In today’s edition: the impact of BLS turmoil, Martha Stewart gets into skincare, and this year’s Most Powerful People in Business.

– Power moves. For the second year in a row, Fortune has ranked the 100 Most Powerful People in Business. This list runs alongside our longstanding Most Powerful Women franchise—and once again shows why it’s still important to cover business’s Most Powerful Women on their own.

Of 105 people on the Most Powerful People list (there are some ties), 19 are women. They’re woven into the ranking in the same order they appear on our 2025 Most Powerful Women list, published in May. The top woman on the MPW list, GM chief Mary Barra, comes in at No. 10 on the Most Powerful People list. She’s preceded by today’s business titans—Jamie Dimon, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and, at No. 1 this year, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

While Silicon Valley founders like Zuckerberg and Altman appear high on the ranking, the top women in business are mostly career executives. (After Barra, there’s Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Citi’s Jane Fraser, and AMD’s Lisa Su.) The only female founder who makes the MPP list is Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei, who appears alongside her brother and co-founder Dario Amodei.

The female founders like Mira Murati, Fei-Fei Li, and Canva’s Melanie Perkins who have become mainstays on the MPW list are poised to build generational companies like OpenAI and Meta—but are still on the way there. A few years from now, perhaps they’ll dominate the top of the ranking, too.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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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.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

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In today’s edition: Kamala’s new book, the tariff deluge, and a record for the Global 500.

– Record-setting. Fortune‘s Global 500, a ranking of the world’s largest companies, was published earlier this week. And it broke a record—women are running more Global 500 companies than ever before.

Of the 500 companies on the list, 33 have female CEOs this year. That’s up from 28 last year—but 33 is still only 6.6%. It’s far behind the Fortune 500, the ranking of America’s largest businesses, where women this year ran 55 businesses, or 11% of the companies on the list.

The companies on the Global 500 total $41.7 trillion in revenue, more than one-third of the world’s GDP. It’s a higher revenue bar for a company to make the list than on the Fortune 500—the smallest company on the Global 500 brings in $32.2 billion annually. On the Fortune 500, that cutoff was $7.4 billion this year. Women-led Fortune 500 companies are often smaller than the world’s giants—one reason the Global 500 lags behind the Fortune 500 in female leadership.

The highest-ranking woman-led Global 500 company this year is General Motors, led by CEO Mary Barra. (One reason she was No. 1 on our Most Powerful Women list earlier this year). GM is followed by Elevance Health, led by Gail Boudreaux; Jane Fraser’s Citigroup; and Sarah London’s Centene.

A handful of companies became women-led Global 500 businesses for the first time this year. Ding Xiangqun now runs the People’s Insurance Co. of China, the $86 billion-in-revenue state-owned insurer. Amanda Bardwell took over the $44 billion-in-revenue Australian supermarket chain Woolworths Group in September 2024. Emilia Esther Calleja Alor took over the Mexican utility CFE in October. Karin Rådström now leads Germany’s Daimler Truck Holding and Susan D. Morris is two months into running Albertsons.

Other notable female CEOs of non-U.S. Global 500 businesses include Sandy Ran Xu of JD.com; Magda Chambriad of Brazil’s Petrobras; and Catherine MacGregor of France’s Engie. And of course Accenture chief Julie Sweet (the company is incorporated in Ireland, and appears on the Global 500 rather than the Fortune 500). My colleague Lila MacLellan has a fantastic new story about the Accenture CEO out now alongside this list.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Dia Dipasupil—Getty Images

In today’s edition: Kamala Harris’s California decision, another Ivy’s deal with Trump, and Fortune‘s Lila MacLellan on the first leadership lesson Accenture’s Julie Sweet ever learned.

– Ready to win. When Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, was a 15-year-old girl growing up in Tustin, Calif., she would often enter local debate tournaments and speech contests in the hope of winning cash prizes. She grew up in a working-class household, she explained recently, and at a Lions Club tournament, “you could earn, like, $500.” 

Sweet’s father would drive her to the events in his beat-up VW bug, wearing the one sports coat he owned, and Sweet would regularly win at the podium—but not every time. One evening, she made it to the semifinals of a competition but lost to the daughter of the club’s president. On the way home, she recalled, “I was kind of complaining in the car to my dad, ‘Oh, she was so cutesy, and she was the daughter of the president.’

“My father looks at me, and he says, ‘First of all, Julie, you’re never going to be the daughter of the president of the Lions Club. That’s not the family you were born into,’” she recounted. “‘And I believe you can do anything, but…you have to be so much better than anyone else that they have to give it to you. 

“‘Tonight,’” he continued, “‘you weren’t that much better.’”

Mackenzie Stroh for Fortune

Sweet called that exchange her first experience of constructive feedback, one that also taught her to be honest with herself about her performance. Her late father’s lesson that night has no doubt also helped her and her army of consultants give feedback companies desperately need as they try to navigate a world being disrupted by AI.

As I report in a new feature story, Accenture is an AI powerhouse, booking hundreds of millions in AI services for clients that are among the world’s most influential companies. Under Sweet’s tenure, Accenture has also grown; it’s worth over $170 billion now, nearly double its value in 2018, the year before Sweet took the reins. It employs 774,000 people globally, compared with 460,000 six years ago. Earlier this year, Sweet was No. 2 on Fortune‘s 2025 Most Powerful Women list. Accenture is No. 211 on the 2025 edition of the Global 500, which was released this week.

Sweet, true to her teenage self, is prepared for whatever comes next, and says she isn’t worried about suggestions that AI itself might one day replace consultants. “AI is only a technology,” she told me. “The value comes from reinvention of how we work, our workforces and the tools we use…We are making sure that we are leading the way with our own reinvention.” 

Read my story full story here. 

Lila MacLellan
[email protected]

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© Mackenzie Stroh for Fortune