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Across cultures, people often wrestle with whether having lots of money is a blessing, a burden, or a moral problem. According to our new research, how someone views billionaires isn’t just about economics. Judgment also hinges on certain cultural and moral instincts, which help explain why opinions about wealth are so polarized. The study, which my colleague Mohammad Atari and I published in the research journal PNAS Nexus in June 2025, examined survey data from more than 4,300 people across 20 countries. We found that while most people around the world do not strongly condemn having “too much money,” there are striking cultural differences. In wealthy, more econ…

The world’s largest retailer has announced massive job cuts before the holidays. On Tuesday, Amazon said in a memo to staff that it will lay off 14,000 employees. Here’s what you need to know about the Amazon layoffs, and why these aren’t the last jobs that Amazon will likely cut in the future. What’s happened? On Tuesday, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, announced the company was eliminating “approximately 14,000” positions. Galetti sent a memo about the layoffs to Amazon employees, which was then published to the Amazon website. The headcount reduction of 14,000 positions is less than the up to 30,000 job …

Food banks and pantries were already struggling after federal program cuts this year, but now they’re bracing for a tsunami of hungry people if a pause in federal food aid to low-income people kicks in this weekend as the federal government shutdown persists. The rush has already begun. Central Christian Church’s food pantry in downtown Indianapolis scrambled Saturday to accommodate around twice as many people as it normally serves in a day. “There’s an increased demand. And we know it’s been happening really since the economy has downturned,” volunteer Beth White said, adding that with an interruption in funding for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program…

In many ways, renowned illusionist Rob Lake’s entire life has been building up to his Broadway debut in Rob Lake Magic with Special Guests The Muppets, which begins previews tonight at the Broadhurst Theatre. As a child growing up in Oklahoma, his parents exposed him to theater by taking him to touring shows. The education didn’t stop there. “When they took me to New York, my first Broadway shows were The Secret Garden, The Will Rogers Follies, and Beauty and the Beast, ” Lake tells Fast Company. “I was just so fortunate to be exposed to the arts quite often as a kid.” This early education included the Muppets and their films. “I wore those tapes out so many …

On October 27, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that President Donald The President has narrowed down his search to replace Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whose term does not end until May 2026. Powell, who has butted heads with The President over lowering interest rates amid the risk of increasing inflation, has said he will serve out the remainder of his term. After his term ends as chairman, his board term still extends until 2028. The President is expected to announce a Federal Reserve chair replacement as early as December, according to reports. “We’re down to five,” Bessent told reporters as he was traveling with The President on Air Force One…

Today, Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) became the first company to cross the $5 trillion valuation—in premarket trading, at least. It marks a major milestone in stock market history and suggests that once other unthinkable valuations are within reach. But Nvidia isn’t the only company breaking a trillion-dollar threshold. Fellow tech giants like Apple, Meta, and Broadcom are close to bursting their own thirteen-figure barriers, too. Here’s what you need to know about Nvidia’s approach to $5 trillion as companies climb toward the most exclusive club on the planet. Nvidia hits $5 trillion market cap in premarket trading As of this writing, Nvidia has…

The Federal Reserve is expected to cut its short-term rate Wednesday for the second time this year despite an increasingly cloudy view of the economy it is trying to influence. The government shutdown has cut off the flow of data that the Fed relies on to track employment, inflation, and the broader economy. September’s jobs report, scheduled for release three weeks ago, is still postponed. This month’s hiring figures, to be released Nov. 7, will likely be delayed and may be less comprehensive when they are finally released. And the White House said last week that October’s inflation report may never be issued at all. The data drought raises risks for the Fed because it…

Stewart McLaurin knew it was coming. An entire wing of the White House, a building he calls “the most special, important building on the planet,” was going to be replaced to make way for a ballroom that President Donald The President wants to add to the building. But when McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association, saw the first images of backhoes tearing into the East Wing, it still came as a bit of a shock. “When the reality of things happen, they strike us a little bit differently than the theory of things happening, so it was a bit of a jarring moment,” McLaurin told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. McLaurin, who has led the nonprof…

The United States and South Korea advanced trade talks on Wednesday, addressing details of $350 billion that would be invested in the American economy, after negotiations and ceremonies that included the presentation of a gold medal and crown to President Donald The President. Both were gifts from the country’s president, Lee Jae Myung, who dialed up the flattery while Washington and Seoul worked to nail down financial promises during the last stop of The President’s Asia trip. Although both sides said progress has been made — The President said things were “pretty much finalized” — no agreement has been signed yet. The framework includes gradual investments, cooperatio…

It’s already been an exciting Major League Baseball season. And that excitement is clearly translating into the business and advertising side as well. Earlier this summer, Variety reported that ads for the MLB All-Star Game, which took place in July, sold out over a month in advance. On Monday night during Game 3 of the World Series, when the Los Angeles Dodgers won against the Toronto Blue Jays—which gave L.A. a 2-1 series lead and featured another significant performance from Shohei Ohtani—the game went to 18 innings and lasted six hours and 39 minutes. So what happens to ads when a game has extra innings? When a large tentpole tournament or games lik…

In these volatile times, how do we navigate the intersection between values and commerce? Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert and Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya join New York Times reporter David Gelles onstage at the Masters of Scale Summit to reveal their different strategies for dealing with an activist White House, the pressure for what moderator Gelles calls “anticipatory compliance,” and how they grow their businesses while also prioritizing causes like environmental conservation and immigration. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podc…

If you’ve been eager to try cultivated meat—meat grown from cells, without the need to raise an entire animal—your options, so far, have been limited. The innovation has only appeared on a handful of restaurant menus since its approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) But if you’re in the Bay Area, you’re in luck: Cultivated meat startup Mission Barns will be selling its pork meatballs (made with a base of pea protein plus the company’s cultivated pork fat) at Berkeley Bowl West, one location of an independent grocery store in California. It marks the first retail sale of cultivated meat in the United States, though the products are available for…

In April 2025, Lucy Guo became the youngest female self-made billionaire after Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, the company she cofounded with Alexandr Wang in 2016. Though Guo had left the company—which builds infrastructure and software to create AI applications—over disagreements with Wang in 2018, she retained her 5% stake in the business, which skyrocketed in value after Meta’s investment. In 2022 she reemerged with Passes, a platform that helps creators monetize their social media followings by selling access to exclusive offerings—from products and merch to pay-by-the-minute private phone calls. As of February, the company has raised a …

Every single day, the average working person plays many roles: sassy coworker, office comedian, and deadline stickler, to name a few. The labor doesn’t stop when one gets home—with new job titles coming into play, such as mom, brother, pet parent, and more. On Halloween, you get to choose which character you want to inhabit instead of having society dictate your role. This frivolity requires forward thinking and planning. If you find yourself running out of time, popular culture and a few easy-to-obtain items can come to the rescue. Here are nine easy costume ideas that range from classic to timely. The Louvre museum robbers This one is perfect for last-min…

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. Glenn Fogel joined dot-com darling Priceline in early 2000, a year after the “name your price” travel site’s blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). “I joined one week before the Nasdaq peaked,” Fogel recalls. Within a year of his arrival, the stock had cratered to $6 a share. By March 2…

When Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, his AI-generated encyclopedia intended to rival Wikipedia, it was not just another experiment in artificial intelligence. It was a case study in everything that can go wrong when technological power, ideological bias, and unaccountable automation converge in the same hands. Grokipedia copies vast sections of Wikipedia almost verbatim, while rewriting and “reinterpreting” others to reflect Musk’s personal worldview. It could genuinely be conceived as the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good, useful, and human. Grokipedia’s edits aggressively editorialize topics ranging from climate change, to immigration, to (of course…

Across the streaming world, companies have been focused on adding features that make their top-tier subscriptions more valuable to the users who consume their content. Anime streamer Crunchyroll recently added access to a library of digital manga for top-paying customers. Spotify—somewhat belatedly—has begun offering high-quality audio for its Premium subscribers. SoundCloud is taking a different approach. It operates a standard streaming platform, with 100 million licensed tracks. But SoundCloud also has an enviable base of creators—musicians, DJs, podcasters, and more—who have uploaded 300 million tracks on the service to reach fans and make money from their stream…

The government shutdown is poised to become the longest ever this week as the impasse between Democrats and Republicans has dragged into a new month. Millions of people could lose food aid benefits, health care subsidies are set to expire and there are few real talks between the parties over how to end it. President Donald The President said in an interview aired on Sunday that he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats who are demanding negotiations to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year for millions of Americans. Echoing congressional Republicans, the president said on CBS’ “60 Minutes” he’ll negotiate only when the government is reopen…

Over the past several days, millions of low-income Americans who use SNAP, the nation’s biggest food aid program, have been left wondering how they will pay for basic necessities this month amidst the ongoing government shutdown. Today, they have an update: In a court filing submitted on November 3, the The President administration said that it would pay just 50% of recipients’ normal allotments this month. Last year, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program helped 41 million people (or about 1 in 8 Americans) buy their groceries, nearly two-thirds of whom were families with children. To qualify for SNAP in 2025, a family of four’s net income can’t exceed the fed…

In late September, President Donald The President posted a racist AI-generated video depicting House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries standing before a podium, wearing a Sombrero and mustache, while Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer says insulting things about Democrats. In mid-October, the government of Ontario aired an anti-tariff ad in the U.S. featuring a clip of Ronald Reagan hammering home the futility of imposing tariffs on foreign goods. The President charged, erroneously, that the video was an AI deepfake — Reagan, he claimed, in fact supported tariffs. While these two incidents — the first is AI disinformation, the second is labeling another’s video as…

After a double-digit loss in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Andrew Cuomo launched his independent bid for the office in June with a video mimicking the style of his primary adversary, Zohran Mamdani. Since then, his campaign seems to have taken most of its cues from the pair’s supposed common adversary, President Donald The President. Throughout his run, Cuomo has used AI slop in attack ads every bit as disgraceful as the worst of The President’s Truth Social feed, while flirting with the kind of fearmongering and bigotry that have colored The President’s entire political career. It’s a questionable choice in a campaign filled with questionable choice…

The U.S. IPO market in 2025 has been relatively busy, with plenty of household names going public, including Klarna, eToro, and Chime. But as you can tell from that brief list, many of the most closely watched IPOs this year have been companies operating in the fintech space. In a change of pace, one company operating in the aerospace sector is expected to make its market debut today. Here’s what you need to know about Beta Technologies and its initial public offering: What is Beta Technologies? Beta Technologies is an aerospace company that specializes in electric aircraft, electric charging systems, and electric propulsion systems. The company was founde…

The cloning industry is contracting—ironically, perhaps. On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced that it has acquired ViaGen Pets and Equine, an animal cloning firm, marking Colossal’s first acquisition since it launched in 2021. Texas-based Colossal Biosciences is best known for its controversial “de-extinction” endeavors, which involve efforts to recover species that have died out. Earlier this year, the company claimed to have “brought back” dire wolves, an assertion that was disputed by some experts, as the animals were created by modifying the DNA of existing gray wolves. The company has also sparked debates about the ethics of bringing species back …

Saudi oil giant Aramco reported Tuesday a $26.9 billion profit in the third quarter, down slightly from last year as global energy prices remain depressed over concerns of too much oil being on the market. Aramco’s results serve as a bellwether for the wider oil industry, which is still digesting the OPEC+ decision this weekend to halt planned production increases in the first quarter of next year over supply worries. Benchmark Brent crude, at just under $65 a barrel, has been fluttering near a four-year low. In filing on Riyadh’s Tadawul stock exchange, Aramco, formally known as the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., reported overall revenue of $111 billion in the third quarter, c…

President Donald The President unveiled a deal Thursday with drugmakers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to expand coverage and reduce prices for their popular obesity treatments Zepbound and Wegovy. The drugs are part of a new generation of obesity medications known as GLP-1 receptor agonists that have soared in popularity in recent years. But access to the drugs has been a consistent problem for patients because of their cost — around $500 a month for higher doses — and insurance coverage has been spotty. Coverage of the drugs for obesity will expand to Medicare patients starting next year, according to the administration, which said some lower prices also will be…