At just 16 years old, Kairan Quazi has already gained accolades most engineers spend decades accumulating. He graduated from college, helped design software for SpaceX Starlink satellites, and turned down offers from Silicon Valley’s buzzy AI labs. Now, the prodigy is taking his next leap—not in Silicon Valley, but on Wall Street, where he’s joining Citadel Securities, a liquidity provider, as a quant developer. 

A defiant attitude 

Quazi’s path has been unconventional from the start. At 9, he left third grade for community college, went on to intern at Intel Labs at 10, and transferred to Santa Clara University at 11, eventually becoming the youngest graduate in its 172-year history. 

In 2023, he made headlines when Elon Musk’s SpaceX hired him at just 14 years old. A “rare company,” Quazi said at the time, that didn’t use his age as an “arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.” 

The same year, he sparred with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn after it locked him out of the platform for being under 16, blasting the decision as “illogical, primitive nonsense.” In fact, Quazi has never been shy about critiquing the traditional system that held him back. Once LinkedIn allowed him back on to their platform, Quazi posted a comment slamming the conventional school system. The 16-year-old argued that “tests are not used to measure mastery, but the ability to regurgitate” and that the modern “school factory” rewards fear and prestige-chasing over learning.

“Age, privilege, and unconscious (sometimes even conscious) biases are used to gatekeep opportunities,” he wrote, adding that philosophers like Seneca the Younger and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius might have seen today’s education system as dangerous.

Two years later, Quazi is channeling that same defiance into a different arena. He turned down offers from top AI startups and tech firms to join Citadel Securities this week in New York, citing the firm’s culture of meritocracy and instant feedback. 

“Quant finance offers a pretty rare combination: the complexity and intellectual challenge that AI research also provides, but with a much faster pace,” he told Business Insider. At Citadel Securities he said, he’ll be able to see the results of his work in “days, not months or years.”

A win-win

Citadel Securities—sister company to the well-known Citadel—for its part, has every reason to trumpet the win. The firm, which handles roughly 35% of U.S. retail stock trades and generated nearly $10 billion in revenue in 2024, is locked in a talent war with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Recruiting a prodigy who was once deemed too young for LinkedIn—but now works at the intersection of engineering and quantitative problem-solving—is a symbolic coup for Ken Griffin’s trading powerhouse.

For Quazi, the move also closes a personal loop. His mother worked in mergers and acquisitions as an investment banker, giving him early exposure to finance. And on campus, he saw how coveted quant jobs had become for math and computer-science students. 

“It’s one of the most prestigious industries you could go into as a computer scientist or mathematician,” he told Business Insider.

Now, he’s living that reality in New York City. Quazi has moved into an apartment just a 10-minute walk from Citadel Securities’ Park Avenue office. 

“New York has a very special place in my heart,” he said, noting that his mom grew up in Astoria, Queens.

Unlike his time at SpaceX, where his mother had to drive him to work in Redmond, Wash., Quazi’s commute is now his own: first on foot, and soon, by subway.

“I felt ready to take on new challenges and expand my skill set into a different high-performance environment,” he said. “Citadel Securities offered a similarly ambitious culture, but also a completely new domain, which is very exciting for me.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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​​Washington restaurants are becoming unexpected collateral damage in President Donald Trump’s D.C. police takeover, with reservation data showing a sharp decline in diners since the president federalized the city’s police force.

Restaurant reservations in D.C. plummeted last week, dropping 16% on Monday—the day he invoked the D.C. Home Rule Act—27% on Tuesday, and 31% on Wednesday compared with the same days in 2024, according to OpenTable. WUSA, a local television station, was the first to report on the news.

Washington, D.C., is one of very few American cities to see a drop in August dining reservations compared to last year, according to OpenTable. Prior to Trump’s police takeover, D.C. had improved in reservation numbers for 11 consecutive months on a year-over-year basis, according to WUSA. 

That makes this August all the more striking. August is typically the slowest month of the year for restaurants in Washington, as Congress recesses and families head out on last-minute vacations.

“There’s always been this expectation that reservations drop in August,” said Shawn Townsend, the president and CEO of Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, who noted that college move-ins and family travel are major seasonal factors. “But the added visibility of federal agents and troops on the streets can’t be ignored—it’s contributing to the downturn.” 

At the same time, Townsend cautioned, it’s still too soon to say how much of the dip is directly tied to Trump’s policy, since the mobilization of federal forces only began in earnest midweek.

Ariel Pereira, a server at Osteria Al Volo, an Italian restaurant in D.C., told Fortune he has “absolutely” seen a decline in diners. He estimated only 40% of the dining room is being sat, when usually the restaurant is at full capacity. 

However, he wasn’t sure if he should attribute that to the recent takeover, or because of children going back to school. 

Reservations also fell over the past two weeks in the neighboring city of Baltimore, according to the OpenTable data. However, the decline is distinctly less steep: Reservations fell by less than 10% every day except Aug. 17, which showed a decline of 19%.

Trump, meanwhile, painted a different picture. On Monday, sitting next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the president told reporters he thinks restaurants are more crowded than they’ve been in a long time.

“The press says, ‘He’s a dictator, he’s trying to take over.’ No, all I want is security for our people,” Trump said. “But people who haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner, and the restaurants the last two days were busier than they’ve been in a long time.”

Even as crime in D.C. has fallen to a 30-year low this year, Trump last week deployed 800 National Guard troops along with hundreds of federal agents to crack down on the city. Governors from GOP states on Aug. 16 pledged to send an additional 750 troops. Officials have since arrested around 300 people, according to the White House, more than 40% of whom are undocumented immigrants, according to the Washington Post.

Trump’s move was met with significant backlash from residents, with hundreds taking to the streets to protest the “hostile takeover” on Aug. 16. Protesters also gathered to demonstrate against the youth curfew posed by D.C. police, which prevents teenagers under the age of 17 from gathering in large groups in a popular hangout area. 

Some D.C. residents are supportive of the move.

“I’m happy Trump is gonna have his department take over the police department. I think it’s needed, I think we will have some results,” Leroy Thorpe, who founded Citizen Organized Patrol Efforts, told NBC Washington. 

Cheryl Watson, another group member, concurred, adding “the kids are out of hand.” 

Other residents have reported eerily empty streets and “roving patrols” that unsettle them. 

“There is not a crime crisis in D.C.,” Rosa Brooks, a former D.C. Metropolitan reserve police officer who is now a professor at Georgetown Law School, told NPR.

“This is police state territory, banana republic police state territory,” she said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Donald Trump’s new immigration policies—including deporting, the White House claims, about 750 immigrants a day on average—are helping drive up prices, Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told Fortune.

He says if Trump continues deporting immigrants at the current rate, inflation will go from 2.5% to somewhere close to 4% “by the time it hits its peak early next year.”

Zandi says his stark prediction is based on recent inflation data. “Foreign-born labor force is declining, and the overall labor force has gone flat since the beginning of the year,” he added. “That’s causing tightening in a lot of markets, adding to costs and inflation.”

The Labor Department reported Thursday that the producer price index (PPI)—a measure of wholesale inflation before it hits consumers—rose 0.9% from June to July, the biggest jump since 2021. Compared with a year earlier, wholesale prices were up 3.3%.

A jump in the cost of services—about 1.1%—accounted for more than three-quarters of the increase in the PPI. This follows data earlier in the week showing the core consumer price index ticked up 0.2%.

The White House pushed back on the idea that Trump’s deportations are fueling inflation, framing the crackdown as part of an effort to tap “untapped potential” in the domestic workforce. Spokesperson Abigail Jackson said more than one in 10 young Americans are neither working nor in school, and told Fortune the administration is “focused on protecting the American workforce” and ensuring job gains go to native-born workers. 

Since Trump returned to office, she added, “100% of job gains have gone to native-born American workers.”

However, Heritage Foundation economist Steve Moore, who recently paraded alternative jobs data next to Trump, told Fortune he is nonetheless “worried about a labor shortage.”

“I think the deportations of working illegal immigrants could have a slight impact on wages and thus prices,” he said. 

Two camps, two very different diagnoses

Zandi’s remarks place him firmly on one side of a growing split among economists since a shock July jobs report showed very low job creation and steep downward revisions to prior months. 

His camp—which also includes Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Bank of America—argues hiring has slowed because the labor supply has been artificially constrained by Trump’s deportations, border closures, and what Zandi calls “self-deportations.”

“It’s the southern border being shut down, it’s deportations, it’s self-deportations,” he said. “Immigrants are scared. They’re leaving the country, they’re not coming in, they’re not going to work.”

He estimates the annual number of immigrants, legal and undocumented alike, has fallen from roughly 4 million at the 2023 peak to just 300,000–350,000 now.

“That’s a massive change,” Zandi said, and one he believes is “significantly lifting the cost” in sectors that rely heavily on immigrant labor: construction, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, hospitality, retail, elder care, child care, and other personal services.

Fresh and dry vegetable prices, for instance, surged almost 40% in the latest PPI. While tariffs and weather also factor in, Zandi says immigration restrictions are a major culprit.

“You can see it in meat prices, agriculture, food processing, haircuts, dry cleaning,” he said. “The fingerprints of the restrictive immigration policy are all over the CPI and PPI numbers we got this week.”

If Zandi’s diagnosis is right, he says the Federal Reserve can hold rates steady without worrying about a cascade of layoffs because the weakness in hiring stems from fewer available workers, rather than collapsing demand.

The other camp, however, sees a different story: a genuine slowdown in labor demand as businesses pull back amid economic uncertainty. They point to sectors like manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing, where payrolls have been shrinking for months, and to surveys showing declining job openings. In that scenario, Trump’s policies may be a factor “at the margins,” Zandi said, but the main driver is waning business confidence and softer consumer demand.

Fed policy caught in the middle

The distinction matters for monetary policy. A true drop in labor demand would usually ease wage pressures and inflation, giving the Fed room to cut rates. But the latest inflation data, where both hiring slowed and prices rose, muddies the picture.

Zandi warned immigration-driven inflation is a supply-side shock — something interest-rate changes can’t easily fix. 

“Demand-side inflation has a different implication for monetary policy than supply-side inflation,” he said. “Rate cuts won’t bring more immigrants into the country.”

He also argues the inflationary effects of immigration restrictions will be more persistent than those of tariffs.

“Tariffs are more likely to be one-off,” Zandi said. “Restrictive immigration adds to shortages, higher labor costs and wages — and that can become self-reinforcing.”

Economists at Bank of America echo the stagflation risk and say it’s why they expect the Fed to avoid cutting rates this year. Markets so far have taken the latest data in stride, with the S&P 500 hovering near record highs on expectations of a September rate cut. But bond traders are starting to price in a slightly more hawkish Fed, pushing short-term Treasury yields a touch higher.

The path forward

Zandi believes easing immigration restrictions could quickly help bring inflation down.

“If we had a rational immigration policy where we allowed immigrants of all skills into the country, that would be a game changer,” he said, noting immigrants’ outsized role in entrepreneurship and innovation.

Whether the White House acknowledges the link between deportations and inflation, Zandi wouldn’t speculate.

“Tariff inflation is not at the top of the list of reasons why they’re pursuing the restrictive immigration policy,” he said. “There are a lot of other motivations.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs. 

For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.

In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”

Ma, a renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, took her team on the road to get a firsthand look at the country’s AI advancements. She told Fortune that while she isn’t an energy expert, she attended enough meetings and talked to enough insiders to come away with a conclusion that should send chills down the spine of Silicon Valley: In China, building enough power for data centers is no longer up for debate.

“This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasingly tied to debates over data center power consumption and grid limitations,” she wrote on X.

The stakes are difficult to overstate. Data center building is the foundation of AI advancement, and spending on new centers now displaces consumer spending in terms of impact to U.S. GDP. That’s concerning since consumer spending is generally two-thirds of the pie. McKinsey projects that between 2025 and 2030, companies worldwide will need to invest $6.7 trillion into new data center capacity to keep up with AI’s strain. 

In a recent research note, Stifel Nicolaus warned of a looming correction to the S&P 500, since it forecasts this data center capital expenditures boom to be a one-off build-out of infrastructure, while consumer spending is clearly on the wane.

However, the clear limiting factor to the U.S.’s data center infrastructure development, according to a Deloitte industry survey, is stress on the power grid. Cities’ power grids are so weak that some companies are just building their own power plants rather than relying on existing grids. The public is growing increasingly frustrated over increasing energy bills. In Ohio, the electricity bill for a typical household has increased at least $15 a month this summer from the data centers, while energy companies prepare for a sea change of surging demand. 

Goldman Sachs frames the crisis simply: “AI’s insatiable power demand is outpacing the grid’s decade-long development cycles, creating a critical bottleneck.” 

Meanwhile, David Fishman, a Chinese electricity expert who has spent years tracking the country’s energy development, told Fortune that in China, electricity isn’t even a question. On average, China adds more electricity demand than the entire annual consumption of Germany, every single year. Whole rural provinces are blanketed in rooftop solar, with one province matching the entirety of India’s electricity supply. 

“U.S. policymakers should be hoping China stays a competitor and not an aggressor,” Fishman said. “Because right now they can’t compete effectively on the energy infrastructure front.”

China has an oversupply of electricty

China’s quiet electricity dominance, Fishman explained, is the result of decades of deliberate overbuilding and investment in every layer of the power sector, from generation to transmission to next-generation nuclear.

The country’s reserve margin has never dipped below 80%–100% nationwide, meaning it has consistently maintained at least twice the capacity it needs, Fishman said. They have so much available space that instead of seeing AI data centers as a threat to grid stability, China treats them as a convenient way to “soak up oversupply,” he added.

That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids typically operate with a 15% reserve margin and sometimes less, particularly during extreme weather, Fishman said. In places like California or Texas, officials often issue warnings about red-flag conditions when demand is projected to strain the system. This leaves little room to absorb the rapid load increases AI infrastructure requires, Fishman noted. 

The gap in readiness is stark: While the U.S. is already experiencing political and economic fights over whether the grid can keep up, China is operating from a position of abundance.

Even if AI demand in China grows so quickly renewable projects can’t keep pace, Fishman said, the country can tap idle coal plants to bridge the gap while building more sustainable sources. “It’s not preferable,” he admitted, “but it’s doable.”

By contrast, the U.S. would have to scramble to bring on new generation capacity, often facing yearslong permitting delays, local opposition, and fragmented market rules, he said. 

Structural governance differences

Underpinning the hardware advantage is a difference in governance. In China, energy planning is coordinated by long-term, technocratic policy that defines the market’s rules before investments are made, Fishman said. This model ensures infrastructure build-out happens in anticipation of demand, not in reaction to it.

“They’re set up to hit grand slams,” Fishman noted. “The U.S., at best, can get on base.”

In the U.S., large-scale infrastructure projects depend heavily on private investment, but most investors expect a return within three to five years: far too short for power projects that can take a decade to build and pay off.

“Capital is really biased toward shorter-term returns,” he said, noting Silicon Valley has funneled billions into “the nth iteration of software as a service” while energy projects fight for funding. 

In China, by contrast, the state directs money toward strategic sectors in advance of demand, accepting not every project will succeed but ensuring the capacity is in place when it’s needed. Without public financing to de-risk long-term bets, he argued, the U.S. political and economic system is simply not set up to build the grid of the future.

Cultural attitudes reinforce this approach. In China, renewables are framed as a cornerstone of the economy because they make sense economically and strategically, not because they carry moral weight. Coal use isn’t cast as a sign of villainy, as it would be among some circles in the U.S. It’s simply seen as outdated. This pragmatic framing, Fishman argued, allows policymakers to focus on efficiency and results rather than political battles.

For Fishman, the takeaway is blunt. Without a dramatic shift in how the U.S. builds and funds its energy infrastructure, China’s lead will only widen.

“The gap in capability is only going to continue to become more obvious—and grow in the coming years,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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On one sweltering summer afternoon in June, thunderstorms rolled over Boston Logan International Airport. It was the kind of brief, predictable summer squall that East Coasters have learned to ignore, but within hours, the airport completely shut down. Every departure was grounded, and flyers waited hours before they could get on their scheduled flights.

Among those stranded were Maxwell Tabarrok’s parents, in town to help move him into Harvard Business School, where he is completing an economics PhD. Tabarrok told Fortune he was fascinated by how an entire airport could grind to a halt, not because of some catastrophic event, but due to a predictable hiccup rippling through an overstretched system. 

So, he did what any good statistician would: dive into the data. After analyzing over 30 years—and 100 gigabytes—of Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, he found out his parents’ situation wasn’t bad luck: Long delays of three hours or more are now four times more common than they were 30 years ago. 

Not only that, but Tabarrok found airlines are trying to hide the delays by “padding” the flight times—adding, on average, 20 extra minutes to schedules so a flight that hasn’t gotten any faster still counts as “on time.” Thus, on paper, the on-time performance metrics have improved since 1987, even as actual travel times have gotten longer. 

“For 15 years, from 1987 to 2000, the actual and scheduled times stayed very close together,” Tabarrok said. “Then, starting right around 2000, they started diverging—a pretty clear sign airlines made a decision to start padding their schedules to avoid shorter delays.”

The padding carries a hidden economic cost. Using average U.S. wage data, the extra minutes built into flights add up to roughly $6 billion in lost passenger time annually, the researcher calculated. 

There are far more users in the National Airspace system today than there were decades ago, industry sources say. U.S. Department of Transportation data shows weather is the most common cause of non-airline delays.  An ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers, combined with recent FAA equipment outages, has also disrupted operations worldwide. 

A structurally unsound system

For Tabarrok, the root of the problem isn’t just bad weather, outdated infrastructure, or even airline strategy: It’s incentives. He argues the FAA has little reason to respond quickly to rising delays because the agency doesn’t bear the cost of stranded passengers, nor are they rewarded when airports run smoothly.

“I think the costs of delays can double, triple, quadruple over the next 10 years. But is anyone’s career negatively affected at the FAA? Probably not,” Tabarrok said.

He pointed to the shortage of air traffic controllers as an example. Hiring and training more staff would ease congestion and reduce cascading delays—a very simple solution that many people have called for. However, doing so requires sustained effort and leadership that is actually willing to push through bureaucratic inertia.

“You need somebody at the FAA who really cares about improving service. That’s not so easy to do because there’s really no incentive for somebody at the FAA to care a lot about this… they don’t get paid more,” Tabarrok said. “They don’t really get rewarded at all.” 

A FAA spokesperson told Fortune the organization prioritizes safety, which sometimes necessitates delays. They pointed to a chart showing the top five causes of delays—with weather being “by far” the largest cause. They declined to answer questions about airlines padding schedules and incentives to improve airport quality.  

Expanding airport capacity, for Tabarrok, is the most obvious long-term solution to reduce the cascading delays. But the U.S. hasn’t opened a major commercial airport since Denver International in 1995, and runway construction at existing hubs has been minimal, he said. Passenger traffic, meanwhile, has grown by about 50% since 2000, meaning more travelers are concentrated in the same physical space.

While we have built larger aircrafts to help carriers move more people, that’s also created new bottlenecks, he added. Bigger planes take longer to fly at every turn. They take longer to board, unload, and turn around at the gate, so the disruption continues to ripple into the schedule.

“The infrastructure at airports is fixed, especially season to season,” Tabarrok said. “So when you have more demand with fixed infrastructure, there’s going to be more delays.”

‘Pessimistic story’

Further, Tabarrok argued big-ticket fixes like building a new airport or runways face environmental reviews and legal challenges that can drag on for a decade. 

That leaves staffing as the most realistic solution, but even that will require changing how the FAA recruits, licenses, and trains controllers.

“It’s kind of a pessimistic story,” Tabarrok said. “We have these two constraints that aren’t that responsive to the market pressures of people’s demand for more reliable travel, and they’ve been around for a long time.” 

Without those changes, Tabarrok predicts the U.S. will be locked into a cycle where every summer thunderstorm or mechanical hiccup crashes airports and wastes millions of hours of Americans’ lives.

“If you just do some rough estimation of the value of people’s time, multiplied by how much time they’re spending waiting around in airports or waiting around for delays, you can easily get billions of dollars lost every year.” Tabarrok said. “And that cost will keep growing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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After 133 years, a bankruptcy, and multiple reinventions, Kodak’s latest snapshot is grim: The company says there’s “substantial doubt” it can stay in business.

In a quarterly filing released Monday alongside its second-quarter earnings report, Kodak’s management raised serious concerns about its ability to continue operating over the next year. The warning stems from roughly $500 million in debt maturing within 12 months and the lack of committed financing to cover those obligations. Without new funding or successful refinancing, the company could default, they said. 

The note’s stark language sent Kodak’s shares tumbling, sliding 21% to $5.43 as of Wednesday morning. 

Deep strains in earnings

For the second quarter ended June 30, Kodak booked $263 million in revenue, which was down 1% from a year earlier. However, the real blow came from the bottom line: Profitability took a sharp hit compared to last quarter, with gross profit sinking 12% to $51 million, squeezing Kodak’s margins from 22% to 19%. What had been a $26 million profit in the same period last year flipped 180 degrees to a $26 million loss. Operational EBITDA slipped to $9 million from $12 million, as significantly lower sales volumes and surging manufacturing costs overwhelmed relatively modest price increases.

Cash reserves also slimmed down. Kodak ended the quarter with $155 million on hand, just $70 million of it in the U.S. That’s $46 million less than it had in December, drained by rising costs, and weaker operating results.

Chief financial officer David Bullwinkle said in the note the company is counting on a somewhat random source of liquidity: terminating its U.S. Kodak Retirement Income Plan and using excess assets to pay down debt. Kodak said it expects clarity by mid-August on how it will settle obligations to plan participants, and aims to complete the process by December.

Dave Zhang, a printing industry expert from analyst group WhatTheyThink, said Kodak’s pain isn’t unique.

“Every major equipment manufacturer in commercial printing is feeling the same squeeze this year, in the U.S. and in Europe,” Zhang told Fortune. “Customers are holding back on big buys unless they absolutely have to. Tariffs and economic uncertainty aren’t giving them the warm-and-fuzzy to invest.”

Kodak’s long fall

Founded by George Eastman in the late 19th century, Kodak revolutionized photography by democratizing film, making cameras affordable for the masses. Its slogan—“You push the button, we do the rest”—became synonymous with convenient sentimentality. At its peak in the 1970s, Kodak controlled nearly 90% of U.S. film sales and 85% of the camera market. 

Then the digital revolution upended the industry, and Kodak stumbled. In a twist of irony, it was a Kodak engineer who created the first digital camera—but, fearing the innovation would cannibalize their current product, the company sat on the invention. They bet on film being a source of nostalgia, even as digital cameras took over the market with a promise of even more convenience. 

By 2012, saddled with billions in debt, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, Zhang traced the decay back even earlier, to the mid-2000s, when then-CEO Antonio Pérez “basically decimated” Kodak’s chemical and film manufacturing—“the company’s roots”—laying off tens of thousands and selling off or destroying key facilities.

“Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Zhang warned. “They blew their future.”

When current CEO Jim Continenza took over, his job was to steer Kodak out of bankruptcy and rebuild its core.

“It’s not just about nostalgia film,” the analyst said. “They’ve had to rebuild a film line from scratch—equipment you can’t just order on Amazon—and now they’re at full manufacturing capacity.”

Kodak’s film output today includes industrial products like films for automotive components, not just 35mm rolls.

Additionally, Kodak shifted from its consumer camera business to focus on commercial printing, packaging, and specialty chemicals. 

In recent years, it has sought growth in advanced materials, including film for the movie industry and components for pharmaceuticals. In fact, the pharmaceutical pivot was so successful that the day Kodak secured a government loan to pursue manufacturing, their stock soared so quickly it broke circuit breakers. 

Kodak has also leaned into nostalgia with hundreds of brick-and-mortar retail stores, which are particularly popular internationally. Despite the brand’s trendiness, Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told The New York Times he found the trademark licensing “striking’” and “sad,” suggesting a sense of desperation in the Kodak brand.

An uncertain path forward

Kodak does have one bright spot from its second-quarter earnings: its Advanced Materials & Chemicals division saw revenue grow, and  the company also recently secured FDA registration for a new pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, allowing it to produce regulated products. 

CEO Jim Continenza framed the development as part of Kodak’s transformation into a manufacturer with diversified products. 

“We continue to accelerate the growth of our Advanced Materials & Chemicals business,” he wrote in the earnings release, adding that U.S. manufacturing capacity could help shield Kodak from potential tariff shocks.

The question is whether that shield will be strong enough. The going-concern disclosure, near the end of the earnings report, makes clear that Kodak’s plans to right the ship—pension reversion, debt restructuring, and refinancing—are not entirely within its control. U.S. accounting rules require such a warning when management cannot conclude those steps are “probable.”

“They need time and money,” Zhang said. “Time is hard to get, but if they can get the money, they might just rebuild this thing.”

For now, investors are wondering if the company can improbably reinvent itself for the second, third, or fourth time, or if this is the long-awaited fade-out of a company that once defined how the world captured its memories.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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A Cincinnati judge has ordered former Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen to explain—in writing—why he unexpectedly resigned in March, forcing him to confront what his attorneys call “completely irrelevant” and “embarrassing” questions in a lawsuit involving singer Jewel.

McMullen, who led the Cincinnati-based grocery giant for more than a decade, resigned following what Kroger described as an investigation into his “personal conduct.” As part of his departure, McMullen forfeited all of his unvested equity and bonuses—a total of $11 million, according to an SEC filing. 

That decision raised eyebrows for Eric Chaffee, a corporate law professor at Case Western Reserve University. “Usually a CEO has downside protection if they leave,” he told Fortune. “The fact that he was willing to give that up may provide some insight that what went on here was something he did not want revealed.”

Kroger offered no further explanation at the time, sparking speculation in business circles. However, the mystery is now back in the spotlight due to an unrelated lawsuit filed against Kroger by singer-songwriter Jewel, and one of her business partners, over Kroger’s annual Wellness Festival. The plaintiffs claim they played a key role in launching the festival and are seeking damages over alleged contractual disputes. 

Their attorneys argue that questioning McMullen about the reasons for his resignation could be relevant to his credibility as a trial witness, and could shed light on the “allegedly corrupt corporate culture at Kroger.”

McMullen’s legal team has fought the request, but earlier this month, Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Christian Jenkins ordered him to submit a written explanation by Aug. 8, including the names of those involved. Whether the public ever sees that document is still uncertain. If Jenkins decides the information is relevant, it could be kept under seal. If it’s not deemed relevant, it won’t be entered into the record at all.

While prying into a CEO’s exit is “somewhat invasive,” Chaffee noted the court could find it justified, especially since Kroger itself tied the resignation to “business ethics.” 

In litigation, he explained, “If the other side offers a witness, you want to test that individual’s credibility… to figure out whether they behave in an ethical manner.”

That relevance test weighs heavily against another legal principle: the risk of unfairly embarrassing a witness. But Chaffee noted that in the U.S., there’s a “strong preference that the public has access to judicial proceedings—not just to be nosy, but because transparency makes for a fairer legal system.”

That principle may prevail. However, for Kroger, keeping the reason private could protect its brand and stave off shareholder lawsuits or regulatory scrutiny.

“There’s a cloud that’s left by his departure,” Chaffee said, “but companies sometimes decide that’s better than the damage that could come from disclosure.”

McMullen likely has his own reasons for staying quiet, Chaffee added. 

“It might be something embarrassing to him personally, to a family member, or something that could have future repercussions for his career,” he said. “If you’re a CEO and there are news reports out there that you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, getting another top job can become very, very difficult.”

While Chaffee doesn’t expect the case to set legal precedent—“this is probably more factually interesting than it is legally interesting”—he said the stakes are still high. 

The plaintiffs’ strategy, he noted, is a common but effective pressure tactic: “Seeking information that may potentially be damaging to Kroger… may incentivize them to settle this case.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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