It turns out, OpenAI’s first hardware device is a bit more prosaic: a keyboard.

On July 15, OpenAI debuted the Codex Micro, a $230 square keyboard with a 12-key pad, a joystick, and neon lights. Targeted specifically at computer coders who use OpenAI’s Codex tool, the Micro keyboard is a one-off project that OpenAI developed with boutique keyboard firm Work Louder. It’s completely separate from the consumer gadget—the so-called AI companion—that’s expected to be released sometime next year.

That hasn’t crimped demand for the Codex Micro keyboard however.

It sold out the day it went on sale in about 12 hours, and some of the lucky few who snagged one are now re-selling them on eBay. One is listed now for $1,850, though the seller is unlikely to make the sale. Looking at past sales on eBay, the biggest bounty was $1,250, listed on July 16, one day after release.

Prices have steadily declined since, selling for around $800-$1,000 in the next week after release. Today, they’re going for around $450, which is still well above the list price. Most sellers are in the U.S., though others hail from France, the Netherlands, and Ireland.

Work Louder

The company has no plans to restock. But anyone who missed out can grab a virtually identical item (in the color black) from Work Louder, the boutique keyboard company OpenAI partnered with to create the device.

The device aims to make it easier for developers to track their progress in Codex, OpenAI’s flagship coding assistant that rivals Anthropic’s Claude Code. An LED ring around the keyboard lights up red, orange, green, or blue, to signal if there’s an error or if the AI agent is still working on a task, for example. Turning the dial adjusts the AI’s effort for a given task. The joystick initiates common tasks such as debugging an error or refactoring code.

Still, $450 for a tiny keyboard is not necessarily a bargain. Some of the product’s target audience—programmers—were quick to call it superfluous. “You can get a programmable keyboard, with a knob, for 18 bucks,” said one Redditor. Another commenter posted a link to open-source software to program any keyboard to have similar functions.

Of course, anyone buying one is likely viewing it as a collectible—an artifact from the dawn of the AI age, when OpenAI reigned as one of the new technology’s standard bearers. OpenAI has no plans to restock the device, but Work Louder, company that manufactured the product in partnership with OpenAI, sells a version on its website that features the Codex integration (but which doesn’t bear the OpenAI branding).

Lacking hardware experience, OpenAI taps Work Louder

The idea for the Codex Micro originated on OpenAI’s merchandise team, which intended to sell the product in its online store, Supply Co. The store began as a private place for OpenAI employees to grab some company swag. But in December 2025, OpenAI briefly opened it to the public in honor of its tenth anniversary, Quartz reports.

Social media promptly did what social media does best, and made fun of the items. Some people called the minimalist, streetwear-inspired hoodies and tote bags “tasteslop” and “nerd merch,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

“OpenX started to get a little bit of heat for their merch,” said Mike Di Genova, co-founder of Work Louder. That pushed the OpenAI team to want to “step up their merch game.”

OpenAI reached out to Di Genova later that month, looking to develop a product geared toward developers, who the company sees as an early adopter group.

OpenAI and Work Louder finalized their concept in a few months, and OpenAI placed a large order of the devices. “I thought it was going to take at least a month to sell through the inventory,” Di Genova said, laughing in disbelief. “It was limited stock, but they purchased a lot.” (Neither or OpenAI or Work Louder were willing to disclose the exact number.)

A testing ground for future OpenAI devices

The Micro is not directly connected with OpenAI’s buzzy upcoming hardware device, which it’s currently cooking up with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive. But it’s a testing ground that’s proving out two concepts key to that effort: Hardware (a physical way to interact with OpenAI’s software), and voice. Now that all the Micro devices are out in the wild, OpenAI is monitoring user feedback and discussing it regularly in a Slack channel, which Di Genova is also a part of.

The Micro has a microphone button. Pressing it gives them easy access to speak to the AI, providing verbal instructions. OpenAI last week released a digital microphone button for ChatGPT Work, a desktop app that merges ChatGPT and Codex.

OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman called voice the “interface of the future” for computing since “it means the computer moves closer to you rather than you having to contort yourself around the machine.” He predicted that we will one day look back on “clicking and typing” as a “phase.”

It remains to be seen if Brockman’s prediction is correct, and if it’s feasible to do detailed tasks on the computer, such as in-depth editing and prompting, exclusively through voice. But for now, many in the AI industry see hardware as a way for companies like OpenAI to differentiate themselves.

“There’s this quote from Steve Jobs where he says, ‘If you want to make great hardware, make software,'” Di Genova said. “I think we’ve quite literally reached the point where now we’re on the backswing of that pendulum. If you want to make great software, make hardware, because basically basically there’s no moat anymore.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A decade ago, Altman said, superintelligent AI felt like a distant dream, something he and his colleagues discussed around the lunch table without expecting to see it themselves. That has changed rapidly as AI development has accelerated.

“We are now, like, in the singularity,” Altman said in an interview on the Relentless podcast published over the weekend. “This is the moment.”

It’s easy to see why he might have a point. Last week, an agent powered by two OpenAI models broke out of a testing environment called a “sandbox,” got internet access, and attacked open source AI platform Hugging Face to try to cheat on an internal evaluation.

While some labeled the incident a marketing stunt, it sparked panic among those who fear advanced AI could someday threaten humanity.

Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI and has warned about AI risks for years, joined the debate on X, writing, “We are in the Singularity,” in response to a post about recent AI advances, including the Hugging Face incident.

With humanity on the cusp of an era when technology will exceed human abilities, Altman said he’s finally looking beyond superintelligent AI to what comes after.

“It’s the first time in like more than a decade I’ve thought about what is the next thing,” he said.

The two influential AI leaders’ comments have also brought fresh attention to a term once associated mostly with science fiction.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil helped popularize “the singularity” with his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. In it, he predicted AI would reach human-level intelligence around 2029 and that it would accelerate until humans and computers essentially merge around 2045.

In a June 2025 blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity,” Altman offered a different theory by arguing that this transformation would unfold gradually as increasingly improving AI capabilities become routine.

Despite the doomerism that has prevailed in recent years, Altman embraces the development of superintelligent AI as a positive thing. 

“I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world. I’m excited to get to work on that,” he said over the weekend.

But Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, doesn’t think the so-called singularity is upon us quite yet. Even the Hugging Face incident, he added, isn’t proof that AI has become an independent intelligence.

“Part of the singularity would be escaping the sandbox and losing control of the AI,” Jackson told Fortune. “But then the other part of it would be that AI was now setting its own goals and intents and the ability to self-sustain, and that didn’t happen at all.”

To be sure, the models crossed a boundary, said Jackson, but they were ultimately trying to complete a task assigned by humans. When they did so in a way researchers hadn’t anticipated, OpenAI was also still able to shut them down.

The episode offers less proof that the singularity has arrived than a glimpse of how difficult it may be to recognize if it does.

In Kurzweil’s version, the singularity involves an unmistakable break in which machine intelligence overtakes humanity and technological progress becomes impossible to predict. 

Meanwhile, Altman sees the transformation beginning while people remain in control and daily life still seems normal. Each new capability AI takes on, therefore, could be treated as another sign that the transformation has arrived. 

But what’s more important, according to Jackson, is whether AI systems remain aligned with human intentions. 

“Let’s just focus on deploying our technology with the right governance and continuing to make sure we’re in control of what’s happening,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

On social media, some have begged and pleaded for him to give at least some of his wealth away, or even all of it, but Musk has been pretty direct about his relationship with philanthropy. 

“I agree with love of humanity, and I think we should try to do things that help our fellow human beings,” Musk told Nikhil Kamath for the WTF podcast in an episode published in December 2025. “But it’s very hard.”

That’s an interesting conception from a person who also believes money won’t matter anymore because of AI, so Nobel Prize–winning economist Daron Acemoglu called Musk out for it on Monday.

“A proposed pledge for Elon Musk,” wrote Acemoglu in an X post on Monday. “An opportunity to put your money where your mouth is. If money won’t matter in 2036, why don’t you pledge to donate your current wealth of approximately $1 trillion to charity no later than 2036. This would establish with great credibility your belief in the powers of AI and technology.”

Acemoglu also argued it would assuage people around the world who are concerned about the political and social power of billionaires and trillionaires. 

“The charities chosen for this should be approved as effective and non-ideological by an impartial body,” he added. 

And in somewhat of a shocking response, Musk replied to Acemoglu and said: “I am actually going to do something along these lines!”

While Musk didn’t elaborate on what this means, it’s a complete 180 of how the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has historically approached philanthropy. He’s also been openly critical of other major philanthropists like Scott, having recently said her efforts make the world worse off.

Musk’s history with philanthropy

On June 27, Pubity, a major viral media and social news brand, posted on X about Scott’s giving, saying her $26 billion in donations has made her one of the “biggest individual donors in history,” and the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos indeed confirmed as the biggest megadonor in 2025.

Then, an account with 22,500 followers with the name @FrenlyOfficer, whose bio describes them as a “Heterosexual Alpha Male,” replied to Pubity’s post about Scott, saying, “Unfortunately, she’s spending it making the world a worse place.” Musk responded to @FrenlyOfficer agreeing with the sentiment, saying: “Sadly, yes.”

While Musk’s foundation stood at about $14 billion as of the end of 2025, according to files obtained by the New York Times, he’s only largely given to organizations that “narrowly track” with the interests of his own businesses. For example, three-quarters of Musk’s total giving in 2024, $370 million, went to a nonprofit in Texas led by his top aide.

“That nonprofit appears to provide a benefit to Mr. Musk’s business empire,” according to the NYT. “It operates an elementary school in a rural area where many of his employees live, near a cluster of Mr. Musk’s companies.”

So with Musk saying in the past that philanthropy is hard and that his track record shows he’s only given to things within his own interest, it will be interesting to see whether the world’s richest man will live up to what he wrote on his own platform, X, this week.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Federal Open Market Committee convenes Tuesday and Wednesday, marking his second meeting as chair. After his first one last month, he told reporters there was a “good family fight” about rates, though central bankers voted unanimously to keep them steady.

That’s a phrase he has used frequently in recent months as he seeks so-called regime change at the Fed. Since his nomination hearing in April, Warsh has mentioned “family fight“ publicly 13 times, according to a CNBC tally.

But if the June FOMC meeting was a good family fight, the temperature for the next one could go up a notch. And unlike last month’s unanimous vote, Wall Street sees at least two dissents in favor of tightening policy at the upcoming meeting. That’s because much has changed.

Most notably, the U.S.-Iran ceasefire has collapsed, and renewed fighting has sent oil prices back up again. This time around, oil stockpiles are nearing operational lows, while ship traffic is now being attacked in the Red Sea and Black Sea as well as in the Persian Gulf.

In addition, chip shortages owing to the AI boom have resulted in price hikes for consumer electronics, with hyperscalers showing no signs that their capital expenditure frenzy is cooling off.

Several Fed officials have signaled they have run out of patience with elevated inflation, which has exceeded their 2% target for five years. After waiting out a series of supply shocks by looking through temporary price spikes, they are ready to bring down the hammer.

A better-than-expected consumer price index for June helped ease fears of an imminent rate hike. But as oil keeps rising, investors are pricing in 34.2% odds that the Fed will lift rates by a quarter point on Wednesday, up from 12.8% a week ago, according to CME Group’s FedWatch tool.

“The July FOMC will be a family feud … just as Kevin Warsh intended,” Oscar Munoz, head of U.S. economics at TD Securities, said in a post. “And the survey says … policy will likely stay on hold for an additional meeting. Hawkish momentum is building, however. We expect two hawkish dissents.”

Wilford Harewood—Disney/Getty Images

He added that hawkish voices on the Fed are growing louder, while noting that a persistent surge in energy prices and/or more signs the AI boom is stoking inflation could trigger a rate hike.

Munoz also pointed out that Fed Governor Chris Waller warned: “Sternly staring at inflation until it melts before our withering gaze is not an option.”

Meanwhile, Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan said earlier this month that “inflation has been too high, for too long, and does not appear to be on track all the way back to 2%,” with price risks to the upside.

Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack also said inflation is too high and that the labor market is “right around my level of maximum employment,” indicating more concern for prices versus jobs.

“For the first time in my tenure, I’m hearing from businesses who say they think we need to take action to curb inflation, and from consumers who can’t make ends meet about a growing sense of despair,” she wrote in a social media post.

Like Munoz, JPMorgan chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli predicted a “contested decision” at the Fed with at least two hawkish dissents from Hammack and Logan.

But he also highlighted signs of patience coming from Vice Chairman Philip Jefferson, Governor Lisa Cook, and New York Fed President John Williams.

Given their stances, a rate hike would require an “impassioned case” from Warsh to get a majority vote, Feroli said in a note.

Indeed, economists at Bank of America wrote that the spike in oil prices has made the FOMC meeting a close call. While they see rates remaining steady, Warsh could tip the scales.

“Not hiking could challenge the Fed’s credibility on inflation. But raising rates would go against his framework of looking through supply shocks. We think July is Warsh’s call as he has enough votes either way. He has strategic incentives to hike soon,” BofA said, reiterating a forecast for three quarter-point hikes this year. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

By the time Cancro joined what was then called Mike’s Subs, the shop, started by Mike Ingravallo in 1956, was already a mainstay of Cancro’s hometown of Point Pleasant, N.J. But Cancro’s vision would later turn the small operation into Jersey Mike’s—a national chain with 4,000 locations open and under development. 

As the sub chain approaches a potential blockbuster IPO set to value the company at about $8 billion and bring in at least $1.1 billion in immediate proceeds, here’s a look at how Cancro helped turn a mom-and-pop sandwich shop into a franchise giant. 

Cancro, born and raised in Point Pleasant, was a normal teenager with a knack for business from an early age. At only 10 years old, he was mowing lawns for $3 to $5 apiece and picking up the loose change that fell through the boardwalk along Point Pleasant Beach for some spending money, he said on the Our American Stories radio show and podcast earlier this month. 

It was his brother, having worked the year before at Mike’s Subs, who got him a job at the sandwich shop that would later become his life’s work. When he first joined as a 14-year-old in 1971, he started out making $1.75 an hour. Today, his net worth sits at a whopping $4.9 billion, according to Forbes, and should grow after the IPO as he still owns more than 30 million shares in the company, according to Jersey Mike’s S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Before Cancro had even thought about buying what would become Jersey Mike’s, he had planned to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and possibly study law. But he “bought a sub shop instead” and embarked on a 50-year journey to make Jersey Mike’s a national success.

It was Cancro’s mother who told him that the owner of the sub shop was planning on selling, and ambitiously suggested he buy the business. But at first he brushed off her suggestion.

“I sort of laughed at her, turned, went up the stairs, and it took one flight of stairs before a trigger went off of my head,” he said on the podcast.

Soon after, he called the owner of the sub shop to tell him he was interested, and quickly started searching for the six-figure loan he needed to buy the business.

“I went out literally knocking on doors, telling people you know, ‘I worked there for four years, I know the business, this is what, you know, I’m looking to do,’” he said.

After approaching several potential investors in nearby towns, he still had no leads.

Eventually, he called up Rod Smith, his former youth football coach, who was also a banker. They met at Smith’s house on a Sunday night and he helped Cancro get the $125,000 loan he needed—which today would be worth about $775,000.

Cancro purchased the shop officially on March 31, 1975, and continued attending high school while running the business. He said he frequently went to his morning classes but then skipped others in the afternoon to go work. 

He almost didn’t graduate because he had missed three months of gym class, but he made up a medical excuse to get by, he said. While some people warned him buying the shop and abandoning his college plans would damage his future, he was confident in his decision.

Cancro operated the original location for more than a decade before beginning to franchise the business and eventually changing the company’s name from Mike’s Subs to Jersey Mike’s. Still, the process of franchising required him to meet with attorneys and juggle a complicated process alone, he said.

“There wasn’t any road map. I had to figure it all out,” he said. “I didn’t have any mentors in business to kind of show me.”

Still, the decision paid off. Soon Jersey Mike’s had opened locations in Ohio and Tennessee, and potential franchisees came running.

“People would come in, try the product: ‘Oh, my goodness, this is great, I want to open up one,’ so that’s how it evolved, and really grew through word of mouth,” he said.

But the journey to success didn’t come without obstacles. In 1991, a recession led to banks in the Northeast sharply restricting financing, which deeply affected a rapidly expanding Jersey Mike’s.

Cancro recalled being $1.5 million to $2 million in the red and even had to liquidate his 401(k) plan to keep the business afloat.

“That was a dark time because it was the first time in my life that I went down and got stripped, sold everything,” he said. 

While Cancro later was able to rehire the employees he had laid off, the struggle to get back to normal took a couple of years. From this experience he learned to resist the temptation to grow too fast, he said.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Jersey Mike’s that valued the chain at $8 billion.

Meanwhile, Cancro stepped down as CEO last year and was succeeded by the former CEO of Wingstop, Charlie Morrison. Cancro is still chairman of the board.

Jersey Mike’s didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Even five decades after his journey with Jersey Mike’s began, Cancro says the chain’s story is just beginning. 

“We believe we are still in the early innings of Jersey Mike’s growth story,” he said in a statement last year when the Blackstone deal was announced.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

James is reportedly toying with living in New York while playing for the Sixers, commuting to games and practices by helicopter. Several basketball insiders posted on X this weekend that James could commute by chopper, and noted NBA insider Shams Charania said the option to live in New York while commuting to Sixers practices and games by helicopter added to Philadelphia’s appeal. James has not disclosed where he’ll actually live.

That presents two issues: being a supercommuter isn’t easy on the taxes, and there’s an ongoing campaign in New York to stop helicopters.

New York wasn’t a hypothetical for him. Sources told Hoops Wire that James’s camp reached out to the Knicks during free agency, but New York wasn’t interested in pursuing him, preferring to keep the roster that had just won a championship intact.

Meanwhile, his 76ers deal is notable even without the commute. James is currently the only active NBA player worth a billion dollars, and he signed a two-year, $8 million contract with Philly, dropping to the league’s veteran’s minimum salary. That represents a pay cut of roughly $48 million, or more than 90% of what he made last season with the Lakers.

By contrast, the Philadelphia are could see a windfall. The Boyd Company, a corporate location consulting firm, projects James’s arrival will generate between $250 million and $430 million in regional economic activity during his first season.

He wouldn’t be the first Sixer to make this exact trip. J.J. Redick, who coached James with the Lakers last season, commuted from his family’s home in Brooklyn to Philadelphia while playing for the 76ers from 2017 to 2019. Wilt Chamberlain did something similar decades earlier, living in New York during the season while playing for Philadelphia and running a nightclub in Harlem.

Helicopter bans, pied-à-terre taxes, and supercommutting costs

The appeal of the helicopter option is speed. A helicopter flight between New York City and Philadelphia takes about 45 minutes, covering roughly 150 kilometers, compared with a car ride of about an hour and a half. Charter operators already run the route regularly, connecting multiple Manhattan lounges to several Philadelphia heliports.

That convenience is colliding with a New York City political fight that’s been building for years. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said during last year’s campaign that he opposed nonessential helicopter travel, after a tourist helicopter crash into the Hudson River killed six people. Now, helicopter opponents are pressing him to follow through by restricting flights from the city’s own heliports. Over the 12 months ending in June, the city logged more than 17,000 helicopter-related noise complaints, and a city council proposal would limit the two city-owned Manhattan heliports to essential flights only.

Then, if James does buy real estate in the city rather than rent, he’ll run into another new cost. New York’s pied-à-terre tax, which took effect July 1, applies to second homes valued at $1 million or more, with properties above $5 million facing a 6.5% annual surcharge. A part-time New York residence—even for a player calling another city home for tax and team purposes—would sit squarely in the tax’s target zone. The New York state governor’s X account posted a joke about James: “LePied-a-Terre.”

Then there’s the tax question tied to the commute itself, which is more complicated than a simple double bill. Ordinary supercommuters face a real asymmetry: New York City has no income tax on nonresidents who work there, so a Philadelphia resident commuting into Manhattan pays nothing to the city itself but is still subject to New York State taxes on those wages.

On the flip side, a New York resident working in Philadelphia owes Philly’s nonresident wage tax on top of full New York State and city resident taxes, and it isn’t settled whether the credit system fully cancels out that overlap.

Regardless of what and where James chooses, many basketball fans online are wondering whether James purposely took the minimum offer so he can finally call New York City home, more than 15 years after he toured his first apartment in the Big Apple. (He never bought it, so a pied-à-terre tax on that does not potentially yet apply to him.)

“Nothing says ‘I’m fully committed to the city of Philadelphia’ like refusing to actually step foot in Pennsylvania unless there’s a game,” wrote one person X.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Others include $400 million into rare-earth miner MP Materials to loosen China’s grip on magnet supply chains; the “golden share” in U.S. Steel retained as a condition of its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel; or the flurry of stakes in quantum computing firms.

But with all that dealmaking, those wary of government’s corruptive tendencies—and of President Donald Trump’s own trading—might want to see some transparency. The portfolio, however, is nowhere to be found. 

There is no consolidated ledger of the government’s holdings; the stakes sit scattered across at least four agencies: 17 deals through Commerce; seven through Defense; six through the Development Finance Corporation; two through Energy. Only one of those, the Development Finance Corporation, has clear statutory authority to own equity at all, under a framework Congress built in 2018 for development deals abroad.

The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. A Treasury spokesperson said agencies report equity interests “in different ways” depending on the legal authority behind each stake.

Some of the “stakes” are signed agreements, while others, including nine quantum computing deals Commerce announced in a single week, remain more ambiguous, closer to term sheets. The most complete public accounting of Washington’s portfolio is kept by the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

“The deals that have been announced to date are only the tip of the iceberg,” Jonathan Hillman, the Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow who maintains that tracker, told Fortune, “and the real test will be whether Washington can build a system to effectively manage its growing portfolio of investments over the long run.”

The best-documented stake in the portfolio is the biggest one. Intel’s August 2025 securities filings name the shareholder: the United States Department of Commerce, counterparty to a “Warrant and Common Stock Agreement” covering 433.3 million shares at $20.47 apiece. It’s a passive stake, with no board seat or information rights, and the government has agreed to vote with Intel’s board on most matters.

Yet some aspects of the deal, in the filings, look strange. Roughly two-thirds of the shares were delivered to Commerce when the deal closed; the rest sit in escrow to be released as Intel hits milestones under a Pentagon chip program, meaning a slice of the government’s marquee holding is not yet in the government’s hands. The clawback and profit-sharing provisions attached to Intel’s earlier $2.2 billion CHIPS Act grant were also eliminated. Grants have strings that these stocks don’t.

In addition, ethics filings revealed that accounts held in the president’s own name began buying Intel in March, months after his administration’s stake sent the stock soaring. No insider trading has been alleged, and the White House says his assets sit in a trust managed by his children; but Trump’s personal holdings are unprecedented for the modern presidency.

For the government’s stakes in private companies—such as Vulcan Elements, xLight, and others—no public securities filings with the SEC exist at all.

Even where the shares can be found, the money is tricky to follow. Federal budget rules, mostly designed for grants and loans, treat an equity purchase as an outlay—money out the door—with very little mechanism for recognizing what comes back, according to research by William Henagan, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. That means the Intel position’s rise from $8.9 billion to $42 billion appears in no budget document.

The Development Finance Corporation, established by Congress in 2018 to make equity investments abroad, is one exception. But the framework has a narrow lens: It was designed for financing ports in developing countries. Yet now it is the closest thing Washington has to a legal template for owning chipmakers.

A DFC spokesperson told Fortune it records its equity postions as investment assets and manages the ownership on a case-by-case basis.

The federal government has held corporate equity at scale once before, and it did so under supervision. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion rescue fund Congress created in October 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, came with a statutory special inspector general who filed quarterly reports to Congress, plus a congressional oversight panel and standing GAO audits to boot.

But even that apparatus was judged insufficient: In 2009, the program’s own inspector general told Congress that taxpayers weren’t being told what recipients were doing with their money.

Today’s sprawling portfolio has none of that. The administration, for its part, has never claimed otherwise;  it has hinted the stakes are the start of something bigger.

“It’s like a down payment on a sovereign wealth fund, which many countries have,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC after the Intel deal was announced.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At a trim six-three, Ackman takes pride in his fit appearance, which he attributes to avoiding sugar and alcohol. He’s not shy about dispensing workout tips to his staff and discussing how many pull-ups he can do: “I’ll say 10,” he notes, adding, “I could do 100 if you give me enough time, though I’d have to rest between sets.” (If a pull-up bar had sprung up from the sidewalk, I have no doubt that he would have leaped upon it to make his point.)

If Ackman feels superhuman these days, it’s understandable: He has just turned his investment firm, Pershing Square, into a public company and simultaneously launched a publicly traded investment fund in an unusual double NYSE listing. The move caps a Wall Street odyssey that began in the 2000s, when he first made a name for himself making bold bets as a short-seller and an activist investor.

His early wins included exposing vulnerabilities in the bond insurer MBIA and anticipating the rise of Chipotle—contrarian investments that led Pershing in its first decade to outperform the S&P fivefold. He has also weathered dramatic stumbles, including a failed $1 billion short-selling campaign aimed at the supplement company Herbalife and a disastrous bet on Valeant Pharmaceuticals that cost Pershing $4 billion. Ackman’s misfires, though, have been offset by some prescient investments in the face of black swan events like the subprime mortgage crisis and COVID, cementing his reputation as one of the shrewdest and most daring risk-takers on Wall Street.

More recently, Ackman has flexed his influence across academic, cultural, and political realms, thanks in large part to his outsize X account, which boasts 2.5 million followers. Indeed, his rising profile as a pugnacious public commentator has arguably exceeded his influence on Wall Street. On X, Ackman banters with the likes of Elon Musk, and launches broadsides at targets such as the former president of his alma mater, Harvard University, whom he helped drive from her chair over the school’s handling of Gaza war protests. He has also been one of the loudest critics of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Ackman relishes financial and digital combat, but he also has an idealistic streak that separates him from some of the tech world billionaires. He is a longtime champion of an idea—government-supported retirement accounts for all Americans—that has gained traction with the Trump administration. He believes such accounts will make more people feel they are sharing in the country’s broader prosperity, and rebuild fading faith in capitalism, which Ackman sees as integral to the American Dream.

In business and in public life, Ackman comes across as a man riding an unstoppable winning streak. But fate recently delivered a painful personal reminder to this master of the universe who has so often bent the world to his will: There are some things that even a powerful billionaire can’t control.

How a short-seller became a culture‑war combatant

Most people have hobbies or interests. Bill Ackman has obsessions. The business world learned this in 2002 during his remorseless short-selling campaign against MBIA, in which Ackman faced down a fierce political and media retaliation campaign and was ultimately vindicated in his claims about the firm’s exposure to toxic mortgage-linked assets in its portfolio.

Ackman has compared the structure of his NYSE-listed fund, Pershing Square USA, to his hero Warren Buffett’s legendary Berkshire Hathaway empire, with its “permanent capital” model. It’s a typically bombastic comparison. The combined value of Pershing Square—the firm and fund—is some $16 billion on the NYSE, while Berkshire Hathaway is worth more than a trillion.

Ackman’s style is not for everyone. The financier Carl Icahn, Ackman’s longtime nemesis and business rival, famously denounced him as a self-righteous crybaby. More recently, former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers—himself hardly a favorite of the left—called Ackman pressuring Harvard to publicly release the names of student protesters “the stuff of Joe McCarthy.”

The same relentlessness that built Ackman’s reputation as a scourge of corporate excess—and, to critics, a bully spoiling for a fight—has increasingly spilled beyond balance sheets and boardrooms. Ackman has become more ideological, expanding his crusades into cultural and academic realms. What was once a highly focused, if combative, investment thesis has evolved into a campaign to defend the moral and economic logic that Ackman believes underpins American capitalism itself. In this year of the nation’s 250th birthday, Ackman worries that the American tradition of celebrating hard-won material success is being displaced by a politics of disparagement and envy. Too many people, he argues, fail to understand that the American Dream is built upon free-market gumption.

“When I grew up, if a guy in my neighborhood got a Corvette, no one resented the guy,” he observes. “Everyone was like, ‘Wow, that’s supercool. Hopefully, someday I can be as successful as that guy so I can buy a Corvette, too.’ We want to get back to that version of America, where people admired people’s success, as opposed to AOC basically saying, ‘If you’re a billionaire, you either committed fraud or you stole from people.’ ” (New York’s Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not respond to a request for comment about Ackman’s remark.)

The wealthy suburb of Chappaqua, N.Y., where Ackman grew up, probably had its share of Corvettes. Ackman describes his own home as comfortable but relatively modest, and recalls that he had to work for any spending money he had. His father, who worked in commercial real estate, made clear to Ackman from a young age that he would have to make his own way and not expect a penny of inheritance.

“My father always said to me, ‘Bill, in life, you have to keep your antennae up,’ ” he told the Wall Street Journal last year. “ ‘Opportunities present themselves. You’ve got to take advantage of them.’”

Fostering opportunity—to be leveraged with hard work—is Ackman’s foundational ethos, says Linda Rottenberg, a friend since Ackman’s undergraduate days at Harvard and the cofounder and CEO of global entrepreneurial network Endeavor. “He’s always been driven, but he was always equally determined to make the world a better place,” she says. “He always has believed that the system should give everyone opportunity, and then you have to make your own way … He wants to try to give everyone opportunity, and to give everyone a shot.”

Spreading the upside of Wall Street

Ackman acknowledges that a growing number of working Americans feel that the opportunity to succeed, or even just to live a comfortable life, no longer exists, that their paychecks can no longer buy a piece of the American Dream. This has resulted, he points out, in a situation where a surge in the stock market is cheered by the roughly 60% of Americans with a stake in it, while the remaining 40%, those without the means or know-how to invest, have nothing to celebrate.

He recalls making this point to President Donald Trump at a gathering of leading Wall Street figures at the White House late last year, telling him: “We’ve got a meaningful percentage of the country who, when the stock market goes up, they’re not participating. If anything, they get resentful.”

The solution he proposes is to ensure that everyone has skin in the game and the opportunity to benefit from markets. In 2020, Ackman wrote an essay for the New York Times calling for the U.S. government to create “birthright” accounts in zero-cost equity index funds that would provide every American with $6,750—an amount that, prohibited from withdrawal until retirement and compounded at a tax-free 8% annual return, would exceed $1 million by age 65.

Daniel Barry—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Ackman endorsed Trump in 2024 after years of supporting Democrats, and called him “the most pro-business president we’ve ever had.” And he found a receptive audience in the president for his thinking on government-supported retirement accounts. He and brokerage founder Charles Schwab campaigned for the expansion of a Biden-era program offering matching funds for IRA accounts as an incentive for lower-income workers to contribute—a program that Trump rebranded as “American Dream Accounts” for workers. “The president said, ‘You know what, Bill? I love this idea,’ ” Ackman recalls. “ ‘Come see me in the White House, and let’s get this done.’ ”

The administration also launched “Trump Accounts” for kids—a program similar to Ackman’s plan that provides $1,000 in seed funding to newborns.

It remains to be seen whether these accounts can meaningfully reduce the country’s widening wealth chasm, or reduce disillusionment among the poor and working class. There’s also the question of how many of those Americans would actually avail themselves of such benefits. To address that concern, Ackman argues that personal finance basics should be taught in schools: “It’s critically important, in order to have a safe retirement, to learn how to invest at a young age,” he says. “You have to start early in order to have a really good outcome.” Ackman has tried to do his part for financial literacy, posting a YouTube video that promises to relate the essentials of finance and investing in under an hour. (It has 13 million views.)

But Ackman is convinced that simply having an investment portfolio of their very own, and watching wealth grow before their eyes, will shift many Americans’ perspective. “Everyone, in my view, needs to participate in capitalism,” he declares. “Otherwise, you’re going to prefer socialism.”

Walking up Seventh Avenue, I observe that he might not be the best emissary for financial inclusion given that, well, he’s a 60-year-old white billionaire in a city that voted for a mayor who has vowed to tax the rich.

“Don’t say that so loud!” interrupts Ackman, looking around at the crowded city street with a laugh—seeming half-amused and half-serious.

Betting on capitalism

As Ackman marches purposefully into Central Park, New York’s crown jewel is noisy with the bustle of tourists, popcorn vendors, and horse-and-carriage drivers waiting for passengers. Its southern entrance is also marked by a newer feature: long shadows cast by the line of massive luxury towers erected in recent years that steal sunlight from the park’s playgrounds and baseball fields. (Ackman himself owns a piece of trophy real estate on this so-called Billionaires’ Row—a 13,500-square-foot unit in the One57 skyscraper that he and a group of friends bought in 2015 as an investment property, for a headline-grabbing $91.5 million.)

There’s no denying that billionaires have shaped the area around Central Park in positive ways, too. The avenues running along the park’s eastern and western edges are framed by museums, art galleries, and concert halls bequeathed by Carnegies, Morgans, and Fricks. Whether you consider them robber barons or industrial visionaries, these figures from America’s Gilded Age left a tangible legacy that benefits millions to this day.

Ben Soskis, a scholar at the Urban Institute, notes that the late 19th century saw the creation of mass concentrations of wealth in a few hands, and that figures from that era established American philanthropy as we know it—focused on education, the arts, and scientific research.

Ackman, who cites the giving of Buffett and Andrew Carnegie as inspirations, follows this tradition, in his way. His Pershing Square Philanthropies (including the Pershing Square Foundation), describes its role as providing “risk capital for philanthropy” and reports more than $1 billion in grants and investments to date.

Broadly, however, Ackman leans toward solutions to society’s problems that tap into private industry and market forces. He envisions a future where there are incentives for companies, on the day they go public, to donate a small percentage of their shares to retirement accounts held by all Americans. “Look, I think of philanthropy as the solution when there isn’t a capitalistic for-profit solution to the problem,” he explains. “But if there is a for-profit solution to the problem, it has a much higher probability of working if it’s a capitalist model.”

Indeed, Ackman suggests, profit-driven companies can often do more to improve lives than any charitable foundation. “I think significance in life ultimately is measured by how positively you affect the largest number of people, and I think you can do that just being a capitalist,” he says. “Jeff Bezos—just by building Amazon—think about the millions of people he’s employed, the cost savings and convenience he’s brought to hundreds of millions of people, the advances in technology, everything else.”

Ultimately, Ackman says, “I want to be measured by my overall impact.”

A different kind of battle

Ackman’s quest for lasting impact has mostly played out on grand stages—in markets, opinion pages, and the halls of power. But lately, his energy has been redirected toward something far more intimate: the fight to save his daughter.

On a quiet, tree-lined side path in Central Park, a different Ackman emerges. He tells a story that has not been reported in the media to date: of the terrible day in February when his family discovered his 26-year-old daughter, Lucy, lying on the floor of her apartment 15 hours after suffering a brain hemorrhage. A person who has experienced many hours of brain compression, as Lucy did, is usually beyond treatment. Miraculously, she regained consciousness after a month. She has lost her voice—an especially painful situation for a writer of TV dialogue—and most of her sight. But she is improving.

Ackman was preparing for Pershing Square’s double IPO during the crisis and its aftermath, and took business calls from the room next to Lucy’s, with breaks in between to avoid leaving her bedside for long. Now, in Central Park, Ackman chokes up as he shows a video of the brave young woman clutching a black dog. In this moment, it’s easy to forget that Ackman is a billionaire; he is simply a parent watching his child struggle.

Michael Nagle—Bloomberg/Getty Images

A beat later, Ackman is back in action mode, talking about the brain institute he plans to build in partnership with Mount Sinai Hospital, where Lucy is being treated. He has purchased a 400,000-square-foot property on Manhattan’s West Side, with additional development rights. The discussion of his plans seems to reinvigorate him.

Back in the cacophony of Fifth Avenue, he reverts to the parry-and-thrust style he likes to use with reporters. “What else have ya got?” he asks. We return to some of his favored bugbears: The New York Times. (“I read it last,” he grumbles.) Harvard University. (“I want to see Harvard succeed,” he says. “[But] I think they’re waiting out the Trump administration.”)

By the time we reach the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s clear Ackman is eager to get to his destination: Mount Sinai, to see Lucy, confer with her doctors, and talk about plans for the brain institute.

This is his new venture and obsession, and his approach is classic Ackman, says Mary Erdoes, CEO of JPMorgan’s Asset and Wealth Management unit, who has worked with him for years: “He’s going to go big,” she says. “His philanthropy has the same passion to it as every company, idea, or anything else—and he is all in.”

This article appears in the August/September issue of Fortune

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The client listened, then asked Barnett, “Can we just buy 10 shares?” Barnett got it done. He likens it to buying a lottery ticket when the jackpot hits $1 billion. You know the odds are slim, but a small bet buys a share of the buzz—and scratches that deep down what-if itch—without jeopardizing your portfolio.

The fear of missing an on-ramp to the next generation of world-changing companies is the most expensive force in the market this summer. Investors call this trio the new Magnificent Three. SpaceX, Anthropic, and eventually OpenAI are the IPOs people are dreaming about, especially if they feel the ache of missing out on Nvidia: $10,000 in Nvidia a decade ago would be worth roughly $1.8 million today. When SpaceX went public, more than 500 million shares traded—marking the second-heaviest first-day IPO volume in Nasdaq history, behind only Facebook’s 580 million in 2012.

But here’s the thing. If you missed day one, all is not lost. And in fact, history shows you may have better opportunities to buy in the future.

The typical (median) IPO is down about 26% three years after its first-day closing price, and some of the initial winners aren’t the ones that become household names. Familiar with the biotechs Abgenix or Enzo Biochem? They had stellar debuts, up 2,071% and 2,445% from their first-day close, data from IPO expert Jay Ritter shows. However, they eventually cooled while it was the patient investors that backed Moderna who saw the fifth-highest return among the 1,020 life-science IPOs from 1980 to 2024.

Here are three top rules investing pros use to evaluate the biggest IPOs.

Rule No. 1: Don’t buy the first day.

Barnett has some cold water to pour on the hot IPO summer. If the shares are easy to get, it’s probably because more privileged buyers already passed. SpaceX spent more than two decades as a private company, and its early investors hold 12.5 billion shares at an average cost of $6.48. Elon Musk’s space company then priced its shares at $135; the stock opened at $150; and it ended its first day on a 19% surge at $160.95.

Even if you got in at $135, that’s a hefty markup for a company trading at about 95 times its trailing annual sales, based on SpaceX’s $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue and $1.77 trillion IPO valuation.

That doesn’t mean public markets are a dead end—far from it, argues Matt Witheiler of Wellington Management, who invests in companies before they go public. Yes, more and more value is being created while a company is private. For instance, SpaceX grew from a startup into a $2 trillion company before it raised gross proceeds of $85.7 billion in its IPO.

“But that does not mean there is not value creation in the public market as well,” notes Witheiler. Look at the scoreboard, he says. The world had never seen a trillion-dollar public company until Apple crossed the line in 2018. Eight years later there are 16, with Nvidia pushing toward $5 trillion.

Just like at a job, the first day is just that and usually isn’t the standout. A newly public stock stays “unseasoned” for about three years, explains Avery Marquez, director of investment strategies at Renaissance Capital, and those years are usually its most volatile and transformative period. Better entry points often open up months after the IPO, when all the hype has died down. SpaceX spiked to $225 within days of the IPO, then fell back to $160. Missing the IPO does not mean you’ve missed out on anything.

Rule No. 2: Follow the revenue.

Witheiler has a blunt instrument for telling a lasting company from a good story.

“You show me the numbers, and it’s obviously real or not,” the Wellington private-company money manager says.

By early 2026, OpenAI’s annualized run rate figures had crossed $25 billion. By May, Anthropic’s had reached roughly $47 billion and publicly guided to more than $50 billion. That’s a far cry from the dotcom bust, when investors bought companies that looked cheap on an “eyeball basis” but had no sales underneath.

“We have companies whose customers are opening their wallets and spending gigantic amounts of money,” Witheiler says. It’s a meaningful tell.

Still, the addressable market has to be “absolutely unbounded,” he notes—like the orbital data centers from SpaceX that could perhaps be among the largest data centers ever. The takeaway is to ask what the company sells, who’s paying for it, and whether it all seems big enough to be worth the hype.

Rule No. 3: Read the prospectus.

Every fund manager who bought SpaceX read its S-1—the disclosure document every company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission before going public. It’s free and easy to read, and you can read it, too, says Marquez of Renaissance Capital.

When it comes to retail investors, “a lot of people don’t,” she notes. “They read the headlines, and that’s pretty much it.”

Case in point: The headlines will tell you Musk aims to build a human colony on Mars with 1 million inhabitants, and that if he ever does, it’ll help him make $1 trillion. The prospectus will tell you that SpaceX doesn’t think he’ll ever do it and hasn’t set aside a penny of that $1 trillion, but it’s giving him the shares underlying the pay package before he sends a speck of dust to Mars anyway. You’ll also see that control of SpaceX resides firmly with Musk via billions of Class B super-voting shares that convert to Class A if he ever sells.

The prospectus is also where a company priced on a five- or 10-year growth story details how it plans to achieve this, because what matters most is whether it can execute. All that happens post-IPO.

One final tip: Look for the picks and shovels, says Bryan Wong, a portfolio manager at Osterweis Capital Management who manages its small-cap growth strategy. All the infrastructure and tooling companies (some already public) offer a much bigger field to pick a winner from—giving you a much better shot at owning the next Nvidia, rather than the next Enzo Biochem.

This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “The insider’s guide to betting on trillion-dollar IPOs.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At the time, the same could be said of GE. When Culp took the helm in 2018, the colossal conglomerate that Jack Welch built into the most valuable and admired enterprise in America teetered on the brink of collapse. The sprawling business model that competitors once envied had become a liability—unwieldy, capital-intensive, and increasingly unable to compete in focused, fast-moving markets. Culp first shrank a crushing debt load and radically retooled operations to remake GE as a durable profit-spinner, then orchestrated a split into three publicly traded players that started via the spinoff of GE HealthCare in early 2023, and culminated in the separation of power franchise GE Vernova and GE Aerospace in April 2024. Culp went from running the whole show to piloting GE’s longtime crown jewel, the jet-engine maker.

On Culp’s first day as CEO, GE’s market cap measured just $96 billion, down over 80% from its peak in September 2000. Today, the valuations of the three enterprises total $689 billion. Combined, they’d rank as one of the top industrial companies in the U.S. by market value, second only to Tesla ($1.5 trillion), and 16th overall, edging the likes of Visa, J&J, and ExxonMobil. Since Culp arrived, the trio has garnered annualized returns of roughly 30%, twice the record for the S&P 500. The performances of GE Vernova and GE Aerospace stocks are particularly notable in their just over two years as independents. The former has jumped over 600%, while the latter has risen more than 160%. (GE HealthCare, the smallest by far of the three, gained only 16% as a standalone, but is strongly profitable.)

According to a number of CEOs and investors Fortune interviewed, Culp’s achievement likely towers as the top comeback in modern business history. “I don’t know of any turnaround that matches it,” says Kevin Sharer, the former Amgen chief who taught at Harvard alongside Culp. Nelson Peltz, CEO of activist firm Trian, took a big position in GE, and Peltz’s then-partner Ed Garden served as an influential dissident director pushing for the regime change that helped put Culp in the CEO seat. Says Peltz: “I was sure GE was going to file for Chapter 11. Then Larry arrived and performed the most amazing rescue I’ve ever read about or borne witness to.”

How did Culp pull off this remarkable turnaround? By deploying a playbook he runs from the factory floor, not the boardroom—one he first learned decades ago, at the foot of an exacting team of sensei in Tokyo, screaming at him in Japanese.

As a kid, Culp witnessed firsthand what it took to run a business. His mom and dad employed about a dozen people at the welding and machine shop that his grandfather founded in 1938 in Silver Spring, Md. “I still have my grandfather’s payroll register to remind me of the importance those modest amounts meant to families,” he says. Upon graduating from Harvard Business School in 1990, the hottest destinations for newly minted MBAs were consulting and investment banking. But Culp saw a big future in the out-of-vogue field of manufacturing. He joined Danaher of Washington, D.C., a midsize maker of hand tools for mechanics.

In just three years, Culp secured his first P&L running Veeder-Root, a manufacturer of gauges for gas station tanks, and proved so successful heading a series of other bigger and bigger Danaher units that in 2001, he rose to CEO at age 38. Over the next 13 years, he constructed a conglomerate resembling a mini-GE, taking Danaher’s revenues from $3.9 billion to $20 billion; multiplying its market cap almost sevenfold to $54 billion; and delivering shareholders five times the returns of the S&P 500.

In his first year at Danaher, Culp had a revelatory experience that would forever forge his approach to leadership: He spent a week learning the Toyota Production System from the original TPS masters at an air-conditioning plant in Tokyo. “If you’ve never been yelled at in Japanese while building air conditioners, you haven’t lived,” he quips. Under Culp, Danaher became a watchword in top-tier production as the first U.S. company to deploy TPS or “lean” production. At the heart of this method are “kaizen” sessions, where trained practitioners lead a structured gathering with employees across departments to identify a bottleneck and rapidly prototype solutions together.

Vicente Reynal, now CEO of industrial equipment maker Ingersoll Rand (market cap: $31 billion), got to watch Culp up close as a young plant manager at Danaher, and marveled at how the boss blended extreme toughness with a caring touch.

In 2012 Reynal had a weak quarter while managing a dental equipment facility in California, and in a meeting, Culp sharply criticized the results. “I was feeling really bad about it,” recounts Reynal. “Then Larry says he’s coming to California and wants to have dinner and says he’ll pick me up at my house. I arrive, and there’s this big guy playing with my 4-year-old. It showed he believed in my potential and wanted to build a strong relationship, despite the bad results that one quarter.” Reynal notes that Culp was particularly attentive after a kaizen session. Culp would show up unannounced at the plant, and head straight for the shop floor to ensure the progress got sustained. “It was his way of finding out if [we were] talking BS about all these improvements, or if they really had legs,” says Reynal.

Culp showed great respect for frontline workers but wouldn’t take guff, even from powerful customers. “We were at a meeting in New York with a health care company that was our biggest client,” Reynal recalls. “The CEO was considered the godfather of the industry, and he was also known for being late. The meeting is supposed to start at nine, and we’re on time and waiting, and the CEO’s late again. At 9:20, Larry gets up and says, ‘We’re leaving,’ and walks right past the ‘godfather’ who’s walking in. Larry showed that he wasn’t going to ‘kiss the ring,’ and that the relationship goes both ways.”

In April 2018, following four years of travel and teaching at HBS after retiring from Danaher at age 51, Culp joined the board of GE, then based near his new home in Boston. In the months that followed, the descent of the fabled, Thomas Edison–founded institution that produced the first long-lasting light bulbs, home TVs, and American jet engines was rapidly accelerating. By that fall, the directors had determined that John Flannery, a GE vet they’d named just over a year earlier, had to go. The board offered Culp the top job three times before he finally agreed to, as he puts it, “suit up again, something I never thought would happen.”

The Global Financial Crisis had saddled GE Capital, long its biggest profitmaker, with mountainous debt. Previous leadership had bet on returning GE to its industrial roots via equipment for gas, steam, and other forms of power generation, but the pivot backfired as energy demand fell short and wind and solar grabbed share. GE couldn’t generate enough cash to pay down debt that totaled a ruinous $150 billion when Culp took charge.

The chance of rescuing the legend whose equipment provides around a quarter of the world’s electricity and whose engines power about three-quarters of commercial flights worldwide clearly stirred the ultra-competitive Culp to action. But also Culp knew from what he saw as a director that he could do the job.

The awakening struck during a meeting of the GE power brass in Atlanta that Culp attended as a board member in the summer of 2018. “It was a windowless room like this one,” Culp told me as we spoke in a nondescript conference area at Lynn. “It was a war room situation. The finance team was putting up charts that looked sharp, crisp clean, on metrics such as trends in inventory levels. But it wasn’t clear that any of it was tied to the underlying operations of the businesses. Plus, the numbers weren’t business by business, but different areas lumped together. And I’m thinking, if we could just get to discrete P&Ls, as in my Danaher experience, we could really see the problems, and grasp the opportunities.”

As CEO, Culp broke the power complex into around eight units led by executives granted broad freedom to manage their own financials, and spread that super-decentralized model across GE. He also unleashed the “lean” credo everywhere. His assorted “sensei” from Japan, including his favorite wingman from his Danaher days, Yukio Katahira, led kaizen sessions at GE plants around the globe. But just as the power numbers started improving, the COVID outbreak struck—and hammered profits at what Culp calls “the engine carrying the corporation,” the aerospace franchise.

Courtesy of GE Aerospace

GE harbored huge central staffs then estimated at 26,000. Culp says he doesn’t remember the exact number but that he eliminated about three-quarters of excess positions, including many in the business segments that each had their own headquarters and big bureaucracies. Many of the people in those jobs left the company. He also shuttered the 60-acre executive training campus in Crotonville, N.Y., that once symbolized GE’s power as a single entity.

Most of all, Culp engineered a cultural reboot that’s enriching all three freestanding players to this day. “The businesses would come to reviews and only talk about things that were going well. Larry called it ‘success theater,’” says Cathie Lesjak, former CFO of HP, who joined the board in the dark days of 2019. Culp reversed that dynamic by encouraging managers to above all spotlight what was failing. “In the old GE, messengers got shot. I wanted to create a market for problems,” says Culp.

Culp has a nonthreatening style that’s highly Socratic. He uses “questions and not directives,” says Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, whom Culp identified as a young star in the power unit and anointed to head the spinoff. “He didn’t say, ‘Do a, b, or c.’ He coached us to determine our own KPIs.” Adds Peter Arduini, president and CEO of GE HealthCare, “Larry made airing problems not something to be feared, but a goal. He called it ‘Embracing red.’”

The economic winds also turned in GE’s favor as air travel rebounded fast post-COVID, and starting around 2023, the boom in AI data centers ignited a liftoff in sales of power-generation gear that continues to make GE Vernova such an extraordinary success story.

With all three franchises on a strong footing, setting them free was a natural extension of Culp’s drive to unbundle GE. “GE was pursuing the benefits of synergies, of using the full weight of GE, and it was expensive and not working,” he says. “The best route was the opposite, allowing each business to operate on its own so it can best serve different sets of customers. Focus beats synergies every time.”

On the factory floor of the Lynn plant, Culp is showing off what the concepts of kaizen and “lean” look like in practice. The CEO pauses at the dojo (Japanese for martial arts training hall) post, where employees study the sequential steps in kaizen problem-solving; then we walk over to the obeya (workspace for collaboration) room, which displays pie charts for every workstation, each divided into five color-coded slices tracking KPIs. “Green” for delivery means the cell is right on time; “red” for inventory means stocks are too high and need a fix. Every morning at 8:30, Culp explains, two dozen managers huddle at the obeya, striving to turn red to green—for example, getting a station the extra parts it needs that very day to raise its output of spare tail rotors to what the customer needs.

Culp’s shop is immensely profitable and growing fast—it already stands among the leading beneficiaries of one of this century’s greatest industries, global air travel. It’s not a matter of whether GE will continue to be successful, but how big a success it will be. Business is so strong that the faster Culp can raise production, the bigger his profits.

His biggest logjam? GE’s sprawling base of over 500 direct suppliers is straining to ship the volumes of parts, at the right times, that the engine maker needs to satisfy the giant backlogs and new orders. Now, as Culp is making GE Aerospace more efficient (from here on referred to as GE), he’s also coaching a galaxy of contractors to raise their lagging output.

The business operates on a “razor and blade” model: The razors are the new engines. GE commands a 55% share of all those freshly installed under-wing, with its LEAP—a 50-year-old joint venture with Safran of France—the sole engine on the Boeing 737 Max and sharing the A320neo family with Airbus, garnering 61% of those orders. GE is also the largest manufacturer of wide-body engines; the GEnx has a 70% win rate on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and the GE90 is the sole source in powering the Boeing 777.

The “blades” part makes up the aftermarket side and divides into two parts: overhauls or servicing of fleets in use, and sales of spare parts. Think of taking your car for a checkup every 10,000 miles. Regulations require that the airlines get their engines overhauled after a set number of hours in the air. That translates into maintenance sessions at five- to eight-year intervals. In most cases, the engines travel to GE’s giant maintenance centers for servicing—two of the largest are in Brazil and Wales—while some airlines do the work in-house but buy custom parts from GE.

GE is now sitting on an immense $211 billion backlog, equivalent to around four years of sales. The $10.6 billion defense side is prospering as well via such big programs as the CH-53K Lockheed Martin helicopter, and lots of service work on the equipment deployed in the Gulf war.

Last year, the “blades” accounted for 70% of GE’s total revenues—and expanded by 21% in 2025. Measured in units, commercial engine sales leaped 25%. For the year, GE grew revenue 19% to $45.9 billion and profits 33% to $8.7 billion, and booked rich operating margins of 21.4%.

Says Scott Mikus, analyst at Melius Research: “The business is all up and to the right, but it all comes down to how much the supply chain can meet demand. That capacity doesn’t come online fast. Factories need to be built, tooling needs to be put in place.”

The steps to maximizing that potential mirror the template Culp learned at the AC plant in Tokyo: identifying the most efficient series of steps in making or inspecting each part, and turning that sequence into an unvarying chain. The guiding concept is the heart of the kaizen gospel, the constant quest for new heights. “The idea is that today is the best we’ve ever done, and the worst we’ll ever do,” says Mohamed Ali, chief of commercial engines and services at GE Aerospace.

Ali says kaizen sessions, many lasting a full week, are happening virtually every week at a GE plant. “It’s not McKinsey or BCG laying out 100 pages of PowerPoint or other superficial forms of management,” Culp avows. “It’s all about getting to the plant floor and finding the screw that needs a quarter turn.” He says that AI is aiding all parts of GE’s operations. But Culp also cautions, “Will the next generation of AI algorithms obsolete the respect for people who do the work? I don’t think so.”

In practice, that means finding improvements by rearranging machines, charting new workflows, and adding automation—not pushing workers to rush. Site leader John McCarron says Lynn has sharply increased production in recent years without adding buildings, raising its workforce only modestly, to around 1,700.

Perhaps Culp’s biggest bet is RISE, a program that encompasses a revolutionary “open fan” engine architecture that eliminates the nacelle or cone surrounding the blades. That enables far larger fans that reduce drag and provide a major advance in fuel efficiency. The airlines, says Culp, are disappointed that some of the newer engines aren’t any more durable, and in some cases have shorter lives on-wing, than the older models. But the RISE open design of the future will use less fuel and will outlast current engines, Culp says. Uncorking one of his favorite expressions, he adds, “It’s ‘the genius of the and.’”

According to Jason Adams of T. Rowe Price, the test for Culp will be convincing the airlines that RISE represents a historic advance, thereby putting pressure on the airframers to adopt it faster. Of course, at 63 Culp will no longer be CEO when and if RISE takes flight a decade or so hence. But its success would be a notable addition to his résumé.

For now he is relishing every chance to make the supply chain a little tighter, the production a little leaner, the process a little more efficient. A few weeks before I met Culp at the Lynn factory, he hosted a kaizen session featuring Yukio Katahira, the celebrated 80-year-old whom he met on his maiden trip to Tokyo all those years ago and shadowed through countless lean workouts. He took his mentor to a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park, where they were especially excited to watch Masataka Yoshida, the DH from Japan: “I got Katahira-san, that joyous soul, and his interpreter ‘Yoshida’ jerseys. The faithful at Fenway are taking pictures of Katahira-san—they think I’m escorting Yoshida’s father!” In the seventh, Yoshida got a single, and the crowd went wild, cheering toward the trio. Says Culp: “It was so beautiful.”

It was the best day Culp had had in quite some time. But taking a cue from his factory floor mantra, one suspects he has a plan to do even better tomorrow, and even better the day after that.

GE gets split into three

GE Aerospace: The aviation-focused company spinoff was completed in 2024.

Makes commercial and military jet engines; an installed base of 50,000 commercial and 30,000 military engines drives aftermarket services, which account for 70% of revenue. It powers 75% of global commercial flights and two-thirds of U.S. military combat and helicopter fleets.

GE HealthCare: Spun off in early 2023.

A provider of advanced medical technology, pharmaceutical diagnostics, and AI, cloud, and software products, with an installed base of approximately 5 million devices serving more than 1 billion patients annually. Its customers include health systems, hospitals, and health care providers.

GE Vernova: Spun off in April 2024.

Makes power-generation equipment, including gas, nuclear, hydro, and steam equipment; wind turbines; and grid infrastructure such as transformers, switchgear, and HVDC systems. About 25% of the world’s electricity is generated using its installed base of technologies.

This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “The CEO who saved GE.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com