But now come findings that could challenge that—specifically, the connection to early mortality, which had come out of a body of research including a 2015 meta-analysis and another from 2018.
The new international study, led by researchers at the University of Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences and published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, has found that loneliness, while common among older adults receiving home care, is not associated with an increased risk of death.
“Our findings suggest that loneliness may not independently increase the risk of death after controlling for other health risk factors among older adults in home care,” said lead author Bonaventure Egbujie, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences, in a news release. “This contradicts much of the existing literature based on the general population.”
For the latest study, researchers analyzed data from more than 380,000 home care recipients aged 65 and older in Canada, Finland, and New Zealand. “Home care recipients are a particularly important population to consider because they may be especially vulnerable to adverse effects of loneliness,” the study authors write. “Mobility problems, sensory impairments, and complex health needs may limit their engagement in the community, leaving them relatively isolated in their homes.”
But what researchers found was that lonely individuals actually had a lower risk of dying within one year compared to their non-lonely counterparts (after adjusting for health conditions, age, and other risk factors).
Still, said senior study author John Hirdes, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a serious health concern.
“Loneliness is a serious threat to psychological well-being,” Hirdes said in the news release. “The mental health consequences of loneliness make it an important priority for public health, even if loneliness doesn’t kill you.”
In the new research, loneliness prevalence—meaning the number of people per 100 who reported feeling lonely—ranged from 15.9% of home care recipients in Canada to 24.4% in New Zealand. “Interestingly,” notes the news release, “people in better physical shape and who got less help from family or friends were likelier to feel lonely, suggesting a complex link between health status, caregiving needs, and social connection.”
The authors call for more longer-term studies and for policymakers and health-care providers to treat loneliness as a quality-of-life issue, not only focusing on its potential link to mortality.
“Home and community care services,” said Hirdes, “must play a protective role by supporting social contact for isolated people.”
As the first large-scale military parade in decades made its way down the streets of Washington, DC on Saturday, organizers gave thanks to the country’s men and women in uniform—and also to various corporate sponsors, including the giant crypto exchange Coinbase. Not everyone was comfortable with the spectacle of the crypto industry—which was founded in opposition to government power—being so closely aligned with a display of force by the U.S.
Coinbase was one of a slew of corporations that sponsored the parade, according to a statement from America250, the official body organizing the events to honor the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Other corporate sponsors included data firm Palantir, aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, and household names like Walmart, Coca-Cola and Chrysler.
Kara Calvert, Coinbase’s vice president of U.S. policy, represented the company at the parade.
“It was an absolute personal honor to attend the 250th celebration of the @USArmy with my son and mom,” Calvert said in a post on X. “I was also honored to represent @coinbase at the event, a proud sponsor of @America250.”
While some saw the sponsorship as a way to bring awareness to crypto, others saw it as a major break from the industry’s ethos as a financial system independent from a centralized entity.
“What Coinbase did by sponsoring this army parade feels like an insult to everything our industry stands for,” one user wrote on X. “Crypto emerged from ideals of decentralization, individual sovereignty, and freedom from oppressive state control.”
Adam Cochran, managing partner at blockchain venture capital firm Cinneamhain Ventures, said that as a result of the sponsorship, he would sell his shares in the company and withdraw his crypto assets from the platform, in a post on X.
Cochran pointed out that the sponsorship went against Coinbase’s policy on political causes. “We don’t advocate for any particular causes or candidates internally that are unrelated to our mission, because it is a distraction from our mission,” the company says on its website.
“Sponsoring a military parade, in a divided country, with already split views of crypto isn’t true to this policy,” Cochran said. “It’s just bad marketing that hurts this industry’s adoption.”
It is unclear how much money Coinbase spent on the sponsorship or if any top-level executives, like CEO Brian Armstrong, were in attendance. A spokesperson for Coinbase declined to comment when contacted by Fortune.
However, some people argued that the military is an apolitical institution and therefore, Coinbase’s sponsorship of the event is not an endorsement of any political party.
“$COIN supporting our military in no way implicates their political affiliation,” one user wrote in response to Cochran’s post. “Military should always be apolitical for the good of the nation.”
Despite the criticism, Coinbase shares are up 5% since the market opened on Monday, growing from $248 to $256.
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — Leavenworth, Kansas, occupies a mythic space in American crime, its name alone evoking a short hand for serving hard time. The federal penitentiary housed gangsters Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly — in a building so storied that it inspired the term “the big house.”
Now Kansas’ oldest city could soon be detaining far less famous people, migrants swept up in President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations of those living in the U.S. illegally.
The federal government has signed a deal with the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp. to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids.
ICE has cited a “compelling urgency” for thousands more detention beds, and its efforts have sent profit estimates soaring for politically connected private companies, including CoreCivic, based in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and another giant firm, The Geo Group Inc., headquartered in southern Florida.
That push faces resistance. Leavenworth filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic after it tried to reopen without city officials signing off on the deal, quoting a federal judge’s past description of the now-shuttered prison as “a hell hole.” The case in Leavenworth serves as another test of the limits of the Republican president’s unusually aggressive tactics to force migrant removals.
To get more detention beds, the Trump administration has modified dozens of existing agreements with contractors and used no-bid contracts. One pays $73 million to a company led by former federal immigration officials for “immigration enforcement support teams” to handle administrative tasks, such as helping coordinate removals, triaging complaints or telling ICE if someone is a risk to community safety.
Just last week , Geo Group announced that ICE modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that the company could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants — and earn $66 million in annual revenue.
“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call last month with shareholders.
A tax-cutting and budget reconciliation measure approved last month by the House includes $45 billion over four years for immigrant detention, a threefold spending increase. The Senate is now considering that legislation.
Declaring an emergency to expedite contracts
When Trump started his second term in January, CoreCivic and Geo had around 20 idle facilities, partly because of sentencing reforms that reduced prison populations. But the Trump administration wants to more than double the existing 41,000 beds for detaining migrants to at least 100,000 beds and — if private prison executives’ predictions are accurate — possibly to more than 150,000.
Only three of the nine potential facilities were listed in ICE’s document: Leavenworth, a 2,560-bed CoreCivic-owned facility in California City, California, and an 1,800-bed Geo-owned prison in Baldwin, Michigan.
The agreement for the Leavenworth facility hasn’t been released, nor have documents for the other two sites. CoreCivic and Geo Group officials said last month on earnings calls that ICE used what are known as letter contracts, meant to speed things up when time is critical.
Charles Tiefer, a contract expert and professor emeritus of law at the University of Baltimore Law School, said letter contracts normally are reserved for minor matters, not the big changes he sees ICE making to previous agreements.
“I think that a letter contract is a pathetic way to make big important contracts,” he said.
A Kansas prison town becomes a priority
CoreCivic’s Leavenworth facility quickly became a priority for ICE and the company because of its central location. Leavenworth, with 37,000 residents, is only 10 miles (16 kilometers) to the west of the Kansas City International Airport. The facility would hold men and women and is within ICE’s area of operations for Chicago, 420 miles (676 kilometers) to the northeast.
“That would mean that people targeted in the Chicago area and in Illinois would end up going to this facility down in Kansas,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Prisons have long been an important part of Leavenworth’s economy, employing hundreds of workers to guard prisoners held in two military facilities, the nation’s first federal penitentiary, a Kansas correctional facility and a county jail within 6 miles (10 kilometers) of city hall.
Resistance from Trump country
The Leavenworth area’s politics might have been expected to help CoreCivic. Trump carried its county by more than 20 percentage points in each of his three campaigns for president.
But skeptical city officials argue that CoreCivic needs a special use permit to reopen its facility. CoreCivic disagrees, saying that it doesn’t because it never abandoned the facility and that the permitting process would take too long. Leavenworth sued the company to force it to get one, and a state-court judge issued an order requiring it earlier this month.
An attorney for the city, Joe Hatley, said the legal fight indicates how much ill will CoreCivic generated when it held criminal suspects there for trials in federal court for the U.S. Marshals Service.
In late 2021, CoreCivic stopped housing pretrial detainees in its Leavenworth facility after then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, called on the U.S. Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. In the months before the closure, the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders detailed stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations in a letter to the White House. CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were “false and defamatory.”
Vacancies among correctional officers were as high as 23%, according to a Department of Justice report from 2017.
“It was just mayhem,” recalled William Rogers, who worked as a guard at the CoreCivic facility in Leavenworth from 2016 through 2020. He said repeated assaults sent him to the emergency room three times, including once after a blow to the head that required 14 staples.
The critics have included a federal judge
When Leavenworth sued CoreCivic, it opened its lawsuit with a quote from U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson — an appointee of President George W. Bush, a Republican — who said of the prison: “The only way I could describe it frankly, what’s going on at CoreCivic right now is it’s an absolute hell hole.”
The city’s lawsuit described detainees locked in showers as punishment. It said that sheets and towels from the facility clogged up the wastewater system and that CoreCivic impeded the city police force’s ability to investigate sexual assaults and other violent crimes.
The facility had no inmates when CoreCivic gave reporters a tour earlier this year, and it looked scrubbed top to bottom and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. One unit for inmates had a painting on one wall featuring a covered wagon.
During the tour, when asked about the allegations of past problems, Misty Mackey, a longtime CoreCivic employee who was tapped to serve as warden there, apologized for past employees’ experiences and said the company officials “do our best to make sure that we learn from different situations.”
ICE moves quickly across the U.S.
Besides CoreCivic’s Leavenworth prison, other once-shuttered facilities could come online near major immigrant population centers, from New York to Los Angeles, to help Trump fulfill his deportation plans.
ICE wants to reopen existing facilities because it’s faster than building new ones, said Marcela Hernandez, the organizing director for the Detention Watch Network, which has organized nationwide protests against ICE detention.
Counties often lease out jail space for immigrant detention, but ICE said some jurisdictions have passed ordinances barring that.
ICE has used contract modifications to reopen shuttered lockups like the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark, New Jersey, and a 2,500-bed facility in Dilley, Texas, offering no explanations why new, competitively bid contracts weren’t sought.
The Newark facility, with its own history of problems, resumed intakes May 1, and disorder broke out at the facility Thursday night. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat who previously was arrested there and accused of trespassing, cited reports of a possible uprising, and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed four escapes.
The contract modification for Dilley, which was built to hold families and resumed operations in March, calls its units “neighborhoods” and gives them names like Brown Bear and Blue Butterfly.
The financial details for the Newark and Dilley contract modifications are blacked out in online copies, as they for more than 50 other agreements ICE has signed since Trump took office. ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.
From idle prisons to a ‘gold rush’
Private prison executives are forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in new ICE profits. Since Trump’s reelection in November, CoreCivic’s stock has risen in price by 56% and Geo’s by 73%.
“It’s the gold rush,” Michael A. Hallett, a professor of criminal justice at the University of North Florida who studies private prisons. “All of a sudden, demand is spiraling. And when you’re the only provider that can meet demand, you can pretty much set your terms.”
Geo’s former lobbyist Pam Bondi is now the U.S. attorney general. It anticipates that all of its idle prisons will be activated this year, its executive chairman, George Zoley, told shareholders.
CoreCivic, which along with Geo donated millions of dollars to largely GOP candidates at all levels of government and national political groups, is equally optimistic. It began daily talks with the Trump administration immediately after the election in November, said Hininger.
CoreCivic officials said ICE’s letter contracts provide initial funding to begin reopening facilities while the company negotiates a longer-term deal. The Leavenworth deal is worth $4.2 million a month to the company, it disclosed in a court filing.
Tiefer, who served on an independent commission established to study government contracting for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said ICE is “placing a very dicey long-term bet” because of its past problems and said ICE is giving CoreCivic “the keys to the treasury” without competition.
But financial analysts on company earnings calls have been delighted. When CoreCivic announced its letter contracts, Joe Gomes, of the financial services firm Noble Capital Markets, responded with, “Great news.”
“Are you hiding any more of them on us?” he asked.
A judge has halted CoreCivic, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025, from housing immigrants facing possible deportation in a shuttered facility that the private prison operator now calls the Midwest Regional Reception Center, in Leavenworth, Kan., pictured Monday, March 3, 2025, unless it can get a permit from frustrated city officials.
Costco is planning to open a stand-alone gas station. The station will be located in Mission Viejo, Calif. in an area formerly occupied by Bed, Bath & Beyond. The station is expected to open next spring. The gas will only be available to Costco members.
If cheap hot dogs aren’t of interest and you don’t need a pack of paper towels that fills up your car’s trunk, Costco’s latest business venture could be right up your alley.
The retailer will reportedly launch its first stand-alone gas station in Mission Viejo, Calif. – a part of Orange County. The gas station, which will take over the space formerly occupied by a Bed, Bath & Beyond store, will be two miles away from the nearest Costco retailer and it’s going to be a whopper.
With 40 pumps, it will be Costco’s biggest gas station – and, like the ones that are part of Costco stores, the pumps (and discount prices) will only be accessible to Costco members. It’s also located just off of the 5 freeway, one of the nation’s busiest roads.
The station won’t have a convenience store attached, so don’t plan on getting a bit to eat or a drink when you fill up. Construction is expected to begin this fall and the facility should open in the spring of 2026.
Costco does not comment on locations that will be opening more than three months in the future.
Gasoline has been an increasingly valuable commodity for Costco. The retailer reported its two highest gallon sales weeks in the U.S. in April after extending gas station hours and opening new stations earlier this year.
CEO Ron Vachris said the extension of gas station hours in North American “was a great indicator that the throughput for our members improved nicely, and we saw that immediately in gallon increases.”
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban didn’t take a vacation for seven years when he first built the $30 million-a-year tech company MicroSolutions. At the time, he was “broke as f-ck,” recently fired and living with five men in a three-bedroom apartment. But working hard at a young age paid off. Cuban is today worth $5.7 billion—and it’s a work philosophy he now recommends.
Most people in their 20s already have their weekends booked out for bar hopping and hanging with friends, but one CEO lived a very different life in his youth. When billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban launched his first technology company at just 24, trips to Bora Bora weren’t on the table.
“[I] didn’t take a vacation for the next seven years,” Cuban said in an interview with Sports Illustrated’s series “The Playbook” on June 3. “I was broke as f-ck, where else was I going to go?”
Today, Mark Cuban may be sleeping in a $25 million, 24,000-square foot mansion in a wealthy Dallas neighborhood. But in the 1980s when the 66-year-old former Shark Tank investor first launched MicroSolutions, a software business also providing computer consulting services, he had just been fired from his job. At that time Cuban was sharing a “nasty” three-bedroom apartment with five roommates, where he often slept on the floor.
“I was living, six guys in a three-bedroom apartment, which wasn’t great. It was a sh-thole,” Cuban said.
But experiencing rock bottom lit the match to finally invest all his time into building his technology business into a million-dollar success. Without a 9-to-5 to report to or a financial safety blanket to back him up, Cuban made it his mission to work night and day until the venture took off.
“If I took the weekend, the whole thing could fall into the sh-tter,” Cuban explained. During those seven years with no days off, he said MicroSolutions climbed to over $30 million in sales, eventually being sold to H&R Block for $6 million.
Cuban’s advice for young people: ‘Work your ass off’ and learn while you sleep
The entrepreneur worth $5.7 billion has always given advice that young people should have an intense work ethic to propel them to success. And in the new era of AI, Cuban said that teens should even be learning in their sleep.
“If I was 16, 18, 20, 21 starting today, I would spend every waking minute learning about AI,” Cuban said at SXSW earlier this year. “Even if I am sleeping, I am listening to podcasts talking about AI.”
“Those people who put in the time are going to crush it.”
In March, Cuban even rolled out a chatbot with MasterClass on Call so users can ask AI-Cuban questions and for advice on emulating his success. At anytime, day or night, people can field ideas and issues by the tool. When Fortune asked the chatbot questions—like how to make your first million dollars—it echoed the same philosophy Cuban has been espousing for years.
“Work your ass off, learn everything you can, and stay adaptable,” Cuban’s AI chatbot responded. “Success rarely happens overnight, but persistence and smart decisions can get you there.”
The entrepreneur was 24-years old and living with five men in a “nasty” three bedroom apartment, when he put his all into making MicroSolutions a success.
Despite competing for consumers’ eating-out budgets, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol and Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright spend most mornings together in the gym. In between sets, they discuss the latest trends, like AI and the protein craze, while also kindling a friendship—something some business leaders say can be a struggle.
At 5 a.m., before most of their customers have even ordered their first latte or burrito bowl, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol and Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright are already side by side—spotting each other on the weight rack.
Despite running rival fast-casual empires, the two millionaire bosses start most mornings in the gym together, debating trends like AI, protein-packed menus, and getting fresh perspectives on each other’s business ideas, like Chipotle’s guacamole-making robots.
“I was actually in the gym with (Niccol) just this morning, talking about what’s going on at Starbucks, sharing some thoughts around what’s happening at Chipotle,” Boatwright recently revealed at Fortune’sCOO summit. Although the CEOs didn’t reveal their preferred workout routine, Niccol has previously told Fortunethat he alternates between strength training, weight lifting, and a “run-slash-walk.”
Of course, the two gym-going executives weren’t always competing for consumers’ dining budgets: Their relationship first blossomed in 2018 when Niccol was tapped to serve as chief executive of the burrito brand, with Boatwright serving as his right-hand man as chief operating officer.
“Brian and I made a great tag-team because I was effectively running the business,” Boatwright added. “I think I ran a pretty good business, and I know that Brian really managed a great stock.”
Their paths diverged when Niccol was tapped to lead Starbucks’ and Boatwright was promoted to take his place. “Don’t screw it up,” Boatwright recalled the advice shared by his bench press spotter.
And it’s a reminder that even at the very top, having a friend you can turn to for career advice still matters.
Fortune reached out to Niccol and Boatwright for further comment.
Keep your friends close at the top of the corporate ladder
Not many business leaders can say they live in the same neighborhood as Niccol and Boatwright and can network at the treadmill. Executives often face isolation in leadership roles, making close professional connections a practical asset.
No business relationship may be better known than billionaire Warren Buffett’s close connection with Charlie Munger. In fact, the Berkshire Hathaway founder has said that his relationship with Munger was critical to both of their success.
“Every time I’m with Charlie, I’ve got at least some new slant on an idea that causes me to rethink certain things,” Buffett said to CNBC. “We’ve had so much fun in the partnership over the years.”
“I think the vast majority of people, if they reach out to someone, someone will want to help them,” he said on Michelle Obama’s podcast IMO. “They reach out to an old friend, the old friend will want to reach back out to them, and that is the path for reconnection. It’s a path for relationships, and it’s a path for purpose.”
Exercise: CEOs’ key to maintaining health at the top
Beyond having friendships, free time is one of the things many leaders would likely say they wish they had more of. But for leaders like Niccol and Boatwright, carving out time to exercise is essential—not just for health, but as a key driver of their success.
For Airbnb’s Chesky, two workouts are sometimes part of his routine. The former competitive bodybuilder begins each morning around 8:30 a.m. with light cardio—either on the StairMaster or walking his dog through his hilly neighborhood—before starting work, he told Fortune.
Then, around 7:30 p.m., he works out again with a personal trainer. But above all, he said getting sleep is the biggest health practice he prioritizes.
“[A] non-negotiable is I want to try to get at least seven hours of sleep,” he said. “I know there are people that go off four, five, even six hours of sleep, but the extra hour you save by not sleeping probably makes every hour the next day a little less productive.”
Despite being in his 70s, Disney CEO Bob Iger starts his day early—at 4 a.m. He uses the time to get in a workout, something he said helps maintain the energy to run one of the largest entertainment companies in the world.
“Staying in shape and having stamina is critical for me—that’s eating well and exercising,” Iger told the In Good Company podcast last year. “Just taking care of my body and my mind is really important, I could not do this job if I were not in some form of physical and mental health.”
The Trump Organization is licensing the family name to a mobile carrier that will be called Trump Mobile. Included in the phone plan’s monthly bill are a slew of benefits like a telemedicine service, roadside assistance, and device protection. Slated for August of this year is a Trump-branded smartphone named the T1.
The Trump Organization is continuing its expansion from real estate and hospitality to technology.
On Monday, the Trump family company announced it was licensing its name to a new wireless service dubbed Trump Mobile—and a soon-to-be released gold-plated smartphone called the T1.
The Trump Organization’s executive vice presidents Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appeared at a launch event at Trump Tower in New York on Monday. The event took place on the 10-year anniversary of the day their father, President Donald Trump, announced his candidacy for president.
Trump Mobile will be powered by a wireless provider called Liberty Wireless, according to its website.
The Trump Mobile plan will include unlimited talk, text, and data. The plan also comes with additional features aimed to help customers get “true value” from a mobile carrier, Trump Jr. said. Trump Mobile includes benefits as telemedicine access, roadside assistance, and phone warranty plans.
The plans will cost $47.45 a month, an apparent reference to Trump having been the 45th and 47th president.
Announced in the plans was an effort to ensure Trump Mobile was an entirely U.S.-based company. The T1 smartphone, slated for release in August, will be manufactured in the U.S. Trump Mobile’s website lists it at a retail price of $499, with a $100 down payment. The company will also have a 250-person customer service center, in St. Louis, Trump said.
Under the elder Trump, the Trump Organization had a long history of branching out into different branded products in addition to its traditional real-estate business. Over the years, the company has sold Trump-branded vodkas, board games, and even made attempts at an airline. More recently, the Trump family business has focused on tech businesses, launching several crypto products and starting a company for its upstart social-media platform, Truth Social.
“This year has been a year of technology,” Eric Trump said on Monday. “Don and I have spent so much of our time on that.”
Trump Mobile is the latest expansion of the Trump family business at a time when its patriarch sits in the Oval Office. Before taking office, Trump placed his assets in a revocable trust of which he is the sole beneficiary; the trust is managed by his son, Trump Jr. So far this year, the Trump Organization has made major strides in developing new properties in Vietnam and Qatar.
The Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the holding company that owns Truth Social, also launched a fintech platform that includes several cryptocurrency ETFs. That latest venture is in addition to TMTG’s existing social-media site and streaming service.
Another separate initiative saw Trump launch a memecoin in January, just one day before his inauguration. The price of the Trump branded cryptocurrency shot up in the first couple days after its release, but has since fallen 77% since its peak. Last month, Trump held a dinner for the top 220 investors in his coin.
A nonprofit run by Anne Wojcicki, the cofounder and former CEO of 23andme, has agreed to buy the genetic testing company for $305 million. Wojcicki’s return is likely to spark lawsuits. The nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, says it will comply with 23andme’s privacy policies.
The swift and sudden fall—and attempted rebirth—of genetic-testing company 23andme has taken a final twist. A nonprofit run by Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and former CEO of the company, has reached an agreement to buy the company, with a $305 million offer.
The deal, announced late Friday, will see Wojcicki take control of essentially all of the company’s assets.
For a long time, it appeared Wojcicki wouldn’t regain control of the company she left in March. New York-based biotech company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was set to buy 23andMe for $256 million, but in the final round of bidding, Wojcicki’s TTAM Research Institute came out of top.
The sale of 23andme, which was once valued at $6 billion, led to a wave of consternation about what would happen with the customer genetic data it held. Approximately 15% of its customers, some 1.9 million people, have requested their data be deleted from the company servers since 23andme filed for bankruptcy in March. The sale of the company has also attracted the interest of the House Oversight Committee, which was concerned about where the data could end up.
TTAM says it will comply with 23andMe’s “privacy policies and applicable law” and has made “binding commitments” to create additional protections and privacy safeguards. These will include a consumer-privacy advisory board.
23andme’s troubles came following a hack of the company in 2023 which raised several concerns about the company. For instance, one online post that offered data for sale bragged of having a huge database of Ashkenazi Jews, including people whose ties with that ancestry are less than 1%.
Wojcicki, while she was still CEO, oversaw three rounds of layoffs and suggested a plan that would transform the company from just a supplier of ancestral data and into a healthcare company that develops drugs and sells subscription health reports.
Wojcicki first offered to buy the company in mid-2024. The 23andMe board rejected her bid to take the company private, later quitting en masse.
The purchase of 23andme by a group run by Wojcicki is likely to spark lawsuits. Earlier this year, an independent investor in 23andMe spoke with Fortune expressed disbelief that Wojcicki, whom he held responsible for allowing 23andMe’s valuation to plunge, could turn around and buy the company at a low price. “I can’t understand why there aren’t other bids,” the investor, who asked that his privacy be protected, told Fortune.
On a Wednesday night in early June, Rene Nezhoda leaned back in a Secretlab gaming chair, fiddled with a computer keyboard, and stared into a camera while looking very much at home. Clad in his company’s black “Bargain Hunters Breaks” T-shirt, Nezhoda carried what could be viewed as an imposing thick-built frame, until he opened his mouth and revealed a self-deprecating charm coated by a soft German accent that would be familiar to fans of A&E’s reality TV franchise Storage Wars – where he and his wife Casey have appeared as central characters for the past decade.
With a box-cutter in hand, Nezhoda sliced open the plastic film covering the back of an ultra premium box of baseball trading cards, the contents of which would soon leave some viewers on the other end of his screen ecstatic, and others likely devastated.
“We got a situation! We got a situation!” he bellowed as he slowly revealed what would turn out to be not just a typical trading card, but instead a small booklet featuring images of two San Diego Padre star teammates – along with tiny pieces of their game-used bats – known as “relics” in the sports card world. A collector’s dream.
“Get some fire,” Nezhoda urged his audience. “Get some fire!”
Fire emojis soon lit up the comments thread at the bottom of the screen, and cartoony flames began bordering the video frame.
A night later, Nezhoda would livestream another high-end card show for his 47,000 followers, with one lucky bidder walking away with a card autographed by New York Yankee star Aaron Judge that also included a swatch from one of his game-worn jerseys embedded within. It was a one-of-one, meaning the only one ever printed – a true “monster hit” in industry speak.
The biggest business you’ve never heard of
Nezhoda’s hundreds of viewers were tuning in to this drama not on traditional TV – but through their smartphone screens and more specifically, a five-year-old shopping app called Whatnot. Over the past couple of years, Whatnot has quietly climbed App Store charts – as one of the leaders of the growing trend of live-streamed commerce in the U.S. – while also capitalizing on reinvigorated collectibles markets. The result? Whatnot currently ranks inside the Top 15 most popular free iPhone apps in the U.S., sandwiched between household names Instagram and Netflix, and No. 1 in the shopping category overall.
While hawking merchandise via live video streams has become lucrative and mainstream for businesses big and small in Asia over the past decade, Whatnot and TikTok are two of a much smaller subset of live-streaming services in the West that have found meaningful success in this area of e-commerce. This sales method, which offers a new spin on the QVC and HSN cable TV shopping channels of yesteryear, marries some of the auction model and enthusiast appeal of eBay with the camaraderie and communal viewing euphoria of Twitch. Merchants on Whatnot sold a combined $3 billion in goods in 2024, mainly in collectible categories like trading cards and sports cards, but also in fast-growing verticals like women’s fashion and sneakers, too. The startup, while unprofitable, is forecasting more than $6 billion in gross merchandise volume, or GMV, in 2025, or about double its 2024 numbers. (EBay’s GMV is about 12 times Whatnot’s but its growth is largely stagnant.) Whatnot would not disclose its revenue, but some back of the envelope math suggests that 2025 revenue could range from perhaps $700 million to around $1 billion based on its average seller commission of around 11% plus a fast-growing advertising initiative.
Courtesy of Whatnot
“We’re the biggest business you’ve never heard of,” Grant LaFontaine, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, told Fortune recently.
While e-commerce incumbents and other would-be acquirers have shown Whatnot “surprisingly little” attention according to LaFontaine (“I am surprised,” the CEO admitted, chalking it up to possibly being “underestimated”) his company has attracted significant interest from venture capitalists, who have poured more more than $700 million into his startup since its 2019 founding, with some recently valuing the company at a nearly $5 billion valuation during a $265 million round announced in early 2025. The Los Angeles-based company now employs around 750 people, and operates in nine countries in North America and Europe, plus Australia.
LaFontaine, the 37-year-old co-founder and CEO, said that while the entertainment and deal-hunting characteristics of the app play roles in its success, he likes to think it’s mostly about community.
“The most salient characteristic of what really makes Whatnot work is just about people,” he said. “You come back to a shop because you know that human being, or know the human beings who frequent it.”
But big questions remain: Can Whatnot (the name is a riff on the idea that all sorts of goods can be sold on the platform) build a big enough profitable business to justify its lofty valuation while built in part on live auctions, impulse buys, and trend-boosted niches? As Whatnot attracts more sellers, will the company be able to attract enough who are as interested in building long-term customer relationships – and real businesses – as they are making a quick buck? And at a macro level, how well will the startup survive a potential economic slowdown that could weaken crucial merchandise categories most reliant on discretionary spending?
At least for the last question, LaFontaine believes his company has at least several years of new-customer runway before they’d have to seriously consider the impact of such a reality.
“We’re still so relatively under-penetrated in every market that we’re in–both from a buyer and seller perspective–that the macro doesn’t deeply affect the business,” he said, “because our experience is so new, and so many new [buyers and sellers] are coming on, that overall growth is still so high.”
Time will determine whether that assessment was realistic or naive.
Baseball trading cards, particularly autographed cards, attract lots of bids in Whatnot auctions
Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images
From Funkos to the Wild, Wild, West
Whatnot was founded in 2019 by two product managers: LaFontaine, who had worked at Facebook and Google and had dabbled in selling collectibles and sneakers online from childhood into his 20s; and Logan Head, a one-time medical marijuana dispensary owner who immediately before Whatnot was a senior product manager at GOAT, the sneaker and apparel resale app. Initially, Whatnot was designed more as a high-end version of Craigslist but the founders quickly pivoted it toward a focus on collectibles, starting with Funko Pop! Figures exclusively for the first year. In 2020, the startup also began experimenting with the livestreaming feature that would become so crucial to its success.
While Whatnot merchants can list products for sale on the app in a more traditional online storefront format, the vast majority of sales on the platform occur via livestreams, in which the seller, or a streamer they pay to host, engages with, and answers product questions from, viewers who can comment in an onscreen thread.
Whatnot’s strength is in collectibles, whether Pokemon cards, sports cards or rare coins. Seth Chandler, owner of the 65-year-old Witter Coin shop in San Francisco has sold millions to coin enthusiasts on Whatnot over the past few years.
But the app’s appeal to buyers and sellers in other categories has broadened over time to include luxury bags, electronics and its fastest-growing segment, women’s fashion.
Ryan Maresch and Jose Lim-Valle are lifelong friends and two of the business owners that have turned Whatnot’s entry into women’s apparel into a multi-million-dollar business. The duo previously ran an apparel liquidation storefront out of a Southern California warehouse before starting to experiment with live streaming on Whatnot in 2023 when they couldn’t sell enough of the clothing that they bought as part of a bulk liquidation purchase of excess Sam’s Club merchandise. Now their business Circle City OC has become the first women’s fashion seller to cross $1 million in monthly Whatnot sales across its three streaming channels targeting three types of customers.
“We realized the reach of customers is endless,” Lim-Valle said, “There’s a morning crowd, the afternoon crowd, the night crowd. East coast and West coast. We started realizing that as long as we keep streaming, we can keep moving product. It lit a fire underneath us knowing that it’s up to us on our success and how far we want to push it. It’s a free-for-all. It’s like the Wild Wild West.”
Other merchandise categories include electronics, beauty products, golf gear, and even live plants. Often with enthusiasts in the audience bonding over time with the fellow enthusiasts who are hosts. Consumer brands like Dolls Kill have also been experimenting with liquidating excess inventory directly on Whatnot.
“What’s really exciting about Whatnot is that they are combining the best of entertainment, shopping, and community to reimagine what a commerce experience is like for sellers and buyers,” said Marcie Vu, a well-regarded investment banker-turned-VC who’s now a partner at venture capital firm Greycroft, which co-led the latest Whatnot investment. Vu took a board observer role with Whatnot alongside her firm’s investment. DST Global and Avra also co-led the round, while Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG, BOND, and Y Combinator have backed the company as well.
Basketball card roulette
Sellers on Whatnot can choose to sell merchandise either at set prices, including in time-limited “flash sales,” or in live auctions – which themselves can come in various forms. Whatnot’s design makes bidding dead-simple through an almost-too-easy swipe to the right. An auction countdown clock creates urgency. And when your bid wins, a digital confetti explosion greets you in celebration.
Some have criticized these design elements as creating fertile ground for regrettable impulse buys, or worse, addiction. But LaFontaine insists that the only way Whatnot will become a long-term durable business is if buyers come back again and again, and feel good about it. He believes buyers who feel burned, or have buyer’s remorse, won’t return.
“If people go in over their skis or they pay too much money through an impulse purchase, those aren’t people who are going to come back; they’re going to feel burned,” he said. “Let’s say we saw a deep problem where people were having all these impulse purchases, they felt really terrible about those purchases, and that was making people talk incredibly negatively and never come back to Whatnot, we would look very deeply into it. We don’t see a ton of that today.”
The CEO added that fun digital design elements are “the cherry on top” and not what keeps viewers returning. Rather, it’s a connection with people, either the hosts of their favorite streams or the fellow viewers who frequent a certain show. Whatnot users spend 80 minutes on average on the app each day.
For Nezhoda, of Storage Wars fame, he told Fortune he makes a point of being as transparent as possible with his viewers about the potential risks of the sales events he hosts. On a recent June night, this reporter tuned into one of his nightly shows unannounced while waiting in a car outside a youth soccer practice. What viewers were witnessing was Nezhoda’s latest “break”—a type of group-buying event that has gained popularity among trading card enthusiasts, collectors, and opportunists in recent years—where buyers either bid on, or buy, the right to receive certain cards from a pack or case of cards that the host “breaks” or sells portions of to different buyers.
In this break, Nezhoda was selling 30 “slots,” each representing one of the 30 Major League Baseball teams. By purchasing a slot (the New York Yankees slot sold for $710, for example), the buyer is essentially claiming the right to the card that corresponds to that particular team—if that team happens to be one of the eight random cards that comprise the set that Nezhoda opens.
For the lucky eight people whose teams turn out to be in the case, the payoff is great. Nezhoda was pulling from a case of 2025 Topps Sterling line of ultra-premium autographed cards, each card essentially a collector’s item. But for the folks who spent hundreds of dollars apiece to snag one of the 22 other team slots, the break is a bust: they’ll walk away with just a $5 pack of basic cards, “skunked” in industry speak. High risk indeed.
Nezhoda sold $8,000 in total slots across all 30 teams. Before the break began, he offered a verbal disclaimer and cautioned that if you didn’t understand the mechanics of what was about to transpire, you’d be better off leaving the virtual room altogether. Whatnot livestreams and their various sale formats and auction types can be confusing to first-timers or novices.
“Please understand the risk of this break,” Nezhoda told his viewers. “This is like roulette.”
“Eighty percent of you will most likely skunk,” he added.
For Nezhoda, that candor – coupled with his celebrity and strong relationships with trading card maker Topps, owned by Fanatics – have been crucial to a lucrative pivot away from his old business of reselling hauls from storage unit auctions, which was his and his wife Casey’s previous claim to fame. The move to selling sports cards – and specifically through live streamed events – has been so successful, he said, that Bargain Hunters Breaks should generate $15 million to $18 million in sales on Whatnot in 2025 alone. (Watching him in action on Whatnot, I quickly understood why. I haven’t purchased a pack of baseball cards since the 1990s but Nezhoda’s show still left me with a tantalizing urge to buy in.)
Nezhoda puts in long hours in this new sector, but it’s not the same grind as scouring storage unit auctions all over the country.
“The big battle was always sourcing product,” he said of his past business.
Given the current frothiness in the sports card market – where card makers release new sets frequently – and Nezhoda’s deep relationship with some card companies, his sourcing work has become much easier.
“I don’t have to hunt for product,” he said.
The next great e-commerce war
While Nezhoda has built a real big business and presence on Whatnot, he does host and sell elsewhere. His other main sales channel is Fanatics Live, a livestream commerce experience but one mainly focused on trading cards – at least for now. Nezhoda said that while Whatnot allows a broad range of sellers – from big companies like his to “somebody that breaks on their living room desk…and has a 9 to 5 [job] – “Fanatics Live is a lot more regulated.”
On the other hand, “Whatnot has the benefit of a lot of different categories,” he said, which attract different kinds of consumers who might not otherwise have come across his digital shop.
“You can pick up new customers – maybe a coin [collector] will see it, or a sneaker guy, and they’ll come over to trading cards.”
DJs perform at Whatnot booth at New York Comic Con
Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for ReedPop
Then there’s the 30-year-old online collectible marketplace giant eBay. The company debuted its eBay Live streaming section in 2022, but has started pushing it aggressively over the past year. Nezhoda sees the onetime sleeping industry giant as a real, potential threat.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if eBay Live might become the market leader because they just have such a big user database,” he said. “But I actually think it’s great that we have different companies, different competitors, because it’s good for the ecosystem.”
The charm of the barroom
Spend some time on the app, and you’ll find shows that vary widely in production value and style. Some sellers like to present themselves to the audience face first, whether in card breaking or to show off and describe a collection of women’s clothes. Others keep the camera’s focus on the cards, with pounding hip hop setting the vibe, and an on-screen Google spreadsheet in view that’s keeping track of which viewer purchased which team or slot in the upcoming card break. And then there’s those who aren’t afraid to reveal their business anxieties – whether real or manufactured – and apply pressure to their viewers with the zealous schtick of an old-time ticket scalper. “Bid me up, chat!” is a refrain you might encounter.
On a recent afternoon, a sneaker seller auctioning off merchandise broke from his jovial demeanor to lay a demand on his audience.
“Do not buy that!” he barked after a collection of Patrick Ewing basketball sneakers was about to sell in his auction too quickly or perhaps well under the price he was looking for. A few beats later, looking dejected, it seemed like he was coming to grips that he had acted too late.
“We just got absolutely killed on those,” he lamented. “Gosh dang it! Fuck!”
It was unclear if the host was legitimately distraught, or rather a talented salesman wanting his audience to believe the sale in question was an amazing steal. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal.
On another day, A 20-something woman hawking luxury bags and other accessories struggled to suppress her laughter after mistakenly referring to high-end tree ornaments as “brown balls.” A few minutes later, she sold a $3,400 saddle purse like nothing.
Whatnot’s CEO said his company aggressively monitors customer feedback for complaints and refund requests, and will remove sellers who breach company thresholds. But he also contends that what might not seem like a quality and entertaining seller experience or setup to some viewers, may hold a different appeal for others. He likened it to how a dive bar may attract loyal customers who frequently visit because of a specific bartender or a connection with fellow patrons – factors that are more important to some than the grime that may cover the barroom floor.
“We want Whatnot to be open to all flavors and tastes,” he said.
Bid me up, chat!
Are you a current or former Whatnot employee, seller, or customer with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at [email protected], [email protected], or through messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp at 917-655-4267. You can also contact him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X, @jdelrey on Threads, and on Bluesky.
“Millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. That kind of this is going to come to America.”
That was U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s pitch in April for the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, the most radical shift in U.S. trade policy since the 1930s.
The administration has used many rationales for tariffs, but the one that seems to animate the president most is a wish to bring manufacturing back home to the U.S. Over the past few decades, many industries including tech have shipped most of their production overseas, where wages are lower, skilled labor is easier to find, and suppliers are more plentiful.
But reversing the status quo for companies like Apple is far more complicated than Trump lets on, if it’s possible at all. Behind a finished smartphone extends a chain of suppliers and assemblers, particularly in Asia, that is difficult to replace.
Trump’s wrecking ball to global trade has already proved too fast and too disruptive to encourage companies like Apple to quickly move their production to the U.S. Instead, to bring U.S. manufacturing back, Washington will need a more targeted, more methodical— and more stable—strategy, according to economists and experts who have spent years, if not decades, studying trade and global supply chains.
“There is no single industrial policy tool which will do this alone. It takes a whole ecosystem,” says Marc Fasteau, coauthor of Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries.
How it happened
Over the past several decades, manufacturing has steadily declined as a share of U.S. GDP, from around 25% in the 1950s to 10% today. Meanwhile, in Asian manufacturing powerhouses like China, Japan, and South Korea, the proportion has grown higher than 20%.
China, in particular, has captured much of the world’s manufacturing, thanks to a massive pool of skilled labor and deeply integrated supply chains. Countless industries—toys and household goods, consumer electronics, and even bespoke products—rely on Chinese factories.
“There’s this deep ecosystem of hundreds, if not thousands, of suppliers and sub-suppliers. You have amazing logistics within the country and then through the ports to the rest of the world,” says Dexter Roberts, a nonresident senior fellow at U.S. think tank Atlantic Council.
Also in China’s favor is that it has an “order of magnitude” more manufacturing workers (105 million) than the U.S. (13 million), notes Dan Wang, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Additionally, China has installed over half of the world’s industrial robots compared with the U.S.’s share of just 7%.
“You can collapse weeks’ worth of coordination time into just telling all of your suppliers that they need to be in your office at 8 a.m. tomorrow,” says Wang, who’s also author of the forthcoming book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
25% / 10%
U.S. manufacturing as a share of GDP in 1950s vs. today
The most popular images of Chinese manufacturing are complexes like “iPhone City,” a 5.6-million-square-meter campus where 300,000 workers assemble most of Apple’s smartphones. But that narrative is increasingly out-of-date.
China isn’t just an offshoring hub. Thanks to heavy investment, it has taken the lead from the U.S. in some key technologies, like electric vehicles and batteries. “The U.S. is in this very strange position of trying to engage in technological catch-up with a lower-wage competitor,” Wang says.
Some final assembly for U.S. Big Tech has moved to “China plus one” destinations like Vietnam, India, and Mexico. This strategy, which involves starting assembly in China and finishing it elsewhere, began under the first Trump administration and accelerated during COVID, when U.S. executives scrambled to find alternative manufacturing hubs after China went into lockdown.
The obvious incentive for companies, as Apple shows, is to create separate supply chains for different markets. When it comes to Apple, Yuqing Xing, at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, says China could continue to be a major supplier of iPhones for non-U.S. markets while India supplies the U.S. and Indian markets. Meanwhile, Vietnam would assemble Apple’s other products such as Mac laptops.
Still, even if the final assembly moves to Vietnam and India, the components must come from somewhere—likely China. And that might suit Beijing just fine, since China dominates many of the industries that produce those components. And yet, “China is not so sad to see this low-value manufacturing leave,” Roberts suggests, noting that Chinese officials are instead encouraging domestic production of higher-value items like semiconductors and batteries.
Estimated price of a U.S.-made iPhone: $3,500
105 million/13 million: number of manufacturing workers in CHina vs. U.S.
$500 billion: Apple’s promised U.S. investment over the next four years
300,000: Number of workers in China’s iPhone city
But there are risks from the U.S. side, too. Trump is not a fan of Apple’s shift to India, threatening tariffs on any iPhone that’s not made in the U.S. “I expect [Apple’s iPhones] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump posted on social media in late May.
The U.S. still makes a lot of stuff, and a lot of that is high-end. Aircraft engines, chipmaking tools, and industrial machinery are just some of the manufactured goods still produced in and exported from the U.S.
A 145% tariff on Chinese goods, or even one at the 54% level first proposed by Trump on April 2, would have wiped out U.S.-China trade. Anything supplied by China for U.S. manufacturing would have become unaffordable immediately. Finished products from countries like Japan or Vietnam could be imported at a lower tax rate, even if they relied on Chinese components, and still undercut U.S.-made products on price.
After initially creating turmoil in the financial markets, Trump has backtracked on many of his original tariff plans. At the time this article was published, the U.S. had a 10% tariff on imports from most countries, 30% tariffs on imports from China, and 25% tariffs on goods deemed important to national security, such as steel and auto parts. Some final products, like smartphones and laptops, are exempt from import taxes.
“There is no single industrial policy tool which will do this alone. It takes a whole ecosystem.”
Marc Fasteau, coauthor, Industrial policy for the United States
Of course, the Trump administration could always decide to hike tariffs again later. Or perhaps the courts may strike down the entire tariff regime as an example of executive overreach, as some federal judges have suggested in recent weeks. In reality, no one knows what will come next, which makes it difficult for businesses to plan much of anything.
Is reshoring possible?
Trade deals, from a legal perspective, are also more squishy than proper trade agreements, which take months, if not years, to negotiate. Since they’re not legally binding, trade deals aren’t enforceable, nor is the Trump administration bound by its own promises. Many companies, in the short term, are therefore wary of pledging large investments in the U.S. Factories are expensive and take years to build—and constant policy changes don’t make the U.S. an attractive investment destination.
Still, even without tariffs, reshoring is a “fool’s errand,” Roberts says. Bringing something like the iPhone back to the U.S. would make it exorbitantly expensive. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, in an April report, estimated that producing an iPhone entirely in the U.S. would triple its price from $1,000 to $3,500.
The Trump administration may have tried to do too much too fast. “You want to start with a small tariff to indicate that you’re serious, and a schedule that ramps it up to track the developing ability of U.S. manufacturers to make this stuff a scale,” Fasteau says.
From the start, tech companies have tried to curry favor with the Trump administration to influence his policies. How much of that courtship is a product of the trade war and what it might accomplish are unclear. In mid-February, in anticipation of the coming import levies, Apple promised to invest $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, bringing its suppliers Foxconn and Wistron with it. Then in early March, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s leading chipmaker, promised to invest an additional $100 billion into its Arizona plant.
If Trump’s tariffs—in whatever form they take—aren’t the best way to encourage U.S. manufacturing, what could?
Fasteau thinks the answer is more investment in automation. The U.S., he says, has significantly underinvested in robotics, compared with other manufacturing hubs like China and Germany. “Without investment in robotics, I don’t see large-scale manufacturing being economically workable in the U.S.,” Fasteau says.
But perhaps most important, the U.S. needs to decide what kind of manufacturing it really wants. The answer, despite what Lutnick says, likely isn’t a U.S.-based iPhone factory.
“If U.S. policymakers really want iPhone manufacturing in the U.S., they should go visit China,” Xing says, implying that it would be eye-opening—in a bad way. “They should see how much workers are paid and what their working conditions are—then report that back to the U.S.”
This article appears in the June/July 2025: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “Reviving U.S. tech is manufacturing is harder than you think.”
Yachting has long been the vacation style of choice amongst Europe’s ultra-wealthy. The continent offers manageable sailing distances, pleasant waters, and an abundance of spectacular coastlines and gorgeous islands to moor at.
Plus, Europe dominates the luxury yacht market, with shipbuilders in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands renowned for high-quality craftsmanship and technological innovation.
According to a new report published by Allied Market Research, the luxury yacht market size was valued at $5.8 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $12.8 billion by 2031, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% from 2022 to 2031. In terms of volume, Europe occupied around two-thirds of the market share in 2020.
Research by Yacht Sourcing found that emerging markets in Eastern Europe are contributing to this soaring sector growth. Croatia and Montenegro have invested heavily in yachting infrastructure and are incentivizing foreign yacht purchases.
So here’s where Europe’s senior executives and C-suite of the Fortune 500 will be vacationing on yachts this summer and how sailing trips are gaining favor as a way for luxury travelers to escape overcrowded hotels and destinations.
The trending yachting destinations of Europe’s most powerful
Southern Italy, the French Riviera, the Greek Aegean islands, and Turkey’s Turquoise Coast are some of Europe’s classic yachting hotspots. But according to Nick Hatfield, managing director of Sanlorenzo Yachts UK, the top destinations he is seeing for this year in the Mediterranean are the Balearic Islands. Mallorca is proving to be a particular favorite, thanks to its “unique blend of stunning coastlines, crystal clear water and vibrant cultural heritage,” he says.
Croatia is also on the rise, with more yachts being based along and visiting the Dalmatian coast. “Its popularity is growing as it is less crowded and more secluded than other destinations yet still offers the same, sought after azure waters and sunshine,” Hatfield says.
He adds that the stern to mooring (where yachts are lined up along a marina or quay) along the coastline “ensures guests can enjoy easy access to the shore and make the most of the yacht’s beach clubs and water toys.”
The annual calendar of Europe’s most glamorous events also influences the popularity of destinations. “Events like the Monaco Grand Prix or Cannes Film Festival cause fluctuations in where charters might visit, if they haven’t originated in these areas—that’s the beauty of a luxury yacht, you can visit more than one destination in a charter,” Hatfield says.
Luxury yachts are becoming an alternative to high-end hotels
As overtourism strains Europe’s vacation hotspots, the ultra high net worth (UHNW) are increasingly turning to yachts to escape the crowds, Hatfield says. “We’re certainly seeing yachting enjoy renewed momentum among individuals seeking alternatives to traditional holidays as charter experiences offer greater privacy, flexibility, and a sense of true freedom,” he explains.
This is “something which is becoming more important to the UHNW as many stunning destinations are becoming more accessible to a growing number of travellers, making them more crowded and less exclusive,” he adds.
“Events like the Monaco Grand Prix or Cannes Film Festival cause fluctuations in where charters might visit, if they haven’t originated in these areas—that’s the beauty of a luxury yacht, you can visit more than one destination in a charter.”
As such, yachts are increasingly favored as an alternative to high-end hotels: “No matter how exclusive a hotel is, you are still sharing it with others, whereas on a charter it is just you and your chosen guests and/or family with everything designed just for you,” Hatfield says.
Plus, today’s yachts can easily rival the amenities of even the most exclusive hotels, with spas, gyms, cinemas, beauty salons, helipads, wine cellars and hottubs.
The 278-feet Fountainhead, built for American billionaire and former CEO of the Sears retail group, Eddie Lampert, has an open-air basketball court. While on board the 258-feet Feadship Hampshire II, guests can play badminton, tennis, and football on the expansive foredeck, equipped with specially designed nets to prevent balls from going overboard. The yacht, owned by British billionaire and Ineos CEO Sir Jim Ratcliffe, also has a zipline and a squash court.
The 278-feet Fountainhead, built for American billionaire and former CEO of the Sears retail group, Eddie Lampert, has an open-air basketball court.
Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images
Onboard greenery is another superyacht luxury. The VSY Stella Maris features a glass-walled, vertical garden that rises up from the main deck to the level above, while the Benetti Ocean Paradise calms guests with a Zen garden in the main-deck foyer that is redesigned every day.
So as Europe’s hotspot destinations fill up, the ultra-wealthy are investing in yachting as the ultimate luxury of crowd-free, exclusive, personalized experiences.
– Soda success. Ten years ago, Allison Ellsworth started mixing fruit, apple cider vinegar and soda water in her kitchen with the goal of making a “healthy” soda that was low in sugar and high in fiber. Last month, PepsiCo closed the acquisition of Ellsworth’s beverage company, now known as Poppi, for $1.95 billion (this figure includes an estimated $300 million of cash tax benefits).
“From day one, we knew that this [selling the company] was always something we wanted to do,” says Ellsworth, who cofounded Poppi with her husband, Stephen, and will remain with the brand as a creative advisor. It was PepsiCo who made the first approach, and the big draw from Poppi’s perspective—in addition to the dollar signs, of course—was the impact an acquisition would have on its distribution system, she adds. In 2024, Poppi, which brands itself as “prebiotic soda,” had annual revenue of more than $500 million, according to the company, and was sold in over 120 different retailers, including Whole Foods, Target and CVS. It is currently only available in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. “There were places we couldn’t get in before, like sports arenas and certain fast casual restaurants,” Austin-based Ellsworth explains. “Now we have a Ferrari underneath us for distribution.” (The “functional” beverages market, meaning drinks that claim to offer health benefits beyond hydration, was worth around $175.5 billion in 2022 and is expected to soar to $339.6 billion by 2030.)
Allison Ellsworth founded Poppi in 2020 and is now an advisor to the company.
Courtesy of Poppi
It’s a remarkable trajectory for a company that only officially launched in 2020, and one facilitated in part by Ellsworth’s determination that Poppi be “a community” at the intersection of wellness and influencer culture, rather than a straightforward drinks brand. “We are not just a soda,” she says. Cans of Poppi come in 16 flavors and are known for their bold, neon branding and celebrity fans (Olivia Munn, Post Malone, Alix Earle and Nicole Scherzinger are all investors). Ellsworth, who in 2018 appeared on Shark Tank while nine months pregnant, resulting in a $400,000 investment from Rohan Oza, is the face of the brand. She frequently communicates with its approximately 1.2 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, announcing new initiatives and addressing controversy when it arises. Notably, Poppi has recently settled a class action lawsuit for $8.9 million, following allegations from a consumer that the company’s marketing promises around gut health are misleading. One can contains 3 grams of fiber and 5 grams of sugar, according to the company. The lawsuit contends that the drinks would need more prebiotic fiber and less sugar to positively impact digestion. “It’s something that big brands go through,” says Ellsworth of the lawsuit. “It feels good that it’s behind us.” The company’s official statement on the settlement adds that Poppi “acknowledges no fault, liability or wrongdoing.”
Ellsworth compares handing over the reins of her company to watching a child go off to college. “You’re happy but you have anxiety,” she says. “You want to see it flourish, but you want to hold on. But I have a calmness. We did good. Poppi is in good hands.”
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It’s a question I’ve been asking a lot of folks recently. Mostly because I get them all the time, at least a few a week, sometimes a dozen. And quite frankly it puts me on edge. I immediately wonder if I’ve met that person before, and dive into my recent past, reevaluating phone calls, networking events, and email exchanges, to see if it’s someone I’ve met and then forgotten.
The whole process can be exhausting—but now I know I’m not alone. Most professionals don’t have the time to “go through all the mental gymnastics” around whether or not they’ve met someone, and if they should accept their request, says Andrew McCaskill, a career expert at LinkedIn with more than 30,000 followers on the platform. He regularly gets 10 requests or more each day from people he’s never met. And while he will consider each one, he doesn’t accept them all.
“I’ve got a lot of followers, and there are a lot of people that will hit me up, and I’m constantly trying to figure out how to triage it,” he says.
McCaskill along with other career experts tell me that there is no formal blueprint for how to handle these requests, because the choice is often so personal. While some people see their network as a large net and accept as many folks as possible, others (like myself) prefer to curate who they interact with. I personally prefer to reserve my connections for people I have met in my real professional life: current and former managers and colleagues, sources, peers, alumni, and other journalists and editors.
“A lot of people hate getting a LinkedIn connection request from a random person, because it’s a bit uncomfortable,” says Gracy Sarkissian, associate dean of Columbia Business School’s Career Management Center. “On the other hand networking is about engaging with both people that you know in your personal network, as well as people who are a couple of degrees removed. And those are the folks who have proved to be the most valuable resources during a job search.”
Neither system is inherently wrong. But for anyone planning to send a connection request to someone they’ve never met, there is one golden rule: write a short note about who you are, and why you’re sending the invite in the first place.
“If I’m looking at a line of people who are asking me for a direct connection, I’m going to look at the note first,” says McCaskill. “Writing the note says that I don’t just want a connection, I’d like you to be my connection.”
Read more here on whether or not to accept or decline LinkedIn requests from strangers.
On the campaign trail last year, then-candidate Donald Trump promised the crypto industry that he would become the first president to embrace blockchain technology. At the time, he didn’t reveal that he also planned to make crypto a cornerstone of his growing business empire.
On Friday, the White House released Trump’s first financial disclosure report as president, revealing new details on his web of business ventures, including his golf courses, sponsorship deals, and publicly traded media group. Notably, the report also provided a window into Trump’s crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, which his sons announced last summer.
According to the disclosures, Trump has earned over $57 million from token sales on the platform and holds nearly 16 billion of the governance tokens—the crypto version of voting shares—launched by World Liberty. Based on earlier sales of those tokens to accredited investors, which valued them between 1.5 and five cents, Trump’s holdings could be worth nearly $1 billion, though the token is not currently trading. Bloomberg recently estimated his total net worth at around $5.4 billion.
As government watchdogs argue that Trump’s ventures in the crypto industry represent a conflict of interest with Congress debating blockchain regulation, the new report provides the first substantial look at the president’s increasing entanglement with digital assets.
The first crypto president
Before his third run for president, Trump had expressed skepticism of crypto, describing Bitcoin as a “scam” just a few years ago. But he increasingly embraced the blockchain industry on the campaign trail last year as companies such as Coinbase and Ripple poured tens of millions of dollars into donations—a reaction to the Biden administration’s crackdown on the sector.
Trump not only touted the technology at industry events, including a Bitcoin conference last summer, but also began to explore his own ventures in the space. Trump had previously launched a series of NFTs, but the newer projects represented a full-blown move into the crypto business, primarily through the vehicle of World Liberty Financial.
The platform, first announced by his son Eric last August, promised a “new era of finance,” though its exact function is still unknown. In the ensuing months, World Liberty has launched a series of products. That has included the governance token, as well as a dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1, which an Emirati investment firm used to invest $2 billion into the leading crypto exchange Binance in May.
While the exact ownership structure of World Liberty, as well as Trump’s potential profit from token sales, remained largely opaque, the financial disclosure report offers the first details on the president’s profit, including the $57 million earned off token sales. World Liberty offered WLFI to accredited investors, including the Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, who had previously faced charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission that were dropped after Trump took office.
The report does not include details on Trump’s other major crypto project—his memecoin, also called Trump, which he launched the weekend before his inauguration. While Trump’s memecoin has plummeted in value since its release, dropping from a market capitalization of $9 billion in January to around $2 billion today, it has remained a source of potential profit—and controversy—for Trump, whose organization likely owns around 80% of the total supply. Trump hosted a dinner for the top holders of the memecoin in May, drawing criticism from lawmakers across the aisle and even industry lobbyists.
Trump continues to advance crypto industry priorities, including legislation in Congress that would establish regulation for stablecoins and token issuance. But even as real estate dominates his holdings, Friday’s financial disclosure report demonstrates the increasing importance of crypto to his business empire.
President Donald Trump (C) speaks alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L) and White House Crypto Czar David Sacks at the The White House Digital Assets Summit at the White House on March 07, 2025
Sales of Tesla vehicles in the U.S. fell 16% in April, according to data from S&P Global Mobility cited by trade publication Automotive News. With a share of 40%, even the slightest weakness at Elon Musk’s company has a disproportionate effect in monthly EV sales. Musk meanwhile has dismissed concerns he has a demand problem on his hands.
When Tesla sneezes, the entire U.S. electric vehicle market catches a cold.
Elon Musk’s company led overall sales of zero-emission cars lower in April, marking the first year-on-year drop in EV sales for 14 months, according to Automotive News.
The Detroit-based trade publication cited data published by S&P Global Mobility that showed Americans bought roughly 97,800 EVs, or 4.4% fewer than last year.
The chief culprit behind the decline was Tesla, whose volumes sank 16% to just below 40,000 for April. By comparison Chevrolet saw its business triple from comparatively low levels on the back of the new Equinox crossover, which blew past all Tesla models in terms of actual real world range.
Neither Tesla nor S&P Global Mobility responded to a request from Fortune made outside normal business hours.
Tesla’s 40% share means it dictates the direction of America’s EV market
Musk made EVs desirable in the U.S., first in 2012 with the Model S sedan that revolutionized the industry, and then eight years later landing a smash hit with the more affordable Model Y crossover.
Despite his success, the rest of the U.S. industry either could not—in the case of EV upstarts like Rivian—or would not follow. Even in its currently weakened state, Tesla still accounts for roughly four out of every 10 EVs sold in the United States, versus market shares of below 10% for its two closest rivals—Chevrolet and Ford.
With such a dominant position, even the slightest declines have a disproportionately large effect on the overall market.
Normally sales figures for April published in June would be considered stale at this point, but there is a dearth of timely data when it comes to the size of the U.S. electric vehicle industry. The market is a laggard compared to most other wealthy and industrialized countries, where EV demand is helped by high fuel taxes.
Musk has dismissed concerns that Tesla has a demand problem
Tesla’s poor results in the U.S. in April confirm a trend that had already emerged in Europe and China, suggesting the company will find it increasingly difficult to meet its full-year forecast for an unspecified return to growing car sales.
Sales are already down 13% in the first quarter, and June needs to be a very strong month to at least eke out stagnant volumes for the current quarter. More troubling for Tesla, there has been no indication of a new model on the horizon, beyond a seven-seat Model Y, despite Musk’s promise since April 2024 that one would launch before the end of June.
Meanwhile the CEO has aggravated some investors by consistently dismissing concerns that Tesla’s core car business is in a protracted slump, one for which he is ultimately responsible. Not only did he kill off his planned $25,000 low cost car in favor of one without any manual controls whatsoever, his political activism has also provoked a customer boycott.
“Don’t worry about it,” he recently said, asked about the slump in Tesla EV sales. “They’re fine.”
Every venture investor tells their portfolio companies that they’re more than just a check. They help with introductions, they help with recruiting, and they help with going public. Some have even been operators themselves and encountered the same problems as their startup founders. But how many full-time VCs can boast that they helped build the biggest tech companies in the world?
There’s Marc Andreessen, of course, and Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla. David Fischer, a partner at 01 Advisors, may not yet have the same name recognition, though he served as a vice president of sales at Google and then chief revenue officer at Facebook as both companies burst out of the stratosphere. And for founders hoping to scale their companies from zero to one in this era of hyper-speed, Fischer’s background may make him as valuable as the giants of Sand Hill Road.
I met with Fischer this spring in 01A’s New York office, which is in the same Lower Manhattan building that houses Union Square Ventures and Inspired Capital. Even before Fischer joined the VC ranks during the pandemic, he took a circuitous route into tech. He worked briefly as a journalist before a stint at the Treasury Department for Larry Summers, which is where he met his future boss at Google and Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg. (Fischer’s father, the famed economist and central banker Stanley Fischer, recently passed away.)
After attending Stanford Business School, Fischer entered Silicon Valley at a transformative time for the tech sector, joining Google in 2002 right after it launched AdWords and was beginning to bring in revenue. He spent eight years at the search giant before Facebook hired him to pull off the same feat. When Fischer started, Facebook had about 1,200 employees, $750 million in revenue, and had yet to wade into mobile. Its acquisition of Instagram and IPO were still two years away. “Ads were a little bit of an afterthought,” Fischer tells me. When he left in 2021, Facebook’s revenue had topped $100 billion.
So, where do you go next? Fischer may not have been in the first 10 or 100 employees at either tech behemoth, but he had experienced the addictive period when a company goes from product-market fit to market domination—and in the case of Google and Facebook, world domination. “I always like to take what I’ve learned before and bring it to do something real and rewarding,” Fischer says.
He began to channel that into investing, first as an angel and then connecting with two friends who had started their own firm. Fischer isn’t the only former operator at 01A—the firm was founded by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, as well as Fischer’s one-time counterpart at Twitter in the CRO role, Adam Bain. Fischer joined full-time for 01A’s third fund, a $395 million vehicle it launched in October 2023.
At a time when many VC firms are either looking for early or late-stage investments, 01A takes a more down-the-middle approach, mostly writing Series B checks of about $15 million. It’s not quite the stage that Fischer joined Google and Facebook, or Costolo and Bain joined Twitter, but it’s still that same sweet spot where a company has a viable product but needs to figure out how to sell it. “That’s the time you actually need some counsel from some folks who ideally have done this before,” Fischer tells me. 01A helps with those key questions, from transitioning from founder-led sales to a real sales operation to building out the executive team to sizing up the competitive landscape. “Sometimes it’s just talking it through,” Fischer adds. “Being a founder is incredibly solitary.”
01A funds a variety of verticals, though only one startup in the advertising and marketing tech space, which may seem surprising given the background of its partners—a San Francisco-based company called Haus, founded by a former Google employee, that helps companies quantify the effectiveness of their marketing. 01A led a $20 million investment into the company last year after Insight Partners backed an earlier round.
The firm’s partners may have helped lead three of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley history, but Fischer acknowledged that the rise of AI is creating a new ballgame. He’ll sit through a pitch now where the founder puts a chart on the screen showing that their annual recurring revenue is going from zero to $10 million faster than Apple, Google, and Meta. “That’s amazing,” Fischer says. “The only problem with it is, I’ve had four other people this month put the same chart up, and two of them are your competitors.”
Still, he thinks that while revenue timeframes may be accelerated, that’s the same for everyone. In other words, there will still only be a few winners per category—the competition is just able to grow faster. Having a head start doesn’t mean much anymore. “Before we make an investment, we have to really have conviction that this is a company that can win,” Fischer says.
ICYMI…I had the exclusive this morning on flexible labor platform WorkWhile’s $23 million Series B. Read the full story here. —Allie Garfinkle
Amex CEO Steve Squeri wants more high-spending Millennials and Gen Z-ers to join his company’s upper echelon ranks. And he’s starting to give hints of just how exactly he plans to lure more of them to the fold, announcing on June 16 that the company will implement a big upgrade late this summer, or in the early fall to its Platinum card. The company says this will be its biggest investment ever in a card program. “We’ll see two areas of investments,” adds Howard Grosfield, Group President for U.S. Consumer Services. “We’ll double down on all the things our cardmembers love now. And we’ll be adding lots of exciting new brands.”
Amex has positioned the Platinum card as the most expensive in its class at $695 a year (Chase Sapphire at a comparable level costs $550.) But as Grosfield points out, the Millennials and Gen Z crowd believe they’re reaping value well beyond the annual price of entry. The proof: The groups covering the mid-20s to mid-40s age spectrum now account for 75% of Amex’s new accounts acquired on its two premium cards, Platinum and Gold, for 2024, up from 60% in 2019. In the twelve months from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, their spending surged by 40%, yet the credit record for the two demographics proved better than the industry average. The fast-rising numbers signing on at $695 helped increase net card fee revenue last year by 18%. These youthful troops, says Amex, are proving extremely loyal. The company doesn’t disclose quit rates by category, but avows that its all-in retention figure stands at 99%.
The strategy dates back to 2021, when three years into the job, Squeri reckoned that the financial services giant’s best path to growth lay in attracting a far younger generation of shoppers than the affluent boomers that had traditionally formed his enterprise’s—and the industry’s—main target. Squeri took aim at Millennials, now 29 to 44, and Gen Z’ers, today’s twenty-somethings, and narrowed his sweet-spot for Platinum to the high-income layer boasting excellent credit records.
Prior to that refresh, the Platinum benefits focused on travel, chiefly offering deals on the likes of hotel stays, airfares, and access to airport lounges. As the COVID lockdown lifted, Squeri and his team reckoned that the Millennial and Gen Z elite would be craving fresh adventures. So Amex greatly broadened its offerings to cover the breadth of their athletic, treat-seeking lifestyles by adding perks in entertainment, wellness and upscale shopping. Amex also recognized that this cohort comprising everything from lawyers, to investment bankers, to software engineers and rising executives didn’t pay like their parents. These were digital natives who often didn’t even carry cash, and charged virtually everything on their cards. They were earning more points toward more goodies than any other generations, and getting hooked. Plus, they relished apps that by tapping a few clicks, could bring them a seat in the hottest new restaurants that were always “booked,” or arrange a tennis lesson on red clay courts during business trip to Paris.
The wider menu of perks proved a big time lure for the younger set
The carrot that attracted the younger generation: a new array of perks covering all territories of their leisure lives. They added a digital entertainment benefit award of $240 a year towards subscriptions for such providers as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu. Amex tapped the Millennial and Gen Z yen for Uber by awarding $200 a year for rides on the service, and cardholders garner $300 each towards memberships at Equinox and SoulCycle. As for shopping, Platinum bridges luxe to daily staples, furnishing a $100 credit at Saks Fifth Avenue and Walmart+ membership offering discounts on fuel and in-home pickups for returns. The travel services are trending more more and more to the one-on-one and bespoke: AMEX’s crew of 7,000 personal travel consultants can plan your itinerary for holidays in Croatia or book you at a rock concert at Wembley.
AMEX also hit an ace by making a major foray into restaurant reservations. Its first move came in 2018, the year Squeri advanced to CEO, via the acquisition of Resy; its app guarantees Platinum holders bookings at super-popular eateries where it would normally take days or weeks to get a table. Today, Resi partners with 20,000 restaurants in thirty countries, and last year bought Tock, another big player that added 7,000 culinary partners, including for the first time, wineries from Napa to the Loire Valley. “We’re the only credit card operator with our own restaurant reservations platform,” says Amex’s Grosfield. “We unlock access to the world’s most sought-after tables.”
Good morning. Is the segment of crypto-friendly CFOs growing? That appears to be the case, as pursuing blockchain initiatives is becoming increasingly common.
Fortune’s Catherine McGrath reported last week that about 60% of Fortune 500 executives say their companies are “working on blockchain initiatives,” according to a new survey published by crypto exchange Coinbase in partnership with GLG Research. This is a 4% increase from last year.
The report also highlighted that 81% of crypto-aware, small- and medium-sized businesses are interested in using stablecoins to address their biggest financial pain points. That belief is catching on at large companies, with more than three times as many Fortune 500 executives now exploring stablecoins compared to last year, according to Coinbase.
Fortune’s Leo Schwartz and Ben Weiss exclusively reported that Meta is in discussions with crypto firms to introduce stablecoins as a means to manage payouts, and has also hired a VP of product with crypto experience to help shepherd the discussions. Amazon and Walmart are also looking into issuing their own stablecoins, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Shifting political dynamics have sparked renewed interest in blockchain among mainstream U.S. corporations. The Trump administration has advocated for a clear regulatory framework for crypto in support of the industry.
The crypto industry also is currently experiencing a surge in IPO activity. Circle, a leading issuer of the USDC stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, went public this month with a valuation of $8 billion. Several other crypto companies also have filed for IPOs or are reportedly exploring the possibility.
Are legacy financial institutions at large prepared for crypto? Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton, doesn’t think so. Johnson helms a nearly 80-year-old, publicly traded financial institution. She writes in a Fortune opinion piece that financial institutions have attempted to integrate digital asset technology for more than 10 years “with little to show for their efforts,” as the total value of blockchain-based finance comprises less than 1% of the $300 trillion global system.
“We believe that the portfolios of the future will increasingly move away from today’s account-based system and rely instead on digital wallets that can hold a limitless number of tokenized assets in a single place—all of which can be transferred instantly, as well as lent out or staked for additional yield,” Johnson writes. She adds, “The advantages of blockchain are so compelling that we don’t foresee the shift to digital-asset technology being slow or incremental. Indeed, we expect our industry will evolve more in the next five years than in the last 50.”
Have you ever planned part of a vacation stay around a free breakfast? Whether it’s sitting down for eggs and waffles or having a coffee and banana to go, complimentary morning meals are a key factor for many travelers when choosing a hotel. Unfortunately, as we head into the summer travel season, some popular hotel brands are reconsidering this popular perk.
Take, for instance, Hyatt Place—one of Hyatt’s largest select-service brands—which has long been known for offering complimentary breakfast. But that’s changing at more than 40 U.S. properties, where a pilot program launched in November has removed free breakfast for all guests. The website now states, “Free breakfast at most hotels.” Instead, these hotels offer rate options: some include breakfast, others do not, and guests can pay separately if they wish. Hyatt Globalist members still receive the free breakfast benefit. Hyatt did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on whether the pilot program has expanded.
Industry analysts have confirmed that a number of hotels are moving to limit or eliminate what guests can munch on in the morning.
“We are aware that some brands have been testing room rate structures inclusive or exclusive of breakfast, grab-and-go options, or programs where complimentary breakfasts are only offered to loyalty members,” Rachael Rothman, head of hotels research and data analytics at CBRE Group, told Fortune.
According to Zach Demuth, global head of hotels research at JLL, Hyatt Place targets value-driven, price-sensitive guests—often longer-stay travelers who prefer larger rooms in secondary markets. At the pilot hotels, guests who opt out of breakfast get discounts or extra loyalty points. Demuth noted, “That consumer is heavily driven by value, specifically price value.” He added it’s too early to judge the program’s success, but Hyatt and others believe replacing free breakfast with alternative benefits could boost demand.
St. Regis Macao, part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio, is also testing changes. As of March 1, complimentary breakfast was eliminated for Marriott Bonvoy Platinum, Titanium, and Ambassador members at this property. Instead, eligible guests receive bonus points or a local amenity, and Platinum status and above members receive a breakfast discount. On the dining page of the hotel’s website, under “Frequently Asked Questions,” it now states: “Complimentary breakfast is not currently served at The St. Regis Macao.” A Marriott representative told Fortune this is a property-specific test, not a broader brand policy.
Demuth said luxury travelers often don’t value free breakfast as much as other perks. “For luxury brands, giving top-tier loyalty members free breakfast really doesn’t do anything for that member—basically, they could care less,” he said.
Why breakfast still matters
Despite these pilots, Rothman emphasized that major global hotel brands are not eliminating complimentary breakfast across the board. “Breakfast is a cost [for hotel brands], without a doubt, but it can also be a key differentiator and can create value through higher rates and higher occupancy levels,” she said.
CBRE research shows that hotels offering complimentary breakfast outperform those that don’t, with revenue per available room (RevPAR) growth more than doubling that of brands without the amenity since 2013. (The data is based on the public filings of Choice, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott, and Wyndham.) This may explain the outperformance of upper-midscale brands, which are more likely to offer breakfast, according to the report.
So why are some brands testing the removal of free breakfast? Demuth explained that many guests prefer to explore local dining rather than eat at the hotel, making complimentary meals less of a draw and more of a cost. “The reality is that, sure, breakfast at a hotel is great, but that doesn’t necessarily allow you to experience the destination,” he said.
For now, complimentary breakfast remains a staple at most major hotel brands, but shifting guest preferences and rising costs are prompting some properties to experiment with new models. Whether these changes catch on more broadly remains to be seen—but for many travelers, that early-morning hotel breakfast is still part of the journey.
The first direct flight from the U.S. to Greenland by an American airline landed in the capital city of Nuuk Saturday evening and is set to make its return flight on Sunday morning.
The United Airlines-operated Boeing 737 Max 8 departed from Newark International Airport in New Jersey at 11:31 a.m. EDT (1531 GMT) on Saturday and arrived a little over four hours later, at 6:39 p.m. local time (1939 GMT), according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware.
A one-way ticket from Newark to Nuuk cost roughly $1,200. The return flight had a $1,300 to $1,500 price tag.
Saturday’s flight marks the first direct passage between the U.S. and the Arctic island in nearly 20 years. In 2007, Air Greenland launched a route between Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and Kangerlussuaq Airport, some 315 kilometers (195 miles) north of Nuuk. It was scrapped the following year due to cost.
Warren Rieutort-Louis, a 38-year-old passenger from San Francisco, decided to visit Nuuk for just one night to be a part of the historic flight.
“I’ve been to Greenland before, but never this way around. I came the other way through Europe, so to be able to come straight is really amazing,” Rieutort-Louis said after the plane landed.
The United Airlines flight took place on U.S. President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday, which was celebrated in Washington with a controversial military parade that was part of the Army’s long-planned 250th anniversary celebration.
Trump has repeatedly said he seeks control of Greenland, a strategic Arctic island that’s a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, and has not ruled out military force.
The governments of Denmark, a NATO ally, and Greenland have said it is not for sale and condemned reports of the U.S. stepping up intelligence gathering on the mineral-rich island.
United announced the flight and its date in October, before Trump was re-elected. It was scheduled for 2025 to take advantage of the new Nuuk airport, which opened in late November and features a larger runway for bigger jets.
“United will be the only carrier to connect the U.S. directly to Nuuk — the northernmost capital in the world, providing a gateway to world-class hiking and fascinating wildlife under the summer’s midnight sun,” the company said in a statement at the time.
Saturday’s flight kicked off the airline’s twice weekly seasonal service, from June to September, between Newark and Nuuk. The plane has around 165 seats.
Previously, travelers had to take a layover in Iceland or Copenhagen, Denmark, before flying to Greenland.
The new flight is beneficial for the island’s business and residents, according to Greenland government minister Naaja Nathanielsen.
Tourists will spend money at local businesses, and Greenlanders themselves will now be able to travel to the U.S. more easily, Nathanielsen, the minister for business, mineral resources, energy, justice and gender equality, told Danish broadcaster DR. The route is also an important part of diversifying the island’s economy, she said. Fishing produces about 90% of Greenland’s exports.
Tourism is increasingly important. More than 96,000 international passengers traveled through the country’s airports in 2023, up 28% from 2015.
Jessica Litolff, a 26-year-old passenger from Louisiana, said she also hopes the new route will benefit the U.S. and Greenland.
“Distance-wise it’s only like four and a half hours, so by flying you can get to Greenland faster than you can to some parts of the United States,” she said.
Visit Greenland echoed Nathanielsen’s comments. The government’s tourism agency did not have projections on how much money the new flights would bring to the island.
“We do know that flights can bring in much more than just dollars, and we expect it to have a positive impact — both for the society and travellers,” Tanny Por, Visit Greenland’s head of international relations, told The Associated Press in an email.
Aria Varasteh, a 34-year-old traveler from Washington, had wanted to travel to Greenland “for a very long time.”
“I do hope that we receive a warm reception from the locals. From those I’ve talked to already, it seems that they’re excited to have us here,” Varasteh said. “And so we’re excited to be here and just be the best versions of ourselves.”
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