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Aker BP ranks 272 with $13 billion in revenue (up 129.5%). The Norway-headquartered mining and crude-oil production company has 2,462 employees and made a profit of $1.6 billion (up 88.4%).

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Aker BP (AKRBY): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Aker BP (AKRBY): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Why has Effective Altruism, a philanthropic philosophy built on solving charity like a math problem, become the center of Washington's biggest battle over AI?
From major figures at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind to sharp criticism from defense officials, the movement is facing unprecedented political scrutiny. Senior AI reporter Bea Nolan joins Fortune Daily to break down what Effective Altruists actually believe, why critics claim it threatens technological progress, and what the debate over AI "doomers" means for the future of the industry.
Also on today's episode: 
• Imperia Launch: First Lady Melania Trump rings the NYSE opening bell to debut Imperia, an invite-only network designed as a "Davos for women" connecting female CEOs with global capital and dealmakers. 
• Under the Radar: Business Editor Nick Lichtenberg explores how Gen Z is building wealth with help from parents—and the economic guilt driving families to step in.

Subscribe to Fortune: https://fortune.com/subscribe/ 
Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

00:00 - Why Washington Is Targeting Effective Altruism 
01:48 - Inside the AI Doomer Debate with Bea Nolan 
11:25 - Melania Trump Launches "Imperia" at NYSE 
13:48 - How Gen Z Relies on the Bank of Mom and Dad


Effective Altruism Explained: Why the Pentagon Is Attacking AI 'Doomers' | Fortune Daily

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You know, he said the administration is trying to pin concerns about AI safety and a desire for regulation on this sort of shadowy group of people that yes, has some odd beliefs to distract from the fact that AI risk is actually becoming a really real and much broader public concern. Hello from New York. I'm Ellie Austin and this is Fortune Daily. Americanism not effective altruism. That's what the Department of War posted on X earlier this month. But what is effective altruism? It's a great question, and I have to say I didn't have a clue until a day or so ago. So it turns out it's a philanthropic philosophy pioneered over a decade ago by two Oxford academics, and it's about approaching charity like a math problem. And figuring out how to save the most lives per dollar. Advocates of EA as it is known for short, include senior figures at OpenAI, at Anthropic, and Google, DeepMind. Meanwhile, the administration believes that EA is what's standing between America and global AI domination. Uh, Pete Hegseth has been particularly vocal on this subject, calling EA sanctimonious. So Fortune. Senior AI reporters Emily Fellini and B Nolan have been reporting on how a fringe movement of mostly young, highly educated utilitarians became Washington's favorite AI villain, and B Nolan is about to join me to explain more. The, hello and thank you so much for joining us from London. So I briefly explained in the intro what effective altruism is, but I also explained that I had never heard of this term until two days ago. So I think you can probably be more eloquent. Give us a rundown of what this movement is. So at its simplest, effective altruism is a philosophical movement, and it's this idea that people should try and use like rational processes to try and do the most good for the most amount of people. Actually traces back to 2009 and these two Oxford philosophers, they founded this thing called Giving What You Can, and it was a pledge that you would donate like 10% of your charity, 10% of your income to charity. Um, the idea was to treat like charity and ethics as like a math problem and you would try and figure out what causes saved the most lives or did the most good per dollar spent. Unpack that for me. So instead of spending it on a charity in the US. You could send money abroad and perhaps that would save more lives or do more good. Another big part of this that links to that is this thing called earn to give. So the idea is that you can do more good by making more money, basically pursuing a high career and then giving that income to these really effective charities. In a way it's an argument for capitalism. Yes, it's very linked to the idea of capitalism. It's also very linked to these analytical math problems, right? Like most people don't treat ethics like maths in this way. I guess the issue is it can lead you to some perhaps immoral places. So if you're trying to do the most good. You could justify a lot of things to get to your outcome, so the ends justify the means in a lot of places. Give us an example of how it could, because to me on the surface this sounds this sounds like a good move for humankind. Um, tell us how it could be used immorally or leveraged immorally. I guess it's an older philosophical problem, right? If you could save 100 lives but you'd have to personally kill one person. Would you choose to do that? Technically, EA and utilitarianism, which is what this is based in, would say that the moral thing to do would be to kill that person. OK, now imagine if that person was your mother. Would you still kill that person to save 100 others? I mean, most people would say no, and it would be ethically immoral to do that, but EA technically have taken to his extremes, would say it was immoral not to do. So you mentioned that EA was born over a decade ago at this point. Why is it finding itself in the headlines now and why has it become so woven into the debate over AI and safety? Yes, it is a bit of a wormhole, but there is, they've always been concerned with AI, and part of this is because they're obsessed with this thing called long-termism, which means when you say they, you mean advocates of EA, yeah, people who subscribe to the philosophical movement. They have been really interested in this idea that you need to protect future generations from risk, so they care a lot about things like climate change and things like that. They also were very early adopters of this idea that we've been hearing about a lot that AI could potentially wipe out humanity. Like then stopping that becomes a moral directive, right? You need to make sure AI is safe and engage in safety research and try and steer AI to be moral in order to stop it, to try and stop it trying to murder all of us. And who is our typical effective altruist? Is there a demo that you can paint for us? I don't know. I think I wouldn't want to tarp everyone who believes in this with the same brush. There are lots of different strands of it. Like some people are genuinely just interested about how they can give to charity and perhaps how they can give to charity more effectively. It's really popular in Silicon Valley because it takes on ethics with this really analytical mindset. So like I said earlier, it's like reducing these ethical problems to maths, and a lot of people who work in Silicon Valley and work in computer science like. That is the way their brain works, so they lean more towards that. Yeah, it makes sense. I think I'm right in saying that one of the early advocates of Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, he is in prison now for fraud. How much does his character, his trajectory loom over and define the movement at this point in 2026? Honestly, quite a lot. He was one of the earliest adopters. He was also one of the biggest bankrollers, so he was a really good example of this urn to give. So he was like, I'm going to go start this huge crypto exchange program. I'm going to make loads of money and then I'm going to contribute it all back to charity. But obviously, as we know now, in the course of doing that, he committed a lot of immoral acts to get to that end. And then people who criticize EA use that as a very good example of how the means do not always justify the ends. Your sources in the piece suggest that this heightened anxiety around EA that we're seeing coming out of the administration at the moment is really a proxy fight and that going over EA is actually a way to discredit AI anxiety. Yesterday at the UN, President Trump described sort of the doomsday AI argument as a hoax. Do you believe that's true? What did your reporting tell you about this theory? Yeah, I mean, I think one of my sources put it like this, which I thought was a really good way to describe it, you know, he said the administration is trying to pin concerns about AI safety and a desire for regulation on this sort of shadowy group of people that, yes, have some odd beliefs to distract from the fact that AI risk is actually becoming a really real and much broader public concern. So in terms of the administration they're very keen to keep regulation off the table. So if they can blame the push for regulation and the push for AI safety on a small group of people with Outside interests like that might make sense for them. I mean that isn't what we're seeing right now in the headlines. I mean just in the general news agenda, I think it's clear that, you know, Jensen Huang is talking about the need for regulation and so I wonder how much that argument is going to hold up in the coming weeks. Um, EA is a movement that some people right now are a bit reticent to be associated with for the exact reasons that you just described. How difficult was it to get people to talk to you for your piece? I mean, interestingly, not that hard. I had a lot of people who worked in AI safety and were researchers on that and had taken money from EA affiliated charities to work on their early research, and they really wanted to make this distinction that just being concerned with AI risk. mean that you're an effective altruist. Like there are lots of people who take this very seriously as an academic issue and sort of by virtue of EA being one of the only people funding research like this, they ended up being quite involved with it, but that doesn't mean that these two things should be lumped together. There's a bit of a tension as I understand it, because on the one hand everything we've been talking about over the past few weeks on this show and beyond is that these AI companies don't care about our future. They don't care about our safety. But now EA posits that actually there's people working at high levels of anthropic and open AI and DeepMind who do really care about the future of humanity. And that's why they've chosen to go into the AI business. I mean, it's interesting. I think one of the criticisms here that might make sense is that AI gets criticized a lot for focusing way too much on these long term risks that might never actually happen. So I think you've heard people say, you know, there's a 10% AI chance AI might wipe out humanity. OK, well there's Much higher percentage chance that it might be used to spread misinformation. It might be used for mass scale hacking, and by focusing on these longer, almost sci-fi risks, they get accused of overlooking these more immediate ones, which a lot of the people in the lab, in the labs, they're very concerned with existential risk. So what actually is the outlook on regulation right now? Has anything actually shifted since Jacob Coxon resigned from? A couple of weeks ago and published that very controversial essay post. I think the main thing is, as I'm sure you've seen, we've all seen is that the public concern about AI risk has really skyrocketed and people in Congress have been responding to that. There has been a push from both Republicans and Democrats to get some regulation on the table and control some of this stuff. It doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be this slowdown that people are asking for, but maybe there's a sort of Consensus forming that having some rules around this technology if it is so dangerous wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. You mentioned um effective altruism charities a moment or so ago. If people want to find out more about this, where should they look? What are some of those charities? One of the main ones is um open philanthropy, and that later became Coefficient Giving. Um, they were founded by one of them was founded by one of the co-founders of Facebook, interestingly, so they do have deep roots to Silicon Valley. Um, yeah, you could find you they disclose their funding and where it goes, so you could look into um their disclosures around that. Um, but generally they have steered a lot of their funding towards addressing these existential risks, so you'll find effective altruists and effective altruist money popping up in lots of places when it comes to AI safety and also AI pro AI regulation. Thank you so much for explaining this weird and wonderful world of AI effective altruism to us. Speak soon. Thanks, Ellie. So that's First Lady Melania Trump ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning, and the exchange is serving as the backdrop for her newly launched initiative, um, which was announced last night, and it's being framed as quote a Davos for women. So what is it? Well, it's called Imperia, and it is an invite only network for. Female CEOs and C-suite leaders with the goal of supposedly connecting the people who move capital, who make deals, and who shape policy. Here at Fortune, I lead our most powerful women summit, uh, which has been going on for almost 30 years now, bringing together women from the most powerful companies globally. And I'm often asked whether in 2026 we actually still need a business conference with only women in the room. My answer is women currently run around 15% of Fortune 500 companies, 15. Now, believe it or not, that is actually a record, but it is still a woefully low number. So yes, I believe that until leadership of the world's largest companies inches closer towards parity, we do indeed need to bring female CEOs and other senior leaders together to share insights and to Discuss the unique challenges that they still face en route to the corner office. With all of that in mind, I applaud the First Lady's intention, um, even if it is dissonant with her husband's pretty firm rollback of DEI policies across corporate America and also across the military and more. At this point, additional details on Imperia are thin, so watch this space, it will be interesting to see how it evolves, who gets involved, and whether it actually leads to concrete deal flow, to investment, and to real opportunity for a diverse lineup of female leaders. Contrary to popular opinion, Gen Z isn't giving up on building wealth. They're just leaning on mum and dad to do it, and parents are feeling guilty about the economy that they're handing over to their kids. Business editor Nick Lichtenberg has the story in Under the Radar. Nick, hello. So on Monday you went to the release of the US bank's, uh, newly released 2026 wealth report, and it's really fascinating what it showed us about, I think how Gen Z are thinking about wealth accumulation. There's this common thinking that actually Gen Z don't care about becoming rich. Um, they are out there enjoying real life experiences and big iced coffees, um, for $8 a pop. Is that true? Is that what this data shows us? No, so the, the, uh, executives at US Bank, similar to other sources I've talked to, are totally different organizations, they've said like Gen Z really is just not that different when you really look under the hood and you ask them what they want and what their aspirations are and what their strategies are. Like the economy is the thing that's different. Gen Z is, is no different from any other generation in terms of what they want. They want to build wealth and they want a good career and I had a separate report out from Boston Consulting Group saying if you look closely, Gen Z is actually doing better than previous generations did at the same age, but it just doesn't feel that way to almost anyone. By what metrics are they doing better? How do we explain that in terms of the wealth they've accumulated at a young age, but I think because We feel like iced coffee, for example, is so expensive. Like you could spend $8 on an iced coffee without realizing it. Just things feel so expensive and so the US bank executives said, I asked them actually is the bank of mom and dad still a thing? It's kind of a cliche that Gen Z, you know, they moved back in after college and they're still relying on the bank of mom and dad, and they said, yeah, that's a real thing, uh, that they track, um, and that it didn't come through. In quite these words, but one of the executives said that there's a guilt feeling that parents have about, you know, sorry we handed this economy that's so expensive over to you guys. And so how does that guilt manifest? What do they give to their children if they're able to? I think it's a lot of general spending money. Like people in their early twenties, they feel less stigma asking for this, and parents feel less stigma giving it to them. Um, that's interesting, um, and the bank of mum and dad is, is nothing new obviously. So did we millennials not depend on it? What does the data show? I mean, I feel like if you spoke to my parents, they would say it was also a thing when we were in our twenties. Yeah, I think there's, there's some of that and you know, millennials were known for burning ourselves out and for hustling too much and for being a little workaholic and Gen Z, we, we do have lots of different indicators showing that there's a different mentality around, uh, boundaries between work and life and. I would say millennials had an unhealthier sense of that. What shock does Gen Z have about home ownership, for instance? So that is the one area that everyone identified as a real problem. Like the average starter home cost is way over 350,000. I think it's close to 400,000 across the country, across the country, and That's the one area where the economy, like viscerally it feels so, so unaffordable. We have Gen Z watching. What are the main takeaways from the report and what should they be doing right now with the money they do have available to them to maybe target owning a home within the next decade? Yeah, I would say that, um, so some of the executives said Gen Z surprised them with how conservative they actually are. And I asked them if financial nihilism, which we hear about, is a real thing, financial nihilism is this phrase for Gen Z's love of cryptocurrencies and alternative investment prediction markets, meme stocks, um, even Pokemon cards, comic books, um. Really affluent Gen Zers buying dinosaur bones we hear about, uh, but I asked, is this really a thing, and the executives said, you know, at the fringes there's more interest, a little bit, but by and large, no, that is not a thing, and Gen Z wants the same thing that any generation wants and the housing market, you know, we're living longer lives. Invest wisely and conservatively and kind of pay your dues, and you will eventually get your chance to get into that. The housing market and all the other markets that adults belong to and maybe give up on the dinosaur bones. Yeah, maybe dinosaur bones maybe for a very niche niche group. Where do you buy a dinosaur bone? You know they have auctions at Sotheby's for dinosaur bones. Fascinating. Of course everyone wants the T. rex, but there's only a little bit of those. A segment for another day, Nick, thank you. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin, please remember to like, to subscribe and to let us know in the comments on our YouTube what you thought of today's topics. I'll see you tomorrow.

Mary Barra has spent more than four decades at General Motors, rising from an 18-year-old co-op student training on the factory floor to CEO. In her 12-year tenure, she’s steered the company through a near-catastrophic safety crisis and helped turn the century-old automaker into an innovation powerhouse that currently ranks No. 23 on the Fortune 500.

In this episode, Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell speaks with Mary about the Barra family roots in GM, as well as the company’s strategy to address shifting EV policy, growing Chinese competition, and the widening trade skills gap.

Why GM's CEO Mary Barra is Still Bullish on Electric Vehicles

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In today’s episode, we explore the high-stakes world of sports ownership and venture capital. Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital is making waves with a major deal to acquire a stake in the Los Angeles Lakers alongside Disney CEO Bob Iger. News Editor Catherina Gioino joins us to break down Kushner’s latest acquisitions and the strategic vision behind Thrive Capital.

Then, reporter Sasha Rogelberg dives into the massive influx of private equity into an unexpected arena: youth sports. From local leagues to national tournaments, we look at why big-money firms are suddenly so interested in the next generation of athletes.

Finally, AI reporter Emily Forlini shares exclusive reporting on the internal challenges at OpenAI, focusing on the team tasked with solving the platform's most complex problems.

How do you feel about private equity moving into youth sports? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe to Fortune Daily for more deep dives into the world's most powerful companies.
Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

Why Josh Kushner is Buying Into the Lakers

It's the biggest sports sale ever in history for $12.5 billion. Hello from New York, I'm Ellie Austin, and this is Fortune Daily. So let's start with a $2 billion signal about China's priorities. The tech company Alibaba is selling its gaming business in a deal worth roughly that figure. On the surface, this move could read like a company deciding to get out of a. Tough, competitive entertainment business. But as Fortune's Maya Osmonbikov reports, the bigger signal is about where money is going next, because as China pushes harder into AI, into chips, cloud infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing, gaming is taking a backseat to other priorities. In China, the government and its corporate giants are increasingly signaling which kinds of tech they want to win and which ones they're willing to leave behind, and gaming appears to be falling in that latter category. In more local policy news, New York City just tried something radical for parents, a free night off. Over the weekend, Mayor Zaram Mandani's parents' Night Out pilot offered 4 hours of free supervised childcare for kids aged 6 to 13 at city rec centers. About 500 families registered and roughly 265 ended up using the program. But the point wasn't just about babysitting. In New York, a babysitter can cost around $30 an hour plus tip, of course. So when I can and does quickly become a luxury for parents if they want to go out, have dinner. The mayor is pitching the program as a small example of a bigger idea, which is that if the city wants families to stay, it has to help make family life affordable. It's a tiny pilot for now. But it marks an important shift in New York City moving to make childcare part of the basic city infrastructure, rather than something unwieldy and unaffordable that parents just have to figure out on their own. In today's big story, we're talking about Josh Krishna's Thrive Capital and his recent deal to buy the Lakers with Bob Iger. News editor Katerina Giorno will tell us about Thrive, the venture capital firm, and Krishna's latest acquisitions. After that, reporter Sasha Rogelberg dives into another financing arm in sports, which is private equity. Because firms seem to be taking enormous interest in the youth sports world. And finally, AI reporter Emily Fellini shares her fascinating reporting on Open AI's internal problem solving team. Let us know what you think about all of this in the comments and please like and subscribe to the show. More Fortune daily ahead. Kat, thank you for coming to talk to us about this big business of sports story. So Josh Kushner and Bob Iger have just bought the Lakers. Tell us what you know about how this deal came to be. Yeah, it's the biggest sports sale ever in history. For $12.5 billion. So that's up $2.5 billion since Mark first bought it. Mark Walter, Mark Walter, yeah, 14 months ago. That's a 25% annual return and annualized is 21%, Biggest deal in sports franchise history. Why has Walter sold the Lakers so quickly? That's still up for debate. Great question. There is a government investigation into him, but we can't say for certain that that's why he's sold. But he said that his 14 months of ownership have been amazing, and he's happy to have had the chance to own it. He said thanks to Bob Iger, to Josh Kushner, and to the Buss family as well, and he's made $2.5 billion just for holding for 14 nice. So last month, uh, Josh Kushner's Thrive Eternal, which is an arm of Thrive Capital focused on permanent capital and into funding into sport. Um, announced that it was going to take a stake in FIFA. That deal has now collapsed. Two weeks later, we hear that Thrive is buying the Lakers. Are those two events interlinked in any way? I mean, this is all part of like Kushner's big plan to really make Thrive Eternal into like a major sports capital arm in the first place. He started off right after making Thrive Capital. In 2010, he's founded it when he was 24 and after buying early stakes in like OpenAI, Instagram, Spotify, all these things, he's a sports guy and so he wanted to make this purely as like a venture firm for sports. FIFA didn't pan out. I mean, there's currently a boycott against the current president, but there's also a question as to what was going to happen with the lead investors in the first place, of which it was Thrive Capital, uh, Thrive Eternal. This is his first. Major stake in a major sports firm, and not just stake, he's the owner of it. And tell us a bit about the relationship between Kushner and Bob Iger. Yeah, because in some ways, I know they've done business together before, but in some ways they feel like a bit of an unlikely path. They're like, they're like besties at this point. If I were to speak for themselves, if they want to tell me otherwise, let me find out. But in 2020, 2022, after Bob Iger left Disney the first time. He went to work for Josh Kushner at Thrive, and he worked at Josh was his boss basically while he was there. And then now when he went back to go replace Bob Chappeck at Disney, he went back for those two short years and now he's back as a partner in an advisory role with Josh at Thrive. So Kishna has stakes in other teams that predate this. He's got a minority stake in the Miami. Heat, um, but I believe he has to unwind to allow this Laks deal to go through. What do you think the chances are of this Lakers deal coming to fruition, or is there a FIFA situation on the horizon where it may all fall apart? All, all done deals so far. I mean, like at any given point, Mark Walter could back out and be like, listen, maybe not, but I mean $2.5 billion for 14 months of, I mean like come on, that's, that's a great deal. Um, what does it mean that Bob Iger and Krishna as characters are gonna take over this team? Oh, this is like a fantastic question that's like playing out in the sports world, the entertainment world. Bob comes from Disney, obviously. He, he's the reason why Disney invented or has acquired, let's say, Pixar and has invented all of these massive franchises that we know today. And the Lakers, on the other hand, are known as the, the Showtime. Of the NBA team. They're known as the entertainment. Tell us what that means, showtime for people who might not be familiar. So there's Jerry Buss, who was the original owner of the Lakers back in the 60s and 70s. He invented Showtime Lakers, and that meant really bringing entertainment to the courtside arena. He's the reason why cheerleaders are now at the halftime show. He invented Paula Abdul essentially found her and gave her carte blanche to do a cheerleading choreography. He brought really Entertainment style to sports because originally sports was just seen as another thing that you go see. This is now entertainment. And he's the reason why we had the Showtime Lakers. We have Magic Johnson as a Showtime like magic basically. You have a massive million dollar and billion dollar industry delivering entertainment to a sports world, which is usually seen, I mean, now it's intertwined, so we don't know the difference. But before it was seen as two very different things, sports are sports, entertainment values and something that. Never have been seen. And that's what, or you can argue, and I would be very much so correct in arguing this one, is what made it into a billion dollars if not $1 trillion dollar industry in the first place, sports in general. Interesting. So really set the standard for the explosion of the business of sport that we've seen. So where is Iger going to take this or could he take this franchise next, given his history of someone who kind of takes much loved stories and put them out into the world across new people. Of course, I mean like this is like the big question, right? It's like we are seeing like a the move of a major player like LeBron from the Lakers to again like the Sixers, but we do have Luka Dankic who is now going to be the star player. You have a lot of like these brand names that are full of action-packed star power who are in the Lakers and at the same time when you have someone with like the brains of Bob Iger who's well known for making stories and delivering the story of a team or. A character and you have Josh who knows how to like go into something and really invest and make it bigger than it has to be or I mean Lakers are a very huge team but make it even grander, we are going to see possibly like more of the Showtime Lakers, possibly more of this, hey, like we are the entertainment sports team, we are the people that people want to congregate to and already it's a massive driver when it comes down to ticket sales. We are probably going to see a lot more ticket sales going to the Lakers. Going to LA specifically, how have the fans responded to this announcement? So far so good. I mean, a lot of questions, a lot of people have questions about Mark and why he's selling as we went over. A lot of people are questioning like whether what he said last year was sincere in the first place. He was saying that he's a lifelong fan, and he again sent his thanks to the Buss family for the selling of the stake. He was originally a minority owner at around 27% a few years ago, and then he then acquired the majority stake. And now you have other people piping in. So Magic Johnson, for example, again, probably one of the biggest faces of the Lakers, he sends his wishes to both Walter and also thinks again that Iger and Kushner will be doing great. On the other hand of it, you have Kushner and Iger who sent out and released a joint statement saying they are like one of the biggest fans of the Lakers and they've been lifelong NBA fans. So they're looking forward to really seeing this team go through. Um, Josh Kushner, obviously brother of Jared Kushner, who is the son-in-law. of President Trump, and as far as we know, those two brothers have very different political leanings. Um, Josh has traditionally, traditionally been a Democratic donor and supporter. What do you think Thanksgiving is like in that house when they all get around the table? Can you imagine that? It's just like one guy talking about the March for Our Lives donations and then the other one saying like my father-in-law is the president. What does this story teach us about Josh Kushner's investment thesis, and I'm asking. In case we have people listening who are themselves investors and thinking about where they should put money next. I mean, like Josh is well known for getting in early on things. He has that kind of magic hunch about things. So again, I'm gonna go back to like Spotify and OpenAI. That's like what he did with Thrive, and he was just like a child when he basically did the child at 24 when he did it. Now with the Lakers and now when he's trying to go through the initial like first round funding, that happens to be his entire approach to both permanent capital and let's say previously. At Thrive Capital and really you can start to question either he wants to go into a maintained established brand like the Lakers, like FIFA, for example, if that deal went through, or more so like get in early about his hunch. He knows what's going to be big, what's going to be he's a really good gut sense for that. He does. Yeah, absolutely. Like he knew that Spotify was going to be a major music kind of industry or game changer, and he got in early. He got in early on OpenAI. So he has that kind of hunch of like knowing what can actually change the landscape. of a certain industry as opposed to doing what the average typical like VC firm would do, which is just spray and play kind of thing. He does it more so he picks and chooses. He knows which one he thinks with his backing also can use his kind of funding, can use his connections to become grander than it is. So it's more of a two-way beneficial street as well. Kat, where can we find more of your intricate reporting? Of course, go unfortune.com. Next up, more sports, the business of sports with Sasha Rogelberg. OK, Sasha, thank you for coming back to join us again. So this is such an interesting story, private equity funneling into youth sports. How did you come to report on this? Right, so basically toward the end of the Men's World Cup this year, uh, US soccer star Landon Donovan, who competed 3 times in the FIFA World Cup, he's a Hall of Famer, he said, I wouldn't have been able to participate in club sports today. Um, I had a single. Mom raising three kids, she's making $34,000 a year, and club sports are just so exorbitantly expensive that he wouldn't have been able to play and ostensibly, you know, reach the heights that he has been able to reach today, and he's not the only one. And so was he expressing regret that that is no longer the case with youth sports? He had some concerns about youth sports today. Basically from 2019 to 2025, the costs of youth sports have increased 46%. It means that fewer kids will have opportunities to compete, basically. And so tell me about the role of private equity here, what exactly is it buying in youth sports? So I think before we talk about private equity, we have. To talk about kind of like the environment that arose um that would enable private equity to enter youth sports. A lot of parents are worried about higher education for their kids and one way to get into college is through sports scholarships. So as the cost of college increases, um, basically more sports scholarships have become available and is therefore incentivized youth sports participation, um, so that's one reason and then at. At the same time, um, after the 2008 financial crisis and further exacerbated by COVID, public funding for rec centers have really decreased. So now there's all of this demand for youth sports, um, but really kind of fewer opportunities to take advantage of it. But what are the mechanisms for this? What is private equity actually buying? Is it buying the team? Is it buying the facilities? Tell me more. All of the above, um, so this has swelled. To a $40 billion industry, private companies see opportunities with leagues, um, with apparel and equipment companies, um, with facilities, um, so all of the above. So, Sasha, you mentioned that the cost of eth sports has gone up by around 46% in recent years. What does it cost these days if, if I'm a parent wanting to enroll my kid in soccer or baseball or whatever it might be? Between travel, apparel and equipment and year-round coaching, it can cost thousands of dollars, sometimes up to $15,000 for one kid for a whole year. And is private equity improving youth sports? What are the benefits of this happening? Private equity would argue that it is, you know, creating a supply for this, for this increased demand, um, as well as, you know, kind of like state of the art, um. Experiences for these kids who want to go pro, but I would imagine it's also creating an accessibility issue here. Yeah, it means for many American families they can no longer participate in youth sports or they have to make incredible financial sacrifices. Is the price of. Kids' sport just going to go up and up and up, or is there going to be a tipping point unless something changes? So I think we're starting to see a tipping point now. There are a couple components of private equity's presence in sports that are really concerning. To people, one of them is this whole state of play idea. Basically, these private companies that own teams or leagues or facilities, they make deals with certain hotels and require teams to stay at those particular hotels at tournaments, which means that they can jack up the prices. Of hotels, um, other companies or leagues require that, uh, athletes play for an entire year, not just the season, which also increased costs, uh, and then you have examples like, uh, Black Bear Sports Group, which is the largest owner operator of hockey rinks in the US, and they've essentially banned parents from live streaming and recording their kids playing hockey. And instead uh require you to subscribe to, um, their own services in order to, you know, see your kid shoot a goal. OK, wow, this is a whole ecosystem that I didn't know existed in the way you were describing, um, if we have any parents watching, please leave us a comment and let us know if your kids play youth sport and what it costs. Sasha, so thanks so much for joining us, come back and tell us more as you continue reporting. Always a pleasure. Next up, I'm chatting to AI reporter Emily Fellini about OpenAI's internal troubleshooting system. Emily, hello, so I wanted to bring you in to do an open AI check-in because as Emma there's a lot going on at the company. You published another really interesting story this week about the internal process at a company for dealing with friction. Tell us what that is. So I, just in my, again talking to former employees, I learned about this process called friction. And it's this internal email address friction at open AI. And when they have a bottleneck, uh, a team is blocking them, a process isn't having the intended result, or even if they have an office-related issue like they said the IT vending machines being. Low or there's no parking spots, they can shoot their shot and email this friction at OpenAI and the leadership team monitors that inbox and they select the ones that they think need to be solved immediately. They're kind of like worthy of of uh fixing and defensible and um the expectation is that those teams will basically fall in line immediately and get it done. And do you have any gauge of how effective this process is? Yeah, it seems to be very effective in the sense that I did talk to somebody who had led a team and was, um, he said on the receiving end of about 12 orders to comply with frictions. And he said it's pretty much just a drop everything, make it work now, and to the point where His team had to build new technology to accommodate the change. Like there was a reason that they had blocked the other team, and they had to reprioritize their roadmap to work on this, as he called it, a friction and the friction team will follow up and ask questions. And make sure it gets done, um, which instills confidence in the employees because they feel like their needs are getting met, they're kind of being addressed, these bureaucratic problems are being slashed and burned, so it's good culturally, but if you have to deal with. Deal with it, it's, it's not fun. And then there's a a monthly Slack announcement to the company, like a big update on everything that was resolved through friction. OK, I wonder if it would work at Fortune to be discussed. Emily, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. That's it for 14tune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin, see you next time.

From hyper-realistic scenes to viral commercial ads, generative video tools like Runway, Sora, and Veo are transforming film and corporate marketing. Fortune’s AI Editor Jeremy Kahn breaks down the multi-model arms race, the corporate backlash over authenticity, and the copyright hurdles keeping Hollywood cautious.

AI can now generate studio-quality video. Could it ever replace filmmakers? | Fortune AI Playbook

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We have officially entered the era of hyperrealistic synthetic cinema, tools that once produced a few seconds of glitchy, distorted, experimental video can now generate studio quality multi-shot scenes from simple text prompts, but as the technology matures, the creative world is grappling with a big transformation. What are the core dynamics driving the AI video surge? Number one, the multi-model arms race. The AI video landscape is highly competitive, with various companies constantly bringing out new models, each more capable than the last. Among the prominent players are Runway with its gen models, Google, which has its VO models, Meta, which has its Movie gen model, Kaishu with its Kling model, and Minimax with its Halu model. Image resolution is no longer what sets these systems apart. Instead, they Competing on temporal consistency, ensuring characters' face, clothing, and environment remain identical from shot to shot and the length of the video that can be generated. Modern generators not only patch frames together, they also simulate basic physics, calculating how light reflects off moving surfaces and how gravity affects falling objects to trick the human eye into believing a synthetic scene is real. Number 2, from Hollywood to corporate marketing, the most immediate economic impact isn't in feature films. It's an enterprise marketing and corporate communication. Brands are using AI video tools to create localized B-roll, training videos, and social media campaigns in half the time, bypassing traditional studio rentals and expensive casting calls. We are already seeing this play out in major ad campaigns like Toys R Us using OpenAI Sora to generate their brand origin film and Coca-Cola using generative video tools to fully animate their iconic Holidays are coming. Christmas commercials, but these rollouts highlight a major corporate tension. While AI drastically slashes production timelines and studio costs, over relying on synthetic imagery risks alienating audiences who crave authenticity and often view the use of AI negatively. Number 3, the legal and intellectual property firewall. The market's growth is colliding directly with copyright uncertainty. On paper, the underlying financials are staggering, with the global generative AI. Market hitting $161 billion this year behind a 29% growth rate. Some brands are hesitant to utilize fully generated platforms for flagship campaigns out of fear that the underlying models were trained on copyrighted material without artists consent. The camera didn't kill painting, and generate video won't kill filmmaking, but what it does mean is that the distance between a creator's imagination and a finished photorealistic sequence has shrunk to zero.

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