Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin juggernaut is at it again, buying near the highs with the kind of capital-markets firepower no other crypto firm can match.
Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy Inc., disclosed Monday that it bought $2.46 billion of Bitcoin in the past week—its third-largest purchase by dollar value since it began accumulating the cryptocurrency five years ago.
The company acquired 21,021 tokens between July 28 and Aug. 3, pushing its total holdings to 628,791 Bitcoin, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This takes the value of the company’s Bitcoin holdings to more than $71 billion at current prices.
Fueled by a steady stream of stock offerings and debt deals, Saylor has transformed his enterprise software company into the dominant corporate buyer of Bitcoin. Its latest acquisition came at an average price of $117,526 per token, the second-highest price Strategy has ever paid, just behind the $118,940 average last month, according to company data.
The move underscores how Saylor has turned public-company finance into a specialized vehicle to amass Bitcoin—and how Strategy keeps buying even as prices hover near record levels. Strategy is by far the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, according to a tally by BitcoinTreasuries.net, and has spurred a new industry of public companies following a so-called treasury strategy dedicated to buying and holding cryptocurrencies.
To fund the purchases, Saylor has employed a combination of common and preferred share sales, as well as debt. The company offers four different kinds of securities to investors—launching its latest preferred stock offering, dubbed Stretch, in late July. Strategy reported an unrealized gain of $14 billion in the second quarter, driven by a rebound in Bitcoin’s price and a recent accounting change that required the company to revalue its Bitcoin holdings.
Saylor recently promised he won’t issue new common shares at less than 2.5 times its net asset value, except to cover debt interest or preferred dividends. This comes after critics like Jim Chanos voiced concerns on the premium Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings have on its share price and the many security offerings the company offers.
Strategy’s stock has surged more than 3,000% since its first crypto purchase, outpacing Bitcoin itself as well as major stock indices like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. Its first and second largest purchases came in November last year totaling $5.4 billion and $4.6 billion, according to company data.
Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters is standing out in the global banking sector by maintaining a flexible, hybrid work policy and resisting the rigid office mandates now sweeping through much of Wall Street. As peers from companies like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs urge staff back to traditional office rhythms, Winters has doubled down on a philosophy of employee autonomy and trust, placing his bank in sharp contrast to its US and UK peers.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Winters was unequivocal: “We work with adults, and the adults can have an adult conversation with other adults and decide how they’re going to best manage their team.” He emphasized that the approach is “working for us,” adding, “How other companies make that work? Everybody’s got their own recipe.” For Standard Chartered, that recipe is rooted in flexibility, allowing teams and managers to agree on in-office schedules that fit their business needs and personal lives.
Winters, who himself follows a hybrid schedule and aims to be in the office four days a week, says his approach is about fostering responsibility. “Our MDs want to come to the office. They come to the office because they collaborate. They manage their people. They lead teams. But if they need the flexibility, they can get it from us,” he said. This hands-off stance has helped the bank retain talent, keep attrition low, and, according to Winters, maintain a productive workforce that manages to deliver results in a post-pandemic landscape.
Standard Chartered’s performance is thriving at the moment. In the second quarter of 2025, the bank reported a 48% jump in pre-tax profit—performance Winters points to as validation of the flexible model. On the second-quarter earnings call with analysts, Winters commented on the strong results, saying they are “testament to our ability to deliver exceptional services in support of our clients’ needs, and it is clear that our strategy is working.”
A bank unlike the others
The bank’s flexible policy stands in contrast to a growing wave of office mandates from industry rivals. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC have all tightened office attendance requirements in the last year. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has criticized remote work for slowing decision-making and inhibiting innovation, recently directing most employees to return to the office full-time. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has similarly dismissed remote work as “not a new normal” but an “aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible.” HSBC, too, recently directed its managing directors to return to the office at least four days a week.
Other banks, like Citi, remain more flexible but still require at least three days of in-office attendance, while offering hybrid employees set windows for remote work. The trend across many sectors, including tech and telecommunications, is toward stricter in-office requirements, with some large employers warning that ongoing remote work could put jobs at risk.
Despite these pressures, Standard Chartered is holding its ground. Winters and the bank’s leadership remain vocal in their conviction that flexibility works—citing strong business results, low attrition, and positive feedback from employees, especially those balancing care responsibilities or preferring non-traditional schedules. The company was among the first major banks to formally adopt hybrid work in November 2020 and has shown little inclination to change course, even as industry sentiment shifts.
Companies who stand by remote or flexible work schedules say it leads to a better talent pool, less turnover, and a happier workplace, while critics say it’s corrosive to the human element that goes with great teamwork. Winters dismisses such concerns. He insists that, with the right leadership, teams remain collaborative and engaged, and that forcing staff into rigid molds can actually hinder, rather than help, performance.
As Wall Street and other sectors debate the future of work, Standard Chartered’s approach offers a compelling case study in the value—and business logic—of empowering employees to strike their own balance.
Standard Chartered did not respond to a request for comment.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
In 2016, Dan Morehead embarked on a world tour to preach the gospel of Bitcoin. A former trader at Goldman Sachs and Tiger Management, Morehead had become orange-pilled just a few years before, convinced that Bitcoin would reshape the global economy. He believed in the currency so fervently that he came out of semi-retirement to remake his hedge fund Pantera Capital into one of the world’s first Bitcoin funds.
The new operation, launched in 2013, got off to a roaring start, with backing from two of Morehead’s fellow Princeton alumni, Pete Briger and Mike Novogratz, both from the private equity giant Fortress. The trio watched with glee as the Bitcoin purchased by Pantera at an initial price of $65 soared to over $1,000 by the end of the year. But then, disaster struck as hackers cleaned out the fledgling crypto industry’s main exchange, Mt Gox, and the price of Bitcoin plummeted 85%. “People would say, ‘Didn’t you do that Bitcoin thing that died?’” Morehead recalls. “It’s still alive!” he would respond.
During his 2016 trip to evangelize Bitcoin, Morehead took 170 meetings, each time going into a prospective investor’s office and spending an hour arguing why the new currency was the most compelling possible opportunity. The result: He managed to raise just $1 million for his flailing fund. Even worse, Morehead’s own fees totaled around $17,000. “I earned $100 a meeting, going out there trying to evangelize people to buy Bitcoins,” he tells Fortune.
Less than a decade later, as Bitcoin pushes $120,000, Morehead’s brutal early slog feels like the stuff of founder mythology— right up there with the tales of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkering in Jobs’ parents’ garage, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger trading stock tips at an Omaha dinner party.
Today, Pantera manages over $5 billion in assets across different crypto funds. Its holdings comprise digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as venture investments in projects such as Circle, which went public in June, and Bitstamp, which was acquired by Robinhood earlier this year for $200 million. But what sets the firm apart from the crowded field of crypto VCs is its early-mover status as a storied bridge between the buttoned-up world of traditional finance and the once-renegade crypto sector. At the center is Morehead, an unsung figure in an industry dominated by larger-than-life characters.
“I’m very stubborn, and I am totally convinced [Bitcoin] is going to change the world,” Morehead tells Fortune. “So I just kept going.”
The Princeton mafia
Back before Wall Street infiltrated the blockchain industry, Morehead’s stuck out in the chaotic world of early crypto. A two-sport athlete at Princeton in football and heavyweight crew, Morehead still has the broad shoulders and square jaw of his youth. The figure he cut was a far cry from the wiry, iconoclastic types who spent most of their time on internet message boards. Morehead, in contrast, came from the conventional world of finance. He’s still rarely spotted without a blazer.
Morehead had already had a long trading career before learning about Bitcoin. After stints at Goldman Sachs and Tiger, he began his own hedge fund, Pantera, which flamed out during the 2008 financial crisis, right around the time that a shadowy figure named Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world in an online white paper.
Morehead first heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from his brother and was vaguely aware that a classmate from Princeton, Gavin Andresen, was running a website that gave out 5 Bitcoins to any user for solving a captcha (current street value: $575,000). But Morehead didn’t think much about it until a couple of years later, when another classmate, Briger, invited Morehead for coffee at the San Francisco office of Fortress to talk crypto, with Novogratz calling in. “Since then, I’ve been possessed by Bitcoin,” Morehead says.
Tech is famous for its so-called “mafias”—clusters of employees from prominent organizations like PayPal who go on to lead the next generation of startups. In crypto, it’s not a company but a university, with Princeton responsible for some of the industry’s most influential projects. Briger and Novogratz both served as key backers of Pantera, with Morehead even moving into empty office space at Fortress’s SF office. Briger remains a powerful, albeit behind-the-scenes, presence in crypto, recently taking a seat on the board of directors of Michael Saylor’s $100 billion Bitcoin holding firm, Strategy. Novogratz went on to found Galaxy, one of the largest crypto conglomerates. And another classmate, Joe Lubin, went on to become one of the cofounders of Ethereum.
But back in 2013, it still seemed far-fetched that Ivy League graduates working in the rarified fields of private equity and macro trading would be interested in Bitcoin. Briger tells Fortune that he first learned about it from Wences Casares, an Argentine entrepreneur and early crypto adopter, while sharing a room at a Young Presidents’ Organization gathering in the San Juan Islands. Briger quickly saw the appeal of upending the global payments system—a point he sticks by today, though he argues that Bitcoin is still in its infancy. He says that Bitcoin mirrors the promise of the internet, which facilitated a new form of information flow. “The fact that money movement doesn’t happen in the same way is a real shame,” he says.
After sharing the idea with Novogratz, they thought that Morehead, who had experience working in foreign exchange markets, would be the right person to bring on. When Morehead decided to devote the rest of his financial career to crypto, he rebranded Pantera as a Bitcoin fund and opened it back up to outside investors. Briger and Novogratz both signed on as limited partners, with Fortress and the venture firms Benchmark and Ribbit taking general partner stakes, though they would later withdraw. His old mentor at Tiger, the legendary investor Julian Robertson, even backed a later fund.
Pantera’s rebirth
In the hurley-burly early days of crypto, entrepreneurs had to confront dramatic booms and busts that make today’s volatility look like minor blips. But the wild price roller-coaster wasn’t the biggest headache, Novogratz recalls. It was simply trying to procure BTC in the first place.
He went to Coinbase, then just a year old, to try and buy 30,000 Bitcoins, which would have sold for around $2 million. He was met with a pop-up that his limit was $50. After trying to work it out with Olaf Carlson-Wee—Coinbase’s first employee, who would go on to become a famed crypto figure in his own right—the firm agreed to increase his limit all the way to $300.
Morehead’s most impressive achievement, however, may be sticking it out during the doldrums of 2013 through 2016, when prices remained in the basement and no one outside of the insular blockchain community paid Bitcoin much mind. “In those quiet years where crypto wasn’t doing shit, Dan was out there beating the pavement,” Novogratz tells Fortune.
That epoch still had its highlights, including three annual conferences hosted by Morehead out of his Lake Tahoe home. At one, Jesse Powell, the founder of the exchange Kraken, opted out of taking a private plane chartered by Morehead and drove instead. “There was a large enough fraction of the Bitcoin community [there] that he feared if the plane crashed, it would take Bitcoin down,” Morehead recalls.
Unlike many of his compatriots, Morehead never positioned himself as a “Bitcoin maxi,” or someone who argues that no other cryptocurrencies should exist. After buying up 2% of the global Bitcoin supply, Pantera became an early investor in Ripple Labs, which created the digital asset XRP. “The way I think about it is Bitcoin is obviously the most important,” Morehead says. “But there isn’t one internet company.”
According to Morehead, Pantera has made money on 86% of its venture investments. It’s a staggering figure considering that the vast majority of VC-backed startups fail. Crypto may be more forgiving given that many projects come with an accompanying cryptocurrency, meaning speculative value often endures even if a startup’s product goes nowhere.
Morehead now spends half his year in Puerto Rico, which has become a hotbed for crypto. Joey Krug, then a partner at Pantera and now at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, had relocated down there, and Morehead decided to make the move. He estimates there are 1,000 blockchain entrepreneurs on the island, though they’ve drawn scrutiny for driving up real estate prices. Morehead faced an inquiry from the Senate Finance Committee over whether he violated federal tax laws by moving to the island and earning more than $850 million in capital gains from Pantera. He told the New York Times earlier this year that he believed he “acted appropriately with respect to my taxes” and declined to comment further to Fortune.
Bitcoin’s future
Morehead acknowledges that much of the crypto industry is saturated with gambling, with Pantera staying away from memecoins, unlike many other venture firms. Still, he argues that it shouldn’t distract from blockchain’s broader goal of reshaping global finance. “It’s ridiculous to try and take down the blockchain industry because of a little sideshow,” he says. “[GameStop] doesn’t mean the entire U.S. equity market is tainted.”
Pantera continues to grow, including raising a fifth venture fund with a $1 billion target, which Morehead says the firm will close after finishing investing out of its fourth fund later this year. Pantera has also moved into the red-hot field of digital asset treasuries, where publicly traded companies buy and hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets.
But Bitcoin remains at the core of Pantera’s strategy. At the end of last year, its Bitcoin fund hit 1,000x, with a lifetime return of over 130,000%. When asked for a prediction of where Bitcoin is headed, Morehead has always had the same answer: The price will double in a year. For the most part, the simple model has worked, though Morehead admits the days of rapid growth are likely slowing down. He argues Bitcoin will still go up another order of magnitude, meaning it will approach $1,000,000, though he thinks that will be the last time it has a 10x increase.
Morehead is happy to shoulder the criticism if Bitcoin never reaches that milestone. In 2016, after all, he was struggling to make the case for the cryptocurrency at $500. And less than a decade later, he’s just getting started. “I have the same conviction—the vast majority of institutions have zero,” he tells Fortune. “It feels like we have another couple of decades to go.”
Updated to reflect the latest regulatory filing figures on assets under management.
Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk has seen his wealth plummet by some $80 billion this year, thanks in part to a 20% decline in his electrical vehicle company’s stock. Now, just $60 billion separates Musk from Oracle’s Larry Ellison—and another Tesla tumble could see Musk dethroned as the world’s richest man.
Elon Musk claims to have slashed billions of dollars worth of wasteful spending during his time as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—but his controversial role may have done more damage to his pocketbook than he anticipated.
This year alone, Musk has lost some $80 billion in his net worth, bringing his current value to about $352 billion—a far cry from his over $450 billion peak late last year, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
Musk’s wealth declines are largely tied to his 13% stake in struggling Tesla. Even after shareholders practically begged the billionaire to leave DOGE and focus on Tesla full-time, Musk’s return to Austin hasn’t been so glamorous. The electric vehicle company missed Wall Street expectations and experienced a double-digit percentage revenue decline in the second quarter of 2025. Tesla’s stock price is down nearly 20% this year.
But shareholders are doing the opposite of pulling the plug on Musk; they’ve just awarded him a pay package worth some $29 billion—in what shareholders called a “critical first step toward” keeping “Elon’s energies focused on Tesla,” reports The New York Times.
While Musk remains the No. 1 richest person on the planet, fellow members of the ultra rich like Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg are tapping at the door to replace him at the top of the billionaire list.
Musk’s climb to the top of the world
2024 was a standout year for Tesla. The company’s stock nearly doubled, with the market cap topping $1.4 trillion in December. Due to his sizable stake, the jump soared Musk’s wealth and seemingly cemented him at the time at the top of the billionaires after years of back and forth among billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Musk’s success also comes from his stakes in his other companies, including XAI Holdings (the combined firm of social media X and AI startup xAI), SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
But like struggles at Tesla, his companies are causing financial headaches for the billionaire. xAI is reportedly burning through $1 billion a month and The Boring Company’s valuation has decreased to $6.4 billion from $8.6 billion in July 2023, according to Bloomberg.
While he did not take a salary from his role at DOGE, his companies have largely benefited from working with the government over the years. According to The Washington Post, his businesses have received some $38 billion in contracts, loans, subsidies, and more.
Now, Musk has an uphill battle ahead of him in the court of public opinion; just 30% of voters have a favorable view of Musk, according to a Quinnipiac Poll released in June. And after a public feud with President Donald Trump over the federal budget, even support among Republicans has dipped.
How Musk may lose his richest man title
While Musk has lost the most wealth of anyone in 2025 so far, he’s not alone. Jeff Bezos is also in the red, losing about $1.7 billion this year, largely thanks to Amazon’s struggling stock performance. Bill Gates has also lost a sizable amount of wealth—some $36 billion—but it’s been because of his ramped-up philanthropy efforts.
On the flip side, Larry Ellison (+$102 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (+$56 billion), and Jensen Huang ($37 billion) have seen sizable wealth increases.
Only $60 billion now separates Musk and Ellison as No. 1 and 2, according to Bloomberg, thanks to the newfound success of Ellison’s tech giant, Oracle. The company’s newfound focus on AI helped earnings soar and contributed to a stock jump of over 50% this year. Ellison’s wealth has grown by over $100 billion this year—and it’s likely to only continue.
“Oracle’s future is bright in this new era of cloud computing. Oracle will be the number one cloud database company,” Ellison said in the business’ earnings call in June. “Oracle is already prospering in this new era of cloud computing and AI, and it’s just the beginning.”
If the trends continue, and Oracle continues to grow while Tesla flounders, Ellison could replace Musk as the richest person in the world by year’s end.
If the Tesla billionaire’s wealth drops by another $60 billion, Elon Musk will lose his crown as the richest person on the planet to Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
Trump Media & Technology Group lost $20 million in the second quarter. The parent company of Trump’s Truth Social saw share prices rise, however, in large part because of its broad Bitcoin holdings. Trump’s holding in the company is currently worth $2 billion.
Typically, if a publicly traded company announced sales of less than $1 million and a quarterly loss of $20 million, that might spook investors. At Trump Media & Technology Group, it’s giving the stock a slight boost.
The parent company of Trump’s Truth Social, in its quarterly earnings, reported $883,300 in net sales for the second quarter. That’s 5.5% higher than a year ago. The $19.7 million net loss compared to a $16.4 million loss in the second quarter of 2024.
Despite that, the stock was up 1.5% in mid-morning trading on Monday.
What gives? Despite the lackluster sales and notable loss, Trump Media is still a cash-rich company thanks to its significant Bitcoin holdings. The 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists financial assets of roughly $3.1 billion, an 800% year-over-year increase. Of that amount, $2.4 billion is in Bitcoin, which it bought in July.
“Among other benefits, the Bitcoin treasury strategy allows Trump Media to give its investors indirect exposure to cryptocurrencies, creates investment income, helps position the Company for expansion, and solidifies the Company’s financial freedom, including enhancing security against debanking and other acts of political discrimination,” TMTG said.
Trump owns 114.75 million of the company’s outstanding shares through a revocable trust. That works out to 52% of the company’s total outstanding shares, according to the company’s 2025 proxy statement.
As of Monday morning, that holding was worth $2 billion. That’s considerably less than the $4 billion it was worth on Jan. 1. Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group are down 50% year to date.
When Susana Pacheco accepted a housekeeping job at a casino on the Las Vegas Strip 16 years ago, she believed it was a step toward stability for her and her 2-year-old daughter.
But the single mom found herself exhausted, falling behind on bills and without access to stable health insurance, caught in a cycle of low pay and little support. For years, she said, there was no safety net in sight — until now.
For 25 years, her employer, the Venetian, had resisted organizing efforts as one of the last holdouts on the Strip, locked in a prolonged standoff with the Culinary Workers Union. But a recent change in ownership opened the Venetian’s doors to union representation just as the Strip’s newest casino, the Fontainebleau, was also inking its first labor contract.
The historic deals finalized late last year mark a major turning point: For the first time in the Culinary Union’s 90-year history, all major casinos on the Strip are unionized. Backed by 60,000 members, most of them in Las Vegas, it is the largest labor union in Nevada. Experts say the Culinary Union’s success is a notable exception in a national landscape where union membership overall is declining.
“Together, we’ve shown that change can be a positive force, and I’m confident that this partnership will continue to benefit us all in the years to come,” Patrick Nichols, president and CEO of the Venetian, said shortly after workers approved the deal.
Pacheco says their new contract has already reshaped her day-to-day life. The housekeeper no longer races against the clock to clean an unmanageable number of hotel suites, and she’s spending more quality time with her children because of the better pay and guaranteed days off.
“Now with the union, we have a voice,” Pacheco said.
Union strength is fading nationally
These gains come at a time when union membership nationally is at an all-time low, and despite Republican-led efforts over the years to curb union power. About 10% of U.S. workers belonged to a union in 2024, down from 20% in 1983, the first year for which data is available, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.
President Donald Trump in March signed an executive order seeking to end collective bargaining for certain federal employees that led to union leaders suing the administration. Nevada and more than two dozen other states now have so-called “right to work” laws that let workers opt out of union membership and dues. GOP lawmakers have also supported changes to the National Labor Relations Board and other regulatory bodies, seeking to reduce what they view as overly burdensome rules on businesses.
Ruben Garcia, professor and director of the workplace program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas law school, said the Culinary Union’s resilience stems from its deep roots in Las Vegas, its ability to adapt to the growth and corporatization of the casino industry, and its long history of navigating complex power dynamics with casino owners and operators.
He said the consolidation of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip mirrors the dominance of the Big Three automakers in Detroit. A few powerful companies — MGM Resorts International, Caesars Entertainment and Wynn Resorts — now control most of the dozens of casinos along Las Vegas Boulevard.
“That consolidation can make things harder for workers in some ways, but it also gives unions one large target,” Garcia said.
The latest contracts secured a historic 32% bump in pay over the life of the five-year contract. Union casino workers will earn an average $35 hourly, including benefits, by the end of it.
The union’s influence also extends far beyond the casino floor. With its ability to mobilize thousands of its members for canvassing and voter outreach, the union’s endorsements are highly coveted, particularly among Democrats, and can signal who has the best shot at winning working-class votes.
The union has — and still — faces resistance
The union’s path hasn’t always been smooth though. Michael Green, a history professor at UNLV, noted the Culinary Union has long faced resistance.
“Historically, there have always been people who are anti-union,” Green said.
Earlier this year, two food service workers in Las Vegas filed federal complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing the union of deducting dues despite their objections to union membership. It varies at each casino, but between 95 to 98% of workers opt in to union membership, according to the union.
“I don’t think Culinary Union bosses deserve my support,” said one of the workers, Renee Guerrero, who works at T-Mobile Arena on the Strip. “Their actions since I attempted to exercise my right to stop dues payments only confirms my decision.”
But longtime union members like Paul Anthony see things differently. Anthony, a food server at the Bellagio and a Culinary member for nearly 40 years, said his union benefits — free family health insurance, reliable pay raises, job security and a pension — helped him to build a lasting career in the hospitality industry.
“A lot of times it is an industry that doesn’t have longevity,” he said. But on the Strip, it’s a job that people can do for “20 years, 30 years, 40 years.”
Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer and lead negotiator, said the union calls this the “Las Vegas dream.”
“It’s always been our goal to make sure that this town is a union town,” he said.
In today’s edition: Mark Zuckerberg’s raid on Mira Murati’s startup, the end of the CPB, and the latest woman fired by Trump.
– You’re fired. President Donald Trump was unhappy with July’s U.S. jobs report, which showed hiring slowing (with 73,000 jobs added, compared to 100,000 predicted) and revised past months’ numbers. The Wall Street Journal called the results “surprisingly dismal.” So, on Friday Trump said he would fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer.
McEntarfer was nominated to lead the BLS in 2023. At the time, it was an overwhelmingly non-controversial appointment. She was confirmed 86-8 in a bipartisan vote.
She’s a longtime labor economist with more than 20 years experience in the federal government, who had worked at the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy and the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a nonpolitical role. Her research focused on job loss, retirement, worker mobility, and wage rigidity, according to the AP.
Trump accused McEntarfer of manipulating jobs data and said that the data was “being produced by a Biden appointee.” “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The BLS produces data relied on by businesses and policymakers, including the Fed.
McEntarfer joins a growing list of female officials fired during Trump 2.0 (and lot of fired men, too). There was Admiral Linda Fagan, the leader of the Coast Guard and the first woman to lead a military branch who was removed on Trump’s second day back on the job. Gwynne Wilcox, who Trump attempted to dismiss from the National Labor Relations Board (she sued, and a back-and-forth over her dismissal reached the Supreme Court). Federal Elections Committee (FEC) chair Ellen Weintraub was let go. Phyllis Fong, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, refused to comply with her firing in January and was escorted out by security. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, was fired via email.
McEntarfer’s colleagues have jumped to her defense. Her predecessor William Beach, who was appointed by Trump in 2019 and served until 2023, said that the “groundless” firing “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.” Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said there was “no conceivable way” the numbers could have been manipulated, relying as they do on strict processes and hundreds of staffers. Janet Yellen said that the firing of the head of the bureau charged with accurately reporting economic data “is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
McEntarfer’s firing is part of a bigger plan for the BLS, the Journal reports. “The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the jobs numbers, they are more transparent and more reliable,” National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said.
McEntarfer responded to her firing in a post on Bluesky. “It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy,” she wrote. “It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.”
On Sunday, Trump officials homed in on the revised May and June numbers as the reason for McEntarfer’s firing. “I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,” Hassett said.
Saying “enough is enough,” thousands of workers at three Boeing manufacturing plants went on strike overnight less than a year after the company boosted wages to end a separate, 53-day strike by 33,000 aircraft workers.
On Monday, about 3,200 workers at Boeing facilities in St. Louis; St. Charles, Missouri; and Mascoutah, Illinois, voted to reject a modified four-year labor agreement with Boeing, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union said Sunday.
In a post on X, the union said: “3,200 highly-skilled IAM Union members at Boeing went on strike at midnight because enough is enough.”
“IAM District 837 members build the aircraft and defense systems that keep our country safe,” said Sam Cicinelli, Midwest territory general vice president for the union, in a statement. “They deserve nothing less than a contract that keeps their families secure and recognizes their unmatched expertise.”
The union members rejected the latest proposal after a weeklong cooling-off period.
Boeing warned over the weekend that it anticipated the strike after workers rejected its most recent offer that included a 20% wage hike over four years.
“We’re disappointed our employees rejected an offer that featured 40% average wage growth and resolved their primary issue on alternative work schedules,” said Dan Gillian, Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager, and senior St. Louis site executive. “We are prepared for a strike and have fully implemented our contingency plan to ensure our non-striking workforce can continue supporting our customers.”
Last week, Boeing reported that its second-quarter revenue had improved and losses had narrowed. The company lost $611 million in the second quarter, compared to a loss of $1.44 billion during the same period last year.
Shares of Boeing Co. slipped less than 1% before the opening bell Monday.
Tesla is awarding CEO Elon Musk 96 million shares of restricted stock valued at approximately $29 billion, just six months after a judge ordered the company to revoke his massive pay package.
The electric vehicle maker said in a regulatory filing on Monday that Musk must first pay Tesla $23.34 per share of restricted stock that vests, which is equal to the exercise price per share of the 2018 pay package that was awarded to the company’s CEO.
In December Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick reaffirmed her earlier ruling that Tesla must revoke Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package. She found that Musk engineered the landmark pay package in sham negotiations with directors who were not independent.
At the time McCormick also rejected an equally unprecedented and massive fee request by plaintiff attorneys, who argued that they were entitled to legal fees in the form of Tesla stock valued at more than $5 billion. The judge said the attorneys were entitled to a fee award of $345 million.
The rulings came in a lawsuit filed by a Tesla stockholder who challenged Musk’s 2018 compensation package.
That pay package carried a potential maximum value of about $56 billion, but that sum has fluctuated over the years based on Tesla’s stock price.
Musk appealed the order in March. A month later Tesla said in a regulatory filing that it was creating a special committee to look at Musk’s compensation as CEO.
Tesla shares have plunged 25% this year, largely due to blowback over Musk’s affiliation with President Donald Trump. But Tesla also faces intensifying competition from both the big Detroit automakers, and from China.
In its most recent quarter, Tesla reported that quarterly profits plunged from $1.39 billion to $409 million. Revenue also fell and the company fell short of even the lowered expectations on Wall Street.
Under pressure from shareholders last month, Tesla scheduled an annual shareholders meeting for November to comply with Texas state law.
A group of more than 20 Tesla shareholders, which have watched Tesla shares plummet, said in a letter to the company that it needed to at least provide public notice of the annual meeting.
Investors have grown increasingly worried about the trajection of the company after Musk had spent so much time in Washington this year, becoming one of the most prominent officials in the Trump administration in its bid to slash the size of the U.S. government.
As I wrote this newsletter in a Google Doc, I found myself toggling between an overwhelming mix of programs with different functions: Slack, Asana, my company’s HR management software, various spreadsheets, and my Microsoft OneDrive—not to mention the AI applications ChatGPT and Perplexity. I started to wonder: Am I the only one feeling tech fatigue?
Apparently not. In a new study, software company Quickbase found that while 80% of companies are investing more in new tech to improve productivity, more than half of the 2,000 workers surveyed across 10 industries are finding it harder than ever to be productive. The reason? Too many new tools with little connection or compatibility between them—and, it seems, a lack of clarity from up top.
This is not the revolution in worker productivity that AI companies have been promising. Indeed, nearly 60% of workers surveyed said they spend 11 hours or more each week chasing down information that is located in a handful of disconnected technology solutions. That’s more than a quarter of a standard work week! And 90% reported just feeling plain overwhelmed by the number of tech programs they needed to get work done on a typical day. I certainly feel validated.
The study calls this phenomenon “gray work,” which it defines as the work done in ad-hoc situations when technology isn’t connected properly. It’s “the hidden cost of inefficiency—the manual tasks employees do to compensate for disconnected systems and rigid tools,” the report explains. Those in the financial services/insurance and professional services industries felt it the most, reporting the largest increases in this kind of work this year.
It may be costing business leaders more than they realize. In addition to wasting time, half of the workers surveyed said they’d experienced project delays, miscommunication, duplicate work, or budget overruns in the past year. Some 53% said they spend just half their week on meaningful work that drives results for key projects.
So how can companies solve this? After diagnosing where the friction is occurring, business leaders should do a full tech stack audit, cutting redundant tech and prioritizing programs that offer interoperability, the report advises. Then, decide who’s in charge of overseeing and simplifying tech systems and create a plan. Only deploy AI in areas where it offers clear advantages—and make sure employees understand how they can (and how they should not) use it.
Kristin Stoller Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media [email protected]
Former Nike CEO John Donahoe has been hired as athletic director at Stanford.
Donahoe will become the school’s eighth athletic director and replace Bernard Muir, who stepped down this year. He will officially begin in the role Sept. 8.
“Stanford occupies a unique place in the national athletics landscape,” school president Jon Levin said in a statement. “We needed a distinctive leader — someone with the vision, judgment, and strategic acumen for a new era of college athletics, and with a deep appreciation for Stanford’s model of scholar-athlete excellence. John embodies these characteristics.”
ESPN first reported the move.
Donahoe graduated from Stanford Business School and was CEO at Nike from 2020-24. Donahoe also served as the CEO of ServiceNow, a global software company, and as CEO of eBay. He served as chair of the board at PayPal from 2015-25 and he worked for Bain & Company for nearly 20 years, including as the firm’s worldwide CEO.
“Stanford has enormous strengths and enormous potential in a changing environment, including being the model for achieving both academic and athletic excellence at the highest levels,” he said. “I can’t wait to work in partnership with the Stanford team to build momentum for Stanford Athletics and ensure the best possible experiences for our student-athletes.”
Donahoe takes over one of the country’s most successful athletic programs with Stanford having won at least one NCAA title in 49 straight years starting in 1976-77 and a record 137 NCAA team titles overall.
But the Cardinal struggled in the high-profile sports of football and men’s basketball under Muir’s tenure, leading to the decision to hire former Stanford and NFL star Andrew Luck to oversee the football program as its general manager.
The Cardinal are looking to rebound in football after going to three Rose Bowls under former coach David Shaw in Muir’s first four years as AD.
Shaw resigned in 2022 following a second straight 3-9 season and Muir’s new hire, Troy Taylor, posted back-to-back 3-9 seasons before being fired in March following a report that he had been investigated twice for allegedly mistreating staffers.
Luck hired former NFL coach Frank Reich as interim coach.
The men’s basketball program hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since Muir’s second season in 2013-14 under former coach Johnny Dawkins.
Dawkins was fired in 2016 and replaced by Jerod Haase, who failed to make the tournament once in eight years.
Muir hired Kyle Smith last March to take over and the Cardinal went 21-14 for their most wins in 10 years.
Muir also hired Kate Paye as women’s basketball coach last year after Hall of Famer Tara VanDerveer retired. The Cardinal went 16-15 this past season and in missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1987.
Muir also oversaw the Cardinal’s transition to the ACC this past year after the school’s long-term home, the Pac-12, broke apart.
Points fatigue is real. What started as a nice-to-have bonus for traveling has ballooned into a sprawl of rewards programs and arcane conversions that requires an advanced degree in statistics to manage.
Brian Kelly made a whole career off the cottage industry, parlaying a side hustle of maximizing credit card and travel rewards into a blog, The Points Guy, that became a verifiable franchise. Now he’s arguing that the points system has jumped the shark. Alongside Lerer Hippeau and Slow Ventures, he’s backing the New York-based startup Journey in a $7.7 million seed round to set it back on the right track.
Maybe this is too much of a first-world problem to care about, but I’m sure plenty of this newsletter’s readers were distraught when Chase announced an abstruse modification of their Sapphire Reserve credit card, or when Marriott acquired Starwood. Who doesn’t love fake internet money that can occasionally give you an airline upgrade or a free hotel night?
John Sutton, the cofounder and CEO of Journey, thinks the system needs a revamp. A longtime tech entrepreneur, Sutton met Kelly while serving as the chief digital officer at Red Ventures, a media-focused investment firm that owns brands like Bankrate, Lonely Planet, and eventually, The Points Guy.
When Sutton left his role in 2021, he took a couple of years off to play professional volleyball before figuring out his next venture. After exploring the idea of investing in short-term rentals like Airbnb properties, he had the idea of building out a loyalty program for travelers. After consulting with Kelly, he realized there was a broader problem—not only of short-term rentals and many independent hotels lacking the infrastructure to create rewards systems, but that points in general were increasingly broken. “They’ve been losing the magic of loyalty,” Kelly told me. “There’s a big opportunity to create a program that people are excited about.”
Journey’s website looks like a cross between a travel platform like Booking.com (an online travel agency, in industry parlance) and an Instagram feed, with lush snippets of desert hideouts and jungle treehouses. On the backend, Journey’s small team curates properties, now totaling more than 1,500 from around the world, that want to participate in their loyalty program—a combination of independent hotels and rental properties. Sutton says they’re not looking for certain price points (with properties ranging from several hundred to many thousand dollars per night) or stars, but whether they’ve “created something special that has a story to tell” (you can check out their portal, which just launched, to judge for yourself).
The upshot for visitors, Sutton and Kelly argue, is that the system is straightforward: You earn five points per dollar spent if you book directly through their platform, with each point worth about two cents, equating to a 10% rebate, which can be instantly redeemed during stays. “Our program is engineered so that you’re not being taken advantage of,” Kelly said.
Journey is the type of consumer-forward, design-first tech product that you don’t see much anymore—a simple concept executed with flair. But this being 2025, there is AI involved, of course. The company has built tools that track visitor preferences and behavior, like whether they’d prefer to be greeted with red wine or mineral water, to help property managers customize the experience. And Journey is also building out a platform for influencers like Kelly that matches them with properties. Eventually, the goal is to build out AI agents that will help tourists. Sutton says it will make platforms like Expedia, where you find a hotel by searching for the top 10 hotels in Paris, look antiquated.
“Travelers will be on a trust journey with us,” he told me.
Good morning. We’re in the second half of 2025, and CFO turnover continues.
This time, it’s at embattled UnitedHealth Group—ranked No. 3 on the Fortune 500 and the largest U.S. health care company by revenue in 2024. John F. Rex, who joined the company in 2012 and has served as CFO since 2016, is being replaced—not by an internal candidate, but by an external hire. Rex will become a strategic advisor to the CEO, Stephen J. Hemsley.
Wayne S. DeVeydt, most recently a managing director and operating partner at Bain Capital, will assume the CFO role effective Sept. 2. DeVeydt brings experience in operational improvement and growth acceleration—a skill set that will be valuable as UnitedHealth’s share price is down more than 50% over the past year. The leadership change comes on the heels of a troubling Q2 2025, in which UnitedHealth’s financial results fell far short of Wall Street expectations, further rattling investors.
The company shocked markets on July 29 by reporting unexpectedly weak quarterly results, according to Fortune’s Geoff Colvin.
As Colvin writes: “The crisis first manifested in April. UnitedHealth Group was emerging from the trauma of executive Brian Thompson’s high-profile murder in December when the company released first-quarter profits far below Wall Street’s expectations. The stock plunged, slashing over $100 billion from market value within hours. A month later, CEO Andrew Witty abruptly resigned for unspecified personal reasons, and former CEO Stephen Hemsley returned to the job. The stock plummeted again.” (You can read the complete report here.)
Managing risk and costs
Now, DeVeydt—also former chairman and CEO of Surgery Partners and former CFO at Anthem (now Elevance)—will need to play a significant role in steering UnitedHealth back on course. The company has four main segments: UnitedHealthcare (coverage), Optum Health (care delivery), Optum Insight (software and analytics), and Optum Rx (pharmacy benefits).
Industry analysts say the road ahead won’t be easy. I asked Julie Utterback, senior equity analyst for health care at Morningstar, for her assessment. “UnitedHealth—and, frankly, the entire managed care organization (MCO) industry—needs to figure out how to balance the current mismatch between rates and medical utilization in their risk-bearing operations,” she told me.
This problem spans the U.S. health care system: higher-than-anticipated medical costs with insufficient premium increases began in Medicare Advantage in late 2023, spread to Medicaid in mid-2024, and now pressure individual exchanges and at-risk employer plans, Utterback said.
In other words, rising health costs are outpacing premiums, which is hurting profits for insurers like UnitedHealth.
On average, the medical cost ratio (the percentage of revenue spent on patient care) among the six MCOs tracked by Morningstar is expected to be more than 450 basis points higher in 2025 than in the prior decade.
In addition, UnitedHealth also faces pressures within its Optum Health unit, where, in some arrangements, the firm not only delivers caregiving services but also assumes the risk of managing a patient’s overall health, she said.
For MCOs to return to target margins, they need to secure better compensation for the risk they assume across the U.S. health care system, she added.
Regarding DeVeydt’s priorities as CFO, Utterback said finance organizations will continue to emphasize cost controls. Further adoption of AI and other digital tools to improve back-office efficiency will remain a focus, although UnitedHealth has already prioritized such initiatives for several years, she noted.
DeVeydt steps into the CFO role next month with a formidable to-do list, and the future of UnitedHealth’s financial recovery on the line.
In the traditional playbook of corporate ascension, general counsel isn’t typically seen as a springboard to the CEO suite, especially not at a global technology consultancy. And yet, Julie Sweet has not only defied that assumption, she’s redefined what modern CEO readiness looks like in an era when domain expertise is being eclipsed by intellectual agility.
Before she took the helm of Accenture, the $176 billion consulting powerhouse, Sweet was a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the elite Manhattan law firm where partners rarely leave and even more rarely leap into a completely different industry. She had built a career there closing high-stakes M&A deals, not architecting cloud transformations or negotiating AI partnerships.
But in 2010, when Accenture approached her to become its general counsel, Sweet made the jump. Her father had recently died at age 68, a personal loss that left her reflecting on what she wanted her career and life to look like. “It reminded me to make sure I was living life to the fullest,” she told my colleague, Lila MacLellan, in a newly published Fortune magazine feature.
At the time, Accenture was shifting its growth strategy and looking to become more acquisitive. It saw in Sweet a business-savvy legal partner who could help execute on that ambition. Still, she joined with no formal background in technology and admits she didn’t know what the cloud was when she started.
Rather than seeing that gap as a liability, Sweet treated it as a learning opportunity. She enlisted Bhaskar Ghosh, now Accenture’s chief strategy and innovation officer, as a personal tutor. They met every two weeks for 18 months. It was a deliberate, sustained effort to build fluency in an area that would soon become central to Accenture’s future and her own.
Sweet has emphasized that understanding technology isn’t optional for executives; it’s foundational. Leaders today, she says, must understand how tech is changing products, industries, and customer expectations.
In 2019, following the untimely death of CEO Pierre Nanterme, Sweet was named chief executive. Her ability to connect the dots across legal, strategic, and operational domains has proven an asset, especially as the company scales up partnerships with firms like Nvidia and Palantir to embed AI across both commercial and government clients.
In interviews with Fortune, analysts credited her with positioning Accenture for the next wave of enterprise transformation. Clients described her as highly engaged, detail-oriented, and deeply prepared. Former colleagues also highlighted her ability to synthesize complex information and her tendency to keep pressing until she fully understands an issue.
Although Sweet’s path from law to CEO of a consulting and tech services company may be atypical, it reflects what modern leadership demands. Increasingly, the most effective CEOs aren’t those who simply follow a linear path up a single function, but rather those who can cross disciplines, absorb new knowledge quickly, and operate with intellectual range.
In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on that time Jack Welch claimed the job numbers were being manipulated.
The big story: Trump continues to make false claims about the employment numbers.
The markets: Recovering from Friday’s collapse.
Analyst notes from Analysts ING on the Fed, Goldman Sachs on U.S. GDP, and JPMorgan on corporate earnings.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. I’ve never liked how the U.S. measures joblessness. The official unemployment rate doesn’t include the number of people who have given up looking for work or are stuck in low-paid jobs that don’t match their skills and aspirations. It doesn’t capture the difference between long-term vs. short-term employment, contract or full-time jobs. Economists at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) understand that frustration and publish a range of measures to capture the nuance of labor underutilization.
President Trump agrees that the number doesn’t reflect the reality of unemployment, though he reached a very different conclusion last week in deciding the numbers were “phony” and “rigged” to underrepresent the robustness of the labor market. He was so mad about the July jobs report, which showed unemployment ticking up to 4.2%, that he decided to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday.
I immediately thought about the reaction when former GE CEO Jack Welch tweeted his disdain about the job numbers under the Obama Administration back in October of 2012. Welch, a lifelong Republican, was skeptical that the unemployment rate had fallen below 8% for the first time in four years with an election looming. He tweeted: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”
Welch had been retired from GE for more than a decade at that point and had plenty of opinions as a columnist for Fortune. Nevertheless, there was outrage that a leader of his stature was attacking the integrity of a vital nonpartisan government agency and the integrity of the U.S. itself by suggesting that core economic data was politicized. Welch quit the Fortune gig amid uproar over the tweet.
But he didn’t back away from his assertion. “I’m not the first person to question government numbers, and hopefully I won’t be the last,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He likened the blowback he was facing to Soviet Russia and Communist China. What Welch, a man who famously claimed to cut the bottom 10% of GE’s workforce every year, did not do: Call for the BLS commissioner to be fired.
U.S. stocks were poised for gains as futures on Sunday evening signaled a rebound after investors digested jobs data that upended their notions of what previously looked like a more resilient economy. Some analysts on Wall Street are warning that the U.S. is now on the brink of recession.
Markets were pointing toward a rebound Sunday evening after startling jobs data delivered a rude awakening to Wall Street bulls.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average reversed higher, rising 114 points, or 0.26%. S&P 500 futures were up 0.34%, and Nasdaq futures added 0.38%.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed 3.3 basis points to 4.253% after plunging Friday on greater expectations for Fed rate cuts. The U.S. dollar was down 0.09% against the euro and down 0.29% against the yen.
Gold rose 0.17% to $3,405.70 per ounce. U.S. oil prices dropped 0.15% to $67.23 per barrel, and Brent crude fell 0.2% to $69.53, as OPEC+ announced another surge in production.
Combined with separate indicators showing deterioration in consumer spending, housing, and manufacturing, the overall picture is one of an economy “on the precipice of recession,” according to Mark Zandi from Moody’s Analytics. That followed a similar warning from economists at JPMorgan.
Analysts have also raised concerns about the potential politicization of data after Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, who headed the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Others had previously sounded the alarm on glaring red flags in the economy. But in the days leading up to the jobs report, some top commentators were still trying to explain why doomsday predictions about Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs had yet to materialize.
On Thursday, former White House economic adviser Jason Furman attributed it in part to “tariff derangement syndrome.” And last Sunday, Rockefeller International Chair Ruchir Sharma said the negative effects of tariffs were likely being offset by other factors like the AI spending splurge and lower inflationary pressure from housing, cars and energy.
With Wall Street now more attuned to economic risks like Trump’s trade war, the tariffs that will go into effect on Thursday may get more scrutiny. That includes steeper duties on trading partners like Canada and Switzerland.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Sunday that tariff rates are “pretty much set” and are unlikely to change in the coming days, though Trump had pushed back the last deadline to Aug. 7 from Aug. 1, which was also a delay from another deadline on July 9.
Meanwhile, the calendar of economic reports thins out in the coming week after several big ones last week. On Tuesday, the trade deficit for June comes out, providing an update on how much tariffs are impacting imports. On Thursday, second-quarter productivity is due.
Earnings season has passed its peak, but several top names will issue quarterly reports. Palantir Technologies reports Monday after securing a $10 billion software and data contract from the Army.
Chip giant Advanced Micro Devices will report on Tuesday—potentially offering hints at Nvidia’s results, which don’t come out until Aug. 27.
Other companies scheduled to release earnings in the coming week include Caterpillar, Disney, and McDonald’s. It will also be a busy time for pharmaceutical and biotech giants like Amgen, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly as Trump weighs steep tariffs on drugs.
The economic commission of Iran’s parliament revived long-delayed plans on Sunday to cut four zeros from the country’s plunging currency, as part of efforts to simplify financial transactions.
“Today’s meeting of the economic commission approved the name ‘rial’ as the national currency, as well as the removal of four zeros,” said the parliament’s website ICANA, quoting Shamseddin Hosseini, the commission’s chairman.
Under the proposed system, one rial would be equivalent to 10,000 at the current value and subdivided into 100 gherans, according to ICANA.
The proposed redenomination was first mooted in 2019 but then shelved. The current bill will have to pass a parliamentary vote and gain the approval of the Guardian Council, a body empowered to vet legislation.
It was not immediately clear when the parliamentary vote would take place.
In May, Iran’s Central Bank Governor Mohammad Reza Farzin said he would pursue the plan, noting that the Iranian rial “does not have a favourable image” in the global economy.
The move comes as Iran faces deepening economic challenges, including runaway inflation, a sharply devalued currency, and the prolonged impact of international sanctions.
As of Sunday, the rial was trading at around 920,000 to the US dollar on the street market, according to local media and the Bonbast website that monitors unofficial exchange rates.
In practice, Iranians have long abandoned the rial in everyday transactions, using the toman instead. One toman equals 10 rials.
Iran’s economy has long been under severe strain due to sweeping US sanctions since Washington’s 2018 withdrawal from a landmark nuclear deal during US President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Upon returning to office in January, Trump revived his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on Tehran.
In June, Iranian lawmakers approved new economy minister Ali Madanizadeh after his predecessor, Abdolnaser Hemmati, was ousted in a no-confidence vote for failing to address the country’s economic woes.
The same month Israel launched an unprecedented attack on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, beginning a deadly 12-day war.
On July 28, President Donald Trump’s attorneys filed an urgent motion in federal court demanding the expedited deposition of Rupert Murdoch—a move justified, they argued, by both Murdoch’s central role in News Corp’s decision-making and his allegedly precarious health.
Murdoch is 94. He could die at any moment, Trump’s lawyers argued.
The legal maneuver, connected to the president’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the mogul and the Wall Street Journal over a story about Trump’s alleged letter to Jeffrey Epstein, has thrown the king of modern media’s longevity and his empire’s future into question.
Trump’s lawyers seem to believe the titan is in no condition to testify at trial, citing a litany of health issues including a severe back injury, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, a torn Achilles tendon, a serious case of COVID-19 in 2022, and an incident in February 2025 when Murdoch collapsed and fainted at breakfast with a journalist.
“Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
For decades, Murdoch’s iron grip steered titanic assets—Fox Corporation and News Corp—across continents, through scandal, boardroom intrigue, and relentless media cycles. Yet the court’s focus on his fragility, and the legal assertion that his control has been contingent on his ability to act, accelerates what could become the defining story of the next era in global media: the fractious, uncertain, and high-stakes succession battle for one of the most powerful empires in news and entertainment.
Much of the Murdoch media dynasty’s fate hangs in the balance of the Murdoch Family Trust. Established in 1999, after Rupert’s second divorce, the trust was created to control the family’s significant stake and voting power in both Fox Corporation and News Corp. Although the trust owns only about 14% of News Corp’s equity, it controls roughly 40-41% of the company’s voting shares, giving the Murdoch family effective control over these major media businesses through a dual-share structure.
Tom Stoddart—Getty Images
The trust was designed so that Rupert himself holds four votes during his lifetime, while his four eldest children—Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence—hold one vote each. Upon Rupert’s death, his four votes will be distributed equally to these four children, so each will then have two votes, ensuring shared control. At the moment, Lachlan is the sole chair of News Corp and the CEO of Fox Corporation, having taken over for his father after his retirement in 2023.
Ultimately, the trust enables the Murdoch family to control its media empire by concentrating voting power among the four eldest children following Rupert’s death. But its irrevocability and the principle of equal control have sparked ongoing legal and familial conflict that stand to jeopardize the media powerhouse Murdoch built.
In late 2023, Murdoch attempted to alter the trust to grant sole posthumous control to his eldest son, Lachlan, allowing him to take over the family business entirely. This move was legally contested by the other three children, who argued it violated the original mandate of equal control. A Nevada probate court ruled in December 2024 against Rupert’s attempt, but the mogul’s legal team has since filed an appeal.
“Lachlan is having to pay his siblings a higher and higher value to get out of his way. … So he’s in a real bind.”
Paddy Manning, Australian journalist and Lachlan biographer
The trust also contains a 2030 expiration date that has only contributed to the ongoing contentious family dynamics that impact the Murdochs’ businesses. The deadline could decide the fate of Fox Corporation and News Corp. Should the trust expire, its terms and centralized structure will dissolve, forcing the Murdoch heirs to determine among themselves the future structure of ownership and control over the family’s immense assets.
Above all, the legal battle over the trust has caused an immense divide in the family. Lachlan and Rupert’s attempt to maintain control has galvanized Lachlan’s three other siblings. “They’ve unified them in a way that they weren’t unified before and so it has been in some ways a miscalculation,” Australian journalist and Lachlan biographer Paddy Manning told Fortune.
Given the long history of Murdoch sibling infighting, succession in a post-Rupert world stands to have significant impacts on the media empire. With control of the businesses passing equally to the four eldest children, boardroom gridlock—if the siblings are unable to reach consensus—could potentially paralyze key business decisions. And ongoing family divisions may shake shareholder confidence.
Majority rules
Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff foresees Lachlan’s three vote-holding siblings ultimately aligning against him and relieving him of his command over News Corp and Fox, and eventually an implosion of the Murdoch media empire we know today.
“The voice of the three would rule. And right now that appears to be that the three would relieve their brother of control and then make a determination about what happened to the remaining assets,” he told Fortune. (James, it’s worth noting, has denied there has even been a secret conspiracy between the siblings to unseat Lachlan in a rare interview with the Atlantic.)
The children, Wolff predicts, will then sell off some of the assets, namely those within News Corp which includes the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London, and James could take over and pivot the editorial slant of Fox News.
“This all comes down to four people, and whether they get along or they don’t get along.”
Michael Wolff, Murdoch biographer
James, who is deeply involved in social-justice initiatives and left-leaning politics, has long been outspoken about his deep disagreements with the editorial direction of both News Corp and Fox News, having resigned from the News Corp board in 2020, explicitly citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” In interviews, he’s criticized his family’s business for “legitimizing disinformation.”
James Murdoch declined a Fortune request for comment.
Even if James were to take over Fox, he would face an uphill battle with the Fox Corporation board that has aligned itself with Lachlan and Rupert’s vision. Since taking over, Lachlan has appointed two of his own directors, including former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. According to Manning: Abbott’s role on the board is largely to buttress Lachlan’s leadership. And shareholders, Manning told Fortune, would be pretty concerned about a strategy that tampered with the editorial line, or the programming, in a way that could dilute its earnings potential.
Fox Corporation declined a Fortune request for comment.
As for the remaining businesses in the Murdoch portfolio, finding a suitable buyer for the myriad lesser-known assets within News Corp would be a significant undertaking. The Wall Street Journal, Wolff said, would be somewhat of an exception. “You have vanity buyers to strategic buyers,” he added, throwing Michael Bloomberg’s name into the mix.
News Corp did not respond to a Fortune request for comment.
Billion-dollar buyout:
Acquiescing to his siblings isn’t Lachlan’s sole option. The eldest Murdoch son could buy out his siblings, but past attempts, in 2019 and 2023, were unsuccessful. Lachlan has never been willing to offer his siblings more than 60% of the market value of their shares.
Manning sees Lachlan buying out his siblings as the most logical move, one made by Rupert himself in the 1990s. But, according to Manning, Lachlan’s successful leadership at Fox and News Corp would allow his siblings to ask a high price, into the several billions of dollars, for control of the companies.
“Lachlan is having to pay his siblings a higher and higher value to get out of his way, and he’s having to pay them for effectively the fruits of his strategy, which they have criticized. So he’s in a real bind,” Manning told Fortune.
Under Lachlan’s leadership, Fox Corporation’s stock has performed well, even rising throughout the initial months of his appointment. Although the stock has seen some fluctuation due to ongoing legal battles, its price reached an all-time high of $58 in February 2025. In its third-quarter financial reporting, the company disclosed $4.37 billion in revenues, a 27% year-over-year increase.
As for News Corp’s performance, the company’s stock has soared, reflecting steady financial performance and strong growth. In 2024, the company’s earnings jumped nearly 79%.
Jackie Luna—REUTERS/Redux
Business as usual
Author and journalist Claire Atkinson, who has covered the Murdochs extensively and is writing a forthcoming book on the media dynasty, points to Lachlan’s business wins as a potential reason for Lachlan’s siblings to allow him to remain in control. She doesn’t view sweeping changes to the Murdoch businesses as inevitable following Rupert’s death.
“Lachlan has run it for more than five years. The stocks have done better than other media stocks,” she told Fortune.
Aside from the stock’s performance, Lachlan has also helped propel Fox News’ success. Fox News remains the top-rated cable news channel, leading primetime and outpacing ABC, NBC, and CBS. And he has continued Fox’s expansion into streaming following the company’s 2020 acquisition of Tubi, which as of July 2025, has since surpassed 100 million monthly active users.
But beyond Lachlan’s success, Atkinson doesn’t see Elisabeth and James attempting to reclaim power at their family’s enterprise. “They’ve got these billion-dollar fortunes of their own to create whatever media companies they want,” she said, something Elisabeth has long been doing. The youngest Murdoch daughter started her global TV and film production and development company, Sister Pictures, in 2019.
Elisabeth Murdoch did not immediately return a Fortune request for comment.
Regardless of the potential outcomes, both Atkinson and Manning expect Lachlan to fight tooth and nail to remain heir to the Murdoch empire. “I don’t see him stepping aside or stepping down or relinquishing that position anytime soon at all. I think he is absolutely committed to his role,” Atkinson said.
Wolff, however, questions Lachlan’s willingness to go above and beyond for control over the businesses. “There’s always the sense that he would rather be doing something else, spear fishing,” he said, referring to Lachlan’s favorite hobby.
How hard Lachlan will have to fight to remain atop his father’s enterprise is ultimately dependent upon his siblings, with whom his relationships have been strained by the weight of the Murdoch legacy and divided ideals.
“This all comes down to four people, and whether they get along or they don’t get along, and whatever accommodation they can come to with each other. Nothing else matters, nothing except what these four people will want at a given moment in time,” Wolff said.
To land the historic job as the first Egyptian, Arab, and African woman to go to space, Sara Sabry trained and researched every morning before her full-time tech job and didn’t see daylight for years. The grind to space isn’t for the faint of heart—and it’s a reality check, she suggests, for work-life balance-loving Gen Z. In an exclusive interview with Fortune, she shares the brutal routine that helped her defy a “0.0%” chance of becoming an astronaut.
Sara Sabry became the world’s first Egyptian astronaut after flying to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on Aug. 4, 2022—marking the first time an Arab or African women has ever gone to space, all before even turning 30.
It’s a common childhood dream, but one that few realize. For starters, you need access to a plane just to rack up the 1,000 flight hours required to apply to programs like NASA.
For Sabry, the mission was even more impossible. She wasn’t born into a country with a space agency. There were no astronauts who looked like her. And she didn’t have elite connections or deep pockets.
So to get her foot in the door, the then 28-year-old had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to squeeze in early-morning training and bioastronautics research, all before reporting to her full-time job as CTO of a Berlin-based tech startup by 9 a.m.
Then after work, she’d work some more on her own start-up and space training—and it’s the kind of gruelling discipline she says young people today shouldn’t shy away from if they want to unlock their dreams.
“Back then it was, it was really, really, it was really tough,” she recalls in those early days of her career, speaking exclusively to Fortune during her stay in London for the 2025 American Express Leadership Academy. “You would wake up at night, and then you would go back at night, so you barely see the daylight ever.”
She says that she’d tackle the most important tasks of the day before 10 a.m., when others start to trickle online.
“I see a lot of young people now they’re wanting to take the easy route without working so hard. But the truth is, you have to make sacrifices. You have to put yourself through a lot of discomfort,” Sabry adds. “Of course, it’s not easy to wake up 4:30 a.m. every morning and be completely isolated from the world, right? But it goes to show that you can really transform your life—and you have so much control over your life.”
Sabry says the experience radically shifted how she viewed limitations tied to class, geography, and identity.
She didn’t have the passport, the platform, or the privilege, but she pushed through anyway. And in doing so, proved what’s possible when ambition is backed by relentless effort.
“It changed the way I see things now. Having gone to space and having done the thing that was impossible, honestly the likelihood of that happening was around 0.0%, unless I changed my nationality.”
She beat the odds—and over 7,000 other applicants for that Blue Origin flight—to make history.
Now, she’s made it—but still pulling 13-hour days and has a jet-setter schedule
Despite finding success, you still won’t find Sabry kicking up her feet.
On top of being an astronaut, the now 32-year-old is also the executive director of Deep Space Initiative—a nonprofit she founded to make space more accessible—co-founder of the Egyptian Space Agency’s Ambassador program, and is completing a PhD in aerospace engineering. She is also conducting research on the engineering of the next generation of planetary spacesuits at the NASA-funded Humanspaceflight lab.
If that wasn’t enough, Sabry is building new ventures and growing a speaking career that’s taking her around the world. And with such a packed, jet-setting schedule, she’s learned to adapt her rigid routine into something more flexible. But that doesn’t mean she lies in.
“I haven’t lived in a one place in three years,” she says. “I have to live out of my suitcase, so you have to adapt.”
Nowadays, Sabry starts her day at around 6 a.m. with a workout, before responding to emails and doing “admin stuff.”
“It’s not 4:30 a.m. anymore, because I have to work late these days,” she explains, adding that the time difference for international calls she has to take while often based in Egypt pushes her work schedule back, bringing her total workday to 13 hours.
“My first meeting is at 9 a.m. and my last meeting is from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. so I can’t be waking up too early,” Sabry continues. Eight hours of sleep is non-negotiable—and so is having every task for the day blocked out in her calendar.
“Because I’m balancing a PhD, two companies, my public speaking, and more, I think it’s really about scheduling. As soon as tasks are scheduled in my calendar, I don’t have to think about them,” she adds.
“It’s so easy to get distracted when you’re working on other things, and you think, ‘Oh I have to work on my research or I have to answer emails.’ But no, emails are going to stay in the inbox until the scheduled time for me to be looking at emails. Sometimes, of course, you have to do urgent things. But the things that are not super urgent? You pre-schedule.”
Eyes on the prize: The cure for exhaustion
If you feel exhausted just reading about Sabry’s routine, let alone copying it, she says there’s only one way to survive it: become obsessed by your mission.
Sabry said she had no other choice because the alternative was not giving it all and risk not achieving her dream.
“It was always this fight,” she explains. “I was never going to be given an opportunity. Having grown up knowing that things are just not going to be given to me, I never expected anything. It makes you work so much harder. But I never really resented it, or felt like, ‘Oh, I’m doing too much,’ because that was just the necessary thing to do to move forward. There was no other option.”
And she says having a packed schedule helped her move forward with her goals because she didn’t even have time to think about anything else.
“Most of the day you’re in the dark, but you’re so consumed by it—having that focus and not having time to look at what’s going on in different places was really, really key,” she tells Fortune.
“So being so consumed and having just a really packed schedule, and knowing that I was investing in myself. When you’re working on things that you know are towards your purpose, it just gives you so much peace.”
Ultimately, she’d only be kicking herself today if she knew there was an extra hour or two in the day that she hadn’t used to push herself forward.
“If I wasn’t doing everything that I can and I could do more, then I wouldn’t feel at peace. Then I would kind of go through like the other rabbit hole of, you know, being kind of like extra tough on yourself. So by doing so much, it gave me peace.”
As remote work lingers, employees are doubling, even tripling, their paychecks by secretly juggling multiple full-time jobs—and not even having to pull overtime. The overemployed workers Fortune spoke to are working up to five jobs and pulling in more than $725,000 a year, all within a standard 40-hour week.
If you’ve grown suspicious of your coworker’s away status on Teams or their refusal to turn their camera on during meetings, there’s a chance they might be trying to earn two salaries at once—and fit it all into a normal workweek.
The practice went viral on social media last month when a single software engineer was found to be working at multiple Silicon Valley startups at once, prompting other companies to check whether they had fallen victim to similar deceitfulness.
However, holding down more than one gig at a time—sometimes even up to five—may be bigger than some companies expect. After all, the continued prevalence of remote work has made it more challenging for employers to know exactly what their workers are up to.
“If you’ve worked in corporate America, it is a lot of fluff and not a lot of substance,” said one worker who spoke anonymously with Fortune. They currently work three gigs, making about $725,000 altogether.
At one point, they were balancing five roles total, something they said has been made possible by AI productivity enhancement, with new tools making it easier than ever to send emails, compile meeting notes, and draft deliverables—and get it all done under relatively normal work hours.
“At this point it kind of became a game to me, how many jobs can I do at once and stay sane?” they recalled.
Maxing out on jobs certainly paid. off. While juggling five at once, they estimated bringing in more than $1 million a year.
“I have zero loyalty to a corporation,” they added.
No regrets about taking work from others
Fortune spoke to a second worker who currently holds two jobs in the healthcare technology industry. And despite being a full-time worker making a combined amount of nearly $250,000, they are able to get all the work completed within 40 hours. They don’t have concerns over taking jobs away from those struggling in today’s rocky job market.
“They’re hiring me for my knowledge and my expertise, not for hours worked,” they told Fortune.
And while holding more than one job may raise eyebrows next time you have to put your work history on a resume, they said they will just write the best full-time role they had at a current period to avoid having to answer for holding two jobs at once. However, the demand for talent in the healthcare tech industry has not made it much of an issue.
“I don’t go look for jobs, jobs come and look for me,” they said. “To be honest, I don’t remember the last time I went to apply for a job. And since 2017, I’ve had four different positions.”
In fact, they said they got so many recruitment offers from firms trying to snatch up talent, the companies practically enabled overemployment behavior.
Holding more than one job might be legal, but some people like Lewis Maleh, CEO of executive recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, don’t recommend people emulate the behavior.
“If someone is doing a full-time perm job and being paid accordingly, they should not be doing another full-time perm role unless the company is OK with it,” Maleh previously told Fortune. “I don’t think it’s ethical and will cost you down the road if you get found out. If you are doing a few part-time gigs, that’s of course a different story.”
A trend that might continue, but maybe not for long
Though both of the sources Fortune spoke with are fully-remote employees, some users on the overemployment Reddit community have deemed it possible to secretly work at a second job while on site elsewhere. But by and large, working multiple full-time jobs has been enabled by the ability to work from home.
Despite calls for workers to return to the office from large Fortune 500 companies like JPMorgan Chase, remote work is still common. In fact, 33% of all workers worked from home in 2024, down just slightly from 35% in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s latest American Time Use Survey.
Remote work has stuck around far more than Jerry Jacobs, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, expected—but now bosses are slowly getting better at gauging workers’ productivity realities.
“The longer (remote work) lasts, the more I think people will get used to this as just being, you know, one way that people work,” Jacobs tells Fortune. “And I think the longer it lasts, the more you know, people are going to get good at managing it.”
And as a result, he doesn’t expect the trend of having multiple full-time jobs to carry on—but rather something people are experimenting with.
“It’s hard to convince people on your first job, that you’re really doing your job, if you’re spending a lot of your time and energy on your second job,” he adds.
Similarly Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor–human relations at Penn State University Abington, believes working more than one full-time job has the potential to grow, but it remains to be seen what that will actually look like.
“The question is, will the ethics, the productivity, the rules and regulations catch up with this?”
Holding multiple full-time jobs may sound impossible, but these overemployed remote workers are managing to squeeze in two to three jobs within a regular workweek—no overtime needed.