In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful People in Business list.
The big story: Grand jury to probe Trump’s “Russia hoax” allegations.
The markets: Coming back nicely.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Fortune’s 2025 ranking of the world’s 100 most powerful people in business came out this morning. Unlike revenue or market cap, power is a more complex concept. We calculate not just the size of the person’s businesses, but also the health of their companies, as well as their innovation, influence, impact and where they are in the arc of their career.
By those measures, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang came in No. 1 on this year’s list. In addition to creating specialized computer chips that are coveted by companies developing artificial intelligence, he is on the front lines of a technology that is changing the global business landscape itself.
Power is not permanent. Elon Musk topped last year’s list not only because of his roles at Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and X, but also because of his work in the Trump Administration. That changed. This year, Musk is No. 4 on the list.
Power is also relative. Companies and leaders grow strong when they have a worthy rival to measure themselves against. Thus does Jensen Huang have AMD CEO Lisa Su, his first cousin once removed, on his heels as a powerful chipmaker. As part of this year’s package, we look at how rivalries in key industries are playing out.You can check out the full list here.
When Elizabeth Gore received an email two years ago informing her that America First Legal (AFL) was bringing a class-action lawsuit against her company, Hello Alice, she thought it was spam.
AFL is a conservative activist group that was cofounded in 2021 by Stephen Miller, one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies and a deputy chief of staff in Trump’s second term. According to its website, AFL exists to “oppose lawless government overreach and fight to restore the rule of law in the United States.”
Gore couldn’t fathom why Miller’s organization would take an interest in her company, a business-to-business platform that serves mom-and-pop companies, offering them, for example, a data-backed assessment of their financial fitness, and potential access to a Hello Alice credit card and other forms of capital. She sees Hello Alice as part of a patchwork of companies, government agencies, and nonprofits safeguarding one of the main paths to the American Dream itself.
But the message wasn’t spam. America First Legal alleged that when Hello Alice made a $25,000 grant available to Black-owned commercial vehicle businesses, it violated a Civil Rights Act law from 1866 that bans racial discrimination in contracts.
The AFL email kicked off a long, emotionally draining legal battle that has consumed Gore and her cofounder Elizabeth Rodz ever since, Gore explains, even as Hello Alice has continued to grow. Though the battle is playing out far from the national spotlight, it’s providing a testing ground for legal arguments that might help companies defend their diversity-oriented programs against claims of reverse racism.
A $25,000, a two-year battle
The program in question was sponsored by Progressive, the insurance company, a co-defendant in the suit, along with Circular Board, Hello Alice’s parent. The legal challenge was brought on behalf of Nathan Roberts, a white man in Ohio who owns a company called Freedom Truck Dispatch.
Last year, the tussle briefly appeared to be over: A federal judge in the Northern District of Ohio agreed to dismiss the case because the plaintiffs failed to show that Roberts would have won the grant if the competition for it had been race-neutral. In legal terms, he didn’t have “standing” to bring the case, a finding related to a couple of specifics about the situation. (For one, Roberts didn’t apply for the grant during the application window and sued the company only after the window closed.)
But America First Legal appealed that decision, and in late July the lawsuit came before the Sixth Circuit appellate court in Cincinnati, where the AFL again argued their client suffered an injury because he wasn’t able to apply for the grant.
Now, based on the discussion before a three-judge panel at the Sixth Circuit, it appears that the Hello Alice lawsuit will solidify a reliable, if unsexy tool that companies can use to defend against claims of reverse racism in anti-DEI campaigns: arcane rules and technicalities.
For years, corporations have used procedural grounds to evade charges of discrimination in employment-related lawsuits brought by people of color, women, LGBTQ+ employees, and others. The Hello Alice case may show that companies can successfully protect themselves against politically motivated anti-DEI lawsuits the same way.
“We were really gratified by the court’s questions,” Neal Katyal, a prominent attorney who leads the Supreme Court and appellate practice at the Washington, D.C. law firm Milbank, and is representing Hello Alice, told Fortune. Indeed, many of those questions definitively zeroed in on procedural issues. (The court asked, for example, what about Hello Alice’s terms and conditions prevented the AFL’s client from applying for the grant.) “They obviously had read everything and asked exactly the right questions. And we very much look forward to the Court’s resolution of this case.”
Issues like these could help defendants scuttle cases before the two sides even approach larger questions, including: Was the federal contract law in question ever meant to help address reverse discrimination? (For the record, Hello Alice argues it was not.) And is giving money away as a grant a form of free speech, similar to making political donations? (The 11th Circuit Court has rejected that argument in a separate case, but the matter hasn’t reached the Supreme Court.)
The outcome of the Hello Alice case may also signal to businesses that they don’t need to preemptively roll back programs for marginalized groups out of fear.
AFL did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Fortune attempted to reach Freedom Truck Dispatch but found a phone number listed for the company was out of service.
A push for inclusion
Since Hello Alice got off the ground a decade ago, Gore says, the company has served 1.6 million small businesses, helping them secure loans and benefit from a wealth of information and resources. “We have all the financial planning software they need to build their business plans,” Gore explains.
The cofounders also spend part of their time advocating for small business owners and raising funds for philanthropic grants. To date, Hello Alice has issued $60 million in small grants across the U.S., according to Gore. “Part of our commitment since day one was to ensure that small businesses who have some kind of barrier to entry, that we dig in and ensure they’re part of the platform,” she says. The company has helped veterans, for example, and women who’ve been in the care economy, both groups of people who may not have the credit histories needed to launch a company.
The company is facing off against a movement that has lately gained momentum. Conservative activists who assert that corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are a form of reverse discrimination have been emboldened by support from the judiciary system and the White House. In 2023, the Supreme Court decision in the Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) case banned colleges from considering race as part of their admissions process, a shift that sent companies scrambling to figure out what the new law meant in the private sector. Separately, President Trump issued executive orders this year that banned certain types of DEI at companies with federal contracts and warned that his administration would investigate private sector firms discovered to be the most “egregious” offenders of DEI.
Whether the Hello Alice case will answer larger questions about DEI’s legality remains to be seen. “Initially, this case presented the big question: Can affirmative action be permissible in the corporate setting?” Katyal explained. “But the trial court said that the plaintiffs didn’t even get to ask that question. They weren’t allowed to because they didn’t meet the legal requirements to be able to bring a case in federal court.” Now, says Katyal, the question before the Sixth Circuit is, “‘Can someone try and complain about a program to give grants to minority-owned businesses when they can’t even allege they would have gotten the grants anyway?’”
Gore and attorney Neal Katyal outside the courthouse in Cincinnati where a panel from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in Hello Alice’s case in July.
Courtesy of Hello Alice
As the legal battle has played out for Hello Alice, Gore has found support from friends and clients across the political spectrum. “We’re based in Houston, Texas, and [there’s a large] amount of folks who you would think would be against us, and they weren’t,” she said, adding, “Think traditional white male biker companies and trucking companies.”
Gore says the business owners who have discussed the issue with her—whether they identify as Republican or Democrat—don’t think the government should be telling businesses how to deploy their money. That’s what her legal team believes, too: Private businesses should have the freedom to run or reject affirmative action programs like the grants for Black businesses. Whether such DEI initiatives are good for a company, morally justified, or, as the AFL claims, racist, should be debated in a boardroom and not in a federal court. And there is nothing inherently illegal about a private company offering a grant dedicated to a minority population.
Playing offense
Lately, many companies have rolled back cohort-specific DEI programs just to avoid the kinds of costly headaches that Hello Alice has faced. Kenji Yoshino, a constitutional law professor at NYU School of Law and director of its Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, believes that’s the right approach for our times.
Yoshino explains that his center has been “beating the drum on moving from cohorts to content.” That is, he suggests companies make programs such as diversity-focused fellowships in the workplace available to anyone who wants to apply, without changing the ultimate mission of the fellowship. “That really allows a company to do an end run around the SFFA decision,” he says.
At the same time, he applauds Gore for sticking with her program for Black business owners and preparing to advance not only the technical argument in the lawsuit—showing that the white male trucker doesn’t have the ground to sue—but perhaps much more. Beyond questions about the original intention behind Section 1981, or whether these grants constitute a contract, there’s that more complicated question about First Amendment rights that has yet to reach the country’s highest court.
If Gore or another business owner can get the law to say that they are merely expressing their views with DEI grant programs, says Yoshino, “that would be the biggest win of all.”
Finding levity
Sticking with this lawsuit has not been an easy decision. When it first hit, Hello Alice was in the middle of a Series C raise, and Silicon Valley Bank, its second-biggest investor, had just collapsed. Hello Alice also had to disclose the lawsuit to other investors, “and there was this fear factor around AFL,” says Gore. “So that capital flew out the door.” But there was a lot at stake, she adds. If the AFL were to prove that grants for minority-owned businesses violated Section 1981, millions of dollars for American small businesses could be lost. So far, the cost of fighting the lawsuit has surpassed $1 million.
The night before the Sixth Circuit oral arguments, she had dinner at a restaurant near the courthouse in Cincinnati. It turned out that the restaurant, Frankie’s, was a Hello Alice customer. For Gore, it was a reminder of the importance of her work. In heavy times, she says, “it gave me levity.”
Power is precarious: The more of it you possess, the more competitors you attract, gunning for your customers, star employees, and market share. We drilled down on five of the biggest rivalries in business, across chips, AI, EVs, investing and finance, and energy. And though these incumbents and rising rivals are fierce, never count out the dark horses who are hungry for a spot at the top.
Check out the 2025 Fortune Most Powerful People list here.
AI chips
Jensen Huang CEO, President, and Cofounder, Nvidia — U.S.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang might be forgiven for taking a moment to savor his company’s meteoric rise to the top of the stock market, driven by soaring demand for its high-performance chips that power generative AI. Now the most valuable company in the world, Nvidia controls over 90% of the market for the specialized chips used to train and run AI systems—cementing its dominance in the hardware race fueling the AI boom. Still, Huang is keeping an eye on the horizon. AMD is positioning itself as a viable alternative, while startups like Groq, Cerebras, and SambaNova are betting on custom chips designed to accelerate AI inference. None pose a serious threat to Nvidia’s dominance—yet.
Lisa Su CEO and Chair, AMD — U.S.
AMD CEO Lisa Su never met her first cousin once removed, Jensen Huang, until both had risen to lead two of the most powerful chipmakers in the world. “There were no family dinners,” Su said in a recent interview. “It is an interesting coincidence.” But the two can’t avoid each other now. With corporate headquarters just miles apart in the same Silicon Valley town, AMD is pushing hard to establish itself as a viable second source for AI chips amid surging demand. The company has secured wins from major players like Microsoft and Meta—both eager to diversify their supply chains and reduce dependence on Nvidia’s tightly controlled hardware and software ecosystem. —Sharon Goldman
Elon Musk CEO, Cofounder, and other roles, Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and others — U.S.
Elon Musk, the man who brought EVs to the masses, has seen Tesla’s fortunes erode as he gets entangled in social media and politics. Tesla’s annual deliveries in 2024 declined for the first time ever, and have continued to decline year over year each quarter since. Musk has bet the future on Tesla’s AI and camera-only self-driving system, with a soft robotaxi launch in June and the ongoing development of its humanoid robot. Critics argue the company’s self-driving tech is well behind that of competitors like Alphabet’s Waymo and BYD. While Tesla is still the most valuable auto company in the world, it’s not clear it will keep the top spot.
Wang Chuanfu CEO, Chairman, and Founder, BYD — China
The late Charlie Munger, one of the most successful investors of all time, described Wang Chuanfu, founder and CEO of BYD, as a hardworking “genius.” In 2023, when BYD began dueling with Tesla for the top spot in EV sales, the U.S. auto industry started paying attention. BYD’s affordable models, ultrafast charging technology, and complimentary driver assistance systems have helped the company garner 20% of the global EV market. BYD is also the world’s second-largest EV battery manufacturer to date, with its innovative Blade Battery using iron and phosphate to help keep prices low. —Jessica Mathews
ALTMAN: JOEL SAGET—AFP/Getty Images; Zuckerberg: Chris Unger—Zuffa LLC
Artificial Intelligence
Sam Altman CEO and Cofounder, OpenAI — U.S.
Altman’s leadership of OpenAI has made him one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful, and polarizing, figures. The AI company is rapidly ascending to tech’s top table, with more than 780 million weekly ChatGPT users, big corporate and government customers, and expansion plans in areas ranging from office productivity software to a new hardware device being built by former Apple designer Jony Ive. Valued at almost $300 billion in a venture capital round led by SoftBank in March, OpenAI is on track to generate more than $10 billion in revenue this year (while still losing billions of dollars annually).
Mark Zuckerberg CEO, Chairman, and Founder, Meta — U.S.
Altman’s meteoric rise has made him plenty of enemies. He fell out with Elon Musk years ago and has clashed recently with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has been poaching OpenAI staff with multimillion-dollar comp packages. GoogleDeepMind competes with OpenAI to build the most capable AI models, and ChatGPT also poses an existential risk to Google’s dominance of internet search. Meanwhile, there’s no love lost between Altman and the Anthropic cofounders, who defected from OpenAI in 2021 in part because of concerns about Altman’s leadership and commitment to AI safety. —Jeremy Kahn
Dimon: Al Drago—Bloomberg/Getty Images; ROWAN: Yuki Iwamura—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Finance
Jamie Dimon CEO and Chairman, JPMorgan Chase — U.S.
As he closes in on his 20th anniversary as CEO of the country’s biggest bank, Jamie Dimon is the undisputed dean of Wall Street and is poised to go down in history as one of the greatest bankers of all time. In times of crisis, the markets turn to Dimon as a source of clear and unvarnished authority. His stature grew in 2024 when he led JPMorgan Chase to record profits of $58.5 billion on $278.9 billion in revenue. Dimon has also responded to growing competition from the private equity world by having JPM establish private credit facilities of its own—and issuing a warning shot to Apollo and others to stop poaching junior bankers.
Marc Rowan, a onetime corporate lawyer, has emerged in recent years as the dominant figure in the fast-growing world of private equity. In 2021, Rowan became CEO of Apollo, which he cofounded, and carved out a bold strategic shift revolving around private credit, a field that has doubled over the past five years to around $2 trillion. The pivot was highly lucrative, helping Apollo notch $1.49 billion in profits in Q4 of 2024. Rowan’s private credit charge poses a growing challenge to traditional banks like JPMorgan Chase, as Apollo and others become the go-to lending venues for large companies and institutions. —Jeff John Roberts
Having missed out on the U.S. shale gas boom, Exxon Mobil was playing catch-up when Darren Woods took over as CEO in 2017. While it was the largest publicly traded company by market cap as recently as mid-2013, Exxon bottomed out amid the pandemic in 2020 when it was kicked out of the Dow, and archrival Chevron briefly surpassed it in value for the first time ever. But Woods’ focus on capital discipline, shareholder returns, and M&A has Exxon back on top of the industry, where it leads shale output in the booming Permian Basin. Its oil discoveries in offshore Guyana are the envy of the energy world.
Mike Wirth CEO and Chairman, Chevron — U.S.
A Chevron lifer who joined as an engineer in 1982, Mike Wirth took over in 2018—one year after Woods at Exxon Mobil. After serving as the energy darling of investors for a few years, Chevron now faces a revitalized Exxon. They’re rivals in the Permian Basin. They just settled a long arbitration rivalry over a dispute in Guyana. They’re even rivals in the burgeoning U.S. lithium business. Both stayed focused on fossil fuels and related low-carbon ventures while Europeans BP and Shell struggled to grow green energy. Meanwhile, TotalEnergies is the only oil major doubling down on a renewable energy focus. —Jordan Blum
Australia will upgrade its navy with 11 Mogami-class frigates built by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Tuesday.
Billed as Japan’s biggest defense export deal since World War II, Australia will pay $6 billion (10 billion Australian dollars) over the next 10 years to acquire the fleet of stealth frigates.
Australia is in the midst of a major military restructure, bolstering its navy with long-range firepower in an effort to deter China.
It is striving to expand its fleet of major warships from 11 to 26 over the next decade.
“This is clearly the biggest defense-industry agreement that has ever been struck between Japan and Australia,” Marles said, touting the deal.
“This decision was made based on what was the best capability for Australia,” he added.
“We do have a very close strategic alignment with Japan.”
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was awarded the tender over Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems.
Mogami-class warships are advanced stealth frigates equipped with a potent array of weapons.
Marles said they would replace Australia’s ageing fleet of Anzac-class vessels, with the first Mogami-class ship to be on the water by 2030.
“The Mogami-class frigate is the best frigate for Australia,” said Marles.
“It is a next-generation vessel. It is stealthy. It has 32 vertical launch cells capable of launching long-range missiles.”
The deal further cements a burgeoning security partnership between Australia and Japan.
Japan is deepening cooperation with U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region that, like Tokyo, are involved in territorial disputes with China.
Both Japan and Australia are members of the “Quad” group alongside India and the United States.
Japanese government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi said Tuesday the deal was “proof of trust in our nation’s high-level technology and the importance of interoperability between Japan’s self defense forces and the Australian military.”
It was also a “big step toward elevating the national security cooperation with Australia, which is our special strategic partner”, Hayashi told reporters in Tokyo.
‘More lethal’
Japan’s pacifist constitution restricts it from exporting weapons—but in 2024 Tokyo loosened arms export controls to enable it to boost sales abroad.
The order is Japan’s biggest defense export deal since World War II, according to local media.
Defense industry minister Pat Conroy said the Mogami-class frigates were capable of launching long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
“The acquisition of these stealth frigates will make our navy a bigger navy, and a more lethal navy,” he said.
The first three Mogami-class frigates will be built overseas, Conroy said, with shipbuilding yards in Western Australia expected to produce the rest.
Australia announced a deal to acquire U.S.-designed nuclear-powered submarines in 2021, scrapping a years-long plan to develop non-nuclear subs from France.
Under the tripartite AUKUS pact with the United States and the United Kingdom, the Australian navy plans to acquire at least three Virginia-class submarines within 15 years.
The AUKUS submarine program alone could cost the country up to $235 billion over the next 30 years, according to Australian government forecasts, a price tag that has stoked criticism.
Major defense projects in Australia have long suffered from cost overruns, government U-turns, policy changes and project plans that make more sense for local job creation than defense.
Australia plans to gradually increase its defense spending to 2.4% of gross domestic product—above the 2% target set by its NATO allies, but well short of U.S. demands for 3.5%.
The Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force stealth frigate JS Mogami (FFM-1) participates in an International Fleet Review commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force at Sagami Bay on November 6, 2022 off Yokosuka, Japan.
SoftBank Group Corp. is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the latest reflection of Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence.
The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about $3 billion by the end of March, up from $1 billion in the prior quarter, according to regulatory filings. It bought around $330 million worth of TSMC shares and $170 million in Oracle Corp., they show.
That’s while SoftBank’s signature Vision Fund has monetized almost $2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of 2025, according to a person familiar with the fund’s activities. The Vision Fund prioritizes its returns on investment and there is no particular pressure from SoftBank to monetize its assets, said the person, who asked not to be named discussing private information. A representative of SoftBank declined to comment.
At the heart of SoftBank’s AI ambitions is chip designer Arm Holdings Plc. Son is gradually building a portfolio around the Cambridge, UK-based company with key industry players, seeking to catch up after largely missing a historic rally that’s made Nvidia into a $4 trillion behemoth and boosted its contract chipmaker TSMC near a $1 trillion value.
“Nvidia is the picks and shovels for the gold rush of AI,” said Ben Narasin, founder and general partner of Tenacity Venture Capital, referring to a concerted effort by the world’s largest technology companies to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get ahead. SoftBank’s purchase of the U.S. company’s stock may buy more influence and access to Nvidia’s most sought-after chips, he said. “Maybe he gets to skip the line.”
SoftBank, which reports quarterly earnings Thursday, should’ve benefited from that bet on Nvidia—at least on paper. Nvidia has gained around 90% in market value since hitting a year’s low around early April, while TSMC has climbed over 40%.
That’s helping to make up for missing out on much of Nvidia’s post-ChatGPT rally—one of the biggest of all time. SoftBank, which was early to start betting on betting on AI long before OpenAI’s seminal chatbot, parted with a 4.9% stake in Nvidia in early 2019 that would be worth more than $200 billion today.
Crippling losses at the Vision Fund also hampered SoftBank’s ability to be an early investor in generative AI. The company’s attempts to buy back some Nvidia shares, alongside those of proxy TSMC, would help Son regain access to some of the most lucrativeparts of the semiconductor supply chain.
The 67-year-old SoftBank founder now seeks to play a more central role in the spread of AI through sweeping partnerships. These include SoftBank’s $500 billion Stargate data center foray with OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund MGX. Son is also courting TSMC and others about taking part in a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona.
As Arm’s intellectual property is used to power the majority of mobile chips and is increasingly used in server chips, SoftBank could carve out a unique position without being a manufacturer itself, according to Richard Kaye, co-head of Japan equity strategy at Comgest Asset Management and a long-time SoftBank investor.
“I think he sees himself as the natural provider of AI semiconductor technology,” he said. “What Son really wants to do is capture the upstream and the downstream of everything.”
Investors have cheered Son’s audacious plans, while analysts say they expect SoftBank to report a swing back to a net income in the June quarter. SoftBank shares marked a record high last month. SoftBank’s planned $6.5 billion deal to acquire U.S. chip firm Ampere Computing LLC and another $30 billion investment in OpenAI are further encouraging investors who see the stock as a way to ride the US startup’s momentum.
Son, however, remains dissatisfied, according to people close to the billionaire. Son sees the big projects in the U.S. as having the potential to help SoftBank leapfrog the current leaders in AI to become a trillion-dollar or bigger company, they said.
The stock continues to trade at a roughly estimated 40% discount to SoftBank’s total assets—which includes a roughly 90% stake in the $148 billion-valued Arm. SoftBank’s market capitalization stands at around $118 billion, a fraction of Nvidia’s $4.4 trillion valuation and that of other tech companies most closely associated with AI progress.
Son, who in the past has seen Washington hamper or derail merger plans like the union of Arm and Nvidia, seeks to leverage his relationship with Donald Trump and is arranging frequent meetings with White House officials. Those efforts are now critical as AI and semiconductors become geopolitical flash points. SoftBank’s plan to buy Ampere is facing a probe by the Federal Trade Commission.
Attention at its June quarter earnings will be on what other assets SoftBank might sell down to help it secure the liquidity it needs to double down on hardware investments. The Japanese company has so far raised around $4.8 billion through a sale of some of its T-Mobile share holding in June. Its Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto has cited the company’s end-March net asset value of ¥25.7 trillion ($175 billion), saying the company has ample capital to cover its funding needs.
In the business year ended March, the Vision Fund’s exits included DoorDash Inc. and View Inc., as well as cloud security company Wiz Inc. and enterprise software startup Peak, even as SoftBank bought up the stakes in Nvidia, TSMC and Oracle.
“We’re after AI using an array of startups and group companies,” Son told shareholders in June. “We have one goal,” he said. “We’re going to become the No. 1 platformer in artificial super intelligence.”
Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks at the SoftBank World event in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Indonesia’s second-quarter growth unexpectedly accelerated to the fastest pace in two years, with exports and investment helping an economy that’s beset by weak loan growth and mass job losses in manufacturing.
Gross domestic product in the three months through June rose 5.12% from a year ago, the nation’s statistics office announced on Tuesday. That beat expectations of a slowdown to 4.8% growth, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey. The rupiah was little changed at 16,384 to the dollar, while stocks increased gains to 1% after the data.
Economists were surprised. Outside of the pandemic, the discrepancy between forecast and actual data was the biggest since the first quarter of 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While the economy may have benefited from interest rate cuts, government stimulus, and the Eid al-Fitr holiday season, analysts are divided over the outlook.
“I doubt if the investment growth will be sustained in the second half of the year,” said Ahmad Mikail Zaini, chief economist at PT Sucor Sekuritas in Jakarta, citing slowing loan growth and a contraction in foreign direct investment in June.
In contrast, Bank Danamon Indonesia economist Hosianna Evalita Situmorang said third-quarter figures “could continue this improvement,” thanks to government stimulus; spending on free school meals and other projects; supportive monetary policy; and resilient agricultural output.
Gross fixed capital formation gained 6.99% in the second quarter, the fastest pace in four years, due to infrastructure development and machinery spending, BPS said.
Still, there are also questions over the reliability of the statistics.
“We don’t have much faith in the data,” Capital Economics said in a report after the announcement. “We’ve long held concerns about the reliability of Indonesia’s GDP data. Before the pandemic, Indonesia went for nearly six years in which official GDP growth barely moved from 5% y/y. And in recent years GDP growth has, again, started to hover around the same rate.”
Private consumption, which accounts for over half of the country’s GDP, rose 4.97%.
“This remains below the 5.0% trend in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic—indicating that consumers remain cautious,” Tamara Mast Henderson wrote in a report for Bloomberg Economics, predicting another quarter-point cut in interest rates in the current quarter.
Indeed, there have been massive numbers of jobs lost in the textile and other industries as Chinese exporters have dumped goods in the nation of 280 million people. The U.S. imposition of tough tariffs may have added to pressure on Beijing to find new markets.
Southeast Asia’s largest economy expanded 4.04% on a quarterly basis, more than the 3.69% expansion forecast by economists. Exports increased 10.67%, helped by front-loaded shipments ahead of looming U.S. tariffs, which have been reduced to 19% from a threatened 32% for Indonesia.
Still, external risks persist due to the worsening trade war and the slower global economy, which could dampen the momentum of domestic demand and trade going forward. The higher tariffs on exports to the U.S. go into effect on Aug. 7.
Government spending dropped 0.33% in the second quarter from a year earlier, amid efforts by President Prabowo Subianto to repurpose some state spending to favored programs, including free school lunches.
Prabowo is set to unveil the government’s spending plans for 2026 in his first budget speech on Aug. 15, along with the economic growth goal for the year. The government has already lowered the 2025 GDP growth outlook to 4.7%-5%, from an initial 5.2% forecast, and has said more fiscal incentives are being prepared to boost purchasing power through the end of the year.
More monetary support is also likely. Since September, Bank Indonesia has lowered its key interest rate by 100 basis points and pledged to continue cutting further to support economic growth and boost bank lending, which dipped to a two-year low in June.
“The stronger-than-expected print in Indonesia’s second-quarter growth—bolstered by investment and exports—is unlikely to last,” Bloomberg’s Henderson wrote. “The impact of higher U.S. tariffs has yet to land. When it does, growth will suffer.”
Still, external risks persist due to the worsening trade war and the slower global economy, which could dampen the momentum of domestic demand and trade going forward.
Figma’s sensational IPO last week resurrected longstanding debates about IPO pricing and first day pops—an unsurprising reaction to the newly listed stock’s 333% surge in its first days of trading. As investors dissect the offering (and as Figma’s stock settles back a bit, falling 27% on Monday), other key questions have emerged: Will Figma’s debut entice other startups to jump into the fray, bringing an end to the tech industry’s IPO drought? And if so, who’s next?
There’s a long list of late-stage VC-backed tech companies with strong customer bases that Wall Street investment bankers would love to take public. Many of these multi-billion dollar companies, including Databricks, Klarna, Stripe, and SpaceX, have been subjects of IPO speculation for years. And then of course, there’s the crop of richly valued AI startups, from OpenAI and Anthropic, to Elon Musk’s xAI.
Those companies will likely continue to be in the spotlight, but in conversations I had with several investors following Figma’s debut, other names came up as more likely to IPO sooner including Canva, Revolut, Midjourney, Motive, and Anduril.
“Having positive IPOs is a good signal for everybody,” says Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner Ventures, whose portfolio company Chime recently went public and experienced a 37% pop in stock price on its first day of trading. (Forerunner also has investments in public company Hims & Hers and late stage private companies including Oura.) “I believe we should revisit this idea: an IPO is the Series A of being in the public market–and having that really be a motivator to people’s willingness, and maybe even eagerness to go public.” (As if on cue, HeartFlow, a medical technology company, filed an S-1 for its IPO at a $1.3 billion valuation on August 1).
Kyle Stanford, the director of research on US venture capital at PitchBook, notes that just 18 venture-backed companies have gone public through June 30 of this year. This, he says, is a factor of policy uncertainties that translate to funding headwinds as well as the overfunding that occurred in 2021 that continues to stymie venture capital. “Figma hopefully starts to break the dam, but it’s been a pretty slow quarter,” he says.
Though Figma, which makes design software, is profitable and has a strong set of integrated AI capabilities, these qualities are not essential to companies bound for IPO success, says Stanford. He says that investors would prefer companies to generate a minimum of $200 million in revenue that grows at high rates and prioritize positive free cash flow over profitability. Having an AI story is also “very important,” unless the company is very high growth and profitable by wide margins.
Canva may be a most-compelling case since it’s a design company with similar fundamentals to that of Figma, said multiple investors I interviewed. Design collaboration company Canva has raised about $589 million over 18 rounds at a $32 billion valuation, higher than that of Figma’s at the time of its IPO. “Canva is a big winner when it comes to what happened yesterday with Figma,” says Jason Shuman, an investor at Primary Ventures. Shuman, who is not an investor in Canva, points to Canva’s $3 billion annual revenue and 35% year-over-year growth as signs of its business’ durability.
Others agree. “Canva—after looking at Figma, holy crap—they’re going to try to IPO as soon as possible,” says Felix Wang, Managing Director and Partner at Hedgeye Risk Management, who is not a Canva investor. Canva, which was recently valued at $37 billion during a share buy back, did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Wang and others note that the surge in Figma’s price is, in many ways, not actually driven by Figma. Rather, the market is at an all-time high, causing retail trader demand for companies new to market. “They don’t even know this company, but they know it’s a new company,” says Wang of retail traders investing in Figma. “They’re going to put some money into it, and then, more interestingly: they’re going to show it off on social media.”
As Figma is to Canva; NuBank is to Revolut, reasons Primary’s Shuman. He looks at fintech NuBank, which is up around 13% from its early 2025 IPO and thinks that Revolut, which has a very similar business model, could copycat. Revolut told Fortune in a statement: “our focus is not on if or when we IPO, but on continuing to expand the business, building new products, and providing better and cheaper services to serve our growing global customer base.”
Another potential IPO candidate in the near-future is chipmaker Cerebras, says Primary’s Shuman, who invests in vertical AI, B2B, SMB and finance and defense companies but has no stake in Cerebras or Revolut. (Cerebras filed an S-1 in September 2024 but its IPO was delayed by regulators concerned about a $335 million investment by UAE-based G42. Now, it’s been cleared by regulators for a public market listing, but the company has held off on an IPO as it fundraises $1 billion, reportsThe Information.)
Many companies, including the largest and hottest private company OpenAI (which just nabbed a $300 billion valuation, per the New York Times), have significant incentives to remain private. This is because they can avoid public scrutiny that arises from disclosures required of public companies and have access to significant private capital for liquidity infusions that are often essential.
Yet, the fact that behemoths like OpenAI, Stripe ($91 billion valuation) and SpaceX ($400 billion valuation) are private may even be a hidden cost for the public market. “I’m going to get philosophical,” says Forerunner’s Green. “Part of the public market was created so the broader population could participate in the economy and in the growth of the economy; it wasn’t meant to sit in a few people’s hands.”
One behemoth may be entering the stock market limelight. Anduril, the defense tech company that nabbed a $30.5 billion valuation on its Series G, has incentives to remain private due to the nature of its business. But Pitchbook’s Stanford predicts it to be the next tech IPO. In addition to Anduril’s CEO announcing it will “definitely” become publicly traded, its value proposition is core to Trump Administration priorities in security and defense, which could make it a hot pick for investors, Stanford reasons.
“Other than that,” he says the list of potential IPO candidates these days is long: “There’s probably about 300 other companies that it could be.”
Globally, women live an average of three-and-a-half years longer than men, for a variety of genetic, hormonal, and societal reasons. But women tend to have shorter “health spans”—years of living in good health. Partly due to the perils they face in pregnancy and childbirth, they spend more of their lives unwell, and in poor countries millions of women and children die from preventable causes.
Addressing that disparity is the focus of the first major tranche of the $200 billion that Bill Gates has committed to improving global health via his Gates Foundation over the next two decades. The Microsoft co-founder announced in May that he would deploy most of the remainder of his massive wealth in an all-out effort to eradicate a slew of diseases that threaten the world’s poorest. Then, he said, the foundation that he began in 2000 with his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, will shut down.
At an event with STAT News in Cambridge, Mass., to announce the initiative, Gates pointed to successes that the foundation has pulled off reducing child mortality with vaccinations, and reducing maternal mortality with simple and cheap devices to measure blood loss. “The progress on childhood death has been pretty phenomenal; maternal deaths have not gone down as quickly,” he said. “We said, ‘We really need to go after these things.'”
Dr. Anita Zaidi, president of the Gender Equality Division at the Gates Foundation, pointed to 2021 research from McKinsey which found that, excluding cancer research, just 1% of healthcare R&D is invested in female-specific conditions. And as Zaidi wrote in a commentary for Fortune today, “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.”
The foundation aims to pull off moonshot innovations using AI to diagnose and treat women, and also to expand the use of existing technology. Technology that’s widely available in wealthier countries—like an ultrasound to determine how a pregnancy is progressing—remains out of reach for many women in poorer countries. “In fact,” Zaidi said as she announced the Foundation’s investment, globally “70% of women do not have access to a simple ultrasound at pregnancy.”
Even in wealthy countries like the U.S., Zaidi wrote, there are major gaps in women’s healthcare. In North Dakota, for example, one in four women must drive 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,” she wrote.
The $2.5 billion in funding for research and development will focus on five areas: obstetrics and maternal immunization; maternal health and nutrition; gynecological and menstrual health; contraceptive innovation; and sexually transmitted infections. Among the areas the foundation hopes to make progress are research into the vaginal microbiome, therapeutics for preeclampsia, and non-hormonal contraception.
The work to be funded has economic and business dimensions too, Zaidi emphasized: The foundation cites research showing that every $1 invested in women’s health yields $3 in economic growth. “Women’s health is not just a philanthropic cause,” Zaidi said. “it’s an investable opportunity with immense potential for scientific breakthroughs that could help millions of women.”
Zaidi emphasized that the foundation’s $2.5 billion commitment, while enormous, “is just a drop in the bucket.” It covers only a part of the battle ahead to protect women and their children from dying of preventable causes. The funding is earmarked for research and development. Delivering actual solutions to women around the world is a complicated process that requires collaborations with governments, other philanthropies, and companies.
“It is truly a big task,” said Dr. Ru-fong Joanne Cheng, the foundation’s director of Women’s Health Innovations. “We need everyone to join in, raise the visibility of these issues, raise the fact that so little attention has been paid toward the health of over half the population of the globe… It’s not going to happen spontaneously; it has to be intentional. It has to be deliberate.”
The Tesla board on Sunday approved an “interim award” of 96 million restricted shares for CEO Elon Musk. His original 2018 moonshot megagrant, previously valued at $56 billion, has been tied up in Delaware courts for the past seven years after a judge rescinded the pay package—twice. Since then, Tesla moved from Texas to Delaware and the board adopted a bylaw requiring any investor who wants to challenge Musk’s pay to hold 3% of Tesla stock. The amount is equivalent to roughly $3 billion, inoculating Tesla against a repeat of last time.
The Tesla board has reinstated CEO Elon Musk as the highest-paid in history with a staggering new $29 billion pay package. His new deal with the $970 billion electric-vehicle maker comes after a Delaware judge twice rescinded Musk’s previous moonshot megagrant. Musk’s pay has been held up in litigation for the past seven years.
“It is imperative to retain and motivate our extraordinary talent, beginning with Elon,” Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm and fellow director Kathleen Wilson-Thompson wrote in a letter to shareholders. “The war for AI talent is intensifying, with recent months including multi-billion-dollar acquisitions of companies and nine-figure cash compensation packages for non-founder, individual AI engineers.”
Even in that select group, “no one matches” Musk, the board members wrote. Thus, the nearly $30 billion award is essential to keeping Musk focused on Tesla—and getting him to recruit new talent to keep the EV manufacturer competitive in AI, robotics, and robotaxis, according to the board. Unlike Musk’s previous pay plan, which included significant shareholder value hurdles he had to overcome, all Musk has to do to collect the new award is remain with Tesla as CEO or in a senior executive role for the next two years. He also has to hold the stock until 2030, according to the terms of the award, which will boost his ownership stake from around 13% to 15%.
Brian Dunn, a 40-year compensation practitioner and director of the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University told Fortune Musk’s new award resembles what some experts have referred to as “fog-the-mirror grants.”
“If you’re around and have enough breath left in you to fog the mirror, you get them,” said Dunn. “These don’t have performance targets.”
Technically, the award will be made in restricted shares, but Musk has to pay $23.34 per share to own the stock—the same strike price as his 2018 options. With Tesla’s stock trading at more than $300 a share, the arrangement gives Musk about $280 per share of built-in value, which some comp experts have referred to as “discounted options.”
Larry Cunningham, director of the University of Delaware’s Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, said that regardless of how the award could be classified for accounting or tax purposes, there’s a simple and accurate description for it.
“A deep-in-the-money stock option grant, awarded solely for retention,” Cunningham told Fortune in a statement.
Musk’s pay package has a $26 billion floor
The new package creates what Farient Advisors’ Eric Hoffmann described as a “floor-and-ceiling” arrangement tied directly to the outcome of the ongoing litigation in Delaware, which Tesla has appealed. If courts again wipe out his original 2018 award of 303 million stock options, Musk gets to keep the new 96 million shares, worth about $29 billion at the current stock price. But if any part of the original grant gets reinstated, the new award will shrink accordingly, said Hoffmann.
“There’s a clause that says ‘no double dipping,’” he said. “But this 96 million share award could be used to make up any of the original grant if he loses in the course of the legal action.”
Hoffmann said the territory the Tesla board is treading is “unprecedented” in executive compensation.
“There’s no playbook for this,” said Hoffmann, who analyzed the terms of the award. “They made the first grant, it got overturned by a judge, they made another grant, got it approved by shareholders and then that got held up.”
To level set, a shareholder challenge over Musk’s 2018 pay package led to a landmark opinion in which Musk’s pay was rescinded. The Tesla board then sent the pay plan back to shareholders in 2024 for a say-on-pay vote approval, and shareholders voted in favor of giving Musk the comp. Last December, the same judge—Delaware Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick—declined to reverse her previous decision, which Tesla has since appealed.
In their letter to investors, the board wrote there’s no telling when the court will rule again and described this award as a “first step, ‘good faith’ payment to Elon.”
However, Tesla’s performance in 2025 is a far cry from 2018, when the board first awarded Musk his daring moonshot grant. He followed the award up by multiplying Tesla’s value 12-fold. Its market cap surpassed $1 trillion in October 2021 and again in May 2025. But recently Tesla has struggled. Year-to-date, its share price is down more than 18% and Musk has been active politically, supporting President Donald Trump despite the affiliation turning off Tesla’s climate-focused consumer base, particularly in California.
And this time, the board has left little to chance. Tesla erected a significant legal barrier in May that makes a challenge to this award a lot more difficult to mete out.
After McCormick’s ruling, Tesla shareholders approved a move from being incorporated in Delaware to Texas. In May, Texas amended its business code and Tesla modified its bylaws accordingly a day later. The bylaw amendment created a new threshold so any shareholder who wants to challenge Musk’s pay in court has to hold at least 3% of Tesla’s stock. The value is worth more than $3 billion.
“The central theme here is that Tesla has moved its jurisdiction of incorporation from Delaware to Texas and as a result the propriety of Tesla’s actions and Musk’s compensation will have to be judged under Texas law, which is more permissive,” wrote Columbia law professor John Coffee in a statement to Fortune. “Tesla may get sued but the odds are more in its favor in Texas.”
Texas followed Tesla’s move by undertaking a campaign to make it a business first state. At this point, it’s unclear how Texas courts would approach a challenge.
“It will be interesting to see whether a Texas court chooses to follow Delaware’s analytical framework—or instead declines to engage in similar judicial scrutiny,” said Cunningham. “The outcome could influence how other companies weigh the relative merits of Delaware versus Texas as a corporate home.”
Investors React to Musk’s comp
Tesla has a veritable army of engaged individual retail investors, and many support Musk and have voted in favor of his comp plan twice now, getting it over the line with more than majority support.
However, some pension fund leaders who oversee retirees assets invested in Tesla stock have been less than thrilled about Musk’s new award.
“A $29 billion compensation package for any CEO, let alone one who has been largely absent from their daily responsibilities as sales and stock value continue to fall short of investor expectations, is obscene,” said New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in a statement.
Lander said Tesla’s board is enriching Musk at investors’ expense, “once again.”
Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs told Fortune a $29 billion comp package is “egregious on its face.”
“But in light of Elon Musk’s inattention to the day to day needs of Tesla, and the company’s worse than expected stock value, the package suggests a board out of step with their responsibilities to investors,” Frerichs wrote in a statement. “With revenues falling short of expectations, the board should be less concerned with paying fealty to a greedy CEO than with long-term planning for the success of the company. Shareholders should demand better corporate governance.”
SOC Investment Group, which represented a group of investors with nearly 8 million shares invested in Tesla, told Fortune in a statement that today’s announcement included a striking admission from the board. “Even an additional $24B in equity might not motivate Elon Musk to stay for two more years, let alone ensure that he devote sufficient time and attention to turn around the currently slumping sales,” SOC wrote.
The ancient Greek play “Antigone” by Sophocles warns that “no one loves the messenger who brings bad news” and “no man delights in the bearer of bad news.”
About 1,900 years later, Lewis Carroll contributed another spin on the ill-tempered response to disappointment with the Queen of Hearts in his 1865 classic Alice in Wonderland. “Off with their heads!” she would exclaim, whenever a subject provided information that displeased her.
In the 20th century, George Orwell delivered another version in his prescient masterwork 1984: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
And so we come to August 2025 and President Donald Trump’s disturbing dismissal of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, immediately after the release of a negative jobs report. On social media, Trump claimed without evidence that the commissioner “faked the Jobs Numbers.” He went on to say, “I’ve had issues with the numbers for a long time. We’re doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony like they were before the election, and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing.”
In short, is this Trump’s “Queen of Hearts” moment, or something more?
The Russian example
It’s difficult to look beyond Trump’s longstanding admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As we’ve documented in the past, Putin has a history of rewriting inconvenient narratives. Rosstat, the nation’s official statistics agency, has a longstanding record of manipulating economic data to please Putin. It goes to great lengths to amend poor figures and hide unflattering statistics under pressure from the Kremlin, especially since Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. The Russian agency has been “switching to new methodologies” and “recalculating data” with alarming frequency. Then there’s the overt political interference—Putin has fired the heads of Rosstat, transferred control of the agency to political appointees, and appointed a blatant political pick as deputy economic minister.
It is no wonder outside observers ranging from international organizations to foreign investors regularly sound alarms over “concerns about the reliability and consistency of the Kremlin’s economic releases.” Putin now refuses to disclose major economic indicators ranging from foreign trade data, monthly output data on oil and gas, capital inflows and outflows, financial statements of major companies, central bank monetary base data, foreign direct investment data, domestic value added by industry, and lending and loan origination data. Even Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s federal air transport agency, has stopped publishing data on air passenger volumes.
Yet these are the major high-frequency flow statistics that go into the construction of an economy-wide GDP forecast for any nation—from the U.S. to China. Since the outbreak of war, the IMF has apparently allowed Russia to violate its membership standards—which require member states to disclose transparent, verifiable, and comprehensive national income statistics. Free markets cannot function without trusted information. That’s why foreign direct investment into Russia has plummeted from over $100 billion to zero, and capital markets activity has been virtually frozen over, with barely any IPOs and little global interest in Russian securities.
Not just Russia
Of course, China is little better. Official Chinese statistics have become so widely recognized as manipulated and baseless that analysts rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese economy. These shadow measures span everything from satellite imagery to nightlife activity to measuring pollution out of smokestacks.
Even China’s top economic official, Premier Le Keqiang, secretly confided that he didn’t believe the official GDP numbers, instead preferring to monitor rail freight volumes, electricity consumption, and bank loans disbursed.
Similarly, in 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proceeded to fire a series of senior economic officials who questioned his unconventional policy of cutting interest rates to fight inflation and spur an economic revival simultaneously. The most consequential action by Erdoğan was his eventual removal of Sait Dincer, head of the Turkish Statistical Institute, after the bureau reported a surge in inflation of 36% year-over-year. The Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association jointly condemned the president’s “political interference in the production of official statistics,” urging him to allow the statistical institute “to produce objective statistical information,” an essential function “to ensure a healthy democracy in Turkey and to maintain international credibility in its statistics.”
In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro has reportedly detained over a dozen economists and consultants in recent months in an attempt to suppress any suggestions of a worsening financial crisis in his country.
Off with her head!
But this is America, it’s supposed to be different. Trump’s abrupt firing of McEntarfer surprised market analysts and economists of all political backgrounds.
Most recently, on CNBC, Elaine Chao, a longtime Republican and former Trump cabinet official (she served as Labor Secretary for eight years under George W. Bush and served as transportation secretary in Trump’s first administration) directly disputed the president’s accusations. Chao told the audience: “It is very, very difficult to tamper or to interfere with these numbers. BLS is very concerned about the security of these numbers … if anything were to be awry … one of these 40 people [conducting] the final analysis would have spoken up. So, it’s highly unlikely.”
Former BLS Commissioner William Beach, another Trump appointee, posted on social media soon after McEntarfer’s firing on Friday, calling it a “totally groundless” decision that “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.” Beach further criticized the president’s move on Sunday, saying his action “undermines credibility” of the agency.
Trump has a (small) point when he claims that BLS performance has been slipping. Concerns about the timeliness and accuracy of BLS data are longstanding, with major revisions occurring only months later. The BLS and other statistical agencies have acknowledged the need to modernize their methodology, but progress has been slow. After COVID-19 disruptions, the extent of job revisions has swung more widely than in the past, notwithstanding attempts to improve their methodologies. The recent downward revision on Friday, subtracting over 250,000 jobs, is the largest since the peak of the pandemic.
However, Trump’s accusations that the BLS faked job numbers to weaken his credibility and that of his Republican supporters highlight his tendency to distort facts. His apparently impulsive decision to fire McEntarfer, on a baseless belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, recalls so many literary depictions of authoritarianism.
Revisions are a standard part of the BLS process, essential for improving the accuracy of the U.S. economy’s picture as new data arrives. Since 2003, the average revision has been around 51,000 jobs, not an insignificant figure in its own right. Despite claims that may suggest otherwise, Trump’s tariff policies have introduced an unprecedented level of uncertainty into the U.S. economy—comparable only to 2020—with many economists anticipating a recession as a consequence. Bloomberg has convincingly suggested a possible link between the magnitude of negative job revisions and recessionary conditions.
Just as leading businesses worldwide have worked to navigate the uncertainties caused by the president’s economic policies, should we expect different outcomes from a government agency that has also faced hiring restrictions and resource cuts due to arbitrary DOGE-led initiatives? Additionally, the Trump administration’s decision to disband the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March removed a vital mechanism for improving agency performance, including the modernization of data collection, tabulation, and analysis. While concerns about BLS methods, such as the dependence on enumerators instead of scanner data, are valid and merit attention, this is not the proper way to address them.
This is far from the first time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. Other infamous examples include how, after Trump mistakenly asserted there would be a “95% chance” that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, he insisted on showing doctored hurricane maps with a Sharpie-drawn track over Alabama, in plain contradiction of NOAA forecasts. Or there was the time when Trump demanded Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find me 11,000 votes”, insisting he won the 2020 presidential election and firing his own deputies such as Bill Barr and Chris Krebs who refused to go along with his election denialism.
More recently, in April 2025, Trump announced “reciprocal” tariffs on Liberation Day based not on actual reciprocal trade barriers but rather from a misleading formula based on trade deficits, leading economists to declare Trump’s numbers were “made-up” and “erroneous.” Finally, there has been Trump’s routine inflation of the crowd size at his rallies, and demands that his subordinates claim his first inauguration was the most attended in history, contradicting factual data across Nielsen ratings, livestream numbers, and Metro ridership showing far fewer attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s inauguration, with Kellyanne Conway citing “alternative facts.” Look to literature. Strongmen out of George Orwell or Lewis Carroll don’t fire back with facts; they fire the truth-tellers.
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.
Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin juggernaut is at it again, buying near the highs with the kind of capital-markets firepower no other crypto firm can match.
Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy Inc., disclosed Monday that it bought $2.46 billion of Bitcoin in the past week—its third-largest purchase by dollar value since it began accumulating the cryptocurrency five years ago.
The company acquired 21,021 tokens between July 28 and Aug. 3, pushing its total holdings to 628,791 Bitcoin, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This takes the value of the company’s Bitcoin holdings to more than $71 billion at current prices.
Fueled by a steady stream of stock offerings and debt deals, Saylor has transformed his enterprise software company into the dominant corporate buyer of Bitcoin. Its latest acquisition came at an average price of $117,526 per token, the second-highest price Strategy has ever paid, just behind the $118,940 average last month, according to company data.
The move underscores how Saylor has turned public-company finance into a specialized vehicle to amass Bitcoin—and how Strategy keeps buying even as prices hover near record levels. Strategy is by far the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, according to a tally by BitcoinTreasuries.net, and has spurred a new industry of public companies following a so-called treasury strategy dedicated to buying and holding cryptocurrencies.
To fund the purchases, Saylor has employed a combination of common and preferred share sales, as well as debt. The company offers four different kinds of securities to investors—launching its latest preferred stock offering, dubbed Stretch, in late July. Strategy reported an unrealized gain of $14 billion in the second quarter, driven by a rebound in Bitcoin’s price and a recent accounting change that required the company to revalue its Bitcoin holdings.
Saylor recently promised he won’t issue new common shares at less than 2.5 times its net asset value, except to cover debt interest or preferred dividends. This comes after critics like Jim Chanos voiced concerns on the premium Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings have on its share price and the many security offerings the company offers.
Strategy’s stock has surged more than 3,000% since its first crypto purchase, outpacing Bitcoin itself as well as major stock indices like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. Its first and second largest purchases came in November last year totaling $5.4 billion and $4.6 billion, according to company data.
As the U.S. labor market shows clear signs of stalling, one of Wall Street’s leading strategists is sounding a sharp warning: With America’s workforce in a demographic crunch and historic changes in immigration policy under way, it is “quite possible that the next five years will see no growth in workers at all.”
The implications, according to David Kelly, Chief Global Strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, are profound for the Federal Reserve and for investors—chief among them, the need for exceptional caution before lowering interest rates.
Kelly used his regular “Notes on the Week Ahead” research note to survey the implications—perhaps assess the damage—of Friday’s shocking jobs report, which revised downward job creation in May and June by 258,000 jobs. Furthermore, employers added just 73,000 jobs in July, well below the 110,000 consensus estimate. This left the average monthly increase for the past quarter at a paltry 35,000 jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% in July, as both employment numbers and labor force participation slipped further.
Kelly also highlighted signs of tightness in the labor market, namely the decline in the labor participation rate from 62.65% in July 2024 to 62.22% in July 2025. That translates to almost 1.2 million fewer people aged 16 and over who are working or actively looking for a job.
He attributed about half this decline to Americans aging into retirement, but noted the participation rate has also fallen among those aged 18 to 54.
Kelly commented on these signs of labor tightness as pivotal context for the wider question of the labor supply in the economy, with long-running trends implying that the Federal Reserve and embattled chair Jerome Powell will face major challenges fighting inflation going forward—meaning ever-slimmer chances of the all important rate cut the market wants so much.
The worker problem in the economy
The aging population and declining labor participation also speak to a deeper, structural challenge that will persist well into the future.
According to Census projections, he noted the working-age population will actually contract in coming years without immigration returning to previous levels.
Kelly highlights the Census prediction that the population aged 18 to 64 would actually fall by over 300,000 people in the year ending July 2026, and continue to fall at roughly that pace through 2030. He notes that the retirement wave and recent changes to major immigration programs are further sapping labor supply, reducing potential growth.
Fed’s dilemma: inflation, growth, and political pressure
This squeeze comes at a time when the Federal Reserve is under immense political pressure to lower interest rates, with President Trump and his allies calling for easier money to offset the effects of new tariffs and support flagging markets.
Yet Kelly argues the central bank must tread carefully, as cutting rates into a structurally tight labor market risks spurring wage and price inflation rather than accelerating economic growth.
He observed that U.S. economic growth has averaged 2.1% per year since the beginning of the 21st century, largely driven by a 0.8% annual increase in the workforce.
“Starting from a point of roughly full employment, given the continued retirement of the baby boom and considering the possibility that deportations and voluntary departures of immigrants entirely offset new immigration in the next few years, it is quite possible that the next five years will see no growth in workers at all,” he added.
If this happens, the economy will grow more slowly, Kelly predicted, “but will only be capable of growing more slowly without igniting higher inflation.”
For the Fed, the message is clear, he adds: Be extremely cautious about any rate cuts. For investors, it’s a warning to temper expectations for rapid economic gains or a sustained bull market driven by easy money. In other words, American “exceptionalism” isn’t a given, going forward.
Investors, Kelly said, “should no longer bet broadly on a strongly rising U.S. economic tide or lower interest rates.”
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
In a candid and far-reaching discussion on Nikhil Kamath’s YouTube channel, legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, one of Fortune‘s most powerful people in business, delivered some advice for Gen Z. It could be seen as a stark warning or as simple pragmatism: the single most important skill for young workers at this moment is not specialization, but the ability to learn rapidly and adapt continuously. His reasoning is simple yet profound: “ChatGPT can teach you any new areas,” rendering traditional academic paths and fixed skill sets increasingly obsolete. The title of the episode was more blunt: “College Degrees Are Becoming Useless.”
The Sun Microsystems co-founder, known for his contrarian views and unwavering certainty in technological possibilities, painted a future where artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally transform the job market. He asserted that “there isn’t a job where AI won’t be able to do 80% of 80% of all jobs” within the next three to five years. He explained that the vast majority of all job functions will be replicable by AI, hence the 80% of 80% estimate. It recalled Sam Altman’s claim that AI will make result in “intelligence too cheap to meter.”
Looking 10 to 15 years out, Khosla said, he believes “there’s no chance there’s a job that humans do that AI can’t do almost as well.” He allowed for some minor exceptions and said even heart or brain surgery an AI should theoretically be able to perform to a high level, although regulation may not allow it. This rapid pace of change, faster than the world has seen in the last 50 years, demands a radical shift in how young people approach their careers, he argued.
For a 22-year-old wondering where to focus their efforts, Khosla’s advice is clear: “you have to optimize your career for flexibility, not a single profession.” He emphasized that the value of learning lies not in mastering one specific trade like welding, finance, or even accounting, but in cultivating “the ability to learn” in its own right. He claimed that at 70 years old, he is learning at a much faster pace than ever before, and every young person should strive for this capability. This includes thinking from first principles and jumping into diverse fields, whether physics, biology, or finance, because AI tools will facilitate the rapid acquisition of new knowledge.
Khosla argued that even disciplines like computer science are valuable less for programming expertise (which AI increasingly handles) and more for the “process of thinking” and understanding systems and architectures they impart. The ultimate goal for a young individual, he suggests, is to choose a path where “your knowledge compounds and your capability compounds over time,” mirroring the principle of financial compounding in knowledge acquisition.
The quality of the entrepreneur
For aspiring entrepreneurs, Khosla advises a strategic focus, since he believes that anybody in any industry not using AI will be rendered obsolete by somebody who is using the tool. While AI may democratize technology, he said, success will hinge on the innate “quality of the entrepreneur” — their ability to think strategically, envision long-term goals, select the right teams, and wisely choose who to trust for advice. Khosla believes the current shortage is not of technology or capital, but of “great entrepreneurs who know how to make these choices.”
Beyond individual careers, Khosla and Kamath talked about the wider implications of AI on the economy. Khosla said it should drive down the cost of many things, acting as a deflationary force on many services, and he envisioned an AI-powered utopian future where services like education, medical expertise, and legal advice become “almost free.” He speculated that in 20 to 25 years, $10,000 might buy more goods and services than $50,000 does today, thanks to the deflationary impact of machines providing abundant services.
The career path open to Gen Z
Khosla is far from the only thought leader weighing in on the employment prospects for Gen Z in the age of AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have engaged in an ever-more-heated war of words over the former’s doomsday prediction that 50% of all white-collar jobs will be wiped out. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI,” has largely agreed with Amodei, saying that only the “very skilled” will remain employed. Huang and Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell have largely agreed with Khosla, arguing that creativity and constant learning will create new jobs for the economy in a virtuous cycle.
Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius has looked at the data and echoed Khosla’s argument that college degrees are losing value, finding that the “safety premium” of a college degree is disappearing. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong agrees that the college degree is losing its status, but casts the blame away from AI and toward the policy uncertainty plaguing the economy, arguing that many Gen Z college graduates are going unhired because conditions are just too risky for most companies. Goldman seems to agree with DeLong, finding in July that AI was overhyped as a reason for most corporate layoffs. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve isn’t completely sold on the revolutionary prospects of AI, arguing that it may be a revolutionary invention like the electric dynamo, but may end up being a one-off boost to productivity, like the light bulb.
Gen Z, for its part, seems to be craving more human connection. Starbucks recently announced it would sunset its mobile-only locations, thought to be more appealing to Gen Z and a desire for “frictionless” experience, in favor of a renewed emphasis on hospitality and human-to-human connection. The generation has been weathering criticism of late that they lack in social skills necessary for success, with the stereotypical “Gen Z stare” at the center of the conversation. Careers site Glassdoor, for its part, has punctured the myth of “conscious unbossing” by Gen Zers, finding that they are becoming managers at exactly the same historical rate as any other generation, AI notwithstanding.
Ultimately, Khosla’s message for the next generation is one of relentless pursuit of learning and adaptability. In a world rapidly being reshaped by AI, the ability to continuously reinvent oneself and embrace new knowledge may be the ultimate differentiator for survival and success. The human capacity to learn new things, after all, is endless.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters is standing out in the global banking sector by maintaining a flexible, hybrid work policy and resisting the rigid office mandates now sweeping through much of Wall Street. As peers from companies like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs urge staff back to traditional office rhythms, Winters has doubled down on a philosophy of employee autonomy and trust, placing his bank in sharp contrast to its US and UK peers.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Winters was unequivocal: “We work with adults, and the adults can have an adult conversation with other adults and decide how they’re going to best manage their team.” He emphasized that the approach is “working for us,” adding, “How other companies make that work? Everybody’s got their own recipe.” For Standard Chartered, that recipe is rooted in flexibility, allowing teams and managers to agree on in-office schedules that fit their business needs and personal lives.
Winters, who himself follows a hybrid schedule and aims to be in the office four days a week, says his approach is about fostering responsibility. “Our MDs want to come to the office. They come to the office because they collaborate. They manage their people. They lead teams. But if they need the flexibility, they can get it from us,” he said. This hands-off stance has helped the bank retain talent, keep attrition low, and, according to Winters, maintain a productive workforce that manages to deliver results in a post-pandemic landscape.
Standard Chartered’s performance is thriving at the moment. In the second quarter of 2025, the bank reported a 48% jump in pre-tax profit—performance Winters points to as validation of the flexible model. On the second-quarter earnings call with analysts, Winters commented on the strong results, saying they are “testament to our ability to deliver exceptional services in support of our clients’ needs, and it is clear that our strategy is working.”
A bank unlike the others
The bank’s flexible policy stands in contrast to a growing wave of office mandates from industry rivals. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC have all tightened office attendance requirements in the last year. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has criticized remote work for slowing decision-making and inhibiting innovation, recently directing most employees to return to the office full-time. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has similarly dismissed remote work as “not a new normal” but an “aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible.” HSBC, too, recently directed its managing directors to return to the office at least four days a week.
Other banks, like Citi, remain more flexible but still require at least three days of in-office attendance, while offering hybrid employees set windows for remote work. The trend across many sectors, including tech and telecommunications, is toward stricter in-office requirements, with some large employers warning that ongoing remote work could put jobs at risk.
Despite these pressures, Standard Chartered is holding its ground. Winters and the bank’s leadership remain vocal in their conviction that flexibility works—citing strong business results, low attrition, and positive feedback from employees, especially those balancing care responsibilities or preferring non-traditional schedules. The company was among the first major banks to formally adopt hybrid work in November 2020 and has shown little inclination to change course, even as industry sentiment shifts.
Companies who stand by remote or flexible work schedules say it leads to a better talent pool, less turnover, and a happier workplace, while critics say it’s corrosive to the human element that goes with great teamwork. Winters dismisses such concerns. He insists that, with the right leadership, teams remain collaborative and engaged, and that forcing staff into rigid molds can actually hinder, rather than help, performance.
As Wall Street and other sectors debate the future of work, Standard Chartered’s approach offers a compelling case study in the value—and business logic—of empowering employees to strike their own balance.
Standard Chartered did not respond to a request for comment.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
The shocking jobs report on Friday wasn’t as bad as it looked and was actually just fine, according to market veteran Ed Yardeni, who cited wage and workweek increases while attributing weak payroll gains to muted labor supply rather than waning demand. That’s as others on Wall Street have raised alarms about the U.S. economy nearing a recession.
Wall Street’s dreams for a bulletproof economy impervious to President Donald Trump’s trade war may have been shattered, but market veteran Ed Yardeni accentuated the positive in what was an otherwise dismal jobs report.
That’s as payrolls grew by just 73,000 last month, well below forecasts for about 100,000. Meanwhile, May’s tally was revised down from 144,000 to 19,000, and June’s total was slashed from 147,000 to just 14,000, meaning the average gain over the past three months is now only 35,000.
While Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, acknowledged in a note Monday the report was a shocker, he maintained the labor market remains resilient.
“It’s hard to put a positive spin on this news, but not for us!” he wrote.
Yardeni pointed to solid increases in aggregate hours worked and the average workweek in the private sector. In addition, private-industry wages also saw healthy advances and hit record highs.
Meanwhile, he attributed some of the slowdown in payroll gains to the shrinking supply of workers instead of waning demand for workers.
The labor force has stopped growing in recent months amid Trump’s immigration crackdown. At the same time, gauges for labor demand have very closely tracked this supply trend so far this year, which is an unusual phenomenon, Yardeni explained.
“This implies that the weak gains in payrolls in recent months might have something to do with the supply of labor,” he added. “The demand for labor might have been temporarily weakened by employers’ holding off on hiring until Trump’s Tariff Turmoil.”
By contrast, JPMorgan economists interpreted the jobs data as an indication of weaker demand for workers.
In a note on Friday evening, they downplayed the increases in wages and average workweeks, while pointing out that hiring in the private sector has slowed to an average of just 52,000 in the past three months, with sectors outside health and education stagnating.
“We have consistently emphasized that a slide in labor demand of this magnitude is a recession warning signal,” JPMorgan added. “Firms normally maintain hiring gains through growth downshifts they perceive as transitory. In episodes when labor demand slides with a growth downshift, it is often a precursor to retrenchment.”
The note also warned the depressed job-growth pace is unlikely to sustain income gains.
Bank of America said in its own note Monday a shock to labor demand should lead to a slowdown in wage growth and hours worked. That didn’t happen. While it’s not clear demand is deteriorating faster than supply, BofA said the jobs data looks more like a supply than a demand shock so far.
For now, even though hiring has cooled sharply, there’s no sign of mass layoffs yet, and the unemployment rate has barely changed, bouncing in a tight range between 4% and 4.2% for more than a year.
The economy is still seen as holding up. The Atlanta Fed’s GDP tracker points to continued growth, though it’s expected to decelerate to 2.1% in the third quarter from 3% in the second quarter.
The supply-versus-demand question could be key in how the Federal Reserve responds, or not, to the jobs data. Given Monday’s big rally in the stock market and continued drop in Treasury yields, Wall Street is betting on Fed rate cuts soon.
JPMorgan said job creation is no longer solid, and that when combined with growing headwinds from Trump’s trade war, the recent data point to the Fed moving closer to lowering rates.
Meanwhile, BofA backed its forecast that the Fed won’t lower rates this year, and Yardeni similarly reaffirmed his view of a “none-and-done” scenario.
“That’s because we expect that the next batch of inflation indicators will show that tariffs are boosting consumer price inflation, especially of durable goods,” he added. “We also expect to see more signs of life in the labor market.”
In 2016, Dan Morehead embarked on a world tour to preach the gospel of Bitcoin. A former trader at Goldman Sachs and Tiger Management, Morehead had become orange-pilled just a few years before, convinced that Bitcoin would reshape the global economy. He believed in the currency so fervently that he came out of semi-retirement to remake his hedge fund Pantera Capital into one of the world’s first Bitcoin funds.
The new operation, launched in 2013, got off to a roaring start, with backing from two of Morehead’s fellow Princeton alumni, Pete Briger and Mike Novogratz, both from the private equity giant Fortress. The trio watched with glee as the Bitcoin purchased by Pantera at an initial price of $65 soared to over $1,000 by the end of the year. But then, disaster struck as hackers cleaned out the fledgling crypto industry’s main exchange, Mt Gox, and the price of Bitcoin plummeted 85%. “People would say, ‘Didn’t you do that Bitcoin thing that died?’” Morehead recalls. “It’s still alive!” he would respond.
During his 2016 trip to evangelize Bitcoin, Morehead took 170 meetings, each time going into a prospective investor’s office and spending an hour arguing why the new currency was the most compelling possible opportunity. The result: He managed to raise just $1 million for his flailing fund. Even worse, Morehead’s own fees totaled around $17,000. “I earned $100 a meeting, going out there trying to evangelize people to buy Bitcoins,” he tells Fortune.
Less than a decade later, as Bitcoin pushes $120,000, Morehead’s brutal early slog feels like the stuff of founder mythology— right up there with the tales of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkering in Jobs’ parents’ garage, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger trading stock tips at an Omaha dinner party.
Today, Pantera manages over $5 billion in assets across different crypto funds. Its holdings comprise digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as venture investments in projects such as Circle, which went public in June, and Bitstamp, which was acquired by Robinhood earlier this year for $200 million. But what sets the firm apart from the crowded field of crypto VCs is its early-mover status as a storied bridge between the buttoned-up world of traditional finance and the once-renegade crypto sector. At the center is Morehead, an unsung figure in an industry dominated by larger-than-life characters.
“I’m very stubborn, and I am totally convinced [Bitcoin] is going to change the world,” Morehead tells Fortune. “So I just kept going.”
The Princeton mafia
Back before Wall Street infiltrated the blockchain industry, Morehead’s stuck out in the chaotic world of early crypto. A two-sport athlete at Princeton in football and heavyweight crew, Morehead still has the broad shoulders and square jaw of his youth. The figure he cut was a far cry from the wiry, iconoclastic types who spent most of their time on internet message boards. Morehead, in contrast, came from the conventional world of finance. He’s still rarely spotted without a blazer.
Morehead had already had a long trading career before learning about Bitcoin. After stints at Goldman Sachs and Tiger, he began his own hedge fund, Pantera, which flamed out during the 2008 financial crisis, right around the time that a shadowy figure named Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world in an online white paper.
Morehead first heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from his brother and was vaguely aware that a classmate from Princeton, Gavin Andresen, was running a website that gave out 5 Bitcoins to any user for solving a captcha (current street value: $575,000). But Morehead didn’t think much about it until a couple of years later, when another classmate, Briger, invited Morehead for coffee at the San Francisco office of Fortress to talk crypto, with Novogratz calling in. “Since then, I’ve been possessed by Bitcoin,” Morehead says.
Tech is famous for its so-called “mafias”—clusters of employees from prominent organizations like PayPal who go on to lead the next generation of startups. In crypto, it’s not a company but a university, with Princeton responsible for some of the industry’s most influential projects. Briger and Novogratz both served as key backers of Pantera, with Morehead even moving into empty office space at Fortress’s SF office. Briger remains a powerful, albeit behind-the-scenes, presence in crypto, recently taking a seat on the board of directors of Michael Saylor’s $100 billion Bitcoin holding firm, Strategy. Novogratz went on to found Galaxy, one of the largest crypto conglomerates. And another classmate, Joe Lubin, went on to become one of the cofounders of Ethereum.
But back in 2013, it still seemed far-fetched that Ivy League graduates working in the rarified fields of private equity and macro trading would be interested in Bitcoin. Briger tells Fortune that he first learned about it from Wences Casares, an Argentine entrepreneur and early crypto adopter, while sharing a room at a Young Presidents’ Organization gathering in the San Juan Islands. Briger quickly saw the appeal of upending the global payments system—a point he sticks by today, though he argues that Bitcoin is still in its infancy. He says that Bitcoin mirrors the promise of the internet, which facilitated a new form of information flow. “The fact that money movement doesn’t happen in the same way is a real shame,” he says.
After sharing the idea with Novogratz, they thought that Morehead, who had experience working in foreign exchange markets, would be the right person to bring on. When Morehead decided to devote the rest of his financial career to crypto, he rebranded Pantera as a Bitcoin fund and opened it back up to outside investors. Briger and Novogratz both signed on as limited partners, with Fortress and the venture firms Benchmark and Ribbit taking general partner stakes, though they would later withdraw. His old mentor at Tiger, the legendary investor Julian Robertson, even backed a later fund.
Pantera’s rebirth
In the hurley-burly early days of crypto, entrepreneurs had to confront dramatic booms and busts that make today’s volatility look like minor blips. But the wild price roller-coaster wasn’t the biggest headache, Novogratz recalls. It was simply trying to procure BTC in the first place.
He went to Coinbase, then just a year old, to try and buy 30,000 Bitcoins, which would have sold for around $2 million. He was met with a pop-up that his limit was $50. After trying to work it out with Olaf Carlson-Wee—Coinbase’s first employee, who would go on to become a famed crypto figure in his own right—the firm agreed to increase his limit all the way to $300.
Morehead’s most impressive achievement, however, may be sticking it out during the doldrums of 2013 through 2016, when prices remained in the basement and no one outside of the insular blockchain community paid Bitcoin much mind. “In those quiet years where crypto wasn’t doing shit, Dan was out there beating the pavement,” Novogratz tells Fortune.
That epoch still had its highlights, including three annual conferences hosted by Morehead out of his Lake Tahoe home. At one, Jesse Powell, the founder of the exchange Kraken, opted out of taking a private plane chartered by Morehead and drove instead. “There was a large enough fraction of the Bitcoin community [there] that he feared if the plane crashed, it would take Bitcoin down,” Morehead recalls.
Unlike many of his compatriots, Morehead never positioned himself as a “Bitcoin maxi,” or someone who argues that no other cryptocurrencies should exist. After buying up 2% of the global Bitcoin supply, Pantera became an early investor in Ripple Labs, which created the digital asset XRP. “The way I think about it is Bitcoin is obviously the most important,” Morehead says. “But there isn’t one internet company.”
According to Morehead, Pantera has made money on 86% of its venture investments. It’s a staggering figure considering that the vast majority of VC-backed startups fail. Crypto may be more forgiving given that many projects come with an accompanying cryptocurrency, meaning speculative value often endures even if a startup’s product goes nowhere.
Morehead now spends half his year in Puerto Rico, which has become a hotbed for crypto. Joey Krug, then a partner at Pantera and now at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, had relocated down there, and Morehead decided to make the move. He estimates there are 1,000 blockchain entrepreneurs on the island, though they’ve drawn scrutiny for driving up real estate prices. Morehead faced an inquiry from the Senate Finance Committee over whether he violated federal tax laws by moving to the island and earning more than $850 million in capital gains from Pantera. He told the New York Times earlier this year that he believed he “acted appropriately with respect to my taxes” and declined to comment further to Fortune.
Bitcoin’s future
Morehead acknowledges that much of the crypto industry is saturated with gambling, with Pantera staying away from memecoins, unlike many other venture firms. Still, he argues that it shouldn’t distract from blockchain’s broader goal of reshaping global finance. “It’s ridiculous to try and take down the blockchain industry because of a little sideshow,” he says. “[GameStop] doesn’t mean the entire U.S. equity market is tainted.”
Pantera continues to grow, including raising a fifth venture fund with a $1 billion target, which Morehead says the firm will close after finishing investing out of its fourth fund later this year. Pantera has also moved into the red-hot field of digital asset treasuries, where publicly traded companies buy and hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets.
But Bitcoin remains at the core of Pantera’s strategy. At the end of last year, its Bitcoin fund hit 1,000x, with a lifetime return of over 130,000%. When asked for a prediction of where Bitcoin is headed, Morehead has always had the same answer: The price will double in a year. For the most part, the simple model has worked, though Morehead admits the days of rapid growth are likely slowing down. He argues Bitcoin will still go up another order of magnitude, meaning it will approach $1,000,000, though he thinks that will be the last time it has a 10x increase.
Morehead is happy to shoulder the criticism if Bitcoin never reaches that milestone. In 2016, after all, he was struggling to make the case for the cryptocurrency at $500. And less than a decade later, he’s just getting started. “I have the same conviction—the vast majority of institutions have zero,” he tells Fortune. “It feels like we have another couple of decades to go.”
Updated to reflect the latest regulatory filing figures on assets under management.
Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk has seen his wealth plummet by some $80 billion this year, thanks in part to a 20% decline in his electrical vehicle company’s stock. Now, just $60 billion separates Musk from Oracle’s Larry Ellison—and another Tesla tumble could see Musk dethroned as the world’s richest man.
Elon Musk claims to have slashed billions of dollars worth of wasteful spending during his time as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—but his controversial role may have done more damage to his pocketbook than he anticipated.
This year alone, Musk has lost some $80 billion in his net worth, bringing his current value to about $352 billion—a far cry from his over $450 billion peak late last year, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
Musk’s wealth declines are largely tied to his 13% stake in struggling Tesla. Even after shareholders practically begged the billionaire to leave DOGE and focus on Tesla full-time, Musk’s return to Austin hasn’t been so glamorous. The electric vehicle company missed Wall Street expectations and experienced a double-digit percentage revenue decline in the second quarter of 2025. Tesla’s stock price is down nearly 20% this year.
But shareholders are doing the opposite of pulling the plug on Musk; they’ve just awarded him a pay package worth some $29 billion—in what shareholders called a “critical first step toward” keeping “Elon’s energies focused on Tesla,” reports The New York Times.
While Musk remains the No. 1 richest person on the planet, fellow members of the ultra rich like Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg are tapping at the door to replace him at the top of the billionaire list.
Musk’s climb to the top of the world
2024 was a standout year for Tesla. The company’s stock nearly doubled, with the market cap topping $1.4 trillion in December. Due to his sizable stake, the jump soared Musk’s wealth and seemingly cemented him at the time at the top of the billionaires after years of back and forth among billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Musk’s success also comes from his stakes in his other companies, including XAI Holdings (the combined firm of social media X and AI startup xAI), SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
But like struggles at Tesla, his companies are causing financial headaches for the billionaire. xAI is reportedly burning through $1 billion a month and The Boring Company’s valuation has decreased to $6.4 billion from $8.6 billion in July 2023, according to Bloomberg.
While he did not take a salary from his role at DOGE, his companies have largely benefited from working with the government over the years. According to The Washington Post, his businesses have received some $38 billion in contracts, loans, subsidies, and more.
Now, Musk has an uphill battle ahead of him in the court of public opinion; just 30% of voters have a favorable view of Musk, according to a Quinnipiac Poll released in June. And after a public feud with President Donald Trump over the federal budget, even support among Republicans has dipped.
How Musk may lose his richest man title
While Musk has lost the most wealth of anyone in 2025 so far, he’s not alone. Jeff Bezos is also in the red, losing about $1.7 billion this year, largely thanks to Amazon’s struggling stock performance. Bill Gates has also lost a sizable amount of wealth—some $36 billion—but it’s been because of his ramped-up philanthropy efforts.
On the flip side, Larry Ellison (+$102 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (+$56 billion), and Jensen Huang ($37 billion) have seen sizable wealth increases.
Only $60 billion now separates Musk and Ellison as No. 1 and 2, according to Bloomberg, thanks to the newfound success of Ellison’s tech giant, Oracle. The company’s newfound focus on AI helped earnings soar and contributed to a stock jump of over 50% this year. Ellison’s wealth has grown by over $100 billion this year—and it’s likely to only continue.
“Oracle’s future is bright in this new era of cloud computing. Oracle will be the number one cloud database company,” Ellison said in the business’ earnings call in June. “Oracle is already prospering in this new era of cloud computing and AI, and it’s just the beginning.”
If the trends continue, and Oracle continues to grow while Tesla flounders, Ellison could replace Musk as the richest person in the world by year’s end.
If the Tesla billionaire’s wealth drops by another $60 billion, Elon Musk will lose his crown as the richest person on the planet to Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
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.
“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.”
The new factory could 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.
China’s long-term economic growth is at risk owing 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 in 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 aging fast.”
Indeed, per the World Population Review, China’s birth rate 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 birth rate 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 age 16–plus compared with people age 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 1.1 million in 2023 to 1.5 million by 2033 and stabilized 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 birth rates 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 such as 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 aging 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 labor 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.”
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.
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![](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/GettyImages-1992407455-e1754318002807.jpg?w=300 "A medical worker cares for a newborn "dragon baby" in the maternity department of Zaozhuang Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Shandong province, China, Feb 10, 2024.")
![](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/GettyImages-1992407455-e1754318002807.jpg?w=2048 "A medical worker cares for a newborn "dragon baby" in the maternity department of Zaozhuang Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Shandong province, China, Feb 10, 2024.")
