Financial Mindset

Ardy Arianpour fled Tehran at six years old with his family and four suitcases. Forty years later, he’s helped scale a $1 billion acquisition, saved his father’s life with his own technology, and built a health data platform sitting on 150 million patient records. The 46-year-old founder and CEO of Seqster grew up in San Diego, the city his family landed in when they escaped war in Tehran in 1986.  Growing up, while most teenagers were working at lemonade stands and ice cream parlours , Arianpour was working at the Salk Institute and teaching himself to trade stocks online by 16. In 1998, he featured in Time Magazine for making big returns as a teen broker and investing in his pension, all while still in high school. But his big break didn’t come from a stock windfall. After studying biological sciences at university and then getting an MBA from the Marshall Goldsmith School of Management, he spent years scaling Ambry Genetics as its senior vice president...

George Clooney sent a holiday season warning to the U.S. economy in December 2025: your wealthy citizens aren’t so impressed by all that American Dream stuff anymore. In France, where he and his family had just gotten citizenship, “they kind of don’t give a s— about fame,” he told  Esquire . He added that he wanted his kids away from “the culture of Hollywood … walking around worried about paparazzi” or “being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.” ​ He’s not alone. Six in 10 affluent Americans say they would consider leaving the United States within the next five years — a striking signal of eroding confidence at the very top of the income ladder. That’s the headline finding from a new survey of 1,733 Americans with household incomes above $200,000, conducted in May 2026 by Apex Capital Partners, a wealth management firm that specializes in second citizenship and overseas investment programs. The results paint a picture of a...

“To be able to trust, you need to be able to see what is happening.” This seemingly simple maxim is at the heart of today’s AI rollouts across the business landscape, according to Laura Heisman, the chief marketing officer of Dynatrace. “That’s probably the biggest conversation that everybody is having across all industries. We hear it from our customers every day,” Heisman said recently on a panel at Fortune ’s Brainstorm Tech conference . “The big question is, can you trust it? Is it right? And if it’s wrong, can you stop it?” As businesses contemplate letting AI agents chain together sequences of tasks, each based on the output of AI models, trust is more important than ever. And the only way to build that trust, according to Heisman and other business leaders on the panel, is to build visibility and control into systems.  “For us visibility, traceability, is not optional, it is foundational. It is how we look at every decision,” said Nikhil Joshi, the chief information...

When Techcombank CEO Jens Lottner looks at Vietnam’s growth ambitions, he sees a simple mismatch: big plans, not enough money. Vietnam’s economy grew by just over 8% in 2025, the second-highest rate in a decade. Hanoi’s ambitions are even more aggressive: It wants Vietnam to grow by 10% a year by 2030, and reach high-income status by 2045, a jump that would require a tripling of its per capita gross national income.  But an ambitious economic program needs capital. The Southeast Asian country has a $200 billion financing gap, to be put towards transport, energy and digital infrastructure. FTSE is set to upgrade Vietnam to secondary emerging market status in September, which will help bring more foreign money into the country. But Lottner thinks that won’t be enough to fill the gap.  “People say that $3 to $5 billion of equity may come in,” Lottner estimates in a conversation with Fortune. “But if you need $1.1 trillion of investment in total, it’s not quite mo...

Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship Freedom 250 spectacle on the White House South Lawn resulted in record bonuses for the winners. The fighters, though, didn’t get paid in U.S. dollars, which would seem to be the obvious currency for such an event. Instead, the prize money came in the form of USD1, a type of synthetic dollar known as a stablecoin, that is run by the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. This arrangement created an ethics scenario that would otherwise be illegal for most federal officials and could be treated as a crime, said Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “If a Treasury secretary had a financial interest in World Liberty and then participated in any government matter that had a knowing economic impact on World Liberty, that Treasury secretary very likely would commit a felony,” Painter told Fortune . Under the federal criminal statute 18 U.S.C. § 208, Painter no...

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday said FIFA should reflect on the high cost of tickets for the  2026 World Cup  as many have called the price far out of reach for the vast majority of Mexicans. Sheinbaum told journalists that soccer should be much more than a business. “Soccer has to be something else,” she said. “All of this should prompt reflection, even within FIFA.” There was no immediate public reaction from FIFA. Its president, Gianni Infantino, last week defended high ticket prices as fitting in the North American market. Earlier this year, tickets for matches in the three host countries including Mexico went on sale at prices ranging from $140 to $8,680. While some prices have fallen, others have soared. Tickets for the final are priced at $32,970. Resale prices are higher. In April, FIFA’s own resale platform listed four tickets for the final at around $2.3 million each. Although Mexico’s president acknowledged that it is “fine” ...

Pakistan says the United States and Iran have reached an agreement to end the war and open the  Strait of Hormuz , offering relief to the global economy more than three months since  the war  began. Full details of the deal were not immediately available. The signing will be Friday in Switzerland. It is not clear how quickly the strait might reopen to all traffic. The U.S. previously said it would ease its blockade of Iranian ports as the strait reopens, and would agree to relax sanctions to allow Iran to sell more of its oil and strengthen its battered economy. U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed a deal had been reached with Iran and said he had authorized an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz. “Congratulations to all!” he wrote on social media, without providing details. He added, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Iranian state media reported Pakistan’s statement after a day in which Israe...