- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on the unlikely CEO trying to reform the U.S.’s corporate capital.
- The big leadership story: Blackstone’s COO-turned-‘accidental influencer’
- The markets: Mixed globally after Trump extended the Iran ceasefire.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. What’s next for Delaware, home to 1 million people and about 2.2 million businesses? Remember when Elon Musk told peers to flee America’s corporate capital, moving Tesla and SpaceX to Texas after a court tried to overturn his trillion-dollar pay package? Several companies heeded his call—TripAdvisor, Roblox, Dropbox, Affirm, Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, even Trump Media & Technology Group—sparking talk of “DExit.”
But Delaware is hard to quit. While states like Nevada, Texas, and Wyoming are becoming more popular places to incorporate, Delaware is still home to more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies and most recent IPOs. Its Supreme Court recently upheld Senate Bill 21, a 2025 overhaul dubbed the “billionaires’ bill” as it limits shareholder suits. And the spirit of Musk still looms large: his team recently accused a Delaware judge of bias over her “heart” on a LinkedIn post, so she used Scrabble tiles to reassign some cases to colleagues, one of whom ruled this month that Tesla could move three shareholder suits to Texas. Barring some appeals, Musk’s days in Delaware may finally be over.
But one CEO is still invested in the future of the state despite moving his company elsewhere.
TransPerfect CEO Phil Shawe understands Delaware courts like few others. In 2014, his co-founder and former fiancé petitioned the court to seize control of the profitable translation management company, forcing Shawe to buy her stake at auction in 2018, a process that he says was opaque, unfair and cost $250 million in legal fees. Shaw moved TransPerfect to Nevada, growing revenues from $600 million then to $1.3 billion today.
Unlike Musk, Shawe stuck around, financing a $2 million anti-Delaware ad campaign during Musk’s battles, helping elect Gov. Matt Meyer in 2024, and lobbying for changes such as mandatory audio in the courtroom, stricter conflict-of-interest rules, and financial disclosure requirements for judges. “I happen to have a lot of hard-earned knowledge that not a lot of people have, and thankfully, the means to do something with it,” says Shawe. He acknowledges Delaware’s continued popularity and argues he isn’t trying to kill it. “What we’ve been trying to do for the past couple years is not tell people to leave Delaware but actually help Delaware reform its courts.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
Blackstone’s ‘accidental influencer’
Jonathan Gray, Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer, has become an "accidental influencer" with his viral jogging dispatches on LinkedIn. The videos, which regularly generate half a million impressions and 100,000 views, are a sign of an unwritten rule in the C-suite: Show up on social media.
Kevin Warsh vs. lawmakers
Kevin Warsh, Federal Reserve chair nominee, is either a “battle-tested” economist or a “sock puppet” for President Donald Trump, depending on who you listened to during his appearance before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. Here’s what he said during the hearing.
Feedback on Apple’s new CEO
Reactions to John Ternus replacing Tim Cook as Apple CEO stretched from Wall Street to the White House. Warren Buffett, Sam Altman, and President Trump all chimed in, while analysts on Wall Street kept their buy ratings in the wake of the seismic shift at the company.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up 0.61% this morning. The last session closed down 0.63%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.15% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.01% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.40%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.66%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1.22%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 0.46%. India’s NIFTY 50 is down 0.64%. Bitcoin was up at $78K.
Around the watercooler
America’s ‘silent army’ of skilled tradespeople are retiring with no one to replace them—and the price tag could hit $1 trillion a year by Sydney Lake
The Trump administration has yet to deploy a key legal move that would render tariff refund applications a ‘waste of time,’ federal litigator warns by Sasha Rogelberg
Investors are valuing Polymarket at a discount to archrival Kalshi—and its crypto ties could be one reason why by Jack Kubinec
JetBlue told a grieving customer to clear his cookies after a $230 price hike—then deleted the evidence by Catherina Gioino
‘They’re sweating’: Why Japanese giants are pouring money into Silicon Valley startups by Nicholas Gordon
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Andrew Wyrich, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
