As one of the most powerful leaders in tech, Pichai reflected on how he got to where he is in his career. On a 2025 podcast by Podium VC, he said it took “a lot of luck along the way,” but added “it’s important to listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it.”

While Pichai sits at the helm of one of the largest tech companies in the world, his path to the top wasn’t a completely smooth ride. His advice to young people who aspire to be in leadership positions like him someday is to surround themselves with people who outshine them.

“At various points in my life, I worked with people who I felt were better than me,” Pichai said. “Get yourself in a position where you’re working with people who you feel are stretching your abilities. [It’s] what helps you grow. [Put] yourself in uncomfortable situations. I think often you’ll surprise yourself.”

How did Sundar Pichai become CEO of Google? 

Pichai was born and raised in Chennai, India, to a father who was an electrical engineer and a mother who worked as a stenographer. They were considered to be a middle-class family; Pichai told Yahoo Finance he was fortunate to have grown up in a household where education was valued. 

He said he had minimal access to computers growing up—and even recalled being on a waitlist for five years to get a rotary phone. He said experiencing technology for the first time changed his life. 

“It was a vivid moment for me as to how access to technology can make a difference,” Pichai told Yahoo Finance, adding that his limited exposure to computers during childhood is something he’s carried with him throughout his career, serving as inspiration for the rollout of Chromebooks to students in the U.S.

Pichai moved to the U.S. in 1993 to earn his master’s degree in materials science from Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley. He briefly worked for a semiconductor materials company after graduating, but then went back to school to earn his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Pichai had a brief stint at McKinsey & Co. after earning his MBA and landing at Google in 2004. 

“I think it’s tough to find things you love doing, but I think listening to your heart a bit more than your mind [helps] in terms of figuring out what you want to do,” Pichai said during the podcast. 

Reflecting on 20 years at Google in April 2024, Pichai said a lot had changed about the company since he first joined, like the technology, the number of people who use Google products, and his hair. 

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A post shared by Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai)

“What hasn’t changed—the thrill I get from working at this amazing company,” Pichai wrote in an Instagram post. “20 years in, I’m still feeling lucky.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on June 10, 2025.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Will oil prices go up?

Oil prices are inherently unpredictable. While many variables come into play, the basic push and pull of supply and demand is what ultimately matters. In times of heightened concern about recession, war, or other major disruptions, oil can swing suddenly.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

Each gallon you pay for at the pump bundles together several costs. Crude oil is one piece, but you also pay for refineries, wholesalers, government taxes, and the price markup set by gas stations.

Because crude oil usually accounts for more than half of the price per gallon, it tends to move the needle the most. Sharp increases in oil almost always show up quickly at the pump. Declines in the price of oil, on the other hand, often translate into slower, more delayed drops in gas prices—the “rockets and feathers” effect.

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

When an emergency arises, the U.S. has a reserve of crude oil called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its chief function is to secure energy during disasters like sanctions, severe storm damage, or war. It can also help take the edge off brutal price spikes when supply gets hit.

It’s not a solution for the long haul. It’s more of an immediate safety net to support consumers and keep crucial sectors of the economy running (think key industries, emergency services, public transportation, and the like).

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Oil and natural gas are two of the main fuels that keep the world running. A big change in oil prices can end up affecting natural gas. As an example, if oil prices increase, some industries may sub natural gas for certain areas of their operations wherever possible. This can increase demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

The oil market typically tracks two benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil (the main global oil benchmark)
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) (the main benchmark of North America)

Between the two, Brent offers a clearer view of global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. It’s also often the preferred gauge for tracking historical oil trends. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration now uses Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

Looking at the Brent benchmark over multiple decades, you’ll find oil has been anything but stable. It’s seen sharp rises due to factors like wars and supply cuts, along with steep declines tied to global recessions and oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s saw the first major oil shock when the Middle East slashed exports and placed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices fell in the mid-1980s for reasons including lower demand and the entry of more non-OPEC oil producers.
• Prices jumped again in 2008 with increased global demand, but then plunged alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before—bringing prices below $20 per barrel.

Bottom line, oil’s historical performance has been anything but smooth. It’s hugely affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

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• Fervo brings the first, next-gen geothermal power to the grid to satiate the AI boom
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Frequently asked questions

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McDonald’s unveiled its updated NEXT growth strategy on Wednesday at its investor day, committing about $8.5 billion in support for franchisees through 2036. That includes roughly $5 billion through 2030, primarily through rent relief and capital support.

The company also expects to spend about $3 billion a year on baseline capital expenditures from 2027 through 2030, based on current foreign exchange rates, plus $1.5 billion to $2 billion in cumulative capital partnering support to accelerate the rollout. The capital partnering support is part of the broader NEXT investment framework.

“It’s a value creation strategy, designed to generate attractive returns for franchisees and shareholders,” Borden said during his investor day presentation. It aims to strengthen restaurant economics and create the capacity to reinvest for long-term growth. Borden, who has been global CFO since 2022, has spent more than 30 years with McDonald’s, including extensive experience leading markets and global functions.

The strategy pairs continued expansion with productivity investments at existing restaurants. Unit growth is expected to contribute nearly 2.5% to systemwide sales growth in 2027, moderating to about 2% by 2030—meaning a growing share of McDonald’s sales gains will come from existing restaurants becoming more productive, not just from opening new ones.

Technology is another part of the strategy. McDonald’s plans to deploy ArchIQ, a generative AI-enabled operating system, at scale to help improve restaurant operations, including the drive-thru.

The company expects its Restaurant NEXT investments to generate about 250 basis points of gross restaurant-level efficiency gains, translating to roughly $100,000 in additional annual cash flow for the average U.S. restaurant. McDonald’s estimates a four-year payback period for franchisees, after partnering support.

By 2030, the company is targeting operating margins in the low-to-mid 50% range, free-cash-flow conversion in the mid-to-high 80% range and G&A costs of about 1.9% of systemwide sales.

The scale of the investment also creates execution risk. Investors appeared cautious: McDonald’s shares fell as much as 6.5% intraday Wednesday, amid concerns about the timing of the benefits and the execution of the strategy. CEO Chris Kempczinski attributed some of that caution to persistent inflation. “We expect industry traffic growth in our wholly owned markets will be flat while inflation remains elevated,” he said.

The strategy also calls for McDonald’s to gain 1.5 percentage points of market share in both chicken and beverages by 2030 while maintaining its leadership in beef.

McDonald’s (No. 170 on the Fortune 500) has more than 46,000 restaurants globally. Approximately 95% are owned and operated by independent local business owners, and the company says its restaurants serve more than 70 million customers daily.

The real test will be whether McDonald’s can turn billions of dollars in restaurant investments into the productivity gains and cash flow it has promised.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The back-and-forth is the latest in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Trump first announced he was banning the outlets Friday, assailing what he called “fake news,” and only later arguing that their reporting was a risk to national security. The outlets argued in a joint lawsuit that the ban was a blatant violation of the First Amendment because it singled them out for the content of their coverage.

In his late-night ruling, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the three outlets’ access. He said they had met the legal thresholds to obtain a temporary restraining order, in effect for 14 days, and were likely to succeed in showing that their press passes were revoked without due process.

“This is a high bar, but Plaintiffs have met it,” he wrote.

Kelly — whom Trump nominated in 2017 and who ordered a CNN journalist’s access restored in a similar case in 2018 — said the government must have clear standards for conduct that would lead to revoking a press pass. He called the standard of objectionable reporting outlined in letters that the White House sent the outlets “so vague it hardly does the trick.”

The judge also made clear he did not buy the administration’s argument that the news outlets’ reporting endangered national security — and noted that Trump himself had not used that argument in the beginning, focusing solely on what he called negative coverage.

“Nothing in the record … suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” he wrote.

The ruling came after Kelly heard arguments in an emergency hearing Wednesday. Temporary restraining orders are typically designed to preserve the status quo pending a closer review of the case by the court.

“This is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law,” Theodore Boutrous Jr., attorney for the outlets, said in an emailed statement. “We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action.”

But a few hours after the ruling, reporters from those outlets said they were not allowed to enter the White House.

The White House did not respond to an email from The Associated Press requesting comment on the order.

Attorneys debated access to the White House and any risk to national security

Boutrous argued in the hearing that there was an urgent need for renewed access, saying that the ban caused irreparable harm to the outlets at a time of momentous news events. “We’re at war. We have world leaders coming to Washington.”

Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik, in his argument, reiterated the administration’s point that the president has the right to choose who gets into the White House.

“Access to the White House is a privilege, not a right,” Velchik said.

In arguing that Trump was not engaging in viewpoint discrimination — the government singling out specific media outlets for the content of what they say or publish — Velchik said the president had criticized other news organizations, but not banned them. He noted, for example, that Trump had called ABC “the worst.”

He added: “The president should be able to take immediate action to protect national security.”

In response, Boutrous said, “Suddenly it’s a national security case,” arguing that the president brought up that point only after the lawsuit was filed.

Trump “keeps proving our point,” Boutrous said, describing how the president has consistently used negative coverage of him as justification for the ban.

Kelly seemed to agree, writing of the national security claim: “Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.”

The Trump administration outlined ‘reporting incidents’ of each news outlet

In a filing Tuesday, administration lawyers detailed letters sent to each of the three news outlets that identified “a non-exhaustive list of reporting incidents, including those that have threatened national security and spread falsehoods.”

Among the incidents cited were: CNN reporting on “‘top-secret’ construction details related to the East Wing bunker”; MS NOW reporting “on an alleged leak investigation”; and Politico publishing “a document detailing funding for the White House ballroom containing intricate descriptions of how the Secret Service would invest in security improvements.”

Politico’s letter also included an incident in June of a report in which a “senior administration official … granted anonymity” predicted whether a preliminary deal would end the conflict with Iran.

That item appeared to reference a background briefing set up by the White House, where an official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the administration itself. Several other outlets also reported the official’s remarks.

Major networks refrained from covering Trump for the media pool

The ban prompted other media outlets to take action in solidarity. The U.S. network press pool — consisting of the five major networks, including CNN — has suspended coverage of Trump pool events pending further notice.

The ruling did not address that rotating pool.

After the hearing Wednesday, the networks continued their ban on Trump coverage. At Joint Base Andrews, where the president formally welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping, journalists from Fox News, CBS and NBC were present but not shooting video.

Other television outlets whose crews were present, according to signs on their tripods and cameras, were NewsNation, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network, One America News and LindellTV.

Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, an amicus brief was filed by other news groups, including The AP, urging the court to immediately restore the three outlets’ White House access.

___

Golden reported from Seattle and Kellman from London.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Will oil prices go up?

Nobody can predict the future path of oil prices with certainty. A range of factors influence how oil trades, yet supply and demand remain the main drivers. When fears of economic slowdown, conflict, or similar shocks rise, oil prices can move sharply.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

The price you see at the gas pump reflects more than just crude oil. Also built in are the costs of refining, distribution through wholesalers, various taxes, and the margin your neighborhood station charges.

Crude oil is still the largest single driver of the final pump price, typically representing over half of each gallon’s cost. Spikes in oil prices tend to push gas prices higher in short order. But when oil prices decline, gas prices often ease down gradually, a behavior known as “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In the event of an emergency, the U.S. maintains a stockpile of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its main goal is to safeguard energy security when disasters strike—think sanctions, severe storm damage, or war. It can also do a lot to ease the pain of sudden price jumps when supply gets disrupted.

It’s not a permanent fix, as it’s more meant to provide immediate support for consumers and ensure critical parts of the economy like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, and so on can keep operating.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Both oil and natural gas play key roles as major sources of energy. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by proxy. If oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, increasing the demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

Oil prices are often measured by two key benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Between the two, Brent is a better representation of global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. It’s also often the best way to review historical oil trends. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration now leans on Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

When you look at the Brent benchmark across multiple decades, you’ll see that oil has been anything but consistent. It has experienced spikes driven by wars and supply cuts, as well as crashes linked to global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as weaker demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with rising global demand, but soon crashed alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before, bringing prices to under $20 per barrel.

In short, oil’s historical performance has been far from steady. It’s massively affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

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• We see the climate tech sector chasing the wrong breakthrough
• Inside Fortescue’s billion-dollar bet to decarbonize mining—and help rebuild Ukraine
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Frequently asked questions

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For those unfamiliar with crypto hardware wallets, they are considered highly secure because they allow users to store digital assets on a physical device that is not connected to the internet. This method of holding assets, known as “cold storage,” has long been popular with hardcore Bitcoin devotees who are reluctant to entrust their assets to a third party or store them online where hackers can target them.

Until now, there has not been a “cold storage” option for holding stocks—unless you count holding paper certificates, which remains an option but is now so rare that it requires undertaking a complicated request process and paying steep fees. This raises the question, though, of how many investors will feel a need to hold their stocks on a physical device, especially in an era when online brokerages handle trillions of dollars of transactions every day with few incidents.

According to Sebastien Badault, a Ledger executive who is leading the Payward tie-up, the company believes that the newfound popularity of tokenized stocks—which took off last year and just received an “innovation exemption” from the SEC—will make cold storage appealing to two sets of investors.

The first are some of Ledger’s approximately 8 million customers, both retail and institutional, who prefer self-custody for their assets rather than relying on third parties. The other group of potential customers, says Badault, are more traditional stock buyers who may be growing uneasy with the rising threat of hackers in the age of AI and quantum computing.

As a practical matter, Badault said the integration between Payward and Ledger runs both ways. This means that a customer who uses Payward’s stock-buying platform, xStocks, can require a signature on their Ledger device as a final security measure before completing a transaction. At the same time, Ledger devices—which offer a trading platform in addition to simple custody—will now include an xStocks integration.

For now, the Ledger devices, including its flagship Stax model developed by former Apple designer Tony Fadell, will only integrate with Payward’s version of tokenized stocks. Badault noted, however, that the company is in talks with other companies—including Coinbase, Binance and Robinhood—that have rolled out tokenized stocks of their own in recent months.

All of this comes at a time when tokenized stocks, which have primarily gained traction overseas, represent just a tiny portion of the broader stock market. Meanwhile, a recent security incident involving a little-known hardware wallet-maker has spurred a debate over whether self-custody is a viable option even for crypto devotees.

Badault, though, makes the case that Ledger’s user-friendly design and the broader push towards tokenization means that, in coming years, more individuals and institutions will come to embrace storing assets of all sorts on secure off-line devices.

In a statement, Payward’s co-CEO David Ripley, said “By partnering with Ledger, we’re building where the industry is heading: a future where secure self-custody and global financial infrastructure work hand in hand to provide powerful and seamless trading experiences.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Solari Capital, the venture firm he is taking out of stealth today, has deployed roughly $350 million across early-stage investing, late-stage growth checks, and in-house incubations since its founding.

The astronomer-turned-venture capitalist

Scaramucci’s route began in science, far from finance. Describing an interest in “amateur astronomy” as a kid, Scaramucci said he worked in a bioelectronics lab, studying implantable therapeutics and the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway, before moving to the Bay Area and taking a job at Tesla in 2013, then a rotation through Google, where he briefly worked alongside Eric Schmidt.

Scaramucci traces his current thesis to April 2012, when he sat in his dorm room at Stanford reading Peter Diamandis’ Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. He described it as something of a spiritual successor to Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book “The Singularity Is Near, calling the pair “the Old and New Testament,” as both predicted the shape of the current AI boom years before the underlying technology existed.

He immediately started working to get to know Diamandis via methods Scaramucci describes as “brute force”: emailing XPRIZE’s general inbox “dozens of times,” failing, and eventually finding his way in through Chris Lewicki, then-CEO of the asteroid-mining startup Planetary Resources. By 2015, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence under Diamandis, building the CAR-T cell therapy startup Cellularity and the education venture Abundance Group. He later worked at Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures, splitting time between San Francisco and Beijing.

Scaramucci traces the same “brute force” instinct to his upbringing. The oldest of five children in what he called “a big, loud Italian family,” he watched his parents go from a one-bedroom apartment above a fire station in Tarrytown, N.Y. — “negative money in debt,” in his description — to a house in posh Manhasset, Long Island, by the time he reached high school. His mother, a chemical engineer, and his father, serial entrepreneur Anthony Scaramucci, gave him “a front row seat to [the] American dream.” That upbringing, he said, shaped his sales-first, ask-forgiveness-not-permission approach to sourcing deals and mentors alike.

Andrea Pasinetti, founder of the AI education startup Kira Learning, a Solari portfolio company, met Scaramucci at Stanford roughly 10 years ago, when Scaramucci was an MBA student. “He basically shared his worldview with me when we first had lunch. He started talking to me about programmable reality,” Pasinetti said. “There’s a remarkable consistency at a macro level with AJ that also permeates the micro.”

The Programmable Reality thesis

But what is Programmable Reality, really? As Scaramucci describes it, it’s the idea that as computational power keeps compounding, biology, intelligence, physical matter and money all become substrates that can be engineered with software-like precision, rather than domains governed by trial and error, intuition or manual labor.

“The ramifications of the programmable reality thesis are that every bit in the universe becomes programmable,” he said. “It’s kind of like the sequel to software eats the world,” he added, citing Marc Andreessen’s famous 2011 essay, “reality becomes programmable.”

The thesis splits into four verticals, each with its own roster of bets:

Programmable Intelligence covers AI, compute and foundation models. Solari’s positions include xAI, the lab behind Grok, now folded into Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: SPCX) following SpaceX’s all-stock merger with xAI; Suno, the generative-music startup; Physical Superintelligence, an AI-native physics lab; and Kira Learning, Pasinetti’s AI-native K-12 education platform.

Scaramucci has backed Kira “from day zero,” according to Pasinetti. Kira’s technology is now used as part of a broader AI-in-education push in El Salvador, where a pilot cohort of 171 public schools recently posted PISA-for-Schools results that officials and the OECD described as comparable to Germany and Sweden’s 2022 averages. El Salvador’s national PISA scores outside that pilot remain well below OECD averages, and Pasinetti cautioned that AI in education “has to be done right.”

Programmable Biology spans computational drug discovery, gene therapy, immunotherapy and longevity. The portfolio includes Tessera Therapeutics, which is developing all-RNA “Gene Writing” therapies; Gameto, which engineers stem-cell-derived ovarian cells for IVF; Orionis Biosciences, which uses AI to discover molecular glues for hard-to-drug cancers; Prolific Machines, which applies optogenetics to biomanufacturing; Cambrian Bio, a clinical-stage longevity company; and General Medicine, a chat-first healthcare marketplace co-founded by Elliot Cohen and TJ Parker, the PillPack co-founders, alongside former Amazon Health executive Ashwin Muralidharan, who serves as CEO.

Our understanding of the immune system and the genome is still nascent but accelerating, Scaramucci said, “particularly because you can design drugs increasingly in silico. I can run simulations as opposed to doing wet lab experiments.”

Programmable Matter covers aerospace, defense, energy, materials science, semiconductors and robotics. Holdings include Varda Space, which manufactures pharmaceuticals and materials in orbit; Apex Space, which builds satellite buses at production-line speed; Giga Energy, which builds modular AI data centers; Base Power, which makes home batteries that function as a distributed grid resource; General Biological, focused on critical-industry supply chains; and Northwood Space, a phased-array ground-station startup founded by Bridgit Mendler.

Solari wrote the first check into Northwood “when it was a baby company,” Scaramucci said. The startup now has over 100 employees and has raised over $100 million. He cited recent progress in humanoid robotics — “we’ve seen robots beat Usain Bolt in a 100-meter dash. That literally happened a few weeks ago” — as evidence that embodied AI is catching up to language models quickly. “We passed the Turing test effectively four years ago,” he said. “When that has a body and it has senses” is, in his view, the next unlock.

Programmable Finance covers monetary-debasement hedges, fintech, blockchain infrastructure and decentralized finance, including Genius Terminal, a non-custodial multi-chain trading terminal; Fission Labs, which tokenizes venture-backed private companies for liquid secondary trading; and Architect Financial, which Solari describes as the first U.S. derivatives exchange built specifically for the AI economy.

Betting on friends, and against the grid

Solari’s investing style, Scaramucci said, leans heavily on long relationships rather than cold outreach to founders it doesn’t know. One clear example: American Bitcoin, the Bitcoin miner co-founded by Eric Trump that went public this year via a reverse merger. Scaramucci backed a $220 million financing round in the company last July, Fortune exclusively revealed at the time, with Solari alone contributing more than $100 million.

The bet traces to U.S. Bitcoin Corporation, where Scaramucci backed Asher Genoot, Mike Ho, and his Stanford Business School roommate, Matt Prusak. That company merged into Hut8, now a $10 billion publicly traded company, which later spun out American Bitcoin. “That story is one of really like an 11-year friendship with Mike and Asher,” he said.

That trade sits inside a broader, deliberately contrarian view of where value is being created. Noting that gold and bitcoin together have created more market capitalization since 2008 than the entire “Magnificent Seven” group of tech stocks, he argued that “currency debasement” is a defining reality of 21st-century finance, with the “average life expectancy of a given currency” running around 26 years. That view extends into Treasure Trove, the collectibles holding company he launched earlier this year and has since used to buy a first-appearance Iron Man comic for $2 million and, separately, a record-setting Pokémon card.

“I think of collectibles as the cultural store of value in the same way gold might be the physical store of value or Bitcoin might be the digital store of value,” Scaramucci explained. “I’ve been in the market buying a lot of one-of-one Grail assets because these Grail assets have unbelievable, uncorrelated returns. … I view them as a debasement trade.”

Pasinetti pointed to Scaramucci’s interest in dinosaur fossils as an example of his timing. “This was probably a year and a half ago, two years ago, he was talking about … the short supply of T-Rex fossils,” Pasinetti said. “Just a few months ago, Sotheby’s transacted the most expensive T-Rex fossil, and AJ was talking about that very one a long time ago.”

Scaramucci called the collectibles market a “sleeping giant” that institutional capital has largely ignored, and pitched Treasure Trove as a way to open it up to ordinary investors, not just the ultrawealthy. “It’s a $25 trillion asset class that has not been properly institutionalized,” he claimed. It’s the flipside of programmable reality, he explained: one trade is “the AI trade or the singularity trade where computational power continues to double … But there’s also this other trade happening, which is the scarcity trade or the cultural trade.”

Building from zero

Solari also builds companies in-house, and Scaramucci said that incubation arm is central to the firm’s identity. Radial Health, an interventional psychiatry chain treating treatment-resistant depression, bulimia, anorexia, addiction and PTSD with transcranial magnetic stimulation and ketamine, is the flagship example. He built it alongside Cohen and Radial CEO John Capecelatro; public filings list Alex Klokus as a third co-founder, along with Anthony Scaramucci. The company has since raised follow-on funding from General Catalyst, the Box Group, the Emerson Collective and SV Angel, and now appears on the Nasdaq Private Market as a pre-IPO name.

Pasinetti recalled hearing the idea early. “He talked about his view on programmable biology and started talking about psychedelics as interventions for PTSD and other mental health disorders. This was before the conversation was mainstream,” he said. “Then you start reading headlines … that play back elements of the vision he had described a year before.”

Solari’s incubation model runs alongside SALT, the investor conference and media business Scaramucci co-chairs, which he described as an informal investor-relations function for the portfolio; its five to seven events a year draw roughly 10,000 attendees combined.

A network built over a decade

The firm’s approved list of backers includes SV Angel founder Ron Conway, Breyer Capital’s Jim Breyer, Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca, former Alphabet chief executive Eric Schmidt and Diamandis, who has founded more than 25 companies in longevity, space, venture capital and education — several of them mentors Scaramucci has known since his 20s.

“AJ is an exceptional investor and operator — a rare combination in venture,” Conway told Fortune. “He has the instincts to identify great founders early, tenacity and the ability to recruit world-class teams.”

Pasinetti compared Scaramucci to a sort of reverse Cassandra, the prophet from Greek mythology cursed to see the future accurately but never be believed. “AJ has a perpetual fear of Cassandra prophecy,” Pasinetti said. “He is able to see things that seem outlandish at first, but become kind of consensus after a year or a year-and-a-half of his working on them.”

Betting that exponentials are deceptive

Asked how quickly these technologies will reshape the economy, Scaramucci pushed back gently on the premise that AI adoption has stalled, arguing that any lag in real-world deployment is structural rather than a sign the thesis is wrong.

“I actually think that things in the digital domain are moving even faster than expectations,” he said. “The notion of having fundamental mathematics or physics or chemistry or biology breakthroughs — we’re starting to have that now.”

“In that reality, well, you have radical abundance,” he said of the world Programmable Reality points toward. “Ideally the optimistic take is that food, water, shelter and basic needs are covered … I’m less of a doomsday-er than I am an optimist.”

“You can expect from us to continue to double down on this nature of programmable reality,” he said. “It’s a thesis that I think has a lot of multi-decade staying power.”

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Trump’s territorial ambitions over Greenland almost broke the NATO military alliance and shattered trust with one of America’s oldest and closest partners. The new defense agreement puts an end to the standoff. But was it worth the cost?

While the new defense agreement is a bit broader, the United States already had extensive military access under an existing 1951 deal and all the gains laid out in the agreement signed on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday could, ostensibly, have been achieved by asking nicely a year ago. The trans-Atlantic distrust created since the end of 2024 seems a very high price to pay for what may ultimately be a fairly incremental gain.

Interestingly, one place may emerge from this standoff as the real winner: Greenland itself.

The promised investments and contracts may never fully materialize, but the episode marks a major step forward in its push for greater autonomy and a more influential seat at the table. Greenland is no longer merely the subject of foreign policy decided by its former colonial rulers. Increasingly, it is helping to shape it.

There’s been progress toward self-determination

“A notable change is Greenland itself at the table today, signing this agreement,” said Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen speaking to a room cram packed with journalists and officials at the UN to witness the signing of the deal.

That’s an understatement. The world’s largest island, home to about 56,000 mostly Inuit people, was still considered a colony until the early 1950s. Progress towards greater self-determination has been slow and it wasn’t until 2009 that Greenland became a self-governing country within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Even then, while the Self-Government Act recognized Greenland’s right to independence when requested by local voters in the future, Denmark retained control of defense and foreign affairs.

“I cannot stress it enough: This is the first time that we are venturing into a binding agreement as a country,” Naaja Nathanielsen, one of Greenland’s two lawmakers in the Danish parliament and a former government minister in Nuuk, told The Associated Press. “That is a huge step forward in our quest for more self-autonomy.”

Denmark and Greenland confront their own troubled past

Like most former colonial powers that discover history keeps receipts, Denmark’s ties with Greenland are complicated. Greenland’s economy is heavily dependent on Denmark, families and students often live between the two territories and the cultural linguistic ties are strong. Yet underwriting modern relations are centuries of Danish policies that dehumanized Greenlanders and their families.

They included forced contraception, the removal of Inuit children for reeducation by Danish foster families, and controversial parental-competency tests that led to children being separated from their parents.

“For many, many years you believed that you were a good colonizer,” Múte Bourup Egede, then Greenland’s prime minister and now its foreign minister, reminded Danish journalists early last year, shortly after a newly elected Trump made his first military threat against the island. “But time has also caught up with us, and … cruel things have come to light.”

The abuses are not distant history; many victims remain alive. Hundreds of Inuit women have claimed compensation from Denmark, alleging that health authorities violated their rights by fitting them with intrauterine devices — often when they were teenagers and without their informed consent. Danish authorities estimate that as many as 4,500 women and girls received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s.

While the first official apology for the historic mistreatment had long been coming it was finally delivered in the summer of 2025.

The standoff with the United States “has been applying pressure and focused some of the Danish attention” on reconciliation with Greenland said Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, but “perhaps, some Greenlanders feel that it’s not as credible as it could have been without Trump.”

Trump’s involvement changed the equation

While Denmark moved to address past grievances, anger with Trump’s tactics also helped shore up support for its sovereignty and take the edge off calls by some in Greenland for quick moves to independence.

At the height of the crisis over Trump’s ambitions in January, Nielsen said that “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO.”

For Denmark, the main victory is no doubt getting the US president off its back and succeeding in framing the crisis as a European security problem.

Danish and Greenlandic diplomats “have been working very hard to have European allies be part of this,” Pram Gad said. “The result is an attempt to patch together the NATO alliance.”

And while Denmark has accepted some limitations to its sovereignty, investments by adversary countries such as Russia had long been off the table.

“The benefit of keeping the transatlantic alliance, or patching it together, or at least not allowing Greenland to be the occasion for Trump to blow it up, I think that counts heavily on both the Danish and the Greenlandic cost-benefit analysis here,” he said.

After Tuesday’s signing ceremony, relief was palpable. But while the Danish and Greenland delegations celebrated with a cold beer on a rooftop bar in Manhattan, the Greenland crisis has scarred a once-undefiable bond. It leaves leaders in Copenhagen, Nuuk and other European capitals now assessing the reliability of the United States — and whether a signed agreement can repair trust once it has been broken.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

That complaint, filed in federal court in New Jersey on Sept. 18, states that the funds raised about $28.7 million from at least 85 mostly high-net-worth investors and family offices between April 2023 and March 2025. The venture firms aren’t named; the SEC states that the two firms are based in Montana. 

It’s an extreme case if the allegations hold up. But the mechanics aren’t exotic. A small firm, a founder focused on deals, and one trusted person running the back end. For anyone who writes checks and works with emerging managers, it’s a question worth verifying every time: Who can move money, and who is checking to make sure it’s going to the right place?

Here’s what happened, according to the SEC. A year into her nannying gig, the fund manager brought Polcari into the firm as an “executive assistant.” Over the next decade, her role grew to cover everything involving the bowels of fund administration. She sent offering documents and wire instructions, tracked down subscription agreements, and wired capital to portfolio companies. 

By April 2023, she allegedly became the sole signatory on a new fund’s bank account and described herself on the application as a “Partner with Control of the Entity” and an 80% owner of the fund, unbeknownst to the owner, the SEC says. The SEC claims neither the VC owner nor its co-owner had access to or signatory authority on the fund’s bank account.

According to regulators, Polcari listed the fund’s mailing address as her own home. In 2024, the firm’s Form ADV listed her as “Controller” and a “Regulatory Contact Person.” When the unnamed owner opened a second VC firm in the summer of 2024, Polcari filed the necessary documents, opened more bank accounts, and again named herself as the beneficial owner for some of them. She and the VC owner were the only two people who worked there, and by early 2025, the SEC claims Polcari’s email address was the only contact on the firm’s website. 

I made my best efforts to reach Polcari and was unsuccessful. I also reached out to the firm that listed her in its Form ADV in 2024 and didn’t get a response. The firm’s website says it has invested in 90-plus companies over 16 years and lists investments in Ripple, Dollar Shave Club, Life360, and Liquid Death. 

The SEC claims Polcari helped herself to the money almost as soon as it was wired in. On Oct. 1, 2024, one of the funds got its first $250,000 investment. Within a day, Polcari allegedly moved $28,000 to her own bank account. Two days later, the same fund got $800,000 in investments, and during the next three weeks, according to regulators, Polcari allegedly moved $97,500 of it to her own accounts. That fund raised a total of $1.34 million and the SEC says about $768,000 allegedly went to Polcari and her bills, including about $131,000 in online-gambling expenses paid straight from the fund’s account. 

By December, that fund had insufficient capital to make its designated portfolio-company investment, and the SEC alleges Polcari moved nearly $1 million out of four other funds to plug the gap. She also allegedly forged the owner’s Docusign e-signature to transfer portfolio company shares to her business, Forks Up LLC, and sold most of the stock for $56,000.

In late February 2025, the VC owner and Polcari learned the SEC was conducting a probe of the firm and the jig, as they say, was up. Three weeks later, Polcari’s lawyer informed the owner she had liberated a “significant amount” from the firms and the funds, the complaint states. She was fired, and on March 30, the SEC says Polcari called the owner and admitted to some of it. 

The allegations are brazen if the SEC’s account holds up. Giving yourself rights and then allegedly raiding the funds repeatedly is an outrageous act. But, trusting one person to route everything? That I don’t get. The trust-but-verify lesson learned the hard way.

See you tomorrow,

Amanda
amanda.gerut@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The U.S. faces an unprecedented demand surge for power from the AI boom and more, and next-gen geothermal power is now part of the mix. Geothermal offers both clean energy and reliable baseload power without the intermittency issues of wind and solar.

Bill Gates-backed Fervo, which went public in May with the biggest clean-energy IPO ever, touts technology that combines old-school geothermal science with modern oil-drilling and fracking techniques to develop reservoirs and power plants anywhere the customers want—as opposed to traditional geothermal power, dating back over 100 years, which relies on naturally occurring reservoirs.

Fervo focuses on enhanced geothermal systems (EGS, not to be confused with ESG), designed to address the scalability limitations of traditional geothermal with the modern drilling approach.

“This is a gamechanger for the geothermal industry,” said Fervo co-founder and Tim Latimer in a statement Thursday. “It establishes EGS as the defining new power generation technology of our time, and we believe it shows that the commercial and technical maturity of EGS is ready to meet the urgent need for reliable, clean power.”

“We are just getting started,” he added.

The startup of Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah represents the first time a utility-scale, EGS development has reached the first power milestone anywhere in the world. Southern California Edison is the primary customer. Cape Station follows Fervo’s initial pilot, Project Red, which went online in 2023.

Fervo went public in May with an upsized IPO and a market cap that quickly ballooned above $10 billion. But its Wall Street momentum slowed in the months that followed and its market cap plunged to about $5 billion. The company is hoping to trigger an upward trajectory again with the Cape Station startup.

The first phase pf Cape Station is a 100-megawatt project—enough to power about 70,000 homes—comprised of three, 33-megawatt “GeoBlocks.” The first GeoBlock just came online. Fervo said it will continue ramping up the first phase through the end of this year. The next phase, an additional 400 megawatts, is under construction with an expected completion in 2028. A third phase would add another 400 megawatts, growing Cape Station to a 900-megawatt complex.

 Scaling next-gen geothermal power up to become economically competitive is the next major challenge.

Cape Station entails drilling wells 10,000 feet deep—about 2 miles—and then directionally drilling horizontally another 7,500 feet to create adequately sized reservoirs, and fracking (hydraulic fracturing) the rock to release the flows of water naturally heated to more than 400 degrees. Utah—and much of the western U.S.—is geographically ideal because the necessary heat levels are accessible at shallower depths than most of the country.

Named from the Latin word meaning “to boil,” Fervo’s technology utilizes water heated underground to generate steam for electricity-producing turbines, then pumps the cooled water back into the subsurface to be reheated and recycled.

“Cape Station works because we treated the subsurface like an engineering challenge,” said Jack Norbeck, Fervo co-founder and chief technology officer. “Years of drilling, completion design, subsurface modeling, and flow testing led to this moment, and this is the validation that matters most. First power is proof the science works.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com