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YouTube | Fortune

YouTube Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Andrew Nusca

Meta steals the ‘not first, but best’ page from Apple’s playbook

/2026/09/24/meta-steals-the-not-first-but-best-page-from-apple-playbook/

Eleanor Pringle

Billionaire YouTuber MrBeast spent $10 million building a village in Ghana—he says viewers watch philanthropy videos less but ‘I’ll keep making them’

/2026/09/21/billionaire-youtuber-mrbeast-ghana-village-philanthropy-work-engagement/

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Tech billionaires and executives like Evan Spiegel and Peter Thiel are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich

/article/tech-billionaires-executives-limit-kids-screen-time-social-media-youtube-snapchat-instagram-children-technology/

Emma Burleigh

Despite his $2.6 billion net worth, MrBeast said he’s had to borrow cash and didn’t even have enough money in his bank account to buy McDonald’s

/article/despite-2-6-billion-net-worth-mrbeast-had-to-borrow-cash-didnt-have-enough-for-mcdonalds/

Lucas Shaw

Bloomberg

YouTube offers creators millions to not work with Netflix

/2026/08/21/youtube-netflix-millions/

Despite his $2.6 billion net worth, MrBeast said he’s had to borrow cash and didn't even have enough money in his bank account to buy McDonald’s

https://fortune.com/article/despite-2-6-billion-net-worth-mrbeast-had-to-borrow-cash-didnt-have-enough-for-mcdonalds/?itm_source=parsely-api

Billionaire YouTuber MrBeast spent $10 million building a village in Ghana—he says viewers watch philanthropy videos less but 'I'll keep making them'

https://fortune.com/2026/09/21/billionaire-youtuber-mrbeast-ghana-village-philanthropy-work-engagement/?itm_source=parsely-api

Natalie Jarvey

CoComelon started as a YouTube show for toddlers. It's now a $3 billion empire that even Disney can't ignore

https://fortune.com/article/cocomelon-youtube-disney-netflix-dreamworks-children-media/?itm_source=parsely-api

Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich

https://fortune.com/article/peter-thiel-tech-billionaires-limit-kids-screen-time-social-media-smartphones-short-form-video-risks/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/article/tech-billionaires-executives-limit-kids-screen-time-social-media-youtube-snapchat-instagram-children-technology/?itm_source=parsely-api

Eva Roytburg

This 22-year-old college dropout with an AI powered YouTube empire makes $700,000 a year and works just 2 hours a day

https://fortune.com/2025/12/30/ai-slop-faceless-youtube-accounts-adavia-davis-user-generated-content/?itm_source=parsely-api

Preston Fore

MrBeast’s $5 billion empire runs on generosity—but at a cost

https://fortune.com/2025/09/26/mrbeast-jimmy-donaldson-beast-industries-philanthropy-profit/?itm_source=parsely-api

YouTube’s founders split over $650 million when they sold to Google in 2006—had they held out, they could have taken a slice of $550 billion

https://fortune.com/article/youtube-cofounders-chad-hurley-steven-chen-sold-google-net-millions-but-now-worth-over-550-billion-missed-opportunity/?itm_source=parsely-api

Billionaire YouTuber MrBeast says he actually has 'very little money' and is borrowing cash from his mom to pay for his wedding 

https://fortune.com/2025/06/03/mrbeast-youtube-wedding-mom-money-reinvest-business/?itm_source=parsely-api

Gen Alpha is snubbing the careers that boomers dreamed of. As influencers become the new faces of entrepreneurship, they want in

https://fortune.com/article/gen-alpha-dream-careers-youtuber-influencer-social-media/?itm_source=parsely-api

Oil prices remain volatile, artificial intelligence is demanding more power than the electrical grid can easily handle, and energy CFOs are deciding where billions of capital will flow next.
Chevron CFO Eimear Bonner joins Fortune Daily to discuss how one of America’s largest energy giants (No. 21 on the Fortune 500) is navigating these shifts—from continuing investments in Venezuela to signing a 20-year natural-gas supply agreement for Microsoft’s massive data center project in Texas. Bonner breaks down energy security, AI’s unprecedented power appetite, and what consumers should expect on their energy bills as winter approaches.
Also on today's episode: • Term Sheet Preview: How did prebiotic soda brand Poppi scale from a local farmers' market booth into a $1.95 billion beverage powerhouse? Senior Writer and Editor Allie Garfinkle talks with the founder to uncover the blueprint behind their rapid growth.
- watch the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqcD2QIeEH8
Subscribe to Fortune: https://fortune.com/subscribe/ 

Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

00:00 - Chevron CFO Eimear Bonner on AI & Energy Demand 
14:04 - Term Sheet: How Poppi Became a $1.95B Soda Brand


Inside Chevron’s Massive Bet on AI & Energy | Fortune Daily

Features

fortunedaily

I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn and one of the main topics of conversation is the price of our energy bills right now. We hear the concerns and the most important thing that we can do and what we are doing as a company is ensuring that we bring as much supply to market as we can. Hello, I'm Ellie Austin and you're watching Fortune Daily. Energy is rarely out of the headlines these days and oil prices continue to be volatile. At the same time, AI needs more power than the grid can easily deliver. At the center of all of this are CFOs, Chief Financial Officers, because they're the ones deciding where energy companies invest their money. Ema Bonner is the CFO of Chevron, which is number 21 on our Fortune 500 list. And she's helping steer one of America's largest oil companies through all of it, from deciding to double down on rigs in Venezuela. To a 20 year deal with Microsoft to supply natural gas power to a massive data center that it's building in Texas and that project alone could deliver power roughly equivalent to 2 million homes. Bonna joins me to talk about energy security, about AI's voracious appetite for electricity, and also about what she'd say to consumers, panicked that as we head into winter, that already very pricey energy bills are about to skyrocket. Eva, thank you so much for joining us. So it's the UN General Assembly this week in New York, and there's real hopes that U.S.Iran talks there could help stabilize global oil prices. What's it like to manage this volatility, this ongoing volatility from the CFO chair of a major oil company like Chevron? Well, thanks, Ellie, for having me. It's buzzing here in New York at Ongo Week. Look, things Very volatile and very uncertain and that's something that we don't try and predict as a company we plan for it and so from a CFO chair I'm involved in planning for all of that uncertainty. Our business is cyclical, so we're used to every few years having some shocks and cycles, and we have to make sure, and I have to make sure from the CFO's chair that we can weather all of that disruption. So what I pay attention to are things that are within our control. How does the portfolio perform at high and low prices? What investment choices make sense? Investment choices that make sense over the long term that will be profitable and deliver high returns even if prices. are lower. How to manage risks around the world, we have operations. Around the world and so each country is different and so we think about that as a company and the CFO plays a key role in looking at all the enterprise risks and ensuring that we can manage those risks. And then third is really to ensure that every day we're safely and reliably operating all of the assets we have because it's that platform of performance that is so important, important, especially given the disruption that we're managing today when Delivering supply to the market to delivering products to customers, and it's even more important when you've got constraints in the system. Chevron has announced that it's planning to more than double its red count in Venezuela following a deal struck with the Trump administration. You've negotiated or the company has negotiated stability clauses and arbitration rights as part of that deal. But this is still a deal that's tied to a certain political administration. What protects that money that Chevron has invested if the politics change over the next couple of years? The new terms that we were able to negotiate it unlocked this growth opportunity for us. It had long duration growth possibilities. It was a low cost. Operations 3 low cost operations and higher returns. So those 3 things came together to give us confidence that we could grow our investment in Venezuela. So when we think about Venezuela, we have 3 operating. Joint ventures today we've been in the country for 100 years, so we understand the country very well. We understand the stakeholders very well. We have exceptional employees in Venezuela, so our human capital is there. Our partnership has been developed over many years. So that's where we're starting from when we got these new terms and additional acreage, it made the outlook for. Venezuela compete with everything else that we have in the portfolio. The extra protections that we put in place, the stability clauses, protects the terms of all of those new agreements regardless of who's in power, regardless, regardless. So the stability clause, and these stability clauses are like what we would have in other parts of the world, so they're no different than what we have in Kazakhstan, for example, and that really protects the investment and that's really important to know when you're in a country that the investment that you're making for the long term is protected. So in addition to the additional acreage, we also got those additional protections. And then we got the right to resolve disputes through international arbitration, which is something that we would typically have in other assets of scale around the world. So it was the terms and it was these protections, the protections on the economics and the protections, legal protections that gave us that overall confidence to grow, and we'll grow production. We'll double production over the next five years. That will require gross $7 billion of commitment. And what we'll unlock at a gross level is roughly 9 billion barrels of commercial. Commercial reserves before becoming CFO you were CTO, um, so you're particularly uniquely placed to talk about what we're seeing now with the AI boom and its potential impact on, um, the energy market. So every week is bringing another story about AI agents and what they can, they can't do, how they might. Behave. AI is now selling utilities protection against that, um, to try and guarantee safety. You're about to sell power to these companies. Um, what goes through your mind? How are you thinking about this moment in time and specifically the conversation we're having right now about AI and long term safety? So we see the opportunity in two areas. One, how to leverage the technology to improve performance, and it's one focus area. And the other area is how to power the energy, the AI growth, and the energy that's needed, that's needed for the AI growth. So we're playing kind of both sides of the equation. I'd start with, you know, leveraging AI. I mean from a CTO perspective, when I was the CTO, we stood up the enterprise AI team, so the team in Chevron that has grown over the last couple of years that has deployed AI across the organization. We're using AI in our assets to improve performance. We're using it in our reservoirs to help us make the right decision on how to increase recovery. We're using it across the organization for personal productivity and team products. Oh, I use it every day. In fact, I can't remember a day where I did not use AI. I'm using it every day to help me synthesize information. There's a huge amount of information that comes obviously across my desk every day. And one of the challenges to discern what really matters and what doesn't. And so it's really helping me with discern discern. Things I should pay attention to. It's helping me with my personal efficiency, and that gives me more time to think about some of these longer term decisions that are important to me. One of the topics that has been mentioned in these doomsday debates that have been swirling over the past week or so is the possibility of AI hacking the energy grid. Is that in your perspective, is that something that's likely within the next decade and sort of all the repercussions that could happen as a result of that? Well, I can talk about the framework that we have in our company around AI. So what regulations and what safety guardrails are you putting in place to make sure that that doesn't happen at Chevron? Yeah, we have a framework in place, a responsible AI framework, and so since the very beginning when we started up our AI team a couple of years ago, everything that we developed and everything we pushed out was consistent with that framework, and that was the third party. Um, um, this third party, um, thought leaders on AI that had developed this framework in the early days and we were able to participate in some of that work and also implement it, you know, for us we have to think every day about cybersecurity risk, risks in general, safety risk. Health risks and so this framework helped us think about the new risks associated with AI. So everything that we've developed is within that in that framework and so for us it's really important that as we leverage the technology we think about it like every other new technology that we deployed. We have good risk management. We test it. And we deploy it responsibly and safely and so that's the approach that we're taking with AI. I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn and I have a WhatsApp chat with all the other kind of apartment holders in my building and one of the main topics of conversation. Is the price of our energy bills right now and specifically going into winter, people are very nervous about, hey, if my kind of energy bill costs this in June in New York City, what's it going to cost in December? What's your response to the consumer and those concerns they have given everything that's going on in the Strait of Hormuz and The soaring prices of energy that we've seen, we hear the concerns, you know, prices impact consumers, businesses, economies. They're very hard to predict prices. And so, you know, given the disruption that we've seen this year, not only to the crude supply that's on the market, but also now to refinery capacity, those things are showing up in the price. Over the last couple of months, all of the buffers that existed at the beginning of the conflict have been drawn down. You know, there were commercial inventories. There were strategic petroleum reserve releases. There were sanctioned barrels that were on the water, and so all of those, all of that supply buffered the price for a while and so now a lot of that is drawn down and so we're seeing that increased pressure in price. In addition to that, refinery. Capacity globally has been decreased as well with some of the some of the conflict and so those two things together are creating creating the challenge and so there's a lot of pressure on prices right now and the most important thing that we can do and what we are doing as a company is ensuring that we bring as much supply to market and that we run our refineries. Reliably and as efficiently as we can and that's what we're doing so we're growing production this year we're putting more supply in the market and that's what you were saying with Venezuela Venezuela is even in addition to the 7 to 10% that we are growing this year. Venezuela will bring more growth. We've grown Venezuela 15% this year already. So what we're focused on is bringing supply to the market and executing our plans with excellence. And then on the refinery side is really running our refineries at maximum throughput and in fact in the 3rd quarter we shared the production records that we are achieving and the refinery throughput records. So that's how we're part of the solution. Bringing supply and refinery throughput, and I think that is the message that operationally, operationally, operationally as best as you can, but you don't know the price is to an extent out of your, we don't control prices. What we control is putting supply in the market and running refineries well operationally, and that's what we're doing. You have had a really interesting career trajectory, Ema. So you started as an offshore. Petroleum engineer in the UK, um, my homeland, um, and then you went on to become Chevron's first female chief technology officer in 2021, um, and then first female CFO, not the first female CFO. OK, that's good news that that someone else had had held that role before you. But becoming the first female CTO, did that have any significance to you? Did you have any relationship with that milestone? It was, you know, exciting milestone. There were a few things that happened at the same time. I moved to Houston. I, um, was part of the executive leadership team and I was the CTO. So all of those things together was, was just, it was such a privilege to get that, get that opportunity. So it was significant on many, many levels. It gives me the opportunity to leverage all of the operational experience. I've had, you know, from multiple parts of the world, the UK, Asia, and Eurasia and really think about what was important in terms of the priorities for, for technology. And so what I learned through the role was that um technology can make what you think's impossible possible and technology can allow you to break through what's limiting performance. And again, the technology needs to be focused. It's got to be focused on the business, and you've got to at the end of the day see a result because that's the return that you get for all the technology programs is that you ultimately achieve a different step change in performance and so that's what I learned in the role and had a lot of fun in that role and then I. I took that lens when I became CFO because it helped me look at the asset performance just with that lens all the time. So I asked myself a lot, what's possible? What's possible? And I think that question came from that time. It's been a pleasure to speak to you. Thanks, Ellie. Cheers. How did Poppy go from a farmer's market stand to a nearly $2 billion soda brand? Here's a preview of Fortune's term sheet where senior writer and editor Ali Garfinkel got the story direct from the founder. What do you think most large companies are getting wrong about Gen Z? 100% of everything that they do. What is this? This is Poppy, the digital first soda brand Pepsi bought for $1.95 billion. Stop spiraling. Get a poppy. In the multi-billion dollar soda market, 3 companies dominate the shelves, and breaking in is notoriously difficult. Poppy, defied the odds. 53 days is the cycle. If you can't hit within that 3 days, you'll be the first to move at the speed of culture, what are you doing? And big corporations. Cannot move that quick, but executing that fast nearly bankrupt them. We had $75,000 in the bank and almost ran out of money. Today I asked Poppy co-founder Alison Ellsworth, how do you outmaneuver legacy giants, survive near bankruptcy and execute one of the largest consumer brand exits in beverage history. A lot of founders tend to cling to a CEO title. You really didn't. Why not? So it's so funny, and I'm here to tell you entrepreneurs, being CEO is just a glorified HR person. Like the last thing I want to do is deal with a ton of people problems and run a P&O. And, and, and in a day, no, CEOs are incredible and they, they have amazing vision and I adored ours at PPI. That's not what I'm saying, but it's like this title that people are so obsessed. with. And it's like, find your superpower. My superpower was running the creative and brand because I was the brand. I I I loved every aspect of it. There wasn't a can that I didn't design with my team, like all of those things. And so why would I want to do the CEO role? And it was the same with my husband. He was incredibly talented in the innovation and supply chain. And his team, I think other than our sales team was like the largest team. He was like managing like 80 people, right? You can find your superpower and not be CEO and I'm here to tell you, like you holding onto it for too long can be, it can hurt the business. To be a CEO, I think that it comes with experience and so Poppy with the crazy growth that we had, me and my husband looked at each other. It was like a year we're going from I think we were looking at going from 50 million to 200 million. We were looking at buying super wads and we looked at each other like we've never done this before. Why don't we bring in people that know more than us and be part of the conversation. And partner with them instead, instead of it getting forced upon you. Because if you have a board and you have investment and you have growth and you hold on for so long and let your ego get in the way of growth, it's going to get forced upon you and it's going to go sour real quick versus acknowledging it and learning from it. And I love that we're able to learn from these people who had been so seasoned in it before. So you can watch the full interview with Alison Ellsworth on our Fortune YouTube channel and we'll also drop the link um to that interview into the show notes for this episode. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin, remember to like, subscribe and let us know in the comments what you think about oil prices or maybe what your favorite coffee flavor is. I'll see you next week.

Adam Faze is helping creators build the next generation of television. The producer and co-founder of FazeWorld sits down with Fortune Daily to discuss:
• Why creators are moving beyond TikTok and building long-form shows on YouTube
• How hundreds of millions of views can translate into surprisingly little money
• The business model behind creator-led shows like Boy Room and Keep the Meter Running
• Why he believes creators should stop chasing virality and focus on making “amazing television”
• What the creator economy can learn from Hollywood, and where traditional media is getting it wrong
• Why the next generation of stars may come from creators who build original IP from scratch

Plus on today's episode: 
• Anatomy of a Deal: What is the true value of cultural influence? Art-o-nomics founder Halim Flowers sits down to discuss his index helping artists and athletes measure their market worth. 
• The Business of Sports: USA SailGP CEO Mike Buckley talks with Fortune's Executive Editorial Director Diane Brady about his strategy to bring racing fans to the water.

Subscribe to Fortune: https://fortune.com/subscribe/ 

Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

00:00 Adam Faze
14:07 Halim Flowers
18:24 Mike Buckley

Why Viral Views Don’t Equal a Business (And What Does) | Fortune Daily

Jeff Bezos’ rise to the top of the Fortune 500 and Global 500 list wasn't an accident. In our pilot episode, Kristin Stoller shares exclusive insights from her interview with Bezos, including his philosophy on “customer obsession” and why early failures like Amazon Prime were actually essential.

Plus, Phil Wahba joins to discuss how Barnes & Noble is pivoting by learning from independent bookstores and we talk about the big number on AI spending with Emily Forlini.

Subscribe to Fortune Daily for more deep dives into the world's most powerful companies.

Read more on Fortune.com

Follow our reporters: 
Ellie Austin: https://fortune.com/author/ellie-austin/
Phil Wahba: https://fortune.com/author/phil-wahba/
Emily Forlini: https://fortune.com/author/emily-forlini/

The Secret to Amazon’s No. 1 Fortune 500 Spot | Fortune Daily

This man has gone through such a transformation physically, right? Like one of my best friends from home, she actually jammed me and was like, Who is that? And I was like, That's Jeff Bezos. She was like, What? That we're valuable. We condemnation OK. Hello from New York, and for the first time ever you're watching Fortune daily. Welcome to the show. So we know that this won't be the first time you've heard many of these stories. Our goal is to give you Fortune's take on them and a new level of insight as to why they matter. This will be our approach to everything we cover and we really want this show to be a dialogue with you, our audience, so please feel free to engage in the comments and send us messages on social media so that we know what you want us to cover. We can then make sure that we're being as valuable an addition to your lives and your. Careers as possible. Let's get into it. Day one. We're going to start with a really unusual move that tells you how nervous governments are getting about markets right now. Last week, the United States and Japan carried out a rare coordinated intervention in currency markets to prop up the yen. It was the first joint yen operation in about 15 years. Tokyo and Washington together stepped in to buy a yen after it slid to a 40-year low. Japan's finance minister said they did it to counter excessive volatility and disorderly movements. So this isn't just about Japan because a yen that week put stress on Japanese banks, of course, but also on their huge holdings of US Treasuries and on global bond markets. And sure, the US wants to support an important ally in Japan, but what it really wants is to prevent a currency crisis from turning into a debt crisis. Now from currencies to a Type of risk debt fueled bets on AI. The New York Times Magazine just published a long piece asking whether Larry Ellison could become the face of the AI bubble because at 81 years old, he's pivoting Oracle hard into AI infrastructure, and he's planning to invest up to $500 billion over 4 years in data centers built around partners like OpenAI. To do this, he's borrowed billions, stacking debt on top of an older tech business that isn't growing at the rate of some of the new giants. So what's the bigger takeaway here? Well, for the past two weeks, the headlines have focused on AI spending at companies like Alphabet, Tesla, Microsoft, and Nvidia. All of which are businesses with more diversified, more positive revenue streams. This situation with Oracle, however, is what it looks like when a legacy player goes all in on AI using borrowed money in the process. If it works, Allison could join the ranks of the new AI titans. If it doesn't, he might just end up as the poster child for what happens when the AI hype cycle ends. Watch this space, we certainly will be. And because we talk a lot about AI taking jobs, here's a story from Fortune's own Claire Zillman about a company that decided not to let that happen. So IKEA recently rolled out an AI chatbot called Billy, cute name, to handle thousands of customer service questions a day. Some context. A consulting survey earlier this year found that 40% of workers now fear AI will make their job obsolete. That figure is up from 28% just two years ago. IKEA's response was basically, we're not doing that, we're not going to let that happen to our people. So instead of laying off over 8000 call center employees, the company spent 2 years retraining them to handle more complex problems and to work. As design advisors and so far it's driving real revenue. This is a different kind of AI story because it's not about fewer humans. It's about humans being freed up to do more valuable work, and you can read the whole story on Fortune.com. Coming up, we are joined by Fortune reporter Kristen Stoller, who wrote our cover story on Jeff Bezos as Amazon tops the Fortune 500 and the Fortune Global 500 for the first time ever. Speaking of Amazon, Barnes and Noble was once thought to be a casualty. Of the tech juggernaut's takeover of the book market. But as Fortune senior reporter Phil Waber learned in our latest episode of Behind the Business in 2026, Barnes and Noble is staging a comeback. How's it doing this? It's taking lessons from independent bookstores. Many other independent bookstores have that cool factor. Does Barnes and Noble need to have some of that cool factor, or is it, is it a different animal, a different concept entirely? Barnes and Noble can be extremely cool, but it's definitely a different sort of cool, and the challenge for us is how do we do it appropriately in each place in which we are, and that I think we're able to do increasingly well at the moment. So Phil, there's been quite a lot of doomsday style hype recently about quote the end of reading. What did your reporting and your time with James Dorn teach you about that? Is it accurate? It's not. Americans are still reading. There might be a smaller number of Americans reading, but those who read are buying more books, and on, it's not a boom market, you know. The American Publishers Association said that last year book sales rose, uh, 1.5%, so it's not a boom, but it's not dying. But certainly, uh, the more avid readers that Barnes and Noble caters to, they're buying more. And what James Dorn is so good at is taking the independent bookstore model and applying it to mass chains like Barnes and Noble or Waterstones in my dear home country. What is the future of a successful retail bookstore going to look like? Well, I think we're, we see it with Barnes and Noble now. Um, what he's done, he founded a chain of 10 stores called Daunt Books in London, and in fact here. I can see a lot of people with the tote bags daunt books, so that has really traveled well. And what he's trying to do is take the best aspects of independent independent bookstores and apply that at scale. So what that concretely means is letting your big box bookstore neighborhood Barnes and Noble function much more autonomously than they used to. What else does it look like in Barnes and Noble right now? So essentially when you enter a Barnes and Noble store, you'll Tables that are where books are stacked by theme. The local employees are the ones who are deciding what that store, what that market wants to read, and so it used to be very much dictated by headquarters for Barnes and Noble, but there were also clear business reasons for doing that. And one of the first things Mr. Dott did when he became CEO is get rid of some of the business model. Components that were leading to that and I have to ask you, what are you reading right now? I'm reading right now, uh, coincidentally is the exact same book as James Dant is reading. Yeah, it's, it, it's, uh, it's a biography of Frederick Church, one of the Hudson River School painters. He was sort of the first American painter to really be taken seriously in Europe. Phil, thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy the book. Thank you, my pleasure. Amazon has claimed the number one spot on the Fortune Global 500, ending more than a decade of Walmart's dominance. Fortune editorial director Kristen Stoller takes us behind the scenes of her interview with Jeff Bezos, where he reflects on Amazon's reinvention and what comes next. Um, Kristen, thank you so much for coming in today to talk about your big cover story with Jeff Bezos. Now Bezos is a man who is very ubiquitous in the business landscape, also just in the culture more broadly, but we rarely hear from him directly. So first of all, how on earth did you get Jeff on the phone? That is a really good question, Ellie, because it is so hard to get Jeff to do anything. Um, it's a funny story though because, and, and you've kind of been with me on this journey, but 2 years ago I did a profile on this company Corning which makes the gorilla Glass for your phone, the old Pyrex, and the CEO of Corning is on the board at Amazon, really good friends with Jeff, and when I asked him. Like, who can speak to your character? He was like, Oh, you should call Jeff. And I was like, Who? And he was like, Oh, Jeff Bezos. And I was like, OK, sure, let's, let's, let's have Jeff give me a call. And we spoke two years ago. It went great. And then when the time came that I knew Amazon was going to be number one on our not only Fortune 500, but our global 500 list, uh, the editors here said, Kristen, why not give it a try, see if he'll talk to you. So. I shot my shots and he said yeah and he said yes. Um, what was he like? Why do I have the feeling he's probably a very charming person? Am I correct? He is, he is, he was so charming. So we, to set the scene a little bit, we, I didn't know, there was some ambiguity of whether, you know, I would go to meet him in person, if it would be on a Zoom. His schedule was very up in the air with the Blue Origin rocket launch. It ended up having to be a Zoom conversation. I think I had about 2 hours. Notice and less like I'm thinking because Kristen said people who don't know like we sit back to back in the office and I remember there was a period of weeks where you were chained to your desk. Like I don't think you were even going to the bathroom because you thought you might get the green light. So I remember it was actually less, far less than 2 hours. I'm thinking like 20 minutes, yeah, and I was racing around for a conference room. You were helping me. We were scrambling and we get the call, we do the Zoom. It ends up being 36 minutes. He's. Zooming from his original door desk, which is like when he created Amazon, they got these slabs and, and these 2x4s and made desks out of doors, and it's now in his study in DC and he was really charming. He was excited, he was glad to be there, um, definitely, you know, very careful in his wording. He's a very measured person, very thoughtful in how he speaks. He does repeat a lot of the same phrases that you've heard him say throughout the years. Like customer obsession, he said that 10 times in our conversation, he's very on brand and on message, but honestly it was lovely to talk with him, he was a delight. And what does customer obsession mean in 2026, because it's a great little turn of phrase. Yeah, but on a concrete level, what does that mean to him and how does that translate to how the company is run? So how he sees it, and now you know he's, he has the benefit of being a former CEO looking back, but he said, Building Amazon all these years, every other company was focused on the competitors, and we, we were not. We were only focused on the customers. And when you have that focus and you're not even worried about what the competition is doing, that's why we're succeeding here. We're always thinking about what can we do better for the people buying our products. Do you believe that Jeff Bezos never thinks about the competition? It's hard to believe that, right? Like there, there has, there has to be some feeling of like this is the first time that they've. Overtaken Walmart on our Global 500 for sure, because he said he was thrilled to be at the top of the list. Yeah, they've got to think he's been all these years thinking, when's our turn, when are we going to be number one, hopefully, um, but I, I think there has to be a little bit of that. There are two really striking images in the piece, so we have um a picture of Bezos when he was starting Amazon in '95, 96. He's unrecogn. Recognizable, he's this wiry computer guy and then contrast that with the image that's on the cover, the image that's on the main spread. I mean this is a man who is like pumped up on gym workouts and expensive living. He's got the tan of someone who spends 6 months of the year on a yacht, he's chiseled, almost a completely different person aesthetically. What do you make of that personal evolution that he's undertaken. Has gone through such a transformation physically, right? Like, and, and I, I posted to my story because I was, I was hoping I'd get a bunch of traction, and one of my best friends from home, she actually DM'ed me and was like, Who is that? And I was like, That's Jeff Bezos, and she was like, What? He looks so different. I would have never known. OK, so you mentioned the Blue Origin, um, rocket launch that happened in May. That did not go well. It, it sort of imploded, um, and I. And, you know, Bezos is a man who is used to big success. Did you get any sense in speaking to him about how he approaches setbacks and failure? Yes, and I actually found, he told me this fascinating story, which I, I think he's told once maybe before, but he is, he is so willing to talk about failure. He was telling me about Amazon Prime and how that was one of, or could have been one of his biggest failures. And when he proposed it, he was like, OK, free 2 day shipping. Basically how he described it to me is like, OK, it's like giving everyone an all you can eat buffet, and the heavy eaters show up first. And so for a year, the economics of it were terrible. They were losing money because all these people were buying so much and, and he was, you know, giving away all this free shipping. But then, and everyone told him like, Jeff, you need to, you need to stop. You need to end Prime. But then over time it proved to be this massive success and it's a huge pillar of the company's business today. So he was like, don't, he kind of told me, you know, don't be afraid to fail. Best ideas come from failures, just gotta let it ride. Um. Interesting lesson, Jeff. Um, so Walmart has held the top spot in the 14tune 500 for 10 years now, which is no mean feat. What changed this year that bumped Amazon to the top spot? I think the big thing that changed this year is really AI, you know, Jeff told me chips and AI. They're really the next pillar for Amazon. Walmart is definitely leaning into that, but they haven't diversified their businesses as much as Amazon had. I actually had one analyst told, she kind of called me up and was like, Who cares that Walmart beat Amazon or Amazon beat Walmart? That's totally irrelevant because it's no longer a retail game, it's now like an AI game, right? So they're playing in two different fields. And what's your response to people who say, who cares? Why does it matter in 2026? Who was top of the Fortune 500 list? Like, it doesn't affect my life. I know that's actually a really good point. The thing that I like about our list is that the Fortune 500, the Global 500, they're totally based on revenue. It's not like you and me sit here and debate like who should be number one this year. It's really numbers driven. So I think it's important, you know, that we as Americans are following this data, following the revenue, seeing which companies are succeeding truly based on where we are putting our own dollars. And um Amazon is forging a lot of partnerships when it comes to AI so it's got a partnership with Meta, it's got one with Anthropic. To what extent do you think these partnerships are going to dictate the size and scale of the company going forward? I think they're certainly helpful, but I don't know if we could measure Amazon's success based on the partnerships alone because there's so much that they're building. Um, on their own, and we could also look at their acquisitions like for example in the healthcare space they recently acquired, you know, um, one Medical, and there's a lot of different brands they're either partnering with or acquiring with which is helpful, but it's really like they're doing, they're doing a lot just on their own. They've got, you know, the Amazon Studios, they've got Prime, they've got Marketplace, they've got AWS now they have chips and AI, so yeah. I think the partnerships are helpful, but it's, it's more holistic. I mean, it does feel a bit like Amazon is taking over the world. It does. I mean, is that your sense? Why is Amazon not at this point? Yeah, and my question to everyone was, does this scare you? Does it scare you that Amazon's taking over the world? Some people are like, no, I, I love it. Some people are like, oh, we need to pump the brakes, this could be a monopoly. And these people that you're talking to are kind of analysts, thinkers outside of Amazon. In the company, absolutely, I talked to analysts. I also talked to a bunch of nonprofit leaders too, and there's one who's been really vocal, um, who said, you know, to save what we all love about Amazon, it needs to face competition because they are, you know, it's, it's kind of like the AI slop a mindset where if they have all these sponsorships and everyone is on AI and it's all looking the same or on Amazon it's all looking the same, how do we distinguish between products anymore if the sponsor products win. Yeah, we needed to face competition. Some people that you spoke to in the piece, and it was really interesting, kind of criticized Bezos for stepping down as CEO, um, in 2021. He's now chairman of the board, um, and they said that he took his foot off the pedal at the exact time that the AI boom was taking off. Yeah. What's your response to that from having reported around this? My thought is, I think that's an interesting critique, certainly. I don't know that it's entirely fair to Jeff, only because, yes, I think in terms of Amazon, right, Jeff, Jeff did leave. He might have taken his foot off the gas there. However, he's now building his own AI company, Prometheus, so I think it's not like he took his foot off the gas with AI. He just wanted to do his own projects. He wanted to do Blue Origin. This new Prometheus, um, which is still a little secretive, but so we don't know at the moment what Prometheus is doing that Amazon AI isn't. That's correct, we know Prometheus is providing creators and engineers with the tools they need to bring their ideas to scale faster, but it's very, we don't know. No specifics yet, yeah. There was a level of really interesting introspection in your piece, um, and a former VP at Amazon says Bezos himself acknowledges that the company will at some point cease to exist. Yeah. Do you, did you get that sense from him? He never said those words to me. Um, but I, I think he's always, he's very realistic, right? I mean, this is a company that's been around since the early 90s and yes, they're innovating, but he's always like, no one can be around forever. But I also spoke with the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jaffe, who I think is, is really doesn't have that same ethos and is more like how. How are we going to bring about the next wave of innovation to stay strong, maybe forever. Kristen, thank you. Please come back and talk to us next time that Jeff gives you a call. We're always say you're my first call, Ellie, you know that, and you may also help me find the conference room to book it. So thank you. That's it for Fortune Daily, our first ever show. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Ellie Austin, and we'll see you next time.

The music business was built in a golden age of mass media: wide distribution, narrow access, and a curated portfolio of monetizable megastars. Digital downloads broke it. Will AI save it—or drive it into the ground? After two decades at two revolutionary media companies, Netflix and YouTube, Robert Kyncl must now confront the collision of creativity and technology as CEO of one of the "big three" recording giants. He's joined by Warner recording artist Grimes, a creative rebel in her own right who's spent years experimenting with AI-generated music and digital identity. In an intelligent age, can the music industry self-replicate its way to success?


Robert Kyncl, Chief Executive Officer, Warner Music Group 
Grimes, Producer and Artist
Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director, Brainstorm, Fortune 

The Industry and the Instigator

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