Financial Mindset

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah  Ali Khamenei  was killed in a major attack on Iran launched by Israel and the United States, President Donald Trump said Saturday on social media. Trump said his death is “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.” The death occurred after a joint U.S. and Israeli aerial bombardment that targeted Iranian military and governmental sites. The president also said “heavy and pinpoint bombing” was to continue “uninterrupted” through the week or longer. There was no immediate comment from Iran. The assassination of the second leader of the Islamic Republic, who had no designated successor, would throw its future into doubt and raise the prospect of a protracted conflict given Iranian threats of retaliation. Trump in his post called Khamenei “one of the most evil people in history.” Trump said that Khamenei “was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely wit...

The ability of the US, Israel and Gulf Arab states to weather Iran’s retaliatory strikes will depend on how many missile interceptors they have — and stocks are most likely dangerously low after intense combat with the Islamic Republic last year. Tehran’s main means of offensive operations is long-range attacks with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, all of which it  launched  after Israeli strikes in June 2025. This time around, Iran reacted to US and Israeli attacks by almost immediately firing on Israel and countries including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. Defending against such weapons requires an even bigger number of interceptors — typical military doctrine calls for firing two or three at each incoming target to maximize the chances of hitting it. Stocks of missile interceptors could be in danger of running low within days if the intensity of current Iranian attacks persists, according to a person familiar with the m...

The Supreme Court ruled that President Donald Trump’s global tariffs were illegal, but that’s not going to stop the administration from holding on to the money it’s already collected. Sources told Politico officials are weighing various ideas, including discouraging companies from demanding refunds, arguing revenue collected previously is retroactively legal under new tariffs, and letting claimants skip to the front of the line if they give up a portion of the funds they’re owed. The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune ’s request for comment. Last Friday, the top court struck down tariffs invoked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, upholding decisions from lower courts. Hours later, Trump announced a fresh set of global levies under a different law as well as investigations that are likely to lead to longer-term duties. But the Supreme Court didn’t detail a process for refunding tariff revenue, leaving it to the U.S. Court of International Tra...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the most important thing he does each day has nothing to do with training AI models or shipping products. Instead, he said, he spends almost half his time working on company culture. “I probably spend a third, maybe 40%, of my time making sure the culture of Anthropic is good,” Amodei said in an interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast earlier this month.  Amodei’s comments offer a rare window into how one of tech’s most closely watched CEOs manages a company that now sports 2,500 employees and is valued at $380 billion . As Anthropic has expanded, it has become nearly impossible for Amodei to weigh in on every technical and product decision, he said. So rather than dig into the finer details, he has tried to focus on the bigger picture: making sure his employees like working for Anthropic; that the company’s mission and values are clear; and that all workers are working toward the same mission instead of against one another, as he said happens at othe...

Federal health care spending has reached a historic turning point. It is now the single largest category of federal expenditures, having surpassed other spending categories including Social Security, national defense and interest payments made to chip away at the national debt. If current trajectories hold, health will be eating up an enormous share of the country’s spending for years to come. The government is on track to spend over $26 trillion on major health programs through 2036, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s review of the country’s most recent fiscal outlook, published Wednesday.  And the numbers are astonishing. The surge will be led by Medicare, which is projected to double in cost from $988 billion in 2025 to almost $2 trillion by 2036. Over the next decade spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program is also expected to grow by 36%, while subsidies for the Affordable Care Act marketplaces are forecasted to...

The Central Intelligence Agency offered help to potential informants in Iran on Tuesday, providing Farsi-language instructions on ways to safely contact the U.S. spy agency as President Donald Trump mulls  possible military strikes . The  post  is the latest in a series of recruitment pitches  in Farsi, Korean, Russian and Mandarin  that offered secure ways to contact the CIA. The Farsi-language message posted Tuesday to X , Instagram and YouTube , however, comes at an especially uneasy time in U.S.-Iran relations and as the Iranian theocracy faces new protests at home. The U.S. has  assembled its largest military force  in the Mideast in decades as tensions with Iran have risen. Trump threatened military action in January in response to the government’s fierce crackdown on national protests before shifting his focus to Iran’s disputed nuclear program and  warning it to make a deal . Another  round of nuclear talks  is planned for lat...

Prediction markets are exploding in popularity as people rush to bet on real world events, from sports to elections to celebrity behavior. The platforms, however, have also tempted individuals to make a quick buck from insider information. The latest example came on Wednesday when Kalshi announced it had closed investigations into two cases of insider trading, including one that targeted a MrBeast employee named Artem Kaptur who made over $5,000 on bets related to YouTube streaming milestones. The second investigation targeted a long-shot candidate for California governor in violation of Kalshi’s rules for politicians. In a salty tweet sharing news of the investigations, Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, using a variation of a popular crude expression, wrote “F***ed around, found out.” Kalshi also suspended Kaptur for two years and imposed a penalty of $20,397.58 , using a power granted by the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission for exchanges to impose fines on customers....

“Today” show host  Savannah Guthrie  said her family is now offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the recovery of her mother, Nancy Guthrie, who went missing from her Arizona home more than three weeks ago. Savannah Guthrie said Tuesday that her family is still holding out for a miracle and hopes her mother will be found alive, but she also acknowledged that they realize it might be too late. “She may already be gone,” Savannah Guthrie said in an Instagram post. “She may already have gone home to the Lord that she loves and is dancing in heaven.” Nancy Guthrie , 84, was last seen at her home just outside Tucson, Arizona, on Jan. 31 and was reported missing the next day. Authorities believe she was  kidnapped , and the FBI  released surveillance videos  of a masked man who was outside Guthrie’s front door on the night she vanished. Drops of her blood were found on the front porch, but authorities haven’t publicly revealed much evidence. Sin...

Criminal investigators hoping to develop suspects in difficult cases have been asking Google to reveal who searched for specific information online, seeking “reverse keyword” warrants that critics warn threaten the privacy of innocent people. Unlike traditional search warrants that target a known suspect or location, keyword warrants work backward by identifying internet addresses where searches were made in a certain window of time for particular terms, such as a street address where a crime occurred or a phrase like “pipe bomb.” Police have used the method to investigate a series of  bombings in Texas , the  assassination  of  a Brazilian politician  and a fatal  arson in Colorado . It’s not a wild guess by investigators to conclude that people are using Google searches in all manner of crimes, as the company’s search engine has become the main gateway to the internet and users’ daily lives increasingly leave online traces. The potential value to inve...

The Supreme Court  said Monday that it will hear from oil and gas companies trying to block lawsuits seeking to hold the industry liable for billions of dollars in damage linked to climate change. The conservative-majority court agreed to take up a case from Boulder, Colorado,  one of multiple lawsuits  alleging the companies deceived the public about how fossil fuels contribute to  climate change . Governments around the country have sought damages totaling billions of dollars, arguing it’s necessary to help pay for rebuilding after wildfires, rising sea levels and severe storms worsened by climate change. The lawsuits come amid  a wave of legal actions  in California, Hawaii and New Jersey  and worldwide  seeking to leverage action through the courts. The case out of Boulder County will likely have implications for those other lawsuits. Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil appealed to the Supreme Court after Colorado’s highest court let the Boulde...

Four years after Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s economy has entered a “death zone,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. In a recent Economist op-ed , the former Russian central bank adviser drew on a term from mountain climbing when high altitude forces the body to consume itself faster than it can repair itself. “Russia’s economy is stuck in what might be described as negative equilibrium: holding itself together while steadily destroying its own future capacity,” she wrote. The economy isn’t headed for an imminent crash, but GDP has stagnated, oil revenue has been halved amid Western sanctions, and the government’s budget deficit is rapidly draining reserves. At the same time, two economic systems have emerged. One is comprised of the military and related industries that receive priority from the Kremlin. And then there’s everything else that’s been “left in the cold,” Prokopenko explained. “The most dangerous feat...

The Supreme Court made clear on Friday that President Donald Trump lacks the legal authority to use his emergency powers to force U.S. companies to pay tariffs. In its 6-3 decision , the court delivered a massive setback to the White House but, in a surprise to legal observers, it failed to address the question that is top of mind for many firms: Will they be able to recoup the money, estimated at around $133 billion, they have already paid under a policy that has now been ruled illegal? According to trade lawyers, the Supreme Court majority’s silence on the refund process—which dissenting Justice Brett Kavanaugh predicted is likely to be “a mess”—means companies must now wait months to learn whether they will get their money back. In the court’s long-awaited decision, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that Trump could not impose emergency levies—like the ones that imposed 25% duties on Canada and Mexico—since the tariffs amounted to a sort of tax that only Congress had the power to im...

JPMorgan Chase acknowledged for the first time that it closed the bank accounts of President  Donald Trump  and several of his businesses in the political and legal aftermath of the  Jan. 6, 2021 attacks  on the U.S. Capitol, the latest development in a legal saga between the president and the nation’s biggest bank over the issue known as “debanking.” The acknowledgment came in a court filing submitted this week in Trump’s lawsuit against the bank and its leader,  Jamie Dimon . The  president sued for $5 billion , alleging that his accounts were closed for political reasons, disrupting his business operations. “In February 2021, JPMorgan informed Plaintiffs that certain accounts maintained with JPMorgan’s CB and PB would be closed,” JPMorgan’s former chief administrative officer Dan Wilkening wrote in the court filing. The “PB” and “CB” stands for JPMorgan’s private bank and commercial bank. Until now, JPMorgan has never admitted it closed the president...

Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump signed an order establishing a new 10% global tariff, he announced an increase to 15%, upending one of his signature trade deals in the process. The abrupt change followed the Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that struck down his tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Hours after the decision, he imposed a 10% rate under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, then hiked the new duty on Saturday morning. While experts have pointed out the Section 122 tariffs are also legally dubious , it could take months to sort through any court challenge. And the new rate can only be in effect for up to five months. But unlike Trump’s attempt to invoke the IEEPA levies, the new ones must be applied uniformly across all trading partners, meaning everyone must face a 15% rate. That conflicts with the Trump administration’s trade deal reached last year that set a 10% rate on imports from the U.K. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer no...

President Donald Trump’s trade war isn’t over, despite the Supreme Court striking down his global tariffs, but the legal setback adds to the growing wall of resistance. The last two months represent a stunning reversal from the first year of his second term when lawmakers, CEOs, foreign governments, and the high court itself deferred to the president—even as he sought to tear down the existing world order. The 6-3 ruling against Trump’s levies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act earned the six justices in the majority a severe tongue lashing . In a press briefing on Friday, he said they were a “disgrace to our nation,” adding that they’re “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats.” He combined his insults with bravado over his ability to enact a fresh set of tariffs under separate laws, and he quickly followed through by imposing a 10% global duty that he hiked to 15% just a day later. “Still, the importance of this judgment is another step i...

Think back to February 2020. A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid. I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy. I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the va...