For more than two decades, AriZona’s iconic 99-cent iced tea has shrugged off pandemics, recessions, and supply shocks. Now, President Donald Trump’s new 50% aluminum tariffs could finally crack its unshakable price tag. 

AriZona Iced Tea uses about 100 million pounds of aluminum for its signature cans, about 20% of which comes from Canada. Founder and chairman Don Vultaggio told the New York Times that unless Trump strikes a deal to lower the new aluminum levy with Canada, the company may be forced to raise prices. 

“I hate even the thought of it,” Vultaggio told The Times.  “It would be a hell of a shame after 30-plus years.”

The founder has made headlines for refusing to hike the price of his tea, even as inflation drives the prices of all other goods up. If Vultaggio adjusted the price of AriZona iced tea to match rising input costs, the tea would cost $1.99 today. Yet, the billionaire didn’t see a point. 

“We’re successful. We’re debt-free. We own everything. Why?,” Vultaggio said in an interview with Today in June. “Why have people who are having a hard time paying their rent have to pay more for our drink?” 

Vultaggio has tried other workarounds to save money on aluminum, including downsizing the can from 23 ounces to 22 ounces. Even that decision weighed on him. 

Now, the founder worries the price of aluminum, which he said has “dramatically bumped up” because of the tariffs, might be the final blow to the 99-cent cans. 

A test case for U.S. manufacturing

AriZona’s predicament could be a test case for what happens when a domestic manufacturer—one that’s nearly fully vertically integrated, even owning the railroad tracks its trains use to ship sugar daily—gets punished for importing some of its materials. 

PNC’s Chief Economist Augustine Faucher told Fortune he thought the aluminum tariffs were unnecessary and inefficient. 

Canada, which has access to abundant and inexpensive hydroelectric power, is one of the world’s leaders in aluminum production. Given the higher input costs of making aluminum in the U.S., importing it will always be cheaper than producing it domestically, he said.

“It’s going to be difficult to completely avoid tariffs, and that’s likely to contribute to higher consumer inflation in the near term as these companies pass along some of their higher input prices,” he said. 

Faucher said companies like AriZona have few ways to blunt the impact. Unlike industries with slow turnover, which can stock up on inventory before the tariffs hit, beverage makers move product quickly. That means the aluminum tariffs will immediately hit the company’s bottom line.

All the price pain comes with very little gain, Faucher noted. Companies like AriZona, which imports some aluminum but produces the rest of the product domestically, might decide to just package the product overseas to avoid the duty. 

“The idea is to help American manufacturers, but this hurts American manufacturers who use these types of imported inputs,” Faucher said. 

The economist said he doesn’t see a need for the United States to have a strong domestic aluminum industry at all. 

“It makes sense over the long-run to specialize in areas where the United States does well,” Faucher said. “But given the energy costs associated with aluminum production and getting bauxite and all that kind of stuff, it just doesn’t make sense for the industry to be located in the United States.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner William Beach—a Trump nominee—said every number on the jobs chart President Donald Trump touted in the Oval Office on Thursday was wrong.

Still bitter over last week’s “rigged” jobs report, which showed weaker-than-expected job growth, Trump convened an impromptu press conference Thursday evening to showcase graphs with what he called “all-new numbers.”

Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist, said during the press conference that the numbers justified Trump’s firing of former BLS Chief Erika McEntarfer. He estimated that over the last two years of President Joe Biden’s administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs. 

In an interview with Fortune, Moore said he disagreed with the president that the numbers were rigged on purpose. He never met McEntarfer, he explained, but said it was “suspicious” that the jobs numbers published right before the election were eventually revised. 

That suspicion formed the basis for the chart Moore brought to the Oval Office, which showed three bars: the benchmark revisions, the monthly revisions, and the total estimated jobs growth from 2024. 

Beach—who Moore said he’s known for 30 years and calls a “good friend” —called those numbers “the strangest thing in the world.” 

“He should have known better than to do that,” Beach said. 

Beach found problems across the board.

The first bar—labeled as an August jobs revision—used a preliminary estimate that was later revised downward in February, meaning the number on the chart didn’t match the official final figure, Beach said. 

Moore countered that Beach misunderstood his method. He said the team was comparing the initial “headline” jobs numbers released each month to the final revised and benchmarked numbers, and summing those differences, rather than simply pulling the final August correction.

Beach also argued the benchmark revision figure on the chart was incorrect and didn’t align with BLS’s published data. The last bar, labeled “total revisions,” was mathematically flawed, he said, because it added benchmark revisions to monthly revisions, even though the benchmark already incorporates those monthly changes—“like counting the same apple twice and pretending you had two.” 

Moore rejected the idea that this was double-counting, saying he was capturing separate steps in the revision process.

Additionally, during the press conference, Moore said the income figures came from unpublished Census Bureau data; Beach says that makes them unverifiable. Moore told Fortune his team developed an algorithm to estimate those income numbers in advance with what he claims is 97% accuracy, and plans to publish a report explaining the method.

Perhaps the largest disagreement between the two longtime friends is philosophical. While Moore claimed he didn’t believe the numbers are rigged, he also said the positive revisions for Biden “raised eyebrows,” and emboldened the president to argue the BLS was corrupted. 

Beach couldn’t fathom this conspiracy. When he led the BLS from 2019 to 2023, he personally saw the decentralized nature of the process and the “hardheaded” loyalty of the statistics that pored over hundreds of pieces of data. Each person in the BLS role has such a particular job, that it was hard to imagine how they could conspire to push the jobs data in one direction or another.

“I mean, there’s a person at BLS who specializes in drinking-places data,” Beach laughed. 

Trump’s suspicions are more than just puzzling, Beach said. They were also “highly dangerous.” Markets rely so heavily on trust in the jobs report data, he said, that the damage from Trump’s words and actions has likely already happened. 

Drawing on his experience in the private sector, he explained that uncertainty in some metrics forces business leaders to widen their “margin of error” when making investments, which can kill deals. If companies doubt the accuracy of federal statistics, he warned, they’ll eventually turn to alternative measures.

Rather than blaming the messenger, or sowing unnecessary doubt, Beach emphasized that many issues with the statistical data could be solved by modernization. 

“I served two years as the chief statistician of the United States, as well as the BLS Commissioner,” Beach said. “So I know how the system is weakened, and it’s been weakened over time by lack of attention by Congress and lack of modernization. So there are many things to be done.” 

He hoped Moore would be able to find an opportunity to explain his statistical discrepancies better. Moore has always had a different way of constructing numbers, something that Beach said he has benefited from. 

“But sometimes, he doesn’t really get engaged with a topic at the time it’s important for him to make that engagement,” Beach said. “And I think this, this is a case in point.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Four former Intel board members are backing President Donald Trump’s surprise attack on the company’s CEO, but they are pushing for a shake-up that is both more dramatic and wholly in line with their vocal criticism of late.

In a rare collective statement provided exclusively to Fortune, the former directors said the fate of CEO Lip-Bu Tan should be decided by Intel shareholders and its board, but called for a radical restructuring that would spin off Intel’s manufacturing arm into an independent company to secure America’s chipmaking dominance.

The group of former Intel board members—Charlene Barshefsky, Reed Hundt, James Plummer, and David Yoffie—pointed out that the company is on its fourth CEO in seven years with little improvement in results. They argued that only a dramatic break could restore Intel’s competitiveness and protect U.S. national security interests, with a rescue plan focused specifically on emancipating Intel’s “Foundry” business, the manufacturing assets in which Intel produces semiconductor chips for its own products and for third-party customers. These advanced chip fabrication facilities are increasingly top of mind for President Donald Trump, his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and the entire tech industry, watching as the drama unfolds.

Intel was long the leader in chips but has fallen behind Nvidia, TSMC, and other players in recent years, as Barshefsky, Hundt, Plummer, and Yoffie argued in the pages of Fortune. Intel has two main businesses, one being the Foundry and the other, called simply Intel Products, which includes its flagship PC and server microprocessors, as well as networking equipment and software. Both are essential for computing, but only the Foundry is key to national security, which has been a key point in trade talks between Trump and Xi. The group of former directors argued that splitting the chips manufacturing entity from the rest of Intel would directly address both market competitiveness and the nation’s strategic need for advanced semiconductors.

The group called for Intel shareholders to insist on the split, which would create a new, independent manufacturing entity, with its own CEO and board. To make the new company competitive with TSMC, the former directors called for remaining funds under the CHIPS Act to go toward supporting the company and to help “persuade American design firms to place orders.” That would position the new company as an alternative to TSMC, “both for cutting-edge chips needed for data-center and other commercial purposes and for national security requirements.”

Mounting pressure

The statement comes as pressure on Intel intensifies, after President Donald Trump publicly called for CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s resignation over his “conflicted” status and alleged ties to Chinese technology firms. Trump’s demand, posted on Truth Social Thursday morning, sent shock waves through U.S. tech circles and drew swift responses from the company. 

Tan responded in a letter to staff, posted publicly on Intel’s website, claiming there has been “misinformation” about his career and past leadership roles. The embattled CEO said that Intel is “engaging” with the Trump White House to “address the matters that have been raised and ensure they have the facts.” He added that he fully shares the president’s commitment to advancing U.S. national and economic security. 

President Trump’s intervention followed Sen. Tom Cotton’s warnings over reports of Tan’s prior investments in Chinese firms, some allegedly tied to China’s military. Trump’s demand for an immediate CEO change provoked a 3% drop in Intel’s stock Thursday, compounding board-level discord and market concerns about the company’s stagnation and loss of ground to rivals such as Nvidia and AMD.

In his note to staff on Thursday, Tan defended his integrity and claimed the current board was “fully supportive” of the work currently underway at Intel, while insisting that throughout his four decades in the industry, he has “always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards.”

Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a previous statement to Fortune, however, the company pushed back on criticism, saying its board and CEO are “deeply committed to advancing U.S. national and economic security interests” and were making “significant investments aligned with the President’s America First agenda.”

Intel noted it has been manufacturing in the U.S. for 56 years and is investing billions of dollars in domestic semiconductor R&D and manufacturing, including a new Arizona fab that will run the most advanced process technology in the country. The company added that it was “the only company investing in leading logic process node development in the U.S.” and said it looked forward to “continued engagement with the Administration.”

Correction, Aug. 8, 2025: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the four former directors called for the ouster of Intel’s CEO. The group of former directors said that Intel shareholders should make the decision about the CEO.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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President Donald Trump is rapidly tightening his grip on institutions that have long been thought to operate independently of the White House.

Last week, he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, just hours after the agency released a dismal July jobs report. He plans to appoint someone in her place that he deems “more competent.” Days earlier, Trump announced plans to name the next Federal Reserve chair “very soon,” months before current Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term is set to expire. The move gives Trump an unusual opportunity to shape the direction of the central bank well ahead of schedule.

Some critics have warned the back-to-back shakeups represent a broader trend of the second Trump presidency, one of weakened political independence of key financial bodies—an essential feature of U.S. liberal democracy. 

To explore what this shift means for business leaders, Fortune spoke with Francis Fukuyama, one of the world’s leading scholars on democratic institutions.

A familiar warning from the 1970s

“Trump’s philosophy is that everything is political,” Fukuyama said. “Either you’re with him or against him—and if you’re against him, you shouldn’t be in government.”

That approach, he said, directly conflicts with the liberal model of governance: one built on an “impersonal, nonpartisan bureaucracy” that is managed by technical experts. In ultra-complex, wealthy economies like the United States, Fukuyama argues, that model is essential for long-term stability.

Trump appears to be disinterested in that vision, Fukuyama said. He has floated the idea of appointing himself as Fed chair and continuously threatens Powell in a bid to challenge his authority. Rather than deferring to experts, Trump has signaled a desire to steer economic decisions from the executive branch. 

Yet, institutions like the Fed are designed to resist this kind of interference. Their role is to be insulated from the drama of political cycles, particularly when it comes to interest rates, where short-term cuts could help a president win reelection but drive long-term inflation.

While Fukuyama said past presidents have respected those guardrails, Trump’s direct and hostile pressure on the central bank is “unprecedented.”

He compared the moment to the early 1970s, when President Richard Nixon repeatedly pushed the Fed to slash interest rates ahead of his reelection campaign. The Fed Chair at the time capitulated, a move that helped trigger the decade’s hyperinflation.

“That era is very comparable to what’s happening now,” Fukuyama said. “We have so many examples of what happens to countries without independent central banks.”

He cited cases from Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s, where politically captured central banks helped skyrocket prices. 

The problem for CEOs and investors, Fukuyama warned, is that if the next Fed chair is more willing to follow Trump’s preferences, the effects may not be felt right away.

“If Trump were to fire Powell tomorrow, people wouldn’t feel the impact for two, maybe three years,” he said. “People may not connect that political act to the economic pain they’re feeling.”

That delay, he added, creates fragility. “You can appear to get away with a lot while you’re actually doing a lot of damage.”

The risks of politicizing data

Fukuyama said Trump’s firing of McEntarfer carries a different, but equally serious risk: the politicization of official statistics. He pointed to Argentina in 2007, when then-President Néstor Kirchner dismissed a government statistician whose inflation reports clashed with the government’s narrative.

“Magically, inflation went down,” Fukuyama said. “Everybody knew that this was just completely politically based and not credible.” 

He warned that once credibility is lost, it’s hard to get it back. “That’s the risk we face when we start chipping away at the independence of these neutral experts.”

Why CEOs should keep their distance

For business leaders, the incentive to stay neutral may not be clear. Fukyuama noted how some executives have attended exclusive Trump fundraising dinners, including events where investors in Trump’s cryptocurrency were offered personal access to the president.

But Fukuyama warned that getting too close to political figures often backfires. 

“It’s hard to run a predictable, modern business when politics gets too involved,” he said. “In the old days, if you had to bribe a politician to get your way, that was a very inefficient system.”

He also cited Elon Musk as an example of how overt politicization complicates a company’s public image. By politicizing his brand, Musk alienated the exact market he hoped to sell cars to. 

The lesson, Fukuyama added, is that CEOs are better off operating within a stable, depoliticized system. “The more predictable the rules, the easier it is to do business.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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