- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady interviews incoming Upstart CEO Paul Gu.
- The big leadership story: Workers’ job anxiety is poisoning the workplace and undermining AI initiatives.
- The markets: Mostly down as uncertainty over Iran lingers.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. How are millennial CEOs viewing AI opportunities? These digital natives have decades ahead of them in leadership roles. Take Paul Gu, who dropped out of Yale to become a Thiel Fellow and co-found Upstart as its chief technology officer in 2012. On May 1, he will step up to succeed Dave Girouard as CEO of the $1 billion-a-year AI lender. I spoke with Gu about his aspirations for his company, his generation, and the future.
On his company: “I think we can build something much, much bigger than what we’ve already built, and I think that it can be one of the most important generational companies of our time. Almost everybody is significantly mispriced in credit, or over-verified in credit. I want one of the answers to that question—how can AI make people’s lives better?—to be: ‘It made me dramatically richer in a direct way, because it radically improved my ability to get low-price credit.’ If you can make money cheaper, everyone just gets richer…You could literally make every single person in the society 10% wealthier if you just moved the cost of credit.”
On millennials: “The really big thing that happened to us was that we really screwed up as a society when it came to the housing market and the ability to access housing. In the last five years, it’s gotten outright impossible. I think of them as having a certain high level of economic anxiety, and I would compress the 80–20 of it down to interest rates and housing.”
On AI: “We’re in a moment where people are extremely pessimistic about AI and what it will do for them—and they’re somewhat justified because so many of the early applications have been about optimizing short‑attention‑span entertainment and betting, not improving real‑world economic outcomes. Right now, people look at AI and think, ‘It’s going to take my job and create deepfakes of me I don’t want on the internet.’ If we do our job, one of the concrete counterexamples will be that AI made their financial lives meaningfully better.”
On the future: “I think the next generation’s problem is not going to be a crisis of economics, it’s going to be a crisis of meaning. People can all get on UBI (universal basic income), but if they don’t feel like they’re meaningfully contributing to the overall success of the society or its production, then I think there’s going to be a lot harder questions than just whether you can afford X, Y, or Z.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
‘FOBO’ rises among workers
A recent survey of 39,000 workers in 36 countries found that fewer than one in four felt confident that their job is safe from elimination. Workers’ job insecurity is manifesting itself as “FOBO” or the “fear of becoming obsolete,” and the sentiment is poisoning the workplace just as CEOs demand more creativity and productivity in the AI age. What can leaders do? It comes down to communication.
Inside a Singaporean engineering giant
In Fortune’s new Asia Agenda column, Seatrium CEO Chris Ong describes how he turned a messy shipyard merger into a profitable offshore oil and wind giant just as geopolitics tightened supply. The state-owned firm is thriving worldwide, with some notable exceptions. “We originally thought the U.S. would be the next major destination that will grow,” Ong says. “But it’s still very nascent, very state-driven rather than federal-driven.”
Rapid-fire AI updates
OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-5.5, to paid subscribers. The new version comes just six weeks after the last and underscores how fierce the battle for enterprise companies has become. OpenAI’s president said the new model is “a big step towards more agentic and intuitive computing.”
The markets
S&P 500 futures are down 0.01% this morning. The last session closed down 0.41%. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 1.01% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.72% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.97%. China’s CSI 300 was down. 0.35%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.24%. South Korea’s KOSPI was flat. India’s NIFTY 50 is down 1.17%. Bitcoin was up at $78K.
Around the watercooler
The starter home is dying. Better.com’s CEO says AI is the only thing that can save it by Jake Angelo
When interest on national debt overtook military spending, it triggered a limit where the U.S. may ‘cease to be a great power,’ warns Hoover historian by Eleanor Pringle
The Gen Z Pout and the Gen Z Stare are both a warning to Fortune 500 CEOs by Nick Lichtenberg
Despite nearing their 60s, nearly four in 10 Americans heading towards the end of their careers don’t even have a retirement account by Emma Burleigh
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Andrew Wyrich, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
