Before she became a multimillionaire TV star, sipping rosé on Wisteria Lane as Desperate Housewives’ Gabrielle Solis, Longoria refused to rough it up like other actors, waiting on tables between auditions and crashing on a roommate’s couch. Instead, she was building a headhunting empire from her soap opera dressing room. 

“The first day I landed in LA, I got a job,” Longoria exclusively tells Fortune. “I was like, I’m not going to be a struggling actor. I’m going to figure this out.”

Figure it out, she did. The 51-year-old star—who now has a net worth north of $80 million, a production company, a directing career, a stake in women’s soccer team Angel City FC, a $6 million investment in the John Wick franchise, and a new mentoring partnership with Lenovo to support small business owners—landed a role at a temp agency as a headhunter. 

And even once she’d scored her first real acting role on The Young and the Restless, she kept going. She was still negotiating salaries, screening candidates, and closing placement deals in between takes. 

“In my dressing room, I was doing the headhunting,” Longoria recalls. “I was negotiating 401(k)s and salaries and interviewing and reading resumes and placing people. And then they would be like, ‘Eva, ready on set.’” She’d hang up mid-call, go act, come back, and pick up exactly where she left off. 

Despite regular screen time, acting paid less than headhunting, so she didn’t quit—she kept up that double life for years, even denying it was her when clients eventually recognised her soap character on screen. She only walked away from corporate life in her third year on the show, after a pay bump finally made acting financially viable. 

“I knew I could always go back to corporate America if acting didn’t work out,” she says. Shortly after, she landed Desperate Housewives—and the rest is television history.

Eva Longoria’s former boss begged her to stay in corporate America

Longoria has never had to look far for her work ethic. The youngest in a female-dominated household—“nine aunts, three sisters, no brothers”—she grew up surrounded by financially independent women. 

As a teenager in Texas, Longoria started working at Wendy’s for $3.35 an hour and hustled her way up from “fried girl to hamburger girl to the drive-through, to head cashier to assistant manager” from the ages of 14 to 18—juggling her part-time job with high school.

“If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it well,” she remembers thinking. “I would work overtime. I work weekends. I was like, ‘pick me, pick me. I’ll do it.’ I love the idea of earning money.”

That same energy followed her to Los Angeles. When she joined the temp agency, the CEO gave her a choice: steady base salary or unlimited commission. “I didn’t know either of those words,” she recalls. “He goes, ‘Well, base salary means you only make this much, but commission means you can make as much as you want.’ And I said, ‘That one. I want that one.'”

Within one month, she says she was making three times the base salary.

In fact, Longoria got so good at her job that her boss tried to renegotiate her commission structure because it “wasn’t built for the volume” she was producing—and when she eventually told him she was leaving for acting, he even tried to talk her out of it.

“He never understood why I didn’t stay in corporate America,” she says. “It just wasn’t my calling, but I was really great at it.”

“Everybody was surprised because I built this small business within his business, and he kept saying, ‘Why would you want to be an actress? You’re so good at business, it’s a one in a million chance you’re going to be successful at acting’. And I said, I know—and I’m the one in a million.” 

Eva Longoria’s advice to Gen Z: ‘Figure it out’

Her mother, for what it’s worth, wasn’t worried when Longoria said she was pursuing a career in acting. Her response was characteristically pragmatic: “You have your degree, so if you need a job, you can get a job… my mom always said that you better figure that out.”

And she says it’s that mantra that separates the one-in-a-million who make it in a creative industry from the thousands who don’t. 

Longoria, for example, didn’t wait for an agent to discover her—she went directly to them. “I looked up who the gatekeepers are, who hold the keys to these opportunities, and then figured out when they were speaking at an event. And I would go to the event, give them my headshot, or introduce myself.” That, she says, is how she landed her breakout role on The Young and the Restless. 

Longoria is refreshingly clear-eyed about the fact that Hollywood, unlike business, doesn’t reward effort with predictable returns. “You could do exactly what I did and not have the same outcome,” she says. 

But she also thinks a particular kind of resourcefulness is non-negotiable—and increasingly rare. “A lot of people prevent progress because of perfection,” she says. “‘I don’t exactly know how to do that, so I’m not going to do that’—that thought process, to me, is crazy.” 

“A lot of people prevent progress because of perfection. Like: ‘I don’t exactly know how to do that, so I’m not going to do that’—it’s an odd thought process to me.”

“I remember landing in LA and going, Okay, what do I need to do? I need headshots. Okay, let me figure that out. I need an agent. I’ve got to figure that out… And that’s really a huge trait.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For a company valued at around $380 billion and reportedly preparing for an IPO this year, it’s an unusual stance—but one that could pay off in the long run.

The new AI model is called Claude Mythos, and it’s the first one Anthropic has publicly deemed too high-risk for public release. (If that name is familiar to you, it’s probably because you heard it here first a few weeks ago when Fortune broke the story about blog posts referencing the model discovered on a publicly-accessible data trove.) Rival AI lab OpenAI once made a similar call back in 2019 by initially withholding GPT-2 over concerns it could be misused to generate convincing fake text—a time when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was still working for Sam Altman.

This time, Amodei is taking a different approach. The company said on Tuesday it was rolling out Mythos through an invitation-only initiative called Project Glasswing, restricted to defensive cybersecurity work and limited to around 40 organizations. It’s aimed at giving cyber defenders a head start on securing some of the world’s most critical software systems from the looming security risks posed by advanced AI models and includes partners such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco.

But what does all of this mean for Anthropic’s standing in the AI race and its rumored upcoming IPO? A few things.

As my colleague Jeremy Kahn notes, Anthropic has been on a bit of a tear recently. The company has hit a $30 billion annual revenue run rate—a figure that implies a 58% revenue surge in March alone, and edges past the $25 billion run rate OpenAI reported in February. (The comparison isn’t exact as the two companies calculate run rates differently, but the direction of both paths is clear.)

Now, the company has developed a model that, according to its own benchmarks, significantly outperforms its competitors. It’s also found a way to forge an even closer partnership with some of the biggest players in enterprise tech. This is all in spite of the company’s very public fight with the Trump administration and two accidental, but high-profile, leaks.

As well as being a responsible safety initiative, Project Glasswing is also just pretty great brand-building, according to Paulo Shakarian, a Professor of artificial intelligence at Syracuse University. 

By creating a tightly controlled consortium and working directly with industry partners, Anthropic is “taking a lead in the industry as to mitigating these new risks,” he told Fortune. It’s an approach that Shakarian says “plays really well with the chief security officers of the world.” In a field that relies on regularly sharing threat intelligence, that kind of collaboration is likely to win Anthropic some favor and could strengthen the company’s standing with enterprise customers. 

But Mythos’ new and improved capabilities also come at a cost. According to Richard Whaling, lead researcher of cybersecurity startup Charlemagne Labs, Anthropic may have more than just safety concerns on its mind when it comes to the powerful AI model.

“I share Anthropic’s concerns around Mythos’ potential misuse, but I think there is also a resource limitation at play,” he said. “Anthropic has not announced how large Mythos is, but has implied that it is many times larger—and more expensive—than Claude Opus. I think it is likely that they simply do not have the GPU and other compute resources available to serve it at scale.”

In other words: Anthropic may have built something both too dangerous and potentially too expensive to commercialize at scale in its current state.

How long Mythos stays out of reach for consumers and enterprise customers is unclear. Anthropic has said they are already working on safeguards for the model. AI models tend to become cheaper and more practical over time. Some customers might also be willing to pay a premium for the capabilities. The lab has already said it will cover the first $100 million in costs for Glasswing participants, and early estimates suggest it could charge participants roughly five times more to use Mythos than its predecessor, Opus.

Not to be counted out quite yet, OpenAI is also reportedly on the verge of realizing a new model and is planning a similar rollout for a separate product with advanced cybersecurity capabilities. But for now, Anthropic is in an enviable position in the ever-changing AI race: ahead on capability and increasingly aligned with the kinds of enterprise and security customers it’s trying to sell to.

See you next week,

Beatrice Nolan
X: @beafreyanolan
Email: bea.nolan@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Administrators found that without their phones, students were using school laptops for distracting activities like watching YouTube or playing games, rather than learning. Some were even using their school Gmail accounts to tease other students, the New York Times reported.

Now, the school has transitioned to using laptops only for specific teacher-assigned activities. Meanwhile, the unused laptops sit in carts in the back of classrooms, and children take notes the old-fashioned way: on pen and paper.

“This technology can be a tool. It is not the answer to education,” said McPherson’s principal Inge Esping, who won Kansas’ middle school “principal of the year” award for 2025. 

Students who want to use the laptops for extra work at home can also borrow a Chromebook from the school library, the Times reported.

Increasingly, schools like McPherson in other states such as North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Michigan are rethinking their policies of buying and assigning a laptop to every student and the millions of dollars they spent on them, as studies show implementing technology in schools has reportedly coincided with either decreasing test scores or no progress at all for students. 

Maine, which in 2002 was one of the states to first adopt a policy of putting laptops in public school did not improve its test scores after 15 years of its laptop initiative, NPR reported in 2017. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and former teacher, said in written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, that math and science scores have decreased as technology has been introduced in classrooms. Citing the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Horvath said “frequent in-class computer use correlates with significantly lower math and science performance across both high-income and middle-income countries.” This study showed that fourth graders and eighth graders test scores correlated with whether they were using laptops almost never on the high end versus almost daily on the low end.

Google Chromebook laptops, which are made by PC makers like Lenovo, Acer, and Dell, have a tight grip on America’s schools. The laptops are relatively low cost, averaging between $300 and $400 per device. In schools, Chromebooks also have an advantage by leveraging ChromeOS, which use built-in web apps like Google Docs rather than installed apps like Microsoft office, which can be costly. Similarly, tools such as Google Classroom have become a mainstay of America’s K-12 schools. 

Google’s education push has also been lucrative. Education accounts for 60% of global Chromebook market share as of 2025 boosting the Chromebook total market to $14 billion. 

Laptop regrets

Schools in North Carolina spent $448 million in pandemic-related federal funding on computers and equipment for students and staff, according to news station WRAL. But after these funds dried up, schools have struggled to replace broken or outdated devices, which last on average less than a decade despite Google’s efforts to extend device lifespans. During a 2025 committee meeting, Robert Taylor, the superintendent of North Carolina’s largest school system in Wake County said the district needed to move away from its one-to-one laptop policy. explain

Another North Carolina school district has tried to diminish laptop use for educational reasons, reported Carolina Public Press. In Burke County, a county in western North Carolina with fewer than 100,000 residents, the school board passed a resolution for Burke County Public Schools to encourage learning with paper and printed materials, and limit screen time only “for activities where technology offers clear, evidence-based instructional advantages.” As a result, in February, parents and educators reported improvements in reading comprehension and test scores, as well as a decrease in homework-related stress that many attributed to the pro-paper resolution.

Earlier this year, a school district in Wexford County, Mich., which has a population of 34,000, banned screens for elementary school students to mitigate its reading proficiency issues. More than 65% of the third, fourth, and fifth-graders in one elementary school alone were “not proficient” or “partially proficient” on state standardized tests, according to Interlochen Public Radio.

The trend of schools moving away from technology comes as evidence emerges that access to screens does not improve student outcomes and could instead be holding them back. Horvath in his written testimony before the Senate, claimed Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower than their parents’ generation on standardized tests. 

Distractions are a major culprit of this degradation of learning, Horvath previously told Fortune, adding that refocusing attention after it’s been diverted takes time to recover.  Educational systems “screwed up,” he told Fortune. “And I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Indeed, the value of the debt itself is not the concern for many. Their alarm stems from the fact that the debt-to-GDP ratio is increasingly out of balance, and that the U.S. economy isn’t growing fast enough to keep up with its borrowing rate.

The more optimistic economic experts might argue the U.S. economy can grow its way out of a crisis (the potential transformative power of AI may offer a silver bullet here), while others point to the fact that 10- and 30-Year Treasury yields are showing no signs of panic.

Michael Peterson, chairman and CEO of the Peter G Peterson Foundation, warns that just because market alarms aren’t sounding right now, it doesn’t mean no issues will arise. The Peterson Foundation has long advocated for a more sustainable fiscal path for the U.S. economy.

“I think the bond market is often a very good indicator of sentiment of concern of risk,” Peterson told Fortune in an exclusive interview. “That’s what all these professionals are thinking about every day, and you have an enormous market that reflects the totality of thinking around that. Given that the bond market is doing decent, they’re not expecting a complete implosion in the near term.”

However, the fiscal decisions made across both sides of the political spectrum are “very damaging, even if there’s not a crisis,” Peterson said: “If you’re looking at a company, it’s not like: ‘As long as it’s not bankrupt, it’s fine.’ There are decisions that companies make that are ineffective and bad for growth—they over-lever, and maybe they don’t go into bankruptcy, but they damage themselves.”

“This is a home-brewed crisis of our own making, putting aside what the bond market might do on top of that,” Peterson continued. “I think we owe it to the next generation to get this under control.”

There’s also the matter of how the borrowing is spent: The CBO says that a significant proportion of government outlays ($1.7 trillion) are on immediate, mandatory expenses such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

While these are important, Peterson said, it doesn’t present the same return on investment that spending on infrastructure or education may have for future generations: “Even if we never have a crisis, these trillions of dollars—the vast majority of which has been for immediate consumption with no economic benefit to the future—have done damage to our kids and grandkids,” he added.

Future generations

Debate is also rife in the economics community about which category of consumer will feel the sharpest end of the national debt burden: Some argue it may be retirees, because their 401(k)s aren’t indexed to inflation and their savings may be lowered by “financial repression”—when the government keeps interest rates artificially low to make public funding cheaper.

Others argue a market reckoning would force interest rates up, so those with a mortgage (or hoping to get a mortgage) will pay the price.

Peterson is of the opinion that either way, the younger generations will bear the brunt of the burden: “I think it’s hard to parse through how it would pan out in terms of the pain, if you will, but it’s going to be widespread and it’s going to be significant and it’s going to be long-standing. We can fight over who got the worst end of the shortest stick, but we clearly are doing a disservice to anybody participating in the economy in the future.” 

“I certainly worry that the most disadvantaged will pay the price if it squeezes out income support and other activities that the government would have done if they had more resources.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

That is the conclusion of investors, economists, and strategists around the world. The common thread isn’t fear of a specific catastrophe. It’s something more unsettling: the sense that a series of permanent structural shifts—in supply chains, in geopolitical alliances, in the balance of economic power—have been accelerated by a war that nobody in power fully planned for.

“It’s going to look fundamentally different for a while, no matter what,” said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. He summed up the new world order to be defined by the winners and losers of this unfolding disaster in three statements: “Good for Russia, good for China, bad for America.”

courtesy Goh Seng Chong/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Even if the new cease-fire holds and energy prices recede, relief won’t come quickly—and the ripple effects of higher prices could still cause global recession or even depression. The Trump administration’s erratic military escalation, meanwhile, could be an even more disruptive force over time, breaking up longtime economic alliances and undermining the country’s status as the world’s most powerful economy.

The war nobody planned

Hanke, who has advised governments from Argentina to Estonia on monetary reform, said many of the problems stem from an initial assumption that the war would be over in a matter of days. It appears that the United States went in without accounting for the vast web of commodity supply chains running through the Gulf—and is now watching ripple effects spread into every corner of the global economy.This was a major planning failure, he said: “You better know all this shit’s going to hit the fan if you go to war,” Hanke said. “They clearly didn’t.”

Kate Gordon, an energy policy expert and former senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy, went further: “It is naive to think that this is just an isolated conflict and the strait will open and everything will go back to the same way it was,” she said. “We’re continuing to attack actual infrastructure, which means things beyond the strait are going to need to be rebuilt.”

courtesy of Kate Gordon

The oil story looks dismal—the Strait of Hormuz has emerged as a global chokepoint; the national average in the U.S. is over $4 per gallon; and countries more reliant on Iranian supply have seen price surges of more than 50%. And yet Wall Street has continued to price in an early end to the conflict.

Even if that comes to pass, Hanke said, don’t expect cheaper prices at the pump anytime soon. His central point: There are two prices for any commodity. The physical price, paid when tankers actually unload cargo; and the paper price, traded on futures markets. When the war began, those two prices split violently. Physical oil in Asian markets spiked past $150 a barrel; the paper market never climbed that high. Oil loaded before the war takes four to six weeks to reach its destinations, and that prewar inventory is only now arriving at ports. Once it runs out, the paper price will be forced to converge with the physical—and it has nowhere to go but up.

Robert Hormats, a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International who served as a senior aide to Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Sinai negotiations following the Yom Kippur War, added a structural reason for skepticism about a quick resolution. His central worry is that Iran, even if seriously damaged, could emerge as a “wounded bear”: hurt enough to be humiliated, but intact enough to still control the strait and continue backing groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis that destabilize the region. “The longer it lasts, the more serious the likely scenario,” he said. A damaged but defiant Iran could use those levers again at any moment.

Xinhua/Zhang Mocheng via Getty Images

Hormats pointed out that the Gulf states eying a post petro-state future “worked for years to establish the notion of stable countries where you can vacation… a nice place to do business, with good laws and tranquility.” They invited in tech giants and built financial hubs. The war has upended that project—and, with it, maybe the confidence those states had in their close partnership with America.

Burt Flickinger, founder of Strategic Resource Group and a veteran consumer analyst, said he sees the attacks on glossy hubs such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh as a sign things will get a lot worse before they get better. With this war, he said, “you crush the luxury malls, you crush the golf, you crush the sports, you crush the luxury living.” And, he added, “When luxury collapses, it’s a harbinger of complete catastrophe worldwide.”

No wonder the Gulf states are reportedly urging Trump to finish the job and not leave a wounded bear in their midst, wreaking havoc on their rebranded economies.

It’s not just about oil

Gordon, the energy policy expert, said the Trump administration isn’t grasping the particular nature of U.S. vulnerability to this war, “because they are acting as if they’re in the 19th century”—i.e. operating on the assumption that controlling resources and raw military power is sufficient. “We don’t live in that world anymore,” she said.

Beyond oil, the war has exposed a second, less-discussed energy chokepoint: Qatar’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure, which suffered major damage from an Iranian attack. Qatar is the world’s largest LNG supplier, and roughly 20% of global gas supply moves through the Strait of Hormuz. “Qatar’s gas infrastructure delivery system was pretty seriously hit,” Gordon said, noting an estimated timeline of at least three years and maybe upwards of five to rebuild the damage done so far.

This is a big hurdle in the Green Transition underway around the world: Gas is the critical crossover between the fossil fuel economy and the electrified one, powering grids that run everything from steel plants to data centers while emitting less greenhouse gases than coal or fuel oil. “Everybody uses it,” Gordon said, “and it’s incredibly important, particularly to Europe and Asia.”

And Hanke drew attention to another commodity whose supply chain is being choked off by the conflict: sulphur. When crude oil is refined, sulphur is a byproduct—and 50% of all traded sulphur in the world comes from the Gulf. Sulphur is the raw material used to make sulphuric acid, essential to fertilizer production and nearly every major metallurgical process, including copper smelting and steel production. “The manufacturing segment of the economy is damaged enormously if you get sulphuric acid out of the system,” Hanke said. “We have it now, but if this thing continues, they’re going to be running out.”

Flickinger zeroed in on diesel as a major problem, explaining that diesel powers the trucks and ocean freight carriers that move virtually everything Americans buy. With ocean container costs at record highs due to the Iran war, he said the pressure will eventually show up on every receipt.

Stagflation’s return

The word most economists reach for to describe what they dread is “stagflation,” a portmanteau that combines “inflation” with “stagnation” and was popular in the 1970s, when the last great oil shocks ushered in an era of gas lines, double-digit-percentage unemployment, and shrinking purchasing power.

Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, didn’t hem and haw while making a dire prediction: “If this persists,” he told Fortune about both the war in Iran and the closure of the strait, “I think it will cause a recession. It will feel stagflationary.”

This shock is landing on a U.S. economy already weakened before the first missile flew: Q4 2025 GDP growth disappointed, employment gains have been volatile, and affordability concerns were already mounting. Meanwhile, the threat of AI-related job cuts looms — something noted repeatedly by outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Now the Federal Reserve is trapped, with rates frozen at 3.50%–3.75%, and rate cuts pushed to September at the earliest. The long-running, well-respected University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey dropped to 53.3 in March, among the lowest of the last five years and approaching the record low of 50 amid the inflation surge of June 2022. “It will feel like the inflationary ’70s,” Winegarden predicted.

Goldman Sachs estimates that the oil shock will suppress U.S. payroll growth by 10,000 jobs per month through year end and push unemployment from 4.3% in March toward 4.6%. JPMorgan estimates global GDP growth could be depressed by 0.6 percentage points annualized in the first half of 2026, with consumer prices rising more than a full percentage point, annualized.

The farm picture is already severe. The key fertilizer urea is up 25%–30%, with nitrogen and potassium fertilizer costs similarly elevated, just as farmers are receiving their lowest cost per bushel in 17 crop years. The American Farm Bureau Federation published an alarming report in February 2026 based on U.S. courts data, showing a 46% increase in farm bankruptcies for 2025, with a 70% increase in the Midwest and a nearly 70% increase in the Southeast.

Rory Doyle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

All this will hit the American consumer hard. Higher energy prices feed into higher shipping costs, which feed into higher food costs and higher healthcare input costs—plastics, pharmaceutical ingredients, IV materials—and eventually a general price level rise. Flickinger, the consumer analyst, said little cushion remains for many households.

For the first time in roughly 70 years, Flickinger noted that American consumers are simultaneously spending more on all 12 major monthly expenditure categories tracked by consumer economists: healthcare, local taxes, debt service, food, housing, transportation, utilities, insurance, entertainment, mobile, clothing, and education. Every category is up at once. At $86 per barrel, oil alone costs the average American $2,000 annually out of pocket. With oil now well above $100 a barrel, the $3,000 to $4,000 in household savings Trump promised from higher refunds during the tax season, Flickinger said, “gets burned up with Zippo lighters before the money even goes to pay the rent.”

Of the experts Fortune talked to, all agreed that a U.S. or global recession was certainly very possible, depending on the fallout in the Middle East. Flickinger went a step further, raising the prospect of a severe, prolonged downturn of the type unseen for several generations: something resembling a depression.

A new world order

Step back from the U.S. price data, and the reordering of global power dynamics is striking and unsettling. “Russia is just an unambiguous huge winner,” Hanke said. Everything Russia sells, especially oil, is now being sold in higher volumes at much higher prices.

Europe, meanwhile, is shouldering the negative effects—absorbing a second enormous energy shock on top of the one it inflicted on itself by cutting off cheap Russian gas. Germany, where roughly 23% of GDP comes from industry, is watching its factories hollow out as it contends with the highest electricity prices in Europe.

As for the U.S., despite the triumphalist narrative being touted by the White House, the war is likely to undermine its standing as the world’s economic leader—and give its fast-growing rival, China, a boost. “The U.S. reputation has been damaged tremendously,” Hanke said. “No one is going to want to really trust and play ball with the United States for a long time.” That reputational damage and the crises caused by skyrocketing oil prices is driving a realignment of the Global South and BRICS nations toward China, which emerges from this conflict as the primary beneficiary of diminished American credibility. Although the dollar is still overwhelmingly dominant as the international reserve currency, analysts have noted cracks in the “petrodollar” regime, in which all oil trades from the Middle East were paid for in dollars, and reinvested back into Treasury bonds.

courtesy of Gaja Capital

Gopal Jain, managing partner of Gaja Capital, one of India’s oldest private equity firms, is seeing the collateral damage firsthand. India imports roughly a quarter of its energy, much of it from the Middle East, and the war has battered Indian stocks. Three of Gaja’s portfolio companies had successful IPOs last year and have seen their share prices hammered since. Despite this, he said he finds a thread of hope heading into more turbulent times ahead. “Human beings are not the strongest species, we are just the most adaptable species.” What’s left implied: We will have much to adapt to.

An “un-modelable” future

Hanke saved his most pointed critique for the political paradox unfolding in Washington. Trump was elected, in part, on a promise of no foreign wars and a return to American economic strength. The defense budget has now hit $1 trillion, with the administration asking for $1.5 trillion in its latest budget—easily the largest increase since the Korean War, some 70-plus years ago. “That’s a massive militarization, completely the opposite of what he told MAGA,” Hanke said.

SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images

That’s unlikely to play well in the U.S. electorate, and nor will a comment Trump said to a private audience at a White House Easter event, attended by the Associated Press: that the federal government soon wouldn’t be able to afford Medicare and Medicaid because it needed to prioritize military spending. With the national debt climbing past $38 trillion, and then $39 trillion, under Trump’s year-and-change back in office, interest costs are larger than defense and education spending combined, forcing tough choices.

Jain, whose three decades building private equity in India have taught him to take the very long view, said he is not panicking. He framed this moment as “turbulence rather than free-fall.” But even he acknowledged that what is unfolding is not normal, and he declined to predict what comes next.

“Can anyone actually talk about that?” He paused. “It’s un-modelable. We can indulge ourselves by attempting to sound sensible and scientific, but it’s radical uncertainty.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

On April 6, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, the four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft, became the farthest humans from Earth since Apollo 13. They broke a 56-year-old distance record; flew behind the far side of the Moon in a total communications blackout; and witnessed a solar eclipse from lunar orbit. 

And less than four minutes before any of that history happened, a jar of Nutella stole the entire livestream.

During the livestream with a countdown of three minutes and 52 seconds before the Artemis II mission broke the Apollo 13 record, a tub of the chocolate-hazelnut spread drifted out of the Orion spacecraft’s kitchen area, rotated lazily in the cabin, and settled label-forward in perfect framing and perfect lighting.

It was the kind of product shot that would have normally come with a six-figure production budget to stage on Earth. But free product placement came a record-breaking 252,752 miles away from Earth, and the NASA livestream caught every second of it. And Nutella and parent company Ferrero were eating it up. 

“We are over the Moon that the world’s best space explorers chose the world’s best spread,” Michael Lindsey, president and chief business officer, Ferrero North America, told Fortune in a statement. 

“Like so many people around the world, we are captivated by the Artemis II mission and inspired by the brilliant teams making it possible. We were over the Moon to see how an unexpected glimpse of Nutella was able to spread a smile to our fans—even in space!” read a statement to Fortune from the Ferrero Group. “We always knew Nutella is out of this world, now we have proof!”

On social media, Nutella went nutty over all the excitement surrounding the brand. “Honored to have traveled further than any spread in history. Taking spreading smiles to new heights,” wrote the company on Instagram along with a rocket and heart emoji. 

NASA’s Kennedy Space Center jumped in on the fun, writing: “Enjoying sweet treats while our Artemis crew takes sweet photos of the Moon!”

In another post, a jar of Nutella, floating just like the real-life one did aboard the Orion, is seen floating aboard a ship, this time beneath the words “Now enjoyed in space.” The caption asks folks to comment on what they would bring to space to win their name on a jar of Nutella: “Houston, we have Nutella in space! Tell us the one thing you’d bring into the cosmos for a chance to have your name written in the stars (or on a custom Nutella jar).”

NASA officials confirmed the Nutella was simply part of the crew’s approved food supply as one of 189 menu items aboard the Orion, alongside beef brisket, mac and cheese, scrambled eggs, and chocolate cookies. Bread, notably, is banned on spacecraft, as crumbs can damage precision instruments, so astronauts wrap most food in tortillas. NASA did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on how the spread was eaten, but we can take a wild guess the age-old teaspoon in the jar technique still works in free fall.

The Artemis II crew will splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on April 10, just nine days after launching from Kennedy Space Center.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The net interest payments on public debt are also increasing at a pace. For the same period last year, the Treasury paid $497 billion to service its debt. The difference from last year to this is a $33 billion leap—or 7% more than before.

The CBO report notes service payments increased “because the debt was larger than it was in the first half of fiscal year 2025 and because of higher long-term interest rates. Declines in short-term interest rates partially mitigated the overall rise in interest payments.”

The wider debt picture

Efforts are being made to rebalance the books, with the likes of President Trump’s tariffs playing a role.

The CBO’s latest monthly update showed that receipts for the first half of the year totaled $2.5 trillion, an increase of $223 billion on the same six-month period last year. Outlays have also increased, but at a slower pace: up $84 billion from $3.57 trillion in 2025 to $3.65 trillion in 2026.

Despite the increase in revenues for the government, a significant deficit still emerged: $1.2 trillion for the first six months of the current fiscal year. Although this was an $140 billion improvement on the deficit for last year, it still represents borrowing of more than $2 trillion for the full fiscal year.

Of that deficit, the latest report shows that in March alone the government borrowed $163 billion—$3 billion more than the deficit recorded for the previous March.

The update did little to impress the likes of Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. In a statement she said: “Both Congress and the president continue to ignore the urgent need to get our borrowing under control. As lawmakers consider the budget process for the upcoming fiscal year, we hope that they come up with plans to reduce deficits from the too-high 6% of GDP to a more sustainable 3% of GDP; secure our nation’s ailing trust funds for Social Security, Medicare, and highways; and ultimately fix the broken process that got us into this mess.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

But there’s one titan of industry bucking that trend: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. In his letter to shareholders, published Monday, the investment bank’s longtime chief executive praised the agility and ownership of small teams in military terms. “The teams needed to tackle [specific problems] should be small and authorized with the decision-making ability to move and act like Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force,” he wrote. “This is trench warfare; it’s about fighting for every inch, moving quickly, and getting things done.”

There’s some basis for the comparison with special forces operations: The SEALs are known to work in squads of eight or fewer, for example. And in the business world, organizing workers into smaller teams can ensure that everyone has a stake in the outcome, Dimon argued. 

In a team with too many members, accountability is spread too thin, he wrote: “Very often when a management team wants to accomplish something new … everyone on the team says, ‘We’ll get it done,’ meaning they will add it to the long list of tasks already on their plate. But when efforts are 1% of a lot of people’s jobs, it will never get done.” 

Smaller teams, with shorter “to-do” lists, are incentivized to give their full focus to any given task, he explained: “You need a team 100% dedicated to the mission—and everyone else supports them.”

In championing smaller teams, Dimon is at odds with the ultra-flat management model being adopted by firms like Meta, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expecting workers to do more with less in the AI era. The tech giant has laid off hundreds of workers this year and implemented worker-to-manager ratios of 50-to-1 in at least one department—a lopsided organizational structure that’s far beyond even the outer limit of the so-called span‑of‑control scale (which measures how flat or hierarchical a structure is by how many direct reports each manager has).

Eliminating layers of management is intended to speed up decisions and innovation by cutting hierarchy and bringing leaders closer to frontline employees and customers, thereby boosting engagement and ownership. But in such arrangements, junior staff can get overlooked, employees can feel directionless, and managers can burn out—or, as Dimon points out, accountability for getting things done can be diluted.

Despite those risks, U.S. companies are continuing to “flatten,” according to Gallup. The average manager’s span of control grew from 10.9 direct reports in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, meaning average team sizes are now nearly 50% larger than when Gallup first began tracking them in 2013.

Flat structures often don’t last long, as employees gravitate toward more managerial interaction. “What happens in most organizations is eventually either a formal or an informal structure appears sort of underneath direct reports,” André Spicer, executive dean of Bayes Business School in London and a professor of organizational behavior, previously told Fortune. 

The general consensus among management experts is that the ideal team size is seven, give or take a few. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously captured this idea by introducing the two-pizza rule in the company’s early days; if two pizzas can’t feed a team, the team is too big. 

That illustration seems almost quaint now, but the central concept still holds. Dimon has landed on roughly the same team size, only he made his point—perhaps fittingly in a time of war—with a military metaphor. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The world’s 500 richest people made $265 billion yesterday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. With the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumping 2.85% and the S&P 500 soaring by 2.51%, it was the second-largest single-day profit since the index was created in 2012.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the most gains and added $12.8 billion to his personal net worth as Meta shares—of which Zuckerberg owns about 13%—rose 6.5%. Luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault had the second-highest gains with $9.89 billion. 

The largest gain for the world’s 500 wealthiest people was just a year ago tomorrow, on April 10.  Last year on this day, Trump paused his planned “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the subsequent 24 hours of trading added a record $304 billion to the top 500 wealthiest’s net worths. In comparison, this Wednesday saw 61 people on the index grow their wealth by more than $1 billion. 

The rally won’t offset that the 500 wealthiest billionaires are still at a collective loss of $38.8 billion year-to-date. The world’s richest man Elon Musk alone lost about $3 billion on Wednesday. 

That growth may not last forever. Both the Dow and and S&P 500 briefly dipped this morning before making modest gains as reports of a shaky ceasefire dominated headlines. Crude oil climbed back up to $100 per barrel on Thursday morning, as doubts grow over how the ceasefire will hold. The current price is far from its peak of $118.35 since the war began, but much higher from its $70 cost before the war. 

After an eleventh-hour ceasefire deal between the U.S., Israel and Iran was reached on Tuesday, just before Trump’s self-imposed 8 p.m. deadline that night, a ceasefire agreement sent markets soaring. Then Israel heavily bombarded what it considered Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon on Wednesday, killing more than 200 people. Iran, which said it believed the ceasefire included Lebanon, claimed Israel had violated the agreement and thus closed the Strait of Hormuz to non-approved ships in response to the attacks. 

On Thursday as talks continue, Trump told NBC News that he asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be “a little more low-key” in operations in Lebanon.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Manna, the Irish drone delivery startup, closed a Series B this month backed by ARK Invest—Cathie Wood’s firm, known for early investments in OpenAI, Tesla, and SpaceX—along with the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Schooner Capital, Coca Cola HBC, and Molten Ventures. The capital will be put towards expanding Manna’s U.S. and European operations. Total funding now sits at $110 million. 

Manna, founded in 2018, operates throughout Ireland, as well as Finland and Texas, delivering anything from burritos to biomedical tests. The company has already completed more than 250,000 successful deliveries. It recently announced a new partnership with Uber, and has existing contracts with DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Just Eat. 

The problem Manna hopes to solve isn’t ritzy, but the math and market are.

Road-based delivery in the U.S. costs merchants around $10 per order in driver costs alone. Manna does it for cents in electricity. Its drones fly at around 50 to 60 mph in a straight line, deliver in under three minutes, and turn around in under 60 seconds—eight deliveries per aircraft per hour versus the industry average of 1.2.

Meanwhile, the global rapid delivery economy—same-day and on-demand—is projected to grow 21.3% year-over-year for the next decade, reaching $100 billion by 2034, according to Manna. And the last-mile (from hub to final destination) delivery market was worth an estimated $166.45 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $311.31 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 9.62 percent.

Manna’s U.S. target is 92 million family homes that gig economy delivery has never served profitably. As Healy notes, there are more than a billion food delivery orders placed annually in the U.S., and not enough drivers to move them without bleeding money. “Drones don’t take jobs away,” Healy added. “You’re giving every small business in the suburbs a better logistics platform than Amazon has.” 

Recent regulatory unlock, according to Healy, is what’s making VCs move now. The FAA has historically required drone operators to keep their aircraft in direct eyesight at all times, making commercial delivery at scale essentially illegal without a one-off waiver for every single flight. In August 2025, the agency proposed Part 108, a new permanent ruleset that would allow drones to fly beyond what operators can see.  The deadline to finalize these rules is mid-2026. 

Manna already has plans for 40 to 50 new U.S. locations in the next 12 months, starting in Texas and Oklahoma.

The competitive field has also thinned to four players: Manna, Google’s Wing (750,000+ deliveries, expanding to 150 Walmart stores this year), Zipline ($600M raise, $7.6B valuation, 2 million deliveries globally, and also has received several investments from ARK), and Amazon Prime Air (~16,000 deliveries). Healy notes Amazon only serves its own parcels, leaving Manna, Zipline, and Wing as the three companies competing for what he calls a $300–$400 billion U.S. opportunity. Manna, however, is the only company in the cohort currently turning a profit on every flight.

In the end, Healy says drone delivery is going to be free. “The only losers here are the people selling cars and e-bikes.”

See you tomorrow,

Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Term Sheet podcast… This week’s guest is Mackenzie Burnett, CEO and cofounder of Ambrook–a modern finance toolkit for farmers. Agriculture is the backbone of the U.S. economy, yet the average American farmer earns only 5 cents of every dollar spent on food. Meanwhile, there’s been an almost 50% spike in bankruptcies of U.S. farms, and margins are thinner than ever due to falling revenues and rising production costs. On the podcast, Burnett breaks down the high-stakes world of agricultural finance, and she and Allie Garfinkle discuss why many farms still rely on paper ledgers, the “unscalable” journey to find product-market fit in a skeptical industry, and how modern financial tools are a critical part of the strategy to save American family farms. Watch the episode here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com