Financial Mindset

Palantir CEO Alex Karp is sick and tired of his critics. That much is clear. But during the Yahoo Finance Invest Conference Thursday, he escalated his counteroffensive, aimed squarely at analysts, journalists, and political commentators who have long attacked the company as a symbol of an encroaching surveillance state , or as overvalued .  Karp’s message: They were wrong then, they’re wrong now, and they’ve cost everyday Americans real money. “How often have you been right in the past?” Karp said when asked why some analysts still insist Palantir’s valuation is too high.  He said he thinks negative commentary from traditional finance people—and “their minions,” the analysts—has repeatedly failed to grasp how the company operates, and failed to grasp what Palantir’s retail base saw years earlier.  “Do you know how much money you’ve robbed from people with your views on Palantir?” he asked those analysts, arguing those who rated the stock a sell at $6, $12, or $20 pu...

Contrary to popular narrative, Europe is not short of cash. In aggregate, European households save $1.4 trillion a year —substantially higher than the $800 billion figure for U.S. households. According to data platform Dealroom, European investors in 2025 were sitting on $31 billion of dry powder, waiting to be invested. But where American capital is one of the U.S. economy’s great strengths, famously accelerating business growth there, Europe’s capital doesn’t deliver in nearly the same way. Startups struggle comparatively to raise funds, turning to U.S. venture capitalists for 35% of the continent’s growth funding pool, per Atomico’s State of European Tech 2024 report . Lower liquidity in Europe’s disjointed public markets, meanwhile, presents growth-stage companies with a stark choice: face the prospect of listing at lower valuations compared to the U.S., or IPO in New York. Despite Europe’s leading talent pools and R&D capabilities, which are key ingredients for a flouris...

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, speaking at Web Summit in Lisbon on Wednesday, said Google was abusing its monopoly position in search to scrape content from the web in order to feed its AI models, while not paying the websites whose content it was copying. In a conversation with Fortune on the MEO arena’s centre stage, he urged executives at Google parent Alphabet to pay website publishers for the content they need to train their large language models. When asked for comment on Prince’s claims, Google told Fortune that it believes its referral traffic has remained stable year on year, and that it is focused on providing more high-quality clicks (for instance, from readers who don’t immediately hit the back button when landing on a source website). Google says it gives sites the option to opt out of AI crawling without hurting their referrals or ad placement. Cloudflare provides backend services for the web, such as content delivery networks, cybersecurity, and denia...

“Pivot from crypto to AI” became a refrain in Silicon Valley after ChatGPT launched in 2022. Opportunistic founders looked to jump from one flagging hype cycle to the newer, shinier thing in tech. Vladimir Novakovski, though, pivoted from AI to crypto—and he’s attracted a who’s who of investors to back his startup Lighter, one of the fastest growing projects in digital assets. Lighter is both a decentralized exchange designed to not be controlled by a single entity as well as a blockchain. It allows users to trade perpetual futures, a type of derivative that lets traders speculate on future prices for cryptocurrencies. It will also soon roll out spot trading for tokens like Bitcoin , Novakovski said. On Tuesday, Lighter announced that it has raised $68 million in a new funding round. According to the 40-year-old Novakovski, who founded Lighter in 2022 and serves as CEO, the fundraise was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the fintech investor Ribbit Capital. Other participants in...

“Bust or boom?” That’s the big question at the heart of UBS’ big forecast for the U.S. economy for 2026 through 2028. But the team led by economist Jonathan Pingle also tackles a question that economists have been raising throughout 2025: the fact that tariffs amount to a large tax increase in all but name. Their analysis finds that the tariffs are acting as a substantial drag on growth and are actively contributing to persistent inflation, eroding real income gains for consumers. “The tariffs are a big tax increase,” the report states simply. According to UBS, the current tariff policies imply a weighted-average tariff rate of 13.6%, based on 2024 import shares, a fivefold jump from just 2.5% at the beginning of the year. This steep rate effectively translates to a tax on imports representing 1.2% of GDP. The most immediate impact of the trade regime is felt in rising prices, which are “keeping things elevated.” UBS estimates that the new trade regime will add 0.8 percentage points ...

In the spring of 2023, while his classmates at Georgetown were cramming for finals, Brendan Foody was busy testing out his new theory of work. “I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year,” he told Fortune . “I just didn’t go to finals.” By then, Foody had already found something he couldn’t learn in a lecture hall. A few months earlier, at a hackathon in São Paulo, he and his co-founders had stumbled onto a simple but powerful model: match companies with skilled engineers abroad, handle the logistics, and take a small cut of each deal. Their first client agreed to pay $500 a week for a developer; Mercor paid the engineer roughly 70% and kept the rest as a service fee. What began as a way to connect talent soon evolved into something more ambitious: a marketplace where humans could help train the AI systems that might one day replace them. Mercor now hires professionals—consultants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors—to create “evals” and rubrics that test and refine mode...

Sea shares plunged in Tuesday trading, despite Southeast Asia’s largest tech company reporting double-digit growth in all three of its business divisions for the most recent quarter. The Singapore-based consumer internet firm reported revenue of $6 billion for the three months ending Sep. 30, up almost 40% year-on-year. Net income also rose by 145% to reach $375 million for the quarter. Yet the surge in profits still fell below analysts’ lofty predictions of $433 million, helping to send shares lower. Sea’s operating expenses also jumped by 28%, as its e-commerce arm Shopee tries to strengthen its competitive edge of rivals like Alibaba’s Lazada and ByteDance’s TikTok Shop. A key focus was strengthening Sea’s logistics arm: “We are making our buyers happier while reducing [delivery] costs,” Forrest Li, the company’s chairman and CEO, said during an earnings briefing. Li pointed to Taiwan, where buyers prefer to pick up goods themselves instead of home delivery. To meet demand, Sea...

CoreWeave needed a lot of things to go right on Monday as it released third-quarter financial results, and one of the most critical was showing that its contracted future revenues could hit a $50 billion target Wall Street had set as a benchmark for the AI data-center and infrastructure operator.  In its announcement, CoreWeave confirmed it nearly doubled its revenue backlog, which includes “remaining performance obligations” (RPOs) and other amounts it estimates will be recognized as revenue, to $55.6 billion, up from $30 billion the previous quarter. The surging backlog, which represents future revenues from customers, was driven by contracts with Meta , OpenAI, and French AI startup Poolside. Earnings and revenue, meanwhile, both beat analysts’ consensus estimates. The company also reported an increase in the debt on its balance sheet, however, and it revised its full-year revenue guidance downward. Following its earnings release and call with analysts, the stock dropped 6% in...

Air travelers should expect  worsening cancellations  and delays this week even if the  government shutdown  ends, as the Federal Aviation Administration moves ahead with deeper cuts to flights at 40 major U.S. airports, officials said Monday. Day four of the  flight restrictions  saw airlines scrap over 2,100 flights Monday after cancelling 5,500 from Friday to Sunday. Some air traffic controllers — unpaid for more than a month — have stopped showing up, citing the added stress and need to take second jobs. President  Donald Trump  pressured controllers Monday on social media to “get back to work, NOW!!!” He said he wants a $10,000 bonus for controllers who’ve stayed on the job and to dock the pay of those who didn’t. The head of the controllers union said they’re being used as a “political pawn” in the fight over the shutdown. Controller shortages combined with  wintry weather  led to four-hour delays at Chicago O’Hare Internationa...

Artificial intelligence may be the most widely adopted technology in modern history, but it’s also one of the least trusted .  That disconnect, David Sacks insists , isn’t because AI threatens your job , privacy and the future of the economy itself. No – according to the venture-capitalist-turned-Trump-advisor, it’s all part of a $1 billion plot by what he calls the “Doomer Industrial Complex,” a shadow network of Effective Altruist billionaires bankrolled by the likes of convicted FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried  and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.  In an X post this week, Sacks argued that public distrust of AI isn’t organic at all — it’s manufactured. He pointed to research by tech-culture scholar Nirit Weiss-Blatt, who has spent years mapping the “AI doom” ecosystem of think tanks, nonprofits, and futurists. Weiss-Blatt documents hundreds of groups that promote strict regulation or even moratoriums on advanced AI systems. She argues that much of the mone...

U.S. stocks pointed to sharp gains Sunday evening as a report said Republicans in Congress are poised to advance a bill that would end the government shutdown. Sources told ABC News that there are more than enough Democratic votes in the Senate to clear a procedural hurdle on a short-term bill that would end the longest-ever shutdown. The breakthrough comes as SNAP payments have been on hold after a brief respite, while Transportation Secretary Scott Duffy has issued dire warnings about air travel ahead of Thanksgiving with thousands of flights canceled this weekend. Futures tied to the Dow Jones industrial average jumped 134 points, or 0.28%. S&P 500 futures were up 0.45%, and Nasdaq futures added 0.64%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose 3.5 basis points to 4.128%. The U.S. dollar was up 0.14% against the euro and up 0.27% against the yen.  Gold rose 0.35% to $4,023.90 per ounce. U.S. oil futures were flat at $59.77 a barrel, and Brent cru...

If you have upcoming travel plans anytime soon, you might notice fewer options on the airport’s departure board. Airlines are scaling back flights at dozens of  major U.S. airports  to ease the pressure on air traffic controllers, who have been  working unpaid  and under intense strain during the ongoing government shutdown. The Federal Aviation Administration says the decision  is necessary  to keep travelers safe. Many controllers have been putting in long hours and mandatory overtime while  lawmakers are at a standstill  over how to reopen the government. Major hubs like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are among those affected, and the ripple effects could mean more cancellations, longer delays and fuller flights for travelers across the country. The cutbacks will impact hundreds if not thousands of flights daily. Here’s what to know about the FAA’s order — and what you can do if your plans are disrupted: Is my airport on the list? Ther...

Not renewing subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act would disproportionately affect Republican states, particularly in the South, according to analysts. The issue is at the heart of the longest-ever federal government shutdown as Democrats have been pushing for an extension of the subsidies, while Republicans want to let them expire at the end of the year. For now, the online marketplace for ACA health plans is pricing in rates without the subsidies. Open enrollment for coverage in 2026 began this month, with premiums more than doubling on average, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group. That’s due to the ACA subsidies expiring and insurers hiking rates. In an Oct. 23 note, Oxford Economics senior U.S. economist Matthew Martin pointed out that more than half of the 24 million enrollees receiving these subsidies live in a handful of Southern states. “Southern states have a much higher share because most of these states did not expand Medi...

Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz have been charged with taking bribes from sports bettors to intentionally throw certain types of pitches, including tossing balls instead of strikes to ensure successful bets. According to an indictment unsealed Sunday in federal court in Brooklyn, Clase and Ortiz helped bettors from their native Dominican Republic win in-game prop bets on pitch speed and outcome by throwing certain pitches slower and down in the dirt, well out of the strike zone. Both pitchers  have been on  non-disciplinary paid leave  since July while Major League Baseball investigated what it said was unusually high in-game betting activity when they pitched. Ortiz, 26, was arrested by the FBI on Sunday at Boston Logan International Airport. He is expected to appear in federal court in Boston on Monday. Clase, 27, is not yet in custody, authorities said. A lawyer for Ortiz declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press and a la...

President Donald Trump wants the planned stadium for the Washington Commanders, an NFL team based in the nation’s capital, to be named after him. A senior White House source told ESPN there has been back-channel communication between the administration and a member of the team’s ownership about his wish.  “It’s what the president wants, and it will probably happen,” the source added. The new $3.7 billion stadium, approved in September and expected to open by 2030, will be constructed at the old RFK Stadium site on the Anacostia River, which served as the team’s home from 1961 to 1996. “That would be a beautiful name, as it was President Trump who made the rebuilding of the new stadium possible,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told ESPN via email on Friday night.  The White House and a Commanders spokesperson did not immediately respond to Fortune ’s request for comment.  An unmanned team source told ESPN that there have been no formal conversations ...

With Thanksgiving less than three weeks away, the question of how much this year’s turkey and trimmings will cost looms large, especially with grocery prices  2.7% higher  than they were in 2024. President Donald Trump has claimed over the past two days that costs for the Thanksgiving meal are down 25% this year, citing a prepackaged Thanksgiving meal basket from Walmart . “I just saw that Walmart came out with a statement last night, they’ve done it for many years, that Thanksgiving this year will cost 25% less than Thanksgiving last year,” he said  during a news conference  on Friday with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But Trump’s numbers are off. Here’s a closer look at the facts. CLAIM: Walmart prices show that the cost of Thanksgiving dinner is 25% lower in 2025 than in 2024. THE FACTS: This is misleading. While Walmart’s 2025 meal basket costs about 25% less than the one from 2024, that’s because it offers fewer items and different products that ma...

The short, handwritten note is a typical letter of reference for a man seeking a job. But the author is the president of the United States. It is also 1861, and the job seeker is a Black man. Abraham Lincoln penned the entreaty on behalf of his young friend, William Johnson, because ironically, his dark complexion caused freed Black White House staffers with lighter skin to shun him. “The difference of color between him and the other servants is the cause of our separation,” Lincoln wrote in the March 16, 1861, letter that private collector Peter Tuite donated in August to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, where it is now on public display. The letter’s recipient, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, reported he had no position available. For a president in the mid-19th century to show such personal concern for a Black man’s welfare is astounding. But consider that Lincoln was fewer than two weeks removed from his inauguration, taking over a country rent by secession, ...