Table of contents for February/March 2024 in Fortune

In 2013, when venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” to describe billion-dollar startups, only a few dozen companies fit the description. By 2021, that number had ballooned to over 1,200 worldwide. (Along the way, in 2015, Fortune announced “The Age of Unicorns.”) Fast-forward to today, and unicorns are failing at a rapid clip. Newly minted unicorns risk being eclipsed by “unicorpses”—former high-flying startups gone belly-up. In this issue, Fortune’s Jessica Mathews explores the trends behind the body count, and our newest tech correspondent, Jason Del Rey, delves into Bird, a scooter startup that was valued at $2.3 billion three years ago—but filed for bankruptcy in December. The toll of failure isn’t just a hit to employees who lose their jobs or investors who lose their capital. It’s…

▸Facial Recognition This is among the most contentious types of AI and is heavily criticized by civil rights groups. The EU’s AI Act would restrict its use to law enforcement for tracking serious crimes like terrorism. But President Biden’s executive order is more flexible, instructing a federal agency to evaluate new systems as they are launched. ▸Copyright Another hot-button issue, with authors and artists filing a slew of lawsuits in U.S. courts, claiming that several companies have used their content to train algorithms, without their consent. The EU would require companies to disclose the data they use, while Biden’s order instructs U.S. patent offices to study the issue and report back. ▸Deepfakes Global regulators largely agree on this issue. Both the EU and Biden want to crack down on…

WHEN MASPHAL KRY was taken into a back room for questioning at New York’s J.F.K. International Airport one morning in November 2022, it wasn’t immediately apparent to him that he was going to miss his connecting flight. The director of wildlife and biodiversity for Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forest, and Fisheries (MAFF), Kry was en route to an international wildlife conference in Panama when agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ushered him into an interview room. They informed the 46-year-old bureaucrat that the United States had a warrant for his arrest, charging him with smuggling wild primates. Kry assured them they had made a mistake, according to a transcript of the encounter later released in court proceedings. “I’m from a conservationist background,” he told them. He encouraged…

THE 50 CITIES WITH THE HIGHEST CONCENTRATION OF THE “SUPER-WEALTHY” THE SIZE OF CIRCLES SHOWS THE NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS HOLDING $100 MILLION OR MORE IN INVESTABLE ASSETS. DARKER CIRCLES MEAN GREATER PROJECTED GROWTH OF THAT NUMBER. SOURCES: HENLEY & PARTNERS; NEW WORLD WEALTH…

“I was very enthusiastic about what I thought the internet was going to do to the world.”MARCOS GALPERIN, CEO, MERCADOLIBRE WHEN MARCOS GALPERIN started online marketplace MercadoLibre in a parking garage, he wasn’t trying to evoke the origin stories of U.S. tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple. In Buenos Aires in 1999, the garage of his father’s leather company was just the best option for fast broadband internet. “It was a building with terrible offices, but at least we had good connectivity,” he says. But like his Big Tech brethren, Galperin spun gold from the dingiest of spaces. Today, Galperin is one of the wealthiest men in Latin America, with an estimated net worth of over $7 billion thanks to MercadoLibre’s astronomical growth. The company, now based in Uruguay,…

In November of last year, a flood of alumni donations came pouring into Harvard—hardly an unusual event for a school that oversees a $50 billion endowment. But something stood out: Many of the donations amounted to exactly $1. The piddling contributions were a protest of a campus culture that, in the eyes of critics, had restricted political speech while giving free rein to anti-Semitism. The action had been inspired by Marc Rowan, CEO of private equity giant Apollo, who a month earlier had called on fellow alums of the University of Pennsylvania—where he has been a prodigious donor—to join him in stiffing that school with $1 donations. And they came as another big Wall Street name, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, launched a noisy campaign to oust the presidents…

BY MIDNIGHT, all the cookies had been eaten. The vending machine was out of coffee. The sandwiches ordered in for dinner were long gone. Still, about 700 lawmakers remained holed up inside the European Union’s soaring executive chamber in Brussels. Finally, as the sun rose on an icy Dec. 8, 2023, they staggered home to nap and shower before returning for a further 17 hours, until—out of exhaustion or expediency—they agreed on a package of laws about one of the thorniest issues on which they had ever voted: artificial intelligence. The marathon negotiations over the EU’s AI Act, as it’s now known, were among the most intensive in the bloc’s memory, and produced the world’s first rule book for a sprawling new technology with seismic implications. The EU’s 27…

THERE’S NO QUESTION technology stocks are exhilarating. Last year, the ETF tracking the Nasdaq 100—the QQQ—soared 54.8%. But there’s a dark side to all that potential upside: Tech stocks are notoriously volatile. The QQQ in 2022 fell a dizzying 32.6%, far more than the market as a whole. Which got us thinking—after a year in which tech was the story, what other stocks might have gotten overlooked? Below, we found five steady bets that each enjoyed double-digit returns over the past decade, which speaks to their staying power, a characteristic that Wall Street seers call “quality.” And they’re still poised to deliver tech-like returns, while rounding out a broader portfolio. CME Group (CME) ▸ 10-YEAR ANNUALIZED PRICE RISE: 12.6% ▸ MARKET CAP: $72 billion The world’s largest derivatives exchange…

Somewhere I heard that a startup doesn’t fail when it fails. It fails when the founders give up. In this “money is no longer free” market, that begs two questions: When should founders give up? And how should those founders manage their psychology while seeking the answers to such a momentous question? I AM FACING THIS EXACT dilemma right now. My new consumer software startup has not gone particularly well by one sort of important measure: growth. It’s been a four-year grind to find some signal of product-market fit—and we haven’t found it yet. At one point, we had 12 people. Soon, it might just be my cofounder Jen Greenwood and me, at least until we rebuild in a more methodical way. It’s been like panning for gold in…

Congressional Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but both concur the U.S. should take a much tougher economic stance toward China—and in defense of U.S.-based companies. A new House select committee on U.S.-China competition released its first report in December. The report frames the U.S.-China business relationship as an urgent matter of national security, a term it uses some 65 times. As the report observes, “Never before has the United States faced a geopolitical adversary with which it is so economically interconnected.” It also urges the federal government to take a more active role in supporting U.S. multinationals in the economic rivalry. NOTABLE AMONG ITS 130 RECOMMENDATIONS: New controls on access of foreign adversaries including China to technologies including AI, quantum computing, biotech, optics, and space-based technologies. Tax…

ON THE DAY that the foundation of Craig Underwood’s business collapsed, he was on vacation—at the beach with his wife, daughters, and grandchildren in Hawaii. It was November 2016, and the fourth-generation California farmer had just completed a perfect pepper harvest—another high point for a business, Underwood Ranches, that had grown exponentially over three decades on the strength of a single crop. As the sole supplier of the juicy red jalapeños for sriracha, Huy Fong Foods’ iconic fiery-red chili-garlic sauce, Underwood’s empire of peppers had spread from a 400-acre family farm in the 1980s to 3,000 acres across two counties outside Los Angeles. Sriracha’s rise had by then become the stuff of business legend. That spicy, slightly sweet, good-on-everything sauce, in the instantly recognizable bottle with its white rooster…

BIG TECH COMPANIES were once the disrupters at the edges of the global economy; now they’re the engines at its center. The 26th edition of the Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies All-Stars list shows how much esteem those giants command among other business leaders. For the 17th straight year, Apple finished first in our annual ranking of corporate reputation, based on a poll of some 3,700 executives, directors, and analysts. And for the fifth year in a row, Amazon and Microsoft rounded out the top three. Meanwhile Nvidia, whose GPU chips are powering the world’s forays into generative AI, soared to its highest-ever ranking at No. 10. In other industries, megaretailer Walmart (No. 9) returned to the top 10 for the first time in 14 years, while COVID-vaccine maker…

Who would drop $6,000 for a dram of whisky? The answer is in The Book. Only a handful of people have ever seen its moss-green cover, inscribed with gold lettering. Hidden like a Horcrux on the tony resort of Sea Island, in Georgia, the volume simply referred to as “The Book” is taken out only when a guest orders a glass of Macallan 1950 at the resort’s sumptuous Georgian Rooms restaurant bar. When a $6,000 order for this 74-year-old elixir from the Scottish Highlands is placed, an entire ritual is set in motion. A bespoke Lalique tumbler appears. The kitchen sends out a suite of hors d’oeuvres. A bat signal goes out to the resort’s beverage director, Nic Wallace, who drops whatever he’s doing to deliver The Book to…

JOSEPH P. BABITS, MBA, JD U.S. Securities Counsel, Associate Counsel Shell USA Inc. Vero Beach, FL Joseph P. Babits serves Shell USA Inc. as lead U.S. securities counsel and associate counsel. Well-versed in national securities law, he represents Shell plc in interactions with government entities and ensures compliance with the SEC’s regulations. He also possesses comprehensive knowledge of European securities regulations. Awarded the Capital Markets Award by the SEC, he has also been a faculty member of the Practicing Law Institute’s seminar on global capital and U.S. securities law. He is running for the Republican nomination to represent Florida’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. His key issues are securing the border, implementing term limits in Congress, and preventing coercion by federal agencies. THOMAS E. GATES,…