Air India flight 171, en route to London from Ahmedabad, India, crashed after takeoff on Thursday, killing more than 200 people. The plane was a Boeing Dreamliner 787-8 jet. Following reports of the crash, Boeing shares toppled about 5%, halting a monthslong stock rally reflecting the aircraft manufacturer’s recovery from years of air-safety scrutiny.
Air India flight 171 was a Boeing Dreamliner 787-8 jet leaving the Indian city of Ahmedabad en route to London, the airline said. The passenger plane contained 242 individuals, including 230 passengers and 12 crew members. No one is expected to have survived the crash, according to Ahmedabad city police chief G.S. Malik.
Officials have not said the cause of the crash, which could take months or years to determine.
“I would like to express our deep sorrow about this event,” Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said in a video posted on social media. “This is a difficult day for all of us at Air India, and our efforts now are focused entirely on the needs of our passengers, crew members, their families and loved ones.”
“We are in contact with Air India regarding Flight 171 and stand ready to support them,” a Boeing spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. “Our thoughts are with the passengers, crew, first responders and all affected.”
The disaster marks the end of a stock rally from the plane maker, which began in April as the company doubled its aircraft deliveries from the year before. Momentum continued to build in May, when Boeing secured more than 300 new orders and produced 38 new 737 MAX jets.
Boeing’s recent share-price climb marked a departure from more than six years of struggles with production and safety concerns. In 2018, Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 Max 8, crashed into the Java Sea after departing from Jakarta and killed 189 people. Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, the same Boeing jet model, crashed months later and killed 157.
Last month, the Justice Department reached a deal with the plane manufacturer, allowing it to avoid criminal prosecution for allegedly misleading U.S. regulators about the jet model prior to both deadly accidents. The Justice Department will drop its fraud charges so long as Boeing pays a $1.1 billion fine, as well as $445 million to the crash victims’ families.
The Dreamliner 787 aircraft, until Thursday, had never experienced a fatal crash but has been under scrutiny for years. The Federal Aviation Administration halted production of the aircraft in 2021, just 10 years after the model was introduced, after finding a manufacturing flaw. Though manufacturing resumed the next year, Boeing whistleblowers have raised concerns about the Dreamliner. Longtime Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour filed a complaint to the FAA and told Congress in April 2024 that the skin on the Dreamliner jets were not fastened appropriately, putting them at risk to break apart.
Boeing did not respond to Fortune’s inquiry about the safety of the Dreamliner 787, but last year denied Salehpour’s allegations and defended its safety and quality testing.
“I am doing this not because I want Boeing to fail,” Salehpour previously told reporters, “but because I want it to succeed and prevent crashes from happening.”
Some companies, like BNY Mellon, are utilizing data to guide their decision making. They originally implemented a three-day in office policy, but after conducting research on worker productivity, they decided to increase to four days in-person.
“We’re complementing [return-to-office] with other benefits, such as two weeks of ‘work from anywhere’ time,” Alejandro Perez, chief administrative officer at BNY, shared at Fortune’s 2025 COO summit. The company also designates two weeks at the end of the calendar year as a “recharge period,” where managers and employees alike are asked to solely focus on critical business and avoid meetings. “People get a little more time to recharge, to spend time at home and get ready for the next year,” he said.
Anne Raimondi, chief operating officer and head of business at Asana, also shared the importance of data in guiding the tech company’s in-office policy. While Asana is used as a platform to guide workplaces with asynchronous work models, the company prefers to utilize a “office-centric hybrid” model. “Especially given our demographic of early-career engineers and early-career salespeople, that in-person collaboration is the best way for people to learn and build cross-functional relationships,” she said.
Employees across the globe all go into the office on the same three days a week: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. But Asana also has “no-meeting Wednesdays,” in an effort to incorporate more flexibility into workers’ schedules. Even with in-office requirements, there are still important steps leaders can take to create flexible options for workers, Raimondi argued. One is allowing workers to manage their own calendars, especially as more members of the workforce are becoming part of the “sandwich generation” and are tasked with taking care of both young children and aging parents.
“Even though we are office-centric, we also want to treat employees like the adults that they are.”
Alejandro Perez, chief administrative officer at BNY, and
Anne Raimondi, chief operating officer and head of business at Asana, speak with Fortune's Kristen Stoller at the Fortune COO Summit on June 10, 2025, in Scottsdale.
Financial institutions have attempted to integrate digital asset technology for more than a decade with little to show for their efforts. As it stands today, the total value of blockchain-based finance comprises less than one percent of the $300 trillion global system.
The finance industry talks a good game about embracing blockchain, but the truth is much of the sector hopes crypto will prove to be a fleeting technical fad like Blu-Ray, so it can stick to business as usual. My colleagues and I at Franklin Templeton (a nearly 80-year-old, publicly traded financial institution) understand the sentiment.
For legacy financial firms, the task of embracing digital asset technology is a daunting one. It means altering our fee structures and potentially losing revenues associated with intermediary functions, rethinking our product offerings and, quite possibly, disrupting our near-term balance sheets as we learn to operate on blockchain and hold cryptocurrencies to pay for block space.
There’s also the awkward reality that financial institutions made tentative efforts to experiment with blockchain in the past, and it did not go very well. We discovered the hard way there was more hype than substance, and that the tech was incapable of delivering at an institutional-grade level. In the past 2-3 years, though, the situation has changed profoundly.
Public blockchains are evolving into hyper-efficient coordination machines poised to replace aspects of legacy financial infrastructure, while unlocking new forms of value for investors. Solana, one of the first institutionally focused blockchains, has demonstrated an ability to process almost 65,000 transactions per second, a figure on par with the Visa network. Sui, a newer blockchain, has shown an ability to process transactions at almost double that rate. With forthcoming upgrades, public blockchains may soon be able to increase their throughput to hundreds of thousands – and even millions of transactions per second.
Decentralized exchanges, like Uniswap, that allow peer-to-peer market-making without a custodian are nipping at the heels of their centralized counterparts in the legacy world, processing trillions of dollars of transactions each year. As these systems become faster, their verification and security features have experienced significant improvements that make them not only resistant to hacks but also better at proving identity and asset ownership. Indeed, proving who owns what and when they came to own it is no small feat. Just ask hedge fund managers who need to rapidly unwind positions across multiple, disparate accounts.
All these changes are poised to benefit investors and traders. Here are some further examples:
Today’s markets are geographically siloed, which leads to fractured liquidity and diminished investor access to quality assets. Decentralized exchanges can help to integrate global markets – making them more efficient and accessible.
Currently, the process of finalizing transactions can take a day or more, creating imbalanced, and often unfair, outcomes. Consider, for example, that securities are generally only available to trade during market hours. Shareholder ownership records are only updated after trading for the day has been concluded. Investors eligible to receive dividends or interest are determined only once daily based on a start-of-day snapshot of shareholders, and then typically paid their yield at the end of the month. Blockchain-based systems can instead calculate and pay out intraday yield if a tokenized security is transferred or traded throughout the day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, uninterrupted – enabling more accurate and ideally more reliable cash flows.
We believe that the portfolios of the future will increasingly move away from today’s account-based system and rely instead on digital wallets that can hold a limitless number of tokenized assets in a single place – all of which can be transferred instantly, as well as lent out or staked for additional yield.
In the future, blockchains are also poised to offer new financial options for homeowners. Those will include, for instance, portions of home equity—an illiquid asset—to pay premiums on an income-generating annuity product, smoothing the path to retirement. Adapting to, and innovating with, these rapid technological changes will require meaningful — and at times uncomfortable — adjustments to how legacy institutions conduct business and make money. There will be winners and losers. Perhaps sooner than expected, some slow-footed legacy players may face a situation akin to Blockbuster, the once dominant video rental chain wiped out by Netflix and other new streaming services
The advantages of blockchain are so compelling that we don’t foresee the shift to digital asset technology being slow or incremental. Indeed, we expect our industry will evolve more in the next five years than in the last 50. The pressing question is whether financial institutions will choose to embrace the digital asset wave (and the disruption coming with it), actively fight it or bury its head in the sand.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned that the economic stimulus from the pandemic has run its course, leaving consumers with depleted savings and raising concerns that inflation could rise while employment falls, posing a challenge for the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate.
For months, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has been nervous that the two sides of the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) dual mandate will end up in opposition.
Now, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has suggested he’s right: The Wall Street veteran sees inflation going up and employment rates coming down, a headache indeed for the FOMC chairman.
Dimon suggested the upset has been brewing for time, as opposed to being symptomatic of recent volatility in economic and foreign policy.
What is driving the billionaire banker’s fears is that the pumps used to boost the economy during the pandemic have finally run dry, and consumers are at last likely to pay the price.
But it seems the economy hasn’t escaped without any significant scars, with Dimon telling Morgan Stanley’s U.S. Financials conference this week the mood is “ok,” explaining: “So the consumer had money, wages are pretty good, unemployment is pretty good, they’re spending it … all the extra money from Covid is kinda gone, so the lower end folks … have normalized.
“At the upper end, the consumer is still traveling and spending some money, their jobs are there. Their home prices are way up, their stock prices are way up, it’s looking pretty good.”
But Dimon also noted that sentiment has fluctuated since Trump took office. Per the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment barometer, for example, the index dropped from 71.7 in January 2025 to 52.2 by April, but has since stabilized.
The stock market has similarly fluctuated, wiping billions off the net worth of some of the world’s richest people before ballooning back up again. The S&P 500, for example, is up 2.6% for the year to date at the time of writing.
“The corporate side’s the same thing,” continued Dimon, per a recording obtained by Fortune. “Sentiments dropped, sentiments are coming back up but business is still OK.
“But the buts are real, I’m not trying to be negative. We spent $10 trillion … well of course consumers have more money, we gave it to them. Of course businesses are doing better, consumers spent the $10 trillion—that goes right through P&Ls in every industry out there.
“And then we had QE … and the real reversal is just starting.”
He added: “Then you have all these really complex, moving tectonic plates around trade, economics, geopolitics and future factors which I think are inflationary: military, restructuring of trade, ongoing fiscal deficits, so it’s OK but whenever you say consumer sentiment remember neither consumers nor businesses ever pick the inflection points, they never have.
“If you’re looking for that inflection point … they’re not going to tell you that, you’re going to see real numbers and I think there’s a chance real numbers will deteriorate. Employment will come down a little bit, inflation will go up a little bit—hopefully it’s just a little bit.”
Worry about the ‘big ones’
Dimon added he wouldn’t worry about smaller fluctuations in metrics such as inflation and the employment rate, but would be more focused on wider issues (as he calls them, the ‘big ones’) like geopolitics, trading partnerships, and the militarization of the world.
This will be no surprise to those who have avidly read Dimon’s shareholder letters over the past few years.
In his most recent letter, for example, he cautioned the White House against pushing key allies too far away: “Keeping our alliances together, both militarily and economically, is essential. The opposite is precisely what our adversaries want.”
“This is going to be hard, but our country’s goal should be to help make European nations stronger and keep them close. If Europe’s economic weakness leads to fragmentation, the landscape will look a lot like the world before World War II.”
He added: “Economics is the longtime glue, and America First is fine, as long as it doesn’t end up being America alone.”
Is RTO an employee perk or necessary retention strategy? The question has led to an endless debate among bosses in corporate America, but employees have never been more clear.
About 63% of workers would take a pay cut for the option to work remotely more often, according to a new report from Cisco, which surveyed 21,513 employees and employers across 21 markets globally to get a sense of where they stand on the future of work. Not only would employees sacrifice pay for flexibility—65% of workers have considered looking for a different job that offers better hybrid options.
The one-size fits nature of RTO policies is the crux of the problem, Francine Katsoudas, chief people, purpose, and policy officer at Cisco, tells Fortune. “The tension point here is that a lot of the return to office policies can’t take into consideration the individual needs [of the employee],” she says.
Unsurprisingly, workers whose employers provide a fully flexible work policy are most satisfied with their work arrangements, with 74% of them indicating approval of the policies. But a close second are workers whose hybrid model includes a mandated set number of days in the office (i.e. three days a week), with 71% of this group of workers feeling positively.
Flexible work is becoming particularly urgent for workplaces as more and more people enter the “sandwich generation,” says Katsoudas, in which they’re tasked with providing care for their young children and aging parents. These employees often have to balance responsibilities like doctors appointments and school pickups.
“Flexibility doesn’t mean that everyone is working remotely,” she adds. “It just means that there’s an ability to take into consideration the needs of every individual.”
Bojangles has reportedly reached out to investment bankers to explore a possible sale. The expected asking price would be three times what it sold for six years ago. The exploration comes after Dave’s Hot Chicken sold for $1 billion.
With Dave’s Hot Chicken recently selling for $1 billion, another popular brand that largely operates in the Southeast is reportedly testing the acquisition waters.
The Wall Street Journalreports fast food chain Bojangles has reached out to investment bankers to potentially sell itself at a price tag of $1.5 billion.
No potential buyers have been identified yet and Bojangles could change its mind and not sell, the report warns. If the company does find a buyer willing to pay that amount, it would be approximately three times the $579 million it sold for in 2019, when it was taken private.
Bojangles, when contacted by Fortune, declined to comment on the report, citing its policy on rumor and speculation.
One thing is certain, however. Chicken-focused restaurants are on a long-standing tear. The chicken category saw sales increase 9% last year, according to Technomic. Burgers were up just 1%. In recent months, McDonald’s has added chicken strips to its menu and Taco Bell has permanently added chicken nuggets. On Thursday, Taco Bell also announced it would begin serving Crispy Chicken Tacos and Burritos on June 17.
Chick-fil-A is still the leader in the category, but the category truly began to take off in 2019, when Popeye’s launched its own chicken sandwich for the first time in its then-50-year history. The chain had what it thought was a two-month supply of chicken sandwich materials on hand when it launched the product. As social media chatter exploded, it exhausted that backstock in just two weeks.
Demand grew so great that Popeye’s, at one point, encouraged customers to bring their own bun to stores and create their own sandwich, using chicken tenders.
New data from the Labor Department shows 1.96 million people were on unemployment benefits the week ending May 31. That is the highest number since mid-November 2021, when they topped 1.97 million. While other data shows a steady labor market, these new figures indicate more people are unemployed at the same time.
Recurring claims for unemployment benefits hit their highest level in more than three years, according to data from the Labor Department released on Thursday.
The latest report, which gathered data through last month, showed 1.96 million people were on unemployment benefits during the week ending May 31. The last time recurring claims exceeded that level was the week ending Nov. 13, 2021, when 1.97 million people were on unemployment benefits, according to historical data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Recurring jobless claims measures the number of people who remain on unemployment benefits, rather than just those who have newly enrolled during a certain time period. It is often used as a proxy for the total number of people on unemployment.
The rising number of people on unemployment benefits indicates it is taking them longer to find a new job. While new claims remained relatively steady, hovering around 248,000 for the week ending June 7, the fact unemployed people are struggling to land new jobs hints at a broader slackening in the labor market.
The latest unemployment numbers complicate last week’s monthly jobs report, which saw the U.S. add 139,000 jobs in May. That level was actually slightly higher than most estimates, which expected around 125,000 new jobs. At the same time, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%. However, the same report saw downward revisions of a combined 95,000 jobs in March and April.
Even though the job market hasn’t yet been characterized by acute shocks like major layoffs, it appears hiring has slowed, or at least that more people are unemployed at the same time than have been during the past three years. Exactly how the labor market will shape up over the next 12 months will depend on President Donald Trump’s trade and economic policies, which have changed considerably during the five months he has been in office.
The Federal Reserve has held off on making any changes to monetary policy until it can better assess the impacts those policies will have on the economy. Over the last several months, Fed chair Jerome Powell has reiterated the U.S. economy is in good condition, which affords the central bank time to continue to assess its next move based on how, or if, the picture changes.
Spotify has a new CHRO: Anna Lundström. Joining the music and podcasting giant in 2016, Lundström has held a variety of roles at the company, and previously served as the VP of HR. She also played a crucial role masterminding the company’s remote work strategy, otherwise known as “work from anywhere.”
Fortune sat down with the newly-minted HR leader to get her thoughts on workforce priorities for the company, what she thinks it takes to build a great work-from-home policy, and of course, AI.
Lundström and chief product officer Gustav Söderström have released a set of AI rules to the entire organization, and introduced a series of trainings for employees that range from prompt engineering to more advanced courses.
“Leaning fully into the learning, making our employees future ready, providing them with AI literacy skills—that will position them really well,” she says. “We don’t know what the future will hold, but the bet we’re taking is making everyone AI ready.”
Lundström says she’s also doubling down on employee well-being, which includes increased mental health support and an annual company-wide “Wellness Week.” An idea born out of pandemic-era Zoom burnout, that’s when the company closes all offices for the first week in November, and sends 7,500 employees home at the same time.
“People love that because usually, when you’re on vacation, you come back to a full inbox and a long to-do list,” she says. “But here, everyone’s off at the same time.”
You can read more of my interview with Spotify’s new CHRO here.
Tom Bodett is suing Motel 6. The long-time spokesperson says the chain is using his voice and name without permission. After 39 years of working together, Motel 6 allegedly failed to make an annual payment and has not rectified the situation, Bodett says.
For 39 years, Tom Bodett encouraged people to stay at Motel 6 with his signature line “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Now he’s suing the hotel chain.
Bodett has filed suit in a Manhattan federal court, accusing the company of using his name and voice without his permission. While the two have been inseparable in many people’s minds, due to the length of the partnership, Bodett says he cut ties with the company in January, after its new owner missed a $1.2 million annual payment.
Motel 6’s new owners made a number of excuses for their failure to make the required payment,” the suit reads. “First, they blamed the delay on the ownership transition and the need to work “through bank transfers.” Then, they claimed with no proof whatsoever that Plaintiffs had not performed their obligations under the Agreements, and threatened to sue Plaintiffs for non-performance if Mr. Bodett would not agree to simply let Motel 6’s breach lie.”
Motel 6, he says, has continued to use his name and voice on its reservation line, however. Bodett also says he coined the “We’ll leave the light on for you” tagline.
Bodett, in the court filing, said he spent five months trying to find a way for the partnership to end amicably and without “undue negative publicity,” but says the company has “only responded with misrepresentations, obfuscations, and delay tactics.” He’s seeking $1.2 million and additional damages.
Bodett, who has also voiced animated series on Saturday Night Live as well as several Ken Burns documentaries, has been the voice of Motel 6 since 1986. The ad campaign, a wry, bare-bones, folksy, low pressure series of commercials, has won numerous awards and has been inducted into the Clio Advertising Hall of Fame. It was so popular at one point that radio listeners would call the stations and request replays of the ads.
G6 Hospitality, Motel 6’s immediate parent, did not immediately reply to Fortune‘s request for comment about the complaint.
– Verdict’s in. In an era of #MeToo backlash, with hyper-masculinity ruling from Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley, the retrial of Harvey Weinstein could serve as a kind of litmus test—would his guilty verdict hold up in 2025?
Yesterday, a jury found the former Hollywood producer and convicted sexual predator guilty on the top charge he faced in New York—but acquitted him of the second and failed to reach a verdict on the third.
Three women—former production assistant Miriam Haley, former model Kaja Sokola, and Jessica Mann, who aspired to become an actress—brought claims forward against Weinstein. These weren’t the most headline-grabbing of Weinstein’s dozens of reported offenses—no celebrities involved—but they were what ultimately brought him to justice in 2020 (as did a trial in Los Angeles, which Weinstein is appealing).
Weinstein’s attorneys were counting on the vastly different cultural moment we are in to protect the ex-mogul. As the New York Times put it, his lawyers bet that the “#MeToo movement had waned enough to cast doubt on the motives and credibility of his accusers.” Attorney Arthur Aidala previously said that the women who accused Weinstein were “were trying to take advantage of [him]”—because of the impact of the #MeToo movement. Weinstein has continued to deny the allegations against him.
While accusations against Weinstein sparked the #MeToo movement, they weren’t its sum-total. The movement led to the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, which allowed victims of years-old abuse to come forward—including musician Cassie, leading to Diddy’s ongoing trial today.
The jury is expected to return today to deliberate on the third charge. Whatever the outcome, #MeToo is bigger than Weinstein—but the movement can still count his partial verdict as a measured victory during a hostile political moment.
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
Spotify has found a new HR leader: Anna Lundström.
The native Swede and New York City dweller was appointed as CHRO of the music streaming giant in April of this year. She previously served as VP of HR, and has been with the company since 2016.
One of Lundström’s most notable contributions to the company so far was the formation of the company’s “work from anywhere” policy, which launched in 2021. A Spotify spokesperson previously toldFortune that the remote work strategy led to a 50% drop in attrition.
In her new role, Lundström oversees all aspects of the company’s human resources department, including people strategy, and managing a workforce of 7,000 employees across 180 markets. And her appointment comes at an exciting time for Spotify: the company celebrated its first full year of profitability since it was founded in 2008.
Lundström sat down with Fortune to discuss her vision for the CHRO role, plans to integrate AI into her department’s workflow, focusing on employee mental health, and connecting people strategy with business strategy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Fortune: What first brought you to Spotify?
Anna Lundström: I was with NASDAQ for almost a decade before joining Spotify. I still had about 20 years in HR, but was obviously working in more of a financial services environment. I loved it, but Spotify reached out and was just starting to expand in the U.S.
[Spotify] is obviously a product that I love and use, so that was important for me as I took my next step, but also the match with me being a Swede in the U.S. and being part of the Spotify journey and expansion here, was really attractive.
You’ve said that one of the goals is to make AI a key focus across the organization. How are you planning to integrate AI into your HR department?
My team partners closely with the product and technology team. A couple weeks ago, Gustav [Söderström], our chief product officer, and I, went out to the full organization with a set of guiding principles around not only the importance of AI, but [how] we are taking the learning approach.
A lot of companies are missing out [by] saying, ‘Get on the AI train!’ But they’re not really doing that. They just want to be fast and out there with the world.
We launched a set of trainings for our employees—everything from prompt trainings to more advanced ones, based on your role. It’s not about rolling out [AI]. It’s rolled out, and now everyone is working on learning.
Leaning fully into the learning, making our employees future ready, providing them with AI literacy skills—that will position them really well. We don’t know what the future will hold, but the bet we’re taking is making everyone AI ready.
In HR specifically, we have also been early adopters. We’ve had a couple of people analytics tools for about two years. Disco is one of them, which gives us real time data. So no more Excel spreadsheets. We go into a Disco feature we’ve built ourselves that gets real time attrition, engagement, and more. We have another platform, Echo, that is built on machine learning and serves as our internal LinkedIn.
What are some of your other priorities as CHRO?
Another big focus is mental health. We’re really leaning into that. We have doubled down on more support for our employees. This year we launched a new mental health platform that provides a more personalized experience, Modern Health. We believe that a sustainable and healthy workforce is a competitive advantage. Retaining our top talent is a massive focus of mine.
Culture is always evolving. Product and business have evolved a lot one year into profitability. For me, a genuine people experience is when you really tie people strategy to business strategy, and they are one.
One of Spotify’s hallmarks is its “Work from Anywhere” policy. How do you view the RTO debate in 2025?
Fun fact: My colleague, Alexander Westerdahl, and I were the architects of that policy. We launched early in 2021. One of our key success factors, as a product but also in our employee offerings, is that we do not look at other companies that much. Of course we set benchmarks. But we have always believed that we have really talented, driven employees with high agency—motivation to work hard, have fun and deliver on the results. Then we don’t necessarily care where you work from. What we have found in the years since we started “Work from Anywhere” is that we need to have those touch points where people come together.
We recently implemented what we call “Core Week,” which is one week per year when your core team comes together and you work from an office of your choosing. The whole purpose is coming together, working, socializing, and planning together.
What mistakes do you think leaders are making when it comes to RTO?
When we launched Work from Anywhere, we said that [companies] need to do what’s right for their business. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. If you really trust and respect your employees, as long as you’re able to explain the reasoning, then you can pick whatever works for you.
Which Spotify benefits are you most proud of?
Parental leave is huge. Our employees love it. Six months, all paid. For all parents: men, women, same sex couples, those carrying a child via surrogacy—it’s for everyone.
One of our most beloved ones is what we call Wellness Week. That came out of the pandemic. Everyone was at home and getting Zoom fatigue. So we came up with an idea to offer one week where the whole company is off. So now we are, for the fifth year in a row, closing all our offices in the first week of November. All 7,500 people, including executive management—no emails, no slacks, no WhatsApp. People go and spend their time recharging, being with their families.
People love that because usually, when you’re on vacation, you come back to a full inbox and a long to-do list. But here, everyone’s off at the same time.
Sometimes CHROs can be left out of conversations around the C-suite. What is your relationship like to the other executive leaders at Spotify?
One of the key success factors of being an effective HR professional, at all levels, is obviously your capability to build relationships, to harness the relationships, act with high integrity. But it’s also about being able to connect the dots between business, product priorities and people strategy—that’s high level.
I’ve been with the company for 10 years. I’ve supported almost all teams in the organization. I know the business and product inside and out. I’ve spent a lot of time with our C-suite and executive team.
Once a week, the “E-team,” or executive team, meets for three hours every Tuesday afternoon. We discuss top priorities, how we’re tracking progress on these priorities, people and culture items, whatever that may be. That has made us so connected and collaborative and fast as an organization. I feel extremely well positioned for the job based on my tenure here and where I’ve worked in the organization and the relationships I’ve had.
“I thought I was never going to raise that fund,” said Senkut. “I had my first son coming, and it was a really tough time…So, when I heard that first ‘yes,’ I thought it was a miracle.”
The year was 2009, and Aydin Senkut—a Turkish immigrant who’d first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1995—had been investing since he left Google in 2005, where he’d been the company’s first product manager and was official employee number 63. He wanted to prove he wasn’t just lucky, but that he could engineer luck, both for himself and for others. Determined to build something from scratch like his entrepreneurial parents, Senkut in 2006 launched Felicis Ventures, a firm named after the Latin word for “good fortune.” His fortune wasn’t very good at first, as he tells it—rejected by former Google colleagues almost unanimously, he forged ahead fundraising, drowning in nos. That first institutional fundraise, finally, pulled together $41 million, with early backers like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. At a moment when little else was in his control, Senkut focused on what he could: his business card.
“I was so into details, like Steve Jobs,” laughed Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis. “I literally found this specific printing shop in South San Francisco. They were the only ones that took heavy card stock and embossed business cards.”
He still keeps that card—it’s even got a QR code that to this day, links back to his contact information. Now, three logos, nearly 20 years, and nine funds later: Felicis has raised its tenth fund at $900 million, the firm’s largest to date, Fortune can exclusively report. It comes two years after the firm announced its ninth fund of $825 million in 2023, and the size of the 35-person team has remained consistent since. The firm’s current portfolio includes Notion, Plaid, and Canva, along with AI startups like Supabase, Mercor, Runway, Poolside, Revel, and Skild AI. Credit Karma, Adyen, Shopify, and Weights & Biases are some of Felicis’s key exits over the years. But Senkut remains acutely attuned to the version of himself that was rejected by dozens of other VCs and LPs at the very beginning.
“You can do one of two things,” he said. “You can either admit defeat, let people put you in a box, like you’re a loser. Or you can take that and say ‘No, I’m not a loser.’ And the way to show them they’re wrong is that you have to pull magic tricks out of nowhere…That’s why there will never be a victory lap.”
Senkut is often described as being in “founder mode”—a term originated via Brian Chesky and Paul Graham to describe a relentless, hands-on leadership style. That ethos carries through in how Felicis engages with startups: The firm includes a unique clause in its term sheets promising never to vote against a founder, contractually aligning itself with the entrepreneur.
“We kept saying we were founder-friendly,” said Senkut. “One of our founders was like: What the hell does that even mean? Just commit. So, it’s now in our term sheet.”
I tell Senkut that I could easily see that going wrong, and he doesn’t flinch.
“It could go really wrong,” he said. “We’ve made hundreds of investments and there were only two in the history of Felicis where things have gone drastically wrong. But you can’t be successful on fear. You’ll only be successful on the companies that work out…That’s the most misunderstood aspect of venture. People think we sit at a table, eliminating risk. And no, actually—you’re taking it on. You’re running into the risk. It’s like F1. One driver says, ‘I can crash, but that’s what it’s gonna take to cut another 0.01 second and get over the finish line first.’ That’s the mindset.”
Felicis was notably active during the ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) era, when markets were frothy and valuations were especially high. According to prior TechCrunch reporting, Felicis funded 50% more deals in 2022 than in 2021. Senkut isn’t worried how that might shake out—that’s part of the race, too.
“If you’re not active, you’re actually going backwards,” he told Fortune. “We can’t say that we’ll just sit it out for a while: Nobody’s going to care about you in nine months. So we never stop investing…The big fabric that people are missing is this: The only thing that matters in this business is not the stages, ownership, whatever. It’s all about how you look after you invest. Is there a hockey stick growth?”
One of the most dramatic growth stories in AI right now is recruiting startup Mercor, which raised a $100 million Series B led by Felicis in February. Mercor CEO and cofounder Brendan Foody wasn’t planning to raise at the time—but when Felicis invited him and his cofounders to race Ferraris in Las Vegas, he figured, “why not?”
“They’ve got incredible hustle—like very few other firms,” Foody told Fortune. “They asked what valuation we thought made sense, we gave them a range of $1 billion to $2 billion, and they went straight to the top. We closed the deal.”
Foody sees Felicis as uniquely poised to help Mercor—whose revenue surpassed $75 million over about two years—in its next phase of growth, citing the firm’s deep understanding of frontier AI research and hiring help. Felicis managing partner Sundeep Peechu and partner James Detweiler have been taking calls with “almost every candidate” as Mercor has been hiring, Foody said. The firm doesn’t disclose ownership, but told Fortune it varies—Mercor was the largest check of Felicis’s last fund at $50 million, while the smallest was $100,000.
Supporting these types of AI companies is key to Felicis’s future and, to this end, the firm this year hired OpenAI’s Peter Deng as a general partner. (Deng was a consumer VP leading the team working on ChatGPT.) Katie Reister, Felicis managing director and GP of fund of funds investing, said that Felicis is actively making choices to stay competitive in a venture space that, over the last two decades, has become more ferociously competitive.
“We’re constantly evolving what our platform looks like, and does it match the game that’s being played today,” said Reister, who was a Felicis LP herself for seven years while an SVB director. “I actually don’t like to think of venture as gambling, so that’s not the association I’m making. I think of it as getting to play a game over and over, but the game changes every time. How do you keep winning? You have to constantly change. You have to be aware of that, recognize that ego doesn’t matter. The fact you’ve won before doesn’t matter.”
To win, Felicis is ultimately looking to underwrite without reservation, going all-in, come what may. Data bears this out: In fund nine, 94% of Felicis’s investments were at the seed or Series A stage, and 87% of the capital deployed went into rounds where the firm led or co-led. They expect a similar breakdown for fund ten. When Senkut was raising the first institutional Felicis fund, he heard 50 nos before landing his first yes—from Judith Elsea, managing director at Weathergage Capital.
“Felicis has reinvented itself from a small, scrappy seed stage investor to a large, scrappy multi-stage investor who regularly leads deals,” says Elsea.
While startup investors often catch an “innovation wave” and reap big profits, Elsea wrote Fortune in an email, the VCs who stay relevant are the ones who are already paddling out for the next wave as the first one reaches the beach: “Being a VC investor is hard to do well and particularly hard to do well over long periods of time. Felicis is showing that kind of stamina.”
Senkut goes to waves too, and we talk about the HBO series, The 100 Foot Wave. You have to be ready to wipe out seriously in order to succeed spectacularly.
“If you ask me, like, our biggest fail mode is we need to take more smart risks,” said Senkut. “So, you have to really unwind your brain, like that surfer in Portugal. I used to say we’re wave surfers. But I realized there are too many good surfers, and too many waves. So, now I’m saying we’re tsunami surfers.”
A string of recent cyberattacks and data breaches involving the systems of major retailers have started affecting shoppers.
United Natural Foods, a wholesale distributor that supplies Whole Foods and other grocers, said this week that a breach of its systems was disrupting its ability to fulfill orders — leaving many stores without certain items.
In the U.K., consumers could not order from the website of Marks & Spencer for more than six weeks — and found fewer in-store options after hackers targeted the British clothing, home goods and food retailer. A cyberattack on Co-op, a U.K. grocery chain, also led to empty shelves in some stores.
Cyberattacks have been on the rise across industries. But infiltrations of corporate technology carry their own set of implications when the target is a consumer-facing business.
Beyond potentially halting sales of physical goods, breaches can expose customers’ personal data to future phishing or fraud attempts.
Here’s what you need to know.
Cyberattacks are on the rise overall
Despite ongoing efforts from organizations to boost their cybersecurity defenses, experts note that cyberattacks continue to increase across the board.
In the past year, there’s also been an “uptick in the retail victims” of such attacks, said Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit.
“Cyber criminals are moving a little quicker than we are in terms of securing our systems,” he said.
Ransomware attacks — in which hackers demand a hefty payment to restore hacked systems — account for a growing share of cyber crimes, experts note. And of course, retail isn’t the only affected sector. Tracking by NCC Group, a global cybersecurity and software escrow firm, showed that industrial businesses were most often targeted for ransomware attacks in April, followed by companies in the “consumer discretionary” sector.
Attackers know there’s a particular impact when going after well-known brands and products that shoppers buy or need every day, experts note.
“Creating that chaos and that panic with consumers puts pressure on the retailer,” Steinhauer said, especially if there’s a ransom demand involved.
Ade Clewlow, an associate director and senior adviser at the NCC Group, points specifically to food supply chain disruptions. Following the cyberattacks targeting M&S and Co-op, for example, supermarkets in remote areas of the U.K., where inventory already was strained, saw product shortages.
“People were literally going without the basics,” Clewlow said.
Personal data is also at risk
Along with impacting business operations, cyber breaches may compromise customer data. The information can range from names and email addresses, to more sensitive data like credit card numbers, depending on the scope of the breach. Consumers therefore need to stay alert, according to experts.
“If (consumers have) given their personal information to these retailers, then they just have to be on their guard. Not just immediately, but really going forward,” Clewlow said, noting that recipients of the data may try to commit fraud “downstream.”
Fraudsters might send look-alike emails asking a retailer’s account holders to change their passwords or promising fake promotions to get customers to click on a sketchy link. A good rule of thumb is to pause before opening anything and to visit the company’s recognized website or call an official customer service hotline to verify the email, experts say.
It’s also best not to reuse the same passwords across multiple websites — because if one platform is breached, that login information could be used to get into other accounts, through a tactic known as “credential stuffing.” Steinhauer adds that using multifactor authentication, when available, and freezing your credit are also useful for added lines of defense.
Which companies have reported recent cybersecurity incidents?
A range of consumer-facing companies have reported cybersecurity incidents recently — including breaches that have caused some businesses to halt operations.
United Natural Foods, a major distributor for Whole Foods and other grocers across North America, took some of its systems offline after discovering “unauthorized activity” on June 5.
In a securities filing, the company said the incident had impacted its “ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders.” United Natural Foods said in a Wednesday update that it was “working steadily” to gradually restore the services.
Still, that’s meant leaner supplies of certain items this week. A Whole Foods spokesperson told The Associated Press via email that it was working to restock shelves as soon as possible. The Amazon-owned grocer’s partnership with United Natural Foods currently runs through May 2032.
Meanwhile, a security breach detected by Victoria’s Secret last month led the popular lingerie seller to shut down its U.S. shopping site for nearly four days, as well as to halt some in-store services. Victoria’s Secret later disclosed that its corporate systems also were affected, too, causing the company to delay the release of its first quarter earnings.
Several British retailers — M&S, Harrods and Co-op — have all pointed to impacts of recent cyberattacks. The attack targeting M&S, which was first reported around Easter weekend, stopped it from processing online orders and also emptied some store shelves.
The company estimated last month that the it would incur costs of 300 million pounds ($400 million) from the attack. But progress towards recovery was shared Tuesday, when M&S announced that some of its online order operations were back — with more set to be added in the coming weeks.
Other breaches exposed customer data, with brands like Adidas, The North Face and reportedly Cartier all disclosing that some contact information was compromised recently.
In a statement, The North Face said it discovered a “small-scale credential stuffing attack” on its website in April. The company reported that no credit card data was compromised and said the incident, which impacted 1,500 consumers, was “quickly contained.”
Meanwhile, Adidas disclosed last month that an “unauthorized external party” obtained some data, which was mostly contact information, through a third-party customer service provider.
Whether or not the incidents are connected is unknown. Experts like Steinhauer note that hackers sometimes target a piece of software used by many different companies and organizations. But the range of tactics used could indicate the involvement of different groups.
Companies’ language around cyberattacks and security breaches also varies — and may depend on what they know when. But many don’t immediately or publicly specify whether ransomware was involved.
Still, Steinhauer says the likelihood of ransomware attacks is “pretty high” in today’s cybersecurity landscape — and key indicators can include businesses taking their systems offline or delaying financial reporting.
Overall, experts say it’s important to build up “cyber hygiene” defenses and preparations across organizations.
“Cyber is a business risk, and it needs to be treated that way,” Clewlow said.
Good morning. The dual role of chief financial officer and chief operating officer is becoming more common, and the experiences of two industry-leading executives demonstrate that the CFO and COO positions can be complementary.
When Gina Goetter joined Hasbro—the largest publicly traded toymaker in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world—in 2023, she was hired as both CFO and COO, a combination that immediately drew her interest. It was her second CFO role, following her time at Harley-Davidson.
Earlier in Goetter’s career at General Mills, she developed the view that finance is inherently operational. “I was kind of born and bred into this mindset that every operational decision is linked to a financial one—they just go hand in hand,” she explained during a panel session at the Fortune COO Summit on Tuesday.
Hasbro has the same philosophy, Goetter said. “When you’re working with a company that is manufacturing a product, that is making real cost decisions—real investment decisions—there is no path that isn’t either operational or financial,” she said.
Panelist Amrita Ahuja, CFO and COO of Block, a Fortune 500 fintech company, shared that during the first half of her career, she was much more of a generalist, starting in strategy and corporate development. The second half of her career focused on finance, where she developed strong analytical skills and a passion for driving insights from data.
Ahuja joined Block in 2019, later adding COO responsibilities in 2023. The company offers customers financial options such as payment plans through Afterpay, various lending choices for Square sellers, and the ability for Cash App users to split paycheck deposits among cash, Bitcoin, or stocks.
In addition to overseeing finance, Ahuja leads the legal and people functions, oversees communications and policy, and serves as chair of Square Financial Services, the company’s industrial bank.
Of the dual CFO-COO role, Goetter explained: “It’s very blended. You can’t do one without the other, and I find combining them actually creates a lot of simplicity across the organization.”
Are there some complexities in serving in the dual role? “The tension in the role is aspiration and discipline,” Ahuja noted. As CFO, you advocate for growth while ensuring responsible capital allocation, she explained. As COO, you enable the business to move quickly but responsibly. “No COO role is alike,” she said.
Some large companies are going beyond the dual CFO-COO role and combining the functions to create a hybrid position. Bridging finance and operations is strategic in an increasingly complex business environment.
You can watch the Fortune COO Summit panel session here.
Scammers disguised as thousands of fake students are flooding colleges across the U.S. with enrollment applications. The “students” are registering under stolen or fabricated identities, getting accepted to schools, and then vanishing with financial aid and college-minted email addresses that give the fraudsters a veneer of legitimacy.
Dr. Jeannie Kim went to sleep thinking about budgets and enrollment challenges. She woke up to discover her college had been invaded by an army of phantom students.
“When we got hit in the fall, we got hit hard,” Kim, president of California’s Santiago Canyon College, told Fortune. “They were occupying our waitlists and they were in our classrooms as if they were real humans—and then our real students were saying they couldn’t get into the classes they needed.”
Kim worked quickly to bring in an AI firm to help protect the college and strengthen its guardrails, she said. Santiago Canyon wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students, said Kim. By spring 2025, ghost student enrollments had dropped from 14,000 since the start of the spring term to fewer than 3,000.
Ghost students
Across America’s community colleges and universities, sophisticated criminal networks are using AI to deploy thousands of “synthetic” or “ghost” students—sometimes in the dead of night—to attack colleges. The hordes are cramming themselves into registration portals to enroll and illegally apply for financial aid. The ghost students then occupy seats meant for real students—and have even resorted to handing in homework just to hold out long enough to siphon millions in financial aid before disappearing.
The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House’s Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure’s client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts.
“Imagine a world where 20% of the student population are fraudulent,” said Burris. “That’s the reality of the scale.”
At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. “It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school’s enrollment system,” said Burris.
The scheme has also proven incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire, the DOE announced this month that it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms.
“Every dollar stolen by a ghost is a dollar denied to a real student attempting to change their life,” Burris explained. “That’s a misallocation of public capital we really can’t afford.”
Under siege
The strikes tend to unfold in the quiet evening hours when campuses are asleep, and with surgical precision, explained Laqwacia Simpkins, CEO of AMSimpkins & Associates, an edtech firm that works with colleges and universities to verify student identities with a fraud-detection platform called SAFE.
Bryce Pustos, director of administrative systems at Chaffey Community College, recalled last fall’s enrollment period when faculty members reported going to bed with zero students registered for classes and waking up to find a full class and a mile-long waitlist.
Michael Fink, Chaffey’s chief technology officer, said the attacks took place at scale and within minutes. “We’ll see things like 50 applications coming in within two seconds and then somebody enrolling in all 36 seats in a class within the first minute,” Fink told Fortune.
Simpkins told Fortune the scammers have learned to strike on vulnerable days on the academic calendar, around holidays, enrollment deadlines, culmination, or at the start or end of term when staff are already stretched thin or systems are more loosely monitored.
“They push through hundreds and thousands of records at the same time and overwhelm the staff,” Simpkins said.
Plus, enrollment workers and faculty are just that, noted Simpkins; they’re educators who aren’t trained in detecting fraud. Their remit is focused on access and ensuring real students can get into the classes they need, she added, not policing fraud and fake students who are trying to trick their way to illicit financial gain. That aspect also makes the institutions more vulnerable to harm, said Simpkins.
“These are people who are admissions counselors who process applications and want to be able to admit students and give everybody an equal chance at an education,” she said.
Sadly, professors have dealt with cruel whiplash from the attacks, noted John Van Weeren, vice president of higher education at IT consulting firm Voyatek.
“One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section,” recalled Van Weeren. “When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people.”
Follow the FAFSA
In a nightmare twist, community and technical colleges are seen as low-hanging fruit for this fraud scheme precisely because of how they’ve been designed to serve and engage with local communities and the public with as few barriers to entry as possible. Community colleges are often required to accept every eligible student and typically don’t charge fees for applying. While financial-aid fraud isn’t at all new, the fraud rings themselves have evolved from pandemic-era cash grabs and boogeyman in their mom’s basement, said Burris.
“There is an acceleration due to the proliferation of these automated technologies,” he said. “These are organized criminal enterprises—fraud rings—that are coming both from within the U.S., but also internationally.”
Maurice Simpkins, president and co-founder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi, Kenya that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges.
The attacks specifically zero in on coursework that maximizes financial-aid eligibility, said Mike McCandless, vice president of student services at Merced College. Social sciences and online-only classes with large numbers of students that allow for as many credits or units as possible are often choice picks, he said.
For the spring semester, Merced booted about half of the 15,000 initial registrations that were fraudulent. Among the next tranche of about 7,500, some 20% were caught and removed from classes, freeing up space for real students.
The human cost
In addition to financial theft, the ghost student epidemic is causing real students to get locked out of classes they need to graduate. Oftentimes, students have planned their work or child-care schedule around classes they intend to take—and getting locked out has led to a cascade of impediments.
“When you have fraudulent people taking up seats in classes, you have actual students who need to take those classes who can’t now, and it’s a barrier,” said Pustos.
The scheme continues to evolve, however, requiring constant changes to the algorithms schools are using to detect ghost students and prevent them from applying for financial aid—making the problem all the more explosive. Multiple school officials and cybersecurity experts interviewed by Fortune were reluctant to disclose the current signs of ghost students, for fear of the scheme further iterating.
In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.
Maurice Simpkins noted an uptick this year in the use of American stolen identities as more schools have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the fraud rings. He’s seen college graduates who have had their identities stolen get re-enrolled at their former university, or have had their former education email address used to enroll at another institution.
Scammers are also using bizarre-looking short-term and disposable email addresses to register for classes in a 10-minute period before they can get their hands on a .edu email address, said Simpkins. That verified email address is “like a gold bar,” Simpkins explained. The fraudster then appears legitimate going forward and is eligible for student discounts on hardware, software, and can use the college’s cloud storage.
“We had a school that reached out to us because some fraudsters ordered some computers and devices and other materials and then had them delivered overseas,” said Simpkins. “And they did it using an account with the school’s .edu email address.”
McCandless said initially it was easy to tell if a fake student was disguised as a local applicant because their IP address was generated overseas. But just a few semesters later, IP addresses were local. When the college’s tech team looked deeper, they would find the address was from an abandoned building or somewhere in the middle of Lake Merced.
Every time the school did something to lock out fraudulent applicants, the scammers would learn and tweak, McCandless said. The school’s system is now designed to block ghost applicants right out of the gate and at multiple stages before they start enrolling in classes.
McCandless said professors are assigning students homework for the first day of class, but the ghost students are completing the assignments with AI. Faculty have caught the fake homework, however, by noticing that half the class handed in identical work, or detecting the use of ChatGPT, for instance.
“They’re very innovative, very good at what they do,” said McCandless. “I just think the consistency with which they continue to learn and improve—it’s a multimillion-dollar scheme, there’s money there, why wouldn’t you invest in it?”
‘Rampant fraud‘
According to the DOE, the rate of financial fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that “imperils the federal student assistance programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act.” In a statement, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the new temporary fix will help prevent identity theft fraud.
“When rampant fraud is taking aid away from eligible students, disrupting the operations of colleges, and ripping off taxpayers, we have a responsibility to act,” said McMahon.
Ultimately, what schools are trying to do is put in place hurdles that make it unappealing for scammers to attack because they have to do more front-end work to make the fraud scheme efficient, explained Jesse Gonzalez, assistant vice chancellor of IT services at Rancho Santiago. However, the schools are attempting to balance the delicate issue of accepting everyone eligible and remaining open to vulnerable or undocumented students, he said. “The more barriers you put in place, the more you’re going to impact students and it’s usually the students who need the most help.”
Dr. Kim from Santiago Canyon College fears too many measures in place to root out fraud could make it more difficult for students and members of the community—who for various reasons might have a new email, phone number, or address—to access education and other resources that can help them improve their lives.
“Our ability to provide that democratic education to those that would not otherwise have access is at stake and it’s in jeopardy because of these bad actors turning our system into their own piggy banks,” said Kim. “We have to continue to figure out ways to keep them out so the students can have those rightful seats—and keep it open access.”
An Air India passenger plane bound for London with more than 240 people on board crashed Thursday in India’s northwestern city of Ahmedabad, the airline said.
Visuals on local television channels showed smoke billowing from the crash site in what appeared to be a populated area near the airport in Ahmedabad, a city with a population of more than 5 million and the capital of Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state.
Firefighters doused the smoking wreckage of the plane, which would have been fully loaded with fuel shortly after takeoff, and adjacent multi-story buildings with water. Charred bodies lay on the ground.
“The scenes emerging of a London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city of Ahmedabad are devastating,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement.
Modi called the crash “heartbreaking beyond words.”
“In this sad hour, my thoughts are with everyone affected,” he said in a social media post.
The airline said the Gatwick Airport-bound flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew. Of those, Air India said there were 169 Indians, 53 Britons, seven Portuguese and one Canadian.
Faiz Ahmed Kidwai, the director general of the directorate of civil aviation, told The Associated Press that Air India flight AI 171, a Boeing 787-8, crashed into a residential area called Meghani Nagar five minutes after taking off at 1:38 p.m. local time. He said 244 people were on board and it was not immediately possible to reconcile the discrepancy with Air India’s numbers.
All efforts were being made to ensure medical aid and relief support at the site, India’s Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu posted on X.
The 787 Dreamliner is a widebody, twin-engine plane. This is the first crash ever of a Boeing 787 aircraft, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.
Boeing said it was aware of the reports of the crash and was “working to gather more information.”
The aircraft was introduced in 2009 and more than 1,000 have been delivered to dozens of airlines, according to the flightradar24 website.
Air India’s chairman, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, said at the moment “our primary focus is on supporting all the affected people and their families.”
He said on X that the airline had set up an emergency center and support team for families seeking information about those who were on the flight.
“Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of all those affected by this devastating event,” he said.
British Cabinet minister Lucy Powell said the government will provide “all the support that it can” to those affected by the crash.
“This is an unfolding story, and it will undoubtedly be causing a huge amount of worry and concern to the many, many families and communities here and those waiting for the arrival of their loved ones,” she told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
“We send our deepest sympathy and thoughts to all those families, and the government will provide all the support that it can with those in India and those in this country as well,” she added.
Britain has very close ties with India. There were nearly 1.9 million people in the country of Indian descent, according to the 2021 U.K. census.
The last major passenger plane crash in India was in 2020 when an Air India Express Boeing-737 skidded off a hilltop runway in southern India, killing 21 people.
The worst air disaster in India was on Nov. 12, 1996, when a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight collided midair with a Kazakhastan Airlines Flight near Charki Dadri in Haryana state, killing all 349 on board the two planes.
The crash comes days before the opening of the Paris Air Show, a major aviation expo where Boeing and European rival Airbus will showcase their aircraft and battle for jet orders from airline customers.
Boeing has been in recovery mode for more than six years after Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 Max 8, plunged into the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. Five months later, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing 737 Max 8, crashed after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, killing 157 passengers and crew members.
Shares of Boeing Co. tumbled nearly 9% before trading opened in the U.S.
The impact of tariffs will depend on who bears their cost, says Jeff Klingelhofer, managing director at Aristotle Pacific—but it doesn’t have to be the consumer, who is “tapped out.” Corporations can better handle an import tax hit because margins “have never been higher,” he says.
With U.S.-China talks ending in essentially a tariff stasis, investors are once again looking at the economy to figure out just how much of a shock the tariffs are going to be.
“The system is incredibly, incredibly fragile,” Jeff Klingelhofer, managing director and portfolio manager at Aristotle Pacific, told Fortune. However, the amount of shock tariffs ultimately deliver will depend on who bears the cost, he said.
Typically, that’s the end user. Importers and economists have for months been saying that the consumer usually pays the cost of import taxes.
“Most suppliers are passing through tariffs at full value to us,” a chemical products company told the Institute of Supply Management in a survey last month. “[T]axes always get passed through to the customer.” Studies of the 2018-2019 tariffs, which were much smaller, found nearly 100% of the added costs were passed on to the consumer. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that tariffs will cost the typical household $2,836 over the year.
Except, Klingelhofer said, this time could really be different.
“It doesn’t have to be the U.S. consumer” that pays tariffs. “You’re likely to see companies ultimately bear more of the pain of tariffs than consumers.”
Indeed, after absorbing four years’ worth of price hikes and shrinkflation on everything from household staples to housing, consumers may not be able to take much more pain. A record 77% are holding some debt, according to the Federal Reserve.
“The state of consumers is tapped out,” Klingelhofer said. However, “Corporate balance sheets are incredibly strong — margins have essentially never been higher in the history of humankind.”
Indeed, corporate profits as a portion of national income, a figure that never exceeded the single-digits until about two decades ago, surged to a record 13.6% in 2021. At they start of this year, they were just slightly lower, at 12.8%.
Companies have an additional incentive to absorb the cost of at least some of the tariffs, he said—the president, whom CEOs have been loath to cross, is watching. Trump’s spat with Walmart in May, directing the retailer to “eat” the cost of tariffs, is a prime example of the type of public policy via social media Klingelhofer said will be much more common if tariffs start to get passed on.
While the exact level of tariffs that companies, consumers and everyone else will pay is still up in the air, Klingelhofer says the direction is clear: “iIt’s going up notably.”
“I find it very hard to believe we exit this presidency with tariffs anywhere below the low teens, versus 1.7% of GDP,” their average level at the beginning of 2025, he said.
Kroger, whose CEO Rodney McMullen is pictured here in 2024, was one of many large companies accused of running up margins during the post-pandemic inflation surge.
Over a two-year span, the Southern Co.’s Plant Vogtle power complex repeatedly made history, potentially changing the entire economics of the nuclear industry with a new uranium fuel.
In 2023, Georgia’s Vogtle brought online the nation’s first new nuclear reactor built from scratch in more than three decades. Last year, a second new reactor turned on, transforming Vogtle into the nation’s second-largest power station.
Now, one of Vogtle’s legacy reactors quietly marked another major nuclear milestone that experts say could shake up the rules for the industry.
Engineers loaded the old reactor with a new type of uranium fuel enriched above the traditional threshold and designed to withstand all kinds of accidents, last longer without refueling, and generate less radioactive waste. In April, the reactor powered up to full capacity, becoming the first commercial reactor in the U.S. to run on next-generation fuel.
It’s the first time in U.S. history a commercial reactor is running on fuel enriched above 5%. That may not sound like much, but many industry analysts recognize the redesigned uranium fuel as a monumental step change for the nuclear sector.
“This is enabling us to get more out of those existing reactors than in the past,” Jonathan Chavers, Southern’s director of nuclear fuel and analysis, told Fortune exclusively. “It’s a significant game changer for the industry.”
There’s a lot of excitement in the nuclear world now with the Trump administration promising to remove nuclear regulatory hurdles and new nuclear technologies ready to take hold, including small modular reactors that use coolants other than water. These are considered fourth-generation models in a world where most reactors in use are second or third gen.
Asked whether the leap from traditional uranium fuel to the pellets Southern (ranked 161 in the Fortune 500) rolled out this spring represented the same jump in technology from third to fourth gen, Ken Petersen, the former president of the American Nuclear Society, laughed.
“This is like going from a Generation I to a Generation IV,” said Petersen, a retired fuel executive from Constellation, the nation’s largest nuclear utility. “It’s really breathtaking. We’re breaking barriers.”
What’s not clear is how widely adopted the new fuel could be in the short term with existing nuclear facilities other than Vogtle. Companies may not want to make the financial investment for older reactors.
Brett Rampal, a nuclear engineer and consultant who previously worked on core design at Westinghouse, called the new fuel program a “big waste of time”—for now.
“As a guy who sold fuel to existing reactor operators, it didn’t matter what I was selling to my customer or utility. It didn’t matter what improvement to the fuel there was,” he said. “The bottom line they asked me is, ‘You’re going to sell this to me at the same price, right?’ Why would we sell you new and improved fuel for the same price? Then they’d say, ‘We’re not interested.’”
How it works
The nuclear fuel that goes into reactors is not the same uranium that comes out of the ground. Once mined, uranium ore is crushed, sorted and compacted into yellowcake, which is then converted into uranium hexafluoride through a chemical process. That grayish solid material is put through a centrifuge to enrich a small percentage of the uranium into uranium-235, the unstable isotope that can split to release energy in the form of heat.
At the end of the enrichment process, gummy bear-sized pellets of fuel are loaded into fuel assemblies like PEZ candy in a dispenser and placed into a reactor that can spark the chain reaction called atom splitting, and the resulting heat is harnessed.
At that point, a nuclear power plant functions just like the coal-fired stations that came before it: the heat turns water into steam that spins turbines and generates electricity.
Since the dawn of the nuclear industry in the U.S., the enrichment process has capped the amount of U-235 present in the fuel at 5%—an artificial industry threshold set decades ago and retained out of what experts said was a sense of inertia in an industry whose tight rules offered little room for innovation. All the atomic energy contained in the other 95% of the uranium that isn’t split contributes to the leftover radioactive waste at the end of the fuel cycle.
In 2012, the year after the Fukushima disaster crushed public support for nuclear power, Congress established the Department of Energy’s accident-tolerant fuel program. At the time, Plant Vogtle was preparing to start construction on the first Westinghouse AP1000, a new generation of reactor with safety features that made a meltdown like the one in Japan almost impossible. The fuel program promised to make uranium pellets themselves that much safer.
The pellets are “doped,” meaning the uranium blend in the nuggets of fuel is modified with materials such as chromium oxide and alumina to improve performance under high heat.
In other words: all the highly radioactive materials that form during the fission process are better contained in the new fuel.
But the next breakthrough in Southern’s novel fuel is newer. The actual cladding in the fuel assemblies—the part that you load the candy into in a PEZ dispenser—is now coated in a zirconium alloy that can withstand more intense heat.
“That helps the rod protect itself in a high-temperature environment,” Chavers said. “[Let’s] say a Fukushima-style event occurred at a nuclear reactor. The coating would protect the rod for an additional amount of time so we could get cooling into the core.”
With those features in place, the reactor can run hotter, allowing it to burn up more U-235. That means the new fuel can be enriched higher—up to 8%. It may not sound like a lot, but the effect is nuclear reactors that must be refueled every 18 months can instead run for 24 months or longer without taking costly breaks to swap out the rods of uranium pellets.
Still, of all the major commercial nuclear operators Fortune contacted to ask about Southern’s breakthrough, none indicated immediate plans to buy the new fuel.
While the new fuel could be commercially manufactured relatively soon, commercial versions of the so-called cladding are likely at least a decade away, according to Southern.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the owner of California’s last nuclear plant Diablo Canyon, said it “remained focused on operating to 2030 with our current fuel design.” New Jersey-based PSEG declined to comment.
The Tennessee Valley authority said only that it “supports accident-tolerant fuels developments” and believes “Southern’s achievement is a good step towards bringing higher assay fuels to market.” Xcel Energy called the milestone “a significant achievement that will enhance safety and reliability,” but declined to say whether it would buy the fuel.
On the other hand, Virginia’s Dominion Energy said it was “considering using [fuel] similar to what’s being piloted by Southern.”
And, while Baltimore-based Constellation said it had “no current timeline for the large-scale use of newer fuels” in its reactors, the nuclear utility said, “We would deploy these newer fuels in our reactors once they make the transition from research and development to a commercial offering.”
New nuclear plants won’t come online anytime soon, so maximizing existing facilities is critical. “If you look at U.S. capacity factors, we’re higher than anybody else,” Petersen said. “We’re pushing up against those limits, and that’s why we need this additional enrichment.”
A new class of young graduates is getting ready to enter the workforce this summer, but they’re likely to face a chilly reception.
In one social media post after another, entry-level workers are bemoaning the state of the labor market and how hard it is to find a job. “It feels more likely to win the lottery right now than get a job,” said one young TikTok poster. “This is not what I expected,” said another young woman on Instagram as she held a stack of resumes and wiped tears from her eyes. “But I can’t be delusional anymore, I literally need to make money.”
The current labor market appears strong on the surface—unemployment is still low at 4.2%, wage growth is steady, and the U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. A deeper look beneath the surface reveals a much different jobs market for entry-level workers. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22-27 was 5.8% as of March, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And a May report from Oxford Economics found that 85% of unemployment since the middle of 2023 could be attributed to people just entering the workforce.
“Top-line job openings and unemployment statistics aren’t, in practice, reflecting the experience of new grads entering the workforce,” Mischa Fisher, an economist at Udemy, a provider of online training courses, tells Fortune. “Because entry-level roles are in short supply.”
It’s no surprise, then, that employee confidence amongst entry-level workers just hit an all-time low, according to a recent report from Glassdoor. And more than half (56%) of this year’s college graduates feel pessimistic about starting their careers in the current economy, according to another survey from jobs platform Handshake.
A few different factors are likely contributing to such a tough job market for young people right now. Experts tell Fortune that a combination of factors including a cooling labor market, a hiring pullback prompted by shifting tariff policies, and the long-promised of integration of AI into the workforce, are all creating massive problems for a new generation of job seekers.
“There are now clear trends in the data, not just vague whisperings, that more and more people are getting left behind,” says Cory Stahle, an economist at hiring platform Indeed’s Hiring Lab.
The ‘lock-in’ effect
The COVID pandemic kicked off a major workforce reshuffling, unofficially dubbed the “Great Resignation,” during which workers were successfully able to switch jobs for higher wages.
But that era is long gone. The labor market has become more stagnant, and quit rates fell from 3% in March of 2022, the highest in over two decades, to around 2% as of April 2025, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Workers who switch roles are also less likely to make more money if they do so. People who stay in their jobs are seeing an average of 4.4% wage growth, while those who leave are getting just 4.3% more, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That lack of turnover means that there are fewer opportunities for entry level workers to nab a role. “We’re seeing the labor market’s version of the housing market’s ‘lock-in’ effect, where employees are too nervous to make moves,” says Fisher. “This freeze is blocking normal opportunity flow, so early career workers can’t break in, experienced workers can’t move up, and burned-out employees are staying put.”
Tariff uncertainty
Trump’s tariff policy changes, and their subsequent impact on the economy, is also creating problems for entry-level workers in the labor market.
With an uncertain economic outlook thanks to on-again-off-again levies for major U.S. trading partners, many companies have pulled back on hiring until they get further clarity on what kind of economy will take shape in 2025.
Around 30% of small and mid-size business owners say tariffs are directly impacting their organizations in a negative way, and 42% say they plan to pull back on hiring as a result, according to a May survey from coaching and advisory firm Vistage, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal.
“Business leaders are uncertain and when that happens they don’t do as much hiring because they don’t know what the next week is going to look like, let alone the next month,” says Allison Shrivastava, a labor economist also at Indeed’s Hiring Lab. “They’re going to wait, especially for those jobs in what we think of as, traditionally, white collar sectors, which are often difficult and costly to hire for.”
The new AI reality
The promise of AI has been a looming threat to human workers for years, but there are now signs that companies are using the new tech to take over work previously done by entry-level employees.
Many of the tasks that used to serve as a training ground for junior employees, like data entry, research, and handling basic customer or employee requests, are already being delegated to AI. Technical fields like computer science and finance are getting hit especially hard. While employment for people older than 27 in computer science and mathematical occupations has grown a modest 0.8% since 2022, employment for those aged 22-27, or recent graduates, has declined by 8%, according to a May report from labor market research firm Oxford Economics. That’s compared to college graduates in all other occupations, who saw 2% employment gains.
“We concluded that a high adoption rate by information companies along with the sheer employment declines in these roles since 2022 suggested some displacement effect from AI,” the report reads.
LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer Aneesh Raman, echoed that thought in a recent New York Times op-ed. “In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging—the ways junior developers gain experience,” he wrote.
Companies are under pressure from investors to show that they can do more with less because of AI, says Sam Kuhn, an economist at Appcast, a job advertising company. Cutting jobs, or freezing hiring, are ways to do that. “We are starting to see the ripple effects of companies that have invested a lot of money into artificial intelligence, wanting to show that they’re actually getting something out of it,” he says.
Meta reportedly plans to use AI to review the platform’s privacy and societal risks instead of human staffers.AtMicrosoft, CEO Satya Nadella said in April that around 30% of code is now written by AI, a reality that likely factored into recent layoffs. And the CEO of payments platform Klarna has openly admitted last month that AI helped the company cut its workforce by around 40%. AI company founders are also getting more candid; Dario Amondei, the CEO of leading AI company Anthropic, has said outright that the technology could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
“It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it,” he said. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
What’s a new grad to do?
New job seekers can comfort themselves with the knowledge that it’s not just their imagination—the hiring landscape really is tougher for them than it was a few years ago.
That means they need to be more resourceful than their predecessors when it comes to outsmarting the labor market. That might include things like pivoting their job search to consider other industries or roles outside of what they studied in school. They also need to work harder to show employers that the skills they learned in college are a perfect fit for a given role.
“In the current labor market, new graduates need to find additional signals of skill beyond just a degree,” says Fisher. “From certificates to demonstrated soft skills like communication, the candidates who stand out show they’re already bridging the gap between school and skills acquisition.”
Because the hiring process skews towards Zoom interviews and AI-driven recruiting, young people also need to take the initiative and reach out to hiring managers on their own, whether that’s on LinkedIn, at a local job fair, or tapping into an alumni network. “There are fewer opportunities now to engage on a human level with employers up front,” says Steve Rakas, executive director of the Masters Career Center at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.
There remains, however, a reason for young people to hold out hope. Labor market trends are cyclical, and there are still opportunities out there for young people who want them, notes Rakas—even if they’re not ideal.
“We’re coaching them to think about not just plan A, but also plan B, C and D,” he says. “To be pragmatic, and also to pivot.”
A new report by the World Bank claims global economic growth could slow to its weakest level since the 1960s. The report pointed to an environment of trade obstacles and tariff policy uncertainty as the underlying reason for sluggish growth as President Donald Trump continues to threaten tariffs against America’s biggest trading partners.
A new era of global tariffs spurred by President Donald Trump could make the 2020s the slowest decade of world economic growth on average in more than 50 years, claims a new report from the World Bank.
The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report, published Tuesday, paints a bleak picture of the world economy over the first seven years of the 2020s—although it stopped short of predicting another global recession such as that caused by the pandemic.
The international financial institution predicted 70% of the world’s economies would see lower-than-expected growth and that overall global growth would top out at 2.3% in 2025, nearly half-a-percentage-point lower than expected at the start of the year.
“The sharp increase in tariffs and the ensuing uncertainty are contributing to a broad-based growth slowdown and deteriorating prospects in most of the world’s economies,” the report states.
Although Trump was not mentioned by name in the report, one expert said the uncertainty the president has brought to U.S. trade policy as well as the possibility that burdensome tariffs could be implemented on major trading partners could play a major role in slowing world economic growth.
Tariffs will both raise prices for businesses and consumers, causing pressure on both the demand and supply side of the economy. This effect could cause customers to spend less and businesses to supply fewer products to those consumers, effects that ripple across economies. At worst, it could lead to stagflation, the double whammy of low growth and high inflation which plagued the U.S. economy during the 1970s, said Rebecca Homkes, a lecturer at London Business School and faculty at Duke Corporate Executive Education.
“If tariffs to the level the administration is proposing do go into effect, it will have a tangible and noticeable impact on the economy, and the U.S. economy has implications for the global economy,” Homkes told Fortune.
If countries are able to mitigate the effects of tariffs with trade deals such that tariff levels are halved from what was announced in May, a month after Trump’s so-called “liberation day,” world economic growth would increase 0.2 percentage points on average between 2025 and 2026, the World Bank wrote in its Tuesday report.
However, Homkes said the most pressing need right now is to decrease uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration’s careening policy decisions.
“Every time a tariff announcement or the possibility of a deal is announced, it’s met with a lot of skepticism that that’s going to be the same one in a few weeks, let alone a few years. So this level of uncertainty makes it incredibly difficult to plan, to model, to think about future growth, future jobs, hiring, etc.,” said Homkes.
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