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Tax Day isn’t usually cause for celebration. The annual due date for filing taxes usually comes with headache-inducing financial stress and mountains of difficult-to-decipher paperwork. But this year, Tax Day apparently came with an unexpected upside for some New Yorkers, thanks to an announcement from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich,” Mamdani said in a video posted to social media on April 15. “Today, we’re taxing the rich.” Mamdani went on to say he had secured a new pied-á-terre tax, or second home tax, a first for the state of New York. The tax would incur an annual fee on residential properties wor…

Trader Joe’s is settling a class action lawsuit for $7.4 million, after a complaint claimed that the grocery giant printed 10 digits—the first six and last four—of customers’ cards on transaction receipts. The 2019 class action lawsuit alleged that Trader Joe’s violated the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) amendment to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. No customers reported identity theft as a result, Trader Joe’s said on the settlement website. However, identity theft is not a requirement to prove a FACTA violation. The court did not rule on the case, and Trader Joe’s’ decision to settle did not confirm the validity of the claims. In the settlem…

Election after election, Democratic strategist James Carville’s maxim, “It’s the economy, stupid!” has held true. But in coming political campaigns, candidates will encounter an especially virulent strain of economic anxiety—driven by artificial intelligence—that is proliferating among lower-wage, working Americans. AI’s advances are directly intersecting with Americans’ economic security. Candidates across parties, states, and offices will have to adapt to this new reality, quickly. New data show why. As AI reshapes the labor market and impacts individual economic prospects, these voters view it in increasingly dire terms. Merit America, the workforce developm…

The challenges with AI adoption have little to do with the technology itself. In the work environment, the hardest part is bringing together a new orchestration model that fully integrates AI tools while ensuring teams both adopt and master new behaviors to deliver tangible results. As Steve Lucas recently wrote in Fast Company, we have entered the era of the “AI natives and the AI nots.” This delta will become vividly apparent this year. At the center of the AI revolution: a fundamental reevaluation of organizational design. Roles are evolving because the skills, intelligence, and processes we have relied on are being upended and redefined. OLD PROCESSES AND …

As Jennifer Harris, director of the Economy and Society Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has recently pointed out, we are at a particularly fraught moment. Rising inequality means that fewer people have spending power, creating incentives that sharpen the affordability crisis for everybody else. But there are remedies that don’t require draconian taxes and are proven to work—at their core is ownership. Since 1984, worker productivity in the United States has risen by 80%. Real wages have risen by 20%. The stock market, in the same period, has risen by roughly 9,000%. Now comes artificial intelligence—poised, in BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s words,…

Egyptian coder Assem Sabry has long wanted an AI model that represents his culture. The problem is he hasn’t been able to find one. “The AI industry in Egypt . . . doesn’t exist,” Sabry says. So he built his own: Horus, named after the ancient Egyptian god of the sky. Sabry says the goal was to stop “relying on other models, like the American or Chinese models,” and instead ask what a more Egyptian-focused model might look like. To make Horus work, he trained it using GPUs from Google Colab and other cloud providers, alongside open-source datasets. The model, released in early April, drew more than 800 downloads in its first week on Hugging Face. Sabry is one of a…

Elon Musk wants to execute the largest initial public offering in history, chasing a staggering $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation for SpaceX. To justify this unprecedented price tag, he is aggressively hyping a cosmic vision: launching 1 million artificial intelligence servers into orbit to create a 100-gigawatt space data center in the next decade. He plans to one day build a factory on the moon to catapult these servers to Earth’s orbit. If that sounds like the background plot of a boring space movie, it’s because it is science fiction. The TL;DR: here is that Musk’s blueprint is fundamentally broken, according to experts in physics, aerospace engineering…

In 2020, as people began to realize they would be spending significantly more time at home than they had planned in January, a lot of people splurged on a new TV. Approximately 315.6 million new sets found their way to households around the world that year, a 6% increase from the year before. Those sets still have some life in them. The average TV will run for 10 years or more without issue, but many homeowners are starting to feel like their sets are getting a bit long in the tooth. And over the next year or two, the industry could see a big rush in customers. Circana, which monitors consumer purchases, says the average TV is replaced every 6.6 years. That figure…

In 1988, a London pre-teen with a penchant for programming and gaming wrote a version of the classic board game Othello—also known as Reversi—for his Amiga 500 home computer. Teaching a piece of software to play the game was an ambitious coding project for someone so young. And with that, Demis Hassabis notched his first achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The Othello-playing app “beat my kid brother, who was only five at the time,” Hassabis remembers. “It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me, because I just thought, ‘Wow, it’s incredible that you can make a program that’s inanimate and it can go off and do something on your behalf.'” That proved to be a fatefu…

Music lovers who have complained for years about Ticketmaster fees for concert tickets are surely reveling in a jury verdict Wednesday that found its parent company Live Nation has been running a harmful monopoly over large venues across the U.S. But they will have to wait to see if the verdict leads to changes that make concerts more affordable. Here are some things to know about the verdict in the closely-watched antitrust battle: No immediate relief for concertgoers The lawsuit, initially led by the U.S. government under former President Joe Biden, accused Live Nation of smothering competition and blocking venues from using multiple ticket sellers. Days into t…

Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) could stay at 2.8% in 2027, the same as its rate for this year. That’s the latest prediction from The Senior Citizens League (TSCL) and mirrors 2026’s COLA. If enacted in October, it would increase the average benefits check from $2,024.77 to $2,081.46—a $56.69 increase. The TSCL finds the 2.8% increase concerning due to high costs of living, such as rents and mortgages. “The fact is that most senior households already get by on only about 58% as much income as their working-age counterparts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a middle-class or working-class American who thinks the economy is doing well right…

Canva built its 265-million-person audience by being the easy-to-use, template-friendly design tool for everyone. And when generative AI arrived, it quickly integrated the technology. Now, Canva is amongst the leading spenders on compute from platforms like ChatGPT, it’s building its own models and acquiring its own AI companies, and it’s launching even more AI design features as part of its Canva AI 2.0 release that it’s announcing today. But the headline marks a deeper, philosophical shift within Canva: From being “a design platform with AI tools” to becoming an “AI platform with design tools.” Connecting with Canva’s CEO, Mel Perkins, I asked about the …

After rising by more than 580% in a single trading session yesterday, shares of Allbirds Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) fell this morning in premarket trading, at one point more than 30%. The steep rise and now potential fall in the stock price followed the company’s unexpected announcement that it intends to transition from a sustainable shoemaker to an AI compute infrastructure provider. But while AI-obsessed investors initially cheered the odd move, history suggests the pivot may be a challenging one to pull off in the long run. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, San Francisco-based Allbirds, whose wool footwear had been popular with Silicon …

It seems that change and volatility are the only things that are certain when it comes to the labor market. Jobs and professions that once seemed ‘stable’ are not immune to the forces of artificial intelligence and other technological advancements. At the very least, AI is changing the nature of what jobs look like and will likely continue to do so at a fast rate. All of this can make it difficult to know what to do to foolproof your career. Liz Tran is a leadership coach to CEOs and founders and the author of AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. After two years of conversations with founders, CEOs, and leaders, Tran found that those who …

As founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance, I am privileged to engage with extraordinary female leaders across industries. This month, I spoke with Shari Hofer about a workforce issue hiding in plain sight: eldercare. For many organizations, caregiving is still viewed as something employees manage quietly outside of work. According to the 2025 Caregiving in the US report, released by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, approximately 63 million Americans provide family care, with almost 48 million providing unpaid care to adults. The 2021 AARP report estimated that the economic value of care was over $600 billion annually. Today, these prof…

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps. Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline…

Warren Buffett is seldom wrong, especially regarding investment and innovation. As most of us know, the Oracle of Omaha offers wisdom that goes beyond industries, generations, and cultures. And that wisdom, even if it seems obvious (ever catch yourself saying, “Wait, I could’ve said that myself!”), is usually right on the mark. Like this piercing bit of truth-telling: If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s what Buffett once shared with a group of students at Georgia Tech when they asked him about his idea of success. He explained that success isn’t just about weal…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Is the Altman firebomb just the start of extreme doomer violence? On April 10, someone threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, didn’t stop there. He then went to OpenAI’s headquarters and told the security guards there that he intended to burn down the building and everyone inside. Two days later, someone allegedly fired two shots from a car driving past Altman’s house, but OpenAI said that…

Over the past few years, words that once had no place in workplace conversations have slowly entered HR agendas: menstruation, endometriosis, perimenopause, menopause, breast cancer and—more slowly—male andropause or prostate cancer. These are not passing trends. They signal a deeper shift in how we understand work and the people who do it. For decades, work was designed around a fiction, that of the “neutral” worker, an abstract individual assumed to be fully available, consistent, rational, and unaffected by bodily constraints. But this neutrality was never real. As Caroline Criado Perez has shown in her brilliant book Invisible Women, many systems and environments …