Financial Mindset

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...

Elon Musk dropped his fraud claims against OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, narrowing the scope of his lawsuit against his business rivals on the eve of trial. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Friday agreed to Musk’s request to “streamline” the case, leaving just two claims to proceed to trial of the 26 included in his November  2024 complaint .  Jury selection is set for Monday in federal court in Oakland, California. Musk alleges the artificial intelligence startup abandoned its founding mission as a nonprofit to benefit humanity when it took billions of dollars in backing from Microsoft Corp. and planned its restructuring as a for-profit business. Musk is seeking as much as $134 billion in damages that he has asked be directed to OpenAI’s charitable arm, if he wins at trial. He also wants a court order restoring the firm’s status as a nonprofit research organization and wants a judge to order that Altman and Brockman both be removed from t...

President Donald Trump’s “gold card” visa, where a foreigner can shell out at least $1 million to  legally live and work in the U.S. , has been approved for one person, said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Thursday — appearing to fall a bit short of an earlier claim. After it  launched in December , Lutnick said that the government had sold $1.3 billion “worth” in just several days, as Trump stood by holding up the gilded ticket and said, “essentially it’s the green card on steroids.” Lutnick did not address the apparent discrepancy in an exchange with a congresswoman at Thursday’s committee hearing. Trump pushed the idea last year, initially suggesting  a cost of $5 million , and arguing that it would  entice foreign talent  to U.S. shores and fill out federal coffers. It’s meant to replace the EB-5 program, a decades-old program that offered U.S. visas to people who invested about $1 million in a company with at least 10 employees. Though only one person...

Tesla’s earning calls in the last few quarters have always been a study in extremes: The EV-maker’s profits from making and selling cars and batteries keeps shrinking, while CEO Elon Musk’s promises of wonders to come for the likes of robotaxis and humanoid robots keep ballooning. The Q1 edition, held after the market close on April 22, set a new standard. Digging into financial statements reveals that Tesla earned almost zip in repeatable, bedrock profits on the EV side. Yet Musk greatly ramped his already super-ambitious investment agenda for pending blockbusters, “revolutionary” offerings that he’s long promised as a year or two away, but that suffer serial delays, and keep gestating as prototypes either in the labs, or making trial runs on the roads. So the question arises that didn’t get answered on the call: How is Tesla going to pay for all that extra CapEx when the only arm generating cash is fading? And can it possibly earn a big enough return on all the capital newly piled ...