The mother of the man who killed four people at a Manhattan office tower home to the NFL told 911 dispatchers during a 2022 incident when he threatened to kill himself that he suffered from a sports-related concussion and other issues, new information released by Las Vegas police Tuesday revealed.
Shane Tamura, 27, had a documented history of mental health problems and carried a handwritten note in his wallet when he carried out the shooting that claimed he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, known at CTE, investigators said. He fatally shot three people in the building lobby before taking an elevator to the 33rd floor, killing a fourth victim and then ending his own life, according to police.
He accused the football league of hiding the dangers of brain injuries linked to contact sports. Tamura didn’t play professional football but played during his high school years in Southern California, where he grew up.
His mother told the dispatchers on Sept. 12, 2022, that her son was under a doctor’s care for “depression, concussion like sports concussion, chronic migraines, and insomnia.” She also said he was taking sleeping pills, smoking marijuana, and kept a gun in his backpack. It was one of two incidents that led to Tamura being admitted to hospitals for mental health crises.
“He said he’s going to kill himself,” she said in the recorded 911 call. “He didn’t say he made a plan, he just said he just can’t take it anymore.”
Tamura’s mother placed the call from outside a Budget Suites Motel. She told dispatchers she would wait in the stairwell because she did not want Tamura to know she had called the police.
“He just started crying and slamming things and said I’m making him worse, so I said, ‘I’ll step outside,’” she said. “I don’t want you to be upset, but I’m afraid to leave.”
Tamura was committed to a hospital again in 2024 after calling his mother and making statements about wanting to hurt himself, according to a first responder captured on body camera video released by Las Vegas police.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said the records, which would normally be withheld due to privacy protections, were being released “in light of the extraordinary circumstances.”
Tamura worked at the Horseshoe Las Vegas’ surveillance department until last week, when authorities say he drove his car to New York and carried out the shooting. He bought the rifle he used in the attack and the car he drove from his supervisor at the casino.
New York City detectives searched Tamura’s locker at the Horseshoe casino Wednesday and found a tripod for his rifle, a box for a revolver that was found in his car in New York, and ammunition for both guns, the police department said.
Police said they also found in his apartment a psychiatric medication, an epilepsy drug and an anti-inflammatory that had been prescribed to Tamura.
His psychiatric history would not have prevented him from legally purchasing the revolver, unless relatives or law enforcement sought a so-called extreme risk protection order from the courts. However, a new state law effective this month will allow officers to confiscate firearms in the immediate vicinity of someone placed on a mental health crisis hold.
Las Vegas police also released records Tuesday related to two other run-ins with the law. Tamura was arrested for trespassing at a casino in 2023, where he became agitated after he was asked to show his ID to collect his winnings and was asked to leave when he refused to. He was also cited for driving an unregistered car and without a license in 2024.
Flower wreaths with the words "Rest In Peace" stand at a vigil for the four people killed in the previous day's shooting at 345 Park Avenue, including NYPD officer Didarul Islam, in Bryant Park, Tuesday, July 29, 2025, in New York.
Mall-based teen accessories retailer Claire’s, known for helping to usher in millions of teens into an important rite of passage — ear piercing — but now struggling with a big debt load and changing consumer tastes, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Claire’s Holdings LLC and certain of its U.S. and Gibraltar-based subsidiaries — collectively Claire’s U.S., the operator of Claire’s and Icing stores across the United States, made the filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware on Wednesday. That marked the second time since 2018 and for a similar reason: high debt load and the shift among teens heading online away from physical stores.
Claire’s Chapter 11 filing follows the bankruptcies of other teen retailers including Forever 21, which filed in March for bankruptcy protection for a second time and eventually closed down its U.S. business as traffic in U.S. shopping malls fades and competition from online retailers like Amazon, Temu and Shein intensifies.
Claire’s, based in Hoffman Estates, Illinois and founded in 1974, said that its stores in North America will remain open and will continue to serve customers, while it explores all strategic alternatives. Claire’s operates more than 2,750 Claire’s stores in 17 countries throughout North America and Europe and 190 Icing stores in North America.
In a court filing, Claire’s said its assets and liabilities range between $1 billion and $10 billion.
“This decision is difficult, but a necessary one,” Chris Cramer, CEO of Claire’s, said in a press release issued Wednesday. “Increased competition, consumer spending trends and the ongoing shift away from brick-and-mortar retail, in combination with our current debt obligations and macroeconomic factors, necessitate this course of action for Claire’s and its stakeholders.”
Like many retailers, Claire’s was also struggling with higher costs tied to President Donald Trump’s tariff plans, analysts said.
Cramer said that the company remains in “active discussions” with potential strategic and financial partners. He noted that the company remains committed to serving its customers and partnering with its suppliers and landlords in other regions. Claire’s also intends to continue paying employees’ wages and benefits, and it will seek approval to use cash collateral to support its operations.
Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, a research firm, noted in a note published Wednesday Claire’s bankruptcy filing comes as “no real surprise.”
“The chain has been swamped by a cocktail of problems, both internal and external, that made it impossible to stay afloat,” he wrote.
Saunders noted that internally, Claire’s struggled with high debt levels that made its operations unstable and said the cash crunch left it with little choice but to reorganize through bankruptcy.
He also noted that tariffs have pushed costs higher, and he believed that Claire’s is not in a position to manage this latest challenge effectively.
Competition has also become sharper and more intense over recent years, with retailers like jewelry chain Lovisa offering younger shoppers a more sophisticated assortment at low prices. He also cited the growing competition with online players like Amazon.
“Reinventing will be a tall order in the present environment,” he added.
More beachgoers have been getting an unexpected shock this summer as jellyfish numbers bloom along the Delaware coast, interrupting — but not stopping — the summer fun.
Beach patrol captains reported a dramatic increase in jellyfish activity and stings in July, the most they’ve seen in recent memory. Lewes Beach reported a fourfold increase in stings compared to 2024.
Lion’s manes, which can have 100-foot (30-meter) tentacles, sea nettles and moon jellyfish are some varieties that frequent Delaware’s summertime waters.
Jellyfish blooms have become common from Maine to Florida in recent years. Warming waters can create ideal conditions for jellyfish growth.
Normally, Delaware’s five state parks may report a handful of summer jellyfish stings, said Bailey Noel, a beach patrol captain. But Fenwick Island State Park recently reported 92 stings on a single July day. Three lifeguards were taken to urgent care after swimming in jellyfish-infested waters, Noel said.
The jellyfish at Delaware’s Towers Beach surprised Philadelphia resident Christina Jones, whose two daughters refused to wade back into the water after being stung, she said.
“The jellyfish are pretty bad,” Jones said. “And not only are they a lot in number, but they’re pretty big.”
Delaware State Beach Patrol started tracking jellyfish stings this year due to the rise in cases, said Noel. Most patrol teams do not track the data.
Lewes Beach Patrol treated 295 stings in 2024, the first year the data was collected, but reported over 1,200 cases so far in 2025, said Capt. Strohm Edwards. Lifeguards started carrying vinegar solutions, which can neutralize the venom agents, to help ease pain, he said.
But vinegar solutions may cause microscopic venom-coated barbs known as nematocysts to discharge, according to some research. Those experts recommend a baking soda slurry.
While venomous, stings from Delaware’s lion’s manes and sea nettles typically only cause minor irritation and pain, said Edwards. In cases of severe allergic reactions and symptoms — nausea, vomiting and trouble breathing — lifeguards can help.
Jellyfish blooms, sudden fluctuations in jellyfish populations, are not uncommon, said Gisele Muller-Parker, a retired marine biologist who would count dozens of lion’s mane jellyfish during her daily Lewes Beach walks in July. Temperature, salinity and food availability influence jellyfish breeding, and in favorable conditions, such as warmer waters, populations can explode.
“This year, we’ve never seen anything like this,” Muller-Parker said.
The jellyfish were near the end of their life cycle, finishing their reproductive phase and laying their eggs. Those jellyfish will die once water temperatures cool, said Keith Bayha, a research collaborator with the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History.
The jellyfish boom can harm ecosystems and marine industries, said Bayha, who has studied the animals for more than 20 years and helped identify a nettle species. Fish larvae primarily feed on plankton, but jellyfish can eat both the plankton and the fish. And with few natural predators, the jellyfish food chain is an ecological dead end, said Bayha.
Delaware’s boom this summer is far from alone. Florida’s Volusia County reported hundreds of stings around Memorial Day weekend. Gloucester, Massachusetts, reminded beachgoers to stay safe around jellyfish in mid-July. And in June, Maine’s Ogunquit Fire Department warned beachgoers about the increase in jellyfish after stings were reported.
Jellyfish research is limited, but Muller-Parker hopes more work will be done to assess the ecological ramifications of jellyfish blooms and improve safety advisories.
For now, some unlucky beachgoers will have to rely on home remedies and, in the case of Massachusetts resident Kathy Malloy-Harder’s third-grade nephew, a little bravery.
“When he got stung, he jumped up and started crying and said, ’I’m never coming back to the beach again ever,’” said Malloy-Harder, who had to try two stores to find vinegar for him. But she said that after talking about it “and once the sting subsided, he was interested in coming back and enjoying the beach.”
Conservatives like me spent decades arguing that renewable energy strengthens American energy independence, yet those who once demanded freedom from foreign oil now bristle at homegrown solar and wind power.
I’m a lifelong Republican who has testified before Congress three times in favor of legislation to reform clean energy incentives. Many of my fellow conservatives have sought to suffocate the U.S. renewables industry in their pursuit of energy independence despite both wind and gas turbines being mostly made in America. The industry isn’t blameless: tying itself too tightly to a left-wing climate crusade alienated many on the right.
But surging electricity demand and market forces now offer the industry an opportunity for resurrection: reframe clean energy, not as eco-virtue signaling, but as a core component of U.S. competitiveness and independence.
Political miscalculation
Over 80% of my fellow Republicans supported wind and solar energy in 2020, but by 2025 that share has fallen to around 60%. The erosion of support was the result of a miscalculation: renewable advocates aligned too closely with progressive climate politics, turning an industry once embraced by all into a left-wing cause, alienating conservatives along the way.
MAGA activists found their bette noir, turning “green energy” into an object of scorn. Republican officials who once welcomed renewable projects in their districts now echo anti-renewable talking points. Although 70% of U.S. wind power is generated in red states (Texas alone gets nearly 30% of its electricity from wind), wind energy has become a pariah among the GOP base.
Market opportunity
Dramatically rising electricity demand, driven by AI and electrification, may accomplish what politics hasn’t: make clean energy indispensable. Traditional sources can’t scale fast enough: new nuclear and coal plants take decades, and even natural gas can’t ramp up quickly enough to meet near-term demand.
In contrast, wind, solar, and battery installations can be built in a fraction of the time. Renewables provide zero-marginal-cost power, and a White House study warns that if we fail to add cheap capacity, AI-driven demand could send electricity prices soaring by 2030. In short, renewables are no longer just about climate virtue; they’re essential for keeping the lights on and energy bills low.
Conservative reframe
To win back conservatives, renewable advocates must recast their message around freedom, security, and free enterprise — values that clean energy can champion.
Freedom: Conservatives prize personal liberty, which should include the freedom to generate your own power — a right already exercised by ordinary homeowners, not just elites.
Security: Domestic renewable energy is a fortress against foreign threats: solar panels generate power for decades, with only clouds and nightfall to worry about. Wind turbines can run for 25 years, and their components are largely U.S.-made. Once installed, no adversary can shut off the supply of sun or wind.
Free Enterprise: Renewable energy often undercuts fossil fuels on cost, and with federal clean energy tax credits expiring in 2027, the playing field will soon level. Policies that block renewables aren’t “pro-market” — if wind and solar are cheaper, let them compete. Far from being a Trojan horse for big government, clean energy exemplifies free enterprise at its best.
Path forward
The clean energy sector is entering a make-or-break period: federal tax credits expire in 2027, leaving a two-year window to build as much capacity as possible while incentives last. This looming deadline has triggered a blitz of development, compressing years of growth into a sprint. Losing subsidies will hurt, but it’s also an opportunity for the industry to prove itself by slashing costs and innovating to compete.
Electricity prices have jumped 13% nationwide since 2022, due in part to a lack of cheap supply — not because of “too much” renewable energy as some claim. Each utility rate hike only makes solar panels and batteries more appealing. If suppliers seize this moment to scale up and drive costs down, they can thrive on merit rather than mandates.
Conclusion
America’s energy future shouldn’t be a partisan battlefield. Our prosperity and security depend on abundant, affordable power from every source, including clean energy. Clean energy isn’t a progressive scam — it’s just plain energy, and it happens to align with conservative values. Let’s end the energy culture war and let free markets fuel the next era of growth so that America wins.
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.
Are you a “coffee badger”? You know the type, the colleague who shows up at the office just long enough to be seen—typically to swipe their badge, greet colleagues, grab a coffee … and then sneak out at some point to keep working remotely, the way millions have for years now.
This new buzzword is stirring anxiety in boardrooms, as “coffee badging” shows that what started as a cheeky work-around to return-to-office mandates post-COVID has become a significant challenge for companies grappling with the changing rules of workplace engagement.
The scope of the problem
Recent surveys show that coffee badging is not a fringe behavior: It is now practiced by a staggering portion of the workforce. According to data from multiple sources, 44% of hybrid workers in the U.S. acknowledge coffee badging, and more than 58% of respondents in a survey of 2,000 American workers admit to having done it at least once. But the issue isn’t confined to a small segment of multinationals or tech workers. In fact, three out of every four companies—75%—report struggling with employees coffee badging, making it a widespread concern across industries and company sizes.
Business Insider recently delivered a scoop that coffee badging has gotten so bad at Samsung’s U.S. semiconductor division that it explicitly scolded workers about it and rolled out an RTO (return-to-office) monitoring tool. While celebrating that “more smiling faces can be seen in the hallways,” Samsung announced its new “compliance tool for People Managers” will “ensure that team members are fulfilling their expectation regarding in-office work—however that is defined with their business leader—as well as guarding against instances of lunch/coffee badging.”
Samsung’s move followed a coffee-badging crackdown at Amazon. It has gotten so bad there that managers are having one-on-one conversations with employees about how many hours they are literally returning to the office. “Now that it’s been more than a year, we’re starting to speak directly with employees who haven’t regularly been spending meaningful amounts of time in the office to ensure they understand the importance of spending quality time with their colleagues,” Amazon previously said in a statement to Fortune.
Why are so many companies struggling?
Return-to-office mandates were supposed to restore normalcy and boost productivity. Instead, they’ve triggered a silent revolt.
Employees—especially millennials—are leveraging hybrid policies in their favor, finding the least disruptive way to comply, while minimizing commute and office time.
One study found that even 47% of managers admitted to coffee badging themselves, underscoring how deeply this behavior is ingrained across hierarchies. That’s actually higher than the number of individual contributors (34%) who are java swiping.
How companies respond
Faced with a widespread and hard-to-measure trend, companies are experimenting with everything from stricter tracking to radically new incentives. First is, simply, tracking badge swipes: Gartner reported that 60% of companies were tracking employees as of 2022, more than doubling since the beginning of the pandemic and only greater in magnitude since. Others, like Amazon, now require a minimum number of work hours in-office, not just a badge swipe.
A minority are shifting from hours-based to results-based evaluations, hoping to boost authentic office engagement. Others court employees with improved amenities and greater schedule autonomy, aiming to make office time more appealing than mandatory. Still, leaders worry that coffee badging signals deeper disengagement—and that one-size-fits-all RTO strategies are backfiring.
Looking ahead
Coffee badging is not just about workers skirting policies; it’s a symptom of a deeper disconnect between traditional workplace expectations and the realities of white-collar work in 2025. As long as employees can be productive remotely—and view in-person time as a performative hoop—companies will need to rethink the value proposition of the office, not just the enforcement.
With the majority of companies reporting struggles and nearly half of hybrid workers engaging in the practice, coffee badging isn’t going away soon. Rather than fighting it with stricter rules, organizations may need to listen to what it reveals about employee motivation, engagement, and the future of work culture itself.
Are you a coffee badger? Do you have them on your team, or know of others who swipe in and out after a brief appearance? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch at [email protected].
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Fresh on the heels of the announcement of President Trump’s AI Action Plan, China released a global action plan for artificial intelligence, calling for international cooperation on tech development and regulation. China’s plan, announced at the annual state-organized World Artificial Intelligence Conference, focused on how China plans to partner with the Global South to promote AI standards around the world.
It’s undeniable that AI is going to make a significant impact on our economy. But there’s always a chance AI could be another bubble. I lived through the internet expansion of the ’90s, and AI is on pace to be much bigger, more disruptive, and more impactful. AI has the potential to impact every human being and company in the world. In order to achieve this and ensure that Western values drive AI adoption, we have three big things to fix before AI can become the “new internet” that changes every interaction we have.
Accessing critical AI infrastructure is hindered by the following fundamental problems: crushing costs, extreme concentration, and insufficient capacity. The U.S. AI Action Plan framed it as, “Currently, a company seeking to use largescale compute must often sign long-term contracts with hyperscalers—far beyond the budgetary reach of most academics and many startups.” Further, data transfer fees, the costs a company faces when moving its own data out of a cloud system, strangle competition by creating artificial barriers that have nothing to do with technical merits.
Part of what made the Internet open to all was the common TCP/IP standard, that lets any computer talk to any other computer. This ability to connect outside of the (then) walled garden of AOL opened up new business uses while creativity flourished and capabilities improved rapidly.
If we want AI to grow and succeed like the Internet, we need the global standards and open exchange that can make accessing it as easy as sending a packet from one computer to the next. Beijing has already published several action plans that help provide direct subsidies to AI companies and make vast datasets available to national champions through public-private partnerships, providing common approaches for Chinese companies to follow. The Chinese government has announced a state-run exchange to catalog and market compute. For too long, America’s fragmented approach and lack of national strategy has risked ceding our current AI leadership permanently. By setting the standards that will help us stay ahead in AI, we can create the type of market-driven solutions that will quickly bring the power of American AI to more of the world’s population.
The ’40s, the ’60s, the ’90s and today
Before the internet, we can look further back to the age of the mainframe and the transition to the PC for insight. In the 1940s, computing power was so expensive that only governments could afford it, housing room-sized machines in hangars and partnering with universities for access. Today, my pocket-sized phone is more powerful than those early supercomputers. What changed? IBM led the commoditization of computer hardware while building a profitable business. Microsoft and Linux created operating system standards. These changes rolled out over decades, but today’s technology moves so much faster, and calls for a faster response to stay competitive.
Today, AI sits where computing did in the 1960s — powerful but accessible only to those with massive resources. We need our own IBM PC revolution for artificial intelligence, with open standards and exchange, so we can move as quickly as possible to win the global war for AI.
This shift won’t happen just through government mandate, nor should it. It requires market forces guided by open standards that make AI resources truly accessible and interoperable. When companies can easily compare compute options and move workloads between providers, competition will drive market-efficient prices and improve service. When developers can access standardized AI infrastructure without months of advance planning, innovation accelerates.
This approach serves America’s strategic interests. When our allies and our adversaries can easily adopt US-developed AI standards and infrastructure, we strengthen the entire democratic technology ecosystem. President Trump’s move to allow China to purchase NVIDIA H20 processors helps us in the long-term, because it helps encourage Chinese developers to build on American technology. When adversaries rely on an American technology stack, we gain influence far beyond what export controls can achieve while promoting our democratic values.
The government has a role here to ensure markets function competitively. Strategic compute reserves could provide emergency capacity during crises, similar to our strategic oil reserve. Procurement policies can prioritize small and medium enterprises over concentrated providers, especially government procurement. Standards development can prevent the kind of fragmentation that has historically hampered American technology leadership.
This is the time for swift action.
President Trump has promised to keep America “the hottest country” in technology and his AI Action Plan positions us for success. China has a plan that they’ve been working on for years. Delivering on the promise of AI for the Western world requires not only a government commitment to leadership but also creating the market conditions where American innovation can flourish – open, competitive, and accessible to everyone willing to build the future.
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.
On this episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, cohosts Diane Brady, executive editorial director of the Fortune CEO Initiative and Fortune Live Media, and editorial director Kristin Stoller talk to Jim Fish, CEO of WM (No. 197 on the Fortune 500). They reflect on the people-first culture Jim has built at the waste management company, they discuss how he wants to integrate AI and self-driving technology, and which states have the best recyclers.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Transcript:
Jim Fish: So, what has caused this doubling, basically, of our life expectancy over a fairly short period of time? I mean, 125 years. And her answer kind of surprised me, and one of the other CEOs sitting next to me nudged me a little bit well. I mean, she said, you know, obviously there have been tremendous advances in medical science, and that’s a big component of it. But she said, one of the big components that people don’t think about, and I didn’t, by the way, I didn’t prompt her with this. I’d never met her, but she said, is the commercial collection of trash.
Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to LeadershipNext. The podcast about the people…
Kristin Stoller: …and trends…
Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.
Brady: And this week, we are talking about waste.
Stoller: Yes, everyone’s favorite subject on this very hot New York City day the trash smell wafts up to us.
Brady: Especially Lower Manhattan, where there are hundreds of garbage bags on garbage day.Waste Management, which, by the way, much like Kentucky Fried Chicken, is now known by only its acronyms, WM.
Stoller: WM, they wanted to make a big sustainability rebrand. They’re all about recycling, which, by the way, I have a ton of European, British, Irish neighbors in my building, and they make fun of me so much because of how I use paper towels. I use plastic soap containers.
Brady: The British are big recyclers?
Stoller: Yeah, apparently. They get so mad and say, Americans are so wasteful, you don’t recycle.
Brady: We are. We are pretty wasteful. I will say it’s a continuum. Having lived in parts of Asia, like India, parts of Africa where I’d say they’re less advanced on the trash collection front, and then Europe, where you have to pay like, $2 to $3 for one trash bag, it really makes you think about how much you put out. So I do think we don’t have enough financial incentive to reduce. Yeah, we have some incentive to recycle, not much to reuse, unless you’re a depression era baby.
Stoller: Not really. But I guess that brings us to our CEO, Jim Fish.
Brady: Have we not mentioned Jim Fish yet? Because Jim Fish is the heart and soul of WM. He’s been there since 2001.
Stoller: Yeah. And he has a very interesting job. Because part of the thing that I think is so interesting about Jim is his workforce. He has to deal with people who this is obviously, or maybe not, their first choice of a job. It’s a dirty job. It’s hard to be on the back of those trucks.
Brady: It’s unsafe.
Stoller: Yeah. How do you keep people? How do you keep an aging workforce in this profession?
Brady: I think technology is going to be interesting. He does tend to cite Herb Kelleher of Southwest as being one of his inspirations for a people-first mentality. And some of those people, 50% of them, do go from jobs for very good reasons. They’re backbreaking jobs. And so how he does that, and of course, I’m fascinated, what does Jim find in the trash?
Stoller: Yeah, that’s my biggest question. He has some good stories for us.
Brady: I’m sure he does, and we’ll be right back with Jim Fish.
Brady: Cities are home to the majority of the world’s population and account for 80% of global GDP. That makes the health and sustainability of our cities critical to creating a prosperous future. And of course, business has a role to play. Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, is the sponsor of this podcast, and he joins us now. Jason, great to see you.
Jason Girzadas: Great to see you, Diane. Thanks for having me.
Brady: So how should businesses play a role in creating more vibrant and sustainable cities?
Girzadas: It’s clear to me that the health of cities is inextricably linked to business’s viability and success. I think it starts with an awareness or a recognition of that mutually dependent reality. I think the how is around collaboration. It’s bringing to bear the capabilities of businesses to support cities’s renewal and innovation. To understand the criticality of cities’s role around economic prosperity, innovation, as well as cultural exchange.
Stoller: Jason, could you give us some examples of successful urban transformation projects that have been driven by these innovative business practices?
Girzadas: I’m proud to say that Deloitte, back in 2023, we started an effort called Yes SF. Here in San Francisco, where I live, the launch of Yes SF, with other business collaborators, has brought together our competencies around stimulating interest amongst innovators to bring sustainability and technology innovation to benefit the city itself.
Stoller: Excellent. Well, that sounds like a very cool project. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Girzadas: Thank you.
Brady: Thanks, Jason.
Brady: So, Jim. You know, I couldn’t help but notice that we should be saying WM instead of waste management, much like KFC with Kentucky Fried Chicken. So I have to ask, Why? Is there a reason? Is it just, is it partly to say something about that you’re more than just waste management, or why are we now calling you WM?
Fish: You nailed it.
Brady: Is that it? Enough said?
Stoller: We can end the interview right here.
Fish: I’ll tell you where it came from. We have a sustainability forum every year that’s held in conjunction with a golf tournament in Phoenix. I’m a golfer, yeah, that’s maybe a little bit of a stretch, but I enjoy it. But one of our guests said, you know, you call yourself Waste Management, and I understand that’s been Waste Management since you were founded, but you’re, you’re becoming more of a sustainability company and this whole golf tournament is focused around sustainability. It’s been zero waste now for 12 years, I think. And not an easy task, by the way, to make a big event like that zero waste. So she said, “Why not call it WM?” And she said, “It might be heresy to you know, suggest that, but why not call it WM, to take the waste out of the were out of the name of the company?” And so we thought about it, and our marketing team said, you know, that’s actually a pretty good idea. It takes a while to get to kind of catch hold. I think when United Parcel Service changed to UPS, my parents called it United Parcel Service forever, but eventually we all know it now as UPS.
Brady: Recycling is a form of waste management, isn’t it?
Fish: In essence, it is.
Brady: But you’re right. You’ve got the energy, you’ve got a lot of different businesses, sort of stemming from your core business, that are much more than waste management. Do you want to give us a broad sense of what you do?
Fish: Sure I mean, we do collect waste, and we dispose of it. And of course, recycling is a big and profitable part of our business as well. So those are the two primary components. And then you can break it down further into the segments of waste. We have commercial waste, we have industrial waste, and we have residential waste. Most people think about this company as a residential waste company, because that’s when we see them. We see them at our house picking up our recycling or our trash. But a big, big piece of our business is commercial, which are the CVSes that I walked through this morning, although we’re not servicing that CVS, but we do service CVSes around the country. So that’s more commercial waste. And then industrial waste is typically the big Exxon Mobils and Marathons and companies like that at their refineries. So, that’s the industrial waste segment.
Stoller: Where are the biggest areas you operate? Because I know New York, you said, isn’t one.
Fish: Well, New York is big for us, but not on the collection side. So that’s the other…
Brady: …we’re not going to blame you for all the trash on the streets this time of year.
Fish: You can’t blame us for the trash on the street.
Stoller: Okay yeah, the trash smell is not Jim’s fault.
Fish: But so, we do have a big business in New York, and it’s kind of the disposal side. And disposal comes in several different forms. It can come in the form of a recycle plant, it can come in the form of a landfill, and it can come in the form of a transfer station. And a transfer station effectively takes the waste, it ends up on a concrete floor, and then it’s loaded into some type of vehicle. Can be a train, as is the case here in New York. It can be a barge, as is also the case here in New York, or it can be a truck. So New York has all three kinds. Most of our transfer stations are truck transfers. So it gets loaded into a big 18-wheeler, and that 18-wheeler goes a fairly long distance, typically to a landfill.
Stoller: And now Diane brought up a good point about WM and your rebrand to sustainability, and I feel like a lot of companies right now are leaning into this sustainability push. For a lot of companies, it’s a lot of marketing, you know, they want to do good for the planet, but also be able to tell their shareholders and customers that they are. But for you, it’s kind of like a new, not a new business line, but an important business line. I’m wondering, are there any times you had to make a trade off between profitability and sustainability? And how do you weigh those?
Fish: I would tell you that if you think about those lines of business I just went through–commercial, industrial, landfill, transfer—the second-highest return on invested capital for us, of all those lines of business, is our recycling business. And so, some people do make the mistake of assuming that, well, you know, when times are tough, you’re going to throw it in the trash because it makes more money at the landfill than it does going through a recycle system. And yeah, but a lot of recyclables don’t weigh that much, but landfill is not the number one. By the way, the highest return on invested capital for us is the commercial line of business, and then second highest is our recycling line of business. So, if I were completely agnostic about the environment, which I’m not, but if I were, I would make the financial decision every time to send it to a recycle center where I can, versus a landfill. So I think it’s something that is a little bit misunderstood about recycling. It’s a very good business for us. It’s not just that we want to be good kind of partners with the Earth and stewards of the environment, but we also are, you know, our shareholders are important to us, and hence the fact that sustainability and financial returns go together is important.
Brady: You know … I’m not sure if you have your golf tournament on a landfill, but I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that landfills can actually generate energy because of the gas that is produced. Talk a little bit about—is that actually a line of business that is lucrative for you? Or is it just a good thing to do? You know, I’m obviously—I won’t say pennies on the dollar. But given the amount of landfill in the U.S., how much can we be relying on that as a source of energy going forward?
Fish: Well, it is profitable for us. And I think every one of these lines of business, we are looking at whether it’s a—regardless of whether there’s something good that comes out of it environmentally, we’re also looking at it as a profit center for us. I think Jamie Dimon said, you know, “if you’re in the sustainability business, and you don’t care about your financials, then then you’re in the wrong business.” And I think he’s right about that. We’re in the sustainability business, but we do care also about the returns on those investments. And when you think about landfills producing gas, they naturally produce gas because the trash decomposes. And probably for 20 years, we’ve been turning that gas into electricity. Most of our landfills have some type of landfill gas to energy, whether it’s landfill gas to electricity through a big generator set, or now landfill gas to renewable natural gas. And part of the beauty of that is that our fleet of trucks, and we have 20-ish-thousand heavy trucks, and about 75% of those are natural gas. They run on CNG. And so, in fact, you create a full circle, because you take trash and you pick it up in a CNG truck, and you take it to a landfill, and it decomposes and turns into gas, and we clean it up, because the gas that comes out of the landfill has some constituents in it that aren’t good for the truck engine. So we clean that gas up. Some of it gets put on the pipeline, and some of it actually goes directly into the tank of that CNG truck. So, it truly is a full circle for us.
Stoller: Are we running out of landfill space? What’s the future of that?
Fish: Landfills do have a finite life to them, and, in the next 15 years—and we’ll present this at our investor day—in the next 15 years, there are about 400 landfills out of a total of 2,000 in the United States that will come offline. And so the question is, how do you replace those? And we, part of our strategy that really separates us from the other guys is that we are: A, we’re better at replacing those, B, we have longer life than the average. See where we’ve really made an effort to divert a lot of material away from landfills to recycle centers, and hence the big investments that we’ve made in these recycle centers that make them more efficient. So there’s, there’s a number of ways that—and then you can also develop alternative forms of transportation. We’re building rail lines to run from, for example, from Miami up to Central Florida. And we have a landfill in Central Florida that has, I don’t know, 100 years of life left. The Miami landfill only has about 10 years of life left. So now we’re expanding that landfill, and we’ve bought a piece of adjacent property, so that’ll help. But at the same time, we are moving some of that waste either to a recycle center where we can or putting it on this newly developed rail line and moving it…
Stoller: For us non-trash people, how do you replace a landfill? What does that mean?
Fish: Well, you can, you don’t really replace—it’s because it’s a finite amount of space. The only way to really replace it—once it gets to a full capacity, some landfills, a small number of landfills fill up based on time. So you know, you have X number of years to fill this landfill, and then you’re done. Most landfills fill up based on capacity. And so you have X number of tons that can go into that landfill. And once you get to that amount, then that landfill is done, it’s closed, and you have to go through a closure process. And so the only way to replace that is to find either another site or another mode of disposal. We owned some of the incinerator plants, and we sold those in 2014, and that is another mode of disposal, and there are some other companies that still do that today. Those are hard to get replaced, harder to get replaced than a landfill, because…
Brady: …It doesn’t sound good for the environment. How are incinerators generally?
Fish: I mean, in Europe, they’re more heavily used because they have less land. In Europe, I think incinerators have done a good job of reducing their emissions. Again, we’re not in that business anywhere. So I’m probably a walking commercial for my competitors here, but I think the incinerator business is a much cleaner business than it ever was. It used to be, when they were initially built in the ’70s, that emissions weren’t as…
Brady: …just toss it all in there and off it goes.
Fish: Right today, I think those incinerators are much, much cleaner than they used to be.
Brady: As you’re talking, you know, I think about personal culpability when it comes to trash. I feel a slight bit of guilt when I see those barges go by, and I know you’ve spent time, you know, on the back of trucks in Pittsburgh and such. So I mean, give me a sense, how much do you think your customers take responsibility for the amount of trash they produce? Because you mentioned Europe, that’s a place where you have to pay a lot of money. In Switzerland, for example, for garbage bags. It’s very expensive to put out your garbage. Here, it’s really not. And what do you think about the reduce part of the equation?
Fish: I think it’s part of our responsibility to—my wife gives me a hard time when we go to a baseball game or whatever, and I see a, you know, a Dasani water bottle in the trash bin and I pick it out of there. And she’s like, “Are you kidding me? What are you doing?” And I said, “it doesn’t go there. It goes over here.” So I’m pretty particular about making sure that what goes in the recycle bin actually is in the bin. Even at our house, we have two girls, 22 and 20, and they’re pretty good about it, too. But sometimes something ends up in our trash can that should go in the recycle bin. So I think we all have a responsibility there.
I will say this about trash, though, and I saw an interesting presentation at the Business Council. I sit on the Business Council, and so the speaker was, she was from Stanford University, and she was talking not about trash, but she was talking about health care, and why health care is so much better today than it was 100 years ago, and why the average age—so we’ll all live to be an average of, I think the average for all of us, maybe women is a little bit older than men. But 82, 83, something like that, is kind of our life expectancy. And in 1900 it was 40, 45, something like that. And so the question was asked of her, “So, what has caused this doubling, basically, of our life expectancy over a fairly short period of time?” I mean, 125 years. And her answer kind of surprised me. And one of the other CEOs sitting next to me nudged me a little bit. She said, “Obviously there have been tremendous advances in medical science, and that’s a big component of it.” But she said, “One of the big components that people don’t think about,” and I didn’t, by the way, I didn’t prompt her with this. I’d never met her. But she said, “is the commercial collection of trash.” So, since you lived in India, you understand this. You walk around Mumbai, and the Dharavi Slum, which I’ve walked through a couple times, and the trash. You think about the trash being dumped on the curb here. I mean, yes, it gets dumped on the curb daily, but then it gets collected daily. But the trash is just thrown out in the street.
Brady: It’s like Shakespearean almost.
Fish: It is like Shakespearean. And so that’s, that’s maybe a kind of a good time period to associate that with. I mean, you think about the bubonic plague, and what ultimately caused that was waste, and these and rats kind of gravitate to it. And if you walk around Mumbai and in the Dharavi, I mean, there are rats all over the place. And so that is, and that was her point was, the commercial collection of trash didn’t really happen in this country until probably 1900, and then ultimately, the guy who was the founder of Waste Management, a guy named Wayne Huizenga, his grandfather, his name was Harm Huizenga, and he came over from, I think, from Poland, and started a commercial trash collection business in Chicago in 1910 or something. And he had a cart, a horsedrawn cart, and he would draw that cart around the streets and pick up trash and then take it, probably take it someplace and dump it in the ground or whatever. Which isn’t great today, but it was better than it sitting there on the street. And to me, that was a really interesting factoid that I hadn’t heard before, that a big component of the health of our society is a function of…
Stoller: Yeah, you never think about that.
Brady: Yeah, and unleaded gas and cleaning up our rivers and waterways.
Fish: Yeah, we all remember—well, you probably don’t, you’re young. You’re young, too. But, the commercials in the 1970s with the guy with a tear running down his face. The Native American guy.
Brady: Like the Coke commercial, it moves you to tears.
Stoller: Oh, wow. So you mentioned India. Are you doing any work there?
Fish: We have 1,500 employees in India, but they’re back-office employees. We’re not doing frontline operations in India. We’ve thought about it. We’ve been asked to do it. It’s not that uncommon for us to be asked. I get emails probably once a month from places around the world saying, “Can you come help us?”
Brady: Why do you say no? Like you said no to New York residential trash, I’m not going to, well feel free to mention that. But what makes you say no to a particular market?
Fish: Some of it’s logistics, you know, I mean, going to Bangladesh. I mean, I’m sure they have, I’ve never been there, but I’m sure they have a problem just like parts of India do as well. But, you know, we have a lot on our plates in Canada and the United States, and then a small piece in Europe. So we could do that. But I think part of it is just getting out over our skis, a little bit. It’s not that we don’t care about those places around the world. I mean, we can talk about people. My single biggest focus is on people.
Brady: Your own people. Yeah, you quote Herb Kelleher, in the past. Why are they your most important stakeholder?
Fish: Well, and I’ll quote Herb again here, he said, and he wrote that kind of crazy book called Nuts, and it’s a book that I’ve read several times…
Fish: …Yeah, and I never met Herb Kelleher, but in the book, he talked about the constituents and in what order they are most important. And I think Southwest has always had really good customer service. And so I think people would have thought that he would put customer first. And you always hear that, well, it’s always customer first, but his point was, you put your employees first, and you treat them as—it’s kind of the Golden Rule, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, and you treat them that way. And if they feel valued, they feel included, they feel like their opinions matter. They feel like it’s a place they want to make their careers. If they feel that good about working for that company, then in turn, they will make the customer feel good. And if the customer feels good, if the customer is happy, then ultimately, your shareholders are happy. And his point was, it has to be in that order. You can’t get them out of order. I gave that answer one time to a group of shareholders, and they looked at me like I was crazy. I’m third in line here? And I always say, look, there’s, you know, we have two other constituents, at least at WM. We have our communities, and then we have the environment. And I always say the environment is kind of the voiceless constituent, because it speaks in longer terms and nobody … get plenty of calls from customers saying, “Hey, what happened to my recycling pickup last week?” The environment doesn’t call me. They don’t send me mail.
Brady: How are you feeling about that voiceless constituent these days?
Fish: Look, I think we always have room for improvement, but I think we’ve made tremendous strides just over the last, you know, 30 years, whether it’s with automobiles, whether it’s with trash collection, whether it’s with recycling. I mean, we can do better, but I’m pretty optimistic that we’ve done pretty well. And you look at these rivers, I mean, even these rivers here around New York. I mean, I remember coming to New York. The first time I came here was with my family, and we took a vacation here. And, gosh, the East River, I looked at the East River and thought, my gosh. I mean, look how horrible that East River is. And I think the commercial that we were talking about, I think he was in Lake Erie, and it was, you know, you could set it on fire, I think. And so I think we’ve done a lot of work as a society to improve the environment. Are we there? No, but are we better than we were? Yes.
Stoller: I will say that I have kayaked in the East River, very unpopular, but my skin looks okay, so I’m ok right now.
Fish: You didn’t turn over, did you?
Stoller: No, no, just, just a bunch of splashing. So I think I’m okay, but I feel like it’s really unpopular right now to care about, you know, the climate, sustainability, kind of like DEI. How do you convince people to care, to recycle, to do these things?
Fish: I mean, I don’t get that, that it’s unpopular. From one political party to another, I mean,really, our business is very strongly focused on sustainability. I haven’t changed my personal view on it. I mean, I have a personal view on politics but that doesn’t change my view of sustainability. It doesn’t change my view of the environment. I mean, my view of the environment was really formed because my mom grew up in a very beautiful place, which is Wyoming, and my dad grew up in Colorado, so two, you know, kind of pretty states. And so every summer was just a Station Wagon. It’s like the Chevy Chase, you know…
Brady: …National Lampoon’s Vacation…
Fish: …town and country, and it had wood paneling. I grew up in Austin, Texas, but we would drive from Austin to Denver, and then we would drive from Denver to Casper to see both my parents’ families. But you see places that are really incredibly beautiful. I mean, the Tetons and Yellowstone, and just, unbelievable. So I always had this love for the environment and a hope that we could get better. And then at about the same time, we took that trip to New York, and I thought, Gosh, it’s filthy. And I think New York has done a–look, it’s not Tokyo–but it has done a nice job of improving over a 50 year period.
Brady: Right, nobody’s saying “drop dead,” or anything like that anymore. Tell me what attracted you to the waste management business? You know, you’ve been there since 2001. Was there something about the nature of the business or was it just the opportunity for advancement?
Fish: I just needed a job. I will tell you, it’s kind of funny, I really had no idea what Waste Management was, and so I got out of University of Chicago, and I went to work for a guy named Maury Myers. I hadn’t really spent much time with him previously, but he had—the first company I worked for coming out of college was KPMG. Then I went to work for an airline that was based in–that’s no longer–but it was based in Phoenix. The airline got into trouble, just like a lot of airlines do financially. And so, a guy named Maury Myers came in and was CEO. And I didn’t know Maury very well, but I went on to graduate school and left America West and went back to the University of Chicago and Maury went on to run a company called Yellow Corporation, which is, at the time, was a LTO business, trucking business. So afterwards, I spoke with him, and he said, “Why don’t you come over and work for Yellow Corporation?” So I did, in the finance group, and then he left pretty quickly, and Yellow consolidated. And so I ended up being out of a job. And so I was looking for work, and I reached out to him and said, you know, “hey, thanks for leaving us.” So what do you have down at—I knew he’d gone down to waste management in Houston—and I said, “What do you have down there?” And he said, “we’re kind of restructuring a bit. We have a lot of open positions. Why don’t you come down?” So I took a manager in financial planning position in Houston, and it was nice. My parents were, you know, kind of down the street in Austin, and so I really didn’t plan on working in this industry. It’s not as if I said, you know, I really want to do something for the environment, or I want to, you know, I feel like this is a company that’s pretty progressive, and I want to work for that company, I just needed a paycheck.
Stoller: As a young boy you weren’t dreaming of trash?
Brady: Then maybe we should say that, was there a role that you took on where you thought, huh, this really, you fell in love with it?
Fish: I think when I eventually moved out into our field operations, is when I said, “Okay, this company is doing a lot of good things.” Because, you know, in financial planning, I mean, I’m not to take anything away from that group. I mean, we have a financial planning group today. They do a fantastic job, but they’re a corporate group, typically, and so they’re doing financial planning and analysis, and they’re assessing acquisitions, and so you don’t really get to see and and feel the the operations of the company. And so Maury had, and he retired in ’04, but I started asking him, you know, what should I do? And he said, “Look, if you work for Procter & Gamble, which is a marketing company, you want to work in marketing at some point. If you work for Goldman Sachs, which is more of a finance company, you have to be in finance at some point. If you’re ultimately going to move…
Brady: …or Waste Management, get on a garbage truck.
Fish: That’s right. So Waste Management is an operating company. And he said, “If you want to give yourself an opportunity to learn the business, then go out into our operations.”
Brady: Get thee to Pittsburgh.
Stoller: What did you do, did you actually get on a truck?
Fish: Oh, I did, until about three years ago, I used to go out probably two times a year, and when I was in the field, I would do it probably once a month. But we moved, actually, from Houston to Boston, lived there for two years, then moved to Pittsburgh, and then Philadelphia back to Houston. But I’ve always felt that my father in law, who was a Pipe Fitter in St Louis, Missouri, and a union guy and he and I were great friends, and unfortunately, passed away too soon. But he said when I was going out to Boston, he said, “Look, are you union or labor or non-union?” I said, “we’re union out there.” And he said, “Well, look, there’s no difference between union and non union. They’re all people.” But he said, “My advice to you is if they have some kind of meetings, because he said, is your office located on one of the work sites? And I said, No, it’s in an office complex. He goes, well, then go out to those sites. And he said, Do it every week. And he said, but if you do it just once, then don’t do it at all, because then they’ll say, Yeah, okay. Jim came out here one time, and we’ve never seen him again. But if you do it every week, then you’ll earn respect. And he said, if you’re unionized, you’ll really earn the respect of the labor union guys. And he said, you’ll earn the respect of the non-union guys too. But so I would go out and ride along on the back of a truck and throw trash with them.
Brady: I don’t know if I’d want my boss riding on the back of a truck.
Fish: Our board did say, once I became CEO, they said, you know, you can ride around in the front And most of our trucks now, we’ve transitioned away from those trucks that where you have a helper on the back anyway,
Stoller: Right. Now, I want to rewind a little bit, because you briefly mentioned your college experience, but I know you had quite a harrowing experience with your undergrad. Is that correct? Can you tell us about that and what you learned from that experience?
Fish: So I started out at University of Texas, growing up in Austin. I mean, I was a Longhorn, and always had had, you know, plans to go to UT. And so I got into UT and was going to—an accounting major is kind of a five year program, not so much four years. So in between year three and year four, I went out to visit an aunt and uncle of my mom’s, and she’d been kind of badgering me for a while, “why don’t you go visit them?” And so I did. And they were, they were living in Scottsdale, and they were, they were elderly, they were in their early 80s. So I went out to visit them in the summer and I got out there, and within about a month, because I was going out there for the summer, so a month into it, I started having these really excruciating headaches. And I didn’t know what it was about. I never had migraines or anything like that. So I ended up going, and they took me to the hospital, and what I had was fungal meningitis, which is a bad form of meningitis. All meningitis is not great for you, but this one was treated with a really strong antibiotic, and so I had to get these spinal taps with this big long needle right there in the base of the skull, so called a cisternal spinal tap. And I got that tap, I had 200 of them to purge this meningitis out of the system. So the interesting part, and the reason I ended up at Arizona State University, actually, is because my mom came out and she—and I did not want to go back, it was such a sensitive treatment. She said, “You want to come back to Austin to have a neurologist treat you?” And I, I mean, I literally cried. Said, “No, I don’t, I don’t want to have anybody touch me.” Even when this neurologist went on vacation.
Brady: So you were stuck in Arizona because of this meningitis, wow.
Fish: And it took me two years to get over it. So three times a week, I would have a spinal tap, and I was completely out of it. I mean, they would give me that spinal tap, they give me a shot of Demerol, and I’d be knocked out for eight hours. But the other four days a week, I didn’t know a soul out there. My aunt and uncle are way up in north Scottsdale, and I was going to a hospital down in South Scottsdale. So my mom rented a small apartment. She had to come back to Austin because the rest of the, you know, my sisters and my dad were back there, so I’m by myself but we’re trying to figure out, before she left, how I would get to that hospital? Because it was a little bit away, and, you know, I wasn’t going to walk. And so she, you know, there was no such thing as Uber at the time, and I wasn’t going to take a yellow cab, because I was really pretty out of it after I got the spinal tap. So she called Arizona State University, and they said we have a van, that’s a handicap van, that we will send over and we’ll take him from his apartment to the hospital and back. But the catch is he needs to be enrolled as a student. And so I enrolled as a student at Arizona State in their accounting program. And then for most of that time, they sent a teaching assistant over to my apartment to give me accounting classes and to finish my degree, so I finished my degree at ASU.
Stoller: Wow. Is there anything you learned from that experience and that time that you’ve kind of taken with you into your leadership role today?
Fish: I think the main thing I learned from that was patience, because when we’re young, we’re all impatient, and I think that’s just human nature. And I was as impatient as anyone. And so when I first went into the hospital the neurologist came in and said, “Well, here’s, here’s the diagnosis, you have spinal meningitis. It’s not a great form of meningitis.” In fact, I was being treated with three other people, and two of the three of them passed away during the treatment.
Brady: Were they young people too?
Fish: One of them was young. One of them was a little bit older, but that doctor came in and said, “You’re gonna have to”— I had had my first Spinal Tap, which was not a pleasant experience. And he said, and I’m thinking, you know, I’ll be over this in a month. I mean, I’ll have to, you know, get maybe four or five spinal taps, but I can put up with it. And he said, “You’re gonna have to go through this. We’ll have to give you a spinal tap. It’ll probably be three to four times a week, and it’ll take about two years to get rid of this.” And I’m 21 at the time, and I’m thinking two years is like 10% of my life. I couldn’t think—I mean, we talked about how people don’t normally think far out. I mean, I’m thinking about what I’m going to do for spring break. I’m not thinking about what I’m going to do two years from now. And so I just had to, had to learn patience. And so every single time I would go into that hospital. And by the way, when I would go in—I still, to this day, when I smell that kind of alcohol, pungent smell in a hospital, it still makes me nauseous, because it was like Pavlov’s dogs. I associated that smell with that treatment.
Brady: I did spinal tap once. I can’t imagine having 200 of them. That’s crazy.
Fish: So I think what I learned from it most was patience. And look, things don’t happen in your timeframe all the time, and my timeframe was not two years. I can tell you.
Brady: Well you mentioned you’ve got daughters, Gen Z, and what do you think of—let’s go back to the talent question—what attracts people now to WM, you know, since that’s your most important constituent, what is it that you think gets them in the door?
Fish: I think, you know, Nicole, our oldest, is going through an interview process right now. She wants to live and work in New York, and so she’s going through an interview process. So I’ve had this conversation with her about what gets her in the door. And in addition to being well prepared when she goes in for the interview, I do think there’s something to be said for your approach and people tend to gravitate to people that are pleasant. You know, have a pleasant expression on their face. And, not everybody, not everybody has that. But I said Nicole, you know, even if you’re not enjoying the interview, act like you’re enjoying it. And so I’ve had some feedback on her and the interview process that she’s gone through, and she’s done extremely well, and she’s a smart young woman, but she does have this very pleasant demeanor about her. And I said, you know, if you don’t have that, it’s a bit off-putting. And so when, sometimes,—I don’t do a lot of interviews, but I’m mostly looking for that type of people connection when I talk to folks. And by the way, it’s not just the interview process, it’s when I’m talking to someone at one of these Business Council meetings, for example. I mean, or, or any kind of social setting. I want to see, is this person kind of going to be socially agreeable. And when I say agreeable, that doesn’t mean they agree with the points that I’m making, but they’re—both of y’all have a very pleasant…
Brady: …that’s our day job, right? No but I get your point. I mean if you have a team, you want people to be a culture fit.
Fish: I think it’s important for me. I mean, I think it’s important, maybe as important for me as anyone, because when I run into people in the elevator or in the offices, I always make a point of saying hello, and I always make a point of smiling. And I’m never too busy to—while I have, you know, a fairly busy schedule, I don’t ever want to be so busy that I can’t say hello to you. Now, it doesn’t mean I’m gonna remember your name, and I’m not great with names, and I try, but…
Brady: …Diane and Kristin…
Fish: …I’ve got Diane and Kristin, but we have 62,000 employees, and many of them I’ve met multiple times, and sometimes their name sticks and sometimes it doesn’t. But I do think it’s important, particularly for me, to demonstrate that. If I’m going to tell Nicole she should be that way, then dad should be that way.
Stoller: Speaking of people and culture. It just, of course, brings me to AI and the future of that in the workforce, because the workforce right now is facing so many challenges. We got immigration reform, we’ve got an aging workforce. WM, you know, said that you were going to eliminate 5,000 jobs through 2026 through automation. I’d love to hear about that journey and how you’re looking at using AI, but also keeping that people-first culture.
Fish: Well and that always, you know, people say that sounds counterintuitive if you’re going to eliminate jobs, but you want to be people-first. And by the way, those jobs that we eliminate are coming from attrition, so I’m not going and doing a reduction in force. Just how when somebody leaves, we, if we’re able, we just don’t replace that position. And so that’s how we’re planning to eliminate 5,000 jobs. There’s a couple of different places where we’re doing that. One is, I’ve mentioned a couple of them. One is the trucks where we’re moving from a traditional rear loader, which is the old style truck, and there’s a person on the back, and that person is loading it, loading trash in the back. And as we’ve talked, I’ve been out there quite a few times on the back of those. And those can be pretty dangerous. I mean, we’ve had, in fact, what really prompted this whole interest for me to move away from those was not financial, it was safety. And we had, we had a guy killed in East Texas, and there was a young woman who was texting and ran into the back of the truck while he was back there. And you don’t survive that. And it was not the first time that that’s happened. And so I told the area, look, we need to move away from those old style trucks. They’re just too dangerous. And this was on a busy street in this town. It was on Martin Luther King Boulevard, which is a busy street in Port Arthur. And so the city said, Well, I’ll tell you what. We’ll put a chase truck behind it, and that’ll protect your people, and we’ll do that for six weeks. And so they did, and literally, the week after that Chase truck dropped off, seven weeks later, we didn’t have somebody hurt, but another person, boom, hit the back of the truck. Fortunately, the helper was not back there. So I said, Look, we have to move for safety purposes. I do not ever want to have somebody else hurt, or, worse yet, obviously, killed behind a truck. So we’re going to move away from those. And at the same time, you can imagine those positions are hard to fill. I mean, the 50% turnover, it’s a growing job. It’s a tough job. Having been back there and done that, it’s heavy, it’s hot, or in the winter, it’s cold. I was back there one time when it was—I went out and it was 10 below zero on the back of a truck climbing over snowdrifts. Your hands are cold. I mean, it’s a hard job and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the folks that do it, but when they leave, and eventually they do, I mean, you know, with 50% turnover, we’ve started to automate those trucks to the truck that has the arm on the side. And those don’t require somebody behind the truck. In fact, they don’t require anybody getting out of the truck. And the most dangerous place around those trucks is when you’re outside of it. So that’s one of the places where we’re reducing head count. And then also these recycle plants. We’re automating them. And again, another position that is hard to fill are those pickers. They’re sorters. They have a conveyor belt that’s coming by pretty quickly, and so they’re picking 2x4s and things like that that don’t go through the recycle equipment off of the conveyor belt, and that can be done in an automated way more efficiently and produces a better product. On the back end, it can handle a conveyor that’s going faster so we can—it increases throughput. And at the same time, you have these jobs that are hard jobs that are hard to fill when people leave, and people do leave them pretty regularly, so most of the positions that we’re eliminating, and I don’t like that word, but the positions that we’re eliminating are positions that are hard to fill, positions difficult to hire for positions and high turnover positions.
Brady: You know, I think about…most CEOs we speak to, actually, are looking at these reductions in workforce because of AI or other factors. And I think—where do you see the opportunities for the next generation as some of those on ramps maybe close a bit? Or the advice you have to your daughter or what you would be doing if you were starting out now?
Fish: Well, I think the advice I would give is that, because there’s always this concern about AI and you hear a lot recently about AI is going to eliminate all these jobs. But technology forever has eliminated jobs. I mean, there’s not a job as far as I know, that’s a plow farmer, any more. So what happened to the plow farmer when tractors came around? Well, that plow that, you know, the plow operator who was doing it with a horse, found something else to do. So technology does replace positions, but then they create positions.
Brady: I’m an optimist, but it feels different when you’ve got agentic AI. And again, I think there will be jobs. It feels like there’s going to be a transition period.
Fish: I’m sure there will be a transition period, but I’m not sure it’s that much different than the Industrial Revolution, which was a massive change from an agrarian society to more of an industrial society. I would argue that was a bigger change than AI will make today, and with that came a whole different type of job. I mean, a mechanic’s job—there was no such thing really as a mechanic on a piece of machinery prior to the industrial revolution. So those are jobs that were created by technology. And I think the same will happen. I think you’re right, I think there will be a transition period. But you know, some of the jobs that Nicole’s interviewing for are not jobs that would have been around in 1950.
Brady: Well, the environment certainly is creating more jobs.
Fish: Yeah, exactly. We were just a trash company in 1970 and now we’re a trash and recycling company, so we have an entire division that’s dedicated to sustainability that wasn’t there 30 or 40 years ago.
Stoller: Is there some other arm of your business that’s not happening right now, besides trash and sustainability that you think will be the next big thing in 2035?
Fish: I do think autonomy is real. I’ve got the app on my phone, the Waymo app, and so I’ve ridden in probably five or six different Waymos in Austin, Texas, in Phoenix. And, I mean they get out on the freeway and they drive to your exit, and they get off, and they drop you off at the restaurant. And it’s pretty amazing, and there is nobody up front. But they do, they do work. I know they’re still working through a few—it’s hard, I think, for Waymos, to navigate snow covered streets. So you don’t see them in Minneapolis, I think, for probably that reason. So the places that they are right now are in California, which, you know, on the coast, they don’t get a lot of snow. Austin, I saw one in Houston a couple weeks ago. Phoenix. So there could be an autonomous garbage truck. Look at Caterpillar. I sit on Caterpillar’s board of directors, and they have autonomous mining equipment for a lot of their mining customers. And part of the reason is it’s hard to hire out in the middle of nowhere, and these mines are out in the middle of nowhere. So we’ve been talking to Caterpillar about developing autonomous or remotely operated heavy equipment, and we buy a lot of Caterpillar equipment, and then on the collection side of our business, we think there’s an opportunity. I’ve challenged our team to come up with an autonomous residential contract in the next two years. And will they do it? I don’t know. But, and I think the way that would kind of manifest itself is that you would have somebody sitting up front, and this wouldn’t be a huge contract. This isn’t going to be, you know, the city of Seattle. This is going to be probably a homeowners association that has, you know, a few hundred homes that we have a contract with. Ideally, you’d have a truck that is that automated side loader. It recognizes the can coming up. We would certainly initially have somebody sitting up front monitoring things, but the truck would be operating itself. That’s my goal. And at least initially, you wouldn’t eliminate anybody. You’d still have a person sitting up front. And I think it’s probably going to be a while before you eliminate anybody. Although, you know these residential driver positions, they have a pretty high turnover too. So you could get to a point down the road where you truly have an autonomous truck, kind of like a Waymo, where there isn’t anybody in the truck, but I think in the near term, I would envision an autonomous residential truck that has somebody up front, so there still is a job there, but it’s it’s testing out the autonomy of a heavy truck.
Brady: How do you keep people engaged in jobs that most people don’t want to do? You’ve mentioned several cases.
Fish: I think part of it is, you know, the obvious part is people want compensation that is adequate. And so we’ve raised our compensation for those types of positions over the last five years. We’ve raised it almost 30% so that’s, you know, an average of about 6% per year. So that’s pretty, that’s well above inflation. But typically that’s not the main reason people leave their jobs, not just those jobs, but any job. People typically leave their job because they’re disinterested, or they don’t feel valued, or they don’t enjoy who they work for. Their boss is a jerk or whatever. And when you look at these exit interviews, number 12 on the list, or 13 on the list, is pay. Because if somebody comes to me and says, you know, look, I love what I’m doing here, but this company, company X, is willing to pay me more, I can resolve that. But if you come to me and say, you know, “My pay is fine, but my boss is such a jerk,” that’s a little tougher resolution.
Brady: Or the nature of my job is such that my back hurts, that’s hard to change, too.
Fish: Or I just don’t feel valued here. The pay is fine, Jim, but I don’t feel like I’m valued. I don’t feel like it matters what I do. That is a tougher resolution. So that’s why I think pay is something that—I can solve that. If you came to me and said you’re not feeling adequately compensated, okay, fine, we’ll work through that. But if it’s, you don’t feel valued, that’s a little different.
Stoller: How do you get people to stay then, to Diane’s point. How do you get them to love trash, love the industry? Because it must be hard.
Fish: Well, when I came to the job in 2016, my goal was to really affect a culture change at the company. And so I kind of have coined the term people-first. And again, I didn’t come up with the idea. Really, I think Herb Kelleher was one of the first CEOs to start thinking about this, but I did coin the term people-first at WM, and I said, look, it’s, you know, I want people to feel valued in what they do, regardless of what the job is, whether it’s a driver, whether it’s a technician, whether it’s an accountant, you know, whether it’s a sales rep, whatever it is, I want people to feel like that they matter. And by the way, they matter all the way up to Jim. Jim cares about me. He cares about my family, he cares about what I do every day. He genuinely seems like I matter to the organization. And then I think it doesn’t really matter whether it’s trash or whether it’s heavy equipment, or whether it’s technology, whatever the business is, I think is less important. Some people leave because it’s a dirty job. Most people don’t leave for that reason. I mean, they get it when they apply for the company. I mean, they know applying for WM or Waste Management, they know what it is. They leave because of a lot of other things, and I think if they feel valued, then they grow to really, really enjoy the company. And regardless of what line of business we’re in.
Brady: Well, you’ve certainly been there 24 years. One question I do have, you’re in the Business Council. You know, one stakeholder we haven’t talked about is the regulatory stakeholder, because obviously that has a huge impact on recycling, trash, the nature of what happens, certainly at the municipal level. What are you seeing there? Are you seeing—åre we moving as quickly as we need to be on that front?
Fish: Well, I always say about regulation, regulation is a good thing for us, and some people say, “Wow, really. That doesn’t sound right,” but regulation is a good thing, I think, and part of that is that we regulate at a higher level than the government. No matter who’s in office, we’ve always regulated ourselves at a higher level than the government would otherwise regulate us. And whether it’s at a landfill, whether it’s collection of landfill gas, whatever it is, we tend to self regulate at a higher level, and so I look at it as a differentiator. Some people, that’s tough for them. Some companies have a hard time with regulation.
Brady: But are we moving quickly enough on, for example, recycling and some of the climate initiatives around waste. I mean, there’s reduce, recycle, reuse, obviously. How are we doing on that front, do you think, as a nation? And you know, obviously these things are regulated at a local level.
Fish: Exactly right. I think they’re regulated more at a local level. So whatever happens with the White House doesn’t matter as much to us from a regulatory standpoint, because most of our regulation is either local or state. And I would say, to answer your question, I think some states do a better job than others.
Brady: Who’s doing a particularly good job?
Fish: You know, when it comes to recycling I think California does a pretty good job. I wouldn’t say California does a great job on all regulation, not necessarily in our business. I think California has their own set of problems, but when it comes to recycling, I think California does a pretty good job. I think the west coast in particular does a pretty good job. I think Oregon does a good job. I think Washington State does a good job. But look, other states are kind of getting on board as well. I mean, Austin, Texas, Houston, Texas has made it important to them. Dallas, I think a lot of the big cities. Less so, maybe, in some of the rural areas. But I think it’s more critical in the big Metroplex’s. I could go down a long list of states that do a pretty good job. You know, I think Florida has done a nice job. And, you know, look, there’s 50 states, and we’re in 48 of them, so we encourage recycling in each one of these states. So that’s why I say there’s a bit of us kind of intervening and saying, “Look, how about adding recycling here?” And most of the time, the communities, or whether it’s the community, whether it’s the municipality, are willing to take that on.
Stoller: I know we’re coming kind of at the end of our time here, Jim, so I have a really weird question for you that I’m just dying to ask you, because I’m curious, what is the…
Fish: about the golf game?
Stoller: …well, that, but also, what is the most kind of bizarre or surprising thing that WM has ever been asked to process or collect?
Fish: There was a, there was a boat anchor that came through, like a cruise ship anchor, almost, I mean, a huge boat anchor that came through one time that ended up on the floor at one of our recycle centers. And this was a long time ago, and pretty clearly that’s not like an aluminum can. It somehow got loaded into the back of a roll off box and I don’t know how much those things weigh, but clearly the people that saw it said, Well, okay, so I don’t think I can move it. That’s not like a two by four that I can pull off. It never made its way onto the onto the belt. But it was on the floor. So there’s been a lot of crazy things that have come through, recycle plants, you know, but that’s the one that kind of comes to mind as being the kind of the craziest.
Brady: Is there any question you wish you were asked more often or don’t get asked often enough?
Fish: I think I wish I was asked more often, particularly by other CEOs, how do I do a better job of taking care of my people? I just think that, while the environment is very important to me, I go back to that ordering of constituents. And you know, if you don’t take care of your people, then they’re not going to take care as well, at least, of your customers, your shareholders, the environment. If you really make that a mandate, that I’m going to take care of my people, and I think I’ve been somewhat successful. I’m never going to be 100% successful in this, but I do think we’ve made some cultural change at WM but I wish other other leaders would focus on that more. I think in today’s world, we don’t focus enough on the culture. And, you know, these jobs, every job has challenges to it, and all of us are under some form of stress. So if I can take a little bit of that stress away from you in your role, and make you feel good about the alarm clock going off in the morning and coming to work, and some of these folks come to work at pretty insane hours. They come to work at two o’clock in the morning or three o’clock in the morning. And so if I can make them feel good about the fact that they work for a company that really cares about them and their families, then I think we will have gone a long way to creating a great culture and ultimately, a great company. I don’t get asked that very often, and that’s maybe a question I wish I had.
Stoller: Thank you so much, Jim. We appreciate you being here with us.
Fish: Thanks for having me.
Brady:Leadership Next is produced and edited by Ceylan Ersoy.
Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.
Brady: Our head of video and audio is Adam Banicki.
Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.
Brady:LeadershipNext is a production of Fortune Media. I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.
Brady: See you next time.
Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.
People love talking to AI—some, a bit too much. And according to contract workers for Meta, who review people’s interactions with the company’s chatbots to improve their artificial intelligence, people are a bit too willing to share personal, private information, including their real names, phone numbers, and email addresses, with Meta’s AI.
Business Insider spoke with four contract workers who Meta hires through Alignerr and Scale AI-owned Outlier, two platforms that enlist human reviewers to help train AI, and the contractors said “unredacted personal data was more common for the Meta projects they worked on” compared to similar projects for other clients in Silicon Valley. And according to those contractors, many users on Meta’s various platforms like Facebook and Instagram were sharing highly personal details. Users would talk to Meta’s AI like they were speaking with friends, or even romantic partners, sending selfies and even “explicit photos.”
But Meta is a different story, particularly given its track record over the past decade when it comes to reliance on third-party contractors and the company’s lapses in data governance.
Meta’s checkered record on user privacy
In 2018, The New York Times and The Guardian reported on how Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy group owned by Republican hedge-fund billionaire Howard Mercer, exploited Facebook to harvest data from tens of millions of users without their consent, and used that data to profile U.S. voters and target them with personalized political ads to help elect President Donald Trump in 2016. The breach stemmed from a personality quiz app that collected data—not just from participants, but also from their friends. It led to Facebook getting hit with a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), one of the largest privacy settlements in U.S. history.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed broader issues with Facebook’s developer platform, which had allowed for vast data access, but had limited oversight. According to internal documents released by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, in 2021, revealed Meta’s leadership often prioritized growth and engagement over privacy or safety concerns.
Meta has also faced scrutiny over its use of contractors: In 2019, Bloomberg reported how Facebook paid contractors to transcribe users’ audio chats without knowing how it was obtained in the first place. (Facebook, at the time, said the recordings only came from users who had opted into the transcription services, adding they had also “paused” that practice.)
Facebook has spent years trying to rehabilitate its image: It rebranded to Meta in October 2021, framing the name change as a forward-looking shift in focus to “the metaverse” rather than a response to controversies surrounding misinformation, privacy, and platform safety. But Meta’s legacy in handling data casts a long shadow. And while using human reviewers to improve large language models (LLMs) is common industry practice at this point, the latest report about Meta’s use of contractors, and the information contractors say they’re able to see, does raise fresh questions around how data is handled by the parent company of the world’s most popular social networks.
In a statement to Fortune, a Meta spokesperson said the company has “strict policies that govern personal data access for all employees and contractors.”
“While we work with contractors to help improve training data quality, we intentionally limit what personal information they see, and we have processes and guardrails in place instructing them how to handle any such information they may encounter,” the spokesperson said.
“For projects focused on AI personalization … contractors are permitted in the course of their work to access certain personal information in accordance with our publicly available privacy policies and AI terms. Regardless of the project, any unauthorized sharing or misuse of personal information is a violation of our data policies and we will take appropriate action,” they added.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Acquired LIVE event at the Chase Center in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024.
The streaming wars entered yet another iteration on Wednesday as Disney announced a major change to the division that it calls direct-to-consumer: Disney+ will integrate Hulu’s operations, transforming into something that looks a lot like the old linear TV bundle. As CEO Bob Iger told investors on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, “combining Hulu into Disney+ [will] create a unified app experience, featuring branded and general entertainment, news, and sports, resulting in a one-of-a-kind entertainment destination for subscribers.”
The night before Disney released its third-quarter earnings, the company confirmed it had struck a deal with its longtime partner in sports, the National Football League, an asset and equity swap that sees the NFL getting a 10% stake in Disney’s ESPN division and ESPN/Disney acquiring several streaming assets from the NFL. The NFL’s 10% stake in ESPN is valued between $2 billion and $3 billion, per estimates from Octagon.
ESPN will gain the rights to three additional NFL games per season, previously broadcast by the NFL’s own networks, meaning more of America’s highest-rated TV shows, live football broadcasts, will be Disney’s as the company fortifies its streaming war chest. Disney has been reconstructing ESPN to survive the decline of linear TV with the launch of a stand-alone streaming service, and it will now plug in content beloved by football fanatics: the NFL Network, NFL RedZone distribution rights, and NFL Fantasy Football. In streaming, Netflix and Amazon have each acquired more NFL rights over recent years, so Disney’s move shows it’s playing defense and some offense, too, on this front.
Disney also announced an expanded agreement with the WWE, another recent Netflix partner, which subsequently emerged as a $1.6 billion deal that will make Disney the home of the marquee event, WrestleMania. Iger said on the earnings call that ESPN “will be the exclusive home for WWE Premium Live Events, further expanding ESPN’s rights portfolio.” On Disney’s plans in this area, Iger added Disney is “building ESPN into the preeminent digital sports platform with our highly anticipated direct-to-consumer sports offering.”
Disney revealed in its earnings that the sports division, anchored by ESPN, saw revenue fall 5% to $4.3 billion, mainly because of higher NBA and college-sports rights fees. Segment profit, however, soared 29% to $1 billion as a merger in its Indian unit took some losses off its balance sheet.
Streaming profitable amid linear TV, movie studio decline
Overall, third-quarter earnings showed resilience in key business segments for Disney such as streaming and theme parks, even as its traditional TV and film studio divisions showed fatigue. Total revenue for the quarter ended June 28 rose 2% year over year to $23.7 billion, just under Wall Street forecasts, while adjusted earnings per share climbed 16% to $1.61, surpassing analyst expectations of $1.47. Net income before taxes rose 4% to $3.2 billion.
A headline achievement for Disney was the solid performance of its streaming business, which posted a 6% revenue increase to $6.2 billion and achieved operating profit of $346 million—a substantial turnaround from a $19 million loss reported in the same quarter last year.
Subscriber metrics reflected steady gains, with Disney+ ticking up 1% quarter over quarter for a total of 128 million and Hulu by the same margin to 55.5 million subscribers. The combined Disney+ and Hulu subscriber base climbed to 183 million, up 2.6 million versus the previous quarter. Disney also finalized its acquisition of the remaining stake in Hulu from Comcast NBCUniversal in June, setting the stage for a tighter integration of its streaming brands later this year.
Meanwhile, Disney’s studio entertainment segment saw more modest 1% revenue growth to $10.7 billion, weighed down by a 15% drop in operating income to $1 billion. Theatrical releases, including original animated and live-action remakes, underperformed compared with last year’s strong box-office showing with Inside Out 2. Additionally, Disney’s linear TV networks, including ABC and Disney Channel, recorded a 15% year-over-year decline in revenue to $2.3 billion, underscoring ongoing challenges from cord-cutting and lower international results following the Star India deal.
Looking ahead, Disney expects total subscriptions for Disney+ and Hulu to rise by over 10 million in the next quarter, driven in part by an expanded agreement with Charter Communications.
Theme parks and experiences shine
Disney’s “Experiences” segment—which covers theme parks, cruise lines, and consumer products—delivered robust numbers, outstripping earlier forecasts. Third-quarter revenue increased 8% year over year to $9.1 billion, fueled by a 22% surge in operating income at domestic parks and experiences to $1.7 billion. Disney pointed to strong guest spending and higher occupancy rates at its parks and cruise lines, especially at Walt Disney World, despite the highly anticipated opening of competitor Universal’s Epic Universe in Orlando. Executives emphasized the “continued resilience” of Disney’s park business in the face of new competition.
Guidance raised, optimism for 2025
Notably, Disney raised its guidance for fiscal 2025, projecting adjusted earnings of $5.85 per share—an 18% increase over the prior year. The company also anticipates double-digit segment operating income growth in entertainment and sports, with an 8% gain in experiences for the full year. CEO Bob Iger affirmed Disney’s commitment to global expansion, noting more active park expansions than at any time in Disney’s history and highlighting ongoing strategic investments in streaming, theme parks, and sports as drivers for future growth.
“Disney is not done building, and we are excited for the future,” Iger said, following the earnings release.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Unemployment among Gen Z workers in the tech sector has risen faster than those in the broader tech industry and young workers overall, according to Joseph Briggs, senior global economist of Goldman Sachs’ research division. In a recent podcast episode, Briggs warned young people in tech are the largest targets for workforce displacement as a result of AI.
As artificial intelligence begins to jostle the labor market, it’s Gen Z tech workers who are at the greatest risk of being displaced by the technology, one Goldman Sachs economist warns.
The unemployment rate for young people between 20 to 30 years old in the tech sector has increased by about 3% since the beginning of the year, according to Joseph Briggs, senior global economist of Goldman Sachs’ research division.
“This is a much larger increase than we’ve seen [in] the tech sector more broadly or a larger increase than we’ve seen for other young workers,” Briggs said in an episode of the bank’s “Goldman Sachs Exchanges” podcast that aired Tuesday.
AI adoption in the workplace so far has been modest: About 9% of companies have used the technology regularly for the production of goods or services in the past two weeks, according to Goldman Sachs’ recent report, “Quantifying the Risks of AI-Related Job Displacement,” co-authored by Briggs. However, employment in the tech sector has dipped in the last few years, coinciding with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT—disrupting more than 20 years of consistent job growth in the industry.
The bank predicts AI will displace about 6-7% of the total workforce.
The proliferation of AI adoption is bound to have an outsized impact on the tech industry, with Microsoft, Google, Meta, and other tech giants laying off a nearly 30,000 workers collectively as they shift investments toward AI. But while millennials were the learn-to-code generation, new-to-the-workforce Gen Z is striking out on tech jobs. Beyond AI hurting tech-sector opportunities, the rise of automation is also disrupting entry-level positions in particular, with entry-level jobs postings in the U.S. diminishing by about 35% since January 2023.
Gen Z is feeling the pressure. Nearly half of Gen Z job hunters in the U.S. believe AI has reduced the value of their college degrees, according to an April World Economic Forum report.
“The story is one where the overall impacts on young workers in the labor market, speaking from an aggregate perspective, is small,” Briggs said. “But if we start zeroing in and zooming in on these specific industries where we are seeing AI be used to drive efficiency gains, there are signs that headwinds are emerging there.”
Gen Z’s broader employment woes
More broadly, young people are entering into a job market that is “low-hiring, low-firing,” Briggs argued. In other words, while AI may be changing the labor landscape, Gen Z workers must also contend with a job market less friendly to new hires.
“There’s been a lot of questions around the lagged hiring rates or the difficulties facing recent college graduates,” he said. “I’m sure that we all know people who have had trouble finding jobs or a harder time than they would have normally following recent graduations.”
Briggs said he is “definitely seeing these lower hiring rates for recent college grads.” The Federal Reserve of New York found last month that the unemployment rate among recent college grads increased to about 5.5%, which is now roughly the same rate as young men who didn’t attend college. For all young workers between 22 and 27 years old, the unemployment rate is 6.9%.
Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a recent Substack post that young people shouldn’t blame AI at all for their unemployment woes, but look to the litany of economic uncertainties—from trade wars to inflation—for reasons why they can’t get hired.
As companies adopt a wait-and-see policy as they learn more about the ramifications of President Donald Trump’s economic policies, they are not firing employees so much as just waiting to hire, DeLong argued. AI has meanwhile become a scapegoat for businesses conscious of their decisions to bide their time instead of expand, he said.
“Blaming AI allows both policymakers and business leaders to avoid grappling with deeper, structural issues—such as the mismatch between what colleges teach and what employers need, or the long-term stagnation in productivity growth that has made firms more cautious about expanding payrolls, or short run policy uncertainty,” DeLong wrote.
Palantir’s first billion-dollar quarter is dramatically increasing the wealth of the company’s cofounders and C-suite. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp have each seen their net worth jump by $17 billion collectively—and the company’s chief technology officer is the latest to join the billionaires club. This comes as Palantir admits its goal is to cut jobs—but grow revenue by 10x thanks to AI.
Palantir’s stock has hit turbo mode. In the last month alone, shares surged by some 25%, helping the AI and analytics company reach a market cap north of $411 billion. And over the last year, the stock has skyrocketed by more than 550%.
For Palantir’s investors and cofounders, this surge has translated to wealth racking up by the billions. Cofounder Peter Thiel’s net worth has jumped to over $25 billion—up $9 billion since January—and Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s has surged to more than $15 billion (up $8 billion YTD), according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. Cofounders Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale are also long-time members of the ultra-rich club.
Now, the financial wins are extending beyond the company’s founders. Chief technology officer Shyam Sankar became its latest exec to cross the billion-dollar mark on Monday, with his net worth climbing past $1.3 billion.
Later that day, the company reported a record-setting $1 billion in revenue for its most recent quarter, up 48% year-over-year. Profit also soared by 33% to $327 million, prompting the company to increase its full-year revenue outlook to at least $4.14 billion.
The company’s successes have been 20 years in the making, Sankar said on Monday’s earnings call.
Fortune reached out to Palantir for comment.
Other companies’ losses are Palantir’s gains
Palantir’s stock growth is likely welcomed news for investors who have been unsatisfied with the performance of other tech companies like Tesla, Apple, and Amazon, which are all in the red this year.
Competitors in the federal contracting space have also struggled, with firms like Accenture, Booz Allen and Deloittelosing key government contracts amid Department of Government Efficiency cuts. However, Palantir has largely gained, with earnings from the U.S. government growing by 53% year-over-year. Just last week, the company landed a $10 billion software and data contract with the Army.
“There are almost no parasitic elements to this company,” Karp said in the earnings call on Monday. “We have a small sales force. We have very little BS internally. We have a flat hierarchy. We have the most qualified and interesting people, heterodox in their beliefs.”
A continued embrace of AI is also making it easier for companies like Palantir to do more with less workers.
“We’re planning to grow our revenue … while decreasing our number of people,” Karp told CNBC. “This is a crazy, efficient revolution. The goal is to get 10x revenue and have 3,600 people. We have now 4,100.”
Like Palantir, Nvidia is a billionaire-producing machine
Like Palantir this year, Nvidia’s stock skyrocketed in 2024—with gains topped 170%. And as each company continues to grow, they’re both on the billionaire-producing track.
“I’ve created more billionaires on my management team than any CEO in the world,” Huang said recently during a panel hosted by venture capitalists running the All-In podcast. “They’re doing just fine.”
Nvidia has about 42,000 and a market cap of about $4.3 trillion, about 10x that of Palantir.
“Don’t feel sad for anybody at my layer,” Huang said. “My layer is doing just fine.”
As Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar becomes the latest to join the billionaires club, the company is competing with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang for who can create the most billionaires on their team.
PlayMonster games has bought Taco vs. Burrito for an undisclosed amount. The game was invented by a 7-year old, who, with his parents’ help, has steer it to over 1.5 million sold units. Creator Alex Butler says, despite its success, “It was never something that I’ve been attached to or anything.”
Alex Butler was just seven years old when he made his first million dollars. A game he had invented, called Taco vs Burrito, had made it to Amazon—and by the end of 2018, it had rung up sales of about $1.1 million.
Now, after overseeing the game’s empire with his parents, Butler has sold the rights to the game to PlayMonster, whose other well-known products include Spirograph, Farkle, and Yeti in my Spaghetti. Terms of the deal were not announced, but Taco vs. Burrito (which retails for $20 on Amazon) has sold 1.5 million copies life to date. The game also has two expansion packs.
PlayMonster says it will continue to expand the game and a version in a collector’s tin is coming later this year.
Butler, who is now 15, says he’s not especially sad to see his creation move on. It was, he says, never really something he wanted to keep doing for the rest of his life.
“It was never something that I’ve been attached to or anything,” he told The Seattle Times. “It’s not super important to me. I just kind of wanted to get the most money out of it.”
Alex’s mother is an entrepreneur herself, so when her son came up with the idea after playing card games like Exploding Kittens, she encouraged him. The family would walk to the neighborhood coffee shop/hangout to test the prototype, which would lead to Alex coming up with a new take on the rules.
To cover production costs, he mother launched an online fundraiser, which brought in $25,000. Alex’s parents set up a holding company for the game (of which Alex was the majority owner), found a manufacturer, and put the game on Amazon. It quickly took off and never slowed down.
While there have been buyout offers in the past, the family said they never felt right. When they began speaking with PlayMonster, things did.
Don’t expect another game anytime soon from Alex, though. His interests have shifted to music production, sports, and video games, he says.
The new “replacement” pay package that Tesla unveiled for Elon Musk on Aug. 3 marks a big improvement over its predecessor, for a basic reason. It guarantees what the previous version left open—the very real possibility that if Tesla’s stock takes a giant roundtrip back to the price where they gave Musk that huge slug, shareholders get nothing but dilution for the directors’ largesse. And Musk still holds shares worth billions.
Recall that in 2024, in response to a lawsuit from the EV maker’s shareholders, the Delaware courts invalidated the famous giga-grant approved in January of 2018. Musk and the company appealed the ruling, and the decision is now on appeal. The Tesla board stepped in to ensure that if the Tesla side loses, the CEO will get something similar to the numbers he’d sacrifice. But this time, they’re attaching a series of wise conditions absent the first time around.
Naturally, the deal only applies if Musk and Tesla lose on appeal. If that happens, under the new iteration he’d receive a restricted stock grant of 96 million shares at a strike price of $23.34, equivalent to the figure when he got the gigantic trove at the start of 2018. At Tesla’s current price of roughly $309, those shares would be worth over $27 billion. Here are the restrictions: The shares vest on the second anniversary of the grant, or early August 2027, but only if Musk serves that entire period as either CEO or chief of product development or operations. In addition, he can’t sell any of those vested shares until five years from the date of the award, or Aug. 3, 2030.
The directors’ objective is obviously to keep Musk in charge, enhancing the chances he’ll deliver big-time on his promises for forthcoming, not yet commercial, robotaxis, self-driving software, and humanoid robots. But for Tesla holders who are starting to lose faith as the gauzy pledges come and go unkept, the plan’s structure, to use the cliché so often found in CEO comp plans, “aligns” Musk’s fate to their own far more tightly than did the first program.
The 2018 plan rewarded Musk for hitting huge valuation gains with lofty rhetoric
The landmark original pledged Musk laddered awards of 1% of Tesla stock, each granted as the valuation rose by an additional $50 billion. The starting point was $100 billion—a multiple of its market cap at the time. If Musk reached the max of $650 billion, a number that seemed wildly improbable at the time, he’d amass 12% of Tesla’s stock. The framework resembled the process of opening a safety-deposit box; getting a new 1% required two “keys”: first, hitting the valuation bogey and second, achieving 12 of 18 combined goals for revenues and Ebitda. The top Ebitda target was $14 billion, and the highest sales figure $175 billion.
Within a mere three and half years—by mid-2021—Musk rang the bell. He first surpassed the $650 billion market cap max, and later scored all the Ebitda benchmarks and supplemented that accomplishment by reaching an intermediate sales bogey of $75 billion, good enough overall to satisfy the 12 operating metrics requirement. Hence, Musk got the full windfall.
The concept’s big flaw: Musk kept making big vows for incredibly profitable new products that wowed investors. That helped send the stock skyward, helping him achieve the valuation part. The revenue and Ebitda requirements were relatively easy to hit. So the combination of rhetorically inflating the stock price and not having to deliver fabulous basic profitability numbers won the day.
To be fair, Tesla’s cap at almost $1 trillion is still three times its level when Musk received his average 1% stock grant, and 50% above where he got his last piece at $650 billion. The problem: It’s impossible to get any idea of what Tesla’s really worth in the long run. And if it turns out to be mainly a metal-bending car company, or if the capex requirements needed to build out Musk’s visionary businesses, as well as heavy competition, make them marginally profitable, Tesla’s value could fall back to something like where it stood when Musk captured the then seemingly mission impossible package at the start of 2018, when Tesla shares traded at $23.34.
Under the new deal, if Tesla’s stock tanks big-time, Musk doesn’t get paid
The original plan had a major weakness. Musk got his 12% of the stock upfront. So even if shares dropped all the way back to the original strike price of $23.34, putting Tesla’s market cap at $75 billion, he’d still own $9 billion in shares (12% of $75 billion). And the shareholders would have endured big dilution, and gotten zip for it.
But the new plan ensures that can’t happen. Is it absolutely impossible that Tesla drops that far? Not at all. Just look at its current fundamentals. The original plan only made sense if Tesla reached the operating goals stipulated to trigger the grants, and kept ramping revenues and profits swiftly from there. In other words, the fundamentals had to grow into the valuation. Musk was essentially getting paid for great things to come.
That didn’t happen. In the first two quarters of this year, Tesla’s sales ran at an annual rate of $84 billion, just above the bogey of $75 billion Musk hit a few years back. In the same six months, its Ebitda was stuck at $12 billion on a yearly basis, below the $14 billion number that unlocked the payout.
I recently wrote a piece on the “Musk Magic Premium” that calculated what Tesla is worth based on its current products, and the extra value awarded for Musk’s visionary pledges—that’s the premium. To get the core, repeatable earnings number for today’s EVs and batteries, I remove accounting gains or losses on its Bitcoin holdings, and subtract sales of regulatory credits that will probably now die owing to Trump’s recent pulling of penalties for the automakers who stop buying them.
For the past four quarters, that “hardcore” number is $3.3 billion. Imagine that Musk raises that figure at a decent 8% a year, so that net earnings reach $5.4 billion in 2030, the year Musk is free to sell shares under the new program (if it happens). Let’s also assume that since it’s a low-growth manufacturer, Tesla warrants a P/E that’s well above the auto industry average at 14. Then it would be worth $75 billion five years hence.
That result would put the shares right back near Musk’s strike price of $23.34. His big grant would be worthless, while under the old one, he’d still have stock worth $9 billion. Even if Tesla’s shares drop to around $50 and its cap stands at roughly $150 billion, Musk would make a lot less, around $2.5 billion. Yes, it’s a good thing that the Tesla board is forcing Musk to wait a long time to get paid. Five years from now, we’ll be able to see what all those promises are really worth. If they’re exhaust from a tailpipe, shareholders will suffer big-time. But Elon Musk will suffer along with them.
Eswar Veluri, the chief technology officer at Equinox, says that when the luxury gym operator is flexing new generative artificial intelligence muscles, the focus tends to center on the two Ps: productivity and personalization.
The productivity bucket is fairly straightforward. Equinox’s team is using AI to summarize documents, create emails, and automate some marketing materials and contracts. Where it gets more interesting for Equinox, which operates more than 100 fitness clubs, is a pilot of a generative AI-enabled feature that offers workout recommendations and nutrition tips.
This tools is built in Equinox’s branded mobile app but only available for employees. The rollout began with the tech team, then corporate employees and instructors, before it could become widely available to all Equinox gym goers if all goes well. This reflects Veluri’s technology playbook: always test internally first.
“Our personal training coaches are probably going to be the most rigorous in terms of the feedback,” says Veluri.
He asserts that the insights from Equinox’s rigorous training data are what sets it apart from the more generalized recommendations that may be produced from standard AI models. “The value is added when we have our proprietary thinking that is embedded with the general recommendation, so that the end user should feel that this is something that I’m getting that is on par with what an Equinox coach would provide,” says Veluri.
There’s also a more valuable feedback loop with the application of generative AI, as Equinox is now able to utilize large language models that can digest written comments from users and then adjust future fitness and nutrition suggestions. Prior variations of these tools would rely on a more simplistic “thumbs up, thumbs down” response.
“That ability for our members to have agency over the recommendations, and for us to be able to incorporate that feedback into modifying the recommendations, is something that would not have been possible if we did not have gen AI,” says Veluri.
Veluri has had a long career at Equinox, joining the fitness company in 2010 as director of digital products and rising up through the ranks to become CTO in 2021. Through that time, Equinox has invested in a mobile app that offers users virtual classes, and invested in more technically advanced treadmills, ellipticals, and other workout machinery.
Over that period of time, the fitness industry has democratized the accessibility of workout data, with fitness trackers like the Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Garmin enjoying mass adoption and easily tracking steps taken throughout the day, calories burned, sleep, and heart rate. Studies on these devices are fairly limited, but research does indicate that the use of fitness trackers can promote more fitness.
AI could make promoting a healthier lifestyle even easier. One way that Equinox utilizes AI, which predates the generative boom, involves Netflix-styled recommendations for classes that a fitness freak may want to try based on their past preference for yoga or cycling, the weather of the day, and the club locations they tend to frequent. Veluri says after this feature went live, Equinox saw class bookings dramatically increase. That engagement can lead to less club member attrition.
The company has also rolled out a generative AI chatbot that can answer straightforward questions including “What time is my gym open?”
“Our business model is one where we want and encourage our members to use our clubs as often as they can,” says Veluri.
With a scrappy technology team of just around 80 people, Veluri says he has to be careful about spending and doesn’t put too much money into any one tech initiative.
Equinox also has a close relationship with Amazon Web Services, a partner it leaned on to rearchitect its tech stack and streamline workflows for engineers. Previously, Equinox ran workloads on a Windows-based server and each digital fitness service ran as an individual task. That added complexity to the software updates process. While the application infrastructure is now housed more efficiently with AWS, Equinox says it utilizes large language models from various providers, including AWS and Anthropic.
Veluri says the culture he’s created with his technology team is one that encourages everyone to offer suggestions for what mobile app features should be explored next. The team takes a close look at competitor gym and fitness apps to ensure the features Equinox offers are in good shape.
“The biggest advantage of Equinox is that we use the services of our company a lot,” says Veluri. “We also have goals and we also want to achieve results.”
John Kell
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Google X’s former chief business officer Mo Gawdat says the notion AI will create jobs is “100% crap,” and even warns that “incompetent CEOs” are on the chopping block. The tech guru predicts that AGI will be better at everything than most humans—echoing the likes of Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and OpenAI chief Sam Altman. Only the best workers in their fields will keep their jobs “for a while,” and even “evil” government leaders might be replaced by the robots.
Tech titans keep insisting that AI will usher in a “golden era” of humanity, where all illness is cured, people live in abundance, and workers have “superhuman” powers. But a former Google executive has slammed the notion that the technology won’t be a job-killer and will actually create new work for humans.
“My belief is it is 100% crap,” Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer for Google X, recently said on The Diary of a CEO podcast. “The best at any job will remain. The best software developer, the one that really knows architecture, knows technology, and so on will stay—for a while.”
Gawdat has joined the cohort of leaders waving the red flag that AI will commence a jobs armageddon within the next 5 to 15 years. Companies including Duolingo, Workday, and Klarna have already laid off staffers in droves or stopped hiring humans altogether to get ready for an AI-centric workforce.
But executives shouldn’t celebrate their efficiency gains too soon—their role is also on the chopping block, Gawdat, who worked in tech for 30 years and now writes books on AI development, cautioned.
“CEOs are celebrating that they can now get rid of people and have productivity gains and cost reductions because AI can do that job. The one thing they don’t think of is AI will replace them too,” Gawdat continued. “AGI is going to be better at everything than humans, including being a CEO. You really have to imagine that there will be a time where most incompetent CEOs will be replaced.”
While the vision of human-less companies solely run by robots is incredibly dystopian, the ex-Google executive isn’t afraid of what lies ahead. The58-year-old doesn’t see AI being the perpetrator of job loss—money-hungry CEOs are actually to blame for letting the technology take over in the pursuit of financial gain, he claimed.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with AI—there’s a lot wrong with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines,” Gawdat said. “And the biggest value set of humanity is capitalism today. And capitalism is all about what? Labor arbitrage.”
Fortune reached out to Gawdat for comment.
For humans to thrive, ‘evil’ world leaders need to be replaced by AI
AI is already outpacing humans when it comes to some abilities—it can code, resolve customer requests, handle administrative work, and even analyze market figures. There’s no telling where its future capabilities lie.
Tech leaders like Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and OpenAI chief Sam Altmanare adamant it’ll outpace even the most powerful people by 2030. And that may be a good thing for humanity: For humans to thrive in this new era, immoral corporate executives and world leaders alike need to be replaced by AI, Gawdat advised.
He said that since harmful leaders will use the tech to “magnify the evil that man can do,” technology will make for more moral world leaders—and that this dystopian scenario of AI-enabled politicians is “unavoidable”.
“The only way for us to get to a better place, is for the evil people at the top to be replaced with AI,” Gawdat continued on the podcast. “[World leaders] will have to replace themselves [with] AI. Otherwise, they lose their advantage.”
Gawdat isn’t the only one sounding alarm bells over AI’s impact on humanity’s future. Altman and Google chief Sundar Pichai have both expressed a need for AI regulation—whether that be “major governments” drawing a line in the sand, or creating a high-level governance body to oversee potential harm.
“We are likely to eventually need something like an IAEA for superintelligence efforts,” Altman wrote in a 2023 blogpost, adding that AI projects should have to confront an “international authority that can inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security.”
Google’s former chief business officer Mo Gawdat said that the notion AI will create jobs is ‘100% crap’. He warns it’ll wipe out jobs, with even ‘incompetent CEOs’ and ‘evil’ government leaders on the chopping block.
The mighty American consumer may have finally met their match, and it’s a giant hulking rectangular box that hosts very few people inside, but rather a huge nest of servers, storage systems, and networking equipment. Consumer spending in the American services economy is so large it can boggle the mind, representing roughly two-thirds of gross domestic product. To paraphrase the long-running coffee chain Dunkin’, America runs on spending.
But this mighty American consumer has slow seasons, and the summer of 2025 appears to be one of them. There are several interconnected factors, namely, recent jobs growth now appearing much smaller than previously thought and the impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce. But those hulking rectangular boxes, the massive data centers sprouting up across the country, are emerging as a giant magnet for dollars in a way that rivals consumer spending itself.
Giant tech companies have spent so much on data centers in 2025 that their spending is now contributing more to U.S. economic growth than consumer spending, long considered the nation’s economic engine. If you make the reasonable assumption that spending on data centers equates to AI capital expenditures, defined as capital deployed for information processing equipment and software, then the pattern is clear: A ton of money is flowing into one concentrated area, and the outcome of that is uncertain.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are the main players investing at staggering levels to build and upgrade data centers that support the exponential demand for AI computing power, with those four companies alone forecasting a record $364 billion of capital investment in 2025. Combined, the so-called Magnificent Seven tech giants spent more than $100 billion on data center projects in just the past three months, as calculated by the Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims.
All this spending has to have an impact on the economy. Analyst estimates from Renaissance Macro Research indicate that so far in 2025, the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data center expenditure surpassed the total impact from all U.S. consumer spending—the first time this has ever occurred.
So far this year, AI capex, which we define as information processing equipment plus software has added more to GDP growth than consumers' spending. pic.twitter.com/D70FX2lXAW
— RenMac: Renaissance Macro Research (@RenMacLLC) July 30, 2025
Or as Rusty Foster, author of the widely read media blog Today in Tabs, puts it: “Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat.” This recalls the classic comedic device of several children wearing a long jacket, pretending to be an adult, as memorably portrayed in Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, when “Vincent Adultman” successfully maintained the illusion for several dates with Princess Carolyn. But then the bubble popped, or the trench coat came off.
Why is this happening now?
Several forces are driving this unprecedented investment wave. The boom in generative AI and advanced large language models—technologies that require vast amounts of computing resources—has forced tech giants to rapidly increase their physical infrastructure. Data from McKinsey projects that between 2025 and 2030, companies worldwide will need to invest a remarkable $6.7 trillion into new data center capacity to keep up with AI demand.
AI data center spending has grown at least 10-fold since 2022, with the well-known business blogger Paul Kedrosky estimating that it’s nearing 2% of total U.S. GDP by itself. “Honey, AI capex is eating the economy,” he writes, arguing that AI capex is so big that it’s “affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom.”
Kedrosky makes a similar point, contrasting capex booms from throughout financial history, notably the telecom boom of 2020 related to 5G/fiber technology and the railroad boom of the 19th century as the United States embraced a transportation revolution. “Capital expenditures on AI data centers is likely around 20% of the peak spending on railroads, as a percentage of GDP, and it is still rising quickly,” Kedrosky writes. “And we’ve already passed the decades-ago peak in telecom spending during the dotcom bubble.” Noah Smith, a widely read economics Substacker, asks the obvious question: “Will data centers crash the economy?”
The impact on the broader economy
This surge in tech investment has had profound downstream consequences. Without the AI data center building spree, GDP might have actually contracted in the face of uncertain macroeconomic conditions. So data center spending may have staved off—or postponed—a recession.
Money flooding into AI infrastructure is being diverted from other sectors, including venture capital, traditional manufacturing, and even consumer-facing startups. Unlike historical infrastructure booms such as those for railroads or telecom, AI data centers are short-lived, fast-depreciating, and require continuous hardware upgrades—suggesting this pattern of investment may remain volatile and capital-hungry for years to come.
As AI redefines industries, the flow of capital into the physical backbone of this technology—vast data centers—has upended old assumptions about what drives America’s economy. Consumer spending, though still immense in absolute terms, is not keeping up with the extraordinary scale and speed of investment by tech giants determined to lead in the AI era. The trajectory suggests that the U.S. economy in 2025 is being shaped not so much by the purchasing power of its people, but by the relentless arms race for AI compute capacity—an unprecedented, tech-led growth engine.
[This headline was updated to clarify that data-center spending has surpassed consumer spending as a share of GDP growth.]
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
More families started their back-to-school shopping in early July than in the past 7 years. Tariffs and inflation are being blamed for the behavioral shift. The average expended spend per student will be lower this year, but the overall totals are expected to rise slightly.
Reading and ‘riting are still important, but as the 2025-2026 school years draws near, parents are paying more attention to the third R – ‘rithmetic.
With tariffs looming and some (though not all) retailers warning that prices are bound to increase, back-to-school shopping began especially early this year. The National Retail Federation notes that more than two-thirds of families started buying pencils, pens, paper and folders in early July.
Some 67% of families got an early start this year, compared to 55% last year. That’s the highest number of early back-to-school shoppers since the NRF began tracking the category in 2018. And it all comes down to price.
“Consumers are being mindful of the potential impacts of tariffs and inflation on back-to-school items, and have turned to early shopping, discount stores and summer sales for savings on school essentials,” said Katherine Cullen, NRF vice president of industry and consumer insights. “As shoppers look for the best deals on clothes, notebooks and other school-related items, retailers are highly focused on affordability and making the shopping experience as seamless as possible.”
To put that 67% statistic into perspective: In 2019, only 44% of parents started looking for school supplies and clothes that early. It’s worth noting that most schools have not issued their lists of which items are required at that time of year.
Families with students in elementary through high school plan to spend an average of $858.07 on clothing, shoes, school supplies and electronics this year. That’s less than the $874.68 they spent in 2024.
Overall spending is expected to be higher, however, jumping from $38.8 billion to $39.4 billion as more consumers will be buying supplies. That doesn’t extend to lower-income families, though. The NRF says those households are pulling back in all back-to-school spending categories because of economic uncertainty.
In New York City's Target store, a section dedicated to school supplies showcases a variety of items like spiral notebooks, composition books, and folders.
Luxury apartment complexes across the U.S. are elevating their amenities to attract affluent residents who expect five-star hotel-style living, complete with services such as daily housekeeping, spa treatments, curated social spaces, and pet-friendly experiences. Developers emphasize that today’s affluent residents demand both exceptional amenities and meticulously detailed service, as basic offerings are no longer enough to stand out in the competitive luxury market.
While amenities like a gym and a pool are considered attractive features by most apartment seekers, the nation’s wealthiest renters see these as basic expectations—and look for much more in a residence.
In recent years, luxury apartment complexes and other high-end housing communities have begun rolling out increasingly specialized services to attract affluent residents. For example, some now offer med-spa amenities such as Botox treatments and IV hydration drips, letting residents access them without leaving home. These types of perks—along with a growing list of exclusive offerings—are emblematic of the ongoing “amenities arms race,” as developers compete to entice and retain the country’s wealthiest tenants with ever more unique and indulgent experiences
Luxury living today is defined by features such as plunge pools, recovery stations, infrared therapy, salt rooms, libraries, cinemas, lounges, co-working spaces, dedicated rooms for children and teens, and expansive outdoor areas, according to Michael Fazio, chief creative officer at LIVunLtd, a company specializing in residential amenity centers. On average, renting a luxury apartment in the U.S. costs about $400 to $500 more per month than a standard apartment, according to RentCafe.
“They expect a high level of design, furnished, and appointed with high-end furnishings. They want the spaces to be something they enjoy and can show off to friends,” Fazio told Fortune. “The amenities are a statement. They’re an extension of the resident’s home, so they have to match the same look and quality.”
And different generations crave these amenities and services—all for different reasons. People under 30 want help getting settled and want “to push a button and have everything done,” Fazio said. Meanwhile, the over-30 crowd tends to gravitate toward the social and networking aspect of being among peers who share similar levels of education and socio-economic status, he added.
Photo courtesy LIVunLtd
“Amenities for the sake of having amenities no longer resonate with savvy residents,” Alex Kuby, associate principal at design, branding, and procurement studio DyeLot Interiors who specializes in multi-family luxury properties, told Fortune. “Deep due diligence pays off. Simply having the amenity on-property isn’t enough, it needs to be delivered with next-level detail and care.”
The luxury rental market is currently strong, with high demand, elevated prices, and growing inventory. Some of the wealthy are turning to luxury rentals as mortgage rates and home prices remain high. And higher demand means luxury complexes have to compete for the wealthiest renters (or buyers, in the case of condos) to come out ahead. That’s where the so-called amenities arms race comes into play. Paying a premium means wealthy residents expect the best of the best, and amenities other complexes don’t offer.
Residents expect five-star hotel living
Considering renters and homeowners shell out much more on their apartment or condo than the average American, it’s no surprise they expect to be treated like they live in a five-star hotel.
One upcoming example of a high-end residential development embracing the demands of today’s luxury residents is Salato Pompano Beach, a 40-residence ultra-luxury oceanfront condo project that’s scheduled to be completed in early 2026. The Pompano Beach, Fla. development partnered with Stay Hospitality, which also manages other high-end condo properties and five-star hotels.
Prices for these condos developed by U.S. Development range from $2 million to $5.4 million, and 60% of the condos at the development have already sold. They’re each 2,106 to 3,354 square feet, and residents also have access to an 80-foot ocean-view pool and spa, an owner’s lounge equipped with coffee, indoor open-air beach showers, and a club room. But that’s just the baseline.
Living at the Salto also includes daily housekeeping with turndown and linen service, grocery pick-up and stocking, spa and beauty services, wellness programming and personal training, an on-demand house car with a private chauffeur, 24/7 valet services, live music, learning workshops, beach service with chair and umbrella setup, as well as boat charters and watersport rentals.
“Discerning buyers look for world-class amenities that you would expect when staying in a five-star luxury resort,” John Farina, president and CEO of U.S. Development, told Fortune. “They expect the service to also go hand-in-hand. If you are not pre-planning and executing a vision meeting these expectations, you will walk short on what the market demands.”
Why luxury amenities matter
Even the ultra-wealthy watch what they’re spending on. Housing—whether renting or buying—has become increasingly expensive during the past few years, so every offering and every detail matters when it comes to luxury residences.
Some developers have taken the approach of an “amenity overload,” or essentially just having a variety of amenities and features to fill a checklist they think will appeal to residents, Kuby said. But without due diligence and understanding what luxury residents really want will make certain developments fall flat.
Photo courtesy LIVunLtd
“While there are core amenities that matter to most residents, the seismic shift in the housing market is driving a different way of looking at amenities,” Kuby said. “People are renting for longer [and] amenities need to be geared to support their evolving lifestyles.”
This looks like taking traditional amenities to the next level. While co-working spaces have become somewhat of an expected amenity, luxury residents expect more functionality than just a desk or private space to take calls and meetings. They want the same comfort a luxury office space would provide.
And, of course, pets are something luxury developers are keeping their eyes on.
“People see their pets as family, so making them welcome in lounges and coworking spaces is key for owners who want to bring them along,” Kuby said. “Turning pet amenities into an experience—rather than just having a dog wash—[and] creating a work space that is pet-friendly is more impactful to residents on a day-to-day basis.”
In today’s edition: Linda Yaccarino’s new job, a business opportunity in sports, and female founders are trying again—and that’s a good thing.
– Take two. Over the past few weeks, some of the names that defined 2010s female-founded startups have been back in the headlines. Audrey Gelman, known for founding the Wing, opened her new hotel the Six Bells in upstate New York. Ty Haney came back to revitalize the struggling, now private equity-owned athleisure brand she founded, Outdoor Voices. Yael Aflalo, who founded the still-popular fashion brand Reformation, has a new label.
All of these women not only built companies in the 2010s—about five years ago, they were part of a wave of female founders who were forced out or lost control of their businesses.
There were a lot of factors at play during that time: lofty promises made by brands that pledged to change the world and achieve equality—and were then confronted with the realities of capitalism; the tensions of the months that followed George Floyd’s murder; the difficulties of the early pandemic; employee and investor pressure; and, yes, genuine leadership issues. Media coverage built these founders up—but then contributed to their fall. I should know; I was writing about these founders through all of it. Besides the three founders who have launched new ventures in recent months, Away’s Steph Korey and Refinery29’s Christene Barberich were some of the others to be swept up in this trend.
But it’s been five years, and I think it’s time to say: these founders deserve another shot.
One reason female founders lost control of their businesses more easily than men did is that their employees and customers both held them to higher standards. Their stakeholders cared more about social justice (and their investors were less likely to have their backs through a crisis).
But the solution isn’t for these women to disappear from public life forever. “The wave of women founders who resigned in 2020—I think it satisfied a cultural appetite, but it sort of left a vacuum,” Gelman told me when I reached out for her thoughts last week. “Particularly these women who were great at building product, creative, and doing things no one had ever done.”
People enjoyed poking fun at the “girlboss,” but the jabs added up. “That period of time, five years ago, certainly turned off many women or girls that I knew that initially had interest [in building companies],” Haney told me when we caught up about her return to OV. Since departing the recreation brand, she has been more quietly building a blockchain-based consumer-loyalty platform called TYB, for which she recently raised $11 million—but her return to her firstborn brand is different. She’s not running the business itself this time and is instead focused on creative, but it’s “on [her] terms,” she says. “I hope it creates a wake of interest from young women in pursuing business aspirations and brand-building aspirations,” she says of her return and others’.
These founders, though, had to be ready to come back too. For now, Gelman’s endeavor (which started with a store in Brooklyn) resembles a traditional small business more than a globally expanding venture-backed startup, although she’s hinted at the potential for more hotels. She calls the through-line between the Wing and the “country kitsch” Six Bells a form of “world-building,” the creative side that originally set the Wing apart from other co-working spaces and private clubs. “Getting to build something new with more maturity and self-awareness—it takes time to properly absorb the lessons from a first company,” Gelman says.
And the question is: will things be different this time? Personally, I think they will. Structurally, some things haven’t changed. Women-only founding teams still get around 2% of VC dollars, and that stat has actually shrunk in recent years.
But culturally, a lot has. With the rise of TikTok, social media has become less glossy—allowing founders to share a more authentic view of their experience from the start, rather than a picture-perfect version that then gets torn down. Founders have more resources to respond quickly to any scandals and speak directly to their audiences. There are more ways to build a brand than fully depending on the founder as the face of it. Five years later, there’s an entire generation of Gen Z consumers that wasn’t really paying attention last time around and doesn’t carry millennials’ 2010s startup baggage.
Within the startup world, there’s less pressure to achieve growth at all costs—which led to some of the challenges for this era of companies. The Wing raised more than $100 million during its life, and Outdoor Voices had raised about $60 million by 2020. More disciplined running of businesses, with an eye to profitability, yields more responsible leadership.
And, of course, there’s a growing frustration with the reality that men have been forgiven by the public for much, much worse than needing some management coaching—just take a look at the White House. The rise of the manosphere has made women hungry to see other women’s success again.
There will still be challenges. Founders aren’t perfect, and female founders are no exception. Consumers will get mad about something, employees will have complaints, and things will go off the rails sometimes. “I’m hopeful that … we can normalize challenges, and ideally, these challenges that come up and people may feel sensitivity around are things that can be worked through, versus causing founders to have to depart the company,” Haney says.
On the whole, it can only be a good thing for women to be building, without fear, in public again. This generation of founders deserve another chance—and all women deserve to see that one failure isn’t the end.
Warren Buffett may be worth billions, but he had a stark reminder he sent every two years in a memo to his managers: reputation and planning for the future should take precedent over profit. It’s a lesson that’s worked wonders for Buffett as he’s led Berkshire Hathaway from a company with roots dating to the 1800s—to a trillion-dollar enterprise today.
Even though he may seem like an easy-going, Coca-Cola-loving old man, he admits his leadership style can sometimes be “ruthless.” In fact, the billionaire sent a stark reminder to his manager every two years of his nonnegotiables, which include “to zealously guard Berkshire’s reputation,” something he believes is the foundation of the entire enterprise.
“We can afford to lose money—even a lot of money. But we can’t afford to lose reputation—even a shred of reputation,” the 94-year-old recalled in a social media post that’s currently recirculating, just months before he’s due to leave the company he’s led for over 50 years.
Since taking over what was once a struggling textile firm in 1965, the well-known investor, worth $152 billion, has turned Berkshire Hathaway into one of the largest businesses in the U.S. Under his leadership, Berkshire hit a market cap of $1 trillion this year. But from January 2026, Berkshire will no longer be under Buffett’s leadership; instead, the memo will serve as a reminder that its future reputation lies in the hands of the staff.
“We must continue to measure every act against not only what is legal but also what we would be happy to have written about on the front page of a national newspaper in an article written by an unfriendly, but intelligent, reporter.”
Safeguarding reputation has been an ongoing theme in Buffett’s history—in a 2010 shareholder letter, he revealed that he’d sent that exact same reputation reminder note to staff for over 25 years and counting.
Famously, in 1991, while addressing members of Congress as the investment bank Salomon Brothers’ chairman, Buffett delivered this message to his employees: “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”
That sentiment was echoed by other business-leading billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who said, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
The need to always plan for the future
This May, the legendary investor announced he would be stepping down as CEO by the end of the year, passing the reins to his successor, Greg Abel, after seeing how much he could do in a working day.
And as a succession planning request, Buffett asks that his managers provide a handwritten letter on any future recommendations to take their place, adding that the letter will be seen by no one unless he is no longer CEO.
“I need your help in respect to the question of succession. I’m not looking for any of you to retire, and I hope you all live to 100. (In Charlie’s case, 110.)” Charlie Munger, who passed away in November 2023 at the age of 99, was Buffett’s close friend, trusted partner, and sounding board for over 60 years.
“But just in case you don’t, please send me a note or email giving your recommendation as who should take over tomorrow if you should become incapacitated overnight,” Buffet wrote.
Going forward, Buffett told the Wall Street Journal he will still be going to the office.
“I’m not going to sit at home and watch soap operas. My interests are still the same.”
Read the full one–and–a–half–page memo
To: Berkshire Hathaway Managers (“The All-Stars”) cc: Berkshire Directors From: Warren E. Buffett
Date: December 19, 2014
This is my biennial letter to reemphasize Berkshire’s top priority and to get your help on succession planning (yours, not mine!).
The top priority–trumping everything else, including profits–is that all of us continue to zealously guard Berkshire’s reputation. We can’t be perfect but we can try to be. As I’ve said in these memos for more than 25 years: “We can afford to lose money – even a lot of money. But we can’t afford to lose reputation – even a shred of reputation.” We must continue to measure every act against not only what is legal but also what we would be happy to have written about on the front page of a national newspaper in an article written by an unfriendly but intelligent reporter.
Sometimes your associates will say “Everybody else is doing it.” This rationale is almost always a bad one if it is the main justification for a business action. It is totally unacceptable when evaluating a moral decision. Whenever somebody offers that phrase as a rationale, in effect they are saying that they can’t come up with a good reason. If anyone gives this explanation, tell them to try using it with a reporter or a judge and see how far it gets them.
If you see anything whose propriety or legality causes you to hesitate, be sure to give me a call. However, it’s very likely that if a given course of action evokes such hesitation, it’s too close to the line and should be abandoned. There’s plenty of money to be made in the center of the court. If it’s questionable whether some action is close to the line, just assume it is outside and forget it.
As a corollary, let me know promptly if there’s any significant bad news. I can handle bad news but I don’t like to deal with it after it has festered for awhile. A reluctance to face up immediately to bad news is what turned a problem at Salomon from one that could have easily been disposed of into one that almost caused the demise of a firm with 8,000 employees.
Somebody is doing something today at Berkshire that you and I would be unhappy about if we knew of it. That’s inevitable: We now employ more than 330,000 people and the chances of that number getting through the day without any bad behavior occurring is nil. But we can have a huge effect in minimizing such activities by jumping on anything immediately when there is the slightest odor of impropriety. Your attitude on such matters, expressed by behavior as well as words, will be the most important factor in how the culture of your business develops. Culture, more than rule books, determines how an organization behaves.
In other respects, talk to me about what is going on as little or as much as you wish. Each of you does a first-class job of running your operation with your own individual style and you don’t need me to help. The only items you need to clear with me are any changes in post-retirement benefits, acquisitions, and any unusually large capital expenditures. But I like to read, so send along anything that you think I may find interesting.
I need your help in respect to the question of succession. I’m not looking for any of you to retire and I hope you all live to 100. (In Charlie’s case, 110.) But just in case you don’t, please send me a letter or email giving your recommendation as who should take over tomorrow if you should become incapacitated overnight. These letters will be seen by no one but me unless I’m no longer CEO, in which case my successor will need the information. Please summarize the strengths and weaknesses of your primary candidate as well as any possible alternates you may wish to include. Most of you have participated in this exercise in the past and others have offered your ideas verbally. However, it’s important to me to get a periodic update, and now that we have added so many businesses, I need to have your thoughts in writing rather than trying to carry them around in my memory. Of course, there are a few operations that are run by two or more of you – such as the Blumkins, the Merschmans, the pair at Applied Underwriters, etc. – and in these cases, just forget about this item. Your note can be short, informal,handwritten, etc. Just mark it “Personal for Warren.”
Thanks for your help on all of this. And thanks for the way you run your businesses. You make my job easy.
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