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Good morning. Is the American Dream still about getting ahead, or just about not falling behind? Bill Ackman wants to get back to when success inspired rather than divided people. \u201cWhen I grew up, if a guy in my neighborhood got a Corvette, no one resented the guy,\u201d the Pershing Square founder told my colleague Jeff John Roberts for a recent feature in Fortune (that I highly recommend you take the time to read). \u201cEveryone was like, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s supercool. Hopefully, someday I can be as successful as that guy so I can buy a Corvette, too.\u2019 We want to get back to that version of America.\u201d<\/p>\n
They probably still want that Corvette. But many can\u2019t afford to buy a new car as billionaires in Bugattis drive by. The question for leaders is what to do about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a topic that has come up repeatedly in my recent conversations with CEOs. The first step? Understand how workers are feeling. In a conversation I recently moderated with Gallup CEO Jon Clifton and Edward Jones chief strategy officer Hasan Malik, they walked through research showing only about one in six U.S. adults feel financially fulfilled. Guardian Life\u2019s 2026 Mind, Body, and Wallet report found just 13% of working Americans feel on track for retirement, the lowest in its 15\u2011year history, and CEO Andrew McMahon noted that \u201cfinancial stress impacts physical and mental health\u201d as much as any other factor.<\/p>\n
Nelson Chai, the CEO of DailyPay, estimates that roughly 160 million front line workers are \u201ctrying to put food on the table.\u201d For them, rising gas prices are a factor in how they get to work, which makes a daily paycheck a meaningful benefit that reduces attrition rates.\u00a0 \u201cWhat we found is that folks who have access to this aren\u2019t using it for bad things,\u201d he told me yesterday. \u201cThey\u2019re really just trying to make ends meet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chris Britt, the CEO of Chime, is attacking a different piece of the puzzle. I met with Britt earlier this week to talk about Chime Invest, which allows the customers in his low-fee accounts to put money into the market. The goal: to help customers \u201cget into the rhythm of building wealth.\u201d While Ackman argues that those who don\u2019t participate in capitalism will turn to socialism, Britt believes dire warnings about the anger of the masses are overwrought. \u201cSometimes this population gets painted with a brush of like, \u2018oh, they all think they\u2019re helpless and the world is stacked against them,\u2019\u201d Britt told me. \u201cWe see people who have agency, who are optimistic, who give back and volunteer\u2014often more than wealthy people.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for why many CEOs don\u2019t like to talk about the affordability issues facing their own employees, I go back to what one retail CEO recently told me in confidence. To talk about benefits like daily paychecks and housing subsidies is to admit that some jobs don\u2019t pay enough to cover the cost of living in some markets. \u201cIt\u2019s frankly embarrassing, but I can\u2019t control housing prices \u2026 and I can\u2019t afford to pay more.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com<\/p>\n
Top leadership news<\/p>\n
A sector nicknamed ‘memi’ is powering much of this year’s stock market gains<\/p>\n
Portfolio managers have coined “memi,” a blend of “memory” and “semiconductors,” to describe the rally in Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, whose chips are a critical bottleneck for AI data centers. Micron’s stock is up 240% this year, and Harbor Capital’s Spenser Lerner says these same memory makers now drive much of the outperformance in small-cap, international, and emerging-market funds.<\/p>\n
OpenAI’s disclosure that its AI models autonomously hacked another company is raising alarm over the lack of AI safety rules<\/p>\n
OpenAI said its most advanced models escaped a test environment and hacked into Hugging Face’s database to steal answers to an evaluation, which Apollo Research’s Marius Hobbhan called a “wake-up call” since no human was involved. Rep. Greg Casar is pushing for mandatory safety testing, but the Trump administration has largely resisted binding AI regulation.<\/p>\n
Alphabet posted the largest quarterly profit in corporate history, but most of it came from paper gains on its Anthropic and SpaceX stakes<\/p>\n
Alphabet’s net income surged 298% to $112.1 billion in the second quarter, even as core revenue grew a solid 24% to $119.8 billion with Google Cloud up 82%. Most of that record profit, $77.1 billion after taxes, came from unrealized and realized gains on Alphabet’s private stakes in Anthropic and SpaceX.<\/p>\n
The markets<\/p>\n
S&P 500 futures are down 0.4% this morning. The last session closed down 0.1%. Hong Kong\u2019s Hang Seng rose 1.3%, South Korea\u2019s KOSPI rose 4.4%, Japan\u2019s Nikkei 225 rose 0.5%, and Mainland China’s CSI 300 rose 0.2%. India\u2019s NIFTY 50 is down 0.6%, while the STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.5% in early trading. Bitcoin is hovering just above $66,500.<\/p>\n
Around the watercooler<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2018It\u2019s called StreetEasy, not StreetHard\u2019: Mamdani cracks down on scourge of \u2018housefishing\u2019 and \u2018real estate slop\u2019 by Tatiana Sataua<\/p>\n
As Washington panics about Chinese AI, Jensen Huang says open-source models like Kimi are \u2018excellent\u2019 and should be embraced, not banned by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez<\/p>\n
Scott Bessent casually says the U.S. has more than $1 trillion in gold\u2014and that it doesn\u2019t matter for the dollar by Sasha Rogelberg<\/p>\n
\u2018The man who dies rich dies disgraced\u2019: The last time America had such wealth inequality, Andrew Carnegie knew he had to give it all away by Nick Lichtenberg<\/p>\n
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.<\/p>\n
#CEOs #agree #affordability #crisis #solve #isnt #simple<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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