Tabla de contenidos para April/May 2022 en Fortune

WHEN MARK ZUCKERBERG launched Facebook, he coined a now infamous internal motto: “Move fast and break things.” Innovation, he meant, requires trial and error. Error was welcomed and even encouraged—even if it came at a cost to users. Since then, Zuckerberg’s motto has evolved. (In 2014 he changed it to the more user-friendly, if less memorable, “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”) But his playbook is still gospel for many founders. Uber’s Travis Kalanick used it to scale his ride-hailing service faster than his regulation-abiding rivals. Instead of waiting to follow a city’s rules, he’d charge in with fleets of drivers, then battle regulators to keep them in place. Crypto founders are following suit. But in Web3, things move and break even faster. Startup valuations are exploding, and founders who don’t…

EARNINGS SEASON is prime time for a particular kind of communication. Here’s an example: “Although our direction is clear, it seems that our path ahead is not quite perfectly defined,” Mark Zuckerberg said, in the course of announcing Meta’s disappointing results for the most recent quarter. He added that his company’s flagship products, Facebook and Instagram, were adjusting to short-form video to fend off rival TikTok. “I’m confident,” he asserted, “that leaning harder into these trends is the right short-term tradeoff.” You recognize this form of language: It’s reassuring yet indistinct, confident yet vague, positive enough to get you on board yet slippery enough to evade consequences when everything goes sideways. In other words, it’s bullshit. The business world is thick with bullshit language: the aspiring founder hyping the…

In March 2021, Sarah Bellamy found her fairy godmother—in the third checkout aisle of Kowalski’s Market in St. Paul. It had been a tumultuous and often tragic year for Bellamy and Penumbra, the 45-year-old Black theater company she runs in Minnesota, seven miles from where George Floyd was murdered. After months of protests and the pandemic’s near-total shutdown of arts organizations, Penumbra was in the process of reinventing itself as a center for racial healing, adding wellness programs and more racial equity trainings to its traditional portfolio. Days earlier, Bellamy had received a mysterious email noting only that a wealth management company was interested in discussing Penumbra. Now, as she was preparing to unload her groceries onto the conveyor belt, her phone rang. “They told me that MacKenzie Scott was…

OVER THE PAST two years, a new genre of video has emerged on YouTube and TikTok: shoppers melting down at the grocery store. It’s here, right alongside the produce and the deli counter, that the worst side of our collective humanity has been on display. From mask-related tirades to freak-outs over missing toilet paper—usually directed at employees—these videos have produced an almost limitless supply of content. But last summer, a TikTok video went viral not because the customer outburst was unusually obscene, but because of the setting. “In Publix?” says the incensed narrator. “Where shopping is a pleasure? … That is Walmart behavior, that is not Publix behavior … It is truly the end of time.” Publix, after all, is the supermarket of anti-drama. Here employees walk your groceries to…

RUSSIA’S INVASION OF UKRAINE has sparked a massive surge in military aid. In March, Congress approved $3.5 billion in funding for military supplies given to Ukraine for its defense, and the European Union has pledged more than $1 billion. Moving forward, the war is almost certain to kick off a new era of escalation. “All indications are that there will be higher demand for arms in Europe,” says Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which tracks the global flow of major conventional weapons. SIPRI’s data shows that the U.S. and Russia have led the world in arms transfers (including sales and gifts) over the past two decades. The U.S. was easily No. 1 with 39% of all exports in the past five years…

THIS EDITED Q&A HAS BEEN CONDENSED FOR SPACE AND CLARITY. “Philosophy is one of the best foundations you can have in tech today. I sometimes think every company should have a chief philosopher.” DATE WITH DESTINY Tinder is still the dominant dating app, but it’s now been around for a decade. 2 That’s a long time in tech years! What’s your plan to stay ahead of the pack? NYBORG: I jokingly refer to our 100-year vision. But given that we make such a big impact on relationships and on society—fundamentally human themes, not just technology themes—I don’t think it’s completely crazy to think about that. We’re addressing the role we play for the next generation, the experience for women and people of color, and building experiences that matter for…

IN MAY 2019, MORE THAN 1,000 NERDS, coders, and crypto-curious collectors gathered over three nights in New York City at a festival dedicated to digital art. Called the Contemporary and Digital Art Fair (CADAF), it showcased works from 60 artists at Lightbox, a futuristic event space in the Garment District of Manhattan. The event catered to what was at the time an extremely niche community—people who were passionate about art attached to blockchains, the digital ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. For two crypto entrepreneurs, the stakes were particularly high. Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah had moved to New York the year before to grow their startup, OpenSea, a marketplace for blockchain-linked art, in–video game items, and collectibles. They had built the platform and secured seed funding, but customers were scarce:…

CEO DAVID SOLOMON could not have been pleased at the turnout when Goldman Sachs reopened its 44-story headquarters in lower Manhattan on the morning of Feb. 1. The building had been closed for a month as COVID-19’s Omicron variant swept through town. Now, finally, with luck, Goldman employees could resume working together in person, as Solomon emphatically wants them to do, without further shutdowns. Yet as of late morning on that Tuesday, only about 5,000 of Goldman’s 10,000 HQ workers had shown up—despite having had over two weeks’ notice, and in seeming defiance of Solomon’s pointed desire to get everyone back in the office as soon as safely possible. Was that tepid turnout an anomaly? Or is it a harbinger? Solomon has risked looking like a Neanderthal as remote work…

BUSINESS. DISTILLED. For a global business that works with miners and farmers, witnessing the ravages of human suffering and even war is too often part of the job. Still, nothing could quite prepare Yara International CEO Svein Tore Holsether for what he woke to on Feb. 26—or, for that matter, what would come next. Yara, a 117-year-old Norwegian fertilizer giant, operates in more than 60 countries. For decades, Yara has had a large and fruitful presence in both Ukraine, a major wheat exporter, and in Russia, a key supplier of the potash and phosphate needed in Yara’s fertilizer production. On day three of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Russian missile blasted into the headquarters of Yara Ukraine in Kyiv. No Yara employees were injured in the early-morning air strike, but…

THE BAD NEWS? Tech stocks have been slammed recently. The good news? Tech stocks have been slammed recently—meaning there are suddenly opportunities for investors to buy tomorrow’s technology stars at attractive prices. Few tech investors have been enjoying 2022 so far. As of late March, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was down 13.8% from its November peak, versus a dip of just 5% for the broad-market S&P 500. But pros who follow the sector see a more nuanced trend behind those numbers: Many smaller, faster-growing tech companies are trading much further below their 2021 highs than the Big Tech Goliaths are. That’s partly because investors flock to familiar names when markets are rough. What’s more, when interest rates rise, investors get skittish about tech stocks in general and in-the-red companies in…

THE SLENDER MAN in the dark-blue suit and crisp white shirt evidently looks unremarkable to the waiters at one of London’s swankiest hotels. So when he arrives to meet Fortune for breakfast, they usher him to a desolate corner of the restaurant—and after indifferent service, proceed to ignore the cryptocurrency mega-billionaire for the following hour. It’s hard to imagine, say, Mark Zuckerberg going unrecognized if he happened to wander in for coffee. True, Changpeng Zhao, unlike Zuck, is almost unknown outside his industry. Yet the 44-year-old founder and CEO of Binance is worth about as much as the chief Meta-mate. Bloomberg estimates that Zhao’s net worth has reached as high as $96 billion. Though that figure fluctuates wildly with the crypto market—by late March it was a mere $74 billion—it…

THE $4 MILLION Bugatti Chiron Super Sport is a supercar whose every exterior detail is designed to project its power—from the low-slung, long-tailed silhouette that appears to be in motion even when standing still, to the slanted LED headlights that give it the aggressive mug of a bird of prey. It rockets from zero to 60 mph in just over two seconds, and the 1,577-horsepower “ultimate grand tourer” coupe version is capable of hitting 304 mph. But the car is also Bugatti’s swan song for the high-octane age, its final pure internal combustion vehicle. Bugatti will make only about 80 of the grand tourers before consigning its hand-built 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder engine to history. The engine is the largest of any production car—four times the size of most engines on the…