Lululemon on Wednesday ended its long-running power struggle with founder Chip Wilson. The upscale athletic-wear company agreed to add three of Wilson's picks to its board of directors, including former ESPN marketing chief Laura Gentile and former On co-CEO Marc Maurer. Wilson, for his part, will not speak negatively about Lululemon for the next 18 months. He left the company more than a decade ago, but has become particularly outspoken against it in recent months, as sales slowed and competition within the sector became more intense.
The wealth gap is widening, and the numbers are staggering. 😳
According to a new Associated Press survey, the median S&P 500 CEO pay jumped nearly 6% in 2025 to a whopping $17.7 million. Meanwhile, the typical worker's pay sat at $89,744.
To put that into perspective: at half of these companies, it would take a middle-tier worker 200 years to make what their CEO pulls in just one.
Here are the most eye-popping takeaways from the latest data:
🚗 Elon Musk (Tesla): Tops the list with a stock-heavy package valued at $132.3 billion, tied to ambitious 10-year goals for market value, robotaxis, and humanoid robots.
🏨 Shankh Mitra (Welltower): Pulled in $821.1 million (mostly in stock) after tripling the company’s stock price over five years.
👩💼 Jane Fraser (Citigroup): Made history as the highest-paid woman CEO in the survey's history at $95.8 million, following a massive corporate reorganization.
🥤 The Widest Gaps: At Coca-Cola and TJX Cos. (TJ Maxx), the CEOs make over 1,700 times more than their median employees, who operate in historically lower-wage industries.
While most of these packages are tied to strict stock performance goals, worker advocates call the skyrocketing numbers "obscene" as everyday families continue to feel the pinch of inflation.
After months of insisting that AI would kill jobs, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are singing a different tune. Altman this week admitted he was "wrong," while Amodei now says AI could promote employment. The reversals come as their respective firms gear up for potentially blockbuster IPOs. Meanwhile, data shows AI has had minimal impact on the job market, despite recent layoffs. AI pioneer Yann LeCun, in a LinkedIn post, urged his followers to ignore the noise, saying, "Listen to economists."
💰 CEO Pay vs. Your Pay: The 2025 Reality Check 💰
🔹 This year: 200 years
🔹 Trend: The gap is widening.
• Does this gap feel fair to you?
• How does your salary compare?
• What changes would you like to see in executive compensation?
📉 New CDC data reveals about 8% of Americans lacked health insurance in 2025.
While the rate held steady compared to the previous year, the actual number of uninsured Americans grew by roughly 800,000—including 300,000 children—partly due to overall population growth.
Experts warn that this number could rise significantly in the near future. Here is what's driving the projections:
Medicaid Changes: Recent legislative changes to the government safety-net program could result in 10 million more uninsured individuals over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Expired Subsidies: The expiration of certain Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies this year is expected to bump up premium costs. Research nonprofit KFF estimates that marketplace plan enrollment could plunge by 5 million people in 2026.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pointed to low-premium catastrophic plans and efforts to lower drug prices for the uninsured, suggesting that projected drops in marketplace enrollment reflect a reduction in fraudulent or ineligible enrollees.
Snowflake plans to inject up to $6 billion in Amazon's AI technology over the next five years, deepening the companies' existing ties. The deal, announced Wednesday, will boost the cloud data giant's use of Amazon's custom chips, reflecting Amazon Web Services' growing influence in the AI cloud market. AWS recently inked deals with Anthropic and OpenAI. Snowflake shares soared up to 35% in extended trading, simultaneously boosted by a first-quarter earnings beat.
Meta is launching subscription plans globally across its major apps, including Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and will begin tests of AI-focused offerings. The app subscriptions, priced between $2.99 and $3.99 per month, will unlock additional features for users, while the AI tools will be offered in two tiers at $7.99 and $19.99 per month and will initially launch in select countries. The initiative underscores Meta’s broader push to diversify revenue streams beyond its core advertising business.
Grocery prices are set to rise again due to a range of factors, including adverse weather, tariffs, and the ongoing Iran war, Bloomberg reports. Experts predict inflation rates could reach 4% to 4.5%, exacerbating affordability issues for consumers. Drought conditions are impacting crop yields, particularly in key agricultural regions, while rising household debt and declining real earnings add to the financial strain. The dynamic suggests that food prices will remain a critical concern for American households moving forward.
SpaceX filed its S-1 last week for what will be the largest IPO ever (~$75B raised at a $1.75T valuation). It is not often you see a mission statement in an S-1 that includes: "to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars".
A few of my takeaways:
1/ Starlink is the company's cash cow - it did $11.4B in 2025 revenue, up 50% y/y at a 39% operating margin. That cash is funding $3B/year in Starship R&D and the AI segment's losses.
2/ The AI segment (xAI + X) had $3.2B in 2025 revenue. But two recent deals - a $~15B/yr compute deal with Anthropic and the option to acquire Cursor for $60B help paint it in a different light. It could be a ~$20B/yr segment at the end of the year, and the 3 layers making up the AI segment is taking place. Compute is the base with Colossus I and II for both internal and external use. Models are Grok, trained in-house, plus a collaboration with Cursor on jointly developing models. Apps is X and the Grok app today, with Cursor being part of that story in the future.
3/ SpaceX is largely launching rockets for itself these days, with ~75% of launches for internal use, and so the Launch business, which did $4B in external revenue, doesn't fully reflect the value of that business strategically. The big bet on the launch side is Starship, which has higher payloads and higher reusability. It's required for Starlink's V3 satellites (1 Tbps each, vs the current gen) and for a future with Orbital compute.
4/ The way these three segments (Space/Starlink/AI) tie together as part of one company is via orbital compute, which is a satellite constellation acting as data centers in space. SpaceX expects to start deploying these in 2028. The launch business is what allows us to get the hardware up cheaply, and the Starlink know-how is used to operate the constellation. The AI segment serves as the demand for computing.
NFL star Travis Kelce is returning to his roots in Cleveland and buying a piece of MLB's Guardians, the team announced Wednesday. "I say it all the time," Kelce told ESPN. "I'm just a kid from the Heights living the dream." Kelce joins a growing list of current and former athletes with ownership stakes, including LeBron James (Red Sox), Magic Johnson (Dodgers), and Tom Brady (Raiders). Kelce's Kansas City Chiefs teammate, Patrick Mahomes, is a minority owner of the rival Royals. Kelce grew up an Indians fan in the 1990s.
Self-help superstar Jay Shetty is bringing the video version of his popular podcast to Spotify and Netflix in a deal worth up to $100 million, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources. The companies confirmed the deal, though not its financial details. Shetty's "On Purpose" will hit both platforms July 13. Netflix and Spotify already have a relationship, but it's the first time they've partnered for this kind of deal. Both are looking to topple YouTube — which previously carried Shetty's show — from the top spot in the lucrative podcasting game.
Amazon is now licensing its in-house AI shopping technology to other retailers, CNBC reports, as part of its aim to "be the backbone of AI shopping" online. The new service, which uses Amazon's recently rebranded Alexa for Shopping agent as its foundation, allows retailers to create customized tools quickly, and follows a similar strategy it used with Amazon Web Services. Brands like Kate Spade have already adopted the service for a gifting assistant, while other retailers are in testing phases.
Robinhood on Wednesday debuted new tools that allow retail investors to automate stock trading and purchases through AI agents. The features, Agentic Trading and Agentic Credit Card, require "minimal human involvement," per CNBC, to look for deals, rebalance portfolios, and other related tasks. CEO Vlad Tenev called them part of Robinhood's "mission... to democratize finance for all." While the company says it's implemented safety measures to protect users, some remain concerned about the risks of autonomous trading for less experienced investors.