- In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune publishes its 2026 Most Powerful Women list.
- The big leadership story: CEOs are starting to rethink their predictions of an AI jobs apocalypse.
- The markets: Mixed globally after the S&P 500 hits another high.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. When Jane Fraser became CEO of Citigroup five years ago, she took over an institution struggling with dysfunction, from cumbersome IT systems to a complacent culture that had produced embarrassing and costly mistakes. Some held her up as an example of the “glass cliff,” where women break through the glass ceiling to get top roles under circumstances that make it almost impossible to succeed. But Fraser did succeed, turning a sprawling bank behemoth into a more streamlined and high-performing company. As a result, Fraser is No. 1 on the 2026 Fortune Most Powerful Women list that was published this morning.
It’s been a tough journey and, as Fraser tells my colleague Claire Zillman in this accompanying feature, there’s more to do in terms of shedding jobs and underperforming parts of the portfolio. But with a stock price that’s up by more than two-thirds over the past year, investors clearly believe that she can do it.
The women on this year’s list, now in its 29th year, oversee a combined 11.8 million employees and $7.3 trillion in annual revenue. They also hold 180 board seats and work across 20 countries and territories. In addition to measuring leaders by the size and health of their businesses, we evaluated their influence, innovation, career trajectories, and efforts to make business better.
As Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Editor Emma Hinchliffe notes in her opening essay, this year’s ranking highlights the rise of women in realms from AI to Big Oil. Hinchliffe suggests keeping an eye on the women CFOs at leading AI companies, from Sarah Friar at OpenAI to Amy Hood at Microsoft: “They are making spending decisions that will determine the future of their companies, this technology, and even the global economy.”
One way to do that is to subscribe to Sheryl Estrada’s CFO Daily newsletter. For a deeper dive on some of the women on this year’s list, check out Ellie Austin’s profile of Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and Hinchliffe’s profile of Sam’s Club CEO Latriece Watkins.
And speaking of potential glass cliffs, Meg O’Neill has her hands full as the new CEO of BP. Chairman Albert Manifold was ousted yesterday over “conduct issues.” O’Neill became the first woman to run BP in April after Murray Auchincloss stepped down amid shareholder pressure. He got that job in 2024 when Bernard Looney was fired for serious misconduct. BP has underperformed its Big Oil peers since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which CEO Tony Hayward lost his job after saying “I would like my life back” in response to the tragedy.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
AI job-loss predictions get a rethink
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn in an interview yesterday that he was “pretty wrong” in earlier predictions that AI would gut white-collar jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has made similar concessions as recently as this month.
Standard Chartered CEO apologizes over AI replacement language
Meanwhile, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters apologized on LinkedIn over the weekend after saying that “lower-value human capital” at the bank could be replaced by AI. “I have received a lot of support for the messages in my previous post but still get questions about my choice of words, which I know has caused upset to some colleagues. For that, I am sorry,” he wrote.
Rare earths expose a U.S. supply chain vulnerability
McKinsey warns that the world could face a magnetic rare earths shortfall of up to 30% by 2035. Recent Chinese export controls have exposed the U.S.’s dependence on rare earths, and a resilient mine-to-magnet supply chain remains years away.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up 0.29% this morning. The last session closed up 0.61%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.41% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.15% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was flat. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 2.25%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.80%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1.06%. India’s NIFTY 50 is down 0.27%. Bitcoin was down at $76K.
Around the watercooler
Billionaire Mark Cuban says bye-bye Bitcoin: Why he is ‘disappointed’ by crypto by Jack Kubinec
Largest study of AI hiring algorithms to date finds ‘clear racial disparities’ — over 25% of Black applicants tainted by bias by Nick Lichtenberg
As China bets its future on AI by cutting arts degrees, Jensen Huang says parents shouldn’t worry about what their kids study by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
Goldman Sachs just ran some ugly numbers on the SaaSPocalypse—and found hedge funds are dumping software and piling into semis by Nick Lichtenberg
America is becoming less neighborly, and it’s hurting Gen Z and millennials’ chances at economic mobility by Tristan Bove
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
