Among all the white-collar jobs threatened by A.I., management consulting—a purely idea-based occupation that relies heavily on analytical and problem-solving skills—sits near the front of displacement fears. As reasoning LLMs and A.I. agents take on many junior-level tasks faster and more accurately, major firms like McKinsey, Accenture and the “Big Four” are cutting jobs and rethinking how they hire.

That doesn’t necessarily mean consulting is disappearing. For college graduates and young professionals who still aspire to the field, it simply means a different set of skills and qualities will be required to succeed. On Tuesday (Jan. 6), Bob Sternfels, McKinsey & Company’s board chair and global managing partner—the firm’s top role—shared those criteria during a talk at CES 2026.

Sternfels highlighted three skills that will continue to matter in an A.I.-infused world:

• Aspire. Setting the right goals and inspiring others to believe in them—essentially leadership and direction-setting.
• Judgment. The ability to distinguish right from wrong and to prioritize effectively. “A.I. models don’t know right or wrong. Humans need to set the right parameters, whether based on a company’s values or societal norms,” Sternfels said.
• Creativity. A recurring theme among leaders across industries. A.I. is still built on “inference models,” Sternfels said, and the ability to generate new ideas from nothing remains a fundamentally human skill that machines won’t replace anytime soon.

For decades, the consulting world was heavily defined by pedigree. But in the A.I. era, “where you went to school matters a lot less,” Sternfels said. In tech, he noted, hiring increasingly focuses on signals of capability rather than credentials—“not what university you graduated from, but what your GitHub profile looks like. That means a wider set of people can enter the workforce with different pathways.”

Sternfels was joined onstage by Hemant Taneja, CEO of venture capital firm General Catalyst, and angel investor Jason Calacanis for a live taping of the popular All-In podcast. On creativity, Taneja added, “Learning how to ask the right questions and solving hard problems are very different mindsets. It’s about curiosity and kind of back to being kids.”

McKinsey recently made headlines for cutting hundreds of back-office jobs as A.I. automates parts of its operations. Putting a specific number on the impact for the first time, Sternfels said the firm is reducing non-client-facing headcount by 25 percent while seeing a 10 percent productivity gain from A.I.

A more telling number, though, is that the firm is also increasing its client-facing staff by 25 percent, Sternfels said, which amounts to an “unprecedented number of new hires, because the work is changing.”

McKinsey employs about 43,000 people globally, according to its website, with headcount roughly evenly split between client-facing and back-office roles. That balance is apparently shifting as the firm staffs its business differently.

The learning gap

However, one question that the consulting industry has yet to find a satisfactory answer to is how to train and develop talent in the A.I. era. And elite universities don’t seem to be preparing students for it, either.

Entry-level consultants have traditionally spent significant time reading documents and performing repetitive work. Such grunt work was not only part of the workflow but also the primary way junior employees learned and progressed. As those tasks become easier to automate, new hires risk losing opportunities to build skills, judgment and character.

“There’s a massive gap in resilience,” Sternfels said. “You’re gonna get knocked out. The question is: do you get back up? And how do you get back up? I think the educational system today doesn’t necessarily build individual capability in resilience.”

Since the abrupt halt brought on by Covid-19, most Chinese companies that once dominated CES have retreated amid extended travel restrictions and rising geopolitical tensions. But Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker, stands out as a notable exception, charging ahead in the U.S. market even as the presence of many of its Chinese peers has faded. This year, Lenovo claimed center stage at CES 2026, hosting its annual product launch event, Tech World, at Las Vegas’s coolest venue: the Sphere.

The two-hour event yesterday (Jan. 6) held the audience’s attention throughout. Lasers cut through the darkness as 16K video washed across the Sphere’s vast, curved screen, wrapping the audience in light and sound. The spectacle doubled as a demonstration of Lenovo’s partnership with Sphere Studios, which produces content for the venue. Behind the scenes, hundreds of Lenovo workstations, servers and services powered the ultra-high-resolution visuals, enabling real-time rendering for immersive live shows and cinematic-scale production.”

Unlike many of its peers, Lenovo loves co-marketing with other major tech brands, often inviting their senior executives to share the stage. Yesterday, Lenovo chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang was joined by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Huang and Su had delivered their own CES keynotes earlier in the week.

Throughout the presentation, Lenovo unveiled a broad slate of products and platforms. The announcements centered on what Lenovo calls Hybrid A.I., led by Qira, a cross-device personal A.I. “super agent,” alongside a full stack of A.I. platforms and services designed for both consumers and enterprises.

On the hardware side, the company introduced new A.I. PCs across its Yoga, IdeaPad, ThinkPad and ThinkCentre Aura Edition lines, along with new Motorola flagship smartphones, including a FIFA World Cup 2026 special-edition Razr. Lenovo also showcased several rollable and wearable concept devices, as well as new ThinkSystem and ThinkEdge servers and an A.I. Cloud Gigafactory developed with Nvidia for large-scale A.I. infrastructure deployments.

Lenovo’s brand push in the U.S.

In recent years, Tech World has evolved into one of the industry’s more closely watched conferences, distinct from traditional product launches in both scope and ambition. Lenovo has used the event not only to introduce new devices but to frame its view of where its industry is headed.

Beyond technology, Lenovo has increasingly aligned itself with high-profile sports brands to strengthen its foothold in the U.S. market. It is an official partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026 in North America and a major sponsor of Formula 1. During yesterday’s event, Lenovo hosted a ticket raffle offering attendees a chance to win an all-inclusive ticket to FIFA World Cup quarterfinal matches (whose prices are at a historical high). FIFA President Gianni Infantino also appeared onstage during the presentation.

Lenovo sells personal computers, servers, monitors and smartphones, and Yang has long framed the U.S. as an important market. “We want to be a solid no.3 in North America,” he told Reuters in a 2021 interview. Today, Lenovo trails HP and Dell in the U.S. PC market. American consumers account for less than 20 percent of Lenovo’s total revenue, Yang told Reuters in August.

In the years leading up to 2020, Chinese companies were a dominant force at CES, often accounting for a third or more of all exhibitors. At CES 2018, more than 1,500 Chinese firms attended the show. By 2023, the first year after China fully reopened, that number had fallen to fewer than 500. While participation has rebounded since then, it remains below pre-Covid levels, and several major Chinese technology companies, including Huawei, DJI and Alibaba, were notably absent in recent years.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is the biggest celebrity in Las Vegas this week. His CES keynote at the Fontainebleau Resort proved harder to get into than any sold-out Vegas shows. Journalists who cleared their schedules for the event waited for hours outside the 3,600-seat BleauLive Theatre. Many who arrived on time—after navigating the sprawling maze of conference venues and, in some cases, flying in from overseas to see the tech king of the moment—were turned away due to overcapacity and redirected to a watch party outside, where some 2,000 attendees gathered in a mix of frustration and reverence.

Shortly after 1 p.m., Huang jogged onto the stage, wearing a glistening, embossed black leather jacket, and wished the crowd a happy New Year. He opened with a brisk history of A.I., tracing the last few years of exponential progress—from the rise of large language models to OpenAI’s advances in reasoning systems and the explosion of so-called agentic A.I. All of it built toward the theme that dominated the bulk of his 90-minute presentation: physical A.I.

Physical A.I. is a concept that has gained momentum among leading researchers over the past year. The goal is to train A.I. systems to understand the intuitive rules humans take for granted—such as gravity, causality, motion and object permanence—so machines can reason about and safely interact with real environments.

Nvidia enters the self-driving race

Huang unveiled Alpamayo, a world foundational model designed to power autonomous driving. He called it “the world’s first reasoning autonomous driving A.I.”

To demonstrate, Nvidia played a one-shot video of a Mercedes vehicle equipped with Alpamayo navigating busy downtown San Francisco traffic. The car executed turns, stopped for lights and vehicles, yielded to pedestrians and changed lanes. A human driver sat behind the wheel throughout the drive but did not intervene.

One particularly interesting thing Huang discussed was how Nvidia trains physical A.I. systems—a fundamentally different challenge from training language models. Large language models learn from text, of which humanity has produced enormous quantities. But how do you teach an A.I. Newton’s second law of motion?

“Where does that data come from?” Huang asked. “Instead of languages—because we created a bunch of text that we consider ground truths that A.I. can learn from—how do we teach an A.I. the ground truths of physics? There are lots and lots of videos, but it’s hardly enough to capture the diversity of interactions we need.”

Nvidia’s answer is synthetic data: information generated by A.I. systems based on samples of real-world data. In the case of Alpamayo, another Nvidia world model—called Cosmos—uses limited real-world inputs to generate far more complex, physically plausible videos. A basic traffic scenario becomes a series of realistic camera views of cars interacting on crowded streets. A still image of a robot and vegetables turns into a dynamic kitchen scene. Even a text prompt can be transformed into a video with physically accurate motion.

Nvidia said the first fleet of Alpamayo-powered robotaxis, built in the 2025 Mercedes-Benz CLA vehicles, is slated to launch in the U.S. in the first quarter, followed by Europe in the second quarter and Asia later in 2026.

For now, Alpamayo remains a Level 2 autonomous driving system—similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving—which requires a human driver to remain attentive behind the wheel at all times. Nvidia’s longer-term goal is Level 4 autonomy, where vehicles can operate without human supervision in specific, constrained environments. That’s one step below full autonomy, or Level 5.

“The ChatGPT moment for physical A.I. is nearly here,” Huang said in a voiceover accompanying one of the videos shown during the keynote.

LEGO just made its most ambitious showing ever at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show—an unusual venue for a toy giant, and a telling one. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, LEGO unveiled a screen-less device called the “SMART Brick,” a bid to bring a myriad of senses to its silent, incredibly precise plastic bricks.

The SMART Brick is a standard two-by-four LEGO brick (1.6 cm by 3.2 cm) with a tiny, custom ASIC chip embedded inside. That chip allows the brick to recognize distance, color and motion, and even to interpret the “personalities” of thousands of LEGO minifigures.

The brick sits at the center of LEGO’s new “SMART Play” system, a platform designed to make physical play more interactive and fun. It’s meant to be a system “where technology seamlessly brings LEGO sets to life, responding to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviours, allowing for a truly responsive play experience,” according to LEGO. The Danish company is billing SMART Play as its most significant product innovation in 50 years, since the introduction of the minifigure in the late 1970s.

The SMART Brick, small enough to be integrated in any LEGO model, packs in far more than its size suggests. It includes responsive lights, a color-recognition scanner to sense its surroundings, a sound synthesizer capable of producing a wide range of effects, and a built-in accelerometer that tracks how the brick moves through the air in real-time.

The SMART brick works in conjunction with SMART tags and SMART minifigures. A SMART Tag is a flat, 2×2 studless tile embedded with a unique digital ID that tells a nearby SMART Brick what role it should assume in a given context. SMART minifigures, without a visible tag, also contain their own unique digital IDs that encode a character’s “personality” and guide how the SMART Brick should behave when that figure is nearby.

During a demo at CES, Tom Donaldson, senior vice president and head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group, placed a SMART Brick on a panel divided into four colors: red, green, blue and yellow. As the brick moved across the surface, it lit up to match the color beneath it.

“When you put that in a LEGO model, the model knows the world around it,” Donaldson said. “It knows it’s in a water bayou; it knows it’s in a jungle bayou because it’s green; maybe it knows it’s in a red fire engine over a blue police car.”

In another demonstration, Donaldson attached a SMART Brick to a LEGO yellow duck and moved it through different positions—splashing, sleeping, even flying to test whether the duck approved. The brick responded with sounds that conveyed different emotions: contentment, snoring, irritation and more.

The SMART Brick can also sense proximity. When another brick moves closer or farther away, it reacts by changing its lights or emitting sounds. When placed on or near a SMART Tag, it instantly assumes whatever role the tag assigns it—a police car, a duck, a helicopter and so on.

SMART minifigures, meanwhile, react uniquely to their environments through distinct sounds, moods and behaviors. Those reactions are played through the speaker inside a nearby SMART Brick; the minifigures themselves don’t produce sound, but instead trigger the brick to do so on their behalf.

LEGO SMART Play is set to officially launch on March 1. Preorders for an all-in-one LEGO Star Wars SMART Play set begin on Jan. 9.

In November, ChatGPT turned three, with a global user base rapidly approaching one billion. At this point, A.I. is no longer an esoteric acronym that needs explaining in news stories. It has become a daily utility, woven into how we work, learn, shop and even love. The field is also far more crowded than it was just a few years ago, with competitors emerging at every layer of the stack.

Over the past year, conversation around A.I. has taken on a more complicated tone. Some argue that consumer chatbots are nearing a plateau. Others warn that startup valuations are inflating into a bubble. And, as always, there’s the persistent anxiety that A.I. may one day outgrow human control altogether.

So what comes next? Much of the industry’s energy is now focused on the infrastructure side of A.I. Big Tech companies are racing to solve the hardware bottlenecks that limit today’s systems, while startups experiment with applications far beyond chatbots. At the same time, researchers are beginning to look past language models altogether, toward models that can reason about the physical world.

Below are the key themes Observer has identified over the past year of covering this space. Many of these developments are still unfolding and are likely to shape the field well into 2026 and beyond.

A.I. chips

Even as OpenAI faces growing competition at the model level, its primary chip supplier, Nvidia, remains in a league of its own. Demand for its GPUs continues to outstrip supply, and no rival has yet meaningfully disrupted its dominance. Traditional semiconductor companies such as AMD and Intel are racing to claw back market share, while some of Nvidia’s largest customers are designing their own chips to reduce dependence on a single supplier.

Google’s long-in-the-making Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, has reportedly found its first major customer, Meta, marking a milestone after years of internal use. Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are also deep into developing in-house chips of their own—Meta’s Artemis, Microsoft’s Maia and Amazon’s Trainium.

World models

To borrow from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the limits of language are the limits of our world. Today’s A.I. systems have grown remarkably fluent in human language—especially English—but language captures only a narrow slice of intelligence. That limitation has prompted some researchers to argue that large language models alone can never reach human-level understanding.

Meta’s longtime chief A.I. scientist, Yann LeCun, has been among the most vocal critics. “We’re never going to get to human-level A.I. by just training on text,” he said during a Harvard talk in September.

That belief is fueling a push toward so-called “world models,” which aim to teach machines how the physical world works—how objects move, how space is structured, and how cause and effect unfold. LeCun is now leaving Meta to build such a system himself. Fei-Fei Li’s startup, World Labs, unveiled its first model in November after nearly two years of development. Google DeepMind has released early versions through its Genie projects, and Nvidia is betting heavily on physical A.I. with its Cosmos models.

Language-specific A.I.

While pioneering researchers look beyond language, linguistic barriers remain one of A.I.’s most practical challenges. More than half of the internet’s content is written in English, skewing training data and limiting performance in other languages.

In response, developers around the world are building models rooted in local cultures and linguistic norms. In Japan, companies such as Sanaka and NTT are developing LLMs tailored to Japanese language and values. In India, Krutrim is working to support the country’s vast linguistic diversity. France’s Mistral AI has positioned its Le Chat assistant as a European alternative to ChatGPT. Earlier this year, Microsoft also issued a call for proposals to expand training data across European languages.

A.I. wearables

It’s only natural that there’s a consumer hardware angle of A.I. This year brought a wave of experiments in wearable A.I.—some met with curiosity, others with discomfort.

Friend, a startup selling an A.I. pendant, sparked backlash after a New York City subway campaign framed its product as a substitute for human companionship. In December, Meta acquired Limitless, the maker of a $99 wearable that records and summarizes conversations. Earlier in the year, Amazon bought Bee, which produces a $50 bracelet designed to transcribe daily activity and generate summaries.

Meta is also developing a new line of smart glasses with EssilorLuxottica, the company behind Ray-Ban and Oakley. In July, Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to suggest that people without A.I.-enhanced glasses could eventually face a “significant cognitive disadvantage.” Meanwhile, OpenAI is quietly collaborating with former Apple design chief Jony Ive on a mysterious hardware project of its own. This all suggests the next phase of A.I. may be something we wear, not just something we type into.

Talk of SpaceX going public is sending the stocks of its partners and investors soaring. After multiple outlets reported earlier this month that SpaceX could pursue an IPO as soon as next year, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (Dec. 14) that the Elon Musk–led rocket and satellite company will begin hearing pitches from investment banks this week, marking a concrete step toward a long-anticipated public listing.

The scale of a SpaceX IPO would be historic. Bloomberg reports the company is seeking to raise more than $30 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion. That would nearly double estimates from earlier reports and quadruple SpaceX’s most recent valuation from a secondary share sale over the summer.

For years, Musk had teased a potential IPO of SpaceX’s Starlink division. Now, the company is considering a full public listing, signaling that its launch business is generating steady revenue capable of withstanding the scrutiny of public markets.

IPO speculation first surfaced on Dec. 5. While SpaceX CFO Bret Johnson has told employees the listing remains “highly uncertain,” the market has already reacted. Shares of several publicly traded SpaceX partners and investors have surged, including EchoStar, a communications networks firm, and STMicroelectronics, which supplies components for SpaceX’s Starlink terminals. Other space-focused companies, such as Rocket Lab, also rose in sympathy.

Here are four companies to watch as SpaceX inches closer to what could be one of the largest IPOs in history:

EchoStar Corporation (SATS)

EchoStar operates satellite communication networks, provides wireless and broadband services, and owns brands including Boost Mobile and Hughes Network Systems. Earlier this year, SpaceX agreed to buy wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar for about $17 billion to support Starlink’s expansion. The deal was funded with a 50-50 mix of cash and SpaceX equity, leaving EchoStar as one of the company’s largest outside shareholders—and positioning it as a major beneficiary of any IPO.

STMicroelectronics (STM)

STMicroelectronics is one of Europe’s largest semiconductor manufacturers and a key supplier to SpaceX. The company provides radio-frequency chips used in Starlink satellites and user terminals, enabling high-speed connectivity across the constellation. STMicroelectronics has shipped roughly five billion chips to SpaceX over the past decade and expects to double that total by 2027, Reuters reported.

Alphabet (GOOG)

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, invested about $900 million in SpaceX in 2015, acquiring an estimated 6 percent to 7 percent stake when the company was valued at $12 billion. That investment, made alongside Fidelity, would see a massive paper gain if SpaceX goes public at the target valuation.

Bank of America (BAC)

Bank of America joined SpaceX’s cap table in November 2018, investing approximately $250 million during a financing round that valued the company at $30 billion. While the stake represents a small portion of the bank’s overall portfolio, it could still deliver an outsized return in the event of a blockbuster IPO.

Other notable shareholders

Musk remains the largest shareholder of SpaceX, owning roughly 40 percent of the company. Other major investors include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford and Valor Equity Partners.

Several public funds also hold exposure to SpaceX, offering investors indirect access to the company ahead of a listing. These include the ERShares Crossover ETF, the ARK Venture Fund (managed by Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest) and the Baron Partners Fund.

Jay Clayton, the former chair of the SEC from 2017 to 2020, known for his tough stance on cryptocurrencies and protecting retail investors, has a few thoughts on prediction markets—a space that is growing dangerously fast and increasingly blurring the line between investing and gambling.

“In any new thing—and I don’t want to get ahead of the CFTC or the SEC—you have to ask yourself: What function is this product performing?” He said yesterday (Dec. 2) during an interview at a Semafor event hosted at the New York Stock Exchange.

One such “new thing” Clayton dealt with during his SEC tenure was initial coin offerings, or ICOs. His view was that ICOs serve the same purpose as IPOs and therefore are subject to U.S. securities laws.

“People were like, Oh no, it’s not a stock, it’s a coin. Well, it’s an investment in a company that you expect to get a return, so the function it’s performing is the same as a stock or the same as some kind of bond,” Clayton said.

He then returned to prediction markets. “The real question is what function are prediction markets providing?” He said. “When does it look just like a cash-settled option on a stock? And when does it look like a bet on a football game? Those are two different functions… If I go into the betting shop and buy a cash-settled option on American Express, should it just be regulated as a bet or should it be regulated as a cash-settled option?”

There’s no easy answer. In the U.S., prediction-market contracts are treated as derivatives or event contracts, putting them under the authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Both Polymarket and Kalshi operate under special CFTC licenses as regulated exchanges under U.S. derivatives law. However, some types of event contracts—particularly those tied to sports or gaming outcomes—may face additional restrictions under state-level gambling laws.

Both companies have had bumpy paths in reaching U.S. customers. Polymarket was banned by the CFTC in 2022 for offering unregistered event contracts. Some U.S. users stayed on the platform by using VPNs. It officially returned to the U.S. last month after receiving an amended Designated Contract Markets license from the CFTC. Kalshi has faced similar scrutiny, including a Nevada court ruling last month that some of its sports contracts fall under state gaming law rather than federal oversight.

“People look for regulatory relief by providing a close enough function to something that’s highly regulated, and then they can operate under less regulation…But you have to ask yourself, is it far enough away from a current function that’s finally regulated that it should be regulated differently?” Clayton said. “Luckily, I don’t have to think about those things.”

Clayton is now the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a role President Trump appointed him to in April.

Prediction markets are breaking into the mainstream. The young founders of both Polymarket and Kalshi recently became billionaires as their companies’ valuations soared.

Last month, the NYSE’s parent company, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), announced plans to invest $2 billion in Polymarket and distribute its data to institutions worldwide. Polymarket is reportedly nearing a valuation between $12 billion and $15 billion as it pursues a new funding round.

During Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting in Austin, Texas yesterday (Nov. 6), investors approved a record-setting compensation plan that could award CEO Elon Musk up to $1 trillion in Tesla stock over the next decade. The package, which is tied to an unusually high set of performance milestones, is the third long-term award Tesla has designed to motivate Musk to grow Tesla’s business exponentially.

Tesla, which currently has a market cap of about $1.35 trillion, has seen EV sales slow in recent periods. Its high stock price is instead riding on expectations that the company will deliver its next wave of A.I.-driven products, including robots and self-driving software. “What we’re about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla but a whole new book,” Musk told shareholders yesterday.

The pay plan, first proposed by Tesla’s board in September, drew opposition from major proxy advisors including Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Even so, more than 75 percent of shareholders ultimately voted for it.

The award is structured as 12 tranches totaling 425 million shares, each tied to a mix of market value and operational targets. If Musk achieves all of them, the shares would be worth about $1 trillion.

Here are the conditions Musk must meet:

• Bring Tesla’s market value to $2 trillion to unlock the first tranche.

• The next nine tranches require $500 billion increases in market value, up to $6.5 trillion.

• The final two tranches require $1 trillion increases, meaning Tesla would have to reach $8.5 trillion by 2035.

• Each target must be sustained on both a six-month and 30-day average basis.

In addition to those valuation goals, Musk must hit a series of operational milestones:

• Deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles cumulatively.

• Reach 10 million active Full Self-Driving (FSD) subscriptions over a consecutive three-month period.

• Deliver 1 million bots, including Optimus or its successors.

• Deploy 1 million Robotaxis in commercial operation.

• Meet annual adjusted EBITDA milestones starting at $50 billion and eventually reaching $400 billion. (Tesla’s 2024 EBITDA was $12.44 billion.)

• The last two tranches are also conditioned on Musk putting in place a board-approved CEO succession plan. He will be 64 in 2035.

If Musk earns the full award, his stake in Tesla would rise to 25 percent from about 13 percent, matching a demand he has made publicly since early 2024. He has argued that a larger ownership position is necessary not to enrich himself but to preserve his ability to steer Tesla toward “an artificial intelligence and robotics juggernaut of truly immense capability and power,” as he said on an earnings call in early 2024.

That vision is expected to include his A.I. startup xAI, now valued at about $200 billion. At yesterday’s meeting, Tesla shareholders also voted on a separate proposal to allow Tesla to invest in xAI. Tesla general counsel Brandon Ehrhart said more shares were cast for the proposal than against it, though there were many abstentions, and the board would review next steps.

Musk has received two similarly structured awards before, in 2012 and 2018, but the new package is dramatically more ambitious. The 2012 plan required him to raise Tesla’s market cap in $4 billion increments; the 2018 plan raised that bar to $50 billion increments. This time, most of the plan is built around $500 billion jumps.

“In 2018, Elon had to grow Tesla by billions; in 2025, he has to grow Tesla by trillions—to be exact, he must create nearly $7.5 trillion in value for shareholders for him to receive the full award,” Tesla said in an SEC filing yesterday.

At some point during the rapid development of any new technology, consolidation is inevitable. Big players eventually buy out smaller competitors or crowd them out by capturing market share. In the current A.I. boom, large firms are taking this further through a strategy known as an “acqui-hire,” where a company purchases a smaller firm mainly to absorb its talent, often shutting down the acquired company’s product afterward.

Big Tech giants like Meta and Google have struck billion-dollar deals in this category: Meta’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI, Google’s $2.7 billion stake in Character.AI, and its $2.4 billion deal with Windsurf, to name a few. But the true master of this playbook is Apple, which has quietly acquired more than 100 companies since 2010—most too small to warrant a press release.

Aside from its $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics in 2014 and the $1 billion purchase of Intel’s smartphone modem business in 2019, Apple rarely makes large public deals. Yet CEO Tim Cook has said Apple buys companies “every two to three weeks.”

Its latest target appears to be a 10-person computer vision startup called Prompt AI, CNBC reported last week. Founded in 2023 by a team of UC Berkeley researchers, the San Francisco–based company has raised only $5 million in venture capital and was last valued at between $50 million and $60 million, according to PitchBook data.

Prompt AI’s main product is an app called Seemour. It connects home cameras to create a more sophisticated understanding of space. Its technology enables cameras to recognize people, pets and objects, alert homeowners to unusual activity, and even answer questions about what’s happening in view. The company describes itself as building “machines that sense the world just like you.” According to CNBC, Prompt’s technology and talent are expected to join Apple’s HomeKit smart home division. Prompt AI could not be reached for comment.

Apple’s acqui-hire playbook

Unlike traditional acquisitions, the main goal of an acqui-hire is talent, not technology. “Acqui-hires let Big Tech firms rapidly capture specialized talent while avoiding the cost, regulation and complexity of traditional acquisitions,” Ben Boissevain, founder of Ascento Capital Invest, an investment bank specializing in advising on tech M&A deals, told Observer. “[They were] specifically got used in recent A.I. acquisitions because the breakthrough ideas come from a few talented top engineers.”

Apple’s best-known deal of this kind is arguably its 2010 purchase of Siri. The company absorbed Siri’s founding team, including co-founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, to develop its own voice assistant. However, unlike a typical acqui-hire, Apple retained Siri’s product and built it into its ecosystem.

Other notable A.I.-related acqui-hires include Emotient, a San Diego-based company that used A.I. to analyze facial expressions and infer emotions. Apple acquired it in 2016 to enhance its facial recognition technology. That same year, Apple also “acqui-hired” two machine learning startups, Turi and Tuplejump, whose key engineers joined Apple’s internal A.I. teams.

Being acquired by a company like Apple often marks a victory for a startup’s investors, but the quicl exit offered by an acqui-hire comes with its own tradeoffs. If the Prompt AI deal goes through, its investors will receive some payout but likely not recover their full investment, CNBC reported. Shareholders typically see modest returns compared to full takeovers,” Boissevain said, adding that acqui-hire deals also often come with retention risks. “Employees benefit from higher pay and infrastructure but often lose autonomy and startup culture, which can lead to burnout or attrition within a few years,” he said.

—Apple’s suite of consumer-facing A.I. offerings, Apple Intelligence, has faced skepticism for lacking truly groundbreaking features. But Cook has hinted the company is far from done making A.I. moves. In July, he said Apple had acquired seven smaller companies in 2025 so far and remained open to larger deals, adding, “We are not stuck on a certain size company.” Cook characterized Apple’s acquisition strategy as augmenting its capabilities—especially in A.I.—consistent with its long-standing preference for buying teams and technology rather than revenue.

“Apple may surprise us with a large acquisition of a company like Perplexity, which is valued between $14 billion and $18 billion, Boissevain speculated on the high-flying A.I. answer engine maker, “which would be an excellent strategic fit, potentially powering Siri, Spotlight and Safari with A.I.-native capabilities.”

Vogue has found a successor to Anna Wintour. The fashion magazine announced today (Sept. 2) that Chloe Malle, a longtime Vogue editor known for leading the company’s digital initiatives, will become head of editorial content at American Vogue. Malle, a former Observer reporter and the daughter of the actress Candice Bergen, began her career at Vogue in 2011. She is currently the editor of Vogue’s website and co-hosts its weekly podcast, The Run‑Through with Vogue. 

Wintour, 75, announced her retirement as editor-in-chief of American Vogue after a legendary 37-year run. She has stepped back into a less hands-on role as Vogue’s chief content officer, overseeing Malle and the magazine’s nine other heads of editorial content around the world. Wintour still works from her office at Condé Nast’s One World Trade Center headquarters in New York City.

“I also feel incredibly fortunate to still have Anna just down the hall as my mentor,” Malle said in a statement.

Malle, 39, is the daughter of Bergen and French filmmaker Louis Malle. She grew up in Los Angeles and New York and studied literature at Brown University. After college, she worked as a reporter at this publication (then the New York Observer), covering arts, fashion and celebrity real estate from 2009 to 2011.

She joined Vogue in 2011 as a social editor, shortly after the magazine relaunched its website as part of a major digital expansion. In a 2014 interview with the beauty website Into the Gloss, Malle recalled her job interview with Wintour in a scene reminiscent of The Devil Wears Prada.

“You’re supposed to never wear black. I wore black. It was in March and so cold, so I wore black tights and these black J. Crew suede booties, which were fine, but were sort of falling apart. And then I wore this very boring…Diane von Furstenberg collared dress with a gray and white striped blazer,” she said. “Apparently, there are a lot of things people know to do and not to do when they’re interviewing at Vogue, and I just didn’t have the community of friends or peers who had that information.”

“I consider myself more of a ‘fashion girl’ now, but my evolution’s been almost by osmosis,” she said in 2014.

But unlike Andrea Sachs, Malle rose through the ranks at the fashion Bible. She covered a wide range of topics, including fashion, politics, homes and gardens, beauty and health. She has also edited several books for Vogue. She began co-hosting The Run‑Through podcast in 2022 and was appointed to lead all of Vogue’s digital content in the fall of 2023. The company said web traffic has doubled since Malle took over.

“I’ve spent my career at Vogue working in roles across every platform—from print to digital, audio to video, events and social media,” said Malle, who lives in Manhattan with her husband, two children and their dog, Lloyd. “I love the title, I love the content we create, and I love the editors who create it. Vogue has already shaped who I am, now I’m excited at the prospect of shaping Vogue.”

“Chloe has long been one of Vogue’s secret weapons when it comes to tracking fashion,” Wintour said in a statement. “But she is not so buried in the industry that she misses the world: Like the best designers, she understands fashion’s big picture, its role shaping not just what’s on the runway but the changing fabric of modern life. Although she is no stranger to the glamour of red carpets, her talent has been for original thinking and hard work.”

ChatGPT’s continued popularity and ballooning user base is propelling OpenAI’s market value to new heights. The A.I. giant is in talks to sell shares held by current and former employees at a valuation of around $500 billion, potentially making it the most valuable privately held company in the world, surpassing TikTok parent ByteDance and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The proposed secondary stock sale, first reported by Bloomberg, would not bring new capital into OpenAI but would instead allow insiders to cash out—a common strategy used by fast-growing startups to retain talent and reward early employees. Thrive Capital, an existing investor in OpenAI, is reportedly in talks to lead the deal. If completed, the valuation jump would mark a nearly 67 percent increase from OpenAI’s last reported valuation of $300 billion in March, following a $40 billion financing round led by SoftBank.

OpenAI’s user base has surged alongside its valuation. ChatGPT recently surpassed 700 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March, the company revealed this week. Users now exchange more than 3 billion messages daily on the chatbot, the company said.

OpenAI makes money primarily through ChatGPT subscription plans ($20 a month) and licensing its A.I. models to enterprise clients and developers. While OpenAI has not confirmed profitability, CNBC reported the company is on track to hit $20 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year—double what it projected just two months ago.

On Tuesday, OpenAI released two “open weight” reasoning models, which the company claims outperform similarly sized open models on reasoning tasks at a low cost. The company is also preparing to launch GPT-5, its most advanced language model to date.

In addition, in a move to expand government adoption, OpenAI recently struck a nominal $1-per-year licensing deal with U.S. federal agencies, enabling them to pilot and deploy OpenAI’s tools across various public-sector applications.

In May, OpenAI announced a $6.5 billion all-stock acquisition of io Products, an A.I. hardware startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive. The deal signals OpenAI’s ambitions to move beyond software and into A.I.-powered consumer devices.

OpenAI isn’t the only A.I. firm commanding sky-high valuations. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, is reportedly seeking a $170 billion valuation in its latest fundraising round. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI, launched in 2023, is aiming for a valuation of up to $200 billion.

With Elon Musk’s controversial $56 billion Tesla pay package still tied up in court, the electric carmaker has approved a $29 billion interim compensation plan in case he ultimately loses the original award. According to an SEC filing yesterday (Aug. 4), Tesla’s board has authorized a package granting Musk 96 million shares of Tesla stock, which will vest in two years as long as he remains CEO or holds another key executive role at the company. However, if a final court ruling allows him to fully receive the original $56 billion package, the interim award will be voided.

What’s happened to Musk’s $56 billion package so far

January 2018: Tesla’s board and shareholders approved a 10-year, performance-based compensation plan for Musk. The plan included 12 tranches of stock options with a total potential value of roughly $56 billion if fully earned through 2028.

February 2019: A group of Tesla shareholders filed a lawsuit in Delaware—where Tesla is incorporated—alleging the plan’s approval process was flawed. The case, known as Tornetta v. Musk, was led by shareholder Richard Tornetta.

April 2022: Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled against Musk, finding that the board’s approval of the plan was not sufficiently independent. Tesla and Musk later appealed the ruling.

February 2024: Judge McCormick formally ordered the $56 billion compensation plan to be rescinded, ruling that Tesla’s board withheld key information from shareholders ahead of the original approval vote.

June 2024: At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, shareholders voted to reaffirm the $56 billion package. They also approved a plan to reincorporate Tesla in Texas to avoid further Delaware judicial challenges. 

What’s in the new $29 billion package:

• Options to purchase 96 million shares of Tesla common stock
• The shares are scheduled to vest on Aug. 3, 2027
• Musk must pay $23.34 per share upon vesting, matching the exercise price from his 2018 compensation plan

Elon Musk’s fortune and Tesla at a crossroads

Musk has exercised stock options from eight of the 12 tranches in his $56 billion compensation package. The remaining four tranches are tied to additional milestones, including further growth in Tesla’s market capitalization and the outcome of ongoing legal challenges.

He currently owns about 13 percent of Tesla, or roughly 410 million shares—a stake that accounts for about a quarter of his nearly $400 billion net worth. Musk, who also leads at least five other companies, has recently faced pressure to refocus on Tesla amid declining sales and a falling share price.

Now that Elon Musk has wrapped up his high-profile advisory role in Washington, a group of Tesla’s institutional investors is pressing him to return his full attention to the company, which has seen sales plummet in key markets in recent months. The investors point to slowing electric vehicle sales and a slumping stock price as evidence that Tesla needs Musk back at the helm.

Yesterday (May 28), Tesla chair Robyn Denholm received a letter signed by 12 major pension funds that collectively hold significant stakes in the company. As first reported by the Financial Times, the letter calls on Musk to commit to working at least 40 hours per week at Tesla.

“The current crisis at Tesla puts into sharp focus the long-term problems at the company stemming from the CEO’s absence, which is amplified by a Board that appears largely uninterested and unwilling to act in the best interest of all Tesla shareholders by demanding Musk’s full-time attention on Tesla,” the letter said.

“Given Musk’s leadership roles at four private companies and his foundation, the Board must ensure that Tesla is not treated as just one among many competing obligations,” the letter said.

Aside from Tesla, he partially owns and runs at least five other companies, including SpaceX, X, The Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI.

Musk recently promised to refocus on Tesla and scale back his role as the head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms. I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla . . . as we have critical technologies rolling out,” he wrote on X earlier this month.

Musk is the largest shareholder of Tesla, owning about 13 percent of the company. Its other major shareholders include institutional funds such as Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. Because Tesla is part of the S&P 500 index (since December 2020), many pension funds that invest in index funds also own shares in Tesla. The signatories of this week’s letter collectively hold about 0.25 percent of Tesla, worth roughly $3 billion.

Before leading the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell had a career on and off Wall Street spanning nearly three decades. Among the handful of people who worked closely with him for an extended period was David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group. Speaking at a conference last week, Rubenstein described Powell as “a nice guy, a lawyer by training—not an investment banker, not an economist,” and credited this background for his success as Fed chair.

“He explains what he’s going to do before he does it, which many Fed chairs didn’t do,” Rubeinstein said during an onstage interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington D.C. on Friday (April 25). “When Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan were chairs, they would take action, and you had to figure out later what they really did, because they didn’t have press conferences.”

The tradition of the Fed hosting press conferences after Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings started with former Fed chair Ben Bernanke in 2011. Powell has expanded the practice—now briefing the press after every FOMC meeting—the committee meets eight times a year—in an effort to improve transparency and communication around monetary policy.

Powell was a partner at Carlyle from 1997 to 2005, leading a U.S. buyout fund. After leaving the private equity firm, he founded Severn Capital Partners before returning to public service in 2012 as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, nominated by former President Barack Obama. He assumed the role of chair in 2018.

Powell recently made headlines after President Donald Trump threatened to fire him—a threat Trump later walked back. The President has criticized the Fed’s interest rate policies and Powell’s warnings that tariffs would drive higher inflation.

Rubenstein praised Powell’s calm in the face of such attacks. “One of the things he’s done very well is not responding to criticism,” he said, then turned to the audience and asked, “How many of you here would like to be beat up by the leader of the free world and just not say anything in your defense?”

“Jay has been very good at basically keeping his head down, not criticizing anybody who’s criticizing him, and just dealing with the problems that the Fed sees,” he added. “I think he’s got the confidence of the [Fed] board and the confidence of the people setting interest rates.”

Powell is widely respected across Washington and Wall Street for his steady leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic—cutting interest rates to near zero, launching massive bond-buying program and supporting emergency lending facilities. While criticized for a slow response to post-pandemic inflation, Powell course-corrected rapidly, hiking interest rates at the fastest pace in four decades while successfully avoiding a recession.

Among President Trump’s long list of high tariffs imposed on goods from China—from 245 percent on needles and syringes to 170 percent on squid—there is one notable exception: zero tariff on children’s books. They qualify under one of the few tariff-exempt classes known as “informational materials.” In the children’s product category, toys should also be exempt from tariffs, argued Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel, the company behind Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Fisher-Price.

“There should be zero tariff on toys, globally. Toys are a foundational part of children’s development. It plays to a fundamental human behavior,” Kreiz said during an onstage interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington D.C. today (April 24). “We believe that, given the roles toys play in society, they should be exempt from tariffs.”

Still, that’s a long shot that will likely require substantial lobbying. In the meantime, even if tariffs on Chinese goods remain high, Mattel is better positioned than many competitors, Kreiz noted.

Industrywide, roughly 80 percent of toys are made in China. Mattel, however, has reduced its dependence on Chinese manufacturing to around 40 percent. The company now manufactures in seven countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and Thailand. These countries are currently subject to a 10 percent tariff and could face steeper rates in three months if Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs return. By 2027, Mattel aims to ensure that no single country accounts for more than 25 percent of its global production. Today, only about 20 percent of all Mattel products flow from China to the U.S., according to Kreiz.

Kreiz, a former entertainment executive, has led a major turnaround effort since joining Mattel in 2018, focusing on IP monetization and brand storytelling. He has revitalized Mattel’s iconic brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels while pushing the company into film and television production, including the blockbuster Barbie movie released in 2023.

“Mattel has evolved from a toy manufacturing company that was making items to become an IP company that’s managing franchises,” Kreiz said. “Much of our business is about growing our core business and evolving beyond toys and capturing the full value of our intellectual property.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that about 20 percent of Mattel products sold in the U.S. are made in China. 

Martin Makary, the newly sworn-in commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said funding cuts initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have not impacted the agency’s core scientific staff. Speaking at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. today (April 24), Makary reaffirmed his commitment to leading the FDA with “gold standard science” and “common sense.”

The Trump administration’s cost-cutting campaign has eliminated approximately 3,500 jobs at the FDA. Makary clarified that the cuts were largely concentrated in the agency’s communications, IT, legislative, and policy teams. “None of the cuts were to scientific reviewers or inspectors,” he said during an onstage conversation with PBS anchor Amna Nawaz, noting that the agency continues to prioritize faster drug approvals.

Makary pointed out that the FDA’s headcount had doubled over the past two decades, standing at around 19,000 employees before the latest cuts. That growth, he said, led to administrative silos and inefficiencies—making some reductions necessary.

One particularly controversial termination was Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator for over eight years. Marks, who served as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and played a central role in the accelerated development of COVID-19 vaccines during Trump’s first term, said he was forced out by Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Marks’ removal has sparked concerns about the administration’s stance on vaccines. Earlier this month, HHS issued a pointed statement: if Marks “does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy.”

Makary pushed back on the characterization of Marks as a vaccine expert, pointing out that his background is in hematology (which studies blood-related diseases), not vaccinology. “He was overseeing a division that houses the vaccine research center,” Makary said, adding that Marks had previously pushed out two senior scientists—Marion Gruber and Philip Krause—over disagreements on Covid-19 booster recommendations for children. “So, the irony that he’s the top vaccine expert is that he pushed out two top career scientists at the vaccine center,” Makary added.

Makary reiterated his stance on vaccines: “Vaccines save lives, and any death from a vaccine-preventable illness is a tragedy.”

However, he has criticized the agency’s pandemic-era approach, particularly regarding quarantine and vaccine recommendations for children. “The worst thing you can do as a doctor is to put out a recommendation with such absolutism when the reality is that data is very fuzzy or there’s no data,” he said.

Before his public service appointment, Makary was a professor at Johns Hopkins University specializing in surgical oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgery. He is widely recognized for co-developing the surgical safety checklist and for founding the Johns Hopkins Center for Surgical Trials and Outcomes Research.

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, says he supports President Donald Trump’s overarching economic goals—cutting government spending, leveling the playing field with trade partners and reviving American manufacturing—but warned that the administration’s current approach to is damaging what he called the “American brand,” a reputation that could take years to repair.

“The United States is more than just a nation; it’s a universal brand, whether it’s our culture, our financial strength, our military strength. America rose beyond just being a country. It was like an aspiration for most of the world, and we’re eroding that brand right now,” Griffin said during an onstage interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. today (April 23).

Griffin’s comments follow Trump’s announcement earlier this month of sweeping tariffs on most countries, which were abruptly paused just days later. The whiplash has rattled markets, with investors selling off both U.S. stocks and Treasury bonds—long considered the world’s safest investments. The selloff suggests deepening doubts about not only the U.S. economy but also the credibility of the U.S. government.

“In the financial markets, no brand compared to the brand of the U.S. Treasuries—the strength of the U.S. dollar, the creditworthiness of U.S. Treasuries. no brand came close. We put that brand at risk,” Griffin warned. “It can take a very long time to remove the tarnish on a brand.”

The selloff of Treasury bonds have led to a weakening of the U.S. dollar against other major currencies. Using the euro as a reference, the U.S. “has become 20 percent poorer in four weeks,” Griffin said.

Discussing the broader implications of Trump’s trade policies and his administration’s stance on the war in Ukraine, Griffin added, “We’ve had a shock to the world about America’s commitment to multilateralism, to free trade. And we’ve had a real calling into question the American role when it comes to global security.”

Griffin urged President Trump, as well as his treasury secretary Scott Bessent and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, to be “very thoughtful” in their policymaking to preserve America’s global image. “When you have a brand, you need to behave in a way that respects that brand, that strengthens that brand because when you tarnish that brand, it can take a lifetime to repair the damage that has been done,” he said.

Later at the same conference, Stephen Miran, chief economic advisor to President Trump, pushed back on Griffin’s remarks, saying he disagrees with the assertion that the administration’s tariff policy is damaging the American brand. He encouraged investors to look beyond the short-term negative impact created by tariffs.

“At the end of the day, the brand of America, the desire to invest in America, to be in American, to hire in America is all a function of economic opportunity,” said Miran, whose background is also in hedge fund. “President Trump and his administration are focusing on creating the best economy American has ever had. I think you got to look forward through what’s happening now with tariffs to the trade deals that are being negotiated, to the tax relief that’s being negotiated with Congress.”

“The more authentically local it is, the more likely it is to travel.” That’s the secret formula behind global sensations like Squid Game, according to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who spoke today (April 23) at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. Over his 25-year tenure at the streaming giant, Sarandos has developed a counterintuitive strategy for creating international hits: don’t aim for global at all.

“Our Korean team feels very much like it’s a Korean company. They were able to make great programming like that for Korea because there was no focus on making it global,” Sarandos said during an onstage interview with Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith today.

Squid Game’s success wasn’t just a lucky break. It rode the crest of a cultural wave that had already brought Korean pop culture to global prominence—from BTS’s chart-topping music to Parasite’s historic Oscar wins. Still, Netflix didn’t create Squid Game with international audiences in mind, even though K-dramas have a large fanbase abroad. (More than 60 percent of Netflix users watched at least one Korean title last year.)

To be fair, Squid Game’s success wasn’t just a lucky break; it rode a cultural wave that had brought Korean pop culture to global prominence—from the boy band BTS’s chart-topping music to Parasite’s historic Oscar wins. Still, Netflix didn’t create Squid Game with international audiences in mind, despite knowing K-dramas have a large fanbase in the West. (More than 60 percent of Netflix subscribers watched at least one Korean title on the platform last year.)

“It’s very different than typical K-drama—it wasn’t romantic, for sure; it’s a bit dark and strange, but it’s very Korean,” Sarandos said, alluding to how the series’ plot draws on traditional Korean children’s games from the 1980s and 1990s.

In its early days, Netflix tested the idea of creating globally oriented shows by mixing actors or storylines from different countries. That strategy flopped, Sarandos said. But when it pivoted to the opposite, viewership soared. Netflix’s overseas teams have “have absolute autonomy over what they program for their countries,” Sarandos said, and “there’s no discussion about making anything from a local [show] global.”

That philosophy extends beyond Korea. The CEO pointed to Adolescence, a newly released four-part psychological crime drama, as another example. The series is so “remarkably British,” Sarandos said, that American viewers might need to watch it with subtitles.

Today, Sarandos describes Netflix as both “a local company and a global company” and both “a tech company and an entertainment company.” Though the U.S. remains its biggest market, international users now make up the majority of Netflix’s subscriber base. About 70 percent of subscribers—and around 80 percent of new signups each quarter—are outside the U.S.

Current claiming a market cap of close to $450 billion, Netflix is one of the few major tech companies to see its stock rise this year amid market volatility triggered by unpredictable policymaking in Washington. Sarandos has stated his ambitions to grow Netflix into a trillion-dollar company eventually, though he hasn’t detailed any plans to expand beyond its core offerings. For now, he said, the company’s streaming business continues to post strong results, with revenue doubling and profits rising steadily over the past five years.

As the global financial system evolves, Fink argues, a better formula to allocate assets should be something like a 50/30/20 portfolio: 50 percent stocks, 30 percent bonds and 20 percent private assets, such as infrastructure, real estate and equity in privately owned companies.

Fink proposed this idea in his annual letter to investors published this week, dedicating a substantial section to private markets and calling for broader access to private assets for retail investors.

Private assets encompass infrastructure projects like ports, bridges, and power grids, as well as companies that aren’t publicly traded. Historically, these investments have been the domain of governments, bank loans, and wealthy individuals who have to meet strict income or capital thresholds. While they carry higher risks, these investments also tend to offer greater returns. As more companies (especially rapidly-growing ones in Silicon Valley) stay private for longer and the demand for infrastructure surges, governments and banks are struggling to keep up.

“Assets that will define the future…aren’t available to most investors,” Fink wrote. “As we enter our century’s second quarter, there’s a growing mismatch between the demand for investment and the capital available from traditional sources.”

To help close this funding gap, BlackRock is channeling its clients into private market opportunities through a series of strategic acquisitions. BlackRock’s clients include institutional investors—like pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies—as well as retail investors who can own a piece of BlackRock’s portfolio through its mutual funds and iShare ETFs.

In October 2024, BlackRock acquired Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a firm owning and operating assets in energy, transportation, water and waste management, and digital infrastructure sectors. BlackRock is also in the process of acquiring Preqin, a leading data provider specializing in private markets, and HPS Investment Partners, an asset manager of private credit.

Making private markets more transparent

Beyond access, another obstacle that discourages investors from entering private markets is a lack of transparency. “Investing in private markets feels a bit like buying a house in an unfamiliar neighborhood before Zillow existed, where finding accurate prices was difficult or impossible,” Fink wrote.

“For decades, private markets have been among the most opaque corners of finance. Investors know these assets hold long-term value—but exactly how much value? That’s not always easy to determine,” he added.

The answer to that questions lies in data—think how Zillow brings clarity on real estate and what Bloomberg terminals do for stocks and bonds. BlackRock aims to provide the same level of transparency to private markets through data providers like Preqin, which tracks 190,000 funds and 60,000 private asset managers globally. “Preqin effectively does for private markets what Zillow did for housing,” Fink wrote.

“With clearer, more timely data, it becomes possible to index private markets just like we do now with the S&P 500,” the CEO added. “Once that happens, private markets will be accessible, simple markets. Easy to buy. Easy to track. And that means capital will flow more freely throughout the economy.”

Between running her namesake brand, spearheading a foundation, co-hosting a podcast, parenting four kids and—until recently—making time for reality TV, Rebecca Minkoff still manages to clock out at a reasonable hour and log eight hours of sleep. “Sleep for me is a big source of recognizing that I need it to go at the rate I go,” she told Observer.

The 44-year-old fashion designer, who uses a giant paper planner and writes everything down, organizes her daily tasks by theme and urgency, with to-dos sorted into “must finish,” “nice to have” and the inevitable “push to next week.” Mondays through Thursdays are reserved for her role as chief creative officer of the Rebecca Minkoff brand. Fridays belong to the Female Founder Collective, which she co-founded with fellow entrepreneur Alison Wyatt in 2018 to support women business owners like herself. She makes tangible quarterly plans instead of chasing five-year visions. And instead of doing everything herself, she has learned to delegate with precision. 

Recently, Minkoff announced her exit from Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City after a one-season appearance. “Family, friends and brand” are now the focus, she said in an Instagram post in early February. 

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Rebecca Minkoff brand and the launch of its iconic “Morning After Bag,” or MAB. Among her “tentpole” moments for 2025: the release of her first book, Fearless, a collection of candid life and career advice; a four-part podcast series with the Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell; and the relaunch of the MAB—a smaller, more shrunken version of the original version designed to “fit under your arm for the girl going out now 20 years later,” Minkoff said. 

A success by accident

Today, handbags account for roughly 80 percent of her brand’s total sales, but Minkoff actually started out as an apparel designer. In 2004, when Minkoff was three years into her apparel design career and working as a celebrity stylist on the side to pay her bills, she received a request by her friend, the actress Jenna Elfman, to design a handbag for a movie she was working on. Despite having no experience in making handbags, Minkoff jumped at the opportunity anyway. 

“In those days, it was all about the Sex and the City lifestyle: serendipitous meetings on the subway, romantic encounters on the street, getting past the velvet rope to dance the night away—and having a handbag with room for your dancing shoes when you headed off to work the morning after a wild night out,” she wrote in Fearless. “And just like that, the idea of the Morning After Bag was born.” 

The first MAB, a chocolate brown canvas with metallic faux crocodile trim and a turquoise zipper made by an industry-famous artisan in the Garment District for $1,600, never made to the big screen but later took off in its own right—thanks to Minkoff carrying it everywhere herself. The bag gained traction through word-of-mouth, got the attention of influential fashion buyers, and eventually catapulted the Rebecca Minkoff brand into the household-name status..  

However, as fashion trends evolved, so did the needs of Minkoff’s customers. “Nobody had smartphones in 2005,” she noted. “Nobody carries an East West wallet anymore. So, we made the bag smaller but big enough to hold a phone.” 

Beyond functionality, Minkoff said her muse has evolved too. “The girl in 2005 was probably a girl who was looking for love and focused on it. I think the girl today—love is going to be part of her life, but it’s not necessarily the sole focus of her life.”

Building a lasting brand in a volatile industry

In fashion, surviving 20 years is a feat, especially for a brand like Rebecca Minkoff, which lands in the “accessible luxury” category—a space that’s not quite fast fashion, not quite heritage luxury, and often vulnerable to trends. 

“The most difficult thing is how fast everything is moving,” the designer said. “You can have a trend and it’s gone in a couple of months.” Because it takes about nine months to get a new design from concept to shelf, Minkoff’s approach is to hedge. “While we are trying to participate in trends, we’re not aligning our entire business to them. For us, it’s always about balancing a few trend-driven items with a core that never goes away.”

That “core” includes the brand’s distinctive hardware—celestial studs, chunky chain links, and the designer’s signature dog leash clips. “I originally was getting those dog clips at Home Depots around the city or wherever I would be traveling. I’d bring an extra suitcase and buy out the Home Depot,” she said.

Ultimately, it’s less about the silhouette or the aesthetics and more about the woman who carries it. “When you close your eyes, we want you to think about the brand as a little bit casual with a bit of a rock n’ roll edge,” Minkoff said. “As long as you can close your eyes and think that, then we can be either part of a small-bag trend or a large-bag trend.”

Rebecca Minkoff’s customers are primarily Millennial and Gen Z women, the latter of which are rediscovering the appeal of the Y2K fashion that defined their preceding generation. Brand awareness appears to remain strong. The economic side of it, however, is another story.

Rebecca Minkoff bags used to be made in China, in the same factory that produced Kate Spade’s. In 2018, new tariffs imposed by the first Trump administration nearly crippled the business, forcing the designer to move her production to Vietnam and Indonesia. 

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. Factory capacities were down as much as 90 percent. Bag sales cratered. Unlike fashion giants with a global reach and an expansive product catelogue, Rebecca Minkoff was too small to keep assembly lines busy alone. In 2021, Minkoff decided to sell her company to Sunrise Brands, a Los Angeles-based apparel group, in order to stabilize its supply chain. She stayed on as chief creative officer, now with the resources to better navigate black-swan disruptions.

In an age of hyper-competition, where trends are driven more by TikTok algorithms than fashion editors, Minkoff’s philosophy hasn’t changed much: consistency, brand identity and a refusal to chase the zeitgeist at the expense of substance. “I think it’s about really honing in on who your woman is, what she stands for, and the lifestyle she’s leading,” she said.