A significant portion of the global A.I. boom traces back to a single Canadian institution: the University of Toronto. Ranked first in Canada and among the top 17 universities worldwide for research and discovery, the university has become a key engine for top-tier talent, spawning more than 86 specialized A.I. and machine learning startups and supplying technologists behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere and xAI. 

Much of the momentum stems from Geoffrey Hinton, the 78-year-old computer scientist lauded as the “godfather of A.I.” He co-founded Toronto’s nonprofit research hub, the Vector Institute and taught at the university for most of the period between 1987 and 2014 before becoming an emeritus professor. Throughout the decades, Hinton maintained an unwavering commitment to neural networks, even when funding and broader interest in the technology dried up.

In 2012, Hinton created AlexNet, a breakthrough image classification neural network, with graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Its success turned Hinton’s lab into a premier recruiting ground for Big Tech.

The next year, Google beat Microsoft in an auction to acquire Hinton’s startup DNNresearch for $44 million, folding his work into Google Brain (later DeepMind). Hinton joined Google for a decade before resigning to speak freely on A.I. safety. Krizhevsky and Sutskever also joined Google for a period of time before pursuing other ventures. Hinton shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yann LeCun, former chief A.I. scientist at Meta, and computer scientist Yoshua Bengio for advancing neural network research during the A.I. winter of the late 20th century. And in 2024, he received the Nobel Prize in physics for foundational contributions to modern A.I. 

The university’s influence extends beyond Hinton, with other prominent figures calling the institution home during their careers. Jimmy Ba, an assistant professor of computer science, co-developed the fundamental machine learning algorithm Adam Optimizer in 2014. Ba later co-founded xAI alongside Elon Musk and former student Yuhuai Tony Wu, bringing the Grok large language model to the global conversation (Ba and Wu left xAI to pursue other ventures in February).

Another one of Sutskever’s mentors, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, formerly worked as a professor at the school before transitioning to Carnegie Mellon University and eventually serving as the inaugural director of A.I. research at Apple.

Richard Zemel, who co-founded the Vector Institute with Hinton, helped form the computer science faculty group at the University of Toronto and now works at Columbia University, earning credit for building an ecosystem of academic freedom and rigorous research praised by the likes of Aidan Gomez, co-founder of enterprise LLM provider Cohere.

The university’s reach extends well past its professors. Beyond faculty, five notable startups founded or driven by six university alumni in particular have shaped the modern A.I. landscape and driven its commercial boom:

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of Safe SuperIntelligence and OpenAI

Ilya Sutskever earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto. The school even gave him an honorary doctorate for his international influence in 2025. Hinton was Sutskever’s Ph.D. advisor as he researched recurrent neural networks. Sutskever co-developed AlexNet and co-founded DNNresearch before branching out into industry. He served as a research scientist at Google before co-founding OpenAI, where he served as chief scientist until June 2024.

Sutskever then co-founded Safe Superintelligence, Inc., which is now worth $32 billion, has expanded strategic partnerships, including a $5 billion compute agreement with Nvidia, announced in July.

Andrej Karpathy, head of pretraining at Anthropic and founding member of OpenAI

Andrej Karpathy earned his undergraduate degree from the university and cites Hinton’s class and reading groups as his first foray into deep learning. After earning a Ph.D. from Stanford University under Fei-Fei Li, he became an early hire at OpenAI. Karpathy worked as a research scientist at OpenAI before leaving in 2017 to serve as senior director of A.I. at Tesla, later returning to OpenAI for a second stint from 2023 to 2024 and launching A.I. education platform Eureka Labs. 

In May, Karpathy joined Anthropic as part of the pretraining team, writing on X that “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.”

Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, co-founders of Cohere

Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst both attended the University of Toronto for their undergraduate education. Together with co-founder Ivan Zhang, they created Cohere in 2019 to build enterprise-grade LLMs, including sovereign A.I. for security-first customers like the Canadian government. In April, Cohere acquired German A.I. startup Aleph Alpha, making the combined company worth an estimated $20 billion.

Gomez credits the school with the opportunity to intern at Google Brain, where he co-authored the seminal paper “Attention Is All You Need” on the transformer architecture that powers LLMs. Frosst was Hinton’s first hire at Google Brain’s Toronto lab when it launched in 2016.

Yuhuai Tony Wu, co-founder of xAI

Yuhuai Tony Wu earned his Ph.D. from the university, mentored by Ba and backed by Hinton’s research ecosystem. 

Following posts at Google DeepMind and OpenAI, Wu co-founded xAI in 2023 with Ba and Musk. Both Ba and Wu later left xAI, announcing their resignation in February. Wu has not disclosed his next role, but hinted at a startup in his future. “A small team armed with A.I.s can move mountains and redefine what’s possible,” he wrote on X. In March, Wu joined the scientific advisory board of Integrated Bioschiences, Inc.

Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic

Chris Olah attended the University of Toronto but left before finishing his degree in 2012 after receiving a Thiel Fellowship to pursue independent machine learning research. He worked alongside Hinton at Google Brain for four years beginning in 2014. 

Olah spent time leading OpenAI’s interpretability team before co-founding Anthropic in 2021 alongside Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and other ex-OpenAI employees. Anthropic has gone on to reach a valuation of roughly $965 billion.

The recent departure of several high-profile executives from Google DeepMind marks a distinct new era for the world-renowned research lab and a natural moment to trace the diverging paths of the trio who built it.

Long before it became an A.I. powerhouse, Google DeepMind was simply DeepMind. Founded in London by machine learning researchers Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, the lab was launched with the goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Hassabis and Suleyman met as teenagers in London, while Hassabis later met Legg at University College London’s Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit.

Starting with a modest $1.85 million in funding from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, which took a 25 percent equity stake, DeepMind proved its early mettle by pioneering deep reinforcement learning, famously teaching an A.I. to master seven Atari games from scratch with zero prior instructions.

In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind for £400 million ($650 million). The tech giant merged its in-house A.I. research unit, Google Brain, with DeepMind to form Google DeepMind, helmed by Hassabis.

Last month, Google DeepMind announced that Hassabis would step back from the day-to-day operations and shift into the role of chairman of Google DeepMind while taking on the title of Alphabet chief scientist, replacing Jeff Dean. The standalone CEO title was abolished. In the meantime, Longtime DeepMind chief technology officer Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to the lab’s senior vice president, reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Today, the original three founders of DeepMind find themselves steering the A.I. revolution from three different vantage points:

Demis Hassabis, 50

Current Role: CEO and Chair of Google DeepMind; CEO of Isomorphic Labs

Hassabis remains a central figure in Google’s A.I. playbook as chairman of Google DeepMind. Meanwhile, he also runs Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed A.I. drug discovery spinout he launched in 2021. His work is split between frontier AGI research and biotech breakthroughs. In 2024, Hassabis, along with Google DeepMind vice president John Jumper and biochemist David Baker, received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing an A.I. model called AlphaFold2 that’s able to predict the structure of virtually all proteins.

In his new role as Alphabet’s chief scientist, “I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters, and to advise [DeepMind] leads, from our awesome new London Platform 37 offices,” he said in a statement last month. He added that he will be leaning further into Isomorphic Labs, as he finds improving human health to be the top priority of A.I.

Mustafa Suleyman, 42

Current Role: CEO of Microsoft AI

Suleyman was Google DeepMind’s head of applied A.I. He notably launched DeepMind Health, now part of Google Health, and applied the lab’s algorithms to cut Google’s data center cooling costs by 40 percent. During his tenure, he also established the DeepMind Ethics & Society unit to analyze the real-world impacts of A.I. and help researchers implement ethical standards.

He left Google in 2022 to co-found personal A.I. assistant Inflection AI with Reid Hoffman. In March 2024, he was tapped by Satya Nadella to head Microsoft AI, leading Microsoft’s consumer A.I. products like Copilot.

Today, his work focuses on “humanist superintelligence” and A.I. safety frameworks. He recently authored Microsoft’s draft A.I. Code of Conduct to ensure frontier models remain subordinate to human control.

Shane Legg, 53

Current Role: Chief AGI Scientist at Google DeepMind

The quiet third founder of DeepMind, Legg has stayed true to the lab’s original charter. He leads Google DeepMind’s technical AGI safety teams, serves on the nominating committee for the AI Safety Foundation, and focuses heavily on talent acquisition and long-term AGI roadmaps. In January, Legg said he sees a 50-percent chance of reaching “minimal AGI,” where A.I. handles standard human cognitive tasks, by 2028.

“I think there are many problems in the world that could be helped by having an extremely capable and ethical intelligence system,” Legg said in an interview for his TIME100 AI placement in 2023. “The world could become a much, much better place.”

As this year’s fashion week season kicks off globally, Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen are preparing their luxury fashion brand The Row for Paris Fashion Week later this month, for the first time as a member of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM). The organization behind Paris Fashion Week accepted the 20-year-old brand in July alongside Alaïa, Tom Ford and Zimmermann. 

The Row joins heritage pillars like Schiaparelli, late-century maisons like Jean Paul Gaultier and modern pioneers such as Off-White in the FHCM. While The Row hasn’t participated in New York Fashion Week since 2019, the Olsens’ relatively young, American-born brand makes its mark with a distinctly minimalist expression and urban functionalism reflective of its New York roots.

Named after London’s tailoring hub, Savile Row, The Row eschews the visible logos and loud advertising often associated with luxury. Even its largely logo-less apparel and accessories remain distinct from legacy brands like Brunello Cucinelli and contemporaries such as Khaite and Toteme. The Row’s price point is generally more ambitious, too: The Dakara Coat costs $12,500, while bags like the Agnes can approach $6,000. Rare editions can reach the tens of thousands; Jennifer Lawrence was seen carrying a $33,000 crocodile Lady Bag in January.

The Row’s acceptance into the FHCM is monumental, according to Derek Warburton, a celebrity stylist who has worked with Jessica Alba, Miranda Kerr and Ariel Winter. “It shows that younger houses can fit into the standards of luxury set by the organization without being necessarily European,” Warburton, who is also the founder of Gurus Magazine, told Observer.

Perhaps best known for the Margaux bag, the Hudson slide and its zipped boot, The Row is “not distracted by trends,” Tammy Smulders, CEO of Trends & Culture, a creative and strategy studio for luxury brands, told Observer. Instead, CEO Ashley Olsen and creative director Mary-Kate Olsen remain true to their personal style—in clothes, art and expression at large.

Working with specialized artisans, The Row manufactures its products in Italy, France and the U.S., while design is centered in New York, Paris and London. Most of its leather is sourced from European tanneries and handcrafted in Italy. And its cashmere comes from places such as India and Mongolia.

An artistic “point of view”

To stand out in the minimalist milieu, you need “a real point of view,” added Smulders, whose studio works with brands such as Givenchy, Louis Vuitton, Montblanc and Tiffany & Co. The Row has a consistent and well-understood design language built around a reduced color palette, expert fabrication and, in some cases, exaggerated proportions. Beyond its products, The Row has created an ecosystem around itself, building on a consistent design philosophy.

Upon entering its London store, for example, visitors encounter installations from 20th-century artists such as light artist James Turrell, sculptor John Chamberlain and furniture designer Charlotte Perriand. Its boutiques are architecturally driven, featuring elements such as a sliding fitting-room door by architect Jean Prouvé at the Paris location. The Row’s Instagram feed is largely filled with photographs of art of this ilk, interspersed with images of its own collections. The brand also shares a monthly Spotify playlist designed to create an elevated atmosphere around its work.

“It’s not just about clothing,” said Smulders. “It’s a sign in many cases of tastefulness, of cultural appreciation and knowledge…It’s a bigger statement than just a fashion statement.”

That’s why The Row’s quiet luxury works: Esteemed artists are recognized by their style, not their logos. Similar to Loewe’s Puzzle purse collection, The Row’s flagships have defined where their style begins and ends. At the same time, the consumer push toward stealth wealth has positioned The Row in a favorable light.

“What current consumers want is to feel that they belong in the cast of luxury, and not be walking ads for their products,” said Warburton, the celebrity stylist.

Even as its popularity has spread beyond the artistically devoted and fashion cognoscenti to a broader market, the Olsens remain “very focused on their own look and aesthetic,” said Smulders. That focus has helped them “gain that respect and earn that accreditation over time.”

The Row’s elevated status—not only in this fall’s major fashion shows but also in the popular conversation—has resulted in part from a major cultural shift, said Warburton. “Clothing is now a statement of personality, of someone’s identity, instead of just a quick trend or branded fashion,” he said. “Nowadays, a person sees themselves in their clothing, and an expertly crafted piece says a lot more about that person’s care for their identity and self-image.”

Given the Olsens’ history of remaining true to their personal style, albeit an evolving one, that authenticity and exacting craftsmanship have inevitably bolstered their status as an imposing force in the global luxury fashion industry. Now an FHCM member, the brand’s focus on attention to detail and recognizable silhouettes, fabrics and movements creates a significant opportunity to become a heritage brand of the future.

Going forward, the likeliest challenge for the fashion house will be “to maintain the quality and distinction of their work while evolving,” said Warburton. Built not just on quietude but also on a scarcity model seen in predecessors like Hermès, The Row proves that luxury doesn’t need to shout to endure.

Across the sporting spectrum, rising costs are increasingly pricing traditional fans out of marquee moments. But despite the expense of attending (and even watching) live sporting events, fan enthusiasm hasn’t slowed. Instead, it’s evolving, with dedicated, often wealthy spectators finding ways to enrich their fandom through elevated luxury experiences.

During the Knicks-Cavaliers playoff series in May, private jet marketplace XO reported a 31 percent year-over-year increase in travel between New York City and Cleveland, the company told Observer. People are traveling farther for sporting events, too. At The Masters in April, private jet charter company VistaJet escorted an attendee from Seoul to Augusta, Ga., Leona Qi, VistaJet’s president of U.S. operations, told Observer.

hoper, a global helicopter booking platform headquartered in Greece, said demand for regional helicopter travel jumped during the Winter Olympic Games in Italy in February and the Monaco Grand Prix in June. Because of the “very strict window of time” associated with live sports, the ease and speed of helicopter travel comes in handy for last-mile transportation, Dimitris Kossyfas, hoper’s chief commercial officer, told Observer. Next week, hoper is launching new services in New York in time for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships.

Travelers are also showing increased interest in destination-based tourism, Kossyfas added. In addition to basic transportation, Hoper also offers scenic helicopter tours. For an industry that generated more than $111 billion in tourism revenue in 2025, there’s no denying the novel luxury that accompanies sports-related travel. In the U.S., 86 percent of sports fans believe live professional sports are becoming a luxury experience, according to the 2026 YouGov sports survey.

Venues and sports organizations are also expanding beyond basic attendance. Lexington-based Keeneland, one of the world’s largest thoroughbred racetracks, has seen this evolution firsthand. Founded in 1936, the venue generates more than half a billion dollars in annual sales through its thoroughbred auctions. It will host the 2026 Breeders’ Cup World Championships in October and debuted its newly constructed $100 million Paddock Building earlier this year to meet rising guest expectations.

“Sports travelers today are looking for more than just the sporting event itself,” Gabby Gaudet, Keeneland’s director of communications, told Observer. “They want an immersive, social experience, and something they simply can’t replicate by watching from home.”

A fall-season opening-weekend ticket for the 1936 Room in the Paddock Building, which includes an up-close view of jockeys en route to the saddling area, reception-style dining and access to the lawn, costs $200, compared with $15 for general admission.

In July, Formula One announced a new multiyear partnership with private aviation supplier Flexjet to support VIP attendees with a fleet of more than 340 private jets. The partnership includes access to the F1 Paddock Club (unrelated to Keeneland’s Paddock Building), a high-end hospitality facility with 24 locations, including Monaco, Las Vegas and Madrid, where access costs nearly $10,000.

Formula One saw a year-over-year attendee increase of 42 percent at Monaco’s Paddock Club and 22 percent at its Silverstone location in England, a representative told Observer. So far this year, more than 60,000 guests have visited hospitality spaces at Formula One venues worldwide.

As demand continues to rise, already pricey premium travel is getting even more expensive. A seat on a hoper helicopter during June’s Monaco Grand Prix cost up to €700 ($808), compared to the standard €195 ($225) during the off-season, Kossyfas said. Renting an entire aircraft for six passengers can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000.

Kossyfas hopes the eventual commercialization of eVTOLs—electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft—will help democratize helicopter transportation. Known for zero emissions and reduced noise pollution, eVTOLs are currently in the final stages of FAA certification. Reduced noise could mean more approved landing zones, while broader operations could make the service more accessible, particularly during periods of heightened demand.

The most influential figures at America’s largest corporations don’t just gather in company boardrooms; many also sit at university trustee tables, where Fortune 500 CEOs and Wall Street financiers help govern some of the country’s most prestigious academic institutions. These leaders, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the University of Chicago, General Motors CEO Mary Barra at Duke and financier Jim Coulter at Stanford, serve without direct compensation. They help lead fundraising, offer strategic advice and even shape universities’ long-term visions.

“This type of participation stands at the intersection of legitimacy enhancement, corporate social responsibility and old-fashioned ego-boosting,” Ethan Ris, chair of the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Observer. “When a corporation can brag that its leaders serve on university boards, that labels it as both brains-adjacent and service-oriented, since most universities are nonprofits and trustees don’t get paid.”

University board memberships benefit elite interests on both sides. “The businesses get legitimacy, and the universities get direct access to rich people and rich companies that can steer big gifts and contracts,” Ris added. For many companies, universities also often serve as pipelines for talent.

Most corporate leaders, however, do not join university boards solely to generate business opportunities, according to Corey Feinstein, a higher-education consultant. They have personal motivations, too, like a university’s mission, “or because it somehow shaped their own lives,” Feinstein, a former U.S. diplomat and external advisor to multiple University of California presidents, told Observer.

Here are notable Fortune 500 leaders and major investors serving on university boards.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft: University of Chicago

Years served: 8
Alma mater: Manipal Institute of Technology in India; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Master’s); University of Chicago (MBA)

Satya Nadella began his initial five-year term on the University of Chicago’s board of trustees in 2018. He was reelected to a second term set to end in 2028. Nadella previously served as chairman of The Business Council, a Washington, D.C.-based association of Fortune 500 CEOs.

Nadella became Microsoft’s CEO in 2014 after joining the company in 1992. Before taking the top job, he helped lead Microsoft’s shift toward cloud computing, increasing cloud-services revenue from $16.6 billion when he assumed leadership of the division in 2011 to $20.3 billion by 2013.

Jim Coulter, co-founder of TPG: Stanford University

Years served: 5
Alma mater: Dartmouth College; Stanford University (MBA)

Jim Coulter was elected to a five-year term on Stanford’s board of trustees in 2021 and faces reelection later this year. Coulter previously served as a Dartmouth College trustee from 2011 to 2019.

Coulter founded TPG in 1992. He served as co-CEO alongside Jon Winkelried from 2014 to 2021, before transitioning to executive chair and leading TPG’s climate investing efforts.

Mary Barra, CEO of GM: Duke University

Years served: 6
Alma mater: Kettering University (formerly the General Motors Institute); Stanford University (MBA)

Mary Barra began a six-year term on Duke University’s board of trustees in 2020. She currently serves as board vice chair and as a member of the executive committee. Barra was reelected this year, and her current term runs through 2032.

Barra previously chaired the Duke Parents Committee from 2018 to 2020 alongside her husband, Tony Barra. Their children, Rachel Barra and Nicholas Barra, both graduated from Duke.

Barra, 64, has worked at GM for her entire 46-year career, beginning as a working student at the Pontiac Motor Division in 1980. She became CEO in 2014, after serving as executive vice president of global product development.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple: Duke University

Years served: 11
Alma mater: Auburn University; Duke University (MBA)

Tim Cook joined Duke University’s board of trustees in 2015. The board initially elected him to a six-year term, and he has since been reelected to serve through at least 2027.

In 2018, Cook delivered Duke’s commencement address. When he earned his MBA from Duke in 1988, he was named a Fuqua Scholar, an honor recognizing top academic achievement at the Fuqua School of Business.

José Feliciano, co-founder of Clearlake Capital: Stanford University

Years served: 5
Alma mater: Princeton University; Stanford University (MBA)

Billionaire investor José Feliciano joined Stanford University’s board of trustees in 2021 for a five-year term. Feliciano graduated from Stanford in 1999 and co-founded private equity firm Clearlake Capital in 2006.

Clearlake manages more than $90 billion in assets. In 2022, Feliciano and billionaire investor Todd Boehly bought English soccer club Chelsea FC for $2.15 billion.

Feliciano has also contributed matching donations during Stanford’s Day of Giving campaigns, helping drive collective fundraising totals into the millions.

Bennett Golub, co-founder of BlackRock: MIT

Years served: 2
Alma mater: MIT

Bennett Golub joined the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing body, in 2024 for a seven-year term. Golub earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees all from MIT.

Before shifting to a part-time advisory role in 2022, Golub served as BlackRock’s chief risk officer and a founding partner. In 2016, he made a substantial, undisclosed donation to support the MIT Center for Finance and Policy, which was later renamed the Bennett W. Golub Center for Finance and Policy.

Joseph Bae, co-CEO of KKR: Harvard University

Years served: 2
Alma mater: Harvard University

Joseph Bae began his 12-year tenure on Harvard Corporation, Harvard University’s governing body, in 2024. Bae earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1994 and joined KKR in 1996. In 2021, he became co-CEO of the private equity giant, which manages $796 billion in assets.

At the start of his Harvard Corporation term, Bae and his wife, fellow Harvard alum and author Janice Y.K. Lee, donated $20 million to the university’s humanities department and financial aid efforts.

Other notable university trustees from corporate America

Beyond these seven industry leaders, several other prominent executives and investors serve as university trustees:

• Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, serves as vice chair of Duke University’s board of trustees, his alma mater.
• Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, serves on Stanford University’s board of trustees. Friar earned her MBA from Stanford.
• Bob Sternfels, McKinsey & Company’s global managing partner (the consulting firm’s top role), serves on Stanford’s board of trustees, where he earned his undergraduate degree.
• Kenneth Chenault, a managing director at General Catalyst and former CEO of American Express, is a member of Harvard Corporation. He earned his J.D. from Harvard.
• Josh Silverman, Etsy’s executive chairman and former CEO, serves on Stanford’s board of trustees, where he earned his MBA.

While the conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and Hennessy appears to be emerging from the broader luxury-sector slump, uncertainty still surrounds its future leadership. At 77, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault has yet to indicate which of his five children will eventually lead the 75-brand empire. Despite Arnault insisting there is no discord within his family, questions persist over the future of the industry’s second richest family (behind Hermès), with a net worth of $147 billion.

LVMH’s 12th-largest shareholder, asset manager DWS Group, said the succession plan remains “uncertain and opaque,” according to a translated report from French publication Le Monde published in July. The conglomerate, which generated €80.8 billion ($96.5 billion) in revenue in 2025, has publicly pushed back on claims of family strife. In a letter posted on X and signed by Arnault, the company said anyone waiting for the family to fracture would be “waiting a long time.”

LVMH’s latest earnings may give Arnault more reason to delay a transition. Revenue rose 3 percent to €19.3 billion ($22.2 billion) in the latest quarter, marking the company’s strongest performance since early 2024. Dior’s creative reset under Jonathan Anderson, Sephora’s growth and strong jewelry sales at Tiffany and Bvlgari all helped bolster results, even as demand in China remained weak and the wine-and-spirits division faced continued pressure.

Arnault is already known for his slow-burn leadership style, with gradual grooming—rather than an abrupt transition—at the center of his approach. “Luxury is one of the few sectors that thinks in generations rather than quarters,” Arnault said in the letter.

The aging CEO has also made clear that he does not plan to step down soon. LVMH shareholders in April approved a change to the company’s bylaws raising the CEO age cap from 80 to 85, allowing Arnault to theoretically remain in the role for nearly eight more years. The measure followed an earlier 2022 change that raised the maximum age from 75 to 80.

Arnault himself won control of LVMH through a financial takeover carried out throughout the 1980s. But the family has since closed the door on a similar outside maneuver. In 2022, it finalized the creation of its holding company, Agache, which owns 50.2 percent of LVMH shares and controls 66.4 percent of voting rights. That majority stake protects the group from a hostile takeover.

Agache operates as a joint-stock partnership, with each of Arnault’s five children holding a 20 percent stake. Decisions within the holding company require the support of at least three of the five heirs.

All five children hold senior roles across LVMH divisions. The eldest two are from Arnault’s first marriage to Anne Dewavrin, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. He shares his remaining three children with his second and current wife, Hélène Mercier-Arnault.

The LVMH heirs are:

• Delphine Arnault, 51, became CEO of Christian Dior Couture in 2023. She has served on LVMH’s executive committee since 2019 and its board of directors since 2003.
• Antoine Arnault, 49, heads Christian Dior SE, another LVMH holding company. He is also LVMH’s director of image and environment, joined the executive committee in February and has served on the board since 2006.
• Alexandre Arnault, 34, is deputy CEO of Moët Hennessy, LVMH’s wine-and-spirits division, under Jean-Jacques Guiony. He joined the board in April after shareholders approved his appointment at the annual meeting.
• Frédéric Arnault, 31, leads Italian luxury label Loro Piana and also joined the board in April.
• Jean Arnault, 27, oversees LVMH’s watches division.

At the April annual meeting, Arnault gave each of his heirs an opportunity to speak publicly for the first time, reinforcing his effort to raise their profiles with shareholders.

What LVMH’s succession could look like

As the oldest child and the one with the most established leadership record, Delphine Arnault could emerge as a future CEO. But a shared leadership model—potentially involving Delphine and Antoine Arnault—also remains possible.

Another, less likely possibility is an external successor. Fewer than a third of global family businesses survive into the second generation. An outside executive could preserve operational continuity while helping avoid internal conflict.

L’Oréal offers one potential model. Leadership there passed from Liliane Bettencourt to her daughter, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, and her grandsons, including Jean-Victor Meyers. Their roles, however, were largely limited to controlling ownership through the family holding company, Téthys, and board stewardship, while non-family executives managed the business. That transition unfolded in the early 2010s, after a French court declared Bettencourt, then 88, mentally unfit because of dementia.

LVMH could pursue a similar arrangement. But Arnault’s decision to place his children in increasingly visible corporate roles suggests he is preparing a more deliberate, if gradual, family handover.

A closer parallel to LVMH’s multibrand luxury model may be Kering, the world’s fifth largest public luxury house. In 2005, founder François Pinault handed operational control of the conglomerate, then known as PPR, to his son, François-Henri Pinault. Over the following decade, François-Henri reshaped the company by divesting non-luxury retail businesses and turning it into a pure-play luxury group centered on brands such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

His siblings, Dominique and Laurence Pinault, are shareholders in the family holding company Groupe Artémis, which owns a majority stake in Kering, but they are otherwise removed from the group’s core business.

Prada’s founders, Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, are also still transitioning leadership to their eldest son, Lorenzo Bertelli. He holds a majority stake in Ludo, the family holding company that controls roughly 80 percent of Prada. Lorenzo, a competitive rally car driver, joined the family business in 2017 and now serves as chief marketing officer, head of corporate social responsibility and Versace’s executive chairman, following Prada’s 2025 acquisition. Prada CEO Andrea Guerra is serving as transitional leadership until Lorenzo is ready to take the helm.

Despite the range of potential models, the outcome of LVMH’s succession remains difficult to read. The group’s resilience amid market turbulence underscores the strength of its family-led structure, but the eventual handover may prove even more consequential for the future of luxury.

For the ultra-wealthy, digital privacy has become a purchasable commodity. Corporations and high-net-worth individuals are increasingly hiring data-removal services to systematically erase their personally identifiable information (PII) from search engines, data brokers and the dark web. These services go far beyond what automated tools can achieve, offering ongoing auditing to mitigate both digital and physical security risks.

Affordable, often automated services such as DeleteMe, Incogni, and Google’s free PII removal tool can only get you so far. Data brokers will “insert something like a captcha to ensure that a bot can’t come in and wipe out their database,” Tom Aldrich, chief operating officer of digital exposure reduction firm 360 Privacy, told Observer.

Aldrich’s firm, which currently works with 32 of the Fortune 100, recently onboarded a wealthy individual who transferred from an automated service. “We found 62 different profiles on them across hundreds of data aggregator sources,” said Aldrich, who added that 93 percent of those profiles included non-public information and could be removed.

Physical attacks, experts say, generally begin with digitally sourced PII. Senior executives have seen a steady rise in threats over the last two decades, with the number of attacks in 2025 more than doubling from the year prior.

“Physical and digital can no longer be separate,” Brian Hill, field chief information security officer of personal cybersecurity firm BlackCloak, which serves corporate executives and high-net-worth individuals, told Observer. Perhaps the poster child for this method is Vance Boelter, the Minnesota gunman who was sentenced in July to two consecutive life sentences plus 40 years for killing Democratic lawmakers last year, who used data aggregator sites to locate his victims.

Incidents like this help explain why the median value of security costs for executives at S&P 500 companies jumped 37.8 percent from 2024 to 2025. (S&P 500 CEOs, for reference, earned an average of $18.9 million in annual compensation during this time.) The biggest spender in this regard is Meta, which spent more than $25 million on physical and digital security for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

BlackCloak’s services for family offices, high-net-worth individuals and celebrities range from $10,000 to about $200,000 per year. Contracts for enterprise clients, including C-suite executives, board members and founders, can go as high as $600,000 a year.

The growing privacy economy

As digital footprints expand, so too has an industry built around them. Data brokers that exist solely to collect and sell consumers’ personal information to third parties contribute to a $40 billion data broker market in North America. The proliferation of a market built around selling personal information has increased demand for sophisticated data-removal services—a time-consuming, often specialized process that has become increasingly difficult to do on one’s own.

Only four U.S. states require data brokers to identify themselves via state-based registries: California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont. More than 4,000 data brokers are reported to be operating in the U.S., most of which run under the radar of regulation requirements. California alone has 545 state-registered data brokers.

Elite data-detox services remove personal information from the web, though protected public records like newspaper archives and campaign donation lists remain largely unerasable. Providers also offer dark web monitoring and security hardening across accounts and devices, including internet-connected home devices such as security cameras. Ongoing retainers and human-in-the-loop auditing make this a highly involved process.

“Reducing your digital footprint to zero is virtually impossible,” said Hill. “Our goal is anywhere from 70–90 percent removal of data.”

Affordable options offer limited protection

While more accessible data-removal providers aren’t as comprehensive as these elite options, they do serve an important role for ordinary citizens who want to limit their digital exposure but can’t afford the white-glove services used by the ultra-wealthy.

One digital security provider that offers automated removal as part of a larger set of services is Aura, a digital safety platform serving families for $32 per month. “As data breaches continue, data brokers expand, and A.I. makes it easier to exploit personal information, more people are looking for ways to reduce their digital footprint and regain control of their privacy,” Tom Clayton, president and chief operating officer of Aura, told Observer.

Despite more options becoming available, only 6 percent of American adults use data-removal services, and more than half are unaware they exist, leaving many vulnerable to privacy breaches.

“The attackers are…going after the small companies, the local family businesses. They’re now becoming the targets because they’re the easy ones,” Hill said.

Wealthy corporate executives remain a top priority, and their personal lives are a key avenue for theft. More than half (51 percent) of security leaders at organizations report cyberattacks targeting the personal accounts of their executives and their families, according to a 2025 report from BlackCloak and the privacy research firm Ponemon Institute. With digital access increasingly blurring the lines between personal and professional lives, in-house cybersecurity teams often fail to adequately protect high-earning executives, thereby elevating the need for pricey digital security providers.

“With a lot of this technology,” said Hill about A.I. and quantum computing, “you’re going to see a lot more data collection, and it’s going to be easier to go after the people that don’t set up an LLC or trust because they just don’t think they need to.”

In April, Sam Altman made unwanted headlines when a 20-year-old man threw a Molotov cocktail at the OpenAI CEO’s home in San Francisco. The threat of violence is not isolated. A surge in attacks has prompted increased executive security across industries, costing Big Tech companies millions.

Threats against senior corporate leaders more than doubled in 2025 compared with the year prior, according to a report from the Security Executive Council, with tech and finance the most targeted sectors. A third of these incidents resulted in death or physical injury. That doesn’t include former UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was killed in December 2024. His alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, is set to stand trial next month.

As threats against executives have risen, the median value of security costs for executives at S&P 500 companies jumped 37.8 percent from 2024 to reach $130,000 in 2025, executive intelligence firm Equilar reported. Given the SEC’s disclosure requirement for any executive perks over $10,000, more public companies are required to shed light on these expenses. These costs cover everything from residential security and bodyguards to private jet travel, personal drivers, and even millions spent on acquiring neighboring properties.

Meta’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has a history of dealing with death threats and stalking, effectively positioning him as a lightning rod for outrage against Meta. This, the company said in a filing, justifies his more than $27 million in security expenses in 2025.

Here’s what some of the biggest tech companies spend on security for their top executives:

Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives

Annual revenue: $201 billion
Executive security spend: $27.4 million

Meta is the biggest spender among Big Tech companies on executive security perquisites, devoting the vast majority of its $27.4 million in 2025 security expenses to Zuckerberg. The company spent more than $25 million on the CEO’s personal security, including $2.2 million for private aircraft travel and a $14 million pre-tax allowance to cover additional personal security costs for him and his family.

Zuckerberg’s security efforts are notably extreme. Since moving into Palo Alto’s Crescent Park neighborhood in 2011, he has reportedly spent over $110 million buying at least 11 adjacent homes to fortify his compound. He also owns 2,300 acres in Hawaii, where he is constructing a highly private estate.

Meta also paid for security for a handful of other executives, including $1.94 million for Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan. “These costs are appropriate and necessary in light of the threat landscape,” the company wrote.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and SVP Philipp Schindler

Annual revenue: $406.2 billion
Executive security spend: $9.4 million

Most of the $9.38 million in security expenses for executives at Alphabet (Google) went to CEO Sundar Pichai, whose personal security cost the company more than $8.8 million in 2025. This included residential security, monitoring services and transportation, including for personal and business use of company aircraft.

Philipp Schindler, SVP and chief business officer of Google, also received nearly $582,000 for personal security.

Andy Jassy and other Amazon executives

Annual revenue: $716.92 billion
Executive security spend: $3.6 million

Amazon’s $3.6 million security spend in 2025 went primarily to CEO Andy Jassy and founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos. The company spent $1.7 million on Jassy and $1.6 million on Bezos. It also spent more than $245,000 on security for Matthew Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Annual revenue: $130.5 billion
Executive security spend: $4 million

Nvidia’s full $4 million in security expenses went to CEO Jensen Huang for the company’s fiscal year 2026, which ended on Jan. 25. Services included residential and travel security, driver services, monitoring and private aircraft travel for business and personal use.

Apple CEO Tim Cook

Annual revenue: $416 billion
Executive security spend: $1.68 million

Apple protected longtime CEO Tim Cook with $1.68 million in security spend in fiscal year 2025, which ended on Sept. 27. Nearly $888,000 of the budget went to outright security costs, while close to $790,000 went to private air travel for security and efficiency purposes. For security reasons, the Apple board requires Cook to use private aircraft for all business and personal travel.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Annual revenue: $95 billion
Executive security spend: $4.8+ million

Tesla’s security spend is less clear. The EV company spent $4.8 million on Elon Musk’s personal security in 2025, up substantially from $2.8 million in 2024. But this amount represents just “a portion of the total cost of security services” for Musk, the company wrote in an SEC filing. Musk has multiple businesses, including SpaceX, which went public in June, and owns his own security firm, Foundation Security. His other businesses pay for additional security expenses.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Market cap: $281.7 billion
Executive security spend: $85,000

Microsoft shelled out just $85,000 for personal security for CEO and chairman Satya Nadella in fiscal year 2025, which ended last year on June 30. This total is significantly less than comparable tech companies, with Microsoft stating these expenses are “an integral part of our risk management program.”

On the heels of Hermès’ strong first-half 2026 results, it’s clear the French luxury house’s scarcity model and singular branding, built around icons like the Birkin and Kelly, have at least partially insulated it from the recent downturn in luxury spending. While ongoing Middle East conflicts and a lagging post-pandemic demand recovery in China have squeezed competitors like LVMH and Kering, Hermès’ distinct strategy shields both the company and the family that has led the brand for 179 years.

The Hermès family, comprising more than 100 heirs, ranks among the world’s richest, with an estimated combined fortune of $184.5 billion as of late 2025. They now stand as Europe’s wealthiest luxury dynasty. Last year, they overtook LVMH founder Bernard Arnault and his family as France’s richest, a title Arnault had held since 2017.

From January through June, Hermès saw revenue rise 6 percent to €8.2 billion ($9.4 billion), driven mostly by the Americas, Japan and Europe. Beyond these regions, China continued to grow, including with a new store in Beijing’s Sanlitun district in early April, contributing to a 2 percent revenue bump for Asia. Despite a 4 percent decline in the Middle East, recovery began by the second quarter, the company said.

“We have stability in our situation in China, but it still hasn’t recovered its past momentum,” Hermès CEO Axel Dumas said in a translated recording of the earnings call on July 29. “The Middle East was an area where there was double-digit growth, and there is now, of course, much less dynamic growth there. We do see, nonetheless, resilience in the Middle East.”

Hermès’ single, impactful brand contrasts sharply with LVMH, a conglomerate with 75 labels including Louis Vuitton, and Kering, which owns 30 brands including Balenciaga. LVMH’s revenue during the same period was up just 2 percent, with its Asia region seeing a 0.5 percent boost and the Middle East shrinking about 10 percent. Kering saw revenue increase 1 percent in total, with Asia and the Middle East shrinking 3.6 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively.

Hermès still faces market turbulence affecting the luxury sector, but its extreme scarcity model generates a consistent backlog of buyers, enabling the company to minimize the impact of broader consumer volatility. Production is inherently throttled by the company’s single-artisan model. Each Birkin bag, for example, requires upwards of 40 hours of craftsmanship by an artisan, with initial training taking 18 months. As a result, rapid expansion is practically impossible, but tactics like years-long waiting lists do serve as leverage for the brand in a fast-fashion world. In 2025, a Birkin bag sold for a record $10 million at auction.

Globally, Hermès continued to invest in store openings, renovations and production capacity expansions, with investments for the first half of the year totaling €344 million ($394 million, up nearly 9 percent year over year). Its flagship leather goods, saddlery, silk and textile products led demand while perfume, beauty and watch sales fell.

A family fortress against takeovers

Founder Thierry Hermès instilled the artisan practice as a core element of the business in 1837, a tradition that the roughly 100 heirs who have remained shareholders have carried into the modern day. These shareholders, divided between three branches of the family (the Dumas, Guerrand and Puech cousins), formed a family holding company, dubbed H51, in 2010 to take majority control of Hermès. The maneuver came in response to LVMH quietly building up a 17 percent stake in Hermès.

Today, H51 controls 50.2 percent of equity, and the sixth generation of Hermès heirs, collectively (including those outside the holding company), own a 66.7 percent stake and more than 76 percent of voting rights, giving them decisive control over governance and preventing a conglomerate takeover.

By consolidating control around uncompromising scarcity and independence, the sixth-generation Hermès heirs have built a structural wall against external takeovers and market turbulence unseen in expansion-focused empires.

In the Mediterranean every summer, the world’s richest vacationers turn superyachts into highly personalized playgrounds, whether they own them or not. Jeff Bezos has been spotted cruising the Balearics aboard his 417-foot sailing yacht, “Koru,” since its 2023 debut, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s 466-foot “Dragonfly,” delivered in 2024, has made appearances along the French Riviera. Meanwhile, chartering remains just as visible: Beyoncé and Jay-Z have repeatedly vacationed on the 450-foot “Flying Fox” off Ibiza in recent years, and Kim Kardashian used the 241-foot “Naia” as a floating base during the Monaco Grand Prix in June 2026.

Owning a superyacht is perhaps the ultimate symbol of wealth, but even among the fraction of the top 0.1 percent who can afford one, buying isn’t always ideal. Instead, a growing class of billionaires is choosing to charter these vessels, dipping in and out of the lifestyle for a few weeks every year without tethering themselves to ownership.

Global yacht broker Burgess Yachts said charter bookings for all yachts in its fleet are up 6.5 percent year over year, while retail rental bookings are up 15 percent. Fraser Yachts, which handles a portfolio of yachts worth over $7.4 billion, reported earlier this year that last-minute charter bookings are on the rise, too, suggesting flexibility as a key motivator.

“Charter has traditionally been something that somebody will do before they would buy,” George Jousma, president of yacht broker Italian Yacht Group in Florida and New York, told Observer. He noted that both renting and owning are growing quickly, especially in the superyacht segment, which generally includes fully staffed luxury vessels that are at least 79 feet long. “There’s a lot of wealth being produced in the upper sector,” he said. “It’s somewhat exponential.”

There are 3,428 billionaires globally today, up from just over 3,000 last year. The population of ultra-high-net-worth individuals is projected to jump 31 percent in the next five years, creating more than 166,000 potential new charter clients, according to Fraser. “The rise of high-profile entrepreneurs in the tech sector has helped drive growth,” Adam Moorey, head of business intelligence at superyacht broker Edmiston, told Observer.

Ownership remains strong at the very top. Bezos bought “Koru” in 2023 for $500 million, and Sergey Brin purchased “Dragonfly” in 2024 for $450 million. In June this year, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman acquired the $400 million “Destiny.” Still, discretion, flexibility and the ability to explore new destinations without long-term commitments are all pushing some billionaires toward chartering.

Musk is famously reluctant to take vacations, but he did charter the 79-foot “Zeus” in Greece in 2022, reportedly for about $7,000 per day. Bill Gates sold his $645 million yacht “Breakthrough” in 2025 before ever using it, despite having it custom-built. He has instead favored chartering vessels like the 351-foot “Lana” and the 436-foot “Serene,” valued at roughly $200 million and $400 million, respectively.

On the celebrity side, Beyoncé and her family have been frequent guests aboard “Flying Fox,” the world’s most expensive charter yacht at roughly $4 million per week. Kim Kardashian used “Naia,” which charters for about $700,000 per week, during the Monaco Grand Prix in June. While not billionaires, other high-profile figures are also leaning into charters: Kevin Hart vacationed with his family on the 236-foot “Axioma” in June, and Formula 1 driver Lando Norris spent time aboard the 238-foot “Coral Ocean” during last year’s Monaco Grand Prix.

“Many younger ultra-high-net-worth individuals are less focused on collecting assets and more focused on making the most of their time,” Alex Guy, a charter broker for Burgess in London and Palm Beach, told Observer. “That said, there are still plenty who view a yacht as an extension of their home and workplace. With remote working now so common, both chartering and ownership allow people to stay connected to business while spending quality time with family and friends.”

Billionaires and their superyachts

Billionaires spend heavily to purchase, maintain and operate superyachts, with annual upkeep typically running about 10 percent of a vessel’s value. Notable examples include:

• Steve Schwarzman’s $400 million “Destiny”: The 332-foot yacht, acquired in June, accommodates 15 guests and a 30-person crew, with a helicopter pad, glass-bottom pool and beach club.
• Jeff Bezos’ $500 million “Koru”: Delivered in 2023, the 417-foot sailing yacht features three 230-foot masts, space for 18 guests and up to 40 crew, along with a pool and multiple jacuzzis.
• Sergey Brin’s $450 million “Dragonfly”: Delivered in 2024, the 466-foot vessel includes a glass-bottom pool, spa and helicopter pad, accommodating 24 guests and 53 crew.
• Roman Abramovich’s “Eclipse” and “Solaris” ($1.3 billion combined): “Eclipse,” at 533 feet, remains one of the longest yachts in the world, with space for 36 guests and 74 crew and advanced security systems. “Solaris,” delivered in 2021, features a helicopter hangar, beach club and capacity for 36 guests and 60 crew.

Flying between Manhattan and the Hamptons has long symbolized wealth. But economically, it’s a difficult business. Despite high fares (seats range from $795 to $1,795) and steady demand, with roughly a third of traffic to the region’s busiest private airport coming from helicopters, operators don’t make much money. Blade Air Mobility, the largest provider on this route, has undergone restructuring and leaned on other segments, including medical organ transport and private jet services, to offset financial gaps.

The biggest constraint, according to Blade founder and CEO Rob Wiesenthal, is the limited number of landing zones. Noise complaints restrict where passenger helicopters can operate. Blade’s New York routes are currently limited to international airports, Manhattan heliports in Chelsea, the Financial District, Midtown and the Hamptons.

Blade is now betting on eVTOLs, or electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, as a solution to the noise problem. In August 2025, eVTOL developer Joby Aviation acquired Blade’s passenger business for $125 million, aiming to integrate its aircraft into Blade’s existing customer network.

Founded by JoeBen Bevirt, Joby has been developing eVTOLs since 2009 and is now in the final stages of FAA certification. The aircraft are designed to be significantly quieter—up to 100 times quieter than helicopters, according to the company. If successfully deployed, eVTOLs could unlock new landing locations in both cities and suburbs.

“We’re going to get in landing zones if we can show that these aircraft are quiet and emission-free,” Wiesenthal said.

“The more landing zones you have, the lower the cost becomes,” he added, “Because Joby aircraft have fewer moving parts, and they’re electric, by definition, they will require less maintenance, and maintenance is one of the biggest [cost] drivers.”

eVTOLs could bring additional cost benefits such as reduced landing fees, broader operating permissions and fewer curfews, Wiesenthal said.

Financially, Blade’s passenger business has lagged behind its medical segment. In the second quarter of 2025, the company’s last financial release before the Joby acquisition, the medical transport business generated more than $45.1 million in sales, accounting for over 60 percent of total revenue. The passenger business contributed $25.7 million, including $17.2 million from short-distance flights like helicopters and seaplanes.

Following the acquisition, Blade’s medical division now operates separately as Strata Critical Medical, focused on organ transport and surgeon travel. Blade continues to supply helicopters for that business.

How far are we from the electric future?

After Joby’s eVTOL receives FAA clearance, Blade and Joby plan to operate them alongside helicopters. “There’s going to be a cohabitation phase,” Wiesenthal said, noting it will take time to scale production to serve Blade’s roughly 100,000 annual passengers.

Joby has not provided a firm timeline for commercial launch, citing the unpredictability of FAA approval. However, it has been selected for early operations in up to 11 states under the White House-backed eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), which could accelerate deployment as early as this year. Pricing has also not been finalized, though Wiesenthal expects it to eventually align with current helicopter fares before becoming more affordable over time.

The company has already logged more than 50,000 test and demonstration miles. In April, it completed its first point-to-point demonstration flights at Port Authority airports, beginning and ending at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Joby also plans partnerships with Uber and Delta Air Lines, both investors in the company.

Meanwhile, demand for helicopter travel is expanding beyond leisure routes like the Hamptons, particularly around major events. hoper, a global helicopter booking platform, plans to launch private and shared flights in New York this September, timed to the U.S. Open.

“The rising demand for premium travel to sporting events is one of the reasons we’re expanding private charters in New York,” hoper CEO Demitris Memos said. “You’re dealing with road closures, congestion and tight schedules.” Memos added that the company is also preparing for the shift to eVTOL aircraft.

A helicopter ride to the Hamptons takes about 40 minutes, compared to over three hours by car via the Long Island Expressway (without traffic). “There are very few ways to buy time,” Wiesenthal said. “We’re in an industry where we actually can create time that didn’t previously exist.”

The Wimbledon Championships have been held annually since 1877, but a newer arm has expanded the tournament’s philanthropic reach. Since 2013, the Wimbledon Foundation has served as the official charity of the All England Lawn Tennis Club and The Championships, distributing grants, donations and programs across a range of sectors within and beyond tennis.

Unlike large endowed institutions such as the Gates Foundation in the U.S. or the Wellcome Trust in the U.K., the Wimbledon Foundation operates as a funding charity that distributes resources it generates. Its funding comes primarily from annual Championship profits and related revenue streams, and it does not follow a fixed payout requirement.

Not to be confused with the soccer-affiliated AFC Wimbledon Foundation, the organization is funded in part by the All England Club, ticket resales, sales of used match tennis balls, and partners such as Barclays and IBM. In 2025, it donated £4.76 million ($6.37 million), bringing its total charitable contributions to more than £24 million ($32.1 million).

Rather than being founded by an individual donor, the foundation was created collectively by the All England Club to formalize its existing philanthropic work. Since 2022, it has been led by head of foundation Paige Murphy, with a team and board of trustees supporting an expanding footprint beyond its local base in Merton and Wandsworth in southwest London.

The people running the Wimbledon Foundation

While the foundation is overseen by the All England Club, its trustees, staff and ambassadors drive its day-to-day work.

Paige Murphy joined as head of the foundation in 2022. With a background in nonprofit grantmaking and community engagement, she oversees initiatives such as the national expansion of Set for Success and the foundation’s long-term strategic planning.

On the trustee side, retired PwC executive Bruce Weatherill has served as chair since 2020. Other board members include:

• Sir Keith Ajegbo: Retired university executive, knighted for services to education
• Anne Keothavong: Retired professional tennis player and current commentator
• Kevin Havelock: Retired Unilever president
• Deborah Jevans: Retired professional tennis player and sports executive, including for the International Tennis Federation
• Ruth Shaw: Former sports executive, including for Sports Grounds Safety Authority, and current independent consultant
• Sir Nick Young: Retired solicitor, knighted for services to cancer care
• Sam Oslen: Public sector executive

In June 2025, British tennis players Katie Boulter and Jack Draper were named the first Wimbledon Foundation Champions, official ambassadors tasked with raising awareness of its work.

What the Wimbledon Foundation supports

The foundation distributes its funding through four main grant programs, primarily benefiting communities surrounding the Championships.

Its largest initiative, the Homelessness Fund, provides multi-year support to organizations addressing housing insecurity. Launched in 2019 to mark the completion of the No. 1 Court roof, the fund awarded seven major grants totaling £740,000 ($988,700) in 2025, supporting groups such as Faith in Action Merton Homelessness Project and Glass Door Homeless Charity.

Additional programs include the Community Fund, which supports local social initiatives; the Get Set, Get Active Fund, focused on increasing sports participation; and the Health and Wellbeing Fund, which backs mental and physical health projects. Recipients have included Off the Record Youth Counselling, Waste Not Want Not Battersea, Youth Sport Trust and the Metropolitan & City Police Orphans Fund. In 2025, the foundation supported 102 organizations through these grants.

Beyond grantmaking, the foundation runs partnerships and initiatives, including an international clean water program delivering water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in eight countries, a national crisis housing collaboration and annual contributions to the British Red Cross Disaster Fund.

Its programming also includes Set for Success, a national youth sports initiative delivered with Barclays and Youth Sport Trust; the Wimbledon Junior Tennis Initiative, which brings All England Club coaches into local state schools; and Work at Wimbledon, which provides employment opportunities at The Championships for people facing barriers to work.

As Wimbledon gets underway, Naomi Osaka has returned to the grass courts ranked in the top 15 in women’s singles, this time with a major shift off the court as well. Four years after co-founding sports management agency Evolve, Osaka has rejoined IMG, returning to a more traditional representation structure as the 28-year-old athlete refocuses on competition. Osaka continues to lead her media company Hana Kuma and skincare brand KINLÒ. While she remains deeply involved in her business ventures, Osaka now relies on a tighter circle of partners to manage the growing portfolio alongside her tennis career.

Osaka’s path to this moment has been anything but linear. After opting to compete on the ITF Women’s Circuit at just 14, she rose to become the first Asian player to reach world No. 1 in singles by 2019. A series of breaks for mental health, maternity and injury recovery followed her Grand Slam run from 2018 to 2021, and her ranking dipped to 59 by late 2024. A recent comeback, however, has pushed her back into the top tier, climbing more than 40 spots and putting her within reach of top players like Aryna Sabalenka, Coco Gauff and Iga Swiatek.

Like many elite athletes balancing competition with business ambitions, Osaka has built a team to support her off-court ventures. Here are the key figures behind that network.

Stuart Duguid, Osaka’s agent and business partner

Stuart Duguid, 43, represented Osaka for roughly a decade after the two met at IMG in 2016, where he served as a senior vice president. In 2022, they left the agency together to launch Evolve, a sports management firm whose early clients included Nick Kyrgios and later expanded to stars like Aryna Sabalenka and Ons Jabeur.

Following the end of Osaka’s contract with Duguid, she returned to IMG, while Duguid remains at Evolve as managing partner.

“You can tell those that have some magic and may touch lives outside of just the ones that surround us when we come to Grand Slams,” Duguid said in a 2024 interview, describing his focus on athletes with “the potential to transcend tennis.”

Duguid and Osaka also co-founded Hana Kuma in 2022 in partnership with LeBron James’ SpringHill Company. The media firm spun out independently in 2023 after raising $5 million and has since backed projects like the Emmy-nominated Mink! and Good Trouble with Nick Kyrgios, along with a brand-building initiative for female golfers. The name, which translates to “flower bear” in Japanese, reflects a balance of softness and strength.

Duguid played a central role in Osaka’s rise as a global business figure, helping her become the world’s highest-paid female athlete from 2020 to 2022—a title later surpassed by Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff.

Hill Harper and Ari Bloom, Osaka’s KINLÒ team

Hill Harper and Ari Bloom co-founded A-Frame Brands in 2019, a beauty incubator focused on underserved markets. Through A-Frame, they partnered with Osaka to launch KINLÒ, a skincare and suncare brand designed for melanated skin. The company has also developed other lines, including Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade’s baby care brand Proudly.

As CEO of KINLÒ, Osaka shapes the brand’s vision and public identity, while Harper and Bloom oversee operations, manufacturing and retail distribution. Their products are now carried by major retailers, including Target and Walmart.

“Our business is built with diversity at its foundation,” Bloom said in a 2023 interview, noting that 97 percent of the company’s team comes from historically underrepresented communities and half of the board members are women.

KINLÒ raised a seed round in 2022 backed by investors including former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and tennis legend Billie Jean King, as well as firms like Forerunner. Kaepernick also serves on the company’s board. The broader leadership team includes president Mia Meachem and dermatology director Dr. Naana Boakye.

Alexandre Cohen, financial advisor for Osaka’s investments

Since 2022, Osaka has worked with Alexandre Cohen, founder of advisory firm Heights, to guide her expanding investment portfolio.

The two co-invested in the Miami Pickleball Club, part of Major League Pickleball, in 2023. Cohen has also advised Osaka on deals involving startups such as healthy ramen brand immi and textured hair salon chain Pressed Roots.

Beyond individual investments, Cohen has supported Osaka in building out her broader business ecosystem, including the launch of Evolve and KINLÒ, while continuing to manage holdings such as her stake in the National Women’s Soccer League team North Carolina Courage.

Nearly four years after stepping away from professional tennis, Serena Williams returned to Wimbledon this year before withdrawing on July 4 due to a knee injury. Off the court, however, she has remained anything but idle: she welcomed a second child with her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, in 2023; launched a brand partnership with weight-loss telehealth provider Ro last year; and continued to expand her footprint in venture capital through Serena Ventures.

Williams quietly founded Serena Ventures in 2014, bringing it out of stealth in 2019 with a mission to back companies led by women, people of color and other underrepresented founders. The firm raised $111 million for its first institutional fund in 2022 and has since invested in more than 100 companies across fintech, health tech and e-commerce.

Its track record is notable: 14 portfolio companies have reached unicorn status, including Indonesian coffee chain Kopi Kenangan and weight-loss app Noom. More than half (54 percent) of Serena Ventures’ portfolio companies are founded by women, compared to just 1.1 percent of total venture funding that went to women in 2025.

“It’s super important for me to make a plan B while I was doing my plan A,” Williams said in a 2024 TikTok video about building the firm alongside her tennis career.

Here are the most notable founders backed by Serena Ventures, whose portfolio is 85 percent led by underrepresented entrepreneurs.

Kara Egan, Teal Health

Serena Ventures first invested in Teal Health in 2023 as part of an $8.8 million seed round alongside firms including Metrodora Ventures and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, and participated again in a $10 million round in 2025.

Egan, 45, founded Teal Health in 2020 to expand access to cervical cancer screening. Its flagship product, the at-home Teal Wand, has demonstrated detection rates for HPV, the leading cause of cervical cancer, comparable to in-clinic testing, according to a clinical study funded in part by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.

Egan said Williams’ firm has helped sharpen the company’s focus. “[Their support] strengthened our conviction that preventive care products must be designed with the same rigor around experience as clinical outcomes,” she told Observer, adding that the team has been an active partner in scaling the business without losing sight of patient needs.

Khalid David, TracFlo

Serena Ventures invested in TracFlo in 2021 as part of a $1 million prize package awarded through the HBCU Startup Pitch Competition at the Invesco QQQ Legacy Classic.

David founded TracFlo in 2019 to streamline financial management in construction, helping teams track time and materials, manage proposals and speed up payments. He previously worked as a safety engineer at Turner Construction and led Bunkers Hill Construction in New York.

In 2024, David participated in the Google for Startups Accelerator, where integrating Gemini helped improve customer efficiency on the platform by 80 percent.

Rodney Williams and Travis Holoway, SoLo Funds

Serena Ventures invested an undisclosed seven-figure sum in SoLo Funds in 2023.

Founded in 2018, the fintech platform enables users to lend and borrow small, short-term funds within a community-based model. Holoway, 38, serves as CEO, while Williams, 41, is president.

The company has facilitated more than 2.5 million loans to date. Despite a lawsuit from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2025 over alleged misleading advertising (the suit has since been dismissed), SoLo Funds remains widely used.

Ishveen Jolly and Ronneil Nesbitt, OpenSponsorship

Serena Ventures backed OpenSponsorship in 2022 with a seven-figure investment.

Founded in 2015, the platform connects athletes, creators and wellness influencers with brands for marketing partnerships. Clients include Jake Paul, LeBron James, Taylor Fritz and Hailie Deegan, while brands such as Walmart, IZOD and Harmless Harvest have used the platform to secure talent deals.

Jolly, a former director for British Wrestling, has emphasized the link between content and engagement. “I feel like the performance is there because the engagement’s there. And the engagement’s there because their content is interesting,” she told the Sports Business Journal recently. Nesbitt, a software developer, leads the company’s technical strategy.

More Serena Ventures-backed founders

• Mina Shahid, Catherine Denis and Benjamin Best founded Numida in 2016, a Uganda-based fintech platform serving small and medium-sized businesses.
• Yele Bademosi and Joseph Taiwo Orilogbon launched Nestcoin in 2021 as a venture studio and holding company focused on crypto-native products.
• Joanna Strober, Sharon Meers, Dr. Kathleen Jordan, Dr. Mindy Goldman and Jill Herzig co-founded Midi Health in 2021, a platform addressing women’s mid-life health needs.
• Emily Hosie founded Rebel in 2021 to resell and liquidate overstock and open-box baby gear and home goods.
• Wemimo Abbey and Samir Goel launched Esusu in 2018 to help renters build credit through on-time payment reporting.
• Isoken Igbinedio founded Parfait in 2020, combining A.I. and human expertise to create custom luxury wigs tailored to individual measurements, skin tone and style preferences.

Days after SpaceX hit the public market, Elon Musk’s mega-company announced plans to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of A.I. coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion in the third quarter of this year. Behind Cursor are four former MIT classmates in their mid-20s. All co-founders became billionaires in November following a $2.3 billion funding round that valued the company at $29.3 billion. With each holding roughly a 4.5 percent stake, a SpaceX acquisition would push their net worth to about $2.7 billion each.

Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger founded San Francisco-based Anysphere in 2022 after meeting at MIT. In just a few years, their flagship product, Cursor, has become a widely used tool for building A.I. coding agents, now adopted by 64 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including Nvidia, Adobe and even competitor OpenAI. Global research firm Gartner has positioned it as a leader in enterprise coding tools alongside OpenAI, Anthropic and GitHub.

The move comes nearly two months after Cursor, which has been working closely with xAI to integrate its technology into the Grok assistant, granted exclusive acquisition rights to xAI’s now parent company SpaceX. If the $60 billion deal falls through, SpaceX has agreed to pay Cursor $10 billion for their collaboration. The deal caps a rapid rise for a team that went from university classmates to major players in the A.I. race within just a few years.

Michael Truell, CEO

The 25-year-old co-founder and CEO attended New York’s Horace Mann School before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Two Sigma, Google and Octant before dropping out in 2021 to co-found Cursor. In 2020, Truell was recognized as a Neo Scholar alongside Aman Sanger, with Neo later becoming one of the earliest investors in Cursor’s $400,000 pre-seed round.

“There was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years and for all of software development to flow through models,” Truell said in an interview for Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in San Francisco last year. “It felt like no one working on the space at the time was really taking that seriously.”

Sualeh Asif, Chief Product Officer

Originally from Pakistan, Asif attended the country’s prestigeous prep school, Nixor College, where he graduated as valedictorian in 2018. At MIT, he worked as a research assistant at the Supertech Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

“In general, over a 1–2 year time frame, I expect that the way people will code will change,” Asif said in an interview with A.I. researcher and entrepreneur Lukas Biewald on his YouTube series Gradient Dissent last year. “In the short term, that seems really scary, but it’ll be this gradual process and will be extremely natural to everyone.” 

Aman Sanger, Chief Operating Officer

Sanger attended Horace Mann School with Truell before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Google and hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates prior to graduating and was also named a Neo Scholar in 2020.

“A lot of the work for Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible,” Sanger said in an interview with venture capitalist Rajan Anandan. “For everything that you may see in the product, there’s ten failed experiments of what didn’t work.” Sanger said he began coding at age 14.

Arvid Lunnemark, Co-founder

Lunnemark, 26, graduated from Malmö Borgarskola High School in Sweden in 2018 before attending MIT, where he worked at QuantCo, Stripe and trading firm Jane Street. In October 2025, he announced his departure from Cursor to found a new venture, Integrous Research, focused on building safer A.I. systems. He reportedly retains his founding equity stake, allowing him to benefit from the potential acquisition.

While still in stealth mode, Integrous Research says it is “devoted to protecting individual human freedom before, during and after the start of the superintelligence era” and believes that “by the time the superintelligence can do that research for us, it may already be too late.”

Soccer has long played a secondary role in the American sports landscape, trailing football, basketball and baseball in cultural prominence. Yet as the 2026 World Cup arrives on U.S. soil, American capital is exerting an outsized influence on the global game.

An influx of investment from U.S. billionaires underscores a striking contrast: while domestic fandom has historically lagged, American money is deeply embedded in soccer’s worldwide growth. From Premier League giants to Major League Soccer expansion teams, these investors increasingly view the sport as one of the most lucrative frontiers in modern entertainment.

Over the past two decades, they have funded turnarounds, driven expansion and helped elevate clubs and players to new heights. Together, these owners show how American wealth is quietly reshaping the world’s most popular sport.

Stan Kroenke, real estate mogul

Net worth: $22 billion

Teams owned: Arsenal, Colorado Rapids

The 78-year-old Missouri native owns roughly 60 million square feet of real estate and 1.6 million acres of ranch land, making him one of the largest private landowners in the U.S. He is married to Walmart heiress Ann Walton.

Kroenke bought the Colorado Rapids in 2004 from fellow billionaire Phil Anschutz. He had held a stake in Arsenal’s parent company, Arsenal Holdings, since the early 2000s and completed a full takeover in 2018, valuing the club at £1.8 billion ($2.3 billion) after buying out minority shareholders, including Alisher Usmanov.

His broader sports portfolio includes teams such as the Rams (relocated from St. Louis to Los Angeles in 2016). He is currently in a dispute with the city of Inglewood over $400 million in public funding for stadium improvements.

Todd Boehly, investor

Net worth: $9.3 billion

Teams owned: Chelsea, RC Strasbourg

The 52-year-old founder of Eldridge Industries entered global soccer in 2022 as part of the consortium that purchased Chelsea for $2.15 billion. He briefly served as interim chairman before stepping back. Chelsea won the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025.

In 2023, Boehly acquired a majority stake in Ligue 1 club Strasbourg for about £65 million ($82 million).

He is known for reshaping player recruitment strategy, introducing long-term contracts—often up to eight years—to spread costs and manage accounting more efficiently.

John W. Henry, investor

Net worth: $5.7 billion

Teams owned: Liverpool

The 76-year-old built his fortune in agricultural futures before founding John W. Henry & Company in 1981. Through Fenway Sports Group, he bought Liverpool in 2010 for £300 million ($476 million), rescuing the debt-laden club. Liverpool is now valued at about £4.6 billion ($6.5 billion) and won the Champions League in 2019 and the Premier League in 2020.

In 2021, Henry backed Liverpool’s involvement in the European Super League, a plan that quickly collapsed amid intense fan backlash. He has since faced recurring criticism over his perceived lack of engagement with the club. As Tony Evans, host of The Athletic’s Walk On podcast, put it: “When he’s engaged, things happen. When he’s not, the club drifts.”

Dan Friedkin, entrepreneur

Net worth: $11.3 billion

Teams owned: AS Roma, Everton

The 61-year-old CEO of The Friedkin Group oversees a portfolio spanning automotive, hospitality and entertainment. He is the grandson of Pacific Southwest Airlines founder Kenny Friedkin.

Friedkin acquired AS Roma in 2020 for €591 million ($700 million); the club won the UEFA Conference League in 2022. In 2024, he expanded his holdings by purchasing a 94 percent stake in Everton for about £400 million ($500 million).

He has also pursued U.S. sports investments, including unsuccessful bids for the MLB’s San Diego Padres and the NBA’s Boston Celtics.

The Glazer Family, real estate dynasty

Net worth: $10 billion combined

Teams owned: Manchester United
The family built its fortune through First Allied Corporation, founded by patriarch Malcolm Glazer. He bought the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for $192 million in 1995, an NFL record at the time, and led them to a Super Bowl win in 2003.

In 2005, the Glazers acquired Manchester United for £790 million ($1.4 billion), a highly controversial leveraged deal that loaded debt onto the club. After his death in 2014, the ownership passed to his six children: Avram, Joel, Kevin, Bryan, Darcie and Edward. 

In 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe purchased a 27.7 percent stake for £1.25 billion ($1.65 billion) and assumed control of soccer operations, while the Glazers retained majority ownership.

Jorge Mas, Miami development giant

Net worth: $4.8 billion

Teams owned: Inter Miami

The 63-year-old chairman of MasTec, a construction and engineering firm founded by his father, joined David Beckham’s Inter Miami ownership group in 2018 and, with his brother José, took majority control in 2021.

The club signed Lionel Messi in 2023 and won the inaugural Leagues Cup. Inter Miami is now valued at $1.45 billion, the highest in MLS. Mas also serves as president of the Spanish club Real Zaragoza.

He is active in Cuban-American political advocacy and has supported the Trump administration’s efforts to accelerate political change in Cuba.

Other notable American billionaires who own soccer clubs

• Shahid Khan (Fulham FC): The Pakistani-American owner of automotive parts supplier Flex-N-Gate is worth $12.2 billion. He purchased Fulham in 2013 for $300 million.
• Gerry Cardinale (AC Milan): The founder of RedBird Capital Partners led the $1.2 billion acquisition of AC Milan in 2022.
• Bill Foley (AFC Bournemouth, Auckland FC): The Fidelity National Financial chairman, worth $2.6 billion, bought AFC Bournemouth in 2022 for £120 million ($148 million) through his Black Knight Football Club consortium. Actor Michael B. Jordan is a minority owner. Foley also acquired Auckland FC in 2023 for an undisclosed sum.
• Wes Edens (Aston Villa): The Fortress Investment Group founder, worth $2.5 billion, bought a 55 percent stake in Aston Villa in 2018 for £30 million ($39 million) and took full control in 2019 at a £54.5 million ($73 million) valuation.
• Arthur Blank (Atlanta United): The Home Depot co-founder, worth $10.2 billion, launched Atlanta United as an MLS expansion team in 2014, paying a $70 million fee.

Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, left the A.I. giant in late 2024 to found her own startup, Thinking Machines Lab, and raised a staggering $2 billion in less than a year. In her first media interview since founding the startup, Murati revealed what she has been building: “interaction models,” or multimodal A.I. systems that process audio, text and video simultaneously and collaborate with humans in near real time, without waiting for prompts. “I have very high conviction that the way to continue building frontier A.I. systems is to [create] systems that are not just autonomously advancing and leaving civilization behind, but are more like a tandem bike,” she said onstage at Bloomberg Tech Summit last week.

“They’re continuously taking in audio, text, video, and continuously providing output,” Murati added, describing the model, called TML-Interaction-Small, which she plans to release publicly later this year.

Unlike many A.I. founders who climbed traditional computer science or venture capital ranks, Murati’s path is rooted in product management. She studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College, where she worked on building a hybrid race car. After graduating, she joined Tesla in 2013 as a product manager for the Model X. She later led product and engineering at augmented reality startup Leap Motion (now UltraLeap), focusing on motion-based human-computer interaction.

In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as head of applied A.I. and partnerships, rising quickly to become chief technology officer. Over six years, she helped steer the deployment of some of the most influential A.I. products, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4.

During Sam Altman’s temporary ousting in November 2023, Murati served as interim CEO for three days, acting as a bridge between Altman and a small group of executives involved in the leadership shakeup. In hindsight, she said OpenAI would have “imploded” without her intervention. “There wasn’t any transition plan, and there wasn’t much thought put into transparency, bringing the team along, providing continuity,” she said. In a recent lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against OpenAI and Altman, Murati also testified that Altman was prone to “creating chaos.”

“The structure of governance in decision-making should not hinge on one person. There should be checks and balances,” she said, reflecting on her time at OpenAI. “To get as many people involved as possible, you have to share the knowledge, you have to share tools, and this is part of the reason why we’ve taken a more open approach with our lab.”

She is now applying those lessons at Thinking Machines Lab, which has attracted top talent from across the industry. CTO Soumith Chintala joined from Meta. Chief scientist John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder, joined from Anthropic. And Lilian Weng left her role as OpenAI’s vice president to become a founding member.

At the same time, the company has faced talent losses. Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, has poached five founding members. The most recent, Joshua Gross, now leads engineering teams at Mark Zuckerberg’s lab. Meta reportedly began its aggressive recruiting push after Murati rejected a $1 billion acquisition offer in mid-2025.

As A.I. systems become more agentic and take on more autonomy in daily life, they will increasingly interact with one another rather than with humans, according to Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s resident philosopher. “Human input is going to be rarer and rarer. That’s the thing that we need to prepare models for,” Askell said at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco last week. Askell’s non-technical role reflects a growing trend among leading A.I. labs to incorporate humanities expertise. But she also sees a future in which A.I. may be able to do her job better than she can. “What [A.I. models] are good at is these deeply human skills,” she said. “Eventually, Claude is going to be a much better philosopher than I am, and probably be much better at every aspect of my job than I am.”

Askell joined Anthropic in 2021, shortly after its founding, following earlier work at OpenAI focused on A.I. safety and alignment. Under CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has emphasized hiring strong communicators with a deep understanding of human behavior. In a February interview with ABC News, Daniela Amodei, who studied English literature in college, highlighted the importance of “understanding what makes us tick” as A.I. grows more capable in technical domains.

“When I think about what my kids will need as they get older, it’s human qualities,” she told The Wall Street Journal in February. ” What’s not going to be replaceable is how you treat other people, how well you communicate with them, how kind you are.”

Originally from Scotland, Askell holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University. She co-authored Claude’s 84-page “constitution,” sometimes referred to internally as a “soul doc,” and now leads Anthropic’s personality alignment team, which works to ensure models remain “helpful, honest and harmless” as their capabilities evolve. In 2024, she was named to the TIME 100 AI list.

Part of that work involves strengthening A.I.’s capacity for empathy. “The same way that models are getting very good at questions of physics and mathematics, they actually should also be getting very good at questions like ethics, and ideally getting very good at empathy in hopefully the right way,” Askell explained.

Askell does not see widespread job automation as inherently negative, provided systems are in place to support people. “That doesn’t strike me as dystopian at all,” she said. “It’s important to remind people that [work] isn’t actually where their value is derived from. Most of your value is just intrinsically your value as a person. You can go out, you can have an impact on your community. You can have relationships. You can experience joy and enjoy the world.”

Askell suggests that human kindness may also shape how we treat A.I. systems themselves. While many argue that models lack true sentience, she cautioned against ruling it out entirely. “Let’s not close the door,” she said. In some cases, she added, there may already be a “functional equivalence” to emotions. If A.I. were to exhibit some form of sentience, even without a biological brain, it may be safer to act with caution.

As Anthropic develops Claude’s personality, other A.I. labs are pursuing related work on alignment, ethics and interpretability. Google DeepMind’s Iason Gabriel focuses on A.I. ethics and value alignment, OpenAI’s Dan Mossing works in interpretability research, and Meta’s Summer Yue leads alignment efforts at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Because ethics and alignment are shaped by differing research traditions and value judgments, approaches across companies are likely to vary.

Days after Anthropic confidentially filed to go public, edging ahead of OpenAI in a closely watched IPO race among A.I. giants, Daniela Amodei, the company’s co-founder and president, sought to draw a sharper distinction between the two rivals. Anthropic is currently valued at $965 billion, with expectations it could climb past $1 trillion on the public markets, compared with OpenAI’s roughly $900 billion valuation. But as Amodei framed it, the competition is not just about numbers, but about how the technology itself is built and used.

“The whole reason we started Anthropic is to be able to build and develop this technology in a way that is ethical, responsible, fair, and I think it’s really incumbent upon everybody at the company, but especially leadership, to say, all of these numbers, they’re actually not the point,” Amodei said at this year’s Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco yesterday (June 4).

Anthropic was founded by seven former OpenAI employees, including Daniela and her brother, Dario, who is the company’s CEO, aiming to build a more transparent and safety-focused A.I. firm. Its divergence from OpenAI extends beyond positioning to how it plans to grow.

The company has emphasized securing compute capacity, including a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which absorbed xAI earlier this year) to access its data centers in Memphis that will cost $1.25 billion per month. But Amodei said Anthropic is deliberately avoiding the aggressive spending levels seen elsewhere. OpenAI has projected as much as $600 billion in compute spending by 2030; Anthropic expects to spend roughly one-third of that.

“The structure of these deals is you have to commit to a certain amount of compute reasonably far in advance, and [we don’t want to] overextend ourselves such that we’re buying more compute than we could productively use,” Amodei explained. “We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we’re able to serve than the inverse, where you overshoot and then you’re not in a great situation, because you’ve bought something you can’t pay for down the road.”

While Anthropic has also expressed interest in more speculative infrastructure, such as SpaceX’s proposed orbital data centers, Amodei said there are “no immediate plans for working with astronauts to get space data centers going.” “But you never know,” she added.

Product strategy marks another key split. Anthropic has prioritized enterprise and coding use cases over mass-market consumer engagement. That contrasts with OpenAI, where more than 70 percent of ChatGPT usage is tied to personal tasks such as search, tutoring and life advice.

“We have always felt that enterprise and business are the best spiritual fit for Anthropic and our values,” Amodei said. “The difference in our consumer product compared to competitors is that we’re not an entertainment tool. It’s really for productive activities, whether those are at work or at home.”

Both companies, however, are investing heavily in advanced cybersecurity A.I. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos has raised concerns about its ability to exploit vulnerabilities. OpenAI’s Daybreak targets similar risks but takes a different approach to deployment.

Daybreak is integrated into existing GPT workflows and offered in tiered access based on user verification. Mythos operates as a closed consortium limited to vetted organizations across roughly 15 countries, including the U.S. government, NATO, ENISA, Samsung and Okta.

“You have to give the defenders a head start,” said Amodei. “A.I. models are going to keep advancing. If it’s not us one day releasing a Mythos-level model [to the public], another A.I. company will.”

Anthropic has also taken a more cautious stance on government work. The company withdrew from a Pentagon contract involving domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, which OpenAI later assumed. Still, Amodei described broader collaboration with the U.S. government as positive.

“Every company is going to have its own principles about what its red lines and values are,” she said. “It’s important that, whatever those values are for you as a company, you are true to them, you feel like you can explain them to employees and to the world more broadly.”

When Sam Liang co-founded Otter.ai in 2016, A.I. was not yet a household buzzword. In the years since, however, the transcription and notes-taking platform has evolved alongside the technology that powers it. Today, its built-in conversational knowledge engine helps users make sense of their business and personal lives by drawing on their own database of meeting recordings. Liang envisions a future where typing—even to a chatbot—becomes largely obsolete.

“When people use chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, one of the biggest problems is context,” Liang told Observer. “It takes a lot of effort to write a good prompt and provide all the context, but when you bring A.I. into the conversation, it has all the context.”

Used by 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies, Otter surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year. The company raised $73 million in venture funding in its first five years and exceeded 35 million users late last year. It combines external integrations—such as Google Workspace and Anthropic’s Claude—with internal innovations like agentic chat, which can pull data and complete tasks. Even large banks with strict compliance requirements are in discussions with Otter about incorporating the technology into their workflows, Liang said.

Otter has managed to compete with Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Google. While Microsoft Teams’ note-taking features and Gemini for Google Workspace benefit from being native to their ecosystems, Otter differentiates itself by working across platforms, including Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and even in-person meetings via its mobile app.

Whether college students are trying to understand lectures, recruiters are analyzing candidates, or CEOs are reviewing meetings they missed, A.I. agents alone are not enough to solve productivity challenges, Liang said. Instead, he argues that access to full contextual data from past meetings enables agents to execute tasks more effectively.

Observer spoke with Liang about the state of A.I. in voice communication, competing with tech giants, and why personal meeting avatars are Otter’s next frontier.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Otter started out primarily as a transcriber and note-taker. When did it become clear that you needed to shift to understanding and acting on conversation? And how did you tackle that shift in a way that was different from the pathways we’re seeing at big tech competitors?

This has always been our vision from day one, but it took us several years to make the transcription and meeting notes work well. With large language models and new agentic technologies, it makes the knowledge engine possible.

There’s another aspect to why we’re making faster progress on the knowledge engine now. It’s the mindset change. It’s the desire to look for A.I. solutions to transform how people work. We’re still in the early innings, but it’s starting to change.

Business or personal, it does seem to require that mindset shift to make the most of A.I. I actually have a smart fridge at home, so I don’t have to add anything by hand to my shopping list anymore, but it took me a while to get used to it. Now, as you mature in this evolution you’ve described, how do you measure success against giants like Microsoft and Google, who admittedly have a broader purview, but whose ambitions increasingly overlap with yours?

When you build something new, you always face competition from large tech. Google, Zoom, Microsoft, their biggest advantage is their distribution channel. They have penetration in enterprises already, so it’s easy for them to bundle something, even for free. 

But this can be their biggest disadvantage. Because it’s so easy for them to bundle things, they don’t really have a strong motivation to build the best product. Microsoft is not known to build new innovative products. They’re known to copy others. For us, with the conversational knowledge engine concept, I don’t see them working on that right now. 

My prediction is that they don’t care about what we do until we reach $1 billion in revenue. Microsoft copied Slack, but they didn’t do it until they were big already. Salesforce acquired Slack when it was valued at $27.7 billion, so we still have many years before Microsoft really pays attention.

You mentioned that A.I. benefits from as much context as possible. For business and personal use, some context is very sensitive. How do you balance the productivity benefits of voice data with privacy concerns inside and outside of an organization’s walls?

There is a common security model already. In Google, Microsoft and Notion, you can control who has access to any content. We created a similar structure in Otter. You can create private Otter channels, but there’s some content that could be public to anyone in the company. 

A lot of enterprises have information silos, which slow people down. Sales teams don’t necessarily know what marketing or product teams are doing, and vice versa. If you share more information between teams, you can accelerate workflows.

From a similar lens, the question of authenticity is increasingly relevant. Video A.I., for example, is facing a lot of questions around authenticity. Outside of the obvious issues with deepfakes, do you see those concerns emerging in A.I.-enabled voice technology, or do they take a different shape?

I believe voice communication is actually more authentic, especially if you meet someone in person. Still, if it’s written by A.I., it doesn’t mean it’s not authentic. It can still come from authentic human ideas. 

Voice communication is actually more likely to be authentic because you’re speaking out of your own mind in real time. In the future, we can build an avatar that can speak just like you, but hopefully that avatar is actually using your own brain dump to talk, so it’s still mostly authentic. 

Do you have any plans to tackle the personal meeting avatar in the future?

Yeah, we do plan to do that, but there definitely are still a lot of challenges to make it work really well. We built an avatar for me already. A Bloomberg reporter interviewed my avatar in a live event. It went reasonably well, and eventually, I see avatars for busy professionals to represent them in some meetings. 

And in that regard, what are you hearing from your users and industry peers about the risks associated with that kind of technology? How are they thinking about it?

Of course, one risk is fraud. There have already been some cases of people using a clone of a relative to scam people into sending money, so it’s how you better detect that and warn people. There are risks for any new technology. 

Looking to the future, what do you think is the next frontier for voice communication in concert with A.I., and how do you see Otter shaping it, especially alongside big tech and these A.I. giants?

I think more and more enterprises will adopt the conversation knowledge engine. You put all the meetings on this system and use it to drive both human and agent workflows, making enterprises way more productive. There’s always competition from Big Tech, but I’m confident that we can innovate way faster.