Vietnam’s Vinfast began production at a $500 million electric vehicle plant in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state on Monday, part of a planned $2 billion investment in India and a broader expansion across Asia.

The factory in Thoothukudi will initially make 50,000 electric vehicles annually, with room to triple output to 150,000 cars. Given its proximity to a major port in one of India’s most industrialized states, Vinfast hopes it will be a hub for future exports to the region. It says the factory will create more than 3,000 local jobs.

The Vietnamese company says it scouted 15 locations across six Indian states before choosing Tamil Nadu. It’s the center of India’s auto industry, with strong manufacturing, skilled workers, good infrastructure, and a reliable supply chain, according to Tamil Nadu’s Industries Minister T.R.B. Raaja.

“This investment will lead to an entirely new industrial cluster in south Tamil Nadu, and more clusters is what India needs to emerge as a global manufacturing hub,” he said.

VinFast Asia CEO Pham Sanh Chau said the company has aspirations to export cars across the region and it hopes to turn the new factory into an export hub.

The new factory could also mark the start of an effort to bring other parts of the Vingroup empire to India. The sprawling conglomerate, founded by Vietnam’s richest man Pham Nhat Vuong, began as an instant noodle company in Ukraine in the 1990s and now spans real estate, hospitals, schools and more.

Chau said Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin had invited the company to “invest in a big way” across sectors like green energy, smart cities and tourism, and said that the chief minister had “promised he will do all what is necessary for us to move the whole ecosystem here.”

A strategic pivot to Asia

Vinfast’s foray into India reflects a broader shift in strategy.

The company increasingly is focusing on Asian markets after struggling to gain traction in the U.S. and Europe. It broke ground last year on a $200 million EV assembly plant in Indonesia, where it plans to make 50,000 cars annually. It’s also expanding in Thailand and the Philippines.

Vinfast sold nearly 97,000 vehicles in 2024. That’s triple what it sold the year before, but only about 10% of those sales were outside Vietnam. As it eyes markets in Asia, it hopes the factory in India will be a base for exports to South Asian countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka and also to countries in the Middle East and Africa.

India is the world’s third-largest car market by number of vehicles sold. It presents an enticing mix: A fast growing economy, rising adoption of EVs, supportive government policies and a rare market where players have yet to completely dominate EV sales.

“It is a market that no automaker in the world can ignore,” said Ishan Raghav, managing editor of the Indian car magazine autoX.

A growing EV market in India

EV growth in India has been led by two and three-wheelers that accounted for 86% of the over six million EVs sold last year.

Sales of four wheel passenger EVs made up only 2.5% of all car sales in India last year, but they have been surging, jumping to more than 110,000 in 2024 from just 1,841 in 2019. The government aims to have EVs account for a third of all passenger vehicle sales by 2030.

“The electric car story has started (in India) only three or four years ago,” said Charith Konda, an energy specialist who looks at India’s transport and clean energy sectors for the think-tank Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis or IEEFA. New cars that “look great on the road,” with better batteries, quick charging and longer driving ranges are driving the sector’s rapid growth, he said.

The shift to EVs is mostly powered by Indian automakers, but Vinfast plans to break into the market later this year with its VF6 and VF7 SUV models, which are designed for India.

The company chose the VF7 for its India launch—unlike the models introduced in the U.S., Canada, the EU, or Southeast Asia—to position itself as a premium global brand while keeping the price affordable, added Chau, the Vinfast Asia CEO.

Can Vinfast succeed where Chinese EVs faltered?

Chinese EV brands that dominate in countries like Thailand and Brazil have found India more challenging.

After border clashes with China in 2020, India blocked companies like BYD from building their own factories. Some then turned to partnerships. China’s SAIC, owner of MG Motor, has joined with India’s JSW Group. Their MG Windsor, a five-seater, sold 30,000 units in just nine months, nibbling Tata Motors’ 70% EV market share down to about 50%.

Tata was the first local automaker to court mass-market consumers with EVs. Its 2020 launch of the electric Nexon, a small SUV, became India’s first major EV car success.

Vinfast lacks the geopolitical baggage of its larger Chinese rivals and will also benefit from incentives like lower land prices and tax breaks for building locally in India. That’s part of India’s policy of discouraging imports with high import duties to help encourage local manufacturing and create more jobs.

The push for onshore manufacturing is a concern also for Tesla, which launched its Model Y in India last month at a price of nearly $80,000, compared to about $44,990 in the U.S without a federal tax credit.

“India’s stand is very clear. We do not want to import manufactured cars, even Teslas. Whether it’s Tesla or Chinese cars, they are taxed heavily,” added Konda.

An uphill battle in a tough market

The road ahead remains daunting. India’s EV market is crowded with well-entrenched players like Tata Motors and Mahindra, which dominate the more affordable segment, while Hyundai, MG Motors and luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz and Audi compete at high price points.

Indians tend to purchase EVs as second cars used for driving within the city, since the infrastructure for charging elsewhere can be undependable. Vinfast will need to win over India’s cost-sensitive and conservative drivers with a reputation for quality batteries and services while keeping prices low, said Vivek Gulia, co-founder of JMK Research.

“Initially, people will be apprehensive,” he said.

Vinfast says it plans to set up showrooms and service centers across India, working with local companies for charging and repairs, and cutting costs by recycling batteries and making key parts like powertrains and battery packs in the country.

Chau added that after a customer clinic in September 2024 and input from top engineers in Vietnam, the company upgraded its feature list to better match Indian customer expectations.

Scale will be key. VinFast has signed agreements to establish 32 dealerships across 27 Indian cities. Hyundai has 1,300 places for Indians to buy their cars. Building a brand in India takes time—Hyundai, for instance, pulled it off over decades, helped by an early endorsement from Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan.

VinFast can succeed if it can get its pricing right and earn the trust of customers, Gulia said, “Then they can actually do really good.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Dhiraj Singh—Bloomberg via Getty Images

• China’s long-term economic growth is at risk due to a shrinking labor force and rapidly aging population, according to Oxford Economics. The country’s potential output growth could fall below 2% by the 2050s, as low birth rates and a rising dependency ratio strain productivity and public finances. While developed nations like the U.S. may buffer this with immigration, China and others face tougher challenges sustaining growth and managing social support systems.

China may be the only nation that could rival America’s economic dominance. But its long-term prospects will potentially be cut off at the knees by a fundamental flaw: It won’t have the people to keep its growth going.

According to a new report from Oxford Economics, the potential output growth for China could fall from around 4% in the 2020s to less than 2% by the 2050s.

That’s on account of the country’s labor force shrinking at an advanced rate, with its fertility rates falling below “replacement levels” where new workers equal the amount of individuals leaving employment.

But not only is there the fundamental issue of not having enough people to do the legwork to keep the economy moving, there’s also the knock-on impact of lower consumption—and hence less business investment, a slower pace of innovation, and increased government debt as leaders seek to support an older population with fewer people to provide for them.

“As populations age, the younger cohorts are often smaller than older ones due to declining birth rates. This raises the dependency ratio, with fewer working-age people supporting a growing number of retirees,” wrote Oxford Economics’ Marco Santaniello and Benjamin Trevis late last week. “We anticipate this pressure being felt most acutely in developing economies like China and Brazil, where populations are still relatively young but ageing fast.”

Indeed, per the World Population Review, China’s birthrate was 7.24 live births per 1,000 people in 2025. By contrast, this figure stood at 11 in the U.S. In comparable nations like Canada, the birthrate stood at 9.82 per 1,000 people, and 10 per 1,000 people in the U.K.

As a result, per Oxford Economics’ calculations, the dependency ratio in China (the working age population aged 16+ compared to people aged 65 or older) will shift by 60 percentage points between 2010 and 2060.

In Thailand, this figure sits at a little over 40 percentage points, while Brazil sits at approximately 35.

By contrast, the United States sits at a little over 10 and the United Kingdom at approximately 15, though the economists point out that “Dependency ratios in developed economies will rise more slowly… because developed economies are already experiencing rising dependency ratios, so the starting point is higher.”

Developed economies also have a further option available to them: Powering their GDP with labor gathered from around the world.

“Immigration helps ease some of the strain by increasing the working-age population. For example, we have shown that in the U.S., if immigration grew from 1.1mn in 2023 to 1.5mn by 2033 and stabilised thereafter, it would provide a notable boost to economic potential by 2050,” Santaniello and Trevis explained.

The retirement question

In developed nations like the U.S, the conversation about declining birthrates and aging populations is already in the mainstream.

On fertility, for example, the world’s richest man Elon Musk has already weighed in. Responding to a post about declining American birth rates on his social media site X earlier this year, Musk wrote, “Low birth rates will end civilization.”

Likewise, figures like BlackRock’s Larry Fink have called on the government to begin a national conversation about the public’s need to save for retirement, instead of relying on the state for support.

He told CNN earlier this year: “One of the fundamental problems in America is, retirement’s not that bad of a problem for the top Fortune 500 companies. We are providing enough support to our employees where they’re getting the adequacy of retirement.

“It’s beyond that, we refuse to talk about how do we get more broadening of our economy with more Americans participating in that. That’s why we have to have a conversation in Washington, this has to be considered a national priority and a national promise to all Americans.”

To this end, the Oxford Economics report shows, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio could spiral beyond 250% by 2060 as the government tries to keep up with payments to support its aging population.

“In economies with less-developed social safety nets, the burden of ageing populations increasingly falls on households via informal caregiving responsibilities,” the economists wrote.

Meanwhile, in nations with more “generous” welfare systems: “Without reform, such as raising retirement ages or boosting labour force participation, many welfare systems risk becoming unsustainable. In our scenario, public debt rises sharply across most advanced economies and in several emerging markets. Heavily indebted countries will be least able to absorb the economic impact of demographic change, and will struggle to respond to future downturns with limited fiscal space.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© CFOTO/Future Publishing - Getty Images

• Trump Media & Technology Group lost $20 million in the second quarter. The parent company of Trump’s Truth Social saw share prices rise, however, in large part because of its broad Bitcoin holdings. Trump’s holding in the company is currently worth $2 billion.

Typically, if a publicly traded company announced sales of less than $1 million and a quarterly loss of $20 million, that might spook investors. At Trump Media & Technology Group, it’s giving the stock a slight boost.

The parent company of Trump’s Truth Social, in its quarterly earnings, reported $883,300 in net sales for the second quarter. That’s 5.5% higher than a year ago. The $19.7 million net loss compared to a $16.4 million loss in the second quarter of 2024.

Despite that, the stock was up 1.5% in mid-morning trading on Monday.

What gives? Despite the lackluster sales and notable loss, Trump Media is still a cash-rich company thanks to its significant Bitcoin holdings. The 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists financial assets of roughly $3.1 billion, an 800% year-over-year increase. Of that amount, $2.4 billion is in Bitcoin, which it bought in July.

“Among other benefits, the Bitcoin treasury strategy allows Trump Media to give its investors indirect exposure to cryptocurrencies, creates investment income, helps position the Company for expansion, and solidifies the Company’s financial freedom, including enhancing security against debanking and other acts of political discrimination,” TMTG said.

Trump owns 114.75 million of the company’s outstanding shares through a revocable trust. That works out to 52% of the company’s total outstanding shares, according to the company’s 2025 proxy statement.

As of Monday morning, that holding was worth $2 billion. That’s considerably less than the $4 billion it was worth on Jan. 1. Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group are down 50% year to date.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Getty Images—Christopher Furlong

• Anthropic billionaire CEO Dario Amodei says many of his employees are turning down Meta’s $100 million poaching offers, adding they “wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg.” And the tech titan isn’t willing to fight fire with fire by raising his own star staffers’ salaries to convince them to stay at the $61.5 billion AI company, saying it’s “unfair” and could hurt company culture. Amodei and other Silicon Valley CEOs, including Sam Altman, have criticized Meta’s strategy as being a killer for company culture. 

Tech companies like Meta and Google have waged an all-out talent war in the fight to build the next revolutionary AI—but Anthropic’s stars aren’t being won over by the promise of $100 million pay packages. 

“Relative to other companies, a lot fewer people from Anthropic have been caught by these. And it’s not for lack of trying,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently revealed on the Big Technology Podcast. “I’ve talked to plenty of people who got these offers at Anthropic and who just turned them down. Who wouldn’t even talk to Mark Zuckerberg.”

Meta’s been on a tear to dominate AI—and if it can’t grow the talent internally, its CEO Zuckerberg has no qualms about buying it instead. In June, reports revealed that he’s been poaching staff at competitor companies (including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic) with $100 million signing bonuses, in an effort to beef up his “superintelligence” AI lab. 

Some have taken up his envy-inducing offer, including at least seven staffers from OpenAI, but Amodei insisted that most of his employees haven’t taken the bait—and he’s not throwing money at staff to keep them.

Why Anthropic’s CEO won’t use cash to convince workers to stay

Employers may be tempted to fight fire with fire by raising their AI stars’ salaries or recruiting others in return—but Anthropic thinks it would hurt its company culture. 

“We are not willing to compromise our compensation principles, our principles of fairness, to respond individually to these offers,” Amodei said. “The way things work at Anthropic is there’s a series of levels. One candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don’t negotiate that level, because we think it’s unfair. We want to have a systematic way.”

Amodei not only thinks that it’s unfair to raise salaries to have his workers stick around, but that it could actually backfire on his billion-dollar company’s mission. In actuality, staying true to his compensation practices amid the poaching chaos has been a win for Anthropic’s culture. 

“I think actually this was a unifying moment for the company where we didn’t give in. We refused to compromise our principles, because we had the confidence that people are Anthropic because they truly believe in the mission,” Amodei continued. 

“The only way you can really be hurt by this is if you allow it to destroy the culture of your company by panicking, by treating people unfairly, in an attempt to defend the company.”

Fortune has reached out to Anthropic and Meta for comment.

Amodei’s criticism of Zuckerberg’s $100 million poaching strategy

Zuckerberg’s aggressive poaching strategy has ruffled some feathers in the AI world. Being scooped up with a $100 million pay package is a dream for most, but the Anthropic CEO has called out the practice for being fundamentally unfair. 

“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dart board and hits your name, that doesn’t mean that you should be paid 10 times more than the guy next to you who’s just as skilled, who’s just as talented,” Amodei said on the podcast. 

Plus, Amodei thinks the hiring strategy is flat-out counterproductive to what Meta wants to get done. The CEO is proud of his staffers for not giving in to the $100 million offer—and that same loyalty isn’t something that can be bought. And other AI talent seem to want in on Amodei’s culture; engineers at OpenAI were eight times more likely to leave the company for Anthropic. The company also has an 80% retention rate for employees hired over the last two years, compared to 78% at Google DeepMind, and 67% at OpenAI. Ironically, Meta is trailing behind at 64%.

Having employees who can do revolutionary work is one thing, but having a culture that makes them want to stay is another. By poaching others, Amodei doubts Meta is recruiting the best fits for its mission. 

“I think that what they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought: and that is alignment with the mission. I think there are selection effects here,” he said. “Are they getting the people who are most enthusiastic, who are most mission aligned, who are most excited?”

Other tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have echoed Amodei’s criticism. Altman said that while Meta has managed to poach some staffers, “so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” Even though Zuckerberg has snatched some of his AI workers, Altman is doubtful that his competitor will be able to replicate the same success of OpenAI.

“I think that there’s a lot of people, and Meta will be a new one, that are saying ‘We’re just going to try to copy OpenAI,’” Altman said on the Uncapped podcast last month. “That basically never works. You’re always going to where your competitor was, and you don’t build up a culture of learning what it’s like to innovate.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty Images

When I was the chief of pediatrics at Aga Khan University hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, I spent a lot of time caring for the babies of new mothers suffering from preeclampsia. Too often, the babies were born too early and too small—and I couldn’t save them.

The hardest part about being a pediatrician is having to tell the parents their precious baby did not survive. The second hardest is not being able to explain why.

Preeclampsia is a significant cause of death for mothers and newborns in places like Karachi and in Seattle, where I live now, yet we do not know what causes it and there is no cure.

The primary reason for this deadly gap in our knowledge is neglect. According to a 2021 analysis led by McKinsey & Company, just 1% of healthcare research and innovation is invested in female-specific conditions beyond oncology. And for conditions that affect women and men, women are severely underrepresented in clinical trials, so we’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding how women experience common conditions like cardiovascular diseases.

As a result, there is a long list of serious and pervasive conditions without good solutions, including autoimmune diseases, heavy menstrual bleeding, and endometriosis. Endometriosis causes severe pelvic pain and affects one in 10 women globally, but it’s so misunderstood that 65% of women are initially misdiagnosed.

This is why, despite living longer than men, women spend more time in poor health—no matter where in the world they live.

Finding answers to longstanding questions about women’s health is a big driver of our gender equality work at the Gates Foundation. This also is fundamental to achieving our 20-year goals of helping end preventable deaths of moms and babies, reducing suffering from deadly infectious diseases, and lifting millions out of poverty onto a path to prosperity.

We’re proud to have contributed with our partners to the incredible progress made over the last 25 years: maternal mortality declined by 40%, expanded access to the HPV vaccine has prevented over 1 million future cases of cervical cancer, and advancements in contraceptives have given women better tools to help them decide whether and when to get pregnant. We still have a long way to go, which is why I am pleased the foundation announced today that it is committing $2.5 billion to women’s health innovation over the next five years.

That commitment is a good start. But it’s also a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. I think the rest of the bucket can and should be filled up by private sector partners.

That’s because women in high-income countries have many of the same health problems in common with women in low- and middle-income countries. There is a massive untapped market opportunity to invent and deliver the solutions women everywhere need. Biotech, consumer health, and pharmaceutical companies should be doing more in women’s health. Above and beyond the moral reasons, it simply makes good business sense.

McKinsey & Company estimates that investing in treatments for endometriosis, for example, has a market potential of $180 billion to $250 billion, comparable to the market for big-ticket conditions like diabetes.

Or consider the many use cases for an AI-powered portable ultrasound, which the foundation helped to develop for the two thirds of women in low- and middle-income countries who don’t have access to expensive ultrasound machines. It’s a wand that plugs into a tablet running an algorithm trained with thousands of ultrasound images, and it can be used by workers who haven’t been trained in obstetrics. Research shows this simple device can identify high-risk pregnancies early and even identify gestational age with more accuracy than humans.

This tool is very useful in remote Kenya, one of the areas where the AI ultrasound was tested. But it’s just as useful in, say, North Dakota, where one in four women have to drive for over an hour to reach the nearest birthing hospital. In 2022, about 2.3 million U.S. women of child-bearing age lived in “maternity deserts,” defined as counties without a hospital, birth center, and doctors and nurse midwives with experience delivering babies.

Thanks to advances in AI, this tool can be adapted for uses beyond obstetric care. Today, people travel to specialty care or emergency rooms to get screened for conditions like breast cancer and heart disease. With portable imaging devices, those screenings could one day be done at local primary care facilities in both high- and low-income countries.

The list of opportunities goes on. Preeclampsia is tricky to diagnose, because women can present with the main symptoms of high blood pressure and proteinuria for many reasons. False positives lead to long, unnecessary hospitalizations, while false negatives can result in a last-minute scramble with fatal consequences. The state-of-the-art sFIt-1PIGF ratio test removes the uncertainty by measuring the levels of two proteins that play a role in the development of new blood vessels in the placenta. In 2024, the FDA approved the test for use in the United States, and the Gates Foundation is supporting studies to adapt it for use in low- and middle-income countries.

Last year, a colleague of mine at the foundation was concerned she might have preeclampsia. She’d been monitoring her blood pressure on her own, but the results were inconclusive. She took the sFIt-1PIFG test at 26 weeks, and it confirmed she had preeclampsia and predicted how much time she had left until she would have to deliver. She was immediately hospitalized and intensely monitored. Six weeks later she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl whose name, Mihika, means “dew drops.”

This test can save the lives of women like my colleague, and it can also save the lives of women like those I used to care for back in Karachi.

And the test is just the beginning. There is still no cure for preeclampsia, and preeclampsia is just one of many woman-specific issues that need solving. If we could close the gap for nine major conditions, it would create 27 million years of healthy life per year—or about three extra healthy days every single year for every single woman on the planet.

That’s the right thing to do. It’s also a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors. Women around the world have waited too long for better solutions. Together, we can deliver.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Gates Foundation

When Susana Pacheco accepted a housekeeping job at a casino on the Las Vegas Strip 16 years ago, she believed it was a step toward stability for her and her 2-year-old daughter.

But the single mom found herself exhausted, falling behind on bills and without access to stable health insurance, caught in a cycle of low pay and little support. For years, she said, there was no safety net in sight — until now.

For 25 years, her employer, the Venetian, had resisted organizing efforts as one of the last holdouts on the Strip, locked in a prolonged standoff with the Culinary Workers Union. But a recent change in ownership opened the Venetian’s doors to union representation just as the Strip’s newest casino, the Fontainebleau, was also inking its first labor contract.

The historic deals finalized late last year mark a major turning point: For the first time in the Culinary Union’s 90-year history, all major casinos on the Strip are unionized. Backed by 60,000 members, most of them in Las Vegas, it is the largest labor union in Nevada. Experts say the Culinary Union’s success is a notable exception in a national landscape where union membership overall is declining.

“Together, we’ve shown that change can be a positive force, and I’m confident that this partnership will continue to benefit us all in the years to come,” Patrick Nichols, president and CEO of the Venetian, said shortly after workers approved the deal.

Pacheco says their new contract has already reshaped her day-to-day life. The housekeeper no longer races against the clock to clean an unmanageable number of hotel suites, and she’s spending more quality time with her children because of the better pay and guaranteed days off.

“Now with the union, we have a voice,” Pacheco said.

Union strength is fading nationally

These gains come at a time when union membership nationally is at an all-time low, and despite Republican-led efforts over the years to curb union power. About 10% of U.S. workers belonged to a union in 2024, down from 20% in 1983, the first year for which data is available, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.

President Donald Trump in March signed an executive order seeking to end collective bargaining for certain federal employees that led to union leaders suing the administration. Nevada and more than two dozen other states now have so-called “right to work” laws that let workers opt out of union membership and dues. GOP lawmakers have also supported changes to the National Labor Relations Board and other regulatory bodies, seeking to reduce what they view as overly burdensome rules on businesses.

Ruben Garcia, professor and director of the workplace program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas law school, said the Culinary Union’s resilience stems from its deep roots in Las Vegas, its ability to adapt to the growth and corporatization of the casino industry, and its long history of navigating complex power dynamics with casino owners and operators.

He said the consolidation of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip mirrors the dominance of the Big Three automakers in Detroit. A few powerful companies — MGM Resorts International, Caesars Entertainment and Wynn Resorts — now control most of the dozens of casinos along Las Vegas Boulevard.

“That consolidation can make things harder for workers in some ways, but it also gives unions one large target,” Garcia said.

That dynamic worked in the union’s favor in 2023, when the threat of a major strike by 35,000 hospitality workers with expired contracts loomed over the Strip. But a last-minute deal with Caesars narrowly averted the walkout, and it triggered a domino effect across the Strip, with the union quickly finalizing similar deals for workers at MGM Resorts and Wynn properties.

The latest contracts secured a historic 32% bump in pay over the life of the five-year contract. Union casino workers will earn an average $35 hourly, including benefits, by the end of it.

The union’s influence also extends far beyond the casino floor. With its ability to mobilize thousands of its members for canvassing and voter outreach, the union’s endorsements are highly coveted, particularly among Democrats, and can signal who has the best shot at winning working-class votes.

The union has — and still — faces resistance

The union’s path hasn’t always been smooth though. Michael Green, a history professor at UNLV, noted the Culinary Union has long faced resistance.

“Historically, there have always been people who are anti-union,” Green said.

Earlier this year, two food service workers in Las Vegas filed federal complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing the union of deducting dues despite their objections to union membership. It varies at each casino, but between 95 to 98% of workers opt in to union membership, according to the union.

“I don’t think Culinary Union bosses deserve my support,” said one of the workers, Renee Guerrero, who works at T-Mobile Arena on the Strip. “Their actions since I attempted to exercise my right to stop dues payments only confirms my decision.”

But longtime union members like Paul Anthony see things differently. Anthony, a food server at the Bellagio and a Culinary member for nearly 40 years, said his union benefits — free family health insurance, reliable pay raises, job security and a pension — helped him to build a lasting career in the hospitality industry.

“A lot of times it is an industry that doesn’t have longevity,” he said. But on the Strip, it’s a job that people can do for “20 years, 30 years, 40 years.”

Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer and lead negotiator, said the union calls this the “Las Vegas dream.”

“It’s always been our goal to make sure that this town is a union town,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/John Locher

A group of countries that are part of the OPEC+ alliance of oil-exporting countries has agreed to boost oil production, a move some believe could lower oil and gasoline prices, citing a steady global economic outlook and low oil inventories.

The group met virtually on Sunday and announced that eight of its member countries would increase oil production by 547,000 barrels per day in September.

The countries boosting output, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman, had been participating in voluntary production cuts, initially made in November 2023, which were scheduled to be phased out by September 2026. The announcement means the voluntary production cuts will end ahead of schedule.

The move follows an OPEC+ decision in July to boost production by 548,000 barrels per day in August. OPEC said the production adjustments may be paused or reversed as market conditions evolve.

When production increases, oil and gasoline prices may fall. But Brent crude oil, which is considered a global benchmark, has been trading near $70 per barrel, which could be due to a potential loss of Russian oil on the market and a large rise in crude inventories in China, according to research firm Clearview Energy Partners.

“President Trump has not obviously relented from his threat to sanction Russian energy if the Kremlin does not reach a peace deal with Ukraine as of August 7, potentially via “secondary tariffs” on buyers,” Clearview Energy Partners said in an analyst note Sunday.

The eight countries will meet again on Sept. 7, OPEC said in a news release.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Lisa Leutner, File

In today’s edition: Mark Zuckerberg’s raid on Mira Murati’s startup, the end of the CPB, and the latest woman fired by Trump.

– You’re fired. President Donald Trump was unhappy with July’s U.S. jobs report, which showed hiring slowing (with 73,000 jobs added, compared to 100,000 predicted) and revised past months’ numbers. The Wall Street Journal called the results “surprisingly dismal.” So, on Friday Trump said he would fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer.

McEntarfer was nominated to lead the BLS in 2023. At the time, it was an overwhelmingly non-controversial appointment. She was confirmed 86-8 in a bipartisan vote.

She’s a longtime labor economist with more than 20 years experience in the federal government, who had worked at the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy and the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a nonpolitical role. Her research focused on job loss, retirement, worker mobility, and wage rigidity, according to the AP.

Trump accused McEntarfer of manipulating jobs data and said that the data was “being produced by a Biden appointee.” “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The BLS produces data relied on by businesses and policymakers, including the Fed.

McEntarfer joins a growing list of female officials fired during Trump 2.0 (and lot of fired men, too). There was Admiral Linda Fagan, the leader of the Coast Guard and the first woman to lead a military branch who was removed on Trump’s second day back on the job. Gwynne Wilcox, who Trump attempted to dismiss from the National Labor Relations Board (she sued, and a back-and-forth over her dismissal reached the Supreme Court). Federal Elections Committee (FEC) chair Ellen Weintraub was let go. Phyllis Fong, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, refused to comply with her firing in January and was escorted out by security. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, was fired via email.

McEntarfer’s colleagues have jumped to her defense. Her predecessor William Beach, who was appointed by Trump in 2019 and served until 2023, said that the “groundless” firing “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.” Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said there was “no conceivable way” the numbers could have been manipulated, relying as they do on strict processes and hundreds of staffers. Janet Yellen said that the firing of the head of the bureau charged with accurately reporting economic data “is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

McEntarfer’s firing is part of a bigger plan for the BLS, the Journal reports. “The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the jobs numbers, they are more transparent and more reliable,” National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said.

McEntarfer responded to her firing in a post on Bluesky. “It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy,” she wrote. “It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.”

On Sunday, Trump officials homed in on the revised May and June numbers as the reason for McEntarfer’s firing. “I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,” Hassett said.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Marvel’s first family stumbled in theaters in its second weekend, but still held on to the top spot at the box office.

“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” earned $40 million from 4,125 North American theaters, a 66% drop from a healthy $117.6 million debut. The film was accompanied by comedies “The Bad Guys 2” and “The Naked Gun” in the top three box office rankings.

The superhero movie dipped significantly more than Marvel’s previous film, “Thunderbolts,” which took a 55% dive in its second weekend.

“First Steps” is the last major blockbuster of the summer. It added nearly $40 million internationally in its second weekend, bringing the film’s global total to $369 million. The movie’s box office drop off was surprising given its strong reviews, said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for the data firm Comscore.

Though the movie’s debut weekend may have given box office results a strong push toward the $4 billion summer benchmark, August is off to a slow start, he said.

“It’s a tough lift, but we might be able to get there. It really means that all the films are gonna have to stand on their own,” Dergarabedian said. “It’s gonna be about getting great reviews, having that staying power, that longevity in the marketplace.”

Newcomer comedy “The Bad Guys 2” earned second place at the box office this weekend, with $22 million from 3,852 North American theaters. That was on par with projections and also in line with the first movie in the series, which brought in $23 million in 2022. Paramount’s slapstick comedy, “The Naked Gun,” also in its debut weekend, snagged the third box office spot, earning $17 million from 3,344 locations.

Jim Orr, president of domestic distribution for Universal Pictures, said the solid debut for “The Bad Guys 2,” coupled with strong audience reaction scores, “should point to a very long, very successful run through not only the rest of the summer, but really, I think into the fall.”

James Gunn’s “Superman,” which opened four weekends ago and already crossed $550 million globally, earned $13.8 million domestically this weekend, taking the fourth spot. “Jurassic World Rebirth” followed with $8.7 million.

The horror movie “Together” had a strong debut weekend, coming in at sixth place and earning $6.8 million domestically, proof that August is a month for edgier and off-beat films, Dergarabedian said.

“That’s what this month is about. It’s not just about box office,” Dergarabedian said. “It’s also about providing really interesting, rewarding movie-going experiences for audiences.”

Dergarabedian said he expects highly-anticipated movies hitting theaters in the next few weeks — including “Freakier Friday,” and Zach Cregger’s horror movie “Weapons” — to give August a needed boost.

The box office is currently up 9.5% from last year.

Top 10 movies by domestic box office

With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore:

1. “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” $40 million.

2. “The Bad Guys 2,” $22.2 million.

3. “The Naked Gun,” $17 million.

4. “Superman,” $13.8 million.

5. “Jurassic World Rebirth,” $8.7 million.

6. “Together,” $6.8 million.

7. “F1: The Movie,” $4.1 million.

8. “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” $2.7 million.

9. “Smurfs,” $1.8 million.

10. “How to Train Your Dragon,” $1.4 million.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Marvel/Disney via AP)

Saying “enough is enough,” thousands of workers at three Boeing manufacturing plants went on strike overnight less than a year after the company boosted wages to end a separate, 53-day strike by 33,000 aircraft workers.

On Monday, about 3,200 workers at Boeing facilities in St. Louis; St. Charles, Missouri; and Mascoutah, Illinois, voted to reject a modified four-year labor agreement with Boeing, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union said Sunday.

In a post on X, the union said: “3,200 highly-skilled IAM Union members at Boeing went on strike at midnight because enough is enough.”

The vote followed members’ rejection last week of an earlier proposal from the troubled aerospace giant, which had included a 20% wage increase over four years.

“IAM District 837 members build the aircraft and defense systems that keep our country safe,” said Sam Cicinelli, Midwest territory general vice president for the union, in a statement. “They deserve nothing less than a contract that keeps their families secure and recognizes their unmatched expertise.”

The union members rejected the latest proposal after a weeklong cooling-off period.

Boeing warned over the weekend that it anticipated the strike after workers rejected its most recent offer that included a 20% wage hike over four years.

“We’re disappointed our employees rejected an offer that featured 40% average wage growth and resolved their primary issue on alternative work schedules,” said Dan Gillian, Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager, and senior St. Louis site executive. “We are prepared for a strike and have fully implemented our contingency plan to ensure our non-striking workforce can continue supporting our customers.”

Boeing has been struggling after two of its Boeing 737 Max airplanes crashed, one in Indonesia in 2018 and the other in Ethiopia in 2019, killing 346 people. In June, one of Boeing’s Dreamliner planes, operated by Air India, crashed, killing at least 260 people.

Last week, Boeing reported that its second-quarter revenue had improved and losses had narrowed. The company lost $611 million in the second quarter, compared to a loss of $1.44 billion during the same period last year.

Shares of Boeing Co. slipped less than 1% before the opening bell Monday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File

Tesla is awarding CEO Elon Musk 96 million shares of restricted stock valued at approximately $29 billion, just six months after a judge ordered the company to revoke his massive pay package.

The electric vehicle maker said in a regulatory filing on Monday that Musk must first pay Tesla $23.34 per share of restricted stock that vests, which is equal to the exercise price per share of the 2018 pay package that was awarded to the company’s CEO.

In December Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick reaffirmed her earlier ruling that Tesla must revoke Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package. She found that Musk engineered the landmark pay package in sham negotiations with directors who were not independent.

At the time McCormick also rejected an equally unprecedented and massive fee request by plaintiff attorneys, who argued that they were entitled to legal fees in the form of Tesla stock valued at more than $5 billion. The judge said the attorneys were entitled to a fee award of $345 million.

The rulings came in a lawsuit filed by a Tesla stockholder who challenged Musk’s 2018 compensation package.

That pay package carried a potential maximum value of about $56 billion, but that sum has fluctuated over the years based on Tesla’s stock price.

Musk appealed the order in March. A month later Tesla said in a regulatory filing that it was creating a special committee to look at Musk’s compensation as CEO.

Tesla shares have plunged 25% this year, largely due to blowback over Musk’s affiliation with President Donald Trump. But Tesla also faces intensifying competition from both the big Detroit automakers, and from China.

In its most recent quarter, Tesla reported that quarterly profits plunged from $1.39 billion to $409 million. Revenue also fell and the company fell short of even the lowered expectations on Wall Street.

Under pressure from shareholders last month, Tesla scheduled an annual shareholders meeting for November to comply with Texas state law.

A group of more than 20 Tesla shareholders, which have watched Tesla shares plummet, said in a letter to the company that it needed to at least provide public notice of the annual meeting.

Investors have grown increasingly worried about the trajection of the company after Musk had spent so much time in Washington this year, becoming one of the most prominent officials in the Trump administration in its bid to slash the size of the U.S. government.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File

Russia’s space chief has visited the United States to discuss plans for continued cooperation between Moscow and Washington on the International Space Station and lunar research with NASA’s acting chief, the first such face-to-face meeting in more than seven years.

Dmitry Bakanov, the director of the state space corporation Roscosmos, met Thursday with NASA’s new acting administrator, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, on a visit to attend the planned launch of a U.S.-Japanese-Russian crew to the space station. The launch was delayed by weather until Friday, when it blasted off successfully.

Roscosmos said Bakanov and Duffy discussed “further work on the International Space Station, cooperation on lunar programs, joint exploration of deep space and continued cooperation on other space projects.”

Once bitter rivals in the space race during the Cold War, Roscosmos and NASA cooperated on the space station and other projects. That relationship was beset with tensions after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in 2022, but Washington and Moscow have continued to work together, with U.S. and Russian crews continuing to fly to the orbiting outpost on each country’s spacecraft.

Plans for broader cooperation, including possible Russian involvement in NASA’s Artemis program of lunar research, have fallen apart.

As Russia has become increasingly reliant on China for its energy exports and imports of key technology amid Western sanctions, Roscosmos has started cooperation with China on its prospective lunar mission.

Speaking to Russian reporters after the talks with Duffy, Bakanov said that they agreed to keep working on keeping the space station in operation to the end of the decade.

“Our experts will now start working on those issues in details,” Bakanov said, praising Duffy for giving a green light for those contacts “despite geopolitical tensions.”

The Russian space chief added that he and Duffy will report the results of the meeting to Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump to secure their blessing for potential space cooperation.

“In view of the difficult geopolitical situation, we will need to receive the necessary clearance from the leaders of our countries,” Bakanov said.

He added he invited Duffy to visit Moscow and the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan for the launch of another Russia-U.S. crew to the space station scheduled for November.

“I will put my efforts into keeping the channel of cooperation between Russia and the U.S. open, and I expect NASA to do the same,” Bakanov said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Vyacheslav Prokofyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File

The Senate has confirmed former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital, filling the post after President Donald Trump withdrew his controversial first pick, conservative activist Ed Martin Jr.

Pirro, a former county prosecutor and elected judge, was confirmed 50-45. Before becoming the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in May, she co-hosted the Fox News show “The Five” on weekday evenings, where she frequently interviewed Trump.

Trump yanked Martin’s nomination after a key Republican senator said he could not support him due to Martin’s outspoken support for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Martin now serves as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney.

In 2021, voting technology company Smartmatic USA sued Fox News, Pirro and others for spreading false claims that the company helped “steal” the 2020 presidential election from Trump. The company’s libel suit, filed in a New York state court, sought $2.7 billion from the defendants.

Last month, Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send Pirro’s nomination to the Senate floor after Democrats walked out to protest Emil Bove’s nomination to become a federal appeals court judge.

Pirro, a 1975 graduate of Albany Law School, has significantly more courtroom experience than Martin, who had never served as a prosecutor or tried a case before taking office in January. She was elected as a judge in New York’s Westchester County Court in 1990 before serving three terms as the county’s elected district attorney.

In the final minutes of his first term as president, Trump issued a pardon to Pirro’s ex-husband, Albert Pirro, who was convicted in 2000 on conspiracy and tax evasion charges.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

Good morning!

As I wrote this newsletter in a Google Doc, I found myself toggling between an overwhelming mix of programs with different functions: Slack, Asana, my company’s HR management software, various spreadsheets, and my Microsoft OneDrive—not to mention the AI applications ChatGPT and Perplexity. I started to wonder: Am I the only one feeling tech fatigue? 

Apparently not. In a new study, software company Quickbase found that while 80% of companies are investing more in new tech to improve productivity, more than half of the 2,000 workers surveyed across 10 industries are finding it harder than ever to be productive. The reason? Too many new tools with little connection or compatibility between them—and, it seems, a lack of clarity from up top. 

This is not the revolution in worker productivity that AI companies have been promising. Indeed, nearly 60% of workers surveyed said they spend 11 hours or more each week chasing down information that is located in a handful of disconnected technology solutions. That’s more than a quarter of a standard work week! And 90% reported just feeling plain overwhelmed by the number of tech programs they needed to get work done on a typical day. I certainly feel validated. 

The study calls this phenomenon “gray work,” which it defines as the work done in ad-hoc situations when technology isn’t connected properly. It’s “the hidden cost of inefficiency—the manual tasks employees do to compensate for disconnected systems and rigid tools,” the report explains. Those in the financial services/insurance and professional services industries felt it the most, reporting the largest increases in this kind of work this year.

It may be costing business leaders more than they realize. In addition to wasting time, half of the workers surveyed said they’d experienced project delays, miscommunication, duplicate work, or budget overruns in the past year. Some 53% said they spend just half their week on meaningful work that drives results for key projects.

So how can companies solve this? After diagnosing where the friction is occurring, business leaders should do a full tech stack audit, cutting redundant tech and prioritizing programs that offer interoperability, the report advises. Then, decide who’s in charge of overseeing and simplifying tech systems and create a plan. Only deploy AI in areas where it offers clear advantages—and make sure employees understand how they can (and how they should not) use it.

Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
[email protected]

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© xavierarnau—Getty Images

The Washington Commanders’ hopes of returning to the site of their former home at RFK Stadium cleared a significant hurdle Friday when the District of Columbia Council approved the legislation.

The bill advanced by a 9-3 vote, but it still must be approved a second time by the council before being sent to Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Bowser negotiated an initial plan with Commanders owner Josh Harris in April, with the team contributing $2.7 billion and the city investing roughly $1.1 billion for the stadium, housing, green space and a sportsplex on land bordering the Anacostia River.

“We are one step closer to securing a sure path to transforming 180 acres of land, which has been our promise to D.C. residents all along,” Bowser said Friday.

The Commanders currently play at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland, but aim to open a new venue in 2030.

“Today’s approval by the council is transformational for D.C. and brings the Commanders back to our spiritual home,” Harris said in a statement. “Like many fans, RFK was the site of memories that fueled my love for this team and this city. Now we’re closer than ever to reigniting that energy for a new generation.”

The bill still faces a process called second reading and must be approved again in a vote that is expected in September. And its advancement Friday was not without some reservations. Councilmember Robert White Jr., who opposed the bill, had three amendments rejected. But one of them, proposing stronger penalties if the team fails to deliver on development commitments, drew a sympathetic response from the panel.

“I want to see us do better than where we are, between now and second reading,” said Councilmember Charles Allen, who supported the bill at this stage. “I think you’re going to hear enough voices on this dais that want to see us continue to work on this between first and second reading, to continue to make this better. … The promises made have to be delivered, and we need to safeguard (so) that happens.”

Councilmembers Zachary Parker and Janeese Lewis George supported the measure after announcing earlier in the day that a contract agreement between the Commanders and union partners had been signed.

The ownership group led by Harris has been considering locations in Washington, Maryland and Virginia since buying the team from Dan Snyder in 2022. Congress passed a bill transferring the RFK Stadium land to the city that was signed by then-President Joe Biden in early January.

That paved the way for possibly replacing the old stadium with a mixed-use development, including the new playing field for the Commanders.

However, President Donald Trump last month threatened to block federal support for the stadium project unless the team reverted to its former name, Redskins. The debate over the team’s nickname did not come up during Friday’s council meeting, although Councilmember Anita Bonds did stress the need to pass this legislation as a way of avoiding possible federal intervention.

“The land was transferred to us via a bill that passed Congress and signed by President Joe Biden two weeks before he left office. I don’t need to remind everyone that times are very different now,” Bonds said. “There is new leadership in our federal government, a new party controlling Congress, and perhaps others across the country and region that may be waiting for us to not approve this deal, so that they can take over. And trust me — if that happens, D.C. gets nothing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File

Former Nike CEO John Donahoe has been hired as athletic director at Stanford.

Donahoe will become the school’s eighth athletic director and replace Bernard Muir, who stepped down this year. He will officially begin in the role Sept. 8.

“Stanford occupies a unique place in the national athletics landscape,” school president Jon Levin said in a statement. “We needed a distinctive leader — someone with the vision, judgment, and strategic acumen for a new era of college athletics, and with a deep appreciation for Stanford’s model of scholar-athlete excellence. John embodies these characteristics.”

ESPN first reported the move.

Donahoe graduated from Stanford Business School and was CEO at Nike from 2020-24. Donahoe also served as the CEO of ServiceNow, a global software company, and as CEO of eBay. He served as chair of the board at PayPal from 2015-25 and he worked for Bain & Company for nearly 20 years, including as the firm’s worldwide CEO.

“Stanford has enormous strengths and enormous potential in a changing environment, including being the model for achieving both academic and athletic excellence at the highest levels,” he said. “I can’t wait to work in partnership with the Stanford team to build momentum for Stanford Athletics and ensure the best possible experiences for our student-athletes.”

Donahoe takes over one of the country’s most successful athletic programs with Stanford having won at least one NCAA title in 49 straight years starting in 1976-77 and a record 137 NCAA team titles overall.

But the Cardinal struggled in the high-profile sports of football and men’s basketball under Muir’s tenure, leading to the decision to hire former Stanford and NFL star Andrew Luck to oversee the football program as its general manager.

The Cardinal are looking to rebound in football after going to three Rose Bowls under former coach David Shaw in Muir’s first four years as AD.

Shaw resigned in 2022 following a second straight 3-9 season and Muir’s new hire, Troy Taylor, posted back-to-back 3-9 seasons before being fired in March following a report that he had been investigated twice for allegedly mistreating staffers.

Luck hired former NFL coach Frank Reich as interim coach.

The men’s basketball program hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since Muir’s second season in 2013-14 under former coach Johnny Dawkins.

Dawkins was fired in 2016 and replaced by Jerod Haase, who failed to make the tournament once in eight years.

Muir hired Kyle Smith last March to take over and the Cardinal went 21-14 for their most wins in 10 years.

Muir also hired Kate Paye as women’s basketball coach last year after Hall of Famer Tara VanDerveer retired. The Cardinal went 16-15 this past season and in missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1987.

Muir also oversaw the Cardinal’s transition to the ACC this past year after the school’s long-term home, the Pac-12, broke apart.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File

Online creators from dozens of countries, led by MrBeast and popular science YouTuber Mark Rober, are launching a $40 million fundraiser to build water quality projects around the world.

The monthlong crowdfunding campaign, touted as the biggest YouTube collaboration and called #TeamWater, promises to rally their combined 2 billion subscribers around combating unsafe water sources. Funds will primarily benefit WaterAid, an international nonprofit that builds community-tailored infrastructure ranging from solar-powered wells to rainwater harvesting systems.

More than 2 billion people lacked access to safely managed drinking water as of 2022, according to the United Nations. Organizers want to put a dent in that figure by providing sustainable access for 2 million people — and instilling new generations with a lifelong commitment to advocacy.

Joining #TeamWater are smaller creators and some of the biggest names online such as streaming giant Kai Cenat, trendy YouTubers the Stokes Twins and sports entertainers Dude Perfect. Whether they are filming serious explainers or silly water-themed challenges, creators are encouraged to produce content that is authentic to their brand.

Water access was identified as a solvable issue that could also unite their mass global following. But MrBeast CEO Jeff Housenbold acknowledged they are better awareness builders than infield executors So, they sought a partner with global reach, existing community partnerships and long-term change-making abilities.

That led them to WaterAid. The organization first started talking with MrBeast’s team two years ago, according to WaterAid America CEO Kelly Parsons.

She said WaterAid typically engages communities for up to a year designing the proper solution. That work sometimes involves training local water technicians.

“It all begins and ends in the communities we work with and through them to ensure design that lasts,” Parsons said. “It’s about people more than about plumbing.”

While WaterAid would did not provide a list of all the places where funds would go, countries include Colombia, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Malawi and Kenya. Charity partners GivePower and the Alok Foundation are also helping implementation in rural Kenya and Brazil, respectively.

U.S.-based projects include an atmospheric water generator for an assisted living facility in Jackson, Mississippi, where the fragile water system nearly collapsed three years ago. The nonprofit DigDeep is helping fix crumbling infrastructure in the small town of Rhodell, West Virginia.

Alex and Alan Stokes, whose 129 million subscribers make them one of YouTube’s biggest channels, filmed in a Nepalese village where the campaign is building a 15,000-liter tank. The trip recalled their own upbringing in a Chinese town where their grandfather walked miles to fill 5-gallon water jugs.

“Being there in person was definitely one of those experiences that brought it all back for us,” Alex said. “(We) saw these kids there and it just reminded us a lot of our childhood as well.”

The multi-platform drive follows the 2019 #TeamTrees and 2021 #TeamSeas campaigns, which reportedly drew more than $50 million altogether. That money helped plant millions of trees and remove millions of pounds of waste from bodies of water.

Those humanitarian efforts, however, drew criticism that they promoted oversimplified solutions to complicated issues and applied Band-Aids instead of addressing the main drivers of forest loss or ocean pollution.

“Ideally, you would not use philanthropy simply to take away the symptoms of whatever is the problem,” said Patricia Illingworth, a Northeastern University philosophy professor who writes about ethics in philanthropy. “But, rather, you would want to address the root cause.”

Matt Fitzgerald, a digital campaign strategist who has organized the efforts, said the campaigns were never intended to be the “end all be all.” He hopes they serve as an entry point for deeper commitments.

While the previous two campaigns were about “a fist-bump, Mother Earth-style of environmentalism,” he said, this one seeks to center people while still “keeping the planet top of mind.”

“No matter how big a mass internet mobilization moment might be, real progress on these issues demands people continuing to pay attention and continuing to stay involved,” Fitzgerald said. “To me, the way you do that, is you reach people’s hearts before you try to convince them with their minds.”

___

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File

Points fatigue is real. What started as a nice-to-have bonus for traveling has ballooned into a sprawl of rewards programs and arcane conversions that requires an advanced degree in statistics to manage. 

Brian Kelly made a whole career off the cottage industry, parlaying a side hustle of maximizing credit card and travel rewards into a blog, The Points Guy, that became a verifiable franchise. Now he’s arguing that the points system has jumped the shark. Alongside Lerer Hippeau and Slow Ventures, he’s backing the New York-based startup Journey in a $7.7 million seed round to set it back on the right track. 

Maybe this is too much of a first-world problem to care about, but I’m sure plenty of this newsletter’s readers were distraught when Chase announced an abstruse modification of their Sapphire Reserve credit card, or when Marriott acquired Starwood. Who doesn’t love fake internet money that can occasionally give you an airline upgrade or a free hotel night? 

John Sutton, the cofounder and CEO of Journey, thinks the system needs a revamp. A longtime tech entrepreneur, Sutton met Kelly while serving as the chief digital officer at Red Ventures, a media-focused investment firm that owns brands like Bankrate, Lonely Planet, and eventually, The Points Guy. 

When Sutton left his role in 2021, he took a couple of years off to play professional volleyball before figuring out his next venture. After exploring the idea of investing in short-term rentals like Airbnb properties, he had the idea of building out a loyalty program for travelers. After consulting with Kelly, he realized there was a broader problem—not only of short-term rentals and many independent hotels lacking the infrastructure to create rewards systems, but that points in general were increasingly broken. “They’ve been losing the magic of loyalty,” Kelly told me. “There’s a big opportunity to create a program that people are excited about.”

Journey’s website looks like a cross between a travel platform like Booking.com (an online travel agency, in industry parlance) and an Instagram feed, with lush snippets of desert hideouts and jungle treehouses. On the backend, Journey’s small team curates properties, now totaling more than 1,500 from around the world, that want to participate in their loyalty program—a combination of independent hotels and rental properties. Sutton says they’re not looking for certain price points (with properties ranging from several hundred to many thousand dollars per night) or stars, but whether they’ve “created something special that has a story to tell” (you can check out their portal, which just launched, to judge for yourself).

The upshot for visitors, Sutton and Kelly argue, is that the system is straightforward: You earn five points per dollar spent if you book directly through their platform, with each point worth about two cents, equating to a 10% rebate, which can be instantly redeemed during stays. “Our program is engineered so that you’re not being taken advantage of,” Kelly said.

Journey is the type of consumer-forward, design-first tech product that you don’t see much anymore—a simple concept executed with flair. But this being 2025, there is AI involved, of course. The company has built tools that track visitor preferences and behavior, like whether they’d prefer to be greeted with red wine or mineral water, to help property managers customize the experience. And Journey is also building out a platform for influencers like Kelly that matches them with properties. Eventually, the goal is to build out AI agents that will help tourists. Sutton says it will make platforms like Expedia, where you find a hotel by searching for the top 10 hotels in Paris, look antiquated.

“Travelers will be on a trust journey with us,” he told me.  

Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: [email protected]

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Journey

The globe is a potent symbol, and one that can mean very different things in dif- ferent eras. Fortune has often used the motif—fittingly, perhaps, for the magazine founded in 1929 by Henry Luce, a globalist before that term came into vogue. His famous 1941 essay “The American Century” laid out an idealistic vision of a global era dominated by a nation only recently freed from colonialism—flawed yet aspirational in its democracy, and rich with
the promise of a “more abundant life,” both materially and culturally. Luce’s worldview has been reflected on dozens of our covers, as rep- resented in this selection, curated by Fortune creative director Josue Evilla. From the 1933 line drawing of the goddess Fortuna lovingly cradling the globe to the Bauhaus starkness of Walter Allner’s 1957 depiction of global trade to the ­Rubik’s Cube–like metal globe on the 2015 cover announcing our first Change the World list, Luce’s humane internationalism lives on.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• The dollar, which has lost value all year against foreign currencies, had been making a comeback in recent weeks. But Friday’s jobs number from the BLS—and the downward revisions to previous numbers that accompanied it—“knocked the stuffing out of the dollar’s rally,” ING says.

The U.S. dollar fell off a cliff on Friday after the Bureau of Labor Statistics dramatically revised downward its estimates of how many jobs the American economy was creating. The economy, it turned out, was far weaker than everyone had assumed.

The dollar has lost value all year. It is currently down nearly 9% YTD against the DXY, an index of foreign currencies, as investors flee President Donald Trump’s tariff barriers. In June, the USD hit a low of more than 10%, but in recent weeks, the dollar has been gaining ground.

Until Friday. 

The dollar fell from 100.22 on the DXY on Friday to 98.82 this morning—a relatively large move for a currency the size of the dollar.

Credit: Google Finance

“The dollar index suffered its biggest one-day drop since May 23 as markets swiftly reassessed the outlook for rates and growth,” George Vessey of Convera told clients in a note.

In notes to clients from ING, analyst Chris Turner called it: “The dollar’s handbrake turn.”

“Friday’s soft jobs report knocked the stuffing out of the dollar’s rally. Investors now attach an 80% probability to a 25bp rate cut from the Federal Reserve in September,” he wrote. “Uncertainty about the quality of U.S. data is not a good look for U.S. asset markets and could add some more risk premium both into the dollar and Treasuries.”

Goldman Sachs called it “USD: Whiplash week.” The bank also published a subdued note from chief economist Jan Hatzius that forecast U.S. GDP growth would be only 1% in the second half of the year.

His colleague Kamakshya Trivedi argued that although the “media narrative” suggested that Trump had somehow won deals that were “negative” for the U.S.’s trading partners, most foreign exports—which go to other countries—won’t be affected.

“We expect that the U.S. will bear most of the cost of the tariffs, which will weigh on its terms of trade. This is partly because of the breadth of the tariff increases, which will make it difficult for U.S. firms and consumers to find suitable substitutes,” he wrote.

That’s why the dollar is so much weaker on foreign exchanges this morning.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© PM Images via Getty Images