Financial Mindset

Alex Bhathal and his sister Lisa Bhathal Merage have some rules they follow ahead of each Portland Fire game they attend. For Alex, it means wearing a lucky red shirt—a switch from his usual black attire, which was correlated with two team losses. And for Lisa, she sits in seat 11 of her designated row. The pre-game rituals of the owners of the first-year WNBA franchise are a product of their father, a businessman and sports investor who emigrated from India to the U.S. in 1960. Lisa remembers one of the superstitions their father would espouse: “If your left eye twitches, it means that money is coming your way.” The siblings have certainly seen recent success through their family investment firm RAJ Sports. After buying the Portland Thorns in the growing NWSL in early 2024 for a reported $63 million, the siblings are expanding their roots in the city. In September of that year, RAJ Sports purchased the Portland Fire for $125 million to secure control of the newly announ...

The global AI landscape is increasingly shaped by two competing world orders: Washington’s Pax Silica and Beijing’s World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). The two initiatives reflect sharply different visions of how power, technology and access to critical AI infrastructure should be organized. Pax Silica, which the U.S. launched in December 2025, purportedly seeks to secure global supply chains for semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, AI technologies and rare earth minerals. Washington positions it as a cooperative organization, rather than a way to enforce its own policies. The China-led WAICO, on the other hand, was launched in Shanghai in July 2026 with 29 founding members. WAICO positions itself as a champion of the interests of emerging economies and of accessible AI, drawing upon the impressive surge in open-weight models from Chinese developers. Originally, Washington said it wouldn’t stop Pax Silica members from workin...

The U.S. labor market is bracing for a decade of slower overall growth, but a handful of industries and occupations are set to expand at a breakneck pace, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 2025 to 2035, total employment will edge up by 5.9 million jobs to 176.2 million, representing growth of just 3.5%—a fraction of the 10.9% pace during the prior decade, BLS said in a report late last month. As the AI boom continues to ripple through the economy, the utility industry is expected to hire at the fastest rate, growing employment by 9.8%. That’s as hyperscalers scramble to build data centers that require immense amounts of electricity. “Nearly all the job growth is expected from electric power generation, transmission, and distribution due to increasing demand for electricity, including artificial intelligence power demands,” BLS said. Within that category, certain sub-sectors will see even bigger employment gains, with solar electric pow...

The old rule says you’re supposed to stop wearing white after Labor Day. For job seekers who spent the summer sending resumes into the void, there’s another piece of September lore worth paying attention to—the job market is supposed to pick back up. The phenomenon has been dubbed the “September Surge,” a term Fortune was writing about as early as 2023, when it was gaining traction on TikTok .  Friday’s jobs report offered some encouraging signs heading into September. U.S. employers added 162,000 jobs in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , while estimates for June and July were revised up by a combined 55,000 jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%. Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics for the Americas, told Fortune that economists typically adjust labor-market data to remove predictable seasonal swings. But those swings can matter to job seekers, and September is one of them. “You see more job postings in September than you do...

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...