Financial Mindset

President Donald Trump’s latest  financial disclosure  has drawn scrutiny for its astonishing scale: 3,711 trades, almost entirely in shares of companies across America, including many whose fortunes can turn on federal policy. Collectively, they constitute an  unprecedented burst  of stock-market activity by a sitting president that has fueled fascination among the day-trading masses and prompted detractors to warn of insider-dealing. But a review of the transactions, combined with interviews with investment experts, reveals trading so multifaceted it doesn’t easily lend itself to definitive interpretation. The patterns bear the hallmarks of overlapping portfolio-management strategies, often index-based and much of it likely automated, and all of it difficult to disentangle. To a large extent, that conforms with the Trump Organization’s public explanation of the matter. It says the president’s holdings are independently managed...

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is near, but a top ally in Congress raised red flags about the implications for the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. In a social media post, Trump said he spoke with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain. “An Agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various other Countries, as listed,” he wrote, adding he had a separate call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Final details are being discussed and will be announced soon, but the deal would allow the Strait of Hormuz to be opened, among other provisions, Trump said. Ahead of the announcement, reports said a deal to extend the ceasefire by 60 days would include Iran gradually reopening the strait and agreeing to discuss its uranium stockpil...

It’s no surprise that the SpaceX offering statement, filed the evening of May 20, shows that as of today, the rocket, satellite and AI enterprise sports tiny revenues and books large losses. That its market cap following the IPO slated for mid-June’s expected to hit $1.5 trillion or more highlights that its fans are basing their overwhelming optimism almost exclusively on great things to come. But a careful reading of the S-1 reveals substantial barriers in the path to achieving the sorcerous performance required to reward shareholders who flock to the most anticipated debut ever seen. The reason isn’t simply that SpaceX will be fighting the law of large numbers by starting life as a public company as an extremely expensive stock. Put simply, as the prospectus highlights, Elon Musk’s creation has essentially re-invented itself from a commercial space pioneer facing relatively mild competition, to an AI-centric player that’s vying for the same dollars...

Most people see the $200 million ARR. They don’t see the summer in Spain with no air conditioning, a dwindling bank account, and investor rejection emails piling up. They don’t see the moment you realize you might have to tell your co-founders it’s over. That’s the part worth talking about. It was the summer of 2023 and our startup Fanvue was in trouble. Months earlier, we’d suddenly found out that we had way less money in the bank than we thought. To fix it, we’d been reaching out to investors and getting nothing. The email responses still haunt me today: “Thanks Joel, but I’ll pass,” read one. “Out of our scope,” said another. This went on for months. Growth slowed, and then stopped completely. What had been working before just stopped. Every founder has heard this story. Nothing prepares you for when it’s yours. Even when you know, there is this voice in your head saying that all that effort you...

The tech bros struck back. That’s the best way to describe what happened yesterday when President Donald Trump suddenly decided to indefinitely postpone signing an Executive Order on AI, even as technology company executives he had invited to be present at the White House for the signing were traveling to Washington for the ceremony. “I didn’t like certain aspects of it,” Trump explained to reporters at the White House on Thursday morning. “I think it gets in the way of—we’re leading China. We’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that.” The order would have created a system in which AI companies could voluntarily submit their most advanced models to key national security agencies for testing and vetting up to 90 days prior to releasing them. Officials from multiple government departments and agencies had spent weeks negotiating over the executive order’s language, and leading AI companies had been briefed on its content. At le...

Salary transparency was supposed to be the major fix for the pay gap.  But at Fortune ‘s Workplace Innovation Summit in Atlanta on Tuesday, a pay transparency CEO and a viral content creator who have spent years working on the issue both said that the problem isn’t companies not sharing pay, it’s that they can’t explain it. “If companies were merely consistent with the things they say they care about in their pay philosophy, and what they actually pay in the execution of offers, merit, promotions, transfers, the pay gap would basically be eradicated,” Maria Colacurcio , CEO of pay equity software company Syndio , told the audience.  Syndio’s newly defined “decision intelligence for pay” category builds AI-powered tools that nearly 400 global enterprises — including more than half the Fortune 100 — use to govern compensation decisions in real time. The disconnect, she said, isn’t intentional, but it s...

ChatGPT transformed AI from a niche, behind-the-scenes tool into one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history. That’s only accelerated this year, as use of tokens—the basic building blocks of any AI query—has exploded, thanks to widespread enterprise adoption and the rise of agentic AI platforms like OpenClaw. That’s caused surging AI costs in enterprises, as their systems start to consume more and more tokens. “Every chat generates a token, and when you scale AI use across organizations, costs start adding up,” Prakash Arunkundrum, HP’s chief strategy and transformation officer (CSTO), tells Fortune. “This is what all the data center guys are trying to solve: How to bring the token cost down.” HP’s solution to the token problem is to sidestep it entirely, by shifting AI from the cloud to people’s devices, or the “edge.” HP is betting on “AI PCs,” personal devices capable of running AI models locally, and has also debuted its own local-first AI model, HP IQ. “A...