Over Labor Day weekend, social media lit up with observations that President Trump had not been seen in public for several days. Soon, rumors swirled about Trump’s health—and ghoulish hashtags even claimed he had died. Yes, it was just another weekend in the online rumor mill, but this round of speculation came with a novel twist: a flurry of bets about the president’s health on so-called prediction market sites. On Kalshi, the odds of Vice President JD Vance taking office by the end of the year shot up to 15%. For Kalshi customers, a wager of $15 would mean a payout of $100 if Vance took office.
Trump’s alleged disappearance, of course, proved a false alarm. By Tuesday, the internet had moved on to other diversions—but not before pundits blasted Kalshi and its prediction markets rival Polymarket for running “assassination markets,” where the public could (indirectly) wager on the death of a public figure.
Those accusations may have been overblown—not least because one of Trump’s sons invests in and advises both Kalshi and Polymarket. But the episode showed how prediction markets, long the province of a niche clique of academics, have suddenly become a mainstay of politics and the news cycle.
They are also on the cusp of becoming big business.
Kalshi and Polymarket have been around for seven and five years respectively, but their big breakout came during last year’s U.S. presidential election campaign. Over the course of several months, millions of people convened on the platforms to wager more than $3 billion on the outcome, resulting in forecast that proved far more accurate than the most highly regarded polls. For the startups’ founders, this proved their thesis: that the platforms’ blend of crowdsourced wisdom and financial self-interest offers an unprecedented window into future events.
Right now on Kalshi and Polymarket, those future events include profound geopolitical and economic questions, like whether China will invade Taiwan by the end of 2025 (6% as of mid-September) or how many rate cuts the Fed will implement by end of year (14% for two cuts). There are also plenty of more frivolous wagers, like whether Taylor Swift will get pregnant in 2025 (15%).
To their backers, these wagers (“events contracts” in prediction markets parlance) represent a promising new industry—and a potentially powerful tool that investors could use to hedge their portfolios, or that businesses could use to predict consumer demand. Sequoia venture capitalist Alfred Lin describes the markets to Fortune as “basically truth machines.”
Seizing on a favorable environment for fintech experimentation, Lin and others have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Kalshi and Polymarket (each of which now enjoy $1-billion-plus “unicorn” valuations) and a handful of smaller platforms; public companies like Robinhood are also jostling for a piece of the action. Right now, monthly wagers on Polymarket and Kalshi are totaling well over $1 billion, while analytics firm Similarweb says the sites attracted over 35 million visitors this summer.
Still, the emerging sector is fraught with risks. While their supporters envision prediction markets as nimble tools for peering into the future, many others—including, it seems, most of the people actually using them—see them as just another way to gamble. If the markets come to be seen primarily as just another casino, they are likely to lose the moral and intellectual high ground their boosters have touted. That’s not to mention the challenge of the brutal competition and legal jeopardy that would go with operating in the tightly regulated gaming industry.
There’s also the public unease around platforms that permit wagers on war or the health of politicians in a time of general social upheaval—an unease intensified by the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. And some question whether the two leading prediction market companies can be trusted to run their startups responsibly. In the past year, the founders of both Kalshi and Polymarket have engaged in eyebrow-raising antics that could give pause to investors and regulators alike.
The biggest risk hanging over the industry, though, is a basic business question: Can sites like Kalshi and Polymarket generate sustained interest—and revenue—outside of the once-in-four-years presidential contest?
Prior to election night, nearly $211 million of prediction market bets came flooding in. The following day, gleeful winners lined up to collect—pleased to have anticipated the triumph of the Democratic incumbent, Woodrow Wilson.
That was in 1916, a year that would prove to be the high-water mark of U.S. prediction markets for over a century. When these markets surged back to prominence in last year’s Trump-Harris contest, they were clothed in Kalshi and Polymarket’s digital wrapper. But the underlying mechanics are very much the same as in Wilson’s era.
You can think of prediction markets as wagers that are fluid. Unlike casinos or conventional betting sites, where bettors place a fixed wager against the house, participants on Kalshi and Polymarket bet against one another and can close out their “event contract” anytime. Like stock exchanges, prediction markets serve as a matching service between buyer and seller.
For instance, a contract for a heavily favored election candidate might cost 80¢, which locks in a $1 payout if the candidate wins. The opposing bettor buys a 20¢ ticket that pays $1 if the other candidate wins. But if the favored candidate suffers a major scandal, the value of that contract might drop to 40¢—leaving the owner to decide whether to sell it to another bettor or hold it till the election results come in.
While this is a form of gambling, proponents argue that any negative social effects are outweighed by the powerful signals the contracts can provide to markets about everything from weather in harvest season to whether a given politician will be elected. In practice, the closer to $1 the value of the event contract comes, the greater the likelihood of the event coming to pass. As the Trump election results demonstrated, the markets can be uncannily accurate—and the more people participate, the more accurate they theoretically become.
According to Kalshi cofounder Tarek Mansour, that accuracy is the result of two interlocking factors. “They’re a market-based mechanism, so you get the wisdom of the crowds,” he explains. “Number two, skin in the game. When people have real money on the line, they don’t lie.
Why did something so useful fall out of favor in the first place? The best answer is that prediction markets got swept up in broader Progressive Era campaigns against gambling, just as the rise of scientific polling pioneered by George Gallup provided a useful alternative. (Ironically, the anti-gambling crusades of that era often spared horse racing, since, in the eyes of the moralists, it enjoyed an association with rural American virtue—while also teaching young, military-age men to size up horseflesh.)
Robin Hanson, a George Mason University professor, sees the debate over prediction markets as part of a longtime push and pull between those who view tools for speculation as a moral threat, and those who see them as useful. “Moralizing about betting markets goes up and down in cycles,” Hanson observes. “Pretty much all financial markets were illegal at some point, including stocks and life insurance.”
In this view, prediction markets are taking their place next to products like options and futures contracts, which regulators long frowned on as overly speculative, but are now viewed as important market signals.
Lin of Sequoia is a Kalshi board member who studied prediction markets in college, and he believes they offer a superior way to hedge against uncertainty, allowing investors to fortify themselves against, for example, adverse interest rate movements. “Right now, the way to do that is to look for interest-sensitive stocks and either buy or short them,” says Lin. “There needs to be a better way.”
Mansour says first-hand experience led him to the same conclusion; he once worked on the “exotics” desk of Goldman Sachs, where he built baskets of stocks to help customers take positions on events like Brexit.
This push to open prediction markets follows decades of the U.S. banning them—though not entirely. In 1998, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) permitted an entity called the Iowa Electronic Markets to run betting platforms in which a small group of academics could wager very small amounts. The agency then gave permission in 2014 to a successor group, PredictIt, to operate a somewhat broader version.
In the past two years, the legal chains holding back prediction markets have largely vanished. But the current era of these markets is being shaped by startup founders with a penchant for bending the rules.
“Bruh!” Shayne Coplan’s curly head yells on my iPhone screen shortly before last year’s election. It’s clear Coplan is sore over a Fortune story that revealed that many of the wagers on Polymarket had come from fishy trades.
That revelation didn’t dim the general enthusiasm around Polymarket, and in the subsequent months, I repeatedly propose Zoom or in-person meetings so Coplan can tell me the full story. Nope: Coplan prefers to do it his way, with direct messages and ambush video calls over Signal, where he has chosen the Beatles’ Revolver cover as his avatar.
The 27-year-old Coplan, a New York City kid who got deep into cryptocurrency in high school, started Polymarket in 2020 after dropping out of NYU. One of his backers, Rob Hadick of Dragonfly Capital, describes him as brilliant, with a deep, all-consuming passion for probabilities. Recent accounts and photos of Coplan reflect a founder with a cooler-than-thou affect possessed of deep confidence—or perhaps overconfidence. Recalling encounters with him, two crypto executives told Fortune of Coplan comparing himself to Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Coplan has also brought his swagger to the way he operates his company. In 2022, Polymarket was hit with a CFTC consent decree barring it from operating in the U.S. Despite this, there’s ample evidence that the site turned a blind eye to Americans who placed bets by using a VPN to mask their location. (Polymarket disputes this characterization.) It’s quite possible that this conduct—or Polymarket’s decision to pay U.S. influencers to promote the site—explained the Justice Department’s decision shortly after the election to raid Coplan’s apartment and seize his smartphone and other devices.
The sensible response to a federal raid is to let your lawyers do the talking. Coplan chose another strategy. Days later, he took to X to tweet “New phone who dis?” The gesture amounted to taunting the prosecutors but would ultimately do him no harm; months later, the Feds dropped the investigation without filing charges.
If Coplan relishes being the enfant terrible of prediction markets, Kalshi’s cofounders have taken a different tack. Mansour and cofounder Luana Lopes Lara are eager to talk up their track record of compliance. This included staying well clear of the U.S. market until September 2024, when Kalshi prevailed in a lawsuit against the CFTC, with a federal judge ruling the agency lacked jurisdiction over events contracts unless they concerned “assassination,” “terrorism,” or “gaming.”
Mansour, 29, is slightly disheveled and shares little in common with Coplan save for a fixation with probabilities. Born in California, the Kalshi CEO returned with his parents to a Christian village in Lebanon as a young child. “We went through a few periods of war or terrorism. It was an anxiety-inducing period,” recalls Mansour, adding that he responded to the turmoil by becoming obsessed with math, and then with getting into MIT. Today, he posts his 5.0 GPA from the university on his LinkedIn page.
His cofounder has a different story and mien. Lopes Lara, also 29 and an MIT grad, was born and raised in Brazil and became a professional ballerina before abruptly pivoting to mathematics. Polished and easy in conversation, she recalled moments when prediction markets directly intersected with her own life.
The question “will Kalshi or Polymarket win the most market share?” would be great fodder for a crowdsourced answer.
“The Kalshi markets started predicting that [COVID] was going to pick up again around Thanksgiving a couple years ago, and we made our own return-to-office decisions thinking about this,” she recalls. The prediction proved correct, she adds: “It was very cool to see and follow it, since you could predict what was going to happen in the news a week later.” Lopes Lara also remembers taking a keen interest in a more trivial wager over whether the band One Direction would reunite, and realizing to her deep disappointment that they wouldn’t.
The Kalshi cofounders run a tight ship, with Mansour serving as the public face of the company while Lopes Lara runs internal operations. The team closely vets new events contracts and has added rules to address unanticipated or controversial outcomes. Those include the “will Trump leave office” contract: Under Kalshi rules, that contract will pay out only partially in the event the president dies, rather than paying out “yes” bettors in full.
Polymarket has no such provision for its “will Trump leave office” contract. It has also listed other bets that ended in controversy—among them, a recent wager over whether the president of Ukraine would wear a suit at a White House visit. When Volodymyr Zelensky turned up in black raiment that media outlets described as a suit, Polymarket nonetheless chose to pay those who bought “no” contracts. That decision followed a shadowy dispute-resolution process involving a vote among holders of an obscure cryptocurrency—hardly the kind of adjudication that mollifies critics or customers.
Coplan’s site has given rise to other controversies, including its decision in January to list contracts on when the catastrophic fires around Los Angeles would be contained—wagers that detractors blasted as “arson markets.” The site, which relies on crypto-based contracts, has also drawn flak for being a locus of “wash trading,” identified by blockchain forensics firms, which involves transactions in which one person takes both sides. While wash trading is common on many crypto sites as a way for traders to artificially bump up a coin’s liquidity or feign momentum, its presence makes it hard to ascertain the true volume of wagering on Polymarket. (“Polymarket’s Terms of Use expressly prohibit market manipulation,” a company spokesperson said in response to an earlier Fortune article that examined the issue.)
Kalshi has had fewer legal and ethical stumbles than Polymarket, but the startup hasn’t always modeled good corporate behavior. Most notably: The site responded to news of the FBI’s raid on Coplan’s house with a dirty-tricks campaign that paid at least four influencers to post social media comments highlighting the episode. Among other moves, Kalshi asked the former NFL star Antonio Brown to tweet news of the incident along with the comment “this nigga seems guilty,” which Brown promptly did. Soon after, tech news site Pirate Wires published direct messages linking Kalshi employees to the campaign.
At the time, Kalshi declined to condemn the behavior or discipline the employee responsible. When asked about the episode in a recent interview, Lopes Lara expressed regret, saying the person responsible had not informed her or Mansour about the plan. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said. “That was a mistake; it was over the line. It’s not something we identify with or would do again.”
While Polymarket and Kalshi have skirmished and pushed boundaries, investors have only grown more enthusiastic. This June, Polymarket finalized a $200 million investment led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, valuing the startup at $1 billion. Meanwhile, Kalshi the same month raised $185 million from Sequoia, Paradigm, and others, at a $2 billion valuation. In September, an anonymously sourced report on tech website The Information claimed both companies were raising more money at significantly higher valuations.
That investor enthusiasm coincides with buzz among news outlets and on social media. But that doesn’t mean the platforms are a sure bet as a business.
Polymarket and Kalshi both peaked on Election Day, when Mansour recalls his site eclipsing even Pornhub (the internet’s most popular destination most days). Since then, no wager listed on either site has come close to re-creating the billions of dollars of bets generated by the Trump-Harris contest. Daily app downloads last October topped 100,000 for Kalshi and 50,000 for Polymarket, according to the companies; the respective figures this June were closer to 6,500 and 650, according to Apptopia.
For now, it’s hard to do a head-to-head comparison between the two companies. Kalshi leads in app download figures. Web traffic tells a different story: Similarweb says Polymarket received 31.7 million visitors between June and August while Kalshi received 4.5 million. But Polymarket’s wash-trading phenomenon is very likely inflating its traffic volumes, while Kalshi’s app advantage can be discounted by the fact it has been the only one of the two allowed to operate in the U.S.
For Kalshi, victory in last year’s CFTC case has served as a regulatory moat to give it a competitive edge. For months, the company also appeared to have an additional political ace up its sleeve in Washington, D.C., in the form of Donald Trump Jr., who became a paid advisor in January. Kalshi’s advantages have quickly eroded, however. Polymarket recently acquired a company that will soon enable it to operate in the U.S. without violating its ongoing consent decree. And Don Jr. revealed in August that his venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, had invested in Polymarket, and that he has joined that startup’s advisory board as well.
Prediction markets may also not be a two-horse race for much longer. New competitors include startups like Railbird and one called The Clearing Company—started by former Polymarket executives. Trading giant Robinhood has also jumped into the sector, offering a series of wagers on high-profile sporting events via third-party partners, including but not limited to Kalshi.
There’s also uncertainty around how these firms plan to make money. The most obvious model is by charging commissions: Kalshi charges around 1% on bets by customers, who are currently wagering an average of $19 million per day. For now, Polymarket is charging no fees, though Hadick, the venture investor, says the site could easily earn several hundred million dollars a year if it did so. Both sites are also signing partnerships with media and AI companies that could yield revenue in the form of data licensing or research fees. Crypto could be another revenue stream: Polymarket is rumored to be launching a digital token, and Kalshi is rushing to embrace blockchain.
All of this, though, will depend on the companies creating a critical mass of liquidity for prediction markets—and a growing reputation for accurate predictions—by persuading everyday people to use them. According to Lin of Sequoia, these tools will follow the same trajectory as any other new technology, spreading from early adopters to the broader public as they become more familiar.
Kalshi’s most popular bets since last year’s election night offer a glimpse of how that adoption might occur. Recent buzzy contracts include wagers on the New York City mayoral race and two sporting events. But Kalshi bettors also rushed to place wagers on Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, and on the resignation of the notorious “kiss cam” Astronomer CEO.
For now, it appears both sites are devoting most of their promotional efforts to sports-related wagers. While that opportunity appears to be low-hanging fruit—Kalshi’s biggest non-election success came in the form of more than $500 million in bets on March Madness—it also may be short-lived. Ordinarily, the sports wagers would be a clear violation of state regulations on gaming, which govern casinos and betting sites like DraftKings. Kalshi and Polymarket are relying on somewhat convoluted legal reasoning that “events contracts” are different from gambling. While Kalshi prevailed in one court ruling, it is not hard to imagine another court finding otherwise—and several lawsuits are proceeding through state courts.
Ultimately, questions like “Will Kalshi or Polymarket win the most market share?” or “Will an appeals court ban sports betting on prediction markets?” would be great fodder for a crowdsourced answer from a large group of people with skin in the game. For now, at least, those are two bets you won’t find on Kalshi or Polymarket.
The bets drawing wagerers to prediction markets
Politics made Kalshi and Polymarket famous, but other topics are attracting big money
$130.5 million 2025 NBA Finals: Oklahoma City or Indiana?
$88.5 million Sept. 2025 Fed rate decision: How big a cut?
$504.2 million March Madness, 2025: Picking NCAA hoops winners.
$218.8 million*
Daily temperatures in multiple cities
$67.8 million* Rotten Tomatoes scores: Ratings on the review site. Recent bets on Kalshi. *Money wagered cumulatively in long-running betting series (as of 9/17/25)
This article appears in the October/November issue of Fortune with the headline “Wanna bet? Why investors are gambling on Kalshi and Polymarket.”
President Trump lives on deals: “That’s what I do—I do deals,” he once told Bob Woodward. On the one-year anniversary of his second presidency, he’s pushing hard to make his biggest, most disruptive deal ever, one that would bring Greenland under the control of the U.S.—and the global business community is still scrambling to adapt to his approach. Here are nine of Trump’s most unorthodox deals from the past year.
Nine deals that shook the business world
April 2, 2025: Reciprocal tariffs
Trump imposes “reciprocal tariffs” on 57 countries, with each tariff understood as an opening bid in a negotiation. Several countries have since made deals. The one-on-one negotiations, unlike the multilateral system of the past 80 years, can be chaotic for companies and economies
June 13: U.S. Steel “Golden Share”
In return for allowing Nippon Steel to buy U.S. Steel, Trump requires that the U.S. receive several powers over the company, including total power over all the board’s independent directors and vetoes over locations of offices and factories.
July 10: MP Materials
The U.S. pays $400 million for a large equity share in MP and signs a contract to buy all of MP’s rare earth magnets for 10 years. The reason for the equity stake was not disclosed.
Trump reverses the U.S. ban on selling Nvidia H20 chips to China in exchange for Nvidia paying the U.S. 15% of the revenue.
July 23: Columbia University
LYA CATTEL/Getty Images
The Trump administration restores $400 million of canceled federal research funding for the university under an unprecedented multipoint deal. For example, Columbia must supply data to the federal government for all applicants, broken down by race, “color,” GPA, and standardized test performance. A few other schools later make similar deals.
August 6: Apple
Bonnie Cash—UPI/Bloomberg/Getty Images
At a public appearance with Trump, CEO Tim Cook announces Apple will invest an additional $100 billion in the U.S. over four years; Trump announces Apple will be exempt from a planned tariff on imported chips that would have doubled the price of iPhones in the U.S.
August 22: Intel
Justin Sullivan—Getty Images
Intel trades the U.S. government a 9.9% equity stake in exchange for $8.9 billion that might already be owed to Intel under the CHIPS and Science Act. The deal is unusual because the company was not in immediate danger or significantly affecting the economy.
December 8: Nvidia, Part 2:
Trump reverses the U.S. ban on selling powerful Nvidia H200 chips in exchange for Nvidia paying the U.S. 25% of the revenue. Both Nvidia deals are unusual because the payments to the U.S., based on exports, appear to be forbidden by the Constitution.
December 19: Pharma
Alex Wong—Getty Images
Nine pharmaceutical companies make deals with Trump that are intended to lower drug prices. This is unusual because Trump negotiated separate deals with each company, and the terms have not been released.
All eyes this week will be watching President Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the president has hinted he’ll announce some high-stakes agreements. Expect the unexpected.
A version of this piece appears in the February/March 2026 issue of Fortune.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been leading the charge on artificial intelligence (AI) for years, owing to his long alliance with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and the groundbreaking work from his own AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, particularly with the Copilot tool. But Nadella has not spoken often about the fears that rattled Wall Street for much of the back half of 2025: whether AI is a bubble.
At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Nadella sat for a conversation with the Forum’s interim co-chair, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, explaining that if AI growth spawns solely from investment, then that could be signs of a bubble. “A telltale sign of if it’s a bubble would be if all we are talking about are the tech firms,” Nadella said. “If all we talk about is what’s happening to the technology side then it’s just purely supply side.”
However, Nadella offers a fix to that productivity dilemma, calling on business leaders to adopt a new approach to knowledge work by shifting workflows to match the structural design of AI. “The mindset we as leaders should have is, we need to think about changing the work—the workflow—with the technology.”
Growing pains
This change is not wholly unprecedented, as Nadella pointed out, comparing the current moment to that of the 1980s, when computing revolutionized the workplace and opened up new opportunities for growth and productivity and created a new class of workers. “We invented this entire class of thing called knowledge work, where people started really using computers to amplify what we were trying to achieve using software,” he said. “I think in the context of AI, that same thing is going to happen.”
Nadella argues that AI creates a “complete inversion” of how information moves through a business, replacing slow, hierarchical processes with a view that forces leaders to rethink their organizational structures. “We have an organization, we have departments, we have these specializations, and the information trickles up,” Nadella said. “No, no, it’s actually it flattens the entire information flow. So once you start having that, you have to redesign structurally.”
That shift may be harder for some Fortune 500 companies as structural changes could be accompanied by uncomfortable growing pains. Nadella says that leaner companies will be able to more easily adopt AI because their organizational structures are fresher and more malleable. On the other hand, large companies could take time to adopt new workflows.
Despite widespread adoption of AI, the 29th edition of PwC’s global CEO survey found that only 10% to 12% of companies reported seeing benefits of the technology on the revenue or cost side, while 56% reported getting nothing out of it. It follows up on an even more pessimistic finding about AI returns from August 2025: that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing.
PwC Global Chairman Mohamed Kande spoke to Fortune’s Diane Brady in Davos about the finding that many CEOs are cautious and lack confidence at this stage of the AI adoption cycle. “Somehow AI moves so fast … that people forgot that the adoption of technology, you have to go to the basics,” he explained, with the survey finding that the companies seeing benefits from AI are “putting the foundations in place.” It’s about execution more than it is about technology, he argued, and good management and leadership are really going to matter going forward.
“For large organizations,” Nadella told Fink, “there’s a fundamental challenge: Unless and until your rate of change keeps up with what is possible, you’re going to get schooled by someone small being able to achieve scale because of these tools.”
New entrants have the advantage of “starting fresh” and constructing workflows around AI capabilities, while larger firms will have to contend with the flattening effect AI has on entire departments and specializations.
To be sure, Nadella says that large organizations have kept an upper hand, especially when it comes to relationships, data, and know-how. However, he maintains that firms must understand how to use those resources to their advantage to change management style, then that could pose a major roadblock.
“The bottom line is, if you don’t translate that with a new production function, then you really will be stuck,” he said.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink opened the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a stark message to the global elite: AI’s unfettered growth risks pummelling the world’s working and professional classes. Beyond that, he warned that it could be capitalism’s next big failure after a 30-year reign after the Cold War that has failed to deliver for the average human being in society.
In his opening remarks on Tuesday at the gathering of thousands of executives and global leaders, the billionaire boss of the world’s largest asset manager—often called one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe”—said that as those in power discuss the future of AI, they risk leaving behind the vast majority of the world, just as they have for much of the last generation.
“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain,” Fink said.
Fink, who has used his annual BlackRock letters and annual appearances at Davos to set the agenda for a more progressive kind of capitalism, even one that is arguably “woke,” making him at times the face of ESG and of stakeholder capitalism, warned that the gains of the tremendous wealth creation since the 1990s have not been equitably shared. And the capitalist ideology driving AI development and implementation forward could come at the expense of the wage-earning majority, he added.
“Early gains are flowing to the owners of models, owners of data and owners of infrastructure,” Fink said. “The open question: What happens to everyone else if AI does to white-collar workers what globalization did to blue-collar workers? We need to confront that today directly. It is not about the future. The future is now.”
Fink’s past critiques of capitalism
Fink, who was appointed interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum in August 2025, replacing founder Klaus Schwab, has long espoused the reshaping of capitalism, seeing it as a responsibility of large asset managers like himself. Fink was formerly vociferous about the importance of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investing, and has argued that climate change is reshaping finance, creating an imperative for executives to reallocate their capital to address the crisis accordingly. In a 2022 letter to investors, published the day before the Davos summit, Fink emphasized a model of “stakeholder capitalism” of a business’s mandate to serve not just shareholders, but employees, consumers, and the public.
Fink’s new primacy in Davos is the first without Schwab, following allegations that he had expensed more than $1 million, billed to the World Economic Forum, on questionable travel spending, as well as claims of workplace misconduct and research report manipulation. The BlackRock chief emphasized the need for the gathering to demonstrate its legitimacy in part by showing that it’s concerned with more than just swelling growth of companies and countries, but also the economic welfare of its employees and citizens.
“Many of the people most affected by what we talk about here will never come to this conference,” Fink said. “That’s a central tension of this forum. Davos is an elite gathering trying to shape a world that belongs to everyone.”
Though BlackRock announced in early 2025 it would roll back many of the diversity, equity, and inclusion goals it created a few years before, Fink has once again used his spotlight to call on leaders to transform their capitalist sensibilities, this time in how they imagine the AI future.
The cost of the AI boom
Last year capped an explosion of growth in the AI sector, with Morningstar analysts finding a group of 34 AI stocks, including Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, shot up 50.8% in 2025. AI firms and investors have seen their wealth skyrocket in the past year, with Per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the median increase in net worth last year was nearly $10 billion among the 50 wealthiest Americans. Google co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for example, got $101 billion and $92 billion richer, respectively, in 2025.
The BlackRock CEO noted these gains, however, have been reserved for the richest few, alluding to a K-shaped economy of the rich getting richer, while the poor continue to struggle: The bottom half of Americans, in short, are not cashing in on the AI race. Although Fink didn’t get into the politics of utilities setting electricity prices, it seems the poor are actually paying higher bills to support the data centers powering the AI boom. According to Federal Reserve data, the poorer demographic owns about 1% of stock market wealth, translating to about 165 million people owning $628 billion in stock. Conversely, the top 1% of wealthiest households own nearly 50% of corporate equity.
Fink’s framing of the post-Cold War era as one of exploding inequality represents a mainstreaming of a once niche view that has become increasingly mainstream in the 21st century. While the triumph of the west over communism was seen as the ultimate victory for capitalism, as epitomized by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, history has in fact continued. The unprecedented rise of China as an economic superpower, through its fusion of socialism and capitalism “with Chinese characteristics,” has complicated the narrative, as has the inequality alluded to by Fink.
An internal critic of the post-Cold War world order is Andrew Bacevich, a military veteran and historian who likened the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as “akin to removing the speed limiter from an internal combustion engine.” Bacevich’s 2020 book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, was an early articulation of the once niche viewpoint that Fink lent support to on Tuesday.
What AI’s growth means for workers
Similarly, the risks of the AI boom on workers extends beyond who has a stake in the technology industry’s growth. Nobel laureate and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton has previously warned this explosion of wealth for the few will come at the expense of white-collar workers, who will be displaced by the technology.
“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said in September. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”
Some companies have already leaned into culling headcount to grow profits, including enterprise-software firm IgniteTech. CEO Eric Vaughan laid off nearly 80% of his staff in early 2023, according to figures reviewed by Fortune. Vaughan said the reductions happened during an inflection point in the tech industry, where failure to efficiently adopt AI could be fatal for a company. He’s since rehired for all of those roles, and he would make the same choice again today, he told Fortune.
According to Fink, sustaining a white-collar workforce will depend on the world’s most powerful people creating an actionable plan that will defy the critiques of capitalism that has, so far, stood to predominantly benefit them.
“Now with abstractions about the jobs of tomorrow, but with a credible plan for broad participation in these gains, this is going to be the test,” Fink said. “Capitalism can evolve to turn more people into owners of growth, instead of spectators watching it happen.”
Politics8 years ago