Financial Mindset

Americans have placed an unprecedented bet on the transformative power of artificial intelligence. The past 50 years of economic history suggests it won’t pay off, at least not on a timetable the market expects. Not since the Gilded Age—when, in 1885, railroad stocks accounted for more than 80% of active trading on the New York Stock Exchange—has the U.S. economy wagered so much on a single theme. When that bubble burst in the Panic of 1893, a third of railroads went bust, more than 500 banks failed, and the economy plunged into a four-year depression. Today’s frantic AI buildout may be on a similar trajectory. AI-related capital spending has surged to about 2% of U.S. GDP , from near zero five years ago. But this time, the AI wager is concentrated in far fewer companies than the railway mania ever was. In January, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported that investments in information processing equipment, software, research and development, and data centers—four...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg intends to maintain control over the company he founded in 2004 and a new class of stock will help him do just that. On Wednesday as Meta released third quarter earnings results, the company announced that it would issue a new share class of Class C stock. The share class, which is technically a one-for-one stock dividend of new Class C shares, will be distributed to all shareholders. It was conceived following months of extensive negotiation that grew contentious at times between Zuckerberg and board members, including DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Ambassador Robert Kimmitt, and ex- Microsoft executive Charles Songhurst. Xu disclosed his personal friendship with Zuckerberg but said it wouldn’t impair his judgement. At one point, the committee even talked about resigning if they couldn’t come to a resolution. According to a Meta filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, Zuckerberg wanted to be able to maintain his voting control, meet his ...

Across the global energy sector, a quiet but significant shift is underway. The debate around energy usage is intensifying because the pressures on it are becoming more real: grid queues, water resource pressures, increased industrial electrification and the need for reliable power at every hour of the day to match changing demand patterns. Recent strategy resets among global energy majors BP , Shell and ExxonMobil illustrate a greater focus on delivering reliable supply and ensuring that infrastructure can meet fast-growing power demand.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global electricity demand to grow at an average annual rate of 3.6% between 2026 and 2030 . That represents an acceleration of around 50% from the average pace of growth over the past decade. Global data center electricity consumption is already spiking , driven in particular by the rapid expansion of AI-focused facilities. That trend shows no signs of slowing down.   The IEA est...

Some of Formula 1’s most populat drivers are already serious about photography. Lewis Hamilton and Lando Norris have both been seen with Leica cameras, and Norris runs a separate Instagram account for his photos. That overlap goes well past the drivers, or even the intricate pieces that goes into both cars and cameras, says Mike Giannattasio, president of Leica Camera North America. “There is such synergy between people who collect cameras and people who collect cars,” he told Fortune . “If you see people who are passionate about vintage cars or racing cars, and if they have anything other than a passenger in the seat next to them, eight out of 10 times it’s going to be a Leica camera.” To Giannattasio, that made a partnership an easy call. On Tuesday, the German camera maker and Formula 1 announced a global licensing deal, Leica’s first official tie-up with the sport. It covers F1 as a whole rather than a single team and includes a special-edition camera, a gallery show ...

Just over a decade after Elizabeth Holmes threatened him with lawsuits and tried to kill his reporting, author John Carreyrou has become a perhaps unlikely fan of “You Can See Everything,” a new documentary exploring the disgraced founder’s home life as she prepares for prison—in fact, he’s seen it twice. Carreyrou is the author of the 2018 book “Bad Blood,” in which he reports on Theranos’ collapse and Holmes’ downfall in a captivating narrative that topped the New York Times’ bestseller list. The new documentary, in which comedian Nathan Fielder lived in the guest house of the home Holmes shared with her partner Billy Evans and her two children for 34 days before she went to prison, has thrust Holmes, and indirectly, Carreyrou, back into the spotlight, while also earning rave reviews and an estimated $15 million during its first weekend—the second-biggest opening for a documentary ever. Carreyrou, for his part, told the New York Times ’ “H...

It’s official: Tesla and SpaceX are in talks. Independent board members at the two Elon Musk-led companies have formed special committees to hash over a possible merger, Musk told investors during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call Tuesday. “These special committees consist of independent directors, and because I’m a conflicted party, I can’t actually be in the discussions of the special committees,” said Musk, who was asked about a potential combination during the call. “This is definitely the kind of question where I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield.” Tesla stock rose just over 1% in after hours trading, while SpaceX rose above 5% following the Q&A with Wall Street analysts featuring Musk, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell, and chief financial officer Bret Johnsen. Musk said the committees haven’t reached any kind of an agreement on the terms of a potential transaction, and there’s no guarantee that they will. He noted that “some people ou...

We’ve all seen those emails or spam ads, telling us of singles in our areas. Sometimes they get past our spam blocker and pop up in our email box. While most of us might delete them, some Singaporean civil servants might soon reconsider: it may very well be a dating service, courtesy of the government.  FirstDate, a pilot program introduced by Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech), offers single public officers ages 21 to 35 one potential match. Once users receive a match, they have 72 hours to decide whether or not to connect. And because the Singaporean government can’t be too sure, the program relies on a Nobel Prize-winning matching theory algorithm to really get their employees together.  “Swipe fatigue ends here,” reads the new pilot program’s website. The experiment taps into a familiar dating-app frustration: whether more options make it easier to find the one—or just make choosing harder. That’s why it’s relying on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, wh...