Financial Mindset

Ford CEO Jim Farley knows AI won’t leave blue-collar workers untouched. But at a backstage media roundtable during Ford Pro Accelerate, he argued the technology will arrive in factories, repair bays, and skilled-trades workplaces principally as a “companion”—a tool to help people perform more complex tasks, build expertise faster, and help employers address an acute shortage of technical labor. “I think most of these jobs will be both using AI and also protected from it,” Farley said at the roundtable, which also included Linda Hubbard, president and CEO of Carhartt, and Chris Nelson, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker. But “if you work in finance doing spreadsheets, or you’re in a call center, or you’re an entry-level programmer—those jobs are definitely going to be changed and eliminated with at least this first inning of AI.” Farley’s distinction was straightforward: AI is likely to disrupt routine, screen-based, and standardized knowledge work more quickly than i...

Nate Bargatze was once paid to go door-to-door reading water meters. Now, he’s selling out arenas and building a theme park. The contrast helps explain why Ford enlisted Bargatze, a comedian who did not attend college, to make the case for skilled-trades careers at a moment when employers are warning that the U.S. lacks enough electricians, technicians, maintenance workers, welders and other people who keep the physical economy running. “I was a water meter reader,” Bargatze told Fortune . “I read people’s water meters.” It was not a joke job, he said. It came with benefits and a career path—exactly the kinds of features Ford and other employers are emphasizing as they try to pull more young people toward hands-on work. “It was very much a job that had benefits and, like, a job that you could kind of grow with and rely on,” he said. “This trade school would have been something that I would have done. If comedy didn’t go where it’s at now, I would have read water meters...

Four astronauts rocketed into orbit Thursday on a space station mission that will stretch until spring, among them a Canadian whose wife will give birth while he’s away. SpaceX launched commander Jessica Watkins and her crew for NASA after a three-week delay to fix their Dragon capsule’s leaking fuel system. Thick clouds threatened all morning to halt the countdown but in the end, the skies cleared enough to allow for a safe liftoff. Although their stay at the International Space Station will last a long six months, the flight there promised to be the quickest yet for Elon Musk’s company : a mere eight-hour transit with an arrival well before bedtime. With the late morning liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Watkins became the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit. A geologist who worked with NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity a decade ago, Watkins is making her second trip to the space station following a lengthy stay in 2022. “Thanks for an amazing ride...

The U.S. military is dispatching roughly 9,000 troops aboard a group of ships to the Middle East, a U.S. official said Thursday. The bolstering of the American military presence comes as President Donald Trump warned anew that new strikes against Iran could be on the horizon. The troop movement, which includes a third aircraft carrier, underscores the rapidly evolving dynamic of Trump’s war against Iran as he ponders his next move, with midterm elections in the United States looming large and new signs that the nature of the conflict may be becoming more complex. Trump has threatened that a post-midterm election escalation — despite his initial promises to Americans of a campaign that would last a matter of weeks — remains a viable option. Further complicating matters, Trump told reporters Thursday that early indications suggest that Iran is linked to the FlyDubai co-pilot who stabbed his captain and tried to crash an Israel-bound flight on Wednesday. In an exch...

Many older people save their money in order to leave something to their families when they pass on. That is not always the best approach, says Penny Pennington, the CEO of Wealth management firm Edward Jones, who suggests that parents and others explore what she calls “giving while living”—distributing portions of their estate to younger relatives before they die. In an interview with Fortune , Pennington explained that a growing number of Edward Jones’ 9 million clients are embracing “giving while living” both for personal and practical reasons. “They are setting up gifting arrangements and trusts because they want to achieve two things: they want to enjoy seeing their impact, and they want to test whether there is a values alignment across the younger generations to see if family values are transferring successfully,” said Pennington. When it comes to “values alignment,” Pennington gave the example of families with mul...