Financial Mindset

Meta’s new AI agent app is quickly taking hold of the consumer market, unseating ChatGPT as the top free app on Apple’s App Store in recent days. The app, which features a personal AI agent that books appointments, shops, and organizes calendars on people’s behalf, is the talk of tech circles this week. Named Muse, the app, which uses Meta’s latest Muse Spark AI model, connects users to a range of services that its AI agent autonomously handles. That means handing over access to accounts across a user’s phone in exchange for Muse booking a vacation or handling restaurant reservations on their behalf. It’s the first major consumer AI agent push by Meta, and it’s catapulting the company for now, past its competitors. Not everyone is rolling out the red carpet for Meta’s Muse, however. Amazon blocked Meta’s assistant from accessing its online store, saying that “continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazo...

President Donald Trump and Mayor Zohran Mamdani held a joint press conference at Gracie Mansion on Monday, the first time a sitting president has visited the mayor’s residence in decades. The two discussed Sunnyside Yards, Temporary Protected Status for Haitian New Yorkers, and press access, while trading warm words despite months of public disagreement on policy. And despite that public disagreement, the two Queens boys seem to have had a warm conversation. Trump even shared praise for the young mayor. “I certainly hope he will be a great mayor. You have to understand, I want what’s good for New York. I want what’s good for the country,” he said. “So, if I had a choice of having him be a bad mayor or horrible mayor, I don’t want that. I want him to be a great mayor, and he certainly got potential, had great potential.” The president, standing alongisde Mamdani as press and the two politicians stood in the garden of Gracie...

Movie studio Paramount  on Monday agreed to settle an antitrust lawsuit filed by 12 states, the last big obstacle blocking the company’s $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal that would transform the movie industry landscape. In the settlement, which still needs to be approved by a judge, Paramount agreed to terms including a five-year movie production plan and to invest $1.5 billion in domestic movies. State attorneys general say the settlement guarantees investment in domestic movie production and provides worker protection. But analysts say the deal is still likely to lead to less competition in the industry — and higher prices for consumers. “Where I’m looking at this is through the consumer’s point of view and resoundingly consumers are concerned about price hikes and they are preparing for price hikes,” said Forrester research director Mike Proulx. “They care less about the theatrical releases and some of the other industry terms. What th...

The workday doesn’t end for millions of American workers when they clock out and go home—there are floors to mop, meals to prepare, and kids to tend to. There’s no paycheck for those chores that keep a household running, but a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report estimated the labor is worth up to $6 trillion a year, or one-fifth of GDP. All that output isn’t counted in GDP because no money changes hands. Yet, over 87% of Americans age 15 and older did some unpaid household work on a typical day, according to GAO’s September report, spending an average of 3.72 hours on those tasks.  “Without those activities, we really wouldn’t have a functioning formal economy,” Misty Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, told Fortune . She said if families stopped cooking and providing childcare themselves, much of that work would have to be bought from the service economy instead.  “The value of the money that...

In today’s CEO Daily: How the media and money are coloring the election. The big leadership story: Better.com’s founder vs. the investor who replaced him The markets: Up around the globe. Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune . Good morning. I’ve been thinking about Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk and the prospects for American voters to get the facts they need to make informed choices in the upcoming midterm elections. In-person voting began on Friday, the same day that President Donald Trump announced that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. (Journalists from those media outlets were denied entry and had their credentials deactivated on Saturday.) Many things will influence how Americans vote at the polls on Nov. 3, but the media and money will certainly color their perceptions. Let’s start with the media. The quality and accuracy of information that voters receive about government leadership matters. For example, they...

Cellular Intelligence is trying to build an AI model that can predict and eventually control how living cells behave, the same way AI models predict text or images, in hopes of making new medicines faster and cheaper to develop. The company took a step toward that goal Monday, announcing that Moderna co-founder Robert “Bob” Langer and Turing Award-winning AI researcher Yann LeCun have joined its scientific advisory board, along with Jens Nielsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute, and Fabian Theis, a computational biologist who directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. Langer is also joining the company’s board of directors as an observer. For decades, developing new medicines, especially cell therapies that use living cells rather than chemical compounds, has depended on slow, expensive trial-and-error lab work. The Boston-based Cellular Intelligence (CI) is trying to apply the same kind of pat...

A six-figure annual salary used to be a milestone for career success and financial security, but it isn’t what it used to be. The era of elevated inflation that began during the COVID pandemic has eroded the value of $100,000 to the point that Americans earning that much are hunting for bargains like everyone else. Walmart has previously noted that more affluent customers are shopping at the discount chain. And now they are patronizing deep discounters like dollar stores. At the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference on Tuesday, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said core customers, whom he defined as those making less than $45,000 a year, change their shopping behavior when gas prices hit $4 a gallon. For example, they tend to buy closer to home, shop more often, and buy less on each trip. The frequency of shopping goes up because customers don’t know what the next week will hold and will buy what they can, when they can. “But the inte...