Financial Mindset

This year’s World Cup was the most profitable in FIFA’s history, just as Gianni Infantino promised. FIFA’s own figures put the 2026 tournament’s revenue at roughly $9 billion to $13 billion, well above the $11 billion FIFA had forecast before the event. Revenue across FIFA’s full 2023–2026 cycle, which includes the Club World Cup and Women’s World Cup alongside the men’s tournament, is on track to top $15 billion, which Infantino called proof the tournament had “opened a lot of doors, a lot of opportunities, a lot of possibilities.” That’s roughly double the $7.5 billion FIFA brought in during the 2022 Qatar cycle. Now Infantino wants more. FIFA is reportedly studying whether to expand the 2030 World Cup from 48 to 64 teams. The vehicle is a plan called FIFA Forward Enterprise, announced nine days after that record-setting tournament closed, and it’s why the European contingent, which has won more World Cups than a...

It was just another sunny summer day in Haarlem, Netherlands, when an unusual request landed in Dutch antiquarian bookseller Pieter de Vries’ inbox. A woman named Natalia, identifying herself as being with a company called “ 2077AI ,” was looking to source what she described as a “fairly large order” of books. Attached was a spreadsheet listing more than 3,000 ISBNs along with instructions to match titles, prepare quotes and estimate shipping costs directed to China. De Vries barely looked at it, dismissing the message as spam or phishing without reading past the first few lines. It wasn’t until weeks later, when a Dutch journalist investigating the procurement request contacted him, that he learned of the request’s connection to artificial intelligence. “I was shocked!” said de Vries, who provided Fortune with the email and subsequent spreadsheet containing 3,001 titles, mostly published between 2020 and 2021 by academic publishers like Emeral...

Amazon’s stock price jumped more than 9% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the retail-and-AI giant reported second-quarter results buoyed by its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which is racing faster ahead than it has in more than four years. The cloud unit posted $42.2 billion in revenue in Q2, up 37% from $30.9 billion a year ago, marking AWS’ fastest growth in 18 quarters, and what Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called its fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. AWS added more than $4.6 billion in revenue quarter over quarter, and AWS operating income hit $16.6 billion, up 64% from $10.2 billion a year ago, on a 39.4% margin, up from 32.9% in the same period a year ago. AWS’s backlog—customer agreements representing future revenue—grew to $496 billion.  “AWS is now a $169 billion dollar annualized revenue run rate business, which, for perspective, would place it 24th on the Fortune 500 list if it was a standalone company,” Jassy said during Thursday’s ear...

Apple said it is facing severe supply constraints that will affect sales of iPhones and Macs in the months ahead, underscoring the challenges looming over the company as Tim Cook prepares to hand over the CEO reins. In his final earnings call as CEO, Cook said he has never been more optimistic about the opportunities ahead for Apple. “I am beyond excited,” said Cook, who has led the company for 15 years and will pass the CEO baton to John Ternus in September . But Cook’s confidence in the future stood in contrast to the picture that he and other executives painted of the current business conditions.  “We’re seeing some very significant constraints currently, with limited flexibility in the supply chain,” Cook said. “There’s a quarter where we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side,” he acknowledged at another point.  The supply crunch is making it more difficult for Apple to obtain the advanced processors it needs for its phones and computers. And that tran...

Prediction markets are deepening their foothold in Major League Baseball. On Thursday, Novig, an up-and-coming trading platform, announced a multi-year deal with the New York Mets to become the team’s exclusive prediction market partner. The Mets are the first MLB team to strike such a deal, with Novig’s branding set to be integrated across the team’s ecosystem. Novig, which launched in January 2024, is backed by Pantera Capital and seeks to carve out a place in the fast-growing prediction market sector dominated by the likes of Polymarket, Kalshi, and Robinhood. Novig declined to disclose additional deal terms, including the contract’s length and the sponsorship’s value.  MLB did not respond to questions about whether it plans a league‑wide prediction market designation or will keep agreements limited to individual teams. Fans will see Novig signage throughout Citi Field, on the jumbotron, and during game broadcasts, a Novig spokesperson told Fortune . Mets fans...

Between tariffs, trade disputes, and the closure and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, “disruption” has moved from being a buzzword to a permanent fixture in the CEO lexicon. Asia is one of the world’s most dynamic regions in the world. Its demographic scale, industrial depth, and technological capabilities puts it at the centre of future growth. According to the IMF , it drives 60% of global growth. But even as trade continues to flourish, CEOs can’t escape geopolitics. Asian businesses are navigating the simultaneous effects of fuel price shocks, power shortages, and grid instability. Fragmentation in the form of armed conflicts, tariff disputes and the dissolution of trade blocs is at an all-time high. Geopolitical competition is reshaping trade and investment decisions, as governments try to control key inputs and technologies. Therefore, CEOs can’t avoid disruption either. Instead, they need to figure out how to excel within it. Corporate executives need to assume th...

Microsoft said its Azure cloud business surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue in its recently-ended fiscal year, cheering investors in the company even as the broader market plunged on worries over AI spending and U.S. inflation. Cloud growth in Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter increased 43% percent year-over-year, providing a boost to overall quarterly revenue of $90 billion , above analyst estimates of $87.7 billion. Azure, the core of Microsoft’s cloud business, surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time ever this fiscal year, rising 33% over last year’s $75 billion, Microsoft said. The gain helps cement Microsoft’s Azure as a leading cloud giant behind Amazon Web Services, and as one of the most prominent providers of the infrastructure undergirding the AI era.  Shares of Microsoft rose more than 8% in after-hours trading, following a broad market selloff in regular trading Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve held interest rates s...

A diary played an unusual role in a  contentious Senate hearing Wednesday  – musings from Dr. Anthony Fauci, a scientist who became a leading voice in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, for years has accused Fauci, the longtime top  infectious disease official  at the National Institutes of Health, of lying about the origins of the coronavirus. In previous hearings, the now-retired Fauci denied the accusation,  calling it “preposterous.”  On Wednesday, he  invoked the Fifth Amendment  in declining to answer more questions. But Paul drew public attention to the latest proceeding by releasing more than 1,000 pages of a long-running diary that Fauci kept – entries that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News his agency extracted from government computers and provided to the GOP-led committee. Paul drew on selected excerpts to argue that Fauci’s “private record tells a d...

Smaller, less digitized Southeast Asian markets are adopting AI-native systems faster than mature economies—partly because they don’t have to deal with the baggage of legacy infrastructure. “Southeast Asia holds a lot of market potential because it’s very hungry for innovation,” Verena Siow, SAP’s new APAC chief, tells Fortune in an interview at the firm’s Singapore office. “The economies which had a later start are looking to leapfrog into the latest and greatest tech.” Southeast Asia, home to young, digitally-savvy populations and a rising middle class, offers fertile ground for leapfrogging, a phenomenon where countries bypass traditional stages of development and move directly towards newer technologies and business models.    For European software giant SAP, this has translated into burgeoning interest in its business AI propositions. “Companies in this region tend to have fewer resources and smaller IT departments, so they’re looking to move straight t...

Dr. Anthony Fauci  on Wednesday repeatedly invoked  the Fifth Amendment  and declined to answer dozens of questions from senators in a Republican-led committee hearing about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision, at least for now, shielded Fauci from answering questions that could expose him to accusations of lying under oath. Though he received  a pardon  in early 2025 from Democratic President Joe Biden, some Republicans pursuing a yearslong campaign for his arrest had suggested he could still face charges for any perjury committed during Wednesday’s hearing. The scientist, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, was subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had an antagonistic relationship with Fauci. In response to angry, sometimes mocking, questions from Republican senators, Fauci  declined to answer  more than 100 times, injecting new drama into partisan divides that have  fes...

Jensen Huang says AI is going to kill tasks, not jobs—a distinction that could define whether the future of work brings mass unemployment or a new wave of growth and opportunity. Speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School in San Francisco over the weekend, Huang didn’t mince words about the effect AI will have on the labor market. “Many tasks will be automated away,” he said in a video published Monday by the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “Every single job will change, and there’ll be a whole bunch of new jobs.” And yet the Nvidia CEO made clear that tasks are not the same thing as jobs. As such, he pushed back on the narrative of a white-collar bloodbath that some high-profile AI leaders have predicted. Instead, Huang argues, AI will bring more jobs, not fewer. “The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards,” he said. “AI automates tasks away, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate jobs.” As companies continue adopting AI, however, the nu...

When Robinhood and Coinbase went public back in the first half of 2021, the companies occupied very different lanes. Today, the two founder-led firms are clashing on multiple fronts as Robinhood seeks to co-opt large portions of Coinbase’s crypto empire, while the latter has rebranded itself as an “everything exchange” for stocks and more. Both firms report second-quarter earnings this week, and their results are likely to reveal which has the upper hand. While the market has soured on both stocks, there are strong indications that one firm—Robinhood—is in a position to turn the corner, thanks to its early momentum in new and emerging sectors like prediction markets and tokenized finance. Coinbase, meanwhile, is struggling to find its footing after betting heavily on a strategy involving its in-house blockchain that has yet to pay off. Q2 earnings preview for COIN and HOOD Robinhood is set to release second-quarter earnings on Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET, and Coinbase will do ...

South Korea’s Kospi closed down nearly 11% on Tuesday, its eighth circuit breaker of 2026 and one of the worst days of the year. South Korea’s famously volatile retail market is now infecting Western markets: The American semiconductor index SOX fell as much as 6% Tuesday, a fourth straight losing session and its longest streak this year, dragging the Nasdaq-100 down 9.7% from its record high—just short of a correction. Yet the panic doesn’t square with what’s happening on the ground. Memory prices just keep going up, not down. Third-quarter contracts for DRAM are settling 20% to 30% higher this month. Google and Meta have signed contracts locking in prices and volumes for five years, and analysts generally don’t expect meaningful new supply until 2028. “Right now there’s a lot of panic around the AI investment,” Gil Luria, a technology analyst at D.A. Davidson, told Fortune, “and the panic appears to be indiscriminate.” What gives? Well, three explanations are circulati...

In 1912, the French physicist Conrad Schlumberger could be found kneeling on the ground of his family’s estate in Normandy, strategically placing wired electrodes in the soil. He was performing conductivity tests to detect the buried ruins of a medieval abbey destroyed there during the French Revolution. But the experiment had a broader purpose: proving that electric instruments could be used to reveal and map underground structures from the surface. Schlumberger’s approach worked, and it turned out to be a remarkably effective tool for a more lucrative enterprise: finding oil. Conrad and his brother Marcel Schlumberger went on to create the first well logs—using electric cables for subsurface readings, producing outputs that resembled EKG heart monitor readings. The method became the backbone of modern geophysical prospecting, and supercharged the growth of a burgeoning oil and gas exploration industry worldwide. In 1926 the brothers founded the Société de Prospection Électrique ...