Financial Mindset

Much of the marketing world is handing over creative tasks to AI with fairly mixed results. But Dan Murphy, who leads marketing at canned beverage brand Liquid Death, said AI models can’t get close to the unique original concepts human writers do. In the world of chief marketing officers, AI might not be the panacea some think it is, he warned.  “There’s never been an easier time to look like you are doing marketing, but you are actually flaming up cash,” said Murphy during a discussion at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen this week. “The message is not getting into the brain, it’s flicked away in 200 milliseconds, and it is as forgettable as most AI slop actually is.” To be clear, like most companies Liquid Death is using AI to an “extreme level” behind the curtain, Murphy said, and employees celebrate it in workplace messaging platform Slack and joke that Anthropic’s Claude is their new direct report. However, true “zero to one thinking,” said Murphy— ...

Olympic snowboarder Shaun White said he came from “pretty humble beginnings” without the same advantages as his rivals. The San Diego native didn’t live in the snowy mountains, and it was expensive to afford lift tickets, lodging, and food for a family of five growing up. “You’re seeing athletes there with full-time coaches,” White told Fortune ’s Andrew Nusca at Brainstorm Tech in Aspen this week. “I didn’t have that kind of access.” But the emergence of new technologies, especially AI, has helped make it easier for athletes to have similar access to important resources to improve performance, even if some don’t have a full-time coaching team.  “It is leveling the playing field in a way,” White said. “This is really going to be accessible for everyone…It’ll give a lot of information to athletes that wouldn’t have had this type of access before, and that’s really the hope.” AI has already made it into the world of sports analytics. ML...

For two months, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul have been building the infrastructure FIFA wouldn’t. Mamdani negotiated 1,000 World Cup tickets at $50 each with free roundtrip transportation for working-class New Yorkers, after N.J. Transit initially priced a match-day rail ticket at $150 to get to MetLife Stadium. The state then committed $6 million for a free watch party for 50,000 New Yorkers on Central Park’s Great Lawn, plus fan fests in all five boroughs. The city launched its most expansive ferry schedule in NYC Ferry history. All of it amounts to a publicly funded workaround for a tournament whose final tickets climbed to $32,970 on FIFA’s own portal—an event the New York and New Jersey attorneys general are now investigating for allegedly inflating prices by design. That’s why it was so confusing for many New Yorkers when the city seemingly used the FIFA playbook. In a GQ article published on Thursday, Mamdani an...

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…highlights from Fortune Brainstorm Tech…Anthropic walks back a controversial decision around its new Fable model…OpenAI considers slashing prices… Meta looks to boost subscription revenue…and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has a new AI policy manifesto. It’s Jeremy here. First, I want to thank Sharon Goldman for her work as my co-writer on this newsletter over the past two years. Sharon, who normally writes the Thursday send of Eye on AI, is going off to become her own one woman media empire. We wish her all the best in her new venture. I spent the first part of this week at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Colorado, where AI dominated every conversation, on stage and off. On Wednesday morning, I even hosted Fortune’s first Eye on AI breakfast, where it was great to meet some readers in the flesh. We discussed the reasons many companies are struggling to realize return on investment from AI. Principles before profit Manoj Bohra, ...

Bank of America told investors to “take profits” on June 5, and many of them did. Savita Subramanian’s strategy team flagged seven of the firm’s 10 bear-market signposts—five already triggered by April, plus two more in May—and told clients to trim their winners. The firm sees the S&P 500 ending the year at 7,100, below where it trades now (at time of writing, 7,367). That note now makes Subramanian look like Nostradamus. The S&P 500 had set a record on June 1, four sessions before she published. By Wednesday’s close it was down about 4.5%, to 7,267. The Nasdaq had fallen roughly 7% from its own June 1 peak; the Dow about 2.7%, or some 1,400 points. Many of the funds that suffered the worst routs were the most leveraged. The Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X fund returned 75.9% in May and still bled $4.1 billion that month—a second straight month of outflows as traders cashed out of the year’s defining rally. The Philade...

Asia’s boardrooms are full of AI ambition. Over the past three years, companies have launched pilots, tested AI assistants, and explored use cases across nearly every function. Business leaders are no longer asking whether AI works, but instead whether it’s materially changing the economics of their organizations. The next phase of enterprise AI will expose an uncomfortable truth. Companies won’t struggle because they don’t have access to powerful models. Instead, they will struggle because they treat AI as a tool to bolt onto old ways of working. McKinsey’s latest global survey argues that the companies with the strongest bottom-line impact aren’t simply deploying more AI. They are redesigning workflows, governance, and decision-making around it. In Asia, businesses are under pressure to do more while facing tighter margins and less tolerance for delay. AI may now be an operating necessity for many organizations—but necessity alone won’t lead to transformation. The f...

SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion IPO is set to become the largest in history this week, and, analysts say, among the most controversial.  The IPO, which aims to raise $75 billion by selling 555 million shares at a fixed price of $135 per share, starts trading on Friday, June 12, and will be listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker SPCX. The IPO, and its gigantic size, reflects investor enthusiasm for all things AI, but it will also help to break a rut in the IPO market. Last year, there were only about 200 public offerings —roughly half the number of traditional IPOs during the 2021 boom. Now, on the back of investor enthusiasm for high-growth plays, AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI have also confidentially filed to go public. Yet SpaceX’s IPO has already become a lightning rod for debate. Some market onlookers argue its eye-popping valuation is untethered from its fundamentals. SpaceX posted $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue, up 33%, while swinging to a $4.94 billion net loss:...