Fortune Magazine Features

Energy companies dominated Fortune's annual list, which ranks companies based on growth in revenue, profits, and stock returns.

The Fastest-Growing Companies of 2024

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Fortune just released the 2024 Fortune Global 500(™), the definitive list of the world’s largest corporations ranked by revenue for the 2023 fiscal year.

Introducing the 2024 Fortune Global 500

The Fortune Global 500

From 60-year old Coach bags to Delta’s first passenger plane, take a trip down memory lane at some of corporate America’s most well-known brands.

Take a tour of some of businesses' biggest archives

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In the archive, we have over 25,000 items. This includes all the original catalogs, all the handbags, all the ready to wear pieces, anything that has a coach stamp on it comes through the archives. Behind me is Delta's first passenger service. Airplane carried five people had wicker seats and was not pressurized. Think about how much laundry has changed over the past 200 years, you know, doing laundry in a tub with bars of soap to then using early powders and flakes and you know, the beginning appliances to then moving to liquids to then moving to pods, still similar chores, but better technologies. And we want to make sure that we capture that evolution in the archives. A lot of the larger companies, particularly those with long histories have both archives and museums and that is to inspire employees to make them feel like they belong to something bigger to themselves. And it's also a way to guide the C SUITE when they're having to do decision making. And that can include things like how was a crisis handled a decade ago. It serves also innovation. So whether you're a designer, a coach or somebody trying to find a new twist on shaving cream at PNG. And so it's a mix of both and that's why companies invest money and hire actually real historians with masters and doctorates in history. Delta has both a museum that's open to the public and is actually a very popular tourist attraction in Atlanta as well as archives. It has things like press releases, minutes from board meetings, presentations from strategy sessions, etcetera, etcetera that are important for the corporate history aspect of it. As the manager of the archives, I take care of Delta Airlines corporate archives that they have been collecting um since the 19 fifties. This is actually a piece of glassware. This is from Delta's first alcoholic beverage service. So this would have held champagne in the late fifties. Delta started, they called Royal Beverage Service and this is such a fun menu. Delta started as a crop dusting company actually in Macon, Georgia, which a lot of people don't realize in 1925 quickly moved to Monroe Louisiana and the name Delta was actually coined by Catherine Fitzgerald. She was known as Miss Fits. So she was the longtime assistant to the principal founder of Delta Ce Woolman. Delta started passenger service in 1929 then this kind of airplane. Um we actually have one, a similar one in the museum behind me is the travel air and it was Delta's first passenger service. Airplane carried five people had wicker seats and was not pressurized. I'm Kelly Moore, executive Director of the Delta Flight Museum here in Atlanta, Georgia. In my opinion, the most interesting piece is Spirit of Delta A 767 aircraft ship 102 that was purchased by employees, friends and members of the community and donated to Delta. She was dedicated on December 15th, 1982 and she flew for 30 years and we are in the first-class cabin which doesn't look anything like the first-class cabins of today. She has IFE that is on a screen mounted to the front of the cabin. We no longer use overhead projectors. One of my favorite things about uh, this airplane that you don't see anymore are the telephones and I can remember seeing people use them. You would slide your credit card and I can't remember what it was per minute, but it was some crazy amount per minute. So behind me, we have then and nail. We have the first class seats from the 19 sixties conveyor 880. You can see the bucket seats from the sixties and then behind me on this side, on my left is the life flat seats of today on the A 350. I prefer the life flat. This is my absolute favorite Delta uniform. It's dubbed the Huntsman 1969 to 70 summer uniform. You can see it comes with its own smock, its own belt, its own hat coach was founded in 1941. It started as a men's wallets and briefcase company originally from a baseball glove, leather, from a baseball glove that was repurposed. Of course, over the decades that has evolved its single against category are women's handbags. And it really hit the big time in the sixties when they hired a designer called Bonnie Cash and who absolutely revolutionized coach and brought it closer to the world of luxury and fashion and not just, you know, functional well made wallets. She was an absolutely trailblazing designer with the locks on her bags that continued to inspire design to this very day. This is the turn lock which was created in the 19 sixties by Bonnie Cash in. And the fun fact about this is that she was inspired by her 19 forties convertible and that the turn lock was what kept the top on of her car. So she redesigned it and placed it on a bag and that's why we have this today. My name is Ryan Borg and I am the manager of the coach archives in the archive. We have over 25,000 items. This includes all the original catalogs, all the handbags, all the ready to wear pieces, anything that has a coach stamp on it comes through the archive. The archive is primarily used by our design teams. They will come down here and look at all the bags for inspiration and that could be from proportions of the bag constructions of the bag and how they were constructed back in the sixties or seventies, but also for color and for the structure and the integrity of the leather. So in this case, here, we start with our 19 forties and 19 fifties collection. Uh when Miles Kahn first started coach um and that continues in this whole case with our 19 sixties, which is when Bonnie Cash and first started in 1962. Uh This is her first bag that she did for us. The shopping bag she did not like seeing women carrying around a brown paper bag down Fifth Avenue. So she designed this more lux shopping bag for people to carry their luxury items in one task for the archivist at coach to do is to source out bags that are rare to find bags that we don't have yet or currently looking for. And one bag in particular is the chubby clutch from 1964 where I recently found this through outside vendors who are willing to part with it. So this is our case of the 19 seventies bag collection. Bonnie Cashen designed up until 1973. At this time. In my opinion, she made one of the most iconic bags for coach, which is the devils. As you can see here. This is a bag that we still design and create today with little to zero modifications. You see how the handbags both reflect and push fashion as you get a sense from the sixties to now, it's really a lot of fun. Um, you know, you obviously have to be there with somebody, but I can match on my own. I could easily spend hours looking at all these products. Procter and Gamble has been around for decades and is the largest consumer products manufactured in the United States. They're behind all sorts of products, Tide and Charmin Gillette, etc, Procter and Gamble is a giant and has always had innovation in its blood. There's a lot more competition now for conser products. And so the pressure to innovate more quickly is great. The P and G Heritage Center collects preserves and shares all the great stories and objects and products and innovations from our past as a catalyst to inspire the employees as they work on the future. My name is Shane Meeker. I am the P and G company historian and corporate storyteller. The origin story of PNG really goes back to two people, an English candle maker named William Proctor and an Irish soap maker named James Gamble. And they end up coming over to Cincinnati, looking to start up their respective businesses and ended up actually becoming partners because they married sisters and it was their father in law's idea that they should join forces. And in 1837 they officially became Proctor and Gamble selling both soap and candles. Not only do we have the original partnership agreement, but we've got some very old handle cases including also some original bars of soap too from around that time period. So a day in the life in the Heritage Center is not only virtual and online requests coming from our employees but also employees just stopping in looking through the artifacts, going through the timelines asking about the stories. And we're pulling everything from photos to content to information that we then can send to them, so they can use that to research the projects that they're doing now. So we have a lot of great artifacts here. But one of the most fun is one of the mock ups of the original prototype for the Swiffer Wet Jet. And that story honestly goes back to consumer. As boss for us, we had started doing some in-home research around mopping. And while watching a consumer mop, she looked at the researchers and said, hey, I tell you if you really want to clean up something, please clean up the closet that I have to put all this mopping stuff in that then became the insight that would turn into creating this great all in one solution that we call Swiffer wetjet. And when you look at the prototype, it's really fun because it leverages areas of our expertise in different categories. Our hard surface cleaning expertise with Mr Clean while also leveraging our absorbency and non woven expertise in pampers, diapers and always pads. The wall of failures is one of our most popular exhibits in the archives and it's really centered around a growth mindset way of thinking because, you know, quite honestly, if you're not failing, you're probably not innovating. And so, you know, being around for 187 years, we try to save all of the projects that we can and all the learnings from them. And just because an idea fails, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. You know, there's so many things that could have influenced that from everything, from habit to technology, to business model, to consumer behavior, to whatever. And so for example, Tide Pods I pod is an incredible success for us that we launched in 2012. But believe it or not, the first actual unit dose detergent that we launched was called Tide Ready Packs in 1960 and that failed. So what you're looking at is 52 years of learning from failure and tempting new and different innovations to get there, just like in other spheres of life, history tends to repeat itself. And I think these archives and these museums really guide companies in harnessing their history so they can continue making products that are contemporary. I think what this shows though is that things move in cycles, what is old is new again if you do it intelligently and in a well guided way, which is what I think all these facilities help these companies to do.

The Aflac duck doesn’t have a salary but is "king of the place," Amos says.

Aflac CEO Dan Amos explains why he bet the company on a duck

Photograph by Kendrick Brinson for Fortune

Leadership

Much too much. Well, our advertising agency was in Central Park just sitting on the bench and they heard ducks and they noticed that it sounded like a light. And so the quack quack like a became the idea and that's how we got in it. The survey showed us that he was wonderful and people enjoyed him and he continued to, he's king of the place, but he doesn't have a salary. He really doesn't do anything but he'll send you the bills. Ok. Warren Buffett would be a Fortune 500 CEO that I look up to. He's the most tenured CEO and he's given fabulous returns to the shareholders. It's been a lot of fun. Uh, goal setting is what A CEO has to do. And achieving those goals is a lot of fun. So I've enjoyed it. Well, I've been CEO for 34 years and I've seen a lot and I think when you work with a good organization, you have to stay with them. And Aflac has been a great place to work.

Fortune's 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list ranks global companies that have seen the most growth in revenues, profits, and stock returns over a three-year period.

This industry showed the fastest growth in the past three years

Electric vehicles, food waste prevention, and helping displaced people find jobs are some of the priorities on this year’s Change the World list, Fortune’s yearly roundup of companies enacting positive impact on people and the planet.

59 companies that are changing the world: From Tesla to Chobani

Electric vehicles, food waste prevention, and helping displaced people find jobs are some of the priorities on this year’s Change the World list.

To change the world. This recognizes companies that are using the profit motive and using their business models to have a positive impact on people and on the planet. It's also important to us that you are making money. We do want to make sure that this is not charity but business. The list isn't ranked. I like to use the metaphor of a hall of fame, for example, in football or baseball. Each year, a new class of great performers gets elected to the hall of Fame, but nobody really tries to rank them by how good they are relative to each other. This year, especially with climate change awareness. Becoming more and more urgent. We zeroed in a little more tightly on efforts to sharply lower carbon dioxide emissions. We gave quite a bit of space to companies in the United States that are working to accelerate the rate at which Americans convert from internal combustion engines to electric drivers are worried that they might not have access to electric chargers if they buy an ev one of the companies that's doing the most to fight against that is a company called Charge point. They operate a huge network of charging stations across North America and all these evs are going to need batteries as well. So we are recognizing a South Korean company called SK on. They have been partnering with Ford and Hyundai and Volkswagen and other companies to essentially build battery factories here in the United States. So that the United States has a safe supply chain, food waste actually generates quite a bit of greenhouse gas when it rots in landfills. So we look at companies that are trying to make sure that less of the food that we produce winds up getting thrown away. This year. In particular, we saw more companies than usual that are working on figuring out how to reach displaced people. There's a record high number of displaced people in the world right now and a lot of companies are trying to figure out how can I give them the skills to have some economic security? How can I help them find the right place to settle, help them become my customers by making their lives more economically stable. For example, we're recognizing Chobani which launched a few years ago what's called tense Partnership for refugees. This is a coalition of about 300 companies worldwide that have all committed to providing job training and jobs for the displaced populations that does not immediately generate a profit, but it does create a workforce that can then work for those companies. So in the long run, they are benefiting by filling their own labor needs with a population that really needs the help. There's a lot of attention being given by companies to helping younger people and people who aren't sort of financially established in their lives get a little bit of traction in the broader economy. Isu they help younger people and people who have been having financial difficulties, build up their credit scores. So what is Susu will do is help these people essentially earn credit for things like on time rent payments is Suu reports. Those to credit bureaus, the credit bureaus register them and it bumps up the payers scores that's going to help them down the road when they need to borrow money for an auto loan or to get a mortgage. Abbi the big health care company, they have a very innovative a program designed to help younger employees use the company's 401k program to help them pay down their student loans whenever they make a payment on those loans. The company puts a matching contribution in their retirement savings. That's important because often younger people have to really choose between saving for the future and paying off their education. Thanks to some recent changes in federal tax law, a lot of other companies are going to be able to follow their lead. Starting next year, the population of companies that are trying to have a positive social impact is definitely growing younger workers, millennials, Gen Z very much want to work for companies that have a positive purpose. More and more companies are recognizing that to invest in protecting the planet, to invest in building up the skills of the people in their communities is going to essentially protect their revenue and their profits and allow them to continue to operate and continue to create wealth. Fortune publishes the change the world list partly because we're still quite bullish and quite optimistic about the ability of business to solve different social problems. In fact, in a lot of instances, we think that businesses can act and make a difference when governments are struggling to do so. At the same time, we are a really established business media brand. Our voice means something in the business community. And we believe that by recognizing companies that are making a difference, we're adding another incentive for people to do great things and boast about them.

This year’s list tells a story of inflation and global tensions.

An in-depth look at the 2023 Fortune Global 500

Illustration by Chris DeLorenzo for Fortune

The global 500 ranks the largest companies in the world by revenue. The smallest company on this year's list has about $31 billion in revenue. In contrast, the smallest company in the US 500 this year has about $7 billion in revenue. While the world is getting more fragmented in ways, the risks are getting more connected and correlated. So I think the challenge is resiliency. Mortgage rates rose more than 3%. Home prices rose by 8% that impacts affordability for home ownership. The economics of every geography are slightly different but there is definitely a commonality around inflation and general uncertainty. 2022 really stood out for um expectations that we were going to have a recession. There was also an increase in focus on us. China tensions. A lot of talk about decoupling and a big transformation to the global commodity market with a real redirection of commodity exports as Russia directed more of its exports east and south. And we saw that Europe did a pivot to the west and away from Russia. Inflation was starting to rise before Russia invaded Ukraine, but that invasion affected the world's oil and food supplies and drove prices up for that. The conventional wisdom is that inflation hurts corporate profits. The profits of the global 500 were down slightly from last year, but collectively they still earned almost $3 trillion in profits, which is the second highest total ever. Number one is Walmart. It is their 10th consecutive year. At number one. Number two is Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian national crude oil producer. Number three is state grid which is China's big National Electric Utility. Number four is Amazon and number five is China National Petroleum. The story that the US 500 tells has recently been very much a story about the huge domination of big tech, all of these companies building tech expertise into huge businesses. And of course, that's an important global story. But the Global 500 reminds you that the rise of big tech is just one story. All those companies are still there. But you also look down the list and you're seeing huge European and Chinese oil companies, big global auto manufacturers like Volkswagen and Toyota. And it reminds you how much of the global workforce and how much global capital is still tied up in laboring in these dominant industries of the 20th century. All of these companies are trying to transition into a 21st century economy that might be greener and higher tech, but they're not there yet. And this list kind of proves that we need a holistic policy that the into consideration, energy reliability, affordability and energy security, oil and gas will continue to be part of the energy mix for decades. Oil prices surged in 2022. And as a result, Saudi Aramco's revenue was up about 50% over two 1021. So they were just within about $8 billion of catching Wal Mart, which in terms of companies this big, that's like a rounding error came really, really close. They also had the most profitable year that any global 500 company has ever had. They earned 159 billion with a B dollars in profits. There are more companies from greater China than there are from the US. But the US companies on the global 500 collectively brought in quite a bit more revenue than the ones from greater China. We are a long way, a long, long way from being anywhere close to the kind of representation in leadership, whether that's of companies or governments or institutions that better represents the societies that we serve. May today, close to 60% of our employee base are people of color as a Latina myself. I'm passionate about diversity inclusion, equal opportunity. First of all, it's good for business, it responds to changes we're seeing in demographics and it honors our mission. I think that in 2023 the market is still waiting to see this recession because of the magnitude of rate hikes that we've seen across central banks and what kind of slowdown will it be? Is a soft landing possible? Is it going to be a mild recession or is there a risk that the longer this is delayed, that you could have a synchronized global downturn? We have yet to see a resolution of Russia's war on Ukraine. We've seen permanent shifts into the commodity markets, but we'll continue to see that trade patterns, you know, investment flows, supply chain resilience, reducing dependencies remain very much in the narrative. And I think you will see that the global South, the emerging market countries are going to play a bigger role. Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Indonesia. Economic growth in 2023 is predicted to grow in the 4.5 up to 5.3% we believe will grow due to the potential increase of domestic economy ahead. And I think when it comes to, to Russia, when it comes to the pandemic, um it's a climate change and to those challenges that are part of the agenda for us. Uh leaders of our generation, I think we we were not trained for any of those. And these past few years of pandemic geopolitical crisis, supply chain disruption, climate change and inflationary pressures mark the dawn of a new era which I call multipolar. This new multi polar world requires companies to become better, to become ever more agile and to constantly transform and adapt. I don't know what the future is going to look like. But what we've learned as Walmart through the last few years, in particular is staying agile, staying nimble, having data, really thinking about how we use that is critical. You need to adapt much faster, you no longer have time to learn everything you need to learn as much as you can and then act.

Employees share what it’s like to work for some of the companies on this year’s list.

Introducing the 2023 100 Best Companies to Work For list

Fortune's 2023 100 Best Companies to Work For list

I love coming to see my team each day at work. Everybody here is so appreciative of you and they really go above and beyond to ensure that they tell you how much they value what you do. I love because of our and our mission. Literally, it is a great place to work and a great place to live when you walk in the door, you know, you belong here. Metlife is very supportive of career development and internal mobility. So I've been at Metlife for 19 years and I've moved around to 89 different jobs in different regions and different departments. There's not a lot of micro management, you know, in contrast with a lot of trust type leadership and that really empowers our team to be self starters. A few years ago, my husband and I went on a journey to start our own family and we were able to leverage our parental leave. We've opened up the diploma and degree program for hourly staff members. And I'm happy to say that I've enrolled to continue my education and work towards another degree. Even just little things like, you know, free ice cream upstairs just at the little bar, we talked to our employees about any of the issues that they want to talk about. And I think it's really important today because I think employees want to work for human beings. They don't want to work for executives. You deserve to be valued. And at a company that is going to help you grow thrive and succeed. Is this a job? No, this is a purpose and this is a passion.

The “Call Her Daddy” host, who struck a $60 million deal with Spotify, answers some of our burning questions.

Podcaster Alex Cooper shares her best dating advice, what she can’t live without, and more

Podcaster Alex Cooper's best dating advice

Alex Cooper shares her best dating advice, what she can’t live without, and more

Ali versus new york, you can't ask that question. Both, both hosts, I love you. There is no big hi, I'm Alex cooper and I am the host and creator and call her daddy okay, fill in the blank, having $60 million product ideal in like it's like getting to wear your previous sweatpants every single day, just having each, that's the worst. Oh wow, I don't even, I was gonna say, I don't think I've ever been on a bad place to date only because I'm a control freak that I would never ever let it be a bad place or a bad experience. It can be bad, but where we're going, it's never a problem and you can't live without, I can't live without my don't move yourself and trying to make the other person like you who has been your favorite color daddy interview. I these are the hardest questions, I don't think I can answer that. I think every single person, daddy, I'm so grateful they come on and share with me and daddy, like I love everyone in different like my Children, right? Like you love all your Children in different ways, What about the weirdest interaction you've ever had? All of them are weird because it's like we're family and everyone's always like, oh you guys know each other from high school, I'm like, no, I just met her, but like daddy gay, so it's always weird, we just like jump into knowing each other and like telling each other our life stories and whenever my mom's walking to make the kind of friend from high school and like, yeah, basically, you know everything about each other.

Chris Kempczinski discusses the challenges the fast food chain faced departing Russia.

McDonald’s CEO on why it was so difficult to leave Russia

Features

Mcdonald's was embraced by the Russian population after 32 years being there for Mcdonald's to leave. Russia was far more complex than most people would realize. They risked enormous boycotts. Bad will the whole accepted view in the western world is that Russia is doing something terrible in Ukraine and it's the moral obligation of people and businesses everywhere not to help that. So that's what they came to realize. And they left. I went to Mcdonald's headquarters in Chicago and sat down with the ceo of chris, kempinski chris, you've said this decision to exit Russia was a very complicated one. What made it so complicated? I think for us the complication was both the size of our business. We have a very large business in Russia 850 restaurants, whole supply chain that that's connected to that. But also the fact that we have 62,000 employees in Russia and thinking through both what's good for the business, but also how do we make sure that we're taking care of our people and doing that at the scale that we're talking about. How do you just make sure that the restaurants are secure that you understand where your people are, Is everybody safe? So for the first few days it was working through all the operational elements of, you know, now a very different situation in Ukraine. The arrival of that first McDonald's in 1990 that symbolized the opening of Russia. The opening of Russia to the outside world, which was full of optimism. People were excited about it. The departure of Mcdonald's symbolizes just the opposite the closing to the outside world was in a way which is again finding to say about the fast food, but that's it, you know, that's true. It was the standard of quality. It was also the man of communication smiles again, something unknown to many. It was one of the symbols of the United States. It was famous when it opened. Everybody knew the story. McDonald's arrived in Russia in Moscow in 1990 and this was global news at the time, 30,000 people were served on that first day, the Soviet Union had been very closed and now it was opening to the west and nothing symbolized the West America in particular. Nothing symbolized it more than McDonald's did. They were astounded at how clean the place was. They were astounded by how friendly the people the employees were. This was the opposite of everything they had come to know in restaurants cautious before. People didn't really know much. All they knew was from the magazines and newspapers and propaganda. But with the beginning of the eighties, there was more and more curiosity and openness. You know, american fashion, american movies, american music, people were really very open towards that. Mcdonald's was part of that, you know, american experience that people were very much willing to enjoy setting up a Mcdonald's restaurant in the soviet union of 1990 was a huge undertaking because none of the infrastructure that any normal Mcdonald's relies on none of that was there. They didn't have the potatoes needed for making the french fries, they had to import seeds and they had to import experts from the Netherlands who taught farmers how to raise these potatoes, they brought in, other people who taught the ranchers how to raise the beef for the hamburgers. Everything had to be created a new. Ultimately, the Mcdonald's decision on this, which didn't come until the middle of May, was that they were going to exit Russia. They had to think about whether it would even be legal for them to operate because of us sanctions on Russia. But those sanctions restricted what Mcdonald's could do in Russia, there were sanctions that were imposed on one of the banks in Russia's far bank. For us, the challenge with that was they process about 90% of our payroll. So the 62,000 employees that I was talking about are getting processed largely through checking and savings accounts that they have a Spar bank. So how are you going to then be able to pay those employees? And in many cases, our restaurants are not in the big cities like Moscow and ST Petersburg, they might be in more of a smaller community where there may only be one bank in town. And so for us, that's just one example where when those sanctions went in place and not being able to pay our people, it becomes pretty challenging to run a business, they sold the whole operation to one of their franchises and he had to agree as part of the sale that he would employ those employees for at least two years. The suppliers would also be taken care of. However, Mcdonald's did not transfer to the buyer any of its intellectual property. That means its trademark, its name, the golden arches. It means the recipes, the menu. None of those things went to the new buyer. Cranes came in and took down the golden arches in the Mcdonald's names. The menus had to be done all over again. No more coca cola. The new name, by the way translates as tasty and that's it. I gather it is not legal now for the successor company that is running the restaurants that used to be Mcdonald's restaurants to use menu items or trademarks or anything else. But the question I want to ask you is, what about the special sauce on the Big Mac? Because that's crucial. Is that a secret? The special sauce is a secret. Will not be able to get the special sauce. I won't be able to tell you about the special sauce. Now, others have tried to replicate the special sauce, but but none have succeeded. So unfortunately for our Russian customers, they will no longer get to enjoy the special sauce in Russia. Let's hope things will change and they will come back. Besides, either businesses, it was a very good opportunity for them. So it's kind of a not win win. It's it's a situation for all sides. A lot of people around the world wonder if Mcdonald's could ever come back to Russia. I would say it's so difficult at this point to to know how the situation evolves. So certainly I would hope that at some point, maybe the situation and the conditions on the ground would allow us to reconsider that and go back in. But it's a dynamic situation. I think there's so many things that need to play out. It's impossible to know at this juncture.

But that may change sooner rather than later.

There are only 44 women and 6 Black CEOs leading Fortune 500 companies

Only 44 women and 6 Black CEOs leading Fortune 500 companies

There are 44 women ceo at the helm of Fortune 500 companies this year. Up three from last year. These women led companies are from a wide range of industries including but certainly not limited to the banking, financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail. The list goes on. So number four we have CVS health. It's run by Karen Lynch. She is the top ranking of women C. E o. S in the Fortune 500. She's one of the most powerful women in the world and she's helping one of the most powerful companies in the world. And there are five new women Ceos who have taken office this year. Laura Priest corn is the Ceo of Jackson Financial. Ellen cooper is the Ceo of Lincoln National's Joyce mullen is Ceo of insight enterprises, Sarah London head Centene and Sarah nash is the interim Ceo of Bath and body works for this push of diversity in getting new faces of leadership were really still not seeing much by way of diversity improvements among the Fortune 500 though three is better than none, but it's still not even 10% of the list. You could say it's significant because it's not really much significant change. There hasn't been a lot of movement and Ceo in general last year. There were five black Ceos of Fortune 500 companies this year. There are six. That list includes Marvin, Ellison, the Ceo of Loews robert, Ruskin, founder and Ceo of compass frank Clyburn, the Ceo of international flavors and fragrances, David Rawlinson, the Ceo of Kerry retail and two black female Ceo to Shonda Brown Ducat of T. I A and Raspberry were of Walgreens Boots Alliance. We do expect to see a lot of seats open up over the next year. We're seeing a lot of CEOs in the same seats. A lot have been sort of hunker down mode as they've been trying to get their companies through the storm of the economy and what's happening in the world right now, we think that will change. Burnout is hitting even the top ranks of Ceo. So you're going to see more seats open up, which of course presents more opportunities for diverse talent to come in and lead.

As economic activity ramped up in 2021, oil and gas prices bounced back.

2022 Fortune 500 list: The return of the energy sector

One of the biggest narratives on the Fortune 500 this year is the return of the energy sector and that of course, was driven by much higher oil and gas prices. If you go back to 2020 oil prices collapsed and there was a lot of pain in the energy sector that was reflected on last year's list As the pandemic eased a bit and economic activity ramped up in 2021 oil and gas prices really bounced back. If you look across the Fortune 500, you'll see that energy companies have shot back up in the rankings. For instance, Exxon was number 10 last year. This year, it's at number six Chevron, the second biggest oil and gas company in the United States, jumped from 27 to 16. The million dollar question or maybe trillion dollar question about energy in the coming year is where will oil prices go? It's a complex picture, the war in Ukraine, the supply chain situation, it all makes for a hard to predict market, but right now, most signs suggest that oil prices are going to stay at an elevated level and that will be good for oil company profits. Another factor to consider when thinking about the future of energy prices is electric vehicles and of course, you can't talk about electric vehicles without talking about Elon musk. The ceo of Tesla, Tesla made a huge jump again this year, 35 spots from number 100 up to number 65 Tesla's profits shot up more than 600% last year to $5.5 billion and Tesla of course, represents a revolution in the auto industry. Because all the other big automakers ford GM Volkswagen internationally, they're all committing to electric cars in the future, and that could really change the demand picture for oil going forward.

Walmart takes the number one spot for the tenth straight year.

Introducing the 2022 Fortune 500 list

Amazon has taken the number two spot behind Walmart.

Watch: Introducing the 2022 Fortune 500 list

The Fortune 500 is America's largest company that's measured by revenue. This is the 68th edition of the Fortune 500. And really the list is synonymous with big business success. The companies in the Fortune 500 this year produced a total of $16.1 trillion $1.8 trillion dollars in profit. That's $16.1 trillion dollars in revenue is equal to two thirds of the GDP of the United States This year. To crack the 500, companies had to have at least $6.4 billion 19% from the year before. And that really shows the strong year that American business had the order of the companies at the top of the Fortune 500 this year stayed the same as last year, walmart was number one amazon number two. Apple, number three Cbs Health, number four and UnitedHealth group number five walmart, the giant retailer based in Bentonville, Arkansas is number one on the Fortune 500 this year. For the 10th consecutive year, Walmart earned $13.7 billion 27th among the entire 500. And it shows that in that retail business, the margins are not nearly as high as for some of these big tech, Apple came in number three on our list, but it is the number one in terms of profit generating companies in America, it's generated $95 billion dollars in profits. So number four, we have CVS Health. It's run by Karen Lynch, she is one of 44 women C. E. O. S in the Fortune 500. She's one of the most powerful women in the world and she's helping one of the most powerful companies in the world. Amazon made another huge leap towards catching up with walmart. It grew its revenues 21% of $470 billion. Amazon's profits also jumped up by more than 50% to $33 billion, nearly three times the profitability of Wal Mart. Amazon of course is one of the companies that really got a big boost over the past year from the pandemic as people turn to online shopping and also from the streaming world from amazon prime to others that use amazon's cloud services. There wasn't much change in the makeup of the top 10 in the Fortune 500 this year, but one notable development was that Exxon mobil jumped from number 10 back up to number six and that was boosted by higher oil prices. Exxon's revenues shot up 57% to around $285 billion last year. The biggest mover in the Fortune 500 this year was Blackstone. The new york based investment house which jumped 295 spots to number 1, 59 in the rankings as its investment portfolios had huge returns in 2021. Another company that made a really big jump in the rankings this year was Carve Ana, Which moved up 193 spots to # 290. Carbonneau is another one of those companies that really benefited during the pandemic. Some other notable trends from the Fortune 500 this year, where we had our first crypto company, you'll notice coin bases on the list for the very first time. Coin base is a big benefactor of the crypto craze were recently, of course, crypto prices have started to sell off and we're not sure if coin base is going to be around on the 500 next year. Moderna jumps onto the list this year and number 1 95 with $18 billion in sales. And Moderna of course, is one of the companies that brought us the M RNA vaccines and it's really brought that company from being a startup with potential to being a Fortune 500 company almost overnight, More than half of the sectors in the Fortune 500 recorded record profits last year, including financials, retail and big tech. In fact, it was an incredibly strong year for the Fortune 500 across the board. Total sales and total profits hit record levels this year, even adjusted for inflation And revenues grew the most since 1975. While profits jumped the most since 2010. One of the things I found most interesting about the list was actually the people on it. They remained relatively unchanged. We saw there were 44 women ceo, this time that's the highest number of women that have ever been on the Fortune 500 list. But it's only three more than last year. We're gonna expect a lot of movement amongst c. E. O. S. In the next year. So I suspect that leadership of the Fortune 500 will be pretty drastically different next year this time around.

Introducing the 2022 Best Companies to Work For list

Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list for 2022

Zhao believes this idea is “based on a lack of understanding about crypto.”

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao says crypto isn't big enough to be a sanction loophole for Russia

International

Watch: Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao says crypto isn't big enough to be a sanction loophole for Russia

So, c c let me ask you first about Ukraine. There is real concern that Crypto in particular is a really easy way for Russian oligarchs to be siphoning money out of the country sheltering it somewhere where it's very difficult for people to track. Um I think those are pretty much all based on lack of understanding of crypto. Um there's a couple of dimensions to that. Number one crypto is very, very small. Crypto probably represents .3% of the global wealth and probably the same proportion for oligarchs in Russia. So cripple is not enough to move any significant amount amount of money and also Bitcoin Blockchain very traceable. Um, so the hackers will have to be finished in 2016 as soon as they use the money this year, they got caught and the law enforcement around the world are increasingly very adapt at it. So, um those things, I think that's just a lack of understanding about what Bitcoin or crypto really is nonetheless, what have you actually done to make sure that those on the sanctions list are not your users. Right? So, um just this morning, um, I got an update from our team that we looked through all the sanctions people, all the people on the sanctions list, we have our our sanctioned department actually look at this very, very closely and only one person has ever used that platform. And this is a this is a kid of one of the persons on the sanctions list. So in that regard, actually, none of the people on the sanctions list I've actually ever used. There has been a call from the Deputy President of Ukraine for crypto companies to essentially block the use by Russians. What's your answer to that? And and is the answer to basically freeze accounts from Russia? So we thought about this long and hard and I think basically we don't have the power to decide to freeze a population assets ourselves. I think, I think that decision power should be, should be resting with very senior levels of the government. Um, the guys will create sanctions list. We follow those sanctions lists. So just like banks. So today, if a Russian, if a Russian person is working on the streets of London, um, they probably do have a bank account with some bank in London, um, that the ceo of that bank probably should not unilaterally laterally just decide himself to freeze that person's bank balance. I cannot make a decision. Just I'm gonna freeze your assets on been in that, I don't think that I believe that would be illegal at best unethical. So we we don't have the power to decide that um at a time when Russians at this point cannot get dollars out of the A. T. M. Um the ruble of course is crashing what role for crypto for regular Russians that you know, you say, whose accounts you should not touch. Um just scripture at that point, play something of a role. I think crypto could play a role, but I think people are way over exaggerating that The, as I said before, based on my calculations, crypto probably represents less than .3 of the world, of the wealth of uh of the entire world and probably the same percentage in in in Russia And crypto is so small that you can't move all of the Russia's GDP, which is $1.5 trillion dollars a year ago into into into crypto. Crypto is just not big enough to handle that. And also people miss people miss the point that Russia government actually wants to block crypto. The Russian government actually wants to block. They actually, last week issued, they were going to block international exchanges. They're going to block people from using international exchanges. Um they Russian banks don't work with crypto exchanges. So for the Russian government actually don't want people to convert from rubles to crypto. That hurts the ruble, which has already crashed, as you said, which is already crashing. So, um, I was talking with a politician here just yesterday and he he says, look, the west should allow Russians to use crypto because that would devalue the ruble, which hurts the current government of quite a lot more. Um, so there's different views on that. So crypto is, as you say, tiny 10.3%. What do you foresee? I realized you don't have a crystal ball, but are we at the beginning of something that is really, really big and that in 10 years time we're gonna look back and think of this time is being the very beginning of something. So I think it's very hard to predict the future, and it's very hard to predict with very precise timing, how the future is going to evolve. But things like e commerce in the early days we had a lot of difficulties but eventually took off and it's very difficult to say what at what point is that is exactly something is gonna happen. There's so many factors we can't control, but crypto fundamentally, Blockchain is a new technology for trust, for establishing a common record, for establishing later. Um, this technology will continue to evolve. I think right now, in the crypto industry, there's probably a couple 100 million people who have some kind of exposure to crypto and with this type of a couple $100 million a couple 100 million people involved, they, there's more and more people working on this technology is going to continue to evolve and its technology doesn't go backwards

Patients are pleading for reform of a drug-pricing system driven by incentives and greed.

High insulin prices in the U.S. are putting some diabetics' lives at risk

JOEY MCLEISTER/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Health

High insulin prices in the U.S. are risking diabetics' lives

100 years ago this year. In 1921, insulin was discovered and produced for the first time. And for the first time in history it was possible For people with type one diabetes to live. And so the big issue and has been for a long time is why does it cost so much, especially when people need it to live? The price. In the year 2000 was around $30 a bottle. The price today Retail at my local pharmacy at $365 for this Very tiny little bodies of influence. My important prescription is for four bottles every month. So one bottle left me about a week. If I didn't have insurance, I would be paying Most of $1500 every month for my prescription. Insulin costs more in the United States than it does in any other developed economy and not just by a little, but by multiples. Insulin's that cost hundreds of dollars for the uninsured in the US Cost maybe $20 in other countries. You go back 2025 years and adjust everything for inflation. Insulin was much less expensive back then. What changed was the rise of a business called pharmacy benefit management companies in that pharmacy benefit managers actually began back in the sixties or seventies helping insurance companies just deal with the huge paperwork of all the prescriptions that they had to pay for. They saw that they had a huge number of prescriptions that they were processing and they realized they could deal with the manufacturers of drugs, uh representing many insurance companies had a lot of buying power and they could help insurance companies get good prices. They could help insurance companies pay less. That was the whole idea. The PBMs said to the insurance companies, look what we can do is negotiate with the drug manufacturing to get a rebate on the price you pay for their drugs. So whenever you pay for somebody's prescription, you pay whatever the drug maker is charging. But then we'll get you a rebate from them. So it lowers your overall cost fundamentally. The drug makers realized the bigger the rebate I can give to the PBMs, the more the PBMs are gonna like me and my drug. And that means that they're more likely to put my drug in the top tier of the drugs that the insurance company sells. It is not a typical supply and demand economic model. The model is the supply and demand Within that little bubble of manufacturer PBM insurance company and your pharmacy, the actual person who needs the product is left out of that equation. Yeah, a really major development in the insulin world took place just this past summer when the FDA approved the very first insulin that we consumers would regard as a genuine generic right now. We have just this one real generic and our experience with other generic drugs is that having just one doesn't do a whole lot to lower the price because after all, it only has to under price the brand name drug by a little bit in order to get the market. Now, will there be a second and a third generic insulin of this particular type? That's what everybody in the industry and everybody in the insulin world is watching mm The insulin problem isn't really just an insulin problem. It's an example of how all prescription drugs in the United States are Christ reports are that at least 25% of insulin using diabetic insulin using major type one or type two and stay alive. You need to take an insulin injection. 25% of us are reported to have rations at some point throughout our lives of having diabetes. This is incredibly dangerous because you can go into diabetic coma and die and it happens. Uh nobody knows exactly how often it happens, but it seems to happen on average a few times a day. Somewhere in the United States monetizing healthcare is a normal result of the capitalist corporate environment, which is what we live in in the United States. And that's fine. Just don't price it so high that we die. As a result, the risk to a diabetic, It doesn't matter if you're type one, Type two and gestational diabetes or some other newly discovered kind of diabetes, if you need insulin, you need it to stay alive. And if you can't afford it, you pay with your life. Nobody. No one should have to make those kinds of decisions when it comes to basic health care. Mhm.

Introducing Fortune's Future 50 list for 2021

Watch: Introducing Fortune's Future 50 list for 2021

Yeah, Yeah, mm. Mhm, mm hmm. Yeah, Yeah, Excuse me.

This year’s list focuses on the access and equitable distribution of vaccines.

Change the World 2021: Vaccine Makers

one thing that's interesting about this year's list as we have the same honoree in the number one slot. And that's the vaccine makers. But what's different this year is that we've focused on the issue of access and equitable distribution of vaccines. And some companies have been really good at that, including astrazeneca, including johnson and johnson. Even in the clinical trial program that we started that we went not only to the United States but to africa where a very significant proportion of our clinical trial participants resided. We went to latin America, particularly brazil. Those also happen to be the places were some of the most virulent, some of the most pernicious uh mutations and variants were occurring at that particular point in time until we are able to manage this on a global basis. Uh We're not safe and we won't get lives back to normal. Hence all the more important to have a global option against covid 19. We tried to find the vaccine almost in every country at the same time. Typically we file in your hop in the U. S. And Japan for new medicine. And then and then we file elsewhere month or two later and here we tried to file almost everywhere at the same time. So it's a big effort to make sure we can bring this vaccine. It's no profit to as many people as possible around the world. The pandemic is still very much with us And that's what's really changed the course of the pandemic and is changing the course of the pandemic is how quickly these companies managed to develop a new technology distributed around the world, is making a major difference for the health of people everywhere. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm.

Marketing on TikTok has proved to be more successful than advertising on other social platforms.

Brands are embracing TikTok and making millions

cost interviewing an influencer for Fortune magazine money son eric here. Hello, Fortune already. Hello, fortunately if you haven't heard lately, there's an app that's taken over the social media space. Tick Tocks growth has been explosive, jumping from about 55 million global users in 2018 to a billion monthly active users now and brands are cashing in on it. I'm jelly pop a Tic Tac is not the first social platform that companies have thrown ad dollars at. So what's the attraction? The first thing that we're talking to them about is the unmatched engagement that Tiktok has to offer and that's because people are spending over movies worth of time consuming content on Tiktok every single day. Tick tock has been downloaded over three billion times and when it comes down to the money, the return on ad spend is 14% better than the rest of digital media. Well what keeps users eye balls glued is the mostly positive and entertaining content on the platform, which is then amplified through tick tocks closely guarded algorithm. So where Tiktok differs with our content graft based off of our algorithm and discovering content that's interested to you when you look at other platforms, they're based on a social graph. And what that means is that sharing content that your friends and your family might be engaging with. I mean, I think that's one reason Tiktok is so unique and other social platforms, you're very focused on building a community. But on Tiktok anyone can be Ticktock famous including a brand enter Tiktok made me buy It Got Me Again a phenomenon where users see a creator user product and immediately try to purchase it. A recent example that we saw is with peter thomas Roth eye cream. A creator on our platform, she put a tick tock off just demonstrating How to use their eye cream within 24 hours. The Peter Thomas Roth Eye Cream sold out everywhere. You couldn't find it. There's over six billion views on the Tiktok made me buy a hashtag. So when you think about the purchase funnel, it's being shortened from, I'm seeing it, I'm buying it. So there's, there's the consideration portion of the funnel is being removed because they're seeing it being used in real time. One of the first large companies and the first restaurant chain to join tick to is Chipotle. And they made their debut using a hashtag challenge, which is a gamified way to get massive participation on the platform, which increases the chances for a campaign to land on the for you page. The main feed where users find content from creators they might not follow yet. It was the lip lip challenge. We created this challenge based off something that we have seen a team member do and we thought, Okay, this is something that people could get in on at home. It has over 330 million views now, which is mind blowing to think about and definitely knew Tiktok with a special place and really started to double down on our marketing efforts there, Teaming up with influencers and celebrities isn't a new type of marketing but on Tiktok the greatest success has proven to be better for every million dollars spent on influencer marketing on Tiktok Brands are seeing $7.2 million 90 days, That's 24% better than a combination of other social media platforms. The next best performer is Instagram that drives $6.6 million dollars for every million spent when Chipotle joined the platform with the lid flip challenge, they used a popular Tiktoker to help it gain steam and realized that's how you go viral. Now Chipotle and I want to select three completely then did another campaign which they used to cultivate a team of creators that are obsessed with its brand. Uh we've done a challenge for example, um called Chipotle sponsor me and you get a chance to get free Chipotle for a year. I won this card eric is one of many who have accidentally fallen into the creator economy, money sign eric here only signed eric here money sign eric. Making money by creating content on social media many times by making campaigns for brands. He got his start when this video of him went viral. Yeah. Mhm Oh I think to this date it has 9.7 million views which is so stupid and I actually hated that video helped him get hundreds of thousands of followers and that got the attraction of some brands. I got my very first ticked off brand new, it was a social media platform called You Bow and he said, hey, if you post a Tiktok for us We'll pay you $3,000. And they reached out to me for a paid opportunity and they gave me 6000 for that. And after that I was like, Oh wow, this is really, really lucrative, I can actually make a living office. And since then on Tiktok I've worked with Tasha Sh Urology and then on Youtube. I have also worked with France like Graham early hello, Fresh and margie. So what's the formula for brands to make its mark on Tiktok? I think a large part of that has to do with the pair of social relationships that a lot of viewers and the audience forms with specific creators because it really just feels like a friend recommended me, a product brands should be looking to build their own in house kick talkers and then it's a sound on environment. Tiktok er say that they now associate sounds with Tic Tac. The way I try to think about it is there is no playbook, we are vying for attention. We're not buying ad space and hoping that people are going to pay attention. So you have to be very clever in the type of content that you're creating to give it that chance to take off. Yeah, so

Vanessa Clark and Lynette Tan are powering some of the world’s most innovative space startups.

Ladies who launch: Meet some of the female stars of the private space industry

Meet some of the female stars of the private space industry

Mhm. Mhm. I think we've all seen the recent headlines about everything that seems to be really exciting and innovative when it comes to space. And most of those headlines have to do with a very small handful of billionaires, male billionaires like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos and a few others. And what I wanted to do with this particular story is look beyond those headlines, not only at some of the really exciting and promising innovations and advances that are happening in the sector, but I also wanted to really showcase some of the women that are driving some of these innovations. It's been really interesting seeing the evolution of public awareness about musk visas and Branson's effort in space. I first became aware of SpaceX in the late two thousands And when they were first launching their Falcon one rocket, my colleagues and I were stunned that this small upstart from America could actually do this. Like it was incredible. They just put so much more attention onto the space industry and that is important. I think maybe in a way that does undermine the technology development that they put in. For example, you know, it took ill on mask a decade long to get to where he wants to with the reusable rocket, with getting contracts and getting business Richard Branson, you know, with the uh developments on the White Knight. Uh you know, that wasn't something that happened overnight, there was a lot of effort. There was a lot of in genuity, there was a lot many, many technology development, what they're doing is really admirable, but I do think it's time that we pay more attention to minority and diversity founders who are doing the same thing that are coming up close on their heels. So early on in my reporting process, I was introduced to a woman named Candace johnson. She's american, but she's been living in europe most of her life. Her dad actually worked on the very first commercial satellite for the U. S. Government Back in the 60s today. She's not only worked for a handful of satellite companies over the years, but she's also invested in a growing number of space and new space startup. And so early on, she connected me to a very, very long list of women all across the globe out of tumors. We are building and operating space tokes. There's a woman Vanessa clark her company what they're developing, they call it a tugboat for satellites. Were using the technology of tomorrow at a time when we are building and operating orbital transfer vehicles. These are space tugs that allow satellite operators to get to their place in space launch vehicles today are really great for getting payloads into space. But once it's in space, a rocket like that isn't that efficient at moving around, which means if satellite operators want to put their systems beyond low earth orbit or even in difficult to reach places in low earth orbit. It costs a lot of money to get them there with orbital transfer vehicles or space tugs. We can use lowest orbit as a transportation hub. Rockets can launch payloads to low accessible of it. And our orbital transfer vehicles which reside in space can run their view with those payloads, capture them and transfer their payloads to their final destination. Our systems can then return to a low staging orbit to be refueled and serve more customers. So this method saves 20-40% of launch costs for satellite operators and allows really challenging missions that just aren't possible with the rockets that we have today. Lynette Town is based in Singapore and she's trying to not only get more people into the sector, but she's really trying to start at a very young age. So things like space camp and education programs In our education program. We start them from five years old, 15 years old, 25 years old all the way to 75 years old. And some of them have taken part in our programs when they were 15, gone on to 25 and started a space company and then we help them without accelerated program. We help them with the connectivity that we provide them Uh and we provide them access to mentors and experts. We have 34, startups from all over the world from Russia, from Uzbekistan, from New Zealand, from Hong Kong and certainly from Singapore. We incubate them. We provide them with access and connections two key market to end users uh, and certainly of in fundraising, we help to act also accelerate the adoption of the technology to integrate it into systems to prove that their technology could make a difference to enterprises or two people. So we do a whole range of activities almost end to end uh, to get them up into the market so that we can all of us here can use their technologies for life to be better for businesses to be more efficient. Uh, you know, to also make the planet a better place for all of us when it comes to space. You know, the vision for a lot of this for a lot of these innovations is that at some point we become a multi planetary species. That's actually probably going to have and if everything from space suit two vehicles to even like pod that will sustain human life at the onset at least is all being developed and designed by one type of individual, then there are going to be problems because they have really long term and really broad implications for humanity. Um, so that's why I think it's really important to have representation from the get go. So in the U. S. A lot of the large aerospace companies and Nasa have great diversity programs. The recently retired Ceo of Lockheed martin was a woman Ceo of Aerojet Rocketdyne is a woman. Ceo of Northrop Grumman is a woman, these incredible women are breaking the glass ceiling at those large aerospace companies. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there is a really big discrepancy in startups and so it's difficult to get women with families or expecting families soon in early stage startups just because there isn't a stability that that type of candidate would typically look for in leadership and start up something. There's also a discrepancy. I know some great women founders out there who are just not as well funded as their male counterparts, which is something that I think we all have to come together as a community to change. It was tough, it still continues to be tough or we will take a while to break the stereotypes. But you know, I think that's why I find this job particularly meaningful because just being in this position to be able to help others, especially young women, you know, means a lot to me. I would want any young bright brain, you know, who want to reach for the star to not have to face unnecessary challenges to get the ones you really want to be. Like I said, face pack is really super hard, you know, I don't want them to have more, more challenges that they should have. There are still definitely barriers and hurdles um there is still a lack of women globally um and a lack of different ethnicities and races represented throughout a lot of these companies, but I would say, you know more and more, I mean they're really they're investing in each others, companies, their networking with each other. They're giving each other speaking opportunities to sort of elevate their profiles. And there are more and more women and again, more and more people in general that are being attracted to this field.

<p>I'm gigi chemo and I'm just here of insta cast. So I grew up into a small town in the south of France and I was a daughter, granddaughter, great granddaughter of fishermen, my grandmother was a fishmonger and I was the first one of my family to graduate from high school, let alone college. I would say it was really during business school that I was learning about different industries and I was incredibly interested in industries that were fast moving and I had kind of the american dream and so as soon as I was able, I set sights on the U. S. And I immigrated to the United States about seven years ago. My first internship was at Ebay and I learned so much about technology that how technology can help people who have a passion uh and and want to make a living really thrive online. I was very interested in moving to facebook because there was this incredible social media platform kind of exploding rolls open at the time were jobs in marketing and communications. I had on strategy at Ebay which had nothing to do with marketing and communications. Uh so I spent all of thanksgiving weekend imagining a product which at the time was called facebook stores and writing all of the marketing materials for that product uh and sending that to the hiring manager kind of begging them to hire me and telling them that even though I didn't have the profile, I don't know his work to prove to them that I could do marketing and communication and that's kind of how I got the job when I moved to product, I had a very well intentioned product manager. Tell me, well Fiji, you're never gonna sheet with the engineers, you're never gonna get credibility with like all of you. And what that meant was, you know, too much makeup to french. I tried for a day to kind of dropped the makeup tie, my hair dressed with a hoodie, no one recognized me and I didn't recognize myself and I realized, no, actually is a way in which I'm gonna lead and the way in which I'm also going to inspire my teams is by recognizing all of who I am. I got a lot of feedback really quickly that uh, it was actually allowing other people to be themselves, giving them permission to really show up with all of their magic, all of their diversity, which I think is incredibly important if we want to create workplaces where people can do the best work of their lives. I was diagnosis endometriosis right? As Mark offered me to lead the facebook app. And you know, the last discussion you want to have with Mark Zuckerberg, who is offering you to lead the facebook app, uh, to tell him about your uterus. Like that's really the last conversation you're hoping to have in your life. And yet I realized that I was probably about to have surgery because of these issues and I needed him to know. And when I told him about it was not only incredibly supportive, but he also told me that it was really looking at people as relationship that he wanted to build a world across the decades and not as you know, something that you wanted from me in the next couple months. So many women do not have to support. So many women are incredibly alone and isolated in the workplace with these issues and terrified to talk to their manager about going through this because our worries are going to lose our job, lose our credibility, lose out the next promotion. I felt a responsibility at that point in time uh to speak up because I was in a privileged position of having all of the support. So many women have said like, oh I have a mess, I have rheumatoid arthritis and I never expected a leader in your position to have, let alone be public about them. I feel that it's a risk as a woman to talk about how it's a huge taboo as women, we need to you know, look absolutely exceptional at everything and and you know, be completely invincible to even get a shot at being taken seriously. So it's always a risk. But I shall like I have a responsibility to do that for all the women that don't have my privilege. Yeah, I think leaders always have to take extreme responsibilities for for anything that they bring to the market and I think we were quite optimistic about all of the outcomes that are products could create. And they certainly created a lot of good. But we didn't look around corners early enough to really understand what could be the shortfalls. But that has taught me is to be incredibly proactive in the future in anticipating the risk of any technology product. You can do great things with technology, you can do bad things with technology. And so as technologies, our job is to make sure that we maximize the good and minimise the bad. And that's something that I'm taking very much to heart in the next job. Mhm. I think the learnings about growing a global company uh and growing and advertising business and understanding the needs of consumers will certainly sell new Orleans the next job. But I also think that in psychology is unique and very different and I think it's a it's a business that is really a marketplace at the intersection of consumers or shoppers or retailers or CPG partners and it's a four sided marketplace and a big part of my role is to make sure that we serve all of these different constituents in the best way possible. Shoppers are literally the face of a company. I take enormous responsibility on making sure that these people who are critical to our service are getting everything they need from us, including flexible learning opportunities which are very important to them, a safe work environment and you know, the recognition that they deserve for for the service that they provide. So uh this is something that I take incredibly seriously and will be a very big part of my job going forward. It's a little bit poetic that I I grew up in a family of fishermen where uh kind of the mission of my family was cheating on their families and and I'm back to my roots by by leading insta cart which is fundamentally about giving people access to food when you grow up in a french italian family uh food is how you should love food is how you celebrate uh fully. That's the center of everything. It's so much more than nutrition. It's it's part of rituals, it's part of all the emotions of the family. And so I hit the cart as you know helping all of the families around around the U. S. Uh in really making this moment of you know bringing food to the table a lot more convenient and a lot more enjoyable. And to me that that was deeply uh</p>

Instacart's new chief executive talks about how she got into tech, her health struggles, and what went wrong at Facebook.

Fidji Simo's path to CEO of Instacart

I'm gigi chemo and I'm just here of insta cast. So I grew up into a small town in the south of France and I was a daughter, granddaughter, great granddaughter of fishermen, my grandmother was a fishmonger and I was the first one of my family to graduate from high school, let alone college. I would say it was really during business school that I was learning about different industries and I was incredibly interested in industries that were fast moving and I had kind of the american dream and so as soon as I was able, I set sights on the U. S. And I immigrated to the United States about seven years ago, my first internship was at Ebay and I learned so much about technology that how technology can help people who have a passion uh and and want to make a living really thrive online. I was very interested in moving to facebook because there was incredible social media platform, kind of exploding roles open at the time were jobs in marketing and communications had on strategy at Ebay, which had nothing to do with marketing and communications. Uh so I spent all of thanksgiving weekend imagining a product which at the time was called facebook stores and writing all of the marketing materials for that product uh and sending that to the hiring manager of kind of begging them to hire me and telling them that even though I didn't have the profile, I don't know his work to prove to them that I could do marketing and communication and that's kind of how I got the job when I moved to product, I had a very well intentioned product manager. Tell me, well Fiji, you're never gonna sheet with the engineers, you're never gonna get credibility with like all of you. And what that meant was, you know, too much makeup to french. I tried for a date to kind of dropped the makeup tie, my hair dressed with a hoodie, no one recognized me and I didn't recognize myself and I realized, no actually is a way in which I'm gonna lead and the way in which I'm also going to inspire my teams is by recognizing all of who I am. I got a lot of feedback really quickly that uh, it was actually allowing other people to be themselves, giving them permission to really show up with all of their magic, all of their diversity, which I think is incredibly important if we want to create workplaces where people can do the best work of their lives. I was diagnosed with endometriosis right? As Mark offered me to lead the facebook app. And you know, the last discussion you want to have with Mark Zuckerberg was offering you to lead the facebook app, uh, is to tell them about your uterus. Like that's really the last conversation you're hoping to have in your life. And yet I realized that I was probably about to have surgery because of these issues and I needed him to know. And when I told him about this, it was not only incredibly supportive, but he also told me that he was really looking at people as relationships that he wanted to build wealth across the decades and not as you know, something that you wanted from me in the next couple months. So many women do not have to support. So many women are incredibly alone and isolated in the workplace with these issues and terrified to talk to their manager about going through this because our worries are going to lose our jobs, lose our credibility, lose out the next promotion. I felt a responsibility at that point in time uh to speak up because I was in a privileged position of having all of the support. So many women have said like, oh I have a mess, I have rheumatoid arthritis and I never expected a leader in your position to have, let alone be public about them. I feel that it's a risk as a woman to talk about how it's a huge taboo as women, we need to you know, look absolutely exceptional at everything and and you know, be completely invincible to even get a shot at being taken seriously. So it's always a risk. But I shall like I have a responsibility to do that for all the women that don't have my privilege. Yeah, I think leaders always have to take extreme responsibilities for for anything that they bring to the market and I think we were quite optimistic about all of the outcomes that are products could create. And they certainly created a lot of good. But we didn't look around corners early enough to really understand what could be the shortfalls. But that has taught me is to be incredibly proactive in the future in anticipating the risk of any technology product. You can do great things with technology, you can do bad things with technology. And so as technologies, our job is to make sure that we maximize the good and minimise the bad. And that's something that I'm taking very much to heart in the next job. Mhm. I think the learnings about growing a global company uh and growing and advertising business and understanding the needs of consumers will certainly sell new Orleans the next job. But I also think that in psychology is unique and very different and I think it's a it's a business that is really a marketplace at the intersection of consumers are shoppers or retailers of CPG partners and it's a four sided marketplace and a big part of my role is to make sure that we serve all of these different constituents in the best way possible. Shoppers are literally the face of a company. I take enormous responsibility on making sure that these people who are critical to our service are getting everything they need from us, including flexible learning opportunities which are very important to them, a safe work environment and you know, the recognition that they deserve for for the service that they provide. So uh this is something that I take incredibly seriously and will be a very big part of my job going forward. It's a little bit poetic that I I grew up in a family of fishermen where uh kind of the mission of my family was cheating on their families and and I'm back to uh to my roots by by leading insta cart which is fundamentally about giving people access to food when you grow up in a french italian family. Uh food is how you should love food is how you celebrate uh fully. That's the center of everything. It's so much more than nutrition. It's it's part of rituals, it's part of all the emotions of the family. And so I hint the cart as you know, helping all of the families around around the U. S. Uh in really making this moment of you know bringing food to the table a lot more convenient and a lot more enjoyable. And to me that that was deeply uh

The Metrodora Institute will be devoted to advancing women’s health equity, with a focus on treating people with “complex neuroimmune disorders."

Instacart CEO Fidji Simo is launching a women's health startup

Instacart's CEO is launching a women's health startup

at facebook, you've spoken about working despite a miscarriage, dealing with endometriosis, um high risk pregnancy that made you do your job while you were on bed rest for several months. And recently you've been vocal about another somewhat under recognized disorder that affects women that you're suffering from called pot. I look at the trends of autoimmune diseases and it's 15 million people in the US75% of the patients are women. It's on the rise massively. And I do believe that uh you know, if we don't address, it's going to end up impacting women in their Korea. It was very interesting to realize how poorly set up the medical system was to take care of women with this condition. And I was lucky to have excellent doctors. And so when we started talking with my doctors about how we would really solve the problem, meaning give better care to women with this condition and advanced research so that we could find a cure because most of these conditions really don't have any cures. Uh, and very limited understanding of even how the disease is work. Um His doctors started to talk about the fact that, you know, we could create a completely new model of health care. And so I decided to partner with them and the result is uh some method or actually make and receptions and it's going to be a clinic in Utah where all of the different specialties of medicine from neurology, gastroenterology, cardiology to immunology will be under one roof to take care of the whole patient and not look at patients as a sum of body parts, but look at them as the whole body and a whole person and really place the patient at the center of the care, which is something that sadly, you know, doesn't happen into into regular medical system because many times women are not trusted, many times women have to bring their husband along with them in medical appointments too, that the doctors will take them seriously. And so we want to create a clinic while they will be taken seriously. And then we also want to create a research institute attached to that where we can have all of the patients of the clinic participate in life changing research on his condition so that we can finally understand why women's immune systems are behaving so differently from men. Uh and this is something that we're like decades behind because so much of the research has been done on male bodies and not women. So much of the research has completely ignored the role of hormones. And so I'm telling incredibly passionate about really bringing together all of my background in technology and all of my contacts and biotechnologies with all of the expenses of micro founders in in medicine and science, to really crack the code on on what's happening with all of these new Orleans

Introducing the 2021 Fortune Global 500

Companies like Bitfarms are showing the possibilities of a greener crypto industry.

Is crypto environmentally sustainable?

Fortune_Crypto

cryptocurrencies are monies that are privately issued, They're not issued by central banks the way dollars or euros are and they don't go through the banking system. The way it's produced is that what they call miners generate Electrical codes. The more computers you have, the more computing power that you have, the more Bitcoin you in its that simple, there's nothing skillful about the game. It's strictly a matter of having tons of computers all stacked up in these warehouses running 24/7, which is the only way you make money, they gotta run day and night. It's completely related to the percentage of the hash power that you have. That's a Bitcoin miner, if you have 5% of the hash rate power, 5% of the computing power, you get 5% of the Bitcoin. So there's a huge incentive when the price is high just to keep on buying more and more and more computers. And then if the cost of energy is fairly low and the price is high, you can make tons of money just running hashes on Bitcoin and that's the case today. These Bitcoin miners are making lots of money Even though the price is down by 50%. But these countries that attract a lot of mining, they often also have goals for carbon emissions and when they want to cut back on excess-carbon emissions. Getting new minds in is not the way to do it. So this is a battle that's going to play out and it's also dependent on the price of Bitcoin. We've got Kathy would saying it's going to go to 300,000 and these predictions of much, much higher prices And certainly the fans expect, I think that this is just a temporary downturn going to 30,000 or so. If we see that beginning to happen and the price doubles, the carbon footprints, going to double to Bitcoin ether, Another popular crypto currency. They are in the red this morning, traders focused on a growing crackdown that's happening in china china is intensifying its crackdown on Cryptocurrency china's crackdown broadly on crypto. Bitcoin moguls in china could be relocating to the United States. The only major green source of Bitcoin mining was in china and it was the six months a year when the northern miners would go south relocate same machines and mind with hydro. That's gone all of a sudden. The biggest source of green mining disappeared. There are many miners outside of china that were incumbents. In other words, they never stopped operating. A great example is bit farms, which is the largest hydro powered minor in Quebec province and in Quebec province, 99.9% of all energy for all purposes. For businesses for home heating is generated with hydro. There was a situation well over 100 years ago as this province was developing with iron ore mining, logging, and heavy industry that they powered all of that industry with hydropower, dams and hydropower. Over time, a lot of those industries have either exported out to third world countries or developing nations uh as well as become, you know, more efficient uh, in their energy use or scale down their production dramatically. But the hydro electric dams still remain there. What we do is we're taking that hydro electric power that all excess power that there's no other industrial use case for and were monetizing it and we're using that to produce Bitcoins. So every single watt kilowatt to megawatt that we're using, It's all power that's being produced historically for heavy industry, that's now being used for the Bitcoin mining industry. So it's very, very green and it's very, very profitable. Now, it was very profitable prior to the china shut down. But china shutdown made it much, much more profitable because its market share essentially doubled. In other words, given how much power it had since half the world's power went off line. All of a sudden it had twice as much power related to the entire market. So bit farms is making much more money than it was before. So it's an example of how profitable Bitcoin mining is for those incumbent miners that didn't have to shut down because so much of the capacity went offline in china that they ended up with the same amount of computing power having twice as much Bitcoin going to them. Well, I think, you know, recently the, the talk about the environment and the pressure on the environment is forcing more companies to do what we do and you know, have this this creator percentage of it in their portfolio. We do tend to leave the space in that I were the largest publicly traded all Green Bitcoin mining company in the world. And so far today we've mined over 11,500 bitcoins with green hydro electric, hydroelectric. I I think this is going to be the trend rolling forward whether or not that can be accomplished in 5, 10, 15 years. I think it's anybody's guess. But the incentives are there for people to develop long term, long lasting relationships with power companies and power producers. And it's easier to fix the economics on renewable power source than it is on one that has appeal input. So for hydropower, you know, the hydropower and geothermal in particular, the two best renewable energy sources. The primary cost is in the context in order to build the facility. and there's very little operating expense once you have the facility up and it's running, the only way that you can produce Bitcoin is by mining it and using a lot of electricity. So that's not going to go away. I don't see that. Bitcoin can move to a model where it uses a lot less energy unless it just goes to renewables and that really hasn't happened much. But you have independent companies that want to make money and more money is in very cheap energy. And the world is a highly energy competitive place where you have a lot of nations mainly powered on coal and natural gas that are going to be competing for these miners. So they'd have to voluntarily make less money and go to venues where they might have to pay more to use green energy because their machines wouldn't be running 24 7. I don't know that they're likely to do that right there, profit maximize ear's and they're going to keep on being profit maximize Urz Yeah.

Fortune takes a deep dive into the world of non-fungible tokens.

NFTs: Past, Present, and Future

Photograph by NICOLAS ASFOURI—AFP/Getty Images

NFTs: Past, Present, and Future


a lot of digital art has been undervalued for decades, There's just so much going on in this space right now. The punks of purple hat for my favorite, we are looking at a very frothy investment market overall if you're buying FTS that are representing pieces of art, Sotheby's will sell it to you increasingly the younger generations are very comfortable purchasing and spending money on things that they cannot hold in their hands were just seeing everyone get excited about it and use it and price it when in reality it is just the technology, it is just a tool. Mhm. In N. F. T. Is basically a new kind of file type except instead of encoding some like video information or imagery, What you're basically doing is you are logging a particular item onto a Blockchain and basically announces your ownership of that thing to the world. So in order to buy your created an FT, you essentially need to first have some kind of Cryptocurrency wallet that usually comes in the form of a theory. Um So in order to actually then buy or sell said artwork or deed you have to go on, then a marketplace like open C. To trade it. So NFC stands for non fungible token fungible basically means that you have an asset that is swappable for any other thing. It's a commodity like a dollar or an ounce of gold. If I give you this dollar and take another one, it's the same thing right? It doesn't matter which dollar I have. But when something non fungible is one of a kind, it's a piece of art that can't be replicated, it's something unique to you. Ethereum has a Cryptocurrency called ether associated with it. But within a theory in one thing that makes it such a special system is that you can build new currencies new tokens on top of them. But the N. F. T. Was an innovation beyond this that said okay now we have a token that you can't swap for any other token. It is a unique token and your possession of this one token is special in some way it represents something individual. So the concept is when someone releases their NFC their token that represents whatever it is, that a krypto kitty or maybe an NBA highlight or a piece of art, then there's the exchange the re exchange value where people start auctioning it off and that's when you see the value really go up in FCS have more recently been associated with artwork. But the reality is it can represent anything. And so its proponents and it's bowls really see it as a symbol of what all of the centralized finance could potentially be. So we see the concept of the N. F. T. You know as far back as 2012 but it didn't get very popular until 2017. And that's when people really started building these tokens and exchanging them. When NFC really had their viral moment. It was a thing called crypto Kitties. Again these little cartoons these cartoons cats that you could breed. They were one of a kind and then resold and some of those ended up killing for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's when this concept really took off. Around the same time. There was an early N. F. T. Project called crypto Punks where there were these sorts of pixelated images of faces that were generated and people started buying and selling them. And now if you own a crypto punk, I mean you're basically a millionaire. Uh these are selling for outrageous sums of money. But really The sort of sonic boom event was when people sold his $69 million dollar sketchbook called every days through the Christie's auction house. This was something that everybody noticed that remains the highest selling N. F. T. Artwork to date. A lot of consumers see it as this get rich quick scheme and it is for a lot of folks. But unfortunately you can make as much as $69 million or you can make absolutely nothing and lose your money because you have to pay transaction fees and you can buy either to actually create the N. F. T. In the first place. A particular NLP is only as valuable as somebody else is willing to pay for it. And so by nature these things are going to happen in fads in waves waves of interest. The thing about digital content before digital scarcity was really you couldn't truly own it. Take for example if I bought a book on a Kindle, I could use it on the amazon platform. But when I was done with that Kindle book or that piece of digital content, I couldn't do what I could do with it. If I owned a book like I owned in the physical role I couldn't give it to a friend, I couldn't lend it out to someone, I couldn't sell it second hand. Now all of a sudden I could have content um in the form of its digital book that actually I own really anything that is collectable and that can be digitized now that you have digital scarcity. You can really own it for the first time. In a way that you couldn't before, when you think about N. F. T. S. When you hear about them in the press, you really hear about these huge pieces of art that have been folds right for 60 plus million dollars. But there are a lot of smaller N. F. T. S. You can buy. So with NBA top shots, you can buy some sort of highlight for you know, a few $100 if you want to and then exchange it for however much. But you can also buy a Lebron James uh you know, winning basket uh For upwards of $300,000. So there's really quite a range, fortunate put together a list of the top 50 N. F. T. Influencers. We're calling it the nifty 50 you've got Mark Cuban. He has been out there constantly talking up N. F. T. S and their potential. You also have people like grimes, the musical artists and a lot of electronic musicians and DJs including Justin Lao Blau. I was really fascinated with how N. F. T. S. Could apply to music. So I teamed up with my art director Slime Sunday. We created an alias called Ssx Blau. And we began to just issue audio visual art with music that I hadn't released to the public. So it was like exclusive audio visual content that we took it. Um and the response was insane. We did over a million in sales in 2020 alone. So enter 2021 after the success of the single, I was like well what happens if we do it for an album and let's experiment with all these other things. And we somehow were able to generate $11.7 million dollars in the sale of um my first debut album in tokenize for I was like whoa there's something here that no one has really explored yet. Mhm. Differences in intellectual property that has the ambition to one day be named in the same breath as transformers and power rangers and hello kitty. So I think of it that way but I just view it as N. F. T. S. Being my launching pad, the way harry potter Saipi was launched through books or the way Angry Birds was launched through an iphone game. The friends are a series of 268 currently characters. So it's a marvel Disney like universe, very vast. But I love that my origin comes from N. F. T. You know, you think back to those Disney cells right that are collectible or the first sketches of Bart Simpson. It's um really really cool. So they came out on May 12 and they started off between 10 and three Ethereum and then Dutch auction down to a floor Somewhere a week or two in. They were all sold out I think 31 million in revenue in the original sales. Very substantially successful right now on the secondary market it's been extremely active. Um and so if you go to crypto slam right now over the last 30 days There has been $7.4 million dollars worth of secondary sales of the bread. So it is establish itself as one of the more significant um projects in the space which I'm incredibly humbled by. You also have lots of artists now. These are people who have been making graphic designs, have been posting their artwork, their digital art online for a very long time and they've built followings, they've built devoted fans who have tracked their work on places like instagram but you know up until now they haven't been getting compensated for that work. Now N. F. T. S for the first time are giving these digital artists a way to make money off of their hard work. Oftentimes an artist will sell their piece for let's say $2000 and then something happens they become more famous. Uh The work ends up being $2 million. They don't get any of that extra money. The way that the industry works now with N. F. T. S. They can keep collecting a 5% fee or or whatever it might be. Each time that piece of art resells, my partner had just started getting into three D. Artwork and they were meeting all these three D. Artists and all of that community was just talking about N. F. T. S. And what they were, what they were going to make. And it was really intriguing. But I was seeing it through the lens of the three D. Art community. So I didn't see many photographers. I didn't see many block artists when I joined the space. So I wasn't sure that it was the type of community for me. I just wasn't sure yet until I met my friend. It sell yard also known as eggshells and she was just this powerful black woman and generative artists who really pushed me to take the leap and make space for myself in a space where I didn't I didn't see myself represented at all. I am 17, I'm 17 years old right now. My my price my my floor for my one of ones is about 1.8 east and that's pretty high that several $1000. But there are a lot of people who would like to sell to that cannot afford that right now. So it's what a lot of artists do is they make these big edition pieces which will be priced at um 100 $100 U. S. Dollars. Or something similar so that many people can purchase them and have it in their collections. Lot of what's missing is education. I mean a lot of this stuff is still very obscure and to get started you need to have some sort of awareness about tech and crypto in general. So I spent a lot of my time trying to educate other black folks, mostly black women. And um I started chiefly with black women photographers. And since then a lot have entered the space thankfully. And they've also been rarely successful. So we spent some months creating an exhibition juneteenth and if t. Exhibition which had a public art shows while it's super cheap gallery N. F. T. In new york city. But it was this room of beautiful afro futuristic block art shown on these big screens and projectors. And it was my debut as a curator which made me one of the youngest curator in the N. F. T. Space. And we also auctioned off the work and all of the work sold. It was a really great moment and I think a beacon of hope for these artists who thought that maybe they couldn't succeed in space. Almost everybody collects something or buy something to show themselves. The fact that that's all going digital no different than all the information in the world. Like digital no different than the way we communicate with each other was forever changed because of digital. The buying of things and the collecting of things Is about to be very understood over the next 20 years. And this is the beginning of it. The public will begin to wrap their head around what it means to own something digital. And start to consider those things special because you're starting to see major influencers of culture, accept this idea of digital scarcity and value it. So whether LFTs are fat or if they're here to stay is really the billion dollar question, right? And when you think about it, we're already living in this world, right? We're already talking to people over slack and zoom constantly. And younger people are really living it through games like Fortnite where that is their social life. That is the way they interact with the world. To this kind of aim where you purchased these digital entities to keep on going. What a lot of crypto investors are banking on is that N. F. T. S are going to become a sort of natural part of this decentralized financial world. They're going to become a way to signify your fandom to show that you're a part of a certain community, a certain tribe. It is going to be validation proof that you belong in a particular community. So many different things can be n f t s and yes, while aspects of it will be faddish, no doubt some of it will be here to stay. Mhm. Oh no.

SEC clarity is still murky, but there are some plays investors can make.

Where investors are placing bets in the crypto economy

today, there's a general appreciation amongst investors that digital currencies are in fact an entire asset class. And so while investors usually are making their first foray into this ecosystem by investing in Bitcoin or a serie um they're now looking to other use cases and other protocols. In recent years, we've been seeing a diversification of the avenues by which people um and companies, individual investors and institutional ones are able to increase their exposure to the Cryptocurrency sector to market that investors are becoming increasingly more comfortable with. We're seeing uh institutional investors, uh you know, pour money into venture capital funds with dedicated crypto investment vehicles like injuries and Horowitz with their in recent $2.2 billion fund. They're seeing a lot of robust demand uh for crypto investments. And so they've responded accordingly and and launched a third crypto fund this year, it's the largest ever of its kind and recent Horowitz crypto fund three, it's our obviously our third crypto fund. Kryptos really grown and so we're not just looking at picks and shovels cos we're not just looking at financial use cases. We're now into a whole brave new world of what crypto means. And um there's just a really vast and rich development ecosystem that we're seeing right now. The future applications that I'm most excited about is that really we think Crypto provides an alternative two big tech right now and I think that any centralized service will be decentralized because now we know that that's possible with technology. Of course there are scalability and performance issues still. But I think it's really important not to judge the current state of innovation as the end state of innovation in crypto. If crypt has proven anything, it's that the pace of software innovation happens really rapidly. Folks who are, you know, investing in the sector, the folks who are managing funds that are invested in the sector, the investment managers and advisors, they're hugely optimistic about and they believe in it wholeheartedly. We're seeing up to a trillion dollars invested in crypto assets globally. Now we're seeing companies and investment managers apply for crypto E T. F. The notion of having an sec regulated investment product is really appealing. We see that for crypto funds like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which is an sec reported company now, it's traded on the secondary market over the counter. So there is a means by which retail investors can gain exposure to it. But it's still difficult. Investors need to figure out where to buy crypto how to transfer it, how to store it, and how to safe keep it. And in contrast to that, investors can simply buy shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust to get Bitcoin exposure. And so for investors looking to gain exposure to Bitcoin right from their brokerage account. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust gives them the ability to have that exposure right alongside stocks, bonds and any other assets that they may invest in today. It holds about 3.5% of the outstanding Bitcoin supply. It is solely and passively invested in Bitcoin, the Bitcoin futures that we're seeing being pitched before the Security and Exchange Commission these days, a lot of respects. They're similar to any E. T. F. Or fund that's backed by a commodity like gold E. T. F. For example, a Bitcoin TTF would hold Bitcoin and allow investors to increase their exposure or gain exposure to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin through investing in that E. T. F. But in lieu of that we've already seen in recent years, investment managers launch products, E. T. F. That focus not on cryptocurrencies themselves, but on um companies and industries and sectors that um themselves are exposed to to crypto and Blockchain amplify as one investment manager. Um They have any T. F. That dedicated towards Blockchain exposed companies and sectors they invest in exchanges like Coinbase, they invest in crypto miners who are hugely important part of the market supply chain. They invest in companies that hold crypto on their balance sheet. It just goes to speak to the overall diversification in the various ways in which investors are looking to increase their exposure to the sector. There's just a really vast and rich development ecosystem that we're seeing right now. We're seeing a lot of different companies um come on the scene and not even companies, what we call projects increasingly, we're seeing crypto projects that we're investing in. We are taking a long term view, kind of call it a 7 to 10 year investing horizon. Um For our for the investments we're making in crypto, people are still looking for the ways in which this technology and these technologies can really be deployed in real world use scenarios. Anybody who's followed the crypto sector would say is kind of the the albatross that hangs over the sector. The notion that, you know, how are what are the avenues by which you can deploy these technologies in the real world? You're seeing financial services use cases emerge and increase in much the same way that different applications were built on top of internet protocols. I project that we are going to start seeing applications built on top of crypto protocols. And that's really exciting. Again, we're already seeing some of that with the intersection of gaming. Um consumer platforms. Again, we're starting to just see the beginning of what I call D so or decentralized social platforms. And really anything centralist can be decentralized. That's really the innovation of crypto defy or decentralized finance. Our cohort of protocols that represent traditional financial services meeting decentralization. We continue to see protocols merge within defy emerged around gaming emerged around file storage. And these are all establishing new use cases for digital assets that investors wouldn't have even dreamed would be possible as the asset class has evolved today, there's over $50 billion of total value locked within the defi ecosystem. And we look at that as a measure of how much capital, how many assets are built into defy protocols and are being deployed into those protocols for the services that they provide defy is a very new and emerging area within crypto, the grayscale, decentralized finance or defy fund. His comprised of protocol of that in a decentralized fashion provide services like exchange lending and borrowing and other services that were typically used to getting from banks, brokerage houses and other financial services players. One thing, if you talk to people in the investment and the difference between a closed end fund, like what Grayscale has and a crypto E. T. S like, um what Grayscale wants to make the grave scale Bitcoin Trust or what ark invest looked to launch recently or what scores of other companies have looked to launch these funds, closed end funds. Often they can trade at a discount to their real underlying asset value. That's an issue that you don't see so much with with any kind of E. T. F. You know, the underlying value of the asset very much is what it is and and trades as such on the open market. The hope is that E. T. F. S. Will make crypto investing more accessible to ordinary retail investors, as well as major institutions who want to pour money into index funds uh and gain exposure that way. It's just various avenues by which folks can gain exposure to the crypto sector. But it's difficult. Some are easier than the others, and the notion of having an sec regulated investment product is really appealing. There is this myth out there that people who are found in crypto projects or designing protocols really just don't want any kind of regulation or oversight at all. And I don't think that describes the vast majority of crypto founders that we see it injuries. And Horwitz, The crypto founders. That we see really what they want is regulatory clarity. They don't want to have 100 different agencies with conflicting rules. And when I say 100 different agencies, I don't really just mean in the US I mean globally and so I think one of the things that needs to happen for further mainstream adoption is some regulatory clarity. We think that regulatory clarity will actually encourage mainstream adoption further and it's good for business. Nobody really knows when the FCC will uh proceed with some kind of guidance on crypto BTS or or other kinds of publicly traded kind of investment vehicles in the crypto sector. Um Some folks think it might happen before the end of the year. Some people think it might happen next year. Some folks think they won't move on it at all and sideline it because they don't have confidence in their ability to regulate it in a way that would protect public market investors from some of the pitfalls of investing in cryptocurrencies, some of the manipulation, maybe that could be that could be prone to. There is an entire industry right now that has already grown up around um kind of regulation. And I'll give you one example is companies like chain analysis for example, it's now a valued at $4 billion dollars in channels. This is just one company. There are a number of others like it and they have government contracts with governments all over the world to help them to transaction monitoring and ensure that I am L. And K. Y. C. Laws are being followed. While the U. S. Doesn't allow crypto if other countries do, namely our neighbors to the north Canada does allow regulated crypt WTF. They not allowed the first ones to launch earlier this year. We're seeing other countries give the green light for investment vehicles like crypto TF. It's just a matter of whether the sec follows suit and whether we see them in the U. S. Because obviously we have among some of the largest exchanges in the world, the the largest companies in the world, a huge pool of investors willing to poor liquidity into some of these assets, so gaining that regulatory guidance on the public markets from the would be a huge step.

Decentralized finance builds on crypto's dream of a future where banking doesn't depend on intermediaries.

Inside 'DeFi': Banking without banks

defy is short for decentralized finance. Banking without banks decentralized finance represents the most important new technological innovation for finance, probably more important than the Internet instead of traditional finance, which is administered with spreadsheets, databases, contract and lots of people defy is generally autonomous computer programs that are running financial products and markets. So instead of there being companies involved, you just have software operating out there on the Blockchain, taking care of all of these transactions that you might associate with a financial institution. We're used to relying on banks, Brokerage houses and other financial services firms for access to exchanges to lending to borrowing and other services. And when you think about the D5 protocols that are being developed, it removes that intermediary, it removes that central party that we have to go to today to access those services In a lot of ways. The things you do today, whether it's earning interest or sending money to a friend, you're going to be able to do through decentralized protocols instead of businesses that you have to trust and that you don't understand, it's going to be how and where all finance is conducted in the next 10 years. In the early days of the crypto sort of revolution that's taken place. You had Bitcoin, It was the earliest the O. G. Cryptocurrency out there. The next big shift that happened was you had ethereum. Now, ethereum was trying to do everything that Bitcoin wasn't doing. Whereas Bitcoin was solely focused on finance and sending and receiving payments. Ethereum was instead trying to do all sorts of things, create basically a world computer system that you can run apps on most of defiance. Built on top of ethereum, you basically have all these projects that are now creating what are sort of financial primitives. People like to call them money legos, they're sort of the basic building blocks that you would build financial institution from things like lending, borrowing credit savings. All these sorts of functions that you might associate with a bank are now being taken care of by defi. And by these software projects that are built on ethereum compound is an autonomous interest rate market for cryptocurrencies compound allows you to earn interest or borrow crypto assets by using the compound protocol on the ethereum Blockchain. We're accessing compound through exchanges, Custodians and other applications and products that have incorporated compound interest rates. It's composed of many different smart contracts. A smart contract is essentially a computer program that's deployed onto a blocking today compound supports approximately 12 assets that you can earn interest on and tomorrow. Across these 12 assets, there's $13 billion worth supply to the protocol earning interest today, douse stands for decentralized autonomous organization, basically means a self driving company. Instead of having a typical setup where you have an incorporated legal entity and a board of directors and managers and all this hierarchy. Instead of having that, it's flat, it's over the internet. Anybody who owns a token has a say in the project. The tokens in this case are similar to stocks in that they give you some level of governance over it. And those people are incentivized to have that project performed better to succeed to beat challengers and to be the best that it can be because its value is tied to a particular token. So people who hold the compound token comp As it's called. They are incentivized to make compound better. It's an incredibly efficient system and this is actually I think demonstrative of the value and power of smart contracts and decentralized finance. Today, the compound protocol has $13 billion dollars of assets earning interest in being borrowed. And the entire protocol runs autonomously. So on a given day there's no employees, there's no head count, there's no operations, there's no labor. It has 100% gross margins and no overhead whatsoever. The team that built compound compound labs is only 16 people and the community around the protocol is able to increase and add functionality to the protocol. A lot of the governance takes place on forums and chat rooms and message boards and it's a way for everybody to come together to discuss and debate ideas and improvements to the protocol. But In aggregate there's almost no official headcount working in the protocol and it supports $13 billion. The way that people collaborate online is typically through WhatsApp instagram. DM in people you might be hanging out on Reddit, you might be hanging out on discord now picture having that sort of group chat arena, but tying a bank account to it and setting some rules in place to govern what people are allowed to do with that bank account. That's basically a doubt. A lot of far out thinkers think that this is actually what the form of a company will look like natively online in the future. In Wyoming in 2021, the bill of this legislative session was a bill creating a new type of limited liability company called a dow LLC. A decentralized autonomous organization. LLC. It's a bit of a misnomer and the reason is a truly decentralized autonomous organization has no human beings associated with it or if it does, there's no one in control, whereas with an L. L. C. There has to be somebody who is what's called a control person, somebody who is organizing the entity and hiring what's called a registered agent to receive lawsuit documentation if the entity has ever sued. So there has to be a person involved doing those things. So what's the secret sauce? The secret sauce is the dow LLC type is an LLC that doesn't require the operating agreement to be in paper form. It can be in the form of code in the event. There are disputes, there are governance mechanisms in the code, but also the judges, To the extent that a dispute reaches a court, the judges will be looking to the code, not to the written legal agreement to govern the nature of the agreement between the members of the doubt. It is a breakthrough in terms of how these legal entities operate. There's a lot of interest coming from institutions on Wall Street to learn what defy is and how it works. I speak to global banks all the time about how defy is going to transform finance. I think everyone's just at the beginning of learning and understanding what defies capable of in a lot of ways. It's like the Internet in 1994, everybody can feel that it's going to be important, it's going to completely transform finance, But we're still not sure exactly where and how it's going to fit in. Many investors are thinking about D5 because they're reading about it every day in popular press and wondering how they get exposure to it. Great scale, recently launched the Great Scale D5 Fund, we decided to launch a diversified funds such that investors could make a single investment, but in doing so gain exposure to a wide array of digital asset protocols within the defi sector. One way that the investment community looks at defi is based on a measurement called total value locked. Today, there's over $50 billion dollars of total value locked within the defi ecosystem. And we look at that as a measure of how much capital, how many assets are built into defy protocols and are being deployed into those protocols for the services that they provide. This is also an important measurement, not only for the overall health of the defi ecosystem, but something that informs some of the decisions that are made around the grayscale defy fund, ensuring that investors are always exposed. The D five protocols with the greatest value and the greatest adoption and usage within the fund itself. At least right now, a lot of D five projects are offering high yields to consumers. These are yields that are in some cases 57% sometimes upwards of that. Of course there is a ton more risk involved. A lot of new protocols, even when they're audited might contain technical flaws and due to the irreversible nature of cryptocurrencies, those issues lead to the permanent loss of funds. So defied developers have to be extremely sensitive to the risks and the responsibilities of building a new financial protocol. It's unclear how regulators are going to deal with decentralized finance. It seems to have been taking a lot of people by surprise. There is so much innovation, things are happening so quickly and government can't quite keep up. There are scams, there is fraud, there are what people in the community call rug polls where all of a sudden a team just sort of up in exits with your money. In the crypto world. It's not uncommon for people to go by pseudonymous sort of aliases. Um, online avatars, governments theme is very important to keep track of where money is being sent and who is sending money to who. A lot of people believe that there's a parallel economy between traditional financial markets and define, and that might appear to be the case today. But increasingly, I think the lines between the two are going to blend and financial markets and defy are going to become the same thing. They're just finance and whether you're accessing those markets on a Blockchain or you're accessing those markets through a bank, they're still going to be the same markets. And I think over time, interest rates and exchange rates and value are gonna look exactly the same, whether it's defy or offline finance. I don't know what time frame this is all going to take place over as the sci fi writer William Gibson once wrote, The Future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. The future is here. All these defy projects are popping off, There is a lot of excitement and enthusiasm in them, uh, and there's this whole weird, wacky, wonderful economy sprouting up around it, whether or not finance needs to be decentralized or needs to be disintermediation. The fact remains that defy presents such utility and such advantages that it's hard to see a future where it doesn't happen.

Fortune Editor-in-Chief Clifton Leaf talks with Bourla about the remarkable development process.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla reflects on unprecedented vaccine development

Fortune's Leaf talks with Bourla about the process.

Pfizer CEO reflects on unprecedented vaccine development

March 1st. It's only the second death in the United States. We've seen a lot of cases of coronavirus around the world. We've seen, uh, being clearly indications of a of a runaway spread, but still, even it's hard to imagine. But March 1st is nothing like what we've seen now. And you make the determination to go all in on a coronavirus vaccine, uh, putting a lot of money at risk. You're only a year or so into into your job as CEO. This is a massive bet, and I just kind of want to have you take us through what that was like. It was like a massive bet, but it was a very necessary one. There are not many companies that they have capabilities in vaccines, but they're Antolin that they can start from early research and going all the way. Not only the manufacturing, but distributing, which is also challenging with vaccines. So the question that was in my mind, if not us, then who and the world needed at that moment something to be done. So I was very clear to my my team. Tell me, how can we have a vaccine? You come and tell me what you need. They told me These are the things that we can do. These are the technologies that we have. And, uh, these are the pros and cons and our recommendations to go with RNA. And, uh, the the talents in my mind was not that I don't trust the scientists. They are. I know them very well. It was that I asked him that Is it true that there was no vaccine made before? With marinade technology? We are successful. That will be the first one. And they said yes. So and then it was against Let's go. And then they told we don't have an agreement then with them. This is nice. If we agree, we need to agree with them as well said, Go ahead and make one. And then, uh, this is when they came back and said, Yes, we are very interested to do it, and but we want to do it very fast. And the biotechs is also we want to do it very fast. He said, Let's start. Then the contract will come And they said Yes. So we started and we started investing. They started sharing their data with us without even a contract. You talk about the ability, uh, and quite presently to talk about if you've got a mutating virus the speed at which you can change, Uh, you know, that part of the vaccine that can, uh, can target the changing virus that the different D n A. And the virus. Um and so this was one of the fundamental reasons why you chose that M RNA vaccine construct. That was one of the reasons. Exactly. It wasn't the only one, but speed was of the essence, and flexibility was of the essence. And this was exactly the reason why 1000 this for flu flu has the same characteristics. Every year is a different flu. It's never the same flu. So every year the vaccines that were getting for floor different vaccines than the year before, and I know how long it takes to develop. And people are starting in March for the new variation of the vaccine, and they end up having a vaccine in September when the flu comes out on October. So it takes really a lot of months, and we knew that when you make a decision in March for something that you will give in September, October, November, December. You may get it wrong. You may create a vaccine for different mutations and the ones that will survive. But that's what you can do because that's the limitations of your science. The RNA could disrupt them because you can do in weeks what you can you need months. In the other cases. You start human trials in May and you've got approved drugs in November. I mean, you must marvel about that. You're thinking about it. I'm proud of the people that did it. I didn't I didn't discover it. I didn't run the studies. I was leading the team that did all of that. And the scientists I told you about 18 months, uh is the earliest they can do. They knew what they were talking about. They were not stupid people. Actually, they were very knowledgeable people because that's exactly what might involve. And my team knew, exactly also, what would it take? And when they told me 18 months, that was, I think, much by breaking any other records that pre existed so that they can do that. It was very clear, and, uh, I have said many times. My challenge was how to make them believe that they can do the impossible possible. Right? And this is where the second wave of the seasons came. Like don't take the money from the from the from the government. Very big bet. But we were already in when we did this bad. I told them, Go ahead And we are now all hands on that. So whatever you need And then when the offer came, we can finance There were billions that were flowing around, uh, to everyone of us, right? I thought a little bit. What would it take to take the money? Because it was the easiest thing to take them. But I realized that if they give you money, there is no way that they will not want to sit on the table. How are you going to do it? Because we give you the money, How you give the money? Because we give you the money. Give us a report. Don't give us in darkness. We want to understand. And I knew that already within a massive company like Pfizer, we have a lot of bureaucracy to deal with. And I was betting that I will take over control. So as the ultimate decision making in the company, I will waive all bureaucracy will say you talk to me directly. I'm replacing world governing bodies. I'm making the decision. But I couldn't do that if I was taking the money. I knew that will never be able to make the impossible possible if we wouldn't do that. And keep in mind that we started much later than Madonna, for example. But also we didn't need the money. I'm sure Madonna needed them, right, But we didn't need the money. Now, if we were failing, what was it going to be? Very painful. Absolutely. There's a lot of money. We're talking about billions. But, uh, if we were failing, was that going to be the enter visor? Absolutely not. This is why I was put in this position, to be able to take the right risks, not to be reckless, but also not to be conservative and not move when the whole needs us. As you know, there's been a lot of complaint about the rollout of the vaccine. How would you characterize that roll out there? To face is the face that I was worried a lot. There is the face that I'm sending to the fighters sending the vaccine to the vaccination centers that every country is asking us to do. That was our responsibility to do it. Unfortunately, we were able, fortunately to do that very difficult logistical step. Quite successful. We were able to see almost 99.99% successful segments on time without any issues on the quality, because we were monitoring the temperatures on every single box that we're sending of these thousands of bucks. But a lot of the countries, including the US they were not ready, uh, to distribute those vaccines. They didn't have enough capacity, the vaccination centres, I'm sure that and I hope that all of them will get their act together. They will change their plans and they will be able to increase dramatically the vaccination rates. But and then, if they do that, we may have a period that we are the bottle bank and we need to produce much more. And we are preparing for that. We have announced recently that you are increasing from 1.3 billion to $2 billion. Is the current variants that we've seen some of these mutations that are much more transmissible, Uh, it seems than than the traditional sars-cov-2 virus, Um, the UK variant and now the South African variant and and some others right now, what have you learned from your vaccine In terms of its ability to neutralize those variants? We are quite confident right now that we can neutralize this variants. We have proved that in on the lab, and this experiment that we did in our own labs has been already replicated in multiple labs in universities and hospitals. So I feel very confident about it right now, we are covering both of them. So as we vaccinate, I think, uh, UK and South Africa were covered. I think the fundamental question is what are the chances that the new mutation that will not be covered by the vaccine could emerge, and no one can be certain, But theoretically is a very possible scenario if you protect very big part of the population, if there is a strain that emerges that they can use this pool of population to replicate, while the current trends cannot because they are protected, obviously this will overtake uh so it's not a certainty, but it is now. I believe it likely scenario, but that will happen. That proves also even more the case that you needed an M RNA because now you can very quickly develop a new version of the vaccine. That other adds to the current. Uh, let's say immunogenicity or, uh creates a very different one that can cover. Also the new meditation. So very important is quickly. We're just just Are we talking weeks? We're talking days that help. I believe that will depend on multiple factors. One of them. It is the regulatory framework. I believe we will be able within two months to be able to have it six weeks to have it and then give it a little bit of a cushion there. Two months. And of course, we will be taking risks to develop at risk manufacturing and all of that, Yeah, but I think we'll be as quickly as two months or so. I think the biggest challenge that you face, though, is moving from the science and the logistics into the politics of it. I know you were wary of that. What sort of eye opening experience was This was a whole different games completely different than what I was expected and let me clarify something. The October timeline was a timeline that I said in the March meeting. I was thinking that October is the flu season, and I knew that this is when things will go back way into that and when the possibility of having into vaccine started becoming reality, Which means after he, uh, had the first data announced and then, uh, starting our face three trials, uh, then people started speaking about the political implications of having a vaccine or not before the elections. And when I realized that when I heard the first presidential debate and the covid and the vaccine was discussed in political terms rather than scientific terms, this is when I made the statement the next day that, you know, some people want us to do faster. Some people want us to do it slower, I'll tell you, will go with the speed of science and so big. And then the October was too early. Then suddenly it came a little bit after, So it came a week later in November because we can overcome them. And then suddenly what for some was too early. Now for some, for the others became too late. And, uh well, what can we do? I tried hard to navigate this, frankly political minefield. And one of the reasons also why we didn't take the money. The second one was that because also, if you take government or money, then everything that you do is becoming even more, uh, let's say politically charge in the new administration. Obviously, this is going to be an opportunity for you to sort of help set some of the agenda for for reform. Um, you know, pricing reform and things like that. How will you go about that? Let me first clarify that I am a very, very strong believer that reform is needed. I'm a very strong believer that the current started school is not sustainable, and it is not desirable. And I'm also in a position to say that the vast majority of my peers, they are already in this camp. Everybody says that we need to make change. The question is what changes. What are the changes in the right direction? And I believe the policies that needs to be followed right now they need to have two fundamental pillars. There needs to be pro innovation and probation. They need to be pro innovation because we need a vibrant industry. But we'll be able to produce innovation that will help the society. And we need pro patient policies because we need to make sure that everyone will be able to have access. So what can become sometimes very expensive technology right now coming to the second piece, which is one of the major debates in the US, which is the drug price, the drug pricing, the cost? There are two different topics. Speaking about drug price one it is. What is the cost of medicines to the system, for example, to Medicare to the federal budget. The second is what is the cost of medicines to the individuals, the individual that goes to the pharmacy and he has to pay something for his pocket to get the medicine. Those who are very different one from another. For example, the first one represents 12% of the overall health care costs, so by definition, cannot be the big problem. Okay, no matter how expensive it is, when you go go to the patients, the people that are going to buy their medicines. This is by far their biggest talents because right now the Americans are paying for their medicines like if they don't have insurance, although they do have they pay everything from out of pocket. That needs to change now to change that, which means to move costs out of the patient friends. Someone is debate because it's not a zero sum. If that's the policy, we are willing to contribute a lot. We're going to take over a very big part of the out of pocket costs for the patients. Right now. I don't say that, and I don't think anyone will say it's fair, but we take all of it, but we are willing to take our further and even more. But this is where the money should go. I don't think that the money should go to cover the black hole of federal budget that will grow and grow and grow and will never find a solution. We must find a solution, and we must find it now this year that Pfizer, uh, you've now promise for or as projected, rather that that you'll have 6% revenue growth for a number of years. Uh, that's that's significantly above where the company has been for the last couple of years. Um, you know, you're you're still confident in that trajectory. So I'm very confident now, And, uh, also, I want to say that we started by saying we are projecting 6%. And now it's almost several months that we change the language to at least 6% for us. 6% is not the ceiling is the floor. And I'm very confident excluding anything coming from covid right now. The covid vaccine, right. I'm very confident that the remaining of the business will Yes, we'll deliver these numbers. And to that we need to add, and whatever the final impact of the covid 19 vaccine will will give. We haven't released any protections for that. I believe on the revenues will be higher than three billion. You know, I'd like to spend a few minutes on you in your life story. Is there some perspective you've got from your training as a veteran area? Uh, maybe opens your eyes up to two challenges that others may not see. I believe everything that it is a little bit out of the ordinary helps bring different perspectives. And I had a few of that. As I said, As you said, I'm veterinarian. And, uh, that helps you understand this time and so I can communicate with those people. But also working in the animal health group of Pfizer, I realized that was when I moved to the human health back 10, 11 years. Now I realized that the animal health was much more. Uh huh. Customer focus. Mhm. Then the big farmer, the big farm at the time that I joined was very much brand focus. It was the brand that matter. Never in our animal health group. It was the customer. Doesn't matter. It was the owner and the dog. It was the veterinarian. So I helped me bring that perspective, I think very clear. Also coming from a small country, Uh, but, uh, with glorious history, like Greece, but with the current reality. But it doesn't have a very big seat on the international table. So you learn how to fight to bring what you want to bring on this table, because it's not going to be easy to allow you to come even close to being a Jewish in a country that the Jewish population was almost exterminated during the Holocaust. Trying to be adoptive, trying to be much more flexible in the society so that you can survive. My mother was arrested and survived. My my father, uh, was hiding and survived, but it was not the same with their families. Right? So the brothers parents, etcetera, they were exterminated. So, uh, yeah, that that gave me, uh, identify the interesting case that my parents never looked back. They never talked to me. Uh, who did that to us? They need to pay. It was always, you know, we move forward. Life is very valuable. Let's move ahead. Let's enjoy the fact that in my career and Pfizer I lived in eight different cities of five different countries, made me appreciate the difference and the power of diversity and how every culture is unique and brings things on the table. And you will be very sensitive to that. All of us were perspectives that I brought that helped me become who I am, and I think everything help

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