Administration tried to illegally force taxpayers to foot the bill instead,” said U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
The Education Department is encouraging SAVE borrowers to enroll in a different repayment plan. It says it will begin reaching out to affected borrowers.
In addition to restarting interest accrual, the Education Department resumed collections on overdue loans in May. It has received nearly $282 million in collections on defaulted federal student loans as of late June, according to a press release. It says it expects wage garnishment efforts to begin later this summer.
Mattel has introduced its first Barbie representing a person with Type 1 diabetes, as part of wider efforts from the toy maker to increase inclusivity among its dolls.
In an announcement Tuesday, Mattel said it had partnered with Breakthrough T1D — a Type 1 diabetes research and advocacy organization formerly known as Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, or JDRF — to ensure that the design of the doll “truly captures the community.” That includes accessories that “accurately reflect the medical equipment” people with Type 1 diabetes may need, the California-based company noted.
“Visibility matters for everyone facing Type 1 diabetes,” Emily Mazreku, director of marketing strategy at Breakthrough T1D, said in an accompanying announcement. And as a mother who lives with Type 1 diabetes, she added, “it means everything to have Barbie helping the world see T1D and the incredible people who live with it.”
The new Barbie wears continuous glucose monitor (CGM), a device that tracks blood sugar levels, on her arm — while holding a phone displaying an accompanying app. She also has an insulin pump attached to her waist. And the doll carries a blue purse that can be used to carry other essential supplies or snacks on the go.
The Barbie’s outfit is blue, too — with polka dots on a matching top and skirt set. Mattel says that this color and design are nods to symbols for diabetes awareness.
This new doll “enables more children to see themselves reflected in Barbie,” Mattel wrote Tuesday, and is part of the company’s wider Fashionistas line committed to inclusivity. The line features Barbies with various skin tones, hair colors and textures, disabilities, body types and more. Previously-introduced Fashionistas include a Ken doll with a prosthetic leg and a Barbie with hearing aids. Mattel also introduced its first doll with Down syndrome in 2023.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 38.4 million Americans of all ages — amounting to about 11.6% of the U.S. population — were estimated to have diabetes as of 2021, the latest year with data available. About 2 million had Type 1 diabetes, including about 304,000 children and teens younger than 20.
Barbie’s new doll with Type 1 diabetes was also introduced at Breakthrough T1D’s 2025 Children’s Congress held in Washington, D.C. this week, where the organization is advocating for continued federal research funding. This year, Breakthrough T1D has been particularly focused on the Special Diabetes Program, which is currently set to expire in September.
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of 𝕏,” Yaccarino wrote on X Wednesday. “When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”
Yaccarinojoined X in June of 2023, and was at the company for two years. She joined X after decades in the media and advertising industry, with long stints at NBC and Turner Broadcasting System. Former colleagues previously told Fortune that she stood out as a gritty executive who was adept at managing difficult clients and “stood up to a lot of misogyny.”
It’s not clear why Yaccarino is departing X, although the social media platform has certainly had its share of troubles since Musk took over. Many users have left the platform since Musk took over in 2022, and competitors like Bluesky have become more popular over the past year. Just this week, a chatbot released by Elon Musk’s AI company called Grok shared anti-Semitic posts on X. The chatbot’s account on X later posted: “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.”
Yaccarino, however, is only the latest high-profile Musk lieutenant to step away from his business empire over the past several months, which have been particularly volatile. These are the other Musk lieutenants who have recently parted ways with the mogul.
Omead Afshar, former head of sales in North America and Europe at Tesla Departure: June 2025 A former top aide to Musk, Afshar left Tesla last month. He ran sales and operations in North America and Europe, but was also seen as a proxy for Musk when he was away from the company, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Jenna Ferrua, former director of HR at Tesla Departure: June 2025 Ferrua reportedly left Tesla last month after spending seven years at the carmaker. Her LinkedIn profile does not reflect any change in her employment status.
Milan Kovac, ex-head of the Optimus humanoid robot team at Tesla Departure: June 2025 Kovac was “the brains behind CEO Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar dream of a robot future,” Fortune wrote when the executive announced he was leaving Tesla last month. Kovac, who worked at Tesla for nine years, said he was going to spend time with his family.
Vineet Mehta, former head of battery architecture at Tesla Departure: May 2025 The former 18-year Tesla veteran recently left the company of his own accord, he wrote on LinkedIn, though his departure came as a surprise to many.
Mark Westfall, former head of mechanical engineering at Tesla Energy Departure: April 2025 Westfall spent a decade at Tesla before leaving four months ago. “It’s hard to put into words what Tesla has meant to me – I never imagined the places this job would take me, or the impact I would be able to have,” he wrote in his departure post on LinkedIn. He’s now the director of engineering at Redwood Materials.
Brett Weitz, former global head of content, talent, and brand sales at X Departure: June 2025 Weitz called his time at X “one hell of a ride” when he acknowledged his departure on LinkedIn last month. The veteran media executive had previously worked at WarnerMedia and Turner before joining X in 2023. Deadline reported that Weitz had spearheaded X’s Originals documentary-style video series and launched video podcasts, including Khloé Kardashian’s Khloé in Wonderland.
David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla Departure: April 2025 Lau’s reported departure earlier this year was described as “abrupt.” He had worked at the EV maker for 12 years. Lau has been credited with changing the way software was managed inside cars after he pioneered a superior experience for the user at Tesla.
Dave Heinzinger, former head of media strategy at X Departure: March 2025 Heinzinger’s term at X could be measured in “Scaramuccis.” The ex-head of media strategy lasted four months in the role before resigning for personal reasons in March. In an interview with Axios, he praised Yaccarino’s knack for recruiting top talent on his way out the door. “I can say that Linda is building one of the most impressive teams in the world. The influx of talent has been incredible, and the platform is stronger, more innovative and more consequential than ever,” he said. He’s now the president of Haymaker Group, a PR firm in New York where he had worked for six years before jumping to X.
Haofei Wang, former head of product engineering at X Departure: March 2025 Wang, who joined Twitter in July 2021, left X in March for unknown reasons, according to The Verge. (Wang’s LinkedIn profile still states that he is an employee at X.) Like others on this list, Wang worked closely with Musk, and reportedly acted as buffer and communication conduit between Musk and the engineering department. Before joining the social media site, he was the vice president of engineering at the streamer Tubi.
Tom Ochinero, former vice president of commercial business at SpaceX Departure: February 2024 A former VP at Musk’s Space company, Ochinero is one of very few high-level executives to leave SpaceX. He’s now the chair and founding partner of an early stage investment group.
Nick Pickles, former vice president of global affairs at X Departure: September 2024 Pickles, a top spokesperson for X, left the company last September after a decade working in public policy roles at Twitter and X. “The constant across my time at Twitter and X has been the amazing people I’ve worked with inside and outside the company,” he wrote on X the day he stepped down. He’s now the chief policy officer for Tools of Humanity, according to his LinkedIn.
Renato Leite Monteiro, former global data protection officer at X Departure: September 2024 Monterio was among the holdovers from X’s Twitter years who stayed at the social media site after Musk took over. The former professor of computer sciences left academia for Twitter in 2020, initially working for the company in Brazil before relocating to Ireland. He quit last September to take some “personal time off,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Five months ago, he became the vice president for legal assurance at e&, a technology and investment group in Abu Dhabi.
David Zhang, former roadster and next-generation vehicle program manager at Tesla Departure: July 2024 Zhang, the manager behind Tesla’s Model S and Cybertruck, joined Tesla in 2015. He left in July 2024, and acknowledged his departure on LinkedIn months later, writing, “Thank you and (belated) farewell, Tesla. It has been a privilege and an honor to have devoted myself to the mission.”
Joe Benarroch, former head of operations at X Departure: June 2024 Considered Yaccarino’s top lieutenant, Benarroch resigned from the social media site in early June of 2024, after spending one year and one month at the company. The executive’s LinkedIn profile states that Yaccarino recruited Benarroch from NBCUniversal. At X, he was put in charge of restructuring the organization following mass layoffs. Benarroch also handled corporate communications for X. Benarroch is now the head of content, media partnerships, and distribution at the NYSE.
Within the resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho, a small group of the world’s richest people are beginning to gather for Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley Conference. The four-day retreat, known informally as “summer camp for billionaires,” is full of opportunities for powerful figures to schmooze, network, and make deals.
Among this year’s cohort are tech tycoons Tim Cook of Apple, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Andy Jassy of Amazon. Bob Iger and Michael Eisner, the current and former CEOs of Disney, respectively, are also in attendance, as well as General Motors CEO Mary Barra. The conference has no shortage of political presence, too: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are both present at the conference this year.
Some of the camp’s usual suspects, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (who had his Venetian “Wedding of the Century” not too long ago) have not yet been spotted, though they were reported to have been invited to this year’s conference, according to Variety. Additionally, Tesla’s Elon Musk wasn’t on the invite list, and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, who announced his retirement earlier this year, won’t be in attendance.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, speaks to members of the media after arriving in Sun Valley, Idaho. The Sun Valley Conference is notoriously private and is known as a breeding ground for big deals between companies.
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In 2021, the total wealth of those attending the conference was reportedly more than $1 trillion.
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Andy Jassy was first reported attending Sun Valley Conference in 2021, shortly after he became Jeff Bezos’s successor as CEO of Amazon.
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Bob Iger, the current Disney CEO, arrives at Sun Valley Lodge. Sun Valley is reportedly the location where the merger between ABC and Disney went down back in 1995. Then-CEO Michael Eisner—who is in attendance this year, too—met up with Capital Cities Chairman Thomas S. Murphy, according to the Los Angeles Times, and the rest was history.
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Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, waves after arriving in Sun Valley, Idaho, for the annual conference, which she has attended in previous years.
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Ivanka Trump and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav are both in attendance at this year’s conference.
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Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and former senior advisor to Donald Trump, arrives at the Sun Valley Conference this year along with his wife.
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Venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang walk together at Sun Valley Lodge. Only 35 guests attended the inaugural conference back in 1983.
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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi walks with Walmart CEO Doug McMillon at Sun Valley Lodge. Khosrowshahi’s brother, Kaveh Khosrowshahi, is a managing director at Allen & Company, which hosts the conference.
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Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos arrives at Sun Valley Lodge for Allen & Company’s annual conference. Although the conference’s agenda is not public, it features activities including hiking, rafting, and golfing.
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Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, arrives in Idaho for the Sun Valley Conference.
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Alex Norström, Spotify’s CEO, is also in attendance at this year’s Sun Valley Conference.
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Gayle King, co-host of CBS Mornings and editor-at-large of Oprah Daily, attends the Sun Valley Conference. Oprah Winfrey, who had attended the Sun Valley Conference in the past, was not included on the invite list this year, according to Variety.
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Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow Inc., arrives at the Sun Valley Conference.
David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong first attended the Sun Valley Conference back in 2021.
Apple CEO Tim Cook first attended the Sun Valley Conference in 2012 and has been a consistent attendee ever since, save for a few years during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sahib Khan, a long-time Apple veteran, will take over for COO Jeff Williams who announced his coming retirement next month. Khan has served under Williams for six years, managing the tech giant’s supply chain and logistics.
Apple named a new operational czar after longtime chief operating officer Jeff Wiliams announced his impending retirement Tuesday. The company promoted Sahib Khan to Williams’ role in what it called a “long planned succession.”
Khan, a 30-year Apple veteran, is rising to COO at a pivotal time for the company. President Donald Trump’s trade policies have significantly impacted Apple’s global supply chain and manufacturing operations. Trump-led tariffs on China and other countries where Apple products are manufactured have added a financial strain to the company. As a result, the business has been actively diversifying its supply chain, shifting some production out of China to countries like India and Vietnam to mitigate tariff impacts. All the while, Trump has called on Apple to move its manufacturing operations into the United States, threatening 25% tariffs on their products should it not comply. Apple has since pledged $500 billion in investments to expand its U.S. facilities.
Aside from global trade wars, Khan’s promotion comes after one of the company’s AI darlings was poached by Meta. Ruoming Pang, head of the foundation models team at Apple, will reportedly be joining Mark Zuckerberg in a major setback for Apple, which has already demonstrated difficulty competing with its peers in the AI race.
Despite global pressures on the company, Apple appears confident in Khan’s ability to weather the current business climate’s enumerable challenges.
“Sabih is a brilliant strategist who has been one of the central architects of Apple’s supply chain,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a company press release. “While overseeing Apple’s supply chain, he has helped pioneer new technologies in advanced manufacturing, overseen the expansion of Apple’s manufacturing footprint in the United States, and helped ensure that Apple can be nimble in response to global challenges. He has advanced our ambitious efforts in environmental sustainability, helping reduce Apple’s carbon footprint by more than 60%.”
Wall Street tech analyst Dan Ives expressed similar confidence in Khan’s promotion. “We believe Sabih is the right choice and an integral part of the Apple growth strategy,” he told Fortune in a written statement, noting that the “Trump tariff black cloud” involving China and India will be an issue Khan will have to tackle.
Khan, who joined Apple in 1995, is currently the senior vice president of operations. Originally from Uttar Pradesh, India, Khan’s educational background is in mechanical engineering and economics. He received bachelor’s degrees in economics and mechanical engineering from Tufts University and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Prior to joining Apple, Khan started his career as an engineer at GE Plastics.
Since 2019, Khan has overseen Apple’s global supply chain and ensured product quality. Khan’s responsibilities also include managing Apple’s planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and product-fulfillment duties, and the company’s supplier responsibility programs that “protect and educate workers at production facilities around the world.”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, suffered a dramatic financial setback after announcing the formation of what he said would be a new political organization, the “America Party.” The move, which followed a highly publicized feud with President Donald Trump, sent shockwaves through financial markets and triggered a sharp sell-off in Tesla shares.
Key developments
Net Worth Drop: Musk’s net worth fell by as much as $15 billion in the days following the announcement of his political party.
Market Reaction:Tesla stock dropped nearly 7% on the first trading day after the announcement, erasing about $68 billion in market value for shareholders.
Investor Sentiment: Wall Street analysts and investors cited growing fatigue with Musk’s increasingly controversial political activities as a key factor behind the sell-off.
Timeline
July 5, 2025: Musk officially declared the formation of the America Party on his social media platform, X, positioning it as an alternative to the two major U.S. parties.
July 7–8, 2025: The first trading day since Musk’s weekend announcement, Tesla shares tumbled, and Musk’s personal fortune dropped by as much as $15 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As of July 9, it stands at $349 billion with Tesla shares broadly unchanged.
Business vs. politics
The market’s reaction underscores the delicate balance between business leadership and political activism for high-profile CEOs. Following Musk’s public break with President Donald Trump over the passage of a sweeping tax and spending bill—which Musk called “insane” and accused of “bankrupting” the country—he declared the formation of the America Party on his X platform, citing a poll in which two-thirds of his followers supported the idea. The billionaire’s stated goal is to disrupt the entrenched two-party system, focusing the party’s efforts on just a handful of Senate and House seats to serve as a swing bloc in Congress.
The announcement came after months of Musk serving as the unofficial head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, where he championed cost-cutting and deficit reduction. But the relationship soured when Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as Musk warned of its estimated cost to the federal deficit. Their feud escalated further when Trump threatened to revoke billions in federal subsidies that Musk’s companies depend on.
Musk positioned his America Party as a home for the “80% in the middle” frustrated by partisan extremes. Although the party has not yet been formally registered with the Federal Election Commission, Musk’s advisors are reportedly exploring the use of a SuperPAC to build initial momentum and gather support.
Musk’s move has attracted interest from other political outsiders, including Andrew Yang’s Forward Party and the Libertarian Party, who see an opportunity to challenge the “duopoly” of Democrats and Republicans. Yet, the practical challenges are formidable: ballot access laws, signature requirements, and the entrenched power of the two major parties have stymied previous third-party efforts.
Despite these obstacles, Musk’s willingness to spend heavily—having already poured hundreds of millions into past campaigns—could make the America Party a factor in the 2026 midterms, especially if it can tip the balance in closely contested districts.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Nvidia made history by becoming the world’s first publicly traded company to surpass a $4 trillion market capitalization. The milestone was reached as Nvidia’s stock price surged to $164.42 during intraday trading on July 9.
The company’s stock has soared by approximately 1,460% over the past five years, with a near 18% gain registered year-to-date. Nvidia’s ascent is driven by its near-monopoly on AI chip manufacturing, with its graphics processing units (GPUs) forming the backbone of machine learning, data centers, and large language models. The Silicon Valley giant’s chips are now essential for tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet.
Jensen Huang’s net worth
Nvidia’s historic rally has had a dramatic impact on the personal fortune of its co-founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. As of July 2025, Huang’s net worth is estimated by Bloomberg at $140 billion, up $25 billion this year alone.
Huang owns about 3.5% of Nvidia, making him the largest individual shareholder. This surge places Huang among the world’s 10 richest individuals, with his fortune closely tracking Nvidia’s stock performance.
Nvidia now holds the heaviest weighting on the S&P 500 index, surpassing tech giants Apple and Microsoft. The milestone has fueled optimism for further growth, with some analysts projecting Nvidia’s market cap to keep rising. Loop Capital’s Ananda Baruah sees Nvidia at the “front-end” of the next “Golden Wave” for generative AI pushing it past $6 trillion in coming years.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s success has billionaires and business leaders gearing up to support Mayor Eric Adams. After Andrew Cuomo’s primary defeat, they see him as the next-best alternative in the city’s upcoming election, and they’re throwing him elite fundraising events.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Party primary win against former governor Andrew Cuomo sent the city’s business community into a tizzy. Now the überwealthy and New York’s real estate scene are rallying around a not-so-new candidate: Mayor Eric Adams.
Several billionaires and moguls have thrown their support behind the scandal-laden mayor in their latest attempt to thwart Mamdani, including Bill Ackman. The hedge fund manager endorsed Adams on X, pitching him as someone prepared to take on the popular democratic socialist candidate. Meanwhile, over the July 4 weekend Kenneth and Maria Fishel, the couple behind a New York real estate empire and the firm Renaissance Properties, cohosted an Adams fundraiser in the Hamptons. The Fishels were joined by billionaires John and Margo Catsimatidis, and real estate investor Jared Epstein, among others in attendance.
“This is about keeping New York vibrant, keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe,” Kenneth Fishel told Fortune about his fundraiser. The event at his Hamptons home, he said, counted more than 100 guests from all sectors of business and industry. Although the exact amount raised at the party hasn’t been tallied up yet, said Fishel, he predicts the event will ultimately bring millions to the Adams campaign.
“It was a great day,” Todd Shapiro, publicist for the Adams campaign, told Fortune. “The mayor felt it was one of the best fundraisers he’s had.”
Since the event, Fishel said fellow business and real estate leaders have told him they plan to follow his lead with similar events in support of Adams. They support the mayor’s policies on housing, zoning, capitalism, and public safety that they see as favorable. These industry titans are particularly concerned by Mamdani’s plans to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, and increase income and corporate taxes. As for Adams, he has voiced opposition to significantly raising corporate taxes and supports streamlining the housing development approval process to create more affordable and regular housing.
Marc Holliday, chief executive of the New York–based real estate investment trust SL Green Realty, is reportedly throwing an Adams fundraiser on Wednesday with dozens of New York’s real estate elite in attendance. Sources told the Wall Street Journal that attendees paid around $2,000 to join the festivities. Shapiro confirmed these details to Fortune.
Similarly, real estate investor Epstein has his own plans to support Adams’ reelection efforts. Epstein, according tothe Journal, has several Adams events planned for August, including a private dinner and campaign events to target younger voters using social media influencers. Shapiro and Epstein confirmed plans for these events to Fortune. He has appeared repeatedly on Fox Business and on social media calling on voters to cast their ballots for Adams.
“The goal is to open minds, not lecture. I want people to hear from Eric directly, to see and feel his deep love for New York, his understanding of its challenges, and his commitment to all New Yorkers,” Epstein told Fortune. He sees Mamdani’s platform as “neither economically viable nor legally achievable,” pointing to proposed tax hikes and Mamdani’s promise to make buses free.
“I don’t believe in perfection, I believe in leadership. Adams isn’t running on ideology or slogans. He’s making hard decisions, stabilizing the city, and delivering measurable results,” he added.
Alongside his events for younger voters, Epstein said he will be opening his Hamptons home to a small group of influential donors. “These are people who don’t just write checks, they mobilize communities,” he said, but did not name any of these high-profile individuals.
Several other business leaders in the city have opened their wallets to the mayor. An intermediary for Madison Square Garden Entertainment has contributed $29,400 to Adam’s reelection efforts. The company is led by businessman James Dolan, and $18,000 of the businesses’ contributions came from members of the Dolan family. Meanwhile, an intermediary for the Real Estate Board of New York contributed $3,100 on the group’s behalf through several donors. By donating through an intermediary, meaning a go-between organization linking donors with organizations they wish to support, donors receive counsel and administrative support in their contributions and are able to pool larger sums of money from various sources for a specific recipient.
Individual contributors to the Adams campaign have also helped fund his reelection bid. However, their donations are capped at $2,100 per New York campaign finance laws.
Joseph and Jack Cayre, who run real estate giant Midtown Equities, and their spouses, have donated $8,000 to Adams’s reelection bid. Several members of the Gindi family, which operates Century 21 department stores and the real estate firm Gindi Equities, have also contributed to the candidate, adding more than $10,000 to his war chest. Several thousand in donations were also made by real estate mogul Alexander Rovt and his son Maxwell, who own a large real estate portfolio in New York and overseas.
Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Marc Holliday, and members of the Cayre, Gindi, and Rovt families did not respond immediately to Fortune requests for comment.
Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak and his wife’s net worth is nearing $1 billion—but he’s not kicking up his feet and retiring any time soon. The Gen X politician has just rejoined investment firm Goldman Sachs as a senior advisor. Despite the role’s likelihood to come with a hefty salary, Sunak has promised to donate this pay to his new charity, The Richmond Project.
Like millions of Gen Z, former British prime minister Rishi Sunak spent the last year on the job hunt, after voters ousted him from 10 Downing Street following a landslide electoral defeat for his party.
Although he’s still working within the government, the 45-year-old has wasted no time in calling up his network for another gig. On Tuesday, Sunak rejoined investment banking firm Goldman Sachs as a senior advisor.
“I am excited to welcome Rishi back to Goldman Sachs in his new capacity as a Senior Advisor,” said Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon in a press release.
Sunak is set to advise clients globally on a range of macroeconomic and geopolitical issues as well as contribute to a culture of “ongoing learning and development” with Goldman employees around the world. While the company declined to share Sunak’s new salary, his pay will be donated to The Richmond Project, a newly launched charity by him and his wife—Akshata Murty—to improve numeracy skills in the U.K. However, it’s unclear whether his wife will take home a salary as a trustee. As a newly registered charity, it has not yet published any financial accounts.
Fortune reached out to Sunak for further comment.
Rishi Sunak is even wealthier than King Charles III thanks to family investments and his prime minister role
Sunak and Murty’s net worth totals about £640 million ($871 million), according to The Sunday Times Rich List. Their family is the wealthiest to have called 10 Downing Street home—and are even richer than King Charles III. This is thanks largely to Murty’s 0.94% stake in Infosys, the Indian IT giant co-founded by her billionaire father. With a market cap of about $78 billion, her stake is worth about $740 million—about 85% of the couple’s net worth.
In fact, Murty has also invested in a number of British start-ups, like the gentlemen’s outfitters New & Lingwood, which sells silk dressing gowns for £2,500 (about $3,400), adding to their household’s wealth.
On top of the lucrative dividends paid from their investment portfolio, the family has gained recent income from Sunak’s role at the Washington Speakers Bureau. In April and May of this year, he received a total of £505,661 ($668,000) for three separate appearances, including a speaking engagement for Bain Capital.
Throughout Sunak’s decade of serving in the British parliament, he earned a salary ranging between £66,365 and £86,584—the latter being his 2023-2024 payout, which translates to about $110,000 based on the exchange rate at the time. It’s a source of income he’s likely to continue to bring in as the representative for the northern U.K. region of Richmond and Northallerton.
Of course, being prime minister further enhanced Sunak’s wealth. Between April 2022 and March 2023, he earned £139,000 (about $167,000) from his salary as a member of parliament, finance minister and prime minister, and £2.1 million (about $2.5 million) from investments, according to accounting data reported by Reuters.
In the U.K., former prime ministers are also entitled to public financial support of up to £115,000 (about $156,200) a year to reimburse “incurred expenses for necessary administrative costs arising from their special position in public life.”
How Rishi Sunak made his first million
Sunak’s latest gig is a full circle moment: Before he entered politics or even attended Stanford, he began his career working for Goldman, as an intern—and then in an analyst role. He later served as a partner at two other hedge funds.
The Gen Xer first hit multimillionaire status in his late 20s, when as a hedge fund manager, he shared a £100 million pot after a lucrative bet in the buildup to the global financial crisis.
In a joint commencement speech with Murty at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (where the couple first met back in 2004), Sunak told graduates that key to finding success is being adept at both what the data and own instinct is telling you.
“As you progress in your own careers, learn to listen to your intuition with as much respect and rigor as you do the analysis because if you want to lead it’s not a question of data or intuition you’ve got to get comfortable with both,” Sunak said.
Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and his wife, Akshata Murty, have a combined net worth of about $871 million, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
Apple is reportedly interested in the broadcast rights to F1. This follows the success of the company’s F1: The Movie. ESPN currently holds the rights and could retain them, but did not make a deal during an exclusive negotiating period with the league.
As F1: The Movie continues to roar through the box office, Apple could be turning its attention to the F1: The Sport.
The Financial Timesreports Apple is in talks to steal away the streaming rights for F1 events from Disney following the success of the company’s first box-office smash. ESPN currently broadcasts F1 races, but its contract is set to expire next year.
Should it succeed, it will be the latest of a growing string of live-sports coups for Apple. The company began airing games from Major League Baseball in 2022 and has a deeper deal with Major League Soccer as well.
F1’s broadcast deal was expected to be worth $121 million per year when it came up for renewal, Citi estimated. However, with the success of F1: The Movie, which has brought in $300 million at the global box office so far, that number could be revised upward. (When it signed the deal with ESPN, the rights went for $85 million per year.)
ESPN could have locked up F1 prior to this, as it had an exclusive period to negotiate a deal. Nothing was struck, though, which opened the rights up to competition. Viewership of F1 events has doubled on ESPN since 2018.
F1 has expanded its footprint in the U.S. lately, with an annual race in Las Vegas along the strip and another high-profile event in Miami. In addition to airing on ESPN, the league offers a stream of races, which charges fans directly.
On this episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, cohosts Diane Brady, executive editorial director of the Fortune CEO Initiative and Fortune Live Media, and editorial director Kristin Stoller talk to Daphne Koller, founder and CEO of Insitro. They talk about using AI to combat the antiquity of drug discovery, working with Big Pharma and the Trump Administration, and helping society prepare for a post-AI world.
Daphne Koller: I think that the future is in a partnership between the human and the machine. I think for every technology that we’ve constructed in the past, people are like, “Oh, my God, this is going to take away my job.” And in fact, it did take away a lot of jobs. I mean, electricity certainly took a lot of jobs, right? I mean, the agricultural revolution took away a lot of jobs. This will certainly be the case here as well. But I think human creativity, human innovation, is is still something that is an important partner.
Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next. The podcast about the people…
Kristin Stoller: …and trends…
Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.
Brady: Kristin, this week, we are speaking with a MacArthur Genius recipient.
Stoller: A genius, she’s in our midst. I’m so excited.
Brady: I’m sounding like a cynical Canadian here. I actually am very fascinated with her. I’m fascinated first of all with the concept of genius writ large. I have a friend who got one of those grants, who’s a jazz musician. Here’s a woman who cofounded Coursera. Now has Insitro, which is drug discovery. I mean, what does it mean to be a genius?
Stoller: It’s, I mean, founding two companies is a great start to being a genius in my book. And Stanford professor too.
Brady: Yes, let’s not forget that. Let’s not forget the Stanford professor. Well, look, I think the most exciting use case for AI is in health care, drug discovery, and she’s right in the heart of some of the most difficult diseases that…
Stoller: She really is. They’re focused on ALS. They’re focused on fatty liver. Those are two really big ones that haven’t seen a lot of innovation.
Brady: No, and heartbreaking ones. My old boss has ALS, and it’s heartbreaking to see the decline people have. And I think with her in particular, she does seem to be somebody who follows her curiosity, from previous interviews I’ve seen. So I’m curious to know what it is about this particular part of the AI ecosystem that drove her to it. She could have gone anywhere.
Stoller: I totally agree. And speaking of AI, I think she’s catching us on a very good week, because we had such an AI-themed week last week.
Brady: I know, you were even interviewing my digital avatar.
Stoller: I was, I was interviewing your digital self to prep for an upcoming conference. I had an AI dinner on Wednesday that I went to, and then Thursday, you and I sat down with this fascinating CEO in the AI space. Sadly, we have to gatekeep his name a little bit, but remember how fascinating the debates we had.
Brady: Yeah, look, I disagree with him on a lot of things.
Stoller: Well, that’s what made it fun.
Brady: Number one, being the idea that AI will reduce drinking because it’ll help us connect more socially. I think that’s open to debate.
Stoller: Let’s unpack that, because he was saying that if there’s, you know, ChatGPT, you could have, like, ChatGPT and AI in a social setting helping tell you, like, conversation starters, questions to ask, and no one needs to take a shot anymore.
Brady: Look, some of us may be neurodivergent. I’m not making any projections here, but maybe that would help some people. Yeah, I don’t think that’s why everybody drinks, A, and B, look, I think EQ and IQ are two different things, so let’s just leave it at that. And I do think AI has a lot of potential. Clearly, this is an area that excites people. And I’m really curious to know what it is and when she hopes to be making some of these big advances. I’m also curious about Coursera, I mean, to me, it’s a fascinating company that did not fully realize the dream of online learning, don’t you think? I mean it, we’ve basically proven the fact, in the same way that AI cannot help you at a party necessarily, to be determined, I don’t think online learning helps you learn as well as being in a classroom.
Stoller: I’m with you there. I think the bigger problem, for sure, is Insitro, because I feel like you know, of course, education is an issue, but with drug discovery, it’s such a field that has so much potential. It’s such a costly field, billions of dollars are invested in every year. It takes so long to bring a drug to the market, 10 to 15 years at best, and it’s rarely successful. They have a 90% failure rate in clinical trials. Not very effective
Brady: Big Pharma.
Stoller: Absolutely, yeah.
Brady: Look, she has a phrase that I’ve heard used in other interviews: Calculus is to physics as AI is to biology. We’re going to have her unpack that. But I do think that we now have an infrastructure to improve drug discovery, no question. Can a startup disrupt Big Pharma, or is it really additive to what they’re doing? To be determined.
Stoller: Well, let’s find out with Daphne after the break.
Brady: Great, we’ll be right back.
Brady: The best business leaders today know the value and importance of empowering those around them, personally and professionally. By encouraging and enabling others to grow, take risks, and fuel innovation, business leaders are not only driving greater engagement and performance, but also future-proofing their organization for years to come. I’m joined by Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, to talk more about this. Welcome, Jason.
Jason Girzadas: Well, thank you, Diane. Great to be here.
Brady: Innovation is about empowering the people around you, and that’s something that a lot of CEOs struggle with. How do they embed it into their leadership style?
Girzadas: Well, I think there’s all types of CEO leadership styles, clearly, and proven that there’s maybe not one recipe for success, but it does require, I do believe, a commitment to inclusive leadership, where all are expected and invited to contribute around innovation. I think there’s also a collaboration and a collaborative culture that’s a requirement that’s also not something that maybe comes as naturally and has to be cultivated and be intentional about. And then also, I think giving leaders some autonomy to actually look at opportunities for innovation, look at opportunities for creative, new ideas to bring forth that requires a degree of trust and a degree of openness by CEOs in particular, to allow for that within an organization.
Brady: So Jason, I want to—on a personal note, I’m talking to a CEO here. What are some of the most effective strategies you think for fostering open dialogue, collaboration? A lot of what you’re talking about is the ingredients to innovation.
Girzadas: Well, for me, it starts with being genuine and authentic as a leader. Being clear that the single leader doesn’t have all the answers to every question, and certainly in my case, it’s inviting a very broad organization to participate in addressing the issues and challenges that we face. So I think that genuineness and that transparency and authentic leadership style is the key ingredient from my experience.
Brady: Good advice. Thanks for joining us, Jason.
Girzadas: Thank you, Diane.
Brady: Daphne, in doing my research, I came across an interesting quote that you said, which was, “Calculus is to physics as AI is to biology.” What did you mean by that?
Koller: So, discipline has become something that we can manage as humans, when they become predictable, when we can have a formalism that allows us to predict what will happen in an experiment and have it be approximately correct. And calculus was that for Newtonian physics, whether it’s a ball rolling down a hill or a pendulum swinging, we were able to make predictions about what a system will do. And we’ve never had that for biology, because biology is complicated and intertwined, and we really can’t predict, for almost any experiment, what will happen. And now, with new measurement technologies on the one hand, and the power of AI on the other, we can start to create models of biological systems where we can start to make predictions that are at least somewhat likely to be correct. And I think that is the path forward to many applications, including, of course, in human health. But I think it’s going to be an incredibly important discipline in the 21st century.
Stoller: You talk in these amazing, you know, philosophical phrases. That wasn’t the only quote that Diane and I came across that I thought was interesting. You have a lot of others. And you’re a Stanford professor. Do you come up with all these yourself? Do you have friends that help you?
Koller: I think much of what all of us do is a distillation of bits and pieces of things that we hear and kind of put together in slightly new ways. I can’t say that I invented these from whole cloth. But rather, you know, you develop a certain way of thinking about things when you get exposed to all these little bits and pieces, and begin to understand how to think about the world.
Brady: I do think, and I want to get back to, of course, AI and what you’re doing now at Insitro, but I do think that having an eclectic background does allow for original thinking. And you are somebody who has had a MacArthur Genius Grant. That impresses me, because I know two other people who’ve had it. One is a novelist, Edward P. Jones. Other is a jazz musician, Mary Halvorson, and here you are, you know, to put you on the spot a bit, how do you define genius?
Koller: You know, I always felt uncomfortable when that word was applied to myself, because I’d always had a very aspirational definition of what genius means. And you know, that was Albert Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. It wasn’t me. And when I did get that MacArthur Award, I actually felt very humbled and unworthy. And one might even say that, and I’ve even said that to the people who gave me the MacArthur Award, that much of my career journey following the MacArthur Award was an attempt to kind of pay it back, to prove myself as having deserved that.
Brady: No offense, that sounds very female impostor syndrome.
Koller: Well, maybe it is, but that’s certainly how I felt. And I think the Coursera experience was definitely—I felt the need to go into something…
Brady: …which you founded and were co-CEO, for those who don’t remember…
Koller: Yes, and that was an attempt to do something that was sufficiently ambitious and world-changing that it deserved that recognition. And so I don’t know what genius is, but I can tell you that one of the things that I consider to be my superpower, trying to avoid that female impostor syndrome, is that ability to connect the dots across different disciplines and see connections that are oftentimes maybe obvious in retrospect, but weren’t obvious at the time. And I find that ability to transfer ideas from one discipline to another and create a synthesis that did not exist before is where a lot of really interesting ideas often emerge. And you can think about what we did in Coursera as kind of bringing the web in a truly meaningful way to education. And you can think of what we do at Insitro as the blend of biology and computer science. And in fact, it’s even in the name. Insitro is the synthesis, the deep integration of in silico, which means in silicone of the computer, and in vitro, which means in the lab. And that is kind of the ethos of the company.
Stoller: Oh, I had no idea as an in vitro baby. I love that too.
Koller: Oh, that’s lovely.
Stoller: Yes, so I’m wondering, Daphne, what was it that was the spark that made you kind of transition from academia into being a founder, and how did you feel? Were you scared? Because I would have been terrified.
Koller: I was absolutely petrified. Not only had I never founded a company, my career journey was such that I’d never even been at a company. I was an academic, through and through. My parents were academics. I was convinced I would retire as an academic, be a professor emeritus, like my father. And then, as I mentioned, that MacArthur thing happened and really helped put a point on—I wanted to make an impact. I wanted to do something that was directly changing the world, as opposed to publishing papers and hoping that someone will read them and do something with that, or, you know, graduating students that go off and do great things, and that’s amazing.
Brady: Especially Stanford, that’s the hub. You also grew up in Israel, which is also a hub of biotech and entrepreneurship…
Koller: …and tech…
Brady: …and tech, and you did college and high school simultaneously. I think you graduated at 17 from university, correct?
Koller: Yes.
Brady: So talk a little bit about what intrigued you there? Because computer science wasn’t really as much of a discipline per se when you and I were growing up….
Koller: …no….
Stoller: …and for women especially, I might add. I think that’s really impressive.
Koller: For sure. No, I got into computers actually, when we were on sabbatical, when my father was here on sabbatical in the United States, and I was 12 years old, and I was fortunate to go to a high school that had a computer lab, and it’s, you know…
Stoller: …Like Bill Gates…
Koller: …well, yeah, kind of like Bill Gates, a few years later. So we had somewhat better computers than he had access to when he was a preteen. But that ability to kind of tell the computer what to do, and then it does stuff I found fascinating, and it really fit in with my kind of wish to create models of complexity, and that theme has been with me throughout my career journey, of taking complex, sort of gnarly things and create models that lend clarity. And I hesitate to say that computers understand, because computers are not conscious, they don’t understand. So to me, a computer can be said to understand when it’s making predictions that are reasonably accurate, which comes back to the comments that I started with. So creating models that are predictive of real-world systems, to me, was just an incredibly fascinating endeavor.
Stoller: I think that’s so important that you said they don’t understand. Because right now, I think a lot of people are using AI like it’s a real human with emotions and feelings. And my friends tell me they use it for therapy. And I’m like…
Brady: …don’t fall in love with your operating system….
Stoller: …yeah, exactly. How are you advising people?
Koller: I mean, look, if it’s useful for you as as a human to speak out what you’re feeling and have something that prompts you in an intelligent way to bring things out, I think that’s great, and I think it’s fine to use a computer as a therapist, but I think it’s important to realize that there is no emotions on the other side, there’s no sentience, there’s no consciousness. It is effectively a really sophisticated mirror that allows you to work your way through, for example, complicated feelings.
Brady: Thus making it particularly well-suited, I think, to things like drug discovery, right? I mean, well, tell me a little bit about the genesis of Insitro and what it is that you felt you could accomplish, especially in the world of Big Pharma, where, you know, it takes years, decades, in some cases, to get to the kinds of drugs that you’re currently developing for diseases for which there’s currently no cure.
Koller: Yeah, so my sort of journey into drug discovery came out of my actually early academic work at Stanford, where I’d been working at that intersection of biology and computer science and machine learning for quite a number of years prior to my detour at Coursera. And when my time at Coursera was over, I realized because I’d actually been at Coursera when the machine learning revolution in 2012 started. In 2016 I lifted my head over the trenches, and I was like, wow, machine learning is changing the world, but not having as big of an impact in life sciences. And I felt like I could potentially make a difference in that. And so I spent some time at Calico, which is a great company, and learned about drug discovery for the first time. And I was like, wait, that’s how we make medicines? I mean, this is, so, what’s the word, serendipitous.
Brady: I thought you were going to say antiquated.
Stoller: I was thinking the exact same thing.
Koller: Fair enough. It’s both, and this is not, you know, this is not to say anything bad about Calico specifically. The whole process is like—a scientist has an idea and based on some intuition, reading some paper, whatever, does some bespoke experiments to kind of try and prove that out, and then you push that into the clinic, and it fails over 90% of the time. And 90% of the time is from the time that you put this into the clinic. Which is pretty late in the process.
Stoller: Why is that?
Koller: Because we are not able to predict upfront what the experiment…
Brady: …your eureka moment could just be a flight of fancy…
Koller: Yeah, I mean, you are making predictions based on experiments in often animal models that are just not human. You know how many mice we’ve cured of cancer? Many, many mice. If only mice were the target audience, we’d be in great shape. But we’re not able to do experiments on humans until the very end of the process, as one should in the clinical trial. And we’re not able to make predictions upfront of what will or will not have a therapeutic impact, will make people better or not. And so what I wanted to do was to bring the power of machine learning on the one hand, and equally importantly, the power of modern-day data collection from humans and different types of human-derived systems, bring that together to make as accurate a set of predictions as one can around whether a drug will have a benefit to a particular patient or not, and that requires having the right AI and having the right data to feed the AI, and those together are what is allowing us to create an engine that turns and makes more and more predictions about therapeutic hypotheses that we think are both novel and more likely to have a success in the clinic.
Stoller: Tell us about this data, because I’m curious where you’re getting that, where it’s coming from. What’s that like?
Koller: So, data is the fuel for AI. I think everyone understands that now. The thing that has given us that ChatGPT moment is the incredible amount of data that is available on the web in terms of text and images. What has given us alphafold Is the significant amount of data about proteins folding. And so in order to give us that next moment, that next ChatGPT moment, we need the right data to feed the AI. And so at Insitro, we actually put together two different types of data that we think are synergistic and complementary. One type is data from humans, where we measure a human system, and we understand how changes in human genetics, the DNA that makes you and me different, has impact on traits that are relevant to health and disease, and we’re able to use measurement technologies like imaging of whole bodies or different organ systems, omics from blood and tissue to really get a picture of human physiology and understand how it relates to genetics on the one hand, and the clinical outcomes on the other. Which is great, but you can do experiments in humans, and you do need to experiment with your hypotheses. So the other half of what we do is we print massive amounts of data in our lab, and this, of course, is data in microcosm systems and cells. But those cells are allowing us to kind of make interventions and see what a particular change in a gene does, in this case, to cellular systems and those together can triangulate us on hypotheses that are actually going to…
Brady: Let me pause a second on the human data, on two fronts. One, I was very early. Me and my family, I forced them to spit in test tubes and send it off to 23 and…
Stoller: …still too scared to do that…
Brady: …and because the promise of how DNA collectively could unlock drug discovery excited me. I’m curious why those models, without making it too personal, have proven to not be as promising, it seems as—or maybe it’s just the business model of some of them. But then I wonder, secondly, about the trust issue, I trust spitting in a test tube. Kristin may not. But also, there are a lot of populations that have been reluctant to share their data. Do you see any pain points around genetic data privacy, trust—and just because it’s so promising, clearly, if everybody in the world contributed their information how lucky we would be, and they’re not.
Koller: Yeah, so I think that is something that has been done poorly in some cases and very well in others. So let me point to a success story, which is something that we leverage a lot, which is resources like the U.K. Biobank, where I think it was done as well as one can possibly hope for. They got half a million people to agree to have their DNA measured, as well as a whole bunch of other what we call phenotypic measurements, which are various traits. And they took people and imaged them, they collected blood samples, they took all sorts of anthropomorphic measurements. And actually it turns out that those together are way more powerful than either one in isolation. When you have both the genetics and the phenotypic data, is where you really start getting insights about what genetics does to actual clinical outcomes. And they did it in a way where people were consented, they knew what they were doing, and they were excited to contribute to medical research. And I think if this was something that was done more broadly, I think we would be, to your point, in a much better situation, and it is possible do it in a way that is privacy-preserving. You create research environments that are protected, the data are anonymized. You can’t download the data, and all of those things are solvable engineering problems. What one needs is the recognition of just how valuable this is from a medical research perspective. Not just medical, by the way—the U.K. Biobank gave us a tremendous amount of insights about nonmedical situations, like the impact of various other environmental factors, for example, on human health and other human outcomes. And when you create that resource, it’s just a gift that keeps on giving. And I wish other governments were, especially ones to your point, that have access to more diverse populations, because the U.K. Biobank was very Eurocentric, would make that effort and create these resources that would allow us to address human health across different ethnic backgrounds.
Stoller: I think diversity is, was, my next question, because going along with the ethics of it, having a diverse dataset really worries me, especially when it comes to health care. How are you at Insitro ensuring that all the datasets are diverse and inclusive?
Koller: So I think it’s important to distinguish between data that’s used for scientific discovery and data that’s used for the delivery of care. And we’ve seen that there is significant differences in terms of, you know, for instance, diagnostic tests that are developed for one population being less accurate than tests that are developed for another. When you’re doing basic biology discovery, and what you’re coming to is the recognition that this gene is a significant causal driver of a particular disease, the prevalence of the disease might differ in different populations, but typically the underlying biology is consistent, and so that same driver is likely to be relevant across populations, even if the prevalence of the disease might be more relevant in some populations than others. So I think it’s less of a concern when you’re doing drug discovery than when you’re doing the delivery of care. However, what we’ve also seen, which is why diversity is, I think, really important for all of us, is that as you get insights about new populations, new biologies emerge that might be kind of just not there in another population. And so you might uncover even more new things by having access to more and more different, diverse populations. So I wish we had that.
Brady: Can you talk a little bit about how you chose ALS, fatty liver disease? What was it that made you target the diseases that are currently on your radar screen?
Koller: So first and foremost, the lens that we begin by applying is how significant of a disease is this and to what extent is there what we call unmet need, because there’s certainly a lot of diseases that are reasonably well treated right now, and there’s companies out there that make, you know, “me-too,” “me-better” drugs for those diseases. And, you know, there’s value in that. But that is not what we wanted to do. What we wanted to do was to uncover new intervention points that make a really significant difference. So ALS, to take a very concrete example, has absolutely nothing. There are four approved drugs. They extend life-span by two to three months. The patients have a three- to five-year life-span. I mean, it’s worse than most cancers, to be honest. And patients die an excruciating death. They basically, they start losing their motor function to the point that eventually they just are unable to breathe, and that’s just a horrible way to die. And so we believe that in the work that we did in ALS, we have uncovered a novel master regulator, actually, we think maybe even more than one, that modulates a number of key proteins that we know are implicated in the pathophysiology of ALS. And so now it’s early days, we haven’t put this in a human, and unfortunately, ALS is one of those diseases where the animal models are particularly poor, and so our proof of success will only be when we put this in a human, which, by the way, is true in general, but maybe even more true in ALS because of the lack of good animal models. But we are so excited about the experiments that we’ve done across multiple different ways of measuring ALS biology and finding that our targets modulate these different aspects of the disease. So we’re really excited about that, and we keep looking for other examples of that. Now the other element, of course, one is unmet need. And the other is, do you have a unique, differentiated ability to do something about this disease? Because there’s a lot of diseases out there that have unmet need, but what makes us the best people to tackle that? And so what we look for are diseases that manifest in meaningful ways, in the kind of high-content data that we have access to on the one hand, and have a sufficient genetic basis on the other, so that we know that genetics is a sufficient driver of the disease, so we can find those genotype phenotype connections. I mean, if it’s a disease that’s driven by smoking…
Brady: …yeah, it seems random. Stop smoking, you’re good to go…
Stoller: …so I want to go back to Diane’s original point when we started this, which is, you know, drug discovery right now can take decades. How far away are we from testing, you know, the ALS research you’re telling me about in humans, and is it, is it still going to be decades?
Koller: Well, so there are certain parts that one can accelerate and others that are harder to accelerate. So for example, at least as of now, there’s a certain set of requirements that regulators require, for example, on toxicity that just take as long as it takes—takes a year to do these experiments. You know, purity of the drug substance is a toxic in two species and so on. So that takes a year. We are hopeful that our ALS drug, which is very much in drug discovery right now, will be heading towards the clinic in, I don’t want to give timelines here in real time, but, but we’ll be heading towards the clinic in the next couple of years and then we’ll have to see how well we are able to address the disease. Now, the other part that can’t be compressed, but then again maybe can, is the actual clinical development. So clinical development is what happens once the clinical trial begins, and you can say, well, if the disease takes a certain amount of time to develop and progress, then you can’t accelerate that. And so it takes a certain amount of time to see that your drug is making a difference relative to the natural progression of the disease. And that is absolutely true, but there are places where the kind of machine learning and AI capabilities allow you to get early signs that your drug is working by looking at, you know, biomarkers that are much more quantitative, that are not things like, is the patient walking better, or…
Brady: …it’s a space with a lot of innovation right now. I mean, I think of Insilico medicine, where they’re using AI for creating molecules, you know, for clinical trials. So there’s so when you look at the ecosystem right now, let’s start with the fact that, if I’m from Big Pharma and I’m here to meet you, are you my friend? Are you my enemy? Or a bit of both?
Koller: Um, I think enemy is probably a strong word. I think…
Brady: …competitor. How about that?
Koller: I think we have places where we have collaborated very effectively with Big Pharma. We have an, I mean, the work on ALS is a collaboration with BMS. There have been wonderful partners. We have actually an kind of inverse collaboration with Lilly, where they have extra capacity and capabilities in making a particular type of molecules that isn’t within our sweet spot, and they’re making that for us. And so collaboration makes a ton of sense in a bunch of cases, and then in other cases, yes, of course, you end up being a competitor. If we make a drug and someone else is making a drug towards the same disease, then you end up competing. But I will just say that there is so much unmet need in the ecosystem right now, not a single company can own the entire market. And so it requires a lot of collaboration, and takes an ecosystem to help us address. I mean, a real enemy is disease. It’s not a different company.
Stoller: Speaking of enemies or challenges, I want to talk about the current political climate, because…
Brady: Wait, I thought the FDA is our friend. Let’s…
Stoller: Yeah, it’s even more challenging than ever now to get funding for biotech and everything that you’re trying to do, how has what the current administration is doing, especially in terms of funding, been affecting what what you do, and how are you getting through it?
Koller: Yeah, so I think it’s definitely challenging times for our industry. I think the thing that is most challenging as far as our industry is concerned, is the uncertainty. When you’re doing drug discovery, the, these are very long timelines, and investors underwrite a particular proposition, and if they know kind of what the path is, they can do the appropriate, you know, ROI analysis, and say, okay, this is how much this is worth. I’m going to underwrite this proposition. But if things change every day, you don’t know what to underwrite. And so people are like, well, I’m just going to sit back for now and see what’s going on. And I think that’s really one of the biggest problems. The other of course, is I think there needs to be more support for scientific discovery in the United States. Continued support for what has been an engine of innovation that has driven so much value in terms of companies being formed, discoveries that have been world-changing and while certainly there have been inefficiencies and ways that this can be made better, I worry that there’s actions that are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, because there is not sufficient sort of distinction between, okay, these are actions that are making the system better, versus we’re just, you know, going to take a chainsaw to a whole bunch of stuff.
Brady: The word “chainsaw” is, of course, it’s very evocative. No name shall be mentioned. But, I mean, I’m a British-Canadian, I’m an immigrant here. You’re an immigrant here. As an academic in particular, we know how important foreign talent has been to this ecosystem. It must be quite painful right now, on so many levels, as well as an academic, what’s going on.
Koller: I mean, to your point about immigration, immigrants have built this country. Immigrants continue to build this country. If you look at almost every slice of companies, whether it’s Fortune 500 companies, whether it’s, you know, startups worth over a billion dollars, even startups as a whole, something on the order of 50 to 60% have been founded by immigrants. And when you look at the talent that is needed to drive forward, especially those companies that are at the frontier of their field—tech companies, biotech companies, AI companies—those disproportionately draw on talented people who come to this country to study and then decide to stay and make a life here, and without that talent, we are not going to be able to build, to continue to build these companies. And so has immigration gone wild? Sure, there were years where there was a flood of immigrants that strained the social network of a lot of communities, and we probably needed to be more thoughtful about, you know, making sure that we had the right flow at the right amount with the right type of talent. But again, I worry that we’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater by cutting off some of those talent pipelines that have been so critical to the success of this country.
Stoller: And the two worlds you live in, too, academia, science, both are heavily under attack right now. How are you thinking about the next couple of years and getting through them? Do you have any optimism? Is there mostly pessimism, or…?
Koller: I wish I had a crystal ball. Mostly what I’m doing is hunkering down and trying to build a company in the best way that we can. I will say that a silver lining here is that there is increasingly greater support for the use of AI. I think this is one thing this administration has done well, is recognize the value that AI can bring to the economy and and different parts of the economy. I mean, even the FDA has moved to embrace AI much more now than it’s had in the, you know, in the past few years. We see that in other places. And so I’m hopeful. So if you’re looking for a reason for optimism, I think that one of the consequences of the push for efficiency, for example, could be and is also aligned with at least the stated ethos of of the administration, is to have a greater use of AI technology across the board.
Brady: And reduced regulation. You only want so much reduced regulation when you’re talking about health care, of course. But you know, one of the things that intrigues me, especially you being in Silicon Valley. You mentioned when you were sitting down, you’d just been in Boston. Typically, the ecosystems for health have been Boston, maybe, you know, Cleveland. What is it about…
Koller: …and the Bay Area…
Brady: …and the Bay Area. But, I’m curious about Silicon Valley. Everybody tries to re-create it in various parts of the country and the world with mixed success. What do you think it is about that ecosystem that has been so successful?
Koller: Yeah, and I think that is a great question, and touches on the same topics that we just discussed. The Bay Area has been the success that it is because it is home to two of the greatest universities in the world, Stanford and Berkeley. Those universities draw a disproportionately large number of super talented people, both from within the U.S. but also from abroad, and create this incredible kind of entrepreneurial feel so people, there’s like a pipeline of people that go from these universities to sound companies…
Brady: …and a lot of money…
Koller: …and there’s a lot of money, and there is indeed a lot of money that supports those companies and allows them to thrive. And I think it’s that mix of things, and we need to make sure we preserve all of those three: the incredible powerhouse of universities, the talent pipeline that flows through these universities into the ecosystem, and enough money to support innovation that happens right here in the U.S. to create new companies that provide incredible amounts of value, both in terms of hiring people as well as, you know, other forms of value to the U.S. And I really hope we don’t lose that.
Stoller: As a two-time founder, was there something that you got wrong the first time with Coursera, that you said, you know what, I’m going to do that totally differently with Insitro? And what was that?
Koller: Yeah, so that’s a great question, and the answer is yes. When we built Coursera, I can tell you one thing that I got right and one thing that I wish I’d gotten right. When we built Coursera, I assumed I didn’t know anything about culture, a company culture, and I remember when I was interviewing for the first time a relatively senior leader, and he asked me, as a Coursera founder, what would you like the culture to be? And I remember sitting there across the desk, thinking to myself, what is culture? Why do you need it? You come to work, you do your work, you go home. I mean, what do you mean, culture?
Stoller: Gen Z will not like that.
Koller: Well, no, and companies are not like that. And one of the things that I discovered is that culture is absolutely critical, and it needs to be nurtured with a lot of deliberation. And at Coursera we were lucky, because we hired amazing people at the beginning, and the organic culture that evolved was actually pretty good, but there were some places where I wish it would have been better. And at Insitro, I have been much more deliberate in nurturing the culture from the very beginning. And we had values that really spoke to, for example, that cross functional collaboration that is so critical to the kind of company that we’re looking to build. Create together is one of our values. Engage with respect is another one. And I think I did that much better the second time around. What I wish I’d done better the second time around, that I didn’t, was, and everyone will tell you that a company is a reflection of the founder. I’m not by nature a particularly process-driven person. In academia, processes are not a thing very much. I mean, you come in, you create, you ideate. It’s very free form. It’s very free-form. And I assumed that we could build a company along the same lines, and that served us well up to about 50 and at that point it became something that we probably should have instituted better processes for…how do we make decisions?
Brady: …hire a CHRO…
Koller: …yeah, yeah. Well, we actually, yeah. So not just people processes, decision processes, governance processes, things like that, even purchasing process. And I will use as an excuse that when we hit 50 was also when the pandemic hit, and so we were busy putting in COVID protocols, which was all about process, and didn’t have enough time to think about the other kind. But that is something that I wish I’d done sooner.
Brady: Well, it gets it takes me back to something you said, I think probably to your dad when you were 13, that you were bored in high school. It sounds like you’re a little bored with processes. So tell me about what your own strengths [are] right now and I’d love to get a sense of how you structure your day as a leader, because obviously, I’m assuming you have people who now take care of the processes so you can focus on…
Koller: …yes, thank God, and they’re very good…
Brady: …what do you focus on?
Koller: So first of all, I’ve been incredibly lucky in the leadership team that I’ve been able to recruit, and they’re remarkable leaders in their own right but also have come in with the clear goal of, you know, reaching an arm out across the chasm and really collaborating with someone with a discipline other than their own. And it’s been really great to kind of bring them together. However, one of the things that I still need to do is to connect the dots, to come back to that phrase, because even though they’re all very inspired to have that reach out to a discipline that’s not their own, I find myself oftentimes kind of still being the synthesizer, the integrator of people with those different disciplines, and kind of figuring out how to put the puzzle together so that the whole is actually truly bigger than the sum of the parts, as opposed to just the sum of the parts, or, as it is in many companies, less than the sum of the parts. And I think we have gotten to better than the sum of the parts. And that is an ongoing journey.
Stoller: We talk a lot on this podcast about, you know, when you’re a CEO or a top company leader, it’s very lonely at the top. And I’m one, wondering if you feel that way; two: You have your foot in so many different worlds, AI, science, academia—who do you consider your trusted advisor, mentors, friends that you go to to talk and get rid of some of that loneliness?
Koller: You know, it is very difficult to be, first of all, I think it’s lonely to be a CEO no matter what. Because while you know I have, as I said, wonderful people on the team, there are certain conversations that you don’t have with people on your team, and we have a wonderful board, and there are certain conversations you don’t have with someone on your board. I think what makes it even more challenging in the situation that I find myself in is that the company that I’m building has never been built before. There’s not like, 50 other role models as there is for some other companies, where it’s like, okay, I’m building a SaaS company. There’s 50 other SaaS companies. Or I’m building a whatever clinical development, clinical-stage biotech company, there’s hundreds of those, right? No one has built the kind of company that we’re looking to build and address the kinds of problems that we need to solve in order to make it successful. And so there isn’t a single person that I can go to to ask, how should I do this? And so I end up gleaning bits and pieces from various mentors, various colleagues, various friends, and then connecting the dots.
Brady: So let’s talk about those dots in terms of what’s on your radar that maybe might not be obvious, that you’d put on ours. Meaning, are there particular developments? Or, you know, what are you seeing out there, Silicon Valley or beyond, that’s intriguing to you, whether it applies to Insitro or not.
Stoller: And what’s next after academia, now health care?
Koller: So I remain very excited by the potential of AI and the potential of foundation models within AI, but specifically expanding the notion of foundation models beyond the sort of ones that people typically think about, which is text and images on the web, and, therefore, that need to reach into and create data that’s fit for purpose, to develop new foundation models that maybe leverage the existing ones of text and images and whatever, but are really the next generation that are special purpose to new tasks, and specifically what I would call deep tech tasks. And that obviously is what we try and do at Insitro for, you know, drug discovery and development. But I think that same, that same idea, applies to other deep test tech tasks, whether it’s in sustainability or in energy or in the environment or whatever. So I think that is a big development for probably the next 20 or 30 years that I remain very excited about. I’m proud to be part of that wave. I don’t think we’re the only one, but I think it’s a really exciting one. As far as my own, uh, career journey, there’s still a lot of work to be done at Insitro, and I’m very excited about what we’ve built, but I think for us, it’s like we’ve built a foundation, and now it’s time to really leverage it to bring benefit to patients, and I’m committed to continuing to do that, so I’m very excited.
Stoller: You mentioned sustainability and energy. So of course, my mind goes to climate. Is that something that excites you, or could be the next thing you work?
Brady: Excites you in California, that’d be hard.
Koller: Well, it’s definitely something that I’m excited about. It’s not something that I personally can take on right now, given the full-time nature of my role. But by proxy, I have two lovely daughters, both of whom are working in different ways in that space, and so by proxy, I am tackling that by sending my next generation to try and solve what I think is a fundamental problem of our generation, and I hope that they, as well as others, can make a difference.
Brady: Professor, what is your advice to the next generation? Since people are concerned that AI, may be if only temporarily, stopping some of those on ramps, you know, for careers, what do you suggest people do that prepares them?
Koller: I think that the future is in a partnership between the human and the machine. I think for every technology that we’ve constructed in the past, people are like, “Oh, my God, this is going to take away my job.” And in fact, did take away a lot of jobs. I mean, electricity certainly took a lot of jobs, right? I mean, the agricultural revolution took away a lot of jobs. This will certainly be the case here as well. But I think human creativity, human innovation, is still something that is an important partner to the machines, and so I would encourage people to develop skills that are ones that help transcend what the machine can do for us today. So things like connecting the dots, things like long arcs of thinking that require different building blocks to be put together in order to address really large, complex problems. So the kind of structured thinking that is so critical in solving hard problems. I mean, even when you think about, you know, as you know, I did education for a lot of a lot of my life, rote memorization was something that Google and such basically made obsolete 20-plus years ago. But it didn’t make people obsolete. It allowed people to move away from memorizing facts and figures and really elevate to the next challenge, which is, how do you put together facts and figures to create good, you know, structured narratives. And I think that will happen here, but one level up, and I think it is critical that we as a society teach our kids the right set of skills that they can leverage technology in the right way.
Stoller: 15-year-old high school me is just clapping internally and wanting to tell my history teacher, “You’re right. I did not have to memorize every single war in order.” Are there any AI fears that you have, or others have, that you think are legitimate, that we should watch out for?
Koller: I would say there’s probably a couple worth highlighting. One is, job loss is disruptive. It’s disruptive to society, at least for a period, as the society adapts. And I think governments should be thinking very deeply about how to mitigate that disruption, so that, so that we avoid some of the social challenges that will emerge when a lot of people become jobless, at least for a while, while we develop hopefully, I hope, the next generation of jobs, and how to educate people to be ready for that next generation. So I would say that is a legitimate fear, and one that we should be investing more in, versus the cataclysm of, you know, Terminator 2–type scenarios. The other one is: These systems are very powerful, and like any tool, they can be deployed for good as well as ill. So you can certainly use these systems to design better medicines, I hope. But you can also use them to design worse toxins, right? You could use them as mental health aids to help people, but you could also use them to twist kids’ minds and get them to do things that you don’t want kids to do, and we’ve even seen that with simpler tools. I mean, social media is not AI, but boy, has it managed to twist the minds of a lot of our kids. And so, thinking about how to avoid the misuse of a tool, it’s not about regulating the tool. It’s about regulating the use case. I don’t think you can stop the advance of technology. I think that is something that has never succeeded for us as a society, but restricting the use cases of a technology and regulating that, I think, is something that I wish more thought would be devoted to, so that we can kind of prevent some of those really nasty use cases where people use technology for ill.
Brady: Give us a sense as to what’s next in terms of—when are we going to see, in your mind, some significant milestones that for you will constitute success in terms of where you want to go?
Koller: So for me personally and Insitro, I think success will be when we put our drugs into patients, and patients actually get better, and I view that as a truly aspirational goal, but elevating beyond that, we are committed to something we call pipeline through platform, and that means that we don’t just make a drug that makes people better. I mean, that’s great and super important, but we also want to do it in a way that is repeatable, that is an engine, that is able to create not just one drug, but a second and a third and a fourth, and where the platform that does that actually gets better and better over time, both because it learns, because it’s a learning platform, and also because, as the technology keeps getting better, we have new ways of collecting data, new ways of leveraging machine learning to interrogate that data, and we’re able to create an accelerated engine for making new drugs, new therapeutics that make people better. And when you go one step beyond that, I think we are finally getting—we’re able to see on our horizon, I would hope, the fulfillment of this dream that has been talked about for probably 30 years, which is this notion of personalized medicine, where we move away from one-size-fits-all. Where you go into a doctor’s office and you are characterized by a disease, and you get the medicine that that disease gets, but rather, you are seen as a full-blown individual. We can measure you in a variety of different ways. Measure you objectively in a data-driven way, not just by your own subjective experience, but by actual measurements, and therefore able to tailor a course of treatment, both at the beginning and throughout the journey to the needs of individual patients. And that requires, I think, a significant technological change, both in measurements as well as in the AI, but it also requires a sociological change of having doctors be willing to trust that the machine is telling them things that they are maybe not able to see for themselves, and that ability to trust the machine and partner with the machine, it’s not making doctors obsolete, but it’s a bit, it’s allowing the insight from the machine to guide course of treatments using subtle signals that a doctor will not be able to perceive probably ever. I think that is a sociological change that we need to see in medicine, but we also need to see in other parts of society. And so coming back to the really big picture, I think the future has to be getting people to partner well and create together with the machines. Because I think here, too, the whole is going to be much bigger than the sum of the parts, but only if we do this the right way.
Brady: Thanks for joining us.
Koller: Thank you.
Brady: Leadership Next is produced and edited by Ceylan Ersoy.
Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.
Brady: Our head of video and audio is Adam Banicki.
Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.
Brady: Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.
Brady: See you next time.
Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.
Kirk Tanner is departing as CEO of Wendy’s to become CEO of Hershey. He was in the role at the fast-food company for 17 months. He could earn over $17 million in his first year, which would be notably higher than outgoing CEO Michele Buck.
Goodbye, burgers. Hello, candy bars!
Kirk Tanner is leaving his role as CEO of Wendy’s to take the top spot at Hershey effective Aug. 18. He’ll replace Michele Buck, who announced her plans to retire earlier this year. (Buck will work with Tanner as a senior advisor to aid the transition.)
It’s a notable passing of the torch. Tanner laid out a playbook that was collaboration intense at Wendy’s, launching items such as the a chicken sandwich and fries topped with Takis, and a Thin Mints Frosty. That got people talking, but hasn’t sparked sales. Wendy’s cut its sales and profit outlook for 2025 in May and shares are down 30% year to date.
Still, Hershey made Tanner an offer he couldn’t refuse. His total compensation at Wendy’s last year was $17.3 million. At Hershey, he’ll make a base salary of $1.25 million and is eligible to earn a cash incentive award that’s targeted at 180% of his base salary.
Tanner will also receive a restricted stock unit award worth $7 million and a performance stock unit worth $4 million as a sign-on bonus. (Both will vest over a three-year period.) He’ll also receive another $3.4 million worth of pro rata stock.
He’ll also be eligible to receive an annual equity-based compensation award of up to $9 million—a figure determined by the company’s board.
Buck, last year, had a base salary last year of $1.4 million and annual incentive of 160% of that base. Her total compensation in 2024 after stock awards and incentives came to $11.9 million. In 2023, she earned $15.7 million.
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