Financial Mindset

American companies are finally getting relief from tariff refunds—only it’s just in time for a new wave of inflationary economic factors. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued $49.2 billion in refunds in June, according to the U.S. Treasury’s monthly statement , bringing total tariff refunds to about $71 billion, or more than 60% of the $166 billion available following the Supreme Court striking down tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in February. But as companies recoup costs associated with the  import taxes they were forced to pay last year, they’re finding that, in many cases, those funds are being eaten up thanks to the impact of other economic pressures. “We do expect some more pressure on the business from a commodity standpoint,” PepsiCo Chief Financial Officer Steve Schmitt said in the company’s earnings call last week. “We will be using the tariff, essentially the refunds, to help offset some commodity inflation tha...

Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released the latest version of its Kimi AI model, further shrinking the performance gap between Chinese and U.S. models just as global businesses are increasingly questioning the cost of deploying models from Anthropic and OpenAI. On July 16, Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, the latest version of its Kimi model. It boasts 2.7 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-weight large language model available today. (Parameters refer to the weights within the LLM; more parameters generally means that models can handle more complex reasoning.) DeepSeek V4 has 1.6 trillion parameters. “K3 stands as Moonshot AI’s most powerful open-source coding model to date,” Moonshot AI wrote in a press release announcing the model’s release. “Operating with minimal human oversight, it can sustain long engineering sessions, navigate massive repositories, and orchestrate terminal tools.” In its release, Moonshot claimed K3 performed “competitively” with An...

The American Experiment is a five-episode documentary that features Apocalypse Now actor Martin Sheen as the voice of George Washington along with a panoply of contemporary figures from U.S. politics including ex-vice presidents Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. It also included 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage that was produced “twice as fast and at half the cost,” said Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. Faster and less expensive could potentially become central to the way Netflix plans to spend what could be up to $20 billion this year on content creation, a line item number that has grown from $16.2 billion in 2024 to $17.1 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, investors appear to be losing patience with the streaming giant as some of the tide appears to be moving in the opposite direction, with revenue growth decelerating from 16% in the first quarter of 2026, to 13% this quarter, and 12% guided for Q3. After earnings results were released, the stock price fell as much as 9% after hours, desp...

Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky appears to have been the target of a cyberattack, a source with knowledge of the situation tells Fortune . On Monday, Chesky’s X account shared a multi-post thread setting out a bullish view on “real-world asset tokenization,” a term from the crypto world that describes converting traditional assets like stocks into digital tokens. “I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on real-world asset tokenization for a while now,” the account wrote in the now-deleted series of tweets. “Most of it is noise. But underneath the noise, something real is happening.” Chesky is an active user of X, where he routinely shares product updates, earnings commentary, and lessons from building Airbnb with his more than 1.2 million followers. He’s even used the platform to crowdsource suggestions for business improvements, such as lowering cleaning fees and, ironically, crypto payments , which earned praise from X owner Elon Musk. “This kind of interaction w...

Disney has historically refused to describe in detail the revenues earned by its growing cruise ship business. Its CFO, Hugh Johnston, has declined to do so on previous earnings calls. “We don’t break out cruise ships,” explained Hugh Johnston on its Q3 call last year.  But Fortune can reveal that a Disney filing in the U.K.—where its ships are based for tax reasons—reveals that cruise revenue passed the $3 billion mark last year for the first time, fuelled by the addition of a sixth ship to its fleet as part of a $12 billion expansion.  Fortune reached out to Disney for comment. Disney’s ships look more like floating theme parks than cruise liners. They are filled with cuddly characters, Broadway-caliber shows and water slides with screens set into the tubes to tell stories about Mickey Mouse while riders rocket past on rafts. The ships are part of Disney’s Experiences division, which also includes its theme parks and is the compan...

MacKenzie Scott has spent the past several years rapidly giving away her $35 billion fortune . But due to the power of Amazon shares she received upon her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the market keeps handing that wealth back to her. Scott received roughly a 4% stake in the company (then worth about $36 billion) when they divorced, but has since donated more than $26 billion to thousands of organizations through her philanthropic platform, Yield Giving . She even was the biggest megadonor of 2025, having donated a whopping $7.2 billion in 2025 alone.  Having given away that much money, how does Scott have essentially the same amount she started with in 2019? It’s essentially market math and what wealth advisors call “concentrated equity wealth.” Why giving billions away hasn’t made MacKenzie Scott poorer This situation isn’t unique to Scott, and happens to other billionaire philanthropists. Another example would be someone like Michael...

The inspiration for Klook, one of Asia’s largest travel platforms, came after Ethan Lin took a trip to Nepal with his friend Eric Gnock Fah. The two were both analysts in Hong Kong’s investment scene: Fah covered consumer retail, while Lin covered hospitality and real estate.  Both were also third-culture kids. Fah grew up in Mauritius, the small Indian Ocean nation whose economy relies almost entirely on tourism. Lin, in contrast, lived in several cities as a child before starting college in the U.S. He links his love of travel to his background: “Experiencing local culture, understanding how the world puts together different markets, traveling a lot with my parents.” Lin’s Nepal trip was a bit of a disaster, in his telling. “We noticed that payment, language, content, infrastructure, and discoverability were not there,” he tells Fortune . “It took us so long to find out what we could do—canyoning, white-water rafting and paragliding—and it was a lot of effort ...