The S&P 500 rose 0.55% on Tuesday as tech stocks, including Meta and Google, ticked upward.
Tariffs may be leaving a cloud over the stock market, but tech companies continue their upward climb, buoyed by investor excitement around artificial intelligence. On Tuesday, Meta’s share price rose 1.20% amid reports that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant planned to invest around $15 billion into the startup Scale AI.
Meta wasn’t the only tech company to receive a boost on Tuesday. Apple shares rose 0.61%, despite a lackluster performance at its annual developer conference, while Tesla rebounded 5.67% as the public spat between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has become more muted. Overall, the S&P 500 rose 0.55%.
Despite markets remaining in the green, investors remain cautious as trade talks between the U.S. and China continued in London. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters on Tuesday that discussions with Chinese economic officials were going well. “We’re spending lots of time together,” he said.
AI buzz
Meta has retained its status as one of the topmost U.S. tech companies, despite high profile stumbles over the past few years. Those include its disastrous pivot to the metaverse, and its more recent scramble to keep pace in the AI arms race with competitors, including Google and OpenAI.
In its latest bid to shore up resources, Meta is building a new “superintelligence” AI research lab—a term for an AI system that would surpass the collective intelligence of humanity—that will likely be headed by the 28-year-old billionaire founder of Scale AI, Alexandr Wang. According to reports from Bloombergand The Information, the deal to bring Wang on board would entail an investment into Scale AI totaling around $15 billion.
Though the move may not be enough for Meta to compete with other AI labs, the company’s stock still ticked up by 1.20%, bringing its monthly gain to 9.85%. Google rose by 1.29% on Tuesday.
As for Tesla, despite Tuesday’s bump, Tesla has still fallen by 5.55% over the past week. The company is planning to launch its long-anticipated self-driving taxi service in Austin by the end of the month.
Another red-hot tech stock, the stablecoin company Circle, maintained most of its massive gains from its initial public offering last week, hovering around $105, though it dropped 8.31% on the day. As Congress inches closer to passing landmark legislation that would establish regulation for stablecoins, a type of dollar-backed cryptocurrency, Circle had the largest two-day pop for an IPO that raised more than $500 million since 1980. Analysts said that Circle’s performance could encourage other fintech and crypto companies to go public, with the exchange Gemini announcing that it had confidentially filed for its IPO last week.
Time is relentless, dwindling, and utterly relative.
“The Greeks have two words for time,” Ryan Alshak, founder and CEO of Laurel, told me in a Los Angeles conference room in May. “There’s chronos, which is clock time, and kairos, which is your perception.”
Alshak has built his life around time—literally. His startup, Laurel, is designed to map how people spend theirs at work. By connecting with tools like Slack, Microsoft Outlook, and Zoom, Laurel quantifies knowledge work, using AI to help individuals and companies see where time goes—and which tasks and activities deliver the most return. The platform is gaining real traction in time-sensitive industries like law and accounting, with ambitions to redefine productivity even in fields where time isn’t billed by the hour.
“Our entire mission is to return time, and the statistic that underpins that: The average knowledge worker today works nine hours a day, but only adds leverage for three,” Alshak said.
The entrepreneur has a knack for imbuing his timekeeping and work analytics startup with axioms that sound like they might have come from the lips of ancient philosophers. “The finiteness of time is the universe’s ultimate feature, because it forces us to confront the reality that we don’t have infinite minutes,” Alshak says. “So, are we spending it wisely? That’s a highly personal decision. Laurel will never tell people how to spend their time, but we’re going to give you information that helps you make the best decision.”
The pitch seems to be working. Laurel has raised a $100 million Series C led by IVP, Fortune has exclusively learned. GV and 01 Advisors joined as new investors in the round, which values Laurel at $510 million—more than double its previously undisclosed valuation, according to the company. The raise also includes a $20 million tender offer, the startup’s first. Other new backers include DST Global, OpenAI’s Kevin Weil, Alexis Ohanian, GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov, and Notable Capital’s Hans Tung. Existing investors—Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, ACME, AIX Ventures, Anthos, and Gokul Rajaram—also participated.
Laurel, which has 59 employees, traces its roots back to 2016, when it launched under a different name: Time by Ping. But the company struggled to gain traction. Alshak says the problem was twofold—an overcommitment to the legal industry, and NLP technology that wasn’t yet up to the task. That changed in 2022, when Alshak gained early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3. He paused everything, overhauled the product, and reintroduced the company as Laurel. When ChatGPT launched, it came with a flood of interest he couldn’t have predicted. After years of nos, “I went from the crazy person to the person who firms were calling, saying ‘help us,’” said Alshak. “That created the zero-to-$26 million-contracted era we have over the last 24 months.”
For accounting giants like Ernst & Young and Grant Thornton, and national law firms like Saul Ewing and Frost Brown Todd, Laurel has become part of their AI strategy. The startup isn’t without competition—rivals include 38-year-old Aderant and 8VC-backed PointOne. But Laurel’s hard-won velocity started drawing attention from investors, including IVP general partner Ajay Vashee. The former CFO of Dropbox, he was compelled by the idea that you could truly start to solve the intractable question of time management, planning, and resource allocation.
“I lived the struggle firsthand,” said Vashee. “At most companies, it’s a total black box. You set goals, you’ll set your budget and plan for the year. And every quarter, you check in and it’s a scramble. What did this team do? Did we actually hit these goals? It’s a really inefficient and clunky process. But I had this vision with Ryan about how that can be completely redefined.”
Vashee and Alshak struck a deal in about a week, spending more than 20 hours together over several days. During diligence, Vashee encountered something he’d never seen before: “Laurel is the only company I’ve seen—and we’ve evaluated thousands since I joined the firm—that received a 10 out of 10 CSAT [customer satisfaction score] rating from every single customer I spoke with,” he said. “And we talked to dozens of customers across legal, accounting, and consulting.”
Tom Barry, managing partner at accounting firm GHJ, has been a Laurel customer since the start of the year—and as an accountant, he’s spent his career living in the six-minute increments the industry bills clients in. The same goes for his colleagues at GHJ, with whom he’s been in close conversation as the firm rolls out the platform.
“Like any other change management technology, there’s a bell curve,” said Barry. “Most people are in the middle of the bell curve. And, first of all, it’s better than any other user interface they had. So, that’s a quantum leap forward. Then there’s another element—you have any idea the amount of business insights we can get on this thing? We’re seeing the long game on all this right now: It’s not just a tool to help track time.”
Laurel’s long game goes beyond traditional timekeeping industries. The platform is starting to show companies the ROI of AI tools—quantifying productivity before and after adoption. “Most companies are putting the cart before the horse,” said Alshak. “None of the LLMs have figured out how to quantitatively prove the impact of AI in the enterprise. They’re relying on surveys or adoption as a proxy.”
“[Famed consultant and writer Peter] Drucker said you can only manage what you measure,” he added. “In the AI world, I think you can only automate what you measure.”
When I suggest this kind of tracking could veer into Orwellian territory, Alshak doesn’t flinch. Laurel, he said, prioritizes SOC and ISO compliance, field-level encryption, and data ownership—customers control their own data.
“Laurel is about aligning employee and employer,” he said. “Minimize input, maximize output. We want people to take agency over their time.”
Barry, the GHJ accountant, joked that time is both his friend and his enemy. That’s true for all of us—sooner or later, we’re reminded that time runs out. Alshak told me he thinks about death often. I believe him. Even Laurel’s LLM-powered chat interface is named Mori—a nod to the Latin phrase memento mori, or “remember you must die.”
For Alshak, the beginning of Laurel is inextricably tied to the end of his mother’s life, the end of their time together—she passed away from cancer in 2018, just weeks after the company closed its seed round.
“A minute with her at the end was worth a million minutes doing anything else,” said Alshak. “And I realized that I’m not building a timekeeping company. I’m building a company that allows people to understand: Am I spending my time in the way I want? I want to be the mirror back to the world, and I want to teach the world this lesson: We care so much about our dollars, but we’re so cavalier about our minutes. And that’s a fundamentally inverted framework.”
“I’m trying to live as if I’m gonna be here for 78 years, 4000 weeks,” he added. “I want every minute to matter.”
President Donald Trump has long wanted to reprivatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have been under government control ever since they needed a $191 billion bailout during the Global Financial Crisis. For Wharton finance and real estate professor Susan Wachter, heavy regulation of utilities and insurance carriers is the best model for the mortgage giants.
No members of the Fortune 500 saw their shares surge last year like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did. Hedge funds who bought nearly worthless stakes in the mortgage giants after the Global Financial Crisis could stand to make billions if President Donald Trump fulfills his goal to take both firms public.
Several experts, meanwhile, remain focused on how to free Fannie and Freddie from government control without repeating the mistakes that helped lead to the 2008 meltdown.
Uncle Sam bailed out both government-sponsored enterprises, which provide crucial liquidity to housing markets, when both teetered on the brink of insolvency. After being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in 2010, their shares continued to trade over the counter.
Billionaire hedge fund owners Bill Ackman and John Paulson are among those who snapped them up, betting the U.S. government would eventually make good on its pledge to reprivatize both agencies. With Trump raising the issue on his social media platform last month, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that both men have backed the president.
“The subtext of the media stories is that [Fannie and Freddie] shareholders, which include many supporters of [Trump], are looking for a gift from the President,” Ackman wrote in a lengthy post on X last week. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Paulson did not respond to a request for comment.
A ‘utility model’ for Fannie and Freddie
Ackman, the CEO of hedge fund Pershing Square, has said ending government conservatorship could reward taxpayers while maintaining widespread home availability and affordability.
A host of thorny issues need to be sorted out before executing what would be the largest public offerings in history, many experts warn. Those debates aside, however, there’s an even weightier question about how the biggest players in American mortgage markets should operate as private companies.
For Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the heavily regulated model for utilities—where state agencies decide how much companies can charge consumers—has proved its worth. She also sees parallels to the insurance industry, where regulators oversee rates to protect customers while also preventing risk from being underpriced.
“It helps insure against another bailout,” she told Fortune, “and it helps maintain profits in the long run.”
Fannie and Freddie support 70% of America’s mortgage market, according to the National Association of Realtors, by purchasing mortgages from lenders and packaging them into mortgage-backed securities, freeing up originators to make more loans. They also guarantee payment on those securities if borrowers default, charging a premium for providing that insurance.
There are many explanations floated for why the housing bubble spelled doom for Fannie’s and Freddie’s balance sheets. The main problem, Wachter said, is that when housing prices tanked by about 20% in 2008, many of the loans Fannie and Freddie insured were “underwater,” meaning the value of the homes securing those packaged loans had fallen below the amount borrowers owed.
As they competed for business, Fannie and Freddie had not collected adequate fees to compensate for taking on this risk, Wachter said.
“If these entities go private without oversight, there is a risk of a race to the bottom,” she said.
Both institutions also got into trouble by buying large amounts of riskier, private-label mortgage-backed securities to hold as investments. They financed these purchases with cheap debt accessible thanks to the so-called implicit guarantee, or the belief among investors—which ultimately proved correct—that the government wouldn’t let the enterprises fail.
In short, Fannie and Freddie both juiced profits by “chasing yield,” becoming what many commentators called the world’s largest hedge funds helped by what was, in effect, a government subsidy. Taxpayers paid the price when these bets on risky assets collapsed.
A path forward
Wachter believes reforms instituted under conservatorship have made Fannie and Freddie much more resilient while remaining relatively effective at encouraging middle-class homeownership.
The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic provided a major test, she said, when a massive spike in unemployment briefly sparked fears of another mortgage market collapse.
“Fannie and Freddie could go on, continue to lend,” said Wachter, codirector of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, “even as it offered forbearance to borrowers.”
Both enterprises remain central to a fixture of the American Dream: the 30-year, fixed-rate, pre-payable mortgage. Of course, some question whether continuing to favor that New Deal–era invention is still worth the cost.
Last month, Trump said the U.S. government “will keep its implicit GUARANTEES,” though what he meant exactly remains unclear. Continuing to federally back Fannie and Freddie as private firms would spark fears about a repeat of 2008. Put them completely on their own, however, and mortgage rates likely go higher as investors demand compensation for taking on more risk when buying both enterprises’ packaged loans.
“But I think what that debate misses is that if you keep the government backing to these giants, you are going to restrict [the] private market and private competition,” Amit Seru, a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told Fortune. “And that means giving up on lots of innovative products.”
For example, the U.S. housing market’s pandemic boom eventually stalled, partially owing to what has been dubbed the “lock-in effect.” Existing homeowners who bought before mortgage rates skyrocketed in 2022, when the Federal Reserve dramatically hiked borrowing costs to fight inflation, have been reluctant to sell and take out a new mortgage at a higher rate.
In many European countries, Seru noted, that’s less of a problem thanks to products that allow people to sell their house, buy a new one, and take their existing mortgage with them. That’s typically not possible in the U.S., he said, because Fannie’s and Freddie’s dominance means originators can’t stray too far from the industry standard.
“No one can compete with the government,” said Seru, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank.
Ackman, meanwhile, sees Fannie and Freddie remaining at the core of the American mortgage market. To facilitate a public offering, Ackman has suggested the Treasury cancel its roughly $350 billion worth of senior preferred shares, meaning it would forgive its right to repayment and dividends. That would remove a massive liability from the enterprises’ balance sheets, making them much more attractive to private investors.
But the government wouldn’t get wiped out. Separate from the preferred shares, it also has warrants that give it the right to buy nearly four-fifths of Fannie’s and Freddie’s common stock at one-thousandth of a cent, or $0.00001, per share. Fannie stock currently trades at about $9, and Freddie is around $7.
If Washington canceled its entire senior preferred stake, the value of the warrants would increase by roughly $280 billion.
That would be the most lucrative outcome for Ackman, who alternatively could see the value of his common stock diluted to almost zero if Fannie and Freddie go public without the Treasury canceling most of its senior stake.
“[Fannie and Freddie] shareholders don’t have their hands out,” Ackman wrote in his social media post last week. “The opposite is the case. Hundreds of billions of dollars of funds that belonged to [Fannie and Freddie] were unilaterally taken by the government years ago, and the companies never received credit for these payments.”
The U.S. government has collected at least $301 billion in profits from Fannie and Freddie, earning nearly 60% on the $191 billion it paid to bail the mortgage giants out in 2008. Ackman says his plan could pave the way for a similarly sized payday for Uncle Sam in a much shorter window.
Wachter and Seru don’t necessarily disagree. Still, they ultimately see the government’s senior preferred shares as a sideshow compared with bigger questions about what Fannie and Freddie should look like as private enterprises.
“There is a lot at stake here,” Seru said, “which I think goes well beyond Ackman’s investments.”
Silicon Valley denizens may not think of the U.S. government as a hub for cutting-edge innovation, but the venture firm DataTribe has a 10-year bet that says otherwise. Defense tech has become one of the hottest areas in VC, but DataTribe flips the approach on its head. While companies like Palantir and Anduril develop tech to sell into governments, DataTribe works with recent government alumni to adapt their cybersecurity expertise for the private sector. The approach has paid off, with DataTribe recently closing a $41 million fund—its third.
I spoke with DataTribe’s managing directors Leo Scott and Robert Ackerman last week to understand this strange moment for government-tech industry relations. Elon Musk and Donald Trump were escalating their social media flame war, with Trump threatening to cancel Musk’s portfolio companies’ government contracts. Meanwhile, Anduril had just announced a massive funding round and a $31 billion valuation. “Within all the chaos, there’s opportunity,” Ackerman told me. “But right now it’s a mess.”
DataTribe’s unique approach insulates it from the other government-aligned venture operations, which probably had panicked meetings this weekend about who to align with in the Musk-Trump feud. The tech industry and the defense wings of the government have a longstanding relationship—that’s how Silicon Valley initially got bankrolled, after all, even if some tech companies in recent years have distanced themselves from such work under pressure from employees. But as companies like Meta start to cozy back up to military clients, DataTribe deviates from firms like a16z’s American Dynamism, or even the CIA-affiliated In-Q-Tel, that view the government as their customer. That approach can be risky, as Musk is learning the hard way.
DataTribe does the opposite, advising its portfolio companies not to chase government dollars. Instead, it recognizes the amount of research and development occurring in the government, helping recent departees take those findings and apply them to the private sector. One such portfolio company, Dragos, was founded by former cybersecurity experts at the National Security Agency to work with companies to assess their operational guardrails. The startup, which DataTribe backed at the seed stage, was last valued in a 2021 funding round at $1.7 billion.
Ackerman described DataTribe’s strategy as the “reverse In-Q-Tel,” meaning it looks for technology that already exists within the government, then builds a commercial application for it. That means it’s often working with first-time founders who may have never built products outside of the government, which is why DataTribe participates at the seed stage, preferring to write $2 million to $3 million checks and taking large stakes in its companies of around 25%, as it then works closely with them to scale up. Out of its new $41 million fund, DataTribe has already deployed around half the capital and plans to be fully invested in about a year, according to Scott.
The recent exodus of government workers, including from Musk’s campaign of DOGE-related layoffs, hasn’t created many new opportunities for DataTribe, because many of those leaving are more policy-focused, says Ackerman. Still, the mayhem in D.C., especially around the budget, justifies DataTribe’s approach that government dollars aren’t a safe bet—but that government talent is.
“I do feel like we were waving the flag a little bit earlier in terms of understanding the value within the U.S. government technologically,” Ackerman said. “The average cybersecurity professional deserves to have the best tools, and we just wanted to be in a position to help focus on that.”
New York goes it alone…Carta has a new report finding that the share of NYC startups with a solo founder has nearly doubled since 2015, rising to 32% in 2024. Mavericks should be cautious if they want outside capital, though—only 13% of VC-backed startups in New York had solo founders.
Stock futures ticked lower on Sunday night as the S&P 500’s recent rally has brought it within 2.4% of its all-time high reached in February, before President Donald Trump’s trade war ravaged markets. That comes ahead of a big week, which will see another round of U.S.-China trade talks and key inflation reports.
U.S. stock futures pointed down on Sunday night ahead of a big week that will be highlighted by more U.S.-China trade talks and fresh inflation data.
A strong jobs report on Friday added more fuel to a rally that has lifted the S&P 500 to within 2.4% of its all-time high reached in February, before President Donald Trump’s trade war sank markets.
Gold dipped 0.28% to $3,337.20 per ounce. U.S. oil prices climbed 0.08% to $64.63 per barrel, and Brent crude gained 0.05% to $66.50.
On Monday, U.S. and Chinese officials will meet in London to begin another round of trade talks after agreeing last month in Geneva to pause their prohibitively high tariffs.
Since that de-escalation in the trade war, both sides have accused the other reneging on their deal. For the U.S., a key sticking point has been the availability of rare earths, which are dominated by China and are critical for the auto, tech, and defense sectors.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, sounded upbeat on Sunday that the London talks could result in a resolution.
“I’m very comfortable that this deal is about to be closed,” he told CBS News.
Meanwhile, new inflation data are due as the Federal Reserve remains in wait-and-see mode to assess how much Trump’s tariffs are moving the needle on prices.
The better-than-expected jobs report on Friday eased fears of a recession, taking pressure off the Fed to cut rates to support the economy. That means that any rate cuts may have to come as a result of cooler inflation.
The Labor Department will release its monthly consumer price index on Wednesday and its producer price index on Thursday.
Also on Wednesday, the Treasury Department will issue its monthly update on the budget, offering clues on how much debt the federal government is issuing amid concern about bond supply and demand.
Taylor Nissi is a senior VP and wealth advisor at the wealth management firm Farther.
He shared his top tips he would give to clients navigating recent market volatility amid tariffs.
Nissi said everyone should have three buckets: emergency fund, growth strategy, and retirement plan.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Taylor Nissi, a wealth advisor at Farther. It has been edited for length and clarity.
It's important that people have a financial plan they can refer to during times of economic uncertainty.
In the current climate, people may want to reevaluate their risk strategies for their investment portfolios and cash management.
As a wealth advisor, it's my job to help both small business owners and employees through this time of economic uncertainty. Here are my top tips.
Make a plan and prioritize your emergency fund
We like to say you should have three buckets. The first bucket is your emergency fund, the second is your taxable growth strategy, and the third is your long-term retirement plan.
Having a financial plan gives people a reference point to return to during market fluctuations. It can help with decision-making in times of high anxiety.
Everyone should prioritize building their emergency fund or "first bucket." Your emergency fund is a way to prepare for market risk and life risk.
If your household has one income, you should have at least six months saved in your emergency fund. If you have two incomes — either two income earners, one person with two incomes, or a person with one income and a trust fund — that number could drop to three months.
Any other money you know you'll spend in the next 24 months, a college tuition to pay or a house down payment, for example, should all be added to your emergency fund.
This money should be held somewhere that it can be easily converted to cash without affecting its market price. You want something safe, easy to access, and earning a little interest: High-yield savings accounts, money market accounts, or short-term CDs are all good.
If you're not coping, remove volatile assets like stocks and add bonds
The "second bucket" is your taxable growth strategy: investments to help your money grow, even in accounts where you pay taxes, like a regular brokerage account. We've been talking with a lot of clients about how they felt when the market crashed in early April. Our clients hold a lot of wealth in stocks and were very uncomfortable.
If clients were very stressed or couldn't sleep at night, then we'd look at their "second bucket" and change the allocation of their portfolio to more bonds and fewer stocks.
However, we'd also tell people that selling stocks and buying bonds can impact your long-term financial goals. If you sell stocks when prices are down, you lock in those losses. Buying bonds instead may mean you miss out if the stocks rebound.
If you were emotionally OK during a volatile market, I'd say continue buying stocks. They're the best way to compound wealth. You want to buy companies with strong balance sheets and a strong moat around them.
Do not make reactionary portfolio decisions
If you make an emotional decision to sell everything and go to cash, there could be a knock-on impact on achieving your financial goals.
If my clients call me and tell me they want to sell everything, I generally try to walk them back, share historical data about why that might not be a good idea, and tell them to sleep on it.
Taking your money out of the market, say the S&P 500, when you're most uncomfortable and returning after a couple of days will reduce your annual average returns.
Knowing when to invest back in is the hard part. The best days in the market often come immediately after the worst days. So if you take your money out on the worst day, and wait for some kind of "all clear sign," you will almost certainly miss the best days.
I talk a lot about what we learned through the 2008 financial crisis. A lot of the people who got hurt the most were the people who reacted emotionally.
Consider long-term investments
If you're younger, under 50, I'd advise clients to own mostly stocks in their "third bucket," their retirement savings plan. Stocks have much more growth potential compared to bonds. If you didn't cope emotionally with what happened in early April, you could adjust to having fewer stocks and more bonds, but that will have a downstream impact.
If you are nearing retirement, you should be thinking about moving some of your "third bucket" assets into more stable investments. Or if you cannot handle the market swings, think about building a more stable and less growth-oriented portfolio.
I always try to help my clients who are getting ready to retire be conscious of the "sequence of returns" risk. This is when you have to pull money out of your retirement fund during bad market conditions, which can drain your savings faster than you planned for.
If you retire during a market decline, you'll be forced to sell assets at a discount rather than their fully appreciated value, which will decrease your future value. Selling investments while they're down means you'll have less money left to grow in the future, so your total retirement fund shrinks faster.
If you're preparing to retire in the next two or three years, your third bucket should have an emergency fund of its own. You want to have two years of expenses in cash in addition to the emergency fund you already have. It will protect you against stagflation and market uncertainty.
A new venture firm aims to prove that the most successful startup ideas don’t have to be born or scaled in Silicon Valley. Fluent Ventures, a global early-stage fund, is backing founders replicating proven business models from Western markets in fintech, digital health, and commerce across emerging markets. The more cynical might describe this as […]
Last week, prediction market startup Kalshi sued New Jersey and Nevada after they tried to shut down its recently launched sports trading operation. In the lawsuit, Kalshi claimed that, since they’re a federally regulated platform, state gaming commissions don’t have the authority to set rules for them. “We’re not necessarily very concerned [because] we are […]
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