Financial Mindset

Richard Kligman didn’t set out to sell President Donald Trump and “Make America Great Again” merch. But Kligman spotted a business opportunity in 2016, when customers began asking for MAGA hats and flags at the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina kite shop he ran with his brother. The duo opened their Trump Super Store in the empty storefront next door in 2018 to keep up with the demand. “You’d have thought I was selling crack,” Kligman jokingly told Fortune . But now he wants out.  “You have to read the writing on the wall that as we go into ‘27, it’s definitely going to fall off, and I’d like to be out of it as much as I could be by the end of ‘27,” he said.  Sales were “going gangbusters,” Kligman said, between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, and the brothers were putting in seven days a week just to keep up with demand from both locals and visitors from around the country.  But now, Kligman said sales of Trump-branded merch have since fallen...

Marissa Mayer has been a builder in Silicon Valley since the dawn of Google. But even she says the honest answer about where AI is headed is that nobody knows.  “We have a new form of intelligence, and anyone who says they know how this is going to play out is either lying or arrogant or both,” Mayer told Fortune executive editorial director Diane Brady on stage at the annual Most Powerful Women Summit in California, when asked about the debate raging over the frontier AI labs. The uncertainty cuts both ways, said Mayer.  “We have to acknowledge that there is a possibility that things won’t go well,” she said. But Mayer put the odds of a negative outcome at “well less than 50%,” noting that even some AI doomers would agree with her. “What that really means is the odds are in our favor,” she said, pointing to potential medical and science breakthroughs and “freeing people up to spend their time and live their lives the way they want to.” She admitted to being ...

AI seems to be springing up in nearly every facet of people’s professional and personal lives, from chatbots installed into workflows to data centers taking root in suburban towns. But Revathi Advaithi, the CEO of supply chain giant Flex, warns that it could all come to a screeching halt if America’s infrastructure continues to fall behind.  “Most of us think about power only when the power goes off in our house or things like that. But we have a grid that’s just not ready for what’s in front of us,” Advaithi told executive editorial director Diane Brady onstage at Fortune’ s annual Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, California.  “When I think about AI readiness, everyone’s focused on technology: whether it’s semiconductors or frontier models and things like that. And I’m focused on, ‘Hey, if you don’t get the energy infrastructure and the grid ready, forget all the frontier models and forget all the semiconductors’…Because you...

A police lieutenant in a Cincinnati suburb has been indicted on a felony charge for allegedly using his department’s Flock license plate reader cameras to track someone he knew. Walter Cordes, 48, a lieutenant with the Sharonville Police Department, searched the Flock system 29 times between Dec. 19, 2024, and April 20, 2026, to find the person’s whereabouts for personal reasons unrelated to police work, according to the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office. A grand jury indicted him Oct. 13 on one count of unauthorized use of a computer, cable or telecommunication property. The charge is a fifth-degree felony that carries up to 12 months in prison under Ohio law. Prosecutors have not identified the person Cordes allegedly tracked or said why he searched for them. The searches came to light in June when Cordes self-reported during a department audit of the system, then admitted to them in an interview, prompting an investigation by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Sh...

Chicago officials are weighing legal action against Barre Seid, the 94-year-old industrialist behind the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, over claims that workers he hires to scatter nuts in Lincoln Park are fueling a rat infestation. Alderman Timmy Knudsen told Axios he is pushing the Chicago Park District to sue Seid for damage to the park, while Park District officials told the publication they are still weighing their options. In an Aug. 25 letter to Seid, Knudsen called the matter a final warning and said city staff had received photos and video documenting Seid or his staff putting out food daily for squirrels and other wildlife, according to WGN . The letter said the feeding created a public health hazard because it drew in not only squirrels but also pigeons and rats. Knudsen cited repeated violations of a city code provision barring the buildup of garbage or food that could feed or shelter rats, according to Block Club Chicago , and gave Se...

In the White House Situation Room, the hardest calls were never the obvious emergencies. What kept me up were the nights when a fragment of information came in and the debate wasn’t about what to do. It was about whether anything concerning was happening at all. In 2023, my team and I were assessing the nation’s pandemic influenza plans when the Situation Room notified me that H5N1 influenza had infected a father and killed his daughter in a remote Cambodian village. Was the virus spreading between people – the start of a pandemic that could kill millions? The national security adviser asked whether to brief President Biden immediately. If these cases were the first signs, we would need to commit billions of dollars to vaccines and treatments within days. I told him to wait. Not because I thought it was nothing, but because we had already agreed, before the alert came, on what would tell us it was something: sustained human-to-human transmission. We worked with health official...

Hello from Santa Barbara. It’s day two of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit . I sat down with Sarah London, CEO of Centene , on Monday. She offered her perspective on health care’s AI boom. Much of the AI being deployed at scale today, London said, goes toward what she calls “inflationary use cases,” tools that generate more revenue in a fee-for-service system rather than reduce the underlying cost of care. AI can make billing faster, automate paperwork and help providers capture more revenue. But those gains don’t necessarily make health care less expensive. London believes the bigger opportunity lies in changing how care is delivered and who can access it. Centene, a $33 billion company operating Medicaid plans in 29 states alongside marketplace and Medicare Advantage coverage, serves 26 million members. They are, London said, “among the poorest, sickest” people in their communities. Yet those populations are often left behind by health care innovatio...