• EXCLUSIVE: Tony Cheng rose up the corporate ladder at Reinsurance Group of America by embracing challenging roles early and credits his steady, decades-long career growth to continual learning, humility, and a willingness to take on responsibility. His leadership helped expand RGA’s presence in Asia and beyond, encouraging individuals looking to lead companies to always be open to continued growth.

It’s rare to be offered a big promotion and turn it down, but it’s even rarer to warn superiors you don’t feel prepared for the role and be appointed anyway.

Yet that’s precisely what happened to Reinsurance Group of America boss, Tony Cheng, in his early years with the business. Cheng has worked his way up the ranks of RGA over the past three decades, helping grow the company to its current position of $3.9 trillion of reinsurance covering active policyholders.

In 2025, RGA announced a landmark $1.5 billion deal with Equitable to reinsure $32 billion worth of life insurance policies, securing its place as an industry leader and expected to boost earnings for quarters come.

Sitting down for an exclusive interview with Fortune this summer, Cheng reflected on that all-important promotion to CEO, and the value of staying humble even in the C-suite.

The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tony, in an era where job-hopping is often seen as the fast track to career growth, you’ve chosen a different tactic—working up through RGA since 1997. Where did your work ethic come from, and what’s inspired your long-standing commitment to the company?

I was born in Hong Kong, and my parents—both teachers—felt for the future of their four kids (of which I was the youngest) Australia would provide the Western education they wanted. So I grew up in Australia from nine months to the age of 20 and didn’t travel overseas much.

My parents worked incredibly hard. Mom looked after the four kids and Dad unfortunately had to give up his love for teaching because it just wouldn’t pay the bills. Eventually they opened up small businesses and then we, the four kids, on the weekend would go work there—12 hour days—and didn’t think otherwise. That really bred in the sacrifice of the parents, the hard work, all things I’d wish to pass onto my kids.

Growing up as many of us in a Western country but very Asian family do, I think I went to Asia once in my life, so [I took] an opportunity to join RGA in 1997 in Malaysia. 

Between 1999 and 2002 you returned to the States to earn an MBA while working for RGA, before leaving to head up the Hong Kong office. When you arrived, you had a team of 10. The Asia Pacific region now has more than 1,000 employees and revenues of $4 billion. Are there untapped career opportunities in emerging markets as opposed to progressing in established regions?

We had a very small operation, but we were actually covering about 500 million people. It was Hong Kong and Southeast Asia so Malaysia, Thailand, all those countries. I went there as the actuary, and a year and a half later they promoted me to be the CEO of that business. It was daunting, right? 

The first time I was asked to take it by my boss, I sort of said, ‘No, I’m too young.’ At the time I was 29. He ignored that. 

The equation in my mind was I’ve probably got a 10% chance of success—and that would be great—or a 90% chance of failure, but hey, I’m gonna learn a hell of a lot. I had no mortgage, no kids, so just wanted to learn. Maybe that instinct, that desire and drive to keep learning was from my parents being teachers.

In its latest financial results RGA reported revenues of $22.1 billion. How has the start-up mentality you learned in Asia helped grow the business globally?

We built that business up with incredible hard work. I’d joke internally that once every month or so pest control would come in, and that meant we could go home at 5 o’clock because what else were we going to do with ourselves? That was the spirit. In the early days, you solve problems. I’d say to the team: ‘Let’s just try. We know it’s really hard, but let’s just try.’

In the U.S., people usually don’t create new products or create new things because the market’s so big, a lot of it’s already played out and it’s been created. Any good idea has been thought of, and that’s truly okay.

It’s actually more connecting the dots in the U.S., but with a drive to not just settle on: ‘Hey, here’s the market, we want a share of it’ it’s a drive to create new things or a new combination of things so that we [can] increase the pie and share in that greater value creation. That’s always been in the company spirit, it was just really about bringing that out again to the forefront.

Like a lot of other Fortune 500 CEOs we speak to, you clearly have a love for learning. In a world where AI is expected to disrupt the labor market, what are the skills you’re looking for in new talent?

I can only think of what I advise my son, who’s in his second year of college. As the younger generation already knows, AI is gonna accelerate, and therefore number one they’ve absolutely got to be able to use it and partner with it.

Ultimately AI, one would think, is gonna replace whatever is mathematically easier to replace. Had a conversation at one of the town halls with some risk professionals in the U.S. last week and I said all those soft skills really matter, you’ve still got to learn the hard skills, you’ve got to understand your subject matter expertise regardless of technology, but increasingly all those abilities to interact, to communicate, to join the dots, to be able to understand information, communicate it, and just put those dots together is the stuff that’s gonna be obviously harder for AI to replicate. 

Maybe it will one day, but then you’ve just got to keep elevating yourself. So, what is that a lesson of? It is a lesson of continually adapting, continually learning, a bit like a sports person. When they’ve lost their passion to play and fight, it’s time to retire. 

For me, when I’ve lost that passion to learn and grow, you’re probably not gonna give it your full go, hence maybe the learning really just keeps me going. It’s not like I ever said, ‘Hey, I want to be the CEO of the company.’ I was so far away, I just wanted to be treated right and enjoy the journey and the growth,

So the lesson to individuals is you’ve just got to keep learning, you’ve got to be humble. If you’re not humble, you’re not gonna listen to yourself or your failings, you’re gonna blame them on something else as opposed to, ‘Well, what was my role in that?’ so I can learn. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© RGA

• Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has officially joined the billionaire ranks, reaching a net worth of $1.1 billion largely through long-term compensation and a 0.02% stake in the $2.3 trillion company. While far behind Big Tech founders in wealth, Pichai’s stake has been boosted by Alphabet’s AI-fueled rally—even as he regularly sells shares under prescheduled trading plans, demonstrating a disciplined and well-known approach amid booming investor enthusiasm.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the glamorous ranks of the world’s billionaires, after the tech giant’s class A share price bubbled up 13% over the past month.

Pichai’s net worth has hit $1.1 billion, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index recorded, courtesy of significant cash reserves and the CEO’s 0.02% stake in the company with a market cap of more than $2.3 trillion.

Unlike many of his Magnificent Seven peers, the Big Tech boss didn’t found the company which has afforded him a 10-figure fortune. Compared with contemporaries like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Tesla cofounder Elon Musk, Pichai’s net worth is considerably lower given the fact he hasn’t held a significant sum of shares since the early days of the company.

Pichai’s path to billionaire status has also been altered by the fact that he has sold shares in Alphabet which were awarded to him as part of his compensation package.

For example, Pichai has sold a reported $650 million in Google-owner Alphabet stock over the past decade he has served as CEO—sales that today would have amounted to more than $1 billion in gains, winning him a net worth of some $2.5 billion per Bloomberg’s index.

For example, in June Pichai offloaded some 33,000 class C Alphabet shares for a price of approximately $169 apiece, totaling some $5.5 million in sales.

But at the time of writing, those shares sit at a little over $193—which would have resulted in a value of more than $6.4 million.

Google declined to comment.

Advance planning

But the CEOs of the world’s largest companies are not playing the highs and lows of their company’s share prices the way retail investors or Wall Street analysts may be.

Many of Pichai’s recent sales have been pursuant to Rule 10b5-1, which allows stock sales to be set up in advance by officers of publicly listed companies to avoid any accusations of insider trading.

The rule has a number of stipulations, chief among them that a formula (not a person) determines the number, price, and date of the trade. A third party who cannot be influenced by the client must also be employed to conduct the sales.

Pichai’s sales on July 16 and June 4 of this year were both pursuant to 10b5-1, for example, as were sales made in previous years.

This tactic will be of no surprise to Wall Street watchers. Fortune reported last summer that Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, for example, was offloading $14 million in stock on a near-daily basis, all pursuant to the same regulation.

At the time, James Reda, managing director at Chicago-based consultancy Gallagher’s HR and compensation practice, said moves for such executives make absolute sense: “Ultimately, if you don’t sell the stock you’re gonna have to be like Elon Musk and some others that are putting stock up for collateral and getting these humongous loans.

“That just makes everybody more leveraged, why do that? Peel off a little stock on a regular basis and sell it.”

The AI billionaires

While Alphabet beat market expectations this week with its second quarter results, the majority of the rally behind the company at the moment comes from (no surprise) AI.

Pichai isn’t alone in thanking artificial intelligence for his good fortune. Last year the world’s richest, from Musk and Zuckerberg to Oracle’s Larry Ellison, added $585 billion to their fortunes largely thanks to the technology.

On the company’s earnings call Wednesday, the phrase “AI” was used some 90 times. Alphabet reported revenues up 14% year over year to $96.4 billion, confirming Google Search, YouTube ads, Google subscriptions, and Google Cloud all delivered double-digit growth in Q2.

A key concern for investors—particularly when looking at the market leaders in the AI race—will be whether companies can keep the talent to stay ahead of competitors. OpenAI, for example, has lost some of its staff to Meta’s newly created AI unit.

Pichai shrugged off such fears, telling investors on the call: “We’ve gone through these moments before. We have obviously always deeply invested in talent, including in AI talent, for well over a decade now. I think we have an extraordinary both breadth and depth of the talent.

“In my experience, the top people look for a combination of—they want to really be at the frontier driving progress, and so the mission and how state-of-the-art your work is matters, so that’s super important to them, access to compute resources, and access to your peers, working with the best people in the industry,” he added. “I think we are pretty competitive on all those fronts.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© David Paul Morris/Bloomberg - Getty Images

• Bryan Johnson is stepping back from running his longevity company, Blueprint, to focus fully on his personal mission: advancing his “Don’t Die” ideology aimed at human survival in the age of superintelligence. Calling the business side a distraction, Johnson is hiring new leadership and expanding Blueprint into clinics, certification programs, and personalized biomarker tracking, teasing investment into the longevity company.

When Bryan Johnson launched his business, Blueprint, the mission was fairly simple: Extend the lifespan of humanity, using the entrepreneur as a guinea pig.

Since then, as Johnson’s successes and failures have garnered greater attention and the longevity lifestyle has gained traction, Blueprint and Johnson’s paths have diverged.

Blueprint has become a one-stop shop for all things longevity—from olive oil to supplements—while Johnson himself is spearheading what he calls the ‘Don’t Die’ ideology. Leading the former is detracting from the work he can do on the latter, he said this week.

Writing on X, the centi-millionaire said the business aspect of his project had become a “pain in the ass.”

He’s hiring a new CEO and CTO, he added, “who can lead the business while I focus on Don’t Die.”

Blueprint has “kept me from not focusing on the single thing I’m consumed with: how does the human race survive the rise of super intelligence,” Johnson explained. “Every minute spent dealing with problems like ‘why a supplier shipped us something out-of-spec’ (now stuck on a boat) is a minute not spent figuring out how to make Don’t Die the fastest-growing ideology in history, increasing our odds of survival and thriving.”

He continued: “After my team and I built a protocol for myself, my friends and family asked if they could get access too. Then their friends and family asked and I said yes again. The circle kept on expanding until we stumbled into Blueprint becoming a company.

“My goal was never to sell nutrition. It’s the last thing in the world I ever imagined doing. I don’t need the money.”

Blueprint’s next phase

Johnson’s activities have been viewed with some skepticism. After all, as the saying goes, the only certain things in life are death and taxes.

The notion of making mortality optional, as Johnson previously told Fortune, has led critics to question the credibility and the motives for expanding Blueprint commercially. How much could a $50 bottle of olive oil or an $135 bag of ‘longevity protein’ really extend customers’ lifespans, spectators argued.

“I started Blueprint and people began calling me a grifter,” Johnson said. “Whatever. They don’t understand.”

But Johnson added he has been grappling with the “tension” of his longevity project and questions of its links to commercial gain, adding selling or shutting down the company might address the issue.

The tech founder of Braintree—which was sold to PayPal for $800 million a little over a decade ago—instead decided to “go all in” he added, and is raising investment as well as recruiting what he called “hard core builders.”

Next in the pipeline for Blueprint are clinics offering “access to cutting-edge longevity technologies, protocols, and therapies,” as well as a ‘quantified’ certification program for food purity, and a tracking biomarker platform for users to measure their progress over time alongside peers.

‘Blueprint Nourish,’ he added, is an extension of existing supplements which will cover “50-100% of your daily nutrition, hair care, skin care, oral care, etc.”

Blueprint has been a pain in my ass.

It's kept me from not focusing on the single thing I’m consumed with: how does the human race survive the rise of super intelligence.

Every minute spent dealing with problems like ‘why a supplier shipped us something out-of-spec’ (now… pic.twitter.com/1x4yXJvSV6

— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) July 23, 2025

The longevity question

While Johnson’s particular brand of biohacking—from eating his last meal of the day at 11 a.m. through to his 4.30 a.m. wake-up call—may not appeal to all corners of the scientific community, the impact of lifestyle on aging and longevity is no new phenomenon.

In fact, researchers have been tracking people in blue zones—regions where culture and characteristics play a part in “significantly longer and healthier” lives—since the late 1990s.

Since them, blue zones have been identified in Ikaria, Greece, Loma Linda in California, Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa in Japan, and Nicoya in Costa Rica.

The reasons for longevity in these regions are, in some parts, loosely aligned with Johnson’s findings. The diet of people living in Okinawa has been the basis of some research into their lifespans, for example, while the physical activity and family networks of Nicoya have been credited as potentially leading to longer lifespans in that area.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg - Getty Images

• Analysis: Donald Trump is set to make a rare presidential visit to the Federal Reserve—only the fourth in U.S. history—amid escalating criticism of Jerome Powell’s leadership and spending on the central bank’s D.C. headquarters. While previous visits symbolized respect for Fed independence, Trump’s stop comes after repeated attacks on interest rate policy and a public clash over renovation costs, raising fresh concerns about political pressure on the central bank.

Donald Trump is taking his battle with Jerome Powell to the doorstep of the Federal Reserve. Literally.

The president will be visiting the central bank at 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, returning to the White House a little over an hour later, per his public schedule.

The move is unusual for a number of reasons. Primarily, because this is the first visit by a president to the central bank in nearly two decades—and only the fourth visit from the Oval Office in history.

The context of this visit also raises eyebrows, as President Trump and his cabinet have been continually lobbying and criticizing the Fed since winning the Oval Office in January.

In the past, visits from the president to the Fed have been viewed as endorsements—both of the chairman at the time and of the Fed’s independence as a whole.

For example, the last visit came from George W. Bush on Feb. 6, 2006, when he attended the swearing-in ceremony for his nominee, Ben S. Bernanke, as the 14th chairman of the Fed.

Bush’s attendance was seen as a backing not only of Bernanke but also of the independent nature of the Fed. When announcing his nomination, Bush told reporters in the Oval Office: “In our economy, the Fed is the independent body responsible for setting monetary policy, for overseeing the integrity of our banking system, for containing the risk that can arise in financial markets, and for ensuring a functioning payment system.

“Across the world, the Fed is the symbol of the integrity and the reliability of our financial system, and the decisions of the Fed affect the lives and livelihoods of all Americans.”

Prior to Bush’s visit, the most recent example of a president visiting the Fed had been President Gerald Ford in July of 1975—again for a swearing-in ceremony at which the independence of the central bank was lauded.

Speaking at the swearing-in of Philip C. Jackson as a member of the Board of Governors, President Ford said: “The essence of the Federal Reserve System is independence. Independence of both the Congress and the president, as well as the individual independence of thought of each of its governors. I firmly and completely respect that independence.”

The final example—but the first visit of its kind—came in 1937 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended the opening of the board’s new headquarters—the Eccles building, which President Trump will likely be visiting today.

Trump vs. the Fed so far

Even before Trump won the election, there were signs he might cause trouble for Chair Jerome Powell. Despite being the president to nominate Powell for the role, he made veiled threats about the security of the chairman’s role. He told Bloomberg: “I would let him serve [his term] out, especially if I thought he was doing the right thing.”

Back then, the “right thing” in Trump’s mind was not to cut interest rates as it would give the economy, and the Biden administration at the time, a boost.

Since taking the Oval Office in January that request has flipped to the other extreme. Trump has dubbed Powell “dumb” and “hardheaded” for not cutting the base rate, adding he knows more than the Fed boss about interest rates.

While some market followers may agree with Trump’s take that Powell and the Federal Open Market Committee are reacting too slowly to economic data, no analyst or investor wants to see the independence of the central bank threatened.

As such, markets reacted shakily when Trump threatened to fire Powell, and then stabilized when the president rescinded the suggestion. After all, the federally mandated independence of the Fed was written into law to protect it from the whims of politicians and instead mandate it to ensure the long-term health of the economy.

While lambasting the policy of the Fed remains a common theme of the Trump administration (even yesterday, the president wrote on Truth Social that “families are being hurt because interest rates are too high, and even our country is having to pay a higher rate than it should be because of ‘Too Late [Powell].’”), criticism is also being lobbied at wider decision-making.

This has included Powell’s management of the central bank’s offices—which Trump will reportedly be touring today—with Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, making public a letter he sent to the Fed chair, saying the president is “extremely troubled by your management of the Federal Reserve System” particularly relating to the “ostentatious overhaul of [the Fed’s] Washington, D.C., headquarters.”

Powell has since responded to, and clarified, some of the points raised in Vought’s letter, noting: “The project is large … because it involves the renovation of two historic buildings on the National Mall that were first constructed in the 1930s. While periodic work has been done to keep these buildings occupiable, neither building has seen a comprehensive renovation since they were first constructed.”

Though the Fed has independence in its business management and expenditures, Powell reaffirmed the bank’s commitment to “transparency for our decisions and to be accountable to the public”—announcing a new section of the Fed’s website had been created to keep voters up-to-date on the latest developments.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• In-N-Out CEO Lynsi Snyder is relocating from California to Tennessee as the company builds an eastern territory office, signaling a cautious expansion. While reaffirming In-N-Out’s California roots, Snyder cited family and business pressures in the state and teased future growth from Texas into nearby states—though East Coast fans will still have to wait.

Lynsi Snyder is a born and bred Californian, and makes no secret of her love for the state where her grandparents founded cult burger empire In-N-Out. But the CEO revealed she is leaving the Golden State for Tennessee, where the company is building a new eastern territory office, teasing a potential push to expand even further across the U.S.

Snyder took over the West Coast chain at the age of 27, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, father and uncle who led the business prior to her succession.

Having grown up in Northern California, Snyder recounted in a recent episode of the ‘Relatable’ podcast how she worked her way up the ranks of the business, from toiling away in stores to helping her grandmother with community work, to running the business’s merchandising branch.

Now at the helm of the business with a net worth of $7.3 billion, Snyder is expanding In-N-Out into new pastures and wants her family to benefit from the change too.

She explained: “We’re building an office in in Franklin … I’m actually moving out there. I really loved living in Northern California and I’m so thankful that I grew up there because I think it changed a lot of who I am today, I think I would be different if I was raised in Southern California.

“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here. The bulk of our stores are still going to be here in California, but it will be wonderful having an office … growing out there.”

Regarding the difficulty of doing business, In-N-Out has rankled with its home state over legal issues in the past—namely, when the business refused to comply with officials and request customers must show proof of vaccination to make purchases.

In-N-Out’s San Francisco restaurant was shut down for a couple of days, with Snyder saying: “There were so many pressures and hoops we were having to jump through. You know: ‘You’ve got to do this, they have to wear a mask, you have to put this plastic thing up between us and out customers.’

“It was really terrible, I look back and I’m like man, maybe we should have just pushed even harder on some of that stuff and dealt with all the legal backlash. But that was definitely where we held the line, like we’re not policing our customers.”

Likewise, last year, the company told local station KTVU it had raised its prices—a move Snyder has historically fought against—to comply with the state’s fast food minimum wage rules and maintain quality.

Commitment to Cali

But In-N-Out’s commitment to California as its western hub remains clear, with Snyder saying over the next five years the company’s two sites in Irvine and Baldwin Park (where its first restaurant opened in 1948) would be consolidated under one roof—the latter site.

The entrepreneur and mom of four explained that her uncle, Rich Snyder, opened the Irvine site when he was leading the business in the 1980s and 90s. However, when he died in a plane crash in 1993 Snyder’s father, Guy, took over running the company.

However, Snyder’s father died in 1999, leaving Lynsi—at the age of 17—the last of her family custodian of the empire.

Snyder explained her dad felt Irvine was not the “roots” of In-N-Out, adding: “He wanted to move everyone back to Baldwin Park so we kind of did a hybrid. He moved a lot of people back to Baldwin Park, but Irvine continued on and continued to grow. And my dad died a handful of years later, so he never got to bring everyone back here and close Irvine.

“So my vision for a long time has been to have these two offices under one roof.”

Expansion plans

In-N-Out has become a pillar of the West Coast lifestyle, and it is beloved by celebrities for a post-Oscar meal. But while its geographical exclusivity has won it visiting customers, the brand has been slowly creeping East.

For example, In-N-Out now has 43 stores in Texas and 13 in Colorado.

It’s unlikely the chain will ever make the decision to expand coast to coast fully, but Snyder teased: “Florida has begged us and we’re still saying no, the East Coast states we’re still saying no.

“We’re able to reach Tennessee from our Texas warehouse—we’re not putting out whole meat facility, we do our own beef, send it to our stores to make patties—we’re not going to have that there. We will have a warehouse … so we’ll be able to deliver from Texas.

“Texas can reach some other states.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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