That story held up — until it didn’t.

Those same Sun Belt markets are now absorbing the consequences of a building boom that flooded them with new supply. Rents in Austin have fallen nearly 20% from their 2022 peak. Orlando, Jacksonville, Nashville, Phoenix — the cities with the most new permits issued in 2023 — also posted the steepest rent declines since. Add surging insurance costs that hit multifamily operators in Florida especially hard, with a Federal Reserve study finding the largest year-over-year premium increases concentrated in Orlando, Houston, Tampa, and San Antonio. Pile on property taxes that have been climbing to match those inflated valuations, and deals that looked great on paper three years ago are a lot less exciting today.

The markets nobody was writing about? They kept right on performing.

Indianapolis. Kansas City. Columbus. These are not markets that generate buzz at industry conferences. They are markets that generate returns.

The risk-adjusted returns available in Midwest markets have always made them more suitable for investors willing to look past the headlines. Factors like steady population growth and job creation, with a construction pace that follows actual demand rather than enthusiasm, create real value. The Midwest tends not to boom; but it also doesn’t bust. For an investor managing risk as carefully as return, that’s not a consolation prize. It’s the whole point.

Take the numbers at face value. Indianapolis and Kansas City both run rent-to-income ratios below 20% — the national average is sitting at 27%. That might sound like a wonky data point, but what it really means is that people can afford to live there. And renters who aren’t stretched to the breaking point every month don’t skip out on rent, don’t bounce from apartment to apartment, and don’t disappear the moment the economy hiccups. Financially stable tenants make for stable assets. It’s really that simple.

It also matters for the tenants themselves. For many of our residents, renting a quality apartment isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a financial strategy. They’re putting money in their savings accounts, working toward the day they can buy a home of their own. That’s a relationship worth protecting. In Sun Belt markets where purchase prices are already astronomical and the rent-to-income math is already tighter, the temptation to keep pushing rents beyond what residents can reasonably afford is real. But when multifamily owners squeeze them just to make the numbers work, they suffer the consequences: good tenants leave, trust in the community goes down the toilet, and occupancy tanks anyway. The same boom-bust cycle that punished investors ends up punishing the people who live there.

We’ve been focused on Midwest markets since 2010, and over time the secret has gotten out. These markets proved themselves during the Great Financial Crisis and again during the pandemic. These two moments showed clearly how much more the hot markets swung than the steady ones. For us, it was less a revelation than a reminder of why we’d stayed put.

Our recent acquisition of Kinsley Forest in Kansas City’s Clay County submarket illustrates why we keep coming back to these markets. There are currently just 342 units under construction in Clay County, representing 1.6% of total inventory, and Kansas City is absorbing new units at more than twice the rate they’re being completed. Those aren’t speculative numbers. That’s the kind of balance that produces durable returns.

As more institutional capital recognizes this, increased competition will reduce yields for new acquisitions — that’s how healthy markets work, and we expect that to normalize over time. Nobody’s watching their insurance bill double overnight, and property taxes aren’t playing catch-up to some valuation spike that happened three years ago. These markets aren’t building recklessly, and that’s not changing anytime soon.

Real estate investors often have a way of confusing speed with skill, especially those who don’t live and work here in the Midwest. Every cycle has the same hallmarks: the loudest markets attract the most money, prices chase the momentum, and by the time the last wave of investors gets in, the party is already over. We never played that game here. The Midwest rewards patience and discipline over speculation.

In this business, the flashiest story rarely has the best ending. But wise investment decisions in the Midwest often do. 

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Just over two decades ago, SpaceX was a fledgling startup sparked by an idea Elon Musk had after talking with his old college roommate. 

Speaking to employees in Texas on Friday just before he rang the opening bell to signal SpaceX’s first day of trading, the CEO admitted he thought the company would fail.

“I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all,” Musk said.

In fact, SpaceX endured multiple rocket explosions and brushes with bankruptcy along the way. Here’s the story, according to Musk’s official biography, by Walter Isaacson.

From PayPal to the stars

Ousted as CEO of PayPal while he was on his honeymoon, Musk had plenty of time to explore his interests. 

One was learning to fly, like his father and maternal grandfather had done before him. With typical Musk obsessiveness, he bought a single-engine turboprop plane and covered the 50 hours of training needed to get his pilots license in two weeks. 

It was partly this affinity for flying that got him thinking about space flight. After a visit with Adeo Ressi, his roommate from the University of Pennsylvania, the pair discussed whether an individual could get to space without the backing of a government. 

While Ressi was dubious, Musk thought it might be possible, given that the basic requirements to make rockets, metal and fuel, are not extremely expensive. This same conversation led Musk to look on NASA’s website to find out what its plans were for going to Mars. His logic was that since humans had already gone to the moon decades ago, Mars was the natural next step, wrote Isaacson. But after searching online, Musk discovered NASA had no plans in place to reach Mars.

As he explored the interest more, Musk went to a dinner hosted by the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that promotes the idea of Mars travel. He started reading about rocket engineering and calling up experts to borrow old engine manuals. By age 30, and with just under $200 million in his pocket after eBay bought PayPal, Musk had a new mission.

“I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization,” he said at a reunion of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas in the early 2000s.

By 2002, Musk had moved to Los Angeles to get closer to the best aerospace engineering talent found at companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Yet at first, Musk didn’t think he would build a rocket company. He instead wanted to pursue a philanthropic mission and get the government’s attention so that it would fund Mars missions on its own. One of the ways Musk thought to do this was with a publicity stunt. 

Musk planned to send a little greenhouse to the red planet and get a plant to grow there. Then, the public would see it was possible for life to grow on Mars and demand more missions, he reasoned. 

First, though, he needed a rocket. Through the Mars Society, Musk had learned about Jim Cantrell, a rocket engineer who had worked on the U.S.-Russian program to decommission missiles. 

Cantrell set up multiple trips with Musk to buy a rocket in Russia, none of which went well. During one of the trips, Musk drank so much vodka he passed out and slammed his head on a table. He was also spit at by a Russian rocket proprietor. During another meeting, Musk balked at some Russian rocket owners’ efforts to sell him two old Dnepr rockets for $18 million each, about 20% of the money Musk had gotten from PayPal sale.

On the flight home from Russia, Musk started putting together a spreadsheet of what it would take to build a rocket. At one point, he turned to Cantrell and future NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who also accompanied him to Russia, and said “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.”

Although friends like Ressi and others tried to talk him out of it, Musk was determined: “I wanted to hold out hope that humans could be a space-faring civilization and be out there among the stars,” he told Isaacson. “And there was no chance of that unless a new company was started to create revolutionary rockets.”

Building SpaceX

SpaceX really took off when Musk met Tom Mueller, a one-time logger who worked as a propulsion engineer at aerospace company TRW. Mueller, who as a side hustle was building the world’s most powerful amateur rocket, was keen to be free of TRW’s risk aversion, while Musk was enthused at Mueller’s knowledge of engine propulsion. 

After several in-depth conversations about the nitty gritty details of rocket engines, Musk offered him the job of head of propulsion. In case the venture didn’t work out, Mueller asked Musk to put two years worth of his salary in escrow. Musk agreed, and Mueller joined as SpaceX’s first hire.

Musk invested $100 million in SpaceX and established a headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., putting engineers, a design team, and factory workers together in one place to boost efficiency and outperform the legacy aerospace companies that had dominated the space industry for decades.

SpaceX cheekily named its first rocket Falcon 1, after the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. Mueller named its engines Merlin and Kestrel after different species of falcon. In an effort to save on costs, Musk eschewed the traditional approach to rocket building, at one point building 70% of the Falcon 1’s components in-house rather than buying them from suppliers. 

Yet, the Falcon 1’s creation was anything but smooth. Its first launch in 2006 ended in an explosion just seconds after liftoff. A year later, a second launch failed to reach orbit. A third launch. in 2008 saw the rocket explode after the first and second stages collided during separation. 

Musk had only budgeted for three launches of the Falcon 1. After three failures the money was almost out, but Musk was saved by an infusion of cash from members of the PayPal Mafia, who only years earlier had forced him out as CEO.

In September 2008, SpaceX executed a successful launch, and the Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit. Months later, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station, and the one-time startup was now an official player in the space industry. 

SpaceX dominance

With Falcon 1 having proven the concept, Musk moved on to the Falcon 9, a nine-engine, 157-foot tall behemoth 10 times more powerful than its predecessor that flew successfully for the first time in 2010. This rocket would later become the company’s workhorse for its flights to the ISS as well as for launching its Starlink satellites into orbit.

Then in 2015, the Falcon 9 achieved a radical feat that would change aerospace forever. SpaceX landed the first stage back on Earth to be reused for a future launch.

More than a decade later, no other rocket in its class has consistently replicated the Falcon 9’s success at scale. While SpaceX has landed and reflown Falcon 9 boosters hundreds of times, many of its competitors have largely struggled to move beyond expendable designs.

In May 2020, SpaceX built on this success by carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station with its Dragon spacecraft in the first crewed launch from American soil in nearly a decade, proving that a private company could achieve what had long been the domain of nation states.

Now, SpaceX is making progress on Starship V3, its next-generation launch vehicle that at 408-feet tall, towers over the Falcon 9. The vehicle is capable of carrying a 100-metric-ton payload, a significant leap from the 35 metric tons its previous model could carry. 

Starship V3 is a key part of NASA’s plans to land astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972. Its large carrying capacity could also be used to realize the space agency’s plan to establish a permanent moon base near the south pole. 

Despite being a relatively new entrant to the space industry, SpaceX has taken over the market partly because of its money-saving reusable rocket design. SpaceX was responsible for just over half of all rocket launches alone in 2025. It also accounts for 83% of the total mass sent to orbit from Earth, significantly more than the next runner up, the Chinese Space Agency. Its network of more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit provides satellite internet to even the most remote areas. Its technology is used by airlines, the U.S. military, and emergency first responders.

On Friday, history’s biggest-ever IPO valued SpaceX at more than $2.1 trillion, rocketing it above Walmart, Samsung, and Meta, at least by market cap. It is now the seventh most valuable company on earth.

Not bad for a company whose own founder once gave it less than a 10% chance of surviving.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Both of these feats were challenging for even Musk to wrap his head around, considering he had said he originally expected the company to fail.

“It’s certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going for the largest IPO ever,” he said at an appearance at Nasdaq when SPCX started trading on Friday. “And let me tell you, if people had told me this was going to happen, I [would’ve said]: ‘Man you must be smoking some really good crack.’”

SpaceX started trading on Friday at $150 per share, and was up to $171 per share by midday, solidifying his title as the world’s first-ever trillionaire, including his majority stakes in his rocket company and Tesla. 

And while there’s a large leap between millionaire and billionaire status, it’s even harder to wrap one’s head around what it actually means to be a trillionaire. Even experienced wealth managers have a hard time wrapping their heads around how they’d manage a fortune the size of Musk’s, especially since it has the power to move markets and make other massive influences if not kept in check.

“I would guess there are zero wealth advisors qualified to handle $1 trillion,” Jake Falcon, CEO of Falcon Wealth Advisors, told Fortune. “If Elon hired me to manage his wealth, I would build a new type of family office.”

Falcon said that would mean building an office that “truly lined up” with Musk’s philosophy and growing a team that caters to all of his wealth-management needs, while also having the confidence to tell him when he’s making a wrong choice.

A whole new scale

Managing a trillionaire isn’t just like managing a billionaire at a larger scale, T.L. Turnipseed, head of estate and tax planning at Alta Trust Company, told Fortune. 

While a billionaire typically needs sophisticated investment management, tax planning, and a family office, he said, a trillionaire would need “something close to private enterprise governance.”

“The planning has to address control, succession, creditor exposure, market volatility, public scrutiny, liquidity, philanthropy, and multigenerational governance all at once,” he explained. “The real difference is that the central question shifts from ‘can we grow the money’ to ‘can we preserve control and purpose’ while the number becomes too large for ordinary planning.’ The answer is a governance system, not just a portfolio.”

Evan Mills, associate financial advisor at Scholar Advising, which specializes in complex wealth planning for ultra-high-net-worth families, said trillionaire wealth can really move markets.

“A billionaire can have concentration risk in a single company or a single sector. But at a trillion dollars, they not only have concentration risk, they have major market impact for any move that they make,” he said. “They sell a stock, they could control the price of that stock just by selling groups of it. Now they’re worrying about voting control and losing control of their overall company.”

For Musk specifically, Mills added, the scrutiny on every transaction compounds the risk. “We’re talking about Elon Musk, so every single movement that gets made is going to be scrutinized,” he said. “The public perception of any move a trillionaire makes in their business is going to drive, or could drive, fear into retail investors and institutional investors.”

The liquidity trap

A trillion-dollar net worth also doesn’t mean $1 trillion in the bank. “They have a trillion dollars on their balance sheet, but that doesn’t mean they’re extremely liquid. How do you actually get your money?” Mills said. “Are you going to borrow against the stock? Now you’re worried about margin risk, lender risk, concentration risk, interest rate risk.” 

Debt actually becomes one of the most useful tools available at this scale, he said.

How wealth advisors would manage a trillionaire

Falcon said he would keep Musk’s wealth-planning “very simple and direct” at its core, with the rest going toward passion projects and speculative plays.

“It would be difficult to only invest in public markets as trades would literally move the market,” he explained, “so there would need to be a large private component as well.”

But the bigger job, the advisors agreed, is defensive. Turnipseed said extreme wealth “is a litigation target, a governance challenge, and a tax problem before it is an investment problem. And at this scale, small inefficiencies carry staggering costs. 

“At a trillion dollars, a 1% inefficiency is roughly $10 billion,” he said. “That is why the work starts with protection and structure, not with the portfolio.”

The structure he’d build would resemble an institution more than a portfolio, anchored by trusts designed to protect the wealth, freeze its taxable value, and organize who controls it. 

“A trillionaire does not need another product,” Turnipseed said. “He or she needs a resilient architecture, anchored by the right trusts in the right jurisdiction, that protects the wealth, organizes decision-making, reduces avoidable transfer taxes, supports philanthropy, and keeps future beneficiaries from inheriting chaos.”

The risk all three kept circling back to is unique to Musk: The companies underpinning his fortune are inseparable from the man himself. Mills said that’s exactly why succession planning can’t wait. 

“Every second of procrastination at this level could create a succession crisis,” he said. A lot of investors are buying into Tesla and SpaceX because they believe in Musk’s vision, he noted, and there’s no guarantee either company stays as successful once the next generation inherits the stock. 

“One of the biggest risks embedded in both of those companies is the longevity of Elon Musk himself,” he added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had some bars about the kids these days: “Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately,” the great philosopher wrote in Rhetoric. “They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over… They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations.”

Later in the same chapter, he had some words for their elders: “They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive.”

He could have been reading my email.

A striking number of my readers—older, almost uniformly—skipped past the data entirely and went straight to character: younger generations complain too much. They spend recklessly. They don’t sacrifice. They whine.

What was notable wasn’t the anger. It was the precision of the deflection. No one challenged the Federal Reserve data showing that Baby Boomers control roughly 52% of U.S. household wealth while representing about 20% of the population. No one argued that Millennials are, in fact, thriving. The response to a structural argument about wealth and power was, almost invariably, a moral argument about character.

That pattern has a name in psychology. And understanding it—alongside what actually makes Boomers different from every dominant class that preceded them—tells you more about where America is stuck than any balance sheet. Is it whiny to try to understand this psychology, or is it a form of self-knowledge?

Two kinds of threats—and why they’re not symmetrical

In 2023, researchers Stéphane Francioli, Felix Danbold, and Michael North published a peer-reviewed study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examining precisely what makes Boomers and Millennials hostile toward each other. The findings map almost perfectly onto the reader mail in this reporter’s inbox.

Both generations express genuine animosity toward the other. But the nature of that animosity is fundamentally different, and the difference is not incidental.

Millennials’ hostility toward Boomers is driven primarily by what intergroup threat theorists call realistic threat—specifically, the fear that Boomers’ delayed transmission of power hampers their life prospects. The Federal Reserve data on housing, wealth, and debt give that fear its material texture. Millennials aren’t upset about Boomer values. They’re upset about Boomer advantages, and the structural conditions that have made those advantages self-perpetuating.

Boomers’ hostility toward Millennials runs in the opposite direction. Their animosity is driven primarily by symbolic threat—perceived conflict over culture, values, and worldview. Not economics or data. The feeling that a generation coming up behind them is challenging something essential about what America is, what hard work means, what success is supposed to look like.

This asymmetry is a predictable feature of dominant-group psychology, older even than Aristotle. When you hold the material advantages, you don’t feel materially threatened — because you aren’t. What you feel threatened by is the narrative that your advantages might not be entirely earned. That is a different kind of threat that produces a different kind of defense.

The meritocracy is the message

One word I used in a previous headline was particularly triggering: “hoarding,” as in, hoarding wealth, hoarding real estate, hoarding political power and opportunity. Seen through the lens of psychology, this verb begs the question of what Boomers are actually being asked to defend.

It isn’t just wealth. It’s the story they’ve told about wealth—that it arrived through discipline, sacrifice and superior decision-making. And many vivid stories I’ve been told show that story isn’t entirely wrong. Many Boomers did work hard. Many did save diligently. But the story has a significant omission: they also came of age during the single most favorable economic environment in American history. Postwar manufacturing at its apex. Housing that cost 2x or 3x annual income, not 10x. Defined-benefit pensions, subsidized public universities, and a tax structure that rewarded wages as much as assets are all features of history, not current economic life.

Researchers who study system justification theory—the psychological tendency to defend existing social arrangements as fair and legitimate, even when they aren’t—have found that this impulse is strongest among people who have benefited most from the system. The more you’ve gained from an arrangement, the more motivated you are to believe the arrangement is just. Not because you’re dishonest, but because the alternative — accepting that luck and timing played a decisive role in your success — is genuinely destabilizing to the self.

A fair objection deserves airing here: a framework in which both agreement and angry disagreement confirm the thesis risks explaining everything and therefore nothing. If every defensive email is just “system justification in action,” the argument becomes unfalsifiable. That’s why the asymmetry documented by Francioli and his colleagues matters. The claim isn’t that Boomers got angry—anyone might. It’s that the anger ran almost exclusively through one channel (character and values) while leaving the other (the data) untouched, exactly as intergroup threat theory predicts for a materially dominant group. Had readers attacked the numbers and ignored the character question, the theory would have been wrong. But they didn’t do that.

Not just any privileged class

Here is where the Boomer defensiveness becomes harder to dismiss—and, strangely, easier to understand.

Every dominant group in history has reached for the same psychological toolkit. Roman senators, English landowners and mid-century American corporate aristocracies — all told versions of the same story: we have what we have because we earned it. System justification is ancient. Generational condescension goes back to the Greeks.

But Boomers are not simply the latest iteration of a recurring historical pattern. The specific configuration of advantages they accumulated — and the mechanisms by which they accumulated them—has no real precedent. This matters, because it means the defensiveness isn’t just psychologically understandable. It’s also, in a structural sense, more consequential than prior versions of the same reflex.

Start with the scale. Boomers hold an estimated $85 trillion in wealth—not merely more than prior American generations at the same life stage, but more than any cohort in recorded economic history by a vast multiple. Many of them would seemingly like to think they earned this simply by working harder than anyone who came before, but they entered the housing and equity markets just before both began 40-year appreciation cycles, and they were the largest generation in American history to do so. They didn’t just accumulate wealth—they sat on top of two of the most powerful asset-appreciation engines in modern economic history during their prime earning years.

Then there’s the democratic dimension, which gets almost no attention. Previous dominant classes held power through class, race or institutional control—not raw democratic headcount. Boomers were the largest voting bloc [by eligibility or participation?] in American history for nearly four consecutive decades, from roughly 1978 until the mid-2010s. That means the policies that shaped housing markets, the tax treatment of capital gains, the defunding of public universities and the dismantling of defined-benefit pensions were debated and passed during a period when Boomers were the decisive electoral constituency. They didn’t just benefit from the system. They voted for it repeatedly at the precise moment when their demographic weight and financial self-interest were in perfect alignment. No prior privileged class had that combination of democratic legitimacy and self-interested policymaking available simultaneously at this scale.

Finally, consider what the gap actually looks like on the other side. In most prior periods of wealth concentration, the non-wealthy simply had less. What’s structurally novel now is that younger generations don’t just have less wealth—they carry the majority of the debt. Federal Reserve data shows Millennial and Gen X mortgage debt is nearly double that of Boomers in absolute terms. More than a third of all student loan borrowers are Millennials, and the St. Louis Fed explicitly documents a generational “clear increase in debt holdings” for younger generations. “Specifically, both Gen Xers and millennials held more debt than Baby Boomers.” Student debt—which exploded during the very decades of Boomer political dominance—has no real historical parallel in prior generational transitions. The floor has been actively lowered, not just the ceiling raised.

The lattés and avocado toast

There’s another concept in social psychology called motivated invisibility — the tendency of dominant groups to render their advantages structurally invisible, not through explicit denial but through reframing.

The most durable reframe in Boomer wealth discourse is the pivot to younger-generation spending behavior: avocado toast, streaming subscriptions, the failure to delay gratification. One reader deployed this argument almost reflexively—a near-word-for-word echo of criticisms that have circulated for a decade. “Wealth is NOT a fixed amount,” they wrote to me. “Want some wealth? Go earn it and save it and accumulate it, rather than always upgrading to the latest iPhone and swilling lattés and avocado toast.” The kicker on the email brought it back to that other epithet: “you’re a whiny turd who figured out who to string some sentences together and vie for cliques.”

But the spending-habits argument is durable precisely because it accomplishes what the data cannot: it relocates the problem from structure to individual. If the gap is about choices, then no one needs to feel uncomfortable about conditions. The system is fine. The kids just need to cut back on lattés.

This is system justification in action, and it is not unique to Boomers, or to this moment. Research consistently shows that members of dominant groups across race, class, and—now, generation—reach for the same mechanism when their advantages are named.

The honest caveat

Serious coverage of this topic requires the acknowledgment

Serious coverage of this topic requires the acknowledgment that Boomers are not monolithic. Per a Pew Research Center analysis, Boomer households collectively held $77 trillion in 2022—and the top 10% of those households held 71% of it. A white-collar Boomer who bought a San Francisco home in 1985 and maxed a 401(k) is in a categorically different position from a working-class Boomer who rented their whole life and watched their pension disappear.

The structural argument is real—but the villain of this story, to the extent there is one, is not a generation. It is a cohort within a generation: college-educated, propertied, politically engaged, and concentrated in expensive coastal metros. They shaped the policy environment in their own interest during the decades when their demographic weight gave them the power to do so. And they are, not coincidentally, the people most likely to be reading Fortune—and writing back.

The scolding reflex, it turns out, doesn’t even stop at the generational boundary. It operates within the generation, too. One Boomer reader described protesting the Vietnam War at 18 and feeling “angst about selling out”—”then I grew up,” he wrote. He told me he isn’t rich, but he “worked my way up to making enough to make sure my kids weren’t hungry.” His verdict on his peers was harsher than anything Millennials sent me: “I am not rich, but I am not complaining. And I can’t believe that so many in my generation of Flower Children are such losers.” The character argument, in other words, is not really about age. It is a portable script, and it gets deployed downward—at whoever has less—regardless of birth year.

Another reader put it more cleanly than most: “The bigger issue is not old versus young. It is a broken American system that has made housing unaffordable, healthcare unaffordable, retirement insecure, and work feel unstable for nearly everyone.” That framing is neither wrong nor incompatible with the structural argument about how we ended up in a place where everyone feels stuck, and like everyone else is whining about it.

That is a harder emotional position than defensiveness. It requires disaggregating two things that Boomer identity has long held together: the real effort and the real tailwind. It requires acknowledging that you can deserve what you earned and still have been given conditions that made earning easier — conditions that were then, through the very political power that prosperity enabled, systematically withdrawn from the people who came after.

Jon from the Channel Islands sees an even larger force gathering behind the generational one. The Boomer/Millennial wealth debate, he argued, is being overtaken by a capitalism-and-AI-driven concentration that will make the current gap look modest—wealth flowing not from young to old but from nearly everyone to the owners of the machines. The combatants in the generational war, in his telling, are arguing over a shoreline that is about to be redrawn entirely: “It is like they are scratching their heads wondering why the water has suddenly drained out of the bay,” he wrote, “oblivious to the tsunami that is coming in shortly, to swallow them up.”

Only a few readers asked the question that none of the angry emails even approached. My favorite: “How do we build a country where younger people can rise without older people being discarded?” That is a political question, not a generational one. The answer isn’t unknowable, but the people with the most power to shape it have spent the better part of a decade arguing about whether the question is fair.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“The future’s gonna look like everyone is complete of their own agency, and [are] spending their days doing the work that they find way more fun than what they’re doing today,” he tells Fortune. “They shouldn’t have to worry about money—it’s coming with the work that you’re finding passionate. We want to build that world.”

And so far, the $1.6 billion social commerce platform—where users monetize their expertise, content, and businesses—has succeeded in realizing the cofounder’s mission. The company says it has minted over 650 millionaires and counting, with people hitting seven-figures selling services such as coaching business programs and skills courses, as well as items like meal kits and vitamins.

One entrepreneur, Shelby Haas, brings in $1 million monthly by teaching remote sales on Whop. Troy Adashun is a self-made millionaire thanks to selling his health products on the platform, Alpha Lion Supplements; and podcast host Jay Shetty even runs his coaching business, the Jay Shetty Certification Shool, on Whop. 

Whop provides a one-stop-shop platform where people sell their services and physical products—albeit, often to much nicher audiences than others like Etsy. But many who are finding their corner of consumers are now living off their pursuits. 

Schwartz’s own entrepreneurial career is a product of his work philosophy. As a kid of military parents practicing medicine, he grew up bouncing around the world—selling water in the streets of China, and refereeing hockey games in Springfield, Illinois—navigating his childhood across many cities, including Honolulu and Chicago as well.

Before high school was even up, Schwartz had already worked for a New York City hedge fund. And in college, during his time at NYU Stern School of Business, he also interned at Accenture in Singapore. Throughout his brief career to date, Schwartz has kickstarted three companies in addition to creating Whop back in 2021. And now the 26-year-old founder is hoping that professionals do not have to dread clocking in for their work shifts. 

“The idea that people can have fun while working is very foreign to most people, but has been solved by some,” the Gen Z leader continues. “We just want to bring it to the rest.”

From building sneaker bots to running a 22 million-person platform

At just 13 years old, Schwartz started working out of his childhood bedroom, building and selling iOS apps that could quickly snap up in-demand sneakers. The then-middle school entrepreneur created the bot operation with Cameron Zoub, who would be his fellow cofounder (and Whop’s chief growth officer) in the years to come. Their business, Sole Sniper, sold bots that ranged from $20 to $500 and quickly bought popular shoes before they sold out. It was inspired out of frustration with a fractured internet economy—the same annoyance which led them to cofound one platform where people sell, connect, and get paid: Whop.

The gig that had really pushed Schwartz into his current career trajectory was a college internship at financial services giant Accenture. As a summer analyst and undergraduate student at NYU, Schwartz worked at the company’s office in Singapore programming projects for major businesses in Southeast Asia. His responsibilities included creating chatbots for shipping companies, which set him up to keep selling the tools after leaving the $108 billion company. Schwartz loved to build, but wanted to pursue a passion over growing his stable corporate career.

It wasn’t long until Schwartz took aim for the founder life. The same year he completed his undergraduate degree in 2021, the fresh-faced graduate founded Whop alongside Zoub and Chief Technology Officer Jack Sharkey. And over the five years since, the company has since raised around $272 million in total funding. In 2023, Insight Partners led a $17 million Series A funding round with notable angel participation from Peter Thiel and The Chainsmokers. Whop also enjoyed a Series B of more than $50 million led by Bain Capital Ventures; and just this February, Tether invested $200 million, setting the company at a $1.6 billion valuation.

Today, Whop says it has around 22 million platform users, with 50,000 to 60,000 streaming in daily. The platform supports around $4 billion in annual commerce generated by businesses across 145 countries, amounting to $300 million in monthly sales. The company says everyday, around 10 to 15 Whop users make their first $20,000 on the platform. 

Schwartz prefers to hire job candidates who work hard, play hard

While many tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are pulling back on their recruitment, Whop is currently in a hiring stretch. The company has 120 full-time staffers and is recruiting for 40 open roles across engineering, growth, and design. In May, the growing digital marketplace onboarded 16 new staffers alone. Schwartz says that overall, it’s a good thing that Whop is bringing on a litany of new employees; however, it also requires more effort to protect the company culture. 

“We’re just recruiting so many new people,” he explains. “Now, I think as numbers go up, there’s a lot of added problems that come, and that a lot of times people think are very important relative to anything else. They’re not.”

One way to avoid picking the bad apples is by having an intentional vetting process. Schwartz says the company looks for a few key traits during hiring rounds to ensure talent are the best possible match. Creativity is a part of the equation; the best applicants are able to drum up ideas and actually put them into motion.

But the most critical quality that Schwartz looks for in Whop talent is being able to build end-to-end—whether it be technical like engineering, or creative like writing. Candidates who see their ideas through have a leg up in the company’s interview rounds. 

“The only thing that really matters is: has this person built something? Is it impressive and cool? And if so, then welcome to the team,” the CEO continues. “We look at energy. How fun is it to be with this person? Do you find yourself wanting to spend a lot of time with them? That’s a good trait.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Americans are already facing a difficult housing market in which buying a home or making renovations has become more expensive. Even something as basic as replacing a kitchen countertop now carries a higher price tag than it did a few years ago. A proposed tariff on quartz surface products would make matters worse.

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled last month that imported quartz surfaces are harming domestic quartz manufacturers. The ultimate decision about whether to impose quartz tariffs now rests with President Trump. If he decides to implement them, the effects will extend far beyond the manufacturers the policy is intended to protect.

The ripple effect begins with a simple mechanism: tariffs are taxes on imports, and importers pass those costs forward. They would raise the cost of importing quartz slabs, which are used in construction and remodeling. Importers and fabricators would face higher input costs, which they typically pass along the supply chain. Builders, contractors, and remodelers would then pay more for materials, and those higher costs would ultimately be reflected in the prices paid by homeowners and buyers of new homes. In a prior estimate, I found that this would increase the cost of a typical quartz countertop from $504 to $1,036 per kitchen.

Higher prices change household decisions. Some households might postpone renovations, hoping that prices will drop. Others will scale back upgrades or opt for different materials. And some will simply decide not to pursue the project at all. 

Those household choices reverberate far beyond individual projects. Imported slabs move first through distributors and fabricators, where they are cut, finished, and prepared for installation. From there, installers, contractors, and remodelers carry out the work in homes and new construction projects. Each step depends on steady demand for affordable quartz products.

When fewer renovations and installations are undertaken, demand falls across the entire quartz supply chain. Fabricators receive fewer orders, installers complete fewer jobs, and contractors and remodelers see reduced work in both new construction and renovation.

In the ITC proceedings last April, plaintiffs projected a gain of roughly 500 jobs under the proposed quartz tariffs. At the same time, respondents estimated that more than 6,400 jobs in fabrication, installation, and related construction activity are at risk. That amounts to about 13 jobs lost for every one job gained under the proposed tariff.

This outcome is not unique or unforeseeable. Prior U.S. tariff episodes have often produced concentrated gains alongside larger downstream losses. An International Monetary Fund analysis of 151 countries similarly found that tariffs lead to net job losses. What begins as a targeted intervention in one industry commonly translates into fewer work hours and jobs across others.

Good trade policy should account for all affected parties, not just the industry seeking protection. Quartz tariffs would raise costs for consumers while reducing work for a far larger set of downstream workers in fabrication, installation, and construction. Any gains for a small group of producers would come at the expense of many more households and employees across the supply chain. That is not sound trade policy — it is the protection of a few at the expense of many.

Quartz tariffs reflect a broader structural problem in U.S. trade policy: too much discretion rests with the executive branch to impose tariffs. When that authority is used, the costs of protection are spread widely across households and downstream workers, while the benefits remain concentrated in a small number of industries.

The remedy is institutional reform. Presidents should not have open-ended tariff authority. Congress should reclaim the taxing power it has delegated away and take back its constitutional role in trade policy. Without that shift, the same pattern of broad harm and narrow benefit is likely to repeat.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Beyond the war-driven boom, executives and analysts point to rising global oil demand to replenish or build up strategic reserves as well as greater reliance on Western Hemisphere supplies amid growing geopolitical unrest in the Middle East and other hot spots. Those trends could keep prices higher than expected into 2027 and even 2028, they said.

“I do think you’ll see this country and this hemisphere become a more important part of the global energy system,” Chevron Chairman and CEO Mike Wirth said June 12 in Houston at a Bloomberg energy event. “The U.S. and the Americas are very well set up with strong energy resources and a lot of access to blue-water ports,” he added, noting they avoid risky chokepoints such as the now-infamous Strait of Hormuz.

Chevron and Exxon Mobil shares are both up about 22% this year. And if not for some of their production volumes in the Middle East remaining disrupted, those gains would likely be higher. Both storied Big Oil giants hit all-time stock market highs in late March before the initial ceasefire agreement with Iran knocked some of the war premium out of oil. Exxon’s market cap now sits well above $600 billion, while Chevron tops $370 billion.

U.S. shale producers are riding the wave even more. Shares of Ovintiv, Chord Energy, and APA Corp. have all climbed close to 50% year to date. SM Energy, which recently grew by acquiring Civitas, has surged nearly 70% since Jan. 1. Refiners that churn out gasoline and jet fuel, such as Marathon Petroleum and Valero Energy, are up about 60% amid high profit margins.

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters are booming too. The upstart Venture Global has rallied over 90% this year, while LNG pioneer Cheniere Energy has jumped about 25% near record highs.

Longer-term trends

Even with oil and fuel prices elevated, crude has not spiked to the nearly $200-a-barrel level feared during the greatest energy supply shock in modern history.

Ironically, that resiliency of the energy markets may keep energy prices higher for longer—potentially well into 2028, said Rebecca Babin, senior equity trader for CIBC Private Wealth.

Ever since the first pseudo-ceasefire was announced in early April, energy markets have leaned heavily on emergency reserves while becoming “numb” to chaos and clinging to optimism of a permanent peace deal, she said. Those reserves are still being depleted to dangerously low levels, and refilling them will take even longer on the back end, keeping prices higher for longer.

“We didn’t get the spike to $150, $200 [oil] and, in a way, that’s made this conflict even more bullish for the longer end of the curve,” Babin said.

And she agreed that U.S. barrels will be more highly valued going forward. “There is probably a bigger pull on U.S. barrels because I want to have that secure barrel without a lot of risk premium built in.”

If anything, Wirth said, many countries will want to build their emergency reserves even higher after the war, desiring a larger safety net and greater redundancy, putting even more demand on oil barrels.

Oil prices have remained lower than feared—although still high—because of rising U.S. crude exports from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), much smaller Chinese imports, and conservation efforts in other countries. More volumes sneaking out of the Middle East via pipeline and the Gulf also are contributing.

Relying on emergency reserves means the nation’s SPR is shrinking to its lowest volumes since 1983 this week.

As of June 5, the administration has drained 66 million barrels and counting from the SPR since the war in Iran began, according to the Department of Energy. Trump has authorized the overall release of 172 million barrels over several months. The companies buying the barrels are pledging to replenish them.

There is now a greater belief that the world may require more oil in the years ahead before oil demand eventually peaks amid rising electric vehicles and electrification. Many of the top oil producers are realizing they need to invest more—not less—in global exploration, said James West, Melius Research energy analyst.

“We’ve underexplored for a decade, and now we’re finally seeing exploration budgets get bumped up,” West said. “Some of the big explorers out there like Chevron, Exxon, and BP are now looking for the next big play.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Companies like Google/YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and Netflix now reach virtually every screen in every home and every device in every pocket. Their scale is staggering. Today, YouTube accounts for one-eighth of all television viewing in the United States. One in four young adults report getting their news from TikTok. The advertising numbers are just as stark: according to S&P Global/Kagan, YouTube alone billed more in video advertising last year than all of broadcast television combined. In 2026, one Wall Street analyst predicts that just five digital entities — Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and TikTok — will control 65% of the advertising market, worth $260 billion. 

These companies are not built to prioritize fact-based journalism or civic discourse. Their business model rewards clicks, not accuracy or accountability. While their content competes with trusted, fact-based journalism in the commercial marketplace, it does not serve the same critical purpose in the marketplace of ideas that is so vital to the proper functioning of our democracy. That makes the threat these companies pose to local broadcasters and local news very real and very urgent. 

If all of this sounds somewhat familiar, it should. Local newspapers were once indispensable — deeply rooted in their communities and widely trusted. Then, with the rise of online news and advertising, their economics began to unravel. New competitors emerged with a scale and reach local publishers simply couldn’t match. The consequences were severe. Thousands of newspapers closed. Many others were hollowed out. According to the Medill Local News Initiative, in the last 20 years nearly 270,000 jobs at local newspapers have been lost. Today, communities are lucky if there is a single paper left. When regulatory relief finally came for newspapers, the economics had already collapsed — a warning local broadcast cannot afford to ignore. 

Local broadcast television now faces a similar inflection point. I have spent the past 30 years of my life building one of the country’s leading local television companies, Nexstar Media Group. I founded the company in 1996 with one television station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, located in the back of a converted Kresge’s department store. Today, with TEGNA under the Nexstar umbrella, we provide local news and programming to more than 130 communities across the country and employ more than 18,000 people, nearly 9,000 of whom are journalists.

Americans consistently rank local newscasts as their most trusted source of information. Across Nexstar stations, we produce more than 300,000 hours of local news and programming each year. And in an era of rampant misinformation and growing polarization, local journalists provide a critical counterweight — offering verified facts and a forum for civic engagement. Sustaining that mission in today’s environment requires scale — which is exactly why Nexstar pursued the acquisition of TEGNA.

This transaction is vital to the future of local television and local journalism. Without the ability to grow, local broadcasters will struggle to compete for audiences, attract advertising, and invest in the journalism that is vital to our communities. With it, we can expand our reach and preserve something no algorithm can replicate: trusted local news. Even combined, Nexstar and TEGNA represent just 15% of the more than 1700 full-power stations across the country and have no presence in 20% of the country. 

The alternative is dire. A future where Americans rely on algorithm-driven feeds, viral content, and AI-generated summaries for information. A future where local voices are diminished or disappear altogether. A future where fewer institutions are dedicated to reporting facts, holding power to account, and fostering informed civic dialogue. No one wants their news from a chatbot or a rage-optimized social feed. And Americans deserve more than a shrinking set of national outlets that do not reflect the diversity of their communities. This deal offers us all a chance to preserve real news options for future generations of Americans.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

While these weight-loss drugs pumped billions into pharma giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk as social media and celebrity endorsements drove more people to buy them, the companies may not be the only ones to financially benefit. According to a new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), taking GLP-1s for obesity might also save middle-aged Americans hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime medical bills.

“Obesity is a big comorbidity for a lot of different chronic conditions, so if you start GLP-1s, like that’s gonna kind of trickle down, and it’s gonna save money,” the study’s lead author, Felipe Montano-Campos, told Fortune. 

NBER’s report estimated that people between the ages of 40 and 50 saved on average $192,735 in lifetime medical bills. Surprisingly, those savings climbed to $220,000 for adults within the same age range without college degrees. Largely, this is due to GLP-1s treating obesity without the usual tried-and-true means to lose weight, namely, a strict regimen of diet and exercise, explained Montano-Campos. 

“Everyone gets a positive treatment effect, but the ones that are benefiting the most are these lower-educated individuals,” he said, explaining that because GLP-1s directly target appetite and metabolism, they make it easier for people with more time constraints, like those working multiple jobs or of a lower socioeconomic status, who may not have the time to stick to go to a gym or purchase healthier foods.

Researchers simulated the U.S. adult population 25 and up to estimate the lifetime health and economic effects of using GLP-1s for weight loss. They tested life-long pathways for two scenarios: one in which adults did not use GLP-1s, and the other with sustained GLP-1 consumption for adults who met the criteria for obesity—defined as having a BMI above 30. 

Using a standard health economics method to classify health improvements and cost savings into dollars, the researchers found that people without college diplomas saved $219,000 to $220,000, while that amount fell for college-educated individuals to $163,000.

Financial barriers to access

Though the 40-50 age group has the highest observed rates of GLP-1 use, the savings compound if people start in their twenties and thirties. The study estimates beginning GLP-1 usage at ages 25 to 30 can save individuals up to $270,800 over the course of their lifetime. 

Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said while these numbers look promising in abstract, achieving the full extent of health benefits from GLP-1s would require paying at least hundreds of dollars per month “indefinitely.”

“When you pull these medications back, meaning [you] don’t utilize them any longer, patients will have weight regain and re-emergence of the cardiometabolic diseases that they were meant to treat,” Stanford told Fortune. 

The average American taking GLP-1s could pay anywhere from about $350 to $450 per month, namely for the GLP-1s approved by the FDA for weight management like Wegovy, according to Stanford. She said that price tag is “outside of reach” for most Americans, meaning those who “might glean the most benefit” from GLP-1s won’t be able to foot the bill. Her numbers align with the $349 to $399 range on TrumpRx for direct-to-consumer purchase, but Wegovy without insurance typically costs $1,350 per month.   

Montano-Campos acknowledged the study doesn’t take into account discontinuation of GLP-1 use for financial reasons, since the simulation assumes lifetime access to the drug on a consistent basis. 

The NBER study also didn’t account for the high likelihood of discontinuation due to side effects, another factor health plan providers weigh when choosing to cover GLP-1s for obesity. That’s according to Morgan Lee, lead researcher of Pharmaceutical Strategies Group (PSG)’s 2026 survey, which surveyed 237 benefits leaders representing employers, health plans and unions. 

“Even if you choose to cover the drug—let’s say you can get the price right and cover it—you also want to make sure that people are staying on the drug long enough and having that continuation, so that they can experience long-term health benefits,” Lee said. Health care providers “want to see long-term return on investment in terms of better health for their members, but they also want to be sure that these are going to be people who are able to then stay on the drug to get to those outcomes to begin with.”

About 75% of health plan providers don’t cover GLP-1s for obesity-related weight loss, according to the PSG survey. Nearly half “indicated they would not cover GLP-1s for obesity at any price,” per the report. 

Ultimately, Montano-Campos hopes his study will help lead to increased GLP-1 access for healthcare purposes. 

“We hope that it anchors the conversation about access because our findings essentially show that this type of medical innovation compresses health inequality,” he said. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

But the timing of an MOU could emerge as a last-minute snag.

President Donald Trump insisted on Saturday that he will sign a deal on Sunday, which also happens to be his 80th birthday.

That came after Pakistan’s prime minister said earlier on Saturday that an agreement is closer than “ever before” and expected it to be finalized within 24 hours.

Pakistan, which has served as a mediator between the U.S. and Iran, is preparing for an electronic signing, followed immediately by technical-level talks next week.

But Tehran pushed back, with its Fars News Agency denying that anything will be signed on Sunday and instead dismissing “Trump’s strange insistence” for that day.

“An hour ago, Trump once again emphasized that the memorandum of understanding with Iran will be signed on Sunday,” it said in a post on X. “This comes even as Iranian officials have explicitly stated that the agreement has not been finalized and will definitely not take place on Sunday.”

Iran’s foreign ministry also maintained that the MOU will not be signed on Sunday—but didn’t rule out that it could happen in the coming days.

To be sure, there have been several times when it looked like both sides were on the verge of a deal, but nothing happened. Reading between the lines this time, however, Iran watchers see a less substantive issue at play.

“They don’t want to give Trump a birthday gift! (seriously, this is being discussed as an important factor among Iranian commentators),” said Hamidreza Azizi, an analyst at SWP Berlin.

Eurasia Group analyst Gregory Brew agreed, and also quipped, “Seems fitting that this should serve as the endgame.”

He predicted the MOU could be signed when it’s Sunday night in the eastern U.S., but early Monday morning in Iran.

Of course, more serious matters could still derail the MOU. For example, Iran has vowed to charge fees on ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, a non-starter for the U.S.

Tehran is also demanding immediate sanctions relief and the unfreezing of assets, while the U.S. has said that could come in phases as Iran satisfies its end of the bargain, especially on winding down its nuclear program.

The U.S. and Iran are also still exchanging fire, with Central Command saying Friday that U.S. forces shot down Iranian drones that were targeting commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, Trump is planning other birthday activities. On Sunday, UFC will stage a fight on the South Lawn of the White House, the first such event at the executive mansion.

The mixed martial arts spectacle, which features a giant claw-like structure that was built around UFC’s Octagon, is timed for Trump’s birthday and the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Last year, Trump celebrated his 79th birthday with a military parade along the streets of Washington, DC, that coincided with the Army’s 250th birthday.

But when asked by a reporter recently what he wished for his birthday this year, he replied, “Peace for the world.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com