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Online creators are giving their followers some unusual advice to help lower their flight ticket prices: head to the public library. Over the past few days, multiple viral posts have sprung up wherein creators claim that they were able to score major savings on flights (up to thousands of dollars, in one case) by booking their tickets on a public library computer rather than their own personal devices. “Yeah, so I just tried this, and it worked for me,” creator Ellyce Fullmore told her followers in an Instagram video posted on May 16, which now has nearly 250,000 likes. She added, “We got a flight for $500 cheaper from booking on the library computer. What in th…

A federal jury has sided with OpenAI and its top executives in a feud with Elon Musk, who accused them of betraying a shared vision for it to guide artificial intelligence’s development as a nonprofit dedicated to humanity’s benefit. The nine-person jury unanimously found that Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit (Musk v. Altman et al.) and missed the deadline for the statute of limitations. Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company that launched in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. After investing $38 million in its first years, Musk accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his …

A decade of light-night history is closing out this week, with Stephen Colbert’s tenure as the host for “The Late Show” coming to an end on Thursday. Filmed in the Ed Sullivan Theater, The Late Show is CBS’s flagship late night talk show, first airing in 1993 with David Letterman hosting. Colbert first joined the show in 2015 following successful stints at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, with his political monologues during the first The President administration helping grow his popularity, particularly among more liberal viewers. His vocal critique of The President is also seen by many as precipitating the end of his hosting duties. CBS parent company P…

In 2006, Amazon Web Services was a fledgling—and a bit of an oddity. Amazon had taken the cloud-computing technologies it had created for its own operations and turned them into a business. Any organization could use them to build out an online presence without managing any infrastructure. Amazon watchers struggled to suss out what the e-tailer was up to: “I have yet to see how these investments are producing any profit,” carped one Wall Street analyst. At the very start—when it was still a big deal if AWS collected $100 in revenue in a single day—an AWS product manager named Matt Garman had lunch with a friend who worked in another part of the company. “[The coworker…

In 1985, Intel was in trouble. Japanese competitors were dominating the memory chip market that Intel had helped invent. Inside the company, leadership debated what to do. During one conversation, Andy Grove, then Intel’s president and COO, asked CEO Gordon Moore a deceptively simple question: “If we were replaced tomorrow, what would a new CEO do?” Moore didn’t hesitate. “He would get us out of the memory business.” The two men looked at each other and realized something uncomfortable. They already knew the answer; they just hadn’t acted on it. Intel exited the market that had defined its identity and doubled down on microprocessors, a decision that reshaped the comp…

While smartwatches have spent the last decade fighting for our attention with buzzing notifications and glowing screens, a quieter revolution has been moving down to our fingers. Yes, the smart ring market has matured from a niche experimental category into a legitimate hardware battleground where the stakes involve more than just step counts. For anyone looking to track their health without (or while) strapping a small computer to their arm, the landscape is now crowded with options that balance high-end aesthetics with serious sensor arrays. Here are some to check out. Oura Ring 4 ($349 + $6/month) The Oura Ring 4 remains the undisputed heavyweight ch…

AI wears many hats at work, whether it’s a brainstorm partner, mentor, or doing the actual work itself. However, it’s time to add a new one to the list: spy. In a recent episode of the “All-In” podcast, Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, said he was using AI to analyze employee slack messages to understand what they’re complaining about. (Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021.) “Because you run your company on Slack, all your DMs, all your channels, we’re reading that now through the AI and we can tell you more about your business than you know,” Benioff explained. “Slackbot is reading stuff that, you know, nobody knew what was happening. I’m using that myself.” Benioff says,…

One of the best days of Gabriella’s career was also one of her hardest days as a parent. Gabriella, who asked for a pseudonym to protect her children’s privacy, had just filmed the launch video for her new company. On the train ride back home, she got a call from her daughter’s school. The new nanny she’d hired, who had been thoroughly vetted, had left her two-year-old son locked in the car in the school’s parking lot and disappeared for half an hour before teachers heard the crying and rushed to help. “I remember feeling so guilty and crushed, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t feel like I can leave my children because I don’t know how to find childcare that I can trust,’…

To make room for more housing without losing green space, planners in a new Toronto neighborhood flipped the usual approach: Instead of carving out room for parks and plazas, they made the streets do that work instead. “The street is almost like a public courtyard,” says Rasmus Astrup, design principal and senior partner at SLA, the Denmark-based firm that was part of the design team for the new neighborhood, called Ookwemin Minising. The main street will be car-free, “like a linear park,” he says, and filled with 400 trees. Other streets will allow cars, but prioritize large swaths of green space. The design gives residents public space, and doubles as climate i…

One cold Friday night a few years ago, I collapsed to the ground in the arrivals hall of a small French airport. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. It took physical collapse for me to acknowledge that I was burned out and that my work life was unsustainable. In the time since my own burnout, the term has become ubiquitous. And given the abundance of research on the topic, I’m not going to deny its dangers. Burnout is real, serious, and measurable. However, I don’t believe that we’re living in a burnout epidemic. What we are living through is an epidemic of the use of the term burnout. And that overuse is blunting the urgency of a massive global issue. What burno…

In a recent speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University, Pope Leo XIV warned that investments in artificial intelligence and high-tech weapons could push the world into what he called a “spiral of annihilation.” Leo has identified AI as a critical issue for humanity and is expected to soon release a papal encyclical (a kind of open letter on Catholic doctrine) addressing the subject. His concerns reflect a broader debate taking shape across religious communities: Though artificial intelligence in its current form has only been in the marketplace for a few years, religious leaders and scholars from traditions stretching back centuries or more have already weighed in on the…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Modern CEO has reported on disparate levels of enthusiasm for AI between corporate leaders and the general public. More worrying, there’s an emerging trust gap in the workplace, with only 27% of workers in the U.S. saying they “trust their employers to use AI responsibly,” according to…

When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify in April 2006, they were two Stockholm entrepreneurs with a prototype so skeletal that Per Roman, the cofounder of investors Bullhound Capital, who would later back the company, says his first look at it was “world-changing,” despite there barely being a product to look at. Two decades and 300 million subscribers later, Spotify has become a defining force in the Swedish tech scene: a company whose alumni have gone on to found, fund, or run many of the most ambitious startups Stockholm has produced, in much the same way Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia shaped the U.S. tech ecosystem. It’s one of several tentpole companie…

When Bob’s Red Mill began in 1978, it was a flour company operated out of a literal red mill by one dedicated married couple. Since then, it’s grown into a grocery store staple with more than 200 products—and, along the way, its fascinating brand story has gotten lost amidst a sea of colorful, overwhelming packaging. To fix that, the company has spent three years on a full branding overhaul to bring all of its products back under one mill roof. Bob’s Red Mill began as the passion project of the late Bob and Charlee Moore, a husband and wife duo who started their own flour milling business as a way to introduce more whole grains into their family’s diet. And, according…

It starts with Jason Sudeikis in the make-up trailer for what must be the latest season of Ted Lasso, where he’s asked if he’s heading back stateside for the World Cup. He says no, then for some weird reason, taps his script with his Visa card. Poof! The script is now a World Cup match ticket. Thus begins Sudeikis’ surreal trip home, as dramatized in Visa’s new World Cup commercial “Tap in.” The campaign uses a simple play on words—in football, a tap-in goal is the easiest there is—to illustrate the ease with which fans can use Visa in and around the 2026 World Cup. Along the way in the campaign we see football stars Lamine Yamal, Erling Haaland, Jorge Campos, and le…

For the past two years, companies have been asking the wrong question: how do we use AI in our processes? That question made sense at the beginning. When large language models first appeared, the instinct was natural: take what already exists, from workflows to functions, decision chains, etc., and try to accelerate them. Add copilots. Add assistants. Add automation layers. Improve productivity. But as we’ve seen, that approach doesn’t scale. As I’ve argued in previous pieces, enterprise AI hasn’t failed because the technology doesn’t work. It has failed because we tried to place it in the wrong layer. Large language models were never designed to run a company, …

If you think memory prices are high now, just wait. A new report from Citrini Research forecasts that Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin AI platform will require more than 6 billion GB of Low-Power Double Data Rate memory (LPDDR) in 2027. LPDDR is the low-power memory used in devices like smartphones, tablets, and ultra-thin laptops. If Citrini is correct, Nvidia could consume more LPDDR memory than Apple and Samsung combined. That could spell bad news for consumers looking to upgrade phones and other personal devices, especially as rising memory costs are already affecting prices across consumer electronics. Rubin, named after astronomer Vera Rubin, is a big bet …

They’re calling it “discomorphism.” To mark its 20th birthday, Spotify introduced a revamped logo that bedazzled its green, circular mark into a shimmering dark green disco ball. Following backlash online, Spotify assured its users that the old logo is coming back soon. “Alright, we know glitter is not for everyone,” the music streaming service said on social media. “Our temp glow up ends soon. Your regularly scheduled Spotify icon returns next week.” Alright, we know glitter is not for everyone. Our temp glow up ends soon. Your regularly scheduled Spotify icon returns next week. — Spotify (@Spotify) May 17, 2026 Spotify tells Fast Company the disco bal…

OpenAI has prevailed in its fight against Elon Musk. A jury on Monday found that Musk did not file his lawsuit against the AI giant within the statute of limitations. The judge quickly agreed with the jury, making the ruling final. The win for OpenAI came after less than two hours of jury deliberation. Within 20 minutes, the judge, who could have taken up to a month to issue a final ruling in the case, agreed with the advisory jury and issues the final say. Musk had alleged that OpenAI “stole a charity” when it converted into a for-profit company. With the case now behind it, a major obstacle in OpenAI’s path toward becoming a publicly traded company has been…

Have you been there? A medical emergency lands you in the ER only to be discharged with a stack of papers, prescriptions to fill, and instructions for your doctor. Will those papers make it to your next appointment? Will you be able to answer, “What diagnosis did the ER give? How many weeks are you supposed to take this RX?” It depends on what kind of fog you were in when you left. There must be a better way. Healthcare’s most dangerous moments often do not happen in the emergency room, but when the patient moves from one system to another—from hospital to home or from specialist to primary care. In transitions, communication breaks down easily, plans fall apart, …

AI is changing the job hunt for candidates and employers, but also the recruiters caught in the middle. From AI-screened video interviews to platforms like Paraform that reward recruiters for smart matches, the hiring industry is evolving fast. But as these tools get smarter, one question remains: Will human recruiters still have a seat at the table? View the full article

With gas prices hovering around $4.51 a gallon, there’s little relief for drivers heading into the busy Memorial Day weekend, the official kickoff to summer travel. Or, is there? While it might seem like an unlikely panacea, Cracker Barrel could bring some unexpected solace. Here’s what to know. What’s happening? On Tuesday, Cracker Barrel launches a 10-week nationwide “Fuel Your Summer Road Trip” giveaway of $250,000 in free gas—and food—to Cracker Barrel Rewards members during this summer’s peak road trip season. The deal lasts through July 26. A total of 250 Cracker Barrel Rewards members will each receive $1,000—a $500 gas gift card and a $500 food gift…

Fifteen years ago, tech investor Marc Andreessen published his famous essay, “Why Software Is Eating the World.” He predicted at the time that technology companies were tremendously undervalued, and that low startup costs and almost infinite scalability would lead software-based companies to dominate every industry. You can see what he means. Today, the “Mag 7” stocks dominate the S&P 500 with market capitalizations in the trillions. Even startups like Anthropic and OpenAI are valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, massive investment in data centers is reshaping industries from construction to energy. But not so fast. While recent advances in ma…

After losing a boardroom power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley, Steve Jobs was exiled to a small building across the street from Apple’s headquarters. It was May 1985. He and his colleagues called his new office “Siberia.” Corporate reports stopped flowing to his desk, and executives stopped calling, leaving him bored and lonely. “It was amazing to see how ostracized he was in the Valley,” recalled Susan Barnes, a Macintosh financial controller who had previously reported to him. “It was really cruel.” Jobs is remembered as the visionary who returned to Apple, the company he cofounded, in 1997, and saved it from near-bankruptcy. But before the comeback, he ma…