Category: Magazine

This year’s Southeast Asia 500, Fortune’s second annual ranking of the area’s largest companies by revenue, is a snapshot of a region ready to take advantage of global supply chain shifts and booming industries like mining, EVs, and AI—even as U.S. tariff policy threatens to roll back some of last year’s gains.

Companies on this year’s 500 list generated $1.82 trillion in revenue last year, up 1.7% from the year before. That lags the 4.1% GDP growth reported across the seven economies covered in this ranking: Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Indonesia, the region’s largest country and economy, has the largest presence on the Southeast Asia 500, with 109 companies; Thailand comes in second with 100. Measure by revenue, however, and the tiny city-state of Singapore takes the lead. Singapore-based companies generated $637.1 billion in revenue last year, just over a third of the region’s total.

The top five companies on this year’s list were big enough in revenue terms to make last year’s Fortune Global 500. They each trade in commodities, whether metals (Trafigura), oil (PTT and Pertamina), or agricultural products (Wilmar and Olam).

No. 6 in revenue this year is Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN), Indonesia’s state-owned power company. Its ranking underscores another quality of this list: Energy—whether resource extraction, power generation, or electrical transmission—is the dominant sector on the Southeast Asia 500, generating almost a third of its total revenue. Thai energy company Bangchak breaks into this year’s top 20 with a 47% jump in revenue.

The three most profitable companies on the Southeast Asia 500 are Singapore’s “Big Three” banks: DBS, OCBC, and UOB. DBS, the youngest of the three, takes the lead with $8.5 billion in profits.

Despite predictions of a booming digital economy, tech has a small footprint on the Southeast Asia 500. Just one tech company, the e-commerce and gaming firm Sea, sits in the top 20. The next internet company, ride-hailing platform Grab, ranks much further down the list at No. 128—although it did climb more than 20 spots in 2024.

But Southeast Asia can’t escape the latest tech trends. The biggest revenue jump on the list belongs to Malaysian contract manufacturer NationGate Holdings, No. 243, whose sales jumped by a whopping 723% over the past year, surpassing $1 billion. NationGate’s story is an AI story: As Malaysia and the region try to ride the technology with data centers and new AI startups, companies like NationGate—Nvidia’s sole contract manufacturer in the region, assembling AI servers—stand to benefit.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Sunlight scattered on the surrounding snow as we hiked single file, crampons strapped to our boots, up Sólheimajökull, Iceland’s southernmost glacier—a 650-foot-thick tongue of solid ice spanning 17 square miles. Black peaks jutted out like dorsal fins from the jagged, white-capped hills around us—forged by eruptions of the volcano Katla, which churned far below ground near the frozen behemoth on which we stood.

A 90-minute trek brought us to our destination point, an ice ridge twice our height, where we sipped a whiskey toast, gazing briefly at the cloudless azure sky before beginning our descent.

Minutes later, a blanket of white unfurled overhead, smothering the sun in a steady snowfall. The
storm cast this already virtually soundless vista into absolute silence—exactly what I’d come to Iceland with Tom Marchant, cofounder of luxury travel outfitter Black Tomato, to find. It’s “a Narnia-like landscape,” Marchant aptly observed, “where the silence is so pure it’s almost discombobulating.

In that incongruous silence, just a couple of hours outside Reykjavík, we reached the glacier’s base to behold small icebergs studding the lagoon created by its meltwater, and dazzling ice walls striped with layers of inky volcanic ash—an astonishing testament to the colossal forces of nature that have clashed for millennia in this country often called “the land of fire and ice.”

Utter soundlessness is not an amenity listed on travel-booking sites. But in a world where life seems louder by the day, some are finding that turning off their mobile phone isn’t enough to give them the peace they crave. Over the past year, Black Tomato—whose trips start at around $15,000 per person, and can run into the hundreds of thousands—has seen a notable uptick in requests for destinations offering natural, unfettered silence. Some 80% of its clients come from the U.S.

We’d driven east from Reykjavík the day before, off-roading through an active volcanic system topped with swaths of green lichen. Splashing through knee-deep streams in our Ford Bronco, we paused beside the Hengladalsá River for a pop-up picnic. The crackling fire and the river’s gentle rush were the only sounds as Tom and I settled into sheepskin-draped chairs while our guide, Jón Gísli Hardarson, offered us mozzarella and pesto panini and poured glasses of rosé.

Marchant cofounded Black Tomato with James Merrett in London in 2005 after a stint at Ernst & Young. He had invited Fortune on this trip to showcase the ethereal pleasures of silence. Not the silence of a nonverbal silent retreat—conviviality and fellowship are part of the experience. The point is to get away from the technological din of modern living, and make space for individual contemplation.

“It’s like being dropped on another planet,” Marchant said. “People want to go somewhere where they can freeze time for a while, and there are few better places to do it.”

Later we headed to Torfhús Retreat (starting rate: $930 a night), our base for most of the week, located in the rural heart of the Golden Circle, Iceland’s iconic tourist route. Modeled after a traditional Viking farm, the ecoluxury escape, powered by geothermal and hydroelectric energy and home to herds of hardy purebred Icelandic horses, melds the landscape’s wild nature with distinctive creature comforts. Each of its 27 “turf houses,” built from reclaimed wood and local stone with living turf roofs, features hand-hewn furniture and a basalt stone hot pool.

That evening, after a dinner of sautéed scallops topped with edible flowers, followed by arctic char with lingonberries and kale, I slipped into the hot pool to stargaze. And there they were, seemingly close enough to touch: luminous curtains of emerald, shifting and flashing against the blue-black night sky. The northern lights.

I half-expected a shaggy-haired troll—one of the mountain-dwelling giants of local mythology—to trundle past.

It stands to reason that in a nation whose prevailing soundtrack is silence, there exists a vibrant world, shrouded by nature, that is neither heard nor seen. In Icelandic folklore, huldufólk (“hidden people”) are an array of secret beings whose legends loom large in the country’s collective consciousness. On our way to a snowmobile ride, Jón recounted a childhood brush with this supernatural realm: He was trying to climb a huge rock in his backyard, grasping at the moss on its steep face for leverage. His mother came running from the house, yelling for him to stop. The moss served as the elves’ curtains, she explained, and tearing it down would anger them and invite retaliation.

“To this day, I don’t know if she’s ever actually seen elves,” Jón told me. “But she has always believed in them.”

Courtesy of Black Tomato

Jón explained that Icelandic roads are sometimes rerouted around boulders to avoid raising the rancor of the elves inside. If issues arise during construction—a bulldozer mysteriously acting up, or an inexplicable rockslide—“seers” are sometimes summoned to mediate the human-elf interaction.

When we reached the snowmobiling site atop the Langjökull glacier, blizzard conditions had set in—a surreal, disorienting whiteout. As the snow raged in deafening silence, I half-expected a shaggy-haired troll—one of the mountain-dwelling giants of local mythology—to trundle past, meeting my gaze.

Two days later, we cruised along the southern coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula—flanked by moss-fringed lava fields stretching to the horizon—to reach our last stop: the Retreat at Blue Lagoon, Iceland’s most exclusive resort (starting rate: $1,800 a night). The storied lagoon—the only one of its kind on earth—holds nearly 1.6 million gallons of geothermal seawater, naturally enriched with algae, silica, and other minerals.

The water’s restorative properties surfaced in the 1980s, when locals began bathing in the reservoir of the Svartsengi Geothermal Power Plant. These dips seemed to cure someone’s psoriasis, and by 1992 a company dedicated to the lagoon’s scientific study had launched, citing research on the water’s healing benefits. In 2018, Blue Lagoon Limited opened a five-star retreat, which resembles a Bond villain’s sleek lair at the world’s edge, with 60 suites, a sprawling underground spa, and a Michelin-starred restaurant.

The eerie silence that pervades the surrounding town, Grindavík, owes to the region’s geological restlessness: Its 4,000 residents were evacuated weeks before a series of eruptions along the Sundhnúkur crater row began in December 2023. Most never returned.

In the hour I spent in the warm, milky blue-hued lagoon, whose singular shade derives from its high silica content reflecting the sunlight, it snowed fiercely, then rained sideways, before the sun and a rainbow simultaneously—almost magically—appeared.

The sole sounds were the howling wind and the occasional lap and distant splash of water. Perhaps the huldufólk, said by some to frolic here, were also enjoying a dip.

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The most silent places to visit for those with audio overload

Bolivian

Known as the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat covers more than 4,050 square miles near the crest of the Andes in southwest Bolivia. Some 12,000 feet above sea level, it is regarded as one of world’s most silent environments.

Haleakala National Park, Hawaii

Once called the “quietest place on earth” by acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, cofounder of Quiet Parks International, the 52-squaremile park’s silence owes in part to the 10,000-foot elevation of Haleakala’s crater, whose ash absorbs sound waves.

Lake Tekapo, New Zealand

An oasis of tranquility in the center of the South Island, renowned for its turquoiseblue water, the nearly 34-square-mile lake is located in the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, where light pollution is virtually nonexistent—offering unrivaled stargazing opportunities.

Skeleton Coast, Namibia

Arguably the quietest region of one of the world’s least populated countries, this hauntingly stark 300-plus-mile stretch along the Atlantic—named for its many shipwrecks and whale and seal remains—is home to desert-adapted wildlife, including seal-hunting lions.

Slovenian Alps

The majestic range, bordering Italy and Austria and recognized for its relatively low tourist density, encompasses Triglav National Park, which has 135 designated quiet zones covering nearly 25,000 acres.

This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “A silence broken only by the whisper of elves.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

To games around the world, April 2—“Liberation Day”—meant something else.

In a slick prerecorded video presentation, Nintendo unveiled the Switch 2, the long-awaited successor of its wildly popular Nintendo Switch handheld console. It was exactly what gamers were hungry for: details on the console’s more powerful specs; expanded access to Nintendo’s decades-old back catalog; and new entries in the popular Mario Kart and Donkey Kong series. Even a surprise price hike—$450 versus the Switch’s $300—didn’t dent enthusiasm.

A U.S. president could, though. A few hours later, Donald Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, including steep taxes on imports from China, Vietnam, Japan, and Cambodia—Nintendo’s manufacturing hubs.

It upended plans years in the making. The Switch 2’s June 5 launch was poised to be a shot in the arm for Nintendo and the video game industry. Nintendo needs “something new and exciting out in the marketplace that kicks that can down the road on the tech stuff for another decade, so they can continue to make the games they want to make,” explains Jeff Gerstmann, a journalist who has covered the industry for decades.

Now Nintendo (like nearly every other company) is trying to keep up, even as Trump has since suspended most of the tariffs amid negotiations. Two days after Liberation Day, Nintendo paused U.S. preorders to assess the “potential impact of tariffs.” It reopened them a few weeks later, maintaining the $450 price point and June 5 launch—but hiked prices on everything else, like controllers, “amiibo” figurines, and other accessories.

Like many other manufacturers, Nintendo (which didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for comment) is trying to figure out how to roll out a new product as the world’s largest consumer market takes a protectionist turn. The Switch 2 is still likely to be a success, even if not quite as much as Nintendo hoped a month ago. But it will also be one of the first tests of how consumer tech companies will stay afloat in a world of tariffs, decoupling, and protectionism.

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If the video game industry has a champion, it’s Nintendo. Founded in 1889 as a playing-card maker, it has developed the most well-known portfolio of intellectual property apart from Walt Disney, thanks to franchises like Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon.

But it’s also one of Asia’s most prominent consumer-tech companies, an Asian brand with true global reach. After struggling to stay relevant in the 2010s, Nintendo unveiled the Switch in 2017: an affordable handheld console that could connect to a television, but could also function without one.

It was a wildly successful move. With 150-million-plus units sold as of March 2025, the Switch is the third-bestselling console of all time, behind Sony’s PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo DS. COVID lockdowns made it a true household name, as consumers occupied themselves with video games. Nintendo, with its affordable console and a new game in the Animal Crossing series of cozy life simulators, was well-placed to capture that demand. Nintendo sold over 27 million consoles in 2020 alone.

But eight years is an eternity in the video game world, and the console was showing its age. Nintendo reported slowing sales as gamers tired of a system that struggled to run the newest games, even those specifically designed for the console. Nintendo was also holding back marquee releases, so many people put their Switches in a drawer and forgot about them.

Nintendo reported 1.2 trillion Japanese yen ($7.6 billion) in sales for its most recent fiscal year, which ended in March, a 30% drop from the previous fiscal year. Its ordinary profit saw an even bigger dip, dropping 45% year on year to reach 372 billion yen ($2.4 billion). And the company sold 11.5 million consoles in 2024, less than half of what it sold during the COVID boom years.

Still, investors have shrugged off Nintendo’s slowdown in anticipation of the Switch 2. Nintendo shares have been at record highs since December. Its market value is over $90 billion, making it Japan’s eighth-most-valuable firm and placing it ahead of many Japanese companies on the Fortune Global 500.

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Nintendo was one of the first companies to shift manufacturing out of China to nearby Vietnam and Cambodia in 2019, after the first Trump administration threatened to impose tariffs on video game consoles made in China.

“The majority of their production is still done in China, but they’ve now switched to Vietnam to focus pretty much entirely on U.S. console production,” says Daniel Ahmad, an analyst with gaming-industry consultancy Niko Partners. That puts Nintendo “ahead of the game” compared with competitors Sony and Microsoft.

As the second Trump administration started up, Nintendo began front-running shipments to get ahead of possible future tariffs. JPMorgan estimated in early April that Nintendo had enough inventory to meet demand for six months to a year.

The Switch 2’s initial numbers likely won’t take a hit, even with the price hike. Preorders in markets like the U.S. and Japan sold out instantly, and the company is already apologizing for future shortages. Nintendo is even selling a cheaper version that works only with games bought in Japan, likely to avoid resellers trying to bring it to markets like mainland China, where the company doesn’t have an official presence.

The real question will come after the initial launch, when holiday shoppers start thinking about buying the latest version. “The big questions are around value—$450 is not a small amount of money,” Gerstmann says. The cost of games, too, is going up: Nintendo is targeting $70 to $80, as opposed to the $60 that has been traditional across the industry.

The company is trying to scale back expectations, forecasting lower-than-expected Switch 2 sales of 15 million (still roughly in line with how the first Switch sold after its launch in 2017). In a May briefing to investors, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said the company was factoring in a profit hit worth “several tens of billions of yen,” but noted the calculation was made on the basis of 145% tariffs on China and 10% tariffs on everyone else. (Trump soon after lowered tariffs on China to 30% for a 90-day period.)

Furukawa noted the company’s “basic policy” was to pass on tariffs to customers—but admitted a price hike might not be the greatest idea for a just-debuted console.

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Nintendo isn’t alone in thinking about how to manage increasing costs and new tariffs. Citing costlier development and “market conditions,” Microsoft implemented a $100 price hike for the Xbox Series X and plans to start selling $80 games. Sony has avoided hiking PlayStation prices in the U.S., but raised prices elsewhere.

The video game industry has been grappling with higher costs for years. Ahmad first points to the COVID supply-chain shock, which pushed up prices of components like memory. Game development is also getting more expensive as graphics become more advanced, boosting staffing and technology costs. That rebounds in the real world; Ahmad notes that Nintendo uses cartridges, rather than discs. “If your game is 64 gigabytes and you get a 64-gigabyte cartridge, that’s going to cost more to publish.”

By making the first move to $80, Nintendo might have done the industry a favor. “I’m sure other publishers and manufacturers are super happy that Nintendo took the blow for them,” Gerstmann says. He speculates that Nintendo’s lower-end hardware, compared with Sony and Microsoft, might appeal to studios now trying to keep costs low: “There’s real potential for the Switch to change a lot of things about the way games are made.”

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The world may have avoided the worst of U.S. tariffs for now—they stand at 30% on China and 10% on everyone else as U.S. officials try to negotiate with major trading partners. At those levels, tariffs are tough but manageable for global business.

But if negotiations break down—or if Trump lets his 90-day pause expire—then tariffs will shoot back up again: 54% on China, 46% on Vietnam, and 49% on Cambodia, giving Nintendo a lot to contend with.

Their struggles are indicative of a broader tension in Trump’s tariff regime: Vietnam and Cambodia are two popular “China plus one” destinations, countries where manufacturers based final assembly so as to avoid tariffs on China-made products.

Trump officials are reportedly pressuring trading partners to limit trade with China in order to isolate Beijing. But a surge in exports by Vietnam, Cambodia, and others will hurt Trump’s other goal: balancing U.S. trade with the rest of the world.

Nintendo’s customers are used to facing uncertain and hazardous environments in the company’s games. The question now: Can Nintendo, and other Asian manufacturers, show that same skill in navigating a more geopolitically fraught world?

This article appears in the June/July 2025: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “Game on!”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This 1972 gate-fold cover collage was created by Walter Allner, the Bauhaus-trained graphic designer who was art director of Fortune magazine from 1962 to 1974. It was photographed by Robert Crandall.

Allner went around his own home and said, “What are the objects that I have in my house that represent Fortune 500 companies?” He wanted to show us how these companies are so embedded in our day-to-day life. You could look at it for hours—and I don’t think it matters whether you’re a designer or you’re into art, because it’s these brands that are so familiar and so top-of-mind: Skippy peanut butter, Carnation, Beech-Nut, Cheerios, Dixie cups, Q-Tips. He used pills in groups of five (with one group of six), to represent each of the companies. I counted a total of 116 companies.

Back then, these American brands were mostly being manufactured and consumed here. Fast-forward, and with globalization that’s not necessarily true anymore—some of the materials are being sourced from overseas, or they’re being entirely manufactured overseas. And now you can get Hershey bars all over the world.

Allner was born in Germany in 1909 and studied at the Bauhaus, the legendary German design school, in the 1920s, before it was closed by the Nazis. He studied typography, poster design, and painting for three years under Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.

At Fortune, Allner designed 79 covers, and his Bauhaus-influenced style was generally simple—geometric shapes and primary colors. Allner was the first person to use an oscilloscope to design a cover—the first computer-generated national magazine cover—for the Fortune 500 in 1965.

There’s nothing Bauhaus about this 1972 cover: It’s too complicated, it’s too busy, there are too many colors, there’s no geometry to it. It feels like a complete departure. But that was Allner’s brilliance.

Click the cover image to view it larger.

Fortune

This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Everything everywhere all at once.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The “bombshell” moment of the whole decade-long Chevrolet Cobalt ignition-failure saga—for which General Motors has already set aside $1.1 billion, with far more costs possible—occurred on April 29, 2013, in a conference room at the Detroit airport Westin Hotel. A GM lawyer used the vivid term in an email direct from the room after a victim’s lawyer showed that the Cobalt’s ignition switch had been changed between 2005 and 2008.

It hardly sounds dramatic, but that simple fact, which GM’s own engineers had failed to unearth for years, was the missing piece in the puzzle of what had gone wrong with the Cobalt. It explained why airbags failed to deploy in some crashes, killing at least 13 people, and why those failures stopped after the 2007 model year. Now the company knew exactly where the problem was. And if you want to see the worst symptoms of a deeply dysfunctional corporate culture doing its damage, consider what happened next.

What happened was nothing. No order for an immediate recall, no report to high-level executives. Not even the general counsel was told. Instead, in the words of the damning Valukas report on the affair, which GM commissioned this year, “The response to the revelation…was to hire an expert.” It took six months for the expert to provide his written report, which merely concurred with what outsiders had been telling GM for years: that faulty ignition switches too easily turned from “run” to “accessory” mode, disabling the airbags.

After that, surely, it was time to act. Thousands of consumers were driving cars with a deadly defect that could now be explained. But no, now the engineer in charge of GM’s investigation had to read the report and reach his own conclusion—which turned out to be the same as the expert’s and, for that matter, the same as what a Wisconsin state trooper had concluded six years earlier.

So now was it time for the recall? Not yet. The Valukas report, which repeatedly cites the problems caused by GM’s “proliferation of committees,” says the engineer’s “conclusion was reported to yet further committees.”

When she was HR chief, Barra shocked GM lifers by reducing a 10-page dress code to two words: “dress appropriately.”Photo: Ben Baker��Redux

GM finally issued its first Cobalt recall on Feb. 7 of this year, nine months after the puzzle had been solved and, the Valukas report concludes, 2 years after GM knew enough about the problem to justify a recall (and 12 years after the problem first manifested itself). Whether any additional people died as a result of those final months of internal stasis may take years to determine.

But the Cobalt affair makes starkly clear what everyone in the auto industry has known for decades: The GM culture needs to be changed profoundly, and changing it will be one of the titanic struggles in the history of American management.

Mary Barra, still just nine months into her tenure as CEO, is embracing the struggle and means to use the Cobalt mess to her advantage. She accepts that it exposed systemic problems. “I don’t want to set it aside and explain it away,” Barra says, “because I think it uncovered some things in the company that it’s critical we challenge ourselves to change and to fix.”

OUT OF THE ABYSS GM’s economic profits. * Earnings adjusted for cost of capitalGraphic Source: Eva Dimensions

To borrow an old line, she’s not going to let a crisis go to waste. “We didn’t have to work too hard to make the case for change because clearly it was deeply troubling,” Barra says. “Anytime you want to drive change, you have to have a catalyst for change, and it did provide that. I will also tell you it’s made me more impatient.”

Her approach to changing the culture is highly un-GM-like. She hasn’t launched a program or put out a 10-point plan; almost incredibly, she hasn’t formed a committee. Her approach is modest and audacious at the same time: She proposes to alter the mindset by behaving differently every day than any GM CEO has behaved in decades, and through her example and a CEO’s influence, to change the way everyone else behaves every day. As she says, “Culture is how people behave.”

As the Cobalt mess shows, GM has a culture in which people try hard not to bring bad news to higher-ups. It’s been that way for decades. Practically no one is ever accountable for a decision, partly because most decisions are made by committees, and even then the process is a charade because key participants agree privately on the outcome ahead of time. Virtually no one gets fired for performance. Rare threats to the established order can almost always be waited out. Combine those traits, and you get an organism, the GM culture, that is highly evolved for survival. The problem is that it’s hobbling its host.

Is Barra the right person to transform this sprawling, wily beast? You could make a case that she isn’t. She’s the ultimate insider, a second-generation company lifer who was born into the GM way. Her father, a diemaker, worked at the company for 39 years, and she has worked there since age 18, when she enrolled at General Motors Institute to get an engineering degree, later earning a Stanford MBA on a GM fellowship. A culture-changing CEO must act with unchallenged authority, yet she isn’t the board chairman—that’s retired Cummins CEO Tim Solso—and the other contenders for CEO, president Dan Ammann and executive vice president Mark Reuss, both of whom had significant internal support for the top job, are still there.

The stronger case, however, holds that Barra is in fact well-suited to the job. She can hit the ground running because she understands the institution in her bones. She’s only 52, so waiting her out won’t work. Most important, she is already setting an example by violating the norms of the culture. She fired 15 employees in the wake of the Valukas report—a seemingly modest response, but very unlike GM—and she has moved out at least seven high-level executives in her first eight months as CEO, another shock to the system.

The GM playbook says safety problems like the Cobalt matter get patched and dispatched quickly. Barra has done the opposite, telling employees at a town hall meeting, “I never want to put this behind us. I want to put this painful experience permanently in our collective memories.” It was clearly the right message, but was jaw-dropping at GM. Retired executive Steve Harris, who started at GM in 1967, observes, “Her remarks at that meeting were unlike anything any previous GM CEO has ever said.”

“Don’t confuse progress with winning,” says Barra. “I accept no excuses for why we can’t be the best.”Photo: Andrew Harrer—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Barra conveys an unusual personality mix. Many observers have noted her plain, sincere manner. Being genuinely contrite about the Cobalt mess has helped her and GM with senators, victims’ families, and the media. At the same time, a marked steeliness is never far away. Talking about the behaviors she expects from her top team—directness, transparency, candor—she says, “I’m not asking people to do it. It’s a requirement—not only that they hold themselves accountable to do it, but they hold each other accountable. That’s the message I’ve delivered and will continue to drive through the whole organization. This is not optional.”

Still, the worrisome fact is that most of GM’s seven previous CEOs, going back to Roger Smith in the 1980s, tried to change the culture, and the culture won. Is it possible that no one can defeat it? Warren Buffett, who is a major Barra fan and a GM customer (he bought a new Cadillac in July) and whose Berkshire Hathaway recently bought more GM stock, thinks she can succeed where all those others failed. “Mary is as strong as they come,” he says. “She is the person to have there. She is as good as I’ve seen.”

Buffett may well be right, as he so often is. But this is one bear of an assignment. GM’s way of being is the kind that’s hardest to change: embedded in a big, old company that utterly dominated its industry for decades. Cultures like that have occasionally been altered. Jack Welch did it at General Electric (GE) in the 1980s; Lou Gerstner did it at IBM in the 1990s; Doug Conant did it at Campbell Soup in the 2000s. But more often the transformations fail, as they did at Kodak, Sears, Westinghouse, Pan Am, and many other storied colossi that succumbed largely to their own weaknesses. The odds are against GM, and another factor makes the challenge even harder. Employees have seen it all before. Over the past 30 years they’ve learned that CEOs come and go, but the way we do things around here is invulnerable. At GM, trying and failing to change the culture is part of the culture.

Change is urgent, a reality that many inside and outside the company have overlooked since the company exited bankruptcy in 2009. Although GM is no longer in danger of failing, it isn’t performing nearly well enough and risks fading into long-term weakness. It’s making excellent-quality vehicles, but it has fallen behind competitors in globalizing and improving fuel economy. Since its stock resumed trading in November 2010, the market has rocketed 60%, while GM’s has been flat. Bankruptcy unburdened GM of vast debts, but that has enabled it to earn only its cost of capital (which it hadn’t managed to achieve for decades). As a financial performer, GM has really upped its game and become mediocre. It has a long way to go.

GM SHARES GET LEFT BEHINDGraphic Source: Bloomberg

Barra knows it. “A phrase I use internally a lot is, ‘Don’t confuse progress with winning,’” she says. “It’s one thing to be making continuous improvements and say, ‘This year I got 10% better,’ but if you’re still last, you have to have that external view and know what it’s going to take to become the best.” Which is what she expects GM to do. “I accept no excuses for why we can’t be the best,” Barra says.

Measuring success against external rather than internal standards, fundamental as it seems, represents a major shift in perspective at GM and is a good example of the task Barra faces. GM has long been obsessively inward-looking. “I had a vehicle line executive come to me with his scorecard” in the past decade, recalls former vice chairman Bob Lutz, who has been a top executive at all three Detroit carmakers during his 60-year career. “He said, ‘I’ve completed the most successful program in the history of the vehicle line executive system,’” and he wanted to talk to Lutz about a bonus. His scorecard “had about 50 metrics on it, scored red, yellow, or green, and they were solid green, top to bottom,” the first time that feat had ever been accomplished. “I said, ‘That’s nice. How’s the car selling?’ He said, ‘Oh, it’s not selling at all. The public doesn’t like it.’ I said, ‘You failed! I don’t care how many metrics you got right. You failed!’” The incident illustrates the larger problem—maybe the most serious of GM’s behavioral deficiencies, Lutz believes—that “everything was internal criteria. The idiotic assumption was that if you fulfill all the internal criteria, somehow the car will be a success.”

Another former executive, consultant Rob Kleinbaum, agrees that GM’s insularity may be its worst failing. “Of all GM’s cultural problems, [insularity] might be the most crippling as it perpetuates an inward focus that is largely responsible for its hostile relations with its dealers and suppliers and, most troubling, with consumers,” he wrote in an influential 2009 report, “Retooling GM’s Culture,” which helped guide the presidential task force that managed the GM and Chrysler bailouts. “Much more attention is given to wondering what the senior leadership will think than to figuring out the right path and trying to make it happen.”

Barra’s approach to fixing the problem, unique in GM’s long history of attempted change, is micro-based rather than macro-based. “I kind of hate when we talk about culture,” she says. “What is culture? It’s how people behave. So if we want to change this elusive culture, it’s changing behaviors. And that becomes actionable very quickly. It’s everyone’s behaviors. It’s mine—I have to change my behaviors.” It’s hers especially because the way she interacts with others will cascade through the organization. She realizes that the change will consist of countless individual moments: “It’s every interaction I have with the leadership team. It’s every time I interact with employees, being crystal clear about my expectations. And frankly, you know, that’s somewhat different than maybe General Motors has been in the past.”

She’s being diplomatic. It’s completely unlike GM in two ways. First, few people are ever told that anything in particular is expected of them and that they’re accountable for it—one of the culture’s most damaging elements. Second, previous reform attempts have used the blunderbuss approach rather than focusing on moment-by-moment behavior change. Fixing GM’s stagnation was a major reason Roger Smith spent $2.6 billion in 1984 to buy EDS, Ross Perot’s highly successful software company. “Smith told me he’d tried everything to change the culture, without success, and now these high-performing EDS people would bring their culture to every part of GM,” recalls Ken Langone, the investment banker best known for co-founding Home Depot, who worked on the EDS deal. “Exactly the opposite happened. The GM culture took over EDS. By the time EDS was spun off from GM in 1996, it was bureaucratic and cost-laden.”

Perot famously observed that “the first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, the first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.”

When GM decided that its dysfunctional culture was a snake under CEO Fritz Henderson in 2009, it followed the script with almost comical precision. First it organized a committee, the culture transformation team. Then it hired a consultant who knew a lot about culture change, from the management consulting firm Booz & Co. It was well on its way to talking about it for a year when the board replaced Henderson as CEO and the project died.

To see the difference in Barra’s approach, consider another GM pathology, the taboo on genuine debate in meetings. A former high executive recalls being new at GM in the early 2000s, when it launched a dramatic remake of Cadillac. “The concept vehicle was absolutely stunning—wow, what Cadillac once was,” he says. But the engineering establishment resisted a complete redesign, instead wanting to build the car off the Corvette platform, “getting fairly close to the vision of the concept car, but not in the way it captured the imagination of the public,” the executive says. At a meeting ostensibly to decide the issue, “there were impassioned presentations by each side, and then it was polite thank-yous, and everybody walked out. No discussion. I was stunned. I asked someone what had just happened. They said it had all been settled beforehand. The old guard had already won. This was just to show that each side had had its say.”

Barra insists that those days are over. “Not that I want to be described as mean, but I think the company’s too nice,” she says. “This is a challenging business, and if you get 16 people in the room like my leadership team and you don’t get all the best thoughts onto the table, you may not be making the right decision. Everybody knows I expect them to get their thoughts on the table. It’s okay to have debates. It shouldn’t be personal or petty or mean. But it can be uncomfortable, because if we have different opinions, we’ve got to talk it through.” Again, the emphasis is not on grand-scale transformation but on changing specific day-to-day behaviors, starting at the top.

In her quest to transform America’s most recalcitrant corporate culture, Barra is taking the right first steps. She’s already ahead of any predecessor’s efforts, and she took some small steps in the right direction in previous jobs. When Barra was made human resources chief in 2009, she found that GM still had a 10-page dress code. When she replaced it with a two-word code—“dress appropriately”—some managers freaked out. They felt they were “in this rules-based organization where I don’t have to think—I just follow these rules,” she recalls. That’s what prompted her to launch new managerial training worldwide, “to reignite the managers.” It’s another sign of how far the company has to go.

Even in the U.S. auto industry, GM is far behind. Chrysler has long had a scrappier temperament than the other two, and Alan Mulally’s turnaround of Ford is already legendary. “Ford is light years ahead culturally,” says Noel Tichy, a University of Michigan management professor who has consulted for GM and Ford in the past. But at least Mulally’s achievement shows that “it can be done in that industry.”

The best reason to be optimistic about Barra’s chances is that, just as she isn’t attempting the change in the old-GM way, she isn’t measuring success that way either. How will she know whether she is actually changing the culture? “The ultimate proof point will be when we deliver exceptional financial results by continuing to do exceptional products and providing an exceptional customer experience,” she says. That is, she’ll look outward. Very un-GM-like. “That’s how I’ll know.”

This story is from the October 6, 2014 issue of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For the past decade or so, it was easy for the average investor to pursue a winning strategy: Load up on low-cost ETFs that tracked the S&P 500 or another big basket of U.S. stocks, then sit back and watch the returns pile up. This strategy became even more appealing as the U.S. tech sector roared and the stock prices of “the Magnificent Seven” climbed to nosebleed heights. This approach, or variations on it, came to be known as Buy America, and it worked splendidly. Until it didn’t.

“If you’d come to me 10 years ago, I would have said, ‘Just buy an index fund and don’t worry about it,’” says Stephanie Guild, chief investment officer of Robinhood Markets. Now she suggests investors consider a more active approach to their portfolios—and give them a lot more geographic variety.

Many investors came to a similar conclusion in April after President Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which signaled that his administration would pursue his goal of expanding the manufacturing sector, even if it incurred near-term damage to a U.S. economy that had been the envy of the world since the Great Financial Crisis. The market response was immediate. The punishing tariff measures not only sent stocks tumbling but also triggered a decline in the value of the dollar and U.S. Treasury bonds. Meanwhile, a flood of capital began to head overseas, leading some to invoke a new investment mantra: Sell America.

That advice is likely overstated, especially as some markets have recovered from the shock of the initial April tariffs. But the recent “Sell America” cries can also be seen as an exclamation point on a broader trend. According to many investment experts, it’s been apparent for some time that the lopsided weighting of tech stocks in many portfolios was not sustainable. And many casual investors may be unaware they’ve built up an oversize helping of Big Tech. Most index funds are asset-weighted, which means that the bigger the Magnificent Seven grew in market valuation, the more space in a set-it and-forget-it portfolio they came to occupy.

“The Magnificent Seven are truly magnificent, but they’ve become outsize and very expensive,” says Erik Knutzen, a co–chief investment officer at Neuberger Berman. As for recent asset flight away from U.S. stocks: “We don’t think this is some kind of dire perspective on the U.S.—more of a normal, rational rebalancing.”

For retail stock owners, the sudden shift is a reminder of one of the bedrock principles of investing: diversification. Research shows that more diverse portfolios perform better over the long run because a decline in one category of assets will typically be mitigated or offset by the performance of other assets. “This year has been a powerful reminder that you don’t want to let yourself get too concentrated in any one industry or asset class, no matter how bright it might shine at the moment,” says Katie Klingensmith, chief investment strategist at Edelman Financial Engines.

The entire global economy, to be sure, is still absorbing the shock from Trump’s tariff policies, which means that the current period of volatility is far from over and investors could feel more pain. But the pain could also be easily reversed, and diversification gives investors a chance to benefit from good news, wherever it surfaces.

Investing in a new landscape

So if a passive strategy centered on U.S. assets is no longer optimal, what should investors
do instead?

First off, investing pros make clear that shifting away from U.S. assets does not mean turning away from them altogether. The U.S. economy is still stronger than many others, and its equities are still a good bet, including the “other 493” (the S&P outside of the Magnificent Seven).

The case for bonds, though, may be weaker. Robinhood’s Guild says the conventional wisdom that calls for steadily increasing the proportion of bonds in one’s portfolio as one gets older has become outdated. She points out that bond volatility has increased and it’s no longer a given that bonds’ returns will display a negative correlation to stocks.

This also means that those looking for income may get a better payoff from high-dividend stocks—a category that does not include Big Tech companies, which pay little or nothing in the way of dividends. Microsoft is the best of the bunch with a dividend of around 0.75%. Tesla and Amazon offer no dividend at all. Compare those with other Fortune 500 names Pfizer and Ford, which paid out annual dividend yields over 6%.

Meanwhile, a series of developments are underway abroad—some of them hastened by economic and geopolitical disruptions unleashed by Trump—that are lifting some investors’ outlook for stocks in Europe and Asia. Knutzen pointed to Germany, in particular, whose government has shifted away from a rigid fiscal policy to pursue broader spending on defense. Knutzen also says his firm is encouraged by pro-growth policies adopted by governments in France and Italy that are invigorating the private sector.

At the Milken Institute Global Conference in May, investing titans Jonathan Gray of Blackstone and Marc Rowan of Apollo both described assets in Germany and the rest of the continent as a bargain, and expressed optimism that an era of hyper-regulation could be receding. The pair also spoke favorably of the investment climate in Japan and India. Knutzen of Neuberger Berman says his firm is likewise keen on Japan, where, he notes, new governance policies have resulted in systemic improvements to how companies are managed. He adds that he is also spending considerable time speaking with more affluent clients about alternative investments like real estate and the booming private credit market.

For those looking to build or rebalance a portfolio, Guild proposes different ideas based on age, investment goals, and risk tolerance. For most people around age 35, she suggests a mix of about 75% U.S. stocks balanced with a helping of European equities packaged in large-cap ETFs. To round it out, she’d consider adding Asian tech stocks and commodities such as gold or Bitcoin. The calculus for those on the cusp of retirement is different, since those investors will typically want lower risk and ready access to cash. For them, Guild recommends a more conventional portfolio of around 60% stocks and 40% bonds, though she adds the latter portions should consist primarily of short-duration bonds given the current volatility of the markets.

For self-directed investors, these calls for a more diverse and complicated portfolio may pose a challenge since it will likely mean wading into unfamiliar asset categories. Hiring an active manager offers a solution to this. As always, one should feel confident that doing so will deliver additional gains that exceed the fees they charge. The good news for considering an active approach is that many advisors’ fees are dropping as a growing number of financial institutions push into wealth management services, creating more competition. (Of course, those fees will never approach those of leading ETFs, which can be as low as five basis points.) Another benefit of working with advisors: They can talk you out of yanking all your money out of the markets during a rough week.

More broadly, investors should treat the market events of 2025 in the context of a return to basics. On fundamental principle of investing that came to be overlooked during the go-go days of Buy America is that diversification will strengthen any portfolio and help it withstand shocks ranging from tariffs and pandemics to the popping of bubbles. “We are working with clients of all types on making sure they don’t have too much concentration,” says Knutzen.

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All that glitters

Angel Garcia—Getty Images

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

But for all its quirks, gold has been one of the best-performing assets of the past year. Recent economic turmoil has seen it live up to its reputation as the safest of safe havens: On April 22, the price of gold crossed the $3,500-an-ounce mark for the first time ever. For those who want to hold the real thing in their hands, Costco offers one of the lowest premiums for physical gold (around 2% compared with as much as 5% at other outlets). And for those who are not craving a physical asset, there is the cheap and more practical—though decidedly less pulse-quickening—alternative of an ETF. Be aware, though, that selling gold at a profit (including in its ETF forms) will incur higher capital gains taxes than stock transactions will, since gold is classified as a collectible and taxed at a higher rate of up to 28%.

For casual investors who have caught a touch of gold fever, Fortune has listed the pros and cons of popular purchasing options below.

Coins and medallions

Typically issued by national governments. The American Gold Eagle coin and the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf are popular choices.
Pros: Beautiful to hold and admire.
Cons: More expensive than other options.

Gold bars

Typically sold in flat one-ounce rectangles imprinted with a company or government logo. You can also buy larger bars—often called ingots—that are primarily traded in wholesale markets.
Pros: As basic as it gets and cheaper than coins.
Cons: Still comes with a premium to order and ship.

Gold ETFs

Among the world’s most popular ETFs, these are shares in a trust that trades like a stock, backed by reserves of physical gold stored by a bank or financial institution.
Pros: By far the cheapest option.
Cons: Nothing shiny to behold; the gold is held by a third party.

This article originally appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Tariffs have halted the ‘Buy America’ era. Here’s what to do next.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

What do Trump’s picks for deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, “AI and crypto czar,” and ambassador to Denmark all have in common?

If you guessed that they are all tech-industry insiders (and men), you’re only partially correct.

A less obvious but important bond linking these techies together is their shared history with Peter Thiel, the reclusive billionaire venture capitalist who famously wrote the first check that funded Facebook.

Thiel’s endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election, and his speech at the Republican National Convention, are considered key factors in Trump’s improbable path to victory. Nine years later, Thiel isn’t a visible part of Trump 2.0—but his fingerprints are everywhere.

Networks are powerful. And Thiel has long been at the center of some of the tech industry’s most influential ones.

There’s the crew that got its start at PayPal, the seminal internetpayments company Thiel cofounded and ran as CEO for several years before it was sold to eBay. The company’s cofounders and early executives, dubbed the “PayPal mafia” by Fortune in 2007, include Roelof Botha, who went on to run venture capital firm Sequoia Capital; Max Levchin, who founded the $18 billion buy-now, pay-later company Affirm; and Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind space exploration company SpaceX and long-standing chief executive of Tesla.

But that’s just one of Thiel’s networks. There is also the alumni network of the Stanford Review, a student newspaper Thiel started with a colleague while he was an undergraduate at Stanford University, where venture capitalists David Sacks and Joe Lonsdale wrote before going on to work in tech. Thiel’s fellowship program, which incentivizes promising candidates to drop out of universities to pursue bold tech ideas, has spawned Vitalik Buterin, cofounder of the Ethereum blockchain network; Dylan Field, the cofounder and CEO of design software company Figma; and Lucy Guo, who cofounded Scale AI.

These networks have wielded tremendous influence across Silicon Valley for two decades, shaping the ideas, funding, and strategies that underpin some of the most successful companies and innovations. With the Trump–Silicon Valley alliance now a defining aspect of the administration, Thiel’s circle is poised to take its clout to the next level and play an ever bigger role on the world stage.

It was Thiel himself who introduced Trump to his running mate, JD Vance, who had worked at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms. Thiel’s longtime colleague Ken Howery, who worked with Thiel at PayPal and launched the esteemed VC firm Founders Fund with him, was nominated to be the ambassador to Denmark. It was Thiel himself who introduced Trump to his running mate, JD Vance, who had worked at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms. Thiel’s longtime colleague Ken Howery, who worked with Thiel at PayPal and launched the esteemed VC firm Founders Fund with him, was nominated to be the ambassador to Denmark. Sacks, who coauthored a book with Thiel criticizing policies like affirmative action, is Trump’s aforementioned AI and crypto czar. A Thiel protégé who worked at Thiel’s former hedge fund Clarium Capital is now director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, responsible for overseeing Trump’s tech policy agenda. Musk, whose companies Thiel has backed over and over, is one of Trump’s close advisors. Even some of the people working in the Department of Government Efficiency, who have been slicing up various federal agencies, have ties to Thiel.

A conservative libertarian who has supported causes ranging from autonomous floating societies, via the Seasteading Institute, to scientific research via his Breakout Labs initiative (essentially a seed fund for hard science), Thiel took a step back as a donor in the 2024 election cycle. In an interview with Fortune two years ago he said he wasn’t convinced money mattered all that much in presidential politics. It turns out he had something that might be better: connections.

Thiel may not be the face of this administration—but it’s the network he has assembled over his career that’s staffing it.

This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Peter Thiel’s deep state: A common thread runs through Trump’s tech team.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

On the morning of Sept. 8, 2020, Meredith Kopit Levien’s first day as CEO of the New York Times, she opened her laptop in the living room of her pandemic rental in Calabasas, Calif., as her 9-year-old son remotely attended fourth grade nearby. She stared into a world on fire.

Much of the publication’s 4,700-person staff was working from cramped apartments, taking meetings on Zoom, or reporting from the streets—some in harm’s way. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer a few months earlier had ignited a summer of rallies and a national reckoning on race and power. Inside the newsroom, an incendiary op-ed calling for military force to subdue Black Lives Matter protests had led to the abrupt ouster of the opinion editor.

Meanwhile, Levien’s longtime mentor, Mark Thompson—the British chief executive credited with transforming the Times into a digital subscription powerhouse—was gone. For years, the two were in constant contact as COO and CEO; Now, she was alone in the chair.

At age 49, Levien (pronounced Lev-EE-yen) was the youngest person and second woman to lead the institution in its 173-year history. “I didn’t really understand, as COO, how profoundly different the CEO role would be,” she tells Fortune now. “It took me at least a year—maybe two—just to have any confidence that I could do the job. And that I could maybe even do it well.”

The demands were immediate and unrelentingly high-stakes: Make the big strategic calls. Choose who stays and who goes. Defend every decision to the newsroom, to shareholders, to the unions, to the public. And at the Times—a public company where editorial integrity and business imperatives often collide—those decisions rippled far beyond the building walls.

“You’re on the hook for everything,” Levien says. “I spent a lot of my first year sort of holding my breath and just not wanting to get it wrong… not wanting to let the board down, not wanting to let the publisher down, not wanting to let my own team down.”

Part of that pressure was to keep up the publication’s remarkable momentum. The Times had crossed several milestones with initiatives Levien helped set in motion as chief revenue officer and later COO. By mid-2020, digital subscription revenue had surged 24% year-over-year to $276 million, surpassing print for the first time. The company ended the quarter with 5.7 million digital-only subscriptions—6.5 million total—making steady progress toward its goal of 10 million by 2025. Wirecutter, the Times’ product recommendation site, had a growing affiliate revenue stream. And the Cooking app saw a spike as people hunkered down at home, hungry for guidance in the kitchen.

But that early success soon gave rise to a more existential question: What’s next? Levien’s answer, in a word: the bundle. By doubling down on the all-access subscription—offering not just news, but also Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, the Athletic, and more—she reenergized the Times. No longer just the storied “Gray Lady,” it has morphed into a lifestyle subscription platform, a daily companion that moves with readers through their routines: morning headlines over coffee, the Spelling Bee on a commute, product reviews at lunch, and analysis of the Lakers game by night. As one marketing campaign put it, the Times wants readers to go “all in.”

Gabby Jones–Bloomberg via Getty Images

So far, the bundle strategy has borne fruit. In fact, of the Times’ 11 million-plus digital subscribers, only 1.9 million pay for news alone. Levien calls it “the essential subscription for every curious person.” The Times doesn’t want drive-by traffic, she says. It wants daily, habitual engagement.

But critics worry that the Times risks straying from its core: rigorous, high-brow journalism. Levien insists the inverse is true, arguing that the bundle is designed to sustain the newsroom, not distract from it. “The first dollar always goes to journalism,” she often says.

The stakes for journalism

That commitment to the work of journalism is particularly necessary at a time when the profession is under siege: Political hostility toward the press is intensifying under a resurgent MAGA movement, and the ad-supported, platform-reliant business model that once propped up the media industry continues its free fall. At the same time, the rise of generative AI threatens to unravel the very concept of authorship, burying real journalism beneath a flood of synthetic content and algorithmic noise.

Against that backdrop, trust in the media has become both more fragile and more consequential. Public confidence in traditional news organizations has eroded sharply in recent years; just 31% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the press, according to Gallup. The result is a precarious information ecosystem where falsehoods sometimes outpace truths, and the very institutions designed to hold power to account are increasingly dismissed, doubted, or directly attacked. It’s amid this disruption and distrust that Levien is staking her strategy.

Unlike peers, such as the Washington Post and the LA Times, the New York Times doesn’t have a billionaire owner with unlimited wealth as a backstop. (Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim provided a $250 million loan at a steep 14% interest rate during the company’s financial crisis in 2009, but that loan was repaid in 2011.) Levien holds the CEO title, but ultimate control still rests with the Ochs-Sulzberger family, who hold most of the company’s voting shares and are known among industry insiders for their cautious approach to risk, measured pace of growth, and complex family dynamics that require company leaders to navigate with finesse and a keen sensitivity to legacy and bloodlines.

“[Levien] has an incredibly complicated job that involves a lot of diplomacy,” says Ben Smith, cofounder of Semafor and a former media columnist at the New York Times. “I do think she has been incredibly successful.”

Her mission, Levien says, is to build a durable business model that makes the hard work of independent journalism commercially viable. To date, the results are unmatched by peers. Still, sustainability is a moving target when trust is fragile, attention is fleeting, and political headwinds are growing stronger.

Hardwired to win

Shortly after then-CEO Thompson announced that he would depart in 2020, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher—who at the time was launching a Times podcast—invited Levien to her home in Washington, D.C. Sitting in the living room, Swisher recalls asking her directly: “Are you going to be the next CEO?”

Levien, Swisher recounts, responded modestly, saying she’d welcome the role but wasn’t the one making the decision.

“I said, ‘Excuse me? What did you just say to me? Don’t do that. That’s such a typical woman thing to say,’” Swisher recalls. “Then I told her, ‘I need you to yell at me right now: I am going to be the CEO of the New York Times. I am the CEO.’”

Levien obliged. “We laughed and laughed,” Swisher says. “Because she knew she was going to be CEO—she was just being polite.”

Levien has spent her career on the business side of journalism, working behind the curtain to build institutions that she never expected to lead. “I never wanted the top job,” she says. “I just wanted to do the biggest version of the work I loved.”

She grew up in Richmond, Va., with a mother who worked in sales and a teacher father, and she spent her early years feeling like a jack-of-all-trades: competent, but never the standout. She wasn’t the star athlete, the gifted artist, or the straight-A student, by her own account. “There was no one thing that people said, ‘Oh, she is awesome at that,’” recalls Levien. “I think that served me because it made me work harder at everything.” Her edge, Levien says, isn’t necessarily innate talent. It’s sheer willpower and a relentless, almost obsessive, hunger to win.

She’s not a journalist, but she has had an acute curiosity about the world from an early age. The Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979, which began when Levien was 8, ignited in her a fascination with current events, magazines, and “serious topics,” she says. She attended the University of Virginia—drawn in part by its affordable in-state tuition—where she wrote for one of the campus newspapers.

After college, Levien hoped to find a foothold in the profession doing fact-checking in New York, but her parents, wary of the city’s cost of living and the industry’s meager starting salaries, talked her out of it. Instead, she took a job at the D.C.-based consulting firm Advisory Board, rising to director of member services and forging a close bond with its founder, David Bradley.

When Bradley bought the Atlantic in 1999, Levien saw a path to journalism and asked him for a reporting job. He offered her a role on the business side, with a deal: If she didn’t love it, she could switch to editorial in a year. She never made the switch.

Levien went on to hold senior roles at the Atlantic, rising from advertising director to publisher of its now-defunct magazine 02138, and later became chief revenue officer at Forbes. Then, in 2013, the New York Times came calling, offering her the chance to lead its advertising business. Friends warned her against it. The business side didn’t carry weight there, they said, and it wasn’t run like a company. The Times’ golden age had passed, she was told, and its future was murky at best.

But Levien saw untapped potential and a once-in-a-career opportunity to reinvent an institution. “The Times should win,” she recalls thinking then. “It makes a product that’s unique at a different scale and level of quality. It should easily have a business model that works.”

The bundle is the business

Levien’s first 18 months in the Times’ iconic midtown Manhattan headquarters were focused on reviving its advertising strategy, but the writing was already on the wall: Big tech platforms were swallowing most digital ad dollars, leaving publishers with diminishing returns. The Times’ leadership had seen the shift coming earlier than most. Advertising alone wouldn’t sustain the institution. The only viable path forward was subscriptions, at scale.

In 2015, Levien was promoted to chief revenue officer, responsible for all business streams, including subscriptions, advertising, and live events. At the time, the Times had just under one million paid digital subscribers. That year, it set a goal to double its digital subscriber base and its nearly $400 million in digital revenue by 2020.

Today, the New York Times has more than 11.5 million subscribers across digital and print, and says it’s on track to reach 15 million by 2027. And Levien, who insists she never chased power, is now arguably the most successful media CEO in America.

If she played a supporting role in the Times’ initial shift to subscriptions, she now takes center stage in its next act: transforming a storied newsroom into a multi-platform bundle of brands that reach readers well beyond traditional news. Part of that strategy is continuously enriching the bundle. In 2022, the company acquired the sports media outlet the Athletic and snapped up the viral word game Wordle, made by a software engineer as a gift for his girlfriend, for a reported low seven figures—a move Smith calls “obviously brilliant.”

Jakub Porzycki—NurPhoto via Getty Images

Levien says her strategy rests on three pillars: lead in news, win in lifestyle, and make the bundle indispensable. The logic appears simple. The more often readers engage across the Times’ ecosystem, the more likely they are to subscribe, stay, and engage. Every product is built to reinforce that habit.

Her strategy is also powered by editorial curation and predictive tech, blending journalist-selected stories with a more dynamic, visual, and personalized feed across the Times’ website and apps. “We’re getting better at surfacing the next best thing for you,” Levien says. “And making it more engaging.”

Despite rising concerns about news fatigue and avoidance, the company says it is seeing direct traffic growth across all products, due in part to the post-2016 election “Trump bump” that sent readership soaring. In 2024, its websites and apps averaged about 137 million monthly unique visitors globally, according to internal estimates. Subscriptions, both print and digital, now account for the bulk of the company’s $2.59 billion in annual revenue, but advertising, affiliates, and licensing are inching up too. Advertising, while significantly down from its peak, generated about $506 million in 2024.

As editor-in-chief Joe Kahn tells Fortune, the editorial sensibility of the Times infuses all its products. “Cooking and games grew directly out of the newsroom, and actually, those are still within the purview of the newsroom,” Kahn explains. “So there’s a cooking editor and a games editor who are journalists, and they came from the traditional New York Times newspaper.”

Lifestyle products like Cooking, which drew more than 456 million visits in 2024 across its site and app, and Wirecutter are produced by journalists. The sports writers, photographers, and editors of Athletic give the Times credibility in sports media.

The Games app was downloaded 10 million times in 2023, and its puzzles were played 11 billion times last year, led by Wordle’s 5.3 billion plays. “Three times as many people play our games every single day as watched the White Lotus season finale,” Levien told advertisers at a media showcase in May.

Smith scoffs at journalism purists who have side-eyed the rise of “softer” business verticals, pointing out that Levien’s bundling strategy has kept the Times on a steady growth track—and, more importantly, provided a financial bulwark against the political pressure that has challenged other outlets. “The only real defense against that kind of pressure, which is economic pressure that Trump is putting on news organizations, is having a strong business,” he tells Fortune.

Swisher agrees. It’s naive, she says, to think the Times can thrive on news alone, especially as overall news consumption plateaus. “If you’re just a pure news organization, well, that’s lovely—if you have a billionaire owner,” she tells Fortune. “Even then, you’re probably screwed because that billionaire has their own agenda. What you need is a 360-degree media offering.”

Public company, private guardrails

Levien remains convinced that the Times is far from hitting subscription saturation. The real challenge, she maintains, is breaking through an information ecosystem dominated by gatekeepers like Google and social media platforms. These companies not only control how people discover content but also prioritize their own, often competing, material. Levien’s offense is not to extract more from the existing Times audience, but to expand it. “We’re not pulling more and more from a fixed pie,” she says. “We’re building a bigger one.” In her view, anything that captures attention and focus—Netflix, TikTok, even a wellness app—is competition.

All told, the Times is thriving while much of the media world retrenches, a resilience that Levien attributes to two pivotal choices. First, a steadfast commitment to investing in journalism. Second, a deliberate focus on building direct relationships with readers. While many publishers chased scale through social platforms, the Times prioritized audience ownership, insulating itself from some of the volatility of tech giants.

Today, it has over 150 million registered users; a flagship newsletter, the Morning, delivered to 16 million people; and The Daily ranks among the most-listened-to news podcasts in the world, drawing some 4 million listeners weekly on average. And the vast majority of the Times’ users now come through owned channels—including newsletters and apps—a rarity in an industry still largely reliant on fickle third-party traffic.

Not having a wealthy benefactor to cushion the risks has its advantages, too, Levien points out. She says the Times’ distinctive governance structure—publicly traded yet family-controlled—offers a rare balance of market accountability and editorial commitment.

“The scrutiny of being a public company has made us sharper,” Levien says, noting her decade of experience on earnings calls. That pressure, she contends, enforces a discipline and day-to-day rigor that private ownership doesn’t always demand.

The Sulzberger family’s majority control and focus on protecting the editorial mission also buffers the Times from short-termism, she says. Whether that model is replicable—or even desirable—for other outlets remains an open question.

Calibrating power and principles

With President Donald Trump back in power, the Times is once more in his crosshairs. Elsewhere in the media, companies appear to have already softened their posture, retreating from confrontational coverage, shedding journalistic muscle, or making deals with the Trump administration. As others backpedal, Levien’s response is unequivocal: “We will not be cowed,” she says. “Not now. Not ever.”

If Levien’s mission is to lead in the business of news, her colleagues in editorial—Kahn, the editor-in-chief, and opinion editor Katie Kingsbury—are charged with upholding its substance. All three report to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Running the Times, Levien says, is a constant calibration between business urgency and newsroom deliberation, and though she is responsible for the former, she takes the latter very seriously too. “If you break the newsroom,” she warns, “you can’t remake it.”

Levien shrugs at criticism of coverage from both the left and the right. “We’re not going to tailor our journalism to please a party or win over a particular audience,” she says. “That’s not the job. It’s to pursue the truth.”

David Dee Delgado—Getty Images for The New York Times

Levien says she’s focused on making the Times’ journalistic process more transparent, showing not just what it reports, but how. The goal, she says, is to increase the public’s understanding of why independent journalism still matters.

That mission has never been more difficult. The press today faces both subtle obstructions and overt hostility, from exclusion at White House briefings to targeted harassment of reporters.

The Times has contingency plans across various functions—legal, operational, financial—to ensure it never has to choose between its values and its survival, Levien says. Her bet is that the Times’ long-game strategy focused on financial strength and original reporting will carry it through an era when facts are contested and journalism is under attack. “We have a very strong balance sheet, so I feel like we are as well prepared as we could be to weather whatever storms come and to do so in a way that does not compromise our principles.”

The AI conundrum

Meanwhile, a new existential challenge looms: artificial intelligence. What happens when machines provide the answer, but erase the source?

In 2023, the Times became the first major news organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they used its copyrighted journalism without permission to train large language models. “We are vigorously enforcing our intellectual property rights,” she explains. “Not just for ourselves, but for the principle that high-quality journalism deserves protection—and compensation.” (OpenAI argues that its use of publicly available internet data to train AI models constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.)

Inside the Times, AI is viewed as both a threat and an opportunity. Teams are prototyping new features, from voice-rendered stories to intelligent cooking tools. In the newsroom, AI is already playing a role. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into bomb use in Gaza used AI to help verify visual evidence from the ground.

“We’re not replacing human journalism,” Levien says. “We’re using AI to make it stronger, more accessible, and more scalable.”

That dual-track approach—defending the journalism while reimagining how it’s delivered—is at the core of Levien’s tech-assisted strategy. And her conviction that the future belongs to publishers that cultivate direct, habitual relationships with their audiences has only deepened in the age of AI.

Even so, Levien is pragmatic about the scale of disruption AI could unleash. “We are in a moment of real transformation,” she says. As platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and large language models become dominant entry points for information, the threat to journalism isn’t just reduced visibility—it’s the erosion of value. When AI delivers answers without attribution, original reporting loses its power, and the public loses connection to the source.

That’s why the Times is trying to reimagine its products for an AI-native world. It’s also why Levien views financial independence as more essential than ever. “A strong business is what allows us to assert the value of the work and protect it,” she says.

We will not be cowed. Not now. Not ever.

Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO, the New York Times

Bend the world

Not every bet Levien has made has been a slam dunk. Nearly four years after acquiring the Athletic, the jury is still out on the wisdom of that deal. The outlet was losing money at the time of the acquisition, and while the Times anticipated continued investment, it set a goal to reach profitability by 2025. In fiscal year 2024, the Athletic generated $172.1 million in revenue—a 31% increase from the year prior—but still posted a $5 million loss. Still, it cleared a critical hurdle by turning a profit in both the third and fourth quarters. Levien isn’t interested in meeting expectations for the Athletic, she says. She wants to far exceed them. “I’ll be bummed if it just becomes a niche part of the whole,” she says. “The ambition is bigger than that.”

So, where does future growth lie? The same place it always has, Levien says: high-quality journalism and a near-stubborn refusal to believe the ceiling has been reached. She has heard every reason that growth should have stalled—political polarization, news fatigue, shrinking attention spans, the dominance of video, a fractured nation allergic to nuance. And yet, the Times keeps adding subscribers. Earlier this month, the company announced that in the last quarter, it added 250,000 digital-only subscribers, and digital subscription revenue jumped more than 14% during that period.

“Persistence,” she says, “is believing the thing matters enough to see it through and then bringing others with you.” Those close to Levien say that that mindset defines her leadership style. She jokes that she was born trying to bend the world to her will.

That conviction runs deep, personally and professionally. Levien says she throws herself fully into both her job and parenthood, commuting weekly from Washington, D.C. to New York while raising her now-teenage son, whom she shares custody of with her former husband. “I have this belief that I can give 150% to both,” she says. “Even though anyone will tell you it’s not possible.”

Still, she knows that passion and stamina alone can’t shield an institution from economic headwinds, political backlash, or technological disruption. Whether the New York Times can continue to grow on its own terms and at its current scale remains to be seen.

For now, Levien is still pushing. And the world is still bending.

This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Bend the world to your will.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This story originally appeared in the January 1970 issue of Fortune. It is the full text of an article excerpted in Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012, a Fortune Magazine book, collected and expanded by Carol Loomis. (more…)

As many millions of people have been reminded recently, Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, doesn’t always call them right. He predicted two years ago that Hillary Clinton would both run for the presidency and win, and he never lost faith in that prospect until Election Night.

On this day two weeks later, nonetheless, it is the right time to look at a widely-noted stock market prediction that Buffett made 17 years ago, in 1999, and that is just reaching its terminal point. Here, Buffett was definitely on the correct side of the bet.

Buffett’s prediction concerned what magnitude of total returns—stock appreciation plus reinvested dividends—U.S. investors would reap in the 17 years that began as 1999 was moving to its close. Buffett made the prediction originally in July of that year in a speech he gave at an Allen & Co. conference; repeated it in several speeches over the next few months; and worked with this writer to turn the speeches into a Fortune article, “Mr. Buffett on the Stock Market,” that ran in our Nov. 22, 1999 issue. You will notice that today is precisely 17 years later.

Why this oddball 17-year span of time? It got Buffett’s attention because in 1999 the U.S. stock market has just finished two wildly different—and aberrant—17-year periods that Buffett realized could be the framework for a speech. He wanted as well to build on to the framework, adding a prediction for the 17 years that began as 1999 moved to a close.

The initial 17-year period that Buffett had in his frame of reference ran from 1964 to 1981, when stock market returns were traumatically bad: The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 1964 at 874 and 1981 at 875. “Now I’m known as a long-term investor and a patient guy,” said a Buffett quote in Fortune’s article, “but that is not my idea of a big move.”

The simplified explanation for this aberrant investing disaster was a dramatic rise in interest rates during the period: Rates on long-term government bonds went from 4% at year-end 1964 to more than 15% in 1981. Inevitably, as Buffett spelled out in Fortune, rising interest rates exert a drag on equity prices. In this particular 17-year period, the drag was strong enough to overwhelm an almost-quintupling of the nation’s GDP, an economic indicator that normally would have been accompanied by roaring gains for the stock market.

There then arrived the second 17-year period, beginning at the end of 1981 and extending through 1998. In those years, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker hammered down both interest rates and inflation rates. In response, equities rose strongly. And so, in time, did corporate profits—“not steadily,” Buffett said, “but nonetheless with real power. “ The Dow, in that 17-year period, rose more than ten-fold, going from 875 to a stunning 9,181.

By then, unsurprisingly, most investors weren’t thinking about outliers. They were instead sure beyond a doubt that they were both brilliant at stock-picking and entitled to the riches they were accumulating. A Paine Webber and Gallup Organization survey released in July, 1999, when the Dow had added another 2000 points, found that the least experienced investors—those who had invested for less than five years—expected annual returns over the next 10 years of 22.6%. Those who had invested for more than 20 years expected 12.9%.

Well, noted Buffett, as he summed up his opinions in the second half of 1999, returns of that magnitude just weren’t going to happen. Instead, he foresaw (without using these words) a sort of reverting to the mean, in which the investing world, going forward, would be locked into the fate of the normal suspects, interest rates and corporate profits.

And here he saw a middling result. Net of the trading and management costs that investors incur, he said—implying that these costs could strip investors of a percentage point in their return—he predicted they might realize annual returns in the 17-year period from late 1999 to late 2016 that would be a so-so 6%.

Today, with the 17 years having passed, what is the answer?

First of all, be reminded that the stock market—as it is presented by the Dow and Standard & Poor’s indices, for example—does not deal in “net” returns. What you monitor on your computer screens are gross returns, before any trading and management costs are deducted.

But the record shows that the period’s gross returns are anemic enough to confirm Buffett’s general accuracy. From mid-November, 1999, to last Friday’s trading day, the annualized total return to investors from the Dow Industrials was 5.9%.

Having proved his ability to handle crystal ball work, Buffett, 86, was asked by this writer—an 87-year-old friend of his—whether he might care to make a prediction about total returns over the 17 years starting now and ending late in 2033. He declined to name a rate of return, explaining “I have to be careful what I say because I have no doubt that you will be around then to write another follow-up report.”

Buffett did, nonetheless, proffer three thoughts about those coming 17 years.

First, he believes that an investor in a low-cost S&P index fund who reinvests all dividends will do better—very likely substantially better—than an investor who buys a 17-year government bond and reinvests all of his coupons in the same instrument.

Second, he suspects that amateur, “do-nothing” investors following the same index fund strategy will in aggregate end up with results superior to those realized by investors who choose to employ professionals charging high fees.

Third, he predicts that many professionals who fail their investors by underperforming the index funds will get very rich in the process of doing so.

Retired senior editor-at-large Carol Loomis is a longtime friend of Warren Buffett’s. She has also been a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder for many years.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com