Financial Mindset

Inside the G20 event in Chapel Hill, N.C. this week, tech leaders like OpenAI’s Sam Altman raved about AI’s capabilities and the need to build more data centers. But outside, protestors struck a different tune. In a “fireside chat” with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Altman called AI “incredible magic of intelligence in a bottle,” while also warning AI’s infrastructure needs would keep expanding. “Even with great gains in efficiency, we are going to need to build much more infrastructure, unless we want this to be a highly priced model, which we don’t,” he added, according to local news outlet the News & Observer . Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Palantir CEO Alex Karp were also present and projected similar positive messages. Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke via conference call. Beyond the security perimeter just outside the Carolina Inn, a hotel on the campus of the University of North Carolina where the tech leaders gathered, hundreds of protestors assemble...

The world’s attention remains fixated on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz , but the four-year slog of Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to have an outsized impact on global energy markets, especially as diesel prices hit all-time highs at the end of this week. The war in Ukraine has caused periodic oil disruptions in the Black and Caspian seas and to pipelines and terminals, but the biggest growing impact is Ukraine’s rising success targeting Russia’s refining network with long-distance drone attacks. An estimated 40% of Russia’s oil-refining infrastructure is now offline, and Russia has cut off its diesel exports—resulting in about 3% of daily, global diesel supplies removed from markets. Combined with even bigger refining outages in the Middle East, and with China voluntarily mothballing some facilities because of its reduced oil imports, the situation has driven up the average price of diesel fuel in the U.S., reaching an all-time high of $5.85 per gallon on Friday, according ...

OpenAI has changed several evaluation benchmarks for its GPT-6 Astra model since first publishing a blog post announcement mid-afternoon on Sept. 3. In some cases, the numbers on the updated versions showed Astra performing better, while numbers for models from OpenAI’s arch rival Anthropic got worse. The changes occurred amid an unusual rollout of the blog post. OpenAI originally planned for the post to go live at 2 p.m. ET, but it took almost another two hours before it was widely viewable online. When OpenAI’s X account tweeted out the blog post at 3:32 p.m., the link was not loading properly, returning an error message. At 3:50 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted the link, writing, “We hit a little snag getting the blog post deployed, but it is really great.” Multiple commenters were still unable to see it, and were getting the same error , as did Fortune . When we checked back about an hour later, it was visible and loading properly. It turns o...

The AI productivity boom will soon make America richer, say the two leaders of the American economy—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh —so much so that it’ll be deflationary; and enough that we can forgo worrying about our $40 trillion debt even.  But analysts are starting to wonder: richer for whom? Workers’ share of U.S. income has already fallen to its lowest level on record, while corporate profit margins keep breaking records quarter by quarter. According to Gregory Daco, the EY-Parthenon chief economist, the productivity gains that explain that divergence largely predate the AI boom. “Productivity growth protects margins, not income,” Daco wrote in a note Thursday.  Economic output grew 1.7% in the second quarter, just based on 0.3% more hours. Compensation rose 2.6%, which, set against a spring and summer of oil-driven inflation, comes out to “flat to slight contraction” in real ter...

The National Parks in the past year have been through a reckoning. The Grand Canyon has seen ravaging floods in the past week, sparking search and rescue missions and damaging nearly 40% of its sole water pipeline. The national park also saw wildfires on its northern edge in 2025, making the floods the second natural disaster to hit the park in the past year.  But the Grand Canyon isn’t the only national park weathering the elements. Yosemite National Park is battling wildfires and shutting down Highway 140 as a result. Now, the park is on its way to lose even more land, but this time it’s not due to mother nature. According to reports from CNN and NOTUS , the transferring of about 700 feet of the park is reportedly being discussed between the National Park Service and the private developer Kingsbarn Realty Capital in order for the developer to build a road to a parcel of land abutting the national park. In a statement to Fortune, the Department of Interior, which include...

As a child, Jonathan Spano had one dream: to be a military pilot. It was swiftly shattered when he learned the U.S. Navy required near-perfect eyesight to fly—a standard he could never meet. So he launched his own business instead. And it’s done so well that decades later, he’s been able to splash out millions on flying lessons and his own aircraft to fulfill his childhood dream. Now, he’s the stunt pilot behind some of Top Gun: Maverick ‘s most acclaimed aerial sequences. “I was just fascinated with airplanes; I would build little models of them, hang them from the ceiling with a fishing line in my room. And like many, many young boys, when the Top Gun movie came out, I was obsessed and wanted to fly planes in the Navy and land on aircraft carriers,” Spano told Fortune .  As he got older, the now 48-year-old CEO realized that no amount of passion, pining, or studying would set him on that career course. “I learned that you had to have better than perfec...

Russia will close German cultural centers on its territory, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday in a retaliatory measure reflecting the  deepening tensions  between Moscow and European countries that are helping Ukraine resist the  Kremlin’s 4 1/2-year-old invasion. Lavrov’s announcement came after Berlin blamed Moscow for  an attempted drone attack  at Leipzig/Halle Airport on Aug. 4. The explosives-laden drone was found near a Ukrainian plane at the airport, a major international freight hub used for providing  support to Ukraine . The drone was later defused. Earlier Thursday in Munich, several incendiary devices were thrown at a construction site near a building where several companies, including from the defense sector, are located, the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office said. There was a brief fire that caused no significant damage, police said, adding they suspect the target was one of the companies in the area. T...