• Nscale’s $35 billion IPO.
• Markets: Bitcoin shows signs of life.
• There was a $62 billion wave of stock-buying before the Fed’s last call.
• The internet is now half written by robots.
• AI’s $3.6 trillion circular financing network.
• Sydney Sweeney owns equity in Novig.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

That shift has expanded the range of new ventures that can be built. And, accelerated how quickly they can scale. Successful ventures now reach $10 million in revenue within 31 months on average, compared to a previous average of 38 months and they break even with 40% less capital than before. 

But there is a catch. The more successful a venture becomes the harder it is to protect. 

The systems that power the core business — governance, teams, processes and controls — can get in the way of the new venture scaling. Which is why CEOs need to be ready to step in.

Choose where to play and how far to go 

Before the CEO can protect the scaling asset, they first need to identify that scalable idea. Often the strongest ideas sit at the intersection of a growing market, a valuable customer problem, and an area where the company can build a distinct, sustainable advantage. 

But, choosing where to play also means deciding how far to go. How close should the venture sit to the core? Should it pursue the home market or somewhere new? What happens if it starts competing for the same customers – or revenue – as the business paying today’s bills? Or can the new venture fuel growth on top of existing revenue? 

Honeywell shows what can happen when a company builds around its distinctive advantages. It created Honeywell Connected Enterprise to turn decades of industrial expertise into recurring software revenues. By 2023, the business had grown to around $1.5 billion in annual sales and is growing around 3x faster than Honeywell overall.

Make several bets and back the scaling venture  

Successes inevitably sit alongside failures. Meaning, CEOs need to give teams room to experiment and learn when ideas fall short, without continuing to fund ventures that aren’t working.

AI is changing the pace of that equation. Faster, cheaper experimentation means companies can place more, smaller bets, then concentrate capital and talent behind those showing real traction. It’s a proven formula. Companies launching three or more ventures simultaneously – the portfolio approach – can achieve up to 30% higher revenue growth than those making a single bet. 

The Saudi Telecom Company Group shows what a portfolio approach can deliver. It has consistently built successful ventures across multiple domains including payments, internet of things, cyber security, data centers and cloud infrastructure. It does this by combining incubation, partnerships and venture investing, and its subsidiaries are now growing 10 to 15 times faster than the core business. 

Decide with evidence, not vanity metrics

One of the reasons ventures fail, is that leadership start seeing project reporting rather than evidence that the business is working. That’s crucial – a venture can hit every project milestone yet still fail to become a good business.

The signals that matter are customer and commercial facts. Are customers using the product? Coming back? Willing to pay? Are the economics improving?

It’s important that funding is given a similar discipline: short review cycles and clear thresholds for further funding can help CEOs act on evidence. Much like a venture capitalist, they can call a halt when the evidence says a venture isn’t working and move capital towards opportunities demonstrating the strongest traction.

Stop the venture from being prematurely corporatized

Funding a new venture inside a corporate comes with advantages independent start-ups spend years trying to establish: customers, capital, data, expertise, distribution, and an established brand. The challenge is accessing them without inheriting the constraints that come with them.

BCP found that balance when it launched Yape, a mobile wallet. It was staffed with product development, engineering, and design talent rather than traditional bankers. That allowed Yape to operate differently while drawing on BCP’s strengths. It has since become a super app scaled to more than 18 million users. 

But, that balance can be hard to maintain as a venture succeeds. More parts of the organization get involved, governance expands, and the venture can gradually inherit the processes it was initially protected from. 

These are moments when CEO involvement can make all the difference: removing internal barriers, opening doors to partners, adding funding as growth takes off, or protecting a promising venture from being pulled prematurely into the core. It works too — where CEOs personally prioritize venture building, new businesses can contribute nearly 20% of enterprise-wide revenue within five years. 

CEOs cannot – and should not – make every decision. But staying close enough to the facts to know when to step in, and doing the things only they can do, may be what turns business building into a repeatable source of growth.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Over the past week, AI’s own builders have sounded the alarm. Several of the industry’s leading CEOs are now publicly calling for a slower pace of AI development, citing risks from loss of control to cyberattacks to bioterrorism. 

That news came days after Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, chairing the Financial Stability Board, told G20 finance ministers and central bankers that today’s already shaky global financial system faces a new threat in AI. With so many institutions now depending on the same handful of AI models and cloud providers, one exploited weakness can spread rapidly. 

We receive these warnings with wariness, but not with surprise. As co-leads for safe, secure and trustworthy AI at the first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva this past July, we agree that the world needs common rules. New AI systems should only be released after being independently tested against agreed thresholds of what they can do. Developers should publish their safety protocols, and any incidents that arise after deployment should be clearly monitored and reported. 

Geneva was an important first step toward coordinated AI governance, one that handed us the roadmap. In a year of widening fault lines around trade, security, and power, 170 countries managed to come together alongside industry and civil society to find some common ground on mechanisms to begin governing this fast-moving technology. 

Appreciating the constraints of working at the UN level, there are “no regret” actions, steps that carry no downside, that the UN could take immediately.

First, connect the dots between science and policy. Right now, the scientists studying AI’s risks and the diplomats negotiating what to do about them are working on separate tracks, with no structured way to talk to one another. The UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI presented its first evidence-based assessment in Geneva. That evidence needs a formal channel into the Global Dialogue’s negotiating process ahead of next May, rather than sitting alongside it. With most AI research and development happening behind closed industry doors, citizens and policymakers need the best scientific advice available if they are going to remain informed and act. 

Second, don’t wait to build on what we know works. We are calling on the UN to develop a common reference baseline for safety, grounded in international human rights law and built from what already exists. Established frameworks such as the OECD AI Principles, the G7 Hiroshima code of conduct, the Frontier AI Safety Commitments from the 2024 Seoul Summit, and UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI point the way, alongside the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards engineers actually build to. 

By creating a shared understanding of current regulatory floors, individual nations can prioritize what to build in their national and regional contexts. Costa Rica’s own National AI Strategy was built with government, civil society, industry, and academia at the same table, and anchored in international frameworks rather than inventing its own. That process is worth replicating. 

Third, we must build in inclusivity—both geographic and financial—so that conversations such as the UN Dialogue are open to everyone. That means funding real participation, so governments, researchers, and civil society with less financial capacity can be in the rooms where the conversations are happening. That needs a dedicated trust fund, similar to the one that funds the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

Inclusivity also means proving that different regulatory systems can work together on equal footing, not just in theory but through a handful of cross-border regulatory sandboxes, piloted by a small group of countries and shared openly. In the financial sector, regulators already do this through the Global Financial Innovation Network, which lets different countries test new financial products together across borders.

These recommendations are absolutely within reach. What matters now is whether we bring the same rigor and political will to following through on what we agreed to. By the time the Global Dialogue reconvenes in May, three things should be in place: an evidence assessment from the scientific panel; a Dialogue agenda that takes up the safety baseline; and a first cross-border sandbox pilot.

This urgency is not abstract. As the Financial Stability Board’s letter and other recent events make clear, these risks are already at our front door, wherever we live.

Governments, companies, and civil society groups spoke with clarity and conviction this summer on what AI governance requires. That work needs to carry forward at the UN this fall and into next year’s talks. We do not have time to relitigate issues that should already be settled. 

If a handful of powerful actors decide how AI is governed, the rest of the world loses out. This summer showed that a wide range of countries and organizations can agree under pressure. The next step is delivering results the world can actually see.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The combined revenues of the companies on the Fortune 500 Europe list rose 4% to a record high of $15.5 trillion this year and profits climbed 3% to $1 trillion. However, on a constant currency basis, the percentage increase in revenues is less than 1% and net profits actually declined. In contrast, the U.S. companies on the Fortune 500 saw profits rise by 12.4% and revenue by 5.4%.

Addressing this growth issue represents a significant challenge for Europe’s largest companies and was the overarching question executives debated at the Fortune CEO Forum, held in London on 16 September.

Here, some of those business leaders share their views on how to drive European growth.

Microsoft

Samer Abu-Ltaif, president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Microsoft

Europe has several strengths. It has talent, great levels of trust and leads on responsible innovation—and it has done for centuries. But at this point in time, there is a need to re-evaluate how we can evolve the regulatory framework that exists in Europe from being sometimes pre-regulating or over-regulating to becoming one that drives innovation. This is what will enable Europe to excel. 

Joe Maher

Nicole Melillo, managing director, Volvo U.K.

I believe Europe’s biggest opportunity for growth is around the sustainability agenda. Everyone shares that common goal to lower carbon emissions. I understand that our industry, the transport industry, is a big contributor. So Volvo very much should be part of the solution, not the problem. We’re working together to make sure, with other manufacturers, that we’re able to move forward in that space.

Mastercard

Kelly Devine, president, Mastercard Europe

Europe has a fantastic history of innovation, and there’s a real opportunity to capitalize on that. European companies need to foster that innovation from the talent that’s coming out of our universities and create the investment capacity. We need to make sure we’re retaining that talent in Europe and answer the question: How do we make sure that we’re creating the programs that enable those entrepreneurs to take the steps they need to be able to grow and scale their businesses here in Europe? 

EDF

Alex Chisholm, U.K. chair, EDF

The lack of competitiveness within Europe is a reflection of high energy costs. It’s not only me who says that, it’s also within the Draghi report [on EU competitiveness] and is reflected in the U.K. government’s industrial strategy, so we need to really address this. With cheaper energy and plentiful electricity, Europe can improve its energy security, and that will be very good overall for our competitiveness and future growth. 

This also represents an opportunity for Europe. The European energy system is only 23% electrified and we are importing 97% of the crude oil that we need and around 83% of the gas. That is money being spent elsewhere in ways that are not sustainable. If we improve our electrification, that will be very good for the environment, economy, and employment. I know that is the ambition that Europe has, but it needs to be more serious in embracing electrification, and the U.K. is part of that, too. 

Bloomberg / Contributor

Hanneke Faber, CEO, Logitech

There are a lot of opportunities for growth in Europe. We’re a very wealthy continent with about a half billion people and we have some real strengths in engineering, innovation, and education, with some of the best technical universities on the planet. 

But Europe needs to improve productivity. AI represents a huge opportunity for this. At Logitech, we’ve built more than 3,000 AI agents and AI has become deeply embedded in the work we do—not just in engineering but across all functions. This is reflected in our operating expenses as a percent of sales—it was up about 200 basis points last year. AI played a big role in that and that’s an opportunity across the continent.

Anant Maheshwari, president and CEO of global regions, Honeywell Technologies

Companies in Europe are grappling with increased energy costs and challenges around energy security, sustainability, and ensuring a continuous supply. The positive is that we are starting from a good position. Nearly half the mix of energy in Europe is already renewable, and there is a lot of focus and openness to try new sources, for example, in biofuels and other new technologies. Europe will continue to lead the world in terms of its push for energy sustainability and this is a good thing, not just for Europe but for the world.

We need to focus on Europe’s strengths and how Europe can position those strengths to the rest of the world. Europe definitely has a lot of capability within life sciences and healthcare, and I think that should remain Europe’s key advantage compared to the rest of the world. Similarly, Europe’s renewed focus on aerospace and defense, is likely to create a lot of positive cycles of additional industries and engineering, that’s going to help Europe going forward. So I strongly believe focusing on industries that are Europe’s strength and doubling down on them represents the best path for sustained growth and success for Europe. 

Anthropic

Pip White, head of U.K. & Ireland, Northern Europe, and Israel, Anthropic

The biggest thing holding Europe back from achieving its growth potential is the CEO and board-level mandate. I still think we’re in the infancy of AI adoption and organizations really understanding the art of what’s possible with this technology. We still see niche use cases of AI around productivity, but organizations should also think about whole-scale transformation. But these discussions need to take place at the board level in order for us to accelerate the opportunities that this technology can deliver.

For the latest coverage and updates from Fortune CEO Forum, as well as insights into the companies on our list, visit this page.

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Good morning. I’ve been thinking about Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk and the prospects for American voters to get the facts they need to make informed choices in the upcoming midterm elections. In-person voting began on Friday, the same day that President Donald Trump announced that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. (Journalists from those media outlets were denied entry and had their credentials deactivated on Saturday.)

Many things will influence how Americans vote at the polls on Nov. 3, but the media and money will certainly color their perceptions.

Let’s start with the media. The quality and accuracy of information that voters receive about government leadership matters. For example, they should know that Trump has traded more stocks since returning to office than every member of Congress combined—making 28,700 trades in 17 months, or about 80 trades every market day. That analysis came from Bloomberg, not the White House. As I’ve written about previously, Trump made more money last year as president than he ever did as a CEO. And there are always scandals on both sides of the aisle. It was a Politico report on sexual assault allegations that forced Democrat Graham Platner to withdraw from the U.S. Senate race in Maine.

Trump’s ban on three outlets he doesn’t like is just the latest in a string of assaults on independent journalism and freedom of speech over the past two years. The president has filed lawsuits and claims demanding more than $70 billion since he declared his candidacy for office in November 2022. Much of that pressure has been exerted on media companies that are already suffering from the impact of AI and disinformation (some of which they have promoted, to be sure). Trump has also been sued over selling sneak peeks of his Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 a month.

What exacerbates this information war is the ability of wealthy donors to shape the narrative by pouring billions into political advertising, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling that lifted the cap on how much corporations, unions, and individuals could spend on independent political communications. That enabled Elon Musk to donate more than $291 million to Republican candidates, political action committees, and other outside spending organizations during the 2024 election, according to OpenSecrets.

One billionaire who does not believe in channeling his wealth into influencing elections is former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who instead has spent more than $100 million to build and fund a nonpartisan, nonprofit initiative to combat political disinformation called USAFacts. I spoke to Ballmer in August 2024, shortly after he’d launched a “Just the Facts” video series and Meta had shut down its CrowdTangle tool to track misinformation. His goal, he told me at the time, was to help journalists and “get people educated, at a minimum.” 

Ballmer is now in the news for channeling his money in other ways, with the NBA suspending him for a year and severely penalizing the Clippers for circumventing its salary-cap rules. Independent journalist Pablo Torre uncovered that story and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work, reinforcing the importance of calling out corporate leaders and politicians both when they do good—and when they fall short. 

Trump is not the first leader to demand deference and attack journalists as corrupt “enemies of the people” for doing their job. I’ve lived and reported in plenty of other places where accurate stories can land journalists in jail. For a media industry that’s already being battered by different forces in Washington and beyond, the 2026 midterms could prove to be a stress test of what kind of system Americans are now willing to accept.

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

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The action seemed all the more noteable as, just weeks before, Bessent announced an intervention to buy up the Japanese yen—the currency of the nation that holds the greatest value in American debt. One interpretation of the move was that it prevented Japan from selling its hoard of U.S. bonds to support its own currency—a move that would have raised yields on U.S. debt, making it more expensive for the government to repay.

Investors began questioning whether Bessent may be trying to shape the very markets that dictate the terms of government borrowing. Rather than “artificially suppressing” yields via “price management,” a “credible fiscal package” out of DC would have had more impact on yields, as famed investor Druckenmiller noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

But Bessent, a self-professed economic historian, a Druckenmiller student, and a notable yen shortseller, knows all of this. Indeed, the Treasury Secretary never stated the buyback scheme was a price-setting exercise—the basis on which some now deem it a failure.

Economists Fortune spoke to suggested that the timing and tone of Bessent’s communication is what has caught the attention of Wall Street, and—potentially—led investors to draw unintended conclusions.

But Bessent may also have revealed to markets more than he calculated: The pain threshold at which the administration is willing to react. In an environment where Bessent is urging investors to look through the “noise,” his actions speak louder than words.

An exercise in responsibility

As the saying goes, the simplest explanation is often correct—and Wharton Professor Christina Parajon Skinner suggests precisely that. Bessent’s scheme is about efficiency, she tells Fortune, or “market plumbing.”

Prof. Skinner served at the Treasury under Bessent from July 2025 until August. While the Ivy League academic didn’t work on the buyback scheme, she said: “From the outside looking in, this very clearly does look like liquidity management, a market functioning exercise, which I don’t at all perceive to have been anything remotely close to a failure.”

The scheme is nothing new, she points out, as regular Treasury repurchasing operations were introduced in May 2024—the change has been in the size of the operation, up from $2 billion per action to $4 billion.

“The Treasury has never been a passive buyer of government debt,” Prof. Skinner said. “If you’re inside Treasury thinking about the market, we see that our bond market is generally working very well, we know what the Treasury market is, but we know that there can be some bumps in the long run that disrupt market functioning,” such as the 10-year going over 5%. “In the last administration, [this] is … precisely one of the reasons why this buyback facility was created, to provide liquidity.”

Yields shifting higher, combined with a confluence of events around national debt and yen intervention, means it’s “easy to put together a story that this was motivated by something else,” Prof. Skinner said. But she believes it would be an “error” to overextend the notion of market efficiency into a question of setting equilibrium prices in the bond market.

“The Treasury Secretary’s responsibility for the debt market is to ensure it’s functioning, to ensure that the government can borrow in the most efficient market possible, and to think about the tools that were already created for him,” she adds. “It would be actually disappointing and surprising if [Bessent] just sat on his hands and said, ‘OK, we’re going to let this shock not be absorbed, even though we have the capacity to help the market be more efficient during this period of time.'”

A policy twist

Macquarie’s global FX and rates strategist, Thierry Wizman, also doesn’t see a fiscal management question mark hanging over Bessent’s bond plan. Like Prof. Skinner, he is interested in Bessent’s justification of “liquidity,” but sees something different between the lines.

“When I see people debating what someone meant, I typically tend to go to the horse’s mouth,” Wizman tells Fortune. “He’s speaking about liquidity, and the question is how do you interpret that, especially since he didn’t talk about … the deficit [or] a yield target. The Treasury Department is always manipulating the Treasury market; that’s nothing new.”

But Wizman does spy a motivation in the global market, one of high issuance of government debt not only in the U.S., but also out of fellow developed economies: “If there’s a pressing need to allow AI infrastructure to get built out and financed, you certainly wouldn’t want all of that government debt issuance to crowd out the corporate issuance, and therefore we need to make space.” Reducing yields on government debt might also reduce the cost of the corporate debt that competes with it, making AI funding cheaper to obtain.

One might argue that if Bessent wanted to funnel funds toward AI, thereby supporting the capital expenditure that is driving U.S. economic growth at present, he would have signaled it. Bessent’s tone has changed in the past couple of months: He has been sharp with critics of the bond scheme, telling  former White House strategist Steve Bannon on a podcast last week: “If some of the Bloomberg Terminal bros are unhappy with what I’m doing, well, that’s too bad.”

Wizman argued that it’s not the Treasury Secretary’s job to promote one sector over another, but points out that Bessent’s boss—President Trump—has been doing precisely that.

“It’s implicit by what the president is saying that they want to run the economy hot for AI, and then it’s the job of the Treasury to execute on that broader intention … the president sets overarching policy, especially industrial policy,” Wizman said. “So [Bessent] said he wants to create liquidity, that implies there’s not enough liquidity—then the question is, why is there not enough liquidity?”

It seems that AI investment is doing just fine without any help—Goldman Sachs estimates global AI investment will exceed $1 trillion in 2026—but the proof will be in the data, Wizman suggests: “You’re gonna have to wait until the end of the year to see if everyone got financed, you’re gonna have to wait until next year to see if the productivity gains from AI will in fact help grow and disinflate the economy” (which on its own right would bring yields down) “there’s a lot of things you need to wait for before you can judge this.”

Giving the game away

While the motivation and intended consequence of the Treasury’s buyback scheme is up for debate, the fact that the mighty department intervened has taught the market a new lesson: The conditions under which it feels compelled to act.

Elevated bond yields aren’t contained to the U.S.; 10-year yields have also been tracking higher in the U.K., Japan, and France, and the fundamentals suggest that government borrowing and inflation expectations will keep them high.

With these risk factors prevailing, the buyback operation may have set something of a precedent for reaction functions, suggests Columbia Business School’s Yiming Ma. She told Fortune: “This kind of communication sometimes works in the short term because it signals commitment to the market that a big buyer is going to step in in times of need. But sometimes it also can backfire because the market will look at this and say, ‘Well, the fact that you need to come out and say and do these things implies that this market has already lost the confidence of investors.'”

“I think that’s why it’s such a slippery slope for the U.S. Treasury to do this, because the U.S. dollar has been the global safe asset for a very long time, one that people tend to buy in bad times, who do not need these kinds of interventions that are much more reminiscent of more developing or emerging market economies whose currencies whose funding conditions are much more uncertain.”  

The intervention is also something of a Pandora’s box, Prof. Ma suggests, because if markets now expect Treasury to step in when yields get too high, and it doesn’t, then confidence will fall dramatically: “Everyone wants to have investors believe that everything is great. Now, whether communication helps, and to what extent it helps, or whether communication hurts, I think that’s a very slippery slope.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The company took a step toward that goal Monday, announcing that Moderna co-founder Robert “Bob” Langer and Turing Award-winning AI researcher Yann LeCun have joined its scientific advisory board, along with Jens Nielsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute, and Fabian Theis, a computational biologist who directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. Langer is also joining the company’s board of directors as an observer.

For decades, developing new medicines, especially cell therapies that use living cells rather than chemical compounds, has depended on slow, expensive trial-and-error lab work. The Boston-based Cellular Intelligence (CI) is trying to apply the same kind of pattern-recognition that powers modern AI systems to biology: feed a model enough data on how cells respond to different signals, and it may be able to predict how to make a cell do what you want, without testing every possibility by hand first. Putting LeCun, an AI researcher with no biology background, on the same board as Langer, a medical researcher with no AI background, is the company’s way of showing it has real expertise on both sides.

“What matters to me is whether the science can lead to something that makes a difference for patients, and whether the people involved can carry it through,” Langer told Fortune. “I have been doing this for over 50 years, and [CI’s CEO] Micha and the scientific team he has brought together are among the very best I have seen.”

Micha Breakstone, the CEO of CI, said the addition of the four new members precisely cater to the company’s foundation as “a marriage of three disciplines: genomics, developmental biology and AI.”

“A world model learns how a system behaves and predicts what happens when you act on it,” he told Fortune. “For us, the system is a living cell: the basic computational unit of life, receiving signals, processing information and changing its behavior in response.”

Combining AI with medicine

The board brings a special mix of medical and technology expertise. LeCun won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his foundational work on deep learning and led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab as the company’s chief AI scientist from 2013 to 2025. He left the company last December to launch AMI Labs, a company built around “world models”—AI systems designed to learn how a physical system behaves and predict what happens when it’s acted on—where he now serves as executive chairman.

Langer is an MIT Institute Professor, the school’s highest faculty rank, and holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents. Beyond Moderna, he has co-founded roughly 40 companies and received the National Medal of Science. Jens Nielsen is chief executive of the BioInnovation Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Copenhagen-based engine for founding and scaling life-science companies. Fabian Theis directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, co-founded the Human Cell Atlas, an international project to map every cell type in the human body, and won Germany’s 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for machine-learning methods.

The company is bringing “a proprietary engine for generating biological data over time, an AI foundation model built to learn from that data, and an owned clinical program where it can test the practical value of its predictions,” Langer said. Early internal benchmarks show stronger prediction results than existing models in both healthy development and cancer, “despite never training on a single cancer cell,” he added.

Breakstone also credited OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, Fidji Simo, with helping shape the company’s direction while serving as a strategic advisor and consultant. “Her guidance has helped me sharpen our strategy and think through how we build a company of lasting significance,” he said. Simo joined OpenAI in the newly created role last year after leading Instacart, and her advisory ties to Cellular Intelligence add another AI-world name to the company’s roster of outside voices.

AI solving for Parkinson’s

The advisory additions follow the company’s acquisition in May of global rights to STEM-PD, an experimental Parkinson’s disease cell therapy that Novo Nordisk shelved when it shut down its cell-therapy division last October. The therapy, designed to replace dopamine-producing neurons lost to Parkinson’s, carries FDA Fast Track designation and is Phase 2-ready. Novo Nordisk took an equity stake in Cellular Intelligence as part of the deal and remains eligible for future milestones and royalties.

“Novo Nordisk selected CI to advance STEM-PD, and we acquired global rights to a Phase 2-ready Parkinson’s program with FDA IND clearance and Fast Track designation. Novo also made a strategic equity investment in CI. We see that as a strong vote of confidence in the next chapter of this work,” Breakstone said.

STEM-PD remains the company’s only owned clinical program, but Breakstone said Cellular Intelligence plans to license its models to pharmaceutical partners for paid drug-discovery work and to develop additional medicines itself or with partners over time.

Langer said his involvement with Cellular Intelligence sits alongside a number of other biotech ventures he’s backed this year, including Vivtex’s $2.1 billion deal with Novo Nordisk, his son Michael Langer’s venture firm T.Rx Capital, and his daughter Susan Langer’s RNA startup Soufflé Therapeutics.

Cellular Intelligence, founded in 2023 and formerly known as Somite.ai, has raised more than $70 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Novo Nordisk. STEM-PD remains an investigational therapy.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

According to a Bloomberg analysis published this week, he has made roughly 28,700 in 17 months, or about 80 trades every market day.

It’s a new habit of Trump’s. In his first term, Trump’s financial disclosures consisted mostly of his real estate and privately held businesses. 

For his second term, the periodic reports he filed through early 2026 showed an account buying municipal and corporate bonds—more than $100 million by August 2025 and more than $337 million in all—along with bank preferred securities and bond ETFs.

The stock trading surfaced in May of this year, when a first-quarter filing listed roughly 3,600 transactions in 90 days. Then the annual disclosure, released June 30 at nearly a thousand pages, showed more than 21,000 trades in 2025, worth between $600 million and $1.86 billion, at 85 per market day. Trump lists eight separate investment accounts but doesn’t give any indication of which institutions manage them.

“I believe that that is a huge problem,” Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush and now teaches securities law at the University of Minnesota, told Fortune. “I’ve gone through every president. I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.”

Since Lyndon Johnson, essentially every president has used a blind trust, held index funds, or just owned Treasuries. Jimmy Carter, for example, put the family peanut business in a blind trust that eventually sold it.

However, Trump’s portfolio is handled differently. In May, after the stock trades appeared, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fortune the assets are held in a trust managed by the president’s children. Eric Trump posted that any suggestion a family member was buying individual stocks “would be a lie and blatantly false.” 

“There’s a financial conflict of interest if he has an ownership interest in the account,” Painter said. “It doesn’t matter who manages it.”

In a statement, the White House’s Ingle told Fortune that third-party financial institutions independently manage the portfolio through “computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.”

He did not answer questions about which institutions manage the portfolio or why the White House described a family trust in May. “There are no conflicts of interest,” the statement said.

Fortune’s review of the president’s first-quarter filing in May found the account bought up to $1.38 million of DoorDash stock; in April, Trump had DoorDash deliver a McDonald’s order to the White House for a tipped-worker tax event.

The account sold hyperscaler stocks in the $5 million-$25 million range on Feb. 10, the day after a chip-tariff carveout leaked. It bought energy stocks in the weeks after the Iran war began, as Trump was downplaying the conflict as a short-term conflagration. It bought Cal-Maine, the country’s largest egg producer, during the egg shortage and sold it two months later for two to five times more.

Every executive branch official except the president and vice president has to abide by 18 U.S.C. 208, a criminal statute that bars participation in government matters that affect one’s own holdings. “If he were Treasury Secretary, he’d have a big, big problem with that account,” Painter said.

He was careful, though, not to allege that anyone is trading on government information, which could constitute criminal insider trading, explaining that stock-trading disclosures can’t prove that. 

That, Painter said, is the argument for a ban. A new House measure, passed in July and attached to a voter-ID bill, bars members, spouses and dependent children from trading stocks; Trump endorsed it in his State of the Union address, saying it should pass “without delay” so Congress “cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.”

Yet when Sen. Josh Hawley advanced a version last July that would have extended the ban to the president and vice president—not until 2029, after Trump leaves office—Trump called him a “pawn” playing “right into the dirty hands of the Democrats,” and a “second-tier Senator.”

To Painter, this is all familiar. On Jan. 6, 2021—”obviously, there was some other news that day,” he added—he and Indiana University law professor Donna Nagy published a letter to congressional leadership calling for a ban on stock trading by members, the president and the vice president.

Neither party acted on it; Republicans wanted to avoid embarrassing Trump, while Democrats wanted to avoid embarrassing Nancy Pelosi, whose husband is an active trader.

The stakes are pretty clear to Painter. “If the president owns a bunch of oil company stocks, he’s making money if the price of oil goes up,” he said. “So if he bombs Iran and the price of oil goes up and he owns oil company stocks, he’s making money, and the rest of us are paying for  $6 gas.”

The account bought energy stocks in March.

“If it’s like a mutual fund,” Painter said, “why not just buy a mutual fund?”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The era of elevated inflation that began during the COVID pandemic has eroded the value of $100,000 to the point that Americans earning that much are hunting for bargains like everyone else.

Walmart has previously noted that more affluent customers are shopping at the discount chain. And now they are patronizing deep discounters like dollar stores.

At the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference on Tuesday, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said core customers, whom he defined as those making less than $45,000 a year, change their shopping behavior when gas prices hit $4 a gallon.

For example, they tend to buy closer to home, shop more often, and buy less on each trip. The frequency of shopping goes up because customers don’t know what the next week will hold and will buy what they can, when they can.

“But the interesting thing with this economy, because of the other sustained headwinds of inflation over the years that have passed, even that middle to upper middle is acting more like a lower-income shopper these days,” he said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

The national average for a price of gasoline is now $4.476 a gallon, up from $3.189 a year ago, according to AAA, as President Donald Trump’s war on Iran disrupts global oil markets. The price of diesel has soared to $6.50, making items shipped by trucks more expensive.

But it’s not just energy costs. Utility bills, new and used cars, insurance, food, and caregiving costs have all jumped. Vasos said even those making $100,000 a year or more are feeling the squeeze.

“I would tell you, what we’re hearing more and more from them is ‘I don’t feel like I’m higher income at $100,000 any longer,’ because of all of the headwinds that I just mentioned,” he added. “So we believe at Dollar General, we’re in a really good position to service all of the different demographics of what we have.”

Still, consumers remain very resilient, and the biggest reason is that they have stayed employed, Vasos explained.

Indeed, the ability of consumers to adapt to higher prices has been a hallmark of the U.S. economy lately. The latest retail sales report showed a better-than-expected 1.2% increase in August and a 1.1% gain after excluding gasoline.

As long employment holds, Dollar General’s costumers will find a way to navigate the inflation landscape, he predicted.

“Having 2,000 items at or below $1 is very meaningful for the consumer, always has, but especially in this environment,” Vasos added.

Other signs have emerged that making $100,000 isn’t enough to avoid economic anxiety. A survey from the Harris Poll last year found that 64% of six-figure earners said their income isn’t a milestone for success but merely the bare minimum for staying afloat.

In fact, even those making $200,000 or more have resorted to financial tactics that are often associated with less wealthy consumers. For example, 64% said they’ve used rewards points to pay for essentials, 50% have used “buy now, pay later” plans for purchases under $100, and 46% rely on credit cards to make ends meet.

And Michael Green, chief strategist and portfolio manager for Simplify Asset Management, wrote a viral Substack post last year arguing the real poverty line should be $140,000.

Conventional gauges don’t capture how much Americans are struggling with the cost of living, even households earning six figures, he said.

“If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at $140,000,” Green added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Carney said the countries will task their space agencies and defense ministries to develop and share infrastructure, including launch systems and ground-based reception facilities. They also agreed to expand cooperation in energy, telecommunications, climate resilience and economic development.

The meeting comes days after Carney embraced the prospect of Canada becoming the European Union’s first associate member and argued that deeper ties with Europe would make Canada less vulnerable to economic coercion by any single country.

“Canada and Europe will build an alliance for the future that will strengthen our collective resilience so we can live our lives as we choose based on the values that we share,” Carney said Sunday.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, demands for economic concessions and repeated talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state have pushed the Canadian government to reduce its dependence on its neighbor and pursue deeper economic, security and political relationships with Europe.

Macron welcomed Carney on Sunday at the airport of the French territoryoff Newfoundland’s coast.

“This is an important moment,” Macron said Saturday upon arrival in Saint-Pierre-et- Miquelon, home to about 5,800 people.

Talks “will allow us … to strengthen our bilateral economic ties and defense relationship,” Macron said.

Macron also said that Sunday’s talks are part of broader efforts to help France secure oil and gas supplies as the Iran war disrupts global energy markets and raises fears of higher prices for fuel and other essentials.

“Canada is a country with significant resources of critical minerals and rare earths. It is also a major oil and natural gas producer,” Macron said. “What we want to do is conclude agreements to secure more liquefied natural gas that can be shipped to Europe’s Atlantic coast.”

The leaders discussed deepening the Canada-France partnership in strategic sectors, including aerospace, energy, critical minerals and advanced technologies such as quantum computing, satellites and supercomputing, Carney’s office said in a statement.

Sunday’s meeting also follows Trump’s announcement of a deal on Greenland that would expand the U.S. military presence there while keeping the island under Danish control. The agreement followed months of threats by Trump to seize the semiautonomous territory of a NATO ally.

Macron welcomed the agreement Saturday.

“Danish sovereignty is being respected, international law is being respected,” he said. “Anything that helps ease tensions is a good thing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com