Financial Mindset

EBay Inc. jumped more than 13% in after-hours trading on Friday after the Wall Street Journal reported that video-game retailer GameStop Corp. is preparing a bid for the company. GameStop, led by e-commerce entrepreneur Ryan Cohen, has been building a position in the online auctioneer and plans to make an offer for the business this month.  Spokespeople for eBay and GameStop didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Shares in GameStop also rose. Cohen, the founder of pets supplies e-tailer Chewy , plans to turn the combined companies into a retail juggernaut, the newspaper reported. GameStop had a market value of $11.8 billion before the news broke, while eBay’s is much larger at around $46 billion. Both companies have struggled to adapt to changing consumer preferences. GameStop has shut stores and emphasized collectible toys and trading cards as more video games are purchased online. EBay has been pushing collectibles and used goods on its marketp...

Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods predicted that crude oil and fuel prices will continue to surge higher in the weeks ahead if the Strait of Hormuz remains blockaded . Both Exxon and Chevron are projecting big profit gains in the ongoing second quarter because of higher prices, even with some of their Middle Eastern operations remaining disrupted. Exxon and Chevron reported first-quarter profits May 1 that beat market expectations, but they both saw their net incomes dip precipitously year-over-year because of lower oil prices early in the year, poorly timed financial hedges, and operational woes in the Middle East and beyond. Chevron, for instance, had to recover from a major fire in January at its massive Kazakhstan operations. Woods said oil prices—even above $100 per barrel—don’t come close to matching the “historically unprecedented disruption” of almost 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows through the Strait of Hormuz from the ongoing war in Iran. ...

Iran’s supreme leader vowed Thursday in a defiant tone to protect the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and missile capabilities, which U.S. President Donald Trump has sought to curtail through airstrikes and as part of  a wider deal  to cement the war’s shaky ceasefire. In a statement read by a state television anchor,  Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei  said the only place Americans belonged in the Persian Gulf is “at the bottom of its waters” and that a “new chapter” was being written in the region’s history. Khamenei has not been seen in public since taking over as supreme leader following the killing of his father in the war’s opening airstrikes. His remarks come as  Iran’s economy is reeling  and its oil industry is  being squeezed  by a U.S. Navy blockade halting its tankers from getting out to sea. The world economy is also under pressure as Iran maintains its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of all crude oil is ...

For more than 50 years, OneUnited Bank has operated on the belief that financial empowerment in Black communities requires more than products and services—it requires confronting the systems that keep wealth out of reach. Now, the nation’s largest Black-owned bank is extending that mission into addressing how to close the racial wealth gap. On May 5, OneUnited launches  Who’s Your Ma Honey? , a 10-episode podcast and video series that the Boston-based bank frames as both a cultural reckoning and a direct extension of its community development work. The show streams on YouTube , Apple Podcasts, Spotify , and Audible, and invites high-profile guests to surface buried experiences of shame—then reframe them as the origin story of their resilience and success. The concept lands with particular weight coming from OneUnited. The bank, a designated Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), has financed nearly $1 billion in loans —the majority in low-to-moderate income communit...

Making his first appearance before Congress since the Trump administration went to war in Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced withering questioning from skeptical Democrats Wednesday over a costly conflict being waged without congressional approval. The war has cost $25 billion so far, according to Pentagon numbers presented to the House Armed Services Committee during the contentious hearing that was ostensibly focused on the administration’s  2027 military budget proposal , which would boost defense spending to a historic $1.5 trillion. While Republicans focused on the details of military budgeting and voiced support for the operation, Democrats pivoted to the ballooning  costs of the war , the huge drawdown of  critical U.S. munitions  and the  bombing of a school that killed children . Some lawmakers also questioned President Donald Trump’s dealings with allies and  his shifting justification for the conflict . Hegseth dismissed the criticism ...

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that the invention of the Watt steam engine — which improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine — made coal a more effective energy source. Jevons called it “a confusion of ideas” to assume the efficiency born from this invention would reduce coal consumption. That efficiency actually dramatically increased consumption even as the total amount of coal required for a particular task fell. There’s now a term for this seemingly contradictory idea: the Jevons paradox. In a note on Tuesday, Apollo Global Management’s influential chief economist Torsten Slok applied the Jevons paradox to the AI age. In this scenario, labor is playing the role of coal, meaning as AI adoption increases, the technology will beget more jobs, not fewer. Slok calls this the Jevons employment effect. As the cost of professional work falls as AI makes tasks more efficient, the market for those tasks will actually expand. The total number...

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady shares highlights from a conversation with Michael Rogers. The big leadership story: Budget airline execs ask the Trump administration for help. The markets: Mixed globally after the S&P 500 hit another record high. Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune . Good morning. What does it mean to be agile during these volatile, fast-moving and often dangerous times? Fortune co-hosted a CEO dinner with BCG in Chicago on Thursday where we talked about opportunities in AI, along with the realities of driving change in a more complex threat environment. Here are some highlights from the group discussion and my on-the-record conversation with Admiral Michael Rogers, former head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, who’s now a senior advisor at Brunswick Group. As he put it: “We have to optimize ourselves to deal with a high level of uncertainty, a high level of complexity and a low tolerance for failure by the peop...