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Steve and Connie Ballmer are splitting their $8 billion philanthropy into three so the people closest to the work can decide how the money is spent

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U.S. Treasury is paying $3 billion a day in interest on national debt, says the CBO—having spent $10 billion to prop up the currency of its top lender

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NewslettersCEO Daily

From Edison to the AI age: inside GE Vernova’s reinvention and 600% stock spike

Diane Brady
By
Diane Brady
Diane Brady
Executive Editorial Director
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Diane Brady
By
Diane Brady
Diane Brady
Executive Editorial Director
Down Arrow Button Icon
August 12, 2026, 5:21 AM ET
CEO of GE Vernova Scott Strazik speaks at the Semafor World Economy 2026 summit on April 15, 2026 in Washington, DC.
CEO of GE Vernova Scott Strazik speaks at the Semafor World Economy 2026 summit on April 15, 2026 in Washington, DC.
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  • In today’s CEO Daily: Scott Strazik’s stunning turnaround at GE Vernova.
  • The big leadership story: Sam Altman’s magic email address.
  • The markets: Mostly down amid wait for Hormuz deal.
  • Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. The company Thomas Edison helped found in 1892 to light up the world is now betting its future on powering the AI age. As GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik told me recently, “For us, our true north is to electrify the world. And if we electrify the world, we will decarbonize the world.”

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GE Vernova’s equipment and technology are used to generate about 25% of the world’s electricity, whether it’s gas, wind, steam, hydro, or nuclear energy. It also produces equipment and software for power grids. (Shawn Tully recently wrote about GE’s turnaround and its split into three entities: GE Vernova is No. 124 on the Fortune 500, GE Aerospace is No. 101, and GE Healthcare is No. 217.) Since GE Vernova became an independent public company in April 2024, the stock is up more than 600%.

But behind those incredible numbers is a deliberate strategy: Strazik has successfully pivoted to new growth areas, in part by turning new customers such as NVIDIA and nuclear-energy startup Blue Energy into R&D partners. In an era of accelerating speed and complexity of transformation, that’s a playbook worth studying.

“The technical hurdle with how they want to run AI factories is much more complex than our standard‑fare offering, and that’s great,” said Strazik. “What I see happening is a lot of the technology we’re developing to help them … will ultimately apply to the broader grid over time. But they will have funded a lot of the learning curve.”

Strazik appreciates but is not sentimental about the past, noting that “25% of our employees today weren’t part of the company the day we spun. They don’t even know GE.” The same is true for customers, 25% of whom only started buying from the company after it spun off, he added: “Technology companies that historically were not buying directly from us have become critical customers and strategic partners.”

What Strazik thinks about is not just the technology but talent: “We need kids that get excited about building stuff, because we need to build a lot of stuff in the next decade.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top leadership news

Schools running VCs

Crystal Springs, a 569-student private day school located on the peninsula between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, is one of a small but growing number of Silicon Valley private schools that have built what amount to miniature venture capital funds. The funds are capitalized with donations from the school community, guided and overseen by parent-investors from well-connected firms such as Lightspeed, Notable Capital, and Sequoia, and are aimed at early-stage, pre-IPO companies.  

Altman’s magic email address

OpenAI is seeking to clear internal bottlenecks with an email address that lands in the inboxes of the company’s leadership team. An employee can email friction@openai.com to raise issues ranging from a technical system that isn’t working to office-related frustrations, such as not having enough IT vending machines. A former OpenAI employee who spoke to Fortune praised the friction system as an effective way for leadership to get ground-level feedback, saying: “Literally anybody can complain about big company bullsh*t directly to Sam and they can act on it.”

Inside AI-free ChatTJB

Former Google employee Tucker Bryant has built a chatbot that behaves like many others: Users ask a question and wait for a response. The difference with ChatTJB is that an LLM or algorithm doesn’t create the answer. It’s written by Bryant, or increasingly, one of the more than 10,000 people who’ve applied to help him answer all those questions. Bryant told Fortune the volunteer waitlist is growing by roughly 1,000 people a day, turning what started as an art project about AI dependence into a strange reversal of the AI boom’s defining anxiety.

The markets

S&P 500 futures are up 0.016% this morning. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.02% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.07% in early trading. The Nikkei 225 is up 0.83%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 3.68%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.58%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1.01%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.73%. Bitcoin was down at $63K.

Around the watercooler

How a book that inspired Warren Buffett and a $14,000 side hustle helped billionaire Bill Ackman get started as an investor By Emma Burleigh 

Long-time OpenAI exec Brad Lightcap is leaving the ChatGPT maker to ‘start something new’ By Emily Forlini 

France hits unsolicited telemarketers with $87,000 fine per call, following similar provisions in other European nations By Joshua Hong

Former deputy mayor and now Mamdani nemesis sued the city’s pied-à-terre tax rollout. The city froze the judge’s pause within hours By Catherina Gioino

CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.

This is the web version of CEO Daily, a newsletter of must-read global insights from CEOs and industry leaders. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
About the Author
Diane Brady
By Diane BradyExecutive Editorial Director
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Diane Brady writes about the issues and leaders impacting the global business landscape. In addition to writing Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter, she co-hosts the Leadership Next podcast, interviews newsmakers on stage at events worldwide and oversees the Fortune CEO Initiative. She previously worked at Forbes, McKinsey, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Maclean's. Her book Fraternity was named one of Amazon’s best books of 2012, and she also co-wrote Connecting the Dots with former Cisco CEO John Chambers.

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