Citigroup Inc. launched a premium credit card designed to rival ones offered by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and American Express Co., the latest entrant in the increasingly crowded market for cards offering high-end perks.
The ‘Strata Elite’ card will feature an annual fee of $595 — a price that the bank says can unlock almost $1,500 in value if used to its maximum potential. It offers the largest points rewards for hotels, car rentals and attractions booked on Citigroup’s travel platform, as well as restaurant dining at peak weekend times.
The card also bakes in perks for customers who fly with American Airlines Group Inc., giving four passes per year to the airline’s airport lounges and the ability to transfer Citigroup “ThankYou Points” into reward miles with the airline. That follows an expansion of the firms’ existing card partnership in December, when American Airlines chose to make Citigroup the exclusive issuer of all its credit cards.
In addition to American Express and JPMorgan, Citigroup will be competing with other banks trying to break into the premium space, including Capital One Financial Corp. The customers they vie for are highly sought after, known for their willingness to pay annual fees, and reliably spending more and prioritizing travel and hospitality.
“It’s always been highly competitive — competition makes us all better,” Pam Habner, Citigroup’s head of US branded cards and lending, said in an interview.
At $595, plus $75 a year for each authorized user, the card is cheaper than JPMorgan’s Sapphire Reserve, which Habner helped launch when she worked there in 2016. That card’s annual fee will jump to $795 from $550, JPMorgan said last month.
In addition to the perks rolled out by Citigroup directly, the Strata Elite card will be the first in Mastercard Inc.’s recently announced World Legend tier of credit cards, meaning it comes with an additional suite of benefits. World Legend cards include access to the Mastercard Collection, which translates into ticket pre-sales and streamlined airport security access, among other rewards.
“We designed benefits that we know our customers can use,” Habner said, adding that the card was designed to give customers rewards for types of spending, rather than handing them coupon-style rewards to use with specific companies.
In addition to American Express and JPMorgan, Citigroup will be competing with other banks trying to break into the premium space, including Capital One Financial Corp.
You’ve read about it all over, including in Fortune Intelligence. Maybe you or friends have been impacted: artificial intelligence is already transforming work, not least hiring and firing. Nowhere is the impact more visible than in the labor market.
The technology industry, the original epicenter of AI adoption, is now seeing many of its own workers displaced by the very innovations they helped create. Employers, racing to integrate AI into everything from cloud infrastructure to customer support, are trimming human headcount in software engineering, IT support, and administrative functions. The rise of AI-powered automation is accelerating layoffs in the tech sector, with impacted employees as high as 80,000 in one count. Microsoft alone is trimming 15,000 jobs while committing $80 billion to new AI investments.
But labor market intelligence firm Lightcast is offering a ray of hope going forward. Job postings for non-tech roles that require AI skills are soaring in value. Lightcast’s new “Beyond the Buzz” report, based on analysis of over 1.3 billion job postings, shows that these postings offer 28% higher salaries—an average of nearly $18,000 more per year. The Lightcast research underscores the split in tech and non-tech hiring: job postings for AI skills in tech roles remain robust, but the proportion of AI jobs within IT and computer science has fallen, dropping from 61% in 2019 to just 49% in 2024. This signals an ongoing contraction of traditional tech roles as AI claims an ever-larger share of the work.
AI demand explodes beyond tech
Rather than stifling workforce prospects, Lightcast’s research suggests that AI is dispersing opportunity across the broader economy. More than half of all jobs requesting AI skills in 2024 appeared outside the tech sector—a radical reversal from previous years, when AI was confined to Silicon Valley and computer science labs. Fields like marketing, HR, finance, education, manufacturing, and customer service are rapidly integrating AI tools, from generative AI platforms that craft marketing content to predictive analytics engines that optimize supply chains and recruitment.
In fact, job postings mentioning generative AI skills outside IT and computer science have surged an astonishing 800% since 2022, catalyzed by the proliferation of tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and DALL-E. Marketing, design, education, and HR are some of the fastest growers in AI adoption—each adapting to new toolkits, workflows, and ways of creating value.
Cole Napper, VP of research, innovation, and talent insights at Lightcast, told Fortune in an interview that he was struck by the lack of a discernible pattern for which industries were most affected by the explosion of AI skills present in job postings, noting that the arts come top of the list.
AI skills are in demand
For the workforce at large, AI proficiency is emerging as one of today’s most lucrative skill investments. Possessing two or more AI skills sends paychecks even higher, with a 43% premium on advertised salaries.
In 2024, more than 66,000 job postings specifically mentioned generative AI as a skill, a nearly fourfold increase from the prior year, according to the Lightcast’s 2025 Artificial Intelligence Index Report. Large language modeling was the second most common AI skill, which showed up in 19,500 open job posts. Postings listing ChatGPT and prompt engineering as skills ranked third and fourth in frequency, respectively.
Sectors such as customer/client support, sales, and manufacturing reported the largest pay bumps for AI-skilled workers, as companies race to automate routine functions and leverage AI for competitive advantage.
Christina Inge, founder of Thoughtlight, an AI marketing service, told Fortune in a message AI isn’t just automating busywork, it’s also becoming a tool AI-fluent workers can leverage to increase their own value to a company—and to outperform their peers. Take, for example, someone in sales using AI to create more targeted conversations to close deals faster, Inge wrote. The same can be said for customer service workers.
“[Customer service workers fluent in AI] know how to interpret AI outputs, write clear prompts, and troubleshoot when things go off script,” Inge said. “That combination of human judgment and AI fluency is hard to find and well worth the extra pay.”
In fields like marketing and science, even single AI skills can yield large returns, while more technical positions gravitate to specialists with advanced machine learning or generative AI expertise.
Crucially, the most valued AI-enabled roles demand more than just technical wizardry. Employers prize a hybrid skillset: communication, leadership, problem-solving, research, and customer service are among the 10 most-requested skills in AI-focused postings, alongside technical foundations like machine learning and artificial intelligence.
“While generative AI excels at tasks like writing and coding, uniquely human abilities—such as communication, management, innovation, and complex problem-solving—are becoming even more valuable in the AI era,” the study says.
Winners and losers
The emerging repercussions are striking. Tech workers whose roles are readily automated face rising displacement—unless they can pivot quickly into emerging areas that meld business, technical, and people skills. Meanwhile, millions of workers outside of tech are poised to translate even basic AI literacy into new roles or wage gains. The competitive edge now lies with organizations and professionals agile enough to combine AI capabilities with human judgement, creativity, and business acumen.
For companies, the risk is clear: treating AI as an isolated technical specialty is now a liability. Winning firms are investing to embed AI fluency enterprise-wide, upskilling their marketing teams, HR departments, and finance analysts to build a future-ready workforce.
AI may be the source of turmoil in Silicon Valley boardrooms, but its economic dividends are flowing rapidly to workers—and companies—in every corner of the economy. For those able to adapt, AI skills are not a harbinger of job loss, but a passport to higher salaries and new career possibilities. Still, the research doesn’t indicate exactly where in the income levels the higher postings are coming, so Napper said it’s possible that we are seeing some compression, with higher-paid tech jobs being phased out and lower-paying positions being slightly better-paying.
Napper said the trend of AI skills cropping up in job postings has exploded over the past few years, and he doesn’t expect a slowdown anytime soon. Napper said there’s a “cost to complacency”—one that includes a significant salary cut. He added that the 28% premium, Lightcast plans to release follow-up research on what level of the income latter the trend is hitting the most.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Denny’s CEO Kelli Valade isn’t afraid to admit she’s always working to be better—and she values that same humility in job candidates. Recognizing your weaknesses and asking thoughtful questions, she says, can set you apart in an interview. It’s a mindset shared by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who got his start as a Denny’s dishwasher and credits the journey teaching him hard work and humility.
Landing a job in today’s market can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. Not only do you have to find a role that you’re interested in—and are qualified for—but you also have to craft an application, resume, and cover letter that’s interesting to both humans and AI. But once you land the coveted interview, that’s when the pressure is on.
Luckily, even during an era of AI-assisted interviews, there remain ways to stick out from the crowd.
When asked what her red flags are in hiring, Kelli Valade, CEO of Denny’s Corporation, noted that she asks applicants a few critical questions.
One of the signs Valade looks for comes at the end of the interview, when she asks: what questions do you have for me?
“Have a thoughtful one or two. You don’t really even have to have more than that,” she tells Fortune. “Any more than that, actually, it’s too much.”
In fact, it often does not matter what the questions are, but the fact that you do ask shows you did your homework and are seriously interested, Valade adds.
(However, Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran advises candidates to ask, “Is there anything standing in the way of you hiring me?”)
She also is sure to ask: what would they say makes you most effective at what you do? Typically, candidates are pretty well equipped to answer that question, Valade says.
“Then I ask them, what would make them more effective?” she explains. “Which basically is saying, what are your weaknesses? And there you’d be amazed at how many people can’t answer that, or would say, ‘I’ve not thought about it.’ And so really what you’re saying is, ‘I’ve not thought about my weaknesses.’”
The 55-year-old admits that she herself is a work in progress, but what’s helped her stand out throughout her career is not shying away from admitting her areas of improvement. It’s something she hopes to see in her employees, too.
From Denny’s dishwasher to leading the world’s biggest company
Now that you know tips for getting hired at Denny’s, you may ask, why work at the restaurant chain?
There may be no more notable member of Denny’s employee alumni than Jensen Huang. The now billionaire CEO of Nvidia started his career at the diner as a dishwasher at just 15 years old—and it’s experience he credits for teaching him about hard work.
“I planned my work. I was organized. I was mise en place,” Huang told students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business last year. “I washed the living daylights out of those dishes.”
“No task is beneath me,” he added. “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.”
And while his time at Denny’s came well before Valade’s tenure, she says they are now friends today—and the billionaire continues to pay homage to the diner. His LinkedIn notably only includes two employers: Denny’s and Nvidia. He also made an appearance last year at Denny’s franchise convention and partnered with the company to launch a special edition “Nvidia Breakfast Bytes.”
“Start your first job in the restaurant business,” Huang said in 2023. “It teaches you humility, it teaches you hard work, it teaches you hospitality.”
From hostess to CEO
Valade started her career in the restaurant space at just age 16, when she landed a hostess job at TJ’s Big Boy. Decades later, she began climbing up the corporate ladder in the human resources world—with the dream of one day becoming a chief people officer, not necessarily becoming a CEO.
So when she was tapped to jump from head of HR to chief operations officer at Chili’s, self-doubt was her first instinct.
“I didn’t think I could do that at the time,” she recalls. “I thought, I think you’re looking for the wrong person here. I don’t know. My first instinct was, I’m not sure I know how to do that.”
While the feeling is natural, she adds leaders—and especially women—should self-reflect on whether you are holding yourself back from a greater potential.
“Push yourself and challenge yourself on why you may not feel like that,” she adds.
After later rising to brand president at Chili’s and CEO of Red Lobster, Valade was tapped to become Denny’s CEO in 2022, centering her career on two of her favorite things: people and pancakes.
A seismic generational shift is underway, and its epicenter is Generation Z. Born from 1997 onward, Gen Z is coming of age in a world where traditional milestones like landing a lifelong job, buying a house in your 20s, or chasing wealth for its own sake have become difficult, or borderline impossible, in the modern economy. Gen Z has responded pragmatically, insisting, well, maybe they don’t really want those things anyway.
A massive new study from EY’s Generational Dynamics core team, spanning more than 10,000 young adults across 10 countries and five continents, finds Gen Z is often misunderstood—and their measured approach should define them as the “pragmatic generation.” The authors, Marcie Merriman and Zak Dychtwald, wrote Gen Z approaches “life’s traditional milestones” with a sort of “reasoned skepticism.”
According to Joe Depa, EY Global chief innovation officer, the research reveals how 18- to 34-year-olds are taking a surprisingly pragmatic approach to adulthood, finances, and their future. “Far from being financially reckless,” Depa tells Fortune Intelligence, “this generation is focused on long-term stability — and redefining success along the way.”
Money, for them, is necessary but not the be-all and end-all: 87% say financial independence is important, yet only 42% rate wealth as a primary marker of success, trailing far behind metrics like mental and physical health and family relationships. Put simply, for Gen Z, financial stability is a tool—not a goal. They use money to open doors to flexibility, purpose, and well-being.
Depa says the research “tells a different story” about Gen Z. “The idea that young adults are postponing adulhtood is outdated.” They’re approaching life milestones not with rebellion but with “reasoned skepticism and a global perspective.” As employees and customers, Gen Z will challenge organizations that have been wired around a different way of doing things. For business leaders, understanding this shift will be vital to attracting and retaining talent.
The job hoppers
Where baby boomers and Gen Xers often stuck with one employer for decades, Gen Z is dismantling that concept.
EY’s research found 59% of young adults globally expect to work for two to five organizations throughout their lives, and nearly 20% say they will work for six or more. This flexible approach to employment—embracing job changes and flexible gig work—reflects not only a desire for varied experiences, but a strategic response to rapid change, uncertainty, and a lifetime of economic instability.
“Younger generations are not merely reacting to financial constraints,” the EY Generational Dynamics team writes, but making rational and thoughtful decisions about what aligns with both their own lived experiences and the pitfalls suffered by previous generations. EY says it’s a perspective that contrasts sharply with the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality often espoused by older generations, with Gen Z finding that to be dismissive of their specific context.
Redefining success: inside out, not outside in
Success, in Gen Z’s eyes, is an inside-out project: emotional well-being, strong relationships, and impact outrank titles and salaries. It’s no longer about ticking the boxes of homeownership, lifelong employment, or even traditional family milestones. Landmarks such as marriage and children are being postponed—not out of rejection, but for pragmatic reasons: economic insecurity, housing unaffordability, and a desire to be emotionally and financially prepared.
The rise of job-hopping has replaced the well-worn “script” of adulthood: Only 59% see working for a single organization as a viable path, whereas nearly 20% of respondents said they plan to work for six or more employers in the course of their careers. Linear career ladders and employer loyalty are giving way to “project-based” growth, taking new jobs, and side hustles, all in search of variety, autonomy, and purpose. “Job hopping is not viewed as a negative, but an essential step to open doors and advance opportunities,” the EY team writes.
The average Gen Z respondent reports feeling like an adult earlier than previous generations, and as a result, more than half (51%) said they prioritize physical and mental health as their chief markers of success, with family ties also outranking wealth in many countries. The push for authenticity is also striking; 84% cite “being true to oneself” as extremely important.
Employers, beware (and evolve)
For Gen Z, a job is not a life sentence, nor is money alone enough to keep them engaged. Employers used to loyalty and linear career ladders may be blindsided by Gen Z’s willingness to prioritize purpose, wellness, and flexibility—even if it comes at the expense of job security or long-term benefits. Conventional incentives are losing their grip.
For employers, this new pragmatism is both a wake-up call and an opportunity. Flexibility is mandatory, with hybrid and remote work, fluid hours, and support for “micro-retirements” between jobs becoming non-negotiable.
Gen Z expects employers to have clear values around well-being, sustainability, and social justice—and to act on them. Over 70% want their employer to be transparent about values and pay, and are unafraid to challenge leadership if authenticity is found wanting. This generation will quickly leave if growth stalls: 57% would quit for better professional development. They crave mentorship, personalized learning, and a sense of upward mobility.
Gen Z is less loyal to brands or employers unless that loyalty is returned; nearly half say they have “zero loyalty” to brands, and only about 60% feel any loyalty to their employer. Empathetic leadership and honest, two-way communication are expected, not a bonus.
Gen Z wants to be included in company decisions and expects a seat at the table. This finding aligns with separate research from Glassdoor, whose Worklife Trends report in June 2025 found emotional intelligence is now a standard expectation held by workers, many of them Gen Z. “The bar on what constitutes a good manager has been raised,” Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao previously told Fortune Intelligence.
Employers slow to adapt to these realities won’t just struggle to recruit Gen Z—they’ll risk losing relevance altogether. The pragmatic playbook demands companies redesign everything from hiring and communication to values and pay structures.
The flip side? Gen Z’s pragmatism can also be an asset: They are technologically adept, mission-driven, and resourceful. But their skepticism can also translate into disengagement or even open dissatisfaction if workplaces fail to address their real priorities. Businesses would be pragmatic in their own right to tune into what Gen Z values most—authentic leadership, transparent communication, and support for well-being—if they want to retain this generation.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Multimillionaire Shark Tankinvestor Kevin O’Leary looks for three star qualities in the entrepreneurs he goes into business with: those who have a “founder’s mindset,” a balanced talking-to-listening ratio, and executional prowess. From working with the likes of late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and multimillion-dollar entrepreneurs to being an investor on his hit-TV show, he’s picked up a few patterns of the most successful people.
Multimillionaire entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary knows a thing or two about picking the right people and ideas to invest in. Having worked with greats like Steve Jobs, not to mention his success on Shark Tank backing businesses generating millions, he’s picked up on a few key qualities in great founders.
O’Leary looks for three qualities in the people he chooses to do business with. The 71-year-old investor tells Fortune the most critical trait is having “founder’s mindset”: adopting a frame of mind that prioritizes “signal,” or what has to get done in the next 18 hours, while drowning out the “noise” of everyday life and complications. He witnessed this demeanor while working with Jobs, when Apple was partnering with O’Leary’s $4.2 billion software company SoftKey Software Products. He requires that the founders he invests in have that same leadership ethos—even if it’s a quality that’s hard to come by.
“The ability to see all the noise coming at you and filter it out, and focus on the three to five things you’re going to get done, that’s a remarkable attribute,” O’Leary tells Fortune. “You find that in 30% of the people. Then you want to back those people, because if they’re not successful in their first mandate, they’re going to figure it out. That attribute is very important.”
When it comes to the signal versus the noise, he currently operates on a 80:20 balance, just like Jobs did while running Apple, and looks for entrepreneurs who can keep their eye on the ball.
O’Leary admits that he didn’t always have the right ratio in embodying the founder’s mindset—but now has achieved it, and looks for it in others.
“You have to decide everyday, every 18 hours, what three to five things you have to get done,” O’Leary says. “It’s not the big vision. It’s what you have to get done in the next 18 hours that matters.”
The two other traits a founder needs to have O’Leary’s backing
O’Leary has heard hundreds—if not thousands—of entrepreneurs plead their business case while starring on Shark Tank. Thanks to his intuition from decades in the game, he’s worked alongside and invested in a lot of winners.
In 2014, O’Leary put $150,000 down for 80% of licensing profits of small photo-book subscription service Groovebook, which was later bought by Shutterfly for $14.5 million, making it one of the show’s biggest acquisitions.
He also had luck with sustainable cleaning-products business Blueland, investing $270,000 for 3% equity and $0.50 per unit royalty until principal was recouped. By 2022, Blueland made over $100 million in lifetime sales and profitability, with its products now flying off the shelves of Target and Whole Foods every 10 seconds.
It’s clear the serial investor has developed a keen eye for what will work well. In addition to the “founder’s mindset,” the serial investor also emphasizes the importance of having a balanced listening-to-talking ratio and strong executional skills, which he says is “impossible to find.”
He says he didn’t always get the talking-to-listening balance right. Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives may think they should be the loudest and most outspoken people in the room—but taking a backseat and giving others the floor is important, too. Not enough listening and too much talking may stifle great business ideas that get drowned out.
“Reverse the ratio of talking and listening. Most people love to hear themselves talk—I was guilty of that for years, and I’ve reversed it,” O’Leary says. “I listen two thirds of the time, and I talk one third of the time. That’s my new ratio, and it’s much more powerful.”
Lastly, the baby boomer investor looks for unparalleled executional skills. Coming up with the next billion-dollar business venture is one thing, but getting it off the ground is another.
O’Leary looks for founders and teams that can get the job done—even if it takes more than one try. Being an excellent executor doesn’t always mean hitting a home run your first time at bat. Sometimes, O’Leary says, investors and entrepreneurs need a little karma and luck.
“Great ideas are dime a dozen—executional skills are impossible to find,” O’Leary continues. “I’ve invested in lots of teams over the years that screw up their first deal, they go to zero, and then I invest again, and I get a huge hit, because I know they’re good.
“I’m working on a deal right now with a team that I just finished a great execution with, and hopefully will be good on the second one. I like to work with people that I know have proven executional skills.”
The multimillionaire entrepreneur and investor looks to do business with entrepreneurs who have a “founder’s mindset”—embodied by late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs—alongside strong listening and executional skills.
Hydrogen fuel cell cars (FCEVs) have been on the market for a similar duration to the current wave of battery EVs (BEVs). But they have sold a tiny fraction in comparison. In 2024, 12,866 FCEVs were registered globally, versus 10.8 million BEVs. Still, some manufacturers have hopes that hydrogen has a role to play in transport.
One of these is BMW, which recently announced it would be bringing its first FCEV into series production in 2028. Fortune caught up with BMW Group’s General Project Manager Hydrogen Technology and Vehicle Projects, Jürgen Guldner, at a recent summit promoting FCEVs, among other hydrogen evangelists.
Toyota has been the leading seller of FCEVs with the Mirai launched in 2014, but it isn’t the only player. Hyundai has been selling its Nexo since 2018, and Honda, after offering various cars under the Clarity name from 2008 to 2021, brought its CR-V e:FCEV plug-in hybrid hydrogen car to market in 2024. BMW has been more cautious. The company has been trialling FCEVs with a pilot run of vehicles based on X5 since 2023. The iX5 Hydrogen is already a credible vehicle, with smooth driving and a familiar X5 interior. However, this won’t necessarily be the vehicle that BMW will launch in 2028.
“The good news is a hydrogen vehicle is an electric vehicle,” says Guldner. “It’s just a different way of storing the energy versus a battery, which also means that we can reuse a lot of the components like the electric motors in the car from our BEVs. It also has a unique value proposition. It’s the best of both worlds, with all the benefits of electric driving—acceleration, silent driving, zero emission—but you can refuel in 3 to 4 minutes and you’re 100% full and ready to go again.”
The problem of hydrogen infrastructure
This has always seemed like a compelling argument for hydrogen on paper, but the reality has been that hydrogen refueling hasn’t proliferated like BEV charging stations. In fact, it has gone backwards in many countries. In the UK, in 2019 there were as many as 15 hydrogen fuel stations, whereas today in 2025 only four were listed, with two potentially not in service. By contrast, according to Zap-Map, there were 39,733 public charging locations in the UK in May 2025, with 80,998 devices and 115,241 connectors. Germany is better served for hydrogen refueling, but some European countries have no stations at all, such as Spain, Portugal and Italy.
Some hydrogen proponents argue that this is a strategic mistake if your goal is to decarbonize road transport.
“FCEVs are complementary to battery electric vehicles and heading towards one common direction,” says David Wong, head of technology and innovation at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. “If you invest in both charging infrastructure and the fuel cell hydrogen refilling infrastructure, the overall cost is lower. We’ve done modelling where they use Germany as an example. It shows that if we have a motor park penetration of 90% BEVs and 10% FCEVs, the overall cost of investing in infrastructure is $40 billion lower than the scenario where 100% of infrastructure is public charge points.”
There is also concern about resource usage when manufacturing BEVs. Guldner points out batteries requires a lot of raw materials, which could lead to scarcity.
“Having a second technology, not putting all eggs in one basket, provides resilience,” he explains. “BMW having two technologies is better than one. We got a lot of feedback from people saying BEVs don’t work for them. We’re thinking about those people who can’t or don’t want to use battery electric cars because maybe they don’t have electric charging at home, or are on the road a lot and don’t want to depend on charging stops, even if you can get them down to maybe 20 minutes. We have issues like towing and cold weather conditions. In the fuel cell you can use excess heat, so you don’t lose any range.”
This still leaves the problem with how you ramp up the infrastructure to support hydrogen. A commercial DC charger might be $50,000, a home charger can cost $1,000, or you can even use a very slow $200 mains plug cable.
But the price for a hydrogen station is much greater—between $1.5 and $2 million, although some estimate as much as $4 million. The solution, at least in the UK, is to target the long-haul commercial sector first and build out from that. HyHAUL is a project aiming to achieve that.
“The biggest challenge with hydrogen is the fact that it works very well at large scale, but not so good at small scale,” says Chris Jackson, CEO and founder of Protium Green Solutions, which co-founded HyHAUL. “One single hydrogen fueling station requires hundreds of passenger cars to make the economics work, but only a very small number of trucks. We are initially developing three major refueling stations and all we need to get the project off the ground is 30 fuel cell trucks. The first stage will be along the M4 corridor. We’ll be covering from Wales all the way into the M25 around London. Over time, we plan to expand across other networks, going up the M5 and M6.”
For consumer adoption of FCEVs, however, it would be necessary to cover the UK completely within half an hour driving distance, which would require about 1,300 stations. One of the reasons why Tesla was able to kickstart the BEV revolution so effectively was its two-pronged approach of building the supportive charging infrastructure to go with its cars.
Automakers developing FCEVs have traditionally left this to third parties, leading to a chicken-and-egg situation where car adoption awaited infrastructure, and vice versa. This has meant that as BEVs have reached a tipping point in many markets, including the UK, EU and China, while FCEVs wait in the wings.
Can fuel cells prevail?
This hasn’t prevented Toyota from persevering with FCEVs. “Our role is to provide customers with choice,” says Jon Hunt, senior manager, Hydrogen Transformation, Toyota GB. “We can’t have people dismissing technologies that are there to enable us all to learn and develop.”
Commercial vehicles could help FCEVs reach that tipping point. In Paris, around 1,000 FCEV taxis have been operated by Hype since 2015, the majority of which are Toyota Mirais. For this reason, Paris has six hydrogen fuel stops with three more being built. This could lay the groundwork for consumers to adopt FCEVs in the city. However, outside Paris there is no supportive infrastructure yet, preventing long journeys beyond the urban limits. Hype has also recently said it is pivoting away from FCEVs to BEVs.
Even with full launch still three years away, BMW is placing a heavy bet on infrastructure having improved sufficiently for hydrogen to be a viable choice for consumers by 2028.
Guldner notes BMW hasn’t yet decided which countries it will bring those vehicles to market, adding that it will depend on the infrastructure.
“Right now, it’s simply not here in the UK. But hopefully in the next few years, development will pick up,” he says.
The exact model that will go into production in 2028 also hasn’t been announced. And while a price hasn’t been unveiled either, BMW is hoping for parity with BEVs, Guldner says, pointing to previous dramatic cost reductions in other technologies like batteries and solar cells.
For these cost reductions to materialize, though, there has to be enough demand for FCEVs to deliver sufficient scale.
“I am always surprised by surveys in newspapers where so many people say they would prefer a hydrogen vehicle over battery power,” he says. “There seems to be demand there.”
The question will be whether these survey responses translate into vehicle sales. In 2028, when BMW launches its production FCEV, we could find out.
Top Trump administration health officials are expected to bring tech companies to the White House this week to roll out a plan to encourage more seamless sharing of health-care data, according to people familiar with the matter.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz are expected to host executives at an event on Wednesday, said the people, who did not provide names of the attendees and asked not to be named because the details haven’t been made public.
The plan was developed in coordination with the White House, building on a May effort by CMS to get public input on addressing barriers to sharing patient data.
The initiative was led by Amy Gleason, acting administrator of DOGE, the initiative known as Department of Government Efficiency, and Arda Kara, a senior adviser at CMS. Both worked for health-tech startups before joining the Trump administration.
“This initiative aims to build a smarter, more secure, and more personalized health care system — one that improves patient outcomes, reduces provider burden, and drives greater value through private-sector innovation and aligned federal leadership,” CMS spokesperson Catherine Howden said in a written statement.
Clear, a company known for its identity verification services frequently used within airports, is planning to attend, according to people familiar with the matter. The company has previously targeted the healthcare industry for expansion. A company spokesperson declined to comment.
Companies will commit to a voluntary framework around what’s known as interoperability, or how different health technology systems connect to one another and share data, the people said. Improving the flow of data across the fragmented US health-care system has long been a policy goal of both Democratic and Republican administrations seeking to improve quality and reduce waste.
The pledges will involve principles around patient and provider access to health information, and data sharing standards, among other elements. CMS will share additional information next week about the timeline for the plan, Howden said.
Hackers gained access to personal data on the majority of the 1.4 million customers of Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America, the company confirmed Saturday.
Minneapolis-based Allianz Life, a subsidiary of Munich, Germany-based Allianz SE, said the data breach happened on July 16 when a “malicious threat actor” gained access to a third-party, cloud-based system used by the company.
“The threat actor was able to obtain personally identifiable data related to the majority of Allianz Life’s customers, financial professionals, and select Allianz Life employees, using a social engineering technique,” Allianz Life said in a statement. “We took immediate action to contain and mitigate the issue and notified the FBI.”
The company said its own systems were not accessed, just the third-party’s platform.
Allianz Life said its investigation is ongoing and that the company has begun reaching out to the impacted individuals. It said the incident involves only Allianz Life in the U.S., not other Allianz corporate entities.
In the case of data breaches, a “social engineering technique” usually involves using trickery to gain access. Spokesman Brett Weinberg said he couldn’t provide details because they are still investigating.
Allianz Life also reported the breach to multiple other authorities, including the Maine Attorney General’s Office. A filing on the agency’s website said the company discovered the breach the day after it happened, and that it will be offering those affected 24 months of identity theft protection and credit monitoring.
Allianz Life was known as North American Life and Casualty until it was acquired by German conglomerate Allianz SE in 1979 and changed its name to Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America. It has nearly 2,000 employees in U.S., with the majority working in Minnesota, according to its website.
It is one of five North American subsidiaries of the Munich-based global financial services group Allianz SE, which says it serves more than 125 million customers worldwide.
Minneapolis-based Allianz Life, a subsidiary of Munich, Germany-based Allianz SE, said the data breach happened on July 16 when a “malicious threat actor” gained access to a third-party, cloud-based system used by the company.
Tea, a provocative dating app designed to let women anonymously ask or warn each other about men they’d encountered, rocketed to the top spot on the U.S. Apple App Store this week. On Friday, the company behind the app confirmed it had been hacked: Thousands of images, including selfies, were leaked online.
“We have engaged third-party cybersecurity experts and are working around the clock to secure our systems,” San Francisco-based Tea Dating Advice Inc. said in a statement.
404 Media, which earlier reported the breach, said it was 4Chan users who discovered an exposed database that “allowed anyone to access the material” from Tea.
Tea founder Sean Cook, a software engineer who previously worked at Salesforce and Shutterfly, says on the app’s website that he founded the company in 2022 after witnessing his own mother’s “terrifying” experiences. Cook said they included unknowingly dating men with criminal records and being ”catfished” — deceived by men using false identities.
Tea markets itself as a safe way for women to anonymously vet men they might meet on dating apps such as Tinder or Bumble— ensuring that the men are who they say they are, not criminals and not already married or in a relationship. “It’s like people have their own little Yelp pages,” said Aaron Minc, whose Cleveland firm, Minc Law, specializes in cases involving online defamation and harassment.
In an Apple Store review, one woman wrote that she used a Tea search to investigate a man she’d begun talking to and discovered “over 20 red flags, including serious allegations like assault and recording women without their consent.” She said she cut off communication. ”I can’t imagine how things could’ve gone had I not known,” she wrote.
A surge in social media attention over the past week pushed Tea to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store as of July 24, according to Sensor Tower, a research firm. In the seven days from July 17-23, Tea downloads shot up 525% compared to the week before. Tea said in an Instagram post that it had reached 4 million users.
Tea has been criticized for invading men’s privacy
A female columnist for The Times of London newspaper, who signed into the app, on Thursday called Tea a “man-shaming site” and complained that ”this is simply vigilante justice, entirely reliant on the scruples of anonymous women. With Tea on the scene, what man would ever dare date a woman again?”
“Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten hundreds of calls on it. It’s blown up,” attorney Minc said. “People are upset. They’re getting named. They’re getting shamed.’’
In 1996, Congress passed legislation protecting websites and apps from liability for things posted by their users. But the users can be sued for spreading ”false and defamatory” information, Minc said.
In May, however, a federal judge in Illinois threw out an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit by a man who’d been criticized by women in the Facebook chat group “Are We Dating the Same Guy,″ Bloomberg Law reported.
State privacy laws could offer another avenue for bringing legal action against someone who posted your photograph or other personal information in a harmful way, Minc said.
The breach exposed thousands of selfies and photo IDs
In its statement, Tea reported that about 72,000 images were leaked online, including 13,000 images of selfies or photo identification that users submitted during account verification. Another 59,000 images that were publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments and direct messages were also accessed, according to the company’s statement.
No email addresses or phone numbers were exposed, the company said, and the breach only affects users who signed up before February 2024. “At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that additional user data was affected. Protecting tea users’ privacy and data is our highest priority,” Tea said.
It said users did not need to change their passwords or delete their accounts. “All data has been secured.”
Lawyer Minc said he was not surprised to see Tea get targeted. “These sites get attacked,” he said. ”They create enemies. They put targets on themselves where people want to go after them.”
The White House’s recent criticism of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters renovation project has highlighted the central bank’s sources of funding. Unlike federal departments that receive taxpayer dollars via appropriations from Congress, the Fed is self-funded, largely via interest income from government securities it holds.
The Federal Reserve’s funding has come under scrutiny as the White House attacks the $2.5 billion headquarters renovation for cost overruns.
That controversy was underscored on Thursday, when President Donald Trump and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell disagreed over the cost during a visit to the central bank. Trump’s allies have suggested the project could be grounds for ousting Powell, but the president has said he would not fire him, though Trump continues to demand lower rates.
Unlike the Pentagon and a new weapons system that has blown through its budget, the Fed and its operations are funded differently.
While the Defense Department and other executive branches receive money from Congress, the Fed is self-funded, largely via interest income from government securities it holds.
That means no taxpayer dollars have been appropriated for Fed operations — including building projects like the headquarters renovation.
Most of the Fed’s income comes from assets such as Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities that sit on the central bank’s balance sheet and earn interest.
That balance sheet exploded in size during the Great Financial Crisis and COVID-19 pandemic as the Fed bought trillions of dollars of bonds to prop up the economy.
Other sources of income include interest on foreign currency investments held by the Fed; fees for services like check clearing, funds transfers, and clearinghouse operations provided to depository institutions; and interest on loans to depository institutions.
To be sure, the Fed’s mission isn’t to maximize its earnings from trading securities. Instead, it has a dual mandate of stable prices and maximum employment. Buying and selling assets is only a means for achieving those ends.
Meanwhile, the Fed also has costs, including interest payments on reserve balances, interest payments on securities sold via repurchase agreements, and operational costs like payroll and its buildings. Costs go up when the Fed hikes interest rates like it did in 2022 and 2023 to tamp down inflation.
When income exceeds those costs, the Fed hands over the surplus to the Treasury Department. In fact, in the decade before COVID, the Fed sent about $1 trillion to the Treasury.
When the Fed’s costs exceed its income, the central bank creates an IOU known as a “deferred asset” to pay for operations. As interest rates rose, the Fed’s deferred asset grew from $133 billion in 2023 to nearly $216 billion in 2024. As of Wednesday, it was $236.6 billion.
Once rates come down further and income tops losses again, the Fed will pay back the deferred asset and then resume giving the Treasury any excess earnings.
“In conclusion, tighter monetary policy to rein in inflation has resulted in a reduction of net income for the Fed,” the St. Louis Fed said in a 2023 explainer. “This does not mean that the Treasury has to recapitalize the Fed, but rather that the Fed records a negative liability in the form of a deferred asset. This deferred asset accumulates until the Fed sees positive net income, which should happen once interest rates on the long-duration assets it owns start exceeding the interest paid on bank reserves and reverse repo facilities.”
One of the provisions of the trade deal that set a 15% tariff on Japan is a pledge from Tokyo to invest $550 billion in key American sectors. The White House said the money will be deployed “at President Trump’s direction,” potentially giving him a bigger say in U.S. industrial policy. But details remain thin, and analysts are skeptical.
The pledge from Japan to invest $550 billion in key U.S. industries could show other countries how to clinch a trade deal with the U.S., even as analysts question how real that money is.
As part of the agreement that set a 15% tariff rate on Japan, the White House said it includes a “Japanese/USA investment vehicle” that will be deployed “at President Trump’s direction” into strategic sectors.
They include energy infrastructure and production, semiconductors, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and shipbuilding, according to a fact sheet from the administration. The U.S. would retain 90% of the profits, though the Japanese government believes profits will be split based on “the degree of contribution and risk taken by each party,” according to the Financial Times.
Still, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent highlighted the fund as a key reason the U.S. and Japan were able to settle on a levy that was lower than the 25% rate Trump had threatened earlier.
“They got the 15% rate because they were willing to provide this innovative financing mechanism,” he told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday, when asked if other countries could get a similar rate.
Indeed, analysts at Bank of America said that the Japan deal “looks like a reasonable blueprint” for other auto-exporting countries like South Korea.
Both countries have similar trade characteristics with the U.S., such as high current account surpluses, high U.S.-bound exports, and less open domestic markets via non-tariff measures, the bank said in a note on Friday.
At the same time, the U.S. is also negotiating deals with the European Union and other trading partners ahead of an Aug .1 deadline, when Trump’s pause on his reciprocal tariffs will expire.
But Wall Street has serious doubts that the $550 billion will actually materialize. Takahide Kiuchi, executive economist at Nomura Research Institute and a former Bank of Japan policymaker, said in a note Wednesday that the investment pledge is merely a target and not a binding promise.
“In reality, under the Trump administration, many Japanese companies likely view the business environment in the U.S. as deteriorating due to tariffs and other factors,” he explained. “Furthermore, at current exchange rates, labor costs in the U.S. are extremely high, providing little incentive for Japanese firms to expand investment there. If anything, we may see a stronger trend toward diversifying investments away from the U.S.”
Meanwhile, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Brad Setser, a former U.S. Trade Representative advisor and Treasury Department official, similarly expressed skepticism about the money.
“Odds are it is vapor ware, beyond the known deals (Alaska LNG),” he posted on X on Wednesday, likening it to a highly touted product that may never become available, “but it would be strange (and would potentially set up future problems) if the US relied almost entirely on other people’s money to fund its own industrial strategies.”
He later added “there is a lot less here than meets the eye,” and pointed out that the industrial sectors highlighted as areas for investment are already logical ones for Japan, given current supply-chain concerns.
A source familiar with the matter acknowledged to Fortune that a lot of details of the $550 billion have yet to be ironed out. That includes the timeframe of the investment as well as an advisory board and guardrails against potential conflicts of interest.
But the source added that the investment would be funded by the Japanese government and is not a just pledge from Tokyo to buy commodities or for Japanese companies to steer investments into the U.S.
It also means Japan is fronting the cash to finance projects that are likely to be in the private sector, the source said, offering a hypothetical example of a chip company looking to build a U.S. plant.
Under this scenario, the investment vehicle could finance construction of the factory and lease it out at favorable terms to the chip company, with 90% of the rent revenue going to the U.S. government.
The $550 billion pledge also comes as Trump’s tariffs face legal challenges, with a court hearing scheduled Thursday on whether the president has authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose wide-ranging duties.
That could make it attractive for countries to promise a lot of money sometime in the future to obtain immediate tariff relief, while running out the clock as legal battles play out.
Analysts at Piper Sandler have concluded that Trump’s tariffs are illegal and noted that the $550 billion Japanese investment comes with few concrete specifics.
“Our trading partners and major multinationals know Trump’s tariffs are on shaky legal ground,” they wrote. “Therefore, we find it hard to believe many of them are going to make massive investments in the US they would not have otherwise made in response to tariffs that may not last.”
The data infrastructure and operations company showed it also has a sense of humor after its CEO and HR chief resigned amid fallout from a kiss-cam moment that captured them hugging during a Coldplay concert. The company posted a video of actress Gwyneth Paltrow, the ex wife of Coldplay singer Chris Martin, addressing the company’s most common questions.
Astronomer showed it also has a sense of humor after its CEO and HR chief resigned amid fallout from a kiss-cam moment that captured them hugging during a Coldplay concert.
The data infrastructure and operations company posted a video late Friday of actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who said she was hired on a “very temporary basis” to speak on behalf of the more than 300 employees at Astronomer.
“Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days, and they wanted me to answer the most common ones,” she said.
The first question was shown in text on screen as, ‘OMG! What the actual f,’ to which Paltrow enthusiastically replied, “Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow unifying the experience of running data, ML, and AI pipelines at scale! We’ve been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation!”
The other common question shown on screen was, “How is your social media team holding,” prompting Paltrow to respond by saying, “Yes, there is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September.”
The video came at the end of a tumultuous period for Astronomer. The once-obscure company went viral after Coldplay singer Chris Martin, who was previously married to Paltrow, spotted the company’s Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot hugging during a kiss-cam moment at a concert and said they are “having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
Byron, who is married, and Cabot, attempted to hide from the cameras. They have since resigned from their respective roles as CEO and HR chief.
“The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies—let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world—ever encounter,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name.”
Meanwhile, Paltrow also sought to help steer the public away from the scandal in her video for Astronomer on Friday.
“We will now be returning to what we do best: delivering game-changing results for our customers,” she said cheerfully. “Thank you for your interest in Astronomy.”
It was once a symbol of rebellion against the well-heeled Wall Street establishment. Today, it’s just another day in markets.
This week proved the point. Opendoor surged 43% in a single day. Krispy Kreme rallied 39% in a matter of hours. GoPro briefly spiked 73%. Reddit message boards lit up once again with rocket emojis and call-option bravado.
Yet it wasn’t the magnitude of the surges that mattered — but the indifference they met. Customary warnings about speculative excess fell on deaf ears. What once felt seismic now feels like a normal part of daily trading — another episode in a US financial system where bursts of retail speculation are routine, expected, and largely unremarkable.
By the end of the week, with the quick rallies faded, the broader market ended with modest moves after a record-setting run. Meanwhile, crypto — once cast as the financial resistance — continued its steady march into the mainstream. A new blockchain-based project involving the likes of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was announced. Crypto funds posted their biggest four-week cumulative inflow ever. Michael Saylor’s Strategy clinched another $2.8 billion in capital markets to fund additional Bitcoin buying.
Taken together, the week offered a broader lesson: retail-driven speculative behavior no longer signals generational angst or post-pandemic distortion. It has instead become a settled feature of the current cycle. Short-dated options are part of the retail toolkit, trading platforms span everything from sports betting to complex stock bets, and manic episodes rarely require justification to take hold.
Peter Atwater, an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary who studies retail investors, said the current wave of activity reflects a shift in both market sentiment and investment toolkit. Meme stocks trading, he says, has lost its sense of novelty — and that’s precisely the point. “We’ve normalized memeing,” he said. “There’s a yawn to it now.”
In Atwater’s view, the most aggressive traders have already moved on to riskier frontiers – digital tokens, leveraged ETFs, prediction markets — while meme stocks have become more of a cultural rerun. “It’s like 30-year-olds dancing to music 20-year-olds used to party to,” he said.
That meme stocks can rip without stimulus checks, lockdowns or zero rates isn’t especially surprising anymore. It is, in its own way, a marker of the moment: everyday speculation, embedded in the architecture of modern markets. Contracts that expire within 24 hours made up a record 62% of the S&P 500’s total options so far this quarter, according to data compiled by Cboe Global Markets Inc., with more than half of the activity being driven by retail trading.
“This generation is far savvier about options and market structure,” said Amy Wu Silverman, head of derivatives strategy at RBC Capital Markets. “While my generation was perhaps taught to ‘buy a house’ this one knows to ‘buy the dip.’”
It’s not happening in a vacuum. This week earnings season offered few surprises. Tariff deadlines slipped again. Noise from the White House blurred into the investment backdrop. The S&P 500 climbed 1.5% on the week and closed at a record high.
And in the end, a group of volatile stocks became yet another playground where regular investors aimed to quickly turn a profit, often by cornering short sellers or leveraging options. Opendoor Technologies Inc., capped a six-day winning streak with a 43% pop on Monday. The following days saw stocks with high short interest such as Kohl’s Corp., GoPro Inc., Krispy Kreme Inc. and Beyond Meat Inc. surge intraday then pare into the close.
Competition for gambling dollars is more brisk than it used to be. Since the post-Liberation Day selloff, a Goldman Sachs basket of the most shorted stocks has jumped more than 60%. In credit, CCCs, the riskiest tier of the junk bond universe, are on track to rack up a seventh week of gains. Crypto funds took in $12.2 billion in the past four weeks, their biggest cumulative inflow for such period, according to Bank of America Corp. citing EPFR Global data. US leveraged-loan market just had one of its busiest weeks ever with junk-rated companies rushing to reprice their borrowings multiple times.
And while the latest frenzy was reminiscent of 2021’s pandemic-era burst, there were a few key differences. This week’s action was fleeting, lasting one or two trading days before petering out. Concerted campaigns in the options market played a smaller role. More than half of the top 100 stocks in the S&P 500 index were trading with inverted one-month call skew in 2021, a sign of bullish intent, according to Cboe. This week it got only as high as 21% for the group.
“The market makers and institutions have really adjusted to this phenomenon,” said Garrett DeSimone, head quant at OptionMetrics. They’re “able to hedge their risk and they know how to price these options in across these scenarios,” he said.
If it signaled anything, enthusiasm for memes is more evidence that an ever-more-empowered retail cadre is a fact of Wall Street life that isn’t going anywhere, at least not soon.
“I don’t think it’s the beginning of a new trend, but it is very interesting to watch because it speaks that the retail investor really wants to be involved in this market,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. “This is bullish. This is not bearish. This is not significant of a top.”
Mark Zuckerberg has named Shengjia Zhao, an artificial intelligence researcher who joined Meta Platforms Inc. from OpenAI in June, as the chief scientist for the social media company’s new superintelligence AI group.
Zhao was part of the team behind the original version of OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. He will help lead Meta’s high-profile group, which is aiming to build new AI models that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans. Zhao will report to Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive officer of Scale AI who also joined Meta in June as Chief AI Officer.
Meta has been spending aggressively to recruit AI experts to develop new models and keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google in the race for AI dominance. The company has been looking for a chief scientist for the group for months. Zhao is one of more than a dozen former OpenAI employees who have joined Meta’s AI unit in the past two months.
“Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one,” Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote in a post announcing the news on Threads. “Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”
Zhao was a co-author on the original ChatGPT research paper, and was also a key researcher on OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, which has helped popularize a wave of similar so-called “chain-of-thought” systems from labs such as DeepSeek, Google, and others. He was listed as one of over 20 “foundational researchers” on the project.
Yann LeCun, another AI researcher who has been at Meta for over a decade and holds the title of chief scientist, will continue to work at the company as chief scientist of an internal AI research group known as FAIR, according to a person familiar with the matter. He will report to Wang, they added.
A Southwest Airlines jet heading to Las Vegas from Southern California took a dramatic plunge shortly after takeoff Friday in response to an alert about a nearby plane, sending some passengers flying out of their seats and injuring two flight attendants.
The plane suddenly jolted shortly after takeover then felt like it was falling, said Stef Zamorano, who was flying to Las Vegas with her husband to celebrate his birthday.
In front of her, Zamorano saw a woman who wasn’t wearing her seat belt shoot up and out of her seat, her long hair flying in a tangled mess. The man seated next to her was clutching her arm, and she said the woman across the aisle was panicking.
“She was pretty much verbalizing how we all felt, saying, ‘I want to get off this plane. I want to be on the ground,’ ” Zamorano told The Associated Press.
Data from the flight tracking site FlightAware shows it dropped roughly 300 feet (91.44 meters) in 36 seconds.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the flight, Southwest 1496, was responding to an onboard alert about another aircraft in its vicinity. The FAA is investigating. Southwest said the crew responded to two alerts that required the pilot to climb then descend. The flight departed from Hollywood Burbank Airport just before noon.
Still in shock, Zamorano said she could hardly make out what the pilot was saying when he later addressed the passengers.
Another passenger, comedian Jimmy Dore, posted on X that the pilot mentioned a near miss.
“Pilot said his collision warning went off & he needed to avoid plane coming at us,” Dore posted.
The plane was in the same airspace near Burbank as a Hawker Hunter Mk. 58 just after noon local time, FlightAware shows. A Hawker Hunter is a British fighter plane. Records show it is owned by Hawker Hunter Aviation, a British defense contracting company. The company didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Mike Christensen, an airport spokesman for Hollywood Burbank, said that neither the control tower nor the operations department, which tracks planes departing and arriving, have any record of the Southwest flight plunging in their airspace.
Southwest said the flight continued to Las Vegas, “where it landed uneventfully.” The airline said that it is working with the FAA “to further understand the circumstances” of the event.
This close call is just the latest incident to raise questions about aviation safety in the wake of January’s midair collision over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people.
With this week’s FCC approval, the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media is expected to be completed in the coming weeks at a value of $8 billion. The question for the new company is whether the psychic cost is much higher.
Following the Federal Communications Commission approval Thursday, one of the triumvirate of current Paramount leaders, Chris McCarthy, said that he would be leaving the company. McCarthy has been in charge of fading cable properties like MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, expected to bear the brunt of an estimated $2 billion in cost cuts identified by Skydance leaders.
Skydance head David Ellison is expected to head the new company, and he has identified former NBC Universal executive Jeff Shell as the incoming president.
CBS News’ trajectory will be scrutinized
After the merger’s Aug. 7 closing date, the new leaders will be watched most closely for how they deal with CBS News, particularly given the $16 million paid in a settlement of Trump’s complaint that last fall’s “60 Minutes” interview was edited to make opponent Kamala Harris look good. Two news executives — News CEO Wendy McMahon and “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens — resigned due to their opposition to the deal.
The appointment of respected insider Tanya Simon to replace Owens this week was seen as a positive sign by people at “60 Minutes.”
Days before the FCC’s vote, Paramount agreed to hire an ombudsman at CBS News with the mission of investigating complaints of political bias. “In all respects, Skydance will ensure that CBS’s reporting is fair, unbiased, and fact-based,” Skydance said in a letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.
The role of an ombudsman, or public editor, who examines a news outlet’s work is often positive — if they are given independence, said Kelly McBride, an ethics expert who has had that role at NPR for five years. “You really want the person to have loyalty only to their own judgment and the journalistic mission of the organization,” she said.
Having the sole mission of examining bias could be problematic, however. To be fair, a journalist’s work should be closely studied before making that determination, not judged on the basis of one report or passage, she said.
Carr, in an interview with CNBC on Friday, said the role “should go a long way toward restoring America’s trust in media.” Anna Gomez, an FCC commissioner who voted to reject the deal on Thursday, interpreted the arrangement as a way for the government to control journalists.
“They want the news media to report on them in a positive light or in the light that they want,” Gomez told MSNBC. “So they don’t want the media to do their job, which is to hold government to account without fear or favor.”
How the merger could ripple out across Paramount properties
According to published reports, Ellison has explored purchasing The Free Press, a flourishing news site founded by Bari Weiss perhaps best known for a former NPR editor’s study of liberal bias in public broadcasting. An Ellison spokeswoman did not return a message seeking comment on Friday.
Colbert’s slow-motion firing — he’ll work until the end of his contract next May — was described by CBS as a financial decision given late-night television’s collapsing economics. Colbert’s relentless lampooning of Trump, and his criticism of the “60 Minutes” settlement, led to suspicion of those motives.
“Was this really financial?” comic Jon Stewart wondered. “Or maybe the path of least resistance for your $8 billion merger was killing a show that you know rankled a fragile and vengeful president?”
Stewart’s profane criticism on his own Paramount-owned show may provide its own test for Skydance. “The Daily Show” is one of the few original programs left on Comedy Central, and his contract ends later this year.
In an odd way, Comedy Central’s “South Park” buttresses CBS’ claim that the Colbert decision was financial, not political. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone delivered an episode this week that depicted a naked Trump in bed with the devil. Paramount just signed Parker and Stone to a new $1.5 billion deal that Skydance executives surely cleared; it makes the entire “South Park” library available for streaming on Paramount+. a platform where Colbert’s show doesn’t do nearly as well.
Figuring out what to do with others at Paramount’s cable networks, or even the networks as a whole, will be an early decision for Ellison, son of multibillionaire and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
“There is a clear opportunity to improve Paramount’s growth profile by letting those assets go,” analyst Doug Creutz of TD Securities told investors Friday. “On the other hand, we suspect the Ellisons did not purchase Paramount in order to break it up for parts.”
The merger also brings together the Paramount movie studio with one of its most regular partners. David Ellison has been one of the industry’s top investors and producers since founding Skydance in 2006.
Ellison has a challenge here, too: Years of uncertainty over its future and modest investment in its movie pipeline has shrunk Paramount’s market share to last among the major studios. The Paramount+ streaming service has been a money-loser.
To revive Paramount, Ellison will look to revamp its streaming operations, leverage its franchises and try to bolster family content.
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AP Film Writer Jake Coyle contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP.
I’m going to start with a caveat from the top: This is not a formal product review. That’s not my background nor expertise, and if that’s what you are looking for, you are likely to walk away at least a little bit disappointed.
What this is, is a first impression based on hands-on experience with the new Alexa from someone who was once a consistent user of Amazon’s original voice assistant. Back then, I relied on Alexa for the kind of straightforward things many of us did every day: playing music, checking the weather, requesting sports scores, setting timers, and answering the types of questions that grade-school kids would get a kick out of (“Alexa, who would win a battle between a lion and a snow leopard?”). But over the years, Alexa’s performance seemed to deteriorate– it had more trouble understanding basic requests and definitely could not hold a conversation like popular AI chatbots could. Eventually, my family’s interest—and patience—waned.
So I’ve been waiting for a new and improved Alexa for quite some time, and when I recently received an invitation offering “early access” to the beta version of Alexa+, I was eager to take it for a verbal spin.
It’s worth noting that Amazon first announced what would become Alexa+ back in September of 2023, but the launch has been repeatedly held up amid “structural dysfunction and technological challenges,” as Fortune reported last June, and later by issues related to how slow the assistant was to respond to commands or complete actions. In February, Amazon finally unveiled details of Alexa+ at a splashy launch event, but did not launch the service widely at the time; instead, it’s been rolling out Alexa+ little by little, in a phased approach (Amazon says that millions of people now have access to Alexa+). Prime members don’t pay anything for the Alexa upgrade, but non-members will pay around $20 a month after the official launch, the company has said. For now, early access is free to Prime and non-Prime members alike. The company has not formally announced an official full public launch date.
I’ve spent some time over the last few weeks using Alexa+ for some of the same things we used its predecessor for, as well as trying out some of the new actions, like booking an Uber and restaurant reservation, that Amazon is pushing. My first impression, in short, is that the service is pretty good. If it had launched shortly after Amazon first announced an updated version of Alexa in the fall of 2023, I might have said it was very good. Its conversational abilities are real and mostly very fluid. Does it blow away voice modes from LLM-based AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity? Not in my experience. But it is vastly superior in that way to the original Alexa so will likely come as a delightful surprise to those who haven’t spent much time with those competitor services. On several occasions, though, I had to re-prompt Alexa by name in the middle of a back-and-forth conversation—I thought I had just taken a normal, mid-speaking pause but Alexa thought differently. If such instances continue to occur at public launch, it might not be a deal breaker for regular usage, but would certainly frustrate me – and I assume some others too.
Can you hear the music playing?
I also had some issues with playing Spotify using the new Alexa, unless I specified that I wanted it played on the specific Alexa device in front of me. The gadget in question was an 8-inch Echo Show device (the Echo device with a screen) to test out Alexa+ because the technology isn’t available on some of Amazon’s older speakers, including the original Pringles-box-shaped Echo speakers, one of which still sits on a shelf in our dining room. (If you don’t have an Echo device, you’ll still be able to use the new Alexa+ from the Alexa app.)
Earlier versions of the Echo smart speaker looked like cylindrical Pringles chip boxes. The new Alexa+ is not compatible with some of those earlier versions.
Cayce Clifford/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The new Alexa told me Spotify was playing, when it actually wasn’t. I thought perhaps it was somehow playing on the old Pringles-tube Echo downstairs, but that wasn’t the case. A spokesperson recommended I change the default device for Spotify in the Alexa app but honestly, the Alexa app isn’t the most intuitive and I gave up after about 10 minutes. Considering that playing music is one of the basic and common tasks for a smart speaker, this didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but I am not ruling out the possibility that I’m overlooking a setting that would fix the issue.
The other flaws I ran into ranged from comical to frustrating. An on-screen prompt on the Echo Show advertised that Alexa could help me choose a new lunch spot, but when I queried Alexa about it the first time, she claimed she couldn’t carry out that task.
I also made the mistake, apparently, of asking Alexa to slow down her speaking cadence at some point so I could take some hand-written notes. That simple command kicked off a minutes-long bizarro-world exchange in which I would ask Alexa to speed up or slow down her cadence, she’d reply that she had—but at a speed which was even more drastically opposite of what I had been asking. It took several minutes, but what felt like an eternity, to rectify.
On another occasion, Alexa got snippy with me when I seemed astonished that she had instructed me to simply unplug and then reconnect my Echo device to try to solve the aforementioned Spotify issue. “It’s your problem not mine” was essentially the gist of the response. Can an AI offend me? I mean, that’d be pretty silly. But the exchange was a bit off-putting, though admittedly mildly amusing as well.
On this point, Panos Panay, the longtime Microsoft executive who joined Amazon in late 2023 to head up Alexa and its broad array of devices from Echos to Kindles to Fire TV sticks, seemed intrigued.
“We’re testing a few of the boundaries,” he told me in an interview at the company’s New York City headquarters in early July. “Like, yeah, you want a little personality out of your assistant, and you want it to feel or be personal. I think that’s okay. Where is that boundary is an interesting question.”
Alexa’s new tricks
For my daughter, Alexa+’s ability to generate images and “paintings” based on voice commands was a treat. I also tried some of the advertised “actions” that Panay and Amazon believe will set Alexa apart from competitors and transform it into more of an agent than an assistant. I asked Alexa to book a reservation for me and my wife at a new local sushi restaurant we’ve been meaning to try – and finally could with our kids staying the weekend with a relative. Disappointingly, though, Alexa replied that she couldn’t make a reservation at that restaurant – the restaurant doesn’t use OpenTable for its reservations and that’s the only current partner that Alexa+ has in the space. Alexa instead simply offered me the restaurant’s phone number which….was not exactly what i was looking for. It’s possible that Amazon ends up cutting a deal with Resy, the restaurant reservation service that the restaurant in question uses. While Panay said more partnerships were in the works, neither he nor a spokesperson would confirm specifics.
That said, ordering an Uber by voice worked seamlessly (once I agreed to provide access to my Uber account), though I do wonder how often people will opt for this experience versus simply pulling out their phone. Browsing and homing in on the cheapest soccer tickets at a nearby stadium also worked quite well though, again, I wonder if talking out loud to a virtual ticket assistant for 4 minutes is actually any better or more efficient than searching for the tickets on my phone or computer.
Panay told me beta feedback so far is “overwhelmingly positive,” and that the “conversational aspect” of Alexa+ alone—versus the prompt and response mode of the original—is delighting customers. “It’s just a part of the kitchen conversation at this point,” he noted, emphasizing his point with an anecdote about his family settling debates or open questions by querying Alexa+ rather than pulling out a phone and falling prey to all the distractions that come with it.
“It’s the idea of being engaged with each other and having an ambient assistant there, where I’m not turning on my phone, I’m not opening an app, I’m not being distracted by whatever it is that is on my notifications,” he said.
One major caveat is that I wasn’t able to try out everything that Amazon is excited about. Panay stressed that while engagement with “traditional features” like playing music are increasing, household-management capabilities of Alexa+ are a hit with early users and he believes they’ll continue to be. In one example, he discussed giving Alexa access to a family’s calendar and then prompting it for the best weekend to get away. I haven’t tried that feature mainly because you can’t yet link work email accounts from Google or Microsoft to Alexa+, and because our kids’ sports calendars are spread across several apps that I’m frankly too lazy to consolidate (yes, embarrassing).
“Please don’t underestimate the power of this”
Amazon’s head of devices Panos Panay at the Alexa+ launch event in February 2025
Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images
Panay also highlighted shopping tools powered by Alexa+ that notify you when a certain product goes on sale. And he stressed the ease with which Alexa users who have outfitted their home with smart devices—think smart lights and smart locks —will be able to speak into existence complex routines.
“Alexa, every night at 8:30, start dimming the lights in the house and then lock the doors,” he said by way of example.
That’s four separate commands in one sentence, versus what would have taken at least a dozen and a half steps within the Alexa app previously, Panos said.
“Jason, please don’t underestimate the power of this,” Panay urged me.
One approach Amazon and Panay could take would be to set expectations a bit low and then overdeliver after such a long wait. After all, the introduction of the original Alexa occurred in a really understated way; it was buried within a larger announcement unveiling a surprise device called the Echo.
Panay, for his part, acknowledged that there is still work to do before the new Alexa is ready to be used by hundreds of millions of existing users. And after such a long wait—with Panay himself setting expectations high—it’s fair to wonder if “pretty good” is anywhere good enough in the new world that Amazon’s famed voice assistant is now reentering. Clearly, there’s more work to do.
Delta Air Lines is having a good 2025, reporting strong second-quarter earnings and reinstating its April profit guidance, leading to a substantial stock bump (up roughly 16% from June to July). True, its guidance is down from its January projections, but it’s weathering the storm of the tricky global economy well, maintaining its status as America’s leading premium airline. As Fortune‘s Shawn Tully reported in March 2025, it has somehow managed the trick of being America’s most profitable airline, while giving billions back to employees in the form of profit sharing.
At the start of the year, CEO Ed Bastian kicked off a celebration of Delta’s centenary by announcing “a new era in premium travel” with the opening of Delta One lounges, a step above its usual Sky Clubs. The Delta One locations will offer “amenities for the premium traveler” ranging from fine dining to spa-like wellness treatments and valet services. Bastian clarified that Delta will continue to invest in its Delta Sky Clubs, with more openings planned to come.
But there is more to the story for Delta, America’s leading premier airline. The Sky Clubs are coming off years of turbulence, with significant customer backlash following several of Delta’s attempts to improve a lounge experience that has become overcrowded. These problems date back several years, to the beginning of the “revenge travel” boom that accompanied post-pandemic reopening. Bastian told Fortune in 2022 that even he was shocked by the level of demand: “People talk about revenge travel, or pent-up travel—this is beyond anything that people can classify as truly pent-up,” he said, adding that his team calculated a whopping $300 billion burst of travel thirst. “That gap is $300 billion—with a B,” Bastian emphasized.
America’s leading premium airline has long offered a standard lounge experience through its Sky Clubs, with free wi-fi, buffets of cold snacks and heated steam trays, and a range of complimentary drinks. The Sky Clubs were no match for the burst of revenge travelers. Bastian’s efforts to fix these problems in 2023—barring Basic Economy passengers and capping the number of visits allowed for credit card holders—sparked backlash on customers’ part and soul-searching for Bastian. “We are victims of our own success,” he told Fast Company‘s Stephanie Mehta in 2024, as he explained changes to benefits including access to Sky Club lounges. “It’s hard to tell someone who’s been at a certain status for many years that what they’ve earned is no longer as valuable.”
That’s why the declining pleasure of the airport lounge resonates for a deeper reason: it’s a metaphor for the declining prospects of the upper middle class in an age of “elite overproduction,” which argues that certain societies grow so rich and successful that they produce too many people of premium education for the number of premium jobs—or premium experiences—that the economy can actually support.
The elites have been so overproduced that you can literally see them—in lines stretching out of airport lounges.
The elite lounge overproduction theory
Several factors make Delta’s overcrowding issue particularly severe, and they have to do with how Delta is really trying—and, as Bastian says, succeeding—in offering a premium service to a large, affluent customer base. Delta offers more comprehensive food and beverage options than many competitors, so travelers linger longer, compounding capacity issues. Indeed, when reached for comment, Delta confirmed that its SkyMiles program has seen “unprecedented engagement,” and its member satisfaction is higher than ever. Delta said it’s committed to continuous investment to further please customers, which includes “modernizing and expanding our lounges.”
Generous lounge access deals with American Express (including non-Delta-branded Platinum Card holders) have greatly expanded eligibility, overwhelming facilities. As more travelers achieve status or purchasehigh-tier tickets, both due to credit card spending and business travel rebounds, demand for lounge space has increased beyond what legacy facilities can handle.
Delta isn’t alone in its lounge struggles, as shown by its partner, American Express, which has tried to physically expand many of its Centurion Lounges. Those have gone from the epitome of exclusivity and comfort to another kind of crowded waiting room—albeit with arguably better snacks and Wi-Fi.
The root of the problem is the same: too many people now have access. The proliferation of premium credit cards, airline status programs, and paid day passes has democratized lounge entry, eroding the exclusivity that made these spaces desirable in the first place.It is unclear if Delta expanded too far, too fast, or if it was surprised by the number of lounge lovers in its clientele.UBS Global Wealth Management has noted a surprising trend in the upper middle class: the rise of the “everyday millionaire,” or people whose assets fall between $1 million and $5 million. These are exactly the kind of people who would see themselves as lounge-worthy, and likely frustrated to find their small-M millionaire status doesn’t go so far.
The consequences for travelers are palpable. Social media and travel forums are rife with stories of travelers paying hundreds of dollars in annual fees only to find long lines clogging, say, New York’s JFK terminals on a daily basis. The proof is abundant on TikTok.On the other hand, expectations are heightened. Travel research firm Airport Dimensions has conducted an “airport experience report” for over a decade and found in 2024 that airport lounges are a contradiction: the definitive democratic travel luxury.
This widespread expectation—and dissatisfaction—is not just a matter of comfort. For many, the lounge was a symbol of having “made it”—a reward for loyalty, status, or financial success. Its decline has become a source of frustration and even embarrassment, especially for those who remember a more exclusive era. There’s an emotional trigger behind an unpleasant lounge experience.
The theory behind the malaise: elite overproduction
The overcrowding of airport lounges is more than a logistical headache—it’s a microcosm of a broader societal phenomenon. University of Connecticut professor emeritus Peter Turchin has developed a controversial theory of “elite overproduction” which posits that frustration and even instability result when a society produces more people aspiring to elite status than there are elite positions. It’s an unorthodox theory from an unorthodox academic: Turchin is an emeritus professor at UConn, research associate at the University of Oxford and project leader at the Complexity Science Hub-Vienna, leading research in a field of his own invention: Cliodynamics, a type of historical social science.
The catch with Turchin’s theory is that his own type of complexity science takes on a pseudo-prophetic quality, similar in some ways to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s “Fourth Turning.” And Turchin has foreseen that the United States has reached a stage repeated in civilizations throughout history, when it has produced too many products of elite education and social status for the realistic number of jobs it can generate. Decline and fall follows, Roman Empire-style. The Atlanticprofiled Turchin in 2020, warning “the next decade could be even worse.” Several writers have expanded on his ideas since then, approaching it from their distinctive and different sensibilities.
Ritholtz Wealth Management COO Nick Maggiulli posted to his “Of Dollars and Data” blog on the subject of airport lounges specifically, writing that the “death of the Amex lounge” simply shows that “the upper middle class isn’t special anymore,” although he did not specifically link this to the concept of elite overproduction. “There are too many people with lots of money,” he concluded.
In the context of airport lounges, the “elite” are not just the ultra-wealthy, but the vast upper middle class—armed with a combination of higher degrees, status, and premium credit cards—now jostling for the same perks. But what if much of society has been turning into some version of an overcrowded airport lounge?
In an interview with Fortune Intelligence, Turchin said this theory makes sense and fits with his thesis when presented with the similarities. “The benefits that you get with wealth are now being diluted because there are just too many wealth holders,” he said, citing data that the top 10% of American society has gotten much wealthier over the past 40 years. (Turchin sources this statement to this working paper from Edward Wolff.)
Turchin said lounges are not by definition restricted from expansion in the same way that political offices are, with a core element of his thesis being there are too many sociopolitical elites for the number of positions open to them, but “it’s the same thing” in light of the difficulties many providers have in expanding lounge access. “There is a limited amount of space, but many more elites now, so to speak … low-rank elites.” Turchin said these low-rank elites, or “ten-percenters,” don’t have the status typically associated with elite status. “The overproduction of lower-ranking elites results in decreased benefits for all.”
When asked where else he sees this manifesting in modern life, Turchin said “it’s actually everywhere you look. Look at the overproduction of university degrees,” he added, arguing that declining rates of college enrollment and high rates of recent graduate unemployment support the decreasing value of a college diploma. “There is overproduction of university degrees and the value of university degree actually declines. And so the it’s the same thing [with] the lounge.”
Noah Smith argues that elite overproduction manifests as a kind of status anxiety and malaise among the upper middle class. Many find themselves struggling to afford or access the very symbols of success they were promised—be it a prestigious job, a home in a desirable neighborhood, or, indeed, a peaceful airport lounge. He collects reams of employment data to show that Turchin’s theory has significant statistical support from the 21st century American economy.
Freddie DeBoer largely agrees, framing the issue as “why so many elites feel like losers.” He focuses more on the creator economy than Smith, but asserts that he sees “think many would agree with me about “a pervasive sense of discontent among people who have elite aspirations and who feel that their years toiling in our meritocratic systems entitles them to fulfill those aspirations.”
Delta’s plan to restore status
In its lounge strategy, Delta is trying to walk a fine line: Offering a premium service to a class of consumers that is becoming more and more mass-market. CEO Ed Bastian acknowledged as much on the company’s latest earnings call. While touting the fortunes of Delta’s target customers, households making $100,000 or more a year, Bastian noted the income cutoff “is not, by the way, an elite definition—that’s 40% of all U.S. households.”
Beginning February 2025, Delta implemented new caps on annual lounge visits for American Express cardholders, setting a maximum of 15 visits per year and requiring exceptionally high annual spending ($75,000+) to re-unlock unlimited access. Basic Economy passengers, meanwhile, are permanently excluded from lounge access, further tightening entry. Travelers can only enter lounges within three hours of their flight’s departure time, discouraging extended stays and unnecessary early arrivals.
Delta is opening and upgrading lounges in key markets: New Delta One Lounges in Seattle, New York-JFK, Boston, and Los Angeles feature larger spaces, exclusive amenities, and new design concepts for premium passengers. Major expansions are under way in hubs like Atlanta, Orlando, Salt Lake City, and Philadelphia, with multiple new or enlarged clubs opening between spring and late 2025—some over 30,000 square feet in size, making them among the largest in the network. Renovations to existing lounges (e.g., Atlanta’s Concourses A and C) are aimed at maximizing capacity and improving guest experiences. Delta is also exploring emergency overflow options and flexible staffing to address unpredictable surges, especially during weather and operational delays.
Delta executives are optimistic. They predict that by 2026, most crowding issues—aside from extreme disruptions—will be resolved on “almost all days.” Continued investments in larger, better-designed lounges, coupled with tighter access controls, are expected to restore the premium experience customers expect.
However, critics note that crowding still occurs at peak times, especially in flagship locations, and design/layout flaws occasionally undermine even the newest clubs. The success of Delta’s fix-it agenda is being closely watched by both rivals and loyal travelers.
But Delta may be overmatched in rehabilitating the overcrowded airport lounge as a potent symbol of this broader malaise. What was once a marker of distinction is now a crowded, noisy, and often disappointing experience. The democratization of luxury, while laudable in some respects, has left many feeling that the rewards of success are increasingly out of reach—or at least, not what they used to be.
As airlines grapple with how to restore the magic of the lounge, they are also confronting a deeper truth: in an age of elite overproduction, the promise of exclusivity is harder than ever to keep.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
EXCLUSIVE: Tony Cheng rose up the corporate ladder at Reinsurance Group of America by embracing challenging roles early and credits his steady, decades-long career growth to continual learning, humility, and a willingness to take on responsibility. His leadership helped expand RGA’s presence in Asia and beyond, encouraging individuals looking to lead companies to always be open to continued growth.
It’s rare to be offered a big promotion and turn it down, but it’s even rarer to warn superiors you don’t feel prepared for the role and be appointed anyway.
Yet that’s precisely what happened to Reinsurance Group of America boss, Tony Cheng, in his early years with the business. Cheng has worked his way up the ranks of RGA over the past three decades, helping grow the company to its current position of $3.9 trillion of reinsurance covering active policyholders.
In 2025, RGA announced a landmark $1.5 billion deal with Equitable to reinsure $32 billion worth of life insurance policies, securing its place as an industry leader and expected to boost earnings for quarters come.
Sitting down for an exclusive interview with Fortune this summer, Cheng reflected on that all-important promotion to CEO, and the value of staying humble even in the C-suite.
The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Tony, in an era where job-hopping is often seen as the fast track to career growth, you’ve chosen a different tactic—working up through RGA since 1997. Where did your work ethic come from, and what’s inspired your long-standing commitment to the company?
I was born in Hong Kong, and my parents—both teachers—felt for the future of their four kids (of which I was the youngest) Australia would provide the Western education they wanted. So I grew up in Australia from nine months to the age of 20 and didn’t travel overseas much.
My parents worked incredibly hard. Mom looked after the four kids and Dad unfortunately had to give up his love for teaching because it just wouldn’t pay the bills. Eventually they opened up small businesses and then we, the four kids, on the weekend would go work there—12 hour days—and didn’t think otherwise. That really bred in the sacrifice of the parents, the hard work, all things I’d wish to pass onto my kids.
Growing up as many of us in a Western country but very Asian family do, I think I went to Asia once in my life, so [I took] an opportunity to join RGA in 1997 in Malaysia.
Between 1999 and 2002 you returned to the States to earn an MBA while working for RGA, before leaving to head up the Hong Kong office. When you arrived, you had a team of 10. The Asia Pacific region now has more than 1,000 employees and revenues of $4 billion. Are there untapped career opportunities in emerging markets as opposed to progressing in established regions?
We had a very small operation, but we were actually covering about 500 million people. It was Hong Kong and Southeast Asia so Malaysia, Thailand, all those countries. I went there as the actuary, and a year and a half later they promoted me to be the CEO of that business. It was daunting, right?
The first time I was asked to take it by my boss, I sort of said, ‘No, I’m too young.’ At the time I was 29. He ignored that.
The equation in my mind was I’ve probably got a 10% chance of success—and that would be great—or a 90% chance of failure, but hey, I’m gonna learn a hell of a lot. I had no mortgage, no kids, so just wanted to learn. Maybe that instinct, that desire and drive to keep learning was from my parents being teachers.
In its latest financial results RGA reported revenues of $22.1 billion. How has the start-up mentality you learned in Asia helped grow the business globally?
We built that business up with incredible hard work. I’d joke internally that once every month or so pest control would come in, and that meant we could go home at 5 o’clock because what else were we going to do with ourselves? That was the spirit. In the early days, you solve problems. I’d say to the team: ‘Let’s just try. We know it’s really hard, but let’s just try.’
In the U.S., people usually don’t create new products or create new things because the market’s so big, a lot of it’s already played out and it’s been created. Any good idea has been thought of, and that’s truly okay.
It’s actually more connecting the dots in the U.S., but with a drive to not just settle on: ‘Hey, here’s the market, we want a share of it’ it’s a drive to create new things or a new combination of things so that we [can] increase the pie and share in that greater value creation. That’s always been in the company spirit, it was just really about bringing that out again to the forefront.
Like a lot of other Fortune 500 CEOs we speak to, you clearly have a love for learning. In a world where AI is expected to disrupt the labor market, what are the skills you’re looking for in new talent?
I can only think of what I advise my son, who’s in his second year of college. As the younger generation already knows, AI is gonna accelerate, and therefore number one they’ve absolutely got to be able to use it and partner with it.
Ultimately AI, one would think, is gonna replace whatever is mathematically easier to replace. Had a conversation at one of the town halls with some risk professionals in the U.S. last week and I said all those soft skills really matter, you’ve still got to learn the hard skills, you’ve got to understand your subject matter expertise regardless of technology, but increasingly all those abilities to interact, to communicate, to join the dots, to be able to understand information, communicate it, and just put those dots together is the stuff that’s gonna be obviously harder for AI to replicate.
Maybe it will one day, but then you’ve just got to keep elevating yourself. So, what is that a lesson of? It is a lesson of continually adapting, continually learning, a bit like a sports person. When they’ve lost their passion to play and fight, it’s time to retire.
For me, when I’ve lost that passion to learn and grow, you’re probably not gonna give it your full go, hence maybe the learning really just keeps me going. It’s not like I ever said, ‘Hey, I want to be the CEO of the company.’ I was so far away, I just wanted to be treated right and enjoy the journey and the growth,
So the lesson to individuals is you’ve just got to keep learning, you’ve got to be humble. If you’re not humble, you’re not gonna listen to yourself or your failings, you’re gonna blame them on something else as opposed to, ‘Well, what was my role in that?’ so I can learn.
Recent studies show that unemployment rates for men aged 22 to 27 with or without college degrees are nearly identical. Younger generations are also finding it harder than in previous years to secure jobs, so they are turning to content creation. Fortune talks to a professor about how to build a successful career as a content creator without a traditional college path.
When Gen Alpha dreams about the future, fewer and fewer are imagining the white lab coat or briefcase wishes of their parents. Instead, they see ring lights and “Get Ready With Me” videos.
In fact, the top two career aspirations among Gen Alpha across the U.S. are YouTuber and TikTok creator, according to a 2024 Whop survey. And many young people are already turning their dreams into reality, including 19-year-old Katie Fang.
The recent high school graduate boasts 6.4 million followers on TikTok and is most known for her popular videos showcasing how she starts her mornings, as well as showcasing brand-deal trips and her recent move to New York City from Vancouver, Canada.
Even though she’s already seemingly gotten a jump-start on her career, Fang is set to attend New York University in the fall, where she will focus on upgrading her digital marketing skills. Fang told Fortune that pursuing a college education will help her think more critically and creatively, especially when crafting content and understanding how platforms like TikTok’s algorithm work.
“I think I’ve always known that I was going to stay in school. I never really took a break—I was online for two years, so it kind of felt like I wasn’t in school, but I was,” Fang told Fortune. “I wanted to go to NYU for the longest time. Just because I started social media, and it became my full-time career, doesn’t mean that dream ever faded.”
Fang’s long-term goal is to start a business after college and to continue to build a personal brand.
“I think the most important thing is just don’t rush to have it all figured out, because especially when you’re so young, you’re not going to know everything,” Fang said.
Since starting her TikTok account in Canada, Fang hasn’t earned revenue directly from her videos. Instead, the majority of her income comes from brand partnerships with companies like Glow Recipe, The Ordinary, and Kosas.
“What I enjoy most is probably how creative everything is,” Fang said. “It’s crazy how you can make the most random video that makes no sense, and that ends up being the one that gets millions of views.”
Fang is just one example of how young people have been able to turn a passion project into a runaway for a high-paying career, where they are their boss.
This comes as a growing number of Gen Zs are questioning the value of a degree to begin with. Recent data shows the unemployment rate for men aged 22 to 27 is almost the same regardless of whether they have a college degree.
Gen Alpha and Gen Z want to follow in the footsteps of MrBeast
The mastermind behind these social phenomena is 27-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, who also holds the crown as the most-subscribed creator on the platform.
A self-made YouTuber whose net worth now exceeds $1 billion, Donaldson began creating and sharing content at just 13 years old. He later dropped out of East Carolina University in 2016 after just a few weeks of courses to pursue content creation full time. Since its launch in 2012, MrBeast’s channel has skyrocketed in popularity thanks to breakout hits like “Squid Game in Real Life,” which racked up over 845 million views.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEOpodcast, Donaldson told host Steven Bartlett that he discovered his motivation to pursue content creation on YouTube when he found out creators were making a high income a year. Growing up without much financial stability, he was driven by a desire to support his mother and family.
“This is what I love doing, I’ve never had as much joy doing something as I do this,” Donaldson said. “I just never give up. There’s no world where I would ever quit. When I was 11, I just said I’m going to be a YouTuber, and I’m going to die trying, and I meant it. Even if there were no one still watching my videos to this day, I would still be going. I’m just the most competitive, stubborn person you’ll ever meet.”
At first, Donaldson’s mother did not want her son to pursue a career in social media because she wanted him to be successful and encouraged him to pursue a college degree instead.
“When people tell me I can’t do something, it makes me want to do more,” Donaldson said. “If you tell me I shouldn’t do something, that’s fine, but if you tell me I can’t, then everything in my body just wants to go.”
Donaldson is not alone in using social media as a source of income and as a career. According to social commerce platform Whop, 42% of US teens are actively earning money online through their digital channels.
Another content creator who did not go through the traditional college pathway is Olajide Olayinka Williams, better known as KSI. He is a 32-year-old British influencer, professional boxer, musician, and entrepreneur. He also founded businesses such as Prime Hydration, Lunchly, and Misfits Boxing, and has a net worth of $100 million.
Joining YouTube in 2009 and initially posting videos of himself playing games, Williams built a following of over 50 million across all his platforms. Unlike his peers, Williams decided not to pursue college at all in favor of his blossoming content creation career — in part after realizing how much he was earning before attending university.
“I remember I asked a teacher, this is how I made this month, it was about £1,500, and I remember him telling me ‘that’s more than I make’,” Williams told the BBC in 2020. “I looked at it and I thought, that’s it, YouTube is the one, it is the goldmine. I need to push and push because I know I can become something and make my parents proud.”
How to be a successful content creator without a college degree
It’s becoming easier than ever to start a career as a content creator and make a living without a college degree. After all, all you need is a phone to get started.
Successful content creators who didn’t go through a traditional educational pathway all share a common trait: building a community so highly engaged that they can rely on their continued support for exposure, said University of Southern California communication professor Freddy Nager.
“It’s important that you try to cultivate your fan base. Otherwise, the only way to reach your own followers is to boost your posts and buy ads,” Nager told Fortune. “A lot of people didn’t become creators to spend money. They wanted to make money, but the platforms want to make money.”
Many creators build their email lists so they can directly notify followers when a new video is released, often encouraging them to watch and leave a comment. He also suggested that creators interact with followers in the comment section, something that is favorable to algorithms.
“You want your users to comment on your posts, because if they do, it means they really care,” Nager said. “Now, the comment could be negative. They could hate your video. Nonetheless, the algorithm reads it that if you’re willing to take the time to comment on the video, not just liking it. So this means that your content must provoke comments. Sadly, that means that a lot of influencers become controversial on purpose.”
This type of collaboration is a key strategy for building influence and trust without a degree requirement. Nager also advised new creators to partner with others, regardless of their fame, emphasizing that exposure to each other’s audiences helps both grow.
In addition, he said that to stand out, creators need two key traits: personality and perspective. They must be relatable yet aspirational, offering a unique voice and sharing their human side to form real connections. Otherwise, they risk being replaced by generic content.
While a formal education isn’t required to break into the industry, Nager said, it offers key advantages.
“I think you need an education to learn from your mistakes, without suffering. We can all learn from suffering, but let’s avoid it. Let’s learn how to analyze data,” he explained.
And while ultimately content creators can and have succeeded without degrees, Nager said more education can also expand one’s worldview and creativity outside of your path.
“Can you be educated without college? Possibly, if you love to read,” he said. “But college lets you explore courses outside your field—take astronomy if you’re a writer, or music if you’re a scientist. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to become a musical expert, but something about music may change the way that you think about chemistry and performance.”
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