After weeks of teasing followers on social media, Ellsworth on Nov. 9 unveiled Jetty, a line of sports and performance drinks and powders, at Target, Amazon, Whole Foods, and Sprouts Market.

With five flavors of ready-to-mix electrolyte powders and bottles, Jetty is trying to carve out space in the multibillion-dollar sports and performance drinks category by not catering to athletes. Formulated without artificial colors, dyes, or sweeteners, it contains only 100 mg of sodium, compared to roughly 300-500 found in leading brands. Ellsworth is aiming to position it as a product for everyday wellness.

“When I say wellness, it’s not athletes. It’s like, hot girl, mom walk, and I just did a quick little Pilates this morning. That type of wellness is really important,” Ellsworth tells Fast Company. “It’s not for a marathon, not for a gym. It’s just yummy hydration. You can just have hydration for existing and have fun while doing it.”

Taking on giants—again

Like she did with Poppi, Ellsworth is launching a new brand in a category already dominated by big names. 

Other brands have established themselves as leaders of the industry. Gatorade remains the top brand with over $11 billion in annual sales, along with Propel, according to a PepsiCo report. Powder mix Liquid IV is another athlete-targeted product that has grown quickly, with almost $1 billion in U.S. retail sales in 2025, according to data from Circana. But Ellsworth says hydration needed a rebrand.

“We didn’t create this because [I realized] ‘Oh, there’s this white space in the market,'” she says. “I was like, I needed this in my life.”

But when she went to Expo West in March, she found that there was real demand for hydration products not geared toward athletes.

“Big hydration…is trying to make moves and take dyes out and update ingrdients,” Ellsworth says. “But it doesn’t change the fact that the branding is still for a sports drink.”

That framing, she says could be another multibillion-dollar opportunity. “I took on soda, the biggest category before. Why can’t I do that with hydration? It doesn’t scare me.”

No, really—what is jetty?

Going up against established brands also means competing with large marketing operations. And Liquid IV recently hired former PepsiCo CMO Jenny Danzi to spearhead its cultural impact as it has shown up at music festivals like Lollapalooza and Governors Ball. 

Ellsworth says Jetty is focused on gaining recognition among younger consumers—and to do that she’s borrowing from a playbook she built while growing Poppi. The rollout has been focused on leveraging the relatability of micro-influencers, rather than relying on celebrity star power.

“I think what a lot of people get really caught up on with working with talent, especially in the early stage, is you really do want to work with creators and influencers and not celebrities,” Ellsworth says. She noted that in the early Poppi days, Jennifer Lopez shared photos

Ahead of launch, Jetty used Ellsworth’s substantial social media following and relied on creators to help cultivate an air of mystery about what the brand is. Before launching, the brand posted hints on its Instagram page, keeping consumers on their toes about what the new product could be. 

The page features a “j-card,” offering VIP perks like first access to new product drops and insider-only information and colorful jelly bites with “jetty” on them. It also posted a social video with branded lipgloss, face mist and a gua sha. It all hinted at wellness, but kept the ultimate product a mystery until launch.

It’s a serious strategy for a serious brand builder, for Ellsworth “it’s fun to be at it again and building.”

Offices are tapping into “Dips-Giving,” a social media trend in which coworkers each bring a different dip to share, potluck-style. 

While the main trend has remained popular over the last few years among friend groups as a lower-effort alternative to traditional “Friendsgiving,” Dips-Giving has slowly made its way into the break room, transforming fare usually seen as an appetizer or side dish into the main event.

The dips can be as classic or creative as a participant wishes. For example, at one dip-themed office party last year, employees brought in an array of dips like salsa, guacamole, cranberry apple dip, and even a cookie dough dip to pair with chips, crackers, breads, fruits and veggies, and more. In a video shared to TikTok, the user revealed the party was the office’s third annual “Dip Off.”

The year before, the same user posted another sizzle reel of the Dip Off, with spreads like a “funfetti” dip paired with cookies and the evening’s winner, a stuffed banana pepper dip.

The tradition also allows for content creation at the office. Take the Omaha-based party supply retailer Oriental Trading Company, which posted a video to TikTok featuring employees and their Dipsgiving dips for the holiday party. Offerings ranged from a cream cheese strawberry habanero dip to a pizza dip and a cannoli dip.

A real estate company in Florida named Gailey Enterprises held a “Christmas Dipapalooza.” While most staff members opted for tried-and-true options like a hummus and pita platter, one employee completely ignored the rules and brought pizza instead.

However, not everyone on social media is excited about Dips-Giving. Some users have raised hygiene concerns about coworkers “double-dipping” or cooking for them—a common worry associated with potlucks in general.

In one TikTok video, a user placed a large pot in her car and filled it with various ingredients to create a buffalo chicken dip. “I didn’t have the time to make buffalo chicken dip for the office potluck,” the user said, captioning the video, “I’m trying my best.”

One person commented: “One thing about me, I will always pass on a potluck.”

Huang and Nvidia confirmed the relationship Sunday, following a bombshell New York Times report. Alice Huang (no relation to Jensen)—the woman at the center of the revelations—is an executive at Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, a major customer of Nvidia chips. U.S. intelligence surveillance reportedly showed that she had been funneling information directly to the Chinese government.

What remains unclear is how much sensitive information may have been compromised, what Huang knew about the woman he was seeing, and why U.S. intelligence officials apparently failed to warn him about her suspected ties to Beijing. The answers could prove deeply damaging to both Huang and the White House.

“It was pretty clear to a lot of people that [Jensen Huang] would be a target of Chinese intelligence collection,” given his proximity to President Donald Trump and his leadership of a company that is “central to the U.S.-China AI competition,” says Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Nvidia’s changing story

The admission of the affair also contradicts how Nvidia and Huang himself had previously characterized his ties to Alice Huang. As recently as October 29, company spokesperson John Rizzo described their interactions as routine business dealings, while Huang insisted they were “completely normal and not unusual.”

Huang now faces an investigation by Nvidia’s board, although directors said in a statement Sunday that they had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised” and expressed “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team.”

The board’s investigation may be the least of Huang’s worries. The powerful CEO faces the prospect of bipartisan congressional scrutiny, along with mounting questions about his influence in Washington and his future at Nvidia.

The questions Congress wants answered

Late last week, three House members—Republicans Brian Mast, John Moolenaar, and Eric Crawford—sent Huang a letter requesting that he attend a closed-door hearing on the matter in Washington, D.C. Asked by Fast Company on Monday whether Huang intends to attend, Nvidia declined to answer on the record. Next year, the new Democrat-controlled Congress will likely call a number of tech leaders, including Huang, to testify about their dealings with Trump.

On Monday, Senator Chris Coons of Delaware called for an investigation into Huang and Nvidia to determine whether national security had been compromised. “We need answers about the relationship between AI billionaires and the Trump administration,” he wrote on X. Coons is poised to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Democrats take control of Congress in January, giving him considerable power to pursue those answers.

There is certainly plenty to investigate. For one, we don’t know whether Alice Huang obtained sensitive information from Jensen Huang and transmitted it to the Chinese government. Bresnick says Huang and his devices may have been in possession of several types of valuable information, including trade secrets about upcoming Nvidia chips, the company’s research strategies, or U.S. government plans to restrict China’s access to advanced AI technology.

“Did he provide information to her about the Trump administration’s thinking on AI—U.S.-China competition, export controls, and trade policy more broadly?” Bresnick asks. “Because if [the Chinese] have greater texture on what the administration’s thinking, it’s easier for them to position themselves.” (The White House did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)

It’s also unclear what Huang knew about the woman, and when. He certainly knew he was having an extramarital affair with an executive at a customer company, which violates Nvidia’s code of conduct. But we don’t know when he learned that she was a suspected spy.

What did the White House know?

Then there’s the question of when U.S. intelligence learned about Alice Huang’s activities.

According to the reporting, the U.S. government had known about her ties to Beijing for months. Bresnick finds it strange that intelligence officials apparently failed to warn the Nvidia CEO, given his close relationship with the president and his position atop a company developing some of the world’s most advanced AI technology. “The fact that this potentially could have been at risk” makes the apparent lack of intervention all the more puzzling, he says.

One possibility is that the White House prevented intelligence agencies from warning Huang about the suspected spy. After all, the Trump administration has compelling reasons to keep Huang and Nvidia out of the headlines.

The stock market’s strong performance has been a central selling point for the administration, and Nvidia is the crown jewel of the AI-related stocks that have driven much of its growth. AI and AI-related companies accounted for as much as half of the market’s gains this year, according to a new J.P. Morgan report.

The White House may have had an even more direct financial incentive. The federal government stands to collect revenue from Nvidia’s AI chip sales to China. Last year, Huang persuaded Trump to allow Nvidia to sell its H200 chips in China, provided the U.S. government received a 25% cut of the sales.

Huang also reportedly discussed selling Nvidia’s top-of-the-line Blackwell graphics processing units in China, but that proposal was ultimately shut down over national security concerns. In August 2025, Huang agreed to give the U.S. government a 15% cut in exchange for permission to sell the lower-performing H20 chip to China.

“Was the government hoping to get a bunch of money from these deals, from Chinese buyers getting access to these things?” Bresnick asks.

Nvidia’s influence comes under scrutiny

Alice Huang’s employer, Megaspeed, became an official Nvidia Cloud Partner in November 2023 and purchased more than $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips over roughly two years, according to the Associated Press. But the company was also under investigation by the U.S. Commerce Department over suspicions that it was funneling restricted AI chips to China.

A New York Times investigation last year found that Megaspeed’s offices in Singapore and Malaysia were largely empty, while many of its executives are based in China. Commerce Department officials who spoke to The Times even described finding boxes of restricted Nvidia chips in a Megaspeed facility in Malaysia.

On Monday, The Times reported that the Commerce Department’s investigation came to an abrupt halt last year after Nvidia’s general counsel, Tim Teter, contacted investigators seeking information about the case. Teter reportedly told them that Jeff Kessler, a senior Commerce official appointed by Trump, had given Nvidia permission to reach out. The communication alarmed investigators, some of whom worried that Kessler’s involvement had potentially compromised their work.

The case was subsequently transferred to the Justice Department, which is now conducting a criminal investigation into Megaspeed. Officials familiar with the matter told The Times the transfer was intended to prevent the investigation from being compromised.

There is no evidence that Kessler instructed investigators to share information with Nvidia, but the unusual circumstances of the transfer have raised questions about the company’s influence over the very officials responsible for policing its chip sales.

For Bresnick, the investigation also raises questions about how Megaspeed was able to acquire billions of dollars’ worth of advanced Nvidia chips despite suspicions about its operations. “We had no idea where those chips went,” he says.

Together, the revelations raise questions about whether Nvidia’s political influence complicated the government’s response to potential national security threats. This all comes at a politically sensitive moment: Corruption was a major factor in voters’ decisions in the midterms, and Nvidia now risks becoming entangled in a controversy that could damage its standing in Washington.

Despite Huang’s scandal, Creative Strategies chairman and longtime analyst Tim Bajarin suggests those calling for his ouster could meet serious opposition. 

“Removal of Jensen would be a very difficult decision because he is the heart and soul of Nvidia,” Bajarin says. “I have met with Jensen many times over the years, and he was always the smartest guy in the room. More importantly, he has the global vision for Nvidia’s future and needs to be the one driving their future.”

The beverage market was apparently thirsty for good news. Stocks of some beer, wine, and liquor brands perked up after election results rolled in. Companies such as Diageo, the British beverage giant behind brands like Guinness and Smirnoff, and Brown-Forman, which makes spirits like Jack Daniel’s and Chambord, enjoyed a stock pop of more than 5% after Election Day. Anheuser-Busch; Molson Coors Beverage Co.; Boston Beer Co.; and Constellation Brands, which imports popular Mexican beer brands in the U.S., also experienced gains on Wednesday as the blue wave swept through.

Trump’s tariffs may have first turned international trade upside down last year, but their effects are still being felt. Last month, the U.S. charged ahead with a plan to ban almost $1 billion in imports from its northern neighbor, restricting the flow of Canadian dairy products, motorcycles, and alcoholic products. The ban was designed to punish Canada for pushing back with its own tariffs on American goods, but a 50% tariff already limited imports across many of those categories. Still, the full ban shows that Trump’s erratic trade wars rage on, even as American consumers shoulder much of the economic pain for those policies.

An existential threat

Alcoholic beverages make up the vast majority of the estimated $967 million in Canadian imports the ban is expected to impact, yet another symbolic blow for an industry already reeling from a perfect storm of market forces. Last year, Canadian stores yanked U.S. booze from their shelves after Trump announced a 25% tariff on almost all imports from Mexico and Canada. At the time, the Distilled Spirits Council, a beverage industry trade association, warned of “great harm” to U.S. companies and their workers in light of the tariffs, expressing further concern that Canada’s retaliation would worsen the stateside situation.

The trade wars amplify an already worrying forecast for the beverage industry, which is scrambling to adapt its business as alcohol consumption continues to plunge not only in the U.S. but also globally. In 2025, the share of American adults who said they drink alcohol dropped to 54%, according to polling from Gallup—lower by 1 percentage point than the previous record low reported in 1958 and a dramatic dip from 2022, when 67% of Americans said they were drinkers.

Drinking less, drinking differently

With drinking habits already drying up, the beverage industry is right to be worried that high costs are accelerating those trends.

In 2026, it wasn’t just expensive chocolate and unaffordable beef weighing down American shoppers. The price of beer, wine, and liquor soared too, putting a damper on drinking culture and straining sales for many booze-based businesses. In a recent survey of 1,000 Americans who drink, market research platform Zappi found that 65% of adults say they “pregame” by drinking at home before going out in order to save money on alcohol. This behavior, often thought of as a college-age ritual among cash-strapped students, is just one way consumers are grappling with the high price of drinks. 

“Pre-gaming is no longer a niche or age-specific behavior—it’s a mainstream occasion that brands need to design for deliberately,” Zappi suggested in its report. “Retail brands, particularly [ready-to-drink products], spirits, and hard seltzers, should be thinking about the ‘pre-game moment’ as a distinct occasion.”

The average price of a cocktail in the U.S. is now above $13—and much more in cities like New York where prices for everything are higher and drinking rituals run deep. Ordering a martini set consumers back an average of $18.63 in the U.S. this year, up 8% from a year ago, according to recent data from food-industry market research and consulting firm Technomic. Opting for a margarita would save you more than $8 compared with a martini, but those prices also crept up by roughly 2% on average in 2026 and as much as 33% in Alaska. 

The new premium on drinking is driving other market changes, too. Suntory Global Spirits CEO Greg Hughes told The Wall Street Journal that demand for its mini-bottles of liquor staples like Maker’s Mark and Jim Beam is surging as drinkers trim their alcohol budgets and order fewer drinks while going or dining out. “They’re trying to stretch the dollar by pregaming,” Hughes said. You can see that’s what’s growing.”

With Americans hurting from high costs, tariff relief is at the top of the menu for Democrats as they take control of Congress in January. “We’re paying a tremendous amount of money for this,” incoming Michigan Sen. Abdul El-Sayed said in a podcast interview last week. He described ending the trade war with Canada as something Democrats “absolutely have to do immediately”—a priority he shares with the beverage industry.

“Getting American distilled spirits back on the shelves in Canada and securing the U.S. removal of the import ban on Canadian spirits remain top priorities for our industry, especially as we head into the crucial holiday season,” Chris Swonger, president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, told Fast Company. “A return to zero-for-zero tariffs on distilled spirits is a proven policy that has fostered economic growth for the hospitality industry, and we will continue to share that message with the administration and the new Congress.”

The Electoral College system was designed to ensure small states aren’t passed over by presidential campaigns, but in the process, it gives those often Republican-leaning states disproportionate control over presidential elections. It’s led to five cases in U.S. history where a candidate won the popular vote but lost the presidency, most recently in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump.

That’s why since 2006, some states have been working toward the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement to ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote also wins the presidency. That two-decade effort could finally pay off, thanks to five states that flipped blue in the midterms.

How the midterms made it possible

For the compact to take effect, laws to join it must first be enacted by states whose combined electoral votes are enough to secure a presidential election. The 19 jurisdictions that have already passed laws pledging their votes to the compact (18 states and the District of Columbia) have a combined 222 electoral votes, still 48 shy of the 270 votes needed to win the presidency.

That’s where five newly blue states come in. Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania now have Democratic majorities in their state legislatures, matching their Democratic governors. Nevada’s voters flipped the state’s governorship from red to blue while maintaining a Democratic legislative majority.

Those states now have a Democratic trifecta, controlling both chambers of their state legislatures and their governorships, setting them up to join the compact if their lawmakers wish. If all five states did so, they’d push the compact past the 270-vote threshold, guaranteeing that the winner of the popular vote would win the presidency as early as the 2028 election.

Challenges to the compact

The compact wouldn’t technically get rid of the Electoral College, a change that would require amending the Constitution. Rather, it requires that all participating states pledge their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote, even if that candidate didn’t get the majority of votes in their state.

The compact would likely face legal challenges. Even if the laws toward the compact are enacted in all five states, it may still need congressional approval under the Constitution’s Compact Clause, and still could face a possible presidential veto. The compact could also become the subject of a Supreme Court case, leaving it at the mercy of SCOTUS’s conservative majority.

Getting rid of the Electoral College is the favored position among voters, though support varies by political affiliation. As of 2024, 63% of American adults supported letting the popular vote decide the presidential election. That includes 80% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans. 

Still, whether states will actually take the leap and pledge their votes to the compact remains to be seen. Some key states have already blocked measures to join the compact in the past: In 2019, Nevada’s then-governor, Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, vetoed a bill to join, saying it could “diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests.” In 2023, Michigan’s legislature did not pass a bill to join the compact, despite holding a Democratic trifecta at the time.

On October 29, when The New York Times first reported that U.S. intelligence officials had concerns about Huang’s contacts with Alice Huang, a former top executive at Singapore-based data center firm Megaspeed, the company characterized the relationship as an ordinary business matter and said it didn’t share classified information with customers.

The board did not announce an investigation until 10 days later, after Huang acknowledged the affair in a memo to staff, emphasizing that it “has no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.” And before the investigation even started, the board had already said it had “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team.”

The announcement also framed the investigation as focused on national security, without mentioning whether it would address potential concerns about Huang’s judgment or conduct as an executive.

Nvidia has said Huang will continue serving as CEO without interruption.

Fast Company reached out to Nvidia for comment but had not received a response by the time of publication.

Indeed, there may be little Nvidia’s board can do to punish Huang without seriously risking the company’s business, which has become inextricable from Huang himself.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has spent more than three decades transforming it from a maker of graphics chips into a dominant force in the artificial intelligence boom. The 63-year-old is involved in nearly every aspect of the company’s business—from product development to its relationships with customers and government officials—with more than 60 executives reporting directly to him.

That dependence could make the board’s task particularly difficult. Nvidia has no publicly identified successor to Huang, and analysts have warned that his departure could create enormous uncertainty for the company.

“Jensen is not replaceable,” wrote Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at New Jersey-based financial firm Yorkville Ives & Co. “There is no other person on the management team bench that can step in seamlessly as CEO.”

An organization putting all its eggs in one leader’s basket can be risky, and not just in business. In politics, the Republican Party learned that the hard way following last week’s blue tsunami. After fashioning itself the party of Donald Trump, GOP leaders are beginning to slowly distance themselves from the president as the Democrats’ historic blowout wins in the midterm elections lay bare the fractures in the MAGA movement. 

Nvidia’s stock was down nearly 5% as of 12:50 p.m. ET.

Housing affordability was one of several key themes that resonated with voters from South Carolina and Ohio to Texas, Montana, and beyond, helping more than 40 Democrats to flip seats in both the Senate and House of Representatives during last week’s midterm elections. Survey after survey pointed to young people, in particular, who feel downtrodden about the prospect of homeownership—and various indicators underscore why.

Earlier this year, the National Association of Realtors reported that the typical first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old, a record high and a sharp increase from even five years ago, when the age was 33. Meanwhile, surging home prices, especially in areas of the country where wages haven’t kept pace, have driven the share of first-time buyers to a record low of 21% last year and have barely budged since then, figures from the Chicago-based trade group show.

But voters will need to see that the new Democrat-controlled Congress is taking these issues seriously, or the party risks being ousted once again in 2028, veteran Democratic strategist Donna Brazile cautioned during a conference hosted by the National Association of Realtors over the weekend.

“Affordability, affordability, affordability. It’s not a slogan that Democrats can use again unless they do something about it,” Brazile said, as reported by Realtor.com. 

While Congress passed landmark legislation over the summer with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that targeted boosting the supply of affordable housing, Wall Street also seems optimistic about the implications of a greater focus on affordability. A stock index made up of 34 companies in the homebuilding industry has risen nearly 4.2% since last Tuesday’s close. 

HOUSING AFFORDABILITY IN FOCUS 

While the housing market has eased in some ways in recent years, it’s not been enough to get many prospective homebuyers in the door of a new home.

The median price of a home on the market, at $415,000 as of October, has fallen nearly 8% from a high of $449,000 in June 2022, according to figures from Realtor.com. But mortgage rates have also risen in recent years, as the average 30-year mortgage rate surged from less than 3% in late 2020 to as high as 8% in late 2023, according to Mortgage News Daily. And rates are still relatively high, at 7.18% currently.

This year has seen the cost of nearly everything increase amid a surge in fuel prices stemming from the war in Iran. To tame inflation, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark federal funds rate for the first time in more than three years in September—and traders broadly expect that central bankers will do so again in December, which means mortgage rates could remain higher. 

While many personal finance experts recommend that people spend no more than 30% of their pretax income on housing costs, many Americans are exceeding that limit. In fact, 29% of homeowners with a mortgage are spending more than this threshold on housing—marking the third consecutive year of gains, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau, as reported by Investopedia.

To deal with rising housing costs, 59% of renters and homeowners alike say they’re taking steps to manage—either finding additional work or tapping into savings, according to a survey conducted by Experian in September. And the housing market seems like such a lost cause that more than one-third of renters don’t think they’ll ever be able to afford a home despite wanting to, according to a quarterly survey conducted by CNBC and SurveyMonkey. 

With the election so squarely focused on the cost of living—and housing affordability—the new Congress has a directive when it convenes in January, as Ali Solis, CEO of Solis Strategic Solutions, told Affordable Housing Finance. 

“Voters sent a clear message that the cost of rent, homeownership being out of reach, and everyday living cost is way too high,” she said. “People are struggling, and they want Washington to act.”

Skydance Motion Picture Group announced Monday that James Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping down as co-chief executives after four years leading DC Studios. Although their first film leading the superhero factory, Superman, reached theaters only last year, their DC run has come to an abrupt end.

Gunn and Safran initially survived Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The studio’s merger with Paramount Pictures was finalized just as DC’s Clayface was released.

However, it turns out Gunn and Safran aren’t surviving the merger. Instead, Skydance chairman and chief executive David Ellison is turning to Jeremy Latcham, a veteran of Marvel Studios, to steer DC.

“James and Peter launched a new era for DC Studios and led it through a period of real transformation, resetting the foundation and building a slate we’re incredibly proud of,” Ellison said in a statement. “We’re grateful for their passion, contributions, and commitment to this legendary brand.”

Latcham was a leading executive for Marvel, including the first wave of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man and The Avengers. He also worked with Gunn and Safran on Guardians of the Galaxy.

The changeover will take effect December 1. But a long pipeline of projects already in production ensures that Gunn and Safran’s fingerprints will be on DC Studios for a while to come. Gunn is currently in post-production on the Superman follow-up, Man of Tomorrow. Other upcoming releases include the series The People v. Gorilla Grodd and The Batman: Part II.

But the decade’s worth of planning that Gunn and Safran instituted will no longer come to fruition. Their reign has been characterized by more idiosyncratic comic book adaptations and genre gambles, like Clayface, which fused superhero with horror. (It’s grossed $109 million so far.) Earlier this year, Supergirl flopped, a major setback in just their second release.

Latcham takes on the roles of president and chief creative officer of DC Studios. He will report to Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, co-chairs of Skydance Motion Picture Group.

“Jeremy brings a deep reverence for DC and its passionate fanbase, recognizing that they are the very foundation of this storied, multigenerational brand,” Goldberg and Greenstein said.

Gunn’s biggest success leading DC was Superman, which struck a decidedly different and more comedic tone than the previous treatments of the iconic hero in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. But it also didn’t reach the box-office heights of the biggest superhero hits, grossing $618.7 million worldwide.

From the start, Gunn, a prodigious filmmaker, was an unusual choice for such a prominent corporate leadership role. In exiting DC, he seemed eager to concentrate again on writing and directing.

“We’re excited to return to what drew us to this job in the first place, which is telling the stories we love, including the next chapter of Clark and Lex’s journey in Man of Tomorrow,” Gunn and Safran said in a statement.

Latcham had been out of the superhero business. In 2017, he departed Marvel to set up Latcham Pictures, producing films including Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Bad Times at the El Royale.

“I’ve had the privilege to help bring some of the most celebrated superhero stories to life on the big screen, and I’m excited and honored for the opportunity to now lead DC Studios into its next era,” Latcham said.

—By Jake Coyle, AP film writer

The survey also found a real difference in who is traveling, and in overall holiday spending based on income levels, as Americans face high inflation and an increasing cost of living.

More than half of those surveyed say they’d prefer to travel and go to live events—but only 15% are actually pulling the trigger on experiences. Meanwhile, 27% plan to buy physical gifts, according to Visa, the top payment network in the U.S.

This is partly because of the high cost of travel—made worse by soaring fuel prices and the war in Iran—which has many Americans sticking closer to home for the holidays. Those unused travel dollars could flow into merchandise instead, which is good news for retailers, according to Visa’s economists.

The only exception to the rule is households earning an income of $200,000 and up: They increased both holiday airfare bookings and spending in September, with bookings up 29% and spending up 38%.

In contrast, roughly 33% of consumers earning under $100,000 plan to switch to lower-cost brands or budget-friendly stores for gifts, indicating how these shoppers are adapting to higher prices, Visa said.

Overall, Visa’s Business and Economic Insights (VBEI) team forecasts U.S. holiday retail sales will rise 4.5% year over year in November and December, the strongest growth since 2021. (However, that figure is in part due to inflation. Without taking price increases into consideration, sales are expected to increase 1.1%, down from 1.3% last year.)

Individuals are planning to spend an average of $777 on gifts this year, signaling Americans’ continued willingness to open their wallets, even as shoppers look for value in the face of inflation.

“Consumers are heading into the holidays with the capacity and willingness to spend, even if they’re being thoughtful about where those dollars go,” Michael Brown, principal U.S. economist at Visa, said in a statement. “Income growth continues to provide an important foundation for spending, and while higher prices remain part of the picture, we expect another healthy holiday season.”

Visa surveyed 4,660 U.S. adults 18 and older to get a sense of the broader consumer sentiment.

Now Musk has added another layer to the Cybertruck’s discontinuation scenario: It will require Tesla to issue refunds to “a lot of people” who’ve ordered the vehicle and won’t receive one.

In a post on X, Musk wrote that shutting down Cybertruck production has little to do with the sci-fi-inspired truck’s profits (or lack thereof). Rather, he claimed, it’s a shift to prioritize the brand’s newest vehicle, the autonomous Cybercab.

“The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate,” Musk wrote. “We will try to make as many as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people.”

He added: “This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.”

Though Musk alleged that the Cybertruck’s profits have been misrepresented in the media, its sales numbers tell a different story. According to data from Kelley Blue Book, sales for the Cybertruck have declined since 2024. Only 16,000 of the vehicles have been shipped so far in 2026, a far cry from Musk’s prelaunch estimate that Tesla would be manufacturing 250,000 Cybertrucks per year.

The announcement continues a trend for Tesla, which also discontinued its Model S and X electric vehicles at the beginning of 2026. At the time, Musk said the decision was to free up Tesla’s resources to focus on other products—in that case, its bipedal Optimus robot, which has yet to hit the market.

On Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Musk said it was time to give the EVs “an honorable discharge” as Tesla entered a new era, adding, “We’re really moving into a future that is based on autonomy.”

The two companies have spent the past few years building a partnership that gives travelers a few extra reasons to choose Delta and T-Mobile. Now, with the launch of T-Mobile’s new T-Mix wireless plans, they’re already thinking about what might come next.

In an interview with Fast Company, Ranjan Goswami, Delta’s chief marketing officer, and Mike Belcher, T-Mobile’s senior vice president of business development, partnerships and loyalty programs, confirmed that they’re exploring additional perks, including potentially expanding Delta’s offerings beyond SkyMiles.

“We started with Miles, but what else can we do together?” Goswami said. “What do T-Mobile customers want?”

Neither executive was ready to share specifics, but both made it clear that the companies have more ideas in the works.

T-Mobile’s new plans could mean more Delta perks

Announced in October, T-Mix takes a different approach to wireless plans. Instead of giving everyone the same collection of benefits, T-Mobile is letting customers pick the perks they’ll actually use.

The plans, which launch in November, come in three tiers: Standard, More, and Loaded. Prices start at $55, $75, and $95 per month for a single line, respectively, with AutoPay, plus taxes and fees.

Depending on their plan, customers can select between one and three benefits through a feature called Picks. Options include subscriptions and perks from companies such as Netflix, Apple Music, DoorDash, YouTube Premium, and Delta Air Lines.

For frequent travelers, one of those choices is Delta SkyMiles, giving eligible T-Mobile customers another way to earn airline rewards.

Customers can also switch up many of their selections during designated windows throughout the year, so they’re not necessarily stuck with the same perks forever.

And Delta might eventually offer more than just miles.

“You know, I would hope that our offering in T-Mix is even more broad,” Goswami told Fast Company when asked what the partnership might look like three years from now.

“I think there’s so much space to experiment there because T-Mobile’s built a platform that allows us to put so many choices in front of customers, and we’re excited to kind of be a part of that journey,” Goswami said.

Belcher said customer feedback will play a big role in determining what gets added next. T-Mobile is already gathering suggestions from customers and frontline employees, and those ideas could help shape future offerings.

“And so, you know, if we get other ideas from customers on what they want to see between Delta and T-Mobile, that’s something we’ll look at,” Belcher said.

For now, neither company has announced any specific new Delta perks or when they might arrive.

From free Wi-Fi to drinks and now airline miles

The Delta and T-Mobile partnership has come a long way since the companies first teamed up to bring free in-flight Wi-Fi to Delta passengers.

What started as a connectivity benefit has grown into something much bigger.

According to Goswami, Delta expects to surpass 115 million logins to its Delta Sync Wi-Fi service, powered by T-Mobile, this year. The service is now available on roughly 1,300 aircraft, including flights to the Asia Pacific region.

And passengers are doing a lot more than checking email. With free connectivity, travelers can stream entertainment, catch up on work, or follow live sporting events while they’re in the air.

The companies later added another benefit: a complimentary premium in-flight drink for eligible T-Mobile customers flying Delta.

Now, with SkyMiles available through T-Mix, the partnership is expanding beyond the flight itself.

“We added on drinks. Now we’re in T-Mix, and you know, watch this space. We’re working on more stuff,” Goswami said.

Belcher said the goal behind expanding the partnership is pretty straightforward.

“What influenced us to evolve it was to continue to deliver more value to our customers,” he said. And the conversations aren’t stopping with T-Mix.

“You know, we’re continuing to talk about other things that we can do across our ecosystem,” Belcher said.

Of course, those freebies also have a business benefit.

Goswami described how something as simple as a complimentary drink could get passengers talking. If someone sitting next to a T-Mobile customer sees them receive a free drink, they might start wondering what other perks they’re missing out on. That could make them more interested in switching wireless carriers. Likewise, a T-Mobile customer who starts earning Delta miles might be more inclined to book their next flight with the airline.

In other words, a free drink isn’t necessarily just a nice gesture. It can also be a pretty effective marketing tool.

Why Delta and T-Mobile want to keep expanding their partnership

The companies’ relationship is also part of a bigger shift in how brands think about customer loyalty.

These days, earning points or getting the occasional discount isn’t always enough to keep customers coming back. Companies are increasingly teaming up with brands outside their industries to offer benefits people can use in everyday life.

“I think partnerships are the future. No brand can be on their own,” Goswami said.

Delta already has relationships with American Express, Starbucks, and Uber, giving customers opportunities to earn rewards in places that have little to do with booking a flight.

T-Mobile has been doing something similar for years through T-Mobile Tuesdays, which offers customers weekly freebies, discounts, and other benefits.

Belcher explained that the company’s approach to loyalty is a little different from the traditional model. Rather than asking customers to prove how loyal they are to T-Mobile, the company wants to show customers why it’s worth sticking around.

“We flip the script on loyalty a little bit,” Belcher said. “We feel it’s T-Mobile’s job to show our loyalty to our customers.”

T-Mix takes that idea further by giving customers more say in which benefits they receive, rather than assuming everyone wants the same things. And for Delta, that creates an opportunity to reach customers who might not otherwise be thinking about the airline.

Neither company is saying exactly what the next benefit will be. But considering how quickly the partnership has grown from free Wi-Fi to cocktails and airline miles, there’s a good chance customers will have more to look forward to.

As Goswami put it, the companies are already working on more stuff.

An industry that polices itself

The federal government often takes an active role in deciding what is safe for the public.

Take the automobile industry, for example. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sits crash test dummies in cars and then runs them into walls to measure how human bodies are affected by vehicle collisions. Government researchers then analyze the crash test data, share it with the public and prescribe national standards to improve vehicle safety, all with the mission of saving lives and lowering economic costs from crashes.

With AI models, safety testing looks very different.

Under then-President Joe Biden, leading AI companies voluntarily agreed to promote “safe, secure, and transparent development” of their models by sharing details with the newly created division of the Commerce Department and following the administration’s guidelines for tests and transparency reports.

In September, following alarming reports of AI systems eluding their makers’ control, Trump asked leading AI companies to undertake “tremendous self-policing” as part of a voluntary safety pact, but his administration hasn’t said how it will monitor the AI companies’ implementation.

The technology is advancing so rapidly that many models are now deployed instead as AI agents that work without human prompting and can plan out myriad steps in real-world environments, such as in a recent case in which an AI agent sent a false tip to Philadelphia police about an unsolved homicide case.

As AI capabilities have grown, the government’s capacity to independently check these systems hasn’t kept pace. There still is no standard process for testing how safely AI agents are acting in the real world, even in simple cases such as when AI agents book a flight, said Sayash Kapoor, an incoming assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.

“Our previous methods would just look at the final answer, the final check, whether the flight was correctly booked. And in this case, it might seem as if the task was solved correctly,” said Kapoor, the co-author of a new paper examining agent evaluations. “But unless you’re looking at the entire set of steps that an agent took, you won’t be able to tell that the agent made a huge mistake.”

Trump has prioritized dominance in AI

When Trump started his second term, he initially empowered venture capitalists David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan as his AI czar and senior AI policy advisor, respectively. Their expertise was in leading tech investments, not the technical evaluation of AI models.

Both stepped down earlier this year but Sacks now serves on Trump’s technology advisory council. And after a relatively unknown Anthropic engineer resigned, warning about the dangers of AI development, Trump made a series of policy changes.

Trump empowered National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton to lead his new Super Intelligence Force, which the president said would keep the U.S. dominant in AI development.

Clayton’s appointment to the force, along with the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, shows how the administration is pushing to frame decisions around model safety as a national security matter that needs executive discretion and secrecy, overshadowing AI’s risks to consumer protection, privacy, and civil rights, said Amos Toh, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Even as Silicon Valley companies have disclosed their models’ involvement in troubling cyberattacks this year, CAISSI has kept a low profile when it comes to testing for AI safety.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also have been promoting the work of independent evaluation firms to help vet their companies’ safety practices, but the AI giants can limit their access and dispense with their evaluations.

“There’s this unclear mission for government evaluators if the largest AI companies are also being encouraged to set up their own internal evaluation systems and/or hire external evaluators,” said Logan Koepke, a senior project director at the civil rights and technology nonprofit Upturn. “Like, what role does government testing actually play in that scenario?”

Letting the labs police their own models and failing to clarify the role of government in AI safety testing weakens independent checks on AI systems that can cause real-world harms, Toh said.

“At the end of the day, all of these decisions are of immense public consequence and should be explained and rationalized in the public eye,” he said. “And that’s not happening.”

—Garance Burke, Associated Press

Climate talks address grid bottleneck

At the U.N. climate talks, hosted in the Turkish resort city of Antalya, organizers describe modern and reliable electric grids as “the backbone of the clean energy system.”

But billions of dollars are needed to upgrade out-of-date grids. These steep costs could hinder further renewable energy installations.

During the U.N. General Assembly in September, the global body launched a Global Grids Accelerator to speed up international funding for electricity infrastructure in Africa and Southeast Asia.

“We’re very confident that the long-term trend is an acceleration of the pace of the energy transition, but we need the infrastructure, grids and storage, to really keep pace,” Hart said.

Annual investment in electricity generation, such as building new power plants, has risen by almost 70% since 2015, reaching $1 trillion a year, according to the International Energy Agency. Yet the agency noted annual grid spending has risen at less than half that pace.

To meet electricity demand through 2030, the IEA calculates annual grid investment must increase by about 50% from today’s $400 billion per year. Any delays will substantially increase global emissions by prolonging reliance on fossil fuels, the IEA warns.

“Power grids have not been readied enough for the scaleup of renewable electricity generation,” said Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford University. “We have been complacent in the past and now the grid has become a real bottleneck.”

Old grids slow energy transition

Power grids deliver electricity from power plants to homes through a network of transmission and distribution lines, substations and transformers.

Originally designed around large, centralized power plants, many of today’s power grids were built like one-way roads, with producers sending electricity to consumers. These older one-directional grids are being overwhelmed by demand surges and a boom in renewables.

Grids have a maximum capacity of electricity that they can safely store, transport and distribute. If a grid is already at capacity, solar and wind farms can be instructed to limit their electricity output, a process known as curtailment.

China and India, which have installed impressive amounts of renewables, can’t take full advantage of the massive buildout for this reason.

China curtailed 360 terawatt-hours — close to the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s annual electricity demand — of wind and solar electricity in the first half of 2026, according to Global Energy Monitor and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

India curtailed 11 terawatt-hours of solar generation — enough electricity to power about 10 million homes — over the course of 15 months spanning 2025 and 2026 because of insufficient transmission and storage capacity, according to the energy think tank Ember.

Curtailing solar and wind generation while fossil fuels continue to supply electricity is a blow to climate efforts, especially since China and India are among the world’s largest emitters, said James Abraham, with the New Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water.

To transition away from fossil fuels, he said, “you need a grid changeover. You need a grid transformation.”

Solutions exist, despite funding concerns

Upgrading existing grids to be more flexible could increase efficiency by allowing electricity flows to adjust to supply and demand. It could help areas with excess solar and wind energy send it to places with higher electricity demand and fewer energy resources.

Newer, more flexible grids could also make it easier for utility companies to exchange electricity with households that have solar panels or battery storage.

But many countries can’t afford to take these steps, or at least not quickly enough, according to Abraham, who said “the need is now. It’s a time tension rather than anything else.”

Global energy security concerns deepen

The Iran war’s energy shock built up momentum for the energy transition, especially in hard-hit regions like Southeast Asia, but investment in renewables is outpacing grid development, said Gahee Han, with the Seoul-based nonprofit Solutions for Our Climate.

“Unless we upgrade our power grid in Asia, Asia will have no choice but to rely on the conventional power plants, like gas or coal,” she said. “It’s nonsense to rely on those power plants, especially considering the energy crisis.”

One of the solutions being promoted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is an interconnected power grid that would allow countries to trade power more easily, adding a safeguard against future shocks.

Interest in the ambitious plan, which is still in its infancy, is growing, according to Abdul Razib Dawood, executive director of the ASEAN Center for Energy.

“We have this crisis that will unify the region. You need your neighbors,” he said. “This is an opportunity for us to really strengthen the cooperation.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

—Anton L. Delgado, Associated Press

According to a recently issued franchise disclosure document, H&R Block had 1,816 franchised physical outlets as of the end of June. That’s down from 2,135 at the end of June 2024—a net decline of 319 franchised physical storefronts over the past two years.

It has also seen a net gain of company-owned stores at the same time—116 over the past two fiscal years—although not enough to make up for the decline. Overall, H&R Block reported 8,561 outlets at the end of fiscal 2026, a net decline of 203 over the two-year period.

Why the reduction? H&R Block says it’s mostly due to a change in strategy, which includes bringing franchised locations back under the company-owned umbrella.

“Like many aspects of our business, our retail footprint continues to evolve as part of H&R Block’s broader transformation strategy,” a spokesperson tells Fast Company. “Recent changes in our franchise portfolio reflect a normal shift in ownership mix, that includes reacquiring a number of franchise locations and integrating them into our company-owned operations.”

Changing preferences, changing tactics

As for what underlies the tweaked strategy, one potential reason is that more people are simply relying on online platforms (including H&R Block’s) to either do their taxes or utilize the company’s other services, which has led to less of a need for physical locations.

That may have been the catalyst when the company closed 400 U.S. offices back in 2018, amounting to 4% of its storefronts at the time. 

More recently, the trend may be hastening by the availability of AI tools. Data published earlier this year from Adobe (which, notably, has tools to help people scan their tax documents potentially to prep their returns) found that year-over-year, U.S. workers were 136% more likely to use AI for tax filing for 2026 than they were in 2025.

H&R Block, too, has rolled out AI tax filing tools in recent years.

Still, while that may account for some of the shift in strategy, the data suggests that H&R Block is leaning away from the franchise model, at least to some degree. While its franchised stores have contracted, its company-owned store count has increased.

During fiscal year 2026 alone, 167 stores were reacquired by H&R Block from franchisees, as were 118 during fiscal year 2025, and 169 in fiscal year 2024, the disclosure document reveals.

Company leadership has also stated that reacquiring franchised locations is a part of a broader growth strategy.

During the company’s Q4 fiscal year 2026 earnings call in August, CFO Tiffany Mason noted that H&R Block will “continue to acquire franchise locations when opportunities arise at attractive EBITDA multiples.”

She added, in response to a question, that those acquisitions were “a core part of our long-term algorithm.” 

The future: Fewer physical storefronts

By reacquiring franchised locations, H&R Block assumes its clients and potential revenue—it’s practically turnkey, allowing for more company-owned storefronts without actually having to open them.

It even has information available to franchisees or other tax business proprietors on its website as to how to start the conversation. Mason has said that the acquisitions present an opportunity for the company.

“In fiscal [20]26, we did 160 franchise buybacks. That compares to about 124 franchise buybacks in the previous year,” she said during the latest earnings call. “Those are opportunistic.”

There may be something to it, too. H&R Block’s stock (NYSE: HRB) has appreciated considerably while its physical footprint has shrunk. As of this writing, shares are up 113% over the last five years and roughly 24% year to date.

Accordingly, the company says its new strategy of fewer franchised locations is here to stay.

“Our focus remains on ensuring clients have convenient access to the expertise and services they need, whether through our retail offices, digital experiences, or a combination of both,” a company spokesperson says. “As we continue to invest in our future and transform our business, we will continue to assess opportunities to optimize our retail footprint.”

Before long, the organization is carrying far more than anyone intended, and very little ever gets taken off the table. Sound familiar?

Leaders aren’t nearly as good at subtraction. That’s why one of Warren Buffett’s most famous observations still deserves attention, although perhaps for a reason different from what we’ve been giving it.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

I’ve written about this Buffett quote before, usually in the context of protecting your time and focusing on what matters. But there’s another leadership lesson buried inside it that becomes more important the higher you climb.

Every “yes” has a cost

When a CEO says yes to another priority, that decision doesn’t stay in the executive suite. It travels downstream.

Someone has to attend the meetings, create the deck, track the metrics, and somehow find room for the new initiative alongside everything else leadership approved last quarter and never officially killed.

Eventually, an organization can have 12 “top priorities,” which is corporate code for having no priorities at all.

Saying no is an allocation decision

This is where Buffett’s advice spells leadership discipline. Leadership is partly the job of deciding where those resources will not go.

Research on “initiative overload” found that companies struggle to kill projects even after they no longer support the strategy. Instead, executives keep adding initiatives, creating overload farther down the organization.

More recently, research found essentially the same problem. Many organizations know they have too many projects, yet still struggle to eliminate them, slowing execution and muddying strategic priorities.

I’ve seen a version of this in leadership work for years. Executives talk about focus while rewarding addition. Every new idea gets oxygen because nobody wants to be the person who kills something that might work. That’s not strategy. To me, that looks more like organizational hoarding.

Give your people permission to stop

Here’s a simple little leadership habit that can change the conversation. Every time your leadership team approves a significant new priority, ask: “What are we going to stop doing to make room for this?”

Don’t accept “we’ll figure it out” as an answer. If nothing comes off the table, you haven’t prioritized anything. You’ve simply increased the workload.

This becomes even more important when resources are tight. Research shows that when the workload keeps growing but resources don’t, leaders can’t keep asking people to do more with less. At some point, something has to come off the table.

The better question isn’t always, “How can we get more done?” Sometimes it’s, “Why are we still doing this?”

Have the leadership courage to disappoint people

There’s another reason saying no gets harder as leaders become more successful: More people want something from them. Customers, employees, investors, and partners believe they deserve attention. But you still can’t satisfy them all.

That means a CEO who refuses to disappoint anyone will eventually disappoint almost everyone, because the organization becomes stretched too thin to execute its best ideas exceptionally well.

Buffett’s wisdom, then, isn’t really about becoming someone who walks around saying no all day. It’s really about becoming clear enough about what matters that the answer to everything else becomes easier.

And sometimes the most strategic thing a leader can say is two letters long. No.

—Marcel Schwantes

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

The threat is quantifiable: Severe bugs are classified as CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures), and around 400,000 have been officially logged since 1988. Of those, 13,000 happened in the last month. PHP2Shell is the perfect example of this. If you spent any time on social media in the last few weeks, you probably heard some chatter about PHP2Shell and just how dire the threat was. Roughly 70% of websites rely on code written using PHP, and the announcement of a fundamental bug in the language—akin to discovering that millions of buildings share the same faulty lock, potentially giving intruders easy access—had people panicking. Websites such as Wikimedia preemptively went offline until a fix was pushed through.

These bugs were rediscovered separately by two cybersecurity firms: Calif and Wiz. The bugs are very difficult to spot. They had to do with how the host computer accesses memory while an application is running: If a malicious actor forced an out of memory condition by whatever means, it would be possible to interrupt the runtime, leave a partially initialized object behind, and have the application treat it as valid. It would be a stepping stone for a hostile takeover of the host server, while a separate bug could leave instructions from a request that could be read again subsequently instead of being reset. This can be an apocalyptic threat if somebody can actually do those things. They would gain remote control over the host computer, and at that point they can do whatever they want with that machine and what’s on it.

Notably, developers at the PHP Foundation knew about this bug in 2024, but couldn’t agree on a solution for it. Every proposed fix had associated costs, and in any event, nobody actually knew how to act against these bugs. The threat was completely theoretical. It sat there, which wasn’t the optimal workflow, but it also wasn’t an omega-level threat until generative AI came into the picture. Forcing the condition while also creating the takeover wasn’t easy to do. Once the vulnerability was publicly announced, what had been a trickle of attacks became a flood. Fixes were rapidly pushed (in some cases by volunteers) and anybody running a website on PHP was urged to quickly upgrade to protect themselves.

This was just one bug, but pretty much everybody expects that more will be found. The people talking loudest about the danger are, surprisingly, generative artificial intelligence companies. AI companies are all too happy to make clear how incredibly dangerous all of this is and how many more bugs and vulnerabilities they expect to find as they continue to look around. Sam Altman doesn’t think we’ll be able to patch all the bugs, while Jason Clinton of Anthropic terms it a “vulnerability tsunami.” They’re promising years of instability following this as they struggle to discover and patch all of these bugs—an ongoing process, because software development is itself a process of continual updates. 

Why are they talking this way? They’re emphasizing how dangerous their product is, which seems like terrible salesmanship. But they’re also peddling the solution to the problem they helped to introduce.

And to force the issue, they’re going to look for the bugs themselves. That’s the point of OpenAI’s Patch the Planet initiative, which is all about looking for defects and vulnerabilities in open-source software. Nor are they just running around bug-hunting and letting chaos ensue. They’re trying to step into the cybersecurity space and set themselves up as the best solution to the problem.

OpenAI unveiled a new security-focused model in September, GPT-6 Cyber. OpenAI’s Daybreak program is intended to be available only to eligible organizations so that only “good actors” can take advantage of this, though in the long term as models become open access it’s not clear how that distinction will matter. Anthropic has its own model, Claude Mythos Preview. Google has Gemini Carbon 4 as its cybersecurity model. As with all models, you pay per token. Access to Daybreak is subsidized, although if you’re a believer in Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification, the long-term business model will be to make this more expensive over time as customers grow to depend on it. These companies are desperate for new sources of revenue even as overall revenue growth slows.

They’re not being subtle about this. Sam Altman told a group of business students at Stanford that “I think we’re going to have to completely switch the defense model to using the same technology for a new kind of defense shield.” In other words: Gotta use my products to keep yourself safe. What they’re doing verges on extortion; they’re trying to monetize the chaos their products are introducing. But in addition to that, they’re taking aim at a fundamentally vulnerable digital space.

A threat to the open-source commons

Let’s take a step back and consider how the internet, much of which runs on open-source software, is really maintained. PHP is supported by the PHP Foundation, which has just over a dozen employees and relies on donations. It is in effect a passion project for a few developers. There’s an Xkcd comic that sheds a great deal of light on this: Random critical pieces of digital infrastructure are being maintained by people entirely on their own, thanklessly and often without compensation. The modern open internet has been built up in ad hoc ways that often deprioritized security, but that mattered less when only human beings were doing the building or the hacking. To take advantage of those vulnerabilities would require not just expertise, but a great deal of time, effort, and computational power in many cases. PHP2Shell’s exploits were hard to spot, even if you really knew what you were doing and understood PHP down to the source code.

Yes, these potential threats are dire, but this isn’t a tsunami or a natural disaster that simply could not have been prevented. This is entirely manmade, and the people shrieking about what a dire emergency it is are also the ones who have helped to inaugurate it. This exploit sat virtually unknown by anybody for more than a decade, and even when it was recognized for what it was, the threat was purely theoretical. Now because of generative AI, cybersecurity is starting to favor the attack rather than the defender. People like Sam Altman helped to create the problem, first by developing the models, and now by going around and actively looking for weak points in our ramshackle internet. They broke it, and now they’re here to offer a solution: “Nice open internet you’ve got right there; it would be a shame if something happened to it.”

And what are the costs associated with this? For individual consumers of course, there’s the threat of hacks, theft, and general instability on the internet. For businesses, outages, lost revenue, and theft. That’s severe. But I think that there’s a more fundamental risk to the whole of the internet, at least as we know it. Groups like the PHP Foundation or the individual developers who sustain free and open-source software (FOSS) are going to be under even greater strain in the years to come, especially when compared to companies like Anthropic that, for the moment at least, have very deep pockets. Those 13,000 CVEs I mentioned at the beginning of the piece? Those largely fall on volunteers and overworked organizations to remediate, which will burn them out and in the long run likely push people away from the whole FOSS project. 

Turning to generative AI is probably what Anthropic and every other company wants, as another use case for their products, but it poses its own severe risks. Large language models (LLMs) are already being used on open-source projects that call into question the whole license-free structure and system of attribution that has made FOSS possible. That’s one leg of our stool that’s being kicked out from under us.

On top of that though, as AI-generated code winds up in more FOSS projects, is it going to introduce more vulnerabilities that will then have to be hunted down and eliminated? The answer seems to be yes. Whether it’s from vibe coding or simply the fact that LLMs trained on code with security vulnerabilities will tend to reproduce those vulnerabilities, we’re likely going to be running in place for years on end. And even if it can be introduced without undermining the security of the code itself, it’s another avenue to eat away at the licensure and copyright-free status that makes FOSS possible.

So this protection racket that’s forming is more than just a tax. It’s going to massively destabilize the ecosystem of the internet as we know it. I don’t know what comes next if the delicate FOSS sandbox falls apart. Maintainers could abandon their projects, which in turn creates more security vulnerabilities as things fall out of date and become obsolete. Even stably running pieces of infrastructure will eventually be unsupported by the languages that they run on; people can wake up one morning and find that some odd dependency powering their website stopped working. Who’s responsible at that point for fixing it? 

Nor do I want to see it entrusted to for-profit entities. Maintaining this work is basically thankless as it stands; it’s unprofitable to take on because the whole point is that everybody can freely use it. The only reason for them to do so in the long run would be to monetize it, which costs the rest of us. And as they make these into their own proprietary systems, will they wall off what is theirs from everything else? Why shouldn’t they; Microsoft spent years fighting the FOSS movement because it saw open-source software as a threat to its copyrighted systems. What has been up until now a true commons, maintained by people and organizations largely doing it out of passion, would become something else entirely: less able to talk to each other, and more expensive to use.

What’s the solution? This is probably a whole other essay, but in the long run it’s going to have to be government. Whether by directly assuming the burden or offering cash and resources to private groups, governments need to take steps to ensure that an open and free internet continues to exist. Could something like the United Nations do it, ensuring that it’s a truly global movement instead of under one national or regional umbrella? Failing that, could the European Union take it on—a prudent move, especially as Europe tries to get out from under the thumb of U.S. big tech. Food for thought, because under the shadow of all of these scary cyberattacks, that’s where I think the real threat lies.

As Zohran Mamdani wraps up his first year as New York City’s mayor, we decided to explore a possibility that got lost in the reductive shouting that surrounded his campaign: What if his democratic socialism-fueled agenda is actually good for business? And what will happen as other cities and states elect leaders with similar ideas?

Making New York more affordable is a goal that most of us can get behind. So is making city government faster, more responsive, and more innovative. The question—a thorny one—is whether Mamdani can deliver a more equitable city without throwing a wet blanket over the investment and entrepreneurship that help it thrive.

That tension animates this issue’s cover story, by Morgan Clendaniel, our executive editor, digital. Clendaniel, who has long covered the intersection of business and progressive politics, spoke to Tony Shorris, president and CEO of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, and Julie Su, deputy mayor for economic justice, about the sweeping role that they believe government can play in the economy—speeding up procurement, cutting red tape, making city services function.

The revolution may include city-owned grocery stores. It will definitely include high-tech public bathrooms.

Capitalism + democratic socialism

There’s something invigorating about that combination of grand ambition and attention to the daily details. At Fast Company, we spend a lot of time talking to visionaries who see a broken system and decide to build something better. It’s exciting to see that startup energy coursing through City Hall.

Clendaniel interviewed chief executives, too, such as Warby Parker’s Neil Blumenthal, and he spoke with key opposition figures, including Steven Fulop, president and CEO of the pro-business Partnership for New York City, and the venture capitalist Bradley Tusk. (Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager, had his own words for the mayor at our Innovation Festival in September.)

This unfettered-capitalism crowd worries that the S-word alone is enough to discourage investment in New York and prompt companies to relocate or move jobs elsewhere. There’s some fearmongering here, no doubt, but also some merit. Business hates uncertainty.

These are complex questions worth exploring with an open mind and a willingness to scrutinize the trade-offs. Clendaniel does just that, with a big assist from his editor, Jill Bernstein.

A visual caffeine jolt

Meanwhile, our creative director, Mike Schnaidt, came up with the idea for the coffee cup on the cover, brought to life by illustrator Justin Metz. Along with Clendaniel and Bernstein’s journalism, this graphic effort reminds me why I love making this magazine. Even in the fully digitized, AI-ified year of 2026, a great magazine cover can turn a complicated argument into something immediate and surprising.

Here, an everyday New York object carries an extraordinary question about the future of the city—and the ever-evolving relationship between the private sector and the public good.