Welcome to Eye on AI! AI reporter Sharon Goldman here, filling in for Jeremy Kahn, who is on holiday. In this edition…General Services Administration approves OpenAI, Google, Anthropic for federal AI vendor list…Consequences of AI spending boom on U.S. economy…Clay AI raises $100 million at $3.1 billion valuation.
Only in the Bay Area does spending a Saturday geeking out about AI agents—alongside 2,000 students, researchers, and tech insiders crammed into UC Berkeley—feel like a totally normal weekend plan. As I picked up my badge at the day-long Agentic AI Summit and watched the line snake through the student union lobby, it felt less like an academic conference and more like Silicon Valley’s version of a buzzy New York brunch spot.
This was certainly due to the speaker lineup, which was stacked with top AI researchers and scientists, including Jakob Pachocki, chief scientist at OpenAI; Ed Chi, VP of research at Google DeepMind; Bill Dally, chief scientist at Nvidia; Ion Stoica, cofounder at Databricks & Anyscale, as well as a UC Berkeley professor; and Dawn Song, a pioneering UC Berkeley professor focused on AI security.
The popularity might have been due to the buzzy topic—AI agents, generally defined as an AI-powered system that can complete tasks, mostly autonomously, using other software tools. Think not only suggested a vacation itinerary, but also booking the flight and making the hotel reservation.
As my colleague Jeremy Kahn said in a recent article, “This kind of automation is a perennial C-suite fever dream. Over the past decade, companies embraced ‘robotic process automation,’ or RPA. This was software that could automate repetitive tasks, such as cutting and pasting between database programs. But traditional RPA systems are inflexible and unable to deal with exceptions, and can usually handle only one narrow task.” Agentic AI is meant to be both more flexible and powerful, adapting to business needs.
In a January 2025 blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.”
But despite the hype, the overall message at the Agentic AI Summit was cautious and grounded: Agents may be the buzziest trend in AI right now, but the tech still has a long way to go, they said. AI agents, unfortunately, aren’t always reliable. They may not remember what came before.
Google DeepMind’s Chi, for example, stressed the gap between what agents can do in curated demos versus what’s still needed in real-world production environments. Pachocki highlighted concerns around the safety, security, and trustworthiness of agentic systems, particularly when they’re integrated into sensitive applications or operate autonomously.
“I still don’t think agents have really lived up to their promise,” said Sherwin Wu, head of engineering at OpenAI API. “Certain more generic cases have worked, but my day-to-day work doesn’t really feel that different with agents.”
While today’s agents may not currently live up to the massive hype (consider Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s recent claim that a shift to digital labor means he will be the “last CEO of Salesforce who only managed humans”), the speakers at the Agentic AI Summit still had plenty of optimism to share. Databricks’ Stoica expressed enthusiasm about infrastructure improvements that are making it easier to build agentic systems. Nvidia’s Dally suggested that continued hardware advances will enable more powerful and efficient agent behavior. Several pointed out “narrow wins” in specific domains, like coding.
Today’s AI agents may still have growing pains, but given the crowded UC Berkeley ballroom, the industry maintains its eye on the prize: AI agents that can reliably operate in the real world. The payoff, they believe, will be well worth the wait.
Kamala Harris did something unprecedented last year: She had just 107 days to whip up a winning presidential campaign, the most compressed timeline ever for a major-party bid. But while she fell short in November, ceding victory to President Donald Trump, many believed she would run for governor of California; in early polling, she was beating every other candidate by double digits. But in an interview with Stephen Colbert, the former vice president explained why she’s sitting this one out.
“Recently, I made the decision that for now I don’t want to go back in the system. I think it’s broken,” she said, eliciting gasps from The Late Show‘s live audience in attendance.
“Listen, I am a devout public servant,” Harris said. “I have spent my entire career in service of the people and I thought a lot about running for governor. I love my state, I love California, I’ve served as elected district attorney, attorney general, and senator. But to be very candid with you, when I was young in my career, I had to defend my decision to become a prosecutor with my family. And one of the points that I made is, why is it when we think we want to improve a system, or change it, that we’re always on the outside on bended knee, or trying to break down the door? Shouldn’t we also be inside the system?”
While Harris made it clear to Colbert she is “always going to be part of the fight, that is not going to change,” the 60-year-old politician said she would rather spend time traveling the country and listening to people without it being “transactional, where I’m asking for their vote.”
“There are so many good people who are public servants who do such good work,” Harris continued. “Teachers, and firefighters, and police officers, and nurses, and scientists. It’s not about them, but I believe that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. And I think right now, they’re not as strong as they need to be. And I just don’t want to go back in the system.”
Harris agreed with Colbert, that a former vice president and one-time presidential candidate calling the system “broken” is “harrowing,” but acknowledged that “the power is with the people.”
“You can never let anybody take your power from you,” Harris said. “And that’s what I’d like to remind folks of.”
President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), last Friday after a dismal jobs report is drawing criticism not just from his usual opponents, but also from his allies.
Stephen Moore, President Donald Trump’s former economic advisor, told Fortune that firing McEntarfer when he did was akin to “firing the referee because you don’t like the way the game turned out.”
“I’m not here to defend Trump,” Moore, who was also Trump’s one-time nominee to serve as a Federal Reserve Governor, added. “But I do think he should have fired her a long time ago, because the numbers that have been coming out now for the last several years have just not been an accurate gauge as to what’s really going on in the economy.”
Trump became incensed with McEnStarfer after the new report significantly revised U.S. jobs figures from May and June, slashing some 258,000 jobs combined for those months. The revision constitutes the largest downward revision to the jobs numbers in almost 60 years.
The president wrote in a Truth Social post Friday that McEntarfer, a Biden administration appointee, “manipulated” and “faked” the jobs report numbers for political gain. He said he would replace her with someone “more competent.”
Transitioning away from survey data
Moore, while disagreeing that the numbers were manipulated, concurred with Trump that the BLS needs a new “Mr. Fix It” to head the Bureau. He said that in his 40 years of working in economic research, he had never seen the jobs numbers become so unreliable.
Recent economic data is plagued by the same issue as political polling data: Nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore, Moore said. The monthly jobs report relies heavily on surveys of businesses and households, which worked when everyone used landline phones, but is less reliable in the digital age.
“The procedures the BLS is using are 75 years old,” Moore added. “They need to be completely revamped.” The pandemic appears to have accelerated the trend of people ignoring pollers’ calls. Before 2020, response rates to the Current Employment Statistics surveys—which the BLS uses to compile the monthly jobs report—hovered around 60%. It has since declined to 45%.
Days before Trump fired McEnfarter, a bipartisan group of economists—including Nobel Laureate Paul Romer—wrote a letter to Congress asking for funding to modernize the data-collection process.
Agencies need the space and money to “restore” survey response rates, while also experimenting with new means of data collection, the economists argued.
“Transitioning to a system in which less survey data is blended with more administrative and private sector data, while preserving data integrity and privacy standards, is the generationally important task facing statistical agencies today,” the economists wrote.
However, researchers at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, who studied survey responsiveness earlier this year, found that while declining response rates present concerns for the reliability of data, it didn’t necessarily lead to larger-than-average revisions to reports like the monthly jobs report.
Claire Mersol, an economist at BLS, told the Wall Street Journal that much of the revisions done to the previous numbers were part of “routine recalculation of seasonal factors.”
“Typically, the monthly revisions have offsetting movements within industries—one goes up, one goes down,” Mersol said. “In June, most revisions were negative.”
In other words, the sharply negative revisions could’ve just been chance.
Even if the data has become more unreliable, some Republican allies of the president said that firing the head of the BLS would do little to fix the problem. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, toldNBC News that he questioned how the move would improve BLS’ accuracy.
“I’m going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting,” he said.
GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska said that she doesn’t trust the numbers, but the move makes it worse.
“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.
Stephen Moore, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, May 2, 2019.
Despite what its name suggests, OpenAI hadn’t released an “open” model—one that includes access to the weights, or the numerical parameters often described as the model’s brains—since GPT-2 in 2020. That changed on Tuesday: The company launched a long-awaited open-weight model, in two sizes, that the company says pushes the frontier of reasoning in open-source AI.
“We’re excited to make this model, the result of billions of dollars of research, available to the world to get AI into the hands of the most people possible,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the release. “As part of this, we are quite hopeful that this release will enable new kinds of research and the creation of new kinds of products.” He emphasized that he is “excited for the world to be building on an open AI stack created in the United States, based on democratic values, available for free to all and for wide benefit.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had teased the upcoming models back in March, two months after admitting, in the wake of the success of China’s open models from DeepSeek, that the company had been “on the wrong side of history” when it came to opening up its models to developers and builders. But while the weights are now public, experts note that OpenAI’s new models are hardly “open.” By no means is it giving away its crown jewels: The proprietary architecture, routing mechanisms, training data and methods that power its most advanced models—including the long-awaited GPT-5, widely expected to be released sometime this month—remain tightly under wraps.
OpenAI is targeting AI builders and developers
The two new model names – gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b – may be indecipherable to non-engineers, but that’s because OpenAI is setting its sights on AI builders and developers seeking to rapidly build on real-world use cases on their own systems. The company noted that the larger of the two models can run on a single Nvidia 80GB chip while the smaller one fits on consumer hardware like a Mac laptop.
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, acknowledged on a press pre-briefing call that “it’s been a long time” since the company had released an open model. He added that it is “something that we view as complementary to the other products that we release” and along with OpenAI’s proprietary models, “combine to really accelerate our mission of ensuring that API benefits all of humanity.”
OpenAI said the new models perform well on reasoning benchmarks, which have emerged as the key measurements for AI performance, with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek fiercely competing over their abilities to tackle multi-step logic, code generation, and complex problem-solving. Ever since the open source DeepSeek R1 shook the industry in January with its reasoning capabilities at a much lower cost, many other Chinese models have followed suit– including Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot AI’s Kimi models. While OpenAI said at a press pre-briefing that the new open-weight models are a proactive effort to provide what users want, it is also clearly a strategic response to ramping up open source competition.
Notably, OpenAI declined to benchmark its new open-weight models against Chinese open-source systems like DeepSeek or Qwen—despite the fact that those models have recently outperformed U.S. rivals on key reasoning benchmarks. In the press briefing, the company said it confident in its benchmarks against its own models and that it would leave it to others in the AI community to test further and “make up their own minds.”
Avoiding leaking intellectual property
OpenAI’s new open-weight models are built using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, in which the system activates only the “experts,” or sub-networks, it needs for a specific input, rather than using the entire model for every query. Dylan Patel, founder of research firm SemiAnalysis, pointed out in a post on X before the release that OpenAI trained the models only using publicly known components of the architecture—meaning the building blocks it used are already familiar to the open-source community. He emphasized that this was a deliberate choice—that by avoiding any proprietary training techniques or architecture innovations, OpenAI could release a genuinely useful model without actually leaking any intellectual property that powers its proprietary frontier models like GPT 4o.
For example, in a model card accompanying the release, OpenAI confirmed that the models use a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture with 12 active experts out of 64, but it does not describe the routing mechanism, which is a crucial and proprietary part of the architecture.
“You want to minimize risk to your business, but you [also] want to be maximally useful to the public,” Aleksa Gordic, a former Google DeepMind researcher, told Fortune, adding that companies like Meta and Mistral, which have also focused on open-weight models, also have not included proprietary information.
“They minimize the IP leak and remove any risk to their core business, while at the same time sharing a useful artifact that will enable the startup ecosystem and developers,” he said. “It’s by definition the best they can do given those two opposing objectives.”
As Gen Z questions the value of higher education, Figma CEO Dylan Field has become the latest tech billionaire to make it big without a college degree, joining the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates. Thanks to his company’s roaring IPO, his net worth has soared to $5 billion. And for the tech founder, the milestone is more than just a financial win—it’s a validation of his decision to drop out of an Ivy League university.
Figma burst onto the public markets last week, surging in share price by 333% and hitting a market cap of over $70 billion in just the first few days of trading.
For investors bullish on startups, last week was a rejuvenation after a sluggish stretch in the IPO market. But for Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field, last week not only helped propel his net worth to about $5 billion—it was also a validation that his decision to abandon an Ivy League education at Brown University was well worth it, a choice made possible by Peter Thiel.
In the early 2010s—with lines on his résumé detailing work at LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Flipboard—Field applied for the Thiel Fellowship, a program funded by the billionaire that gave $100,000 to young people who “want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom” (the prize has since doubled to $200,000). At the time, his parents admitted they were skeptical, with his mom telling CNBC that she feared Field would want a degree to fall back on later in life.
“I’m quite nervous, yeah,” Field’s father, Andy, said. “Most startups do fail. I think he has a good shot, but certainly not a sure thing by any means.”
After being awarded the fellowship, Field felt confident it was the right move—especially since he had once considered dropping out of high school owing to his struggles with structured education. In 2012, the same year Facebook went public (a company also created by a dropout enabled by Thiel), Field left school to build Figma. The rest is billion-dollar history.
Fortune reached out to Field for comment.
Billionaires who made it big after dropping out
Field is far from the first highly successful individual to have carved their own path in business without having walked across the stage to obtain a college diploma. In fact, many of the richest people on earth can call themselves college dropouts.
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg (right) and Dustin Moskovitz.
Justine Hunt—The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Perhaps one of the most well-known college dropouts, Zuckerberg ditched his Harvard dorm in 2004 to move to California and dedicate his time to creating Facebook. Zuckerberg received an honorary doctorate from the school in 2017. His current net worth is about $272 billion.
Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Block, in 2009.
Thomas SAMSON—Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
The cofounder of Twitter and Block, Jack Dorsey is a double dropout. After a brief stint at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Dorsey called it quits before trying again at New York University. One semester before he would have graduated in 1999, Dorsey ditched school to focus on founding Twitter. After selling the social media platform to Elon Musk in 2022, he came home with a $268 million windfall. His current net worth is about $4.7 billion.
Sam Altman
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 to work on his first startup: Loopt, a location-sharing app. By 2015, he had helped cofound OpenAI, the leading AI organization behind ChatGPT. His net worth is now about $2 billion.
Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison, cofounder, chairman, and CTO of Oracle
Mark Peterson—Corbis/Getty Images
Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle, first attended the University of Illinois thinking he might one day become a doctor. After the death of his adoptive mother, he dropped out, then later attended the University of Chicago. While he never obtained a degree from either institution, his move to California opened doors into the tech industry. After jumping from job to job, he met Bob Miner and Ed Oates, and together they created the company that would later become Oracle. He is currently the second-richest person in the world, with a net worth of just over $300 billion.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, in 1995
Patrick Durand—Sygma/Getty Images
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates enrolled at Harvard University in 1973 before leaving two years later to lead the computer company. While he admitted in the early years he wanted to return to school and finish his degree, he’s since become one of the most recognized names in the world. His net worth is about $123 billion.
Why Gen Zers are turning their backs on higher education
Being a college dropout is by no means the secret to becoming a billionaire—after all, many top business leaders have multiple degrees to their name, such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
However, Gen Z is increasingly having doubts about whether the promise of a high-paying, secure job after spending four years on campus will be fulfilled; more than a third of graduates believe their degree was a “waste of money,” according to a recent survey by Indeed.
With millions of young people unable to find jobs in their desired industry, there may be some validity to their concerns. Zuckerberg suggested the disconnect may come from colleges being out of sync with today’s workforce needs.
“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are … really big,” he said on This Past Weekend, a podcast with Theo Von.
“The fact that college is just so expensive for so many people, and then you graduate and you’re in debt.”
During the 2019 reveal of the Tesla Cybertruck, the company’s chief designer Franz von Holzhausen threw steel balls at the truck to demonstrate its sturdiness, but instead shattered two windows. In a recent interview, von Holzhausen said the mishap became a “great marketing moment.” Tesla began selling T-shirts alluding to the accident, and CEO Elon Musk claimed the company saw 200,000 orders for Cybertrucks in the days following its launch.
Some may call Franz von Holzhausen’s accidental destruction of a Tesla Cybertruck window a blunder; von Holzhausen would prefer to call it a “great meme” instead.
During the 2019 reveal presentation of the Tesla Cybertruck, von Holzhausen, the company’s chief designer, threw steel balls at the vehicle, intending to demonstrate the windows CEO Elon Musk said were made of “armor glass” were indeed extra tough. The windows, however, unexpectedly shattered, leaving Musk to deliver the rest of his presentation of the new truck while standing in front of the damaged car. Tesla’s stock fell more than 5% the next day.
While the incident seemed like an omen, indicative of the Cybertruck being poised to fail, the botched demonstration actually opened up an opportunity to give the new model a spotlight, van Holzhausen said in an interview with Tesla Club Austria published on Saturday.
“It was just one of those Murphy’s Law kind of things where something about happens, but it turned out to be a great meme,” von Holzhausen said, referring to the phenomenon of when something can go wrong, it usually will. “And I think in an odd sort of way—we don’t do marketing—but it turned into a great marketing moment.”
“It was not an expected moment, but in that moment, you have to roll with it,” he added.
Following the reveal of the vehicle, Musk posted a video on X of van Holzhausen throwing a steel ball at the model Cybertruck before its launch, with its windows withstanding the force of the throw with no visible damage. The video was viewed more than 6 million times within three days of its posting.
“Guess we have some improvements to make before production haha,” Musk wrote.
Days later, Musk touted the success of the Cybertruck launch, saying Tesla had received more than 200,000 orders for the vehicle. While Tesla does not break out Cybertruck numbers when it reports earnings, instead grouping them with the Model S and X, the company recalled nearly all of the Cybertrucks it had on the road earlier this year due to an issue where an exterior panel could become detached, and that only tallied around 46,000 vehicles.
Bigger problems than broken windows
Despite Musk’s preorder optimism, Cybertruck’s inauspicious launch was a sign of things to come for the vehicle. Though Musk initially bragged the truck would retail at only $39,900 when it was expected to hit the market in late 2021, the Cybertruck faced years of delays, debuting in November 2023 with a price tag of $60,990.
Tesla tried to reclaim the shattered glass mishap with a $45 T-shirt sold on its website, but the brand was developing an otherwise soured reputation on other parts of the internet, particularly as concerns mounted over the security of the Cybertrucks, which saw numerous recalls as a result of a malfunctioning tire pressure monitoring system, among other issues—including the aforementioned recall of all 46,100 Cybertrucks ever delivered back in March.
To pile onto its troubles, multiple deaths have occurred following Cybertruck crashes. One wrongful death lawsuit alleged the truck had defective safety mechanisms after a man in Houston died in a crashed Cybertruck that burst into flames.
Safety concerns and recalls associated with the Cybertruck have coincided with faltering sales for the truck. The vehicle’s demand remained steady last year, but Cybertrucks are now piling up in lots as dealerships navigate stockpiles of the unwanted vehicles. Last quarter, Cox Automotive reported Cybertruck sales plummeted 51% year-over-year to just 4,300 vehicles, eclipsed by the Ford F-150 Lightning and GMC Hummer EV truck as legacy brands gain market momentum.
“Suffice it to say, the hyper-competitive EV market is providing the troubled automaker no relief,” Cox Automotive said in its report.
Tesla did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
We define who we are not in times of ease—but in moments of fear. Today, fear is everywhere: in politics, in the markets, and in our planet’s future. However, uncertainty is also a call to lead with clarity, with intention, and with a long view. These are the moments that test legitimacy and define our legacy. When fear tempts us to retreat from what we know is right, it is precisely then that we must ask: What does the evidence tell us, and what kind of world do we want to create?
In today’s polarized environment, where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk analysis are under political attack, it’s easy to get swept up in the noise. Organizations like Adasina Social Capital, American Pride Rises Network and countless other values-aligned investors and entities have been outspoken advocates of DEI and ESG investing long before these attacks started. Our steadfastness has always been grounded in prudent investing and social justice values. Beneath the political noise, DEI and ESG are value-driven principles that improve outcomes across the board. From performance to customer loyalty, they reflect smart business tactics. They are strategic investing essentials, deeply tied to financial performance and risk management.
Institutional investors agree: 87% still believe ESG factors—including DEI considerations—are indicators of financial risk, not ideological positions. In an environment charged with fear and polarization, some may retreat from these proven frameworks in search of perceived safety. But like anyone in a volatile marketplace understands, smart money demands we stay the course. Integrating environmental risks, social dynamics, and governance structures leads to savvier decisions and stronger portfolios. It’s not political—it’s prudent.
DEI drives measurable performance
Companies leading the pack in diversity outperform those at the bottom by a remarkable 36% in profitability. The gains extend even further, showing that diverse organizations see 19% higher revenues from innovation. Most compelling of all, highly diverse teams make better decisions up to 87% of the time.
These aren’t just feel-good stats—they’re flashing signals to investors: ignore DEI, and you’re leaving performance on the table.
The cost of retreat
Since rolling back its DEI programs, Targethas seen 5 million fewer shopping trips among customers, with CEO Brian Cornell confirming that sales fell because of “the reaction to the updates we shared on [DEI] in January” as a key factor driving the decline. Meanwhile, Costco saw nearly 7.7 million more visits since doubling down on its commitment to DEI.
The impact extends beyond consumer behavior. In a recent survey of 750 U.S. business leaders, 2 in 3 say their company suffered consequences after cutting DEI programs, including diminished employee morale and difficulty hiring top talent. The workforce impact is stark: 82% of employees said pulling back on DEI made them less engaged, and 62% of job seekers say they’d turn down offers from companies that don’t stand for diversity. These consequences represent material risks to business performance that prudent investors must consider when evaluating potential investments.
Recognizing these market realities, 1 in 3 business leaders in the above study say DEI is being reinstated. 75% admitted that whether or not their company has a DEI program ultimately comes down to what’s best for the bottom line, an admission that signals that business fundamentals, not political positioning, are still driving long-term decision-making.
ESG strengthens investment resilience
The politicization of ESG has created similar challenges, but the fundamental investment logic remains sound. Global insured losses from natural disasters reached $140 billion in 2024, the third most expensive year on record, forcing insurers to integrate climate risk data into pricing and underwriting decisions. To tell investors not to consider ESG factors forces them to intentionally ignore relevant information about a company, and investors simply won’t accept such constraints when performance and profitability demand comprehensive analysis. Smart investors know the truth: environmental risks hit supply chains, social issues affect talent retention, and governance impacts decision-making. These aren’t buzzwords—they’re business fundamentals. More than 75% of S&P 500 companies still tie executive compensation to ESG metrics, recognizing these factors as core business considerations. Market evidence continues to support this approach, as companies with strong ESG profiles show more resilient stock performance during market turbulence.
Shareholder support remains strong
Recent shareholder voting patterns offer the clearest proof that investors remain committed to DEI and ESG risk analysis. In 2025, every single anti-DEI shareholder proposal—across 32 major companies—has failed and they’re consistently rejected by margins of 97-100%. Major companies across the political spectrum, including Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, and Goldman Sachs, have all seen overwhelming shareholder support for maintaining DEI initiatives. Remarkably, company management largely recommended voting against anti-DEI proposals as well, demonstrating robust alignment between corporate leadership and shareholders.
This universal failure rate across these major corporations reveals that institutional investors view diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as business necessities, not political positions. . Market demand for ESG data has resulted in Bloomberg, MSCI, and S&P Global all increasing their ESG-related research and analytics products in 2024-2025, responding to institutional investor demand for comprehensive risk assessment tools.
The confident path forward
The current political environment has shifted the conversation around DEI and ESG, but wise organizations know nothing real has changed the underlying financial logic that drives smart investing. While others retreat, those who recognize DEI and ESG considerations as essential investing tools—not political statements—may find themselves uniquely positioned for what’s ahead. The market doesn’t follow rhetoric. It follows returns.
In moments of fear, we’re tested. But what will last is how we chose to act when it mattered.
History will remember that the smart money wasn’t afraid—it was bold and invested with clarity, courage, and conviction.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Palantir Technologies just achieved a milestone that would have seemed outlandish even for its boldest promoters a year ago: a first-ever billion-dollar quarter, propelled by a runaway boom in artificial intelligence that is now fundamentally transforming how the company operates—and how many employees it believes it needs.
The software and data analytics giant reported $1 billion in revenue for its most recent quarter, up 48% year-over-year, as it dramatically outpaced Wall Street estimates and posted surges in both commercial and government contracts. U.S. revenue alone jumped 68% to $733 million, with domestic commercial sales skyrocketing 93%. Profit, too, soared by 33% to $327 million, and Palantir raised its outlook for the year, projecting full-year revenues of $4.14 billion–$4.15 billion.
The company’s “rule of 40” score—a key measure of growth plus profit margin—hit a near-unprecedented 94%, “once again obliterating the metric,” according to Karp. Palantir’s executives made it clear there is one main source for these new levels of productivity: artificial intelligence, blended into every layer of its business and rapidly automating tasks that once required armies of highly paid coders and IT staff.
CEO Alex Karp was notably exuberant in both the earnings call and his shareholder letter. “This was a phenomenal quarter,” he wrote in the earnings release. “We continue to see the astonishing impact of AI leverage.”
In a subsequent appearance on CNBC, Karp said, “We’re planning to grow our revenue … while decreasing our number of people,” and described what AI is enabling his company to do. “This is a crazy, efficient revolution. The goal is to get 10x revenue and have 3,600 people. We have now 4,100.” Karp also laid out the company’s goals on the earnings call with analysts, explaining that it won’t conduct mass layoffs, but will freeze hiring and rely on AI to multiply every employee’s productivity. This has already been under way: in March, the company cut its IT workforce from 200 to fewer than 80 full-time employees.
Earnings call victory lap
Karp and other Palantir executives celebrated their astonishing quarter on the analyst call, saying that Palantir’s bespoke models are core to maximizing the impact large language models. “LLMs simply don’t work in the real world without Palantir,” Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Taylor said. “This is the reality fueling our growth.”
Taylor discussed how Palantir is thriving where other firms are not seeing the return on investment yet from AI. “LLMs, on their own, are at best a jagged intelligence divorced from even basic understanding,” Taylor said in remarks reported by Business Insider. “In one moment, they may appear to outperform humans in some problem-solving task, but in the next, they make catastrophic errors no human would ever make.”
Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar said that “twenty years of grinding has built a unique moat and a massive lead.” He also claimed that “AI is giving the American worker superpowers,” citing advances seen at the AI race summit in DC from examples including an ICU nurse, a factory worker, a hospital administrator, and an electric vehicle battery maintenance technician.
Karp was so bullish on Palantir’s particular employment of AI technology that he issued a challenge to higher education and elite institutions like the Ivy League. All the previous credentials for success are worthless, he suggested. “If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian — no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said. He added that the environment at Palantir is different from what most workers have experienced: “Most of them come from university, where they’ve just been engaged in platitudes.”
Karp told CNBC that he wants to engage with unions as reindustralization will require AI, arguing that blue-collar workers’ salaries should go up as a result. “This is an America story,” he said. Another statement from Karp: “Just tell the haters: read ’em and weep.”
“Palantir is clearly benefiting from AI industry momentum across its government and commercial customer bases,” noted William Blair analysts. Meanwhile Bank of America Research reiterated its buy rating, saying it expects growth to continue as Palantir “remains the best in class for deploying and operationalizing AI into enterprises.”
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
McDonald’s is reaching into its past to appeal to younger customers. The company will resurrect the characters of McDonaldland, including Birdie, Hamburglar and Mayor McCheese starting Aug. 12. A grown up version of the Happy Meal will also be offered.
Grimace’s return to McDonald’s was a viral hit. Now the company is bringing back a gaggle of characters from its past.
For the first time in 20 years, McDonald’s plans to incorporate Ronald McDonald, Grimace, Birdie, Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese and the Fry Friends (aka the Fry Guys) into its marketing. Still MIA are Officer Big Mac, Captain Crook (basically a Hamburglar for the Filet-O-Fish) and Ronald’s Dog Sundae.
Starting Aug. 12, the chain will launch the McDonaldland Meal, an adult Happy Meal of sorts featuring either a Quarter Pounder with Cheese or 10-piece Chicken McNuggets, fries, a collectible souvenir and the new Mt. McDonaldland Shake, which features a mystery flavor the company is encouraging diners to figure out.
It’s a marketing push that could appeal to both Gen Z and Ge X.
“Over the past few years we’ve seen how fans flock to our characters, everyone from Grimace to the Hamburglar. But many, especially the new generation, don’t know that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Jennifer “JJ” Healan, McDonald’s vice president of U.S. marketing, brand, content & culture. “It’s a chance for us to give fans a new, modern way to experience this magical world.”
The meals will include one of six collectible tins that include postcards, stickers and more, each inspired by the different characters.
The McDonaldland ad campaign dates back to 1971 and featured everything from Apple Pie Trees to Hamburger Bushes. The ads for it were … well, pure 1970s.
(Intrigued and or horrified? Here’s almost 10 minutes of the ads in a row.)
McDonald’s isn’t stopping with the meals. It’s also launching a line of McDonaldland merchandise, ranging from luggage tags to shirts and hats. The line is made in collaboration with Pacsun and will be available on Aug. 12. Another line with Away goes on sale Aug. 18.
Fujifilm is raising prices across the board on cameras and lenses. Included in the move are the X100VI, a TikTok favorite, which will cost $200 more. One camera will see an $800 price increase.
Fuiifilm has increased the prices on virtually all of its cameras and lenses, with prices jumping from $50 or so to $800. Included in the increase is Fuji X100VI, which has seen a big boost in popularity as TikTok influencers have talked it up. (There are more than 11,000 posts about the camera at present.)
The X100VI will now cost $1,799, a $200 increase. The company’s highest-end camera, the GFX100 II (body only) will receive the highest increase, jumping $800 to $8,299.
Fuji’s not alone. Canon has already raised prices once since the tariffs were first announced and has warned it could do so again.
Fuji is in a somewhat precarious position, though. Last year, the company moved its supply chain to China as TikTok love for the X100VI’s predecessor was just as strong, creating inventory issues. When Trump announced the first round of tariffs, however, it pivoted, bringing some manufacturing back to Japan.
Japan, subsequently, was hit with an additional 15% tariff.
The continued confusion over tariffs is causing all sorts of pricing whiplash for companies and consumers. It’s also causing economic agita. Stocks have yo-yo’d in recent weeks, with charts looking like a theme park rollercoaster track. And big financial names continue to sound warnings.
Danny Moses, founder of Moses Ventures and the subject of the book/film The Big Short, recently warned there are signs of stagflation in the market.
“There’s just so many moving parts right now that it’s really hard to decipher where you’re going to pinpoint,” Moses told Fortune. “Anyone can find a data point that says it’s inflationary, and someone can find a data point that says it’s not. So it’s just difficult. But bottom line … Is the [economy] going through a stagflationary period? It appears to me, it is.”
The new Fuji camera is on display at the Fujifilm booth at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre in Shanghai, China, on July 17, 2025, during Photo & Imaging Shanghai 2025.
Big Oil has taken over the Environmental Protection Agency.
Last Tuesday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin made official his plan to overturn a 16-year-old ruling allowing the government to protect the country and economy from the greenhouse gas pollution fueling the climate crisis. The announcement effectively gifts the largest and most dangerous polluters in the country the right to unregulated emissions. People around the world will be harmed for generations.
It is truly Orwellian to see the EPA—an agency signed into existence by Richard Nixon to protect the public from environmental degradation—divesting itself of the responsibility to address the ravages of the climate crisis during a summer of extreme weather and following the hottest year in recorded history.
But it is not surprising.
Zeldin has made no secret of his ambitions to use the EPA as a means for deregulation and driving “a dagger straight into the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring back auto jobs to the U.S. and more.” He is of course wrong on every point.
The more-than 10,000 businesses committed to science-based emissions reductions should be outraged. These businesses will be left between government mandates—or lack thereof—and market momentum. Corporate leaders are already overwhelmingly invested in climate programs because they’re good business and build resilience, but an erratic regulatory environment throws those practices into question.
Performative orders like this leave businesses scrambling to understand what it means for them. Add in legal challenges to the directive, and businesses will be stuck in limbo as cases play out in court. While the administration frames this as a rebuke against an ideology, companies worldwide will feel the effects.
Deregulation to this level will only add to the skyrocketing costs caused by the climate crisis on our collective bottom line. Whether a company has emissions targets or not, extreme weather disasters are increasingly affecting more businesses. The Census Bureau found that nearly one out of 10 businesses experienced monetary loss because of extreme weather. In total, reporting businesses lost 32% of revenue due to the events. In 2024 alone we suffered $182.7 billion in economic damage from 27 individual billion-dollar climate disasters. More than 1,500 people lost their lives in climate disasters in the past three years.
Yet the Trump administration would have us believe the greenhouse gases that directly contribute to intensifying storms and fires do not pose a danger to the public.
Taken in tandem with the targeted evisceration of the renewable energy industry, Zeldin is indeed “driving a dagger”— twisting it in the back of years of stability, investments, science, facts, progress, and protections for businesses and people that deserve clean air, clean water, and some degree of security.
So who benefits? The administration’s powerful fossil fuel benefactors. For them, a reversal that undermines years of hard work, investment and time from the public and private sector to protect us counts as a win.
The simplest response to the turmoil this policy will cause is to continue doing the work. If you’ve made climate commitments, don’t back down. The widespread corporate “greenhushing”—or when businesses are afraid to reaffirm their bottom-line-driven climate action policies for fear of drawing the administration’s ire—must end. To compete globally and create long-term stability, we must speak out. We are past the point of corporate “optics.” The climate crisis will worsen whether Zeldin and the Trump administration believe it or not. No executive order, law or statement can wish it away.
For our part at Patagonia, we will stay the course. We will continue to invest in decarbonization. It is good for business, customers and community. It is also staying true to our purpose.
A committed corporate sector can prove this administration’s invitation to irresponsible behavior will not undermine commitments to shareholders, employees and customers. Our businesses and communities depend on it. If anything, this moment must become a call to the business community to show Zeldin and the federal government just how powerful the market can be.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Gen Z often gets flak for starting their days glued to their phones—but GoTo Foods CEO Jim Holthouser similarly begin his 12-hour workdays “meme-hunting” before lifting weights. The chief executive leading a billion-dollar company has 12-hour workdays jam-packed with meetings with his direct-reports, employees, and mentors. Yet to wind down each night, he reads 100 emails to hit “inbox-zero,” just like ex-Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban and Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena.
Many CEOs may swear by morning cold plunges or green juice shots to jump-start their days. But GoTo Foods CEO Jim Holthouser begins his 12-hour workdays with black coffee and reading the news—but also, scouring the internet for jokes to send to his friends, much like Gen Z and millennials might.
“I do something a little ridiculous but very fun: I go meme-hunting. I’ve got friend groups from different chapters of my life, and we send memes to each other 365 days a year,” Holthouser recently revealed to Business Insider. “Some are political, some are just absurd. It’s not about the jokes so much as it’s a way to stay connected to people I care about.”
Holthouser leads a food empire spanning Carvel, Cinnabon, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Auntie Anne’s, and Jamba Juice, with more than 7,000 restaurants worldwide and system-wide sales of more than $4.2 billion since 2020.
To get a handle on all his iconic brands, he starts work at 8:30 a.m.—a bit later than the typical Silicon Valley executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, setting 5 a.m. alarms. But like most leaders, his days are often long, extending into the late hours of the night. To get the energy he needs to lead GoTo Foods, he swears by his morning workouts set to the tune of classic oldies.
“I’m pretty religious about my daily workouts. Three days a week are cardio, and three are weights,” Holthouser said. “I’m on the Peloton at least once a week. If I’m not listening to coach Leanne Hainsby to get me through an intense session, I’m listening to 70s music.”
From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m: Meetings, mentorship and beers
Once he gets to the office, Holthouser does a sweep of the floor of his Atlanta headquarters. He explains he tries to remember his employees’ names and hobbies to try and nurture a caring work environment.
Then, the meetings come—he checks in with his 10 direct reports each week for an hour each. Holthouser is also keen on making time for those outside of his direct circle, even those who are vying to be mentored by the food mogul.
“I also do regular skip-level meetings with brand heads who don’t report to me directly. We’ll grab a beer, lunch, have a casual chat in my office,” Holthouser said. “It’s not about metrics; it’s about getting to know each other.”
“A lot of people here have asked me to mentor them. If someone has the guts to reach out, I’ll almost always say yes. Most of the time, it’s just a monthly lunch. But it’s meaningful for both of us.”
Fortune reached out to GoTo Foods for comment.
Holthouser’s day doesn’t end at 5 p.m.—and he can’t sleep until his inbox is clear
Holthouser’s five-to-nine after the “typical workday” ends doesn’t look like TV binge-watching or bar hopping with friends. He works late everyday in an effort to “mentor, check in, give recognition, and stay connected”—but also to maintain the right connections to help GoTo Foods succeed.
“My day doesn’t end until 8 or 9 at night, often because I have a lot of entertaining and after-hours meetings and activities to do,” Holthouser continued. “We try to stay dialed into the local political scene to develop those kinds of contacts—you never know when you’re going to need them.”
When he finally gets a minute to himself, he catches up with his wife over a glass of wine, and pursues his childhood passion: playing the piano. The CEO said that he started practicing at the age of 6, and was later invited to study at Julliard when he was just 11. His talent helped him pay his way through undergraduate and graduate school, playing at piano bars and nice restaurants. Now, he sits down for 30 minutes each night to play and “decompress”—it’s a daily habit that helps him not think about work. But there’s one last thing Holthouser has to check off his agenda to be able to sleep.
Like ex-Shark Tankinvestor Mark Cuban and SquarespaceCEO Anthony Casalena, Holthouser reads all his unread emails by his 11 p.m. bedtime. If he doesn’t hit inbox-zero, it’s harder for him to completely relax. The CEO said that answering messages from his more than 2,000 franchises is always his top priority, as “they’re the lifeblood of our company.”
“I’m one of those inbox-zero people. If I don’t clear my email before bed, I won’t sleep well,” Holthouser said. “I probably get around 100 emails a day, but only 30% of them are truly important.”
Leading a billion-dollar business is exhausting work. Yet GoTo Foods' boss Jim Holthouser winds down after his 12-hour work day by reading 100 more emails.
Just below the Arctic Circle, Northvolt’s flagship battery factory once stood as a beacon of Europe’s ambitions to power its future with clean energy. But following the company’s recent bankruptcy, its last production lines have fallen silent.
Yet one thing is certain: neither the European Union nor Sweden will rescue Northvolt, even though it was once Europe’s best funded startup, having secured $15 billion in funding commitments from investors and governments.
How a company founded by two former Tesla executives managed to fail despite such a massive amount of capital will be a case study for business schools for years to come. It also raises questions as to whether the government did enough to support its former battery champion, and how Europe should revise its approach to competing with China in high-growth, low-carbon industries.
What went wrong?
While Canada and Germany both provided significant support and grants to the Swedish company, its home country largely abstained, understandably raising criticism from shareholders and former executives. After all, the dominant Chinese industry has long benefited from state aid, which helped it reach the maturity to drive down unit costs to 30% lower than batteries made in Europe.
However, it’s far from clear whether more financial support would have made a decisive difference, given that Northvolt was already so well-financed. According to Craig Douglas, a partner at climate tech venture capital firm World Fund, Northvolt’s problems had more to do with the difficulty of playing catch-up with China, and the missteps it made along the way.
“If you want to scale up new production capability in a commoditized market, your executions have to be spectacular; Northvolt’s were not,” says Douglas. “They continued to scale up and expand geographically before they had a good handle on their actual production capability. They did not get their yield numbers up and their delivery times were delayed, so they could not be competitive.”
As a result, automotive customers started losing confidence. BMW delivered a major blow by canceling a $2.15 billion order amid delays. Scania had to secure alternative supply for its electric fleet as Northvolt struggled to ramp up output.
Even Volkswagen, which held a 21% stake in Northvolt, eventually lost faith and took a major writedown on its investment in 2024, moving forward with its own subsidiary, PowerCo—a move that underscores the ongoing demand for homegrown batteries.
Stepping down as CEO after the company applied for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S., Northvolt cofounder Peter Carlsson said that while the company’s challenges were multifaceted, he had to take responsibility for the fact it had ended up in this situation.
A make-or-break moment for Europe’s EV sector
Northvolt’s failure is undeniably a blow to the wider ecosystem. For Douglas, it “will make a lot of the larger investors nervous about future scale-ups, and stakeholders will be much more focused on the scale-up manufacturing risks than before.”
“If you want to scale up new production capability in a commoditized market, your executions have to be spectacular; Northvolt’s were not.”
Craig Douglas, a partner at climate tech venture capital firm World Fund
However, it’s important to remember that Northvolt wasn’t the only scale-up in the race. “It’s not because some have struggled, like Northvolt, that it’s the end of the game. Europe needs to keep pushing,” French entrepreneur Benoit Lemaignan recently said. His startup, Verkor, is backed by Renault, and secured $2.15 billion to build an EV gigafactory in Dunkirk.
Once presented as the French Northvolt, Verkor has moved more slowly than its former peer. Although its pilot line located in Grenoble is manufacturing cells—the basic units that store energy in a battery—full-scale production in Dunkirk hasn’t started yet.
This means that Verkor is still in a critical transition phase, but it can at least now count on a little help from Brussels.
The European Commission recently announced it will distribute approximately $1 billion in grants to six EV battery projects, as it seeks to level the playing field and support Europe’s transition to a clean, competitive, and resilient industrial base. These include Verkor, but also NOVO Energy, a former joint venture between Northvolt and Volvo Cars, the latter of which recently took full ownership; Cellforce, owned by Porsche; and ACC, backed by Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz.
“It’s not because some have struggled, like Northvolt, that it’s the end of the game. Europe needs to keep pushing”
“There are enough examples in history that show that it is seldom too late to catch up, but the question is whether we are willing to do what it takes to compete,” says Andreas Fischer, a founding partner at deep tech VC firm First Momentum Capital. For him, this would require investing heavily into the entire European EV industry, not trying to pick a ‘winning’ company.
Protectionism, specialization and long-termism
It’s a view shared by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which says that we’re in a “make or break” moment for the European battery industry. Although China—which has extensive manufacturing know-how and supply chain integration—now produces three-quarters of batteries globally, there are pathways for building a more competitive battery industry in Europe, beyond blanket subsidization.
“All start with ensuring strong domestic demand, which gives manufacturers time to hone production processes and develop strong regional industrial ecosystems. On this front, clear policy that signals continued demand growth and reduces investment risks is essential,” the IEA wrote earlier this year.
Fischer adds that policy support for the European battery industry would also need to involve either loosening regulations or turning to protectionist policies, such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, an EU system to confirm that a price has been paid for the carbon emitted during the production of certain imported goods, which will fully apply from 2026.
Douglas agrees—“things like the CBAM or local content requirements could help create a level playing field with a clearer value add for being local”—but still thinks it is going to be difficult for Europe to compete in the two main types of lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric vehicles: LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate), prices for which have dropped, especially in China; and NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide), in which Korea and Japan have developed strong expertise.
Instead, Douglas believes that Europe stands a better chance at high-end cells and new cell chemistry. He also points to other, related industries where the price gap with China is either less, or just less important: “Decarbonized industrial manufacturing, recycling and circularity, biotech and agritech, and energy business model innovations all have great starts in Europe.”
Nonetheless, Northvolt’s collapse exposed scale-up shortcomings that need to be addressed if Europe wants to build the supply chains that are crucial for its sovereignty, in EV batteries and beyond.
One of these, according to Dr. Herbert Mangesiu, a general partner at early-stage deep tech VC firm Vsquared, is that western VC ecosystems should better appreciate how hard it is to build economically viable production systems at the scale and sophistication of China’s. “It is crucial to have appropriate risk management and oversight engraved in governance structures, i.e., the ability to judge progress relative to budgets,” he cautions.
At a system level, cheap energy and a skilled workforce are also a necessary “baseline” for competitiveness, Mangesiu adds. Achieving those can take time, but that itself is a lesson from how the Chinese built their own thriving industries. Says Mangesiu: “China shows consistency in industry policies which allows reliable and competitive ecosystems to build up, in particular in cleantech sectors.”
Swedish megabrand Ikea’s affordable self-assembly furniture has made Scandi style the go-to look for homes, hotels and Airbnbs all over Europe. More than 30 million of its ubiquitous Poang armchairs, for example—curious-but-memorable names also being an Ikea speciality)—have been sold since launch in 1977, making it one of the most popular furniture products ever.
But the company has another, less well-known claim to fame. Since 2009 it has invested over €4.2 billion ($4.9 billion) in renewable energy, which now provides 75% of the electricity used by the business to make, transport and retail all that furniture. “Today, it turns out that we are also a mid-sized utility company, although to be honest that was not part of the strategy,” deadpans Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka (the largest Ikea franchisee, responsible for 90% of group sales).
It’s only half a joke: if their output was sold on the power market, the 49 wind farms and 26 solar parks owned by Ingka do produce enough low carbon electricity to meet the needs of 1.47 million EU households.
The investment has certainly paid off in carbon terms. The firm’s CO2 emissions—scope 1,2 and 3—are down 30% since the Paris Agreement of 2015, while sales have grown by 24% over the same period. Yet what started out as a desire to do the right thing for the planet and the brand (68% of Ikea customers think that climate change is the most serious global challenge, says Brodin) has morphed into an unexpected source of competitive advantage.
$4.9 billion
Ikea’s investment in renewable energy since 2009
“When we set out to invest, we were not sure that it would be smart from an economic point of view. But our energy bills are down 27% [from 2015] so we have saved a lot of money. Over a three-to-five-year period, renewables come out at about half the price [of fossil fuel generated power]. People think that renewable energy will come at a financial premium, but actually it’s the opposite.”
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a two-year spike in wholesale gas prices, a similar change of emphasis has occurred in Brussels. The EU Commission’s latest plan for its carbon economy—the Clean Industrial Deal, announced in February—has dropped previous appeals to the collective consciences of business leaders to help save the planet, in favor of focusing on the competitiveness advantages of further adopting renewable power across the continent.
Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said that the deal will “cut the ties that still hold our companies back, and make a clear business case for Europe”.
Alongside reforms to electricity and gas markets designed to cut energy costs, the Clean Industrial Deal aims to mobilize €100 billion of EU funding to support low-carbon manufacturing, particularly in hard-to-abate industries like metals, chemicals and cement that rely on hydrocarbons for their highly energy-intensive processes. The Commission predicts the policy program will create over 500,000 new jobs, and ample opportunities for European businesses looking to carve a competitive, low-carbon niche.
Green steel start-up Stegra is one such company. It has raised a total of €6.5 billion (including a €250 million grant from the EU innovation fund) to build a plant at Boden in the north of Sweden which will use 100% renewable energy to produce 5 million tonnes of homegrown ‘green’ steel per annum by 2030, with a carbon footprint 95% smaller than a traditional ‘brown’ steel plant.
Stegra’s process uses renewable power to generate hydrogen, which is then used not as a fuel but as a chemical reagent. Production will begin at a lower level in 2026, and despite a 25%-30% price premium over brown steel, it is already proving popular: the firm has forward-sold around 1.25 million tonnes—half of its initial production target—to customers eager to get in on the green steel ground floor.
“Our customers are planning ahead, they see that brown steel will eventually be more expensive than green steel once the full cost of carbon is included. They are not buying it for branding or marketing purposes, it’s pure economics,” says Henrik Henriksson, Stegra’s CEO.
High costs, big barriers
If von der Leyen’s vision of secure, green growth is to be realized at scale for more companies, Europe needs to ramp up the transition to renewables significantly, at the same time as bringing down costs.
By the end of 2023, Europe (excluding Russia) had 786 gigawatts of installed renewable generation capacity, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). That’s an increase of 79% since 2014, and the pace has continued since, with a record increase of 65.6 gigawatts in the EU alone last year and another record predicted this year.
However, it still leaves a long way to go to reach the EU’s ambitious targets of 69% of electricity consumption and 42.5% of total energy coming from renewables by 2030. According to the European Commission’s 2022 REPowerEU plan to end reliance on Russian fossil fuels, the EU would need to nearly double its capacity to 1,236 gigawatts to achieve this goal. Some estimates suggest this will cost around €1.5 trillion.
Then there’s the need to update Europe’s grids, not just to handle the greater peak loads from these investments, but also to cover the distance between the best sites for renewable generation (solar in southern Europe, wind in coastal western Europe) and distant urban centers. So far, network investment has considerably lagged investments in renewables themselves.
“Because of the variability of wind [and solar], there is an urgent need for more interconnectors, and more investment in grids,” says Christophe Zipf, spokesperson for WindEurope, the trade body for the EU wind energy industry. One such mooted project is the North Sea Renewables Grid, a £20bn project to link 400 wind turbines in the North Sea, to facilitate the exchange of wind power between countries on both sides of the water. “Where there are such clusters it makes sense to link them to more than one country—the U.K., Denmark and Belgium for example,” Zipf says.
But where will the money come from? Given the right regulatory environment, there is capital ready to move, says Francecso Starace, partner at EQT, the world’s third largest private equity investor, which has invested €17 billion in renewables in Europe over the past 15 years. There is already quite an appetite for investment in the grid and distribution networks. The networks need to be restructured for the modern world, not for the world of 50 years ago when they were built.
“Regulators have a major role to play, but they need to understand that more money needs to be invested into the networks. Network operators need regulation that incentivizes investment rather than discouraging them from doing that, which has been the case for many years,” says Starace, a former CEO of Enel.
In practice, pro-investment regulation can mean several things: improvements in investor returns, relaxation of planning restrictions and greater central coordination of national transmission upgrade schemes.
Even if all that happens, what of the days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing? Renewables may be homegrown, but their output is inherently unpredictable.
“Network operators need regulation that incentivizes investment rather than discouraging them from doing that, which has been the case for many years”
Starace, former CEO of Enel
As a result, Starace believes the next big thing will be grid-scale battery storage. “We believebatteries will be the next source of explosive growth. Battery storage can deal with fluctuations, and batteries are becoming pervasively competitive and a compelling investment.”
Battery infrastructure on this scale would also require substantial capital, of course, altogether making the idea of cheaper power by 2030 seem rather less likely: whether through bills or taxes, someone’s got to pay.
But relying on fickle global gas markets no longer seems an option once your main supplier turns into an adversary, and in the long term the economic logic is there: once the infrastructure is built, the marginal unit cost of renewable power is far lower. In the meantime, as companies like Ikea and Stegra are showing, European businesses are increasingly looking for opportunities from the transition itself, rather than just waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel.
“You’re losing,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told an audience in Dublin earlier in July, speaking about Europe and its companies. He warned of the continent’s declining share in global GDP, and suggested a pro-growth agenda was needed to make up for the shortfall. “Europe has some serious issues to fix,” he had previously said.
Back in Brussels, many were nodding in agreement. After all, European growth has been tepid in the past decade, particularly compared to the US and China. In our own Fortune 500 Global list, which ranks companies by revenue, the number of European companies fell back from 142 in 2004 to 98 in 2024. And almost no new tech or industrial giants have emerged out of Europe in that time.
Yet it wasn’t Dimon’s analysis, but that from another one-time banker, former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, a year earlier, that made competitiveness such a hot issue. Notably, he put energy at the center of it.
Former Italian Prime Minister and European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi.
Horacio Villalobos#Corbis/Getty Images
Alongside recommending a greater focus on innovation, security and economic independence, Draghi explicitly linked the continent’s commitment to decarbonization with the competitiveness of its economies.
“Without a plan to transfer the benefits of decarbonization to end-users, energy prices will continue to weigh on growth. The global decarbonization drive is also a growth opportunity for EU industry… yet it is not guaranteed that Europe will seize this opportunity,” wrote Draghi, who minted his reputation in European politics with his “whatever it takes” approach to saving the euro in the global financial crisis.
His message wasn’t that different from similar, previous reports that were quickly forgotten. After all, European industrial electricity prices can be 2-4 times higher than in the U.S., and with the exception of a few smaller countries, energy costs throughout the continent are higher than elsewhere in the industrialized world.
But the economic and geopolitical context in which Draghi delivered his message meant that this time it carried a heightened sense of urgency.
“Europe built its economic model around access to cheap energy from Russia, export markets in China, and security guarantees from the U.S., and none of these things are there anymore. That was the underlying message from Draghi,” Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank, says.
Whether Draghi ever made his analysis so explicitly about Europe’s adversaries and allies isn’t clear: his office declined to comment on the matter when I reached out. But the idea that Europe’s economic competitiveness could only improve if it becomes energy independent, is a key consideration of President von der Leyen’s new European Commission, which started its term less than a year ago.
“The Draghi report is the foundation of the European consensus on the new economic context that must be built at the European level for the next five years,” Stéphane Séjourné, the French Executive Vice President of the European Commission, in charge of the bloc’s industrial agenda, says. “There has truly been a change in approach on these issues… decarbonization is not just a climate plan, it is an economic strategy.”
“Europe built its economic model around access to cheap energy from Russia, export markets in China, and security guarantees from the U.S., and none of these things are there anymore. That was the underlying message from Draghi.”
Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank
There is broad support beyond politics too. The link between Europe’s energy independence, decarbonization and industrialization plans was one of the main agenda items in a meeting between the European Commission and 60 business leaders, including the leaders of SAP and IKEA, this past June in Brussels.
“Russia won’t come back,” Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, Europe’s largest tech company, told me following that meeting. “So we should rather invest in infrastructure and the grid to have access to other sources of energy.”
Jesper Brodin, the CEO of Ingka (IKEA) agreed: “The hard-learned lesson of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and what it meant, is that there is a very strong majority in all camps for European energy independence.”
Making the change
But how can Europe even begin to turn this tide, even if the sense of urgency is real? All of Europe’s economic indicators are still blinking yellow or red, and national budgets are increasingly constrained by recent commitments to invest massively more in defense.
“The fundamental problem is that Europe imports all the fossil fuels it needs,” Tagliapietra said. “Europe is trapped.”
To give an idea, the North Sea, which 25 years ago produced 4.4 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, now produces around 1 million, a figure that is still dropping. The EU alone consumes over 10 million a day, even as it pushes to wean itself off hydrocarbons from Russia, which was its primary long-term supplier.
Faced with this stark reality, Europe wants to generate more homegrown energy, more energy from electricity, and more links between countries’ electricity grids. It’s hardly a small challenge, as electricity (including solar and wind) still only supplies 23% of Europe’s energy needs. But this time Europe is serious about improving and greening the grid.
“Russia won’t come back. So we should rather invest in infrastructure and the grid to have access to other sources of energy.”
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP
Séjourné told me of his plans to advance the “single market”, as one key aspect. He plans to introduce a so-called “28th regime”, for example, so companies can operate all over Europe without having to establish separate entities in each market. (Europe has 27 member states, hence the notion of a 28th regime.)
There are other reforms that could help too, including Draghi’s suggestions of improving or reducing Europe’s “inconsistent and restrictive regulations”.
The goal is ultimately to incentivize the development of all types of European-produced energy, such as wind and solar, in a more coordinated way—and with more focus on speed of execution, compared to the country-by-country, slow, and highly bureaucratic ways of the past.
“Europe wants to go to a world where governments are not planning their energy strategies at the national level only, but… in a way that is fully coordinated with other European countries,” Tagliapietra said.
Will political commitment be enough for the continent to power its future, and enhance its competitiveness on the global stage? Do the continent’s leaders have the capabilities for reform to match their intent? What role will business play? In the remaining articles in this series, we plan to find out.
“I planned my work. I was organized. I was mise en place,” Huang said during a March 2024 interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business. “I washed the living daylights out of those dishes.”
But Huang attributes his wild success in business to the work ethic he picked up during his time with Denny’s as a dishwasher, before he was “promoted” to busboy.
“I never left the station empty-handed. I never came back empty-handed. I was very efficient,” Huang said. “Anyways, eventually I became a CEO. I’m still working on being a good CEO.”
And his alma mater of sorts, Denny’s, has honored Huang the best way they know how: by adding a menu item in honor of his chipmaking behemoth.
Denny’s debuted the aptly named Nvidia Breakfast Bytes earlier this year to pay tribute to Huang’s “remarkable journey from Denny’s dishwasher and server to a tech titan.” The breakfast includes four sausage links that customers can wrap in Denny’s buttermilk silver dollar pancakes and dip in maple syrup—which is Huang’s favorite way to eat the dish, according to Denny’s.
“Jensen’s journey from Denny’s kitchen and dining room to the pinnacle of the tech world is a testament to the power of dreams and determination,” Denny’s CEO Kelli Valade said in a statement. “We’re deeply honored that America’s Diner played a role in NVIDIA’s origin story as a global AI powerhouse.
How Huang cofounded Nvidia
Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963, moved to Thailand at age 5, and moved to Washington State in the U.S. when he was 9. He went to high school outside of Portland, Ore., where he started working for Denny’s at age 15, according to an Nvidia blog post. Huang then earned his electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University, then went on to get his master’s in the same subject from Stanford University in 1992.
Not only did Huang land his first job at Denny’s—but it’s also the place where he and two of his friends cooked up the idea that would make him a billionaire. In 1993, Huang, along with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem (who both worked at Sun Microsystems), met at what was one of Denny’s “most popular” locations in Northern California to discuss “creating a chip that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers,” according to the Nvidia blog post.
“Chris and Curtis said one day they’d like to leave [Sun Microsystems], and they’d like me to go figure out what they’re going to leave for,” Huang said. “They insisted I figure out with them how to build a company.” But with little runway on how to build a business, Huang said he resolved to visit a bookstore to find books on starting a business and found one titled How to Write a Business Plan by Gordon Bell. But the issue was the book was 450 pages long.
“Well, I never got through it. And not even close,” Huang said. “I flipped through a few pages and I go, ‘You know what, by the time I’m done reading this thing, I’ll be out of business.” So with that, Huang took to a Denny’s booth with his two friends to brainstorm a business.
At the time, Huang was working as an engineer with LSI Logic, a company in Santa Clara, Calif., that sold semiconductors and software. Avago Technologies acquired LSI Logic for $6.6 billion in 2014. But Huang kind of skips over that part when he’s telling his career story.
“My first job before CEO was a dishwasher,” Huang said in the Stanford interview. “And I did that very well.”
While at Denny’s that fateful night, Huang, Malachowsky, and Priem “polished off a Lumberjack Slam, Moons Over My Hammy, and a Super Bird sandwich—washed down with plenty of coffee,” according to Nvidia, the perfect fuel for masterminding a new technology. Now there’s a booth dedicated to Huang at an East San Jose Denny’s location.
“The PC revolution was just getting going,” Huang said in the Stanford interview. “We thought, why don’t we build a company that solves problems that a normal computer that is powered by general purpose computing can’t. That became the company’s mission.” Some of the industries “opened up,” Huang said, as a result of Nvidia’s technology, include computational drug design, weather simulation, materials design, robotics, self-driving cars—and the big one: artificial intelligence.
Nvidia’s technology “enabled a whole new way of developing software where the computer wrote the software itself—artificial intelligence as we know it today,” Huang said. “That was the journey.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s leadership advice
While Nvidia has undoubtedly been developing the technology fueling the AI revolution, it had done so relatively quietly until just about a month ago. But in February 2024, its 46% stock surge pushed it past Amazon, adding about $560 billion in market value. Then Nvidia beat out Alphabet to become the third most valuable U.S. company. But there are some skeptics who think Nvidia may be overvalued. Apollo Global Management said that Nvidia’s inflated earnings are creating an AI bubble even “bigger than the 1990s tech bubble.”
But even as successful as Nvidia becomes, Huang consistently reflects on his humble beginnings. He tries to maintain a very flat structure at his company and lends a helping hand where he can. He says (counter to conventional business wisdom) that a CEO should have the most direct reports; he has 50.
“No task is beneath me,” he said. “I used to be a dishwasher. I used to clean toilets. I cleaned a lot of toilets. I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined. And some of them you just can’t unsee.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on March 12, 2024.
Beverly, Massachusetts is the nation’s hottest ZIP code, according to a study by Realtor.com. Houses in the area sell in just 16 days. The Northeast boasts seven of the 10 hottest ZIP codes this year.
While the housing market, overall, has seen better days, some areas are still doing well.
Realtor.com has issued its study of the country’s hottest ZIP codes—and if you’re looking to sell and live in the Northeast, things could be a lot worse.
Beverly, Mass. is the country’s hottest area, particularly houses in the 01915 ZIP code, with houses only staying on the market for an average of 16 days (and selling for an average of $746,000). The Boston suburb has commuter rail access, appealing livability and its houses, while $250,000 higher than the national norm are 16% cheaper than the rest of the Boston metro area.
Seven of the 10 ZIP codes is in the Northeast, in fact. And none of the ZIP codes featured has a median days on market over 3.5 weeks.
Here’s how the 2025 list lines up.
Beverly, Mass. (01915)
Marlton, NJ (08053)
Leominster, Mass. (01453)
Ballwin, Mo. (63021)
Wayne, NJ (07470)
Strongsville, Ohio (44149)
Trumbull, Conn. (06611)
Cumberland, R.I. (02864)
South Windsor, Conn. (06074)
Bexley, Ohio (43209)
National housing inventory was 28.9% higher year-over-year in June of this year, but even with that boost, listings were 12.9% below where they were before the pandemic. In the hottest ZIPs, however, inventory averaged 58.9% below the 2019 levels.
This year marks the third consecutive year that the South and West did not make the list. The addition of Strongsville marks the first time a Cleveland suburb has made the list.
“Buyers are moving fast, thinking big, and choosing communities that offer the right blend of value, access, and quality of life,” wrote Realtor.com. “As mortgage rates remain high and inventory levels gradually recover, expect these kinds of high-performing, value-driven suburban areas to remain at the forefront of market activity.”
OpenAI has removed a feature allowing ChatGPT conversations to be indexed by the Google search engine. The action comes following a growing number of complaints about user privacy. The company called it a “short-lived experiment.”
OpenAI’s “short-lived experiment” with letting people share their ChatGPT conversations with Google’s search engine has come to a close.
The company has removed the feature after a report in Fast Company found thousands of conversations with the chatbot in search results on Google. While those did not have directly identifiable information, several did contain specific details that would aid in discovering who the human half of the conversation was.
OpenAI’s chief information security officer, Dane Stuckey, in a post on Twitter/X announced the feature’s removal last week.
“This was a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations,” he wrote. “Ultimately we think this feature introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to, so we’re removing the option. We’re also working to remove indexed content from the relevant search engines…Security and privacy are paramount for us, and we’ll keep working to maximally reflect that in our products and features.”
While users had to choose to make the chatbot chats shareable via a pop-up window, and OpenAI initially said it felt the labeling on the feature was “sufficiently clear,” there were some concerns raised in the Fast Company story that people could have made the information sharable in order to forward it only to friends or loved ones.
The change in discoverability comes as OpenAI says ChatGPT is set to hit 700 million weekly active users this week. That’s up from 500 million in March and quadruple what its usage was just one year ago.
OpenAI secured $8.3 billion in funding last week and is expecting revenues to top $20 billion by the end of 2025.
In today’s edition: the impact of BLS turmoil, Martha Stewart gets into skincare, and this year’s Most Powerful People in Business.
– Power moves. For the second year in a row, Fortune has ranked the 100 Most Powerful People in Business. This list runs alongside our longstanding Most Powerful Women franchise—and once again shows why it’s still important to cover business’s Most Powerful Women on their own.
Of 105 people on the Most Powerful People list (there are some ties), 19 are women. They’re woven into the ranking in the same order they appear on our 2025 Most Powerful Women list, published in May. The top woman on the MPW list, GM chief Mary Barra, comes in at No. 10 on the Most Powerful People list. She’s preceded by today’s business titans—Jamie Dimon, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and, at No. 1 this year, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
While Silicon Valley founders like Zuckerberg and Altman appear high on the ranking, the top women in business are mostly career executives. (After Barra, there’s Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Citi’s Jane Fraser, and AMD’s Lisa Su.) The only female founder who makes the MPP list is Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei, who appears alongside her brother and co-founder Dario Amodei.
The female founders like Mira Murati, Fei-Fei Li, and Canva’s Melanie Perkins who have become mainstays on the MPW list are poised to build generational companies like OpenAI and Meta—but are still on the way there. A few years from now, perhaps they’ll dominate the top of the ranking, too.
GM chief Mary Barra is the top woman on Fortune's 2025 Most Powerful People list. Like most women who made the list, she's a career executive—not a founder.
Gen Z is ditching college for “more secure” trade jobs—but building inspectors, electricians and plumbers actually have the worst unemployment rate. Meanwhile, jobs in logging, hunting, fishing and refuse have high fatality rates. New research has revealed the safest jobs that the millions of unemployed non-grad Gen Z could apply for instead, with office admin roles coming out on top.
Gen Z are ditching degrees in droves and landing trade jobs. They’re finding themselves in six-figure careers that tap into their desires for more travel and less time at a desk, without any student debt.
But not all that glitters is gold. Many of these jobs come with risks of their own.
Take wind-turbine technicians, for example. It was the fastest-growing job in the U.S. last year and doesn’t require a degree. But the work is far from easy: Technicians face extreme weather, haul 50 pounds of gear, and climb tall ladders into tight spaces.
Despite the buzz, the safest non-degree role is still at a desk.
Research by Yijin Hardware analyzed jobs based on fatal injury rates, projected openings (2023 to 2033), median wages, and education requirements—and coming in at No. 1 is office admin and support roles.
These roles offer lower physical risk, consistent demand, and decent salaries—making them especially appealing for Gen Zers looking for stability without a degree.
According the research, the 5 safest jobs of 2025 that don’t require a degree are as follows:
Office and Admin Support
Production Workers
Installation and Repair
Construction and extraction
Transportation and Material Moving
‘Safe’ office jobs may be a ticking time bomb
Entry-level office jobs in admin and support may still be the safest bet for non-grad Gen Zers right now, but unfortunately for them, they could be starting to dry up.
Even highly educated students are currently finding themselves “unemployable” as employers launch a “wait-and-watch strategy” in the midst of AI advancements and economic uncertainty. Graduates in the UK are facing the worst job market since 2018 as employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, warns Indeed. Companies like Intel, IBM and Google have been freezing thousands of would-be new roles that AI is expected to take over in the next 5 years.
And entry-level roles, like office admin ones, are among the first to be slashed.
At global investment firm Carlyle, previous entry-level hires who evaluated deals used to turn to Google for articles and request documents manually. Now, the work is being done by AI, and the firm is shifting toward hiring junior-level employees who can ensure the work is accurate.
CEOs have also iterated their hiring strategy. Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, told The Wall Street Journal he decided not to hire a summer intern.
Despite the headwinds, the research forecasts 19,000 new jobs in the sector over the next decade—far fewer than transportation’s 63,000 predicted new opportunities, but still more than in repair or construction (between 11,000 and 15,000).
‘Dangerous’ trade jobs
Trade jobs are having a moment. Touted as the smarter, safer alternative to “irrelevant” overpriced degrees and (at risk of being automated) entry-level white-collar jobs, around 78% of Americans say they’ve noticed a spike in young people turning to jobs like carpentry, electrical work and welding, according to a 2024 Harris Poll. They’re not wrong. Trade-school enrollment really has been surging post-pandemic, even outpacing university enrollment.
But the new research suggests the reality isn’t as stable—or as future-proof—as it’s being pitched.
Yijin Hardware found trade jobs are among the most “dangerous” out there for non-grads—logging, hunting, fishing and refuse have the highest on-the-job fatality rates, paired with unpredictable working conditions, and limited opportunities. Not a single entry-level office job made the bottom rankings of their list.
It’s not the first study to suggest Gen Z may be looking at manual work through rose-tinted glasses. According to another new WalletHub study ranking the best and worst entry-level U.S. jobs in 2025, trade roles dominate the bottom of the list. Welders, automotive mechanics, boilermakers, and drafters all rank among the least promising career starters.
According to the researchers, these roles scored poorly due to limited job availability and weak growth potential, as well as their potentially hazardous nature.
“While trade work isn’t as easy to automate as some office jobs, new technologies like prefabrication and robotics are starting to take over parts of the workload, which can reduce demand,” WalletHub’s analyst Chip Lupo told Fortune. They’re also not immune to mass layoffs and at the mercy of interest rates and demand.
And worse still, more often than not, many trade jobs might not actually make Gen Z happier than a desk job. Another study ranked electricians as the least happy workers of all. According to the research, the physically demanding nature of the job and 40-plus hour workweeks weren’t made up for by the just “decent” salary. Perhaps surprisingly, not a single trade job made the list of happiest jobs.
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