In an interview with CNBC Thursday shortly after the company reported first-quarter earnings, Isom called the merger a “non-starter from the get-go.”

“At the end of the day, there’s no way to view that as anything but anti-competitive,” he said. He added the deal would be “bad for customers, ultimately bad for American Airlines, bad for our team.”

Rejection of the deal came swiftly from all sides shortly after United CEO Scott Kirby reportedly pitched the idea to a Trump administration official. But President Donald Trump was one of the first to kill it. While he has appeared more open to big deals than his predecessors—he played an active role in the $81 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger—he said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday “I don’t like having them merge.” So, too, did a bipartisan pair of legislators. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Ariz.) warned the deal would cause harm to consumers.

Isom declined to mention whether or not United made a formal inquiry to American. But last Friday, American issued a statement saying that it is “not engaged with or interested in any discussions regarding a merger with United Airlines.”

United and American Airlines didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Why the Iran war is fueling merger chatter

One issue potentially driving consolidation chatter is rising fuel costs. Jet fuel prices have spiked from $100 a barrel pre-war levels to nearly $200 a barrel, spelling trouble for even the larger carriers. Now, United on Wednesday said the airline may have to raise prices by 15% to 20%. And German carrier Lufthansa just slashed 20,000 flights as the European market endures some of the most brutal conditions amid the ongoing energy crisis. Those price shocks have contributed to much of the discussion around consolidation. 

“Is there room for some mergers in the aviation industry? Yeah, I think there is,” transportation secretary Sean Duffy told CNBC earlier this month. Delta CEO Ed Bastian echoed that sentiment. 

“Over my career, I’ve seen many periods of disruption in this industry,” he said on the Delta earnings call last week. “Time and again, high fuel prices have been the most powerful catalyst for change, separating the winners and forcing weaker players to rationalize, consolidate or be eliminated.” Delta posted revenue of $14.2 billion for the first quarter, up 9% year over year, slightly above expectations. But the company said its fuel bill would be $2 billion higher than anticipated thanks to the spike in costs.

The Big Four, which include American, Delta, United, and Southwest, already account for 75% of the domestic market share. If the two airlines were to merge, American and United would encompass nearly 40% of U.S. domestic capacity, according to airline data firm OAG. Any deal of that nature would have faced obvious antitrust hurdles, according to experts.

“Fewer choices mean higher ticket ⁠prices, more fees, and fewer options for anyone who wants to get from point A to point B,” Ganesh Sitaraman, ​legal scholar and author of Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix it, told Reuters.

Customers would also face a shortage of certain key flight routes. The merger would force the combined airline to sell off operations on an estimated 289 routes where the two airlines are currently the only, or one of only two, airlines flying, Tom Fitzgerald, airline analyst at TD Cowen, told CNBC last week. 

There have been other attempted carrier deals over the past few years, several of which the Biden administration shut down. The Biden administration sued to block a potential $3.8 billion JetBlue-Spirit merger, successfully preventing the deal after a federal judge sided with the Biden administration.
In an unexpected turn, Trump is reportedly nearing a $500 million rescue plan for Spirit Airlines. The deal, which hasn’t yet been confirmed, would hand the government warrants to purchase Spirit stock, potentially giving taxpayers a stake in the company should it financially recover.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

While the U.S. leads the world in crude oil production, California is not able to enjoy the bounty as much as the rest of the country. The Golden State—the fourth-largest economy in the world—essentially operates as an island sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean on one side and mountainous terrain on the other. That makes it difficult and expensive to build oil and fuel pipelines. A tougher regulatory environment and heightened fuel standards have also made the state’s refineries less economical over the years.

The bottom line is California must import a lot of its oil, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from Asia—a region that is itself currently struggling with shortages because of its reliance on Middle Eastern supplies.

And, in something of a perfect storm of unfortunate timing, the Iran war coincides with the recent shuttering of the Phillips 66 Los Angeles refinery and the April closure of Valero Energy’s Benicia refinery near San Francisco. The two complexes combined for nearly 20% of California’s oil-refining capacity. Valero also is weighing the future of its Wilmington refinery near Los Angeles.

“It’s real terrible timing for California to see the loss of two refineries at a time when Asia is struggling with oil supplies of its own,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

“If we don’t have some concrete [peace] deal here in the next three weeks, then I’m really nervous for the West Coast this summer in terms of jet fuel,” De Haan told Fortune. “That’s not going to be great for California’s economy.”

Norse Atlantic Airways announced this week the cancelation of all its summer flights from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Delta Air Lines is canceling a handful of U.S. flights for now from Detroit to New York. Air Canada cut some flights to New York. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said in his April 22 earnings call that United is raising fares up to 20% and proactively canceling flights at off-peak times and days. And struggling Spirit Airlines—pushed over the cliff by the spike in fuel prices—may need a federal bailout to survive.

The biggest headline in Europe this week was German airliner Lufthansa axing 20,000 flights through October.

“It’s not so much gasoline supply on the West Coast that I’d be worried about yet, but it’s jet fuel out of LAX, San Francisco, Seattle, and then it’s diesel,” De Haan said, arguing that nationwide reductions, especially of new flight routes, are likely in order to conserve fuel. “I would look for a lot of route cancellations potentially this summer.”

Refineries primarily churn out gasoline to meet passenger vehicle demand, so supply shortages of refined products typically hit jet fuel first and then diesel. Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and Alaska all stand to be among the most impacted as well.

Plans for new fuel and refined products pipelines into California are underway, including from Phillips 66, but the earliest those would come online is 2029.

The California Energy Commission told Fortune that jet fuel stocks remain adequate and within historic norms, although supplies are admittedly tight. For West Coast travelers, the near-term risks are sustained higher prices and airline schedule adjustments—not the physical shortfalls that Europe is facing.

But would that remain the case in June if the Strait of Hormuz energy chokepoint is still blocked? “Our analysis is thorough and ongoing, but we can’t provide a definitive answer on that kind of forecasting,” the CEC said.

One partially saving grace is the Trump administration’s decision to temporarily waive the 106-year-old Jones Act, which requires cargo ships moving between U.S. ports to be U.S. built, flagged, and manned, reducing the number of vessels available to move crude oil and refined products between domestic ports.

The waiver allowing more ships, for instance, to move fuel from the U.S. Gulf Coast through the Panama Canal and up to California to help alleviate shortfalls. The CEC confirmed the waiver is bringing incremental supply to the state.

Looking ahead for relief

While the White House previously touted the Jones Act waiver as a move to lessen the spikes in fuel prices—that impact is minimal—the bigger difference it’s making is the eased logistical movement of supplies to needier domestic areas.

A White House official said California and Alaska count among the biggest beneficiaries of jet fuel deliveries from the Jones Act waiver. And the 60-day waiver could be extended.

Otherwise, California must compete internationally for more expensive and increasingly scarce fuel imports from Asia. The state leans on South Korea, Singapore, Japan, India, and the Middle East for more of its oil and fuel.

“The risk is California has to compete on price to get those barrels, and what’s an already expensive market becomes really expensive,” said oil forecaster Dan Pickering, founder of Pickering Energy Partners consulting and research firm.

While the rest of the country is worried about fuel prices and not physical shortages, California is a “different animal,” Pickering said, “The risk in California is both its price and its availability. And, because availability is tough, the price goes up even more.”

Already, California’s gasoline prices are 45% above the national average. The national average on April 23 for a gallon of regular unleaded was $4.03, while it’s a U.S.-leading $5.85 in California. And there’s a $2 gap between diesel prices in California compared to the national average, $7.49 per gallon versus $5.47.

Despite the geographical and regulatory challenges of building new fuel pipelines to California, several projects have popped up to help fill the gaps left by the refinery closures.

Phillips 66 and Kinder Morgan plan to build the Western Gateway Pipeline System from Texas to Phoenix and southern California. Pipeline developers ONEOK and HF Sinclair are both weighing competing projects.

But the Western Gateway project isn’t slated for completion until 2029, so bridging that gap will prove to be the challenge, De Haan said.

“It’s great news for California because they’ll have better-connected markets,” De Haan said. “California will be a little bit less of a petro island.”

Kinder Morgan CEO Kim Dang said on the company’s earnings call this week that the war in the Middle East highlights the need for the project.

“California has to import some of its supply, and that makes it subject to the variability in global markets,” Dang said. “Instead of bringing in a fair amount of product over the water, they’ll now be bringing in supply from Texas and from the eastern United States. The other thing it does is it serves the Phoenix market, which is also right now reliant on the California refining capacity.

“I think it’s a great solution for California and for Arizona to be able to access domestic supply, as opposed to having to be reliant on the international market,” Dang added.

In the immediacy though, Pickering fears the world is still “dangerously complacent” about the war and the greatest energy supply shock in history. Oil and fuel shortages are almost guaranteed at least through the end of this year, and Pickering doesn’t see a peace deal occurring overnight.

“If they don’t [make a deal], in a month or two, the problems that we’re seeing in Asia are going to be everywhere,” Pickering said. And, if June is when shortages really kick in, well, “June is a day closer every day.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This particular FPSO vessel, built by Singapore’s Seatrium, No. 42 on the Fortune Southeast Asia 500, will soon be bound for Brazil and its state-owned oil giant, Petrobras. It took around three to four years to get the ship completed, a lifetime compared to how quickly most goods get produced.

Seatrium’s most recent contract with Petrobras, a deal worth approximately 11 billion Singapore dollars ($8.2 billion) for two all-electric FPSOs, was signed back in May 2024, with first delivery expected in 2029. Much has changed since the contract was first signed. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs rewired global supply chains, and the Iran war, with its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, upended the entire conversation around energy, particularly in Asia, which sources much of its oil and gas through that narrow chokepoint.

Chris Ong, Seatrium’s CEO, sees the Iran conflict sharpening what specialists call the energy trilemma, or the trade-off between energy security, affordable supply, and environmental sustainability. “The situation is now even worse because of the destruction of supply, which is still not fully priced in,” Ong says. “People don’t understand; they have been swung between different stories every day.”

Yet if oil prices stay elevated, Ong thinks that will unlock new offshore projects around the world. “I think a lot of projects would come online if the price per barrel were around $100.”

‘A builder and a businessman’

Seatrium itself is barely three years old, though its DNA stretches back to Singapore’s colonial-era naval docks, later converted by the newly independent government into commercial shipyards. The company itself was formed in 2023 when Sembcorp Marine absorbed its rival, Keppel Offshore and Marine. Sembcorp Marine was contending with COVID-era disruptions and a legal hangover from corruption investigations in Brazil; Keppel, meanwhile, had decided to reinvent itself as an asset manager and was eager to shed its manufacturing business.

As Ong explains it, Singapore couldn’t sustain two shipyards competing for the same scarce land, talent, and capital. “We were competing against each other when there’s bigger competition in China and Korea,” he says. The fight over talent had grown particularly fierce: “We were competing with data centers, other builders, even our own customers.”

A former junior engineer, Ong spent nearly three decades in the industry, rising through both predecessors before taking over the merged group. Ong knew both companies, and so knew how to stitch the two together. “You are no longer red or green,” he recalled telling staff, referring to Keppel’s and Sembcorp’s corporate colors. “You are now electric blue.”

Seatrium posted a 1.9 billion Singapore dollar ($1.5 billion) net loss in 2023, partly because of substantial write-downs on non-core assets and obsolete inventory.

Under Ong, the company has turned itself around. The company reported 11.5 billion Singapore dollars ($9.0 billion) in revenue for 2025, up 24% from the year before. Net profit more than doubled to 324 million Singapore dollars ($254 million). Oil and gas accounted for just over 70% of revenue, offshore wind just under 20%, and repairs and upgrades for clients ranging from the Singapore Navy to Royal Caribbean’s cruise fleet at roughly 7%.

Ong credits a supply chain overhaul he branded “One Seatrium” for the turnaround. Seatrium now operates like a global manufacturer: components are built wherever it makes most sense and then brought together for final integration, usually in Singapore. “That allows us to scale the order book.” Ong explains.

A decades-old relationship with Brazil

Seatrium’s relationship with Brazil reaches back to the 1980s, predating the country’s oil boom. “Fortunately, our predecessors were very farsighted,” Ong says. “They realized that if you weren’t in Brazil, you wouldn’t be part of its growth.”

Still, Seatrium has had a “love-hate relationship” with the country at times, Ong says. “There were a lot of startup and tuition costs when we went in.”

Both of Seatrium’s predecessor companies were ensnared in Operation Car Wash, Brazil’s sweeping anti-corruption investigation that eventually consumed much of the country’s political and business establishment. In July 2025, Seatrium agreed to pay approximately $190 million in fines to Brazilian and Singaporean authorities to settle the case, finally closing the matter.

“There are challenges in every geography you operate in,” Ong says, when asked on the subject. “I reckon that’s behind us.”

He adds the experience drove the company to build “one of the most structured compliance programs” in the industry. “The question was, after Operation Car Wash, do we continue our presence in Brazil? First our compliance culture had to be right, then we had to determine whether this was the right geography to focus on our value-add to the energy landscape. And the answer was yes.”

In September 2025, the company handed over the P-78 FPSO, with a production capacity of 180,000 barrels of oil per day, to Petrobras, the first in a growing line of Brazilian vessels. The two new FPSOs under construction, P-84 and P-85, will be all-electric platforms designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30% per barrel.

Seatrium is also embedded in Guyana, which has gone from producing no oil in 2019 to nearly 900,000 barrels per day in 2025, and potentially 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030, according to ExxonMobil. The country’s oil windfall has tripled GDP per capita since 2020, transforming a nation of roughly 800,000 people.

“It all started when we realized that Guyana is also a former British colony,” Ong says. “Guyana and Singapore felt almost like siblings.”

Seatrium’s other bet: Offshore wind

While fossil fuels drive the bulk of Seatrium’s revenue, the company is also positioning itself as a builder of offshore wind infrastructure, including installation vessels, floating turbine carriers, and the high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) substations that transmit power back to shore. 

Ong sees wind as a natural extension of the company’s engineering DNA. “You have your installation jack-ups, your foundations get bigger, and the whole infrastructure gets more complex. That complexity in engineering, proprietary technology, and execution excellence all fall in line with what we do in offshore oil and gas,” he says. 

Seatrium has been involved in offshore wind since 2012, when it built its first wind turbine installation vessel. Today, it says it has contributed to projects representing nearly 16 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity worldwide.

Europe remains its strongest market. In December 2025, Seatrium and GE Vernova won a contract from Dutch transmission operator TenneT to deliver BalWin5, a 2.2-gigawatt HVDC connection linking North Sea wind farms to Germany’s onshore power grid. The project,  enough to power roughly 2.75 million households, is expected to be commissioned in 2032. “Europe needs to become independent from Russian gas,” Ong says, “and Germany has said it will not go back to nuclear.”

The U.S., by contrast, has proven a more treacherous market. Trump scrapped subsidies for wind power, suspended issuing permits for new projects, and even agreed to pay nearly $1 billion for TotalEnergies to surrender its East Coast leasers.

“We originally thought the U.S. would be the next major destination that will grow,” Ong says. “But it’s still very nascent, very state-driven rather than federal-driven.” 

Seatrium has had its own U.S. drama. Last year, its partner Maersk canceled an order for a wind turbine installation vessel bound for the Empire Wind 1 project, citing construction delays.The vessel, at the time, was 98.9% complete. The case went to arbitration, and eventually Seatrium delivered the vessel in February. 

Long-term bets

Shipbuilding has become one of the most securitized industries in the world over the past two years, particularly as the U.S. chafes under China’s dominance of commercial shipbuilding. 

Seatrium doesn’t make container ships, and so avoids the most prominent debates over shipbuilding. But Ong knows the company can’t avoid security questions—in part because the company’s clients include the Singaporean, U.S. and U.K. navies. 

“If a project is sensitive to being built in China, we simply don’t build it there,” he says. “We have the flexibility to choose. Our Seatrium ‘arsenal of capacity’ gives us a very unique proposition.”

Seatrium remains closely tied to Singapore, which has long tried to take a more neutral role in world affairs, maintaining close security ties with the U.S. and close economic ties with China. Temasek, Singapore’s state investment company, holds a 36% stake. 

That positioning extends to Seatrium’s longest-range bets: floating nuclear power plants and floating data centers. Onshore projects can get snarled in land permitting issues, political blowback, and policy volatility; offshore projects, in contrast, can just get moved somewhere else. 

“Building offshore energy infrastructure can actually be faster than building on land,” Ong says. 

In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, released twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Van Dyke’s wagers won him $409,881, according to the U.S. Justice Department, but now the soldier’s wagers have earned him something else: a series of criminal charges related to insider trading that come with the prospect of decades in prison.

“Gannon Ken Van Dyke allegedly betrayed his fellow soldiers by utilizing classified information for his own financial gain,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle Jr., in a statement announcing the charges, which cited unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.

According to the Justice Department, Van Dyke used classified information he acquired as part of planning for the mission to place his successful bets. He did so despite signing non-disclosure agreements that forbade him from divulging sensitive information related to military operations.

Polymarket is a platform where users take positions in so-called events contracts that offer shifting odds on a wide variety of real life scenarios ranging from elections to sports games to the weather, and where users take “yes” or “no” positions on the contract. In the case of Van Dyke’s wagers, he took the Yes position on wagers like “U.S. Forces in Venezuela . . . by January 31, 2026”, “Maduro out by . . . January 31, 2026”, “Will the U.S. invade Venezuela by . . . January 31,” and “Trump invokes War Powers against Venezuela by . . . January 31.”

In the days following Maduro’s capture, a series of reports appeared in the press highlighting the unusual wagers. In response, Van Dyke sought to cover his tracks by deleting his account from Polymarket and changing the email account tied to a cryptocurrency exchange where he had initially parked his winnings.

According to Polymarket, the company identified suspicious behavior and contacted federal authorities.

“Last month, we published our enhanced market integrity rules to combat insider trading. When we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation. Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today’s arrest is proof the system works,” said a spokesperson.

As prediction markets have exploded in popularity, reports of insider trading are becoming more common. In February, for instance, Polymarket’s chief rival Kalshi announced it had banned a Mr. Beast employee who had made bets based on insider information tied to his jobs, and this week the company announced it had done the same for several political candidate who had wagered on their races.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

On Thursday, as Intel crushed Wall Street financial targets, the company had a new message: There’s nothing wrong with being a 58-year-old maker of PC and server microprocessors.

“We are embracing our roots as data driven, paranoid, and engineering driven,” CEO Lip Bu Tan said at the start of the company’s Q1 earnings conference call, referencing the famous “only the paranoid survive” philosophy of Andy Grove, the late cofounder of Intel.

Shares of Intel surged more than 22% in after hours trading Thursday after the company reported first-quarter results. Instead of the 2% decrease in revenue that analysts were expecting for the first three months of the year, Intel grew revenue 7% year-over-year to $13.6 billion. Revenue in the current quarter will range between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion, Intel said, well above the $13.06 billion analysts have been expecting. 

Demand for Intel’s central processing units (CPU) chips, which are based on its longstanding x86 architecture, is booming, the company said. In fact, revenue would have been even higher had it been able to produce more of the chips.

“A year ago the conversation around Intel was about whether we could survive,” Tan said. “Today it’s about how quickly we can add manufacturing capacity and scale our supply to meet enormous demand for our products.” 

It was hardly an exaggeration when it comes to the bleak outlook for the company, which he joined as CEO in March 2025, a few months after Pat Gelsinger was ousted from the top job. At the time, many observers, including former board members, wondered whether the company should be broken apart, with its manufacturing facilities sold or spun into a separate business. A few months after Tan started, the U.S. government bought a 10% stake in Intel, helping to shore up the company in a deal the Trump administration said was important for national security and American industry. 

CPUs are back, but is Intel?

The resurgence in demand for Intel’s CPUs is a somewhat surprising turn of events after several years in which the GPUs, or graphics processing units, made by Nvidia appeared to be the future because of their prowess with AI models. 

“In recent months we have seen clear signs that the CPU is reasserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era,” Tan said on the call. The reason, he explained, is that CPUs are better suited for running AI services, as opposed to creating—or training—AI models, where GPUs have the edge. In the early days of the generative AI boom, as companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google were training giant new AI models, GPUs were the clear winner. But as the market evolves, Intel said the pendulum is swinging back to CPUs. 

Intel finance chief Dave Zinsner said that the ratio of GPUs to CPUs in AI data centers is changing. While there are typically seven or eight GPUs for every one CPU for the job of training AI models, the ratio is only three or four GPUs for every one CPU when it comes to inference, or running AI models. And as agentic AI gains ground, Zinsner said the ratio could hit parity or even flip in Intel’s favor. 

But there are still plenty of challenges. Nvidia recently released its first standalone CPU, adding to existing competition Intel faces from longtime rival AMD, as well as from server chips based on the ARM architecture (including an upcoming chip that ARM is making itself, instead of strictly licensing the chip design to other companies). 

And the bigger question is whether Intel’s resurgence is truly a sign that the company is on the mend, or simply a reflection of the booming AI infrastructure buildout, as data center companies snap up as many chips as they can. Big questions also remain about Intel’s so-called foundry business, which manufactures chips for other companies and competes with global giant TSMC—particularly whether Intel will continue to invest the massive sums required to develop the next generation of chipmaking technology. 

Tan has previously said Intel would not commit to building factories using the most advanced 14A fabrication process (capable of producing chips with 1.4 nanometer circuits) unless it has committed customers. And he gave no update on that front on Thursday, despite speculation that Elon Musk and Telsa’s recently announced partnership with Intel, via Terafab, might be the much-anticipated 14A customer.

Asked about Terafab deal, Tan described it as a broad relationship in which the two companies will learn a lot together, but provided few specifics. “Elon and I believe the global supply chain is not keeping pace with the rapid acceleration in the demand,” he said.

As for 14a customers, Tan was equally tight lipped: “We’re making great progress in terms of yield and cycle time. And clearly we’re engaging with multiple customers; heavy engaging. My style is underpromise, over delivering. So we have no plans to announce the customer unless a customer wants to announce it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Every generation faces a new wave of technological disruption and responds with the same blend of overconfidence, short-termism, and reluctance to let go of what’s working. The internet did it. The mainframe era did it. AI is doing it now.

“The technology always evolves faster,” he told Fortune backstage at Great Place to Work’s For All Summit in Las Vegas, when asked about the pace of change. “There are more tools, but the human part is not different,” he said.

What makes Devgan’s perspective unusual is that he’s not a philosopher: He’s an engineer at the center of the AI build-out. As president and CEO of Cadence, the $90 billion-plus electronic design automation company whose software underpins the chips in everything from iPhones to AI data centers, he has a front-row seat to the most consequential technology boom in history. And he keeps seeing the same human tendencies play out—in corporate boardrooms, in Washington, and in the broader culture of AI panic and AI hype.

AI vs. humanity

Onstage, in conversation with Great Place to Work CEO Michael C. Bush, Devgan sounded a similar tune about why he believes AI is a bit overhyped.

“There is some AI washing going on,” he said, referring to the practice of attributing mass layoffs to AI efficiencies that may or may not exist or ever materialize. “It is a real thing. It is a big, big thing,” he told Bush, referring to projections that the semiconductor market where his customers operate was supposed to hit $1 trillion by 2030, but Devgan said it’s set to hit $1.2 trillion this year—impressive when you consider that in 2025, global semiconductor sales were roughly $793 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

“Because of AI, the whole industry is going much faster,” he continued. Devgan’s levity may be a big part of why Cadence ranked No. 11 on the 100 Best Companies to Work For list in 2026.

Backstage with Fortune, Devgan dismissed the idea that AI is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, even as he hailed its breakthroughs. He kept coming back to a constant refrain: Humans will be human, no matter what technological changes society undergoes.

Data centers aren’t the real crisis

That framing helps explain why Devgan is relatively unbothered by one of the loudest anxieties in tech right now: the idea that AI data centers will strain electric grids, spike utility bills, and ultimately prove energetically unsustainable.

He sees it as a classic first-derivative mistake—projecting a straight line from current conditions and ignoring the human ingenuity that always bends the curve. Calling it a “first-derivative projection,” he said people extrapolate from the data-center boom onto a spike in utility bills, “but human innovation always saturates.” He predicted software efficiencies alone—not quantum computing, not new energy sources, just better algorithms—will deliver the 10x improvements in AI computation that make today’s projections obsolete.

“It always happens in software,” the Silicon Valley veteran told Fortune. “One software change can give you 10x improvement.”

Balance sheet philosophy

Cadence is careful with its balance sheet and debt. The company posted more than 14% revenue growth and roughly 45% non-GAAP operating margins in fiscal year 2025, making it one of the most profitable companies in tech. And yet even from that position, Devgan said he deliberately sets aside 20% of investment for what comes next—recent bets including a $3 billion acquisition of Hexagon’s design and engineering business.

“The best time to do this is when you’re doing really well,” he said, “because the typical mistake is when you’re doing really well, you will just try to milk what you have.”

What’s next for tech

On the question of what comes next, Devgan gets expansive. He called Waymo “the biggest breakthrough in AI in the last five years”—a window into a $3 trillion to $4 trillion global transportation industry on the verge of total transformation. He estimated 25% of downtown Los Angeles currently consists of parking lots—real estate that should become available the moment self-driving goes mainstream. On defense, he said he sees the industry being “completely redesigned for autonomous”—noting the absurdity of a $1 million missile being fired in Iran to knock down a $30,000 drone. Robotics and drug discovery are the next frontiers, for him: “We can’t even imagine how different the world is going to look.”

And yet, in the same breath, he returns to his anchor: Human nature doesn’t change. Kids today have the same worries about careers and friendships that his generation did. The nostalgia for previous eras is always misplaced. The warnings about disruption are always slightly overblown, the timelines always slightly wrong—self-driving cars were supposed to arrive in 2012, he noted, and they’re only arriving now.

Onstage with Bush, Devgan framed this not as pessimism, but as a kind of operating principle. His biggest worry about AI adoption, he said, isn’t the technology—it’s the disconnect between executives who are enthusiastic and employees who are skeptical.

“The enthusiasm is very high at the leadership level,” he said, “but there’s more skepticism at the employee level—and that’s the real thing.” His advice to leaders: Stop positioning AI purely in terms of margins and efficiency.

“We need to bring everybody along and do it in a truthful manner, right, in a transparent manner,” he said. Not everything has to be positioned as a question of financial gains or increased margins, he added, but “also how it affects the whole organization.” (In other words, the human part.)

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Apple plans to relocate the robotics team from John Giannandrea’s AI organization to the hardware division later this month, according to people with knowledge of the move. That will place it under Senior Vice President John Ternus, who oversees hardware engineering, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change isn’t public. 

The pending shift will mark the second major project to be removed from Giannandrea in the past month: The company stripped the flailing Siri voice assistant from his purview in March. The changes are part of a broader effort to catch up in artificial intelligence, a field where Apple has fallen behind tech peers such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI.

Giannandrea, a former Google executive who serves as senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy, continues to run most of Apple’s AI efforts. And the change will give his group more time to focus on underlying artificial intelligence technology, the people said.

A representative for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.

The Siri engineering unit was taken over by Mike Rockwell, who previously ran hardware and software development for the Vision Pro headset. As part of that management shift, Rockwell kept oversight of the visionOS operating system. He is replacing much of the management of Siri with top deputies from the Vision Pro team, Bloomberg News reported this week.

The robotics team, in contrast, is more behind the scenes at Apple. It’s working on ways to use AI technologies to power devices — potentially laying the groundwork for a new product category. The group is led by veteran executive Kevin Lynch, who has managed Apple Watch software and the company’s now-defunct self-driving car initiative. 

As part of the robotics project, Apple plans to release a tabletop robot that uses an artificial limb to move around an iPad-like display. For further in the future, the group has discussed building mobile machines, including a roaming robot similar to the Amazon Astro. The products are designed to be telepresence devices, meaning they would let users videoconference with others.

Robots are quickly emerging as one of the most exciting fields in Silicon Valley, with Tesla Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and other giants investing billions of dollars in the category. After losing ground in generative AI, canceling its self-driving car plans and arriving late to the smart home market, Apple can ill-afford to miss out on yet another major AI-driven category. 

Top Apple executives have faith in Ternus’ ability to oversee the project. He’s one of Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook’s most trusted lieutenants and is already in charge of hardware engineering for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro and most other products. Many employees believe that Ternus could be Apple’s next CEO — a future shift that could occur at a time when robots become more mainstream. 

Ternus already has jurisdiction over a hardware engineering team run by executives Matt Costello and Brian Lynch that has been working on robotics and smart home technologies. The latest shake-up also suggests that Apple is ramping up work on the effort and wants both groups more closely aligned under a single boss. 

The relocation of Lynch’s unit is also notable because it gives Ternus control over key AI operating system and algorithms teams, groups not typically managed by the hardware engineering department. Ternus briefly oversaw the Vision Pro software unit — until Rockwell moved with that team to the software engineering organization. That coincided with the Siri management shift last month.

For Giannandrea, the switch will mark yet another demotion of sorts in the wake of major delays to key Siri features and a tepid response to the Apple Intelligence platform. He has now lost hundreds of engineers just this year — to Ternus, Rockwell and software chief Craig Federighi — after Cook lost faith in his ability to execute on new product development. 

The shifts do free up Giannandrea’s group to focus on development of underlying models that will power future Apple products — including upgrades to Apple Intelligence and Siri.

The AI and machine learning group, mocked by some employees as “AI/MLess,” has been reeling for months after multiple delays to promising Siri features. People within Apple also have complained about a lax attitude that has slowed down engineering and the development of new initiatives. In an all-hands meeting last month, Apple’s former head of Siri under Giannandrea — Robby Walker — called the situation “ugly” and “embarrassing.”

Giannandrea hasn’t given his team any indication that he is planning to leave soon, but the continued shift of responsibilities has raised the prospect that the company may be preparing for a world without the executive at the helm of its AI efforts. Eight years after combining Apple’s AI teams into a single group with the hire of Giannandrea, a breakup of the AI and ML team is looking more likely, the people said. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As Cook begins his 10th year at the helm, his management group is filled mostly with senior vice presidents who have worked at Apple for more than two decades, made tens of millions of dollars and are at or near the ages of 55 to 60 when many previous executives have stepped aside. That, along with typical corporate planning, has spurred the Cupertino, California-based company to cultivate its next class of top managers, said people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified talking about internal company discussions. Apple declined to comment.

Cook, who took over from Steve Jobs in August 2011, has led Apple to become the world’s most valuable company and the first in the U.S. with a market capitalization that topped $2 trillion. Even with the company’s success, the next group of leaders will need to navigate rising global antitrust concerns, build stronger relationships with app developers, reduce the reliance on Chinese manufacturing and find devices or new services to carry the company beyond the iPhone.

The CEO has given no indication he’s ready to retire, but if the 59-year-old Cook moved on tomorrow, look no further than Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, 57, to take over. Williams is seen as the heir apparent, having run the company’s global operations under Cook for the past several years. In 2013, he took over development of the Apple Watch and Apple’s health initiatives, and last year, added oversight of hardware and software design. 

In many ways, Williams is seen as pragmatic as Cook and as someone who wouldn’t let the company miss a beat. He is an operations-focused executive like Cook rather than a product visionary like Jobs or former design chief Jony Ive. With the company’s decade of success under Cook, it’s unlikely the board would want to shift away from this proven formula. 

Below, Bloomberg takes a look at possible successors to the current executives in charge of each major Apple division. 

Marketing

Greg Joswiak, 56, took over for Phil Schiller as Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing in August, but Schiller, 60, had been gradually handing off some responsibility for years, according to people familiar with the transition. 

At Apple, the product marketing organization is broader than ads, as the group helps choose which features to add to devices and helps manage product development. Joswiak joined Apple in the 1980s, and is just about three years younger than his semi-retired predecessor. The company has a list of potential successors to Joswiak, with the “smart money” being on newly appointed vice president of iPhone marketing Kaiann Drance, 42, to eventually take over, according to a person close to the company. 

Other potential contenders include Stan Ng and Susan Prescott. Ng, vice president of Apple Watch marketing, has been a mainstay in Apple’s marketing organization since the late 1990s, starting off on the Mac, transitioning to the iPod, and then working on the iPhone before the Watch. Prescott, 55, oversees marketing for apps and enterprise.

Software engineering

Craig Federighi, 51, is the youngest member of Apple’s executive team and is likely to remain in his role for several more years. But if he stepped down, Federighi has at least two key lieutenants that could fill the role. 

Sebastien Marineau-Mes, vice president of Intelligent Systems Experience, and Jon Andrews, who was named a vice president in charge of CoreOS last year, are seen by people close to Apple as most likely to be promoted if necessary.

Andrews’s CoreOS is the most fundamental component of Apple’s operating systems, the layer that handles underlying features like wireless networking and the file system. Marineau-Mes used to hold Andrews’s role, but in 2016 was moved to oversee the Photos and Camera apps in addition to system security. More recently, Marineau-Mes was shifted to work on features like the new iOS 14 widgets. 

Marineau-Mes was hired away from BlackBerry Ltd. in 2014 after running the Canada-based company’s software division, and Andrews joined Apple in 2006.

Services

Services are one of Apple’s fastest growing segments and a key driver for device sales. Eddy Cue, 55, was named the senior vice president of the unit in 2011. 

Cue, who has worked more than 30 years at Apple, started at the company by managing customer service teams and now oversees Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud, Apple Maps, many of the applications that run on the company’s devices and dealmaking for content. As for Cue’s eventual successor, Peter Stern, 48, is at the top of the short list.

Stern, who joined Apple from Time Warner Cable in 2016, is a content dealmaker. He oversees the business side of Apple’s video efforts and leads work on Apple News, Apple Books, iCloud and the company’s advertising platforms. He also helped handle the development of Apple’s upgraded TV app last year and is leading the charge on Apple’s push into services bundles. 

Operations

Apple’s operations division is perhaps the company’s most important. The team is responsible for cranking out hundreds of millions of devices from Asia and shipping them across the world. The group also must develop manufacturing techniques, source components and strike deals with suppliers. 

Cook ran Apple’s operations before handing over that responsibility to Williams. Last year, Apple tapped Sabih Khan, 54, as senior vice president of operations. Beyond Khan, Apple has a team of several veterans such as operations executives Dan Rosckes, Rob York and Rory Sexton.

But the most likely long-term successor, according to people familiar with the group, is Priya Balasubramaniam, head of operations for the iPhone. Balasubramaniam has been in her current role since 2014 and joined Apple nearly 20 years ago. She is in charge of the production, supply chain and repair network for Apple’s most important product as well as underlying components.

In 2017, Balasubramaniam helped fix development challenges with the iPhone X’s facial recognition sensor at facilities in South Korea. The phone ended up shipping in time for the holiday season and helped lead to strong overall sales.

Hardware engineering

Dan Riccio, 57, has run Apple’s hardware engineering division since 2012 and oversees the hardware development of almost every Apple device. 

The group has several vice presidents who run different areas, but John Ternus’s profile inside and outside of the company has steadily risen over the past several years. As a top lieutenant to Riccio, Ternus, 45, is in charge of hardware engineering for the iPad and Mac. He also contributes to the development of several other products. 

A person who knows Ternus called him a well-respected manager who understands the technology, and despite his rising profile, has remained unassuming — all characteristics of a potential future division head or even CEO.

Ternus recently supervised the development of the new iPad Pro design, an increased focus on the Mac after the company let several lines languish and has been key in the company’s transition from Intel Corp. to its own Mac processors. 

Hardware technologies

Johny Srouji’s Hardware Technologies group has increasingly become one of Apple’s most important assets. His team’s chips have powered the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch with performance outpacing many rivals. The group is also developing chips at the core of Apple’s upcoming augmented-reality headset and glasses, cellular modems for future iPhones and processors to replace those from Intel in Macs. 

Srouji, 55, joined Apple in 2008 and was appointed to Apple’s executive team in 2015. He is a demanding leader who keeps a tight grip on a team that has a rising profile in the chip industry. None of his direct reports are seen as having Srouji’s clout to run such a demanding division. Still, Sribalan Santhanam, 54, is most likely to take the role if Srouji were to step down or retire, people close to the company said.

Santhanam, the company’s vice president of Silicon Engineering, joined Apple in 2008 when his previous employer P.A. Semi, was acquired to kickstart Apple’s in-house chip efforts. His profile has risen lately after he announced the iPhone 11’s processor and was one of the showmen of Apple’s Mac processor transition.

Retail & human resources

When Angela Ahrendts left her post as Apple’s retail chief last year, Tim Cook tried something new: promoting an insider to the job. Cook’s first choice as head of retail in 2012, John Browett, came from the outside and clashed with a culture of customer service, which triggered his departure after less than a year. While Ahrendts revamped the look and operations of stores, some employees and customers weren’t pleased with the changes. 

Since taking over last year, Deirdre O’Brien has pushed Apple retail online amid the Covid-19 pandemic and navigated opening and shutting locations on an ad hoc basis. If O’Brien, 54, were to step down from her post as head of retail and human resources, Apple has a bench of lieutenants in place to take over. 

The company could consider again splitting the role into two positions, such as promoting a retail leader of a major geography in addition to having a standalone human resources executive. Apple could also look to hire an outsider as it did before. 

Chief Financial Officer, General Counsel and Machine Learning

About a year before the retirement of previous Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer in 2014, Apple hired current CFO Luca Maestri, 56, away from Xerox Corp. He served as corporate controller and vice president of finance before taking the CFO job. If Maestri were to leave Apple, it’s possible the company could once again look for an outsider to take the job. It could also consider Saori Casey, its current vice president of finance, who oversees the company’s books and is responsible for putting together earnings reports. 

The company has also hired outsiders for its past two general counsels: the current holder of the job Kate Adams, 56, came from Honeywell, while her predecessor, Bruce Sewell, joined from Intel. 

Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy role was created specifically for John Giannandrea, 55, who earlier held a similar job at Google. Giannandrea does not have a clear top lieutenant, so if he were to depart Apple, it’s unclear who would replace him or if Apple would fold the unit back into the Software Engineering department. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In a video posted on Tax Day by the NYC Mayor’s Office, Mamdani announced the city’s first-ever pied-à-terre tax: an annual fee on luxury properties valued above $5 million whose owners do not live in New York full-time. The video, which has already drawn nearly 470,000 views and 48,000 likes, was shot outside 220 Central Park South, the building where Griffin owns a four-floor penthouse he purchased in 2019 for $238 million, then the highest price ever paid for a home in the United States.

“When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich,” Mamdani said in the one-minute clip. “Well, today we’re taxing the rich.”

But a week later, Griffin’s COO at Citadel, Gerald Beeson, hinted the company might not move forward with a massive undertaking in a Midtown construction project.

“We are about to commence the redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, creating 6,000 highly paid construction jobs and supporting the creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in mid-town New York,” wrote Beeson in a letter viewed by the Wall Street Journal. “The project—if we move forward—will entail more than $6 billion dollars of spending.”

Later in the letter, Beeson called out the mayor personally, for personally calling out Griffin. “It is shameful that he used Ken’s name as the example of those who supposedly aren’t carrying their fair share of the burdens associated with New York City’s often costly and wasteful spending,” the email said, according to the Journal. “In doing so, the mayor has once again manifested the ignorance and disdain of the elite political class towards those who have been consistently committed to building one of the greatest cities in the world.”

“We have nearly 2,500 colleagues who have chosen to build their careers here,” Beeson wrote in the letter, the Journal reported. “We understand that our hard work and success will, on occasion, make us targets for political rhetoric. But it should not diminish the pride we take in building firms that will continue to help New York City thrive for decades ahead.”

Mamdani’s campaign promise to “Tax the Rich”

The pied-à-terre tax, which is backed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and still requires approval from the state legislature, would apply to one-to-three-family homes, condominiums, and co-ops worth over $5 million when the owner’s primary residence is outside New York City. Mamdani’s office estimates the tax would generate at least $500 million annually, with revenue directed toward free childcare, street cleaning, and neighborhood safety.

Griffin relocated Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022, drawn by Florida’s lack of a personal income tax. He shares the move with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, all of whom recently left high-tax states and now maintain Florida residences. Griffin also recently paid $38 million for a duplex apartment up the block from where Mamdani shot the video, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Mamdani said the tax would fix “a fundamentally unfair system.” “These units are sitting empty,” he said. “And even so, they’re able to reap the huge financial rewards of owning property in, dare I say, the greatest city in the world.”

The pied-à-terre tax has circulated in New York policy circles for years but has repeatedly stalled in Albany. Mamdani recently pushed a wealth tax in New York but said the city would be forced to instead increase property taxes if the tax didn’t get state approval. Neither Griffin nor the mayor’s office responded to Fortune’s request for comment.

In a post on X a few days after the video was published, billionaire Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman backed Griffin and Citadel in the public back and forth.

“Non-residents who spend millions of dollars on NYC apartments help drive NYC’s economy,” wrote Ackman. “The Ken Griffins of the world make NYC high end development viable, driving high-paying construction, brokerage, legal, marketing, and other jobs in NYC. We should be applauding Ken for spending $238 million in NYC, not attacking him for doing so.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on April 16, 2026.

More on real estate:

• The starter home is dying. Better.com’s CEO says AI is the only thing that can save it
• Florida and Texas are the biggest losers in the housing market as Ohio emerges a surprise winner
• Omaha ranks over NYC, LA because Gen Z has ‘a shot at purchasing a house’ for under $300K

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The recent depressing news included a top Apple AI executive’s defection to Meta just weeks after another high-level AI researcher had left—especially painful because Apple is widely seen as a laggard in the world’s hottest technology, AI. Last month Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, often a scene of breathtaking new products or services, was “a snoozer,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. While stocks of Microsoft and Alphabet are hitting new highs, Apple is down 16% this year.

Little wonder that a Wall Street research firm, Lightshed, concluded Cook is no longer the right boss for Apple. The company “now needs a product-focused CEO, not one centered on logistics,” the firm wrote. “AI is not something that Apple can merely ‘pull the string’ on. Missing on AI could fundamentally alter the company’s long-term trajectory and ability to grow at all.”

By earlier standards, Cook would have been on his way out in any case. In August he will have been CEO for 14 years, and in November he turns 65. But 65 is nothing special anymore, and no board of directors will hurry to dispatch a CEO who created far more shareholder value than his legendary predecessor, Steve Jobs, ever did. At least in theory, the options for Cook and the board are wide open.

So what should Cook and the board do? To get an authoritative answer, Fortune recruited three eminent executive search experts, each of whom has counseled scores of major boards on managing successions. We agreed to withhold their names so that they could speak completely candidly. Here are their combined thoughts—as well as the final word from preeminent business historian Richard Tedlow, who gives a compelling comeback to anyone who thinks Cook’s time is up.

Apple’s competitive environment now. “Two things are happening in parallel. One is AI, which is a much bigger deal than the internet was. The second thing is the evolution of the hardware. There’s a ‘good enough’ problem. For most users, the phones are good enough. I’m a power phone user, and I use a several-year-old iPhone because there’s no compelling reason to upgrade. Those two things in combination make for a more challenging environment for Apple.”

At the same time, the consultants see a temporary upside for Apple. “They don’t have the existential threat that Google has from AI. Apple still has the platform—I’m still using my Apple phone to reference ChatGPT. They’re not losing revenue in that exchange. So if you look at where they make money, they actually don’t need a quick entry [into AI].”

“Remember, Apple has never been first to market with anything. They’re considered to be the most innovative company in the world, but they have largely taken a concept that’s been proven and made it applicable for use in ways that are highly innovative and esthetically appealing.”

Still, the clock has been ticking for a while. “I would be shocked if within the next 12 months they do not release a truly functioning baseline agent to replace Siri.”

When might Cook be thinking of stepping down? “That’s really the foundational question. If it’s two years, are there any outsiders who could plausibly come in? Are there any boomerang people who could come back from outside of Apple?”

“Apple is less likely to go outside because of the cultural history of outsiders at Apple. It’s almost revered, the story of how outsiders almost killed Apple [before Steve Jobs returned in 1997]. We hear pretty consistently that Cook is thinking of an age 68 to 70 timeline [which would be three to five years from now.] He feels that, with AI, there’s some unfinished business.”

“I don’t think Tim will be CEO until he’s 70. I think he’s tired, honestly. It’s been an exhausting journey, and he’s amazing, but I do sense a different energy.”

What kind of executive will Cook’s successor be? “The common wisdom is that they really need a product visionary, as opposed to the operational genius that he was. I would argue that until the tariff and supply chain issues get resolved, they probably do need him at the helm because that is a non-trivial issue for them.”

Who are the leading candidates to succeed Cook? “The most obvious are John [Ternus] and Craig [Federighi].” Ternus is senior vice president hardware engineering. Federighi is senior vice president software engineering. “But given the timeline, [the company] could still make quite a few changes, and it could be somebody quite different.”

“There are a few companies where being a CEO is really like being the president of a country, and Apple is one of those. There are maybe a dozen. It sounds kind of heretical to say, but to some degree, the smaller part of the job is effectively operating the company.”

Bottom line, what is the big-picture assessment of Tim Cook? For this we turn to a business historian, Richard Tedlow, an emeritus professor at the Harvard Business School. Like any good professor, he asks questions. He starts by asking five crucial questions about Apple: Does it satisfy customers? Does it come from behind? Does it have a powerful corporate culture? Is it willing to admit mistakes? Does it have “an imagination of disaster,” a realization that things could go badly wrong? Approvingly, he answers Yes to all. Told that a Wall Street research firm has said Cook should resign, Tedlow notes that Warren Buffett invited Cook to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in May and said, “I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I’ve ever made [for] Berkshire Hathaway.” Tedlow asks, “If that Wall Street firm called Buffett and said, ‘Warren, do you think it’s time to get rid of Tim Cook,’ what do you think Warren would say?”

Tedlow’s ultimate query: “If you could choose anybody to be the CEO of Apple right now—anybody in the whole history of business, from John Jacob Astor to John D. Rockefeller to Tom Watson Sr. to Andy Grove to Tim Cook—whom would you choose? This is actually not a difficult question.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com