Being in the C-suite is a high-pressure job with long hours, responsibilities to the board, and intense scrutiny. But what is it like to be a top executive when you’re off the clock?
Fortune’s series, The Good Life, shows how up-and-coming leaders spend their time and money outside of work.
Today we meet the two-time Grand Slam tennis champion, Coco Gauff.
Whether you’ve watched her recently shred the courts in the U.S. Open, or you’ve been following her string of career achievements for years, Gauff is one of the biggest names in tennis. The world tuned into her talent when she was only 15 years old—one year into her professional career—as Gauff made history as the youngest to qualify for Wimbledon’s main draw.
Now at the age of 21, the professional athlete hasn’t quit breaking records and taking names. In 2023, she became the youngest American to win the U.S. Open singles title since Serena Williams in 1999; she’d go on to claim the 2025 French Open singles title, her second Grand Slam singles victory. Gauff has also been crowned the world number one ranking in doubles, and world number two ranking in singles, according to the Women’s Tennis Association. Not to mention the honor of being the U.S. flag bearer for the Paris 2024 Olympics—making Gauff the youngest American flag bearer in U.S. Olympic history.
But beyond the court, the Florida native has expanded her empire into business. The Gen Z tennis star and entrepreneur has her own company, Coco Gauff Enterprise, to manage her business partnerships.
This April, Gauff announced her venture on Instagram, saying how it would mirror “[her] passion for making an impact—not just in tennis but in business, philanthropy and beyond.” The business is powered by WME, a talent representation entity that controls IMG and represents sports icons like Carlos Alcaraz, Iga Świątek, and Gauff’s childhood role model Serena Williams. Some of her main brand sponsors include New Balance, Rolex, and sports equipment business Head.
I’ve actually never been on a real holiday since I was probably 16…My dream holiday would be somewhere tropical, just sitting around doing nothing but drinking piña coladas and doing water sports.
Just in time for the U.S. Open this year, Gauff also launched her own signature protein smoothie with $3.3 billion Naked Juices, Coco’s Protein Pineapple Orange smoothie, inspired by her fruit salad that went viral at the competition two years ago.
To wind down from her electric tennis career and business forays, Gauff journals and treats herself with $3,000 shopping sprees. The multimillionaire also likes to balance luxury with the simple pleasures; she can’t live without her $2 monthly subscription to Trivia Crack and loves to shop on second-hand clothes website Depop. Gauff hasn’t taken a real vacation since she was 16—but dreams of sipping piña coladas and playing water sports.
This interview has been condensed for clarity.
The finances
Fortune: What’s been the best investment you’ve ever bought?
My house was probably the best investment because I feel like that’s something that will only appreciate in value and it’s in my hometown. I can see myself living there for the rest of my life—but who knows. If I don’t end up there forever, I can pass it down to my future kids, my brothers, or someone in my family.
What are your living arrangements like: Swanky apartment in the city or suburban sprawling?
When I’m not traveling for tournaments, I’m back home in Delray Beach, Florida. It’s where I grew up, and I’ve always loved the laid-back vibe—sunshine, palm trees, and space to just breathe. My house is close to my family, which means everything to me. I don’t have a traditional office unless you count the tennis court, but being home gives me time to recharge, stay grounded, and catch up with friends and family.
How do you commute to work?
When I’m home, I usually practice at the court at my parents house which isn’t too far away, so after I wake up I usually grab my kit and a Naked smoothie and drive to their house, listen to music in the car, and eat something small there before I get going.
Do you invest in shares?
In the investing world, I’m still very new. I really just go off the recommendation of my dad. He has a financial advisor he talks to, and then he’ll ask for my input, but I’m very much in the learning phase. If it’s something I absolutely don’t believe in—like a specific company—then I’m like, “Yeah… no thanks.” But most of the time, I trust him. He had a lot of experience at his job when he was working and learned a lot about the market, so I trust his opinion.
What personal finance advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
Well, 20 was only a year ago for me, so I’m still figuring it out! But if I had to give myself advice, I’d say don’t be afraid to ask questions and make sure you’re intentional about collaborating with people and brands that truly align with who you are—it makes everything feel more meaningful, authentic and way more fun.
I’ve actually never been on a real holiday since I was probably 16…My dream holiday would be somewhere tropical, just sitting around doing nothing but drinking piña coladas and doing water sports.
The necessities
What’s the one subscription you can’t live without?
I would say Netflix, but I actually don’t pay for my Netflix subscription—I still use my parents’ account. One that I do pay for is a game called Trivia Crack. I can’t stand when there are ads popping up while I’m trying to play, so it probably costs me like $2 a month which doesn’t quite set me back.
Where’s your go-to wristwatch from?
It’s a Rolex—the Oyster Perpetual. I’ve had it since I was 15 years old, and I love it. It’s my everyday watch. It has some wear and tear, but I like to think of it as being loved.
What about eating on the go?
I don’t really ever eat out for lunch. When I do, I just Uber Eats and order lunch. I practice at my parents’ house because that’s where the court is, and my parents will often cook lunch. I don’t really eat much during practice unless it’s a Naked smoothie, fruit, or a protein bar. I usually try to get a lot of protein—I like my lunches to be protein, starch, and vegetables. Typically, it’s chicken, rice, and vegetables; chicken, pasta, and vegetables; or fish, potatoes, and vegetables. It’s always some variation of that.
How often in a week do you dine out versus cook at home?
When I’m home, I order delivery for lunch. For dinner, either my grandparents—who live 15 minutes away—are cooking, or my parents are. When nobody’s cooking, I’ll try a TikTok recipe and cook for myself. I’m not a cook—my dad and grandparents are expert cooks—but I’m learning as I go.
Where do you shop for your work wardrobe?
My work wardrobe consists of basically only tennis clothes—so New Balance. My favorite brands right now are definitely New Balance, MiuMiu, and honestly, Depop. It’s not a brand, but it’s an app where people can resell things, kind of like an online thrift store. You can find some really unique pieces on there.
What would be a typical work outfit for you?
Depends on the day! If I’m practicing or playing, I love my New Balance gear—it’s comfortable, performance-driven, and really aligns with the essence of my street style. For meetings or when I’m filming brand content like with Naked, I like to mix sporty and chic like New Balance sneakers paired with cargo pants or something elevated, like a Miu Miu blazer or cropped jacket. I love blending sporty vibes with high-fashion touches that show off my personality, whether it’s bold colors or fun accessories.
The treats
Are you the proud owner of any futuristic gadgets?
I own the Meta glasses, and I was able to try them before they were ever out because I did a brand shoot for Ray-Ban and they gave me some glasses. I don’t use them that much because I don’t content-create often, but when I do, it’s really cool to get that perspective. I can also play music in them, which is the reason I liked them the most.
I also own an Oculus—the virtual reality headset. I don’t use it a lot because I don’t travel with it, but when I’m home, sometimes I’ll pop in and play a game just to do something different.
How do you unwind from the top job?
I prioritize journaling and have been trying to add more mindfulness habits to my repertoire so that I continue to be at my best. I’ve been journaling since I was little, so I find it helps me get my thoughts out especially when things get overwhelming.
What’s the best bonus treat you’ve bought yourself?
Ooh, that’s a good question. Honestly, just clothes. I’ll give myself like a $3,000 limit and online shop until my fingers fall off. So I would say clothes or a bag. I think bags are a good thing to invest in—although when they’re worn, they depreciate a little, it’s never to the point where you can’t get some of your money back if you decide to resell them.
Take us on holiday with you, what’s next on your vacation list?
I’ve actually never been on a real holiday since I was probably 16. I went to the Bahamas with my best friend and my parents, and that was the last time. Usually when the off-season rolls around, I’m so tired of traveling that I just want to lay in bed. My dream holiday would be somewhere tropical, just sitting around doing nothing but drinking piña coladas and doing water sports. I’d probably want to go to Jamaica.
How many days of annual leave do you take a year?
That’s a tough question—I don’t have a number. If I do well in a tournament, I’ll take maybe 5–7 days off. If I do a big tournament like a Grand Slam and win, I’ll take a week off. Sometimes I go three or four weeks without taking a day off, and sometimes I get one or two days off per week for three or four weeks. It’s very results-dependent in tennis.
When it comes to creating irresistible storylines, Netflix, the home of Stranger Things and The Crown, is second to none. And as the streaming video giant delivered its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, executives were in top storytelling form, pitching what they promise will be a smash hit: the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery.
The company’s co-CEOs, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, said the deal, which values Warner Brothers Discovery at $83 billion, will accelerate its own core streaming business while helping it expand into TV and the theatrical film business.
“This is an exciting time in the business. Lots of innovation, lots of competition,” Sarandos enthused on Tuesday’s earnings conference call. Netflix has a history of successful transformation and of pivoting opportunistically, he reminded the audience: Once upon a time, its main business entailed mailing DVDs in red envelopes to customers’ homes.
Despite Sarandos’ confident delivery, however, the pitch didn’t land with investors. The company’s stock, which was already down 15% since Netflix announced the deal in early December, sank another 4.9% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Netflix’s financial results for the final quarter of 2025 were fine. The company beat EPS expectations by a penny, and said it now has 325 million paid subscribers and a worldwide total audience nearing 1 billion. Its 2026 revenue outlook, of between $50.7 billion and $51.7 billion, was right on target.
Still, investors are worried that the Warner Bros. deal will force Netflix to compete outside its lane, causing management to lose focus. The fact that Netflix will temporarily halt its share buybacks in order to accumulate cash to help finance the deal, as it disclosed towards the bottom of Tuesday’s shareholder letter, probably didn’t help matters.
And given that there’s a rival offer for Warner Bros from Paramount Skydance, it’s not unreasonable for investors to worry that Netflix may be forced into an expensive bidding war. (Even though Warner Brothers Discovery has accepted the Netflix offer over Paramount’s, no one believes the story is over—not even Netflix, which updated its $27.75 per share offer to all-cash, instead of stock and cash, hours earlier on Tuesday in order to provide WBD shareholders with “greater value certainty.”)
Investors are wary; will regulators balk?
Warner Brothers investors are not the only audience that Netflix needs to win over. The deal must be blessed by antitrust regulators—a prospect whose outcome is harder to predict than ever in the Trump administration.
Sarandos and Peters laid out the case Tuesday for why they believe the deal will get through the regulatory process, framing the deal as a boon for American jobs.
“This is going to allow us to significantly expand our production capacity in the U.S. and to keep investing in original content in the long term, which means more opportunities for creative talent and more jobs,” Sarandos said.
Referring to Warner Brothers’ television and film businesses, he added that “these folks have extensive experience and expertise. We want them to stay on and run those businesses. We’re expanding content creation not collapsing it.”
It’s a compelling story. But the co-CEOs may have neglected to study the most important script of all when it comes to getting government approval in the current administration; they forgot to recite the Trump lines.
The example has been set over the past 12 months by peers such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The latter, with his company facing various federal regulatory threats, began publicly praising the Trump administration on an earnings call last January.
And Nvidia’s Huang has already seen real dividends from a similar strategy. The chip company CEO has praised Trump repeatedly on earnings calls, in media interviews, and in conference keynote speeches, calling him “America’s unique advantage” in AI. Since then, the U.S. ban on selling Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to China has been rescinded. The praise may have been coincidental to the outcome, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
In contrast, the president went unmentioned on Tuesday’s call. How significant Netflix’s omission of a Trump call-out turns out to be remains to be seen; maybe it won’t matter at all. But it’s worth noting that its competitor for Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance, is helmed by David Ellison, an outspoken Trump supporter.
It’s a storyline that Netflix should have seen coming, and itmay still send the company back to rewrite.
After nearly a year of promises tariffs would boost the U.S. economy while other countries footed the bill, a new study shows almost all of the tariff burden is falling on American consumers.
Americans are paying 96% of the costs of tariffs as prices for goods rise, according to research published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank.
In April 2025 when President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, he claimed: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.” But the report suggests tariffs have actually cost Americans more money.
Trump has long used tariffs as leverage in non-trade political disputes. Over the weekend, Trump renewed his trade war in Europe after Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland sent troops for training exercises in Greenland. The countries will be hit with a 10% tariff starting on Feb. 1 that is set to rise to 25% on June 1, if a deal for the U.S. to buy Greenland is not reached.
On Monday, Trump threatened a 200% tariff on French wine, after French President Emmanuel Macron refused to join Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza, which has a $1 billion buy-in for permanent membership.
“The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth,” wrote Julian Hinz, research director at the Kiel Institute and an author of the study. “The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill.”
The research shows export prices stayed the same, but the volume has collapsed. After imposing a 50% tariff on India in August, exports to the U.S. dropped 18% to 24%, compared to the European Union, Canada, and Australia. Exporters are redirecting sales to other markets, so they don’t need to cut sales or prices, according to the study.
“There is no such thing as foreigners transferring wealth to the U.S. in the form of tariffs,” Hinz toldTheWall Street Journal.
For the study, Hinz and his team analyzed more than 25 million shipment records between January 2024 through November 2025 that were worth nearly $4 trillion.They found exporters absorbed just 4% of the tariff burden and American importers are largely passing on the costs to consumers.
Tariffs have increased customs revenue by $200 billion, but nearly all of that comes from American consumers. The study’s authors likened this to a consumption tax as wealth transfers from consumers and businesses to the U.S. Treasury.
Trump has also repeatedly claimed tariffs would boost American manufacturing, butthe economy has shown declines in manufacturing jobs every month since April 2025, losing 60,000 manufacturing jobs between Liberation Day and November.
The Supreme Court was expected to rule as soon as today on whether Trump’s use of emergency powers to levy tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was legal. The court initially announced they planned to rule last week and gave no explanation for the delay.
Although justices appeared skeptical of the administration’s authority during oral arguments in November, economists predict the Trump administration will find alternative ways to keep the tariffs.
Investors are “selling America” in spades Tuesday: The 10-year Treasury yield is at its highest point since August; the U.S. dollar slid; and the traditional safe-haven metal investments—gold and silver—surged once again to record highs.
The CEO of UBS Group, the world’s largest private bank, thinks this market is making a “dangerous bet.”
“Diversifying away from America is impossible,” UBS Group CEO Sergio Ermotti told Bloomberg in a television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday. “Things can change rapidly, and the U.S. is the strongest economy in the world, the one who has the highest level of innovation right now.”
The catalyst for the selloff was fresh escalation from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened a 10% tariff on eight European allies—including Germany, France, and the U.K.—unless they cede to his demands to acquire Greenland.
Trump also threatened a 200% tariff on French wine and Champagne to pressure French President Emmanuel Macron to join his Board of Peace. Trump’s favorite “Mr. Tariff” is back, and bond investors are unhappy with the volatility.
But if investors keep getting caught up in the volatility of day-to-day politics and shun the U.S., they’ll miss the forest for the trees, Ermotti argued. While admitting the current environment is “bumpy,” he pointed to a statistic: Last year alone, the U.S. created 25 million new millionaires. For a wealth manager like UBS, that is 1,000 new millionaires a day. To shun that level of innovation in U.S. equities for gold would be a reactionary move that ignores the long-term innovation of the U.S. economy.
“We see two big levers: First of all, wealth creation, GDP growth, innovation, and also more idiosyncratic to UBS is that we see potential for us to become more present, increase our market share,” Ermotti said.
But if something doesn’t give in the standoff between the European Union and Trump, there could be potential further de-dollarization, this time, from Europe selling its U.S. bonds, George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note Sunday. Indeed, on Tuesday, Danish pension funds sold $100 million in U.S. Treasuries, allegedly owing to “poor” U.S. finances, though the pension fund’s chief said of the debacle over Greenland: “Of course, that didn’t make it more difficult to take the decision.”
Europe owns twice as many U.S. bonds and equities as the rest of the world combined. If the rest of Europe follows Denmark’s lead, that could be an $8 trillion market at risk, Saravelos argued.
“In an environment where the geo-economic stability of the Western alliance is being disrupted existentially, it is not clear why Europeans would be as willing to play this part,” he wrote.
Back in the U.S., the markets also sold off as the Nasdaq and S&P both fell 2% Tuesday, already shedding the entirety of Greenland’s value on Trump’s threats, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers noted. Analysts and investors are uneasy, given the history of Trump declaring a stark tariff before negotiating with the country to take it down, also known as the “TACO”—Trump always chickens out—effect. Investors have been “burnt before by overreacting to tariff threats,” Jim Reid of Deutsche Banknoted. That’s a similar stance to the UBS bank chief: If you react too much to headlines, you’ll miss the great innovation that’s pushed the stock market to record highs for the past three years.
“I wouldn’t really bet against the U.S.,” he said.
Politics8 years ago