“Countries don’t need you for tax revenue. Corporations don’t need you for your labor. Because it’s coming from AI.” 

Microsoft is reportedly considering a spinoff or restructuring of its Xbox gaming unit, as the division’s bets on subscriptions and cloud gaming have come up short and console sales have continued to decline. Sales of Xbox hardware were down 33% year over year, the company reported in its most recent earnings.

An initial public offering has its official functions—raising money, providing liquidity for equity-holding employees and early investors—but it has unofficial ones, too. The record-setting $1.77 trillion SpaceX IPO, whose valuation was partly pumped up by its artificial intelligence ambitions, just reminded us all of a big one: a blockbuster IPO can be a blockbuster branding event. No wonder the scramble to reap the publicity benefits of being seen as the next trillion-dollar-plus IPO started before SpaceX even launched its offering, and has only accelerated since.

World leaders began gathering in a French spa town Monday for a summit of the Group of Seven club of powerful democracies with a new impetus following President Donald Trump’s announcement of an agreement that he says will bring an end to the U.S. war against Iran.

Trump arrives in Evian-les-Bains on Monday afternoon for talks with G7 leaders, including some who have been sharply critical of his managing of the roughly 15-week conflict that has led to a surge in global energy prices.

Trump has had sharp disagreement with host French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni over failing to consult them before the decision to go to war. Trump has threatened reprisals, including drawing down U.S. troops in all four countries, all members of the NATO military alliance, for their lack of support.

The G7 includes France, the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom. Guest nations at this summit include Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya, South Korea, Qatar, Syria, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.

In addition to Iran, the other leading issue will be Ukraine war that’s largely slipped down the White House’s list of top priorities. Trump spoke to Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday.

At a morning session Tuesday, Zelenskyy will have the opportunity to showcase progress that Ukrainian forces are making against the Russian invasion.

—Associated Press

SpaceX’s initial public offering lived up to expectations, making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire and minting more than 4,000 millionaires in an instant as the stock price blew past its asking price and kept rising—up 27% in the first few hours of trading.

Britain will ban children under 16 from using a range of social media apps including Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to protect young people from harmful content and excessive screen time, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday,

Starmer told a news conference that he will fight back if technology companies resist the move, and acknowledged some teens would try to find their way around a ban. But he said he is “not prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children.”

“Every parent can see it with their own eyes. Social media is making children unhappy,” said Starmer, who has two teenage children. “I’ve heard first hand from families crying out for change and we will do right by them.”

The move, expected to take effect early next year, makes the U.K. part of a growing global movement to tighten online safety for children. Australia, Canada, Brazil and Indonesia have introduced legislation or announced age-based restrictions or requirements for children’s access to social media. France, Spain, Denmark, Thailand and South Korea are among others studying or developing similar approaches.

The U.K. plans to follow the same model for a social media ban as Australia, which last year became the first country to bar under-16s from holding social media accounts. Platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to exclude children younger than 16 could be punished with multimillion-dollar fines.

The U.K. said its ban will apply to platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, but not YouTube Kids or messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Starmer stressed that enforcement action will target tech companies, not children.

The prime minister also said he will go further than Australia’s measures.

He said the government will act to prevent strangers from contacting children on gaming and livestreaming platforms. Authorities are also considering additional measures including overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for those under 18. More details are expected next month.

The streaming and media wars continue with yet another big acquisition: Fox Corporation is acquiring Roku for $22 billion.

Anthropic says it was forced to shut down access to its new Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 AI models after the Trump administration issued a broad warning against use of the models by foreign nationals. The warning, from the Commerce Department, would have banned even many of Anthropic’s own employees from using or working on the models.

High oil and gasoline prices and energy supply problems won’t be solved overnight, despite an agreement to end the Iran war and open the Strait of Hormuz announced Sunday.

It will likely take months before energy companies can resume operations to the point of meeting the world’s demand, according to energy experts. The slow pace of the process of shipping and refining crude oil, and doubts about the security of traveling through the strait mean the effect won’t be seen immediately, they said.

Ships loaded with crude oil have been stranded in the Persian Gulf for more than three months, unable to safely travel through the waterway, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gasoline supplies typically traveled before the war began.

“It’s going to take time for people to feel comfortable and for insurance to be in place … particularly to get people on the ground to restart some of these assets,” said Daniel Evans, global head of fuels and refining research at S&P Global Energy.

Still, oil prices slipped early Monday after the deal was announced.

Brent crude, the international standard, was down $3.45 at $83.89 per barrel. U.S. benchmark crude oil lost $4.03 to $80.85 per barrel.

Those prices are still well above the roughly $70 per barrel where oil was trading before the war started.

As the higher prices unwind, ships that have been stranded will have to exit the strait, and then new tankers will have to come in to be loaded, Evans said.

“To bring a ship in, you need to be confident that you’ve got a big enough window of safety to bring it in, load it and move it out,” he added.

Oil tankers also move slowly, he explained. It takes months to travel from the strait to distant countries, deliver the crude oil to a refinery for processing and then arrive at its final destination.

In addition, some producers in the Middle East paused extracting oil from the ground, known as a shut-in, when they ran out of storage space. Restarting those operations can be a slow process.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, where there are alternate pipelines or routes besides the Strait of Hormuz to deliver oil, may be among the quickest to resume production, said Alan Gelder, senior vice president of refining, chemicals and oil markets at Wood Mackenzie, an analytics firm.

“But places like Iraq could be much more challenged because they’ve had a much bigger shut-in, their fields are more difficult … it may well take about a year before they get back,” he said.

Investment in the energy system, which can take years to see the results, ground to a halt after the strait’s closure, Gelder said. So it will take time for this capital to restart.

Countries that shut in oil production won’t want to restart until they know there is a stable, durable strait, and that a ceasefire will last more than 30 or 60 days, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

“We don’t know what open means or what the speed of evacuation of trapped material is going to be,” he said.

West Marine, a major boating and marine supply retailer that has been operating since 1968, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Every June, my coaching conversations change. The leaders I work with are still talking about strategy and succession, but underneath, a second operating system is running. One client described her summer as “a staffing plan involving three camps, four children, three pickup times, and one car.” Another scheduled our session for her car, in a parking lot, between a board call and a camp release that happened at the exact same instant as her other child’s, twenty minutes away.

For years, companies treated employee mental health as peripheral rather than central to their core operations. It was something you offered employees as a benefit, pointed people toward as a resource, or handed off to HR rather than owned at a leadership level.

Over the next two decades, roughly $124 trillion is expected to change hands in what analysts describe as the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. A growing share of that wealth is moving to women through inheritance, entrepreneurship, and rising lifetime earnings. At the same time, healthcare is confronting another reality: Much of modern medicine was built around male biology. Those two shifts are beginning to collide.

The first thing you see are the colors.

During the NFL’s 2024 AFC championship game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Kansas City Chiefs, play was stopped when a drone entered restricted airspace over the stadium. The operator later pleaded guilty to violating national defense airspace. Thirteen months later, a wild-card playoff game featuring the Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers was suspended for the same reason. According to the NFL security chief, Cathy Lanier, unauthorized drone incursions over NFL stadiums jumped from 67 in 2018 to 2,845 in 2023—an increase of 42x. For most of that time, the league had almost no legal mechanism to stop them.

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. 

It would be very easy for Ben Blumenrose to buy his nearly 7-year-old daughter a kit to build a Rube Goldberg machine. Instead, he gave her some spent toilet paper rolls, pieces of cardboard, and bits and bobs found around their house. That’s because she’ll need to play, imagine, and pivot with these objects. It’s his way of helping her discover the value of tinkering, an activity that shaped his way of thinking. As a child, he hacked the first video games he bought and figured out how to use his computer to make art. “It was this intersection of design, creativity, technology, and just tinkering,” he says. “That is where I came from.” 

Over the past few years, the social psychologist Ron Friedman has been studying what makes teams successful—really successful—and what high-performing teams do differently.