Financial Mindset

In today’s CEO Daily: How the media and money are coloring the election. The big leadership story: Better.com’s founder vs. the investor who replaced him The markets: Up around the globe. Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune . Good morning. I’ve been thinking about Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk and the prospects for American voters to get the facts they need to make informed choices in the upcoming midterm elections. In-person voting began on Friday, the same day that President Donald Trump announced that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. (Journalists from those media outlets were denied entry and had their credentials deactivated on Saturday.) Many things will influence how Americans vote at the polls on Nov. 3, but the media and money will certainly color their perceptions. Let’s start with the media. The quality and accuracy of information that voters receive about government leadership matters. For example, they...

Cellular Intelligence is trying to build an AI model that can predict and eventually control how living cells behave, the same way AI models predict text or images, in hopes of making new medicines faster and cheaper to develop. The company took a step toward that goal Monday, announcing that Moderna co-founder Robert “Bob” Langer and Turing Award-winning AI researcher Yann LeCun have joined its scientific advisory board, along with Jens Nielsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute, and Fabian Theis, a computational biologist who directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. Langer is also joining the company’s board of directors as an observer. For decades, developing new medicines, especially cell therapies that use living cells rather than chemical compounds, has depended on slow, expensive trial-and-error lab work. The Boston-based Cellular Intelligence (CI) is trying to apply the same kind of pat...

A six-figure annual salary used to be a milestone for career success and financial security, but it isn’t what it used to be. The era of elevated inflation that began during the COVID pandemic has eroded the value of $100,000 to the point that Americans earning that much are hunting for bargains like everyone else. Walmart has previously noted that more affluent customers are shopping at the discount chain. And now they are patronizing deep discounters like dollar stores. At the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference on Tuesday, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said core customers, whom he defined as those making less than $45,000 a year, change their shopping behavior when gas prices hit $4 a gallon. For example, they tend to buy closer to home, shop more often, and buy less on each trip. The frequency of shopping goes up because customers don’t know what the next week will hold and will buy what they can, when they can. “But the inte...

When the Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by Elon Musk, gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it included slashing an estimated $329 million in humanitarian aid to Nepal. Stuti Basnyet, who served as the acting program office director for USAID in Nepal since 2024, remembers the months following the cuts. “Everyone went through denial first that this was even happening, to just deep grievance at how it was being done,” she told Fortune . According to Basnyet, USAID’s closure led to an estimated 30,000 direct job losses in the country. Among a raft of slashed humanitarian aid projects was foundational educational opportunities in Nepal, including support for early grade reading in Nepal across all its 35 districts, teacher training, and reviewing and refunding educational materials. Basnyet was left with the puzzle of recreating those services and resources—and building new ones—without the same steady funds Nepal had received from the U.S. s...

President Donald Trump said Saturday he will form an “AI Force,” hinting at a law enforcement role as public anxiety grows over the rapidly accelerating technology. He also pledged to appoint an AI czar and compared recent calls for the AI industry to slow down development to politically driven “hoaxes.” “We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry,” Trump posted on Truth Social . “Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” He noted a backlash against data centers, which have emerged as a top issue during the midterm election season, and claimed it has largely failed. But Trump suggested that the administration will be on the lookout for bad behavior, saying the existing criminal and civil justice system can handle it. “For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term,...

The parents of a 23-year-old woman who was fatally struck after her Uber driver pulled over along a southern California highway were awarded $40 million after an arbitrator found both Uber and the driver liable for her death. Carol Normandin and Ken Parker said Friday that they hope the amount will put a spotlight on the 2023 death of their daughter, Emily Normandin-Parker and to use the money to advocate for strengthening safety standards and transparency in the ride-hailing industry. “I want to do good with it,” Parker said of the money, but “I never wanted it. No parent would ever want it. The best thing about it is that it’s bringing attention to the issue that sorely needs attention.” On the night she was killed, Normandin-Parker had ordered the Uber for her and her friend to get home after spending a night out drinking alcohol. When the friend got sick and vomited, driver Vu Tran pulled over on the side of Route 73 in Orange County and all three got out of the ...

The 2026 economy has created a new throng of one-day millionaires, businesses raking in seven-figure sums in 24 hours or less. That includes teams at AI frontier labs like Anthropic, who are seeing monthly revenue top $500 million from just a single client’s Claude spending, one consultancy reported. That’s nearly $17 million per day. Outside of the AI boom, there’s a new stock of near-instant daily millionaires as a result of the Iran war: oil tankers willing to odyssey across the Strait of Hormuz. The cost for a vessel to haul oil from the Persian Gulf to China, which requires crossing the key chokepoint, reached $1.035 million per day, according to data from the Baltic Exchange this week, the first time the price tag has exceeded seven figures. By comparison, a similar large crude carrier transiting from the Persian Gulf cost about $208,000 per day , per the Platts VLCC index. Commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has continued to dwindle in the Iran war’s ...