Содержание выпуска: June/July 2025 — Fortune

Newsletters for Curious Leaders Stay sharp with Fortune’s digestible morning briefings—like CEO Daily and Term Sheet—delivered straight to your inbox. (fortune.com/newsletters) Subscribe for Full Access Power, leadership, and influence are always shifting. Unlock continued tracking of the Fortune 500 and more with unlimited access to web articles and rankings. (fortune.com/subscribe) Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit The Fortune MPW community brings together standout leaders in business, government, philanthropy, education, sports, and the arts to shape what’s next. Oct. 13–15, Washington, D.C. (fortune.com/conferences) FOR MORE INFO, GO TO FORTUNE.COM…

GIVING UP “CIGAR BUTTS” Buffett began his career as a disciple of Benjamin Graham, who recommended buying stocks only at rock-bottom prices. But Buffett’s business partner, Charlie Munger (pictured), convinced him that some strong companies were worth buying even when they weren’t bargains—paving the way for some of Buffett’s best investments. CATCHING UP ON TECH Even as he built a peerless track record, Buffett avoided investing in tech companies, arguing that their future value was impossible to estimate. But he eventually came to recognize Apple, under CEO Tim Cook, as a traditionally great business with a huge competitive “moat.” It became one of Berkshire Hathaway’s top-performing holdings. GIVING TO THE BETTER GIVER Buffett had long planned to give away most of his wealth after his death. But the accomplishments of…

WHAT DO Trump’s picks for deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, “AI and crypto czar,” and ambassador to Denmark all have in common? If you guessed that they are all tech-industry insiders (and men), you’re only partially correct. A less obvious but important bond linking these techies together is their shared history with Peter Thiel, the reclusive billionaire venture capitalist who famously wrote the first check that funded Facebook. Thiel’s endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election, and his speech at the Republican National Convention, are considered key factors in Trump’s improbable path to victory. Nine years later, Thiel isn’t a visible part of Trump 2.0—but his fingerprints are everywhere. Networks are powerful. THE BILLIONAIRE VENTURE CAPITALIST HAS ASSEMBLED A NETWORK OF SINGULAR INFLUENCE. And Thiel has long…

UNTIL EARLY THIS YEAR, investors could make out handsomely by focusing on the few big U.S. tech stocks known by the movie-inspired moniker “the Magnificent Seven.” Inevitably, though, that playbook grew outdated as those stocks became expensive and new opportunities emerged. For those looking to balance their portfolio, here are three strategic suggestions: THE OTHER 493 Investors may have overlooked other gems from the S&P 500. Stephanie Guild, chief investment officer of Robinhood Markets, likes these three: INTUITIVE SURGICAL (ISRG) This stock is already a darling, but the company has a unique, in-demand product—surgical robots—that gives it plenty of room to grow. ARISTA NETWORKS (ANET) In the AI era, Big Tech firms are hungry for data centers, and Arista specializes in making network equipment for those vital hubs. GAP INC.…

MELINDA FRENCH GATES, at 60, is setting her own agenda: Four years after her divorce from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, she is dedicating her resources to improving the lives of women and girls in the U.S. through her company, Pivotal Ventures. With her then husband, French Gates cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, and spent over two decades traveling globally to understand the world’s biggest health challenges and how best to utilize a multibillion-dollar fortune to address them. She stepped away from her role at the foundation in 2024, and it was later renamed the Gates Foundation. Fortune spoke with French Gates about what has been achieved in the foundation’s first 25 years, her hopes for the future, and her views on the foundation’s ambitious plan to spend…

ON THE MORNING OF Sept. 8, 2020, Meredith Kopit Levien’s first day as CEO of the New York Times, she opened her laptop in the living room of her pandemic rental in Calabasas, Calif., as her 9-year-old son remotely attended fourth grade nearby. She found herself staring into a world on fire. Much of the publication’s 4,700-person staff was working from cramped apartments, taking meetings on Zoom, or reporting from the streets—some in harm’s way. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer had ignited protests and a national reckoning on race and power. Within the Times, an incendiary op-ed calling for military force to subdue Black Lives Matter rallies had led to the abrupt ouster of the opinion editor. Meanwhile, Levien’s longtime mentor, Mark Thompson—the British chief executive…

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM MARQUIS WHO’S WHO Since 1899, Marquis Who’s Who has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals from every significant field of endeavor and remains the standard for reliable biographical reference material for researchers, libraries, and executive institutions around the world. Please visit www.marquiswhoswho.com for additional information. DOREEN FUKUSHIMA, MD Dr. Doreen Fukushima, the founder and psychiatrist of Ho’ola Pono LLC, is distinguished for her efforts to eradicate the stigma associated with mental health. Serving at the helm of the facility since 2019, she is regarded highly for her premier service to adult patients with mental health conditions. With a particular focus on treating patients with depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance use disorder and schizophrenia, among other conditions, Dr. Fukushima is particularly proud of her resilience…

SIX MONTHS AGO, a top executive at the third-largest company in America was shot dead. Brian Thompson, CEO of the $300 billion insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group (UHG), was murdered on his way to the company’s investor day in Midtown Manhattan. At the time, UHG’s business had never been stronger. The health care giant also runs a prescription drug operation, employs thousands of doctors, and manages huge medical billing systems. Just a few weeks after Thompson was shot, the company reported that its revenue topped $400 billion in 2024—more than three times what it was 10 years ago. But the murder forced UHG to face a harsh fact: The health care system has never felt more broken to the patients it’s meant to serve. The alleged killer is a man who…

ANA BOTÍN doesn’t have “normal” days. As executive chair of Banco Santander, one of Europe’s largest banks by assets, she’s perpetually flying from one part of the world to another. Santander has operations in 10 core markets: When Botín chatted with Fortune, she was just back in Madrid from a visit to Mexico, gearing up to head to Doha and New York in subsequent weeks. She has also accepted that her high-stakes gig will always require the utmost from her. “I’m a very happy person, but…I need to be—literally—like an Olympic athlete,” Botín says. “If you have a mission that matters, it’s worth it.” It helps, of course, when your mission is a resounding success. In 2014, when Botín succeeded her father, Emilio, the longtime chairman credited with making Spain’s…

IN THE AGE OF APP-BASED stock buying, it’s easy to forget that there is one popular asset you can store in a safe or bury in your backyard: gold. It’s also beautiful: A handsome doubloon or gleaming ingot will fetch a lot more compliments than the bits of digital dust that make up the rest of your portfolio. On the downside, unlike owners of run-of-the-mill stocks, gold owners must pay significant sums to safely transport and store their holdings, and face a very real risk of robbery from burglars or shifty visitors. Gold has other drawbacks, too, of course: Unlike stocks or bonds, it provides no income yield, and physical gold is not always the easiest thing to convert to cash. But for all its quirks, gold has been one…

On the Gates Foundation’s 25th anniversary, the fight against poverty and preventable disease looks quite different than it did in 2000. The turn of the century was a moment when multilateral approaches held great promise: The Cold War was over, the Digital Age was dawning, and there was a new urgency to bring the blessings of tech and medical innovation to every corner of the globe. Capitalism, it seemed, could be a benevolent force even for the world’s poorest. Back then, Bill Gates and his then wife, Melinda French Gates, were far from alone in their conviction that the world’s biggest problems could be solved with fresh ideas, international cooperation, and a whole lot of money. The United Nations announced the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 to reduce poverty and…

THIS DEFINITIVE ranking of the women at the top of the global business world—now in its 28th year—tells us both who wields power today and who is poised to climb even higher tomorrow. While the Most Powerful Women list has always been data-driven, with executives chosen based on the size and health of their businesses or P&Ls, this year it is even more so. (We’ve changed the publi-cation date, too.) For the first time, Fortune relied on a more complex scoring system, as-signing values to candidates based on those business met-rics (over both 12-month and three-year periods), as well as an executive’s influence, inno-vation, career trajectory, and efforts to make business better. We introduced this meth-odology with our first Most Powerful People list in 2024. The system gives an edge to…

METHODOLOGY Companies are ranked by total revenues for their respective fiscal years. Included in the survey are companies that are incorporated in the U.S., operate in the U.S., and file financial statements with a government agency. This includes private companies and cooperatives that file a 10-K or a comparable financial statement with a government agency, and mutual insurance companies that file with state regulators. It also includes companies that file with a government agency but are owned by private companies, domestic or foreign, that do not file such financial statements. Excluded are private companies not filing with a government agency; companies incorporated outside the U.S.; and U.S. companies consolidated by other companies, domestic or foreign, that file with a government agency. Also excluded are companies that failed to report full…

ON JULY 3, 2006, Warren Buffett drove to the U.S. Bank branch in downtown Omaha, walked in, went downstairs, and opened his safe-deposit box. He removed a piece of paper, a certificate for 121,737 shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock. It was worth about $11 billion. The money from the sale of those shares, a fraction of his Berkshire holdings, would be the first tranche in his program to give away virtually all his wealth. That bank visit was a bookend in Buffett’s life, a fittingly financial signal event in the life story of the man widely regarded as the world’s greatest investor. He told Fortune at the time that it reminded him of a visit to that same bank, then called Omaha National, almost 70 years earlier, an event that…

FOR THE PAST decade or so, it was easy for the average investor to pursue a winning strategy: Load up on low-cost ETFs that tracked the S&P 500 or another big basket of U.S. stocks, then sit back and watch the returns pile up. This strategy became even more appealing as the U.S. tech sector roared and the stock prices of “the Magnificent Seven” climbed to nosebleed heights. This approach, or variations on it, came to be known as Buy America, and it worked splendidly. Until it didn’t. “If you’d come to me 10 years ago, I would have said, ‘Just buy an index fund and don’t worry about it,’ ” says Stephanie Guild, chief investment officer of Robinhood Markets. Now she suggests investors consider a more active approach to…

After a friendly dinner this past winter at Mar-a-Lago with incoming President Donald J. Trump, Bill Gates told interviewers he was “frankly impressed” with Trump’s interest in global health. Now, months into Trump’s administration, Gates said we find ourselves in a “painful” situation, one that could slow or reverse the progress of the past 25 years. The new administration’s cuts to international aid “will cut kids off from vaccines, and kids will die,” Gates told Fortune in a late-April interview. “It’s been cut very dramatically, and very differently than what I expected.” Gates said his foundation’s efforts to eradicate or dramatically decrease deaths from disease and poverty could be undermined by the government’s cuts—but he hopes these cuts will be temporary and that U.S. funding will be restored. It remains…

The body of a 1-year-old boy lay on a bare examination table in Soweto, South Africa, looking precious and small, heartbreakingly beyond help. In the dimly lit room, two researchers methodically took samples from the child’s brain, lungs, and liver with a needle and swab. The body was then gently lifted into a postmortem pouch, to be sent for a proper burial. The boy’s grieving mother had consented to the examination by Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance, or CHAMPS, an organization funded by the Gates Foundation. The deaths of poor children around the world have remained largely an unsolved—and uninvestigated—mystery. For the researchers at CHAMPS, the mission is to treat every death of a child as a tragedy worth investigating—and not a faceless statistic. The Gates Foundation’s relentless focus…

IN HER HIGH-RISE OFFICE at SiriusXM’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, CEO Jennifer Witz keeps a four-foot-by-three-foot collage of concert tickets—featuring the $10.50 stub from her first-ever show, a 1982 performance by Hall and Oates, as well as tickets to a 1993 Simon and Garfunkel show, Metallica’s 2000 spectacle at Giants Stadium, and a 2010 Paul McCartney concert to celebrate SiriusXM reaching 20 million subscribers. Music was what drew Witz in 2002 to a position in finance at Sirius, the then-new satellite radio company. Her first job had been in banking, working for garbage and hazardous-waste clients. “I decided I had to find my way in to be around music,” Witz says. More than two decades later, Witz, 56, became the CEO of a sprawling audio entertainment business, one that includes music,…

THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of reasons these days for business leaders to lose sleep over what-ifs. What if tariffs crush my supply chain? What if inflation impoverishes my customers? What if AI makes my company obsolete? What if some other technology makes my company obsolete while I’m worrying about AI? Everybody’s got the Sunday scaries, every day of the week. Many measures of CEO confidence plunged in April after President Trump unveiled a stunningly broad and deep round of tariffs. Consumer optimism has plummeted still further, even after the administration scaled some of them back. Giants like General Motors, UPS, and Delta Air Lines have withdrawn their full-year earnings guidance, because they have no clue whether an unforeseen policy plot twist might kneecap their profits. Amid all this agita, you might…