Meet @anduril CEO Brian Schimpf, the engineer-CEO building America’s $31 billion weapons startup.
The U.S. is, in many international arenas, finding itself literally outgunned. And Anduril could be the company best positioned to bring about, at scale, a sea change in how weapons are made in and for the U.S. They are racing to shore up supply chains, test, and get the right products in the right places. Though some products haven’t succeeded out of the gate, and have drawn sharp scrutiny, the trajectory is clear: Anduril is looking to claim a place among (or oust) Fortune 500 defense giants.
“The question isn’t whether we can build the next Lockheed Martin,” Schimpf says. “It’s whether we can avoid becoming the thing we’re trying to replace.”
Fortune's Allie Garfinkle traveled to Anduril’s secretive Texas test site to learn more about the breakout weapons-making startup.
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As generative AI threatens to upend the white-collar workforce, it’s creating a surge of opportunity in one corner of the labor market: the skilled trades.
That’s at least according to Jon Gray, president and chief operating officer at @blackstone —the biggest publicly-traded alternative asset manager—who predicted a “huge boom in blue-collar employment certainly over the next five years.”
Speaking at the Milken Institute last week, Gray pointed to QTS, one of Blackstone’s portfolio companies, which operates or is developing more than 75 data centers worldwide.
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Harrison Ford is known to the world for helping turn characters like Han Solo and Indiana Jones into cultural legends. But before blockbuster Hollywood fame and multimillionaire status, Ford and his growing family were struggling to make ends meet.
“Acting was not yet paying the bills,” he said this week during a commencement address at Arizona State University, reflecting on the 1960s and 1970s when he was landing only minor—or entirely uncredited—roles in film and television.
So, the now-83-year-old actor did something many young people know well: he picked up a side gig.
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Anthropic’s Claude is telling people to go to sleep and users can’t figure out why.
A quick scan of Reddit reveals that hundreds of people have had the same issue dating back months—and as recently as Wednesday. Claude’s sleep demands are varied and, often, quirky variations of the same message.
To one user it may write a simple “get some rest,” yet for others its messages are more personalized and empathetic. Oftentimes, Claude will repeat the message multiple times.
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As hyperscalers like Alphabet look to the skies as the next frontier of data centers, Peter Thiel is looking to the seas.
Panthalassa, a U.S.-based start up betting on ocean waves to power a fleet of floating data centers, announced $140 million in funding earlier this month led by Thiel.
The funding pushes Panthalassa’s valuation close to $1 billion, the Financial Times reported, citing a person familiar with the terms of the deal.
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"We will take real paying astronauts into suborbital space."
At the 2008 Fortune #BrainstormTech, Jeff Bezos described Blue Origin’s ambitious effort to build a fully reusable rocket system—predicting that years of testing and iteration would eventually make commercial human spaceflight possible.
Seven years later, Blue Origin successfully completed its first vertical landing after reaching space in 2015. The company launched its first crewed flight in 2021.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Brainstorm Tech, where leaders across technology, business, and policy will gather once again in Aspen June 8-10 to discuss the ideas shaping the future.
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In 1992, a 29-year-old Scott Bessent looked at the Bank of England and saw something no one else did.
The Bank of England couldn’t afford to keep its promises. It had committed to keeping the pound trading within a narrow radius against the German mark, requiring it to spend whatever it took to defend the currency’s value. The trouble was that the British economy was fragile—most mortgages in the UK at the time had variable rates, so raising interest rates would devastate British homeowners. Bessent convinced his boss, George Soros, to bet against the pound. When it crashed a week later, Bessent made $1 billion for the firm and made himself and Soros famous.
The lesson Bessent learned on that “Black Wednesday” is simple: when a central bank is artificially holding its currency at a level the market wouldn’t otherwise support, eventually the market will win.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was spotted by local media and members of the public at No. 69 Fangzhuanchang Noodles for a bowl of "zhajiangmian" after accompanying President Donald Trump on his state visit to China.
“It’s so good,” he said, as he dug into the bowl, standing in front of the restaurant entrance. Onlookers crowded around filming him and taking photos.
Huang was touring the Nanluoguxiang area in Beijing’s eastern district. The area is a mix of shops, restaurants and also home to some city residents.
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"Everybody's playing to win, and there's gonna be a handful of winners."
In the latest episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, @qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Fortune Editor-in-Chief @alysonshontell that it's too early to call winners in the AI race, emphasizing that "everybody’s playing to win."
"As we go to the next few years, you're gonna have different changes in the slope of the growth, but the growth is gonna be very high and will continue to be very high," Amon told Shontell.
đź”— Click the link in the bio to watch the full episode.
Last year, FIFA president Gianni Infantino hailed the upcoming World Cup as the equivalent of “104 Super Bowls,” quantifying just how big the sport known as football worldwide is—or, at least in comparison to America’s football version.
With the average Super Bowl getting 125.6 million views annually, Infantino expects the World Cup to attract the equivalent viewership of three Super Bowls a day for all 39 days of the competition.
FIFA predicts games would touch six billion viewers globally, and expects the influx of travelers and tourism will help contribute to a projected $30.5 billion economic windfall for the three host countries of the U.S, Mexico and Canada.
The U.S. hospitality industry, however, is skeptical of the event’s money-making promises.
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In the first week of May, two data center developments, one in Arizona and another in Georgia, were caught taking public water without authorization.
In both cases, data center developers consumed water they were prohibited from taking, in communities already experiencing water stress, and in both cases it was the residents who discovered it.
When residents complained of low water pressure in Georgia or dust control efforts in Arizona, they unknowingly tipped off regulators in areas fraught with depleting water supplies, and added to an escalating conflict over data center water use across the country.
In 2023, U.S. data centers directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons of water, a figure projected to rise to between 38 and 73 billion gallons by 2028, according to the EPA.
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