Financial Mindset

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...

China has blocked Meta’s deal to acquire AI startup Manus. The National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top macroeconomic regulator, unceremoniously posted on Monday that it had “decided to block the foreign acquisition of the Manus project and require the parties to unwind the deal.” The move is a headache for Meta, for whom the Manus acquisition, reportedly valued at around $2 billion, was a key element of its new AI strategy. It’s also not clear how Meta can “unwind” the deal: Manus employees had already joined Meta’s AI team, and backers like Tencent and Hongshan Capital had already received their cut of the deal, according to a report from Bloomberg . The blocked deal also shows how quickly the U.S. and Chinese AI ecosystems are decoupling, as both Washington and Beijing now seek to maintain control of strategic technologies and prevent them from leaking to the other.  “The transaction complied fully with applicable law. We anticipate an appropriate resol...

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on the lessons from this weekend’s shooting. The big leadership story: Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is inheriting a messy China business. The markets: Edging up after Iran reportedly proposed a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune . Good morning. The world is more dangerous for leaders, across multiple dimensions. The attempted shooting attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday and the Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman’s home earlier this month are further proof of that. Researchers tracked more than 2,200 direct threats to CEOs across different channels in the five weeks following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson in late 2024, more than the entire year that preceded it. Spending on physical security is up and the geopolitical landscape is obviously more risky with the war on Iran. Now add AI, which has made it dramatically cheaper t...

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is using the shooting at the  White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday  to try to pressure preservationists to drop their lawsuit over his planned $400 million ballroom on the site of the former East Wing of the White House. “It’s time to build the ballroom,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said plainly Sunday on X , posting a letter in which Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate gave the National Trust for Historic Preservation,  which has sued to block construction , until 9 a.m. Monday to dismiss its lawsuit. If it doesn’t do so, Shumate wrote, the government would ask a court to do so “in light of last night’s extraordinary events,” calling the Washington Hilton — the site of Saturday’s gala — “demonstrably unsafe” for events with the president “because its size presents extraordinary security challenges for the Secret Service.” The White House ballroom, Shumate wrote, “will ensure the safety and security o...

The Iran conflict has confirmed a transformation in the economics of warfare toward cheap, mass-produced weapons, forcing a wholesale rethinking of military procurement, according to a recent report. While the U.S. and Israel have decimated Iran’s military, the Islamic republic still has enough combat power to inflict meaningful economic and physical damage, said Noah Ramos, chief innovation strategist at Alpine Macro, in a note earlier this month. In particular, the regime has leveraged its Shahed drones, which cost only $20,000-50,000, forcing the U.S. and its allies to shoot them down with $4 million PAC-3 missiles or THAAD interceptors that cost $12 million-15 million. “Even with interception rates above 90%, the value of asset protection is diminished given the obscene economics,” Ramos wrote. “This imbalance has haunted Western military planners since the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” He explained that such lopsided attrition is the opposite of the West’s model...

Charlie Greene, the cofounder and CEO of Remento, first learned about the importance of recording memories when his father, Don Greene, died during the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11. A 10-year-old boy at the time of the terrorist attack, which resulted in his father’s plane crashing in Shanksville, Penn., the now 34-year-old Greene mostly has a collection of old home videos to remember him by.  So when his mother Claudette, 74, was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer, he quickly acted to record her memories. With the intention of conducting an oral history interview, Greene searched “Questions to ask a parent,” which Google morbidly autocompleted with “before they die.”  When he started asking her the questions like “How did you get to elementary school as a kid,” she lit up, surprised he was interested at all.  “The thing that blew me away about that experience was how unmorbid it felt,” he said. Claudette is in remission, but her battle with ca...